China And Space

They seem to be trying to get a little more innovative, but they don’t seem to be in a big hurry about it:

Reusable lift-body launchers will be developed in three stages — rocket-engine partial reusable vehicle, rocket-engine full reusable vehicle and combined cycle-engine reusable vehicle, said Lu.

The Long March carrier rockets still have room for improvement, Lu said, adding that the CALT is developing a heavy-lift launch vehicle with a payload of 140 tonnes to low Earth orbit and 50 tonnes to lunar transfer orbit.

The heavy-lift carrier rocket is currently called the Long March-9, and it should be sent into space by 2030, he said.

[Via Parabolic Arc]

The Musical Tent

Almost a decade ago, I had a post about my boyhood in Flint, MI, that got picked up by a Flint nostalgia blog. At the time, there wasn’t much response to it, but I see that the post there is now the number one search item for “Flint Musical Tent,” and there are some great memories there, including one from just a few months ago. Unfortunately, still nothing on line about the A.C. concerts. Next time I’m back there, I may see if there is anything in the library at Kettering.

The Campus Sex Police

Trump’s budget cuts funding for it. Good, except it will probably be restored by Congress. Devos needs to put the right people in place, and issue new guidance.

[Update a while later]

Related, sort of. Students are largely not learning to think in college. Because it’s more important to the universities to indoctrinate them, while taking their money and blighting their futures.

Mars

Another demonstration of how fundamentally unserious we are about it, and what a fraud NASA’s #JourneyToMars is:

“Right now we are unconsciously setting ourselves up for a very difficult Mars program in the 2020s, because of all these immediate needs,” Casey Dreier, director of space policy at the Planetary Society, tells The Verge. “We don’t want to have a problem where we’ve prepared these samples and then they just rot on the ground because we’re unable to commit to bringing them back.”

Dreier argues that, above all, the most immediate need is the development of a new Mars telecommunications orbiter. Any future spacecraft we send to the Red Planet is going to need a way to communicate with mission teams on Earth. Right now, NASA has three operational satellites orbiting Mars, but only two — the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey — are primarily used for telecommunications. And these vehicles are getting old. Both orbiters have been at Mars for more than a decade and have lasted much longer than the span of their primary missions. By the time spacecraft are sent to retrieve samples from Mars, these satellites may have broken down and have stopped functioning. There are other orbiters circling Mars, operated by NASA and other space agencies, but these satellites are primarily aimed at doing science, and their orbits make them ill-suited for telecommunications, according to the Planetary Society.

But we have a giant rocket and a capsule in development that we don’t need to get to Mars, so we have that going for us.

Public Speaking

This looks like a very useful development. I find this a strange attitude:

Let’s just remember that bilingual speakers are by definition fluent in two languages yet are too often deemed uneducated or undeserving of opportunity simply for sounding not quite like the people we see on TV.

As someone really only fluent in one language, I’m always impressed by people who are bi- or multi-lingual, even if they have an accent.

No, This Is Not Terrorism In England

It’s a protracted insurgency. It’s war, regardless of how much people want to deny it:

Britons trying to remain optimistic note that they survived and eventually defeated Irish nationalist terrorism not all that long ago. But this is a flawed analogy. In the first place, at any given time during the Troubles, the number of active Provisional Irish Republican Army terrorists seldom exceeded a hundred. Moreover, the PIRA was a “normal” terrorist group with rational political motives, not a religiously-motivated death cult, and it generally eschewed killing civilians for its own sake. Indeed, atrocities like the 1987 Enniskillen attack, which murdered 10 innocents, proved a black mark for the group, even among staunch republicans. Therefore, comparing the PIRA to ISIS and its murderous Western wannabes isn’t much help to practical counterterrorism.

That said, if Britain doesn’t soon devise tough countermeasures to its vast domestic jihadism problem, many of its cities may come to resemble Northern Ireland a generation ago, with armed soldiers in battle gear patrolling the streets as “aid to civil power” while enforcing frequent security checks on average citizens with the aim of stopping terrorists.

In their historically recent unwillingness to allow Britons to defend themselves (appalling, considering that we inherited our notions about the Second Amendment from ancient English Common Law), the contradictions of their multi-culturalism will become untenable.

[Update a few minutes later]

Counterterrorism lessons from America’s Civil War:

Destroying ISIS, al-Qaeda and other Muslim terror groups is not particularly difficult, far less difficult than Sherman or Sheridan’s task during the Civil War. It simply requires doing some disgusting things. Western intelligence doesn’t have to infiltrate terror groups, tap phones, mine social media postings and so forth (although these doubtless are worth doing). Muslim communities in the West will inform on the terrorists. They will tell police when someone has packed up and gone to Syria, and when he has returned. They will tell police who is talking about killing westerners, who has a suspicious amount of cash, who is listening to broadcasts from Salafist preachers.

They will tell western security services everything they need to know, provided that western security services ask in the right way. I mean in Phil Sheridan’s way. Like the victorious Union generals of the Civil War, the West does not have to be particularly clever. It simply needs to understand what kind of war is is fighting.

Yes, ultimately, the only way to victory is to make them fear us. As Mark Steyn has said, the question is not “Why do they hate us,” but “Why do they despise us”? It is because they have no respect for us, and given the behavior of the “elites,” it’s hard to blame them.

[Early-afternoon update]

In the face of terror, Londoners told to “Run, Hide, Tell.”

Contrast this with the London of eight decades ago.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!