So why is Russian miltech performing so badly in Ukraine? In addition to some of the reasons we’ve already covered, this video provides additional answers (skip to 1:35 in to avoid the sponsor blather).
Russia has 2.5 to 3 million people in arms manufacturing, “20% of the country’s industrial jobs.”
“We all thought Russia had the military muscle to be able to take over Ukraine in a matter of days. However, the real way to test a country’s military power is not in a parade but a war. And with the invasion of Ukraine we are seeing something that has become the norm in the Russian economy. Something like an Expectation vs Reality meme.”
60% failure rate for some Russian missiles?
“After a month of the Ukraine invasion, we can say it clearly: Russian armament falls far behind the expectations and hype they had created.”
Modernization of the armed forces was supposedly a priority for Putin, with up to 5% of GDP spent on defense.
Russia should theoretically have military equipment better than anyone but the U.S.
One reason they don’t: Attempted capitalism without privately owned arms companies.
“The Soviet military industry was full of unprofitable State enterprises, obsolete factories and, above all, a great deal of corruption.”
The U.S. bids out contracts. The Soviets depended on state monopolies.
“Russia has never embraced free market capitalism.”
According to Vladimir Putin, the problem with communism was not the centralized economy but an economy based on ideological principles. In other words, if you want to improve the efficiency of the system, it is enough to change the managers and put technocrats in charge. Technocrats who have been forged in the bosom of the KGB and who have a pragmatic mentality, totally free of the romanticism of communism or any other ideology. This type of person has a name: “SILOVIKI”. And so, just what was Putin’s formula for bringing his military industry into the 21st century? Very simple: To put Silovikis in all managerial positions. This is how Rostec was conceived in 2007, a conglomerate of companies designed to be the great umbrella of Russian defense. Under this umbrella are more than 700 armaments companies: all of them State-owned. By grouping companies together, a lot of duplication can be eliminated. All following purely technocratic criteria. And who is the CEO of Rostec? None other than Sergey Chemezov, who was a colleague of Vladimir Putin himself when they were both in the KGB offices in East Germany. In other words, a textbook SILOVIKI.
Yes, in this, as in many other areas, Putin is a complete dumbass.
“By acquiring more and more companies, Rostec has ended up consolidating even more monopolies. For example: fighter jets. The United States works with four major manufacturers: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Airbus (Yes, Airbus is European but it also has contracts with Washington). In the case of Russia, practically all fighter jets are manufactured by the same company: UAC which, of course, is under the umbrella of Rostec.”
“Another major Russian defense company is Almaz-Antey. This company does not depend on Rostec but is directly owned by the Russian Ministry of Finance. The CEO of this company is another textbook Siloviki. In this case we are talking about Viktor Ivanov, another former KGB agent. Almaz-Antey is the giant where NPO Novator, the manufacturer of almost all Russian precision missiles, is located. Yes, those very missiles that are proving to be so flawed in the invasion of Ukraine.” Try to contain your shock.
“In 2017, NPO Novator could only produce 60 Kalibr missiles in six months. As you can imagine, these figures are ridiculous if we take into account that, in just one month of war, Russia has launched more than 1,200 missiles.”
I know you’ll also be shocked to learn that Yevgeny Prigoshin, another friend of Putin’s, was in charged of the company responsible for providing expired food to Russian troops. “As Alexei Navalny reported, Prigozhin dodged all public tender systems to become the army’s caterer. Today, Navalny is in jail and Russian soldiers are receiving expired cans of food.”
Russia hasn’t achieved air supremacy because Russia doesn’t have enough precision munitions for its planes to use, which is why they do stupid things like hit hospitals with dumb bombs and fly low enough to be shot down. “Russia’s best planes are dropping like flies because they don’t have adequate ammunition.”
“Are you really saying that the Russians are stupid and have gone to war without ammunition? Well, no: the problem is not that the Russians are stupid. The problem is that a political system with bad incentives generates nothing but failure.”
In closing, he wonders just how well-maintained those nuclear weapons and ICBMs are.
All this accords with what we have observed in Russia’s operation failures, and with what we know about the basic incompetence and economic misallocation of command economies.
(Sorry about the delay in getting this up. BlueHost was down earlier today.)
Russia eyes Moldova, Ron DeSantis and Florida republicans strip Disney of it’s special privileges in record time, CNN+ dies quicker than Sean Bean, and Florida Man scores a trifecta! It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
A Russian General announced plans to occupy the Transnistria region of Moldova on Friday.
Speaking at a defense industry meeting, Brigadier General Rustam Minnekayev, acting commander of Russia’s Central Military District, stated that the Russian Armed Forces plan to “make passage” into the region – in Moldova’s East, bordering Ukraine and less than 30 miles from the port city of Odessa – to create a “land corridor to Crimea,” Russian media reported. Such a corridor would also purport to connect the Russian mainland to Transnistria.
Minnekayev stated that the measure was part of Russia’s second phase in its war in Ukraine, which involves establishing full control over the Donbas Region and Ukraine’s coast along the Black Sea. No timeline was provided for the maneuver to begin, however.
Rather seems like overweening hubris to think about invading another country when they haven’t managed to defeat Ukraine despite pouring huge resources into the attempt.
Speaking of Russia walking on rakes:
Giant fire engulfs Russia’s biggest chemical plant right after a fire broke out at “a sensitive Russian Defense Ministry research facility in the city of Tver.”
Huge plumes of smoke were seen enveloping the Dmitrievsky Chemical Plant late this afternoon. The cause of the fire remains unknown. Almost 150 plant workers were reportedly evacuated.
The facility in Kineshma, east of Moscow produces more industrial solvents than any other in Russia. It is less than 1,000km from the border with Ukraine.
“Less than 600 miles” does not strike me as super close, even for Russia.
Naturally, observers are starting to ask in connection to Russia’s war in neighboring Ukraine: coincidence? sabotage operation?
Anti-Putin racecar driver Igor Sushko in tweeting the above video of the Dmitrievsky Chemical Plant going up in flames commented: “We are beginning to see a pattern develop.”
Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation Friday that strips Disney of its 50-year-old “independent special district” status in retaliation for lobbying against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law.
The law dissolves the Reedy Creek Improvement District, an autonomous area created in 1967 to accommodate the massive Disney World complex near Orlando. The independent status has shielded Disney from significant tax burden.
The governor fast-tracked the initiative to a special session Tuesday, after which the state Senate voted 23-16 on Wednesday to advance it.
The parental rights measure keeps gender identity and sexual orientation instruction out of K-3 elementary school classrooms and enjoys majority support among Floridians.
To quote The Wire: “You wanted to be in the game, right? Now you’re in the game.” For years, The Mouse was considered an unstoppable juggernaut that always got what it wanted. Then Disney decided to to throw it’s corporate weight behind the pro-grooming faction opposing a bill banning discussion of sex in elementary schools, and DeSantis knee-capped them in a week.
Though the losses from special tax breaks and privileges is going to hurt the bottom line, Disney has done far, far more damage to its brand for stepping into the cultural wars to embrace forcing radical transexism on a resisting American public. That’s going to be destroying shareholder value for years (if not decades) to come.
DeSantis Bonus: Christopher Rufo spoke at the signing ceremony:
At the end of my speech, I gave a direct warning to Disney CEO Bob Chapek: he must immediately terminate the company's critical race theory training program, "Reimagine Tomorrow," which is now illegal under Florida law. No more racism in corporate America.https://t.co/bIu0Rt0kRapic.twitter.com/S1dJAFe3XS
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 22, 2022
Am I and are others supposed to feel bad because the most opportune time to end Disney’s corporate welfare exploits the momentum that Disney created against themselves?
Because I don’t.
Disney vociferously and hatefully opposed parents who didn’t want ideological activist teachers lecturing their K-5th grade kids about how they bang their significant others after hours — Disney accused parents of opposing this as literally killing gay people because teachers with fantasy pronouns can’t talk about genitals when kids should be learning math.
The left hated corporations influencing issues because of Citizens United v. FEC until they realized they could push Disney to lobby for them and now they LOVE corporations again! Party! I’m confused — are corporations still evil? They can’t influence issues or push for candidates that aren’t Democrat and they have more rights to a child than the parents raising said child? We really need some consistency from the left here.
When corporations act as agents of the state all bets are off. When a corporation’s actual heir, the CEO, and executives say on camera and on their own social media accounts (as Disney’s did) that parental rights erase gay people (I know, what?) and people who support parental rights in the classroom are murderers, all bets are off.
Who is “gaslighting” whom, here? Where was the opposition to the heinous manner in which parents were smeared? Was that not Disney’s “revenge” for opposition?
Disney chose the boss fight against taxpaying parents and they lost.
Losing their corporate welfare isn’t revenge, it’s a reckoning.
Relevant tweets:
Why is Disney throwing its weight behind the FL "say gay" controversy?
Same reason Home Depot inserted itself in the GA voter bill last year… Proxy advisory firms. Specifically Glass Lewis & ISS pic.twitter.com/WaKWlbMoA1
DeSantis and Florida Republicans: Go woke… **blows viking battle horn** and we shall burn your entire village to the ground and sing a song of victory so that any potential enemies in our future shall learn from your folly.
I find it mesmerizing that, after the last few years of corporate America bending over backwards to appease every tenet of progressive philosophy, it’s now a national scandal when Republicans decide to “dissolve Walt Disney World’s private government”https://t.co/KI2eL9itcq
John Nolte: “Yes, Democrats Really Do Want to Groom Your Children.”
The debate we’re having right now…
THE LEFT: We don’t want to sexualize little kids behind the backs of parents. Stop saying that. It’s a lie!
FLORIDA: We’re going to outlaw sexualizing little kids behind the backs of parents.
THE LEFT: NOOOOooooooo!
What kind of country are we living in where we even have to pass a bill that outlaws sexualizing kids aged four to eight in the classroom?
What kind of country are we living in where Florida teachers are angry that they can’t discuss their personal lives with your little kids, much less discuss sex?
What kind of country are we living in where the Walt Disney Co., a company built on the idea of preserving the innocence of children and teaching them lessons about honesty, hard work, and true love, is now openly bragging about feeding the little kids sexual propaganda?
Of course, this is grooming.
What else would you call it?
What is the rationale for telling innocent little boys that they might be girls or gay or bisexual? What other rationale could there be for that other than to destroy their innocence, to turn them into sexual creatures, and warp their sexuality into something that can later be exploited?
Behind the backs of parents!
For the life of me, except for my second-grade teacher talking about the day John Kennedy was assassinated, I cannot remember a single teacher who ever discussed their personal life. A couple of times, I remember seeing a teacher outside of school, at the store or something, and how odd it was to realize they existed outside the classroom.
The thing to keep in mind here is that this is not a “gay” thing.
It’s not gay people looking to groom little kids.
Plenty of gay people are as disgusted by this as anyone. In fact, this sick movement is a terrible disservice to gays. What you have here is the LEFT working overtime to bring to life the very worst stereotypes about homosexuals looking to recruit among the innocent.
What you have here is Disney bringing to life these terrible stereotypes.
But that doesn’t change the fact that the left is desperate to groom your kids, to sexualize them behind your back.
Why?
Well, a whole lot of leftists want to have sex with your kids, and want to normalize sex between kids and adults. The evidence of that is everywhere. Democrats know opening the southern border will mean the import of child sex slaves. And yet, Democrats still open the border. Democrats continue to release child predators and suspected predators. We’re about to be saddled with a Supreme Court Justice who shrugs at child porn. More than one left-wing publication has asked us to better understand and sympathize with child molesters. The left embraced Jeffrey Epstein for decades. The left-wing Lincoln Project shielded a suspected predator.
The other reason for the grooming is political.
