In addition to getting over a cold, I spent most of the non-work day trying to assemble a pressure washer so I could attach a water-jetting attachment so I can clean out a blocked exterior line so I can run my dishwasher without it overflowing my sink.
The result of all this labor is that I still need to call a plumber. So enjoy yet another abbreviated LinkSwarm.
Hmmmmmm! “Hunter Biden Business Partner Flips, Now ‘Cooperating’ With GOP Investigators.”
Eric Schwerin, a close business associate of Hunter Biden who also dealt with Joe Biden’s business and tax affairs, is now working with House GOP investigators looking into Biden family dealings – particularly in Ukraine and China, where the family collected millions of dollars, Just the News reports.
Eric Schwerin, a close business associate of Hunter Biden who also dealt with Joe Biden’s business and tax affairs, is now working with House GOP investigators looking into Biden family dealings – particularly in Ukraine and China, where the family collected millions of dollars, Just the News reports.
“He is cooperating with us,” House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) told the outlet.
“His attorneys and my counsel are communicating on a regular basis. Now, I feel confident that he’s going to work with us, and provide us with the information that we have requested,” Comer continued. “I think that Schwerwin is going to be a very valuable witness for us in this investigation.”
Of note, Schwerin, the former president of Hunter Biden’s now-dissolved investment firm Rosemont Seneca Partners, visited the White House at least 19 times from 2009 to 2015, according to White House visitor log records reviewed by The Epoch Times and first reported by the New York Post.
Patrick L. Wojahn, the Democratic mayor of College Park, MD, resigns over child porn charges. Name that party: His political affiliation only shows up in the 19th paragraph of the piece. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Illnesses to Democratic senators Dianne Feinstein and John Fetterman mean that Democrats have temporarily lost their senate majority. That will teach you to rely to Octagenerians and visibly impaired stroke victims to carry your water. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta submits $5.5 billion bid for NFL’s Commanders.” He should move them to Austin and change the name back to the Redskins, just to spite them.
Did MacKay get Tulipmania wrong? It turns out he was also an enthusiast for the far more destructive “Railway Bubbles” that struck England in the 19th century.
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…
As revelations continue to roll out about a third set of classified documents being illegally kept by Joe Biden, and crackhead son Hunter Biden paying The Big Guy $50,000 a month to rent his house (which would have meant that Hunter only got to keep $33,333 of his Burisma salary…assuming there was no other graft being passed on) a question occurs to me: Which Democratic Kingmaker(s) want to force Biden out of office?
With midterms safely past, news about the classified documents (which was known in advance of the midterms) was allowed to leak out, indicating that whoever arranged Slow Joe’s greased-skid path to the White House has lost confidence in his ability not to screw things up so badly that Democrats get slaughtered in 2024. And this despite the decided unpopularity both of VP Kamala Harris and backup catspaw Pete Buttigieg. My working theory is that the same people who installed Biden will try to install Gavin Newsom in 2024.
But the question is who is calling the shots in the Democratic Party? George Soros? Barack Obama? Valerie Jarrett? Ron Klain? Randi Weingarten? (I might previously have included Tom Steyer on this list, but if he really were calling the shots he wouldn’t have tried that disasterous presidential run.)
If you have good theories and solid evidence on who is actually calling the shots in the Democratic Party these days (and thus the likely candidate for wanting to push Biden out), let me know in the comments below. As Instapundit noted, those that foisted Joe Biden on us have an awful lot to answer for…
Early on, a lot of observers predicted that Russia, with it’s vast store of Soviet-era aircraft, would quickly achieve air-superiority over Ukraine. That hasn’t been the case.
This video from the British Imperial War Museum lists some reasons why.
Takeaways:
They failed to hit Ukrainian aircraft on the ground in the opening phases of the war.
A “great deal of mismanagement, kleptocracy, you know, favored projects over some kind of strategic effect.” Note how Putin is always announcing some sort of awesome wonderwaffen while neglecting basic needs like logistics.
“The level of corruption in Russia itself has had an impact on its ability to have a tactical or even strategic effect without support from the air. Russia’s ground forces have been largely unable to mount effective combined arms operations.”
“The key reason for Russia’s inability to effectively use its air force has been its failure to take out Ukraine’s mobile surface to air missile systems. They have been unable to suppress enemy air defenses.”
Ukraine made an early effort to obtain SAM systems from the west.
Both mobile tracked systems like S-300 and MANPADS have been used.
Failure to achieve air superiority has both sides investing in drones.
“What you do is you flood the airspace, almost like a denial of service attack, as we see on the Internet. As you attack a server, for instance, by having so many pings against it, it essentially shuts down the server. And what we see in the case of Russia is that it’s doing the same thing. It’s trying to flood the air defense systems.”
“The relatively low cost of these drones is one of the main reasons for Russia to deploy them, and in such numbers. Each drone reportedly costs around $20,000. And so losing an expensive advance guided missile to these drones is not an ideal strategy for Ukraine.”
