Peter Zeihan (him again) spoke at Iowa’s Swine Day on the topic of Agriculture at the End of the World:
At lot of this is Zeihan’s polished Greatest Hits presentation (Deglobalization, the need to stop Russia in Ukriane to prevent a future conflict with NATO that would go nuclear, China’s demographic crash, the cult of personality/isolation of Xi Jinping, China’s absurd never-ending Flu Manchu lockdowns, etc.), but here are some highlights of specific agriculture topics:
Russia isn’t just destroying population centers in Ukraine, it’s deliberately targeting Ukraine’s agricultural infrastructure, including grain silos.
Odessa is not a normal city. It is at the mouth of the Nipur river, which is kind of their equivalent of the Mississippi, and it is also their manufacturing center. It’s a cultural hub. It’s a financial center. It is New York and Houston and St. Louis and Chicago and New Orleans all in one. And if the Russians succeed in capturing it, that is the end of Ukraine as a modern economic entity. Right now Odessa is under blockade. They can’t export anything. This has been the source of 95 of their exports to this point.
China’s pork industry got hit hard by swine flu three years ago, and they’re probably getting hit by it now.
They’re trying to regrow the swine industry with subsidies, but that’s just resulted in “Two million people who have no idea what they’re doing” buying the wrong kinds of feed.”
“If they don’t have pork, all they’ve got left is rice. Rice is the most phosphate input intensive crop.”
“The Chinese have traditionally been the world’s largest producer and exporter of phosphate, ’cause it’s a food security issue. Well they’ve stopped all exports until further notice. So we’ve lost potash because of the Ukraine War. We’ve lost phosphate because of Chinese mismanagement.”
Skipping over the oil stuff, but Texas is sitting pretty because it’s easier and quicker to bring shale oil production online.
Did I already mention that Zeihan says Russia is probably going to lose Siberian well use because if they can’t ship it off, it freezes in the permafrost?
“We’re not looking at a recession, we’re looking at an energy-induced depression that’s already affecting multiple continents. But not here…The baseline here are pretty good.”
The effect of reduced fertilizer supply to the rest of the world? “This is famine. We will have it again in the fourth quarter of this year…a half a billion to a billion people will suffer malnutrition.”
If you stop growing wheat on marginal land due to fertilizer shortage, you start growing it on your better land, and your export output collapses.
“The volume of internationally traded agricultural commodities is in the early stages of collapse.”
The Brazilian Serato is heavily dependent on external inputs from abroad. We, on the other hand, get the overwhelming majority of our fertilizer inputs nationally and from Canada.
“There is no Brazilian agricultural sector without Russian involvement. And Russian involvement is going away. It’s the world’s largest source of soy exports. And without global soy exports, there is not a global pork industry. Except here. And if we’re being nice, Canada too.”
Argentina will probably do fine as well.
“Your mid case scenario should be inflation of nine to 15% for at least the next five years.”
“You are looking at the fastest expansion in farm incomes, per person, and per acre that we have ever seen in this country’s history, and it will last for at least the remainder of this decade.”
I think Zeihan has a tendency to overstate the case sometimes, but he’s more right than wrong…
Lebanon has seized a ship loaded with barley and wheat flour while it determines whether the cargo may have been stolen from Ukraine, said Public Prosecutor Ghassan Oueidat.
The Ukrainian Embassy in Beirut said the vessel was loaded at Feodosia in the Russian-occupied peninsula of Crimea, and that the commodities originated from Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv and Kherson in southeastern Ukraine.
The embassy accused Russia of stealing more than 500,000 tons during its occupation of the three regions. While Russia denies stealing grain, it has publicly touted the resumption of grain shipments from occupied ports.
Grain shipments from Crimea have surged since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, which analysts say indicates Ukrainian grain is being exported. Exports from Crimea are sanctioned by the European Union and the U.S..
The cargo ship Laodicea arrived at Tripoli in northern Lebanon on July 27, according to ship-tracking data monitored by Bloomberg. It will be held while Lebanon carries out an investigation into the cargo’s origin, Oueidat told Bloomberg.
Supposedly the seizure is limited to 72 hours. We’ll see.
The ship’s registered owner is Syria Mar Shipping Ltd., according to European database Equasis. Syria Mar Shipping Ltd. wasn’t immediately available to comment. Both the company and the ship were sanctioned by the U.S. in 2015 for their association with the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad.
