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Suck Less

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Zero accountability for personal failure is the diamond-hard core principle of the woke mind virus.

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Zuckerberg Admits Facebook Censored Truth for the Government

Zuckerberg Admits Facebook Censored Truth for the Government

In a letter dated August 26 to the Chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary, Jim Jordan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed that Facebook had inappropriately censored users’ posts at the request of the Biden administration.

The letter states that, “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”

While saying that the decision whether to censor was ultimately Meta’s, he expressed regret about caving to pressure from the White House. “I believe the government pressure was wrong,” he wrote, “and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”

He added that Meta was “ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

Zuckerberg also admitted to having wrongly censored a New York Post article from October 2020 reporting on emails obtained from the laptop of Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, indicating that he arranged a meeting between his father, who was then Vice President, and an adviser to the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where Hunter was a board member.

Less than a year after that meeting, Joe Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating the company, afterward publicly bragging about having done so at a videotaped meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The New York Post story about corruption and influence-peddling was dismissed by Democrats as “Russian disinformation”. More than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed a letter characterizing the story as “a Russian information operation” aimed at “trying to influence how Americans vote” in the following month’s presidential election, and Politico and other mainstream media outlets ran with that narrative. Facebook censored the New York Post story, and Twitter went so far as to suspend the Post’s account.

The contents of the laptop were subsequently verified as authentic, and it was also later revealed that some of the former intelligence officials who signed the letter were CIA contractors and that the letter was written at the behest of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.

Thus, true information was censored on social media and the claim of “Russian disinformation” aimed at influencing the election outcome was itself a disinformation campaign emanating from the Democratic establishment in collusion with the Deep State to influence the election in Biden’s favor.

Zuckerberg acknowledged in his letter to the House Committee, “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the single greatest purveyor of disinformation was the US government itself, such as the big lie that two doses of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine would confer durable sterilizing immunity that would enable the population to reach herd immunity by stopping infection and transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

As I and others were pointing out at the time, there was no scientific evidence to support that claim as the clinical trials were not designed to determine these pharmaceutical products’ effectiveness against infection and transmission.

Dr. Deboarah Birx, the former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, later admitted to Congress that the false claim upon which the vaccines were sold to the public was not based on scientific evidence but rather “hope”. Dr. Rochelle Walensky likewise later admitted that the claim was not science-based but faith-based.

I discussed how factually accurate information about COVID-19, the lockdowns, and the vaccines was being censored by social media companies in order to facilitate the propagation of official government disinformation on The Tom Woods Show in February 2021.

Cross-posted from JeremyRHammond.com.

Freedom of Navigation? US Navy Continues to Fail

houthisunk

It appears the US Navy and the NATO midgets continue to be thwarted in trying to secure safe passage through the Red Sea arterials against a foe which has no navy to speak of. If the data is correct, the Yemeni Houthis have no vessels beyond the size of a patrol boat with a provenance newer than 1973.

You US Navy dollars at work.

None of these efforts were helped when the EU formed a splinter coalition called Aspides so as not to associate with the US posture in Israel. The West’s inability to agree on how to perform a relatively basic task did not go unnoticed by potential adversaries. It was certainly noticed by the shipping companies we were trying to reassure.

Since January, not only have the attacks steadily increased in number, they have diversified too. Drones and cruise missiles were accompanied by hijackings and ballistic missiles. April saw the first use of a surface drone and there has been a steady increase in this method since.

Recently the Houthis have started following up their attacks with small arms fire from fast boats and the last few weeks have seen the amount of attacks increase above what was an average of 2.5 a week.

Even Russia doesn’t want to risk it at the moment. Earlier this month, Russian tankers Arpus and Arlan, which could have gone through the Suez Canal, instead transferred their oil into the Gold Pearl – too big for the Canal – and she duly went round the Cape. 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/24/red-sea-houthis-us-navy-prosperity-guardian-iran-gaza/

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Why Do Americans Trust Either Trump or Harris?

