The lockdowns are finally ending for Americans (at least in states without Democratic governors), and the lockdown also ended for Michael Flynn, who was finally freed from his Kafkaesque prosecution:
The Justice Department has moved to withdraw its case against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, citing “newly discovered and disclosed information,” according to a new court filing.
The move, first reported by The Associated Press, comes less than an hour after the top prosecutor on the case, Brandon Van Grack, submitted his withdrawal from the case. The decision said that the White House interview Flynn gave to the FBI, which ultimately led to his guilty plea, was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”
“The Government is not persuaded that the January 24, 2017 interview was conducted with a legitimate investigative basis and therefore does not believe that Mr. Flynn’s statements were material even if untrue,” the decision states, citing Flynn’s 2017 guilty plea of lying to federal investigators. “Moreover, we do not believe that the Government can prove either the relevant false statements or their materiality beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Jeff Jensen, the U.S. attorney tasked by Attorney General Bill Barr in February to reviewing the case, recommended that it be dropped. Flynn moved to withdraw his guilty plea in January, saying he “never lied” to FBI agents over his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
“Through the course of my review of General Flynn’s case, I concluded the proper and just course was to dismiss the case,” Jensen said in a statement. “I briefed Attorney General Barr on my findings, advised him on these conclusions, and he agreed.” The DOJ’s filing states that Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak “were entirely appropriate on their face.”
In recent weeks, additional information released in the case has shed scrutiny on the way the case was conducted. Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell claimed last month in a court filing that Van Grack had made a “side deal” with Flynn’s former defense team that was withheld from the retired Army general, citing heavily-redacted emails that show Flynn’s former lawyers discussing why the deal needed to be “kept secret,” implying that Flynn would be used to testify in further criminal cases.
Further documents released last week showed handwritten notes from an FBI official questioning the goal of Flynn’s White House interview with FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka, suggesting the intent was “to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”
Another release revealed that Flynn had been the subject of a spinoff surveillance operation under the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” probe of the 2016 Trump campaign.
Given all the dirt that has come out about Crossfire Hurricane, AKA the Russian Collusion Hoax, AKA The Plot Against the President, this is not the last we’re going to hear about that conspiracy…
The people running states like New Jersey and cities like Chicago know they’re broke. Ridiculously generous public employee pensions – concocted by elected officials and union leaders who had to have understood that they were writing checks their taxpayers couldn’t cover – are bleeding them dry, with no political solution in sight.
They also know that they have only two possible outs: bankruptcy, or some form of federal bailout. Since the former means a disgraceful end to local political careers while the latter requires some kind of massive crisis to push Washington into a place where a multi-trillion dollar state/city bailout is the least bad option, it’s safe to assume that mayors and governors – along with public sector union leaders – have been hoping for such a crisis to save their bacon.
And this year they got their wish. The country is on lockdown, unemployment is skyrocketing and mayors and governors now have a plausible way to rebrand their criminal mismanagement as a “natural disaster” deserving of outside help.
Early estimates of the COVID-19 death rate, cited to justify the lockdowns, have proven far too pessimistic. In March, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated a 3.4 percent fatality rate and Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated that the fatality rate of the coronavirus was about 2 percent. As PJ Media’s Matt Margolis reported, at least five studies have placed the death rate below 1 percent, confirming President Donald Trump’s hunch.
Recent studies have found that far more people than expected have COVID-19 antibodies — meaning the virus has spread faster than previously thought, but also proving that it is far less deadly than previously thought.
Furthermore, a recent study showed that Democratic governors were three times more likely than Republican governors to impose a lockdown. This would make sense, given the Democratic control over many population centers experiencing large outbreaks: New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., for example. However, the study found that “counterintuitively, the percentage of the state’s population infected with COVID-19 had the weakest effect on the governors’ decisions of all the four variables.”
The study found that the three most significant variables were political affiliation (a heavy slant toward Democrats), “social learning” (governors of states afflicted by COVID-19 later acted much faster than governors of states who were afflicted early on), and “mini-cascades” (the actions of some governors sparked multiple other governors to order lockdowns in the next three days).
Both social learning and mini-cascades shine a light on how news of the coronavirus’ danger spread. As states with coronavirus hot spots reacted, other states followed suit, preparing for outbreaks of their own.
Yet the political slant is also extremely significant, especially considering the different ways state and local officials have carried out their lockdowns. Greenville, Miss. Mayor Errick Simmons notoriously defended his ban on drive-in church services that led to parishioners facing $500 fines. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio threatened to “permanently” close churches and synagogues unless they comply with his orders — and he issued a disgusting threat to the Jewish community in particular. Andy Berke, mayor of Chattanooga, Tenn., banned drive-in church services even though Tennessee’s governor permitted them. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear dispatched the State Police against a church hosting a drive-in service. Police in Virginia threatened a pastor with a year in jail for hosting a socially-distanced church service, enacting Gov. Ralph Northam’s order.
All these political leaders belong to the same party: the Democratic Party. Not all of the onerous coronavirus restrictions that violate religious freedom have been issued by Democrats, but there is a disturbing correlation between the left-wing party and crisis orders that single out churches, synagogues, and mosques. It seems one party is more likely than the other to think of religion as less than “essential,” and much of that animus traces back to the mistaken idea that religion (Christianity in particular) and science are in conflict.
The outrageous tyranny of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and her heavy-handed, illogical, and irresponsible Wuhan coronavirus edicts have finally been outdone by another Democrat governor, this time on the east coast.
Maine governor Janet Mills jumped on the one-size-fits all Wuhan coronavirus bandwagon, and forced a state-wide shutdown order, including in counties that have tiny numbers of infections and zero deaths.
