As George Soros-backed leftwing Democrats started capturing District Attorney offices across the country, a dangerous soft-on-crime ethos has taken hold in many blue-controlled cities. Prosecutors are letting violent felons back on the streets for minimal bond, no bond, or even failing to charge them entirely. Just this week comes news that Harris County Democratic Judge Josh Hill let a convicted felon accused of kidnapping, beating, and choking a woman out on $2 bail.
The Texas Republican majority in the statehouse has had enough.
In his victory speech on the first day of the Legislative session, Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan (R-Beaumont) said that “rogue district attorneys” who refuse to prosecute certain criminal offenses must be “rein[ed] in.” Legislation filed this week provides an initial glimpse at Texas Republicans’ plan to do that.
“Carte blanche public pronouncements by district attorneys that laws we have on the books will be ignored renders the authority of the Legislature to determine what is and isn’t a crime, moot,” state Rep. David Cook (R-Mansfield) said in a statement provided to The Texan. “It is my intention to rein in renegade district attorneys and ensure the rule of law is respected in Texas.”
Cook’s House Bill (HB) 1350 — with an identical version filed in the Senate by Sen. Tan Parker (R-Flower Mound) — would forbid district or county attorneys with criminal jurisdiction to “adopt or enforce a policy under which the prosecuting attorney prohibits or materially limits the enforcement of any criminal offense … [or] as demonstrated by pattern or practice, prohibit or materially limit the enforcement of any criminal offense.”
Enforcement of the law would be granted to the Office of the Attorney General, and violators may face civil penalties up to $1,500 for an initial offense and then up to $25,500 for ensuing ones. Offending prosecutors may also be removed from office and their replacement would be appointed by the governor.
Prosecutors and judges have a certain amount of discretion on when and what crimes to charge suspects with. But by ignoring the law entirely for far-left ideological reasons, Soros-backed DAs and judges are violating the equal protection rights of Texas citizens who are victimized by soaring crime. Securing the life, liberty and property of its citizens is the most basic and essential function of government.
If they can’t do their job, they need to be removed from office.
Russia detailed plans Tuesday to expand its military to 1.5 million personnel over the next few years, a move that comes as Ukraine warns that Moscow may be planning an offensive and increased tensions between Moscow and the United States and its allies.
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced the troop increase, which is expected to be complete by 2026, according to Russian state news agency, TASS.
Russia will also create military districts in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and an army corps will be created in the Republic of Karelia along Russia’s border with Finland, The Wall Street Journal reported. In addition, Moscow will set up “self-sufficient” units in Russian-held territories of Ukraine, Shoigu said.
“Only by strengthening the key structural components of the Armed Forces is it possible to guarantee the military security of the state and protect new entities and critical facilities of the Russian Federation,” Shoigu said, according to Reuters.
The announcement comes as Moscow faces setbacks on the battlefield in neighboring Ukraine. Since its 2022 invasion, Russia has been bogged down in Ukraine’s east despite some territorial gains.
Russia’s military has around 1 million troops.
The question I have is: How is Russia going to equip and train these 500,000 new conscripts when they’ve hardly been successful providing equipment for their previous conscripts?
Have they gotten better in the last few months? Well, it would be hard to top their previous “stick a tampon in your wound” level of incompetence. The hard-won success in taking Soledar suggests some improvement in tactics, but since most of the success was accomplished by the Wagner group, it says nothing about Russian conscripts being better equipped or trained.
On paper, there’s nothing to prevent the Russians from churning out more field kits, uniforms, small arms, ammunition and bandages with which to equip their new conscripts. None of those things require high tech components. But thus far they’ve proven singularly incapable of supplying them to their troops.
Throwing bodies at the problem is a classic Russian war strategy, but absent a miraculous increase in basic competence, the latest move shows little promise to win the war in Ukraine for Russia, even if they are capable of rounding upo another 500,000 Russians to throw into the meat-grinder. .
For most of last year there was a recurring pattern for German military aid to Ukraine:
The German government would talk about sending various types of modern military equipment to Germany.
The German government would actually send Ukraine numerous pallets of Diddly and Squat.
I almost did a post on “What’s holding up the German weapons pipeline?” Now, thanks to Peter Zeihan, we know that clog has a name: Christine Lambrecht, the German Defense Minister, who just resigned.
Takeaways:
Lambrecht is not somebody with defense experience. She’s a politico. She has been up relatively high in Germany’s Social Democratic Party, which is a center-left party for decades. So it’s not that she’s a nobody, it’s just she doesn’t have a lot of skills that are appropriate to her current portfolio. This has not been a problem. In fact her specific, deliberate, intentional incompetence and defense matters in many ways was seen by the SPD as a plus.
