Houston Crime: “Galleria Is The New Greenspoint”

April 17th, 2022

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.)

Which brought this up:

More opining:

Sharpston was a now-dead mall that was close to the Galleria (at least in Houston terms, around five miles away).

This sort of broad daylight shooting at the Galleria would have been unthinkable thirty years ago. But it’s all too thinkable with the general rise in Harris County crime under Soros-backed DA Kim Ogg, Harris County judge Lina Hidalgo, and hard left activist judges. (Houston mayor Sylvester Turner is also a Democrat, but he notably rejected calls to defund the police back in 2020 and his policies don’t seem to have been a driver for the crime increase.) But it’s the Democrats in Harris County government whose policies are responsible for putting violent felons back on the streets.

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.

The Future of Texas and California

April 16th, 2022

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…

    LinkSwarm for April 15, 2022

    April 15th, 2022

    Greetings, and welcome to a smallish LinkSwarm! My taxes are done, but I’m playing catchup on just about everything else.

  • The Biden Administration is all-in on grooming and mutilating children.

    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:

  • “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!
  • “Brian A. Benjamin, the lieutenant governor of the state of New York, has been indicted on federal bribery charges.”
  • Is Sri Lanka facing starvation?
  • Democrats on Twitter: “We’re totally going to defeat Ron DeSantis!” Deantis: [Raises $100 million for reelection.]
  • 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.”
  • Get A Rope Part 2: Two puppies stolen at gunpoint in D.C.. Actually, never mind. Hangin’s too good for ’em…
  • Ken Paxton has a 30 point lead over George P. Bush in the Texas Attorney General runoff.
  • News of Our Media Elites: “WNYC’s Jami Floyd accused of plagiarism in 45 articles dating back to 2010.” Also: “Floyd, 57, was the director of New York Public Radio’s Race & Justice Unit.” What are the odds? (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Speaking of media elite follies, CNN+ is sucking the farts out of dead cats.

    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…

  • Is Highland Park, Michigan, the worst city in America?
  • There are numerous local corruption stories involving payoffs, but few that involve a police chief’s Earth, Wind, and Fire cover band. Take a bow, newly convicted felon Tim Vasquez!
  • “Liberals Outraged To Learn 10% Of Twitter Now Owned By African-American.”
  • “Not To Be Outdone, Bill Gates Buys 9.2% Of MySpace.”
  • Friend-of-the-blog Michael Sumbera gets gets a profile of his store, Classical Music of Spring, which I encourage you to patronize.
  • Speaking of music:

    OK, not really…

  • Is China Screwed?

    April 14th, 2022

    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…

    WaPo Mounts Another Expedition To Darkest Redstate Texas

    April 13th, 2022

    Like outfitting a 19th century expedition to darkest Africa, or finding someone willing to live with the Amish, the clueless clerisy of the MSM are at it again, looking to hire some brave, adventurous soul to bring them dispatches from that exotic foreign locale know as “Texas”:

    “A region shaped by conservative ideology.” Truly a penchant for low taxes, limited government, strong borders, free speech, the rule of law, and opposition to strangers diddling and mutilating your children is alien and unfathomable for those who dwell inside the Beltway.

    Commentators had a field day:

    Pity the poor Waposians, whose social circle is so circumscribed that they never interact with actual living, breathing conservatives, and must dispatch intrepid explorers to learn the secrets of that exotic tribe…

    I See Hungary, I See France

    April 12th, 2022

    Let’s clear some tabs on recent European elections of note. First up: Hungary reelects Viktor Orban.

    Viktor Orbán, who has served as prime minister of Hungary since 2010 — and spent a stint in the same office from 1998-2002 — won yet again in Sunday’s much-anticipated elections. His party, Fidesz, won two-thirds of the seats in parliament. Fidesz’s closest competitor was United for Hungary, an amalgamation of parties which included socialists, greens, and Jobbik, which was recognized as an antisemitic, neo-Nazi outfit until recently. Now, it presents itself as a moderate, “modern,” alternative to Fidesz.

    Orbán’s triumph, we are meant to believe, represents a near-fatal blow to Hungarian democracy, and a painful one to the capital L, capital W, capital O, Liberal World Order.

    Snip.

