Tag: history

How We Got Here

Don’t blame it on the goose, blame it on Big Ben Bernanke.

As the Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006-2014, he decided in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis that the banking system had to be saved, by any means necessary. To finance the massive losses – which were over $10 trillion in the U.S. alone – the world’s central banks began printing money and buying government bonds to finance massive bailouts.

Like squirrels watching a bank robbery, the members of the Nobel Committee – which recently awarded Bernanke the prize in economics – saw everything that happened and knew nothing about what it meant.

Printing money doesn’t cure economic problems: it simply skews who pays for them.

Printing trillions to paper over the financial system’s losses moved the egregious errors of Bank of America, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, General Electric, General Motors and others from their balance sheets, onto the balance sheet of the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

Morally these actions are repugnant – much like requiring that taxpayers finance hundreds of billions’ worth of second-rate college educations for 10 million lazy, underachieving students – but on a vastly bigger scale.

The real problem isn’t financial. Printing money changes societies by giving the government virtually unlimited amounts of power. That warps the ambitions of politicians and gives socialists unlimited budgets. People soon believe every problem can be solved by the government and the printing press. Trade-offs are no longer required. Costs are no longer relevant. In this kind of environment, no problem is too big to solve through politics and the central bank. And if there isn’t a crisis, then one will soon be invented.

And, sure enough, as soon as the U.S. central bank began to sell assets and return to “normal” policies in 2018 and 2019, a new, even bigger crisis was “found.”

A novel coronavirus. Never mind that coronaviruses appear all the time and that most people will get and survive the flu a half dozen times in their lives… this time the world went completely nuts.

Everything was shut down for two years – except politics. Trillions were spent on vaccines – vaccines that don’t prevent you from getting Covid or from transmitting Covid. It was definitely a government vaccine: it cost trillions, everyone was forced to use it, and it didn’t work.

Nothing else worked during the Covid lockdown either. Kids don’t learn at home. Employees don’t work at home. Flimsy surgical masks don’t prevent you from contracting or spreading Covid – they don’t work, but they were required too. Fauci wore two masks, everywhere. He received four different shots of the “vaccine.” Guess who got Covid anyway?

Worst of all, the government spent unlimited sums of money on things like the ridiculous “paycheck protection program,” which might as well have been called “Fraud on a Federal Scale For You.”

The lie that we could print over the mortgage losses led directly to the lie that wearing a paper mask can stop a virus. Or that a vaccine created in a few weeks and tested only on a handful of people could stop a coronavirus that constantly mutates. With a printing press, there’s no problem that appears too big for the government to handle.

But, much like the “vaccine” and the paper masks, the printing press is just a lie too.

Altogether, the world’s central banks have printed over $25 trillion over the last 12 years.

In the United States, the printing was equal to more than 30% of our GDP. In the Eurozone, the printing was twice as large – over 60% of GDP. In Japan, the printing has been equal to over 100% of GDP.

You can think of these figures as being the size of the mirage we’ve been living in.

Reality looms.

This is why the Sino-Russian alliance is going to win WWIII. They not only have the advantages of population, territory, social stability, and manufacturing capacity, but they also have the advantage of not being hamstrung by completely screwed-up economic systems.

Capitalism has completely and utterly failed, as what presently passes for capitalism is nothing more than a massive credit-fueled Ponzi scheme.

One of the most important historical lessons of warfare: he who can pay his troops wins.

DISCUSS ON SG

When Dialectic Exceeds Rhetoric

It renders the rhetoric toothless and useless:

Liberal MSNBC hosts and pundits worried about potential Democratic losses in the upcoming midterm elections, took to Twitter this week to stoke fears of “fascism” if voters supported Republican Party candidates.

The liberal anchors were largely reacting to a New York Times poll that found independent voters were turning to the GOP over concerns about the economy.

In a melodramatic tweet, MSNBC’s Joy Reid bashed anyone who voted Republican as choosing “literal fascism.” “It’s terrifying how many Americans will choose literal fascism, female serfdom, climate collapse and the reversal of everything from Social Security & Medicare to student loan relief bc they think giving Republicans the power to investigate Hunter Biden will bring down gas prices,” she tweeted.