Until the Russo-Ukrainian War.
“The general position in Germany as a whole, and specifically in the SPD, was that the Defense Ministry itself is unnecessary, that in the aftermath of the Cold War, the threat to Germany is gone.”
Plus the deep-seated problem of all Germany’s Historical Unpleasantness.
So for the Germans, the post-cold war environment in Europe has been the best it’s ever been. You’re talking about a golden age, because NATO has provided defense, but all the countries that border Germany are either neutral, like Switzerland, or are members of NATO, which is basically everyone else. And in that sort of environment, the Germans can kind of dither and become pacifist socialists. Which, to be perfectly blunt, looking at the long stretch of German history is much, much, much, much, much, much better for everyone than the alternative.
“Lambrecht was put in charge of the Defense Ministry to basically continue slowly sliding it into functional oblivion.”
“That doesn’t work in an environment where the Russians are back on the warpath, and the Germans need to be starting thinking not just about 20th century military strategy, but 19th century military strategy, and Lambrecht was completely unprepared, professionally, personally and ideologically for this sort of shift.”
Indeed, she was a poor fit for a Germany doubling its defense budget. Plus, she hates the U.S.
“The Russians are not just mobilizing, but mobilizing in force. They’re finally beginning significant industrial upgrades. They’re finally starting to churn out missiles and ammo and tanks and numbers. And they are finally doing a full-scale mobilization. This isn’t the 300,000 that they did a few weeks ago. We’re talking about at least another half a million men likely being in the theater within a very few number of months.” Not sure where he’s getting this info, only see references to Russia considering it. (Unless my speculation that Russia was carrying out a full mobilization under the guise of a partial mobilization was on the mark.)
Germany may now finally move on approving other countries transferring Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. “There are a number of countries, specifically Denmark and Poland, who have been pressuring the Germans in order to allow them to take these exported tanks and then send them on to Ukraine. That requires Berlin’s approval, and Berlin at this point has been demurring. But the coalition now involves almost every single country that the Germans have sold the Leopards, to and so all of a sudden with Lambrecht gone, all of this is in motion, and I think we’re going to see the Germans relent.”
Faster, please.
Finally, all of this is just an excuse to embedded this classic Norm Macdonald bit about Germany. “I’m not sure if any of you are history buffs…”
As revelations continue to roll out about a third set of classified documents being illegally kept by Joe Biden, and crackhead son Hunter Biden paying The Big Guy $50,000 a month to rent his house (which would have meant that Hunter only got to keep $33,333 of his Burisma salary…assuming there was no other graft being passed on) a question occurs to me: Which Democratic Kingmaker(s) want to force Biden out of office?
With midterms safely past, news about the classified documents (which was known in advance of the midterms) was allowed to leak out, indicating that whoever arranged Slow Joe’s greased-skid path to the White House has lost confidence in his ability not to screw things up so badly that Democrats get slaughtered in 2024. And this despite the decided unpopularity both of VP Kamala Harris and backup catspaw Pete Buttigieg. My working theory is that the same people who installed Biden will try to install Gavin Newsom in 2024.
But the question is who is calling the shots in the Democratic Party? George Soros? Barack Obama? Valerie Jarrett? Ron Klain? Randi Weingarten? (I might previously have included Tom Steyer on this list, but if he really were calling the shots he wouldn’t have tried that disasterous presidential run.)
If you have good theories and solid evidence on who is actually calling the shots in the Democratic Party these days (and thus the likely candidate for wanting to push Biden out), let me know in the comments below. As Instapundit noted, those that foisted Joe Biden on us have an awful lot to answer for…
Asianometry has an interesting video up about East Germany expensive, strenuous efforts to catch up to the west in semiconductor manufacturing technology.
Spoiler: They didn’t.
Some takeaways:
“In the late 1980s, the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, went all in on the monumental task of domestic semiconductor production. This semiconductor obsession failed, and the billions of marks spent on it eventually bankrupted the country’s failing economy.” I think he oversells the role the semiconductor push had on bankrupting the economy; everything in late commie East Germany was failing (just like the rest of the Warsaw Pact), they suffered a credit crunch for investment due to tightened western restrictions, couldn’t export Soviet oil as profitably due to the Reagan/Saudi created oil glut, and also were running into hard currency shortages to but the components their manufacturing sector needed to keep exporting.
