Aussie Climate Council Tries to Explain Why Abandoning Net Zero is a Problem
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And tacitly admits people would not choose green energy solutions of their
own free will.
1 hour ago
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
Germany prepares for war... again!
The Germans are preparing for war. But at the moment it's being taken for granted that not everyone is going to be in favour of it. In fact it ought to go without saying that Germany is currently the most antiwar country in the whole of the western world. And it has to be said that that's despite some pretty stiff competition.
The problem of course is that war is inevitable. For all the magical thinking of western elites (including both the Biden and Trump Administrations in America), Putin's conquest of Ukraine is currently continuing largely unimpeded by anything other than his own troops' incompetence.
And so of course there's going to be war at some point whether the demos like it or not. And thus it's interesting to observe, in the face of such an obvious "democratic deficit", the means that a supposedly democratic government will be forced to deploy against its own voters.
As Lisa Haseldine describes exercise Red Storm Bravo (itself a rehearsal for Operation Deutschland) in The Spectator
The first day’s main event was moving a military convoy through the centre of the city after dark. As the sun set over Hamburg’s port, I watched the heavily armed soldiers march towards a fleet of about 70 military vehicles, lined up three abreast. Some were small armoured vehicles, others enormous Rheinmetall-branded trucks, several with machine-gun turrets that would later be manned as the convoy sped through the city. Many soldiers wore balaclavas to prevent them being identified, according to our Bundeswehr escort.
...
At two points along the route, the convoy was stopped by pretend protests: at the first, army reservists in civvies waved banners and chanted at the convoy to ‘turn back’; at the second, ‘protestors’ staged a sit-in, with signs saying ‘glue’ around the necks of some to denote those who would have stuck themselves to the ground. The point was for the riot police to practise removing them. Groups of three took turns: a grab at the protester's head from behind and a knee to the back, one arm twisted around, then the other, allowing the police to peel them off the ground and carry them away.So far, so German!
The "interesting" question of course is to what extent countries with longer and, er, perhaps "deeper" traditions of "liberal" democracy will follow suit. Can one really imagine English police, let alone the Army, cracking down on "democratic" protesters in London or Marchwood?
We'll wait and see.
Thursday, October 23, 2025
Trump's New War?
Well, it has to be said that "color revolutions" don't have the appeal they once did. Yes, the CIA are down there right now, but one can only assume they're spying out the land and softening the place up for something else. And that, of course, is where the biggest US military build-up in the western hemisphere since 1989 comes into play.
Needless to say, the official reason Uncle Sam is down there is to take care of drug cartels. But is that really credible? In the old days (i.e. pre-Trump 2.0), the US Coast Guard would intercept, board and confiscate. Nowadays though, the US Navy just blows the smugglers' little boats to little bits.
A month ago, Little Marco Rubio was sent out to make the case for America's new "kinetic" drugs policy, and he promised they'd do it again. Today, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced on X (where else?) that they'd done just that.
And the Colombians aren't happy about it either.
The head-banging element of the nationalist "Right" in America will of course shriek and holler. But the moderates will be more than happy.
And so long as he wins, Trump will be pretty happy too.
Monday, October 13, 2025
The defense industry and the US government are inextricably linked
Close examination indicates that in the US, one branch of the bureaucracy buys weapons from another
Tuesday, September 9, 2025
Fresh on the heels of news that the government will take a 10 percent stake in failing chip company Intel, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has floated the possibility of commanding a direct stake in Lockheed Martin and other large defense corporations. Speaking on CNBC, and extolling the “exquisite” proficiency of Lockheed products, he claimed “my Secretary of Defense and Deputy Secretary of Defense are thinking about it.”
The proposal obviously fulfills a key requirement, which is to appeal to the transactional proclivities of the boss. Donald Trump had greeted the Intel arrangement as a “good deal” criticized only by “stupid people,” and suggested that there will be more such investments. (As is already happening with the injection of Pentagon funds into rare-earth producer MP Materials.)
