Free Republic 3rd Qtr 2025 Fundraising Target: $81,000 Receipts & Pledges to-date: $2,980
3%  
Woo hoo!! 3rd Qtr 2025 FReepathon is now underway!!

Posts by Zhang Fei

Brevity: Headers | « Text »
  • Trump says Ukraine will need Patriot missiles for its defence, chides Putin

    07/05/2025 6:02:19 AM PDT · 16 of 38
    Zhang Fei to backpacker_c; marcusmaximus; Paul R.; Bruce Campbells Chin; PIF; familyop; MercyFlush; tet68; ...

    Ukraine ping

    [With all the daily stories that you post about how well ukraine is doing and how they are winning over russia....

    there doesn’t appear to be any need for the U.S. to help ukraine anymore, so the U.S. should be rebuilding all the stocks biden sent to ukraine, but never replenished.]


    Ukraine is doing pretty well, given the very limited help it’s getting, a tiny fraction of what was given to either Russia or Britain against Germany or China against Japan. As a country invaded by a much larger one, Ukraine does need foreign supplies, since its economy can’t match Russia’s.

    In WW2, Russia was invaded by Germany, a country with 1/3 its population and 1/40 its size. Yet it relied on massive US aid, including as much as half of many raw materials, more than half of a number, 100K trucks, 400K jeeps, 14K planes, 13K tanks, huge numbers of railroad cars. Khrushchev and Stalin admitted it would have lost without US aid.

    When Finland fought Russia during the Winter War while Russia was allied with Nazi Germany to divide up Poland and hand over the Baltics to Russia, the Finns relied on foreign supplies to keep fighting, but was denied this aid by Germany, leading to its partial defeat and the loss of 10% of its land.

    But in the Continuation War, which Finland launched to retake its lost territory, it received full German support, including a detachment of German troops. In that campaign, it not only recovered lost territory, it advanced onto Russian land, and held it until it signed a separate peace in 1944 giving that land back and another piece as a concession. German supplies to the Finns had slowed to almost nothing, and it could not keep fighting Russia without that imported equipment, so it made the best deal it could, under these straitened circumstances. As with Russia’s reliance on Lend Lease supplies from the US and massive rerouted Lend Lease from the UK, foreign aid meant the difference not just between victory and defeat, but the very ability to continue the war.

    But in light of July Fourth celebrations, a more timely comparison might be to the rebel cause being aided by French and Spanish cash and arms. France and Spain gave 3% and 1.5% of their GDP to the Patriots for 7 years running. They fought the British Empire in Europe and throughout the Atlantic, which diverted Crown resources, both material and men, that could not be used against the Patriot cause. At the time of Yorktown, financed for the Patriots by Spain, the French Navy was blockading supplies to Cornwallis and a French ground force was on hand, just in case British reinforcements arrived by land.

    The bottom line is that all small powers require foreign help to sustain a war against bigger powers. Ukraine’s need isn’t indicative of incompetence, corruption, congenital bad luck, or whatever. China and Russia, were both substantially larger than Japan and Germany in land and resources, but needed foreign supplies delivered as gifts to remain in the war. Both the Chinese and the Russians were incompetent relative to their adversaries, but better supplies courtesy of Uncle Sam helped turn certain defeat into certain victory.

    The impressive aspect of Ukraine’s war effort is the way it has held the line against Russia with a fraction of the material supplied to Russia in WW2, and without direct allied military action against Russia to divert its resources. Without US and British action in WW2 against Germany and Japan to divert and exhaust the latter’s resources, Russia and China would have been defeated.

  • One of America's most important companies slashes 20,000 jobs and offers huge buyouts

    07/04/2025 6:06:06 AM PDT · 4 of 29
    Zhang Fei to DFG

    Amazon deliveries are more reliable than UPS. My Prime shipments always get to me when Amazon delivers. FedEX and UPS are a mixed bag. The issue is a mix of 4 things - package theft, driver malfeasance or incompetence and shipper fraud. By delivering its own packages, Amazon has a handle on all four.