    Now, Orbán is no saint, and yes, that is an understatement. He enjoys close relationships with both Vladimir Putin’s Russia (although he has denounced the invasion of Ukraine) and Xi Jinping’s China. As Jimmy Quinn detailed here, Orbán has helped China carry out its post-pandemic propaganda program, and pursued deeper financial ties between his country and the genocidal one to the east. This is not the behavior of a man keen on being what Rod Dreher calls “the leader of the West now — the West that still remembers what the West is.”

    Moreover, Orbán’s domestic behavior can fairly be called authoritarian. He has championed what he calls “illiberal democracy,” and enacted reforms to the country’s judicial system that undermine its independence. Evidence points to significant financial corruption on his watch as well.

    But the failure of many of Orbán’s critics to accurately report on his regime points to the weakness of many of their arguments. Take this piece from The Atlantic, which, as National Review alum Daniel Foster notes, doesn’t exactly describe Orbán as an autocrat. Its author argues that the formation of a private, pro-Orbán media conglomerate that receives government funding is damning evidence of the corrosion of democracy in the country at the hands of its leader. That’s not exactly convincing to those of us who have watched NPR hold a pillow to the face of the Hunter Biden-laptop story and erroneously smear Supreme Court justices.

    Orbán is not a U.S.-style conservative fusionist or anything especially close to it, and that’s a bad thing, in this writer’s opinion. But he is, quite obviously, the kind of conservative who appeals to Hungarians, and despite his many warts, that might just be okay. People in other countries are allowed to hold different opinions on LGBT issues, European integration, etc. than your average undergrad at Middlebury. Indeed, the implementation of those policies at the public’s will represents democracy in action, not its antithesis.

    Orbán, the prime minister of a nation with a population only slightly larger than New York City’s and something approximating a friend of the Chinese Communist Party, is no more the savior of Western Civilization than Joe Biden is. But he’s also no threat to self-government across the world, and his critics’ flubbing of basic terms they proclaim to love leaves the rest of us wondering if they even know what it is that they value.

    Orban’s victory has generated much consternation among the Euroelite:

    Viktor Orbán and his brand of conservatism faced a crucial popularity test in Sunday’s general elections, a test he passed with flying colors. The Hungarian premier and his Fidesz party thumped the opposition’s unity coalition—composed of liberals, greens, Communists, and the neo-Nazi Jobbik—by a humiliating margin of nearly 20 points; opposition leader Péter Márki-Zay was defeated even in his own district.

    Orbán also struck a painful blow against his critics in Brussels. Ever since he returned to power in Budapest in 2010, and especially in recent years, Orbán has played lightning rod for seemingly the entire EU establishment, even as he has galvanized populist and national-conservative forces on the Continent. Reviled, denounced, sanctioned, and banished from the European Parliament’s center-right bloc, he has gone from internal critic of Brussels to an outright dissident.

    In this, Orbán hasn’t been alone. For the past five years, the European Union has also locked horns with the national-conservative Law and Justice party, or PiS, in neighboring Poland. Both countries allegedly fail to uphold “rule of law,” as defined by Brussels. The European Commission charges Hungary and Poland with threatening media freedom and judicial independence, with not doing enough to tackle (or actively engaging in) systemic corruption, and with violating LGBT and minority rights—charges denied by political leaders in Budapest and Warsaw.

    Some paragraphs on Hungary’s largely neutral stance on the Russo-Ukrainian War snipped.

    Still, once the Russo-Ukrainian dust settles, it is likely that the older dynamic—Budapest and Warsaw together in the anti-EU trenches—will resume. PiS might have won some temporary favor with Western hawks by toeing a hawkish line on Russia, but the underlying tensions haven’t eased. Indeed, the issue that has received the most attention in recent years is the Polish government’s decision to establish, in 2017, a new judicial disciplinary body, composed of jurists appointed by the lower house of Parliament, to hear complaints against judges facing misconduct allegations. European officials claim, not entirely without reason, that this exposes the Polish judges to political control.

    This clash is often framed by both camps in stark culture-war terms. “Pro-European” liberals and EU officials themselves present it as a conflict between the liberal-democratic values of the union and the illiberal and undemocratic practices of the two countries’ nationalist governments. Partisans of Hungary and Poland, meanwhile, frame the contest as one between two traditional and religious nations and an imperialistic Brussels bent on pushing a left-wing, globalist, and anti-Christian agenda.

    Things are a little more complex. For starters, the crimes Hungary and Poland are accused of aren’t unique to those two countries, not by EU standards, at least. The high courts of EU states, where they exist, are all highly politicized, which usually means they hardly ever dare challenge the wisdom of EU legislation.

