Trump might actually bring peace to the Middle East, the FBI behaving badly (again), Letitia James gets served a heaping plate of payback, a bomb factory goes boom, a dive into the mind of a social justice warrior, Ukraine keeps wrecking Russia’s oil infrastructure, and ShoeOnHead dives deep into really icky erotica aimed at women. Plus multiple good boys.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Peace in the Middle East? “Trump Announces Israel, Hamas Have Agreed to First Phase of Peace Deal to End Gaza War.”
President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that Israel and Hamas have agreed on the first phase of his 20-point peace agreement to end the war in Gaza.
Hamas will exchange the remaining living and dead hostages in its captivity and Israel will respond by releasing Palestinian prisoners, Trump said on Truth Social.
“I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan. This means that ALL of the Hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their Troops to an agreed upon line as the first steps toward a Strong, Durable, and Everlasting Peace,” Trump said.
“All Parties will be treated fairly! This is a GREAT Day for the Arab and Muslim World, Israel, all surrounding Nations, and the United States of America, and we thank the mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey, who worked with us to make this Historic and Unprecedented Event happen,” he added.
“BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS!”
Snip.
With the deal on the table, the White House said Trump is considering a trip to the Middle East after he completes his annual checkup on Friday.
Releasing the hostages and prisoners is one aspect of the Trump administration’s plan to stop the fighting in Gaza and foster economic development in the region. Hamas is expected to begin releasing the hostages this upcoming weekend.
In September, the White House released Trump’s plan for stabilizing Gaza and creating a temporary governance structure to rebuild the territory and prevent Hamas from governing it after the war. At the same time, Trump gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the green light to escalate the conflict in Gaza if Hamas rejected his latest overture.
“With God’s help we will bring them all home,” Netanyahu said in a statement.
Trump’s announcement Wednesday marks the beginning of end of the war between Israel and Hamas after almost two years of fighting and tens of thousands of casualties. The war began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters killed 1,200 innocent civilians and abducted more than 250 hostages.
If it works out and the hostages get home, fine and dandy, but Jihadis not living up to their promises and treaties is pretty much the norm, so I’m not going to hold my breath…
“Patel Fires FBI Agents, Ends CR-15 Squad After Learning Jack Smith Tracked GOP Senators. Patel also said the FBI “initiated an ongoing investigation with more accountability measures ahead.”
FBI Director Kash Patel announced he fired the agents and dismantled the squad after learning former Special Counsel Jack Smith tracked eight GOP senators while investigating then-former President Donald Trump.
Patel wrote on X:
Transparency is important and accountability is critical. We promised both, and this is what promises kept looks like. This FBI is delivering.
As a result of our latest disclosure about the baseless monitoring of members of Congress by the prior leadership team of the FBI, we have already taken the following actions:
We terminated employees, we abolished the weaponized CR-15 squad, and we initiated an ongoing investigation with more accountability measures ahead.
Transparency is important and accountability is critical. We promised both, and this is what promises kept looks like. This FBI is delivering.
As a result of our latest disclosure about the baseless monitoring of members of Congress by the prior leadership team of the FBI, we…
— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) October 7, 2025
But will the DOJ take action against Smith? That’s my big question.
The CR-15 squad is a federal public corruption squad. It helped Smith during the Arctic Frost investigation, which involved Trump allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election and the Capitol Hill Riot.
In May, Patel said he folded the squad and reassigned the agents. I’m unsure if today’s comments indicate that the FBI will no longer have another CR-15 squad.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) revealed the tracking memo on Monday. Smith tracked these eight senators:
Marsha Blackburn (TN)
Lindsey Graham (SC)
Bill Hagerty (TN)
Josh Hawley (MO)
Ron Johnson (WI)
Mike Kelly (PA)
Cynthia Lummis (WY)
Tommy Tuberville (AL)
Yet another reason President Autopen was so busy handing out pardons like Halloween candy…
R.S. McCain takes a deep dive into the Democrat Party’s social justice craziness.
Did you ever wonder how the Democratic Party got so crazy? For example, how is it that the governor of Illinois is inciting violent mobs against federal immigration authorities and meanwhile, in Virginia, every Democrat is rallying to the defense of Attorney General candidate Jay Jones, who openly fantasized about murdering political opponents?
To summarize briefly: Bad causes attract bad people.
To understand the symbiotic relationship between toxic political movements and their toxic supporters, my advice is to first read Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic, The True Believer, especially Part 2: “The Potential Converts.” Next, you should read Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, focusing on Chapter 10, “Why the Worst Get on Top.” Among the personal experiences that led me to comprehend this phenomenon was being swarmed by a mob of “Occupy” protesters in 2011. If you ever had the misfortune to be in close proximity to a zombie horde like that, you would never doubt that the fundamental problem of the Democratic Party is that its grassroots “base” is composed of dangerous lunatics.
If you ever needed a reason to vote Republican, this is it: Democrats are the party of people who celebrate terrorist massacres of innocent Jews.
All of which is preamble to introducing you to the person calling herself “Cloud,” who describes herself as “Pisces / 26 / ATL / Immortal Angel Femboy / Cosplayer” on an Instagram account with approximately 8,000 followers. If ever anyone needed a Kiwi Farms LOLCow file . . .
This summer, “Cloud” went viral with a video denouncing Taylor Swift’s engagement to “MAGA-adjacent” Travis Kelce:
“I can already feel myself regretting making this video. If ten people are sitting at a table, and one of them is a Nazi, and the other nine people are not telling the Nazi to fuck off, then you’re at a table with ten Nazis. When Taylor Swift first started dating Travis Kelce and Travis Kelce was so open about his ‘respect’ for Donald Trump, I already knew we were reaching the beginning of the end, right? When she was posting photos with, like, other NFL wives and girlfriends or whatever, and they were all open MAGAs, and Taylor was happily posing with them on Instagram, I knew we were at the beginning of the end. I just didn’t know how long it would take for the general populace to catch on that it was the beginning of the end. You cannot be friends with people who have different opinions on you when those opinions are life and death for other people — when the Supreme Court ruling today has decided that certain people’s lives are genuinely worth more on paper than others. This is a black-and-white issue. I’m sorry, but there is no nuance when it comes to Trump. You’re either chill with the guy who has death camps in El Salvador or you’re not. And the only reason I’m making this video is because I’ve been very open about how much I love Taylor Swift during the last few years. So I do feel obligated to come on here and say she is MAGA — or at least, MAGA-adjacent. And I’m sorry, as a trans person, if you’re Nazi-adjacent, that’s still a Nazi to me. Do with that info whatever you will.”
Oh, wow — where to begin unraveling this gigantic yarn-ball of dangerous craziness? To start with, the Supreme Court ruling she references (see “NY Times on the Left’s Skrmetti Bungle: ‘Somebody Set Up Us the Bomb’,” June 21) was a consequence of transgender activists overplaying their hand, trying to claim that a state law prohibiting transgender “treatment” for children to be a form of sex-based discrimination that violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Pause for a moment to ask yourself whether those who voted to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 intended for it to protect the use of synthetic hormones and surgery to turn children into carnival sideshow freaks. As a legal theory, this is bizarre, and yet “Cloud” (who identifies as a “trans person” despite apparently having undergone no such treatment herself) sees the Skrmetti ruling as “life or death.” This over-the-top rhetoric is entirely consistent with her lazy formula “MAGA = Nazi.” If you don’t vote for Democrats, you are a latter-day Hitler, she contends, and therefore . . . ?
