Sunday and Monday this week, I gathered up all my dead branches from the ice storm along the curb in advance of Tuesday’s announced neighborhood-wide branch pickup. I know it’s going to take some time, but it’s Friday and I see no signs that brush has been cleared from anyone’s curbs…
He said ESG poses a threat to the American Economy and individual economic freedom, he further said it’s an attempt for corporate’s elite to discriminate against those who do follow a particular “ideological agenda.” His proposal will outlaw this.
“By applying arbitrary ESG financial metrics that serve no one except the companies that created them, elites are circumventing the ballot box to implement a radical ideological agenda. Through this legislation, we will protect the investments of Floridians and the ability of Floridians to participate in the economy,” DeSantis said, at the news conference.
Heh. “Federal District Court Judge Orders Illinois to Show Examples of Every Newly-Banned Firearm.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Maybe they should spend more time on schools instead. “Not A Single Student Can Do Math At Grade Level In 53 Illinois Schools.”
“Judy Monro-Leighton, one of three women who accused now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, was found to have lied during a congressional investigation and is now being charged with making materially false statements and obstruction.”
Nicaragua’s scumbag commie government sentences Roman Catholic bishop Roland Alvarez to 26 years in prison for “treason” for daring to stand up for Catholics and refusing to be exiled.
What began as a trickle is now a flood: the US government is using the banking sector to organize a sophisticated, widespread crackdown against the crypto industry. And the administration’s efforts are no secret: they’re expressed plainly in memos, regulatory guidance, and blog posts. However, the breadth of this plan — spanning virtually every financial regulator — as well as its highly coordinated nature, has even the most steely-eyed crypto veterans nervous that crypto businesses might end up completely unbanked, stablecoins may be stranded and unable to manage flows in and out of crypto, and exchanges might be shut off from the banking system entirely. Let’s dig in.
For crypto firms, obtaining access to the onshore banking system has always been a challenge. Even today, crypto startups struggle mightily to get banks, and only a handful of boutiques serve them. This is why stablecoins like Tether found popularity early on: to facilitate fiat settlement where the rails of traditional banking were unavailable. However, in recent weeks, the intensity of efforts to ringfence the entire crypto space and isolate it from the traditional banking system have ratcheted up significantly. Specifically, the Biden administration is now executing what appears to be a coordinated plan that spans multiple agencies to discourage banks from dealing with crypto firms. It applies to both traditional banks who would serve crypto clients, and crypto-first firms aiming to get bank charters. It includes the administration itself, influential members of Congress, the Fed, the FDIC, the OCC, and the DoJ. Here’s a recap of notable events concerning banks and the policy establishment in recent weeks:
On Dec. 6, Senators Elizabeth Warren, John Kennedy, and Roger Marshall send a letter to crypto-friendly bank Silvergate, scolding them for providing services to FTX and Alameda research, and lambasting them for failing to report suspicious activities associated with those clients
On Dec. 7, Signature (among the most active banks serving crypto clients) announces its intent to halve deposits ascribed to crypto clients — in other words, they’ll give customers their money back, then shut down their accounts — drawing its crypto deposits down from $23b at peak to $10b, and to exit its stablecoin business
On Jan. 3, the Fed, the FDIC, and the OCC release a joint statement on the risks to banks engaging with crypto, not explicitly banning banks’ ability to hold crypto or deal with crypto clients, but strongly discouraging them from doing so on a “safety and soundness” basis
On Jan. 9, Metropolitan Commercial Bank (one of the few banks that serve crypto clients) announces a total shutdown of its cryptoasset-related vertical.
More at the link. I’ve long been skeptical of cryptocurrency advocates assertion that crypto provides a useful alternative to government-backed fiat currency. But it sure looks like the federal government is acting like that’s the case…
An important message about eternal truths from well-known biologist Fred Rogers:
TRIGGER WARNING. ⚠️ This is the most upsetting thing you will see all weekend. pic.twitter.com/eVLPZ3J3RI
CRT-pushing commie Angela Davis finds out that one of her ancestors was on the Mayflower.