One reason not covered: Russia seems to have used up a good portion of it’s high tech weapons in the opening phases of the war, and western sanctions mean that it can’t easily replace them. Sophisticated fighter bombers are a whole lot less effective when they’re reduced to dropping gravity bombs rather than guided munitions.
Greetings, and welcome to a Friday LinkSwarm…on Friday! What are the odds?
More dispatches from the Biden Recession: “Homebuyers are GONE.” Home sales are cratering nationally, companies that bought up lots of properties are slashing prices, and the number of homes being built is also cratering.
From the same guy: The 10 locations housing prices will crash the most. #5? Austin. “This is a market in absolute free-fall.” I know prices in my neighborhood have probably lopped off a good $100,000 or so, forcing me to rely on my vast book holdings to remain a millionaire…
The other day, I saw on Twitter someone saying that they are a good liberal and all that, but they are really worried about what they’re seeing regarding the emerging culture of the medical and teaching professions encouraging children to transition to the opposite sex. “But,” said this person, “I don’t want to surrender to a moral panic.”
I submit to you that a moral panic is precisely the correct response to this egregious phenomenon. That is, what is happening is so hideous, and so widespread, and the reaction by most people to this point has been so muted to non-existent, that if you are not panicking, you are not paying attention.
Most people are not on Twitter, and if you’re one of these people, you may not be aware of the extent of the insanity. The media are not covering it, of course. It falls to badasses like Matt Walsh, Chaya Raichik (who runs the Libs Of Tik Tok account), Christina Buttons, and Chris Elston, the guy who runs the Billboard Chris website and Twitter account, to sound the alarm.
The things they document are not nut-picking (the practice of finding extreme weirdos, and falsely using them as an example of the whole). They are completely mainstream. These are things that, if we had a functional media instead of a Narrative-massaging industry, would be widely reported, and discussed intensely.
The Left’s agenda to groom your children has taken another turn. Various states across America have begun implementing laws and policies to allow children to make healthcare decisions without a parent or guardian’s consent — and the medical industry is promoting it. Many of these states are using these new laws to allow for drastic medical decisions to be made without parental consent including hormone therapy, gender reassignment surgery, and medicated mental health treatment.
In Washington, children as young as 13 are now allowed to undergo gender reassignment surgery and other questionable medical treatments without parental consent.
One Washington dad alleged in a viral TikTok video that a school gave his 15-year-old child antidepressants without informing him. Sounds completely insane and illegal, right? Well . . . it sounds that way, but it isn’t. Under Washington law, this is 100% legal and is allegedly being carried out by schools.
New York has hopped on the bandwagon of removing parents from the treatment room as well. New York-Presbyterian recently sent out emails to their patients explaining that accounts for 12-17-year-olds must be updated to reflect the adolescent’s personal email address as the primary contact as New York State law allows children “to keep their sensitive medical information private and to consent to some of their own medical treatment.”
Twelve-year-old children will now have the ability to be the primary decision-maker for many of their medical treatments and procedures. Children will also have the ability to completely revoke medical record access for their parents or guardians. 12-year-old children who can barely do their own laundry now have authority over their healthcare.
Snip.
One concerned parent in Kennebunk, Maine shared photos with us of a medical questionnaire for patients 12 years of age and older which read “To be filled out by patient only.” The questionnaire included questions about sexuality, asking children what gender they’re attracted to, and if the child has ever been in a romantic relationship or had sex. Separate questions ask the children if they’ve ever had questions about their gender identity and what their preferred pronouns are.
The parent spoke to me regarding the questionnaire and stated her child was given the forms right after he turned 13. Naturally, her son was uncomfortable and confused by the questions and asked his mom for help. However, the mom claims the doctor made her leave the room and refused to allow her to be present while her son was answering the questionnaire.
Why would a doctor need to secretly know the sexual preference and gender identity that a 13-year-old child claims without his mom present? Why would any child be required to share answers to all these invasive questions and bar any parental involvement?
It’s not just Maine, Arizona, New York, and Washington — the removal of parents from important decisions in their children’s lives is becoming a nationwide policy trend aggressively pushed by the Left.
Given how much Libs of TikTok has uncovered of the groomer agenda, it’s no wonder that Facebook has banned her:
JUST IN: Facebook permanently banned Libs of TikTok on Wednesday evening and gave absolutely no reason why https://t.co/m6F3wIdzlZ
“Austin Fire Department Chaplain Fired over Blog Post Objecting to Males in Women’s Sports.” No surprise to followers of Austin politics, given the way their union has been taken over by the radical left.
