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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

israel blimp

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.

***

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.

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The Zumwalt: Hit or Miss? Mostly Miss

zumwalt

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.

A version of the LRLAP was being designed to be used in the 127mm (5in) guns which were the ubiquitous round in the surface navy. This was due to rising costs resulting from the trimming of the Zumwalt-class destroyer fleet to from 35(?) to just three ships, raising individual shell cost to $800,000-$1 million, about as much as the Tomahawk cruise missile. About 90 rounds had been secured for testing aboard the three hulls, but a full buy of about 2,000 planned rounds would be about $1.8-$2 billion. The LRLAP is dead.

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):screenshot 2024 05 28 at 07 52 24 justification book panmc 1 book.pdf

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.

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Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.

The innocent dead of Rafah, have you no shame?

Footage from the Israeli Military assault on Rafah has again revealed the gruesome reality of war. A reality that tends to be omitted by the censors of the legitimate media, footage of headless babies. Their young bodies, limp, held by rescuers and loved ones in one final desperate embrace. We usually see this sort of evidence of war when it is conducted by a pariah power or is spun in such a way that it’s rare. The natural collateral consequence of warfare. Civilised nations must wage wars, murder the innocent to accomplish policy or achieve goals, it’s the done thing.

Their Headless babies are statistics, ‘our’ babies are sacred.

The people of Palestine have no where to go, they were instructed to flee to Rafah. A refuge. Now the IDF murders them. The death and plunder secondary to the greater ambition of manifest destiny. The world has suffered it before, a chosen people, the most civilised, the shining light on the hill all exercised such violence to accomplish their aims. It is how civilisation purifies the planet from those deemed as being ‘savages’.

The 21st century may allow us the keyhole to witness such ‘progress’, smart phones make anyone a journalist, decentralised media outlets who are not servants of advertisers or national governments and the victims themselves share the reality. If we wish to learn about the world around us we can see the indignity and mass murder. Dig deep enough you can see it happening in the Congo and Western Papua as well. Colonialism, imperialism, whatever the outsiders wish to call it. It’s simply policy. This is government, beneath the facade of civilisation, headless babies.

Chances are you live in a nation state that was built over the bones of the conquered, how you live today is because frontiers ran red with the blood of the ‘savages’. Conquest led to civilisation, today is yesterdays dream. The dead, no longer matter. Later this century at the present rate of murderous progress, Gaza and the West Bank may become what the Lebanon once was, a Paris of the Middle East. Real Estate. The wealthy and important enjoying spectacular views above the long forgotten grave of a headless baby.

Remember the little refugee girl in her soaked red dress, face down on a European beach. The Mediterranean waves washing over her little corpse, beneath the same sea countless others who drowned as the fled war and conditions caused not by them. Seeking a place of peace, chasing a land where they were told freedom soared. Her body has long been lost to the digital voyeurs, for a moment their was the confused realisation that a migrant is a human being, a child even. Though because of where she was born, perhaps her skin tone, language, religion she was always ‘inferior’. Unwanted. To be lost in limbo. A Biafran or dare I say, Palestinian.

The children in Rafah are not in limbo, they are living through a real hell. The biggest government in history sends the money and ammunition, provides weapon systems and watches on while its great ally conducts itself in a familiar manner. Pushing outwards, expanding, conquering the ‘breathing room’, exercising the manifest destiny of its people. To conquer then settle. That is how the civilised do it. If the entire executive branch of the Israeli government were imprisoned for war crimes, it would never punish the criminals. They are the ones shooting, dropping bombs, operating drones, blocking aid convoys, torturing children, no politician among them, just human beings granted the magical right to do terrible things through the writ of government power.

The little child, head ripped from an innocent body is the reality of policy. The brutal truth of collectivism, statism. The ultimate culmination of taxation, regulation, law, professionals working inside a monopoly under the pretence of measured power. It’s easy to dismiss it as just Zionism, a Middle Eastern problem. Though we are witnessing exceptional cruelty for the modern world by the Israeli government, it’s what South East Asia once endured when dropping millions of bombs kept dominoes still standing or when the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan in order to stop it from descending into uncontrollable chaos. Afghanistan has not recovered since and thousands continue to die from the bombs and mines still hidden in the jungles of Asia. The legacy of great powers, where children born generations after continue to lose limbs.

Chances are your government has blown children to pieces for you. You just ignore it, the money, it’s so good. The status quo is maybe kind to you. You claim to be powerless, despite the religion of democracy and the bullshit, this is the reality. Yet, you want government to do the things you want it to do, you push for it, maybe even earn a living from it. National Socialists had welfare policies as well and the Bolsheviks claimed to be benevolent, dead innocent is always the outcome of policy. That’s why you need armed agents to FORCE others to comply. You may proudly wear ACAB yet every single policy you desire requires cops even a conquering military.

Today it’s Palestine, a place of mostly children. The Congo suffers too so that Western hegemony secures the precious resources. Over a century ago, the Congolese were enslaved, hacked to pieces and millions murdered so that Europe had rubber for bicycles. Civilisation. Today smart devices, EV’s and tech is hungry for the plunder beneath African dirt. Western nations boast saving the planet but outsourcing the pollution and suffering to the poorest nations, turn a blind eye to children dying from the poison that powers the ‘renewable’ energy. Beneath the green pretentiousness runs the blood of those who burn coal in the cold to live because the modern colonialism is powered by slogans. For the Western Papuan’s an aggressive Indonesian government, as it has done for decades rules with venom, punishing the people for their culture and for potential resources. Indonesia has big friends, the Western Papuans are a forgotten people. To be ruled and eliminated, progress?

Just another headless child. The voyeurs are all out of “Oh, dears.”

Things happen in war…” Always to them though, always their babies, always their children.

I wonder if shame exists any more, the privileged in the West are too medicated to know what it feels like.

Dead children doesn’t make them depressed, just indifferent.

May, 2024

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