Quotulatiousness

January 31, 2025

“… and 10% for the Big Guy”

Filed under: Books, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the New English Review, Bruce Bawer reviews Miranda Devine’s new book, The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America:

Even now, roughly half of Americans seem to believe that all the attention that’s been paid to Hunter Biden and his laptop has to do with his love of prostitutes and drugs rather than with high crimes and misdemeanors committed by him on behalf of his dad and other members of the clan. Even now, many Americans seem to be blithely unaware of the mountains of evidence showing that Hunter has long been fleecing foreign firms on Daddy’s behalf. For some reason those clueless Americans, even if capable of accepting that Hunter was up to no good, simply can’t believe that his pop – good old Lunchpail Joe – has ever been guilty of anything. (These same people, of course, are convinced that Donald Trump is the most corrupt politician ever to come down the pike.)

This blindness to facts – or stubborn refusal to pay attention to them – is immensely frustrating. And it must be especially frustrating for Miranda Devine, the Australian-American New York Post journalist who, in Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide (2021), detailed the contents (by turns sordid and criminal) of Hunter’s celebrated computer, the story of which her newspaper broke 20 days before the 2020 presidential election, and who in her new book, The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America, focuses on the cover-up.

To say that Devine tells her story in impressive detail would be an understatement. Like War and Peace, The Big Guy opens with a long list of the main players, just in case you lose track of who’s who. And you will. Reading this book isn’t just like reading War and Peace – it’s like reading War and Peace at the same time as One Hundred Years of Solitude. You have to remember a slew of foreign-sounding names, many of which sound very much alike, all the while following an exceedingly labyrinthine narrative.

To be sure, this tale also involves plenty of Americans, some of them public officials who, when they scented the heady whiff of corruption in the Biden circle, actually did their jobs by digging into the facts and gathering evidence. Others, alas, are people who also held positions of authority but who did their damnedest to put up “roadblocks” or “obstructions” or “delays” or “logjams” – to use some of the many synonyms that Devine uses to describe efforts to keep the public in the dark.

And boy, was there a lot to cover up. Among the expenses that Hunter tried to write off on his taxes – not that he was quick to pay them, mind you – were disbursements to prostitutes and drug dealers and memberships in sex clubs. During one “crack and hooker bender” in 2018, he spent $8,000 on a single sex worker, $140,000 on a stay in Las Vegas, and $34,000 on a sojourn at the Chateau Marmont in L.A. The Chateau Marmont is legendary for playing host to celebrities on drug binges, but Hunter caused so much damage to his room that he was banned from the place thereafter, which even he suspected was a first.

Part of the reason why Hunter was able to go through a small fortune so quickly was that he had a “sugar daddy” by the name of Kevin Morris, who for reasons that still remain a mystery chose to give him millions of dollars over the years to save him from financial crises (such as the ones posed by the relatively modest monetary demands of Hunter’s baby mama in Arkansas). A 2019 book contract with Simon & Schuster also netted Hunter a $750,000 advance, even though the book (surprise!) ended up selling so few copies that it made back only a tiny fraction of that sum. Then there were his paintings, which brought in at least $1.5 million. People laughed when Hunter first revealed his artworks to the world in 2020, but I didn’t: they’re no worse than a hell of a lot of contemporary art – and, after all, the art market these days is as much about laundering money than it is about aesthetics.

But Hunter’s main sources of mazuma were foreign companies. One of them was Barisma in Ukraine. Another, in Russia, was run by a man named Zlochevsky who said that Hunter, whom Joe Biden had called the smartest man he knew, was in fact stupider than Zlochevsky’s dog. A third was the Chinese energy company CEFC, a leading promoter of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. CEFC put Hunter on its board – and paid him millions – in exchange for his promise to use his father’s name to “open … doors around the world” for the firm.

Collecting loot from all these sources and funneling some of it to family members involved a complex network of bank accounts and shell companies that was designed to make the moolah tough to trace. To illustrate the process, Devine follows the path of a single $5 million payment by a CEFC affiliate to one of Hunter’s firms, HWIII. Over time, Hunter transferred most of that $5 million to another firm of his, Owasco; in addition, he wired some of it to his uncle Jim’s company, after which Jim’s wife, Sara, withdrew a fraction of that sum and deposited it in the couple’s personal account and dispatched a $40,000 check to Joe Biden.

January 18, 2025

The Battle of the Bulge, LGBTQ+ Victims & Atomic Secrets – WW2 – OOTF 038

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 17 Jan 2025

This episode of Out of the Foxholes dives deep into your WWII questions. From LGBTQ+ persecution during and after the war, to the potential impact of diverting Battle of the Bulge troops to the Eastern Front, and Ukrainian collaboration with the Germans, we unravel the complexities of war. Join us as we tackle the secrets, strategies, and untold stories of WWII.
(more…)

December 14, 2024

Matt Gurney’s final thoughts from the Halifax International Security Forum

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the things I regret about being totally broke is that I can’t pay for a full subscription to The Line, which is one of Canada’s best sources of (relatively) unbiased commentary on current events both in Canada and around the world. This is the third instalment of Matt Gurney’s report from the recent Halifax International Security Forum (earlier parts linked here and here):

This next one is going to be very brief, since it’s really just an observation. There was very little discussion of Israel. As I noted at the top, there was discussion of the situation in the Middle East. But it was mostly in the context of “The world is currently a mess”. Parts of the Forum involve breaking into smaller groups for more focused discussion on specific issues, and some of those might have focused on Israel or the Middle East more broadly. I can’t speak to what I didn’t see. But I was surprised by a relative lack of focus on the ongoing fighting around Israel in the main events.