“[Of] the five Upper Midwestern states…Minnesota has both the highest unemployment rate and the worst COVID-19 death rate in the region. Heckuva job, Timmy!” That would be Minnesota’s Democratic governor Tim Walz.
As I write this, I am surrounded by silence: not only the silence of a small university town on lockdown but, also, the silence of the feminists and postmodernists as the COVID-19 pandemic has taken over.
Where are the usual attacks on white male-dominated science? Where’s the “standpoint epistemology” to tell us how different is the knowledge intersectionally-appropriate feminist scientists would bring to this crucial problem? How many of those labs fiercely trying to find a treatment, a vaccine, a path forward, have a demographically appropriate number of women researchers? Not to mention racially and sexually “diverse” ones? What can possibly explain the lack of attention to this terrible problem of marginalization of the already oppressed?
On a women’s studies listserve I subscribe to, activity has been almost at a standstill for weeks. You’d think with the endless attention paid to the virus there would be vigorous debate about the need to bring feminist, queer, trans, and other such perspectives to bear, and heated discussions of how to convey this to students via distance learning. Or, at the very least, that criticisms would be voiced of the data showing that men are more vulnerable to the virus than women. If one is “assigned” the category of male or female at birth—by now a routine formulation aped even by medical organizations– how could an uncaring virus ever make such a distinction?
Can anything positive come out of the current crisis? Or, is it strictly a negative to be reminded that reality – the actual physical world, in all its threatening materiality – is not a social construction, and that solutions to a virus must engage with that material world, and not merely attack the rhetoric of disease and the identity of those researching it.
Part of the frustration in dealing with a really bad situation is a ravenous hunger for magic bullet solutions. One reader wrote in, contending that hydroxychloroquine is effective 100 percent of the time if it’s administered early enough, so why not reopen society and give everyone a prescription for hydroxychloroquine at the first sign of the virus?
Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine actually slow down parts of a patient’s immune system by “interfere with lysosomal activity and autophagy, interact with membrane stability and alter signalling pathways and transcriptional activity, which can result in inhibition of cytokine production and modulation of certain co-stimulatory molecules” — which is a jargon-heavy way of saying it makes your immune system’s cells not work as well together.
People might wonder why anyone would want to take a drug that weakens their immune system. Hydroxychloroquine can be an effective drug for lupus, because with lupus, the body’s immune system becomes overactive and starts attacking healthy, normal cells. It is also used to treat arthritis, because in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, their immune system attacks the lining of their joints. With patients suffering from malaria, the parasite actually can send out “messages” that distract the body’s immune system, causing it to attack healthy red blood cells and ignore the real threat: “While the immune system is busy defending the organism against fake danger, the real infection proceeds inside red blood cells, allowing the parasite to multiply unhindered at dizzying speed. By the time the immune system discovers its mistake, precious time has been lost, and the infection is much more difficult to contain.” Hydroxychloroquine effectively calms down the immune system and along the way binds to the malaria parasite, breaking it apart.
The coronavirus identified as SARS-CoV-2 can generate a “cytokine storm” — when the body’s immune system kicks into overdrive and starts attacking healthy cells in important organs. Dr. Randy Cron, an expert on cytokine storms at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told the New York Times last month that in about 15 percent of coronavirus patients, the body’s defense mechanism of cytokines fight off the invading virus, but then attack multiple organs including the lungs and liver, and may eventually lead to death. As the patient’s body fights its own lungs, fluid gets into the lungs, and the patient dies of acute respiratory distress syndrome.
From this, you can get a sense of how and why hydroxychloroquine might be effective in some circumstances and not others. If the patient’s immune system is strong enough to fight off the coronavirus, but is at risk of going into overdrive and setting off a cytotkine storm, administering the right amount of hydroxychloroquine might put their immune system back in the Goldilocks zone — strong enough to fight off and defeat the virus, but not so strong that it starts attacking vital organs by mistake. It’s also easy to see why we would only want people taking this drug under a doctor’s recommendation and possibly supervision — take the drug too early, and you suppress the body’s immune system just when it needs that system functioning well to fight off the invading virus. Take the drug too late, and the damage to the vital organs can’t be overcome.
Media outlets treat conservative Americans as second-class citizens whose arguments don’t need to be listened to or engaged with. Instead, they take the vanishingly small number of column inches or pundit panel seats they have and give the “conservative” slots to people who repeatedly disparage conservative elected officials, their voters, and their policies.
In some cases, the supposed “conservatives” have long ago renounced their conservatism. The Washington Post’s Max Boot, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, and Twitter’s Bill Kristol receive a great deal of mockery for their boring obsession with Orange Man Bad, an obsession that has led them to renounce every one of the policy positions they once held.
Even as their positions change in response to whatever Trump has said, NeverTrump is known for writing the same column over and over again. It’s usually headlined something like “Why Trump And His Voters Are So Awful That They Forced Me To Leave the GOP But Also Remember To Please Continue Calling Me A Republican To Preserve The TV/Column Gigs That Depend On Me Claiming I’m On The Right Even Though I Am Now Aligned With Democrats, Write Columns About How I Vote For Them, And Generally Work To Help Them Gain More Political Power.”
“Democrat On Committee To Oversee Coronavirus Stimulus Payouts Broke Federal Law By Failing To Report Stock Sales.” That would be Florida Representative (and former Clinton Administration official) Donna Shalala.
Good Samaritan health care workers: I will go to New York to help out with the crush of Wuhan coronavirus cases! Andrew Cuomo: Fark you, have some more taxes.