    As for corruption, it’s notoriously hard to measure. To the extent that some institutions try to gauge it, on the basis of people’s perception of the levels of corruption in their country, Poland’s and Hungary’s governments come out as significantly less corrupt than those of other Eastern nations, such as Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Bulgaria; they also come out better than governments in Spain, Portugal, and Italy.

    Paragraphs on press freedom and “LGBT” issues snipped.

    In light of all of the above, the real question isn’t whether what’s happening in these two countries is indeed worrying, or whether an a-democratic, supranational body like the European Union has any right to lecture the governments of two democratic member states and the people who elected them. The more interesting question is why Brussels has singled out Hungary and Poland for problems common to the bloc as a whole.

    The answer has relatively little to do with the charges brought against the two countries, though of course they play a role. In the eyes of the European gatekeepers, the pair has committed a much more heinous crime: Hungary and Poland have openly challenged the authority and legitimacy of the European Union itself. More specifically, they have dared to reject what is arguably the most important article of faith of EU doctrine: the primacy of EU law over national law.

    Thus, when Brussels claimed that Poland’s judicial disciplinary body, created in 2017, violated EU law and should be revoked “in accordance with the principle of the primacy of EU law,” the Polish government refused to comply, contending that the demand represented an unacceptable infringement on the country’s national sovereignty. In an attempt to resolve the dispute, Polish premier Mateusz Morawiecki asked the Polish Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw this question: If push came to shove, and EU law were ever to clash with the Polish constitution, which should prevail?

    The tribunal delivered its verdict in 2021: It voted 12 to 2 for the national constitution, holding that “the attempt by the [European Court of Justice] to involve itself with Polish legal mechanisms violates … the rules that give priority to the [Polish] constitution and rules that respect sovereignty amid the process of European integration.”

    The Polish tribunal, in other words, insisted that national law enjoys primacy over EU law—a principle without which “the Republic of Poland cannot function as a democratic and sovereign state.” More than that, the tribunal accused the European Union and the ECJ of violating EU treaties themselves by claiming otherwise. Quite the bombshell.

    Suffice to say, EU officials and pro-EU elites didn’t take it well. Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, claimed that the tribunal’s ruling put the very existence of the European Union in jeopardy. “The primacy of European law is essential for the integration of Europe and living together in Europe”, he said. “If this principle is broken, Europe as we know it, as it has been built with the Rome treaties, will cease to exist.”

    To understand why the ruling represents such an existential threat to the EU, one must comprehend the fundamental role of EU law in the bloc’s superstate-building project. Legal scholars have contested the supposed primacy of EU law for half a century. In practice, however, national courts and governments, which tend to have an engrained pro-EU bias, have hardly ever contested the primacy principle. This has allowed the ever-expanding body of EU legislation, the so-called acquis communautaire, to become the main engine for so-called integration by law—the hollowing out from above and within of national constitutional and legal systems.

    EU legal primacy has also bestowed huge powers upon the ECJ: Despite lacking the democratic legitimacy and accountability of national courts, the European court, by constantly creating new “laws” through its rulings, almost always in favor of “more Europe,” has effectively become the bloc’s most important legislative and, indeed, constitution-writing body. Alec Stone Sweet, an international-law expert, has termed this a “juridical coup d’état.”

    By going against this principle—and by asserting the primacy of national sovereignty over EU law—Hungary and Poland have thus dealt a potentially deadly blow to one of the bloc’s main empire-building tools. This is ultimately what the two countries are being punished for. And to do so, the European Union is resorting to the most powerful tool at its disposal: money. Last year, in a move clearly aimed at Hungary and Poland, Brussels adopted for the first time ever a Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation, which allows the European Commission to withhold the payment of EU funds to member states that are found to be in breach of the rule of law—as defined by the EU/ECJ itself, of course.

    The commission has already used the new rule to refuse to approve the Next Generation EU Covid-19 recovery funds for the two countries—€7 billion for Hungary and €36 billion for Poland. And more funds may be withheld in the future. Budapest and Warsaw challenged the new rule at the ECJ, which predictably dismissed the two governments’ complaints.

    Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before The EU.

