Enough links have filtered into the semiconductor bucket to be worth doing a roundup. This one touches on China and the corruption of our political elites.
The congressional Democrats’ attempt to throw money at the problem is going nowhere fast.
The Biden administration is laser-focused on sending Ukraine billions of dollars in weapons, including the latest round of anti-ship systems, artillery rockets, and rounds of 105 mm ammo for howitzer cannons that it has entirely lost focus on reshoring efforts to boost semiconductor production Stateside.
Multiple manufacturers of semiconductor wafers have announced plans for new multi-billion dollar factories across the U.S. but are contingent on Congress allocating funds to aid in building facilities under the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act.
Congress passed the CHIPS Act in January 2021 as part of last year’s National Defense Authorization Act, which proposed $52 billion in funding for increasing the domestic capacity of chip production, though the House and Senate have come to a standstill over disagreements on certain parts of the bill that have sparked so much uncertainty among companies set to build new factories.
In a letter on June 15, dozens of technology executives from IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Analog Devices, Micron, Amazon, and Alphabet called on Congress to move quickly on the CHIPS Act. They wrote, “the rest of the world is not waiting for the U.S. to act,” and funding for new chip factories must be achieved immediately.
Taiwan’s GlobalWafers announced a new $5 billion factory in the U.S. on Monday, but contingent on subsidies from the federal government.
“This investment that they’re making is contingent upon Congress passing the CHIPS Act. The [GlobalWafers] CEO told me that herself, and they reiterated that today,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told CNBC, the same day GlobalWafers announced its development plan.
Notes:
IBM doesn’t own any fabs any more, having sold them all to GlobalFoundries.
Intel runs a huge number of very profitable fabs (troubles with their sub-10nm process yields notwithstanding) and doesn’t need federal subsidies.
Microsoft doesn’t own any fabs and is deeply unlikely to build any; their flagship Xbox Series X uses a custom AMD Zen 2 fabbed by TSMC as its CPU.
Analog Devices is an Integrated Device Manufacturer that owns several fabs with pretty old technology; they don’t have any 300mm fabs. They closed a small fab in Milpitas they got from their acquisition of Linear Technology last year. Designing analog chips is its own black art, and not everything that applies to shrinking digital circuits applies to the analog realm.
Amazon has no fabs and probably won’t be building any, but they do have a chip design division to support Amazon Web Services, and recently designed a cloud computing chip. They work closely with AMD (fabbed at TSMC), Intel (own their own fabs) and Nvidia (another fabless design house that also gets their chips fabbed at TSMC).
Alphabet AKA Google has no fabs and probably won’t be building any, though they do have a lot of AI chip design work going on.
GlobalWafers isn’t a semiconductor manufacturer, it’s a silicon wafer manufacturer. Making such wafers (the substrates upon which semiconductor fabrication depends) has its own challenges, but they are several orders less difficult than cutting edge chip fabrication. Maybe I’m quite far out of the loop, but I’m deeply suspicious that GlobalWafers planned wafer plant in Sherman, Texas will cost $5 billion. That’s a relatively piddling sum for a new semiconductor fab, but extremely expensive for a wafer factory. This makes me suspect a subsidy grab is afoot.
So of the companies mentioned, Intel could suck up government funding to build a fab they were going to build anyway, I’m sure Analog Devices would build a fab with government money, but chances of them running an under 10nm process in said theoretical fab is extremely slim, none of the other mentioned copies are going to build a fab, and none of that government money is going to alleviate the main problem 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.
$250 billion in taxpayer subsidies wouldn’t get you a single additional wafer start this year, and probably would accomplish little more than channeling money to politically connected firms and sticky pockets in a state (New York) that no one wants to build fabs in any more because of high costs, high taxes and union rule requirements.
So who expects to earn immediate gains from the taxpayers subsidizing semiconductors? Would you believe Nancy Pelosi?
I bet you would.
This past week it hit the terminal that House Speaker Pelosi was doing a little portfolio re-jiggering, including exercising $8 million of call options in Nvidia and selling Apple and Visa calls. The data was per CongressTrading.com and was reported on by Bloomberg.
