During World War II, the Wehrmacht developed the remote-controlled Goliath tracked mine to take out tanks, fortifications, and other targets. Despite some models packing a whopping 220 pounds of explosive, they sort of looked like a toy a child could ride on, and would almost be adorable if it weren’t for the fact that they were Nazi death bombs.
Who’s an adorable little Nazi death bomb? You are! You are!
As in so many things, Ukrainians have rediscovered and deployed (kinda) another lost weapon/tactic from World War II. Namely, they’re using remote control vehicles as suicide antitank bombs.
I’ve long thought you could use even smaller, slightly modified off-the-shelf RC cars in mass to take out softer targets like trucks. Or drive into a enemy barracks with just a couple of pounds of plastique studded with roofing nails.
The Russo-Ukrainian War continues to expand the possibilities of drone warfare, and I trust the Pentagon (and every other military in the world) is taking notes.
“How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” – Charles de Gaulle (attributed)
Ah, France! [Insert lazy paragraph describing France in in terms of classic cliches including food, wine, cheese, sex, cigarettes and surrender.]
Yes, you’ll do nicely, Cliched French Guy Clip Art
In addition to those classic French attributes, another time-honored French tradition is “widespread rioting,” which they’ve been celebrating over the last few weeks. What they’re protesting is French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to force through an unpopular bill to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64.
French President Emmanuel Macron ordered his prime minister to wield a special constitutional power Thursday that skirts parliament to force through a highly unpopular bill raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 without a vote.
His calculated risk set off a clamor among lawmakers, who began singing the national anthem even before Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne arrived in the lower chamber. She spoke forcefully over their shouts, acknowledging that Macron’s unilateral move will trigger quick motions of no-confidence in his government.
The fury of opposition lawmakers echoed the anger of citizens and workers’ unions. Thousands gathered at the Place de la Concorde facing the National Assembly, lighting a bonfire. As night fell, police charged the demonstrators in waves to clear the elegant Place. Small groups of those chased away moved through nearby streets in the chic neighborhood setting street fires. At least 120 were detained, police said.
Similar scenes repeated themselves in numerous other cities, from Rennes and Nantes in the east to Lyon and the southern port city of Marseille, where shop windows and bank fronts were smashed, according to French media. Radical leftist groups were blamed for at least some of the destruction.
The unions that have organized strikes and marches since January, leaving Paris reeking in piles of garbage, announced new rallies and protest marches in the days ahead. “This retirement reform is brutal, unjust, unjustified for the world of workers,” they declared.
Macron has made the proposed pension changes the key priority of his second term, arguing that reform is needed to keep the pension system from diving into deficit as France, like many richer nations, faces lower birth rates and longer life expectancy.
Macron decided to invoke the special power during a Cabinet meeting at the Elysee presidential palace, just a few minutes before the scheduled vote in France’s lower house of parliament, because he had no guarantee of a majority.
French President Emmanuel Macron chose on Thursday to shun parliament and impose his unpopular pension reforms via a special constitutional power, the so-called “Article 49.3.”
The procedure has been regularly used in the past by different governments. But this time it’s drawing a lot of attention and prompting much criticism because of the massive public opposition to the increase in retirement ages.
Here’s a look at how and why the special power is used.
WHAT’S ARTICLE 49.3?
Article 49, paragraph 3 of the French Constitution provides that the government can pass a bill without a vote at the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, after a deliberation at a Cabinet meeting.
In response, lawmakers can file a no-confidence motion within 24 hours. If the motion gets approval from more than half the seats, the text is rejected and the government must resign.
If not, the bill is considered adopted and passes into law. Since the Constitution was established in 1958, only one no-confidence motion was successful, in 1962.
Charles de Gaulle (him again) rammed through the Constitution of the Fifth Republic because he wanted a stable central government and, compared to some other European states (I’m looking at you, Italy), it’s largely achieved those goals.
