Posts Tagged ‘Foreign Policy’

China, The Philippines, Marcos, And Blind Spots

Monday, December 18th, 2023

This post was going to be on how China is still screwing around in the South China Sea (and we’ll get to that), but I want to talk about the difficulty of keeping up with current events, especially of events in foreign nations, especially those nations that don’t usually receive too many headlines. It’s easy to develop blind spots and areas of ignorance.

All of that is prelude to saying that until today, I had no idea that Ferdinand Marcos was President of the The Philippines.

The Marcos in question is not dictator kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos Sr., who died in 1989, but his son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Romualdez Marcos Jr.. (Note how obvious it is that his Wikipedia entry was written by his political enemies.) He was elected in May 2022 and assumed office June 20, 2022. How did I miss that?

In fact, I’ve actually heard more about the failed David Byrne/Fatboy Slim disco musical about his mother Imelda Marcos than I did about Bongbong.

One reason is that I don’t subscribe to a newspaper, because I don’t want a dime going to the Democrat Media Complex. (“If you don’t read a newspaper, you’re ill informed. If you do read a newspaper, you’re misinformed.” – Probably Not Mark Twain) Ditto watching any network newscasts, and I don’t have cable.

I checked my email, and evidently not one of the zillions of newsletters I get ever mentioned the Philippines election while they were going on. Which is odd, since it had a pretty compelling storyline: Marcos’ Vice Presidential running mate was Sara Duterte, the daughter of then President Rodrigo Duterte, in a sort of national unity ticket.

Maybe I’m just out of touch and everyone else already knew about Ferdinand II: The Marcosing, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Anyway: China is screwing around with The Philippines again.

On Dec. 9, China Coast Guard vessels fired water cannons at Philippine supply ships in the Scarborough Shoal, where the Philippine ships had arrived to resupply fishermen. That’s just the latest skirmish in the disputed atoll, which is located near the Philippines but was seized by China in 2012. In fact, in recent months, China has markedly increased its maritime bullying in the waters off the Philippines. That trend is already beginning to spread nervousness among Western businesses interested in friendshoring some of their operations to the Philippines—which may be precisely what China is after.

The water-cannon attack on the Philippine supply ships, which resulted in one of the vessels suffering engine damage and having to be towed back to port, came only a few weeks after two other heavy-handed actions by Chinese vessels near the Philippine coast.

In late October, a Philippine supply vessel and a vessel from the Philippine Coast Guard were bumped, respectively, by a China Coast Guard vessel and a vessel belonging to China’s maritime militia. The incidents took place near the Second Thomas Shoal, in waters that both the Philippines and China consider their own. In 2016, the tribunal in charge of enforcing the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) sided with Manila over the Second Thomas Shoal, but that hasn’t stopped Beijing from claiming it is the rightful owner and underlining this point through various maritime provocations.

Indeed, for the past decade, there have been regular encounters between China and the Philippines in the desolate waters.

In recent months, China has been particularly keen to demonstrate its presence around the Scarborough and Second Thomas shoals. It has rammed Philippine Coast Guard vessels and boats resupplying fishermen. It has used water cannons against Philippine vessels and tried to chase them away. On just one day in November, 38 Chinese vessels were circling the Second Thomas Shoal’s waters, according to The Associated Press.

Snip.

[Ray Powell, the director of Stanford University’s SeaLight group,said Beijing’s objective] is to discourage any attempts by nearby countries to follow the Philippines’ example in asserting their rights to waters that China has unilaterally declared to belong to Beijing. “China wants to communicate that it has jurisdiction in the South China Sea and gets to decide over activities there,” he explained.

The aggression may be of the gray-zone kind—that is, not involving military violence—but it’s decidedly harmful, and not just to the Philippine and other vessels being targeted. “China’s harassment of civilian Philippine vessels carrying out humanitarian missions has a negative impact on shipping in the surrounding waters,” Amparo Pamela Fabe, a professor at the Philippines’ National Police College and a fellow of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Brute Krulak Center, told me. “It also heightens the geopolitical tensions in the South China Sea.”

Indeed, the harassment has so alarmed the U.S. Defense Department that the U.S. military is now making a point of showing its presence off the Philippine coast, including by sending aircraft to circle above altercations between Chinese and Philippine vessels. But in reality, there isn’t much the Pentagon can do to deter the vessels from the China Coast Guard or the maritime militia off the coast of the Philippines: The United States wouldn’t risk an armed conflict with China over the harassment of Philippine vessels.

I’m pretty sure that China wouldn’t be nearly so confident of that if Donald Trump were still President…

Italy’s Meloni Cuts The Baloney

Sunday, December 17th, 2023

When Giorgia Meloni of the conservative Brothers of Italy was elected head of Italy’s coalition government, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the usual Eurolefty sorts and their media cheering corner about how radical, populist, etc. etc. she was. Plus the usual accusations of fascism, due Brothers of Italy having a bit of that DNA from one of the party’s it joined with being the successor party to the successor party of Il Duce. (It’s Italy. You can’t really tell all the twists and turns of party lineage without a dense color-coded flow chart.)

Wait, you can’t tell it with one, either.

But Meloni has generally governed as a fairly stand-issue slightly rightist leader by European standards. But recently she’s been saying and doing things that show she has a bit more starch than the usual Euroweenie leader.

First up: She announced that Italy’s pulling out of China’s debt-trap Belt-And-Road circus.

Italy will pull out of China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the government has confirmed.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s administration notified Beijing that it would cease participating in the BRI ahead of a deadline at the year’s end.

Italy was the only major Western nation to sign up to the BRI, one of China’s most ambitious trade and infrastructure projects, in 2019.

The move was heavily criticised by the US and others at the time.

Launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, the BRI aims to invest an estimated $1tn (£794bn; €925bn) across Asia and Europe. Projects including new and upgraded railways and ports aim to connect China with Europe and other parts of Asia.

Snip.

Only a fraction of the up to €20bn worth of investment in Italy promised by Mr Xi in 2019 has materialised.

Italian exports to China were worth €16.4bn last year, compared to €13bn in 2019.

By contrast, Chinese exports to Italy rose to €57.5bn from €31.7bn over the same period.

The bill benefited China a lot more than Italy. Indeed, Chinese investment in Italy actually dropped after signing the Belt and Road agreement, from $650 million in 2019 to just $33 million in 2021. (I suspect Flu Manchu had a lot to do with that, but, well, that was China’s fault too.)

Now Meloni has come out and stated that Islam is incompatible with Italy’s values.

Giorgia Meloni said, “In Europe there is a very Islamization process distant from the values ​​of our civilization!”

Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni scoffed at Islamic culture and said that there is no place for it in Europe. “I believe that there is a problem of compatibility between Islamic culture and the values ​​and rights of our civilization,” she said.

The premier added, “The Islamic cultural centers in Italy are financed by Saudi Arabia where Sharia is in force. In Europe there is a very Islamization process distant from the values ​​of our civilization!

The comments come after the Italian prime minister hosted a political festival organised by her far-right party- the Brothers of Italy- in Rome which was attended by British prime minister Rishi Sunak. In his speech, Rishi Sunak said that he would push for global reforms to the asylum system while warning that the threat of growing number of refugees could “overwhelm” parts of Europe.

A whole lot of people in Europe are thinking the same thing, but few have stated it as bluntly as Meloni, and virtually none among EU country Prime Ministers. (Though Hungary’s Viktor Orban has come closest.)

Despite the Russo-Ukrainian War and the growing recession, unlimited Islamic immigration into traditionally Christian European countries is the hot-button topic European elites have been desperate to avoid talking about, and the one in which governing elite groupthink seems farthest away from the actual will of the people.

Expect it to continue to be a hot topic as long as European leaders continue to ignore the consensus among citizens of EU nations that they don’t want Muslim illegal aliens coming to their country.

LinkSwarm for December 1, 2023

Friday, December 1st, 2023

Congratulations! You’ve successfully made it to the last month of 2023! Give yourself a cookie!

I’ve spent most of today getting my latest book catalog ready to send out, so I’m probably going to have to break this LinkSwarm into two parts. This part: More Biden corrupton evidence, Big Brother wants all your tweets, Jihadi gets stabby in Ireland, and a couple of fairly notable political deaths.

  • “Bank Investigator Flagged ‘Unusual’ Chinese Payments behind $40k Check to Biden, Raised Possibility of Influence Peddling.” Ya think?

    A bank money-laundering investigator expressed serious concerns about a transfer of funds from China that ultimately trickled down to President Biden in the form of a $40,000 check from his brother, James Biden, according to an email obtained by the House

    Biden received a $40,000 personal check from an account shared by his brother, James Biden, and sister-in-law, Sara Biden, in September 2017 — money that was marked as a “loan repayment.” The alleged repayment was sent after funds were filtered from Northern International Capital, a Chinese company affiliated with the Chinese energy firm CEFC, through several accounts related to Hunter Biden and eventually down to the personal account shared by James and Sara Biden.

    Northern International Capital sent $5 million to Hudson West III, a joint venture established by Hunter Biden and CEFC associate Gongwen Dong on August 8.

    On the same day, Hudson West III then sent $400,000 to Owasco, P.C., an entity owned and controlled by Hunter Biden. Six days later, Hunter Biden wired $150,000 to Lion Hall Group, a company owned by James and Sara Biden. Sara Biden withdrew $50,000 in cash from Lion Hall Group on August 28 and then deposited the funds into her and her husband’s personal checking account later that day.

    On September 3, 2017, Sara Biden wrote a check to Joe Biden for $40,000.

    We all know that if Trump did something remotely close to this, he’d already be in prison.

  • Hamas Violates Cease-Fire, Israel Resumes Airstrikes in Gaza.” This is my shocked face.
  • Big Brother says that all your tweets are belong to us.

    Special Counsel Jack Smith demanded information on Twitter users who liked or retweeted former President Donald Trump’s tweets leading up to the January 6 riot, according to a heavily redacted search warrant and other documents released Monday.

    Smith’s comprehensive search warrant sought the 2024 Republican presidential primary front-runner’s search history, direct messages, and “content of all tweets created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted” by his account from October 2020 to January 2021.

    The special counsel also demanded a list of all devices used to log into Trump’s then-Twitter, now X account, as well as information on users who interacted with the then-president in the months leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, the court filings show.

    Among the information Smith sought were lists of all Twitter users who “favorited or retweeted” Trump’s tweets, “as well as all tweets that include the username associated with the account” in “mentions” or “replies.”

    The special counsel also requested a list of every user Trump “followed, unfollowed, muted, unmuted, blocked, or unblocked” and a list of users who took any of the same actions with Trump’s account during the aforementioned timeframe.

    “There is no benign or reasonable justification for that demand,” wrote former FBI agent/whistleblower Steve Friend on X.

  • “Patrick Wojahn, a well-known LGBTQ activist and friend of key people in the Joe Biden administration, was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Monday. Wojahn pleaded guilty to 140 charges related to child pornography as part of a deal struck with prosecutors.”
  • Henry Kissinger dead at 100.

    Henry Kissinger, the legendary diplomat who played a central role in advising Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford on foreign policy, died at his home in Connecticut late Wednesday at age 100.

    Kissinger was the only person to simultaneously be secretary of state and hold the position of White House national-security adviser. In 1973, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Le Duc Tho for their work in brokering the 1973 Paris Agreement ending America’s involvement in Vietnam.

