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Kowloon City as Rhizome

Thursday, September 28th, 2023

The now-torn down Kowloon Walled City was a megastructure/hyperslum/gangster paradise situated just outside Hong Kong proper.

Kowloon City was an acknowledged influence on William Gibson’s urban dystopian cyberpunk: A hyper-dense, interconnected, lawless locale whose buildings and infrastructure grew organically without rhyme, reason, planning or building codes. It was one inspiration for the phrase “Temporary Autonomous Zone” briefly popular among anarchists and Libertarians in the 1980s and 90s.

In this video, YouTuber Dami Lee argues that Kowloon City is best understood as a rhizome, a kind of horizontal-growing root that intertwines with everything.

  • “When we first started looking into the Kowloon Walled City, also known as the densest city in the world, we thought for a place that’s essentially a slum full of crime and drugs, with subhuman living conditions, there sure is a lot of romanticization about this place.”
  • “The city looks like it came straight out of a dystopian sci-fi novel.”
  • “It’s a giant megastructure part architecture, part living organism, and it’s actually something architects have been dreaming about for years. One continuous structure where you could access all the necessities of daily life but evolves and grows with time.”
  • New York City has a population density of 11,000 per square kilometer. Kowloon City had a population density of 1,255,000 per square kilometer.
  • “Kowloon Walled City was a city within Hong Kong that was technically a part of China.” It started as a fort, but after being abandoned Chinese refugees flooded there after World War II.
  • “It was known as the only Chinese enclave that the Hong Kong government couldn’t touch. But after that, it included anyone and everyone from gangs, criminals to doctors to entrepreneurs, people trying to escape poverty or people trying to capitalize on this unregulated haven.”
  • “Crime naturally flourished there with gangs, drugs, brothels. If you had an industrial business, you could ignore the fire codes, the labor codes or safety codes So you could produce goods at a fraction of the cost. You could also sell things that were banned anywhere else, like dog meat.”
  • “With unbeatable prices, industry kind of thrived here and lots of things made in Kowloon Walled City made their way back to China, Hong Kong, and sometimes even overseas. They were known especially for their fish balls and dumplings.”
  • “in Kowloon, buildings will get built, leaving these small gaps for air and light. But very quickly they get filled in with stairways, which sometimes connect it to three or four buildings. The city of Kowloon had around 350 buildings, but eventually the all merge into this one giant megastructure. The rooftops would connect, forming one giant rooftop, and even the residential units were connected to each other. And since not all the units had electricity or other resources, it allowed them to share things like power out of a single source.”
  • “It especially allowed businesses to expand strategically and organically.” Such as a strip club that lured people in to make real money in the gambling den a floor down.
  • “New buildings could attach and be integrated to existing structures. And with every new building, new circulation paths and collection points are formed which evolve and expand with the growth of the city. And at the intersection of these connections or stairs or alleys, nodes would organically merge.”
  • “Chinese doctors and dentists who couldn’t afford to get relicensed in Hong Kong, set up shop here and offer services for bargain prices, which attracted customers from outside the city.”
  • Factories gravitated to ground floors with vehicle and water access, while residential went to higher floors. “But most of the residents actually moved through the hundreds of alleys and secret paths, which all twisted and turned and stepped up and down and cut through multiple buildings. So unlike a typical city where you have one point of connection, you had multiple points of connection vertically and horizontally between multiple spaces.”
  • The hard limits of the city forced it to expand upward and inward.
  • “Even though they didn’t have a government, the residents self-organized to fix problems as they came up to deal with crime. They formed groups of volunteers to escort single women. And when the Hong Kong government released plans to demolish the city, they organized the Kowloon City Anti Demolition Committee that fought against the plan for years. Even the five Triad gangs organized garbage cleaning teams and helped settle disputes between businesses.”
  • Kowloon City was demolished in 1994.

    • At it’s height, Kowloon City was an an example of “spontaneous order” that can arise from the intersection of capitalism and low- or no-regulation environments. But much of its success was based on a rare combination of things, namely its proximity to a huge, thriving, international city, private ownership of land, ethnic homogeneity, and a ready populace of low-wage workers, many of whom had fled communism.

    By contrast, Seattle’s antifa “Autonomous Zone” thugocracy had none of these things going for it, and the only industry they brought to the area was shaking down existing businesses for protection money ‘donations.”

    I can imagine it both as a place of tremendous economic dynamism as well as someplace I personally would never want to live. Just imagine if you had a factory using deadly chemicals right below you. And I imagine the illegal activity providing a significant portion of Kowloon City’s income.

    It was an interesting, unintentional experiment, and I’m sure the vast majority of residents there fared better than they would have under the Great Leap Forward…

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    Posted in Communism, Economics, video | 7 Comments »

    Was the Yugo As Bad As Critics Said? Yes.

    Saturday, September 16th, 2023

    How bad an idea was it buying a car made in a communist country? Two guys from Donut Media pick up a used Yugo to see if it lives down to its reputation.