The thing is, Macron is probably right in that the French welfare state needs an older retirement age for the entire system to stay solvent (at least for a while longer). But the way his proposal was passed also emblematic of the deficit of democracy in the EU generally and France specifically. That old saw about democracies only lasting until people figuring out they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury is largely right, and in this, as in so many, many things, Eurocratic elites have decided the peasants simply can’t be allowed to derail the plans of their illustrious betters.
As of this writing, Macron just survived a no confidence vote over the issue. So France may well have bought itself a little more time before inevitable national bankruptcy. But every maneuver like increases French anger over the obvious democracy gap, and, as the Grand Tour lads have noted, the French can be exceptionally bloody minded over expressing their disapproval of laws they hate.
Here’s Joe Rogan shooting a Pit Viper, which is evidently the 2011 model Wick shoots in the film:
“That is the smoothest gun of all time. It doesn’t move. Like it literally doesn’t move, there’s no recoil.”
It does indeed look pretty cool and easy to shoot, but before you rush out to buy one, keep in mind that: A.) It’s not going to be available for sale until May, and B.) It’s going to set you back about seven grand.
Here Colion Noir interviews a rep for Staccato about the differences between the 1911 and the 2011.
Staccato is in Texas, and their 2011 models start at a somewhat more reasonable $2,499.
(Aside: I like Noir, but he does the “yeah,” “uh-hu” noise thing that tells the person he’s talking to “Yes, I’m following you,” which he needs to learn not to do for filmed interviews.)
Is there significant enough difference between a 1911 and a 2011 to justify the nomenclature change? I’m slightly skeptical, but I’ve never fired a 2011. Maybe the difference is night and day.
Would I buy a 2011? Not right now, mainly because I just picked up a Sig Sauer P365 Micro Compact 9mm as a carry gun last year, and even $2,500 is considerably more than I want to spend on a gun right now. But if the prices drift down to around $1,000 over the next few years, I’d definitely give them a more serious look.
I meant to mention something about the Credit Suisse situation in Friday’s LinkSwarm but ran out of time. I’m not an expert on European banking in general or Swiss banking in specific. (As opposed to being a squinty, one-eyed, myopic man in the land of the blind sort of expert on American banking, which is not very.) But it’s a big story, so I suppose I should post something about Credit Suisse.
So here’s something.
First, as of this writing, it appears that fellow Swiss bank UBS is about to take over Credit Suisse, probably with the financial backing of the Swiss National Bank (SNB)
Late on Thursday, just hours after the SNB had launched the first (of many) bailout attempts of Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse, Bloomberg blasted the following headline:
*UBS, CREDIT SUISSE SAID TO OPPOSE IDEA OF A FORCED COMBINATION
This lack of enthusiasm by UBS to acquire its struggling rival of course forced the Swiss National Bank to front CS a CHF50 billion credit line to hold it over for the next four days amid a furious bank run, one which we said would be woefully insufficient to restore confidence in the collapsing lender, and which we probably used up in just a few hours.
Then, late on Friday, both banks “unexpectedly” changed their minds and we got the following 180 degree U-Turn report from the FT:
*UBS IN TALKS TO ACQUIRE ALL OR PART OF CREDIT SUISSE: FT
So a deal is inevitable after all… but as always, there is a footnote one which we predicted yesterday when we said that a deal would only happen if the acquiring bank – in this case UBS – got a full central bank backstop.
That now appears to be the case with Bloomberg, Reuters and the WSJ all reporting that UBS is asking the Swiss government for a backstop to cover future risks if it were to buy Credit Suisse Group AG, after the Swiss National Bank and regulator Finma have told international counterparts that they regard a deal with UBS as the only option to arrest a collapse in confidence in Credit Suisse. The FT reported that deposit outflows from the bank topped CHF10bn ($10.8bn) a day late last week as fears for its health mounted.