    Kissinger was born in Germany in 1923. Three months before Kristallnacht, his family fled, bound for New York City. Kissinger served in the Army during World War II and was assigned to the 84 Infantry Division, voluntarily staying behind at the Battle of the Bulge to reportedly conduct “hazardous counter-intelligence duties” while also “making good use of his German.”

    Kissinger was a key Cold War figure as Secretary of State, and one who doesn’t deserve all of the extensive condemnation he receives (for different reasons) from left and right, nor the hosannas of praise he received from the mainstream media during is heyday. The instantly betrayed peace treaty with North Vietnam (the won he won the Nobel Peace Prize for) was shameful, but LBJ’s incompetence and Washington elite failure of nerve probably doomed South Vietnam before Kissinger even got to the negotiating table. The opening to China was a brilliant move to counter the Soviet Union at the time, and helped usher in a brief period of economic and political liberalization that has now been almost completely undone. SALT1 and the ABM treaties were violated by the Soviet Union before the ink was even dry.

    Kissinger was at his best down deep in the intricacies of face-to-face diplomacy, and played a key role in negotiating details after the Yom Kippur War. Indeed, Kissinger’s goal of stabilizing the Middle East (at least as far as preventing another major Arab-Israeli War) was met.

    Kissinger was ultimately wrong for favoring detente over rollback, but that preference was also emblematic of the Washington foreign policy establishment of the time, and it would take Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 to set America on the right course (and the Soviet Union to the dust-heap of history).

  • Sandra Day O’Connor dead at 93. Eh, she wasn’t the worst Republican appointee to the Supreme Court.
  • Irish riot over illegal alien stabbing spree against children. Rioting is bad, mmkay, but Irish citizens, like those across the rest of the EU, are tired of the enforced consensus for allowing unassimilable Islamic immigrants to cross the border and immediately apply for the welfare rolls.
  • History made as the Irish riot while sober.
  • “Ireland Declares Asking An Immigrant To Stop Stabbing You A Hate Crime.”
  • Not just Ireland. “‘We are here to stab white people’: Teen killed, 16 others wounded in French village after migrant gang reportedly descends on winter ball.”
  • High prices and “lot rot” are doing CarMax in. Not to mention the Biden recession…
  • More of that voting fraud that doesn’t exist. “Virginia Election Official ‘Altered Election Results’ in 2020.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • I just must not be paying attention, because I missed I missed the return of former UK PM David Cameron as foreign secretary a few weeks ago. Eh, you do get a lot of reruns this time of year…
  • “Disney got Microsoft to change its AI image generator because people were making too many savage Pixar-style posters.”
  • Examples, some of which are very not safe for work:

  • Speaking of AI, Sports Illustrated has evidently been caught using it rather than hiring competent sportswriters.
  • Critical Drinker is not too impressed with Napoleon.
  • “Biden Airdrops Humanitarian Resupply Of Hostages Into Gaza.”
  • No Wonder the Left Hates “Argentina’s Trump”

    Sunday, November 26th, 2023

    One reason to be cautiously optimistic of anarcho-capitalist outsider Javier Milei’s victory in their presidential election is just how freaked out the international left is over it.

    In a world with two (or more) major wars going on, China imploding, and a major U.S. recession, a libertarian winning election in Argentina is suddenly the new Worst Thing Ever.

  • “This came after years of far left fascist rule which has plunged the country into crisis, with the inflation rate hitting 143% earlier this month. Argentina has gone from a wealthy nation with an enviable standard of living to one destroyed by socialist lunacy.”
  • “That’s why firebrand Javier Milei, a conservative, a libertarian, a vehemently anti-socialist, anti-woke outsider won the presidential election in a landslide.”
  • “The world’s media went into a predictable meltdown, similar to when Italy’s center-right Giorgia Meloni was elected prime minister last year.”
  • “But the election results show Argentinians, including young Argentinians, importantly, have finally woken up to the lunacy of watching close to half the population live in poverty despite being blessed with abundant natural resources.”
  • Milei “has been clear in his desire to tackle the bloated bureaucracy that has so poorly served the country.”
  • And yes, he still intends to shut down Argentina’s central bank. “This weekend he confirmed that it was an absolute, non-negotiable.”
  • He wants to eliminate the Ministry of Sports and Tourism, the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development, the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity, and Ministry of Public Works.

  • Says Milei: “We are crushing them in the cultural battle! We are not only economically superior, we’re culturally superior, we are aesthetically superior, we are better than them at everything, and that triggers them!”
  • And since they can’t beat him in the field of ideas, “they use the repressive power of the state to destroy their enemies.”
  • You know who else likes the cut of Milei’s jib? Donald Trump.

    “Congratulations to Javier Milei on a great race for President of Argentina! The whole world was watching, and I’m very proud of you! You will turn your country around and truly make Argentina great again!”

    Trump also plans to visit him in Buenos Aires.

    Argentina’s President Not A Fan Of Communist China

    Saturday, November 25th, 2023

    There are a lot of reasons to celebrate Javier Milei’s election as president of Argentina, the biggest of which is that he’s going to apply free market, limited government principles to reviving Argentina’s moribund economy.

    But he’s also not a fan of communist China.

    “People are not free in China, they can’t do what they want and when they do it, they get killed,” he told Bloomberg News on Wednesday, referring to Beijing’s government. “Would you trade with an assassin?”

    Milei shook Argentina’s political establishment last weekend after receiving more votes than a probusiness opposition bloc and the ruling Peronist coalition, putting him in the lead to be the country’s next president. His election in October would generate shock waves across a region largely ruled by leftist leaders.

    In his blanket refusal to do any kind of business with “socialists,” he lumped Communist China in the same category as Argentina’s biggest trade partner, Brazil, led by leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. China is the second-largest buyer of Argentine exports and provides a crucial $18 billion swap line with the central bank that’s being used to pay the International Monetary Fund.

