COVID19 Factors We Should Consider/Current Events

[Mark Rippetoe]

This is the Government that is going to win WWIII? In Red Sea, US Navy paying the price of shipbuilding failures | Responsible Statecraft

The Navy is struggling to meet some of its operational requirements in part because it simply doesn’t have all the ships it expected. The current threat to navigation in the Red Sea is precisely the scenario for which the Navy invested so much time and resources building the Littoral Combat Ships. The LCS program was sold to the American people as a “networked, agile, stealthy surface combatant capable of defeating anti-access and asymmetric threats in the littorals.”

The Houthi rebels launching missiles and drones from shore and hijacking commercial shipping in the confined waters of the Red Sea meets the textbook definition of an asymmetric threat in a littoral region. Yet the “little crappy ships,” as they have come to be known, are nowhere to be seen inside the Red Sea. Rather, the Navy has to keep a carrier strike group composed of Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers on station longer than anticipated in an attempt to keep an important maritime choke point open.

The Littoral Combat Ship is one of two major shipbuilding failures from the past 20 years. The other is the Zumwalt-class destroyer. Both programs began in earnest in the years after 9/11 and almost immediately ran into trouble. The Zumwalt program saw massive cost growth which forced Navy leaders to slash the planned fleet size from the originally planned 32 to 7 and finally to the three which were actually built. These three ships cost nearly $8 billion each while failing to deliver promised combat capabilities.

The Littoral Combat Ship program cost $28 billion to build a fleet of 35 ships. According to the Government Accountability Office, the Navy expects to pay more than $60 billion to operate the fleet for its expected 25-year lifespan. Like the Zumwalt, the LCS program’s combat functionality is far less than expected. The ships were designed to be modular with crews swapping out mission systems in port for different missions. Engineers could never get the mission modules to work properly, so the scheme was abandoned.

The LCS program does excel in spectacular breakdowns. The USS Milwaukee famously broke down shortly after it had been commissioned and had to be towed into a Virginia port while its crew attempted to sail the ship to its intended San Diego home for the first time. Other ships suffered from saltwater corrosion, cracked hulls, and broken-down water jets. The Freedom-class variant LCS had trouble with the combining gear linking its diesel engine with the ship’s turbines. The problems grew so bad that Navy leaders essentially threw up their hands and began retiring ships decades before they should have smelled mothballs. The Navy decommissioned the USS Sioux City after a single deployment and less than five years after the ship entered service.

[David A. Rowe]

This is the Government that is going to win WWIII? In Red Sea, US Navy paying the price of shipbuilding failures | Responsible Statecraft

And I can tell you this from personal experience:

These program failures almost never stem from a failure or lack of science, engineering or technology. It's a combination of insanely bloated oversight requirements, bureaucratic and diluted program management, and an absolute failure of integration of many, many systems required to pull off that much technological innovation in one platform. It's not done under one roof anymore. Many times not even for the same system, and it typically involves several agencies and commands.

There are still competent, good people in the military and DoD. They're just buried under a pile of BS.

A palate cleanser: from a different era.
https://youtu.be/cu9Mi0ury38?si=SRKiuwdVCUiiwjd_

[anticausal]

Clown World’s Best Intellectuals are Retarded - Vox Day

Don’t get me wrong. I LIKE Victor Davis Hanson. A lot. I own several of his books. I genuinely admire his work. But there is no way to escape the obvious. At the end of the day, VDH is totally fucking retarded about the decline and fall of a West that has already been infiltrated, subverted, subjugated, and functionally disarmed by the global satanists:

VDH: I don’t think the average American understands that the Chinese are producing four ships per year to our one ship. Or that if you took any of our $15 billion carriers and you put them in the straits between Taiwan and China, they wouldn’t last more than an hour given the Chinese have developed missile batteries where they could launch 5,000 or 6,000 small missiles that would go about 6 inches above the water and hit the waterline at night. And you couldn’t stop that.