A British farmer reviews Clarkson’s Farm. He says despite obvious setup bits, a lot of it (like the unexpected catastrophes and intractable town council bureaucracy) rings true.
Feb 21 (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that Russia was suspending participation in the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with the United States, after accusing the West of being directly involved in attempts to strike its strategic air bases.
“I am forced to announce today that Russia is suspending its participation in the strategic offensive arms treaty,” he said.
New START is the successor to START I, signed by Bush41 and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, limiting strategic weapons to 6,000 nuclear warheads and 1,600 ICBMs and nuclear bombers. New START, signed by Obama and Putin, lowered that to 1,550 nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers (800 total for non-deployed). It placed no limits on tactical nuclear weapons.
Should we worry that Putin is about to launch a new nuclear arms race?
I wouldn’t.
One repeated lesson of the Russo-Ukrainian War is that Russian equipment is ill-kept and ill-maintained. If Russia can’t even properly maintain it’s current military infrastructure, how is it going to launch a new nuclear arms race?
The United States is going to spend some $634 billion this decade maintaining its nuclear deterrent. The U.S. spends more money maintaining nuclear weapons in a given year than Russia spends annually on its entire military. Thermonuclear weapons (not fission-only tactical nuclear weapons) require regular Tritium refresh. Fission weapons still require battery and explosive refresh. Where is Russia going to find money to expand it’s nuclear arsenal when it’s going into it’s second year fighting a full-fledged conventional war, for which it’s already expended most of it’s high precision munitions?
Could Russia build more nuclear weapons? Sure. They have a lot of the old Soviet infrastructure left over, known Uranium deposits, and probably some remaining personnel from the Soviet era with the know-how to do so. But what they don’t have is an overabundance of money, with the Russian economy contracting under sanctions, dwindling hard currency reserves and difficulty obtaining high tech components.
The real reason that Putin withdrew from START is that it allows America to carry out regular inspections of Russian infrastructure, and I’m sure they feared America relaying any actionable intelligence from such inspections to Ukraine.
Aside from that, it’s likely this is simple brinkmanship designed to make the world back down from supporting Ukraine, but if Russia does want to expand it’s nuclear arsenal, expect the process to be slow, difficult and underfunded.
Here’s a longer-than-usual LinkSwarm, since last week’s edition was wiped out by the ice storm power outage.
The leftwing corruption of all government institutions continues apace. “US lost 287,000 jobs while government was reporting +1 million in gains.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“That’s because economic growth is slowing down,” explains research fellow EJ Antoni. “Even the areas which contributed positively to gross domestic product (GDP) are not necessarily signs of prosperity. For example, business investment grew at only 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter, but that was almost entirely inventory growth. Nonresidential investment, a key driver of future economic growth, was up just 0.7 percent.”
“Meanwhile, residential investment fell off a cliff,” Antoni continued, “dropping 26.7 percent as consumers were unable to afford the combination of high home prices, high interest rates and falling real incomes. No wonder homeownership affordability has fallen to the lowest level in that metric’s history.”
There was a gain in net exports, but that was largely a mirage created by a major slowdown in international trade. “Imports are simply falling faster than exports, which shows up as an increase in GDP.”
But probably most concerning to Antoni is the sharp decline in real disposable income in 2022, which exceeded $1 trillion.
“This is the second-largest percentage drop in real disposable income ever, behind only 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression,” he observed. “To keep up with inflation, consumers are depleting their savings and burning through the ‘stimulus’ checks they received during 2020 and 2021. Credit card debt continues growing, while savings plummeted $1.6 trillion last year, falling below 2009 levels.”
Boom. “Texas has punted Citigroup from the syndicate that’s set to manage the Lone Star state’s largest-ever municipal bond offering, saying the bank’s policies for gun retailers discriminate against the firearms industry.”
Grand Theft Pollo. The food service director of an impoverished Illinois school district was charged with stealing $1.5 million of food — most of which was chicken wings. Vera Liddell, 66, allegedly began stealing from the Harvey School District during the height of COVID-19.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Bill Maher continues to take regular red pills. “The problem with communism and some very recent ideologies here at home, is that they think you can change reality by screaming at it.”
