The Russian offensive in Ukraine continues to bog down against stiff resistance, Putin puts his nukes on alert, a rumor of peace talks, momentum to suspend some Russian banks from SWIFT builds, and a whole lot of aid from the rest of the world is pouring into Ukraine.
Russia invaded Ukraine from three sides on Wednesday night Eastern time, and as of now, early afternoon Saturday, the Russian army has yet to seize any Ukrainian cities.
This morning, a senior defense official at the Pentagon briefed reporters and declared, “We continue to believe, based on what we have observed that this resistance is greater than what the Russians expected and we have indications that the Russians are increasingly frustrated by their lack of momentum over the last 24 hours particularly in the north parts of Ukraine… As of this morning we have no indication still that the Russian military has taken control over any cities. As of this morning we still believe that Russia has yet to achieve air superiority. Ukrainian air defenses including aircraft do continue to be operable and continue to engage and deny access to Russian aircraft in places over the country.”
There is an intriguing but unverified claim from Ukrainian intelligence that Putin is furious, that he expected a quick surrender from Kiev, and that the invading Russian forces weren’t equipped for a long war – and that after ten days, the Russian forces will face serious problems with supply lines, fuel, equipment, ammunition, etc. Maybe this is just Ukrainian propaganda, meant to keep up morale for the next week or so. But there are some intriguing anecdotes of Ukrainians hitting Russian supply columns and videos of Russian tanks running out of fuel. (It turns out supply chain problems are just everywhere these days!)
Sending in armored columns without dedicated infantry, artillery and air support is a big risk, big reward move. Patton did it successfully in the race across France in 1944, but he had air superiority, a friendly population, and the greatest war machine ever assembled in the history of mankind up to that time backing him, and even he had to halt when he outran his supply lines.
Putin’s initial goal, the Russian reabsorption of Ukraine or the transformation of it into a lackey state of a renewed Russian empire, is now probably impossible. Any Russian-backed Ukrainian puppet government is likely to be vehemently rejected by the Ukrainian people. Russian forces will find it difficult to go out on patrol when every citizen’s got a rifle and every grandma on every street corner is handing them sunflower seeds, telling them they are going to be fertilizer soon.
Russia may take large chunks of Ukraine, but they will have an exceptionally difficult time keeping it.
The last three days of combat should put a serious dent in the reputation of this new Russian army. We should, however, try to understand why the Russians are struggling. First, the Russian army’s recent structural reforms do not appear to have been sufficient to the task at hand. Second, at the tactical and operational level, the Russians are failing to get the most out of their manpower and materiel advantage.
There has been much talk over the last ten years about the Russian army’s modernization and professionalization. After suffering severe neglect in the ’90s, during Russia’s post-Soviet financial crisis, the army began to reorganize and modernize with the strengthening of the Russian economy under Putin. First the army got smaller, at least compared to the Soviet Red Army, which allowed a higher per-soldier funding ratio than in previous eras. The Russians spent vast sums of money to modernize and improve their equipment and kit — everything from new models of main battle tanks to, in 2013, ordering Russian troopers to finally retire the traditional portyanki foot wraps and switch to socks.
But the Russians have also gone the wrong direction in some areas. In 2008, the Russian government cut the conscription term from 24 to twelve months. As Gil Barndollar, a former U.S. Marine infantry officer, wrote in 2020:
Russia currently fields an active-duty military of just under 1 million men. Of this force, approximately 260,000 are conscripts and 410,000 are contract soldiers (kontraktniki). The shortened 12-month conscript term provides at most five months of utilization time for these servicemen. Conscripts remain about a quarter of the force even in elite commando (spetsnaz) units.
As anyone who has served in the military will tell you, twelve months is barely enough time to become proficient at simply being a rifleman. It’s nowhere near enough time for the average soldier to learn the skills required to be an effective small-unit leader.
Yes, the Russians have indeed made efforts to professionalize the officer and the NCO corps. Of course, non-commissioned officers (NCOs) have historically been a weakness of the Russian system. In the West, NCOs are the professional, experienced backbone of an army. They are expected to be experts in their military speciality (armor, mortars, infantry, logistics, etc.) and can thus be effective small-unit commanders at the squad and section level, as well as advisers to the commanders at the platoon and company level. In short, a Western army pairs a young infantry lieutenant with a grizzled staff sergeant; a U.S. Marine Corps company commander, usually a captain, will be paired with a gunnery sergeant and a first sergeant. The officer still holds the moral and legal authority and responsibility for his command — but he would be foolish to not listen to the advice and opinion of the unit’s senior NCOs.
The Russian army, in practice, does not operate like this. A high proportion of the soldiers wearing NCO stripes in the modern Russian army are little more than senior conscripts near the end of their term of service. In recent years, the Russians have established a dedicated NCO academy and cut the number of officers in the army in an effort to put more resources into improving the NCO corps, but the changes have not been enough to solve the army’s leadership deficit.
Now, let’s talk about the Russian failures at the operational and tactical level.
It should be emphasized again that the Russian army, through sheer weight of men and materiel, is still likely to win this war. But it’s becoming more and more apparent that the Russians’ operational and tactical choices have not made that task easy on themselves.
First, to many observers, it’s simply shocking that the Russians have not been able to establish complete air superiority over Ukrainian air space. After three days of hostilities, Ukrainian pilots are still taking to the skies and Ukrainian anti-air batteries are still exacting a toll on Russian aircraft. The fact that the Russians have not been able to mount a dominant Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) campaign and yet are insistent on attempting contested air-assault operations is, simply put, astounding. It’s also been extremely costly for the Russians.
To compound that problem, the Russians have undertaken operations on multiple avenues of advance, which, at least in the early stages of this campaign, are not able to mutually support each other. Until they get much closer to the capital, the Russian units moving north out of Crimea are not able to help the Russian armored columns advancing on Kyiv. The troops pushing towards Kyiv from Belarus aren’t able to affect the Ukrainians defending the Donbas in the east. As the Russians move deeper into Ukraine, this can and will change, but it unquestionably made the opening stages of their operations more difficult.
Third, the Russians — possibly out of hubris — do not appear to have prepared the logistical train necessary to keep some of their units in action for an extended period of time. Multiple videos have emerged of Russian columns out of gas and stuck on Ukrainian roads.
The classic saying is “Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics” (attributed to Marines Corps commander Gen. Robert H. Barrow, but I suspect the general sentiment is much older). An army runs on its stomach, and a modern mechanized army runs on its gas tank, and something has clearly gone wrong in with Russian logistical support for this war.
Russia seemed to have expected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to fold. He hasn’t.
America offered to evacuate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy replied, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”
Zelenskyy’s reply was reminiscent of past heroes in times of war: Gen. Anthony McAuliffe who replied in “NUTS” in response to the German demand for surrender at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944; and the Texans striving for independence from dictator Santa Anna’s Mexico with their “Come and Take it Flag,” which was itself appropriated from Spartan King Leonidas and his response the Persian surrender demand at the Battle of Thermopylae.
This bravery, in a day when modern communications allow all Ukrainians and the world to see it, has rallied Ukrainians to defend their nation. And now that the fighting has gone on for three days, what might that mean?
Russian President Putin is said to have assembled 200,000 troops for the invasion. It is estimated that half of them have been committed so far. Further, Putin has called on 10,000 battle-hardened Chechen mercenaries. More than half of Russian forces are likely committed to the battle of Kyiv.
Ukraine has 245,000 active-duty members, but most are in the east, facing the Russian-led and equipped militia in the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukraine also has another 220,000 reservists. Many of these are spread across the nation slightly larger than the state of Texas.
The strategic target is Kyiv and its independent government. To move the reservists to the fight, they must contend with Russian air superiority, slowing their march. More importantly, given this struggle for national survival, 7,000,000 men of military age and fit for military service are taking up arms. Every day, many more older men — and many Ukrainian women — are also being issued weapons, making Molotov cocktails, and joining the fight.
The ongoing Ukrainian mobilization means that the Russian military will soon be outnumbered most everywhere on the battlefield. The Ukrainians may not have the same level of modern equipment — missiles, jets, helicopter — but they have numbers and will power. And, the Russians need to eat, they need fuel, and ammunition — their resupply trucks must get through. They won’t, not in large enough numbers; everyday Ukrainians will see to that.
Zelensky: ‘We successfully fought off enemy attacks. We are defending our country, our land, future of our children. Kyiv & key places near the capital are under our control. The occupiers wanted to capture our capital and install their puppets like Donetsk. We broke their idea.’ pic.twitter.com/3PtnzXmPoy
Russian forces’ main axes of advance in the last 24 hours focused on Kyiv, northeastern Ukraine, and southern Ukraine. Russian airborne and special forces troops are engaged in urban warfare in northwestern Kyiv, but Russian mechanized forces are not yet in the capital. Russian forces from Crimea have changed their primary axes of advance from a presumed drive toward Odesa to focus on pushing north toward Zaporizhie and the southeastern bend of the Dnipro River and east along the Azov Sea coast toward Mariupol. These advances risk cutting off the large concentrations of Ukrainian forces still defending the former line of contact between unoccupied Ukraine and occupied Donbas. Ukrainian leaders may soon face the painful decision of ordering the withdrawal of those forces and the ceding of more of eastern Ukraine or allowing much of Ukraine’s uncommitted conventional combat power to be encircled and destroyed. There are no indications as yet of whether the Ukrainian government is considering this decision point.
