Marine Littoral Combat Regiment?

May 3rd, 2020

In something of a follow-up to news that the Marine Corps is eliminating its tank regiments over the next decade, there are plans afoot to develop and field a Marine Littoral Combat regiment

The Marine Corps’ current force design conversations and planning will help develop the littoral regiment concept, Stephenson said.

If the past few months of public appearances by Berger and his top generals are any indication, a littoral regiment would likely find itself in the III Marine Expeditionary Force, headquartered in Okinawa, Japan, and consist of small teams of Marines armed with a host of unmanned air, ground and maritime assets along with long range fires and air defense systems.

Sounds like the Marines are going to go heavy into drones.

While details are not yet available, a regiment is a sizable unit to form in a limited manpower Marine Corps.

An infantry regiment can include up to nearly 2,200 Marines divided into three battalions along with a headquarters and support company, depending on the mission and configuration.

But there are different configurations for a regiment. The Corps also staffs combat logistics regiments to provide transport, communication and logistics assets to the ground combat forces.

In October 2019, Brig. Gen. Benjamin Watson said that the Corps was “no longer going to stick or take an uncompromising position on the sanctity of the MAGTF,” [Marine Air-Ground Task Force, a basic Marine organizational structure since 1963] while speaking at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Expeditionary Warfare Conference in Annapolis, Maryland.

“If what is needed is a piece of the Marine Corps that is not organized like a MAGTF or a capability the Marine Corps can bring that is not a MAGTF, then we are not too proud to provide that,” he said.

A retired Marine Corps officer now a senior adviser for the Center for Strategic & International Studies shared analysis at the same conference showing “no growth” for personnel in future Marine budget planning.

“Coastal defense, cyber, space,” Mark Cancian said. “They will have to take down existing capabilities to find the structure and the space to do that.”

I rather doubt the Marines are going to field localized cyberwarfare units out in combat regiments beyond some basic signal corps countermeasures. I suspect we already have a cyberwarfare unit up and running out of one or more three initial agencies in the greater D.C. area.

The Corps will need to cut and shift priorities for the next fight, Berger said at a November Marine Corps Association and Foundation dinner.

“We may need to get smaller, trade some parts we’ve had for a long time but are not a good fit for the future,” Berger said.

He looked to reduce or eliminate money going toward manned anti-armor ground and aviation platforms, manned and traditional towed artillery that can’t shoot hypervelocity rounds and short range mortar systems.

All other efforts are leaning into conducting sea control and sea denial operations from the sea and maritime terrain, he said.

To make that happen, the commandant said that he wants low cost, lethal air and ground unmanned platforms, unmanned long range surface and subsurface vehicles, mobile, rapidly deployable rocket systems, long range precision fires, loitering munitions across the echelons, mobile air defense and counter-precision guided munitions capabilities, signature management, electronic warfare and expeditionary airfields. [“Signature management,” in this context, means controlling your electronic emissions and observables. “To be detected is to be targeted is to be killed.”]

And it appears, the Marine littoral regiment may be the formation for many of those new capabilities and manpower.

All this seems both forward-looking and also very amorphous. It suggests “we’re adjusting our force mix to better face off against China, but we’re not sure quite how yet.” But China is just one part of the equation; the furious pace of technological change, budget pressures, and long simmering doctrinal debates all seem to be additional change drivers.

It’s also interesting that they’re using the word “littoral,” as the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship program was hardly a smashing success.

Great power military conflicts of the future are likely to use weapons smarter, more autonomous, more lethal and probably lower cost than the weapons systems we’ve built our combat forces around today. Taking and holding contested shorelines is probably going to look less like Iwo Jima and more like battles between rival autonomous drone swarms.

The question is how long it will take to get to that technological plateau, and what the Marine Corps will look like during the transition.

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Posted in Military | 3 Comments »

The History of Firearms Development Part 1

May 2nd, 2020

This Borepatch post got me thinking about the history of firearms development, and all the mistakes and blind alleys along the way. Plus I wanted to put up videos (where available) of how some of the weird firearms Borepatch described actually worked.

But before I did that, I realized I needed to delve into the basics of gunpowder and early firearms development, to set out things in chronological order.

Here’s a short one covering the invention of gunpowder in China, featuring primitive proto-firearms like the firelance, up through early European cannons, the hand-canon and the arquebus.

Here’s a video of someone testing a home-built recreation firelance using bamboo. The first attempt does not go well, so they reinforced the bamboo on the second with electrical tape.

A longer look at the development of early gunpowder weapons in Europe up through the early Napoleonic War:

Highlights: the difficulty of getting saltpeter means Europeans needed to make it by boiling down animal waste, how “corning” vastly increased the power of gunpowder, how they made cannon bodies out of strips of metal bound with iron hoops (why they’re still know today as bun barrels), and how the Pumhart von Steyr is the largest siege cannon still existent, firing stones that weighed 1,533 pounds. Also, Henry Knox, George Washington’s master of artillery, was by profession a bookseller of military history. And the exploding shell was invented by British Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel.

A short look at gun development from the hand-cannon to the musket:

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Posted in Guns, Military, video | 1 Comment »

LinkSwarm for May 1 , 2020

May 1st, 2020

Happy Victims of Communism Day. Texas is reopening, California is closing beaches, and we contemplate the mysteries of Sweden and Denmark.

  • Director Blue sent me this comparison of Wuhan coronavirus curves in various countries. The point of the piece was that Sweden, which hasn’t practiced social distancing, is doing better than European countries that have. However, what I find most interesting is that Denmark seems to be doing even better. Anyone know the reason?
  • Speaking of Denmark, they haven’t seen any sort of uptick in cases since they reopened.
  • “New York Required Nursing Homes To Admit ‘Medically Stable’ Coronavirus Patients. The Results Were Deadly.”

    On March 25, New York’s Health Department issued a mandate that state nursing homes could not refuse COVID-19-positive patients who were “medically stable,” meaning facilities that housed the most vulnerable populations were forced to introduce the virus into their midst.

