Free Republic

The problem with the story is Trump’s lead extends to likely voters in the polling. One of the basic definitions of “likely voter” is one who voted in recent elections.

So it is not clear how they reach their conclusion. Yes, the young did not vote in the last election. They were not old enough, but Trump’s polling results are not young dependent.

I suspect this is article is about black men, who maybe did not vote last time, but their numbers are not big enough to define the current Trump lead.

I just did a search for ceasefire Ukraine.

There is a Reuters report of such a thing, quoting unnamed Russian sources. There are no clips of Putin saying this.

Nothing can be believed unless there are direct quotes.

The writer is a Los Angeles lawyer. Automatically suspect.

And near the beginning he gets a factual matter wrong . . . that the time frame for Democrat panic is October.

Wrong. Early voting dominates now. It will be weeks before October that panic would set in.

Rather too often there is talk of jamming and corrupting coordinates and things like that.

Facts:

1) GPS is a spread spectrum signal. A navigation solution requires lock-on to 4 spacecraft orbiting about 10,000 miles up. The signal arrives from above. If you want to jam it, your transmitter needs to be above, and the jamming source, to spread its bandwidth over the wide spectrum of the signal, has to deliver big kilowatts of power at the relevant 1GHz+ frequency. It’s not easy.

2) GPS has an encrypted mode. It transmits a low precision signal, a high precision signal and an encrypted high precision signal. When the encryption is turned ON, it is on the satellites. Every receiver on the footprint of that satellite (which would include Africa and the Mediterranean/Europe) would be denied precision unless they have the decryption key. Commercial aircraft and ships don’t have it. It’s for military use.

3) Russia has its own constellation of satellites that generate its own high precision navigation solution. (China has one, and the EU as well, and Japan and India) Turning on encryption, originally installed to deny enemies use of the precision signal, doesn’t deny Russia anything, since they aren’t using GPS.

4) These stories of jamming are likely not correct. Now, jamming probably does destroy drone activity. Drones have signals in 2 directions, the video from the drone, and the piloting commands to the drone. You need only jam one of those directions to render them largely useless. If you really want to talk about the Russian electronic warfare advantage, talk about how they are undoing Ukraine drone activity. If you can do that, you don’t spend a $10million intercept missile on a cheap drone.

5) If the Russians have found a way to destroy the electronic function of artillery, regardless of navigation issues, and achieved huge rendering of Ukraine artillery useless, then it’s time to surrender. And I mean everyone, not just Ukraine. That would be a localized, focused EMP. That is game over.

>>
Whether he will be able to navigate the perilous, weed- and snake-infested waters of The Swamp is another question. I have recommended he bypass Washington altogether, beginning with holding his inauguration elsewhere. I don’t think he will, though, and I think it is an open question whether he can triumph over the entrenched elite that actually governs the country.
>>

This is the key. The rejection of elitism and entrenched power. Not abortion. Not guns. Not taxes. Not spending. Not foreign affairs. Not race politics.

The key is the Swamp. And the border, which largely is a problem caused by the Swamp.

The world of politics is filled with a class of people who declare themselves elite, usually by virtue of a meaningless undergraduate degree and even more meaningless graduate degree in some completely undemanding discipline like sociology or political science or history.

It’s never engineering. Or physics. Or geology. Or math. Always these soft pseudo sciences that generate an academic credential that the Swamp has incrementally declared necessary to be hired into government.

Somehow, a billionaire has become the leader of populism. The chief opponent of the Swamp.

No. The only opponent of the Swamp.

The most credible scenario would be “ISIS-K” getting funded and provided weapons to launch on US population centers from Mexico or some Caribbean island.

Then you can have some brand new website suddenly calling themselves the voice of ISIS-K take credit for it.

The weapon fragments will be clearly Russian, but of course the fragments now hitting Russian targets are clearly American.

1) These are Muslims, not Palestinians, though they will support Palestinians — mostly because most Muslims in the US, particularly Dearborn, MI, are Sunni.

2) Muslims for whatever reason are over-represented in med schools and as physicians at hospitals. Not PAs and Nurse Practitioners. MDs. In that context, major contributors to Michigan society.

3) Only those naturalized or born in the US can vote. Their birthrate is spectacularly high and is why their voting numbers can outright decide Michigan. (Note that Muslims are 20% of Israel’s population, and growing. Muslims. Not Arabs. Muslims.)

