We don’t need a Department (sic) of Government Efficiency. (It’s a nongovernment thing.) We need a “Department” of What the Hell Should the Government Be Doing in the First Place? Efficiency implies that you know the objective of a course of action and want to avoid or minimize waste in achieving it. What is the objective of government? We can’t judge its efficiency if we don’t know its objective.
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Anti-War Blog – Osama Bin Laden won
Bin Laden Won
He won and the US warmasters are celebrating. Imagine rejoicing after a government falls to the descendants of Al-Qaeda. We don’t have to because the Washington gang are doing just that. The Islamo-Fascist Jihadis who terrorised the minds of the West for decades are again ‘moderate rebels’.
In the twenty-odd years since the 2001 attacks, the US has found and re-discovered other enemies. North Korea has always been there to hate and fear. After the attacks, it was Russia who offered bases and support. But they are the (Soviet) Bear again. The invasion of Afghanistan would not have been possible without the assistance of Iran and their Northern Alliance allies. It may as well be the 1980s again with the hate for Tehran. China has been a constant buyer of US debt and trading partner, but not even the genocidal Mao Te-Tsung was viewed as poorly as the current mob in power. Syria had joined in on the first invasion of Iraq and Libya was desperately trying to come in from the cold. Now both of those regimes are gone, replaced by terror gangs.
In fact in 2001, I worked with a delegation of Libyans who wanted to buy Australian meat. The deal collapsed due to US government preferences (rules of sanctions and all that) but the delegates spoke of free markets and Western values. I spent a week with them, driving them around Adelaide. They even had a ‘political officer’ who barely spoke but had a photo of Qaddafi on his watch face. They were human beings, perhaps more human than any Australian government officials I had the displeasure of working with while in the meat industry. There was optimism among the younger members that Libya may be a ‘friend’.
Then Al Qaeda attacked the US. Revenge, murder, ‘Oh My God’ repeated from witnesses on the ground as buildings fell into dust. Nothing short of war was expected. The Taliban in Afghanistan did everything to co-operate with the US. The US and it’s allies invaded regardless. Bin Laden was found years later in allied Pakistan. After hundreds of thousands dead, the further ruination of the region. Twenty years later, the Taliban won. They had returned to power.
The US has been bombing Iraq since 1991, the dictator Saddam Hussein was the ‘next Hitler’ of Next Hitlers, even worse that Milosevic and Ho Chi Minh . His regime was despised. With no links to Al Qaeda. A Weapons of Mass Destruction angle was used, though if Iraq had such weapons then Hussein would still be in power, perhaps replaced by one of his loony sons. Instead, the Coalition of the Willing invaded and carnage and mass death befell the region. The belief that Iraqi oil would pay for the war was a delusion, besides can oil money bring back hundreds of thousands of lives?
Then in 2011 the Arab Spring occurred which led to the toppling of dictators and juntas through the region, some of the uprisings were supported by the West. Libya for example. Which led to a civil war and destruction that lingers on. The Syrian civil war also erupted, the violence crossing into Iraq. The US supporting former enemies, as it tends to do, in order to upset the balance of power. The Syrian government headed by Assad was pariah, so terror factions were ‘good’. Then came ISIS, the worse of the worse of all evil Islamic terror groups. There existence justified more war and interventions. Then they blended away for a time. The West fought ISIS, sort of and Assad’s regimes. Other factions fought too. It was a real mess.
Yemen suffered a genocide, a starvation war waged by the wealthy Gulf states against the poorest nation in the region. Enabled and supported by the Western nations, thousands died. The Chinese brokered a deal once it turned out that the Yemeni resistance were capable of fighting their own ‘war of the flea’ against the mighty Saudi led coalition. A coalition that had blown up school buses and had roaming ‘butcher trucks’ where men were abducted and hacked to pieces by the special forces of the allied governments. The terrorists are always on the other side, you see. Yemen still fights on, even recently taking on Israel and the US.
Russia invades Ukraine, China and Taiwan squabble, North Korea exists and Israel expands it’s territories further into Palestine and Lebanon. The US and it’s allies have it’s share of enemies. It hasn’t really won a war in a very long time. The national debt is frightening in all of the allied nations, the populations meander between addiction to ‘legal’ and illegal drugs while mental health has become both the grift that keeps on giving and a very real crisis for those who suffer. And it now seems that those burn after 2000 are less healthy than previous generations. The outsiders often claimed the West to be ‘sick’, it seems to be now in more ways than one.
The imperial amnesia is something only experienced by those nations constantly waging war, with the inability to recall history, some in the populace and the rulers with a straight face spread lies and myths without any shame or self-awareness. History is dear to many of those outside the West, it’s known and understood because it is felt. That is why even extremists are adored and followed, they are reactions to the entitled actions of Western nations and their proxies. The CIA calls it Blowback. Osama Bin Laden and men like him are blowback to foreign policies going back into the 1980s and beyond.