Why Do Americans Trust Either Trump or Harris?

As I’m sure you all know, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump. Among those applauding this move, the idea seems to be that perhaps Trump will appoint Kennedy to some role in his administration in which Kennedy might have a positive impact on the health of the US childhood population. But this is a leap of faith as far as I have seen. And it’s not like Trump kept his campaign promises to “drain the swamp”, etc., during his first term in office.

Meanwhile, with the Democratic establishment no longer able to pretend as though Joe Biden’s cognitive decline is a mere figment of Republicans’ imagination, given his embarrassing debate performance with Trump in June, Democrats are rallying around their party’s replacement candidate; and suddenly we are supposed to perceive Vice President Kamala Harris as an inspirational embodiment of American ideals and values, a shining beacon of wisdom and righteousness, and, weirdly, a source of “joy”.

Why “joy” was chosen as part of Harris’s public relations campaign is a mystery to me, beyond the obvious reason that “hope” and “change” had already been used by previous candidates in ways that would risk their mindless repetition being much more widely recognized as meaningless rhetoric by sensible Americans who do not have selective amnesia about the empty campaign slogans of the past.

But what is particularly informative about it is how the media have adopted the word “joy” in their coverage of Harris’s campaign and passed it off as though we were all too stupid to recognize it as a talking point of an organized propaganda campaign. (And, well, sadly, many Americans do seem incapable of catching on to how they are being manipulated by the thought-controlling news media all reading off the same script.)

As an example of the mindless slavish devotion to the political establishment, a recent New York Times opinion piece credits Harris with envisioning “a more holistic and entirely new story about how the economy works and the aims it should serve.”

So, suddenly, Kamala Harris is an expert on the economy!

Never mind how she has blamed the problem of price inflation on businesses engaging in “price gouging”, thus deflecting from its true primary cause, which was the trillions of dollars that the Federal Reserve created out of thin air in order to rob us all of our purchasing power in service to the state, by monetizing the debt incurred as a result of the government’s insane and criminal policy of deliberately shutting down the economy in response to the COVID‑19 pandemic, with the endgame of that policy from the start having been coerced mass vaccination.

Harris is economically illiterate, but here she is being characterized as some kind of visionary who is going to educate us all about how the economy really functions, and we are supposed to believe that her proposed policies are really in our own best interests. Never mind that it’s not actually very clear what those policies might be—it’s all so very vague.

The insult to any thinking person’s intelligence is just too much to bear. The most specific the Times article gets is to say she proposes “using trillions of dollars in public investment to simulate private dollars”, including with the aim of building three million new homes.

But “public investment” is just the usual code phrase for the forcible expropriation of our wealth for redistribution according to the whims of clueless politicians.

It’s the usual code for saying that Harris aims to continue increasing the public debt, which the Fed will monetize since Americans would never agree to any of this if they were directly taxed to pay for it all; and which debt monetization will effect the continued upward transfer of wealth from all of us peons to the ruling class of politically connected financial elites, while concurrently causing even further malinvestment and distortions of the market, resulting in unsustainable booms followed by the inevitable busts that are the necessary market corrections; and which corrections the Fed, as always, will try to prevent by doing even more of what caused the problems in the first place only on an ever greater scale.

It was the government and its partner in crime, the Federal Reserve, that caused the housing affordability crisis. Therefore, even more government interference in the housing market cannot possibly be the solution. The obvious solution is rather to get the government out of the housing market—and out of interfering harmfully in every other aspect of our lives, too, for that matter.

The key lesson neither Harris nor the Times will tell you, because they are too indoctrinated into the state religion to be able to comprehend its simplicity, is that the government cannot legislate away the law of supply and demand. Price fixing, including the Fed’s manipulation of interest rates, is the cause of so many problems and never the cure. Any government interference in our lives that results in an absence of true market prices is always and ever accompanied by harmful consequences that may be unintended but are hardly unforeseeable.

