Zeihan on Evergrande: 1.5 BILLION Unsold Condos?

February 6th, 2024

I haven’t been updating every twist and turn of the Evergrande collapse, but we’re going to look at it again because this Peter Zeihan video has a fairly staggering statistic. He asserts that there are 1.5 BILLION (with a B) unoccupied housing units in China. Even though we already knew about the ghost cities, that’s like an entire ghost nation for a China that was already headed down the economic crapper.

  • “A Hong Kong court has ruled that China’s largest property development group, Evergrande, is bankrupt and needs to be broken up. This is something that the Chinese government has spent a lot of effort on the last two years not happening.”
  • “There’s two big things that dominate the Chinese economy. The first is something I call hyperfinancialization: The idea that the government both de facto confiscates the savings of the citizen population so it can only go into projects funded by Chinese State Banks, as well as massively expanding the money supply to a tune of like almost triple what we have here in the United States.”
  • “It’s a public stability political control approach to finance. It’s not about profit, it’s about throughput, because throughput requires a lot of bodies.”
  • “Number one, you get companies like Evergrande, who gorge on all this bottomless supply of debt to build build, build, build, build, even if there’s no demand.”
  • “Second, you get a population who knows that their private savings is almost worthless, because the Chinese government is forcing them to keep it in the state banks, and they want to put it into a hard asset that preferably the state can’t control. And if they can’t get their money out of the country, then the next best thing is a hard asset in the country, which typically is property.”
  • “You have somewhere probably in the vicinity of 1.5 billion units in the country that have never been lived in, never will be lived in. So you’re talking about 100% overbuild, conservatively. Some estimates say it’s as high as three billion, which is just so far beyond stupid.”

    • This is such a huge number that I’m having trouble believing it. After all, 1.5 billion is more than at least once current estimate for the current total number of houses in Asia. Is there supporting evidence? Well, I found this.

    “How many vacant homes are there now? Each expert gives a very different number, with the most extreme believing the current number of vacant homes are enough for 3 billion people,” said He Keng, 81, a former deputy head of the statistics bureau.

    “That estimate might be a bit much, but 1.4 billion people probably can’t fill them,” He said at a forum in the southern Chinese city Dongguan, according to a video released by the official media China News Service.

    That’s people, not homes. Still, even if you cut it in half, to 750 million vacant condos, that’s a huge number. That’s the equivalent of 30 empty Shanghais.

    Back to Zeihan:

  • “Evergrande going down means that their debts aren’t going to be serviced anymore, and the physical assets they have are going to be parceled up and foreign investors are going to be coming in seeing what bits that they can get.” Any foreigners investing in Chinese real estate need their heads examined.
  • “These things are things that the Chinese Communist Party would not normally allow to happen, so there’s a couple ways that this can go, none of them are good.”
  • “Option number one is we follow a western style bankruptcy and restitution program where this system is broken up and a lot of their assets are sold at pennies, maybe dimes, on a dollar.”
  • “You can count on private citizens being up in arms. I mean, the best estimate I’ve seen out of China is at 70% of total private savings is wrapped up in real estate, and most of these assets are worth no more than 10 cents on the dollar.”
  • “You have a fire sale of the single largest player which controls one sixth of the market, holy shit, things are going to get real very, very, very quickly.”
  • “Option number two is that the Chinese step in and abrogate the Hong Kong ruling. Now legally this cannot happen, but the Chinese Communist party is not really big on legal details when it comes to Hong Kong in particular.”
  • “Then Evergrande goes on some sort of state drip and everything with the system just kind of limps on, with the understanding now that Hong Kong has no legal authority over its own holdings, which will start an exodus of what few international firms are still there.”
  • “Regardless how this goes, don’t expect anything in the market to get better.”
  • “Evergrande may be the biggest player in this market, but it is by far not the only one who’s been doing stupid things like this, building condos that have no demand or running it like a Ponzi scheme. Every development company in the country basically operates this this way, and the second and third largest players in the industry are state-owned.”
  • “Even if all of a sudden this place were run by a bunch of Austrian economists, it’s too late.” Because of the one-child policy, there simply aren’t enough people of home-buying age.”
  • “I don’t want to say anything overly dramatic as ‘This is where it all starts to fall apart,’ because we’ve had a lot of things like that go down in the last 18 months. But this cuts to the core of what enables the average [Chinese] citizen to actually support the government, and there’s no way we move forward from this without a lot of side damage.”