Democrats are losing key parts of their coalition: the working class, Hispanics, and chunks of the black population. One way they see of making up those numbers is to create a lot of damaged and broken young people obsessed with their sexuality. It’s just a fact that neurotic, unhappy lunatics and narcissists who define themselves by what they do with their sex organs vote Democrat. So… Democrats want to damage your kids to create a whole lot more of them.
“EIGHT news stories about teachers committing sex crimes upon children. ALL TODAY.”
From Powerline comes two tales of endemic corruption. The first was Yale University employee Jamie Petrone admitting to stealing over $40 million in computer equipment. “So for years, 90 percent of the equipment (sub-$10,000) that Yale’s emergency medicine department paid for–more than $40 million worth–never showed up. It didn’t exist. And no one noticed.”
That’s the smaller of the two scandals. The bigger:
A second instance of corruption is the Feeding Our Future scandal in Minnesota. The scandal actually involves entities in addition to FOF, and altogether $460 million or more has been funneled through these agencies by the federal free food programs Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) and the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP). The whole thing turned out to be a criminal enterprise. Various crooks pretended to be feeding many thousands of non-existent Minnesota children. The fraud should have been obvious since, if you added up the numbers, a ridiculous percentage of all of the children in the state were supposedly getting free food through these newly-founded charities.
The corruption occurred primarily, although not entirely, within Minnesota’s Somali community. Apparently spread sheets have been circulating among fraudsters showing the names and addresses of many thousands of Somali immigrants who can be listed as phantom beneficiaries of government programs. Here, like the Yale criminal, those who were in on the fraud have lived lavishly, with federal taxpayer money administered by the State of Minnesota paying for luxury cars, expensive homes, exotic vacations, and so on. Scott wrote here about a young Somali bride who was given a tray of gold worth $100,000 as a wedding gift by persons involved in the Feeding Our Future fraud.
Such criminality is not subtle. Little care is taken to hide it. How can a handful of fly-by-night fraudsters steal hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. government and the State of Minnesota, and no one notices? As in Yale’s case, the answer is partly gross incompetence in Minnesota’s Tim Walz administration. But in the larger picture, government at all levels is rolling in so much dough that they don’t know what to do with it. A few hundred million is hardly worth checking up on.
This goes toward proving my “Working Thesis,” that all new welfare state programs are designed to channel money into the pockets of crooks and left wing activists (to the extent that it’s possible to distinguish the two).
But the government not only attempted to manufacture “terrorists” in the Whitmer kidnapping hoax—the same FBI operation also tried to coax a man in Virginia to participate in the same sort of plot against Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. That scheme didn’t fully materialize, but the FBI’s attempt to pull off a similar stunt in Virginia reveals just how far agents were willing to go to bolster FBI Director Christopher Wray’s false warning that domestic extremists planned to “kill and assassinate” public officials.
In summer 2020, Dan Chappel, the main informant in the Whitmer fednapping who was compensated at least $60,000 by the FBI for his services, targeted a man named Frank Butler, a disabled veteran in his late 60s and an alleged militia member. Taking instructions from Jayson Chambers, one of his FBI handling agents, Chappel used the same playbook in Virginia.
“Dan suggests to Frank that he engage in acts of domestic terror,” defense attorneys wrote in a joint motion filed last year in the Whitmer case. “Like the defendants in this case, Dan suggested to Frank that he attack the governor of Virginia.”
Screenshots submitted into evidence show a jaw dropping exchange between Chappel and Chambers in August 2020. “Goin [sic] to call frank butler today,” Chappel texted Chambers, asking for direction on what he should say to his target.
“Mission is to kill the governor specifically,” Chambers replied.
Just as in the Whitmer plot, Chappel lured Frank Butler into attempting to build an explosive device. Another text exchange in September 2020 shows Chappel and Chambers discussing a “recipe” for a bomb that Chappel can provide to Butler. After passing along the information to Butler, Chappel texted Chambers to tell him Frank planned on purchasing bomb-making supplies. “Awesome. Excellent work,” Chambers told Chappel.
Chappel also invited Butler to a field training exercise in Wisconsin during the last weekend in October, an excursion attended by some defendants in the Whitmer caper.
“This event, like all the others,” defense attorneys wrote, “was conceived, planned, and conducted by the federal investigative team of agents and undercover informants working together to provide a stage upon which to manipulate their targets into acting out ostensibly incriminating behavior the government hoped to elicit in its bid to develop and then ‘interrupt’ the operation of a ‘domestic terrorist organization.’”
Butler, who cannot drive due to disabilities, did not participate. And to date, he has not been charged with any crime.
“Seattle’s transit system struggles as riders refuse to pay. So few riders are paying, fares are currently covering just 5% of the system’s operating costs, a fraction of the 40% mark Sound Transit set as a requirement.” (Hat Tip: Dwight.)
While most reporting on Harris County’s problems revolve around Democrat County Judge Lina Hidalgo, this citizen’s research suggests ties exist between Democrat County Commissioner Rodney Ellis (a former state senator) and certain organizations receiving taxpayer monies.
Ellis’ influence, and the influence of at least one of these organizations, appears to reach all the way to Hidalgo’s office.
Snip.
To counteract shuttering the economy in 2020, Congress broke open a dam and flooded federal taxpayer monies nationwide. These monies flowed to state and then local governments for eventual distribution. Harris County’s cut from the 2020 CARES Act was $426 million.
One organization the county commissioners gave some of these funds to was the Coalition for the Homeless. Ties were verified between Commissioner Ellis and this organization.
Licia Green-Ellis, Ellis’ wife, is a partner of the Waterman Steele Real Estate Consulting Group. Another partner is Lance Gilliam, who is chairman of the Coalition for the Homeless. Gilliam donated to Ellis’ campaign in 2015, and he also donated to Hidalgo in 2018, 2019, and March and June of 2021.
Hidalgo’s chief of staff, Alexander Triantaphyllis, is also on the coalition’s board.
