Russia Reorients

April 8th, 2022

Just because Russia is obviously retreating from Kiev due to getting mauled doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth in the argument that their biggest aims lie in eastern Ukraine. This video suggest three main remaining goals for Russian forces:

  • Restore and control the flow of water to Crimea (Ukraine dammed up the Dinappa river following the seizure of Crimea, which has put them in a world of hurt).
  • Gain control of “the Yokosuka Gas Field, which was discovered in 2010 and it has about 42 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, that could threaten Russia’s oil dominance in the region.”
  • Controlling all Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.
  • More details on each in the video.

    If they can achieve those goals, if Russia can achieve capturing those three goals they will have landlocked and absolutely wrecked Ukraine’s entire economy. So when they say that the main war is in the east, they’re actually, on some level, telling the truth. The problem for Russia, though, is that without having captured Kiev their chances of holding on to those objectives is greatly reduced.

    (Between getting my house cleaned, relatives visiting (Yes, those two are related), and tax season, no time to put up a LinkSwarm today. Tomorrow is not looking good either…)

    Biden Family Corruption Update for April 7, 2022

    April 7th, 2022

    Now that the Hunter Biden dam has finally burst for the MSM, we’re finally getting the “Hey, the Biden family sure seems to be involved in a lot of shady business deals” stories we should have gotten well before the 2020 election if the media weren’t so in the tank for Democrats.

    A roundup:

  • Hunter and Joe aren’t the only crooked members of the Biden clan.

    While conservative heat has for three years focused on the past business activities of President Biden’s son Hunter, a key Senate Republican told CBS News this week that newly obtained banking records raise similar concerns about first brother James Biden.

    “We have people with the Biden name, dealing with Chinese business people that have a relationship to the Communist Party,” Senator Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told CBS News senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge. “I think James Biden was very much a part of this.”

    Bank records released by Republican senators this week indicate James Biden’s company, the Lion Hall Group, received payments from a Chinese-financed consulting group in 2018, before his brother Joe announced he was running for president. Grassley says that same year James Biden and the president’s son, Hunter, received monthly retainers totaling $165,000 — $100,000 to Hunter and $65,000 to James.

    Grassley said his team obtained the records directly from the bank where the consulting group did business. He has spent three years investigating and described James and Hunter Biden’s business dealings as “very concerning.”

    Really, who of us hasn’t received $65,000 in monthly consulting fees from a communist Chinese company?

    In a September 2020 report with Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, Grassley alleged Hunter, James, and James’s wife Sara tapped into a line of credit Hunter set up with a Chinese business executive to purchase more than $100,000 in airline tickets, hotels and restaurants.

    Newly released records from Republican investigators show what appears to be the 2017 application for that $99,000 line of credit bearing the signatures of Hunter Biden and the Chinese executive.

    Hunter gets a $99,000 expense account. Meanwhile, HR rejects your expense report for spending $26 on lunch.

  • “Joe Biden’s Released Tax Returns Don’t Explain Millions In Income. Where Did It Come From?”

    In the week prior to the presidential election, I wrote a piece that asked the question, “Where Is Hunter Biden’s Money?” It was an important question then, even more so now. Given the legacy media’s recent validation of Hunter’s laptop that discussed a slice of equity planned for the “Big Guy” in a deal that involved an entity controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), we should know if any money from it (or other foreign sources) ended up in Joe Biden’s pocket, but we don’t.

    Recall that despite then-presidential candidate Biden having bragged that he had released his tax returns with what his team called “a historic level of transparency,” the truth is that he only released his individual returns. Those returns provided no detail regarding the source of most of his income, dollars that flowed to him and his wife Jill by way of S-corporations they set up shortly after his departure from the office of vice president. Those entities, CelticCapri Corp (his) and Giacoppa Corp (hers), contained more than $13 million of the $17 million the couple had reported in income after Biden left office, most of it in the first year (2017).

    The same media that ignored Hunter’s laptop has shown a complete incuriosity about these entities, accepting the premise that Joe and Jill raked in $13 million from their book deal to generate their huge increase in income. We simply don’t know if that’s true, though. What we do know is that their book sales were dismal.

    Perhaps sensing smoke starting to build just before the election, USA Today published a “fact check” piece that attempted to support that the Bidens earned “$15.6 million … from speaking fees and book deals” in the years 2017 through 2019 and that “more than $10 million of that total income was profits from Biden’s memoir ‘Promise Me, Dad’ and $3 million in profits from Jill Biden’s book.”

    Follow the source link provided to that $10 million number, though, and you’ll end up at Joe Biden’s campaign website with financial disclosure links to only their individual returns — no S-corporation tax returns. So, in reality, readers were left with a smokescreen. (Now the financial disclosure links for 2016, 2017, and 2018 have even been changed to connect to a Democratic National Committee fundraising site via ActBlue rather than the tax documents.)

    I noted back in 2020 that, “While (Joe Biden’s) financial disclosures reasonably support the $2.7 million of net income reported by CelticCapri in 2018, a notable $8.7 million gap exists between its $9.5 million net income in 2017 and the $809,709 of disclosed income in that year from book tour and related speaking events. Since his disclosure covers only part of 2017, we lack the insight into other income that may explain it.”

    Enter (yet again) Hunter and China.

    Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., recently showed proof of payments from what they said were CCP-controlled firms “that prove just how connected the Bidens were and how compromised President Biden probably is.” An August 2017 wire receipt showed $100,000 sent from CEFC Infrastructure Investment to Owasco, and a copy of a November 2017 check from CEFC Limited revealed $1 million paid to Hudson West III, LLC. Both recipient entities were tied to the president’s son.

    Did any of that money, or other overseas income, go to Joe or Jill? We would know if the president provided a copy of their S-Corp. tax returns with all partner K-1’s that flowed through them. But the only detail we have is aggregate numbers reported on the couple’s individual returns.