Ukrainian resistance remains remarkably effective and Russian operations especially on the Kyiv axis have been poorly coordinated and executed, leading to significant Russian failures on that axis and at Kharkiv. Russian forces remain much larger and more capable than Ukraine’s conventional military, however, and Russian advances in southern Ukraine may threaten to unhinge the defense of Kyiv and northeastern Ukraine if they continue unchecked.
Key Takeaways
Russia has failed to encircle and isolate Kyiv with the combination of mechanized and airborne attacks as it had clearly planned to do. Russian forces are now engaging in more straightforward mechanized drives into the capital along a narrow front along the west bank of the Dnipro River and toward Kyiv from a broad front to the northeast.
Russian forces have temporarily abandoned failed efforts to seize Chernihiv and Kharkiv to the northeast and east of Kyiv and are bypassing those cities to continue their drive on Kyiv. Russian attacks against both cities appear to have been poorly designed and executed and to have encountered more determined and effective Ukrainian resistance than they expected.
Russian movements in eastern Ukraine remain primarily focused on pinning the large concentration of Ukrainian conventional forces arrayed along the former line of contact in the east, likely to prevent them from interfering with Russian drives on Kyiv and to facilitate their encirclement and destruction.
Russian forces coming north from Crimea halted their drive westward toward Odesa, and Ukrainian forces have retaken the critical city of Kherson. Some Russian troops remain west of the Dnipro River and are advancing on Mikolayiv, but the main axes of advance have shifted to the north and east toward Zaporizhie and Mariupol respectively.
Russian forces have taken the critical city of Berdyansk from the west, threatening to encircle Mariupol even as Russian forces based in occupied Donbas attack Mariupol from the east, likely to pin defenders in the city as they are encircled.
Russian successes in southern Ukraine are the most dangerous and threaten to unhinge Ukraine’s successful defenses and rearguard actions to the north and northeast.
Russian troops are facing growing morale and logistics issues, predictable consequences of the poor planning, coordination, and execution of attacks along Ukraine’s northern border.
It appears that the various armored column incursions were secondary to or distractions from the attempted paratroop-powered decapitation strike to be launched from Antonov International Airport. When that went awry (as airborne assaults often do; see the SNAFU that was Operation Market Garden in World War II), there appeared to be no coherent backup plan.
Indeed, the entire operation seems to have been hastily planned and executed, which is odd, since Ukraine has obviously been much on Putin’s mind since 2014.
This is not the way competent troops act in hostile urban environments. It’s like the Russian army forgot all they learned from getting their asses kicked in the First Battle of Grozny, where driving ill-supported mechanized columns filled with untrained conscripts into the city resulted in horrible losses for the Russians.
The Kiev assault seems even less thought out, and their opponents appear much better equipped and trained than the Chechens were.
On the other hand, here’s a report that Kiev is surrounded. I’d take that with several grains of salt.
Putin puts Russian nuclear forces on alert. The idea that Putin would actually contemplate nuclear war with the west because his own ill-conceived and badly-executed invasion of Ukraine has gone off the rails is hardly credible. Russia would be annihilated.
“As you can see, not only do Western countries take unfriendly measures against our country in the economic dimension – I mean the illegal sanctions that everyone knows about very well – but also the top officials of leading NATO countries allow themselves to make aggressive statements with regards to our country,” Putin said on state television.
“Mommy, they’re saying bad things about me!” Those unfriendly measures would, of course, stop instantly if Putin were to withdraw his forces from the territory of other sovereign nations.
Here’s a video of Putin explaining himself:
Does that look or sound like an all-powerful conqueror at the top of his game? No, that’s the tone and the body language of a guy trying to explain why he just fucked up. “We had no other choice!” Yeah, except, you know, not invading another country.
There are evidently plans for talks between Ukrainian and Russian delegations on the Ukraine border with Belarus. Don’t expect much. Zelenskyy: “I do not really believe in the result of this meeting, but let them try, so that no citizen of Ukraine would have any doubt that I, as president, did not try to stop the war when there was even a small chance.”
The U.S. is sending $350 million in military aid. “The defense aid will include anti-armor, small arms and various munitions, and body armor and related equipment.” Let’s hope none of it disappears into the pockets of people connected to members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee…
Speaking of reversing course, Germany has also done an about-face and is now in favor of removing some Russian banks from SWIFT. “The sanctions, agreed with the United States, France, Canada, Italy, Great Britain and the European Commission also include limiting the ability of Russia’s central bank to support the ruble.” I get the impression that the Eurocrats were hesitant to cut Russia off from SWIFT because they thought it would be a useless gesture. Now that Russia’s invasion has gone off the rails, they’re rethinking. The quick reverse also indicates how pissed they are at Russia right now.
Europe has effectively closed its airspace to Russia:
Based on published NOTAMs, adding Austria, Germany, Iceland, and Italy to the list of airspace unavailable to Russian flights — all in effect by 14:00 UTC. Based statements by government officials, we expect further prohibitions on Russian flights. https://t.co/3GtCYRmZUQpic.twitter.com/O0WTcsdRlz
A final word: There are a few Twitter pundits suggesting that some sort of “wag the dog” scenario of a fake war might be unfolding in Ukraine. I don’t buy it. There’s too much real reporting from too many points in Ukraine for such an elaborate, two-part deception to be unfolding. Lots of weird things happen in warfare.
I will say one thing: The manifest incompetence with which Russia has tried to carry out this assault suggests that Putin felt he had to launch it then due to some sort of time pressure or deadline, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe Putin has late stage cancer, or he felt Ukraine was about to join NATO, or a major Russian oilfield is about to run dry. Whatever it is, this war appears to be a panic move that’s gone very badly for Putin.
Ukraine fights back, Biden isn’t going to do jack about it, Kyle Rittenhouse is going to sue everyone, inflation soars, the Canadian “emergency” is ended, disaster looms for Democrats, and Ilhan Omar gets an unusual challenger. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
While reports of the battle are confused and preliminary, it appears that Ukrainian forces counterattacked, shot down some Russian helicopters, and have so far been able to prevent the Russians from landing reinforcements. Initial claims that the Russian force at the airfield had been “destroyed” were later clarified; it now seems that the battle at Gostomel is continuing. It’s easy to understand how crucial this battle is, simply by looking at a map. If the Russians could gain control of the Gostomel airfield, they could score a quick knock-out of the Ukrainian capital as part of what is being called their “decapitation” strategy.
Russian news services are claiming they’ve taken the airfield, but that may be stale news or propaganda.
Ukrainian forces take up positions in Kiev. Also: “Reports that the Ukrainian military has delivered a strike on a Russian airfield in Millerovo, Rostov Oblast have now been confirmed.”
The invasion of Ukraine by the armed forces of Russia at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s orders marks the first time since 1945 that Russia has engaged in a conventional war with a near-peer nation.
Ukraine isn’t restive Warsaw Pact nations, it isn’t Afghanistan, it isn’t Chechnya, it isn’t Georgia, and it isn’t Crimea.
The conflict launched by Putin is on a far grander scale than the invasion of Crimea in 2014, launched as Ukraine’s last pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, was driven from office in a popular uprising.
Putin, by choosing to reach beyond the ethnic-Russian majority separatist provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas Basin, has decided to end the independent, Western-looking Ukrainian government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and install a pro-Putin quisling.
And while the fog of war, some deliberate mis-and disinformation operations by the combatants, and the far-from-perfect filter of Western media leaves much unknown at this time, what is known is that Zelenskyy is still in power a day after the Russian offensive. Further, the Ukrainian military appears to be taking a toll on the Russians invading from three sides: south across the Pripyat Marshes from Russian satellite Belarus; west from Russia, including Donbas; and north from the Black Sea in the region of Odessa and Transnistria, a Russian client breakaway state in Moldavia.
Modern conventional war is extremely difficult to do well. Imagine being a conductor of an orchestra, all while the audience was lobbing soccer balls at you and your musicians as you perform J.S. Bach’s Chaconne in D — that’s modern warfare. Putin is attempting a highly complicated operation over large distances in the face of a determined foe. Further, he’s doing so with an army largely composed of conscripts serving for only one year.
Since Putin has decided to oust the Ukrainian government, this means that every day Zelenskyy remains in office is another day that adds to Ukrainian national confidence to resist — and another day that Putin looks to have miscalculated.
A Russian Military Ship telling 13 Ukrainian troops on Snake Island to surrender. They were met with a response of " Russian military Ship, go fuck yourself."
Both the EU and the Biden Administration offer sanctions they admit will not do Jack Squat.
FULL DOCUMENT: This is the general license that US Treasury has issued exempting any "energy" related dealings from the sanctions imposed on some of the biggest Russian banks. It's so wide ranging that even includes "wood" as a form of energy exempted | #Ukraine#OOTTpic.twitter.com/3X5t0LFi3W
WATCH: AP reporter roasts Biden's State Department spokesman over the "frankly huge" list of exemptions in Biden's sanctions on Russia.pic.twitter.com/gzAWB4LwMg
Taiwan joins sanctions against Russia, including their semiconductor industry. I don’t know if any fabless Russian chip design company gets their chips fabbed at TSMC, so I’m not sure how badly this hurts their economy in the long run.
