Hey, at least it FLIES!

Given all the other problems with the F-35, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it turned out that the overdesigned grand compromise didn’t even stay in the sky:

The latest news about the F-35 isn’t just bad – it’s CATASTROPHIC. It turns out that this utter turkey of a plane is so badly built and designed that its gun can’t even shoot straight:

Add a gun that can’t shoot straight to the problems that dog Lockheed Martin Corp.’s $428 billion F-35 program, including more than 800 software flaws.

The 25mm gun on Air Force models of the Joint Strike Fighter has “unacceptable” accuracy in hitting ground targets and is mounted in housing that’s cracking, the Pentagon’s test office said in its latest assessment of the costliest U.S. weapons system.

The annual assessment by Robert Behler, the Defense Department’s director of operational test and evaluation, doesn’t disclose any major new failings in the plane’s flying capabilities. But it flags a long list of issues that his office said should be resolved — including 13 described as Category 1 “must-fix” items that affect safety or combat capability — before the F-35’s upcoming $22 billion Block 4 phase.

The number of software deficiencies totaled 873 as of November, according to the report obtained by Bloomberg News in advance of its release as soon as Friday. That’s down from 917 in September 2018, when the jet entered the intense combat testing required before full production, including 15 Category 1 items. What was to be a year of testing has now been extended another year until at least October.

“Although the program office is working to fix deficiencies, new discoveries are still being made, resulting in only a minor decrease in the overall number” and leaving “many significant‘’ ones to address, the assessment said.

Settle in with a stiff drink, chaps, because carving up this turkey is going to take a while.

Here’s to hoping the empire goes out with a whimper and not a bang.

The necessity of debt cancellation

An excellent interview with Michael Hudson, author of And Forgive Them Their Debts:

Rees Jeannotte: To think about a more sensible way to deal with a debt crisis. Maybe you can use the most recent example of a national debt cancellation, namely here in Germany.

Michael Hudson: That’s right. The German Economic Miracle was the Allied debt reforms of 1947/48. They essentially wiped out all debts except for what employers owed their employees – you know, the workers’ wages and minimum working balances at the banks. It was easy for the Allies to cancel the debts owed to German creditors. because the creditors were mainly Nazis. The whole idea was to wipe them out. They didn’t the want to leave the former Nazis with financial power to take over the economy again. They wanted a Clean Slate.

Canceling the debts created the German Economic Miracle. Because the economy was able to operate without personal debt, and without much public debt or corporate debt. It was able to take off. Today, essentially you’re dealing with a criminalized banking class that I think we should treat in the same way that the Allies treated the Nazis. If you don’t cancel the debts owed to them, the economy is going to shrink and shrink, and polarize. We’re going to have essentially a neo-feudalism controlled by the creditor class, like you had in Rome in the Dark Ages. Do you really want a new Dark Age?

Rees Jeannotte: No, not particularly. This leads us into the financial crisis of 2008, where you were among the few people to predict it accurately. It was largely based on a giant private debt bubble. Private debt is something that we don’t hear much about. I tried to look for the totals on private debt worldwide. You find out the debt to GDP ratio for public debt. For government debt, but it’s never about private debt.

Michael Hudson: That is because the right-wing politicians want to abolish government and the social services it provides. Apart from the money governments owe for military spending and NATO, they owe pensions and health care. The right-wing program in Germany and Europe is to get rid of pensions, to lower them, to financialize and privatize the pension system instead of Germany’s pay-as-you-go system, which is quite good. They want to get rid of social spending.

Also, they look at government debt as the adversary of private debt. For instance, in the United States, President Clinton finally ran a budget surplus in the last year of his rule. What happens when a government runs a surplus? That means that it doesn’t spend money into the economy. The economy has to rely on banks to get credit, because every economy needs credit to function and grow. Bankers realize that if the government doesn’t provide the economy with money – by spending deficits into the economy to promote employment – then people will have to borrow from the banks. But if they keep borrowing from the banks to buy homes rising in price and just to maintain their living standards, their families will end up looking like Greece or Argentina. They’re going to have to pay more of their income as interest. Bankers will end up with the houses, and with private industry. They will end up controlling everything, including the government.

