Russia Russia Russia

Vlad and Kim announced that they are strengthening economic and military ties. I don't know what North Korea has to export beyond 152mm artillery shells of apparently dubious quality and starving conscripts, but apparently Russia needs more of it.

Meanwhile, have a detailed guide to telling various Russian tanks apart.

Also, allegedly this morning the Russians dropped an RS-26 ICBM (SS-X-31) sans warhead on Dnipro.

Clownshoes

Trump's cabinet picks started off normal enough. Marco Rubio as SecState? Sure, dude's been a senator for over a decade, with most of that time on the Senate Committee for Foreign Relations and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (he's currently the ranking member on the latter), and that's as solid a resume for the job as you can want. 

Things got progressively sillier from there, though. I'd make fun of RFK, Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services, but that's been thoroughly covered elsewhere.

The proposed Director of National Intelligence, though, is a huge yikes. You know who's excited about her? Komsomolskaya Pravda.

“The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are trembling,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Russian newspaper, wrote on Friday in a glowing profile of Ms. Gabbard, noting, positively, that Ukrainians consider her “an agent of the Russian state.” Rossiya-1, a state television channel, called her a Russian “comrade” in Mr. Trump’s emerging cabinet.

Jesus wept.

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Busted

Well, they caught the guy they think was the leaker of the Israeli attack plans. Turns out he was a CIA employee.

A C.I.A. official has been charged with disclosing classified documents that appeared to show Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran for a missile attack earlier this year, according to court documents and people familiar with the matter.

The official, Asif W. Rahman, was indicted last week in federal court in Virginia with two counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. He was arrested by the F.B.I. on Tuesday in Cambodia and brought to federal court in Guam to face charges.

Meanwhile, the dweeby A1C who put all the classified docs on that gaming Discord server is going to the big house for fifteen years. He should have kept them in a spare bathroom or garage, then he could be going to the White House for four.

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U-Turn

Looks like Rubio's investment in the good kneepads has finally paid dividends.

Gotta wonder if Don's gonna slip up and refer to his Secretary of State as "Widdle Marco" in a tweet out of sheer force of habit?

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Know Nukes

With all the data center construction that's accompanied the AI... boom? bubble? ...the demand for power is off the charts and this is leading to talk, wild speculation, and outright misinformation about nuclear power and potential reactor construction.

Here's a dude who knows something about the topic talking about small modular reactors:

Tech giants are signing deals with nuclear power companies to supply energy to their data centers. Many of these deals revolve around unproven Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). This is a relatively new term for most people, so I figured it as worth it to dig in a little to help it make sense.

First to get the hysteria out of the way. No, Microsoft and Google will NOT be running nuclear reactors. No, AI will not be running nuclear reactors. These SMRs will be operated by highly trained operators licensed by the NRC, just like I was on my reactor. Every licensed operator is personally responsible for ensuring nuclear safety. Like go to prison personally responsible. It doesn’t matter who’s name is on the front gate.

Go thou and RTWT.

And remember, any talk about running a technological civilization on clean power that doesn't involve nukes is fundamentally unserious.

Politics as Team Sportsball

So Bumpstock Donnie is coming back because in the Fox News Cinematic Universe anybody to the left of Pinochet is a "communist"*.

Inflation's down, unemployment's as low as it's been in decades, and they keep having to add new lines to the top of stock market charts in newspaper business sections because the market's never been this high... and apparently neither have American voters because everyone seems sure that we're in the middle of The Great Depression II: Electric Boogaloo.

Ask the Man (or Woman) on the Street (or Facebook) what the state of the nation is, and you get some unfocused argelbargle along the lines of "Eggs are eating our pets and immigrants are expensive and it costs four dollars a gallon to trans our kids or something. Plus Ukraine** is taking all the FEMA away from decent American retirees."

Truly we are a fundamentally unserious people.

*Y'ever notice how you can't call someone "Hitler" until they've actually killed six million people and invaded Poland, but if someone proposes jacking the upper marginal tax rate a few percent, they're definitely Stalin?