Violence is the logical conclusion of a syllogism built on such premises, and good luck trying to convince Democratic voters that their belief system is based on dubious premises and fallacies. Having convinced themselves that they are “on the right side of history,” they consider it a hate crime to disagree with them. This fanaticism attracts bad people to the Democratic Party banner, and the bad people expect their party to represent their beliefs, which is why the Democrats are so crazy.
A federal grand jury in Eastern Virginia has indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James on one count of bank fraud, multiple outlets are reporting.
US Attorney Lindsey Halligan presented the case to the grand jury on Thursday, according to sources, one month after she was installed in her role.
As noted in August, a criminal referral was filed against James, alleging that she had “falsified records” to get home loans for a Virginia property that she claimed was her “principal residence” in 2023 – while she was serving as a New York state prosecutor.
Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director William Pulte sent the missive to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy AG Todd Blanche, claiming that in late August 2023 – weeks before she launched her civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization for inflating the values of its properties.
In 2021, James also purchased a 5-family Brooklyn property, but has “consistently misrepresented the same property as only having four units in both building permit applications and numerous mortgage documents and applications,” the letter noted.
Loans secured for this property could have reduced her mortgage interest rate by as much as 1% – leaving James with lower monthly payments under the federal Home Assistance Modification Program (HAMP) since it was listed as containing just four units, according to Pulte.
More on that subject:
Not trying to make a political point here.
I spent years as a mortgage banker at Quicken Loans (now Rocket Mortgage), the number one mortgage lender in the country, before I ever went to law school. So when I see stories like this, I look at them a little differently.
The Trump Administration has designated international drug cartels as unlawful combatants.
President Donald Trump has finally named the enemy: Mexican drug cartels. Declaring them unlawful combatants and recognizing a “non-international armed conflict” marks one of the most consequential national security shifts in modern history.
For decades, Washington treated cartel violence as a crime — a problem for prosecutors, not generals. Indictments were filed, assets seized, and sanctions imposed. But the cartels fought a different kind of war, one that combined terror, intelligence, and territorial control. Calling it “crime” guaranteed defeat.
We refused to define the cartels as belligerents — and fought the wrong fight.
According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, Mexico ranks among the world’s most violent conflict zones — behind only Palestine, Myanmar, and Syria. It is also the second-most dangerous country for civilians. Those numbers are not from a failed state overseas. They come from our southern border, where cartel wars spill into American communities daily.
For decades, federal authorities insisted on using a law-enforcement lens. Agencies operated under Title 21, Title 50, and limited “detect and monitor” authorities. They punished crimes but never broke campaigns. The narrow scope bred strategic blindness. While U.S. prosecutors filed indictments and built cases, cartels corrupted institutions, coerced populations, and built empires.
As the Marine Corps teaches: How you define the environment determines how you operate in it. We refused to define the cartels as belligerents — and fought the wrong fight.
By every operational measure, cartels are hybrid threats. They control territory, command loyalty through terror, and run parallel governments. They tax, adjudicate, and even “protect” local populations. Their power rests on corruption and espionage: bribing officials, infiltrating agencies, and compromising law enforcement through human networks that resemble intelligence tradecraft.
Cartels operate across land, air, maritime, subterranean, cyber, and electromagnetic domains. They deploy drones, tunnels, jammers, and encrypted systems. They are multi-domain actors running hybrid campaigns.
Cartels don’t just smuggle — they destabilize. Mass migration has become a weapon of war: overwhelming institutions, hiding operatives, and masking foreign infiltration. Millions of illegal entrants from more than 170 nations have crossed under cartel supervision. The intent is not just profit. It’s demographic disruption.
Under federal law, terrorism includes violence intended “to intimidate or coerce a civilian population” or “influence government policy.” By that definition, Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation qualify as terrorist organizations.
Munitions plant explodes in Bucksnort, Tennessee. Which is a real place off I-40. “Accurate Energetic Systems, LLC (AES) is a certified Women-Owned Small Business specializing in the production, handling, and storage of energetic materials for military, aerospace, and commercial demolition sectors.” Chopper footage shows the place leveled.
“Ukrainian drones hit multiple targets in Russia [including] the Feodosia oil depot in Crimea, a chemical plant Sverdlov in Dzerzhinsk and power plants in Belgorod and Klintsy.”
They also carried out a drone strike on a key oil pumping station in Efimovka. “The station [is] a key node on the Kuibyshev-Tikhoretsk pipeline that moves Urals crude to the Black Sea.”
Finland’s President Alexander Stubb says that Russia’s economy is crumbling. “Inflation is over 20% which means that their [financial] reserves are close to zero.” Also: “In the past roughly 1,000 days, Russia has advanced only one percentage point of Ukrainian territory.”
Eman Abdelhadi, an associate professor in the university’s Department of Comparative Human Development, was arrested Friday and charged with two counts of aggravated battery to a government employee, a Class 3 felony, and two counts of resisting/obstruction peace, a Class A misdemeanor, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office told Fox News.
Radical sociologist Abdelhadi, who previously cursed out her employer while speaking at a “Socialism 2025” conference, is due in court again on Tuesday.
It sounds like University of Chicago already has plenty of evidence to fire Abdelhadi for cause.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton joins lawsuit to close the Texas Republican primary. Paxton might quite rightly have a conflict of interest here, since Democrats voting in he Republican primary would obviously favor his Senate race opponent John Cornyn…
EPCOR Utilities Inc. recently announced its intent to begin construction and eventual operation of a facility in Galveston Bay, a region that is home to almost eight million people.
Beginning with a permit application with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), EPCOR is planning to construct a desalination plant on the San Leon Peninsula, which, according to a press release, will supply approximately 26.5 million gallons of fresh water per day.
The Bayshore Desalination Facility is projected to be completed in approximately five years if the design and construction phases are allowed to proceed.
Various government entities have been warning about potential water shortages for some time now, so it’s good to get ahead of the curve.
“Morning Glory Milking Farm [is] a popular romance novel about a young woman down on her luck who does what every young woman does when facing financial struggle. She starts an Only Fans. No, I’m just kidding. She wouldn’t degrade herself like that. She gets a job jerking off monsters.”
“I forgot to inform you that there is a new epidemic. An epidemic that many have yet to discuss and that epidemic is female Gooners. Now, for those of you unaware, Goonar is internet slang for someone addicted to porn, and smut is slang for dark romance novels, otherwise known as porn.” [sigh] I did a tiny bit of research on the term “gooner” when I first came across it in an Asmongold video, and Shoe is slightly off in her definition, as the most common use of the term seems to be someone who masturbates constantly without achieving orgasm.
“I actually read the book myself, and I’m not going to lie: the Nineteenth Amendment needs to be abolished.”
“I like how in this fantasy world, student loans still exist. Like, we can imagine a world with minotaurs and humans in a relationship, but we can’t imagine a world without student loans.”
She reads a goodly portion of the scene where the minotaur insists on paying for his handmaiden’s dinner. “Inside every woman there are two wolves or two bulls, the strong independent girl boss and the submissive doting housewife. And in the presence of a masculine man, or a farm animal, she will fold like a lawn chair and instantly return to factory settings.”
“Women are going to be picking up Animal Farm now, ‘like, where’s the horse cock?'”
One of the books Amazon recommended after she bought this one: Pounded By Produce.
“Are we really going to pretend that a story about a young woman getting a job milking mythical creatures to pay off her student debt is not funny? It’s funny. If that makes me a sexist misogynist, you got me. To act like you are so different and above the other Gooners is just it’s silly. I’m sorry, but you are no different than Joe Schmo jerking it to Fat Booty Latinas in Space 12.”
