Sunday and Monday this week, I gathered up all my dead branches from the ice storm along the curb in advance of Tuesday’s announced neighborhood-wide branch pickup. I know it’s going to take some time, but it’s Friday and I see no signs that brush has been cleared from anyone’s curbs…
He said ESG poses a threat to the American Economy and individual economic freedom, he further said it’s an attempt for corporate’s elite to discriminate against those who do follow a particular “ideological agenda.” His proposal will outlaw this.
“By applying arbitrary ESG financial metrics that serve no one except the companies that created them, elites are circumventing the ballot box to implement a radical ideological agenda. Through this legislation, we will protect the investments of Floridians and the ability of Floridians to participate in the economy,” DeSantis said, at the news conference.
Heh. “Federal District Court Judge Orders Illinois to Show Examples of Every Newly-Banned Firearm.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Maybe they should spend more time on schools instead. “Not A Single Student Can Do Math At Grade Level In 53 Illinois Schools.”
“Judy Monro-Leighton, one of three women who accused now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, was found to have lied during a congressional investigation and is now being charged with making materially false statements and obstruction.”
Nicaragua’s scumbag commie government sentences Roman Catholic bishop Roland Alvarez to 26 years in prison for “treason” for daring to stand up for Catholics and refusing to be exiled.
What began as a trickle is now a flood: the US government is using the banking sector to organize a sophisticated, widespread crackdown against the crypto industry. And the administration’s efforts are no secret: they’re expressed plainly in memos, regulatory guidance, and blog posts. However, the breadth of this plan — spanning virtually every financial regulator — as well as its highly coordinated nature, has even the most steely-eyed crypto veterans nervous that crypto businesses might end up completely unbanked, stablecoins may be stranded and unable to manage flows in and out of crypto, and exchanges might be shut off from the banking system entirely. Let’s dig in.
For crypto firms, obtaining access to the onshore banking system has always been a challenge. Even today, crypto startups struggle mightily to get banks, and only a handful of boutiques serve them. This is why stablecoins like Tether found popularity early on: to facilitate fiat settlement where the rails of traditional banking were unavailable. However, in recent weeks, the intensity of efforts to ringfence the entire crypto space and isolate it from the traditional banking system have ratcheted up significantly. Specifically, the Biden administration is now executing what appears to be a coordinated plan that spans multiple agencies to discourage banks from dealing with crypto firms. It applies to both traditional banks who would serve crypto clients, and crypto-first firms aiming to get bank charters. It includes the administration itself, influential members of Congress, the Fed, the FDIC, the OCC, and the DoJ. Here’s a recap of notable events concerning banks and the policy establishment in recent weeks:
On Dec. 6, Senators Elizabeth Warren, John Kennedy, and Roger Marshall send a letter to crypto-friendly bank Silvergate, scolding them for providing services to FTX and Alameda research, and lambasting them for failing to report suspicious activities associated with those clients
On Dec. 7, Signature (among the most active banks serving crypto clients) announces its intent to halve deposits ascribed to crypto clients — in other words, they’ll give customers their money back, then shut down their accounts — drawing its crypto deposits down from $23b at peak to $10b, and to exit its stablecoin business
On Jan. 3, the Fed, the FDIC, and the OCC release a joint statement on the risks to banks engaging with crypto, not explicitly banning banks’ ability to hold crypto or deal with crypto clients, but strongly discouraging them from doing so on a “safety and soundness” basis
On Jan. 9, Metropolitan Commercial Bank (one of the few banks that serve crypto clients) announces a total shutdown of its cryptoasset-related vertical.
More at the link. I’ve long been skeptical of cryptocurrency advocates assertion that crypto provides a useful alternative to government-backed fiat currency. But it sure looks like the federal government is acting like that’s the case…
An important message about eternal truths from well-known biologist Fred Rogers:
TRIGGER WARNING. ⚠️ This is the most upsetting thing you will see all weekend. pic.twitter.com/eVLPZ3J3RI
CRT-pushing commie Angela Davis finds out that one of her ancestors was on the Mayflower.
A British farmer reviews Clarkson’s Farm. He says despite obvious setup bits, a lot of it (like the unexpected catastrophes and intractable town council bureaucracy) rings true.
he Austin City Council on Wednesday voted to fire City Manager Spencer Cronk following his response to the winter storm earlier this month. The council voted 10-1 in a special called session, with only Natasha Harper-Madison (District 1) voting against Cronk’s firing.
Natasha Harper-Madison is an ultra-lefty sort, which makes me slightly more assured that firing Cronk was the right move.
Cronk’s termination is effective Thursday, Feb. 16. He will receive a one-year severance of $463,001.50, under a City ordinance in which he was hired in 2018. The council has appointed Jesus Garza, who served as Austin’s city manager from 1994 to 2002, to serve as interim city manager.
This is where things get interesting. The city of Austin has an Assistant City Manager, Veronica Briseno. Normal procedure is that the Assistant City Manager takes over as Acting City Manager while a permanent replacement is found. Why was that not done here? Could it have something to do with the fact that current Travis County DA and Soros-backed leftist tool Jose Garza is Jesus Garza’s nephew?
What are the odds?