  • “Journalists have been crapping on it for decades, but is it really that bad?” Spoiler: Yes.
  • Their Yugo has 20,593 miles on it, and the build quality is obviously crap. “The needle for the speedometer is broken off, which is annoying, and it has a very optimistic high number of 110 miles per hour.”
  • One reason the car has such poor quality is the cost: The Yugo was $4,000 brand new back in the mid-1980s.
  • “This was the first and only Yugoslavian car that made it to the U.S market. It was made by a company called Corvina Zastava, which literally means red flag. You think the people that bought these would have seen the huge red flag.”
  • “In reality the Yugo is a clone of the Fiat 127. Corvina Zastava licensed the design from Fiat and built their version in the motherland.”
  • “One thing that communist Yugoslavia didn’t have access to that Fiat did was purpose-built machinery. And that’s how you get panel gaps.”
  • “Zastava literally spared every expense they possibly could when making this thing, from the metal stamping to the interior.”
  • You really have to watch the entire video to enjoy the diverse panoply of mystery noises and bumps they experience.
  • “Americans ended up hating the Yugo, but here’s the thing: It was never meant for the U.S market. It was a complete fluke that had ever made it to our shores in the first place.”
  • It was strictly meant as a utilitarian vehicle for Yugoslavians.
  • “As Edmunds said when they reviewed an 89 Yugo, ‘the Yugo is slow, low grip and high effort.’ Sure, it’s got a rack and pinion, but the Yugo doesn’t even have power steering. You have to throw your entire body weight into most of your turns.”
  • “This is not good. Dude, having a car change direction depending on what the throttle is doing? I’m gonna give that a fail.”
  • The transmission is awful, the shifter is floppy and the throttle is sticky.
  • It idles at 3,000 RPM. (A Honda Accord idles around 750.)
  • Car entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin (who formed Subaru of America to import those cars) was looking to import low-cost cars in America. Not in the video is this weird passage in Bricklin’s Wikipedia entry: “Bricklin, senior advisor Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Under-Secretary of State and Yugo board member Lawrence Eagleburger, and Global Motors executives met with Zastava. Bricklin agreed to import the Zastava Koral, marketing it as the Yugo.” Because who knows about cars better than Secretaries of State?
  • “The kids were calling it Yugomania, and people were legitimately psyched about the Yugo.” Having been alive at that time, I can assure you that never happened. The only marketing I remember from the time was a radio spot that focused on the cheapness and the “new car smell” and had an insipid little jingle: “Me and my Yugo/Wherever we go.”
  • “140,000 Yugos were sold in the U.S.”
  • The reason it got imported over here was that Yugoslavia had broken away from the Soviet Union and enjoyed pretty good relations with Reagan’s America, and Fiat had pulled out of the American market, meaning Zastava had no contractual bar to exporting the Fiat clone into the U.S.
  • “The manufacturer claimed it could go 0-60 and 14.3 seconds, which is horrible for even then but some reviewers clocked in at more like 18 seconds.” How long did it take the Donut guys to hit 60? 35.3 seconds. At full throttle.
  • “Carbureted engines can be very reliable, but probably not ones built in a communist country on the brink of collapse.”
  • Their Yugo broke down 10 minutes into filming a mile down the freeway.
  • “Factories in communist countries had terrible working conditions and very little oversight. Consistency also wasn’t their top priority, either. That’s all to say that the high tolerances they had while manufacturing these cars led to some very unreliable parts.”
  • At the time Yugos were being sold, Honda Civics started at $5,800. And the stock Civic engine makes more power than two Yugo engines!
  • “Yugo did not make a good car.”

    • Sales peaked at 48,812 in the U.S. in 1987, but had declined to 3,092 in 1991, when the Yugoslavian Civil War got underway, then less than half that in 1992, when UN sanctions came down, and that was the end of the Yugo in America. Supposedly later Yugos were somewhat more reliable.

    The lesson here: Never buy a car made in a communist country, unless you’re building a Museum of Failure.

    As a bonus, enjoy this hilariously dishonest Yugo TV ad.

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    Posted in Communism, video | 25 Comments »

    Mangosuthu Buthelezi, RIP

    Sunday, September 10th, 2023

    South African Zulu leader and key figure in helping end apartheid Mangosuthu Buthelezi has died at age 95.

    Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a towering figure in South African politics and outspoken Zulu chief, has died at the age of 95.

    During the racist apartheid regime, he founded the Zulu Inkatha [Freedom] party after becoming disillusioned with the African National Congress (ANC).

    Thousands were killed in clashes between supporters of the two parties in the early 1990s.

    But he was later welcomed back into the fold, serving as President Nelson Mandela’s minister of home affairs.

    Chief Buthelezi was a shrewd but controversial politician, who disagreed with the ANC’s tactics of armed action against white-minority rule and trod a moderate path as leader of an ethnic-Zulu homeland.

    He was opposed to international sanctions on South Africa, arguing that they would only harm the country’s black majority.

