I didn’t mean to do two big “Russian fire” stories back-to-back, but this seems like potentially big news:
A fire broke out on the territory of the Motovilikha Plant defence holding in Perm, Russia.
Source: Kommersant citing Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Russian Federation and Motovilikha Plant
Details: Photos of the fire were posted by Perm’s social networks. Smoke from the territory of the plant is visible from different locations in Perm.
The Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Russian Federation stated that a report of a fire on the territory of PJSC Motovilikha Plants was received at 20:08. After arriving on location, it was established that the transformer booth was on fire. 37 people and 10 pieces of equipment from the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Russia were involved in extinguishing the fire. The previous area of the fire was 10 square metres.
Quote: “Today, a fire broke out at the transformer substation on the territory of the enterprise. The fire was promptly contained by the specialists of the Ministry of Emergency Situations who went to the spot,” the press office of the PJSC Motovilikha Plant reported.
Frankly, those giant plums of smoke don’t look particularly contained.
The transformer station belongs to the VK-2 boiler house (MZ subsidiary – Teplo-M LLC). According to the media sources, the fire did not affect the power supply of the boiler house.
As Kommersant writes, PJSC Motovilikha Plant, Russia’s only manufacturer of multiple rocket launcher systems, has been in the tender process since 2018. At the time of its introduction, the company’s registered debt amounted to about RUB 17.6 billion. The production activity of mashholding is concentrated in its subsidiary structures: Special Design Bureau CJSC is engaged in the manufacture of weapons, and the rest of the production is carried out by Motovilikha – civil engineering, LLC. The PJSC property complex is put up for auction.
Could be shoddy Russian safety protocols. Could be sabotage from anti-war Russian partisans. Could be Ukraine action, though Perm is some 2,300 kilometers from Kiev. Could just be Uncle Ivan torching the place for some Goodfellas-esque debt erasure.
But whatever the cause, MLRS systems are a huge part of “the Russian Way of War,” and having their main factory offline is going to put a huge crimp in Russian field operations.
Busy Saturday, so enjoy a couple of Suchomimus videos about a Crimean oil refinery that Ukrainian drones made blow up real good.
Here’s footage of the refinery burning bright in the forests of the night:
“This video is showing a burning oil refinery in Depot at Kozaka Bay near Sevastopol Harbor in Crimea.”
“This took place at 4:30 AM, and it was said to be a UAV. Given the size of a blaze I would say it seems that multiple UAVs were used here.” Maybe. Or maybe it’s just that refined petroleum products are naturally very sploady and Russian safety standards and precautions suck harder than Kamala Harris.
And follow-up footage of the fire mostly controlled, but showing two oil storage tanks totally destroyed and several others damaged:
“This oil storage facility is one which supplied the Black Sea Fleet, so we’re going to have to wait and see if it’s loss will have an impact on operations from there.”
It remains an open question how much Russia has actually used its Black Sea Fleet since the sinking of Moskva over a year ago. Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention, or maybe not much news leaks out, but we don’t hear a lot about the black Sea Fleet playing a significant role in the conflict beyond occasionally participating in the missile wave attacks against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure.
Also, one wonders how much gasoline and diesel is flowing into Crimea without the Kerch Strait Bridge back at full rail capacity. I see only one other oil refinery in all of Crimea, a tiny one near Voinka Boihka that could just be a storage facility. And given the lack of visible cars and trucks in Google map images, it may not even be active.
All the more reason to believe that a counterattack taking Melitopol would make Russian resupply of troops in Crimea exceptionally difficult…
Our Glorious Elites try mightily to keep us peons from expressing #WrongThink, two high profile media firings, and more Blue City decline. Enjoy a short but sweet Friday LinkSwarm!
It transpires that the infamous incident before the 2020 election in which 50 former intelligence officials signed an open letter declared a New York Post expose about Hunter Biden’s laptop to have the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” was instigated at the behest of the Joe Biden campaign. This at least is the allegation in a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken released by Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government.