    Read on for how there’s no way he made that money off book sales. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • How many “concerning transactions” are there? Would you believe 150?

  • “Biden wrote college recommendation letter for son of Hunter’s Chinese business partner.”

    President Biden, in 2017, wrote a college recommendation letter for the son of a Chinese executive who did business with Hunter Biden, according to emails reviewed by Fox News Digital.

    The president has repeatedly denied discussing Hunter’s business ventures with his son.

    Fox News Digital obtained emails between Hunter Biden and his business associates involved in his firm Rosemont Seneca’s joint venture with Chinese investment firms Bohai Capital and BHR.

    Hunter held a 10% stake in BHR as recently as last year, the White House previously acknowledged. Hunter’s attorney told the New York Times in November that he had since divested.

    In an email dated Jan. 3, 2017, and sent to Hunter Biden and his business associates Devon Archer and Jim Bulger, CEO of BHR Jonathan Li writes:

    “Gentlmen[sic], please find the attached resume of my son, Chris Li. He is applying the following colleges for this year,” Li writes, listing Brown University, Cornell University, and New York University.

    Remember how Biden swore up and down he never interacted with Hunter’s business partners?

  • “The Media Campaign to Protect Joe Biden Passes the Point of Absurdity.”

    In confirming that federal prosecutors are treating as “authenticated” the Biden emails, the Times story applies the final dollop of clown makeup to Wolf Blitzer, Lesley Stahl, Christiane Amanpour, Brian Stelter, and countless other hapless media stooges, many starring in Matt Orfalea’s damning montage above (the Hunter half-laugh is classic, by the way). All cooperated with intelligence officials to dismiss a damaging story about Biden’s abandoned laptop and his dealings with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma as “Russian disinformation.” They tossed in terms thought up for them by spooks as if they were their own thoughts, using words like “obviously” and “classic” and “textbook” to describe “the playbook of Russian disinformation,” in what itself was and still is a wildly successful disinformation campaign, one begun well before the much-derided (and initially censored) New York Post exposé on the topic from October of 2020.

    Not to be petty, but — well, yes, let’s be petty, just a little, and point out that many of the people who were the most pompous about this story turned out to be the most wrong, including the conga line of Intercept editors and staffers who essentially knocked Glenn Greenwald all the way to Substack over the issue. There are more important things going on in the world, but for sheer bootlicking conformist excess and depraved journalist-on-journalist venom the “Russian disinformation” fiasco has no equal, and probably needs recording for posterity before it’s memory-holed via some creepy homage to Severance, or a next-gen algorithmic witch-hunt, or whatever other federally contracted monstrosities are being readied for deployment somewhere far up the anus of Silicon Valley. For comic relief, start with the Intercept.

    Much blow-by-blow analysis of Bursima and Ukrainian investigations snipped.

    Note all this took place before the New York Post ran its October, 2020 piece about the trove of Biden emails culled from the laptop, which included an ominous email from Pozharsky ostensibly thanking him for the “opportunity to meet your father.” It’s never been verified that this meeting actually took place, but what has absolutely been verified by now — not just by the Times but via the extensive digging done by Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger in his book The Bidens — is that the laptop is, in fact, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the emails they contain are real.

    In a just world this would be career-altering news for the parade of media figures who spent months loudly insisting the opposite, cheered the unprecedented decisions by Facebook and Twitter to restrict access to the story, and repeated the Langley-driven fiction that it was a Russian smear. The fact that none of them are bothering to comment on any of this shows that the line between the intelligence community and commercial media has blurred to the point of meaninglessness. They know everyone knows they screwed this up and are long past pretending to care. This is like someone committed to a life in sweats who eats another piece of pie at night, because what difference will it ever make? That weight is never coming off anyway.

    I long thought the decision by Facebook and Twitter to block the Post just before an election was a bigger deal than the actual story, which to me was mislabeled “smoking gun” evidence of major corruption because almost none of the information in those emails had been confirmed then. After reading this latest Times piece, which among other things confirms that Joe Biden (if not the Burisma official) was present at the infamous “meeting” referenced in the original Pozharsky email, I’m not sure so sure.

  • The Hunter Biden laptop whistleblower says he has 450 GB of deleted material recovered from the laptop. “[Jack] Maxey says the data includes 80,000 images and videos, and more than 120,000 archived emails.”
  • “Secret Service paying over $30K per month for Malibu mansion to protect Hunter Biden.” Are cocaine and underage prostitutes the only things Hunter has to spend his own money on?
  • Except maybe fundraising…for his own father. “President Joe Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain allegedly emailed Hunter Biden in 2012 to ask him for money for his father.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • If I’ve missed any important Biden corruption news, feel free to leave links in the comments.

    Know Who’s Bummed About Russia’s Military Failure In Ukraine? China

    April 6th, 2022

    A goodly part of the world is pleased about the manifest failure of Vlad’s Big Ukraine Adventure, some are indifferent to it, but only Russia, client-state Syria, and puppet-state Belarus really seem upset about it.

    Know who else is bummed? China.

    Operation Desert Storm was a turning point in modern Chinese military history. As military planners with the People’s Liberation Army watched U.S. and allied forces make short work of the world’s fourth-largest military (on paper), equipped with many of the same systems as the PLA, it became obvious that China’s quantitatively superior but qualitatively lacking massed infantry would stand no chance against the combination of modern weaponry, C4ISR, and joint operations seen in Iraq. The result was new military concepts and over two decades of often-difficult reforms, which produced the modern, far more capable, “informationized” PLA of today.

    Today, the PLA is no doubt closely observing its Russian contemporaries in Ukraine as they under-perform in multiple areas, from failing to take key targets or claim air supremacy to running low on fuel and supplies and possibly experiencing morale collapse, and surely taking away lessons that will shape its own future. Of note, Russia’s experience appears to have confirmed many of China’s recent assumptions behind its investments, such as the utility of unmanned aerial systems in high-intensity conflict, as well as the necessity for the PLA’s 2015 reforms, which aim to fix many of the issues driving Russian failure that the PLA recognizes in itself.

