[Red State] For the last 50 years, the United States military has enjoyed air superiority over essentially every other nation on the planet. In addition to good-old American ingenuity and freedom to create, this superiority was created and is maintained by the government’s support of ongoing research and development to maintain that superiority. The research and development process for new fighter jets can take decades, as with the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). China has always lagged significantly behind the United States in this department, but they’ve recently made major strides.
A significant factor in China’s progress comes as a result of the 2015 acquisition of Henniges Automotive, a Michigan company whose anti-vibration technology is used on the F-35 (stealth) fighter, by Aviation Industry Corp of China (AVIC), the state-owned entity that produces fighter jets for the Chinese military.
Guess whose company partnered with AVIC in that acquisition? That’s right — Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz’s BHR.
As a refresher: BHR is a Chinese venture capital firm in which Rosemont Seneca Thornton (the Biden/Heinz/Archer/Bulger partnership) owned a 30 percent stake, and which is majority-owned and controlled by the state-owned Bank of China. (Hunter Biden still owns 10 percent through his Skaneateles, LLC entity.)
For the 2015 transaction a wholly-owned subsidiary of AVIC, AVIC Auto, partnered with BHR to acquire Henniges, with AVIC Auto owning 51 percent and BHR owning 49 percent — meaning that the Chinese government-owned military manufacturer ended up with controlling interest of Henniges.
The Chinese government and military have attempted for decades to catch up to the aforementioned US military superiority, by any means necessary. At the time of the sale, US government officials — and the public, through Edward Snowden — were aware that China had hacked "terabytes" of data, including F-35 technology, and made use of it in their J-20 fighter. By acquiring Henniges and their anti-vibration technology, AVIC could put that technology directly to use in the Chinese military jets.
[AmGreatness] Election Day is almost here, and the time has come for closing arguments. For the Left, four years of agitation have culminated in this proposal: join the revolution, or we’ll destroy you.
You have to admire the simplicity of it.
Understand, removing Trump from power is only the first step on the road to true democracy. His presidency must also go down as a cancerous aberration never to be repeated, and he and his supporters must be consigned to the outer darkness, forever.
Continued on Page 49
[Gold Goats Guns] Russia is done with the European Union. At last week’s Valdai Discussion Forum Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made this quite clear with this statement.
Those people in the West who are responsible for foreign policy and do not understand the necessity of mutually respectable conversation—well, we must simply stop for a while communicate with them. Especially since Ursula von der Leyen states that geopolitical partnership with current Russia’s leadership is impossible. If this is the way they want it, so be it.
Lavrov’s statements echo a number of statements made in recent months by Russian leadership that there is no opportunity for diplomacy possible with the United States.
We can now add the European Union to that list. Pepe Escobar’s latest piece goes over Lavrov’s comments about the European Union and they are devastating, as devastating as when he and Putin described the U.S. as "Not Agreement Capable" a few years ago.
Lavrov reiterated this with the following comments at Valdai last week. [Video in link]
But as badly as the U.S. has acted in recent years in international relations, unilaterally abrogating treaty after treaty, nominally with the goal of remaking them to be more inclusive, Lavrov's upbraiding of the current leadership of the European Union is far worse.
Because they have gone along with, if not openly assisted, every U.S.-backed provocation against Russia for their own advantage. From Ukraine to MH-17, to Skripal to now Belarus and the ridiculous Navalny poisoning, the EU has proved to be worse than the U.S.
Because there can be no doubt the U.S. views Russia as an antagonist. We're quite clear about this. But Europe plays off U.S. aggression, hiding in the U.S.'s skirts while telling Russia, usually through German Chancellor Angela Merkel, "Be patient, we are reluctantly going along with this." But really they're happy about it.
So Russia is ultimately caught between the U.S. and Europe on all basic issues of trade, politics, and international law....
h/t HotAir
No profession is ever really "finished" after a catastrophic failure. Ask someone who opposed the Iraq war. They’ll talk your ear off about how cheerleaders for the invasion ended up failing upward in the foreign policy establishment or landing softly as "wise men" commentators in American media. Please reconsider the truck Frank.
Polling won’t disappear either if it misjudges Trump’s chances again this time. Everyone will pay *some* attention to it in 2024. But the industry, and satellite industries like election modelers, will never fully regain their credibility. It’s one thing to underestimate Trump by three points in 2016, a year when you had no inkling of how strong his support might be among working-class white voters. It’s another thing to recalibrate for that, conclude that he’s trailing this time by eight or nine points instead of three — and then miss again.
Better get the outcome right this time. All the well-meaning introspective "how we blew it" postmorterms in the world will be farts in the wind in terms or rebuilding public confidence.
#2
As long as there are Party operated media, you have no worries about creating fake news for them to pedal. Since the boards and CEOs are more interested in expending corporate capital to preen among their peer group rather than make money for the stockholders, they'll keep the Party media in business. So, don't worry sugar plum, your future is fine. Just like those who sell horoscopes.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
10/25/2020 10:25 Comments ||
Top||
#9
When the two pollsters that nailed 2016 are saying Trump is ahead in several swing states and very well could win, and the party owned pollsters are claiming a Biden landslide, I tend to believe with those that were right before.
That being said, I do believe we are seeing the final death spasms of the party run media. They won't be able to recover from this and will degenerate even more to small, paranoid little things that barely anyone watches.
