Posts Tagged ‘video’

“The Internet Is Unusable Without Ad Block”

Monday, March 18th, 2024

Here’s a rant from Charles White, AKA Cr1TiKaL, AKA penguinz0, about the pain of using the web without an ad-blocker.

I have dialed in my ad-blocker so that the only time I see the damn things is when using my iPhone, when they make some sites unusable.

  • “There’s a few things that everyone knows human beings can’t live without water, air, a nice smile. But there’s actually something that’s often overlooked that’s a necessity for life on this planet, and it’s an ad blocker when using the worldwide web.”
  • He made the mistake of turning off adblock to look at something…and unleashed an unspeakable horror!
  • “It’s just a massive headache, just this visual nuisance, all this clutter with an inundation of ads that seems like it’s some kind of scene from a 90s movie where you get hacked, where it just has, like, ‘Virus Detected!'”
  • “If you try and watch a video on some of these mainstream media sites, you get an ad every 2 or 3 seconds, and I’m not exaggerating. I don’t mean you get a banner ad, I mean you get a full 20 to 30 second video ad that pauses your video to play that ad. So a 2-minute video that I was trying to watch about a bobblehead heist ended up taking over 10 minutes, and I still didn’t even finish the video.”
  • “It is absurd, it’s unusable.”
  • “I would argue it’s like a basic human right at this point to have an ad blocker when using the internet. It is that fucking atrocious.”
  • He then demonstrates, and it’s every bit as horrifying as described. “This can’t be legal.”
  • He mentions YouTube’s war on ad-blockers, which I seem to have defeated with a combination of scripts.
  • Which sites do you particularly find unusable without adblock?

    Why Russia’s Weapons Suck

    Wednesday, March 13th, 2024

    We’ve covered some of this before, but here’s a nice roundup of why Russia’s major weapons systems suck. It’s a handy tour through the world of over-promised, under-performing vaporwear.

  • “Before February 24th, 2022, the Russian Federation looked like it would deploy or soon be able to field some pretty formidable new weapons.” At least among those who hadn’t noticed Russia’s previous vaporware claims.
  • “In everything from fifth generation fighter jets to modern tanks, to new body armor and even tsunami-causing nuclear torpedoes, there was enough hype to make even informed Western national security experts worry about what they were seeing.”
  • “Little wonder that they believed Ukraine would fall in days in the months prior to the invasion. Those predictions did not turn out to be the case. And now two years later, Russia still finds itself fighting a war of attrition with no end in sight.”
  • It covers Russia’s one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, how it’s been under repairs since 2018, is markedly less technologically advanced than American carriers, and how it has a history of corruption as well. It”s supposed to enter service again this year. I wouldn’t count on it.
  • Admiral Kuznetsov isn’t Russia’s only naval problem. “It is steadily retiring its Soviet-era ships and replacing them with lighter, less combat-worthy vessels.”
  • There’s the new, formidable (on paper) Lider-class destroyers, first unveiled in 2015 and capable of using a host of advanced new weapons. Tiny problem: “On paper” is the only place you can see them, since they haven’t started building them yet.
  • Then there’s “the Belgorod submarine, and particularly its Poseidon Torpedo, are two other items of hype in the Russian Navy that don’t seem to stand up to scrutiny. The Belgorod and Poseidon have often been items of fear in Western media and national security circles, which have nicknamed the former Russia’s ‘Doomsday Submarine.'”
  • “According to the Kremlin’s hype, the submarine and its arsenal of smart drone Poseidon torpedoes can unleash a 100 megaton yield capable of creating radioactive tsunamis that would inundate coastal communities and make them unlivable.”
  • “However, tests of the Poseidon have seemingly proven less than satisfactory. That shouldn’t be too surprising, because for the Poseidon torpedo to work as the Russians claim, it would need to be able to house all of the equipment needed for a nuclear reactor to convert atomic fission into electricity and propulsive force, while ensuring negligible waste heat (to avoid detection). It would also need the hardware to shield its sensitive electronics from the nuclear fission process.”
  • “Unfortunately for Moscow, the torpedo is too small to do this, meaning that it is either an object of hype or Russian engineers have come upon a technological leap enabling exotic engineering methods. We’ll let you decide which of the two scenarios is likelier.”

