Instead of actual content, enjoy watching drivers attempting (and failing) to drive down the steep, rain-slick streets of the Paso Florentino in Mexico City.
Also: Open thread.
Steep Mexican Road 15, Drivers 0
July 30th, 2022LinkSwarm for July 29, 2022
July 29th, 2022The Biden Recession picks up downhill speed, liberals are spending $160 million to seize control of elections, Biden wants to starve your children until you accept transgenderism, and another Soros-backed DA gets the heave-ho from voters. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Two big money liberal operations, ready to spend $80 million each, are trying to determine who controls elections and how in the years ahead.
“The overall objective of the political left is to change the way you conduct overall elections,” Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, which advocates clean elections, told The Daily Signal.
One of the two liberal groups, Run for Something, is a political action committee founded by a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer. In the spring, Run for Something established its Clerk Work project with the goal of electing clerks, election supervisors, registrars, recorders, and other local officials charged with running elections.
The PAC says it will promote thousands of election administrators in the years ahead. But for 2022, it reports endorsing 11 candidates competing in races in California, Colorado, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
Local election clerks generally are empowered to interpret and enforce state election regulations. They often have discretion on matters such as whether to count absentee ballots that come in after Election Day, how strictly to enforce voter ID or signature-matching requirements, and how closely poll watchers may monitor the ballot counting on Election Day.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, county-level election officials are elected in 22 states. In 10 states, elected officials appoint members to a local board of elections. Another 18 states divide election administration duties between two or more offices.
In any case, donating to specific candidates to oversee elections could directly or indirectly affect who holds these positions.
Some practices of local election administrators also could be guided by another $80 million effort by the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a coalition of mostly left-leaning organizations financed in part by Big Tech executives to train local officials in running elections.
Snead and other critics say they see parallels between Run for Something and efforts to elect liberal prosecutors financed by liberal hedge fund manager George Soros. They also see strong similarities between the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s election administration grants in the 2020 election cycle.
“What we shouldn’t lose track of is they are playing the long game,” Snead said. “They are going to look for every possible way to impact elections, and they can make substantial changes in the long run through this kind of program that they wouldn’t have been able to make in 2020.”
When Soros-backed socialist son of convicted terrorists Chesa Boudin was recalled as San Francisco DA, the writing was on the wall. “Decarceration” is a disaster for everyone . . . except criminals.
Now another Soros-backed “decarceration” state’s attorney has lost her reelection bid. It’s not clear if the multiple crimes for which Marilyn Mosby has been charged are the impetus for Baltimore’s voters deciding it’s time to move on or if it’s the shocking crime rates in the city as a result of her radical anti-law and order agenda. Maybe both.
Mosby rose to national attention in the wake of the Freddie Gray riots and for her hyper-politicized botching of the prosecution in those cases.
Fox News reports:
Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby lost her reelection bid to defense attorney Ivan Bates in the Democratic primary after she was indicted by a grand jury on federal charges alleging that she used coronavirus hardship as a reason to take money out of her city retirement account.
The Associated Press called the race in favor of Ivan Bates, a defense attorney, on Friday night. Bates is a former prosecutor in Baltimore who served from 1996 to 2002 before becoming a defense attorney.
Mosby, a Democrat, directed her office to stop prosecuting offenses such as drug possession, prostitution, urinating in public, and more during the coronavirus pandemic in an attempt to stop the virus from spreading in jails and prisons.
In May, the Biden administration announced that any school that participates in the federal school lunch program (which is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service) must allow students to use bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers and play on the sports teams aligning with their gender identity if they want access to funds for the program — effectively holding money meant for ensuring student nutrition in exchange for compliance on radical leftist gender ideology.
Now, twenty-two Republican attorneys general are fighting back by suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture over that new guidance.
“We all know the Biden administration is dead-set on imposing an extreme left-wing agenda on Americans nationwide,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said. “But they’ve reached a new level of shamelessness with this ploy of holding up food assistance for low-income kids unless schools do the Left’s bidding.”
According to the Washington Times, nearly 30 million students take advantage of the National School Lunch Program at about 100,000 public and non-profit private schools and residential childcare institutions. The Biden administration policy was seen as a direct assault on the 18 states with existing laws barring male athletes from participating in female sports.