It is the West’s wacko environmentalists who handed Russian President Vladimir Putin the leverage and money to invade Crimea in 2014 and Ukraine this week.
Without these wackos, Putin would be just another gangster in charge of a crumbling country, and maybe one on the verge of a revolution to depose him.
But the facts are the facts are the facts, and the facts are these… Thanks to the West’s environmentalists, those smug greenies who are more concerned with carbon output than world peace, this gangster controls much of the energy going to the European Union (E.U.).
Thanks a lot, Greta…
A great mystery:
Under Carter, Russia invaded Afghanistan. Under Obama, Russia took over Crimea. Under Biden, Russia is invading the rest of Ukraine. Russians do land grabs when Democrats control the White House. Democrats get pissed when you point it out. But it is still true.
Biden is demonstrably more hostile to American oil and gas companies than he is to Russian companies, having frozen oil and gas leasesdespite a court order otherwise.
Thanks to Biden’s inflation, the cost of everything is going up. “70 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.”
Fellow former finance reporter Chrystia Freeland — someone I’ve known since we were both expat journalists in Russia in the nineties — announced last week that her native Canada would be making Sorkin’s vision a reality. Freeland arouses strong feelings among old Russia hands. Before the Yeltsin era collapsed, she had consistent, remarkable access to gangster-oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky, who appeared in her Financial Times articles described as aw-shucks humans just doing their best to make sure “big capital” maintained its “necessary role” in Russia’s political life. “Berezovsky was one of several financiers who came together in a last-ditch attempt to keep the Communists out of the Kremlin” was typical Freeland fare in, say, 1998.
Then the Yeltsin era collapsed in corrupt ignominy and Freeland immediately wrote a book called Sale of the Century that identified Yeltsin’s embrace of her former top sources as the “original sin” of Russian capitalism, a “Faustian bargain” that crippled Russia’s chance at true progress. This is Freeland on Yeltsin’s successor in 2000. Note the “Yes, Putin has a reputation for beating the press, but his economic rep is solid!” passage at the end:
It looks as if we’re about to fall in love with Russia all over again…
Compared to the ailing, drink-addled figure Boris Yeltsin cut in his later years, his successor, Vladimir Putin, in the eyes of many western observers, seems refreshingly direct, decisive and energetic… Tony Blair, who has already paid Putin the compliment of a visit to Russia and received the newly installed president in Downing Street in return, has praised him as a strong leader with a reformist vision. Bill Clinton, who recently hot-footed it to Russia, offered the equally sunny appraisal that “when we look at Russia today . . . we see an economy that is growing . . . we see a Russia that has just completed a democratic transfer of power for the first time in a thousand years.”
To be sure, some critics have lamented Putin’s support for the bloody second war in Chechnya, accused him of eroding freedom of the press…and worried aloud that his KGB background and unrepenting loyalty to the honor of that institution could jeopardize Russia’s fragile democratic institutions. But many of even Putin’s fiercest prosecutors seem inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the economy…
Years later, she is somehow Canada’s Finance Minister, and what another friend from our Russia days laughingly describes as “the Nurse Ratched of the New World Order.” At the end of last week, Minister Freeland explained that in expanding its Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) program, her government was “directing Canadian financial institutions to review their relationships with anyone involved in the illegal blockades.”
The Emergencies Act contains language beyond the inventive powers of the best sci-fi writers. It defines a “designated person” — a person eligible for cutoff of financial services — as someone “directly or indirectly” participating in a “public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace.” Directly or indirectly?
She went on to describe the invocation of Canada’s Emergencies Act in the dripping-fake tones of someone trying to put a smile on an insurance claim rejection, with even phrases packed with bad news steered upward in the form of cheery hypotheticals. As in, The names of both individuals and entities as well as crypto wallets? Have been shared? By the RCMP with financial institutions? And accounts have been frozen? As she confirmed this monstrous news about freezing bank accounts, Freeland burst into nervous laughter, looking like Tony Perkins sharing a cheery memory with “mother.”
Angeleno’s tax dollars at work:
A city audit found LA spends $837,000 to house one homeless person. Perhaps this is why Newsom has done everything he can to block my statewide audit.
China is getting a good return on its investment in the Biden clan: “DOJ shuts down China-focused anti-espionage program. The China Initiative is being cast aside largely because of perceptions that it unfairly painted Chinese Americans and U.S. residents of Chinese origin as disloyal.” We can’t let national security stand in the way of political correctness…
In what may be remembered as one of the greatest miracles of all time, it seems that an upcoming American election cycle is set to put an end to the great COVID pandemic in regions that have been clinging to “mitigation” tactics despite them being proven ineffective long ago. What science couldn’t do for blue state governors, politics is about to. Meanwhile, much of the rest of the country has already adopted an “endemic” approach to COVID. In my Indiana community, for instance, school systems have been in-person and maskless for well over a year.
A combination of experience and common sense led local officials to recognize that while COVID was a serious virus, and an often-times unpleasant condition to endure, we just weren’t experiencing the kind of mortality rates or critical hospitalizations that would require the suspension of normal life. If I was guessing, I would say that there are more counties, cities, and communities in the United States like mine than not.
While mainstream media may be drawn like a moth to the bright lights of urban areas with all the restrictions, mandates, and panic-fueled policies enacted there, most Americans have been “living with” the virus for a long time now.
In fact, if my community is any bellwether for the nation, most Americans are already wondering why anyone is still attempting to take a non-endemic approach at this point. The virus has proven itself to be, like all other viruses, prone to seasonal surges that are largely unaltered by our theatrical mitigation techniques. Not that anyone with their head screwed on straight ever thought there was value in wearing a porous cloth mask while standing up at a restaurant, then taking it off while sitting down, but the comical nonsense of mask histrionics is now widely appreciated as a goofy spectator sport. Behold:
So silly. And so as opinion polls continue showing that an ever-increasing number of Americans are infuriated by this nonsense, and that they are done with all the aggressive pandemic restrictions that proved unnecessary a long time ago, a public pivot of massive proportions is underway amongst the political class.
Whether it’s big blue state governors like California’s Gavin Newsom hilariously announcing that he will be transitioning his state to the country’s first “endemic” virus policy – meaning they’re going to start doing some things that Texas, Florida, South Dakota, Indiana, and so many others have been doing for over a year – or whether it’s blue city school boards like San Francisco’s being recalled by angry voters for their abusive and needless shutdown and masking policies, it’s clear where we’re headed.
Despite that, the midterm news for Democrats is not good.
Democrats know that they should be preparing for a brutal showing in this November’s midterm elections. Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race last year — and, more to the point, the substance and style of his successful campaign — were the first sign of it.
But the hits have kept on coming. In San Francisco last week, two progressive parents succeeded in their campaign to oust three school-board members for being . . . too progressive. Irked initially at how long it was taking for area schools to reopen for in-person learning during the pandemic, these two single parents did some digging and discovered even more to be upset about: an enormous budget shortfall, an intensive campaign to rename dozens of school buildings, and the replacement of a merit-based admissions program with a diversity-minded lottery, among other issues.
Suggesting just how central education has become to politics, San Francisco’s intensely progressive mayor, London Breed — who last fall violated her own mask mandate at a concert and defended herself by saying she was “feeling the spirit” — endorsed the school-board recall effort.
“My take is that it was really about the frustration of the board of education doing their fundamental job,” Breed said after the results were in. “And that is to make sure that our children are getting educated, that they get back into the classroom. And that did not occur. . . . We failed our children. Parents were upset. The city as a whole was upset, and the decision to recall school-board members was a result of that.”
San Francisco–based writer Gary Kamiya suggests in a piece for the Atlantic that the results of the recall seem to confirm the conservative narrative. Kamiya writes that conservatives have argued “that the Democratic Party is out of step not just with Republicans, but with its own constituents. . . . Progressives rejected such conclusions, insisting that the recall was simply about competence and was driven by an only-in-San-Francisco set of circumstances.” Kamiya concludes that the best way to read the outcome is “closer to the conservative view.” “At a minimum,” Kamiya writes, “the recall demonstrates that ‘woke’ racial politics have their limits, even in one of the wokest cities in the country.”
Over in Texas, meanwhile, failed Senate candidate and failed presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke is gearing up to become a failed gubernatorial candidate, too. Running against incumbent Republican governor Greg Abbott, O’Rourke was most recently seen trying to pretend that he isn’t a fan of radical gun-control measures.
Asked about the promise he made during his run for president that he would “take away AR-15s and AK-47s,” O’Rourke attempted a hard about-face.
“I’m not interested in taking anything from anyone,” he said. “What I want to make sure that we do is defend the Second Amendment. I want to make sure that we protect our fellow Texans far better than we’re doing right now. And that we listen to law enforcement, which Greg Abbott refused to do. He turned his back on them when he signed that permitless-carry bill that endangers the lives of law enforcement in a state that’s seen more cops and sheriff’s deputies gunned down than in any other.”
As Charlie Cooke has noted, this is utter tripe. It also isn’t working. The latest poll of the race from the Dallas Moring News has Abbott up by seven points, 45 percent to 38 percent. O’Rourke himself remains underwater with voters: Only 40 percent view him favorably, while 46 percent say they have an unfavorable view of the candidate.