The East German Uprising of 1953 kicked off what would be a persistent, and ultimately existential problem, for the GDR: Emigration. Throughout its history, its best and smartest people consistently sought a way out to the West. To convince its people to stay, the SED [Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, AKA Socialist Unity Party of Germany] promised a better future through the use of technology. More than the Soviets, East Germany leaned on information technology as a pathway towards economic vitality and a glorious socialist future. The Party’s elites saw themselves locked in a technology race with the capitalists to see who can build a better society. Leader Walter Ulbricht called for an “industrial transformation” with the ultimate aim of “catching up with and surpassing capitalism in terms of technology.” A thriving computer industry was crucial towards making this ideology work. And in order to produce these superior computers, East Germany needed to learn and master microelectronics technology.
“Less than four years after the Americans invented the germanium transistor, East Germany moved quickly to build their own line of first generation semiconductors. In 1952, development work began at the VEB Works for Electrical Components for Communications Technology, or WBN, in the town of Teltow near the city of Berlin. This put them about even with West Germany. The FRG’s first semiconductor factory came about in 1952, built by Siemens.” Indeed, this is very early to get into the semiconductor game. It wasn’t until 1957 that Fairchild Semiconductor, widely considered as Company Zero for America’s semiconductor industry, was founded.
“WBN suffered from a lack of cooperation between its industrial and academic sides. The production teams lacked discipline, hands-on experience, and did not appreciate the scale and difficulty of the task they were facing. In one incident, the team dumped hot ashes right outside a factory window where they were producing a pilot run of semiconductors.” Ouch! A very uncleanroom…
“The state failed to give their young semiconductor team the resources it should have gotten. Administration – their chief accountant, in particular – seemed to care very little for semiconductors. When the team asked for money to purchase felt slippers to prevent static charge buildup in the clean room, their chief accountant denied the request.”
The Soviets didn’t help. “Despite being the GDR’s primary political backer, the Soviets were strangely wary. In 1958, two WBN staff members traveled to the Soviet Union to do technical exchanges. A year later, they came back complaining of limited cooperation. Much of what the Soviets had developed was created for military use. Thusly, the Soviets were concerned that transferring that to the East Germans would leak via scientists defecting to the West.”
They tried to get information from the U.S., but Cold War tech transfer policies were already falling into place. They had better luck in the UK. “Through the contacts of Arthur Lewis, a British Labour Party politician, the delegation saw plants owned by British Philips, Siemens-Edison, and British-Thompson-Houston. The latter is a descendant of the Vickers Company that sold oil equipment to the Soviets in the early 1900s. Just thought that was a nice connection. This visit was very successful. The East Germans learned a whole lot about industrial level semiconductor manufacturing. They even managed to purchase equipment for low-frequency transistors, a trailing edge technology.”
Despite that, the gap grew wider: “In 1958, WBN produced 100,000 germanium diodes, transistors, and rectifiers. Worse yet, some 98% of what they produced eventually needed to be discarded throughout their entire working lives.” Classic commie quality. “That same year in 1958, the United States alone produced 27.8 million transistors. Two years later in 1960, the US grew that production capacity five times over to 131 million.”
“Erich Apel, head of the Economic Commission of the Central Committee Politburo and an economic reformer – wrote in late April 1959: ‘Compared to … the American, Japanese, and West German industry, we lie in a state of backwardness that can scarcely be estimated … this backwardness will not decrease through 1961 at least, but will instead grow. Another inspection in 1960 identified more items of backwardness in semiconductor production. Workers tended to use rules of thumb rather than their instruments to measure. The various factory lines did not cooperate with one another.”
“Interestingly, when reporting these results to the Economic Commission of the Central Committee Politburo, that inspector softened his results. In his notes to state authorities, he said the GDR was 5 to 6 years behind. But in his analysis to the more politically charged Economic Commission, he cut it in half, 3 to 4 years.” Commies always institute thermoclines of truth to avoid being purged.
The brain drain to the west continued. The solution: The Berlin Wall. “For semiconductors however, the Wall pinched off what little technology the GDR had imported from the West.” The solution was to suck up even more to the Soviets, and to spy harder.
In 1963, the aging Walter Ulbricht launched a new initiative – called the New Economy System of Planning – to bring more market elements to the GDR economy. Now industrial groups, not bureaucrats, can actually decide how money can be spent. The reform also elevated the status of technology sectors like semiconductor manufacturing in the economy. R&D spending increased by over a third from 1959 to 1963. In 1965, nearly 40% of the electronics that the GDR produced by value were semiconductors – 82 million marks out of 223 million marks in total. Four years later in 1969, that number grew four-fold. Many of these transistors went into new consumer technical goods like radios, TVs and fridges. In 1971, semiconductor production reached 535 million marks by value. That year, East Germany began producing their first integrated circuits, some 10 years after Texas Instruments did it.
“Strange inequalities in policy planning meant that color televisions were widely available, but consumer items like toothbrushes and toilet paper were in short supply.” Communist planning at its finest!