    A nursing home in Queens received two coronavirus patients who had been discharged from a hospital (but were still contagious and in need of care) – along with a box containing body bags, The New York Post reported. An executive at the facility told the Post it had been free of the coronavirus prior to accepting those two patients. The executive also said that along with the two patients arrived a shipment of personal protective equipment and the body bags.

    “My colleague noticed that one of the boxes was extremely heavy. Curious as to what could possibly be making that particular box so much heavier than the rest, he opened it,” the executive told the Post. “The first two coronavirus patients were accompanied by five body bags.”

    The Post reported that within days, “three of the bags were filled with the first of 30 residents who would die there.” The nursing facility continued to receive shipments of five body bags per week since those first two patients arrived – and they have been needed.

    “Cuomo has blood on his hands. He really does. There’s no way to sugarcoat this,” the nursing home executive told the outlet. “Why in the world would you be sending coronavirus patients to a nursing home, where the most vulnerable population to this disease resides?”

  • Speaking Cuomo scandals, here’s a look back at the Buffalo Billions crony graft scandal.
  • What the hell? “NYPD telling cops to prioritize 311 calls over 911.” “People getting jumped, robbed, assaulted…doesn’t matter.” How do you expect NYPD to deal with assault when there are so many people standing only five feet apart?

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • While Texas is starting to reopen the economy today, California Governor Gavin Newsom is closing down the beach. This is what happens when your governor is Stuck On Stupid.
  • YouTube censors California doctors for daring to disagree with Democratic politicians.
  • Georgia lifts the stay-at-home order.
  • “California Prisons Release Thousands Of Felons To Make Room For Skaters, Surfers, People Who Go Outside.”
  • Are overall American death rates in the United States actually down due to the coronavirus?

    Low fatality rates for 2020 are, at this point, a mystery. However, assuming I am reading the CDC spread sheet correctly, one thing is clear: there are nowhere near as many deaths actually caused by COVID-19 as government sources claim. If the Wuhan flu had really killed 40,000 or so people who would not otherwise have died over the last 14 weeks, it would be obvious in the overall mortality statistics. The fact that no such effect is visible–that, astonishingly, the death rate has actually declined–is consistent only with the assumption that not many people have died from COVID-19 who would not have died anyway, at about the same time.

  • In the land of Blue-on-Blue violence, Michael Moore has produced a new documentary out that takes on environmental green-washing. (The full film can be found here.)
  • Politico admits that a President Trump/Bank of China hit piece was completely false.
  • “I’m not saying it’s aliens, but…” (Previously.)
  • Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Andy Beshear slams somebody for filing for unemployment under the name “Tupac Shakur.” Tiny problem: that’s the guy’s real name.
  • How Democrats suppressed Republican votes in Wisconsin.
  • “Two Americas: Karens and Everybody Else.”
  • Nailed it:

  • Whoa:

  • Flashback to 2016 and Kat Timpf at The Gathering of the Juggalos.
  • Dolly Parton the vampire slayer.
  • “YouTube Removing All Videos That Don’t Begin With The Chinese National Anthem.”
  • Your daily “Awwww”:

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Texas, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »

    Tomorrow is Victims of Communism Day

    April 30th, 2020

    Remember that tomorrow is May 1st, which means that once again it’s time to observe Victims of Communism Day, as the victims of a brutal ideology that killed over 100 million people deserve their own day of remembrance.

    VictimsofCommunismDay

    Here’s a list of memorials to the victims of communism. Some I’ve linked before, some I haven’t. I was unaware that they had unveiled a memorial to the Holodomor in Washington, D.C.

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    Posted in Communism | No Comments »

    A Farewell to Marine Tanks?

    April 29th, 2020

    Evidently the Marine Corps is going to shed all its tank units over the next decade.

    In the next decade, the Marine Corps will no longer operate tanks or have law enforcement battalions. It will also have three fewer infantry units and will shed about 7% of its overall force as the service prepares for a potential face-off with China.

    The Marine Corps is cutting all military occupational specialties associated with tank battalions, law enforcement units and bridging companies, the service announced Monday. It’s also reducing its number of infantry battalions from 24 to 21 and cutting tiltrotor, attack and heavy-lift aviation squadrons.

    The changes are the result of a sweeping months-long review and war-gaming experiments that laid out the force the service will need by 2030. Commandant Gen. David Berger directed the review, which he has called his No. 1 priority as the service’s top general.

    “Developing a force that incorporates emerging technologies and a significant change to force structure within our current resource constraints will require the Marine Corps to become smaller and remove legacy capabilities,” a news release announcing the changes states.

    By 2030, the Marine Corps will drop down to an end strength of 170,000 personnel. That’s about 16,000 fewer leathernecks than it has today.

    In a certain way it makes sense, as the Marine Corps is a branch of the Navy and focused on amphibious operations, and you can’t fit a lot of M1A2 Abrams tanks on a Wasp class amphibious assault ship. On the other hand, the Marine 1st Tank Battalion predates Pearl Harbor. That’s a lot of tradition to leave behind.

    The decision to de-emphasize rotor craft (presumably both helicopters and the V-22 Osprey) is also interesting, especially since the Marines are the only users of the new AH-1Z Viper.

    “The future Fleet Marine Force requires a transformation from a legacy force to a modernized force with new organic capabilities,” it adds. “The FMF in 2030 will allow the Navy and Marine Corps to restore the strategic initiative and to define the future of maritime conflict by capitalizing on new capabilities to deter conflict and dominate inside the enemy’s weapon engagement zone.”

    Existing infantry units are going to get smaller and lighter, according to the plan, “to support naval expeditionary warfare, and built to facilitate distributed and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations.”

    The Marine Corps will also create three littoral regiments that are organized, trained and equipped to handle sea denial and control missions. The news release describes the new units as a “Pacific posture.” Marine expeditionary units, which deploy on Navy ships, will augment those new regiments, the release adds.

