As is the now annual tradition, enjoy Stellarscope’s version of “Silent Night”:
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas!
December 25th, 2023Library Additions: Seven Non-Fiction Books
December 24th, 2023I usually note library additions in the other blog, but all of these but two are political or military books. Two are also signed copies replacing or supplementing unsigned copies.
Hamas: We Make Our Own Sniper Rifles! Ian McCollum: Busted!
December 23rd, 2023While Israel pounds the snot out of it, Hamas continues its long-running video deception operations. “Pallywood” usually uses its video editing to gin up more Palestinian civilian casualties from Israeli, but this time they’re trying to convince the world they make their own “al-Ghoul” sniper rifles. Ian McCollum looks at the resulting video, and concludes that, once again, they’re full of it.
Pretty much nothing they’re doing in the video involves actual manufacturing of sniper rifles.
Par for the Pallywood course…
Biden’s Illegal Alien Flood Results in 7 Year Court Date Wait
December 21st, 2023The Biden Administration’s attempt to flood the country with illegal aliens continues apace. The situation has gotten so bad that aliens seeking asylum are now receiving court dates in 2031.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have set a court date for an illegal alien seeking asylum on January 23, 2031, more than seven years away.
Fox News Correspondent Bill Melugin reports that the Colombian woman seeking asylum crossed illegally into El Paso, and her immigration attorney, Matthew Kolken, is shocked by the six-year wait time to process her claim.
“Kolken tells me his client is a legitimate asylum seeker with what he feels is an air tight case, but because the system is so backlogged with illegitimate asylum claims, he’s not sure they’ll ever get a chance to argue it in court with her next check in 8 years into the future,” posted Melugin on X.
“It made me realize the Biden administration is basically providing backdoor amnesty for anyone who wants to show up at the border,” Kolken told Melugin.
Citizens responded with outrage in the comments.
“Will be voting in 2 national election cycles before her court date,” posted Dr. Joe Borelli.
Indeed, even if a Republican—presumably Trump based on polling—retakes the White House in 2024, he would be out of office by 2029, two years before the woman’s court date.
According to Transactional Record Access Clearinghouse immigration data, the court backlog has reached a record 3 million pending cases.
Meanwhile, illegal border crossers are released into the U.S. and flown to cities across the country.
Democrats, of course, want as many illegal aliens as possible as new welfare state clientele and Democratic Party voters, either to vote illegally or to legalize via amnesty. And they seem intent on keeping high levels of illegals coming across the border no matter how much their existing welfare state clientele in blue cities complain about it.
In other border control news, a 5th Circuit Court of Appeals judge “gutted a lower court’s decision that allowed the Biden administration to continue destroying concertina wire and other border barriers set by the State of Texas.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in October alleging that border guards were destroying the state’s barriers.
The 5th Circuit decided that an earlier decision by a district judge in Del Rio denying a preliminary injunction is faulty. The decision only provides an exception for medical emergencies.
“Concluding that the district court legally erred with respect to sovereign immunity and that Texas has otherwise satisfied the factors under Nken v. Holder, 556 U.S. 418, 434 (2009), we GRANT Texas’s request for an injunction pending appeal,” the judges wrote.
“Accordingly, Defendants are ENJOINED during the pendency of this appeal from damaging, destroying, or otherwise interfering with Texas’s c-wire fence in the vicinity of Eagle Pass, Texas, as indicated in Texas’s complaint. As the parties have agreed, Defendants are permitted to cut or move the c-wire if necessary to address any medical emergency as specified in the TRO.”
For all that the MSM constantly told us that Trump’s border wall is ineffective, they sure seem to spend a lot of effort trying to take it down…
Biggest Losers From Houthi Attacks? Not Israel And America
December 20th, 2023It’s hard to report on Houthi rebels telling U.S. armed forces to “bring it on” and keep a straight face. It’s like Steve Urkel declaring he’s going to kick Mike Tyson’s ass, or Bambi vs. Godzilla.
I mean, their video features a Northrup F-5, a plane introduced to service in 1964 and last manufactured in 1987. It would be very, very unlikely to defeat an F-15, much less an F-35, which would probably splash it from 50 miles away with an AIM-120 and be back in time for breakfast.
