Raytheon has delivered the US Navy’s first Block V configured Tomahawk missile, marking a major milestone for the capability modernisation programme.
The latest delivery creates a path to provide the fleet with an ‘upgraded warfighting capability’.
Tomahawk is a long-range, all-weather, subsonic cruise missile in service with the US and the British Royal Navy’s surface ships and submarines.
In a press statement, US Naval Air Systems Command said that these first Block V missiles are from the existing Tomahawk Block IV inventory.
The first Block V missiles have been recertified and modernised for fleet use.
Tomahawk Weapons System programme (PMA-280) programme manager captain Vernon ‘John’ Red said: “This is the next big advancement in Tomahawk capability and a major achievement for the programme.
“We’re focused now on delivering advanced capability to the fleet by recertifying and modernising our Block IV inventory, and by contracting production Block V missiles.”
Here’s a video that covers the enhanced capabilities:
The navy’s VLS has proven pretty flexible, being able to accommodate both the Tomahawk and the new Naval Strike Missile, and presumably some in-development hypersonic missiles. Lots of countries have cruise missiles, and supposedly Russia, the UK and France all used cruise missiles at some phase of the Syrian conflict, but none has the demonstrated battlefield record of the Tomahawk.
I used to follow some college athletics. Now I don’t. At the same time universities were getting more and more expensive, they were also getting more and more woke. College sports used to be an oasis from that nonsense, but so many programs bent the knee to #BlackLivesMatter last year that I just stopped paying attention.
he U.S. Supreme Court on Monday threw out limits set by the major governing body for American intercollegiate sports on education-related benefits that schools can give players as a violation of antitrust law, handing a big victory to student-athletes fighting for greater financial compensation.
The 9-0 ruling put the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) further on the defensive as it struggles to preserve a business model – huge revenues generated by college sports and big salaries for executives and coaches while players remain unpaid – under assault on multiple fronts.
The NCAA’s curbs on non-cash payments to college athletes related to education – including benefits such as computers, science equipment and musical instruments – were part of what critics have called the fiction of amateurism in college sports, an enterprise that rakes in billions of dollars annually.
These limits, according to the ruling authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, are anticompetitive under a federal law called the Sherman Antitrust Act. The ruling could pave the way for challenges to other NCAA compensation rules, a prospect that Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared to invite in a separate opinion agreeing with Gorsuch.
Kavanaugh wrote that those other limits on compensation for players “also raise serious questions under the antitrust laws” and suggested they likely would be struck down if lower courts follow the analysis laid out in Monday’s ruling.
“The NCAA is not above the law,” Kavanaugh added.
For years, football and basketball have been big moneymakers for some colleges and universities (and money losers for others). Why not let student athletes benefit from that? Tradition? Hell, colleges are hellbent on destroying every tradition that made them vital institutions (including freedom of speech, free inquiry and the rule of law), so why not that one as well?
I’ve long thought that traditional football power schools (Alabama, Texas, USC, Oklahoma, etc.) could make a lot more money by leaving the NCAA and forming their own competing football conference of 15 or so teams, playing a round robin schedule plus playoffs. They could pay athletes and forge a partnership deal with the NFL to provide year-round professional coaching. It would provide more entertainment than watching power schools beat up on Rice or UNT every year.
America’s entire higher education system needs a hard reboot: Shut down all colleges and universities for a year, eliminate SJW departments like Women’s Studies entirely, hand every woke professor and administrator a pink slip, and deny federal loan and contracts for any university it costs students more than 10 grand a year to attend. Right now all this is a pipe-dream, but college athletics are one of the last sources of unwarranted affection ordinary people feel toward higher education. (“College is a $120,000 hooker, and you are an idiot who fell in love with her!”) Maybe the demise of the current plantation athletic complex will help pave the way for real reform.
I can’t remember if I’ve included a LinkSwarm link on the problems of Zumwalt-class destroyers, which the navy killed after only three of the projected thirty-two ships were built. This video offers a solid overview of the issues that led to the cancellation.
