PERHAPS YOU CAN BORROW SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE: ‘Anyone Taping Me?’ Ellison Reveals How Pelosi Really Feels About Single-Payer.
Ellison is having quite the run lately, isn’t he?
Archive for 2017
August 22, 2017
DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS. Washington Post perspective: Liberals should stop being free speech absolutists.
PLANES WITH BENEFITS: How Buying Light Attack Fleet Would Help USAF’s Pilot Shortage.
The problem the Air Force faces is not recruitment. It’s that the service is currently producing more pilots than it can absorb into operational units, Air Combat Command chief Gen. Mike Holmes explained here in an Aug. 17 interview. In other words, many pilots who complete undergraduate pilot training (UPT) have no spot available for them in the combat Air Force. Some end up flying T-38s here as aggressor aircraft for the F-22 Raptor until a spot opens up on a fourth- or fifth-generation aircraft, Holmes said.
“We are making more lieutenants than we can comfortably absorb right now in the squadrons, so if we had another place to put them we’d start feeding them in there,” Holmes said.
A light attack fleet would provide another track for new fighter pilots, allowing them to gain critical combat experience and accumulate hundreds of flight hours in a short amount of time, Holmes said. Part of the appeal for new pilots would be that the light attack fighters would likely see more combat and fly more hours overall than the high-end fighters, because they are so much cheaper to fly.
“We’d use it as a way to season new pilots,” Holmes explained. “Some of them would choose to stay in that airplane because they liked it and they liked the mission. A lot of them then would move on into one of our other fighter aircraft that would enter the squadron as an experienced fighter pilot but new in that aircraft.”
As I wrote last week, “less bureaucratic bullcrap, more flight hours,” would go a long way towards mitigating the Air Force’s pilot retention problem. The light attack fleet would certainly help with the second part of that.
IT’S NOT JUST IN THE UNITED STATES: Universities are broke. So let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching.
AT AMAZON, save in Health and Personal Care.
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-DOMINATED COMPANIES SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM? Women say they quit Google because of racial discrimination: ‘I was invisible’.
I really think we need a federal investigation of Google’s employment practices. They sound like a terrible place to work. On the other hand, if the most important thing about a job to you is that you “belong” and that you don’t “have to prove yourself,” maybe you need to rethink.
LESS-THAN-SHOCKING NEWS: A Shot of Caffeine May Speed Wake-Up After Anesthesia.
PROCUREMENT: Northrop, Boeing Win Initial Deal to Replace Land-Based Nuclear ICBMs.
After the 36-month risk reduction phase, a single company will be chosen for the engineering and manufacturing development in 2020.
“We are moving forward with modernization of the ground-based leg of the nuclear triad,” said Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said. “Our missiles were built in the 1970s. Things just wear out, and it becomes more expensive to maintain them than to replace them. We need to cost-effectively modernize,” she said in the release.
“As others have stated, the only thing more expensive than deterrence is fighting a war. The Minuteman III is 45 years old. It is time to upgrade,” added Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein.
The Air Force is responsible for two out of the three legs of the nuclear triad. It expects to deploy GBSD in the late 2020s.
There’s some debate on whether we still need a land-based ICBM force when our submarine-based SLBM nukes are nearly as accurate, but advances in computing technology could rob our “boomer” fleet of its invisibility.
IT’S ON: Breitbart Slams Trump ‘Flip-Flop’ on Afghanistan.
Gail Wynand could not be reached for comment.
TRUMP’S AFGHAN STRATEGY: New essay by Jeff Goodson, this one in The Hill.
President Trump’s deliberative approach to formulating a new Afghanistan strategy has drawn fire from every corner of the political spectrum. That ended Monday night, when he announced a new long-term approach to Afghanistan and South Asia designed to achieve an ‘honorable and enduring outcome.’
In a major break with the past, Trump’s ‘principled realism’ strategy, is conditions-based rather than driven by arbitrary timelines. It will employ military, diplomatic and economic instruments of power, but eschews nation-building and curtails the pursuit of democracy as an end in itself.
It will aggressively ramp up pressure on Pakistan, develop a strategic partnership with India on economic development in Afghanistan and greatly strengthen counterterrorism operations in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theatre of the Islamic holy war. The government of Afghanistan will, conditionally, be required to carry its share of the economic, military and governance burden.
Note Goodson’s bio — between 2006 and 2012 he spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. That gives this line extra bite: “Political snipers will re-focus on the substance of the strategy, but for the first time in years, there is a blueprint for moving forward in Afghanistan that makes strategic sense.”
Read the whole thing.
SPOUSAL ABUSE: Spouse Criticism May Worsen Chronic Low Back Pain.
BIG WORDS: Taliban Vow Jihad with ‘Lofty Spirits,’ ‘Graveyard for the American Empire’ After Trump Speech.
If Trump is serious about really loosening up the Rules of Engagement in Afghanistan, then maybe the old Mike Tyson quote is apropos here: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
U.S. IMPOSES NEW NORTH KOREA-RELATED SANCTIONS ON CHINESE AND RUSSIAN COMPANIES: And on some individuals as well.