I’m neither a fascist nor a communist, but I would absolutely, one hundred percent, vote for a literal Italian fascist, a Chinese neo-communist or a medieval Norman aristocrat over the global satanists who presently rule the West. Even the literal German National Socialist Workers Party was less evil, less wicked, and less murderous than the global satanists.

That is not a defense of any of those evil historical ideologies and organizations. To the contrary, it is an indictment of the current global elite, who might – perhaps – be ever so slightly less awful and wicked than the elites of the Aztec and Carthaginian empires. Possibly.

And given how compromised the corrupt and corpocratic Republicans are themselves, literal fascists are probably to be preferred to them too.

DISCUSS ON SG

Elizabeth the Catastrophic

Ann Barnhardt’s indictment of the late Queen Elizabeth II is as savage, and as accurate, as one might expect.

Queen Elizabeth II, already being called “Elizabeth the Great”, presided as monarch over the most rapid and profound societal, cultural, religious and imperial collapse in human history, it seems to me. Any historians that would like to chime in on this question, please email me. I truly can’t think of another example in history that was as severe and as rapid as what has happened in Battenburgian Britain. Consider what the both the British Empire AND the British culture were in ARSH 1952, and what they are today. When Elizabeth took the throne, it was literally true that “the sun never set” on the British Empire. They had already lost India just five years earlier in ARSH 1947, but in ARSH 1952 the U.K. had real, legitimate control of massive swaths of Africa, a huge presence in SE Asia, Hong Kong, the entirety of Oceania and the South Pacific, the Falklands, a large presence in the West Indies and the Caribbean, and, of course, nearly half of North America. Today, almost every colony and territory has declared total independence, and the so-called “Commonwealth” nations are IN NAME ONLY. The United Kingdom has ZERO authority in say, Canada. Or Australia. Or New Zealand. None. And everyone knows it. And the only thing keeping Argentina from invading and taking the Falklands is the fact that Argentina is such a broke, incompetent kakistocracy that they can’t. But the Royal Navy today could NOT defend the Falklands, and everyone knows it.

But more importantly, as “Head of State and Head of Nation”, Queen Elizabeth signed off on the largest race-replacement scheme in human history. Today, the city of London IS LESS THAN HALF WHITE – not merely “British”, but WHITE. It was in the high 90 percentile BRITISH when she took the throne. The City of Leicester is a fully-conquered territory of the Caliphate. Non-musloids basically can’t walk the streets of Leicester without risking their lives. Many cities in the U.K. have surpassed the percentage musloid from which only hot war can reclaim the territory. Queen Elizabeth SIGNED OFF ON ALL OF THIS.

Queen Elizabeth bestowed countless honors and knighthoods on the most open, disgusting sodomites and moral monstrosities, and British culture went from what we see depicted in “All Creatures Great and Small” to the totally degenerate, revolting Brit culture we see today ON HER WATCH. So when I saw people immediately beating the drum that Queen Elizabeth “reigned over the greatest advancement in British culture in history”, I just sat there shaking my head thinking, “How is it possible to be so utterly detached from reality?” Her reign was the most catastrophic civilizational collapse perhaps in human history.

The point is not that the queen was in full control of events, or that she was the primary architect of “the most castastrophic civilizational collapse,” which is still very far from complete. The point is that she was in a powerful position to resist the collapse of her realm and her society, but instead of living up to her duty to do so, chose to embrace it instead.

Far from being the glorious figure of history that some would paint her, she will instead be remembered as a sad and ineffectual creature who presided over the precipitous decline of the United Kingdom. And, of course, given the inversion being presented here, we know perfectly well precisely what is behind this attempted lionization.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Belated Peace

Japan wants to end its long-standing war with Russia. But it doesn’t appear that Russia is interested now.

ITEM: Tokyo, 3 October. The Japanese government will continue to adhere to the course aimed at concluding a peace treaty with Russia, despite the deterioration of bilateral relations, said Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in a keynote address at the opening of the extraordinary parliamentary session. Relationships between Russia and Japan has been overshadowed by the absence of a peace treaty for many years, which countries have not signed after World War II.