The Intel deal at least involved no further investment of taxpayers’ cash, since it involved merely the conversion of Biden-era CHIPS Act bailout money into a stock holding. But it is hard to discern merit in turning weapons production into more of a government-run enterprise. The prospect has certainly excited alarm among free-market partisans. “I don’t really understand why they would want to do this,” Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Defense News. “This is basically abandoning the free market for national security. This becomes state capitalism, much more in the model of China than in the American tradition.”
But Harrison and other such complainers miss the point. The free market in national security went away a long time ago; major defense firms already enjoy a symbiotic relationship with Uncle Sam. As Lutnick himself told CNBC, “Lockheed is basically an arm of the US government” deriving 97 percent of its income from government contracts. Much the same applies to the rest of the defense-industrial sector, with sellers and the buyer enjoying a seamless relationship in which a perpetually revolving door spins defense officials into the corporate world, including as lobbyists, and back.
A 2023 report by Senator Elizabeth Warren detailed how the top American defense contractors employed no fewer than 672 former officials, military officers, along with former members of Congress and staffers as board members, lobbyists and senior executives, with Boeing leading the way. A total nationalization of the defense industry could potentially eliminate the current army of lobbyists. Yet, as one longtime critic put it, “I’m not crazy about replacing private sector lobbyists with government official lobbyists. With even more politicians having a finger in the pie, what could possibly go wrong?”
Though Lutnick would hardly care for the comparison, our system has broad similarities with the way the Soviets ran defense, a system replete with bloated and inefficient enterprises staffed by an army of dependent bureaucrats and workers insulated from competition or failure. It ultimately bankrupted the Soviet economy.
Close examination indicates that in the US, one branch of the bureaucracy buys weapons from another branch. This arrangement does not allow for failure, since those who lose out in bidding for a particular contract can customarily be assured that they will be compensated next time around. Thus Boeing lost to Lockheed in the competition for the lightweight fighter contract that spawned the ill-famed F-35. But now it is Boeing’s turn as winner of the contract for the next multi-billion US Air Force fighter contract, the F-47. Sometimes the process is short-circuited, as in the case of the Navy’s littoral combat ship (LCS), for which Lockheed and General Dynamics submitted competing designs. Under pressure from the contractors’ congressional offshoot, the Navy bought both rather than picking a winner. The program was beset by gigantic overruns in cost and produced a fleet of ships prone to breakdown and equipped with deficient weapons systems.
The problem is exacerbated by the domination of our defense industry by an oligopoly of five “prime” contractors – Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop-Grumman. In its present form, the oligopoly was fostered by Clinton’s defense secretary William J. Perry. Following the end of the Cold War, he thought it a fine idea for these corporations to absorb multiple weapons producers – at least 40 at the time – on promises of efficiency and cost-savings.
The mergers Perry promoted were lubricated with attractive tranches of government cash. As the sorry saga of the Lockheed-General Dynamics LCS program ($100 billion lifetime cost), not to mention the US Army’s Future Combat Systems program supervised by General Dynamics ($20 billion, but nothing actually produced) or the Air Force and Navy’s F-35 deal with Lockheed (years late, multiple shortfalls and a doubled cost) might indicate, these promises remain unfulfilled.
Meanwhile, unlike the hapless Intel corporation, which lost almost $19 billion last year, the surviving defense giants are extremely profitable. In 2024, Northrop, for example, had an overall operating profit of just over 10 percent; Lockheed, though doing less well than in recent years, still turned in a profit of just over 7 percent, with chief executive James Taiclet taking home more than $23.8 million in total compensation. Even Boeing, hobbled by spectacularly inept management in recent decades, is back to making money on its defense business.
Pentagon shortcomings have attracted vehement criticism of late, and there is the threat of competition from the burgeoning tech industry centered in Silicon Valley, where companies large and small are eager to get a slice of the $1 trillion defense budget. The software company Palantir, for example, was founded by entrepreneur Peter Thiel with the express intention, according to his biographer, of bringing “the military-industrial complex back to Silicon Valley, with his own companies at its very center.”
