4 Bore Rifle vs. Body Armor

July 8th, 2023

4 Bore is an obsolete black-powder rifle with a (roughly) 1 inch barrel used for hunting big game in Africa. Scott at Kentucky Ballistics got a modern version of that and decided to test it against body armor. Consider this as the latest in the “BattleSwarm features videos of absurdly large rifle calibers for your viewing pleasure.”

Though it has a 2,150 grain bullet producing over 200 pounds of felt recoil, the round is too flat and slow to actually penetrate the body armor, but it packs so much force that it just drags most of the body armor into the chest cavity. The zombie torsos do not fare well.

Thanks to Dave Hardy for bringing the video to my attention.

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Posted in Guns, video | 4 Comments »

Low-Calorie LinkSwarm Substitute

July 7th, 2023

This week’s been a bear…

…and I’ve just run out of time to do a decent LinkSwarm. Instead, in honor of police finding Hunter Biden’s cocaine unexplained cocaine of unknown origin at the White House, here’s a video of Norm MacDonald doing cocaine jokes, followed by a mini-LinkSwarm.

  • Russian ammo dump blows up real good.
  • Peter Zeihan: Scottish independence is a suicide pact.
  • RedHat is trying to paywall open source code. Penny wise and pound foolish.
  • “DC Police Say They May Never Discover Who Left Bag Of Cocaine Labeled ‘Property Of H. Biden’ At White House.”
  • Protip for professional sports teams: Don’t hold Dog Night and Fireworks Night on the same night.

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, video | 3 Comments »

    The Battle of Juba: When China Got Its Ass Kicked

    July 6th, 2023

    Peacekeeping missions in Africa have a way of humbling proud nations, like America in Mogadishu or Ireland in Jadotville. But while American and irish troops actually acquitted themselves well in their respective engagements, the same can’t be said for Chinese troops in the Battle of Juba, in South Sudan, in July of 2016.

    The short summary is that two sides in the civil war had set up bases on either side of a UN refugee camp, and when fighting broke out, woefully unprepared Chinese peacekeeping troops got their asses kicked.

    Takeaways:

  • “Both sides fielded artillery and tank units. Chinese peacekeepers, of course, had neither.”
  • “Heavily outnumbered and outgunned, the Chinese soldiers couldn’t have asked for worse battlefield conditions.”
  • “The United Nations Camp perimeter was lightly protected by Hesco barriers, which are filled with sand instead of concrete walls.”
  • “The guard towers were wooden shacks instead of concrete pillboxes. They had no bullet resistant glass or reinforced sandbags, no concrete mortar protection zones that you would typically want on a base like this. The entrance gate was a flimsy metal fence instead of a heavy metal block gate. The main defense was barbed wire fences.”
  • “This place was not set up to prevent a heavy assault.”
  • Then the two forces started attack each other.
  • “The government army forces and the rebel forces rampaged through the city. They did not observe any rules of engagement, attacking hospitals and non-combatants.”
  • Some 1,400 rebel troops “looted shops, hospitals and aid stations.”
  • “Both sides were shooting at each other through the refugee camp.”
  • “Wooden UN guard towers came under heavy machine gun fire. This forced the Chinese peacekeepers to leave and take cover.”
  • “Hundreds of bullets rockets and artillery [shells] peppered the perimeter. The Chinese U.N forces retreated deeper into the compound and clustered around the few armored personnel carriers they had. This is when an enemy rocket-propelled grenade struck their APC. It killed two Chinese soldiers and wounded six others.”
  • “Enemy militiamen then looted one of the aid warehouses. They stole $30 million worth of United Nations goods. This was enough food to feed over 200,000 people for a month in the famine stricken nation.”
  • “Chinese-led UN peacekeepers were pinned down inside the compound, and unable to effectively return fire with the weapons and vehicles they had at their disposal. They were unable to prevent militia forces on the streets from going house to house hunting people down and committing
    unspeakable acts just outside the camp.”