    • The Chinese economy is already sucking. If the housing oversupply is really as bad as Zeihan makes out, China is in for an economic upheaval that makes 1929 look like a mild case of the hiccups.

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    Posted in video | 32 Comments »

    Texas Statistics Roundup

    February 5th, 2024

    Longtime readers will remember that I used to do a regular Texas vs. California roundup of the respective directions of the two biggest states in the union, until that just became too big a pain to keep doing. We now have enough data of how Democrats have ruined single party California to just take it for granted that its slide into the toilet will continue unabated.

    But the latest data on how Texas continues to grow by leaps and bounds is worth taking a look at.

  • The state population continues to grow.

    New population estimates have been released, and once again Texas gained far more residents than any other state. The US population increased by a little more than 1.6 million people during the 12 months ending in July 2023. That’s a rise of just 0.5%, but it’s better than the 0.4% increase in 2022 or 2021’s 0.2% gain. Migration was up, and there was a drop in deaths (though they remain well above pre-COVID levels).

    About 87% of the increase was concentrated in the South. More than 706,000 people were added to the region due to net domestic migration, with almost 500,000 from net international migration.

    The increase in Texas was 473,453 (about 1,300 people per day), followed by Florida (up 365,205). South Carolina and Florida were the two fastest-growing states in percentage terms, increasing by 1.7% and 1.6%, respectively. The Texas pace was just slightly under 1.6%.

    Eight states saw their population fall in 2023 including California (‑75,423), Hawaii (‑4,261), Illinois (‑32,826), Louisiana (‑14,274), New York (‑101,984), Oregon (‑6,021), Pennsylvania (‑10,408), and West Virginia (‑3,964).

  • Next up: Texas is the second youngest state in the union. At an average age of 36, Texas is only behind Utah at 32 (which I’m presuming is all those marriage and children-minded Mormons).
  • Finally, in an important economic indicator for the state, the Texas oil and gas industry set new production records.

    Texas’ oil and gas industry continued to one-up itself in 2023, setting new records for production, exports, taxes paid, and more, according to a new report.

    The Texas Oil and Gas Association’s (TXOGA) 2023 annual report showed the state’s industry produced 5.5 million barrels per day of crude oil and 31.8 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/d) of natural gas — both the highest in the U.S. If it were its own country, Texas would place fourth on the hierarchy of oil-producing nations behind the U.S., Russia, and Saudi Arabia.

    “American energy leadership starts in Texas and our nation, our economy and our world are better because of the unparalleled stewardship of Texas oil and natural gas companies,” said TXOGA President Todd Staples.

    “2023 was such a blockbuster year that the Texas oil and natural gas industry effectively rewrote its record book, clocking unmatched economic and energy achievements across the board.”

    According to TXOGA, members of the industry paid over $9 billion in oil and gas severance taxes to the state in 2023 — revenues that fund the state’s savings account and highway fund. Overall, $26.3 billion in state and local taxes were paid by oil and gas companies last year, edging out 2022’s previous record high.

    TXOGA listed out property taxes paid by the industry broken down by county and school district.

    The industry continues its strong rebound from the global turmoil wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which West Texas intermediate prices plunged to negative levels. In 2022, the industry accounted for 6 percent of the state’s gross domestic product.

    The industry employs over 480,000 people in Texas with an average annual wage of $124,000.

    Just as in previous years, the Texas formula of freedom, low taxes, low regulation, the rule of law and small government continues to pay dividends.

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    Posted in Democrats, Regulation, Republicans | 4 Comments »

    Ukraine Switching To A War Of Attrition Against Russia?

    February 4th, 2024

    Two videos on increasing Russian logistics difficulties in the Russo-Ukrainian War. First up: A video that suggests Ukraine has switched from a territory recapture strategy to an attrition strategy.

