How bad does housing suck if you’re poor and live in Shanghai, China? This much:
“Shanghai’s landlords are quite ingenious, managing to convert even the smallest spaces into rentable rooms at high prices.”
Bathroom with a ladder to a crude loft above it? 600 yuan. (Exchange rate is currently running just above 7 yuan to the dollar.)
At least that had air-conditioning. For 300 yuan, you can get a room barely big enough for a small bed with two hole punched in the wall for ventilation.
For the same price, you can get a bathroom with a bed in the crawlspace right behind the toilet. “After using the toilet, the smell lingers in the room. Also don’t turn the shower head [over the tiny sink] on too high or it’ll soak the bed.”
One room is a twice-coffin size crawlspace off a balcony for 1,500 yuan.
But wait! For a mere 50 yuan, a guy rented a 0.3 square meter crawlspace he can’t fully lie down in. “Some local netizens from Shanghai commented that a closet could not be rented for 50 yuan, the price being at least 120 yuan.”
“This design is really thoughtful! Knowing you’d have to squat to cook noodles, they smartly place a toilet right here, complete with a door!”
“Here’s another place for 500 yuan rent combining living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom all in one!” Complete with cardboard box bed in the entry. “There’s a simple induction cooker for cooking, but it’s a tight squeeze for anyone a bit larger, though there is an exhaust fan. This stove is too far from the toilet. It’s inconvenient to cook while you are using a toilet, but when you shower you can easily stir fry at the same time.” No AC, but the landlord said they could add it for 200 extra yuan rent…
Of course, those exciting bed-in-toilet apartments are only available to people who can afford to pay any money for rent. Many can’t. “There are also groups known as Knights of the Bridge Underpass. In big cities, you can deliver food without renting a place. We found a bridge where several delivery guys and girls live.”
We’ve covered problems with youth despair in China before, including both the “lie flat” and “let it rot” movements.
“How do you deal with water and electricity?…First you can use water from public toilets, but this water is only for washing and laundry, not drinking.” To be fair, they show sinks in public toilets, so I imagine that’s where they’re getting their water, but it’s China, so who knows?
“Drinking water is bought from villagers nearby.”
“Electricity can be sourced from the batteries of delivery ebikes, which are rented for 300 to 400 a month. You can swap many each day, then connect an inverter to the battery you get 220 volt household electricity, and that solves that problem.” (220 volts was evidently standardized by the nationalist government in 1930.)
There’s a video blogger who lives in his solar equipped van, and he seems much better off than any other housing option covered in this video.
“It’s not just Shanghai. Nearly all major Chinese cities host these workers, often labeled as a low-end population. These include delivery workers, ride share drivers, factory or construction site laborers, or college students from out of town.” During America’s industrial boom, working in a factory allowed you to buy a house. Thanks to China’s factory boom, factory workers can enjoy living under a bridge.
“Working odd jobs, they hustle in every corner of the city, typically working over 10 hours a day without a single day off. The city’s prosperity doesn’t touch them. Their daily focus is simply on earning more money.”
The situation is slightly better in Beijing, which has 3 square meter apartments for 2000 yuan, and Shenzhen offers “urban villages” (I think we’d call them apartment complexes) with 1 bedroom apartments for 700 yuan a month.
In Guangdong, the so-called “Shango Gods” have completely given up on life and just live under bridges.
“The unemployed crowd together both men and women in an area filled with unbearable odors.”
“They work one day and rest for a week. A day’s pay can be 200 yuan, enough to sit in an Internet cafe for a week. They eat steamed buns, buy three or four to last the day.”
“In many cities, there are many of these so-called Shango Gods who have completely given up on life. ‘Already seeing no hope. This kind of life is actually pretty good. Wherever you go, just find a place to lie down and don’t think about anything, because no matter how hard you try, without connections it won’t work.'”
America is hardly free of homelessness or tiny apartments. But America’s homeless population is overwhelmingly mentally ill alcoholics and drug addicts living off handouts whose plight is catered to by a Homeless Industrial Complex that rakes off graft pretending to help them, not able-bodied young people willing to work but unable to afford even the meanest accommodations. And the smallest New York City apartments you can find on YouTube all look lightyears better than the horrors seen in Shanghai.
Communists have long bragged about working for the proletariat, but in Communist China, the actual proletarians have been reduced to living under bridges.
Details on the people and organizations dedicated to burning America down, more Biden corruption, more of his censorship regime, a few Russo-Ukrainian War updates, and a pedophile gets ventilated. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Have America’s college students suddenly converted en masse to anarcho-communist-jihadism? Not quite. Many are far left and anti-Israel. Some are foreigners, or the children of foreigners, who have imported the conspiracies and hatreds of their homelands. More, admitted under relaxed pandemic-era admissions standards and proudly ignorant of both American and world history, are taking the “decolonial” half-knowledge pushed by their elders to its logical conclusion.
But students are not the only, and perhaps not even the most important, faction active in the campus protests. As in the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, “outside agitators”—professional radicals and organizers, black bloc antifa thugs, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, and Palestinian and Islamist radicals—have played a central role in organizing and escalating the campus protests, just as they have organized and escalated the wider anti-Israel protest campaign that began almost immediately after Oct. 7. This largely decentralized network of agitators is, in turn, politically and financially supported by a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups ultimately backed by big-money donors aligned with the Democratic Party.
