November 15, 2026

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY:

UPDATE: They hate him because they hate excellence, and they hate things and people they can’t control.

UPDATE (From Ed):

Posted at 1:44 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HIDE THE DECLINE:

 

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

NEWS FROM 1945: NASA’s moon rocket was built under a former Nazi scientist who developed Hitler’s V-2 missiles. Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department, says Wernher von Braun.. (Says Tom Lehrer.)

Of course, I remember Freeman Dyson saying that the V-2 was seriously damaging to the Germans. It cost more to build than a bomber, was less accurate, and unlike a bomber wasn’t good for more than one mission.

UPDATE (From Ed): In his 2017 book The Second World Wars, Victor Davis Hanson wrote:

The comparison with traditional bombers was instructive. Just four or five large Allied bombing raids late in the war (500 planes carrying 4,000 pounds of ordnance each) delivered as much explosive as all of the V-2 launches combined. Yet both V-weapons proved evolutionary in a way that piston- and propeller-driven bombers did not. The V-weapons were respectively the antecedents of the late twentieth-century cruise missile and Cold War intercontinental ballistic rocket. Given the programs’ huge research and development budgets and their lack of precision targeting and relatively small payloads, what supported the use of at least the V-1 flying bomb (but not the far more expensive V-2 rocket) was its psychological effect upon the Allies in late 1944, when they were confident of victory. The vengeance weapons were launched at a time when Germany was short of trained pilots and the fuel to train them, and they were the only viable mechanisms for both delivering ordnance over enemy targets and diverting Allied raids away from German cities.

Nevertheless, frightening though the V-weapons were, had Hitler earlier invested commensurate resources in a long-range strategic bomber, he would have had far more chance of causing havoc over Britain. Alternatively, the postwar US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that the huge resources devoted to the V-weapons program could have produced an additional twenty-four thousand fighters. German sources put the costs of the programs somewhat higher, and suggest that just for the full investment and production costs of making, for example, five thousand V-2s at twenty thousand man-hours per rocket, the Luftwaffe might have instead built well over twenty-five thousand additional Fw 190 top fighters—a figure greater than the twenty thousand 190s that were built—and that might have changed the air war over Germany, had the planes been supplied with good pilots and adequate fuel.

The German Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (OKW) was originally not told of the extent of the V-weapon programs. But even when later briefed on both the V-1 and V-2 programs, it seemed, quite understandably, underwhelmed, concluding that “the quantity of explosive which can be delivered daily is less than that which could be dropped in a major air attack.” Alternatively, had Hitler canceled the V-2 program and used its resources to focus solely on the V-1s, he might have produced well over a hundred thousand more such cruise missiles, with a far greater likelihood of inciting terror among the British population. The misplacement of resources into the V-2 program, as in a litany of other grandiose German projects, proved a disaster of enormous proportions for the Wehrmacht that even today is not fully appreciated.

A presenter in this 2023 Imperial War Museum video on the V-2 adds, “The V2 project had become central to the Nazi regime and the SS mobilized thousands of concentration camp prisoners to build the factory and the rockets. These prisoners face terrible conditions in which their guards neglect was matched only by their brutality. In all some 60,000 people were deported to the concentration camps, [and] at least twenty thousand died. The V2 killed thousands of people in London,  Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, and elsewhere. But many more people died making these weapons.  When we look at the V2 we should remember that its technological achievement was built on the slaughter and cruelty of the Nazi regime.”

Posted at 1:14 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ROGER KIMBALL: Marco Rubio Reasserts the Moral Legitimacy of American Power.

Reagan lost 26 House seats in the 1982 midterm election. But even in the midst of that gloomy situation, the embers of renewal began to glow. As it happens, 1982 was the year that the Federalist Society was founded. Formed by a handful of conservative jurists, including Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, the organization was dedicated to reshaping the legal profession by “checking federal power, protecting individual liberty, and interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning.” Nineteen-eighty-two was also the year that Reagan’s economic policies began to bear fruit, sparking what would become the greatest generation of wealth in history. The electorate took notice. In 1984, Reagan resoundingly won his second term. He took 49 states to Walter Mondale’s one (plus the District of Columbia), 525 electoral votes to 13. As Rubio stressed, one of those lessons of that turnaround is that “politics requires more than simply winning elections.” Why? “[B]ecause the government is not the only source of political power.”

