Hollywood Out of Ideas, Money, Jobs

April 18th, 2024

Sunday I watched Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire at the local Alamo Drafthouse. All of the trailers shown before the movie were for sequels or reboots:

  • Furiosa
  • Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
  • The Crow reboot
  • Bad Boys Ride or Die
  • Twisters
  • I understand there’s a certain amount of irony in complaining that all the trailers were a sequel or a reboot before a movie that was a sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a reboot, but usually Alamo has more varied trailer fare.

    But that lack of originality, along with wokeness, the red ink carnage of the streaming wars, and the lingering effects of the most recent strikes, has led to a deep recession in Hollywood, so much so that Deadline has a regular Hollywood Contraction feature.

    How bad is it? “Employment in “motion picture and sound recording” has grown nationwide, but the share of workers in LA or New York went from just under half at the beginning of 2023 to just one-third earlier this year.”

    All this activity peaked in 2022, when 600 original scripted shows were in production, according to the network FX. That gave lots of opportunities to everyone who makes a film shoot possible: Writers, crew members, caterers, and actors, like Haddad Tompkins. But it didn’t last.

    “When the beginning of 2023 happened, it seemed like there was this chill on production and making things and buying things,” she said.

    Per FX’s count, the number of scripted shows dropped to 516 last year. Studios pulled back for a few reasons, according to Patrick Adler, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong and head of the consulting firm Westwood Economics, which issued a recent report on the film industry workforce.

    First, investors started feeling the effects of rising interest rates.

    “Wall Street just got significantly less patient with the spending by the studios on streaming platforms as soon as money started to be more expensive,” Adler explained.

    Second, he said, studios realized that consumers might not have as much capacity as they anticipated for lots of new streaming subscriptions.

    Then, in May of last year, the Hollywood writers’ union went on strike, followed by the actors’ union…

    The resulting work stoppages effectively shut the industry down for six months. But once both unions reached contract agreements with studios, many people in the industry expected production would pick back up. Maybe not to the level of the streaming bubble, but an uptick.

    But in LA and New York, that hasn’t really happened. Actor Janie Haddad Tompkins said when studios were pumping out shows in the midst of the streaming bubble, she’d get one or two auditions per week.

    “Now, it’s like I’ve had maybe one a month,” she said. “So it’s been bleak.”

    The studio whose wokeness seems to have wrecked hardest is Disney. “Its last four high-profile releases bombed at the box office, losing over $1 billion between them. Once Hollywood’s most successful film studio, Disney was dethroned last year by Universal Pictures.” And Elemental was the worst performing film in Pixar history.

    It’s so bad that even Hollywood regulars who tick all the proper intersectionality boxes are being laid off. Quel dommage! Here’s a Critical Drinker round-table on the subject.

    “Every IP is dead. The snake has eaten its own tail. There’s no more tail left to eat.”

    If Disney just could have avoiding injecting wokeness, it could have milked Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar and its own IP for decades. Instead, its wokeness and poor quality has alienated its core demographics, possible for a decade or more. And the rest of Hollywood hasn’t been far behind.

    Mayorkas-Linked NGO Tells Illegals To Vote For Biden

    April 17th, 2024

    Conservative have been asserting for years that Biden’s illegal alien invasion is to create new Democratic voters. Now there’s more proof.

    The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project posted an image on X of what they say is a flyer from a non-governmental organization operating in Mexico encouraging migrants to vote for President Biden once they arrive in the United States.

    “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open,” part of the flyer read.

    The Oversight Project said the flyer was initially discovered by a Muckraker journalist while touring the site of Resource Center Matamoras in Mexico.

    “They [flyers] also appear to be handed out when illegal aliens use the RCM for assistance in coming to the USA,” the group said.

    RCM founder Gaby Zavala told one of Muckraker’s journalists that she is trying to flood the US with as many illegal aliens as possible before former President Trump is reelected.

