MiniLinkSwarm for March 25, 2022

For several weeks, I’ve been running out of time to post every link I’ve gathered, so I’ve been bumping some links (generally ones that seemed less time-sensitive or required more commentary than others) to the next week’s LinkSwarm, whereupon I may use one or two, but otherwise the process repeats.

Well, I’m just going to post all those today to clear the decks.

  • California’s leftwing Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom is using his position as governor subsidize his wife’s own leftwing business empire.

    In the summer of 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom convinced the state legislature to provide $4.7 billion for K-12 mental health services, which, among other things, funded 10,000 new school counselors.

    Gavin Newsom convinced the legislature because Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of the governor, convinced him. The biggest advocate for mental health funding within the K-12 California public schools in the Newsom administration was Mrs. Newsom, according to published accounts.

    In fact, Gavin Newsom created The Office of First Partner so his wife could promote her policy agenda using taxpayer money. Since 2019, Siebel Newsom’s been armed with nearly $5 million and nine staffers within her subdivision of the governor’s office.

    Snip.

    Siebel Newsom spent years laying the ideological groundwork and political infrastructure to support her policy ambitions.

    In 2012, Siebel Newsom founded a nonprofit, The Representation Project, that licenses “gender justice” films and curricula to 5,000 schools in all 50 states. The year Gavin Newsom became governor, the California Board of Education adopted guidance that recommended her films and curriculum be licensed and used in classrooms.

    Policy making in California isn’t magic. Turns out, it’s a carefully thought through process to maximize political power and personal return from public investments.

    Last week, we investigated the sophisticated scheme through which Siebel Newsom’s film and curricula “gender justice” nonprofit, The Representation Project, leverages taxpayer dollars to promote radical ideologies, personally profit, and push the political ambitions of her husband. She brags that 2.6 million students have seen the films nationwide.

    The Representation Project contracts with her for-profit film-production company, Girls Club Entertainment. Since 2012, Siebel Newsom received $1.5 million in salary from the nonprofit. Furthermore, since 2012, the Siebel’s nonprofit paid her for-profit Girls Club $1.6 million to produce films.

    Last month, our investigation broke the story that The Representation Project was not in compliance with the California Charitable Solicitation Act. The organization was not permitted to operate or solicit donations in California most of 2022 – yet spent all last year in operation and fundraising.

    Now, we dig deeper, investigating the $4.8 million “Office of the First Partner” Gavin Newsom established for his wife’s policy work, and how Jennifer Siebel Newsom used her position to impact social and political processes, cashing checks along the way.

    n 2019, Gov. Newsom created an office for his wife as a division within the governor’s executive team. According to a press release “the First Partner and her team will focus on lifting up women and their families, breaking down barriers for our youth, and furthering the cause of gender equity in California.”

    Since inception, Siebel Newsom’s office has received nearly $4.8 million in directed taxpayer funding. The Office of First Partner has grown from seven employees with a budget of $791,000, to nine employees with a budget of $1,166,000 proposed for 2023-2024.

    Snip.

    Parents have complained about the pornographic content in Newsom’s films shown to 11-year-olds (such as an animated, upside-down stripper with tape over breasts) and 15-year-olds (nearly naked women being slapped, handcuffed, and brutalized in images taken from porn sites) — to view images, viewer discretion is advised.

    Editorials have criticized the activities in Newsom’s film The Great American Lie as “emotionally abusive.” The activities ask students to publicly reveal personal information and force commentary on their relative “privilege” and “oppression.”

    So Jennifer Siebel Newsom is using California taxpayer money to propagandize children for radical social justice and transexism.

  • An Australian comedian, YouTuber and Journalist, made videos making fun of Australian politicians and covering their oppressive Flu Manchu lockdown policies. That’s when they started trying to use the state machinery to shut him up. Then they firebombed him.

    Jordan Shanks is an Australian comedian, also know as freindlyjordies, who fell in to doing YouTube videos about Australian politicians and powerful companies over the past few years. Along the way he became a journalist, the only journalist covering some of the things being done by the government and the corporations. Then in November of 2022 his house was firebombed. It was only by chance that he wasn’t in the house at the time.

    And hey, if that sounds too dry, well you kids like Knives Out or whatever. Stick around. It’s a pretty interesting whodunit.