  • A Clear Path for a GOP Mayor in NYC?

    06/30/2025 2:12:05 AM PDT · 59 of 61
    Zhang Fei to Vermont Lt

    [Sliwa has zero chance of winning. Not in a million elections.]


    Sliwa got 28% in 2021. If none of the other 3 candidates gets that much, he’s got a shot. But these are long odds, given the voter tendency to bandwagon.

  • Disney Layoffs Continue, Hitting Product and Technology Division Hard

    06/26/2025 11:29:54 AM PDT · 20 of 23
    Zhang Fei to DiogenesLamp

    [Till they fire Kathleen Kennedy, they aren’t serious.]


    Indeed. Two words that come to mind re her tenure - vandal, firebug.

  • Lt. Gov. Patrick rips Gov. Abbott for vetoing THC ban, digs in against calls for regulation

    06/24/2025 7:58:46 PM PDT · 84 of 84
    Zhang Fei to Antoninus

    [Again, you’re delving into the fantasy realm that’s not too far from outright lies. Laudanum was not “much more potent” than the opium smoked by the Chinese in opium dens. It normally contained 10% opium and it was used in the form of drops as an ingredient when preparing other tinctures for various uses. It was most commonly used as a painkiller and its addictive properties were not well understood until the late 19th century.

    You can compare the use of such a product with what went on in opium dens if you wish. But such a comparison is nonsense. Here’s a primary source account from 1878, nearly 40 years after China’s defeat in the First Opium War. Enjoy:
    The room is four or five yards long and perhaps three wide low ceiling blackened with smoke and covered with black cobwebs. The floor is the bare earth the walls are black as soot save here and there where they are adorned with a few strips of red paper most of which bear inscriptions sounding like horrid mockery. Take one: “May all who enter here gain health and happiness.” On all sides of this den are wooden benches like tables covered with a piece of matting and each furnished with lamp and pipe. Most of these were occupied with gaunt hollow eyed figures lying curled up some taking their first puffs others in different stages of prostration and stupefaction.

    Go read the entire account here, and imagine 40 million people in such a condition. Then, laugh it off as a fairy tale that had no impact on China.]


    I don’t understand your proclivity for Chinese fairy tales. You can only smoke opium so fast. You can take as much laudanum as you want. And a single drop of laudanum was sufficient to sedate a baby, so this stuff was strong. Opium’s universal availability everywhere else was insufficient to throttle the West’s meteoric rise, but China alone took damage, in an empire whose inhabitants were genetically less prone to addiction than other demographics? Tell me another one.

    [In 2021, American Indian or Alaska Native (36.1%) or Multiracial people (34.6%) were more likely to have used illicit drugs in the past year compared with Black or African American (24.3%), White (22.5%), Hispanic or Latino (19.4%), or Asian people (11.1%). Asian people were less likely to have used illicit drugs in the past year compared with people in most other racial or ethnic groups. ]

  • Exclusive: Early US intel assessment suggests strikes on Iran did not destroy nuclear sites, sources say

    06/24/2025 12:22:20 PM PDT · 9 of 67
    Zhang Fei to McGruff

    Unsurprising. A well-fortified underground facility should require more than a single air strike. Trump’s skittishness may be driven by political considerations, but the fact is this is a hard target that should require multiple days or weeks of air strikes. Cheyenne was built to withstand a nuclear strike a mile away.

  • Lt. Gov. Patrick rips Gov. Abbott for vetoing THC ban, digs in against calls for regulation

    06/24/2025 12:04:43 PM PDT · 50 of 84
    Zhang Fei to Antoninus

    [That’s a fascinating take. The Opium Wars are a case-study in “sub-optimal governance” but not for the reason you posit. Rather it was because the only man among the Mandarins who wasn’t corrupt (Commissioner Lin) was undercut and persecuted at every turn both by the British and by those within the Q’ing bureaucracy until his effort to enforce the opium ban ended in failure.

