I have a whole host of “China is Screwed” videos I’ve gathered to post, but haven’t had the time to properly queue them up. So here’s a big picture piece from Peter Zeihan on China’s immediate economic foe: deflation.
Sucks to be you, China…
China’s New Enemy: Deflation
August 12th, 2023LinkSwarm For August 11, 2023
August 11th, 2023Still more Biden corruption comes to light, Yellow goes belly-up, things get worse in China, and a truly horrifying food discovery. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The Biden family and its business associates received millions of dollars from oligarchs in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine while Joe Biden was vice president, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee.
With the new payments included, the committee says it has now identified more than $20 million in payments from foreign sources to the Biden family and their business associates. Those foreign sources include not only the three aforementioned countries, but also China and Romania as well.
Hunter Biden’s former business associate Devon Archer previously testified that then-Vice President Biden joined roughly 20 phone calls on speakerphone with Hunter Biden’s foreign business associates and attended dinners with foreign oligarchs who paid large sums of money to Hunter Biden.
The foreign funds were sent to accounts tied to Devon Archer that used the Rosemont Seneca name and were then doled out in incremental payments to Hunter Biden, the records show, in what the committee suggests was an attempt to hide the source and size of the payments.
Those payments included $3.5 million sent from Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina to the shell company Rosemont Seneca Thornton in February 2014. Roughly $1 million was transferred to Devon Archer, while the rest was used to fund a new account Rosemont Seneca Bohai, which was used by both Archer and Hunter Biden to receive other foreign wires.
After Baturina sent the massive sum to Rosemont Seneca Thornton, then-Vice President Joe Biden attended dinner with Baturina, Archer, Hunter Biden, and others at Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden attended dinners with Hunter Biden; Archer; Baturina; Burisma executives; and Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakhstani oligarch, in the spring of 2014 and 2015 at Cafe Milano.
In February 2014, Hunter Biden met with Rakishev at the Hay Adams Hotel in Washington, D.C. In emails to Archer discussing the D.C. meeting, Rakishev, who was a director at Kazakhstan’s state-owned oil company KazMunayGas, asked that then-Secretary of State John Kerry visit Kazakhstan. Archer said, “if we have some business started as planned I will ensure its planned soonest.”
So members of the extended Biden business family were asking the Secretary of State of the United States of America to visit a foreign country so the Biden clan could do business. Are all American institutions now corrupted for the sole purpose of enriching Democratic Party insiders?
In April 2014, Rakishev wired $142,300 to the Rosemont Seneca Bohai account. The figure amounted to the exact price of Hunter Biden’s sports car that the account purchased one day later.
After receiving the payment, Archer and Biden arranged for executives at Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma to visit Kazakhstan in June 2014 to discuss a deal between Burisma, a Chinese state-owned company, and the government of Kazakhstan. Rakishev had a working relationship with Karim Massimov, who became prime minister in April 2014. Earlier this year, Massimov was sentenced to 18 years in prison for treason, abuse of power, and attempting a coup.
Also in spring 2014, Archer and Biden joined the Burisma board of directors at a salary of $1 million per year each. President Biden visited Ukraine soon after Archer and the younger Biden received their first payments — payments that were sent to Rosemont Seneca Bohai and later sent in incremental amounts to Hunter Biden’s different bank accounts.
The committee confirmed IRS whistleblower testimony that Archer and Hunter Biden received $6.5 million in funds from Burisma, which is owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, a Ukrainian oligarch who bribed officials $6 million over the investigation into the natural gas company.
Archer told the committee last week that Hunter Biden’s value on Burisma’s board was “the brand.” Archer said then-vice president Biden was “the brand.”
“Burisma would have gone out of business if ‘the brand’ had not been attached to it,” Archer said, according to the committee.
We can’t let corrupt foreign companies that keep Hunter in cocaine go tits-up, can we?
Text messages that have recently been given to the FBI show that a Chinese energy company sought to utilize its connections to Hunter Biden in order to purchase domestic energy assets within the United States.
According to Just The News, the text exchange in question took place between two of Hunter’s business partners, James Gilliar and Tony Bobulinski, on Christmas Eve of 2015. This exchange was shortly after Hunter had first been told about the conglomerate, CFEC China Energy, led by wealthy businessman Ye Jianming.