In that letter, which is not easy to find, you’ll see three snippets of dialogue from questioning of Morell, who appears to have organized the open letter. In the first snippet, he explains that the idea originated with a call from Blinken, then of the Biden campaign.
I knew things were bad in my world, but the truth turned out to be much worse than I could have imagined.
My name is Andrew Lowenthal. I am a progressive-minded Australian who for almost 18 years was the Executive Director of EngageMedia, an Asia-based NGO focused on human rights online, freedom of expression, and open technology. My resume also includes fellowships at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. For most of my career, I believed strongly in the work I was doing, which I believed was about protecting and expanding digital rights and freedoms.
In recent years, however, I watched in despair as a dramatic change swept through my field. As if all at once, organizations and colleagues with whom I’d worked for years began de-emphasizing freedom of speech and expression, and shifted focus to a new arena: fighting “disinformation.”
Long before the #TwitterFiles, and certainly before responding to a Racket call for freelancers to help “Knock Out the Mainstream Propaganda Machine,” I’d been raising concerns about the weaponization of “anti-disinformation” as a tool for censorship. For EngageMedia team members in Myanmar, Indonesia, India, or the Philippines, the new elite Western consensus of giving governments greater power to decide what could be said online was the opposite of the work we were doing.
When Malaysian and Singaporean governments introduced “fake news” laws, EngageMedia supported networks of activists campaigning against it. We ran digital security workshops for journalists and human rights advocates under threat from government attack, both virtual and physical. We developed an independent video platform to route around Big Tech censorship and supported campaigners in Thailand fighting government attempts to suppress free expression. In Asia, government interference in speech and expression was the norm. Progressive activists in search of more political freedom often looked to the West for moral and financial support. Now the West is turning against the core value of free expression, in the name of fighting disinformation.
Before being put in charge of tracking anti-disinformation groups and their funders for this Racket project, I thought I had a strong idea of just how big this industry was. I’d been swimming in the broader digital rights field for two decades and saw the rapid growth of anti-disinformation initiatives up close. I knew many of the key organizations and their leaders, and EngageMedia had itself been part of anti-disinformation projects.
After gaining access to #TwitterFiles records, I learned the ecosystem was far bigger and had much more influence than I imagined. As of now we’ve compiled close to 400 organisations globally, and we are just getting started. Some organisations are legitimate. There is disinformation. But there are a great many wolves among the sheep.
I underestimated just how much money is being pumped into think tanks, academia and NGOs under the anti-disinformation front, both from the government and private philanthropy. We’re still calculating, but I had estimated it at hundreds of millions of dollars annually and I’m probably still being naive – Peraton received a USD $1B dollar contract from the Pentagon.
In particular, I was unaware of the scope and scale of the work of groups like the Atlantic Council, the Aspen Institute, the Center for European Policy Analysis and consultancies such as Public Good Projects, Newsguard, Graphika, Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub and others.
New York City Democratic Mayor Eric Adams ripped President Joe Biden’s policies on the southern border Friday, saying that the White House’s position on the issue has turned the Big Apple into a disaster.
Adams has repeatedly asked for assistance from the federal government as New York City deals with thousands of illegal immigrants who have made their way to the city thanks to Biden’s lax border policies. New York City will spend $4.2 billion to house and care for illegal immigrants by the middle of 2024.
“The city is being destroyed by the migrant crisis,” the first-term mayor said during a panel discussion hosted by the African American Mayors Association, the New York Post reported.
The Democrat then said that his city would have seen the biggest financial turnaround in the city’s history if it hadn’t been for the illegal immigration crisis.
“If you removed the $4.2 billion that have been dropped into my city because of a mismanaged asylum seeker issue, you [would have] probably witnessed one of the greatest fiscal turnarounds in the history of New York City,” he said.