To the great consternation of liberal Democratic mayors in the northeast, the governors of Texas and Arizona continue to send busloads of illegal migrants to New York and Washington to lessen the burdens on their states and draw more attention to the Biden border crisis. This has put the municipal governments of these self-defined sanctuary cities in a bit of a tough position politically. They are supposed to represent bastions of hope for the migrants and freedom from the “oppression” of ICE and the Border Patrol. But now that the migrants are arriving in larger numbers and doing so in a very public way, it’s becoming clear that this is a problem that the mayors were not prepared to handle. As Charles Lipson explains in Newsweek today, these so-called sanctuary city claims were clearly more of a case of virtue signaling than anything else, but when the cost of invoking such policies began to rise, the backlash came quickly.
I still don’t understand Obama’s deep infatuation with Iran’s mullahs, or why he sent them pallets-full of currency, or why he desperately wanted to get nuclear technology to Iran. But I suspect his enthusiasm for providing nuclear technology to Iran was in equal proportion to his enmity toward Israel.
So how was the American left supposed to keep championing Mr. Rushdie when Barack Obama, their Lightbringer, was such a fan of the mullahs who wanted Rushdie dead? Barack Obama had taken American tax dollars and sent it to the mullahs so that they could then turn around and use that money to pay the bounty to whomever successfully pulled off the fatwa against Rushdie. To stay true to Obama, America’s liberal elites had to now ally themselves with the men trying to murder Rushdie.
Conservatives, of course, always supported Rushdie’s right to free speech and always decried the fatwa on him. But for those who matter most in elite society, the fatwa now reflected poorly on Rushdie, not those who imposed the fatwa.
Rushdie was abandoned by the left, because they were now aligned with the mullahs who wanted him dead.
Over in London, unions are working on their Winter of Discontent cosplay by launching a Tube strike.
Families are getting the hell out of north Portland due to the huge increase in drug-addicted transients ts infecting their neighborhood. This is your city on social justice.
Turkey’s wild and crazy president Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues his innovative “lower interest rates during hyperinflation” gambit. Result? The Lira has crashed to an all time low.
Remember San Angelo police chief Tim Vasquez, who accepted bribes via gigs for his Earth, Wind & Fire cover band Funky Munky? Well he just got sentenced to 15 years in the slammer. I guess he’s no longer a shining star…
Also on the crime beat: Charges filed in Whitey Bulger whacking. “Fotios Geas, Paul J. DeCologero and Sean McKinnon have been charged with crimes related to the murder of Whitey Bulger.”
More New York Times editorial judgment on display: “NYT Cuts Ties With Reporter Who Called For ‘Killing,’ ‘Burning’ Jews ‘Like What Hitler Did.’” The surprise is that they actually fired her. How do you think that conversation went? “Sure, lots of us have called for death to the Jews, but the ‘burning’ part just crosses the line…”
The Biden Recession continues to wreck the pocketbooks of Americans, EU economies are sucking even worse than ours, more Bidens Behaving Badly, and unlimited abortion is not nearly as popular among the American public as it is among New York Times staffers.
Support for unlimited abortion is deeply unpopular:
New Harvard/Harris poll: Huge super-majority of Americans favor 15-week abortion bans in states. Women more likely than men to favor such restrictions; men more likely to support no limitations. Just 10% of respondents agree with federal Dems' 9-month-abortion radicalism: pic.twitter.com/wyOzUPg9uE
Democrats are just tired of Joe Biden and of having to explain away his poor performance. Since Biden was elected, the only thing that has gone right is that the Covid-19 pandemic effectively ended and the unemployment rate has remained low. Inflation is out of control, gas prices are at record highs, grocery bills are skyrocketing, the stock market is getting battered and people’s 401(k)s are shrinking, crime remains high, mass shootings keep bedeviling America’s public spaces, Russia’s invading Ukraine, there’s a global food and commodity crisis, and the Taliban is running Afghanistan and oppressing women again. Democrats are apoplectic that the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, a New York State gun law, and the EPA’s right to regulate carbon emissions without explicit approval from Congress. Parents are up in arms, the teachers’ unions look like callous fools who kept schools closed and harmed a generation of schoolchildren, and “abolish the police” looks like a suicidal public policy. Republicans notice that waves of illegal immigrants headed north shortly after Biden’s inauguration and haven’t stopped coming since.
You didn’t even mention the Social Justice insanity and all the transexual madness.
That New York Times poll found that 64 percent of Democrats want a different presidential nominee in 2024. Nobody’s willing to cover for this guy anymore; no one is inclined to avert their eyes when Biden or his wife blurts out something tone-deaf now.
There are some of us who would argue that Joe Biden has always been an insecure, abrasive, presumptuous, disingenuous, demagogic, insufferable blowhard who was largely protected by a cozy, all-too-friendly relationship with a press inclined to airbrush his glaring character faults, presenting him as a wacky neighbor or a kindly, ice-cream loving grandpa.
What we see now is what happens when much of the national media, the Democratic Party establishment, and liberal interest groups stop playing along with the narrative that Biden is a wiser, sharper, kinder, more energetic and sensitive man than he is. And the truth isn’t pretty.