Syria, of course, is a neighbor that has repeatedly interfered with Lebanon through its terrorist proxy/political party Hezbollah, though current Lebanese President Michel Aoun usually counts Hezbollah as a parliamentary ally. (Summarizing the weird twists and turns of Lebanon’s ever-shifting multi-confessional political landscape is way beyond the scope of this article, though if you’re really interested, reading Michael Totten’s The Road to Fatima Gate might help.) The fact that Lebanon, a small and broke country, is willing to defy both Russia and Syria, speaks to how unified much of the world is against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and how little such countries fear Russia’s wrath these days.
Indeed, the “broke” part may be the deciding factor here, as Lebanon is seeking a $3 billion bailout from the IMF (which is demanding enactment of serious reforms before handing the money over), and the big backers of the IMF are all firmly on Ukraine’s side.
If counties like Lebanon (somewhere around the 100th largest economy in the world) are willing to seize illicit Russian cargo, then the opportunities for Russia to financial benefit from its illegal occupation of Ukraine would seem to be thin.
The Biden Recession picks up downhill speed, liberals are spending $160 million to seize control of elections, Biden wants to starve your children until you accept transgenderism, and another Soros-backed DA gets the heave-ho from voters. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
GDP shrunk by .9% in Q2, making the Biden recession official, no matter how much Biden Administration officials and their Democratic Media Complex toadies attempt to spin it otherwise.
Two big money liberal operations, ready to spend $80 million each, are trying to determine who controls elections and how in the years ahead.
“The overall objective of the political left is to change the way you conduct overall elections,” Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, which advocates clean elections, told The Daily Signal.
One of the two liberal groups, Run for Something, is a political action committee founded by a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer. In the spring, Run for Something established its Clerk Work project with the goal of electing clerks, election supervisors, registrars, recorders, and other local officials charged with running elections.
The PAC says it will promote thousands of election administrators in the years ahead. But for 2022, it reports endorsing 11 candidates competing in races in California, Colorado, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
Local election clerks generally are empowered to interpret and enforce state election regulations. They often have discretion on matters such as whether to count absentee ballots that come in after Election Day, how strictly to enforce voter ID or signature-matching requirements, and how closely poll watchers may monitor the ballot counting on Election Day.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, county-level election officials are elected in 22 states. In 10 states, elected officials appoint members to a local board of elections. Another 18 states divide election administration duties between two or more offices.
In any case, donating to specific candidates to oversee elections could directly or indirectly affect who holds these positions.
Some practices of local election administrators also could be guided by another $80 million effort by the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a coalition of mostly left-leaning organizations financed in part by Big Tech executives to train local officials in running elections.
Snead and other critics say they see parallels between Run for Something and efforts to elect liberal prosecutors financed by liberal hedge fund manager George Soros. They also see strong similarities between the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s election administration grants in the 2020 election cycle.
“What we shouldn’t lose track of is they are playing the long game,” Snead said. “They are going to look for every possible way to impact elections, and they can make substantial changes in the long run through this kind of program that they wouldn’t have been able to make in 2020.”
When Soros-backed socialist son of convicted terrorists Chesa Boudin was recalled as San Francisco DA, the writing was on the wall. “Decarceration” is a disaster for everyone . . . except criminals.
Now another Soros-backed “decarceration” state’s attorney has lost her reelection bid. It’s not clear if the multiple crimes for which Marilyn Mosby has been charged are the impetus for Baltimore’s voters deciding it’s time to move on or if it’s the shocking crime rates in the city as a result of her radical anti-law and order agenda. Maybe both.
Mosby rose to national attention in the wake of the Freddie Gray riots and for her hyper-politicized botching of the prosecution in those cases.
Fox News reports:
Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby lost her reelection bid to defense attorney Ivan Bates in the Democratic primary after she was indicted by a grand jury on federal charges alleging that she used coronavirus hardship as a reason to take money out of her city retirement account.
The Associated Press called the race in favor of Ivan Bates, a defense attorney, on Friday night. Bates is a former prosecutor in Baltimore who served from 1996 to 2002 before becoming a defense attorney.
Mosby, a Democrat, directed her office to stop prosecuting offenses such as drug possession, prostitution, urinating in public, and more during the coronavirus pandemic in an attempt to stop the virus from spreading in jails and prisons.