The Supreme Court unanimously bitch-slapped the Ninth Circuit for ruling that a federal statue that makes it illegal to encourage illegal aliens to come to the U.S. was unconstitutional. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg delivered the opinion.
Williamson County commissioners took a step toward suing Sheriff Robert Chody when they voted Tuesday to hire lawyers for a possible lawsuit over a contract he signed for the “Live PD” television show.
LivePD is sort of “NFL RedZone for Cops.”
Chody did not get permission from the Williamson County Commissioners Court before he signed an agreement in March allowing Big Fish Entertainment, the production company for “Live PD,” to resume filming sheriff’s deputies.
In August, the commissioners canceled the county’s contract with “Live PD” after the show had come under fire from prosecutors and defense attorneys who cited a lack of access to potential evidence gathered by film crews, and from officials who said it portrayed the county in a poor light.
Chody did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. He has hired, at his own expense, attorney Eric Taube to represent him, Taube said in an email Tuesday.
“While the sheriff would have preferred to resolve this issue with the commissioners with civil discussion and dialogue, it appears that the commissioners would rather attempt to go down a different path,” Taube said.
“The sheriff is happy to resolve this issue based upon the law and not on politics, and will look forward to continue to exercise his discretion as a law enforcement officer to serve the citizens of Williamson County as he believes most effective.”
Taube did not respond to a request for comment on why the sheriff decided to sign an agreement with the production company without getting permission from the Commissioners Court, as had happened with the original contract.
Jason Nassour, general counsel for Williamson County Attorney Dee Hobbs, sent the commissioners a letter Friday saying that, although the commissioners have the power to determine the sheriff’s budget, they cannot “decide how an official uses those resources once allocated and may not micromanage an official’s decisions as to the use of those resources.”
The letter also said that what the sheriff signed with Big Fish Entertainment was not a contract but an access agreement.
“The court has attempted to assert control based on the premise that the access agreement is a contract rather than what is actually is the sheriff’s lawful authorization to allow Big Fish representatives into those areas controlled by the sheriff,” the letter said.
Commissioners have disagreed, saying what the sheriff signed was a contract and that the law gives the county control over how the sheriff’s facilities and equipment are used.
Austin attorney and former Travis County Judge Bill Aleshire said Tuesday, “The sheriff has almost no authority to contract with a vendor without approval by the Commissioners Court.”
“But the sheriff has independent authority to operate his office, including deciding who can and who cannot be present on calls the deputies go out on. Having disputes between county officials that give rise to litigation is not common, but there have been plenty of them over the decades.”
On Tuesday, the Commissioners Court unanimously hired the law firm of Howry Breen & Herman LLP and the law office of Randy Leavitt to represent the county in the dispute.
“We are in the middle of a disaster, a pandemic, and people are sick, and people are losing their jobs … and the sheriff is playing on TV,” Commissioner Russ Boles said after the court approved hiring the lawyers.
County Judge Bill Gravell abstained from voting on the hiring of the law firm and said he would not take part in the discussion of it in executive session. Gravell said there were “attorneys involved” that would cause him to abstain. He made no further comments.
You may remember my post on the original LivePD ban, which seemed to be in response to various non-PC events at the Sheriff’s office.
Chody reinstating LivePD after the Commissioner’s Court banned it once suggests there’s some sort of deeper pissing match going on there. Chody was an APD officer before he and his wife literally literally won the lottery, which would suggest that money isn’t a factor in his insistence on keeping LivePD filming.
Both Chody and three-quarters of the commissioner’s court (along with Gravell) are Republicans, but the commissioner’s court voted unanimously to fill a cease-and-desist letter over LivePD. Chody attended President Donald Trump’s 2019 State of the union address at the invitation of Congressman John Carter.
Does Chody like the fame LivePD brings him? Probably. Does the commissioner’s court have a grudge against him? Probably. But it feels like something else is going on here, and I’m not sure what it is.
Time for another roundup of Chinese lies and perfidy!
Remember all that blather about how there was “no way” the Wuhan coronavirus could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Yeah, not so much:
A US government analysis leaked to the Washington Times concludes that the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Chinese CDC is the “most likely” source of the COVID-19 pandemic which has killed over 200,000 people worldwide in roughly four months.
The document, compiled from open sources and not a finished product, says there is no smoking gun to blame the virus on either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, both located in the city where the first outbreaks were reported. -Washington Times
And while we may not have a smoking gun proving that COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab, “there is circumstantial evidence to suggest such may be the case,” according to the report.
Also, it’s perhaps the world’s easiest game of connect-the-dots;
In 2013, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology collected horseshoe bats at a cave 1,000 miles away infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. (Stored away and forgotten until January this year, the sample from the horseshoe bat contains the virus that causes Covid-19. -WSJ)
Peng Zhou, WIV’s head of Bat Virus Infection and Immunization, was researching “the molecular mechanism that allows Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses to lie dormant for a long time without causing diseases,” while a press release from his lab was titled “How bats carry viruses without getting sick.”
Zhou’s colleague, Shi Zhengli, has been involved in bioengineering bat coronaviruses – co-authoring a controversial 2015 paper which described the creation of a new virus by combining a coronavirus found in Chinese horseshoe bats with another that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice.
In 2015, Nature magazine expressed concern over Zhengli’s experiments with bat coronavirus. The same year, the US government suspended funding to the lab due to their concern over risks of experimenting with bat coronavirus.
Meanwhile, the US State Department warned over safety standards at the Wuhan lab in a series of cables beginning in 2015, according to the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin.
