How to prevent it from ever happening again

To prevent it from happening again.  They say this after every screwup.  There is a simple answer.  Find who caused it and fire him/her.  Publically.  That will teach 'em.  We haven't fired anyone for causing great depression 2.0.  We haven't fired anyone over Benghazi.  We haven't fired anyone at FBI for failing to inform Cambridge police that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was fingered by the Russians as a terrorist.  We haven't fired anyone at IRS for targeting the Tea Party.  We haven't fired anyone at BATFE for giving guns to Mexican drug runners.
   They never learn unless they know something bad will happen to them for being stuck on stupid.

GM is spending money to expand in China

Fox news is yelling about US taxpayer money being used to create jobs in China.  Which is a good reason never to give tax money to private companies.  Not that I like the idea of my tax money going to China, but I don't want to tell an American company not to expand overseas.  There are a lot of customers overseas and we do better when they buy American than when they buy Toyota.  Even if "American" is assembled overseas.  The Japanese  assemble most of the cars they sell here in Kentucky and Tennessee.  They make money doing so.  GM ought to be encouraged to make money assembling cars in China to sell in China, or anywhere else for that matter.
  The real answer to my tax money going to make Cadillac Escalades  in China is not to give my tax money to private companies.  Let the private companies raise money from private investors, or go thru REAL bankruptcy.  Not Obama haircuts of investors and handouts to unions.

Words of the Weasel Part 35

"Passed"  short for "passed away".  Nobody on TV every says "died" anymore.  Notice that even Mr. Hicks, the Benghazi witness, said the ambassador "passed" rather than coming right out with it and saying "died". 
Death is horrible and terrible.  Millenniums of usage have tied some of the horror and terror of death to the word "died".  To avoid using the proper word is to smooth over the death, to make it seem of little importance.  Something that weasels do. 

FBI failed to notify Boston Police says Fox

That wouldn't have done much good.  The Tsarnaev's lived in CAMBRIDGE, not Boston.  FBI could have done some good if they had notified the Cambridge Police that the Russians thought Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a terrorist.  Notifying the Boston police wouldn't have done any good, Boston police have no jurisdiction in Cambridge.  Perhaps the FBI understands the difference between Boston and Cambridge,  Fox news surely doesn't.

Birds of a Feather, flock together

NPR came on the clock radio this morning with a tear jerking piece.  Since the sequester, civil servants have been taking furloughs, not getting raises, having to conserve office supplies, having more work to do and fewer people to do it.  Awful.
  And morale is down.  No raises, and lots of criticism is just crushing the tender egos of the gov'ment workforce.
  And it's all the fault of that nasty sequester.
  And all of the civil servants interviewed for this piece were government union representatives.
  It's just terrible that the civil servants, who enjoy better salaries, benefits, and retirement than ordinary working stiffs, have to forgo a raise.  It's a good thing they have NPR to plead their case to the public.  On the public's nickel no less.

NPR was hitting on all cylinders this morning.  After that plea for the poor down trodden civil servants they launched into an attack on Facebook.  According to NPR, Facebook spend some $10 million (chickenfeed) lobbying Congress on the immigration bill.  Something to do about H1B visa's.  The reporter didn't bother to explain just what Facebook was lobbying for, but she was sure it was evil.  H1B visa's are a deal to let high  tech workers, most often computer programmers, into the US.  US union people are always against H1B 'cause they think it lowers American worker's wages.  US companies are always in favor of more H1B visa's cause good programming talent is hard to come by and bringing it in from overseas gives them a bigger pool to fish in.

Non political that NPR is, very non political.  And government funded.

Jet Tankers in Merrie Old England

The Royal Air Force has an interesting way of doing things.  The are just getting a brand new 14 aircraft fleet of Airbus A330 jet tankers into the RAF.  Or sort of.  The aircraft are owned by a "private" company called AirTanker .  This company is authorized to rent, loan, or lease these shiny new tankers out to other EU countries when they are not needed by the RAF.  For instance just last month, France found itself way short of tankers to support their Mali operation. 
   This sort of thing has been going on long enough for the various EU air forces to define a "Standard C130 Flying Hour" as a unit of account.  One flying hour from an RAF jet tanker will be worth three Standard C130 Flying Hours.  Borrow my nice new A330 tanker for one hour and you owe me three C130 flying hours.
   And the Brits have yet to accomplish some Brit paperwork needed in order to actually refuel in the air.  Each warplane type (F16, Tornado, Grippen, whatever) needs paperwork before air to air refueling can be done.  This has gotta be some kind of Euro job security system.  In USAF all warplanes refueled off the KC-135's, here now and forever.  There was no paperwork to accomplish on a type by type basis. 

Aviation Week criticizes FAA's 787 Lithium battery decision

Aviation Week feels that the 787 should have gone back to nickel cadmium batteries.  Lithium is not an essential technology.  They never did figure out why the batteries burst into flames.  The fixes to the battery itself may or may not work.  Nobody knows.  The fireproof battery box ought to work, but who can be happy with a battery so fire prone to need such?
   Clearly, if Aviation Week had been calling the shots, they would have told Boeing to get rid of the lithium.

Leaf Day at last.

Spring is indeed sprung.  The trees up here at the top of Franconia Notch have turned green.  Took long enough.  In fact, it got so nice and warm I had to break out an electric fan to keep cool as I watched the 6 o'clock TV news.