    Buthelezi was a key figure in ending apartheid, not only as ancestral leader of the Zulu nation, the largest ethnic group in South Africa, but also as elected leader of the (at the time) KwaZulu bantustan homeland. Both he and his Inkatha Freedom Party were strongly pro-Western, pro-capitalist and anticommunist, as opposed to the ANC, who were unabashed allies of the South African Communist Party. The ANC itself was riddled with communist sympathizers, including Mandela’s wife Winnie, who was a real piece of work, and who advocated “necklacing” ANC’s political opponents by setting fire to gasoline-filled tires around their neck.

    Despite this, Buthelezi insisted that Nelson Mandela’s release was a precondiction for a political solution in South Africa.

    For decades, the Soviet Union had been funding communist revolutionary organizations around the world, the economic strain of which was one of the many factors (along with communism’s horrible economic inefficiency and low oil prices) that forced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to institute perestroika and glasnost. Those dire economic straits meant the Soviets could no longer afford to fund their “franchise for totalitarianism” program for communist parties in Africa and elsewhere.

    The combination of Soviet bankruptcy, Buthelezi’s insistence on a peaceful, democratic and capitalistic post-apartheid South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s moderation, and South African President F. W. de Klerk belief that apartheid was unsustainable all came together to allow South Africa a peaceful transition to majority rule.

    For all the troubles South Africa has experienced over the last 40 years, it has fared far better than the like of Zimbabwe, Mozambique or Angola, and Buthelezi’s influence was a big factor in making South Africa’s transition a peaceful one.

    I met Buthelezi at a 1987 Dallas-area conference put on by the Landrum Society, a conservative group founded (I think) by Dallas Morning News columnist William Murchison. Buthelezi struck me as a smart, dignified man.

    In addition to his political work, he also got to play his own ancestor in the classic film Zulu. How cool is that?

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    Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy | 8 Comments »

    LinkSwarm For September 8, 2023

    Friday, September 8th, 2023

    I haven’t been covering the Ken Paxton impeachment because I don’t think I have anything novel to say about it that hasn’t been covered better elsewhere. Enjoy the Friday LinkSwarm!

    

  • U.S. credit card debt tops $1 trillion. Thanks, Joe Biden.
  • Truth about our current economic situation:

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Chinese nationals gate-crashed U.S. institutions more than 100 times in recent years.
    

  • How John Stewart created Tucker Carlson.

    The feature that really made The Daily Show famous was its masterful use of archival video clips to reveal the hypocrisy of the chattering classes. Stewart would set his target on some party shill or professional talking head being condescending, self-important, dishing out blame, kissing whatever ring he’d been paid to kiss. And then the show would play a clip of the same talking head’s appearance on a C-SPAN 3 four-in-the-morning call-in show from ten years ago, back when he’d been paid to kiss another ring, saying the exact opposite thing.

    There was a clip, there was always a clip. And our righteous host would send these hacks packing.

    Through all this, certain public figures would be transformed into storylines with narratives and characters, with inside jokes and recurring bits. The media’s storytellers became the subjects of a theater of the absurd. It got so that when certain figures would show up in a segment, you knew you were about to witness them receive their just comeuppance, a great spectacle of spilled archival blood. The audience would titter in excited anticipation.

    It was a delight to watch.

    Snip.

    What had created a culture of “just talking on TV without any accountability,” as one Daily Show writer put it, was not only the sheer volume and speed of the news. It was this true fact that will sound insane to anyone under the age of thirty: People on television reasonably assumed that no one would hear what they had said ever again.

    As essayist Chuck Klosterman records in The Nineties: A Book, the key characteristic of twentieth-century media was its ephemerality. You experienced it in real time and internalized what was important and what it felt like. Then you moved on. “It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.”

    People used to argue with their friends about the plot of a show or what the score had been in the ball game because, well, how were you going to check? Unless you had personally saved the newspaper or recorded it on your VCR, you would need to go to a literal archive and pull it up on microfilm.

    TV news was even shakier, as networks often recorded over old tapes. Some of this footage only exists today because of the obsessive efforts of one Philadelphia woman who recorded news broadcasts on 140,000 VHS tapes over forty years.

    And so, if you were a pundit or a commentator or a “spin doctor” PR flak, you could say whatever suited your needs at the moment, or even lie with impunity — as long as your lie did not become its own pseudo-event. Your lasting impact was whatever stuck in viewers’ heads and hearts. And if you changed your tune in the months or years afterwards, who would remember?

    The Daily Show would remember.

    The explosion of live broadcast and cable news had created a new, completely under-valued resource for whoever thought to harness it: catalog clips. Soon, new digital technology could preserve content in amber, allowing for its retrieval, repurposing, or referencing at any time.

    It’s a long essay, and I don’t necessarily agree with all the writer’s points, but it’s worth reading.

  • How Sweden got Flu Manchu right.

    There was no state of emergency, no curfews, no orders to stay at home or shelter in place. Young Swedes were encouraged to continue with their sports training and events. Schools remained open, and so did offices, factories, restaurants, libraries, shopping centers, gyms, and hairdressers. As a rule, borders were not closed to fellow Europeans and public transportation kept running.

