Usually, we have to play “Guess that party!” In the case of the Kansas City shooter, we get to play “Guess his motive!”
Police would link at least 12 such attacks to the same .380-caliber weapon before they ultimately arrested 27-year-old Mohammed Pedro Whitaker. On Thursday, they swarmed his home in the south Kansas City suburb of Grandview, where a tributary of highways converge and where many of the attacks had happened.
In Whitaker’s home, police said, they found a .380-caliber handgun. After weeks of fear, they told the press they had their man, and not longer after, Whitaker was charged with 18 felonies. (It’s not clear if Whitaker, who has not entered a plea, has a lawyer, and he is being held in lieu of $1-million bond.)
No motive has been publicized, and police declined to speculate.
Emphasis added. I’m sure they decline to speculate, but the rest of us are under no politically correct strictures to do so.
I wonder if that’s the name on his birth certificate? Am I allowed to ask questions like that?
I talked to Glenn Reynolds yesterday about our Russian entanglement. Just civil, though, not the military space problem.
[Afternoon update]
Space News had a blistering editorial on Monday, excoriating the fools on the Hill:
Those who bemoan NASA’s reliance on Russia, yet shortchange the very program designed to fix that problem, are at the same time adamant that the agency spend nearly $3 billion per year on SLS and Orion, vehicles that for all their advertised capability still have no place to go. Their size and cost make them poorly suited for space station missions, even as a backup to commercial crew taxis, and in any case the first SLS-Orion crewed test flight won’t happen before 2021.
NASA currently lacks an independent crew launching capability because of decisions made a decade ago, the consequences of which were fully understood and accepted at the time. The longer this situation lasts, however, the more culpable the current group of decision-makers will become.
In that vein, the current criticisms of NASA and the White House might be viewed as a pre-emptive strike by lawmakers who sense their own culpability. But in pressing arguments that fail to stand up to even modest scrutiny, they not only undermine their credibility, they give NASA cover to pursue a Commercial Crew Program approach that might not be sustainable.
…we may undo the work of the Cold War era and stand godfather to a new Sino-Russian alliance. This without doubt would be the stupidest move in the history of American foreign policy. Russia’s economy is weak, but Russia has considerable latent resources in military technology. Russia has a limitless market for natural resources in China and a prospective partner in military technology. If we continue to dismantle our defense capacity while Russia and China nourish theirs, we will be in deep trouble.
The best response to Putin’s challenge would be a massive increase in defense R&D, with a view to neutralizing Russia’s perceived areas of strength in missile and air defense technology (remember how SDI cowed Gorbachev in the 1980s?). That would command China’s respect and reduce Russia’s attractiveness as a prospective partner. The Crimea was, is, and will be Russian, and it’s pointless to cry over milk that was spilled in 1783. We need to think several moves ahead on the chessboard. Otherwise, Chancellor Merkel is quite right: sanctions are pointless.
That would include innovations in Milspace, something that apparently only DARPA is capable of.