One day in 1967, the Minister of Electrical Engineering and Electronics showed up to an East German electronics firm with a suitcase full of integrated circuits from TI. He told them to copy them exactly. The Ministry for State Security – better known as the Stasi – had been engaged in scientific and technology espionage since the 1950s – mostly related to atomic engineering and other sciences. Then in 1969, the Stasi’s Scientific and Technical Sector was reorganized and expanded with the goal of acquiring military technologies. After Honecker came into power in 1971, the Stasi’s job shifted from acquiring scientific knowledge to specific technologies – mostly via informants in the West who found and handed the goods over to East Germany. One such informant was Hans Rehder, a physicist working for the West German firms Telefunken and AEG. He handed over technical secrets for over 28 years and was never caught.
“Western companies knew about this copying of course. In one famous example, a GDR chip analyst looking at a stolen chip from the US firm Digital Corporation saw a message n Russian, roughly translating to: ‘When do you want to stop to swipe. Own design is better.'”
Stasi intellectual theft kept them from falling further behind, but couldn’t close the gap. “Because the Stasi were spymasters not technical experts, they frequently asked for the wrong item. Their methods of laundering the technology before passing it on made it harder to understand how to use it. Tightening embargoes from the West also interfered with industrial development. Stolen Western products got progressively older and more expensive to acquire. The embargoes gave other countries the chance to scam the Stasi, adding mark-ups frequently in the range of 30% to 80% to even 100%. This drained the East Germans’ already limited R&D budgets.”
“The wholesale copying also undercut the country’s ability to export its goods abroad. The Stasi did not want other countries to see what they had managed to acquire. And had they tried anyway, sales would have been blocked on patent infringement grounds. And finally, semiconductors were getting to the point that East German technicians struggled to replicate them. As early as 1976, an IC’s physical form no longer yielded secrets on how to produce them.”
“In 1981, with the GDR still about 7-10 years behind the West in microelectronics development, Erich Honecker announced a ten-point program to produce the majority of its semiconductors domestically by 1985. The 1970s were rough years for the GDR. Tighter export bans. The Oil Crises of the 1970s. Heavy borrowing from the West. Declining productivity and worsening competitiveness. It was all weighing heavily – grinding the country’s economy to a halt. Gerhard Schürer, head of the State Planning Commission, convinced Honecker that investing in semiconductors would bring the country out of its economic morass.”
They even struck a deal with Toshiba.
In exchange for 25 million marks, Toshiba – a long running technology partner with the GDR – would furnish the GDR with designs for their 256 kilobyte memory chips along with instructions on how to produce them. At the time, 256-kilobyte was leading edge stuff. The GDR was still struggling to produce 64 kilobyte memory. This would have been a game-changer. But in 1987, Toshiba got caught selling submarine propeller equipment to the Soviet Union. Huge scandal back then. Afraid of getting caught again, Toshiba offered the Stasi a 95% refund to destroy the evidence. [Spy Gerhardt] Ronneberger agreed. So in July 1988, he got the money back and dissolved the chip designs in a vat of acid in front of Toshiba’s people. But never trust a spy! Those were just copies, produced for exactly that purpose.
Finally in September 1988, Zeiss General Director Wolfgang Biermann triumphantly presented Erich Honecker with the first samples of that 1 megabit chip – the U61000. Honecker said that the chips were “convincing proof that the GDR is maintaining its position as a developed industrial country.” This technical “triumph” was the bitterest of them all. In semiconductors, prototypes mean nothing. Production means everything. Dresden produced just 35,000 chips throughout the entirety of 1988 and 1989 with a yield of 20%.
To say this was “piss poor” would be an understatement. Those are ruinous, “fire everyone” numbers for actual semiconductor manufacturers.
They planned to scale up to 100,000 1 megabit chips each year. Toshiba alone produced that many in a single day. Two months later in November 1988, the leading edge moved once more. Toshiba began shipping its 4-megabit DRAM in high volume, seeking to produce a million chips a month by March 1989.
Then history happened. “By then, the East German economy was in shambles, scheduled to default on its debts by early 1990. It never even got there. In May 1989, Hungary opened its borders with Austria and East Germans swarmed through there en route to West Germany. Later in November 1989, a year after its one megabit technical triumph, the Berlin Wall fell.”
East Germany stole as many designs as they possibly could, but they couldn’t steal the intellectual expertise behind the numerous process tweaks, nor the furious swarm of technological innovation drive by Silicon Valley’s capitalist high risk/high reword startup culture that drove Moore’s Law for decades.
Top-down communist command economies never had a chance to keep up.
The Supreme Court of Texas (SCOTX) on Friday reversed a lower court judgment that has prevented the Texas Education Agency (TEA) from taking over the troubled Houston Independent School District (HISD) since 2019.