The first hint that the protests are not entirely organic is their striking resemblance to previous rounds of organized far-left agitation, from the “uprising” of summer 2020 to the rolling antifa vs. Proud Boys brawls of 2016-17. The creation of “liberated” or “autonomous” zones on campus, for instance, is a hallmark of anarchist organizing familiar from Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and New York’s City Hall Autonomous Zone four summers ago. Familiar, too, is the governance of these zones, with masked security details prohibiting filming from outsiders and directing reporters to trained media representatives. During clashes with police or with counterprotesters, students and their allies have deployed classic “bloc” tactics, covering their faces and dressing in matching outfits to promote anonymity, linking arms to interfere with police attempts to conduct arrests, and attempting “de-arrests”—i.e., the coordinated swarming of police officers—to rescue apprehended comrades. At Yale, student activists doxxed the police officers sent to clear them out of the encampment—another harassment tactic frequently deployed by antifa.
These resemblances are no accident. All of these tactics require a degree of instruction and training. Footage from Columbia showed the professional “protest consultant” Lisa Fithian, a veteran of Occupy, BLM, Standing Rock, and Stop Cop City, teaching students at Columbia how to barricade themselves into Hamilton Hall. Recent video from inside the protest encampment at UCLA, meanwhile, showed masked men leading a hand-to-hand combat training. When police cleared out encampments at the University of Texas-Austin and Columbia and the City University of New York last week, roughly half of those arrested—45 of the 79 in Texas, 134 of the 282 in New York—had no connection with the university at which they were arrested. Some, like the 40-year-old anarchist heir James Carlson, arrested at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, had protest related rap sheets going back two decades.
“What you’re seeing is a real witches’ brew of revolutionary content interacting on campuses,” says Kyle Shideler, the director for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and an expert on far-left domestic extremism. “On the left-wing side, you have a broad variety of revolutionary leftists, who serve as rent-a-mobs, providing the warm bodies for whatever the leftist cause of the day is. And on the other side you have the Islamist and Palestinian networks: American Muslims for Palestine and their subsidiary Students for Justice in Palestine, CAIR, the Palestinian Youth Movement. We’re seeing a real mixture of different kinds of radical foment, and it’s all being activated at the same time.”
The far-left groups active in the protests include antifa and other anarchists: Anarchist literature has been distributed in the encampments, and antifa websites have published dispatches from “comrades” on the inside. They also include various communist and Marxist-Leninist groups, including the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the International ANSWER coalition, a PSL front group that worked with several Muslim groups to organize the Jan. 13 March on Washington for Gaza, at which protesters flew the black jihadist flag. On April 29, for instance, shortly before masked assailants stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and barricaded themselves inside, The People’s Forum—a Manhattan event space affiliated with the PSL and funded by Neville Roy Singham, a wealthy businessman who “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide,” according to an August profile in The New York Times—urged its activists to rush up to Columbia to “support our students.” Similar calls for an “emergency action” were distributed throughout radical networks in New York City.
Snip.
The “movement,” in turn, while it recruits from among students and other self-motivated radicals willing to put their bodies on the line, relies heavily on the funding of progressive donors and nonprofits connected to the upper reaches of the Democratic Party. Take the epicenter of the nationwide protest movement, Columbia University. According to reporting in the New York Post, the Columbia encampment was principally organized by three groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime (WOL). Let’s take each in turn.
JVP is, in essence, the “Jewish”-branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, backed by the usual big-money progressive donors—including some, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that were instrumental in selling Obama’s Iran Deal to the public. JVP and its affiliated political action arm, JVP Action, have received at least $650,000 from various branches of George Soros’ philanthropic empire since 2017, $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation (founded by early Amazon employee Sheldon Kaphan), $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and smaller amounts from progressive donors such as the Quitiplas Foundation, according to reporting from the New York Post and NGO Monitor, a pro-Israel research institute. JVP has also received nearly $1.5 million from various donor-advised funds—which allow wealthy clients to give anonymously through their financial institutions—run through the charitable giving arms of Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard, and TIAA, according to NGO Monitor’s review of those institutions’ tax documents.
SJP, by contrast, is an outgrowth of the Islamist networks dissolved during the U.S. government’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and related charities for fundraising for Hamas. SJP is a subsidiary of an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); SJP in fact has no “formal corporate structure of its own but operates as AMP’s campus brand,” according to a lawsuit filed last week against AJP Educational Fund, the parent nonprofit of AMP. Both AMP and SJP were founded by the same man, Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian academic who formerly fundraised for KindHearts, an Islamic charity dissolved in 2012 pursuant to a settlement with the U.S. Treasury, which froze the group’s assets for fundraising for Hamas (KindHearts did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement). And several of AMP’s senior leaders are former fundraisers for HLF and related charities, according to November congressional testimony from former U.S. Treasury official Jonathan Schanzer. An ongoing federal lawsuit by the family of David Boim, an American teenager killed in a Hamas terrorist attack in 1996, goes so far as to allege that AMP is a “disguised continuance” and “legal alter-ego” of the Islamic Association for Palestine, was founded with startup money from current Hamas official Musa Abu Marzook and dissolved alongside HLF. AMP has denied it is a continuation of IAP.
Today, however, National SJP is legally a “fiscal sponsorship” of another nonprofit: a White Plains, New York, 501(c)(3) called the WESPAC Foundation. A fiscal sponsorship is a legal arrangement in which a larger nonprofit “sponsors” a smaller group, essentially lending it the sponsor’s tax-exempt status and providing back-office support in exchange for fees and influence over the sponsorship’s operations. For legal and tax purposes, the sponsor and the sponsorship are the same entity, meaning that the sponsorship is relieved of the requirement to independently disclose its donors or file a Form 990 with the IRS. This makes fiscal sponsorships a “convenient way to mask links between donors and controversial causes,” according to the Capital Research Center. Donors, in other words, can effectively use nonprofits such as WESPAC to obscure their direct connections to controversial causes.