The key lesson the politicians and pundits will never explain to you is that government bureaucrats making decisions at best arbitrarily, assuming only benevolent intent and an absence of corruption (which is a dubious assumption, indeed), do not know better than the market with its pricing system how to efficiently allocate scarce resources towards productive ends as determined by the will of consumers, which is to say, by all of us. There is no more perfect manifestation of the democratic principle than the free market. We do not need the government to take care of us and to tell us what to do. Incessant government interference in our lives is neither necessary nor desirable!

The author of the Times article ludicrously argues that “markets, left on their own, often tend to concentrate power”, resulting in “fewer options, worse service, higher prices, lower pay, less innovation and generally less control of our economic lives”.

But that is exactly backwards. All of those harmful outcomes are precisely the outcome of government interventionism and our consequent inability to engage in voluntary exchange for mutual benefit absent harmful government interference. People think they live in “the land of the free”, but a free society is logically impossible when you have a government that will not allow any aspect of our lives remain un-interfered with.

This goes back to that point about how Kamala Harris is somehow going to enlighten us with her economic vision while blaming price inflation on corporate greed instead of properly informing Americans how the inflation, including the insanity in the housing market, was the natural and inevitable result of the COVID‑19 lockdown madness and the Fed’s response of dutifully monetizing the debt resulting from the government’s efforts to paper over the harmful economic consequences of that insane exercise in authoritarian governance.

The corporate greed we really need to be concerned about is that which leads corporations to try to circumvent market forces and instead utilize government force to achieve their financial aims, like the pharmaceutical industry. The problem is not that there is “corporate capture” of government agencies like the FDA and CDC but that such government agencies exist to be captured and utilized to advance the agenda of a few at the expense of everyone else.

But you don’t see Kamala Harris talking about that type of corporate greed, for the obvious reason. Who do you think she really aims to serve? Hmm? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not us. She’s all about serving the special interests that keep clueless politicians like her in power.

And to come back to Trump for a moment, let’s not forget how the lockdowns were implemented during his term in office; how he bragged about being responsible for “Operation Warp Speed” and the consequent treatment of the entire population as subjects of a mass uncontrolled experiment without informed consent; how his administration rolled out “stimulus” packages to try to paper over the harmful consequences of deliberately shutting down the economy, dramatically increasing the government debt and predictably resulting in a massive theft of our purchasing power (not “transitory” price inflation, mind you); how he treated Russia as an enemy despite campaign promises to pursue friendlier relations, pursued extreme Zionist policies in his support for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, and otherwise continued a basically neo-con foreign policy agenda; how he promised to “drain the swamp” but then kept people like Dr. Anthony Fauci in positions of power such as, in Fauci’s case, the president’s chief medical adviser; etc.

And while Trump and other Republicans eventually came around to opposition, Democrats, of course, were even more insanely pro-lockdown, and they remain unapologetic to the extraordinary harm caused by this authoritarianism, so it should come as no surprise to anyone that instead of acknowledging the real problem and cause of the housing affordability crisis, all we get from Harris’s admirers is the usual gibberish about how she will fix the problems caused by too much freedom in the marketplace with “public investment”, i.e., forcibly expropriating the fruits of your labor for redistribution according to her whims because you, dear peasant, are too stupid to know how to spend your own money and therefore need Kamala Harris and her ilk to decide how to spend it for you.

Then there is the matter of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has been supported by the Biden/Harris administration, would have been likewise supported by Trump had he been reelected, and has been defended by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., thus rendering vacuous his claim to be a defender of children and human rights.

During the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that Harris has been “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza”, which was certainly news to everyone actually paying attention to this issue.

But even if we assume for the sake of argument that it is true that she has been “tirelessly” involved in the Biden administration’s efforts, all that would mean is that Harris is totally on board with Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide.

