NekkidCuties

Here are links to some posts on the other ‘Safe-for-Work’ Blog.

Dune, Islam, Arab Nationalism and Star Wars

We can finally stop pretending that the Fremen are something other that Muslim Arabs in the Middle-East or that Arrakis is some place other than the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. Denis Villeneuve does a pretty good of highlighting this underlying subtext to the audience in a multitude of ways from how actors look, landscape, architecture, traditional dress etc. The similarities between how Harkonnen use aerial military power to attempt subjugating the Fremen has more than a passing similarity to scenes of conflict from the Middle-East, which we have all seen since the early 2000s.

Chinese E-Commerce Outlets Will Soon Destroy Their Western Competition

Yes.. most of the stuff you buy on American e-commerce sites is made in China, often in the same factories and on same assembly lines at the stuff sold on Temu, Shien etc. In fact, over the past 2-3 years, it is becoming increasingly hard to ignore that a lot of products advertised and sold on Amazon are identical to those on Temu, but significantly more expensive than on the later. Hence the first big perceived advantage of Amazon such as better quality and lower price no longer holds for many classes of products and this situation is only going to get worse for Amazon etc as sites such as Temu will start going after product categories higher up the value chain.

Ukraine Conflict Has Exposed the Mediocrity of Western Weapon Systems

Three decades of deindustrialization has left the West with an inability to build weapon systems at the rate they get consumed in a real armed conflict. This is why Russia can easily make over 5-6 times the number of artillery shells than entire military industrial base of NATO can produce. The same is true for many other consumables from ATGMs, MRLS projectiles, air-defense missiles, tanks, AFVs and much more. It seems the West can’t even rapidly scale up production of its mediocre over-priced weapons because the industrial and skilled manpower base to do so has decayed or was outsourced to China.

Enjoy!

Here are links to some posts on the other ‘Safe-for-Work’ Blog.

Engineering and Scientific Capabilities of West are in Precipitous Decline

Since we are on the topic of American ICBMs, let us talk about the many issues plaguing successful development of the replacement for Minuteman III. This project, known as LGM-35 Sentinel, hasn’t produced a single fully validated prototype for over a decade, is experiencing serious cost and schedule issues- to put it mildly. But to truly grasp the extent and depth of these problems, we have to first talk about the missile system it is supposed to replace. The original Minuteman ICBM was one of most revolutionary and successful weapon system ever created by the American defense establishment.

USA and UK Played a Minimal Role in Defeat of Nazi Germany During WW2

To put it bluntly, the vast majority of equipment loss and casualties suffered by American and British Airforce during their strategic bombing campaigns on Germany were useless and unnecessary. At this point, some of you might say that the loss of German pilots and aircraft during such raids was worthwhile “compensation”- except it wasn’t. By 1943, Germany had already started investing much more in ground-based aircraft interception (better AA guns, automated gun laying, early warning and tracking radar networks etc) than aircraft interceptors.

Part 2: Elites are Not Good at Strategic or Long-Term Thinking

At some stage the forces which hold the stressed society together are overwhelmed by those caused by cascading events caused by the unnecessary suffering of the average people in the system. The majority then lose their faith in “elites” and all institutions associated with them, creating a power vacuum that is inevitably filled by some other faction or group. While those who fill such an emergent power vacuum might not be much better than the old “elites”, they do represent a shift from the disastrous policies and institutions which drove that society to implode in the first place.

Enjoy!