Up here, trees are the enemy.

Now that the snow has melted out, I'm doing some yard work.  Been using the lopping shears and the grass whip to cut back the eager saplings and briar bushes around the house.  Took me an hour to cut back the wannabee trees  for a mere six feet from the foundation of the house.  I have woods behinds the house, sort of concealing the house from the road behind, and giving me somewhere to rake the autumn leaves.  We don't get curbside pickup round here.  But I gotta get back there and lop some more brush or it will become an impenetrable briar patch in just another season.

The Cleveland Kidnapped women case

All I can say, is it is horrible what happened to these girls/young women.  I hope family, friends, and the society will do every thing in their power to mitigate the awful captivity they have suffered.

Sequester vs NASA

Aviation Week has Senator Barbara Mikulski as worried about future NASA funding, in the face of the sequester budget cuts.  Mikulski fears that there isn't enough money to continue the Space Launch System (SLS) booster program.  Oh dear, how tragic.
  Space Launch System is an unneeded boondoggle from the word go.  We have two (2) working, well proven, heavy lift boosters,  Space-X's Falcon 9, and United Launch Association's Atlas 5.  Atlas has been lofting big commercial satellites for years.  Falcon is newer and has a shorter service record, but it has made resupply missions to the International Space Station (ISS).  SLS has never flown.
  SLS, wags have suggested the acronym stands for "Senate Launch System" is a  $1.385 billion program pushed by the US Senate as a way to keep all those redundant Shuttle people on the NASA payroll.  We ought to kill it off completely and use existing, well proven private industry boosters. 
   Now that the Russians have hiked the price of a ride up to the ISS from $21 million a seat to $71 million a seat, we could pop a capsule atop Falcon or Atlas and save a lot of money. 
   Aviation Week is clearly in favor of SLS.  They close their article thusly.  "Is the US space program any less important than on time arrivals for air travelers?"  
Well, actually, the US space program would be better off without the SLS program.

Where was the air support at Benghazi?

I asked this question back in September.  We could have had fighters over that beleaguered consulate within two hours.   Back when I was in USAF we kept two jet fighters on 10 minute alert.  Loaded, fueled, armed, pilots standing by in operations, they could be wheels up airborne within ten minutes of the sirens going off. Inside of two hours, they could be 1200 miles away, on internal fuel and drop tanks, no tankers.  We have bases and aircraft carriers all over the Mediterranean, we could have had fighter support over Benghazi.  Jet fighters, low overhead, are very intimidating to spontaneous demonstrators, trained Al Quada terrorists, just about anybody. 
  Some how, nobody in our gallant press corp has brought this issue up since last September.
  Until just today.  Someone on Fox News  said the issue of air support would be brought up on Wednesday.
  About time.

New Immigration bill does what?

Hard to tell.  The bill is long, hundreds of pages, all written in a foreign language (legal gobbledegook).  The best summary I found was this Reuters article.  It seems like a balanced discussion to me, Reuters has a good reputation for impartiality going back a century or so, and being British, is less likely to take sides in a purely American issue.   And, many, if not most, of the other articles on the web quote the Reuters article or are clearly based upon it.
  So what will this immigration reform bill do?
1.  Create a path to citizenship for the 11 million illegals already in the country.  It's a fairly demanding path.  Immigrant must have a reasonably clean criminal record, must become reasonably fluent in English, must attend civics classes, pay substantial fees, and probably more.  And spend some ten years on the path.  It will take serious motivation to stay on the path for that length of time.  I'm confident that any illegal who stays the course and gets naturalized will be a willing and loyal citizen of the US.
2.  Give the secretary of Homeland Security broad powers to waive problems with an immigrant's criminal history.  Pretty much, if the secretary is OK with the immigrant's record, he gets in.
3.   Revise immigration policy from the current family ties policy to a merit based policy.  Immigrants (all immigrants) will be given points for college degrees, valuable industrial experience (machinist, technician, computer programmer,etc) fluency in English, and again, probably more.  The idea is to favor immigrants who will contribute to the American economy, rather than the current policy that favors grandparents and siblings of US citizens.
4.  Provide $150 million in funding for immigrant advocacy groups to inform potential immigrants of  their opportunities and to assist them with the paperwork.
5.  Labor unions and the Chamber of Commerce have wrangled over the guest worker and H1B visa provisions and are reported to be happy with them. 
6.  Probably a lot of other stuff buried in the hundreds of pages of the bill.  Who has the energy to plow thru that much gobbledegook?
7.  Congresscritters have a couple of days left to slip their favorite goodies into the bill, so we won't know what's been done to us until they do it.   

From what Reuters has published, it isn't a bad bill.  It would be a better one if they boiled it down to 20 pages, in English and published it so we really knew what we were getting into.

