Forgotten Weapons
Published 30 Apr 2018The CR-21 was a private effort to create a new rifle for the South African military in the 1990s. Bullpup designs were all the rage at the time (Austria has the AUG, France had the FAMAS, the UK had the SA80, etc), and so a company called Lyttelton Engineering Works (now part of Denel Land Systems) created a bullpup conversion design for the South African R4 (Galil). It was given a very fluid, futuristic look, and equipped with a fiber optic optic without any iron sights. The action and magazines remained original R4/Galil, however.
The weapon was promoted to the South African military as an economical upgrade package for the R4 rifles already in service, but was met with little interest. Further efforts to sell the weapon to South African police and international military or security customers similarly met with no success. In total, only 200 complete rifles were made, plus parts for another 200. They achieved some notoriety in fictional media because of their looks, including use in the film District 9. As often happens, however, becoming popular in film or video games does not equate to commercial success.
Many thanks to the anonymous collector who let me take a look at this piece and bring you a video on it!
(more…)
February 17, 2023
Vektor CR21: South Africa’s Futuristic Bullpup
QotD: Risk mitigation in pre-modern farming communities
Let’s start with the first sort of risk mitigation: reducing the risk of failure. We can actually detect a lot of these strategies by looking for deviations in farming patterns from obvious efficiency. Modern farms are built for efficiency – they typically focus on a single major crop (whatever brings the best returns for the land and market situation) because focusing on a single crop lets you maximize the value of equipment and minimize other costs. They rely on other businesses to provide everything else. Such farms tend to be geographically concentrated – all the fields together – to minimize transit time.
Subsistence farmers generally do not do this. Remember, the goal is not to maximize profit, but to avoid family destruction through starvation. If you only farm one crop (the “best” one) and you get too little rain or too much, or the temperature is wrong – that crop fails and the family starves. But if you farm several different crops, that mitigates the risk of any particular crop failing due to climate conditions, or blight (for the Romans, the standard combination seems to have been a mix of wheat, barley and beans, often with grapes or olives besides; there might also be a small garden space. Orchards might double as grazing-space for a small herd of animals, like pigs). By switching up crops like this and farming a bit of everything, the family is less profitable (and less engaged with markets, more on that in a bit), but much safer because the climate conditions that cause one crop to fail may not impact the others. A good example is actually wheat and barley – wheat is more nutritious and more valuable, but barley is more resistant to bad weather and dry-spells; if the rains don’t come, the wheat might be devastated, but the barley should make it and the family survives. On the flip side, if it rains too much, well the barley is likely to be on high-ground (because it likes the drier ground up there anyway) and so survives; that’d make for a hard year for the family, but a survivable one.
Likewise – as that example implies – our small farmers want to spread out their plots. And indeed, when you look at land-use maps of villages of subsistence farmers, what you often find is that each household farms many small plots which are geographically distributed (this is somewhat less true of the Romans, by the by). Farming, especially in the Mediterranean (but more generally as well) is very much a matter of micro-climates, especially when it comes to rainfall and moisture conditions (something that is less true on the vast flat of the American Great Plains, by the by). It is frequently the case that this side of the hill is dry while that side of the hill gets plenty of rain in a year and so on. Consequently, spreading plots out so that each family has say, a little bit of the valley, a little bit of the flat ground, a little bit of the hilly area, and so on shields each family from catastrophe is one of those micro-climates should completely fail (say, the valley floods, or the rain doesn’t fall and the hills are too dry for anything to grow).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!”, A collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-24.
February 16, 2023
The mass spell to destroy Hogwarts Legacy turns out to be a squib
All the angry people on social media had a new thing to be angry about: the release of a new online game based on the works of she-who-must-not-be-named (that’d be J.K. Rowling if you haven’t been keeping up with the woke’s ledger book of cancelled persons). They’d gather in their mighty legions, denounce the evil woman and the tech company would shiver and shake and then apologize for offending them and pull the game from the market, just like so many other companies had fallen to their online rage before.
It hasn’t quite worked out that way, as Tom Knighton relates:
The extreme left, those we term as “woke”, like to think they have a great deal of power. They think they’re the majority of the nation, and that they can shift the world based on their own whims.
