The champion freestyle skier said the other day, after she had to settle for a silver medal in an event at the Olympics, that “sometimes it feels like I’m carrying the weight of two countries on my shoulders.”
Gu would be carrying the weight of only one country if she had chosen to represent her native USA at the games, rather than a hostile totalitarian state.
Gu skis for China, a choice that is a little like deciding to a represent a fascist country during the 1930s.
And there's much more at the one-sentence-per-paragraph New York Post.
From the start of her freestyle skiing career, Eileen Gu has been a runaway financial success. When the U.S.-born star opted in 2019 to compete for her mother’s home country of China, sponsors flocked to her camera-ready charisma—and for her access to one of the world’s largest markets.
But Gu, who grew up in the Bay Area and studies at Stanford, might be even more valuable to the Chinese government than she is to backers such as Porsche and Red Bull. And in the leadup to this Olympics, it became clear just how much China was willing to pay to support her.
In 2025, the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau was set to pay Gu and another athlete a combined $6.6 million.
That figure emerged in a public budget that was released in early 2025. It accidentally included the names of Gu and figure skater Zhu Yi or Beverly Zhu, another U.S.-born Olympic athlete who competes for China. The document didn’t break down their individual payments, though it’s likely that Gu, a three-time Olympic medalist, received a larger share of the funding.
That revelation was quickly scrubbed from the Chinese Interwebs, as were comments about it. "Forget it, Jake. It's China."
I see some academic type has lamented that Gu was “subjected to conditional belonging by the media, whereby their status as Americans was contingent upon their perceived loyalty to the United States.” Eh, when you choose to not represent the country where you’re a citizen, where you were born, where you were raised, and where you train, and then agree to represent another country that pays you millions of dollars… is it really that outrageous to question her loyalty or to no longer think of her as one of “our” athletes?
It would be fantastic if some enterprising NBC reporter should dare to ask Eileen Gu some hard, pointed questions
about this. "Fantastic", that is, in the classic sense: "remote from reality" and "almost certainly not gonna happen."
Unlike most Americans, however, McClintock was in a position this week to translate that skepticism into action.
Given that chance, McClintock (and the vast majority of his Republican colleagues) chose cowardice and voted to continue Trump's unilateral executive control over American trade policy.
We'll see who winds up on my ballots later this year, I guess. (September Primary, November General.)
It's difficult to fill in the
little ovals with one hand holding my nose, and I may just give up.
Scott Shambaugh woke up early Wednesday morning to learn that an artificial intelligence bot had written a blog post accusing him of hypocrisy and prejudice.
The 1,100-word screed called the Denver-based engineer insecure and biased against AI—all because he had rejected a few lines of code that the apparently autonomous bot had submitted to a popular open-source project Shambaugh helps maintain.
The unexpected AI aggression is part of a rising wave of warnings that fast-accelerating AI capabilities can create real-world harms. The risks are now rattling even some AI company staffers.
I just finished reading
a book that discussed the probability
that AI will kill us all, Bayes-abbreviated to P(doom). So: read the WSJ and Slashdot stories and
plug in your own values to Bayes' formula.
As long as you or I or anyone we know has been alive — for all of recorded history, and in fact for much much longer than that — humankind has been the most intelligent thing on this planet.
Intelligence is as intelligence does. If it helps you feel unique and special to sit there and tell yourself “AI can’t think!”, then go ahead. And sure, AI doesn’t think exactly the way you do. It probably never will, in the same sense that a submarine will never paddle its fins and an airplane will never flap its wings. But a submarine can go faster than any fish, and an airplane can fly higher and faster than any bird, so it doesn’t matter. You can value your own unique human way of thinking all you like — and I agree, it’s pretty special and cool — but that doesn’t make it more effective than AI.
Back in the 1980s, I
coded
up a
Reversi play-against-the-computer
game in UCSD Pascal, running on my venerable Apple ][. It wasn't very good, but neither
was I, and I still remember when it beat me.
Since being sworn in as Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has repeatedly tried to undermine public trust in vaccines. His agency recently took steps to slow down the development of these public health tools yet again.
This week, vaccine manufacturer Moderna revealed that Vinaya Prasad, the top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—which is a part of HHS—declined to even consider the safety and efficacy of the company's new mRNA influenza vaccine.
The decision is not surprising, especially when one considers Kennedy's past statements on mRNA vaccines. Nor is it surprising, given the broad discretion that the FDA has on public health. The FDA's precautionary approach to all matters has slowed innovation in a variety of areas. In August 2025, the agency limited access to COVID-19 vaccinations (chiefly mRNA vaccines) to people aged 65 and older and to those with underlying health conditions that put them at higher risk of severe outcomes.
Ron quotes the WaPoeditorialists
(archive.today link): "Overzealous government agencies arbitrarily suppressing innovation is lamentable. When that innovation could save countless lives, it becomes a tragedy."
But what are you gonna do? The quacks are running things.
You may have heard last week that actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt went to Washington DC and gave a short speech at an event put on by Senator Dick Durbin calling for the sunsetting of Section 230. It’s a short speech, and it gets almost everything wrong about Section 230.
Let me first say that, while I’m sure some will rush to jump in and say “oh, it’s just some Hollywood actor guy, jumping into something he doesn’t understand,” I actually think that’s a little unfair about JGL. Very early on he started his own (very interesting, very creative) user-generated content platform called HitRecord, and over the years I’ve followed many of his takes on copyright and internet policy and while I don’t always agree, I do believe that he does legitimately take this stuff seriously and actually wants to understand the nuances (unlike some).
But it appears he’s fallen for some not just bad advice, but blatantly incorrect advice about this. He’s also posted a followup video where he claims to explain his position in more detail, but it only makes things worse, because it compounds the blatant factual errors that underpin his entire argument.
He was also good in Third Rock From the Sun.
Are we ready for CongressCritter Urrutia?
The progressive knives are out for nepo baby Steffany Shaheen, who's running to replace my
CongressCritter, Chris Pappas. Wielding today's shiv is Christian Urrutia, as reported at NHJournal:
Urrutia to Shaheen: ‘Meet the Moment’ or Move Aside.
Christian Urrutia has issues with Stefany Shaheen.
Literally.
During an NHJournal podcast interview on Thursday, the NH-01 Democratic primary candidate pointed out that Shaheen — daughter of U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen — “doesn’t even have an ‘issues’ page. I don’t understand that.”