  • “Russia is burning whether it’s oil terminals on the Baltic and the Black Sea, factories in far-flung Siberia, or military bases in Crimea, it seems almost every day something bursts into flames in Putin’s backyard. And Ukraine is thought to be the one behind it.” It’s an open question whether structure hits in places like Siberia are Ukrainian “werewolf” teams operating behind enemy lines, or native anti-Putin/anti-war (or even anti-Russian) partisans, but the effect seems the same: Russia now has to worry about attacks to its military, transport, energy, and manufacturing infrastructure far from the frontlines in Ukraine.
  • Zelensky warned Putin that if Russia attacked Ukrainian cities with indiscriminate missile attacks again, Ukraine would hit back. When it did, “Ukraine struck back a fire at the electrical substation outside Moscow, plunged three districts of the capital into darkness. Water pipes also burst, leaving people freezing in their homes. The plague of accidents soon spread to the cities of Omsk and Novosibirsk, deep in Siberia, which were left without heating as temperatures fell below -2.” Actually, Omsk and Novosibirsk aren’t “deep” in Siberia, because the place is so vast there another five time zones east of there.
  • “Soon after attacks began on critical infrastructure, including oil refineries upon which Putin’s economy relies. To date, three refineries have been blown up or set on fire, including two which were hit by long-range Ukrainian drones. One of those the Ust-Luga oil refinery near St. Petersburg, is almost 600 miles from Ukraine.”
  • “Railways and factories have also been blown up or burned down at the same time the Ukrainians have stepped up their campaign against Crimea.” Naval successes we’ve covered here already skipped.
  • At this point the video argues that Ukraine’s strategy was to liberate Ukrainian territory, no matter the strategic value. I don’t think that was the case.
  • Following the “failure” of the summer offensive (I would say “limited gains”), “Ukraine is digging in and refocusing liberation of territory is no longer the main goal hitting Russia where it hurts most.”
  • “Ukraine knows that victory in a long war depends on two things above all else: The will of people to keep fighting, and the ability of the country to provide weapons for them to fight with, and that’s where these drone missile and sabotage attacks come in.”
  • It then argues (as many others have) that Crimea is Putin’s main weakness, and that losing it will cripple his prestige and ability to stay in power and continue the war.

    • I think there has been a shift in Ukrainian strategy, but that shift has mainly been driven by the development and availability of longer-ranged weapons Ukraine lacked earlier in the war, combined with the effects of a long-term campaign to degrade Russia air power, naval assets and SAM systems, opening up avenues for longer range strikes. Ukraine focused on attacking Russia’s logistics systems right after the Battle of Kiev was won, but now they have the capability to hit much deeper into Russia’s logistics infrastructure.

    Actually, I’m surprised there haven’t been any reported attacks on the Trans-Siberian Railway, given what a long, slender link that is. A few medium-to-long range drone teams inserted into northern Kazakhstan or Mongolia could wreck real havoc on trains, lines, bridges, etc.

    Next, a video from Kanal 13 (very much a pro-Ukrainian source) suggests that the war and sanctions are cratering Russia’s military industrial complex.

  • “The Russian military industrial complex is being destroyed because of the war against Ukraine.”
  • Dimitri Fidive, CEO of the Muram Machine Building Plant, wrote in an email intercepted by the activists, that inflation and the shortcomings of Russia’s bureaucratic approach prevents plants that form the country’s military industrial complex from fulfilling government orders.”
  • “Plants are forced to sell their goods at prices set in 2019, but are at the same time expected to purchase details at market prices and in advance.”
  • “The money received from the government was not enough to cover the interest on the credit that his firm would need to take out to pay its suppliers.”
  • “Money is tied up until the completion of the government contracts, which normally last 3 to 5 years, meaning during this time the money is effectively frozen.”
  • “There is a shortage of staff at the plants due to both mass mobilization and a lack of accommodation [housing] in the area.”

    • Hell of a way to run a railroad. One wonders how extensive these problems are with other companies in Russia’s military industrial complex

    Ukraine’s strategy has shifted more in relation to the way the war developed, and the changing availability of western weapons, than any fundamental shift in strategy. It became apparent that this was going to be a war of attrition in the first year, and the question of which would break first: The west’s willingness to send Ukraine weapons, or Russia’s economy and ability to wage it’s illegal war of territorial aggression?

    Nothing about that strategy has changed, only Ukraine’s greater reach to affect the latter.

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    Posted in Economics, Foreign Policy, Military, video | 16 Comments »

    French Farmers: “Jeremy Clarkson Was Right”

    February 3rd, 2024

    Farmers blockaded Paris to protest the impossible mandates being handed down to them by both Paris and the EU in the name of fighting “global warming.”

  • “Farmers are laying siege to Paris, as they put it, at eight points around the capital. And they say they won’t budge until the government gives them more concessions.”
  • “We need one of our French celebrities to do the same thing as Jeremy Clarkson.”
  • He said Clarkson “exposed the red tape in relation to the environment. Everything he explained, we’re going through in France.”
  • “It’s about bureaucracy, it’s about the European Union.”
  • He says farmers in the UK are still waiting for promised post-Brexit support.
  • “Everything in relations to environmental requirements is exactly the same in France, maybe even worse.”
  • “We are fed up with the admin, which is excessive in our country with regards to our work, the red tape that France adds in addition to the EU requirements.”