Just wait until she talks about women attending the “Sinners and Stardust” convention and actually sexually assaulting a man there. So if you’re a single man desperate enough to attend such a convention know that the odds are good, but the goods are odd…
“The women are like conquered and taken and overpowered by these monsters. And I think many of these women are reading these books containing monsters and not men because masculinity and dominance in men has been completely demonized in modern society. But the truth is many women still crave it. You see, the monsters in these stories have those like dominant masculine traits that women like so much, but they’re not human men. They have all these traits women desire without the problematic baggage human men bring without being the men they hate or have been told to hate. It is the perfect guilt-free slop.”
On the other hand, he thinks Tron: Ares is “complete arse. “I’ve got plenty of issues with Tron: Legacy, but that movie was a goddamn masterpiece compared to this.” “Not only can Disney not be trusted as the custodians of other people’s IPs that they bought their way into, they can’t even be trusted to manage their own fucking IPs at this point.”
Ridley Scott says that most films today are crap. on the one hand, he’s right. On the other hand, he’s also the director of Prometheus, so glass houses, stones…
A massive explosion at Iran’s largest commercial port killed several people and destroyed shiploads of ballistic missile fuel from China, news reports suggest. “A huge blast probably caused by the explosion of chemical materials killed at least 18 people and injured more than 700 on Saturday at Iran’s biggest port, Bandar Abbas,” Reuters reported, citing Iranian regime-run media.
The exploding rocket fuel sent out a huge plume, unleashing a shock wave spanning several miles. “Iran’s official news channels aired footage of a vast black and orange cloud of smoke billowing up above the port in the aftermath of the blast,” the news agency added. “The blast shattered windows within a radius of several kilometres and was heard in Qeshm, an island 26 kilometres (16 miles) south of the port, Iranian media said.”
The shipment was reportedly carrying sodium perchlorate, which is indeed pretty spicy stuff if handled improperly.
Now we have footage of the blast and, holy crap, was it massive and devastating:
At 36 seconds in, you get footage of the start of the fire. It doesn’t look like an explosive or a drone strike, just a fire that got out of control, so I doubt the U.S. or Israel was behind this one. Neither China nor Iran is known for their painstaking attention to detail.
On top of the rogering Iran’s missile program has already received from Israel, the explosion will make it that much more difficult for Iran to reconstitute their missile program anytime soon.
Wikipedia, the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge, tells us “Shahid Rajaee Port is responsible for 85% of the total loading and unloading carried out at the Iranian ports. By 2011, Shahid Rajaee port ranked 44th among the 3500 major ports of the world.” With Iran’s inflation rate already creeping toward 40%, damage to their main container port is going to weaken their economy further, giving President Trump additional leverage in talks over their nuclear program.
The general course of the Russio-Ukrainian War seems the same (Russia grinding out slow gains in the Severodonetsk front, while Ukraine gains back territory on the wings near Kharkiv and Kherson), but there are a lot of interesting stories out on the periphery of the conflict.
First, the requisite map snap:
(These snapshots are not the end-all and be-all of the situation, but back when I was covering the war against the Islamic State, I found that they were helpful in jogging my memory reviewing the course of the war at later dates.)
Members of the Russian military community continue to comment on the shortcomings of Russian force generation capabilities, which are having tangible impacts on the morale and discipline of Russians fighting in Ukraine. Russian milblogger Yuri Kotyenok claimed that Russian troops lack the numbers and strength for success in combat in Ukraine. Kotyenok accused Russian leadership of deploying new and under-trained recruits and called for replenishment of forces with well-trained recruits with ground infantry experience—though the Russian military is unlikely to be able to quickly generate such a force, as ISW has previously assessed. Despite growing calls for increased recruitment from nationalist figures, Russian leadership continues to carry out coercive partial mobilization efforts that are only producing limited numbers of replacements while negatively impacting the morale and discipline of forcibly mobilized personnel. Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) claimed that Russian authorities in Luhansk are arranging gas leaks in apartment buildings to force men who are hiding from mobilization into the streets. The Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) additionally reported that Russian soldiers in occupied Tokmak, Zaporizhia Oblast, are appealing to local Ukrainian doctors to issue them certificates alleging medical inability to continue military service.
Ukrainian forces conducted a drone strike (likely with a loitering munition, though this cannot be confirmed) on a Russian oil refinery in Novoshakhtinsk, Rostov Oblast, on June 22. Russian Telegram channel Voenyi Osvedomitel claimed that the strike, which targeted Russian infrastructure within 15 km of the Ukrainian border, originated from Donetsk Oblast. Ukrainian forces have not targeted Russian infrastructure for several weeks, and this strike is likely an attempt to disrupt Russian logistics and fuel supply to Russian operations in eastern Ukraine.
Though they also note that Russia has been using its anti-air capabilities to better deal with Ukrainian drones.
Well, a June 14 press release from Freeport LNG notes that “the incident occurred in pipe racks that support the transfer of LNG from the facility’s LNG storage tank area to the terminal’s dock facilities. … Preliminary observations suggest that the incident resulted from the overpressure and rupture of a segment of an LNG transfer line, leading to the rapid flashing of LNG and the release and ignition of the natural gas vapor cloud. Additional investigation is underway to determine the underlying precipitating events that enabled the overpressure conditions in the LNG piping.” The statement added that federal authorities were assisting with its investigation.
However, what was not explained is how a critical overpressure event could have occurred without safety systems kicking into action. Two LNG pipeline experts I talked to, who both asked to remain anonymous due to potential retaliatory damage to their business interests, say that pipeline corrosion and other material failures can cause critical incidents. Still, the FBI’s investigative involvement, the specific nature of this explosion, and the scale of damage incurred do raise major questions. The experts suggested that piping from a storage tank to a terminal, as in this explosion, should have extensive safeguards to prevent overpressure events. One expert was highly confident that control of pipeline flows would be undertaken from a networked control facility.
That brings us to the Russian cyber unit involved in the targeting reconnaissance against Freeport LNG.
Named XENOTIME by researchers, the unit has utilized boutique TRITON/TRISIS malware developed by the Russian Ministry of Defense’s Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics. That malware is designed for the seizure of industrial control systems and the defeat of associated safety systems. In 2017, GCHQ (Britain’s NSA-equivalent signals intelligence service) outlined the need for network compartmentalization to protect safety systems against this malware better. In March 2022, the FBI warned that TRISIS malware remained a threat.
XENOTIME is assessed by the U.S. and British governments as a critical infrastructure-focused, advanced persistent threat actor. The unit’s modus operandi involves targeting industrial control systems and supervisory control systems in order to effect unilateral control of a network. XENOTIME has caused specific concern in Western security circles for its targeting of safety systems that would otherwise mitigate threats to life during a cyberattack. XENOTIME’s activity has escalated in 2022. Evincing as much, an April 13 U.S. government cybersecurity warning noted, “By compromising and maintaining full system access to [industrial control system]/[safety] devices, [threat] actors could elevate privileges … and disrupt critical devices or functions.”
Snip.
While the Freeport LNG explosion remains under investigation, multiple sources told me they were struck by the overpressure event along a key pipeline transit route and the evident failure of safety systems to engage. This fits with XENOTIME’s modus operandi.
That’s an “interesting but unproven” in my book… (Hat tip: Jim Geraghty at NRO.)
More than 3 tons of gold was shipped to Switzerland from Russia in May, according to data from the Swiss Federal Customs Administration. That’s the first shipment between the countries since February.
The shipments represent about 2% of gold imports into the key refining hub last month. It may also mark a change in perception of Russian bullion, which became taboo following the invasion. Most refiners swore off accepting new gold from Russia after the London Bullion Market Association removed the country’s own fabricators from its accredited list.