The Economist opposes "Austerity" in Europe

Europe has been sliding down the tubes since Great Depression 2.0 hit them in 2007.  They are doing worse than we are, we have at least leveled out the downturn, Europe is still in a power dive toward the ground.  The Economist is all sorts of concerned, they run long articles about it, but they dance around the real issue[s].  This week they are blaming "austerity", but they never get around to defining the word.  "Austerity" hits bankrupt countries like Greece.   The Greek government is spending more money than it takes in. Nobody will lend money to Greece.  They cannot print their own money.  The Germans won't give them more bailout money.  So Greece has to raise taxes and kick people out of government jobs and off welfare.  No Greek likes any part of this. They are rioting in the streets.  It's all Angela Merkel's fault 'cause she won't give us more bailout money.
  In the old days, the Greek government could simply print more money to pay the bills.  When the extra Drachma's became cheaper, Greece merely devalued the currency.  But when Greece gave up it's own currency and joined the Euro, they gave up the right to print their own money.  Joining the Euro was a dumb move for the Greeks. 
   Staunch European Union supporters like the Economist simply cannot bring themselves to admit this in print.  So they ramble on, for several pages, talking about the evils of "austerity" without saying a single word about how to fix things.  No talk about placing new products into production, exploiting shale oil and gas, placing new land into agriculture, in short, expanding the pie.  Europeans don't think that way.  They just rail against "austerity".  

The Old Man of the Mountains fell 10 years ago today

My house is within walking distance of the Old Man.  Today we held an out of doors memorial service at the Profile Lake site.  Weather was perfect, clear blue sky, warm, no precip, gentle breeze.  We attracted a crowd of several hundred.  John DeVivio, the Cannon Mt. manager spoke.  Dick Hamilton who runs the Old Man memorial committee spoke.  All our congressmen sent representatives to say a few appropriate words.  The only person missing was Ray Burton which was something of a surprise to old timers.  Ray is recovering from chemo therapy and I hope he is OK.  Ray usually makes everything.  They say that if three people get together in Grafton county one of 'em will be Ray Burton. 
   We didn't solve any of the problems of the universe, but we all felt better about the loss of everyone's favorite bit of geology.  I think we done more good than those idiots in Concord who declared the potato to be the official New Hampshire vegetable yesterday.

Words of the Weasel, Part 34

"What did they know and when did they know it"?   famous newsie question going back to Watergate.  Knowing ain't a crime.
More to the point, "What did you DO, and when did you DO it?"   DOing  can be a real crime.  Just knowing is a thought crime.  I don't believe in thought crimes. 

Do I believe in "self radicalization"?

On TV, Obama described the Boston bombers as "self radicalized".  I suppose Obama means that the Tsarnaev brothers converted from reasonable people into terrorists merely by visiting websites.  Somehow I don't believe that.  I think some person established a relationship with the brothers and sold them the Islamist terrorist ideology.  We ought to be looking for that person. 
  If there are Islamist web sites so compelling as to "self radicalize" individuals we need to study their technique.  It could be dynamite for selling cars, or nearly anything else.

$2,788,578 to fix each and every 787

Ouch.  The whole airplane only costs $200 million.  The retrofit kit takes 5 days to install.  This includes two 1/8th inch thick stainless steel fireproof battery boxes, two brand new batteries, two jazzier microprocessor controlled battery chargers that monitor the batteries while charging and light up warning lights in the cockpit when they detect a problem. 
   The new batteries have more insulation between cells to prevent/retard one runaway cell from setting off the other 7 cells in the battery.  These are 32 volt batteries made up from eight 4 volt lithium cells all packed into a single battery enclosure.  They believe (they don't know for sure) that something goes wrong in a single cell, shorting it out.  They don't know what "something" is.  All the stored chemical energy of the shorted cell runs thru the short and heats the cell up. The heat warms up the other cells and they fail too.  The new batteries have a little more airspace inside them and more insulation around each cell.  The idea is to prevent the chain reaction where all the cells melt down, and if it does, the stainless steel battery box will contain the fire and prevent it from setting the entire aircraft ablaze. 
  Let's hope it works. 

Senator Kelly Ayotte gives a Town Meeting

This meeting was at Tilton, NH, a little bit north on Concord on I93.  Word had been circulated by email that Moveon.org was sending demonstrators to protest Senator Ayotte's vote against Obama's gun control bill in the Senate.  In fact, I spread some emails urging people to come to express support for Kelly.  I  arrived an hour early, and we all ready had people gathering with signs.  The Kelly Ayotte supporters stood on one side of the driveway, the Moveon.org    people on the other.  I counted about 12 on each side.
    Once the meeting got started inside it was fairly clear that the ordinary Republicans vastly out numbered the moveon people.  The place had some 300 seats and every one was full.  They had a bullpen for the video cameras.  There was an NBC TV satellite truck parked out side. 
   Kelly drew repeated rounds of applause from the floor.  Tax reform, and spending reduction got big hands.  Someone asked about "Common Core" (curriculum) and Kelly drew more applause when she came out in favor of local control of education.  A few of the moveon people tried to get the floor by shouting from the audience but it didn't work for them.  It was a good event for Kelly, and I don't think she is going to have much trouble getting re elected four years from now.  The crowd was clearly on her side.
  I was gonna post a few pic, but the picture uploader in blogspot is broken, again. 

Time Warner Cable going west

Something has gone wrong with the cable up north of the Notch.  First the TV just went black.  After it came back it was all fuzzy,  sound was OK but the picture is nearly unwatchable.
Cable modem internet service died too.  It took longer to come back.  I think it's working now, but it's SLOW.  TV was blacked out for 15 minutes, Internet for a couple of hours. 
Let's see if this posts.

Technical assistance or radicalization?