    • The farmer interviewed says they (i.e. FNSEA, the largest French farming union) have a list of 140 demands. Try as I might, I can’t find a list of those demands, in English or even French. This seems to hit on key grievances, but there’s a fair amount of highfalutin generalities in the English translation. This seems to be a key point: “In Europe, the very philosophy of the Green deal which assumes degrowth needs to be reviewed to restore visibility to farmers.”

    If previous demands from other Eurostrikers are any guide, the demands are probably a mix of good (stop with the green insanity, lower taxes and eliminate red tape) and bad (more subsidies).

    It looks like the blockade ended because the government met some of their demands.

    The French farmers said President Emmanuel Macron’s government now needed to act fast on its pledges, which have included scrapping plans to raise tax contributions on tractor diesel, an easing of pesticide regulations, a pause on new fallow land rules, and more safety checks on food imports.

    If you had told some one five years ago that “French farmers will be hailing Jeremy Clarkson as a hero,” no one would have believed you…

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    Posted in Global Warming, Regulation, video | 8 Comments »

    LinkSwarm For February 2, 2024

    February 2nd, 2024

    Let’s get this out of the way:

    Tons of Fani Willis’ crooked shenanigans come to light, Ukraine bags another warship, all those things they said the vaccine wouldn’t do it’s doing, and an anger management therapist who was very poor at his job. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • If you were wondering why Fulton County DA (and Trump prosecutor) Fani WIllis was so eager to bump uglies with married lover Nathan Wade, it turns out that his business partners bankrolled her campaign, and she gave them lucrative contracts.

    Business partners of District Attorney Fani Willis’ alleged lover Nathan Wade, whom she appointed to work on the case against former President Donald Trump, made donations to her campaign before receiving lucrative contracts from her office.

    Terrence Bradley, Wade’s former partner, and Christopher Campbell, his current partner, have collectively contributed more than $5,000 to Willis’ campaign, contribution disclosure reports show. Moreover, both men have each raked in tens of thousands of dollars from contracts with the district attorney’s office, according to county records.

    Campbell is a partner at Wade & Campbell Firm, where he works with Wade. Bradley formerly worked with Wade at Wade, Bradley & Campbell Firm, and also represented Wade in his divorce case until Sept. 2022.

    The donations add another wrinkle to Willis’ already-scrutinized relationship with Wade.

    Willis was accused in a motion earlier this month by Trump co-defendant Michael Roman of benefiting from the “lucrative” contract she awarded Wade when he took her on vacations using money earned from the position. Wade filed to divorce his wife on Nov. 2, 2021, the day after his contract with the district attorney’s office began, and has earned nearly $700,000 from the Fulton County District Attorney’s office since his appointment.

    Quid Pro, meet Quo. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • More Willis shenanigans: “DA Fani Willis fired a whistleblower who informed her about the intentional misuse of federal funds and there’s audio of their conversation.”

  • If you’re having trouble keeping track of all Fani Willis’ lawbreaking, here’s a timeline.
  • Old and Busted: “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black!” The new hotness: Black voters just aren’t into Biden.

    Resident Biden appears to be in serious trouble with black voters ahead of the 2024 election, and black lawmakers and organizers are starting to panic.

    “What I’m hearing in my district is how ‘Bidenomics’ hasn’t really hit them in the pocket,” New York representative Jamaal Bowman told National Review earlier this week on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. “I need him in the barbershops. I need him on the basketball courts. I need him talking to the hip-hop community. I need him talking to the sports and athletics community to really get at what is troubling black men.”

    Polling suggests Bowman is right to be concerned. Just 50 percent of black adults said they approve of Biden in a national AP-NORC poll last month — a 36-point drop from July 2021. An October Siena College/New York Times poll found that 22 percent of black voters surveyed in six competitive presidential battlegrounds say they will vote for Trump over Biden in 2024, a stunning polling shift from a reliably Democratic coalition that helped Biden win the White House in 2020. That same survey found Trump’s numbers were even higher among black men.

    In the 40 years he’s spent in political activism, National Black Farmers Association president John Boyd Jr. says the Biden administration has done worse than any other administration in his lifetime in opening its doors to black voters. That lack of outreach, Boyd warns, may come back to bite him in November.

    Wait, black people like jobs and safe neighborhoods and dislike inflation and illegal aliens sucking up welfare benefits? Who knew?