Zumwalt-class destroyers turned out to be quite stable, and the stealth design worked well, but they require far more personnel to run than originally specified, and the small number of Zumwalt class actually built resulted in the radical new shore-attack munitions costs spiraling to more than $1 million for each projectile, or more than the cost of a Tomahawk cruise missile, which offers 15 times the range and 30 times the payload.
Other problems include having to retrain crew to take into account the unique shape and handling characteristics:
The combination of the Zumwalt ’s size and inability to switch quickly from ahead to astern propulsion or vice versa (because of fixed pitch propellers) creates substantially more inertia than on a smaller vessel, a characteristic magnified by the large sail area.
…The outward-sloping tumblehome design creates the illusion that the ship is farther away from the pier than it is.
…All the mooring stations are internal. (it) makes it impossible for the bridge to see progress in the mooring stations.
…A relatively low height of eye of 35 feet, along with large gun mounts on the forecastle, result in a substantial shadow zone of 469.2 feet dead ahead.
If all this is disheartening, realize that technical innovations have just as many teething problems for the Chinese navy as well (and probably much worse quality control). I would say the Russians as well, but almost all of their much-hyped “superweapons” turn out to be pure vaporware.
Here’s an HBO special from nine years ago with four top comedians (Jerry Seinfeld, Louis C.K., Chris Rock and Ricky Gervais) talking about how comedy works, how they work using old and new material, how they deal with sensitive subjects, etc.
Notice how absent current social justice concerns are from their consciousness. They even discuss whether or not to use rape jokes, gay jokes, etc. There’s no worry about social justice warriors being offended at the mere discussion of these topics…
As the one-eyed myopic liberal in the land of the blind, there are a bunch of Bill Maher videos that I’ve almost posted, only to get about three-quarters of the way in and go “Nah, too smarmy.” Or “Not funny enough.” Or “Too much gratuitous Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
But this one, on the state of higher education, was just good enough to pull the trigger on.
Ignore the swipe at Florida, the swipe at Trump, and the several pregnant “please clap” pauses,
“Let’s talk about what higher education in America really is: A racket, that sells you a very expensive ticket to the upper middle class.”
“We imagine going to college is the way to fight income inequality, but actually it does the reverse.”
“Is it really liberal for someone who doesn’t go to college and makes less money to pay for those who do go and make more?”
“Colleges have turned into giant, luxury babysitters anxious to indulge every student whim.”
“A third of students now spend less than five hours a week studying, and when they do it’s for their onerous magna cum bullshit course load of Sports Marketing History Through Twitter, Advanced Racist Spotting, Intro To Microaggressions, and You Owe Me An Apology 101.”
“Say what you want about Lori Laughlin, at least she understood one good scam deserves another.”
“Since 1985, the average cost of college has risen 500%.”
Plus thoughts on grade inflation and credentialism.
On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement that roundly rejected the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism. Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China” and asserted: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began. To Gilles Demaneuf [a data scientist with the Bank of New Zealand in Auckland], following along from the sidelines, it was as if it had been “nailed to the church doors,” establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy. “Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That set the tone.”
The statement struck Demaneuf as “totally nonscientific.” To him, it seemed to contain no evidence or information. And so he decided to begin his own inquiry in a “proper” way, with no idea of what he would find.
Demaneuf began searching for patterns in the available data, and it wasn’t long before he spotted one. China’s laboratories were said to be airtight, with safety practices equivalent to those in the U.S. and other developed countries. But Demaneuf soon discovered that there had been four incidents of SARS-related lab breaches since 2004, two occuring at a top laboratory in Beijing. Due to overcrowding there, a live SARS virus that had been improperly deactivated, had been moved to a refrigerator in a corridor. A graduate student then examined it in the electron microscope room and sparked an outbreak.