In overturning a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) issued by a Travis County trial court, SCOTX cited legislation passed by the state Legislature in 2021 that strengthened the authority of the TEA commissioner to intervene in districts failing to meet minimum state standards.
In 2019, a TEA investigation concluded that several HISD board members had violated the Open Meetings Act and state laws related to contracting, all while district schools struggled to meet performance standards.
After TEA Commissioner Mike Morath initiated proceedings under state law to replace the elected board of trustees with an appointed board of managers, the district sued, arguing that Morath had exceeded his authority.
A U.S. District court judge dismissed the case from the federal court system, but the state district court judge issued an injunction blocking TEA action. The injunction was upheld by the Third District Court of Appeals and then temporarily by the state Supreme Court while the case was under consideration.
Attorneys for HISD argued that although Wheatley High School had incurred “F” ratings every year between 2013 and 2019, since the school was not rated in 2018 due to Hurricane Harvey, there were not enough “consecutive” years of failure to trigger state intervention. They also asserted that Morath did not have the authority to place a conservator over the district in lieu of a superintendent, and could not delegate to an agency the underling authority to review the district’s objections.
The injunction blocking TEA action prompted state Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston) and Rep. Harold Dutton (D-Houston) to both introduce legislation to address legal ambiguities identified in the HISD case, with Bettencourt’s Senate Bill (SB) 1365 receiving final approval from both chambers.
In the SCOTX opinion written by Justice Jane Bland. the court referred to SB 1365 provisions, writing, “In sum, the Legislature abrogated much of the court of appeal’s interpretation of the Education Code provisions that govern this case.”
In addition to changes in the law, SCOTX notes that since 2019, voters have elected several new HISD board members and hired a new permanent superintendent. With such changes, the court concludes there is no basis to continue the TRO against the TEA Commissioner’s appointment of a board of managers.
“We hold that the District failed to demonstrate that the Commissioner and his conservator’s planned conduct violates the law,” the SCOTX decision reads. “Thus, the District is not entitled to injunctive relief. We remand the case to the trial court, however, to permit the parties to fully develop the record in light of intervening legal and factual changes.”
“Accordingly, we reverse the court of appeals’ judgment, vacate the temporary injunction, and remand the case to the trial court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
Bettencourt hailed the SCOTX opinion, saying the intent of his bill was to “have a school accountability system that worked.”
“This Supreme Court ruling is a much-needed step to reverse the Third Court of Appeals and return the case to the intent of the Legislature back to having a conservator take additional steps to help improve public education in school districts,” said Bettencourt in a statement.
Many HISD schools, especially in minority neighborhoods, were already sketchy when I grew up and have gotten worse, any Critical Race Theory was a hot issue in 2021 HISD elections. Hopefully TEA can get things moving in the right direction.
Fallout from the House speaker’s race, Biden busted for mishandling classified files, more blue state teachers raping their students, Cadillac’s EV breaks into double digit sales, and the Imelda Marcos disco musical! It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Kevin McCarthy finally wins Speaker of the House race on 15th vote after offering concessions to the House Freedom Caucus.
How is McCarthy doing? Early signs are encouraging. “The House of Representatives passed a new rules package Monday that overhauls the way it functions by putting up more barriers to congressional spending and creating a more deliberate process for passing legislation, which were key demands of the more conservative members of the Republican Party.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) used Thursday morning’s press briefing to criticize the Department of Justice’s handling of the issue.
“They knew this happened to President Biden before the election, but they kept it secret from the American public,” McCarthy told a scrum of reporters on Capitol Hill.
Chicago Board of Education Inspector General Will Fletcher reported 470 sexual complaints against Chicago Public School employees from students in 2022.
“The report details students being abused, groped, groomed, assaulted and threatened by school officials.
“One investigation found a former Junior ROTC staff member had sex with a 16-year-old high school student for a year. When he learned there was an investigation, the staff member threatened to kill the girl and her family if she cooperated with investigators.”
The teachers’ union in Chicago, Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers, so praised by Joe Biden, has done nothing and said nothing about it so far as I can tell, and I did look, focusing instead on promoting critical race theory into the school system. Left unsaid is that the union ensures that firing any of these teachers involved in this activity is virtually impossible. Chicago’s public schools’s firing rate of bad teachers owing to their union membership, as of a few years ago, is 0.1%.
What’s vivid here amid all this widespread predatory behavior from the teaching classes, which like Harvey Weinstein, are prolific campaign donors to Democrats, is that the low outrage factor stands in sharp contrast to the sexual abuse scandals of the Catholic Church, which was ordered by courts to pay billions in reparations to the victims, has seen its leaders publicly apologize for the abuses, and has many programs now to prevent child abuse by perverts in authority. This activity was evil and inexcusable and rightly punished.