Last year, Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer, penned “The Defense Reformation,” a trenchant critique of current defense procurement practices, complete with an excoriation of Perry’s rearrangement which, he wrote, had led to a “monopsony” in which “one entity is the sole buyer of a given product or service,” thus stifling innovation. Highlighting the need for competition, Sankar called for an overhaul of the way the Pentagon does business and demanded the deployment of artificial intelligence (central to Palantir’s business) across the board.
Yet there are telling signs that the disruptors of Silicon Valley will not bring about significant change to business as usual. The company’s roster is already festooned with a host of former Pentagon officials and politicians, including former congressman and noted China hawk Mike Gallagher, heading its defense business. Meanwhile, Palantir’s sister company Anduril is set to garner a contract enjoined by the “Big, Beautiful Bill” that has been carefully crafted to benefit the Thiel-founded firm – and none other. Buried deep in the bill is a section authorizing border surveillance towers that specifically requires they be “autonomous,” i.e., controlled by AI, a technology for which the company is the sole vendor, thus granting Anduril a profitable monopoly.
Partisans for further government support and control of the defense business may point to China, where major defense firms are government-owned, as a worthy example of the benefits of such a system. The expanding Chinese military, supplied by giant government-owned firms such as Norinco and Avic, do indeed get glowing reviews on this side of the Pacific, not least from tech industry hawks such as Gallagher and Anduril president Christian Brose. But since China has not fought a war since 1979, we know very little about its actual military abilities. Xi Jinping feels the need regularly to purge his military high command on grounds of corruption, notably including the People’s Liberation Army’s Equipment Development Department, which is responsible for developing weapons and widely cited as a hotbed of graft. The actual performance of Chinese weapons systems is a matter of conjecture and hype. There have been complaints out of Pakistan, a major customer for Chinese hardware, about reliability, including in frigate warships, although the recent Pakistani success in downing French-supplied Indian Rafales with their Chinese J-10 fighters (reportedly thanks to longer-ranged air-to-air missiles) was a significant publicity boost.
DJI, a privately owned Chinese company, is by far the most successful drone company in the world and has done thumping business supplying both sides in the Ukraine war. Its DJI Mavic 3 drone ($3,500 on Amazon), when suitably adapted, is held in high esteem by Ukrainian and Russian soldiers alike and remains in demand more than three years into the war. Other recent reports out of Ukraine reference a formidable attack drone recently deployed by the Russians, dubbed the V2U by Kyiv. That machine carries an AI chip, the Jetson AGX Orin processor, made by none other than US chip powerhouse Nvidia. That’s private enterprise at work. So, for a real payoff, Lutnick and “his” defense secretary might consider putting more money into Nvidia – or even DJI.
Andrew Cockburn is Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.
Tuesday, September 9, 2025
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| (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) |
Fresh on the heels of news that the government will take a 10 percent stake in failing chip company Intel, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has floated the possibility of commanding a direct stake in Lockheed Martin and other large defense corporations. Speaking on CNBC, and extolling the “exquisite” proficiency of Lockheed products, he claimed “my Secretary of Defense and Deputy Secretary of Defense are thinking about it.”
The proposal obviously fulfills a key requirement, which is to appeal to the transactional proclivities of the boss. Donald Trump had greeted the Intel arrangement as a “good deal” criticized only by “stupid people,” and suggested that there will be more such investments. (As is already happening with the injection of Pentagon funds into rare-earth producer MP Materials.)
The Intel deal at least involved no further investment of taxpayers’ cash, since it involved merely the conversion of Biden-era CHIPS Act bailout money into a stock holding. But it is hard to discern merit in turning weapons production into more of a government-run enterprise. The prospect has certainly excited alarm among free-market partisans. “I don’t really understand why they would want to do this,” Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Defense News. “This is basically abandoning the free market for national security. This becomes state capitalism, much more in the model of China than in the American tradition.”
