Posts Tagged ‘South Korea’

China’s Semiconductor Industry: Shell Games All The Way Down

Wednesday, April 7th, 2021

I’ve written about China’s semi-illusory semiconductor businesses before: “In China the question is always how much of that investment is real, and how much is illusion. A lot of those ‘under construction’ fabs never materialize, either unable to attract investors or having their funds magically siphoned off to some other enterprise.” While researching yesterday’s piece on the current semiconductor shortage, I came across this Emily Feng NPR piece on more multi-million dollar shenanigans in that space:

In 2019, the U.S. sanctioned two major Chinese telecom firms, temporarily cutting them off from a vital supply of semiconductor chips — bits of silicon wafer and microscopic circuitry that help run nearly all our electronic devices.

Wuhan Hongxin Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. promised a way out, toward self-reliance in the face of increasingly tough U.S. curbs on this technology. The private company once boasted on its website that it would raise a total of $20 billion to churn out 60,000 leading-edge chips a year.

None of that would come to pass.

Hongxin’s unfinished plant in the port city of Wuhan now stands abandoned. Its founders have vanished, despite owing contractors and investors billions of yuan.

The company is one of six multibillion-dollar chip projects to fail in the last two years. Their rise and fall is a cautionary tale in an industry that is flush with state cash but still scarce on expertise — and a preview of the expensive and winding road China will have to take toward semiconductor self-sufficiency, now a national security priority.

Hongxin Semiconductor began in November 2017 as a joint venture between Wuhan’s Dongxihu district government and a company called Beijing Guangliang Lantu Technology.

The venture got off to a good start — on paper — but a closer look shows there were a number of issues. One of the co-founders of Guangliang had only finished elementary school and was allegedly using false credentials and a different identity, Cao Shan, according to 36Kr, a Chinese tech news outlet. Another co-founder, Li Xueyen, dabbled in selling Chinese traditional medicine, alcohol and tobacco before starting Hongxin, according to corporate records reviewed by NPR.

These are not the profiles you look for in semiconductor startup founders.

The two could not be reached for comment.

Yeah, I bet.

To balance out their lack of technical know-how, the Hongxin founders lured in one of Taiwan’s most famous semiconductor engineers, Chiang Shangyi, to serve as director. He left the company in 2020 to become the deputy chairman of China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., telling Hong Kong paper South China Morning Post that his time at Hongxin was “a nightmare.” Chiang did not respond to NPR requests for comment.

Hongxin made headlines in December 2019 when it managed to buy an older model lithography machine made by Dutch company ASML, despite American lobbying to prevent its sale to the Chinese chipmakers.

OK, on the face of it that sounds pretty impressive. If you want to have a cutting edge fab, you have to have one of ASML’s top of the line Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) steppers. In almost every other segment in the semiconductor equipment market, there’s competition between the three big players (Applied Materials, LAM Research and Tokyo Electron) and occasionally other companies (like Axcelis for ion implanters). But while you might be able to get away with lesser Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines from Nikon or Canon for some tasks, for the smallest features on cutting edge 7 and 5nm nodes, you simply can’t do without an ASML EUV stepper. (More background here.)

Well, guess what? The vaunted ASML tool Hongxin bought is apparently an older 1980 model (presumably this one, which dates from 2015, not 1980) which is DUV, not EUV.

Back to the NPR piece.

ASML sold the multimillion dollar piece of equipment — used to etch semiconductors — because of Jiang’s top-notch reputation, according to two people familiar with the sale who were not authorized to speak publicly about it. ASML declined to comment.

Feng (or her editors) goofed here. ASML makes lithography machines, not etch tools.

Hongxin’s timing was opportune. Chinese chip companies still rely heavily on European, American and Japanese technology — much of which, in turn, relies on American intellectual property, which the U.S. appears determined to keep out of Chinese hands. China’s semiconductor demand continues to surge beyond what it can supply itself; trade data show that in 2019, Beijing imported around $350 billion worth in chips.

Given that reliance, China’s central and local governments have been pumping money into the sector to accelerate domestic chip design and manufacturing. The country’s latest five-year economic planning document released in March identifies integrated circuits — semiconductors — as a priority sector for research and development funding.

When governments starts pumping big money into private companies, you can be sure multiple scams are never far behind.

The all-out approach has notched achievements. Successful chip design companies such as Cambricon and Huawei’s HiSilicon have allowed Huawei to replace some of its U.S.-designed chips in its mobile phones.

Cambricon and HiSilicon are both fabless design houses, and both get their chips fabbed at foundries like TSMC. Huawei is one of the largest electronics companies in the world, with over $100 billion in annual sales, and they don’t own their own fab.

Not far from Hongxin is Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC), a partially state-owned company that plans to double its output of memory chips to overtake South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix, which currently dominate production.

Memory is a tough business. SK Hynix exists because Hyundai and LG (aka Lucky Goldstar), two huge Korean chaebols who hate each other only slightly less than rival Samsung, found the sledding too tough to go alone and had to combine their respective semiconductor operations to survive. Memory makes money hand-over-fist in boom times, but barely breaks even during busts. It’s less technically demanding than some other semiconductor segments, so China could conceivably make some headway there.

YMTC is a subsidiary of Tsinghua Unigroup, a wholly owned business unit of Tsinghua University. Hu Haifeng, Communist Party secretary of Tsinghua Holdings, is the son of Hu Jintao, former CCP General Secretary and President of the People’s Republic of China.

Hongxin sought to capitalize on this momentum. It rented a discreet office on the 25th floor of Wuhan’s Dongxihu district government headquarters.

“Cao” and his partners promised to pitch in 1.8 billion yuan ($276 million) in investment on top of 200 million yuan ($30.7 million) in starting funds from Dongxihu district.

Wuhan’s city government was, around the same time, also beginning construction on a cybersecurity park to provide office and residential space for technology businesses, and it was looking for a flagship company to anchor the complex. In 2018 and 2019, the city named Hongxin its most important “critical construction project” and the company began building its factory next door.

As early as late 2019, even while Hongxin was being lauded by Chinese media for securing an ASML machine, several Wuhan-based construction crews were scrambling to get paid for millions of dollars of work for Hongxin.

“Four months ago, [Hongxin’s] payments to us started to be short, and now we are missing 18 million yuan [$2.76 million],” one contractor, Lu Haitao told another, Wang Liyun in December 2019, according to phone recordings NPR obtained. Wang confirmed the authenticity of the recordings when reached by phone. Lu did not respond to several texts and calls from NPR. Wuhan’s municipal government did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, two other semiconductor companies — Tacoma Semiconductor Technology Co. Ltd. and Dehuai Semiconductor Technology Co. Ltd. — were also running out of cash.

Tacoma was over 350 miles from Hongxin along the Yangtze river, in the port city of Nanjing. There, the Taiwanese entrepreneur Joseph Lee had initially found a welcome harbor for his own ambitions, starting Tacoma in the city in 2015. He pledged to raise $3 billion to make wafer chips, with consultation from Israeli company Tower Semiconductor (formerly TowerJazz). Tower declined to comment for this story.

Lee continued pitching other local governments. In 2016, he co-founded a second company in Jiangsu province’s Huai’an city, named Dehuai Semiconductor. (Lee sold his stake the same year, citing a clash in vision with the firm’s other managers.)

In 2017, Lee invited Chinese media to tour Tacoma’s facilities, declaring the company had somehow scored 200 million yuan ($30.7 million) in sales. Tacoma had yet to even finish construction on its manufacturing facilities.

Lee initially agreed to an NPR interview for this story but later retracted it, citing state pressure. “Officials have told me not to talk to the media,” he said by text.

Yeah, I bet.

By 2018, Tacoma’s employees were blasting an online forum run by the Nanjing mayor’s office with complaints about unpaid salaries. Chinese corporate records show at least 50 legal complaints have been filed against Tacoma in provincial court, all seeking to recoup construction costs or unpaid wages. Lee disputes owing employees 20 million yuan in unpaid wages.

“Real or fake, the truth is in the hearts of the people,” Lee wrote shortly after these allegations, on Wechat, the Chinese messaging app, and cited a verse from the New Testament: “Now faith is the certainty of things hoped for, a proof of things not seen.”

Citing bible verse when rumbled for his scam. Classic.

Hongxin, Tacoma and Dehuai were able to secure billions of yuan in state funding on the condition they would match that with investment of their own — a commitment that never materialized. Tacoma eventually raised only a fraction — 250 million out of 2.5 billion yuan — of what it promised.

“We never imagined that when our cash flow dried up, we would not be able to find new [cash flow sources], that we would get in so deep,” he told Japanese broadcaster NHK this March.

And this is the problem with doing business in China in general: it’s shell games all the way down. At lot of times, loans and investments are siphoned through four or five different entities from the purposes for which they were originally obtained. Everyone’s trying to get rich, and they hope to survive on smoke and mirrors long enough to get profitable. Imagine if Kleiner Perkins invested $25 million in a software startup, only to find that money was spent on a noodle shop, a used car dealership and a golf club manufacturer.

Sometimes it works. You can build a company on margin, get profitable quickly, and be paying off investors and contractors before anyone realizes how shaky the entire enterprise is.

But you can’t do that with semiconductor manufacturing. The startup costs are simply too high, easily in the billions. Very, very few companies can afford to be in a game that expensive. China’s two biggest semiconductor manufacturing success stories, SMIC and Tsinghua Unigroup, all have have CCP direct government investment.