TV news keeps talking about technical assistance in bomb making for the Boston bombers.  Interesting and all, but to my way of thinking, not all that important.
Important, is how the brothers converted from reasonably successful immigrants into terrorist bombers.  Did someone preach Jihad to them?  Is it possible for just internet websites to turn reasonable people into bombers?  Without a live person to spread the message?  Are the brothers more pliable than anyone I know?
   Anyhow, I'm more interested in motivation, what turned the brothers into bombers, than I am in how they built the bombs.

Idling Firefox is writing to the hard drive

I wonder what.  With Antique Laptop powered up, XP running, Firefox 20.0.1 active, and laptop just sitting there, no one running it, I see continuous I/O writes in Task Manager, and I see the hard disk LED flickering all the time.
    Translation: when it has nothing to do, Firefox is stashing something to the hard drive.  I wonder what it might be.  Cookies?  That many cookies?  That's hard to believe.  A virus?  Has my Firefox been infected by something awful?  Should I wipe it off the hard drive and down load a fresh copy?  I ran Spybot, Malicious Software Removal, and Malware bytes just a few days ago.  No hits. 

Followup.  Problem seems to be an obsolete version of Adode "reader" the Firefox plugin, not to be confused with the Adode PDF reader.  Anyhow, run Firefox.  Click on "tools" on the Firefox menu bar.  Select "Add -ons"  This opens a window with four selections.  You want the one named "Plugins".  "Plugins are bits of computer code written be third parties that load into Firefox and can do nearly anything.  A defective plugin can do all kinds of evil things.  At the top of the list of plugins there is a highlighted text line reading "Check to see if your plugins are up-to-date".   Click on it and after a little thrashing it will tell you what plugins need updating. 
   In my case a plugin named "Adobe Reader", a Firefox plugin, not to be confused with an application of the very same name used to view .pdf files, needed update.  It's slow but it works.  The strange disc accesses went away after update finished.  Update is SLOW, but it does work. 
   The Adobe update is "bundled" with some McAfee anti -virus.  I failed to uncheck the teeny weeny camoflaged box to skip McAfee.  Which made the sluggish download more sluggish.  Just for grins I ran the McAfee antivirus and it locked up.  After waiting half an hour for something to happen, I killed it off with Task Manager and zapped it off disk with Add/Remove programs.

Chemical weapons and red lines in Syria

Why does killing with poison gas rate more Obama rhetoric than killing  with anything else.  Assad in Syria has been killing his opposition in vast numbers and the US does nothing, says little, and doesn't get excited.  Obama declared that killing civilians with poison gas was worse than killing them in ordinary ways.  I don't see that, killing is killing, doesn't matter what weapons the killing is done with.
   Anyhow,  Obama now finds that he has to do something or be branded as a paper tiger. 

The Economist trashes Maggie Thatcher

In the letters section of this week's Economist magazine we have all the letters expressing various hostilities to former and recently deceased Margaret Thatcher.  Not one friendly letter.   All letter writers were willing and able to speak ill of the dead.  Despite a couple of nice Thatcher obituaries last week, seems like the Economist (a very liberal rag) harbors some ill feeling for the Iron Lady. 

Signs of Spring in New Hampshire

Spring might actually happen this year.  It was 60 here, snow is melted out except up on Cannon ski trails, and the yard sale signs were out.  Alder Brook Sportsman's Club had the annual range cleanup.  The dirt access road is dry enough to drive upon.  Some twelve members, and two big $20 K privately owned John Deere tractors  on fancy trailers showed up.  Between the tractors, the pickups, the SUV's and just plain cars there must have been $200K worth of machinery out there.
    By hand the range was raked, getting up piles and piles of broken clay pigeons and shot gun wads and shot cups.  The tractors graded the access road.
   I'm getting old.  I get tired from just swinging a rake, which didn't used to happen. 
   So we are ready for another season of shooting.

Terrorists vs Freedom Fighters

Tennessee parents are objecting to a high school "textbook" that asks "Is bombing an Israeli pizzeria terrorism or a legitimate act of war by Palestinian revolutionaries?" 
    Dunno how that "textbook" answered the question. 
   Far as I am concerned, maiming and murdering innocent strangers with bombs is always terrorism.  Nothing ever justifies terrorism.  Legitimate acts of war are conducted against enemy soldiers, not against innocent strangers. 
  I fully share the Tennessee parents concern about that "textbook".  It sounds like Al Quada propaganda to me. 

Bird lovers versus cat lovers

NPR ran a nice little piece on feral cats, and a volunteer organization that does catch, neuter, and release.  But then the inner bird lover in the reporter surfaced, and she went on about predation of birds by cats.  She claimed that cats kill 2.5 billion birds every year and isn't that horrible.  I had to wonder where she got her numbers from.  Did someone go about interviewing cats?   Then she claimed that the house cat was an invasive species, not native to the western hemisphere and the poor birds had no natural defenses.  She forgot about the native bobcats, a little bigger and faster and meaner than a house cat. Besides, any bird dumb enough to let a cat get so close it can pounce before the bird can get airborne, is probably better off as cat food. 
   On their side, cats totally understand humans, and make themselves so friendly, so cuddly, and so attractive that most humans go ga-ga and feed them, pet them, and shelter them.  Birds don't compete in this league.  So there are gonna be plenty of cat lovers looking out for cats. 