The lawsuit argues that the Biden administration (again) violated the Administrative Procedures Act by issuing regulations without going through the rulemaking process and that Bostock v. Clayton, the 2020 Supreme Court’s 2020 decision on employment discrimination, doesn’t apply to Title IX as the Biden administration claimed when they announced the guidance.
“This case is, yet again, about a federal agency trying to change law, which is Congress’ exclusive prerogative,” Tennessee Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III said. “The USDA simply does not have that authority. We have successfully challenged the Biden Administration’s other attempts to rewrite law and we will challenge this as well.”
In other news, Samantha Bee was evidently still on the air somewhere.
Ill-Advised Semiconductor Subsidies Pass
July 28th, 2022Semiconductor subsidies passed the Senate and House and now will become law.
The House on Thursday passed the bipartisan Chips and Science Act, which aims to increase domestic production of computer chips to allow the U.S. to become more competitive against China in the global technology market.
The bill passed the House in a 243-187 vote one day after passing the Senate in a 64-33 vote. The legislation now heads to the desk of President Joe Biden.
Biden called the passage of the bill on Thursday “exactly what we need to be doing to grow our economy right now.”
“Today, the House passed a bill that will make cars cheaper, appliances cheaper, and computers cheaper,” Biden said. “It will lower the costs of every day goods. And, it will create high-paying manufacturing jobs across the country and strengthen U.S. leadership in the industries of the future at the same time.”
Twenty-four Republicans voted to pass the measure, despite Republican leadership making a last minute push to discourage GOP lawmakers from supporting the bill. GOP leaders sought to keep the bill from passing after news broke on Wednesday that Senator Joe Manchin (D., W. Va.) had reached a deal with Democratic leaders on a nearly half-a-trillion dollar spending package targeting energy and climate, health care, and increased taxes on the wealthy.
Snip.
The measure includes $39 billion to “build, expand, or modernize domestic facilities and equipment” for semiconductors, $2 billion to specifically manufacture semiconductors and $11 billion for Department of Commerce research and development.
“Research and development” is no doubt going to be a rich conduit of graft to Democratic Party cronies having nothing to do with semiconductors.
For reference, $29 billion is probably just enough to build two state-of-the-art 300mm chip fabrication plants.
As I’ve argued before, the reasoning behind the bill is specious and it won’t result in a single new chip being fabbed in the next two years.
The most recent stats I can find show that the United States has some 47% of the semiconductor market. We (and Taiwan, and South Korea) are kicking China’s ass in semiconductors.
The chips China make are generally either: A.) Cheap, or B.) intended for their internal market. No one sends cutting edge chips to be fabbed in China because they don’t have the tech to do it and everyone know they’ll steal your designs and crank out knock-offs on the sly whenever possible. China’s semiconductor industry is mostly smoke and mirrors all the way down.
Semiconductor subsidies have all the hallmarks of a classic Washington boondoggle: The wrong action at the wrong time for the wrong problem.
First, there are already signs that the automotive semiconductor crunch is easing, thanks not to the Biden Administration but to the actions of the free market.
Second, the shortage wasn’t the result of a “chip shortage,” it was the result of “a lack of available foundry wafer starts.” Automakers cancelled their orders for display drivers when it looked like Flu Manchu lockdowns were going to depress the economy for a while, and were caught off-guard by the V-shaped recovery under Trump, and got sent to the back of the line to get their product fabbed after they changed their mind. Remember, just about all foundries are running flat-out 24/7/365, pausing only to switch to different chips for different customers. There’s no slack in the system, and those wafer starts are already spoken for (and possibly paid for) by other customers well in advance. Just as nine woman can’t give birth to a fully grown baby in one month, you can’t just “make chips quicker” in an existing fab.
Third, remember that cutting edge semiconductor fabs are hideously expensive. Moore’s second law states that the cost of a new, cutting edge semiconductor plant doubles every four years. Samsung’s planned fab in Taylor, Texas is going to cost $17 billion.