We could be heroes, just for one day. Or once a month, as the case may be…
This week in rapper murders: “Tampa rapper arrested for young mother’s murder days after being acquitted of recording studio double-murder.”
A Tampa jury acquitted Billy Adams of killing two men in a makeshift recording studio in Lutz. He walked free from a Tampa courtroom on January 27.
Three days later, a young mother who was pregnant with her second child was found shot to death in a residential area of New Tampa. Her toddler was still in her vehicle nearby.
A week after her death, Tampa police said Billy Adams “did admit to being the one to pull the trigger.”
I’ve previously covered suicide drones and drones dropping RPGs. Now Ukraine is evidently cutting out the middleman and passing the savings on to Ivan by just strapping RPGs to light drones and guiding them in.
Here’s a screen-grab of this masterpiece of redneck engineering:
The is a great application of one of Murphy’s Military Laws: “If it’s stupid but it works, it ain’t stupid.” For the Russians, it must be quite embarrassing to get yeeted into the afterlife by Doogie Howser’s science fair project.
I’m somewhat surprised that drones that small can carry the RPG rounds effectively, but presumably they’re replacing camera gear or something close to the same weight.
An RPG-7 costs about $2,500 each, while a BMP-3 costs about $800,000 each. Even if you double the price for the quadcopter ($2,500 is a bit pricey, but not out-of-line for some pro rigs), you still get a hugely useful loitering munition for less than 1/100th the cost of the target you’re taking out…
Once again, Russia has announced its latest Wunderwaffe is coming to Ukraine, which ZeroHedge treats seriously, because ZeroHedge.
Western media outlets flooded the airways with hope for Ukraine this week as the US prepares to send 31 main battle tanks to the wartorn country in Eastern Europe to counter Russian aggression ahead of spring. What wasn’t highly publicized is that these M1 Abrams are a modified version and will be stripped of “secret” uranium armor.
Following the news of NATO-made tanks set to flood Ukraine, the former head of Russia’s space agency Dmitry Rogozin told the Russian newspaper Pravda that “Marker,” a new robo-tank, will be able to ‘destroy Western tanks, including American Abrams and German Leopards.’
Rogozin explained the robot tank automatically recognizes and attacks Ukrainian equipment, including NATO tanks, all because of its artificial intelligence system and machine learning technology.
“The combat version of the Marker robot has an electronic catalog in the control system that contains images of targets both in the visible and in the infrared range,” he said.
The director of the Air Defense Museum, retired colonel Yuri Knutov, told Lenta.Ru, a Russian newspaper, “the robot can thus identify NATO-made tanks” and will be “armed with a machine gun and an anti-tank missile with a range of up to about six kilometers.”
Honestly, all of this is pretty hilarious stuff.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are real disciplines, and Russia doesn’t entirely lack technological and programming talent. It’s entirely possible that you could develop and effective autonomous battle-tank driven by AI that can adequately detect between friend and foe given lots of money, lots of time, honest, hands-off project management, and sophisticated, iterative, trial-and-error proving over a decade or more of time.
All things Russia isn’t going to have or do. If they could adequately identify friend from foe on the battlefield (especially given how much kit Ukraine shares with Russia), then they’d already be using such technology to prevent the numerous, documented friendly fire instances Russia has suffered from. And training AI to do that is something like six orders of magnitude harder than training troops to do it.
And we all know Russia sucks at training its own troops as well.
Russia’s military is so demonstrably backwards that they can’t even have their army and air force communicate with each other in real time for combined arms operations. And yet we’re supposed to believe that they’ve developed cutting edge autonomous battlefield AI?
Pull the other one.
Russia has a long history of vaporware, and Russia’s previous attempt at field trials for a semi-autonomous AFV in Syria was a hilarious disaster. And it was plagued by bog-standard mechanical failures. Autonomous driving is a whole lot harder.
There’s a small possibility that they’ll get this thing into the field and immediately start blowing away its own troops, but a far more likely outcome is that it never sees the field at all, just the latest case of Russian Wunderwaffe vaporware.