**You know they broke out the good vodka in the Kremlin this morning.

Another BRIC in the wall

Xi and Putin have been eagerly trying to steer the BRICs nations into becoming a more-or-less explicitly anti-Western coalition. Some member states like India and Brazil aren't too hip with that.

Countries like Brazil and India may subscribe to the overarching philosophy of the BRICS as an institution that can help shape the new “multipolar” world in an age of waning U.S. and Western influence, but they are not interested in subscribing to an anti-Western alliance. Both were originally skeptical of China and Russia’s push to expand the bloc, seeing it as an implicit attempt to dilute their own clout. Some analysts in both countries argue they may be better off quitting the enterprise all together.

“For us, the United States is by far the most important partner in terms of our future growth and technologies and access to technologies, and therefore, we don’t want a situation where BRICS become the focal point of conflict with the West on the economic political fronts,” Kanwal Sibal, former foreign secretary in India and former ambassador to Russia, told my colleagues in an interview.

“So while we are in there, we would like to have more cooperation within BRICS and work on a positive agenda for the form of the international system in a cooperative mode, rather than in a confrontational mode,” Sibal said. “Otherwise the BRICS will move in a direction which would become pronouncedly anti-Western.”

I can see how the fact that they have to hold meetings only in countries where Putin is allowed to travel could cause inconvenience.

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Ты с ума сошел, бро?

Russia is big mad that some Russkie channels have been removed from YouTube, so a Moscow arbitration court has fined the tech giant a jillion squillion hojillion dollars, which is roughly a bazillion times more than all the money in the world.

The fine, imposed after certain channels were blocked on YouTube, which Google owns, has reached more than 2 undecillion rubles, Russian business newspaper RBC reported this week. That’s about $20 decillion — a two followed by 34 zeros.

The fine is significantly more money than the combined total global net wealth of $477 trillion, according to Boston Consulting Group, and the worldwide gross domestic product last year of about $105 trillion, according to the World Bank.

Google’s parent company Alphabet — one of the five most valuable companies in the world — is valued at about $2 trillion, about 10 billion trillion times smaller than the fine.

LOL.

ROFLMAO, even.

This certainly makes me take Russia seriously and not think of them like a cross between a comic opera kleptocracy and the fictional bad guy country from an Austin Powers movie.

(The post title is, of course, Google Translate's attempt at "You mad, bro?" in Russian. Is it accurate? I don't know, and I also don't care, much like Google doesn't care about bogus fines issued by some phony-baloney court.)

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Norks on Film

Video leaks confirm North Korean troops in Russia, likely to be used against the Kursk salient.

North Korea has one of the largest militaries in the world with about 1.2 million soldiers, but most are underfed and poorly equipped, and have been used as labor forces rather than for military operations.

But the soldiers sent to Russia were special operations troops, including from North Korea’s elite Eleventh Army Corps, often called the “Storm Corps,” South Korea’s spy agency said this week.

The “Storm Corps” is among North Korea’s best trained and best equipped units, said Go Myong-hyun, senior research fellow at Seoul’s Institute for National Security Strategy, which is affiliated with South Korea’s intelligence agency.

Deadly Hand Me Downs

Australia is engaged in modernizing their military in the face of regional Chinese saber rattling, which includes upgrading their military's armor with M1A2 Abrams tanks. As a result, they're shipping 49 of their older M1A1 Abrams to Ukraine to bolster the latter's armored forces.

Also, it looks like an F-16 might have splashed an Su-34 Fullback with a long-range AMRAAM shot. If true, that's probably an ex-Danish F-16A, a Disco Era cold warrior still out there doing work. The Su-34 had only been in real serious series production for half a decade or so and some OSINT types are claiming that Russia has less than a hundred left.

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When R2D2 goes rogue...

An internet connected appliance is a hackable appliance.

Robot vacuums manufactured by Ecovacs have gone rogue, with some customers reporting the tiny tech tools chased them around their homes and barraged them with profanities after being hacked.

Minnesota lawyer Daniel Swenson is one of those people. He told Australia Broadcast Network about an experience in May with his Deebot X2. the uniquely problematic model from the Chinese manufacturer.

