Given that, it’s no surprise that Cornyn was booed at last week’s Texas GOP convention.
Before he could get a word out, the boos descended upon Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) during his speech at the Texas GOP convention.
After getting up to the podium, about a minute and a half went by before Cornyn could even begin his speech. The crowd’s objections were a direct response to the role Cornyn is playing in the U.S. Senate in bartering a gun reform bill pushed in the wake of the Uvalde shooting.
Cornyn knew full well he was walking into the lion’s den, stating, “I will not approve any restrictions for law-abiding gun owners, and that’s my red line. And despite what some of you may have heard, that’s what our plan does.”
Citing conservative lodestar William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review, Cornyn added, “Someone needs to stand athwart history, yelling stop.”
Each time he repeated this formula, the crowd returned fire, yelling “Stop!” at Cornyn.
The senior Texas senator did receive some applause when touting Trump-appointed judges and pro-life legislation, and when criticizing critical race theory and rising crime rates.
Right after Cornyn left the stage, Attorney General Ken Paxton took the stage and delivered a tacit shot at the senator — with whom he has sparred before.
“We have some Republicans who are trying to run from the fight (to preserve gun rights), and we need to remember their names next time they’re on the ballot,” Paxton warned. Earlier this month, Paxton said Texas “will be the first to sue” if the federal government passes a gun bill that “infringes on our Second Amendment Rights.”
Here’s some video to judge for yourself:
If it’s just a matter of “enforcing existing laws” as Cornyn states, why isn’t he holding hearings on why the Biden Administration refuses to enforce those laws? Why cooperate with the party that seeks complete civilian disarmament rather than actually stopping criminals?
Says Michael Quinn Sullivan: “The senator seemed stunned by the response, clearly not expecting grassroots activists to understand what he had been pushing in Washington with the Democrats.”
The longer Cornyn has been in office the squishier he’s gotten (a sadly familiar pattern), not only on gun control but also illegal alien amnesty. He’s gone from “pretty reliable conservative” to someone whose feet you have to hold to the fire to keep from drifting left on the latest burst of media hot air, and the latest chorus of boos shows that Republican activists know it.
The imperfect status quo in gun laws is vastly preferable to any “reform” the current congress is likely to cook up.
The Fed goes Volcker, more Welcome Back Carter cosplay, Big Yellow moves to Texas, and Florida Man makes a run for the ocean.
FYI, Blue Host has been acting weird today, giving errors when you tried to save, even though everything appears to be there upon reloading. (Shrugs.)
Fed hike rates 75 basis points. The attempt to Volckerize inflation during the Biden Recession has begun.
Speaking of St. Volcker, there were a lot of other factors that helped kill inflation in the early 1980s:
Oil was one of the primary causes of the 1970s inflation and everyone remembers the oil crisis. During the decade, oil ran all the way from $2 to $39. However, the flipside to this story is that with a lag, high oil prices will eventually incentivize production. The issue was that the US specifically disincentivized US producers and importers. Ronald Reagan signed an Executive Order in January of 1981 to eliminate oil price controls and then removed Jimmy Carter’s idiotic Windfall Profits Tax a few years later. As expected, global production expanded rapidly and with the removal of price controls, that production flooded into the US. By the middle of the decade, despite repeated production cuts by OPEC, there was a global glut of oil and by 1985, oil had collapsed all the way to $7. It wasn’t interest rates that made oil decline, it was government policy on the deregulation side, along with rapid production increases from non-OPEC countries.
President Reagan’s Economic Recovery Tax Act was signed into law in August of 1981, designed to reduce tax rates and incentivize investment by rewarding risk-taking by businesses. In particular, the Accelerated Cost Recovery System served to accelerate depreciation, reducing taxes for those that invested in productive capacity. Once again, government policy, not interest rates led to an increase in investment and ultimately supply, helping to tame inflation.