Nothing to cheer you up quite like a discussion of potential genocide.
Takeaways:
He starts out talking about how Russia plans to add some 500,000 new troops and use them in a late spring offensive when the mud dries up. As I mentioned previously, that plan is only scheduled to produce new troops over several years, and I express grave doubts that Russia can train and equip new troops when it has singularly failed to do so thus far.
He reiterates from previous videos that Russia’s military is heavily dependent on rail, but they’ve had to make do with trucks, and those trucks have been heavily targeted by Ukraine.
“Russians began the war with 3,000 military support trucks they’re probably down to only about 500 now.”
“[Russians] are doing what they can to destroy morale, and destroy the Ukrainian economy, and kill as many Ukrainian civilians as possible. They’re using drones, they’re using fighter launch missiles, they’re using cruise missiles and they’ve started to use ballistic missiles, to target specifically Ukrainian physical infrastructure, most notably electricity generating plant.”
Ukraine is having trouble exporting grain. “Exports have fallen to almost nothing.”
The countries that would normally import from Ukraine, come October, November, December are going to realize it’s just not there. Most of those countries are in Africa, some are in South Asia. And the one I am, by far, the most worried about is Egypt. Egypt is poor and they import over half the grains they need to survive, mostly wheat. The wheat is already off-line, and so we should expect to see significant upheaval—economic, humanitarian, political—across the Arab world and into South Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa.
The mention of a second Holodomor is a reminder that not enough people know about the first Holodomor, when the Soviet Union starved some 5-7 million Ukrainians to death (and some 14.5 million total for the whole collectivization famine/”dekulakization”/suppression of the Kazakhs and Tartars/etc.
Russia detailed plans Tuesday to expand its military to 1.5 million personnel over the next few years, a move that comes as Ukraine warns that Moscow may be planning an offensive and increased tensions between Moscow and the United States and its allies.
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced the troop increase, which is expected to be complete by 2026, according to Russian state news agency, TASS.
Russia will also create military districts in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and an army corps will be created in the Republic of Karelia along Russia’s border with Finland, The Wall Street Journal reported. In addition, Moscow will set up “self-sufficient” units in Russian-held territories of Ukraine, Shoigu said.
“Only by strengthening the key structural components of the Armed Forces is it possible to guarantee the military security of the state and protect new entities and critical facilities of the Russian Federation,” Shoigu said, according to Reuters.
The announcement comes as Moscow faces setbacks on the battlefield in neighboring Ukraine. Since its 2022 invasion, Russia has been bogged down in Ukraine’s east despite some territorial gains.
Russia’s military has around 1 million troops.
The question I have is: How is Russia going to equip and train these 500,000 new conscripts when they’ve hardly been successful providing equipment for their previous conscripts?
Have they gotten better in the last few months? Well, it would be hard to top their previous “stick a tampon in your wound” level of incompetence. The hard-won success in taking Soledar suggests some improvement in tactics, but since most of the success was accomplished by the Wagner group, it says nothing about Russian conscripts being better equipped or trained.
On paper, there’s nothing to prevent the Russians from churning out more field kits, uniforms, small arms, ammunition and bandages with which to equip their new conscripts. None of those things require high tech components. But thus far they’ve proven singularly incapable of supplying them to their troops.
Throwing bodies at the problem is a classic Russian war strategy, but absent a miraculous increase in basic competence, the latest move shows little promise to win the war in Ukraine for Russia, even if they are capable of rounding upo another 500,000 Russians to throw into the meat-grinder. .
Lindybeige (a military YouTuber whose tank videos I’ve used before) interviews a British volunteer fighting in Ukraine as to what is and isn’t useful field kit.
“Joe Rogan interviews Peter Zeihan” is obviously irresistible catnip for me, as any regular readers recognize. It’s like Rogan is reading my blog! (Joe, you should totally interview me! I’m a great speaker, I’m local, I can bring my dogs over to play with Marshall, and I can tell you what doing standup comedy was like in Houston in the 80s…)
I don’t have the entire interview, because Spotify, but there are some big, interesting chunks I found on YouTube. Many cover ground familiar to BattleSwarm readers.
