TOC Ready Room 31 May 2023: B-1Bs do the Balkans; Fox suffers analysis fail; RR Shorts

We’ll try to get through the Ready Room grab-bag with dispatch today.  The starter topic is whatever it is going on in the Balkans, which if you don’t recall hearing much about it means you’re normal.  We’ve got B-1B Lancers tootling around Europe like a supersonic Bugs Bunny, and wouldn’t you know it, they’ve already had signal events over Bosnia-Herzegovina in the past week, right next to where NATO’s KFOR peacekeepers were attacked in Kosovo on 30 May.

But there’s more context, so let’s back it up a little.

It’s always the Balkans

Don’t worry:  we’ll only go this far back for one data point.  Readers may recall the odd incident in August 2022 in which Russians and a Ukrainian were detained in Albania

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The bait and switch of election “security”: Timeline nuggets from a colluding cabal

A great deal has come out from the “Twitter files” about the collusion of federal government agencies, Big Tech and social media, legacy/left-wing media, and “civil society” organizations (think-tanks, self-appointed “watchdog” groups) to silence legitimate speech, and to do so on a thoroughly biased basis.

Although the pattern demonstrated in Twitter correspondence has related to several topics, one of the most important is suppression of reporting on Hunter Biden, his laptop, and the Biden family ties to foreign governments and companies.  The files, and testimony prompted by their revelations, have clarified that systematic collusion was behind suppression of information about the Hunter Biden laptop in the weeks just before the November 2020 election.

In fact, there’s good reason to posit a connection between suppression of the laptop story on social media,

TOC Ready Room 7 Jan 2023: Border disorder, Project Censorship, Church redux

Back from a Christmas “break,” and I’m still tired of politics.  What a silly method of dealing with human affairs.

A few random updates for the TOC squadron.

Readers probably won’t be surprised to learn that in December, the House Democrats adopted a rule that the J6 Committee materials they were going to send to the National Archives must be sequestered from release for 30 years.

Sourced from Yahoo report below.
Yahoo refs LAT rpt (scroll down) that house Dems rule of Dec 2022 wd prevent Archives release of most J6 docs for 30 yrs (extra-sensitive up to 50).
Democracy so important it requires hiding J6 matl for decades?https://t.co/N96MACCRC9 https://t.co/TvSXEXA311

— J.E. Dyer ☘️ (@OptimisticCon) January 6, 2023

It’s now being reported,

TOC Ready Room 28 December 2022: Grab bag – AZ election lawsuit; George Santos; illegal migrants

As readers have probably guessed, I’ve been taking a bit of a Christmas holiday and not posting much recently.  (As an update from several weeks ago, I continue to work on an extensive article about Chinese land holdings in the U.S., and some implications for national security.  That won’t be out until the New Year at this point.)

This Ready Room will be a little grab-bag of reflections on a few topics, the first of which is the Arizona judge’s ruling against gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s lawsuit over the conduct of the 2022 general election in Maricopa County.  The evidence of irregularities is extensive, and a strong case was made that failures of preparation and operation on election day, including machines and back-up planning, ended up disenfranchising numerous voters.  In the opinion of legal experts who were tracking the lawsuit and the court filings by Kari Lake, the evidence also showed an unmistakable bias in the political demographics affected by the irregularities, which were overwhelmingly Republican precincts.

I want to focus on just one aspect of the issue, however.

TOC Ready Room 26 October 2022: 101st Airborne in Romania; Kanye, China, and other wonders

This will be a rough-and-ready Ready Room, intended to spray a few current topics out there without going in-depth on any of them.  I really mean it this time, so throw rotten fruit if you catch a glimpse of over-analysis out here in the heathery rough.

The first topic is the headline teaser:  deployment of the U.S. 101st Airborne to Europe.  CBS did a segment this past week in which its crew accompanied soldiers of the 101st on field activities in Romania, just “a few miles” from the border of Ukraine.

CBS gets an exclusive sneak peak: "The US Army's 101st Airborne is practicing for war with Russia just miles from Ukraine's border"

"It's not just about defending NATO territory," correspondent @charliecbs reports. "They're fully prepared to cross over into Ukrainian territory" pic.twitter.com/XE2OfHZV4o

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) October 22, 2022

A great deal was made of the point that the 101st hasn’t deployed to Europe since World War II.