  • “The likeliest scenario is a yield of about one to two megatons per torpedo, which would be enough to inundate a coastal area with dangerous radioactive waters, but not to create a tsunami.” And the hundred knot speed is also bunk for numerous technical reasons.
  • “We now journey from the sea to the skies and look at the Russian answer to the American fifth generation F-22 and F-35 fighter jets – the Su-57 Felon. To be fair, the Su-57 does have some impressive features, like its 3D thrust vectoring engines, climb rate of 64,000 feet per minute, 66,000-foot service ceiling, Mach 2 speed, and range of 2,186 miles without refueling. In a plane vs. plane battle, the Su-57 should be a capable opponent against almost any fighter jet on the planet.”
  • “However, the Su-57 has a big drawback – its comparative lack of stealth. Aviation experts regard the Su-57 as being by far the least stealthy of the fifth generation fighters currently in service. For example, the F-22 Raptor is detectable at a range only under 10 miles, while the Su-57 would be detectable at a range of 35 miles.”
  • “Its stealth features are also concentrated in the front of the plane, meaning that if it turns or maneuvers, it is far more detectable.” Good thing fighter aircraft never need to turn or maneuver…
  • “Some aviation experts are even less kind and believe the Su-57’s radar cross section is similar to that of the F/A-18 Super Hornet, which is 1,000 times less stealthy than the F-35 Lightning II.”
  • “The Su-57 has played little part in the war in Ukraine, as the Russian aerospace forces have refused to field it in Ukrainian airspace. Instead, it has only attacked targets at long range from within Russian airspace.”
  • Then there’s the ridiculously low production rate. “The Kremlin ordered 76 Su-57s in 2019. 22 are in service as of December 2023, after several years of delays.” And we only have Russia’s word that they’ve produced that many. The real total could be lower. By contrast, Lockheed Martin has produced over 1,000 F-35s.
  • Next it’s a familiar punching bag, the T-14 Armata. “To be fair, the T-14 Armata does have significant improvements over the tanks Russia has usually fielded in Ukraine – the T-72, T-80, and T-90. These tanks have been lost in their thousands during the fighting in Ukraine, thanks to bad doctrine and their own design flaws. Because they do not segregate their ammunition magazines in a sealed compartment, they have often suffered from complete destruction with jack-in-the-box explosions.”
  • “The T-14 Armata mitigates this flaw with a protective capsule isolating the crew from their vehicle’s ammunition magazine.”
  • Unfortunately, the video goes on to say the T-14 has a low profile, which simply isn’t true. As I’ve noted before, the T-14 is 3.3 meters high vs. 2.44 meters for the M1A2, 3 meters for the Leopard 2, and 2.49 for the Challenger 2. 3.3 meters is higher even than the World War II M3 Lee tank the Soviets (who got them via Lend-Lease) called “a coffin for seven brothers.”
  • “The Armata’s main weapon is a 125mm 2A82-1M smoothbore gun which can fire related rounds and laser-guided missiles. This weapon would be a significant threat to the Western main battle tanks that Ukraine began fielding in larger numbers last year.” The “large numbers” are pretty small numbers.
  • “Unfortunately for Russia, this gun is not backward-compatible with its older tanks, which means only the Armata can field it, and that’s a problem, because there has never been a confirmed sighting of the T-14 in Ukraine. Russia has even fewer T-14 Armata tanks than it does Su-57 fighter jets.”
  • There follows a discussion of the T-14’s X-shaped engine that has evidently engendered a lively debate online, so I’m not going to get into it here.
  • “Meanwhile, the electronics for the Armata’s sensory and fire control systems are no longer as widely available due to the sanctions put in place as a result of its invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, there has not even been an assembly line built for the Armata and all of the prototypes have been made by hand. Given all of these problems, don’t expect to see the Armata fielded in large numbers, if at all, anytime soon.”
  • “Russia’s body armor has also been a subject of embarrassment. Many of Russia’s soldiers, especially the conscripts Putin mobilized in the autumn of 2022, have lacked proper protection. Infamously, some Russian troops were issued airsoft versions of the Ratnik body armor. Despite its problems in this area, Russia has made bold claims about what it has coming down the pike – its next-generation Sotnik body armor, which it says will be able to stop a .50 caliber Browning Machine Gun round.” Yeah, no.
  • We’re not even going to bother with the MiG-41, which doesn’t exist yet. Vaporware all the way down.
  • It’s always safest to assume that the latest Russian wunderwaffen is vaporware unless proven otherwise.