    “RCM bills itself as an operation which houses functions for Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which helps illegal aliens enter the United States,” Oversight Project said, adding that disgraced Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas “is a former board member of HIAS, which received numerous grants from Soros’ Open Society Foundation over the years.”

    Soros! What are the odds?

    Given the lousy economy of the Biden Recession, Democrats know they can’t win this election without cheating, so they’re going all out on that front, and amnestying illegal aliens is a key part of their strategy, no matter how many black and Hispanic American voters it alienates in the process.

    Australia: Muslim Stabs Priest Yelling “Allahu Akbar.” We May Never Know His Motive

    April 16th, 2024

    This story seems strangely familiar.

    The teenager who allegedly stabbed a bishop in an act of terrorism justified his actions by telling police the Christian leader had ‘sworn’ at ‘my prophet’, and reportedly screamed the Islamic phrase ‘Allahu Akbar’.

    Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was attacked while performing a service at the Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley, in Sydney’s west, on Monday night.

    He was captured on the live stream of the attack shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he stabbed the bishop in the head, neck and torso at least eight times.

    His motives are truly a mystery.

    The video went out on livestream, yet no Australian news organization will show the actual video of the stabbing. Here’s one with some freeze frames:

    The couple of foreign media sources that do show the video (like The Daily Mail) have age restrictions that prevent embedding. Further, tweets that show it appear to have been deleted.

    Because we wouldn’t want to show actual Islamic terrorism when reporting on what authorities refuse to call Islamic terrorism…

    Samsung Snags $6.4 Billion For Texas Fabs

    April 15th, 2024

    Samsung’s Texas fabs are evidently going to be the beneficiary of CHIPS Act subsidies.

    The U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) has announced that $6.4 billion will be sent to a Texas Samsung facility to bolster the supply chain of semiconductors.

    The multi-billion dollar investment is part of a larger $40 billion dollar federal funding agreement as part of the CHIPS and Science Act.

    As a White House press release states, the investment aims to “cement central Texas’s role as a state-of-the-art semiconductor ecosystem, creating at least 21,500 jobs and leveraging up to $40 million in CHIPS funding to train and develop the local workforce.”

    This investment would be used at both the research and development facilities in Taylor and the expansion of the fabrication factory in Austin.

    The Taylor facility isn’t just an R&D site, it’s a full-blown state-of-the-art fab, and they could start running the line as early as July. The chips Samsung will be producing are planned to be on their 4 nanometer node.

    The City of Austin has previously identified semiconductor production as part of its Opportunity Austin economic expansion plan where the city sees itself as a “top global destination for businesses and investment.”

    “We’re not just expanding production facilities; we’re strengthening the local semiconductor ecosystem and positioning the U.S. as a global semiconductor manufacturing destination,” said Kye Hyun Kyung, president and CEO of the Device Solutions (DS) Division at Samsung Electronics.

    “To meet the expected surge in demand from U.S. customers, for future products like AI chips, our fabs will be equipped for cutting-edge process technologies and help advance the security of the U.S. semiconductor supply chain.”

    As I’ve written before, semiconductor subsidies are the wrong solution for the wrong problem (especially if the Biden Administration demands Samsung pledge fealty to social justice before sucking the taxpayers teat). But if you are going to subsidize someone, and your goal is more cutting edge American fabs, then Samsung isn’t the worst recipient. Their fab tech is either second third best (depending on whether intel has actually gotten their act together or not) in the world behind TSMC, and 4nm is good enough for just about every fab customer in the world, save Apple (who is TSMC’s alpha customer), Intel (yes, Intel gets some of their cutting edge chips fabbed at TSMC), AMD, and a few others. Technical details here, assuming the difference between FinFET and GAAFET doesn’t make your eyes glaze over.

    But the American taxpayer might rightly question why they’re being asked to subsidize the twenty-first largest company in the world, and one headquartered in South Korea.

    Once again, the Biden Administration is taking money from the poor to give to the rich.