I’m a bottomless well of Skiffy pop culture references.
And the rest of their air force (or what little of it survives after Saudi air strikes) is old (and probably ill-maintained) Soviet crap of the type that got smoked by F-15s during Desert Storm more than 30 years ago.
Beyond that, the Houthis probably only have the shitty drones Iran sells to Russia, and the even shittier rockets they give to Hamas, and neither of those will get the job done, either.
So: Yeah.
So instead of the laughable idea of direct Houthi-U.S. military confrontation, let’s turn to Peter Zeihan (yeah, him again) to talk about who the biggest losers are in the Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping. (Hint: It’s not the U.S., or Israel.)
I also have to wonder if there are mercenaries Ukraine could hire to carry out letters of marquis and reprisal on Russian ships…
Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw Files Bill To Ban DEI Statements At Universities
December 19th, 2023Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw sometimes strikes me as a bit squishy, but his bill to ban requiring DEI statements at American universities is a step in the right direction.
A Texas congressman has introduced legislation to quell diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements at American universities by prohibiting “ideological oaths and similar statements” on college campuses.
The bill from Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX-2) would amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 by adding that a university cannot require an employee to “endorse an ideology that promotes the differential treatment of an individual or group of individuals based on race, color, or ethnicity[.]”
The legislation would also prohibit universities from compelling employees to provide DEI statements.
Crenshaw told National Review that “we can see the utter moral bankruptcy in higher education with the spread of antisemitism on college campuses.”
“Make no mistake: The DEI bureaucracy is directly responsible for a toxic campus culture that separates everyone into oppressor versus oppressed.”
“That’s why I am dropping legislation to protect free thought and prevent federal funding for universities that force students to write diversity, equity, and inclusion statements.”
During its 88th regular session, the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill (SB) 17 banning DEI offices at public institutions of higher education. Included in SB 17 are limitations placed on admissions, scholarships, and grants programs.
This June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action admission policies, an opinion based on the legal challenges raised against admission policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina that were accused of disadvantaging Asian applicants.
Although legal challenges to such ideas appear to be winning, the radicalization of students and young people remains an issue to be confronted.
This is a start, but falls far short of the sort of hard reboot our social justice-infected universities really need. And it’s deeply unlikely to pass the Democrat-controlled senate…
China, The Philippines, Marcos, And Blind Spots
December 18th, 2023This post was going to be on how China is still screwing around in the South China Sea (and we’ll get to that), but I want to talk about the difficulty of keeping up with current events, especially of events in foreign nations, especially those nations that don’t usually receive too many headlines. It’s easy to develop blind spots and areas of ignorance.
All of that is prelude to saying that until today, I had no idea that Ferdinand Marcos was President of the The Philippines.
The Marcos in question is not dictator kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos Sr., who died in 1989, but his son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Romualdez Marcos Jr.. (Note how obvious it is that his Wikipedia entry was written by his political enemies.) He was elected in May 2022 and assumed office June 20, 2022. How did I miss that?
In fact, I’ve actually heard more about the failed David Byrne/Fatboy Slim disco musical about his mother Imelda Marcos than I did about Bongbong.
One reason is that I don’t subscribe to a newspaper, because I don’t want a dime going to the Democrat Media Complex. (“If you don’t read a newspaper, you’re ill informed. If you do read a newspaper, you’re misinformed.” – Probably Not Mark Twain) Ditto watching any network newscasts, and I don’t have cable.
I checked my email, and evidently not one of the zillions of newsletters I get ever mentioned the Philippines election while they were going on. Which is odd, since it had a pretty compelling storyline: Marcos’ Vice Presidential running mate was Sara Duterte, the daughter of then President Rodrigo Duterte, in a sort of national unity ticket.
Maybe I’m just out of touch and everyone else already knew about Ferdinand II: The Marcosing, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
Anyway: China is screwing around with The Philippines again.
On Dec. 9, China Coast Guard vessels fired water cannons at Philippine supply ships in the Scarborough Shoal, where the Philippine ships had arrived to resupply fishermen. That’s just the latest skirmish in the disputed atoll, which is located near the Philippines but was seized by China in 2012. In fact, in recent months, China has markedly increased its maritime bullying in the waters off the Philippines. That trend is already beginning to spread nervousness among Western businesses interested in friendshoring some of their operations to the Philippines—which may be precisely what China is after.
