Posts Tagged ‘video’

ASML Exits, China Screwed

Thursday, December 26th, 2024

I’ve previously talked about China’s difficulties in catching up to the west in semiconductor manufacturing here, here, and here, among other places. To summarize: Western nations have an advanced, highly interconnected semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem that China doesn’t have the technical expertise to replicate. In particular, China has nothing like ASML’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines (AKA a “stepper”) necessary to build the most advanced chips with the smallest feature geometries.

Here’s a piece with ASML’s CEO talking about just how far China is behind.

Though advancements that SMIC and Huawei have made in the semiconductor sector in recent years are pretty impressive, the companies are 10 to 15 years behind industry giants like Intel, TSMC, and Samsung, said Christophe Fouquet, chief executive of toolmaker ASML. It’s well known that even with the best-in-class DUV tools, Chinese fab SMIC will be unable to match TSMC’s process technologies cost-effectively. This is because Chinese companies cannot access leading-edge EUV lithography tools.

“By banning the export of EUV, China will lag 10 to 15 years behind the West,” said Christophe Fouquet in an interview with NRC (machine translated). “That really has an effect.”

ASML has never shipped its EUV tools to China due to the Wassenaar Arrangement, despite SMIC’s reported order for one EUV machine. The details remain unclear, but ASML did not deliver the machine to the Chinese foundry due to US sanctions. However, ASML kept shipping advanced DUV lithography tools, such as the Twinscan NXT:2000i, which are capable of producing chips on 5nm and 7nm-class process technologies.

As a result, SMIC has been producing chips for Huawei using its 1st-generation and 2nd-generation 7nm-class process technology for years now. This has certainly helped the Chinese high-tech giants weather U.S. government sanctions.

Having understood that EUV tools are not coming to China, Huawei and its partners have explored extreme ultraviolet lithography themselves with the aim of building their own lithography chipmaking tools and ecosystem, which will take 10 – 15 years at best. For reference, it has taken over 20 years for ASML and its partners from foundational work to complete commercial machines to build the EUV ecosystem.

China thought it had found a way out of the western ban on high end lithography machines. Turns out: Not so much.

  • “In the past two years, China has spent a staggering 8 billion euros to procure fewer than 120 Advanced immersion DUV lithography machines from Dutch company ASML.” DUV (Deep Ultraviolet) was the generation of machines before EUV, and can’t effectively pattern features of less than 10nm.
  • “On the surface this seemed like a bold and extravagant move. However, as of September 7th, the reality has turned into a bitter irony. Maintenance and upgrades for these machines are now completely restricted. In other words, starting next year these state-of-the-art [not quite – LP] lithography machines could become little more than scrap. To make matters worse, even repairs for older equipment are off the table.”
  • “Lithography machines are the backbone of semiconductor manufacturing, etching intricate circuits onto silicon wafers. Without proper maintenance and upgrades, these machines, worth tens of millions of euros each, will gradually deteriorate into expensive junk. Producing advanced chips smaller than 14 nanometers will become nearly impossible. Yield rates will plummet and costs will skyrocket.”
  • “Even TSMC, a global benchmark, requires ASML engineers to be stationed on site for regular recalibrations every 3 to 6 months. Earlier this year, an earthquake in Taiwan caused TSMC’s lithography operations to halt, and it took a month of recalibrations to resume lithography.” Requalification is indeed a huge pain in the ass.
  • “Machine maintenance depends on ASML proprietary components, software and technical support. Hiring a few engineers, or even the CEO of ASML, won’t solve the fundamental complexities of this highly specialized system. China’s attempts to rely on sheer manpower to bridge this gap are wishful thinking.”
  • “Thinking a few engineers could crack this technology is simply laughable. Lithography machines are just the tip of the iceberg in the complex semiconductor manufacturing supply chain.”
  • “China owns nearly 1,400 ASML lithography machines. With Western restrictions on maintenance spare parts and engineering services, these multi-million euro machines have been reduced to a rob Peter to pay Paul situation keeping them operational for just one more day at a time. Chip production is bound to shrink, creating a vicious cycle.”
  • “New sanctions implemented in September have blocked sales of models like the NXT1970i, shutting down access to both hardware and technology. At best, China’s capabilities remain stuck at the level of ASML’s older NXT 1470 machines, which date back to the early 2000s.”
  • “China’s so-called domestic lithography machines are limited to 65 nanometer dry DUV technology, with some reports claiming they can reach 55 nanometer. However, this is equivalent to ASML 2006-era technology, putting China 18 years behind. Worse, key components for these domestic machines still rely on suppliers from Japan and Germany.”
  • “China’s domestic lithography machines are largely a symbolic effort, more about saving face than actual technological advancement.”
  • There’s no way China can catch up to ASML in EUV lithography, and no way they can eliminate their deep dependence on western semiconductor manufacturing technology.
  • “Cutting edge EUV systems have been banned from China since 2019. Last June, high-end immersion DUV machines were added to the list. Now even older models like the NXT 1970i and 1980i can’t be sold or upgraded. China’s ambitions have been crushed, reducing it to square one.”
  • “This February, the Dutch Minister of Trade openly stated that China uses foreign high tech knowledge to advance its military capabilities, and ASML tools could produce sophisticated weapons. Handing over lithography machines to China is akin to arming an adversary, a move unacceptable on any strategic level.”
  • Without western technology, China’s desire for a technologically advanced semiconductor industry are dead in the water.
  • “The myth of China’s technological rise is unraveling and heading toward decline.”
  • When you buy a piece of high-end semiconductor equipment, you’re not just buying the machine, you’re buying the knowledgebase of deep technical expertise of both the on-site technical staff, as well as the process wizards back in Eindhoven, Santa Clara and Tokyo. There are inumerable parameters that need to be just right, and you need to know how to tweak them if the yield goes south. Without that expertise to guide you, the high end machines quickly become worthless.