    He described his foreign policy proposals as a global “fight against socialists and statists.”

    Libertarians critical of communists? What are the odds?

    It probably means that Argentina won’t be buying any of China’s crappy jet fighters, either.

    LinkSwarm For November 17, 2023

    Friday, November 17th, 2023

    Progressives kick Jews out of the club, San Francisco cleans up for a communist dictator (but not mere citizens), FBI busts a brothel catering to politicians…then refuses to divulge their clients, and The Marvels crashes and burns on opening weekend. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Jews Get Kicked Out of the Progressive Club.”

    To sustain the alliance between leftists and Islamists, something had to give. And that something was Jews.

    After a while, it became a parody worthy of classic comedy skits: the Biden administration’s reflexive need to launch into a condemnation of “Islamophobia” every time the discomfiting topic of antisemitism came up — which, you may have noticed, it does quite a bit these days.

    Progressives hate antisemitism. Not, unfortunately, the concept . . . the word. It holds a mirror up to their internal contradictions.

    Jews have been among the most consequential, cutting-edge progressives in history. A few months back, I reviewed Democratic Justice, Brad Snyder’s biography of Felix Frankfurter, who may have been as responsible for forging the dominance of American progressivism as Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president he zealously served. Alas, Frankfurter would not be welcome today in what’s become of his movement — not least because of another project on which he collaborated with his mentor and fellow Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis: Zionism. That project is anathema to today’s progressives. It honors the old order and the uniqueness of a people reified in their ancestral homeland, one in which they dwelled for millennia — before Islam existed and, 14 centuries later, the notion of “Palestinians” was conceived.

    Moreover, to highlight antisemitism is intolerably inconvenient to the collaboration of highest priority for modern progressives: Their partnership with sharia supremacists — so-called Islamists, adherents to “political Islam.”

    Snip.

    Ostensibly, it’s an unlikely partnership: Sharia supremacists despise many signal progressive causes — e.g., abortion, equality for women, civil rights for homosexuals, and “gender fluidity.” (How long do you figure the “activists” waving their “Queers for Palestine” placards would actually last in Gaza?) And it seems odd for progressives, infamously intolerant of religious liberty, to make common cause with unabashed theocrats who would impose on society a systematically discriminatory legal code enforced by barbaric punishments — of the terrorizing kind that, not coincidentally, the Brotherhood’s Hamas jihadists inflicted on Israeli men, women, and children on October 7.

    But let’s dig deeper. The ne plus ultra for sharia supremacists and leftists is the extirpation of the established order. Yes, they have very different ideas about what should replace that order; but that’s an argument for later (at which point progressives would find themselves in the unenviable position of the appeaser after the crocodile is done devouring everyone else). For now, it is a marriage of convenience, a joint war of conquest against Western civilization.
    Marriages of convenience are not big on commitment and loyalty. Hence, Jews — predominantly on the left, with legions of stalwart progressives who would as reflexively rebuke Islamophobia as any good Democrat — have become a casualty of that war.

    The sharia-supremacist hatred of Jews is doctrinal. As the Hamas Charter relates, Islamic eschatology is consumed by an end-of-times war in which even trees and stones will help Muslims kill their mortal enemies, the Jews. The Islamic claim on the land “from the River to the Sea” also stems from scripture: Mohammed’s night ride from Mecca to Jerusalem and on to heaven. And Muslim scripture further holds that Islam’s prophet died upon being poisoned to death by a Jewish woman.

    This is all very uncomfy for progressives. They really don’t do doctrine, let alone submit — or at least allow themselves to appear to be submitting — to religious doctrine. Thus must they engage in euphemistic games to sidestep reality.

  • “Democrat Media Arm Scrambles As It Becomes Clear They Knew About Hamas Invasion Of Israel Before It Happened. “Reports have been bubbling up that the various tentacles of the Democrat hacktivist media actually had pro-Hamas activists ‘journalists’ embedded with Hamas before and on October 7th.”
  • Democrats wouldn’t clean up San Francisco for mere citizens, but they did it for a communist dictator.

    Apparently, the city of San Francisco can indeed clear out the tent cities of homeless, remove the human feces and hypodermic needles from the sidewalks, and make the downtown look sparking clean and shiny in just a matter of days. All it takes is sufficient motivation — like hosting a visit from Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.

    Even the New York Times can’t deny the irony that the arrival of Xi and a plethora of overseas leaders is spurring efforts that, presumably, could have been started and carried out at any point with enough motivation:

    On Market Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, maintenance workers resurfaced uneven sidewalks and installed plywood over empty tree wells.

    Nearby, a crew gave a long-derelict plaza a makeover by turning it into a skateboard park and outdoor cafe with ping-pong tables, chess boards and scores of potted plants. Elsewhere, workers painted decorative crosswalks and new murals, wiped away graffiti, picked up piles of trash and removed scaffolding to show off a refurbished clock tower at the Ferry Building. . . .

    Perhaps the most obvious change has been seen at the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building at the corner of Seventh and Mission Streets, less than a mile from the conference center.

    Before we go any further, can I just point out how infuriating it is that we live in a country with so many genuinely heroic, inspiring, and under-recognized figures, and yet we name things after politicians whose greatest achievements were bringing back a lot of federal funds to their constituents? I realize in the state of West Virginia, that statement is blasphemy.

    In a perfect irony, in August, “Officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services advised hundreds of employees in San Francisco to work remotely for the foreseeable future due to public safety concerns outside the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building on Seventh Street.” As Iowa GOP senator Joni Ernst noticed, to protect the building named after the House speaker who said that border walls are “immoral,” federal officials put up a high chain-link fence.

    In other words, the official assessment of the federal government is that the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building is not a safe place for anyone, which strikes me as a heavy-handed metaphor.