In this game, little hucksters working the margins have no chance.

LinkSwarm for January 15, 2021

Friday, January 15th, 2021

Austin actually enjoyed a rare snowstorm this week. As opposed to those who follow the mainstream media, who enjoy snowstorms 24/7/365…

  • President Trump is declassifying “a foot high stack of documents” related to Russiagate and Obamagate. Good.
  • In the “stop panicking” category: “Statehouse wins position GOP to dominate redistricting“:

    An abysmal showing by Democrats in state legislative races on Tuesday not only denied them victories in Sun Belt and Rust Belt states that would have positioned them to advance their policy agenda — it also put the party at a disadvantage ahead of the redistricting that will determine the balance of power for the next decade.

    The results could domino through politics in America, helping the GOP draw favorable congressional and state legislative maps by ensuring Democrats remain the minority party in key state legislatures. Ultimately, it could mean more Republicans in Washington — and in state capitals.

    By Wednesday night, Democrats had not flipped a single statehouse chamber in its favor. And it remained completely blocked from the map-making process in several key states — including Texas, North Carolina and Florida, which could have a combined 82 congressional seats by 2022 — where the GOP retained control of the state legislatures.

    After months of record-breaking fundraising by their candidates and a constellation of outside groups, Democrats fell far short of their goals and failed to build upon their 2018 successes to capture state chambers they had been targeting for years. And they may have President Donald Trump to blame.

    “It’s clear that Trump isn’t an anchor for the Republican legislative candidates. He’s a buoy,” said Christina Polizzi, a spokesperson for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, on Wednesday. “He overperformed media expectations, Democratic and Republican expectations, and lifted legislative candidates with him.”

    Snip.

    The biggest disappointment came in the seat-rich state of Texas, Democrats needed nine seats to reclaim the majority after flipping a dozen in the midterms. Though some races remain uncalled, so far Democrats were able to unseat one incumbent and Republicans offset that with another pickup.

    Now Texas Republicans, retaining control of the Senate and the governor’s mansion, will have total authority over the drawing of as many as 39 congressional districts in the state. Democrats fear Republicans will pack and crack the rapidly diversifying suburbs to dilute unfriendly voters. Despite targeting 10 districts, Democrats failed to flip a single targeted seat in 2020 on the current map, which was drawn by the GOP roughly a decade ago.

    There are plenty of things to worry about with Democrats control (by the skin of their teeth) the White House, the Senate and the House, but federalism provides strong state power as a counterbalance to the federal government.

  • “10 Times Democrats Urged Violence Against Trump And His Supporters.”
  • “MIT Professor Who Received $19M in Federal Grants Arrested for Concealing Ties to China.”

    A Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and researcher who has received almost $20 million from the Department of Energy was arrested Thursday after he allegedly failed to disclose ties to the People’s Republic of China.

    Mechanical engineering professor Gang Chen faces charges of wire fraud, failing to file a foreign bank account report, and making a false statement in a tax return, the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston revealed Thursday.

    Prosecutors allege the 56-year-old professor, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in China, has held a number of positions on behalf of the PRC with the goal of promoting China’s technological and scientific capabilities.

    They claim he shared his expertise directly with Chinese government officials “often in exchange for financial compensation,” including serving as an “overseas expert” at the request of the Chinese consulate in New York and a member of at least two PRC Talent Programs.

    The Department of Energy has given Chen $19 million for research since 2013.

  • The Second Impeachment Farce doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on.

    The president didn’t mention violence on Wednesday, much less provoke or incite it. He said, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

    District law defines a riot as “a public disturbance . . . which by tumultuous and violent conduct or the threat thereof creates grave danger of damage or injury to property or persons.” When Mr. Trump spoke, there was no “public disturbance,” only a rally. The “disturbance” came later at the Capitol by a small minority who entered the perimeter and broke the law. They should be prosecuted.

    Actually, I think it’s been firmly established that the entry into the capitol occurred even before Trump stopped speaking.

  • Did you notice that Iran seized a South Korean flagged tanker in the Persian Gulf? South Korea has, in turn, deployed a destroyer to the Gulf.
  • Also not so much in the news: Israel launched its biggest airstrike in years against Iranian positions in Syria.

    A senior U.S. intelligence official with knowledge of the attack told The Associated Press that the airstrikes were carried out with intelligence provided by the United States and targeted a series of warehouses in Syria that were being used as a part of the pipeline to store and stage Iranian weapons.

    The official said the warehouses also served as a pipeline for components that supports Iran’s nuclear program.

    Maybe the Islamic Republic of Iran expects that they can just ask the Biden Administration for highly enriched uranium directly…

  • Total crude oil imported from Saudi Arabia last week: Zero.
  • How big tech erases conservatives from the Internet:

    Two companies, Google and Apple, each control about half of the smartphone market. So when the two companies made a move against Parler, the conservative social media alternative, it effectively erased its app from existence. Joining the party was a third member of the FAANG Big Tech consortium, Amazon, which deplatformed Parler from Amazon Web Services.

    AWS controls a third of the cloud marketplace. Microsoft and Google are in 2nd and 3rd place.

    Blocking an app doesn’t permanently kill a social networking service, though it places it at a structural disadvantage, but Apple and Google can flag sites as unsafe through their browsers.

  • “Twitter Admits They Lied About the Current Conservative Purge.”

    Originally, the social media giant and former favorite platform of President Trump claimed that it was simply a matter of accounts not verifying their information. Twitter claimed that until those accounts did so, they would simply not show upon follower accounts.

    Well, the tune has been changed. As most suspected from the beginning, there is actually a widespread deletion of conservative accounts goings on under the guise of them being QAnon related. This has supposedly hit over 70,000 accounts so far.

    Let me explain how this works. Basically any small amount that propagated the idea that the election was stolen is going to be lumped in as QAnon and targeted.

    I don’t believe in QAnon conspiracies. I do believe the election was stolen.

  • Speaking of which, Twitter and Facebook lost a combined $51 billion in market value following their banning of Donald Trump from their platforms.
  • “The world’s biggest gun forum was booted off the Internet because they can be.” In other news, Go-Daddy sucks. I hope AR15.com files a very expensive lawsuit against them.
  • Looks like Twitter didn’t quite erase Trump’s tweet history:

  • Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ((D)umbass-NY) wants to create a Ministry of Truth to censor the media. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • On Trump’s appeal to hardcore Trump fans:

    There is a large segment of American society, maybe 15-20%, that has not had a president who represents their basic worldview for decades. These folks tend to be white, exurban or rural, believe in religious tradition and cultural conservatism without being regular church-goers, very patriotic, very pro-military, hostile to immigration and free trade, skeptical of big business, big government, and establishment experts, and in favor of entitlement programs and the safety net…

    Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan appealed to this demographic to a large extent. Beyond that, the only major national figure I can think of in my lifetime who more or less represented them was George Wallace.

    So along comes Trump who appeals to this constituency almost perfectly. Sure, he’s a rich New Yorker, but his outer-borough accent and mentality, scorned by the elite, reminds people that their own regional accents are also scorned by the elite.

    This constituency used to be divided between Republicans and Democrats, which is one reason they lacked influence on presidential nominees, but they have shifted to be heavily Republican, which gave them a lot of influence on the nominating process in 2020 [I think he means 2016 here. -LP], and they chose Trump.

    Trump, to almost everyone’s surprise, wins. So how do big government, big business, elite experts and so on, i.e., the establishment, react, from his fans’ perspective? Without even giving Trump a chance, they decree that he is illegitimate, that he needs to be resisted, and that his voters are beyond redemption; “this is 1932 in Germany” was not a rare reaction.

    So, from these voters’ perspective, the one time in their lifetimes and much longer a president comes around who really speaks to their worldview, the establishment tries to destroy him. Rather than the anti-Trump sentiment persuading them, it makes them stronger supporters, people who see Trump as their weapon against an establishment that disparages them.

    He’s more right than wrong.

  • “Why The Left Can Be Violent Morons And Destroy Stuff And You Can’t.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Related:

  • Intel ousts CEO Bob Swan and replaces him with Intel veteran Pat Gelsinger. Intel has stumbled so badly over the last few years that replacing Swan (who has a finance background) is probably overdue. Gelsinger spent 30 years at Intel, some as CTO, so maybe he has a good chance of ironing out their process problems.
  • Speaking of semiconductors, there’s a global chip shortage going on, with auto makers among the hardest hit. And it’s not from TSMC’s cutting-edge fabs, it’s from older, larger geometry fabs. And dependence on Chinese chips plays a role as well.
  • Democrats ❤ Communism:

  • The ongoing chronicles of Andrew Cuomo, idiot:

  • The Air Force is testing swarm munitions.
  • Depressing, detailed story of how good high school kids became pill-popping drug addicts.
  • Portland police are taking longer than ever to respond to 911 calls? Just because the ruling democrats hate them and won’t back them up, refuse to charge habitual lawbreakings, and engendered a wave of retirements? Imagine that. (Hat tip: 357 Magnum.)
  • Burning in Hell watch: Lisa Montgomery, who strangled a pregnant mom to death and cut out her unborn baby to parade around as her own, was executed.
  • California elementary school requires kids to rank their ‘power and privilege’ and “assess their racial and sexual identities.”