A notable exception was the presence of Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy on one of the on-record panels. An international law expert, she has spent the months since the October 7th attacks documenting the mass sexual violence that was such an awful feature of Hamas’s attack. Her comments were brief but powerful and can be seen here starting at around the nine-minute mark. I’d like to zoom in on one comment in particular. Dr. Elkayam-Levy told the audience how the invaders were able to capture the personal devices of many of their victims, and use those devices to broadcast the abuse and sometimes murder of these victims via the victims’ own social media apps. This was something that was discussed shortly after the October 7 attacks but not much after: by seizing the victims’ phones, the invaders were able to spread terror and traumatize the loved ones of the victims by showing their friends and family, via photos and videos and live streams, exactly what the victims were being made to suffer.

“I thought I had seen the worst,” the doctor told the assembled audience. “But really, if there is hell, this is what it looks like. Someone abusing your kin. Someone killing your loved ones in front of your eyes.”

Though it was only a small part of the official agenda, Dr. Elkayam-Levy’s comments left an outsized impression on me, and I suspect on many others.

He also discussed his own professional path which he regrets didn’t include a lot of traditional on-the-spot reporting on tragedies and interviewing survivors, as he feels he doesn’t have a good “game face” for those times when he now finds himself doing that kind of work:

I am 100 per cent on side with Ukraine in its war with Russia. I’m not blind to flaws in Ukraine today or in Ukraine’s history, but I have absolutely no doubt who’s the good guy and the bad guy in that ongoing war. I’ve had wonderful opportunities to speak with many Ukrainians since their country was invaded. I have heard their stories and tried to share them on my platforms. I’ve also had opportunities to meet and talk to many Ukrainians who are living now in my own hometown, mostly women with young children, who fled the fighting or once lived in parts of the country that are now occupied by Russia.

I feel so profoundly that these people have been wronged, and tremendously wronged. I believe so sincerely that they should have our full backing as they try and drive back the invaders and liberate their country. That their cause is not just in the West’s strategic interests, and I very much think that it is, but also that it is morally just.

But I have concluded that they’re screwed. We’ve lost interest, and Ukrainians are about to get the Kurd treatment, if I can be so crass. And I just didn’t have the heart to tell them that. I don’t even know how I’d begin to say that to them. I write and speak for a living. And words still failed me.

During a meal in Halifax, a woman who’d flown in to give a presentation on the work her organization does in Ukraine assisting displaced people told me a story of her own experience with the war. The original Russian invasion in 2014 hadn’t been anywhere near where she lived. She was somewhat shocked, she told me, when in 2022, her hometown came under attack. She described the first time she heard air raid sirens. The first time she heard a bomb blast. The first time she could hear the gunfire of advancing ground troops. She told me about the first person from her small community to die, a paramedic who was on her way to collect wounded when their ambulance was hit. And then she told me how, months later, she realized she couldn’t remember any of those things anymore, except for the first time, because they’d happened so much. Constant sirens. Constant bombings. Constant gunfire. The deaths of more people she personally knew than she could even remember.

And as she told me this story, I found myself near tears. I was able to cover it up, I think. I wish I had better game face, but I have some. But my tears weren’t even of sympathy. I wasn’t overwhelmed by her sad story, though it was awfully goddamned sad. No, the tears I felt were tears of shame. I knew that at the end of the conference, I’d get to go home. Toronto is a bit rougher than it was when I was growing up, but it ain’t a war zone.

This woman doesn’t get to go home, assuming her home is even still standing. She knew it, I think. I knew it. I think we both knew that the other knew. But we talked around it.

History is going to judge us harshly for our failure to do more, faster, to help Ukrainians defend themselves.

And alas, we’ll deserve it.

December 5, 2024

Mélanie Joly in Halifax, demonstrated her belief that “communication” is much more important than “action”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney continues his report from the recent Halifax International Security Forum, where the Trudeau government’s representatives were Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and Bill Blair, the Minister of National Defence:

Whoo boy. Mélanie Joly has got to go. Now. Today, if possible. Because we’ve got problems enough without, uh, well … maybe I should just explain what happened.

Joly is, of course, our foreign affairs minister. She and Bill Blair, the national defence minister, constituted the “star power” the Trudeau government sent to the Halifax International Security Forum, which I attended late last month. Joly would have, no doubt, taken part in many direct meetings with allied counterparts and various stakeholders behind closed doors during the three-day event. I can’t tell you what happened there. I can tell you, though, what happened during her public, on the record appearances. One of them in particular. And I can tell you what happened after it.

It wasn’t good.

I covered a bit of the basics about the Forum itself — what it is, who funds it, who shows up — in my last column about this year’s event, so I’ll skip the recap this time. Except for this: the event schedule is divided up into on-the-record panel discussions, off-the-record sessions (generally, those are the more interesting ones), and just lots of slack time for networking and gabbing over coffee and routinely excellent food. Joly took part in two of the on-the-record sessions. In one, she gave introductory remarks. They were about what you’d expect. The other time, she was a panelist. And that’s the one where things went wrong for Joly.

Joly was on a panel titled “Era of Unity: Victory for Ukraine”, moderated by Russian political dissident and chess grandmaster (uh oh) Garry Kasparov. Kasparov can be an aggressive moderator, and he and Joly sparred about the value of the United Nations. (I’m more of Kasparov’s view on the value of the UN, to put it mildly, but Joly more or less held her own under his questioning.) Kasparov followed up with a question about tangible support by Canada for Ukraine. He set it up as a hypothetical — he alluded to the recent re-election of Donald Trump, and noted that there are many who’d be happy to sell out Ukraine to secure some kind of peace with Russia. “Will Canada step in … will Canada play a bigger role? Canada is an important country, as you said,” Kasparov put to Joly. “When you have free time from diplomatic victories at the United Nations,” he asked, a bit mockingly, “can you help Ukraine win?”