Speaking of unwanted Bidens: “Hunter Biden could face prostitution charges for transporting hookers across state lines and disguising checks to them as payments for ‘medical services.'” I’ll believe Hunter Biden prosecution when I see it. Also, I’ve been treating the 4Chan “Hunter Biden iPhone leak” with a certain amount of skepticism. Certainly the Hunter laptop revelations were real, and Hunter is a big enough scumbag to do the the things alleged iPhone leak materials depict. But I try to be cautious about anything that fits too neatly into my preconceptions. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
“Left-Wing Nonprofit Scores $171.7 Million-$1 Billion Government Contract To Help Illegal Immigrants Avoid Authorities.”
A liberal non-profit group has been given a taxpayer-funded government contract worth at least $171.7 million — which could potentially reach just under $1 billion — for assisting illegal immigrant minors in avoiding capture or incarceration by U.S. Border Patrol and state officials.
The Department of the Interior was the awarding agency and “The Vera Institute of Justice,” based out of New York — which supports the “defund the police” movement and has lax views on immigration enforcement — was the beneficiary.
Thanks in part to a lack of zoning, Houston builds housing at nearly three times the per capita rate of cities like New York City and San Jose. It isn’t all just sprawl either: In 2019, Houston built roughly the same number of apartments as Los Angeles, despite the latter being nearly twice as large. This ongoing supernova of housing construction has helped to keep Houston one of the most affordable big cities in the U.S., offering new arrivals modest rents and accessible home prices even amid seemingly endless demand.
Houston is by no means a model for planning. Like every other Sun Belt city, it struggles with segregation and sprawl. Yet its continued success as one of America’s most affordable and prosperous cities reveals the workability—indeed, the desirability—of non-zoning. Houston is a profoundly weird place, resistant to seductive oversimplifications. But it provides insight into what comes after the arbitrary lines that have misshapen our cities—and how we might get there.
So why didn’t Houston adopt zoning like every other U.S. city? The answer comes down partly to process. Unique among major cities, Houston subjected zoning to a citywide vote. While most city councils had, historically, quietly adopted zoning after a few perfunctory public hearings, the Bayou City invited voters to decide on zoning in 1946, 1962, and 1993. Voters rejected it each time—a reality that calls into question the often-postulated popularity of zoning.
Zoning critics rightly dispensed with the comforting myths surrounding zoning—that its purpose was to merely rationalize land use—and zeroed in on its tendency to restrict new housing construction, limit access to opportunity, institutionalize segregation, and force growth outward. Far from being duped, Houston’s working-class residents exhibited a subtler understanding of the purposes of zoning than many contemporary planners and rejected it accordingly.
But the answer to why Houston remains unzoned also comes down to politics. Zoning proponents didn’t merely lose the referendums—they were also tactfully bought off by being allowed to have something resembling zoning in their immediate vicinity. Indeed, the dark little secret of non-zoning in Houston is that it depends on a system of land-use regulations known as deed restrictions, which empower certain communities—principally middle- and upper-class homeowners—to effectively “opt out” of non-zoning, writing their own land-use rules for their own neighborhoods. In exchange, Houston is able to protect the vast majority of the city from the types of arbitrary-use distinctions, density limits, and raucous public hearings that cause so much harm in every other U.S. city. That is to say, in exchange for respecting pockets of private land-use regulation, Houston is able to grow, adapt, and evolve like no other city.
Deed restrictions are private, voluntary agreements among property owners—typically the homeowners of a particular subdivision or neighborhood—regulating how they can and cannot use their land. These rules are literally tied to the deed, meaning that a property owner must agree to them as a condition of the sale. Since the failed 1962 zoning referendum, the city has enforced these agreements on behalf of the relevant parties, refusing to issue permits that run afoul of their provisions and bringing legal action against violators.
Is this system of publicly enforced deed restrictions “basically zoning,” as some might argue? On the one hand, deed restrictions—like zoning—demarcate specified areas subject to a distinct set of stricter land-use rules. Both zoning and deed restrictions in Houston are enforced by the government, principally with the aim of propping up home values and maintaining a certain quality of life. Many deed restrictions even have rules banning apartments and enforcing a strict two-and-a-half-story height limit.
Yet, the similarities end there, and Houston’s system of deed restrictions is a significant improvement over zoning. For starters, deed restrictions only cover an estimated quarter of the city, largely in areas with low-rise, detached, single-family housing. Industrial areas, commercial corridors, mixed-use and multifamily neighborhoods, urban vacant lots, and yet-to-be-developed greenfields are virtually never subject to their provisions. This means that roughly three-quarters of Houston—including its more dynamic sections—are largely free to grow without anything even resembling zoning holding them back.
Another key difference is that deed restrictions must be voluntarily opted in to. This serves to discipline deed restrictions in a way that is rarely true of zoning: If the rules are stricter than what prospective homebuyers might prefer, or not strict enough, or simply focus on the wrong concerns, this may translate into lower home values. This in turn nudges homeowners to think through the optimal form of land-use regulation to a degree that rarely happens with zoning.
