As tyranny seems to be descending on Hong Kong, remembering the bloody Cultural Revolution of 53 years ago.
And Bryan Preston has four questions.
[Update a while later]
The China challenge.
[Friday afternoon update]
“American flags in Hong Kong show that people still fight for our values. We should join them.”
I think he’s right, but there’s too much Trump bashing in here. Trump is not the problem.
[Bumped]
Is he following in the footsteps of George H. W. Bush?
This has always been the problem with Trump: He doesn’t have any firm ideological principles and is first and foremost a populist. This would be an opportunity for him to explain why these things won’t work, but it’s not clear that he even understands that, and instead he is going along with them.
I used to admire his writing, but he has become the poster child for Trump derangement:
Before yesterday, my primary criticism of the Washington Post’s Max Boot was political in nature. As I wrote in a recent book review, I found it regrettable that Boot’s opposition to the president had not prevented him from “succumbing reactively to Trump’s cult of personality, or from making Trump the origin of every graph onto which he plots himself.” As of yesterday, my primary criticism of the Washington Post’s Max Boot is that he is a narcissistic, dishonest, calculating, manipulative writer who is prone to engaging in precisely the sort of willfully dishonorable conduct that he claims to disdain in others.
Tell us how you really feel, Charlie.
When a former conservative is telling you to vote for Democrats (as George Will did as well in the last cycle), particularly the Democrats currently on display in the primary campaign, you know that he has gone completely around the bend.
They’re filing a lawsuit against the USAF over launch procurement.
I don’t understand why the Air Force wouldn’t want more than two launch providers.
[Afternoon update]
I have some thoughts on Twitter, based on some of the comments here.
First, since people are saying that Blue Origin should demonstrate the ability to develop an orbital rocket, it’s fair to say that so should ULA. They’re flying vehicles developed by other companies over two decades ago.
Arguably, only two teams with recent orbital launcher development experience are SpaceX and NGIS (by acquiring Orbital ATK). Vulcan and New Glenn both currently remain paper rockets. At this point in time, SpaceX has the most experienced launch-development team on the planet.
And while NGIS does have the Antares experience, that won’t necessarily apply to their new vehicle. Even if it was a good idea, no one has successfully developed an orbital launcher based on a large segmented solid rocket. We know that Ares I had teething issues. And of course, this all ignores the reusability factor.
I assume that ULA still wants to recover engines, but that won’t make them competitive with Falcon series, let alone a successful Starship program. At least Blue plans booster reuse.
And ULA will remain hobbled by its parents’ unwillingness to allow it to spend sufficient resources on Vulcan development (and forget ACES). So the trajectory is that, if only two providers, Blue Origin and SpaceX are the way for the USAF to bet.
Also, both Blue Origin and SpaceX will have large commercial markets. Because it probably won’t be cost competitive, Vulcan probably won’t. But there are political reasons for the blue suits (if they remain in charge of launch procurement) to want to keep ULA alive.
If I were the head of Pentagon procurement, I’d go talk to the
FECFTC about forcing a divestiture of ULA from its parents, not just on legitimate charges of child abuse, but because of the huge changes that have occurred in the launch market since 2006. But USAF seems to be stuck in the past, when it comes to procuring launches.
[Tuesday-morning update]
A nice history of the RD-180 and how it’s about to be superceded by both BE-4 and Raptor. The days of Russian dominance in rocket propulsion have come to an end.
[Bumped]
…in troubled waters:
Mueller’s professed lack of knowledge during recent congressional testimony regarding Fusion GPS was inexplicable since, as former deputy assistant attorney general Bruce Ohr’s closed-door testimony before Congress shows, Weissmann had full knowledge of the fake nature of the Steele dossier that was a major predicate of the Russian witch-hunt that became the Mueller probe. Weissmann knew there was collusion with the Russians, and that it was between the DNC, the Clinton campaign, British agent Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, the DoJ, the FBI and, yes, Russian sources interested in upending the Trump presidency.
Bruce Ohr, the number four official at the Justice Department as U.S. Deputy Associate Attorney General and the highest-ranking nonappointee, with an office a couple of doors down from Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, kept Weissmann “in the loop” about the fake dossier and its journeys through the deep-state swamp, along with a myriad of other co-conspirators in a web of conspiracy and deceit so vast that Watergate trivia question Carl Bernstein may be right in a way he did not intend when he suggested this whole matter may be bigger than Watergate. It seems only the DoJ janitor was not involved.
If Horowitz finally releases his report next month, it may be a very interesting month.
…and gun-shooting statistics:
For a variety of reasons having to do with social and economic factors the firearms murder rate went down. What the current debate really seems to be about is whether rapid-fire guns increase the frequency of a special kind of crime called mass shootings. However, this is a somewhat artificial category. Mass shootings are a subset of the larger phenomenon of mass killings, sometimes referred to as rampage killings. “A rampage involves the (attempted) killing of multiple persons at least partly in public space by a single physically present perpetrator using (potentially) deadly weapons in a single event without any cooling-off period.”
It is one killer, one place, one time, many victims in a setting outside of war. The data collected on this type of even notes the type of weapon used, which is not always a firearm. It is mass killings that one would want to reduce, not just mass shootings.
The brothers in the Boston Marathon bombing didn’t use guns. As with the “War on Terror,” this is the insanity of going after inanimate objects, instead of the would-be murderers.
[Monday-morning update]
Six ways Bill Clinton lies about the “assault weapons” ban.
To be fair, though, Bill Clinton lies about a lot of things.
How many heads will roll over it next month?
Not enough, judging by history, but maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.
A recommendation of Steve Kwast.
General Kwast has read my book, and I’ve heard that he occasionally quotes it.
No, you don’t win wars with “deals.” And trade wars are neithet “good” or “easy to win.”
Trump often doesn’t seem to recognize the nature of who he’s dealing with.
Well, this is interesting. The Acting Secretary of the Air Force is advocating to amend Article X to create a U.S. Space Force as a separate service.