While that was viewed as a de facto ban on fresh Russian gold from the London market, one of the world’s biggest, the rules don’t prohibit Russian metal from being processed by other refiners. Switzerland is home to four major gold refineries, which together handle two-thirds of the world’s gold.
Almost all of the gold was registered by customs as being for refining or other processing, indicating one of the country’s refineries took it. The four largest — MKS PAMP SA, Metalor Technologies SA, Argor-Heraeus SA and Valcambi SA — said they did not take the metal.
In March, at least two major gold refineries refused to remelt Russian bars even though market rules permit them to do so. Others, such Argor-Heraeus, said they would accept products refined in Russia prior to 2022, so long as there were documents proving that the gold had not been exported from Russia after beginning of the war, and that accepting them would not benefit Russia, a Russian person or entity anywhere in the world.
he fight for Severodonetsk is a Russian information operation in the form of a battle. One of its main purposes for Moscow is to create the impression that Russia has regained its strength and will now overwhelm Ukraine. That impression is false. The Russian military in Ukraine is increasingly a spent force that cannot achieve a decisive victory if Ukrainians hold on.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is therefore trying to turn his invasion of Ukraine into a brutal contest of wills. He’s betting his army on breaking Ukrainians’ collective will to fight on in their country. His own won’t likely break. Fortunately, Ukraine doesn’t need it to. If Ukrainians can weather the current Russian storm and then counterattack the exhausted Russian forces they still have every chance to free their people and all their land.
Putin amassed the wreckage of Russian combat forces into a lethal amalgam around the cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk in Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk Oblast. That amalgam is crawling forward using massive artillery barrages to obliterate everything in its path allowing Russia’s demoralized and frightened soldiers to walk into the rubble.
The Ukrainian defenders are wisely withdrawing in the face of this reckless barbarism, but at a high price to their own morale and their will to continue the fight. Ukrainian soldiers and citizens are criticizing their government for not supporting the troops on the front lines. Ukrainians are starting to doubt that they can prevail for the first time since they won the Battle of Kyiv. Delays in the provision of Western aid and refusals by the U.S. and other countries to provide certain needed weapons systems are helping to fuel those doubts. And now voices are rising in the West calling on Ukraine to offer concessions.
All of which is exactly what Putin needs. He cannot defeat Ukraine militarily as long as Ukrainians retain the will to fight and the West the will to back them. So he attacks the will of both by forcing his own troops into the most vicious and brutal offensive of this war, hoping to persuade everyone that he’s finally harnessed the mass and power of Russia that Stalin wielded to defeat Hitler—and thus that resistance to his demands is futile. Putin also holds hostage critical export supplies of Ukrainian food and fuel, hoping to impose high enough costs on the West to persuade it to abandon Ukraine.
Neither Ukrainians nor their friends around the world must give in to Putin or be deluded by the current mirage of Russian success and power he is presenting in the Battle of Severodonetsk. For mirage it is. Russia’s drive in Luhansk is the desperate gamble of a dictator staking the last of the offensive combat power he can scrape together in hopes of breaking his enemies’ will to continue the fight. and let him claim that he’s taken all of Luhansk Oblast. It is a historical rhyme with Hitler’s determination to seize Stalingrad in 1942 or to hold Kharkov in defiance of his commander’s advice. There are no Russian large reserves coming behind this force to carry its successes forward. On the contrary, Putin has created it only by denuding other key axes of the forces they need to defend against Ukrainian counterattacks. This offensive will likely culminate soon because even this slow, grinding advance will exhaust the forces conducting it. Putin will then be unable to launch another for quite some time.
I thought this would be a longer update, but I’m running out of day…
I got my Mac back on Monday with the battery, bottom and trackpad replaced, and everything works fine. But between contractors redoing my bathroom and cleaning ladies coming in today to get ready for July 4, this week, has, if anything, been even busier than last week. So enjoy this low-calorie LinkSwarm substitute featuring only the crowd-pleasing LinkSwarm favorites: The Babylon Bee, dogs, guns and explosions.
WATCH: Sky9 was overhead when police attempted to detonate a stash of illegal fireworks that ended in an explosion in the 700 block of East 27th Street in South L.A. https://t.co/KpWiAEoyqvpic.twitter.com/UbIXLDoZjh
Welcome to a special Christmas day LinkSwarm! And by “special,” I mean “because Christmas falls on Friday.”
Explosion rocks downtown Nashville. “Around 6:30 a.m., police received a call for a suspicious RV with no tags parked across from the Davidson County courthouse. As officers arrived, the RV exploded, blowing out the windows of nearby buildings and leaving extensive damage.” They’re calling it an “intentional act.” Maybe, especially across the street from a courthouse. But it could still be a meth lab cooking off. As always, remember that much of the early reporting around such events are usually wrong.
Update: Assuming the message in this video is real, it does appear to be a premeditated act of which authorities were warned:
WATCH: “If you can hear this message, evacuate now.”
This is allegedly video of the explosion in Nashville this morning, with a woman’s voice recording over a PA beforehand…
The deal comes in just eight days short of the hard-Brexit deadline. Rather than erecting trade barriers to which some had resigned themselves, the two sides are looking toward a more cooperative than contentious relationship, reports the Wall Street Journal:
Under the terms of the accord, both sides will continue to trade free of tariffs but there will be significant new bureaucracy for importers and exporters. The free flow of workers between the two economies will end and trade in services will be much reduced. London’s vast financial center will no longer have guaranteed access to European markets.
The deal gives Britain significant freedom to depart from EU regulations and sign free-trade deals with countries like the U.S. But as the price for securing a deal without tariffs, the U.K. agreed that it wouldn’t seriously undercut EU standards on issues such as labor and the environment and would maintain similar constraints on the subsidizing of private industry.
The agreement must formally be ratified by the European and U.K. parliaments and signed off by EU leaders before the end of the year. Capitals have insisted they need proper time to comb through the text before approving it. Though their approval is likely, France has warned it could veto a deal if some of its key concerns, including access to British waters for its fishing fleet, aren’t met.
Here’s the short version: One main problem is that the 5,500-plus page legislative package was drafted behind closed doors by party leaders, then quickly unveiled hours before a vote.
As voices as disparate as Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Libertarian Rep. Justin Amash have pointed out, this meant that most members of Congress had to vote for or against the package before actually getting to read the legislation.
Congress is expected to vote on the second largest bill in US history *today* – $2.5 trillion – and as of about 1pm, members don’t even have the legislative text of it yet.
That’s right: Trillions of taxpayer dollars were doled out, and the members of Congress who voted for it don’t even know where much of it is going.
This bill pours hundreds of billions of dollars into preexisting stimulus programs that were rife with waste, fraud, and abuse, without meaningfully addressing any of the problems. You can expect more stimulus checks sent to dead people and more runaway fraud to plague the expanded unemployment benefits.
“Tables Turned: Detroit Sues Black Lives Matter Group for ‘Civil Conspiracy’ to Riot and Attack Police.” The group in question is Black Lives Matter umbrella group Detroit Will Breathe. Discovery should be extremely interesting… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Andrew Yang is running for mayor of New York City. It would be very difficult indeed for Yang not to be a vast improvement over the burning Porta-Potty stuffed with dead clowns that is the De Blasio administration. As a moderate Democrat, I would expect Yang to be a better mayor than de Blasio or David Dinkins, but not as good as Rudy Giuliani or Ed Koch. I would expect a Yang mayoralty to be about on par with Bloomberg’s, with maybe more upside if he’s willing to shake up the corrupt status quo and not push his disasterous pet guaranteed income idea.
In an address to the UN Security Council on Monday during a monthly session on the Middle East, US Ambassador Kelly Craft asserted that President Donald Trump’s policies had “overturned” long-held views about diplomacy in the region.