    In addition to more unmanned systems and long-range fire capabilities, the Marine Corps also wants a new light amphibious warship and will invest in signature management, electronic warfare and other systems that will allow Marines to operate from “minimally developed locations.”

    Berger has called China’s buildup in the South China Sea and Asia-Pacific region a game changer for the Navy and Marine Corps. He has pushed for closer integration between the sea services, as the fight shifts away from insurgent groups in the Middle East and to new threats at sea.

    Part of the reason for Marines getting rid of tank sis their increasing vulnerability to precision weapons systems:

    Tanks and armored vehicles have had trouble surviving against the threat of precision strike and the plethora of drone and reconnaissance systems flooding conflict zones across the Middle East.

    For recent evidence, a Turkish launched operation targeting Syrian regime army troops in late February decimated more than a hundred tanks and armored vehicles, dozens of artillery pieces and hundreds of Syrian forces, according to the Turkish National Ministry of Defense.

    Turkey posted videos highlighting a mixed role of drones, Paladin artillery systems and aircraft pounding Syrian armor from the skies over the course of several days. The Syrian army appeared helpless to defend from the onslaught of long range systems. Even tanks camouflaged by buildings and bushes were no match for sensors and thermal imaging watching from the skies.

    The problem is exacerbated by the number of sophisticated anti-tank systems flooding counterinsurgency conflicts across the globe and access to long range drones once only in control by state actors are now being operated by militia groups.

    In Libya, the Libyan National Army has the upper hand in its drone war with the UN-backed Tripoli government. It’s equipped with an alleged UAE-supplied Chinese drone known as the Wing Long II that boasts a 2,000 km range through a satellite link and is reportedly armed with Chinese manufactured Blue Arrow 7 precision strike air-to-surface missiles.

    So it once again gets back to China.

    In a way it’s heartening that the U.S. military is preparing to fight the next war rather than remain stuck in the paradigms of the last one. But history shows that the next war has way of popping up where we didn’t expect it. U.S. and Soviet armor never faced off in the Fulda Gap, and in 1989, no one was expecting U.S. forces to be fighting in Iraq.

    We still have the best military in the world, I just hope we retain the tactical and strategic flexibility to meet all the challenges of the 21st century.

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    Posted in Military | 2 Comments »

    Gov. Abbott Unveils Plan To Reopen Texas

    April 28th, 2020

    After much criticism from conservative activists that he was moving too slowly to reopen the Texas economy, Governor Greg Abbott has finally unveiled his plan to do just that.

    Governor Greg Abbott today announced the first phase of the State of Texas’ ongoing plan to safely and strategically open Texas while minimizing the spread of COVID-19. Under Phase I, certain services and activities are allowed to open with limited occupancy, and the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) is issuing minimum standard health protocols for all businesses and individuals to follow. The Governor also outlined special guidance for Texans over 65 and detailed a comprehensive mitigation plan for nursing homes in Texas. The Governor also announced a statewide testing and tracing program developed by DSHS that will help public health officials quickly identify and test Texans who contract COVID-19 and mitigate further spread of the virus.

    The Governor’s announcement is accompanied by Texans Helping Texans: The Governor’s Report to Open Texas. This detailed report, available on the strike force website, helps Texans understand phase one by outlining the new protocols, guidance, and recommendations. The report also includes a series of Open Texas Checklists that outline DSHS’ minimum standard health protocols for all Texans.

    “This strategic approach to opening the state of Texas prioritizes the health and safety of our communities and follows the guidelines laid out by our team of medical experts,” said Governor Abbott. “Now more than ever, Texans must remain committed to safe distancing practices that reduce the spread of COVID-19, and we must continue to rely on doctors and data to provide us with the safest strategies to restore Texans’ livelihoods. We must also focus on protecting the most vulnerable Texans from exposure to COVID-19. If we remain focused on protecting the lives of our fellow Texans, we can continue to open the Lone Star State.”

    By way of Executive Order (GA-18), all retail stores, restaurants, movie theaters, and malls are permitted to reopen on Friday, May 1. These services must limit their capacity to 25% of their listed occupancy. Within shopping malls, the food-court dining areas, play areas, and interactive displays and settings must remain closed.

    All museums and libraries may open under the same 25% occupancy limitation, but interactive areas of museums must remain closed. State libraries and museums will open by May 1, and local public museums and libraries may reopen only if permitted by the local government. Single-person offices may reopen as well.

    Churches and places of worship remain open. Outdoor sports are allowed to resume so long as no more than four participants are playing together at one time. Certain social distancing practices must also be followed. Local government operations, including county and municipal government operations relating to permitting, recordation, and document-filing services, may reopen as determined by the local government.

    DSHS has recommended minimum standard health protocols for all individuals, all employers and employees, as well as industry-specific protocols for retailers, retail customers, restaurants, restaurant patrons, movie theaters, movie theater customers, museums and libraries, museum and library visitors, outdoor sports participants, single-person offices, and low COVID-19 counties. These protocols are outlined in the Open Texas Checklists within the Governor’s report beginning on page 20.

    Essential services such as farmers and ranchers, grocery and drug stores, banks, and gas stations will continue to operate. Public swimming pools, bars, gyms, cosmetology salons, massage establishments, interactive amusement venues, such as bowling alleys and video arcades, and tattoo and piercing studios will remain closed through Phase I. Nursing homes, state supported living centers, assisted living facilities, and long-term care facilities must remain closed to visitors unless to provide critical assistance.