Oh dear, I thought. This could be bad.

And it was. And then it got worse.

To Kasparov’s specific question — would Canada help Ukraine win? Would Canada step up and do more? — Joly replied at length about how much she believes in defence. And collaboration. And working together with allies. And why we need an Arctic strategy. And the value of deterrence. And the need for a stronger security architecture in the Indo-Pacific. And then some stuff about North Korean missiles. And then a nice bit about Canada’s long friendship with Ukraine. And how Canada, even though we’re smaller than the U.S., will always advocate for Ukraine at the NATO table.

I haven’t quoted directly from what the minister said. I am conscious about not wanting this entire column to become long quotes. You can see the entire exchange between Kasparov and Joly here, starting at around the 37 minute mark. What I can tell you as someone who watched it in person was that there was a real vibe shift — see, I can talk about vibes, too! — in the room as Joly spoke. Kasparov had asked a straightforward question and he’d gotten an answer that seemed as if Joly was envisioning a globe in her head, and spinning it, and just commenting on everything that came to mind as a different region came into view. Oh! There’s the Indian Ocean! Say something about the Indo-Pacific!

It was bad. Everyone in the room knew it was bad, with the possible exception of Joly.

But Joly hadn’t hit bottom yet.

November 25, 2024

Looking toward the first order effects of 47

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, Government, Media, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter is delighted that his pessimistic election forecast turned out to be wrong and considers what the incoming Trump administration will be doing in the short-term:

There are obvious parallels between the 2024 election, the 2016 election, and the Brexit vote, all of which are a bit awkward for elite theory maximalists. Their position, taken to its extreme, seems to be that only the elite can actually do things, that all political phenomena are ultimately a consequence of elite machinations. Which makes elite theory in many ways the highbrow version of conspiracy theory, the main difference being that they talk about the Cathedral’s systems of power instead of the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and smoky backrooms. And yet, the elite clearly don’t always get their way. In the case of Brexit, the elite were absolutely unanimous in their support for Remain … and the elite lost. Similarly in the case of the 2016 US election. Elite preferences carry an enormous amount of weight; it’s generally much better for a cause to have elite support than suffer elite opposition. But elites are not actually decisive. They can be beaten.

It’s obviously much too early to judge the 47th US presidency, which hasn’t started yet. Cynics expect a repeat of 2016: just as Trump’s promises to drain the swamp and build the wall came to, if not nothing, then very little, so will his promises to deport them all, replace the income tax with tariffs, reign in the universities by going after their accreditation and endowments, drain the swamp for real this time, and so on prove to be so much hot air. So far all we know are Trump’s cabinet picks and other appointments, which suggest that this cynicism might be premature. […]

The new Trump admin shows every sign of gearing up for a Dark MAGA rampage through the Beltway.

If you’re curious about where Dark MAGA came from, why yes it was memed into reality. Aristophanes
tells the wild saga: from in-joke to shitcoin to the hat on Elon Musk’s head.

They aren’t going to just drain the swamp. They’re going to drain it, dry it, soak it in gasoline, and set it on fire. They are going to purge the US government of the useless, the incompetent, the subversive, and the criminal. At least, that seems to be the intention … and given the way the rats are scrambling to escape the ship before it sinks, the regime’s minions, at least, seem to think that plan has a good chance of succeeding. […]

Of course, a lot could happen between now and January. The Democrats might find some convoluted legal pathway to deprive The Insurrectionist of the Oval Office, as Tree of Woe suggested, which of course would initiate a constitutional crisis and probably a civil war. They could assassinate him, which would also probably start a civil war, and which is probably why Trump has been holed up in Mar-a-Lago since the election. Either of these outcomes would probably place JD Vance in the presidency, which is probably much worse for the regime than Trump: Vance is marine corps combat vet who reads Curtis Yarvin and is fluent enough in meme that he probably has a frog alt on Twitter.

[…]

News that suicides spiked after the election is apparently fake, though crisis call centres catering to the Pronoun Jugend did experience a massive increase, and one guy apparently unalived his entire family. They’re still in a state of shock: shaving their heads, vowing to start a sex strike, fleeing to Canada (I do not recommend).

The left are religious fanatics, and religious fanatics don’t give up just because it looks hopeless. It’s also worth recalling that the last time Trump won, the riots didn’t start until inauguration. There’s plenty of time yet, and there are a lot of very wealthy and very influential people who probably feel they have nothing to lose as their precious oxen are in danger of being lethally gored by Dark MAGA on the Washington Mall as a sacrifice to America’s Founding gods, after which they themselves will be hanged from Wotan’s Tree of Liberty. Note that it doesn’t matter if Trump will really follow through with all of this; what matters is if the other side thinks that he will. Ruling out a dramatic escalation in civil violence in the US is almost certainly hasty.

[…]

Another play the regime could make is to just start World War III before Trump takes office, either in order to justify a military coup d’etat, or just to dump a catastrophe in Trump’s lap so that he’ll be too busy dealing with that to drain the swamp. They definitely seem to be ramping things up in Ukraine, with the new strategy of long-distance missile strikes deep into Russian territory. The idea is probably to provoke the bear so badly that it starts mauling NATO countries directly, rather than just chewing through their exhausted national arsenals in the mud of the Donbass. That might work; then again, Putin knows full well that all he has to do is wait a couple months and he’ll be dealing with Trump directly, and Trump is on record as wanting to wind down hostilities as a top priority as soon as he’s in office. Vlad may be a bad man, but he is a very patient bad man.