This made me search out Urrutia's candidate page… ah,
here it is… Jeez, how many teeth does this guy have, anyway? … No, I'm
not giving you any money! …
The word "Issues" doesn't appear on his front page, but let's take a look at his
Agenda page, that's probably close. What's his
take on "Protecting Social Security, Medicare, & Medicaid"? Well, basically, it's "Do Nothing":
Oppose any effort to reduce Social Security benefits, cut Medicare and Medicaid, or upend legitimate access to these programs through staff cuts, office closures or increasing the administrative burden on legitimate applicants
The right people are freaking out in expected ways to recent news, as Steve Guest documents:
The unhinged fearmongering about President Trump rescinding the endangerment finding needs to be studied, mocked, and understood for what it is: propaganda from the climate cult. https://t.co/28488U3Yripic.twitter.com/q4ZhWMM8cP
The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday at long last repealed Barack Obama’s so-called endangerment finding that declared greenhouse gas emissions a threat to public health and safety. Cue the apocalyptic warnings unhinged from reality. What progressives really fear is that they won’t be able to dictate the energy supplies, cars and appliances that Americans can buy.
Progressives recognize the importance of Thursday’s news. A New York Times headline says “Trump Allies Near ‘Total Victory’ in Wiping Out U.S. Climate Regulation.” That could be true if the Administration prevails against the inevitable legal challenges.
The editorial goes on to remark on the irony of progressives, usually aghast at Trump's authoritarianism,
now upset that Trump wants to cut back his arbitrary authority bequeathed to him by past administrations.
Climate change is a real problem facing humanity, and reasonable people could support government regulation to push down greenhouse gas emissions. There may come a time when the people elected to enact laws decide the modest benefits of regulating greenhouse gases outweigh the considerable economic costs. For now, free-market-driven innovation has done more to combat climate change than regulatory power grabs like the “endangerment finding” ever did.
The U.S. share of global greenhouse gas emissions has been trending downward since the end of World War II, and the 2009 policy change didn’t meaningfully alter its trajectory. The recent decline has been driven by the embrace of natural gas and renewables, which lower electricity prices when adopted for economic reasons rather than because of government mandates. Despite the obsession with gas-powered vehicles, light and medium-duty cars and trucks combined to generate just 1.8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2022.
And if you enjoy reading progressive rants: the editorial has (as I type) 1,194 comments, and the AI summary begins "Participants in this discussion express strong disapproval of the opinion piece…"
Trump imposed "reciprocal" tariffs on nearly every country in the world last year, citing the "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States" that "large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits" posed. This included a 31 percent tariff on goods from Switzerland. He later modified rates in July, which included raising Switzerland's to 39 percent.
"The wealthy Alpine nation has been hit with one of the Trump administration's highest tariff percentages," Justin Klawans wrote in The Week at the time. "This has led to people across Switzerland, a country that typically stays out of global conflicts, wondering why the nation is in Trump's crosshairs and what it means for the Swiss economy."
Why, indeed. As Reason's Eric Boehm wrote after the initial round, "last year, the average Swiss tariff on U.S. goods was a minuscule 0.2 percent, while the U.S. charged an average tariff of 1.4 percent on goods imported from Switzerland." Switzerland then lowered the rate to zero, making it even more nonsensical for Trump to impose "reciprocal" duties of 31 percent. (Further adding to the confusion, Trump dropped the rate to 15 percent in November—not after economic concessions but when the Swiss gave him expensive gifts.)
In a Fox Business interview that aired Tuesday, Trump told Larry Kudlow he imposed the original tariff on Switzerland because of a $42 billion trade deficit with the country, but he raised it because its leader was rude to him.
"I got an emergency call from, I believe, the prime minister of Switzerland," Trump said, "and she was very aggressive, but nice, but very aggressive. 'Sir, we are a small country, we can't do this, we can't do this,' I couldn't get her off the phone….And I didn't really like the way she talked to us, so instead of giving her a reduction, I raised it to 39 percent."
How about doing that checks-and-balance thing, Congress? SCOTUS?
Trump loyalists once understood that attacking civilians had generally been off the table. It’s why they took such umbrage at Hillary Clinton in 2016 deeming “half” of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.” Shots at Trump were all part of the game, of course — but Clinton turning her ire against his supporters was like an irate hockey player dropping his gloves, skating over to the seats, and starting to punch out the fans.
Nonetheless, Trump is willing to shout his disdain for rank-and-file Americans from the roof of the White House. Recall that he reposted an AI-created (we suspect) video of himself flying a fighter jet labeled KING TRUMP, from which feces are released on people protesting his actions below.
Just this week, Trump used social media to call U.S. Olympic skier Hunter Hess “a real loser” after Hess expressed “mixed emotions” about representing the U.S. given the trouble happening back home.
For the 235th time: We coulda had Nikki Haley instead. Just sayin'
Taking her cues from the boss.
Not to be outdone in arbitrary pettiness, as reported
at the (reliably anti-Trump) Daily Beast:
ICE Barbie’s Alleged Lover Fired Her Pilot for Absurd Reason.
"ICE Barbie" is DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and her alleged lover is
Corey Lewandowski.
Corey Lewandowski, who serves as a senior adviser to the Department of Homeland Security Secretary, fired the pilot after a blanket belonging to Noem was left behind on a different plane, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
Noem was forced to switch planes due to a maintenance issue, but the blanket she used was not transferred to the second plane, according to people familiar with the incident. In response, Lewandowski fired the pilot.
In another plot twist, the pilot was then reinstated after no one else was available to fly the pair home.
Lewandowski and Noem, who are both married, have publicly denied the reports of an affair, but people said they do little to hide their relationship inside the department. The DHS spokeswoman said the department “doesn’t waste time with salacious, baseless gossip.”
The pair have lately been using a luxury 737 MAX jet, with a private cabin in back, for their travel around the country, according to people familiar with the matter. DHS is leasing the plane but is in the process of acquiring it for approximately $70 million. DHS has previously used other planes through the Coast Guard or other agencies for the secretary’s use.
Social Security is drifting toward a cliff, and Congress keeps pretending the shortfall will fix itself. It won’t.
Absent reform, benefits will be cut across the board by roughly 23 percent within six years. That outcome would harm retirees who depend on Social Security the most — while barely affecting the living standards of those who do not need financial support in old age.