“For decades, the prevailing assumption was that the world would only see normalized international relations with Israel following a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute,” Craft told the virtual meeting. “But we have proven this assumption wrong.”
She touted the Trump administration’s pursuit of “economic and cultural ties” between Israel and its Arab neighbors, which has led to normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. Similar deals with countries such as Saudi Arabia and Oman, among others, could also be in the offing.
“All of us here should think long and hard about what else we may have missed or misinterpreted over the years.”
“Demanding Silicon Valley Suppress ‘Hyper-Partisan Sites’ in Favor of ‘Mainstream News’ (The NYT) is a Fraud:
The most prolific activism demanding more Silicon Valley censorship is found in the nation’s largest news outlets: the media reporters of CNN, the “disinformation” unit of NBC News, and especially the tech reporters of The New York Times. That is where the most aggressive and sustained pro-internet-censorship campaigns are waged.
Due in part to a self-interested desire to re-establish their monopoly on discourse by crushing any independent or dissenting voices, and in part by a censorious and arrogant mindset which convinces them that only those of their worldview and pedigree have a right to be heard, they largely devote themselves to complaining that Facebook, Google and Twitter are not suppressing enough speech. It is hall-monitor tattletale whining masquerading as journalism: petulantly complaining that tech platforms are permitting speech that, in their view, ought instead be silenced.
Snip.
The conceit that outlets like The New York Times, CNN and NPR are the alternatives to “hyper-partisan pages” is one you would be eager to believe, or at least want to induce others to believe, if you were a tech reporter at The New York Times, furious and hurt that millions upon millions of people would rather hear other voices than your own, and simply do not trust what you tell them. Inducing Facebook to manipulate the algorithmic underbelly of social media to artificially force your content down the throats of citizens who prefer to avoid it, while rendering your critics’ speech invisible — all in the name of reducing “hyper-partisanship,” “divisiveness,” and “misinformation” — is of course a highly desirable outcome for mainstream outlets like the NYT.
The problem with this claim is that it’s a complete and utter fraud, one that is easily demonstrated as such. There are few sites more “hyper-partisan” than the three outlets which the NYT applauded Facebook for promoting. In the 2020 election, over 70 million Americans — close to half of the voting population — voted for Donald Trump, yet not one of them is employed by the op-ed page of the “non-partisan” New York Times and are almost never heard on NPR or CNN. That’s because those news outlets, by design, are pro-Democratic-Party organs, who speak overwhelmingly to Democratic readers and viewers.
It is hard to get more partisan than the news outlets which the NYT tech reporters, and apparently Facebook, consider to be the alternatives to “hyper-partisan” discourse. In April, Pew Research asked Americans which outlet is their primary source of news, and the polling firm found that the audiences of NPR, CNN and especially The New York Times are overwhelmingly Democrats, in some cases almost entirely so.
As Pew put it: “about nine-in-ten of those who name The New York Times (91%) and NPR (87%) as their main political news source identify as Democrats, with CNN at about eight-in-ten (79%).” These outlets speak to Democrats, are built for Democrats, and produce news content designed to be pleasing and affirming to Democrats — so they keep watching and buying. One can say many things about these news outlets, but the idea that they are the alternatives to “hyper-partisan pages” is the exact opposite of the truth: it is difficult to find more hyper-partisan organs than these.
The Establishment decided that instead of having a vigorous debate and discussion over the safety and efficacy of these prophylactic potions, they would just short circuit the whole messy truth determination process that Western civilization has relied upon for a millennium – argument, debate, and eventually consensus after everything is fully and freely hashed-out – and move right to the Official Truth. All the smart set decided that the Official Truth would be that these vaccines were all perfect and necessary and that we needed to stamp out any hint of dissent lest people pause and think for themselves and thereby disrupt the plan by raising unapproved notions. And the tech overlords would do their part by ensuring that any info, ideas, or interplay that was not inline with the narrative would be suppressed.
It’s so much more efficient, you know, to tell people what they think than to take the time to convince them and refute counter-arguments.
Not everyone was foolish. It was very smart and good leadership for Mike Pence to take the shot in public in front of cameras. That a couple of tentacles didn’t sprout out of his clavicles was reassuring. That’s leadership, and that’s what our leaders should be doing. But most of our ruling class instead thinks that if they lie to us and suppress our debates and call us stupid enough, we’ll fall into line.
When has that worked for long?
A roundup of climate predictions for 2020 that were horribly wrong. Remember how snowfall would be a thing of the past?
Among Paul’s instances of waste were several health studies, including more than $36 million spent on studying why stress makes hair turn gray, more than $1 million spent studying whether people will eat ground-up bugs, and more than $3 million spent interviewing San Franciscans about their edible cannabis use.
As far as taxpayer dollars spent aiding other countries, $8.62 billion was spent in Afghanistan on counternarcotics efforts, more than $37 million was spent helping deal with truant Filipino youth, and more than $3 million was spent on sending Russians to American community colleges for a “gap year.”
Among funds spent on the environment, energy, and scientific research, more than $1 million was spent walking lizards on a treadmill, nearly $200,000 was spent studying how people cooperate while playing e-sport video games, and more than $2 million on developing a wearable headset to track eating behaviors.
The military had several particularly high expenditures this year that Paul listed as waste, including repurposing $1 billion in coronavirus response funds for unrelated acquisitions, more than $ 715 million in lost equipment designated for Syrians fighting ISIS, and $174 million on drones that were lost over Afghanistan.
Other eyebrow-raising expenses included more than $4 million spent on spraying alcoholic rats with bobcat urine, more than $10 million spent on would-be coronavirus test tubes that turned up as used soda bottles, and nearly $6 million spent building three bicycle storage facilities at Washington, D.C. Metro stations.
Man of the year: Jeffrey Toobin. “Toobin’s grip on the media was relentless. In 2002 he joined CNN and became the network’s chief legal analyst, a cocksure critic of Republicans…” (Hat tip: HashtagGriswold.)
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Peace has unexpectedly broken out in the Middle East, the science behind Beirut’s big boom, and more Democrats destroying their own cities.
It’s supposed to hit 105°F in Austin today. Stay frosty…
If Obama had done this, it would be front page news on every paper in America proclaiming what a “historic” peacemaker Obama was. Since no Democrat can take the credit, newspapers that hate Trump and Israel have been downplaying the news as much as possible.
Since people are always talking about “October Surprises,” here’s a possibility: Saudi Arabia and Israel signing their own peace treaty and full diplomatic recognition. Israel and the Saudis have been secretly cooperating against the Iran-Syria axis for quite some time. And now there are public signs of a thaw, including positive depictions of Jews in a new TV drama shown on Saudi TV.
New York’s richest people have fled during the lockdowns. If their kids’ tony public schools don’t offer personal instruction or look likely to maintain the chaos of rolling lockdown brownouts, those wealthy people have better choices. They can stay in their vacation houses or newly bought mansions in states that aren’t locked down. They can hire pod teachers or private schools.
And the longer they stay outside New York City and start to make friends and get used to a new place, the less likely they are to ever return. Cuomo is well aware of this.
“I literally talk to people all day long who are now in their Hamptons house who also lived here, or in their Hudson Valley house, or in their Connecticut weekend house, and I say, ‘You got to come back! We’ll go to dinner! I’ll buy you a drink! Come over, I’ll cook!’” Cuomo revealed in a recent news conference. “They’re not coming back right now. And you know what else they’re thinking? ‘If I stay there, I’ll pay a lower income tax,’ because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge.”