    That’s your fairy tale, right there. The rest of the world “did just fine” — except for the literal millions who became addicted and ruined their lives and the lives of those around them. Of course, the cause and process of addiction was not well understood until the late 19th century. Once addiction was better understood, that is what drove to efforts to ban or strictly regulate certain highly addictive substances that provided little or no benefit to society.]


    And yet the availability of narcotics sold like grocery items not only failed to cause the collapse of the rest of the world, it raced ahead while China stagnated. Chinese coolies in Singapore did just fine, used opium in their off hours while their ethnic kin in China went hungry. That’s what suboptimal means - opium use supposedly causes Chinese decline even as others race ahead despite never having regulated opium.

    The Chinese fairy tale is that the West poisoned China. That’s a lie. In that era, opium was, like alcohol and tobacco, just another trade good. It merely insisted that if ordinary Chinese wanted to use it, that merchants be allowed to import it.

    Opium was not just available in the West, it was sold in much more potent form, as laudanum, and as ubiquitous as aspirin. That only 10% of Chinese used opium is consonant with Asian addiction rates in the US, which are far lower than that for other ethnicities. The ubiquity of laudanum suggests that the entire US population used opium. Diluted, laudanum was used as a sedative for toddlers.

    I once accepted Chinese lies about opium’s role in China’s decline as gospel. Parenthetically, it was the mention of laudanum in Tombstone that led me to look up its meaning, then its role in the 19th century. At which point I came to see the Chinese opium fairy tale as the pack of lies it is.

    I’m not a fan of narcotics for recreation. But the fact is narcotics went unregulated around the world, but China alone kept falling behind.

  • Lt. Gov. Patrick rips Gov. Abbott for vetoing THC ban, digs in against calls for regulation

    06/24/2025 9:54:40 AM PDT · 39 of 84
    Zhang Fei to Antoninus

    [They do, because they lost several shooting wars against drug pushers, in their case pushers sponsored by the hegemonic power of the mid-19th century, Great Britain.

    The result was the ultimate destruction of the Q’ing Dynasty within fifty years.

    What China learned is that drug pushers need to be eliminated with extreme prejudice. And that introducing drugs into your enemy’s society is an effective way to wage war.

    A Disgraceful Little War ~ The Opium War and Commissioner Lin]


    It’s a Chinese fairy tale made up to divert attention from sub-optimal governance. Drug use was ubiquitous in the rest of the world, and it did just fine.

    https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Opium-in-Victorian-Britain/

    Narcotics could be, and was bought OTC in the US until 1914’s Harrison Act.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Narcotics_Tax_Act

    Coca Cola’s name isn’t incidental - it included trace amounts of cocaine until 1905, a selling point for fans of the beverage.


    https://www.justthinktwice.gov/article/did-coca-cola-ever-contain-cocaine
    [(NIDA Blog Team) Scientific research is constantly discovering new things about drugs, such as the health benefits and risks of using (or misusing) them. Sometimes, these discoveries lead to changes in the way a drug is used.

    For example, did you know that the original recipe for Coca-Cola contained cocaine?

    Coca-Cola’s history has been well-documented. The drink was invented in 1885 by John Pemberton, a pharmacist from Atlanta, Georgia, who made the original formula in his backyard. Pemberton’s recipe contained cocaine in the form of an extract of the coca leaf, which inspired the “Coca” part of the beverage’s name. The “Cola” comes from the kola nut (which contains caffeine, another stimulant).

    When Coca-Cola was invented, cocaine was legal and a common ingredient in medicines. People thought it was safe to use in small amounts.]


    The astonishing aspect of the Chinese libel that the West was trying to poison China, rather than merely export a commodity then in wide use everywhere, is that this despicable lie is now practically holy writ in the West. But it’s completely consistent with the current lie it peddles, that the pandemic it created had its origin in the West. Different regime, same attitude towards the truth, and a tendency towards blood libels.