This should not be a radical idea. Government income transfers should be targeted to those who need financial support — not used to subsidize consumption among well-off seniors at the expense of younger working Americans. This approach is grounded in what Social Security was meant to do in the first place: “give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against…poverty-ridden old age,” in the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
You know who this is aimed at? The guy I see in the mirror brushing his teeth every morning.
But (seriously) I have a problem: Romina aims proposed benefit
cuts at the "wealthy", which is fine in theory, but I'm pretty sure
Uncle Stupid has no infrastructure that would allow it to accurately determine the "wealth" of millions of
geezers. It does some snooping on those it suspects of financial shenanigans, but taking snapshots on the
(volatile) assets of everyone at retirement age? Ye gods, I think that's problematic!
(The IRS currently claws back some Social Security benefits, but that's based on recipients having
a high income from other sources, not "wealth".)
Your representatives may finally grab the feared "third rail" of U.S. politics. When the Social Security and Medicare trust funds run out in the early 2030s, the law is clear: Benefits must be slashed. That would mean a roughly 24% cut to Social Security checks and an 11% cut to Medicare benefits. But Congress almost certainly won't let that happen.
The easy, though irresponsible, political path may seem obvious: Change the law, keep benefits whole, and pay by borrowing the money. This way legislators won't have to cast unpopular votes for spending cuts or tax hikes. This makes sense only if the consequences won't become clear until much later, after voters have forgotten all about it.
What most people are missing is that this time, the consequences may show up quickly. Inflation may not wait for debt to pile up. It can arrive the moment Congress commits to that debt-ridden path.
Interestingly, a runaway inflation also makes the problem worse, very quickly, since Social Security benefits
go up automatically. Aieee!
Increased spending on old-age entitlements and the cost of financing the national debt will push annual budget deficits from $1.9 trillion this year to over $3 trillion by 2036.
That's according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) latest 10-year budget estimate, released Wednesday morning. Over the next decade, the CBO expects the national debt to hit a record high of more than 120 percent of America's gross domestic product, exceeding the previous high of 106 percent near the end of World War II.
Much of that new borrowing will occur despite an anticipated increase in federal revenue, which the CBO expects will increase from about $5.6 trillion this year to $8.3 trillion by 2036. That increase in revenue is completely swamped by a projected rise in government spending, which will surge from about $7 trillion this year to over $11.4 trillion by the end of the 10-year budget window.
Hey, but what about that $18 trillion that
Trump promised
was in the pipeline?
It’s hard to recall a regulator who has done as much damage to medical innovation in as little time as Vinay Prasad. In his latest drive-by shooting, the leader of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine division rejected Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine without even a cursory review. This is arbitrary government at its worst.
The FDA rarely refuses to review a drug or vaccine application. Our sources say the FDA has rejected only about 4% of applications without a review, typically when they are missing important information. That wasn’t the case with Moderna.
Dr. Prasad spiked Moderna’s flu vaccine because its Phase 3 trial was putatively not “adequate and well-controlled.” He quibbled that the control group in Moderna’s late-stage trial didn’t receive the “best-available standard of care.” He decides what is “best.”
I assume Vinay is following Junior's orders here. I'm pretty sure that pharmaceutical companies have
yet to develop a vaccine that would regrow his spine.
I had high hopes and low expectations that the FDA under the new administration would be less paternalistic and more open to medical freedom. Instead, what we are getting is paternalism with different preferences. In particular, the FDA now appears to have a bizarre anti-vaccine fixation, particularly of the mRNA variety (disappointing but not surprising given the leadership of RFK Jr.).
The latest is that the FDA has issued a Refusal-to-File (RTF) letter to Moderna for their mRNA influenza vaccine, mRNA-1010. An RTF means the FDA has determined that the application is so deficient it doesn’t even warrant a review. RTF letters are not unheard of, but they’re rare—especially given that Moderna spent hundreds of millions of dollars running Phase 3 trials enrolling over 43,000 participants based on FDA guidance, and is now being told the (apparently) agreed-upon design was inadequate.
Alex's bottom line:
An administration that promised medical freedom is delivering medical nationalism: fewer options, less innovation, and a clear signal to every company considering pharmaceutical investment that the rules can change after the game is played. And this isn’t a one-product story. mRNA is a general-purpose platform with spillovers across infectious disease and vaccines for cancer; if the U.S. turns mRNA into a political third rail, the investment, talent, and manufacturing will migrate elsewhere. America built this capability, and we’re now choosing to export it—along with the health benefits.
I've said this before, but: It's Calvinball, except with lives in the balance.
(paid link)If the flu don't get ya, the singularity will.
I'm currently reading a dire prediction of AI doom predicting … well, you can read the title for yourself
over there on your right. Nate Silver is not as apocalyptic, but
he's pretty gloomy:
The singularity won't be gentle.
So here’s a take I consider relatively straightforward, but I don’t think has really sunk into the conventional wisdom. If AI has even a fraction of the impact that many people in Silicon Valley now expect on the fabric of work and daily life, it’s going to have profound and unpredictable political impacts.
Last June, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, published a blog post entitled “The Gentle Singularity”. If you’re not familiar with the jargon, the Singularity (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not) is a hypothesized extremely rapid takeoff in technological progress — so technologies that would once have taken years or decades to come to fruition might be realized in months, days, hours, minutes, microseconds. I’m not sure that I want to weigh in right now on my “priors” about the Singularity. It’s probably safe to say they’re more skeptical than your average Berkeley-based machine-learning researcher but more credulous than your typical political takes artist.
These guys have put some thought into likely scenarios, and I haven't. (I have a good excuse: I went to bed
on November 7, 2016, glumly resigned to the fact that Hillary Clinton was going to be our next President.
Since then, I've avoided making predictions, "especially about the future".)
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration refused to review Moderna’s application to sell a new seasonal flu vaccine.
The FDA sent Moderna a “refusal-to-file” letter earlier this month, saying the company’s study testing the vaccine wasn’t sufficient, and the agency wouldn’t take up the company’s request for approval to sell the shot, Moderna said Tuesday.
In the letter, the FDA said Moderna failed during testing to compare its experimental flu vaccine with the best available vaccine on the market.
Moderna said the FDA didn’t identify any concerns about the safety or effectiveness of the company’s experimental vaccine. The company said it was asking the agency for a meeting to discuss the matter.
Moderna was surprised by the rejection. “It does feel like the rules of the game are being changed after it’s been played,” Moderna President Stephen Hoge said in an interview.