Adams is delusional if he thinks illegal aliens alone are destroying his city. Graft, corruption, high crime engendered by leftwing Social Justice policies, high taxes, horribly burdensome regulation, and all the other hallmarks of undivided Democratic Party rule all played bigger roles in New York City’s demise. But the extra illegal aliens didn’t help. So how do you think Texas citizens have felt about the crisis all this time?
“Dem Bigwigs Caught Hobnobbing With Secret Chinese Police Mole.” “New York Sen. Chuck Schumer was recently caught on video rubbing elbows with one of two men arrested for running a secret — and illegal — Chinese police station in New York City’s Chinatown. The hobnobbing occurred at a gala for the Fukien American Association.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Bud Light’s Marketing VP Takes a Leave of Absence and Will Be Replaced.” Not good enough. Alissa Heinerscheid needs to be fired for cause for destroying billions in shareholder value.
Taking the next two in the order they were announced, not order of importance: Don Lemon fired from CNN. Also:
I previously covered this case while it was ongoing. Now Obama bundler Prakazrel “Pras” Michel has been convicted.
A Fugees rapper accused in multimillion-dollar political conspiracies spanning two presidencies was convicted Wednesday after a trial that included testimony ranging from actor Leonardo DiCaprio to former US Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Prakazrel “Pras” Michel was accused of funneling money from a now-fugitive Malaysian financer [Low Taek Jho] through straw donors to Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, then trying to squelch a Justice Department investigation and influence an extradition case on behalf of China under the Trump administration.
So a Democratic Party bundler committed a felony to channel millions in illegal foreign donations to the Obama campaign and the mainstream media can barely be bothered to cover the story. We all know that if the amount had been mere thousands, and the words “Trump” and “Russia” appeared in the story, the mainstream media would still be talking about it…
Russia has begun using its new T-14 Armata battle tanks to fire on Ukrainian positions “but they have not yet participated in direct assault operations,” the RIA state news agency reported on Tuesday, quoting a source close the matter.
RIA said that the tanks have been fitted with extra protection on their flanks and crews have undergone “combat coordination” at training grounds in Ukraine.
The T-14 tank has an unmanned turret, with crew remotely controlling the armaments from “an isolated armoured capsule located in the front of the hull.”
The tanks have a maximum speed on the highway of 80 kilometres (50 miles) per hour, RIA reported.
In January, British military intelligence reported that Russian forces in Ukraine were reluctant to accept the first tranche of the tanks due to their “poor condition.”
It also said that any deployment of the T-14 would likely be “a high-risk decision” for Russia, and one taken primarily for propaganda purposes.
“Production is probably only in the low tens, while commanders are unlikely to trust the vehicle in combat,” the British military said.
“Eleven years in development, the programme has been dogged with delays, reduction in planned fleet size, and reports of manufacturing problems.”
Here’s a brief overview video:
The T-14 has had more than its share of developmental problems, and there are plenty of articles and videos detailing its shortcomings. Lazer Pig’s “The T-14 Armata tank sucks” is a long example of the genre.
If your interest level doesn’t support viewing a full hour of Armata-bashing, here are some takeaways:
“The T14 combines all the ultimate Russian technology previously introduced onto NATO tanks 25 years ago in a way that only a country trying to inflate the share prices of Raytheon would understand.” (Raytheon makes Javelin.)
“It does away with all the unnecessary ERA systems of the T90, which cannot protect the tank against missiles that were invented in the 80s, and instead replaces them with an active protection system that can almost defend the tank against missiles that were invented in the 90s.”
“An auto loader famous for jamming that now cannot be accessed and cleared when it does jam, is somehow heavier and slower than the tank it has replaced, and comes combined together in a package so expensive the company that made it immediately went bankrupt. The country that bought it cannot afford it and it has about as much export potential as English whiskey.”