    There were no mask mandates and not even a recommendation for the public to use masks—until January 2021, when they were recommended on public transportation during rush hours (7–9 a.m. and 4–6 p.m. on weekdays). While some other governments forced school children to wear face masks, Tegnell even warned against making children wear them, saying that “school is no optimal place for face masks.”6

    One can see how Sweden’s path diverged from that of its peers by consulting the latest Human Freedom Index, which has data through 2020. During this first year of the pandemic, Sweden’s freedom rating only fell by 0.19 on a 10‐​point scale, compared to 0.49 in Britain and 0.52 in the United States. The only rich country that saw a smaller decline in freedom than Sweden was Singapore, at 0.16.7

    Snip.

    Analysts from other countries—and even some Swedish scholars—predicted disaster. One influential Swedish model, inspired by the famous British Imperial College study, predicted that Sweden would have 20,000 COVID-19 patients needing intensive care by early May 2020 and a need for intensive care units around 40 times over capacity. By July 1, Sweden would have 82,000 COVID-19 deaths. The Imperial College model predicted between 66,000 and 90,000 deaths without mitigation efforts, and a peak demand of intensive care unit patients 70 times higher than capacity.

    Snip.

    When you look at excess deaths during the three pandemic years, 2020–2022, compared to the previous three years, you get a very different picture. According to this measure, Sweden’s excess death rate during the pandemic was 4.4 percent higher than previously. Compared to the data that other countries report to Eurostat, this is less than half of the average European level of 11.1 percent, and remarkably, it is the lowest excess mortality rate during the pandemic of all European countries, including Norway, Denmark, and Finland.

    (Hat tip: John Tierney at Instapundit.)

  • Sweden got immigration wrong.

    The latest violence has erupted in Malmo following a Quran burning by an ‘Anti-Islam activist’ according to the BBC.

    “A group of angry protesters tried to stop the burning, which resulted in a showdown between them and police,” the report states.

  • “Poland Aims To Create Largest Army In Europe Within Two Years.” Golly, who would need a large army with such historically peaceful neighbors as Germany and Russia?
  • Surprised I didn’t see this elsewhere: “Murder & Drug Chaos Forces Lockdown Of Entire Texas Prison System.”

    e Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) declared a statewide lockdown of all its correctional facilities on Wednesday morning, citing increased contraband-related incidents and drug-related inmate homicides.

    TDCJ said most inmate-on-inmate homicides “are tied back to illegal drugs … and over the last five years, the volume of illegal narcotics entering the system has substantially increased.”

    In response to the drug and murder epidemic in Texas jails, TDCJ is implementing the following strategies to restore order:

    • Systemwide Lockdown: Each facility will limit the movement of inmates and their contact with those outside the prison. Inmates and staff will undergo intensified searches to intercept and confiscate contraband.
    • Digital Mail: TDCJ is completing the rollout of the digital mail program. Over the last few years, there has been a significant increase in paper soaked in K2 or methamphetamines coming into our facilities. The digital mail program will halt this contraband being sent through traditional mail. Effective September 6, 2023, all inmate mail should be addressed and sent to the Digital Mail Center. All mail received this week will be delivered to the digital mail processing center. More information about this program can be found here: TDCJ News – TDCJ Digital Mail Rollout.
    • Increased K9 Searches and Other Technology: To assist in contraband detection and outside funding related to contraband, TDCJ will be deploying additional resources. Specialized search teams and narcotic dogs will be deployed to units and staff will be subject to enhanced search procedures.
    • Comprehensive Searches: All persons entering our facilities at all locations will undergo comprehensive searches.

    “Due to the fact staff will be concentrating on these search efforts, visitation will be canceled until further notice. Inmates will still have access to the phone system and tablets,” TDCJ said.

    If drugs are getting into Texas prisons, there’s over a 90% chance correctional staff are getting them in there.

  • “Over 1,600 Scientists Sign ‘No Climate Emergency’ Declaration.”

    “There is no climate emergency,” the Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) said in its World Climate Declaration (pdf), made public in August. “Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”

    A total of 1,609 scientists and professionals from around the world have signed the declaration, including 321 from the United States.

    The coalition pointed out that Earth’s climate has varied as long as it has existed, with the planet experiencing several cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age only ended as recently as 1850, they said.

    “Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming,” the declaration said.

    Warming is happening “far slower” than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

    “Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools,” the coalition said, adding that these models “exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases” and “ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.” For instance, even though climate alarmists characterize CO2 as environmentally-damaging, the coalition pointed out that the gas is “not a pollutant.”

    Carbon dioxide is “essential” to all life on earth and is “favorable” for nature. Extra CO2 results in the growth of global plant biomass while also boosting the yields of crops worldwide.

    CLINTEL also dismissed the narrative of global warming being linked to increased natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and droughts, stressing that there is “no statistical evidence” to support these claims.

    “There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. Go for adaptation instead of mitigation; adaptation works whatever the causes are,” it said.

  • “California mom Jessica Konen won a $100,000 settlement from her daughter’s school district, Spreckels Union School District, after Buena Vista Middle School had socially transitioned her 11-year-old daughter, Alicia, without her knowledge or consent.”
  • “Hospital Employee Leaks DEI Training Materials That Say Three Year-Olds Can be Transgender.”
  • Remember how the UK was economically lagging other countries in Europe and Remainers blamed Brexit? Yeah, not so much.

