Ruble Now A Penny

August 14th, 2023

When Russia launched its illegal war of territorial aggression against Ukraine in February of 2022, many observers thought western financial sanctions would quickly crash the Russian economy. When Russia was cut out of SWIFT, the Ruble plunged to below a penny against the dollar, but quickly recovered, at least a bit.

Due to various reasons (gas and oil sales, gold transfers, and the many loopholes EU countries have made for their sanctions), Russia’s economy hasn’t collapsed as quickly as many expected, or hoped.

But just today, the ruble finally slipped back below the penny-parity line again.

Russia’s central bank called an extraordinary meeting Tuesday after the ruble crashed through the level of 100 to the dollar for the first time since March of last year as Russia’s war in Ukraine drags on and international sanctions hit trade.

Policy makers will publish a statement on the key rate at 10:30 a.m. after the meeting, the Bank of Russia said in a statement, without giving any further details. The central bank hiked its key rate by a percentage point to 8.5% last month, the first increase since emergency measures imposed immediately after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The exchange rate has emerged as the barometer of health for an economy battered by shrinking export revenues and its isolation from international financial markets, bringing infighting between the government and central bank into the open.

The ruble reversed losses after the announcement, traded up 1.8% at 97.6625 at 7 p.m. in Moscow. The currency, which had broken through 101 earlier on Monday, has weakened about 27% this year for the third-worst performance in emerging markets. The central bank had sought to arrest the slump by saying it won’t purchase foreign currency on the domestic market for the rest of 2023.

Yeah, no one trusts Russia to hold adequate foreign currency reserves a year and a half into sanctions. So that move doesn’t help.

Lots of meaningless Russian “economy is great” blather snipped.

Revenues of Russian oil and gas exporters declined to $6.9 billion in July from $16.8 billion in the same period last year, according to the latest central bank data. An easing of restrictions on moving money abroad has also led to accelerated capital flight as Russians race to shift funds into foreign accounts.

“The weakening of the ruble is the result of the international screws tightening around the Russian economy, but also the cost of keeping the economy going,” said Erik Meyersson, chief emerging-market strategist at SEB AB in Stockholm. “Nobody wants to hold rubles, and the limited supply of foreign exchange from exporters weighs on the currency.”

Of course, Russia could get out of it’s self-imposed monkey trap by withdrawing its forces from all occupied Ukrainian territory. But I don’t think anyone is hold their breath for that to happen…

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Posted in Economics, Foreign Policy | 20 Comments »

China Is Screwed: Pipe People

August 13th, 2023

I didn’t intend to do an all “China is Screwed” video roundup weekend, but the videos keep stacking up and I need to post some rather than producing a giant unwieldy post with hours of footage.

First up: Young people’s whose job prospects and futures are so dim that they’re actually living in concrete pipes.

Takeaways:

  • Certainly America has no shortage of transients living rough, but in contrast to ragged drug addicts, alcoholics and dangerous lunatics, the people living in these pipes look to be normal, healthy 20-something Chinese.
  • Just because you’re living in a concrete pipe doesn’t mean you can’t be a live-streamer. Like the under-the-bridge streamers seen in previous videos, you wonder how widespread this behavior is, or whether we’re just seeing the edge of the freak show.
  • “Despite the female hosts not being beautiful and the male hosts not handsome, it doesn’t affect viewership.” I do rather want to check their numbers, here.
  • “This is because it’s happening in the industrial city known as the world’s factory – Dongguan in Guangzhou.” It’s on the Pearl River Delta near Guangzhou and Hong Kong. “After more than thirty years of China’s reform and opening up, Dongguan, which has always been at the forefront of economic development, has recently seen a wave of business closures and foreign capital relocation.” See also: all those previous China is screwed videos.
  • “When foreign capital withdraws, thousands of Chinese workers lose their jobs. Among these people, some have worked in factories for decades and are now middle-aged. It’s overwhelming to be suddenly faced with unemployment and consequential cost-of-living pressures, coupled with labor competition against millions of university graduates.” I’m sure that sucks, just like getting laid off here sucks. But in a capitalist economy, even a flawed one like we have, is always going to be more flexible about creating jobs that one ruled by a communist party’s aristocracy of pull.
  • “Those who are single simply adapt to homelessness, creating their own personal space amongst the concrete pipes.” Or, you could have, you know, lived modestly, saved money, and shared housing with other people. The fact they haven’t gone this route and are instead living in pipes suggests something in the Chinese economy is even more broken than we think.
  • Foreign companies like Microsoft and Nokia are now moving to Vietnam and India. “Japanese companies like Panasonic, Daikin, Sharp, and TDK are planning to move their manufacturing bases back to Japan. Well-known companies like Uniqlo, Nike, Funai Electric, Samsung, and others are also accelerating their withdrawal from China.”
  • Like industry is also fleeing from elsewhere in China.
  • “The once bustling Bund in Shanghai is now overgrown with weeds due to lack of maintenance and tourism, presenting a scene of desolation. Everywhere in Shanghai’s luxury residential communities, there are messages about subleasing and selling at a loss. The elites, celebrities, and tycoons left Shanghai at the first chance they got after the lifting of the lockdown. The political uncertainty in China and the frequent changes in regulatory clauses by the authorities have made entrepreneurs miserable.” Communists making entrepreneurs miserable? This is my shocked face.
  • “Domestic entrepreneurs are reluctant to invest further, and foreign investors are hastening their departure.”
  • Various Chinese company specific layoffs and financial difficulties snipped.
  • “Wall Street leading figures, after enjoying three years of benefits from the broad opening of China’s financial market, are planning large-scale cuts to projects and staff in China…Goldman Sachs has lowered its five-year plan expectations, and Morgan Stanley has decided not to set up a securities dealer in China, reducing its derivative and futures business investment to $150 million. JPMorgan Chase & Co. began cutting its dedicated staff in China earlier this year.” There’s not a violin small enough.

    • In a capitalist economy, there would be some sort of middle ground between the empty ghost cities and people living in pipes near megalopolises. If you don’t regulate the economy so heavily as to make building housing impossible (I’m looking at you, California and NYC), then profit will drive developers to create housing to fill a market need. With China’s crazy misallocation of loans to unprofitable housing to satisfy regional government growth targets, supply has been so severed from demand that such market-making is impossible.

    China is going to come out of it’s decades-long growth spurt with crumbling cities and people that mostly are still poor.

    Great job, Xi!

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    Posted in Communism, Economics, Foreign Policy, unions, video | 13 Comments »

    China’s New Enemy: Deflation

    August 12th, 2023

    I have a whole host of “China is Screwed” videos I’ve gathered to post, but haven’t had the time to properly queue them up. So here’s a big picture piece from Peter Zeihan on China’s immediate economic foe: deflation.

  • “They never really recovered from Covid.” Aw. My heart bleeds.
  • “Growth is actually lower now than it was over the course of the last two years when they were supposedly under complete lockdown.”
  • “Consumption is down. Imports and exports both dropped in July compared to a year earlier by double digits of percentages. Normally the sort of stuff you only see out of a country like, say, Ukraine or Russia when a war starts.”
  • “We saw a demographic bomb go off in China before Covid. going back to as early as 2017, the demographics really turned negative from 2017 to 2021. The birth rate dropped by about 40%.”
  • “We’ve had all of these trends with four, five, six, years behind them, and as they’re manifesting in a more normal environment, the numbers are really, really, really bad.”
  • A whole lot of that is due to the One Child Policy.
  • Problem two: Deflation. The rest of the world suffered inflation when the lockdowns ended.
  • “The consumption boom never happened, so supply chains never had to adjust. What has happened is people are less confident in their future, so they’re consuming less.”
  • “We’re seeing mounting trade wars out of Europe, Japan, the United States, and increasingly secondary states like the Koreans are joining in. And that means the Chinese have fewer places to send stuff.”
  • “Product that was normally produced for export from China is now being locked up within the Chinese system at the same time that the population is purchasing less. You have an oversupply of goods and an under demand, both at home and abroad. With all those extra goods prices go down, and you get deflation.”
  • “This is what you would expect when you’re at the beginning of a deflationary spiral that’s caused by a fundamental mismatch between supply and demand, which is where we are going with deglobalization and the Chinese demographic. Trends which are now well past the point of no return.”
  • Japan’s deflationary spiral lasted 20-25 years.
  • Deflationary spirals are very hard to pull out of.
  • “The Chinese economic system isn’t really based on exports or consumption, it’s based on investment, the idea that the state fosters mass borrowing in order to build industrial plant infrastructure. Based on whose numbers you’re using, those are somewhere between 40-70% of the entirety of the Chinese economy, and has generated the vast majority of economic growth.”
  • “You can only do that for so long. Eventually you don’t need any more bridges, or any more factories, and I would argue the Chinese reached that point before Covid. Again, there’s been this three, four year lag between reality and the data finally manifesting.”
  • More spending won’t help.
  • “The amount of growth they get for every Yuan spent has been dropping steadily for 40 years, and now it’s in far less than one to one. So it really doesn’t matter how much more fuel and how much cheap capital the Chinese pump into the system, it’s never going to generate more economic activity than what it costs to put it in the first place.”