Republicans win a Jacksonville City Council race:
It's a citywide race, and this result will more or less match the average partisanship of the city for the past decade or so. But this was a Dem-held seat, and losing it in this fashion has to hurt the local party. And doesn't portend well in other races.
Kyle Rittenhouse is finally ready to sue, including lawsuits against Whoopi Goldberg and Cenk Uygur. I hope he bankrupts anyone who called him a white supremacist.
Former Houston Rockets draft bust Royce White is running for Congress as a Republican against “Squad” member Ilhan Omar. Hopefully he can be on the campaign trail more than he was on the floor for the Rockets…
BBC correspondents heard loud bangs in the capital Kyiv, as well as Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. Blasts have also been heard in the southern port city of Odesa.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had carried out missile strikes on Ukraine’s infrastructure and on border guards.
Russia’s defence ministry has denied attacking Ukrainian cities – saying it was targeting military infrastructure, air defence and air forces with “high-precision weapons”.
Tanks and troops have poured into Ukraine at points along its eastern, southern and northern borders, Ukraine says.
Russian military convoys have crossed from Belarus into Ukraine’s northern Chernihiv region, and from Russia into the Sumy region, which is also in the north, Ukraine’s border guard service (DPSU) said.
Belarus is a long-time ally of Russia. Analysts describe the small country as Russia’s “client state”.
Convoys have also entered the eastern Luhansk and Kharkiv regions, and moved into the Kherson region from Crimea – a territory that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
If multiple Russian convoys just crossed the border without significant opposition from ground troops (either tanks or hidden soldiers with antitank and RPGs) it’s quite the indictment of Ukrainian war-planning.
The Russian offensive was preceded by artillery fire and there were injuries to border guards, the DPSU said.
There have also been reports of troops landing by sea at the Black Sea port cities of Mariupol and Odesa in the south. A British resident of Odesa told the BBC many people were leaving.
As I mentioned last night, Putin’s fiction that this is “a military operation in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region” is an obvious lie. Here’s a tweet highlighting the wide range of Russia’s operations:
Here is a map of all the verified Russian attacks on Ukraine as of 3:30 am last night. Just a reminder that just a day and a half ago, Putin was claiming he was just sending in “peacekeeping” forces to defend the area circled in yellow. pic.twitter.com/f7byy9WARK
(Some of the footage circulating on Twitter is evidently from previous conflicts. Hopefully the above are not among them, but if they are let me know.)
There are conflicting reports on whether Antonov International Airport on the outskirts of Kiev is currently in Russian hands or not. The fighting there has reportedly gone back and forth.
At least 16 cities in Ukraine are reporting explosions. Footage of cruise missiles flying over Ukrainian heads is appearing on social media. Apparently, a Russian soldier parachuting into Ukraine has posted video of himself on TikTok. There are reports that Belarusian military forces have joined the Russian forces in attacks on Ukrainian border guards.
We are witnessing, on our television screens and through the web, the largest land war in Europe since 1945, an unprovoked attack by an autocratic superpower with nuclear weapons against a flawed but independent democracy that had committed no crime or provocation. The world is less safe today than it was at the start of the week. Many Ukrainians are already dead, some Russian forces have likely also been killed, and a lot more people will die in the near future.
This is exactly the nightmare scenario that U.S., NATO, and European Union policy aimed to prevent; short of a Russian invasion of NATO member states, this is the worst-case scenario. This is not another relatively small-scale, minimal-conflict land grab like the Russian seizure and occupation of Crimea in 2014. This is the full wrath of the Russian war machine coming down like a ton of bricks on a country of 80 million people.
At the most basic level, realism begins with the recognition that wars occur because there is no agency or central authority that can protect states from one another and stop them from fighting if they choose to do so. Given that war is always a possibility, states compete for power and sometimes use force to try to make themselves more secure or gain other advantages. There is no way states can know for certain what others may do in the future, which makes them reluctant to trust one another and encourages them to hedge against the possibility that another powerful state may try to harm them at some point down the road.
Liberalism sees world politics differently. Instead of seeing all great powers as facing more or less the same problem—the need to be secure in a world where war is always possible—liberalism maintains that what states do is driven mostly by their internal characteristics and the nature of the connections among them. It divides the world into “good states” (those that embody liberal values) and “bad states” (pretty much everyone else) and maintains that conflicts arise primarily from the aggressive impulses of autocrats, dictators, and other illiberal leaders. For liberals, the solution is to topple tyrants and spread democracy, markets, and institutions based on the belief that democracies don’t fight one another, especially when they are bound together by trade, investment, and an agreed-on set of rules.
After the Cold War, Western elites concluded that realism was no longer relevant and liberal ideals should guide foreign-policy conduct. As the Harvard University professor Stanley Hoffmann told Thomas Friedman of the New York Times in 1993, realism is “utter nonsense today.” U.S. and European officials believed that liberal democracy, open markets, the rule of law, and other liberal values were spreading like wildfire and a global liberal order lay within reach. They assumed, as then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton put it in 1992, that “the cynical calculus of pure power politics” had no place in the modern world and an emerging liberal order would yield many decades of democratic peace. Instead of competing for power and security, the world’s nations would concentrate on getting rich in an increasingly open, harmonious, rules-based liberal order, one shaped and guarded by the benevolent power of the United States.
Had this rosy vision been accurate, spreading democracy and extending U.S. security guarantees into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence would have posed few risks. But that outcome was unlikely, as any good realist could have told you. Indeed, opponents of enlargement were quick to warn that Russia would inevitably regard NATO enlargement as a threat and going ahead with it would poison relations with Moscow. That is why several prominent U.S. experts—including diplomat George Kennan, author Michael Mandelbaum, and former defense secretary William Perry—opposed enlargement from the start. Then-Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were initially opposed for the same reasons, though both later shifted their positions and joined the pro-enlargement bandwagon.
Proponents of expansion won the debate by claiming it would help consolidate the new democracies in Eastern and Central Europe and create a “vast zone of peace” across all of Europe. In their view, it didn’t matter that some of NATO’s new members were of little or no military value to the alliance and might be hard to defend because peace would be so robust and enduring that any pledge to protect those new allies would never have to be honored.
Moreover, they insisted that NATO’s benign intentions were self-evident and it would be easy to persuade Moscow not to worry as NATO crept closer to the Russian border. This view was naive in the extreme, for the key issue was not what NATO’s intentions may have been in reality. What really mattered, of course, was what Russia’s leaders thought they were or might be in the future. Even if Russian leaders could have been convinced that NATO had no malign intentions, they could never be sure this would always be the case.
One need not buy all of Walt’s assertions to realize that liberal foreign policy wonks got Russia badly wrong.
One of the problems with using economic sanctions as your primary tool of deterrence in foreign policy is that eventually you’ll run into a hostile foe or force that does not care about trading with the U.S. or even money at all. In fact, it is fair to wonder how much money motivates any of America’s current foes.
The Taliban certainly don’t particularly care about money; they think they’re on a mission from Allah. Iran has been hit with just about every sanction in the book, and no doubt it’s had an impact on the Iranian economy, but the mullahs don’t seem to care much. Kim Jong-un and the North Korean regime have been sanctioned many, many times, and they just keep getting better and better at evading them. The U.S. and China are too economically intertwined to easily enact sanctions that are serious enough to alter the decision-making in Beijing.
And then there’s Vladimir Putin’s Russia — a government that foresaw the types of moves the West was likely to make, and prepared accordingly:
Russia has drastically reduced its use of dollars, and therefore Washington’s leverage. It has stockpiled enormous currency reserves, and trimmed its budgets, to keep its economy and government services going even under isolation. It has reoriented trade and sought to replace Western imports.
But even more than that, for a greedy kleptocrat, Putin doesn’t seem primarily motivated by money or his country’s economic prospects. Putin’s address yesterday was a long stream of grievances, and it is clear that what really enrages him is that Russia is not as powerful as it was when he was a younger man and the Soviet Union existed.
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, is a cooperative of financial institutions formed in 1973 and headquartered in Belgium. It is overseen by the National Bank of Belgium with cooperation from other major central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank.
But SWIFT is not a traditional bank and does not transfer funds. Rather, it acts as a secure messaging system that links more than 11,000 financial institutions in over 200 countries and territories, alerting banks when transactions are going to occur. (For instance, American banks have a unique SWIFT code that customers use for incoming wire transfers in U.S. dollars.)
In 2021, SWIFT said it recorded an average of 42 million messages per day, an 11 percent increase from the year before. In 2020, Russia accounted for 1.5 percent of transactions.
For the U.S. and its European allies, cutting Russia out of the SWIFT financial system would be one of the toughest financial steps they could take, damaging Russia’s economy immediately and in the long term. The move could cut Russia off from most international financial transactions, including profits from oil and gas production, which accounts for more than 40 percent of the country’s revenue.
“But doing so, which some financial analysts have likened to a ‘nuclear option,’ would be an unprecedented move against one of the world’s largest economies.”
No, a financial sanction for one nation invading another is not a “nuclear option.” When it comes to war, the nuclear option is literally the nuclear option.
Putin will happily trade some short-term economic sacrifice for rebuilding an empire. China will gladly undergo some trade sanctions to take Taiwan. Iran will cheerfully be excised from global trade to destroy Israel.