As for the more widescale abuse now seen in Chicago’s public schools, along with comparable scandals in the Los Angeles public school system, and other bad cases in New York and other blue cities, well, crickets. The perversion has gotten out of control in Chicago and the story barely makes the national news.
How Biden’s inflation is destroying family budgets:
The reality of the inflation report for American families – year-over-year real wages have been negative for 21 straight months. pic.twitter.com/1Bh4DNqZBF
A federal appeals court on Friday struck down the Trump-era ban on bump stocks, a firearm accessory that enables a semi-automatic gun to shoot at an increased rate of fire.
In a 13-3 decision, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans held that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), acting under “tremendous” public pressure, short-circuited the legislative process by approving a rule to define bump stocks as “machineguns,” which are illegal to possess. The court said ATF did not have the authority from Congress to do so.
This is what a real pro-natalist policy looks like: “Hungary addresses falling birthrates by exempting moms under 30 from income tax for life.” More:
Hungary has taken several measures in recent years to encourage its citizens to have more children, including three years of paid parental leave and state-funded daycare.
The country previously suspended income tax for moms with four or more children, but this new policy specifically encourages women to have children sooner, which in the long run means a higher likelihood of having more children overall.
Israel hit Syria again, and I heard just about nothing about it. Ukraine has really pushed Syria out of the headlines.
Speaking of Ukraine, Russia has largely captured the salt mining town of Soledar, though at a high cost in man. And good luck checking those hundreds of miles of salt tunnels for partisans…
“Tesla plans Houston-area expansion with large new industrial site in Brookshire…Little is known about Tesla’s plans, but the Fortune 500 company signed a lease late last year for about 1.03 million square feet at 111 Empire West, part of the 300-acre Empire West Business Park in Brookshire.” A bold move, considering how radically car sales have dived this year.
Other EVs update: “GM delivers record Cadillac Lyriq deliveries in Q4 – 12 per month.”
“David Byrne, Fatboy Slim Disco Musical ‘Here Lies Love’ Sets Broadway Debut. The musical, which has had a long journey to Broadway, centers on the life of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines.” They say the mirror ball shine bright on Broadway… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
One huge advantage Texas has over one-party Democrat-rule states is the salutary habit of running budget surpluses year after year after year. (Or, to be technically correct (“the best kind of correct!”), biennium after biennium after biennium.)
Now Comptroller Glenn Hegar has officially forecast that the Texas budget for 2024-2025 (the one the legislature will pass in the just-started legislative session) will be a $32.7 Billion surplus.
The historic Texas budget surplus estimate has grown even larger as Comptroller Glenn Hegar announced a $5 billion increase in an updated Biennial Revenue Estimate (BRE) on Monday.
The Texas Legislature convenes for the first day of its 88th Regular Session on Tuesday and now appears to have at its disposal $32.7 billion — a sum that has more than its fair share of stipulations and restrictions. Hegar’s July 2021 projection pegged the number at $27 billion.
“Even with constitutional spending limits and an inflation-influenced new normal, the enormous amount of projected revenue gives the state a remarkable, or a truly ‘once-in-a-lifetime,’ opportunity for historical actions this legislative session,” Hegar said, presenting the BRE Monday.
Tempering reactions, he added, “Don’t count on me announcing another big revenue jump two years from now.”
“The revenue increases that we’ve seen have been in many ways unprecedented and we cannot reasonably expect a repeat. We are unlikely to have an opportunity like this again.”
Overall, the comptroller estimates $188 billion available in general-purpose spending for the 2024-2025 budget, a 26 percent increase from the current biennium. The state will also receive an estimated $176 billion in federal dollars and other revenues that are non-discretionary, earmarked already with specific purposes.
Over half of the general revenue-related funds come from sales taxes and 13.2 percent from oil and gas severance taxes. Due to the high oil and gas prices over the last year, severance tax collections rose 116 percent in 2022; the average annual increase from 1996 to 2021 was just 7.5 percent.
Without new appropriations, Hegar estimates the Economic Stabilization Fund to reach a balance of $27.1 billion, slightly constrained by a constitutional limit.
Texas has had a Republican trifecta (House, Senate and Governor’s mansion) for two decades, and in that time it has followed the budget maxim of former governor Rick Perry: “Don’t spend all the money!” Conservative governance, free market policies, low taxes and fiscal prudence have all combined to keep the economy growing even in difficult times, a record few Democratic-dominated states even remotely approach.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation has more thoughts on how Texas government can reduce the Texas tax burden even further.