It wasn’t just Reagan working on de-regulation; The Staggers Act of October 1980, deregulated the railroads, The Motor Carrier Act of July 1980, deregulated the trucking industry, and the Airline Deregulation Act of October 1978 effectively deregulated transport industries. The net effect was dramatic price competition, better ability to invest and innovate, and the ability to eliminate unprofitable business that was funded by profitable business. Almost immediately after passage, pricing for transport services collapsed and the ease of transporting goods expanded.
Organized labor was also dealt a near-fatal blow when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in August of 1981. This may have reduced the wages for a generation of middle-class workers, but it sure wasn’t inflationary. It also accelerated the decline of unions which had already peaked out as a percentage of workers. More importantly, it reduced the militancy of unions and took the teeth out of their ability to disrupt businesses, leading to better efficiency and lower costs for consumers.
At the same time, when it comes to macroeconomics, demographics equals destiny. In this case, Volcker simply got lucky. Think of the Baby Boom generation, the last of whom was born in 1964. By 1982, these last Boomers hit 18 and started joining the workforce. The eldest Baby Boomers, born in 1946, were already 36 by then. Look at the massive increase in workers starting in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, which tamped down wages and tamed inflation—especially as female participation in the workforce expanded dramatically. This added labor slowed a key component of the inflation.
The Biden Administration looks capable of pursuing none of those policies, and the Baby Boomers are starting to retire…
How did we get here? Well, in addition to those SUPERgeniuses in the Biden Administration, decades of deficit spending, and loose Fed money printing, there’s the Flu Manchu lockdowns.
For weird reasons, some people, many people, imagined that governments could just shut down an economy and turn it back on without consequence. And yet here we are.
Historians of the future, if there are any intelligent ones among them, will surely be aghast at our astounding ignorance. Congress enacted decades of spending in just two years and figured it would be fine. The printing presses at the Fed ran at full tilt. No one cared to do anything about the trade snarls or supply-chain breakages. And here we are.
Our elites had two years to fix this unfolding disaster. They did nothing. Now we face terrible, grim, grueling, exploitative inflation, at the same time we are plunging into recession again, and people sit around wondering what the heck happened.
I will tell you what happened: the ruling class destroyed the world we knew. It happened right before our eyes. And here we are.
Last week, the stock market reeled on the news that the European Central Bank will attempt to do something about the inflation wrecking markets. So of course the financial markets panicked like an addict who can’t find his next hit of heroin. This week already began with more of the same, for fear that the Fed will be forced to rein in its easy-money policy event further. Maybe, maybe not; but recession appears impending regardless.
The polling error for the 2020 election was roughly 4% nationwide, the largest in the last 40 years.
Fast-forward to today. Inflation is 8+ percent, the price of food and gasoline is way up, crime is up, there is a nationwide shortage of baby formula, and don’t get me started on the border crisis. Yet Joe Biden’s job approval is close to 40% positive. That means almost four out of every ten Americans think Joe is doing a good job if you believe the RealClearPolitics average. And I don’t.
Snip.
If the polls are overestimating approval numbers for Biden and other Democrats, how bad is it? The political climate today is different since the 2020 election, but the Democrat poll bias seems intact, which was 4% nationwide. Since nonresponse bias, 4%, and registered voter bias, 2.6%, should be mutually exclusive, we can add them together. This gives us a total Democrat bias of roughly 6.5%
What does this mean? Until pollsters switch to sampling likely voters right before the election, you can subtract a solid 6 percent from Joe Biden’s approval numbers. And if nothing changes before the election, any Democrat who leads by 3 percent or less is likely to lose.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is enjoying a victory against a Biden administration policy that has allowed illegal aliens to cross the southern border without consequence.
In 2021, President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security issued a rule giving immigration law enforcement officials the power to decide whether or not to detain illegal aliens who attempt to cross the border (in contradiction to federal law, which says they must all be detained).
This policy caught the attention of Texas Attorney General Paxton and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who sued to stop the rule change, arguing that Biden was violating federal law when refusing to take custody of criminal migrants.
Paxton bashed President Biden, arguing that the policy was contrary to federal law and was instituted without following the proper procedure. Over a year since the original lawsuit was filed, a federal judge issued a ruling against the Biden administration on Friday.