They are building nuclear weapons at a phenomenal rate. They’re working on anti-missile defense. They’re back up to probably 250,000 students in the United States; if 1 percent are engaged in espionage—and the FBI says it’s more than that—you’ve got thousands of people who are appropriating technology.

I don’t think anybody understands that it’s going to take us six years to replenish Javelin stocks and maybe we can’t. North Korea is producing more 155-mm shells than we are. At least they sent 2 million of them to the Russians.

So we are not armed, and yet, our strategic responsibilities, our strategic confidence, our arrogance has not lessened commensurately with our reduced defense capacity.

We’re 40,000 recruits short now in the military—never happened before. And when you analyze who is not joining the military, it’s not blacks, it’s not Latinos, it’s not gays, it’s not women, it’s not trans people, all of those numbers are the same … the largest group are white males from the lower and middle classes whose families fought in Vietnam, first Gulf War, Afghanistan, but this third and fourth generation are not joining up.

And unfortunately, for the military, if you look at the casualty or the fatality rates in Afghanistan and Iraq, that demographic dies at twice their demographics—72 percent to 74 percent of all the dead in Afghanistan, in Iraq are white males from the middle and lower classes.

And yet, this is the very demographic that [retired Gen.] Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and [Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin, in testimonies, have suggested suffer from white rage or white privilege. And the Pentagon was investigating just those kind of slanders about that demographic, and they found, of course, in December, they quietly issued a report, there was no cabal of white supremacists.

But the point is, you can’t really have a successful military when you’re 40,000 recruits short in just a year.

Mr. Bluey: What do you suggest that societies today, including the United States, learn from those historical examples you gave us earlier in the interview to maybe mitigate some of the risks that we might find ourselves in in the future?

VDH: I would not put much confidence in international bodies or even in so-called close allies. The Spartans came all the way up to the Thebans and they heard the Macedonians, they turned right back. On the last day of the existence of Constantinople, they were looking out at the walls at the Hellespont thinking that Venetian galleys en masse would come up and save them.

So … I support NATO.

NATO? NATO is supposed to be the answer to the complete destruction of industrial capacity across the post-Christian West? That’s not a viable strategic analysis by a military historian, that’s Salvador Dali multiplied by Jackson Pollock on mushrooms.

I’ll definitely read his new book. It appears to be ominously relevant, particularly in light of VDH’s own prescriptions.

From another part of the VDH interview:

And when you see the same denial, people get very angry when you mention Putin’s threats, they say: “Oh, he’s just bluster. He would never do that.” And, “Kim Jong Un would never do that.” And, “I’m not sure that’s true.” History says that the odds are they won’t, but it’s happened and there’s no second chances when that happens.

I think the biggest problem with guys like VDH is that they are absolutely married to the idea that the post WWII order was something wonderful and good. It is beyond dispute in their minds. They look with vigilant skepticism at bluster from foreign leaders, but can't bare to honestly examine the many decades long, systemic anti-white/anti-European, and arguably genocidal posturing of the Western elite since the end of WWII. They only see something "gone wrong" recently, as if it wasn't baked into the cake from the start. It simply can't be thought about or analyzed because it would require one to look at the ethnic division between the Jewish elite (the winners) and native European elite (the losers) in the Western post-war order. Not being "Hitler!" is obviously way more important to these guys than the truth, and that is why they fail so miserably in their analysis of this front.

I wrote a few months ago:

Hanson does better than most, but he still simply trusts the narrative on a lot of things. He was also horribly wrong on the Iraq war, so he's clearly not as astute as someone like Pat Buchanan.

Call me crazy, but it seems to me like there might be more to learn from the guys who were right than the guys who were wrong:

Why the Paleos Were Right About Iraq - Twenty years after the Iraq invasion: The paleocons were right about the Iraq War because they were right about liberalism.

And what do they always call the guys like Pat Buchannan, who get most things right while the Clowns get it all wrong? Why, antisemite, of course.