For thousands of years the leading tension of civilization has been over who is going to dominate and plan society’s economy. Will it be democratic governments or wise rulers seeking stability and military security? Or, will it be a financial oligarchy that wants to get rich by impoverishing the rest of society?

He’s correct. The ultimate and mathematically certain outcome of the current financial system is that the owners of the banks own literally all the property and all of the people. This is not a question of right-wing vs left-wing, and it’s very important to remember that banks are not capitalism, corporations are not human beings, and usury is not freedom.

Quite the opposite, as it happens.

As usual, there are commenters at Unz who can be relied upon to produce the retarded “conservative” attack on debt cancellation. Make no mistake, if at this point you still oppose debt cancellation on the grounds of “personal responsibility”, you are economically retarded, by which I mean, you are so stupid, so shortsighted, and so unable to do the very simple math involved that if I had the ability to do so, I would forbid you to read this blog.

If it’s selective then people who made responsible economic decisions will be forced to subsidize the self-indulgent and/or foolish economic decisions of others. 

The inexorable math of usury and the way in which credit shifts the demand curve upward dictates that however “responsible” your economic decisions are, sooner or later you will be forced to not only “subsidize the self-indulgent and/or foolish economic decisions of others”, you will be forced to make equally foolish decisions yourself. The fiscal conservative’s belief in “responsible debt” is no different than the Churchian’s belief in Judeochristianity, and it stems from exactly the same evil source.

Complete Iowa Fail

The Democrats just made a very powerful case for reelecting the god-emperor:

The Iowa presidential caucuses were thrown into chaos late Monday after the state Democratic Party said it found “inconsistencies,” delaying results and causing widespread confusion across the state.

The Iowa Democratic Party said early Tuesday that it would release the results of the Iowa caucuses later Tuesday after “manually verifying all precinct results.”

Party chair Troy Price said the party is “validating every piece of data we have against our paper trail. That system is taking longer than expected, but it’s in place to ensure we are eventually able to report results with full confidence.”

The state Democratic party’s communications director, Mandy McClure, said on Monday night that there were “inconsistencies” in the reporting of three sets of results. “In addition to the tech systems being used to tabulate results, we are also using photos of results and a paper trail to validate that all results match and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report,” McClure said.

Translation: Creepy Joe was destroyed by Bernie Sanders, so they need more time to produce fake ballots and destroy enough of the Sanders votes. And given today’s Democrats can’t run either an impeachment or a caucus, who could possibly imagine that they can run the federal government successfully?

The reason for the shenanigans appears to be that the system is designed to prevent the most popular vote-getter from actually winning the most delegates if the establishment disapproves of him. This suggests that the delay is to make the votes look more like the delegate totals. It would look very bad if Sanders ends up with the same number of delegates as the candidates who have less than half his votes.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’s supporters angrily stormed out of a caucus here on Monday night, calling the process a “joke” and a “waste of time” after they started out with more than twice as much support as any other candidate, but ending up in a five-way tie, with all viable candidates sharing one delegate apiece.

Under the complicated caucus system, there are multiple stages of voting. First, there is a vote to determine initial support. After that point, only candidates with 15{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} of the vote are considered viable. However, those voters who did not initially choose a viable candidate can migrate to another candidate. After the final numbers are counted, they are translated to delegate equivalents, which help determine how many supporters each campaign gets to send to state, and ultimately, national conventions.

After the initial vote at the First Presbyterian Church, just Sanders, with 32 votes, and Pete Buttigieg, with 15 votes, met the viability threshold of 13.

But then, in the second vote, Biden’s support started to grow to as high as 16. Because he had votes to spare, his representatives siphoned them off to Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar. As a result, all three just met the viability threshold.

After the shift, Sanders ended up with 37{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} support in the room, Buttigieg had 17{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}, and the three other campaigns each had just cleared 15{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}.