    Of the many issues that have contributed to Russia’s physical battlefield woes in Ukraine, one of the most important has been the lack of effective joint or combined arms operations, widely considered essential to any effective modern fighting force. Russia’s poor level of coordination between its various services and branches can only be generously described as incompetent. For example, it has repeatedly failed to provide effective air support to its ground forces or deconflict its air and air-defense forces to avoid friendly fire.

    The PLA has long had its own serious issues with joint operations. Traditionally dominated by the Army, the PLA had little success developing a truly joint force until a series of sweeping reforms in 2015 that replaced the former Army-dominated system with a series of joint theater commands. The PLA is thus aware of its own shortcomings and taking steps to fix it, but likely remains far off from being able to conduct truly effective, seamless joint operations. Efforts to conduct joint exercises are becoming more common, but most senior PLA leaders are still relatively inexperienced with joint operations, and even new officers typically do not receive joint education below the corps level. Further, it remains to be seen how far these reforms will go or to what extent they will “stick;” indeed, one reason the PLA did not attempt these reforms until 2015 was because of strong institutional pushback from the Army, whose leaders wished to retain their dominant status.

    To China, the Ukraine invasion will reinforce the importance of joint and combined arms operations, while also making clear that such operations are highly difficult to conduct in practice. Russia’s stumbles may give the PLA pause as to whether it is truly ready for all the joint elements that a successful Taiwan seizure would require, including close coordination between sea, air, and land forces.

    As well they should be. Russia shares a giant land border with Ukraine, was able to through something like 150,000 troops into the fight, and still got mauled while failing to meet their initial objectives. A giant land border is world’s away from having to conduct fiercely contested landing operations against the heavily defended island of a sophisticated, technological peer foe who’s had over half a century to prepare.

    Also, it can’t be encouraging that Russia was unable to hold control of Hostemel Airport during the early stages of the war, since airport seizures for an airbridge into Taiwan has played a large role in many wargamed invasion scenarios.

    Some paragraphs on conscript armies and information warfare skipped.

    China has also taken note of Russia’s disasterous logistics:

    Another ongoing issue has been Russia’s serious problems with poor logistics. The sight of broken-down or abandoned vehicles has become common as Russian forces run out of fuel and other vital supplies. To its credit, the PLA has also been rapidly reforming and modernizing its logistical system as part of the same broad set of 2015 reforms. As part of these reforms, the PLA has emphasized its logistics organizations and created the Joint Logistics Support Force. This force’s training has focused on cooperation with other branches of the PLA, and it has cut its teeth training to establish supply lines during natural disasters. In 2018, the JLSF launched its first major exercise, dubbed “Joint Logistics Support Mission 2018,” featuring medical drones, helicopter-dropped refueling depots, and operations in harsh and remote terrain.

    Hey, remember all that stuff I said about long land borders vs. amphibious and airborne invasion? It applies double (if not quadruple) for logistics. China can’t assume it will have complete air and sea control of the Taiwan strait, and it’s really hard to run an invasion if you’ve run out of ammo, food and fuel.

    However, while the outward manifestation of many of the issues faced by the Russian military appear to be logistical in nature, the true heart of the issue may be corruption. There are reports that before the invasion Russian military officers sold off their fuel and food supplies, and that these corrupt practices may be responsible for the stalling of a Russian tank column outside Kyiv. In this regard, the PLA has much to fear. Corruption has plagued the PLA for decades, with some PLA officers bluntly stating in 2015 that it could undermine China’s ability to wage war. Reportedly, more than 13,000 PLA officers have been punished in some capacity for corruption since Xi Jinping took power, including more than a hundred generals. This was a particular problem in the logistics sector, where there are more opportunities for corruption and links to the civilian economy.

    Yet, despite the reorganization of the PLA and widespread prosecution of corruption cases, it still appears to be a major issue. Anti-corruption efforts are ongoing, with Chinese Gen. Zhang Youxia recently calling for innovative measures to keep up the fight. But the fact that Fu Zhenghua, the man brought in to take down the corrupt former security chief Zhou Yongkang, is himself now under investigation for corruption does not bode well for the long-term effectiveness of China’s efforts. The troubled invasion of Ukraine provides a stark real-world example to Xi, the CCP, and PLA about the impact corruption can have on military effectiveness, and will no doubt cause them to redouble their anti-corruption efforts with a newfound urgency. However given its similar authoritarian system and emphasis on career advancement through patronage, systemic corruption may be baked into the system.

    China without corruption is like Norway without snow.

    But not everything is that’s made life difficult for Russia will apply to China.

    While China will benefit from Russia’s increasing reliance on its goods and services, Beijing can be expected to retool its geo-economic strategy to reduce its vulnerability to a similar nightmare scenario. For example, it will likely redouble its efforts to promote its Cross-Border Interbank Payment System—an alternative to the SWIFT international banking system—among its strategic partners and foreign aid recipients in the developing world.

    Likewise, China’s recent “Dual Circulation” economic strategy appears to be aimed at countering a decoupling from China’s trade partners. Further, Beijing has surely observed how easy it was for corporations to withdraw from Moscow. If China is to be exposed to the risk of global sanctions and corporate withdrawal, so too are countries and corporations exposed to dependence on the world’s second-largest economy, and thus the government will likely take efforts to make any sanctions or corporate turn against China as painful a prospect as possible. Either way, policymakers in Washington need to understand that the sanctions being used today against Russia are unlikely be as effective the next time around, as China is not just a different economy, but also will learn from the current conflict and adjust accordingly.

    This is undoubtedly true, and China has a much broader and more modern economic and industrial base with which to wage war. All the more reason for America to bring critical manufacturing and other economic business outsourced to China back home.