    The Governor also established increased occupancy protocols for certain counties with five or fewer laboratory confirmed cases of COVID-19. Those counties may, on an individualized basis, increase occupancy limits to up to 50% for restaurants, retail, shopping malls, museums and libraries, and movie theaters if they meet certain criteria. The county judge must certify and affirm to DSHS that the following standards have been investigated and confirmed to be met:

    1. The county had five or fewer COVID-19 laboratory confirmed cases on April 30, 2020 or, at a later date, five or fewer active COVID-19 cases as verified by DSHS.
    2. The county has created a list of testing opportunities in the county or the area.
    3. The county has been in contact with its designated regional advisory council to ensure the community is prepared for any needed health care transfers.
    4. The county has provided public notice to the residents of the county, including: Signs and symptoms of COVID-19: Recommended health and safety protocols in line with CDC guidance; Information regarding how residents can get tested in the area; A link to the DSHS website where residents can go to learn about community spread in nearby communities, in order to help county residents understand their risk to exposure if they travel regularly outside of the county.
    5. The county has contacted each of the following types of facilities located in the county to ensure they are complying with Texas Health and Human Services (HHSC) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines regarding COVID-19: Nursing homes; Assisted living facilities; Industrial, agricultural, or business facilities with a significant number of employees; and City or county jails.
    6. The county is equipped and prepared to protect vulnerable populations, including nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
    7. The county has documented procedures to be activated if a resident becomes COVID-19 positive, including procedures to take appropriate measures as necessary in line with the plan to open Texas.
    8. The county has contacted DSHS in order to create a plan to ensure contact tracing will occur within 48 hours of a positive test reported to DSHS.

    Phase I will begin Friday May 1 and continue until at least May 18. The Governor will continue to evaluate next steps for the state.

    I like the fact that there’s some movement to reopen the economy, and that there’s finally a recognition that it’s stupid for Harris and Loving counties to be following the same rules. In fact, I’d prefer to see counties with no reported cases open up 100%.

    What I dislike is the institutional hypocrisy of imposing rules that no one is going to enforce. Do you think police are going to go around calculating capacity? “Hey! This place is 27% full! You, get out!”

    Outdoor sports with four people sounds like a pander to the golf set, although I suppose tennis, boxing and mixed martial arts would all qualify if it occurs outdoors, but five people playing Frisbee? Verboten!

    The restaurant patron guidelines have all the power of Austin Powers saying “Oh, behave!”

    I’m OK with continued nursing home guidelines.

    I would like to see more bias toward freedom in these guidelines and less toward ass-covering, with lots of guidelines that seem to be there just so Abbott and company can say “I told them to do X!” if infection rates start rising again.

    My guess is they won’t, based on the almost universal infection decline curve exhibited in various countries, and increasing evidence that sunlight/hard UV kills the virus. In fact, on that basis I’d like to see limited reopening of bars for outdoor service. Maybe in Phase 2?

    Texas has the second-best recovery rate from infection of any state:

    Our hospitals are not overwhelmed, so we have the capacity to handle an uptick in cases.

    Based on those metrics, I would have liked to see more boldness from Gov. Abbott than shown here. Abbott’s advisory board seems to be looking at the early (inaccurate) models rather than latter data.

    Still, an overly timid reopening is much better than no reopening at all…

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    Posted in Economics, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »

    BidenWatch for April 27, 2020

    April 27th, 2020

    The Tara Reade rape-accusation scandal isn’t going away, nor is the Bejing Biden tag, no matter how hard Team Joe might try to jujitsu it away. Plus Q1 fundraising numbers drop. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Well well well well well: “New Evidence Supporting Credibility of Tara Reade’s Allegation Against Joe Biden Emerges“:

    A new piece of evidence has emerged buttressing the credibility of Tara Reade’s claim that she told her mother about allegations of sexual harassment and assault related to her former boss, then-Sen. Joe Biden. Biden, through a spokesperson, has denied the allegations. Reade has claimed to various media outlets, including The Intercept, that she told her mother, a close friend, and her brother about both the harassment and, to varying degrees of detail, the assault at the time. Her brother, Collin Moulton, and her friend, who has asked to remain anonymous, both confirmed that they heard about the allegations from Reade at the time. Reade’s mother died in 2016, but both her brother and friend also confirmed Reade had told her mother, and that her mother, a longtime feminist and activist, urged her to go to the police.

    In interviews with The Intercept, Reade also mentioned that her mother had made a phone call to “Larry King Live” on CNN, during which she made reference to her daughter’s experience on Capitol Hill. Reade told The Intercept that her mother called in asking for advice after Reade, then in her 20s, left Biden’s office. “I remember it being an anonymous call and her saying my daughter was sexually harassed and retaliated against and fired, where can she go for help? I was mortified,” Reade told me.

    Reade couldn’t remember the date or the year of the phone call, and King didn’t include the names of callers on his show. I was unable to find the call, but mentioned it in an interview with Katie Halper, the podcast host who first aired Reade’s allegation. After the podcast aired, a listener managed to find the call and sent it to The Intercept.

    On August 11, 1993, King aired a program titled, “Washington: The Cruelest City on Earth?” Toward the end of the program, he introduces a caller dialing in from San Luis Obispo, California. Congressional records list August 1993 as Reade’s last month of employment with Biden’s Senate office, and, according to property records, Reade’s mother, Jeanette Altimus, was living in San Luis Obispo County. Here is the transcript of the beginning of the call:

    KING: San Luis Obispo, California, hello.

    CALLER: Yes, hello. I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.

    KING: In other words, she had a story to tell but, out of respect for the person she worked for, she didn’t tell it?

    CALLER: That’s true.

    .

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • The video in question:

  • By an amazing coincidence, that episode has been removed from the Google Play catalog. What are the odds?
  • Want to guess which Democrat is calling on Biden to bow out over the Tara Reade accusations? Would you believe notorious Hillary shill Peter Daou?

    Given that Daou’s Clinton sycophancy meter was pegged at 11 in 2016 (even Renfield told him “dial it back”), that gives some credence to the “replace Biden with Hillary at the convention” conspiracy theory. But Daou went all Bernie Bro in 2019, so maybe he’s just disgruntled. Or maybe he was only a Clinton mole the entire time pretending to be a Bernie Bro. Or maybe…(leads pack mule back to the Sierra Madre)

  • Also asking for Biden to drop out: Rose McGowan.
  • “The More Anger at China, the Worse for Biden.”

