Ordinary Chinese have gotten so fed up with the endless Flu Manchu lockdowns that they’ve started mass protests in multiple cities, even going so far as to demand the CCP and Xi Jinping step down.
Some commenters have even suggested that a revolution is the offing. I’ve seen too many hopeful shoots of Democracy crushed in not only China, but also Iran, Russia, Venezuela, etc. to have much optimism on this front. It would be nice to be proved wrong.
So how are Chinese communist authorities fighting the movement? Would you believe with pornbots?
As Chinese citizens take to the streets to protest the county’s “Zero Covid” policies and President Xi Jinping’s lockdowns, searches for names of cities and hashtags regarding the protests on Twitter have been filled with sexually explicit posts and ads for escorts to reportedly block out news of the massive protests.
Searches for the names of major Chinese cities have resulted in a massive spike in content for porn, escorts, and gambling, “drowning out legitimate search results,” wrote Twitter user Air-Moving Device. The account shared a chart showing a massive spike in the number of accounts posting such content on November 28. “Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a significantuptick in these spam tweets.”
For example, searching for the Chinese characters for Shanghai (上海) brings up the following on Twitter:
The combination of pretending to transition to a green energy future combined with dependence on Russian gas and the fallout of the Russo-Ukrainian War has Germany looking at some very tough choices:
“Europeans have chosen to largely remove natural gas from their industrial space, and so we are seeing huge amounts of industrial closures across the entire industrial space.”
“Natural gas isn’t just part of their electricity system, it’s part of their petrochemical system, which is what makes their manufacturing sector possible. So in shutting all this stuff down the Europeans are choosing, maybe not consciously, but they are choosing a general de-industrialization trend for the entire continent.”
“No one is making nitrogen-based fertilizer in Europe anymore. No one is smelting aluminum anymore. A lot of the steel foundries are shutting down.”
And so far it’s a relatively mild winter in Europe. Next year will be worse.
Zeihan talks about how Germany “fudges” some of it’s green energy pledges. (In a previous video he mentioned some bit of legerdemain where they don’t count fossil fuel baseload power that spins up to take over for solar at night.) So exactly what has Germany’s much-vaunted green energy programs accomplished? Not much.
In 2000, Germany obtained 84 percent of its energy from fossil fuels. By 2019, it was 78 percent. As Vaclav Smil pointed out a couple of years ago, at this rate, Germany would still be deriving 70 percent of its energy from fossil fuels by the year 2050.
Sure, Germany hasn’t managed to transition away from fossil fuels, but they have managed to make their energy infrastructure expensive and unreliable…
Much of China’s last two decades of apparent prosperity seems to be an illusion designed to fool both its own people and outside investors. But the Potemkin village of Huaxi takes China’s illusory prosperity to the next level.
“Huaxi in east China, is a mysterious socialist town that once believed that the residents were entitled to extraordinary amenities, including free healthcare, education, luxurious homes, cars, and at least $250,000 in their bank accounts. The so-called richest village in China is now running into debt with villagers waiting in the rain to claim their money back from Huaxi.”
Potemkin prosperity is a poor substitute for an actual productive economy.
Governor Ron DeSantis said in his victory speech that, not only did he win the Florida gubernatorial race, but he has also “rewritten the political map.” It is difficult to argue with that assessment. He beat Democrat Charlie Crist by 20 percentage points and flipped Democratic strongholds such as Miami-Dade County.
A particularly potent force in his campaign has been culture-war issues — battles DeSantis won by going on the offensive. “We fight the woke in the legislature,” he said in his speech. “We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”
As with Trump, DeSantis’s political aggressiveness wins him admirers. The tactics that some conservatives consider morally or philosophically dubious appear only to intensify his popularity.
In March, the Republican Florida legislature passed the Parental Rights in Education Act, preventing teachers from instructing kindergarten through third-grade students in gender identity and sexuality. “I would say when you oppose a parent’s rights and education bill, which prevents six-, seven-, eight-year-olds from having sexuality, gender ideology injected in their curriculum, you are the one that’s waging the culture war,” DeSantis said in defense of the bill. DeSantis also signed the Stop W.O.K.E. (Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act, preventing critical race theory from being promoted or advanced in schools and corporations.
