2009 – The Obama-Biden administration takes office
November 1, 2013 – China / BHR:
Hunter Biden, business associate, and Chinese investors agree to create Bohai Harvest RST Equity Investment Fund Management Co., Ltd. (BHR), an investment fund controlled by the Bank of China, to focus on mergers and acquisitions, and investment in and reforms of state-owned enterprise.
December 4, 2013 – China / BHR
Vice President Biden travels with Hunter Biden on Air Force 2 to China and meets CEO of BHR, Jonathan Li. Shortly thereafter, BHR’s business license was approved and Hunter Biden was a board member.
February 5, 2014 – Kazakhstan
Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakhstani businessman, meets with Hunter Biden at a hotel in Washington, D.C.
April 15, 2014 – Ukraine
Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, appoints Biden business associate to their board of directors.
After initially killing a bill on July 12, 2023 that would have increased the penalties on child sex traffickers, the Democrats who completely control the California Assembly’s Public Safety Committee reversed course one day later and voted to advance the bill.
With a final vote of 6-0, including two abstentions from progressive Democrats, the bill now moves to the Appropriations Committee, after which, if it is approved, can move the bill to be voted upon by the entire State Assembly. If passed, SB 14 will make trafficking of minors a serious felony that would qualify under California’s three strikes law, which keeps dangerous, serial criminals off the streets, and make individuals convicted of the crime ineligible for early release.
I highlight the two abstentions by Democrats. Even after a nationwide uproar over their willingness to block harsh penalties on those who traffic young children for sexual slavery, these two Democrats, including Assembly Majority Leader Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles), still could not bring themselves to vote for the bill.
State Senator Charles Schwertner (my state senator) has his DWI charges dismissed. Still, he hardly crowned himself in glory. At least he didn’t yell “Call Greg!” (It did make me wonder what Rosemary Lehmberg is doing today, and if she ever conquered her alcoholism…)
A detailed look at the recording of one of my favorite albums of all time: Peter Gabriel III.
Just what does electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick’s “Silver Apples of the Moon” sound like? You know that scene in a 70s SciFi dystopia where someone’s face gets ripped off to reveal they’re a robot? It sounds like that.
GWAR plays for NPR. So on one side you have horrible monsters who are unbearable to listen to, and on the other side you have GWAR…
There’s a difference between “young and naive” and “young and stupidly naive.”
Today’s college jkids thinking they’re automatically going to make six-figure salaries thanks to their college degrees is the latter. Let’s look at this clip from Dave Ramsey’s show:
“Current college students expect to…a hundred and three thousand eight hundred and eighty dollars in their first job.”
“Yeah, that’s a problem.”
“I interviewed a bunch of high schoolers, and when I talked to them, they all were, like, ‘Well, yeah, I’m gonna make six figures when I graduate,’ and I was like ‘What makes you think that,’ right? There’s no reality.”
“They are way overestimating their starting salaries.”
I’ll never forget a college prep after school program I was in during high school. They were supposed to be telling us how to fill out applications and talking about student loans. The instructors actually said that you won’t need to pay off your student loans; they don’t expect you to. When I told my dad that, he pulled me out of there immediately.
Can you earn six figures right out college? Potentially…if you’re getting a highly technical degree (Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, etc.) and you already have demonstrable mastery of some highly technical skills. Say, you’re getting a CS degree and you already know C and JavaScript, and you have multiple projects on GitHub that demonstrate coding ability, and maybe a desirable technical cert or two, then yes, a six figure salary right out of school is certainly possible.
But if you have a Liberal Arts degree? No. Not unless your last name is “Clinton” or “Biden.”
People who have told kids “Hey, you can party for four years, get a degree, waltz into a six figure salary and have the government forgive your student debt” have done them a grave disservice. Life is hard, and earning a living is work. I worked a lot of crappy jobs immediately after college (retail sales, phone sales) before bootstrapping my way into a technical writing career. (It didn’t help that I’m a smart ass.) There were a lot of post-college roommates, cheap used cars, and pasta, rice and ramen meals along the way.