In April 2021, the coalition recommended commissioners allocate taxpayer monies toward “the rapid expansion of housing” for the homeless. This resulted in agreements between the county and multiple organizations, including a more than $1.2 million agreement with BakerRipley Community Developers. We’ll come back to them in a minute.
The following month, commissioners ballooned funding for the housing program to more than $7 million, of which more than $3.6 million went to BakerRipley for the county’s “Rapid Rehousing” program.
New York City: Now that the pandemics over, everyone’s going to come back to our high-tax hellhole, right? People who used to work in NYC: LOL. Get Rekt!
A high-tax, highly regulated city, New York has relied for the past 25 years on a growth formula of low crime, a stable social order, and an emphasis on high-value jobs at profitable companies for whom being in the city brought advantages that outweighed the costs. The result was a prosperous but hollow economy that featured well-paid jobs in finance, law, and technology alongside low-paid service-industry jobs necessary to support those workers, but lacked many of the middle-class jobs in manufacturing or financial back offices that the city once boasted.
The pandemic has changed that calculus. The work-from-home movement has hit New York City’s office market—the backbone of its economy—right in the pocketbook. More than two years after the initial lockdowns that brought much of the economy to a standstill, only 38 percent of office workers have returned to their city jobs, which is below average for major cities. Employers have tried to get workers back to their Manhattan offices, only to be thwarted by Covid surges and resistance from employees who don’t want to return to working in person five days a week. A rise in violent crime and disorder hasn’t helped. Both the city’s current mayor, Eric Adams, and his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, as well as former governor Andrew Cuomo and successor Kathy Hochul, have at various times urged workers to return, but to little avail.
The more that workers and companies discover they can accomplish through remote work, the greater the danger—because New York is by far the most expensive place to locate a worker in the country. Its overall cost of occupancy, including labor, utilities, and taxes, is 50 percent higher than the next most expensive American city, San Francisco, and three times as high as Dallas, Chicago, and Seattle. The gap is even larger with many smaller metro areas that seem poised for growth. One big component of these costs is taxes: the city and state together out-tax other competitors, taking as much as 45 percent more taxable income than the average of U.S. big cities and their states. No surprise, then, that even in the pandemic’s early stages, experts rated New York one of the places that might struggle the most to recover its jobs and residents.
What are the Democrats who run New York (city and state) going to do to bring down high taxes? Jack and Squat.
In case you missed it, Pakistan’s Prime Minister was ousted two weeks ago. “Pakistan’s political opposition toppled Prime Minister Imran Khan in a no-confidence vote in Parliament early Sunday after several political allies and a key party in his ruling coalition deserted him.” He wasn’t the worst person to run Pakistan, but high inflation (even worse than ours) brought him down.
California’s corporate diversity law ruled unconstitutional. California’s law mandated that corporations stock their executive boards with members from various victimhood identity politics groups.
The trifecta! “Florida man arrested after cops find him in possession of drugs, guns and alligator.” Click through to see what a hard 31 looks like. (Hat Tip: Dwight.)
“Downtown Greek Restaurant Owner Escapes the Country, Leaving Workers and Rent Unpaid. That’s Simi Estiatorio, and the manager partner who fled the country is George Theodosiou. Read the link for the details. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Heh:
Reward Offered: any information that can lead to finding the person or persons responsible for putting this flag behind our council dais. #SpaceForce
Ps my DMs are open and as far as I can tell it has shown up in the last week or two. I want to know the story. pic.twitter.com/RmDcOtidi1
Time to do a report on a war theater where heavily armored vehicles shoot it out with each other in city streets: Mexico.
(You were thinking Ukraine? Probably an update on that next week.)
Cartel violence waxes and wanes, and regular readers know that the cartels are heavily armed. Even so, it may come as a shock to many that Mexican drug cartels have their own “tanks” (AKA “Monstruo”), i.e. up-armored civilian vehicles more accurately described as technicals or armored cars.
Mexico’s Guardia Nacional in Jalisco have captured a homemade ‘narco tank’ thought to be used by one of the country’s most powerful drug cartels.
The officials shared the news to Twitter after it was found in the area of Jalisco on 12 April.
According to the Mexican police, the vehicle was harbouring 2,000 rounds of ammunition.
In Texas, we call that “a good start.”
The heavy metal plated vehicle is thought to be owned by the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion [CJNG], who operate in the area, as reported by The Star.
Painted green to blend in with surroundings, the tank is heavily armoured, with protective metal casing around the driver’s sider.
Publication Borderland Beat noted that the tank was discovered while being transported inside of a trailer.
The trailer limitation is probably why it seems unusually narrow.
En #Jalisco, la #GuardiaNacional aseguró un vehículo con blindaje artesanal y alrededor de dos mil cartuchos útiles que fueron localizados al interior de un tractocamión, como resultado de los recorridos para inhibir hechos delictivos en el municipio de Jamay. pic.twitter.com/jLgKnf5eqh
Here’s a video covering various captured cartel narco tanks (though the voice-over isn’t the best).
Here’s a shorter video from several years ago showing various monstruos, mainly from the 2010-2011 timeframe.
This video shows still more footage, including (about 1:50 in) modern CJNG vehicles that not only look more professionally constructed, but have red-blue flashing lights and a cartel logo on the side, which does rather suggest they’re not trying to keep a low profile. Also includes combat footage of CJNG blowing away Northeast Cartel (CDN) rivals through their own gunholes.
Here’s a tweet that shows video of two other captured Nueva Generacion vehicles in 2019:
"Elements of the Mexican Army, seized several armored vehicles in a workshop allegedly used by members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The events took place in the municipality of Tuxpan, in the state of Jalisco."
The Austin City Council will consider approval of a $1.18 million universal basic income (UBI) pilot program that will award 85 families $1,000 per month for one year.
It is part of the “Mayors for Guaranteed Income” initiative of which Austin Mayor Steve Adler is a member, along with Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg. “Even prior to the pandemic, people who were working two and three jobs still couldn’t afford basic necessities,” reads that website.
“COVID-19 has only further exposed the economic fragility of most American households, and has disproportionately impacted Black and Brown people.”