When Walt Disney executives criticized the education law as a “Don’t Say Gay” bill, DeSantis retaliated by questioning whether the corporation’s 50-year-old “independent special district” status should go under “review” to ensure that it is “appropriately serving the public interest.” Charles C. W. Cooke warned about the dangers of this move. Yet, however short-sighted, it was undoubtedly effective culture-war politics. DeSantis’s enemies fell into the trap: Democrats revealed their hypocrisy by rushing to the defense of big business.
DeSantis has also won the PR fight on immigration. His morally dubious decision to fly asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard revealed Democrats’ hypocrisy. His hard line on immigration does not dampen support among Hispanics. According to a Telemundo/LX News poll, DeSantis had a 51 percent to 44 percent lead over Crist among Hispanic voters. A bilingual pollster who conducted the survey explained: “There are lots of Hispanic voters in this state who really like the governor’s style, this strongman who won’t back down.”
On transgenderism, DeSantis has been utterly fearless. He stated that, in children, most “dysphoria resolves itself by the time they become adults” and “it’s inappropriate to be doing basically what’s genital mutilation.” While other Republican states have tried to use legislation to stop gender experiments, DeSantis appointed a state medical board that banned doctors from prescribing puberty blockers, hormones, and gender-transition surgeries. This way, his enemies can’t claim that politicians are interfering in the medical profession. Rather, it’s medical professionals keeping politics out of health care.
FTX’s new CEO and liquidator, John Ray III, who also oversaw the unwinding and liquidation of Enron, admits that “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.”
And just in case his shock at FTX’s fraud of epic proportions was not quite clear enough, he adds that “from compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”
Snip.
Below we excerpt some of the most notable highlights from the affidavit, which we embed at the bottom of the post and which everyone should read to get a sense of just how massive Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud was.
I have over 40 years of legal and restructuring experience. I have been the Chief Restructuring Officer or Chief Executive Officer in several of the largest corporate failures in history. I have supervised situations involving allegations of criminal activity and malfeasance (Enron). I have supervised situations involving novel financial structures (Enron and Residential Capital) and cross-border asset recovery and maximization (Nortel and Overseas Shipholding). Nearly every situation in which I have been involved has been characterized by defects of some sort in internal controls, regulatory compliance, human resources and systems integrity.
Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.
For purposes of managing the Debtors’ affairs, I have identified four groups of businesses, which I refer to as “Silos.” These Silos include:
(a) a group composed of Debtor West Realm Shires Inc. and its Debtor and non-Debtor subsidiaries (the “WRS Silo”), which includes the businesses known as “FTX US,” “LedgerX,” “FTX US Derivatives,” “FTX US Capital Markets,” and “Embed Clearing,” among other businesses;
(b) a group composed of Debtor Alameda Research LLC and its Debtor subsidiaries (the “Alameda Silo”);
(c) a group composed of Debtor Clifton Bay Investments LLC, Debtor Clifton Bay Investments Ltd., Debtor Island Bay Ventures Inc. and Debtor FTX Ventures Ltd. (the “Ventures Silo”);
(d) a group composed of Debtor FTX Trading Ltd. and its Debtor and non-Debtor subsidiaries (the “Dotcom Silo”), including the exchanges doing business as “FTX.com” and similar exchanges in non-U.S. jurisdictions. These Silos together are referred to by me as the “FTX Group.
Each of the Silos was controlled by Mr. Bankman-Fried. Minority equity interests in the Silos were held by Zixiao “Gary” Wang and Nishad Singh, the co-founders of the business along with Mr. Bankman-Fried. The WRS Silo and Dotcom Silo also have third party equity investors, including investment funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds and families. To my knowledge, no single investor other than the co-founders owns more than 2% of the equity of any Silo.
Much, much more at the link, including an eye-dropping, deeply incriminating Twitter thread by founder Sam Bankman-Fried about the step-by-step decisions they made that weren’t really illegal because they had such good intentions.
BlackRock’s energetic focus on ESG investing is affecting its bottom line. The index fund’s performance is deteriorating, and risks are accumulating. In the face of this situation, UBS Wealth Management recently downgraded ratings for BlackRock (NYSE: BLK) by now listing it as a “Neutral” recommendation rather than a “Buy.” The bank also cut the target stock price to $585 from $700.
The new recommendations were made based entirely on BlackRock’s reckless ESG positioning. UBS says that stubborn insistence on this course could also trigger increased regulatory inspections and investor withdrawals.
Thus, the company pressuring countless firms to adopt more “woke” positions has suddenly found a boomerang coming in its direction. Investors and analysts are now telling BlackRock that ESG shenanigans are bad business and want it stopped.
