Ukraine Hits Airbase 600 Kilometers Inside Russia

December 5th, 2022

Ukraine has been so successful at hitting Russian infrastructure with HIMARS that it’s no longer news when they hit something 100 kilometers behind Russia’s lines.

But when they hit something 600 kilometers away, that’s news.

Several people have been killed in explosions at two Russian military airfields, according to reports.

A fuel tanker exploded killing three and injuring six in an airfield near the city Ryazan, south-east of Moscow, Russian state media is reporting.

Another two people are reported to have been hurt in an explosion at an airfield in the Saratov region.

It is not known what caused the blasts. Both areas are hundreds of kilometres from the Ukrainian border.

Long-range Russian strategic bombers are believed to be based at the Engels airbase in the Saratov region.

Here’s a Suchomimus video on the Engels Airbase attack:

Reportedly two Tu-95 bombers were hit.

He suggests that the attack may have been carried out by a new Ukrainian drone with a reported range of 1,000 kilometers. Whatever it was presumably cost a whole lot less than a strategic bomber.

Ukraine’s ever-increasing range puts a whole lot of Russian infrastructure (military and otherwise) under potential threat. Perhaps Putin should take that into consideration before ordering the next round of attacks on Ukrainian power plants…

Is The Iranian Regime Starting To Crack?

December 4th, 2022

I haven’t covered too much of the unrest in Iran, mainly because we’ve seen widespread Iranian protests fizzle out before (in 1999, 2003, 2009, 2011-12 (remember, Obama was far more interested in pursuing his crazy nuclear deal than in helping the Iranian people free themselves from the Mullahs)) up to the most recent protests.

But we finally have a sign that this time may be different, in that this is the first time the regime has (reportedly) offered concessions.

After a series of fiery protests, Iran is reportedly abolishing its morality police and may loosen requirements on wearing hijabs, the country’s attorney general confirmed on Saturday.

Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri said at a press conference that the morality police have “nothing to do with the judiciary and have been abolished.”

This is not a small concession. The Mullah claim to being an Islamic State rests on implementing Koranic governance, including Shariah law governing personal behavior, of which the requirement that a woman wear a hajib is only the most visible. But even if true (and there are reports online stating that promises to eliminate the morality police, AKA the Guidance Patrol AKA the Gast-e Ersad, is in fact government disinformation to stop the protests), Iran still has plenty of other internal police organs to oppress its citizens with: the FARAJA (Law Enforcement Command of Islamic Republic of Iran), the PAVA (the intelligence subset of the former), the Basij (a paramilitary Islamic militia run as a subset of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards), etc.

“Of course, the judiciary continues to monitor behavioral actions,” he added. The Iranian authorities will consider whether to adjust the headscarf rules, the attorney general said in a statement.

Born after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the religious force, charged with patrolling for and arresting women who violate the Islamic dress code, e.g., by not wearing a head covering or loose-fitting clothing, has existed outside of the judicial system, operated by law enforcement.

The mass unrest that has swept the country in recent months was triggered by the arrest of 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini in Tehran for not wearing the mandated hijab headscarf. After she was escorted to a police station, the woman went into a coma and later died in a hospital. While the official state account contends that Amini suffered a fatal heart attack, eyewitnesses claim that several security officers assaulted her in the police van following her detention.

Amini’s death fueled a wave of anti-regime rallies pressuring the theocracy to relax its restrictions. Mostly women and young adults, including many university students, have participated, urging an overhaul of the fundamentalist religious dictates. In a show of resistance, protesters have marched in the streets yelling slogans like “woman, life, freedom,” burned their hijabs, and cut their hair, the New York Times reported. Some protesters have called for the end of the Islamic Republic. In late November, an Iranian general acknowledged that more than 300 people have been killed in the ongoing demonstrations.

Many doubt that the Guidance Patrol has in fact been dissolved, or that it would actually make any difference if it was:

Still, even if the regime is only pretending to make concessions to the protesters, this is more than we’ve seen in previous protests, so the regime must obviously be rattled.

