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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 […] Any scientist whose legacy includes the McNamara Line may be said to have led a checkered life. Physicist Sidney Drell’s death at 90 recalls that grotesque failure during the Vietnam War of a misguided, triumphalist American engineering mindset. Epitomized by the hush-hush Jason military advisory clique, of which he was a founder, the mentality combined […] The United States leads the world in government spending on research in science and technology, with only China and the combined European Union budgets coming anywhere close. Sounds good. But in FY2015, the Department of Defense accounted for 48.2% of total federal R&D funding–$65.5 billion out of $135.8 billion–which was more than twice the support […] The death at 95 of economist Thomas Schelling brings an end to a generation of prominent 20th century “social scientists” so enthralled by the power of physics to describe nature with universal laws that they believed the same could be done with human nature. Some found their Manhattan Project during the hysterical Cold War proliferation […]
A1A, Cocoa Beach; February 23, 1962 (Buick Electra 225: [l to r], LBJ, Annie Glenn, John Glenn)
Will James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who reminds the next commander-in-chief of George “Blood and Guts” Patton, be any more horrifying at the job than Robert McNamara, Caspar Weinberger, or Donald Rumsfeld? We shall now see. George Patton’s ivory-grip Colt .45 was what a lot of little boys used to want for Christmas. No doubt some […] Northrop Grumman, the $25 billion defense industry giant that has been in Maryland since 1938 (via the old Westinghouse Radio Division) and is under no economic duress whatsoever that might incline it to leave, will get a $20 million gift from the state, just because not getting it would “send a bad message,” according to […] Justin Trudeau must have a big globe of the world somewhere at home or in his office at 80 Wellington Street in Ottawa. He must have been staring at it one day recently, puzzling about why Canada needed to spend $45 billion on a fleet of new American F-35 fighter jets. Malcolm Turnbull must have […] |