Another one of those things that makes you go “Hmmmm“: “The Funeral Business Is Booming (And Not Because Of COVID)…We’re having to do at one point of time 20 percent more funerals which is unheard of…the third quarter of this year, we did 15% more calls than we did in the third quarter of 2019.”
Jay Leno is expected to make a full recovery after getting seriously burned in a gasoline fire from one of his many cars. Conan O’Brien should call him up and go “Jay, when I said ‘die in a fire,’ I meant it figuratively, not literally!”
“This was a close call,” said one Republican leader in Washington. “We were worried that we would achieve massive victories tonight, but we thankfully snatched defeat from the jaws of victory to achieve a much more proper and sensible red trickle, like the proper gentlemen we are.”
Right after Kherson city was liberated and spans on the Antonivsky and Nova Kakhkovka bridges blown, a whole lot of commenters went “Well, Ukraine obviously isn’t going to try to cross the Dnipro there, it’s too wide.”
The Kinburn Spit is a narrow finger of sand and scrub, barely three miles long, that juts from the wider Kinburn Peninsula into the Black Sea at the mouth of the Dnipro River south of Kherson. It and the adjacent peninsula also are the last parts of Ukraine’s Mykolaiv Oblast that remain under Russian occupation.
Don’t expect that to last. The Kremlin on Wednesday ordered its battered forces on the right bank of the Dnipro to retreat to the river’s opposite bank.
The order came six months after Ukrainian brigades, re-armed with European howitzers and American rocket-launchers, began bombarding Russian supply lines in the south—and two months after those same brigades launched a counteroffensive aimed at liberating Mykolaiv and Kherson Oblasts.
The Ukrainians have the Kinburn Spit in their sights. They’ve got the troops, the equipment … and a plan.
Russian troops seized the Kinburn Spit in mid-June as Russian advances in the south—having already overwhelmed Kherson city—ran into stiff resistance a few miles south of Mykolaiv city. Capturing the spit would turn out to be one of the Russian army’s last victories in the south. The four-month Ukrainian counterlogistics campaign that preceded Ukraine’s southern counteroffensive already was underway.
Kinburn matters. Russian control of the sandy strip “will allow them to exert further control of the Black Sea coast,” the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C. explained in June. For the Ukrainians, Kinburn is a back door—a way to get forces onto the left bank of the Dnipro without crossing the river, likely while under fire.
As far back as April, U.K. intelligence agents were advising their government to support Ukrainian forces in any future attempt to “conduct beach reconnaissance” on the Kinburn Spit. The recon could “Identify good landing locations for a larger assault force for a future counterattack,” the agents explained in a presentation that later leaked to the press.
It’s possible Ukrainian special operations forces riding in rigid-hull inflatable boats began reconnoitering the spit as early as September. In October, video circulated online reportedly depicting the Ukrainian navy’s last remaining big ship, the 240-foot amphibious vessel Yuri Olefirenko, apparently firing rockets at Russian forces on or near the spit.
The Ukrainian military’s southern command on Saturday announced its intention to liberate Kinburn. Within a day, there were videos online possibly depicting Ukrainian commandos riding toward the spit in their small boats.
Here’s a video of Ukrainian forces doing just that:
Looks more like a commando raid or a reconnaissance in force. And here’s a video analyzing Russia defensive position on the Spit:
There are unconfirmed reports of other river crossing zones. I’d take those with several grains of salt. But it seems possible. Indeed, there are reports confirming that Russia has indeed bugged out from towns in Kherson south of the Dnipro, like this video of apparently abandoned posts in Oleshky, directly south of the Antonovsky Bridge:
The Ukrainian Defense Ministry has evidently confirmed Russia’s pullout from the banks of the Dnipro as well:
Russia is preparing defensive positions in Crimea:
Three areas they’ve prepared defensive lines are on the isthmus just south of Perekop, just south of the Chongar Strait, and even on the Arabat Spit, that tiny bit we talked about having a tiny dirt road here. Says Suchomimus: “It’s a bit of preparedness and foresight we haven’t seen from them so far.”
Peter Zeihan thinks that Crimea is so hard to supply that Russia would be better off abandoning it:
I suspect Putin would rather die that give up Crimea voluntarily.
Pooty Poot certainly knows how to make friends and influence people…
Update: Current thinking seems to be that the Polish missile strike was a Ukrainian ground to air missile that went astray trying to intercept a Russian missile.