    The Office for National Statistics (ONS) now says that the UK economy actually recovered from the pandemic recession back in 2021. It turns out that wholesalers and the healthcare sector, in particular, had produced much greater output than previously thought.

    These updated figures suggest that the UK economy is as much as two per cent larger than previously believed. This means that the UK can no longer be considered the worst-performing economy in the G7. In fact, post-Brexit, the UK recovered from the pandemic at a similar rate to France and at a faster pace than Germany, Europe’s largest economy.

    The ONS’s revision is extraordinary. As one leading economist put it: ‘The entire UK economic narrative – post-pandemic – has just been revised away.’ The very basis for the Remainer elites’ narrative of doom has now been shattered before our eyes.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • San Francisco: A dozen overdose deaths in one day.
  • Hollywood types are starting to get evicted due to the strike. Perhaps someone should let them know that you can find jobs outside the movie industry…
  • Dwight has a swell Medal of Honor story. In Vietnam, he flew four surrounded soldiers to safety hanging off his helicopter skids…
  • Why in God’s green earth is Amazon allowing people to sell AI generated mushroom foraging books on its site?
  • John Lennon wrote “I Am the Walrus” to troll English teachers and make fun of Allen Ginsberg.
  • Mark Felton visits Buckingham Palace, and is Not Amused. “The rooms open to the public are, of course, lavishly decorated. The amount of gold painted furniture, pianos and urns, similar to what I imagine Liberace’s house look like. The walls are hung with the usual assortment of well-fed Hanoverians.” Plus: No bathrooms for you, lowly peasant!
  • Can you spot the Transwoman?
  • “Vials Of Mysterious Substance At Wuhan Lab Labeled ‘Save For 2024 Election.'”
  • Boop!

    (Hat tip:

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    Posted in Communism, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Uncategorized, unions | 1 Comment »

    Rolling Stone Very Concerned That Random YouTuber Might Fight The Man

    Thursday, August 24th, 2023

    Rolling Stone has evidently moved on from libeling random lacrosse teams for being gang rapists to writing hit pieces about random YouTubers.

    Of course, the random YouTuber in this piece, Cody Crone AKA Wranglerstar, has 2.41 million subscribers, meaning he has more than five times as many viewers as Rolling Stone has subscribers.

    I’ve watched the occasional Wranglerstar video for homesteading and prepping information, but never noticed any bomb-throwing proclivities. But the Rolling Stone piece by Miles Klee seems to be a blatant hit piece.

    One of the main contentions is Klee’s portrayal of Crone’s comedic or satirical videos as factual and instructional. The blending of satire with fact can often create misleading perceptions. It’s important for journalists to differentiate between the two, rather than painting everything with the same brush.

    Moreover, Klee’s article leans heavily on the negative aspects of Crone’s channel, with little consideration of its broader context. For instance, discussions about preparedness or self-defense can be essential for people living in remote areas, where reliance on immediate help might not always be feasible. The article also fails to mention the vast amount of educational content Wranglerstar has provided over the years, focusing solely on the more controversial topics.

    The growth of platforms like YouTube and TikTok allows for diverse content and narratives. However, it’s essential for journalism to remain objective and provide a balanced view. Misrepresentation not only undermines the credibility of media outlets but can also unjustly tarnish the reputation of individuals who rely on these platforms to share their voice and experiences.

    It is also important to note that Klee recently openly mocked and ridiculed the movie, “Sound of Freedom”. “I watched Jim Caviezel’s QAnon-ish child-trafficking drama “Sound of Freedom” with the kind of muttering, coughing, “Amen!”-bellowing boomers who have made it a right-wing indie hit. Hard to overstate just how disgusting it was!” Klee wrote on his Threads account.

    So Klee is evidently someone that hates preppers and movies about people who fight sex trafficking equally.

    Here’s Wranglerstar’s own response, how received tons of threats after the Rolling Stone piece, how law enforcement offers reached out to him with credible threats against him and his family, and how he initially took down his videos, then regretted doing so.

    The amazing thing to me is how Rolling Stone, a theoretically still-important member of the Fifth Column Fourth Estate, literally went after a random guy on YouTube for daring to suggest prepping for hard times and potential government oppression. So much for those “counterculture” roots, Rolling Stone declares itself firmly in the camp of Team Bootheel and seems very, very concerned that some random guy in Washington state might not knuckle under to The Man…

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    Posted in Communism, Jihad, Media Watch, unions, video | 10 Comments »

    China Is Screwed: Pipe People

    Sunday, August 13th, 2023

    I didn’t intend to do an all “China is Screwed” video roundup weekend, but the videos keep stacking up and I need to post some rather than producing a giant unwieldy post with hours of footage.

    First up: Young people’s whose job prospects and futures are so dim that they’re actually living in concrete pipes.

