Ukraine Celebrates Tanksgiving

January 25th, 2023

After almost a year of dithering, Germany has finally relented and is sending Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine.

After weeks of reluctance, Germany has agreed to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, in what Kyiv hopes will be a game-changer on the battlefield.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced the decision to send 14 tanks – and allow other countries to send theirs too – at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.

But that’s not the only big tank news.

US President Joe Biden’s administration is also expected to announce plans to send at least 30 M1 Abrams tanks.

Biden just announced while I was writing this that the U.S. will provide 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine.

It could take months to deliver the tanks because the U.S. has to purchase them through a procurement process.

The move marks a reversal for the Biden administration, which had resisted sending the tanks, and comes as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced his country would provide 14 Leopard 2 A6 tanks for Ukraine’s military. Britain said earlier this month it will provide 14 of its Challenger 2 tanks. France plans to contribute 10 armed fighting vehicles.

They’re also sending parts and equipment and eight recovery vehicles.

The Pentagon has long shown a reluctance to send their best miltech abroad for fear of it falling into enemy hands. However, for both the Leopard 2 and the Abrams, the question is which version of the tank are they sending to Ukraine? Any version of either is going to have more sophisticated and modern fire control systems than the majority of Russian tanks currently in theater. And any version of the Leopard 2 is going to feature a Rheinmetall 120mm smooth-bore gun, either the L/44 or the more powerful L/55. The L/44 should punch through the front armor of most Soviet/Russian tanks, and the L/55 should theoretically punch through all of them.

For the Abrams, the M1A1 and M1A2 are both armed with the L/44, and National Review is reporting that the Biden administration is sending M1A1s. (The original M1 uses the older 105mm rifled M68 gun. That’s thought to be able to penetrate any Soviet armor up to and including the early T-72 models, and possibly some later export models, but not later T-72s and more modern domestic Soviet/Russian tanks. In Desert Storm, even M60 Patton tanks with the 105mm gun were regularly reporting kills on T72s.) Thus Abrams and Leopard 2 120mm rounds of various sorts are fully interchangeable.

The Challenger 2 uses the Royal Ordnance L30 rifled 120mm gun, which uses different ammo.

Back to the BBC: “Germany also permitted other countries to send their Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine – which was restricted until now under export regulations.”

Poland has been itching to send Leopard 2s to Ukraine since very early on in the conflict, but Germany had been dragging its feet until now. Previous German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht was reportedly the clog in the process, and given this came down a week after her departure suggests that was in fact the case.

They’re getting enough Abrams for two plus tank companies (three tank platoons of four tanks each, plus two command tanks), but not enough for a full armor brigade. But add the 14 German Leopard 2s, and presumably you have a force that can rip a hole in any Russian line. Add the already announced Bradleys and other IFVs, and you have a mobile infantry force behind them that can then exploit those holes.

Ukrainian military blogger Denys Davydov seems pretty ecstatic at the news:

  • He says that Ukraine will be receiving Leopard 2A6 tanks, which are very modern indeed. There are a number of country-specific variants, but they all use the L/55 main gun and modern fire control systems, electronics and composite armor.
  • He repeats the rumor that Germany refused to send Leopard tanks unless America sends Abrams, which has a fair amount of plausibility. If Russia does go apeshit over the move (doubtful), Germany could always go “Hey, we just followed America’s lead!”
  • Correction: Davydov states that the Abrams requires jet fuel for the turbine engines. This is false. The Honeywell AGT1500 gas turbine engine powering the M1 does not require jet fuel to operate, it can run on jet fuel, diesel, gasoline, or marine diesel (which used to have a higher sulfur content than regular diesel, though I’m not sure that’s true anymore, and is probably not relevant to usage in Ukraine).
  • He says the Leopard 2s being sent are in active service with the German army, not in long-term storage.
  • “We have the common decision from many of the Western allies (Norway, Poland, Germany, and many others, UK obviously, and probably United States, will provide the tanks to Ukrainian.” Indeed, Norway just announced that it is also sending leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine.
  • As for his predictions that Ukraine will liberate Crimea come spring, and that this will, in turn, cause the collapse of the Russian federation and drive Putin from power, well, let’s just call them highly speculative.