With RFKJr calling the "shots" (heh), pharmaceutical companies had best prepare for
unpredictable Calvinball rule changes from the FDA.
I switched off the game early because it was so boring, so I didn’t watch the halftime show when it was on. Instead, I “Twitter-watched” it — watched the reactions of others online. And what I saw spill forth was a Rorschach inkblot spreading out in real time: Was it political? Was it mild and inoffensive? Was it an entertaining hoot or a bizarre failure? All I know is that everybody was fighting bitterly about the cultural import of a guy who self-identifies as a vicious hare — which I assume is about as seriously as we should take him — and the angles were almost entirely predictable based on partisan priors. (Notable exception: Commentary’s John Podhoretz, who delightfully zagged where others zigged.)
When I finally checked the thing out myself, I had three takeaways: (1) My conversational Spanish is way rustier than I thought. (2) Golly, Puerto Rican women sure are lovely. (3) Whoever choreographed this should work on the next major stage production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Seriously, hundreds of humans dressed as tall reeds and sugarcane stalks? Watching them exit the field afterward was its own kind of surreal joy. Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane on Sunday night, so if you’re the sort to put stock in witch’s curses, best start contemplating the end of your reign.
Jeffrey gets more content out of the halftime show by not watching it real time. I will have to remember
this for next year.
It’s always a good day when the New York Times editorial board catches up to our Charlie Cooke.
Back in November, Charlie wrote a typically insightful and well-thought-out magazine piece lamenting that “marijuana legalization is a good idea with bad consequences”:
The United States has some of the greatest and most interesting cities in the world — New York, Chicago, San Francisco — and, over the last five or so years, almost all of them have become unpleasant to walk around in thanks to the ubiquitous smell of weed. Truly, it is everywhere — including, most distressingly, wafting through open-air restaurants and sidewalk cafés. There is a reason that the colloquial name for marijuana is “skunk,” and there is a reason that one tries to avoid skunks: They are not, in any circumstance, nice to be around. . . .
Nobody seems to believe that the omnipresent smell of weed is the inevitable consequence of their viewpoint. And they’re right: It’s not. Toleration of the public consumption of marijuana — whether explicit or implicit — is a choice that exists wholly independently of the underlying legal status of the drug. Indeed, when one stops to think about it for a moment, it’s rather peculiar that we have ended up in this position in the first instance. The go-to comparison for cannabis is alcohol. And, in almost every major city in the United States, it is illegal to drink alcohol on the street. How can it possibly be the case that we are more permissive toward a drug that has just been legalized than toward the one that has been a mainstay of our culture (including during Prohibition!) since the beginning of the republic?
We could have just put piles of burning tires interspersed throughout the downtowns of major U.S. cities and achieved the same olfactory effect.
Charlie also pointed out the absurdity that a culture that has effectively banned tobacco smoking in every public space is now completely fine with smoking marijuana in those same public spaces. A major argument that drove the ban on tobacco smoking in public places was the danger of secondhand smoke. Apparently, both the broader public and most lawmakers have decided that when it comes to marijuana smoking, we’re just not going to worry about that sort of thing.
I lost my sense of smell a few years ago, so someone would have to tell me if
that's an issue in the LFOD state.
Spurning the rich subtleties of the English language, JD Vance has a penchant for words that he perhaps thinks display manly vigor, and express a populist’s rejection of refinement. In a recent social media post, he called someone whose posts annoyed him a “dipshit.” He recently told an interviewer that anyone who criticizes his wife can “eat shit.”
Now, Vance might reasonably believe that many Americans enjoy potty-mouthed high officials. The “Access Hollywood” tape became public 32 days before the 2016 election in which the star of the tape, who mused about grabbing women’s genitals, was elected president. At a minimum, it would be reasonable for Vance to suppose that, after five years of a president who talks about “shithole countries,” Americans are inured to such pungent language.
I will admit that I've grown inordinately fond of using "bullshit" when talking about Trump or Vance.
In my defense, George, I'm not sure there's a better word available.
The most salacious Winter Olympics drama of the week was, for me, an emotional roller coaster. A high-speed journey from dismay to horror to nauseated recognition, culminating in a sense of having fallen out of space and time as déjà vu collided with clairvoyance. The thing that was happening had happened before; it would happen again, and again.
I am referring, of course, to the incident wherein American Olympic skier Hunter Hess said he had “mixed emotions” about certain U.S. domestic policies, and President Donald Trump called Hess a “real loser” who “shouldn’t have tried out for the team, and it’s too bad he’s on it.”
Hess’s comments appear to have been made in response to a question from the press about how it felt to be representing the United States at this present moment of political turmoil (as opposed to, you know, any prior moment of the near-continuous turmoil of the past 15-odd years). That Trump responded by calling Hess a “loser” is best categorized, like so many Trumpian shenanigans, under “disappointment” rather than “surprise.” I’m not saying the 79-year-old president of the United States shouldn’t indulge in petty middle school–style beefing with an athlete one-third his age; I’m saying, if he’s going to do it, can’t he steal Hess’s girlfriend, put rotten eggs in his locker, and challenge him to a dance-off like a normal person?
Fine, Kat. I just hope Gertie Burper does OK in (or at least, survives) the
luge.
Flour and sawdust?
Kevin D. Williamson goes up to Iowa's Hat:
A New
American Development. (Subtitle: "A short, sad tale of public grief and newfangled Midwestern Jacobinism in the City of Flour and Sawdust."
(archive.today link)
MINNEAPOLIS—Uff da! Minneapolis has seen better days.