But Harrison and other such complainers miss the point. The free market in national security went away a long time ago; major defense firms already enjoy a symbiotic relationship with Uncle Sam. As Lutnick himself told CNBC, “Lockheed is basically an arm of the US government” deriving 97 percent of its income from government contracts. Much the same applies to the rest of the defense-industrial sector, with sellers and the buyer enjoying a seamless relationship in which a perpetually revolving door spins defense officials into the corporate world, including as lobbyists, and back.
A 2023 report by Senator Elizabeth Warren detailed how the top American defense contractors employed no fewer than 672 former officials, military officers, along with former members of Congress and staffers as board members, lobbyists and senior executives, with Boeing leading the way. A total nationalization of the defense industry could potentially eliminate the current army of lobbyists. Yet, as one longtime critic put it, “I’m not crazy about replacing private sector lobbyists with government official lobbyists. With even more politicians having a finger in the pie, what could possibly go wrong?”
Though Lutnick would hardly care for the comparison, our system has broad similarities with the way the Soviets ran defense, a system replete with bloated and inefficient enterprises staffed by an army of dependent bureaucrats and workers insulated from competition or failure. It ultimately bankrupted the Soviet economy.
Close examination indicates that in the US, one branch of the bureaucracy buys weapons from another branch. This arrangement does not allow for failure, since those who lose out in bidding for a particular contract can customarily be assured that they will be compensated next time around. Thus Boeing lost to Lockheed in the competition for the lightweight fighter contract that spawned the ill-famed F-35. But now it is Boeing’s turn as winner of the contract for the next multi-billion US Air Force fighter contract, the F-47. Sometimes the process is short-circuited, as in the case of the Navy’s littoral combat ship (LCS), for which Lockheed and General Dynamics submitted competing designs. Under pressure from the contractors’ congressional offshoot, the Navy bought both rather than picking a winner. The program was beset by gigantic overruns in cost and produced a fleet of ships prone to breakdown and equipped with deficient weapons systems.
The problem is exacerbated by the domination of our defense industry by an oligopoly of five “prime” contractors – Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop-Grumman. In its present form, the oligopoly was fostered by Clinton’s defense secretary William J. Perry. Following the end of the Cold War, he thought it a fine idea for these corporations to absorb multiple weapons producers – at least 40 at the time – on promises of efficiency and cost-savings.
The mergers Perry promoted were lubricated with attractive tranches of government cash. As the sorry saga of the Lockheed-General Dynamics LCS program ($100 billion lifetime cost), not to mention the US Army’s Future Combat Systems program supervised by General Dynamics ($20 billion, but nothing actually produced) or the Air Force and Navy’s F-35 deal with Lockheed (years late, multiple shortfalls and a doubled cost) might indicate, these promises remain unfulfilled.
Meanwhile, unlike the hapless Intel corporation, which lost almost $19 billion last year, the surviving defense giants are extremely profitable. In 2024, Northrop, for example, had an overall operating profit of just over 10 percent; Lockheed, though doing less well than in recent years, still turned in a profit of just over 7 percent, with chief executive James Taiclet taking home more than $23.8 million in total compensation. Even Boeing, hobbled by spectacularly inept management in recent decades, is back to making money on its defense business.
Pentagon shortcomings have attracted vehement criticism of late, and there is the threat of competition from the burgeoning tech industry centered in Silicon Valley, where companies large and small are eager to get a slice of the $1 trillion defense budget. The software company Palantir, for example, was founded by entrepreneur Peter Thiel with the express intention, according to his biographer, of bringing “the military-industrial complex back to Silicon Valley, with his own companies at its very center.”
Last year, Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer, penned “The Defense Reformation,” a trenchant critique of current defense procurement practices, complete with an excoriation of Perry’s rearrangement which, he wrote, had led to a “monopsony” in which “one entity is the sole buyer of a given product or service,” thus stifling innovation. Highlighting the need for competition, Sankar called for an overhaul of the way the Pentagon does business and demanded the deployment of artificial intelligence (central to Palantir’s business) across the board.