    • Sucks to be you, China…

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    Posted in Communism, Economics, video | 9 Comments »

    LinkSwarm For August 11, 2023

    August 11th, 2023

    Still more Biden corruption comes to light, Yellow goes belly-up, things get worse in China, and a truly horrifying food discovery. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • “Biden Family Received Millions from Foreign Oligarchs Who Had Dinners with Then-VP Joe Biden.”

    The Biden family and its business associates received millions of dollars from oligarchs in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine while Joe Biden was vice president, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee.

    With the new payments included, the committee says it has now identified more than $20 million in payments from foreign sources to the Biden family and their business associates. Those foreign sources include not only the three aforementioned countries, but also China and Romania as well.

    Hunter Biden’s former business associate Devon Archer previously testified that then-Vice President Biden joined roughly 20 phone calls on speakerphone with Hunter Biden’s foreign business associates and attended dinners with foreign oligarchs who paid large sums of money to Hunter Biden.

    The foreign funds were sent to accounts tied to Devon Archer that used the Rosemont Seneca name and were then doled out in incremental payments to Hunter Biden, the records show, in what the committee suggests was an attempt to hide the source and size of the payments.

    Those payments included $3.5 million sent from Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina to the shell company Rosemont Seneca Thornton in February 2014. Roughly $1 million was transferred to Devon Archer, while the rest was used to fund a new account Rosemont Seneca Bohai, which was used by both Archer and Hunter Biden to receive other foreign wires.

    After Baturina sent the massive sum to Rosemont Seneca Thornton, then-Vice President Joe Biden attended dinner with Baturina, Archer, Hunter Biden, and others at Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C.

    Then-Vice President Joe Biden attended dinners with Hunter Biden; Archer; Baturina; Burisma executives; and Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakhstani oligarch, in the spring of 2014 and 2015 at Cafe Milano.

    In February 2014, Hunter Biden met with Rakishev at the Hay Adams Hotel in Washington, D.C. In emails to Archer discussing the D.C. meeting, Rakishev, who was a director at Kazakhstan’s state-owned oil company KazMunayGas, asked that then-Secretary of State John Kerry visit Kazakhstan. Archer said, “if we have some business started as planned I will ensure its planned soonest.”

    So members of the extended Biden business family were asking the Secretary of State of the United States of America to visit a foreign country so the Biden clan could do business. Are all American institutions now corrupted for the sole purpose of enriching Democratic Party insiders?

    In April 2014, Rakishev wired $142,300 to the Rosemont Seneca Bohai account. The figure amounted to the exact price of Hunter Biden’s sports car that the account purchased one day later.

    After receiving the payment, Archer and Biden arranged for executives at Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma to visit Kazakhstan in June 2014 to discuss a deal between Burisma, a Chinese state-owned company, and the government of Kazakhstan. Rakishev had a working relationship with Karim Massimov, who became prime minister in April 2014. Earlier this year, Massimov was sentenced to 18 years in prison for treason, abuse of power, and attempting a coup.

    Also in spring 2014, Archer and Biden joined the Burisma board of directors at a salary of $1 million per year each. President Biden visited Ukraine soon after Archer and the younger Biden received their first payments — payments that were sent to Rosemont Seneca Bohai and later sent in incremental amounts to Hunter Biden’s different bank accounts.

