Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, Space

A Billion Here, A Billion There

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There’s an interesting post on military aircraft procurement over at Winds of Change today (interesting if you’re interested in such things, that is).

Norm Augustine, former head of Martin Marietta (now part of Lockheed Martin) wrote an amusing (and insightful) book back in the eighties called “Augustine’s Laws” (it’s now on its sixth edition, last published about a decade ago). One of the things he did was to plot the growth in cost of military fighters over the decades since the war, and extrapolate it out. He predicted that in some year of the twenty-first century, the military would be able to only afford a single multi-purpose aircraft, and the Air Force and Navy would have to share it.

One point made in comments over there is that the reason these things cost so much per unit (I was shocked to read that the Raptor is a third of a billion dollars per unit) is because it includes amortization of the development and fixed production costs–if they had decided to purchase the originally planned seven hundred, the price per aircraft would be much lower. The problem is that, though we get more bang for the buck, we never want to spend that many bucks.

We did the same thing with the Shuttle. It was about a five-billion-dollar development program, in seventies dollars, but when the fleet size was cut from seven to five during Carter-Mondale (Mondale actually wanted to completely kill the program) as a cost saving, the price per orbiter went up a good bit. It would have probably only cost an additional billion or so to get the two extra vehicles, and we’d be in a lot better shape now (all other events since being equal) with a remaining fleet of five, instead of three. Having had two more might have made us more willing to continue to press forward even in the face of the losses, because even if the president hadn’t decided to end the program next year, we’d probably have to do it anyway, particularly if we lost one more, and had only two left. In fact, one of the few smart moves made on the program in the eighties was to order “structural spares” (things like the titanium keel and spar) before the production was shut down and tooling dismantled. That allowed us to build Endeavor after Challenger, something that would not have been possible otherwise, and in the absence of that new vehicle, we’d have been down to two after the Columbia loss.

We’re not just penny-wise pound-foolish in production. The Shuttle has a similar problem in ops. If we’d had more vehicles, and made the investment in facilities for them, we could have doubled the flight rate, without that much of an increase in annual fixed costs (perhaps a billion more a year). Which would have been a better deal: four flights a year for three billion a year (a typical number), resulting in a cost of three quarters of a billion per flight, or eight flights a year for four billion, with a cost of half a billion per flight?

Neither number is attractive, but the taxpayer would have gotten a lot more for the money if the purse strings had been loosened on the program. It might have made it a lot more sustainable.

Political Commentary, War Commentary

Down A Big Cup Of Duuuhhhh

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Some intelligence agencies are starting to think that maybe bin Laden hasn’t been alive for a long time:

Questions about Bin Laden are being raised by intelligence officials who say that without a specific time mark with a photo of Bin Laden, his presence cannot be confirmed and the most recent statements could have been put together from older audio.

Yes, and that has been true since Tora Bora. Haven’t these people ever wondered, or speculated why bin Laden, who was second only to Senator Schumer when it came to being a camera hog, all of a sudden switched from video to audio about six years ago? Even if he said things that seemed to indicate knowledge of recent events, that could have been done by splicing and manipulating an audio tape, or finding someone to imitate his voice. Maybe they’ve been using voice prints, but I don’t know how reliable they really are. I do know that it’s a lot harder to fake a video, and when I consider the fact that we’ve heard only audios, and not seen a new video (at least one that can be shown to be from a post-2002 period) I have long thought that he’s been pushing up poppies since then.

Of course, the other reason that I’ve long thought that he’s dead is that our so-called intelligence agencies–the same ones that subverted our pressure on Iran last fall with their “intelligence” estimate that they’re not building a bomb–have continued to tell me that he’s alive. To me, the question is not whether or not he’s alive, but why so many in the so-called intelligence community have been so determined to continue to attempt to convince us that he is for the past six years.

Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Cairing Party

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The misspelling is deliberate:

Perhaps some members of Congress had been fooled by CAIR’s deception. But now they have no excuse. Now Sen. Barbara Mikulski, who saluted CAIR’s “important work,” and Sen. Paul Sarbanes, who applauded “CAIR’s mission,” know better.