    For months now, it has been clear that Biden family corruption will be a campaign issue. The impeachment focused attention on ties between the vice president’s son, Hunter, and the corrupt Ukrainian oil and gas giant Burisma. But Hunter had equally close, equally profitable ties to Chinese state-owned banks. Those connections were formed when Joe Biden was leading the Obama administration’s policies toward both China and Ukraine.

    Cozy, profitable, and possibly corrupt connections with the Chinese government are the last thing Americans want to hear about their politicians right now. Those voters are closeted at home, worried about their future, thanks to a virus that originated in Wuhan. They are mad as hell at Beijing for hiding what it knew, early on, about the pandemic. The Chinese Communist Party knew something terrible was happening, and it refused to share honest information about it. It denied the virus could be spread by human contact, weeks after it knew patients were infecting health care workers, and it hid vital information about the origins and genetic structure of the virus. The World Health Organization spread that misinformation. Beijing’s deception cost lives and livelihoods. Americans are reminded of it every day they are home from work or school under quarantine.

    This anger at China’s rulers is bad news for Joe Biden. Voters see China as a rising threat and its economic gains as coming out of American pockets. The Trump campaign was already pushing these issues. It won’t have any trouble tying them to Joe Biden and making his family the face of American elites who profit from their insider positions.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Rudy Guillani’s Commen Sense podcast did a show on the same theme. “Joe Biden’s relationship with China, ‘they make the Clintons look like cheapos.'”
  • Team Biden raised $46,741,037 in Q1. It’s much better than Biden had been fundraising, and a tiny bit ahead of what Hillary Clinton raised in 2016.
  • The challenges of fundraising from your basement.
  • What did they spend it on?

  • Another Slow Joe verbal fumble video:

  • And another:
    

  • And still another, with Special Guest Al Gore:

    Gore looks like he needs to invest in some sunblock.

  • “Joe Biden: Unfit to Serve by Any and Every Measure.” It’s sort of a Greatest Hits of Biden incompetence. “You might think that after five decades of experience with public policy both foreign and domestic that you’d be able to discern Biden’s governing philosophy, even given his inability to express a coherent thought. But you’d be wrong. The lessons and experiences that inform a person’s decisionmaking seem to pass completely through Biden’s brain without leaving a trace of residue.”
  • “Joe Biden Advisor Tries to Blame Republicans for Small Business Loan Money Running out. It Doesn’t Go Well.”
  • New York Times does a Biden in quarantine piece. Anything remotely interesting or unexpected? (scans) “At times, callers deduce from rowdy background noise that Mr. Biden is working beside his German shepherds, Major and Champ.” Good for him. Also:

    The former vice president also places calls to mayors and governors; congressional leaders like Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina; elder statesmen like Al Gore; potential running mates; donors; and former rivals like Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren. A few governors have become favorite points of contact, including Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, Jay Inslee of Washington and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

    Oh yeah, pick Gretchen Whitmer as your running mate. That move is gonna make you super popular…

  • There is simply no way Biden can out-hawk Trump on China. Some of the premises of this piece are ill advised, but the conclusion is not.

    The implication of Biden’s new ad is that China didn’t give Trump timely information about the COVID-19 outbreak, because Trump wasn’t tough enough on China’s leaders. The commercial mocks Trump’s praise for Xi Jinping and is filled with supposedly damning images of Trump and Xi together. By contrast, it shows Biden vowing, “I would be on the phone with China making it clear: We are going to need to be in your country. You have to be open. You have to be clear. We have to know what’s going on.” In other words, Biden would boss the Chinese around.

    This is a jingoistic fantasy. China is a rival superpower run by an authoritarian and fiercely nationalistic regime. Biden can’t force it to comply. When Beijing has given the United States valuable information about virus outbreaks in the past, it’s because American presidents spent time and money building joint U.S.-Chinese initiatives and took pains to make China’s leaders feel like equals. In 2009, Biden’s then-boss, Barack Obama, stood on a stage with the Chinese leader Hu Jintao in Beijing—in the kind of scene Biden mocks in his ad—and said the two governments should “build upon our mutual interests and engage on the basis of equality and mutual respect.” The two leaders announced that they would “deepen cooperation on global public health issues, including Influenza A (H1N1) prevention, surveillance, reporting and control.” As the Rand Corporation’s Jennifer Huang Bouey has noted, this cooperation hastened the development of an H1N1 vaccine. In suggesting that Biden could bludgeon China into submission—in a phone call, no less—the Biden campaign is peddling a lie about how public-health cooperation with China actually works.

    This Dem-leaning piece is way too kind on China (as you would expect), but is correct that trying to spin Biden as “tough on China” is absurd.

  • “Candidate Who Killed #MeToo Movement Returns Donation From Notorious Masturbator.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Documents seized in the raid that killed him showed that Osama bin Laden wanted to assasinate President Obama because he thought Biden was woefully unprepared to take over. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Virtual rope line?
  • Reporter tries to nail President Trump for having a rally in early March. Know who had rallies later in March? Biden. To be fair, they were much, much smaller rallies than Trump’s…
  • Is Biden going to release a potential SCOTUS list? David Harsanyi says “Go ahead, make our day.”
  • Why Biden might pick Alabama Congresswoman Rep. Terri Sewell. Basically because she’s black and endorsed Biden.
  • “Why Joe Biden’s America loves a lockdown. The divide between the professional and servant classes has never been more stark.”

    The highly educated professional classes can work from home, and their jobs are relatively secure; the service class, on the other hand—the waiters and cooks and hotel maids and retail clerks and others — are out of their jobs and shit out of luck. Not to worry: the professional class will write all of them checks for $1,200. Let them eat cake, you know?

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Bernie Bro who created meme Twitter banned: “They took the bait!”

  • Heh:

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    Movie Review: Fury

    April 26th, 2020

    Yesterday’s post featured Sherman tanks facing Panzers on the Golan Heights in 1967, so let’s do a review of a movie about a Sherman tank crew late in World War II to make it an All Sherman Tank Weekend, because why the hell not? (Plus it’s a chance not to talk about the Wuhan coronavirus, China or the lockdown.)

