[Federalist] Tucker Carlson admitted on Wednesday that he’s "never been this worried about anything" as much as he is about where the country is headed under a deep state that repeatedly targets its political enemies and "rigs" elections instead of acting on voters’ desires.
Carlson made his anxieties about the state of our constitutional republic known in an interview with Adam Carolla, who asked the former Fox News host to weigh in on the coordinated effort by intelligence agencies and political elites to keep former President Donald Trump from taking back the White House.
To kick off the question, Carolla showed Carlson a clip of now-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer telling MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in January 2017 that it was "dumb" for Trump to "take on the intelligence community" because "they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."
"From what I am told, they are very upset with how he has treated them and talked about them. And we need the intelligence community," Schumer said.
Carlson said that every time he hears Schumer’s words in that clip, "it renders me speechless."
"That’s the end of democracy," Carlson remarked. "I don’t know how you can in the same sentence say ’I’m for democracy’ and then say ’actually, our country is run by a shadowy intel agency no one elected and no one has oversight over."
[Federalist] Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, better known as "Joe the Plumber," passed away from pancreatic cancer this week. For those too old to remember him, Wurzelbacher, 49, became a minor political celebrity during the 2008 presidential race when he confronted Barack Obama, surely the most coddled candidate until that time, about his far-left economics.
Wurzelbacher, who worked at a small plumbing company near Toledo, believed that Obama’s redistributive policies would hurt small businesses. It was clear enough that the Democratic Party’s candidate was intent on instituting as much top-down federally managed economic control as possible. This was obvious.
Wurzelbacher’s question sparked plenty of ginned-up indignation from the left. As Byron York noted at the time, if Joe the Plumber had any unsavory events in his past, we were probably going to find out soon enough. Indeed, the same press that had allowed Obama to fabricate much of his life story jumped into action. ABC News reported that Wurzelbacher owed $1,200 in taxes, The New York Times reported that he wasn’t actually a licensed plumber, and so on.
Obama would answer Wurzelbacher’s accusation over the next couple of weeks with a torrent of platitudes and strawmen. It was clear the soon-to-be president believed we were a nation awash in breathtaking greed, inequality, and exploitation. By 2011, in a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, Obama dropped the pretense and made a progressive case against markets, which he called a "simple" ideology that "speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. ... And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work." Today, regrettably, this kind of statist rhetoric runs the partisan gamut.
Obama was interested in transforming America into something distinct and new. Democrats viewed Obama as a counterrevolutionary against Reaganism. And, whereas Reagan promised Americans the power to build their own shiny cities on hills, Obama promised endless dependency and handouts. So they were right.
#1
My guess is Soetoro has been an intelligence community stringer since his early college days. I also suspect the family had been under British intelligence surveillance since the Kenyan 'Mau Mau' insurgency period. As we all know, stuff on communists back then got passed around. I doubt his recruitment was much of a challenge for the community.
Frank Marshall Davis would have most certainly been under surveillance by the intelligence community. It would follow that his associates would have been monitored as well.
#2
About damn time the FBI did something right. But I'm tempted to compare this to some of the over hyped drug busts our government periodically announces. Those busts are so big you might wonder how the cartels remain in business, yet the cartels are still doing just fine and there is no shortage of illicit drugs on the streets.
Sorry, but I have lost all faith in the FBI and DoJ. If Merrick Garland announces a big victory like this, I can't help being skeptical. Don't stop backing up your files.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
08/31/2023 13:06 Comments ||
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opinion of Lawrence Person of BattleSwarm
Technology marches on, and there's no reason you couldn't have drones half the size and one-tenth the cost of an A-10 armed with 10-12 smart missiles replacing most of the A-10"s mission capabilities. Whether the Air Force will let that happen is another question, as the Sky Warden shows the Air Force never wants to give up a mission, but drones have proven too valuable in Ukraine to shove that genie back inside the bottle.
Finally, note that when asked about obtaining A-10s, Ukraine"s own defense minister said they weren't the right aircraft for the role.
I have to reluctantly conclude that the time for the A-10 may indeed be drawing to a close.
Posted by: lord garth ||
08/31/2023 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[16 views]
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#1
Yeah, every team gets a 'strapped-on' drone operator for CAS. I'm not seeing it.
#2
"...drones half the size and one-tenth the cost of an A-10 armed with 10-12 smart missiles replacing most of the A-10"s mission capabilities."
*Uh-huh* I heard the same 'transformation' hocus pocus about the F-35 and the LCS... a whole lotta 'mosts' about how they will do better than proven concepts ... and cheaper too!
#3
To me its a Law of Diminishing Returns' thing -- the best designs are small, task specialized and cheap enough you can kamikaze it if you don't have any better payload. The more 'bells and whistles' it has the less you want to actually risk it. Not to mention how do you handle EMCOM and ECM in a peer or near peer conflict ...oh, you make an expendable drone more expensive.
#6
The A-10 may be old but like a previous comment, some things are just right. Do agree the Air Warden has its place but like anything the Air Farce touches, there has to be some gold plate added. The cockpit armoring is essential but look at some of the other things that are not for a CAS platform.
And please for God’s sake, stop the ‘F-35 can do the Watthog’s job’ spewing……..
Wanna cancel something, start with that overpriced toy and buy more F-22’s.
