Don’t think anyone is in the mood for any intellectual heavy lifting today, so here’s a fireworks livestream:
Don’t ask me how they’re doing live nighttime fireworks during the middle of the day.
This is a more eclectic livestream, with parades and such:
And here’s that famous San Diego fireworks shot where they accidentally set off everything at once.
Happy Independence day, everyone!
Although a lot of attention has been lavished on Ukrainian Forces getting Leopard 2, Challenger 2 and Abrams main battle tanks, we’ve also sent them 109 Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Many of those have been involved in the Zaporizhzhia counter-offensive, and early reports had several being destroyed in early fighting (though crews reportedly escaped). How do Ukrainian crews like the Bradley compared to the Soviet BMP series IFVs they were using before?
As Ukrainian forces continue their counteroffensive against Russia, some soldiers say an American-supplied vehicle is making a key difference in their advances, and more importantly, saving lives.
The U.S. has provided has provided Ukrainian forces with Bradley Fighting Vehicles as part of aid packages since the beginning of the year and they have been heavily used in the counteroffensive Ukraine that launched in early June.
Two Ukrainian soldiers from the 47th brigade, Serhiy and Andriy, told ABC News that they and their crew wouldn’t be alive today if Bradley didn’t protect them from a battle early on in the counteroffensive where they were struck by mines, high caliber guns and attack drones.
“We were hit multiple times,” Andriy, who drove one Bradley, said. “Thanks to it, I am standing here now. If we were using some Soviet armored personnel carrier we would all probably be dead after the first hit. It’s a perfect vehicle.”
The Bradleys are armed with a 25mm automatic cannon, a 7.62mm machine gun, and a TOW missile system that can hit armored targets more than two miles away.
While a Bradley is way undergunned compared to a modern MBT, remember that Bradleys killed T-72s with TOW missiles in the Battle of 73 Easting, even though that’s not the tasked it’s designed for. And while the Bradley’s 25mm autocannon can’t defeat Soviet/Russian tank armor thicknesses with any but lucky shots, consensus is that the tungsten or depleted uranium rounds can penetrate any Russian vehicle below a MBT.
Andriy and Serhiy’s brigade was part of one of the first major assaults using significant amounts of Western-supplied armored, launched against heavily fortified Russian lines in the Zaporizhzhia region in southern Ukraine at the start of June.
As they advanced towards the Russian positions, protected by dense minefields, the Ukrainian troops came almost immediately under heavy fire. The vehicle behind Andriy was struck by an attack drone, killing his unit’s commander.
Andriy’s Bradley was then hit first by a 120mm mortar. Two 150mm shells then struck both sides of the vehicle, he told ABC.
“Almost all of my guys were concussed, and they were really disoriented,” he said. But the squad inside bailed out and managed to safely escape back to cover.
Crew survivability seems to be one of the biggest advantages Bradleys have over their Russian BMP counterparts, as covered in this video:
U.S./NATO doctrine has always placed a much higher value on crew survivability than Soviet/Russian doctrine. Ukrainians crewing Bradleys are keenly grateful for that difference.
I’ve covered Peter Zeihan videos on China’s crashing demographics before. We already knew China was “the fastest aging society in human history, with the largest sex imbalance in human history.” Now he’s dug into new some new data.
It’s much worse than he thought.
Add to that the fact that China economy is probably overstated by 60%, and it looks like China’s brief days in the sun are already over.
I was going to do a post rounding up the sudden spat of absolutely unhinged attacks on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has had the unmitigated gall to actually primary Slow Joe Biden. Only to find out that Tucker Carlson had already done it for me.
Some takeaways:
There’s never been a candidate for president the media hated more than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. You thought that title belonged to Donald Trump. Of course it must! But go check the coverage. Trump got a gentle scalp massage by comparison when he announced. When Trump rolled out his presidential campaign in 2015, the New York Times waited until the 17th paragraph of the story to attack him. “But as well known as he is,” the paper said at the time, “Trump is also widely disliked.” Then they cited a poll to back it up. That was the attack on Trump. Eight years later, the Times attacked Bobby Kennedy in the very first sentence of the story. Quote, “Robert F Kennedy, Jr.” the paper declared, “announced a presidential campaign on Wednesday built on relitigating covid-19 shutdowns and shaking Americans faith in science.”
