Comprehensive49

While studying for his PhD at Tsinghua, Ben Norton is even giving amazing lectures on political economy at Fudan University. Life goals.

The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) is responsible for auditing the US government to avoid wasting money. However, the Pentagon just refused GAO inspectors and blocked public release of their latest F-35 report, probably because they look so bad. Here's what the numbers that have been released earlier already show:

F-35 readiness rates are disastrous:

• Mission capable F-35s (can fly any mission, even a beginner familiarization hop): 67% in 2021 → 44% in 2025
• FULL mission capable (can do all combat missions): 38% → 25%^1
• Even the old F-16C built in the 1980s sits at 64%, much higher than the F-35

F-35 fleet is split into castes:

~1,057 F-35s have been built, spread across the US and its allies. Of these, the US operates ~800 of them.

"TR" (Technical Refresh) is the jet's built-in electronics hardware, "Block" is the software it runs. Old hardware can't run new software, so TR-3/Block 4 is the only fully modern configuration:

• 238 global jets / ~180 US jets (~23%) built before TR-2/Block 3F will never be fully operational, and are not upgradeable. These can only be used for testing, training, or scrapped.
• 524 global jets / ~400 US jets (~50%) stuck at old TR-2/Block 3F standard, no plans to upgrade them.^1 Combat capable, but frozen at 2015-era capability.
• 295 global jets / ~220 US jets (~28%) are the only ones on the modern TR-3/Block 4 path. Except these are good for training only:^2 they're delivered without their delayed radar, and the engine core upgrade needed to fully power and cool the Block 4 electronics will only be installed in 2031

Zero F-35s are both combat-ready and on the modernization path. The mid-generation jets are the only ones actually doing any fighting, even though the aircraft was bought for the capabilities Block 4 promises.

The US only has ~800 × 25% full-mission-capable = ~200 combat-ready F-35s,^2 all frozen at 2015-era capability.

Meanwhile, China has produced ~500 J-20s at ~120/year, projected ~1,000 by 2030.^3 This means China probably already has more modern, combat-ready 5th-gen jets than the USA (at even a bad ~50% readiness rate (~500 J-20s × 50% = ~250 combat-ready J-20s versus ~200 combat-ready US F-35s).

Lockheed profits from every failure:

Lockheed's own 2025 study found their suppliers can't make 48 critical components for the F-35 on time. The Pentagon now wants to give Lockheed another $13.7B just to get to 65% full-mission-capable by 2030.^1 Of course, the Pentagon will also need to replace the ~580 unupgradeable or frozen US jets, all of which become future orders for Lockheed.

Other References

This Wednesday, Hunter Biden launched the $LAPTOP crypto coin, only for it to crash 98% by Thursday while 'mystery traders' of the coin have made windfall profits. ^[https://wset.com/news/nation-world/hunter-bidens-meme-coin-down-98-since-being-launched-report-crypto-laptop-social-media] ^[https://futurism.com/future-society/hunter-biden-laptop-memecoin-crypto-rugpull-national-disgrace]

This exactly mirrors Trump's and Melania's earlier crypto rugpulls. This universal scammy behavior is the most visual example of the equivalence between liberals and conservatives. Both will scam the working class to enrich capitalists.

Pretty sure this still counts as SFW. In other news, Grindr in Dallas suffered an overload and outage today.

Sauce: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sE6xJGCX34w

Sauce: https://www.reddit.com/r/TankieTheDeprogram/comments/1wajmco/thank_you_for_your_service_comrade/

After her side job as Biden's Commerce Secretary in charge of suppressing Chinese technological innovation, Gina Raimondo has now gone back to her main job of licking capitalist boot by suppressing any mention of wealth redistribution like UBI.

UBI is the only relatively mainstream solution to AI layoffs that isn't just straight socialism.

Joe Biden's Former commerce secretary Gina Raimondo has decided that UBI in response to AI is the thing to fear most. She said: "I personally think it's like the end of America."