#12
After Trump won in '16, there was a brief moment of soul-searching on the part of pollsters, media, even the entertainment industry.
It lasted about a month.
Same thing will happen this time if Trump wins.
Their livelihood depends on being mendacious scumbags, and they will only cease to be mendacious scumbags when it is no longer remunerative or they are dead.
#13
There will always be jobs for the best of those trained to read chicken entrails for private clients. As for the rest, almost all have become influence operations pretending to be scientific.
#14
If I were hiring a poll, I'd want two products:
One showing my guy ahead that I can use for publicity. Obviously, it may have to be cooked, but not overdone, please We don't want to make people laugh at its wrongness. "Margin of Error" can hide a number of flaws.
The second would be an accurate reading of what is actually happening. This one would be for internal use only and done under a Non-Disclosure Agreement.
#18
The way I understand it the internal polling is generally pretty accurate because they know what questions they need and will pay to get the right level of trustworthiness.
The other polls are just propaganda intended to help fund raising and keep hopes up and depress the other guys from showing up.
#19
Given the confirmation bias of the left-leaning press in terms of what to put in the headlines, and what to ignore, and leftism/socialist leanings of the "social sciences" departments and types who do these polls, I think it's inherent that they will be wrong, and wrong in the same direction. This will continue until the ideology is beaten (fiscally) out of them and the academic departments that train them.
[FrontPage] The plight of Christian girls in Pakistain (AKA "Land of the Pure").
Christian girls are being kidnapped, sexually abused, and forced into Islam with increasing frequency all throughout Pakistain, and everyone—including local police, court officials, and Islamic holy mans—seem bent on facilitating this human rights ...which are usually entirely different from personal liberty... tragedy.
A long list of nasty examples from calendar 2020 can be read at the link.
The reason few authorities do anything and some even side with the abductors/rapists was explained by the Asian Human Rights Commission in a 2011 report:
The situation is worse with the police who always side with the Islamic groups and treat minority groups as lowly life forms. The dark side of the forced conversion to Islam ... involves the criminal elements who are engaged in rape and abduction and then justify their heinous crimes by forcing the victims to convert to Islam. The Moslem fundamentalists are happy to offer these criminals shelter and use the excuse that they are providing a great service to their sacred cause of increasing the population of Moslems.
In short, "Christian girls are only meant for the pleasure of Moslem men"—to quote a group of Moslem men, seconds before they rammed their car into three young Christian girls, who had ignored their sexual advances while walking home from work; one died. Talking about this incident, one human rights activist said that police were "doing little to apprehend the young men and are allegedly delaying the investigative process":
In any other nation [than Pakistain] the perpetrators would be arrested, convicted for murder and sentenced for a long term.... Violence against Christians is rarely investigated and highly unlikely to be met with justice.... Women have a low status in Pakistain, but none more so than Christian women who find themselves under the grip or terror, especially after this attack. Moslem NGO Movement of Solidarity and Peace state[s] that around 700 Christian women in Pakistain are kidnapped, raped and forced into Islamic marriage every year — that figure is almost two a day and the world does nothing.
More recent statistics from 2019 indicate that "around 1000 girls from [Christian and other] religious minorities are forcibly converted to Islam every year. The numbers might [even] be higher as many cases are not even reported."
As another indicator of prevalence, back in 2010, a Pak pedophile told his 9-year-old victim "not to worry because he had done the same service to other young Christian girls"—some of whom were then murdered—before mauling her. While discussing that particular incident, another human rights activist summarized the situation in Pakistain well:
It is shameful. Such incidents occur frequently. Christian girls are considered goods to be damaged at leisure. Abusing them is a right. According to the community’s mentality it is not even a crime. Moslems regard them as spoils of war.
[TakiMag] In his memoir, Banana Sunday, the late British newspaperman Christopher Munnion described his first encounter with what was then called New Journalism. This was a style of newswriting that got going in the 1960s and 1970s. It was more like long-form fiction than conventional reporting. The style relied on subjectivity and emphasized "truth" over facts. The idea was for the reporter to tell a story from the perspective of an active participant, rather than a passive observer.
Munnion had been reporting on Africa for a long time for The Daily Telegraph, covering the transition in Africa from colonialism to independence. Like most reporters of his day, he reported on what happened, who was there, what they said, and so forth. It was the old-style reporting that had been the standard for generations. That meant going to the event, observing what was happening, and interviewing people about the event. The facts drove the coverage.
The new style of journalist came to the story with a narrative in mind. He was a storyteller who would provide the reader with a sense of what it was like to be in the story, at least the story the writer wanted to tell. As Munnion explained, the journalist showed up with a prepared narrative and then went around looking for people, events, and images to fill in the details. The facts were mere ornaments to decorate the story, not the point of the story.
Continued on Page 49
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Red State] For the last 50 years, the United States military has enjoyed air superiority over essentially every other nation on the planet. In addition to good-old American ingenuity and freedom to create, this superiority was created and is maintained by the government’s support of ongoing research and development to maintain that superiority. The research and development process for new fighter jets can take decades, as with the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). China has always lagged significantly behind the United States in this department, but they’ve recently made major strides.
[AmGreatness] Election Day is almost here, and the time has come for closing arguments. For the Left, four years of agitation have culminated in this proposal: join the revolution, or we’ll destroy you. 