    For all these valuable lessons, there is little doubt that China has been watching the ongoing conflict with no small amount of chagrin. Chinese leaders are reportedly surprised and unsettled by the poor military performance of its Russian partners, Ukraine’s resistance, and the level of solidarity from the international community. The image of a much smaller state, against all odds, successfully resisting a larger neighbor surely sits uneasily in the psyches of CCP apparatchiks and PLA officials. It also counters the narrative of overwhelming force and grim inevitability Beijing has sought to instill in the psyches of the Taiwanese people. It is notable that early attempts by Chinese state media to capitalize on the Ukraine invasion in precisely this fashion, illustrating how the United States will surely abandon Taiwan when the chips are down, quietly ceased after the initial days of the war, when it became apparent that the U.S. was not, in fact, abandoning Ukraine. Beyond purely psychological factors, Ukraine also offers a blueprint for successful resistance via asymmetric warfare very similar to Taiwan’s proposed Overall Defense Concept, perhaps giving a jolt to a plan that most analysts agree offers Taiwan its best chance of success against the PLA but has stalled out in the face of bureaucratic resistance.

    While China and the PLA will surely watch Ukraine closely and try to take away the correct lessons, there is one uncomfortable parallel which China may be unable to avoid by the very nature of its authoritarian system. The runup to the Ukraine invasion featured multiple strategic miscalculations by Putin, driven at least in part by him surrounding himself with the yes-men who inevitably cling to authoritarian leaders, eager to please and afraid to speak truth to power. This was obvious in the visibly uncomfortable reaction of Russia’s SVR (foreign intelligence) chief as he was publicly pressured to agree with Putin in the days leading up to the war, as well as in the sackings and arrests of multiple military and intelligence officials after the war turned poorly. Authoritarian leaders have systemic problems in gaining reliable intelligence, oftentimes magnified by their overconfidence in their own singular understanding of a situation. As China continues its slide away from a system of intra-Party consensus toward a one-man cult of personality in which dissenting views are increasingly unwelcome, Xi is bound to encounter the same problem. It is unclear whether Xi will learn this lesson from Putin, or make his own similar miscalculations in the future towards China’s own neighbors.

    Dictatorships (especially communist dictatorships) greatly increase the possibility of a “Thermocline of Truth” building up between bad news and fawning yes-men fearful of making the dictator angry. There’s very little reason to believe that Xi Jinping’s chain of command suffers from the problem any less than Putin’s.

    In war, comforting lies will get your ass kicked.

    Elon Musk and Twitter: Memeorama

    April 5th, 2022

    Everyone and their dog has already commented on Elon Musk becoming Twitter’s largest shareholder. With a 9.2% stake, and being ushered onto the board of directors. Obviously Musk should #FreeTheBee, restore Donald Trump, and kick every social justice warrior off the company’s “safety committee” for starters.

    But instead of cognizant commentary, have a random collection of memes (some of which you’ll need to click through):

    Is Russia Running Out Of Troops?

    April 4th, 2022

    Ukraine is often depicted as David up against Russia’ Goliath, but this analyst argues the situation is closer to the reverse when it comes to in-theater manpower:

    Some takeaways:

  • Russia didn’t anticipate Ukraine undertaking mass mobilization, and now finds itself outnumbered. “There’s a fair chance the number will get even more lopsided.”
  • Estimates for losses on each side are hard. Guestimate: 11,000 Russians dead, 9,000 Ukrainians.

  • Add in captured troops and those wounded enough to be out of combat yields about 39,000 Russians out of action. “That’s a lot. It’s about 21% of the Russian starting force.”
  • Not referenced in the video, but: “Pentagon officials say a 10 percent casualty rate, including dead and wounded, for a single unit renders it unable to carry out combat-related tasks.” Though I’ve seen higher numbers (20-30%) elsewhere.
  • Ukrainian losses are probably around 6%.
  • “Russian losses have a higher percentage of professional soldiers.”
  • Offensive operations produce higher casualties than defense.
  • “Ukraine is vast. It’s bigger than France. [It] had more than 40 million people before the war.”
  • By March 15, Ukraine had hit its planned reserve call-up troop level of 130,000. Add in volunteers, foreign fighters, National Guard, etc., Ukraine may have as many as 400,000 troops (with various levels of training) under arms.
  • Ukraine could potentially have 750,000 troops under arms by July.
  • “Russia is unable to seriously increase the number of its troops in Ukraine. That is because Russia is evidently fearful of sending its conscripts into battle.”
  • After a small number of conscript units got mauled, Putin promised that no more conscripts would be sent.
  • The “Russia has a million man army” figure is misleading. Ground troops only total some 360,000 troops across the entire country, many of which are conscripts.
  • Russia can’t afford to pull every single competent ground troop from every corner of its country and send them to Ukraine. He could maybe get another 10-20,000 professional troops, but those would only be compensating for existing losses.
  • Russia has 35,000 local fighters in Donbas, but they’re not equipped to go on big offensives.
  • Belarus is unlikely to get involved, and may be more trouble than it’s worth, because their army is heavily made up of conscripts. “Fewer than 10,000 troops.” And the political repercussions could be costly.
  • But for Russia to have some chance of continuing to push inside Ukraine under the present conditions – where arms aid is flowing into Ukraine, and where morale issues are widespread within the Russian army – many more soldiers are an absolute must. If Russia does decide to send in conscripts or even the national guard, those would likely be kept back, to keep securing the taken areas. But for that the frontline needs to fully consolidate, without so many Ukrainian pockets of resistance. And still, the domestic political fallout of such a move might be deeply destabilizing.