    The principal lesson of the world’s century-long experience with legal narcotics is that some lives were worsened or cut short, but for most, life not only went on, the period’s robust economic growth was unaffected. Western colonies prospered throughout this period as China languished, despite the ubiquity of opium consumption. Singapore became Britain’s Gibraltar of the East, a thriving entrepot where Chinese coolies smoked opium to relax in between bouts of back-breaking labor.

    Later in the 19th century, China began exporting opium to North America.

    https://web.uvic.ca/vv/student/chinatown/opium/p3.html

    Throughout, the US went from strength to strength, with Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet of battleships declaring to the world in 1907 that the US had not simply become the world’s biggest economy by 1890, it had now become a major military power.

  • House Democrat: Trump bombing Iran ‘an unambiguous impeachable offense’

    06/22/2025 6:50:20 AM PDT · 44 of 120
    Zhang Fei to DallasBiff

    Iran had a US envoy tortured to death. That isn’t just an act of war, it’s treachery deserving of severe consequences. When the head of a Khwarezmian fief killed Genghis Khan’s envoys, he besieged it, had its population wiped out.


    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otrar_Catastrophe
    [The Otrar Catastrophe was a siege that took place between December 1219 and February 1220 during the Mongol invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire at Otrar, a large trading city on the Syr Darya river. Inalchuq, the city’s governor, had seized the goods of a Mongol trade caravan the previous year; after more provocations from Inalchuq’s liege and ruler of the Khwarazmian Empire, Shah Muhammad II, Genghis Khan launched a full-scale invasion of the empire.

    The city had been extensively garrisoned and fortified, and the Mongol troops found it difficult to breach the battlements. Progress was slowly made, and by February Genghis felt confident enough to detach part of his army and head southwards towards Transoxiana. His sons Chagatai and Ogedei were left behind to continue the siege. Qaracha, the leading general of the city, deserted in February 1220 and the inner citadel fell soon afterwards. Inalchuq was captured alive, and was executed. Some sources relate that he was executed by having molten metal poured into his orifices; this story, symbolising his greed in seizing the caravans, is almost certainly apocryphal.

    Muhammad had expected the nomadic invaders to fail in capturing Otrar. Its seizure left the Khwarazmian heartland open to conquest—the Mongols would isolate and capture the great cities of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Gurganj in turn. The Otrar oasis would revive as the Syr Darya shifted in its course; the Khwarazmian citadel would remain abandoned.]

  • House Democrat: Trump bombing Iran ‘an unambiguous impeachable offense’

    06/22/2025 6:37:36 AM PDT · 20 of 120
    Zhang Fei to metmom

    [Iran has posed an imminent threat to us for decades.

    Those nukes are meant for us since Iran has vowed to destroy us.]


    Never mind imminent. We should have bombed Iran for what they did to Bill Buckley, a CIA station chief with diplomatic immunity.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Francis_Buckley
    [Kidnapping
    edit
    On March 16, 1984, Buckley was kidnapped by Hezbollah[17] from his apartment building when he was leaving for work.[5][18] Army Major General Carl Stiner had warned Buckley that he was in danger, but Buckley told him that “I have a pretty good intelligence network. I think I’m secure.” However, according to Stiner, Buckley continued to live in his apartment and travel the same route to and from work every day.[19]

    Aftermath
    edit
    On November 22, 1985, Ted Shackley, Buckley’s friend and recruiter, traveled to the Atlantic Hotel in Hamburg, where he met General Manouchehr Hashemi, the former head of SAVAK’s counterintelligence division. Also at the meeting was Manucher Ghorbanifar. According to the report of this meeting that Shackley sent to the State Department, Hashemi said Ghorbanifar had “fantastic” contacts with Iran,[20] but the CIA had designated him one year earlier as a “fabricator”.[21] At the meeting, Shackley told Hashemi and Ghorbanifar that the United States was willing to discuss arms shipments in exchange for the four Americans kidnapped in Lebanon, although Buckley was already dead at this point.[22][23][4]