Assuming that the regime is unsuccessful in baiting Russia into a direct attack on Europe, Trump’s victory probably has very big, tumultuous, and positive implications for European politics. Positive, at least, for anyone who doesn’t hate Europe … and therefore very bad implications for the people currently running the civilizational centre of the human species into the dirt.

The Germans, at least, seem to think so.

Chancellor Scholz’ unstable “traffic light” coalition disintegrated almost immediately after Trump was elected, sending Germany into its own election … in which the AfD is poised to do very well for itself, much to the consternation of Germany’s political class. eugyppius has been doing invaluable work covering Germany’s politics for the anglosphere audience; he provides an excellent overview of the reasons for the coalition’s collapse in this recent interview on the J Burden show.

November 24, 2024

“… if Russia were found to have had its own troops assemble a long-range missile and help launch it into the United States, do you think a US president would feel able to let it slide?”

Filed under: Britain, Military, Russia, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It probably tightened a lot of already tight sphincters when it was announced that President Biden had authorized the Ukrainian government to use US-supplied long-range missiles to attack targets on Russian soil:

There was something truly surreal about President Biden suddenly changing course and agreeing to give Ukraine advanced long-range missiles to attack deep inside Russian territory in the last two months of his administration. There was no speech to the nation; no debate in the Senate; just a quiet demonstration of unilateral presidential fuck-you power. You know: the kind we’ve long worried about with Donald Trump. The missiles up the ante considerably against a nuclear power for a simple reason. As Putin noted:

    experts are well aware, and the Russian side has repeatedly emphasized this, that it is it is impossible to use such weapons without the direct involvement of military specialists of the countries producing such weapons.

The tiny tsar continued:

    We consider ourselves entitled to use our weapons against the military facilities of those countries that allow to use their weapons against our facilities. And in case of escalation of aggressive actions we will respond also decisively and mirrored.

And he looked on edge, bedraggled and belligerent, his arms and hands not moving a millimeter in what sure looks like AI.

There was a time when a NATO missile strike on Russian territory, followed by a Russian threat to attack NATO “military facilities” in response, would have caused the world to stop dead, paralyzed by the fear of nuclear armageddon. Yet here we are, blithely preoccupied by Pete Hegseth’s sexual exploits and Congressional bathrooms.

Others are not so sanguine. “I believe that in 2024 we can absolutely believe that the Third World War has begun,” Ukraine’s former military chief, Valery Zaluzhny, warned yesterday, noting both the new involvement of NATO troops and the involvement of North Korea. Our own president, having brought us much closer to the brink as a lame duck, seemed unconcerned. He was last seen wandering off-stage in the vague direction of the Brazilian rainforest. Not optimal.

The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, was even punchier, and pledged to allow Ukraine to use British long-range missiles as well: “We need to double down. We need to make sure Ukraine has what is necessary for as long as necessary, because we cannot allow Putin to win this war”. When asked if he was prepared to risk the UK forces or Ukraine or a third country like Poland being nuked in response, as Putin has threatened, Starmer simply ignored the question.

Meanwhile, just to keep things from escalating, the deputy chief of the British defense staff told a parliamentary committee yesterday:

    If the British Army was asked to fight tonight, it would fight tonight. I don’t think anybody in this room should be under any illusion that if the Russians invaded Eastern Europe tonight, then we would meet them in that fight.

There seems to be a general impression that Putin is of course bluffing, that NATO can keep lobbing missiles into Russian territory with minimal consequences, and nothing could possibly go wrong.

But Putin has responded by launching a long-range missile that could be used to carry a nuke but didn’t, as well as lowering the bar for the use of nukes in his military “doctrine“. And ask yourself: if Russia were found to have had its own troops assemble a long-range missile and help launch it into the United States, do you think a US president would feel able to let it slide? Here’s what the British missile, the Storm Shadow, did in hitting an underground military facility in Kursk, according to unverified Russia media sources:

    [The strike] resulted in the Death of 18 Russian Officers, including a Senior Commander, as well as 3 North Korean Officers. In addition, a Dozen other Soldiers and Officers were Wounded in the Attack, including one of North Korea’s most Senior Generals.

I can’t verify that, but it’s perfectly possible. To have NATO’s fingers on the targeting and launch of that missile puts us in a whole new category of conflict.

The job of a president is to keep us far, far away from any risk of nuclear conflict, as Biden seemed to understand until now. And any student of history will know that blithe complacency as two sides trade military escalations is often exactly the precursor to something going very, very wrong. Accidents happen; misjudgments occur; the point of never getting to this point is that this point contains a host of unknowables, some of them globally existential.

I assume that this is all about strengthening Kyiv’s hand in what will be grueling negotiations to end the conflict once Donald Trump gets back into office. Or the intelligence is worse than we know and it’s about avoiding an Ukraine collapse before Biden leaves office — which, after Afghanistan, would be a final, damning verdict on his foreign policy. Or the intelligence is better than we know and the Russian economy is so weak and his military so depleted that NATO thinks this extra pressure will force Putin to crack. Or it’s a norm-defying attempt from an outgoing administration to derail any peace process the incoming one might want to start. The latter possibility — with Biden rolling the dice because he thinks someone else will have to face the music — is not a minimal risk.

November 14, 2024

Trump’s position and likely options on Ukraine

Filed under: Europe, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In his weekly commentary, Niccolo Soldo considers what the incoming Trump administration might do about the war in Ukraine:

The situation in Ukraine as of 8 November, 2024.
Map from the UK Ministry of Defence via X.

… Ukraine is losing the war, and is losing it at a faster pace than before. Time is not on Kiev’s side, and there is no magic wand that anyone can wave to turn the tide in its favour. The question is: how much is Kiev willing to give up in order to save as much as it can?