If you were going by the hallucinogenic Fox News/talk radio/your weird uncle who is on Facebook way too much/X/GOP press release/ipso-facto-nutso/parallel universe view of the world that informs so much of the right-wing side of the American political conversation, then you’d think that Minneapolis, the “City of Flour and Sawdust,” was pretty much exclusively run by some kind of al-Shabaab-adjacent Somali mafia, that it was all halal butchers and mosques and the muezzin’s call of Ashhadu an la ilaha illa Allah! ringing out incongruously over the frozen urban Wonder Bread tundra. But turns out, it’s a lot of familiar American slop: chain strip clubs and drag-show cabarets and ersatz retro diners, faux Irish pubs that fill up promptly at 5:03 p.m. on weekdays with broad-bottomed government workers in stretchy slacks knocking down a couple of vodka-and-Sprites after a long day’s bureaucratting, the now-ubiquitous sickly stench of marijuana smoke on the streets, and just scads and scads of downscale white people, both the expensively educated kind (“Try dunking some of that gluten-free chai cookie into this depth charge!” is a literal thing I heard from a young woman at the May Day Café recounting her internship in ceramics, and, by God, she really did say “gluten-free”) and the genuine lumpenproletarian cigarette-smokers, including these two pockmarked, runty Midwestern specimens in a crappy green Subaru who pulled up alongside me as I was walking down Lake Street inquiring with as much modest menace as they could muster about my “credentials.” Their faces were largely obscured by over-the-nose black masks (just like the insidious agents of you-know-who!) and big black sunglasses, but they were unmistakably pallid, dead-guy white and just trying real hard to sound like tough guys. They weren’t sharing their names, of course, but I immediately nicknamed them Elwood (the thinner one, at the wheel) and Jake (who had had a few more Twinkies in him and did the talking) inasmuch as they looked like a couple of antifa dorks trying to launch a Blues Brothers tribute act.
Well, it's sheer genius from KDW. And I especially like the Uff da!,
something my dad used to say when I was being obstreperous.
Not that it matters: Although born in
South Dakota, Dad had to spend some of his formative years in Norway, thanks to WWI making
transatlantic travel perilous.
After the war, back in the USA, he entered grade school in Lake Mills, Iowa not knowing English.
And the "flour and sawdust" thing is explained
here.
Families across the U.S. are questioning whether a four-year degree is worth it. Student debt has soared. Recent graduates are struggling in a rapidly changing job market. Colleges can also be too ideological: On many campuses, students are exposed to a limited range of perspectives, signaling to them what rather than how to think.
American higher education has a trust problem. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise, and it won’t solve itself. In 2026 I’d like to see colleges and universities across the country take steps to restore trust. As president of Dartmouth College, I’m committed to this goal, and how to restore public confidence in higher education animates conversations among my presidential peers.
She makes a lot of sense, and I wish her luck. (There's a famous quote
I can't find right now about even the most radical left-wing faculty can be amazingly
reactionary when it comes to campus reforms.)
I especially wish her luck with this:
Third, re-center higher education on learning rather than political posturing. Too often, colleges and universities have participated in the culture wars. The result is an environment in which students and faculty feel they must toe an ideological line rather than explore ideas that fall outside prevailing norms.
Our institutions must reclaim a narrower, firmer sense of our role. That means embracing institutional neutrality—or restraint, as we call it at Dartmouth—on issues that don’t directly affect our mission or core functions. When we, as institutions, rush to issue statements every time there’s a national or global controversy, we signal there’s a “right” position and that opposing views are unwelcome.
Must I write about Epstein stuff?
I find it pretty boring, mostly one nothingburger after another, except for the Andrew formerly
knowing as Prince. But Andrew C. McCarthy has a pretty good take
on the latest, and he's refreshingly honest:
Of Course Ghislaine Maxwell Took the Fifth.
(archive.today link)
To recap, surrogates of the president’s 2024 campaign, including Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, who were later tapped to run the DOJ and FBI, got Trump supporters spun up about a massive Epstein cover-up — the notion that the Biden administration was suppressing what should have been charges against a pedophilia ring in which Epstein and Maxwell were supplying underage girls to prominent “clients.”
The conspiracy theory never made any sense — and I say that as someone who has proved more than his share of actual conspiracies. First, the Biden DOJ, which indicted Trump twice and provided assistance to Democratic district attorneys who also indicted Trump, was trying hard to make any criminal case against Trump that might stick. Second, it is inconceivable that the Epstein prosecutors in the Southern District of New York (SDNY), led by Maureen Comey, daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, would have buried a career-making case against Trump or any other prominent person. Third, as Rich and I have discussed on the podcast several times, the big problem — the most publicly misunderstood problem — is that most sex crimes are not federal; they are state offenses. That includes sex with underage persons.
Well, it wasn't the Patriots. They were awful. But Anheuser-Busch InBev deserves some love
for their commercial:
That's so cool.
I am normally a Sam Adams guy, but the next time I buy beer…
In other SB news: I kind of spaced during Bad Bunny. Not for me. Not aimed at me.
But I did like the opening ceremony's renditions of "America the Beautiful" and "The Star Spangled Banner".
Which brings me to a very pithy quote from Yuval Levin's
essay in the current National Review:
America the Durable.
(archive.today link)
Our civic vocabulary is deeply shaped by this existential insecurity. The American national anthem, for instance, is not a celebration of the beauty or glory of our country; it is a song about barely surviving the night. We all implicitly share the wonder it expresses at the improbable fact that our flag is still there.
Yuval's article is about our centuries-long collective worry that our country is circling the drain. That worry, too,
has a long tradition of existence.
Also of note:
Rhetorical Shenanigan #517.
Well, actually, I haven't been counting. I've seen quite a few over the decades, though.
In the WSJ "Free Expression" newsletter, Jack Butler chides users of one of his irritants:
‘Our Democracy’ Isn’t Your Free Pass.
(WSJ gifted link)
“Our democracy” is under attack. Not yours. Not theirs. Ours.
Survey the rhetoric of left-leaning politicians and you’ll notice a liberal employment of this phrase “our democracy.” Of late, it has been a favorite of state-level Democrats defending their vigorous redistricting efforts. It is invoked as a civic-minded and incontrovertible proposition, an all-purpose warrant for whatever the speaker wanted in the first place.
The left had already made “our democracy” a vernacular mainstay when Kamala Harris said she was running for president in 2019. “The American dream and our American democracy are under attack and on the line like never before,” she said.
“Never before” happens a lot nowadays. Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign didn’t make it to 2020, but she ended up on the Democratic ticket that year and again in 2024. In June 2024, she issued the self-fulfilling nullity that “Our democracy is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it—and we stand prepared to do just that.” Once she became the Democrats’ presidential nominee, she promised to “stand for our democracy.” And after democracy rendered a verdict on her in that election different from the one she hoped for, she nonetheless said that “we will never give up the fight for our democracy.”
Jack notes that "our democracy" is also at stake in recent efforts ensuring Congressional districts are
gerrymandered to minimize the possibility that Republicans might get elected.