Federal District Judge Drew Tipton said in his decision that the rule was “an implausible construction of federal law that flies in the face of the limitations imposed by Congress.” Tipton added, “Whatever the outer limits of the authority, the executive branch does not have the authority to change the law.”
After a legal fight lasting almost a year, Texas judges ruled a final judgment banning Biden’s detention-discretion rule.
Speaking of Musk: Several snowflakes working at SpaceX circulated a letter calling Musk “an embarrassment” and demanding the company be more “inclusive.” Result: He fired their ass. Good.
San Antonio symphony orchestra shuts down and files for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. “The last bargaining session between the Symphony Society and the Musicians’ Union took place on March 8, 2022 after which the Union declined to return to the bargaining table, despite efforts of federal mediators and the Symphony. The Musicians’ Union has made it clear there is no prospect of the resumption of negotiations, absent the Board agreeing to a budget that is millions of dollars in excess of what the Symphony can afford.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Reader Kirk suggested Chinese bank runs might be the next story to cover. I think I covered bank runs at smaller rural Chinese banks in a previous “China is screwed” post. Is a wider run in progress? Maybe.
Multiple sources contacted by Asia Markets, have confirmed deposits at the following six banks have been frozen since mid-April.
Yuzhou Xinminsheng Village Bank (located in Xuchang City, Henan Province)
Zhecheng Huanghuai Bank (City of Shangqui, Henan Province)
Shangcai Huimin Rural Bank (Zhumadian City, Henan Province)
New Oriental Village Bank (City of Kaifeng, Henan Province)
Huaihe River Village Bank (Bengbu City, Anhui Province)
Yixian County Village Bank (Huangshan City, Anhui Province)
It’s understood the banks with branches across the Henan and Anhui Provinces successively issued announcements in April, stating they would suspend online banking and mobile banking services due to a system upgrade.
At the same time, clients reported their electronic deposits in online accounts, mobile apps and third-party platforms could not be withdrawn.
This led to depositors rushing to local bank branches, only to be told they were unable to withdraw funds.
By late May, images emerged on Chinese social media of demonstrations at the front of numerous bank branches. Asia Markets has verified these images with local contacts.
Snip.
Regardless of the cause, the developments raise serious questions about the health of China’s and its regulatory oversight. The more immediate concern, however, is the prospect of contagion, which could see the (so-far) rural-only bank run spread to bigger cities.
There’s evidence this is already happening.
In one of the only mainstream international media articles to report on the unfolding situation, local residents highlighted the seriousness of the situation and the likelihood of contagion.
From the Financial Times on June 9:
“Some depositors such as Xu have already lost trust in the system. The 39-year-old said he had withdrawn all of his deposits from 10 other small banks that had promised him an annualised yield of more than 4 per cent.
“Another depositor, a 30-year-old father, said he had placed more than Rmb900,000 in his village’s banks since 2020 at a return of 4.1 per cent. “I felt like being slaughtered,” he said, declining to give his name. He drove overnight to negotiate with the banking regulator in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan, in mid-May. “This is the money my wife and I have saved together since we got married. I had to lie to her that I was away for work.”
On Twitter, a video of a large line at an ICBC Bank in China (one of China’s largest state-owned banks) posted on Tuesday, June 9, suggest contagion is in progress.
Translated to English, the tweet reads “The bank card system is locked, and these people are here to unlock it. Massive runs are coming.”
Blogger, Jennifer Zeng, has reported major issues with withdrawing cash from banks in Shanghai in recent days. The uncertainty no doubt exacerbated by the prospect of more lockdowns as COVID cases again spike.
“All banks in Shanghai have restricted depositors from withdrawing money… A bank run is about to sweep China,” she said.
Maybe. This, from five days ago, suggests Shanghai banks are limiting total transactions to 300 a day.
While I’m always willing to believe the worst about China’s smoke-and-mirrors economy, it’s possible that Shanghai’s problems are just temporary post-lockdown issues that will subside, assuming China doesn’t lock that city down again. (Don’t count on it.)