    • So too Peter Zeihan (him again) is on the tank news as well:

    Some takeaways:

  • As to why the Germans have been so hesitant, I don’t know if you know your history…

    …but the last couple hundred years of history [doesn’t] necessarily put the Germans in the best light. And so the idea that the Germans would ever, in a peaceful environment, decide that they should take a leadership position on military affairs is something that is antithetical, not just to the German population in general, but the government of Scholz specifically. His party is the Social Democrats, and they have basically made their bones in geopolitics about making sure that Germany is never an offensive power at all.

  • The Leopard 2 is good, but “the Abrams should be more accurately thought of as the pinnacle of armored equipment development. This is a system that is not merely a tank, it’s a weapons system that has several integrated programs within it, some of which the Americans still consider top secret so anything that the United States sends from its arsenal is going to honestly have to be dumbed down a significant amount, and that is going to at a minimum take time.” I think he overstates the case here slightly, because the M1A1 isn’t on the cutting edge the way the M1A2 Sepv3 is, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if their are some systems in there the Pentagon doesn’t want anyone outside to take a look at. On the other hand, there several other nation operators, so this is a solved problem. Also, Abrams have been deployed to Europe as recently as 2020 as part of Operation Atlantic Resolve.
  • “There are over a dozen countries in Europe that use [Leopard 2s], and everyone except for the Germans has been arguing for sending these things for weeks now. So these the Leopards can actually be on the front lines in Ukraine probably within two or three or four months, which means it can actually make a difference in the coming spring offensive, which will happen in May and June.” My caveat would be that it takes about as long to properly train a Leopard 2 crew as an Abrams crew, and if I were the government of the USA, Poland, etc., I would have already been secretly training Ukrainian crews on Abrams and Leopard 2 simulators.
  • “You’re talking a minimum of the year, probably closer to three, three to build out the physical support infrastructure to get an appreciable number of Abrams in play.” This is either false or only narrowly true in that it might take 1-3 years to train a single Ukrainian technician to master the complete suite of Abrams repair and maintenance skills. It uses the same main gun ammo, the same 7.62x51mm NATO machine gun ammo (though the Leopard 2 lacks the M2 .50 BMG machine gun, but .50 BMG is hardly difficult to get a hold of), and the same fuel as the Leopard 2, and we’re sending spare parts along. The logistical tail is real, but it overlaps heavily with the Leopard 2. A C-5 Super Galaxy can lift two Abrams tanks, so if it was absolutely a top priority, all 31 Abrams could be delivered tomorrow to Rzeszów–Jasionka Airport less than 100 miles from the Ukrainian border. (More likely is something like shipping from Charleston to Gdansk, which would be about 15 days after all the bureaucratic niceties are observed.)

    • As always, tank crew effectiveness comes down to training. A good tank crew takes a minimum of six months to become proficient enough to be effective in combat (and most would argue it takes longer). Even if you assume you can shave some time off for Ukrainian tanks crews experienced on Soviet equipment, it still takes a good deal of time to become proficient on either an Abrams or a Leopard 2; two to three months would seem to be the absolute minimum. So unless Ukrainians were already training on Leopard 2s and/or Abrams in secret, I wouldn’t expect to see in the field any until (at the earliest) late April.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 21 Comments »

    Peter Zeihan on A Second Holodomor in Ukraine

    January 24th, 2023

    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.”
  • He reiterates predictions of famine.

    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.

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    Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy, Military, video | 8 Comments »

    In Which I Fail To Write About Jeremy Clarkson

    January 23rd, 2023

    I was going to write about the latest cancel culture lynch squad attempt to get Jeremy Clarkson, but then I see that I would have to talk about the no-talent “royal couple” and I refuse to. Instead, enjoy a three minute Paul Joseph Watson video on the topic.

    “Never apologize!”

    I would link to Clarkson’s blistering attack on Wokeness…but it appears that the Sunday Times has cravenly removed it from their website. The Daily Skeptic appears to have reprinted it.

    How did a movement theoretically dedicated to “checking privilege” take as its sacred totem a woman who’s only accomplishment is marrying into the royal family?

