56 Comments

Ancient ICBM's in silos = TARGETS, NOT DETERRENTS !!! Another thing that has outlived its usefulness by several decades, kinda like NATO, "rules based order", the aircraft carrier task force, eternal enemies & alliances . . .

Expand full comment

First black swan event = Austin sacked? Thereby debilitating our military?

Jamie Dimon in the news… https://www.foxbusiness.com/financials/us-economy-starting-look-more-1970s-jpmorgan-chase-jamie-dimon

Expand full comment

Nothing Dimon says should be taken as an objective, expert observation for the benefit of the general public. Rather, he issues statements that he thinks will best serve his own (that is, JPM's and SIFIs in general) interests. It is kind of maddening to think that he can move markets - but he can and for that he has to be taken seriously - but not literally.

Expand full comment

If ever some information should have been classified, it is that senior administration officials did not know that Austin was in the hospital. Why in the world do we know this? I am sure that things like this happen regularly, around the world. It is not something that we need to hear about.

Expand full comment

Jeff: I think that you are proceeding from the false assumption that anyone in this administration has a clue as to what constitutes a “good idea”. These folks prove on a daily basis just how far in over their heads they are, in fact, I submit that they’ve elevated it to an art form.

As Mark has said many times, we have the finest politicians money can buy, you just don’t get much for your money anymore. ;-)

Expand full comment

For people trying to mold the world as they want it, they have no discretion or sense.

Expand full comment

It’s worse - No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none and

therefore am no beast.

-William Shakespeare

They have no touch of pity because they are empty of heart but full of narcissism - beyond repulsive.

Expand full comment

For the last several years, I've been reevaluating my thoughts about Reagan. I think that he was sincere in his love for the country and in his Christian faith. But I don't think a lot of what he did is holding up under the passage of time.

He gave us O'Connor and Kennedy. I'm not as keen on Scalia as I was. Scalia was okay overall but he had a few clunkers on eminent domain and religious freedom.

Expand full comment

A lot of Trump in Reagan.

Expand full comment
Jan 10·edited Jan 10

I think Shakespeare nailed it in “Julius Caesar”, “The good men do is oft interred with their bones, but the evil lives on”. Ironic that the play was about political intrigue and betrayal, times being what they are.

Expand full comment
Jan 10·edited Jan 10

How did we get here?

Read PNAC- Project for a New American Century

It spells it out just like Event 201 did for Covid.

False Flag Operation leads to massive Federal Spending on said "threat" and the federal budget never retreated from the increased spending.

Naturally, insiders stole from the government while the Federal Reserve played along with ZIRP-

Zero Interest Rate Policy for 20 years.

And people wonder why we have so many Multi-Billionaire Megalomaniacs like Larry Fink of Blackrock

The Republican Party was hijacked by Human Garbage aka FormerTrotskyites in July of 1980 (Podhoretz, Kristof, Frankfurters).

The plan was set in motion when Reagan appointed George H.W. Bush Vice President

I could go on and on be we all know and most of us have lived through it.

Expand full comment

And Pence being very Bush esque… closet Neocon hawk in mold of McCain.

Expand full comment

Wow Mark, lotta stuff to unpack in this post but as a retired maintenance manager for a textile company, I was absolutely astounded by the statement about “drawings no longer exist for the Minuteman lll and the ones that do exist are useless because nobody alive can understand them”!!! It is beyond my comprehension how a situation like this can happen within the defense apparatus of this country, I mean after all we do have a Secretary of Defense, right? Yeh we do but nobody knows where he is, but I digress. Please adjust your sarcasmometer to its highest setting regarding my last remark.

I would have thought that the engineers and managers in charge of those systems would have heard of the law of entropy and acted accordingly, but evidently I would be wrong.

The idea that the Department of Defense would allow this to continue unabated for years until we reach the point that we can’t fix’em anymore and we got nuthin to replacem with is, well I have to repeat myself, unbelievable. I’m wondering if the elective surgery that our illustrious Secretary of Defense had was a brain transplant. Sorry to be so snarky, but DAMN people, does anyone anywhere in the federal government have a clue as to what their job is and how to perform it beyond a level that makes Elmer Fudd look like a savant?

Expand full comment

My 2¢ on how this could happen based upon my experience as a DOD employee.