Chinese health officials were drawing up plans to combat the CCP virus, which they knew to be infectious, days before they informed the public about its potential to spread, according to internal government documents obtained by The Epoch Times.
The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, originated in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. The virus has since spread to more than 200 countries and territories, causing more than 61,000 deaths in the United States alone.
China officially confirmed that the virus could be transmitted between humans on Jan. 20, when top respiratory expert Zhong Nanshan made the announcement.
Now, internal documents provided to The Epoch Times show that Beijing covered up what it knew, as central authorities were secretly providing directives to regional governments on how to cope with the outbreak.
On Jan. 15, the regional health commission in northern China’s Inner Mongolia issued a “super urgent” emergency notice to its municipal counterparts, explaining how medical facilities should respond to a new form of pneumonia. The notice said that China’s National Health Commission had implemented treatment and prevention measures for local health agencies to deal with the new disease (now known as COVID-19).
During the Cold War, the U.S. foreign policy was largely based on assumptions that the Soviet Union’s leaders were determined to spread communism worldwide; they possessed strategic patience and were adaptive in pursuing their goal. The USSR would never be America’s partner but a long-term rival, and therefore it must be contained. Moreover, U.S. decision-makers assumed that American society would fully support this approach.
However, after the end of that confrontation, strategists like former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger falsely assumed that Communist China could be changed into a benign actor, even a “responsible stakeholder,” or strategic partner of the U.S. were the U.S. to engage with China, believing that China’s rise was a positive thing.
We argue that China is not just a rival but a formidable enemy. Its goal is not just to weaken America but supplant it and the liberal international order it created with a Communist ideology-based model of global governance. The PRC is more dangerous than the Soviet Union because it is unpredictable and more formidable. It is an amalgamation of a rapidly rising power and an ideological regime with an aggressive leader in Chairman Xi Jinping. Xi is both extremely ambitious and paranoid about his regime’s security as well as his own. These factors make this enemy far less certain than the Soviets.
Additionally, China is far more formidable than the Soviet Union because it has learned key lessons from the USSR’s mistakes regarding competition with the United States. It is an extremely adaptive adversary. So adaptive that it has been seen as a partner rather than an enemy for a generation. Moreover, it was so highly valued as a partner that it was brought into the Western economic ecosystem to be allowed and encouraged to prosper. China’s rapid growth was made possible by the U.S. government, business, financial markets, and universities, as well as its own efforts. Close ties between the American elite and Chinese business interest remain strong, even in the wake of the coronavirus.
Fundamentally, there remain sectors in U.S. government, business, and intellectual communities who still see China as a partner and want to return the Sino-American relationship to “normalcy.” Even in the wake of the coronavirus, close ties between the American elite and Chinese business interest remain strong, and there is an assumption that things will return to normal once Trump leaves office.
Decades ago, the political, corporate and industrial leaders of the West chose to enmesh the fate of their pliable people with that of the vigorous, voracious Chinese.
Like the United States, another hard-hit region—Northern Italy, so progressive and tony—had swung its toll gates open. Italy outsourced whole production lines to China.
Free trade in goods is great. But trade goods, not places. The toll gates were swung open to human trade, or population replacement.
Since the Chinese had begun settling in Northern Italy and buying up assets, I hazard that, much like youngsters of King County, in Washington State—local Italian girls and boys have had a hard time affording life in their homeland.
And now, their grandparents and parents are dying.
Italy constructed gleaming tarmacs to accommodate the many direct flights to and from Wuhan. More than 100,000 Chinese citizens moved to Italy. As the Chinese accrued wealth over the past two decades, still more took up residence in Northern Italy, and bought up Italian firms.
See if you can spot the trend. New York City, by Wikipedia’s telling, is home to far and away “the highest Chinese-American population of any city proper.”
Courtesy of an Italian strain of COVID-19, the New York metropolitan area has been as badly struck as Italy. In early April, it was said that “coronavirus was killing a person roughly every four minutes in New York state, and about every six minutes in New York City.”
In my state of Washington, the overwhelming majority of Chinese reside in King County and Snohomish County, where the infection was seeded and from where it spread.
The West’s political and corporate leaders, not China’s, had opened their borders to the world’s flotsam and jetsam. Agreements to exchange goods and people reflected the choices of these gilded global elites, not those of their people.
The sphinxly Bill Gates, we are told, foresaw the pandemic. Gates also pioneered the outsourcing of American lives to China (and India). I say “lives,” because, as it has become abundantly clear, in the wake of COVID, the very stuff of life has been outsourced to China. Not mere jobs; but careers, not just some products, but entire production lines; not one or two manufacturing plants, but the entire means of production.
As the Wuhan coronavirus continues to spread, stay at home orders have shut down commerce in many parts of the world. Some have predicted a 40% contraction in the U.S. economy in the 2nd quarter of 2020. This means that China’s economy, heavily dependent upon exports, will see no economic rebound for quite some time. In the mean time, the Trump administration has “turbocharged” its effort to relocate global supply chains from China to markets less hostile to the West.
Details on manufacturing and commerce imploding in Q1 snipped.
This gives the Trump administration more ammunition in its attempts to move global supply chains away from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Reuters reported on Sunday:
Now, economic destruction and the massive U.S. coronavirus death toll are driving a government-wide push to move U.S. production and supply chain dependency away from China, even if it goes to other more friendly nations instead, current and former senior U.S. administration officials said.
“We’ve been working on [reducing the reliance of our supply chains in China] over the last few years but we are now turbo-charging that initiative,” Keith Krach, undersecretary for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment at the U.S. State Department told Reuters.