ITEM: Moscow, 3 October. Dmitry Peskov, Press Secretary for President Putin, ruled out the possibility of negotiations on a peace treaty with Japan. “Of course, in such conditions, negotiating a peace treaty is not possible,” Peskov told reporters. He added that Japan took a place among other Western countries and itself turned into an unfriendly country for Russia, which does not allow for negotiations.

So it doesn’t appear that Russia is going to be inclined to overlook the behavior of all of the unfriendly countries who stood with Ukraine in the future. But that’s not the interesting question here. That is: why Japan is so concerned about belatedly making peace with Russia at this particular moment in time?

DISCUSS ON SG

God Withdraws His Hand

Rod Dreher believes that God withdrew His hand of protection from the United States on September 11, 2002. And, let’s face it, subsequent events do tend to support his contention.

On this morning in 2002, I woke up before daylight to join a journalist friend in Brooklyn, where we both lived, and to follow a NYPD bagpipe band down to Ground Zero. The NYPD arranged for one of its piper bands to begin marching from each of the five boroughs, all to converge simultaneously at Ground Zero, where the memorial service was to begin.

The only people who had access to Ground Zero were family members of victims, and officials. But when we arrived there, a huge crowd had massed outside the perimeter. I said goodbye to my friend, and melted into the crowd to gather material for the piece I was writing for National Review (I had gone to work there that previous January). I remember standing there at the edge of Ground Zero, looking at my watch, waiting for the minute when, one year earlier, the first plane struck the north tower. That was also to be the signal for the start of the memorial service at Ground Zero.

At that moment — at that precise moment — a ferocious wind blew in from the same direction that the plane had taken. It was uncanny. There was a hurricane far offshore, and this was its outermost fringe. Still, the timing was eerie. That wind blew like something biblical, all morning. Signs, chairs, anything not tied down was blowing around. I walked around in that for hours, watching and talking to people.

After a while, I made it to the other side of Ground Zero, and took refuge from the wind in Trinity Church Wall Street, the old Episcopal church next door to the Twin Towers. The Archbishop of Canterbury had come over to preside over a memorial service there. I stayed for that. At some point towards the end of that service, we all heard the bells toll from Ground Zero next door, signaling the end of the reading of the names, and that service. When I emerged out onto the street a few minutes later, the wind had stopped. I don’t know what time it ceased to blow, but I would bet it was when the last name was read. In all these years since then, I’ve never seen anything online remarking about it one way or the other.

I walked back home to Brooklyn, wrote a piece for NR, filed it, then relaxed. The phone rang. It was my journalist friend, slightly freaking out. “Come over,” she said. I took off.

At her apartment, she led me into her home office, and pointed to something hanging on a wall. It was a small American flag, almost paper-thin, and very old. Judging from the number of stars on its field, I would say from the Revolutionary War era. It was mounted and framed under glass.

And it was torn from top to bottom, right down the middle.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

She explained that someone had given her that antique flag many years earlier. She had it framed, and it had hung on the wall of every home office she had had since then, wherever she lived. Every day she was home, for years, she had looked at it.

On this day, however, when she returned from Ground Zero, she noticed that it had been torn right down the middle.

Nobody else had been home, and if they had been, they would have had to have torn the paper on the back of the frame to get to the flag. It was untouched.

Both of us were, and are, Christian. The significance of this sign was not lost on us.

The curtain of the Temple separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the Temple. Traditionally, Christianity interprets this sign as indicating God’s judgment on the religion of His people, the Jews. I can’t speak for my friend, with whom I lost touch after I left New York, but I immediately interpreted the torn flag as a sign that God had withdrawn his protection from America, in judgment.

The USA observably ceased to be either a Christian or an American nation after its leaders surrendered to decades of tireless blandishments by judeochristians, led by Emmanuel Cellar, in 1965. But it wasn’t until 2001 that it became undeniable the US government was being ruled by a foreign elite, as the intentional sacrifice of thousands of US citizens for the purpose of engaging in imperialist warfare and eradicating historical American liberties sufficed to demonstrate.

