Posts Tagged ‘Ted Rall’

LinkSwarm for July 20, 2018

Friday, July 20th, 2018

Job interviews and book-related work have taken up the majority of my waking hours this week. Also, The Burning Time has fully arrived here in central Texas. It’s supposed to hit 108° on Monday…

  • There are plenty of risks with President Donald Trump’s trade strategy in China, but China faces risks of its own:

    The smartest short-term decision Beijing can make is simply to absorb the next round of blows and hold its punches. For instance, if Washington moves ahead to impose 25% tariffs on $16 billion of Chinese imports, Beijing would withhold fire, in the hope of enticing Washington into a ceasefire, which in turn could create an opportunity to negotiate a face-saving way to avoid further and much more costly escalations.

    The most compelling rationale behind this strategy of quick capitulation is to protect China’s centrality in the global manufacturing supply chain. About 43% of Chinese merchandise trade in 2017 (totaling $4.3 trillion) is, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, “processing trade” (which involves importing intermediate goods and assembling the products in China). What China gains from processing trade is the utilization of its low-cost labor force, factories, and some technological spillover. Processing trade generates low value-added and profitability. For example, Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles iPhones in China, had an operating margin of only 5.8% last year.

    One of the greatest risks China faces in a prolonged trade war with the U.S. is the loss of its processing trade. Even a modest increase in American tariffs can make it uneconomical to base processing in China. Should the U.S.-China trade war escalate, many foreign companies manufacturing in China would be forced to relocate their supply chains. China could face the loss of millions of jobs, tens of thousands of shuttered factories, and a key driver of growth.

    However, capitulating to a “trade bully,” as the Chinese media calls Trump, is hard for Xi, a strongman in his own right. Worse still, it is unclear what Trump wants or how China can appease him. The terms his negotiators presented to Beijing in early May were so harsh that it is inconceivable that Xi could accept them without being seen as selling out China.

    Even if the trade war with the U.S. could be de-escalated with Chinese concessions, Beijing faces another painful decision. The trade war in general, and in particular the forced shutdown of the Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE after Washington banned the company from using American-made parts have highlighted China’s strategic vulnerability from its economic interdependence with the U.S. Before the two countries became geopolitical adversaries, economic interdependence was a valuable asset for China. It could take advantage of this relationship to build up its strength while the mutual economic benefits cushioned their geopolitical conflict.

    But with the overall U.S.-China relationship turning adversarial, economic interdependence is not only hard to sustain (as shown by the trade war), but also is rapidly becoming a serious strategic liability. As the economically-weaker party, China is particularly affected. In the technological arena, China now finds itself at the mercy of Washington in terms of access to vital parts (such as semiconductors) and critical technologies (operating systems such as Android and Windows). Should the U.S. decide to cut off Chinese access for whatever reason, a wide swathe of Chinese economy could face disruption.

    China’s somewhat vulnerable on semiconductors, but it’s severely vulnerable on semiconductor equipment.

  • Democratic U.S. House candidate and socialist darling Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: “We need to occupy every airport.” Yeah. I can’t possibly see that backfiring. Sayeth Powerline’s John Hindraker:

    Yes, please! Please go straight to LaGuardia and shut it down. But don’t stop there! “Every airport” needs to be occupied and shut down by Democrats. Between now and the midterm elections, Democrats should do all they can to make air travel inconvenient, and preferably impossible.

    This actually happened not too long ago, in the fall of 2001. Ocasio-Cortez may be too young to remember it clearly, but all of America’s airports were closed for a few days as a result of al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks. Ocasio-Cortez is more ambitious, of course. She doesn’t just want to shut down “every airport” for a few days, she wants to make it long-term. Terrific, I say! Led by Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Party could be as popular as al Qaeda by November.

  • “A California man who allegedly attacked his wife with a chainsaw is an illegal alien who has been deported at least 11 times since 2005, immigration officials confirmed Friday.”
  • Congress breaks record confirming trump picks. Also, check out this from Sen. Dianna Feinstein (D-CA): Oldham’s record “could not be more extreme and overtly political.” Really? Did he order kittens to be slaughtered in his chamber so he could bath in their blood while invoking Satan? No? In that case, I’d say he his a lot of headroom on the “more extreme” front… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Baltimore is suffering an entirely predictable rise in violent crime:

    The most difficult times I faced during my years with the LAPD were during the years Bernard Parks served as its chief. Parks, in an overreaction to the Rampart scandal (which, though a genuine scandal, was confined to a handful of officers at a single police station), had disbanded the LAPD’s gang units and instituted a disciplinary system that placed a penalty on proactive police work. It was under Chief Parks that I attended a supervisors’ meeting after a week in which my patrol division had seen four murders and a wave of lesser crimes. Despite these grim statistics, not a single word at this meeting touched on the subject of crime. What did we talk about? Citizen complaints. And even at that we didn’t discuss them in terms of the corrosive effect they were having on officer morale. Instead, we talked about the processing of the paperwork and the minutia of formatting the reports. Fighting crime, it seemed, had taken a back seat to dealing with citizen complaints, even the most frivolous of which required hours and hours of a supervisor’s time to investigate and complete the required reports.