Reopening means swimming against their anti-Trump base and teachers union donors’ full-court press to amp school funding and slash teacher duties. That means the below-surface financial and political pressure Cuomo, Pelosi, and Schumer are under to make this kind of a reversal must be huge. It’s likely coming from not only internal polling but also early information about just how many people have left New York and New York City, as well as interpersonal intelligence from their influential social circles.
This means three things. First, the pressure to reopen schools is on everywhere now that New York is doing it. Second, Democrats’ hard opposition to school reopenings has been politically devastating. Third, all the push polls and media scaremongering promoting the idea that most parents shouldn’t and wouldn’t send their kids back to school have failed.
However, the people packing their bags are not coming to New York City — they’re fleeing it for good.
Due to increasingly squalid conditions on the Upper West Side, including two new homeless shelters packed with junkies and registered sex offenders, longtime dwellers are departing the Big Apple with no plans to ever return.
One of the Escape from New Yorkers is Elizabeth Carr, one of the area’s most vocal leaders in combating mounting crime in the well-heeled ‘hood. She was an administrator of the Facebook group NYC Moms for Safer Streets, and the face of a public-safety movement that has attracted thousands to demand better policing and city services.
“In the best of times, NYC is a hard place to live,” said Carr. “Now you have all this other stuff. It’s a question for families … to have to see a guy masturbating on the corner or explain to my kids while I’m buying diapers at Duane Reade why this guy wearing no shoes is collapsed on the floor and they’re doing CPR on him.”
She said she started planning to move before the COVID crisis and recent neighborhood developments, but officially put down stakes Sunday in North Carolina with her finance husband and three kids under 7.
“We reached our New York expiration date,” the former nonprofit exec, who’d lived on the UWS since 2007, told The Post from her new home 600 miles away. “Things weren’t heading in the right direction. What we’re seeing now isn’t at all surprising.”
Crimes committed over the past several days would’ve been unheard of a year ago in the quiet neighborhood that’s home to Lincoln Center and restaurants by Daniel Boulud. A 40-year-old woman was randomly stabbed in the 72nd Street subway station at noon Thursday; a 56-year-old man was sucker-punched while dining outdoors with his wife Wednesday night; photos were posted online of a man masturbating on the steps of the New York Historical Society; and onlookers witnessed an apparent overdose in the aisle of a Duane Reade across the street from the Lucerne Hotel.
The Lucerne, at 79th Street and Amsterdam, and the Hotel Belleclaire, at 76th Street and Broadway, were recently converted into homeless shelters, with nearly 300 vagrants between them. Ten of the men are registered sex offenders, including convicted rapists, child molesters and child-porn possessors — all living a block away from a school playground.
“Minneapolis Forcing Riot-Wrecked Businesses To Pay Property Taxes Before Getting Permits To Rebuild.” Pay property taxes for what, since they voted to disband the police. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) (Update: Fortunately, somebody handed the City of Minneapolis a clue-by-four.)
Florida Democrats have a problem: there were supposed to be more of them by now.
Following narrow losses in 2018 races for Florida governor and U.S. Senate, Democrats emerged from the midterms with a new resolve to register more voters in the nation’s largest swing state as a path to victory in 2020. Former gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, fresh off a stinging 34,000-vote loss, vowed to “flip Florida blue” by registering or “re-engaging” 1 million voters, including 200,000 new Democrats added by the Florida Democratic Party.
But those initiatives fell well short of their goals. And with seven weeks until mail ballots go out in the Nov. 3 election between presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, Florida Republicans are closer to parity in voter registration than they’ve been in decades — a dynamic that may portend yet another hard-fought, narrowly decided presidential election.
“We won the voter registration war,” Republican Party of Florida Chairman Joe Gruters said last week.
Voter registration — the grunt work of politics — sets the foundation for campaign season. For Florida Democrats, who historically have had a harder time turning out their voters than Republicans, it’s even more crucial.
When former President Barack Obama first won Florida in 2008, he entered the final months of the campaign with an advantage of more than 500,000 registered Democratic voters. That lead has steadily dwindled, dropping to about 259,000 in 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Florida by 112,000 votes.
New data posted online Wednesday by the Florida Division of Elections showed that, as of July 20, when books closed on eligible voters for the upcoming Aug. 18 primary, Democrats led Republicans in the state by 240,423 people — about 5,000 fewer than at the same point in 2018.
The videos also show an unnervingly uniform hemisphere of white propagating outward from the blast site, a dome of vicious vapor that eventually hurtles toward every person filming and announces its arrival in the audio with a crash. This hemisphere is the pressure wave produced by the explosion.
No, it’s not a shock wave. It’s a pressure wave, and that key difference affects the number of casualties expected. A shock wave goes from zero pressure to its absolute maximum pressure in literally zero seconds. The impact of a pressure wave is like hitting the ground after rolling down a steep cliff; the force of a shock wave is like hitting the ground after falling through the air and reaching terminal velocity. High explosives produce shock waves; low explosives, like ammonium nitrate, produce pressure waves, which have a bit of slope to their shape, a period of time over which the pressure increases more gradually.
Shocks, because of their fascinating and complex physics, travel faster than the speed of sound, and they cause far more damage than pressure waves. Thankfully, we know this blast did not produce a shock because the speed of the water-vapor-filled white dome can be measured.
The speed of sound in air is 343 meters per second. Based on the viewing angle and distinctive red chairs pictured in some of the later frames, I traced one of the Beirut videos posted by The Guardian to its filming location on the rooftop terrace of La Mezcaleria Rooftop Bar, and measured it to be 885 meters from the center of the blast. From that vantage, the pressure wave can be seen neatly traveling from the center of the blast first to the point halfway between the end of the pier and the edge of the long, massive gray grain silo building, a distance of 151 meters, then to the end of the pier, 262 meters, then eventually to La Mezcaleria.
By measuring the times at which the pressure wave reaches these landmarks on the video, we know that, as it blazed down the pier, its rampage occurred at a speed of only 312 meters per second. That’s slow for a bomb. Then by the time the audible crash and mayhem reached the formerly peaceful and picturesque outdoor bar, it had slowed to at most 289 meters per second. The pressure wave, slower than the 343 meters per second speed of sound, caused destruction, horror, confusion, shattered glass, torn-apart flat surfaces, and disorientation for onlookers as their ears were subjected to the rapid pressure fluctuations. But a shock wave could have caused them to drop dead from lung trauma as they watched.
Snip.
Thanks to modern technology that charge size can be calculated scientifically too, even while waiting for more complete information to trickle out, using the size of the telltale crater. Analysis of the aerial photographs of the pier shows a crater in the range of 120 to 140 meters in diameter; blast physics mixed with history tell us that to carve a chunk that size from the side of the planet requires a charge equivalent to 1.7 to 5.4 million kilograms of TNT (that’s 3.8 to 11.8 million pounds for any Americans dragging their feet on converting to metric). For reference, the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 used the equivalent of 1.8 thousand kilograms of TNT. So, Beirut was at minimum a thousand times more boom than Oklahoma City.
DC comics decided it wanted to get woke, so it’s no surprise that Warner Media decided they needed massive layoffs.
It’s a “bloodbath” at the WarnerMedia-owned DC Comics, with the Editor in Chief, the Publisher, and one third of the editorial staff sacked.
Included in the sackings is — this is a rumor as of yet, not confirmed — leftwing SJW ideologue Andy Khouri, one of the absolute cancers killing the industry, who brought in GamerGate skel Zoe Quinn to “write” “comics” for DC, despite her having no comic book experience and no writing experience (outside Depression Quest and a failed kickstarter). Khouri filled DC’s Vertigo imprint with angry yet untalented SJW freaks; Vertigo was cancelled within a year.