    Takeaways:

  • Certainly America has no shortage of transients living rough, but in contrast to ragged drug addicts, alcoholics and dangerous lunatics, the people living in these pipes look to be normal, healthy 20-something Chinese.
  • Just because you’re living in a concrete pipe doesn’t mean you can’t be a live-streamer. Like the under-the-bridge streamers seen in previous videos, you wonder how widespread this behavior is, or whether we’re just seeing the edge of the freak show.
  • “Despite the female hosts not being beautiful and the male hosts not handsome, it doesn’t affect viewership.” I do rather want to check their numbers, here.
  • “This is because it’s happening in the industrial city known as the world’s factory – Dongguan in Guangzhou.” It’s on the Pearl River Delta near Guangzhou and Hong Kong. “After more than thirty years of China’s reform and opening up, Dongguan, which has always been at the forefront of economic development, has recently seen a wave of business closures and foreign capital relocation.” See also: all those previous China is screwed videos.
  • “When foreign capital withdraws, thousands of Chinese workers lose their jobs. Among these people, some have worked in factories for decades and are now middle-aged. It’s overwhelming to be suddenly faced with unemployment and consequential cost-of-living pressures, coupled with labor competition against millions of university graduates.” I’m sure that sucks, just like getting laid off here sucks. But in a capitalist economy, even a flawed one like we have, is always going to be more flexible about creating jobs that one ruled by a communist party’s aristocracy of pull.
  • “Those who are single simply adapt to homelessness, creating their own personal space amongst the concrete pipes.” Or, you could have, you know, lived modestly, saved money, and shared housing with other people. The fact they haven’t gone this route and are instead living in pipes suggests something in the Chinese economy is even more broken than we think.
  • Foreign companies like Microsoft and Nokia are now moving to Vietnam and India. “Japanese companies like Panasonic, Daikin, Sharp, and TDK are planning to move their manufacturing bases back to Japan. Well-known companies like Uniqlo, Nike, Funai Electric, Samsung, and others are also accelerating their withdrawal from China.”
  • Like industry is also fleeing from elsewhere in China.
  • “The once bustling Bund in Shanghai is now overgrown with weeds due to lack of maintenance and tourism, presenting a scene of desolation. Everywhere in Shanghai’s luxury residential communities, there are messages about subleasing and selling at a loss. The elites, celebrities, and tycoons left Shanghai at the first chance they got after the lifting of the lockdown. The political uncertainty in China and the frequent changes in regulatory clauses by the authorities have made entrepreneurs miserable.” Communists making entrepreneurs miserable? This is my shocked face.
  • “Domestic entrepreneurs are reluctant to invest further, and foreign investors are hastening their departure.”
  • Various Chinese company specific layoffs and financial difficulties snipped.
  • “Wall Street leading figures, after enjoying three years of benefits from the broad opening of China’s financial market, are planning large-scale cuts to projects and staff in China…Goldman Sachs has lowered its five-year plan expectations, and Morgan Stanley has decided not to set up a securities dealer in China, reducing its derivative and futures business investment to $150 million. JPMorgan Chase & Co. began cutting its dedicated staff in China earlier this year.” There’s not a violin small enough.

    • In a capitalist economy, there would be some sort of middle ground between the empty ghost cities and people living in pipes near megalopolises. If you don’t regulate the economy so heavily as to make building housing impossible (I’m looking at you, California and NYC), then profit will drive developers to create housing to fill a market need. With China’s crazy misallocation of loans to unprofitable housing to satisfy regional government growth targets, supply has been so severed from demand that such market-making is impossible.

    China is going to come out of it’s decades-long growth spurt with crumbling cities and people that mostly are still poor.

    Great job, Xi!

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    Posted in Communism, Economics, Foreign Policy, unions, video | 13 Comments »

    China’s New Enemy: Deflation

    Saturday, August 12th, 2023

    I have a whole host of “China is Screwed” videos I’ve gathered to post, but haven’t had the time to properly queue them up. So here’s a big picture piece from Peter Zeihan on China’s immediate economic foe: deflation.