  • “U.N. Agency for Palestinians Discloses Involvement of Employees in October 7 Attack.”

    The U.N.’s agency for Palestinians said that it fired several employees after receiving information from Israel showing that they had taken part in the October 7 terrorist attacks. The State Department indicated that twelve U.N. employees allegedly took part in the attacks and announced that it had temporarily paused funding for the agency while it reviews the situation.

    The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) delivers aid to Palestinians across Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The U.S. is UNRWA’s largest donor, providing $343 million of its budget in 2022.

    In a statement Friday morning, UNRWA commissioner general Philippe Lazzarini disclosed that Israel had presented his agency with evidence of its employees’ involvement in Hamas’s massacre of Israelis.

    “To protect the Agency’s ability to deliver humanitarian assistance, I have taken the decision to immediately terminate the contracts of these staff members and launch an investigation in order to establish the truth without delay. Any UNRWA employee who was involved in acts of terror will be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution,” he said.

    Sure they will. The question is why the United States ever funded UNRWA, since the funds seem to go straight into rockets and murder tunnels to kill Israeli civilians with?

    The Trump administration cut off all funding to UNRWA in 2018, saying that the U.S. shoulders a disproportionate share of its budget. Blinken resumed funding to UNRWA three years later, pledging that the U.S. would seek reforms to the organization.

    Oh. That’s why…

  • They continue to play games with the job numbers.
  • It’s not just Fani Willis. “DOJ Opens Criminal Probe into Cori Bush for Allegedly Funneling Campaign Funds to Husband.”
  • Austin news via Libs of Ticktock:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Ohio senate overrides the Governor’s veto of bill banning child genital mutilation and males playing female sports. Good.
  • Japan is not having America’s woke nonsense.
  • UPS is laying off 12,000 workers. You know, because of how strong that Biden economy is…
  • Mail is screwed up in Missouri City, Texas (southwest of Houston) because a new sorting machine didn’t fit in the building.
  • You know all those crazy “fringe” “conspiracy theories” about the Flu Manchu vaccine? Yeah, about that.

    We found the number of myocarditis reports in VAERS after COVID-19 vaccination in 2021 was 223 times higher than the average of all vaccines combined for the past 30 years. This represented a 2500% increase in the absolute number of reports in the first year of the campaign when comparing historical values prior to 2021.

  • Ukraine bags another Russian warship, in this case the Tarantul-class corvette Ivanovets.
  • “Starbucks Employee Opposed to Unionization Sues to Declare National Labor Relations Board Unconstitutional.” “The National Labor Relations Board should not be a union boss-friendly kangaroo court run by powerful bureaucrats who exercise unaccountable power in violation of the Constitution.” This is another post-Chevron lawsuit that has the potential to completely dismantle the administrative state.
  • Language on Texas 2021’s Proposition 2 declared illegal.

    Proposition 2 allowed counties to create transportation reinvestment zones (TRZs), a power they did not previously have. According to the Texas Department of Transportation, a TRZ is a kind of tax increment financing district where a “zone is created, a base year is established, and the incremental increase in property tax revenue collected inside the zone is used to finance a project in the zone.”

    The proposition did not include language about the use of increased ad valorem taxes to pay bonds or notes issued by the county in the TRZ district. A similar measure in 2011 that included such language was voted down.

  • “Anger management therapist loses his temper and murders a homeless man.” To be fair, the transient did try to fark with his dogs…
  • Woman with Master’s degree finds out that her trade school husband is quadrupling her salary with no debt.

  • Disney losses lawsuit against Ron DeSantis over Reedy Improvement District.
  • Media site called The Messenger blew through $50 million and closed down in less than a year. No, I never heard of it either…
  • George Carlin’s estate sues makers of AI Carlin.
  • “Texas Finds Loophole With New ‘Super Ouchy Pokey Wire.'”
  • “Tragic Report Reveals Thousands of Journalists Still Have Not Been Laid Off.”
  • I think he likes to swim…

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, unions | 3 Comments »

    Federal Judges Strikes Down California Background Checks For Ammo

    February 1st, 2024

    Another Second Amendment win, this time in the People’s Republic of California.

    A San Diego federal judge on Wednesday again struck down a state law that required background checks for nearly all purchases of firearm ammunition and barred California residents from bringing home ammunition that they purchased out of state.

    U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez ruled that such restrictions violate the Second Amendment. He also ruled that the portion of the law restricting out-of-state purchases violated the dormant Commerce Clause and is preempted by federal law regulating interstate transportation of firearms.