The latest update on Iran from ISW:

Protest coordinators and organizations continued issuing guidance on December 3 in preparation for the planned countrywide protests and strikes on December 5-7. The Hamedan Neighborhood Youth posted instructions on how to make hand-thrown explosives, Molotov cocktails, and pepper spray. The Karaj Neighborhood Youth and others published maps of planned protest locations. The Shiraz Neighborhood Youth advised citizens to prepare basic necessities and cash for themselves given the planned strikes.

Statements from the neighborhood youth groups portray a protest movement that is still trying to cohere and experimenting with different approaches. The Karaj group, among others, called for increasingly concentrated protests on each day from December 5 to 7. The Tehran group repeated on December 3 its calls for a different approach, in contrast. The Tehran group acknowledged ”differences of opinion” and insisted that citizens only strike on December 5 because security forces can more easily identify protesters and traverse city streets during strikes due to the reduced traffic. The Tehran group called for protests on December 6 and 7. This iteration within the protest movement is a natural step as it tries to coalesce and organize.

Alas, this hardly sounds like a well-oiled revolution ready to push the regime to collapse and step in when it does.

As in China and Venezuela, it takes a whole lot more than protests to bring down totalitarian regimes. I’d love to be proved wrong, but right now I very few signs that the Islamic regime is actually threatened.

Russia’s Failure To Achieve Air Superiority

December 3rd, 2022

Early on, a lot of observers predicted that Russia, with it’s vast store of Soviet-era aircraft, would quickly achieve air-superiority over Ukraine. That hasn’t been the case.

This video from the British Imperial War Museum lists some reasons why.

Takeaways:

  • They failed to hit Ukrainian aircraft on the ground in the opening phases of the war.
  • A “great deal of mismanagement, kleptocracy, you know, favored projects over some kind of strategic effect.” Note how Putin is always announcing some sort of awesome wonderwaffen while neglecting basic needs like logistics.
  • “The level of corruption in Russia itself has had an impact on its ability to have a tactical or even strategic effect without support from the air. Russia’s ground forces have been largely unable to mount effective combined arms operations.”
  • “The key reason for Russia’s inability to effectively use its air force has been its failure to take out Ukraine’s mobile surface to air missile systems. They have been unable to suppress enemy air defenses.”
  • Ukraine made an early effort to obtain SAM systems from the west.
  • Both mobile tracked systems like S-300 and MANPADS have been used.
  • Failure to achieve air superiority has both sides investing in drones.
  • “What you do is you flood the airspace, almost like a denial of service attack, as we see on the Internet. As you attack a server, for instance, by having so many pings against it, it essentially shuts down the server. And what we see in the case of Russia is that it’s doing the same thing. It’s trying to flood the air defense systems.”
  • “The relatively low cost of these drones is one of the main reasons for Russia to deploy them, and in such numbers. Each drone reportedly costs around $20,000. And so losing an expensive advance guided missile to these drones is not an ideal strategy for Ukraine.”
  • One reason not covered: Russia seems to have used up a good portion of it’s high tech weapons in the opening phases of the war, and western sanctions mean that it can’t easily replace them. Sophisticated fighter bombers are a whole lot less effective when they’re reduced to dropping gravity bombs rather than guided munitions.

    LinkSwarm for December 2, 2022

    December 2nd, 2022

    Howdy! Hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving! I spent six days up in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, visiting relatives and buying some 180 books, some for myself and some to deal. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm!
    

  • We keep hearing that it’s impossible rig government unemployment statistics, but something funny is going on.

    A superficial take of today’s jobs report would note that both jobs and earnings “blew past expectations, flying in the face of Fed rate hikes”, and while that is accurate at the headline level, it couldn’t be further from the truth if one actually digs a little deeper in today’s jobs numbers.

    Recall that back in August, September, and October we showed that a stark divergence had opened between the Household and Establishment surveys that comprise the monthly jobs report, and since March the former has been stagnant while the latter has been rising every single month. In addition to that, full-time jobs were plunging while part-time jobs were surging and the number of multiple-jobholders soared.