Demaneuf published his findings in a Medium post, titled “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: a review of SARS Lab Escapes.” By then, he had begun working with another armchair investigator, Rodolphe de Maistre. A laboratory project director based in Paris who had previously studied and worked in China, de Maistre was busy debunking the notion that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a “laboratory” at all. In fact, the WIV housed numerous laboratories that worked on coronaviruses. Only one of them has the highest biosafety protocol: BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body pressurized suits with independent oxygen. Others are designated BSL-3 and even BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office.
Read on to see mostly what those of you reading this blog knew last year, albeit with some new details. Such as…
It seems that even The State Department tried to block investigation of the lab leak hypothesis:
A report in Vanity Fair details actions by some members of the U.S. State Department to block efforts to investigate the origins of the coronavirus because the inquiry could open “a can of worms.” An internal memo sent to department heads by Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, warned “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19.”
The “can of worms” in question was the extensive funding by the U.S. government into the Wuhan Virology Lab’s “gain-of-function” virus research. It’s unclear whether DiNanno was concerned that an investigation would uncover evidence of a lab leak or the extent to which the U.S. was funding dangerous research.
Indeed, there’s a lot more going on with this gain-of-function research than has ever been revealed. There appears to be a powerful lobby within the U.S. government that is heavily invested in the dangerous research and is serious about keeping it quiet. Former CDC chairman Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab.
The pro-lockdown “experts” were shocked. If a state as big as Texas joined Florida and succeeded in thumbing its nose at “the science” – which told us that for the first time in history healthy people should be forced to stay in their houses and wear oxygen-restricting face masks – then the lockdown narrative would begin falling apart.
President Biden famously attacked the decision as “Neanderthal thinking.” Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa warned that, with this order, Abbott would “kill Texans.” Incoming CDC Director Rochelle Walensky tearfully told us about her feelings of “impending doom.”
When the poster child for Covid lockdowns Dr. Fauci was asked several weeks later why cases and deaths continued to evaporate in Texas, he answered simply, “I’m not sure.” That moment may have been a look at the man behind the proverbial curtain, who projected his power so confidently until confronted with reality.
Now a new study appearing as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, highlighted recently in Reason Magazine, has found “no evidence that the reopening affected the rate of new COVID-19 cases in the five-week period following the reopening. …State-level COVID-19 mortality rates were unaffected by the March 10 reopening.”
Hunter Biden said he couldn’t remember his baby mama. Turns out she worked for him. And he fired her.
Every time Hunter is in the news, the MSM asks Joe Biden about…ice cream. “The record is now rife with individuals associated with foreign governments and intelligence organizations giving millions to Hunter and his uncle as well as luxurious expenses and gifts.”
Rashard Turner, founder of St. Paul chapter of #BlackLivesMatter learns better:
That was made clear when they publicly denounced charter schools alongside the teachers union. I was an insider in Black Lives Matter. And I learned the ugly truth. The moratorium on charter schools does not support rebuilding the black family. But it does create barriers to a better education for black children. I resigned from Black Lives Matter after a year and a half. But I didn’t quit working to improve black lives and access to a great education.
Congressional Democrats just hit a snag in trying to cram through lots of budget busting bills using reconciliation.
While the Democrats have high, if not delusional hopes of fundamentally changing every aspect of American life, from federal voting dictates to essentially outlawing sub-contracting, the actual rules of the Senate have stood in their way. The filibuster, which Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (among others who are laying low) have pledged to not touch, means that Chuck Schumer and his merry band can’t force through things on a simple 50-50 vote.
The Democrats were given a shot of life a few months ago, though, in the form of a parliamentarian ruling that Schumer claimed greenlit most of his agenda. I expressed skepticism at the time in an article discussing the infrastructure package.
Chuck Schumer recently claimed the Senate parliamentarian gave him free rein, yet that decision has not been made public, and there’s probably a reason for that.
