It’s a good thing we have those “professional” federalized screeners at the airports.

Moody’s has downgraded their government bonds–they’re now equivalent to those of Latvia and Poland.

The writer of this article is a brave man.

Today, as a Muslim and as an insider, I would like to hold a mirror to Islam; if the Muslim community does not like the reflection in the mirror it is not the fault of the mirror. You can call it a soul-searching of a concerned Muslim.

Cathy Seipp has a nice (long) piece on blogging/bloggers in American Journalism Review.

Jonathan Last says that, even in the wake of September 11, Hollywood remains too PC to make real contemporary war movies, and that “The Sum Of All Fears” is a disastrous proof of his thesis.

When we can’t depict terrorists as Muslims in a movie, the terrorists have won.

Peggy Noonan has a disturbing piece in today’s Opinion Journal. It’s particularly disturbing that it’s coming from her.

She is asking the question seriously: was the FBI failure in 911 merely incompetence? Or something worse?

While few hold the FBI in lower esteem than I do, I have trouble believing that this was a deliberate effort to prevent the lower-level agents from thwarting the attack. Not because I believe the FBI incapable of such coverups and deliberate inaction–we saw plenty of it during the Clinton years, after Judge Sessions was fired and replaced by the more pliant Louis Freeh–but that they would do so for a foreign power (as opposed to a corrupt White House) is a new and frightening possibility.

The FBI was unable, or unwilling, to connect the dots that would have shown the pattern that resulted in the deadly attack of last fall. But now Peggy connects some dots herself, within the agency, and the picture isn’t very pretty.

Any real probe will take this as an opportunity to air all of the agency’s dirty laundry, going back to the Clinton years, and all the evidence tampering and obstruction that went on during that time. Because the dots from such an investigation may show the much bigger picture of government malfeasance that the kneepad press largely ignored, out its adoration for the man it put in the White House in 1992.

Cynthia McKinney is in trouble in her own district.

A brave Palestinian “freedom fighter” was shot and killed after throwing hand grenades into a nursery in a West Bank settlement. Fortunately, no one (who mattered) was injured.

Emmett Tyrrell gives away the ugly little secret–American journalists hate each other.

If the members of the National Football League harbored as much hatred for their fellow football savages as the journalists harbor for their fellow journalists, no football game would begin without a thorough weapons search.

Is it just me, or is there much more collegiality in the blogosphere than in paid journalism?

I don’t normally deal with defense procurement issues, particularly in this detail, but Dan Hartung sends me this link to an article in the Atlantic by James Fallows on the Joint Strike Fighter. As usual from Mr. Fallows, it provides a riveting bit of history on that subject.

He wonders whether it offers any lessons for NASA.

Having read it once, I’m not sure, but I’ll give it some thought. I’m not sure how applicable the approach is to NASA, given how limited its vision is for spacelift. If it could somehow be coordinated with the military needs, then there might be a chance, but it’s even harder to coordinate NASA with the Pentagon than it is to get the services to agree.

But here were the things that jumped out at me from having read it.

First, it provides a nice little description of Darleen Druyun, and why she may continue to be a major player.

Second, this passage provides some interesting insight:

“There was one point [in 1999] where it was strongly urged that we terminate Lockheed and give the program to Boeing,” Jacques Gansler told me recently. “Even if to do that we had to give Boeing the Lockheed Martin design to build. The skunk works had just lost cost control. The management was in terrible shape.”

We get a clue from it as to one of the reasons that the X-33 program failed. Skunk Works just ain’t what it used to be.

The third thing I saw was this:

At the Lockheed Martin plant in Fort Worth, under the guidance of Martin McLoughlin, the JSF’s director of manufacturing, I saw a demonstration of modern manufacturing systems like the ones already in place at Boeing. The wing is formed as two great halves, and the joined halves are matched so precisely to the fuselage that they snap in. The computer industry as we know it would not exist were it not for high-speed, high-precision assembly, nor could America’s car makers compete with Japan’s had they not used these techniques. This is the first time these methods will be used for the military.

This, I believe, does have major implications for the space industry. The reason that companies like XCOR and Pioneer Rocketplane can contemplate building space vehicles for affordable prices is because of the revolution in computer-aided design and fabrication, that throw many of the old aerospace costing models into a cocked hat, even for limited production runs.

In any event, the article’s definitely worth a read for those interested in aerospace and defense policy (including a lot of dirty laundry in the Beltway), and it may spark some further thoughts as to its applicability to our launch conundrum.