Yesterday’s post about Russians starting to bug of Kherson Oblast north/west of the Dnipro Rover is already obsolete, as Russia appears to have completed its retreat.
Russia’s military said on Friday it had completed its withdrawal from Kherson, a lightning-fast retreat of tens of thousands of troops across the Dnipro river in the south of Ukraine.
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, one of President Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, on Wednesday ordered troops to leave Kherson in a pullout that allows Ukrainian forces to move closer to Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.
Russia’s defence ministry said all Russian forces and equipment had been transferred to the eastern bank of the Dnipro. It said the withdrawal was completed by 5 a.m. Moscow time (0200 GMT) on Friday.
“The transfer of Russian troop units to the left bank of the Dnipro river has been completed,” the defence ministry said in a statement.
“Not a single unit of military equipment or weapons have been left on the right (western) bank. All Russian servicemen crossed to the left bank,” it added. Russia, it said, had not suffered any loss of personnel or equipment during the withdrawal.
I’m betting that last paragraph is a huge exaggeration, as we already have reports of wounded Russian soldiers being abandoned in the retreat. And there are already videos of captured equipment:
Lots of trophies today. The trophy Russian TOS-A1 "Solntsepek" pulls the trophy tank. The Russian army, as usual, leaves its heavy equipment in working condition. pic.twitter.com/cXBuZ3ehgN
And Russia blew a span out of the Antonovsky Bridge.
It appears that the Nova Kakhkovka Bridge has also been blown:
NOVA KAKHOVKA DAM+LOCK 🧵 /16 It looks like several spans of the bridge along the dam were blown up by Russians during the retreat pic.twitter.com/hmaK13SKNG
Right now the Kherson retreat looks like considerably less of a debacle than the rout in Kharkiv. We’ll see how many troops were captured and how much equipment captured after the dust settles.
Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be on course for a bigger victory in Israel’s fifth election in less than four years than initial exit polls suggested, all three of the country’s main television channels projected Wednesday morning.
His Likud party and its natural allies are currently projected to win 65 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, with 86% of the votes counted as of Wednesday afternoon Israel time.
A coalition of Netanyahu’s Likud, the Jewish nationalist Religious Zionism/Jewish Power bloc, Shas and United Torah Judaism would, on paper, be the most right-wing government in Israel’s history.
This, the 37th, makes the sixth government Netanyahu has led (following the 27th, 32nd, 33rd, 34th, 35th), eclipsed only by Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion’s nine, and Netanyahu is the first to serve three non-consecutive stints in power.
By the time most movies get to a sixth installment, most are going direct to video, but Netanyahu’s pro-security policies have increasingly dominated Israel. Public support for the ever-ephemeral “two state solution” favored by the leftwing opposition has fallen to record lows.
Whoever is running Biden’s foreign policy apparatus seems to be less institutionally hostile to Netanyahu than the Obama Administration was, and Biden met with him earlier this year.
Bibi’s like the Terminator: no matter what the international left throws at him, or how many times he’s been written off for dead, he just keeps coming back.
It occurs to me that the Terminator franchise has also had six films. Let’s hope that Bibi VI is better received than Dark Fate…
I’ve long thought that, based on the fragmentary evidence we have (the huge debt load, the ghost cities, the known mismanagement and calculation problem of planned communist economies, etc.), the size of China’s economy is overstated by 40%. Now, according to the measurements of one pretty good proxy for economic activity, it appears that I was too trusting and optimistic about the size of China’s economy, in that it’s probably overstated by 60%.
Takeaways:
Building on the work (caveat: paywalled) of University of Chicago economist Luis R. Martinez, economist and YouTuber Joeri Schasfoort (guest lecturer at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) calculates that China’s economy is overstated by 60%.
Martinez’s original paper calculates the visible difference between official stated GDP growth in 184 different countries between 1992 and 2008, and compared those numbers to the visible nighttime light from satellite imagery, and mapped the correlation. You know that South Korea/North Korea image comparison? That, but for the entire world, and mapped over time.
“Autocratic countries typically reported a whopping 35% higher GDP growth numbers compared to nighttime lights growth. And for China specifically, Martinez states that, based on his analysis, China’s GDP growth between 1992 and 2008 was likely 4.9% per year, rather than its average reported growth of 6.3%.”