4) They don’t have to vote for Trump to get him elected. They merely have to subtract their numbers from Biden.

5) FYI the largest Muslim country in the world is not in the Middle East. It is Indonesia.

Not quite sure I understand how that aligns with the data provided.

China’s consumption growth since 2019 is 22%. They face the possibility of war upcoming, which would place LNG ports at risk of blockade or outright destruction. The safest source of gas is pipeline. That 22% rise was

Bookmark this: https://www.bakerinstitute.org/chinas-energy-infrastructure there are clickable boxes on the right to display China’s pipeline network, and the Power of Siberia 1 routing

The pipeline already in place is Kovykta to Helye and carries 63 billion cubic meters/year (Power of Siberia 1). The Altai gas pipeline (Power of Siberia 2) is proposed for Sakhalin to Xinjiang and is 1500 miles long. Pipelines cost $8M/mile. Sum therefore 1500 X 8M = $12B. No idea how anyone gets $100B from this.

Also, the Beijing meeting did not include senior gas officials from Russia. The lead energy guy is Novak, who is the interface with OPEC+ and now also Deputy Prime Minister. He is an oil guy.

The absence of senior gas officials made clear no new agreement was expected for signing. Per the data above, 22% rise in Chinese gas consumption from 2019 — amounting to 380ish billion cubic meters/yr. I did not mention Chinese internal production above. They do 4 million barrels oil/day output (consume 15mbpd) and gas is often a byproduct of that, and is for their DaQuing fields 221 billion cubic meters/yr.

So consumption is 380, production 220. They need 160 and already get 60+ from Power of Siberia 1. The next pipeline is proposed at 50. They will sign on. It is much safer.

That will leave other sources as fringe suppliers, which they would very much prefer to isolate their gas sources from blockade. Not that dollars, being created whimsically via QE, matters much, but the consumption increase per year is maybe 40 bcm, is much cheaper via pipeline rather than the cryogenic overhead of LNG.

Patrushev was replaced as Secretary of the Russian Security Council by Shoigu last week. Patrushev is in his 70s. It was a retirement for him and a promotion for Shoigu.

This leaves Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council (Putin is Chairman) as 2nd in command behind Putin, followed by Shoigu. Medvedev’s quotes would be wise to examine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Medvedev scroll to the Foreign Policy paras, unless one wishes to read about his law school academic work.

Geology doesn’t care about ideology.

The US produces about 0.978 trillion cubic meters of gas per year.

The US consumes about 0.881 trillion cubic meters of gas per year.

US natural gas reserves, 12.5 Trillion cubic meters, including shale. The last big increase in reserves came when it became clear the hunt of shale oil would flow gas as byproduct. That is all in the numbers above.

(From BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, the bible of energy for about 80ish years now)

The source for this report was Alexander Milov, mentioned very briefly at the end of the excerpt.

He is exiled from Moscow. He worked in their energy ministry and apparently made some bizarre proposals to break up GAZPROM. Putin chose not to pursue his plan and he went into exile in 2002, to Vilnius from where he declares Putin is a murderer to anyone who will interview him (for pay) so he can make a living.

Here are some pre 2022 facts about natural gas. From the Statistical Review of World Energy — published for about 70 years annually by BP. It’s a big spreadsheet. Get it here from BP’s outsource — https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review scroll down to the choice of .pdf or spreadsheet. Definitely choose spreadsheet because there are so many tabs.

Russia’s natural gas reserves are 37.4 trillion cubic meters. In the world of gas be very careful with units. Propaganda often tries to quote in trillion cubic feet and this corrupts the number to big, eyes-glaze-over amounts.

This 37.4 number does not include the Bazhenov shale, which they have had no cause to even begin to frack.

The #2 gas source in the world is Iran at 32.1 Tcm. Qatar #3 at 24.7 Tcm. The US is about 12 Tcm.

Flow for the Russians 702 billion cubic meters for 2021. 2022’s number down to 638 bcm. That’s for the year. Iran flows about 260 billion cubic meters, the buyers of which seemed not to care about sanctions.

US output post Covid 2022 was 978 billion cubic meters. That is 0.978 trillion . . . out of 12 Tcm reserves and those reserves include shale, the fracking of which is, of course, underway.