I mean, it’s just plain odd to hire someone who was last city manager 20 years ago. That’s like thinking that M. Night Shyamalan is a sure thing to helm a big budget movie because Signs made a lot of money.
Here’s a longer-than-usual LinkSwarm, since last week’s edition was wiped out by the ice storm power outage.
The leftwing corruption of all government institutions continues apace. “US lost 287,000 jobs while government was reporting +1 million in gains.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“That’s because economic growth is slowing down,” explains research fellow EJ Antoni. “Even the areas which contributed positively to gross domestic product (GDP) are not necessarily signs of prosperity. For example, business investment grew at only 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter, but that was almost entirely inventory growth. Nonresidential investment, a key driver of future economic growth, was up just 0.7 percent.”
“Meanwhile, residential investment fell off a cliff,” Antoni continued, “dropping 26.7 percent as consumers were unable to afford the combination of high home prices, high interest rates and falling real incomes. No wonder homeownership affordability has fallen to the lowest level in that metric’s history.”
There was a gain in net exports, but that was largely a mirage created by a major slowdown in international trade. “Imports are simply falling faster than exports, which shows up as an increase in GDP.”
But probably most concerning to Antoni is the sharp decline in real disposable income in 2022, which exceeded $1 trillion.
“This is the second-largest percentage drop in real disposable income ever, behind only 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression,” he observed. “To keep up with inflation, consumers are depleting their savings and burning through the ‘stimulus’ checks they received during 2020 and 2021. Credit card debt continues growing, while savings plummeted $1.6 trillion last year, falling below 2009 levels.”
Boom. “Texas has punted Citigroup from the syndicate that’s set to manage the Lone Star state’s largest-ever municipal bond offering, saying the bank’s policies for gun retailers discriminate against the firearms industry.”
Grand Theft Pollo. The food service director of an impoverished Illinois school district was charged with stealing $1.5 million of food — most of which was chicken wings. Vera Liddell, 66, allegedly began stealing from the Harvey School District during the height of COVID-19.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Bill Maher continues to take regular red pills. “The problem with communism and some very recent ideologies here at home, is that they think you can change reality by screaming at it.”
We could be heroes, just for one day. Or once a month, as the case may be…
This week in rapper murders: “Tampa rapper arrested for young mother’s murder days after being acquitted of recording studio double-murder.”
A Tampa jury acquitted Billy Adams of killing two men in a makeshift recording studio in Lutz. He walked free from a Tampa courtroom on January 27.
Three days later, a young mother who was pregnant with her second child was found shot to death in a residential area of New Tampa. Her toddler was still in her vehicle nearby.
A week after her death, Tampa police said Billy Adams “did admit to being the one to pull the trigger.”
Despite increasing sanctions and scrutiny on hostile Chinese business practices and intellectual property theft, private equity firms have previously managed to mostly evade scrutiny for taking Chinese money. That may finally be changing.
Takeaways:
“The US is starting to wise up on Chinese investments. It’s been cracking down by closing loopholes But not all the loopholes have been closed, Which means China could be getting US trade secrets.”
“Better late than never. This feels like your grandparents finally learning how to unplug and plug back in the WiFi router. Shouldn’t have taken this long to figure out something so obvious, but glad they eventually got there.”
“After years of letting China buy up sensitive US technology, property, and companies, the US government is finally putting its foot down. In 2018, Trump signed the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act, or FIRRMA. This changed how the Committee on Foreign Investment, or CFIUS, screened investments in the US for national security issues.”
“Before, CFIUS could only review foreign investments if they resulted in a controlling stake. Now CIFIUS can review any investment.”
“When Biden got into office, he ordered CFIUS to look at all investments that affect critical aspects of the US supply chain, or Americans’ personal data, and several other things.”
“As you might imagine, this has not gone over well with Wall Street, which loves Chinese money more than Snoop Dogg loves marijuana.”
“‘Wall Street now stands as an increasingly lonely voice arguing for more engagement with China.’ This was going on even as China was taking a wrecking ball to its economy with its zero covid policy, committing genocide against an ethnic minority, and selling the organs of political prisoners for profit. Find someone that loves you the way Wall Street loves Chinese money. They’re ride or die…and the people that die are political prisoners.”
“Private equity and venture capital firms were able to get an exception granted in FIRRMA for limited partners. That means that if a foreign entity becomes a limited partner in, say, a private equity fund, CFIUS doesn’t have any jurisdiction over it. Should have seen something like this coming. Finding loopholes is what Wall Street does best.”
“The type of investments that private equity firms are involved in means that Chinese companies could get access to critical technology. Stuff that could affect national security. Portfolio details could hold national economic or intelligence value.”
“The China Investment Corporation or CIC. At $1.3 trillion US dollars, it’s the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. ‘CIC has said repeatedly that it separates commercial activities from governmental functions and makes its investment decisions independently.'”
“CIC’s board of directors includes representatives from the Chinese government.”
“CIC’s Deputy General Manager Qi Bin has explained that cooperation with developed economies is to be leveraged to obtain advanced technology.”
“CIC is also partnering with large investment companies, like Goldman Sachs, Japan’s Nomura Holdings, and France’s BNP Paribas. CIC’s Deputy General Manager Qi Bin has talked about leveraging these partnerships for the ‘win-win’ ‘mutual benefit’…of Chinese companies. Somehow I’m getting the sense that “win win” has a different meaning in China. I think in English we would call this ‘short-term win for long-term loss.’ I’ll give you my money and you give me your trade secrets.”
