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Two “tourists” may learn the hard way next year why NASA depended on military fighter pilots with thousands of hours of cockpit time when it sent humans into outer space. Finding billionaires to stage the round-the-moon excursion (Elon Musk) and buy tickets (so far unnamed) is no problem–Earth has always harbored plenty of nuts with […] The last time the Pentagon literally had more money than it knew what to do with was during Ronald Reagan’s debauched defense build-up, which included such contrived dollar-binge programs as the “Star Wars” antimissile system and a 600-ship Navy. The term bow wave was used by policy analysts and journalists to describe the enormous backwash […] In the first months of the Third Reich, after gaining the Chancellorship in January 1933, one of the first actions of the Führer against German liberal traditions was to shut down the free press. Independent newspapers were replaced with media under direct National Socialist control. President Trump does not have such power, yet, […] The legal military coup d’état that has placed generals, active or very recently retired, in top civilian national security leadership roles at the Pentagon and White House was solidified today with Herbert Raymond McMaster’s appointment as NSC advisor. Widely greeted in the press as a “soldier-scholar,” he earned the latter designation presumably via a PhD […] News that American warplanes fired depleted-uranium (DU) rounds at Islamic State oil tanker trucks in the Syrian desert in 2015 raises the question of um, why? This specialized cannon ammunition was designed to pierce heavily armored combat vehicles such as tanks and troop carriers, based on the high school physics lesson that the force of […] When Phyllis Schlafly visited Johns Hopkins in 2005 as part of a campus speakers series organized by undergraduates, she tried to bill herself as a “civil rights activist.” This prompted a quick call by me to the organizers, explaining how they were about to make Martin Luther King Jr. roll over so hard in his […] For anyone enamored of the expanding universe of “alternative facts,” the Air Force/Lockheed-Martin F-35 program is an endless summer. Donald Trump evidently smelled the roses and today announced $600 million of cost savings for the next production run, called Lot 10. But in the topsy-turvy world of F-35 development, where the technology never works as […] The military term “stealth” acquired a new interlinear gloss today after B-2 strategic bombers performed a tactical ground-attack mission near Sirte, Libya. Why they were used is the stealthy bit. Strategic bombers are astronomically expensive–each B-2 costs billions of dollars (good luck trying to nail down the figure)–and designed for one principal task, which is […] Since the retraction of Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 Lancet article that purported a link between MMR vaccine and autism, the subject has faded from being of scientific medical interest. However, public health and social psychology researchers now study it under the rubric of “social judgment theory” to learn how people persuade themselves about an idea (in […] In the post-truth era, it is apparently still possible for a lone scholar toiling deep in an archival mine to unearth scraps of paper that finally slay the Beast. We have known for a long time how Richard Nixon turned the White House into a criminal enterprise, as Woodward and Bernstein wrote in All the […] |