    Fast forward to today when the inconsistencies not only continue to grow, but have become downright grotesque.

    Consider the following: the closely followed Establishment survey came in above expectations at 263K, above the 200K expected – a record 7th consecutive beat vs expectations – and down modestly from last month’s upward revised 284K…

    … numbers which confirm that at a time when virtually every major tech company is announcing mass layoffs…

    … the BLS has a single, laser-focused political agenda – not to spoil the political climate at a time when Democrats just lost control of the House as somehow both construction (+20K) and manufacturing (+14K) added jobs according to the BLS, when even ADP now reports that these two sectors combined shed more than 100,000 workers in November.

    Alas, there is only so much the Department of Labor can hide under the rug because when looking at the abovementioned gap between the Household and Establishment surveys which we have been pounding the table on since the summer, it just blew out by a whopping 401K as a result of the 263K increase in the number of nonfarm payrolls (tracked by the Household survey) offset by a perplexing plunge in the number of people actually employed which tumbled by 138K (tracked by Household survey). Furthermore, as shown in the next chart, since March the number of employed workers has declined on 4 of the past 8 months, while the much more gamed nonfarm payrolls (goalseeked by the Establishment survey) have been up every single month.

    What is even more perplexing, is that despite the continued rise in nonfarm payrolls, the Household survey continues to telegraph growing weakness, and as of Nov 30, the gap that opened in March has since grown to a whopping 2.7 million “workers” which may or may not exist anywhere besides the spreadsheet model of some BLS (or is that BLM) political activist.”

  • Senate passes bill to avoid rail strike.
  • “Zuckerberg, Soros Bankrolling Left-Wing Think Tank Conducting Racial Census of Hill Staff.”

    A non-profit bankrolled by some of the nation’s largest corporations and left-wing billionaire George Soros is conducting a racial census of House and Senate staff as part of its effort to establish a “Bipartisan Diversity and Inclusion Office,” according to internal emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

    Senate and House staff received emails from a researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies starting in July asking them to confirm their “racial and ethnic identity” as part of an alleged data collection effort. In at least two cases, senior congressional staffers who declined to provide their races were told by the researcher that the organization’s current data indicated they “may identify as white” and asked the staffers to update if the information was incorrect.

    Information collected by the group will be used in its annual report that lobbies for “structural changes on Capitol Hill that would allow for more people of color to be hired in senior positions,” a previous report from the group states. That report is made possible in part by millions of dollars in donations to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies from Apple, Google, Meta, Pfizer, the Soros-backed Open Society Foundation, among dozens of other large corporations and nonprofits.

    The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ survey is part of a broader trend by left-wing organizations to pressure workplaces and governments to increase affirmative action policies. Often couched in promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” those policies have received criticism for coming at the expense of competence and offering advantages based on race instead of merit.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “Collin County Ends Automatic Deduction of Union Dues.” Good.
  • “‘Philadelphia is a war zone’: Moment thug casually strolls up to parking officer and shoots him in the head in broad daylight in Dem-led city.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of Blue Zone violence, some occurred only a few miles from my house, when lawyer Gavin Rush walked into the bar where his ex-girlfriend worked and tried to shoot her before patrons wresteled him to the ground.

    Rush was charged with a second-degree felony, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon family violence. An emergency protection order was issued against him, and he was soon back on the streets after making a $40,000 bond, KVUE reported.

    “For $4,000, you can get out, go home, watch Netflix after trying to murder your ex-girlfriend — are you kidding me?” one of the customers said.

    So in addition to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and possible attempted murder, our super-genius lawyer also violated section 46.03 of the Texas penal code by carrying a gun into a bar. And he bonded out. For all that Democrats blather about “gun violence,” they don’t seem top treat gun felonies with any seriousness when they actually occur. Thanks, Soros-backed DA Jose Garza!

    But it turns out that Rush didn’t just go go home to watch Netflix, as he was found dead on Thursday.