There’s finally some efforts for CFIUS to close private equity loopholes.
Pardon me if I express deep skepticism that the Biden White House will actually constrict the inflow of Chinese money…
Jordan Peterson always makes a great Joe Rogan guest, and the new interview they did last week is no exception.
Discussing the Twitter files, Critical Race Theory and Marxism, victimhood identity politics, postmodern theory, and falseness of reducing everything to power dynamics.
On the World Economic Forum:
“Globalist Utopian Tyranny” is a great phrase.
They follow in the wake of “Paul Ehrlich, in the 1960s, who really believe, really believe, truly, that maybe the planet should only have 500 million people on it.”
There then follows a devastating take-down of the immortality of pushing 350 million of the world’s poorest to the brink of death through higher energy prices in the hope that maybe 100 years from now life for the poor will be better. I encourage you to watch the entirety of this segment for that.
“It’s a little bit too convenient for me that your prescriptions to save the planet are accompanied by this insistence that the only way forward to that is to give you all the power. It’s like there’s a bit of a moral hazard in, that don’t you think?”
“Do you want to save the planet, or do you want the power? And let’s let’s put the second one first, because the probability that you’re a saint or the messiah is pretty damn low. So that’s the danger of the Davos crowd.”
I suspect I’ll be putting up more snippets from this interview sometime this week…
Democrats enabling sexual predators (yet again), more tanks for Ukraine information, and the unexpected return of Storm Drain Woman. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Published in November of 2022, the story indicated “thousands of child molesters are being let out after just a few months, despite sentencing guidelines.”
The story reported that more than 7,000 inmates convicted of “lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14 years of age” were released from prison the same year they were incarcerated.
The Daily Mail’s analysis was conducted using a database—created in 1994 after the federal Megan’s Law was passed—requiring law enforcement to make public information regarding registered sex offenders. The news organization examined data in California through July of 2019.
“Everyone should be really upset and frightened by this,” Dordulian said.
According to Dordulian, child molesters are the least likely of criminals to be rehabilitated and are four times more likely to commit the same crime again.
“Once they’re out,” he said, “they are going to re-offend and there’s going to be another child that is victimized by these people.”
Senate Bill 357. Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in July, the measure decriminalized loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution. The bill did not officially take effect until January 1 of this year; but, from the moment it became law back in July, these women say, the on-the-ground reality changed. “The minute the governor signed it, you started seeing an uptick on the streets,” Powell said. “And on social media, the pimps were saying: ‘You better get out there and work because the streets are ours.’”
The pimps were right: police stopped making arrests for crimes that would no longer be charged. The anti-loitering statute had provided the grounds for officers to question women and children whom they suspected might be trapped in a prostitution ring. “As a police officer, you need probable cause to stop and investigate,” Powell explained. “So if I have a law that says you can’t loiter in this area, with pasties and a G-string, flagging down cars, I could stop you for that because you’re loitering. But if I just say I’m stopping you because you look kind of young, that’s a little weak. So, it takes away a tool.” Without the statute, police hands were suddenly tied. Henceforth, questioning the girls—and potentially provoking a violent confrontation with pimps—came to seem a Pyrrhic gamble, one that California’s police officers would now avoid.
The films, which include “Miss Representation,” “The Mask You Live In,” “The Great American Lie” and “Fair Play,” are licensed to taxpayer-funded schools across every state and sometimes contain sexually explicit imagery and push students to feel “shame and sorrow” about American society split by privilege and oppression. They are paired with curricula that include discussion on Gov. Newsom’s comments within the films, urging them to gather their friends and vote for aligned politicians that support a “care economy” that “embraces universal human values.”
“Former Arlington teachers union president charged with embezzlement. A former president of the Arlington teachers union, who was ousted last spring, has been charged with embezzling more than $400,000 from the organization. Ingrid Gant, 54, of Woodbridge, was arrested yesterday (Monday) in Prince William County on four counts of embezzlement.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
“Thirty years ago, Guan County, Shandong Province launched the ‘Hundred Childless Days‘ campaign under the aegis of national family planning, known in the West as the ‘one-child policy.’ The birthplace of the “Boxers” was deemed to have too high a birth rate by the provincial government. County officials sought to correct this by ensuring that not a single baby was born between May 1 and August 10, 1991.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
North says they do not feel safe anymore, and she believes it all ties back to the large homeless encampment located only feet away from the salon.
“Our safety started to become a big issue. We suffered from multiple break-ins. We’ve had our cars broken into. We clean up feces and needles on a weekly basis. It increased from that to, you know, people approaching us and threatening us with weapons, threatening rape, murder, all of those things,” said North.
The salon has been up and running just off Ben White Blvd. for four years now. North says she has seen an uptick in crime for a while now, but the dangerous behavior from people living in this encampment picked up recently.
“In the past year, it’s gotten increasingly worse and, in the past couple of weeks, it’s gotten to the point where I actually finally felt like this might shut my business down,” said North.
Erin Mutschler, another co-owner of the salon, says they have called the police every time they have dealt with a situation like the one caught on video, but she says police often take 45 minutes to an hour for anyone to show up.