The [Artemis] program hasn’t just been inefficient in terms of time, but it’s been a money drain as well, a sign of the inherent inefficiency of even noble governmental endeavors. Even by the standards of government procurement, the rocket is massively over budget. The SLS was originally supposed to cost $7 billion. But before it has even flown a single crew of astronauts, taxpayers have already spent roughly $32 billion on the SLS rocket, according to the Planetary Society. The capsule necessary for astronauts to operate the rocket already comes to another $20 billion. In 2023, NASA’s Office of the Inspector General estimated SLS will cost $93 billion for the rocket to deliver astronauts to the Moon, and costs have only risen since then.
“Artemis is not even an effective program to explore the Moon, offering significantly lower capability than we demonstrated during the Apollo missions more than a half-century ago,” Zubrin continued, discussing his objections to the plan to return to the Moon previously published in National Review. “It’s now been eight years since Trump started the Artemis program, and stuck with a mission plan that makes absolutely no sense, we are still years away from a Moon landing. Eight years after JFK announced Apollo, we were walking on the Moon. And that was done by an America with half the population and one quarter the GDP of today, using slide rules instead of AI to do its design work.”
With all the hoopla about "fraud" in various entitlement/welfare schemes, it's difficult
to focus on the reality here: there's no fraud, but vast sums of taxpayer cash wind up
in some well-connected pockets, with very little to show for it. (Also see:
California High-Speed Rail.)
Jamie, you say that like it's a bad thing.
Jonathan Turley looks at the latest excuse for opposing Voter ID laws,
as promulgated by CongressCritter Jamie Raskin (D-MD):
Voter ID Law Violates the 19th Amendment in Denying the Vote to Women. Raskin's reply to his CNN interlocutor,
who threw him what should have been a softball:
“… what’s wrong with the Save act? What’s wrong with it is that it might violate the 19th Amendment, which gives women the right to vote, because you’ve got to show that all of your different IDs match. So if you’re a woman who’s gotten married and you’ve changed your name to your husband’s name, but you’re so now your current name is different from your name at birth. Now you’ve got to go ahead and document that you need an affidavit explaining why. And why would we go to all of these, troubles in order to keep people from voting when none of the states that are actually running the elections are telling us that there’s any problem.”
Jonathan debunks. But Jamie's condescension is over the top even taken at its face value: We can't
expect these delicate flowers to do something as complex as meeting ID requirements! That's a man's job!
Ladies—and gentlemen, for that matter—if you can't manage that, maybe the country would be
better off with you not voting.
I suppose you'd see longer odds as you got more specific, for example "Jesus Christ returning at Levi's Stadium
on February 8, 2026, disrupting
Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl.
That link goes to Philip Greenspun's speculation on BB's set list. "Monaco" sounds as if it could be rated NSFSBHS
("not safe for Super Bowl Halftime Shows"). Phil excerpts the lyrics (in English), which I won't do. But here's ChatGPT's
analysis:
[Regarding the flight attendant line] That lyric describes conduct that would violate multiple aviation rules and laws. Interference with flight crew (14 CFR §91.11): Anything that distracts or interferes with a crewmember’s duties is prohibited. Engaging a flight attendant in sexual activity would clearly qualify. … Consent & power dynamics: Any sexual activity involving a working crewmember raises serious legal issues, including coercion and workplace sexual misconduct. … Sexual acts in public conveyances: Aircraft are considered public spaces under U.S. law. Sexual activity onboard can constitute indecent exposure or lewd conduct, which is prosecutable.
Well, I'll watch anyway, just in case JC shows. In that event, future postings may be put off
indefinitely.
When Joe Biden entered office with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in 2021, the Democrats insisted that their first priority would be to nationalize American election administration.
A bill to do that, the so-called “For the People Act,” was H.R. 1 and S. 1 in the 117th Congress. In the immediate wake of a crisis of confidence in our election system created by a president who refused to accept his loss of a close election, the Democrats sought to have an exceptionally narrow Democratic majority in Washington take over key election-administration rulemaking in every state and impose new and often looser rules involving voter registration, ID requirements, eligibility, ballot harvesting, early voting, drop-boxes, mail-in voting, locations and hours of polling stations, voting by felons, campaign donations, and more. It was madness. Utter civic vandalism.
The problem wasn’t even that their doing this would change the results of elections. It’s unlikely that it would have. The problem was just that this would be a needless assault on public confidence in the system at a moment of already collapsing trust. But anyone pointing this out at the time was sure to be dismissed as a racist partisan hack (believe me).
Pun Salad's postings relevant to the "For the People Act" back in 2021:
here,
here,
here, and
here. I'd forgotten
just how awful it was.
Washington isn’t a cultural center the way New York, Nashville and Los Angeles are. It has no cultural infrastructure to support artists and art-based institutions: no Juilliard, no Grand Ole Opry, no University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. Washington doesn’t even have a bohemian or hip section of town where artists prefer to hang out. Given scant home-based talent and difficulty recruiting the best talent to Washington, the programming at the Kennedy Center hasn’t been competitive with what large-city performing arts institutions offer.
The building is another problem. People try to be nice about it, but let’s face it, it’s cold, flinty and cheap looking. It lacks grace and grandness. Designed by Edward Durell Stone, it suffers from the out-of-date look of similar 1960s architecture. It’s a bunch of rectangular boxes stacked on top of each other. Too many straight lines and flat surfaces. It’s jammed into a tight space along the Potomac as if it were a low-budget real-estate development without enough money for land worthy of the building.
The exterior and interior are bland. The building has no elegant approach. Despite its exterior Carrara marble surfaces, the building looks lightweight and poorly made. The pillars surrounding the building don’t fit it. The interior is cavernous with no comfortable, welcoming spaces (including the boardroom). Even the President’s Box feels as though the National Park Service manages it, which it once did.
In the 1970s, when we lived in suburban Maryland,
Mrs. Salad and I used to frequent the American Film Institute's small movie theater
at the JFK Center, which showed classic movies, cheaply. The AFI boogied out of DC proper
in 2003, moving out to
a renovated theater in Silver Spring, Maryland. That was long
after we moved back to New Hampshire, where the movies are more expensive, but everything else is nicer.
Once you've watched that (and you should, it's hilarious, while also maddening),
you can check out the numbers for
Publicly Funded NFL Stadiums
at 22Zin, a website from Tom Knecht exploring the relationship between politics and sports.