Something of the sort appears to be happening with WESPAC. Run by the market researcher Howard Horowitz, WESPAC reveals very little about its donors, although scattered reporting and public disclosures suggest that the group is used as a pass-through between larger institutions and pro-Palestinian radicals. Since 2006, for instance, WESPAC has received more than half a million in donations from the Elias Foundation, a family foundation run by the private equity investor James Mann and his wife. WESPAC has also received smaller amounts from Grassroots International (an “environmental” group heavily funded by Thousand Currents), the Sparkplug Foundation (a far-left group funded by the Wall Street fortune of Felice and Yoram Gelman), and the Bafrayung Fund, run by Rachel Gelman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. (A self-described “abolitionist,” Gelman was featured in a 2020 New York Times feature on “The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism.”) In 2022, WESPAC also received $97,000 from the Tides Foundation, the grant-making arm of the Tides Nexus.
WESPAC, however, is not merely the fiscal sponsor of the Hamas-linked SJP but also the fiscal sponsor of the third group involved in organizing the Columbia protests, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), formerly known as New York City SJP. Founded by the Palestinian American lawyer Nerdeen Kiswani, a former activist with the Hunter College and CUNY chapters of SJP, WOL has emerged over the past seven months as perhaps the most notorious antisemitic group in the country, and has been banned from Facebook and Instagram for glorifying Hamas. A full list of the group’s provocations would take thousands of words, but it has been the central organizing force in the series of “Flood”-themed protests in New York City since Oct. 7, including multiple bridge and highway blockades, a November riot at Grand Central Station, the vandalism of the New York Public Library, and protests at the Rockefeller Center Christmas-tree lighting.
More info on the people backing the Stop Cop City protestors:
Where did the money come from? From donations solicited through left-wing fundraising and organizing networks. One of those networks was the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), an umbrella group for more than 80 “community organizations,” including the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, which organized an illegal anti-Israel protest in the Capitol Rotunda in December at which more than 50 activists were arrested. CJA’s website promotes a grab bag of far-left causes, and includes a “Free Palestine” page proclaiming that “the path to climate justice travels through a free Palestine.” To this day—eight months after the Georgia RICO indictment alleged that the Forest Justice Defense Fund was a fraudulent charity paying for ammunition purchases in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy—CJA maintains a Stop Cop City page urging readers to donate to the Forest Justice Defense Fund and the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. CJA also endorsed a “statement of solidarity” with Stop Cop City, which claimed, by the inexorable logic of intersectionality, the fight against “gentrification and police violence” in Atlanta as part of the fight against climate change.
CJA is a subsidiary of the Movement Strategy Center, a California-based 501(c)(3) that has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and various branches of the Open Society network. But it has another financial supporter, one that may come as a surprise: You, the American taxpayer. In November, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was entrusting $50 million in federal grant money under the Inflation Reduction Act to the CJA, to be distributed in sub-grants to fund “environmental justice” projects by “community-based nonprofit organizations.”
Read the whole thing.
More on the same subject: “Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors.” Surprising to people who haven’t been paying attention, maybe.
The donors include some of the biggest names in Democratic circles: Soros, Rockefeller and Pritzker, according to a POLITICO analysis.
Two of the organizers supporting the protests at Columbia University and on other campuses are Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Both are supported by the Tides Foundation, which is seeded by Democratic megadonor George Soros and was previously supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It in turn supports numerous small nonprofits that work for social change.
Soros declined to comment, but a spokesperson with the Open Society Foundations, of which Soros is the founder and chairman, said in a statement that it “has funded a broad spectrum of US groups that have advocated for the rights of Palestinians and Israelis and for peaceful resolution to the conflict in Israel.” The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has previously funded the Tides Foundation and other groups, said it no longer has active grants to Tides. It also does not support Jewish Voice for Peace or IfNotNow.
Covers some of the same ground as the Tablet piece, but still worth reading the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Former president Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Florida for allegedly mishandling classified documents is being postponed indefinitely.
Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon ordered a new pretrial schedule for motions and discovery Tuesday afternoon after the classified documents case was originally scheduled to go to trial later this month.
“The Court also determines that finalization of a trial date at this juncture — before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and CIPA issues remaining and forthcoming — would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions before the Court, critical CIPA issues, and additional pretrial and trial preparations necessary to present this case to a jury,” Cannon said in her order.
The trial will likely be pushed until after the 2024 presidential election this November.
It’s hard to exaggerate how abysmal Biden’s polling has been lately.
No incumbent president should ever want to be near 43 percent in a head-to-head ballot test. Yet here is Joe Biden at 43 percent in the latest CNN poll, 43 percent in the latest Morning Consult poll, 43 percent in the latest Economist/YouGov poll, and 43 percent in the latest Harvard/Harris poll. (NB: Biden ticked up to 48 when Harvard/Harris pushed respondents to choose between Trump and Biden, and the Economist/YouGov poll had RFK Jr. in the mix.)
Detect a trend? (There are other polls that have Biden a little higher.)
It’s no mystery why Biden’s polling is at crisis levels.
An incumbent president’s level of support in a reelection bid is typically tethered closely to his job approval. It’s hard to get much more than a couple of points above it. Biden’s job approval is at 40 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average and at 39.3 in the 538 polling average.