    NYC’s Illegal Alien Debit Card Scam

    Sunday, March 10th, 2024

    There’s a scam sweeping New York City. And by “New York City,” I mean “the New York City mayor’s office.” Instead of feeding the illegal aliens New York has lured there as a “sanctuary city,” Eric Adams has decided to just hand out preloaded debit cards.

    These are theoretically to replace buying food for them. Theoretically.

    Handing out free money to illegal aliens paid for with citizen taxpayer dollars is unconscionable enough.

    But let me ask the obvious question that no one seems to be asking: How do we know these debit cards will actually be handed out to illegal aliens? How do we know it won’t just be handed out to friends of Eric Adams, leftwing activists, etc.? At least with real food there are receipts. I’m betting there is not a rigorous, auditable, traceable system where the illegal aliens are required to show ID and sign off on receiving the cards.

    I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that no two-factor authentication is going on here. Being cash-equivalent debit cards, I’m also guessing there’s no way to keep them from being used in liquor stores.

    Here Adams is declaring there he’s going to start handing the 21st century equivalent of “walking around money” and we just have to trust him when he says its going to the illegal aliens so they can buy food.

    Yet another reason Democrats love illegal aliens is that, like the homeless, they have no support network to speak up for them when welfare state goodies get diverted into the pockets of leftwing activists.

    China’s Roving Death Vans

    Sunday, March 3rd, 2024

    The more we find out about Communist China, the more there is to loath, despite all the globalist happy talk about a “flat” world where we could export manufacturing to China for lower costs without any negative consequence. Today’s example: A government propaganda video bragging about their mobile death vans.

  • “This is one of those times where I wish genuinely that I hadn’t found something. I just discovered something absolutely horrid.”
  • “These cars just show up and execute you.”
  • They used to have public executions in arenas. They haven’t done away with that (or shooting you on the side of the road and burying you in a ditch), but the death vans are considered more “efficient.”
  • “How [the government video] is framed, it’s like how would you be executed, this is going to happen to you. You’re supposed to enter this POV, this is from your perspective, how are you going to be taken out by the government?”
  • They make a point of how much more humane lethal injection is. “Look how nice we are!”
  • They talk about how much cheaper a mobile execution van is than a fixed execution center. “This is really good! It’s a cost-saving method when we need to go murder all those people!”
  • “China, even per capita, executes more people every year than every single country combined. And that’s just the people that they count…every year, China is executing thousands and thousands of people.”
  • One estimate has 8,000 people per year executed in China. (And that’s just the ones we have some evidence for. “Some people just get disappeared.”) By contrast, there were 18 death row inmates executed in the U.S. in 2022.
  • “It’s really grim and also very dystopian, the fact that when you’re strapped down and laying there, you’re looking up at the Communist Party of China’s insignia and right above that is a security camera.”
  • Remember: China has nothing like our legal system or the rule of law. They have a 99.9% conviction rate.
  • There’s a long list of crimes you can receive the death penalty for, including owning a gun or using a VPN. “If somebody wants you gone, you could get the death penalty for really anything.”
  • And the government video talks about the process of the lethal injection shutting down your organs.
  • Matthew Tye, the covering the video, lived in China for a decade. This is “how human life is treated on a political level in China…I think this gives you a perspective on how hard Chinese citizens have it.”

    Bill Ackerman Shocked To Find Antisemitism On The Left

    Saturday, March 2nd, 2024

    Some people figure things out slower than others. Such is the case with formerly lefty billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackerman, who is simply shocked to find out that Harvard has unquestionably embraced antisemitism and diversity in the name of DEI.

