Enemies

This week’s post is going to be a little scattered, (yeah I know, so what else is new?) because I’m going outside of my normal beat for a bit of it. So pull up a chair, grab something to drink, and let’s talk. Dinner is Italian meatball subs, the booze is in the sliding pantry, the soda is under the settee, and the tip jar is at the link.

Sailors have many enemies.

The Sea herself being the first on the list. It’s sort of a Stockholm thing, without a sea, there can be no sailor; but like a psychotic mistress, while we love her, she’s often trying to kill us. For submariners that’s even more true than for anyone else. After that comes the enemies of our nation, and again, submariners earn a special place on most countries’ hate list, and for good reasons. We’re the sea-war equivalent of the sniper.

The first clue you have that there’s a sniper in the area, is when one of your buddies, or your officer, collapses with a head wound, and then you hear the shot. Likewise the first clue you have that a submarine is in the area in a war, is when one of your ships suddenly explodes. Most vessels will never hear the torpedo coming. Even those that do, mostly will not be able to GTFO before it hits. Modern Torpedoes are quiet, very smart, and fast. If one has found you, the chances of getting away from it are damn small, unless you are also a submarine. Even then, you’re going to have to really work at it, to get away.

Then there’s high command. Yes, sadly the head bosses are often the enemy of the guys on the pointy end. But that’s a story for another day.

The final enemy of Sailors is one that predates submarines.

RUST

Rust is implacable, it never sleeps, and it happily works with all your other enemies to kill you. The sea is a great ally of rust, salt water conducts better than any other atmosphere most folks are likely to experience, and since rust is formed by the transfer of ions, thus converting iron, or any alloy with iron in it, into iron oxide, well, anything that makes ionic transfer easier (that’s a fancy way of saying anything conductive) is great, if what you want is rust. Rust finds the minute cracks and flaws in metal, and makes them bigger, until things break.

This is why chipping, grinding, and painting have been a significant part of the sailor’s job since the first time people put iron on a ship at sea.

Well sailors aren’t the only people that have to fight this enemy, basically anyone who has iron or steel equipment exposed to the elements spends time battling this particular beast. Farmers especially get to do battle with it, because many of the chemicals (fertilizers etc....) are just as good as sea water when it comes to making strong iron into crumbly iron-oxide.

I mention all of this, because rust is something I’ve been battling myself this past week. The Conex boxes that currently hold almost all of our worldly possessions have big dents in the roof, (it’s why they aren‘t still being used for sea voyages) and those collect water, and thus rust. Allowed to continue, this would end poorly.

So, yours surly was up removing the rust from large swaths of steel and then priming it for paint. My wife bought some new heads for our string trimmers, to battle another enemy, KUDZU. While I was putting them on the trimmers, I happened to notice what they were originally made for, before Amazon started marketing them as weed-eater heads. Yes, you can consider this a commercial for these things, but on my word as a Mason, I receive no compensation from the manufacturers, or anyone else except you, the readers, for my writing.

Note the label on the side. “derusting wire wheel.” Well, I said, let’s give it a go at that. Since we have two string trimmers, I put one of these on each one, left one in the capable hands of my wife, for kudzu eradication, and took the other one up on the roof.

Holy shit, where has this tool been all my life? Seriously, I’ve used just about every tool in the USN’s arsenal against rust, and this thing beats them all hollow. Look, it’s not for the careless. I’m pretty sure the OSHA folks would have a coronary.

I wouldn’t give this tool to a twelve-year-old and let them go to town, unless said kid was also checked out with and using, something like oh say, a chainsaw. Yes, it could get away from you, and that stainless steel cable is not going to give a shit whether it’s cutting rust, weeds, or you. But damn does it do a number on rust.

And best of all, no kneeling and crawling around. I’m at an age where that’s starting to suck, so being able to do this work from a standing position is a real plus. The Navy needs to get some of these.

Then there’s another ally, this one is an old friend I learned about from the navy. Folks in this part of Tennessee had never heard of it, so we had to go find it on the internet, but I want to introduce it to anyone who battles rust

.

You have to remove all the lose rust before you use it, (hence the previous tool) but once you do, this stuff,( which has a consistency somewhere between water, and thinned linseed oil) can be put on with a brush, a roller, a spray bottle… Out of a spray bottle it goes on like a general purpose cleaner. You will probably need to spread it around with a brush or something (I used the cheep foam brushes, worked fine.) When it goes on its sort of a milky white, upon drying, it becomes clear on any previous painted surface, and will not harm the paint. On rust, or bare metal, however, it becomes black, that’s how you know it’s done its thing. The black is a chemical conversion of iron-oxide to a plastic polymer. It doesn’t matter if there’s visible rust or if it’s shiny steel, it will find enough iron-oxide to do its thing. Dries completely in 24-48 hours and then can be painted directly over. Best of all, it encapsulates the steel, so no oxygen can get to it, to cause further corrosion, and it penetrates into pits and cracks, to seal them. Oh, and its water based so cleanup is easy. If you have rusty iron things that have to stay out in the weather, you need this stuff. It’s better, cheaper and easier to use than the “primer and rust encapsulator” paints by Rust oleum and such, and you can use it in a confined space, without worrying about your health.