    Iran’s Israel Strike Follow-Up: A Colossal Failure

    April 14th, 2024

    In a follow-up on yesterday’s news of Iran attacking Israel directly, it looks like Israel and its allies intercepted more than 99% of incoming drones and missiles.

    Israel and its coalition partners in the Middle East successfully defended against an unprecedented Iranian attack featuring hundreds of drones and missiles soaring into Israeli airspace.

    The Israel Defense Forces said early Sunday morning Iran launched 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles, with over 99 percent of them getting intercepted. Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari called the defense “a very significant strategic success” as only a small fraction of them reached Israel itself.

    A seven-year-old girl suffered severe injuries from shrapnel that fell directly onto her home. She was rushed to the hospital and underwent emergency surgery for a head wound. An estimated 31 people in total were treated for stress and minor injuries.

    The U.S., U.K, France, and Jordan came together with Israel to intercept the onslaught of Iranian drones, according to multiple reports. Explosions could be seen over Jerusalem and other parts of the Jewish state as Israel and its allies defended the Jewish state. Most notably, Israel intercepted Iranian missiles headed towards the temple mount, a holy site for Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

    Suchomimus is reporting that seven of the missiles that got through, all of which hit Nevatim Air Base.

  • “Not all of these were launched from Iran. Some of the drones came from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.”
  • “Around seven missiles [all hit near] Nevatim Air Base. The base is still operational, however. Here is an F-35 landing shortly after the attack, so I expect the damage is actually quite minimal.”
  • “Some Reports say they actually landed in open areas, missing the key infrastructure.”
  • The Times of Israel is reporting that airbase, which is home to Israel’s F-35s, appears to have been a primary target in the strike.

    While a list of sites Iran tried to hit has not been publicized by Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — which launched the drones and missiles — the main target of the attack appeared to be a sensitive airbase in southern Israel, home to the F-35 stealth fighter jet, the military’s most advanced aircraft.

    According to the Israel Defense Forces, Iran’s attack comprised 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles — 99% of which were intercepted by air defenses.

    All the drones and cruise missiles were downed outside of the country’s airspace by the Israeli Air Force and its allies, including the United States, United Kingdom, Jordan, France, and others — according to the IDF’s top spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari.

    Though Israel and Jordan have been quietly working together since they signed a peace treaty in 1994, this is the first instance I can recall of Jordanian planes helping protect Israeli airspace.

    The drones had a flight time of multiple hours to reach Israel, and the cruise missiles similarly would have taken around more than an hour to reach their target, according to assessments by defense officials.

    The ballistic missiles, however, have a much shorter flight time — around 10 minutes — and are more challenging to intercept, and indeed some managed to evade Israel’s air defenses early Sunday.

    The IDF said that the long-range Arrow air defense system managed to knock down the “vast majority” of the 120 ballistic missiles. The Arrow 3 system is designed to take out ballistic missiles while they are still outside of the atmosphere.

    We’ve talked about Iron Dome, Israel’s short range air defense system, but less about David’s Sling (intermediate range) and Arrow (long range). David’s Sling is a joint venture between Rafael and Raytheon, while Arrow 3 is jointly developed between Israel Aerospace Industries and Boeing.

    Unlike the drones and cruise missiles, the ballistic missiles were shot down over Israel, leading the IDF to activate warning sirens over fears of falling shrapnel. The sole injury in Israel due to the Iranian attack was a Bedouin girl who was struck and seriously wounded by falling shrapnel in the Negev desert.

    Snip.

    Most of the sirens warning against the falling shrapnel and ballistic missiles were activated in the central and eastern Negev region of southern Israel, specifically in the area surrounding Nevatim Airbase. Sirens also sounded in the Jerusalem area, the West Bank, and Golan Heights.

    A few of the ballistic missiles managed to bypass the Israeli defenses and strike the Nevatim base. According to the IDF, minor damage was caused to infrastructure at the airbase, but it was operating as usual on Sunday morning.