    The committee confirmed IRS whistleblower testimony that Archer and Hunter Biden received $6.5 million in funds from Burisma, which is owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, a Ukrainian oligarch who bribed officials $6 million over the investigation into the natural gas company.

    Archer told the committee last week that Hunter Biden’s value on Burisma’s board was “the brand.” Archer said then-vice president Biden was “the brand.”

    “Burisma would have gone out of business if ‘the brand’ had not been attached to it,” Archer said, according to the committee.

    We can’t let corrupt foreign companies that keep Hunter in cocaine go tits-up, can we?

  • “China Wanted to Use Biden Family to Acquire U.S. Energy Assets.

    Text messages that have recently been given to the FBI show that a Chinese energy company sought to utilize its connections to Hunter Biden in order to purchase domestic energy assets within the United States.

    According to Just The News, the text exchange in question took place between two of Hunter’s business partners, James Gilliar and Tony Bobulinski, on Christmas Eve of 2015. This exchange was shortly after Hunter had first been told about the conglomerate, CFEC China Energy, led by wealthy businessman Ye Jianming.

    “I think this will then be a great addition to their portfolios as it will give them a profile base in NYC, then LA, etc,” said Gilliar in the text message. “For me it’s a no brainer but culturally they are different, but smart so let’s see. … Any entry ticket is small for them. Easier and better demographic than Arabs who are little anti US after trump.”

    This evidence further supports the bombshell claims made by another former business partner of Hunter, Devon Archer, in closed-door testimony before Congress earlier this week. Archer testified that Joe and Hunter Biden both actively sought to promote their “influence” to potential foreign partners, and that the two of them were considered a package deal in efforts to sell the “brand” of their family name and political power while Joe was Vice President.

    According to calendar schedules from his abandoned laptop, Hunter eventually did have a meeting with CEFC Executive Director Jianjun Zang in December of 2015. By March of 2016, two of Hunter’s business partners, Gilliar and Rob Walker, drafted a memo for Hunter to sign and send to CEFC, to which Hunter agreed.

    The text messages, exchanged between 2015 and 2017, eventually reveal that CEFC simply hoped to gain “influence” through its partnership with the Bidens, in order to eventually enter the American energy market with the purchase of energy assets in America and elsewhere in the West.

    “Still closing the perimeters of ops with the Chinese, will know Thursday if we are driving U.S. investments,” Gilliar wrote to Bobulinski in May of 2016, adding that things might be “still a little premature.”

  • Want to know who funded that dirty Chinese bioloab in California? Would you believe Gavin Newsom?
  • Yellow files for bankruptcy, citing union contracts. Look how they shine for you. And all the things that you do…
  • Judge slams Southwest Airlines for ignoring ruling over firing an employee for daring to have wrongthink on abortion. “The judge said the airline acted as if its own policy limiting what employees can say is more important than a federal law protecting religious speech.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • Teacher who made racist statements and bragged about how she couldn’t be fired fired. (More.)
  • “Twitter Sues Pro-Censorship Wokescolds Over “False And Misleading Claims” of racism.
  • Tell the truth about the losing streak for the team you’re reporting on? That’s a suspension.
  • Old and Busted in China: Sleeping on someone’s couch because you can’t afford your own bedroom. The New Hotness: Sleeping in the same bed with strangers because they can’t afford a couch

    (hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Every day, we drift further and further from God’s light.
  • How Oppenheimer is breaking IMAX projectors. (Previously.)
  • There’s a new meme for ironic failure.
  • “Biden Makes Things Up To 7th Grandchild By Appointing Her Head Of Ukrainian Shell Company.”
  • “Democrats Hire Professional Puppeteer To Continue Operating Dianne Feinstein.”
  • “Trump Indicted For Mocking US Women’s Soccer.”

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    Posted in Budget, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Obama Scandals, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas, unions, video, Waste and Fraud | 2 Comments »

    M1A1 Abrams Tanks Finally Heading To Ukraine

    August 10th, 2023

    Remember all the fanfare over the U.S. sending Abrams tanks to Ukraine? Supposedly in time for the much vaunted Spring Offensive?

