The Inflation Reduction Act includes in it a provision that allows the government to set the price of medicine by allowing Medicare to “negotiate” a price with the drug manufactures when it is deems the price too high for “inflationary” reasons.” Merck is suing the government over the provision of the law and it is now working its way through the legal system on a collision course with SCOTUS, who must determine if, for the purpose of controlling inflation, the government can do something it could never legally do before (nor should it ever in the future), be allowed to set the price of markets. Should this precedent be allowed to be set, this writer has little doubt the government will expand its justification of price fixing until it controlled the whole market.
Headlines
Ireland hopes a wholesale slaughter of its cattle will somehow save the planet from man-made climate change. The country plans on killing more than 200,000 cattle that are not to be replaced in an effort to cut down on greenhouse gases produces by the flatulating animals.
The move is sure not to have disastrous “unintended” consequences that will trickle down to the small farmer first and the working class person second. The reduction in Ireland’s cattle will also be less taxing on other lands that will no longer have to grow the rich grains these cows are normally fed.
Ireland currently exports 90 percent of its dairy and beef production, meaning the reduction in cattle will reduce in significant losses of revenue gained from exports.
According to Cook Political Report analyst Dave Wasserman, the SCOTUS Ruling on Allen V Milligan that upheld the voting rights act, which forced states to create minimal black majority districts, could lead to a solid Democrat majority in the south for decades to come. The analyst said, “The landmark decision in Allen v Milligan could reverberate across the deep south, leading to the creation of new Black-majority, strongly Democratic seats in multiple states. Politically, the ruling could shake up the 2024 battle for the House, send shockwaves beyond Alabama and potentially offset a new gerrymander Republicans are likely to impose in North Carolina. The key states to watch are Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina.”
Anti-Americanist and Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsome has recently threatened to bring kidnapping charges against Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He hopes to prosecute him for the “crime” of flying illegal aliens to Sacramento, a self-described sanctuary city willing to defy Federal law to enable the continued lawless invasion of our territory thanks to DNC-CCP policies that open our borders and incentive criminal immigration to our country.
An article in Legal Insurrection points out the fact that California’s State Bill 54, signed in 2017 by then-Democrat Governor Jerry Brown, makes the whole state of California a federally defiant state willing to continue to encourage the criminal immigration invasion of American territory. The state is deemed a “Sanctuary State,” meaning criminal immigrants can rest assured that California officials will not follow Federal law that demands criminal immigrants be returned to their country of origin.
The House Oversight Committee has passed a contempt resolution against Christopher Wray, the FBI Director, for his ongoing efforts to protect the Biden administration, the Clintons, the Obamas, and the DNC from criminal charges. The House Oversight Committee Chair, James Comer (R-KY) tweeted, “FBI Director Wray continues to withhold information from Congress in an attempt to protect the Biden family.@GOPoversight has officially filed a resolution to hold Wray in contempt and will hold a hearing tomorrow. The politicization of the FBI must end.
Here is the text for the resolution:
The form of the resolution that the Committee on Oversight and Accountability would recommend to the U.S. House of Representatives for citing Christopher Wray, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, for contempt of Congress pursuant to this report is as follows:
Resolved, That Christopher Wray, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, shall be found in contempt of Congress for failure to comply with a congressional subpoena.
Resolved, That pursuant to 2 U.S.C. §§ 192 and 194, the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall certify the report of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, detailing the refusal of Christopher Wray, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, to produce documents to the Committee on Oversight and
Accountability as directed by subpoena, to the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, to the end that Director Wray be proceeded against in the manner and form provided by law.
Resolved, That the Speaker of the House is authorized to take all appropriate action to enforce the subpoena.
Comer released a statement that read, “We have been clear that the FBI must produce the unclassified FD-1023 record to the custody of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. To date, the FBI has refused to comply with our lawfully issued subpoena and even refused to admit the record’s existence up until a week ago. Once Director Wray confirmed the record’s existence, the FBI started their coverup by leaking a false narrative to the media. The case is not closed as the White House, Democrats, and the FBI would have the American people believe. The FBI created this record based on information from a credible informant who has worked with the FBI for over a decade and paid six figures. The informant had first-hand conversations with the foreign national who claimed to have bribed then-Vice President Biden. And now, Attorney General Barr has confirmed that the record was given to the U.S. Attorney in Delaware for the purpose of that investigation. Americans have lost trust in the FBI’s ability to enforce the law impartially and demand answers, transparency, and accountability. The Oversight Committee must follow the facts for the American people and ensure the federal government is held accountable.”