Again, this should be as obvious as 2+3=5. Tom's article is from 2023, but here's
a timeless observation, not adjusted for inflation since then:
There is nothing wrong with building expensive stadiums. What I don’t like is billionaire owners making John and Jane Q. Taxpayer foot the bill. Americans have paid over $10.6 billion to build the current NFL stadiums. But when we want to visit that stadium we helped build, we’re then required to pay that owner $200 per ticket, $50 for parking, $13.75 for a beer and $6.25 for a hot dog.
Tom has charts showing the diverse levels of taxpayer subsidies for current stadia.
Patriots fans rejoice: Gillette Stadium received $0 in direct subsidies! (But as Tom points
out, "that doesn’t even count the myriad tax breaks, tax credits, tax rebates, donated land, infrastructure projects, and opportunity costs that state and local politicians give NFL owners."
Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, CA, site of tomorrow's Superb Owl,
is also on the low end of the taxpayer ripoff scale, a mere $130 million
in direct cash.
The current money pit under construction is the Buffalo Bills'
Highmark Stadium:
The stadium is estimated to cost $1.7 billion.
Under an agreement with the state of New York, taxpayers will pay $850 million of the construction cost (with $600 million coming from New York State and $250 million coming from Erie County). With the State of New York also paying for all maintenance and repair costs once the stadium opens, it is the largest taxpayer contribution ever for an NFL facility.
Economics professor Victor Matheson, who studies stadium subsidies, described the deal as "one of the worst stadium deals in recent memory."
Fun fact from that Wikipedia page:
During the excavation phase in September 2023, a fan jumped over a fence guarding the construction site and fell into a hole 30-40 feet. He was found "covered in human excrement" and under the influence of drugs and alcohol before being removed from the site.
“There are reams of writing about fascist military parades and socialist-realist murals, yet there is almost nothing comparable about the dull tint at the end of history. Where is liberalism’s ‘Fascinating Fascism’? Who is its Riefenstahl?”
So writes Becca Rothfeld, in an energetic, sharp, fun, and highly critical review of two books, one by yours truly (On Liberalism, if you want to know). https://thepointmag.com/criticism/listless-liberalism/
Rothfeld’s review is called Listless Liberalism (ouch).
Becca's review and Cass's observations are interesting enough.
But what leapt immediately to my mind (for some reason) was
Cafe Hayek's
Quotation of the Day
for yesterday:
Liberalism is no religion, no world view, no party of special interests. It is no religion because it demands neither faith nor devotion, because there is nothing mystical about it, and because it has no dogmas. It is no worldview because it does not try to explain the cosmos and because it says nothing and does not seek to say anything about the meaning and purpose of human existence. It is no party of special interests because it does not provide or seek to provide any special advantage whatsoever to any individual or any group.
The Cafe's proprietor, Don Boudreaux, cites Ludwig von Mises’s 1927 book, Liberalism.
I'm not sure I totally agree, I'll have to think on it, but it seems relevant.
Woodrow Wilson was an inspiration for Tolkien's Sauron.
But respond to what? As often seems to be the case with “postliberal” arguments, Reno is vague and euphemistic in exactly how he wishes to present Wilson as a role model other than to promote a general sentiment in favor of strongman government. We need “solidarity,” he writes, and “our history has . . . been marked by periods during which illiberal methods were employed to renew and buttress solidarity,” a process in which “Woodrow Wilson played a central role.” Wilson and FDR “sought to renew American solidarity, which required taming and restraining certain kinds of freedom, especially freedom of contract. (Roosevelt intimidated the Supreme Court to secure the overturning of Lochner.) In a word, Wilson and FDR administered strong doses of illiberalism.” This is, in unspecified ways, a good thing because the past gave us the present, and this makes it good. And we ought therefore to repeat the past:
We are living in a similar period. Immigration, economic vulnerability, globalization—the American people are anxious. Once again, a powerful, energetic executive presses against liberal norms, as did Wilson and FDR. I don’t wish to commend any of the particular measures taken by the present administration, although some strike me as wise and necessary. My point is more fundamental. . . . We’ve been here before as a nation, and we have had statesmen who addressed liberalism’s failures so that the American ideals of liberty could be renewed and reshaped for new circumstances. In 2026, we would do well to study the methods of Wilson and FDR and weigh their achievements as well as failures. For we need something of their innovation and daring to navigate our present crisis.
What methods of Wilson and FDR, other than intimidating the Supreme Court with threats of Court-packing, does Reno have in mind? The Palmer raids? Jailing dissenters? Segregating the federal government? Forcible sterilizations? German and Japanese internment? Covering up the president’s incapacitation? Or simply bureaucratic micromanagement of American commerce?
When government grows to dominate ever-larger shares of the economy, and when politicians refuse to be responsible about what they spend, there's a predictable next move: Insist that the problem is "the rich" not paying enough. Never mind that high earners already shoulder a disproportionate share of the tax burden. Never mind that relying on a small and mobile group of people for the bulk of your revenue makes public finances more volatile, not more stable.
No, once spending is treated as untouchable and restraint as politically impossible, it's only a matter of time before politics demands more, more, more. More taxes and more distortion. This helps explain why wild new forms of wealth taxes are popping up.
California voters are heading toward a November ballot fight over a so-called one-time 5% tax on billionaires' net worth, tied to residency on a date that's already passed. Illinois lawmakers recently flirted with a tax on unrealized gains — think of stocks yet to be sold at fluctuating prices that only exist on paper — before retreating. And New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants a wealth tax to help close the city's roughly $12 billion budget gap. Prominent progressive Democrats have explicitly endorsed national wealth taxes (e.g., proposals from Sen. Elizabeth Warren).
Different places, same impulse: Avoid hard fiscal decisions by squeezing a narrow group harder.
Maybe I should have added "economic illiteracy" to my answer above.
I generally don't celebrate when people lose their job. As most of us know firsthand, being laid off can be a brutal experience. Indeed, when an outfit such as the Post cuts back its workforce, good people will typically lose their jobs while the worst offenders stay on.
But the unmitigated arrogance and sense of entitlement exuded by journalists, who seem to believe they have a God-given right to work no matter how much money they lose their employer or how poorly they do the job, speaks to the problem more.
Over the past decade, the Post has been one of the leading culprits in the collapse of public trust in journalism. The once-venerable outlet has spent the past 10 years participating in virtually every dishonest left-wing operation, including giving legitimacy to the Brett Kavanaugh group rape accusations, delegitimizing the Hunter Biden laptop story, spreading the Gaza "genocide" lie, covering up Joe Biden's cognitive decline, sliming the Covington children, and countless others.