If Dreher’s instincts are correct, then America was judged for its excessive tolerance, for committing the sins of Jeroboam and for its submission to evil, and was given over to the wicked to rule. And so long as the wicked rule, the suffering of Americans and those who live in US satrapies will continue, and most likely, will continue to increase.

What do Jeroboam’s sins have to do with us today? More than one would think, because the root cause of his sins is a temptation faced by most Christians today. Tolerance is a byword for virtue these days, but it was Jeroboam’s tolerance for that which was wrong which led to his disobedience, and ultimately culminated in the kingdom’s full-blown rejection of the Lord God of Israel. The Israelites did not immediately turn to Baal and Asherah, indeed, it took them many years to reach that state of apostasy. But the seeds of evil had already been sown by Jeroboam, in his willingness to tolerate forms of worship that God had expressly forbidden.

DISCUSS ON SG

Yes, They ARE Trying to Kill You

Karl Denninger doesn’t believe that the satanic global depopulationists actually want to kill anyone.

No, They’re Not Trying To Kill You

The common chestnut among those with a bit too much Reynolds wrapped around their head:

This is part of a depopulation move to kill you all.

IMHO, nope.

Why? Because while those who think they’re your “betters” are indeed desirous of you all getting “out of their way”, such as not being on Martha’s Vineyard if you’re brown and from Venezuela, unless of course you’re already a servant (Want to see this in prime action? Visit Jackson Hole, MV, or any of these other places); if you are suddenly there and “in their face” they want those folks as actual people who expect to be treated on an equal footing about as much as a plantation owner wanted the black folks in his house sleeping in his bed (other than when providing sexual pleasure “on demand”, of course.)

But even so all these people do fully understand that without plenty of roughnecks and “lessers” in the form of something as simple as a car mechanic they’re fucked. Their jet is useless without fuel in size and to get it to their airport it first must be drilled for, extracted, refined and then transported and none of these people will dirty their hands to do any of that. Never mind that effectively zero of them could replace a wheel bearing on their nice expensive car if it required it; without said replacement when it needs to be done the vehicle is a 2-ton brick.

Karl is a genuine American hero. His courageous work on the vaccine front saved many lives and families. He always tells the truth as best he sees it, and I regard his blog as one of the very few must-reads on the Internet.

He is a smart, observant, and rational man. But he is not, to the best of my knowledge, a religious man.

Which, I think, makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for him to connect the events that he analyzes so well today with the pattern of historic manifestations of the same evil that is ascendant today. Because the wicked elite are not rational, their motivations are difficult to comprehend, and their inspirations are inhuman.

But the one thing we do know about them is that they celebrate death and seek to create more of it everywhere they go and in everything they do.

So, yes, with all due respect, they are trying to kill you.

DISCUSS ON SG

Serbia Calls Out NATO’s Double Standard

It’s fascinating to see the same countries that bombed Serbia in its attempt to maintain its territorial integrity now claiming “territorial integrity” is the reason four pro-Russian provinces can’t be permitted democratic self-determination or to leave Ukraine:

Western countries have failed to explain why they have different points of view on Ukraine and Serbia’s territorial integrity, given that they support Kiev in its fight against Russia, but endorsed Kosovo’s independence, President Aleksandar Vucic said on Tuesday.

In an address to the UN General Assembly in New York, the Serbian leader stated that his state respects the territorial integrity of all countries, including Ukraine, and that many describe the hostilities between Moscow and Kiev as “the first conflict on European soil since WWII.” He said, however, that the truth about the violation of Serbia’s territorial integrity “is constantly unspoken.”

“We ask for a clear answer to the question I’ve been asking… for years – what is the difference between the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine and the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Serbia, which was grossly violated,” Vucic said, referring to the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

According to Vucic, Serbia “has never [set] foot” on anybody’s territory, but this “did not prevent the 19 richest NATO countries from attacking a sovereign country without a decision by the UN Security Council.”

He also said that while NATO pledged to respect the full territorial integrity of Serbia, it did not stop many Western countries from unilaterally recognizing the breakaway province of Kosovo in 2008. NATO occupied Kosovo in 1999, after a 78-day bombing campaign against what was then Yugoslavia. The province declared independence in 2008 with Western support. While the US and most of its allies have recognized it, many other countries, including Russia and China, have not.