“For a while, every idiot with even the vaguest sense of military interest was banging on about this tank as if Stalin had come back to life and had personally forged the hull from his own ball sack. And that all tanks across every nation in the world had just been rendered obsolete.”
Sections on repeated post-Soviet tank design failures, like the T-95 and Black Knight, and coverage of Russian brain drain, omitted.
The weird, Tiger-2 derived engine is unreliable.
The driver’s vision sucks.
No crew access to the turret internally.
The autoloader is slower than the manual fire rates on T-80s, T-72s and Abrams.
“The qualifying time for [an Abrams] loader to pass training is seven seconds, and the best crews claim they can reload in about four to five seconds. Meaning a good Abrams can fire twice before the T-14 has reloaded.”
“Ukrainian hackers found that most of the electronic systems on board, including the digital sights, the night vision, the infrared, were all in fact western imports. Most notably, these were last generation French optics from Leclerc MBTs left over from when they were all upgraded to ICONE in 2009.”
Current Russian tank optics are actually available to the general public. “They’re not even the best that are currently available. If you’ve got a spare five grand, you can go into any high-end spy gadget store and buy a drone that will give you better night vision and IR tracking capabilities than the latest generation of modern Russian tanks.”
China reportedly found out that none of the tank’s systems actually worked. “The soft kill defense systems were simply smoke screens, and the hard kill systems designed specifically to stop the Javelin and the TOW missile could not detect if either of these systems had been fired at the tank, and relied entirely on the crew being able to notice a missile traveling at the speed of sound flying towards them.”
“To top it off, there was no evidence of the supposed electronic warfare systems that could render guided missiles and mines inert.”
“Nothing in the Armata is new.”
The idea that western tanks need to catch up to the Armata is laughable. “By the time the Armata enters service, it will already be outdated.”
“Everything the Armata is has been done before, and in many cases has been done better.”
“Russia is not an equal to the United States and NATO, it’s an equal to North Korea, both technologically backwards nations.”
Will all those problems still be present when the Armata engages enemy armor in Ukraine? Some certainly will. I doubt Armata electronics or optics can compare to those on western vehicles, and I bet that its active protection package is miles behind Trophy (which I don’t think will be on any Ukrainian tanks anyway). But I do suspect they’ve had enough time to improve the reliability of the engine, and I’m guessing the armor and autoloader improvements will improve survivability for the tank crew.
Can the Armata take out Ukraine’s legacy Soviet tanks? Almost certainly. Can it take out Challenger 2s, Leopard 2s, and M1A2 Abrams? If it’s able to close in and get off the first shot, probably. But I’m guessing it will find the opportunities to do so few and far between.
British-born Laurence Brown has a YouTube channel dedicated to documenting the differences between Britain and the USA. In the last year, he’s become and American citizen and bought a house in the suburbs (Chicago’s, alas), and has some observations, mostly positive, about American suburbs, including the community of dog owners, immaculate lawns, and America’s love affair with rectangles.
It’s that time of the year again, when local official try to sneak through bond elections when they think taxpayers aren’t paying attention.
The May election in Texas is underway, with polling locations across the state now open to early voters for offices in local political subdivisions.
Early voting in the May 6, 2023 election begins Monday, April 24, and continues through May 2, 2023, with polling locations being open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
According to the Texas Secretary of State, the May election will see a variety of local elected offices on the ballot, including cities, school districts, water boards, and other local special districts.
Here’s a detailed list of those bond elections. Austin-area bond elections include Round Rock (the city, not the ISD), Eanes ISD (three different bond issues), Leander ISD (ditto), Hutto ISD (ditto), Liberty Hill ISD (ditto), Dripping Springs ISD, Coupland ISD and Jarrell ISD.
In Williamson County, you can look to see what you can vote for in your locale here.
Back in November, I put up a post on Ukrainian forces crossing the Dnipro River for a probing raid. Since then I’ve noticed a persistent trickle of hits to the post, presumably off social media posts of further activity. Today came more concrete evidence that Ukrainian troops are landing and operating on the eastern/southern bank of the Dnipro.