The mayorship of Steve Adler is the gift that just keeps giving, even with him out of office… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Follow-up: Democratic State Rep. Harold Dutton: “Don’t Blame Abbott, Houston ISD Takeover Plan Was My Idea.” (Previously.)
A Florida woman was pulled from a storm drain for the third time in two years. Maybe she was looking for David Icke’s lizard people. Also, she sounds like a real winner: “Police said her license had been suspended 17 times from 2007 to 2020.” (Previously.) (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Jay Leno broke his collarbone, several ribs and both kneecaps in a motorcycle accident. But it sounds like a freak accident: “So I turned down a side street and cut through a parking lot, and unbeknownst to me, some guy had a wire strung across the parking lot but with no flag hanging from it…I didn’t see it until it was too late. It just clothesline me and, boom, knocked me off the bike.” (There’s no evidence the line was strung there by Conan O’Brien.) “But I’m OK!…I’m working this weekend.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Nothing to cheer you up quite like a discussion of potential genocide.
Takeaways:
He starts out talking about how Russia plans to add some 500,000 new troops and use them in a late spring offensive when the mud dries up. As I mentioned previously, that plan is only scheduled to produce new troops over several years, and I express grave doubts that Russia can train and equip new troops when it has singularly failed to do so thus far.
He reiterates from previous videos that Russia’s military is heavily dependent on rail, but they’ve had to make do with trucks, and those trucks have been heavily targeted by Ukraine.
“Russians began the war with 3,000 military support trucks they’re probably down to only about 500 now.”
“[Russians] are doing what they can to destroy morale, and destroy the Ukrainian economy, and kill as many Ukrainian civilians as possible. They’re using drones, they’re using fighter launch missiles, they’re using cruise missiles and they’ve started to use ballistic missiles, to target specifically Ukrainian physical infrastructure, most notably electricity generating plant.”
Ukraine is having trouble exporting grain. “Exports have fallen to almost nothing.”
The countries that would normally import from Ukraine, come October, November, December are going to realize it’s just not there. Most of those countries are in Africa, some are in South Asia. And the one I am, by far, the most worried about is Egypt. Egypt is poor and they import over half the grains they need to survive, mostly wheat. The wheat is already off-line, and so we should expect to see significant upheaval—economic, humanitarian, political—across the Arab world and into South Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa.
The mention of a second Holodomor is a reminder that not enough people know about the first Holodomor, when the Soviet Union starved some 5-7 million Ukrainians to death (and some 14.5 million total for the whole collectivization famine/”dekulakization”/suppression of the Kazakhs and Tartars/etc.
Due to issues of politics, congestion, or just plain corruption, nations get the bright idea to build brand new capital cities far away from existing urban areas. Sometimes it works out (as with Washington D.C.), and sometimes it doesn’t. China’s Xi Jinping is trying something different with Xiongan, which is being built not so much a replacement to Beijing but as sort of “mini-me” Beijing to relieve overcrowding by offloading functions to the new built-from-scratch city in Hebei* province.
About 60 miles south of the center of Beijing, a new city is being built as a showcase of high-tech ecologically friendly development. Its massive high-speed rail station and “city brain” data center have been heralded by Chinese state media as evidence of the speed and superiority of China’s growth model—not least because the city is a “signature initiative” of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Commies (and their American fans) do love their high speed rail projects. Never mind that high speed rail in China has mostly been a trillion dollar, money losing sinkhole.
Xiongan New Area is also a test for whether China can boost domestic innovation and climb into the ranks of advanced nations in the face of slowing economic growth and efforts by the United States and others to restrict its access to advanced technology.
Xiongan offers a window into what Xi’s vision of state-led innovation looks like on the ground. Xi has called the city his “personal initiative” and a qiannian daji, or “thousand-year plan of national significance.”
You know who else had a thousand year plan?
Sorry, I just can’t resist a good Hitler meme when you pitch a slow ball right over the center of the plate…
The plan for Xiongan, which was formally unveiled in 2017 to relieve pressure on Beijing and promote the “coordinated regional development” of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, has faced financial struggles due to the huge investment costs—even more of a problem given China’s mounting real estate crisis. Overall, the new area encompasses about 650 square miles, with a planned population of around 3 million; currently, the three counties comprising the zone have around 1.4 million long-term residents. As of September 2022, 400 billion yuan (about $57 billion) in completed investment had been reported in the city overall.
While Xi has stacked the new Politburo Standing Committee with officials loyal to him, he has also elevated those with strong science and engineering backgrounds. In his speech at the 20th Party Congress last October, Xi declared that “innovation will remain at the heart of China’s modernization drive” and that China has “worked hard to promote high-quality development and pushed to foster a new pattern of development.” Nevertheless, a confluence of factors including COVID-19 lockdowns and trade tensions is contributing to overall slower growth in China.
In Xi’s vision, however, party control is not a hindrance to innovation. Rather, Xi’s vision of innovation is one in which the state and party play a leading role. Xi has led a crackdown on private technology firms such as Alibaba but has also promoted policies, such as his Made in China 2025, that aim to boost research-and-development spending and subsidies to give Chinese firms competitive advantages in industries including biotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and semiconductors.