The United States is imposing new North Korea-related sanctions, targeting Chinese and Russian firms and individuals for supporting Pyongyang’s weapons programs, U.S. officials announced on Tuesday, but stopped short of an anticipated focus on Chinese banks.
The Office of Foreign Assets Control designated six Chinese-owned entities, one Russian, one North Korean and two based in Singapore. They included a Namibia-based subsidiary of a Chinese company and a North Korean entity operating in Namibia.
Six individuals including four Russians, one Chinese and one North Korean were targeted, the Treasury Department said.
It’s coercive diplomacy, with the goal of squeezing the nukes out of North Korea.
DAVE MAJUMDAR: The U.S. Navy’s Greatest Enemy Might Be Exhaustion.
“The U.S. combat fleet is already over-stretched,” Seth Cropsey, director of the Center for American Seapower at the Hudson Institute told The National Interest.
“Being short of two Aegis-equipped DDGs that provide ballistic missile defense while North Korea is threatening to launch ballistic missiles at local U.S. targets or allies is deeply unhelpful and regrettably timed. The overall impact on the Navy should be measured not only in the loss of sailors’ lives and unavailability of the ships as they are repaired but in the possibility that requirements have exceeded capabilities so far that the training needed to avoid such accidents has been impaired.”
Bryan McGrath, managing director of the naval consultancy FerryBridge Group, agreed with Cropsey’s assessment.
“Two fewer DDGs—I believe both of which are BMD equipped—leaves a sizable hole in a fleet that is already too small for what is being asked of it in the Western Pacific,” McGrath told The National Interest.
“I imagine that the Navy will have to move ships out of their regular cycles from Hawaii and CONUS [continental United States] to cover down on Pacific requirements.”
It will not be easy to cover for the loss of the two destroyers, explains Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
“With two FDNF (Forward Deployed Naval Forces) DDGs out, the Navy would either need to forego some operations, work the remaining 10 cruisers and destroyers harder, or bring ships from Hawaii or CONUS to cover for them,” Clark told The National Interest.
Indeed, the fact that the Navy is forcing its fleet to do more with fewer ships to perform its global mission might have contributed to both collisions.
The value of our seaborne trade increases every year, but the oceans remain the same size and our Navy has shrunk considerably.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Vague Yet Imminent Malaise. “If leaders have been kicking the can down the road the palliative benefits of altering the database, fudging the reports, cooking the books, cheating the tests and cultivating the Narrative only guarantee that the dam when it bursts will release a flood, not a trickle. Eventually the self deception fails and fails big time. Sooner or later the filter clogs up and Narrative is propelled face first into the 100 million ton iceberg of reality.”
JOURNALISM AS NARRATIVE CONTROL: James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.
We’ve been hearing a lot about “right-wing violence” lately. If we’re to believe our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters, there’s a Klansman on every street corner and a Nazi under every bed. There’s nothing more terrifying than a “white nationalist” who lives in his mom’s basement, which is why it’s okay for feral Antifa children to beat these guys up and drench them with balloons filled with piss. It’s “self-defense.”
But what happens when an act of violence is irrefutably motivated by left-wing ideology? What happens if, for example, a Bernie Bro named James T. Hodgkinson shoots at a bunch of congressmen for the explicit reason that he hates Republicans and wants them dead? How do we fit that into the preferred narrative?
We can’t. There’s no way. So we just leave it out entirely.
Well, for certain values of “we.” But it’s sad to see this even from the WSJ. Plus:
If James T. Hodgkinson had been a Trump supporter who shot and almost killed a Democratic congressman for political reasons, he’d be the most infamous man in America. But now, just two months after his attempt to murder a group of Republican lawmakers, he’s not even worth mentioning.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think the press is sad that Hodgkinson didn’t succeed.
Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong. Even at the WSJ, it seems.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Nazi-Hunting Fantasies Have Unhinged The Left: After Charlottesville, the Left’s tendency to smear anyone who disagrees with them as a Nazi is spiraling to the point of paranoid insanity. “Believe me, the arguments about how Nazis don’t have free speech rights and how it’s okay to punch them sound much more ominous if anyone has ever called you a Nazi just because he doesn’t like your stand on single-payer health care.”
Remember, the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. Plus, an important Twilight Zone reference.
EVERYTHING IS NOT PROCEEDING QUITE AS ARTHUR C. CLARKE HAS FORESEEN: Scientists Say It’s Raining Diamonds on Neptune and Uranus.
(Classical reference in the headline.)
AT AMAZON, on sale, Rain-Mate Compact Travel Umbrella – Windproof.
MEDICAL BREAKTHROUGHS: Cancer, Herpes, Metformin and the FDA. More breakthroughs, please.
AFGHANS ENCOURAGED BY TRUMP SPEECH, PAKISTANIS STUNG BY CRITICISM: Well, providing safe havens for the Taliban rubs a lot of people the wrong way.