She is now heading up a newly-launched extremely well-funded organization to make sure the country reaches for anything but a basic income in response to AI. It's called RAISE US, and the money behind it comes largely from the companies building the disruption it exists to manage.

RAISE US launched June 25, with Raimondo as CEO and former Indiana governor Eric Holcomb as co-chair. It has already secured more than $500 million toward a $1 billion target. Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and the OpenAI Foundation are anchor partners. Behind them sits a wall of corporate and philanthropic money: Blackstone, General Motors, IBM, Eli Lilly, Mastercard, Deloitte, UPS, Cisco, Workday, Arnold Ventures, and a dozen more.

The article goes on to show that RAISE US's advertised alternative to UBI, job retraining programs, is proven to be as ineffective as one single community college course is at improving job prospects. RAISE US's entire job is to mount excuse after excuse to allow capitalists to capture all profit from replacing everyone's jobs, while making it appear like it's the workers' fault for not keeping up.

Who could have possibly foreseen this? /s

It's almost like when these AI CEOs constantly tell their investors how they're going to make everyone homeless and jobless, then all the workers start taking them seriously and seeing them as the threat that they are.

As I have posted before:

There are only 2 ways the worker-capitalist contradiction can ever be solved:

• communism, where the abundant fruits of automation are distributed evenly among all, ala fully automated luxury communism
• exterminism (from Peter Frase’s book Four Futures), where the capitalists finally fulfill their dream of automating everything and can genocide all the unneeded workers.

It’s quite important we bring about revolution before option 2 becomes viable.

This video by Adam Ragusea (a pretty mainstream food channel) looks at how U.S. hereditary farms often preserve quasi-feudal relationships where large farm landowners exert control over migrant and trafficked laborers, recreating power imbalances similar to feudal lord-serf dynamics.

Along the way, he makes a nice overview focusing on the advent of capitalism as a progressive force against feudalism, and how US farmers, whose practices are descended from southern feudal slave plantation owners, still preserve some unproductive, harmful aspects of feudalism.

I have not seen a good explanation on this from Americans, who usually peddle the brainless "they hate our freedom" line. Lemmygrad is also sorely lacking any good discussions on this topic.

The U.S. funded the mujahideen to drain Soviet resources in Afghanistan. This makes it rather strange that after the Soviet Union collapsed, Al-Qaeda (one of the factions in the mujahideen) would turn around and bite the hand that fed them.

Was Al-Qaeda dissatisfied with some aspect of U.S. treatment toward them and expected the 9/11 attacks to change that? Or did the U.S. and Israel tacitly allow or even encourage the attacks to provide an excuse to dominate the Middle East?

I would love more sources and reading on this that aren't just pro-US-empire propaganda!

Chinese automotive glass company Fuyao builds a brand-new factory in Ohio employing 3000 Americans.

WSJ then writes a smear piece crying about the new factory outcompeting an 80-year-old nearby plant employing 250 workers (which is actually owned by a Mexican company, but they only say that at the end of the article to made their smear seem stronger). WSJ complains that China is somehow "hollowing out American manufacturing" by BUILDING FACTORIES IN AMERICA, EMPLOYING AMERICANS, and COMPETING IN AMERICA.

Ohio senator Bernie Moreno now want the US government to force Fuyao to sell its factory and lose out on its investment.

The USA previously stole a solar panel factory built in the US by Chinese solar giant Trina Solar by threatening to pass the bill "American Tax Dollars for American Solar Manufacturing Act", which would deny any solar tax credits to Chinese-run solar plants in the USA. As a result, Trina was forced to sell to American company Freyr (now rebranded T1 Energy). ^[https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1985870993118937221] T1 Energy now has the gall to brag about how advanced "their" new plant is. ^[https://x.com/T1_Energy/status/1985420138058023011]

Even if China builds factories in the USA, they're somehow not doing it the right way. Apparently China is just supposed to build factories in the USA and give them away for free or something. This is some damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't type-shit.

Obligatory Parenti quote:

“In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.

“If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disenfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.”

— Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds; Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism, pp. 41-42