    Most of the Australian press is even more in the bag for the powers-that-be than the US national media is for the Democrats. There were numerous stories, all but ignored by the mainstream. One example, the Premiere of New South Wales was under investigation. That was all but ignored by the press until she resigned. Then there were the antics of her Deputy Premiere, John Barilaro.

    That is the most entertaining — or damaging to powers that be — story friendlyjordies covered.

    As a result of that coverage, the Australian anti-terrorism machinery was directed at Shanks and his employees. Of course that turned out to be a group of Keystone cops, which got their own exposure on freindlyjordies. Along the way he exposed the abuse of the anti-terrorism squad, the relationship between some of the politicians and large corporations and perhaps organized crime. Then in November of the last year, after the lawsuits failed, the anti-terrorism actions failed, and the intimidation failed, someone moved to direct action, and tried to kill him.

  • You may remember my previous post on the army selecting the M5 Next Generation Squad Weapon. So how is that going? Evidently not well.

    On all key technical measures, the Next Generation Squad Weapons program is imploding before Army’s very eyes. The program is on mechanical life support, with its progenitors at the Joint Chiefs obstinately now ramming the program through despite spectacularly failing multiple civilian-sector peer reviews almost immediately upon commercial release.

    Indeed the rifle seems cursed from birth. Even the naming has failed. Army recently allowed a third-party company to scare it off the military designation M5. The re-naming will certainly also help scupper bad public relations growing around ‘XM-5′ search results.

    Civilian testing problems have, or should have, sunk the program already. The XM-5/7 as it turns out fails a single round into a mud test. Given the platform is a piston-driven rifle it now lacks gas, as the M-16 was originally designed, to blow away debris from the eject port. Possibly aiming to avoid long-term health and safety issues associated with rifle gas, Army has selected an operating system less hardy in battlefield environments. A choice understandable in certain respects, however, in the larger scheme the decision presents potentially war-losing cost/benefit analysis.

    Civilian testing, testing Army either never did or is hiding, also only recently demonstrated that the rifle seemingly fails, at point-blank ranges, to meet its base criteria of penetrating Level 4 body armor (unassisted). True, the Army never explicitly set this goal, but it has nonetheless insinuated at every level, from media to Congress, that the rifle will penetrate said armor unassisted. Indeed, that was the entire point of the program. Of course, the rounds can penetrate body armor with Armor Piercing rounds, but so can 7.62x51mm NATO, even 5.56x45mm NATO.

    The fundamental problem with the program is there remains not enough tungsten available from China, as Army knows, to make the goal of making every round armor piercing even remotely feasible. The plan also assumes that the world’s by far largest supplier will have zero problems selling tungsten to America only for it to be shot back at its troops during World War III. Even making steel core penetrators would be exceedingly difficult when the time came, adding layers of complexity and time to the most time-contingent of human endeavors. In any case, most large bullet manufacturers and even Army pre-program have moved to tungsten penetrators for a reason, despite the fact it increases the cost by an order of magnitude and supply seems troubled. Perhaps Army has a solution, perhaps.

    The slight increase in ballistic coefficiency between the 6.8x51mm and 7.62x51mm cartridges neither justified the money pumped into the program nor does the slight increase in kinetic energy dumped on target. Itself a simple function of case pressurization within the bastardized 7.62mm case. Thus the net mechanical results of the program design-wise is a rifle still chambered in a 7.62×51 mm NATO base case (as the M-14), enjoying now two ways to charge the weapon and a folding stock. This is the limit of the touted generational design ‘leap’ under the program. And while the increased case pressure technology is very welcome the problem is, in terms of ballistics, the round is in no way a leap ahead compared to existing off-the-shelf options as those Army nearly went with under the now disavowed Interim Combat Service Rifle program, or it in fact did purchase schizophrenically just before the NGSW program began with the HK M110A1.

    The Army is evidently still moving ahead with the program.

    I can’t tell you whether the criticisms are true or not unless Sig Saur sends me a example to shoot. While that would be cool, I suspect it’s pretty unlikely, and I fear many test ranges have picayune policies against using military grade automatic weapons…

  • How Georgetown Law cracked down on Flu manchu mandate heretics.

    For questioning Covid restrictions, Georgetown Law suspended me from campus, forced me to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, required me to waive my right to medical confidentiality, and threatened to report me to state bar associations.