DC had already laid off people last year, and now has to cut even more. Co-publisher Dan DiDio was fired last year, leaving the other co-publisher, Jim Lee, supposedly in charge; now Jim Lee has been pushed out of that position, though he’ll probably be kept in some other role. (He’s a major comic book artist.)
Why did this happen to DC Comics?
Let’s ask Wonder Woman and see if she can tell us.
Oh yeah, everyone involved in this deserved to lose their job:
America:
As a creative Director, this is one of the best ads I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen and worked on a lot across different industries.@realDonaldTrumppic.twitter.com/KcTje7ESIO
Driving back from a barbecue road trip Saturday, I saw a Trump 2020 billboard, which was simplicity itself:
TRUMP: JOBS
BIDEN: MOBS
This is pretty interesting:
Justice Kavanaugh issued a tactical nuke on George Soros & Globalism.
SCOTUS has ruled Organizations affiliated to the “Open Society” lose the protection of 1A and can be treated as international threats as this impacts supporters in the US and abroad.
— The Red-Headed Libertarian™ (@TRHLofficial) August 13, 2020
Google puts its thumb on the scale yet again:
I assumed this was a joke, but it’s real: if you Google “socialism and racism,” the top result you’re offered will be “capitalism and racism.” Big Tech gets more openly ideological by the day. And weird that one of the world’s most profitable companies hates capitalism so much. pic.twitter.com/vhSqflY74g
“I know just the thing to make him complete: Some bacon! I don’t know if it’s cooked, I don’t want to know if it’s cooked. All I need to know is that I get to give him some creepy bacon fingers!
Wants no part of the goat rodeo:
Good morning, Twitter. When you're just trying to get your drunk friend Steve home again and he wants no part of it. pic.twitter.com/5nQv467UnL
Sometimes you do calculations and get a result that you know must be wrong, and you report them anyway so others can spot your errors. Reports had the explosion shattering windows 10 kilometers away, and doing damage to the Beirut airport, so I set out to calculate the explosive yield using the Nukemap, based on shattering windows at the airport (the 1 psi overpressure ring) and ignoring radiation effects. (The nukemap interface is far more user friendly than the “Nuclear bomb Effects Computer” at the back of Samuel Glasstone’s The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.)
Here’s the map with the resulting 1 psi ring just reaching the airport:
That’s a blast effect map for a 300 kiloton blast.
That has to be wrong, since the devastation is nowhere near that immense, and I can’t fathom even having enough space to store that much ANFO or PETN in one location. (And it was obviously a non-nuclear blast, due to lack of radiation and the color of the blast itself.)
So let’s look at some comparable explosions:
The 2015 Tianjin blast, consisting of about 800 tons of ammonium nitrate:
It’s reported that the port is under unofficial Hazbollah control, and wide-spread rumor is that it was a Hezbollah munitions or rocket factory that went up, but I haven’t seen any confirmation of this.
In the fire before the big explosion, fireworks or munitions are clearly seen going off.
The speed of the blast makes me think it was not TNT or a BLEVE. That explosion went up fast, and all at once. Here’s a Tweeter that suggests it was ammonia nitrate:
CHEMISTRY FACT: Explosives have characteristic "detonation velocities" at which shockwaves expand. Smartphone video records at 30 FPS, so the adjacent frames here suggest the front expands at ~100 m/(1/30 sec), or 3,000 m/sec. Consistent with ammonium nitrate, not black powder. pic.twitter.com/DDoVJxY3gP
And indeed that’s what the government has come out to say it is:
BREAKING: Lebanese Prime Minister says #Beirut explosions caused by an estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate left unsecured for 6 years in a warehouse. He vows to punish officials responsible. 50+ dead, 3,000 injured, hospitals overwhelmed.
But how do you abandon 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate? I know Lebanon is not exactly run on western efficiency, but that much exploding stuff just lying around for six years does rather strain credibility.
But to return to the title question: ammonium nitrate is roughly 42% as effective as TNT. Which means the explosion would have been about 1.155 kilotons, or less than 1/15th the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Assuming that’s correct, here’s the revised nukemap blast:
Somehow that blast radius seems too small, as the damage and overpressure wave seemed to travel much farther than shown here. But you wouldn’t want to stand next to it.
I wrote Lebanon expert Michael Totten to ask about the blast, and he said he heard that the Lebanese Army has been storing confiscated high explosives there since 2014. If we assume that it’s ANFO rather than straight ammonium nitrate, that’s about 72% as effective as TNT, and with just under twice the detonation velocity of ammonium nitrate. That yields a blast of 1.98 kilotons. The nukemap for that:
That seems to accord a bit better with blast observations.
So what did it take to turn spineless lefty Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler into a law-and-order guy? Trying to create an “autonomous zone” on his own street. “By 1 a.m., elaborate barricades had been erected. But in the early hours of Thursday morning, police moved into the area, declaring it an unlawful assembly. Portland Police estimated about 50 people were in the area when they dispersed the autonomous zone.”
It’s certainly frustrating to watch a pack of reeking leftist scumbags declare a portion of an American city an “autonomous zone” – what is it with Democrats and their secession fetish? – but do not get frustrated because Donald Trump has not sent the 101st Airborne in to powerwash the human grunge from Seattle’s feces-bedecked streets.
That’s what the Democrats want. And Trump – a better strategic thinker than all the media geniuses, hack politicians, and Afghan War-losing generals who cry about him – is not only not going to give them the victory they crave. He’s going to jam their cheesy plan down their throats.
The libs’ plan to win in November corresponds to Trump’s plan to crush them yet again. Skeptical? Consider this. In the five years since he rode down that escalator bringin’ hell with him, how many times have they come at Trump and won? Zero. He’s spent half a decade on the edge of doom and he’s still here. Why would you think that the walls are suddenly closing in now? You shouldn’t.
Let’s understand the strategic scenario. The long-term strategic objective of the leftists is to turn the United States into Venezuela, and they want to be Maduro. The major strategic objective that will put them in position to do so is victory in the November elections. Everything happening right now is part of their overall strategy to achieve that objective. But what kind of operation are they using to achieve that objective? There are two types of operations relevant here – kinetic and information. A kinetic operation is actual warfare. It’s violence designed to defeat the enemy and cause his surrender by either physically destroying him or occupying his territory and compelling surrender. An information operation is designed to affect the perceptions, and thereby the actions, of the target. Kinetic ops tend to do something to the enemy; and info op tends to get the target to do something to himself.
Elections are usually information operations. They attempt to build a narrative and play on perceptions and cause the target to take the action that will lead to victory. That is, get the target (the electorate) vote for the candidate the info operator wants elected.
Okay, so what is the 2020 elections, with the rioting, vandalism, violence and occupations?
This still an information operation, not a kinetic one.
They want to convince us we are powerless, that everyone else supports their commie agenda, that we cannot win. Their tactics are designed to create that impression and crush our morale. These include the 24/7 media hype, the outright media lies, the movie stars with their dumb PSAs, the staged statue attacks, the corporate solidarity proclamations, the social media cancellations, and the craven kneeling by people who are supposed to stand up for us. But another tactic, familiar to any student of insurgencies, is to provoke an overreaction by those in power in order to undermine its moral authority. They want is to make us (including the president) think this is a kinetic operation, and get our side to make fundamental strategic errors by failing to recognize the true nature of the threat. They hope that such a mismatch between perception and reality will then lead to gravely damaging blunders. One of those would be Trump succumbing to his legit frustration and sending in a bunch of federal troops to crack skulls in Seattle.