  • “They never really recovered from Covid.” Aw. My heart bleeds.
  • “Growth is actually lower now than it was over the course of the last two years when they were supposedly under complete lockdown.”
  • “Consumption is down. Imports and exports both dropped in July compared to a year earlier by double digits of percentages. Normally the sort of stuff you only see out of a country like, say, Ukraine or Russia when a war starts.”
  • “We saw a demographic bomb go off in China before Covid. going back to as early as 2017, the demographics really turned negative from 2017 to 2021. The birth rate dropped by about 40%.”
  • “We’ve had all of these trends with four, five, six, years behind them, and as they’re manifesting in a more normal environment, the numbers are really, really, really bad.”
  • A whole lot of that is due to the One Child Policy.
  • Problem two: Deflation. The rest of the world suffered inflation when the lockdowns ended.
  • “The consumption boom never happened, so supply chains never had to adjust. What has happened is people are less confident in their future, so they’re consuming less.”
  • “We’re seeing mounting trade wars out of Europe, Japan, the United States, and increasingly secondary states like the Koreans are joining in. And that means the Chinese have fewer places to send stuff.”
  • “Product that was normally produced for export from China is now being locked up within the Chinese system at the same time that the population is purchasing less. You have an oversupply of goods and an under demand, both at home and abroad. With all those extra goods prices go down, and you get deflation.”
  • “This is what you would expect when you’re at the beginning of a deflationary spiral that’s caused by a fundamental mismatch between supply and demand, which is where we are going with deglobalization and the Chinese demographic. Trends which are now well past the point of no return.”
  • Japan’s deflationary spiral lasted 20-25 years.
  • Deflationary spirals are very hard to pull out of.
  • “The Chinese economic system isn’t really based on exports or consumption, it’s based on investment, the idea that the state fosters mass borrowing in order to build industrial plant infrastructure. Based on whose numbers you’re using, those are somewhere between 40-70% of the entirety of the Chinese economy, and has generated the vast majority of economic growth.”
  • “You can only do that for so long. Eventually you don’t need any more bridges, or any more factories, and I would argue the Chinese reached that point before Covid. Again, there’s been this three, four year lag between reality and the data finally manifesting.”
  • More spending won’t help.
  • “The amount of growth they get for every Yuan spent has been dropping steadily for 40 years, and now it’s in far less than one to one. So it really doesn’t matter how much more fuel and how much cheap capital the Chinese pump into the system, it’s never going to generate more economic activity than what it costs to put it in the first place.”

    • Sucks to be you, China…

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    Posted in Communism, Economics, video | 9 Comments »

    Movie Review: Oppenheimer

    Monday, August 7th, 2023

    Title: Oppenheimer
    Director: Christopher Nolan
    Writers: Christopher Nolan, Kai Bird, Martin Sherwin
    Starring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Jason Clarke, Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Alden Ehrenreich

    I finally saw Oppenheimer, and if you have an interest in the subject, it’s well worth seeing. It’s a near-great film that’s great when it covers the atomic bomb project, and considerably less great when It Has Important Things To Say.

    The movie covers much of the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), director of the Los Alamos part of the project to build the atomic bomb. The movie has a non-linear format, using the framing device of two different hearings (on the renewal of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, and the cabinet confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), who lured Oppenheimer to Princeton and oversaw the Atomic Energy Commission, and who is eventually revealed to be the film’s antagonist) interspersed with Oppenheimer’s life before and during the The Manhattan Project.

    When the film is good, it’s flat out great. The scenes here tend to be small in scope, seldom more than a minute long, slowly building up Oppenheimer’s life, his love and study of physics, his dalliance with communism (he was a fellow-traveler who never joined the party, but did take a commie (Florence Pugh) as his first wife and an ex-commie (Emily Blunt) as his second), his dismay as a Jewish American at the rise of Nazism, and his involvement in the atomic bomb effort.

    The brevity of the scenes is one of the film’s greatest strengths. Though mostly quiet and understated in themselves, they slowly build up a heady steam of narrative momentum. By the time they get to Los Alamos itself you’re absolutely riveted.

    And it gets better. The scenes leading up to the Trinity detonation are a masterpiece of film editing, successfully ratcheting the tension higher and higher just by showing scenes of the elaborate preparations leading up to the blast, under-laid by Ludwig Göransson’s tense, violin-heavy score. I saw the film in IMAX, and I think I got my money’s worth out of that sequence alone.

    But that headlong pace enfolds within it a problem: Things move so fast, that some scenes have a certain checkmark quality to them, so that you know exactly what’s coming. Gee, when commie girlfriend picks up a Sanskrit text, what do you want to bet that the passage he’s reading is “I am become death, destroyer of worlds?”

    Please, no wagering.

    But that’s a minor problem compared to the biggest flaw of Oppenheimer, which is what they chose to include as the main non-Trinity storyline. Why have the climax of your film feature the literal explosion of an atomic bomb when you can spend the rest of it on the pulse-pounding excitement of committee meetings?

    To be fair to Nolan, this is obviously the film he wanted to make, and the film is called Oppenheimer rather than The Making of the Atomic Bomb. And the committee meeting scenes are as well-acted, well-directed and well-paced as you could reasonably ask of a big-budget, A-list Hollywood film. But the real reason they’re there is so the leftist screenwriters can Say Important Things.

    Oppenheimer must feel massive guilt and remorse for having helped usher in the atomic age, because this is Approved Opinion. Leftists, even commies, must be shown in a positive light, because this is Approved Opinion. Likewise, McCarthyism must be shown to be Very Bad, so all the crimes of communism have to be kept offstage.

    Indeed, an awful lot happens off-stage, including the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then again, Oppenheimer is the viewpoint character.

    From my better-than-the-average-layman-understanding-at-how-an-atomic-bomb-works-but-hardly-an-expert vantage point, the historical accuracy for the film seems painstaking and effective. I understood why Klaus Fuchs was important when he was introduced, appreciated the Nixie tubes in the Trinity countdown, and figured out the guy with the bongos must have been Richard Feynman. Everything sure as hell looks accurate, and the New Mexico photography is gorgeous.