  • Speaking of the insane doings of school administrators, a New Jersey high school evacuated the school because someone brought in a piece of Fiestaware.
  • “Texas Solicitor General Resigns and Former Scalia Clerk Appointed…Judd Stone will succeed Kyle Hawkins.” Stone previously worked for Ted Cruz. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
  • “Lincoln Project Co-Founder John Weaver Accused by Multiple Young Men of Grooming for Sex.” Creepy, but at least it’s young men
  • The Beard has left the building.
  • Dwight has up two documentaries on punk rock, for those interested in such.
  • Quintin Tarantino at three different budget levels.
  • Have you always wanted to be a faceless drone in a science fiction dystopia? There’s a Kickstarter for that.
  • Millions Kicked Out Of Heaven Following Enforcement Of New Diversity Quota.”
  • Quant Fund or Metal Band? (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Your cute dog video for the week:

  • LinkSwarm for August 14, 2020

    Friday, August 14th, 2020

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Peace has unexpectedly broken out in the Middle East, the science behind Beirut’s big boom, and more Democrats destroying their own cities.

    It’s supposed to hit 105°F in Austin today. Stay frosty…

  • President Donald Trump helped broker a peace agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates that includes fully normalized diplomatic relations.

    If Obama had done this, it would be front page news on every paper in America proclaiming what a “historic” peacemaker Obama was. Since no Democrat can take the credit, newspapers that hate Trump and Israel have been downplaying the news as much as possible.

  • Since people are always talking about “October Surprises,” here’s a possibility: Saudi Arabia and Israel signing their own peace treaty and full diplomatic recognition. Israel and the Saudis have been secretly cooperating against the Iran-Syria axis for quite some time. And now there are public signs of a thaw, including positive depictions of Jews in a new TV drama shown on Saudi TV.
  • “Obama Horrified As Trump Undoes His Years Of Hard Work Bombing The Middle East.” “My drone strikes — all for nothing!”
  • Hydroxychloroquine cuts the death rate in countries that administer it early to Wuhan coronavirus victims. Why won’t the media report that?
  • Democrats cave on reopening schools:

    New York’s richest people have fled during the lockdowns. If their kids’ tony public schools don’t offer personal instruction or look likely to maintain the chaos of rolling lockdown brownouts, those wealthy people have better choices. They can stay in their vacation houses or newly bought mansions in states that aren’t locked down. They can hire pod teachers or private schools.

    And the longer they stay outside New York City and start to make friends and get used to a new place, the less likely they are to ever return. Cuomo is well aware of this.

    “I literally talk to people all day long who are now in their Hamptons house who also lived here, or in their Hudson Valley house, or in their Connecticut weekend house, and I say, ‘You got to come back! We’ll go to dinner! I’ll buy you a drink! Come over, I’ll cook!’” Cuomo revealed in a recent news conference. “They’re not coming back right now. And you know what else they’re thinking? ‘If I stay there, I’ll pay a lower income tax,’ because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge.”

    Reopening means swimming against their anti-Trump base and teachers union donors’ full-court press to amp school funding and slash teacher duties. That means the below-surface financial and political pressure Cuomo, Pelosi, and Schumer are under to make this kind of a reversal must be huge. It’s likely coming from not only internal polling but also early information about just how many people have left New York and New York City, as well as interpersonal intelligence from their influential social circles.

    This means three things. First, the pressure to reopen schools is on everywhere now that New York is doing it. Second, Democrats’ hard opposition to school reopenings has been politically devastating. Third, all the push polls and media scaremongering promoting the idea that most parents shouldn’t and wouldn’t send their kids back to school have failed.

  • More on New Yorkers fleeing the DeBlasio-made hellhole:

    Start spreadin’ the news, they’re leavin’ today!

    However, the people packing their bags are not coming to New York City — they’re fleeing it for good.

    Due to increasingly squalid conditions on the Upper West Side, including two new homeless shelters packed with junkies and registered sex offenders, longtime dwellers are departing the Big Apple with no plans to ever return.

    One of the Escape from New Yorkers is Elizabeth Carr, one of the area’s most vocal leaders in combating mounting crime in the well-heeled ‘hood. She was an administrator of the Facebook group NYC Moms for Safer Streets, and the face of a public-safety movement that has attracted thousands to demand better policing and city services.

    “In the best of times, NYC is a hard place to live,” said Carr. “Now you have all this other stuff. It’s a question for families … to have to see a guy masturbating on the corner or explain to my kids while I’m buying diapers at Duane Reade why this guy wearing no shoes is collapsed on the floor and they’re doing CPR on him.”

    She said she started planning to move before the COVID crisis and recent neighborhood developments, but officially put down stakes Sunday in North Carolina with her finance husband and three kids under 7.

    “We reached our New York expiration date,” the former nonprofit exec, who’d lived on the UWS since 2007, told The Post from her new home 600 miles away. “Things weren’t heading in the right direction. What we’re seeing now isn’t at all surprising.”

    Crimes committed over the past several days would’ve been unheard of a year ago in the quiet neighborhood that’s home to Lincoln Center and restaurants by Daniel Boulud. A 40-year-old woman was randomly stabbed in the 72nd Street subway station at noon Thursday; a 56-year-old man was sucker-punched while dining outdoors with his wife Wednesday night; photos were posted online of a man masturbating on the steps of the New York Historical Society; and onlookers witnessed an apparent overdose in the aisle of a Duane Reade across the street from the Lucerne Hotel.

    The Lucerne, at 79th Street and Amsterdam, and the Hotel Belleclaire, at 76th Street and Broadway, were recently converted into homeless shelters, with nearly 300 vagrants between them. Ten of the men are registered sex offenders, including convicted rapists, child molesters and child-porn possessors — all living a block away from a school playground.

    Now, with the thinnest of justifications:

  • As always, riots hurt the poor the worst. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Residents push “protestors” away from Chicago police station. “We refuse to let people come to Englewood and tear Englewood apart.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Minneapolis Forcing Riot-Wrecked Businesses To Pay Property Taxes Before Getting Permits To Rebuild.” Pay property taxes for what, since they voted to disband the police. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) (Update: Fortunately, somebody handed the City of Minneapolis a clue-by-four.)
  • “Florida Democrats aimed to register 1 million voters by now. They didn’t come close.”

    Florida Democrats have a problem: there were supposed to be more of them by now.

    Following narrow losses in 2018 races for Florida governor and U.S. Senate, Democrats emerged from the midterms with a new resolve to register more voters in the nation’s largest swing state as a path to victory in 2020. Former gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, fresh off a stinging 34,000-vote loss, vowed to “flip Florida blue” by registering or “re-engaging” 1 million voters, including 200,000 new Democrats added by the Florida Democratic Party.

    But those initiatives fell well short of their goals. And with seven weeks until mail ballots go out in the Nov. 3 election between presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, Florida Republicans are closer to parity in voter registration than they’ve been in decades — a dynamic that may portend yet another hard-fought, narrowly decided presidential election.

    “We won the voter registration war,” Republican Party of Florida Chairman Joe Gruters said last week.

    Voter registration — the grunt work of politics — sets the foundation for campaign season. For Florida Democrats, who historically have had a harder time turning out their voters than Republicans, it’s even more crucial.

    When former President Barack Obama first won Florida in 2008, he entered the final months of the campaign with an advantage of more than 500,000 registered Democratic voters. That lead has steadily dwindled, dropping to about 259,000 in 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Florida by 112,000 votes.

    New data posted online Wednesday by the Florida Division of Elections showed that, as of July 20, when books closed on eligible voters for the upcoming Aug. 18 primary, Democrats led Republicans in the state by 240,423 people — about 5,000 fewer than at the same point in 2018.

  • South Korea plans to build F-35 aircraft carrier. Due late this decade. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Hezbollah linked to “spike in drug trafficking across the Middle East and Europe.”
  • Interesting piece on the physics of the Beirut explosion:

    The videos also show an unnervingly uniform hemisphere of white propagating outward from the blast site, a dome of vicious vapor that eventually hurtles toward every person filming and announces its arrival in the audio with a crash. This hemisphere is the pressure wave produced by the explosion.

    No, it’s not a shock wave. It’s a pressure wave, and that key difference affects the number of casualties expected. A shock wave goes from zero pressure to its absolute maximum pressure in literally zero seconds. The impact of a pressure wave is like hitting the ground after rolling down a steep cliff; the force of a shock wave is like hitting the ground after falling through the air and reaching terminal velocity. High explosives produce shock waves; low explosives, like ammonium nitrate, produce pressure waves, which have a bit of slope to their shape, a period of time over which the pressure increases more gradually.

    Shocks, because of their fascinating and complex physics, travel faster than the speed of sound, and they cause far more damage than pressure waves. Thankfully, we know this blast did not produce a shock because the speed of the water-vapor-filled white dome can be measured.

    The speed of sound in air is 343 meters per second. Based on the viewing angle and distinctive red chairs pictured in some of the later frames, I traced one of the Beirut videos posted by The Guardian to its filming location on the rooftop terrace of La Mezcaleria Rooftop Bar, and measured it to be 885 meters from the center of the blast. From that vantage, the pressure wave can be seen neatly traveling from the center of the blast first to the point halfway between the end of the pier and the edge of the long, massive gray grain silo building, a distance of 151 meters, then to the end of the pier, 262 meters, then eventually to La Mezcaleria.

    By measuring the times at which the pressure wave reaches these landmarks on the video, we know that, as it blazed down the pier, its rampage occurred at a speed of only 312 meters per second. That’s slow for a bomb. Then by the time the audible crash and mayhem reached the formerly peaceful and picturesque outdoor bar, it had slowed to at most 289 meters per second. The pressure wave, slower than the 343 meters per second speed of sound, caused destruction, horror, confusion, shattered glass, torn-apart flat surfaces, and disorientation for onlookers as their ears were subjected to the rapid pressure fluctuations. But a shock wave could have caused them to drop dead from lung trauma as they watched.

