Essays

Be Careful Of Your Sources

Michael Cessna November 10, 2023

In the last week or so, many people have been sharing images of what they feel are alarming amounts of military air traffic culled from various online tracking websites, purporting to show a “highly unusual” increase in air traffic throughout the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean (a.k.a., “The Levant”).

For those who are exploring a new landscape on the internet, such as aircraft and ship tracking websites, these images can, in fact, look incredible. Most of the online maps are indeed very cluttered, to such an extent that many computers have a hard time keeping up with the running updates, unless a user “drills down” to a very narrow region.

And to be fair, given the recent events within the region, with terrorist massacres in Israel, leading to brutal counterattacks by Israel, and the hysterical responses from throughout not just the region, but the threat of this new “Yom Kippur War” expanding to include most of the region – something that the few sane leaders of the world ‘body politic’ is desperate to prevent – is certainly making many people terrified of anything new and strange, that is presented with either incomplete, or flat-out wrong context, deliberately or otherwise.

The short answer to the “unusual increase” in aircraft activity in the Middle East is that it is a giant “nothingburger.” The long answer is far more mundane…but not so the reason behind it.

The fact is that Israel has severely neglected its defenses, both internal and external, for at least twenty years. Externally, Israel fell into the complacency trap of “Victory Disease” (the laziness and complacency resulting from too many victories), in that it felt that its “Iron Dome” missile defense system was mostly unbeatable, while its more conventional forces could easily handle anything that “Iron Dome” could not.

Internally, this dangerous complacency was compounded by Israel’s disastrous moves, beginning in 2012, to restrict the ability of Israeli citizens not on military or police duty, to owning or possessing military style firearms.

And on October 7, 2023, Israel and its citizens were given a stark wake up call as to why you should never beat your swords into plowshares before the right time.

As a result, Israel suddenly found itself in a desperate, grueling and bloody war against an implacable and bloodthirsty enemy at one end of its country, while facing another potential – and much more dangerous – foe to their north. While this is certainly not an unusual circumstance for Israel, Israel the state, as well as Israeli citizens, now finds itself being rudely forced to reorient its mental perspective on reality.

All-out war, as should be clear to anyone who has read an article on the Russo-Ukrainian War in the last almost two years, consumes people, ammunition, vehicles and supplies at a ferocious rate. While the scale and pace of the war in Israel may not currently be at the same overall scale as what is happening in Ukraine, when adjusted for scale, Israel is not much better off than Ukrainians.

In answer, the United States – long Israel’s only truly reliable ally – has doubled down on US support to Israel in the current conflict, complete with sending two complete carrier battle groups to the region, potentially committing US forces to direct combat in the conflict.

And fears of a widening of the conflict have already been realized, as the USS Carney, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, has shot down multiple missiles launched by Houthi insurgents from their base areas in Yemen.

Obviously, no matter the Reader’s feelings – one way or another – about the current conflict, the United States has to supply Israel with weapons, ammunition and much else, exactly as it has for Ukraine. Normally, such supplies are sent by ship, and then by rail or road. The reason is simple: it is vastly more efficient than air transport.

Sometimes, however, speed is essential. Relatively small and light supplies, like ammunition and medical supplies, can be rushed to a conflict zone relatively quickly, as these are always the most critical supplies that would be needed early on in a conflict. In the case of any sudden uptick of military air traffic, however, there is currently another factor:

Volcanoes.

In 2010, a series of volcanic eruptions from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland in April of that year completely shut down all air traffic in Europe outside of Spain and a tiny portion of France. That was, obviously, a very annoying situation for many travelers, as it up-ended flights throughout the world.

Now, however, another Icelandic volcano threatens to erupt: the Blue Lagoon thermal spa, long a popular tourist destination, is threatening to erupt.

Military planners, already struggling to juggle the delivery of supplies to multiple active and potential combat areas, now have no choice but add the potential of a natural disaster shutting down European airspace for an unknown period. The only real option is to start drawing supplies from existing bases in the region, and sending those to Israel…by air.

At the same time, however, those supply bases will need to be restocked, and fast, given the potential for regional escalation. This problem can be solved via a surge in sending war materials and equipment to those bases via conventional shipping…that seems to be happening.

The Ready Reserve Force ship MV Cape Orlando is currently underway from Tacoma, WA, crossing the Pacific Ocean. The Cape Orlando, originally berthed in Oakland, was actually boarded by pro-Palestinian protesters on November 4th, delaying its departure for Tacoma. (The protestors were not charged.)

While the MV Orlando is certainly the most public of the ships potentially carrying supplies to the combat area, it is also certainly not the only one.

What is happening is clear: a giant “shell game” is underway, with supplies being shuffled as quickly as possible, to cover as many holes as have been left open by shockingly poor military policies by the West and its allies over the preceding c.30 years…But such circumstances cannot endure forever.

*Sun Tzu, Author of Art of War. Photo: Gary Todd, 2008. Public Domain.*

Because, as the Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote some 2,500 years ago, if you try to defend every point equally, every point will be weak.

*The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To*

No, They’re Not Drafting People…Yet

Michael Cessna November 3, 2023

A funny thing happened on the first of November of 2023. A few hundred (ultimately, up to eight hundred) Non-Commissioned Officers in the active duty US Army were stunned when they received orders, via email, to report – within a week – to a school none of them were expecting to attend: the Army’s recruiting school at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

This order, coming with no warning, is up-ending hundreds of enlisted families as there is little time to reorder the lives of married NCO’s. Compounding the problem, none of the soldiers ordered to the school knows where they will be assigned, leading to extreme uncertainty on where their new posting will be, as active duty recruiters are spread out across the country. This is guaranteed to strain relationships to the breaking point, compounding an already high divorce rate within the service.

As we reported previously, the harsh realities of the third decade of the 21st Century have caused not only the US Congress, but also the Defense Department, to begin discussing an idea that would have been unthinkable just ten years ago: the reinstatement of conscription, i.e., the Draft – and not simply the draft of the old days, which was male-only, but a draft which would almost certainly apply equally to women.

Needless to say, the sudden nature of the Army’s move has added fuel to the strident denunciations of the very idea by “Gen-Z” and their “Millennial” parents…And the Army’s move on the 1st of November is elevating the hysteria.

For the troops, it’s not so much that the recruiting school itself is overly difficult. It is the fact that most recruiters only volunteer for the duty reluctantly, as their usual alternative is a tour as a drill instructor, something that many NCO’s dread. This is because there has always been a stigma to the duty, dating from at least the official end of the draft in 1973, in that failing to meet assigned quotas of recruits can seriously damage the continuing career prospects of the recruiter. Recruiters are usually long serving NCO’s, with ten to twelve years in the service when they enter the recruiting school; this means that they have seriously committed to the idea of twenty to twenty-five years of service, in order to retire with a reasonable pension. That continued career, however, could be seriously damaged by a failed tour as a recruiter.

The reality, despite Gen-Z’s hysteria, is that the Army’s move has come – officially – as an unexpected result of recruiters and possible recruiter candidates leaving the service at an unexpectedly high rate. Functionally, sending an emergency draft of NCO’s to school to become recruiters – whether they want to be or not – is not a preparation for a reinstatement of conscription.

As we discussed previously, the military’s recruiting woes, where all of the military services except the Marine Corps and the Space Force, are missing their recruiting targets, are made worse when taking into account the comparatively small size of the Marine Corps and Space Force in contrast to the other services. The effects of badly managed “forever wars” and conflicts for over twenty years, coupled to other astoundingly bad decisions, have left the majority of the US population severely disinclined to support enlistment in general.

Obviously, the resulting falling recruitment numbers have left the US military, as a whole, in a dangerous situation, as mounting threats – from Ukraine and Israel, to Iran and China – equate to the likelihood that the United States may well find itself in a very large war – or two…or three – sooner than later. And, after spending some twenty years laser focused (albeit with a very smudged lens) on fighting insurgencies, the armed forces got a stark wake-up call from the Russo-Ukrainian War on casualty rates in large scale combat, to the point that the Army is desperately trying to relearn the flawed strategies of the 1970’s and 80’s, all while missing the mark in spectacularly catastrophic ways, that would be funny, if their effects were negligible…which they are not.

*105th Medical Battalion Aid Station (30th Inf Div), Mortain, France, August 1944. US Army Photo.*

Having stated the above, while the Army’s sudden orders are not a herald of a return to conscription in and of themselves, there is are a pair of outlying possibilities, that it could signal a middle ground” move, neutralizing a flawed medical screening system that has slashed the number of recruits by upwards of 25%. The return of medical waivers for volunteers for minor conditions dating from as long as a decade prior, would be seen as a solid move to increase recruit intakes. Of course, such a move would also open the way to waive medical issues for potential draftees.