    Benitez had previously struck down the same law in April 2020, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the law just days later while the government appealed the ruling. Before the 9th Circuit could rule on that appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion in a New York gun case that upended Second Amendment case law.

    After the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, the 9th Circuit sent the case back to Benitez to be relitigated under that new framework, which holds that modern gun laws must be “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

    Benitez found that the “ammunition background checks laws have no historical pedigree and operate in such a way that they violate the Second Amendment right of citizens to keep and bear arms.” He issued an immediate injunction barring the state from enforcing the law.

    The California Rifle & Pistol Association, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement that Wednesday’s ruling represents “continued progress in rolling back decades of attacks on the rights of lawful gun owners.”

    Chuck Michel, president and general counsel of the group, said the ruling showed, once again, that the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision has greatly impacted how courts must analyze “these absurdly restrictive laws.”

    Snip.

    “In the end, the State has failed to carry its burden to demonstrate that the ammunition background check laws ‘are consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,’ as required by Bruen,” the judge wrote. “… A sweeping background check requirement imposed every time a citizen needs to buy ammunition is an outlier that our ancestors would have never accepted for a citizen.”

    He also wrote that state data showed too many people seeking to lawfully purchase ammunition were being rejected because of flaws in the system. He said that according to state statistics, when the system was first implemented in 2019, the rejection rate was 16 percent. That has since fallen to 11 percent, “but is still too high,” he wrote.

    When a circuit court as notoriously liberal feels compelled to send cases back to lower court in light of Bruen, the the Second Amendment is winning.

    On the downside, the Democratic Party in general, and California Democrats in particular, have proven that no amount of rulings will prevent them from pursuing the goal of complete disarmament of law-abiding citizens.

    Expect California Democrats to respond by passing a whole slew of gun-grabbing legislation that continues to ignore the clear guidelines of Bruen.

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    Posted in Democrats, Guns, Regulation | 6 Comments »

    Chinese Commies PianoGate: One Of Them Was A Spy

    January 31st, 2024

    This story just gets weirder and weirder.

    The Chinese commies freak out at being filmed story (and the follow-up) has a new twist that makes that helps explain the freakout: One of them was a known spy.

  • “Christine Lee she was named by the MI5 back in 2022 as an agent of influence…British Security Service issued an alert earlier this year stating that a UK-based lawyer had been engaged in political interference activities for the Chinese state.”
  • This marked a shift in approach “being taken against the security threat posed by China.”
  • “She has personally met with Xi Jinping back in Beijing.”
  • “This is a bunch of people in a conference room. This is called the political consultative conference. They invite a bunch of people living overseas back to China to get greeted by Xi Jinping for to thank them for their effort in conducting influence operations overseas.”
  • “It’s also possible that CH Lee doubles as somebody from one of the intelligence bureaus.”
  • “On the surface she’s a lawyer in the UK, and she is also a political influence campaign, specialist and also she could also be a secret agent doing something even worse.”
  • “The entire thing started because Christine Lee did not want her face to appear on camera, but she was not able to go up directly to confront Dr K [Brendan Kavanagh], being that she’s publicly known by the MI5 as an agent of influence.”
  • “I think Dr K needs to be aware that this was not just against a series of random CCP nationalists, he’s actually against a systematically planned out series of influence operations. And this, in my view,escalates the situation entirely. I think he should do something to protect himself, protect his family, and also be aware of who he dealing with. This is not a regular group of people.”

    • Meanwhile, the Chinese communists are threatening to sue Kavanagh for “defamation.”

    The story started out looking like it was just “Little Pinks” acting like assholes in another country, but the truth appears to be stranger and more sinister.

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    Posted in Communism, video | 14 Comments »

    Trump Endorses Phelan Opponent David Covey

    January 30th, 2024

    A huuuuuge Texas Republican Primary endorsement just dropped.

    Former President Donald Trump has officially waded into the Texas House Republican primaries with his first endorsement, throwing his support behind House District (HD) 21 candidate David Covey, who is challenging incumbent House Speaker Dade Phelan (R-Beaumont).

    In an exclusive interview with The Texan last year, Trump first indicated his intent to endorse Covey, saying, “Well, tell David to get ready,” after slamming Phelan for the House’s role in impeaching Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

    Now, in a post on Trump’s social media website Truth Social, the former president and leading 2024 GOP presidential candidate made his support for Covey official.

