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Zionism versus Judaism

From the start, political Zionists identified their program with Judaism the religion (despite their secularism, even atheism).

Also from the start, Jews — including the most tradition-bound Jews — vigorously disavowed that identification. They were shamed as self-hating traitors to “their people.” As a consequence, many went silent and eventually acquiesced in the creation of Israel, the self-identified “Jewish state.” Some even converted to Zionism.

So don’t blame non-Jews for being unclear about the relationship between Zionism and Judaism.

The F35 Continues NOT to Stick the Landing

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“I’m getting tired of over-promising and under-delivering,” F-35 program head Air Force Lt. Gen. Mike Schmidt said.

The newly-envisioned Block 4 would instead focus on delivering “‘must-have’ content,” Schmidt wrote, which will include an undefined “subset” of 88 capabilities originally approved as part of the Block 4 plan. “Reimagined Block 4 must consist of ‘what industry can actually deliver’ across the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP),” Schmidt wrote, and will likely consist of traits like enhanced electronic warfare and communications capabilities.

“I am as frustrated as you that I can’t nail down a specific date and be extremely clear about exactly when we will deliver,” F-35 Program Executive Officer Lt. Gen. Michael Schmidt told lawmakers during a House Armed Services tactical air and land forces subcommittee hearing Tuesday.

The “best chance” the program has is to accept jets before TR-3 is fully finished, Schmidt said. Under this “truncated” plan, the Pentagon will receive jets loaded with an interim version of the TR-3 software.

See: https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2024/04/f-35-deliveries-could-resume-july-new-jets-wont-be-combat-ready-year/39581

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Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.

At First I Hated Rian Johnson

For making the very worst Star Wars movie, Episode 8, and ruining Luke Skywalker.

But now I realize that he was just making a film about how disappointing it was to meet Mark Hamill.

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Chasing Ghosts Dispatch 006: The Carrier Reality: Dead on Arrival

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Stop the madness.

Stop deploying carriers

Stop building them.

Just stop.

I won’t be getting Christmas cards this year from the Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition

I am not alone in these notions and the late Captain Wayne Hughes did yeoman’s work on these ideas along with the terrific analyses from CDR Jeff Vandenemgel, author of “Questioning the Carrier: Opportunities in Fleet Design for the US Navy”, which should be on every amateur navalist’s bookshelf.

All of these gentlemen have great ideas although I do think they neglect the vast broken design and infrastructure process for shipbuilding in the US that would not support a wholesale re-imagining and implementation of rational fleet design in this century.

Although the Navy wants to achieve and maintain in coming years a fleet of 381 manned battle force ships, including 12 aircraft carriers, force-structure studies done by the Navy that eventually led to the 381-ship goal showed future Navy force structures that included 8 to 12 carriers, to be supplemented (in the case of the lower end of that range) by up to 6 light aircraft carriers (CVLs). The Navy does not currently operate CVLs. The Navy in recent years has experimented with the concept of using an LHA-type amphibious assault ship with an embarked group of F-35B Joint Strike Fighters as a CVL.28.

It gets worse:

The most criminal event occurred in 2019 when it was obvious there were serious problems with the Ford design that may be un-fixable. Admirals pressed Congress to fund two more Fords earlier than planned, as though they wanted to get them under construction before Congress and media learned about problems.

And stop the surface stealth tilting at the military windmill. I can assure every military on Earth that your stealth technology will be decoded and broken shortly after deployment. The ridiculous F35 willfully baked in payload limitations (both radar cross section (RCS) concerns and internal loading for the former) on a conceptual design that beggars engineering description.

Read the rest.

Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.

No Crickets for Cricket!

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The governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, has been plagued by a self-inflicted and festering wound for about a week now. An excerpt from her soon-to-be released memoir, aptly and prophetically entitled No Going Back, has transformed the governor from a Republican party darling and possible choice as Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate to a permanent political pariah, even more repugnant than some people find Trump himself to be.

Given that Noem has been vying for the position of vice commander-in-chief of the endless missions of mass homicide perpetrated by the U.S. military state, it might be difficult to imagine what sort of revelation could possibly have the power to destroy her once promising political career in so little time. No, she did not deviate from the standard neocon line on Israel now being parroted by all contenders for the Republican vice presidential position. Instead, she relayed an unsavory anecdote about her former German wirehaired pointer puppy, Cricket, whom she executed for the crime of … drum roll … being a puppy.