“I think this will then be a great addition to their portfolios as it will give them a profile base in NYC, then LA, etc,” said Gilliar in the text message. “For me it’s a no brainer but culturally they are different, but smart so let’s see. … Any entry ticket is small for them. Easier and better demographic than Arabs who are little anti US after trump.”
This evidence further supports the bombshell claims made by another former business partner of Hunter, Devon Archer, in closed-door testimony before Congress earlier this week. Archer testified that Joe and Hunter Biden both actively sought to promote their “influence” to potential foreign partners, and that the two of them were considered a package deal in efforts to sell the “brand” of their family name and political power while Joe was Vice President.
According to calendar schedules from his abandoned laptop, Hunter eventually did have a meeting with CEFC Executive Director Jianjun Zang in December of 2015. By March of 2016, two of Hunter’s business partners, Gilliar and Rob Walker, drafted a memo for Hunter to sign and send to CEFC, to which Hunter agreed.
The text messages, exchanged between 2015 and 2017, eventually reveal that CEFC simply hoped to gain “influence” through its partnership with the Bidens, in order to eventually enter the American energy market with the purchase of energy assets in America and elsewhere in the West.
“Still closing the perimeters of ops with the Chinese, will know Thursday if we are driving U.S. investments,” Gilliar wrote to Bobulinski in May of 2016, adding that things might be “still a little premature.”
(hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
M1A1 Abrams Tanks Finally Heading To Ukraine
August 10th, 2023Remember all the fanfare over the U.S. sending Abrams tanks to Ukraine? Supposedly in time for the much vaunted Spring Offensive?
That didn’t happen. Evidently the usual Biden Administration competency was in play. But now the allotment of M1A1 Abrams tanks (not the M1A2s previously discussed) are finally ready to be shipped over.
The first batch of Abrams tanks that the U.S. is providing to Ukraine was approved for shipment over the weekend, and the tanks remain on track to arrive in Ukraine by early Fall, Army Acquisition Chief Doug Bush told reporters on Monday.
“The last of the set was officially accepted by the U.S. government or the production facility over the weekend. So they are done,” said Bush. The 31 Abrams tanks destined for Ukraine – older M1A1 variants – had been undergoing refurbishment and preparation for shipment for months.
Though the tanks are ready, they still have to be shipped overseas and sent to Ukraine, “along with all of the things that go with them – ammunition, spare parts, fuel equipment, repair facilities,” Bush said. “So it’s not just the tanks.”
The goal, said Bush, remains to get the Abrams tanks to the unit level by “early Fall.” He did not give a specific date or even month. Last month, Politico reported that the tanks would arrive on the battlefield in September.
Helping Ukraine repel Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression has frequently been cited as a top priority by members of the Biden Administration,a cause in whose over $46 billion in military aid has been sent. Given that the UK’s Challenger 2 tanks arrived in Ukraine in March, it would seem like the Biden Administration hasn’t treated their pledge of Abrams tanks with any urgency.
To be sure, several U.S. weapon systems (HIMARS, Patriot, Excalibur and various drones) have proven absolutely vital in letting Ukraine resist the Russian invasion. But for something the U.S. defense establishment, and just about all our NATO allies, view as a top priority, the Pentagon as been quite sluggish at getting them tanks. A cynic might wonder if it’s because, being drawn from existing stocks, sending them M1A1s doesn’t grease enough Beltway Bandit palms.
Given how long it will take to train Ukrainians on them, maybe they’ll be available for the 2024 Spring Offensive…
Russian Optics Factory Goes Boom
August 9th, 2023No indication yet that this was a Ukrainian rocket attack, drone attack, or even partisan sabotage. But it sounds militarily significant.
Local officials in Russia say an explosion at an optical plant in the city of Sergiyev Posad, about 70 kilometers outside Moscow, killed one person and injured at least 43 people on August 9.
Five of the injured are in intensive care with serious burns or head injuries, according to the city administration’s Telegram account. Some of the 43 people admitted to a regional hospital have shrapnel injuries, it said.
Officials at the city’s central hospital said that a woman had succumbed to wounds sustained in the blast.