Ukrainian soldiers have crossed the Dnipro River for the first time since the early days of the invasion and built positions that could be used to launch attacks deeper into Russian-occupied territory, analysts have said.
The crossing of the Dnipro River, which has marked the front line since Russian forces retreated from Kherson city in November, comes days after reports of a partial Russian retreat in the area.
It comes as Ukraine is widely expected to launch a counteroffensive, which analysts have said may be aimed at pushing 100 miles south of the Dnipro River at least as far as Crimea.
The US-based Institute for the Study of War said that video and photos have generated the first “reliable geolocated imagery of Ukrainian positions” south of the river.
“The extent and intent of these Ukrainian positions remain unclear, as does Ukraine’s ability and willingness to maintain sustained positions in this area,” it said.
Several Russian military bloggers used geolocation techniques to pinpoint Ukrainian military positions around the village of Oleshky, south of the Dnipro River.
Russian military blogger “Thirteenth”, who has more than 100,000 followers, posted a video that he said showed Ukrainian special forces using fast small boats to land on the river bank, where “they have been hanging out for a couple of weeks”.
Another, Rybar, which has links to the Russian security services and has more than 1 million subscribers, posted a lengthy blog on the “foothold” the Ukrainian forces have secured.
Suchomimus has the video and geolocation north of Oleshky, near both Dachy and Dachi (enjoy the confusion) near the Antonovsky bridge.
“Both have little Russian presence in them, with Ukrainian forces now there in some number, with a claim being that Ukrainian troops Advanced alongside the E97 [road] south towards Oleshky.”
These landings have evidently been going on since April 20.
“It’s looking like a decent amount of troops, though most likely without vehicle support, are operating along this area of Kherson along the Dnipro.”
Suchomimus suggests that it may be an attempt to secure both sides of the Antonovsky bridge and repair the dropped spans, but I’m not so sure. Without a sustained effort to push Russian troops out of artillery range, if would be very difficult to repair and maintain the bridge as a crossing point. I also question his assertion that it would be easier to repair those than throw up a pontoon bridge. True, Russia has proved inept at building them quickly (as it has in so many things), but in World War II the U.S. army could throw them up at 50ft an hour or so.
“This could be anything. It could be recon. Could be special forces. Could be a diversion. Could be harassment of Russian forces.” Or a probing raid to map and exploit Russian weaknesses.
It’s unclear how much special forces or infantry could accomplish on their own without vehicle support, but they would have enough artillery (at least initially), drone and possibly air support for a probing raid to cause panic and confusion among Russian forces, especially as part of a broader spring counter-offensive.
Rheinmetall has a new “GameChanger” drone (so they say) with an official “Rheinmetall Combat Drone” moniker that only a German company could love. I don’t see it as an actual gamecharger, but it is pretty interesting: a fixed-wing drone that can drop three other quadcopter drones (or, technically, loitering munitions), each of which can then be guided to the target.
The Rheinmetall Combat Drone is based on the German arms maker’s Luna NG reconnaissance drone and can carry the Hero-R type loitering munition.
“The Rheinmetall Combat Drone is the game changer for protecting your troops and fighting tactically relevant targets,” the company stated.
“Effectors as payloads transform the multipurpose drone from a sensor-to-shooter system into a highly efficient means of reconnaissance with com/network relay and SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) capabilities.”
The NG is the latest in the Luna family of reconnaissance drones, with an endurance of 12 hours and a data link range of 100 kilometers (62 miles). Satellite Communication would provide it with increased range.
The robust fiberglass composite drone has a take-off weight of 40 kilograms (88 pounds) and a service ceiling of 5,000 meters (16,404 feet).
The runway-independent vehicle can be launched with a rope hoist catapult and landed with a parachute and has stealth features with low acoustic, thermal, and radar signatures.