OK commercial over, let’s go on to other things.

There was a discussion on a dear friend’s blog regarding the middle east, and I wrote a piece in that discussion refuting the claim that “well, this is all because the Russians were so heavy handed in Afghanistan.” Being somewhat Scottish and wanting to get as much milage as possible out of my work, I feel the need to post and expound on it here.

With respect, no. This happened long before Afghanistan. If you want to go back to the origins of the clusterfuck that is the Middle East, it's the colonial pre-World War one schtick by all of Europe, but most especially England and Germany. What really got it going though was when England, exhausted from two world wars, decided that they no longer wanted to deal with a world empire, but that they were going to put "Wiley Oriental Gentlemen" (What WOG stands for) that they could trust, IE guys that they had gone to school with back at Eaton, or wherever; in charge, because "well, I know him, he's a reasonable man, we can deal with him."

Then to make it worse, they drew lines on the map with straight edges, and said things like "Right then, we'll make this Jordan, and we'll put Abdullah in charge."

"But, sir, that line includes a lot of Bedouin Al-Ka'abneh territory, and they HATE Abdullah."

"Good, that will keep them busy fighting each other, and out of our hair."

Add the discovery of oil, and with it the ability of the "Royal" family to ignore their people, except for their particular clan, and well... you have the shit show that is the middle east.

See, one part of the problem is that practically every Abdullah, Mohamad, and Husain can claim "royalty." It's the clans of Scotland writ large. They mostly didn't have a particular chunk of land that they called their own other than a few cities (often well spread apart) and caravan routes. (Think Western US Plains Indians.) Those frequently crossed other tribes’ routes. You can't cut out a chunk of land in the ME and give it to one tribe, without cutting through land considered to be the possession of some other tribe. And so we have instability built into the structure from the start. I don’t believe there’s a fix for this, short of “Let them all kill each other, and we’ll make a peace with the winner.”

I see where someone finally found another good use for AI.

First let me be clear, AI isn’t actually “intelligence.” It’s a self-correcting program that runs programs. It can learn, by seeing what happened with the first test run of something, and correct the issues… Which usually causes other issues… And in a form of successive approximation, dials in on how to do X. It can’t THINK. It merely follows its instructions. OK, to an extent, it can think, at about the level of a bird. Certainly not at the level of oh say a dog or cat. And definitely not at the level of a human. What it CAN do, is crunch a bunch (for exponential values of “bunch”) of data looking for patterns and then identify when that pattern shows up again. Think of it as an even more stupid version of an idiot savant, and you’ll be close. Well, some folks with the 3D imaging company TreisD, and some folks at the U of Tennessee, are coming up with a way to use this, like using Dustin Hoffman’s character’s math skills at Vegas. They’re hooking it up to three dimensional scanners and looking at sinkholes, to figure out what causes them to break through, and then mapping places where sinkholes are likely to occur, so that they can be fixed before they start to collapse. https://www.wate.com/news/knox-county-news/imaging-company-partners-with-the-university-of-tennessee-to-study-sinkholes/ Of course, if you can predict sinkholes, you can use this technology on other things too, from mineral and fossil fuel location, to detecting the mines and other ordinance that is still being found throughout the world from past wars. Yeah, you could do the three D scan and then go through it with trained people and find the same information, but that is the beauty of AI, it can go over the data thousands of times faster than a human eye, it doesn’t get bored or distracted, and it doesn’t demand more money.

In a miracle that could only be equaled by the second (or first if you’re Jewish) coming of the savior:

AOC (d NYC) Brian Fitspatrick (r Pen) Josh Haley (r Mo) Chip Roy (r TX) and even Tim Burchett (r TN) are all on the same page about something. the TRUST in Congress Act. “The Transparent Representation Upholding Service and Trust (TRUST) in Congress Act would require Members of Congress, their spouses, and dependents to place certain investment assets into a qualified blind trust while serving in office. That way, Representatives and Senators cannot leverage their power as public servants to line their pockets.” (Quote from Rep. Roy’s web page)

Now I’ve been calling for this, or something like it for at least a decade, but it looks like it is actually getting traction on both sides of the aisle and might actually become law. Trust in congress act (that link may be behind a pay wall, sorry.)

Look, the idea that, if you know things that the general public does not know, and use that to buy and sell stock, you’re guilty of insider trading and can go to jail. (Martha Stewart Orange curtesy phone, please) But if you’re a congressman, and know things others don’t know and make law about a company, you can get obscenely rich by either buying stock yourself, or having your spouse buy it, like Nancy P and the rest of the crooks in Washington have been doing; is a miscarriage of justice, and it needs to be stopped. Write your congress critters and demand that they support this bill. If it’s something that Occasional Cortex and Tim Burchett can agree on, there’s absolutely no reason to not get behind it, unless you’re hoping for your turn in the trough.

Well, that’s enough for this week, I’ll leave you with the:

QOTD: "Look, big cities have crime. There's no doubt about it. But let's just pay attention to what President Trump is doing." —Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker

Yours in Service,

William Lehman