NATO are not the good guys here. To the contrary, they are, and have been, the evil imperialists since 1990. The so-called “New World Order” that Bush the Elder announced on September 11, 1990, is the very Empire of Lies that Russia, China, and most of the rest of the world is now fighting.

Hence the demonic inversion that we witness on an almost daily basis these days. But it was there from the beginning.

Ours is a generation to finally see the emergence of promising, exciting new world order which we’ve sought for generations. And we are witness to the first demonstration of this new partnership for peace: a united world response to Iraq’s aggressive ambition.

George Bush, September 19, 1990

And now we know precisely whom had been seeking that “promising, exciting new world order” for generations, and what their real objectives are.

DISCUSS ON SG

Amazon’s Diary of Anne Frank

I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to this one.

Hey, if you don’t have a problem with ballpoint pens in 1941 and a teenage girl writing copiously about middle-aged male sexual fetishes on MySpace, then a simple change of skin color shouldn’t be a problem for you either. Also, Mary Beard was the historical consultant, and you know you can trust her. Checkmate, haters.

DISCUSS ON SG

WW3 Mobilization Math

The Tree of Woe contemplates WW3 from a historical and statistical perspective, and reaches precisely the same conclusions I have.

Today, Russia spends 4.1% of its GDP on its military; America spends 3.5%; and China spends 2.1%. (Saudi Arabia, at 10.4%, and Israel at 5.2% are the two biggest spenders by ratio.) They are essentially on pre-war footing, demobilized.

To what extent could today’s superpowers match the mobilization of the WWII-era US and USSR?

According to the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), about one-third of military spending is on personnel. The remainder is on equipment and operations, both of which are highly demanding on the economy’s manufacturing and energy sectors. At the outbreak of World War II, manufacturing and energy accounted for approximately 30% of the American GDP. From that basis, America spent 40% of its GDP on war. As a first approximation, therefore, the maximum extent to which an economy can be mobilized for defense spending might be 133% of its manufacturing and energy GDP.

At present, manufacturing and energy make up 41% of China’s GDP, 30% of Russia’s GDP, and 20% of America’s GDP. Therefore, the maximum mobilization we would expect their economy to achieve would be 54% for China, 40% for Russia, and 27% for America.

Wait, you ask — Why can’t we just “build more factories?” Because it’s very difficult to rapidly grow manufacturing. The fastest large-scale improvement I have found in looking at data is a 3% increase in the share of manufacturing per year for a major economy. Achieving this during wartime, when manpower is diverted into uniform and infrastructure is under attack seems unlikely. A nation can rapidly convert its peacetime manufacturing to wartime manufacturing, but it cannot rapidly build manufacturing capability where none existed. I assume that maximum mobilization might increase by at most 1% per year from their present level.

Even when taking advantage of pre-existing industrial infrastructure, mobilization is never instantaneous. In its best year, the US was able to mobilize from 10% to 35% (1941 to 1942), and the USSR was able to mobilize from 20% to 55% (1942 to 1943). That suggests the absolute best possible mobilization is a 3.5 increase annually. It’s not clear to me that any of today’s great powers could match those, due to the vastly increased complexity and fragility of our supply chains. Therefore I assume that actual mobilization can at most double yearly, until the maximum mobilization is reached. Therefore I estimate the following:

In one year, America could achieve 7% mobilization; in two years, 15% mobilization; in three years, 30% mobilization; in four years 31%; in five years 32%.

In one year, China could achieve 5% mobilization; in two years, 10%; in three years 20%; in four years 40%; in five years 60%.

In one year, Russia could achieve 8% mobilization; in two years, 16%; in three years, 33%; in four years 44%; in five years 45%.

Now, in considering what mobilization as a percentage of GDP means, we need to be sure we are comparing apples to apples. A comparison of nominal GDP won’t do. At a minimum we need to use Purchasing Parity Power (PPP) adjusted GDP. But even that might understate the relative capabilities.