Earning a college degree does not hand you a “Get Out Of Poverty Free” card, it only gives you a chance to get out of poverty, and not a very good one if you’re dragging a ton of student debt behind. The best way to avoid the boat anchor of student debt is to avoid taking out student debt. And there are a whole lot of decent paying trade jobs out there (welder, plumber, electrician, HVAC, etc.) that don’t require college degrees to get your foot in the door.
College graduates need to avoid the debt trap of a lavish lifestyle. Live modestly, pay off your debts, and build wealth. And realize that it may be many years (if ever) before you’re pulling down a six-figure income.
The Kerch Bridge connecting Russia with occupied Crimea has been hit again.
Two people have died after an “attack” on the bridge linking the occupied Crimean peninsula to Russia.
Moscow has blamed Ukraine for the incident, alleging US and UK involvement, but Kyiv has not officially said it was responsible.
The Kerch bridge was opened in 2018 and enables road and rail travel between Russia and Crimea – Ukrainian territory occupied by Moscow’s forces since 2014.
Russia’s transport ministry said the bridge’s supports were not damaged.
The ministry said investigations were continuing, but unconfirmed reports said explosions were heard early on Monday.
It is the second major incident on the Kerch bridge in the past year. In October 2022, the bridge – which is an important supply route – was partially closed following a major explosion. It was fully reopened in February.
Suchomimus has a video showing the damage. One of the road spans has been dropped by the attack, but not completely. It took several months to repair the road span damage from the last attack.
He says that a sea drone appears to be responsible.
With Russia’s supply lines in Zaporizhzhia under increasing pressure due to the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive there, even partially disabling the bridge is going to put more pressure on Russia’s logistics network to keep their troops supplied, not to mention encouraging even more Russians to get out of Crimea while the getting is good.
If you’ve wondered why homelessness in California seems so much worse than in other states, Siyamak Khorrami’s interview with El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson for California Insider provides some answers:
Some takeaways:
“According to the latest report, California alone has one third of the U.S homeless population today.”
“What we have is you can be arrested or cited did over and over and over and over again, and there’s no consequences. And it’s just getting worse and worse.”
The same transients sprawling unconscious on city streets in LA and San Francisco are now found in San Diego.
“If you look at the people and look in their eyes, you see a lost [soul], almost like a post-apocalyptic look. It’s not somebody who’s lost their job or lost their housing, it’s someone who is addicted to drugs. In large part have fried their brains. They’re suffering from mental illness.”
“Stanford recently looked at it last year, their school of economics looked at it, and they found were over the last 10 years, most of the United States homelessness dropped by roughly 9%. In the same period here in the state of California, it went up by 43%.”
He says that other blue states aren’t having the same problem California is, but that’s slightly misleading. There are blue cities that are starting to see some of the same problems (Seattle, Portland, Austin) that are starting to have the same problems because they follow the same playbook. But they do touch on Seattle at the end of the interview.
“The most notable, unique difference is our decriminalizing hardcore drug use, and decriminalizing large or low-level property crimes.”
You can’t trust crime statistics, because people have just stopped reporting things. Auto thefts are still reported for insurance purposes. “Vehicle thefts here in the state of California have gone up significantly, so much so that on a per capita basis we are double the State of Florida.”
One Target accurately reporting thefts for a month doubled San Francisco theft statistics.
“Employees that don’t want to come to work and be exposed to that, because of being told don’t contact anyone.”
“Shoppers stop coming to stores. You just had Nordstrom’s in San Francisco close after 35 years. They’re one of their hallmark stores. That is a huge store in San Francisco closed because theft.”
“Every year more people leaving than are coming to the state because of poor public policy decisions.”
“The single dividing line between us and everywhere else in that regard is the legalization of hardcore drug use, or the decriminalization of hardcore drug use.”
