Category Archives: War Commentary

Business, Economics, Law, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Blue Origin

17 Comments

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A nice history of the RD-180 and how it’s about to be superceded by both BE-4 and Raptor.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]

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Both Ohrs

3 Comments

…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.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Lies, Damned Lies…

9 Comments

…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.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Left And Trump

23 Comments

Why they so despise him:

The far-left faction of the Democrats, led by congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, have with this big, very white, rigorously politically incorrect billionaire, what they believe, tactically and by uncontainable impulse, is the target of their political dreams.

Mr. Trump is the personification of every policy they hate and every human trait they despise; to them, he is a monster of ignorance, greed, bombast, bellicosity, and racist bigotry. They are like World War II movie submarine captains seeing a thousand feet ahead of their periscopes a giant enemy oil tanker, inching through still waters.

Their hate is real, but their impression of the target is a chimerical mirage. In pursuit of him it is acceptable to say publicly “impeach the motherf***er,” to claim adequately outfitted border detention centers where illegal migrants are fed Big Macs are “concentration camps” where children are forced to drink from toilets, and to demand a green terror, unpatrolled borders, free health care for everyone, doubled income-tax rates in the high and corporate brackets, trillions of dollars for reparations to nonwhites, and legalized infanticide.

All four of them qualify as anti-Semites. As has been widely mentioned, the president is doing what he can to help make these four the best publicly known face of the Democrats. They are, to adapt other lavatory images, drinking their own bathwater, and the president will hang their insane ideas around the Democrats’ necks like a toilet seat.

Conrad Black has a way with words.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Questions For Mueller

8 Comments

Haven’t been listening to much, but Mueller does not seem to be acquitting himself well. Anyway, some of the questions he’s getting from Republicans (and to which he has no good answers) are described here. The remarkable thing about it is that it comes from The Nation.

[Update a few minutes later]

What rock has Mueller been hiding under that he’s never heard of Fusion GPS? Twitter responds.

[Update a few more minutes later]

Mueller is being exposed as the magician of omission on Russia.

[Mid-afternoon update]

Mueller goes from savior of the Republic to bumbling fool in the course of five hours.

Pretty obvious why he was reluctant to testify. It’s become quite clear that he didn’t lead the investigation, or even read “his” own report. He was led by his partisan investigators by the nose.

[Update a few minutes later]

Mueller was supposed to “bring the report to life,” but even an NBC analyst says that he “sucked the life out of” it.

[Update a while later]

The painful, pointless testimony of Robert Mueller.

[Thursday-morning update]

The Mueller testimony was box-office poison.

In retrospect, someone, at least toward the end, should have asked Mueller who wrote the report, since it was clear that either he hadn’t read it himself, or was so bereft of his faculties that he couldn’t recall key parts of it.

[Update a few minutes later]

Heh.

House Democrats: We won’t rest until Trump is stopped…OK, time for recess.

[Update a while later]

Mueller’s performance raises questions about his handling of the investigation. You don’t say.

And was it a sign of a guilty conscience?

[Late-morning update]

Was Aaron Zebley running the Mueller probe? He’s the one who authorized the destruction of the Clinton henchpeoples’ cellphones.

[Bumped]