This is how some people think: Business has long used the government to gain benefits it could not get in the marketplace. I have the cure for that: Abolish the market and expand the government to encompass all of society.
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Another Aspect of the Eternal Intelligence Failure in the West
Had a brain zephyr.
I know this because I am on the spectrum.
The intelligence community (IC) hires high IQ but neuro-divergent individuals who have difficulty with tone and context and that colors reporting, assessments and final analyses.
Couple that with group-think and an institutional refusal to thoroughly “red team” all analysis and to punish moral courage and you get the seamless perfect storm of disastrous decision-making informed by flawed intelligence products.
I suspect this is a proximate cause to the problem throughout the IC in the West getting so much wrong so much of the time.
Forever.
The state is the apex producer of chaos avalanches.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.
What Is Easy and What Is Not Easy
It is easy to oppose Israel’s massacre in the Gaza Strip. Just watch a few horrifying videos. What is not easy is understanding the price system, its prerequisites — private property and free exchange — and its benefits for mankind, including civil peace.
Firing Blanks: The Pentagon as a Fiscal Disaster Factory
I have mentioned previously that the introduction of all the latest and greatest western weapons in the inventory given to the Ukraine would have some very deleterious effects in the future. One was permitting possible future antagonists to observe and and take detailed notes on the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) and experiment with prospective or actual countermeasures to neutralize or destroy these weapons systems and platforms. The other concerns would be allowing the first near-peer/peer martial contest to use this to shape and refine future strategic objectives. The Russians are certainly doing their homework and actively modifying and improving their means of waging war.
Performance is predictably abysmal for so many of these Western systems. The corporate/access media seems to finally be catching on that the weapons programs are not very effective.
The Biden administration has committed more than $50 billion in military aid to Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022, according to a Pentagon fact sheet. U.S. assistance has proven vital in helping Ukraine fend off Russia’s advances and mount counteroffensives, but some of the weapons have failed to have the desired impact as Russia’s military has adapted, according to media reports and experts.
Here are some highlights from the article:
If only the diversity enthusiasm incentivized opposing viewpoints and genuine intellectual differences.
Future historians will have a tremendous cottage industry trying to tease out how the world’s most expensive military paper tiger not only convinced the bill-payers to keep funding these disasters but the cognitive strategic deficit disorder that informed the entire fallacious enterprise managed to spend tens of trillions of dollars for a non-nuclear military apparatus that had a picture perfect track record of consistent failure since 1945.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.
Can’t We All Get Along?
Pre-Zionism and pre-Israel, Arab-Muslims, Arab-Christians, and Arab-Jews (yes!) got along in many places as neighbors and friends. Compare that to Europe. Arab and Jewish nationalism messed it up. See Avi Shlaims’s Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew.
Lying Politicians Gonna Lyingly Politick
House Speaker Mike Johnson speaking on Holocaust Remembrance Day:
We remember what happened then [in Nazi Germany], and today, we are witnessing American universities quickly become hostile places for Jewish students and faculty.
The very campuses which were once the envy of the international academy have succumbed to an antisemitic virus. Students who were known for producing academic papers, are now known for stabbing Jewish peers in the eyes with Palestinian flags.
Faculty who once produced cutting-edge research are linking arms with pro-Hamas protestors calling for a “global intifada.”
Administrators who were once lauded by their peers for leadership are barring Jewish faculty and choosing not to protect their Jewish students. Jewish students are physically threatened when they walk on campus, as their peers hold posters repeating the Nazi propaganda and the program: the final solution.
Now is a time for moral clarity – we must put an end to this madness.
The Purpose of the Antisemitism Awareness Act
The point of the House-passed (and misnamed) Antisemitism Awareness Act is not to empower the Education Department to sue and defund colleges under civil rights law. It is to make lawsuits unnecessary by chilling expression.
The Prussian Culture of Disobedience
“The German and Prussian officer corps are the officer corps with the greatest culture of disobedience–with maybe the exception of the French. The stories and events that kept alive the virtue requiring an officer–even in war–to disobey an order “when justified by honor and circumstances” were corporate cultural knowledge within the Prussian and German officer corps and it is therefore important to recount them here.”
– Jörg Muth, CommandCulture
Contrary to popular opinion, the German Army in both world wars was not an army of automatons but a thinking and reactive combat force at the tactical and operational level unmatched in efficacy and superiority.
I recommend this splendid essay.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.
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