The foreign policy blob is on tenterhooks, waiting to see what Trump will do regarding this conflict:

    Like in Trump’s first term, different factions are set to compete to influence the Republican’s foreign policy. More traditionally minded allies such as Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state now in contention to lead the Pentagon, are likely to push for a settlement that doesn’t appear to give a major win to Moscow. Other advisers, particularly Richard Grenell, a top candidate to lead the State Department or serve as national-security adviser, could give priority to Trump’s desire to end the war as soon as possible, even if it means forcing Kyiv into significant concessions.

Pompeo is out, but that doesn’t mean that those like him are entirely out either, as he has DoD officials sharing his views. No doubt that there are certain elements in the State Department, CIA, and in Congress as well who take the same position.

    The proposals all break from Biden’s approach of letting Kyiv dictate when peace talks should begin. Instead, they uniformly recommend freezing the war in place — cementing Russia’s seizure of roughly 20% of Ukraine — and forcing Ukraine to temporarily suspend its quest to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

    One idea proposed inside Trump’s transition office, detailed by three people close to the president-elect and not previously reported, would involve Kyiv promising not to join NATO for at least 20 years. In exchange, the U.S. would continue to pump Ukraine full of weapons to deter a future Russian attack.

    Under that plan, the front line would essentially lock in place and both sides would agree to an 800-mile demilitarized zone. Who would police that territory remains unclear, but one adviser said the peacekeeping force wouldn’t involve American troops, nor come from a U.S.-funded international body, such as the United Nations.

    “We can do training and other support but the barrel of the gun is going to be European,” a member of Trump’s team said. “We are not sending American men and women to uphold peace in Ukraine. And we are not paying for it. Get the Poles, Germans, British and French to do it.”

“Pumping” Ukraine full of weapons would be attractive to Trump, as it means steady cash flow. He is a businessman after all.

The last bit is the most important, as it conforms to US policy trends in which the dumpster fire that they started is left to the Europeans to extinguish while the Americans go deal with the Chinese.

    That proposal in some respects echoes comments made by Vice President-elect JD Vance during a September interview, when he suggested a final agreement between Ukraine and Russia could involve a demilitarized zone “heavily fortified so the Russians don’t invade again.” Russia, Vance continued, would get to keep the land it has taken and be assured of Ukraine’s neutrality.

    “It doesn’t join NATO, it doesn’t join some of these sort of allied institutions,” he said on “The Shawn Ryan Show,” a podcast.

“No NATO, no stealth NATO”, is music to Moscow’s ears. The problem here is that the Russians do not trust the Americans to keep up their end of any deal. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov has famously described the Americans as “agreement non-capable”.

Also, why would the Russians even agree to negotiate at this point?

    For one, Ukraine and Russia still have vastly differing war aims and little desire to alter them. With Russian troops advancing slowly but steadily in Ukraine, the Kremlin has shown little inclination to negotiate, and has shown its willingness to escalate the conflict with hybrid attacks outside its borders, such as sabotage operations in Europe.

    “The objectives of the special military operation remain unchanged and will be achieved,” Dmitry Medvedev, a top Russian official, posted Wednesday to X after learning of Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee.

Zelensky is over a barrel:

    Zelensky, whose country is heavily dependent on the U.S. for military and financial assistance, could — more easily than Putin — be forced by Trump to negotiate, but the Ukrainian leader would have to contend with a public that views ceding territory as capitulation to Moscow.

    Trump has said that Ukraine’s survival is important to the U.S., but has repeatedly criticized Zelensky, calling him the “greatest salesman”, a stance that has worried some officials in Kyiv that a Trump-led U.S. might push for a settlement that favors Russia.

    Zelensky on Wednesday congratulated the president-elect on his victory, appealing to their September meeting in New York and praising his “‘peace through strength’ approach in global affairs”.

Forcing Zelensky to concede land would open up the possibility of a coup d’etat in Kiev, and even civil war. Even if a deal were hammered out, Zelensky would be forced to try to sell it at home. There are may factions in Ukraine that have no desire to budge even one inch, and would happily take his head off of the rest of his body to make sure that no one signs away any Ukrainian land.

November 8, 2024

An alternative path to meeting Canada’s 2% of GDP defence-spending aspirations

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I’m not convinced that Brian Graff is correct here, but it’s certainly a bit of unusually out-of-the-box thinking on Canada’s defence shortcomings:

Canada has sent a few tanks over to Ukraine, as well as other supplies and financial aid. We will have to replenish these things, and this might be an opportunity to expand Canada’s capacity to make and export military arms and equipment. Maybe our defense policy and spending has been wrongheaded. Since we have so few troops, are unlikely to need to defend our own soil, and are far from any country likely to be in conflict, we may be able to meet our 2% target with some innovative thinking.

Since the Second World War, the US has described itself as the “arsenal of democracy”, a phrase which Franklin Roosevelt used in 1940 when the US was supporting Britain (and Canada) by sending arms, most notably through the “Lend Lease” program that sent ships and equipment to Britain, technically on loan.

Maybe a bigger part of Canada’s own defence policy should be to make and stockpile arms, equipment, and supplies to send to our allies or friends in times of need. Such equipment need not be “state of the art” like F-35 fighter jets. Canada could also expand production of parts for equipment assembled in other NATO countries – particularly for spare parts we need for ourselves.

We need not limit this to new equipment. Canada could also promote companies that refurbish older equipment to be stockpiled or resold. And of course, Canada could determine which countries benefit from our stockpiles of military equipment. We could ensure that this equipment is not acquired by countries with regimes we oppose, and we would have the leeway to give or sell only to the “right” side of a conflict, possibly with strings attached.

