Platforms are back.

    Used to be, each party, and many candidates, would publish a list of things they would do, if elected.  These lists were called platforms, and they had a decent effect upon voters.  For the last couple of elections, neither party bothered to publish a platform.  Probably because politicians think that taking a stand on anything loses you votes.  What ever the issue is, there are voters who are for it and voters that are against it.  Taking a stand, on anything, loses the voters who don’t agree, and fails to gain votes of those who do agree.  Which accounts for the hours and hours of politicians speaking but saying nothing.

   Mirabel Dictu.  The Republicans just published their platform for the coming election.  “Commitment to America” they called it.  The name sounds similar to “Contract with America” which was the name Newt Gengrich used for his platform many years ago.  Newt’s platform was fairly effective.  Let us hope this one works as well. Needless to say, the Democrats have been trashing “Commitment to America” ever since it came out on Friday.

How Bad is the illegal immigration situation?

I just received one of those “Do Not Destroy. Registered Member Documents Enclosed” envelopes in the US Mail.  It was from Judicial Watch (a reasonable political group to whom I have contributed some money in the past) and the first seven questions were about the very large costs of illegal immigration, extra school costs, extra hospital costs, and more,  from illegal immigration.  The costs quoted were high, so high that I would want to check them out before I believed the numbers.  The tone of the rest of the document was “Illegal immigrants are costing us an arm and leg and we should shut them down.” I suppose the states on the Mexican border might be getting hit this hard but I don’t think my state is, yet.

   Where I live, New Hampshire, is a border state, our border is with Canada.  Far as I can tell, Canadians are happy with things in Canada and are staying in Canada, except for shopping.  Prices are lower in the US than they are in Canada, so we see a reasonable number of Canadians down here shopping.  They spend money, which is a good thing.  The Canadians mostly drive back to Canada after a shopping trip to New Hampshire.  The Mexican border is as far away from New Hampshire is it can be for an American State so I don’t think we are getting hit as hard as this questionnaire suggests, yet.

   Personally I am perfectly OK with illegal immigrants who find a job, pay their taxes, stay out of trouble with the law, go to mass on Sunday, and send their kids to school.    I call these good citizens, and our country needs all the good citizens it can get. 

   Immigrants who are MS13 gang members, who smuggle fentanyl, extort money, and engage in crime, are terrible citizens and we should lower the boom on them, good and hard.

   Anyhow I will return the questionnaire to Judicial Watch and maybe even send them a little money.

 

Fog in the Notch

 It is so thick I can barely see the house across the street.  And it is raining.  Fall is coming, today I hear. 

Camp Lejeune water

    You must have heard the lawyers advertising for plaintiffs over the matter of Camp LeJeune’s water back in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s.  The lawyers are taking up as much airtime as Mike Lindell, the pillow guy.  The lawyers all call the Camp Lejeune water “toxic” and cause of a lot of bad sounding illnesses.  I have not heard just what it was/is in that water.  “Toxic” is just enough word for poisonous.  I’d like to know what they found in the water and how much.  Modern chemistry is good enough to detect small amounts of anything just about anywhere.  Before I get very excited about such detections I want to know just how much was detected and what is the safe limit for what ever it is that got detected.  I have no heard that about the Camp Lejeune situation. 

Newsies don't know Cape Cod very well.

Those 50 immigrants that Texans flew up to plush Martha's Vineyard were relocated to "a Massachusetts National Guard base on Cape Cod".  That was probably Otis Air Force Base, where I did Air Force summer camp back in the early '60s.  I heard or read somewhere lately that Otis AFB has been renamed "Joint Base something-or-other".  I am so glad that we have bureaucrats and paper pushers with nothing better to do than rename Air Force Bases.  We could even save a little taxpayer's money by tracking those bureaucrats down and laying them all off. 

Aviation Week still pushing for green airliners.

There are three ways to go to make an airliner that is better for the climate than what we have flying today.  Airliners use and burn a LOT of fuel.  Just to fuel a single seat, single engine fighter plane for a long flight (Duluth Minnesota to Tyndall AFB Florida) took 10,000 gallons of jet fuel.  This is a full 18 wheeler semi trailer worth of fuel.  That’s just for a little fighter plane.  To fuel a four engine jet liner carrying a couple of hundred passengers across an ocean takes a lot more, probably something like 40,000 gallons, 4 full 18 wheeler semi trailers. 

  Aviation Week keeps mentioning “Sustainable Aviation Fuel” (SAF).  What ever it is, Aviation Week claims it burns without CO2 emissions, and to work fine in existing jet engines.  I have no idea what SAF is, how it is made, what it might cost.  Googling turned up one post, which I wrote myself a couple of years ago. 

  Then there is hydrogen.  Burns good and clean, no CO2, just H2O (water).  Has to be cooled way way down so it liquefies, before you can get enough of it into an airliner to do any good.   The airliner needs special hydrogen tanks, fitted in somewhere.  The usual plan for fuel storage, filling up the wings with kerosene, probably won’t work for hydrogen.  The hydrogen keeps boiling off, requiring a cylindrical fuel tank that can take some pressure.  The wings cannot take any sort of pressure. 

  And finally there are batteries.  I am surprised that even theoretically possible batteries have enough power to lift themselves (let along an airliner) off the ground.  I am aware a one experimental battery powered aircraft project.  The aircraft is the size of a Cessna.  They got a lot of development work to grow that up to airliner size.

Butterflies.

 

Monarch butterfly gets caught in abandoned spider web.  I have a couple of very sizable webs hung off my eaves.  After a couple of days of steady rain the spiders, big ones, abandoned the webs, I have not seen the spiders in several days.  But the webs are still up and this big Monarch butterfly got caught in one.  He fluttered and flittered and yanked himself around for a long time.  He must have been successful, I just looked for him and he was gone.  Good luck butterfly.  You are gonna need it this time of year.