The criminal briefing should also disabuse Rep. John Conyers, who’s trumpeted CAIR’s “long and distinguished history.” Rep. John Dingell, who said “my office door is always open” to CAIR, now has an obligation to slam it shut.

No red-blooded American lawmaker wants to do anything that would facilitate the support of terrorists, not even Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who’s gushed “CAIR has much to be proud of.”

And shame on the (much fewer) Republicans on the list as well.

Moderate American Muslims need to form and promote an organization that truly speaks for them, and not for radicals and terrorism. But if they do, will the Democrats pay any attention, or will they remain enthralled with CAIR?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Big Lie Continues

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I don’t generally agree with Paul Krugman (to put it mildly) and in fact I don’t agree with much in this piece, either, except for one thing:

I’m not the first to point out that the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.

But the real reason I put this post up is to note the lie that will not die (mostly because the media liars, or at least deranged, such as Krugman, who may actually believe it, continue to promulgate it).

The prime example of Clinton rules in the 1990s was the way the press covered Whitewater. A small, failed land deal became the basis of a multiyear, multimillion-dollar investigation, which never found any evidence of wrongdoing on the Clintons’ part, yet the “scandal” became a symbol of the Clinton administration’s alleged corruption.

There was abundant evidence of wrongdoing found, and it can be found in Bob Ray’s report. The fact that he chose not to indict was not because there wasn’t “any” evidence. It was because he didn’t think that he had enough (and indeed, he may have thought that no amount would have been enough) to successfully prosecute and convict them, given the fact that it would only take a single Clinton cultist to hang a jury, as happened in the Susan MacDougal case.

Just to clarify the record. I won’t bother to fisk the rest of Krugman’s Clinton-defending nonsense today.

Political Commentary, War Commentary

Boo Hoo

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Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is very demoralized:

In the Anbar document, the author describes an al-Qaida in crisis, with citizens growing weary of militants’ presence and foreign fighters too eager to participate in suicide missions rather than continuing to fight, said Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a U.S. military spokesman.

“We lost cities and afterward, villages … We find ourselves in a wasteland desert,” Smith quoted the document as saying.

The memo cites militants’ increasing difficulty in moving around and transporting weapons and suicide belts because of better equipped Iraqi police and more watchful citizens, Smith said.

The author of the diary seized near Balad wrote that he was once in charge of 600 fighters, but only 20 were left “after the tribes changed course”_ a reference to how many Sunni tribesmen have switched sides to fight alongside the Americans, Smith said.

No thanks to Harry or Nancy. This is a real problem for the press. There may not be enough foreign fighters left to create the new Tet that they’re dying to report.

[Update early afternoon]

The WaPo has more detailed account. Apparently the diary was from the October time period.

Political Commentary

Fascists To The Left Of Me

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Matthew Franck liked Jonah’s book:

Edmund Burke in 1775, in what seems to be the first defense of partisanship in Western political thinking, argued that party loyalty and striving for victory over one’s opponents is a good thing, so long as loyalty to one’s own did not lead each party to attempt the “proscription” of the other. My second and last question prompted by Jonah’s Liberal Fascism is, how real is the prospect that one of our parties may try to proscribe the other. And which is more likely to try it?

It is a standard charge of left-wingers who claim to see “fascists” on the right that conservatives want to crack down on dissent and stifle freedom of political speech. But if, as Jonah powerfully argues, our fascists are liberals and many of our liberals are fascists–while fascism is much more weakly present (if at all) on the right–then it should not be surprising that we find the left to be the maker of speech codes, hate crimes laws, political correctness, indoctrination programs in all levels of education, campaign finance “reform,” and so on. Can anyone recall any similar campaigns by conservatives for the repression of dissent in the last several generations? (And no, efforts to revive now-lost prohibitions on obscenity and pornography don’t count.) Proscription of its opponents’ views–a classic great-party gambit by those who wish to unmake and remake regime-question settlements–seems to be the agenda of the American left, not of the right.

It’s not just fascism that is redefined by the book, but the words “left” and “right” as well.