#7
None of this would be happening if Martha McSally, the "senator from A-10" had been elected...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/31/2023 7:45 Comments ||
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#8
...Mr. Hog is, sadly, coming up on the far end of its survivability curve. I worked Hogs and bow to no one in my admiration for them, but we need to look at reality. It was the perfect weapon for the GWOT, but in a peer-vs.-peer war, they will be in mortal danger.
Also, to USN, Ret.: Interestingly, the tooling for the -22 was 'accidentally scrapped' not long after the decision was made to prune the program. Somebody at DOD - or higher - was bound and damned determined to drive a stake through the Raptor's heart, and that was the best way and surest way to do it. Without the tooling you can't do rebuilds to keep 'em in service longer, and you can't build any for the Australians and Japanese, both of who seriously wanted some.
#11
I think it's time to break the "Key West" agreement and turn close air support over to the Army. Along with the budget for it.
Let the blue sky boys stop pretending they care about the ground outside of an air base.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
08/31/2023 10:38 Comments ||
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#12
As an 11B, I loved the Hog. Watching them live fire was an amazing experience. I was very much against retiring it during the GWOT as it was a perfect platform for the anti-insurgency operations over in the sandbox.
But those days are over and as the skies over Ukraine is proving, the days of the dedicated CAS aircraft is coming to an end and... gods it hurts to say... so is the end of the A-10. The future will have swarms of remote and AI automated cheap drones that can hit an armored column and wipe it out. Still a place for attack helicopters, as long as they can fire from cover like the Longbow (AH-64D Apache) with its radar on top that can guide hellfires into targets where the rest of the airframe can stay behind cover. But other CAS birds are gonna die if they pop up.
#13
^ Exactly! The MANPADS are getting smarter and smarter so the days of the persistent, loitering CAS bird or helo are coming to a close -- for the moment because who knows what technological marvel will reverse that trend? The A-10, AH-64 or even some converted crop duster are just "a target" and when directed energy weapons get better ...*shudder* the saying is 'it flies it dies' unless you hug the trees sneaking in and out.
#14
As an ancient ground-thug with infantry and armor background, I have a certain fondness for stupid, kinetic weapons. So my KSA's are way out of date and limited. Given that, it seems to me if it is smart enough to fly independently, it is expensive to produce in mass quantities. If it requires external comms to control it, quantity is less of a problem but it is ultimately jammable by some form of emission. Directed energy seems a great new tool for ground attack and air defense, but the power source demands impact land mobility.
After the initial swarm, counter swarm, and heaps of really expensive and complex wreckage from the crust engagements, it seems likely that the winner of a protracted contest will still have more and better guys with things that go bang and ka-boom where somebody aims them, and the ability to put them where they are needed, when they are needed. Just saying....
#15
The future in contested airspace is unmanned. You may see a return of high-performance interceptors firing hypersonic air-to-air against bombers or cruise missiles, but it makes no sense to risk a pilot in a situation where an expendable munition can be delivered cheaper, faster and more safely.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/31/2023 12:30 Comments ||
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#16
MM, how hard do you think is to jam UAV to operator communication?
#17
Thanks for that info re: tooling, Mike. That seems to happen quite frequently: referring to B-49 Flying Wing, P-6 SeaMaster
, sr-71, F-14, and sure there are others.
#18
Re jamming, there will be downlinks from sats that won't be easily jammed from the ground. Measure / countermeasure is an ongoing contest, not a "checkmate, your done" scenario.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/31/2023 13:30 Comments ||
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#19
#18 Provided the surprised side survives the surprise.
#20
how hard do you think is to jam UAV to operator communication?
I have experience with this and the answer is "Depends".
A civilian drone, piece of cake. They operate on very narrow and known frequencies and it is easy to overwhelm them on those.
Military, especially with frequency hopping technology is a different story. Jammers work by flooding communication frequencies with white noise so the target can't talk/see/target anything. "Burning" through the jamming is finding out what frequencies are being jammed and tuning your equipment so the noise is filtered out. With the radio equipment the west uses that frequency hops (and is encrypted), it is much more difficult for a jammer to jam all the radio possibilities that can be used. Best bet to defeat military drones is ground fire and EMP. Don't know how well the last one would work next to your electronics, but the engineers can figure something out.
Problem with a jammer that just blasts all frequencies is not only does it take a shit ton of power (radio waves are converted from electricity to electromagnetic waves, so more waves=more power) and you would have to have it hooked to a city power grid, but it would also keep you from talking/targeting at the same time as your shit would be jammed. Russians actually had a problem with this at the beginning of the war and turned off their jammers allowing the Baykar to cause havoc as it was jammed before.
So in short, it can be done depending on platform, but the engineers are working on ways to get around it.
#24
EMP bursts will quickly identify drones that have been hardened and those that have not and the contractors who cheated on the contracts. Hardened drones are not going to be 'cheap'.
#25
As some posters have noted about drones: More Features = Higher Cost. Another thing that bothers me is the worshipping of the Goddess of Stealth while forgetting the major problem that stealthy vehicles work best alone. At some point as the sky becomes cluttered your stealthy vehicle is likely to be spotted, interfered with or shot down because the other side was shooting at someone else. Besides as soon as you start firing you stop being stealthy.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