    Major General Carl Stiner stated that “Buckley’s kidnapping had become a major CIA concern. Not long after his capture, his agents either vanished or were killed. It was clear that his captors had tortured him into revealing the network of agents he had established.”[24] According to the United States, Buckley had undergone 15 months of torture by Hezbollah before his death. After Buckley’s kidnapping, three videos of Buckley being tortured were sent to the CIA in Athens. Interpreters noticed puncture marks indicating he was injected with narcotics. According to several sources, as a result of his torture, he signed a 400-page statement detailing his CIA activities.[5][25]

    In a summary of the content of a video taken approximately seven months after the kidnapping, Buckley’s appearance was described as follows:

    Buckley was close to a gibbering wretch. His words were often incoherent; he slobbered and drooled and, most unnerving of all, he would suddenly scream in terror, his eyes rolling helplessly and his body shaking.[26] The CIA consensus was that he would be blindfolded and chained at the ankles and wrists and kept in a cell little bigger than a coffin.[5]]


  • Defusing a Bomb: Michael Powell's The Small Back Room

    06/22/2025 1:30:14 AM PDT · 6 of 6
    Zhang Fei to Mozilla

    [His podcast returned and his site is being updated as I checked it out.]


    Thanks for the updates. Whether on current affairs or cultural artifacts of a bygone era, Steyn is consistently incisive and entertaining.

  • Defusing a Bomb: Michael Powell's The Small Back Room

    06/21/2025 3:34:52 PM PDT · 2 of 6
    Zhang Fei to Twotone

    Steyn is a treasure. That he got kicked off National Review is a travesty.

  • Exclusive: Israel seeks swift action on Iran, sources say, with a split U.S. administration

    06/21/2025 3:24:46 PM PDT · 47 of 64
    Zhang Fei to bantam

    [There is NO NEED FOR A 2 WEEK hug it out fest!
    I do not for the life of me get this 2 weeks thing!
    It’s BS!!!]


    If it’s just a few bombs, there’s no need. If Trump intends on a big air campaign, of hundreds of sorties a day, two weeks isn’t a long time to build up a force able to get the job done. Desert Storm featured 3000 sorties a day for 30 days. That meant close to 3K fighter/bomber aircraft in the region, since every plane can do one sortie a day, on average. That buildup took almost half a year, included 6 carriers.

  • Exclusive: Israel seeks swift action on Iran, sources say, with a split U.S. administration

    06/21/2025 3:04:00 PM PDT · 42 of 64
    Zhang Fei to Jim Noble

    [Bombing does not win wars.]


    This is a raid, not a war, where some amount of land is usually at stake. For Iran, it’s a campaign in a several decade war at the end of which it hopes to kill every last Jew in Israel. For Israel, it’s yet another raid to swat the current threat, an outgrowth of Islamic eschatology. Muslims believe a Final Solution to the Jewish question is necessary for the world to end. This is literally why Muslims have such an affinity for Nazism - the two creeds are fellow travelers in this regard.

  • U.S. Senator Ted Cruz has received $1.8 Million from AIPAC in contributions

    06/20/2025 7:32:31 PM PDT · 117 of 117
    Zhang Fei to yelostar

    [At the fourth paragraph there is a chart. From 1946-2024, we gave Israel $308 billion in economic and military aid. No other country is close.]


    Not even close to true. The US donated 38K dead GIs to South Korea and a much bigger chunk of cash. It donated 58K GIs to Sout Vietnam and, again, a bigger amount of money. Then there were the Afghan and Iraqi governments, each soaking up $1T and thousands of dead GIs. That’s not taking into account France and the UK, on whose account the US lost 400K GIs and the equivalent of $40T fighting their wars.

