May 14, 2025

LONG PAST TIME: Time to Fix the Navy’s Frigate Problem.

Most recent reports on the construction of the first U.S. Navy Constellation-class frigate are grim and filled with unwelcome news.

The first ship of the class is only 10% complete despite years of construction. The design of the ship has not been completed, and changes continue, no doubt accounting for rising costs and lengthening delays in construction.

Senior leaders at Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) continue to blame industry for these problems, industry blames the Navy, and Congress penalizes the program in response.

While U.S. designs like the DDG-51 have been a “gold standard” for survivability, the Navy must strike a balance between ability to resist and sustain damage and rapid construction, perhaps across multiple ship flights, to field warships in needed numbers.

The current outlook for frigates is questionable, and does not look to improve soon. Still, the frigate is essential to the U.S. Navy force structure. The fleet has become increasingly imbalanced with more high-end ships like the DDG-51 used for low-end missions like counter-piracy and show the flag port visits.

Navies always find a need for larger numbers of smaller warships in wartime. It’s time to fix the frigate, and produce it in numbers, even at the expense of the larger DDG, and pair all manned combatant ships with unmanned “sidekicks” that add additional firepower and more options for distributed capacity.

The Navy couldn’t take a proven design like the FREMM without twisting it into something that can’t come in anywhere close to on time or on budget.

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green

THE BIGGEST STORY EVERYBODY MISSED, A THREAD:

A few bullet points:

  • What does this do? The most important part is that every agency has 365 days to list out all the regulations that have a criminal penalty and then that report has to be made public.
  • All future regs have to state criminal offenses clearly. Mens rea is back on the menu! The default will be to require mens rea.
  • This EO is tremendously important and will have direct, and hopefully immediate, affect on more or less everyone in America. And did you hear anything about it? Anything at all?

    • Read the whole thing.

    Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green 0

    BASTIAT’S WINDOW: Persuasive Beats Abrasive. 12 suggestions for Democrats on how they might win back skeptical voters.

    Posted at 2:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 22

    ROBERT SPENCER: Trump Shocks the World — Again. “In many ways, Trump’s meeting with al-Sharaa is as momentous, and could be more momentous, than his first-term overtures to Kim Jong Un. The two meetings come from the same wellsprings: Trump is attempting to break longstanding logjams and end the status quo that the foreign policy establishment, both inside the U.S. and elsewhere, had come to take for granted.”

    Posted at 2:17 pm by Stephen Green 17

    CHANGE: MLB reinstates Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson, making them Hall of Fame eligible.

    Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson were reinstated by baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred on Tuesday, making both eligible for the sport’s Hall of Fame after their careers were tarnished by gambling scandals.

    Rose’s permanent ban was lifted eight months after his death and came a day before the Cincinnati Reds will honor baseball’s career hits leader with Pete Rose Night.

    Manfred announced Tuesday he was changing the league’s policy on permanent ineligibility, saying bans would expire at death. MLB said 17 individuals had their status changed by the decision, including all eight banned members of the 1919 Chicago Black Sox, former Philadelphia Phillies president Williams D. Cox and former New York Giants outfielder Benny Kauff.

    Under the Hall of Fame’s current rules, the earliest Rose or Jackson could be inducted would be in 2028.

    Faster, please.

     

    Posted at 2:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 60

    “WEAK” IS THE WORD:

    Posted at 1:56 pm by Stephen Green 34

    JIM GERAGHTY: Yes, Our President Was Senile for a Long Stretch.

    Mass delusion gripped the entire Democratic Party, and they talked themselves into believing they could carry a senile president over the reelection finish line, Weekend at Bernie’s–style, if everyone just tried hard enough to gaslight the public. And as far as we can tell, at no point did any of them pause to contemplate the potential consequences for the country.

    There’s something grimly satisfying about the bitter recriminations laid out in the concluding pages of Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s new book Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, as the Democrats grapple with the fact that their own leaders misled them about the reality of the 2024 presidential race every step of the way.

    Three weeks after Election Day, top Kamala Harris campaign staffers appeared on Pod Save America and contended their internal polling always showed the vice president trailing. “It was hard for Democratic voters to tell what was real,” Allen and Parnes write. “They had been led to believe that Joe Biden was in fighting shape. But he wasn’t. They had been led to believe he was locked in a dead-heat race with Trump. But he wasn’t. They had been led to believe that [Kamala] Harris was in a position to win. But she wasn’t. And now they were being led to believe she never had a chance. That wasn’t really true, either.”

    And in the preceding 287 pages, we keep getting anecdotes indicating things had gone terribly, glaringly, obviously wrong in the Democrats’ world, but no one wanted to admit it and confront the problems.

    After his disastrous debate performance, President Biden attempted to reassure a group of unnerved Democratic governors by telling them he would no longer plan to appear at events past 8 in the evening. Allen and Parnes say one governor later quipped, “Somebody better tell the Chinese when they can attack us, because I don’t want them to wake him up.”

    Now it can be told. And then immediately forgotten once the 2028 election cycle begins:

    Flashback: Gay Talese, Call Your Office!

    Posted at 1:49 pm by Ed Driscoll 82

    MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: New Beard, Same Buttigieg. “The beard jokes write themselves, but I’m not here to take cheap shots at Buttigieg; I’m here to take high-class, data-rich cheap shots.”

    Posted at 1:15 pm by Stephen Green 48

    NO. NEXT QUESTION? Are “Tiny Homes” The New Solution To Homelessness? New video from Matt Walsh:

    Posted at 1:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 134

    THE NEW SPACE RACE:

    I’d just add that the New Space Race would only be half as exciting without SpaceX’s unprecedented transparency for a launch company.