All the reports of bank runs I’m seeing either link to that Asia Markets piece, or the Hal Turner radio show piece that largely reprints it.
Right now I’m going to go with “Not Yet Proven” for current bank runs in China.
Though Lord knows if I were stuck in China (and had somehow managed not to get imprisoned or executed), I’d be pretty intent on getting my money out of Yuan entirely and into something more stable like gold, silver, or even U.S. dollars…
Lefty sorts are always whining that other countries have high speed rail networks and we don’t. Many point to China’s extensive network of high speed rail as what we should be doing.
Tiny problem: China’s high speed rail network is a giant, unprofitable sinkhole of $1.8 TRILLION worth of debt.
Some take-aways:
The average operating loss for the system is $24 million per day.
The official amount for China National Railway debt for high speed rail is $900 billion, but since roughly half of the debt comes from local governments, the total is probably closer to $1.8 trillion.
For comparison sake, $1.8 trillion is about South Korea’s entire yearly GDP.
“Shanghai, the richest city in China, has a total GDP of $600 billion in 2020, which means that even the whole year of Shanghai’s GDP won’t be able to cover the debt of China National Railway.”
It’s extensive: 37,900km, nearly double the length from 2015.
Return on high speed rail investment is only about 2%, and the bulk of bond payments for loans are coming due over the next few years. “Cash flow from railway transportation revenue isn’t enough to cover the operating costs, let alone the ability to pay the debt and interest.”
Local government debt levels are around 100%.
“More than 85% of the funds raised through urban investment bonds are earmarked for repaying old debts with new ones.”
Even the most profitable high speed rail stretch, Beijing to Shanghai, only earns a return on investment of 5%.
Japan’s successful high speed rail network serves three metropolitan areas (Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka) that have 55% of that nation’s population.
“A professor at the School of Economics and Management of Beijing Jiaotong University concluded that the operating costs are only just covered when the transport density of a high-speed rail line reaches 36 million passenger kilometers per kilometer. In China the average transport density is only about 17 million passenger kilometers per kilometer.”
High speed rail can’t transport heavy freight.
“The Lanzhou Uramuchi HSR in western China can run more than 160 trains per day. In reality, this route only runs four trains per day.”
High speed rail occupancy rate is only 30%, and is still too expensive for most Chinese to use.
High speed rail construction has squeezed out much-needed construction of regular rail. “China’s rail freight capacity can’t meet market demand. China’s market share of road freight turnover has risen rapidly to 49% market share in 2016.” China rail has jacked up freight costs to make up for losses on high speed rail.
China’s freight trucks get overloaded all the time.
China’s containerized shipping accounts for 40% of global trade, but “the proportion of China’s sea rail intermodal transport volume in 2017 was only about 2.5 percent.” 84% of port containers go out by road.
So why all the money poured into high speed rail? Opportunities for corruption.
Officials see the high-speed rail project in which China is involved as a lucrative opportunity. China’s former minister of railways, known as the father of high-speed rail, was sentenced to death for corruption. Emerging industries such as high-speed rail, which offer both substantial commercial value and political achievements for local officials, have enormous room for corruption. In a systemically corrupt environment white elephant projects, that is a large project that falls significantly short of its goals, and the costs of upkeep outweigh its usefulness, are favored by many officials and businessmen looking to make a fortune. The vast majority of high-speed railways around the world can’t make ends meet on passenger revenues alone to cover their construction and operating costs. Most operate at a loss.
In light of all that, why do American leftists keep complaining about America’s lack of high speed rail? Simple: It’s the corruption, stupid. High speed rail construction offers boundless opportunities for graft and corruption, and refusing to build any keeps them from getting their snouts into another giant trough of taxpayer money…
(I didn’t expect this past week to become a string of “China’s economy is smoke and mirrors all the way down” posts, but I keep running into more examples.)