The Nvidia LEAPS were bought June 3, 2021 with $100 strikes, set to expire June 17, 2022 and the position appeared to be disclosed on Thursday morning for the first time. $8 million trades seem a little odd for members of Congress to begin with, but who are we to judge?
But then, what did Speaker Pelosi do just hours after disclosing the trade, on Friday?
She threw her weight behind a stalled $50 billion CHIPS PLUS bill that “would provide $52 billion in funding for semiconductor manufacturing grants and investment tax credits for the chip industry.”
We tend to discuss leading-edge nodes and the most advanced chips made using them, but there are thousands of chip designs developed years ago that are made using what are now mature process technologies that are still widely employed by the industry. On the execution side of matters, those chips still do their jobs as perfectly as the day the first chip was fabbed which is why product manufacturers keep building more and more using them. But on the manufacturing side of matters there’s a hard bottleneck to further growth: all of the capacity for old nodes that will ever be built has been built – and they won’t be building any more.
Not strictly true. Remember, Bosch just finished building a 65nm fab.
As a result, TSMC has recently begun strongly encouraging its customers on its oldest (and least dense) nodes to migrate some of their mature designs to its 28 nm-class process technologies.
Nowadays TSMC earns around 25% of its revenue by making hundreds of millions of chips using 40 nm and larger nodes. For other foundries, the share of revenue earned on mature process technologies is higher: UMC gets 80% of its revenue on 40 nm higher nodes, whereas 81.4% of SMIC’s revenue come from outdated processes.
That’s because UMC has fallen woefully far behind TSMC, and no one trusts them because they let Chinese spies walk out the door with other company’s IP. SMIC is on Mainland China, sucks even more, and is trusted even less.
Mature nodes are cheap, have high yields, and offer sufficient performance for simplistic devices like power management ICs (PMICs). But the cheap wafer prices for these nodes comes from the fact that they were once, long ago, leading-edge nodes themselves, and that their construction costs were paid off by the high prices that a cutting-edge process can fetch. Which is to say that there isn’t the profitability (or even the equipment) to build new capacity for such old nodes.
This is why TSMC’s plan to expand production capacity for mature and specialized nodes by 50% is focused on 28nm-capable fabs. As the final (viable) generation of TSMC’s classic, pre-FinFET manufacturing processes, 28nm is being positioned as the new sweet spot for producing simple, low-cost chips. And, in an effort to consolidate production of these chips around fewer and more widely available/expandable production lines, TSMC would like to get customers using old nodes on to the 28nm generation.
“We are not currently [expanding capacity for] the 40 nm node” said Kevin Zhang, senior vice president of business development at TSMC. “You build a fab, fab will not come online [until] two year or three years from now. So, you really need to think about where the future product is going, not where the product is today.”
This video asks whether China can produce their own chips:
Obviously, they already produce some of their own chips, but the video covers most of the issues China has with fabbing more complex chips that I’ve already discussed here and here. They’re still dependent on the same three leading fab companies (TSMC, Intel and Samsung) everyone else is for sub 10nm feature chips, and are overwhelmingly dependent on both foreign talent and foreign semiconductor equipment manufacturers like ASML and Applied Materials.
Speaking of TSMC and Intel, India would really like them to build fabs there. The problem is, despite a whole lot of technical talent there, it doesn’t have a terribly large domestic electronics manufacturing base.
Following the Russian capture of Severodonetsk, the Russo-Ukranian War seems to have gone into an operational pause. Ukraine has now received and fielded its first HIMARS multiple rocket launch systems from the U.S. This video makes the case that that’s very bad news for Russian logistics.
Some takeaways:
HIMARS can hit targets at 80kms with high accuracy, far superior to Russia’s Uragan system (40km and less accurate) and Smersh systems.
The high accuracy makes 6 HIMARS missiles equal to 70 rounds of Russian artillery.
Systems move at 90kph.
Five minute reload time.
Crew of three.
“Just a few highmars can cut off a 100 kilometer long front line from supply and control.”
“Ukraine has already been able to destroy more than 20 large ammunition depots and several command posts.”
All well and good, but I have some caveats with the contention that HIMARS can drive the enemy before it and hear the lamentations of their women.