Take our Leopard 2 tanks that were built in Germany. We have given some to Ukraine. We have unfortunately scrapped even older Leopard 1 tanks, that could have been refurbished or modified to serve as platforms for other uses. Canada should probably give the rest of our tanks to Ukraine, then get into the business of buying older Abrams tanks from the US to refurbish as replacements or for re-export.

Israel is a good example of a nation that builds up its military capacity with secondhand tanks and other equipment, and is now a major exporter of military equipment that it developed at least in part for its own defence.

The trend in US equipment has been to build state of the art equipment, and buy smaller quantities of it. But the conflict in Ukraine has shown that even when fighting a country with advanced military technology like Russia, using some older equipment combined with innovative new designs has been successful for both sides. Along with the introduction of drones, the Russians have modified older bombs to become guided bombs that are accurate and far cheaper than building new missiles.

October 16, 2024

QotD: Technical differences between ground-attack and air-defence missiles

Filed under: Military, Quotations, Russia, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Russians claim the missile that struck the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kiev yesterday was an American-made air defense missile. It wasn’t; video footage clearly shows that it was a Russian KH-101.

To help everybody not get fooled again, I’m going to explain some basic differences between ground-attack and air-defense missiles, and why nobody should have been fooled by this propaganda for a second.

The top-line thing here is that ground attack missiles can be large and have heavy warheads, while air defense missiles have to be smaller and have lighter warheads.

Air defense missiles have to intercept a target traveling at high speed. They have to be as fast and agile as possible in order to do that; every gram of weight is a penalty. That means you’re going to make the warhead no heavier than you have to in order to kill a plane. And it doesn’t take much kaboom to kill a plane.

Even if we didn’t have footage of the missile and wreckage to examine, it would be obvious that the damage to that hospital wasn’t done by an air defense missile because there’s too much of it. You can’t get that much blast shock out of the smallish warheads they put in those things.

The weight penalty for a big warhead is much less in something like a KH-101. It’s not designed to be agile, it’s designed to get from point A to point B on a least-time course and then blow up real good.

You can use an air defense missile for ground attack with some hacking of the guidance software, but you can’t use a ground-attack missile for air defense; the physics are against you.

The problem with using an AD missile for ground attack is it it won’t give you much of a kaboom when it gets there. They’re just not very effective.

Nevertheless, the Russians have actually been doing this in Ukraine, throwing S-300s and S-400s at ground targets. Only because they were short on ground attack missiles to start with, and their capacity to manufacture them is limited by Western sanctions on the electronics they need.

So the next time the Russians try to deflect blame for one of their missile strikes on civilian cities by claiming the explosion was from a failed Ukrainian intercept, treat the assertion with the contempt it deserves. If whatever went boom actually was an air defense missile, it was almost certainly a repurposed Russian one.

Eric S. Raymond, X(the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, 2024-07-11.

October 14, 2024

The reviews are in for this season of The West and it’s as bad as you think

Filed under: China, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Spaceman Spiff has been a longstanding fan of The West, but the current season is doing much more than giving him the sadz:

The current season of The West is a disappointing mishmash of bad writing, wooden acting and implausible plot lines.

Critics have known the show has been in decline for years although have been reluctant to say openly.

But with cancellation rumours growing it is difficult to see how it can survive. If the current season is any measure they simply don’t have the writers even if the producers hadn’t lost their minds.

The plot thickens

The West has always been known for its compelling plots. Epoch-defining inventions, new technologies and globe-spanning empires. Even grand moral crusades no one else would consider such as ending slavery or elevating women to equal status.

Just some of the storylines they said would never work and yet we were glued to our screens as they unfolded.

Unfortunately, more recent seasons have shown none of the flair of the past.

The latest drama is the threat of another plague. It is difficult to know how this got the go ahead so soon after the Covid storyline.

The original pandemic idea got off to a roaring start since it was then a novel idea. But as the drama unfolded the plot became increasingly contrived. The writers became carried away and eventually struggled to get out of the hole they had dug themselves.

It ended in absurdity with obvious conflicts between the original lockdown plot and the later mask and vaccine subplots.

It was almost as if different teams of writers were competing with each other instead of cooperating on the story arc, exactly the kind of mistake audiences are increasingly complaining about.

The latest version is a species-jumping virus and is already facing criticism for lazy writing and reheating ideas from last time. Audiences are unimpressed. Time will tell if they can pull it off again.

The second plot they seem to be exploring is even more implausible, war with China.

After the last few seasons mired in the Ukraine storyline it beggars belief the writers went in this direction.

There were rumours of production overruns and expensive reshoots as the Ukraine storyline dragged on. We will never know the full extent of their production woes but tough decisions were clearly made as well as a shakeup of the production team.

Critics had warned wars were rarely popular. People like the drama of course, but audiences quickly get bored. None of this stopped the producers and the writers dutifully did as asked.

Now it is China.

Many are saying this is just a sign the producers have been there too long. It is time for another clear out.

At least war is exciting. But after numerous attempts to sell immigration storylines they are trying it again despite its unpopularity.

Previous attempts to promote immigration plots failed to resonate with audiences although it has always been popular with a small, loud minority.

Most found it too farfetched, millions of young foreign men just wandering into Western nations as if no one would stop them. The critics had a field day.

But this season they are going with climate migration. People moving around because of the weather.

This is partly to shore up their failing climate plot. It was obvious several seasons ago this long running theme, a strong favourite with the showrunners, was no longer popular.