    How this will pan out remains to be seen. The European Union isn’t new to this kind of blackmail. The European Central Bank has repeatedly choked member states, to bring recalcitrant eurozone governments to heel or even to force regime change (the removal of Silvio Berlusconi in 2011, the shutdown of Greece’s banks in 2015). EU leaders seek a similar coup in Hungary and Poland. Only, Hungary and Poland aren’t in the eurozone; they control their own currencies. The money the pair receives from the European Union is significant, but it isn’t a lifeblood: Between 2010 and 2016, annual net transfers from Brussels—the difference between the total expenditure received and contributions to the EU budget—amounted to 2.7 percent of GDP in Poland and 4 percent in Hungary. This puts the two countries in a very different position than, say, Greece.

    Meanwhile, over in France, incumbent Emmanuel Marcon and right-wing challenger Marine Le Pen head to a runoff. (Naturally, French antifa reacted to Le Pen making the runoff by rioting. If you’re a moron and all you have is a hammer…)

    Remember how self-described “Bonapartist” Eric Zemmour was supposed to be the new hotness? Yeah, he finished a distant fourth. Le Monde describes his failure thus:

    Eric Zemmour gathered 7.07% of the votes cast in the first round of the presidential election on April 10, according to official results. This defeat can probably be explained by several factors, which the far-right candidate saw creeping up on him over the past few weeks, leading him to seek supporters in all segments of the electorate.

    Eric Zemmour failed to unite “the patriotic bourgeoisie,” apart from some who voted for François Fillon in 2017 and the Catholics in the “Manif Pour Tous” organization [a group opposing same-sex marriage] and “the working classes,” who have remained for the most part loyal to Marine Le Pen (23.15% of the vote). His Reconquête ! party was already showing these weaknesses: Eric Zemmour has in fact built a new Rassemblement National (RN) party to the right of the RN, where support from Les Républicains (LR) is rare. The only people to join him from the traditional right-wing party Les Républicains are the obscure senator Sébastien Meurant, an unknown former MP, Nicolas Dhuicq, and Guillaume Peltier, the former number two of LR, who is known for switching parties a lot (he is a former member of the Front National, of Bruno Mégret’s Mouvement National Républicain (MNR), of Philippe de Villiers’ Mouvement pour le France (MPF), and also of the UMP).

    Yeah, for the most part I don’t know who those people and parties are either.

    Eric Zemmour had reason to believe in victory: With barely 7% of intended votes in September 2021, he rose to 17% and 18% in polls in mid-October, before plunging down the rankings. He has obviously succeeded in forcing his campaign issues to the forefront, including on the traditional right, building a movement from scratch that now gathers more than 100,000 supporters who are extremely active on social media and drawing crowds to rallies like no other candidate.

    “Extremely active on social media.” That should be a big ole red flag. Twitter is not the territory.

    But the excitement that he generates among his supporters has not translated into votes. “I believe that the momentum is on my side,” he repeated on April 6 on France Inter public radio. “All the objective elements: the full rooms, the excitement, the television ratings, the number of supporters; all of that is me.” His sycophants around him have greatly elevated the hubris of a man who had no shortage of it, and who didn’t mind becoming a kind of a guru whose mere presence electrified the crowds.

    Snip.

    In the end, it is the war in Ukraine that led the candidate to plummet in the polls. Due in part to his admiration for Vladimir Putin (“I dream of a French Putin,” he had said in 2018), his inability to call him a “war criminal,” and finally his reluctance to welcome Ukrainian refugees – unlike Marine Le Pen.

    Yeah, I’m not sure how much that had to do with it, since Le Pen is hardly tough on Putin herself.

    Is Le Pen a nasty piece of work? Well, she’s certainly not my cup of tea, and I doubt she has a translated copy of The Federalist Papers on her bookshelf. (Though thankfully, she seems to have abandoned her father’s antisemitism.) Macron is arguably more “free market,” though that phrase has very little meaning in the matrix of current French politics. Yellow Vest voters seem to favor Le Pen, and she wants to lower VAT taxes. She opposes Flu Manchu passports. She’s still a Euroskeptic, wants to reform the European Commission, wants a referendum on immigration restriction, and opposes jihad. She wants to abolish the International Monetary Fund. She’s a Russo-phile who wants to remove France from NATO. Like Orban, she would be a big thorn in the side of the EU. Unlike Ortban, she would also be a big thorn in the side of the US as well.

    Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

    Those in the chattering classes proclaiming Orban a grave threat to democracy are wrong. Those proclaiming Le Pen a threat to democracy (and American interests) are slightly less wrong, but Le Pen is less a long-term threat to democracy than the EU’s own transnational globalist elite. NATO survived over 40 years of France’s withdrawal from NATO’s command structure under de Gualle, and (to the extent the alliance is relevant to the 21st century) could survive France’s withdrawal once again.