We know from experience that this approach almost never works, because the profit motive of capitalism is always a superior discovery mechanism for innovation than top-down bureaucratic mandates. We know that the state-led approach has already been a colossal failure for semiconductors even before the sanctions came down, and it’s a good bet that it’s been just as colossal a failure in all the other areas mentioned.
Xi’s policies favor “hard tech” over software-based platform app companies. The first party secretary of Xiongan was Chen Gang, who oversaw Beijing’s Zhongguancun high-tech park before being transferred to Guizhou, where under Xi ally Chen Miner he helped turn the southwestern province into a center of big data and cloud computing.
The approach to innovation in Xiongan involves embedding technology within the fabric of the city as well as innovation processes within the party-state. Xiongan Group was created as the investment vehicle for the area’s overall development, under the control of Hebei province but backed partially by loans from China Development Bank. The first central state-owned enterprises to begin construction of offices in the new area were China Satellite Communications Co., the energy giant China Huaneng Group, and Sinochem Holdings. Others now include the big three telecoms and China State Grid, as well as China Mineral Resources Group, a conglomerate set up last year to centralize China’s coal mining industry. These state-owned enterprises could use Xiongan as a test bed for new technologies. Research institutes and satellite branches of several Beijing universities are planning to open in the area around 2025. The relocation of these major units and their thousands of employees will determine how quickly Xiongan’s development proceeds.
Even as China’s economy has slowed during COVID-19 lockdowns and the global downturn, construction of the first phase of Xiongan has marched on: A huge high-speed rail station to connect the city with Beijing opened in 2020, followed by residential slabs, massive underground utility corridors, and the city brain data center, which will serve as the nerve center of the city’s digital systems. The first section, Rongdong, has been mostly completed, with housing for 170,000 people. Media reports of new schools opening show the effort to build high-quality public amenities to attract residents to the city: Branches of Beijing institutions such as Shijia Primary School and Tsinghua University High School are among the new educational institutions being built in Xiongan.
The Foreign Policy piece is OK as a sort of sanitized, high level overview, but lacks several key words (“shoddy,” “rotten,” “unsafe,” “tofu dregs,” etc.) that reflect the grittier reality of Xi Jinping’s dream:
Takeaways:
“This is arguably the world’s biggest rotten tail project.”
“The project, which was billed as a Millennium Project and a major national event, fell apart after only five years.”
“According to the official website of Xiongan New Area, in 2021 the area arranged more than 230 key projects with a planned investment of more than 200 billion RMB. In 2022, 232 key projects were arranged with an investment of another 200 billion RMB and the cumulative total investment has exceeded 700 billion RMB, i.e. nearly 100 billion US dollars.”
Add area rail and road infrastructure investments and the total rises to $150 billion.
“Located 105 kilometers from both Beijing and Tianjin, the new area is positioned to decongest Beijing’s non-capital functions and will host administrative and institutional units, corporate head offices financial institutions, universities, research institutes and other organizations evacuated from Beijing.” I bet workers who have already gone through the expensive and difficult process of buying their own condos in Beijing will just love being forced to move an hour away.
“The initial planning area is about 100 square kilometers, with plans to slowly expand to an eventual area of about 2,000 square kilometers.” 2,000 square kilometers works out to about 772 square miles, or larger than Houston, one of America’s most sprawling cities.
“Average folks have wondered why did the central government put this new area…in a sparsely populated and heavily polluted poor rural area.”
The idea seems to be to bring Beijing, Tianjin and Xiongan into a single economic circle with a population of 130 million.
Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao each decreed creation of their own special areas, and Xi is following in their footsteps.
After the new area was announced, “real estate speculators from all over the country flocked overnight. The local property price soared from 4 000 RMB per square meter to 40,000 RMB, catching up with the first tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.”
There was an explosion of construction, but then it stopped.
“For more than five years, the large-scale construction of the Xiongan New Area didn’t move. The streets were empty, and people from outside had left one after another.”
A high speed rail station said to be the largest in Asia the size of “66 soccer stadiums” has only one train a day.
“In August 2021, the CCP issued a regulation that downgraded Xiongan to a regional level jurisdiction.” So instead of being it’s own special area, it’s now run by Hebei province, which means “this ‘Millennium Project’ is no longer possible, and the central government has simply dumped this hot potato on the local government.”
Official use words like “expedite, start construction, registering land, basically confirmed, etc didn’t explain any more specific progress. This actually allowed the public to read its true meaning, that is there is no substantial progress.”
The same pagoda seems to have been constructed several times.
“No one wants to go there at all. Even if you force them out of Beijing, they still don’t want to go there. There are no actions from the universities either.”
Chinese people think the area has bad “Feng Shui,” and it’s in a low-lying area near a lake that used to be flooded. The local lake and river also have very poor water quality. “However, the [water] treatment project hasn’t yet been completed.”
“Xiongan New Area is like building a mansion in a garbage dump, and people don’t want to live there.”
“More than five years later, no decent state-owned enterprises have really moved to Xiongan.”
“Given China’s objection to objective reality, the only way to make people move to Xiongan is by force. This is what happened in 2017, when the Beijing government forcibly evicted the so-called low-end population and people took to the streets in protest.”