Well, it appears my skepticism was warranted. In what is claimed as a “new ruling,” the parliamentarian effectively rips the heart out of the Democrat agenda.
the ruling ALSO said Congress would have to start over. Repass budget in committees and bring them to the floor. in the senate, that would trigger another vote-a-rama. This would be exceedingly time consuming, and potentially politically risky.
Reconciliation is a very narrow process, and the Byrd Rule requires that anything included in a reconciliation bill must deal with taxes and budgetary issues. You also have stipulations about deficit offsets that must be taken into account. You can not pass regularly legislative items under the guise of reconciliation.
Given that, this ruling essentially defeats HR1, the ProAct, and much of what is included in the current “infrastructure” bill. Of course, none of those bills were likely getting support from Manchin anyway, but with reconciliation off the table to get this stuff passed, Schumer is now officially out of options.
Corn, soybeans, and wheat have been trading at multiyear highs, with corn having risen from around $3.80 per bushel in January 2020 to approximately $6.75 now. Chicken wings are at all-time record highs. It is getting more expensive to eat.
Copper prices have risen to an all-time high. Steel, too, recently traded at prices 35 percent above the previous all-time high set in 2008. Perhaps most famously, the price of lumber has nearly quadrupled since the beginning of 2020 and has nearly doubled just since January.
Naturally, with raw materials prices soaring, prices of manufactured goods are jumping, too. That is especially noticeable in the housing market, where the median price of existing homes rose to $329,100 in March—a whopping 17.2 percent increase from a year earlier.
The cost of driving is soaring, too. According to J.D. Power, cited in the Wall Street Journal, the average used car price has risen 16.7 percent and new car prices have risen 9.6 percent since January.
My answer would’ve been blunt – What I like about being white is I’m free to think anything I like; believe anything politically and not be prejudged by liberals for it. I don’t have people assuming I vote a specific way, for a particular party, simply because of my skin color. That no matter what I believe, I won’t be called a traitor to my race, a sell-out, or some racial slur like “Uncle Tom,” or “Uncle Tim.”
What I like about being white is I don’t have to suffer the bigotry of leftists demanding I conform to how they insist I must think.
Hill and pretty much every left-wing pundit, TV personality, reporter, academic, actor, etc., do not extend that same courtesy to, say, any black conservative. Ever.
In that answer, it would have exposed Hill for what he was trying to do to Rufo, and it shows what the left is now: you are your skin color. If you refuse to conform, if you won’t be what they demand you must be, you are their enemy.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid announced that he is able to form a new government, in another step towards ousting longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Lapid’s coalition is made up of parties from the left and right wings of the political spectrum, many of whom would not normally sit together in the same government. For the first time in Israel’s history, an Arab political party—the Islamic conservative United Arab List—signed on as part of the prospective governing coalition.
The new government must survive a vote of confidence in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, but the Knesset will not be in session for another twelve days. This means that members of Lapid’s coalition may defect in the meantime, potentially sending Israel to another round of elections.
Before Democrats start celebrating the fall of their designated bogeyman, the man likely to replace Netanyahu in the new government is Naftali Bennett, who is even harder right than Bibi:
Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett have reached an agreement to rotate the prime minister’s position between them as they race to meet a Wednesday midnight deadline to finalize a coalition government to end Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year rule.
Under the agreement, Bennett will take the premiership first, but the two are still working on finalizing their ruling coalition, which would include parties from across the political spectrum. The Associated Press reported that as of 6 p.m. Wednesday in Israel, there was still no sign of progress.
Bibi would be going into the opposition. This isn't American politics, where losing a presidential election confines you to the outskirts of politics (usually). From the opposition, Bibi, who runs the largest party in Israel, is well-positioned to become PM again in the mid-term.
A-listers including actress Gwyneth Paltrow and director Steven Spielberg have raised the stakes with their backing of candidates. Spielberg and his wife have finally supported activist Maya Wiley, while Paltrow has supported Ray McGuire, a former Citigroup executive, Bloomberg reports.
