At some point during yesterday’s diagnosis of my ongoing technical difficulties, the BlueHost technician asked if 185.122.204.37 was my IP, because there were something like 30,000+ hits from it that day. I verified it wasn’t mine, and that it wasn’t Instapundit (which had linked me that day), and did a reverse DNS lookup, which brought up the following:
IP Location: 185.122.204.37
185.122.204.37 appears to be located in Moscow, Russia and allocated to Chang Way Technologies Co. Limited. Autonomous System Number (ASN) code for 185.122.204.37 is AS57523. IP Address local time zone is Europe/Moscow (+0300). PTR record is set to 185.122.204.37.
That’s a very curious site to be sending me traffic, since I’m seeing none of it in my stats counter. Could I be receiving a low-grade DoS attack due to my criticisms of Putin’s war in Ukraine, or even my coverage of China’s slow-motion economic collapse, given the Chinese-sounding company? Possibly, though given BlueHost’s history, there are certainly far more prosaic explanations for my ongoing difficulties.
Also, speaking of Internet bogusity, if you search for “Battleswarm” and some topic I’ve covered (say, “Beto”), the top links are not from my blog, but from some BS “https://jawabansmk.my.id” domain that’s scraping my content and then doing all sorts of clickjacking redirect bullshit. This may be entirely unrelated to the slowness issues and the Russian/Chinese IP above, but if you would, do a Google search “BattleSwarm” and something I’ve covered, and if that site comes up, click on those three dots next to the results that send feedback to Google to remove that result. Something like: “This is not battleswarmblog.com, this is a clickjacking malware site scraping the content of battleswarmblog.com. Please delete this domain from your listings.”
Also, normally I like everything to go to my posts, but given the recent difficulties, please feel free to reprint this entire message when linking, so regular readers will know what’s up.
As for a tech update on the ongoing problems, my dashboard actions are still dog slow, but the issue has been escalated.
If you’re wondering about the 2022 Texas Gubernatorial Race between Republican incumbent Greg Abbott and Democratic challenger Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, there isn’t one.
Gov. Greg Abbott’s lead is widening over Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke, according to two polls this week that show Republicans gaining ground ahead of the November midterm election.
This comes months after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade sent shock waves through the country and inspired a wave of left-leaning activism. The latest data indicates that energy around that ruling may be overshadowed by Republicans’ intense focus on border security, including their more recent efforts to bus migrants to Democratic-led cities.
The Spectrum News/Siena College poll showed Abbott with a 50-43 lead over O’Rourke, and other statewide candidates had similar gaps: Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was up 49-40 over Democrat Mike Collier, and Attorney General Ken Paxton had a 47-42 lead over Democrat Rochelle Garza.
The poll also found that Texas voters consider immigration a more important issue than abortion. About 31 percent of respondents said immigration was their first- or second-highest concern ahead of the midterms, while 22 percent said the same for abortion.
Overall, Texans overwhelmingly consider the economy and inflation their highest priorities.
The Siena poll was conducted Sept. 14 through 18 as Abbott continues to draw national attention for busing thousands of migrants out of Texas and dropping them off in Washington, D.C., New York City and Chicago, in what he has described as an attempt to show President Joe Biden how grave the situation is at the border. The governor’s critics have characterized the program as a stunt that uses human beings as political pawns.
“The Biden-Harris administration continues ignoring and denying the historic crisis at our southern border, which has endangered and overwhelmed Texas communities for almost two years,” Abbott said last week.
About 52 percent of likely voters support the busing initiative, according to the Siena poll. Another 40 percent oppose the effort.
O’Rourke’s gubernatorial candidacy was always going to be a longshot in an off-year election that was going to favor Republicans. But the disasterous incompetence of the Biden Administration, spiraling inflation, the Biden Recession, resentment of wokeness, and deeply unpopular open borders policies that have pushed more and more Hispanics to switch to the Republican Party have turned the basic headwinds of an off-year election into a howling gale that’s going to blow O’Rourke to his third high profile defeat in five years. His three point loss to Ted Cruz in 2018, in a Trump mid-year election favoring Democrats, against a lightning-rod incumbent wounded by his own high profile defeat at the hands of Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, looks like his best possible showing under any circumstances.
I expect O’Rourke to do better than Wendy Davis did in 2014, simply because he’s a better candidate (he’s too leftwing for Texas, but he does the hard work of campaigning, for which Davis showed little inclination) and because Democrats have poured a lot of money into building election infrastructure. But like Davis, he seems to have made the foolish decision to run as the Unlimited Abortion Candidate, expecting the overturning of Roe vs. Wade to sweep him into office. The problem with that theory is that everyone who was a single-issue voter on Unlimited Abortion was already voting for Democrats, and the people who aren’t seem to care more about such trivia as “paying for food for their children.”