Here’s another entry for the “China’s economy is smoke and mirrors all the way down” file. Remember the previous story on the mountains of unused bikes for failed Chinese bike-sharing startups? Well, evidently the exact same thing happened with “green” cars:
The mechanics of the scam:
First they put together a down payment, order a batch of vehicles, and license them at a vehicle administration office.
Then they contact government officials, present the vehicles in their hands and apply for permission on the grounds that they are operating an online car sharing business.
The third step is to get the government’s permission, then go to the bank to get a loan.
The fourth step is to find a financer and present the vehicles and the government papers to secure some venture capital from the financer.
Last mortgage the vehicles to some smaller financial institutions to squeeze out their final value.
After all these steps are completed, the scammers disappear. The bank, the financer and the small financial institution are left with triangular disputes while the vehicles rot somewhere in the wilderness.
More takeaways:
China offers subsidies for new “green” cars.
Lots of these subsidized cars are bought by ride-sharing startups…
…that just happen to be subsidiaries of the the Chinese car companies manufacturing the cars being subsidized. (Presumably these are different companies than the pure scammers, but who the hell knows?)
Despite not being used, many have new license plates and up-to-date inspections.
Though there are minimum mileage requirements to get the subsidies, the businesses (in best Chinese fashion) just falsify the data.
“Especially the electric cars produced in previous years, the battery has a short range and the performance declines quickly. It’s worthless. At present it costs more to replace a new battery than the value of the old car.”
Most insane of all: China’s communist government required scrapping vehicles after 10 years or 100,000 kilometers. How’s that for “green”?
They later revised this to 15 years with annual inspections, then revised it again to a maximum of 600,000 kilometers.
And, of course, you can bribe inspectors to pass the inspection.
Green subsidy scams and failed startup detritus is hardly unknown in the U.S. (witness all those electric scooter sharing startups that are just now starting to go bankrupt), but China’s corner-cutting, get-rich-quick mentality combined with green government subsidies, interlocking corporate ownership, the usual Chinese scam artists and loose, bribe-able enforcement at various levels of Chinese government all combined for an especially appalling mountain of waste.
Just days after the Chinese Communist Party lifted Shanghai’s last Flu Manchu lockdown, they’re locking Shanghai down again.
China’s commercial hub of Shanghai will lock down millions of people for mass COVID-19 testing this weekend – just 10 days after lifting its gruelling two-month lockdown – unsettling residents and raising concerns about the business impact.
Racing to stop a wider outbreak after discovering a handful of community cases, including a cluster traced to a popular beauty salon, authorities have ordered PCR testing for all residents in 14 of Shanghai’s 16 districts over the weekend.
Five of the districts said residents would not be allowed to leave their homes while the testing was carried out. A notice issued by Changning district described the stay-home requirement as “closed management” of the community being sampled.
The latest scare triggered a rush to grocery stores and online platforms to stock up on food, as users of China’s Twitter-like Weibo expressed fear they could be locked down for longer, having only started going back to work after the last lockdown was lifted on June 1.
Some areas had remained sealed off or quickly returned to lockdown due to infections and their close contacts.
While the rest of the world has moved on from useless lockdown foolishness, China is still Stuck On Stupid, and their “Zero Covid” policy has as much chance to stop spread as tying a live chicken rump to buboes had at stopping bubonic plague.
You’ve got to hand it to Peter Zeihan, who said this was precisely the sort of stupidity China would keep pursuing when talking about Tianjin’s lockdown last month.
I’ve been telling my clients for quite some time that it was only a matter of issue as to how the American/Chinese relationship imploded. It could be Trump, could be Biden, could be energy, could be food, could be security, could be trade, could be ethics, could be genocide. It’s a long list, but it appears that Covid ultimately is the one that is winning out.
The Chinese vaccine does not work against Covid, and the Chinese have spent the last two years lambasting the world and lying in the propaganda that they are the only country that’s even remotely dealt well with Covid. And they’ve specifically parroted a lot of the crazy theories out there about the western vaccines, that they make you magnetic or they make you infertile or whatever else, so they can’t import the western vaccines at all they have to wait until they make their own MRNA formula, and there’s no way that’s going to happen in the next year or two, so lockdowns are the only public health policy they have and now the majority of the parts of china that matter are offline.