Since there were only five delegates to be awarded in this caucus location, and under rules no viable candidate can lose their single delegate if they only have one, each of the five campaigns ended up with one delegate apiece. This even though Sanders won by 20 points.

A partial result released by the Sanders campaign suggests that Sanders won about 30 percent of the vote, with Buttigieg and Warren finishing second and third. Goodbye, Creepy Joe!

It’s not about the numbers

It’s about the quality of the engagement and the strength of the commitment.

One blogger who is on SocialGalactic recently commented that his 85 followers on SocialGalactic have made a much bigger impact on his blog traffic than his 500 followers on Gab. We’ve seen similar results vis-a-vis social media platforms ranging from Instagram and Twitter to Facebook and Amazon.

But then, Man has known this since the days of Gideon and Leonidas. Better 200 who will stand and fight than 20,000 who will run.

It’s hard to decide how to cheat

Iowa Democrats are desperate to to find out how they’ll be manipulated and misrepresented by their national counterparts in the caucuses tonight:

Underlying the bold pronouncements, campaigns and voters acknowledged a palpable sense of unpredictability and anxiety as Democrats begin selecting which candidate to send on to a November face-off with President Donald Trump. The Democratic race is unusually large and jumbled heading into Monday’s caucus. Four candidates were locked in a fight for victory in Iowa; others were in position to pull off surprisingly strong finishes.

“This is going to go right down to the last second,” said Symone Sanders, a senior adviser to Biden’s campaign.

Polls show Biden in a close race in Iowa with Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang are also competing aggressively in the state.

Democrats’ deep disdain for Trump has put many in the party on edge about the decision. A series of external forces has also heightened the sense of unpredictability in Iowa, including Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, which marooned Warren, Sanders and Klobuchar in Washington for much of the past week.

Many campaigns were looking to a final weekend poll to provide some measure of clarity. But late Saturday night, CNN and The Des Moines Register opted not to release the survey because of worries the results may have been compromised.

New caucus rules have also left the campaigns working in overdrive to set expectations before the contest. For the first time, the Iowa Democratic Party will release three sets of results: who voters align with at the start of the night; who they pick after voters supporting nonviable candidates get to make a second choice; and the number of state delegate equivalents each candidate gets.

Both national establishments manipulate and screw over their grass roots. But it’s particularly interesting to observe it when the national establishment isn’t sure of its direction. The one thing we can be fairly certain of is that Bernie Sanders will not be the beneficiary. He is to the current Democratic Party what Ron Paul was to the pre-Trump Republican Party. The problem is that the Democrats still haven’t settled on their Mitt Romney.

UPDATE: Mike Cernovich reports the results of the spiked final Iowa poll. Looks like things are going south fast for Creepy Joe.

  • 22 percent Sanders
  • 18 percent Warren
  • 16 percent Buttigieg
  • 13 percent Biden

Mailvox: the circle-back

A reader observes that Gammas never leave, they always linger about in the corners like a noxious fog:

I was reading the comments on your post yesterday on creating omegas. It struck me that last year I had someone I thought a friend who turned on me in a very public way for noticing uncomfortable facts. Then there was some cyber-stalking that struck me as rather creepy. Gamma behavior. You said Gammas will turn on you sooner or later.

Do they ever try to ingratiate themselves back into the good graces of the person they turned on to begin with? The faux-sincere apology or do they dig in that they were right? I was thinking that gammas are somewhat opportunistic and will try to get back into the circle if they think it is to their benefit.

Gammas will absolutely try to work their way back in, but they always do so in an indirect manner. They will try praising you or making positive, supportive comments, without ever admitting the fact that they were previously condemning you or apologizing for their past behavior. Of course, they will only take the ingratiation route until it becomes obvious that the tactic is not working, then they will revert to attacking you again.