  • Some individual Chinese forces did better, rallying and retrieving the weapons they had abandoned, and preventing forces from storming the center of the compound.
  • 272 confirmed casualties day one, 20 of which were under Chinese protection.
  • Reports said “UN leadership had directly ordered Chinese and Ethiopian battalions to leave the base and act as a quick response force They were supposed to go out, leave the gate, and set up a perimeter, but they refused to go.”
  • “Major General Patrick Cameron, in charge of the United Nations investigation, wrote a damning report on the Chinese soldiers…he cites an overall lack of leadership preparedness and international integration.”
  • “In the past four decades, Chinese soldiers have had basically zero combat experience, so it’s interesting to see that one of the major findings from the report is that they’re very risk-adverse. They don’t have the experience of what it takes to put your life on the line.”
  • Chinese retort that UN weapons and equipment suck. That’s probably true as well.
  • Chinese soldiers didn’t even know the rules of engagement.
  • “Orders were flat out ignored by Chinese soldiers because they came from a different source than they were used to. They weren’t flexible.”
  • “There was also evidence of a lack of basic medical training and Hazevac procedures” among the Chinese soldiers.
  • The two deaths made Chinese soldiers even more risk adverse.

    • Supposedly China implemented reforms after the dismal showing, but throughout history, China’s military has looked remarkably ineffective in fighting against theoretically smaller foes.

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    Posted in Military, video | 13 Comments »

    Bodycam Footage of Cop Taking Down Active Shooter

    July 5th, 2023

    I may be late to this party, since the story broke several days ago, but I think this video is worth covering to highlight all the things the Allen PD officer (whose name, as far as I can tell, hasn’t been released yet) did right.

  • He instructed others to get to safety before moving to engage the shooter.
  • He paused to get a better weapon out of his car and take a moment to assess the situation.
  • He maintained constant communication with the dispatcher to let other officers know where he was all the time to reduce the possibility of friendly fire.
  • He constantly moved toward the sound of gunfire to engage the target.
  • He maintained solid trigger discipline throughout running to contact.
  • He engaged the shooter from behind cover, and continued controlled fire until putting him down.

    • As far as things to be improved on, he did slow noticeably while moving toward contact, so maybe better cardio is in order. But I’m hardly one to cast aspersions here…

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    Posted in Crime, Texas, video | 10 Comments »

    Happy Independence Day!

    July 4th, 2023

    Don’t think anyone is in the mood for any intellectual heavy lifting today, so here’s a fireworks livestream:

    Don’t ask me how they’re doing live nighttime fireworks during the middle of the day.

    This is a more eclectic livestream, with parades and such:

    And here’s that famous San Diego fireworks shot where they accidentally set off everything at once.

    Happy Independence day, everyone!

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    Posted in unions, video | No Comments »

    Why Does Will Hurd Think He’s Running For President?

    July 3rd, 2023

    In one of those periodic, inexplicable outbreaks of a U.S. Representative deciding that he needs to run for President, former Texas Congressman Will Hurd has announced he’s running for President.

    Former Texas Rep. Will Hurd announced Thursday that he’s throwing his hat in the ring for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

    Hurd, who was first elected to his congressional seat in 2014 and did not run for reelection in 2020, now enters the crowded presidential field of 13 other candidates as a major underdog.

    The former congressman has been an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump and said last month that a race between President Joe Biden and Trump would be a “rematch from hell.”

    “Someone like me, right, a dark horse candidate, can pull this off,” Hurd, 45, told “CBS Mornings” Thursday. “One, you can’t be afraid of Donald Trump. Too many of these candidates in this race are afraid of Donald Trump. But we also have to articulate a different vision.”

    In a video announcing his candidacy, Hurd listed illegal immigration and inflation as chief among his motivations to run.

    “Our enemies plot, create chaos, and threaten the American dream. At home, illegal immigration and fentanyl stream into our country. Inflation, still out of control. Crime and homelessness growing in our cities,” Hurd says in the video.

    The big question, of course, is “why?”

    2020 saw no shortage of former or current House members running for President. Names like “Joe Sestak,” “John Delaney,” “Seth Moulton,” and “Tim Ryan,” were introduced to the voting public and promptly forgotten, garnering neither fame nor delegates. Eric Swalwell made no impression on the race, and promptly returned to being known for irritating people and screwing Chinese spies. Former three-term Texas congressman Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke was already famous for raising a lot of money by not being Ted Cruz, losing to Ted Cruz, and then raising a lot of money to run for President, only to drop out before the first votes were cast. Objectively the most successful was Tulsi Gabbard, who earned two whole delegates by being photogenic, moderately heterodox, and the candidate not named “Biden” or “Sanders” to stay in the race longest. The “heterodox” part would cause her to leave the party that openly loathed her.