If you’re stuck in manufacturing in China this is the beginning of the end, if it’s not the end already, because as soon as you have an opening, Omicron comes back in and then you get a closing again because that is the only tool that the Chinese Communist Party has left.
In The Before-Time, The Long Long Ago, prior to The Great Dot Com Bubble Bust, newspapers (remember those?) were filled with reports of day-traders, ordinary people who quit their day jobs to trade stocks. And what do you know! A whole bunch of them made money doing that! They must have been geniuses!
Few paused to test an alternative theory: They just happened to be riding the tail end of one of the greatest stock bubbles in history. It’s easy to pick stock market winners when there are lots of winners around.
Then the bust hit, and a whole lot of geniuses turned out to not be so smart after all, especially those who had backed such companies as Flooz and WorldCom.
Thanks in large measure to the SUPERgenius economic management of the Biden Administration, the world is now exiting an era of historically cheap money and entering a period of rising interest rates. A whole lot of business models that seemed to make sense during an era of cheap credit are going to look as retroactively foolish as Pets.com.
Vice will be mounting a new round of cost-cutting to try to stretch out its solvency while it searches for some sucker to buy it.
Vice does not make money. It will never make money. It just wants a series of Sugar Daddies willing to pump money into it forever to keep its overpaid, underperforming staff paid.
Snip.
The article says that they can only estimate what Vice is worth. They guess it’s worth, maybe, “at least one billion.” (And they owe $1.1 billion in debt?)
It was valued at $5.7 billion just a few years ago.
Ace of Spades also posted this Ryan Long video that I’m absolutely stealing:
As for the next media outlets to close, well, I’ve got to think any Bulwarkesque outlets whose entire raison d’être is subsidized Trump-hating is going to look like a luxury good during the Biden Recession.
High debt, high inflation and high interest rates are all recipes for disaster. And as those pools of liquidity dry up as cheap capital recedes, all the stranded starfish that so briefly thrived will find that they have no place to hide in the Biden Recession.
78 years ago today, some 175,000 American, British and Canadian troops were either being dropped behind enemy lines or coming ashore under enemy fire at Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah beaches.
Here’s some footage of D-Day:
There are still D-Day veterans alive today, but soon the war will pass out of living memory.
Information coming out of the Russo-Ukrainian War can be hard to verify, especially given how untrustworthy the mainstream media have made themselves. But Ukraine seems to have launched a successful counterattack in the key city of Severodonetsk.
Russia is “suffering huge losses” and losing hard-fought ground in the Ukrainian city of Severodonetsk after invading units started retreating from the key industrial center, Ukrainian officials asserted Saturday.
The dramatic turnabout, which could not be independently confirmed, represented a rare successful counter-offensive against Russian forces, which had recently been steadily advancing in Ukraine’s eastern territories.
It was the first time Ukraine claimed to have conducted a large counter-attack in Severodonetsk, a city of 100,000 and the last major municipality in the disputed Luhansk oblast under Ukrainian control, after days of losing ground in the country’s embattled east.
Russia had “previously managed to capture most of the city,” Sergiy Haidai, the governor of the Luhansk region said in a televised address Saturday, The Guardian reported. “But now our military has pushed them back.”
Later Saturday, Oleksandr Stryuk, the head of the city’s military operations, said that Ukrainian forces were able to build a line of defense in Severodonetsk, according to The Kyiv Independent.
Both sides of the war have claimed to have inflicted huge casualties in the fighting for the city — a battlefront that military experts believe could determine which of the two countries has the momentum for a prolonged war of attrition in coming months.