    Posted at 12:58 pm by Stephen Green 16

    TAPPING INTO THE MEMORY HOLE: Jake Tapper’s past coverage of Biden’s cognitive decline under scrutiny ahead of his new book.

    Concerns over Biden’s age and stamina go as far back as 2019 as he ran in the Democratic primary. The subject wasn’t just raised by conservatives at the time, it was used as a cudgel by Democratic rivals Julián Castro and Cory Booker, who both cast doubt on the former VP’s sharpness.

    Once Biden clinched the nomination in 2020 during the COVID pandemic, he ran what many dubbed the “basement campaign,” a name meant to signify Biden’s limited public appearances on the campaign trail. Biden frequently went viral for incoherent word jumbles during various events. His campaign repeatedly claimed that his various verbal stumbles stemmed from Biden’s lifelong battle of overcoming a stutter.

    In October 2020, Tapper touted the Biden talking point, even showing a clip from the DNC convention of a 13-year-old Biden supporter with a severe stutter who turned to the Democratic nominee for inspiration, during a tense exchange with then-Trump 2020 campaign advisor Lara Trump (now a Fox News host), who drew attention to Biden’s cognitive decline at a campaign event.

    “How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that?” Tapper asked indignantly after showing a clip of Lara Trump commenting on Biden struggling for words.

    “First and foremost, I had no idea that Joe Biden ever suffered from a stutter,” Lara Trump responded. “I think what we see on stage with Joe Biden, Jake, is very clearly a cognitive decline-”

    “Ok,” Tapper quickly interrupted while talking over her. “It’s so amazing to me- a ‘cognitive decline.’ I think you were mocking his stutter. Yeah. I think you were mocking his stutter and I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline. I would think somebody in the Trump family would be more sensitive to people who do not have medical licenses diagnosing politicians from afar.”

    After Lara Trump insisted Biden’s cognitive decline was “very concerning,” Tapper cut the interview short.

    “Thank you, Lara. I’m sure it’s from a place of concern. We all believe that,” Tapper sarcastically told her before ending the interview.

    Related: Jake Tapper Tries To Make Millions Exposing Biden’s Cognitive Decline After He Spent Years Hiding It.

    More: CNN Cover-Up: Brian Stelter Eagerly Jumped on the Biden White House-Driven ‘Cheap Fakes’ Bandwagon.

    UPDATE:

    Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 68

    WE START SAVING BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, THAT MUCH IS CERTAIN: If Congress actually cancels the SLS rocket, what happens next?

    The most likely answer is that NASA turns to an old but successful playbook: COTS. This stands for Commercial Orbital Transportation System and was created by NASA two decades ago to develop cargo transport systems (eventually this became SpaceX’s Dragon and Northrop’s Cygnus spacecraft) for the International Space Station. Since then, NASA has adopted this same model for crew services as well as other commercial programs.

    Under the COTS model, NASA provides funding and guidance to private companies to develop their own spacecraft, rockets, and services, and then buys those at a “market” rate.

    The idea of a Lunar COTS program is not new. NASA employees explored the concept in a research paper a decade ago, finding that “a future (Lunar) COTS program has the great potential of enabling development of cost-effective, commercial capabilities and establishing a thriving cislunar economy which will lead the way to an economical and sustainable approach for future human missions to Mars.”

    Sources indicate NASA would go to industry and seek an “end-to-end” solution for lunar missions. That is, an integrated plan to launch astronauts from Earth, land them on the Moon, and return them to Earth. One of the bidders would certainly be SpaceX, with its Starship vehicle already having been validated during the Artemis III mission. Crews could launch from Earth either in Dragon or Starship. Blue Origin is the other obvious bidder. The company might partner with Lockheed Martin to commercialize the Orion spacecraft or use the crew vehicle it is developing internally.

    Other companies could also participate. The point is that NASA would seek to buy astronaut transportation to the Moon, just as it already is doing with cargo and science experiments through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.

    This is the way.

    I also hope that Congress uses the savings from SLS to restore some of NASA’s science funding, particularly the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

    Posted at 11:42 am by Stephen Green 43

    FREE SPEECH DEFENDERS ARE FAMILIAR WITH COMMON “ZOMBIE ARGUMENTS” (ARGUMENTS THAT JUST WON’T DIE) AGAINST FREE SPEECH: e.g. “words are violence,” “hate speech ≠ free speech,” & “free speech is rightwing.” In The War On Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail (due out July 1) Nadine Strossen and I will hopefully debunk those pesky fallacies once and for all.

    Posted at 11:14 am by Greg Lukianoff 55

    SURPRISING TO WHOM?

    You’d think that a magazine called The Economist would understand something about economics — but only if you hadn’t read The Economist in the last 15 years or so.

    Posted at 10:56 am by Stephen Green 151

    THE TRADE WAR: Trump tariffs have little impact on prices so far, defying grim forecasts.

    Prices climbed at an unexpectedly slow pace last month, offering a boost to President Donald Trump, whose aggressive trade policies have sparked fears of a resurgence in inflation.

    The Labor Department on Tuesday reported that prices rose at an annual rate of 2.3 percent, the smallest increase since early 2021. While price growth in so-called core sectors of the economy — which exclude volatile food and energy costs — remained elevated at 2.8 percent, April’s Consumer Price Index contained only scant evidence that Trump’s tariffs have meaningfully driven up the cost of living.

    Kudos to Politico for framing the story this way.

    Now then — what will they do with all those experts who provided the grim forecasts?

    Posted at 10:40 am by Stephen Green 214