    As National Review once said of Jean Le Pen, “we have no frog in this fight.”

    Breaking: Lina Hidalgo Aides Indicted On Corruption Charges

    April 11th, 2022

    Several previous LinkSwarms have reported on the burgeoning Harris County corruption scandals (many reported by Holly Hansen) involving corrupt no-bid contracts and FBI raids. Now the scandal has finally resulted in indictments.

    Three employees of Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo have been indicted by a grand jury on charges related to how they helped award a contract for COVID-19 vaccine outreach last year.

    The Harris County district clerk lists two felony counts each for chief of staff Alex Triantaphyllis, policy director Wallis Nader and policy aide Aaron Dunn. The charges are misuse of official information and tampering with a government record.

    The charges add weight to a scandal Hidalgo has attempted to dismiss as politically motivated, and they threaten to tarnish her image as an ethically minded public servant as she seeks reelection this year. Hidalgo is widely seen as a rising star in the Texas Democratic Party and a future statewide candidate.

    The three employees were part of a selection committee to choose a vendor for a COVID-19 vaccine outreach campaign Hidalgo wanted. The committee, which also included members of the county health department, unanimously awarded an $11 million contract to Elevate Strategies, a small political consulting firm owned by Felicity Pereyra, who has previously worked on Democratic campaigns.

    Republicans have seized on this as evidence of corruption, alleging without evidence [Ahem – LP] that Hidalgo was funneling money to help the Democratic Party build relationships with voters. Hidalgo accused Republican county commissioners of spreading conspiracy theories, though she agreed to cancel the contract in September because she said it had become too politicized.

    Court records filed by the Texas Rangers, who are assisting prosecutors, suggest the inquiry focuses on whether Hidalgo’s office inappropriately involved Pereyra in designing the bid proposal she would later win.

    My working assumption is that any time you see smoke like this, the fire is almost invariably channeling taxpayer money to the pockets hard-left Democratic Party cronies.

    When Holly has a piece up on the story I’ll link it here.

    Edited to Add: Holly’s piece is now up, and provides important context left out of other stories.

    The affidavits also allege that in April 2021, after the University of Texas (UT) Health Science Center earned a higher score at a lower cost than Elevate Strategies, Triantaphyllis texted Nader that they needed to “slam the door shut on UT.” The selection committee later instructed purchasing agent Dwight Dosplauf to disqualify UT for underperforming on another project.

    In August of 2021, The Texan first reported that Harris County had awarded an $11 million vaccine outreach contract to Pereyra’s Elevate Strategies. Prior to founding the company in 2019, Pereyra had previously served as the deputy campaign manager for county Commissioner Adrian Garcia (D-Pct. 2). Pereyra had also been with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and worked with the Democratic National Committee.

    During the August 26, 2021 meeting of the commissioners court, Hidalgo accused Commissioner Jack Cagle (R-Pct. 4) of telling a “bold-faced lie” after he posed questions about the “one-woman firm” handling the contract.

    Following Monday’s indictments, Cagle said on social media that he “took no pleasure in being right about this.”

    “This is a major black eye for Harris County. Now it’s time for the courts to sort it out.”

    Last September, emails obtained by The Texan showed that Dunn, Nader, and Triantaphyllis had instructed Dopslauf to revise vendor experience requirements for the vaccine outreach project. Documents obtained by FOX 26 Houston also showed that UT had earned a score of 240 and bid $7.5 million compared to Elevate Strategies’ score of 204 with a cost estimate of $19 million. Some time before the project award, Elevate Strategies lowered the cost to $10.9 million.

    Even before the scoring of proposals, however, on January 14, 2021, Hidalgo had texted about the scope of a project mentioning “Felicity,” and Triantaphyllis later clarified to Nader, saying, “She was trying to add to Felicity’s scope relating to engaging community groups and stuff.”

    Q: Can You Double-Pattern Rather Than Use EUV? A: You Don’t Want To

    April 10th, 2022

    This is going to be pretty esoteric for many of my readers, but in previous semiconductor posts covering ASML, some commenters have suggested that fabs can do multi-patterning for smaller nodes rather than having to use ASML’s extreme ultraviolet stepper. The following video explains why, below a certain threshold, no, you really can’t.