    The Dean of Students claimed that I posed a “risk to the public health” of the University, but I quickly learned that my crime had been heretical, not medical.

    Just before I entered Georgetown Law in August 2019, I watched The Paper Chase, a 1973 film about a first-year Harvard Law student and his experiences with a demanding professor, Charles Kingsfield.

    The movie has the standard themes of law school: teaching students how to think, challenging the premises of an argument, differentiating fact patterns to support precedent. Kingsfield’s demands represent the difficulty of law school, and the most important skill is articulate, logic-based communication. “Nobody inhibits you from expressing yourself,” he scolds one student.

    “Nobody inhibits you from expressing yourself.”

    Two years later, I realized that Georgetown Law had inverted that script. The school fired a professor for commenting on differences in achievement between racial groups, slandered faculty members for deviating from university group-think, and threatened to destroy dissidents. Students banished cabinet officials from campus and demanded censorship of a tenured professor for her work defending women’s rights in Muslim-majority countries.

    Unaware of the paradigm shift, I thought it was proper to ask questions about Georgetown’s Covid policies.

    In August 2021, Georgetown Law returned to in-person learning after 17 months of virtual learning. The school announced a series of new policies for the school year: there was a vaccine requirement (later to be supplemented with booster mandates), students were required to wear masks on campus, and drinking water was banned in the classroom.

    Dean Bill Treanor announced a new anonymous hotline called “Law Compliance” for community members to report dissidents who dared to quench their thirst or free their vaccinated nostrils.

    Meanwhile, faculty members were exempt from the requirement, though the school never explained what factors caused their heightened powers of immunity.

    Shortly thereafter, I received a notification from “Law Compliance” that I had been “identified as non-compliant” for “letting the mask fall beneath [my] nose.” I had a meeting with Dean of Students Mitch Bailin to discuss my insubordination, and I tried to voice my concerns about the irrationality of the school’s policies.

    He had no answers to my simple questions but assured me that he “understood my frustration.” Then, he encouraged me to “get involved in the conversation,” telling me there was a Student Bar Association meeting set to take place the following Wednesday.

    I arrived at the meeting with curiosity. I had no interest in banging my fists and causing a commotion; I just wanted to know the reasoning – the “rational basis” that law schools so often discuss – behind our school’s policies. There were four simple questions:

  • What was the goal of the school’s Covid policy? (Zero Covid? Flatten the curve?)
  • What was the limiting principle to that goal? (What were the tradeoffs?)
  • What metrics would the community need to reach for the school to remove its mask mandate?
  • How can you explain the contradictions in your policies? For example, how could the virus be so dangerous that we could not take a sip of water but safe enough that we were required to be present? Why are faculty exempt from masking requirements?
  • I feared there were simple answers to my questions that I had overlooked: these administrators made hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, surely they must have had some reasoning behind their draconian measures. Right? The contradictions appeared obvious to me. The data seemed to be clear, but maybe there was an explanation.

    I delivered the brief speech without a mask, standing fifteen feet away from the nearest person. I awaited a response to my questions, but I realized this wasn’t about facts or data, premises or conclusions. This was about power and image.

    Arbitrary. Irrational. Capricious. Students learn in their first days of their legal education to invoke these words to challenge unfavored laws and policies. I figured that I was doing the same, and I thought the school would welcome a calm, albeit defiant, student asking the questions rather than loud and angry crowds.

    But this assumption turned out to be an incorrect premise. Nobody cared about my points regarding rationality – they cared that I had been reading from the wrong script. Even worse, not wearing a mask had been a more objectionable wardrobe malfunction than Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl performance.

    (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • Scrapped Railway Project Could Derail Putin’s Arctic Ambitions.

    Moscow’s ability to develop its own resource-based economy, expand the Northern Sea Route, cement ties with China and support Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to project power into the Arctic depends on the development of land-based infrastructure in the northern regions of the Russian Federation…

    Yet, that ability has now been called into question, as the Russian government has canceled, despite Putin’s repeated orders to the contrary, a program to complete the broad-gauge Northern Broad-Gauge Railway. The route was intended to link settlements that support the Northern Sea Route, military bases and the locations of key sources of raw materials across the Russian North with the rest of the country…

    Snip.

