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.