    We’ll have to wait for satellite imagery to confirm that, but I suspect it will.

    Why are Israeli air defense systems so much better at intercepting missiles and drones than Russia’s is? For one thing Israel’s systems are probably at least 30 years more advanced than Russia’s predominately ancient, predominately Soviet systems. For another, Russia is 779 times larger than Israel.

    Right now it appears that Iran’s attack against Israel has been an expensive, colossal failure.

    Update: Suchomimus has a new video up that shows minimal damage to the base.

    Breaking: Iran Launches Drone Strike Against Israel

    April 13th, 2024

    Not even sure that this is worth a breaking, since it’s drones rather than missiles or planes, but Iran just launched a drone attack at Israel.

    Iran launched a massive drone attack toward Israel Saturday night into Sunday morning local time, following through on its vow to retaliate against the Jewish state after several top Iranian commanders were killed in a suspected Israeli strike in Damascus earlier this month.

    The Israeli military estimates that the attack involves over 100 drones, which won’t arrive in Israel for another few hours. Some reports indicate that the airborne operation will also include missiles. This would mark the first direct Iranian attack on Israeli soil.

    On Friday, President Joe Biden said that Iran’s retaliatory attack against Israel was imminent and warned Tehran against carrying out the attack. “Don’t,” he said. U.S. officials believe the attack, once it hits Israel, will lead to a wider regional conflict that extends beyond Israel and Iranian proxies such as Hamas or Hezbollah.

    Airspace in Israel, Iraq, and Jordan have been closed as the attack unfolds. U.S. and Israeli officials said they plan on intercepting the Iranian drones before they reach Israel, according to reports.

    Early reports said “over 50,” now it’s “over 100,” and some Iranian sources say “500.”

    According to a Denys Davydov livestream, U.S. planes in Iraq have scrambled to shoot them down.

    It’s one thing to get drones past spread out Russian SAM systems, and quite another to get them past modern U.S. and Israeli aircraft, AWACS and Iron Dome.

    Iran claims ballistic missiles are on the way. We’ll see. Nazi Germany hit London with V2s back in 1944, so it’s not like the basics are out of Iran’s technological reach. Still, I wouldn’t expect anything more sophisticated than a SCUD, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Iron Dome could shoot those down as well.

    If it is just drones, it strikes me as more a performative strike than anything that will actually damage Israel. This was Iran gets to say “We struck back!” without actually committing serious assets.

    Livemap says “dozens” of rockets have been fired from Lebanon, which is honestly pretty by the standards of Hezbollah rocket attacks.

    Of course, Hamas isn’t launching any rockets, because they’ve contracted a terminal case of IDF.

    Developing…

    Update: Jordan has gotten in on the intercepting action.

    Update 2: Explosions in Damascus. It’s possible Israel has struck back before the drone even got there…

    Update 3: One missile hit the Negev and over 100 drones have been intercepted.

    Update 4: Boom!

    Update 5: Israel says that 99% of some 300 Iranian drones were intercepted. At least that’s 300 they can’t sell to Russia…

    Billions Disappear Into Black Hole Of California Homeless Programs

    April 13th, 2024

    I’ve covered the homeless industrial complex here several times, both here in Austin and in California. Now California itself has done an audit on its homeless programs, only to find billion unaccounted for.

    Exactly how much is California spending to combat homelessness — and is it working?

    It turns out, no one knows. That’s the result of a much-anticipated statewide audit released Tuesday, which calls into question the state’s ability to track and analyze its spending on homelessness services.

    The state doesn’t have current information on the ongoing costs and results of its homelessness programs because the agency tasked with gathering that data — the California Interagency Council on Homelessness — has analyzed no spending past 2021, according to the report by State Auditor Grant Parks. Three of the five state programs the audit analyzed — including the state’s main homelessness funding source — didn’t even produce enough data for Parks to determine whether they were effective or not.