So far, Ukraine has fielded precisely four HIMARS. Four may be able to change the course of a battle, but certainly not a war.
There’s no reason to believe that Russia can’t adapt by dispersing ordinance to smaller and less dense ammo depots, or by restarting air sorties (which they seem to have largely abandoned) to hit HIMARS. Knowing the Russian military, the rate of adaptation will be very slow, but it’s not beyond their abilities.
While HIMARS help? Yes. Will they completely destroy Russian command and logistics? Color me very skeptical.
Thus far I have seen no signs of any real Ukrainian counter-offensive in the last month. Until that changes, we still look to be in for a long, bloody stalemate.
Hayden Sparks at The Texan news has the story of a long-simmering scandal at Neches ISD finally reaching trial.
A former elementary school principal is scheduled to be tried in Palestine next month on charges of official oppression and evidence tampering stemming from allegations that she impeded an investigation into suspected sexual abuse of children.
Kimberlyn Snider — the principal of Neches Elementary School — was indicted by an Anderson County grand jury on five misdemeanor counts of official oppression and one count of tampering or fabricating physical evidence with intent to impair, a third-degree felony.
Per online records, the criminal case against Mrs. Snider is set for trial on August 8 in the 87th District Court, where Judge Deborah Oakes presides. Mrs. Snider’s first trial in March was canceled after her attorney had a medical emergency during court proceedings.
After Mrs. Snider was indicted in January 2021, the Neches Independent School District Board of Trustees extended her contract with the school district through June 2023, local media reported. The decision to keep her employed with the district was made by her husband, Randy Snider, Neches ISD’s superintendent at the time.
Yes, it’s a great mystery how she got an extenstion. Randy Snider resigned as of June 2021.
In April, the school board hired Amy Wilson to be the new elementary school principal after Mrs. Snider was placed on administrative leave. Mr. Snider stepped down as superintendent in May of last year and was eventually replaced by Cory Hines.
Kaitlin Scroggins, who leads a local group called Change for Neches that opposes Mrs. Snider, spoke favorably of Wilson and called her appointment “a great new start” in a video posted on social media.
“The only problem that I have, which is something that I spoke on this evening, was that we’re still paying two different salaries,” Scroggins said, referencing the fact that Snider still receives a paycheck while on administrative leave.
With respect to the board extending Mrs. Snider’s contract, Scroggins said the school board “voted for their friendship as opposed to what was best for the taxpayers and what was best for the district.”
One of the amazing things about Kimberlyn Snider is that allegations against her have been going on for over seven years. From January 2015:
A new Facebook page calling for an investigation into abuse allegations against a Neches ISD principal is garnering attention in the tight-knit community.
Some parents say their children are not only being bullied by other students, but are even being bullied by their own principal, and say they want to see something done about it.
Since it was started back in November the Facebook page, Change for Neches, has gotten more than 600 likes. And shared on the page’s wall are dozens of stories of alleged abuse and misconduct from parents of current and former Neches ISD students — as well as concerned community members — who say the district needs to take action.
“We started getting these letters and they were just gut-wrenching, about abuse and the children being mistreated and the parents having no recourse because of the nepotism,” said Rebecca Wood, Change for Neches page administrator.
Many of the complaints center around Neches Elementary School principal Kim Snider, who last month was the topic of a more than four-hour school board meeting, a meeting in which Wood says no parents were given the opportunity to speak.
“It was one step from a circus,” she said. “I was appalled. I was disgusted.”
Among the allegations against Snider are that she bullies and threatens students and parents.
“She is just a bully,” Wood said. “She tells you to shut up, get out of her office, ‘You’re not welcome here, I make all the rules, you don’t have any say here, I own Neches. She’s even told people, ‘We have a way of making you disappear.'”
Serena Hodge has three children in the district, and says her kids begged her not to speak to the media out of fear of retaliation from Snider.
“It’s scary, they’re scared of her,” she said. “Very scared of her.”
But it’s not just Snider the group is calling out, saying more needs to be done about student bullying too.
Terri Flusche’s 15-year-old daughter Amanda committed suicide back in 2010, after being bullied by other students all freshman year.
