Obama’s post-aggression sanctions regimen is not merely inadequate, it is a joke. Russian hard-power aggression, annexation and expansion require a hard-power response. Here are some I recommend: (1) We can’t flip-flop NATO Article 5, NATO’s commitment to mutual defense. The U.S. must demonstrate it takes its NATO obligations seriously. So, deploy U.S. troops to Poland. The U.S. withdrew its last tanks from Germany in 2013. The Poland garrison needs a U.S. armor brigade. (2) Cancel all defense budget cuts. Faculty club snark aside, peace through strength means something. (3) Open federal lands to natural gas “fracking” and start shipping gas to Europe. Undermining Russian gas sales is a real economic sanction. (4) Arm the Baltic nations. They are also NATO allies. And (5) deploy the GBI’s to Poland, and build a more robust missile defense system. As for permanently deploying U.S. Patriot PAC-3 short-range anti-missile missiles in Poland — that’s an idea whose time has come.
I think we need a new Marshall Plan to quickly reconfigure Europe’s energy infrastructure. If Obama was really serious about his “phone and pen” there are things that are entirely within his power to do. He could open up Keystone and approve the permits for those LNG terminals tomorrow. Investments in new European pipelines and terminals could be paid for with revenues from gas sales. And despite Kerry’s idiotic blathering about an end to all life on earth, this is the real crisis, not carbon.
Woody Allen has put more wood in the mouth of his characters than the guy who invented the disposable tongue depressor. Perhaps it’s this: Allen is a nihilist whose characters search for meaning; the Coen Brothers are romantics whose characters confront reality. The former example is grounded in the futility of it all; the latter is a caution against finding too much meaning in the swells and peaks and troughs of life. Not to say you shouldn’t look: that’s what art is for, as “Finding” clearly suggests. Something makes him sing like that. But in the end it’s not art that redeems him. The idea seems ridiculous, a sophomoric conceit.
“There are three barriers particular to civil supersonic flight; sonic boom, high altitude emissions and airport noise. Of the three, boom is the most significant problem,” said Peter Coen, manager of NASA’s High Speed Project with the agency’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate’s Fundamental Aeronautics Program.
There’s a fourth barrier not mentioned: the low L/D, which restricts range and makes for high fuel costs. If that problem doesn’t get solved, it will never become a huge market, and will mostly be restricted to business jets.
Is climate linear or non-linear? As she says, this is the heart of the scientific debate. But even if it can be modeled as linear, we still don’t understand enough about the interactions to model it with confidence.