    What appears to be this project’s death knell, at least for the time being, is instructive in its own right. It occurred not with some dramatic single action by the Kremlin but in a rolling fashion as has often been the case with the backtracking of decisions under Putin. In April 2021, to much acclaim, the Russian president called for construction of the Northern Broad-Gauge Railway to begin, with the goal of completing the project in the next few years. Yet, despite Putin’s words, nothing happened, at least in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic, increased spending for his war against Ukraine and the impact of Western sanctions. Then, in 2022, Putin issued a new order for the project to go ahead. Again, nothing happened. Instead, less than a month later, Marat Khusnullin, a Russian deputy prime minister, quietly stopped all work on the project without giving anyone reason to think it would be resumed. Indeed, many Russian experts and commentators concerned with infrastructure issues believe that this railway plan has come to the end of its line, and one has even suggested that the cancellation of this project puts “a cross on the future of Russia.

    Russia was broke before it launched its illegal war of territorial aggression against the Ukraine. Now it’s even more broke.

  • Turns out I got through all but one…

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    9 Responses to “MiniLinkSwarm for March 25, 2022”

    1. The Gaffer says:

      Instead of “Russia was broke before it launched its illegal war of territorial aggression against the Ukraine.” How ’bout ‘Aside from vast natural resources Russia was broke before it responded to the provocation of Obama, Biden, and Soros.’

    2. Kirk says:

      @The Gaffer,

      Awwwww… Poor widdle Wussia, being beaten up by the big bad Americans…

      Yeah. Cry me a fucking river, why don’t you? Or, have you noticed the incessant work they’ve been doing against the general interests of anything civilized since, well… Forever? And, it didn’t stop when the Wall came down, either. Just got drastically curtailed because “money”.

      I could list all the things the Russians have done, in terms of being just plain dicks, but I suspect that’d be someone else’s fault in your eyes. Like, oh… Polonium? Novichok? If the Brits send depleted uranium to the Ukrainians, I’ll just giggle a little, ‘cos that’s pretty much the just deserts for what Putin did, already.

      All you Russia-fellators seem to forget the things Russia did, and is still doing. Wagner is conducting atrocities in Syria; they’re doing it in Africa, as well. If Russia was the sainted entity you all seem to imagine, most of that crap wouldn’t be happening. But, they’re assholes. Why? Because they’re Russians.

      They could have conducted themselves a hell of a lot differently, and been in a much better place. But, you see… That’s not what Russians do. They play the victim, but never, ever take responsibility for what they do. The Germans hit them hard, but what, pray tell, did they do before that? Oh, yeah; they raped Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland… They tore strips off of Romania, and a bunch of other crap, while pumping resources into Nazi Germany that enabled the Germans to take down the rest of Western Europe. Then, after the Nazis turned on them, they played victim. Thanks to their infiltration of our government, they got all the Lend-Lease they needed to keep their totalitarian nightmare state alive.

      What we should have done was give them nothing, let the Germans do unto them what they rightly deserved, and then nuked the shit out of Germany. That’s probably how the war would have worked out, were it not for all the Communist sympathizers in our government.

      Russia loves playing the victim. They’re anything but.

    3. 370H55V I/me/mine says:

      First PARTNER??!?!?

    4. Kirk says:

      Ever notice how all these little peculations and fiddles are never, ever highlighted by the media? When they’re done by the Democrats…?

      Would a Republican governor get away with that, d’you suppose?

      Our problem is that the “immune system for governance”, which is supposed to be what exposes and stops this BS has been suborned by the wrecking crew on the left. There’s so much stuff that we only find out after the fact of its passing here in my home state that it’s not even funny. The “news” incessantly yammers on and on about things like “climate change”, and never says a damn thing about putting transsexual males into women’s prisons until it’s a done deal. Or, they outright lie, as when they made believe that “transferring” a weapon meant “selling” one, instead of handing one to your buddy to shoot on a range…

    5. Kirk says:

      On that NGSW thing… I think the real problem here is the fundamental dysfunction present in the military, not the least in the officer corps.

      The main driver behind NGSW is that the bright lights decided that they were “overmatched” in small-arms centric combats taking place in the mountains of Afghanistan. Nobody was saying they had problems with the weapons suite in Iraq, because we had the full range of supporting arms available. If you’ve got a 25mm Bushmaster in a turret with optics and all the rest? Who cares how effective your guys are with the 7.62mm MG they have along for fire support?