“There would be at least four to five days a week that she would come in off that school bus her head just hanging and beg me, ‘Mama, please don’t make me go to school,'” she said.
But Flusche says her countless efforts to get help for her daughter were ignored.
“I couldn’t win,” she said. “There was no winning because there was no help from anybody. Nobody would listen to me.”
She says she even asked school administrators if she could see surveillance footage from her daughter’s school, but was always told the cameras were broken.
The usual “innocent until proven guilty” caveats apply, but it sure sounds like Kimberlyn Snider was a criminally negligent principal, and that justice for her victims is long overdue.
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
Kevin Downey, Jr. does some good work on PJmedia, and I’ve linked to him in many a LinkSwarm, but this time he has crossed the line!
Not a picture of Kevin Downey, Jr.
In an otherwise righteous roasting of Jill Biden’s “Latinex” pandering speech comparing Hispanics to breakfast tacos, Downey says that Jill Biden referred to Latinos “as a grotesque breakfast that most Latinos would never eat.”
WRONG!
Not only is this a vile calumny against The National Breakfast Food of Texas, saying that “most Latinos would never eat” them is factually incorrect. Downey states that he’s engaged to a Puerto Rican and “calls New York City home,” and this is no doubt what has led him astray. Only in New York and New Jersey is a Puerto Rican the default Latino. In 47 other states (Cubans in Florida being the other exception), Mexican-Americans make up the biggest Hispanic ethnicity, and as a rule, Mexican Americans love breakfast tacos.
Every TexMex joint in central Texas that serves breakfast serves breakfast tacos. They’re the dominant breakfast food on food trucks serving construction sites. They’re found all across the state, as far east as El Paso, as far north as Texhoma, as far east as Texarkana, and as far south as Brownsville.
It’s entirely possible that all the breakfast tacos in New York City suck, just like the BBQ. But he owes the vast majority of breakfast-taco loving Hispanic Americans an apology.
Daily Mail online carried a headline on the 8th of June: Healthy young people are dying suddenly and unexpectedly from a mysterious syndrome – as doctors seek answers through a new national register.
This is SADS – an acronym that stands for Sudden Adult Death Syndrome – and according to the Royal Australian College of GPs, it occurs most commonly in people under 40. This is properly scary; I don’t mind telling you. Healthy young people are going to their beds of an evening and not waking up ever again, or otherwise going about their everyday business and dropping dead, for no identifiable medical reason.
The best anyone in the health professions can apparently do is describe it as mysterious, baffling even, that there are people under 40 dropping in their traces for no known cause. At the same time, around the world, there have been reports of many hundreds of sports men and women dying suddenly and unexpectedly in the past year – super fit individuals uniquely focused on their own health – keeling over dead, often on the field of play.
Here at home we have had updated information campaigns about how important it is to be aware of the incidence of heart attacks and strokes. It has been deemed appropriate to remind us as well that heart attacks are not unknown in children. It’s almost as if we’re not to be unduly alarmed by the sight of passers-by dropping to their knees and clutching at their chests. Elsewhere there is a poster campaign about a rise in the number of cases of shingles. The small print on the posters mentions shingles may strike people with lowered immune systems. Fancy that.
Deaths have been attributed by coroners to the Covid vaccines. The numbers are disputed, but people have died on account of the jabs. That much at least is undeniable. Around the world there are millions of cases of alleged adverse reactions to the jabs – lives severely compromised in some cases. I won’t get into the numbers, because those are always disputed too – but the facts remain. People are dying.
The elephant in the room here is the Covid-19 vaccines – and again I make no apology at all about banging on about this topic week after week. The push to move on, to leave all talk of Covid and pandemic behind us, is palpable and, I would say, downright sinister. I am nowhere near ready to move on – not while there is still so much we do not know, so much we are not allowed to say, think and ask.
We are told all about Covid 19 – and all manner of ways in which it might affect health long after a person has recovered from the initial infection. But as well as the pandemic, the other momentous arrival among us – indeed in just the past year and a half – is the biggest mass vaccination campaign in the history of the world – vaccination with products that had emergency approval, but in my opinion are experimental and for which no long-term data is available – on account of their being brand new and just out of the box.