ISIS spoke about Sykes-Picot, to their enemies in the West those two names are forgotten. When Zionists and Arab leaders mention Balfour, the benefactors of such imperialism shrug with blank minds. History for those in the West only started in September, 2001 or October, 2023. Anything before did not matter, they were not paying attention, they didn’t need to. Because the history beyond those dates did not impact, was not visually alluring. History is dead in the West.
Osama Bin Laden understood that, he and his band of killers could not defeat the empire head on. They were too few. But the reaction would bring thousands to their cause. With every dead child, murdered woman, boot on the ground, farmers and bakers would become warriors. The invaders and their proxies repelled. The US and it’s allies look to General Petraeus and proclaim his doctrine as genius, though he and his forces were defeated by those who do not have the luxury of war college or billions of dollars. They lost to those who had nothing to lose, who hated for ideological or personal reasons and to individuals who adapted. The US and it’s allies can sustain it’s hubris and lust for war because despite defeat, it’s never seemingly lost.
There is no occupation force, just much of the same. Though the defeat is eating inwards. Slowly, like the black fumes of burn pits, consuming the inside of empire. The allied nations are swollen with dependency, governments are so big that individuals and innovation are smothered, soon it will be impossible to wage wars let alone function. After all who will actually fight them? Bin Laden did not cause this, it’s a self inflicted infection but his war helped to spur it along.
Assad’s regime has fallen. The victors are terrorist. The terrorists who kicked off this ‘war on terror’. They are now ‘moderate rebels’ or whatever the current version is, ‘reformed insurgents’, ‘non-binary guerillas’ or ‘transcombatants’. Either way the government, that most people love, seems to love them. And already we see footage of torture and killings, anyone who is ideologically not in line with the new rulers must flee or likely die. Then again we are able to witness a genocide in Palestine and another Israeli attempt to destroy Lebanon. To discuss the murder of children is ‘antisemetic’.
The deranged son of a bitch did it. He won. That goofy looking rich kid Jihadist adventurer was victorious. That doesn’t mean the war is over. It’s never over. The wars will always go on. Those over there they know it too, they suffer it. In the West it may just be an inconvenience felt when prices go up or maybe it will come to our shores. The horrendous cycles of revenge, the next unwritten chapters of Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation. In this distorted age, perhaps if he was still alive, Osama Bin Laden would be a US ally again.
We Can’t Consume Our Way to Prosperity
Once upon a time, John Stuart Mill could write these words truthfully (“Of the Influence of Consumption on Production,” 1844):
It is no longer supposed that you benefit the producer by taking his money, provided you give it to him again in exchange for his goods.
He was talking, of course, about government tax-transfer programs intended to stimulate employment by subsidizing consumption. We cannot say this today.
Pearl Harbor: Not What You May Think it Was
I have always had my doubts but Jane Shaw brings the receipts.
RedDR needed the war because his communist takeover of America was failing bigly and a war empowered government like nothing else.
A decade ago I began to research the history of the Pearl Harbor attack. I had happened upon the book Infamy by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, John Toland, which raised disturbing questions about foreknowledge of the attack. [2] This was Toland’s third book about World War II. His prize-winning Rising Sun had treated the attack as a dastardly Japanese act; the second revealed poor communication between Washington, D.C., and Hawaii; and Infamy blamed the U.S. president and his high-level advisors for allowing the attack to go forward.
In Liberty magazine in 2010 (you can read the article on p. 39 of the October issue in Liberty Unbound ) I reviewed The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable, a 2007 book by George Victor. [3] And I took the opportunity to discuss the long-standing controversy over the question, Did President Roosevelt and/or his advisors know about the potential attack and could they have taken action to prevent it?
My conclusion was, and remains, that FDR knew the Japanese were about to attack, as did his chief of staff, George Marshall, and they almost certainly knew the target would be Pearl Harbor. This is heresy to most people. In 2001, Robert Bartley, the esteemed editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, called the possibility that the president would conceal such information “wildly implausible; what commander would sacrifice most of a fleet to open a two-front war?” [4]
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
Anyone Can Be a Capitalist, part 2
“It might be argued that only the ‘rich’ can afford to be capitalists, i.e., those who have a greater amount of money stock. This argument has superficial plausibility, since … for any given individual and a given time-preference schedule, a greater money stock will lead to a greater supply of savings, and a lesser money stock to a lesser supply of savings…. We cannot, however, assume that a man with (post-income) assets of 10,000 ounces of gold will necessarily save more than a man with 100 ounces of gold. We cannot compare time preferences interpersonally, any more than we can formulate interpersonal laws for any other type of utilities. What we can assert as an economic law for one person we cannot assert in comparing two or more persons. Each person has his own time-preference schedule, apart from the specific size of his monetary stock. Each person’s time-preference schedule, as with any other element in his value scale, is entirely of his own making. All of us have heard of the proverbially thrifty French peasant, compared with the rich playboy who is always running into debt. The common-sense observation that it is generally the rich who save more may be an interesting historical judgment, but it furnishes us with no scientific economic law whatever, and the purpose of economic science is to furnish us with such laws. As long as a person has any money at all, and he must have some money if he participates in the market society to any extent, he can be a capitalist.
—Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State
Anyone Can Be a Capitalist, part 1
“[A]ny man can be a capitalist if only he wants to be. He can derive his funds solely from the fruits of previous capitalist investment or from past ‘hoarded’ cash balances or solely from his income as a laborer or a landowner. He can, of course, derive his funds from several of these sources. The only thing that stops a man from being a capitalist is his own high time-preference scale, in other words, his stronger desire to consume goods in the present. Marxists and others who postulate a rigid stratification—a virtual caste structure in society—are in grave error. The same person can be at once a laborer, a landowner, and a capitalist, in the same period of time.”
—Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State
Billion Dollar Disasters Continue to Steam Ahead
Word.
The Zumwalt-class destroyer will never be the battleship of the twenty-first century. It’s the U.S. Navy’s version of the Russian Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier.
Yet another multi-billion dollar failure.
Yet, the instant that the Zumwalt-class appears to conduct strikes against enemy ground targets, they can be visually spotted by an enemy scout wielding binoculars. The reduced radar cross-section provides little protection for the warship when operating within the visual range of the enemy.
What’s more, the moment the Zumwalt fired its payload its stealth would be gone, as the enemy would quickly discern that the Zumwalt was a destroyer rather than some fishing boat off their coast.
So, even the vaunted stealth capabilities of these boats are not that great.
And what about the “impressive” weapons systems of these boats? Well, they’re not impressive. Originally, Zumwalt’s Advanced Gun System (AGS) was trumpeted as the great weapon system of its time. It was deemed a total failure. That’s because the specialized 155 mm rounds designed for these systems, the Long Range Land Attack Projectile (LRLAP), became too expensive to mass produce.
So, the Pentagon reduced the ammunition order, meaning that there was an artificial limit to how many rounds each ship would have in combat. That made the guns unusable.
This led to the calls by the Navy to embrace the Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) hypersonic weapons platform. Launched from Multiple All-Up Round Canisters (MACs), each MAC holds three CPS missiles. According to their specifications, the CPS is a boost-glide missile with a kinetic-energy warhead that can travel upwards of Mach 5 (3,800 miles per hour).
Here’s the problem: the CPS is in no way ready for showtime. Given the limitations of the Navy’s budget under current conditions, it is unlikely that the Navy will be able to develop these proposed weapons promptly.
So, here again, the Zumwalt-class destroyers are failing to deliver.
Zumwalt-Class: Don’t You Dare Call This Destroyer a Battleship
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
Martial Law in South Korea & Ukraine’s No-Fly Zone: New Episode of the Kyle Anzalone Show
Are we witnessing the dawn of a new geopolitical crisis in Asia? As South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol declares martial law over perceived threats from the North, the region teeters on the edge of upheaval. This episode of the Kyle Angelo show dives into the fallout from this dramatic move, analyzing its impact on South Korea’s political landscape. We explore Yoon’s strategic gambit against a backdrop of declining popularity and a strengthening opposition, while weighing the implications of a possible Trump return and its effect on U.S.-North Korea diplomacy.
The storm clouds over Ukraine are no less ominous, as Keith Kellogg shares his contentious perspectives on the U.S. and NATO’s role in the ongoing conflict. Kellogg advocates for a UN-enforced no-fly zone, despite the perilous risk of sparking a broader war. We unpack his vision for supporting Ukraine with advanced weaponry while keeping American boots out of the fray, and how this aligns with his broader strategy to focus on China. The episode sheds light on the intricate geopolitical chess game, where every move could tip the balance of power.
Tracing the evolution of U.S. policy on Ukraine, we contrast the varied approaches of Obama, Trump, and Biden. From non-lethal aid to aggressive sanctions, we critique these policies and their impact on the conflict’s trajectory. The recent decision by the West to arm Ukraine with long-range missiles marks a significant escalation, and we scrutinize the incoming Trump administration’s apparent backing of this aggressive stance. This episode promises a gripping examination of the escalating conflict and its broader implications for global security, touching on the strategic roles of North Korea, Iran, and China.
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