    I can imagine President Trump offering China a grand bargain, in which they stop stealing western technology, stop committing genocide against the Uighers, stop clashing with Philippine ships in the South China Sea, meet its treaty obligations regarding Hong Kong, and let international agencies inspects its high level bioweapon labs in exchange for easing semiconductor sanctions.

    I doubt China would take such a deal, as it would be too humiliating for Xi to stand. But I can imagine Trump making it…

    Merry Christmas: Stellarscope’s “Silent Night”

    Wednesday, December 25th, 2024

    As is the now annual tradition, enjoy Stellarscope’s version of “Silent Night”:

    Merry Christmas!

    How Not To Make A Pistol

    Saturday, December 21st, 2024

    Been a while since we did some gun geeking, so here’s Ian McCollum doing a Forgotten Weapons video on all the ways you can screw up while trying to make a new pistol.

  • “If you design an answer to a question that nobody is asking, well, not a lot of people are going to pay you for it.” His first example: The Zip 22. “It’s a piece of junk.”
  • Another way to screw up: Have a good design, but manufacture it poorly. “An excellent example would be the South African Mamba.” Designed by competitive shooters, they had problems with the heat treating. “Even if people like the concept, the gun has to work effectively.”
  • Or you can have a good design with quality control issues. “The Caracal C slides had a tendency to break in the middle and launch back at their shooters faces.”

  • Or you can produce a really good pistol, and then announce that you’ve got a better version coming out soon. “Hudson H9, another darling of Shot Show, highly anticipated. [It’s] a really nice pistol, it did everything it was supposed to, [but] was a little more expensive than a lot of people would have liked when it came out.” Then they announced they were just about ready to come out with a lighter aluminum-framed model. “And all of a sudden everybody who had been considering spending $1,200 on a Hudson H9 decided “‘Ah, I’m just going to wait for the aluminum framed version.’ Their cash flow dried up and the company went bankrupt.”
  • There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip…

    Russia Showing Visible Cracks

    Wednesday, December 18th, 2024

    More than two years into Putin’s three day Special Operation, Russia is starting to show extensive cracks in its facade of normalcy.

  • Would you believe the return of food rationing?

    Russian lawmakers have proposed introducing food ration cards across the entire country in response to rising prices, claiming the idea has a “healthy foundation”, the Moscow Times wrote on Dec. 15.

    Anatoly Aksakov, head of the State Duma’s Committee on Financial Markets, endorsed the idea of reintroducing food vouchers reminiscent of those used in the Soviet Union – the proposal, initially suggested by the Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast governor.

    Aksakov believes the initiative should be expanded nationwide. The Russian official stated that food vouchers would help “support socially vulnerable groups,” though he did not specify a potential monthly allowance for these cards.

    “As of Dec. 9, the Russian Ministry of Economic Development reported annual inflation reaching 9.2%, the highest level since February 2023. However, alternative metrics indicate significantly higher figures,” the publication noted.