Oregon’s DNC Activist and Anti-Amerricanist Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum is using Fox News’ surrender on the Dominion lawsuit to execute a new lawfare assault on the once-conservative news network. The move once again confirms the adage that, when it comes to leftists, it never pays to apologize.
Even after surrendering to Dominion and allegedly firing Tucker Carlson to compensate the leftists, they will never quit using “any means necessary” to silence all dissent, even from news organs that are no longer remotely offering any real dissent to the DNC agenda.
Rosenblum claims she is investigating whether the Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund has grounds to sue Fox News in its capacity as a shareholder of the token opposition network. She boldy proclaimed, “We hope to hold the board accountable and protect the long-term value of Oregon’s investment in Fox Corp.”
The excuse Fox News gave for surrendering to the baseless lawsuit was, accouding to Fox Corp CEO Lachlan Murdoch was “we were going to be in multi-year, prolonged legal battle, which we would ultimately win, but the distraction to the company, the distraction to our growth plans, our management, would have been exrtraordinarily costly, which is why we decided to settle.”
In his statement, he never acknowledged the firing of Tucker Carlson as a condition of that lawsuit, and would probably deny such a claim as it would give Carlson the out he needs to be free from all of the ramifications of his current contract, which limits his ability to be a news voice in the open market.
The House Republican Conference Chair, Elise Stefanik (R-NY) told Breitbart News that the Top Secret Document investigation of Donald Trump started with a “baseless” archives referral based on DNC officials wanting to see the Top Secret documents around Trump’s communications with North Korean President Kim Jung Il.
Stefanik said of the news, “This bombshell finding is the epitome of the illegal weaponization of federal agencies against President Trump, the leading candidate for President of the United States. The fact is, an unelected bureaucrat at a federal agency egregiously abused their position with a baseless referral causing the unprecedented raid of the residence of a former President, based simply on personal correspondence from President Obama to President Trump and between President Trump and the leader of North Korea.”
California’s Assembly Bill 873, introduced by Assembly member Marc Merman (D-Menlo Park), would empower the state’s “Instructional Quality Commission” to create a media literacy education program for students from K-12. Since all of the decision makers involved are leftists, it is likely the “education” will involve training children to reject non-authoritative, non-orthodox views as potentially containing any real truth. In other words, all non-leftist “fact claims” are fake news.
We would like to express our thanks to naval OSINT analyst H I Sutton, of Covert Shores, for his kind assistance with this article.
Illness is an odd thing. One rarely pays close attention to outside events unless those events have a direct and immediate impact on the ill person. In the case of your humble author, 2022 was a rough year. As a result, I completely missed this article when it came out, and didn’t think clearly about the implications of using larger vessels in a DIY Navy when that article was written.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa…Consider this to be Part 2.
For small national navies, as well as “guerrilla” navies, Part 1 is still absolutely true: limited funds and resources limit options when building a naval force of any kind. However, for the nation-state that is in the “middle sea” [sic], so to speak, those have more options.
As described in a previous article, a nation desiring to construct a navy needs to first decide on exactly what kind of navy they need – not want, but need. To briefly recap, there are three basic choices: Blue, Green & Brown:
- A “blue” navy is basically the kind of navy used by the United States, Great Britain, and France, the kind of navy that Communist China aspires to: a naval force to maintain the “Sea Lanes of Communications” (the SLOC). This is the hardest kind of fleet to build, and far and away the most expensive.
- A “green” navy is mostly a coastal force, whose main job is to facilitate amphibious operations, i.e., landing troops ashore. Still expensive, but the better choice for nations like the Republic of the Philippines.
- A “brown” navy operates almost solely along rivers and close in to coastlines. These naval forces are comparatively cheap, but are very limited in range and capabilities, compared to the other two types of fleet.
Obviously, there is a good deal of overlap between the various types: brown and green navies complement each other well, where their environments meet. Likewise, green and blue navies can have a very great deal of overlap when projecting state power at a long distance. While there is little overlap between blue and brown fleets, blue water units can benefit from the lightweight/high-speed boats of the brown squadrons.
Iran, however, has taken the path of outside-the-box thinking to a different level.
Beginning in 2021, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commissioned the building of at least two “drone carriers,” former “Panamax” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamax] box-carriers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_ship] refitted to operate combat and surveillance drone aircraft, “Shahid Mahdavi” and “Shahid Bagheri”. In form, the two ships initially looked like their recent sister ship, the “forward base ship” “Makran”.