In May, the Biden administration announced that any school that participates in the federal school lunch program (which is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service) must allow students to use bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers and play on the sports teams aligning with their gender identity if they want access to funds for the program — effectively holding money meant for ensuring student nutrition in exchange for compliance on radical leftist gender ideology.
Now, twenty-two Republican attorneys general are fighting back by suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture over that new guidance.
“We all know the Biden administration is dead-set on imposing an extreme left-wing agenda on Americans nationwide,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said. “But they’ve reached a new level of shamelessness with this ploy of holding up food assistance for low-income kids unless schools do the Left’s bidding.”
According to the Washington Times, nearly 30 million students take advantage of the National School Lunch Program at about 100,000 public and non-profit private schools and residential childcare institutions. The Biden administration policy was seen as a direct assault on the 18 states with existing laws barring male athletes from participating in female sports.
The lawsuit argues that the Biden administration (again) violated the Administrative Procedures Act by issuing regulations without going through the rulemaking process and that Bostock v. Clayton, the 2020 Supreme Court’s 2020 decision on employment discrimination, doesn’t apply to Title IX as the Biden administration claimed when they announced the guidance.
“This case is, yet again, about a federal agency trying to change law, which is Congress’ exclusive prerogative,” Tennessee Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III said. “The USDA simply does not have that authority. We have successfully challenged the Biden Administration’s other attempts to rewrite law and we will challenge this as well.”
Amid fears of worldwide food shortages due to the Russo-Ukrainian war, Russia and Ukraine signed an agreement to reopen sea corridors to allow food exports from the Ukrainian port of Odessa to recommence.
World leaders swiftly condemned the Russian missile strike on a Ukrainian port, a dramatic revelation amid a U.N.-brokered deal that secured a sea corridor for grains and other foodstuff exports.
A day prior, representatives from the U.N., Turkey, Russia and Ukraine signed an agreement to reopen three Ukrainian ports, an apparent breakthrough as the Kremlin’s war on its ex-Soviet neighbor marches into its fifth month.
The deal, signed in Istanbul and set to be implemented in the next few weeks, follows a months-long blockade of dozens of Ukrainian ports sprinkled along the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.
The strike on Odesa, Ukraine’s largest port, illustrates yet another anxious turn in fruitless efforts to mitigate a mounting global food crisis.
Given how many agreements and treaties Putin violated by occupying parts of Ukraine and then launching the current war, there’s no reason to believe that Putin will adhere to the terms of any agreement.
The path to lasting peace in Ukraine is complete destruction and ejection of invading Russian forces.
Following the Russian capture of Severodonetsk, the Russo-Ukranian War seems to have gone into an operational pause. Ukraine has now received and fielded its first HIMARS multiple rocket launch systems from the U.S. This video makes the case that that’s very bad news for Russian logistics.
Some takeaways:
HIMARS can hit targets at 80kms with high accuracy, far superior to Russia’s Uragan system (40km and less accurate) and Smersh systems.
The high accuracy makes 6 HIMARS missiles equal to 70 rounds of Russian artillery.
Systems move at 90kph.
Five minute reload time.
Crew of three.
“Just a few highmars can cut off a 100 kilometer long front line from supply and control.”
“Ukraine has already been able to destroy more than 20 large ammunition depots and several command posts.”
All well and good, but I have some caveats with the contention that HIMARS can drive the enemy before it and hear the lamentations of their women.
So far, Ukraine has fielded precisely four HIMARS. Four may be able to change the course of a battle, but certainly not a war.
There’s no reason to believe that Russia can’t adapt by dispersing ordinance to smaller and less dense ammo depots, or by restarting air sorties (which they seem to have largely abandoned) to hit HIMARS. Knowing the Russian military, the rate of adaptation will be very slow, but it’s not beyond their abilities.
While HIMARS help? Yes. Will they completely destroy Russian command and logistics? Color me very skeptical.
Thus far I have seen no signs of any real Ukrainian counter-offensive in the last month. Until that changes, we still look to be in for a long, bloody stalemate.
The Biden Recession continues to wreck the pocketbooks of Americans, EU economies are sucking even worse than ours, more Bidens Behaving Badly, and unlimited abortion is not nearly as popular among the American public as it is among New York Times staffers.