Billions of people around the world have submitted to the procedure. In a coercive and bullying atmosphere created by politicians and the media, that was mandatory in feel, if not in fact, unknown and unknowable numbers of people did so simply to keep their jobs, to get on a plane and go on holiday or to a gig – and yet in the midst of one report after another of otherwise unexplained sudden deaths in the past 18 months or so, the only emergent variable, the only new thing in the world that we are not allowed to discuss, absolutely not allowed to discuss far less point accusatory fingers at, is the mass vaccination programme.
Again, I ask the question I posed at the top of this piece – are we stupid? Or are we just being treated as if we’re stupid? Which is it?
Sri Lanka was a product of that government following, you know, the the madness of [World Economic Forum] inspired policies: Net Zero, the stripping of fertilizers, and all the rest of it…wholesale strife, collapsing crops and all the rest of it. You would think in a sane world the politicians in each of the countries would respond to the people, but I suspect they won’t. We saw something similar in Canada with the trucker’s freedom convoys, but look what happened there. Obviously Justin Trudeau was was told to get a grip of that situation. He clamped down on it violently, arrested bank accounts and took away the funding for that movement.
Bit on Sri Lanka skipped.
I think what you’re looking at in The Netherlands, for example, is the deliberate dismantling of the land owning class. 85% percent of the of the land in The Netherlands is held by farmers, and has been for generations, and that’s an inconvenient situation for globalist leftist politicians who’ve got other ideas for the land, which is specifically to build houses to cope with the with the levels of immigration that are going on. They’ve empowered themselves the politicians to help themselves to 30 percent of the Dutch farmer’s land, and surprise, surprise! Just as I suspect you would or I would, if the government came into our homes and said they were taking 30% everything we had we owned and had worked for, the farmers have said no…It’s a blatant land grab.
It gets harder and harder to ignore the intent by by leftist globalist governments to return us to some form of feudalism. All these people like us owning property, owning homes, living lives independent of the state. You know what the intention is there, to take people’s independence away. Take away their property, take away the land, and if you control the farmland, you control the food. And if you control the food, you control the people. So you can plainly see what the agenda is.
One need not agree with every one of Oliver’s conclusions to agree that the pattern he deduces, of elites acting against the best interests of the countries they govern and the people they ostensibly serve, seems very real.
Harris County, which has given us no end of corrupt and sketchy practices over the last few years, continues the trend of Democratic Party downplaying and trivializing threats against prominent Republicans, this time a man who threatened to kill senator Ted Cruz.
A Harris County criminal district court magistrate released a suspect who threatened to kill Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and other legislators on a personal bond that required no payment whatsoever.
According to charging documents on June 26, Isaac Ambe Nformangum, aged 22, allegedly called the senator’s Houston office regarding Republican opposition to legislation regarding elections. Nformangum accused Cruz and other Republicans of working to have voting rights repealed and then threatened violence.
A transcript of the phone call provided by investigators quotes Nformangum as saying, “Every last one of your Republican colleagues to have signed off on that platform is to be found and, is to be found and killed, be it by a bullet to the face or by the smashing of a brick in your skull. It is a civic duty of every American citizen or resident to see to it that every last one of your colleagues is to be killed. Killed. Be it by finding you in a public space or by trailing you to your very, by your very public homes.”
“You and every one of your colleagues is to be shot dead. Found and killed.”
Following an investigation conducted by Harris County sheriff’s deputies, the district attorney’s office filed charges against Nformangum of making a felony-level Terroristic Threat, and he was taken into custody on July 2.
Although the Harris County District Attorney’s Office (HCDAO) motioned for his bond to be set at $250,000, on July 3, magistrate Cheryl Harris Diggs for the 177th Criminal District Court ordered Nformangum released on a pre-trial personal bond of $2,500.
Under the conditions of pre-trial personal bonds, however, defendants may be released without posting bail or paying fees. The court coordinator for the 177th Court confirmed to The Texan that Nformangum did not have to pay anything for his release from the jail system.
As with rage against sitting Supreme Court justices, Democrats seem to have so little problem with threats against their political enemies that judges are willing to let those issuing felony threats to be let off with no more than a promise to behave themselves.
