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In a rare military-industrial megadeal that does not involve the USA, the 50-year marriage of French and Australian naval establishments that will build and maintain 12 new submarines for some 34.3 billion euros (~$39 billion) is a further escalation in the West’s nightmare of an Asian superpower. The three amorphous bugaboos that drive military budgets […] Unusually skeptical commentary about “lie detector” exams for a U.S. government publication can be found within an April 12 report from the Congressional Research Service. The report finds (page 24): . . . polygraph examinations are not necessary to the security clearance process. For example, no one in the legislative branch is subject to polygraph […] Since its inception some 35 years ago, there has been nothing–zero, goose egg, zip-t-crow–good to say about the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. Okay, it is stupendously noisy, which can be fun if you’re 8 years old at an air show with your Cub Scout pack. But for $30 billion, American taxpayers might expect a bit […] Sam Roberts continues to build his idiosyncratic pantheon in the New York Times obit section of historians-you’ve-never-heard-of with a paean to William O’Neill, who made a career out of disparaging the New Left and Sixties counterculture. “Many protesters, lacking serious reasons for being in college, resented having to study” was typical O’Neill scholarship (from Coming […] As April 15 approaches, American taxpayers might wish to contemplate the $37.5 million in tax credits for the Northrop Grumman corporation approved by a Maryland Senate committee. The military-industrial giant’s annual revenues have been in the $25 billion range in recent years–most of it thanks to government contracts, of course–making it the fifth largest such […] Seventy years of being a nuclear superpower have resulted in astonishing numbers of dollars spent on armaments that exist to be on perpetual standby. And then there is the nasty radiotoxic stuff that would make their actual use an act of national suicide. The White House has released a fact sheet touting the reduction of […] The death at 78 of writer Jim Harrison has revved up the outboard motor of Key-West-in-the-Seventies lore that substantial numbers of American men of a Walter Mitty bent have been yanking on for 40 years to Jimmy Buffett’s furniture music. Harrison and his more talented but more bourgeois friend, Tom McGuane, produced some very entertaining […] In a weird twist on the old Wernher von Braun model for contradictory celebrityhood, Robert De Niro is now both a hero of cinematic art and a patron of fraudulent science. We may or may not learn more about where the money came from to make the ghastly, stupid anti-vaccination propaganda film Vaxxed, but at […] Taking a long sea voyage on a tramp freighter has a romantic ring, but the two decidedly non-tramp vessels that arrived today at the port of Tokai in northeast Tokyo would not fit the bill. The British Pacific-Egret and Pacific-Heron will be loaded with 331 kilograms of weapons-usable plutonium. They will then embark on a […] On the fifth anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear power disaster: 97,324 people are still living as evacuees 400-500 tons of radioactive water accumulate onsite every day, stored in tanks that now number 1000 spent fuel assemblies are still inaccessible in 3 reactor buildings because of debris and high radiation levels the amount and location of […] |