    But with so much time spent on the commie and Strauss plots, and Oppenheimer having visions of particle physics (early) and atomic destruction (late), the rest of the film (the far more interesting part) feels a bit rushed. Plus the sheer smallness of the stakes that drive the frame-story/post-Trinity portion feels like a distinct anticlimax. Indeed, the primary subplot turns out to be (spoilers) Strauss secretly shiving Oppenheimer by getting his security clearance yanked for…his supporting export of radioactive isotopes to Norway? It’s like if during the climax of Kill Bill, you find out that the Bride’s entire motivation for her revenge spree was Bill never returning her DVD of Steel Magnolias.

    All that said, this is still an exceptionally good film, and even the ostensibly bad guys Have Their Reasons. Even hydrogen bomb father Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), who the writers must have been tempted to turn into a secondary villain, comes across as a smart, sympathetic figure. And history validates both his and Strauss’ view that America was right to move forward on the H-Bomb, as the Soviets were utterly untrustworthy as arms control treaty partners.

    I expect Oscar nominations galore.

    If you’re the kind of person that would watch a three hour movie on the making of the atomic bomb, this is the one to watch.

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    Posted in Communism, Media Watch, Military | 15 Comments »

    Taibbi: How The Left Lost Its Mind

    Monday, July 31st, 2023

  • “It’s as simple as people thought everything was permitted in pursuit of getting rid of Donald Trump.”
  • Taibbi says he wasn’t pushed out of Rolling Stone, he just thought he could make more money by leaving. And he was right! “Let’s just say that I’m making many times over more than I was making at Rolling Stone.”

  • MT: I don’t believe a lot of the identity politics that are being proffered by the current version of the Democratic Party are genuine. And my first experience with this, where I really, really thought about this, was when I was following Bernie Sanders’s campaign in 2016. And there was a moment in that campaign where he first started to really draw blood against Hillary right. You might remember it was like in February, uh, or late January of 2016. He was hammering her on her ties to Goldman Sachs and other Banks. The New York Post interestingly did this, published this big list of all of her speech commitments and it was kind of amazing. And she wouldn’t release the transcripts right she wouldn’t release the transcripts. I mean, even the schedule was amazing. She was doing three hundred thousand dollars in the morning and then flying to some place and doing 400 Grand or something.

    Reason: Yeah circle of the Bilderbergers, or whatever.

    MT: And they tried everything to hit back, and nothing worked until she said: “If we break up the banks tomorrow, will that end racism?” And Bernie was paralyzed by that.

    Reason: Yeah, Bernie’s an old school, he’s a real old school Commie. I mean, like where it’s class and everything else is a distraction, right? That, you know, capitalists will use race in order to keep the workers from realizing, no, they’re all on the same side well

    MT: I almost wish he was that, because you know Bernie also marched in, you know, in for the civil rights movement in the 60s. And he was terrified of the idea that he might be accused of racism. It mortified him, and I think it really slowed his campaign.

    Reason: There was also that moment, I think it might have been in Seattle or something, where he was almost literally pushed off the stage by a couple of black activists, who were like “We need to be talking about racial concerns,” not whatever he was talking about.

    MT: Right, not your class thing. [And] that was when they started to sort of demonize the white working class, right, which is a brilliant strategic move. Also, interestingly, it was the exact opposite of what the Clintons had done in the 90s. You know the Clinton’s whole strategy was let’s peel off a little bit of that white working class-

    Reason: We feel their pain.

    MT: We feel their pain, right. And that’s, you know, they just got over the finish line doing that. So we can add to the sins of Hillary Clinton that she also injected identity politics.

    With all due respect to Taibbi, identity politics had been injected into the Democratic Party’s DNA long before the 2016 presidential race.

  • “Trump [has] been an enormous Boon to the intelligence Services they’ve been able to say hey if you if you code as somebody who sides with Trump…essentially they’ve created what I like to call the One Villain Theory of the Universe. Which is if you’re on Trump’s side, that means you’re on Putin’s side, which means you’re also on Assad’s side, you’re on Orban’s side, you’re on the side of domestic violence.”
  • MT: “Covid has a whole long list of things that have added to Middle America’s grievances. Beginning with the fact that it it increasingly looks like they lied to us about the origins of the disease for some pretty weak reasons. Maybe they were trying to cover up some research they were doing. That’s thing one that’s looking increasingly likely. At the very least they excluded the possibility of that illegitimately and used

    Reason: “And that’s where the government was telling Twitter and Facebook, like, don’t run this stuff or they’ll squelch it.”

  • “I did a story about Loudoun County, Virginia, when Republicans won the gubernatorial election there. And there were people there who were furious at the way they had been portrayed in the media, as racists or anti-vaxxers. Really, they wanted their kids to go back to school, because they had done their own research online, they found the kids weren’t really at risk, and their kids weren’t learning anything, and it was a burden on them personally, right? So there’s a million things like this.”

    • I don’t agree with all Taibbi’s takes, and a whole lot of things were going wrong with the left long before he deigned to notice it, but over all it’s an interesting interview.

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    Posted in Communism, Democrats, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, video | 2 Comments »

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