[Mark Rippetoe]

Another reason to reconsider going to college: Lancaster University votes to ban meat and dairy at outlets - FarmingUK News

And this just in: https://x.com/UltraDane/status/1791556173721932117

Paul Pelosi's man-whore gets 30 years, the black rapist of multiple children ages 4 - 9 gets 6 months.

Now that you understand how the criminal justice system works, how do you feel about Mr. Trump's involvement with the NY Court system?

[Subby]

Clown World’s Best Intellectuals are Retarded - Vox Day


From another part of the VDH interview:



I think the biggest problem with guys like VDH is that they are absolutely married to the idea that the post WWII order was something wonderful and good. It is beyond dispute in their minds. They look with vigilant skepticism at bluster from foreign leaders, but can't bare to honestly examine the many decades long, systemic anti-white/anti-European, and arguably genocidal posturing of the Western elite since the end of WWII. They only see something "gone wrong" recently, as if it wasn't baked into the cake from the start. It simply can't be thought about or analyzed because it would require one to look at the ethnic division between the Jewish elite (the winners) and native European elite (the losers) in the Western post-war order. Not being "Hitler!" is obviously way more important to these guys than the truth, and that is why they fail so miserably in their analysis of this front.

I wrote a few months ago:



And what do they always call the guys like Pat Buchannan, who get most things right while the Clowns get it all wrong? Why, antisemite, of course.

Also from the VDH interview

I guess what I’m saying is we’re in a revolutionary Jacobin period, kind of a Reign of Terror. And I don’t see it stopping unless—I don’t think the election of Donald Trump will be enough. You’ll have to elect the Senate, Donald Trump, and enlarge the House majority. And then they’re going to have to act very quickly to stop it, to restore the border, to restore deterrence, to restore deterrence against criminals, to get back our preeminent position economically, to stop this $1 trillion borrowing every 100 days.

At least he identifies the revolution that is taking place.

[Mark Rippetoe]

Atilis Gym kicks New Jersey's Yankee ass: https://x.com/iansmithfitness/status...75792827240949

ALL OF THE 80+ municipal citations of violations of a governor's order, public nuisance, disturbing the peace, and operating without a license against us have been dropped by the courts WITH prejudice. This means the State has NO ability to revist or refile these charges.

This victory opens the battlefield again and gives us options to continue to push back and bring justice to the treasonous actions of Phil Murphy and his lackies.

[anticausal]

Atilis Gym kicks New Jersey's Yankee ass: https://x.com/iansmithfitness/status...75792827240949

I hope those who folded like lawn chairs with their own gyms/businesses/whatever feel a healthy and proper sense of humiliation at this news. You can't win if you don't even fight. The time to mentally prepare is now, because you better expect the next test to be harder and a lot more scary.

[Mark Rippetoe]

How the West Was Woke, to the Point of Near Extinction – PJ Media

This social conditioning -- being told we are racists if we criticize minorities who commit crimes -- is working wonders here in the U.S. as well.

The fear of being labeled a "racist" is so powerful that half the nation remains quiet as our cowardly, globalist president invites our replacements (when I say replacements I mean they will replace ALL Americans, not just us pesky peckerwoods), as many as eight to ten million of them, and says nothing because they are afraid of being called a racist. Naturally, most Americans do not know about the rape epidemic in the UK because the news media, most of which is dominated by the commies, hasn't told them. But if you want to see America in seven years, look to see what is happening in England today.

[wal]

There are still competent, good people in the military and DoD. They're just buried under a pile of BS.

Not only the Military, but in just about all government departments have been infiltrated with "new think", "preferred pronouns","diversity training" and "green energy". If it does not cripple an organization it certainly diverts its direction into the path of fantasy land. Your enemies are laughing all the way to the fall of the US. You know why? It is all self inflicted. How do you defeat a superior force? You rot it out from the inside. It is called white anting here, all you will have left is the shell.

[Jason Donaldson]

It is called white anting here, all you will have left is the shell.

Looking that up, I now know that Aussies call termites "white ants". I guess I learned something today.