At a Monday morning roundtable about the topic, Adler said that a couple years ago when this topic was first broached with him, he was initially “questioning of such a program.”
“There’s always a question about using taxpayer dollars [this way],” Adler said, adding, “[but here the beneficiaries] might know better than we do how to spend this money.”
I’m pretty sure that the average Austin taxpayer knows that they know better how to spend their own money than letting the Austin City Council hand it out to randos. (Actully, I doubt it will be handed out to rando or “deserving” families; I fully expect it to be yet another mechanism to rake off graft to the hard left.)
The first such program began in Stockton, California in 2020 and it has extended to dozens across the country.
On the council’s Thursday agenda, the pilot program falls under the city’s Equity Office and the funding will come out of the General Revenue fund. Chief Equity Officer Brion Oaks said on Monday that the pilot will inform the city of best practices to implement a larger program down the road.
You may remember Brion Oaks from such hits as “Defund The Police And Give All The Money To Leftwing Activists.” What do you think the odds are that the families Oaks will pick for this program will have connections to radical leftwing Democratic social justice activists?
The program’s design, including which families will take part, is still up in the air and will begin to be sorted out after the council approves the item this week. He did say that “housing insecurity” will be prioritized in that selection process — something loosely defined but may include eviction history, poverty status, and applicants’ ability to pay bills on time.
Deadbeats only need apply.
UpTogether, which runs a nationwide private UBI program, is the vendor chosen to oversee the program which is estimated to begin either in late May or early June should the council approve it. Oaks said the $1,000 figure was arrived at as roughly half of the average monthly rent in the City of Austin.
UpTogether is run by FII-NATIONAL, and both of which are run by Jesus Gerena, whose own biography describes UpTogether as “an antiracist change organization.” So the radical leftwing social justice warrior Austin City Council wants to take taxpayer money and have radical social justice warrior Brion Oaks oversee radical social justice warrior-run UpTogether run the program.
Why, it’s almost like a pattern.
What do you want to bet that there will be no external oversight to the program, and that privacy rules will prevent us from ever learning which “families” will be chosen to receive such taxpayer-funded largess?
Even by the standards of welfare statism, this is an egregious misuse of taxpayer money to fund radical leftwing pilot programs.
The City Council will reportedly be voting on this idiocy on Thursday. Austin taxpayers who oppose it should show up and say so.
There more you start poking around online, the more you turn up reasons why China is screwed.
The first installment in this series was popular. Well, there’s a lot more reasons why China is screwed.
It’s screwed all the way down.
First up: Demographics:
Takeaways:
Remember all that talk of an “Asian Century?” Yeah, not so much.
“China will soon run out of people.”
China’s population pyramid is about to shift from a huge bulge of people in their prime earning years to one where that bulge is disproportionately elderly.
“Everything that made China what it is today has relied on a large, young, and productive workforce. Now, that workforce is about to succumb to biology just as every other generation has in every other country, ever.” Their demographic dividend is running out.
“China’s working-age cohort grew from 58% of the country in 1978 to 74% in 2010. But in less than twenty years, the UN predicts that number will be roughly back where it was in ‘78. By then, China will have twice as many seniors as children under 15.”
“Per capita wealth remains low, on the level of Mexico, the Maldives, and Kazakhstan. That means this mass of retirees won’t just contribute less to the economy, but will also require immense financial support — the kind China’s fractured pension and healthcare system isn’t remotely prepared for.”
“Unfortunately for China, the One-Child Policy has set the cultural expectation firmly at one.”
Replacement fertility: 2.1 children per woman. China’s official fertility rate: 1.6. “Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison [estimates] the true number at 1.18.”
“China’s preference for male babies means that between 2020 and 2060, there will be roughly 3 single men for every 2 single women.”
“China’s 2020 Census, [tallied] 14.65 million births the previous year — the lowest level since 1961.”
Japan, which is also aging, provides a best case scenario. “With a median age of 48.6, Japan is the 2nd oldest place on earth. Today, its share of the world’s manufacturing exports has fallen from 12.5% to just 5.2. Japan did not fade into global irrelevance. It’s still a great power. But it never fulfilled what once seemed certain: its rise to rival the U.S. as a superpower. And it never will.”
That’s part 1. Part 2 focuses on China’s out of control property market:
It starts off talking about the ghost cities, especially Ordos.
“Ordos does have an interesting story to tell. Just, not the one you might expect. The missing context, at the time, was far stranger than what the unimaginative pessimists concocted: Nearly all of these half-finished homes have owners — the vast majority of which have no intention of ever moving in.”
“All over China are millions of empty, some unfinished, but almost universally sold homes — not just in far-flung corners but also in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. Over one-fifth of all urban homes — 65 million in all — sit vacant.”
China relied on “a surplus of cheap labor, which means, by definition, wages are low. You can only compete with the entire rest of the world for so long — and neither do you want to. Low-value manufacturing has long since moved South, to places like Vietnam, Laos, and Bangladesh.”
All the long-hanging fruits of infrastructure spending have already been built.
“Individually, Chinese consumers really don’t spend very much — just 32% of GDP — less than half that of the US, and far below countries like Japan and Germany. Worse, this number has actually been decreasing over time.”
“Chinese consumers are spending, but only on one thing, something not considered ‘consumption’: houses!”
China’s home ownership rate “is among the highest in the world — 90% — to much of the developed world’s mid-60s. It gets much weirder, still. If you can believe it, the majority of recent purchases have been 2nd and 3rd homes. In 2018, for instance, 87% of new home buyers already owned at least one.”
“Because the government tightly controls how much cash is allowed to leave the country, Chinese people simply don’t have a lot of options, and of them, housing is seen as the only sure thing.”
Also, given the sex imbalance mentioned above, for men, home ownership = marriage.
“For all of these reasons, prices have risen to extreme levels. In Shenzhen, Beijing, and Shanghai, it takes 40 years of the average income to afford a home.”
Most are bought before construction even begins.
