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Radicalism for the Young – Anti-War Blog
Radicalism is for the youth, but drips away over time. Generation X watched their hippy parents become corporate and government stooges, gorged on real estate and careerism. The Pump up the Volume teenagers became parents, lost the radicalism to care about the world, feeling it wane away as the mortgage swelled. Many of the youth today are finding an outrage over a genocide that their parents may not care about. On social media exists keyholes into other parts of the world that legacy media omits. The tragedies of war that everyone knows exist, just the radicals care about has spurred an energy among the young. They care and share about it, upset, outraged, but is that it?
For now the war masters have lost the minds of the youth. The generation that would make up the fodder are mostly wary and sceptical of power. They are yet to become employed in the government and corporate sectors, prohibited from ‘owning’ their own homes so many of them can only watch on and witness what their rulers and elders do and in some way support. Headless children, mass starvation, colonialism, viscous imperialism. The young, are kinda pissed off about it. But what about being pissed off? Is that all?
The spirit of 1968 beats inside of the hearts of those too young to know or have been taught the real history of the World. Their elders found jobs in the pages of 1984, secure in that niche of comfort and luxury that only debt can bring. There may be no Woodstock, Democratic national convention protests, invasion of Prague or Tet offensive to invoke the youths zeitgeist but there is that same spirit. It simmers beneath the surface lost inside the screens pressed into faces, instincts for justice seek it out, but how?
Maybe it’s more in common with 1989, the destruction of the Iron Curtain, the feared Berlin Wall beaten down by the people. The paid professional mercenaries of government told to stand down, their limp rifles and cold machine guns no longer trained on their fellow citizens. Instead hammers, and fists beat down the walls from both sides. Suddenly the wall seemed pathetic, arbitrary, the state itself powerless. Soon too the great Soviet Union fell, the great bear once feared snuffed out beneath its own fur. It’s claws suddenly soft, weakened by the very economic ideology that experts boasted about.
Now, as inflation soars, debt all too common and decades of wars all fought in the name of abstracts whether against terrorism, drugs or for vengeance itself. The outcome is misery, rivers of blood gush into the oceans of destruction. And afterwards, what for? Why? Was it ever worth it? Those who benefit always wanting more and the apathetic, the parents and elders they shrug their shoulders with indifference. They have jobs, careers, so the wars don’t matter to them. That’s for the wacky radicals to care about. More important things fill their day to day.
But, for a moment many of the young are upset. Tired of it. Angry? Or disgusted? Either way the state that needs them to fill their universities, serve them and to become obedient tax-debt cattle don’t have control of their minds. In time that may change, attention spans being so poor and all. But right now, they are upset by what they see and in this moment of precious truth the Wizard’s cloak has fallen and we can see his withered wand. There is no magic, no super power just human fragility that is so perverted by its own arrogance, war, war and war is the only impulse. And when they wage war, its always the innocent who suffer. They fill uniforms, waste them, then grow more bodies to fit into the uniform. The babies over there, they will always be bludgeoned to death.
What will happen with this spirit? We shall see but to be radical is precious. The tragedy is that there will always be injustice to rebel against and that most feel it immature to remain radical. They lose interest either through apathy or as mentioned above more important things.
Rejoice the young. Morality does not come from law. Justice never from the state. Peace comes from the people, the people make peace. Not governments, they only tire from their own futile destruction, they yield only once they have expended their ability to wage war. Peace is made when the state has spent too much of your blood, your capital. And as we see, again, the United Nations and every sacred institution that rationalises law and government are incapable of stopping the genocide. Not even Covid took this many children’s lives in such a short amount of time. Remember how government saw it fit to swell and grow and the guise of such benevolence. Now, it swells to wage war, prepare for future ones and to support allies in genocide. They will run out of babies long before the ammunition runs out. Is it really radical to find that disgusting? Apparently so. Never grow up to the point where you accept such a thing. Stay radical, don’t become pathetic, too many babies have been murdered already.