Gammas are not “somewhat opportunistic”, they are EXTREMELY opportunistic, which means that even when they are silent, they are always lurking about, looking to either ingratiate themselves or seek revenge, depending upon which opportunity happens to present itself first. I have witnessed Gammas lurking silently for years before taking the opportunity to strike back; for example, one Gamma troll whose name would be familiar to the Dread Ilk recently surfaced for the first time since 2014 in an attempt to glom onto the /r/Owen anklebiters and their campaign against UATV.

This is why you should never forget a Gamma or fail to observe his inevitable reappearance. Because you can be absolutely certain that he will never forgive nor forget anyone who has rejected him or publicly bested him, not until the heat death of the universe.

Super Bowl LIV

This was my prediction the last time Andy Reid got to the Super Bowl:

Andy Reid is a solid coach, but he is not a great one. He doesn’t get outcoached, for the most part, but neither does he outcoach anyone, not even Mike Tice. Bill Belicheck, on the other hand, has repeatedly proven himself to be a Jedi master, with game plans in this year’s playoffs that left two very good teams, Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, in near-complete disarray. Notice how there hasn’t even been a whisper of Charlie Weis being distracted by his moonlighting job as the Notre Dame head coach of late. The Patriots are a strategic machine, awesome to behold.

Factor in the Terrell Owens injury and the “happy-to-be-there” factor of the Eagles, and I suspect that under the guidance of the maglia ex machina, the Patriots will methodically dismantle the Eagles. I don’t think it will be a blow-out, and the combination of a tough Eagles defense and a screw-the-gameplan drive filled with scrambles by McNabb will probably help the Eagles make a last, desperate push to keep the game close in the third quarter, but this one should be over early in the fourth with a nail-in-the-coffin Patriots score.

I suspect Kyle Shanahan learned more from his Super Bowl failure than Andy Reid did from his. Despite all the media hype surrounding the Chiefs and Pat Mahomes, few observers seem to be paying much attention to the actual performance of the two teams this year or the way in which they played in getting to the Super Bowl. I really don’t like the way Kansas City seems to come out flatter than flat in big games this year.

It is, of course, well known that in championship games, defense generally trumps even the most explosive offenses. The 49ers have the second-best yards/game defense and the eighth-best points/game defense. The Chiefs actually have the seventh-best points/game defense, although they give up more yards and rank only 17th in that category.

But when it comes down to it, I have more confidence in Shanahan + Garappolo + DEF-SF than I do in Reid + Mahomes + DEF-KC. Also, if the 49ers have the lead, Shanahan isn’t going to make the mistake that Houston’s O’Brien did by taking his foot off the gas.

49ers by 10.

Football Outsiders, on the other hand, predicts a Chiefs victory:

I give the slight edge to Kansas City. I think San Francisco will be able to have offensive success running the ball, but their defense is not going to go out and make Patrick Mahomes look like Kirk Cousins looked three weeks ago. Calling for a high-scoring game didn’t end up working out for me last year but I’m calling for a high-scoring game again this year. I also think it will be close, but the Chiefs are the favorite with the better chance to come out ahead.

Both MDS and Florio from ProFootballTalk are also picking the Chiefs.

HALFTIME: 10-10. I don’t watch the halftime show, or the commercials, but the game itself is pretty good. Shanahan was getting a little too cute early on, but now that he’s gone back to the run, I expect San Francisco to start to take control in the third quarter.

4TH QUARTER: SF 20 KC 17. Kyle Shanahan is still a choker. Twice, he’s faced 2nd-and-5, tried to get cute instead of relying upon his superior running game, thrown incomplete twice, and been forced to punt. Incredibly stupid considering they have the lead, the ball, and the clock. SF could and should win this game, but if they lose it, it’s on Shanahan’s poor play-calling in the fourth quarter.

Unbelievable! San Francisco is averaging nearly 9 yards per rush on the ground. It’s first down inside Kansas City territory with four minutes left. So, naturally, you THROW THE BALL FOUR TIMES I A ROW for zero yards to lose the game. Absolutely INDEFENSIBLE stupidity. This is the second time Shanahan has thrown away a perfectly winnable Super Bowl for his team.