“Harm reduction centers” just prevent people from dying on that particular day, and do nothing to keep drug users from gradually killing themselves over months and years. Those non-profits are “simply enabling them to continue to that that addiction and to use those drugs, knowing it will kill them.”
Pierson: HUD, uh, in 2015, 2016 decided…”Hey, we’re a housing entity. Why are we spending 60%, 70% percent of our resources on rehab for people? And so let’s get out of that business and go and do this other one.” I think that happened at a time which was critical in for California, to where we were already going down this housing housing first, or type in harm reduction type philosophy.
Khorrami: Then you exacerbate it by giving the homeless housing, and then you give them, let them use the drugs, and then you’re not really thinking about dealing with their addiction, right?
Pierson: Yeah, it’s absurd.
“We have based all of our policy on the slogan called ‘Housing First.’ What it says is, if you provide them housing and you provide this, provide some services to him, the person will stop using drugs.”
New York (which I personally would not point to as a model, it’s simply less of an obvious failure) has a ratio of one social worker to eight homeless people. California has a ratio of one to thirty-two.
“Compassion isn’t enough.”
“Compassion isn’t letting someone die in a ditch somewhere. Compassion isn’t letting someone lay on the street with a needle in their arm. That’s not compassion.”
“Enough is enough. You’ve tried this grand social experiment over the last eight or ten years. It didn’t work. We need a course correction, and we need to do something about it now.”
Seattle is an extreme example of what’s happening here in California. Everybody, the businesses are fleeing. The people who are living there that can leave are leaving. And it is very similar to what we’re doing, where open rampant hardcore drug use, little or no consequence for property crimes, and they also have a horrendous problem with law enforcement staffing. They simply can’t hire law enforcement officers because, frankly, the way they’ve treated them. It is a handful of really bad policy decisions that created this problem.
No one wants to work at Nordstrom’s because they know their car will be broken into while they work.
One flaw with the interview is that they did not discuss the role of the Homeless Industrial Complex in creating the situation. My working theory is that the appalling decisions we see being made on homelessness and crime are because the hard left is actively benefiting from the situation because it provides myriad ways to rake off graft and fraud. Ditto the lunacy of defunding the police.
The recoil shockwave of the .577 Tyrannosaur visibly travels through one of the Slow Mo Guys’ back muscles. It really emphasis the felt recoil of that monster.
At 82,000 frames a second, you can see a flash of light from bullet impact as it enters the ballistics gel. They talk about naming this “The Kentucky Effect.”
The bullet sucks the fireball from the initial shot in, then the collapsing cavitation of the gel reignites the gases.
4 Bore is an obsolete black-powder rifle with a (roughly) 1 inch barrel used for hunting big game in Africa. Scott at Kentucky Ballistics got a modern version of that and decided to test it against body armor. Consider this as the latest in the “BattleSwarm features videos of absurdly large rifle calibers for your viewing pleasure.”
Though it has a 2,150 grain bullet producing over 200 pounds of felt recoil, the round is too flat and slow to actually penetrate the body armor, but it packs so much force that it just drags most of the body armor into the chest cavity. The zombie torsos do not fare well.
Thanks to Dave Hardy for bringing the video to my attention.
…and I’ve just run out of time to do a decent LinkSwarm. Instead, in honor of police finding Hunter Biden’s cocaine unexplained cocaine of unknown origin at the White House, here’s a video of Norm MacDonald doing cocaine jokes, followed by a mini-LinkSwarm.
Peacekeeping missions in Africa have a way of humbling proud nations, like America in Mogadishu or Ireland in Jadotville. But while American and irish troops actually acquitted themselves well in their respective engagements, the same can’t be said for Chinese troops in the Battle of Juba, in South Sudan, in July of 2016.
The short summary is that two sides in the civil war had set up bases on either side of a UN refugee camp, and when fighting broke out, woefully unprepared Chinese peacekeeping troops got their asses kicked.