    That didn’t happen. Evidently the usual Biden Administration competency was in play. But now the allotment of M1A1 Abrams tanks (not the M1A2s previously discussed) are finally ready to be shipped over.

    The first batch of Abrams tanks that the U.S. is providing to Ukraine was approved for shipment over the weekend, and the tanks remain on track to arrive in Ukraine by early Fall, Army Acquisition Chief Doug Bush told reporters on Monday.

    “The last of the set was officially accepted by the U.S. government or the production facility over the weekend. So they are done,” said Bush. The 31 Abrams tanks destined for Ukraine – older M1A1 variants – had been undergoing refurbishment and preparation for shipment for months.

    Though the tanks are ready, they still have to be shipped overseas and sent to Ukraine, “along with all of the things that go with them – ammunition, spare parts, fuel equipment, repair facilities,” Bush said. “So it’s not just the tanks.”

    The goal, said Bush, remains to get the Abrams tanks to the unit level by “early Fall.” He did not give a specific date or even month. Last month, Politico reported that the tanks would arrive on the battlefield in September.

    Helping Ukraine repel Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression has frequently been cited as a top priority by members of the Biden Administration,a cause in whose over $46 billion in military aid has been sent. Given that the UK’s Challenger 2 tanks arrived in Ukraine in March, it would seem like the Biden Administration hasn’t treated their pledge of Abrams tanks with any urgency.

    To be sure, several U.S. weapon systems (HIMARS, Patriot, Excalibur and various drones) have proven absolutely vital in letting Ukraine resist the Russian invasion. But for something the U.S. defense establishment, and just about all our NATO allies, view as a top priority, the Pentagon as been quite sluggish at getting them tanks. A cynic might wonder if it’s because, being drawn from existing stocks, sending them M1A1s doesn’t grease enough Beltway Bandit palms.

    Given how long it will take to train Ukrainians on them, maybe they’ll be available for the 2024 Spring Offensive…

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military | 15 Comments »

    Russian Optics Factory Goes Boom

    August 9th, 2023

    No indication yet that this was a Ukrainian rocket attack, drone attack, or even partisan sabotage. But it sounds militarily significant.

    Local officials in Russia say an explosion at an optical plant in the city of Sergiyev Posad, about 70 kilometers outside Moscow, killed one person and injured at least 43 people on August 9.

    Five of the injured are in intensive care with serious burns or head injuries, according to the city administration’s Telegram account. Some of the 43 people admitted to a regional hospital have shrapnel injuries, it said.

    Officials at the city’s central hospital said that a woman had succumbed to wounds sustained in the blast.

    Independent Telegram channel Baza shared images of a tall cloud of smoke and identified the site as the Zagorsk Optical and Mechanical Plant, which produces night-vision and other optical devices for the military.

    Russian officials later confirmed the location.

    Russian news agency TASS has quoted the emergency services as rejecting assertions on social media that the cause of the blast was a drone attack.

    That speculation has been fueled by months of remote attacks in Russia that Moscow blames on Kyiv along with Russian reports it “thwarted” two fresh drone attacks near Moscow overnight.

    TASS said the blast happened where pyrotechnics were being kept and destroyed a 1,600-square-meter warehouse.

    An unexplained fire damaged the same Zagorsk plant in June 2022.

    Seemed to blow up real good:

    You can’t trust TASS, and it’s entirely possible that it’s your standard negligent Russian military industrial accident. But why would you store pyrotechnics next to an optics factory?

    Other news notes that the plant makes optics for Russian security forces. Keep in mind that obtaining optical sights for their tanks has been an ongoing concern for Russia.

    Developing…

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 7 Comments »

    Texas Outlaws Men In Women’s College Sports

    August 8th, 2023

    Many U.S. states have outlawed men from participating in women’s college sports. (An absurdity that would never have to be outlawed in sane times, but social justice and transexual madness has rendered this an insane society.) Now Texas has officially joined their ranks.

    In a ceremony at the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame in Denton, Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law the Save Women’s Sports Act. The new law is designed to protect women’s collegiate sports and competitions from men masquerading as women.