    The three-term Texas congressman bit would make O’Rourke the obvious point of comparison for Hurd’s run, but there are two problems. The first is that Hurd objectively pulled off a more difficult feat than O’Rourke in winning three very tight races in TX-23, the only true 2012-2020 swing-district in Texas. By contrast, O’Rourke was running in a safe Democratic district backed up by scads of in-law money. The second is that Hurd doesn’t have the huge, high-profile, big money race to draw on a network of contributors like O’Rourke had. I also suspect that he’ll get an order of magnitude less fawning glossy magazine profiles than O’Rourke got, assuming he gets any. (He may get a few, as he’s just the sort of soft, no-hope Republican the national media loves to pump up.)

    Hurd was a squishy three-term congressmen from a squishy swing district, and in terms of accomplishments, that’s not chicken feed. It’s an open question whether a more conservative Republican could have captured and held the seat at the time (though Hurd was a border control squish, and Texas Hispanics have very much taken a hard right turn on the issue since, so, maybe). But that a national political figure does not one make.

    So that brings us back to the central question: Why is Will Hurd deluding himself into running for President? He seems to be running as the Trump Derangement Syndrome candidate (the Liz Cheney Lane, if you will), and that’s good for, oh, maybe 2% of the Republican base (and 50% of “conservative” D.C. pundits). That’s the land of has-beens and never-beens like John Kasich and Evan McMullin. Looking at the current 2024 field, there’s no-shortage of “Not Trump” candidates. I see Hurd possibly doing better than Vivek Ramaswamy (running in the Andrew Yang Outsider With Ideas Slot), and running about even with Miami mayor Francis Saurez for the “Who?” slot. And at this point, being an unknown, he’s less loathed than Chris Christie. He’s not even doing as well as Doug Burgum, and no one’s heard of him.

    Worse still for his essentially non-existent chances, he probably won’t be in the initial debates, as he refuses to sign a pledge to support the nominee. (There’s that TDS again.)

    As I’ve written before, there is practically zero appetite for squishy moderates in the Republican primary, and less than that for someone running on the “I Hate Trump” platform. Hurd’s chances essentially amount to “Maybe if everyone else gets hit by a bus.”

    My suspicion is that Hurd has been recruited to run by the same sort of left-leaning special interests that fund things like The Bulwark and The Lincoln Project to generate soundbites for an MSM that will inflate his campaign’s profile solely to go “Look! Republicans hate Trump too!”

    Then there’s this little tidbit: “Before his career in politics, Hurd was an undercover CIA officer working in counterterrorism.”

    There was a time that would have been considered a plus in Republican politics. That was before the Russiagate hoax and Hunter Biden’s laptop (among many others) showed how the deep was willing to meddle in domestic politics. Now it’s a giant red flag.

    Expect Will Hurd’s run to be every bit as successful as Tim Ryan or Seth Moulton’s attempts.

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    Posted in Border Control, Elections, Republicans, Texas | 4 Comments »

    Ukrainian Soldiers Love Bradleys

    July 2nd, 2023

    Although a lot of attention has been lavished on Ukrainian Forces getting Leopard 2, Challenger 2 and Abrams main battle tanks, we’ve also sent them 109 Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Many of those have been involved in the Zaporizhzhia counter-offensive, and early reports had several being destroyed in early fighting (though crews reportedly escaped). How do Ukrainian crews like the Bradley compared to the Soviet BMP series IFVs they were using before?

    They love them.

    As Ukrainian forces continue their counteroffensive against Russia, some soldiers say an American-supplied vehicle is making a key difference in their advances, and more importantly, saving lives.

    The U.S. has provided has provided Ukrainian forces with Bradley Fighting Vehicles as part of aid packages since the beginning of the year and they have been heavily used in the counteroffensive Ukraine that launched in early June.