Think Boeing has it bad?

Boeing's 787 was only grounded for a couple of months and looks like it will fly again by the end of this month.  Bad, but read this.
Eurocopter EC225's (a big helicopter used to support North Sea oil drilling) was grounded in October of 2012 and looks to stay grounded until this fall.  Grounding was ordered by both the British and the Norwegian governments after two forced landings in the North Sea, caused by failures in the main gear box.  The main gearbox connects the engines to the rotor.  When that breaks the rotor stops turning and the chopper falls out of the sky.
  That's a lot worse than flaming lithium batteries.

Airline money sink, GEN-X

GEN-X is the FAA scheme to modernize the entire US air traffic control system.  Today's system works on ground radar stations, straight out of World War II.  Controller eyeball the radar screens and radio flight orders to airliners to keep them from colliding.  The radar beams are fairly tight, 3 degrees, but that means an uncertainty of plus or minus 2.5  miles when the plane is 100 miles from the radar station.  So controllers maintain a ten mile spacing between planes.
  GEN-X requires all aircraft to carry a GPS and a special transmitter to send the aircraft's GPS position to the ground station.  GPS is accurate to 100 feet and so the planes can be packed up tighter in the sky.
  The GEN-X equipment costs $500,000 per airliner.  Right now the airlines are supposed to pay for this, although FAA will make loans to airlines to fund GEN-X installation.  And, the airline gets no return on investment.  With or without the $500,000 GEN-X equipment, the plane gets from here to there at the same speed.  All GEN-X does for the airline is cost money.  It doesn't offer any benefits.
  The greater accuracy of GEN-X doesn't matter. Packing airplanes more tightly together in the sky won't help move more traffic.  There is plenty of sky to hold all the airplanes.  The bottleneck is airport runways.  An airport can only handle one flight a minute, and all the major airports have been running at capacity for twenty years or more.  I  picnicked on Castle Island, just off  Logan Airport, and watched a never ending stream of airliners, packed up head to tail, coming in for a landing.  That was 20 years ago on a nice sunny day.  It gets worse when the weather gets bad.
  Any how, FAA is pushing hard for GEN-X, for mysterious reasons.  Our tax money at work. 

So what do you do with an International Space Station?

Now that we have one.  Serious money was put into it.  Now it is up there with not much to do.  The earth imaging mission is handled by recon satellites good enough to spot a cigarette pack lying on the ground.  The astronomy mission is well in hand at Hubble.  They aren't enough tourists with money to make an orbital tourist hotel work.
  According to Aviation Week, they have space to spare for more scientists and experiments.  The only work on going is "micro gravity" (we used to call it weightlessness) what ever that means.  Could it be that the best part of ISS was the "International" part of the name.  That helped mightily at funding time.

Quibble

The surviving Boston bomber has been charged with "using a weapon of mass destruction".  "Weapons of mass destruction" is diplo-speak for nukes.  Diplomats have trouble with the English language.
The Boston bombs weren't nukes.
  How about a charge of plain old murder in the first degree?  Four counts. Murder is murder whether it is done with bare hands, firearms, bombs, or anything.  Killing is the crime, not the weapon used.

Furlough bureaucrats, not air traffic controllers

FAA surely has a bunch of bureaucrats that could be furloughed to save money.  Instead FAA decided to furlough air traffic controllers to slow air travel and inflict as much pain on the public as possible.  We would never miss bureaucrats.  Air traffic controllers actually provide a needed service. 

Common Core Curriculum

There is a national movement to create a nation school curriculum, the same in all states.  It is controversial, lotta folks think the school curriculum in their state is nobody else's business.  Lot of education folks like the idea of a national standard, to which they can point, when parents press them to soften up school standards.
The common core is posted on the web and Google led me to it.  I scanned the math standards for first grade thru high school.  They aren't very rigorous.  And the have a lot of new age time wasters.  For instance they try to introduce algebraic concepts in first grade.  High school geometry proves some of the easier theorems but does NOT bother to prove the Pythagoras theorem.  They don't understand the purpose of high school science labs. 
   In short, Common Core isn't going to improve anything.  On the other hand it doesn't look like it does much damage.

French Govt buys from and owns the French defense industry

Long article about this in Aviation Week.  The French government owns sizable chunks of stock in the big French defense firms like Dassault, Thales, and Sagam.  Which puts the French in a confusing spot when they are negotiating contracts with the industry.  There is pressure on the government to sign contracts generous to the contractors because the extra money will make the government's stock holdings worth more.  Which does French tax payers no good at all. 
  Apparently the French government fears  their companies will merge with companies in Germany and Britain, which will make it hard for the French to build up a French built armed force to fight a war with Germany or Britain.  So the French use their stock holdings to put a veto on international mergers.
   Aviation Week, an industry organ, is all in favor of defense industry mergers, it gives the merged company more pricing power.  As in when we merge with all the competitors, we can charge as much as we like, 'cause there is nowhere else to go.
   Fortunately the US government doesn't own stock in defense contractors. 

Photobucket needs to shape up.