    Food ration cards in Kaliningrad Oblast are set to roll out in 2025, targeting pensioners with incomes below the subsistence minimum.

    On Dec. 10, it was reported that the Kremlin had significantly increased military spending amid a catastrophic collapse of the ruble. The Russian government has allocated unprecedented funds for the war against Ukraine.

    For 2025, Russia’s budget includes a 25% increase in military spending, bringing it to 13.49 trillion rubles ($175.37 billion). Military expenditures will account for 32.5% of the budget, an unprecedented level since the Soviet era. By comparison, during the first year of the war against Ukraine, the government spent 17% of its budget on the military. In 2023, this figure rose to 19%, and the 2024 year’s allocation stands at 29.5%.

  • And how is the rest of the Russian economy doing? The parts supporting the war are doing great, but the rest is overheating due to inflation and crumpling under the load of high interest rates.

    • Interest rates are expected to hit 23% this month.
    • Despite the high interest rates, inflation isn’t going down, running at an official rate of 9% (and unofficially much higher).
    • Food staples are up even more, from 12% for bread to 74% for potatoes. Stores are locking up butter to prevent theft.
    • Russian business bankruptcies are up 30%.
    • Russia’s rail system can’t afford preventive maintenance due to higher interest rates.
    • Russia’s current low unemployment is driven by government spending on its war economy, and its not sustainable.
    • The military sector is sucking in more and more manpower, leaving fewer and fewer workers for other sectors of the economy hit by higher labor costs, higher interest rates, and higher inflation.
    • Unequal distribution of the gusher of war economy money is screwing the poor even harder.
    • Even Putin says Russia needs another million workers.
    • “There is a shrinking number of people who can keep Putin’s war machine running.”
  • Speaking of Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression, just how is that going? Given that Russia now has 63-year old recruits, I’ve got to guess not that well.

  • Also, two Russian oil tankers sank in the Kerch Strait, reportedly because they were river going vessels, and thus not rated for seaborne stresses. That suggests that Russia’s oil transportation capability is in serious trouble.
  • Also in serious trouble: Russia’s arms export industry, thanks to how poorly their arms have performed in Ukraine.

  • Finally, largely (though not entirely) unrelated to the Ukraine quagmire—

    —is the collapse of Assad’s Syria, an important client state for Russia:

    Russia is in a pickle getting its men and equipment home, because it can’t overfly nations hostile to it (most of them), it can’t sail ships home through the Bosporus (Montreux Convention), and it probably can’t get them all the way home up to its Baltic ports because it can’t refuel and resupply at hostile NATO ports (I wonder if a combination of Mediterranean African ports and at-sea resupply could get the job done). Plus Russia has been resupplying its mercenary army supporting Africa’s League of Assholes (Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso) from Syria, and Assad’s fall puts the entire operation in jeopardy.

  • The stresses on Russia are only going to get worse moving forward. For all the talk that Trump is going to bail Russia out, Volodymyr Zelenskyy evidently doesn’t think so. Plus one of Trump’s key negotiating tactics is to threaten whatever the other party holds most dear to force them to agree to a deal. And given Russia’s numerous manifest weaknesses, Trump is going to go into talks with an awful lot of leverage points…

    The Battle Of The Bulge: 80th Anniversary

    Tuesday, December 17th, 2024

    Eighty years ago, on December 16, 1944, Hitler’s last-ditch effort to stave off defeat in World War II got underway. Using the same trick Germany had used twice before (1914 and 1940), they launched a massive offensive push through the Ardennes that came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. To quote Wikipedia, the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge:

    The Germans’ initial attack involved 410,000 men; just over 1,400 tanks, tank destroyers, and assault guns; 2,600 artillery pieces; 1,600 anti-tank guns; and over 1,000 combat aircraft, as well as large numbers of other armored fighting vehicles (AFVs). These were reinforced a couple of weeks later, bringing the offensive’s total strength to around 450,000 troops, and 1,500 tanks and assault guns. Between 63,222 and 98,000 of these men were killed, missing, wounded in action, or captured. For the Americans, out of a peak of 610,000 troops, 89,000 became casualties out of which some 19,000 were killed. The “Bulge” was the largest and bloodiest single battle fought by the United States in World War II and the third deadliest campaign in American history.