  • Russia currently seems to be unwilling to increase its numbers in Ukraine above 200,000.
  • “For Ukraine, this war IS what the great patriotic war was for the Soviet Union in 1941.”
  • “With time, further troops and more weapons, Ukraine’s army may try to pressure even those consolidated Russian positions in the east and south.”
  • If there’s a flaw in this analysis, it’s that Putin could change his mind about using conscripts in a heartbeat. But Russia has had huge problems feeding and resupplying it’s existing army. Until that problem is fixed. more conscripts would mean throwing more badly-trained and ill-equipped troops into the meat grinder.

    Is Russia’s Military Running Out Of Equipment And Spare Parts?

    April 3rd, 2022

    Is Russia’s military running out of the equipment, spare parts and supplies necessary to maintain their war in Ukraine? Some reports say so, suggesting it’s because the parts are made in Ukrainian factories.

    Vladimir Putin is said to be running out of missiles, tanks and aircraft, because the parts they rely on are made in Ukraine.

    The engines of Russian military helicopters and key components for warships, cruise missiles and the majority of the nation’s fighter jets are all made in Ukrainian factories, the Telegraph reports.

    The factories, which also produce parts for tanks and ground to air missiles, no longer supply Mr Putin’s army.

    I’ve got to take this report with several grains of salt, because I assume those same factories must have stopped supplying Russia with spare parts after the seizure of Crimea and invasion of Donbas back in March of 2014. Are we to believe that Russia has failed to find alternate manufacturing sources for key military equipment for eight years? Russia’s invasion has displayed multiple levels of manifest incompetence, but it’s hard to believe they would be that incompetent for that long. (Now, could spare parts not exist due to massive corruption? That seems plausible, but it’s not the kind of thing you can count on your opponent suffering from.)

    The army is also understood to be running low on arms following five weeks of sustained bombardment of Ukrainian cities.

    This, on the other hand, seems quite plausible, given the well-documented logistical difficulties, and the furious rate at which Russian forces expended munitions during the initial assault.

    The T-72 battle tank is one of the Russian army’s main armoured vehicles but, parts for it are understood to be manufactured in Izyum, an eastern Ukrainian city that Mr Putin’s forces have failed to capture.

    The T-72 has been around since 1969. I can believe some of the high tech components for the most modern variants are in short supply, but surely they’ve have multiple source for the vast majority of mechanical parts for a long time now. And even if not, they built some 25,000 of the things, so I can’t imagine they don’t have enough mothballed tanks to provide spares, though it’s going to take time to get cannibalized parts out to field repair centers. (I’m assuming Russia has some sort of field repair capabilities, and I know Russian tank recovery vehicles were spotted on trains en-route to the theater before the war began.)

    Open-source intelligence estimates suggest that Russia has lost at least 2,000 tanks and armoured vehicles, although true figures are suspected to be higher.

    This I just flat out don’t believe. And indeed, when you go to what appears to be their primary source, they’re including a whole lot of trucks in that list, which aren’t counted as “armored vehicles.” The lesson here is “don’t believe anything that sounds too good to be true” and “always check the primary sources.”

    Speaking of primary sources, that Oryx blog list does look pretty useful, though the nature of the methodology (adding up all pictures of destroyed equipment) is certainly suspect to manipulation.

    Their summary line for Russian equipment losses as of this post “Russia – 2360, of which: destroyed: 1190, damaged: 41, abandoned: 232, captured: 897.”

    Here are the individual type breakdown lines:

    Tanks (405, of which destroyed: 190, damaged: 6, abandoned: 42, captured: 167)
    Armoured Fighting Vehicles (274, of which destroyed: 129, abandoned: 32, captured: 113)
    Infantry Fighting Vehicles (392, of which destroyed: 216, damaged: 2, abandoned: 31, captured: 142)
    Armoured Personnel Carriers (81, of which destroyed: 21, damaged: 1, abandoned: 17, captured: 42)
    Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) Vehicles (17, of which destroyed: 9, abandoned: 3, captured: 5)
    Infantry Mobility Vehicles (76, of which destroyed: 43, damaged: 2, abandoned: 5, captured: 24)
    Communications Stations (15, of which destroyed: 4, abandoned: 5, captured: 6)
    Engineering Vehicles And Equipment (78, of which destroyed: 23, abandoned: 13, captured: 37)
    Heavy Mortars (11, of which destroyed: 3, captured: 8)
    Towed Artillery (47, of which destroyed: 9, damaged: 4, abandoned: 5, captured: 29)
    Self-Propelled Artillery (72, of which destroyed: 25, damaged: 3, abandoned: 14, captured: 29)
    Multiple Rocket Launchers (45, of which destroyed: 18, abandoned: 5, captured: 23)
    Anti-Aircraft Guns (3, of which captured: 3)
    Self-Propelled Anti-Aircraft Guns (11, of which destroyed: 5, abandoned: 3, captured: 3)
    Surface-To-Air Missile Systems (42, of which destroyed: 22, damaged: 1, abandoned: 7, captured: 12)
    Radars (4, of which destroyed: 1, captured: 3)
    Jammers And Deception Systems (6, of which destroyed: 2, damaged: 2, captured: 2)
    Aircraft (19, of which destroyed: 18, damaged: 1)
    Helicopters (38, of which destroyed: 33, damaged: 3, abandoned: 1, captured: 1)
    Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (21, of which destroyed: 14, captured: 7)
    Naval Ships (3, of which destroyed: 1, damaged: 2)
    Logistics Trains (2, of which destroyed: 2)
    Trucks, Vehicles and Jeeps (698, of which destroyed: 401, damaged: 16, abandoned: 59, captured: 210)

    (An aside: You’ve got to hand it to those Russian miltech geeks who look at this:

    And confidently declare “Oh, those are two destroyed 120mm 2B11/2S12 heavy mortars!” That’s some #DavesCarIDService level obsession there…)

    Keep in mind that Russia only had some 2,500 tanks assigned to active units at the start of the war (though other estimates are considerably higher). But given well-documented Russian maintenance problems, I can well believe several units have sustained losses in excess of that necessary to impair combat effectiveness.