Shenzhen New Area benefited from China’s opening, foreign investment and proximity to Hong Kong. “The dysfunctional mechanism of the CCP which had suppressed economic momentum for decades was released at the moment when the country opened its doors, so that Shenzhen could rise with the momentum.”
By contrast, Xiongan suffers from global economic headwinds and local finances are “very poor.”
Banks poured money into the area, accompanied by corruption. Natives forced out of their homes got low compensation and the new homes were shoddy. Many still haven’t found new homes.
“Videos provided by local residents show that the most common problems with homes are water leaks cracked exterior walls and sinking floors in some homes water leaked all over the floor.” A video shows a stairway turning into a waterfall during heavy rain.
It’s hard to find on Google maps, but I think this spot shows the same cookie cutter buildings seen in the video.
Ghost city, tofu dregs, rotten tail; parts of Xiongan seem to check all three boxes.
*Note: Hebei Province is completely different from Hubei Province further south…
The true character and scope of the harm caused by the unprecedented mass vaccinations for COVID-19 is just now beginning to become clear. Leading scientific journals have finally begun publishing data corroborating what the underground research community has observed over the last two years, especially in relation to complex problems of immune suppression.
Truly concerning numbers pertaining to both births and mortality are also emerging.
At this moment in time, a new, allegedly super-infectious Omicron variant is all over the headlines. A sub-variant of XXB, this strain is said to possess immune escape capabilities of precisely the type that some independent researchers predicted would follow on the heels of the mass vaccinations’ narrow antigenic fixation.
The WHO maintains that worldwide, 10,000 people still die due to Covid every single day, an implausible death toll more than ten times that of an average flu. It reiterates the urgent need for vaccinations, especially in light of China’s reopening and allegedly falsified data on mortality and infections.
The EU has even called an emergency summit in light of the purported Chinese “Covid chaos” that “calls to mind how everything began in Wuhan, three years ago”.
In Sweden, the Minister for Health and Social Affairs has said he cannot rule out new restrictions, and states that everyone must take “their three doses”, since “only” 85% of the population is ‘fully inoculated’.
That such an extensive vaccine coverage has not yielded better results after nearly two years is a remarkable fact. Even more so in light of some individuals receiving four or more repeated exposures to the same vaccine antigen, yet still contracting the disease they are supposedly immunised against.
At the same time, even more ominous warning signs abound.
One such warning sign is the fact that average mortality in many Western states is still at a remarkably high level, in spite of the direct effects of the coronavirus being marginal for more than a year. Data from EuroMOMO indicate a marked excess mortality in the EU for all of 2022, and the German Bureau of Statistics reports that the country’s mortality in October was more than 19% over the median value of the preceding years.
Is this due to Covid, as the WHO’s ’10 000 per day’ figure would seem to indicate?
Blame is placed at the feet of ‘Long Covid‘ as well as the regular acute infections, but according to the EuroMOMO and Our World in Data stats, the bulk of the excess deaths in Europe during 2022 are actually not due to clinically manifest coronavirus infections.
Moreover, we shouldn’t see continued excess deaths from a respiratory virus of this kind after three years of global exposure due to the inevitable consolidation of natural immunity.
If such a situation persists, the hypothetical connection to a vaccine-related immunity suppression that just now has come into focus becomes pertinent to investigate in detail.
If, as has been argued, the vaccinations, and especially the boosters, alter the immune profile of recipients such that Covid infections get ‘tolerated’ by the immune system, it’s possible that vaccinated individuals will tend towards a situation of long-term, repeat infections that do not get cleared, and do not present with obvious symptoms, while still promoting systemic damage.
The literature now indicates an extensive substitution in the vaccinated of virus-neutralising antibodies for non-inflammatory ones, a ‘class switch’ from antibodies that work towards clearing the virus from our system, to a category of antibodies whose purpose is to desensitise us to irritants and allergens.
The net effect is that the inflammatory response to Covid infection gets down-regulated (reduced). This means that full-blown infections will present with milder symptoms, and that they won’t get cleared as effectively (partly since fever and inflammation are essential to your body getting rid of a pathogen).
That these developments alone aren’t cause for an immediate halt to the mass vaccinations, as well as thorough investigations, is astonishing.
There is of course another, and more well-known, potential partial explanation of the surprising excess mortality. We have indications of clotting disorders connected to the Covid vaccines, evident in a new major Nordic study, while repeated studies evidence a clear correlation between heart disease and Covid vaccination (see Le Vu et al., Karlstad et al. and Patone et al.).
A newly published Thai study moreover indicated that almost a third of the vaccinated youth enrolled exhibited cardiovascular manifestations, and a yet unpublished Swiss study suggests that as many as 3% of everyone vaccinated manifest heart muscle damage.
Oh, you’re serious? Let me laugh even harder. “San Francisco panel urges reparations of $5 million per black adult.”
“The embezzlement and fake kidnapping were part of the unraveling of a coal company called Signal Peak Energy that also involved bribery, cocaine trafficking, firearms violations, worker safety and environmental infringements, a network of shell companies, a modern-day castle, an amputated finger and past links to President Vladimir Putin of Russia.” There’s also a weird part…
Virginia rejects Ford battery plant plans over commie ties. “Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who is a potential Republican candidate for the office of US President in 2024, rejected the $3.6 billion investment because it involved a partnership with China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., better known as CATL.” Hey Ford, have you considered possibly not teaming up with commies?