    Title: Fury
    Director: David Ayer
    Writer: David Ayer
    Starring: Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena, Jon Bernthal
    IMDB entry

    Fury is the story of the crew of a M4A2 Sherman tank crew driving deep into Germany in April of 1945. It starts with the aftermath of a battle where where the crew had to haul a dead crewmate out and every other American tank but the titular Fury was wiped out. Soon tank commander ‘Wardaddy’ Collier (Brad Pitt) welcomes green recruit Norm (Logan Lerman) as their new assistant driver/machinegunner. They’re sent with a new platoon of tanks to rescue a trapped unit and the lead tank is promptly taken out by a panzerfaust. Fury leads an assault on a German antitank unit in a treeline, then participates in taking a large German town, where the tank crew spends some occasionally tense R & R with two German fraulieins before moving out to help defend a key crossroads. On the way, all the tanks in the platoon but Fury are destroyed in an encounter with a Tiger tank. The last 45 minutes or so of the film depict Fury’s crew, one tread taken out by a mine, defending the crossroads against an SS company.

    Fury succeeds when it focuses on being a World War II tank film, and loses momentum when tries to Make Serious Statements About The Human Condition And How War Is Hell.

    The scenes that work best are the everyday lives of the crew. They used real Shermans in the film, and the scenes inside the tank have the convincing claustrophobia of a real tank interior. (Though they vastly understate how noisy a tank interior is; some of that is inevitable, as no audience would want to watch an entire tank movie with the noise as loud as an actual tank, but the nosiebed here should have been louder to at least give a hint of the real thing.) The battle scenes are gripping, and the attention to detail pretty good; I especially liked the improvised log armor on the sides, and the use of different types of main gun ammunition for different purposes, including laying down smoke just like in the instructional videos.

    A video tour of the interior of a Sherman (with some clips from the movie) is here:

    Ignore the guy in the knight’s helmet.

    On the other hand, no World War II unit used that many tracer rounds in daylight, and they didn’t look like lasers.

    It’s the Deep Meaning Of It All Scenes that drag the movie down. Norm fails to machine-gun teenage German troops with the panzerfausts, with Dire Consequences. Collier forces Norm to shoot a German prisoner to Prove His Loyalty. A burning soldier shoots himself in the head. Another falls on a live grenade. After Norm makes out with a hot frauliein, want to guess who gets killed in a random artillery barrage?

    No cliche will be left behind.

    Despite that, the acting is very good. Pitt is fine as Hardened Stoic Leader Who Will Get His Men Through. Lerman is good in the green ostensible-viewpoint character role. Michael Pena (Luis in the Ant Man films) is solid as driver (and semi-comic relief) Gordo. Jon Berenthal does fine in the thankless “rude redneck with bad hygiene” role of gun-loader Coon-Ass.

    Weirdly enough, the actor who comes out best is Shia LaBeouf as gunner Boyd “Bible” Swan. He brings a quiet, understated dignity to a role as a devout Christian, and “quiet,” “understated” and “dignity” are adjectives that seldom accrue to LaBeouf in any aspect of his life, and whose acting usually tops out at “only mildly annoying.” Jason Isaacs is also excellent in a supporting role as a gritty, unsentimental, matter-of-fact Captain.

    Fury is worth watching, but it really could have been about 45 minutes shorter. The best war movies tend to be those that focus on soldiers just trying to do The Task At Hand (Das Boot being the classic example) and not worrying about making Deep Meaningful Statements.

    6/10

    Also, Hollywood needs to make more movies about tanks.

    Here’s the trailer:

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    The Last Panzer Battle

    April 25th, 2020

    When would you think the last World War II German Panzer IVs saw combat? The Battle of Berlin in 1945?

    Try the Golan Heights in 1967:

    Syria had sourced leftover Panzer IV from all over Europe (along with a handful of Sturmgeschütz III assault guns and Jagdpanzer IV tank destroyers), which they deployed to the Golan Heights. Ironically, some of the tanks they faced were uparmed “Super Sherman” M4 tanks, some with 105mm guns. But the Israelis were also using British Centurion tanks (also with 105mm guns), which handily outclassed the German tanks, and the better trained and equipped Israeli forces routed the Syrians from the Golan Heights as part of the Six Day War. At least 10 of the 25 operational Panzer IVs were knocked out by the Israelis. “Not one Israeli tank was knocked out by a German Panzer.”

    Some Super Shermans were pressed into service in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and some even found their way to Israeli-supported factions in the Lebanese Civil War that stretched into the early 1980s.

    Believe it or not, Paraguay was still using not only Sherman tanks, but M3 Stuart light tanks in 2016.

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    LinkSwarm for April 24, 2020

    April 24th, 2020

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! It turns out that the Wuhan coronavirus has more tricks up its sleeve than we thought:

  • We knew about the viral pneumonia, but not about the blood clotting:

    Craig Coopersmith was up early that morning as usual and typed his daily inquiry into his phone. “Good morning, Team Covid,” he wrote, asking for updates from the ICU team leaders working across 10 hospitals in the Emory University health system in Atlanta.

    One doctor replied that one of his patients had a strange blood problem. Despite being put on anticoagulants, the patient was still developing clots. A second said she’d seen something similar. And a third. Soon, every person on the text chat had reported the same thing.

    “That’s when we knew we had a huge problem,” said Coopersmith, a critical-care surgeon. As he checked with his counterparts at other medical centers, he became increasingly alarmed: “It was in as many as 20, 30 or 40 percent of their patients.”

    One month ago when the country went into lockdown to prepare for the first wave of coronavirus cases, many doctors felt confident they knew what they were dealing with. Based on early reports, covid-19 appeared to be a standard variety respiratory virus, albeit a contagious and lethal one with no vaccine and no treatment. They’ve since seen how covid-19 attacks not only the lungs, but also the kidneys, heart, intestines, liver and brain.

    Read the whole thing.