And liberals wonder why law-abiding citizens refuse to give up their guns.
Update: Reader LKB noticed a new addendum to the story: “On Tuesday, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office told the state Senate Committee on Finance that the U.S. Marshals have taken Nformangum into federal custody.”
Messing with Harris County judges is one thing, but messing with Raylan Givens is another…
With Russia shutting down the NordStream gas pipeline for maintenance, Peter Zeihan wonders if the end of Germany’s vaunted economic engine is nigh.
Some takeaways:
NordStream has made Germany “horrendously” dependent on Russia for energy.
Russia is blackmailing Germany to stop supporting Ukraine.
“Four things that the Germans rely upon to be the economic powerhouse that they are:”
That cheap natural gas.
Their economic model it is based on access to large volumes of cheap Russian energy, both in terms of for electricity, and as industrial inputs to power the entire German manufacturing model. So that all by itself could kill the German system almost overnight. Well, not overnight, but within a year.
“The Germans rely on a large, robust, highly skilled workforce, but Germany has one of the fastest aging societies in the world…Germany will hit mass retirement this decade, and so the model was always in danger on demographic grounds.”
Third: “Access to central European labor all the way from Poland to Romania and even further east…but that’s going away too. Because just as the Germans are rapidly aging, the central Europeans are aging even more rapidly…the birth rate in all of these countries is actually lower than it is in Germany, so it’s every bit as terminal.”
Fourth, you need the global economic trading system that is now breaking down and America is backing away from.
His conclusion:
All of this put together suggests that the manufacturing model that has sustained Germany, that has provided the tax base, that has provided economic growth, that has made the population relatively happy with their situation, it’s gone. And it’s going to vanish within the next year. And a Europe that does not have a German motor at its heart is a Europe that all of a sudden needs to find a very very different way to function.
As with a lot of Zeihan’s observations, he has a lot of fundamentals right but his conclusions seem overstated. Germany has the resources to abandon their green delusions and restart coal and nuclear plants, assuming they have the political will. And the degree to which globalization is breaking down is the significant subtraction of China and Russia from it. There’s still a lot of U.S./EU trade to be had, even if it does get a bit more expensive. And Germany, so high up on the value-added foodchain, is well-position to survive.
The labor shortage is a trickier problem to solve, and probably was one of the main reasons Angela Merkel was so intent on raking in Islamic “refugees.” But maybe real refugees from the Russo-Ukrainian War might provide an opportunity. It would be pretty ironic if Ukrainians were to find their lebensraum in the bosom of Germany…
This is a catch-all post of various instances of Democrats acting badly I meant to include in the last few LinkSwarms and just didn’t manage to squeeze in.
On Wednesday, Reuters revealed that more than 5 million barrels of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves were sent overseas as part of President Joe Biden’s latest release initiated in March.
Some of that oil went to India, some to the Netherlands, and some was sent to China where the president’s son has engaged in years of potentially criminal business activity embroiling the Biden White House in scandal since the 2020 campaign.
On Thursday, the Washington Free Beacon published new details about the Chinese oil shipments from the U.S. emergency reserves that Biden promised were tapped to “ease the pain that families are feeling” in the United States from high energy prices.
“The Biden administration sold roughly one million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a Chinese state-controlled gas giant that continues to purchase Russian oil, a move the Energy Department said would ‘support American consumers’ and combat ‘Putin’s price hike,’” the Beacon’s Collin Anderson reported. “Biden’s Energy Department in April announced the sale of 950,000 Strategic Petroleum Reserve barrels to Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation. That company, which is commonly known as Sinopec, is wholly owned by the Chinese government.”
Sinopec is also tied to Hunter Biden, whose private equity firm, BHR Partners, bought a $1.7 billion stake in the company seven years ago.
Hunter Biden’s lawyer told the New York Times in November that the president’s son, “no longer holds any interest, directly or indirectly, in either BHR or Skaneateles.”
According to the Washington Examiner, however, Hunter Biden remained listed as a part-owner of the firm as late as March.