Asianometry has an interesting video up about East Germany expensive, strenuous efforts to catch up to the west in semiconductor manufacturing technology.
Spoiler: They didn’t.
Some takeaways:
“In the late 1980s, the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, went all in on the monumental task of domestic semiconductor production. This semiconductor obsession failed, and the billions of marks spent on it eventually bankrupted the country’s failing economy.” I think he oversells the role the semiconductor push had on bankrupting the economy; everything in late commie East Germany was failing (just like the rest of the Warsaw Pact), they suffered a credit crunch for investment due to tightened western restrictions, couldn’t export Soviet oil as profitably due to the Reagan/Saudi created oil glut, and also were running into hard currency shortages to but the components their manufacturing sector needed to keep exporting.
The East German Uprising of 1953 kicked off what would be a persistent, and ultimately existential problem, for the GDR: Emigration. Throughout its history, its best and smartest people consistently sought a way out to the West. To convince its people to stay, the SED [Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, AKA Socialist Unity Party of Germany] promised a better future through the use of technology. More than the Soviets, East Germany leaned on information technology as a pathway towards economic vitality and a glorious socialist future. The Party’s elites saw themselves locked in a technology race with the capitalists to see who can build a better society. Leader Walter Ulbricht called for an “industrial transformation” with the ultimate aim of “catching up with and surpassing capitalism in terms of technology.” A thriving computer industry was crucial towards making this ideology work. And in order to produce these superior computers, East Germany needed to learn and master microelectronics technology.
“Less than four years after the Americans invented the germanium transistor, East Germany moved quickly to build their own line of first generation semiconductors. In 1952, development work began at the VEB Works for Electrical Components for Communications Technology, or WBN, in the town of Teltow near the city of Berlin. This put them about even with West Germany. The FRG’s first semiconductor factory came about in 1952, built by Siemens.” Indeed, this is very early to get into the semiconductor game. It wasn’t until 1957 that Fairchild Semiconductor, widely considered as Company Zero for America’s semiconductor industry, was founded.
“WBN suffered from a lack of cooperation between its industrial and academic sides. The production teams lacked discipline, hands-on experience, and did not appreciate the scale and difficulty of the task they were facing. In one incident, the team dumped hot ashes right outside a factory window where they were producing a pilot run of semiconductors.” Ouch! A very uncleanroom…
“The state failed to give their young semiconductor team the resources it should have gotten. Administration – their chief accountant, in particular – seemed to care very little for semiconductors. When the team asked for money to purchase felt slippers to prevent static charge buildup in the clean room, their chief accountant denied the request.”
The Soviets didn’t help. “Despite being the GDR’s primary political backer, the Soviets were strangely wary. In 1958, two WBN staff members traveled to the Soviet Union to do technical exchanges. A year later, they came back complaining of limited cooperation. Much of what the Soviets had developed was created for military use. Thusly, the Soviets were concerned that transferring that to the East Germans would leak via scientists defecting to the West.”
They tried to get information from the U.S., but Cold War tech transfer policies were already falling into place. They had better luck in the UK. “Through the contacts of Arthur Lewis, a British Labour Party politician, the delegation saw plants owned by British Philips, Siemens-Edison, and British-Thompson-Houston. The latter is a descendant of the Vickers Company that sold oil equipment to the Soviets in the early 1900s. Just thought that was a nice connection. This visit was very successful. The East Germans learned a whole lot about industrial level semiconductor manufacturing. They even managed to purchase equipment for low-frequency transistors, a trailing edge technology.”
Despite that, the gap grew wider: “In 1958, WBN produced 100,000 germanium diodes, transistors, and rectifiers. Worse yet, some 98% of what they produced eventually needed to be discarded throughout their entire working lives.” Classic commie quality. “That same year in 1958, the United States alone produced 27.8 million transistors. Two years later in 1960, the US grew that production capacity five times over to 131 million.”
“Erich Apel, head of the Economic Commission of the Central Committee Politburo and an economic reformer – wrote in late April 1959: ‘Compared to … the American, Japanese, and West German industry, we lie in a state of backwardness that can scarcely be estimated … this backwardness will not decrease through 1961 at least, but will instead grow. Another inspection in 1960 identified more items of backwardness in semiconductor production. Workers tended to use rules of thumb rather than their instruments to measure. The various factory lines did not cooperate with one another.”
“Interestingly, when reporting these results to the Economic Commission of the Central Committee Politburo, that inspector softened his results. In his notes to state authorities, he said the GDR was 5 to 6 years behind. But in his analysis to the more politically charged Economic Commission, he cut it in half, 3 to 4 years.” Commies always institute thermoclines of truth to avoid being purged.
The brain drain to the west continued. The solution: The Berlin Wall. “For semiconductors however, the Wall pinched off what little technology the GDR had imported from the West.” The solution was to suck up even more to the Soviets, and to spy harder.