Lindybeige (a military YouTuber whose tank videos I’ve used before) interviews a British volunteer fighting in Ukraine as to what is and isn’t useful field kit.
The rich world was a population column from [as opposed to a pyramid] 1945 to 1992, and with the end of the Cold War, the developing world became a column in 1992 until now. The problem is that this is all temporary, because birth rate keeps dropping. People keep living older and your column eventually inverts into an open pyramid upside down. And now you no longer have children, you no longer have a replacement generation at all, and there aren’t enough people in their 20s and 30s to buy everything, and there aren’t enough people in their 40s and 50s to pay for the retirees. So this decade was always going to be the decade that most of the advanced world moves into mass retirement, and the economic model collapses, and next decade was always going to be the decade that that happened to the developing world.
“The Chinese have jumped the ship and this is their last decade, too.”
“We now know that they’ve lied about their population statistics and they’re they over counted their population by over 100 million people, all of whom would have been born since the one child policy was adopted. So this is one of those places where they’ve got more people in their 60s and their 50s and their 40s and their 30s and their 20s.”
“Mao was concerned that as the country was modernizing, the birth rate wasn’t dropping fast enough, and that the young generation was literally going to eat the country alive. So they went through a breakneck urbanization program which destroyed the birth rate, at the same time they penalized anyone who wanted to have kids, and both of those at the same time have generated the demographic collapse we’re in now.”
The male to female sex ratio in China was bad before, and now it’s obviously worse.
“Without young people, we’ve seen their labor costs increase by a factor of 14 since the year 2000, so Mexican labor is now one-third the cost of Chinese labor. Their educational system focuses on memorization over skills, so despite a trillion dollars of investment in a bottomless supply of intellectual property theft, they really haven’t advanced technologically in the last 15 years. Mexican labor is probably about twice as skilled as Chinese labor now, even though it’s one-third the cost.”
“They’ve consolidated into an ethnic-based paranoid nationalistic cult of
personality, and it’s very difficult for the XI Administration to even run it, because it’s not an administration anymore no one wants to bring Xi information on anything.”
The Biden Administration has adopted the Trump Administration’s trade policies on China.
“They now have tech barricades that prevent the Chinese from buying the equipment, the tools or the software that’s necessary to make semiconductors. In fact, [Biden] went so far as to say any Americans working in the sector have to either quit or give up their American citizenship. Every single one of them either quit or was transferred abroad within 24 hours.”
“They’re completely dependent on the U.S Navy to access international trade, they are the most vulnerable country in the world right now. And based on how things go with Russia, we’re looking at a significant amount of raw materials falling off the map, specifically food and energy, and the Chinese are the world’s largest importer of both of those things. So there’s no version of this where China comes through looking good.”
“Say what you will about the Russian economy (it’s corrupt, it’s inefficient, it’s not very high value-add), but it’s a massive producer and exporter of food and energy. You put the sanctions that are on the Russians on Beijing and you get a de-industrialization collapse and a famine that kills 500 million people in under a year.”
“Even if the Chinese were able to capture Taiwan without firing a shot, it doesn’t solve anything for them. They’re still food importers, they’re still dependent on the United States, they’re still energy importers. And even if they take every single one of those semiconductor fab facilities intact, they don’t know how to operate them, because they can’t operate their own, their own are among the worst in the world.”
“One of the fun things about Russia versus China right now is that the Russian information security is so poor that American intelligence is literally listening on everything, but in China we can hear into the office but there are no conversations happening.” I suggest taking both these revelations with a few grains of salt. Maybe Zeihan has great sources in the intelligence community, or maybe Zeihan’s great sources are lying.
Plus more on how Xi has killed or exiled any possible challenger to his power, and how they’re now having a massive Flu Manchu outbreak. “Their overall health is worse than ours, diabetes as a percentage of the population is higher, they don’t have a critical care system like we have, and their hospitals are really their only line of defense.”
Next: Why EVs are a disaster.
“All kinds of people think I’m full of shit!”
Rogan: “What is your perspective on EVS?” Zeihan: “They’re not nearly
as good on carbon as people think. Most of the data that exists doesn’t take into the fact that most of this stuff is processed in China where it’s all coal doesn’t take [into account] the fact that most grids they run out are also majority fossil fuels. And that extends the break-even time for carbon from one year to either five or ten based on what model you’re talking. Cyber trucks are far worse than EVs, but the bigger problems we’re just not going to be able to make them much longer.”
To electrify everything “We need twice as much copper and four times as much chromium and four times as much nickel and ten times as much lithium, and so on. We have never, ever, in any decade in human history, doubled the amount of a mainline material production in ten years, ever, and we need all of this by 2030. No, it’s just not technically possible.”
