The 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…)
If 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.
In an attempt to subvert the Supreme Court’s clear directions in the Bruen decision, California’s gun grabbing Democrats have actually made their case weaker through their own arguments. Armed Scholar Anthony Miranda:
Some takeaways:
It would be nice if the citizens of California could enjoy the Second Amendment rights enjoyed by American citizens in the overwhelming majority of the other 49 states…
Sometimes actual justice wins:
After intense backlash from local bodega workers and city tabloids, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg on Tuesday dropped all charges against bodega clerk Jose Alba, who was allegedly acting in self-defense when he fatally stabbed a man who was attacking him.
The liberal DA’s decision comes after weeks of criticism of Bragg’s decision to send the 61-year-old to Riker’s Island and charge him with second-degree murder in the death of 35-year-old Austin Simon. Bragg first requested Alba’s bail be set at $500,000 before it was lowered to $50,000 in response to criticism from the community. He was later released on a $5,000 bail bond.
Snip.
Bragg’s office said Tuesday that “a homicide case against Alba could not be proven at trial beyond a reasonable doubt” after further investigation, according to the New York Times.
This is obviously the correct decision, but this was obviously justifiable self-defense from the very beginning, and that didn’t keep Soros-backed DA Alvin Bragg from charging Alba with murder in the first place. Indeed, chances are good that if it weren’t not for widespread outcry from other politicians (like Mayor Eric Adams), it’s quite possible that Alba would still be languishing in Riker’s Island awaiting trial.
The Defund The Police wing of the Democratic Party won’t give up their war on legal self-defense without a lot more fights.
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 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:
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.
As I’ve mentioned previously, semiconductor subsidies are the wrong solution to the wrong problem.
$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.
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.”
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.
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:
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.
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.
I note that this is the second “Official Oppression” charge I’ve reported in as many months. Anderson County is a rural Texas county located between Lufkin and Dallas.
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.
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.
First up: Scottish commentator Neil Oliver wonders about all the questions we’re not allowed to ask about Flu Manchu.
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?
Next: Oliver notes how mass protests and even open revolt against the green globalist/Build Back Better agenda are being downplayed or ignored by the media:
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.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)