Sure, we’ve heard since last year that the Biden administration has been working toward a ceasefire. But what that has really meant is that the administration worked tirelessly to provide Israel with the arms it has needed to perpetrate a genocide, to block ceasefire resolutions in the UN Security Council, and to announce a supposedly Israel-backed “ceasefire” proposal for the purpose of shifting the blame for the absence of a ceasefire onto Hamas when the truth is that the regime of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear from the start that it would not agree to ending its genocidal military campaign before achieving the stated aim of eliminating Hamas, only to a temporary pause involving an exchange of hostages, which is to be followed by a continuation of Israel’s criminal violence.

Agreeing to its own destruction along with the continued destruction of Gaza and indiscriminate massacre of Palestinian civilians is obviously a non-starter for Hamas, the antithesis of an actual ceasefire, and Israel has otherwise been making demands clearly intended to ensure that no ceasefire can be achieved. And the Biden/Harris administration cannot possibly be incognizant of how their “tireless” efforts to achieve a ceasefire have in fact been facilitating Israel’s genocide, but, you see, the narcissists, megalomaniacs, sociopaths, and psychopaths who exercise government power over you think that you are just too stupid to see through their ridiculous pretenses of benevolent intent.

Everyone participating in the US presidential election is, by the act of voting, legitimizing the outcome, which any sane person can foresee will be the perpetuation of the criminal activities of the regime in Washington, DC. For Americans to place faith in either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris to change this course for the country is completely irrational. It is up to free-thinking, rational Americans to effect real change, and a good first step would be to stop legitimizing your own disenfranchisement, consenting to servitude, and perpetuating the regime’s criminal violence and human rights violations.

Cross-posted from JeremyRHammond.com.

Collision Alarm: Terror on the Horizon

pakistanattacks

“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”

-William Tecumseh Sherman

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. The indicators and warnings on the board are lighting up more often now than in the past.

I did a series this year called Storming America (Episodes 37, 41-43, 49-50) on the Chasing Ghosts podcast where I laid out the probabilities and architecture of an up-scaled 7 October 2023 Gaza-Israel complex terror attack on the US and the West. A complex terror attack is a coordinated multi-dimensional attack that takes place at the same time in multiple locations. I do not infer this hasn’t happened in the past but the perfect storm of new technology and weapons employment is changing by the decade. The element of synchronization of simultaneous attacks against soft and hard targets really compromises the decision loops and reaction cycles of centralized governments crippling their timely response to these attacks.

From Michael Collins’ complex attacks on British occupation forces in the UK-Irish war at the turn of the twentieth century and Beslan and everything in between, synchronized non-state military actors are accelerating their impact in this new era. I have spoken to the leveling of weapons technology and salvo competition that is increasing the effectiveness of developing and third world countries and their concomitant military capabilities against very sophisticated first world armies and navies.

And the simpler and less sophisticated militaries are winning again and again. Terror attacks are going through the same evolution.

The wind-up to these events is starting to cascade in frequency and ferocity that will not relent for the foreseeable future. It may time to bring back air raid sirens of old. And don’t think for second these new threats aren’t the result of the US meddling constantly in other nation’s affairs over the past 150 years.

Dateline Pakistan:

More than 70 people have been killed in four assaults amid several reported incidents of violence in Balochistan province in southwestern Pakistan, according to military and police officials.

The country’s military said 14 soldiers and police, as well as 21 militants, were killed in fighting after the largest of the attacks, which targeted vehicles on a major highway in Bela, a town in Lasbela district.

This is coming to the US and the West. Newton’s Third Law is a stone cold killer.

Prepare accordingly and buckle up.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/pakistan-over-70-dead-gunmen-storm-highways-execute-civilians-24-hours-terror

“And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beastsAnd I looked, and behold a pale horseAnd his name that sat on him was death, and hell followed with him”
– Johnny Cash, When the Man Comes Around

Email at cgpodcast@pm.me.

Honest Voices In The Intellectual Ecosystem

https://scotthorton.org/interviews/8-14-24-matthew-hoh-on-obamas-folly-in-afghanistan-and-recourses-for-managing-and-dealing-with-ptsd/

Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton recently interviewed former USMC Captain / former State Department official Matthew Hoh.