    Keep in mind that the Soviet Union lost 83,500 tanks between 1941 and 1945 in World War II. Of course, that was a much broader theater, using much more widely-produced, low-tech tanks. Hell, two-way radios didn’t become standard Soviet equipment until 1944.

    For high tech munitions like smart bombs and guided missiles, I can well believe that Russia is running low on stock that can’t easily be replenished under the current sanctions regime. And we see ample evidence that field resupply has been negatively impacted by severe logistical difficulties. But “T-72s lack spare parts because the original factory was in Ukraine” doesn’t pass the smell test.

    Is The Army Finally Ready To Pull The Trigger On 6.8mm TVCM?

    April 2nd, 2022

    The light recoil of the 5.56 NATO round has helped make AR-pattern rifles a favorite of the civilian market, but the military has been looking for a rifle round with more punch for a while. Now they’re evidently moving forward with the replacement:

    Buried deep within the DoD FY23 budget request by weapon system, the US Army has officially chosen the contractor(s) for the Next Generation Squad Weapons (NGSW) program.

    NGSW is a prototyping effort by the Army that consists of a new rifle (NGSW-R) and automatic rifle (NGSW-AR), chambered in a new high tech 6.8mm cartridge, set to replace the aging M16, M4A1 Carbines and the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, chambered in a 5.56 NATO round.

    The NGSW has been in competitive prototyping testing with three defense firms, including SIG Sauer, General Dynamics – OTS, and Textron Systems.

    On page 53/106 of the budget request, the Army expects to procure 29,046 NGSWs in 2023.

    “Starts funding for the procurement and fielding of 1,704 NGSW-AR, which is the planned replacement for the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) within the Close Combat Force; Procurement and fielding of 15,348 NGSW-R which is the planned replacement for the M4A1 Carbine within the Close Combat Force; and procurement and fielding of 11,994 Next Generation Squad Weapons Fire Controls,” the document read.

    If I’m reading that correctly, the “new high tech 6.8mm cartridge” would be the 6.8mm TVCM, which uses a polymer case rather than brass.

    Supposedly the round is compatible with a wide range of current weapon platforms with just a barrel swap.

    The hybrid polymer-cased cartridge, developed by Texas-based True Velocity as part of the Army’s Next Generation Squad Weapon program, is compatible with legacy firearms as well.

    The 6.8mm TVCM composite case design, coupled with the Army’s 6.8mm (.277-caliber) common cartridge projectile, was originally developed and optimized for use in the NGSW-Rifle and NGSW-Automatic Rifle submissions submitted to that military program by General Dynamics-OTS.

    However, using what True Velocity characterizes as a “switch barrel” capability, they have demonstrated it can work with much of the Army’s currently fielded small arms including the M240B belt-fed machine gun, the M110 semi-automatic sniper system, and the M134 minigun.

    Here’s a video of test-firing the ammo in an Assault Machine Gun.

    Next Generation Squad Weapon will also be using an on-weapon ballistic computer integrated into the optics:

    “The new optic has a integrated laser range finder, wind sensor, temperature gauge, elevation sensor, and ballistic computer all rolled into one.” That is likely to be a huge boost to troop capabilities, assuming it works as planned. Like any piece of technology, expect a shakedown phase where they work out all the bugs.

    True Velocity hails from Garland, so mark that down as another win for Texas.

    If there’s a downside for the civilian market, I’m pretty sure polymer ammo is not reloadable, and certainly not with current reloading presses. On the plus side, if the army makes a big move to 6.8mm TVCM, maybe 5.56 NATO ammo will come down in price…

    LinkSwarm for April 1, 2022

    April 1st, 2022

    Russia pulls back, inflation soars, and the Biden Administration is all in on grooming your kids. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

    Don’t forget it’s April Fools Day, so don’t take any wooden NFTs.

  • Russia has reportedly withdrawn its forces from Hostemel Airport outside Kiev.

    Russian forces have retreated from a Ukrainian airfield that was key to their original plan of overthrowing Volodymyr Zelensky’s government.

    Hostomel airport, just oustide Kyiv, was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the Ukraine war, as Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, sought to establish an air bridge to the capital.

    Control of the airport, 20km from Kyiv, changed hands several times, as Ukrainians at first defended fiercely and then attacked the Russian occupiers.

    Five weeks on, the Russians have moved out having failed in their mission, according to a senior US defence official, as it abandons plans to take the capital and shift forces to the east.

    This is a huge win for Ukraine, but it also means that surviving Russian forces can shift over to east Ukraine where the war is still hot.

  • Also: “Ukraine forces pulled off a rare attack on Russian soil Friday when two military helicopters destroyed a fuel depot in the city of Belgorod, situated roughly 40 miles north of the border with Ukraine.”
  • “Key Inflation Gauge Reaches 40-Year High.”

    A key inflation metric monitored by the Federal Reserve soared 6.4 percent in February compared to a a [sic] year ago, reaching a new 40-year high.

    The latest price surge, which affected the price of fuel, groceries and other consumer essentials, represents the largest year-over-year increase since January 1982, according to data released by the Commerce Department on Thursday.

    Not taking into account food and energy fluctuations, which tend to be more erratic and can overemphasize inflation, the personal consumption expenditures price index, the preferred inflation gauge of the Federal Reserve, jumped 5.4 percent in February from a year prior. Including gas and groceries, PCE surged 6.4 percent.

    It’s gonna get worse…

  • The Biden Administration is evidently all-in on tranny madness and grooming your children:
    
    

  • As is Disney.
  • DeSantis to Disney: You want to complain about teachers no longer being allowed to talk to kindergartners about anal sex? Fine. How about we just remove your special self-governing status? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of DeSantis, he has some pretty sweet talent lined up for this:

  • What’s behind this creepy push for foisting transexualism on pre-teens? A long, creepy history of Marxist indoctrination.