And here’s where the demographics above provide a double whammy. “The majority of homebuyers, meanwhile, are aged between 20-50 — precisely the segment China will soon lose.”
One huge reason for the bubble: Local governments using their control of land to balance their budgets:
They created what are basically state-owned shell companies called “Local Government Financing Vehicles”. They gave these LGFVs free valuable land, which they then used to take out loans that local governments themselves couldn’t. The trick is that because their debt is hidden, local governments appear far healthier than they really are, while at the same time, meeting the quotas set by Beijing. Following the 2008 crisis, LGFVs transformed from a little quirk of its financial system to the backbone of local economies. If these ‘financing vehicles’ default on their loans, or if housing prices fall too steeply, local governments now have just as much to lose as homeowners. If a local government stops taking out loans, it instantly loses over a third of its revenue, causing a different kind of doomsday. So while the central government may direct local officials to control their debt, the best they can really do is feign cooperation.
Flu Manchu only temporarily halted home price rises, and they’re still soaring.
“Solutions are far too costly to assume their implementation.”
There are a lot more videos of China suckage, but I’ll have to split this up and get to those another time.
Another “Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes” entry, but with a twist. A man killed home invader who was pretending to be a cop.
A man with a badge around his neck didn’t fool a Pa. resident with a gun in his pocket. The resident, who was bound by zip ties, managed to grab his gun and opened fire on two home invaders posing as cops, killing one of them, police tell 6ABC.
It happened around 10 p.m. Sunday in Philly, where police say a 25-year-old resident was confronted outside his home by two men posing as cops. The man with a badge around his neck forced the male resident inside the home, where he was bound with zip ties.
The fake cops were demanding money and threatening his life. But the resident was able to get his pocketed gun, and he shot the man with the badge three times, killing him, police said. The dead suspect had gunshot wounds to his head, neck and arm.
The are some pretty big giveaways that it wasn’t real cops:
Real cops tends to use handcuffs rather than zip-ties. (There are occasionally exceptions, mostly during widespread civil disorder like mass arrests during riots.)
A real cop would have search him for a weapon.
A real cop wouldn’t be demanding money. Or I should say a real, non-corrupt. Offer void in New York City in the 1970s.
In Houston, the Galleria (located centrally just outside the 610 loop at Westheimer) has long been the ne plus ultra of retail shopping, filled with high-end shops for designer clothing, jewelry, etc. While other malls built out, the Galleria built up, with four floors around a large open atrium and an ice rink. The Galleria was where rich people shopped.
My most vivid memory of the Galleria was my family taking us there to see Star Wars, where it was playing in one of only 50 theaters nationwide, right after a rave write-up in Time magazine.
A long time ago in a decade far away, Time magazine, Star Wars and the Galleria were all important.
We got there in the early afternoon, and not only was the next showing sold out, the line for tickets stretched all the way around the ice rink and halfway up the other side. It turned out that all showings until midnight were already sold out.
Needless to say, we didn’t see Star Wars that day.
Instead, we saw it a month or two later at the movie theater in Greenspoint Mall. Greenspoint was still pretty new at that point, built out on north IH-45 at Gears (later Greens) road just the year before, at a time when north Houston was experiencing rapid growth but there were still miles and miles of green fields interspersed with tracts of tall pine forests. It was a mall anchored by large department stores Sears and Foley’s (a Houston-area department store chain that Macy’s would purchase and largely ruin), which would later be expanded to include Joske’s (a Dallas department store later bought by Dillard’s), JCPenney, Montgomery Ward and Lord & Taylor. Greenspoint was a good mall where middle class Houstonians shopped.
As Houston grew, new malls opened in the northwest (Willowbrook) and northeast (Deerbrook). That, age and changing demographics changed the character of Greenspoint over the years. It went from being a mall where middle class Houstonians shopped to one where gangbangers shot at each other and your hubcaps got stolen. (Word was that if you reported getting your hubcaps stolen to the HPD, they didn’t even ask how many if it happened at Greenpoint; they just assumed it was all four.) Thus Greenpoint became know as “Gunspoint,” and stores started closing. Macy’s was the last anchor tenant, and closed in 2017. After that it was mainly known for the carnival in the parking lot. It’s actually unclear to me whether Greenspoint is still alive or not; I sort of assumed Flu Manchu killed it off, but there are tweets from people this year that talk about visiting, so maybe not.
What brought back all these mall memories was the fact that there was a shooting outside the Galleria yesterday. Video below. (Language warning of the “black people talking about other black people” variety.)
Don’t ask me why don’t I go to the galleria….. CUZ NIGGAS DO NOT KNOW HOW TO ACT. pic.twitter.com/U9TTs7Zkgi
— Freckled Face Fuck Around and find out Doc (@DrKeezyWagz) April 17, 2022
They shut down Sharpstown Mall and all people who drink codeine out a coffee cup and breed Pittbulls with chains around their neck been invading the Galleria
Decline is a choice. Democrats activists have decided that getting their hands on the money and putting felons back on the streets in the name of “racial justice” is a far more important goal that keeping law-abiding citizens safe from crime.
I had no intention of posting another Peter Zeihan video so quickly after Is China Screwed?, but it’s also been a good long while since I did a Texas vs. California update, so let’s tuck in to this video:
Takeaways:
Texas doesn’t attract foreign investment.
Instead, Texas lures development and projects from other states with target tax breaks. “You can stay in Illinois and pay 20% tax or come to Texas, where we’ll give you a 20 year deferment and you’ll pay no tax.” (This is a bit overstated; some companies get those sweeteners, but for most Texas locales simply offer sounder fundamentals.)
“Everything is inexpensive. It’s where the food comes from, it’s where the energy comes from. The land is cheap. Mexico is right next door. It’s got the major port in Houston. It’s a financial center, it’s an energy center, it’s a manufacturing center, it’s a processing era. It’s all of those things.”
As global trade becomes more difficult, Texas moves up the value-added chain with more processed and refined goods. Lots of incentive for all sorts of manufacturers to relocate to Texas to take advantage of these intermediate products.