Here’s Patrick Boyle on how Credit Suisse brought itself low:
One big take-away: It wasn’t bad investments per se that wrecked confidence in the bank, it was involvement in a series of scandals, as they have “a strong, liquid balance sheet.” “Credit Suisse has instead been plagued by repeated scandals. From spying on a former employee, a criminal conviction for allowing drug dealers to launder money, a massive leak of client data to the media, Archegos, Greensill, Mozambique ‘tuna bonds,’ the list is too long.”
UK courts are at the heart of a spate of litigation arising out of the Mozambique “Tuna bond” or “hidden debt” scandal. The scandal involved $2 billion of bank loans and bond issues from Swiss bank Credit Suisse and Russian bank VTB. The bank loans were taken out in secret by Mozambican state-owned companies, without the legally required approval of the Mozambique Parliament and backed with hidden government guarantees.
The loans were intended to finance contracts between the state companies and a Lebanese-UAE based ship builder, Privinvest, between 2013-2016 for three maritime projects. These projects were intended to boost maritime security and develop the country’s fishing industry. However, a 2017 audit by Kroll found that $500 million of loans could not be accounted for and that Privinvest may have over-inflated prices by $713 million. The audit also found that $200 million of the loans were spent on bank fees and commissions.
So it turns out that Mozambique’s political and business elites are at least as corrupt as our own political and business elites.
Good to know.
Ironically, according to Boyle, the reason European banks may be in better shape than our own is because they had to deal with the fallout of the Euro crisis. “This is not because European banks are very good — it is precisely because they have historically been quite bad.”
Practically every banking regulation in existence commemorates a time when things went badly wrong, and Europe spent a decade toughening up banking regulation because it went through a rolling multiyear euro crisis. The European regulators have a detailed set of standards for testing interest rate risk, with the idea that they will be applied to every significant bank in Europe. Unrealized losses are not ignored under this regime and the global Basel standards on stable funding are applied across the entire banking sector. This is quite different to the regulations applied to community banks in the United States who lobbied the government for regulatory exemptions over the years.
“The economist Matthew Klein argued in a blog post that banks today can be seen as speculative investment funds grafted on top of critical infrastructure, and that this structure is designed to extract subsidies from the rest of society by threatening civilians with crises if the banks’ bets are ever allowed to fail.”
Was Credit Suisse infected with the radical transexual social justice warrior madness as the rest of our elites? Of course they were:
Fear not! The banks that are failing are not woke! OK, they’re woke, but they’re not broke! OK, they’re broke, but they are not without allies who realize that they must support this house of cards freak show. OK, the contagion will take the little people down, but so what? https://t.co/D76Y8svHTL
A Chinese company based out of Hong Kong which paid at least $3 million to several members of the Biden family has since been revealed to have ties with the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
According to the Daily Caller, State Energy HK Limited sent $3 million via wire transfer to Robinson Walker LLC, a company run by an associate of the Biden family named John Robinson Walker. The wire transfer took place in March of 2017, shortly after Joe Biden’s term as Vice President came to an end, according to a report released on Thursday by the House Oversight Committee.
One of the direct subsidiaries of State Energy HK is State Energy Group International Assets Holdings Limited (SEIAH). At the time of the wire transfer, SEIAH’s chairman was Ren Qingxin, who previously worked for the CCP as a representative at a business organization.
Shortly after the $3 million transfer, Ren was succeeded in his leadership position by Lei Donghui, who had been a member of the CCP since 2002, where he served as Secretary General of the International Engineering Business Bureau of China State Construction (CSC). CSC has since been designated by the Department of Defense as a “Communist China military company.”
Subsequently, the $3 million sent to Robinson Walker was then transferred to four different members of the Biden family: Joe Biden’s son Hunter, brother James, daughter-in-law Hallie, and a fourth unidentified family member, the Oversight Committee reports. The transfers were sent in several transactions, both to the family members directly and to several of their companies, including Owasco PC, JBBSR Inc, and RSTP II, LLC.
The previously-unknown involvement of Hallie – the widow of Biden’s elder son Beau, who later became Hunter’s girlfriend after Beau’s death – has proven to be one of the biggest bombshells yet in the GOP’s investigations into Biden family corruption.