I only use Photobucket  as a work around to some low speed websites that don't handle their own photographs.  High speed sites like Facebook allow up to just upload your photos to their site.  Low speed web sites don't accept photos.  You have to upload your photo somewhere else and post a "link"   (long string of characters that serves as the internet address of the photo) into the low speed site.  The low speed site  doesn't have to supply the storage to hold the all the bits that make up a picture.
   The first thing Photobucket did to raise my ire was to move all my photographs with so much as a by your leave.  That broke all the links to my older posts on low speed websites, making the pictures go away.  Thanks Photobucket.  I love you too.
  Then you ought to be able to organize your Photobucket, put all the pictures of the cat in a folder named cat, all the pictures of the model railroad in a folder named railroad, and so on.  Otherwise you have a huge bucket of photos and you cannot find any of them.
   Photobucket  offers a truly brain dead organization scheme.  You have to move photos one by one.  No highlighting of a group of pix.  No drag and drop. It takes six mouse clicks per photo to move it.  You cannot upload to a folder, all uploads go into your main bucket and have to be moved one by one. 

787 to fly again. FAA approves Boeing mods

I heard this on NPR yesterday.  It kinda got lost in all the Boston Marathon Bombers stories, but it is good news for Boeing.

And we caught the other one, alive

It was 10 PM last night by the time the TV declared Jokhar Tsarnaev "in custody".  Even  here,130 miles north of Boston, the relief was obvious.  Must have been enormously greater in Watertown.  The TV showed people dancing in the streets, waving American flags, and singing the national anthem. 
   Since he was taken alive, we will be able to ask him a few questions.  The number one question is how, after living in this country for ten years, getting a top flight education, having friends, winning awards, could he turn on us to maim and murder innocent strangers with bombs.  This act is abominable by anyone's standards.  Doing it after ten years living among us in Cambridge makes it treacherous as well as horrible.
   Was it Islamist propaganda?  mental illness? some affront offered him or his family?  Influence of some Svengali like religious figure?  Just asking him to tell us why ought to be instructive.
   Did anyone ever teach the brothers that murdering innocent strangers is horrible?  Where does their family stand on murder?  Do Cambridge schools teach ethics?   I haven't heard any Muslim clerics condemning the bombings yet.  Did the brothers attend a mosque?  If so,  what is taught there?
    There are plenty of clerics and websites preaching hate and violence.  Freedom of speech means we cannot censor them. But we could identify them, make them known as bad websites and bad people,  have the IRS audit them,  have the police tail their cars and ticket them, put them on no fly lists, get really difficult about visas and passports,  check their immigration status,  get difficult about credit ratings and credit cards.
   The FBI needs to let us know why they fingered the brothers.  Although the brother's drastic resistance to arrest makes them look all kinds of guilty, we need to know that there was good reason to pursue them in the first place.  Does FBI have photos of them carrying suspicious packages?  Leaving black back packs at the explosion sites?  Stashing pressure cookers in public trash cans?  If so, let's see them. It is important to convince everyone, at home and abroad, that we got the right guys.  The court that counts is the court of public opinion.
   I wonder how so many of the Tsarnaev family immigrated from Chechnya.  There is mother, father, and three children in Cambridge, an uncle and cousins in Maryland, an aunt in Toronto.  That's a lot of family members to get out of Russia, across the Atlantic, and into the US and Canada.  Where did the money come from?  Did they all get green cards? 
   At least we made it plain that if you mess with Americans we will get you.  We never give up.  Took us ten years to get Bin Ladin, but we got him.  We got the Tsarnaev brothers inside of a week.  Not a bad statement to make to the world.

One down, one yet to catch

TV news has been solid with Boston Marathon bombers.  Something broke loose last night, Suspects #1 and # 2 decided to knock over a Cambridge 7-11.  This put the cops onto them.  A car chase ended in Watertown and a shootout with police.  The older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died of gunshot wounds and/or bomb explosions.  The younger brother, Johar Tsarnaev, escaped somehow and is still at large.  The cops are turning Boston upside down looking for him.  They have turned off the MBTA, Amtrak, and put roadblocks up everywhere.  Everything is closed.  Nobody is going to work.
   The TV has been interviewing neighbors and classmates.  The younger brother graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin school (top ranked Cambridge public high school)  Classmates have expressed shock and surprise to learn of his involvement.  They all recall Johar Tsarnaev as well liked, lot of friends, honor student, athlete of the year, in short, a successful high school career. 
   Neighbors describe the Tsarnaev family as Muslim, from Chechnya in Russia, but they have been living in the US for 6, maybe 10 years, a long time to carry an old world grudge against anyone or anything. 
    I lived in Cambridge for a long time, and I know most of the places making it into this story.  WMUR Channel 9's TV crew is set up in front of Webster Auto Body on Webster Ave Cambridge.  I bought a used car radio from them many years ago.  They dropped a hostage off at a gas station on Memorial drive.  I commuted on Mem Drive for years, there are two gas stations, a Shell by the BU bridge and another one under a new high rise down close to Western Ave.  I have bought gas at both of them over the years.  Wounded were taken to Mt Auburn hospital which I know fairly well.  Strange to hear these familiar places coming out in the dramatic news coverage.

New Immigration Bill 844 pages long

And that's one VERY good reason not to pass it.  844 pages of  obfustication means the law will allow just about anything. If I have 844 pages to look in, I can find words to cover anything I want to do.  Long and wordy laws grant bureaucrats freedom to do as they please.
    The "gang of eight" should be told to boil it down to no more than ten pages, single spaced.  Then at least we would know what we are getting into.