This is a key point.

Power also lives in the universities. Power lives in the press. Power lives in the whole expanse of civil society, all of the institutions that define and shape our understanding of ourselves as a nation and as a people. Every society . . . has an elite, has a ruling class. And in ours, that class resides not just in the White House, not just in Congress or the courts; it also resides in academia, in powerful nonprofits, and in nongovernment organizations. It resides in corporate boardrooms and C-suites and think tanks and journals, in foundations and in mass media, stretching across the commanding heights of business and education and culture.

One of Rubio’s greatest intellectual strengths follows from his understanding of the real, as distinct from the utopian or politically correct, metabolism of power: what it is and what legitimates it.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

SCHRÖDINGER’S HONEYPOT:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

MIAMI STEVE’S NEW GIG: Holocaust education.

Steven Van Zandt is worried about the Jews. “There is that pre-Holocaust vibe,” the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently about what he sees on social media, where he is a prolific user.

“They spread lies around year after year after year, and if you say something often enough, people start to believe it.

“And that’s what happened that led to the Holocaust in the first place, and that’s what’s going on now.”

Exploring Jewish culture, resilience through music

For a man equally beloved for his longtime work with Bruce Springsteen in the E Street Band and his role as Silvio on HBO’s “The Sopranos,” such a detour might seem unusual.

But Van Zandt is looking to make his own mark in the world of Holocaust education, via his education initiative TeachRock, which since 2013 has provided K-12 lesson plans on a range of subjects built around popular music.

Titled “Jewish Heritage and the Holocaust: Exploring an Enduring Culture Through Music,” the initiative’s four-day lesson plan, launched this week, includes the onset of antisemitism in prewar Europe, survivor testimony, and Jewish values.

Anchoring the lessons are rock songs from the likes of KISS, the half-Jewish glam metal band, beloved Jewish folk singer Leonard Cohen, and contemporary New York pop band Lawrence, which is fronted by two Jewish siblings.

It’s a departure from the somber tone of most Holocaust education programs, a space that the Jewish community has heavily invested in despite mounting questions about the effectiveness of such lessons in curbing antisemitism.

TeachRock may be aimed at the K-12 plan, but perhaps The Boss, aka Miami Steve’s boss, should audit a few classes. Or as Christian Toto writes: The Boss Should Listen to Little Steven – Stat.

Days before the midterm elections, Springsteen endorsed Abdul El-Sayed, the radical Democrat running for the Michigan Senate.

“Dr. El-Sayed is a fighter for our American Constitution, he’s a fighter for our American Democracy, and he’s a fighter against the corrupt, lawless, and anti-American leadership currently in the White House … That’s why I’m in his corner 100%.”

That endorsement did more than shatter a longtime Springsteen fan group. It let the rocker praise a man with concerning ties to antisemitism. The American Jewish Congress:

He is sharply critical of the Israeli government and has described Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide. In 2026 reporting, El-Sayed said he would withdraw both offensive and defensive U.S. military aid to Israel, characterized the Israeli government as being as evil as Hamas, described Israeli policy as apartheid, and rebuffed the premise that Israel has a right to exist specifically as a Jewish state, arguing that such a definition is incompatible with equal rights.

El-Sayed’s family also has troubling ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, a terror group with deeply antisemitic views. El-Sayed also campaigned with Hasan Piker, a pundit serially accused of being antisemitic.

I assume he’ll be updating the laser light show and carrying plenty of inflatable props on his next tour; Bruce Springsteen morphed into Roger Waters so slowly, I hardly even noticed.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

A FRIEND COMMENTS THAT HE IS A LITERAL BOND VILLAIN.

Posted at 9:50 am by Glenn Reynolds

“ALL THESE PEOPLE, PLAYING WITH FIRE:”

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

November 14, 2026