    “We’re here because women’s sports are threatened across the entire country,” said Abbott. “Some women are being forced to play against biological men. … College records that women set are being threatened. Women’s sports, women’s records, women’s teams, women’s locker rooms all are jeopardized when biological men are allowed to compete for those titles, for those teams, for those records.”

    Now, according to Abbott, “the legacy of women’s sports is safeguarded by the law for generations to come.”

    The legislation, Senate Bill 15 by State Sen. Mayes Middleton (R–Galveston), bans Texas’ public universities and colleges from allowing biological men to compete against women.

    Brady Gray, president of Texas Family Project, told Texas Scorecard he was “proud to be present for the historic signing of SB 15.”

    “We are thankful for the work of Riley Gaines and others who helped champion this historic legislation to save women’s sports,” said Gray.

    Gaines, a former collegiate champion swimmer, was forced to compete against a biological male and even lost championship titles due to his biological advantage. She was also forced to change with him in a locker room.

    “This new law will protect the integrity of women’s sports,” said Gaines during the ceremony.

    “It’s pretty amazing that this law is even necessary,” she continued, stating it’s obvious that “men are––and this is a fact––on average taller, stronger, more powerful, [and] can jump higher than women.”

    Slowly but surely, sane states are pushing back against transsexual madness, as well as all the other social justice insanities. And ordinary Americans, even many who previously thought themselves Democrats, are growing increasingly fed-up with the crazy spewing from the loony left.

    Faster, please.

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    Posted in Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 5 Comments »

    Movie Review: Oppenheimer

    August 7th, 2023

    Title: Oppenheimer
    Director: Christopher Nolan
    Writers: Christopher Nolan, Kai Bird, Martin Sherwin
    Starring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Jason Clarke, Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Alden Ehrenreich

    I finally saw Oppenheimer, and if you have an interest in the subject, it’s well worth seeing. It’s a near-great film that’s great when it covers the atomic bomb project, and considerably less great when It Has Important Things To Say.

    The movie covers much of the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), director of the Los Alamos part of the project to build the atomic bomb. The movie has a non-linear format, using the framing device of two different hearings (on the renewal of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, and the cabinet confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), who lured Oppenheimer to Princeton and oversaw the Atomic Energy Commission, and who is eventually revealed to be the film’s antagonist) interspersed with Oppenheimer’s life before and during the The Manhattan Project.

    When the film is good, it’s flat out great. The scenes here tend to be small in scope, seldom more than a minute long, slowly building up Oppenheimer’s life, his love and study of physics, his dalliance with communism (he was a fellow-traveler who never joined the party, but did take a commie (Florence Pugh) as his first wife and an ex-commie (Emily Blunt) as his second), his dismay as a Jewish American at the rise of Nazism, and his involvement in the atomic bomb effort.

    The brevity of the scenes is one of the film’s greatest strengths. Though mostly quiet and understated in themselves, they slowly build up a heady steam of narrative momentum. By the time they get to Los Alamos itself you’re absolutely riveted.

    And it gets better. The scenes leading up to the Trinity detonation are a masterpiece of film editing, successfully ratcheting the tension higher and higher just by showing scenes of the elaborate preparations leading up to the blast, under-laid by Ludwig Göransson’s tense, violin-heavy score. I saw the film in IMAX, and I think I got my money’s worth out of that sequence alone.

    But that headlong pace enfolds within it a problem: Things move so fast, that some scenes have a certain checkmark quality to them, so that you know exactly what’s coming. Gee, when commie girlfriend picks up a Sanskrit text, what do you want to bet that the passage he’s reading is “I am become death, destroyer of worlds?”

    Please, no wagering.

    But that’s a minor problem compared to the biggest flaw of Oppenheimer, which is what they chose to include as the main non-Trinity storyline. Why have the climax of your film feature the literal explosion of an atomic bomb when you can spend the rest of it on the pulse-pounding excitement of committee meetings?

    To be fair to Nolan, this is obviously the film he wanted to make, and the film is called Oppenheimer rather than The Making of the Atomic Bomb. And the committee meeting scenes are as well-acted, well-directed and well-paced as you could reasonably ask of a big-budget, A-list Hollywood film. But the real reason they’re there is so the leftist screenwriters can Say Important Things.