Dutch Farmer’s Party poised to win 16 or 17 seats in parliament thanks to opposing that country’s mad global warming anti-meat mandates. “The Boer-Burger Beweging (BBB), or Farmer-Citizen Movement, is set to become the largest party in the country’s senate, winning more seats than Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s ruling conservative VVD party.”
Red Guards come to Maine. “Kristen Day said students affiliated with one of RSU 14’s Civil Rights Teams harassed her daughter. When her daughter refused to speak about her sexuality, two students affiliated with the club began to bully her and call her homophobic.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Eric Weinstein on Joe Rogan about what really happened with Kayne West. He suggests that West’s Hitler comments were simply him trying to channel Thomas à Kempis.
I wasn’t planning on writing more about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, but too much info has been coming down the pike to ignore. Plus, I found the video below, and felt I had to share it.
A newly published database from the Claremont Institute has revealed that the since-collapsed Silicon Valley Bank donated or pledged to donate nearly $74 million to the Black Lives Matter movement and related causes.
In an August 2020 Diversity, Equity & Inclusion report, SVB declared “we are on a journey committed to increasing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in our workplace, with our partners and across the innovation economy.”
The bank revealed that they had donated $1.6 million to “causes supporting gender parity in innovation,” as well as $1.2 million to support “opportunities for diverse, emerging talent in innovation.”
In SVB’s 2021 Proxy Statement, the bank wrote in relation to racial and social equity that “the calls to end systemic racial and social inequities following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 had a profound global impact.”
“We responded by expanding opportunities for dialogue, including hosting over 40 small group ‘Conversation Circles’ in which over two thirds of our employees participated in discussions about racial equity issues.”
The statement continued to say that the bank’s “DEI-focused ‘town hall’ meetings for employees were in response to our recognition of the need for greater transparency and dialogue around the racial representation of our workforce and the innovation ecosystem.”
In addition, the bank, provided “opportunities for action, mobilizing our employees and clients to join in community service through Tech Gives Back, a week of volunteer events focused in part on racial equity, social justice and access to the innovation economy,” and partnered with “Act One Ventures to launch The Diversity Term Sheet Rider for Representation at the Cap Table initiative, which advocates for venture capital firms to include in all of their term sheets a pledge to bring members of underrepresented groups into deals as co-investors.”
A 2020 letter from CEO Greg Becker stated, “In recent months, we’ve expanded our philanthropic giving through corporate donations and employee matching programs. These programs focus on pandemic response, social justice, sustainability and supporting women, Black and Latinx emerging talent and other underrepresented groups. You’ll find examples of these programs in this report, ranging from workforce development to affordable housing.”
In 2020, the bank launched its Missions program, “a software platform designed to engage employees to act in support of the causes they care about most such as voter education and racial justice and equity,” which saw employees donate $400,000 for “justice and equity for Black Americans.”
According to the Claremont Institute, an additional $250,000 was allocated by the SVB Foundation to support grants for social justice organizations including the NAACP, ACLU, and National Urban League.
SVB additionally partnered with 44 organizations focused on furthering DEI in innovation and invested in relationships with historically black colleges and universities, and hosted internships and provided tuition assistance for students from “underserved communities.”
In a Corporate Responsibility Report from 2021, SVB pledged to donate $50M in its diversity and inclusion programs and partnerships, “with a focus on women, Black and Latinx individuals.”
In May of 2021, SVB announced a proposed five-year, $11.2 billion community benefits plan in collaboration with The Greenlining Institute, an M4BL, or Movement For Black Lives, member. The Claremont Institute wrote that “that plan includes $75M in unspecified charitable contributions (also not included in our total).”
Social Justice is bad enough by itself, but it’s also a marker for those incapable of thinking clearly enough to focus clearly on their main jobs.
