De mortuis nihil nisi bonum? Speak nothing but good of the dead? Well, I leave that to the fancy outfits. If you want to read about what a wonderful guy Il Giorgio, aka “Aitch Dubya,” was, well, read the Post or the Times, or whomever. Here at Literature R Us, we mix the good with…
Search Results for: bombers
Justin Bachman is confused
Over at Bloomberg, Justin Bachman is confused. *What Keeps the B-52 ‘Stratosaurus’ Airborne?” he wonders. “The Air Force says it sees a mission for the 1950s-era bomber until 2050. How can that be?” I’ll tell you how, Justin, or rather why. Because our other bombers—our “new” bombers, the B-1 and B-2—are crap, that’s why. Worst…
Fred Kaplan: So sadly so right
I blow hot and cold on old Fred Kaplan, who hangs his hat at Slate, most recently, cold, when Fred waxed hot, announcing that “America’s retreat from the world under Trump has shown why we’re still the indispensable nation”1, vaguely claiming that all the world is crying out for American “leadership” to solve all their…
Real presidents effectuate regime change
When did “regime change” become the mark of a “real” president? Well, not to keep you in suspense, but it was in the brief reign of George Herbert Walker “Bad Ass” Bush. While still a mere VP, Georgie wanted President Reagan to green light the removal of Panama strongman Manuel Noriega—basically a CIA “asset” gone…
Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk: Too cute!
Okay, we have changed the name of this website to “Snark R Us”, but bear with me. This is snark, but snark with a thesis. Is Dunkirk an extraordinary visual spectacle? Well, duh. Yeah. I saw it at the Lockheed IMAX in the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, one of the biggest screens in the…
New York Times Obituary Department now wholly owned subsidiary of Rockwell International and U.S. Air Force
Sam Iacobellis, father of the B-1 bomber, the plane that won the Cold War, is dead. Well, that’s what NYT obit dude Sam Roberts tells us, in a stunning outburst of chest-beating Reaganite nonsense. Sam is dead (I guess), so that part of the obit is true, but the rest of it, I strongly suggest,…
Peter Thiel is pathetic
Angry, middle-aged billionaire Peter Thiel has a column up in the Washington Post that is remarkable for both its incoherence and lack of substance. Briefly, he advocates the election of Donald Trump so that we Americans can have a universal health care system that works, dadgumit, just like the one in Canada. And it won’t…
The F-35 “Hanger Queen”
I recently stumbled across an intriguing site on the Internet,“War Is Boring”, which featured a necessarily long article—necessarily long because it was titled “Everything Wrong With the F-35”, the F-35 being America’s newest and (of course) most expensive fighter jet. The F-35 is in fact the most expensive weapons project in history, and one that…
The Americans: Flying Home on a Wing and a Prayer
I don’t know if you follow The Americans, F/X’s intense if implausible take on deep-cover Soviet spies in the U.S. during the Reagan Administration. There are several things in the show that are particularly entertaining for me—for example, the spies Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Mathew Rhys and Keri Russell) live with their two kids in…
Fred Kaplan, still not getting it—UPDATED
Several dog lifetimes ago, Bob Newhart was on the Tonight show, and he told Johnnie Carson “You know, Johnnie, truth is stranger than fiction. And even if it isn’t we’re going to pretend that it is, because if you buy the frame, you buy the bit.” The accuracy of Bob’s words of wisdom were perfectly…