First, DOD had the collapse of the Soviet Union, which changed the binary world and led to instability as terrorism increased. As I recall, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their clock a few seconds back. The nation began to reduce our stockpile of nuclear weapons and helped the Soviets secure and reduce theirs. It’s not hard to imagine that an attitude of “We’ll never need to use these” set into DOD thinking, even if it was a collective mindset that was just accepted and never openly stated.

Second, years of not hiring in the 1990s. Ten years is a long time and senior employees begin to retire.

Third, an uptick in missions like Desert Storm, combatting terrorism, wading into Mogadishu and other stresses on the military. A lot of new priorities and the focus let up, even slightly, from our nuclear deterrent. DOD had to juggle so many things and the nuclear arsenal became just another priority.

Fourth, we were on top of the world, the ‘lone superpower” and I think DOD came to believe the hype. DOD started putting faith in our perceived military superiority and believed that they could use air supremacy as a one-size-fits-all solution.

Fifth, the explosion of technology, data and open source. It’s like the DOD had to drink from a fire hose to cope with everything coming its way. Even for a huge bureaucracy, that’s a lot to handle. My agency developed multiple focus areas. One of my coworkers asked me “How do you track so many focus areas? If everything’s a focus, then nothing's a focus.”

Finally, Clapper, Brennan, Bush, Cheney, Clinton, Obama, Biden. Need I say more?

Just a guess on my part extrapolating from my agency to all of DOD.

Expand full comment

I'm spit-balling but the likely reason why the drawings no longer exist is that acquisitions and mergers within industries lead to a year or two of asset-stripping and profit-taking via personnel retrenchment, sale of property, and wholesale ignorance of knowledge transfer. Then sell it on to someone else who squeezes out the last of the juice, etc. When Corp A takes over Corp B the last thing they want is to pay a minion to sort through the archives or make an inventory of the equipment. Just pay some data disposal firm to burn the lot.

We can always Build Back Better innit.

Expand full comment

I work in telecom. You are spot on. It is the same way with the nation’s com network. Records don’t exist, they’ve been lost to time and consolidation. And the people with institutional knowledge are gone or dead.

Expand full comment

I don’t suppose that it ever crossed anyone’s mind that, “Hey, this is part of the national defense structure so maybe we should treat it differently from the latest iteration of Emeril’s Robo Oven”. But I guess the fact that these defensive systems are basically boat anchors is no big deal. The bright side is if the Russians attack us, they can aim at the old Minuteman silos and get a twofer-their warhead explodes and sets ours off. What a deal, discount destruction, American ingenuity at its finest.

I guess they didn’t get the text about eternal vigilance being the price of liberty.

Expand full comment

This is what a bureaucratized, ossified, inefficient system that rewards conformity with rules and regs and negatively sanctions/penalizes individual initiative or prevents its possibility entirely gets you. I have had a number of people tell me over the years "you have to have worked for the federal government or a defense contractor to truly understand." I believe it.

This is why the founders posited a very limited role for the national government. Now, the federal government outlays as a percentage of GDP is hovering around 25%. Is it any wonder we can't accomplish anything as a society any more?

Expand full comment

"I have had a number of people tell me over the years 'you have to have worked for the federal government or a defense contractor to truly understand.'"

Yes.

Expand full comment
author

Political philosopher Patrick Deneen

https://meaninginhistory.substack.com/archive?sort=search&search=patrick%20deneen

argues that the original coup that led to the US Constitution and a strong federal government was not an accident. That the dominant federal government was the goal of the federalists. He advocates for the anti-federalists.

Expand full comment

Mark, thanks so much for responding to my comment and especially for your post today about Deneen. I really appreciate the fine job you have done describing Deneen's views (and your own associated views) of the Constitution, Federalism, and Liberalism, which make a great deal of sense to me.

I know you have broached this topic many times but as a relatively recent follower of yours I appreciate you laying it out once again so clearly. I certainly agree with you about the necessity of morality and virtue to good governance; and that the emphasis on the individual to the degree that it is made in Liberalism (of whatever variety) is certainly detrimental to the cohesion of society. Now, I intend to read Dineen and to learn more about the Federalist / Anti-Federalist divide. Thanks very much, again!