    Through brand names like “comprehensive sex education” and one of its parent programs, “Social-Emotional Learning (SEL),” our government schools have been turned into Groomer Schools, and parents are beginning to notice. What many will not understand, however, is that this isn’t just a fluke of our weird and increasingly degenerate times. It is, in fact, a long-purposed Marxist project reaching back into the early 20th century. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, join James Lindsay as he explains the long history of the sexual grooming that has come into our schools through Critical Gender Theory and Queer Theory as they have crept into educational programs.

    There’s an hour long video there I haven’t watched all of yet…

  • Speaking of groomers:

  • Just how bad is the graft, waste and fraud in that $1.5 trillion porkulus bill? This bad. Look over that vast list of special subsidies and ask yourself “How many of these programs are designed to channel taxpayer money into the pockets of Democratic activists.” The answer seems to be “Most of them.”
  • 8 Joe Biden Scandals Inside Hunter Biden’s MacBook That Corporate Media Just Admitted Is Legit.” China, Ukraine, Russia, etc.
  • Republican lawmakers would like to see emails between Hunter Biden and the Obama White House.
  • White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki is leaving for MSNBC. So many angles: A.) Rats, sinking ship. B.) That revolving door between Democratic staffers and the MSM continues apace. C.) I hear she has an offer to star in Chairman of the Board 2.
  • Flu Manchu update: Asymptomatic spread is bunk.
  • BuzzFeed News union votes to strike as job cuts loom.” I suppose that would be Amalgamated Listicle Crafters Local 106…
  • Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the supply chain: “22,000 Union Workers At 29 West Coast Ports May Strike…West Coast union dockworkers may strike if they don’t come to an agreement to replace their existing contract with marine terminals. The contract is set to expire at the end of June.” Labor strikes are yet another part of the classic winter of discontent formula the Biden Administration is using to bring back the worst of the 1970s.
  • Another part of that classic 1970s discontent record is soft on crime polices, just like those pursued by George Soros-backed DA’s like Larry Krasner.

    Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner has presided over a surge in violent crime, and his new policy promises more of it. Krasner recently announced plans to de-prosecute crimes for offenders aged 18 to 25, ignoring how this age group tends to contain the most violent of criminal defendants.

    Krasner’s office has established a new unit that will move some 18-to-25-year-old defendants into “rehabilitative programming” instead of seeking criminal punishments. As Krasner’s data dashboard demonstrates, “rehabilitative programming” is just a euphemism for dismissing charges. Krasner promises that the program will be limited to nonviolent offenses, including drug trafficking and other offenses. (The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that gun crimes will not be included, but Krasner has previously stated that prosecutions for illegal gun possession are “not only ineffective but unjust and racially discriminatory.” The link in the district attorney’s office data dashboard about Philadelphia’s Gun Violence Task Force takes the reader to a page that states “Article Not Found.”)

    This new program reflects Krasner’s determination not to think like a prosecutor, but instead to think like the criminal defense lawyer he was. The program was developed by Sangeeta Prasad, a fellow with the district attorney’s office who previously served as a public defender in New York, New Mexico, and Philadelphia. Before assuming her current post, she had no prior experience as a prosecutor, just like Krasner. The chief public defender for Philadelphia has called the new unit “an incredible initiative,” but Philadelphia courts were not invited to the press conference announcing the plan and stated that they were not aware of the experiment.

    The new initiative comes at an awkward time. In 2021, Philadelphia experienced the highest number of homicides in its history, and the violence is continuing in 2022. Indeed, Philadelphia homicides have risen every year that Krasner has been in office, as carjackings, shootings, and drug overdoses soar. What makes the policy more bizarre is that it runs counter to decades of criminological research. One of the iron laws of criminal conduct is the so-called age-crime curve, which demonstrates that the majority of serious crimes are committed by defendants between the ages of 15 and 25. This finding obtains around the world and has been replicated time and again.

  • Speaking of repeat offenders, Millen, Georgia police Officer Larry “Ben” Thompson quit after being caught on tape having public sex while on-duty. Fair enough, but his lengthy record of misdeeds makes you wonder why he wasn’t fired long ago, since he managed to shoot another officer in the arm (“negligent discharge”) and killed a guy in a traffic accident in route to a call. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Nevada/Utah Ponzi scheme leads to FBI shootout. “The alleged $300 million scheme, run by a lawyer named Matthew Beasley, came to a head when FBI agents went to his home earlier this month and Beasley drew a gun on himself, before pointing it at agents, prompting them to shoot him.”
  • “[Fort Worth Superintendent] Kent Scribner will leave the district this August instead of in 2024, when his contract ends. In response to recent outcry from parents regarding Superintendent Kent Scribner’s support of CRT-based policies, Fort Worth ISD’s school board voted 7-0 to move up Scribner’s last day as superintendent to August 31, 2022.”
  • Ouch! Texas “Taxpayers’ Property Appraisals Rising 20% to 50% as Supply Chain Disruptions Meet Population Growth.” Austin-Round Rock is slated for the biggest increase, some 35.4%.
  • Don’t look now, but there’s another big Zero Day Internet infrastructure exploit out in the wild. “Spring4Shell is a remote code execution vulnerability in Spring Framework that can be exploited for remote code execution without authentication.” Spring is a Java framework that’s almost 20 years old, so the issue could potential be lurking in a lot of places…
  • Another week, another hate crime hoax. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of false accusations of racism, Gibson’s Bakery win over Oberlin in court yet again. “A three-judge panel on the Ninth District Court of Appeals issued a unanimous decision to uphold a 2019 ruling by Lorain County Judge John Miraldi, who initially awarded the bakery more than $40 million in punitive and compensatory damages, Cleveland.com reported. However, the sum was later reduced to $25 million, though the bakery was awarded more than $6 million for lawyers’ fees.”
  • Bullet vs Newton’s Cradle at 100,000 FPS.
  • Final Destination: Schuylkill County edition:

  • The Lock-picking Lawyer fills his wife’s Beaver.
  • Huskeys be crazy:

  • What New Hunter Biden Revelations Are Coming Down The Pike?