And, in the past, it sure looked like it.
They’d get on Twitter and scream in outrage and brands would back down. They’d issue apologies and capitulate with the mob.
Then JK Rowling got on their bad side. She doesn’t think transwomen are women, that they haven’t lived with the struggles that women grow up with.
So, they decided to destroy anything they can associate with her.
That included the new video game, Hogwarts Legacy. Before the game came out, they tried to sabotage it on Steam, describing it as a “genocide simulator”.
I’ll be honest, that made me want to play the game. Apparently, I was far from alone.
Hogwarts Legacy has got off to a very big start at UK games retail, and is comfortably the No.1 game of the week (GfK data).
It is the biggest launch for any Harry Potter game ever, with sales 64% higher than the previous best — Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone from 2001. In fact, the biggest week for a Harry Potter game wasn’t a launch week at all, it was the second week of the Philosopher’s Stone (due to hype around the movie). Even compared to that week, Hogwarts Legacy was still bigger by 2%.
This result is more impressive when you consider this is just for physical sales. Hogwarts Legacy would have received a substantial number of digital downloads (that data will come later in the week), whereas Philosopher’s Stone didn’t have any digital sales back in 2001. Therefore, the success will be even more pronounced once all the data is in.
In other words, the woke don’t have the pull they like to believe they do.
In a rational world, companies would see this and take it to heart: despite their apparent popularity on some social media sites, the very very woke are a tiny layer of froth on the ocean of non-woke customers. It’s often said that the terminally online think that Twitter is the real world — which is why Elon Musk taking over their preferred online megaphone was so traumatic to so many of them — but they’re mostly bellowing at one another, not at the population as a whole.
Cut the Sliding Dovetail Joint with common hand tools
Rex Krueger
Published 15 Feb 2023There’s another dovetail that you might not know about. Learn to cut it and use it.
(more…)
A modern irregular verb: I mis-spoke. You spread misinformation. He has been banned from social media
I derive my headline from the original words of Bernard Woolley: “That’s one of those irregular verbs, isn’t it? I give confidential security briefings. You leak. He has been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act.” It was a joke in Yes, Minister, but as Jon Miltimore shows, it’s a model for how the powers-that-be want to treat how information is shared on social media:
As Reuters reported in a recent fact-check, Mr. Gore was guilty of misrepresenting scientific data — or “spreading ‘misinformation'”.
In 2009, many responded playfully to Gore’s faux pas.
“Like most politicians, practicing and reformed, Al Gore has been known to stretch the truth on occasion”, NPR noted, adding that Gore had also claimed he’d helped create the internet.
Today, misinformation is treated in a much different way — at least in some instances. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many writers and scientists who questioned the government’s use of lockdowns, mask mandates, enforced social distancing, and vaccine mandates were banned from social media platforms while others lost their jobs.
San Francisco attorney Michael Senger was permanently banned from Twitter after calling the government’s pandemic response “a giant fraud”. Prior to him, it was former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson who got the boot after questioning the efficacy of vaccines in preventing COVID-19 transmission. Months earlier it was author Naomi Wolf, a political advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
All of these accounts were reinstated after Elon Musk purchased the company. Twitter is hardly alone, however. Facebook and YouTube also announced policies banning the spread of COVID misinformation, particularly information related to vaccines, which is what got Drs. Peter McCullough and Robert Malone ostracized and banned.
Some may argue these policies are vital, since they protect readers from false information. However, there is nothing that says Big Tech can only ban information that is false. On the contrary, in court proceedings Twitter has claimed it has “the right to ban any user any time for any reason” and can discriminate “on the basis of religion, or gender, or sexual preference, or physical disability, or mental disability”.
Facebook, meanwhile, has argued in court that the army of fact-checkers they employ to protect readers from false information are merely sharing “opinions”, and are therefore exempt from defamation claims.
[…]
What Big Tech is doing is concerning, but the fact that this censorship is taking place in coordination with the federal government makes it doubly so.
In July, in arguably the most anti-free speech pronouncement made at the White House in modern history, White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted the White House is “flagging problematic posts for Facebook”.