    Oppenheimer must feel massive guilt and remorse for having helped usher in the atomic age, because this is Approved Opinion. Leftists, even commies, must be shown in a positive light, because this is Approved Opinion. Likewise, McCarthyism must be shown to be Very Bad, so all the crimes of communism have to be kept offstage.

    Indeed, an awful lot happens off-stage, including the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then again, Oppenheimer is the viewpoint character.

    From my better-than-the-average-layman-understanding-at-how-an-atomic-bomb-works-but-hardly-an-expert vantage point, the historical accuracy for the film seems painstaking and effective. I understood why Klaus Fuchs was important when he was introduced, appreciated the Nixie tubes in the Trinity countdown, and figured out the guy with the bongos must have been Richard Feynman. Everything sure as hell looks accurate, and the New Mexico photography is gorgeous.

    But with so much time spent on the commie and Strauss plots, and Oppenheimer having visions of particle physics (early) and atomic destruction (late), the rest of the film (the far more interesting part) feels a bit rushed. Plus the sheer smallness of the stakes that drive the frame-story/post-Trinity portion feels like a distinct anticlimax. Indeed, the primary subplot turns out to be (spoilers) Strauss secretly shiving Oppenheimer by getting his security clearance yanked for…his supporting export of radioactive isotopes to Norway? It’s like if during the climax of Kill Bill, you find out that the Bride’s entire motivation for her revenge spree was Bill never returning her DVD of Steel Magnolias.

    All that said, this is still an exceptionally good film, and even the ostensibly bad guys Have Their Reasons. Even hydrogen bomb father Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), who the writers must have been tempted to turn into a secondary villain, comes across as a smart, sympathetic figure. And history validates both his and Strauss’ view that America was right to move forward on the H-Bomb, as the Soviets were utterly untrustworthy as arms control treaty partners.

    I expect Oscar nominations galore.

    If you’re the kind of person that would watch a three hour movie on the making of the atomic bomb, this is the one to watch.

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    Posted in Communism, Media Watch, Military | 15 Comments »

    Why The SA80 Sucked

    August 6th, 2023

    On the post about China’s funky military gyrocopter, a discussion of just how bad the British SA80 assault rifle (AKA Enfield L85A1) sucked broke out. And boy did it suck.

    Almost immediately, the rifles were plagued with problems. The L86A1’s bipod tended to fail to lock, were weak, and generally crappy. Additionally, the plastic melted when it interacted with bug repellant, and the metal rusted easily. The weapons were found to be unreliable in both arctic and desert environments.

    The SA80 family used stamped steel, which the Brits had experience with in the form of the Sten gun. However, the Sten had much lower tolerances than the SA80. The tighter tolerances required more skilled labor and better machinery. This led to tons of waste and slow production of the SA80 family of rifles and squad support weapons.

    Their first trial by combat came to be in the Gulf War and then later in African operations. It’s tough to say anything nice about these weapons’ performance in the desert. Both the L85A1 and L86A1 proved to be unreliable. The L85A1 worked best on fully automatic, and the L86A1 worked best on semi-auto. This created was the inverse of how the weapons were intended to be used.

    The polymer furniture fell apart easily. The magazines and the magazine catch proved problematic. It was too easy to access and would cause soldiers to accidentally drop magazines. The top cover catch required tape to hold it in place. The weapons needed to be kept incredibly clean and could deform if gripped too hard.

    The weapon overheated quickly, the firing pin was fragile and broke easily, and dirt could accumulate behind the trigger and prevent it from being pulled. The safety selector could swell when it got wet and render the weapon useless. SAS operator and Gulf War commando Chris Ryan stated that the SA80 was “poor-quality, unreliable weapons at the best of times, prone to stoppages, and it seemed pretty tough to have to rely on them.”

    It’s easy to see why the rifles sucked. The British Ministry of Defence commissioned a report that stated,

    “The SA80 did not perform reliably in the sandy conditions of combat and training. Stoppages were frequent despite the considerable and diligent efforts to prevent them. It is extremely difficult to isolate the prime cause of the stoppages.

    It is, however, quite clear that infantrymen did not have CONFIDENCE in their personal weapons. Most expected a stoppage in the first magazine fired. Some platoon commanders considered that casualties would have occurred due to weapon stoppages if the enemy had put up any resistance in the trench and bunker clearing operations.