I've kind of liked the WaPo's recent editorial turn to the center, if not
the right. No clue what a reasonable path forward for it might be.
I didn't bother reading it then. But here's one of his claims:
At the same time, I have successfully wielded the tariff tool to secure colossal Investments in America, like no other country has ever seen before. By his own accounting, in four years, Joe Biden got less than $1 trillion of new Investment in the United States. In less than one year, we have secured commitments for more than $18 trillion, a number that is unfathomable to many.
What could it possibly mean to say that Trump “brought in” $18 trillion? That number is nearly as big as China’s GDP in an entire year. Where did it come from? Where has it gone?
If some fraction of this unseen $18 trillion that “Trump brought in” was already creating an economic boom, then why hasn’t anyone shown us the booming economic statistics for manufacturing, employment, construction, or foreign investment?
The mysterious $18 trillion boast of Trump loyalists cannot mean we are “bringing in” that much actual foreign direct investment (FDI). If it did, foreigners would have to acquire an extra $18 trillion in US dollars to finance all that new US plant and equipment in the USA—either by selling us much more than they buy from us (requiring much larger US trade deficits for many years) or by selling us huge amounts of their real or financial assets (convincing Americans to invest more abroad than they do at home).
More at the link, but you get the idea. Trump's claim is bullshit.
Trump's op-ed also says:
The Journal has charged repeatedly that tariffs are nothing but a “tax” on American consumers, which has proved to be totally false. Experience since Liberation Day has proved that this analysis is not only far too simplistic—it is absolutely wrong! The data shows that the burden, or “incidence,” of the tariffs has fallen overwhelmingly on foreign producers and middlemen, including large corporations that are not from the U.S. According to a recent study by the Harvard Business School, these groups are paying at least 80% of tariff costs.
We published that claim because readers should know that’s what the President believes, but the paper he cites says something different. In an updated version released after Mr. Trump wrote, the authors note that the “retail pass-through” of the tariffs has been 24%—a measure of the extent to which a given tariff rate feeds through to consumer prices, given that the cost of the good at the border is only one part of the final price. This pass-through rate is higher than under Mr. Trump’s 2018-19 China tariffs.
But that doesn’t tell the full picture of how the tariff cost is distributed. The Harvard economists note in the same paragraph that U.S. consumers are bearing up to 43% of the tariff burden, with U.S. companies absorbing most of the rest. That aligns with other research, such as a recent paper from Germany’s Kiel Institute that found Americans pay 96% of the cost of tariffs. Foreign exporters either pass on the full cost of the tariffs to their U.S. customers, or they ship smaller quantities of goods.
Americans pay one way or the other—via higher prices or less choice. Mr. Trump admitted as much when he said last year that tariffs mean Americans might have to buy fewer dolls for their children at Christmas.
He quotes some critics of the new "inverted" pyramid. I won't bother you with the details, because…
Yet the nutritional experts’ argument over what belongs in the food pyramid obscures the real issue: Isn’t it moronic for the government to have a food pyramid?
The idea that the federal government should play a role in determining the food we eat only serves to stroke the egos of those who believe nothing worthwhile happens in the world without bureaucratic approval. What types of diets best serve individual citizens is one of the most-studied topics in human history, and most of that analysis has been conducted by private actors. There are infinite apps, websites, chat rooms, TikTok videos, workout plans, and the like that will get you where you want to go on your fitness journey, all thankfully operating outside the walls of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Christian goes on to observe that, in addition to being inappropriate for a free country,
Uncle Stupid's dietary advice has a lousy track record.
For the record: I got e-mail from Dr. Oz yesterday, nagging me to
Boost Your Protein and Healthy Fats. Think eggs, seafood, red meat, dairy, beans, nuts, and seeds. Aim for 6-7 servings per day (based on a 2,000-2,200 daily calorie level). And remember to keep saturated fats under 10% of your daily calories.
I am in awe of the sheer arrogance involved in demanding that I (and my fellow geezers) break out the
paper, pens, and calculators to figure out whether they've gone over that 10% figure.
The Space Launch System rocket program is now a decade and a half old, and it continues to be dominated by two unfortunate traits: It is expensive, and it is slow.
The massive rocket and its convoluted ground systems, so necessary to baby and cajole the booster’s prickly hydrogen propellant on board, have cost US taxpayers in excess of $30 billion to date. And even as it reaches maturity, the rocket is going nowhere fast.
Eric recalls the dismal history of the unmanned Artemis I mission, plagued with multiple
delays. And that was more than three years ago.
While Elon Musk’s SpaceX has slashed launch costs by landing and reusing rocket boosters, SLS remains an old-school, expendable system; only the capsule survives each flight. No wonder NASA’s Office of Inspector General estimates this white elephant will cost a staggering $4.1 billion per mission. So, once again, NASA is saddled with a spaceflight system too expensive to fly routinely.
New NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman knows all this. As a self-made entrepreneur and a veteran of two self-funded SpaceX flights, he’s an advocate for NASA’s commercial approach—and for retiring SLS. In his first confirmation hearing, Mr. Isaacman gently told the senators that SLS wasn’t “the long-term way to get to and from the moon and Mars with great frequency.” In a compromise, he suggested NASA should use the two existing SLS rockets to carry the Artemis II and Artemis III, which aims to put a crew on the lunar surface. After that, the agency should move on. The senators later approved Mr. Isaacson’s nomination. But they pushed back on retiring SLS, instead adding funding to build more SLS rockets to last year’s Big Beautiful Bill.
I believe I mentioned this before but I briefly worked as a project engineer on the Orion program and it was - by far - the worst job I've ever had. Whatever excitement of "working for NASA" was washed away in a sclerotic bureaucracy that throttled any real progress. There were regular newsletters circulated that heralded how NASA programs were spread over every state in the Union which should tell you what you need to know: this is a jobs program, not a space program.
The SLS/Orion program is still dependent upon Space Shuttle technology from over 40 years ago. Why? Because some Congressman didn't want to see a NASA subcontractor in his/her district lose that sweet federal money. This is all part of the grift along with the endless delays. There are never any consequences for delay so why not keep your job going? These programs achieve a kind of half-life behavior where progress slows the closer you get to the finish line.
I hope and pray I'm wrong, but I fear this Artemis launch will result in cataclysm`
When (or if) Artemis II launches, I'll be watching and hoping for the best. But like the VP, fearing
the worst.
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