Desperate for cash, James Biden traveled to Qatar with the aim of personally presenting to Qatari Finance Minister Ali Sharif Al Emadi who was later arrested and charged with bribery and laundering over $5 billion and sentenced to 20 years in prison. While little is known about the details behind the internal power struggle in the corrupt terror state, Al Emadi had been accused of “channeling Qatari support to various Islamist groups over the years” as well as subverting American and European institutions with sizable infusions of Qatari money.
As the American end of the deal fell apart in recriminations and lawsuits, one of the litigants received “blood-stained currency” and a “torture ticket” after suing James Biden and his partners. The blood money came from a Middle Eastern country known to be associated with terrorists. But the FBI refused to name the country and insisted the media also hide its identity.
Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released an 800-page report that reads like Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”
Take a look:
In March 2021, an Amazon employee emailed others within the company about the reason for the Amazon bookstore’s new content moderation policy change: “[T]he impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden Administration about sensitive books we’re giving prominent placement to.”
In March 2021, just one day prior to a scheduled call with the White House, an Amazon employee explained how changes to Amazon’s bookstore policies were being applied “due to criticism from the Biden people.”
In July 2021, when Facebook executive Nick Clegg asked a Facebook employee why the company censored the man-made theory of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the employee responded: “Because we were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more. . . . We shouldn’t have done it.”
There’s chutzpah, and then there’s chutzpah: “Denver Illegals Make Demands, Include ‘Culturally Appropriate’ Food, Lawyers, Unlimited Showers And Warnings Before Evictions.”
It was fun seeing Ukraine’s Bradley’s take out Russian tanks with their Bushmaster, but they just took out a T-80 from a mile away with their TOW missile, which is the recommended method of a Bradley killing a Russian tank.
In addition to using high tech weapons against Russia, Ukraine is also using caltrops to shred their tires, a weapon first deployed by the Roman empire.
So the City of Pasadena, Texas was hassling Azael Sepulveda’s Oz Mechanics car repair shop over parking for no apparent reason, came to an agreement to settle his lawsuit, and now says, get this, they don’t have to follow the agreement because they claim the city enjoys “immunity” from lawsuits. “The property he purchased had housed another auto mechanic shop for more than 30 years and included five parking spaces, but under revised ordinances, the city demanded that Sepulveda provide 28 parking spots.” Somebody in the Pasadena city government deserves a dick punching…
More corruption from the Biden family (plus a Texas Democratic congressman), more bad news from the Biden Recession, more pedophile sex offenders, more college madness, and virtue signaling, Third Reich style. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
And remember: If you’re in a large Texas county, there’s a tax appraisal district election tomorrow, so be sure to get out and vote if you haven’t already voted early.
Another week, another corrupt Biden family scheme exposed. “Joe Biden’s Brother Embroiled In High-Ranking Qatari Scheme To ‘Provide Wealth Of Introductions’ Through ‘My Family.'”
Qatar has had a lot of fingers in a lot of pies. While we knew about the EU’s ‘Qatargate,’ investments with the Kushner family, and of course Sen. Bob Menendez advancing Qatar’s interests, Politico reports that the Biden family’s ties to Qatar “would constitute some of the closest known financial links between a relative of President Joe Biden and a foreign government,” if courtroom testimony about Jim Biden’s foreign fundraising efforts is substantiated.
In June 2017, Qatar’s neighbors – led by Saudi Arabia, banded together and cut diplomatic ties with the country, citing its alleged support for terrorism. As a result, the country was thrown into a sustained crisis.
To dig themselves out, Qatari rulers began showering well-connected Westerners with gifts and financial benefits, according to Politico, “sometimes in the form of investment funding.”
Around this time, Jim Biden was trying to raise $30 million for embattled hospital chain Americore – teaming up with Florida businessman Amer Rustom, CEO of the Platinum Group, who boasted of his ties to officials in the Middle East, as well as fund manager Michael Lewitt. Together, the three sought investment funding from various Middle Eastern sources for Americore and other ventures – “which came to focus largely on Qatar,” according to a former Americore executive who spoke on condition of anonymity.
According to public records obtained by the outlet, Jim Biden leveraged ties to his older brother and “sought workarounds to restrictions on international money movements,” including one discussion about trying to move money across a Middle Eastern border in the form of gold bars that may or may not have happened.
Let ye who has never smuggled gold across the border of an Arab country cast the first stone.
“My family could provide a wealth of introductions and business opportunities at the highest levels that I believe would be worthy of the interest of His Excellency,” Jim Biden and Rustom wrote in a draft letter to an official at the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority. “On behalf of the Biden family, I welcome your interest here,” the draft continues.
Corrupt to the core.
More evidence from the Biden recession: “Job Openings Tumble, Quits Plunge, Hires Unexpectedly Crater To January 2018 Levels.”
After several months of relatively boring JOLTS prints, this morning Janet Yellen’s favorite labor market indicator once again got exciting, and not in a good way.
Starting at the top, according to the March JOLTS reported, job openings unexpectedly tumbled by 325K – the biggest drop since October 2023 – from an upward revised 8.813 million in February to just 8.488 million, far below the 8.690 million expected – and the lowest number since February 2021 when it last printed below 8 million.
The Department of Justice has arrested two Chinese nationals who allegedly plotted to export U.S. technology to advance the People’s Republic of China’s military operations.
Han Li, 44, and Lin Chen, 64, have been charged with several counts of conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), in addition to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR), for attempting to export a machine used to process silicon microchips….