“We are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team”, Psaki explained. (Today we know that these companies are staffed with dozens of former CIA and FBI officials.)
All of this is being done in the name of science, but let’s be clear: there’s nothing scientific about censorship.
Twist Solution | Paul Sellers
Paul Sellers
Published 7 Oct 2022Take the guesswork out of truing up a twisted board by setting lines that guarantee dead-on accuracy. When we buy wood, it is often too twisted to work with, so we must remove the twist, cup, and bow.
This quick tip gives you lines to work to with only minimal measuring and a positive outcome.
(more…)
QotD: Obituaries
Most obituary notices are quite properly mealymouthed, the word “irreplaceable” being a standby. Strictly speaking, it is never false, for no one is exactly the same as anyone else, and therefore everyone is irreplaceable. “Sadly missed” is another favorite. “Yes, but by whom and for how long?” one is inclined to ask. Frankness is not the first thing that one looks for or expects in obituary notices.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Obit Snit”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-06-09.
February 15, 2023
J.K. Rowling’s critics reach the “Burn the witch!” phase
In The Free Press, Megan Phelps-Roper introduces a new audio series featuring extensive interaction with J.K. Rowling herself:
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books were insanely popular among Millennials until she had the temerity to say things the Trans* activists hated. Now, they try to sell customized copies of her books that omit her name completely.
J.K. Rowling is arguably the most successful author in the history of publishing, with the possible exception of God. And “Harry Potter” was a kind of bible for my generation. Since its publication beginning in the late ’90s, the series has taught tens of millions of children about virtues like loyalty, courage, and love — about the inclusion of outsiders and the celebration of difference. The books illustrated the idea of moral complexity, how a person who may at first appear sinister can turn out to be a hero after all.
The author herself became part of the legend, too. A broke, abused, and depressed single mother — writing in longhand at cafes across Edinburgh while her baby girl slept in a stroller beside her — she had spun a tale that begat a global phenomenon. If “Harry Potter” was a bible, then Rowling became a kind of saint.
When she gave the Harvard commencement address in 2008, she was introduced as a social, moral, and political inspiration. Her speech that day was partly about imagination: “the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared”.
“We do not need magic to transform our world,” Rowling told the rapt audience. “We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already.”
The uproarious applause that greeted her in 2008 is hard to imagine today. It’s hard to imagine Harvard — let alone any prestigious American university — welcoming Rowling. Indeed, I’m not sure she’d be allowed to give a reading at many local libraries.
That’s because to many, Rowling has since become a kind of Voldemort — the villain of villains in her own stories.
It all blew up in the summer of 2020.
“‘People who menstruate'”, Rowling wrote on Twitter, quoting a headline. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
She continued: “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”
It’s hard to capture the breadth of the firestorm that followed.
Medieval French Toast
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 14 Feb 2023
(more…)
Refuting The End of History and the Last Man
Freddie deBoer responds to a recent commentary defending the thesis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man:
… Ned Resnikoff critiques a recent podcast by Hobbes and defends Francis Fukuyama’s concept of “the end of history”. In another case of strange bedfellows, the liberal Resnikoff echoes conservative Richard Hanania in his defense of Fukuyama — echoes not merely in the fact that he defends Fukuyama too, but in many of the specific terms and arguments of Hanania’s defense. And both make the same essential mistake, failing to understand the merciless advance of history and how it ceaselessly grinds up humanity’s feeble attempts at macrohistoric understanding. And, yes, to answer Resnikoff’s complaint, I’ve read the book, though it’s been a long time.
The big problem with The End of History and the Last Man is that history is long, and changes to the human condition are so extreme that the terms we come up with to define that condition are inevitably too contextual and limited to survive the passage of time. We’re forever foolishly deciding that our current condition is the way things will always be. For 300,000 years human beings existed as hunter-gatherers, a vastly longer period of time than we’ve had agriculture and civilization. Indeed, if aliens were to take stock of the basic truth of the human condition, they would likely define us as much by that hunter-gatherer past as our technological present; after all, that was our reality for far longer. Either way – those hunter-gatherers would have assumed that their system wasn’t going to change, couldn’t comprehend it changing, didn’t see it as a system at all, and for 3000 centuries, they would have been right. But things changed.
