We oughta do something to help the Iranian protesters

The Iranian mullah government is hostile to us, supports terrorism world wide, and thanks to Obama, will have nuclear weapons shortly.  Anything we can do to make life hard for them we ought to do.  They are having some anto regime demonstrations.  We ought to assist the demonstrators
Favorable publicity on the net, the MSM, radio and TV is good.  We need to make contact with Iranian dissidents inside Iran.  That could be difficult since I don't believe we have diplomatic relations with Iran.  We need to tell CIA to get some agents inside Iran, even without embassy cover and diplomatic immunity. 
   Political dissidents can use money, weapons, internet access, passports and visas, airline tickets, satellite antennas, cell phones, xerox machines, lots of stuff, that we have and aren't all that expensive, compared to say a single new F35. 
  

How much infrastructure do we need??

New Hampshire has kept it's roads and bridges in pretty good shape over the years.  Much better shape than New York.  Right around my place in Franconia, which is pretty rural, the state has replaced two smallish highway bridges on secondary roads for being really old.  Aside from the stalled widening project on southern I93, the rest of the state is in quite passable shape.  We haven't fallen into the railroad track black hole yet, despite the best efforts of some commuter rail enthusiasts.
  And we have enriched a lot of road contractors over the years.  I have been driving I93 from Boston to NH ski country since the road first got started.  The first asphalt was put down in the 1950's, and they had it finished all the way to Cannon Mt by the late 1960's.  It was built to the Interstate highway standards of the 50's and 60's, four lane divided highway, good for 70-80 mph.  I drove up and down it for skiing for decades. 
   Then sometime in the 90's Interstate standards were tightened up.  More clearance and longer sight distances required.  And so, a lot of contractors got nice jobs blasting back all the rock cuts from the Mass border to Franconia notch, making the cuts wider.  Did not make the road wider, just the rock cuts. And there are a LOT of rock cuts going thru the White Mountains  The same rock cuts I had been driving thru, with no problems, for 30 years, were now wider, and a lot of contractors got richer, but it didn't make I93 any better for drivers.  It did soak up quite a bit of infrastructure money.
   And then the infrastructure spending folks decided that we needed huge electric signs, to show helpful messages like "Drive Safely", and "Snowfall expected, Plan ahead".   Really essential those messages are.  The signs probably cost $100,000 apiece and they put in half a dozen of 'em. 
   And then more infrastructure signage.  We now have big, cute mileposts, every 0.2 miles.  I drove I93 for 40 years without cute mile posts so close together that you can see one from where ever you are.  I figure each sign cost a couple a hundred dollars, installed.  I93 is about 100 miles long, that's 500 mileposts, and $100,000 for the lot.  Really essential infrastructure that was.
   I think we ought to dump federal infrastructure spending, the Highway Trust Fund.  And drop the federal gasoline tax that finances it. Let the states decide what infrastucture is worth paying for, and let them raise the money for it.  They can hike the state gas tax to raise the necessary money.
  Anyhow Trump is talking up an infrastructure spending bill. All the road contractors and the state highway departments love the idea.  Trump is thinking there is a chance that he can get the Democrats to vote for it.  Faint that chance is.  But "bipartisanship" is a many splendored thing. 
   Far as this taxpayer is concerned, we have plenty of infrastructure.  All it needs is routine maintenance, plowing, mowing, culvert cleaning, and the like, and the states can handle that.
  

I wonder why they turned back in mid flight?

United Airlines I believe it was.  They got off the ground and four hours into a flight from California to Japan.  Someone discovered that one of the passengers on board, was supposed to be on another flight.  Apparently some screwup at the airport, the guy showed a valid boarding pass at the gate. Only it was a boarding pass for another flight.  So the air crew decided to turn back to California.
   I wonder why.  Doing that created a full plane load of angry passengers, angry because they had been stuck on the airplane for better than eight hours (four hours out, four hours back) and hadn't gotten any closer to their destination.   They could have continued on to Japan and had Japanese air port security deal with the problem after they landed.  They could have duct taped the guy if they had thought he was about to detonate a bomb in his underwear.  What ever they feared he might do, he had four hours in the air back to California to do it.  Pressing on to Japan would have taken about 8 hours, but if you can handle the guy for four hours back to California I don't see why they could not have handled him for eight hours on to Japan.
   So much for passenger relations.