Fourth, nothing about these subsidies will address the real problem with American semiconductors, which is that the overwhelming majority of cutting edge chip designs have to flow through TSMC fabs in Taiwan. What will solve that problem is TSMC opening a state-of-the art fab in Arizona in 2024. No amount of U.S. taxpayer money will make that already-under-construction fab start producing chips any quicker.
Could these subsidies boost American semiconductor manufacturing 2-3 years from now? Possibly. Knowing the cycling nature of the industry and the tendency of government subsidies to backfire, new/upgraded fab lines might come online just as the industry is experiencing a glut.
But the real key to restoring America to the cutting edge of semiconductor manufacturing is the already-in-progress inshoring of cutting edge foreign owned fabs from Samsung and TSMC, and having American semiconductor manufacturers like Intel and GlobalFoundries master sub-10nm chip fabrication processes, something they have heretofore been unable to do. (Intel is closer, having been on the cutting edge until they lost their way, while GlobalFoundries stopped all development on their 7nm node because they couldn’t find a way to make the investment pay off.)
Throwing buckets of budget-busting borrowed taxpayer money around isn’t going to make any of those things happen any faster.
The Chieftain Reviews Movie Tank Scenes
July 27th, 2022Why yes, this is relevant to my interests!
Nicholas Moran, AKA The Chieftain, reviews various movie tank scenes for technical accuracy. Fury and Saving Private Ryan both rank pretty high.
He also has good things to say about The Beast and Kelly’s Heroes, both of which are on our Saturday Night Movie Group to-watch list.
Scenes From China’s Slow-Motion Collapse
July 26th, 2022Remember the bank runs in China story after all those bank accounts in Hunan were frozen? I’ve been looking for signs of wider contagion amidst the Chinese banking sector, and mostly haven’t seen it. But I have seen a lot of other cracks appear in China’s overall economic system, so here’s a roundup.
A large crowd of angry Chinese bank depositors faced off with police Sunday in the city of Zhengzhou, and many were injured as they were taken away, amid the freezing of their deposits by some rural-based banks.
The banks froze millions of dollars worth of deposits in April, telling customers they were upgrading their internal systems. The banks have not issued any communication on the matter since, depositors said.
According to Chinese media the frozen deposits across the various local banks could be worth up to $1.5 billion and authorities are investigating the three banks.
On Sunday, about 1,000 people gathered outside the Zhengzhou branch of China’s central bank on Sunday to demand action; they held up banners and chanted slogans on the wide steps of the entrance to a branch of China’s central bank in the city of Zhengzhou in Henan province, about 620 kilometers (380 miles) southwest of Beijing.
(Plus more on the property slump.)
A rapidly increasing number of “disgruntled Chinese homebuyers” are refusing to pay mortgages for unfinished construction projects, exacerbating the country’s real estate woes and stoking fears that the crisis will spread to the wider financial system as countless mortgages default.
According to researcher China Real Estate Information, homebuyers have stopped mortgage payments on at least 100 projects in more than 50 cities as of Wednesday, up from 58 projects on Tuesday and only 28 on Monday, according to Jefferies Financial Group Inc. analysts including Shujin Chen.
And that was over a week ago.
According to Citi analysts, average selling prices of properties in nearby projects in 2022 were on average 15% lower than purchase costs in the past three years. Meanwhile, it’s only getting worse as China’s home prices fell for a ninth month in May, with June figures set for release Friday.
The crisis engulfing Chinese developers is reaching a new phase, with a debt selloff expanding to firms once deemed safe from the cash crunch, including investment-grade names such as Country Garden Holdings, the largest builder by sales.
The payment refusals, which come at a time when China’s economy is set to post what may be a negative GDP print due to the latest economic shutdown over Xi’s catastrophic zero covid policies, underscore how the storm engulfing China’s property sector is now affecting hundreds of thousands of average citizens, posing a threat to social stability ahead of a Communist Party Congress later this year. Chinese banks already grappling with challenges from liquidity stress among developers now also have to brace for homebuyer defaults.