And now this video, which slams “Stupid Valley Bank” for its egregious stupidity and slams It’s Pat, which is these days is almost like a Hispster move (“It’s a pretty obscure bad movie, you’ve probably never heard of it”).
Don’t attempt to steal a helicopter unless you can actually, you know, fly a helicopter.
Multiple helicopters were broken into and one was operated before crashing on Wednesday morning at the Sacramento Executive Airport, according to the Sacramento Police Department.
Police say that they received several reports of multiple helicopters being broken into early Wednesday morning.
Officers that responded found a helicopter with major damage that “appeared to have been operated,” police said in a statement.
The damaged helicopter was left on its side and is a Bell 429 model, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
A further investigation showed that when the helicopter crashed it also damaged several other helicopters.
Yeah, I’d say there was some serious damage.
I have so many questions about this. Like: What did they think they were going to do with the helicopter after they stole it? Take it for a joy ride and return it? Try to sell it? Just how do you go about selling a stolen helicopter? Did they think regional air traffic control was just going to ignore it? (“Hey, stray helicopter! No biggee!”) Did he not realize Sacramento Police have helicopters to chase you with? (Oh yeah: There was an alert.)
No suspect in custody, so police are looking for a doubly lucky dumbass…
A Russian military plane collided with a U.S. drone in international airspace over the Black Sea on Tuesday, prompting U.S. forces to land the unmanned aircraft in international waters.
U.S. European Command confirmed that a Russian Su-27 aircraft struck the propeller of a U.S. MQ-9 drone, which was on a routine mission in international airspace when two Russian jets attempted to intercept it.
“Several times before the collision, the Su-27s dumped fuel on and flew in front of the MQ-9 in a reckless, environmentally unsound and unprofessional manner. This incident demonstrates a lack of competence in addition to being unsafe and unprofessional,” a spokesman for the U.S. European Command said in a statement.
The Russian jets’ recklessness almost caused one of the fighter jets to crash, the statement added.
Sounds like a pretty stupid thing for the Russians to do, as an Su-27 is obviously a lot more expensive to replace (including the pilot) than an MQ-9 Reaper drone. For one thing, the MQ-9 is over 15 years old and we have more than 300 of them, so losing one isn’t going to deter the American military in the slightest. But they’re not building any more Su-27s (a 1980s Soviet attempt to rip off the F-14 Tomcat), and Russia only had some 100 of them when the war started. (No documented losses on Oryx as of this writing, but Russia became ultra-conservative about committing manned airpower to the arena after the opening phases of the war.)
Russia continues to be annoyed at NATO in general, and America in specific, using technologically superior surveillance and communications assets to effectively provide the entire killchain for Ukrainian forces. Indeed, it appears that those assets are far more effectively integrated into Ukrainian forces than Russian assets are integrated into their own military and/or Wagner Group.
I can understand their frustration, but directly attacking American assets (over international water or otherwise) is only going to make things much, much, much worse for them…
I was involved in the occasional fight in middle and high school, but it never involved more than one other person. When a fight broke out, a circle would gather to watch it, but it never occurred any of us to wade in and join the melee. Widespread brawls with multiple combatants just never happened.
Well, that was then, and this was now. Every year, people post videos of large brawls to social media, and not all of them of them happen at Waffle House. On March 8, a huge brawl broke out at EBR Readiness Alternative School in Baton Rouge, which happens to be a middle school.
How huge? 200 people (including parents) were involved, and multiple cars of policemen had to break up the fight:
I can honestly say that I never considered “brawling with police” to be a viable life strategy in middle school. (Or any time.)
I know very little about “Alternative” schools in Louisiana, but this one appears to be majority black.
The more I hear about the Silicon Valley Bank collapse mentioned in Friday’s LinkSwarm, the worse it sounds.
I saw a snippet of Gary Tan, CEO of startup fund Y Combinator, talking about how bad it is. I can’t find a video of the full interview online, but evidently it was excerpted on Bannon’s War Room podcast and there’s a transcript.