May, 2024
Economics in One Other Lesson
“The number one principle of economics…: the secret of mass consumption is mass production…. What about distribution? Here’s what we know from all of human history, all of economic history. Any large increase in production is widely shared. There’s no such thing as a large increase in production that only benefits a small fraction of the population. The Industrial Revolution did not just benefit factory owners. The internet did not just benefit computer programmers. Vaccines do not just benefit pharmaceutical companies…. You really should not just focus on distribution; [you should] focus on production.” —Bryan Caplan
I will presumptuously comment that Caplan uses the word distribution in the statistical sense and not in any overall active sense. In a market economy, no one distributes income. The income configuration in a market economy is a snapshot result of countless voluntary exchanges, agreements, and contracts. Because this is so, we should not say that governments try to redistribute income. Rather, we should say they try to distribute it. That is, they try to move from a society of persuasion and consent — freedom — to a society of command and force — serfdom.
Drone Detection Balloon Destroyed by Drone
Unpossible!
230 million dollars for a balloon.
Then the vaunted IDF says this:
“Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, Israel’s military spokesman, confirmed that a Hezbollah drone had scored a direct hit on Sky Dew but added there were no casualties and that it “had no impact to the IDF’s aerial situational awareness capability in the area”.
If it had no impact, why use the 230 million dollar balloon?
The aerostat was destroyed by a drone it was lofted to protect against.
Israel has suffered a substantial setback to its surveillance capabilities after a Hezbollah drone struck a $230 million advanced radar detection airship in its deepest attack into the country to date.
Israel’s military has confirmed that the Sky Dew blimp, which can spot targets up to 250km away, had been damaged in an attack by a kamikaze drone. Local reports suggest the blimp was shot down.
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But that capability has either been severely damaged or destroyed after Hezbollah launched a one-way attack drone that flew 33km undetected into Israeli airspace and struck the balloon close to the town of Tiberias.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.
My Speech Again Nominating Angela McArdle for Natl. LP Chair
The Zumwalt: Hit or Miss? Mostly Miss
The corporate/access media press is gushing about removing the 155 mm Advanced Gun System (AGS) to replace it with the Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) missile on the ugly Zumwalt-class ship in the US Navy. The AGS was designed in the 1990s to increase the ability of ship to conduct shore bombardment but too little too late with technology that (of course) didn’t prove out.
So Lockheed Systems looked at rocket assisted guided rounds, and came up with the Long Range Land Attack Projectile (LRLAP). Nor would it meet US Navy Insensitive Munitions requirements (LRLAP having fairly strict requirements in regards to shells resting in hot gun barrels for hours). Cancelled in November 2016.
So the AGS was something of an interim replacement for the cancelled LRLAP.
The LRLAP story is a snapshot of the martial malpractice that has been a hallmark of American military thinking for half a century.
Check out this snapshot I drew from the 2016 budget request (those figures are in millions):
And, of course, the AGS gun has a different chamber and rifling than all other US military 155mm guns in the inventory. Bottom line is the form factor limitation for long range 155mm shells would trade range for reduced actual munitions payload. It appears, once again, ,no one was paying attention to the unintended consequences of using technology to increase effectiveness and failing on all counts.
So they parked the AGS on the three hulls of the silly Zumwalt. Now they’re removing them for the newest pipe-dream destined for oblivion, the CPS missile.
And the Zumwalt may be one of the ugliest ships in the entire global inventory of surface craft.
AGS and LRLAP problems are primarily due to high-technical risk leading to high R&D costs, combined with truncated programs loading those R&D costs over an ever-smaller number of platforms, further increasing costs, rather than having them spread over a large production of ships.
CPS formerly called Prompt Global Strike (PGS), is a United States military effort to develop a system that can deliver a precision-guided conventional weapon strike anywhere in the world within one hour, in a similar manner to a nuclear ICBM first started in 2.
The rosy article below is reflective of the nature of the defense press.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.