Anger Management

We had a Fox News anchor interviewing a shrink about the Boston Marathon bombing.  The shrink and the anchor agreed that there is a good deal of anger in Boston, and presumably in the rest of the country.  Yeah, they got that right.  Then the anchor seemed to draw back and worried that such anger might get out of hand and lead to something bad.
   I don't worry about that.  A good old fashioned lynching might be just the right thing for that scum.  We could do it right in front of Fanuel Hall.  On live TV. 
  

Would you buy a used airliner from this man?

A series of articles in Aviation Week about end of life for airliners.  The airlines now retire an airliner after 20 years of service, which sounds kinda young for something that lasts forever.  I mean the B-52s have been flying for 50 years and will fly for a lot more.  Speaking as a passenger, the new airliners are no faster and no comfier than the old ones. 
   The brand new airliners have somewhat better fuel economy which the airlines figure will pay off eventually  Boeing and Airbus are claiming their next year's models will have 10 even 15 percent better fuel burn than current models.  I haven't worked the numbers, but it seems like it will take a long time to pay off a $100 million new airliner on 10% better fuel burn. 
   When parted out, the engines and avionics can be resold for big money.  It's possible to realize $15 million in parts sales from a tired airliner you can buy for $5 million.  Doing so requires good timing, the parts are only worth money as long as airliners of that model are still flying. 
   Boeing and Airbus have backlogs of a couple of thousand new airliners.  Due to the continuing Great Depression 2.0  air traffic isn't growing much.  Does this mean a couple of thousand new airliners causes a couple of thousand old ones scrapped?

The Atlantic gets profound about North Korea

Joel Wit and Jenny Tower conclude their piece on the Atlantic magazine website thusly:

"The bottom line is that, even if this current crisis recedes, North Korea's WMD programs pose serious security risks in the region and to the U.S. that will continue to grow if not addressed in a direct and compelling way. ....   It may be distasteful given the nature of the North Korean regime, but there is no substitute for diplomacy and direct contact with Pyongyang."

Great.  "addressed and a direct and compelling way."   So what does that mean?  Talk at 'em, nuke 'em, blockade 'em, invade 'em, bury our heads in the sand, or what?  Just saying we ought to do something doesn't help.  You gotta say what you wanna do.  Especially if "something" involves a lot of pain, which doing a second Korean War would involve.

 Ah, here we get to it.  "there is no substitute for diplomacy and direct contact with Pyongyang". Been there, done that.  Both Clinton and Bush tried to cut a "economic assistance in return for stopping weapons development" deal.  The North Koreans signed two such deals and  reneged on both of them.  In actual fact, the North Koreans see nuclear weapons as the only thing that will keep the North Korean regime alive in the face of South Korean and American economic, political, and military pressure.  The Kim regime knows that all their citizens would join South Korea in a flash. As soon as the North Korean secret police and army loose their grip, even for a day or two, the regime is gone, the Kim's are dead, and  Korea is re unified under Seoul.  At least with nukes they don't have to worry about ground invasion or air strikes from the South.  No way are the North Koreans going to give up their nukes no matter what we promise 'em.

Another Retailer dies the death

Just got a "Going out of Business" sale post card from Pilgrim Furniture.  An ordinary furniture store in Littleton, it's been in business there for ever, 30-40 years.  A landmark.  My wall-to-wall carpet came from them and it's been down for 30 years.  Any how, they are doing the going out of business sale, and they probably mean it. 
  Either the owners are getting old and want to retire, or business is really bad, or both.  We will miss them.

I still hate doing Federal Income Tax

A complete pain in the tail.  I spend all day rummaging thru my files looking for dividend payment slips and deductible stuff.  More time trying to read gobble-te-gook instruction sheets cluttered with useless information.  I mean like who needs to know who has to file.  We all have to file, and we all know it. The lack of  any sort of general rules.  Like is Social Security taxable, yes or no?  They don't state any rule, they give you a 17 step work sheet, take this line, add that line, take a percent, and half an hour later you find out Social Security is a little bit taxable.  They pull the same worksheet dodge for capital gains and qualified dividends. 
   Then there are a myriad of deductions, exemptions, tax credits, and malarkey.  None of which help me or any one else, but you gotta read up on them just in case they might apply to you.  You feel really bad if you miss a tax loophole in your favor, so you waste more time checking them all out. 
   We ought to scrap the current personal income tax law[s] completely.  Start over with something like this.

                                       New 21st Century Personal Income Tax Law.

All income is taxable at the same rate.  Nothing is deductible.  No credits, no exemptions.  Capital gains is taxed the same as salary.  No loss carryover.  No income averaging.  Married or single, with or with out children everyone pays the same. No special deals for anyone.  Everyone pays something, no free riders.

    Tax Table

Yearly Income          Tax Rate
<$10000                  1%
$10000-$30000       5%
$30000-$125000     15%
>$125000                 25%

                                                              The End

We can't even do a foot race without terrorist attacks

The Boston Marathon, a simple foot race, been held for better than 100 years, attracted terrorists with bombs.  What used to be a happy day, is now a horror, with two dead and more injured.
   We need to find the perps and then get medieval on them.  Draw and quarter, boiling oil, nothing is too good for those cowardly scum. 