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    Posted in Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, video | 1 Comment »

    “Beijing Mini-Me” Xiongan Is China’s Largest “Rotten Tail” Project

    January 22nd, 2023

    Due to issues of politics, congestion, or just plain corruption, nations get the bright idea to build brand new capital cities far away from existing urban areas. Sometimes it works out (as with Washington D.C.), and sometimes it doesn’t. China’s Xi Jinping is trying something different with Xiongan, which is being built not so much a replacement to Beijing but as sort of “mini-me” Beijing to relieve overcrowding by offloading functions to the new built-from-scratch city in Hebei* province.

    About 60 miles south of the center of Beijing, a new city is being built as a showcase of high-tech ecologically friendly development. Its massive high-speed rail station and “city brain” data center have been heralded by Chinese state media as evidence of the speed and superiority of China’s growth model—not least because the city is a “signature initiative” of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

    Commies (and their American fans) do love their high speed rail projects. Never mind that high speed rail in China has mostly been a trillion dollar, money losing sinkhole.

    Xiongan New Area is also a test for whether China can boost domestic innovation and climb into the ranks of advanced nations in the face of slowing economic growth and efforts by the United States and others to restrict its access to advanced technology.

    Xiongan offers a window into what Xi’s vision of state-led innovation looks like on the ground. Xi has called the city his “personal initiative” and a qiannian daji, or “thousand-year plan of national significance.”

    You know who else had a thousand year plan?

    Sorry, I just can’t resist a good Hitler meme when you pitch a slow ball right over the center of the plate…

    The plan for Xiongan, which was formally unveiled in 2017 to relieve pressure on Beijing and promote the “coordinated regional development” of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, has faced financial struggles due to the huge investment costs—even more of a problem given China’s mounting real estate crisis. Overall, the new area encompasses about 650 square miles, with a planned population of around 3 million; currently, the three counties comprising the zone have around 1.4 million long-term residents. As of September 2022, 400 billion yuan (about $57 billion) in completed investment had been reported in the city overall.

    While Xi has stacked the new Politburo Standing Committee with officials loyal to him, he has also elevated those with strong science and engineering backgrounds. In his speech at the 20th Party Congress last October, Xi declared that “innovation will remain at the heart of China’s modernization drive” and that China has “worked hard to promote high-quality development and pushed to foster a new pattern of development.” Nevertheless, a confluence of factors including COVID-19 lockdowns and trade tensions is contributing to overall slower growth in China.

    In Xi’s vision, however, party control is not a hindrance to innovation. Rather, Xi’s vision of innovation is one in which the state and party play a leading role. Xi has led a crackdown on private technology firms such as Alibaba but has also promoted policies, such as his Made in China 2025, that aim to boost research-and-development spending and subsidies to give Chinese firms competitive advantages in industries including biotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and semiconductors.

    We know from experience that this approach almost never works, because the profit motive of capitalism is always a superior discovery mechanism for innovation than top-down bureaucratic mandates. We know that the state-led approach has already been a colossal failure for semiconductors even before the sanctions came down, and it’s a good bet that it’s been just as colossal a failure in all the other areas mentioned.

    Xi’s policies favor “hard tech” over software-based platform app companies. The first party secretary of Xiongan was Chen Gang, who oversaw Beijing’s Zhongguancun high-tech park before being transferred to Guizhou, where under Xi ally Chen Miner he helped turn the southwestern province into a center of big data and cloud computing.

    The approach to innovation in Xiongan involves embedding technology within the fabric of the city as well as innovation processes within the party-state. Xiongan Group was created as the investment vehicle for the area’s overall development, under the control of Hebei province but backed partially by loans from China Development Bank. The first central state-owned enterprises to begin construction of offices in the new area were China Satellite Communications Co., the energy giant China Huaneng Group, and Sinochem Holdings. Others now include the big three telecoms and China State Grid, as well as China Mineral Resources Group, a conglomerate set up last year to centralize China’s coal mining industry. These state-owned enterprises could use Xiongan as a test bed for new technologies. Research institutes and satellite branches of several Beijing universities are planning to open in the area around 2025. The relocation of these major units and their thousands of employees will determine how quickly Xiongan’s development proceeds.