“Specifically, the defendants sought to illegally obtain for CGTC a DTX-150 Automatic Diamond Scriber Breaker machine from Dynatex International, a Santa Rosa, California company.”
That’s a backend semiconductor machine for slicing finished individual computer chips off a processed wafer.
Representative Henry Cuellar and his wife were indicted by a federal grand jury on bribery, foreign influence, and money-laundering charges, the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Friday afternoon.
The Texas Democrat and his wife are accused of accepting roughly $600,000 in bribes from two foreign entities starting in December 2014 and continuing through 2021. The foreign entities are a Mexican bank and an oil and gas company linked to the government of Azerbaijan, according to the Justice Department.
In exchange for the bribes, Cuellar agreed to use his office for promoting favorable U.S. foreign policy towards Azarbaijan and pushing legislative and executive branch officials to adopt policy measures beneficial to the bank, authorities said.
In 2022, Cuellar’s home and office were searched during a federal investigation into Azerbaijan and American businessmen linked to the Middle Eastern nation. Cuellar formerly co-chaired the congressional Azerbaijan caucus.
Cuellar represents TX28. Republicans Jay Furman and Lazaro Garza Jr. are competing in the runoff to challenge Cuellar this fall.
Columbia shows some semblance of a spine, threatens to expel students occupying administrative buildings.
Related: “Columbia Student Who Said ‘Zionists Don’t Deserve To Live’ Reportedly ‘Thrown Out Of School.'”
Also: “Police Begin Detaining UCLA Protesters Occupying Campus.”
“Tucked away in the $95 billion military aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan is a $3.5 billion slush fund to open new processing centers for Muslim migrants, in what Sen. Eric Schmitt described as a bid to “supercharge mass migration from the Middle East.” Republicans in congress asleep at the switch again.
It’s not just China that the CCP’s crazy policies are ruining. There are over 500 abandoned, unfinished buildings in Cambodia. A crackdown on online gambling also hastened the demise of many real estate ventures there.
Tranny sex offender tries to snatch a child from an elementary playground in broad daylight. “Trans-identifying male Solomon Galligan [simply] walked on campus last Friday afternoon during recess at Black Forest Hills Elementary School in Aurora, Colorado, and straight-up tried to steal a kid.”
The suspect, who is identified as male in the arrest affidavit, shared news of his transition on Facebook back in 2011.
‘So im starting my hormone shots and i relly cant wait im on my hormone pills ive been on them for almost 4 months i wake up all depressed and crying but in the end its gonna be totally worth it you know what io mean im really excited my measurements are already changing and im super thrilled,’ he wrote.
Galligan was put on the sex offender registry and was convicted that same year of non-consent sexual contact, according to his latest arrest affidavit.
Ernest Herrera, 56, was arrested Monday after he admitted to sexual contact with a 13-year-old student, claiming they had “developed a relationship.”
Herrera taught social studies at Southside Independent School District’s Losoya Middle School in San Antonio.
He was charged with improper relationship between educator and student, a second-degree felony punishable by 2 to 20 years in prison.
Herrera was booked into Bexar County Jail and held on a $75,000 bond.
The district superintendent stated that Herrera was fired “effective immediately.”
Andrew McCown, 27, was arrested Wednesday and charged with having an “improper relationship” with a 17-year-old female student.
McCown is a math teacher and football coach at Roosevelt High School in San Antonio’s North East ISD.
He was reportedly placed on leave in March and will be terminated.
McCown, who is related to former NFL quarterbacks Josh and Luke McCown, was arrested in 2022 for drunk driving while he was a teacher and coach at Robinson ISD.
According to a statement to MySA, the district “conducted a background check on April 25, 2023, and at that time, it was clear and McCown was hired.”
Another football coach, Perryton ISD athletic director Cole Underwood, was arrested Wednesday and charged with sexual assault of a child, a second-degree felony.
The alleged victim is a Perryton High School student, reportedly a 14-year-old girl.
Underwood was released from Ochiltree County Jail on Thursday after posting a $125,000 bond.
According to a statement from Perryton ISD, Underwood resigned.
Chinese officials are asking villagers to take out fake business licenses. Is that for their own business scams, or to artificially pump up Chinese economic statistics?
Profiles in Cowardice: “PEN America, a leading nonprofit dedicated to free expression, canceled its 2024 World Voices Festival late last week under pressure from pro-Palestinian activists. Many writers affiliated with the organization either threatened to boycott the event unless PEN acceded to certain demands, including labeling Israel’s actions in Gaza ‘genocide,’ or distanced themselves from the free-speech group in response to online pressure from pro-Palestinian activists.”
It turns out that unleashing a deadly engineered plague on the world, bellicose posturing, currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, treaty breaking, and genocidal actions against ethnic minorities isn’t a recipe for winning friends and influencing people.
Who knew?
Evidently not Xi Jingping, as under his leadership, it looks like some 90% of Chinese factories will close due to lack of business.
“My factory closed down, ended up losing over 10 million.” I’m assuming that’s Yuan.
“China continues to face a harsh winter, with reportedly 90% of factories either closing down or falling into difficulties.”
Factories that has been in business and profitable for 15 years got walloped by Flu Manchu in 2020. “After the outbreak, the factory started and stopped production intermittently, basically losing money for a year. Unexpectedly, the following three years were worse.”
“At the start of the year, there were almost no new orders. The old customers who used to order every month also significantly reduced their orders. The entire industry had fewer orders than during the 3 years of the epidemic.”
This lead to “severe competition within the industry this year to get orders. Besides low profits, customers also demanded goods to be made before payment.”