  • Slippery, meet slope. “Assisted suicide plans for children unveiled at Toronto’s Sick Kids hospital.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • “Wisconsin School Counselor Sues District after Firing over Objections to Child Gender Transition.” Bend the knee, peasant.
  • Newly Elected Conservative School Board Fires Superintendent, Bans Critical Race Theory.”

    In one meeting, Deon Jackson went from South Carolina’s Berkeley County school superintendent to unemployed.

    His firing came at the hand of a newly-elected school board, which appears to have declared a judgment day for woke practices in its district.

    In its first meeting after the Nov. 8 election, the board fired superintendent Jackson and school counsel Tiffany Richardson. Then it hired Anthony Dixon as superintendent and retained Brandon Gaskins as counsel. And before the day was over, the board banned teaching critical race theory and created a board to review library books for pornographic content.

    Moms for Liberty, an activist group that supports parental rights in education, endorsed six of the board’s nine members. Many Moms for Liberty candidates won school board elections this November.

    Faster, please.

  • The road portion of the Kerch Strait bridge has been repaired.
  • Reality continues to outpace The Babylon Bee: “Former White House ‘Disinformation Czar’ Nina Jankowicz Registers As Foreign Agent.”
  • Speaking of disinformation, CNN carries out more mass layoffs, including Chris Cillizza. Let’s have a moment of silences for his careerOK that’s enough.
  • Today’s hate crime hoax comes to you from pedo-friendly California Democratic State Senator Scott Weiner.
  • Legal Insurrection conducts a 2024 presidential preference poll. Not surprisingly, DeSantis comes in first and Trump second. Nikki Haley third over Ted Cruz is a mild surprise. Greg Abbott ranked dead last, tied with Liz Chaney, is a much bigger one.
  • The B-21 Raider strategic bomber was officially rolled out today.
  • San Francisco police to arm robots with bombs. The Robocop joke are already made at the source.
  • U.S. defeats Iran in EuroFlopBall.
  • I used to joke “becoming a book reviewer for riches and fame is like becoming a monk for the kinky sex and hard drugs.” I may need to amend that joke.
  • Sarah Hoyt on bad feminist worldbuilding.
  • Epic fail: Crashing your car. SuperEpicMegaFail: Into a fireworks store. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Pilot builds tiny home out of a scissor lift airline snack truck.
  • Here’s your chance to pick up a shooting script for Citizen Kane.
  • World’s oldest cat dies in Texas at age 30.
  • Colin Furze turns himself into a Weeble.
  • Jobs For Gender Studies Majors

    December 1st, 2022

    The Babylon Bee offers up useful career advice:

    Be sure to stay for the list of genders at the end. “Canadian, bilingual, Cylon…”

    Hiroshi Miyamura, RIP

    November 30th, 2022

    Via Dwight comes word that Medal of Honor winner Hiroshi Miyamura has died at age 97.

    Hiroshi “Hershey” Miyamura, the son of Japanese immigrants who was awarded the U.S. Medal of Honor for holding off an attack to allow an American squad to withdraw during the Korean War, has died.

    The Congressional Medal of Honor Society announced that Miyamura died Tuesday at his home in Phoenix. He was 97.

    Born in Gallup, New Mexico, Miyamura’s parents operated a 24-hour diner near the Navajo Nation where the family interacted with the diverse population of miners and travelers who passed along Route 66.

    Miyamura’s mother died when he was 11 and his father never talked about Japan, Miyamura said in later interviews. He would earn the nickname “Hershey” because a teacher couldn’t pronounce his first name.

    Miyamura worked as an auto mechanic during high school. He joined the U.S. Army late in World War II after the federal government lifted restrictions on Japanese Americans serving. Miyamura was allowed to join the 442nd Infantry Regiment, composed almost entirely of “nisei” — those born in the U.S. to parents who were Japanese immigrants.

    After the war, Miyamura met Terry Tsuchimori, a woman from a family who had been forced to live at the Poston internment camp in southwestern Arizona following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. They married in 1948 and had three children.