    Snip.

    Thanks to modern technology that charge size can be calculated scientifically too, even while waiting for more complete information to trickle out, using the size of the telltale crater. Analysis of the aerial photographs of the pier shows a crater in the range of 120 to 140 meters in diameter; blast physics mixed with history tell us that to carve a chunk that size from the side of the planet requires a charge equivalent to 1.7 to 5.4 million kilograms of TNT (that’s 3.8 to 11.8 million pounds for any Americans dragging their feet on converting to metric). For reference, the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 used the equivalent of 1.8 thousand kilograms of TNT. So, Beirut was at minimum a thousand times more boom than Oklahoma City.

  • Bank of Japan gives up on negative interest rates.
  • “Despite The Diplomatic Bluster, China’s State-Run Banks Are Quietly Complying With Trump’s Hong Kong Sanctions.”
  • DC comics decided it wanted to get woke, so it’s no surprise that Warner Media decided they needed massive layoffs.

    It’s a “bloodbath” at the WarnerMedia-owned DC Comics, with the Editor in Chief, the Publisher, and one third of the editorial staff sacked.

    Included in the sackings is — this is a rumor as of yet, not confirmed — leftwing SJW ideologue Andy Khouri, one of the absolute cancers killing the industry, who brought in GamerGate skel Zoe Quinn to “write” “comics” for DC, despite her having no comic book experience and no writing experience (outside Depression Quest and a failed kickstarter). Khouri filled DC’s Vertigo imprint with angry yet untalented SJW freaks; Vertigo was cancelled within a year.

    DC had already laid off people last year, and now has to cut even more. Co-publisher Dan DiDio was fired last year, leaving the other co-publisher, Jim Lee, supposedly in charge; now Jim Lee has been pushed out of that position, though he’ll probably be kept in some other role. (He’s a major comic book artist.)

    Why did this happen to DC Comics?

    Let’s ask Wonder Woman and see if she can tell us.

    Oh yeah, everyone involved in this deserved to lose their job:

  • America:

  • Driving back from a barbecue road trip Saturday, I saw a Trump 2020 billboard, which was simplicity itself:

    TRUMP: JOBS
    BIDEN: MOBS

    

  • This is pretty interesting:

  • Google puts its thumb on the scale yet again:

  • “I know just the thing to make him complete: Some bacon! I don’t know if it’s cooked, I don’t want to know if it’s cooked. All I need to know is that I get to give him some creepy bacon fingers!
  • Wants no part of the goat rodeo:

  • LinkSwarm for July 10, 2020

    Friday, July 10th, 2020

    China buys Pakistan, the Supreme Court gives Oklahoma back to the Indians, another cartel shootout in Nuevo Laredo, and cancel culture comes for everyone! Enjoy another Friday LinkSwarm!

  • “In a major Supreme Court decision Thursday, justices decided that a large swath of [Oklahoma], including part of Tulsa, is still an American Indian reservation. Tribal members can no longer be prosecuted by the state for crimes that happen in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.” I have not had time to read the decision, but my impression is that it’s somewhat less sweeping than the MSM is making it out to be.
  • The Trump Administration officially withdraws from WHO.
  • Interesting piece on the Sino-Indian conflict:

    China has become the ultimate fiscal lifeline for Pakistan. Decades of deficits, growing corruption, excessive defense spending and military domination have left Pakistan broke and few willing to give or lend enough cash to keep Pakistan solvent. A recent example of how this works was seen when despite economic recession and a public debt crisis (no one will lend to Pakistan anymore), the Pakistani defense budget was increased twelve percent for 2020, with annual spending now $7.85 billion. Spending on dealing with covid19 has averaged about $100 million a month and by the end of the year military spending will be at least five times what was spent on covid19. The India defense budget is also up (13.6 percent more) in 2020 to $66 billion.

    The only economic relief available to Pakistan is China and CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic corridor). CPEC is a vast Chinese investment and construction effort that depends on vigorous support of the Pakistani military to succeed. China needs the Pakistani military to keep Islamic terrorists and tribal separatists from attacking the Chinese construction projects. Pakistan also helps China by keeping Indian forces occupied in Kashmir and the northwest Indian portion of the Pakistani border.

    Northwest India (Ladakh State) is the current a hot spot because India has been building roads to the border and threatening to take back the portion of Kashmir Pakistan illegally, according to the agreement that established the India-Pakistan border after the British left in 1947, seized from India. Pakistan signed that agreement but had second thoughts as it was being implemented. Pakistan urged Pakistani Pushtun tribes in the area to “liberate” Kashmir from the Hindus and managed to grab about half of the disputed area. This dispute has remained unresolved ever since and led to several wars with India. Pakistan always lost but India never sent troops into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The current Indian leader is openly questioning the wisdom of that policy.

    India controlling all of Kashmir is a major economic threat to China, which has invested over $10 billion to build a highway and rail line from China to the Pakistani coast and it goes through Pakistani occupied Kashmir. This link is part of the Chinese OBOR/BRI (belt and road project) which aims to revive the ancient Silk Road that for thousands of years was the main economic link between East Asia and the rest of Eurasia. The Pakistani portion is called CPEC and is costing China at least $62 billion (so far). The Indian threats to the Kashmir road-rail link are minor compared to the problems China is having with Islamic terrorist and tribal violence against CPEC projects as well as the high levels of corruption in Pakistan which are also damaging CPEC projects. This is driving up costs while lowering quality and slowing progress. But China also claims ownership of much Indian territory so helping Pakistani keep what they have grabbed is considered something of a professional courtesy. At the same time the Pakistani military have gained an ally they cannot abandon or say no to.

    In June China revived the border war over Pangong Lake, which is largely in Tibet and patrolled by a small Chinese naval force. This is the longest lake in Asia and part of the 134-kilometer long lake extends 45 kilometers into the Indian Ladakh region. China is using its usual “sneak, grab and stay” tactics to slowly move the border into territory long occupied by India. The portion of the lake shore in dispute has no native population. The only people who visit the area are soldiers from India or China.

    Given this newly declared foreign threat China has, since 2019, sent new Type928D Patrol Boats to guard the lake. This fast (70 kilometers an hour) boat is armed with an RWS (Remote Weapons System) using a 12.7mm machine-gun plus two or more smaller (7.62mm) machine-guns that can be outed elsewhere on the boat and operated by one of the ten sailors on board. There is also seating below deck for up to twenty troops. India has smaller boats patrolling it portion of the 4,200-meter high lake, except for the few months when the entire lake is frozen over.

    In the last decade China has been building roads into remote and formerly inaccessible (via vehicle) portions of the lake coastline. China has built some of these roads into areas claimed by India but not regularly patrolled because special mountain troops must be employed to get into these areas without coming in by boat or on foot over the ice.

    India admits that the Chinese aggression along its northern border is active again and the Chinese are now actually taking control of Indian territory and apparently plan to continue doing so. Despite Indian nuclear weapons China believes it can get away with gradually gaining control over more than 100,000 square kilometers of Indian territory it claims. This will be done by grabbing a few square kilometers at a time without triggering a nuclear exchange. Fortune favors the bold, even in slow motion.

  • Bank runs in China?
  • “Stony Brook professor Helmut Norpoth says Trump has a 91% chance of winning in November.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at instapundit.)
  • Twelve members of a cartel hit squad killed in Nuevo Laredo shootout.

    The dead were allegedly members of the Tropa del Infierno, or Hell’s Army, the armed wing of the Northeast Cartel, who attacked soldiers while they were patrolling the highway to the airport. No military personnel were reported injured in the shoot-out.

    Investigators at the scene recovered two of the squad’s vehicles that were reported stolen in the United States, as well as 12 guns including two Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifles and eight AR-15s.

    The Northeast Cartel, a faction of Los Zetas, is headed by Juan Gerardo Treviño Chávez, alias El Huevo. A reward of 2 million pesos (US $89,000) has been offered for information leading to his arrest. Treviño is the nephew of the former leader of Los Zetas who was arrested in Houston in 2016.

    Nuevo Laredo, which is right across the Mexican border from Texas, was also the scene of two previous massive cartel shootouts, in 2012 and 2018.

  • “As Black children are killed in spiking urban violence, where’s the outrage from the white and the woke?”
  • New Jersey Democrat-to-Republican U.S. Representative Jeff Van Drew won his primary. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Inside Ghislaine Maxwell’s Life on the Lam.”

    Her business, first and foremost, was keeping Jeffrey Epstein happy. He shared much with her father: a humble origin, a vast fortune derived by mysterious means, even rumors of ties to the Mossad and other intelligence agencies. Like Robert Maxwell, Epstein also attached himself to a woman of higher status. In those days, Manhattan was party central, a place where connections were made at night, person to person. “Ghislaine was at the epicenter of all that,” says Euan Rellie, a British investment banker who knew Maxwell in both London and New York. “She befriended everybody and had a massive Rolodex of influential people.”