August 30, 2024

Experts are concerned that criticism of experts will weaken their role in our political system

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the National Post, Geoff Russ dares to imply that the experts are not the divinely inspired superior beings with unfailing wisdom about any and all issues:

So-called “experts” have weakened Canada’s political discourse far more than Pierre Poilievre ever has. Journalist and author Stephen Maher recently penned a column in the Globe & Mail titled, “By slamming experts, Pierre Poilievre and his staff are degrading political debate”.

Maher is an even-handed journalist, and his column should not be written off as the scribblings of a Liberal partisan. What his column misses is how the term “expert” has been abused, and the degree to which “experts” have thoroughly discredited themselves in recent years.

Poilievre’s criticisms of the “experts” would not resonate if they lived up to the title bestowed upon them.

For example, the Doug Ford government’s decision to close 10 safe injection sites after implementing a ban on such facilities located near schools and child-care centres. The closures were lamented by “experts” trotted out by the CBC as putting peoples’ lives at risk.

The safe injection sites slated to be shut down are near schools and daycares, and there is demonstrable proof that crime rises near these sites wherever they are located.

Derek Finkle recently wrote that the critiques of the closures levelled by selected “experts” failed to note how community members had been threatened with rape, arson, and murder since the injection site in his Toronto neighbourhood had been opened.

These are reasonable grounds for a government to reconsider whether they should allow drug-use, supervised or not, to proliferate in neighbourhoods where families reside.

For all their alleged expertise, many “experts” seem unwilling to actually investigate what is happening on the ground, and often give plainly bad advice altogether, and this goes back decades.

The “experts” failed to predict the 2008 financial crisis, they said the risk to Canadians from the coronavirus was low in early 2020, and they failed to prevent runaway inflation after the worst of it had subsided.

Was it not the “experts” who asserted that arming and funding of Ukraine prior to Vladimir Putin’s invasion in 2022 was a bad idea? After the invasion began, was it not the “experts” who confidently predicted Putin’s army would conquer the whole of Ukraine in a matter of days, and not be bogged down in a years-long conflict that would reshape global trade?

The truth is that we live in a worse-off world because of the advice and predictions of “experts”.

June 25, 2024

“Nigel Farage’s sin […] was to tell the truth which our rulers and their bought, sycophantic media are desperate to hide from us”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As the British general election rumbles into its final days, most media outlets reacted very strongly to Nigel Farage’s willingness to break with the narrative over the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war:

Nigel Farage has really got the elites and their prostitute mainstream media panicking, this time by being the only politician who dares tell the truth about the origins of the Russia-Ukraine war.

First let me stress that I am not condoning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But Putin has made it very clear for at least the last 15 years that he saw Ukraine and Georgia, which both have long borders with Russia, joining Nato as an existential threat to his country and warned “not an inch eastwards”.

The West arrogantly ignored Putin’s warnings. That was dumb.

At a conference in April 2008, where Putin was invited to address Nato leaders, he warned that inviting Ukraine and Georgia to join Nato, and thus parking Nato troops and missiles directly on Russia’s borders, would be seen as an existential threat to Russia’s security. This was even reported in the BBC’s in-house rag, the Guardian, on April 4 2008: “The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, today repeated his warning that Moscow would view any attempt to expand Nato to its borders as a ‘direct threat'”.

In December 2021, Putin yet again warned the West that allowing Ukraine and Georgia to join Nato would be unacceptable, in the first minute of this three-minute video. In this video Putin (sensibly in my opinion) asks whether the US would allow Russian troops and missiles to be positioned along its borders with Canada or Mexico and reiterates his “not an inch eastwards” threat.

Yet in January 2022, the US presented its written response to Russian demands on Ukraine not joining Nato and on Nato troops being withdrawn from Romania and Bulgaria, but made clear that it did not change Washington’s support for Ukraine’s right to pursue Nato membership, the most contentious issue in relations with Moscow.

The reply, which was delivered to the Russian Foreign Ministry by the US ambassador in Moscow, John Sullivan, repeated the US offer to negotiate with Russia over some aspects of European security, but the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said the issue of eventual Ukrainian membership of the alliance was one of principle.

Blinken was speaking hours after his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, threatened “retaliatory measures” if the US response did not satisfy the Kremlin.

“Without going to the specifics of the document, I can tell you that it reiterates what we said publicly for many weeks, and in a sense for many, many years. That we will uphold the principle of Nato’s open door”, Blinken said, adding: “There is no change. There will be no change.”

June 4, 2024

Assassination-to-order, or war by other means

Filed under: Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I was not well-informed about the goings-on within Vladimir Putin’s Russia even before the Russo-Ukrainian war went into high gear and disrupted all information from that part of the world and I hear much but trust nothing I’ve been hearing since then. kulak, on the other hand, seems to have paid much closer attention to Russian internal affairs, including one particular political assassination:

On August 20, 2022, 29 year old Daria Dugina was killed in a car bombing on the outskirts of Moscow. The bomb, it was widely agreed, had been intended for her father the famed/infamous Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin (whose works are now shockingly hard to get in English and appears on my “Real Banned Books List“), and while there were lots of deflections and denials, it was fairly widely agreed the plot had been carried out with US and UK backing by Ukrainian-aligned insurgents and agents within Russia.

Indeed many US aligned “Journalists”, “Open Source Intelligence” types, Bellingcat-associated influencers, and other CIA-aligned carve outs openly CELEBRATED the death of Daria, since she had been involved in Putin-aligned political youth organizing.

Of course, the fact political volunteers and door knockers have NEVER been considered legitimate military targets, nor the fact the real target was a PHILOSOPHER and everything he had ever done would have been perfectly legal to do even within the United States under the auspices of the first amendment … that somehow never occurred to these commentators. Nor the wider US intellectual class, and somehow neither did the natural logical conclusion.