Defining this insurgency as a kinetic operation supports the leftists’ information operation goal of making Americans perceive the situation as out of control, of there being chaos, and of making the election of Grandpa Badfinger being the only thing that will resolve the situation. But there is no kinetic situation to resolve – at least none that is strategically significant in a kinetic sense. Despite the hype, the protests may have involved a peak of 2 million people across the country – out of 330 million. That’s nothing kinetically; it’s significant informationally because it is pushed by so many cultural influencers. The scurvy scumbags of Antifa hold essentially no ground except the turf they are physically standing on at the moment, and that is minuscule. Even the hilarious Road Warrior Republic of Seattle is not even a rounding error of a rounding error in terms of US territory. It’s significant only in the context of an information operation.
Many of us cons are furious that Trump is “doing nothing.” This is the wrong thing to think. Trump is only doing nothing if this is a kinetic operation; because this is an information operation, not going kinetic (sending in the troops) is doing something. And in fact, Trump is employing the law enforcement component of his kinetic assets by having the feds wait and arrest Antifa types after the protests end, and hitting them with hardcore federal rioting-related charges. Previously, they would get ticketed and released; now, looking at a five-to-ten stretch, the lawyers their daddies hired to get these sunshine anarchists out of their beefs are going to be advising them to roll over so they can start back up at Cornell in September and not at Leavenworth.
Who benefits then from our national nervous breakdown that never seems to end?
It is the globalist elites who still govern most of our society today, despite the invasion of Donald Trump.
And those elites wish to continue that rule through what they fervently hope will come as the outcome of these demonstrations—more government control, particularly government control that helps them.
They have seen it done elsewhere with results they might want to emulate, at least until recently.
Call it China Envy.
The Chinese Communist Party has, over the years, found a way to regulate their society to an extraordinary degree via a form of communism that maximizes profits and power for those (party) elites while holding the masses largely at bay.
No wonder our elites are jealous.
People call ours “globalists” but they’re not really global. They’re selectively global, but actually just greedy and power-hungry, like the ChiComs.
Whether planned or not, or partially planned, the current confluence of catastrophes has offered them an opportunity to advance their cause against their natural adversary, Mr. Trump.
In macro, that is the landscape of election 2020—the globalist elites represented, for the moment anyway, by Joe Biden versus the American people, represented by Donald Trump.
Many of those American people, heavily influenced by the media and repelled by the president’s rhetoric, do not realize that he is representing them, but he is. Ignorant, often willfully, they oppose him tooth and nail.
An equal number, or possibly larger, as the one million plus requesting tickets to his Tulsa rally indicates, supports Mr. Trump.
We are in the midst of a Battle Royale for the soul of our nation, whether it remains more or less the democratic republic the Founders envisioned or becomes an Americanized version of what has been evolved by the CCP.
If the latter, ironically, then such groups as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa will be kicked to the curb once victory has been achieved and secured.
It’s always the same thing: Our newspapers are full of intense interest in Harvard’s admissions standards but have very little to say about New York City’s dropout rate. People can’t help being fascinated with themselves and their peers. If you want to know what is on the minds of the leaders of the American ruling class, it’s no secret. They’ll tell you, if you ask — and if you don’t.
George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police. More than a third of black students will drop out of high school in Milwaukee. But Forbes has announced a change in its in-house stylebook and will henceforth honor the woke convention of uppercase Black vs. lowercase white. And George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police.
Oh, but they got James Bennet, the opinion editor at the New York Times. And surely that is something? It is, indeed, a very useful illustration of the E-Class vs. S-Class divide. Bennet was fired after purportedly endangering the lives of black Times staffers — a charge no mentally normal adult actually takes seriously — by publishing a guest column about the riots and the Insurrection Act by Senator Tom Cotton. The campaign to end Bennet did not come from America’s poor black communities as the workers of the world looked up, stunned, from page A24 of the New York Times — the venom came straight and undiluted from 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y., with Bennet’s underlings and juniors more or less putting him on an ice floe and pushing him out to sea.
Bennet was pushed out on behalf of marginalized black Americans, which necessitated that Bennet immediately be replaced by . . . a well-off white woman who went to Georgetown and Columbia and won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about that great loathsome theater of American middle-class anxiety: restaurants. (“The real price of inexpensive menu items,” the Pulitzer people summarized.) Well-off white women from elite colleges run the diversity-and-sensitivity racket like the 17th-century Dutch ran the tulip racket, like the De Beers cartel used to run diamonds. Big Caitlyn is getting paid. Affluent white women are the main E-Class beneficiaries of the current headhunting project to clear a little room at the top, just as they have historically been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative-action programs, contracting set-asides, and other programs to help out the poor disenfranchised Georgetown alumni out there in the cold and dark.
“Police, Fire Reportedly Refused to Respond to Crime in Progress in Seattle’s Breakaway CHOP.” “This is where ‘defund the police’ will lead not just in Seattle, but wherever it’s thoughtlessly implemented. Probably not all the way to the segregationist, secessionist CHOP, but to crime-ridden streets into which police and fire are more circumspect about intervening.”
these riots and their associated melodrama might most accurately be called the Nov. 3 riots. It’s the prospect of the election, especially the possibility that President Donald Trump will be reelected, which provides the fuel for the current hysteria.
But Simon is right. A solid majority of voters are disgusted by what they see. There is a large overdraft on the country’s budget of white guilt. Expect a foreclosure on the account Nov. 3. Yes, yes, the situation is fluid and a week, as Harold Wilson once observed, is a long time in politics. But a biopsy of the body politic in mid-June 2020 doesn’t bode well for the old man in the basement or scriptwriters Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
The longer this madness continues, the more likely it is that the president will enjoy a victory of historic proportions.
Another caveat about all those “Oh my God, Wuhan coronavirus cases are spiking in Florida,” etc. stories, take a look at these statistics. Assuming they’re accurate (a big assumption), new cases are going up (not spiking per se), but deaths are going down. It really looks like cases aren’t spiking, we’re just detecting milder and milder cases of it thanks to widespread testing.
Instead of #BlackLivesMatters, how about actually defending black lives? “National African American Gun Association (NAAGA) Membership Grows as Members Purchase Ammo in Record Numbers.” Good. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
Good news in a sea of bad: Austin Police Chief Brian Manley is not getting the axe. Finally, a scalp the radical left didn’t take.
Antifa members arrested in Austin for looting. “Lisa Hogan, Samuel Miller, and Skye Elder were arrested last week and charged with various state jail felonies after they smashed into a boarded-up Target, destroyed and ripped out surveillance cameras, and looted the store, stealing and damaging over $20,000 in property.” The mugshot:
Exactly the sort of Antifa winners you would expect to loot a Target
Chuck-E-Cheese files for bankruptcy. When they had to make it on the quality of their food, they were doomed…
Also filing for bankruptcy: 24 Hour Fitness. Hard to make a living when the government outlaws your business model. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Rocket fuel storage facility explosion in #China, the air catches fire before the explosion, the orange smoke is a clear indication of rocket fuel. The Shockwave shatters the glass of the nearby textile mill. You will not find this story on Chinese "news"
An explosion has ripped the facade off a townhouse in the Belgian town of Verviers. While it’s possible it was a gas leak, the town “has recently appeared in the headlines in connection with the mastermind of the Paris terror attacks in November. Abdelhamid Abaaoud was one of the leaders of a terrorist cell in the town. During a raid on the cell in January 2015, two of its members were killed.” Which makes me think that radical Islamic terrorism is yet again the culprit (either intentionally, or via premature detonation of an IED), rather than, say, radical Flemish separatists. (Mutters) Stupid Flanders…
Injuries have been reported after an explosion tore the facade from house in Verviers, Belgium.
Photo by @TheateCpic.twitter.com/t6wXjMKtem