    Even as China’s economy has slowed during COVID-19 lockdowns and the global downturn, construction of the first phase of Xiongan has marched on: A huge high-speed rail station to connect the city with Beijing opened in 2020, followed by residential slabs, massive underground utility corridors, and the city brain data center, which will serve as the nerve center of the city’s digital systems. The first section, Rongdong, has been mostly completed, with housing for 170,000 people. Media reports of new schools opening show the effort to build high-quality public amenities to attract residents to the city: Branches of Beijing institutions such as Shijia Primary School and Tsinghua University High School are among the new educational institutions being built in Xiongan.

    The Foreign Policy piece is OK as a sort of sanitized, high level overview, but lacks several key words (“shoddy,” “rotten,” “unsafe,” “tofu dregs,” etc.) that reflect the grittier reality of Xi Jinping’s dream:

    Takeaways:

  • “This is arguably the world’s biggest rotten tail project.”
  • “The project, which was billed as a Millennium Project and a major national event, fell apart after only five years.”
  • “According to the official website of Xiongan New Area, in 2021 the area arranged more than 230 key projects with a planned investment of more than 200 billion RMB. In 2022, 232 key projects were arranged with an investment of another 200 billion RMB and the cumulative total investment has exceeded 700 billion RMB, i.e. nearly 100 billion US dollars.”
  • Add area rail and road infrastructure investments and the total rises to $150 billion.
  • “Located 105 kilometers from both Beijing and Tianjin, the new area is positioned to decongest Beijing’s non-capital functions and will host administrative and institutional units, corporate head offices financial institutions, universities, research institutes and other organizations evacuated from Beijing.” I bet workers who have already gone through the expensive and difficult process of buying their own condos in Beijing will just love being forced to move an hour away.
  • “The initial planning area is about 100 square kilometers, with plans to slowly expand to an eventual area of about 2,000 square kilometers.” 2,000 square kilometers works out to about 772 square miles, or larger than Houston, one of America’s most sprawling cities.
  • “Average folks have wondered why did the central government put this new area…in a sparsely populated and heavily polluted poor rural area.”
  • The idea seems to be to bring Beijing, Tianjin and Xiongan into a single economic circle with a population of 130 million.
  • Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao each decreed creation of their own special areas, and Xi is following in their footsteps.
  • After the new area was announced, “real estate speculators from all over the country flocked overnight. The local property price soared from 4 000 RMB per square meter to 40,000 RMB, catching up with the first tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.”
  • There was an explosion of construction, but then it stopped.
  • “For more than five years, the large-scale construction of the Xiongan New Area didn’t move. The streets were empty, and people from outside had left one after another.”
  • A high speed rail station said to be the largest in Asia the size of “66 soccer stadiums” has only one train a day.
  • “In August 2021, the CCP issued a regulation that downgraded Xiongan to a regional level jurisdiction.” So instead of being it’s own special area, it’s now run by Hebei province, which means “this ‘Millennium Project’ is no longer possible, and the central government has simply dumped this hot potato on the local government.”
  • Official use words like “expedite, start construction, registering land, basically confirmed, etc didn’t explain any more specific progress. This actually allowed the public to read its true meaning, that is there is no substantial progress.”
  • The same pagoda seems to have been constructed several times.
  • “No one wants to go there at all. Even if you force them out of Beijing, they still don’t want to go there. There are no actions from the universities either.”
  • Chinese people think the area has bad “Feng Shui,” and it’s in a low-lying area near a lake that used to be flooded. The local lake and river also have very poor water quality. “However, the [water] treatment project hasn’t yet been completed.”
  • “Xiongan New Area is like building a mansion in a garbage dump, and people don’t want to live there.”
  • “More than five years later, no decent state-owned enterprises have really moved to Xiongan.”
  • “Given China’s objection to objective reality, the only way to make people move to Xiongan is by force. This is what happened in 2017, when the Beijing government forcibly evicted the so-called low-end population and people took to the streets in protest.”
  • Shenzhen New Area benefited from China’s opening, foreign investment and proximity to Hong Kong. “The dysfunctional mechanism of the CCP which had suppressed economic momentum for decades was released at the moment when the country opened its doors, so that Shenzhen could rise with the momentum.”
  • By contrast, Xiongan suffers from global economic headwinds and local finances are “very poor.”
  • Banks poured money into the area, accompanied by corruption. Natives forced out of their homes got low compensation and the new homes were shoddy. Many still haven’t found new homes.
  • “Videos provided by local residents show that the most common problems with homes are water leaks cracked exterior walls and sinking floors in some homes water leaked all over the floor.” A video shows a stairway turning into a waterfall during heavy rain.