    Even a longtime rival and enemy that once contested California, the Russians, took in 11% of 1941 GDP, half of a good chunk of their supplies, 14K aircraft and 13K tanks. And this was a war Russia started in alliance with Germany, where it switched sides only after Germany invaded it. Israel has gotten a tiny fraction of US aid to Russia, an enemy bent on America’s destruction, that returned the favor by not only supplying North Korea and North Vietnam, but by actively being involved in combat against US troops in Korea and Vietnam.

    https://www.rferl.org/a/did-us-lend-lease-aid-tip-the-balance-in-soviet-fight-against-nazi-germany/30599486.html

    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/seventy-years-ago-soviet-mig-15s-attacked-american-pilots-180977440/

    https://www.rbth.com/history/332396-how-soviets-fought-against-americans

  • Donald Trump delays decision on Iran strikes as Keir Starmer calls for restraint

    06/19/2025 10:47:47 PM PDT · 11 of 26
    Zhang Fei to MinorityRepublican

    This may be camouflage. It takes time to get equipment ready for a major air campaign. Took 5 months to line up Desert Storm’s 3000 sortie a day campaign. The Israelis are said to be doing maybe 150.

  • Could Israel Deploy Massive Bunker Busters That Duplicate US Capabilities?

    06/19/2025 10:23:11 PM PDT · 20 of 50
    Zhang Fei to Waverunner

    [Mossad sets up a drill on the surface, drills down, and pumps in the appropriate explosives. detonates, repeat until the ground penetrating radar says the bunker complex is collapsed. No need to kick the door in, or use complex bombs. Hell the Iranian army ( not the irgc) might help them.]


    The Mossad recruits and manages foreign sources. Demolition is handled by specialists in the army (Tzahal), but I’d agree with your characterization. Demolition is a known quantity, with large numbers of people able to do the job without highly specialized equipment. Bombers and large bombs are needed only if you have momentary access to the site. With Israeli control of the air, they could presumably sanitize the site with air strikes, land people and hundreds of tons of pallet-borne explosives, set remotely detonated charges, extract their people, blow up the mountain remotely.

  • Could Israel Deploy Massive Bunker Busters That Duplicate US Capabilities?

    06/19/2025 10:12:33 PM PDT · 18 of 50
    Zhang Fei to SeekAndFind

    People drill holes without massive charges. The big problem was if they had to do it in one air attack that snuck in before the Iranians knew they were under attack. Further waves of planes risked getting shot down by a fully-alert Iranian air defense.

    Now that Israel controls the air, its bombers can drill at leisure. They’re standing aside, waiting for Trump to do the honors, let him cut the ribbon, so he can claim he ended the Iranian nuke. If he decides not to, they will do the necessaries, complete the mission either with smaller JDAMs dropped one after another, or pallets of explosives precision-dropped and rigged by air-dropped demolition specialists.

  • Canadian Indigenous leader says he was ‘filled with rage’ before ‘intense’ conversation with Trump

    06/19/2025 8:44:03 AM PDT · 18 of 64
    Zhang Fei to MinorityRepublican

    Looks like a normal white guy. The song and dance and war bonnet are presumably to distract from that reality.

  • U.S. Senator Ted Cruz has received $1.8 Million from AIPAC in contributions

    06/19/2025 6:03:59 AM PDT · 48 of 117
    Zhang Fei to FLvoter

    [Huh?? Massie never said Jews can’t be supportive of a Jewish country. But there is clearly a large percentage who are more loyal to Israel than they are to the US. You, for example. You still didn’t explain how Massie is a “Nazi level Jew hater.” My guess is that you think anyone who doesn’t want Americans to die for Israel are Jew haters. And no, Israel is not an ally in any way to the US, no matter what Ben Shapiro tells you.]


    Massie hates Jews for free, hopes Iran will finish the job. That’s Nazi-level hatred. Your sly evasions simply don’t cut the mustard. We have treaty commitments to multiple countries. Do you complain about that? We lost 500K men fighting in two world wars. Do you complain about that? Israel has fought three existential wars with the combined Arab armies. The US military played no active part in two, served as arms supplier in the third.

    Not one American has died fighting for Israel. It has never asked the US to invade anyone on its behalf, and opposed the invasion of Iraq, for fear the Shia minority would be co-opted by Iran, which is exactly what happened.