    Those connections proved pivotal to Epstein. “I always say that Ghislaine helped Jeffrey become who he became,” says one of Epstein’s victims. “He had the money, but he didn’t know what to do with it. She showed him.” Epstein built a 21,000-square-foot mansion on a 10,000-acre ranch in New Mexico, which he boasted made his New York town house “look like a shack,” and named it the Zorro Ranch. He also acquired a 72-acre island in the Virgin Islands and an 8,600-square-foot home in Paris, which is said to have featured a specially built massage room. Maxwell is said to have shared Epstein’s bed in each of the residences, as his girlfriend, before moving on to become his “best friend,” as he called her in Vanity Fair. (“When a relationship is over, the girlfriend ‘moves up, not down’ to friendship status.”)

    Maxwell soon had a bed of her own in a five-story town house on the Upper East Side, tended by a live-in couple who served as her housekeeper and driver, two secretaries (one for her and a second for Jeffrey), and an immense budget for the six properties she was managing for Epstein. She had found a path back to the lifestyle she’d lost when her father died. “She was used to living very well,” says a friend who knew her then. “She didn’t want to go back to where she was.”

    She wore a large diamond ring Epstein had given her, which she called her engagement ring, according to one of Epstein’s victims. “She would say things like she was the only one who Jeffrey slept with,” the woman says. “I know that she would have died to marry him. She would have done anything for him. He trumped everybody and everything.”

  • Former Reddit CEO Ellen K. Pao in 2011: “Sure, everyone knew Ghislaine Maxwell provided underage girls for sex.” Decent people: “Did you go to the police?” Pao: [LOCKS TWITTER ACCOUNT]
  • “Authors of Study on Race and Police Killings Seek Retraction Because Conservatives Cite It.”
  • “British Media Outlets Wake Up, Begin Distancing Themselves From UK Black Lives Matter Organization.”

    There is, of course, a big difference in saying you believe black lives matter versus saying you agree with the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a very important, key distinction to make in this debate. Unfortunately, “woke” reporters here in the U.S. often deliberately blur the lines by conflating the two as if they mean the same thing, so they can play the exact type of word games they did with [White House press secretary Kayleigh] McEnany over Trump’s tweets.

    Across the pond in the UK, however, there’s been an unexpected development on this front. Unlike the mainstream media here that routinely fails to make the distinction between saying “black lives matter” (blm) versus saying you support Black Lives Matter (BLM), a growing number of media outlets there have started distancing themselves from the political group because of their calls to defund the police and after a series of anti-Israel, anti-Semitical tweets posted by BLM-UK were recently posted.

    Is it too much to ask for our own MSM to start waking up as well?

  • Another week, another fake hate crime.
  • “It Wasn’t My Cancelation That Bothered Me. It Was the Cowardice of Those Who Let It Happen.”

  • Cancel cultures comes for Steven Pinker. “This transparently idiotic diatribe, previously dissected by folks such as Jerry Coyne and Barbara Partee — the latter of whom notes Pinker’s role in recruiting female and minority linguists to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — can’t possibly succeed. Can it?” I wouldn’t want to bet money on that proposition. Reason and logic play no role in cancel culture.
  • “Anyone Who Claims Cancel Culture Is Real Is A Bigot Who Should Lose His Job.”
  • On the other hand, Kurt Schlichter sees an opportunity to kill off academia as we know it. “Academia today is a pack of rabid reds, and we need to put it down like Old Yeller. And academia itself has loaded up the 12 gauge.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Fairly horrific F5 load balancer security bug discovered. Those things are pretty much everywhere in tech, so this is a big deal.
  • “Media Begging for a ‘Second Wave.”‘
  • “Governors Reinstate Lockdowns To Combat Recovering Economy.”
  • Physicians: ObamaCare deserves to die.
  • “This Was Russia’s Version of the F-22 Raptor. And It Was a Big Failure.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Mayor of Seoul dead in possible suicide.
  • This is indeed an extremely good parody. For me the giveaway was her saying she was running for Florida’s 28th congressional district…

  • Old and busted: Banning Jews. The new hotness: Banning “Jews.”
  • Good catch.
  • Ivy League cancels fall athletics.
  • While the Big 10 is moving to a conference-only schedule.
  • “I Survived the Warsaw Ghetto. Here Are the Lessons I’d Like to Pass On.”

    I would, first, urge future generations of Europeans to remember my generation as we really were, not as they may wish us to have been. We had all the same vices and weaknesses as today’s young people do: most of us were neither heroes nor monsters.

    Snip.

    Second, just as there is no such thing as a “heroic generation”, there is no such thing as a “heroic nation” – or indeed an inherently malign or evil nation either.

    Snip.

    Third, do not underestimate the destructive power of lies. When the war broke out in 1939, my family fled east and settled for a couple of years in Soviet-occupied Lwów (now Lviv in western Ukraine). The city was full of refugees, and rumours were swirling about mass deportations to gulags in Siberia and Kazakhstan. To calm the situation, a Soviet official gave a speech declaring that the rumours were false – nowadays they would be called “fake news” – and that anyone spreading them would be arrested. Two days later, the deportations to the gulags began, with thousands sent to their deaths.

    Those people and millions of others, including my immediate family, were killed by lies. My country and much of the continent was destroyed by lies. And now lies threaten not only the memory of those times, but also the achievements that have been made since. Today’s generation doesn’t have the luxury of being able to argue that it was never warned or did not understand the consequences of where lies will take you.

    Confronting lies sometimes means confronting difficult truths about one’s self and one’s own country. It is much easier to forgive yourself and condemn another, than the other way round.

    (Hat tip: ASM826 at Borepatch.)

  • Couple plot to ambush the wife’s ex-husband and new wife, drive from North Carolina to Ohio to murder them. Big mistake:

    According to the transcript of his Feb. 12 interview with sheriff’s deputies, Lindsey said he owns a gun, but had left it in the house earlier, and so he asked Molly if her gun was in the car. Both Duncans have Ohio conceal carry permits, which they told investigators they had obtained out of fear that Cheryl Sanders wanted to do them harm. They obtained the permits when they moved about four years ago to the area, where Molly has family nearby.

    With Molly’s gun in hand, Lindsey said he exchanged fire with the man later identified as Reed Sanders. Lindsey said his ex-wife then pulled up in a vehicle, got out and also threatened them with a gun before being shot by Duncan.

    The Greene County coroner said in February that the apparent cause of death for the Sanderses was multiple gunshot wounds. Investigators reported finding three weapons at the scene and multiple shell casings. The Duncans were not physically hurt in the altercation.

    The ambush took place in February, but due to coronavirus-related court closures, the grand jury didn’t no-bill them until recently.

  • Heh:

  • Say Uncle on The Great Pickle Shortage of 2020, which I’ve also noticed here.
  • Sounds like Amber Heard is a really shitty person.
  • Dwight has a nice collection of things that blew up real good.
  • Much crypto. Many monies.
  • “It’s time to put Facebook away.”

  • President Trump’s Coronavirus Press Conference

    Thursday, February 27th, 2020

    Here’s President Donald Trump’s press conference on fighting the coronavirus:

    Some takeaways:

    1. Vice President Mike Pence will lead the task force on fighting the virus.
    2. President Trump talks as though the he takes virus figures coming out of China at face value. That may be the right decision to avoid causing a panic, but I hope he doesn’t treat those figures as gospel, as most observers seem to feel the real numbers are 5-10x higher.
    3. America is rated the country best prepared for a pandemic.
    4. There are plans to address a larger nationwide outbreak “if needed.”
    5. Calls Nancy Pelosi incompetent.

    A few other Coronavirus tidbits:

  • The outbreak continues to widen in South Korea, and both China and Japan have closed all their schools to stop the virus spread.
  • How coronavirus could have leaked from the Wuhan virus lab:

    Add to this China’s history of similar incidents. Even the deadly SARS virus has escaped — twice — from the Beijing lab where it was — and probably is — being used in experiments. Both “man-made” epidemics were quickly contained, but neither would have happened at all if proper safety precautions had been taken.

    And then there is this little-known fact: Some Chinese researchers are in the habit of selling their laboratory animals to street vendors after they have finished experimenting on them.

    You heard me right.

    Instead of properly disposing of infected animals by cremation, as the law requires, they sell them on the side to make a little extra cash. Or, in some cases, a lot of extra cash. One Beijing researcher, now in jail, made a million dollars selling his monkeys and rats on the live animal market, where they eventually wound up in someone’s stomach.

  • By an amazing coincidence, Nancy Messonnier, the CDC official saying that a coronavirus outbreak is “inevitable” just happens to be Rod Rosenstein’s sister. Evidently undermining Republicans is the family business…
  • This is not good:

  • Is Coronavirus 1000 times more infectious than SARS?
  • Chinese car sales drop 92%.
  • Coronavirus Update for February 20, 2020

    Thursday, February 20th, 2020

    Basically every dystopia you’ve seen or read about in the last 20 years is happening in China right now. Here’s a roundup of Coronavirus news:

  • The official infection figures everyone believes are understated:

    Total confirmed cases: 75,751
    Total deaths: 2,130
    Total recovered: 16,847

    There are some MSM outlets saying that, based on those official numbers, the worst of the outbreak has passed. I wouldn’t wager much money on that proposition…

  • American evacuees from the Coronavirus-stricken Diamond Princess cruise ship have been flown to the Nebraska Medical Center campus in Omaha. (Yesterday the official Coronavirus tracker showed a jump in U.S. cases to 29 based on that, but today the tracker number is back down to 15. Curious…)
  • Over 700 people in Washington State being “under supervision” for possible coronavirus infection? “The figure includes close contacts of laboratory confirmed cases, as well as people who have returned from China in the past 14 days that are included in federal quarantine guidance.”
  • Walter Russell Mead on why China is the real sick man of Asia:

    Epidemics also lead us to think about geopolitical and economic hypotheticals. We have seen financial markets shudder and commodity prices fall in the face of what hopefully will be a short-lived disturbance in China’s economic growth. What would happen if—perhaps in response to an epidemic, but more likely following a massive financial collapse—China’s economy were to suffer a long period of even slower growth? What would be the impact of such developments on China’s political stability, on its attitude toward the rest of the world, and to the global balance of power?