Support for unlimited abortion is deeply unpopular:
New Harvard/Harris poll: Huge super-majority of Americans favor 15-week abortion bans in states. Women more likely than men to favor such restrictions; men more likely to support no limitations. Just 10% of respondents agree with federal Dems' 9-month-abortion radicalism: pic.twitter.com/wyOzUPg9uE
Democrats are just tired of Joe Biden and of having to explain away his poor performance. Since Biden was elected, the only thing that has gone right is that the Covid-19 pandemic effectively ended and the unemployment rate has remained low. Inflation is out of control, gas prices are at record highs, grocery bills are skyrocketing, the stock market is getting battered and people’s 401(k)s are shrinking, crime remains high, mass shootings keep bedeviling America’s public spaces, Russia’s invading Ukraine, there’s a global food and commodity crisis, and the Taliban is running Afghanistan and oppressing women again. Democrats are apoplectic that the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, a New York State gun law, and the EPA’s right to regulate carbon emissions without explicit approval from Congress. Parents are up in arms, the teachers’ unions look like callous fools who kept schools closed and harmed a generation of schoolchildren, and “abolish the police” looks like a suicidal public policy. Republicans notice that waves of illegal immigrants headed north shortly after Biden’s inauguration and haven’t stopped coming since.
You didn’t even mention the Social Justice insanity and all the transexual madness.
That New York Times poll found that 64 percent of Democrats want a different presidential nominee in 2024. Nobody’s willing to cover for this guy anymore; no one is inclined to avert their eyes when Biden or his wife blurts out something tone-deaf now.
There are some of us who would argue that Joe Biden has always been an insecure, abrasive, presumptuous, disingenuous, demagogic, insufferable blowhard who was largely protected by a cozy, all-too-friendly relationship with a press inclined to airbrush his glaring character faults, presenting him as a wacky neighbor or a kindly, ice-cream loving grandpa.
What we see now is what happens when much of the national media, the Democratic Party establishment, and liberal interest groups stop playing along with the narrative that Biden is a wiser, sharper, kinder, more energetic and sensitive man than he is. And the truth isn’t pretty.
Speaking of unwanted Bidens: “Hunter Biden could face prostitution charges for transporting hookers across state lines and disguising checks to them as payments for ‘medical services.'” I’ll believe Hunter Biden prosecution when I see it. Also, I’ve been treating the 4Chan “Hunter Biden iPhone leak” with a certain amount of skepticism. Certainly the Hunter laptop revelations were real, and Hunter is a big enough scumbag to do the the things alleged iPhone leak materials depict. But I try to be cautious about anything that fits too neatly into my preconceptions. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
“Left-Wing Nonprofit Scores $171.7 Million-$1 Billion Government Contract To Help Illegal Immigrants Avoid Authorities.”
A liberal non-profit group has been given a taxpayer-funded government contract worth at least $171.7 million — which could potentially reach just under $1 billion — for assisting illegal immigrant minors in avoiding capture or incarceration by U.S. Border Patrol and state officials.
The Department of the Interior was the awarding agency and “The Vera Institute of Justice,” based out of New York — which supports the “defund the police” movement and has lax views on immigration enforcement — was the beneficiary.
Thanks in part to a lack of zoning, Houston builds housing at nearly three times the per capita rate of cities like New York City and San Jose. It isn’t all just sprawl either: In 2019, Houston built roughly the same number of apartments as Los Angeles, despite the latter being nearly twice as large. This ongoing supernova of housing construction has helped to keep Houston one of the most affordable big cities in the U.S., offering new arrivals modest rents and accessible home prices even amid seemingly endless demand.
Houston is by no means a model for planning. Like every other Sun Belt city, it struggles with segregation and sprawl. Yet its continued success as one of America’s most affordable and prosperous cities reveals the workability—indeed, the desirability—of non-zoning. Houston is a profoundly weird place, resistant to seductive oversimplifications. But it provides insight into what comes after the arbitrary lines that have misshapen our cities—and how we might get there.
So why didn’t Houston adopt zoning like every other U.S. city? The answer comes down partly to process. Unique among major cities, Houston subjected zoning to a citywide vote. While most city councils had, historically, quietly adopted zoning after a few perfunctory public hearings, the Bayou City invited voters to decide on zoning in 1946, 1962, and 1993. Voters rejected it each time—a reality that calls into question the often-postulated popularity of zoning.