Famously, Hoh resigned from a State Department post in Afghanistan in 2009 and valiantly attempted to convince President Barack Obama’s administration to not go forward with a planned military surge in Afghanistan. He tried to convince them to get the hell out of there instead. That’s 12 years before we finally got the hell out of there. In disgrace.

The Obama administration passed on Hoh’s facts-based warning of impending disaster. It marched headlong into the disaster. But something interesting happened. Instead of having his voice repressed, Hoh found himself constantly invited to appear on MSNBC and tell the truth about how unwinnable the Afghan War was. And MSNBC was “controlled by the White House.”

What the hell?

Hoh’s experience highlights that despite the state’s patronage of sycophants and psychopaths, reality always gets a vote. And those who speak truth to (and about) power can find a place in the intellectual ecosystem.

There are two kinds of intellectuals, those who serve the state and those who don’t.

Regime intellectual is a sweet gig. As long as one commits to core elements of the state’s point of view (government supremacist, domestic imperialist, pro-war) one can be as lazy and/or insane as one wants to be. Case in point: 1999’s Tyranny’s Ally, by David Wurmser. Here is a book that reads like it was penned by an inmate at Arkham Asylum:

“Anti-Americanism among pan-Arabic nationalists emerges from the same source as did.

Communist and Nazi anti-Americanism: the nature of tyrannical regimes. The hostility is a product of neither the U.S. presence nor its policies. Since the concept of enemy is essential to legitimize internal repression, neighbors or superpowers that represent ideas antithetical

to tyranny are particularly threatening to the tyrant and are thus considered the most dangerous of its foes. In the Middle East, those enemies are the United States and Israel—not because of what they have done, but because of who they are, what they represent, and the fact of

their existence.”

Crazy stuff. Although the part about “the concept of enemy is essential to legitimize internal repression” rings true. But the rest is kooky. Not only was Wurmser not committed to a hospital for the criminally insane, he became Middle East Adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.

America does not have a monopoly on deranged regime intellectuals. A fascinating example in Russia is Alexander Dugin. An ultranationalist, his 1997 book The Foundations of Geopolitics reads like a Russian version of The Grand Chessboard. Dugin wrote:

“Then there is the Ukrainian issue. Ukrainian sovereignty is such a negative phenomenon for Russian geopolitics that, in principle, it could easily provoke an armed conflict. Without the Black Sea coastline from Ismail to Kerch, Russia gets such a long coastal strip, effectively controlled by who knows who, that its very existence as a normal and independent state is called into question.”

Actually, that doesn’t sound so crazy. But consider this passage from his 2009 book The Fourth Political Theory:

“American liberal Ayn Rand (Greenspan was one of her greatest admirers) has created an entire philosophy (“Objectivism”) based on the following blunt idea: if one is rich, then he is good. She

reached the limits of Weber’s idea about the origin of capitalism in the Protestant ethic and said that the “rich” is always and necessarily the “good” – almost a “saint”, while the “poor” is evil, lazy, bad, and corrupt – a “sinner”.”

Presenting Rand as the flag bearer of American Liberalism is so uncharitable as to be diabolical. Maybe not as delusional as Wurmser, but certainly tapped.

Anyway, regime publication Foreign Affairs called Dugin “Putin’s Brain” and portrayed his philosophy as driving the Russian state. Which is preposterous. Alex Hu explained Dugin’s role in The National Interest:

“…a cursory look at his career reveals that he is just one of many pawns in Putin’s curated media ecosystem. The regime’s “political technologists” are known to impersonally employ thousands of media personalities like Dugin to shape public opinion. These personalities do not control their public profile, nor do their ideas necessarily even reflect official policy. The regime also sponsors extremists and pseudo-oppositionists to make itself look moderate in comparison.”