    March 31st, 2022

    If you followed this blog back in 2020, you know that I’ve been covering Hunter Biden’s sleazy business dealing even back before the laptop from hell revelations. So none of the latest burst of Hunter Biden stories has brought up (as far as I can tell) any new information.

    But the fact that the mainstream media is now reporting on them is new. We take it as a given the MSM ignored them in 2020 because they wanted to drag Joe Biden’s ambulatory corpse over the finish line. By why are they reporting on them now?

    One thing they’re still doing: ignoring the fact that the laptop ties Joe Biden to an international pay-for-play bribery scheme.

    After our story was censored by Big Tech and dismissed as “Russian disinformation” by Democratic prevaricator Adam Schiff, and 51 former spooks led by former CIA Director John Brennan, apparently it’s safe to admit the laptop is real and the emails we published can be easily authenticated.

    Of course, they all avoid the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from evidence contained on the laptop that the president’s drug-addled son Hunter abandoned at a MacBook repair shop in Delaware in April 2019: that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, was aware of, and intimately involved in, a corrupt, multimillion-dollar, international influence-peddling scheme run by Hunter, and Joe’s brother Jim Biden, in the countries for which Joe was point man in the Obama administration, such as Russia, Ukraine and China.

    Hunter’s laptop is a large piece of the jigsaw puzzle that leads to such a shocking conclusion.

    But despite acknowledging that the material on the laptop showed that Hunter was “trading on his ­father’s name to make a lot of money,” as CNN White House correspondent John Harwood put it, both the Washington Post and CNN were at pains to absolve Joe Biden of any involvement in the scheme.

    “There is zero evidence that Vice President Biden, or President Biden, has done anything wrong in connection with what Hunter Biden has done,” Harwood said.

    Right. Pull the other one.

    No doubt these august media organs that treated our story with sneering disregard for a year and a half have their reasons for jumping on board. For one thing, their original goal of removing President Donald Trump from office was achieved long ago, and Joe Biden is now so unpopular that his Praetorian Guard is melting away and reporting on his family is less hazardous to Beltway dinner party invitations.

    For another thing, they can’t have their audiences blindsided when the US attorney in Delaware completes his investigation of Hunter. God forbid that their readers and viewers wake up to the fact they have been misled and kept in the dark by their media outlets of choice.

    Read on for how the MSM is still omitting tons of important information (like Tony Bobulinski) from their reporting.

    One thing that is coming down the pike after Hunter Biden: a tax probe.

    A federal tax investigation into Hunter Biden is gaining momentum as prosecutors gather information from several of his associates about the sources of his foreign income, including from Ukraine, and examine President Biden’s son’s relationship with a company that handled some of his finances, according to people familiar with the matter.

    In recent weeks, prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware have sought information and grand-jury testimony about the money Mr. Biden received several years ago from Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings Ltd., and how he used that money to pay some obligations, one of those people said.

    Last month, prosecutors also extensively questioned at least one other associate of Hunter Biden about Mr. Biden’s drug and alcohol use, spending habits and state of mind in 2018, another person said, suggesting prosecutors are exploring whether such activity would present a defense against a potential criminal tax case.

    Prosecutors often seek to get such testimony on the record to secure it before the defense gets a chance to present it more favorably at trial.

    All in all, it looks like someone in D.C. is aware of some heavy revelations about to drop down on Hunter Biden, and they’re trying to get ahead of it.

    Bergstrom Airport Running Out Of Jet Fuel?

    March 30th, 2022

    This seems like poor planning:

    On Monday, airport officials in Austin, Texas warned of an impending jet-fuel shortage amid a surge in travel to and from the state’s capital city.

    Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, which is ranked No. 29 in the U.S. based on 2021 passenger traffic, issued a fuel-shortage alert on Monday and urged airlines to carry extra fuel or send in more supplies via tankers, said Sam Haynes, a spokesperson.

    “The on-hand supply just isn’t enough to keep up with demand,” she said. “This is all a result of the tremendous growth we’ve seen” in the Austin area.

    Haynes also said that the airport’s two fuel-storage tanks haven’t been expanded or augmented since it opened in 1999, and as a result, the Austin facility typically holds just one to two days of supply, less than half the five-to-seven days of fuel stockpiled by most airports of similar size, she said.

    The fuel shortage was not the only problem Bergstrom experienced this week:

    Abandoned rental cars snaked down the road outside Austin-Bergstrom International Airport on Monday morning and passengers waited in a security line that reached outside the terminal and onto the sidewalk.

    Some travelers waited in security lines for hours, missed flights or even had to make alternate travel arrangements over the weekend as the airport was unable to handle unusually high passenger traffic generated in part by several high-profile sporting events.

    Snip.

    “These volumes reflect thousands of Austin visitors traveling home after attending events,” including the Texas Relays, the World Golf Championships-Dell Technologies Match Play and NASCAR races at Circuit of the Americas, the statement said.

    I’m not sure how much I buy the “sporting event” excuse. The NASCAR event was expected to pull 50,000-55,000 people, while Texas Relays also draws about 50,000, and the Dell golf event, though annoying for anyone trying to drive 360, only draws about 10,000. By contrast, some 400,000 came in for Formula 1. Bergstrom may be suffering from the same staffing shortages hitting the rest of the economy, but this still seems to be a case of bad planning.

    Bergstrom is run by the City of Austin, so it’s probably too much to expect the manifest incompetence that seems to plague all city governance not to show up there. Here’s the 2040 master plan for upgrading Bergstrom that the city put out in 2018. There’s lots of terminal expansion information, precisely one mention of “Fuel Storage Impacts” on one slide, and zero discussion of expanding fuel storage capacity.

    This is my shocked face…