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.