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Bir Hakiem

          Paris Metro  -  You will find that several Metro and train stations are named for famous battles (Won !) such as Waterloo in London, Austerlitz and Bir Hakeim in Paris.  We’ve all heard about Waterloo (Brits/Germans won that one), Austerlitz (Napoleon won that), but Bir Hakeim was always a mystery  to me .  I researched a bit and found the battle was in North Africa in 1942  S-W of Tobruk. The French Foreign Legion (Le Legion Etrangier de France)  was holding the Old Ottoman Fortress ( meaning Old Man’s Well) and managed to hold it long enough to deter  the  Nazi from getting around it. It is one of a few Metro stations that are above ground, next to the Seine and also  a stop for the Tower Eiffel.

OFFENSIVE SPENDING

  We always claim it’s for defense but why have we gotten to be such Military/Industrial spenders, which seems to add up more than the next FIVE nations combined to an unbelievable 700 Billion a year?  They (We!) spent 6 billion recently just to find out how much money that the Pentagon needed to overspend  on items so drastically.  It seems that the Pentagon is “Too big to count”.  There seems no way for us to cut back on these items as both parties seem silent about each increase of billions every year. My miserable little theory is that there are too many people working in the Industry to cut it back any. How about Boeing,  General  Dynamics ?  And other industries like computers, etc. ? Just imagine how many workers would lose their jobs if we cut back on our military orders?

TRUMP WHO?

 I  try to stay aloof of politics but once in  while I just have to get my hands dirty and talk about it. I always wondered how someone like T. was so popular that he was elected by nearly a majority. I ran across a short article in the New Yorker that kind of threw some light on the great mystery. They claimed that his Television  stint elevated him to a position of competence that is not part of this real world. One of his contestants said of him “He is a poor persons idea of a rich person”.   Now I get it.

MEMORIAL DAY   

It’s more than a day off for Federal  Workers, it was supposed to reflect the death of many of our young people in the First War to End Wars.  John McCrae’s short poem regarding the loss is especially poignant in the last two stanza;

                ……………

                We are the dead, Short days ago

                We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

                Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe;

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold high,

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

                In Flanders fields.

I guess we didn’t take their advice?

WHAT DOES ONE TRILLION DOLLARS LOOK LIKE?

  See Link above on You Tube : What does one trillion dollars look like? We hear these numbers bandied around but have not a clue how much we are imagining.  It's about as big as a building, solid with 100 dollar bills, new.

WE GOT OUR NEW TELEPHONE BOOKS YESERDAY

 Just for fun I looked up Architects in Sonoma county and found about one half a page listed. Then for more fun I looked up attorrneys and found 17 pages for them.

PROECTING AGAINST WHO?

    We seem to be  i n  a big brau Hau right now regarding whether having a gun is all right as we may be called on to fight our own government for control. At least this was written into our constitution in 1770’s when most men and boys owned a gun at the time and they actually used it to defend against the British Forces.  When they drafted the Constitution  Little did they believe that in a few hundred years a weapon will be a much different machine that could shoot hundreds of rounds without loading until you had killed that many people in one fell swoop.   It didn’t matter whether these dead were friends or enemies or just innocent folks in the wrong place with the right Karma. They said nothing about hand grenades as they hadn’t been perfected at that time.  Also, maybe we have forgotten that in those days it took about three minutes for an expert to load and shoot someone .  It would have been easier and faster to use a big knife or sabre to even begin killing folks around you.  

2010; ODYSSEY TWO

  I just finished Arthur Clarks’ sequel to 2001, written about 1982 and was always hoping someone would do a movie of it as they could probably simulate the destruction of Jupiter nowadays.   We all would like to know what happened to Dave Bowman his transformation into “StarChild” and what ever happened to the black monoliths out in space?  Why would HAL, a stable intelligent computer, kill the crew?( By the way, HAL stands for Hueristic ALgorithmics).  And whatever happened to the Spaceship Discovery?   Clark does answer some of these questions, while making it all sound very logical and possible.  Written during the cold War, most of the crew is Russian. 

STUMBLES IN THE MARCH OF HISTORY

 While sporting a rather dumb title, but a cogent  illumination of some of the major  problems in world Governments and Private enterprise managed and some kind of solutions that was not what always was expected.   The book, STUMBLES IN THE MARCH OF HISTORY, Beginning in the year 500 years B.C. (Does that still mean Before Christ?), and ends with the WMDS that the Iraqis never had, It covers a lot of ground..