The report describes a “whole-of-government” effort in which free trade advocates seem to be losing their struggle with China hawks inside the administration. Citing national security concerns, many departments have joined in the process to figure out how to incentivize U.S. firms to move their operations out of the Chinese mainland. Options reportedly include ‘reshoring’ subsidies, tax incentives, developing closer ties to Taiwan, and ever higher tariffs on goods produced in China.
Teng Biao, a former fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s human rights center, attempted to host a panel discussion on Chinese human rights issues in 2015. A vice dean at Harvard Law School, however, ordered him in February of that year to cancel the event because it would have been “embarrassing” for the university, according to Teng.
“He called me into his office and he told me that the Harvard president was meeting Chinese president Xi Jinping,” Teng told the Washington Free Beacon. “It seems that for Harvard leaders, it was very embarrassing if we had a talk at Harvard about human rights issues in China when the Harvard president just came back from China after meeting with the Chinese president.”
Teng is a human rights lawyer who fled China after authorities kidnapped and tortured him for his participation in the 2014 Hong Kong protests. Professor William P. Alford, a vice dean at the Harvard Law School, played a role in bringing Teng to Harvard. He also ordered Teng to cancel the event, according to the Harvard Crimson. Alford confirmed with the Free Beacon that he told Teng to postpone the event, a decision he made on his own accord, rather than at the administration’s urging. He said that he allowed Teng to host other events during his time at Harvard. While Teng did participate in other events, he said the panel discussion was never rescheduled.
Evidently having a $40 billion endowment just isn’t enough to keep you from having to suck up to communist China…
Europe: “Hey China, want to help us create a vaccine for this coronavirus of yours?” China: “Go flu yourself!”
If you want to see exactly how China lies about the Wuhan Coronavirus, here’s an example:
— Ambassade de Chine en France (@AmbassadeChine) April 30, 2020
Compare those statements to this timeline to see everything they left out. (Hat tip: Neontaster.)
Speaking of propaganda:
The past 6 months have seen a massive uptick in new Twitter accounts from Chinese diplomats & embassies around the world. Many post accusations, boasts & name-calling directed at governments & individuals they feel have insulted China. @BethanyAllenEbrhttps://t.co/kml5BkNKbd
Speaking of willing dupes: “POLITICO Peddles Red China Propaganda Attempting To Own Trump–Gets SLAMMED On Twitter.” “POLITICO promoted a piece praising the Chinese Communist Party’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak and blasting the Trump administration.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Sadly, foreign news outlets seem more immune to China’s influence than our own MSM:
Phenomenal: Very much worth watching. Germany’s largest newspaper shows courage & clarity. Is ANYBODY at NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, WaPo, NYT, Bloomberg willing to demonstrate even a fraction of this journalistic integrity? Or are the $$ from the Chinese market all you care about? https://t.co/KgR7o1nrks
Not sooner do I start writing about Sherman tanks than suddenly all sorts of Sherman-related information starts popping up.
First, here’s are two really detailed videos from Nicholas Moran, AKA The Chieftain, of the features of a Sherman M4A1:
Second, Dwight sent me this twitter thread, that goes into a great deal of detail about how the Sherman’s later reputation for being Not So Great came almost entirely for the way they were deployed in roles they were not specialized for.
Here’s a Tweet from that thread that talks about the weird (but highly effective) redesign that became the Sherman M4VC Firefly used by the British Army:
The story of the Sherman Vc's development is amazing (and look I've fixed the meme for you)… but they arrive at units with a shitty No. 43 Telescope with 3x magnification.
It's marginally better than the standard offering, but isn't really even remotely suitable. /27 pic.twitter.com/ZrHOtGM0Qr
Is the Tara Reade rape allegation going to be the silver bullet that drops Biden? It seemed unlikely when the story first broke, but just enough supporting evidence has come to light, and just enough Democrats not acting like total hypocrites and supporting an investigation into the charges, that the scandal won’t go away.
Oh, and New York just threw Bernie Sanders off the ballot. Funny how things like that happen when you cross the DNC. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
The New York Times follows up the Tara Reade story with news that activist women’s groups and key Democratic officials have not remained entirely silent about the allegation of sexual assault. Over the last three weeks, those groups have pressed Joe Biden to speak out and deal with Reade’s allegations, and they have held their fire after being promised action.
Now, however, they’re tired of getting strung along — and may soon make their unhappiness public:
• Is a Democrat • Verifiably worked for Joe Biden • Accused Joe Biden of sexual assault • Has 4 witnesses saying she told them about it around the time she says it happened, 1 is a Biden supporter • Video of her Mom calling Larry King for advice after her firing
Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen “Lockdown” Whitmer saysnot every sexual assault claim is equal. Of course she does; her party has always treated those against someone with a (D) after their name as unworthy of investigation.
Women’s groups on Biden accuser Tara Reade: “Who?”
NYT editorial board: "This is so important that it can't be investigated by reporters…it can only be investigated by the Democratic National Committee…which will clearly not have any biases." pic.twitter.com/O5mNgdpOfw
If I was facing a constant stream of claims that I’m throwing my husband into the most stressful job in the world as his brain turns to tapioca pudding, I probably wouldn’t put out a video where I do all the talking and he looks like someone struggling to stand on his own. https://t.co/Wm0rQoZUOP
The operative question for many in the press as they assess Tara Reade’s assault allegation against Joe Biden is the correct one: Is Tara Reade telling the truth? It does not matter what other senators may or may not have done to other women in other places or at other times. It does not matter — for purposes of establishing Joe Biden’s culpability — whether the Long Arc of History Bends toward Justice, whether other women who look like Tara Reade were assaulted by men who look like Joe Biden, or whether it would facilitate a more equitable future if we jettisoned Joe Biden, guilt be damned. What seems to matter to the media, for purposes of assessing Biden’s candidacy, is whether then-senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. digitally penetrated Tara Reade in 1993.
