I just couldn’t let this one slide, there were a few things I found to be quite hilarious. It should be said that I found most of his argument interesting and in all likelihood accurate, but some of his claims or statements just make you go…WTF?

[B]DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Going bankrupt: The US’s greatest threat
By Chalmers Johnson

Here’s the first amusing line:

“…preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries.”

A “war”? As in a shooting war? Against who, the one-inch-tall men seen on Mars in the NASA image from a few weeks ago?

“We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world’s number one polluter.”

Health care is provided by health care corporations. Complain that people can’t afford it, but this is not a welfare state. If spending is the issue, then making the government more expansive to take on health care isn’t going to help either, genius. And I won’t even touch the second one. Do rocks and trees vote? No? Moving on.

“They also agree on a figure of $141.7 billion for the “supplemental” budget to fight the global “war on terror” “

It is amusing that we spend twice as much on this war that China spends on her entire military, and we still have made close to zero progress.

“Unfortunately, that statement is no longer true. The world’s richest political entity, according to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook, is the European Union. The EU’s 2006 GDP (gross domestic product – all goods and services produced domestically) was estimated to be slightly larger than that of the US However, China’s 2006 GDP was only slightly smaller than that of the US, and Japan was the world’s fourth-richest nation.”

How is the statement that “the US is the richest nation on Earth” no longer true because of the EU? Since when did the EU become a nation state?

“There is today no sane use for them, while the trillions spent on them could have been used to solve the problems of social security and health care, quality education and access to higher education for all…”

Again with the welfare state thing! Social Security should be eliminated, not repaired.

“There are, however, some steps that this country urgently needs to take. These include reversing Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy, beginning to liquidate our global empire of over 800 military bases, cutting from the defense budget all projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States, and ceasing to use the defense budget as a Keynesian jobs program. If we do these things we have a chance of squeaking by. If we don’t, we face probable national insolvency and a long depression.”

I agree with what he says here (it’s a quote actually, but whatever), with the exception of the obligatory Bush bashing. I am nowhere near “upper class”, and yet the Bush tax cuts positively affected my bank account. How can that be if these liberal mouthpieces are convinced that they only helped the wealthy?

Anyway, I just thought that article was interesting. I’d have commented on the entire thing, but a crapload of “he’s right here…” or similar phrases would’ve been asinine 😀

incase you didn’t know putin was the guy single handedly flying the trolling bomber! 😀 Edit: i only joke when i say there trolling just to be clear.

That’d be more amusing if he wasn’t sitting in a Tu-160 cockpit 😀

No one said they were trying to avoid detection.

And neither was the carrier.

will the Russians have enough of a missile arsenal to be a viable threat to NATO

And they can’t simply retask an SSBN or two to take out Western Europe because…?

Anyway, people getting worked up because a BEAR-H happens to find a carrier or flys close to the USA or Japan is amusing. This happened all the time in the Cold War with zero problems. Of course their flights were going to drop in number for a while, a good portion of the strategic bomber fleet was in either the Ukraine or Kazakhstan when the USSR fractured for one. No big deal.

Now, the Su-24 overflight a few years ago, THAT was amusing 😀

The double digit ones did enter service in the late 80s.

The S-300PT was ready in the late 70’s…

Because if you had any idea at the Russian midset you’d have noticed all those things were nothing but “Disinformation” by the there are at least 64000 S-300 V/PMU-2’s a Battery of the S-300 PMU-3 AKA (S-400) with 32 missiles protecting Russia

So what system do the Russians use to transmit false data into the Digital Globe imaging satellites to ensure that false imagery is loaded into public servers like Google Earth’s? Otherwise this is not disinformation.

And I’m not telling you that there aren’t a whole crapload of S-300P batteries…just look around outside Moscow for a whole mess of them. There just aren’t that many in the interior of the nation. Most of them are positioned to defend cities and industrial areas, as well as strategic facilities along the periphery of the nation such as the SSBN bases.

your blog means nothing.

Damn. Guess I should stop having bits of it published in Jane’s then.

No. Three are kept as core-elements of the atomar deterence force together with some Deltas. Next best thing are the mobile ICBM.

Only Dmitri Donskoi TK-208 is still active as a missile test platform, the rest of the Typhoons have been withdrawn. There are 6 Delta IIIs and 6 Delta IVs still active, and the first Dolgorukiy-class SSBN has recently been launched but probably isn’t operational yet.

The better question is how on earth are you ever going to do an intercept if it comes in below your radar like it was meant to do in an actual war.

Wrong, BLACKJACK has always been an ALCM carrier in service. It is only now getting weapons other than the Kh-55.

That means that in the first portion of their flight the Blackjacks will travel 200km further than the Bears every hour. Unless the Blackjacks slow down they are unlikely to all arrive to their launch points together.

And what if the BEARs were taking off from a point closer to the target than the BLACKJACKs were…

PRH implies passive homing…the PL-11 is a semi-active AAM, not a passive homer like the R-27P.

Regardless of the intake design, the YF-23A met the USAF’s LO requirement, with some people claiming that it actually exceeded the requirement.