Secondly, this move could signal actual preparation for renewed conscription laws, where recruiters could be assigned secondary duties to process a new wave of draftees. As we implied previously, a reintroduction of a Draft for Gen-Z and/or some Millennial’s would almost certainly spark a wave of draft dodging and draft riots on a scale that would make those of the Civil War era pale in comparison.

*An illustration in The Illustrated London News depicting armed rioters clashing with Union Army soldiers in New York City, July 1863. The Illustrated London News, 1863. Public Domain.*

And, of course, a third possibility is hanging in the air, namely, the idea of offering bounties and legal amnesty via recruitment to those “military age males” currently flooding across the southern border of the United States…

…However, considering how armed forces frequently act in their countries origin, this may well be more of a curse than a benefit.

The American Foreign Legion – Revisited

Michael Cessna October 27, 2023

Over a year ago, we discussed the possibility of an “American Foreign Legion”. This was a hypothetical idea, based on most of the US Armed Forces’ continual failure to meet their recruitment targets. Tangentially, about a month prior to this article, we discussed a possible “deep plan” (an idea that, admittedly, verged into raw “conspiracy theory”) that the disaster at the border, specifically in allowing ‘unfettered’ access to the nation for tens of thousands of “military-age males”, potentially allowing in a hostile army, an army that could be used for nefarious purposes against Americans in general, not simply that percentage of the population that is armed and very unhappy with the status quo in Washington, DC.

But – what if there is something else going on?

In writing that article this past September, there was a wrinkle that kept bothering this author, namely, that while the numbers of unaccompanied males entering the country was indeed dangerously large, it was not large enough to actually be a significant threat to the supposed target, that being those unhappy gun owners.

Something, some other point, was missing.

But then, a funny thing happened: Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States, and the most likely contender for the Republican nomination for President in 2024, stated “categorically” that he would round up and deport every person currently being allowed over the border…

However, this doesn’t make a great deal of sense: how could such a thing be accomplished? Leaving aside the fact that such a program would certainly be fought tooth and nail at every step in Congress and the Courts, the problem is similar to “confiscating guns”: With no registry of firearms, police officers would have to raid and search every single building in the United States, to effectively “confiscate” privately-held firearms. Even assuming that absolutely no resistance to such a thing would occur – a notion that is, quite literally, “whistling past the graveyard” – there are simply not enough law enforcement officers available to conduct those searches. The idea is ludicrous.

But not when it comes to the flood of “migrants” crossing the border. The reason is that those crossing the line, while largely vanishing into the masses of large cities, are in fact on the radar of various agencies of the Federal government, not least because the governors of Texas and Florida are not doing all of the busing of those migrants to cities like Chicago and New York City. And this is over and above the “CBP One” app those migrants carrying smartphones are encouraged to place onto their phones. Those carrying such apps on their devices are loading tracking software that gives them a level of legitimacy to then file for status as refugees entitled to economic support with state and local agencies.

Assuming that Donald Trump were to win in 2024, and would attempt to make good on his campaign promise to deport illegal migrants, and, given the certain resistance to such an attempt, if presented with an option to “negotiate a middle ground”, would Donald Trump do so?

Given both the nature of his character, and factors we will look at below, such a negotiation is almost a given.

What is this “middle ground” approach? Simply put – join an “American Foreign Legion”, or face immediate arrest and deportation.

This is not idle speculation. In Issue 3 of Volume 53 of Parameters, the magazine of the US Army War College, there is an article from August of 2023, “A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force”, discussing the need to seriously rethink the Draft. Strident calls from the mainstream press’ gatekeepers to the contrary, this article is blunt, to the point that it is worth quoting:

“…These numbers cannot fill the existing gaps in the active force, let alone
any casualty replacement or expansion during a large-scale combat operation.
The implication is that the 1970s concept of an all-volunteer force has outlived
its shelf life and does not align with the current operating environment.
The technological revolution described below suggests this force has reached
obsolescence. Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well
require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and
a move toward partial conscription.16…”

It is that superscript note that presents an issue, as at press-time, the referenced article, “Was Fifty Years Long Enough? The All-Volunteer Force in an Era of Large-Scale Combat Operations”, by Kent Park, is not available for review.

This is a direct and pointed statement that the US Armed Forces need to consider the likelihood that the government will have to resort to a new Draft to meet it’s operations needs.

But – why?

Simply put, both “Millennial’s” and “Gen-Z” have little interest in volunteering for military, despite eye-watering bonuses of up to $75,000, over and above issues such as chronic obesity and a medical screening process that eliminates up to 25% of potential recruits who do volunteer. Bland platitudes from military managers wearing stars to the contrary, this is situation is very likely to persist.

And yet – for good or ill, the United States needs to keep recruits flowing into its units…And a “negotiated solution” to the illegal immigrant crisis is a very attractive answer.

Speaking strictly hypothetically, such a force would be easily and quickly fielded. All that would be necessary would be deploying fingerprint scanners to recruiting offices, to verify whether the illegal immigrant had been arrested while in the United States before that point. If not, the illegal immigrant could be offered a minimal cash bounty for enlisting, considerably less than those currently being offered to citizens born here, along with a guarantee of amnesty and legitimized citizenship after a minimum of four years’ service.

This is a very attractive prospect to someone coming from a culture that respects and/or fears soldiers, and which neatly sidesteps the problem of a large percentage of bitter and bluntly un-patriotic teens and twenty-something’s who would absolutely not report to a Draft board if faced with the prospect…

…It’s almost as if it were a planned operation.

“Five-D Chess”, indeed.

The New Pulse of the Neo-Con Forever War

Michael Cessna October 20, 2023

What follows is an “estimate of the situation”, concerning what may well become known as the “Guns of October”. This is a strategic assessment of the current situation in the Levant, and what the deeper plan[s] may be. Nothing in this article is based on “classified information” or “anonymous sources”, but sober estimates based on training, experience, intuition and “informed speculation”.

Around the world, October 7th stunned many people. Even after over twenty years of continuous warfare, the scenes of slaughter coming out of Israel were stunning, both in their daring, but even moreso for their brutality and savagery. Inevitably, perhaps, some people have began to promote an idea that the Israeli High Command was operating in full knowledge of what Hamas was going to do, because there was “no way” that the vaunted Israeli intelligence agencies could have missed Hamas’ preparations.

The fact is, people are always people, and people make mistakes – often, those mistakes boggle the imagination with their stupidity. There is no real evidence of anything like an intentional conspiracy on the part of the Israeli High Command’s part happening.

In this case, however, there are parties throughout the world, who have been desperate for a crisis like Yom Kippur 2.0 to restore their flagging efforts. This group has been pushing an endless series of wars since the 1990’s, and while their influence is, indeed great, they are masters of the notion espoused by one-time White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s quip, “… you never want a serious crisis to go to waste…”

The people in power, or hanging on to the tailings of power, who espouse such ideas, are known as “neo-cons”…But – what is a “neo-con”?

Foreign Policy Magazine accurately describes neo-cons as “liberal imperialists on steroids”. They are firm believers in the notion of a highly totalitarian vision of the so-called “Pax Americana”, a series of policies that have produced a national debt in excess of an eye-watering $33 trillion, as of 10/18/2023. These beliefs – and the people behind them – also led to the roiling disasters in Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and most of the rest of the Middle East.

Another key descriptor of the neo-cons is that they have no political party, beyond that which is most expedient for them at the moment. Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928 – 2017), one-time National Security Advisor to Democrat party President Jimmy Carter, laid out the neo-con strategy and thought in his 1997 book, “The Grand Chessboard”. His criticisms of Republican President George W. Bush’s handling of the post-9/11 wars were not one of actual opposition, but complaining about their mis-handling.

Neo-Con thinking is also at the core of the Russo-Ukrainian War that began in February of 2022. No matter what side of that conflict the Reader may fall on, the fact is that – like Japan attacking Pearl Harbor in 1941 – the West, led by the United States, goaded Russia into its attempt to dismember the Ukrainian state. Why? Because the neo-cons desperately wanted to initiate Cold War 2.0, because Islamic jihadi’s were simply not working as an existential threat to Western society that justified obscenely massive military spending; terrorists are annoying, but they will never seriously threaten the Western social order.

Russia and China, on the other hand…

In early-to-mid 2022, there was a point where the world held its breath, as it seemed that the major powers of the world might actually enter into direct, large-scale combat with each other, something that has not been seen since 1945. While that danger still looms, the important takeaway, is that these situations have sparked increasingly strident calls to revamp western military establishments, to something resembling “the old days”.

But – how does this relate to the “Guns of October”?