But this, crucially, is not what mattered to these same media players when then-judge Brett Kavanaugh was accused of assault, then indecent exposure, then gang rape in a series of successively more lurid allegations. What mattered then were not only the merits of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation — and that’s Dr. Ford, to you — but also the behavior of parties completely unrelated to those allegedly involved in the assault, parties who, by accident of birth, happened to look like Brett Kavanaugh, grow up like Brett Kavanaugh, and inhabit the “world of privilege” that Kavanaugh allegedly inhabited.
Joe Biden is being treated as an individual — a man being accused of a specific crime that either did, or did not, occur. Brett Kavanaugh was treated as a totem — an antihero, an anti-messianic stand-in for all of History’s various Straight White Men who “got away with it,” who were cushioned from the vagaries of life by their unthinkable “privilege,” lashing out against the browning of America and the long-prophesied end of the Old Boys’ Club.
The problem with defending due process in a case like Biden’s with respect to Tara Reade is that Biden himself, when it comes to allegations of sexual abuse and harassment, doesn’t believe in it. Perhaps in part to atone for his shabby treatment of Anita Hill, Biden was especially prominent in the Obama administration’s overhaul of Title IX treatment of claims of sexual discrimination and harassment on campus. You can listen to Biden’s strident speeches and rhetoric on this question and find not a single smidgen of concern with the rights of the accused. Men in college were to be regarded as guilty before being proven innocent, and stripped of basic rights in their self-defense.
Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen noted the consequences of Biden’s crusade in The New Yorker last year. “In recent years,” she wrote, “it has become commonplace to deny accused students access to the complaint, the evidence, the identities of witnesses, or the investigative report, and to forbid them from questioning complainants or witnesses … According to K.C. Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College and an expert on Title IX lawsuits, more than four hundred students accused of sexual misconduct since 2011 have sued their schools under federal or state laws — in many cases, for sex discrimination under Title IX. While many of the lawsuits are still ongoing, nearly half of the students who have sued have won favorable court rulings or have settled with the schools.”
On Friday’s Morning Joe, Biden laid out a simple process for judging him: Listen respectfully to Tara Reade, and then check for facts that prove or disprove her specific claim. The objective truth, Biden argued, is what matters. I agree with him. But this was emphatically not the standard Biden favored when judging men in college. If Biden were a student, under Biden rules, Reade could file a claim of assault, and Biden would have no right to know the specifics, the evidence provided, who was charging him, who was a witness, and no right to question the accuser. Apply the Biden standard for Biden, have woke college administrators decide the issue in private, and he’s toast.
Under Biden, Title IX actually became a force for sex discrimination — as long as it was against men. Emily Yoffe has done extraordinary work exposing the injustices of the Obama-Biden sexual-harassment regime on campus, which have mercifully been pared back since. But she has also highlighted Biden’s own zeal in the cause. He brushed aside most legal defenses against sexual harassment. In a speech at the University of Pittsburgh in 2016, for example, Biden righteously claimed that it was an outrage that any woman claiming sexual assault should have to answer questions like “Were you drinking?” or “What did you say?” “These are questions that angered me then and anger me now.” He went on: “No one, particularly a court of law, has a right to ask any of those questions.”
Particularly a court of law? A court cannot even inquire what a woman said in a disputed sexual encounter? Couldn’t that be extremely relevant to the question of consent? Or ask if she were drinking? It may be extremely salient that she had been drinking — because it could prove rape, if she were incapacitated and unable to consent and sex took place. But Biden’s conviction that young men on campus should be legally handicapped in defending themselves from charges of sexual abuse occluded any sense of basic fairness.
Early Presidential race dropout California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell thinks Reade’s claim should be investigated. How many of you had “Eric Swalwell” on your Biden Scandal Bingo cards? Now put your hands down you damn liars!
“Big money donors are pressuring Joe Biden against picking Elizabeth Warren for VP: ‘He would lose the election.'” For once, big donors and Bernie Bros are on the same page…
“Blue-check feminist who was AOK with innocent men losing jobs over false allegations believes Tara Reade but still voting Biden.”
How desperate are Democrats? Desperate enough to float a Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama ticket, Constitution be damned. (The author’s attempt to tapdance around the constitutional issue should cause thousands of legal scholars to faceplam themselves.)
The Marine Corps’ current force design conversations and planning will help develop the littoral regiment concept, Stephenson said.
If the past few months of public appearances by Berger and his top generals are any indication, a littoral regiment would likely find itself in the III Marine Expeditionary Force, headquartered in Okinawa, Japan, and consist of small teams of Marines armed with a host of unmanned air, ground and maritime assets along with long range fires and air defense systems.
Sounds like the Marines are going to go heavy into drones.
While details are not yet available, a regiment is a sizable unit to form in a limited manpower Marine Corps.
An infantry regiment can include up to nearly 2,200 Marines divided into three battalions along with a headquarters and support company, depending on the mission and configuration.
But there are different configurations for a regiment. The Corps also staffs combat logistics regiments to provide transport, communication and logistics assets to the ground combat forces.
In October 2019, Brig. Gen. Benjamin Watson said that the Corps was “no longer going to stick or take an uncompromising position on the sanctity of the MAGTF,” [Marine Air-Ground Task Force, a basic Marine organizational structure since 1963] while speaking at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Expeditionary Warfare Conference in Annapolis, Maryland.