O’Rourke may not even equal the 42.5% a sleepwalking Lupe Valdez garnered in 2018. My guess is that he’s going to end up with somewhere like 40-45% of the vote, another high profile flameout, and another giant bucket of Democratic donor money wasted on his campaign rather than being sent to candidates that might actually win.
This video, covering a scaled down prototype of the Ultra Heavy-Lift Amphibious Connector (UHAC) craft, caught my attention:
The UHAC drives across the water on treads that double as paddlewheel-style water propulsion.
That video dropped this week, but most of the UHAC testing seemed to have happened back in 2014. (Another sign that the video is old is the mention of the USS Bonhomme Richard as though it were still in service, when it infamously burned up in 2020. In fact, the arson trial of Ryan Sawyer Mays, the disgruntled SEAL washout accused of setting the fire, is going on this week.)
If the program is dead, I can understand why. The UHAC seen in the video is only one-fifth of the projected size of the final vehicle, which was supposed to be 84 ft long and 34 ft high. That’s roughly 75% as big as Nazi Germany’s contemplated but never-even-attempted Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte tank, a project remembered for being long on imagination and short on practicality. Things that large tend to be a big magnet for air and artillery targeting.
Another thing probably dooming it: the Marine Corp decision to move away from tanks. An amphibious assault vehicle that (as per the video) can carry three M1A1 Abrams tanks probably won’t be a priority if you don’t have any in inventory.
California is (still) broke, Stacey Abrams is (still) not very bright, Joe Biden tried to deal gas to the commies, and the FBI can’t be bothered to investigate such trivia as “sex crimes involving children.” It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Remember how the State of Texas came in with record revenues and a $27 billion surplus? Well, the flip side is California, which just saw 11% personal income tax revenue drop. Funny how chasing away productive taxpayers through punitive taxation and insane over-regulation isn’t a recipe for success…
Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee have obtained bombshell documents proving that Joe Biden was deeply involved in the family business of selling American natural gas to the Chinese–while he was planning to run for President. According to multiple whistleblowers, the Biden family made promises to those who worked with them in 2017 and onward that they would “reap the rewards in a future Biden administration.” These explosive revelations “pose national security concerns,” Oversight Republicans proclaimed Tuesday night.
The Biden clan enriched itself by selling the natural resources to a Chinese firm closely affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—just a few years before the cost of gas in the United States hit record highs, the Oversight Republicans stated.
In a letter to United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the ranking Republican on the Oversight Committee, alleged that according to whistleblowers, Joe Biden was heavily involved in this treachery.
“This comes to light at a time when the cost of natural gas is at a 14-year high and Americans struggle to pay their energy bills,” Comer wrote in the letter to Yellen. “The President has not only misled the American public about his past foreign business transactions, but he also failed to disclose that he played a critical role in arranging a business deal to sell American natural resources to the Chinese while planning to run for President.”
Comer sent a letter to Yellen in July complaining that the Treasury Department was restricting access to over 150 Suspicious Activity reports (SARs) on Hunter Biden, amid explosive revelations that came out from Biden’s “laptop from Hell,” and iPhone.
On Sept. 2, 2022, the Treasury Department stated in a letter to Committee Republicans, that the SARs may be provided “upon a written request stating the particular information desired, the criminal, tax or regulatory purpose for which the information is sought, and the official need for the information.”
In response, Comer said that “based on the documents provided in this letter, we request all SARs from Biden family transactions, including those involving President Biden, related to transactions with Chinese entities. We are concerned that the President may have compromised national security in his dealings with the country most adverse to U.S. interests—China. These SARs will inform our analysis of this matter.”
Comer said Oversight Republicans have obtained a “presentation” emailed to Hunter Biden’s firm Hudson West III LLC (Hudson West) on December 13, 2017. The document, translated from Mandarin Chinese, is titled, “Overview of the U.S. Natural Gas Industry Chain, and is concerned with selling American natural resources to China.”
“Jiaqi Bao, who created the presentation, was previously an employee of the CCP, and worked for Hunter Biden’s corporate entity Hudson West,” the letter states.
Comer provided Yellen with two maps that were part of a presentation emailed to Hunter Biden. The maps include sophisticated analysis written in Chinese, and show the United States carved up based on natural gas reserves “with particular emphasis on Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.”