No one in the national media bothered to explain why autism diagnoses had skyrocketed. If it wasn’t the vaccines, and maybe it wasn’t, then what was it? To this day there has not been a convincing explanation. Instead, reporters just attacked Bobby Kennedy. They’ve called him a lunatic and a Nazi. Instagram shut down his account YouTube just last week pulled down a perfectly reasonable interview he did with Jordan Peterson.
Speaking of which, here RFK Jr. explains to Jordan Petersen how he thinks ObamaCare got the Democratic Party in bed with Big Pharma.
I’ve omitted a lot of Carlson providing example after example of various Democratic Media Complex personalities viciously attacking Kennedy.
I’m no fan of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. His a lefty scumbag on many (perhaps most) issues, has more than a whiff of fringe lunacy about him, and (through no fault of his own) I find him hard to listen to, due to his spasmodic dysphonia. (Though obviously he’s much more coherent and articulate than Biden. As is the average third-grader.) And I think he’s more wrong than right on the vaccine-autism link.
Still, the degree to which the Democratic Media Complex has thrown away even the merest pretense of dispassion about him due to his threat to either a Biden second term or the wishes of Big Pharma (to the extent those two can be disentangled) makes me more inclined to listen to him, and more readily defend his right to speak in the public space. The DNC seems hellbent on presenting any fair challenge to Biden in the Democratic primary, which makes me very curious about just what they’re so scared of…
At such a remove from the actions in a vast country with no free news services, it’s hard to definitively say what’s going on with the Russian coup. So here are a variety of “state of play” snippets from various sources (Suchomimus’s discord, MSM, YouTube, Twitter, other social media, etc.). Some of these are rumors that may later turn out to be false, so treat with as many grains of salt as you deem necessary.
The Wagnerites broke through the barriers on the way to Moscow. https://t.co/ys98bor3yG pic.twitter.com/pazOSU5xXK
— Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) June 24, 2023
Here's another video from Voronezh 🔥 pic.twitter.com/yPNlnGwY4E
— MAKS 23 👀🇺🇦 (@Maks_NAFO_FELLA) June 24, 2023
That’s supposedly Russia hitting a Russian oil depot.
Here are some update videos. From Peter Zeihan on the Ukraine war:
I think Zeihan is too optimistic about the hole Ukraine put in the Chongar bridge, and I think Russians will try to at least run supply trucks around it and hope it doesn’t collapse.
From Suchomimus:
Wagner reportedly has 25,000-50,000 men, plus tanks on transporters and anti-aircraft systems. “This isn’t a ragtag army.”
Russia was “also building defensive positions near Serpukhov, 100 kilometers away from Moscow. So far the troops based around Moscow look like they do remain loyal to Putin.”
Developing…
Update: Is the coup already over?
Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced a deal late on Saturday that Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin would depart for Belarus in return for being spared prosecution, after an abortive rebellion in which his troops made a dash for Moscow.
The announcement, carried by the Tass news agency, came shortly after embittered warlord Prigozhin announced his men were turning back from Moscow to avoid a devastating civil conflict. In a voice recording posted to his Telegram channel, Prigozhin said his troops would turn back after advancing within 200 kilometers of the capital.
It was the culmination of an extraordinary day, in which Putin had accused the Wagner group of “treason” and said that their uprising risked tipping Russia into civil war.
Prigozhin, smarting over the Kremlin’s handling of the war in Ukraine, announced early on Saturday that his mercenaries had seized the major southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, a logistics hub for Putin’s war, and threatened to push on to Moscow. Wagner forces also appeared to be well established in the city of Voronezh, 500 kilometers south of the capital.
Well, that’s a disappointment to all of us who thought it would allow Ukraine to liberate itself from a distracted Russia.
Prigozhin’s coup didn’t even last the three days of the 1991 Soviet coup…
Update 2: Oryx has a list of equipment lost during the coup.
Hunter Biden will get a slap on the wrist and no prison time for federal firearm and tax evasion crimes, just the way you or I wouldn’t.
As you may recall, Biden owed a whopping $1.2 million tax liability for 2017 and 2018, but despite multiple warnings he was flouting the law, Biden didn’t pay back the tax bill until 2021, well after the Justice Department and IRS opened investigations into President Joe Biden’s son. Prosecutors are reportedly set to recommend probation as punishment, not jail time.
Of course, this blatant display of a two-tired justice system (one for Democratic Party Royalty and their rich backers, another for everyone else) is the point.