In 1963, the aging Walter Ulbricht launched a new initiative – called the New Economy System of Planning – to bring more market elements to the GDR economy. Now industrial groups, not bureaucrats, can actually decide how money can be spent. The reform also elevated the status of technology sectors like semiconductor manufacturing in the economy. R&D spending increased by over a third from 1959 to 1963. In 1965, nearly 40% of the electronics that the GDR produced by value were semiconductors – 82 million marks out of 223 million marks in total. Four years later in 1969, that number grew four-fold. Many of these transistors went into new consumer technical goods like radios, TVs and fridges. In 1971, semiconductor production reached 535 million marks by value. That year, East Germany began producing their first integrated circuits, some 10 years after Texas Instruments did it.
“Strange inequalities in policy planning meant that color televisions were widely available, but consumer items like toothbrushes and toilet paper were in short supply.” Communist planning at its finest!
One day in 1967, the Minister of Electrical Engineering and Electronics showed up to an East German electronics firm with a suitcase full of integrated circuits from TI. He told them to copy them exactly. The Ministry for State Security – better known as the Stasi – had been engaged in scientific and technology espionage since the 1950s – mostly related to atomic engineering and other sciences. Then in 1969, the Stasi’s Scientific and Technical Sector was reorganized and expanded with the goal of acquiring military technologies. After Honecker came into power in 1971, the Stasi’s job shifted from acquiring scientific knowledge to specific technologies – mostly via informants in the West who found and handed the goods over to East Germany. One such informant was Hans Rehder, a physicist working for the West German firms Telefunken and AEG. He handed over technical secrets for over 28 years and was never caught.
“Western companies knew about this copying of course. In one famous example, a GDR chip analyst looking at a stolen chip from the US firm Digital Corporation saw a message n Russian, roughly translating to: ‘When do you want to stop to swipe. Own design is better.'”
Stasi intellectual theft kept them from falling further behind, but couldn’t close the gap. “Because the Stasi were spymasters not technical experts, they frequently asked for the wrong item. Their methods of laundering the technology before passing it on made it harder to understand how to use it. Tightening embargoes from the West also interfered with industrial development. Stolen Western products got progressively older and more expensive to acquire. The embargoes gave other countries the chance to scam the Stasi, adding mark-ups frequently in the range of 30% to 80% to even 100%. This drained the East Germans’ already limited R&D budgets.”
“The wholesale copying also undercut the country’s ability to export its goods abroad. The Stasi did not want other countries to see what they had managed to acquire. And had they tried anyway, sales would have been blocked on patent infringement grounds. And finally, semiconductors were getting to the point that East German technicians struggled to replicate them. As early as 1976, an IC’s physical form no longer yielded secrets on how to produce them.”
“In 1981, with the GDR still about 7-10 years behind the West in microelectronics development, Erich Honecker announced a ten-point program to produce the majority of its semiconductors domestically by 1985. The 1970s were rough years for the GDR. Tighter export bans. The Oil Crises of the 1970s. Heavy borrowing from the West. Declining productivity and worsening competitiveness. It was all weighing heavily – grinding the country’s economy to a halt. Gerhard Schürer, head of the State Planning Commission, convinced Honecker that investing in semiconductors would bring the country out of its economic morass.”
They even struck a deal with Toshiba.
In exchange for 25 million marks, Toshiba – a long running technology partner with the GDR – would furnish the GDR with designs for their 256 kilobyte memory chips along with instructions on how to produce them. At the time, 256-kilobyte was leading edge stuff. The GDR was still struggling to produce 64 kilobyte memory. This would have been a game-changer. But in 1987, Toshiba got caught selling submarine propeller equipment to the Soviet Union. Huge scandal back then. Afraid of getting caught again, Toshiba offered the Stasi a 95% refund to destroy the evidence. [Spy Gerhardt] Ronneberger agreed. So in July 1988, he got the money back and dissolved the chip designs in a vat of acid in front of Toshiba’s people. But never trust a spy! Those were just copies, produced for exactly that purpose.
Finally in September 1988, Zeiss General Director Wolfgang Biermann triumphantly presented Erich Honecker with the first samples of that 1 megabit chip – the U61000. Honecker said that the chips were “convincing proof that the GDR is maintaining its position as a developed industrial country.” This technical “triumph” was the bitterest of them all. In semiconductors, prototypes mean nothing. Production means everything. Dresden produced just 35,000 chips throughout the entirety of 1988 and 1989 with a yield of 20%.
To say this was “piss poor” would be an understatement. Those are ruinous, “fire everyone” numbers for actual semiconductor manufacturers.
They planned to scale up to 100,000 1 megabit chips each year. Toshiba alone produced that many in a single day. Two months later in November 1988, the leading edge moved once more. Toshiba began shipping its 4-megabit DRAM in high volume, seeking to produce a million chips a month by March 1989.
Then history happened. “By then, the East German economy was in shambles, scheduled to default on its debts by early 1990. It never even got there. In May 1989, Hungary opened its borders with Austria and East Germans swarmed through there en route to West Germany. Later in November 1989, a year after its one megabit technical triumph, the Berlin Wall fell.”
East Germany stole as many designs as they possibly could, but they couldn’t steal the intellectual expertise behind the numerous process tweaks, nor the furious swarm of technological innovation drive by Silicon Valley’s capitalist high risk/high reword startup culture that drove Moore’s Law for decades.
Top-down communist command economies never had a chance to keep up.