The water-cannon attack on the Philippine supply ships, which resulted in one of the vessels suffering engine damage and having to be towed back to port, came only a few weeks after two other heavy-handed actions by Chinese vessels near the Philippine coast.
In late October, a Philippine supply vessel and a vessel from the Philippine Coast Guard were bumped, respectively, by a China Coast Guard vessel and a vessel belonging to China’s maritime militia. The incidents took place near the Second Thomas Shoal, in waters that both the Philippines and China consider their own. In 2016, the tribunal in charge of enforcing the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) sided with Manila over the Second Thomas Shoal, but that hasn’t stopped Beijing from claiming it is the rightful owner and underlining this point through various maritime provocations.
Indeed, for the past decade, there have been regular encounters between China and the Philippines in the desolate waters.
In recent months, China has been particularly keen to demonstrate its presence around the Scarborough and Second Thomas shoals. It has rammed Philippine Coast Guard vessels and boats resupplying fishermen. It has used water cannons against Philippine vessels and tried to chase them away. On just one day in November, 38 Chinese vessels were circling the Second Thomas Shoal’s waters, according to The Associated Press.
Snip.
[Ray Powell, the director of Stanford University’s SeaLight group,said Beijing’s objective] is to discourage any attempts by nearby countries to follow the Philippines’ example in asserting their rights to waters that China has unilaterally declared to belong to Beijing. “China wants to communicate that it has jurisdiction in the South China Sea and gets to decide over activities there,” he explained.
The aggression may be of the gray-zone kind—that is, not involving military violence—but it’s decidedly harmful, and not just to the Philippine and other vessels being targeted. “China’s harassment of civilian Philippine vessels carrying out humanitarian missions has a negative impact on shipping in the surrounding waters,” Amparo Pamela Fabe, a professor at the Philippines’ National Police College and a fellow of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Brute Krulak Center, told me. “It also heightens the geopolitical tensions in the South China Sea.”
Indeed, the harassment has so alarmed the U.S. Defense Department that the U.S. military is now making a point of showing its presence off the Philippine coast, including by sending aircraft to circle above altercations between Chinese and Philippine vessels. But in reality, there isn’t much the Pentagon can do to deter the vessels from the China Coast Guard or the maritime militia off the coast of the Philippines: The United States wouldn’t risk an armed conflict with China over the harassment of Philippine vessels.
I’m pretty sure that China wouldn’t be nearly so confident of that if Donald Trump were still President…
Italy’s Meloni Cuts The Baloney
December 17th, 2023When Giorgia Meloni of the conservative Brothers of Italy was elected head of Italy’s coalition government, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the usual Eurolefty sorts and their media cheering corner about how radical, populist, etc. etc. she was. Plus the usual accusations of fascism, due Brothers of Italy having a bit of that DNA from one of the party’s it joined with being the successor party to the successor party of Il Duce. (It’s Italy. You can’t really tell all the twists and turns of party lineage without a dense color-coded flow chart.)
Wait, you can’t tell it with one, either.
But Meloni has generally governed as a fairly stand-issue slightly rightist leader by European standards. But recently she’s been saying and doing things that show she has a bit more starch than the usual Euroweenie leader.
First up: She announced that Italy’s pulling out of China’s debt-trap Belt-And-Road circus.
Italy will pull out of China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the government has confirmed.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s administration notified Beijing that it would cease participating in the BRI ahead of a deadline at the year’s end.
Italy was the only major Western nation to sign up to the BRI, one of China’s most ambitious trade and infrastructure projects, in 2019.
The move was heavily criticised by the US and others at the time.
Launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, the BRI aims to invest an estimated $1tn (£794bn; €925bn) across Asia and Europe. Projects including new and upgraded railways and ports aim to connect China with Europe and other parts of Asia.
Snip.
Only a fraction of the up to €20bn worth of investment in Italy promised by Mr Xi in 2019 has materialised.
Italian exports to China were worth €16.4bn last year, compared to €13bn in 2019.