“The emails that accompany the transmitted maps reveal a plan to sell natural gas reserves to China via the same corporate entity branded on the presentation-Hudson West III LLC (Hudson West)–set up by Hunter Biden with officials from the Chinese company CEFC, at the time, one of the largest oil companies in China,” the letter stated.
I have only skimmed this dog's breakfast of a complaint, but what popped out at me for the parts I looked are were the lack of damages allegations, much less ones against NY, the plaintiff. You cannot sue if you did not suffer a loss. None are pleaded in the parts I looked at. 3/
So, the initial motion to dismiss will not be heard before the midterm – the real mission was accomplished by filing suit in time to influence the election, but not so early that this garbage case could be tossed out before the election.
FBI investigations of child sex abuse claims are no longer a priority with all these conservatives and Trump supporters they need to prosecute for WrongThink…
At lot of details of how Russia will carry out its projected 300,000 man mobilization discussed yesterday are unclear. Binkov’s Battlegrounds, which covers a lot of different military topics, discusses some of the details about how it would (theoretically) be carried out.
Takeaways:
“Officially, Putin said mobilization will draw on reservists: only those who served in the armed forces with a certain experience. He further stated those called upon will undergo additional military training.”
“He also said no students will get mobilized.”
“By law some two million Russians are kept listed as being qualified to serve as reservists. Those are people who had served in the military in the previously; several years, most of them, excluding officers and specialists, between six to eight years ago in theory.”
“Even 300 000 might be quite hard for Russia to pull off quickly.”
No refresher training for the vast majority.
“The social and political climate in Russia is such that many reservists will likely try to dodge service. Russian law was amended alongside the mobilization calling for greater prison sentences for such and similar transgressions. The fact the new law included the provision for prison sentences for voluntary surrenders may already mean even the Russian government expects some people will try to surrender outright to the enemy.” Hard to see how expecting reservists to fight to the death for Vlad’s Big Adventure will increase morale.
300,000 is the number of reservists who left in the last two years.
If almost all of those new reserves are to serve in the land forces, with the Army being a third of the overall military, it might mean people called upon will mostly be five years past their military service. [Defense Minister] Shoigu further said mobilization will also be limited to those with combat experience. All the Russian troops rotated in Syria since 2014 are unlikely to reach that figure, but there are veterans of operations in Ukraine 2014 of Georgia in 2008 and the wars in Chechnya. Those may indeed yield a force over 300 000, but it also may mean that some of those mobilized reservists will have not seen military training for 15 or more years.
Veterans of the Georgian war (which Russia won handily) probably won’t be a problem, but I doubt the others were such happy affairs that veterans of those campaigns will be eager to repeat the experience against the far better-armed and better-trained Ukrainians.
“In 2019, Russia had perhaps 5,000 reservists receive refresher training. A new push was done in 2021 with plans of 38,000 troops adjusting the Southern military District. But allegedly only 10% of the called upon men actually enlisted in the reserves.”
Conscripts can’t be sent outside of Russia, but surprise! When Russia announces that their sham referendum passed, that means they can be sent to Ukraine then.
“Seven months ago, such mobilization might have been more effective. But as Ukraine has a seven month lead in mobilization and training of reservists, it’s not likely Russia will be able to stop Ukrainian counter-offensives right away.”
Judging from how well Russia has previously run this war, expect badly equipped and under-trained reservists to be thrown piecemeal into the battle lines to be slaughtered.
Faced with the continued erosion of Russia’s military position in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has chosen to double-down on failure.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday announced the partial mobilization of military reservists, a significant escalation of his war in Ukraine after battlefield setbacks have the Kremlin facing growing pressure to act.
In a rare national address, he also backed plans for Russia to annex occupied areas of southern and eastern Ukraine, and appeared to threaten nuclear retaliation if Kyiv continues its efforts to reclaim that land.
It came just a day after four Russian-controlled areas announced they would stage votes this week on breaking away from Ukraine and joining Russia, in a plan Kyiv and its Western allies dismissed as a desperate “sham” aimed at deterring a successful counteroffensive by Ukrainian troops.
Before this announcement it was apparent that Russia basically had no reserves, so a mobilization isn’t a surprise. Why admit failure when you can simply get more of your countrymen slaughtered for doubling-down on your own mistake?
It won’t be easy or fast to call up that many reservists, according to military experts, because Russia basically doesn’t have a reserve.