      The basic issue they’re trying to address is a figment of their imagination. We weren’t “overmatched” by the Taliban because of the caliber or anything else, we were overmatched because they were firing at us from tripod-mounted PKM machineguns, which were then being answered by guys firing back at them from the bipod on M240 machineguns. The real issue wasn’t the gun or the cartridge, it was that we were taking a system with an 800m effective range and matching it against a system with a 1200-1800m range. The tripod makes that big a difference, because it has a much more stable and controllable base to fire from. You cannot replicate what you can do with a tripod off of someone’s shoulder and a bipod; that’s the source of the “overmatch”.

      Notably, while they are changing caliber and getting new guns, there’s nothing being done to improve the abysmal tripod we issue.

      Which basically means that they have both mis-identified the problem, and are implementing a solution that isn’t going to fix anything, because it’s addressing the wrong thing.

      This would indicate that our leadership is basically both inept, and stupid. The men running our military do not understand combat, and when they can’t even figure out why the hell our machinegun crews can’t do their job right, we’re even more deeply screwed than anyone could believe.

      NGSW basically just recapped the entire mistaken developmental process that got us the 7.62mm NATO, and it’s resulted in the same sort of cartridge. Epic stupidity.

    6. Chemist says:

      Re. – NGSW:
      7.62 Nato pushes a .308 dia bullet weighing 130 grains at 3050 fps for a muzzle energy of 2686 ft-lbs.
      6.8X51 pushes a 0.278 dia bullet weighing 135 grains at 2950 fps for a muzzle energy of 2609 ft-lbs.
      These are close enough to be the same.
      The NGSW does this with a 13″ barrel whereas the 7.62 needs a 22″ barrel.
      The difference?
      The NGSW has an operating pressure of 80,000 PSI compared to the 7.62 at 60,191 PSI.

      Has anyone explored barrel life?
      I’m going to bet that the barrel is not going to last very long at a 30% increase in operating pressure.

    7. Kirk says:

      And, what’s worse? The point of all that velocity, which is purportedly to enable armor-piercing effect? The necessity for such a thing isn’t really demonstrated.

      In Ukraine, right now, the Russians and the Ukrainians are using the same-old, same-old weapons suites they’ve always had. They’ve also got body armor. Ain’t nobody screaming for a new cartridge; they’re getting along just fine with the existing 5.56, 5.45, and 7.62 cartridges in various flavors.

      The major issue with a lot of this crap stems from a failure to develop a working model of how your small arms systems are supposed to work. These idiots are talking about the individual weapon being able to make kills out to 800m, when the unpleasant fact is, most of the time you’re taking shots within 400m and not hitting them because “reasons”. Like, fleeting engagement opportunities, not observing the enemy, and basic ineffectiveness of a guy with a rifle hitting a point target at long range while under stress.

      Flatly put, an individual weapon is for close-in combat and security, while the real killing should be done by machineguns, mortars, rocket launchers, and grenade launchers. You don’t have a situation in combat where your riflemen are magically reaching out and touching people out past maybe 500m with their weapons. And, even if you did, you’d be a lot better off engaging that target with something that has some area effect. Why? Because you’re typically not engaging the one guy you can see, you’re engaging him and all of his buddies that are likely all around him. You’re putting a burst of MG fire into that beaten zone on speculation that there are troops that you didn’t observe clustered around the one guy you did spot.

      That’s the essential conceptual error with regards to the original 7.62 NATO trials and NGSW; they think that an infantry action consists of riflemen shooting at each other at range, when the reality is that the riflemen are just there as local security and spotters for the area-effects weapons like the machineguns. The real killing power in a squad isn’t in the riflemen; it’s in the machineguns and indirect systems they have control over.

      Actually, if you’ve got the fire support, the key and essential system is the radio, through which you call for fire. Absent that, the machine gun and all the rest of the bigger weapons are what you do most of your killing with. Optimizing around the individual weapon is just… Nuts.

    8. Zendo Deb says:

      Thanks for the link

    9. […] & Road, California From The Inside, Rebuking The Flakiness, and Mistaken Identity BattleSwarm: MiniLinkSwarm for March 25, also, Bald, Bearded, Bespeckled British Bloke’s YouTube Empire Behind The Black: NASDAQ gives […]

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