    As one might have expected, officers reacted to these disincentives by practicing “drive-and-wave” policing. Yes, they responded to radio calls as ever, but it became all but impossible to coax them out of their cars to investigate suspicious activity when they came upon it. As one might also have expected, the crime numbers reflected this change in police attitudes. Violent crime, which had been falling for seven years, began to increase and continued to increase until Bernard Parks was let go and replaced by William Bratton.

    Which brings us back to Baltimore, where, USA Today informs us, 342 people were murdered in 2017, bringing its murder rate to an all-time high and making it the deadliest large city in America. (Baltimore’s population last year was about 611,000. In Los Angeles, by comparison, with a population of about 3.8 million, there were 293 murders last year.)

    The Baltimore crime wave can be traced, almost to the very day in April 2015, that Freddie Gray, a small-time drug dealer and petty criminal, died in police custody. When Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby made the ill-considered decision to charge six officers in Gray’s death, she sent a clear message to the rest of the city’s police officers: concerns about crime and disorder will be subordinated to the quest for social justice.

    As was the case in Los Angeles years ago, the result was entirely predictable. Officers disengaged from proactive police work, minimizing their risk of being the next cop to be seated in the defendant’s chair in some Marilyn Mosby show trial. The prevailing thought among Baltimore’s cops was something like this: They can make me come to work, they can make me handle my calls and take my reports, but they can’t make me chase the next hoodlum with a gun I come across, because if I chase him I might catch him, and if I catch him I might have to hit him or, heaven forbid, shoot him. And if that happens and Marilyn Mosby comes to the opinion that I transgressed in any way . . . well, forget it. Let the bodies fall where they may, and I’ll be happy to put up the crime-scene tape and wait for the detectives and the coroner to show up.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • More from Borepatch on the same subject.
  • Texas Democrats are having trouble competing because they’ve been out of power so long there’s not a pool of experienced staffers to tap for campaigns, and the few that are around all gravitate to federal races. (Hat tip: Flight93_Militia’s Twitter feed.)
  • 14 people stabbed on German bus. Bet it was those darn Lutherans again…
  • Ninth Circuit Upholds Preliminary Injunction Against Magazine Confiscation in California.” Wait, the Ninth Circuit upholding the Second Amendment? Dogs and cats sleeping together! (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
  • Andrew Cuomo fundraising tidbits. Cuomo has $31.1 million cash on hand and spent more on TV advertising ($1.5 million) than Cynthia Nixon has raised in total. Bonuses: Low-level shenanigans (one guy gave 69 donations totally $77) and Winklevoss twins!
  • The EU fines Google over $5 billion for antitrust violations in locking in Google services on Android devices.
  • UK’s Labour Party looks to oust pro-Brexit MPs Kate Hoey, Frank Field, John Mann and Graham Stringer. (Hat tip: Pat Condell on Gab.)
  • Social Justice Warrior mobs eat their own. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Defeated Republican state representative Jason Villalba calls for President Trump’s impeachment. Thanks for reminding Republican primary voters, yet again, why they dumped you for Lisa Luby Ryan.
  • Williamson County officials behaving badly. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity.” (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Is Tesla storing cars rather than selling them? Channel stuffing?
  • How Jeff Immelt destroyed GE.
  • Kicking, screaming, biting Kansas councilwoman finally taken down with Taser, arrested.” Bonus 1: She later bite a deputy’s thumb so hard she broke a bone. Bonus 2: She was elected to the Huron (population: 73) city council with a grand total of 2 votes.
  • Gun shop owner punks Borat.
  • There’s hot tortilla chips, and then there’s really hot tortilla chips. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Iowahawk addresses the Allegra Budenmayer menace. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Heh:

  • Heh 2:

    And I just posted a Ted Rall cartoon. And the moon became as blood…

  • LinkSwarm for June 27, 2014

    Friday, June 27th, 2014

    A small LinkSwarm for a busy Friday:

  • Evidently Obama wants $500 million to arm the Syrian rebels that we’re supposedly trying to fight in Iraq. Oh, the article says he wants to arm “moderate” rebels. Has anyone seen these moderate rebels? Who are they? Kurds? Oppressed Christians? The problem isn’t that they don’t exist, the problem is that the actual moderates seem to have forces too small to affect the outcome of the fight, and I don’t trust this administration on, well, anything, but especially on their ability to discern the difference between “moderate” rebels and radical Islamic militias from 6,000 miles away….
  • Welcome to the ObamaCare Death Spiral.
  • The War Nerd suggests that Putin is mucking around in eastern Ukraine less to take it outright than to keep it at a simmer so he gets to keep the Crimea without a fight. Also include this epic quote: “Tom Friedman, the Michael Jordan of wrong.”
  • Obama gets unanimous beatdown from the Supreme Court. For the 13th time.
  • Even liberals are turned off by Hillary’s poor, poor pitiful me act.