“In the second half of 2023, he was basically just chasing payments. Many customers were withholding final payments, and his factory had long run out of operational funds. During this period, he had already mortgaged his house in Shinjin for business loans. For these three years, his factory had been barely surviving on loans, and he didn’t know when it would all end. Recently he’s been exhausted, so he decided to shut” everything down.
“Bosses like us in small manufacturing factories will soon become the bottom of society. Becoming a bad debtor is only a matter of time, My factory in Guangdong is quite typical of those in the industry. Most of my customers products are for export.”
Factory workers, of course, are losing jobs and hours left and right due to the shutdowns. Plus those few factories still hiring can afford to be picky. “Those over 33 can go back! Those under 33 stay! Not accepting anyone over 33!”
“China’s products such as petrochemical raw materials, fuel and electric vehicle power batteries and non-core chips are all facing overcapacity.”
“After the pandemic, China’s economic recovery has been weak. Traditional export orders are insufficient, and products manufactured by Chinese factories exceed the domestic markets absorption capacity causing almost every industry to face overcapacity as other countries strive to curb inflation.”
“China is experiencing rare deflation.”
China’s plan to combat this is exporting high tech goods to the rest of the world. The rest of the world doesn’t seem enthused.
I’m skipping over some Q1 growth statistics for China I don’t believe.
“Due to overcapacity in China, companies are squeezing each other’s profits by lowering export prices.”
“In the first quarter, China’s manufacturing capacity utilization rate plummeted to 73.8%, the weakest level since 2015.”
“The utilization rate of the automotive manufacturing industry has now dropped to below 65%.”
And the electric car bubble bursting has hit China hard. “For years the CCP has spared no effort, using high subsidies and various preferential policies to fully support the development of new energy vehicles.”
“It is estimated that from 2010 to the present, over 200 billion yuan, about $28 billion US, has been directly subsidized to new energy vehicle companies by the CCP.”
“The CCP’s irrational economic measures not only harmed the global economy, but also damaged China’s own economy. The subsidy policy has not only led to the emergence of numerous purported new players in the automotive manufacturing sector, but has also notably spawned a significant number of counterfeit car companies that rely solely on deceiving subsidies through presentations and mockup models.” In other words, the same smoke and mirrors companies seen throughout the rest of China economy.
“The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2018 there were already more than 487 Chinese electric car manufacturers, but now there are only over 40 remaining.” (Previously.)
Is the 90% factory closure estimate way too high? Probably. But if it’s even of factories, imagine the devastating economic and social dislocation effects this will have on China’s aging economy.
Much of China’s economic miracle was built on smoke and mirrors, and by one estimate China GDP was overstated by 60%. And thanks to Xi Jinping’s gross mismanagement of just about everything, the bill for all those illusions is now coming due.
It’s been a week of petty frustrations, with simple things like paying for online transactions made impossible by websites that send out the wrong information despite the right information being on file. Speaking of frustration, Americans continue to be battered by high inflation, blacks continue to abandon Biden, and it turns out that the Pope might, just might, be Catholic after all.
A hotter-than-expected consumer price index report rattled Wall Street Wednesday, but markets are buzzing about an even more specific prices gauge contained within the data — the so-called supercore inflation reading.
Along with the overall inflation measure, economists also look at the core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, to find the true trend. The supercore gauge, which also excludes shelter and rent costs from its services reading, takes it even a step further. Fed officials say it is useful in the current climate as they see elevated housing inflation as a temporary problem and not as good a measure of underlying prices.
Supercore accelerated to a 4.8% pace year over year in March, the highest in 11 months.
Tom Fitzpatrick, managing director of global market insights at R.J. O’Brien & Associates, said if you take the readings of the last three months and annualize them, you’re looking at a supercore inflation rate of more than 8%, far from the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal.
According to a Wall Street Journal Swing State Poll, blacks, especially black males are abandoning Biden in huge numbers.
While most Black men said they intend to support Biden, some 30% of them in the poll said they were either definitely or probably going to vote for the former Republican president. There isn’t comparable WSJ swing-state polling from 2020, but Trump received votes from 12% of Black men nationwide that year, as recorded by AP VoteCast, a large poll of the electorate.
That’s an 18 percentage point swing, minimum, for black males, if the national results and the swing state voting is similar.
By confirmed, I mean those who said they intended to vote for Trump.
The gap is even larger if we factor in undecided voters. Biden is down by a massive 30 percentage points vs 2020.
Good: A teacher helping her son with homework. Bad: A teacher helping her son force female students into sex trafficking. “Klein Cain High School cosmetology teacher Kedria McMath Grigsby is accused of helping her son, Roger Magee, force the troubled teens into prostitution.”
Investigative science writer Paul Homewood last year discovered considerable tampering in 2022 with the recent CET record. He initially found that in version one, the summer of 1995 had been 0.1°C warmer than 2018. In version 2, the two years swapped places with 1995 cooled by 0.07°C and 2018 warmed by 0.13°C. Alerted to these changes, Homewood then analysed the full record from version 1 to 2, and the graph below shows what he found.
As can be seen, the adjustments up to 1970 are small with ups and downs offsetting each other. Homewood then found that the years from 1970 to 2003 had been cooled markedly, followed by significant rises to 2022. Homewood concludes that “unfortunately it is part of a much wider tampering with temperature globally – and the tampering is always one way, cooling the past and heating the present”. Given that we now know that the Met Office has been using class 4 statistics for two thirds of its database since 2006, the recent higher adjustments would seem to call for clarifying explanations from the state-funded Met Office.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has announced his interim charges for the Senate, a set of 57 issues he is calling on Senate Committees to investigate and research ahead of the legislative session next year.