    “David Covey is running against Dade Phelan, the speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, who led the Fraudulent Impeachment of the recently re-elected, in a landslide, Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton,” Trump wrote. “David is an America First Conservative who will Secure the Border, Restore Election Integrity, Protect our Families, and Military/Vets, and Defend our under siege Second Amendment.”

    Covey reacted to the news with a statement, writing that he spoke with Trump and reassured the president that he intends to win the race.

    “When I spoke with President Trump, a few minutes ago, I reassured him that for the sake of Texas’s future, we will win this race for President, and my race to unseat liberal Dade Phelan,” Covey said.

    Naturally this is big news. Texas House District 21 Republican voters who hadn’t been paying attention to how Phelan has repeatedly thwarted conservative priorities and foolishly impeached Paxton now have no excuse to ignore Phelan’s sins.

    Phelan needs to go, as well as every one of his enablers in the Texas House.

    The weeds making up the Democrat-backed Straus-Bonnen-Phelan axis must be pulled out by their roots so they can’t grow back.

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Regulation, Republicans, Texas, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

    Debunking The “700,000 Truckers To Texas” Story

    January 29th, 2024

    Sometimes a story comes along that’s so ludicrous that you rush to debunk it. Such as with the “700,000 truckers are descending on the Texas border to protest Biden’s refusal to halt the flood of illegal aliens” story.

    EAGLE PASS, Texas (TND) — A convoy seeks to line the southern border with more than 700,000 vehicles and hold several rallies next week to demand action from the Biden administration.

    The Take Our Border Back Southern Border Convoy will span from Virginia Beach, Va. to San Diego, Calif. and hold protests urging officials to enforce the Constitution’s amendments and halt human and drug trafficking across the border from Jan.29-Feb. 3.

    Fellow citizens and compatriots … I call on you in the name of liberty, of patriotism and everything dear to the American character to come to our aid with all dispatch,” Pete Chambers, one of the coalition’s commanders, wrote. “If this call is neglected, we are determined to sustain ourselves as long as possible and act like soldiers who never forget what is due to our own honor and that of our country.”

    The convoy aims to “send a message” to local, state and federal officials and law enforcement that they need to close the border and deport all illegal immigrants in its plan to “shine a spotlight” on open borders. Chambers claims Americans are “besieged on all sides” by evil “dark forces.”

    “We have sustained continual bombardments of tyranny and have maintained our honor, prestige and esprit de corps,” Chambers asserted. “The enemy has demanded the surrender of Lady Liberty and her children. Tyrannical actors have tortured and oppressed without cause, without mercy and without reprieve.”

    This is a bad idea and a silly story. Before we get to the ideological reasons, let’s explicate a much more basic one: Math.

    Since there are three routes, let’s divide that 700,000 into three, which gives us 233,333 each going to Eagle Pass, Texas, Yuma, Arizona and one from California to Yuma (all details from their website).

    They say that not just 18-wheelers, but cars, campers, etc. are welcome. So let’s use the average car length of 14.7 feet (rather than an average 18-wheeler length of 70 feet) just to be on the conservative side. There are 5,280 feet to a mile. That yields 359 cars per mile.

    That’s 649 miles of cars per convoy.

    But wait! It gets worse! According to their route, they are taking 290 through Dripping Springs, Texas on their way to Eagle Pass. 290 is a four-lane state highway (two lanes each way). Dripping (as the locals call it) is a small town of just under 5,000 people that used to be way the hell out in the country and is now in the Austin exurbs.

    In April of last year, I went through Dripping on the way to and from a dog rescue event. They were having their Founder’s Day Festival, which they say draws “thousands,” and traffic on 290 slowed to a crawl.

    I think there are seven stoplights in Dripping proper, and much more between it and Austin, between Austin and Manor, Manor and Elgin, etc.

    There’s no way 649 miles of cars and trucks are passing Dripping in one day. It’s probably pushing it to expect one week.

    By contrast, the Canadian trucker protests (for reasons very immediately concerning the truckers themselves) may have had 2,000 trucks join. Even that many would tie up Dripping for several hours.

    This is evidently the guy behind it, who I’ve never heard of before:

    The Infowars watermark doesn’t give me much confidence.

    This is all before we ask why would truckers even go to the border in the first place. To make a wall that illegal aliens could just duck under between your tires? To be seen on TV? Neither are good reasons to massively inconvenience ordinary Texans who are already suffering the worst under Biden’s failure to secure the border.