    Here’s Dave Rubin excerpting Ackerman’s interview with Lex Friedman:

  • “The governance structure [of Harvard] is a disaster.”
  • “October 7th is the event that woke me up. Thirty student organizations came out with a public letter on October 8th, literally the morning after, this letter was created, and said Israel is solely responsible for Hamas’s violent acts.”
  • “Again, Israel had not even mounted a defense at this point, and there were still terrorists running around in the southern part of Israel.”
  • “And I’m, like, what is going on, you know? WTF, right? And that’s when I went up on campus and I started talking to the faculty, and that’s where I started hearing about ‘Actually, Bill, it’s it’s this DEI ideology.'”
  • “They started talking to me about this oppressor/oppressed framework, which is effectively taught at on campus, and represents the backdrop for many of the courses that are offered.”
  • “You know, I’m a pretty aware person, but I was completely unaware.” If you were “completely unaware,” then no, you’re not a “pretty aware person.” The malignancy of social justice has been know for at least a decade, and the hard left’s love for Muslim terrorists manifested itself at least as far back as the 1980s, when campus lefties loved the PLO almost as much as the commie Sandinistas. My guess is that by “a pretty aware person” you mean “you read the New York Times and watched a nightly MSM news broadcast, and stayed safely inside your real estate/hedge fund bubble, and never realized just how much your news sources were lying to you.” And all those PLO- and Sandinista-loving lefties now have their hands on control levers of the Democratic Party.
  • “They’re like ‘Look, Israel is deemed an oppressor and the Palestinians are deemed the oppressed, and you take the side of the the oppressed. And any acts of the oppressed to dislodge the oppressor, regardless of how vile or barbaric, are OK.”
  • “This is a super dangerous ideology.”
  • “DEI comes out of a kind of a Marxist, socialist backdrop way to look at the world.”
  • “Unfortunately it’s advancing racism as opposed to fighting it.”
  • As Dave Rubin notes:

    Yes, his conversion is welcome, but again, conservatives (and even just anyone paying attention) has know what poison DEI/Critical Race Theory/Social Justice is for a decade. The #BlackLivesMatter/#Antifa riots didn’t make him think something just might be wrong with victimhood identity politics?

    Bill Ackerman needs to go back and look at what else the left-leaning MSM has lied to him, about (including inflation, China, crime statistics, the Russian collusion hoax and and Donald Trump).

    He has a lot of reading to do…

    Ukraine Inflicts Unsustainable Losses On Russian Aviation

    Thursday, February 29th, 2024

    Something interesting is unfolding in the skies over Ukraine’s south-central front. Over the last ten days, Ukraine has managed to shoot down no less than 12 Russian military aircraft:

    First the shootdown list:

  • “17th of February: Two Su-34s and a Su-35.”
  • “18th of February A Su-34”
  • “19th: A Su-34 and a Su-35”
  • “21st: A Su-34.”
  • “23rd: A Su-34 and an A-50.”
  • “27th: A Su-34 and a Su-34.”
  • “And today the 29th: another Su-34.”
  • For what it’s worth, Livemap says that Ukraine shot down two Su-34s today.

    David Axe at Forbes suggests that Russia’s air arm is dangerously close to collapse.

    The Russian air force lost another Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bomber on Thursday, the Ukrainian air force claimed. If confirmed, the Thursday shoot-down would extend an unprecedented hot streak for Ukrainian air-defenses.

    The Ukrainian claim they’ve shot down 11 Russian planes in 11 days: eight Su-34s, two Sukhoi Su-35 fighters and a rare Beriev A-50 radar plane.

    But those 11 claimed losses are worse than they might seem for the increasingly stressed Russian air force. In theory, the air arm has plenty more planes. In practice, the service is dangerously close to collapse.

    Exactly how the Ukrainians are shooting down so many jets is unclear. It’s possible the Ukrainian air force has assigned some of its American-made Patriot missile launchers to mobile air-defense groups that move quickly in close proximity to the 600-mile front line of Russia’s two-year wider war on Ukraine, ambushing Russian jets with 90-mile-range PAC-2 missiles then swiftly relocating to avoid counterattack.