    Anyway, back to the Xi-driven cleanup:

    For two years, a stubborn fentanyl market at the corner and a sprawling homeless encampment across the street became neighborhood fixtures. People regularly used drugs in an adjacent alley.

    Most have seemingly disappeared in a poof…

    It’s almost like the city government of San Francisco perceives Xi Jinping as the boss it needs to impress, instead of the voters whose exorbitant taxes (including an 8.625 percent sales tax!) pay city employees’ salaries. If the city is worth making safer, cleaner, and more attractive for a visit by Xi, President Biden, and a whole bunch of diplomats . . . why isn’t it worth making safer, cleaner, and more attractive for the full-time residents?

    Why indeed.

  • “Newsom Assures Homeless They Can Resume Pooping On Sidewalks Once His Boss Leaves.”
  • “Californians Set Up President Xi Dummy So Newsom Will Keep The Cities Clean All The Time.”
  • Thinks that make you go Hmmmm: “DOJ Protects D.C. Brothel Customers… As Congress Votes For New FBI Facility.”

    Two tightly connected things happened in Washington, D.C., on November 8: a “high-end” brothel serving “elected officials” was shut down by the FBI, and the U.S. House approved a controversial $300 million new headquarters building for the weaponized agency.

    In announcing the brothel’s bust, the Department of Justice explained that the sex-trafficking operation served “elected officials, high tech and pharmaceutical executives, doctors, military officers, government contractors that possess security clearances, professors, attorneys, scientists and accountants, among others.”

    The press release named the brothel operators: Han “Hana” Lee, 41, of Cambridge, MA; James Lee, 68, of Torrance, CA; and Junmyung Lee, 30, of Dedham, MA.

    In lurid detail, the Department of Justice explained how the operators advertised their services—primarily young Asian women—for high-end customers. In order to utilize the prostitution services of the brothel, prospective clients allegedly completed “a form providing their full names, email address, phone number, employer and reference if they had one.”

    Not mentioned in the press release were the names of the customers.

    The announcement was made just ahead of a vote in the U.S. House, which would have defunded the $300 million new headquarters building proposed for the FBI. The facility, to be built in Maryland, will reportedly be larger than the Pentagon. The Pentagon has a total floor area of 6.5 million square feet and offices 23,000 military and civilian employees.

  • Dispatches from the Biden Recession: “Stellantis offers buyouts to roughly half of U.S. salaried workers.” Stellantis consumed the corpse of Chrysler several years back.
  • “Taibbi: According To Pundits, ‘Ignorance’ Makes Americans Give “Wrong” Answers To Economic Confidence…The Guardian editorial Krugman linked to explains: Americans continue to believe the economy sucks, even though they’ve been told over and over it doesn’t! Why won’t they listen?…I can’t remember an instance of newspapers polling Americans about their feelings, then telling them their answers are not only wrong, but ignorant!
  • “Pro-Palestinian” protestors are anti-American protestors:

    (Hat tip: The Daily Gator https://thedaleygator.net/?p=25316 )

  • Gaza kids say the darndest things…about killing Jews. “I want to stab them again and again.”
  • Speaking of which, what better accessory is there for a little girls room than a cache of rocket launchers?
  • Tim Scott is out. Like so many in this presidential campaign cycle, he made himself less, not more, electable by taking the wrong side in the culture war.
  • Texas Republican congressman Michael Burgess will not seek reelection.
  • This is a weird story: “Congressman Pat Fallon (R-TX-4), who had filed to run for Texas Senate District (SD) 30, has now backed out and will instead run for re-election to his currently held congressional seat.” Being a state senator is all well and good, but who steps down from a U.S. Congressional seat to a state senate seat?
  • Austin police officer Jorge Pastore was killed in the line of duty early Saturday morning.
  • “Texas: Islamic scholar praises Gazans for having ‘thrown horror’ in the hearts of the Israelis.” That would be Mohamad Baajour of the East Plano Islamic Center.
  • Another week, another liberal journalist charged with child pornography.

    A BuzzFeed feature story from 2018 about a journalist who told a group of schoolchildren that he was gay was taken down just a day after it was announced that he had been brought up on child pornography charges.

    Slade Sohmer, 44, the former editor-in-chief of the left-leaning video-driven news site The Recount, was freed on $100,000 bail on Monday after he was charged in Massachusetts court with possessing and disseminating “hundreds of child pornography images and videos.”

    He has pleaded not guilty to two counts of possession of child pornography and two counts of dissemination of child pornography.

    (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

  • “Germany’s Rheinmetall to supply Ukraine with 25 Leopard-1 tanks.”
  • Asianometry takes a deep dive into Nvidia’s radical new computational lithography method for generating semiconductor masks. I know a whole lot of eyes just glazed over, but this stuff is important, and I don’t think any other bloggers are covering semiconductors. And speaking of eyes…
  • World’s first whole eyeball transplant performed. No vision yet, but doctors are hopeful.
  • Rosalynn Carter joins her husband in hospice care.
  • Texas A&M head football coach Jimbo Fisher just got paid $77 million to go away. Nice work if you can get it…
  • The Marvels officially has the worst opening weekend of any MCU film. Yes, worse than the Ed Norton Hulk.
  • Speaking of disasterous superhero films, Critical Drinker goes over the compounding errors of the never-to-be-released Batgirl movie. Surprisingly, the film itself was reportedly not that bad, it’s just a cascading series of studio decisions made the film nonviable.
  • Snoop Dogg says he’s giving up weed. And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
  • A tale of two Halloween lights.
  • “Hamas Says All The AK-47s Found In Gaza Hospital Were Strictly For Medicinal Use.”
  • “Thousands Already Lined Up For Black Friday After Grocery Store Offers Prices From When Trump Was President.”
  • LinkSwarm For November 10, 2023

    Friday, November 10th, 2023

    Republicans subpoena Biden Crime Family members, Israel is handily kicking Hamas’ ass in Gaza, Jezebel goes down in flames, and The Marvels looks to be doing as badly as everyone expected. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • House GOP subpoenas Hunter Biden alongside suite of Biden family members.”

    Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden have been subpoenaed Wednesday by the House Oversight Committee, which took the remarkable step of seeking depositions from family members of President Biden amid its impeachment inquiry.

    As part of the request, the committee asked for James Biden’s wife, Sarah Biden, as well as Hunter Biden’s wife, Melissa Cohen, to sit for transcribed interviews. The panel also asks for interviews with Hallie Biden, the widow of Beau Biden, and her sister Elizabeth Secundy.

    The subpoenas come weeks after the Oversight Committee demanded both Hunter and James Biden’s personal bank records, and also include a subpoena for Hunter Biden’s former business partner Rob Walker.

    The panel is also requesting to speak with Tony Bobulinski, whom Hunter Biden’s attorney have accused of lying to the FBI.

    The release from House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said he “plans to send additional subpoenas and transcribed interview requests later this week.”

    If James Biden is a potential felony suspect (which he is), I doubt the House can compel his wife to testify.

  • “Hunter Biden Wants To Sic Daddy’s DOJ On Whisteblower Biz Partner.” Of course he does.
    

  • Despite the expert opinions of all those expert commentators, Israel appears to be handily kicking Hamas’ ass.

    The IDF’s tactical success so far in its nearly two-week-old ground incursion into Gaza – cutting the north from the south and entering Gaza City with limited troop casualties – has surprised some observers. There have been 32 Israeli troops killed during the incursion, according to The Times of Israel, which is far fewer than anticipated. The IDF said it is killing fighters and destroying scores of tunnel shafts and other Hamas infrastructure during its advance that has reached the Mediterranean Sea coast. Still, the mounting casualty toll and displacement of civilians remains a grave cause for concern as outrage grows and calls for a ceasefire increase.

    Snip.

    While good analysis of any major news story should not accept on face value any claims by the participants, it most certainly must not accept the claims of a source known to lie. And yet, the mainstream press and the experts it has relied on have accepted and continue to accept what Hamas tells them, with no skepticism, to the point that several media sources (Reuters, CNN, AP, and the New York Times) allowed themselves to be used by Hamas as propaganda outlets. Their blind passion to get the story combined with their willingness to repeatedly accept the words of an organization not only known to repeatedly lie but to rape, torture, and slaughter women, children, and babies caused them to misread the situation badly.

    Others might not be so kind, and will instead say this poor analysis was because many of these news organizations and the experts they relied on have taken sides. They see Hamas as the good guy and victim, and Israel as the bad guy and oppressor. Thus, their analysis is warped because they assume Israel is lying and Hamas is telling them the truth.

    This conclusion is certainly possible with some news organizations and some experts, but it is a mistake to rely on it entirely. For example, many of the military experts quoted in the articles above were from Israel itself. Yet they too were fooled, and thought Hamas was stronger than it is.

    Muslim fanaticism and Jew-hatred are poor substitutes for planning, training, doctrine and logistics.

  • West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin will not run for reelection. That’s pretty much a lock for Republicans to flip next year in a state that went for Trump over Biden by 49 points in 2020.
  • If the 2024 Presidential election were held today, Trump would win over 300 electoral votes. “Five out of six swing states that Joe Biden won in 2020 show Trump winning well outside the margin of error.” Usual poll caveats apply.
  • UNRWA Staffers, Teachers Celebrated Hamas Massacre of Israeli Civilians.” Of course they did.
  • Five Nordic nations agree to share flights deporting illegal aliens. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Pennsylvania voting machines shut down after displaying flipped votes for judges in Northampton County.” This looks more like a bug than a felony, as votes between candidates were swapped, not simply switched from a Democrat to a Republican.
  • Former Soros-backed Baltimore State Attorney Marilyn Mosby convicted on purjury charges.
  • Green Charter Township, Michigan board: “Here, have a Chinese battery company.” Voters: “Here, have a pink slip.” All of them were voted out.

  • Leftwing rage monkey Cenk Uygur thinks he’s running for President, despite being constitutionally ineligible.
  • WeWork files for bankruptcy. I thought there might have been a pre-Flu Manchu use case for making a profitable business of co-working spaces, but even that wasn’t possible for WeWork, since they lease rather than own all their space. This means they’re just a middleman in an economy that increasingly eliminates middlemen, and there’s nothing special about their model that actual landlords can’t do better.
  • Feminist blog Jezebel shutting down after failing to find buyer.”

    There aren’t enough Nelsons in the world… (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of Nelson-worthy news: Fake meat company Beyond Meat is laying off workers. Seems like Vegetarianism is a luxury good people will are willing to go without in the Biden Recession. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Right now, The Marvels is tracking to have one of the lowest openings in the entire MCU, with just around $60 million. To put that into perspective, Captain Marvel opened with $153.4 million in 2019.”
  • Oh, and as you might imagine, Critical Drinker is not impressed. “People aren’t even angry anymore, they just don’t care. The original Captain Marvel was a divisive movie that inspired debate and controversy, but this one falls victim to a far more Insidious problem: absolute apathy. This really is how the MCU dies, not with a bang, but with a whimper.”
  • Speaking of the Drinker, he referenced this extensive Variety piece on MCU troubles. There’s a lot to chew on here, including how the Blade reboot “morphed into a narrative led by women and filled with life lessons.” (I’m guessing the Variety stylebook forbids using the word “woke.”) But the most interesting bit was the disasterous incompetence surrounding the She-Hulk TV series:

    But some internal sources suggest [Victoria] Alonso was a scapegoat and point to the “She-Hulk” VFX issues as a symptom of a deeper rot — namely a lack of oversight on script development. In the original arc of “She-Hulk,” a flashback of star Tatiana Maslany’s transformation into her Hulk character didn’t take place until Episode 8, the penultimate episode. But after Marvel’s brain trust watched footage, it realized the scene needed to happen in the pilot episode so that audiences could see more of the character’s backstory early. That meant that the VFX team was tasked with fixing the mess in postproduction.