Under Justice Department policy, even with a plea agreement, the government is supposed to seek a plea to the “most serious,” readily provable “offense that is consistent with the nature and full extent of the defendant’s conduct.” Hunter Biden committed tax offenses that could have been charged as evasion, which is punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment for each count. Furthermore, he made a false statement that enabled him to obtain a firearm; that’s a ten-year felony under legislation pushed through by then-senator Joe Biden to show how very serious Democrats are about gun crime.
Biden apologists have tried to minimize that transaction as a “lie and try” case, which they say is often not prosecuted. But such non-prosecution (though it shouldn’t happen) occurs because of what you’d infer from the “try” part — i.e., the liar got caught and failed to obtain the gun. Hunter’s case, to the contrary, is a lie and succeed case. He got the gun. What’s more, he was then seen playing with it while cavorting with an “escort” (see the New York Post’s pictorial, if you’ve got the stomach for it). Shortly afterwards, he and his then-paramour — Hallie Biden, the widow of his older brother — managed to lose the gun near a school (it was later found by someone else).
Those are the kinds of gun cases that get charged by the Justice Department even if the suspect hasn’t, in addition, committed tax felonies by dodging taxes on the millions of dollars he was paid, apparently for being named Biden. Yet after refusing for years to appoint a special counsel despite the five-alarm conflict of interest attendant to investigating the president’s son ( . . . and family . . . and the president himself), the Biden Justice Department is permitting Hunter Biden to dispose of the case with misdemeanor tax charges that will allow for a probation sentence, and diversion — essentially, no prosecution — on the gun felony that would result in imprisonment for most Americans who engaged in similar conduct.
Here’s Tucker Carlson, contrasting how different Biden’s treatment was from Biden’s political enemies.
Ep. 5 As in most of the developing world, it's safer to be the president's son than his opponent. pic.twitter.com/AtRRaxYSjs
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 20, 2023
A whole lot of very rich and power people stepped up to help Hunter maintain his cocaine-fueled lifestyle.
Of course Biden and Company are counting on the Democratic Media Complex to keep the story buried. We have to make sure they don’t succeed.
I try to keep up with the latest drone developments out of the Russo-Ukrainian War, so this funky remote-control mine-laying device caught my eye:
Ukrainian ground drone carrying TM-62 anti-tank mines being tested at military proving ground
📹https://t.co/KXT1hTplIO pic.twitter.com/No23BdTJNM
— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) April 29, 2023
It looks like someone took a lawnmower chassis and replaced the mower blade and engine with a mine-laying servo.
#Ukraine: Judging by the video, the main idea is that this UGV "RATEL" is used as a mobile warhead that carries two TM-62 AT mines and whose goal is to be activated under a vehicle or tank. In the video, UGV was successfully tested on an old van. #UkraineRussiaWar️ #Russia pic.twitter.com/JRqtabl4nj
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Warfare (@WeaponsWarfare) April 29, 2023
RATEL is evidently the name of the device, and not connected to the South African Ratel IFV (though it wouldn’t shock me to see those show up in Ukrainian inventories, despite being fairly long in the tooth).
I first saw this mentioned in a Reporting from Ukraine video:
Not a whole lot of information there, either, but he did say “Recent combat footage shows that Ukrainians finally started using mine-laying drones in large numbers. Even though such drones cannot be driven far behind the front lines, they are very effective at mining the roads that go along the front line, especially those that connect Russian positions between the tree lines.”
There’s very little information available on this device online, but speculation on previous prototypes suggested they were trying to lay mines under enemy vehicles, which makes no sense. The Reporting from Ukraine description of them as an area denial weapon makes much more sense.
We think of mines as buried items, but laying them atop roads can take out unwary or distracted drivers, or cause them the to stop to clear the mines (a risky proposition, since they could be designed to explode at any removal attempt, and which subjects stopped targets to possible hostile fire), or to divert around into areas that may have buried mines (and we’ve seen plenty of video from Ukraine of Russian vehicles hitting mines buried to the side while trying to avoid some obstacle).
The Mine-Laying Lawnmower of Death (MLLoD) looks a bit more purpose-built than The Flying Yeet of Death or their wheeled RC bombs.
A whole lot of low-cost, low-tech drone innovation is coming out of this war…
Here’s something informational for Sunday, Nicholas Moran explaining exactly how a modern 120mm (AKA 120×570mm NATO, the type used by the M1A2 Abrams and the German Leopard 2) APFSDS round works.
Here’s another video that provides a visualized simulation of how APFSDS rounds work.