A more detailed annotated map from Random Guy On Twitter (grains of salt apply):
SEVERODONETSK / 2245 UTC 04 JUN/ UKR forces continue to consolidate holdings and advance. Present line of contact reported to be the E side of the park area paralleling Centralny Prospect. With Ukrainian forces in the ascendant, RU morale is now a factor. pic.twitter.com/cBmov2De6z
There’s some talk on Twitter of Ukrainian forces luring Russia into a trap and using the high ground in Luhansk to rain artillery on Russian positions:
Ukrainian positions in Lysychans'k are raining precision artillery fire on Severodonetsk Russian positions. The high ground of Lysychans'k proves to be very helpful for supporting fire.
Here’s Denys Davydov, AKA Ukrainian Map Guy, on the action (usual caveats and grains of salt apply):
When faced with the task of taking large hostile cities, Russian doctrine has been to bomb them flat with artillery first. Historically, urban warfare has not been a source of happiness for the Russian military. They got torn up badly in Grozny, and seem to have forgotten all the painful lessons learned there.
Russia may have a hefty supply of old tanks, but it’s supply of competent ground forces absent a general mobilization (which Putin has thus far refused to authorize) is quite finite. Russia has even resorted to forced mobilization of troops in the area it occupies, a desperation tactic likely to make things worse for an army that already suffers from low morale.
The Ukrainian government and military are furthermore discussing the battle of Severodonetsk in increasingly confident terms and are likely successfully blunting the Russian military’s major commitment of reserves to the grinding battle for the city. While Russian forces may still be able to capture Severodonetsk and Lysychansk and Ukrainian forces are likely more degraded than Haidai’s statements imply, Ukrainian defenses remain strong in this pivotal theater. The Russian military has concentrated all of its available resources on this single battle to make only modest gains. The Ukrainian military contrarily retains the flexibility and confidence to not only conduct localized counterattacks elsewhere in Ukraine (such as north of Kherson) but conduct effective counterattacks into the teeth of Russian assaults in Severodonetsk that reportedly retook 20% of the city in the last 24 hours. The Ukrainian government’s confidence in directly stating its forces can hold Severodonetsk for more than two weeks and willingness to conduct local counterattacks, rather than strictly remaining on the defensive, is a marked shift from Ukrainian statements as recently as May 28 that Ukrainian forces might withdraw from Severodonetsk to avoid encirclement.
The fog of war and the paucity of competent in-theater reporting makes things hard to analyze, but at this point in time, it appears that Ukraine is winning the Battle of Severodonetsk.
This Memorial Day we honor the memory of Navy Commander Samuel David Dealey, AKA The Torpedo Toting Texan, AKA Destroyer Killer, the Medal of Honor winner whose submarine the U.S.S. Harder sank five Japanese destroyers in five days off the Sulu Archipelago during World War II.
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty as commanding officer of the U.S.S. Harder during her 5th war patrol in Japanese-controlled waters. Floodlighted by a bright moon and disclosed to an enemy destroyer escort which bore down with intent to attack. Comdr. Dealey quickly dived to periscope depth and waited for the pursuer to close range, then opened fire, sending the target and all aboard down in flames with his third torpedo. Plunging deep to avoid fierce depth charges, he again surfaced and, within nine minutes after sighting another destroyer, had sent the enemy down tail first with a hit directly amidship. Evading detection, he penetrated the confined waters off Tawi Tawi with the Japanese Fleet base six miles away and scored death blows on two patrolling destroyers in quick succession. With his ship heeled over by concussion from the first exploding target and the second vessel nose-diving in a blinding detonation, he cleared the area at high speed. Sighted by a large hostile fleet force on the following day, he swung his bow toward the lead destroyer for another “down-the-throat” shot, fired three bow tubes, and promptly crash-dived to be terrifically rocked seconds later by the exploding ship as the Harder passed beneath. This remarkable record of five vital Japanese destroyers sunk in five short-range torpedo attacks attests the valiant fighting spirit of Comdr. Dealey and his indomitable command.
Dealey survived that action, but his sub was lost sometime on August 24, 1944 somewhere off the Philippines. “In the final analysis, Dealey had sunk 16 enemy ships, with total tonnage of 54,002 tons (according to the postwar accounting – enough to make him number five among U.S. submarine skippers in World War II.)”