A 2019 RAND study noted that “Russia has paid little attention to developing an effective and sizable active reserve system that might be immediately required in the event of a major war.” RAND estimates that Russia has an effective reserve of only 4,000-5,000 men.
The country’s former army reserve units had been disbanded from 2008-2010 as part of the military’s modernization program, with their equipment — all of it older — going into storage or scrapped.
That doesn’t mean that Russia can’t conscript, train, organize, and arm 300,000 new soldiers, but it won’t be quick or easy.
One problem, as Foreign Affairs analyst Oliver Alexander put it, is “effectively readying and equipping these reservists. Russia already has problems equipping its professional armed forces.”
Then there’s the speed problem. Dara Massicot wrote back in August — weeks before Kyiv’s stunning counteroffensive in Kharkiv — that “Even if the Kremlin pulls all levers available, declaring a general mobilization to call up sufficient armored equipment and trained personnel, that process would still take time.”
That’s because with something like 80% of Russia’s combat power already fighting in Ukraine, plus wartime losses to their NCO and officer corps, the Russian army will need to train more trainers before anything like 300,000 men can be mobilized.
Just last month, Putin ordered an increase in the size of the Russian military of 137,000 troops. But as I reported to you then, Putin’s order only meant that “Starting next year, the Russian military will be authorized to find another 137,000 troops.” The country has long had a problem with draft dodgers, one that Putin’s “special military operation” won’t help.
He also notes the problem of obtaining new equipment. Even the first wave of Russian invasion included troops who were armed with ancient rifles. With the sanctions in place, none of that is going to get any better. Plus the fact that Russia essentially used up all their smart ordinance during the first stage of the war and that sanctions ensure they can’t easily make more.
Is there a Peter Zeihan video on the topic? Of course there is.
Some takeaways:
Reiterates why everything in the Russia army travels by rail. “The Ukrainians were able to take a couple of re-up depots in eastern Ukraine and Kharkiv a couple weeks ago and the front just collapsed.”
“We might be seeing a repeat of that in the Donbas.”
“The Russians are now discovering that they’re actually outnumbered locally, and that with all the captured equipment, the Ukrainians actually now have more artillery and more ammo.”
“This is the sort of war the the Russians know how to fight: Just throw bodies after it.”
The influx of new troops “doesn’t mean that the nature of the war is
fundamentally changed,” but now they’ll be able to rotate fresher troops in, “and continue fighting the war more or less the way that they have been now, which is to say poorly.”
Russia is already crashing demographically, and the main cohort of this war is coming from the men who should be fathering children. “This is a potentially a country killer. Before I thought that this was Russia’s last war. Now I’m certain of it.”
Says Ukraine can still win, but they need to do the Kharkiv counteroffensive twenty times over.
Says they need to continue hitting Russian logistics nodes. “The one I am most interested in, of course, is Miriapol. Because if the Ukrainians can reach Mariupol, they basically isolate Russian forces throughout southern Ukraine, and then you’re talking about a hundred thousand Russian troops that are just stranded with no hope of resupply at all.” (Assuming his later mention of taking out the Kerch Strait Bridge.)
Nor are the sham referendums likely to make any difference either.
Russian-appointed occupation officials in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia oblasts announced on September 20 that they will hold a “referendum” on acceding to Russia, with a vote taking place from September 23-27. The Kremlin will use the falsified results of these sham referenda to illegally annex all Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine and is likely to declare unoccupied parts of Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia oblasts to be part of Russia as well.
The Kremlin’s annexation plans are primarily targeting a domestic audience; Putin likely hopes to improve Russian force generation capabilities by calling on the Russian people to volunteer for a war to “defend” newly claimed Russian territory. Putin and his advisors have apparently realized that current Russian forces are insufficient to conquer Ukraine and that efforts to build large forces quickly through voluntary mobilization are culminating short of the Russian military’s force requirements. Putin is therefore likely setting legal and informational conditions to improve Russian force generation without resorting to expanded conscription by changing the balance of carrots and sticks the Kremlin has been using to spur voluntary recruitment.
Putin may believe that he can appeal to Russian ethnonationalism and the defense of purportedly “Russian peoples” and claimed Russian land to generate additional volunteer forces. He may seek to rely on enhanced rhetoric in part because the Kremlin cannot afford the service incentives, like bonuses and employment benefits, that it has already promised Russian recruits. But Putin is also adding new and harsher punishments in an effort to contain the risk of the collapse of Russian military units fighting in Ukraine and draft-dodging within Russia. The Kremlin rushed the passage of a new law through the State Duma on September 20, circumventing normal parliamentary procedures. This law codifies dramatically increased penalties for desertion, refusing conscription orders, and insubordination. It also criminalizes voluntary surrender and makes surrender a crime punishable by ten years in prison. The law notably does not order full-scale mobilization or broader conscription or make any preparations for such activities.