    Two Ukrainian soldiers from the 47th brigade, Serhiy and Andriy, told ABC News that they and their crew wouldn’t be alive today if Bradley didn’t protect them from a battle early on in the counteroffensive where they were struck by mines, high caliber guns and attack drones.

    “We were hit multiple times,” Andriy, who drove one Bradley, said. “Thanks to it, I am standing here now. If we were using some Soviet armored personnel carrier we would all probably be dead after the first hit. It’s a perfect vehicle.”

    The Bradleys are armed with a 25mm automatic cannon, a 7.62mm machine gun, and a TOW missile system that can hit armored targets more than two miles away.

    While a Bradley is way undergunned compared to a modern MBT, remember that Bradleys killed T-72s with TOW missiles in the Battle of 73 Easting, even though that’s not the tasked it’s designed for. And while the Bradley’s 25mm autocannon can’t defeat Soviet/Russian tank armor thicknesses with any but lucky shots, consensus is that the tungsten or depleted uranium rounds can penetrate any Russian vehicle below a MBT.

    Andriy and Serhiy’s brigade was part of one of the first major assaults using significant amounts of Western-supplied armored, launched against heavily fortified Russian lines in the Zaporizhzhia region in southern Ukraine at the start of June.

    As they advanced towards the Russian positions, protected by dense minefields, the Ukrainian troops came almost immediately under heavy fire. The vehicle behind Andriy was struck by an attack drone, killing his unit’s commander.

    Andriy’s Bradley was then hit first by a 120mm mortar. Two 150mm shells then struck both sides of the vehicle, he told ABC.

    “Almost all of my guys were concussed, and they were really disoriented,” he said. But the squad inside bailed out and managed to safely escape back to cover.

    Crew survivability seems to be one of the biggest advantages Bradleys have over their Russian BMP counterparts, as covered in this video:

  • “Bradley’s armor has multiple times saved lives of Ukrainian infantry. If we had used BMP during current military operation, our brigade would not be here.”
  • “Foreign military equipment has very strong armor and it really helps us. Thank God, when our vehicles get hit, personnel doesn’t get destroyed.”
  • “Bradley’s armor has multiple times saved lives of Ukrainian infantry during our operations. I personally once hit an anti-tank mine and it was a direct hit of a cumulative projectile to the tower. So it hit the sighting devices and shuttered triplexes and only driver suffered concussion all the rest of the crew and landing were OK.” “Landing” means “landing party,” i.e. the infantry troops carried to deploy and fight away from the vehicle.
  • “Many times Bradley vehicles hit anti-tank mines and only track and roller were damaged. Nevertheless, crew and landing were OK and carried out with their task.”
  • “If I was to compare Bradley to Soviet examples of vehicles, such as BMP or BTR, they have much lower level of protection. If we had used BMP during current military operation, our brigade would not be here. Considering the level of mine threat, every time BMP would hit the mine, it would result in minus personnel. People would be left disabled or dead. In our case, it means that the vehicle cannot operate for a few days.”
  • “It got hit, we get it, send it for repair, and in 3-4 days it is ready to carry out further tasks. When the vehicle gets hit, personnel doesn’t stop and continues to carry out the task.”

    • U.S./NATO doctrine has always placed a much higher value on crew survivability than Soviet/Russian doctrine. Ukrainians crewing Bradleys are keenly grateful for that difference.

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    Posted in Military, video | 12 Comments »

    Supreme Court Strikes Down Biden Unilaterally Forgiving Loans

    July 1st, 2023

    In all the other Supreme Court news dropping, I didn’t have time to include the fact that the Supremes struck down Biden’s student loan forgiveness executive order.

    The Supreme Court on Friday struck down President Biden’s student-loan-forgiveness program, finding that the statute the administration relied on in issuing the executive order does not give the secretary of education sweeping authority to forgive billions in student loans for tens of millions of Americans.

    In the first of two cases the Court ruled unanimously that the individual plaintiffs lacked the standing to sue because they failed to establish harm. But in the second case, the Court ruled 6-3 that the state of Missouri had standing to sue and convincingly argued that President Biden lacked the authority to forgive student loans for entire categories of borrowers under the HEROES Act.

    The Court’s precedent “requires that Congress speak clearly before a department secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.