    Miyamura continued to serve in the Army Reserves and was called into action during the Korean War.

    On the night of April 24, 1951, near Taejon-ni, Miyamura’s company came under attack by an invading Chinese force. Miyamura ordered his squad to retreat while he stayed behind and continued to fight, giving his men enough time to evacuate.

    Miyamura and fellow squad leader Joseph Lawrence Annello, of Castle Rock, Colorado, were captured. Though wounded, Miyamura carried the injured Annello for miles until Chinese soldiers ordered him at gunpoint to leave Annello by the side of a road. Miyamura refused the orders until Annello convinced him to put him down.

    Annello was later picked up by another Chinese unit and taken to a POW camp, from which he escaped.

    Miyamura was held as a prisoner for two years and four months.

    Upon his release, he was presented the Medal of Honor by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It had been awarded in secret while he was still a prisoner of war.

    I previously celebrated Miyamura’s service here.

    Here’s a video of him talking about his combat experiences:

    And here’s a video celebrating his service:

    Blogger Censors Borepatch

    November 29th, 2022

    Blogger, owned by Google, has evidently decided that it, and not the individual bloggers that use it, are the ultimate arbiter of what those bloggers should be allowed to say, and they’ve started censoring Borepatch. From Friday, November 25, 2022:

    In the ongoing effort to protect the world from Borepatch, the following actions have been taken by The Blogger Team.

    https://borepatch.blogspot.com/2008/06/what-smells-good.html has been removed.

    http://borepatch.blogspot.com/2011/05/america-do-your-part-to-when-harry-met.html has been put behind a warning wall.

    http://borepatch.blogspot.com/2010/06/ouch.html has been put behind a warning wall.

    As a blogger and Borepatch reader, this sticks in my craw, so here is a a Wayback Machine link to “What smells good.” What Google hopes to accomplish by censoring a 14-year old post to gun cleaning solvents is unclear.

    But that’s not all Google objects to! For some reason, they also decided that a post doubting “climate science” from 2014 was also verbotten.

    As you may know, our Community Guidelines
    (https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we allow– and don’t allow– on Blogger. Your post titled “How do we know that Climate “science” is terribly weak?” was flagged to us for review. We have determined that it violates our guidelines and have unpublished the URL http://borepatch.blogspot.com/2014/07/how-do-we-know-that-climate-science-is.html, making it unavailable to blog readers.

    Why was your blog post unpublished?

    Your content has violated our Malware and Viruses policy. Please visit our Community Guidelines page linked in this email to learn more.

    Reading the archived piece, I see nothing that could even be remotely construed as code.

    It seems Google is using vague terms-of-service complaints to carry out ideological language policing in the name of crushing dissent against The Holy Narrative.

    And it seems like a pretty good reason not to choose Blogger as your platform if you can choose something else.

    China Fights Revolution With Porn

    November 28th, 2022

    Ordinary Chinese have gotten so fed up with the endless Flu Manchu lockdowns that they’ve started mass protests in multiple cities, even going so far as to demand the CCP and Xi Jinping step down.

    Some commenters have even suggested that a revolution is the offing. I’ve seen too many hopeful shoots of Democracy crushed in not only China, but also Iran, Russia, Venezuela, etc. to have much optimism on this front. It would be nice to be proved wrong.

    So how are Chinese communist authorities fighting the movement? Would you believe with pornbots?

    As Chinese citizens take to the streets to protest the county’s “Zero Covid” policies and President Xi Jinping’s lockdowns, searches for names of cities and hashtags regarding the protests on Twitter have been filled with sexually explicit posts and ads for escorts to reportedly block out news of the massive protests.

    Searches for the names of major Chinese cities have resulted in a massive spike in content for porn, escorts, and gambling, “drowning out legitimate search results,” wrote Twitter user Air-Moving Device. The account shared a chart showing a massive spike in the number of accounts posting such content on November 28. “Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a significantuptick in these spam tweets.”

    For example, searching for the Chinese characters for Shanghai (上海) brings up the following on Twitter:

    And hundreds of duplicates of those and others, all of which seem to be pretty tame by Western twitter standards.