“If what is needed is a piece of the Marine Corps that is not organized like a MAGTF or a capability the Marine Corps can bring that is not a MAGTF, then we are not too proud to provide that,” he said.
A retired Marine Corps officer now a senior adviser for the Center for Strategic & International Studies shared analysis at the same conference showing “no growth” for personnel in future Marine budget planning.
“Coastal defense, cyber, space,” Mark Cancian said. “They will have to take down existing capabilities to find the structure and the space to do that.”
I rather doubt the Marines are going to field localized cyberwarfare units out in combat regiments beyond some basic signal corps countermeasures. I suspect we already have a cyberwarfare unit up and running out of one or more three initial agencies in the greater D.C. area.
The Corps will need to cut and shift priorities for the next fight, Berger said at a November Marine Corps Association and Foundation dinner.
“We may need to get smaller, trade some parts we’ve had for a long time but are not a good fit for the future,” Berger said.
He looked to reduce or eliminate money going toward manned anti-armor ground and aviation platforms, manned and traditional towed artillery that can’t shoot hypervelocity rounds and short range mortar systems.
All other efforts are leaning into conducting sea control and sea denial operations from the sea and maritime terrain, he said.
To make that happen, the commandant said that he wants low cost, lethal air and ground unmanned platforms, unmanned long range surface and subsurface vehicles, mobile, rapidly deployable rocket systems, long range precision fires, loitering munitions across the echelons, mobile air defense and counter-precision guided munitions capabilities, signature management, electronic warfare and expeditionary airfields. [“Signature management,” in this context, means controlling your electronic emissions and observables. “To be detected is to be targeted is to be killed.”]
And it appears, the Marine littoral regiment may be the formation for many of those new capabilities and manpower.
All this seems both forward-looking and also very amorphous. It suggests “we’re adjusting our force mix to better face off against China, but we’re not sure quite how yet.” But China is just one part of the equation; the furious pace of technological change, budget pressures, and long simmering doctrinal debates all seem to be additional change drivers.
It’s also interesting that they’re using the word “littoral,” as the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship program was hardly a smashing success.
Great power military conflicts of the future are likely to use weapons smarter, more autonomous, more lethal and probably lower cost than the weapons systems we’ve built our combat forces around today. Taking and holding contested shorelines is probably going to look less like Iwo Jima and more like battles between rival autonomous drone swarms.
The question is how long it will take to get to that technological plateau, and what the Marine Corps will look like during the transition.
This Borepatch post got me thinking about the history of firearms development, and all the mistakes and blind alleys along the way. Plus I wanted to put up videos (where available) of how some of the weird firearms Borepatch described actually worked.
But before I did that, I realized I needed to delve into the basics of gunpowder and early firearms development, to set out things in chronological order.
Here’s a short one covering the invention of gunpowder in China, featuring primitive proto-firearms like the firelance, up through early European cannons, the hand-canon and the arquebus.
Here’s a video of someone testing a home-built recreation firelance using bamboo. The first attempt does not go well, so they reinforced the bamboo on the second with electrical tape.
A longer look at the development of early gunpowder weapons in Europe up through the early Napoleonic War:
Highlights: the difficulty of getting saltpeter means Europeans needed to make it by boiling down animal waste, how “corning” vastly increased the power of gunpowder, how they made cannon bodies out of strips of metal bound with iron hoops (why they’re still know today as bun barrels), and how the Pumhart von Steyr is the largest siege cannon still existent, firing stones that weighed 1,533 pounds. Also, Henry Knox, George Washington’s master of artillery, was by profession a bookseller of military history. And the exploding shell was invented by British Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel.
A short look at gun development from the hand-cannon to the musket:
Happy Victims of Communism Day. Texas is reopening, California is closing beaches, and we contemplate the mysteries of Sweden and Denmark.
Director Blue sent me this comparison of Wuhan coronavirus curves in various countries. The point of the piece was that Sweden, which hasn’t practiced social distancing, is doing better than European countries that have. However, what I find most interesting is that Denmark seems to be doing even better. Anyone know the reason?
“New York Required Nursing Homes To Admit ‘Medically Stable’ Coronavirus Patients. The Results Were Deadly.”
On March 25, New York’s Health Department issued a mandate that state nursing homes could not refuse COVID-19-positive patients who were “medically stable,” meaning facilities that housed the most vulnerable populations were forced to introduce the virus into their midst.
A nursing home in Queens received two coronavirus patients who had been discharged from a hospital (but were still contagious and in need of care) – along with a box containing body bags, The New York Post reported. An executive at the facility told the Post it had been free of the coronavirus prior to accepting those two patients. The executive also said that along with the two patients arrived a shipment of personal protective equipment and the body bags.
“My colleague noticed that one of the boxes was extremely heavy. Curious as to what could possibly be making that particular box so much heavier than the rest, he opened it,” the executive told the Post. “The first two coronavirus patients were accompanied by five body bags.”
The Post reported that within days, “three of the bags were filled with the first of 30 residents who would die there.” The nursing facility continued to receive shipments of five body bags per week since those first two patients arrived – and they have been needed.
“Cuomo has blood on his hands. He really does. There’s no way to sugarcoat this,” the nursing home executive told the outlet. “Why in the world would you be sending coronavirus patients to a nursing home, where the most vulnerable population to this disease resides?”
Speaking Cuomo scandals, here’s a look back at the Buffalo Billions crony graft scandal.
What the hell? “NYPD telling cops to prioritize 311 calls over 911.” “People getting jumped, robbed, assaulted…doesn’t matter.” How do you expect NYPD to deal with assault when there are so many people standing only five feet apart?
