December 2024

Hypersonic dreams for a billion-dollar Zumwalt blunder

At the Huntington Ingalls Industries shipyard, where the San Diego-based USS Zumwalt—lumbering titan of bureaucratic ambition—lay in drydock, welders and engineers moved with an almost ecclesiastical focus, reworking the innards of a ship that was born both too early and too late. The twin turrets, relics of a system so prohibitively expensive it was abandoned in a silent bureaucratic shrug, were gone now, replaced by…



Broligarch visions are a nightmare for the rest of us

Ok, politics fans, it’s time to get past the shock and awe of Donald J Trump inching past Kamala Harris to become President of the United States on January 20. Nope, not a mandate. The media, by and large, has conceded their independence, starting with the Morning Joe hosts, the choreography of three major east coast newspapers disposing of their political editors, and the biggest…