    Even discounting the familiarisation period of desert conditions, when some may have still been using the incorrect lubrication drill, stoppages continued to occur.”

    Commenter BigFire noted that Ian McCollum had done a video on the weapon, and he’s no less scathing:

  • “Can you hear that? I can hear it. That’s the sound of every former British service member cringing at the mere sight of this rifle. And it’s so loud you can hear it over the internet.”
  • “This is, probably more so than any other firearm in current service, a giant scandal of plastic and metal.”
  • They started with a proprietary 4.85mm cartridge, but eventually went with 5.56 NATO. Brits didn’t go with the M16 because they wanted a bull-pup (and presumably because they wanted to make them domestically).
  • Desert Storm: “The guns really performed poorly in the sand. And there was a report that was written detailing all of these problems and submitted to MOD in the aftermath of Desert Storm. And it got leaked to the public. And this document basically said, ‘These guns are a piece of junk, and they never work.'”
  • The Brits turned to Heckler & Koch (which was actually owned by a British company at the time) to fix the weapon. “And they came up with just a couple things to fix, namely everything. In the rebuild they either replaced or redesigned the bolt, the gas piston, the gas block, the front trunnion, the hammer, all of the springs, pretty much all of the pins, the magazine release, and the furniture [stock, grip and handguard], and the charging handle, and probably a couple other things that I’ve forgetting about. They basically kept the receivers as a shell and replaced everything else inside them.”
  • “They rebuilt about 200,000 of these rifles into what became known as the L85A2 configuration, for the cost of about £92 million.”
  • “They had far more problems than the M16 did in Vietnam, and yet still to this day we hear about the M16 being an unreliable piece of junk, because of some limited issues that were actually pretty easily fixed in the early days of Vietnam. Well, the L85 had much more substantial and severe problems to begin with. And even though the A2 appears to be a pretty darn good gun now, its reputation is dead forever … because of how bad the A1 was.”

    • Making simple weapons that can be turned out on prosumer grade CNC machines gets easier and easier every year, but designing automatic weapons that reliably work across a wide range of combat situations is still hard…

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Military, unions, video | 14 Comments »

    Ukrainian Naval Drones Hit A Tanker, Gives Russia Another Dilemma

    August 5th, 2023

    Ukraine is stepping up it’s naval drone game, as they just hit a Russian tanker.

    A Ukrainian sea drone full of explosives struck a Russian fuel tanker overnight near a bridge linking Russia to annexed Crimea, the second such attack in 24 hours, both sides said on Saturday.

    No one was hurt, but the Crimean Bridge and ferry transport were suspended for several hours, according to Russian-installed officials in Crimea, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.

    A Ukrainian intelligence source told Reuters that the drone with 450 kg of explosives hit the SIG vessel as it transported fuel for the Russian military in Ukrainian territorial waters.

    “The tanker was well loaded with fuel, so the ‘fireworks’ were seen from afar,” the source said, of the joint operation by Ukraine’s navy and security service.

    Kyiv says destroying Russia’s military infrastructure inside Russia or on Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine is crucial to its counteroffensive after the February 2022 invasion.

    Another sea drone attack on Russia’s navy base at Novorossiysk damaged a warship on Friday, the first time the Ukrainian navy had projected its power so far from its shores.

    Suchomimus has two separate videos up about the attack, the second of which includes footage of the strike itself:

    To me one of the interesting things in that video is not about the attack itself, but the sat pic 25 seconds in that shows over a dozen ships anchored some 20km south of the Kerch Strait Bridge. I don’t know why they’re doing that (Escorting them one at a time through the strait? Port capacity?), but an anchorage area like that offers a target-rich environment now that we know Ukraine has the capability to hit it.

    That video shows a guided rather than pre-programmed drone, as it corrects course to hit the tanker.

    In the second video, Suchomimus also covers the various Black Sea naval assets Russia might have to employ to defend against naval drone attacks. The choices are limited, and some of the ships they have available seem unsuited to the task. And a few that are suitable will have to be taken off duty firing Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian civilian infrastructure.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military | 8 Comments »

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