I don’t like the 49ers. I didn’t want them to win, although I’m not looking forward to all the unwarranted, but inevitable Mahomes worship to come. But watching the SF playcalling in the 4th quarter was downright painful. I can’t even imagine how berserk the more knowledgeable 49er fans must have been going when watching that coaching choke job for the ages.

The greatest press conference of all time

Everyone knows that Prince’s performance at Super Bowl XLI was the greatest halftime show ever. But most people don’t know that his pre-Super Bowl press conference was arguably even more legendary.

When we said, “You’ll have to have a press conference. They would like to interview you,” Prince point blank said, “I don’t do interviews.”

Whose authority would that be?

The Kurgan addresses John Salza’s The Errors of Sedevacantism and Ecclesiastical Law in detail:

As a result of Vox Day mentioning my earlier blog post challenge to nominal Catholics concerning the fact that we have only had antipopes since 1958, one of the commenters there brought up some supposed studied theologians who claim to have fully refuted the position they call Sedevacantism (but I call SedePrivationism for precision, since words matter). My post on the antipopes and the legal reasoning why is here and it is rooted in the fact that we, as obedient catholics, must believe the fake Popes are fake, and have been at the very least since 1963, for certain, because that is what the Code of Canon Law of 1917 necessarily states, which being put together by the Magisterium of the Church, we, as Catholics could never and should never had ignored when Vatican 2 raised its evil and apostate head from the darkness. Nor can we ignore it now. Remember that the only current and valid code of canon law is the one of 1917, since the one of 1983 was put together by the same impostors, non-clerics and non-catholics that usurped the Chair of Peter in the first place, and it was also specifically designed to try and invalidate the truth of the code of 1917 and obfuscate its clarity and precision.

Not having read or known anything about the two individuals mentioned by the commenter at VP calling himself MisesMat, who later emailed me and assured me both these gentlemen would be happy to debate me, in writing, I did a quick search for one the names that he mentioned and found Salza’s document online, which I reproduce below with my commentary. His words are in black and mine in red.

Not being Roman Catholic, I only scanned both documents in passing. So, I won’t pass any judgement on either man’s case, except to say that I am extremely dubious of anyone who, in light of the observable misrule of the present Fake Pope, could possibly reach the following conclusion.

Restoring the Church will be furthered by recognizing the authority of the current Pope.

Extremely dubious is, of course, a significant understatement.

Bernie must have been winning

The Des Moines Register inexplicably refuses to release its final poll before the Iowa caucuses:

The Des Moines Register, CNN and Selzer & Co. have made the decision to not release the final installment of the CNN/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll as planned this evening.

Nothing is more important to the Register and its polling partners than the integrity of the Iowa Poll. Today, a respondent raised an issue with the way the survey was administered, which could have compromised the results of the poll. It appears a candidate’s name was omitted in at least one interview in which the respondent was asked to name their preferred candidate.

While this appears to be isolated to one surveyor, we cannot confirm that with certainty. Therefore, the partners made the difficult decision to not to move forward with releasing the Iowa Poll.

Sanders was shown leading by as much as four points in the previous poll. The pollster with the best track record, had him five points ahead of Creepy Joe.

Selzer’s most recent poll, conducted Jan. 2-8, showed Sanders at 20 percent, Warren at 17 percent, Buttigieg at 16 percent and Biden at 15 percent. 

And “subsequent reports said that Pete Buttigieg’s name had either been accidentally omitted or mispronounced by a poll worker during at least one call.” Yeah, because that would have totally altered the results….

It’s obvious that the Democrats desperately want to avoid throwing a decrepit jewish socialist up against the God-Emperor Donald I. As wicked and stupid as they are, even they understand that will end in disaster as blacks and Hispanics either stay home or vote for the only candidate they can possibly respect.

Buttigieg and Klobuchar are nonentities. Biden is as hapless as he is hopeless. Sanders is more obviously unelectable than Dukakis or Mondale ever were. Warren has been unable to generate enthusiasm. They have no one to stop the inevitable Trumpslide 2020.