|
|
|
|
The Israel Defense Forces–in conjunction with their U.S. military industrial subsidiaries Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin– placed an advertisement in the Washington Post today for Israel’s $3+ billion anti-missile system, a gift from American taxpayers. The ad looks just like a news column, even signed by Jerusalem-based reporters William Booth and Ruth Eglash, with cool […] A new regulation from the office of National Intelligence Director James “Not Wittingly” Clapper creates a high-priced menu for anyone who dares ask for the declassification and release of secret documents: Sec. 1704.8 Fees. (a) Requesters making requests directly to the ODNI shall be responsible for paying all fees under this regulation. (b) Requesters making […] There is an august statue in the otherwise lovely environs of Mt. Vernon Place in my native city that has puzzled me for most of my life. It honors Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1836 until his death in 1864. Taney delivered the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, ruling […] After two years of construction, $300 million, and a lot of fanfare, the wall of frozen soil that was supposed to solve Fukushima’s radioactive groundwater problem has been nixed by Japan’s Nuclear Regulatory Authority. “TEPCO is scattering a strange illusion” about the efficacy of the wall, warned NRA chairman Shunichi Tanaka last spring. Tests showed […] The contiguous paths of building rockets to launch satellites into space and/or carry nuclear warheads as ICBMs were blazed after World War II by the United States and the Soviet Union. For the first few years after the war, both superpowers exploited V-2 technology pioneered by Nazi Germany. By the mid-1950’s there was no technical […] Fox News, National Review, the American Council on Science and Health–at long last, have you left no sense of decency? Their latest hue and cry is to bring back DDT, the most infamous environmental pollutant of the 20th century. As though there is no other way to control the mosquitoes that carry Zika virus. Nothing […] “There appears to be no threshold below which exposure [to ionizing radiation] can be viewed as harmless.” This statement by Herbert Abrams, renowned radiologist and longtime professor at Harvard and Stanford who died last week, can be fairly characterized as fundamental bedrock beneath principled arguments against nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and the full panoply of […] The Washington Post is developing a serious born-yesterday syndrome in its reporting, perhaps understandable after years of veteran staff losses, a radical ownership change, and move to a new office building. How quickly the factual past is being replaced by entertainment. In its coverage today of the 30th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, […] Sam Roberts continues his string of weird New York Times obits of far-right academic luminaries with a doozy about Forrest McDonald, a longtime outlier historian at the University of Alabama. Prof. McDonald made a prosperous career by worshipping the Founding Fathers and excusing American slavery as “heaven compared to the Russian serf.” This kind of […] The 2,000-mile flight from Guam to the Korean peninsula takes at least 4 hours. B-52’s made lots of similar trips to Vietnam and back two generations ago during Operation Rolling Thunder. There was no need to perform carpet bombing (a war crime under the Geneva Conventions since 1977) in a hurry. Since a military air […] |