    Though well-planned and executed, achieving the element of surprise against outmanned and outgunned American forces, German forces soon bogged down due to harsh weather conditions and fiercer-than-anticipated resistance. In particular, the town of Bastogne, through which all seven main roads in the Ardennes highlands converged, was supposed to fall early in the campaign, paving the way to the Meuse River and the ultimate objective of Antwerp beyond. Instead, American forces held off the Germans just long enough for the 101st Airborne and other forces to mount a perimeter defense around Bastogne.

    Surrounded on all sides, outnumbered 5-1, low on supplies and ill-equipped for cold weather fighting, American forces were asked to surrender. Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe answered with one of the most famous replies in the history of warfare: “NUTS!” American forces would stave off repeated attacks, until a resupply airdrop on the 26th and the arrival of elements of Patton’s Third Army on the 27th lifted the siege of Bastogne.

    Another hard month of fighting lay ahead (aided by better weather and America’s overwhelming air superiority) until the “bulge” was entirely eradicated, but after Bastogne, Hitler’s last great gamble had failed.

    Here’s the Simple History video overview:

    The Battle of the Bulge produced 21 Medal of Honor winners.

    See also:

  • Five Things Bbout The Battle of the Bulge
  • The Battle of the Bulge: A Helmet Full of Beer
  • Memorial Day: Remembering Henry F. Warner
  • The Case Of The Missing 15,000,000

    Saturday, December 14th, 2024

    From Russiagate to the uselessness of masks to Hunter Biden’s laptop, the pattern we’ve all come to recognize is Democrat-controlled institutions lying to our face about something, then accusing people of being “conspiracy theorists” when people question the false narrative. Time after time, the “conspiracy theorists” were proven right.

    So let’s hear Townhall’s Larry O’Connor talk about those missing 15,000,000 Biden votes from the 2020 Presidential election.

  • “It appears that upwards to 15 million or more Americans have been abducted.”
  • Then he shows The Chart.

  • “Starting all the way to the left, with Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney, and you can see there that Barack Obama just got over about 66 million votes. Then four years later, Hillary Clinton [got] about the same about 66 million votes as Barack Obama did. And then we get to 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, Joe Biden got, of course, famously, 82 million votes which is you know the difference of about 15-16 million votes.”
  • “That would be about 15 million votes that we believe disappeared. Because when you come back to this presidential election, you can see that Kamala Harris once again returns to form and gets that same sort of 66 million that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did.”
  • “We saw this drastic drop all of a sudden this year, where the same number of voters in 2012, 2016 and 2024 all voted for a Democrat. But there’s that that outlier Joe Biden.”
  • “They were either abducted by aliens, or they got taken up to heaven by Jesus in The Rapture, or the people suddenly became apathetic about politics, where they rallied to vote in 2020 but now they don’t care.”
  • “They loved Joe Biden so much that they came out of the woodwork by the level of 15 million, but then they don’t like Kamala Harris, so they’re just going to sit it out?”
  • “Or our last option is that they never actually existed in the first place. The people didn’t exist. The ballots certainly existed, but not the people.”

  • “Total votes cast: 2004, 121 million. 2008, big year, Barack Obama caught fire, built a huge momentum behind him, and people got excited about making history. That increased by about 8 million [129 million]. 2012 it went down a bit about two million, two and a half million [126 million]. 2016, we’re back up around the same level. Total votes cast 128 million, which is about the same as it was in 2008.”
  • “You pop down to 2024, again, slight increase about 129 million again, which puts us back to the Barack Obama levels.”
  • “But then it was four years ago. Four years ago you’re looking at total votes cast 155 million. Have we ever seen anything like this before?”
  • “Is there any possible explanation to that? Are we to believe that that many people wanted to vote in 2020, and only 2020, and then this year they just shrugged and said, ‘Ah, forget about it?'”
  • “Are you telling me that with a billion dollars in the bank, Kamala Harris only focusing on seven states, the same seven states, by the way, that Joe Biden focused on four years ago, that they were that inept?”
  • “This is criminal malpractice in the world of politics, that they were that incompetent that with a billion dollars, they couldn’t get out that vote?”
  • “Somebody posted going back to 1984…Bellweather counties in America are seen as counties that [the] way these counties vote generally speaking reflect the way the presidential election will go.” Rather than O’Connor describing the chart, here’s the chart itself:

    That seems…statistically unlikely.