As a result of the unprecedented push for a debt jubilee, shares of China’s banks extended their recent decline Thursday, with the CSI 300 Banks Index falling as much as 3.3% before closing down 2.2%. A Bloomberg Intelligence index of Chinese developer stocks slid as much as 2.7%, even though Chinese lenders were quick to try and dispel fears that the movement could crash the economy: according to Bank of Communications, its outstanding balance of overdue mortgage loans linked to housing projects with risks of delayed delivery is 99.8 million yuan, accounting for 0.0067% of its domestic housing mortgage balance. The bank added that its housing mortgage loan quality is stable and risks are controllable, the Shanghai-based lender says in an exchange filing. At the same time, Postal Savings Bank of China says its overdue mortgage loans linked to halted housing projects is 127m yuan, and risks are controllable. Of course, it’s not like Chinese banks would ever lie, now is it?
The Great Debt Jubilee is picking up speed: China’s homebuyer mortgage boycott, which prompted Beijing to scramble to avoid a potentially devastating crash in what is the world’s biggest asset is spreading, and according to Bloomberg, some suppliers to Chinese real estate developers are now also refusing to repay bank loans because of unpaid bills owed to them, a sign that the loan boycott that started with homebuyers is starting to spread.
In a jarring case study of what happens when a ponzi scheme goes into reverse, hundreds of contractors to the property industry complained that they can no longer afford to pay their own bills because developers including China Evergrande Group still owe them money, Caixin reported, citing a statement it received from a supplier Tuesday.
Similar to homebuyers who have taken a stand and refuse to pay for properties that remain uncompleted, one group of small businesses and suppliers circulated a letter online saying they will stop repaying debts after Evergrande’s cash crisis left them out of pocket.
“We decided to stop paying all loans and arrears, and advise our peers to decline any requests to be paid on credit or commercial bill,” the group said in the letter dated July 15, which was sent to the developer’s Hubei office. “Evergrande should be held responsible for any consequence that follows because of the chain reaction of the supply-chain crisis.”
As Bloomberg oh so perceptively puts it, “the payments protest is the latest sign of how a movement by homebuyers to boycott mortgages on unfinished homes in China is spreading to affect other sectors in the economy.”
Yes it is, and it’s also why Beijing should be freaking out (if it isn’t), because what is taking place in China is far worse than what took place in March 2020 when the global credit machinery ground to a halt, only back then it’s because there was no other option, now it’s a voluntary development and not even fears of reprisals from China’s ruthless, authoritarian, Lebron-beloved dictatorship is stopping millions of people from calling for a systemic boycott, one which can topple China’s entire $60 trillion financial system in moments.
Probably an overstatement, just because it takes a whole lot to overcome the inertia of the average Chinese citizen just wanting to keep their head down and not be the nail that sticks up.
Embattled Chinese real estate giant Evergrande is expected to deliver a preliminary restructuring plan this week, following the exit of two bosses.
The firm says its chief executive and finance head have resigned, after an internal probe found that they misused around $2bn (£1.7bn) in loans.
Chinese businessmen misusing funds? Try to contain your shock.
Evergrande has more than $300bn in liabilities and defaulted on its debts late last year.
The crisis has spooked traders who fear contagion in China’s property sector.
On Friday, Evergrande said it found that chief executive Xia Haijun and chief financial officer Pan Darong were involved in diverting 13.4bn yuan ($2bn; £1.7bn) in loans secured by its property services unit to the wider group.
The firm said in a filing to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that Mr Xia and Mr Pan had resigned because of their “involvement in the arrangement of the pledges”.
Getting caught trying to cook the books even after it’s hit the fan. Classic Chinese management.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has started the process, compelled by a 2020 law, and investors have started to pay attention. So has China, which moved to potentially clear a big hurdle that stymied U.S. regulators for years.
1. Why does the U.S. want access to audits?
The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, enacted in the wake of the Enron Corp. accounting scandal, required that all public companies have their audits inspected by the U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. According to the SEC, more than 50 jurisdictions work with the board to allow the required inspections, while two historically have not: China and Hong Kong. The long-simmering issue morphed into a political one as tensions between Washington and Beijing ratcheted up during the administration of President Donald Trump. The Chinese chain Luckin Coffee Inc., which was listed on Nasdaq, was found to have intentionally fabricated a chunk of its 2019 revenue. The following year, in a rare bipartisan move, Congress moved to force action.