While Texas is starting to reopen the economy today, California Governor Gavin Newsom is closing down the beach. This is what happens when your governor is Stuck On Stupid.
Low fatality rates for 2020 are, at this point, a mystery. However, assuming I am reading the CDC spread sheet correctly, one thing is clear: there are nowhere near as many deaths actually caused by COVID-19 as government sources claim. If the Wuhan flu had really killed 40,000 or so people who would not otherwise have died over the last 14 weeks, it would be obvious in the overall mortality statistics. The fact that no such effect is visible–that, astonishingly, the death rate has actually declined–is consistent only with the assumption that not many people have died from COVID-19 who would not have died anyway, at about the same time.
In the land of Blue-on-Blue violence, Michael Moore has produced a new documentary out that takes on environmental green-washing. (The full film can be found here.)
Politico admits that a President Trump/Bank of China hit piece was completely false.
Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Andy Beshear slams somebody for filing for unemployment under the name “Tupac Shakur.” Tiny problem: that’s the guy’s real name.
At a press conference this morning, President Trump said "Good morning." Here are the headlines covering his controversial statement from twelve different news outlets:https://t.co/Lzg8ytpAa4pic.twitter.com/QN1U2lK4bB
Remember that tomorrow is May 1st, which means that once again it’s time to observe Victims of Communism Day, as the victims of a brutal ideology that killed over 100 million people deserve their own day of remembrance.
In the next decade, the Marine Corps will no longer operate tanks or have law enforcement battalions. It will also have three fewer infantry units and will shed about 7% of its overall force as the service prepares for a potential face-off with China.
The Marine Corps is cutting all military occupational specialties associated with tank battalions, law enforcement units and bridging companies, the service announced Monday. It’s also reducing its number of infantry battalions from 24 to 21 and cutting tiltrotor, attack and heavy-lift aviation squadrons.
The changes are the result of a sweeping months-long review and war-gaming experiments that laid out the force the service will need by 2030. Commandant Gen. David Berger directed the review, which he has called his No. 1 priority as the service’s top general.
“Developing a force that incorporates emerging technologies and a significant change to force structure within our current resource constraints will require the Marine Corps to become smaller and remove legacy capabilities,” a news release announcing the changes states.
By 2030, the Marine Corps will drop down to an end strength of 170,000 personnel. That’s about 16,000 fewer leathernecks than it has today.
In a certain way it makes sense, as the Marine Corps is a branch of the Navy and focused on amphibious operations, and you can’t fit a lot of M1A2 Abrams tanks on a Wasp class amphibious assault ship. On the other hand, the Marine 1st Tank Battalion predates Pearl Harbor. That’s a lot of tradition to leave behind.
The decision to de-emphasize rotor craft (presumably both helicopters and the V-22 Osprey) is also interesting, especially since the Marines are the only users of the new AH-1Z Viper.
“The future Fleet Marine Force requires a transformation from a legacy force to a modernized force with new organic capabilities,” it adds. “The FMF in 2030 will allow the Navy and Marine Corps to restore the strategic initiative and to define the future of maritime conflict by capitalizing on new capabilities to deter conflict and dominate inside the enemy’s weapon engagement zone.”
Existing infantry units are going to get smaller and lighter, according to the plan, “to support naval expeditionary warfare, and built to facilitate distributed and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations.”
The Marine Corps will also create three littoral regiments that are organized, trained and equipped to handle sea denial and control missions. The news release describes the new units as a “Pacific posture.” Marine expeditionary units, which deploy on Navy ships, will augment those new regiments, the release adds.
In addition to more unmanned systems and long-range fire capabilities, the Marine Corps also wants a new light amphibious warship and will invest in signature management, electronic warfare and other systems that will allow Marines to operate from “minimally developed locations.”
Berger has called China’s buildup in the South China Sea and Asia-Pacific region a game changer for the Navy and Marine Corps. He has pushed for closer integration between the sea services, as the fight shifts away from insurgent groups in the Middle East and to new threats at sea.
Tanks and armored vehicles have had trouble surviving against the threat of precision strike and the plethora of drone and reconnaissance systems flooding conflict zones across the Middle East.
For recent evidence, a Turkish launched operation targeting Syrian regime army troops in late February decimated more than a hundred tanks and armored vehicles, dozens of artillery pieces and hundreds of Syrian forces, according to the Turkish National Ministry of Defense.
Turkey posted videos highlighting a mixed role of drones, Paladin artillery systems and aircraft pounding Syrian armor from the skies over the course of several days. The Syrian army appeared helpless to defend from the onslaught of long range systems. Even tanks camouflaged by buildings and bushes were no match for sensors and thermal imaging watching from the skies.
The problem is exacerbated by the number of sophisticated anti-tank systems flooding counterinsurgency conflicts across the globe and access to long range drones once only in control by state actors are now being operated by militia groups.
In Libya, the Libyan National Army has the upper hand in its drone war with the UN-backed Tripoli government. It’s equipped with an alleged UAE-supplied Chinese drone known as the Wing Long II that boasts a 2,000 km range through a satellite link and is reportedly armed with Chinese manufactured Blue Arrow 7 precision strike air-to-surface missiles.
So it once again gets back to China.
In a way it’s heartening that the U.S. military is preparing to fight the next war rather than remain stuck in the paradigms of the last one. But history shows that the next war has way of popping up where we didn’t expect it. U.S. and Soviet armor never faced off in the Fulda Gap, and in 1989, no one was expecting U.S. forces to be fighting in Iraq.
We still have the best military in the world, I just hope we retain the tactical and strategic flexibility to meet all the challenges of the 21st century.