    “The Secretary asserts that the HEROES Act grants him the authority to cancel $430 billion of student loan principal. It does not,” Roberts goes on to write. “We hold today that the Act allows the Secretary to ‘waive or modify’ existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs under the Education Act, not to rewrite that statute from the ground up.”

    Roberts went on to cite a statement made by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), who in 2021 insisted that President Biden could not exercise executive authority in the name of “debt forgiveness,” to bolster the majority opinion.

    “People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress,” the California Democrat said during a press conference in July 2021.

    Snip.

    In August of last year, the Biden administration announced an executive order that would cancel up to $20,000 in federal student-loan debt for those making less than $125,000 in income per year. The administration invoked the HEROES Act to justify the plan. It was the same statute that was invoked by former president Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsey DeVos, to pause student-loan payments as well as the accrual of interest early in the pandemic.

    Notice: Pause. Not forgive. There’s a vast difference.

    It was always a crazy idea that the President of the United States could unilaterally forgive someone’s debt. This goes against the entirety of the English/American legal tradition, where debts are considered enforceable unless discharged by an action of the courts (such as in bankruptcy).

    Joe Biden is not a king, nor does the cabal backing and ruling through him have the power to unilaterally forgive debts. We should all be glad the Supreme Court squashed this insane idea.

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    Posted in Democrats, Supreme Court | 6 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for June 30, 2023

    June 30th, 2023

    Another half year gone. In one way, it seems impossible that it’s flown by so quickly. In another, I certainly feel tired enough for that, and then some…

    There’s a zillion Biden corruption links I could have added to this week’s LinkSwarm, so feel free to share your favorites in the comments.

    

  • “Prosecutor Reportedly Told Six Witnesses He Was Not Permitted To Charge Hunter Biden.”

    U.S. Attorney David Weiss wanted to bring charges against President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden in Washington, D.C., IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley said on Friday — and when he was reportedly barred from doing so, he told six witnesses.

    Shapley testified on the matter last month, telling the House Oversight Committee that Weiss revealed in an October 2022, meeting that he had actually wanted to charge Hunter Biden in two federal districts but that he had been denied — and when Attorney General Merrick Garland denied that had ever happened, Shapley publicly named the witnesses he said Weiss had told.

    “He surprised us by telling us on the charges, ‘I’m not the deciding official on whether charges are filed,’” Shapley told the committee when he testified in late May. “He then shocked us with the earth-shattering news that the Biden-appointed D.C. U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves would not allow him to charge in his district.

    Shapley explained that by not allowing Weiss to file charges in D.C., Graves had effectively barred Weiss from seeking charges on crimes allegedly committed during 2014 and 2015 — including “foreign income from Burisma [Holdings] and a scheme to evade his income taxes through a partnership with a convicted felon … The purposeful exclusion of the 2014 and 2015 years sanitized the most substantive criminal conduct and concealed material facts.”

    It was at that same meeting in October 2022 that Weiss said his request for special counsel authority had been denied, Shapley said. He was instead told to go through the regular process — which would have once again pitted him against a Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “‘Bidens are the Best’: Hunter Demanded $10M From Chinese Energy Company, Bragged About Connections.”

    The House Oversight Committee released a Hunter Biden WhatsApp message to Communist Party-linked Chinese energy firm CEFC associate Gongwen Dong.

    Hunter demanded $10 million because $5 million “is not acceptable obviously.”

    Hunter then said his shell company Owasco “in consultation with Hudson” will determine his expenses along with the “BIDEN (loan 5M) capital.”

    It also “baffled” Hunter if the “Chairman” didn’t think the relationship with the Bidens was worth at least $5 million.

    Hunter reassured Gongwen that “The Bidens are the best I know at doing exactly what the Chairman wants from this partnership.”

    Then Hunter told him not to “quibble over peanuts.”

    Man, imagine having to complain about ONLY $5 million dollars.

  • Joe Biden actually picks up when journalist calls burner phone in Hunter Biden laptop docs.
  • Supreme Court strikes down Affirmative Action.

    The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the race-conscious admissions policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

    “The Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the six-justice majority.

