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Failure Follies: The US Navy Continues the Race to the Bottom

by | Apr 16, 2024 |

boxer

The collapse of western martial civilization is sticking to its schedule.

The Wasp class LHD, USS Boxer, has suffered yet another engineering casualty. On this, the Navy delivers with a spectacularly consistent track record of failure with the Little Crappy Ships, the Zumwalt class and the 20 billion dollar USS Ford that cannot reliably launch and retrieve aircraft (you had one job!).

Keep in mind the USN already lost the USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD 6) to a catastrophic fire in July 2020.

Will anyone in uniform ever be held accountable? Don’t hold your breath.

Expect the chaos avalanche of engineering and mechanical failures to continue apace. In good news for the world, it makes American foreign policy’s armed jeremiad against Earth a little more problematic with the inability to reliably project naval power.

The ship got underway again at the end of March without issue.

A defense official told Military.com in March that the Boxer had originally been slated to deploy late last year, but it was held up thanks to a series of delays and mechanical issues that were driven, at least partly, by poor leadership aboard the ship.

Two previous command investigations conducted on at least three different engineering breakdowns showed “a lack of procedural compliance, substandard supervisory oversight, and general complacency by the crew,” according to the ship’s strike group commander.

Those breakdowns, information on which was released to Military.com as part of a Freedom of Information Act request, revealed that the ship had experienced damage to two “forced draft blowers” on Nov. 8, 2022. A separate investigation into that incident, also provided to Military.com via FOIA request, faulted “poor quality craftsmanship, lack of industry repair skill set/capabilities” and a “lack of supervisory oversight” from the Navy offices overseeing the work.

Then on May 14, the ship had a “boiler safety” breakdown. That investigation “once again revealed a lack of procedural compliance and overall complacency of all personnel involved,” documents from the strike group commander revealed.

Troubled USS Boxer Returns Home 10 Days into Deployment Due to Maintenance Issue

More on Immigration and Public Property

by | Apr 16, 2024 |

Inspired by scholar Simon Guenzl, it occurred to me that regarding “state-claimed” so-called public property, people have been wronged not primarily as taxpayers but as potential homesteaders. (See Guenzl’s “Public Property and the Libertarian Immigration Debate,” Libertarian Papers, 2016 vol. 8, no. 1, and listen to his conversation with Bob Murphy’s Human Action Podcast.)

Guenzl properly distinguishes between state-claimed land and state-seized land, such as that acquired through eminent domain. In the latter case, government personnel took land from identifiable owners, but state-claimed land never had owners. The state foreclosed homesteading.

Among the people prevented from homesteading are would-be immigrants, people from other parts of the world. In times past, many came to America to stake out parcels on the frontier to make better lives for themselves and their families. They demarcated, cleared, plowed, planted, and harvested it. They built homes with it. They “mixed their labor” with it, Lockean-style, and made it their own.

By foreclosing homesteading to this day of a vast portion of America, the government harms their modern-day counterparts as much as it harms those politically defined as citizens. Libertarians (and others) who would treat citizens from foreigners differently in this matter are obliged to justify that seemingly arbitrary distinction. So far they have failed to do so.

The F35: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

by | Apr 15, 2024 |

f35 moneydump

“Soon after publication ‘Superiority’ was inserted into the Engineering curriculum of MIT, to warn the graduates that the Better is often the enemy of the Good, and the Best can be the enemy of both, as it is always too late.”

– Arthur C. Clarke

Superiority by Arthur C. Clarke should be required reading for the modern technocrats.

It’s tax day so what better way to celebrate than to see how those tax dollars are spent.

The F35 has been a very expensive disaster for the American Department of Defense. Betting the farm on emerging unproven technology instead of iterative engineering is a gamble that doesn’t pay off in large scale programs.

There are, of course, major problems with the software upgrades in the F35 platform. This has plagued the program since its inception. By the time everything is 100 percent operational with this aircraft, it will be a biplane in the twenty-first century. As sexy as stealth is to the attention deficit disorder fantasists at the Pentagon, in a future near-peer and peer fight, it will be quickly obviated by technical workarounds.

There are apocryphal stories that some of the F22 aircraft in the boneyard at the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, AZ are there because they missed two consecutive software patches and were bricked.