Zoning critics rightly dispensed with the comforting myths surrounding zoning—that its purpose was to merely rationalize land use—and zeroed in on its tendency to restrict new housing construction, limit access to opportunity, institutionalize segregation, and force growth outward. Far from being duped, Houston’s working-class residents exhibited a subtler understanding of the purposes of zoning than many contemporary planners and rejected it accordingly.
But the answer to why Houston remains unzoned also comes down to politics. Zoning proponents didn’t merely lose the referendums—they were also tactfully bought off by being allowed to have something resembling zoning in their immediate vicinity. Indeed, the dark little secret of non-zoning in Houston is that it depends on a system of land-use regulations known as deed restrictions, which empower certain communities—principally middle- and upper-class homeowners—to effectively “opt out” of non-zoning, writing their own land-use rules for their own neighborhoods. In exchange, Houston is able to protect the vast majority of the city from the types of arbitrary-use distinctions, density limits, and raucous public hearings that cause so much harm in every other U.S. city. That is to say, in exchange for respecting pockets of private land-use regulation, Houston is able to grow, adapt, and evolve like no other city.
Deed restrictions are private, voluntary agreements among property owners—typically the homeowners of a particular subdivision or neighborhood—regulating how they can and cannot use their land. These rules are literally tied to the deed, meaning that a property owner must agree to them as a condition of the sale. Since the failed 1962 zoning referendum, the city has enforced these agreements on behalf of the relevant parties, refusing to issue permits that run afoul of their provisions and bringing legal action against violators.
Is this system of publicly enforced deed restrictions “basically zoning,” as some might argue? On the one hand, deed restrictions—like zoning—demarcate specified areas subject to a distinct set of stricter land-use rules. Both zoning and deed restrictions in Houston are enforced by the government, principally with the aim of propping up home values and maintaining a certain quality of life. Many deed restrictions even have rules banning apartments and enforcing a strict two-and-a-half-story height limit.
Yet, the similarities end there, and Houston’s system of deed restrictions is a significant improvement over zoning. For starters, deed restrictions only cover an estimated quarter of the city, largely in areas with low-rise, detached, single-family housing. Industrial areas, commercial corridors, mixed-use and multifamily neighborhoods, urban vacant lots, and yet-to-be-developed greenfields are virtually never subject to their provisions. This means that roughly three-quarters of Houston—including its more dynamic sections—are largely free to grow without anything even resembling zoning holding them back.
Another key difference is that deed restrictions must be voluntarily opted in to. This serves to discipline deed restrictions in a way that is rarely true of zoning: If the rules are stricter than what prospective homebuyers might prefer, or not strict enough, or simply focus on the wrong concerns, this may translate into lower home values. This in turn nudges homeowners to think through the optimal form of land-use regulation to a degree that rarely happens with zoning.
After deciding to let drug-abusing transients use their restrooms, Starbucks is now closing 16 stores because of rising violence, and the fact that transients are shooting up in their restrooms. Golly, who could have possibly seen that coming?
Another Texas school superintendent has stepped down amid criticism from parents concerned about liberal indoctrination in their children’s classrooms.
At a special meeting Monday afternoon, Clear Creek Independent School District’s board of trustees accepted the retirement of Superintendent Eric Williams, effective in January 2023.
Conservative parents in the Houston-area district had complained that Williams, who started in early 2021, was subjecting their students to liberal ideologies he brought from his former job as superintendent of
With Russia shutting down the NordStream gas pipeline for maintenance, Peter Zeihan wonders if the end of Germany’s vaunted economic engine is nigh.
Some takeaways:
NordStream has made Germany “horrendously” dependent on Russia for energy.
Russia is blackmailing Germany to stop supporting Ukraine.
“Four things that the Germans rely upon to be the economic powerhouse that they are:”
That cheap natural gas.
Their economic model it is based on access to large volumes of cheap Russian energy, both in terms of for electricity, and as industrial inputs to power the entire German manufacturing model. So that all by itself could kill the German system almost overnight. Well, not overnight, but within a year.
“The Germans rely on a large, robust, highly skilled workforce, but Germany has one of the fastest aging societies in the world…Germany will hit mass retirement this decade, and so the model was always in danger on demographic grounds.”
Third: “Access to central European labor all the way from Poland to Romania and even further east…but that’s going away too. Because just as the Germans are rapidly aging, the central Europeans are aging even more rapidly…the birth rate in all of these countries is actually lower than it is in Germany, so it’s every bit as terminal.”