    So just like in so many other areas, Chinese pornbots are clearly inferior to American pornbots…

    On the Way Out Of New York, Louis Rossmann Gets Slapped With A Spite Audit

    November 27th, 2022

    In my previous post on crime statistics, several commenters (here and over on Instapundit) noted that Louis Rossmann had also put up a video covering the final straw that caused him to decide to leave New York: an audit he was subjected to after making a video discussing how incompetent New York taxing authorities were. I had seen it, but it was a bit long and I already had the crime statistics video cued up. Here it is by way of prologue for the next video.

    The upshot is that, after having millions in fines and the possible destruction of his business dangling over his head for over a year thanks to New York authorities, the audit found that Rossman’s reporting had a 0.11% error rate.

    If you thought that was the end of it, you underestimate the penny-ante fury of petty bureaucrats against those who would dare to criticize them. New York has launched a spite audit of Rossmann on his way out of the state:

    Yet another excellent reason for business owners to leave New York as soon as possible…

    Texas Vs. California Budgets: 2022 Edition

    November 26th, 2022

    State budgets for Texas and California are in the news, and once again the two largest states in the union are headed in opposite directions:

  • In Texas, lawmakers are wrangling about what to do with a $27 billion surplus.

    The Texas Legislature is in for a fight over how to spend its expected pot of money from inflation-driven record consumption tax collections.

    Trying to direct the Legislature and the Texas House specifically often resembles herding cats — 150 members with 150 different ideas on how the $27 billion projected surplus should be appropriated.

    Comptroller Hegar indicated this week that the total might grow even more by the New Year. He will provide an updated certified revenue estimate in January.

    Whether it grows or not, the sum will be a large pot with which the Legislature can do a lot.

    The foremost suggestion is to buy down property taxes through ramped-up compression of local ad valorem tax rates.

    Gov. Greg Abbott has called for spending “at least half” on “the largest property tax cut ever in the history of Texas.” Lt. Governor Dan Patrick first called for using $4 billion to cut taxes and then upped that to possibly more than half of the total.

    The Legislature already has $3 billion earmarked for a buydown next session from holdover American Rescue Plan Act funds.

  • Meanwhile, California is suffering from a $25 billion deficit.

    $25 billion.

    That’s the estimated deficit Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers will confront when crafting a budget for the upcoming fiscal year, the Legislature’s nonpartisan fiscal advisor announced Wednesday.

    The projection marks a stunning reversal from back-to-back years of unprecedented prosperity: The budget for California’s current fiscal year clocked in at a whopping $308 billion, fueled by a record $97 billion surplus that was by itself enough to treat every state resident to a $7,500 vacation. The year before, Newsom and lawmakers approved what was at the time a record-busting $263 billion budget that included a $76 billion surplus.

    Snip.

    The Legislative Analyst’s fiscal outlook doesn’t take into account soaring inflation rates or the increasingly likely possibility of a recession. Due to inflation, “the actual costs to maintain the state’s service level are higher than what our outlook reflects,” the analyst’s office wrote. The estimated $25 billion deficit thus “understates the actual budget problem in inflation-adjusted terms.” And, if a recession were to hit, it would result “in much more significant revenue declines,” meaning California could bring in $30 to $50 billion less than expected in the budget window.

    I don’t think there’s any “if” about a recession anymore.

  • For a while California’s tech and entertainment industry strengths were outrunning its massive blue state economic mismanagement and green energy delusions. That’s no longer the case.

    The problem with the blue state model is that they either run out of other people’s money, or people take it with them when they move before the state can take it away. Still others leave to avoid the outrageous cost of living. No wonder U-Haul ran out of trucks to leave the state.

    Budgets are hard to balance even in good times, given competing priorities and political factions. It becomes much harder in a recession. And it becomes nearly impossible when you try to fund not only the regular Democratic Party graft and fraud, but social justice madness and green energy delusions.

    Which is why so many Californians are getting out while the getting is good…