The Last Jedi 2017

Went to see it at the Jax Jr in Littleton.  Good crowd, it's been playing at the Jax for a week or more, but there were a lot of people who either had not seen it, or were seeing it a second time.  It was reasonably OK, better that the prequels in the '90's, not really as good as the original three.  I have been seeing Star Wars movies for a long time.  I saw the first one, the night it opened in Boston back in the '70's, so I'm gonna see this one.
   It had a LOT of light sabering, spaceship to spaceship duels, strange CGI creatures, explosions, pretty much constant action.  If the movie had a plot, I never understood it.  Maybe that is how they cover up the plot holes.
  They had Carrie Fisher, who looked older than the hills, and Mark Hamill, who didn't look much younger.  Daisy Ridley was back as Rey.  She did good, she looked slim, and tough.  She had a glare that could stop a clock at fifty meters.  Her costume included clam digger pants that did nothing for her looks.  The fixed that in the last reel.  She didn't get any memorable lines, but she done good.  They had three First Order bad guys, a really evil looking emperor, a nasty general, and Kylo Ren, a Darth Vader wannabee, who has a thing for Rey and kept turning up when Rey wasn't expecting him.  These guys all dressed in black and did a lot of evil.
   The Rebel Alliance has lost a lot of strength in this one.  There was a time when the Alliance could muster a fleet of a hundred or more ships for a mission against the Death Star.  In this flick the Alliance has been reduced to a single star cruiser, completely surrounded by dozens of  First Order star destroyers.  
   Rey has found Luke Skywalker, who is all sorts of old, and snarly too.  At first Luke refuses to help at all.  Then somehow, I never did understand just how, Rey converts him to the Alliance cause.  Luke gives Rey lessons in the Force which make her scary powerful.  In the last reel we see Rey doing stuff even more amazing than the time Yoda hoisted Luke's X-wing fighter out of the swamp purely with the Force.
   They introduced some new stuff, including scenes from a hoity toity Las Vegas type casino.  They had a lot of fun inventing costumes, makeup and hairstyles for the casino patrons.  A much higher class place than that dive on Tatinooe  that won't serve their kind in here.
   The movie had three story lines running side by side,  Rey and Luke Skywalker, Rose (a new character)  and Finn, Leia and Poe Dameron (another new character).  The movie jumped back and forth between the story lines with abandon, which is maybe why I never understood that plot.  They had another one of those camera men who turns the lights out on the set and films in the dark.  PITA.  And it is LONG, better than 2 1/2 hours.
   For dyed in the wool Star Wars fans, like me, it's a must see,  For ordinary people, not so much.

Do we need a US Space Corps?

We have an op-ed in the Wall St Journal pushing for one.  Me, an old USAF veteran, I'd think my old service would be over joyed, highly motivated, and more than capable to take on any space defense or offense programs.  I doubt that we need a another government organization to preform the mission, whatever that mission might turn out to be.
   Right now we have a flock of recon satellites, the GPS nav satellites, weather satellites, and a bunch of comm satellites up there.  If an enemy shot them down we would miss them, a lot.  And shooting down a satellite than travels in a highly predictable orbit, in plain sight of ground radar, is fairly easy,  compared to shooting down an ICBM, which we claim we can do now. 
   Trouble is,  there isn't much a satellite can do to defend itself.  And there isn't much that a "anti-anti-satellite" weapon could do either.  Best I can think of is to use ICBM's to vaporize the launching sites of enemy anti-satellite missiles, which is really really an act of war.  Some kind of hi tech shoot out above the atmosphere might get passed off as a trivial border incident, but nuclear weapons detonating on your soil cannot be. 
    So despite the need for defending our satellite fleet, I don't see what anyone, a hypothetical Space Corps, or the good old USAF can do about it, given today's, or even tomorrow's, technology. 
  

The US must be doing something right

Chinese "birth tourists" are going to Saipan to give birth on US soil to give their children US citizen ship.  Saipan is popular because we allow visa free entry for Chinese and Russian citizens, since 2009. This can cost a Chinese family as much as $50,000 for hospital and doctors fees, air fare, and bribes. 
   I'm impressed that Chinese families value US citizenship for their children that much.  We must be doing something right here in the USA. 

Merry Christmas to all

It's gonna be a white Christmas up here.  We have snow on the ground, just got 8 more inches yesterday, and another 8 inches is forecast for Christmas day.