In the aftermath of the seeming failure of neo-con ambitions as the “Global War On Terror” sputtered out in the mid-20-teens, despite the flare-up provided by the so-called “Arab Spring”, the neo-con movement became increasingly desperate for something to revive their plans to continue their series of planned wars, the exhaustion and disgust of the people’s of the West – and Russia – over the never-ending series of wars at the dawn of what should have been a “golden century” for humanity.

The clearest example of the desperation of the neo-cons, including their abject hatred of US President Donald Trump, came when Trump rejected their plans to strike three targets in Iran in response to the 2019 downing of an unmanned US drone. Trump canceled the retaliatory attacks when he was informed that the attacks were expected to kill at least 150 Iranians; Trump did not feel that level of retaliation to be a “proportionate” response to shooting down an unmanned drone.

But now, with a reimposition of sanctions against Russia in April of 2021, leading to a near-war with that state, the neo-cons within Washington DC and allies in several European governments have been awaiting a crisis of an appropriate scale to move the world back into the realm of “forever wars”.

Enter October 7th, of 2023.

With increasing calls in the West to end the open and naked barbarity of Hamas – barbarity that organization happily live-streamed, until it realized how bad the optics were – coupled to the deranged bleatings of the Communist mullahs in control of Iran – handed the neo-cons the golden crisis they have desperately needed to galvanize Western governments into continuing the wars: the United States – even under an “anti-Israel” establishment – cannot oppose Israel in assaulting Gaza, nor in hammering the Iranian-back Hezbollah organization in southern Lebanon, especially in the face of Hamas’ barbarity, without suffering catastrophic political consequences. Similarly, the Western European “street” is fed up with their government’s policies of accommodation and appeasement of “refugees” who spare no expense to tell the world how much they hate their “hosts”, who spared little expense to give them shelter and sanctuary.

Caught in the middle, are the Muslim governments of the region, none of whom want anything to do with this war, but who have enough internal problems that they cannot be seen by their populations to be completely abandoning the Palestinians. But, with more and more US Navy warships being deployed to the region at speed, the possibility of an “incident” occurring that “required” a military response against Iran – one that would make the Iraq war look like a training exercise – is an increasingly likely possibility.

Why is this important? Put simply, the United States does not have the manpower to fight the wars the neo-cons want the West to fight. As has been pointed out previously at the Freedomist, two decades of no-victory wars – as well as policies to insult and demean the US military’s primary recruiting pool – have turned a generation of potential recruits firmly against military service…so much so, that there has been a quietly increasing spate of military officers “speaking truth to power”, pointing out that the current world strategic will eventually force the United States to return to conscription, the dreaded “D-word”, that has been anathema to both the political and military spheres alike, for fifty years, since peacetime conscription was ended in the US by President Richard M. Nixon in 1973.

The neo-cons have painted themselves into a corner: They have relentlessly pursued aggressive policies that have burned off most of any good will built up by the United States over the past four decades, in pursuit of a strategy of continual conflict that requires a level of military recruitment that is a pale memory. At the same time, their actions have severely damaged the US economy, because markets not under a regimen of centralized planning respond poorly to toxic cycles of borrowing money, then borrowing more money to simply pay the interest, all while expanding the pool of currency by running the printing presses at high speed.

Likewise, the manufacture of basic war materials has been so neglected the West is finding it difficult to supply a single large war, much less multiple wars.

With much of the potential military recruit-base firmly rejecting staggering enlistment bonuses of over $50,000, there will come a point where the United States will be forced to attempt to revive the Draft for 18-to-30 year-olds…and there has been legislation language already draft, that was repeatedly submitted for some thirteen years.

By Democrat Party apparatchiks.

Needless to say, a Democrat administration reviving the Draft for 18-to-30 year-olds will be “interesting”, to say the least.

The bottom line?

Be careful what you wish for – especially if you have children.

Hamas And The Dangers Of Wargaming As Military Training

Michael Cessna October 16, 2023

SYNOPSIS

Let us start off by addressing the proverbial elephant in the room.

On October 7^th, 2023, the forces of Hamas – the Palestinian terror group with such delusions of legitimacy that they haven’t bothered with elections since attaining power – launched a short, sharp and brutal assault into southern Israel. For the first time since the rise of ISIL in 2011, the world was “treated” to a level of sadistic brutality that beggars the imagination. The acts of savagery – including the live-streamed slaughter, brutalization and kidnapping of mostly under-30 year olds at a literal “peace festival” – stunned the “polite” world as much as the apparent failure of some of the most vaunted intelligence services in the world.

The resulting war, on the fifty-year anniversary of the first “Yom Kippur War”, is now being termed “Israel’s 9/11”.

This article will not go any further into the political situation. Likewise, “sides” are not our purpose, here. This is strictly an examination of Hamas’ military operations, based on published reports and “informed supposition”, from October 7 to October 14, 2023. A much more in-depth examination of the situation will be available to our subscribers towards the end of the month.

OVERVIEW

In the early dawn hours of October 7, Hamas combat units launched a “broad spectrum” attack from its sanctuaries in the Gaza Strip. The assault opened with a massive and concentrated barrage of rocket artillery. The artillery assault was large enough and concentrated enough that it overwhelmed the “Iron Dome” anti-missile system that Israel has relied on for over a decade to defend itself from such attacks.

As the rocket attacks opened, mobile combat groups – some dressed in Israeli Defense Force (IDF) uniforms – infiltrated border checkpoints and massacred or captured the troops within, most of whom seem to have still been asleep. Simultaneously, other units conducted combat breaching operations at several points along the border, using a variety of techniques, ranging from simple RPG-7 rocket, to dedicated breaching charges, to using civilian construction equipment to batter holes in the security fences. Mobil combat groups, mounted on “technicals” and small motorcycles, quickly swarmed through the breaches, and fanned out to assault small town and villages, ultimately capturing and holding these urban areas for up to four days, a circumstance that has not happened since Israel’s War of Independence in 1948.

*A map of the Gaza Strip showing key towns and neighbouring countries, 2009. Credit: Wikimedia User: Gringer. CCA/3.0*

Perhaps most spectacularly, an airborne element assaulted the aforementioned peace festival using “paragliders” to insert a raiding force into the festival grounds, timed to strike shortly before the arrival a relief convoy mounted in technicals.

In both cases, at the peace festival and in Israeli urban settlements, Hamas forces deliberately massacred civilians, and captured as many as possible, carting them off to Gaza to be explicitly used as hostages and human shields against the expected Israeli counterattack. This has resulted in the largest number of Jewish lives lost in a single weekend since the Holocaust of World War Two.

While some Hamas forces held out for as long as four or five days in places, the bulk of surviving Hamas units had retreated into Gaza within seventy-two hours.

ANALYSIS

Hamas’ attack, on the purely tactical level, stands as a masterclass in operational deception, tactical ingenuity, flexibility and maximizing limited supplies on a shoestring budget.

It was also a complete and abject failure.

Way back in 2022, we discussed the emerging phenomenon of small-scale, targeted, and focused military training that was available to the general public around the world with nothing more than an internet connection. And that remains true – anyone who is at least moderately intelligent and educated can learn a very great deal by searching out real military informational guides via the internet.

The unspoken cautionary warning in the last paragraph is that such information, if not presented in a coherent manner, will most certainly not convey the level of competence necessary to fight and win.

Case in point – Hamas.

While Hamas demonstrated a surprisingly level of competence at the commando/light infantry level of warfare, its forces were absolutely no match for their enemy, once that enemy roused itself, and organized a coordinated counterattack. While Hamas’ leadership seems to have understood this, in a strictly tactical sense, it completely failed to tie tactical acumen to a realistic operational or strategic plan.

There was no possibility that Hamas was going to “win” against Israel in a conventional military sense. Hamas could – and did – certainly bloody Israel’s nose, exposing staggering complacency within the IDF, while also demonstrating the stark reminder that unarmed civilians are nothing but targets in a combat environment. As a result, as of this writing (October 16^th 2023), the IDF has eliminated all Hamas forces that remained within Israel after the initial assault…and the IDF is now girding for an all-out assault into the Gaza Strip to put an end to Hamas, once and for all, world opinion be damned.

This also demonstrated the defective strategic thinking of Hamas, as the avowed purpose of taking hostages, to be used as human shields – and joyously live-streaming it via the internet – is something that they allowed themselves to believe would be a viable tool of negotiation with Israel…The problem being, this is not an “intifada” – Hamas’ very success is the agent of their coming destruction, because the State of Israel will now stop at nothing to destroy them.