First up: Zeihan explains his theory on why the Russo-Ukrainian War was inevitable because they had to get across Ukraine to plug defensive gaps, and that Russia had to do it in advance of a demographic death spiral.
Caveat: I’m not sure the “plugging the gaps” theory explains the invasion any better than old fashioned Russian chauvinism; how dare those lowly Ukrainians resist being incorporated into glorious Russia?
Next up: Will Russia use nukes? Zeihan thinks it unlikely.
“We’re not just providing the Ukrainians with the weaponry and the ammo, we’re providing them with the intelligence and most of the steps of the kill chain. Without that, the weapons are of limited usefulness, especially at long range, and the Ukrainians have no desire to rupture that relationship.”
“The Russians are relatively casualty immune. They fight in an area where they fight with numbers. They’ve never been technologically advanced versus their peers, they’ve always just thrown bodies at it. So there has never been a conflict in Russian history where they have backed out without first losing a half a million men. We’re at about a hundred thousand now. We have a long way to go before the Russian military breaks.” (I think he’s forgetting the Russo-Japanese War, where they got their asses kicked but lost a whole lot less than half a million men. Maybe he implied European war, and ignored a lot of minor ones following the Russian revolution, and ignored anything before the Russian Empire…)
We don’t how many Ukrainian civilians the Russians have slaughtered; maybe 250,000. “If you think of things like Bucha and Izyum, German radio intercepts told us as far back as May that there were at least 70 places behind Russian lines that had suffered massacres [like] Bucha, and when we’ve had additional liberations since then, it corroborates that general assessment.”
“The Russians are fighting so badly, they’re doing much worse than the Iraqis did in 1992.”
“Russia has always been poorly managed and authoritarian, but under Putin it’s taken a much darker turn because of the nature of the end of the Cold War.” Yeah, no. Putin is not a “darker” authoritarian than Stalin.
On Putin’s paranoia, isolation, and possible illness. Plus a bit about gay demons.
“We’re now in an environment that between the terminal demographic structureof the Soviet/Russian system, and Putin’s personal paranoia. So he’s gone through and purged what was left of the KGB, FSB, of anyone who has personal ambitions to succeed him. We’re left with an entire political elite of only about 130 people, and Putin has removed anyone who has leadership ambitions.”
“Any sort of leadership talent has left, or been killed.”
“When it came to the Kherson offensive, and it became clear that there was more going on than just NATO weapons, the Ukrainians actually knew what they were doing, they changed the the line from that these are all Nazis to these are actually gay demons.” (Rogan: “What???”)
“This is the official line right now that ‘We have homosexual demons fighting us in Ukraine.'” (I’m going to guess that it’s not the line, but just the latest in a firehose stream of ever-more-risible excuses for failure that no one pays any serious attention to, just like whatever Baghdad Bob spit out in 2003.
“The guy who’s in charge of the Orthodox Church is a Putin crony.”
“We’ve got a Jewish Nazi gay demon.”
On Putin having cancer and/or Parkinson’s: “He’s clearly on steroids, but that could mean a whole lot of things…He looks very, not just flushed, but puffy, and that’s that’s kind of a classic too many steroids in your system issue.”
“There was this great piece that came out that I saw last week, where it was all the propaganda shots that he’s taken with, like, the soldiers mothers, and on the front, and with the tech people, and in the, intelligence and it was like the same twelve people were in every single shot, just in different outfits and even with those people he’s wearing his ballistic vest.”
“He’s clearly unhealthy.”
“He’s got the shakes, that’s one of the reasons [for the] Parkinson’s analysis.”
“The Ukrainian propaganda guy has been saying that there’s a coup underway since March…I wouldn’t put too much into that.”
Rogan: “What a fucked-up situation.” Zeihan: “For the Europeans who have been dealing with the Russians for three centuries, this is kind of par for the course.”
I’ve got at least four more videos to go, so let’s break this post into two parts.