Zeihan says California’s mandates for phasing out gasoline by 2035 aren’t quite as bad as they seem, as the bureaucracy has the ability to move the goal posts if they prove to be unfeasible. Pardon me if I’m not sold on the beneficent rationality of California’s hard left bureaucracy.
Speaking of things I’m skeptical of:
There is a fascinating discussion happening in the environmental community right now, because they’re being confronted with reality. So California and Germany have very similar Green Tech policies, but the Germans have spent three times as much as California, but are only getting about a fifth as much power. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Germany, but the sun doesn’t shine in Germany. And now, with the Russians on the warpath and their clean-ish energy from natural gas going away, they’re going back to lignite coal in force. It was already their number one source of power. The idea that Germany’s green is ridiculous, because they rely on really, really dirty coal, now especially. But there’s now a conversation going on between the German environmentalists and the Californian environmentalists about why California, in relative terms of doing so well at this, while Germany is not. And the answer is simple geography, but that’s never been part of the conversation in the environmental community before. Now it is. They should have had this conversation 15-20 years ago, but they’re having it now. And as soon as they come to the conclusion, unwillingly but they’ll get there, that we have to choose where we put our copper and our lithium and our nickle, EVs are not going to make the cut.
This assumes that California environmentalists are susceptible to the sweet voice of reason, and that modern environmentalism isn’t half religion and half scam. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” California’s Democratic power establishment has shown an amazing propensity to impose radical solutions that bring obvious and immediate harm to people that are not them. Why should they worry about forcing other people to buy pricey EVs when they already have theirs?
Next up: The drug war, both here and in Mexico.
Rogan starts by noting that marijuana legalization in California led to cartels planting massive amounts of weed in national forests, and suddenly guys who were game wardens are now wearing tactical gear and carrying machine guns.
“I think the mafia is a great example for why you shouldn’t look for the silver bullet [of drug legalization], because, yes, that in the 1920s during prohibition, was one of the big reasons it got going, but the mafia didn’t waste any time in diversifying and neither have the cartels.”
“They’ve gotten into cargo theft and kidnapping and avocados and limes and real estate and local government.”
“Now the attractiveness of gutting them of some of their primary income. Should we look at that? Of course! But it’s not so simple as removing one and it just all stops.”
“The challenge we’re seeing in Mexico right now is that the, uh, the air quotes “good” cartel the, one that saw drugs as a business, is being broken up. If you remember El Chapo—” Rogan: “That’s the good cartel?” Zeihan: “Sinaloa cartel, yeah. He thought of himself as a Korean conglomerate president. So it was like ‘We smuggle drugs. That’s our business. You don’t mess with things that mess with the business. You don’t trip the old lady, you don’t steal her purse, you don’t shoot at the cops. These are people who live where we operate, we want them to be on our side, so maybe even throw a party every once in a while. You focus on the business.'”
“The replacement cartel is Jalisco New Generation, They’re led by a former Mexican military officer who thinks that rather than don’t shit where you sleep so that the people on your side whenever you move into a town, you shoot it up. You do kick over the old lady, you do take her purse, you make the people scared of you, that’s the point of this. Drug running is a side gig.”
“We are here to be powerful, and drug running is just one of the ways we make that happen. And he has taken the fight to every cartel and the Mexican government, and they’re in the process of trying to break into the United States.”
“El Chapo and the Sinaloa became the largest drug trafficking organization in America under the Obama Administration. And one of the reasons our birth rate went down, so far so fast is they basically either co-opted or killed American gangs. So they killed the people who were doing the killing. Not a lot of Americans got killed after that.” I think he meant to say murder rate.
“All of the other cartels control the access points in the United States, but
Jalisco New Generation now is challenging every single one of them trying to break through. And if they do, and they bring their business acumen, if you will north of the border, they’re going to start killing white chicks named Sheila in Phoenix and then we’re gonna have a very different conversation.”
“Sinaloa they co-opted the Hispanic gangs, especially the Mexican gangs, because there wasn’t a language barrier there, and they really targeted and gutted a lot of the African-American gangs. They took over drug smuggling and distribution from them to deny them income and then they just shot a lot of people…it was pretty much completed by the time we got to 2013.”
“Look at the violent crime rates in the United States, they’ve been trending down really significantly since about 2004 and the drop from 2004 to roughly 2014 was amazing. That’s largely Sinaloa.”
And now all the cartels are fighting and the murder rate in Mexico is skyrocketing.
He’s not a fan of legalizing cocaine:
Also says that cartels are now laundering money via marijuana dispensaries using the federal reserve.
And he’s not a fan of Crypto:
Bonus: “Maxine Waters is not exactly the brightest person in congress.”