    • It’s hard to find on Google maps, but I think this spot shows the same cookie cutter buildings seen in the video.

    Ghost city, tofu dregs, rotten tail; parts of Xiongan seem to check all three boxes.

    *Note: Hebei Province is completely different from Hubei Province further south…

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    Posted in Communism, Economics, Foreign Policy | 9 Comments »

    Toss-able Suicide X-Wing Drone

    January 21st, 2023

    More interesting news on the drone front:

    The state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries arms firm on Thursday unveiled a new small hand-launched loitering missile, or attack drone, that can land back in a soldier’s hand without exploding, the company said.

    The announcement came as IAI had been awarded a multi-year, multi-million-dollar contract with the United States Department of Defense to develop a version of the missile for the American market.

    The device, dubbed Point Blank, is a small electro-optically guided missile that can be carried in a soldier’s backpack. It can be launched and operated by a single soldier.

    Loitering munitions are also known as “suicide drones” or “kamikaze drones.”

    Snip.

    According to IAI, the device weighs about 6.8 kilograms (15 pounds) and is about 90 centimeters (3 feet) long. It can fly at altitudes above 460 meters (1,500 feet), at a maximum speed of 286 kilometers per hour (178 mph), and can hover in the air while the operator confirms a target’s nature and exact position.

    The device includes electro-optical systems to validate and collect surveillance information in real-time, as well as a warhead in order to destroy a target, it said.

    If the operator decides not to attack, the device can be flown back and land in their hand safely, according to IAI.

    “The system answers the battlefield requirement to provide tactical units ranging in size from small tactical teams to battalion level, with an independent and organic capability to increase their lethality,” IAI said in a statement.

    The Point Blank variant being developed for the US Department of Defense is dubbed ROC-X, and first prototypes and training would be provided in the coming fiscal year, the company said.

    This video shows a vaguely X-Wing shaped drone that looks like it might have been assembled from an Estes rocket kit:

    Switchblade-300 drones cost about $6,000 each, so presumably these are cheaper, and the ability to just toss them into the air before guiding them to the target will probably make them useful in a variety of dense environments where Switchblade might be difficult to launch.

    Assuming that the Russo-Ukrainian War extends to the end of the year (a distinct possibility), don’t be surprised if Point Blank/ROC-X sees real world trials there.

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    Posted in Military, video | 3 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for January 20, 2023

    January 20th, 2023

    More Flu Manchu madness, DeSantis continues to drive the woke before him, and a guinea pig mystery. Plus: Monorail! It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    

  • Atlanta antifa types are very upset that shooting cops gets them dirtnapped.
    

  • “COVID Vaccines Are “Obviously Dangerous” And Should Be Halted Immediately, Say Senior Swedish Doctors.”

    The true character and scope of the harm caused by the unprecedented mass vaccinations for COVID-19 is just now beginning to become clear. Leading scientific journals have finally begun publishing data corroborating what the underground research community has observed over the last two years, especially in relation to complex problems of immune suppression.

    Truly concerning numbers pertaining to both births and mortality are also emerging.

    At this moment in time, a new, allegedly super-infectious Omicron variant is all over the headlines. A sub-variant of XXB, this strain is said to possess immune escape capabilities of precisely the type that some independent researchers predicted would follow on the heels of the mass vaccinations’ narrow antigenic fixation. 

    The WHO maintains that worldwide, 10,000 people still die due to Covid every single day, an implausible death toll more than ten times that of an average flu. It reiterates the urgent need for vaccinations, especially in light of China’s reopening and allegedly falsified data on mortality and infections.