2. Where does it stand?
As required by the law, known as the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act or HFCAA, the SEC in March started publishing its “provisional list” of companies identified as running afoul of the requirements. While the move had long been telegraphed, the first batch of names fueled a sharp decline in U.S. shares of companies based in China and Hong Kong as it dashed hopes for some kind of compromise. In all, the PCAOB has said it’s blocked from reviewing the audits of more than 200 of those businesses. The companies say Chinese national security law prohibits them from turning over audit papers to U.S. regulators. SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in late March that the Chinese authorities faced “a hard set of choices.” Days later, China announced it would modify a 2009 rule that restricted the sharing of financial data by offshore-listed firms, potentially clearing one obstacle.
3. What is China changing?
The China Securities Regulatory Commission said the requirement that on-site inspections should be mainly conducted by Chinese regulatory agencies or rely on their inspection results would be removed. It said it would provide assistance for cooperation with foreign regulators. The CSRC said it’s rare in practice that companies need to provide documents containing confidential and sensitive information. However, if required during the auditing process, they must obtain approvals in accordance with related laws and regulations.
4. What’s the broader issue?
Critics say Chinese companies enjoy the trading privileges of a market economy — including access to U.S. stock exchanges — while receiving government support and operating in an opaque system. In addition to inspecting audits, the HFCAA requires foreign companies to disclose if they’re controlled by a government. The SEC is also demanding that investors receive more information about the structure and risks associated with shell companies — known as variable interest entities, or VIEs — that Chinese companies use to list shares in New York. Since July 2021, the SEC has refused to greenlight new listings. Gensler has said more than 250 companies already trading will face similar requirements.
5. How soon could Chinese companies be delisted?
Nothing is going to happen this year or even in 2023, which explains why markets initially took the possibility in their stride. Under the HFCAA, a company would be delisted only after three consecutive years of non-compliance with audit inspections. It could return by certifying that it had retained a registered public accounting firm approved by the SEC.
6. How many companies will be affected?
There’s not much discretion. If a company from China or Hong Kong trades in the U.S. and files an annual report, it will soon find itself on the SEC’s list simply because those have been identified as non-compliant jurisdictions. In the March interview, Gensler pointed out that the law focuses on non-compliant countries, rather than specific companies.
“Demographically they’re in collapse…China’s not even going to survive this decade. They don’t even have the numbers to try…China doesn’t have the naval capacity to secure markets and resources….Xi Jinping has enacted a cult of personality that is tighter than anything that has existed through Chinese history. It’s gotten so tight that no one wants to bring him information about anything…This is how countries die.” Plus: China doesn’t know how to store grain.
The widely acclaimed globalization of the post-Cold War era is now running in reverse. A protracted slowdown in global trade has been reinforced by persistent pandemic-related supply-chain disruptions, ongoing pressures of the US-China trade war, and efforts to align cross-border economic ties with geostrategic alliances (“friend-shoring”). These developments tighten the noose on China, arguably the country that has been the greatest beneficiary of modern globalization.
Of the many metrics of globalization, including financial, information, and labor flows, the cross-border exchange of goods and services is most closely tied to economic growth. Largely for that reason, the slowdown in global trade, which commenced in the aftermath of the 2008-09 global financial crisis and intensified in the COVID-19 era, points to a sea change in globalization. While global exports went from 19% of world GDP in 1990 to a peak of 31% in 2008, in the thirteen years that followed (2009-21), global exports have averaged just 28.7% of world GDP. Had world exports expanded on a 6.4% trajectory – halfway between the blistering 9.4% pace of 1990-2008 and the subdued post-2008 rate of 3.3% – the export share of global GDP would have soared to 46% by 2021, far above the actual share of 29%.
China’s gains from the globalization of trade have been extraordinary. In the decade prior to China’s 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization, Chinese exports averaged just 2% of total world exports. By 2008, that share had risen nearly fourfold, to 7.5%. China had timed its WTO membership bid perfectly, just when the global trade cycle was on a major upswing. While the financial crisis took a brief toll on Chinese export momentum, the interruption was short-lived. By 2021, Chinese exports had surged to 12.7% of world exports, well above the pre-2008 peak.