In a July 2017 white paper by the Heritage Foundation called “Putting Defense Spending in Context: Simple Comparisons are Inadequate,” the authors found:

For the equivalent investment in terms of U.S. dollars, China and Russia respectively have 1.7 times and 2.5 times the purchasing power within their domestic markets… Due to differences in purchasing power across economies, then, two countries could hypothetically field the same size and quality force at dramatically different spending levels.

For example, the Chinese Yuzhao-class landing platform dock (LPD) costs approximately $300 million to build and is most similar in terms of displacement and capability to the U.S. San Antonio-class LPD. However, the purchase price of the San Antonio-class LP exceeds $1.6 billion per unit…

In the March 2015 article “China’s Military and Growing Political Power,” the CEPR notes:

Using exchange rates comparisons significantly understates the Chinese military spending. A much more realistic assessment is obtained using PPP terms… China’s military budget was 18% of that of the US using market exchange rate comparisons, but 33% of the one of the US using PPP exchange rates…

The correct exchange rate with which to compare military spending would be a price or unit cost ratio of military services in each country… We use market exchange rates as a measure of relative military equipment costs facing each country… For relative operations costs, however, we use PPP exchange rates as a reasonable proxy… Finally, relative personnel costs are obtained using manufacturing wages, either gross or net of on-costs, since this represents the social opportunity cost of military employment.

This low relative military costs exchange rate implies a real value of China’s military spending of 40% of the US in real terms – larger than the level implied by using PPP rates of 33%, and much larger than the market exchange rate based figure of 18%.

Thus the best estimates are that in relative terms, we have to scale up China’s GDP by (40%/18%) = 220% in order to get an accurate picture of its potential mobilization. Unfortunately CEPR did not provide a similar ratio for Russia, but we can approximate it by multiplying Russia’s PPP multiplier (250% of nominal GDP) by (40%/33%) = 120%, for a total multiplier of 300%.

This is not a pretty picture if you like the Star-Spangled Banner. China’s military-effective GDP is already almost 200% the size of America’s military-effective GDP, and its effective military spending is 130% of our own! Meanwhile, Russia — currently mocked in the mainstream press as an economic weakling — is maintaining an effective military budget of 30% of America’s. Given that the US tries to maintain military power across the entire globe, while Russia only needs regional dominance, this should make us very uneasy about our relative capabilities.

It gets worse when we consider mobilization over time. Much, much worse. US deindustrialization has virtually crippled our large-scale mobilization, while China has become an Arsenal of Authoritarianism. Below I have tabulated each nation’s expected Mobilization Ratio and used that to calculate its Effective Military Spending (EMS) per year of World War Next.

The longer the war goes on, the worse it looks for America. In year one, America is able to spend 64% of China and Russia’s defense budget. By year five, America can only spend 26% of its rivals’ defense budgets.

The Tree of Woe’s detailed research backs up the previously observed historical analogy, which is to say that the USA and its European allies today are in much the same position that Germany and its allies were during WW2. Neither the superior quality of German and Japanese manufacturing nor the superior quality of German troops were sufficient to even begin to make up for the massive advantage in manpower and manufacturing enjoyed by the USA-USSR-UK alliance.

The Sino-Russian alliance alone dwarfs the manpower and manufacturing capacities of the NATO alliance, even if NATO’s prospective allies in South Korea, Japan, and Israel are included. And if the rest of the BRICSIA nations – who are already aligned with Russia in this global conflict – are included in the equation, the conclusion is even more heavily stacked against the Were-West.

The key is this: manufacturing capacity can be repurposed during wartime, but it cannot be constructed from scratch.

This mobilization math explains why the neocons and their pets presently presiding over the European nations have been so desperate to “win the war in Ukraine”. The Empire That Never Ended’s chances in the proxy war between Kiev and the Donbass republics were considerably better than its odds in either a regional war or a global war, although as we’ve seen, the proxy war has already been won by the two former Ukrainian republics.