Expand full comment
author

Your comment spurred me to do this.

Expand full comment
author

So thanks.

Expand full comment

Thank you, again!

Expand full comment

“drawings no longer exist for the Minuteman lll and the ones that do exist are useless because nobody alive can understand them”!!!

See what Etch A Sketch gets ya over time! Lead crystal fade and baby boomers.

Expand full comment
author

"The idea that the Department of Defense would allow this to continue unabated for years"

Hard to figure. Somehow there must not have been enough money in this to interest the MIC.

Expand full comment
RemovedJan 10·edited Jan 10
Comment removed
Expand full comment

Fake pancreatic cancer incident is a great way to vacate the premises as the walls crumble.

Expand full comment

Certain Telegram channels are speculating that actually Austin was knocked senseless (perhaps not the best idiom...) in a decision-making center in Ukraine that had a close encounter with a Kinzhal. US casualties are disguised with a few helicopter crashes, sudden illnesses, etc. Whether this is in any way plausible I'll leave to the reader to decide.

Expand full comment

I don't buy that. If Austin were knocked, the only possible outcome was it knocked sense into him. Zero from zero is still zero.

Expand full comment

I’m leaning heavily toward “the whole thing”! Incompetence has been the qualifying standard for such a long time that DEI just made it much more obvious, and dangerous. So here we are between a rock and a hard place!

Expand full comment
Jan 9·edited Jan 9

Another great post.

Part of the problem for the last 40-plus years is people turning to 'the experts' for everything. Benjamin Spock is a prime example. Why parents turn to people like Dr. Spock, Ann Landers, Dear Abby, etc., is mystifying. Who better knows and loves children than their own parents? The 'experts' aren't going to be there when your kid is sick, needs help in school or is being bullied. I don't understand outsourcing a prime responsibility like parenting to others.

I think my example is a good illustration of how presidents, governors and mayors often turn to others for things that are in their wheel house. Not that I'm saying any man knows everything. If your elected to lead, lead.

Another part of the problem is that no one has the courage to speak the truth any more. In the big cities we have blacks killing blacks. Rather than discuss the lack of the father, the ill effects of welfare and other causes, the Left calls for gun control. Or, spends a ton of money on programs like Cure Violence. The predictable stories eventually come out how the 'leaders' of these organizations are caught feeding at the trough.

I see many example of simplistic or magical thinking. I believe that you have also mentioned magical thinking.

Expand full comment

Dr. Fauci as latest example.

Expand full comment

Dr. Spock was the beginning

I was a kid in the 1970s and my mother called Spock a freak and said he'd lead to the downfall of my generation

She was right.

Expand full comment
author

After months of soft peddling the issue ...

https://original.antiwar.com/john-mearsheimer/2024/01/07/the-case-for-genocide-in-gaza/

Expand full comment

Yeah, he can go away now.

Expand full comment
author

What's clear is that Israel has plans for US.

Douglas Macgregor @DougAMacgregor

**It is now clear that Israel plans on a wider war. **

Yoav Gallant the leader of the more “moderate” wing of Netanyahu's cabinet has effectively said so.

SECSTATE Blinken acts as though his words to the enraged leaders of the Middle East can reverse America’s slide into war in support of Israel.

He is out of his depth and is held in contempt by virtually every Arab Statesman along with the leaders of Turkey and Iran.

Expand full comment

I don’t envision Zhou has plans to follow to closely especially during an election year.

Expand full comment

Israel may have plans for the US but the rest of the World has plans for Israel and the US.

Two countries now in a box.

Expand full comment

After using Ukraine, we see the US hoist by its own petard. Used to the last American by Israel. How the wheel turns (but by whom?)

Expand full comment

We as a society couldn’t even build the trans continental railroad today, let alone modernize our nuclear arsenal. Look at the brand new airplanes with loose and missing bolts flying full of unsuspecting passengers, and piloted by recent DEI graduates.

Expand full comment

It’s worse than I thought:

https://youtu.be/rO0Di1ET8Zg?si=sl214kIwiXCAKOfP

And it seems airlines are focused on diversity for pilots:

https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/airline-safety-is-off-to-a-bad-start-in-2024-thanks-to-biden-admin-policies/

And the faa for air traffic controllers,

Expand full comment
author

What could go wrong?