ISW has observed no evidence that the Kremlin is imminently intending to change its conscription practices. The Kremlin’s new law is about strengthening the Kremlin’s coercive volunteerism, or what Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov called “self-mobilization.”
The Kremlin is taking steps to directly increase force generation through continued voluntary self-mobilization and an expansion of its legal authority to deploy Russian conscripts already with the force to fight in Ukraine.
Putin’s illegal annexation of occupied Ukrainian territory will broaden the domestic legal definition of “Russian” territory under Russian law, enabling the Russian military to legally and openly deploy conscripts already in the Russian military to fight in eastern and southern Ukraine. Russian leadership has already deployed undertrained conscripts to Ukraine in direct violation of Russian law and faced domestic backlash. Russia’s semi-annual conscription cycle usually generates around 130,000 conscripts twice per year. The next cycle runs from October 1 to December 31. Russian law generally requires that conscripts receive at least four months of training prior to deployment overseas, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly denied that conscripts will be deployed to Ukraine. Annexation could provide him a legal loophole allowing for the overt deployment of conscripts to fight.
Russian-appointed occupation officials in Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts announced the formation of “volunteer” units to fight with the Russian military against Ukraine. Russian forces will likely coerce or physically force at least some Ukrainian men in occupied areas to fight in these units, as they have done in the territories of the Russian proxy Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR).
The Russian State Duma separately passed new incentives for foreign nationals to fight in Russia’s military to obtain Russian citizenship and will likely increase overseas recruitment accordingly. That new law, which deputies also rushed through normal procedures on September 20, allows foreign nationals to gain Russian citizenship by signing a contract and serving in the Russian military for one year. Russian law previously required three years of service to apply for citizenship.
Putin’s appeals to nationalism may generate small increases in volunteer recruitment from within Russia and parts of occupied Donetsk and Luhansk. However, forces generated from such volunteers, if they manifest, will be small and poorly trained. Most eager and able-bodied Russian men and Ukrainian collaborators have likely already volunteered in one of the earlier recruitment phases.
Local Russian administrators will continue to attempt to form volunteer units, with decreasing effect, as ISW has previously reported and mapped.
Russian forces and the Wagner Private Military Company are also directly recruiting from Russian prisons, as ISW has previously reported. These troops will be undisciplined and unlikely to meaningfully increase Russian combat power.
Putin likely hopes that increasing self-mobilization, and cracking down on unwilling Russian forces, will enable him to take the rest of Donetsk and defend Russian-occupied parts of Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia oblasts. He is mistaken. Putin has neither the time nor the resources needed to generate effective combat power. But Putin will likely wait to see if these efforts are successful before either escalating further or blaming his loss on a scapegoat. His most likely scapegoat is Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the Russian Ministry of Defense. Reports that Shoigu would accompany Putin while Putin gave a speech announced and then postponed on September 20 suggest that Putin intended to make Shoigu the face of the current effort.
That decree is every bit as popular as you would expect.
Takeaways:
“Today, people went to the streets from Moscow to the Far East to protest. Even though it only concerned those in reserve, everyone sees where this is going.”
“Former Security Minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic called on Russia’s military command to better supply existing units on the ground. He also added that lack of equipment is the main reason why the Ukrainians keep advancing in Kherson.”
He thinks the conscripts will work logistics jobs, free up contractors to do the fighting. I remain doubtful that the effective military contractor pool for this war is terribly deep.
Neither the mobilization nor the sham referendums change any immediate facts on the ground in Ukraine. It will take many months to take new “recruits” up to even the most basic soldiering standards. Or maybe they’ll just give them three days training and send them into battle with old rifles and old ammunition like they did before, with the same results.
Either way, it doesn’t solve any of Putin’s immediate problems…
Like a Marvel crossover comic that features two characters you’re interested in, having both Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons and tank expert Nicholas Moran talk about the .50cal machine gun (and why the Germans never adopted it) did indeed peak my interest.
A few takeaways:
“That the M2 I think is so well known today, it’s so recognized and … is ubiquitous. During World War Two, the U.S. kind of did a like a massive industrial flex on the rest of the world with the M2. It’s a bit memey, but you could think of this as like the classic Uncle Sam painting with like glowing red eyes of fire. Because the US manufactured about 2 million Browning .50 caliber machine guns.”