There is a reason that Stalin is still the highest-polling leader in Russia. In her Nobel Prize–winning oral history Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich quotes a former Communist factory worker imprisoned and beaten half to death by the regime.
As an old man, the imprisoned worker said, “When I go into my grandchildren’s room, everything in there is foreign: the shirts, the jeans, the books, the music…Savages! I want to die a Communist. That’s my final wish.”
The West is failing because it not only doesn't understand why other countries feel this way, but because we ourselves have given up any belief in a higher purpose.
Putin’s Big Ukrainian Adventure isn’t doing wonders for the Russian stock market.
Russia’s stock market has lost nearly 40% of its value today — and at one point was down nearly 45%. It’s one of the biggest single-day meltdowns in modern market history.
Though Russian forces are quite formidable on paper (especially now that Russia has reportedly achieved air superiority over most of Ukraine), a whole lot of variables are at play in this war. How well maintained are all those old Soviet weapons Russian has lying around? How much of it has been modernized? How long can they sustain this rapid pace of operation? How much has Soviet doctrine changed following what they learned in Grozny? Soviet/Russian experience in counter-insurgency operations has generally not been a happy one. How stiff a resistance can Ukraine put up against the Russian invasion?
Finally, what is Putin’s real goal: Ukraine acquiescing to his previous territorial conquests, Findlandization and agreement never to join NATO, incorporation of all Russian-speaking areas into Russia proper, installing a Russian-friendly puppet government, or actual outright conquest of all of Ukraine? Which he’s aiming for will determine how much pain he’s willing to let Russia endure and how difficult the military task will be.
My god: “An invasion has begun” by Russia into #Ukraine. Our @mchancecnn is reporting right now that an advisor to Ukraine Interior Minister says the sounds of explosions are missle strikes and Russia is invading. The explosions can be heard in the Capitol Kyiv. War has begun. pic.twitter.com/ho0KzoEbn6
Biden’s weakness and cognitive decline clearly emboldened Putin, and Ukrainians will be paying the price. It remains to be seen whether he just wants control over Russian-speaking portions of Ukraine, or actually wants to wipe it off the globe and incorporate the territory into Russia.
Though quite jaundiced and cynical about the “good intentions” of our national and international elites (political and otherwise), I’ve tried to avoid buying into conspiracy theories about a “great reset” being planned for us by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum. But now come news that Justin Trudeau wants to make all the “temporary” expanded financial surveillance powers permanent.
As all eyes were trained on the aggressive police sweep of the Ottawa trucker convoy this week, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s administration was quietly moving to implement a sweeping expansion of surveillance power at the federal level.
The Trudeau government’s financial war against the truckers has been covered at length. But one underreported aspect of this broader assault on Canadian civil liberties is the effort to bring crowdfunding and payment service providers — two of the most prominent routes for financial transactions on the Internet — under the permanent control of a centralized government authority.
In a February 14 news conference, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said that the government was using the Emergencies Act to broaden “the scope of Canada’s anti-money-laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use.” That broadened power requires all forms of digital transactions, including cryptocurrencies, to be reported to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada. (I.e., “Fintrac”). “As of today, all crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with Fintrac, and they must report large and suspicious transactions to Fintrac,” Freeland said. She justified the move as a way to “mitigate the risk” of “illicit funds” and “increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by Fintrac and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement.” Trudeau, standing behind Freeland at the press conference, nodded his head in agreement.
Freeland said the trucker convoy, which had assembled to protest coronavirus restrictions, had “highlighted the fact” that digital assets and funding mechanisms “weren’t captured” by the Canadian government’s pre-existing surveillance powers. As a result, she said, “the government will also bring forward legislation to provide these authorities to FinTrac on a permanent basis.”
That seems an awful lot less like an emergency measure to deal with honking truckers and more like a naked power grab to further the building of a sinister, ubiquitous surveillance state, doesn’t it? It’s the sort of thing that makes accusations of trying to impose a Chinese-style social credit system on western democracies a lot more credible, doesn’t it?
It doesn’t help that Schwab dresses and talks like a supervillain.
Why do they dress like sci-fi supervillains? Klaus Schwab looks like he could be on the set of Babylon 5 or The Expanse. pic.twitter.com/qgQVUDALDt
James Lindsay has a long thread on Schwab’s book The Fourth Industrial Revolution, his sweeping vision of “a technological fusion of the ‘physical, digital, and biological worlds,’ which is creepy transhumanism under their direction.”
Read this however you want, but this is Schwab's stated objective: to take the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is already naturally underway, and shape it according to his vision. That vision is elsewhere seen to be fascistic, Communist, transhumanist, and under WEF control. pic.twitter.com/6wUigHDpNB
— James Lindsay, useful degenerate (@ConceptualJames) February 21, 2022
Is all this just paranoid pattern-matching confirmation bias? Possibly. Let’s hope so. It probably is crazy to ascribe every baleful trend of recent memory (social justice, creeping authoritarianism, tranny madness, rising crime, pedophilia among left-wing elites, media insistence that ordinary people need to start eating bugs, etc.) to one grand conspiracy. It’s paranoid to ascribe every problem to a single malevolent actor. There are always going to be competing agendas by competing power players. It’s a mistake to assume that all the bad guys, from Schwab to George Soros to Bill Gates to Xi Jinping, are on the same team, working with each other. That way lies madness.
But there sure seems to be a whole lot of something going on.
Justin Trudeau’s storm troopers start arresting peaceful protesters, he wants to kidnap the children and dogs of free Canadian citizens who dared to bruise his fragile ego, Texas sends more lawsuits flying, and another case of Sudden Epstein Death Syndrome. It’s the Friday Saturday LinkSwarm!
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cancelled parliamentary debate today as federal police began arresting protesting truckers and confiscating vehicles. Trudeau did not want to face government while the operation to break the back of the freedom protestors begins.
Early this morning, federal police assembled a convoy of heavy tow trucks to begin the operation. The identities of the tow truck companies were masked by painting over the logos to avoid retaliation. RCMP and Ottawa police then brought in Armored Personnel Carriers (MRAP’s and APC’s) to support the operation.
Media were told to leave the enforcement zone to help hide the optics of heavily armed RCMP tactical units, and they began breaking the windows of the trucks and forcibly removing the truck drivers. For the same reason, popular social media YouTuber’s, who had been broadcasting livestreams, were arrested as the operation began.
They’re also threatening to take children from protesting parents. “Just imagine the uproar that would ensue if Trump had taken children from Black Lives Matters protesters.”
“When Fascism Comes To America, It Will Look Like Justin Trudeau’s Canada. Trudeau’s dangerous not just because he’s abusing Canadians, but because he is providing the wish list for crackdowns by Democrats in the U.S.: Every single bank, credit union, investment broker and insurance provider in the country has been deputized to figure out if they have a blockader as a client, and to immediately freeze their accounts if so.”
It’s public health 101: if you want to protect people from a +99% survivable virus, you trample them with horses in front of their kids and euthanize their pets and freeze their bank accounts
The Chicago Teachers Union provides a real-world example of what happens when a government union has too much power.
CTU has gone on strike three times in three school years. In the latest work stoppage, over 330,000 schoolchildren missed five days of school. Parents were notified of the walkout after 11 p.m. on a school night, leaving them just hours to develop a back-up plan after the union decided not to show up.
This shut-down follows the 2020-2021 school year, when Chicago Public Schools was fully remote for most of the year, rolling out hybrid options starting in February 2021. All told, Chicago students had gone 17 months without fully in-person education by the time they started the current school year Aug. 30, 2021.
And students’ academic achievement suffered for it. One example: On the SATs, there was a 6.1 percentage point decrease in the number of Chicago students at least meeting standards in math – and a drop of 6.7 percentage points for the same category for low-income students – in 2021 compared to 2019.
But CTU’s political muscle – and their willingness to flex it – could become the blueprint for schools and government at all levels if Illinois’ powerful government-sector unions get what they’re asking for at the polls in November. They want an amendment to the Illinois Constitution that would give unelected government union bosses more power than state law or the people elected to represent residents’ best interests.
Snip.
Amendment 1 is billed as a right-to-work ban in a state that already doesn’t allow right to work, but it’s much more than that. It would give unions a “fundamental” right to organize and bargain over wages, hours, working conditions, economic welfare and safety at work – i.e., virtually anything – and explicitly prohibit lawmakers from ever interfering with or diminishing those rights.
Unions would be able to demand anything during negotiations and go on strike to get their demands met. Resulting contracts would carry the weight of the state constitution. Lawmakers wouldn’t be able to restrict what unions can negotiate or limit when they can go on strike without running afoul of the state constitution.
What’s more, lawmakers would never be able to repeal a little-known Illinois provision that allows many union contracts to override conflicting state and local laws and regulations.
Known in legal parlance as a “supercedence clause,” the practical effect is that a union will be able to rewrite laws it doesn’t like just by negotiating a contrary provision in its contract. If the employer doesn’t agree? The union goes on strike. And government officials’ hands will be tied.
That includes laws in place to protect children.
A provision requiring “background information” on employees of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services – the department charged with protecting children who are reported abused or neglected – could be contradicted in the union’s contract with the state.
So could the provision prohibiting employment of “sexually dangerous” persons.
Paxton and Texas also sued Facebook over facial recognition. “Facebook unlawfully captured the biometric identifiers of Texans for a commercial purpose without their informed consent, disclosed those identifiers to others, and failed to destroy collected identifiers within a reasonable time.”