    China’s financial markets are probably more dangerous in the long run than China’s wildlife markets. Given the accumulated costs of decades of state-driven lending, massive malfeasance by local officials in cahoots with local banks, a towering property bubble, and vast industrial overcapacity, China is as ripe as a country can be for a massive economic correction. Even a small initial shock could lead to a massive bonfire of the vanities as all the false values, inflated expectations and misallocated assets implode. If that comes, it is far from clear that China’s regulators and decision makers have the technical skills or the political authority to minimize the damage—especially since that would involve enormous losses to the wealth of the politically connected.

    We cannot know when or even if a catastrophe of this scale will take place, but students of geopolitics and international affairs—not to mention business leaders and investors—need to bear in mind that China’s power, impressive as it is, remains brittle. A deadlier virus or a financial-market contagion could transform China’s economic and political outlook at any time.

    Many now fear the coronavirus will become a global pandemic. The consequences of a Chinese economic meltdown would travel with the same sweeping inexorability. Commodity prices around the world would slump, supply chains would break down, and few financial institutions anywhere could escape the knock-on consequences. Recovery in China and elsewhere could be slow, and the social and political effects could be dramatic.

  • China expelled three Wall Street Journal reporters over that editorial:

    Beijing’s propaganda campaign to paper over the depredations of its heavy handed quarantines and other outbreak-suppression efforts was launched into hyperspeed earlier this month as the international community – including the WHO – started questioning everything – from whether Beijing deliberately hid information about the outbreak in the early days (looks like it did), to whether the virus was originally developed in a bioweapons lab in Wuhan before being unleashed on the public (…), to whether Beijing was actually capable of resolving this issue without some kind of intervention.

    These doubts likely played some role in Beijing’s decision to refuse to allow foreign experts into the country – though it gladly accepted shipments of facemasks and medicine – as the most important thing is that the Communist Party project an image of strength upon the global stage.

    Which is probably why this editorial annoyed them so much.

    From time to time, China expels foreign journalists. In recent years, reporters from Bloomberg, WSJ and the New York Times have been booted from the country. But early Wednesday morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that three of its reporters – Deputy Beijing Bureau Chief Josh Chin and reporter Chao Deng, as well as reporter Philip Wen have been ordered to leave China in five days, according to Jonathan Cheng, WSJ’s Beijing bureau chief and a formidable foreign correspondent in his own right.

  • China’ economy is still flatlined.
  • And the Chinese government is telling its citizens to get ready for austerity. Which will come as quite a shock after two decades of overinflated smoke-and-mirrors growth.
  • Coronavirus may be twenty times more readily transmittable from human to human than SARS.
  • Significantly more cases reported in Japan, South Korea, and Singapore.
  • Are China’s coronavirus figure reliable? Wait, are you suggesting that a communist government might lie?

  • I guess that’s why they’ve deployed 1,600 online trolls to combat the spread of non-Communist-Party-approved information.
  • It’s not just China: The World Health Organization wants tech companies to censor non-approved truths.
  • Speaking of lying, Republican senator Tom Cotton says that China refuses to “hand over evidence concerning the bio-safety level 4 research lab in Wuhan despite a new report from biological scientists at the South China University of Technology saying it may have been the source of the coronavirus outbreak.”
  • China deploys 40 mobile incinerators to Wuhan. “According to the reports, the mobile incinerators are able to destroy up to five tons of waste per day – burning a load in as little as two seconds.” Assuming the average Chinese person is 150 pounds, that means that collectively these 40 incinerators can dispose of 2,666 bodies a day.
  • More numbers out of line with government figures:

  • Get ready for coronavirus-induced drug shortages.
  • Things have gotten so bad in China that some residents have openly called for revolution, and for freedom in both Hong Kong and Tibet:

  • Changes in grocery shopping:

  • Meanwhile in Iran: Two dead and a reported military lockdown in Qom. Qom being the heart of the mullah’s regime, it could also be a long overdue coup by the regular army. Or an attempt to forestall a coup by the Republican Guards/Basij.
  • Finally, here’s a link to N95 facemasks. They’ve gotten pricier, but these show up as in-stock…
  • LinkSwarm for November 15, 2019

    Friday, November 15th, 2019

    Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm filled with news from the impeachment farce:

  • Summary of George Kent’s testimony:

    Kent is not a first-hand witness and much of his testimony is based off of second-hand knowledge. [Page 206-207]

    Kevin Bacon has fewer degrees of separation to the Trump Zelensky call than George Kent.

    That being said, his closed-door testimony revealed far more devastating pushback on the Democrat narrative than anything else.

    Kent testified that it is appropriate for the State Department to look at the level of corruption in a country when evaluating foreign aid. [Page 103]

    (Reminder: The Trump administration sent Ukraine lethal aid.)

    Kent also testified that Hunter Biden being on the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma while Joe Biden was VP was a conflict of interest. [Page 226-227]

    And according to his testimony, when he raised corruption concerns with the Obama White House, he was rebuffed and was told “There was no further bandwidth to deal” with Hunter. [Page 226-227]

  • Summary of Bill Taylor’s Testimony:

    Reminder: Chargé d’affaires for Ukraine, Bill Taylor, is not a fact witness to the Trump Ukraine call.

    Taylor was not on the July 25th call and he did not read the transcript until it was publically released for the world to see.

    Furthermore, Taylor doesn’t have relationships with any of the players involved. He has previously testified that he did not have direct communication with President Trump, Rudy Giuliani or Mick Mulvaney. [Pages 107-108]

    Yet even worse for Democrats’, Taylor’s closed door testimony has undermined their phony narrative.

    Taylor testified that at the time of President Trump’s call with Ukraine, the Ukrainians were unaware of the hold on the U.S. aid. [Page 119]

    Taylor also testified that combatting corruption in Ukraine is a “constant theme” of U.S. foreign policy. [Pages 86-88]

    (Preceding two links both from Director Blue.)

  • Even some Democrats are getting tired of the impeachment sham:

    Surprisingly, McDaniel reports that opposition to the hearings among Democrats is up 6 points. Could it be that there are still some sane members left in the Democratic Party who see this spectacle for what it is? Regardless of what new information is learned, no matter how favorably it may reflect on President Trump, there are a large number of Democrats who will not be swayed. Most Democrats hate Trump so much that, even though they’re well aware of how unfairly he’s been treated, they’re willing to go along with anything that will remove him from office. A six point shift doesn’t seem like much, but even a small move can swing an election.

    This shift also makes sense in light of the recent rally data released by Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale…He reported that 27% of those who attended Trump’s Tupelo, MS rally on November 1st identified themselves as Democrats. At an October 17th rally held in Dallas, TX, 21.4% identified as Democrats. These figures are stunning.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Ten signs the impeachment farce is actually a coup:

    1) Impeachment 24/7. The “inquiry,” supposedly prompted by President Trump’s Ukrainian call, is only the most recent coup seeking to overturn the 2016 election.

    Usually, the serial futile attempts — with the exception of the Mueller debacle — were characterized by about a month of media hysteria. We remember the voting-machines-fraud hoax, the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, the McCabe-Rosenstein faux coup and various Michael Avenatti-Stormy Daniels-Michael Cohen psychodramas. Ukraine, then, isn’t unique, but simply another mini-coup.

    2) False whistleblowers. The “whistleblower” is no whistleblower by any common definition of the noun. He has no incriminating documents, no information at all. He doesn’t even have firsthand evidence of wrongdoing.

    Instead, the whistleblower relied on secondhand water-cooler gossip about a leaked presidential call. Even his mangled version of the call didn’t match that of official transcribers.

    He wasn’t disinterested but had a long history of partisanship. He was a protégé of many of Trump’s most adamant opponents, including Susan Rice, John Brennan and Joe Biden. He did not follow protocol by going first to the inspector general but instead caucused with the staff of Rep. Adam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry. Neither the whistleblower nor his doppelganger, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, was bothered by the activities of the Bidens or by the Obama decision not to arm Ukraine. Their outrage, in other words, was not about Ukraine but over Trump.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Rep. Jim Jordan rips apart the sham witnesses. None of them have any first-hand knowledge of anything.
  • Alexandria Ocasio Cortez admits that the entire point of the impeachment hearings is to unite the Democratic Party. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Whistleblower Revealed To Be Recently Hired White House Janitor Hillarita Clintonez.”
  • A transnational elite racing its way to a revolution.
  • “Capitol Building To Be Decorated As Giant Circus Tent For Duration Of Impeachment Hearings.”
  • TPPF looks in-depth at firearms and crime in Texas:

    At publication, Texas’ crime rate is the lowest it has been since 1965. Similarly, violent crime in Texas is at a 40-year generational low with 410.8 incidents per 100,000 residents, a rate not seen since 1977. This trend follows a decades-long aggregate decrease in both violent and property crime rates. As illustrated in Figure 1, murder—the most heinous crime that can be committed using a firearm—has mimicked the decline as well with the drop in constituent subcategories of homicide. (Note that the rifle and shotgun homicide rates are reflected on the secondary vertical axis on the right in order to display the drop in these rare incidents.)