After deciding to let drug-abusing transients use their restrooms, Starbucks is now closing 16 stores because of rising violence, and the fact that transients are shooting up in their restrooms. Golly, who could have possibly seen that coming?
Another Texas school superintendent has stepped down amid criticism from parents concerned about liberal indoctrination in their children’s classrooms.
At a special meeting Monday afternoon, Clear Creek Independent School District’s board of trustees accepted the retirement of Superintendent Eric Williams, effective in January 2023.
Conservative parents in the Houston-area district had complained that Williams, who started in early 2021, was subjecting their students to liberal ideologies he brought from his former job as superintendent of
Lefty sorts are always whining that other countries have high speed rail networks and we don’t. Many point to China’s extensive network of high speed rail as what we should be doing.
Tiny problem: China’s high speed rail network is a giant, unprofitable sinkhole of $1.8 TRILLION worth of debt.
Some take-aways:
The average operating loss for the system is $24 million per day.
The official amount for China National Railway debt for high speed rail is $900 billion, but since roughly half of the debt comes from local governments, the total is probably closer to $1.8 trillion.
For comparison sake, $1.8 trillion is about South Korea’s entire yearly GDP.
“Shanghai, the richest city in China, has a total GDP of $600 billion in 2020, which means that even the whole year of Shanghai’s GDP won’t be able to cover the debt of China National Railway.”
It’s extensive: 37,900km, nearly double the length from 2015.
Return on high speed rail investment is only about 2%, and the bulk of bond payments for loans are coming due over the next few years. “Cash flow from railway transportation revenue isn’t enough to cover the operating costs, let alone the ability to pay the debt and interest.”
Local government debt levels are around 100%.
“More than 85% of the funds raised through urban investment bonds are earmarked for repaying old debts with new ones.”
Even the most profitable high speed rail stretch, Beijing to Shanghai, only earns a return on investment of 5%.
Japan’s successful high speed rail network serves three metropolitan areas (Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka) that have 55% of that nation’s population.
“A professor at the School of Economics and Management of Beijing Jiaotong University concluded that the operating costs are only just covered when the transport density of a high-speed rail line reaches 36 million passenger kilometers per kilometer. In China the average transport density is only about 17 million passenger kilometers per kilometer.”
High speed rail can’t transport heavy freight.
“The Lanzhou Uramuchi HSR in western China can run more than 160 trains per day. In reality, this route only runs four trains per day.”
High speed rail occupancy rate is only 30%, and is still too expensive for most Chinese to use.
High speed rail construction has squeezed out much-needed construction of regular rail. “China’s rail freight capacity can’t meet market demand. China’s market share of road freight turnover has risen rapidly to 49% market share in 2016.” China rail has jacked up freight costs to make up for losses on high speed rail.
China’s freight trucks get overloaded all the time.
China’s containerized shipping accounts for 40% of global trade, but “the proportion of China’s sea rail intermodal transport volume in 2017 was only about 2.5 percent.” 84% of port containers go out by road.
So why all the money poured into high speed rail? Opportunities for corruption.
Officials see the high-speed rail project in which China is involved as a lucrative opportunity. China’s former minister of railways, known as the father of high-speed rail, was sentenced to death for corruption. Emerging industries such as high-speed rail, which offer both substantial commercial value and political achievements for local officials, have enormous room for corruption. In a systemically corrupt environment white elephant projects, that is a large project that falls significantly short of its goals, and the costs of upkeep outweigh its usefulness, are favored by many officials and businessmen looking to make a fortune. The vast majority of high-speed railways around the world can’t make ends meet on passenger revenues alone to cover their construction and operating costs. Most operate at a loss.
In light of all that, why do American leftists keep complaining about America’s lack of high speed rail? Simple: It’s the corruption, stupid. High speed rail construction offers boundless opportunities for graft and corruption, and refusing to build any keeps them from getting their snouts into another giant trough of taxpayer money…
(I didn’t expect this past week to become a string of “China’s economy is smoke and mirrors all the way down” posts, but I keep running into more examples.)
Several previous LinkSwarms have reported on the burgeoning Harris County corruption scandals (many reported by Holly Hansen) involving corrupt no-bid contracts and FBI raids. Now the scandal has finally resulted in indictments.
Three employees of Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo have been indicted by a grand jury on charges related to how they helped award a contract for COVID-19 vaccine outreach last year.
The Harris County district clerk lists two felony counts each for chief of staff Alex Triantaphyllis, policy director Wallis Nader and policy aide Aaron Dunn. The charges are misuse of official information and tampering with a government record.
The charges add weight to a scandal Hidalgo has attempted to dismiss as politically motivated, and they threaten to tarnish her image as an ethically minded public servant as she seeks reelection this year. Hidalgo is widely seen as a rising star in the Texas Democratic Party and a future statewide candidate.