Russia is by and large NOT run by its political organizers and academics. You could probably kill 1000 Russian university professors and it wouldn’t unbalance the Russian state too extraordinarily. Russia is run by a combination of old Soviet secret policemen, gangsters, and crooked/”reformed” oligarchs all attempting to reorganize themselves into a somewhat respectable upper-class, with a blend of impressive and farcical results.

Before he was killed in an internal power struggle the former head of Wagner PMC Yevgeny Prigozhin embodied this, turning from a St. Petersburg gangster, to a prisoner, to a (definitely money laundering) caterer for the presidential palace, to the head of a PMC mercenary company. Every prominent person in Russia has a career like this Right down to Putin going from a KGB officer, to a gangster/political fixer, to president … Every elite member of Russian society is basically leading a life ripped right from Grand Theft Auto IV, complete with the eternal struggles of trying to “go legit” and formalize everything as a normal upper-class elite, to being dragged back into gangsterism or even Soviet power struggles by their complex past.

Put simply the actual Russian Elite are not people very intimidated by assassination. They’ve all known people to be killed in power struggles, espionage, and criminal altercations, and are used to the anxiety that death might wait for them around the corner. And the US and Ukraine lashing out at academics who might be intimidated doesn’t really affect them.

However, if the Russian state did the logical tit-for-tat escalation and responded in kind … that would shake America to its knees. America actually IS run by its academics, political organizers, and bureaucrats. And almost none of the people with power have a gangster or KGB agent’s stoic familiarity with death and danger.

Killing a Russian Academics daughter did very little to the Russian state… It’d be a very different story for Russia’s armed agents to do the same in America and kill Chelsea Clinton, daughter of current Columbia professor Hillary Clinton.

It’s be a very different story if Russia assassinated Brookings senior fellow Robert Kagan, husband of former under-secretary of state Victoria Nuland. Or any number of Harvard, Stanford, Yale or Princeton political philosophers or International Relations commentators, or members of their family.

One can imagine the headlines if John Hopkins and RAND fellow Francis Fukuyama was so killed:

“It is the end of Fukuyama”
– History

And again remember, though the various income streams of the US elite may resemble embezzlement, protection rackets, and money laundering … these aren’t gangsters. These are complacent, highly agreeable, shockingly unoriginal and cowardly … academics and bureaucrats.

Indeed one can imagine Putin weighing the risk of such a reprisal and then deciding against it, not out of ethical concerns, but because the American ruling class is too unpredictable and prone to womanly hysterias.

Indeed amongst the few senior American and Ukrainian officials who knew of the attack beforehand you can imagine them salivating that Putin might respond in kind and the subsequent freakout might commit the US to joining the war (one of the few scenarios where Ukraine could possible survive against their overwhelming odds).

May 10, 2024

A different take on the Russo-Ukrainian War

Filed under: Economics, Europe, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Kulak suggests that far from being a model for future wars, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine may not prefigure anything at all about future wars:

Few weeks go by where I don’t read a piece on how Ukraine is the Future of warfare and armies and thinkers need to adjust to the reality that the warfare of the future will involve massive unaccountable amounts of artillery, trenches, conscription and grinding warfare.

While sometimes they point to relevant lessons: Yes the inability of the US to quickly reindustrialize and produce artillery shells at a rate comparable to Russia does speak to a profound rot in American governance, the military industrial complex, and American business regulation more generally,

Often times the conclusions drawn are dangerously delusional: A draft would be more likely to break the American nation than save it. As indeed conscription has resulted in Ukraine’s population collapsing with somewhere between 6 and 10 million Ukrainians (out of a pre-war 36 million) having fled the country, not to escape the mostly static war, but to escape the Totalitarian conditions the Zelensky regime has imposed in response to the war. (1.1 million of whom escaped INTO Russia, for any who deny this [is] largely an ethnic conflict between Western and Russian Ukrainians, as it has been since 2014).

And the thing is all of these discussions rest on a assumption that seems ludicrous the second you stop and think about it: Ukraine is not the future of Warfare, these conditions will be almost impossible to ever create again.

Ukraine had a pre-war Nominal GDP of 199 billion USD. Officially this only declined to 160 billion in 2022 as a result of the war, but there’s good reason to think its actual internal private sector economy collapsed far further [given] it had collapsed from 177 billion in 2013 to 90 billion in 2015 as a result of the US backed Coup/Revolution.

Indeed given the population flight, conscription, and impositions on the populace, it is very likely a SUPER-MAJORITY of that 160 billion GDP in 2022, was actually the result of US and NATO pouring hundreds of billions into the country. Where it was either used or siphoned off as corruption.

Simply put Ukraine has received military, financial and other aid most like in excess of what its entire internal economy produced in the same period, and as of writing it’s still losing territory.

When commentators say this is a war between NATO and Russia they are almost entirely correct. If you combine all the economies that are funding, arming, or fighting on one side or the other of this war you get a majority of the entire global economy.

And they have used all that money to pay off the Ukrainian regime to refuse any peace agreement, even ones their own negotiators had agreed to, and that were clearly in the best interest of the country … you know if you value hundreds of thousands of young men and not having your population collapse more than narrow stretches of land being bought up by Blackrock.

April 20, 2024

Russian and French Nazis Defend the Reich – ϟϟ Foreign Fighters Part 3

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 19 Apr 2024

As the war turns ever more against Germany, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler keeps loosening the racial standards of his Waffen SS. More and more non-Germans fill the ranks of his forces. Some of these non-German fighters will be among the last defenders of the Third Reich.

Click here for parts one and two:

• ϟϟ Foreign Fighters
(more…)

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