“We’re going to put them on trucks, we’re going to put them on tanks, we’ll put them on some Jeeps, we’ll put them on half-tracks. We’ll put four of them together in a big mount and put that on a half-track or on a trailer. It’s like Oprah just handing out .50 cal machine guns.”
Because McCollum didn’t know, he asked Moran, leading to the special Gun Jesus/Chieftain Crossover Issue.
Moran’s first cut: “Dunno! Let me ask around.”
For starters, the Germans used small canons instead of big machine guns.
It was a hell of a lot safer to be buttoned up in the tank with aircraft shooting at you than outside it trying to score an unlikely machine gun kill.
“The reality was that aircraft generally were horrible at killing tanks.” (Caveat: I hear the Stuka version with the 37mm cannon was actually pretty good at it, but German tankers obviously didn’t have to worry about that.)
Also, since they thought taking out aircraft with machine guns was unlikely, one light machine gun with tracers was just as good as four heavy machine guns at “giving pilots something to think about” on their strafing runs.
The Germans did have “the MG 131, a 13mm weapon, and thus as close to a caliber .50 as possible. Though primarily an electrically primed aircraft gun, it could be converted to a ground mount and percussion fired. It could thus be mounted on a tank much like an American caliber .50, yet it never was.”
Germans had a doctrinal preference for saving ammo wherever possible if the possibility for effective fire was too low. Americans had a doctrinal preference for turning out giant piles of ammo.
“If you want something which provides a lot of coverage, and has a good chance of actually shooting down a target, especially an armoured one like an IL-2, you’re better off with a heavier gun on a dedicated platform with a trained, dedicated anti-aircraft crew.”
I’ve extensively covered Hunter Biden’s extensive illegal activities, some of which involve his father Joe. With interference from the FBI, DOJ, and the entirety of the Democratic Media Complex, any real investigation into Hunter’s misdeeds and influence peddling was pushed back until after the 2020 presidential election.
U.S Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and 32 other Senate Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland asking him to grant special counsel protections and authority to U.S Attorney David C. Weiss for his investigation into Hunter Biden.
Biden, son of President Joe Biden, is being investigated over his previous involvement with a Ukrainian gas company while his father was vice president; he’s facing allegations of tax code violations and unregistered lobbying.
Weiss is a Trump-appointed prosecutor who was kept on by the Biden administration. He is already leading the investigation into Hunter Biden, but these GOP Senators state that authority is not enough to limit political influence from the Department of Justice (DOJ).
The senators criticize Garland for “politicizing” the DOJ, stating that he promised to do the opposite.
“On October 4, 2021, you unleashed [the] DOJ’s National Security Division and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, among other criminal components, on millions of concerned parents across the country, who were exercising their First Amendment rights to be involved in decisions about their children’s education,” they wrote.
“We have received hundreds of pieces of correspondence detailing how your memorandum chilled constitutionally protected speech.”
The letter highlights the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and criticizes the lack of “measurable efforts” to prevent violence against Supreme Court Justices in the wake of the Dobbs decision.
Some of the Hunter Biden controversy stems from his role as a board member of Ukrainian gas company Burisma from 2014 to 2018.
A joint report released by the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Finance Committees allege that a significant conflict of interest arose as a result of Hunter Biden’s position and that of his father
At the time, the U.S. government was pursuing an anti-corruption investigation into Ukraine and Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky.
Hunter Biden is accused of lobbying U.S. officials for Burisma interests while then-Vice President Joe Biden was the “public face of the administration’s handling of Ukraine.” This was at the height of the anti-corruption investigation pursued by the U.S. government.
The report also states, “Hunter Biden was serving on Burisma’s board when Zlochevsky allegedly paid a $7 million bribe to officials serving under Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Vitaly Yarema, to ‘shut the case against Zlochevsky.’”
Hunter Biden is also accused of taking millions from a Chinese energy firm with connections to the Chinese Communist Party. President Joe Biden said on Sunday evening that the United States would directly engage China militarily if it invades Taiwan — a contrast from the administration’s previous position.
The senators’ letter states, “Given that the investigation involves the President’s son, we believe it is important to provide U.S Attorney Weiss with special counsel authorities and protections to allow him to investigate an appropriate scope of potentially criminal conduct, avoid the appearance of impropriety, and provide the additional assurances to the American people…that the investigation is free from political influence.”
“As detailed by Senator Grassley, ‘highly credible’ whistleblowers have come forward to detail a ‘widespread effort within the FBI to downplay or discredit negative information about’ Hunter Biden.”