    The EU has even called an emergency summit in light of the purported Chinese “Covid chaos” that “calls to mind how everything began in Wuhan, three years ago”.

    In Sweden, the Minister for Health and Social Affairs has said he cannot rule out new restrictions, and states that everyone must take “their three doses”, since “only” 85% of the population is ‘fully inoculated’.

    That such an extensive vaccine coverage has not yielded better results after nearly two years is a remarkable fact. Even more so in light of some individuals receiving four or more repeated exposures to the same vaccine antigen, yet still contracting the disease they are supposedly immunised against.

    At the same time, even more ominous warning signs abound.

    One such warning sign is the fact that average mortality in many Western states is still at a remarkably high level, in spite of the direct effects of the coronavirus being marginal for more than a year. Data from EuroMOMO indicate a marked excess mortality in the EU for all of 2022, and the German Bureau of Statistics reports that the country’s mortality in October was more than 19% over the median value of the preceding years.

    Is this due to Covid, as the WHO’s ’10 000 per day’ figure would seem to indicate?

    Blame is placed at the feet of ‘Long Covid‘ as well as the regular acute infections, but according to the EuroMOMO and Our World in Data stats, the bulk of the excess deaths in Europe during 2022 are actually not due to clinically manifest coronavirus infections.

    Moreover, we shouldn’t see continued excess deaths from a respiratory virus of this kind after three years of global exposure due to the inevitable consolidation of natural immunity.

    If such a situation persists, the hypothetical connection to a vaccine-related immunity suppression that just now has come into focus becomes pertinent to investigate in detail. 

    If, as has been argued, the vaccinations, and especially the boosters, alter the immune profile of recipients such that Covid infections get ‘tolerated’ by the immune system, it’s possible that vaccinated individuals will tend towards a situation of long-term, repeat infections that do not get cleared, and do not present with obvious symptoms, while still promoting systemic damage. 

    The literature now indicates an extensive substitution in the vaccinated of virus-neutralising antibodies for non-inflammatory ones, a ‘class switch’ from antibodies that work towards clearing the virus from our system, to a category of antibodies whose purpose is to desensitise us to irritants and allergens.

    The net effect is that the inflammatory response to Covid infection gets down-regulated (reduced). This means that full-blown infections will present with milder symptoms, and that they won’t get cleared as effectively (partly since fever and inflammation are essential to your body getting rid of a pathogen).

    That these developments alone aren’t cause for an immediate halt to the mass vaccinations, as well as thorough investigations, is astonishing.

    There is of course another, and more well-known, potential partial explanation of the surprising excess mortality. We have indications of clotting disorders connected to the Covid vaccines, evident in a new major Nordic study, while repeated studies evidence a clear correlation between heart disease and Covid vaccination (see Le Vu et al., Karlstad et al. and Patone et al.).

    A newly published Thai study moreover indicated that almost a third of the vaccinated youth enrolled exhibited cardiovascular manifestations, and a yet unpublished Swiss study suggests that as many as 3% of everyone vaccinated manifest heart muscle damage.

  • Oh, you’re serious? Let me laugh even harder. “San Francisco panel urges reparations of $5 million per black adult.”
  • “Seattle public schools sue Big Tech for ‘creating’ youth mental health crisis.” Well, we can’t blame the manifest failures of Social Justice-riddled unionized public education and Flu Manchu lockdowns, can we?

    Penny Arcade nailed this one.