And for thousands of years, people living at the height of human civilization thought that there was no such thing as an economy without slavery; it’s not just that they had a moral defense of slavery, it’s that they literally could not conceive of the daily functioning of society without slavery. But things changed. For most humans for most of modern history, the idea of dynastic rule and hereditary aristocracy was so intrinsic and universal that few could imagine an alternative. But things changed. And for hundreds of years, people living under feudalism could not conceive of an economy that was not fundamentally based on the division between lord and serf, and in fact typically talked about that arrangement as being literally ordained by God. But things changed. For most of human history, almost no one questioned the inherent and unalterable second-class status of women. Civilization is maybe 12,000 years old; while there’s proto-feminist ideas to be found throughout history, the first wave of organized feminism is generally defined as only a couple hundred years old. It took so long because most saw the subordination of women as a reflection of inherent biological reality. But women lead countries now. You see, things change.
And what Fukuyama and Resnikoff and Hanania etc are telling you is that they’re so wise that they know that “but then things changed” can never happen again. Not at the level of the abstract social system. They have pierced the veil and see a real permanence where humans of the past only ever saw a false one. I find this … unlikely. Resnikoff writes “Maybe you think post-liberalism is coming; it just has yet to be born. I guess that’s possible.” Possible? The entire sweep of human experience tells us that change isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable; not just change at the level of details, but changes to the basic fabric of the system.
The fact of the matter is that, at some point in the future, human life will be so different from what it’s like now, terms like liberal democracy will have no meaning. In 200 years, human beings might be fitted with cybernetic implants in utero by robots and jacked into a virtual reality that we live in permanently, while artificial intelligence takes care of managing the material world. In that virtual reality we experience only a variety of pleasures that are produced through direct stimulation of the nervous system. There is no interaction with other human beings as traditionally conceived. What sense would the term “liberal democracy” even make under those conditions? There are scientifically-plausible futures that completely undermine our basic sense of what it means to operate as human beings. Is one of those worlds going to emerge? I don’t know! But then, Fukuyama doesn’t know either, and yet one of us is making claims of immense certainty about the future of humanity. And for the record, after the future that we can’t imagine comes an even more distant future we can’t conceive of.
People tend to say, but the future you describe is so fanciful, so far off. To which I say, first, human technological change over the last two hundred years dwarfs that of the previous two thousand, so maybe it’s not so far off, and second, this is what you invite when you discuss the teleological endpoint of human progress! You started the conversation! If you define your project as concerning the final evolution of human social systems, you necessarily include the far future and its immense possibilities. Resnikoff says, “the label ‘post-liberalism’ is something of an intellectual IOU” and offers similar complaints that no one’s yet defined what a post-liberal order would look like. But from the standpoint of history, this is a strange criticism. An 11th-century Andalusian shepherd had no conception of liberal democracy, and yet here we are in the 21st century, talking about liberal democracy as “the object of history”. How could his limited understanding of the future constrain the enormous breadth of human possibility? How could ours? To buy “the end of history”, you have to believe that we are now at a place where we can accurately predict the future where millennia of human thinkers could not. And it’s hard to see that as anything other than a kind of chauvinism, arrogance.
Fukuyama and “the end of history” are contingent products of a moment, blips in history, just like me. That’s all any of us gets to be, blips. The challenge is to have humility enough to recognize ourselves as blips. The alternative is acts of historical chauvinism like The End of History.
Ancient Rome’s Naked Fertility Festival (Lupercalia)
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 8 Feb 2022
(more…)
QotD: The divine right of kings
England’s James I, for instance, was a deeply weird dude. Though he wrote a whole book about his divine right to rule, he kept his weirdness sufficiently in check so as not to alienate his court. Alas, his heir didn’t bother, and we know how that turned out. And so it went with just about any divine right monarch — the more people who actually saw him, the flimsier the theory seemed. History is full of examples of kingdoms “ruled” by insane kings, but not too many of kingdoms thriving when the people knew the king was a lunatic. Feebleminded monarchs are generally kept under lock and key by their courtiers, or they end up Epsteined.
