Briefly Noted: Trump Indicted; Major Problems With F-35
Let me say this up front—the case against Trump doesn’t really interest me. Not from a legal standpoint. If you want to dig into the details I’ll provide two links to reputable legal scholars, but even they are more concerned for the political future of the country than they are with the strictly legal aspects (although they both go into the required detail).
First, Margot Cleveland:
Political prosecutions the new norm. I won’t argue with that. Dems are rushing forward to embrace that new norm, even as their regime drags America to new lows in almost every way imaginable—including official corruption.
Jonathan Turley comes down basically on the same side with Margot:
This excerpt sums it up:
Bragg is releasing this case into a public that is already on edge.
Polls show that a large number of Americans believe that the legal system is being politicized and hold both state and federal government in suspicion.
A fifth of Americans now view the government as the greatest threat facing the nation. What is truly shocking is that 53% in one poll agreed with the statement that the FBI acts like “Biden’s Gestapo.”
This case could well succeed at trial, but it will come at a great cost even if overturned on appeal. It is inviting other prosecutors to act with the same political abandon.
Let’s be clear about this. Of course Dems bear responsibility, but so does the GOP establishment. And no one bears more responsibility than Turley’s good friend, Bluto Barr.
We’ll have to wait and see how this develops. Perhaps some Dem judge who cares about the nation will pull the plug. I’m not holding my breath. Instead, I see the country unraveling socially and politically, even as we teeter on the brink of an insane war.
Commenter Cord the Seeker launched a rant about the state of what could be called “national security” hardware technology. The rant was prompted by the current inability of Lockheed Martin to develop a hypersonic missile that works reliably:
One thing that's getting missed here is that this is part of a larger pattern. Technologically, we can no longer do stuff that we did almost a lifetime ago. NASA is claiming that the recent Artemis 1 unmanned Moon shot "aced" its test despite the loss of heat shield material. That the crew would have died had there been one isn't that big a deal, I guess. I think they're talking about a hypothetical landing in 2024 or 2025, but on the current flight schedule they won't be able to test out the hypothetical lander before then. (And the lander is still hypothetical). back in the days the Lunar module had teo manned test flights before the Big Show in July 1969.
We could not today build an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane or a B-70 Valkyrie bomber. Both were done up my smart guys with slide rules, and the advanced computers we have today can't duplicate what those guys did. Modern military aircraft can't fly as high or as fast as they did in the 60s. Or as reliably. Despite taking more time to develop the F-35 than it took to out a man on the Moon, the beast still isn't ready for prime time. It can't match the sortie rate of a 60s era F-4 Phantom.
More below re the F-35.
The Russian hypersonic program was carried out with a sense of urgency since they took the possibility seriously that American missile defenses would render their ballistic missiles impotent and useless. (They need not have. Those defenses never existed in reality, but that is neither here nor there.) Our hypersonic program was the product of a bloated, over managed R&D bureaucracy that cannot produce deployable weapons in a timely manner and at an affordable cost. It cannot even duplicate past weapons successfully. The Ford class carrier is a disaster for which people should hang.
In addition to being sitting ducks in this hypersonic age.
The weapons with which we won the Cold War, the nuclear subs, ICBMs and manned bombers that provided our deterrent back in the days were built with the same urgency that the Russians brought to their hypersonic program, the same feeling that "we have to get his done or else". They were also produced by defense contractors that had to compete. The monopoly producers of today know they're getting the contract regardless with predictable results.
This reminded me of a tweet by Will Schryver today that addresses the F-35 issue directly. The linked article is way above my pay grade, but the tweet tells the story quite succinctly. What’s notable is that the US is peddling the plane to all our vassal states, few of which will be able to afford to keep it working:
All this is symptomatic of the metastasizing social and political corruption of our country. Most of our so-called representatives are preoccupied with fomenting war with Russia and China instead of taking care of business at home—business that we cannot as a nation afford to put off:
But we lead the world in correct pronoun use, and our hashtag armies are without par.
There have been a few days in my life when I find myself wondering where we're headed as a country. This is one of those days. Washington DC, and quite a few states apparently, are corrupted by politics to a degree not seen in our country before. The foundation is eroding and while it isn't easy to place blame on certain things I would like to posit that the 60's generation so often mentioned as problematic has come full circle. Many people of that generation are great patriots and Americans but a rotten core of them and the corrupted ideas have come to fruition. Their march through the institutions is complete and they have full control. God help us.