“Say what you will about the Donald Trump Administration, the renegotiation of NAFTA was a brilliant call, it was probably overdue by 15 years.” More North American content, especially from Texas and Mexico.
“Texas trades nearly as much with Mexico as the rest of the country combined.” Huge for automotive, but also electronics and aerospace.
Labor shortages: “Texas is just hoovering up people from across the entire country.”
“People are moving to the West, the Southwest and the South. Texas is right in the middle of that. It has the cheapest land and the cheapest power and the cheapest food.”
Biggest success story for the next 30 years: Houston. “It has it’s finger in each and every one of those pies. It works with the Mexicans, it’s in the energy sector, it’s its own financial link. It’s on the highway system that links on the East coast. It’s good at moving large pieces of metal around, so it’s getting into heavy equipment, it’s already in automotive. It has everything.”
My caveat: Not everything. It doesn’t have much of a software base outside the oil industry and a few related verticals, and it doesn’t have any semiconductor fabs (both of which the Austin and Dallas areas have in considerable depth).
Plus: Third largest metro in the country.
“Everything you hear about California when it comes to regulation and cost is true.”
All the good land has been grabbed. Maybe growth on the fringes of LA.
“The same urbanization and depopulation push that hit Europeans 60 years ago hit Mexico 25 years ago.”
“California is looking at decades of depopulation moving forward. Not catastrophic and not rapid.”
“I see Oregon and Washington as the next California, and I don’t mean that in a good way.”
Things are better the other side of the mountains (Yakima, WA, and Bend, OR). Also Tri-Cities (Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland), WA.
“The same thing that’s happening in the United States with the retirement of the baby boomers is happening in the wider world. But what is unique about the American baby boomers is that they actually had kids. So we’ve got the Millennials, which are a large generation that are providing a lot of consumption and ballast. That doesn’t exist in most of the rest of the world.”
And the rest of the world is screwed. “You’re looking at general economic degradation on a broad scale that we haven’t seen in well over a century and a half.”
Solution for the rest of the world is printing currency. Thus massive capital flight to more stable locations. “Nine cases out of ten that safer place is the United States.”
This all seems to excerpted from his book The End of the World Is Just The Beginning. As with some of his other videos, I think he’s identified some real concerns, but overstates his case (and the nearness of an imminent global trade collapse rather than some retrenchment). Irrational things can go on a whole lot longer than you might think they would be able to…
While testifying before the House Budget Committee yesterday, Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Xavier Becerra affirmed that yes, his department was in favor of taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgeries for minors. “So for the record, you favor HHS funding . . . for sex-reassignment surgeries for minors?” Lauren Boebert, (R, Colo.) asked. Becerra answered:
I will do everything I can to defend any American, including children, whether or not they fit the categories you have mentioned or not. And if they talk about gender-affirming care, I am there to protect the rights of any American.
In other words: yes.
Related:
“They’re losing their minds because parents want to protect kids from grooming. Pay attention to this.” pic.twitter.com/j8EhsQi9gM
“Black Lives Matter Secretly Bought a $6 Million House.” I’m shocked, shocked that people who encouraged riots to help out Democrats are corrupt. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Biden: Surely Democrats everywhere will embrace my scaled-back Build Back Better bag of bloated bilge! Kyrsten Sinema: “LOL! Get rekt!”
Neither snow no rain, nor gloom of night, shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. But multiple assaults? Yeah, they’re drawing the line there. So no more mail for a block of Santa Monica, California, until they fix the problem. This is your mail on one-party Democratic control.
Get A Rope Part 1: “Hospital Refuses Father-To-Son Kidney Transplant Over COVID Jab.”
In theory, at least, the role of an organization such as McKinsey is to ask, “Why?” Everyone wants to start a streaming service. Why does yours make sense? If CNN were run by thoughtful people, it might have taken the opportunity to ask some fundamental questions of itself before procuring a new toy: “Who are we?” “What do we do?” “Are we good at it?” “Why do our staff keep getting themselves embroiled in scandals?” “Has anyone heard Brianna Keilar utter a single sentence that might be termed useful?”
Had these questions been asked, it might have dawned on CNN’s leaders that the way in which Brian Stelter sees the network is not, in fact, the way in which anyone else sees the network. Had these questions been asked, it might have become apparent to CNN’s leaders that Americans do not regard CNN and its staff as brave, diligent, indispensable firefighters, that consumers do not believe Jim Acosta to be a hero, and that, when people think about America’s turbulent democracy, the last person who comes to their minds as a fix is Jim Sciutto. Had these questions been asked, CNN’s leaders might have learned that the network’s obsession with Fox is annoying to viewers, and that launching CNN+ with a flagship documentary, The Murdochs: Empire of Influence, would probably send the wrong message. As for the network’s slogan: “The Most Trusted Name in News”? One might as soon call Chris Cuomo a wit.
Thus, the entirely predictable disaster that is unfurling before our eyes. And, thus, CNN’s bafflement that it has become a joke. And what a joke! 10,000 people a day? That’s the size of the home crowd at a Durham Bulls minor-league-baseball game. It’s the number of people who attend “MerPalooza,” a “celebration of mermaids and mermen,” or the international UFO convention and film festival, or BronyCon.
I think this comparison is unfair to BronyCon, which has historically attracted a much lower percentage of sex offenders than CNN…
Here are two videos where Peter Zeihan argues that China is screwed for many reasons, not least of which is demographics.
Takeaways:
One child per couple means that China is “the fastest aging society in human history, with the largest sex imbalance in human history.”
“They’ve run out of people of childbearing age.”
They were going shrink in half by 2100. “Then they realized that they had been overcounting people for some time.” Then new data moved the date moved up to 2070. And now they’re saying it will be 2050. “For that to be true, the Chinese would have overcounted the population by 100 million.” And all of those missing people are of childbearing age.
Their population actually peaked 15 years ago.
