Amid 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.
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.
Paying people not to work makes them worse off, Democrats sleepwalk toward disaster, another would-be assassin of a Republican congressman walks away without bail, more Democratic judicial officials who refuse to obey the law, and a disturbing number of pedophiles in our school systems. Welcome to a special Saturday LinkSwarm!
The “experts” didn’t expect it to turn out this way. An experiment conducted by Harvard University and University of Exeter social scientists found no-strings-attached handouts harmed low-income recipients rather than help them.
Funded by an anonymous nonprofit, the study centered on an experiment in which 2,073 low-income people were randomly selected to receive a single, unconditional cash transfer of either $500 or $2,000. Another 3,170 low-income study subjects received no money from the study.
The experiment was conducted from July 2020 to May 2021. On average, the subjects were earning roughly $950 a month while receiving another $530 in food stamps and other government benefits. A little over half were unemployed and 80% had children.
Over a 15-week period, participants were periodically surveyed about their financial, physical and mental health. Across a wide range of financial and non-financial attributes, researchers found no positive effects on those who received free money — but plenty of negative ones.
For a few weeks, people who received the extra money spent more than the control group — $182 a week for the people who received $500, and $574 a week for the ones given $2,000.
The additional spending didn’t bolster their financial health. The handout recipients reported the same rate of overdraft fees, late-payment charges and cash advances as did those who didn’t receive the extra money. And it was all downhill from there. The handout recipients reported:
Less earned income
Less job satisfaction
Lower work performance
More financial stress
Less liquidity
Worse sleep
Worse physical health
More anxiety
More loneliness
The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley writes:
“It’s no surprise that people who received a large percentage of their monthly income for doing nothing were less motivated to work and less satisfied with their work.
Earning a paycheck can give workers a sense of personal agency that encourages them to make better financial and health decisions. Receiving a handout may do the opposite.”
The editors of The Economist beg the Democratic Party’s leaders to “wake up” to the fact that they’re about to get demolished in the upcoming midterms. Politico reports that, “The gubernatorial race in Pennsylvania has begun to look more competitive than either party expected.” The Economist blames the loud voices of the hard-left fringe, and warns that Democrats must “moderate, or die.” But this is just about the least likely moment for centrist Democrats to launch a new fight against the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez types, and Democrats won’t have that fight until a midterm thrashing forces them to — and even then, Democrats may well choose to learn the wrong, but more comforting lessons, from a sweeping defeat.
The editors of The Economist, sensing an impending midterm blowout and the ensuing empowerment of a Trump-friendly GOP, beg the Democratic Party’s leaders to distance themselves from their fringe elements:
Fringe and sometimes dotty ideas have crept into Democratic rhetoric, peaking in the feverish summer of 2020 with a movement to “defund the police”, abolish immigration enforcement, shun capitalism, relabel women as birthing people and inject “anti-racism” into the classroom.
Snip.
First, out of all the possible times for the leaders of the party and its centrist members to embrace a fight with their hard-left grassroots, four months before Election Day is perhaps the worst time. Right now, Democrats desperately need progressives — the Bernie Bros, the Squad fans, and your crazy Aunt Edna with the Ruth Bader Ginsburg prayer candles — to turn out in November; they’re disappointed enough with Joe Biden already. The future of Senators Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and Mark Kelly of Arizona depends upon frustrated and impatient progressives in those states.
Second, rebuking the fringe Left is going to be difficult, and few people embrace difficult change until they hit bottom. Nobody likes admitting that they got something wrong, and nobody in politics wants to admit that their approach didn’t work — until after they’ve paid a high price at the ballot box.
The disappointing results of 2020 were clearly not enough. Shortly after the election, Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia seethed about her party’s left wing: “Tuesday was a failure, it was not a success. . . . If we don’t mean defund the police, we shouldn’t say that. . . . And we need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. Because while people think it doesn’t matter, it does matter, and we lost good members because of that. If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a congressional standpoint, we will get f***ing torn apart in 2022.”
Do the Democrats seem more centrist and results-focused now than they did in 2020?
Democrats can’t rebuke their social justice warrior radicals because the shock-troops of that “fringe” has taken control of vast swathes of the party machinery. The SJW faction is willing to endure electoral disaster as along as it lets them sieze full control of the party machinery and thus all the spigots party patronage.
How bad is it? Ruy Teixeira, whose “emerging Democratic majority” thesis is is so central to Democratic administrations refusing to enforce border controls, is leaving the Center for American Progress because it’s gotten too radical.
Ruy Teixeira, a prominent scholar at the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress (CAP), is leaving his job for a conservative organization because of liberals’ obsession with race, gender and other identity issues, according to Politico.