Even democracies once understood this. Pick any 19th century American legislator, for example. As P.J. O’Rourke once said about rock stars, to call one of these guys a drunken, borderline-illiterate pervert just means you’ve read his autobiography. But they knew enough to keep it sufficiently in check around the voters, so that so long as they didn’t actually Chappaquiddick someone, they’d face no repercussions.
Speaking of Chappaquiddick, the Media has always been complicit in the great game of Fool-the-Rubes. They only do it for Democrats now, of course, but that’s the real problem these days: the Media has been doing all this for so long, and so successfully, that they no longer feel the need to bother. Just as Charles I decided to let his freak flag fly because hey, why not, I’m the king, so the Democrat-Media complex went all-in in 2008. You watch these guys — Don Lemon, say, mocking Trump voters as illiterate hicks — and the expression on their face is one of relief. It feels good to finally let it all out, and the more you do it, the better it feels.
Severian, “Rule by Lunatic”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-29.
February 14, 2023
Are you not a PATRIOT? Do you hate FREEDOM?
I sometimes wonder if any bill ever gets passed in the United States without a catchy acronym anymore. Rob Henderson notes the anti-patriotic PATRIOT act and the anti-freedom FREEDOM act as examples of bills named in a way to almost exactly invert the true purpose of the legislation:
Many fully-grown adults have never developed the ability to think beyond words. Others are keenly aware of how easily people fall for this language game. And tactically exploit this mental weakness.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. William Shirer, the American journalist and author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, described his experiences as a war correspondent in Nazi Germany:
The strangest variant of this way of thinking is the belief that just because a word or a term sounds good, the reality behind it is also unquestionably good.
In October of 2001, the Bush Administration famously decided to expand state surveillance. This allowed federal agencies to monitor domestic telephone conversations, online activity, email, and financial records, among other intrusions, without a court order.
And what did they call this decision? The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act.
USA PATRIOT Act.
Better known as the PATRIOT Act. And if you were against it, what did supporters say that your criticisms implied?
In June of 2015, the PATRIOT Act expired. The Obama Administration then restored most of the provisions under the title Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act.
USA FREEDOM.
Better known as the FREEDOM Act. And if you were against it, what did supporters say that your criticisms implied?
There’s a country in which the first three names are “Democratic”, “People’s”, and “Republic”. The first and third words essentially mean the same as the middle — this state belongs to the people, and represents them.
In the modern era, government legitimacy is derived from this concept — representation of the people.
So the name of this particular country basically begins: “Legitimate Legitimate Legitimate”. Officially it known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Sounds like a lovely place. It’s more commonly known as North Korea.
The Soviet Union was officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
China today is officially known as the “People’s Republic of China”.
Who could be against entities with names containing words like Republic, Democratic, People’s, and Union? They sound so nice. Even socialist is cleverly named — who could be against anything with the word “social” in it?
There’s a violent organization that calls themselves Antifa. Short for antifascist.
There are people who will say with a straight face that if you criticize Antifa, then you are a fascist. Or they will imply that you harbor fascist sympathies.
Interestingly, as William Shirer notes in the book referenced above, Antifa collaborated with the Nazis to help elect Adolf Hitler. Antifa has its origins in Germany, and, as a communist organization, their primary goal was to accelerate the forces of history. Antifa in the 1930s aimed to bring forth the revolution. They partnered with the Nazis to overthrow the Social Democrats who controlled the Weimar Republic. Antifa supporters believed that a fascist regime was a necessary step to end capitalism and usher in a communist utopia.
During this period, fascist was used as an epithet against capitalist society and anyone opposed to communism. They used this term to describe the center-left party in control of the Weimar Republic. As Stalin put it, “Fascism and social democracy are twin brothers, social democracy is only a wing of fascism.”
You need a tailor. And a cobbler.
At least, that’s Tom Knighton‘s take:
“The Desbecker-Block Tailoring Co. Buffalo, N. Y. Tailors to all America. We’ve a man on the spot. He takes your measure – we do the rest.” by Boston Public Library is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
.