    But the distance at which the Ukrainians shot down that A-50 on Friday—120 miles or so—hints that a longer-range missile system was involved. Perhaps a Cold War-vintage S-200 that the Ukrainian air force pulled out of long-term storage.

    It also is apparent the Ukrainians have moved some of their two-dozen or so 25-mile-range NASAMS surface-to-air missile batteries closer to the front line. After all, the Russians found—and destroyed with a missile—their first NASAMS launcher near the southern city of Zaporizhzhia on or before Monday.

    He also suggests Russia may be flying more sorties close to the lines to follow-up on its costly victory in Avdiivka.

    This surge in Russian sorties presents Ukrainian air-defenders with more targets. So of course they’re shooting down more Russian planes.

    It helps the Ukrainian effort that Russian pilots increasingly are blind to Ukrainian missile-launches. The Russian air force once counted on its nine or so active A-50 radar planes—organized into three, three-plane “orbits” in the south, east and north—to extend sensor coverage across Ukraine.

    In damaging one A-50 in a drone strike last year and shooting down two more A-50s this year, the Ukrainians have eliminated a third of this sensor coverage, and created blind spots where Russian pilots might struggle to spot approaching missiles.

    In any event, the consequences of the Ukrainians’ recent kills, for the Russians, are dire. The Russian air force is losing warplanes far, far faster than it can afford to lose them. Russia’s sanctions-throttled aerospace industry is struggling to build more than a couple of dozen new planes a year.

    Escalating losses, exacerbated by anemic plane-production, almost certainly are increasing the stress on the surviving planes and crews. The Russian air arm isn’t yet in an organizational death spiral. But it’s getting closer.

    The numbers tell the story. On paper, the Russian air force has acquired 140 of the twin-engine, two-seat, supersonic Su-34s. Counting this year’s unconfirmed losses, the air force has lost 31 of the Su-34s.

    But 109 Su-34s still is a lot of Su-34s, right?

    Wrong, according to Michael Bohnert, an engineer with the RAND Corporation in California. Shoot-downs represent “only a portion of total losses” of Russian fighters, Bohnert wrote back in August. “Overuse of these aircraft is also costing Russia as the war drags on.”

    “In a protracted war, where one force tries to exhaust the other, it’s the total longevity of the military force that matters,” Bohnert added. “And that’s where the VKS”—the Russian air force—“finds itself now.”

    Bohnert assumed the air force went to war two years ago with around 900 fighters and attack planes and, in the first 18 months of fighting, lost around 100 of them to Ukrainian action. The problem for the Russians—besides the losses—is that the requirement for fighter and attack sorties hasn’t decreased even as the fighter and attack inventory has decreased.

    So those 800 remaining planes are flying more frequently in order to handle taskings the Kremlin once assigned to 900 planes. And that means more wear and tear, deepening maintenance needs and a growing hunger for increasingly hard-to-find spare parts—imperatives that effectively remove airframes from the front-line force.

    Given what we know of lax Russian maintenance practices, it’s probably safe to assume that considerably less of those 100 Su-34s are mission capable than would be the case in, say, the U.S. Air Force, which have mission-ready goals of 75-80%, but frequently falls short.

    A few more weeks of disasterous losses like this and Russia will be at dire risk of having what remains of it’s air campaign collapse.

    And Ukraine still has F-16s due to enter service this year.

    Ukraine’s Super Tiny, Super Expensive Black Hornet Drone

    Monday, February 26th, 2024

    The Black Hornet drone that western nations have supplied Ukraine with has some very interesting tech and capabilities, and is all but invisible to visual and electronic detection. But there’s a catch.