Fourth, you need the global economic trading system that is now breaking down and America is backing away from.
His conclusion:
All of this put together suggests that the manufacturing model that has sustained Germany, that has provided the tax base, that has provided economic growth, that has made the population relatively happy with their situation, it’s gone. And it’s going to vanish within the next year. And a Europe that does not have a German motor at its heart is a Europe that all of a sudden needs to find a very very different way to function.
As with a lot of Zeihan’s observations, he has a lot of fundamentals right but his conclusions seem overstated. Germany has the resources to abandon their green delusions and restart coal and nuclear plants, assuming they have the political will. And the degree to which globalization is breaking down is the significant subtraction of China and Russia from it. There’s still a lot of U.S./EU trade to be had, even if it does get a bit more expensive. And Germany, so high up on the value-added foodchain, is well-position to survive.
The labor shortage is a trickier problem to solve, and probably was one of the main reasons Angela Merkel was so intent on raking in Islamic “refugees.” But maybe real refugees from the Russo-Ukrainian War might provide an opportunity. It would be pretty ironic if Ukrainians were to find their lebensraum in the bosom of Germany…
The U.S. Army on Tuesday selected General Dynamics Land Systems to build a light tank meant to improve mobility, protection and direct-fire capabilities for Infantry Brigade Combat Teams.
The production deal is a key step forward for Army Futures Command, which has promised faster and more successful modernization programs through a competitive prototyping approach.
GDLS will deliver 26 vehicles initially, but the contract allows the Army to buy 70 more over the course of low-rate initial production for a total of $1.14 billion, according to the Army.
At least eight of the 12 prototypes used during competitive evaluation will be retrofitted to be fielded to the force, service officials in charge of the competition said.
The first production vehicles are expected to be delivered in just under 19 months. The first unit will receive a battalion’s worth of MPF systems — 42 vehicles — by the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025. The Army plans to enter full-rate production in calendar year 2025, according to GDLS.
It uses 105mm main gun (the same caliber used in the first iteration of the M1 Abrams) and weighs 35 tons.
The German company said the Panther KF51 (KF is short for Kettenfahrzeug, or tracked vehicle; the number indicates it falls into the 50-ton plus class) “is destined to be a game changer on the battlefields of the future.” It sets “new standards” in “lethality, protection, reconnaissance, networking and mobility,” the company boasted in a statement.
Jan-Phillipp Weisswange, Rheinmetall’s assistant head of public relations, told Breaking Defense that the vehicle was designed on the company’s own funds and not in response to a client’s request. Weisswange said the tank was not designed as a candidate for the Franco-German Main Ground Combat System (MGCS) project, launched in 2012 to replace the Leopard 2 and Leclerc main battle tanks, but rather for an export market.
Still, those two systems could provide a sense of where Rheinmetall could target potential sales. Users of the Leopard 2 are Austria, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Indonesia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, while the Leclerc is used by Jordan and the UAE.
The Panther’s chassis uses components of the Leopard 2 hull, but the turret is entirely new. According to the company, the 59-ton vehicle has a maximum operating range of about 500 kms (310 miles).
The main armament is the Rheinmetall 130mm cannon, designed for the MGCS project’s Future Gun System (FGS). The FGS is automatically loaded from two revolver-type magazines which each hold 10 rounds of insensitive munition-compliant ammunition. According to the company, the FGS “enables a 50% longer kill range to be achieved [than 120mm] with an unrivalled rate of fire due to the autoloader performance.” It can fire kinetic energy rounds as well as programable airburst ammunition and practice rounds.
There’s also a integrated drone launcher option. Here’s a short video on the tank, showing the location of the autoloader in the rear turret bustle:
Speaking of Germany, they’re evidently blocked Spain’s sale of used Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. (I have a skeleton post full of videos (some from this guy) about Germany announcing that it was thinking of sending heavy weapons to Ukraine, then dragging its feet with bureaucratic paperwork to actually do anything. It’s a strange, frustrating topic someone with more experience than myself in the arcane practice of Germany bureaucracy should research…)
The Economist published a thumbsucker on the future of the tank. It covers some familiar ground, including covering Russian failures during the opening phases of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Also includes a scrolling web-graphic thingee covering parts of modern tanks.