Put more prosaically, Hamas’ combination of tactical acumen with idiotic and outdated strategic thinking, is effectively the strategy for a “live action” first-person shooter video game, like a combination of “Call of Duty” with “Grand Theft Auto”, where the player gets more rewards for being more ruthless and savage, a view that is being reinforced daily, with the gleeful cheering on of troops in combat zones operating drone that drop grenades on enemy forces…just like in a video game – and if a war crime is committed in the process, that is worth double-XP.

Video games, however, are not real life. They are nothing more than a pale and warped reflection of reality – and basing your military plans on visions of video game victory is not simply a poor strategy, it is a strategy of suicide.

Yours.

Write that on your hand, if you need to.

For a more detailed look at this conflict, subscribe to the FREEDOMIST today for exclusive content

The Forgotten Cold Warrior – The MAS 49/56

Michael Cessna October 6, 2023

Unless you are a “gun person”, it is very likely that the reader has never heard of the MAS 49, much less its final iteration, the “49/56”…which is not surprising. However, this little-known weapon had a huge impact on world, not least because it remains in action on the world’s battlegrounds, into the current day.

The MAS (Manufacture d’Armes de Saint-Étienne, formerly one of the weapons makers for the government of France) series of rifles were the result of the French military and government trying to learn from their (many) mistakes made during World War One.

During that war, France – like most nations, being fair – had found itself woefully unprepared for the conflict. One of the main lessons learned by all of the combatant nations was the sheer scale of wastage of all categories of weapons and equipment, especially small arms. As casualties began to quickly mount, national military establishments found it nearly impossible to keep ahead of the need for weapons to both arm new troops, and to rearm troops whose weapons had been lost, destroyed or worn out.

This proved a windfall for arms manufacturers in the rest of the world, who were uninvolved in the fighting. Indeed, Great Britain found itself in such dire need of small arms that its Royal Navy had to turn in its standard-issue SMLE’s, and rearm themselves with everything from Winchester level-action rifles to Japanese Arisaka’s. Even Imperial Russia bought extensively from anyone they could, including Winchester.

In the aftermath of the war, France found itself with literal piles of small arms of all descriptions, from countries and manufacturers from around the world, all using different ammunition and parts, most of which wasn’t made in France, and which could not be easily (nor cheaply) licensed for manufacture. As well, the standard French rifle and machinegun cartridge, the venerable 8mm Lebel, was not a very good cartridge, and needed to be replaced. As the 1920’s dawned, France seemed to have placed itself on the path to rearmament, with a realistic and well-thought out program to develop a broad spectrum of small arms and light infantry weapons for its armed forces.

The execution of that program, however, was an entirely different matter.

While the Chatellerault M1924/29 light machinegun and the MAS 36 rifle were both excellent weapons that worked very well, and were mostly on time in their development, France failed to get the weapons into production in enough numbers to completely rearm its forces. It would not be until World War 2 was almost upon Europe that France saw the danger, and began to ramp up production in earnest. Of course, it would be too little, too late.

The reasons for this are not difficult to understand. France, like most of the “winners” of the ‘war to end all wars’, was in financial ruin after the end of the war. With the advent of the Great Depression on the world, money for military-anything was in short supply, and for France, especially, having lost the better part of an entire generation of young men during 1914-1918, was spending much of what little money it had for defense on an alternative plan.

After France was overrun in 1940, the Various French arsenals were in German hands. While the Nazi forces kept some of the factories working to produce ammunition for captured weapons (“beutewaffe”), as German industrial capacity was simply incapable of meeting Hitler’s war needs, very little new work was done on the incomplete French designs, until the country was liberated in 1944.

Almost as soon as the Germans had been driven out of the various French state arsenals, their workers flooded back in, retrieved blueprints and designs that had been hidden for four years, and immediately got back to work, completing production on the MAS 36, quickly finalizing the first MAS 44 semiautomatic rifles and getting those first guns into production just as the war was ending.

The MAS 44, like most prototype designs, had a lot of issues. Although the design had been in its final stage of development when France was overrun, it had not been perfected, and was rushed into production primarily to show the resilience of French industry. One critical flaw in the design – a flaw never corrected – was the rifle’s detachable magazine.

In the rush to complete the design, the decision was made to use tooling for the rifle receivers that was originally made for the bolt-action MAS 36. All that was modified for the MAS 44 was to remove the floorplate of the MAS 36’s fixed, five-shot magazine. The “magazine catch”, which locks a detachable magazine in place, was simply a ledge-shaped shelf milled into the outer-right side of the receiver. The rifle’s ten-round magazines were all fitted with a thumb latch on the magazine’s exterior, making it very awkward to try to fit two magazines into a pouch. For reasons unknown – but likely related to the magazine’s inability to safely hold the weight of additional ammunition – the magazines would remain at their ten-round limit throughout the rifle’s service life. However, the semiautomatic rifles would still retain their ability to be loaded via five-round strip-clips.

*French rifle MAS 49. Photo Credit: Joe Loong. CCA/2.0*

By 1949, enough lessons had been learned from the -44 that a new model began to make it out to the troops. The MAS 49 corrected several internal reliability issues (but not the magazine, nor the silly “spike” bayonet that the French arms industry was fascinated with), streamlined some aspects of the rifle to make it cheaper and faster to produce, and added a method to add a rifle grenade launcher, something the French infantry establishment had a long-standing love affair with.

It was this rifle that France would sell to many of its colonies (resulting in the so-called “Syrian Contract” rifles) and take into battle in Indochina, Algeria, and the Suez Crisis, all of which – in time-honored tradition – revealed where yet more improvements to the rifle could be made.

The result, developed in 1956 and deployed in 1957, was the rifle’s final form, as the “MAS 49/56”.

While retaining the overall look, feel and handling (and the magazine, still) as its predecessors, the stock was significantly changed, as was the rifle grenade system. As France had joined NATO, it was attempting bring its weapons in line with early NATO standards. The rifle grenade system was altered to use the NATO-standard 22mm grenades, which required the installation of a gas cut-off, to prevent damage to the rifle. This also resulted in a better sighting system for firing the grenades, as the grenade sight had to be raised, in order to disengage the gas system. Most importantly, this system was installed on all MAS 49/56 rifles. Another significant improvement was the incorporation of a scope mount milled into the left side of the rifle’s receiver, a feature also incorporated into every 49/56. And, because of the redesign, the rifle lost the spike bayonet, and received a proper knife-type pig-sticker.

*MAS49-56 with APX Scope and Bayonet from personal collection of Wikimedia User TL-Wiz63. CCA/4.0*

Despite some lingering problems, the matured design continued in service as France’s standard infantry rifle until 1979, when it was replaced by the FAMAS rifle), and remained in combat action until its complete replacement. The MAS semiautomatic rifles were mostly sent as aid to many armies in the newly-free states resulting from France’s abandonment of empire. Many of those rifles remain in combat as of this writing.

In an interesting twist to the end of this story, a good number of MAS 49 and 49/56 rifles are on the surplus market in the United States. Many rifles were sold into the American surplus market, beginning in the late 1980s. Some versions were modified to take 7.62x51mm, instead of the 7.5x54mm French round. As a word of warning, if those conversions were done in France, they most likely work well, but the ones converted in the US are known for gas-cycling issues.

Look into older firearms – they tend to have very long lives.

Intentional Consequences – How A Cold War Warning Framed A 21st Century Battleplan

Michael Cessna September 29, 2023

BACKGROUND

It should come as no surprise to anyone reading this, that there is something strange happening at the southern border of the United States…even NEWSWEEK magazine is talking about it. No one who claims to watch the news at any level of attention has failed to see the hysterical cries from all levels of society in New York City that the mainstream media bothers to pay attention to, that the “migrant crisis” has finally come home to roost in the self-declared “sanctuary cities”, who are now facing just a fraction of what tiny towns along the US-Mexico border have been dealing with on a weekly basis, and for decades.

But, it is considerably more than that. In fact, it is alarming in the extreme.

In previous decades, a significant proportion of the illegal aliens crossing the US-Mexico border were women and small children; indeed, despite breathless denunciations to the contrary, the phenomenon of the “Anchor Baby” is very real. Prior to 2020, many, if not most, of the illegal crossers were unaccompanied men, actual “economic refugees” from Mexico and other parts of Central & South America, who were coming north to seek work, because even making significantly less than American-born workers, they were still able to make enough to more than fully support their families back home.

However, beginning at some point in 2020, that mixture began to significantly shift.

Beginning, again, in 2020, more and more Africans began to be observed at the border, crossing in illegally. However, like Mexican illegals before them, significant proportions of the flow were women and children.

But, beginning in 2022, the numbers shifted again. Increasingly, unaccompanied men of “fighting ages” (17-45 years old) began to appear – not mixed in with families, but in very large – alarmingly large, in fact – proportions of crossing groups.