Independent Telegram channel Baza shared images of a tall cloud of smoke and identified the site as the Zagorsk Optical and Mechanical Plant, which produces night-vision and other optical devices for the military.
Russian officials later confirmed the location.
Russian news agency TASS has quoted the emergency services as rejecting assertions on social media that the cause of the blast was a drone attack.
That speculation has been fueled by months of remote attacks in Russia that Moscow blames on Kyiv along with Russian reports it “thwarted” two fresh drone attacks near Moscow overnight.
TASS said the blast happened where pyrotechnics were being kept and destroyed a 1,600-square-meter warehouse.
An unexplained fire damaged the same Zagorsk plant in June 2022.
Seemed to blow up real good:
You can’t trust TASS, and it’s entirely possible that it’s your standard negligent Russian military industrial accident. But why would you store pyrotechnics next to an optics factory?
Other news notes that the plant makes optics for Russian security forces. Keep in mind that obtaining optical sights for their tanks has been an ongoing concern for Russia.
Developing…
Movie Review: Oppenheimer
August 7th, 2023Title: Oppenheimer
Director: Christopher Nolan
Writers: Christopher Nolan, Kai Bird, Martin Sherwin
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Jason Clarke, Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Alden Ehrenreich
I finally saw Oppenheimer, and if you have an interest in the subject, it’s well worth seeing. It’s a near-great film that’s great when it covers the atomic bomb project, and considerably less great when It Has Important Things To Say.
The movie covers much of the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), director of the Los Alamos part of the project to build the atomic bomb. The movie has a non-linear format, using the framing device of two different hearings (on the renewal of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, and the cabinet confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), who lured Oppenheimer to Princeton and oversaw the Atomic Energy Commission, and who is eventually revealed to be the film’s antagonist) interspersed with Oppenheimer’s life before and during the The Manhattan Project.
When the film is good, it’s flat out great. The scenes here tend to be small in scope, seldom more than a minute long, slowly building up Oppenheimer’s life, his love and study of physics, his dalliance with communism (he was a fellow-traveler who never joined the party, but did take a commie (Florence Pugh) as his first wife and an ex-commie (Emily Blunt) as his second), his dismay as a Jewish American at the rise of Nazism, and his involvement in the atomic bomb effort.
The brevity of the scenes is one of the film’s greatest strengths. Though mostly quiet and understated in themselves, they slowly build up a heady steam of narrative momentum. By the time they get to Los Alamos itself you’re absolutely riveted.
And it gets better. The scenes leading up to the Trinity detonation are a masterpiece of film editing, successfully ratcheting the tension higher and higher just by showing scenes of the elaborate preparations leading up to the blast, under-laid by Ludwig Göransson’s tense, violin-heavy score. I saw the film in IMAX, and I think I got my money’s worth out of that sequence alone.
But that headlong pace enfolds within it a problem: Things move so fast, that some scenes have a certain checkmark quality to them, so that you know exactly what’s coming. Gee, when commie girlfriend picks up a Sanskrit text, what do you want to bet that the passage he’s reading is “I am become death, destroyer of worlds?”
Please, no wagering.
But that’s a minor problem compared to the biggest flaw of Oppenheimer, which is what they chose to include as the main non-Trinity storyline. Why have the climax of your film feature the literal explosion of an atomic bomb when you can spend the rest of it on the pulse-pounding excitement of committee meetings?
To be fair to Nolan, this is obviously the film he wanted to make, and the film is called Oppenheimer rather than The Making of the Atomic Bomb. And the committee meeting scenes are as well-acted, well-directed and well-paced as you could reasonably ask of a big-budget, A-list Hollywood film. But the real reason they’re there is so the leftist screenwriters can Say Important Things.
Oppenheimer must feel massive guilt and remorse for having helped usher in the atomic age, because this is Approved Opinion. Leftists, even commies, must be shown in a positive light, because this is Approved Opinion. Likewise, McCarthyism must be shown to be Very Bad, so all the crimes of communism have to be kept offstage.
Indeed, an awful lot happens off-stage, including the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then again, Oppenheimer is the viewpoint character.