The three employees were part of a selection committee to choose a vendor for a COVID-19 vaccine outreach campaign Hidalgo wanted. The committee, which also included members of the county health department, unanimously awarded an $11 million contract to Elevate Strategies, a small political consulting firm owned by Felicity Pereyra, who has previously worked on Democratic campaigns.
Republicans have seized on this as evidence of corruption, alleging without evidence [Ahem – LP] that Hidalgo was funneling money to help the Democratic Party build relationships with voters. Hidalgo accused Republican county commissioners of spreading conspiracy theories, though she agreed to cancel the contract in September because she said it had become too politicized.
Court records filed by the Texas Rangers, who are assisting prosecutors, suggest the inquiry focuses on whether Hidalgo’s office inappropriately involved Pereyra in designing the bid proposal she would later win.
My working assumption is that any time you see smoke like this, the fire is almost invariably channeling taxpayer money to the pockets hard-left Democratic Party cronies.
When Holly has a piece up on the story I’ll link it here.
Edited to Add: Holly’s piece is now up, and provides important context left out of other stories.
The affidavits also allege that in April 2021, after the University of Texas (UT) Health Science Center earned a higher score at a lower cost than Elevate Strategies, Triantaphyllis texted Nader that they needed to “slam the door shut on UT.” The selection committee later instructed purchasing agent Dwight Dosplauf to disqualify UT for underperforming on another project.
In August of 2021, The Texan first reported that Harris County had awarded an $11 million vaccine outreach contract to Pereyra’s Elevate Strategies. Prior to founding the company in 2019, Pereyra had previously served as the deputy campaign manager for county Commissioner Adrian Garcia (D-Pct. 2). Pereyra had also been with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and worked with the Democratic National Committee.
During the August 26, 2021 meeting of the commissioners court, Hidalgo accused Commissioner Jack Cagle (R-Pct. 4) of telling a “bold-faced lie” after he posed questions about the “one-woman firm” handling the contract.
Following Monday’s indictments, Cagle said on social media that he “took no pleasure in being right about this.”
“This is a major black eye for Harris County. Now it’s time for the courts to sort it out.”
Last September, emails obtained by The Texan showed that Dunn, Nader, and Triantaphyllis had instructed Dopslauf to revise vendor experience requirements for the vaccine outreach project. Documents obtained by FOX 26 Houston also showed that UT had earned a score of 240 and bid $7.5 million compared to Elevate Strategies’ score of 204 with a cost estimate of $19 million. Some time before the project award, Elevate Strategies lowered the cost to $10.9 million.
Even before the scoring of proposals, however, on January 14, 2021, Hidalgo had texted about the scope of a project mentioning “Felicity,” and Triantaphyllis later clarified to Nader, saying, “She was trying to add to Felicity’s scope relating to engaging community groups and stuff.”
Now that the Hunter Biden dam has finally burst for the MSM, we’re finally getting the “Hey, the Biden family sure seems to be involved in a lot of shady business deals” stories we should have gotten well before the 2020 election if the media weren’t so in the tank for Democrats.
While conservative heat has for three years focused on the past business activities of President Biden’s son Hunter, a key Senate Republican told CBS News this week that newly obtained banking records raise similar concerns about first brother James Biden.
“We have people with the Biden name, dealing with Chinese business people that have a relationship to the Communist Party,” Senator Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told CBS News senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge. “I think James Biden was very much a part of this.”
Bank records released by Republican senators this week indicate James Biden’s company, the Lion Hall Group, received payments from a Chinese-financed consulting group in 2018, before his brother Joe announced he was running for president. Grassley says that same year James Biden and the president’s son, Hunter, received monthly retainers totaling $165,000 — $100,000 to Hunter and $65,000 to James.
Grassley said his team obtained the records directly from the bank where the consulting group did business. He has spent three years investigating and described James and Hunter Biden’s business dealings as “very concerning.”
Really, who of us hasn’t received $65,000 in monthly consulting fees from a communist Chinese company?
In a September 2020 report with Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, Grassley alleged Hunter, James, and James’s wife Sara tapped into a line of credit Hunter set up with a Chinese business executive to purchase more than $100,000 in airline tickets, hotels and restaurants.
Newly released records from Republican investigators show what appears to be the 2017 application for that $99,000 line of credit bearing the signatures of Hunter Biden and the Chinese executive.
Hunter gets a $99,000 expense account. Meanwhile, HR rejects your expense report for spending $26 on lunch.
“Joe Biden’s Released Tax Returns Don’t Explain Millions In Income. Where Did It Come From?”
In the week prior to the presidential election, I wrote a piece that asked the question, “Where Is Hunter Biden’s Money?” It was an important question then, even more so now. Given the legacy media’s recent validation of Hunter’s laptop that discussed a slice of equity planned for the “Big Guy” in a deal that involved an entity controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), we should know if any money from it (or other foreign sources) ended up in Joe Biden’s pocket, but we don’t.