What follows is an analysis that may sound “conspiratorial”. Given the current rhetoric from certain organizations – it is most definitely something that needs to be taken seriously.

ACTORS IN PLACE

“Men fleeing their country to take refuge in a foreign land, bring their women and children with them.

Men invading a foreign land – do not.” – Anonymous

Nearly fifty years ago, now, 1974 was a strange time. It was the height of the Cold War; the Vietnam War was grinding to its bloody end; tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were still very frosty, and getting more hostile as the political fallout from Richard M. Nixon’s resignation from the Presidency threw treaties and agreements into doubt.

In the midst of this turmoil, a small, 18-page study was presented to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under contract number RDA-TR-4301-001. Its title?

“A SOVIET PARAMILITARY ATTACK ON U.S. NUCLEAR FORCES – A CONCEPT”

(HTML) (PDF)

The paper outlines the feasibility of an “asymmetric” (to borrow a phrase from the modern day) attack on the US’s “nuclear triad” by Soviet special forces teams inserted into the US by slipping them over the border, mixed in with the yearly flow of illegal migrant workers.

When viewed through a more modern lens, this study stands as a stark warning for the current situation at the border, with only minimal editing for the current situation: simply replace “Soviet” with “militant actor groups”, and “nuclear forces” with “civilian soft targets”.

This is not hyperbole – if the numbers remained as small as they once were, this view would, indeed, verge into paranoia. However, with even the low figures hovering around 10,000 people per week, and even being generous in estimating the numbers of actual refugees, that equates to the core cadre of an infantry division entering the United States each week.

BEANS, BULLETS & TRAITORS

Now, the above is a pretty heady statement to make. After all, how would such a hypothetical force be armed and supplied, to what purpose, and by whom?

If you, the Reader, think that we are about to go to a very dark place – you would be correct.

It has long been known that certain elements of the United States government’s apparatus have deliberately tread very carefully, lest they goad the c.100,000,000 private firearms owners in the country into doing something “rather rash”. Frequently, they even try to crack jokes about it – jokes which absolutely no one finds funny.

Those same elements, however, certainly seem hell-bent to inflict demented plans on not simply the US population, but on the populations of the wider world. The United States’ population, though, is unique as it has not simply the highest proportion of private firearms ownership per capita, but also the largest numbers overall…and a significant proportion of that number are military veterans, many with recent combat experience.

In fact, those elements are so concerned about this potential threat to their plans that they have been issuing increasingly strident warning calls about the situation since the mid-1990’s. Yet, for them, the “problem” remains.

But – how to mitigate that problem?

It is clear to these elements that deploying the actual US armed forces, or even police, against the citizens they are sworn to defend through “kinetic action” is not an option: far too many would almost certainly either desert outright, or might actually mutiny, taking their weapons and joining their fellow citizens who are being attacked. And this is all aside from the fact that those “regular” forces, even in concert with law enforcement officers, simply do not have the numbers to make “martial law” a viable option.

But…What if those forces were given an actual, hostile foreign target inside the United States? For that matter, what if those private firearms owners could be induced by circumstance to join the regular armed forces and law enforcement in an action to “defend America” against that force? Stentorian denials from the “right wing” on social media aside, this “Reichstag Fire” scenario would force self-proclaimed “2A supporters” into a Catch-22: Either support the direct defense of the nation – in concert with the armed forces and the police – or suffer consequences far worse than being exposed as fakes.

*FMLN guerrillas, El Salvador, c.1980’s. Photographer Unknown.*

However, as there has been no such credible threat inside the United States – because “Antifa” is not the threat many, including that group’s members, suppose it to be – such a force would have to be “imported”.

Hence: foreign, fighting-age men, flooding into the country in massive numbers – but numbers not sufficient to actually conquer the country, but certainly enough to cause a sufficiently large and alarming threat…a flood actively encouraged, by public policy.

Note that none of either the foregoing, or what follows, is even a possibility without the active collusion of large sections of the government apparatus in Washington, DC.

It is vital to understand that, even assuming that certain reporting, dismissed a decade ago as “deranged conspiracy theories” were to be true, such a potential hostile force cannot successfully seize control of any great portion of the United States – at least, not for any real length of time.

But – why?

Simply put, the potentially hostile forces that would act, would be extremely disjointed and lacking in any more than the most basic of direction, and outside the cities, would find themselves vastly outnumbered, outgunned and over-matched by the local population. Unlike other parts of the world where groups like these operate, the local population in the United States – overall, but most certainly in the more suburban and rural areas – are very well-armed, by current world standards, and are peopled with a high percentage of recent military veterans, most of whom are armed.

This does not mean that such hostile forces would be completely impotent. Indeed, current technology means that these forces could easily arm and equip themselves effectively, simply by raiding firearms dealers (making the publication of the personal information of firearms permit holders over the last few years…“interesting”) not simply for weapons and ammunition, but also for the information on the dealers’ Form 4473’s, as described in the famous scene from the original “Red Dawn” (1984). As well, functional support equipment could be constructed at reasonable speed, allowing this potential hostile force to cause a lot of “hate & discontent”, and all without a great deal of the typical heavy ordnance one would see in most of the conflicts of the last c.25 years…for a time, at least.

In the aftermath – if this strictly hypothetical plan were to be real – the surviving American citizens would be ready to fall in line behind a government professing to have “learned its lesson”, that would revitalize and regularize citizen “militias”…under strict government control and supervision, of course.

IN THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

Is any of the foregoing true, though?

There are no “smoking gun” documents – that the author is aware of – that detail the above speculative plan as a real, deliberate and ongoing operation…That in no way means that it is impossible.

There is an overused saw in current vogue, to wit, that “history does not repeat – but it does rhyme”. In this case, real, fundamental manipulation of a population to a meaningful purpose they would otherwise not only have no interest in, but would actively oppose if said plan were enacted too quickly, is not a thing that can be achieved overnight. It is a process that takes years to plan and decades to implement.

Once again – 1974 was an odd time. Lot of plans were flitting around the literal swamp that Washington, DC perches in, like a vulture’s nest…Plans like “NSSM 200”.

You, the Reader, should reflect on that link.

Coughing Tiger, Drunken Dragon – The Danger Of Globalization

Michael Cessna September 22, 2023

Amid all the shrill backbiting over continuing to flagellate the dying Ukrainian efforts against Russia, as well as the capering of France trying to stave off the disintegration of its African satrapies, as those states internally realign themselves with Russia and China – by force, when necessary – a specter lurks in the background, the proverbial “elephant in the room”: Communist Chinese insecurity over Taiwan.

In this insecurity, lay the seeds of global economic collapse.

At the end of World War Two, Communist leader Mao Zedong led his “People’s Liberation Army” out of their mountain hideouts, and slid in behind Soviet forces occupying Manchuria, swiftly arming themselves with ex-Japanese military equipment captured from the defeated Imperial Japanese Army. Thus armed, the Communists went on the offensive against the exhausted Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) forces, which had born the brunt of fighting against the Japanese for the preceding eight years (1937-1945).

Despite several billion dollars in US aid, and the poorly though-out deployment of the III Amphibious Corps and elements of the 7^th Fleet, the sheer exhaustion and demoralization of the KMT resulted in a series of worsening defeats on the battlefield, until, in 1949, the surviving KMT military and government units retreated (for the most part) to the island of Formosa (now, Taiwan), and established a government in exile.

That is the situation as it remains, today.

Communist China, throughout its bloody and draconian history from 1950 until today, cannot abide that a recognized province of the country is not under its thumb. This manifests itself in the news of today, as near-continual violations of Taiwan’s declared air and sea boundaries by Communist military forces. The normal response of the United States has been to occasionally deploy aircraft carrier battle groups into the disputed waters as a dare to the Communists to fire on them.

The question for many, however, is – why? After all, the United States famously showed Taiwan the door in 1972, which made the country a diplomatic pariah state…so, why does the United States constantly go “eyeball-to-eyeball” with Communist Beijing over the island? For that matter, why can’t Beijing just let it go?

Two answers: For Beijing – and particularly for Premier Xi Jinping – Taiwan is a gaping sore for the Communists, as the island rapidly prospered under the KMT’s governance, while Communist China wallowed in poverty, famine and induced technological stagnation under the increasingly mentally unstable Mao…and that, in spite of the extreme brutality of the KMT’s actions in securing the island, beginning in the late 1940’s. As prosperous as Communist China has become in the aftermath of the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, the Communist state still lags behind Taiwan by a long distance.

