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David Willman survives at the Los Angeles Times as one of a minuscule number of mainstream American newspaper reporters who know how to dissect a sick Pentagon program. (Actually, I can’t think of any others.) His exposé about the Army/Raytheon JLENS radar balloon system reveals a textbook case of waste, fraud, and abuse in military-industrial […] Why are Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos renting old launch pads at Cape Canaveral? Because they can. Florida politicians will always roll out the red carpet for them or anyone else with money to burn along the down-at-the-heels Space Coast, just to get the dollars flowing again into Cocoa Beach motels. When Bezos says “the […] What is it about missile defense that charms journalists and pumps the military-industrial complex into ecstasy? Devastating technical critiques of myriad Star Wars iterations and the ageless Patriot missile never seem to alter either the dumbfounded attention of the news media or the billions upon billions of dollars that pour into these congenitally flawed weapon […] Technology is a forward-looking engine of change that pays scant attention to the past. It defines progress. American culture, which has scant interest in history, has embraced technology like no other. Japanese culture, which pays enormous attention to the past through Buddhist traditions, has also been a progenitor of high technology, but straddles an uneasy […] Seventy years after Japan’s first experience with nuclear energy, the nation resumed its affair with the atom after a four-year breakup. Kyushu Electric Power, the utility that restarted the Sendai plant, presumably waited for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemorations to pass before letting the core go critical. Volcanic activity poses a threat to the region […] “Hiroshima was a city of considerable military importance.”–Washington Post, August 6, 2015 On the 70th anniversary of the American atomic attack on Hiroshima, one of the most indelible aspects to commemorate may be the mythology that has survived despite three generations of historical scholarship. Today Richard Johnson and Bonnie Berkowitz repeat one of the most […] Hoover Institution and Heritage Foundation fellow, Thatcher flack, Reagan sycophant, repentant Oxford undergraduate communist (rather like having joined a campus Gilbert and Sullivan troupe–he was simultaneously a member of the Tory-bastion Carlton Club), proto-Formalist poet, advocate of a zenophobic “Anglosphere” of nations–Robert Conquest’s affiliations comprise a panoply of right wing encomia. His lifework was delineating […] The venerable aviation tradition of blaming dead pilots for fatal crashes continues with the investigation of last October’s Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo disaster. The NTSB spreads plenty of opprobrium around, putting private manufacturers and federal agencies on the hook, but finally it’s the dead co-pilot’s hand on the lever that unlocked the craft’s radical wing “feathering” […] Dear Members of the Johns Hopkins Community, Yesterday, our university made history. I had the great privilege of being at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory with CLASSIFIED as we celebrated CLASSIFIED. Thanks to the ingenuity and leadership of our colleagues at APL, humankind has now CLASSIFIED. After nearly CLASSIFIED years of exhaustive planning and […] Almost everybody except the Germans. Thomas Piketty’s very French diatribe in Die Zeit (in German, so paste it into Google Translate for a ricketty English version) against current German behavior towards Greece skips just about everything related to World War I and the Cold War. Eduardo Porter’s Picketty mimicry in the New York Times is […] |