“Instead of encouraging FBI and DOJ whistleblowers to report crimes and promote government transparency,” the senators wrote to Garland, “you took the inexplicable step of chilling lawful whistleblower activity.”
Actually, it’s super-duper explicable, if you assume that Garland’s number one priority is protecting members of the Democratic Party. Indeed, this seems to be the Prime Directive of the current DOJ, a few honest holdouts notwithstanding.
For that reason, I expect zero serious examination of Hunter Biden’s shady deals.
Unless, that is, the Obama Administration powers behind the throne (Ron Klane, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, etc.) decide Biden must be eased out well before 2024.
The administration of US President Joe Biden next month is to broaden curbs on US exports to China of semiconductors used for artificial intelligence and chipmaking tools, several people familiar with the matter said.
The US Department of Commerce intends to publish new regulations based on restrictions communicated in letters earlier this year to three US companies — KLA Corp, Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Every wafer fabrication plant in the world uses equipment from one of those three companies. Applied Materials and LAM Research (along with Tokyo Electron) have their fingers in almost all areas of chipmaking equipment (PVD, CVD, Etch, etc.), while KLA (formerly KLA-Tencor) dominates the wafer inspection equipment segment. Add ASML in the Netherlands, and those five absolutely dominate the semiconductor equipment market.
The letters, which the companies publicly acknowledged, forbade them from exporting chipmaking equipment to Chinese factories that produce advanced semiconductors with sub-14 nanometer processes unless the sellers obtain commerce department licenses.
This is where things get tricky. SMIC claims they can do 7nm, but everyone outside China doubts they can do it reliably, repeatably and profitably. SMIC announced they’re about to start manufacturing 14nm, and that they can probably do. Practically, they’re the only semiconductor manufacturer in China that can do sub-14nm, as just about everyone at the top of the next biggest semiconductor manufacturer, Tsinghua Unigroup, just got arrested in July.
Without a continued stream of machines, spare parts and technical know-how from those five semiconductor giants, China’s semiconductor industry is doomed. China’s domestic semiconductor equipment industry is essentially garbage, and they’re so far behind in so many areas that they can’t even steal their way to parity. The knowledge gulf is just too vast.
According to World Trade Organization statistics, China’s trade deficit in integrated circuits and electronic components (including Hong Kong’s trade deficit) has almost doubled from the equivalent of $135 billion in 2010 to $240 billion in 2020.
The growing trade deficit in integrated circuits reveals one crucial fact: Achieving technological self-reliance is still a faraway Chinese dream. To keep its exports growing, China has no other way but to keep importing advanced chips to assemble into consumer goods with high-tech intensity (e.g., smartphones, tablets, and the like).
Although China (including Hong Kong) is also the largest exporter of semiconductor chips in the world, less than 7% of chips produced in China were made by Chinese semiconductor companies in 2021.
More than 90% of chips produced in China are made by foreign firms. In other words, China’s exports of semiconductor chips are overwhelmingly dominated by foreign companies.
Its inferior level of technology is the main reason for China’s chip reliance on foreign firms. While Chinese firms are stuck with advancing toward 7nm chips, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung are progressing towards mass production of 3nm chips this year. Intel plans to take over TSMC’s leading role in semiconductor technology by 2025.
The competition among a few tech giants in the U.S., Taiwan, and South Korea is clear, and the Chinese firms are not likely to jump into the global technology competition in the semiconductor industry anytime soon.
The U.S. restrictions on exporting chipmaking equipment to China’s largest semiconductor firm, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., have not only deterred China’s technological advancement, but also exposed the fundamental mismanagement problems inside China’s semiconductor industry.
Xi might not have noticed his industry’s poor performance had China been able to continue to produce chips with foreign equipment.
Some parts about the Tsinghua scandal snipped.
Several Taiwanese executives leaving China’s semiconductor industry last year is another major setback in the development of China’s semiconductor industry.
China not only spent tremendously on building chip plants and purchasing expansive equipment, but also on recruiting talent from overseas. Over the past few years, China recruited more than 3,000 skilled workers from Taiwan to work in China’s semiconductor industry.
China amassed enormous capital, talent, and foreign equipment, but the problem is with governance. Xi’s absolute authority encouraged a rush into China’s semiconductor industry. Moreover, the extraordinary integration of the public and private sectors in China has twisted industrial development toward short-term profit-making, instead of long-term accumulation of manufacturing strength and technological improvement.