The list of charges runs the gamut of issues conservatives have called on the legislature to address, including property tax relief, protecting Texas land from hostile foreign ownership, and strengthening laws preventing electioneering by school districts and other political subdivisions.
Some of the biggest reform proposals, however, have been reserved for higher education.
Patrick has asked the Higher Education Subcommittee to study and make recommendations regarding the role of ‘faculty senates’, antisemitism on college campuses, as well as to review the implementation of a new state law banning DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in state universities that went into effect earlier this year.
“The Senate’s work to study the list of charges will begin in the coming weeks and months. Following completion of hearings, committees will submit reports with their specific findings and policy recommendations before December 1, 2024,” said Patrick.
When you think Houston Democratic Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee has already said the stupidest thing she possibly can, she goes out and proves you wrong.
Thanks to New York City’s idiotic rent control laws, not only would a hotel guest refuse to pay rent or leave, but a court actually ruled that he was the owner of the hotel.
First class stamps are going up to 73 cents. Thanks, Joe Biden.
If the commies running Vietnam accuse someone of a crime, I don’t automatically trust them, but Truong My Lan may actually be guilty.
Behind the stately yellow portico of the colonial-era courthouse in Ho Chi Minh City, a 67-year-old Vietnamese property developer was sentenced to death on Thursday for looting one of the country’s largest banks over a period of 11 years.
It’s a rare verdict – she is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime.
The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court’s way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.
The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.
The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five others were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges and can appeal.
All of the defendants were found guilty. Four received life in jail. The rest were given prison terms ranging from 20 years to three years suspended. Truong My Lan’s husband and niece received jail terms of nine and 17 years respectively.
Snip.
By 2011, Truong My Lan was a well-known business figure in Ho Chi Minh City, and she was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller, cash-strapped banks into a larger entity: Saigon Commercial Bank.
Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.
They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.
The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank’s lending.
According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.
That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam’s largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.
I've been waiting 29 years to tell this story about OJ and his days at USC. Now that he's dead (may he burn in hell) I have a story that I signed an NDA for that is no longer valid. I was a junior at USC working in Topping Student Center on campus in 1995. I was an administrative…
Margaret Thatcher said “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money,” but Cuba appears to have gone them one better: Bad policies means that they’re now running out of their own money.
‘There is no money in the banks’: Cubans stand in line since dawn to cash their paychecks.
“There is no money in the banks to pay people, everyone is upset and they haven’t even given us an explanation,” said Leydis Tabares, a Cuban who resides in Camagüey, to Martí Noticias this Friday.
The problem is nationwide, said Cubans consulted from different provinces by our editorial team. The lack of cash in ATMs has caused state workers to be unable to withdraw the salary deposited onto their magnetic cards.
“In Sancti Spíritus, queues start forming since dawn because by nine or ten in the morning there is no cash left. Some employees have had to wait up to 45 days to be able to withdraw,” reported independent journalist Adriano Castañeda.
According to the journalist, the process of banking and the limitation of cash withdrawals is the cause of this crisis. “That system is a disaster,” he opined.
“A general reform is needed in Cuba, of all kinds, social, political, and economic,” commented independent journalist Guillermo del Sol. According to him, many owners of private businesses in the country have stopped depositing cash due to the same restrictions imposed by the regime.
“The money that Micro, Small, and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs) deposited in the bank they couldn’t retrieve, so they stopped depositing money in banks. And since they are the ones carrying the weight of what little works within Cuba, the banks ran out of money. That’s what’s happening right now,” he explained.
So even in communist Cuba, small and medium size business are what keeps the economy running, and the commies are destroying them by withholding their access to their own money. That’s some mighty fine management, Lou.
In Guantánamo, the shortage of money for worker payment affects all sectors and is creating another type of business in the streets.
“Some charge for making the long queues in the early mornings for employees. There are also people who have cash and charge a 10% fee to deliver the amount of money they have on the card,” commented independent journalist Anderlay Guerra Blanco.
“When there’s an ATM with money, the queues are endless,” said opposition member José Rolando Cásares, who resides in Pinar del Río.
Independent journalist Vladimir Turró explained that in the capital, there are even people who line up pointlessly because at dawn, the bank doesn’t supply cash to the ATM.
“We’re talking about people who gather at banks, some even go to sleep at the ATMs, trying to get some cash, and so they spend days trying to withdraw money,” he said.
When Cuba in early August announced it was taking a major step towards electronic banking and a “cashless” society, the offices of fledgling small businesses across the communist-run country were left scrambling to figure out how to respond.
Most alarming to many budding entrepreneurs was a new 5,000 peso ($20) daily cap on cash withdrawals for businesses, one of several measures the government said were aimed at forcing Cubans to do their transactions electronically, via transfer, online payment and bank cards.
So commies limit bank access to a business’s own cash, and they’re shocked that businesses stop depositing it in banks.
Cubans are preparing for a new wave of inflation after the government last week rolled out details of an austerity plan that economists say will touch nearly every facet of the communist-run island’s already flailing economy.
I guess the austerity plan means the usually tactic of just printing more money is off the table.
The measures – which include price and tax increases and cuts in subsidies – will slow a soaring budget deficit forecast to exceed 18% of gross domestic product and set the stage for growth, according to Prime Minister Manuel Marrero.