China is unlikely to maintain this performance. Overall growth of global trade is slowing, and China’s slice of the trade pie is under mounting pressure.
The ongoing trade war with the United States is especially problematic. During the first phase of China’s export-led growth surge in the aftermath of WTO accession, the US was consistently China’s largest source of external demand. Largely due to former US President Donald Trump’s tariffs, that is no longer the case. By 2020, US imports of Chinese goods and services had fallen 19% below the peak levels of 2018. Despite rebounding sharply on the heels of the US economy’s post-pandemic snapback, in 2021, US imports from China remained 5% below the 2018 peak. Partial tariff rollbacks for selected consumer products, which President Joe Biden’s administration is apparently considering as an anti-inflation gambit, are unlikely to jump-start bilateral trade.
At the same time, enduring pandemic-related supply-chain disruptions are likely to take a sharp toll on China and the rest of the world.Over the six months ending in April, a “global supply chain pressures index” constructed by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York averaged 3.6, well above the 2.3 reading in the first 21 months following the February 2020 onset of pandemic-related lockdowns, and sharply higher than the “zero” reading associated with the absence of supply-chain disruptions.
This is a big deal for a world connected by supply chains. Global value chains accounted for more than 70% of the cumulative growth in overall global trade from 1993 to 2013, and China has enjoyed an outsize share of this GVC-enabled expansion. As supply-chain disruptions persist, exacerbated by China’s zero-COVID policies, pressures on Chinese and global economic activity are likely to remain intense.
Mounting geostrategic tensions are the wild card in deglobalization, especially their implications for China. “Friend-shoring” in effect turns Ricardo’s efficiency calculus of cross-border trade into an assessment of the security benefits that come from strategic alliances with like-minded countries. China’s new unlimited partnership with Russia looms especially relevant in this regard. With China edging closer to crossing the line by providing support to Russian military efforts in Ukraine, the US has recently moved to impose sanctions on five more Chinese companies through its so-called Entity List.
No doubt I’ve missed many other examples of cracks in China’s economic edifice. Feel free to share them in the comments below.
Dispatches From The Burning Land
July 25th, 2022Going to the dentist always makes me tired, and I already wasn’t feeling up to any intellectual heavy lifting today, so instead let’s turn to one of the laziest of lazy blogger tropes: Talking about the weather.
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but it’s hot around these parts.
With Austin on the verge of wrapping up its warmest July on record, Mother Nature appears to be assembling the ingredients for the city’s hottest summer ever.
Austin’s average temperature in July as of Sunday was 90.7 degrees, which is not only 5.2 degrees higher than normal but also a full degree warmer than the July record set in 2011, the year drawing the most comparisons to our blistering summer.
The historic weather of 2011 bore memorable disasters and set a benchmark for drought and heat records for Central Texas, including:
90 days of 100-degree weather, a record that holds up to this day — but could be broken this year. The Bastrop Complex Fire, which started in September and burned 34,000 acres and 1,600 homes in central Bastrop County about 30 miles east of Austin, becoming the most destructive fire in Texas history. Austin’s warmest year ever with an average temperature of 72 degrees. Six years later, 2017 became the warmest year, but only by a tenth of a degree. A drought that reached record levels across the state in 2011, according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor, a joint effort of the National Drought Mitigation Center, the U.S. Agriculture Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Exceptional drought — the drought monitor’s most severe level, typified by crop loss and extreme sensitivity to fire danger — had spread to as much 87.8% of Texas in mid-September and 88% in early October that year.
It’s not the hottest temperatures we’ve had on record: In September of 2000, it hit 112°. In 2011, we had the worst drought in recorded history. So maybe we’re just in the “Every 11 years Austin gets really screwed” cycle.
And we’re not even having the worst of it. Drought has Lake Mead at record lows. (Evidently China has gotten all our rain and is suffering record floods.)
We’re used to 100° summer days, we’re just not used to so many above 100° days in a row. A certain sense of lassitude slips in.
Still, we soldier on. Dogs still get walked three times a day, and I did my usual Sunday bike ride, since it was only 100°.
But expect some lazy blogging days.