The majority of those identified as actors or part of the entertainment industry have opted to join Paltrow in backing McGuire, who has vowed to boost film tax credits, Bloomberg reports. Figures who have donated to McGuire include “Despicable Me” producer Chris Meledandri, filmmaker Spike Lee and comedic actor Steve Martin. McGuire is also the only candidate not accepting public matching funds, Bloomberg notes.
Other candidates getting attention from Tinseltown include Scott Stringer and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang. Actress Scarlett Johansson has donated to Stringer, while Yang has reportedly received financial backing from actor Michael Douglas.
Also: “Recent polls, however, show Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams in the lead.”
“Google’s Diversity Chief Removed for Decrying Jews’ ‘Insatiable Appetite for War and Killing.’ No doubt they’ve moved him to their Republican Deplatforming division…
This Memorial Day we honor Marine Corporal John Henry Pruitt, who not only won the Medal of Honor, he won two Medals of Honor (the Army and Navy versions) for the same action:
For extraordinary gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty while serving with the 78th Company, 6th Regiment, 2d Division, in action with the enemy at Blanc Mont Ridge, France, 3 October 1918. Cpl. Pruitt, singlehandedly attacked two machine guns, capturing them and killing two of the enemy. He then captured 40 prisoners in a dugout nearby. This gallant soldier was killed soon afterward by shellfire while he was sniping at the enemy.
Here’s a short video on Pruitt, primarily voiceover narration over stock footage, but it does give additional information:
“He died from his wounds on October 4, 1918. It was his twenty second birthday.”
If you wonder why it takes so long to get new guns into production, Ian McCollum has an answer for you: Because designing and manufacturing guns is hard. Mainly because of the extensive trial and error necessary to establish the correct tolerances for each part.
Here’s an excerpt from an interview Joe Rogan did with Austin mayor Steve Adler:
How many lies can you spot? Here are a few.
Before they repealed the camping ban: “I had more and more neighborhood associations complaining about more and more encampments, and I had no solution to that.”
Of course you did. You and the city council could have let Austin police enforce the law and either cleared homeless encampments and/or arrested people for breaking the law. That would have prodded the sturdiest beggars to move on to greener pastures. But the city council wouldn’t let APD enforce the law because there was no money to rake off to leftwing activists as part of the homeless industrial complex.
So instead you made the problem ten times worse.
His claim that “90-95% success rate” for “housing first” curing the problem is absolute garbage. Mentally-ill, drug-using transients don’t become magically sane or drug free because they’re in a hotel on the taxpayers dime.
“Smaller cities than Austin have 3-6x the amount of homelessness.” So that’s why you imported west coast policies to Austin? So you can increase the size of the homeless population like they did? If so, mission accomplished.
“They told me the same thing as San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.” Oh, so you sought advice from the cities with the worst homeless problems and the most obvious failed policies that made the problem worse! Genius!
When he says that the “overwhelming majority” of the current transient population are “from here,” either he’s lying or his staff is. A good two-thirds of the current homeless population seem to have come from out of town. And they’re not coming from “the areas immediately around us,” they’re coming from Houston and the Metroplex so they can do drugs and sleep in the street and not be arrested.
“We needed to get people off the streets.” Yeah, that’s why you turned every park and overpass into Bumsville: To get them off the street. Pull the other one.
“If all they’re doing is surviving…” And by “surviving,” he means “shooting up heroin in public.”
And note throughout the newly-minted PC neologism “people experiencing homelessness,” which I’m sure focus groups much better than “drug addicted transients” and “gibbering street lunatics.”
Also, that veterans program isn’t the shining success that Adler is making it out to be. According to a friend that applied for veteran housing, there was a nine month wait, so they put your name on a list, and if you couldn’t accept right then (say, you had just signed a lease), your name went right back to the bottom of the list.
I suspect the rest of the interview would offer up a lot more lies to flag…