  • “Argentina’s inflation rate at 95%, highest since 1991.”
  • Austin 7-11 blares opera music to drive homeless away.
  • Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rejects AP’s social justice-ridden African-American Studies program for violating law on teaching critical race theory.
  • More DeSantis driving the woke enemy before him: “NHL Reverses Course On ‘Discriminatory’ Job Fair After DeSantis Warns It Won’t Be Tolerated In Florida.”
  • “College professor claims he’s being fired for asking questions during campus diversity meeting…. Tenured Bakersfield College history professor Matthew Garrett said he and other faculty members of a free speech coalition were targeted with false allegations after they asked questions during a campus diversity meeting last October.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.
  • Providence Public School District wants to discriminate based on race. Legal Insurrection Foundation sues.
  • China’s population is already shrinking. And that’s based on the official numbers; the actual numbers are far worse.
  • New Zealand’s Covid Zero fanatic prime minister Jacinda Ardern announces she’s stepping down. Good.
  • Seven missing in oil tanker explosion in Thailand.
  • “The embezzlement and fake kidnapping were part of the unraveling of a coal company called Signal Peak Energy that also involved bribery, cocaine trafficking, firearms violations, worker safety and environmental infringements, a network of shell companies, a modern-day castle, an amputated finger and past links to President Vladimir Putin of Russia.” There’s also a weird part…
  • Telsa drops prices on some models $13,000 overnight.
  • Virginia rejects Ford battery plant plans over commie ties. “Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who is a potential Republican candidate for the office of US President in 2024, rejected the $3.6 billion investment because it involved a partnership with China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., better known as CATL.” Hey Ford, have you considered possibly not teaming up with commies?
  • CNN closes its iconic Atlanta center building. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • 30 years ago: “Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!”

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Local news: “Someone is dumping dozens of guinea pigs in parks around Austin and nobody knows who or why.”
  • One thirsty dog:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ)

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    Posted in Austin, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Texas Aims To Rein In Rogue DAs

    January 19th, 2023

    As George Soros-backed leftwing Democrats started capturing District Attorney offices across the country, a dangerous soft-on-crime ethos has taken hold in many blue-controlled cities. Prosecutors are letting violent felons back on the streets for minimal bond, no bond, or even failing to charge them entirely. Just this week comes news that Harris County Democratic Judge Josh Hill let a convicted felon accused of kidnapping, beating, and choking a woman out on $2 bail.

    The Texas Republican majority in the statehouse has had enough.

    In his victory speech on the first day of the Legislative session, Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan (R-Beaumont) said that “rogue district attorneys” who refuse to prosecute certain criminal offenses must be “rein[ed] in.” Legislation filed this week provides an initial glimpse at Texas Republicans’ plan to do that.

    “Carte blanche public pronouncements by district attorneys that laws we have on the books will be ignored renders the authority of the Legislature to determine what is and isn’t a crime, moot,” state Rep. David Cook (R-Mansfield) said in a statement provided to The Texan. “It is my intention to rein in renegade district attorneys and ensure the rule of law is respected in Texas.”

    Cook’s House Bill (HB) 1350 — with an identical version filed in the Senate by Sen. Tan Parker (R-Flower Mound) — would forbid district or county attorneys with criminal jurisdiction to “adopt or enforce a policy under which the prosecuting attorney prohibits or materially limits the enforcement of any criminal offense … [or] as demonstrated by pattern or practice, prohibit or materially limit the enforcement of any criminal offense.”

    Enforcement of the law would be granted to the Office of the Attorney General, and violators may face civil penalties up to $1,500 for an initial offense and then up to $25,500 for ensuing ones. Offending prosecutors may also be removed from office and their replacement would be appointed by the governor.

    Prosecutors and judges have a certain amount of discretion on when and what crimes to charge suspects with. But by ignoring the law entirely for far-left ideological reasons, Soros-backed DAs and judges are violating the equal protection rights of Texas citizens who are victimized by soaring crime. Securing the life, liberty and property of its citizens is the most basic and essential function of government.

    If they can’t do their job, they need to be removed from office.

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    Posted in Economics, Texas | 20 Comments »

    Russia Says It’s Expanding Military To 1.5 Million

    January 18th, 2023

    As Peter Zeihan noted in yesterday’s video, Russia says they’re expanding their military manpower to 1.5 million.

    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. .

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 31 Comments »

    German Dam On Ukraine Aid Finally Bursts

    January 17th, 2023

    For most of last year there was a recurring pattern for German military aid to Ukraine:

  • The German government would talk about sending various types of modern military equipment to Germany.
  • The German government would actually send Ukraine numerous pallets of Diddly and Squat.

    • I almost did a post on “What’s holding up the German weapons pipeline?” Now, thanks to Peter Zeihan, we know that clog has a name: Christine Lambrecht, the German Defense Minister, who just resigned.