    I’m not sure if this is a false flag or some puffed up idea of a local gadfly. The 700,000 is an impossibility, and I would expect the actual turnout to be a tiny handful. (They might expect the same, which is why the Dripping rallying point is an HEB parking lot.)

    If you wanted to do something equally stupid and counterproductive, but at least have the satisfaction of irritating the actual targets of your ire, a rolling roadblock of the Beltway and all the arteries into and out of D.C. for days on in, blowing your horns like they did in Canada, that would at least piss off the people responsible…

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    Posted in Austin, Texas | 13 Comments »

    A Naive Look At The Homeless Industrial Complex

    January 28th, 2024

    If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, then you’ve already familiar with some of how the Homeless Industrial Complex operates. Here’s a somewhat naive look at some of those problems.

    There are some decent nuggets in here, but there are several big parts of the problem this piece ignores.

  • “America has a homelessness crisis as record numbers of people are ending up on the streets in a few concentrated city centers.”
  • “Cities are spending billions of dollars on failing projects to try and solve this problem, which has attracted a growing list of companies happy to provide their services for a price.”
  • “Helping the homeless has become a lucrative business, with multi-million dollar government contracts awarded every day. But if there’s so much money to be made, do these companies really want a long-term fix?”
  • Austin: “49 apartments for the homeless built at a whopping $739,000 a unit.”
  • “The annual budget for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority Rose from $63 million in 2015 to $808 million in 2022, a 1,300% increase in just 7 years. And what did the hardworking taxpayers of Los Angeles get for their money? The number of homeless people went up by 56%.”
  • “Everybody deserves the right to Affordable comfortable shelter.” False. Shelter is a good. Rights are God-given and Constitutionally guaranteed, not material goods.
  • LA: “The Inside Safe Homelessness Reduction Policy [was] to have social workers offer hotel rooms to homeless individuals while they sought out longer term housing arrangements data collected by the City and compiled by local news outlet The Center Square found that the plan had cost $250 million over just one year the program only served 1,463 individuals, which works out to be $17,000 per individual per month, that is over $200,000 every year being spent on one individual.”
  • “The homeless industrial complex is actually a combination of bad management structures, bad incentives, and bad market conditions.”
  • “The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is a joint Powers Authority that gets funding from federal, state, county and city budget budgets, but it doesn’t actually do any of the work itself.”
  • “According to the authority’s own website, the LHSA offers funding programs, design outcomes, assessment and technical assistance to more than 100 nonprofit partner agencies that assist people in experiencing homelessness achieve independence and stability in permanent housing.” Or so they say. How much of the money given to those 100 programs is siphoned directly to the pockets of leftwing activists?
  • “The organization that only runs a few programs of their own has over 750 employees, primarily dedicated to liasing with their nonprofit partners overseen by highly paid executives, including the CEO of public Va Licia Adams Kellum, who is paid a base salary of $430,000 per year.” Nice work, if you can get it. And that $420K doesn’t include any money that might be kicked back to her…
  • “According to SalaryCube and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this is roughly double the pay of the average CEO for organizations of this size in the private sector.”
  • “Most of the money entering this program goes to nonprofit partners, but since each of them are contracted for niche roles across dozens of different programs the real work is bogged down an endless siloing of responsibilities and overhead.” No, harvesting the graft to leftwing activists and causes via the overhead is the intended result.
  • “Even though these are nonprofit organizations, they all want to protect their role so their people can keep their jobs and they frequently get into turf wars over whose responsibility is what. They also don’t have a direct line of communication to one another since all report reporting goes back through the LHSA.”
  • “The Housing Authority isn’t even the central authority within Los Angeles. Within just this one city, different homeless issues are handled by the LHSA, the chief of Housing and Homeless solutions, county homeless services, the California Department of Housing and Community Development, the federal inter-agency Council of homelessness, in addition to federal, state, city, and local police departments.” The more red tape and bureaucracy, the more palms that get greased.
  • “A senior adviser on homelessness to Governor Gavin Newsom defended the state of California spending $17.5 billion that much money would have been enough to just pay rent at market rates for every homeless person in the state with around $4 billion left over.”

    • I think I’m done critiquing this video. Despite having some useful numbers, he’s not looking in the right places. “Addiction” and “mental illness” each receive one mention (besides the counselor accused of identity theft fraud), but no mention of how that’s the primary driver of keeping people on the street, and only one mention of “housing first,” and no analysis of why it’s a disastrous policy. Nor has he looked to see if the principles receiving fund are passing that money on to Democratic candidates and causes.

    Try again.

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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, unions, video, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 4 Comments »

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