  • “Donald Trump won every single one of those counties except for one. And yet that year (2020), the only year since 1984 the winner of these bellweather counties, which was Donald Trump, did not become the eventual winner of the Electoral College, the only one. And then we go to this last election, and you can see [in] 2024 Donald Trump won 88% of the counties, Kamala Harris won only two of them, and he was eventually the president.”
  • “So 2020 is the outlier. It’s the only year that Joe Biden ends up being the president, the winner of the Electoral College, by only winning 6% of these bellweather counties, just one of them, just one county, and it happened to be in his home state of Delaware.”
  • Roseanne Barr: “They still think Biden got 81 million votes at 4 a.m. Trump’s the most popular candidate of all time. He won three elections, two handily in a row.”
  • “It’s a fair observation. In fact, it’s hard not to reach this conclusion.”
  • “I’m curious as to how anyone is looking at these numbers and not asking this question.”
  • Democrats have been confronted by a whole lot of difficult truths following this election: A majority of Americans dislike their party, people hate wokeness, and Joe Biden was just as senile and corrupt as Republicans have argued all along.

    Now they should face up to the fact that President Lol81million’s 2020 “victory” was due to massive voter fraud.

    Just like all of us said four years ago.

    How Do You Miss Six Shots From Five Feet Away?

    Friday, December 13th, 2024

    The Secret Service agent that engaged the would-be Trump golf course assassin missed six shots despite being five feet away.

    How does that even happen? How can even you even miss from that close?

    I’m an adequate shot (not a Secret Service agent who presumably visits a shooting range every month), but I don’t think I could miss a human target from that range. Even if they were prone, behind a bush, next to a chain link fence.

    I doubt any of my armed friends would miss either

    That’s like the scene from Pulp Fiction:

    Karl Rehn occasionally does some A/B testing for shooters at his range based on site picture, type of sights/red dot/etc. I would like to see him do some testing to see just how much you would need to distract even a semi-competent shooter to start missing a human target from 6 feet away. Mild electric shocks? A tuba solo directly behind them? A bright strobe light? 10 cans of Red Bull?

    I wonder just how much distraction it would take for them to turn into as poor a shooter as this highly trained Secret Service agent.

    I just hope they’re tasking the agent with gobs of range time before they work their next Trump detail…

    (Note: No LinkSwarm today, as I’ve been too busy finishing up my latest book catalog. Maybe Monday…)

    Diversity != Strength

    Thursday, December 12th, 2024

    The ritual cliche invoked by the social justice left is that “diversity is strength.” But as the Irish mother in the video notes, importing waves of unassimilated foreigners into local communities doesn’t strengthen them at all.

  • “You have not seen what was coming yet, and I have.”
  • “Where I live is about 85% foreign nationals. I can walk down the street on any given day, walk into the supermarket, and I don’t hear an Irish conversation. I hear foreign people everywhere.”
  • “My child is one of 30 children in her class, and she’s the only Irish child. She came home crying from school a few weeks ago because she doesn’t understand what any of her friends are saying. The children revert back to their own languages when they’re not being taught. She literally cannot understand the conversations around her.”
  • They cancelled Halloween because some foreign children might get offended.
  • “I don’t go for a walk around the park during the day with my child anymore. I have a big dog and I don’t go for a walk by myself anymore. I very rarely leave my house, because where I live is so unsafe.”
  • “That is the reality that you’re facing if you don’t make a stand. And I understand it’s really really hard to, you know, be called names and all of these things. But you have to stand up on behalf of your children and the future of the country.”
  • Immigrants should come to a country to assimilate with it, not to colonize it. As in the US, EU elite have decreed that ordinary citizens of various European countries that the Brussels elite will never interact with must bear the burden of unassimilated immigration due to elite desire for cheap labor and the need to change the composition of the electorate they claim to operate on behalf of.

    Stand up or be washed away.

    Biden Unbanking And Censoring Political Enemies?

    Sunday, December 8th, 2024

    The Biden Administration isn’t yet done, and still more of it’s dirty dealings are coming to light. Remember Operation Choke Point, the semi-secret program to “debank” disfavored businesses like guns and weed under the Obama administration? Well say hello to Operation Choke Point 2.0, where the disfavored people being unbanked are the Obama/Biden Machine’s political opponents.

    Investor Marc Andreessen made headlines last week when he told Joe Rogan that dozens of tech founders had been quietly “debanked” under the Biden administration.

    Elon Musk commented on a shorter clip and asked: “Did you know that 30 tech founders were secretly debanked?”