The obsession with identity politics at CAP made it difficult for him to do work involving class and economics, he told the outlet, so he’s leaving for the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. Left-leaning think tanks have given in to demands of junior staffers and made it difficult for scholars to discuss crime, immigration and other issues beyond a narrow set of default assumptions, according to Teixeira.
The culture within left-leaning organizations “sends me running screaming from the left,” Teixeira told Politico. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land … the fact that nobody is willing to call bullshit, it just freaks me out.”
Attack a Republican congressman? Enjoy your Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card. “A 43-year-old man [David G. Jakubonis] accused of attacking Representative Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.) with a sharp object at a campaign stop in upstate New York on Thursday evening was charged with a felony and released from custody just hours after his arrest, police said…Jakubonis was charged with attempted assault in the second degree and was released on his own recognizance.”
The groomer plague is not your imagination. “At least 181 K-12 teachers, principals, and staff have been arrested for child sex crimes in the United States so far this year.”
“Self-Proclaimed Socialist Judge in Harris County Facing Removal by Judicial Conduct Commission. Judge Franklin Bynum allegedly ordered the sheriff not to collect DNA samples required by law and repeatedly dismissed domestic and family violence cases for no probable cause.”
Cost of living index for cities worldwide. Weirdly, Austin is still pretty affordable in relation to purchasing power compared to most of the world. Also weirdly, New York City is the index city…
Gascón’s prosecutors sued him so they could “charge repeat offenders to the fullest extent of the law.” The DA wants to appeal in front of the California Supreme Court:
In June, the Second Appellate District Court upheld portions of a lower court’s injunction that said Gascón cannot refuse to charge three-strike cases, which can dramatically increase prison sentences for some of the most serious repeat offenders.
Gascón is hoping to have the court’s order overturned, arguing that it is “draconian,” creates “a dangerous precedent” and amounts to “taking the charging decision out of a prosecutor’s hands.”
“The district attorney overstates his authority,” the Second Appellate District ruling reads. “He is an elected official who must comply with the law, not a sovereign with absolute, unreviewable discretion.”
Don’t the peasants know that laws are for the little people?
Good. “San Francisco’s New DA Goes On Firing Spree After Voters Recall Soros-Backed Predecessor…”The new district attorney in San Francisco fired at least 15 employees from the prosecutor’s office after her left-wing predecessor Chesa Boudin was recalled last month.
“Charlene Carter, a flight attendant who had worked at Southwest Airlines for 20 years but was fired in 2017 because she had publicly opposed the use of her union dues to fund pro-abortion protests, has now won a $5.1 million lawsuit against both Southwest and her union.” Good. Coerced speech violates the First Amendment. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
Beto O’Rourke gets a $1 million donation from George Soros. Well, at least that’s $1 million that won’t go toward burning down small businesses and defunding the police. Also, remember how Democrats are always saying they want to get money out of politics? They never mean it.
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:
“The state of California just backed themselves into a major corner in the California ‘assault weapons’ ban case, Miller v Bonta.”
California “requested that the Ninth Circuit vacate Judge [Roger] Benitez’s ruling and remand the case back down to him for him to have to completely rehear the case all over again from square one. This was the State of California’s effort to stall this case out as long as possible because that’s really one of the only cards they have left.”
“[Firearms Policy Coalition] just obliterated all the State of California’s arguments in their reply, and they completely trapped the State of California with their own words.”
In short, California was still trying to argue that the two-step approach to exercising Second Amendment would be upheld on appeal despite the fact that the Supreme Court had explicitly bitch-slapped the two-step approach into oblivion.
California also falsely announced that in striking down the two-step approach, the Supreme Court had created a new legal framework, when in fact they had merely explicitly affirmed the existing framework of Heller.
The district court “found that California’s ban on modern firearms was not one of the presumptively lawful measures that was identified in Heller, and also found that the ban on modern firearms has no historical pedigree.”
To whit: “Prior to the 1990s, there was no national history of banning weapons because they were equipped with features like pistol grips, collapsible stocks, flash hiders, flare launchers or barrel shrouds.”
“Benitez ultimately found that those arguments were exactly the type that the Supreme Court and Heller broadly caution courts against when deciding whether analogous regulations were long-standing. Something that was put in place or didn’t pop up until the 1930s or the 1940s or 50s doesn’t actually align with the historical pedigree that the supreme
court commands that courts must look at.”
California “acts as if Judge Benitez did not consider text as informed by history, when in fact he actually did in his original ruling. Also, all the harm California claims that will be suffered if the state is lifted has also been found 100% illegitimate prior by Benitez himself.”
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…
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 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