    However, universities may still consider an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. Roberts clarified that this does not mean universities can simply establish through application essays or other means the regime declared unlawful by the Court. It means, explained Roberts, “the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.”

    Of course our elite liberal institutions are furious, since they desperately want to discriminate the basis of race.

  • Another Russian war crime: “Russia executed 77 civilians detained by its forces.”
  • “First transgender state rep in NH charged with child pornography.” Try to contain your shock. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “The IC Inspector General: China Hacked All of Hillary’s State Dept. Classified Emails. FBI: So What, She’s a Democrat.”
  • Despite lifting of Flu Manchu restrictions, U.S./China flights are only running at 6% of their previous volume.
  • It’s riot season in France again.
  • “Democratic Donor Arrested and Charged With Setting Destructive Wildfire That Democrats Blamed on Climate Change.”
  • Statewide malaria alert in Florida. Cue the MSM stating this is all DeSantis’ fault.
  • Paragraph 2: National Geographic magazine (now owned by Disney) laid off its last remaining staff writers. Paragraph 14: “Among those who lost their jobs in the latest layoff was Debra Adams Simmons, who only last September was promoted to vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion at National Geographic Media.” Usually it takes longer for DEI to destroy a company… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of Disney disasters, Indiana Jones and the Dial Up Internet of Depravity: “What a fucking incomprehensible calamity of a film this is. I mean, I’d be lying if I said I went into it expecting great things, but Jesus Fucking Mother of Christ, this was worse than anything I could have imagined.”
  • eBay has glitch that adds sold items as available.
  • “7 Simple Ways To Get Away With A Massive Foreign Bribery Scheme.” “Get one of your immediate family members elected to a powerful office: Like your father, for one completely random example.”
  • “Hollywood Concerned As They’re Running Out Of Beloved Movie Heroes To Turn Into Sad, Pathetic Old Failures.”
  • “Karine Jean-Pierre Throws Smoke Bomb And Disappears When Asked About Hunter Biden Texts.”
  • Baily loves tiny bunny.

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    Posted in Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Waste and Fraud | 5 Comments »

    China’s Demographics: Even Worse Than You Think

    June 29th, 2023

    I’ve covered Peter Zeihan videos on China’s crashing demographics before. We already knew China was “the fastest aging society in human history, with the largest sex imbalance in human history.” Now he’s dug into new some new data.

    It’s much worse than he thought.

  • “We’ve gotten some new data out of the Chinese that has made it way to the U.N, and so the updates have allowed us to update our assessment, and oh my God, it’s bad.”
  • “Here is the new data, and as you can see, the number of children who are under age 5 has just collapsed, and they’re now roughly twice as many that are age 15 as age 5.”
  • “What happened back in 2017, well before Covid, is that we had a sudden collapse in the birth rate, roughly 40% over the next five years among the Chinese, the ethnic Han population, and more than 50 percent among a lot of the minorities. And that is before Covid, which saw anecdotally the birth rate drops considerably more.”
  • “We’re never going to get good data on death rate, or at least not anytime soon, because the Chinese, when they did the reopening, just stopped collecting the data on deaths and Covid and everything because they didn’t want the world to know how many Chinese died, so they don’t know.”
  • And if you look at the data from the Shanghai Academy of Science, it’s even worse than the official state numbers.
  • “China aged past the point of demographic no return over 20 years, ago and it wasn’t just this year that India became the world’s most populous country, that probably happened roughly a decade ago. And it wasn’t in 2018 that the average Chinese aged past the average American, that was probably roughly in 2007 or 2008.”
  • “This is not a country that is in demographic decay, this is a country that is in the advanced stages of demographic collapse. And this is going to be the final decade that China can exist as a modern industrialized nation state, because it simply isn’t going to have the people to even try.”
  • “Labor costs you’re having now or as low as they’re ever going to be. Consumption is as high as it’s ever going to be.”
  • “So even before you consider the political complications or issues with operating environment or energy access or geopolitical risk or regulational risk, the numbers just aren’t there anymore so you have to ask yourself why you’re still there.”

    • Add to that the fact that China economy is probably overstated by 60%, and it looks like China’s brief days in the sun are already over.

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    Posted in Communism, Economics, Foreign Policy, video | 25 Comments »

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