Obviously, a major malfunction

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, […]

Away Down South: On the Death of Forrest McDonald

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 […]

B-52s for Youse

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 […]

Mars and/or Bust

The chart below from a new Congressional Research Service fact sheet on NASA funding shows in a glance why nobody is going to Mars anytime soon. viagra sans prescription http://robertrobb.com/how-much-difference-would-a-1-billion-rainy-day-fund-make/ In this manner this treatment activates the normal mode in existence of ED health condition. The principle dynamic part of Kamagra Oral Jelly and I […]

Plutonium Nation

The bazillion-dollar American plutonium manufacturing complex that is a legacy of Cold War nuclear weapons mania has found its silver lining in production of Pu-238 for fueling spacecraft electricity generators. Like Bulova’s plutonium-powered wristwatch, Monsanto’s atomic coffee machine, and Medtronic’s nuclear pacemaker, NASA’s RTG units were plausible technology only because they were backed up by […]

Fukushima Reality: Half a Century, Maybe

It’s been four years since the Japanese government declared the Fukushima disaster to be “under control,” though that was clearly a politician’s wishful thinking, not an engineer’s assessment. Now the man in charge of decontaminating the site admits that no one knows how long the cleanup and decommissioning will take. The most optimistic projections are […]

The Technology of Terrorism: Plus Ça Change

Kalashnikovs and TATP: still the same cheap, reliable, low-tech weaponry from last century. As the most lavishly supported intelligence services in the world continue to be foiled spectacularly by terrorists on the lowest rung of the ladder, old lessons remain valid:

Terrorists don’t work to overcome particular anti-terrorist technologies. They choose softer targets. Instead of […]

The Whole World is Watching

The history of protest on the Left had a sad moment at the University of Missouri yesterday when students and faculty aligned with the Concerned Student 1950 movement blocked a news photographer. Regardless of the dialectic of mistrust that led activists and at least one journalism professor (well, an assistant professor of mass media in […]

Take Me Out to the Flag Waving

The last week or so has opened an unusually clear window on the depraved side of the Pentagon’s budget, which, like all the other sides, carries a shocking number of digits in front of the decimal point. First there was the multi-billion JLENS balloon debacle, now there is the multi-million “paid patriotism” program at pro […]

JLENS raison d’être

One might reasonably conclude that yesterday’s Army JLENS fiasco will bring a swift end to this sorry program. But one should never, ever underestimate the ability of multi-billion-dollar military programs to defy reason, viz the Air Force’s new doomsday bomber announced a day earlier. JLENS and the LRSB have little or nothing to do with […]