Russia on Sunday defaulted on its foreign debt for the first time since 1918 after the grace period on its $100 million payment expired, according to reports.
The $100 million interest payment deadline due to be met by the Kremlin had initially been set to May 27 but a 30-day grace period was triggered after investors failed to receive coupon payments due on both dollar and euro-denominated bonds.
Russia said that it had sent the money to Euroclear Bank SA, a bank that would then distribute the payment to investors.
But that payments allegedly got stuck there amid increased sanctions from the West on Moscow, according to Bloomberg, meaning creditors did not receive it.
Euroclear told the BBC that it adheres to all sanctions.
The last time Russia defaulted on its foreign debt was in 1918 when the new communist leader Vladimir Lenin refused to pay the outstanding debts of the Russian Empire during the Bolshevik Revolution.
Peter Zeihan explains what this means for the international financial order:
Is there any sign of Russia’s economy cratering from the sanctions? Not yet:
NATO formally invited Sweden and Finland to join the alliance Wednesday at a summit in Madrid, Spain, in the midst of security concerns due to the Russia-Ukraine war.
The announcement comes after Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan lifted his veto after a weeks-long stalemate over the negotiations. The decision will now rely on final ratification from all 30 member states.
“The accession of Finland and Sweden will make them safer, NATO stronger, and the Euro-Atlantic area more secure. The security of Finland and Sweden is of direct importance to the Alliance, including during the accession process,” NATO said in a statement.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called the decision “historic,” and thanked the leaders for their agreement.
Turkey signed a memorandum with Finland and Sweden on Tuesday confirming Erdogan would support the nomination of the two Nordic countries into the alliance.
Remember that tangling with the Finns has not been a source of happiness for Russia. The Soviet Union may have gained some territory in the Winter War and the Continuation War, but the Finns tore them a new asshole in the process. For the entirety of post-World War II, the Soviet Union and Russia have relied on a neutral Finland (“Finlandization”) to secure their northernmost flank. With Finland joining NATO, they no longer have that luxury.
The Finns have a fair amount of German equipment (including Leopard 2 tanks) and American aircraft (including having F-35s on order). I imagine integrating their forces into the NATO command structure should be quite feasible.
Speaking of countries that Russia has not had much joy tangling with, Sweden has invaded Russia more than once.
Though Swedish armed forces are relatively small, they have, if anything, even more German tech, and their native-built Stridsvagn 122 tank is based on the Leopard 2. Their Archer mobile artillery system is arguably the best in the world.
Oh, and both Sweden and Finland have several nuclear power plants each. Both could develop nuclear weapons in fairly short order if they had to. And any Russian moves against the Baltic states would probably be enough to push them into doing it, Nonproliferation Treaty be damned.
Getting Finland and Sweden to join up with NATO is has a high probability of being a historical blunder that outweighs any Ukrainian territorial gains Russia might end up with.
Welcome to the second half of 2022! The Biden Economy suckage becomes more obvious, the world’s most taboo lawsuit wants justice for real women being raped by fake women that the state of California forced on them, the Supreme Court slaps the EPA with a ruler over regulating carbon dioxide without congressional authority, and Eric Adams finally realizes he’s running a hellhole. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Welcome to the world’s most taboo legal case, a lawsuit over imprisoned woman having the right not to be raped by men who “identify” as women.
On November 17, 2021, the Women’s Liberation Front, or WoLF, filed a civil rights lawsuit in California that drew almost no coverage. A press corps gearing up to be outraged en masse by the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp defamation case had zero interest in a lawsuit filed by far poorer female abuse victims.
Janine Chandler et al vs. California Department of Corrections targeted a new California state law, the “The Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act,” a.k.a. S.B. 132. The statute allows any prisoner who self-identifies as a woman — including prisoners with penises who may have stopped taking hormones — into women’s prisons. There was nothing TV-friendly about the scenes depicted in the complaint:
Plaintiff Krystal Gonzalez (“Krystal”) is a female offender currently incarcerated in Central California Women’s Facility. Krystal was sexually assaulted by a man transferred to her unit under S.B. 132. Krystal filed a grievance and requested single-sex housing away from men; the prison’s response to Krystal’s grievance referred to her assault by a “transgender woman with a penis.” Krystal does not believe that women have penises…
After a week spent denounced for reviewing the Matt Walsh documentary What is a Woman?, and for saying things I think will be boring conventional wisdom within a year, I was ready to never go near trans issues again and move to the impending financial disaster. But accident sucked me back. I’d made a point of pride of not reading a line of commentary about Heard-Depp, but listened to an episode of Blocked and Reported that touched on it after it was over, and learned three things that made me furious and think immediately of Chandler.