  • “In Ukraine’s battle for Air Supremacy with Russia, a swarm of tiny black hornet drones might just give it the edge.” I wouldn’t say air supremacy, I would say it’s extending Ukraine’s lead in recon supremacy.
  • “These drones act as eyes for Ukrainian troops on the ground. And thanks to the US, UK and Norway, Ukraine now has an entire fleet of them ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice.”
  • “In July 2023, the United States announced that it would deliver $400 million in security assistance to Ukraine. Beyond the typical armored vehicles and air defense missiles, that package would also include Black Hornet drones made by Teledyne FLIR defense. A month later the UK made a similar announcement. Working with Norwegian manufacturers it would spend $9 million on these microdrones, sending them over to Ukraine for use as covert surveillance tools.”
  • “All told, Ukraine now has over 1,000 of these drones at its disposal, and they’re helping Kiev slowly turn the tide against Putin’s invading forces.” Hopefully, but I think that remains to be seen at this point.
  • “In Ukraine’s case, they’ve received shipments of the Black Hornet 3, which measures just 6.6 inches from nose to tail, and weighs only 1.16 ounces. In other words they’re tiny. So tiny, in fact, that the,drones are easy to hide among foliage and trees, making them almost imperceptible to opposing troops.”
  • “Further more, the drones are designed to be practically silent when in operation.”
  • It’s a tiny helicopter outfitted with several high definition cameras, limited autonomy, a radio range of a bit over a mile, about 25 minutes of flight time (and takes about the same to recharge). It can actually penetrate into buildings and trenches.
  • I’m skipping over the idea the video floats of these things spying on Russian planes, since the size/speed/distance equation simply isn’t there.

    But all these high tech capabilities come at a price: “$195,000 per unit.” You can buy an awful lot of RPG drones for that kind of money…

    The drones are not brand-spanking new, and were used in Afghanistan. However, I’ve got to think the Russian’s insistence on extensive defensive fortification are going to make them ideal for the sort of atomized conflicts we’ve seen thus far in the war, and they should be great at spotting targets for artillery and weapons drones.

    I can see having one of these per infantry platoon. But the high per-unit costs precludes the idea they discuss of each member of the platoon having one, at least until that cost comes way, way down…

    China’s Abandoned Levittown McMansions

    Thursday, February 22nd, 2024

    Another dispatch from one of China’s ghost city developments, but this one with a twist: All the homes were theoretically designed for rich people, but I’m having a hard time figuring out why they would want them.

  • More than 100 uncompleted McMansions sit in Shenyang City some 400 miles northeast of Beijing.
  • They were “built by Greenland Group, one of the more than 50 housing developers that have defaulted on their debt in recent years.”
  • “Construction in 2010 but came to a halt a few years later.”
  • I know that China is a very different country indeed, but I can’t figure out why the developers thought that these McMasions, all made on the same floorplan and jowl by jowl next to each other on pretty small plots of land, would be appealing to the wealthy in the first place. They houses themselves are big and stylish enough in the 19th century French style they were aping, but the rich want land, space and differentiation, not to live between two houses exactly like their own on a small plot of land.

    Yet another example of China’s inexplicable, wasteful policies…

    Chinese Border Invasion In Progress?

    Monday, February 19th, 2024

    Back in December, Texas Governor Greg Abbott warned about an “invasion” of Chinese nationals at the border.

    Gov. Greg Abbott is highlighting recent numbers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection that show a record-breaking number of Chinese nationals encountered at the southwest border.

    According to the latest numbers released, border patrol agents encountered 4,261 Chinese nationals in October—a massive increase from the 430 encounters in October 2022.

    The increase in illegal aliens attempting to cross the southwest border has caused Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to take several measures to secure Texas’ southern border.

    Abbott spoke to Fox News, explaining how the crisis at the southern border has become an “existential threat” to the United States.

    It is extraordinarily dangerous because, first of all, as you point out, we have people from China coming here. We also have people on the known terrorist watch list who are coming across the border. And so there’s extraordinary dangers, calls to our country by Biden’s open border policies. And obviously, Biden is doing nothing about it. And that’s why Texas has to step up and apprehend as many of these people as possible to make sure that they’re not posing a threat to our country.

    Abbott’s not the only one. On Joe Rogan’s podcast, Bret Weinstein talked about traveling to Panama to see illegal alien migration problem firsthand, and came away with some disturbing information.