“This would mean that instead of soon becoming the second largest economy in the world, China’s economy is only about a third of the size of the mighty US economy. And it also means that predictions such as those made by billionaire investor Ray Dalio that China is soon to overtake the US as the world’s next superpower are way overblown.”
“For China specifically, Martinez states that, based on his analysis, China’s GDP growth between 1992 and 2008 was likely 4.9% per year, rather than its average reported growth of 6.3%.”
“Based on how much authoritarian countries overstate in GDP growth compared to night light growth, Martinez produced what he calls a GDP deflator. This GDP deflator is basically a number by which to reduce official GDP numbers each year based on how authoritarian a country is using his deflator. We extend Martinez’s analysis to the year 2021, and while between in 1992 and 2021, China reported a sky high GDP growth between 14% and 8%, Martinez’s analysis suggests that China actually only grew between 6% and 2%.”
Still impressive growth by world standards.
“You should take these adjusted numbers with a big grain of salt. But that being said, I do actually think that the adjusted numbers are closer to the truth than the official numbers.”
“China is quite unique in that the central government used to set GDP growth targets for provincial governors. And if any of you ever worked in a company with a growth target, you probably know that while they can be effective, they typically also produce a lot of unwanted side effects.”
“Research has already shown that China’s GDP growth targets led to both wasteful investment projects and, more importantly, to us manipulated GDP numbers. Similarly to Martinez’s study, another economist uncovered that in the years that Chinese provincial governments needed to be selected, there were huge differences between the reported GDP figures for that province and data that could not be manipulated such as electricity consumption.”
“When I myself looked into the nightlife data of a paper published in Nature and compared that to the World Bank GDP data, I found that indeed China has reported much higher GDP growth compared to nightlight growth. And for example, its more democratic also rapidly growing and larger neighbor India. So yeah, there is a lot of evidence that China is manipulating its GDP data just as much, if not more, than other autocratic countries.”
“And this is why, with the caveat that this is an extremely rough calculation, in my opinion, China’s GDP is likely 40% of its official figure.”
(Note: Normally I say “Watch the whole thing.” However, there’s some unrelated tragic news at the very end, so if you’re prone to I Haz A Sadz, you might want to stop at 13:08.)
Here is a moderately in-depth look at China’s current generation of artillery, and how it stacks up to American artillery.
A lot of this is a fairly detailed order-of-battle breakdown of what and how many artillery pieces are assigned to each level of Chinese military organization, which I’m not going to try to summarize here. But here are some of the more interesting takeaways:
China’s artillery mix seems to be between Russia’s “more is more” giant units of towed artillery and America’s largely mobile, increasingly high tech approach.
There are different mixes of self-propelled artillery deployed to north Chinese units than south Chinese units. The north emphasizes larger systems, while the south features smaller, more mobile systems for more rugged terrain. (Remember, China got its ass kicked in the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979.)
Like the U.S., China supports infantry companies and battalions with mortars.
Towed artillery is on its way out of the PLA. They’re even using self-propelled artillery in light units that look like six-wheeled technicals, so they can shoot-and-scoot. These look like they could be pretty cost-effective.
Like the Russians, China has also gone heavy into unguided rockets.
“The Chinese have also adopted a modular pod-based rocket artillery similar to a larger HIMARS, capable of taking different sizes of GPS guided missiles.”
U.S. artillery tends to be longer-ranged than equivalent Chinese, especially when it comes to guided shells.
Old, big Soviet 152mm and 130mm weapons are being replaced with self-propelled 155mm platforms (PLZ-05, PCL-181).
The PHL-03 is an MLRS firing unguided rockets up to 300km.
The newer PJL-16 fires unguided 300mm, guided 370mm, and 750mm guided missiles using a pod system. The accuracy range on the guided munitions are reportedly 30m, as opposed to the HIMARS 8m.
China has a loading crane system for their advanced MLSR which is better than the Russian system (still loading each tube manually), but not as good as HIMARS self-loading pod system.
The high tech Chinese system isn’t as good as the best U.S. systems yet, but they seem to be catching up. However, I wonder how well they can continue to build high tech weapons guidance system under the new semiconductor sanctions. GPS is an old technology, so presumably China build guidance systems in their older fabs guided missiles using their own GPS-like BeiDou system. But the question is whether they can keep even the older fabs running without U.S. support and inputs, and if they can, how high a priority such munitions will be under the new constraints. There are only so many wafer starts to go around…