“Business records from China’s National Credit Information Publicity System accessed Tuesday continue to identify Skaneateles as a 10% owner in BHR, and Washington, D.C., business records continue to list Biden as the only beneficial owner of Skaneateles,” the paper reported. “The White House has routinely deflected questions about Biden’s business dealings to his attorneys, who have remained largely mum.”
“It’s possible that China’s business registry hasn’t yet been updated to reflect a potential transfer or sale of Skaneateles’s 10% stake in BHR to another party,” the Examiner added.
Meanwhile, Biden’s Energy Department has refused compliance with requests under the Freedom of Information Act probing the administration’s improper use of the nation’s strategic oil reserves maintained for emergencies. Last week, the Functional Government Initiative, a nonprofit government watchdog, filed a lawsuit to compel records concerning administration officials’ decision to tap the oil reserves in the absence of a sudden disruption in supply such as a hurricane or cyberattack.
I would say it’s quite revealing how quickly Democrats resorted to racist slurs against Justice Clarence Thomas following the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, but not really. They’ve long shown they are racist against any minority that refuses to toe the leftist line.
Twitter has been a cesspool of liberals calling Justice Thomas endless racist slurs … and of course, Twitter does nothing. Samuel Jackson called him ‘Uncle Clarence,’ and several people reported him and said they were told by Twitter it was not against the rules to call him that slur.
Why has Clarence Thomas become the target of so much flak following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade? It’s because he’s black. It’s because, as someone with black skin, he is not meant to hold conservative views on issues like abortion. In the eyes of the furious woke agitators who are haranguing Thomas even more than they are the other Roe-sceptical justices, he has not only made a bad legal decision – he has also betrayed his race. His sin is twofold: he has undermined the right to abortion and he has failed in his racial duty to nod unquestioningly along to every ‘progressive’ idea. He’s a racial transgressor, a bad black man, and therefore he must be reprimanded even more severely than the white folk on the Supreme Court. Ladies and gentlemen, behold the scourge of woke racism.
We have just witnessed one of the clearest examples yet of identity politics crossing the line into flagrant, undeniable racism. No sooner had it been announced that the Supreme Court was ditching Roe v Wade than so-called progressives were gunning for Thomas. They’ve never liked Thomas, who has been serving on the Supreme Court since 1991. Sure, he might be just the second African American to sit on the court, but for the identitarian elites he’s the wrong kind of African American, so his historic achievement doesn’t count. He’s Catholic – ‘decidedly and unapologetically Catholic’, as he says – and he’s not down with abortion or same-sex marriage. ‘Wait, I thought all blacks were BLM-supporting, pro-trans, sassy progressives like the ones I know from Twitter?’, you can almost hear the upper-middle-class left say. Thomas doesn’t compute for them. To paraphrase Biden, ‘He ain’t black!’.
And so it was inevitable he would get it in the neck following the fall of Roe. Vile racial hatred has been hurled his way since the ruling. Angry woke Twitter has even used the N-word. Thomas is ‘just another dumb field nigger’, said one tweeter. Another called him a ‘nigger slave’ to his white ‘nutcase’ wife. He’s a ‘coon-ass motherfucker’, apparently. And of course he’s an Uncle Tom. Or ‘Uncle Clarence’, as Samuel L Jackson called him. As a result, ‘Uncle Clarence’ trended online for hours. Welcome to the twisted moral universe of Silicon Valley, where you can be banned for life for saying ‘he’ about someone with a penis but you can happily surf a wave of retweets for using racial slurs about high-ranking black men.
For some reason that I really can’t fathom, the progressive left is escalating its hounding of conservative Supreme Court Justices. If they’re trying to turn off normal Americans, they’re doing a great job. If they’re trying to intimidate or coerce SCOTUS, they are failing miserably. But radicals gotta radical.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh already was the target of an attempted assassination. But the hounding and targeting of him continue.
Politico reports that Justice Kavanaugh was escorted by his security team out the back door of a DC restaurant because leftists were “protesting” outside.
On Wednesday night, D.C. protesters targeting the conservative Supreme Court justices who signed onto the Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion got a tip that Justice BRETT KAVANAUGH was dining at Morton’s downtown D.C. location. Protesters soon showed up out front, called the manager to tell him to kick Kavanaugh out and later tweeted that the justice was forced to exit through the rear of the restaurant.