    Andreessen called the orchestrated effort “Operation Choke Point 2.0,” in reference to an Obama-era initiative targeting the gun industry which triggered anti-boycott laws in some red states.

    “Debanking is when you, as either a person or your company, are literally kicked out of the banking system,” he explained. “Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there’s now a category called a ‘politically exposed person,’ PEP. And if you are a PEP, [banks] are required by financial regulators to kick them off, to kick them out of your bank. You’re not allowed to have them.”

    “Basically, it’s a privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran, just kick you out of the financial system,” he said. “So this has been happening to all the crypto entrepreneurs in the last four years.”

    “So when Trump says the deep state, the way we would describe it is administrative power,” Andreessen said. “It’s political power being administered, not through legislation. There’s no defined law that covers this, it’s not through regulation. There’s nothing you can do — you can’t go sue a regulator to fix this. It’s not through any kind of court judgment. It’s just raw power. It’s just raw administrative power. It’s the government or politicians just deciding that things are going to be a certain way, and then they just apply pressure until they get it.”

    Sounds deeply illegal, unconstitutional, and un-American, doesn’t it?

    Here’s the video:

  • One person Andreessen mentions as being debanked is David Horowitz of FrontPage and the Freedom Center.
  • “You literally can’t get a bank account. You can’t get a Visa terminal. You can’t process transactions. You can’t do payroll. You can’t do direct deposit. You can’t get insurance.”
  • “Choke Point 2.0 is primarily against their political enemies and then to their disfavored tech startups, and it’s hit the tech world hard. We’ve had like 30 founders debanked in the last four years.” But lunatic tech/crypto founders like Sam Bankman-Fried get left alone despite breaking the rules because they donate to Democrats.
  • “This is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump. It’s like we just can’t live in this world. We can’t live in a world where somebody starts a company that’s a completely legal thing, and then they literally get sanctioned.”
  • Here’s more of that interview with Andreessen, in which he says that the censorship regime against the enemies of the left/deep state was “widely understood.”

  • MA: “There’s nothing that happened at Twitter in the Twitter files that wasn’t happening to the all the other companies.”
  • MA: “It’s a consistent pattern. If you got the YouTube files, they would look exactly the same.”
  • MA: “The Biden White House was directly exerting censorship pressure on American companies to censor American citizens, which I think is just flatly illegal. I think it’s actually subject to criminal charges.” That would be willful denial of rights under the color of law.
  • MA: “There were also members of Congress doing the same thing, which is also illegal.”
  • MA: “Then there was a lot of funding of outside third party groups that were that were bringing a lot of pressure down on censorship.”
  • MA: “There’s a unit at Stanford, you know, right next door. The internet censorship unit that was funded by the US government [that] exerted tremendous pressure on the companies to censor, and it was very effective.”
  • JR: “One of the things that I found really kind of shocking was when they revealed how much money the Democrats had spent on the election, and how much money was spent on activist groups. It’s like more than $100 million, right?”
  • MA: “There’s extensive Government funding of politically oriented NGOs. NGO is one of those great terms, right? Non-governmental organization, all right. Like what what the hell is that?”
  • JR: “What is that? Tell me. I don’t know.”
  • MA: “It’s sort of a charity. But most of the time it’s a political entity. It’s an entity with a political agenda, but then it’s funded by the government. In a very large percentage of cases, including the the NGOs in the censorship complex. Like the government grants, National Science Foundation grants, like direct State Department grants, right? Then its okay. Now you’ve got an NGO funded by the government. Well, that’s not an NGO, right? That’s a GO.”
  • MA: “You’ve got government officials using government money to fund what what look like private organizations that aren’t.”
  • MA: “What happens is the government outsources to these NGOs the things that it’s not legally allowed to do.”
  • JR: “Like what?”
  • MA: “Like censorship. Like violation of First Amendment rights. What they always say is the First Amendment only applies to the government. The First Amendment says the government cannot cannot censor American citizens. And so what they do is, if you want to censor American citizens, if you’re [what] you do is you fund an outside organization and then you have them do it.”
  • JR: “That’s like hiring a hitman. Like it’s not okay to murder someone, but you can hire someone to murder someone and you’re clean.”
  • MA: “When the government does that, [that’s] a very powerful message. Like it’s a message from a mob boss. ‘Don’t you want to do me a favor?’ ‘Yes, Mr. Gambino, I do right. I’d like my corner store not to catch on fire tonight.'”
  • Also this tidbit: “In her book, Melania Trump, the former first lady, claimed her bank account and that of her son Barron were shut down in the wake of the Jan 6 riots. ‘This decision appeared to be rooted in political discrimination,’ she wrote.” Ya think?