Second, the United States knows a fundamental truth that many around the world (and particularly within the United States), a truth that is the basis of this article:

Any Communist attempt to invade and conquer Taiwan – even if it failed – would collapse the global economy overnight.

The reason for this is brutally simple: microchips.

Silicon chips, semiconductors, or integrated circuits as the Reader prefers, are what drive modern technology, from the device you are reading this article on, to the CPU in your car, computer chips drive every object of any consequence in your everyday life.

And Taiwan produces at least fifty percent (50%) of the world’s supply.

Most of Taiwan’s chips are produced by one company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC). Unlike other manufacturers like Samsung and Intel (who manufacture chips for internal products), however, TSMC chips are not proprietary to them. Instead, their chips supply manufacturers of computer-driven hardware around the world, companies like Apple, Nvidia and Qualcomm, to name just three. Other nations around the world currently hover at less than half of TSMC’s production capacity; the United States currently holds about 12% of the global manufacturing capacity.

Invasions, as proven by the Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, are bloody, messy and highly destructive affairs. Any actual Communist Chinese attempt to seize Taiwan would be no different, the severe problems of a combined arms assault on the island equating to a probable Communist failure aside. To say that such an invasion would “disrupt” TSMC’s operations is a laughable understatement, not least because standard military doctrine virtually guarantees direct attacks on the company’s production facilities, to say nothing of worker attrition from “collateral damage”.

*Devastation in Bucha, Ukraine. CC0/1.0, Public Domain.*

What would such a circumstance mean for the global economy? Simply, virtually all generalized computer and electronic device production and repair or upgrades utilizing semiconductors would grind to a halt, as stocks of chips dried up virtually overnight. This is due to the phenomenon of “just-in-time delivery”, an outgrowth of the wave of globalization that has been the norm since the 1990’s.

The Reader may recall the term “supply chain disruption” that became popular during the recent pandemic. Workers at both manufacturing plants, but also – critically – stevedores and loading crane operators stayed home, either terrified of catching the disease, by legal order, or both. This ricocheted throughout the global supply and transport system, and was greatly aggravated by what many considered to be a minor event, namely the grounding of the container ship Ever Given in March of 2021. The effects of these body blows to the global economy continue as of this writing.

*Container Ship ‘Ever Given’ stuck in the Suez Canal, Egypt, March 24th, 2021. Copernicus Sential photo. CCA/2.0 Generic*

In regards to a hypothetical – but very possible – Communist invasion of Taiwan, the disruption would be vastly worse, as there is no way for global manufacturers to quickly retool to make up for the loss, even if a ceasefire were quickly closed…And note that this does not address the general disruption of commercial cargo traffic in and out of the Communist nation, in the event of such a war.

But, there is an even greater danger lurking in this very possible scenario: the facts that not only will Taiwan not go quietly, but that they have a plan to take Communist China with them.

Without resorting to nuclear weapons.

The non-Communist Chinese in Taiwan all know full well what a Communist takeover of their country would entail. Given the Communist state’s recent history, to say nothing of its habit of “disappearing” political dissidents and anyone who disagrees with their regime too loudly. Because of this, there lurks a plan that Taipei lets slip every once in a while, to remind Beijing of what the consequences of invasion would be.

*The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, China, 2009. CCA/2.0 Generic*

Taiwan’s “doomsday” plan (YouTube link) would be a series of strikes against the Three Gorges Dam. If concentrated, such a strike package would collapse at least a section of the dam, releasing the force of 39.3 km³ to pour downstream in a massive deluge.

Provisionally, this action could kill up to 400 million people…And this is not an idle threat, as the KMT has done it before. To say that this could result in a nuclear response is a given…with everything else that derives from that.

Right now, Communist China is desperate to appear tough and capable. The chances of bluster turning into an actual invasion are very real, however.

This fact is something that should be taken seriously by anyone reading this.

Building a Hope Exit: Enabling Technologies

Paul Collier September 22, 2023

By Paul Collier, Editor

INTRODUCTION

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” – Romans 12:2

Welcome to this special installment of the Hope Exit series as we pause to take a high-altitude overview of our reality of power by looking at some key emerging technologies that can equip small-scale free associations to build their own stewarded versions of sustainable flourishing.

We are going to look at a few key emerging technologies that cover a number of our basic needs, including communications, food, and self-defense. We have yet to look at healthcare (that’s coming up next), but we’ll dip our toe in that need as well in this high-altitude overview.

We will begin our installment by looking at a high-level need that touches all other needs, research and development (R&D). It is a core need that is currently almost exclusively in the hands of the Egyptians (sticking with our Exodus-themed series), the powers that be that seek to keep us dependent on the products and services that come from that R&D.

Next, we will focus on a crucial element of effective, secured R&D: digital communication.

In order to get to the development part of our research, we need to be able to manufacture our ideas, so we will look at the emerging tech in 3D printing. Finally, we will take a peek at vertical farming, which could provide our medical, food, and even manufacturing resources.

In these times, the mind is being constantly bombarded with agit prop, shock and awe conditioning designed to cripple your renewing imagination. The first step to becoming an emerging tech steward is to not walk in the fear they want you to be governed by. The world as it is need not continue to be as it is, and the future need not be defined by the elite few who currently believe that future is inevitable. It is not. Technology is on your side if you can possess it for yourself. And the powers that be know this, which is why they are moving so aggressively to cripple our imaginations and our free associations.

A. R&D DEVELOPMENT

“The same day, Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people and their foremen, ‘You shall no longer give the people straw to make bricks, as in the past; let them go and gather straw for themselves. But the number of bricks that they made in the past you shall impose on them, you shall by no means reduce it, for they are idle. Therefore they cry, “Let us go and offer sacrifice to our God.” Let heavier work be laid on the men that they may labor at it and pay no regard to lying words.’” – Exodus 5:6-9

Before the Israelites exited Egypt, the Egyptians appeared to do everything they could to incentivize them to want to leave. First, they made them slaves; then they sought to put technological impediments up to ensure that they would have reason to further “punish” them when they failed to meet the quota.

While we here in America cannot exactly say that we are slaves, certainly not in the sense that the Israelites were, we are becoming increasingly limited in our ability to live lives of our own choosing, which is moving us more and more toward the type of slavery the Israelites experienced.

Not only that, but our ability to meet our needs is being artificially hampered by the leaders on top preventing us from fully maximizing the technologies that exist today. They do this by limiting access to their platforms if we don’t tow the party line, making the use of technologies illegal (like making home gun manufacturing illegal), and through Intellectual Property laws that conceal technologies behind IP firewalls.

ED NOTE: Not all IP laws are oppressive, especially ones that stop forms of identity theft (such as claiming a celebrity endorsed your product when they didn’t or using another company’s logo as your own). In a future issue of FIA, we will probably have a report on the complex issues surrounding IP that oppresses versus IP that protects.

1. MY NOVUSNOW CONCEPT – Back in the early Ots, I was the publisher and editor of an online weekly journal called Freedom Through Autonomous Living (FTAL). I wrote about emerging technologies that could equip people to be “autonomous,” a word I wouldn’t wish to use now. Back then, I was much more comfortable with the idea of becoming a self-contained, sustainable island. Years later, my assumptions have changed; I now believe that in order for me to build a hope exit, I will need to build it with others. I will need a community, not a castle (though it would be great to have a castle inside a community).

I should have figured that out even back then, because at that same time I had another idea I called Novusnow (New Now). I shared that idea in my publication and even built up a sizeable Yahoo group of the same name. The idea behind Novusnow was to form a Research and Development test community funded by an association of “intentional communities,” communities that are purpose-created for people wishing to live out their beliefs with others who wish to do the same. I call them free association communities today.

What I realized back then is that many of the most advanced technologies that could be used to build autonomy (what I call sustainable flourishing today) cannot be used to build our own stuff because their IP belongs to a corporation. Today, it’s even worse. Not only could you be sued for using technology that is similar to ones behind IP firewalls; IP trolls, or patent trolls, are also likely to sue you, people who file all the lawsuits they can, banking on a small few settling just to get them off their back.

A blurb I recently wrote for freedomist.news highlights how IP can be abused and why it is a favorite tool for tyrants to exploit:

Chairman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) is raising a warning flag to the American people about the ongoing threat to our agricultural IP that the Chinese Communist Party represents. He is starting a hearing intended to expose the extent of the theft and ongoing threat.

He stated, “Our country is filled with invisible factories and invisible farms – those that would have been built or planted here if we’d chosen to protect American technology and resources. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have oriented U.S. strategy around ‘competing’ with the Chinese Communist Party. But we’re not ‘competing’ if we’re letting the CCP steal hundreds of billions of dollars from Americans – we’re throwing the game from the outset.”