  • “There is a migration of Chinese immigrants that looks different, feels different, and is being housed in a totally separate way in Darien for reasons that are not in any way obvious.”
  • “Now I don’t know exactly what to make of that. I have hypotheses there are no more than that. But the Chinese migration is not forthcoming about why it is migrating. It is composed mostly of young military-aged men. There are some women present, but it’s not 50/50 by far.”
  • “The international community has arranged separate encampments. The Chinese are in many cases traveling a separate way across the Darien Gap. They’re skipping some of the worst parts of it traveling by boat.”
  • “When asked where they’re from, where they’re going, why they’re going, they are uninterested in talking. There’s a hostility to it that I found shocking.”
  • “[If they] didn’t like the way things were in China, they feared their government, they thought that there was economic opportunity, they would be curious about Americans. These are soon to be their countrymen. They would tend to be interested in talking. And even if they, for some reason, because they had lived under a totalitarian regime, felt that they couldn’t talk, they wouldn’t be broadcasting hostility, they would be ambivalent or something.”
  • “That is not the impression that they leave when interacting with them, so I found that utterly alarming.”
  • “I wonder if the [larger migration] is a cloak for this other migration from China, which is nothing if not mysterious. Why are they letting it happen? Why do you think the government is allowing the border to be so porous, and why are they resisting when Texas tries to do something about it?”
  • “Before I went to to Panama, I thought there was a migration of people. Now I think there are two. One of them’s clearly a migration, and the other one could well be an invasion.”
  • “The belief amongst many who have been on the story of the migration for years now is that this is a ploy to create voters, Democratic voters, and I don’t think that’s impossible. I think that’s probably playing a role.”
  • He also brings up the possibility some of have floated to trade military service for citizenship as a way to lessen the army’s resistance to illegal orders. “If you wanted a force that was capable of acting on behalf of tyranny against Americans, then a force that doesn’t have a deep history with the rights of being an American, that doesn’t have a long-standing allegiance to people within the country, that force would be potentially more compliant.”
  • Pre-Flu Manchu, all this would have seemed like paranoid conspiracy theories. But after the lockdowns, the Antifa riots, and the continued government insistence that the warm yellow substance they were distributing on our pants was rain, I have to admit the idea is a lot more plausible than I would have previously considered. And until the social justice warriors ran amok at Evergreen College, Weinstein considered himself a Democrat.

    Someone is importing Chinese national illegal aliens into the United States, for some reason. The only question is who and why.

    Dutch “Perfect” Planned City = Instant Slum

    Saturday, February 17th, 2024

    Bijlmer, built as a planned neighborhood near Amsterdam, was supposed to be the “prefect city” of the future, with high rise apartment complexes surrounded with green space to make the buildings more warm and inviting for residents.

    You know, just like they did with American public housing projects at the same time.

    Bijlmer worked out just as well.

  • “The goal was space, green, and light.”
  • The place was laid out in hexagon structure, so I guess it would make a great wargame map.
  • “We have all the benefits of a dense wealthy neighborhood but with the empty space of a rural one.” Or so they thought.
  • The buildings were 11 stories high, with storage space at ground level and communal areas.
  • Transportation? The pitch: “Innovative three-tiered transportation system! Dedicated roads for cyclists and pedestrians! Separate roads for personal cars buses and trucks! An elevated metro line” into Amsterdam proper.
  • The reality: “There you can find a stray junkie who is illegally occupying one of the apartments. A lot of middle class people do not want to live in the Bijlmer. Our apartments are empty, our construction has been delayed, our metro isn’t finished yet, so the Bijlmer is separated and alone.”
  • “The Bijlmer did not attract the amount of people that were expected. Many households were turned off by the large, alienating high-rises, so they left for recognizable suburbs instead.”
  • Oh, and the prices were too high as well.
  • “A place that was intended to attract middle class families just didn’t. It attracted poverty. Instead the Bijlmer’s design and negative stigma created a self-fulfilling cycle. The nature alleys and parking garages helped criminals get away with crime and made people feel unsafe.”
  • And then the Dutch government turned the place into an immigrant ghetto for people fleeing Suriname. Want to guess how that worked out?
  • “Overcrowding made it impossible to take a bath at rush hour.”
  • Two-thirds of the high rises were eventually demolished.

    I wonder if the video of the projected city was actually from the era. I doubt it, because it really gives off a Backrooms vibe.

    Government urban planners always think they can always do a better job than the free market, and they’re always wrong.

    The guy who did that video also has his notes up so you can check his work.