Takeaways:
“Both sides fielded artillery and tank units. Chinese peacekeepers, of course, had neither.”
“Heavily outnumbered and outgunned, the Chinese soldiers couldn’t have asked for worse battlefield conditions.”
“The United Nations Camp perimeter was lightly protected by Hesco barriers, which are filled with sand instead of concrete walls.”
“The guard towers were wooden shacks instead of concrete pillboxes. They had no bullet resistant glass or reinforced sandbags, no concrete mortar protection zones that you would typically want on a base like this. The entrance gate was a flimsy metal fence instead of a heavy metal block gate. The main defense was barbed wire fences.”
“This place was not set up to prevent a heavy assault.”
Then the two forces started attack each other.
“The government army forces and the rebel forces rampaged through the city. They did not observe any rules of engagement, attacking hospitals and non-combatants.”
Some 1,400 rebel troops “looted shops, hospitals and aid stations.”
“Both sides were shooting at each other through the refugee camp.”
“Wooden UN guard towers came under heavy machine gun fire. This forced the Chinese peacekeepers to leave and take cover.”
“Hundreds of bullets rockets and artillery [shells] peppered the perimeter. The Chinese U.N forces retreated deeper into the compound and clustered around the few armored personnel carriers they had. This is when an enemy rocket-propelled grenade struck their APC. It killed two Chinese soldiers and wounded six others.”
“Enemy militiamen then looted one of the aid warehouses. They stole $30 million worth of United Nations goods. This was enough food to feed over 200,000 people for a month in the famine stricken nation.”
“Chinese-led UN peacekeepers were pinned down inside the compound, and unable to effectively return fire with the weapons and vehicles they had at their disposal. They were unable to prevent militia forces on the streets from going house to house hunting people down and committing
unspeakable acts just outside the camp.”
Some individual Chinese forces did better, rallying and retrieving the weapons they had abandoned, and preventing forces from storming the center of the compound.
272 confirmed casualties day one, 20 of which were under Chinese protection.
Reports said “UN leadership had directly ordered Chinese and Ethiopian battalions to leave the base and act as a quick response force They were supposed to go out, leave the gate, and set up a perimeter, but they refused to go.”
“Major General Patrick Cameron, in charge of the United Nations investigation, wrote a damning report on the Chinese soldiers…he cites an overall lack of leadership preparedness and international integration.”
“In the past four decades, Chinese soldiers have had basically zero combat experience, so it’s interesting to see that one of the major findings from the report is that they’re very risk-adverse. They don’t have the experience of what it takes to put your life on the line.”
Chinese retort that UN weapons and equipment suck. That’s probably true as well.
Chinese soldiers didn’t even know the rules of engagement.
“Orders were flat out ignored by Chinese soldiers because they came from a different source than they were used to. They weren’t flexible.”
“There was also evidence of a lack of basic medical training and Hazevac procedures” among the Chinese soldiers.
The two deaths made Chinese soldiers even more risk adverse.
Supposedly China implemented reforms after the dismal showing, but throughout history, China’s military has looked remarkably ineffective in fighting against theoretically smaller foes.
I may be late to this party, since the story broke several days ago, but I think this video is worth covering to highlight all the things the Allen PD officer (whose name, as far as I can tell, hasn’t been released yet) did right.
He instructed others to get to safety before moving to engage the shooter.
He paused to get a better weapon out of his car and take a moment to assess the situation.
He maintained constant communication with the dispatcher to let other officers know where he was all the time to reduce the possibility of friendly fire.
He constantly moved toward the sound of gunfire to engage the target.
He maintained solid trigger discipline throughout running to contact.
He engaged the shooter from behind cover, and continued controlled fire until putting him down.
As far as things to be improved on, he did slow noticeably while moving toward contact, so maybe better cardio is in order. But I’m hardly one to cast aspersions here…