[Interviewer]: How many of these startups that have been through Y Combinator, for example, have their cash tied up at Silicon Valley Bank? And over this weekend, I’m gonna try to figure out how they’re gonna make payroll next week. Do they have to go to investors and say, can you front me some cash so that we can stay alive?
[Tan]: We have funded about 3,000 active startups right now. I would guess that this affects more than 1,000 startups. And about a third of those startups will not be able to make payroll in the next 30 days in the current configuration. As of this morning, RIPLING, which many startups use to manage payroll and benefits, transfers were not being processed by SVB for payroll.
And so that’s a really existential threat for companies broadly. These are founders who are texting me and calling me saying, do I need to furlough my workers next week? Because I do not have other bank accounts, you know, a Google or a Facebook or even companies farther along with a Treasury Department. They’re going to be able to weather this, but if SVB is your only bank, it’s actually an existential risk. You’re going to go out of business if you can’t pay payroll. And that starts Monday.
That transcript also has this sobering figure: “97% of the deposits at Silicon Valley Bank. 97% are not insured by FDIC because they’re in accounts over $250,000. These company accounts that would be $169 billion.”
So what was Silicon Valley Bank doing rather than properly managing their risk profile? Banks have Chief Risk Officers whose job is to make sure their risk exposure ratios don’t get out of whack. Well, guess what? SVB didn’t have one for some nine months. “SVB’s former head of risk, Laura Izurieta, who formerly performed a similar role for Capital One, left the bank in April 2022. She wasn’t replaced until January 2023 when the bank hired Kim Olson, formerly of Japanese bank Sumitomo Mitsui.”
But don’t worry: SVB had CRO for the bank in Europe, Africa and the Middle East who was entirely focused…on Social Justice and ESG.
Jay Ersapah, who acts as CRO for the bank in Europe, Africa and the Middle East and who describes herself as a ‘queer person of color from a working-class background’ – organized a host of LGBTQ initiatives including a month-long Pride campaign and implemented ‘safe space’ catch-ups for staff.
In a corporate video published just nine months ago, she said she ‘could not be prouder’ to work for SVB serving ‘underrepresented entrepreneurs.’
Professional network Outstanding listed Ersapah as a top 100 LGTBQ Future Leader.
‘Jay is a leading figure for the bank’s awareness activities including being a panelist at the SVB’s Global Pride townhall to share her experiences as a lesbian of color, moderating SVB’s EMEA Pride townhall and was instrumental in initiating the organization’s first ever global “safe space catch-up”, supporting employees in sharing their experiences of coming out,’ her bio on the Outstanding website states.
It adds that she is ‘allies’ with gay rights charity Stonewall and had authored numerous articles to promote LGBTQ awareness.
These included ‘Lesbian Visibility Day and Trans Awareness week.’
Separately she was also praised in a Facebook post by the group ‘Diversity Role Models,’ a charity which campaigns against homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying in UK schools.
Being in Silicon Valley, I’m betting that the entire company was whole hog backing DEI, ESG, Transwhatever and the entire rainbow of victimhood identity politics acronyms.
In a strong economy, you can get away with a bit of shareholder-value-destroying, virtue-signaling luxury goods as long as your core business is strong. But with rising interest rates, Biden Inflation, the Biden Recession and the gale winds of deglobalization, taking your eye off the ball to focus on anti-reality SJW garbage is a recipe for disaster.
And all the startups that relied on SVB for their banking are well and truly screwed.
Update: Uncle Sugar is evidently going to make all depositors whole at both SVB and newly insolvent Signature Bank. This relatively early intervention may indeed be the best move to prevent bank runs at other institutions, and may reflect a change in philosophy since 2008. (It’s a thorny subject.) But it does make me think that a lot of well-connected depositors were screaming in the ears of Washington to be made whole at the taxpayer’s expense. What do you think the odds are that the same consideration wouldn’t be given to, say, a Texas bank that specialized in underwriting oil and gas ventures?