Instead of Skynet infiltrating our fortified bunkers with T-800 Terminator killbots, it's 4chan infiltrating our living rooms with robot vacuum cleaners that bang into our ankles and call us names.

This future is somehow both duller and dumber and yet also more dystopian than the one I was promised.

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Tab Clearing...

• We "dial" and "hang up" phones, have web "pages", and "roll up" the windows in our cars.


• Russian hackers breach Verizon's PTT network.


• "Hey, buddy, do you have the time?" On distracting questions.

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Going off half-cocked...

*rubs temples*

He was charged with the misdemeanor crime of Battery against the woman, as well as the misdemeanor crime of Assault on an Unborn Child.

The headline and article are poorly and unclearly written, but for heaven’s sake, people, would it kill you to do a little journalism of your own before setting your hair on fire and running in circles?

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Tab Clearing...

• Why is it so hard to produce good infantry?


• Afghan man arrested in Oklahoma, said to be plotting ISIS-inspired attacks on Nov. 5th.


• Why was Roman infantry weaponry so weird relative to other Mediterranean nations?

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As the Wind Blows...

There's a good explainer here on what caused the rapid intensification of Hurricane Milton, why "bigger" doesn't necessarily mean "stronger" when it comes to hurricanes, and what's likely to happen over the next couple days as Milton continues to track to the northeast and encounters less favorable (for the hurricane) atmospheric conditions while still remaining over unusually warm Gulf waters...

The hurricane went from a Category 1 storm at midnight to a Category 5 hurricane by noon. And it didn’t stop there.

By 8 p.m. on Monday, the storm’s maximum sustained wind speeds had increased to 180 miles per hour, making Milton one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes ever. Based on wind speed, it joined a handful of other hurricanes to rival the strongest Atlantic storm ever recorded: a 1980 hurricane named Allen, which had a peak wind speed of 190 m.p.h. before it made landfall along the United States-Mexico border.

As a small, compact system, however, Milton was more similar to Hurricane Wilma in 2005, which holds the record for the lowest pressure in a hurricane, another measure of a storm’s intensity. Its small size, an excess of extremely warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico and calm atmospheric conditions allowed Milton to “explosively” intensify, as hurricane center forecasters noted Monday afternoon.

The standard meteorological definition of “rapid intensification” is 30 knots in 24 hours, or roughly 35 miles per hour daily. Milton increased by more than double this definition on Monday, at a pace similar to that of Wilma and another record storm, Hurricane Felix in 2007.

It's funny that, like, the sixth post ever made at this blog, just over nineteen years ago, was about politics making people stupid about hurricanes...

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Tab Clearing...

• Head of RT admits in interview that there are more clandestine influence operations where that one came from.


• A tour of Fort Wayne... the one in Detroit, that is.


• Beware of acorns!

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That's good news!

Better check and see if Costco will let you return those three cases of toilet paper you bought on speculation, hoping to sell it to your less-foresighted neighbors in a couple weeks, because the longshoremen's strike is off (at least for the next several months.)

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Speaking of which...

I just linked to a piece about Diego Garcia the other day, and now comes the news that the United Kingdom has agreed to hand the Chagos Islands (of which the Diego Garcia atoll is a part) over to Mauritius.

That was the last British colonial possession east of Suez, so this is kinda historic.

As part of the conditions of the treaty, which is still being finalized, the UK/US base on Diego Garcia will be permitted to remain. That's a good thing because it's of enormous, and growing, strategic importance.

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Charlie Hustle has left the building.

Pete Rose was controversial for a whole bunch of reasons, but there's also no denying he was one of the greatest to ever play the game.

After stints with the Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Phillies and Montreal Expos, Mr. Rose retired as a player in 1986 with 4,256 hits and a career batting average of .303, hitting above .300 for a season 15 times. Most baseball historians and stat aficionados presume that the combination of Mr. Rose’s skill and longevity — the average MLB career is about six years — will make his hits record impossible to beat.

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Tab Clearing...

Today in headlines:

• Fidelity has cut its estimate of X’s value by 79% since Musk’s purchase


• China, at UN, warns against ‘expansion of the battlefield’ in the Ukraine war


• Switzerland and Italy redraw border due to melting glaciers

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