    If Democrats didn’t hesitate to go after a First Lady and her son, they certainly wouldn’t hesitate to come after me or you…

    Is Damascus Falling? Update: Yep.

    Saturday, December 7th, 2024

    While we were looking at the rebel advance on Homs, another rebel force seems to have boiled up to successfully invest Damascus from the south.

    Syrian rebel groups reported gains in the country’s south on Saturday, capturing swaths of territory including Daraa, the city known as the birthplace of the country’s 2011 uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, and closing in on the capital, Damascus.

    Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the armed Islamist faction that made stunning gains in the north over the past week, said its forces had begun encircling Damascus after sweeping advances by other rebel groups to the south. The group said that its forces had also carried out an operation Saturday within Homs, a strategic choke point between rebel-controlled areas in the north and the capital.

    As its grip on the south crumbled, the Syrian cabinet held an emergency meeting to address the attacks by “armed terrorist gangs” on “a number of cities and regions.” The Syrian military denied that it had withdrawn from areas of the Damascus countryside but said that its forces in the southwestern cities of Daraa and Sweida had “redeployed” to new positions after rebel fighters had “attacked the army’s checkpoints and military points.”

    The Southern Operations Room, a newly announced rebel faction in the south, announced its control of the province of Daraa and vowed to “continue until the liberation of Damascus.” Videos posted online and verified by the Agence France-Presse news agency showed a statue of former president Hafez al-Assad being toppled in the city. The Syrian state news agency SANA said that “the sounds heard in some areas of the southern Damascus countryside are of long-range targeting and shooting at terrorist gatherings in Daraa.”

    The faction also said Saturday it had taken control of Quneitra, near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in southwestern Syria. The claim could not immediately be independently confirmed. The Southern Operations Room added that its forces were working to “complete the siege of the capital.”

    Sweida, a city in southwestern Syria inhabited by members of the Druze religious minority, was under the control of Druze factions on Saturday morning after the army withdrew, said a 29-year-old local activist who spoke on the condition of anonymity for security reasons. The relationship of the southern rebels with HTS remains unclear, but their advance has activated and invigorated local opposition groups.

    HTS said Saturday that its forces had captured the city of al-Sanamayn, north of Daraa, and were about 12 miles away from the “southern gate” of the Damascus. The group’s forces have also been closing in on Homs. The Syrian military said forces around Homs and rebel-held Hama have been “carrying out intensive artillery and missile fire on terrorist locations and supply lines, achieving direct hits.”

    Here’s a snapshot of the overall military situation, with red for Assad-controlled territory and green for that of the rebels:

    And here’s a closer view of the Damascus area:

    There’s report after report on Liveumap of Assad forces abandoning various posts throughout the city.

    With rebels already in the south of the Damascus and another rebel group coming in from the west, the situation looks pretty dire for Assad.

    Here’s a SkyNews video of rebels in the Damascus suburbs toppling a state of Bashar Assad’s father, Hafez Assad:

    Notice that many participating in the toppling just seem to be ordinary Syrians, and not members of rebel groups.

    It looks like Israel’s decapitation of Hezbollah weakened Bashar Assad even more than previously suspected, and Iran’s overreach in supporting so many regional jihadest groups at the same time has left them so dangerously overextended that they will not be able to save their most important regional ally from falling.

    This is a fast-moving breaking story, but I’d say there’s a 90+% chance that Assad’s goose is cooked.

    Update: Unconfirmed reports that Assad has fled Syria in his private plane and flown to Abu Dhabi. Update 2: Maybe not? “Axios: Israeli security sources report that their intelligence suggests Assad remains in Damascus.”

    Update 3: Rebels appear to have taken Homs.

    Update 4: Less than a day, and the map has already drastically changed:

    Update 5: Israel reportedly hits a Hezbollah column reportedly trying to bugger back to Lebanon.

    Update 6: Reuters says that Assad has left Syria.

    Update 7: There’s some evidence that Assad’s plane may have been shot down.

    Update 8: It appears that Assad has now arrive in Moscow, and that Russia has granted he and his family asylum.