  • As Hillary Clinton gears up for a Presidential run in 2016, ABC decides to make one of Bill Clinton’s chief aides a network anchor. Lovely.
  • Hillary’s book sells more than 100,000 copies, but woefully short of what it would need to earn back it’s whopping $14 million advance…
  • Did Obama Fail Black America?” Obviously the question mark is unnecessary, as the only question is whether that headline is one or two words too long.

  • Feminism: The Tiny Elite: “You don’t have to look far to realize that victimhood is the flavor of the moment in America. Deeming oneself a victim delivers an afforded reverence, especially if said victimhood is biologically based.” Today feminism is “a group working largely for the interests of elite white women.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • How the media discriminates against stories than indict big government.
  • Phil Collins donates his extensive collection of Alamo relics to the state. In fact, Collins is donating not only his existing collection, but stuff he continues to acquire. Three cheers for him.
  • Much like obeying the law, word problems are not Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings’ strong suit.
  • Texas man told to remove American flag from his balcony because it was “a threat to Muslims.” Get a rope…
  • Far-left cartoonist Ted Rall gets the axe. I’m not sure there’s a violin tiny enough…
  • Finally, you too can own the screenplay to Manos: The Hands of Fate.
  • I hope to have a longer post of the kangaroo court trying Michael Quinn Sullivan next week…

    LinkSwarm for December 3, 2013

    Tuesday, December 3rd, 2013

    Some news from before Thanksgiving weekend, some after. Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.

  • Detroit is eligible for chapter 9 bankruptcy. “Judge Steven Rhodes turned down objections from unions, pension funds and retirees, which, like other creditors, could lose under any plan to solve $18 billion in long-term liabilities.”
  • Missed this earlier: The ObamaCare cancellation-to-enrollment ratio is 50-to-1.
  • Selling ObamaCare door-to-door is not exactly going swimmingly.
  • Colorado’s ObamaCare enrollment numbers are worse than the worst case scenario. Then again, Democratic losses in 2010 (and 2014) are probably worse than the worst-case scenario as well.
  • How the MSM is trying to cover for Obama’s ObamaCare lies and their own complicity in them.
  • How’s that “jobless recovery” coming along? “The number of people on payrolls in the U.S. is still 1.5 million below the number in 2008, even after a 5 year-old rally that has boosted the value of stocks by $14 trillion. A 167% advance of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index during the past 57 months has been driven by reduced costs and record-low borrowing costs boosting corporate profit, analysts say. Employee compensation relative to net corporate profit is at its lowest level since 1966.” To put it in lefty terms: Obama is obviously God’s gift to the 1%.
  • Paul Krugman, idiot. Though to be fair, long-term the Euro probably is doomed…
  • Ultra-liberal DailyKos accuses ultra-liberal cartoonist Ted Rall of being a racist. Rall is a nasty piece of work, and no liberal deserves a free “get out of charges of racism simply for being a liberal free” card, but he happens to be right in this respect. This has nothing to do with racism and everything to do with liberals circling the wagons to protect Obama in the wake of ObamaCare’s massive failure.
  • Non-poor preppy liberal campaign consultant whose mother bought her a house garners over $62,000 of donations by claiming to be poor.
  • The problem with linking to this Charles Davis article on liberal media exploiting intern labor is how the entire piece reeks of Special Snowflake Syndrome. It would be a far more compelling story if Davis didn’t come across as such a self-righteous, self-important douche-bag.
  • “It always cracks me up when I hear lefties like Matthews bemoaning “incivility”, as if their side didn’t invent it, didn’t expand it, and didn’t propagate it at every opportunity. They think all the disgustingly vile rhetoric they’ve hurled continuously at every conservative starting with Goldwater and continuing on through Nixon, then Reagan, Gingrich, Bush, Palin, etc. has been flushed down the memory hole. I think what they mean by “incivility” is really “conservatives talking back”.
  • A question for my readers: Can anyone tell me whether HR992 is good or bad for the taxpayer? On the surface it looks like more underwriting of crony capitalism, but the technicalities lie outside my sphere of expertise.