By contrast, Chinese exports to Italy rose to €57.5bn from €31.7bn over the same period.
The bill benefited China a lot more than Italy. Indeed, Chinese investment in Italy actually dropped after signing the Belt and Road agreement, from $650 million in 2019 to just $33 million in 2021. (I suspect Flu Manchu had a lot to do with that, but, well, that was China’s fault too.)
Now Meloni has come out and stated that Islam is incompatible with Italy’s values.
Giorgia Meloni said, “In Europe there is a very Islamization process distant from the values of our civilization!”
Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni scoffed at Islamic culture and said that there is no place for it in Europe. “I believe that there is a problem of compatibility between Islamic culture and the values and rights of our civilization,” she said.
The premier added, “The Islamic cultural centers in Italy are financed by Saudi Arabia where Sharia is in force. In Europe there is a very Islamization process distant from the values of our civilization!
The comments come after the Italian prime minister hosted a political festival organised by her far-right party- the Brothers of Italy- in Rome which was attended by British prime minister Rishi Sunak. In his speech, Rishi Sunak said that he would push for global reforms to the asylum system while warning that the threat of growing number of refugees could “overwhelm” parts of Europe.
A whole lot of people in Europe are thinking the same thing, but few have stated it as bluntly as Meloni, and virtually none among EU country Prime Ministers. (Though Hungary’s Viktor Orban has come closest.)
Despite the Russo-Ukrainian War and the growing recession, unlimited Islamic immigration into traditionally Christian European countries is the hot-button topic European elites have been desperate to avoid talking about, and the one in which governing elite groupthink seems farthest away from the actual will of the people.
Expect it to continue to be a hot topic as long as European leaders continue to ignore the consensus among citizens of EU nations that they don’t want Muslim illegal aliens coming to their country.
Russia Now Getting U.S. Forces Directly On Its Border
December 16th, 2023Imagine a timeline in which Russia became a normal country.
Imagine, instead of Putin and a corrupt oligarchy, that Russia had a functioning democracy and a viable economy. It wouldn’t need to be perfect, just something as functional as that seen in, say, Poland or Hungary. There would still be controversies and scandals, but Russia wouldn’t be an international pariah, and would still be fully plugged into the global trade system.
And a normal country wouldn’t have launched an illegal war of territorial aggression against Ukraine.
In such a timeline, old Russian foes Finland and Sweden would never see the need to join NATO. And Russia wouldn’t be getting U.S. bases right on its border.
The US will gain access to 15 military bases along the border with Russia under a defence deal to be signed with Finland next week.
Russia would regard the presence of Nato infrastructure near its borders as a threat, said Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman.
“This will certainly lead to tension. We can only regret this,” Mr Peskov said.
The treaty must be approved by Finland’s parliament.
Elina Valtonen, the country’s foreign minister, will be present in Washington during the signing to meet Antony Blinken, the United States secretary of state.
Washington signed a similar pact with Sweden on Dec 6 that gives the US access to 17 military bases.
Concerns raised by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 led both Finland and Sweden to abandon their military non-alignment and apply for membership in the Nato.
Finland joined in April, while Sweden is still waiting for its bid to be ratified by Nato members Hungary and Turkey.
To be sure, the U.S. already has some access to the military bases of NATO members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. But Finland is much larger than all three combined, and has a vast border with Russia. And the Finns, as I’ve noted before, are no pushovers, having fought the Soviet Union to stalemate during The Winter War.
And now you add American force projection to Finland, and there chances of Russia securing its vast northern flank in any potential war against NATO is essentially nil. Plus it puts St. Petersburg at risk of being captured in a swift pincer movement.
And with real U.S. Air Force support, Russia will be completely incapable of establishing or maintaining air superiority. Ukraine has already made it prohibitively dangerous for Russian aircraft to overfly their territory. How well do you think Ivan will fare when he has to go up against F-22s and F-35s? (And yes, there are already F-22s in Estonia. And Finland and Poland already have F-35s on order.)
Of course, Russia could have avoided all this by not launching an illegal war of territorial aggression in Ukraine. But that would require it being a normal country, which is evidently too much to ask…
(Hat tip: Prairie Pundit.)