“San Francisco police linked a woman to a crime using DNA from her rape exam, D.A. Boudin says.” Though the charges were dropped, this seems like not only a clear Fourth Amendment violation, but an absolute abuse of trust. “Sure, just give your DNA to the government! There’s no way they would ever abuse that!” Can you believe that Soros-backed Boudin is the subject of a recall petition?
This isn’t just the crest of a wave: if Republicans offer a positive, credible alternative, as @GlennYoungkin did in Virginia, it’s the making of a realignment. https://t.co/5lzpE6B7IL
Let me see if I have the timeline on this story correct: 1. Leftwing racial justice activist Quintez Brown attempts to assassinate Louisville Democratic mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg, and 2. He’s almost immediately bailed out for a paltry $100,000 by #BlackLivesMatter? How often is bail set so low for attempted political assassinations?
CRT got blown away by a massive truth bomb dropped by North Carolina dad — and local GOP candidate — Brian Echevarria at his school board meeting on Monday.
“As a parent, I speak to other parents,” he told Cabarrus County School Board members, “And there’s a few things we don’t want.”
“I’m biracial, I’m multilingual, I’m multicultural. The fact is in America and North Carolina, I can do anything I want — and I teach that to my children. And the person who tells my little pecan-color kids that they’re somehow oppressed based on the color of their skin,” he justly insisted, “would be absolutely wrong and absolutely at war with me.”
Speaking of pedophilia: “Alternatively described as Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘best mate’ and ‘pimp’, Jean-Luc Brunel, a former French modeling agent who has been imprisoned since 2020 on charges he aided Epstein’s sex-trafficking enterprise, has committed suicide in his cell.” I think we’ve seen this movie before, and we didn’t believe the ending the first time…
Speaking of Adams: “I want to discuss the new fuckface mayor of New York City that replaced the old fuckface mayor.” The mayor that wants to force employers to enforce vaccine mandates also wants them to force workers back to their NYC offices.
What’s in it for those businesses that now realize that three hundred thousand dollars a month in office space “We don’t need it anymore.” What’s in it for those employees that figured out that they can have homes that are two or three times the size for half as much money and not have to deal with a commute every day? What’s in it for them?”
With oil prices up, so are U.S. rig counts, up to a four year high.
New Bloom County animated TV show in development for Fox. I view this with more trepidation than hope. There’s about a 95% chance the screw it up, and if they don’t, there’s a good chance Fox will cancel it anyway, since that’s their MO…
P. J. O’Rourke, RIP. I reviewed Holidays in Hell for Reason back in the day…
In 2017, a pilot aborted takeoff after V1, the inflection point for when a safe abort was still possible. “Still traveling at 100 knots, but decelerating rapidly, the plane rumbled across the grass overrun area, plowed over the airport perimeter fence, struck a raised embankment, lost its landing gear, crossed a road, and ground to a halt straddling a ditch.” Post-incident analysis showed why that was the right call. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
FLOCK DROP MYSTERY: A security camera in Chihuahua, Mexico, captured the moment hundreds of yellow-headed blackbirds suddenly fell from the sky — many nosediving to their death https://t.co/45WA052YZOpic.twitter.com/FsZkEorTc7
[The sound you hear is the countless multitudes clicking off to another blog.]
Way back last decade, dispatches on the ongoing crisis were a regular staple of the blog. To summarize the crisis for those who weren’t paying attention back then:
A bunch of countries joined the Eurozone without following the requirements outlined for membership, including limiting budget deficits to 3% of less of their GDP, and overall debt-to-GDP ratio of 60% or less. How were they able to join? Simple: They lied and the Eurocrats turned a blind eye, because EU.
Foremost among those running into trouble were the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain). (Cyprus and Malta also had serious issues, but their tiny size meant they presented no systematic risk for other nations, and Cyprus relieved its problems by becoming the dirty Russian money laundering capital of Europe.)
Ireland was probably the most incongruous of the five, since their debt only spiked when the Irish government nationalized Anglo Irish Bank to prevent it from collapsing.
In all other cases, the cause of of the problem was obvious: Each ran huge budget deficits to underwrite generous welfare state programs for countries with below replacement birth rates, and they were allowed to get away with it for a while because they used Germany’s credit rating in lieu of their own thanks to the Euro.
The problem finally came to a head after the SubPrime Meltdown in 2008 made various banks and regulatory agencies actually scrutinize balance sheets and realize just how broke the PIIGS were.
Greece was the worst, being the most dysfunctional, and absolutely refusing to slow down spending on their own. There followed a reoccurring farce where various Euro regulatory agencies (including the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank, collectively known as “the Troika”) demanded Greece end their ridiculous high levels of deficit spending, Greece refused, the Troika threatened to cut off the tap entirely, Greece promised to be better, the Troika reluctantly extended them another loan, and then Greece continued to spend recklessly, setting up the next round of the farce.
A bunch of Eurozone countries then implemented “austerity,” which involved not cutting spending to balance their budgets, but merely reducing the deficits slightly.
None of these “austerity” measures eliminated deficit spending, and none addressed the issue that’s driving all of Europe (and us) bankrupt, namely unwillingness to carry out structural reforms of the welfare state. The few tiny reforms that have been undertaken have been, as NRO’s Michael Tanner notes, ridiculously timid, and even those have been heavily weighted in future years. “So far, European governments haven’t even been willing to take a penknife to the welfare state, let alone an axe.” Plus a huge round of tax hikes…
Actual austerity would mean (at a minimum) reducing spending to the amount of money actually taken in. As best I can tell, none of the PIIGS, or France, or the UK has undertaken such real austerity. That “severe” Greek austerity that just caused a change in government? It reduced Greece’s official deficit spending from 9.0% of GDP to 7.5% of GDP. They didn’t even want Greece to stop digging a hole, they just wanted them to dig more slowly.
Austerity did not fail, it was declared difficult and left untried.
Eventually growth in the Eurozone picked up just enough, and the Troika managed to install enough of their own functionaries in various PIIGS positions to ensure that their half-assed, anemic austerity programs were actually followed that, along with Brexit and the Rise of Trump, it got Eurozone debt crisis off the front page and back under the rug.
So fast forward to today. Has the European debt crisis been solved?
Hah! Of course not. Does the EU ever really solve anything? European debt grew during the pandemic, but this time they get to blame Flu Manchu rather than slow growth, high taxes, declining births and a bloated welfare state.
Spain, Italy and Greece have all continued their PIIGS-ish ways. The UK, under ostensibly conservative Tory governments for the entire pandemic and constant attack for “austerity,” and they’re still piling up debt like one of the PIIGS, though the double-whammy of Brexit dislocations and idiotic lockdowns are more to blame than increased spending per se.
Ireland, with the lowest deficit for the period, seems to have proved that their membership among the PIIGS was transitory.
What then of Portugal? Have they improved? It turns out only slightly and relatively. Their debt increased by 13.9% for the period, making them better not only than Spain, Italy, Greece and the UK, but also France, Cyprus, Malta, Hungary and Slovenia. They evidently managed a balanced budget in 2019 (at least on paper). Their Flu Manchu deficit spending is still unsustainable, just slightly less unsustainable than many of their fellow Eurozone grave-diggers.
We don’t have much standing to condemn others, as the United States ratio stands at 106.70%. Donald Trump had numerous virtues as President, but he was no deficit hawk, and Biden would crank up deficits even higher if the Senate let him.
We can see the fruits of this orgy of deficit spending in the worldwide inflation we’re seeing. (Feel free to argue whether government budget deficits or central bank quantitative easing is more at fault.) Inflation may ruin nations, but it’s the deficit-spender’s friend, letting him pay off debt on the cheap with now devalued currency. And it’s the working poor whose lives are most impoverished by it.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul has always been a popular proposition to get Paul’s vote, but we’re now robbing Peter and Paul’s unborn grandchildren to delay financial reckonings until after the next election cycle.
More Democrats accepting foreign payola, Russia sabre-rattles over Ukraine, a Supreme Court justice retires, Canada revolts, Harris County’s soft-on-crime policies are getting cops killed, and the war over tranny madness spreads. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm.
Long time Democratic power broker Tony Podesta has earned $1 million over the past half year lobbying the Biden White House at the behest of a blacklisted Chinese tech giant, recent federal disclosures show. Huawei, which was placed under trade sanctions during the Trump administration, paid Podesta $500,000 in the fourth quarter of 2021 in an attempt to shake off the trade impact of the restrictions, according to the disclosure form filed on the evening of Jan. 20.
With the $500,000 Podesta made from the previous three months lobbying the White House, he has been compensated $1 million over a six-month period for the lobbying effort.
Podesta’s latest lobbying campaign targeted the Executive Office of the President and centered around “telecommunications services and impacted trade issues,” the disclosure said.
Huawei, once the world’s largest telecom makers, has been facing international scrutiny in recent years. U.S. authorities have flagged the China-based company as a national security threat, saying the company’s close ties with China’s ruling communist regime, as well as Chinese law, could make it a potential espionage tool for Beijing.
A stream of U.S. sanctions since 2019—which have barred Huawei from using U.S. technology and software, and shut out its gears from critical U.S. infrastructure—have slashed the company’s annual revenue by a third. In November, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that further tightened restrictions on Huawei by restricting it from receiving new equipment licenses from U.S regulators.