    Further, the percentage of total homicides committed with a firearm in Texas has been trending downward as well. Similar to Figure 1, Figure 2 shows declines across all major categories of firearm homicide, with rifles and shotguns being displayed on the right-hand vertical axis. During the preceding two decades, a handgun has been used in an average of 46.53 percent of all homicides, while rifles and shotguns were used in 3.57 percent and 4.10 percent, respectively. For handguns, the highest use was 54.55 percent in 2005; the lowest was the most recent year, 2018, at 40.12 percent.

    Also: “These trends persist in tandem with a proliferation in concealed carry permits being issued. Between 1998 and 2018, the number of concealed handgun licenses issued have increased 568 percent.”

    Writer Derek Cohen examines possible solutions to violence involving guns, and finds all of them but one wanting:

    The Legislature should consider implementing and funding a Texas program similar to federal initiatives, which uses a multi-pronged strategy of policing and prosecution, agency integration, and identification of violent crime hot spots. The focus would be on criminals with guns, not law-abiding Texans (Governor’s Texas Safety Action Report).

    Of all the recommendations made in this report, this enjoys the strongest scholarly backing. This essentially describes what is known as “focused deterrence,” a holistic public safety strategy that includes law enforcement, prosecutors, social services, and analysts. The process begins when on-the-street law enforcement describes gang conditions in the area they patrol, both in terms of geography (what is the gang’s “territory”) and identifying key members. The analysts then create a gang map as well as a relational network of the gang. Those in the gang are notified that they have been identified as such and invited to a “call-in.” During this meeting, attendees are informed of the strategy and, should violence persist associated with the gang, not only will state and federal prosecutors seek the maximum punishment for all potential criminal charges, but gang members stand to face these charges should others within the network be responsible for furthering violence. Conversely, attendees are offered the option of enrolling in relevant social services to ease the transition to a more law-abiding life.

    These programs have gone by multiple names during their ascendency: Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV), Operation: Ceasefire, and the like. Their efficacy has been demonstrated in individual and meta- analyses, suggesting “that focused deterrence strategies are associated with an overall statistically significant, medium-sized crime reduction effect.”

  • After protecting Jeffrey Epstein, ABC is still looking for the whistleblower who revealed that fact.
  • “New Emmy Category Announced: Best Covering For A Pedophile.”
  • Speaking of child sex predators, ICE arrested over 3,700 of them in FY2019. They’re just molesting the children native Americans won’t…
  • Denver business owner fined by government for not cleaning up the feces left by homeless people attracted by local government policies. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Probably should have included a link to this in my Austin homeless roundup, but there’s a YouTube channel dedicated to drunken brawls on Sixth Street, which seems to have gotten much worse in the last year or so. (Hat tip: Paul Martin of KR Training.)
  • Nine deaths at USC since August? That starts to seem like a startlingly high number. And, accord to feminists, there must have also been thousands of student rapes in the same period…
  • “Chinese Communists Infiltrate British Universities, Confiscating Papers and Cancelling Events.” All universities outside China should close any “Confucius Institutes” they’ve allowed to operate.
  • Related: “South Korean, Chinese students face off over Hong Kong protests.” Note that this was in Seoul.
  • Venice floods (even worse than usual, due to high tides and rain). (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Bolivia’s socialist president Evo Morales resigns over voter fraud.
  • Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton became the first the secure his reelection in 2020. How? Within hours of the filing deadline closing, his legal team challenged false statements by his only Democratic opponent, who promptly withdrew.
  • ProTip: Try not to drop your four baggies filled with cocaine. Especially at the airport. Especially if you’re Democratic state representative. Texas Democratic State Representative Poncho Nevarez evidently had to learn that the hard way, and now he’s not running for reelection.
  • Massachusetts to seize cars of people caught with untaxed vaping products. Even by the standards of Massachusetts crazy that’s Massachusetts crazy, and likely both and Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual) and a Ninth Amendment (neither necessary nor proper) violation.
  • Michael Chabon on Star Trek and his dying father. It’s a really good essay and you should read it. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Japan’s (mostly) failed attempts to firebomb the U.S. via balloon. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Classic Onion piece relinked by Instapundit: “Marxists’ Apartment A Microcosm Of Why Marxism Doesn’t Work.”

    Despite the roommates’ optimism, the system began to break down soon after its establishment. To settle disputes, the roommates held weekly meetings of the “Committee of Three.”

    “I brought up that I thought it was total bullshit that I’m, like, the only one who ever cooks around here, yet I have to do the dishes, too,” said Foyle, unaware of just how much the apartment underscores the infeasibility of scientific socialism as outlined in Das Kapital. “So we decided that if I cook, someone else has to do the dishes. We were going to rotate bathroom-cleaning duty, but then Kirk kept skipping his week, so we had to give him the duty of taking out the garbage instead. But now he has a class on Tuesday nights, so we switched that with the mopping.”

    After weeks of complaining that he was the only one who knew how to clean “halfway decent,” Foyle began scaling back his efforts, mirroring the sort of production problems experienced in the USSR and other Soviet bloc nations.

    At an Oct. 7 meeting of the Committee of Three, more duties and a point system were added. Two months later, however, the duty chart is all but forgotten and the shopping list is several pages long.

    The roommates have also tried to implement a food-sharing system, with similarly poor results. The dream of equal distribution of shared goods quickly gave way to pilferage, misallocation, and hoarding.

    “I bought the peanut butter the first four times, and this Organic Farms shit isn’t cheap,” Eaves said. “So ever since, I’ve been keeping it in my dresser drawer. If Kirk wants to make himself a sandwich, he can run to the corner store and buy some Jif.”

  • Narwhale the Unipuppy. Which was trending over the impeachment hearings two days ago…
  • In keeping with all that global warming, Austin had an unseasonably early hard freeze this week. Stay warm out there…

    LinkSwarm for April 27, 2018

    Friday, April 27th, 2018

    I foolishly thought I would have time to get more done this week…

  • By the way, the Korean War is ending. Something that couldn’t be ended by Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush41, Clinton, Bush43 or Obama is being ended by President Donald Trump. I look forward to Jennifer Rubin’s forthcoming essay on why this is actually a bad thing…
  • Midwestern Democrats are fearful that this Russian conspiracy bullshit will doom them all.
  • House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer explains to aspiring #Resistance leader that the DCCC tries to rig all House races for their preferred candidates, with none of that foolish input from mere voters. “This is how the party does it everywhere.”
  • Woman who campaigns against the deportation of migrants from Sweden was raped and sexually assaulted by two Afghan teenagers she met outside a bar.”
  • All about China’s aircraft carrier fleet. Interesting stuff, though I’d take the “OMG, China’s economy will be double that of the U.S. by 2030!” alarmism with several grains of salt.
  • Islamic State gets propaganda servers seized in the united States, Canada and the Netherlands.
  • Why you shouldn’t use your fingerprint as a password: “The first rule of passwords is that if you think it may have been compromised, you change the password. If you use your fingerprint as a password, you can’t change it.”
  • Mail bomber put to death.
  • Gang-banger executed for murdering two people, including a five-year-old girl.
  • Speaking of gang-bangers, the Obama Administration placed admitted members of the criminal MI-13 gang around the country as “dreamers.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Coward of Broward showered with soured no confidence votes.
  • Bill Cosby found guilty of three counts of aggravated sexual assault. It’s a sad end to a sordid saga, but I did find one Cosby meme that made me laugh:

  • Singer Morrissey commits the unpardonable sin of attacking left wing shibboleths and supporting Brexit. (Hat tip: The People’s Cube.)
  • Ford decides to stop making and selling most cars in the U.S. to concentrate on SUVs and trucks, Mustangs being the sole exception.
  • Scientists: “Dogs understand what we say and how we say it.”
  • Ted Cruz on North Korea

    Monday, October 23rd, 2017

    Ted Cruz has an editorial about North Korea in Sunday’s New York Times.

    On Oct. 31, the State Department faces a critical decision in our relations with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The Iran-Russia-North Korea sanctions bill enacted in August included legislation I introduced that requires the secretary of state to decide whether to relist North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism within 90 days.

    Look at the accusations against Pyongyang: the unspeakable treatment of Otto Warmbier; the assassination of a member of the Kim family with chemical weapons on foreign soil; collusion with Iran to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles; cyberattacks on American film companies; support for Syria’s chemical weapons program; arms sales to Hezbollah and Hamas; and attempts to assassinate dissidents in exile. Given this, the decision should be easy. In fact, Americans could be forgiven for wondering why North Korea is not already designated as a sponsor of terrorism.

    Cruz then reiterates the decades of unsuccessful “engagement” various Presidential administrations have attempted with North Korea, to no avail. He then lays out the reasons that North Korea should be re-added to the list of terrorist nations:

    It is time to acknowledge that North Korea may never be interested in negotiating away its nuclear deterrent. Of course we should continue to leave the door open for serious discussions if the situation changes, but the United States government does our citizens — and the world — a disservice if it continually discounts the centrality of nuclear weapons to the Kim regime.

    They are not a mere insurance policy for survival. They are a means to a more sweeping end: reunification of the Korean Peninsula on Pyongyang’s terms. We must seriously consider the possibility that the North’s current leader, Kim Jong-un, is preparing to use nuclear weapons to drive American forces out of South Korea and coerce Seoul — even at the risk of fighting a limited nuclear war.