    “The so-called bad VFX we see was because of half-baked scripts,” says one person involved with “She-Hulk.” “That is not Victoria. That is Kevin. And even above Kevin. Those issues should be addressed in preproduction. The timeline is not allowing the Marvel executives to sit with the material.”

    All the while, Marvel was bleeding money, with a single episode of “She-Hulk” costing some $25 million, dwarfing the budget of a final-season episode of HBO’s “Game of Thrones, ” but without a similar Zeitgeist bang. The August 2022 series premiere at the El Capitan Theatre foreshadowed what was to come six months later at the “Quantumania” bow: the “She-Hulk” special effects were out of focus in multiple scenes.

  • Important safety tip: If you’re choosing a victim to rob at knife-point, try not to pick an Ex-MMA fighter.
  • Tentative agreement reached in actor’s strike.
  • Here Lies Love, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s disco musical about Imelda Marcos will be closing on Broadway. The first sign the production was in trouble: It was a disco musical about Imelda Marcos. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Researchers Discover Miracle Cure For Gender Dysphoria Called ‘Deleting TikTok.'”
  • I don’t mean to cause no fuss/But can I ride your doggy bus?

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    How Bad Off Is The Russian Ruble?

    Saturday, November 4th, 2023

    An important but less dramatic aspect of the Russo-Ukrainian War is just what effects the war and resulting sanctions are having on the Russian economy. It’s hard for outsiders to get a handle on just how badly the Russian economy is doing. Since Russia was a net grain and oil exporter before invading Ukraine, it’s not likely to have obvious shortages in food and fuel.

    One economic proxy is exchange rates on the Russian ruble, which is now stuck right around 100 to the dollar. But as Joe Blogs explains, Russia has recently undertaken several actions that indicate the situation is worse than just the exchange rates would have you believe.

  • “The Russian authorities have now imposed additional currency controls, which restrict Western companies that sell their Russian assets from taking the proceeds in dollars and Euros. International companies that want to exit Russia now have to sell their assets in rubles, and if they insist on receiving foreign currency for their assets, they face delays or even losses on the sums that can be transferred abroad.” Obviously I have zero sympathy for any western company still doing business in Russia, as they should have extracted themselves shortly after Russia launched their illegal war of territorial aggression in 2022, but it’s hardly going to encourage the ones that remain to put more resources into their businesses there.
  • Russia first started slapping currency controls down when the ruble weakened in July, with various repatriation restrictions and limiting schemes. Also, businesses wanting to get their money out were forced to pay “a contribution to the Russian budget, which is deemed to be ‘voluntary’ but in reality is mandatory, which was recently raised from 10% to 15% of the total transaction value.” The line item on that should probably read “Vlad’s Protection Money.”
  • Plus: “The sale of any Russian assets must take place at a discount of at least 50%.” You lie down with jackals and you wake up with fleas.
  • Various other indignities visited upon foreign businesses doing Russia snipped because, really, screw those guys.
  • Then there are the foreign income controls:

    On October 11 “President Putin signed a decree mandating the reintroduction of capital controls for an undisclosed list of 43 exporting firms. The controls will last for six months, and Russia has not published the list of which companies these measures will apply to. However, they are companies in the fuel, energy, metal, chemical, timber and grain industries. Starting from October the 16th, certain Russian exporters within 60 days from the moment of receiving funds are obliged to credit their accounts in Russian banks with no less than 80% of all foreign currency received in accordance with the conditions of their export contracts. They also required within two weeks to sell on the country’s domestic market no less than 90% of foreign currency revenues credited to their accounts at Russian banks.

  • “President Putin believes that this will solve the problems with the ruble, and stated there are reasons to believe that the ruble rate is fluctuating because foreign currency earnings are not being returned in sufficient volume to mobilize the money supply on the domestic market.” Or, and here’s an alternate theory, rubles are worthless because no one inside or outside the country wants to keep them.
  • “Twelve months ago, one US dollar was trading for 61 Russian rubles, to today it’s trading for 93, which represents a fall in value of more than 50% in the last year, which is an absolute disaster from a currency perspective. The long-term value of the ruble has declined significantly.”
  • “There is absolutely no way that the Kremlin is happy with an exchange rate of 93 to 1.”
  • “Let’s not forget that the current exchange rate has only been achieved after four interest rate rises over the last three months, which means that it’s doubled in a three month period.” Russia’s interest rate is currently at 15%, which is one of the highest in the world.
  • Had Russia not intervened, “the ruble [to dollar exchange rate] could have hit 120 or 130. So Russia is currently doing everything within its powers to maintain the value of the ruble. But even after all of that effort the ruble is trading at its worst level at any time in history” save that right after the Ukraine invasion.
  • With all those rules and declining ruble values, Russian companies have less and less money to spend in international markets, which demand hard currency.
  • Even though sanctions are leaky, Russia’s crashing economy means the ruble is worth less, and Russian companies will find it harder and harder to buy things (like computer chips) on the international market that requires hard currency. And remember that that BRICS currency idea is going nowhere.

    Expect Russia’s economy to continue declining as long as Russia is still trying to occupy Ukraine.

    The Palestine Myth

    Saturday, October 28th, 2023

    With Israel’s full-blown ground incursion into Gaza still looming, it’s time to go over The Palestine Myth again, i.e. just about everything your left-wing types spew about how Israel “dismembered Palestine” is wrong.