  • A coronavirus map based on self-reported symptoms. I note that Williamson County has only about 0.32%.
  • Over on Borepath, there’s a good discussion of all the known unknowns of the Wuhan Coronavirus, and all the data we don’t have.
  • Quillette writer Jonathan Kay looks at coronavirus “superspreader” events:

    Only 38 of the 58 SSEs that I recorded were documented in a way that permitted me to determine their date with any specificity. (And even in these cases, I sometimes had to make educated estimates because of the vague nature of the reporting.) In the case of multi-day SSEs, such as religious festivals, I picked a day corresponding to the middle of the event. Unfortunately, some of the largest SSEs, such as those at North American meat processing plants, can’t be usefully pinpointed at all because the infections span multiple weeks (or even months), and the employers haven’t released detailed date-tagged data.

    Of the 38 SSEs for which dates could be usefully identified, about 75 percent (29/38) took place in the 26-day span between February 25th and March 21st, roughly corresponding to the period when thousands of infected COVID-19 individuals were already traveling around the world, but before social distancing and event-cancelation policies had been uniformly implemented in many of the affected countries. (A notable early outlier is Steve Walsh, who spread COVID-19 from a Singapore corporate meeting to a French ski resort to his native UK in late January and early February.) No doubt, a vast number of SSEs occurred in January and February without being reported as such, because public-health officials and journalists weren’t alive to the nature or scale of the coming pandemic. But it is reassuring that, so far, April has been almost entirely bereft of publicly reported SSEs.

    I was struck by how few of the SSEs originated in conditions stereotypically associated with the underclass (though a March outbreak at a Qatari migrant workers camp in the industrial area north of Doha offers one such example). Many of the early SSEs, in fact, centered on weddings, birthday parties, and other events that were described in local media as glamorous or populated by “socialites.” Examples here include a March 7th engagement party at a Rio de Janeiro “mansion” that attracted “high society” fly-ins from around the world, and a similarly described birthday party in Westport, CT.

    It is theoretically possible that socioeconomically privileged individuals really do lack some immune-response mechanism that protects individuals who have been exposed to a wider array of infectious pathogens. (A recent report on COVID-19 surveillance testing at a Boston homeless shelter contained the stunning disclosure that 36 percent of 408 screened individuals tested positive for COVID-19. Yet the vast majority were asymptomatic, and even the few who were symptomatic did not diverge statistically from the 64 percent of tested individuals who were COVID-19-negative.) But absent more data, the more obvious explanation is that these early SSEs are linked to the intercontinental travel practices of the guests. (In the case of the Connecticut event, reports the New York Times, “a visitor from Johannesburg—a 43-year-old businessman—fell ill on his flight home.” And the Rio party was attended by guests who’d traveled recently from, or through New York, Belgium and Italy.) Moreover, COVID-19 outbreaks in poor communities are simply less likely to be reported, because the victims have less access to testing, high-end medical care, or media contacts.

    In fact, the truly remarkable trend that jumped off my spreadsheet has nothing to do with the sort of people involved in these SSEs, but rather the extraordinarily narrow range of underlying activities. And I believe it is on this point that a close study of SSEs, even one based on such a biased and incomplete data set as the one I’ve assembled in my lay capacity, can help us:

    • Of the 54 SSEs on my list for which the underlying activities were identified, no fewer than nine were linked to religious services or missionary work. This includes massive gatherings such as February’s weeklong Christian Open Door prayer meeting in Mulhouse, France, which has been linked to an astounding 2,500 cases; and a massive Tablighi Jamaat Islamic event in Lahore that attracted a quarter-million people. But it also includes much smaller-scale religious activities, such as proselytizing in rural Punjabi villages and a religious meeting in a Calgary home.
    • Nineteen of the SSEs—about one-third—involved parties or liquor-fueled mass attendance festivals of one kind or another, including (as with the examples cited above) celebrations of weddings, engagements and birthdays.
    • Five of the SSEs involved funerals.
    • Six of the SSEs involved face-to-face business networking. This includes large-scale events such as Biogen’s notorious Boston leadership meeting in February, as well as one-on-one business meetings—from the unidentified “traveling salesperson” who spread COVID-19 in Maine to Hisham Hamdan, a powerful sovereign-wealth fund official who spread the disease in Malaysia.

    All told, 38 of the 54 SSEs for which activities were known involved one or more of these four activities—about 70 percent. Indeed, the categories sometimes overlap, as with patient A1.1 in Chicago, who attended both a party and a funeral in the space of a few days; or the New Rochelle, NY man who covered the SSE trifecta of Bar Mitzvah party, synagogue services, and local funeral, all the while going to his day job as a lawyer in New York City.

    But even that 70 percent figure underestimates the prevalence of these activities in COVID-19 SSEs, because my database also includes five SSEs involving two warships and three cruise ships—the USS Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Diamond Princess, Grand Princess and Ruby Princess—at least three of which (and probably all five) featured onboard parties.

    These parties, funerals, religious meet-ups and business networking sessions all seem to have involved the same type of behaviour: extended, close-range, face-to-face conversation—typically in crowded, socially animated spaces.

    So you probably want to avoid such events for the near future. Snip.

    In the case of religious SSEs, Sikhs, Christians, Jews and Muslims are all represented in the database. The virus makes no distinction according to creed, but does seem to prey on physically intimate congregations that feature some combination of mass participation, folk proselytizing and spontaneous, emotionally charged expressions of devotion. In the case of Islam, it is notable that the same movement, Tablighi Jamaat, has been responsible for massive outbreaks at completely separate events in Lahore (noted above), Delhi and Kuala Lampur. At Mulhouse, the week’s schedule included Christian “choir performances, collective prayer, singing, sermons from preachers, workshops, and testimony from people who said God had cured their illnesses… Many people came day after day, and spent hours there.” And in Punjab, dozens of Sikhs died thanks to the itinerant rural preaching of a single (now deceased) infamous septuagenarian named Baldev Singh.

    Sporting events? Out. Choir performances? Out. Snip.