I’m now of the opinion that every man needs a tailor and a cobbler to go along with their barber.
Why? Because quality has a quantity all its own.
Yeah, I know that phrase usually goes the other way around, but we’re not talking about warfare where you need a lot of tanks and airplanes. We’re talking about clothes and accouterments. You can only wear one suit and one pair of shoes at a time. You’ve only got one head to wear a hat on. You don’t need 500 of each to have a well-rounded wardrobe.
So why do we? Why do we, as a society, insist on buying so much so cheaply?
What’s more, are you someone who supports those in the trades while simultaneously engaging in activity that threatens some of them?
Look, I get that not everyone can drop $500 for shoes or $5,000 for suits. I sure can’t, after all, so there’s no way I’d expect anyone else to. In fact, no one has to do any such thing.
However, what they can do is buy the best quality they can find, particularly in a grade that can be repaired and/or altered if needed.
We can start utilizing these tradesmen, hopefully needing them more often than our plumbers or auto mechanics. Not only will we dress better, but we’ll also show more young people there are other ways to go forward in life without spending tens of thousands of dollars to get a college degree that qualifies them for little more than to ask, “Do you want fries with that?”
I’m certainly in agreement with Tom on where the needle should rest on the quality-quantity meter, in that I’ve always preferred to buy higher quality whenever I could afford it rather than cheaper but lower quality items. It’s mostly paid off for me, although others in my family were of the other persuasion, where “more now” was better than “lasts longer”.
In a later post, he quotes Sam Vimes and again, I largely agree:
Despite that, I can buy quality. I may have to pay a bit more upfront, but it’s like the Vimes theory of boots written by Sir Terry Pratchett that’s been talked about here a couple of times:
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
So, spend the money on the leather boots and skip having to spend it later.
As a result, though, that’s kind of luxurious.
China’s awkward actions on the world stage do not charm the neighbours
CDR Salamander explains why the BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China) “coalition” is as unlikely to occur in the real world as any other opium pipe-dream:
Yes, the USA and Canada had our Balloons of February, but in the last year or so, what has China been doing to seem like a pleasant alternative to the United States to the rest of the world?
Her largest neighbor? They get sticks:
The root cause is an ill-defined, 3,440km (2,100-mile)-long disputed border.
Rivers, lakes and snowcaps along the frontier mean the line can shift, bringing soldiers face to face at many points, sparking a confrontation.
The two nations are also competing to build infrastructure along the border, which is also known as the Line of Actual Control. India’s construction of a new road to a high-altitude air base is seen as one of the main triggers for a deadly 2020 clash with Chinese troops.
How bad is the situation?
Despite military-level talks, tensions continue. In December 2022 troops clashed for the first time in more than a year.
It happened near the Tawang sector of Arunachal Pradesh state, the eastern tip of India. Some soldiers suffered minor injuries.
De-escalation work has taken place since a major clash in June 2020. The Galwan Valley battle — fought with sticks and clubs, not guns — was the first fatal confrontation between the two sides since 1975.
At least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers died.
Another face-off in January 2021 left troops on both sides injured. It took place near India’s Sikkim state, between Bhutan and Nepal.
The “I” and “C” in the B.R.I.C. are not going to be close friends, ever — one of the reasons I roll my eyes at those who propose the BRIC nations as some kind of power block — something only slightly sillier than the Cold War “Non Aligned Movement.”
With the “B” being the basket case Brazil (always the nation of the future, and always will be), and the “R” being Russia, I mean, child please.
Another nation that if the PRC was just slightly more subtle and less arrogant they might have a chance to make things more difficult for the USA-Japan-Australia defense concerns is The Philippines. They had a window in the last couple of decades, but … if they’re doing this;
The PRC Wolf Warrior Lack of Charm Campaign perhaps may play well internally — and that may be all they care about — but there was a window not long ago that the PRC was playing smart on the world stage — making significant impact in Australia and having the USA happy to let them set up Confucius Institutes at our major universities, etc … but the last decade or so they somehow decided to play a different game.