    This is a map of the territory now known as the State of Israel, and many use it to support their argument that modern Israel has ‘stolen’ the lands of Palestinian Arabs.

    But there was never a country called ‘Palestine’ to begin with. That name is for a territory, not an actual country.

    So, the whole “Israel took land from a country” idea?

    It’s not the full picture.

    Let’s skip the ancient empires and zoom in on more recent history.

    Specifically, to the Ottoman Empire that governed the territory in question for four centuries, from 1516 to 1917.

    This is an essential context because, during their rule, the area we now refer to as Israel and Palestine was part of a much larger imperial jurisdiction, and not a sovereign state called ‘Palestine.’

    The area had a relatively sparse population. Throughout their rule, the Ottomans encouraged Muslim migration to Palestine, primarily from Egypt and Sudan. This is, in fact, the origin of many of today’s Palestinians, as indicated by the surnames of major clans.

    After WWI, starting in 1917, Britain took over the territory. They quickly issued the Balfour Declaration, which was the first nod to creating a Jewish homeland in Israel.

    Pro-tip: If a lefty wants to debate you on the Middle East, bring up The Balfour Declaration. If they don’t know what that is, point out that they’re simply too ignorant of the most basic facts of the region to have an informed conversation and disengage. (There I go again, winning friends and influencing people…)

    On Nov 29, 1947, the UN passed a partition plan dividing the territory of British Mandate Palestine between Jews and Arabs. It recognized both sides’ rights to establish a nation-state within agreed-upon borders, a move voted on and approved by UN member states.

    The Jewish community fully embraced the UN’s partition plan, but the Arab population flatly rejected it.

    Armed conflict against Jewish settlements started almost immediately, dubbed the War of Independence, even as British rule persisted.

    On the last day of the British Mandate, May 14, 1948, a Jewish state was declared. The very next day, armies from Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt, with smaller forces from Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, invaded the territory, initiating the 2nd phase of the War of Independence.

    After nearly a year of fighting, the young State of Israel successfully repelled invading foreign armies and internal Arab forces, capturing additional territories in the process.

    The armistice lines of 1949 established that the West Bank would be under Jordanian control, and the Gaza Strip under Egyptian control. The remaining territories were incorporated into Israel. These borders held until the 1967 Six-Day War.

    Which is when Israel captured the Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights.

    In 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat visited Israel, marking the beginning of a peace process between the two countries. As part of this, Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. Egypt, however, declined to retake control of the Gaza Strip, leaving it in Israeli hands.

    The 1993 Oslo Accords led to a phased transfer of most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to Palestinian control.

    Fast forward to 2005, Israel unilaterally disengaged from Gaza Strip, evacuating all its settlements.

    Since 2005, there’s been no Israeli presence—civilian or military—in Gaza. Since then, Hamas, a terror organization, effectively controlled the territory.

    The last is not strictly true, since Operation Cast Lead (i.e., Israel reacting to the last time Hamas tried this bullshit) resulted in a short military presence in Gaza while the IDF thoroughly kicked Hamas’ ass.

    His conclusion:

    1. There has never been a sovereign state called Palestine. In fact, as of today, the territories belonging to the Palestinian Authority are the largest ever held by an entity defined as Palestinian.
    2. The majority of Palestinians originated from migration from countries like Sudan and Egypt during the Ottoman Empire, with no proven historical connection to Israel.
    3. Arabs residing in Israel before 1948 were offered the chance to establish their own nation-state but chose to go to war instead. They can’t blame anyone but themselves for the outcomes.
    4. Regardless of history, millions of Palestinians currently live in Gaza and the West Bank, and a viable solution must be found for their peaceful coexistence.
    5. It seems that Palestinians have been the ones sabotaging solutions so far.

    And how.

    (Some Twitterisms like hashtags stripped.)

    Russia: “We Are Withdrawing From The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.” U.S.: “OK.” BOOM!

    Sunday, October 22nd, 2023

    Some under-reported news from last week: Russia withdrew from the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), and literally hours later the U.S. conducted a nuclear test.

    The U.S. conducted a high-explosive experiment at a nuclear test site in Nevada hours after Russia revoked a ban on atomic-weapons testing, which Moscow said would put it on par with the United States.

    Wednesday’s test used chemicals and radioisotopes to “validate new predictive explosion models” that can help detect atomic blasts in other countries, Bloomberg reported, citing the Department of Energy.

    So, a nuclear test, but not a nuclear/fission device. It seems like this was a test using conventional high explosive mixed with radioactive isotopes, For Science.

    “These experiments advance our efforts to develop new technology in support of U.S. nuclear nonproliferation goals,” Corey Hinderstein, Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration, said in a statement. “They will help reduce global nuclear threats by improving the detection of underground nuclear explosive tests.”

    The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty is a bit of an outlier, because it was signed, but not ratified, by the United States, and never went into force because China, Egypt, Iran and Israel also signed but never ratified it, and other “Annex 2” countries India, North Korea and Pakistan never signed it. Despite that, the United States and Russia had been adhering to its terms until Putin decided to do his “Look at me, I’m a big scary nuclear power, fear my wrath!” thing to distract people from his continued failure in Ukraine.

    Like Russia’s withdrawal from START, there’s not much to worry about here. The United States is going to spend some $634 billion this decade maintaining its nuclear deterrent. Russia, already broke before it launched its illegal war of territorial aggression in Ukraine, has probably spent decades under-funding the nuclear program it inherited from the Soviet Union, and the endemic corruption and the brain drain of nuclear scientists to richer western countries probably hasn’t helped either.

    The U.S is still a signatory to a number of other nuclear weapons treaties. But it’s pretty interesting that the Department of Energy had this one cued up and ready to go immediately after the Russkies nixed the treaty…