Expand full comment

Is this the plane foreign airlines kept crashing? Oh never mind.

Expand full comment

I'll go you one better. If Lewis and Clark were to set out today, they'd have never left St. Charles, MO. By the time they got all their vaccinations, taken ethics training, covered mandatory training, developed a safety plan, conducted an environmental study, purchased eco-friendly canoes, made a mitigation plan for endangered species, learned about microaggressions against indigenous peoples, confronted their implicit bias, made sure they had black, female, Hispanic, differently-abled people and LGBT representation, they'd set out and find McDonalds and Wal-Mart had beat them to it.

Expand full comment

Shows what happened to Boeing when the McDonald Douglas culture took over and they moved the corporate headquarters from Washington to Chicago, Engineers no longer ran the company, huge cost cutting, and dei/crt governed hiring and promotion.

Expand full comment

Hey enough with the Chicago bashing or Mark or I will send you to DEI training. LOL.

Expand full comment

CEO came from GE, and later Blackstone. Degree in accounting.

Translation- really good at financial stuff.

I used to think of GE as amazing with what Jack Welsh did. Now it just seems it was financial bs.

https://www.boeing.com/company/bios/david-l-calhoun.page

Expand full comment

When companies began to think of their employees solely as assets, forgetting that they're also people, it becomes easy to shed them. Look at the devastation among the white middle class as we've closed factories, accelerating that in the 1990s.

How many CEOs really care what they have done to millions of Americans. As Glenn Frey sang, "I got mine." Glenn got his, too, but he was still correct.

Then we have union leaders thinking they can score $15.00 an hour for jobs that frankly aren't worthy of being paid $15.00. The result? You and I are encountering ordering kiosks at Taco Bell and one crew member, maybe two, is missing from the kitchen.

But, hey, it sure looked and sounded good and you got all the right press from the clueless media and all the love from the American People for supposedly doing the right thing in sticking it to the Man.

Expand full comment

"I used to think of GE as amazing with what Jack Welsh did. Now it just seems it was financial bs."

Like a human body, shed a few pounds and one starts to look good for a while. But if those pounds had more than fat, like maybe a few vital organs, over time, not so good.

I'm sure Welsh demoralized his rank and file. As a fan of Made in USA, he sure demoralized me, and I never worked for GE.

Expand full comment

Not a fan of Jack Welsh anymore. After reading his book and his success I got a chance to work with a few GE "cast-off's" in the mid 2000's and their stories of long hours, ruthless culture, and back-stabbing leaders. Further, Welsh was no "balanced lifestyle" fan either which is a black mark in my book.

Boeing's culture I believe seems similar but not close enough as they left the Windy city. I do know the head of executive recruiting as she used to work at my place of employment.

Expand full comment

I did not realize Boeing left Chicago in 2022 for Virginia.

Current CEO mostly works from home. Multiple residences, but none in Wa.

Visits the corporate hq twice a month.

Another issue is they outsourced key areas, including spinning off the spirit operation.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12944167/Boeings-bean-counter-Embattled-aviation-giant-slammed-hiring-22m-year-ACCOUNTANT-CEO-rival-Airbuss-boss-aeronautical-engineer-firms-killer-737-Max-jet-hit-fresh-safety-woes.html#article-12944167

Expand full comment
author

Is it any wonder that this internationalist ruling class regard "populism" and the cultural formation of the masses as the enemy?

Expand full comment
deletedJan 9
Comment deleted
Expand full comment
author

C'mon Heather. Do you have any idea how much time I put into researching and documenting everything I write, and now you're telling me that you haven't bothered to read any of it re Palestine but you want a personal tutorial instead? Really?

Expand full comment
deletedJan 9
Comment deleted
Expand full comment
author

No, maybe reading about the background to the Balfour Declaration, what was behind it, the Jewish member of government who wrote about it in opposition to dispossessing the Palestinians, the Nakba, etc.--all of which I wrote about and thoroughly documented--maybe that's beyond you? You address none of that. NONE of that. You speak of Israeli "hostages" but not about Palestinian prisoners--held without trial. You say nothing about illegal settlements on Palestinian land.

Please gimme a break.

Expand full comment
author

Heather, I'd rather you took some time and read what I've written.

Expand full comment