“To provide some perspective, the F-35 has been in production since 2008-9. That’s 16 years and we still don’t have full combat-capable aircraft due to software delays. Just as we’ve begun retiring LCSes without them ever having had fully functional modules installed, we may see F-35s retire without ever having been fully combat capable.

I am a big fan of the Navy Matters blog.

Thomas Szasz: Champion of Freedom

by | Apr 15, 2024 |

Today is the 104th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Szasz (1920-2012), the great if unappreciated libertarian and defender of individual autonomy and dignity. A psychiatrist by profession, for over 50 years, Szasz was the foremost critic of the social-control system we call institutional psychiatry, or what we could call the government-medical complex. He called it the Therapeutic State. He opposed involuntary mental hospitalization, forced medication, the insanity defense, prescription laws, drug prohibition, laws against suicide, and the psychiatric position (until the 1970s) that homosexuality was a mental illness requiring forced intervention. I am proud to have had him as a friend and also a columnist when I edited The Freeman. He was a delightful man. His books include The Myth of Mental Illness, Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences, Our Right to Drugs, The Manufacture of Madness, and Faith in Freedom. He also published several collections of wonderful aphorisms.

I wrote the following about 20 years ago to summarize a good deal of what Thomas Szasz said in his dozens of books and hundreds of articles. I call it “Szasz in One Lesson”:

If neuroscientists discovered that mass murderers and people who claim to be Jesus had different brain chemistries from other people, most everyone would accept this as evidence that they suffered from a mental illness/brain disorder (MI/BD).

If neuroscientists discovered that homosexuals had different brain chemistries from heterosexuals, far fewer people would accept this as evidence that they suffered from a MI/BD.

If neuroscientists discovered that nuns had different brain chemistries from everyone else, very few people would accept this as evidence that they suffered from a MI/BD.

If neuroscientists discovered that married men had different brain chemistries from bachelors, no one would accept this as evidence that they suffered from a MI/BD.

Clearly, a difference in brain chemistry per se is not enough to make people believe that someone has a MI/BD. It takes more. Why, then, would a difference in one case be taken as evidence of MI/BD, while a difference in another case would not be? The obvious answer is that people, including psychiatrists, are willing to attribute behavior to mental illness/brain disorder to the extent that they disapprove of that behavior, and are unwilling to do so to the extent they approve of, or at least are willing to tolerate, that behavior. (Psychiatry once held that homosexuality was a mental illness. That position was changed, but not on the basis of scientific findings. Science had nothing to do with the initial position either.)

In other words, the psychiatric worldview rests, not on science or medicine, as its practitioners would have us believe, but on ethics, politics, and religion. That would be objectionable only intellectually if that were as far as it went. Unfortunately, it goes further, since the practitioners and the legal system they helped shape are empowered:

•  first, to involuntarily “hospitalize” and drug people “diagnosed” as mentally ill and thought possibly to be dangerous to themselves or others, and

•  second, to excuse certain people of responsibility for their actions (for example, via the insanity defense).

Postscript: I’m often asked which one of Thomas Szasz’s two dozen books I’d recommend to someone unfamiliar with his work. I suggest Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences. This highly readable book covers most of his views on psychiatry, mental illness, and the Therapeutic State, with responses to his critics along the way. Of course, after that, you’ll want to read the rest.

Post postscript: More on Thomas Szasz to come. Meanwhile, see my 2005 interview with Szasz.

Iran Attack Liveblog (PHOTOS/VIDEOS)

by | Apr 14, 2024 |

My live coverage of Iran’s missile and drone attack on Israel Saturday night, as it happened.

Obviously much of this information has either been confirmed, disproven or become obsolete by now, but the thread is full of interesting details that didn’t make it into my latest write-up at Antiwar.com – including photos and videos of the attack in progress.

 

*SEAD = “Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses,” or actions aimed to destroy, overwhelm or otherwise disable a military’s air defense capabilities. Israel has several such systems in addition to the well-known Iron Dome, including its long-range Arrow interceptors, the David’s Sling platform for medium-range projectiles, and the shorter-range Iron Beam directed-energy weapon.