From my better-than-the-average-layman-understanding-at-how-an-atomic-bomb-works-but-hardly-an-expert vantage point, the historical accuracy for the film seems painstaking and effective. I understood why Klaus Fuchs was important when he was introduced, appreciated the Nixie tubes in the Trinity countdown, and figured out the guy with the bongos must have been Richard Feynman. Everything sure as hell looks accurate, and the New Mexico photography is gorgeous.
But with so much time spent on the commie and Strauss plots, and Oppenheimer having visions of particle physics (early) and atomic destruction (late), the rest of the film (the far more interesting part) feels a bit rushed. Plus the sheer smallness of the stakes that drive the frame-story/post-Trinity portion feels like a distinct anticlimax. Indeed, the primary subplot turns out to be (spoilers) Strauss secretly shiving Oppenheimer by getting his security clearance yanked for…his supporting export of radioactive isotopes to Norway? It’s like if during the climax of Kill Bill, you find out that the Bride’s entire motivation for her revenge spree was Bill never returning her DVD of Steel Magnolias.
All that said, this is still an exceptionally good film, and even the ostensibly bad guys Have Their Reasons. Even hydrogen bomb father Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), who the writers must have been tempted to turn into a secondary villain, comes across as a smart, sympathetic figure. And history validates both his and Strauss’ view that America was right to move forward on the H-Bomb, as the Soviets were utterly untrustworthy as arms control treaty partners.
I expect Oscar nominations galore.
If you’re the kind of person that would watch a three hour movie on the making of the atomic bomb, this is the one to watch.
Why The SA80 Sucked
August 6th, 2023On the post about China’s funky military gyrocopter, a discussion of just how bad the British SA80 assault rifle (AKA Enfield L85A1) sucked broke out. And boy did it suck.
Almost immediately, the rifles were plagued with problems. The L86A1’s bipod tended to fail to lock, were weak, and generally crappy. Additionally, the plastic melted when it interacted with bug repellant, and the metal rusted easily. The weapons were found to be unreliable in both arctic and desert environments.
The SA80 family used stamped steel, which the Brits had experience with in the form of the Sten gun. However, the Sten had much lower tolerances than the SA80. The tighter tolerances required more skilled labor and better machinery. This led to tons of waste and slow production of the SA80 family of rifles and squad support weapons.
Their first trial by combat came to be in the Gulf War and then later in African operations. It’s tough to say anything nice about these weapons’ performance in the desert. Both the L85A1 and L86A1 proved to be unreliable. The L85A1 worked best on fully automatic, and the L86A1 worked best on semi-auto. This created was the inverse of how the weapons were intended to be used.
The polymer furniture fell apart easily. The magazines and the magazine catch proved problematic. It was too easy to access and would cause soldiers to accidentally drop magazines. The top cover catch required tape to hold it in place. The weapons needed to be kept incredibly clean and could deform if gripped too hard.
The weapon overheated quickly, the firing pin was fragile and broke easily, and dirt could accumulate behind the trigger and prevent it from being pulled. The safety selector could swell when it got wet and render the weapon useless. SAS operator and Gulf War commando Chris Ryan stated that the SA80 was “poor-quality, unreliable weapons at the best of times, prone to stoppages, and it seemed pretty tough to have to rely on them.”
It’s easy to see why the rifles sucked. The British Ministry of Defence commissioned a report that stated,
“The SA80 did not perform reliably in the sandy conditions of combat and training. Stoppages were frequent despite the considerable and diligent efforts to prevent them. It is extremely difficult to isolate the prime cause of the stoppages.
It is, however, quite clear that infantrymen did not have CONFIDENCE in their personal weapons. Most expected a stoppage in the first magazine fired. Some platoon commanders considered that casualties would have occurred due to weapon stoppages if the enemy had put up any resistance in the trench and bunker clearing operations.
Even discounting the familiarisation period of desert conditions, when some may have still been using the incorrect lubrication drill, stoppages continued to occur.”
Commenter BigFire noted that Ian McCollum had done a video on the weapon, and he’s no less scathing:
Making simple weapons that can be turned out on prosumer grade CNC machines gets easier and easier every year, but designing automatic weapons that reliably work across a wide range of combat situations is still hard…
Ukrainian Naval Drones Hit A Tanker, Gives Russia Another Dilemma
August 5th, 2023Ukraine is stepping up it’s naval drone game, as they just hit a Russian tanker.