Recall that despite then-presidential candidate Biden having bragged that he had released his tax returns with what his team called “a historic level of transparency,” the truth is that he only released his individual returns. Those returns provided no detail regarding the source of most of his income, dollars that flowed to him and his wife Jill by way of S-corporations they set up shortly after his departure from the office of vice president. Those entities, CelticCapri Corp (his) and Giacoppa Corp (hers), contained more than $13 million of the $17 million the couple had reported in income after Biden left office, most of it in the first year (2017).
The same media that ignored Hunter’s laptop has shown a complete incuriosity about these entities, accepting the premise that Joe and Jill raked in $13 million from their book deal to generate their huge increase in income. We simply don’t know if that’s true, though. What we do know is that their book sales were dismal.
Perhaps sensing smoke starting to build just before the election, USA Today published a “fact check” piece that attempted to support that the Bidens earned “$15.6 million … from speaking fees and book deals” in the years 2017 through 2019 and that “more than $10 million of that total income was profits from Biden’s memoir ‘Promise Me, Dad’ and $3 million in profits from Jill Biden’s book.”
Follow the source link provided to that $10 million number, though, and you’ll end up at Joe Biden’s campaign website with financial disclosure links to only their individual returns — no S-corporation tax returns. So, in reality, readers were left with a smokescreen. (Now the financial disclosure links for 2016, 2017, and 2018 have even been changed to connect to a Democratic National Committee fundraising site via ActBlue rather than the tax documents.)
I noted back in 2020 that, “While (Joe Biden’s) financial disclosures reasonably support the $2.7 million of net income reported by CelticCapri in 2018, a notable $8.7 million gap exists between its $9.5 million net income in 2017 and the $809,709 of disclosed income in that year from book tour and related speaking events. Since his disclosure covers only part of 2017, we lack the insight into other income that may explain it.”
Enter (yet again) Hunter and China.
Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., recently showed proof of payments from what they said were CCP-controlled firms “that prove just how connected the Bidens were and how compromised President Biden probably is.” An August 2017 wire receipt showed $100,000 sent from CEFC Infrastructure Investment to Owasco, and a copy of a November 2017 check from CEFC Limited revealed $1 million paid to Hudson West III, LLC. Both recipient entities were tied to the president’s son.
Did any of that money, or other overseas income, go to Joe or Jill? We would know if the president provided a copy of their S-Corp. tax returns with all partner K-1’s that flowed through them. But the only detail we have is aggregate numbers reported on the couple’s individual returns.
President Biden, in 2017, wrote a college recommendation letter for the son of a Chinese executive who did business with Hunter Biden, according to emails reviewed by Fox News Digital.
The president has repeatedly denied discussing Hunter’s business ventures with his son.
Fox News Digital obtained emails between Hunter Biden and his business associates involved in his firm Rosemont Seneca’s joint venture with Chinese investment firms Bohai Capital and BHR.
Hunter held a 10% stake in BHR as recently as last year, the White House previously acknowledged. Hunter’s attorney told the New York Times in November that he had since divested.
In an email dated Jan. 3, 2017, and sent to Hunter Biden and his business associates Devon Archer and Jim Bulger, CEO of BHR Jonathan Li writes:
“Gentlmen[sic], please find the attached resume of my son, Chris Li. He is applying the following colleges for this year,” Li writes, listing Brown University, Cornell University, and New York University.
Remember how Biden swore up and down he never interacted with Hunter’s business partners?
In confirming that federal prosecutors are treating as “authenticated” the Biden emails, the Times story applies the final dollop of clown makeup to Wolf Blitzer, Lesley Stahl, Christiane Amanpour, Brian Stelter, and countless other hapless media stooges, many starring in Matt Orfalea’s damning montage above (the Hunter half-laugh is classic, by the way). All cooperated with intelligence officials to dismiss a damaging story about Biden’s abandoned laptop and his dealings with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma as “Russian disinformation.” They tossed in terms thought up for them by spooks as if they were their own thoughts, using words like “obviously” and “classic” and “textbook” to describe “the playbook of Russian disinformation,” in what itself was and still is a wildly successful disinformation campaign, one begun well before the much-derided (and initially censored) New York Post exposé on the topic from October of 2020.
Not to be petty, but — well, yes, let’s be petty, just a little, and point out that many of the people who were the most pompous about this story turned out to be the most wrong, including the conga line of Intercept editors and staffers who essentially knocked Glenn Greenwald all the way to Substack over the issue. There are more important things going on in the world, but for sheer bootlicking conformist excess and depraved journalist-on-journalist venom the “Russian disinformation” fiasco has no equal, and probably needs recording for posterity before it’s memory-holed via some creepy homage to Severance, or a next-gen algorithmic witch-hunt, or whatever other federally contracted monstrosities are being readied for deployment somewhere far up the anus of Silicon Valley. For comic relief, start with the Intercept.
Much blow-by-blow analysis of Bursima and Ukrainian investigations snipped.
