Neo-neocon has a link round up. And yes, I do think that a lot of the immigration outrage is a (successful) attempt to deflect attention from this.
Category Archives: War Commentary
Space Force
There’s been a lot of stupid talk about Trump’s announcement at the Space Council meeting. Here’s some smarter discussion.
[Noon update]
Here’s Eric Berger’s take. The bureaucracy will fight it.
[Friday update late morning]
Here’s a pretty good history and context, for those unfamiliar.
[Bumped]
Freeman Dyson
An interesting interview of one of the most fascinating men of the 20th century. I saw him at ISDC, and he is holding up well mentally, though he’s been physically frail for decades.
[Wednesday-afternoon update]
Well, the comments have certainly drifted on this one.
The FBI’s Fractured Fairy Tale
Sharyl Atkisson (who was herself surveilled by the Obama administration) explains.
Seems like Fractured Fairy Tales were funnier when I was a kid.
Charles Krauthammer
This is tragic: He has just announced that he has only weeks to live. It’s certainly been a life well lived.
[Update a while later]
Here’s a piece he wrote at the turn of the century, lamenting the decline of the space program.
Horowitz’s Report
“Stop sanitizing it and release it now.”
It must be pretty bad.
[Afternoon update]
DOJ watchdog finds that Comey “defined authority as FBI director.”
What a pompous, self-righteous anal orifice he is.
[Update a while later]
Strzok and Page didn’t just hate Congress; they despised it.
This was/is clearly an agency out of control.
Tom Wolfe
Thoughts from Tim Fernholz on his space legacy.
The Mueller Investigation
Michael Mukasey: “It’s time to end it.”
Yes, but we also need to properly investigate what happened with the Obama administration, and see that justice is done. Though perhaps Horowitz’s report will have the whole story.
[Update a few minutes later]
(Democrat pollster for Bill Clinton during his impeachment) Mark Penn agrees. He’s been on Fox News saying this for a while.
[Update late morning]
The hunter becomes the hunted:
The current conflict in Washington, though dismaying, is at least much more comforting than the condition where everyone sings each other’s praises. The whole purpose of oversight, checks, and balances is to avoid the formation of an absorbing Markov transition — a kind of political Hotel California — which you can enter but never leave.
Avoiding a crisis depends on not crossing certain lines and concealing that fact if it has occurred. That has now gone by the board. When a system is undeniably confronted with deceitful lawlessness it is like finding the dealer was cheating at cards. Trump, by officially demanding an answer into whether the previous administration engaged in political spying, is effectively accusing them of cheating at cards. As everybody knows, once you ask this question at a table, the surface game stops and a deeper game begins. Suddenly the little cardboard rectangles don’t matter anymore.
Stay tuned.
[Afternoon update]
I suppose I shouldn’t be, but I’m kind of gobsmacked at the number of people on Twitter, many of whom purport to be journalists, claiming that the Justice Department is “independent of the executive branch.”
The Latest Safety Insanity
OK, so I read this, and the steam that shot out of my ears took the fresh paint off the wall of the kitchen on both sides of the room:
His committee recommended that NASA and the other ISS partners should plan for ways to operate the station with a reduced crew if commercial crew vehicles aren’t ready to enter service by the fall of 2019.
“Given these schedule risks, we recommend the partnership pursue plans to protect for a minimum crew capability to ensure ISS viability during the flight development phase,” he said. “NASA’s biggest priority is maintaining the U.S. presence on the ISS in case the commercial crew launch dates slip.”
One option he mentioned at the meeting is “providing training to Russian crewmembers on the USOS critical systems.” That training, he said, would be provided to cosmonauts scheduled to fly to the station on Soyuz missions in September 2019 and March 2020.
So, let me get this straight: In order to avoid any risk of loss of crew (and there is no way to do that), we are going to not only make ourselves more dependent on the Russians, but further reduce, if not eliminate any actual utility we’re going to get out of a facility in which we’ve invested over a hundred billion dollars and, as a bonus, put that facility at risk.
All because “safety is the highest priority.”
This is insane.
Iran
Yes. Best outcome will be a revolution replaced by a more western democracy, but unsure what the likelihood of that is.