    I’m not going to summarize every point, but the largest takeaway is that multi-patterning is computationally prohibitive. Double-patterning splits a single mask into two masks, each of which only create half of the mask pattern on the die. Double-patterning was fine for a while, but triple patterning and self-aligned double-patterning start making finding optimal solutions to the mask splitting problem exponentially more difficult.

    Take a square. A square has four nodes in it. With double patterning, each of the two masks handle opposing sides of the square. And with this four-node shape, there are two double patterning options available for coloring. The EDA software thus has to check through them for design rule violations and whatnot. With triple patterning, the number of variations explodes exponentially. For that same square four node structure, triple patterning has 18 variations rather than just two with double patterning. A five node structure, 30. And so on. A semiconductor design can have hundreds of different nodes and design variations. The software needs to check through at least a good portion of these. This problem is not solvable in polynomial time. In other words, for you computer science nerds out there, it is an NP complete problem.

    And then there’s the cost. “Depending on whose cost model you consult, [10nm]’s triple patterning makes its lithography module 3.85x higher than [28nm].” And the non-EUV 7nm node required triple-patterning and something called “self-aligned quadruple patterning.” And on Intel: “Brian Krzanich has said that in certain cases the company needs to use quad (4x), penta (5x), or hexa (6x) patterning for select features, as they need to expose the wafer up to six times to “draw” one feature. I am not super surprised that it wouldn’t yield. No wonder GlobalFoundries ditched their 7nm node.”

    And this summary glosses over big differences between different fab technologies on different companies. TSMC’s 7nm isn’t the same as Intel’s 7nm.

    Anyway, all this goes a long way to explain: Multi-patterning is much more painful than simply ponying up the cost for an ASML EUV stepper. And if you want to do 6nm, you have to use EUV.

    On Conservative Inc.’s Culture War Disdain

    April 9th, 2022

    You would think that by now, even the more dandified blue bloods of Conservative Inc. would have learned something from the Trump uprising about the power of populist and culture war issues. But increasingly it seems like even some of those that didn’t develop full-blown Trump Derangement Syndrome objected not only to Trump’s style, but his actual substance. They seem more afraid of alienating liberal MSM and Hollywood friends over culture war issues than paying attention to outrage among actual voters.

    That’s why this Twitter thread is fire.

    I’m not sure that’s the case. I think a number of them are worried that they’ll be blocked from obtaining cushy corporate-funded sinecures at colleges and think-tanks if they ruffle too many feathers. They want their bread to stay well-buttered, and are willing to keep quiet in order to stay on as some sort of pet opposition as long as the left is willing to throw them occasional “strange new respect” bones and rub their furry bellies.

    The Social Justice Warrior-infected Democratic Party has moved so far, so fast, to such radical extremes, that it’s even woken up the normies. When a school board revolt breaks out in San Francisco, you would think that even the dullest blades in the Conservative Inc. silverware closet would sense the once-in-a-generation realignment opportunities, but no. They seem to be off daydreaming of their next Ahoy cruise or a Jeb! restoration rather than detecting the smell of blood.

    The “moderate” Biden Administration is declaring that it may mutilate your children in the name of transgenderism without telling you. And that’s not a hill to die on? Is there any hill they’ll die on that doesn’t involve marginal tax rates?

    These is a giant red wave building to sweep left-wing crazies from power almost everywhere that cuts across all previous demographic, geographic and class lines. Conservative Inc. can ride that wave, or be drowned by it.

    Russia Reorients

    April 8th, 2022

    Just because Russia is obviously retreating from Kiev due to getting mauled doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth in the argument that their biggest aims lie in eastern Ukraine. This video suggest three main remaining goals for Russian forces:

  • Restore and control the flow of water to Crimea (Ukraine dammed up the Dinappa river following the seizure of Crimea, which has put them in a world of hurt).
  • Gain control of “the Yokosuka Gas Field, which was discovered in 2010 and it has about 42 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, that could threaten Russia’s oil dominance in the region.”
  • Controlling all Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.
  • More details on each in the video.

    If they can achieve those goals, if Russia can achieve capturing those three goals they will have landlocked and absolutely wrecked Ukraine’s entire economy. So when they say that the main war is in the east, they’re actually, on some level, telling the truth. The problem for Russia, though, is that without having captured Kiev their chances of holding on to those objectives is greatly reduced.

    (Between getting my house cleaned, relatives visiting (Yes, those two are related), and tax season, no time to put up a LinkSwarm today. Tomorrow is not looking good either…)