 

If you like this kind of news coverage, follow me on Twitter at @TheWillPorter, with much more in my archive here at the Institute, as well as in the news and viewpoints sections at Antiwar.com. 

The Dogs of War are in Heat

The Dogs of War are in Heat

by | Apr 14, 2024 |

The dogs of war are always in heat. They bark, they gnaw, they kill and breed. Civilisation a chimera, chewing through bones, tearing at flesh, the killers are never in defeat. No matter how well behaved they act, whatever laws claim to be their collar and what kennel of state they sleep from within. They bark for more. A hungry pack, they hunt, kill. They want more.

As a mob we tell ourselves lies, we pretend to be cultivated and wise. We look down on the savagery of ancient times, when tribes waged wars. They did it with bare hands, axes and clubs. We are sophisticated now with missiles, drones and helicopters. The Maxim gun, dynamite and atom bomb were meant to temper us but war found away, gave them bigger teeth.

Religion and ideology was meant to tame the spirit, to govern man, save our souls. Instead it became the reason to kill, a reason to die, the killers edge. “Never again!” they said at Nuremberg, beneath the dangling feet of Hitler’s men. Instead they bark, “Again!” “Again!”

Little boys rape for Joseph Kony, Jihadist’s behead, colonisers bomb, Crusaders torture and the civilised starve millions to death. We can watch it all online, a child’s cut from ear to ear in 4k. A babies severed head on your phone. They kill families wholesale, they always have but now with a hashtag. Progress. We see it, watch it. Pretend it’s not us, just another them. Most of you vote, put your hand out, how many slithers of silver to snuff a baby out? King and Kaiser are both the same. Ayatollah or President, whose more insane?

So cooler heads will prevail, so we are told. The mob, a gaggle of strangers vote for a man, he stumbles and slurs, empowered with a magic powers to press Pandoras button. Millions dead, with one push. No wand, or mystical potion. Just a blob of strangers at the ballot box. The right to rule, magically decide. No bones or soothsayers needed. Progress. By now even Prometheus would tire.

Ancient monuments once ran with blood, their ruins eroded from its gushing flows. Wise men punctured bellies, as the victims cried. They had to, otherwise no sun would rise. Now, the blood can fill rivers, thousands, millions all to die, does it matter? Now the knives are bigger, built by Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin and Sukhoi. They kill more. Progress.

Escalation, deescalation. You know the inevitable?

Hear them bark?

The bitch is in heat.

The dogs of war of whom you love to keep.

They don’t protect you, the love only war.

Iranian-Americans Weigh in On Tehran’s Attack on Israel

by | Apr 13, 2024 |

National Iranian American Council (NIAC) president Jamal Abdi has commented on Tehran’s major drone and missile attack on Israel on Saturday night.

NIAC has worked to improve US-Iran relations and spent years pushing for increased diplomacy.

We are deeply concerned that Iranian retaliatory strikes following Israel’s April 1 attack on its diplomatic compound in Damascus will move the region even further from the path to peace and security. The launch of a significant attack on Israeli territory from Iran is without recent precedent and, unless there is a serious effort towards deconfliction, may confirm that Iran, Israel and the United States are in the midst of the regional war that so many have feared.

We call on the Biden Administration to exercise the United States’ considerable diplomatic leverage to restrain Israel and Iran to ensure this conflict does not spiral further out of control. Far too many innocents have already suffered in the war that began October 7, and the cycle of violence and inhumanity must be broken. Preventing a regional war must be the top imperative and this may mean that Joe Biden must finally say “no” to Israel and Netanyahu.

Biden’s bearhug approach towards Israel has completely failed and has put the U.S. at the risk of entering a war of choice – Netanyahu’s choice. Israel launched a military attack on a diplomatic compound, violating international law and all but guaranteeing an Iranian response. The Israelis notably did not warn the United States, even though it put U.S. troops in harm’s way, and still faced no consequences from the Biden Administration. Netanyahu appears eager to extend and expand the disastrous war in Gaza and draw the U.S. into a regional war and, by continually abetting the war and enabling Israel’s worst instincts, Biden may have granted Netanyahu’s wish.

Read the rest of Abdi’s statement here.

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