There’s an official video, but Rheinmetall has disabled embedding. So here’s a random Ukrainian guy (judged entirely from the trident on his hat) who’s evidently offering commentary on the drone, and has thus embedded most of the Rheinmetall video into his own. The relevant portion starts around 1:42 in.
Rheinmetall is a very solid MilTech company, but they tend to publicize things well in advance of commercial availability. (They’re hardly alone in this.) As such, I wouldn’t expect released versions to show up in the Russo-Ukrainian War. But they might send a few there for field testing.
I can see use cases for this weapon, especially for hunting down high value targets deep behind enemy lines. But this is sort of like the Cadillac Escalade of drones, while Ukraine’s flying yeet of death is more like an electric scooter: much shorter range, much more annoying, and much more cost effective for their intended task.
The Russo-Ukrainian War is probably cramming decades of drone development into white hot years of combat evolution (as wars tend to do), and every world military needs to be paying attention.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has laid out the devastating results of runaway government spending on the middle class and why it’s so important to claw back lost ground for the average American, who has “received a pay cut for 24 consecutive months … as inflation has persisted.”
He also noted the average American family has lost the equivalent of more than $7,000 in annual income.
There is a direct link between spending, borrowing and printing trillions of dollars, and these disastrous results for Americans.
President Biden has spent trillions of dollars the nation didn’t have.
These unchecked costs drove the deficit to record highs and pushed the debt over $31 trillion.
A former Connecticut Planned Parenthood honcho took his own life days after police failed to arrest him on child pornography charges — botching the raid by knocking down the door of the suspect’s New Haven neighbor.
Tim Yergeau, 36, the former director of strategic communications at the Southern New England branch of Planned Parenthood, died by suicide on Tuesday amid a child pornography investigation in Connecticut last week.
The Biden administration on Thursday unveiled a proposal that would prohibit schools from instituting policies that “categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.” The policy would allow schools to implement certain limitations in the interest of fairness or safety, however.
The proposed rule, which would impact any school or college that receives federal funding, would expand Title IX protections to include gender identity. Under the proposal, a “one-size-fits-all” ban on transgender athletes playing on teams that match their stated gender identity would be a violation of Title IX. The rule, which is likely to face challenges, will face a lengthy approval process.
This is, in fact, the exact opposite of the text of Title IX, which provides special protection for biological women, not men pretending to be women.
Under the radar, a package of bills is ramming through sweeping changes that will reorient our public schools around a new paradigm — subordinating academic basics to an obsessive, politicized preoccupation with race and social justice activism.
“Critical Social Justice” ideology (CSJ) — the vehicle for manipulating our young people into adopting this worldview — is laced strategically through a variety of bills, including “ethnic studies” (HF 1502), “Teachers of Color” (HF 320) and now the House and Senate omnibus education bills (HF 2497/SF 2684).
Taken together, this legislation will inject reductive, racialized thinking into every classroom in Minnesota’s approximately 500 school districts and charter schools; change the fundamental mechanics of education in our state; and give the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) and the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB) broad new powers that amount to an end-run around our state’s hallowed tradition of local control.
Here’s a story I missed earlier: “Kazakhstan Impounds Property of Roscosmos Subsidiary.” That’s the Russian company that’s the main operator of Baikonur spaceport. Haven’t seen any resolution to this, mainly because Russia is so broke thanks to mismanagement, sanctions, and an illegal war of territorial aggression.
Jay Leno drives the 1,025 horsepower 2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170. I have an irrational desire to own something with a Hellcat engine, which I need like I need a hole in my head. Plus I like the look of the Shelby GT-500 Mustang better, and I’m not buying one of those either.
“Disney has proudly employed sex predators for years, and this act of aggression by DeSantis will force thousands of our proud pedo-American workers to leave the park to stay outside the 1,000-foot radius required by law,” said Disney CEO Bob Iger. “This is tyranny!”