Battered by the restrictions, Huawei has ramped up its U.S. influence operation in recent months. Podesta is one of half a dozen lobbyists the firm has engaged since July, which includes a former congressman and one former congressional aide, according to disclosure filings….
Tony Podesta’s brother, John Podesta, served as White House chief of staff to former U.S. President Bill Clinton and the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. He was also a former counselor to President Barack Obama, overseeing climate and energy policies.
There’s your swampy Democratic Party corruption and graft, right there out in the open for all to see.
Affiliates of two European companies that fund Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline contributed to the campaign of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), who Republicans say has blocked sanctions on the Kremlin-backed project.
ENGIE North America and BASF Corporation each gave $2,500 to Schumer in September through their corporate political action committees, according to newly disclosed Federal Election Commission records. ENGIE North America’s parent company and a BASF subsidiary are part of a consortium of five companies that finance Nord Stream 2, which will transport natural gas from Russia to Germany. While President Joe Biden has called the pipeline a geopolitical threat to Europe that helps Russian president Vladimir Putin, last year he waived sanctions on the project.
Republicans have pushed for legislation to enforce sanctions only to be met with resistance from Senate Democrats and the White House. Schumer for months blocked Republican requests to vote on a sanctions bill. He approved a vote on sanctions legislation proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) earlier this month in exchange for Cruz lifting holds on several State Department nominees. The bill received bipartisan support by a 55-44 vote, but Senate Democrats used filibuster rules to block its passage. Democrats say they want to use sanctions against the pipeline as a last resort should Russia invade Ukraine.
Convicted pedophile, UAE adviser and central witness in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, George Nader, has pleaded guilty to his role in helping the UAE funnel millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions into US campaigns during the 2016 presidential election, according to The Intercept, citing federal court documents filed last month.
In a December sentencing memo, federal prosecutors disclosed that Nader had agreed months early to plead guilty to a single count of felony conspiracy to defraud the US government by pumping millions in donations to Hillary Clinton’s campaign – concealing the foreign origin of the funds.
Snip.
Nader is accused of taking instructions from UAE Crown Prince [Mohammed bin Zayed], and gave regular updates on his efforts to get close to Clinton.
In total, Nader transferred nearly $5 million from his UAE business to [Los Angeles businessperson Ahmad “Andy”] Khawaja – CEO of a Los Angeles-based payment processing company. According to prosecutors, the funds were disguised as a routine business contract between the two men. Of the total transferred, more than $3.5 million came from the UAE government and was given to pro-Clinton Democratic political committees. Prosecutors have yet to publicly identify what happened to the remaining $1.4 million Nader transferred to Khawaja.
Khawaja’s money laundering for Democrats was previously mentioned in this LinkSwarm. How many of the travails of the last five years boil down to Democrats trying to avoid going to jail for their corruption?
Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer announced he’s retiring. Biden, pandering as always, announces he’s going to nominate a black woman.
How massive would the protest have to be to make Justin Trudeau change course? Leftists hate giving up government control of people’s lives, no matter how unpopular….
Tracy Compton, a mother of two in Fairfax, Virginia, had voted for Democrats for as long as she can remember, until the COVID-related school closures.
‘I tried and went to apply to work with the Democratic Party. I was told I was not allowed to become a member of the Democratic Party [in Fairfax].’
A recording of a reorganization meeting showed fellow Democrats deeming Compton too ‘anti-school’ to be part of their political efforts.
What made Compton anti-school?
She wanted the public schools to fully reopen.
When Compton worked to collect signatures for a recall petition for the local school board, she was welcomed out of the rain by a Republican party tent, even after telling them she was a Biden voter.
In contrast, when Compton offered the petition to those inside the Democrat party tent, she was yelled at.
Now? Given a hypothetical matchup between Kamala Harris or President Joe Biden vs. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, she said she’d vote for the Republican in a heartbeat.
All Florida trends are coming up sunshine for continued freedom from Covidstan. Recently Republican registrations surpassed Democrats in the state for the first time. Net domestic migration to the state also increased during COVID. Many commentators attribute both to Governor Ron DeSantis’s pandemic management policies. Just how bad does 2022 look for Democrats in the state? According to the Miami Herald:
Evidence is piling up that Democrats in Florida have no clear bench of candidates willing to challenge Republican incumbents in South Florida, in what’s expected to be a daunting and expensive 2022 cycle for their party.
Two first-time candidates who made early announcements they would run for South Florida House seats have both since dropped their bids to pursue runs for state office. A rumored likely candidate for federal office, former state Sen. José Javier Rodríguez, was recently nominated by President Joe Biden to serve as an assistant secretary at the Department of Labor.
The three Florida seats in question represent districts in Miami, including Reps. Carlos Giménez, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Mario Diaz-Balart. Giménez is the former mayor of Miami-Dade County and an immigrant from Cuba. Salazar defeated Clinton ally Donna Shalala in 2020, and Diaz-Balart has represented his district since 2002. The Herald called these districts competitive and said redistricting provided Democrats an opportunity.
However, the only potential candidates are a few retreads who lost in 2020. Reportedly, Shalala, who is knee-deep in Clinton ick, may be considering a rematch with Salazar. She served as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services and as President of the Clinton Foundation from June 2015 to March 2017. Former representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who lost to Giménez in 2020, may also jump in the race. To date, neither woman has announced their intentions.
Unless you owe someone favors, why run an almost certainly losing campaign in a red wave year?
Masks don’t work:
Update from the Fargo, North Dakota masking study: Two neighboring K-12 districts (same community) both with around 12,000 students 🔵 Mask mandate 🟡 Masks optional (<5% masking) Y axis= % of students positive for covid Green vertical line: when🔵 went masks optional pic.twitter.com/OoU9vmsbiz
Unvaccinated people in Austria have been locked down for two-and-a-half months. I wonder if people will stop pretending they are to blame for infection rates. pic.twitter.com/AjVpp7IvNI
“During the last year’s attempts to defund the police and reduce the number of violent encounters on the street, Baltimore kicked off what they call the Safe Streets Project.” Surprise! A Safe Streets worker was one of three people killed in a shootout. Dwight would be disappointed if I didn’t include this:
In addition to looting, murder and arson, the primary accomplishment of #BlackLivesMatter seems to be making donations disappear.
No one appears to have been in charge at Black Lives Matter for months. The address it lists on tax forms is wrong, and the charity’s two board members won’t say who controls its $60 million bankroll, a Washington Examiner investigation has found.
BLM’s shocking lack of transparency surrounding its finances and operations raises major legal and ethical red flags, multiple charity experts told the Washington Examiner.
“Like a giant ghost ship full of treasure drifting in the night with no captain, no discernible crew, and no clear direction,” CharityWatch Executive Director Laurie Styron said of BLM.
BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors appointed two activists to serve as the group’s senior directors following her resignation in May amid scrutiny over her personal finances. But both quietly announced in September that they never took the jobs due to disagreements with BLM. They told the Washington Examiner they don’t know who now leads the nation’s most influential social justice organization.
Paul Kamenar, counsel for conservative watchdog group the National Legal and Policy Center, said a full audit and investigation into Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the legal entity that represents the national BLM movement, is warranted.
“This is grossly irregular and improper for a nonprofit with $60 million in its coffers,” Kamenar said.
Sundown Joe unwittingly greenlights a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Right now there’s a lot more jaw-jaw than war-war. I’ve avoid penning a thumbsucker on the situation because I’ve been too busy.
Virginia Republican Delegate Nick Freitas is done with having Critical Race Theory advocates calling all who oppose them racist:
Enough. I have had it, my constituents have had it, and I am no longer going to sit here while a member of this body accuses us of being bigots simply because we disagree on policy. pic.twitter.com/dx0uMyFmnB
Today’s unexpected ally in the war on transgender madness: actor Sean Penn.
Sean Penn is doubling down on his defense of traditional gender roles.
In two separate interviews this month, the two-time Academy Award-winner and ex of Madonna made comments bemoaning his perception that men are becoming more feminine.
“I am in the club that believes that men in American culture have become wildly feminized,” the 61-year-old told the UK-based publication The i in an interview ahead of the UK release of his new film “Flag Day.”
“I don’t think that being a brute or having insensitivity or disrespect for women is anything to do with masculinity, or ever did. But I don’t think that [in order] to be fair to women, we should become them.”
In a subsequent interview the “Milk” star did with The Independent this week, he dug his heels into the polarizing opinion, going even further in his critique of men who challenge gender norms.
“There are a lot of, I think, cowardly genes that lead to people surrendering their jeans and putting on a skirt,” he told the publication. Furthermore, he noted that the women in his life don’t seem bothered by the patriarchy.
“I have these very strong women in my life who do not take masculinity as a sign of oppression toward them,” he said.
Penn is wrong about an awful lot, but he’s right about this.
Intel to build $20 billion chip manufacturing facility near New Albany, Ohio (near Columbus), starting with two fabs. Intel had already announced a big investment initiative, and announced their were building two new fabs in Arizona last year. The Ohio location is a surprise, since there’s no fab infrastructure there, but evidently Ohio is throwing lots of money at them.