A Ukrainian sea drone full of explosives struck a Russian fuel tanker overnight near a bridge linking Russia to annexed Crimea, the second such attack in 24 hours, both sides said on Saturday.
No one was hurt, but the Crimean Bridge and ferry transport were suspended for several hours, according to Russian-installed officials in Crimea, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.
A Ukrainian intelligence source told Reuters that the drone with 450 kg of explosives hit the SIG vessel as it transported fuel for the Russian military in Ukrainian territorial waters.
“The tanker was well loaded with fuel, so the ‘fireworks’ were seen from afar,” the source said, of the joint operation by Ukraine’s navy and security service.
Kyiv says destroying Russia’s military infrastructure inside Russia or on Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine is crucial to its counteroffensive after the February 2022 invasion.
Another sea drone attack on Russia’s navy base at Novorossiysk damaged a warship on Friday, the first time the Ukrainian navy had projected its power so far from its shores.
Suchomimus has two separate videos up about the attack, the second of which includes footage of the strike itself:
To me one of the interesting things in that video is not about the attack itself, but the sat pic 25 seconds in that shows over a dozen ships anchored some 20km south of the Kerch Strait Bridge. I don’t know why they’re doing that (Escorting them one at a time through the strait? Port capacity?), but an anchorage area like that offers a target-rich environment now that we know Ukraine has the capability to hit it.
That video shows a guided rather than pre-programmed drone, as it corrects course to hit the tanker.
In the second video, Suchomimus also covers the various Black Sea naval assets Russia might have to employ to defend against naval drone attacks. The choices are limited, and some of the ships they have available seem unsuited to the task. And a few that are suitable will have to be taken off duty firing Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian civilian infrastructure.
Federal Judge Rules Against ATF Brace Rule
August 3rd, 2023A small victory in the war against ATF overreach:
The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that two Texas residents are likely to prevail in their legal challenge to a Biden administration rule that redefined firearms with pistol braces as heavily regulated short-barreled rifles (SBR), ordering the district court to reconsider issuing a permanent injunction to block the rule.
The case, styled Mock v. Garland, was brought by attorneys with the Firearms Policy Coalition on behalf of Texas residents William Mock and Christopher Lewis. The plaintiffs sought to block the administrative rule that would subject firearms, otherwise legally classified as pistols, as SBRs, which are heavily regulated under the National Firearms Act (NFA).
To purchase an NFA-regulated weapon, a buyer must undergo a background check, pay $200 in taxes to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), and wait roughly a year. NFA firearms are also subject to a litany of additional regulations, the violation of which can subject the owner to substantial civil and criminal penalties.
Gun owners were given four months after the rule change in January to remove braces from their pistols and either destroy, register, or surrender them to the ATF, or else be subject to criminal charges after the grace period.
Snip.
The 5th Circuit’s decision noted that the rule was challenged on two fronts, the first being that the ATF failed to follow proper procedure by giving public notice of one version and then implementing a different final version with a broader application.
Because the court sided with the plaintiffs on the administrative procedural challenge, determining they would likely succeed on the merits at trial and that they meet the requirements for injunctive relief, the court stopped short of addressing the constitutional challenge. However, Justice Don Willet wrote in a separate concurring opinion that he suspects the rule would likely “not withstand constitutional muster.”
God bless Judge Willet and President Donald Trump for nominating him to the Fifth Circuit.
The majority opinion remanded the case to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, where the original judge had denied the plaintiff’s past request for an injunction blocking the rule.
For now, the appeals court is maintaining an order blocking enforcement of the rule against FPC and its members until the district court issues a new ruling on its injunction request that complies with the appeals court’s findings.
Several other legal challenges to the pistol brace rule are presently ongoing in federal district courts, with challenges from Gun Owners of America and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty prevailing earlier this year in securing injunctions to block the rule’s enforcement for the organizations’ members.
The pistol brace rule would retroactively make millions of law-abiding Americans criminals for not registering them (which, for the left, is no doubt the point). Government agencies should not be able to unilaterally and retroactively declare ownership of legally obtained goods suddenly forbidden on penalty of law.
Hopefully the pistol brace rule gets overturned entirely.