Yet there are telling signs that the disruptors of Silicon Valley will not bring about significant change to business as usual. The company’s roster is already festooned with a host of former Pentagon officials and politicians, including former congressman and noted China hawk Mike Gallagher, heading its defense business. Meanwhile, Palantir’s sister company Anduril is set to garner a contract enjoined by the “Big, Beautiful Bill” that has been carefully crafted to benefit the Thiel-founded firm – and none other. Buried deep in the bill is a section authorizing border surveillance towers that specifically requires they be “autonomous,” i.e., controlled by AI, a technology for which the company is the sole vendor, thus granting Anduril a profitable monopoly.
Partisans for further government support and control of the defense business may point to China, where major defense firms are government-owned, as a worthy example of the benefits of such a system. The expanding Chinese military, supplied by giant government-owned firms such as Norinco and Avic, do indeed get glowing reviews on this side of the Pacific, not least from tech industry hawks such as Gallagher and Anduril president Christian Brose. But since China has not fought a war since 1979, we know very little about its actual military abilities. Xi Jinping feels the need regularly to purge his military high command on grounds of corruption, notably including the People’s Liberation Army’s Equipment Development Department, which is responsible for developing weapons and widely cited as a hotbed of graft. The actual performance of Chinese weapons systems is a matter of conjecture and hype. There have been complaints out of Pakistan, a major customer for Chinese hardware, about reliability, including in frigate warships, although the recent Pakistani success in downing French-supplied Indian Rafales with their Chinese J-10 fighters (reportedly thanks to longer-ranged air-to-air missiles) was a significant publicity boost.
DJI, a privately owned Chinese company, is by far the most successful drone company in the world and has done thumping business supplying both sides in the Ukraine war. Its DJI Mavic 3 drone ($3,500 on Amazon), when suitably adapted, is held in high esteem by Ukrainian and Russian soldiers alike and remains in demand more than three years into the war. Other recent reports out of Ukraine reference a formidable attack drone recently deployed by the Russians, dubbed the V2U by Kyiv. That machine carries an AI chip, the Jetson AGX Orin processor, made by none other than US chip powerhouse Nvidia. That’s private enterprise at work. So, for a real payoff, Lutnick and “his” defense secretary might consider putting more money into Nvidia – or even DJI.
Andrew Cockburn is Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.
Tuesday, September 23, 2025
A Muslim woman tells a ‘Queer for Palestine’ that he’s not welcome at a pro-Palestinian protest and to leave.
— Dr. Maalouf (@realMaalouf) September 22, 2025
“Get out, we don’t want your kind here. We are Muslims, and you disgust us. You are not part of our cause.”
LGBT who support Palestine are the dumbest people ever! pic.twitter.com/P0LVttUnX8
Wednesday, September 10, 2025
The First American Pope
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| But Americans in Rome during conclaves always carry Old Glory about with them - just in case! |
The news that the new Pope comes from not just a military family but from a US Navy family really shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone. His father served during the Second World War. His brother also served.
That no doubt is one of the reasons why he's been entrusted with trying to tidy up the mess of the Bergoglio papacy. Needless to say, he and Bergoglio were elected by essentially the same people.* The difference is that Bergoglio was a disaster in every possible way - including those that matter to Uncle Sam. (The Vatican's coffers, natch - and of course the institution's capacity to project its "soft power" around the world to further western interests, e.g. peace for the sake of prosperity and free trade, and "human rights" and "democracy" in the face of the world's increasingly integrated networks of dodgy dictatorships and quasi-dictatorships!)
Needless to say, they weren't expecting Bergoglio to fuck up literally everything he turned his spiteful, vindictive little mind to - including opening up splits between Catholics over things like liturgy and sexuality, which must have seemed quite baffling to any standard US foreign policy wonk. (And of course they hadn't expected Benedict XVI at all - the Michael Gove-style wild card of the 2005 Conclave. Strange but true, but back in 2013 the narrative coming out of Langley was that the new Pope was going to have to clean up Ratzinger's mess. Be careful what you wish for!)
*And no, I still don't believe in nonsense about "the St Gallen Mafia". Austen Ivereigh is Deep State, working with the Americans. James Martin SJ was at university in Chicago. He and Robert Prevost are old friends.
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