One, the ACLU, in apparent exchange for a pledge of $3.5 million, ghost-wrote Heard’s offending editorial, and in particular a line about her having “felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out.” Two: Guardian writer Moira Donegan declared, “We are in a moment of virulent antifeminist backlash.” Three: Vice proclaimed without irony, “We’ve all failed Amber Heard.” Almost as one, the establishment press declared itself concerned with the suffering of a rich actress. However, there’s a gaping loophole in their concern for women, and Chandler sits in the middle of it.
Let’s talk about “the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out” in the context of this case:
Chandler is the headline legal action in a nationwide battle over whether or not prisoners who self-identify as women, including those with histories of rape or sexual abuse, should be allowed to transfer to women’s correctional facilities. There have been both official and unofficial policy changes on this front in a growing collection of states across the country. These often happen with little to no public debate, because this issue may be the most impenetrable media taboo in America now.
The group bringing the suit, WoLF, has been targeted from every conceivable angle by pressure and censorship campaigns. While we at least heard about protesting Canadian truckers having their GoFundMe campaigns frozen, WoLF didn’t even bother trying to raise money on that platform, “because they just ban you really easily,” as legal director Lauren Adams put it.
They moved to a purportedly speechier platform, GiveButter, hoping they would have “less of a censorious kind of view.” But even GiveButter soon gave WoLF the boot (I reached out to the company, which hasn’t provided public comment yet). “It was just a general fundraiser,” Adams explains. “And they said we violated their community standards. So now we’re on GiveSendGo, which is a Christian crowdfunding site.”
If there’s a better illustration of the upside-down state of politics in 2022 America, it’s a feminist activist group forced to seek cyber-refuge in a Christian fundraising company.
Snip.
Most of the cross-dressing men claiming a “transgender identity” and granted transfer… are sex offenders, most are heterosexual men who want to be housed with women to get penis-in-vagina sex, most stop taking any feminizing hormone medications right after getting into women’s prison, they all refer to themselves as men when speaking to the women inmates, many have threatened to “fight you like a man” to women inmates, many have threatened to rape us, and they all have working penises that they are using to have sex with female inmates.
Transexism is now so central to the social justice victimhood politics ideology that controls the Democratic Party that it leads to letting men rape women rather than question the holy tenant that a man can magically become a women by declaring it so.
Notice how that “giant backlash” against the overturning of Roe vs. Wade seems to be limited to leftwingers freaking out on social media? Here’s a good explanation why:
This sums up my evolution better than I could have. Bet it’s highly highly a common sentiment.
Speaking of which, New York City mayor Eric Adams is shocked, shocked to discover that the city he runs sucks.
During an exclusive interview conducted as Adams rode the subways overnight for more than three hours last week, the former NYPD transit cop said he was astounded by the botched “deployment of resources” that has New Yorkers on edge amid a nearly 40 percent surge in major crimes this year.
“Let me tell you something: When I started looking into this, I was shocked at how bad this place is,” he said of the city.
Adams — who campaigned on a promise to restore order to an increasingly lawless Gotham — said the scales fell from his eyes when he began reviewing internal city operations following his swearing in moments after midnight on New Year’s Day.
Yet somehow I could tell that despite living some 1,700 miles away, thanks to the magic power of “paying attention” and “not depending on the MSM for news.”
Nowhere is the shift more pronounced — and dangerous for Democrats — than in the suburbs, where well-educated swing voters who turned against Trump’s Republican Party in recent years appear to be swinging back. Over the last year, far more people are switching to the GOP across suburban counties from Denver to Atlanta and Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Republicans also gained ground in counties around medium-size cities such as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Raleigh, North Carolina; Augusta, Georgia; and Des Moines, Iowa.
Who has the highest debt in the EU? Exactly who you would think: The PIGS (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, in that order), then France, Belgium and Cyprus.
Following other western tech giants, Cisco plans to exit Russia permanently. Unless you’re in the sector, you might underestimate just how many pies Cisco has fingers in. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