One of those political technologists was Vladislav Surkov:

“As deputy head of the administration he would meet once a week with the heads of the television channels in his Kremlin office, instructing them on whom to attack and whom to defend, who is allowed on TV and who is banned, how the president is to be presented, and the very language and categories the country thinks and feels in.”

Apparently, even though Russia is a repressive autocracy and American is an enlightened democratic republic, the White House deploys the same media tactics as the Kremlin. Which brings us back to Hoh. He told Horton he believes the White House authorized MSNBC to platform him because it had accepted the truth about Afghanistan:

“They keep having me on. I’m on MSNBC so often that the makeup ladies keep my mixture of… makeup ready for me because I’m in there a couple times a week, you know. And why, why do they keep having this guy come on arguing to get out of Afghanistan? Well, it’s because Barack Obama couldn’t be seen as weak or soft, but he also knew that he could lose the reelection, because Afghanistan was another Iraq. So, we’re going to surge in Afghanistan and then what happens Scott right we’re going to start pulling out in the summer of 2011.”

Now imagine if there were no intellectuals like Matthew Hoh out there speaking the truth. Imagine if we were fully a nation of Wurmsers. Reality would still get a vote. And at some point, reality would overwhelm the false narratives. But we would have already marched into Hell and obliterated civilization, possibly the species.

So, give reality a hand and support honest intellectuals like Hoh and the cats at the Libertarian Institute. Donate Today!

 

 

 

 

 

Sealift Takes a Dump: The US Navy Continues to Degrade

spearhead

Another USN ship disaster in the offing. Contrary to what one would first think, this is tangential to the “IED* recruiting crisis.” This is due to a separate recruiting crisis in Military Sealift Command (MSC) caused by the extreme workloads the civilian mariners who crew these ships are subjected to – far in excess of what military sailors or mariners working in the civilian sector are expected to do.

The US Navy is, of course, not looking to the future and treating the oversight and incompetence as simply more tens of millions of dollars they can write off.

All 12 currently-active Spearhead-class fast transports.

These ships are militarized fast catamaran ferries and largely intended for use rapidly moving troops and equipment around inside of a given theater. The class is apparently a perfectly workable port-to-port ferry but totally unsuitable for the various amphibious warfare schemes the USN and USMC have tried to use for the emerging near-peer and peer littoral and blue water fights. But then again, the era of contested amphibious landings in the near-peer and peer fights with the ubiquity of missiles and inexpensive artillery is over.

The upshot of this is that the US military is going to lose enough high-speed, shallow-draft sea-lift capacity to move a brigade at a time from Point A to Point B. This suggests that the US is 1) de-prioritizing actually defending the Baltic States and Finland; (2) equally de-prioritizing the defense of the Southwest Pacific on land; or (3) both, given that seaborne troop movements are now going to have to rely on far more conventional amphibious shipping that will be wasted on ferry duty, or highly vulnerable commercial shipping.

Military Sealift Command has drafted a plan to remove the crews from 17 Navy support ships due to a lack of qualified mariners to operate the vessels across the Navy, USNI News learned.

The MSC “force generation reset” identified two Lewis and Clark replenishment ships, one fleet oiler, a dozen Spearhead-class Expeditionary Fast Transports (EPF) and two forward-deployed Navy expeditionary sea bases that would enter an “extended maintenance” period and have their crews retasked to other ships in the fleet, three people familiar with the plan told USNI News Thursday.

Based on the crew requirements on the platforms, sideling all the ships could reduce the civilian mariner demand for MSC by as many as 700 billets.

This is mostly infuriating because these ships are brand-new. In fact, they actually commissioned a new one in February 2024.

In April 2013, the EPF program was added to the remit of the Littoral Combat Ship Council, so that the capabilities of both ship types could be considered together conjoining it with one of the premier naval shipbuilding disaster of the new century. In 2014, the USN considered outsourcing the management of the fleet, but concluded that the ships would continue to be manned by civil service mariners.