“Every few months to couple of years, a new conventional wisdom takes hold that the United States is in its final years, if not final months, and some big political thing is going to happen that is going to dethrone the US dollar as the global currency, and all American power will unwind with that. There is no part of that logic chain that has ever been correct.”
Some takeaways:
U.S power is not a result of its position as the global currency, it’s the other way around. The global currency has to be able to impose, by force if necessary, some sort of taxpax on the trading system to allow trade to happen in the first place. And right now the U.S Navy is more powerful than that of all other navies combined by about a factor of seven. And if you consider that the world’s second and third most powerful expeditionary navies are the Japanese fleet and the British fleet, and you throw them in as American for this Force projection factor, you’re now talking in excess of 12 to 1.
“Honestly, there’s there’s never been any math there and there’s no danger to the U.S. position from a strategic point of view.”
“BRICs is a group of four large developing economies: Brazil, Russia, India and China. It’s a grouping that was put together by some finance guy back in the 2000s, and all he meant by it was ‘Hey, look, these are four big countries with big bond markets we might want to consider trading these as a group.’ That’s all he ever thought about it.”
“The leaders of the BRICs countries do get together from time to time. [No]
meaningful policy has ever come out of it, because these countries don’t really trade. I mean they all trade with China, of course, but they don’t trade with one another, so there’s a reason to caucus with Beijing, but the rest of it is just kind of fluff. Always has been.”
“When I see stories about other countries such as South Africa, or Argentina, or now Saudi Arabia starting to join, I’m like ‘Oh, this is really boring.’ Because these countries really have nothing in common.”
“The conspiratorial logic goes: If they stop using the U.S. dollar, then the US is doomed. Well they’d have to start using something else, and none of them, none of them, want to use each other’s currencies, because that would give that country a leg up.”
“The Russians have always said that the ruble should be the global currency, which makes everyone, everyone laugh, because nobody wants rubles, especially Russians.”
Same for the Yuan and the Rand.
“If you want to have a Global Currency it has to be huge. It has to be able enough to lubricate the global exchange mechanisms, which at last check was in the tens of trillions. And that doesn’t mean that your currency has to be in the tens of trillions, that means you have to be able to lubricate the exchange of tens of trillions, your currency needs to be even bigger.”
Which gets us to probably the single biggest constraint on being a global currency: you have to not care what happens to the value of your currency in any given day, because if there’s a trade surge and demand of your currency goes up, then all of a sudden supply of your currency is plummeted, and you’re dealing with very real economic distortions at home. So your currency has to be so huge that you don’t care that global exchange in it is moving around every day. And that means you also need to be able to run a persistent trade deficit, because you have to be able to provide currency for everyone who wants to trade everywhere at any time, and you cannot sign off on each individual transaction.
“That makes the list down to one already.”
“Europeans couldn’t do it, because they have to run a trade surplus because their demographics are so aged they will never be net importers again.”
“It can’t be the Chinese. The Chinese are the most manipulated currency in human history. They print two to five times as much currency every month as the U.S Fed did at the height of our monetization programs in 2007 to 2008, and then again during Covid. It’s everything that everyone says is wrong with the US dollar is actually wrong with the Yuan by a factor of 10.”
“Every time the Chinese start to loosen up their capital controls in an attempt to have a bigger role for their currency internationally, a half a trillion to a trillion dollars of private savings floods out of the country in a matter of months, and they have to slam that window shut again.”
Even in times of war, countries tend to use the dominate global currency for international trade, even if issued by their current enemy.
“The Russians are under financial constraints right now, sanctions put on them by the Americans the Europeans and others, and so they tried to pull a lot of their petroleum earnings, which comes in in euros and dollars, and they tried to push it into Chinese yuan as kind of like a stick it to the West. Well, a few months later they tried to then pull it out, and the Chinese went like ‘Well, no, we really don’t want these Yuan back.’ And so the Russians just lost tens of billions of dollars.”
In a post-globalist economy, American dollars provide a handy hedge against regional hegemons.
“There’s no shortage of people who don’t like Americans, who have no sense of math or history, who are always going to trot this up every few months, and it means as little today as it did then.”