Unlike Makran, however, Mahdavi and Bagheri are apparently focused solely on drone craft operations. The Bagheri is being fitted with an overhanging deck extension on their port (left) side. While visually similar to US Navy carriers of the last c.65 years, this seems to have been designed in order to launch and recover heavier drone craft on an angle, from port to starboard, due to the container ships’ superstructure at the aft (rear) end, which cannot be easily modified. This seems to be confirmed, as Iranian state news is showing pictures of a “ski jump” being installed on the Bagheri. The “ski jump” flight deck has been used to aid in flight operations since at least the 1970’s, when the UK’s Royal Navy used them for their “Harrier carriers”, HMS Hermes and HMS Invincible, during the Falkland Islands War of 1982.
This modification opens the possibility of launching much heavier drone craft, capable of carrying much heavier ordnance than other drones. While certainly incapable of handling heavier, manned craft, this bodes ill for anyone Iran chooses to focus on.
There has not been a direct, “force on force”, aircraft carrier battle since WW2; the aforementioned Falklands campaign nearly resulted in one, but that turned out to be a false start. While there have been thousands – if not tens of thousands – of carrier-launched fighters and bombers attacking land targets and land-based aircraft, these were not “carrier” battles, in the naval sense. The concern, here, the nightmare of rational naval planners since the 1970’s, has been the “improvised aircraft carrier.” The naval dimension of the Falklands War, once again, informs on the problem.
When Argentina invaded the Falklands, Great Britain immediately assembled an amphibious task force for “Operation Corporate”. Like most post-WW2 navies, Great Britain had comparatively few naval supply and support ships in its fleet, and had to resort to “STUFT” (Ships Taken Up From Trade), civilian vessels requisitioned into military service as auxiliary vessels to carry supplies, and occasionally troops.
One of these vessels was the SS Atlantic Conveyor.
A combination roll-on/roll-off container ship, Atlantic Conveyor was used primarily to ferry aircraft for the British invasion force. When the vessel arrived in the combat area, the Harrier ‘jump jets’ she carried were launched from her, and flown off to the aircraft carries. On May 25th 1983, during the ferocious air attacks by Argentine air forces during the Battle of San Carlos, Atlantic Conveyor was struck by two Exocet anti-ship missiles, killing twelve of her crew, including her captain; gutted by fires, the ship sank three days later, while under tow, joining several other vessels in becoming the first Royal Navy vessels lost in action since World War 2. The loss of all of the remaining aircraft aboard (all of them helicopters) would severely hamper British operations ashore for the remainder of the campaign.
But note the first part of that story: Atlantic Conveyor was able to at least launch manned fighter jets while underway. What the Royal Navy – long starved for funding for ships and manpower (HMS Hermes was scheduled for decommissioning – without a replacement – when the invasion happened) had built a “jack carrier”, effectively equivalent to a WW2 “escort carrier”, at very short notice, with the potential – had she not been destroyed – of being able to conduct combat operations at some level.
This capability had been recognized with helicopters for many years, but this was the first time it had been proven valid for manned combat jet aircraft. Although conjectural, this is likely the real reason why the US and UK defense establishments buried the Harrier’s proposed follow-on aircraft, the supersonic version of the Hawker Siddeley P.1154, cancelled in 1965. No serious attempt was made to perfect a supersonic-capable VTOL until the introduction of the F-35B by the United States in 2015. As there are few carriers in the world capable of operating conventional jet aircraft, this ensured the naval dominance of those states that possessed these massive and expensive weapons.
Now, however, we find ourselves in the 21st Century, and technology has significantly progressed, across the board. Long-range drone craft, capable of carrying heavy ordnance, and armed – presumably – with anti-ship missiles and capable air- and anti-ship missile defenses, have now changed the structure of naval “battle calculus.” This is because the world’s second- and third-line military forces have relearned the fundamental truth of national military strength: it doesn’t matter how strong a nation’s military is overall, but how much of that force can be brought to bear against a particular target.
Iran’s naval deployment of ersatz carriers may seem laughable to many in first-line forces, but no one in second- or third-line navies are laughing. Iran has demonstrated that they are perfectly capable of worldwide naval cruises and deployments, and while their carriers and other vessels almost certainly stand no chance against a US or UK task force, they are more than a match for most of the other navies in the world. This is especially true for their “forward base ship” concepts, which are capable of deploying commando units via helicopter and speedboat, in a manner similar to first-line navies.
The deployment of these three vessels, the Makrun, Mahdavi and Bagheri, marks the first time since 1976 (in the days of the Imperial Navy of Iran) that Iran has had a truly capable naval arm for its military forces. Given the country’s friendly relations with Russia and Communist China, the possibility of joint fleet operations with at least China, if not Russia, along with their recent truce – brokered by the PRC – with Saudi Arabia, means than Iran can easily conduct far more complicated and wide-ranging power projection operations than they were able to in the past.