In a rare move, Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley has sent letters to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich, and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin demanding that authorities put an end to picketing and “threatening activity” outside the homes of SCOTUS justices.
The letter seeks to use state laws to achieve what the Justice Department has clearly rejected under federal law. If the letter prompts arrests, we could see a major free speech challenge in the courts. The timing of the letter, however, is particularly interesting and may reflect a recognition of the limits of the federal law.
Snip.
Under a federal law, 18 U.S.C. 1507, any individual who “pickets or parades” with the “intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer” near a U.S. court or “near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer” will be fined or “imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”
The Hunter Biden shenanigans, though illegal, immoral and infuriating, is just more of the foreign graft rakeoff that Joe Biden and other high ranking Democrats have been pulling off for years. But the radical unhinged attacks on the Supreme Court after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned the Democratic Party’s most Holy of Holies shows that the new pitch of derangement Democrats showed after Donald Trump’s unexpected election was not a temporary aberration.
These days, the Democratic Party seems less a political party than a criminal graft conspiracy married to a crazed social justice cult enraged by any setbacks to its grandiose plans or any questioning of their delusional status as anointed saviors of designated victims.
As reality crashes through their swaddling cocooned delusions and limitless self-regard, expect the derangement to get worse.
Friday’s LinkSwarm mentioned the plight of New York City bodega clerk, who was viciously attacked by the convicted-felon boyfriend of a patron whose credit card had been refused. Defending himself from the attack, Alba stabbed his attacker to death, and was charged with murder.
GoFundMe has deleted the legal defense fund page for the hard-working Manhattan bodega worker holed up at Rikers Island on a whopping $250,000 bond after he fatally stabbed a violent ex-con he was trying to fend off.
Jose Alba, 51, is currently languishing behind bars at the notorious jail despite surveillance video capturing the alleged victim, Austin Simon, 35, storming behind the counter of the bodega to attack him Friday night.
Alba’s family insist he was acting in self-defense when he grabbed a knife to fight off Simon inside the Hamilton Heights Grocery.
Relatives immediately launched a GoFundMe page to help raise funds to cover Alba’s sky-high bail and legal fees after he was hit with a second-degree murder charge — but the page was mysteriously removed Wednesday night.
“Our terms of service prohibit fundraising for the legal defense of a violent crime. At this time, the fundraiser has been removed and all donors have been refunded,” GoFundMe said in a statement Thursday.
The page had already raised $20,000 for Alba when it was suddenly removed, the Daily Mail reported.
Under GoFundMe’s terms of services, the platform can’t be used for the legal defense of “alleged crime associated with hate, violence, harassment, bullying, discrimination, terrorism.”
Controversial Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has faced backlash over Alba’s case after his office brought the charges — and then pushed for $500,000 bail for the father-of-three at his arraignment Saturday.
This is just the latest example of a Soros-backed Democrat DA filing charges against law-abiding citizens daring to defend themselves from violent attacks by felons. (See also: Kyle Rittenhouse.)
Former New York City resident Louis Rossmann has a nice video rant on the subject.
“If you are a criminal, Alvin Bragg has your back!”
You have felonies that have been, in many cases, decreased to petty misdemeanors. So if you commit a felony, it’ll get decreased to a petty misdemeanor. However if you are one of the people that allow society to function, one of the people that puts in work every day, a law-abiding citizen that simply wants to go home without getting killed by somebody half his age, who has a criminal record, who is beating you up, we throw the book at you this is sickening and tiring and it has to stop!
“They will always simp for the criminal.”
He’s right about everything, but the name “George Soros” never appears anywhere in his rant. Pretty much every-time you see this sort of coddling of criminals and throwing the book at the law-abiding, a George Soros-backed DA is the one making the prosecution decisions.
Soros-backed DAs seem intent on destroying the social fabric of America, and of prosecuting the law-abiding Americans as though the right to self-defense didn’t exist. It goes hand-in-hand with the Democratic Party’s obsession with disarming law-abiding Americans.