Jump Starting the 787

Can you hear the holding of breath?  Boeing finished up the modifications to the battery and battery box on 5 April and sent the paperwork to the FAA.  FAA has said nothing, and has a hearing scheduled for 23-24 April on the adequacy of the Boeing fixes.  With $200 million airliners piling up at the factory, billions of dollars of sales, American leadership in the jet airliner business at stake, FAA is under a lot of pressure to OK the fixes and get on with it.  Even an Obama FAA  doesn't want to torpedo American airliner sales, at least I don't think they do.
   Boeing's fixes are not confidence inspiring.  They never did figure out what caused the batteries to catch fire.  They made a number of improvements to the battery, but since they don't know what caused the fires, they don't know if the fixes will do any good.  They are putting their real faith in a fireproof stainless steel battery box to contain any fires and vent the smoke over board.
   If the FAA approves Boeing's fixes, and more trouble occurs, they will look really bad.  And they know it.  FAA could decide that nothing less than ditching lithium batteries and going back to something tried and true, like NiCad, or even lead acid will do.  If they feel this way, they should have let Boeing know back in January.  To let Boeing waste three months, hold up the program for three months, is inexcusable.  If FAA want's to be hard ass, they ought to have had the guts to make their feelings clear, back in January.  If FAA announces "no good" next week, it will take Boeing another couple of months to do a battery change.
   Anyhow, the breath holding at Boeing will continue.

Checking out the Infrastructure

The democrats are hiking the NH gas tax fifteen cents a gallon.  They claim that NH infrastructure (roads and bridges) is falling apart. Only a stiff tax hike will save NH from falling back into the stone age.
   I drove to a train show out in the sticks today.  Sutton NH, a tiny place way out in the boondocks.  I picked up NH route 11, an obscure two lane road at Tilton and followed it west for 30 miles.  The Mercury hummed along at 60 mph, smooth, no serious bumps, decent road.  It's mud season, when the town and country road agents post a 6 ton load limit on every road except I93.  Roads are better for the rest of the year. 
   If NH infrastructure is in need of another 15 cents a gallon you couldn't prove it by me.   Little old two lane rural NH 11 is in much better shape than I95 going thru Manhattan. 

Tummy side up

Stupid Beast spends a lot of her time lying around the house.  Sometimes she sprawls out flat on one side, other times she does the make-a-cat-shaped-ball routine with all four paws on the floor. 
  Lately she has been cat napping on her back, all four paws in the air.  She doesn't really feel secure in this position, she flips right side up instantly when I get up from my chair to fix me a drink.  The sudden surge from flat on the back to ready to run must wear down something in the mature cat.  It's like leaping to your feet from a light snooze in a recliner.  That would wear me down pretty quick. 
   Question:  Why does not Stupid Beast nap in a less tension inducing way?

What is the US trying to say about North Korea?

The TV news is carrying the story that the North Koreans may indeed have nuclear warheads for their missiles.  The story comes out of the US defense department. 
   Truth or falsity of this report is unknown.  I doubt that CIA has any agents in the north.  NSA has probably cracked North Korean codes,  so we know what the North Koreans have put out over the air.  But how much would a top secret project in a paranoid state like North Korea put out over the air?  Korean CIA ought to have some agents in the North.  The North Koreans could have their own Rosenburgs passing information to the South, but who knows?  South Korean intelligence is probably smart enough to keep such an agent secret if they actually have one. 
   But, when the US defense department puts out the story, we give the story credence that it wouldn't otherwise have.  Why do we do that?  Are we trying to make the North Koreans look even more dangerous?   Practical minded Americans wouldn't mind a pre emptive strike against a truly dangerous enemy.  Up until now, practical minded Americans have discounted the North Koreans, we beat them once, we could do it again, and they know it.  We don't  want to react to North Korean name calling.  We don't think they are dangerous enough to justify a pre emptive strike, at least not right now. 
    If we think they have nuclear tipped missiles, that actually work, that attitude might change. 
    The Obama administration surely doesn't want a military confrontation with anyone,  certainly not the North Korean's and their sizable army.  Why would they release such a provocative report?
    May be a leak?  We have Secretary of Sate on Fox TV denying that report at this very moment. 

Annette Funicello

News of Annette's death hit me harder than I would have thought.  Firstly, it makes me feel older than a stone.  I remember Annette on the Mouse Club.  In those days that was the only TV show in the late afternoon that any self respecting kid would watch.  Annette was so pretty, so vivacious, she made the show.  Like most of my peers I had a crush on Annette.  And she was real.  Plenty of girls  had the hair color, the complexion, and the figure to look like Annette, she represented a real girl that one might, with luck, date and even marry.  The great movie actresses of the day were beautiful and all, but no girl in my high school had the peaches and cream complexion, the blonde hair, the figure, that Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield had.  And from a high school boy's perspective, they were old, old enough to be your mother, whereas Annette was just our age. 
   There were no scandals associated with Annette to shame her fans.  She didn't pose for nude photographs, she didn't get sent to drug rehab, she didn't have eating disorders, she didn't speed around her neighborhood in a Ferrari and get into altercations with the neighbors, she didn't show off her tattoos. 
   I'm sorry that the MS made her latter days miserable, and I'm sorry that she is no longer with us.