Much more worryingly, these ship commissioning’s are being done in public, and there are plenty of nations in the world at Iran’s tier who can take inspiration to boost their own naval capabilities.
The foundations of the world economy are set on the concept of the “freedom of the seas”, a concept enforced since World War 2 by the United States, Great Britain and France…but all three states are in financial trouble, and their navies are down to razor-thin numbers, in both ships and sailors. It will take careful, resolute and competent leadership to navigate through this.
The question is: is that leadership in place? Or even on the horizon?
On May 21 of 2023, CBS news released a story concerning the Senate Sergeant at Arms, retired US Army LtGen Karen Gibson, offering satellite telephones (pdf link) to the 100 members of the United States Senate, as an “enhanced security measure.” The wording in the wider reporting on this occurrence is odd, with at least one outlet opining that the ‘offer’ of the devices “…has been extended to all 100 senators…”.
Odd…So – Not all Senators were offered the phones initially? Why? It’s not like the Houses of Congress have ever been shy with budgetary items for themselves.
Moving on.
While the public reason for issuing Senators with these devices is to “enhance security” in the wake of threats to members of Congress – citing the January 6, 2021 protests and the recent attack on the husband of former house Speaker Nancy Pelosi – the deeper picture is not so straightforward.
“Continuity of Government Operations” (or “COGOPS”) are operations, protective measures and security procedures designed to maintain government functions in the face of some catastrophic event. An artifact of the Cold War, the idea behind ‘continuity of government’ came from the very real threat that a Soviet surprise nuclear strike could destroy the entirety of the United States’ elected leadership in a single, Pearl Harbor-like strike. Numerous measures and programs were instituted (the Congressional bunker at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia among them), and one of the many was a monitoring system that can and does track the locations of all members of Congress.
The problem with a cell phone-based tracking system is that, in the event of major damage being done to the cell tower network in a region (by whatever mechanism), your personal cell phone will not be able to connect to the network. While the cell phone identification numbers of the members of the “National Command Authority” (the President, Vice President and the President’s Cabinet), the Supreme Court and both Houses of Congress all have priority access to the nation’s cellular telephone network in case of a “disruptive event,” that priority access is worthless if there is no network to connect to.
In contrast, a satellite phone network works by connecting a phone directly to the satellite communications network. This network is largely immune – at least in theory – from being significantly damaged by most conceivable “disruptive events.” It also allows a much cleaner and clearer signal when trying to locate a particular person.
The notion that members of Congress require satellite phones for their personal and family security is, to be blunt, laughable to the point of being offensive.
There are very few things could potentially impact the cell grid to the point of requiring satellite phones as a substitute emergency communications device. We’ll briefly look at a few of those possibilities below.
The preeminent threat of this type, as of mid-2023, is a large scale nuclear attack on the United States, an idea that would have been unheard of barely ten years ago. This would obviously have a vast and destructive impact on the nation as a whole, but would particularly impact the telephone system. The primary vectors of a nuclear-induced incident would include electromagnetic pulses (EMP) critically damaging unprotected and unhardened points within the network across a wide area.
But there are other possibilities, many of which may seem to approach a level of hysterical hyperbole.
The notion of a “supervolcano” such as Yellowstone, erupting is a certainly extremely remote as a possibility…but not an impossible one. Similarly, a smaller volcanic eruption at – for example – the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, has the potential (YouTube link) to generate a tsunami that would make the tsunamis in the Indian Ocean in 2004 (YouTube link) or the 2011 event at Fukushima, Japan (YouTube link) look tiny in comparison.
An even more remote – but still very real – potential avenue of disruption would be a cometary or meteoric impact. The Earth is being continually bombarded by meteors; they can be seen as “shooting stars” in the night sky. The vast majority of these objects never actually reach the Earth’s surface, burning away to vapor long before coming close to the surface…some, like the 1908 Tunguska Event, are another matter entirely.
However, an event such as the Burckle Impact Event – which occurred, in geological and astronomical terms, only yesterday – or a smaller-scale version of the 1994 impact of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 into Jupiter (just on a smaller, Earth-sized scale) would obviously damage the systems of the world to the extent that the survivors may well be reduced to barbarism…but that is not an option that any government – and especially that of the United States – is willing to entertain. And mitigating that fall – no matter how remote a possibility the causative event may be – requires some level of a functioning government, which as always, is rooted in those placed in authority.
It is perfectly acceptable to detest those in government – especially when they deserve it – but it also must be acknowledged that any civilization above the most basic level requires some form of leadership in order to function. What you, the Reader, should be doing, is figuring out your own strategy to get through what may well be coming.
…Because governments rarely update their COGOPS in public.