Russia Signs Grain Export Corridor Agreement With Ukraine, Then Promptly Attacks Export Port
July 24th, 2022Amid fears of worldwide food shortages due to the Russo-Ukrainian war, Russia and Ukraine signed an agreement to reopen sea corridors to allow food exports from the Ukrainian port of Odessa to recommence.
Then Russia hit Odessa with missiles.
World leaders swiftly condemned the Russian missile strike on a Ukrainian port, a dramatic revelation amid a U.N.-brokered deal that secured a sea corridor for grains and other foodstuff exports.
A day prior, representatives from the U.N., Turkey, Russia and Ukraine signed an agreement to reopen three Ukrainian ports, an apparent breakthrough as the Kremlin’s war on its ex-Soviet neighbor marches into its fifth month.
The deal, signed in Istanbul and set to be implemented in the next few weeks, follows a months-long blockade of dozens of Ukrainian ports sprinkled along the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.
The strike on Odesa, Ukraine’s largest port, illustrates yet another anxious turn in fruitless efforts to mitigate a mounting global food crisis.
Given how many agreements and treaties Putin violated by occupying parts of Ukraine and then launching the current war, there’s no reason to believe that Putin will adhere to the terms of any agreement.
The path to lasting peace in Ukraine is complete destruction and ejection of invading Russian forces.
The Bomb That Ended A War
July 22nd, 2022The title overstates the case, but this story of the red-tape cutting, round-the clock efforts to field a bunker busting bomb during the Gulf War is fascinating stuff.
(Today has been a bear for a variety of uninteresting reasons, so no LinkSwarm today. Hopefully tomorrow…)
Texas Republican Agriculture Commissioner Comes Out For Legalizing Medical Marijuana
July 21st, 2022If you’re wondering whether a true sea-change in the way America thinks about marijuana legalization, Republican Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller coming out for medical marijuana is an interesting signpost.
Miller likened regulation of medical marijuana to national prohibition of alcohol in the U.S. from 1920-1933.
“The history of cannabis prohibition reflects the failed alcohol prohibition of the 1920’s. Complete with gangs, corruption, and widespread violence against the lives and liberties of American citizens,” Miller wrote.
“As I look back, I believe that cannabis prohibition came from a place of fear, not from medical science or the analysis of social harm. Sadly, the roots of this came from a history of racism, classism, and a large central government with an authoritarian desire to control others. It is as anti-American in its origins as could be imaginable,” he continued.
Keep in mind the Miller is hardly Rand Paul on the conservative-to-libertarian spectrum, with tons of cultural conservative endorsements over the years. The fact he’s willing to talk about the issue in a year he’s up for reelection indicates that it’s far from a forbidden notion on the right.
In 2015, Texas passed the Compassionate-Use Act, which allowed for the prescription of low-THC cannabis to patients with intractable epilepsy. It was later expanded to include patients with autism, seizure disorder, cancer, post-traumatic stress disorder and a number of other conditions.
Miller said he wants to make medical marijuana available to all Texans “who are suffering.”
“I worked diligently to bring hemp farming to Texas and supported the development of products such as hemp oil for medical use. These products are making a difference in the lives of many where other medicines have failed,” Miller wrote. “It is my goal next year to expand access to the compassionate use of cannabis products in Texas so that every Texan with a medical need has access to these medicines.”
Caveat: Miller isn’t for full legalization.
Despite the move by several states, including Colorado and Nevada, Miller is not in favor of recreational marijuana being legalized in Texas, writing, “Eighteen states, including conservative western states like Arizona, Montana, and Alaska, have legalized commercial cannabis sales to ALL adults. While I am not sure that Texas is ready to go that far, I have seen firsthand the value of cannabis as medicine to so many Texans.”
I’m in the “remove federal prohibition (on Tenth Amendment grounds), then let each state vote on legalizing, regulating and taxing it” camp. While I might vote for that, I suspect a small majority of Texas voters might still reject outright legalization. But I suspect actual legalization of marijuana (and not the dishonest “you want legal” dispensary scheme some states instituted) might well pass.
In any case, if the Republican Agriculture Commissioner of Texas can come out for marijuana legalization, you know it’s no longer the third rail it once was.