Xi’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy has further overshadowed the outlook of its semiconductor industry. China’s success relies on close partnerships with various suppliers and customers in different countries across the globe. Alienating them on the geopolitical front only undermines those relationships.
The U.S. ban on exporting chipmaking machines to China was the straw that broke the Chinese semiconductor industry’s back.
On top of that, the CHIPS and Science Act just signed into law bans semiconductor companies receiving U.S. government subsidies from investing in China for the next 10 years. There are major loopholes in that prohibition, but if Congress can manage to keep the administration’s feet to the fire—including by tightening the legal restrictions—it could have a major impact on China’s tech development.
In addition, the U.S. has extended the export restriction to 14 nm chipmaking machines to the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. and other foreign chipmakers in China. A specific electronics design automation software for making advanced chips is also banned from exportation to China.
Without foreign investment and inputs, China is only likely to deepen its reliance on importing advanced chips from overseas.
Peter Zeihan notes (correctly) that China’s semiconductor industry has been singularly unable to fab advanced chips on their own.
Not to mention that fraud still abounds. Chinese CPU semiconductor startup Quillion Technology closed up shop three months after raising $89 million.
$89 million is probably enough to get you to tape-out for a fabless semiconductor house designing a smaller chip (or maybe even a low-power ARM-based CPUs for embedded markets), but it’s a woefully small sum for a real cutting-edge CPU company, and laughable if they intended to be an integrated design manufacturer fabbing their own chips, where building even a trailing edge fab starts in the billions.
More on that topic:
Takeaways:
“Money seems to have a strong corruptive power over CCP officials that they can’t resist. Like China’s real estate industry, China’s semiconductor industry is also plagued with corruption, over-construction, and highly leveraged capital maneuvers.”
She goes over the history of the Chinese “Big Fund” for semiconductors I covered here, and later talks about the indictments.
“The state-run Semiconductor Investment Fund was used more as an instrument to speculate in stocks than an institution for conducting basic R&D. The government-backed fund, aka the “Big Fund,” has investments in 2,793 entities within three layers of ownership.” Very few of them have the word “semiconductor” in their names. (Like I said before, shell games all the way down.)
From 1984 to 1990, the Ministry of Electronics Industry delegated the management of the vast majority of state-owned electronics enterprises to local provincial and municipal governments. While these state-owned enterprises (SOEs) obtained more autonomy, something strange happened. These companies imported outdated integrated circuit production lines that had no commercial value. The wasteful projects cost money, but people used the opportunities to take foreign trips, receive kickbacks, and send their children abroad. And this happened on a large scale.
Pretty much classic ChiCom behavior.
China’s high-tech industry, like its financial industry, is dominated by powerful CCP families, and the Jiang Zemin family is one of them. In 1999, Jiang Zemin gave his oldest son, Jiang Mianheng, the reins of China’s “autonomous chip development.” As vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and president of the Shanghai branch for many years, the junior Jiang has long held the turf of China’s science and technology sector. He is also personally involved in the semiconductor business. His Shanghai Lianhe investment has holdings of Shanghai Zhaoxin Semiconductor Company.
Classic story:
Chen Jin, a former junior test engineer at Motorola, joined Shanghai Jiaotong University in 2001 after returning to China.
He was given the responsibility to develop the “Hanxin” chip, an important part of the state-run high-tech development program known as the “863 Program.” In just three years, Chen obtained 100 million in R&D funding and applied for 12 national patents. On Feb. 26, 2003, Chen’s team officially released the “Hanxin 1” chip. The Shanghai Municipal Government, the Ministry of Information Industry, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences all backed his work. The expert panel declared the “Hanxin 1” and its related design and application development platform as being the first of its kind in China and achieving an important milestone in the history of China’s chip development. Subsequently, Hanxin 2, 3, 4 and 5 chips were launched, all of which were claimed to have reached an advanced level globally. The Hanxin series of chips even entered the General Equipment Procurement Department of the Chinese military. However, 3 years later, on Jan. 17, 2006, “Hanxin 1” was revealed to be completely fake. Chen downloaded a Motorola chip source code through a former Motorola colleague. Then he secretly bought a batch of Motorola dsp56800 series chips, paid a peasant to scrape the original Motorola logo with sandpaper, and asked a local Shanghai print shop to print the “Hanxin” logo on it.
China correctly identified semiconductors and semiconductor equipment as key technologies for truly becoming the world’s preeminent technological manufacturing giant. Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for us), the CCP’s endemic culture of corruption and their top-down command economy are antithetical to the onrush of capitalist technological innovation that powers Moore’s Law.