Authorities have already announced gas at the pump will jump nearly five-fold on Feb. 1. But some economists say less visible government price increases such as on wholesale fuel and moving freight, as well as sales and import taxes, are sure to ignite substantial hikes on most products and services at the retail level.
“In economics, such prices are not increased in one area without affecting others,” Cuban economist Omar Everleny said in an interview in Havana. “And in general they are passed on to consumers. I think they will increase 400% to 500%.”
Reuters spoke with several Cubans in Havana who said prices were already rising following the announcements and in anticipation of the price hikes – and were set to soar further in the coming weeks.
Snip.
Inflation was 30% last year, cooling slightly from 38% in 2022, according to the government. Many economists say those rates fall short of reality as the government does not adequately monitor a booming informal market pegged to an informal exchange rate much higher than the official one.
In Holidays in Hell, P. J. O’Rourke talks about exchanging $480 for a gymbag full of cordobas in Sandinista Nicaragua. “You probably have to take economics over and over again two or three times at Moscow U before you can make cash worth this little.”
Government officials have announced wholesale fuel prices will double next month, freight transportation will jump between 40% and 60% in March and for the private sector import duties will increase five-fold. Private companies will also be charged a new 10% sales tax on wholesale transactions.
So prices are soaring, but people can’t get their own money out of the bank to make ends meet. So Cuba’s communist government has accomplished the rare feat of a liquidity crunch and soaring inflation at the same time.
The more we find out about Communist China, the more there is to loath, despite all the globalist happy talk about a “flat” world where we could export manufacturing to China for lower costs without any negative consequence. Today’s example: A government propaganda video bragging about their mobile death vans.
“This is one of those times where I wish genuinely that I hadn’t found something. I just discovered something absolutely horrid.”
“These cars just show up and execute you.”
They used to have public executions in arenas. They haven’t done away with that (or shooting you on the side of the road and burying you in a ditch), but the death vans are considered more “efficient.”
“How [the government video] is framed, it’s like how would you be executed, this is going to happen to you. You’re supposed to enter this POV, this is from your perspective, how are you going to be taken out by the government?”
They make a point of how much more humane lethal injection is. “Look how nice we are!”
They talk about how much cheaper a mobile execution van is than a fixed execution center. “This is really good! It’s a cost-saving method when we need to go murder all those people!”
“China, even per capita, executes more people every year than every single country combined. And that’s just the people that they count…every year, China is executing thousands and thousands of people.”
One estimate has 8,000 people per year executed in China. (And that’s just the ones we have some evidence for. “Some people just get disappeared.”) By contrast, there were 18 death row inmates executed in the U.S. in 2022.
“It’s really grim and also very dystopian, the fact that when you’re strapped down and laying there, you’re looking up at the Communist Party of China’s insignia and right above that is a security camera.”
Remember: China has nothing like our legal system or the rule of law. They have a 99.9% conviction rate.
There’s a long list of crimes you can receive the death penalty for, including owning a gun or using a VPN. “If somebody wants you gone, you could get the death penalty for really anything.”
And the government video talks about the process of the lethal injection shutting down your organs.
Matthew Tye, the covering the video, lived in China for a decade. This is “how human life is treated on a political level in China…I think this gives you a perspective on how hard Chinese citizens have it.”
Another dispatch from one of China’s ghost city developments, but this one with a twist: All the homes were theoretically designed for rich people, but I’m having a hard time figuring out why they would want them.
More than 100 uncompleted McMansions sit in Shenyang City some 400 miles northeast of Beijing.
They were “built by Greenland Group, one of the more than 50 housing developers that have defaulted on their debt in recent years.”
“Construction in 2010 but came to a halt a few years later.”
I know that China is a very different country indeed, but I can’t figure out why the developers thought that these McMasions, all made on the same floorplan and jowl by jowl next to each other on pretty small plots of land, would be appealing to the wealthy in the first place. They houses themselves are big and stylish enough in the 19th century French style they were aping, but the rich want land, space and differentiation, not to live between two houses exactly like their own on a small plot of land.
Yet another example of China’s inexplicable, wasteful policies…
Really? Which part of “communist China” was unclear to you?
The real people to blame are the Worldcon members who voted to hold a Worldcon in a communist country that routinely rapes and tortures ethnic minorities as a matter of policy to keep them in line. Communist China’s numerous trespasses against international human rights agreements and common decency alike have been known for decades, yet Worldcon voters took a look at China’s Worldcon bid and went “Nah, it’ll be fine!”
I’m not even mildly surprised at this outcome. Worldcon and most of science fiction’s institutions already showed that they had been corrupted and infected with social justice during the Sad Puppies incident. After that, I decided that neither Worldcon nor the Hugos were worth my time, money or attention. (And keep in mind that I had had collected literally every Hugo winning novel in first edition hardback up to that time.)
The commie Hugo kerfuffle didn’t cause me to lose respect for the Hugos or Worldcon because I had already lost all respect for both.
Some of the Chinese news/videos because they’re important. But this story I’m putting up because it’s so ridiculous.
There’s evidently a genre of China’s video of pretty women in rural China carrying massive logs.
I know you’ll be shocked, shocked to find out there aren’t really lots of attractive women in rural China wearing makeup and carrying heavy logs around. Naturally, the logs are hollow or made of balsa. Naturally, they’re scamming poor simps (including some in the west) out of sympathy money.
The one the girls struggling through the mud in her old fashioned revolutionary clothing is particularly risible.
I wonder what American internet fads are inexplicable to the Chinese. Maybe they’re completely baffled by Hammurabi memes or Rickrolls…