    It’s worth scanning all the myriad forms of common human activity that aren’t represented among these listed SSEs: watching movies in a theater, being on a train or bus, attending theater, opera, or symphony (these latter activities may seem like rarified examples, but they are important once you take stock of all those wealthy infectees who got sick in March, and consider that New York City is a major COVID-19 hot spot). These are activities where people often find themselves surrounded by strangers in densely packed rooms—as with all those above-described SSEs—but, crucially, where attendees also are expected to sit still and talk in hushed tones.

    Again, read the whole thing.

  • Speaking of things you’re not supposed to do: “Bangladesh: Over 100,000 gather for funeral of Islamic teacher, defying coronavirus lockdown.” What could possibly go wrong? (On the other hand, if this doesn’t turn into a superspreader event, then we have some valuable data about that seemingly invariant infection curve and/or the role of sunlight/warm climates in preventing infection.)
  • Speaking of superspreader events, want to guess who owned that South Dakota meat packing plant with the heavy infection rate? “In September 2013 Smithfield Foods was acquired by China’s biggest meat processor, Shuanghui International Holdings, in the largest acquisition ever of a U.S. company by a Chinese one.”
  • Speaking of China’s perfidy, while they rest of the world was struggling with the Wuhan coronavirus, they thought it was the perfect time to arrest dissidents in Hong Kong:

    Fifteen activists between 24 and 81 years old were rounded up on suspicion of organizing, publicizing or taking part in several unauthorized assemblies between August and October and will face prosecution, the police said on Saturday without disclosing their names, following protocol.

    The arrested democratic heavyweights included the veteran lawyers Martin Lee and Margaret Ng, the media tycoon Jimmy Lai and the former opposition legislators Albert Ho, Lee Cheuk-yan and Leung Kwok-hung, political parties and aides said.

  • Half the residents of a Boston homeless shelter had the Wuhan Coronavirus, but none showed any symptoms.
  • Democrats want a depression:

    If the Malevolent Donkey Party was actively seeking to plunge the country into an economic tailspin, while still maintaining some level of deniability to the credulous suckers out there, exactly what would it be doing differently? It would be pretty much doing exactly what it is doing right now – shilling for the bat-gobbling ChiComs, delaying needed assistance to keep America working, and generally trying to keep us all locked in the dark in perpetuity.

    It’s fair to assume that you intend the expected consequences of the actions you take, and the consequence of the actions the Democrats are taking is economic ruin. The indisputable fact is that they’re totally cool with that if that is what gets them back into power.

    Democrats are never ones to let a good crisis go to waste, and this Wuhan Flu is a very good crisis indeed if your goal is leftist hegemony. The Trump economy was booming after the near-decade of the Obama doldrums, and people were getting a taste of prosperity. But a happy, prosperous America is something the Democrat dudes can’t abide. All the Democrats had to sell were recycled cries of “RACISM!” and “RUSSIA!” and their standard-bearer was that sinewy weirdo Grandpa Badfinger, who was promising to drag us all back into the nightmare of globalist failure. The future looked grim, which means it actually looked bright for the rest of us.

    So, the Chinese coronavirus was a dream come true, a deus ex pangolin that finally, after an endless series of leaks, impeachments, investigations, and media meltdowns, might be the magic bullet that actually takes Trump down.

    Am I saying that the Democrats are exploiting the pandemic for their own cheesy advantage? Well, yeah. Everything they are doing is consistent with that. Everything. No, in the abstract, many of them would probably not prefer that tens of thousands of Americans die (I get enough Twitter death wishes to know, from their own filthy mouths, that some absolutely do want us to die), but their attitude seems to be that if life gives you tens of thousands of dead Americans, make political lemonade.

  • How can Nancy Pelosi worry about your piddling lives when there’s so much ice cream to eat?

  • Democrats delayed emergency aid for ordinary Americans so they could maintain “leverage” to achieve Democratic Party priorities.
  • “Top Elections Lawyer: Vote-By-Mail Is ‘The Most Massive Fraud Scheme In American History.'”
  • “U.S. Intelligence Knew Russia Preferred Hillary to Trump, But John Brennan Hid the Truth, Ex-NSC Chief Says.” This story probably deserves more attention than I can give it right now…
  • Iran: Watch our tiny boats harass the Great Satan! President Trump: I hope you like your gunboats getting destroyed.
  • Masks are for the little people, not a Bill Clinton aide-turned “journalist.”
  • Even Fredo’s brother said that the federal Wuhan coronavirus response was “a ‘phenomenal accomplishment.'”
  • Speaking of Gov. Cuomo, he said that if you’re not an essential worker, sucks to be you. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • In New York, the death panels are already here. If you code, you’re cold…
  • How the CDC screwed up testing kits. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Another reminder: Don’t freak out over polls:

  • Least surprising news ever: “Dysfunction in Baltimore police homicide unit went unaddressed as killings hit historic levels.”
  • “Vindictive Detroit Democrats to Censure Lawmaker for Saying Trump Saved Her Life.” Given that State Rep. Karen Whitsett is black, by Democrat’s own rules, her censure must mean they’re racists. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • A look at Amity Shlaes’ book, Great Society: A New History.
  • Won’t someone please spare a moment to think about how the coronavirus outbreak has derailed the Austin politicians’ plans to spend billions on their toy trains? (Hat tip: Iowahawk.)
  • Speaking of Austin, the coronavirus has closed landmark Austin restaurants Threadgill’s…
  • …and Enchiladas Y Mas.
  • Is Apple moving to ARM for Mac? They’re planning to have their own Apple-designed chips fabbed at TSMC on the latter’s 5nm process. Intel, the current supplier for Mac CPUs, isn’t slatted to hit 5nm until 20203, and there’s long been talk that bringing up yield on their existing 10nm process has been in a world of hurt for a while.
  • “Respect my (round) authoritah!”
  • Stop having non-Party approved fun, drone!

  • We’re all in it together:

  • Heh:

  • Heh, BAM!

  • Whippet. Whippet Good!

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