“We’ve seen a 12-fold increase in Chinese labor costs since 1991.”
“China isn’t getting rich, it’s getting old.” They’re facing demographic collapse within a decade.
Xi’s instituted a cult of personality, and silenced anyone capable of independent thought. “He knows that the country’s current economic model has failed. And he knows he can’t guarantee economic growth, and he knows he can’t keep the lights on, and he knows he can’t win a war with the Americans.”
Xi’s solution? “Naked, blatant, ultra nationalism. Ethnocentric ultranationalism of the Nazi style.”
At the top, they don’t care about keeping the lights on. “A third of the country is facing power rationing.”
“These are the sorts of things that you do if you know that the bottom’s falling out and there’s nothing you can do about it, and you have to shift the conversation to remain in power.”
“In China, money is a political good. It exists to serve the needs of the CCP.”
“All of the economic growth we have seen in China since 2006 is because of debt.”
Corporate debt is 350% of GDP, “making China the most indebted country in human history in both absolute and relative terms.” Every country that’s come within half of this has collapsed under the debt load.
I’m omitting discussion of how China is screwed on semiconductors (covered enough here), and also the possibility of invading Taiwan (this video was released late last year, before Russia invaded Ukraine).
“The Biden administration in bits and pieces is redefining strategic ambiguity, and it’s not clear to me what the endgame is here.” Well, there’s a whole lot that isn’t clear about the Biden Administration…
Zeihan thinks Biden might recognize Taiwan for a foreign policy win. Zeihan also thinks that both China and Russia are so weak we can wait them out. (Remember: Pre-Ukraine invasion.)
Zeihan dismissive of both Obama and Trump foreign policy.
“Joe Biden has been on the wrong side and the right side of every foreign policy decision the U.S. has made in the last 45 years, because he doesn’t have any core beliefs he tacks with the wind.”
Now let’s forward to March 24, where Russia’s colossal failure in Ukraine has actually made China even more screwed.
Takeaways:
The biggest damage that we are seeing from the Ukraine war (outside of Ukraine, obviously) is in China. Because in one month the Russians have pulled back the blinders on what has been a 50-year strategic program, the idea that China can come to global power with American sponsorship, with American indifference, that it can take Taiwan, that it can intimidate Japan, that they can dominate all of east Asia and yet not suffer economically at all. It was always ridiculous, but now it’s been shown to just be absolutely stupid.
No one can escape the power of global markets because of trade.
“The yuan is only traded internally because it’s the most manipulated currency in history. The euro confiscates bank deposits to pay for bailouts.”
Russia is the world’s second largest oil exporter, and it can’t export more to China because the pipes that go east don’t interconnect with the ones that go west. “The rail lines are already beyond capacity.”
In the west: “One way or another, those pipes aren’t surviving this year.” (Not sure that’s correct, but I’ve long thought that we should be seeing more structure hits inside Russia than we’ve seen thus far.)
“The stuff that goes to the Black Sea is in a war zone, so insurance companies will not give the indemnification that is necessary for vessels to operate in that area. So the only way a ship can go and dock it overseas right now is if a country gives its sovereign indemnification and takes all the risk.”
Primorsk, on the Baltic, is open. However: “Ship captains for the most part are refusing to go, and European dock workers are refusing to unload the cargo when it arrives. So that is still in use but not nearly as much, maybe a quarter of what it used to be before the war started.”
To get more oil to China: “You would have to build a fundamentally new infrastructure from the fields in northwest Siberia to Chinese population centers that is greater than the distance from Miami to Anchorage, most of which is through virgin territory that is very rugged. That’s a 10-year program minimum even with the Chinese building it.”
“We’re looking at the single largest removal of crude from the market ever, and in proportional terms it’s going to have a shock somewhat similar to World War II.”
We have insurance companies not doing it, shipping companies not doing it, dock workers not doing it and now Halliburton, Baker Hughes and Schlumberger have pulled out, and they do the technical work that makes a lot of this possible. All the super majors are gone, and we even have a couple of major projects out in Sakhalin that are probably just going to die because the Russians can’t make those projects work by themselves. Most of the oil and gas out of that goes to China, so we’re actually looking at an environment where the Chinese see reduced flows rather than increased, as Russia is just melon-scooped out of the market.
When the Russians fell under sanctions, everything that the Chinese thought was true about their future was laid bare as, at best, wishful thinking and bad analysis. So they are now looking east to the United States and west to the Russians in a little bit of a panic, because they are being tied indirectly to what’s going on in Ukraine. And they have now found out not only does the west’s and specifically the United States’ financial tools work very well, they now know they would work much better against China than against Russia, because at its core Russia is a commodities exporter, most notably oil, natural gas and food. China imports all those things, so if an equivalent sanctions regime was done against the Chinese, you’d have 500 million dead Chinese in less than a year from starvation.
Here I think he overstates the case, as there are a lot of emergency avenues a communist government could pursue to stave off starvation. Like invading Mongolia and turning it into emergency farmland. Which is not to so they wouldn’t have some starvation, especially in worse-case scenarios…
“The Chinese have always seen themselves as anti-American [well, the commies, anyway -LP], they’ve always seen themselves as anti-Western, anti-democracy and now they’re realizing that the mood of the man in the White House determines whether their country exists.”
As tight as the sanctions are, as big as they’re getting, they’re nothing compared to the corporate boycotts. Almost every single company that left Russia was under no legal requirement to do so, they just didn’t want to be associated with the war. And we’re talking about those ESG, social goody two-shoes mammoth companies like Exxon and Halliburton, who are now gone, and everyone else followed. So if that happened to China, you know that’s all of their investment that matters. That’s all of their technology transfers, that’s all of their end markets. This system, if it turned against China, would be far more damning than anything we’ve seen out of Russia so far.
I think Zeihan overstates the case a bit, and probably immanizes the timeline of crisis more than warranted, but the demographic and economic challenges China faces are very real.
Also keep in mind that no one in 1988 expected the Soviet Union to collapse as quickly as it did, either…