What’s interesting here is that there are actually six of these ships extant or under construction but only the two forward-deployed hulls have been mentioned as in line for mothballing. I’d be on the lookout for the rest of the class being similarly deactivated in the near future, even though some of them are literally still on the slipways.

With the exception of those cuts (which make up a small amount of the total), however, the obvious conclusion is that the US Navy is cutting auxiliary vessels that don’t directly support its high-end battle fleet. This sort of retrenchment and specialization onto the “core mission” of fighting World War Three, however, carries the risk that – as usual – the next war will be with the people we weren’t planning to fight. The USN has already struggled mightily doing what was, objectively, a very simple humanitarian aid/disaster relief mission in Gaza… and equally-mightily keeping the Bab al-Mandeb open to Western shipping.

https://news.usni.org/2024/08/22/navy-could-sideline-17-support-ships-due-to-manpower-issues

The first five ships in the class will require additional work done to improve the superstructure, at a cost of $350k-$1.2M each. The remaining ships which are still various stages of construction will require upgrading following construction as well.

https://www.wired.com/2016/01/yar-the-navy-is-fixing-its-busted-high-speed-transport-ships/

H/T to armchairwarlord at Twitter

* IED = Inclusion, Equity and Diversity

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Anti-War Blog “Won’t somebody think of the children!”

Anti-War Blog “Won’t somebody think of the children!”

The French government has recently arrested and detained Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram. The alleged offence is that the messaging app is not policing and governing what it’s users do. So a national government has kidnapped and demands that the CEO give up access to the app. Currently Telegram is used to get information out of Gaza, with many on the ground reporting from the Palestinian side. It is also where most of the accurate reporting from both Russian and Ukrainian sources can be found from that ongoing war as individuals are sharing information and personal ordeals. It has been the pipeline of the common person on the ground from various conflict zones the world over.

As Dave DeCamp reports on Antiwar.com, Durov had been previously approached by the Russian government who wanted access to his platform. The US also had attempted to pressure Telegram to give up information on its users and supply them with the data that it may have. Fortunately Durov’s Telegram and apps like Signal remain free of such intrusions and the prying self interest of national governments, for now.

In the old days of the internet, this would have been widely viewed as a good thing, various perspectives and access to information from those witnessing events. PRIVACY. To have ones data and privacy respected. To not be spied on. To not have ones data sold, shared, intercepted, monitored and potentially edited or censored. PRIVACY. In 2024, the internet is no longer a frontier but rather a place of corporate and government jurisdictions where YOU are the product and are to be governed. It’s a permissive world.

Won’t somebody think of the children!”

The world is harsh, horrible and nature wants to eat or poison you. Attempting to make everything G rated is idiotic. Hoping to destroy every liberty under the pretence that some may be offended or in an attempt to deny nefarious actors the ability to do evil things is an impulse of hubris. In fact it is offensive to be so offended that freedom itself must be curtailed and prohibited. And for those claiming to care about children, let’s not forget that governments are currently intentionally starving and murdering scores of children. Most “smart” and “renewable” technology is made abundant in the opulent welfare states of the West because children in the poor nations recycle and mine the rare Earth so that you can constantly upgrade your toys. It’s where pollution is exported to the poorest.

Ross Ulbrycht, the inventor of the website Silkroad, remains in prison. It was alleged that assassins and drug dealers used his platform. Those interested should look into his case and the corrupt and unjust process the US government agents used to get him convicted. He invented a media platform so that others could use it freely. Freedom is illegal. The real crime was that individuals may have made money without the taxman knowing,government people not like.

Won’t somebody think of the children!”

Everything on the internet needs to be child friendly, in case a childrenperson walks into the room or needs to be so policed in case someone is doing a bad thing to a child. Under this fear all platforms can be brow beaten and bullied into complying with child killing governments. Because the monopoly on child abuse is sacred. Therefore privacy violated and censorship mandated across the board. Soon everything online will be Mr Beast and we know how much his origanisation loves children.