Seed engineering is one of the most significant IPs the CCP is stealing from American farmers.

What we who wish to live free-associative and sustainably flourishing lives need are our own technologies, our own IPs, that can be freely used by anyone who is part of our research and development association, which I called Novusnow. This was to be the name of the organization that would build a test community to develop sustainably flourishing technologies and test them in the real world.

The community would offer training to members who could then take that knowledge to their own communities, to be duplicated and customized according to the particular needs of that community. So much of the ability of the powers that be to continue to control the many with the few depends on their control of IP. This is, in part, why Open-Source technologies have developed, in recognition of not wishing to be dependent on a few mega-corporations for our technological development.

There’s a lot more behind the Novusnow idea, but I think I have covered the core basics that should help you understand the overall concept: to develop a team of researchers, manufacturers, and testers that is funded by communities that are then able to use these technologies freely themselves, a research and development department for a confederation of sustainably flourishing communities.

2. OPEN-SOURCE AI – The Open-Source movement is largely populated with leftists, for the right has failed to understand that “democratizing technology” should be a conservative value. Leftists only democratize until they control, then they close the door behind them. This writer has little doubt that the open-source leftists of today will be the corporate gatekeepers of tomorrow if those corporations are fully reflective of their leftist values.

AI is being used to race through potential technological patterning so corporations can patent as many potential new technologies as possible, so if we don’t use it to develop our own non-corporatized IPs, there won’t be any left. Thankfully, the open-source market offers us an opportunity to build some of the tools that can get our research and development venture off the ground.

Whatever you feel about AI, I am here to tell you that it is a technology you should embrace, so long as that technology isn’t behind an IP firewall owned by the metaphorical Egyptians. Fortunately, there are already options available.

AI is short for Artificial Intelligence, but when you think of it as augmented intelligence, as this writer does, then perhaps it won’t seem as intimidating as it is to some probably reading this right now. AI as a sustainably flourishing tool is not going to be the governor of our governing algorithms, but it will accelerate our ability to develop and test emerging technologies that can equip us to begin our Hope Exit.

Here is one open-source IP software tool as described by GoodFirms:

TensorFlow is an open-source artificial intelligence software that helps you develop and train Machine learning models. It presents the library for high-performance numerical computation. Across a variety of platforms (CPUs, GPUs, TPUs), this free AI software allows easy deployment of computation due to its flexible architecture.

With this software, you can accomplish the power of data in your business by building advanced predictive modeling applications. This software makes use of data flow graphs to build models. In perception, understanding, prediction, creation, and classification, you can make use of this software.

These tools can be our source of augmenting our intelligence, accelerating the development process exponentially. A core group of researchers who can master the AI tools within the context of their particular research field will get our venture started. Thankfully, we will have plenty of open-source alternatives to experiment with.

B. DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS

In order for us to be able to coordinate our efforts with one another, we will need to be able to digitally communicate with one another effectively and securely. It might be the first step taken by our Novusnow group (or whatever something along that line might be called).

1. THE AFRICA EXAMPLE – The Council on Foreign Relations of all places has a report called “Technologies of Freedom Enabling Democracy in America.” It details how the rise of authoritarianism in Africa is not succeeding in shutting down its citizens’ desires to freely digitally communicate:

In response to internet censorship by governments across the continent, Africans have resorted to using technologies of freedom, tools such as virtual private networks (VPNs) that allow them to access social media platforms, messenger apps, news websites, popular blogs, and other blocked content online. Oftentimes, users download these tools directly from websites and app stores…

… people have come up with creative methods for sharing VPNs, which, in addition to allowing users to access blocked content, also allow them to circumvent bandwidth throttling. For instance, in Cameroon, people that I interviewed used Bluetooth, USBs, and Xender, a mobile app that allows users to share files without using the internet, to share VPNs that they had downloaded prior to government efforts to slow down internet speeds. The spread of these VPNs in turn enabled access to content that would otherwise be inaccessible.

… even when censors blocked Facebook and WhatsApp in Northwest and Southwest Cameroon, or created an extensive list of over fifty prohibited communication platforms in Uganda, they invariably neglected to block platforms that they weren’t aware of.

2. DNS ENCRYPTION – An emerging technology called DNS encryption promises to “restore your privacy by making it impossible for anything other than the DNS resolver to read and respond to your queries. You still have to trust the resolver you send your requests to, but the eavesdroppers are out in the cold.”

This technology could be used on a limited network that is only accessible by certified and confirmed members, such as could be needed by our Novusnow group.

3. PASSWORDLESS AUTHENTICATION – This technology replaces passwords that can be hacked with biometrics that cannot be hacked. I have passwordless authentication to access some of the apps I use. There are some caveats to using biometrics, and certainly where the state is in control, more caveats than benefits.

4. ONION NETWORKING – Some might already know that the version of the internet called Tor is short for “the onion router.” Onion routers are essentially routers that can create an anonymizing computer network. Tor has limited use today, but some believe the technology behind it could revolutionize “democratized” Internet

From Malwarebytes.com:

According to security evangelist Alec Muffett, we are overlooking a very important aspect of this technology, though. Muffett was previously a security engineer at Facebook, where he was responsible for putting the social network on Tor. Speaking to David Ruiz on a recent Malwarebytes Lock and Code podcast, he explained how he sees Tor as “a brand new networking stack for the Internet” that can “guarantee integrity, and privacy, and unblockability of communication.”

5. HOMOMORPHIC ENCRYPTION – The principles behind this emerging technology are far beyond my technological acumen, but in layman’s terms, Homomorphic encryption allows you to view an encrypted message without having to ever actually decrypt it. This means that even if you receive an encrypted message, you won’t have access to how that message is encrypted, so you can’t use that information to decrypt more information than the user wanted you to see.

C. SELF-MANUFACTURING

Now that we have created our empire of Augmented Intelligence tools and developed our effective, secured digital network to communicate with one another, we need to turn our ideas into physical reality. We are only going to touch on a few examples of emerging 3D-Printing (or additive manufacturing), the primary technology that will enable us to be self-manufacturers.

1. 3D-PRINTED HOMES – I am a strong advocate for using compressed earth bricks to build homes, or even some form of rammed earth. With walls that are one-foot thick and made of compressed earth, extended family homes can have a high level of soundproofing that helps a larger number of people stay together in closed spaces. They also withstand natural disasters in general a lot better than traditional-built stick-frame homes. Finally, they eliminate or reduce the amount of energy needed to heat and cool the home.

But building these homes can be labor intensive. This is where 3D Printing comes in. Initially, 3D printed homes were limited in the materials that could be used, but already 3D printers that can build homes can use a wide variety of materials to do so, including earth. As a matter of fact, the trend is to develop 3D Home printers that are capable of exploiting the local resources, especially resources available right where you want to build your home. One such printer uses sawdust to build homes.

The Zebra lists some of the advantages of 3D home construction (as they call it):

Speed: Often, it doesn’t even take 24 hours to build a small 3D-printed home, although this build-out is typically done in waves rather than all at once.

Cost: 3D-printed homes are surprisingly cheap to create, running around $10,000 on average today. 3D-printed home leader ICON hopes these homes are even more affordable in the future, with a projected goal of reducing builds down to $4,000. Once plumbing, electrical, and other additional construction is added, the final housing cost is around $140,000 to $160,000 on average today.

Versatility: Rather than having to enlist the help of an architect, homebuyers can use 3D technology to customize their home shape and build in the blueprint phase without a hefty price tag.

Sustainability: 3D-home construction boasts a shorter supply chain and less waste due to over-engineering. This reduction in process and waste makes these homes more eco-friendly.

Let me add this one, for it relates to our imagined project, our Novusnow project. 3D home construction will enable us to build more test homes within rigid experimental parameters using fewer human hands.

2. SELF-DEFENSE – In our self-defense installment of the Hope Exit series, we covered 3D-printed guns. Here, we are looking at community-scale self-defense tools, with UAVs (unmanned autonomous vehicles) being at the top of that list; UAVs for land, sea, and air, for patrolling, and for defending.

If you’re following the war in Ukraine, you know how important drone warfare is becoming. It continues to be a rapidly developing element of the battlefield of the 21^st century. 3D printing is a key part of sustaining the manufacturing of UAVs, especially for small-scale groups defending themselves against large-scale attackers.

Drones will, in this writer’s opinion, get smaller and smaller. The U.S. Department of Defense is hoping to get a leg up on this emerging technology. They have created a swarm of 3D-printed micro-UAVs. These drones are micro-jet-fighters. The drones had to be effective and 3D printable. Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) created the first prototypes with a budget of $20 million. Called Perdix drones, they’re designed to be released from fighter jets.