Note all this took place before the New York Post ran its October, 2020 piece about the trove of Biden emails culled from the laptop, which included an ominous email from Pozharsky ostensibly thanking him for the “opportunity to meet your father.” It’s never been verified that this meeting actually took place, but what has absolutely been verified by now — not just by the Times but via the extensive digging done by Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger in his book The Bidens — is that the laptop is, in fact, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the emails they contain are real.
In a just world this would be career-altering news for the parade of media figures who spent months loudly insisting the opposite, cheered the unprecedented decisions by Facebook and Twitter to restrict access to the story, and repeated the Langley-driven fiction that it was a Russian smear. The fact that none of them are bothering to comment on any of this shows that the line between the intelligence community and commercial media has blurred to the point of meaninglessness. They know everyone knows they screwed this up and are long past pretending to care. This is like someone committed to a life in sweats who eats another piece of pie at night, because what difference will it ever make? That weight is never coming off anyway.
I long thought the decision by Facebook and Twitter to block the Post just before an election was a bigger deal than the actual story, which to me was mislabeled “smoking gun” evidence of major corruption because almost none of the information in those emails had been confirmed then. After reading this latest Times piece, which among other things confirms that Joe Biden (if not the Burisma official) was present at the infamous “meeting” referenced in the original Pozharsky email, I’m not sure so sure.
But the fact that the mainstream media is now reporting on them is new. We take it as a given the MSM ignored them in 2020 because they wanted to drag Joe Biden’s ambulatory corpse over the finish line. By why are they reporting on them now?
After our story was censored by Big Tech and dismissed as “Russian disinformation” by Democratic prevaricator Adam Schiff, and 51 former spooks led by former CIA Director John Brennan, apparently it’s safe to admit the laptop is real and the emails we published can be easily authenticated.
Of course, they all avoid the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from evidence contained on the laptop that the president’s drug-addled son Hunter abandoned at a MacBook repair shop in Delaware in April 2019: that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, was aware of, and intimately involved in, a corrupt, multimillion-dollar, international influence-peddling scheme run by Hunter, and Joe’s brother Jim Biden, in the countries for which Joe was point man in the Obama administration, such as Russia, Ukraine and China.
Hunter’s laptop is a large piece of the jigsaw puzzle that leads to such a shocking conclusion.
But despite acknowledging that the material on the laptop showed that Hunter was “trading on his father’s name to make a lot of money,” as CNN White House correspondent John Harwood put it, both the Washington Post and CNN were at pains to absolve Joe Biden of any involvement in the scheme.
“There is zero evidence that Vice President Biden, or President Biden, has done anything wrong in connection with what Hunter Biden has done,” Harwood said.
Right. Pull the other one.
No doubt these august media organs that treated our story with sneering disregard for a year and a half have their reasons for jumping on board. For one thing, their original goal of removing President Donald Trump from office was achieved long ago, and Joe Biden is now so unpopular that his Praetorian Guard is melting away and reporting on his family is less hazardous to Beltway dinner party invitations.
For another thing, they can’t have their audiences blindsided when the US attorney in Delaware completes his investigation of Hunter. God forbid that their readers and viewers wake up to the fact they have been misled and kept in the dark by their media outlets of choice.
Read on for how the MSM is still omitting tons of important information (like Tony Bobulinski) from their reporting.
Sen. Grassley: 'There’s no middle man in this transaction. This is $100,000 from what is effectively an arm of the communist Chinese government direct to Hunter Biden. To the liberal media and my Democratic colleagues: is this official bank document Russian disinformation?' pic.twitter.com/g3QvLzLHkh
Now that the NYT and WP have belatedly reported that the emails on Hunter’s laptop are (and always have been) legitimate, when will we see stories about “10% to the Big Guy”? Will the press ask the WH if Joe Biden is the Big Guy. This story is not over. It’s just beginning.
One thing that is coming down the pike after Hunter Biden: a tax probe.
A federal tax investigation into Hunter Biden is gaining momentum as prosecutors gather information from several of his associates about the sources of his foreign income, including from Ukraine, and examine President Biden’s son’s relationship with a company that handled some of his finances, according to people familiar with the matter.
In recent weeks, prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware have sought information and grand-jury testimony about the money Mr. Biden received several years ago from Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings Ltd., and how he used that money to pay some obligations, one of those people said.
Last month, prosecutors also extensively questioned at least one other associate of Hunter Biden about Mr. Biden’s drug and alcohol use, spending habits and state of mind in 2018, another person said, suggesting prosecutors are exploring whether such activity would present a defense against a potential criminal tax case.
Prosecutors often seek to get such testimony on the record to secure it before the defense gets a chance to present it more favorably at trial.
All in all, it looks like someone in D.C. is aware of some heavy revelations about to drop down on Hunter Biden, and they’re trying to get ahead of it.
Guys, the mainstream media suddenly deciding to go after Hunter Biden isn't an accident. Something big is coming, and they are looking to get out in front of it.
