Things are about to get ugly.
This may be like Budapest in 1956, or Prague in 1968. How will we, and Britain, respond?
Category Archives: War Commentary
Back To Basics
The military is being trained (for the first time in decades) how to manage without computers.
This is good, not just as a defense against cyber attacks, but because it will give them a lot more insight. Even when I started my career in aerospace, I worried that young people were being too confident in computer output, without understanding the fundamentals sufficiently to know whether or not it made sense.
Ilhan Omar
She happened because the media chose to lie to you.
I wonder how much longer they’ll be able to cover this up?
[Update a few minutes later]
Tying up loose threads in the curious case. The media must hate that Trump brought it up, because it makes it harder to ignore.
[Update a few more minutes later]
First link is fixed now, sorry.
The Gray Lady
Continues to diminish the achievement of Apollo 11.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related: Apollo Shrugs.
[Late-afternoon update]
Treacher: Yeah, well, the Soviets sent women and minorities into space first.
[Friday-morning update]
More thoughts from Karol Markowicz (who was born in the Soviet Union):
Sure, Communists tortured and executed dissidents, starved their own people by the millions and operated gulags — but have you heard about their amazing space feminism and space intersectionality?
“Cosmonaut diversity was key for the Soviet message to the rest of the globe,” the writer, Sophie Pinkham, wrote. Her piece reads like something from an old issue of the Soviet newspaper Pravda boasting of the achievements of the Soviet space program.
It’s not like this is anything new from the paper.
[Bumped]
[Update a few minutes later]
Lileks
Writes about the funeral of his father, a WW II vet (among many other things). He was three years younger than mine, who has been gone now for forty years.
China And NASA
Are they in a race?
Bryan doesn’t mention the (white) elephant in the room: SLS.
The Truth Comes Out
“Washington has laid all the ugly cards out on the table, and at last we have clarity.”
What a scene it presents. On the one hand is a group of people who think America is the source of all evil that should spend the rest of its historical existence atoning for the mischief it has loosed in the world. On the other hand is a group who believe that for all its faults it is the greatest country in the world and that those who want to destroy it should go back to Somalia. Whichever point of view you subscribe to (or neither) it’s hard to deny that these factions have existed for some time and are only now coming to grips in the open.
Yes.
[Update a while later]
Trump is not a racist: He’s just moving the Overton Window back to normal.
Eastern Europe’s “Subconcious” Fear Of Islam
A history of the Siege of Vienna.
Bastille Day
Yes, it is nothing to celebrate. Might as well celebrate the October Revolution, or the ascent of Hitler.
The First Moon Landing
What most people don’t know about it.
As I’ve noted for years, the reason that we haven’t been able to do Apollo again is that we just barely did it the first time, and it’s extremely unlikely that the stars will align to allow it to happen again. And that is as it should be, for America. There was a very powerful sense in which Apollo was not the right thing for a country based on entrepreneurialism and free enterprise to be doing.
I’m reading Roger Launius’s new book, in which he talks about four perspectives of Apollo. I noted to him privately that there was a fifth, that he didn’t address:
I felt a little left out. I think I represent a fifth perspective, in that I believe that Apollo was both necessary and not a waste of money for what it accomplished (a major non-military victory in the Cold War), but that it set us back in human spaceflight for decades (and continues to do so, as witness the current ongong Artemis fiasco).
He didn’t disagree.