DISCUSS ON SG

The TWA 800 Coverup

This “conspiracy theory” has been so obvious for so long that it won’t surprise anyone to learn that US Navy personnel who were on the scene have confirmed that the US Navy shot down the passenger plane:

On the evening of July 17, 1996, as Teele relates, the Carr was trying out new AN/SPY-1 Alpha radar as well as new AN/SPS 49 radar. For this simulated air attack, the target was to be a drone pulled by a military aircraft using a thousand-or-so foot chain. Teele was among the personnel monitoring this activity from within the ship’s combat information center (CIC).

In its November 1997 summary the FBI acknowledged that three submarines — the USS Normandy, the USS Trepang, and the USS Albuquerque — were in the “immediate vicinity of the crash site.” So too, said the FBI, were an Aegis cruiser, and a US Navy P-3 Orion. The P-3, in fact, just happened to be flying about seven thousand feet above TWA 800 when the plane was blown out of the sky.

Teele puts the USS Carr in this group as well. Although he has not said so publicly, Teele strongly believes that the USS Leyte Gulf, another Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser, was involved. With Teele confirming there was a drone in the mix, the U.S. Navy had all the “combatants” needed for a Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) missile test.

In 1996, the Navy was in the process of introducing this enormously complex system. The CEC was created to integrate the information coming from each of the combatant’s sensors — range, bearing, elevation, Doppler updates etc. — and feed the integrated picture back to the individual combatants. In the CEC live-fire tests, which began as early as 1994 in Puerto Rico, drones played the role of “unknown assumed enemy.” The P-3’s role was to relay data among the various units involved. In this way, as Teele explains, one ship could track the assumed enemy, and another ship could fire.

Teele describes the assumed enemy as a “low, slow flier flying toward us.” The tragedy that followed would likely have been averted had not air traffic control held the Paris-bound TWA 800 at 13,700 feet to allow US Air 217 heading north to pass safely overhead. “I believe we jumped the gun,” said Teele. “We had a track on a contact that came out that fit the profile that we were given.” TWA 800 became the “assumed enemy.” Says Teele, “It matched the drill.”

Two missiles were fired. Over his headset, Teele heard the announcement, “Birds away.” A few minutes later, he heard “Splash,” meaning the missiles had hit the target. Soon after that, he heard someone say, “Wo, wo, wo.” And another person added, “Wait a minute. We hit an Airbus.”

In fact, eight years earlier, at the tail end of the Iran-Iraq War, an Aegis cruiser, the USS Vincennes, fired two Standard Missiles at a commercial Iranian Airbus, IR 655. IR 655 had reached 13,500 feet, a final altitude almost identical to TWA 800’s. Capt. Will Rogers III gave the order to fire. Rogers and his crew had mistaken the ascending passenger jet with 290 people on board for a descending Iranian F-14, a fighter plane. Stuff happens.

The stuff that happened on the night of July 17, 1996 outraged Teele’s CO, Captain Wray. “These have got to be the dumbest idiots I’ve ever seen in my life,” Teele remembers Wray as saying. “How do you accidentally fire a missile? You don’t know the color of missiles? One is blue. One is white. Blue mean training. White means live. You’ve got to be stupid to put a white on the rail.” Although his memory as to which ship was responsible is admittedly uncertain, Teele believes it was the Leyte Gulf.

Despite the long-established mandate that neighboring ships rush to the scene of an accident, the Carr turned tail and headed out to sea “at top speed.” Teele’s leading petty officer made it so clear that he was to say nothing of what he saw or heard. He then issued the order, “Pull the RD390 tapes, close all positional log books, including the bridges, tape them and leave them on the DRT table!”

The documents were then taken to a place called the “shred room” where they were destroyed using salt water and a shredder. “We ran to Bermuda where we were not allowed to leave the ship, no phone calls, emails secured, and nothing was to be discussed!” says Teele. “Everyone that was involved was told in CIC, ‘This didn’t happen!’” As far as the major media are concerned, it never did.

Of course, given what we now know about government-related incidents, the more serious question isn’t whether the US Navy shot down TWA 800 or not, but whether the firing of the live missile at the airliner was intentional or accidental.

In the post-vaxx era, argumentum ad incredulitatem is no longer viable. Because now we all know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that U.S. government employees are absolutely capable of doing something like that.

DISCUSS ON SG