In a new geo-military landscape, Belarus’s Lukashenko goes to China

Just over six years ago, in January 2017, I noted in an article at Liberty Unyielding that China had recently closed a logistics gap eyed for some 200 years by military planners.  The gap had been felt as a hindrance for much longer than that, but it became especially significant to warfare and geopolitics in the age of rail.

China’s feat was completing a capable, reliable rail network all the way from China’s eastern coast to the UK, on the western edge of Europe.  On 1 January 2017, Beijing inaugurated the first freight train service from China to London.

Rail service all the way across Asia and Europe, and not operated by Russia to at least Eastern Europe, had never existed before.  The lack of such service was a key factor in every kind of geopolitical calculation about Asia:  economic and military as well as political.  The Soviet “iron curtain” had laid a long stasis

Uranium jerky: Angle on Ukraine (Part VII)

Back in the fall of 2020, I published a series of six articles* under the subject “Uranium Jerky” (explanation in the first article), taking note of the extraordinary connection of the events recounted in them to the Obama administration and – among other things – the high-profile Clinton-involved developments of the time, including the sale of Uranium One to the Russians.

One of those events was Goldman Sachs’s unique, remarkable decision, announced on 20 January 2009, that it would become a buyer of and dealer in physical uranium.  It proceeded to do so, and to this day has not shed that role, although the company began suggesting it would do so under congressional pressure at least seven years ago.

I’m still not sure most readers fully grasp the significance of a firm like Goldman Sachs, with little visibility or transparent exposure to observers of the uranium industry, owning and moving around thousands of tons of uranium.

TOC Ready Room 15 Dec 2021: Contra-indicative speech; Trump’s F-bomb; military notes

The strangeness of this hour has crossed a line in recent days.  It’s a line between some level of fealty to demonstrable reality, and none.

Over the last few years, we have repeatedly witnessed the media, and many politicians pushing a far-left agenda, twisting their speech into knots in order to not quite be lying when they present an untruthful picture of events.

In the last few days, they have liberated themselves from the constraint to not quite be lying.  One of the most noticeable instances of this is Rep. Liz Cheney’s dramatic reading on 13 December of text messages that flew on 6 January 2021 during the Capitol riot.  The text messages were turned over to the committee by Trump’s then-chief of staff, Mark Meadows.  (*Update*:  See new reporting from Wednesday, at the end of this section, on doctoring of a Jim Jordan text message by Adam Schiff.)

German schools rename ‘St. Martin’s Day’ fest – but look who opposes doing that

St. Martin’s Day – too Christian for the European left. (Image: Mitteldeutsche Zeitung)

You just know this latest in the thousand cuts of “multi-kulti” cultural suicide has to do with fear of offending Muslim immigrants.  And it does.

But I urge readers to look past the surface and keep in mind who’s doing the slice-and-dice job.

The story at hand involves a school in Oberkassel, Dusseldorf, which has redesignated the traditional St. Martin’s Day festival, held on 11 November, as an absurdly generic “Festival of Light.”  German media reported this late last week, and it was picked up quickly by English-language outlets.  (It’s worth making the point, as an aside, that we not only have to give up the richness of our own Western culture to supposedly avoid offending those from other cultures; we have to dumb everything down as well, turning ourselves into primitive animists and nature-worshipers.  Having a festival about “light” is so 10,000 years ago.)

Migrant influx has Europeans arming up

The workshop of Austrian gunmaker Steyr-Mannlicher. (Image via gunsforsale.com)

The urge to self-preservation may not be entirely dead among native Europeans.  According to European news sources, cited in this article at WND, Europeans who have the realistic option of purchasing firearms have started doing so, at a dramatically increased rate.

Although the citizens of several key countries (e.g., Germany, the Netherlands) are basically prohibited from buying guns — by the very high obstacles their governments set for such purchases — those who can are flocking to gun vendors.  Women are reportedly the customer base showing the biggest increase.

Austria is one of the nations where guns are selling fast.