Global gas consumption is 3.9 trillion cubic meters/year.

US consumes 881 billion cubic meters per year (of the 978 production). Russia consumption 408 billion cubic meters/yr. China consumption 376 billion cubic meters/yr in 2022 — down 1% from 2021 (they had Covid issues a year or so behind rest of world). Their pre Covid 2019 consumption 308 billion cubic meters. So 2022 is up 22% from 2019. That ain’t slowing down, and Russia is the place with spare capacity that doesn’t have to ship by sea where they can be blockaded.

The ATESH group quoted does have a wiki.

Described as a group of Ukrainians and “Crimean Tatars” in their own wiki. The article calls it a Russian partisan group.

The group says a goal is to have the Ukraine Constitution modified to declare Crimea an autonomous National Republic.

All of their claimed actions take place in Crimea and southern Ukraine via what is quoted as “1000 Tatars”. Not clear how that translates to “Russian partisan group”.

2014 Census of Crimea (over 2 million people) lists Tatars at 12%, Russia at 68% and Ukrainians at 16%. 2021 lists no change in Tatar population, Ukrainians left and down to 7% and Russians now 76%. Tatars were dominant % up to the mid 1800s and then via various causes they disappeared from significance.

Details matter:

>>In April, Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov was arrested for bribery. Ivanov was a close associate of Sergei Shoigu, whom President Vladimir Putin dismissed as defense minister soon after Putin’s inauguration to a new term in May. Lt. Gen. Yury Kuznetsov, head of the Defense Ministry’s personnel directorate, was arrested on bribery charges two days after Shoigu was replaced.>>

Shoigu was promoted to Secretary of the Russian Security Council, replacing a guy named Petrushev, who is 72 years old.

This was not a dismissal.

It has always been intriguing that Covid killed so many oldsters in Europe and the US in 2020, starting in March. Hundreds of thousands.

But Asia . . . Asia was spared until 2021/2022, when mutations had had a chance to arrive.

The original design spared Asians. Only when the variants hit did the death count in Asia rocket upwards.

What a coincidence.

At some point the Fed and Treasury will stop pretending that money is anything other than a substance whimsically created from nothing via QE.

That’s when they whimsically create $50T check and pay it all off.

And that’s when Russia and its vast resources becomes both economically and militarily overwhelming

THE ONLY THING THAT CONGRESS SEATS DETERMINES IS STOPPAGE OF REMOVAL FROM IMPEACHMENT.

No, there is no need for “pursuing the Trump agenda”. There is no need for “getting things done”.

THERE IS 36T in debt. The goal is to NOT get things done. The goal is to slash that debt IN HALF in 2 years.

That means millions of federal employees, including military, have to be unfunded.

You will never get that from GOP congress. What you get from a GOP congress is a $10B cut and celebration that “it is a good start”. No, it’s not a good start. $36T is generating $1T in interest. That’s just interest and they would say $10B is a good start.

This is all Swamp thinking. Trump’s power will be the veto, a tool of NOT getting things done.

Math tends to ignore ideology.

The planet is not growing. There is not a 50% increase in the volume of the planet vs its volume 50 years ago.

It is finite. Stuff in it is also finite.

Most of population growth is in Africa right now, and it is getting fed with farming there. No, there was no order of magnitude jump in production of a particular seed. The growth is in how much land is producing stuff, and that happens for two reasons — synthetic fertilizer and oil.

Rock phosphate and nat gas makes fertilizer on a scale appropriate to the vast expanse of land devoted to growing food. And oil powers the tractors that get seeds planted on the 100s of thousands of acres before planting season expires. And then gets it harvested before winter rots it in the fields.

These items are finite because the planet’s size is finite.

Math doesn’t care about ideology.

The LP is Independent, and they will represent 47% of the vote. And there is nothing you can do about it.

I would guess the optimal response would be hypersonic missiles provided to ISIS K and transported to Mexico to launch from there. Yeah, the same ISIS K that our MSM jumped to declare the culprit in Moscow a few months ago, with all of them agreeing in a matter of minutes, after someone called them all and said they were ISIS K and they did it.

The only way Swamp filth can redeem themselves is by announcing their apology for participation in politics, and leaving politics for a minimum of 15 years.

Then **maybe** they are no longer filth.