    Given this, the United States must approach North Korea with sobriety and urgency. The Trump administration has the opportunity to join both houses of Congress in acknowledging the truth about North Korea and using it to open new opportunities to maximize pressure.

    Among North Korea’s many significant forms of illicit financing are foreign slave labor and money laundering. From Africa to Europe, North Korean diplomats exploit their consular posts to launder money at the expense of international comity. If North Korea is relisted, these nations would face a significant decision: Is continuing diplomatic and economic relations with a state that uses diplomacy and finance to export and foment terrorism in their interest?

    It would pose an even deeper question to the United States: Will we continue our diplomatic overtures to the Kim regime on the flawed assumption that it is interested in a future without nuclear weapons? It is because of America’s bipartisan belief in North Korea’s potential amenity in a political settlement, captured in the 2008 delisting, that North Korea can now marry a miniaturized warhead to an intercontinental ballistic missile. Relisting Pyongyang is the first step toward a strategic vision based on facts rather than aspirations.

    We must tell the truth about the dangerous ambitions of North Korea and once again list it as a state sponsor of terrorism, a move that only strengthens our hand and weakens that of Kim Jong-un. I strongly urge the State Department to relist North Korea, and to meet this challenge with the resolve it has long demanded.

    There’s not a whole lot here that will be new to anyone paying attention, but since a Washington establishment gripped by Trump Derangement Syndrome seems incapable of clear thinking or action on a wide host of issues, including North Korea, maybe we need to remind people that a communist scumbag dictatorship is, in fact, still a communist scumbag dictatorship…

    LinkSwarm for May 12, 2017

    Friday, May 12th, 2017

    Lots of border control news at the top of today’s LinkSwarm:

  • “According to figures released yesterday, the number of illegal aliens crossing the U.S. southwestern border has dropped by an astonishing 76% since President Trump took office.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Authorities Arrest 1,378 in ICE-Led Operation Targeting Gangs.” More: “The majority, 955, of those arrested were U.S. citizens, while 445 were foreign nationals from around the world.” Also: Three were Obama’s “Dreamers.”
  • “If the Trump administration is serious about controlling illegal immigration and illegal alien driven crime, it should begin by going after employers who hire illegal aliens. The move would not only help to prevent the exploitation of illegal immigrants, but it would also help to foster higher-paying jobs for American workers.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Maryland Democrats shocked, shocked to discover that legal immigrants who followed the rules aren’t wild about sanctuary city BS for illegal aliens. (Hat tip: Louder With Crowder via The Other McCain.)
  • “James Clapper: Still no evidence of any Russian collusion with Trump campaign.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • From the House to the Big House: Former Florida Democratic Representative Corrine Brown was found guilty on fraud and tax evasion charges.
  • Democrats had a real shot at winning the Omaha Mayor’s race…until the DNC came in and pulled all support to punish pro-life heresy.
  • “Aetna, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, has announced that it will exit all Affordable Care Act exchanges in 2018 after experiencing massive losses in 2016 and 2017.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • On the Democratic Party’s civil war:

    If Obama is really responsible for Democrat losses, then the party and its donors just bought first class seats on the Titanic. That’s why Democrat autopsies of the defeat remain so explosive. Blame can be apportioned to white people, to racism, Islamophobia and to Global Warming, but not to Barack Obama.

    Keith Ellison was the best messenger Sanders had to take a shot at Barry. Black loyalty to Obama is still the third rail of politics. And Ellison is one of the few black people in the Sanders inner circle. Obama’s pricey Wall Street speech offered the opportunity for a more direct attack from Bernie Sanders.

    “I just think it is distasteful,” Bernie slurred on CNN. “At a time when we have so much income and wealth inequality … it just does not look good.”

    The attack went to the heart of his differences with Obama. Unlike the Clinton era, the split is no longer between the left and the radical left. Obama and Sanders are both representatives of the radical left.

    But they don’t represent the same radical left.

    Bernie embodies the old left. Its mantra is class warfare. There is a great deal of talk about billionaires, working people and the ruling class. Obama pays lip service to that same rhetoric, but his is the program of the intersectional left. The intersectional left is far more interested in identity than class. It defines its organization around a coalition of racial, sexual and other minorities. Where Bernie wants to talk to the working class, the intersectional left wants to hear from transgender Muslim women of color.

    The differences aren’t just intellectual. They define the tactics and agenda of the Democrats.

    When Tom Perez, Obama’s DNC boss, recently read pro-life Democrats out of the party, he was following the Obama blueprint. Bernie meanwhile went on campaigning for a somewhat pro-life Dem. Bernie does not really care about abortion, gay rights, transgender bathrooms and the social issues of the intersectional left. The old Socialist follows the older slogan of the hard left. No war, but class war.

    Snip.

    Democrats and the left had long ago replaced pure class warfare with identity politics warfare. Intersectionality entirely displaced and demonized the old Dem white working class base.

    And the Dems paid the price.

    Obama’s reign torched most of the last of that white working class base. Trump’s victories would not have been possible if the Dems had not become a party of wealthy bicoastal urban and suburban elites who were out of touch with the South and the Rust Belt. And who were proud to be out of touch with a bunch of “ignorant racist, sexist homophobes” still “clinging to their guns and religion”.

    The clash between Bernie and Obama is also over the autopsy of Hillary’s defeat. Did the Dems lose because they failed to turn out the base as effectively as Obama had or because former Obama voters had come out for Trump? Should the Dems try to appeal to working class whites with a class warfare pitch or work harder to turn out the intersectional coalitions of minority voters?

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • The U.S. is arming Syrian Kurds fighting the Islamic State despite Turkish opposition. Good. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • 10% of French voters turn up at polls only to spoil their ballot in disgust.
  • Mark Steyn covers the French election:

    The French have voted to postpone their rendezvous with destiny. But kicking the croissant down the road means another half-decade of demographic transformation that lengthens the odds against ever winning the numbers to halt it….

    Yet the fact is that, with the arrival of President Macron in the charmed circle, the leaders of Europe’s biggest economies and of all the European members of the G7 are childless: Germany’s Angela Merkel, Britain’s Theresa May, Italy’s Paolo Gentiloni, and now France’s Macron.

    This would have been not just statistically improbable but all but impossible for most of human history. Whatever Euro-politics is about, it’s not, as Bill Clinton was wont to say, the future of all our children. Indeed, of the six founding members of the European Union – France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg – five are led by childless prime ministers: joining Merkel, Gentiloni and Macron at the no-need-for-daycare Euro-summit are the Dutch PM Mark Rutte and the Luxemburger Xavier Bettel. Mark Rutte is single and childless. Xavier Bettel of Lux is married, but gay and, hélas, for the moment without progeny….

    That’s the demographics of Western Europe writ small. The Eurocrats are a Continental version of the Shakers: They’re apparently forbidden to breed, and can only increase their numbers through conversion. From Nice to Cologne to Rosengård, a significant proportion of New Europeans seem to think that, au contraire, they’ll be the ones doing the converting.

  • Sally Yates was the real blackmailer.”
  • Nevada Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto wants choose senators based on diversity rather than all those annoying elections. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Canada arrests 104 men on child sex trafficking charges. The Other McCain notices a certain pattern to the names of those arrested that will be familiar to those that followed the Rotherham child sex trafficking scandal:

    Suresh Patel, 49; Muhammad Jaffer, 22; Muhammad Sarchami, 31; Hernando Carvajal, 29; Intekhab Shaikh, 42; Sakhi Alekozai, 29; Shamim Abowath, 54; Ruchir Shah, 34; Nima Latifpour, 25; Sanjay Ninan, 42; Jaipal Sidhu, 26; Adeniran Adekola, 33; Ming Wong, 39; Zan He, 33; Segundo Fernandez, 54; Anpalagan Kanapathipillai, 39; Navaneetharan Packianathan, 25; Rajorshi Bhaumik, 34; Miguel Feliciano, 38; Virushan Premanathan, 25; Suhayl Rajan, 24; Sivanesan Veerasingam, 50; Jamshid Jalilian, 25; Zhi Situ, 22; Tejash Patel, 33; Quang Tran, 37; Ravikumar Ghandhi, 31; Ahmad Hassan, 21; Anshu Manocha, 33; Sivaratnam Sinnappillai, 39; Naidu Matas, 54; Paramjit Sandhi, 35; Hari Bhaskar, 55; Ramy Kawar, 39; Zu Liang Xiao, 28; Ali Mansourinajand, 24; Ramiz Multani, 25

  • AC-130 gunship now comes with a 105mm Howitzer option. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Wargaming a second Korean war. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • U.S. Air Force’s robotic X-37B space plane finally lands after circling Earth for “an unprecedented 718 days.”
  • UT stabbing spree followup: The stabber “was suffering from mental illness and didn’t seem to be targeting anyone in particular during his Monday afternoon spree, police said Tuesday.”
  • “‘Chicago Is A War Zone’: Police Suicide Rate Surges To 60% Above The National Average.”
  • Gun-blogger Bob Owens dead of apparent suicide. Unlike many in the blogsphere, I didn’t know Owens personally, but we did follow each other on Twitter. RIP.
  • Windows 10 on ARM supports x86 apps, and Microsoft says your 32-bit applications should run just fine. Won’t make me use it, but for some people…
  • Behold the #BowWowChallenge.
  • Bucket-eye view of critters drinking water.