Any intimate message you may have sent to a lover, perhaps you have a personal conversation with a family member or need to spitball ideas among work colleagues. The devious eyes, ears and minds of government agents are magically omnipotent enough to be privy to such communications. Like human gods, the State has deemed itself and those who make it function the ultimate deity, it must know all. Remember when the lie of liberal democracy was that the government worked for the people, so much so that the people constantly lose their rights at the expense of the governments paranoia so that it can continue to serve the people. Whoever or whatever “the people” is, I am yet to know. Perhaps some day it may be AI that polices the net will serve a government master as easily as the ideological or monetarily motivated currently do. Then the AI may better know how to serve the people.

The argument is always that surveillance will be used to find terrorists and child sex traffickers. The great monsters that most can appreciate as being a threat. When the Israeli government and the company NSO developed Pegasus spyware, it was used by those governments that purchased it to predominately go after human rights activists and journalists. The pretence is always that child rapists and terrorists are the target, instead it’s those who dare to report on government corruption, abuse and murder. Those who would report on the rape and murder of children are likely to suffer from such surveillance rather than those doing the raping and murdering.

Whatever the platform or lack of platform, terrorists and child predators will lurk. Making every person suffer a regime of spying under the promise that these parties will be stopped is a lie of arrogant assumptions or blatant deception. Given that governments often dump child exploitation material into cyberspace, running their own websites in an attempt to entrap and “catch” pedos. The FBI itself became the worlds largest child porn distributor. I doubt that any of the victims in the released material gave their permission. But because a government did it, it’s not a bad thing?

The fascinating thing about government is that it’s apparently magical moral, when it blows up houses full of families, it’s righteous in doing so. It can distribute child porn, and it’s agents may view such content that an ordinary person would be jailed for doing. Remember that government lady who had thousands of dick pics that she had collected at work from her job of prying into peoples personal accounts or the cops who distribute USB’s of naked girls, taken from their phones when arrested? It’s alright cos gods.

Social media already has to succumb to the whims of various national governments allowing them to perve inside of your DM’s. To peruse your conversations and do with it as they please. When the depictions of East German secret police vans driving down streets with listening devices was viewed as vile. When dystopian fictions envisioned a world of no privacy, the State a supreme overlord of everything in your life, it was understood to be evil, to be wrong. Now, it’s 2024 and seemingly welcomed, desired or maybe just accepted. Vote One for more government!

I have nothing to hide,”mumbles the indifferent. Those who trust and believe in the status quo. The ability to pause, delay and edit messages also exist, so soon it won’t matter what you do or do not do. It will be up to those who invent and interrupt the evidence to decide. Perhaps some day nothing we witness through the screen can be trusted, or should be trusted. Either way, most will remain indifferent or care little. Those who work in government will shrug so long as they are paid and get that pension. The powerful monopoly has the monopoly on your privacy. Not just the local national government that taxes you and regulates your day to day, but those in foreign lands to. It’s a globalised spy ring.

The funny thing about those of us who think coercion is wrong, any form of it. Including when the magical government does it. One is ridiculed as being Utopian. Naive. Maybe that is true. The flipside, is that in not opposing such a thing, we inevitably end up in a dystopia. The union between well meaning intentions and the cynically apathetic who serve any master for pay make it possible. My solace is in knowing that dystopia’s are more like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil rather than anything Huxley or Orwell conjured up. You see, despite all of the putrid intrusions and murderous mercenaries, they are incompetent. While it will kill and imprison many, beneath all that paperwork and debt and hubris its a big fuckup. A clumsy, bloated, corrupt pile of shit that threatens, bribes, murders and steals. It functions because it bribes, for every true believer are scores who would do near anything for money. A jobs a job. It’s made up of people and if they are not ashamed of themselves for what they make possible, then the rest of us should be ashamed of them what they do. Few will own what they are complicit in and anyone who dare speak out, won’t even have a shadow to whisper in.

But please, won’t somebody think of the children.

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