The U.S. Army is working on creating 3D Printers that use as many local resources as possible to build drones on demand. Instead of shipping drones, you ship a few 3D printers that can use a lot of the indigenous resources to manufacture drones on-site, as needed.

From 3Dprint.com: … with the advent of some impressive and innovative unmanned aircraft systems, Army researchers are showing a new level of commitment in their exploration of 3D printing.

At the Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiments (AEWE) in Fort Benning, GA, from December 1-3, engineers from the Army Research Laboratory were invited by the US Army Training and Doctrine Command to launch their new 3D-printed unmanned aircraft.

“We’ve created a process for converting Soldier mission needs into a 3D printed On-Demand Small Unmanned Aircraft System, or ODSUAS, as we’ve been calling it,” said Eric Spero, team leader and project manager.

3. ELECTRONICS – 3D-Printing is becoming increasingly more complex, able to print more complete products, including and especially electronic ones. Part of the increasing effectiveness of 3D-Printing UAVs is the ability of 3D electronic printing to create whole complex electronic products or major components that are easy to assemble together.

From sculpteo.com: Electronic components production can now be thought of in terms of 3D design and not only 2D, with new ways of stacking the circuits. It opens new possibilities to design for electronics, that are new to explore! Customization is becoming a big asset while using additive manufacturing for the creation of your products: you can create parts perfectly adapted to a circuit board or any electronic device. 3D printing can be used to create personalized electronic enclosures, USB stick cases, and keyboards, for example.

4. MEDICAL – In the next installment of the Hope Exit series, we will be going into more detail about 3D printing medicines on-demand. The technology is emerging, but is already being used by some hospitals.

From ucl.ac.uk: Medicines can be printed in seven seconds in a new 3D-printing technique that could enable rapid on-site production of medicines, reports a UCL-led research team… scientists have developed a new vat polymerisation technique that prints the entire object all at once, reducing the printing speed from multiple minutes to just seven to 17 seconds (depending on the resin composition selected). This works by shining multiple images of the object viewed at different angles, onto the resin. The amount of light shone gradually accumulates, until it reaches a point at which polymerisation occurs. By adjusting the intensity of light at different angles and overlaps, all points of the 3D object in the resin can reach this threshold at the same time, causing the entire 3D object to solidify simultaneously.

D. VERTICAL FARMING

This technology is one that can tie a lot of our other emerging technologies together. Back in those early Ots, my publication, Freedom Through Autonomous Living, extensively covered the development of vertical farming. This is indoor farming, usually hydroponics-based, that happens in multi-story structures.

My dream at the time was the creation of what I then called Farm Towers (a term I still like) that could be used for food, creating raw materials for printing products, and even for creating medicines. I envisioned a day when our medical institutions will have farm towers that can create a majority of the raw materials needed to 3D print medicines on demand. I also envisioned farm towers that would be used by manufacturing centers that were building the types of products that could be made with plant-based materials. What was fantasy then is increasingly becoming real already.

This technology right now is more promising than it is cost-effective, but it has already come a long way in a short period of time. Our Novusnow group can surely develop better versions of vertical farming that will make it the potential self-manufacturing game changer I long envisioned it could be.

The World Economic Forum is a strong advocate for vertical farming, but they want to patent their designs and limit our ability to create our own farm towers (they call them vertical farms; I’m sticking with farm towers).

One of the most cost-effective types of Farm Towers right now would be growing “pharmaceutical crops.” They are already being created.

PREDICTIVE ANALYSIS

There are two scenarios I see unfolding for our future. The first one is the one where we freedom-and-liberty-minded folks don’t find one another and start creating flourishing communities of our own. In that scenario, we own nothing, we rent everything, and everything we could possibly create or possess would be considered intellectual property.

Already, seeds are now patented, meaning the future of food production could be locked behind IP firewalls, limiting our ability (or ending it altogether) to grow our own food, something the powers that be do not wish us to do. IP is the removal of straw from our bricks to prevent us from meeting our quota so our slave masters can punish us all the more.

If the powers that be were ever freedom-and-liberty minded, they could have long ago empowered people across the globe to become locally sustainably flourishing. The technologies are already there to equip all of us to be able to design, develop, create, service, and repair our own products and services with little need to interact with the large-scale monoliths that currently dominate those need-fulfilments today.

If we can find one another and begin to build with one another, if we can develop the shared IP that we can freely use, there is little the powers that be can do to hold on to the monopolistic advantages they currently hold.

I am betting on the belief that at least 40 percent of humans fundamentally want to be self-stewarded individuals, and when the outside world continues to choke off our paths to self-stewardship, we will learn to hack the system and bypass it altogether. Myanmar was taken over by a military oligarchy, but without the will of the people to follow them, the oligarchy is failing to consolidate power in large part because the technology is on the side of the small-scale. Now more than ever before, authority cannot control lands by force that don’t want to be controlled.

The powers that be know this, and they have been working overtime to keep you in fear and confusion, afraid of the monsters they either invent or create. Renew your mind with the possibility that, as the opening of Six Million Dollar Man says, “we have the technology, we can rebuild (her),” with her being our American republic.

FURTHER RESEARCH

DNS Encryption Explained – Cloudflare

How to Access .onion Sites (Also Known as Tor Hidden Servies) – How-To-Geek

Liberation Technology – Larry Diamond

Vertical Farming – How To Start Vertical Farms At Home – diys.com

Trump Wants Republicans to Go Easy on Abortion Issue

Paul Collier September 19, 2023

Former President Donald Trump is calling on Republicans to moderate their approach to abortion, saying they “speak very inarticulately” about abortion. Trump, speaking in an NBC interview said that if he were elected, on the abortion issue He would “sit down with both sides and I’d negotiate something, and we’ll end up with peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years.”

This writer is pressing x to doubt on that claim, as abortion is an issue that individuals in this country will never be satisfied with until, on one side, it’s ended almost completely (save for exceptions such as rape, incest, and the health of the mother, more on that later), or, on the other side, has no restrictions applied at all.

Trump warned Republicans that going hard on this issue could lose them votes in most places, saying, “Other than certain parts of the country, you can’t- you’re not going to win on this issue.” He was speaking specifically of efforts to restrict abortions even in the cases of incest, rape, and the health of the mother, though such legislation is not widely supported, even among most “hardcore” Pro-Life supporters.

Trump even went so far as to say that efforts by Florida to outlaw abortions after six weeks was “a terrible, terrible mistake.” He said, “What’s going to happen is you’re going to come up with a number of weeks or months, you’re going to come up with a number that’s going to make people happy.”

One of the major criticisms of Trump is his tendency to be “pragmatic” rather than consistent in our ideals. It’s a critique leveled at conservatism in general, and is one of the major reasons this writer doesn’t identify as a conservative even if, socially, the Ven diagram between myself and conservatives overlaps considerably.

As if to accentuate his pragmatism, he also said, “From a pure standpoint, from a legal standpoint, I think it’s probably better. But I can live with it either way. It could be state or could it federal, I don’t frankly care.”

We made the case in a report I wrote called “Abortion or the Republic, You Can’t Have Both,” that winning elections by compromising on abortion won’t actually restore or preserve our republic.

From our report on abortion and the GOP:

The Republican Party has long been the only party openly supporting making the murdering of unborn children illegal. Now, it faces a hostile crowd that has been inured to the evil of abortion as surely as a dairy farmer gets inured to the smell of cow manure after working in those conditions for years. Now, the Republican party appears ready to seek to win elections over defending the underlying American standard that gives our republic its legitimacy, that all humans are created in God’s image, and thus entitled to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The question for the Republican Party is this: Would you rather win and lose the republic or lose and keep fighting to restore and preserve the republic?

We can posit this question to Donald Trump, the far-and-away frontrunner for the GOP Presidential nomination and ask him if he even understands what he is surrendering by seeking to drive the GOP down the path of “compromise” on the abortion issue (never mind his strawman argument against banning abortions without exceptions, like rape, incest, and the health of the mother, which aren’t seriously considered by the Pro-Life community).

I realize my position on abortion, that it should be outlawed altogether save for the exceptions already listed, is cutting against the overwhelming worldviews of most Americans, but I hold to my assertion that if you want an American republic where the individual is assumed to have God-given rights to self-stewardship, you cannot support abortion. I might be fighting windmills or battling the wind itself in making this claim, but I believe it is the right proclamation to make, come what may.

From Ezekiel 3:16-19

“ And at the end of seven days, the word of the Lord came to me: ‘Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, “You shall surely die,” and you give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way, in order to save his life, that wicked person shall die for his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked, and he does not turn from his wickedness, or from his wicked way, he shall die for his iniquity, but you will have delivered your soul. ‘”

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