Vegetarian “meat” company Impossible Foods just laid off a bunch of people. “Technocratic elites have decided in the so-called ‘Great Reset’ in a post-COVID world that peasants should eat plant-based meat instead of the real thing as a way for ‘sustainable nutrition.'”
Yikes!
You may need to get a prescription of beta blockers after watching this video.pic.twitter.com/6GKk09DmjG
The new Superman is a “bisexual climate warrior.” Those comic book issues aren’t exactly flying off the shelf.
Speaking of comics: This comic page just sold for $3.3 million. A wee bit rich for my blood. And is possibly more than the artist made over his entire career working at Marvel…
Heh.
Yoko Ono has threatened to have her music added to Spotify unless Joe Rogan is removed
— State Line Crosser Dennis (LGB) (@Buzzsaws1990) January 28, 2022
Larger cities will be limited to 250 metres — less than half the height of China’s tallest buildings.
Now, special exemptions may still be given if a small city really needs a new skyscraper, but they absolutely, definitely cannot go above 250-metres.
Likewise, a bigger city could go higher than that if it has a convincing case, but if it wants to go over 500-metres then forget it. No more Shanghai Towers or Ping An Finance Centers — and that’s final.
There are even new rules to follow past the 100-metre mark. To go higher than that a building will need to meet certain seismic performance and fire safety requirements.
Which sort of suggests that they didn’t have seismic performance and fire safety requirements before. Or maybe not adequate requirements. (Previously.)
Here’s the article in video form:
The usual subjects are touched on: The real estate market collapse, buildings so large there was no way all the space in them would ever be rented, Ghost Cities, etc. But the fact that the skyscraper boom got so far out of whack with economic reality is just another indication of how much of China’s “economic miracle” is a complete mirage.
Mass protests and anti-government violence have left dozens dead. Russia is deploying 3,000 paratroopers after Kazakh security forces were overrun. The largest city, Almaty, looks like a warzone. To appreciate why Russia is willing to deploy troops to Kazakhstan, it’s critical to understand the depth of Russia’s vital national interests inside the country. This isn’t just any former Soviet republic. It’s almost as important to Russia as Belarus or Ukraine.
First, Russia and Kazakhstan have the largest continuous land border on planet earth. If Kazakhstan destabilizes, a significant fraction of the country’s 19 million residents could become refugees streaming across the border. Russia is not willing to let that happen.
Second, roughly one-quarter of the population of Kazakhstan is ethnic Russians. Kazakh nationalists are overwhelmingly Muslims, who resent the Orthodox-Christian Russian minority. Russia believes that civil war would entail a non-trivial risk of anti-Russian ethnic cleansing.
Third, the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was the heart of the Soviet space program. Russia still uses it as its primary space-launch facility. The Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East will lessen that dependence, but it still isn’t complete.
Fourth, Russia conducts its Anti-Ballistic Missile testing at the Sary-Shagan test site within Kazakhstan. This is where ongoing development of the S-550 ABM system is occurring, one of the foundations of Russia’s national security.
Fifth, Russia’s nuclear fuel cycle is intimately linked to Kazakhstan. Russian-backed Uranium mining operations are active in the country. Uranium from Kazakhstan is enriched in Novouralsk, Russia and then returned to Kazakhstan for use in Chinese nuclear-fuel assemblies.
Collectively, these security interests make Kazakhstan a region that Russia is willing to stabilize with force. The 3,000 troops it has already committed are not the maximum it is willing to deploy. If necessary, these will only be the first wave of RU forces in the country.
3,000 troops for a country roughly three times as large as Afghanistan is not going to pacify a country if the country doesn’t want to be pacified.
All that provides a thorny geopolitical problem for Kazakhstan’s neighbors (including China, where it borders Xinjiang, and for which it it would provide the ideal base for any Uigher insurgency), but isn’t why I’m writing about it. No, what caught my attention is The Hunter Biden connection:
Among the boldest and eye-brow raising political moves by embattled Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev within the past days that grabbed international headlines was his ordering the arrest of Kazakhstan’s powerful former intelligence chief, Karim Massimov, on the charge of high treason.
Indicating that amid widespread fuel price unrest which quickly became aimed squarely at toppling Tokayav’s rule there’s a simultaneous power struggle within the government, Massimov had headed the National Security Committee (KNB) up until his Thursday sudden removal and detention. Massimov had served as the prior longtime strongman ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev’s prime minister and has long been considered his “right hand man”.
Nazarbayev was essentially “president for life,” an Ex-Communist Party leader who transitioned to ruling the country after the breakup of the Soviet Union until resigning during a wave of protests in 2019.
Shortly after, a photo has resurfaced, currently subject of widespread speculation which shows Joe Biden and Hunter Biden posing with the now detained Kazakh security chief Karim Massimov, along with well-connected oligarch Kenes Rakishev.
With Hunter, it always seems to be oligarchs all the way down. I can only assume they have the best cocaine and teenage prostitutes.
Further an email and communications have surfaced, previously subject of extensive reporting in The Daily Mail, and related to prior extensive commentary and questions concerning Hunter’s ‘laptop from hell’ – that appears to confirm that Hunter Biden and Massimov were “close friends”. Reporting at the time indicated that “when Biden was vice president, Hunter worked as a go-between between for Rakishev from 2012 until 2014. And further the emails were from “anti-corruption campaigners” in Kazakhstan showing that Hunter made contact with Rakishev. And more: “Per the report, Hunter successfully got a $1million investment from Rakishev to a politically-connected filmmaker.”
According to a 2020 article in The New York Post written when the photo first began gaining attention among Western pundits, “The snap, first published by a Kazakhstani anti-corruption website in 2019, follows last week’s bombshell Post exposés detailing Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings and a report claiming Rakishev paid the Biden scion as a go-between to broker US investments.” Concerning his relationship with Kazakh oligarchs and power-brokers, the NYPost story had detailed further:
…Hunter Biden’s alleged work with Rakishev, claiming he dined regularly with the Kazakh businessman and attempted to facilitate investment for his cash in New York, Washington, DC, and a Nevada mining company.
But Rakishev, who enjoys close ties to Kazakhstan’s kleptocratic former president, reportedly ran into trouble when Western business partners realized that the opaque origins of his reported $300 million fortune could become a “liability,” the Mail reported.
This brings up a slew of questions, starting with: What is the nature of the ties between the Biden family and Kazakhstan’s kleptocratic former president and his circle of oligarchs and powerful security officials?
Officials in Kazakhstan have denied that a controversial ‘military biological laboratory’ was seized in the recent unrest, which has so far claimed 160 lives since starting on January 2.
It is not clear if the 164 deaths refer only to civilians or if law enforcement deaths are included, but the number – provided by the health ministry to state news channel Khabar-24 – are a significant rise from previous tallies.
Kazakh authorities said earlier on Sunday that 16 police or national guard members had been killed.
Russian media highlighted claims that the US-funded facility near Almaty was compromised, resulting in a possible leak of dangerous pathogens.
The airport, mayor’s office and secret services buildings fell briefly into the hands of rioters during a wave of protests backed by shadowy armed cells.
The secret bio-laboratory funded by the US defence department – which has links to Russian and Chinese scientists – was also compromised in the disturbances, according to social media claims that it was seized.
‘This is not true. The facility is being guarded,’ said the health ministry which is responsible for the Central Reference Laboratory, in Almaty.
Official Russian news agency TASS had highlighted alleged social media reports that it was taken over by ‘unidentified people’ and ‘specialists in chemical protection suits were working near the lab so a leak of dangerous pathogens could have occurred’.
The laboratory’s existence has been controversial and in 2020 the country formally denied that it was being used to make biological weapons.
At the time, the Kazakh government stated: ‘No biological weapons development is underway in Kazakhstan – and no research is conducted against any other states.’
It was built in 2017 and is used for the study of outbreaks of particularly dangerous infections.
Dangerous pathogens are stored here, it is reported.
2017 date aside, there was already an ex-Soviet pathogens facility in the general vicinity (Almaty = Alma-Ata), so my suspicion is that it’s a more modern facility for an existing lab team.
Maybe it’s not a bio-weapons lab. Maybe it’s just studying pathogens to better fight them.
Just like the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
So: It’s totally a bioweapons lab.
Both the United States and Kazakhstan are signatories to the Biological Weapons Convention, which outlaws “the development, production and stockpiling of chemical and bacteriological (biological) weapons.”
Is the CDC actually funding/working with a biological lab in Kazakhstan?
CDC strengthens clinical and laboratory capacity to minimize biosecurity threats in the Central Asia region through collaboration with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and its Cooperative Biological Engagement. CDC works with public health laboratories across Kazakhstan to build a robust and sustainable network of quality management systems, standard operating procedures, training requirements, disease surveillance and testing capacity, and necessary legal and regulatory framework. CDC and the Kazakhstan MOH also partner with hospitals to improve surveillance and testing of especially dangerous pathogens and antimicrobial drug-resistant pathogens.
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CDC assisted all 17 regional laboratories within the National Center for Expertise in Kazakhstan to achieve ISO 15189 standard certification for laboratory quality management.
That’s all from Infowars. Oh wait, did I say Infowars? I meant the CDC’s own website.
Maybe we owe Alex Jones an apology.
This is breaking story that sprawls out in dozens of directions, but I think Dr. Fauci has even more ‘splainin’ to do…