The story has gone viral because it is shocking not that Noem put her dog down, which many people have done before, for many different reasons, but because she explicitly claimed to “hate” the dog for being unruly and undisciplined. In other words, her execution of the young (14 months old), healthy dog had nothing to do with the standard reason for euthanizing beloved family pets: that they are ill and suffering to the point where it is in fact cruel to keep them alive. Instead, Noem terminated the dog’s life for not meeting her expectations. Because the not-so-gentle governor was the very person training the dog, the natural reaction of many people has been that Noem blamed Cricket for her own inability to tame her and in fact executed her for what she cast as the dog’s capital crime.

The ill-fated Cricket was also being trained to hunt, but every dog kept as a domestic pet must be schooled in basic matters of etiquette and propriety. Among other things, puppies, no less than babies, do not arrive at their new home potty trained. As many dog owners will attest, controlling a canine is not always an easy task, which is why professional trainers and even dog academies exist. People have often struggled with disciplining their dogs, losing furniture, pillows, carpets, and sundry random objects, and making human enemies as a result of what is regarded as their best friend’s antisocial behavior.

Eventually, having failed at DIY training, some dog owners will resort to enrolling their “problematic pets” in formal obedience classes. Other people, too busy or not wanting to be bothered with the trials and tribulations of training, send their pups off to school even before admitting them into their new home. Professionals with a wide array of experience are able to teach even the most refractory of canines to heel, exhibit appropriate behavior toward other animals and persons and, above all, to understand where it is and is not appropriate to attack, to eat, and to relieve themselves. Rather than enlisting the aid of a professional, Kristi Noem arrogantly assumed that Cricket was constitutionally untrainable because she was incapable of bending the dog to her will.

The story has gone viral because it is appalling to animal lovers, across the political spectrum, on the most basic level. How could anyone summarily execute a happy, healthy puppy, unruly though he may be? Dogs have been known to wreak much havoc in bourgeois homes, and some have also attacked and killed other animals when left unconstrained. Many people, above all, dog lovers, have chimed in on what Noem should have done and expressed disgust and even horror at what she did. Dogs are not always the right fit for a given family, but they can be put up for adoption into a more amenable home. Instead, as Noem relays the story, she shot the puppy in the face and then threw it in a gravel pit.

Now, vegans and PETA members will be quick to observe here that such callous slaughter of animals goes on all over the place, all of the time. Anyone who enjoys eating burgers, steak, bacon, chicken, lamb, etc., is complicit, at least indirectly, in the industrial massacre of animals on a massive scale. What singles out Noem’s action is not only her emotional expression of “hatred” toward a family pet, but also her belief that the animal was bad and did not deserve to exist because she could not tame it. What makes her act reprehensible to many is that, as arbitrary as this distinction may seem to animal rights advocates, Cricket had been invited to join the Noem clan as a family member, and then was destroyed for being who she was.

Even some of the most sanguinary of neocon warmongers have made their views known on the plight of Cricket. They of course have no problem with the mass slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza, because all of what has been going on is being framed as a necessary act of national self-defense in response to the crimes of Hamas on October 7, 2023. They insist, against all credible evidence, that bombing schools and hospitals and refugee camps and universities in Gaza has been morally permissible because evil people were hiding in all of those places. The innocent people who die in the crossfire of what has been designated a just war are said to be collateral damage, unfortunate but unavoidable, if the state is to survive.

In her damage-control media tour over the last few days, Noem has tried to invoke a self-defense rationalization for her decision cold-bloodedly to dispatch her family’s pet. But because she framed the story differently in her book, explicitly claiming to have hated the dog, the self-serving apology that she was acting so as to protect her children is much too little and far too late. Nor can she blame what was published on an anonymous ghostwriter or editor, for she herself narrated the audiobook and therefore spoke those disturbing words outloud. She may for a time to continue to dig the grave of her political career even deeper, but Kristi Noem has already fully exposed herself as a heartless, mendacious sociopath, who in fact would have possessed all of the requisite qualities needed to serve as the commander of the endless U.S. wars, which now she will never be.

Creative Control and Private Property

Private property isn’t about selfishness so much as it’s about creative control. Someone might want to have their own business, not because they’re greedy, but because they have a vision of how they want things to go that won’t be realized if everyone else gets a say in it.
– Chris Freiman, Professor, John Chambers College of Business and Economics at WVU

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