    Takeaways:

  • Lambrecht is not somebody with defense experience. She’s a politico. She has been up relatively high in Germany’s Social Democratic Party, which is a center-left party for decades. So it’s not that she’s a nobody, it’s just she doesn’t have a lot of skills that are appropriate to her current portfolio. This has not been a problem. In fact her specific, deliberate, intentional incompetence and defense matters in many ways was seen by the SPD as a plus.

    Until the Russo-Ukrainian War.

  • “The general position in Germany as a whole, and specifically in the SPD, was that the Defense Ministry itself is unnecessary, that in the aftermath of the Cold War, the threat to Germany is gone.”
  • Plus the deep-seated problem of all Germany’s Historical Unpleasantness.

  • So for the Germans, the post-cold war environment in Europe has been the best it’s ever been. You’re talking about a golden age, because NATO has provided defense, but all the countries that border Germany are either neutral, like Switzerland, or are members of NATO, which is basically everyone else. And in that sort of environment, the Germans can kind of dither and become pacifist socialists. Which, to be perfectly blunt, looking at the long stretch of German history is much, much, much, much, much, much better for everyone than the alternative.

  • “Lambrecht was put in charge of the Defense Ministry to basically continue slowly sliding it into functional oblivion.”
  • “That doesn’t work in an environment where the Russians are back on the warpath, and the Germans need to be starting thinking not just about 20th century military strategy, but 19th century military strategy, and Lambrecht was completely unprepared, professionally, personally and ideologically for this sort of shift.”
  • Indeed, she was a poor fit for a Germany doubling its defense budget. Plus, she hates the U.S.
  • “The Russians are not just mobilizing, but mobilizing in force. They’re finally beginning significant industrial upgrades. They’re finally starting to churn out missiles and ammo and tanks and numbers. And they are finally doing a full-scale mobilization. This isn’t the 300,000 that they did a few weeks ago. We’re talking about at least another half a million men likely being in the theater within a very few number of months.” Not sure where he’s getting this info, only see references to Russia considering it. (Unless my speculation that Russia was carrying out a full mobilization under the guise of a partial mobilization was on the mark.)
  • Germany may now finally move on approving other countries transferring Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. “There are a number of countries, specifically Denmark and Poland, who have been pressuring the Germans in order to allow them to take these exported tanks and then send them on to Ukraine. That requires Berlin’s approval, and Berlin at this point has been demurring. But the coalition now involves almost every single country that the Germans have sold the Leopards, to and so all of a sudden with Lambrecht gone, all of this is in motion, and I think we’re going to see the Germans relent.”

    • Faster, please.

    Finally, all of this is just an excuse to embedded this classic Norm Macdonald bit about Germany. “I’m not sure if any of you are history buffs…”

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 13 Comments »

    Which Democratic Party Kingmaker(s) Want Biden Out?

    January 16th, 2023

    As revelations continue to roll out about a third set of classified documents being illegally kept by Joe Biden, and crackhead son Hunter Biden paying The Big Guy $50,000 a month to rent his house (which would have meant that Hunter only got to keep $33,333 of his Burisma salary…assuming there was no other graft being passed on) a question occurs to me: Which Democratic Kingmaker(s) want to force Biden out of office?

    With midterms safely past, news about the classified documents (which was known in advance of the midterms) was allowed to leak out, indicating that whoever arranged Slow Joe’s greased-skid path to the White House has lost confidence in his ability not to screw things up so badly that Democrats get slaughtered in 2024. And this despite the decided unpopularity both of VP Kamala Harris and backup catspaw Pete Buttigieg. My working theory is that the same people who installed Biden will try to install Gavin Newsom in 2024.

    But the question is who is calling the shots in the Democratic Party? George Soros? Barack Obama? Valerie Jarrett? Ron Klain? Randi Weingarten? (I might previously have included Tom Steyer on this list, but if he really were calling the shots he wouldn’t have tried that disasterous presidential run.)

    If you have good theories and solid evidence on who is actually calling the shots in the Democratic Party these days (and thus the likely candidate for wanting to push Biden out), let me know in the comments below. As Instapundit noted, those that foisted Joe Biden on us have an awful lot to answer for…

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Waste and Fraud | 27 Comments »

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