    The audit also analyzed homelessness services in San Jose and San Diego, finding both cities failed to thoroughly account for their spending or measure the success of many of their programs.

    “The lack of transparency in our current approach to homelessness is pretty frightening,” said Assemblymember Josh Hoover, a Republican from Folsom who co-authored the request for the audit.

    To the Democrats running the program, that “lack of transparency” is a feature, not a bug.

    That means state policymakers have little data to go on when they make funding decisions related to what has become one of California’s most dire challenges.

    “The State Auditor’s findings highlight the significant progress made in recent years to address homelessness at the state level, including the completion of a statewide assessment of homelessness programs,” the Interagency Council on Homelessness wrote in an emailed statement. “But it also underscores a need to continue to hold local governments accountable, who are primarily responsible for implementing these programs and collecting data on outcomes that the state can use to evaluate program effectiveness.”

    As the homelessness crisis has intensified, California under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s leadership allocated an unprecedented $24 billion to address homelessness and housing during the last five fiscal years, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

    Nine state agencies administered more than 30 programs aimed at preventing or reducing homelessness. Some of those programs did such a poor job tracking their outcomes that it’s impossible to tell if they’ve been successful, according to the audit, which marks the first such large-scale accounting of the state’s homelessness spending.

    The report evaluated five state homelessness programs and found two “likely” are cost-effective. Newsom’s signature Homekey program helps cities and counties turn hotels and other buildings into homeless housing at an average cost of $144,000 per unit (in the program’s first round), compared to the $380,000-$570,000 it would cost for new construction. The CalWORKS Housing Support Program, which gives financial help to families who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless, also saves the state money because it’s much cheaper to help someone stay housed than it is to help them find housing once they become homeless.

    The auditor found the CalWORKS program spent an average of $12,000-$22,000 per household, while a single chronically homeless person can cost taxpayers as much as $50,000 per year.

    Funny how Democrats are always willing to spend more to help drug-addicted transients than many taxpaying citizens make in a year.

    But for three other programs, the state hasn’t collected enough data for the auditor to make an assessment: the State Rental Assistance Program (which helped people pay rent and other expenses during the COVID-19 pandemic), the Encampment Resolution Fund (a program Newsom launched to help cities clean up specific encampments) and the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention program (the state’s main source of general homeless funding, also known as HHAP).

    “Fundamentally, the audit depicts a bit of a data desert,” Sen. Dave Cortese, a Democrat from Santa Clara County who joined Hoover in asking for the audit, said during a media call.

    For example, nearly one-third of people who left placements funded by the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention program left for “unknown” destinations, according to the auditor’s analysis of round-one funding in Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Clara and San Francisco counties. That ambiguous data makes it impossible to tell if the program has been successful, the auditor wrote. Even so, the state authorized billions of dollars for four additional rounds of funding.

    I’m sure the programs are considered a “success” by Democrats because they provide a giant bucket to dole out graft and fraud to the leftwing activists working in the Homeless Industrial Complex.

    But I have a deep suspicion that things are even worse than we think. Remember the effort to recall Newsom, and how Democrats from across the country sprang immediately to his aid? At the time, Scott Adams said that protecting Newsom was “the top process in the system.” I suspect that California’s homeless programs are not just a channel for graft and fraud to left-wing activists in California, but a way to rake off money directly to Democratic Party campaigns and coffers nationwide. (Though certainly not the only source. Remember how $850 million in the hands of New York City Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio’s wife just sort of magically disappeared?)

    If Trump wins in November, a law should be passed allowing federal audits of state social programs that accept federal block grants. Money from the American taxpayer is being siphoned off, and we deserve to know where.

    LinkSwarm For April 12, 2024

    April 12th, 2024

    It’s been a week of petty frustrations, with simple things like paying for online transactions made impossible by websites that send out the wrong information despite the right information being on file. Speaking of frustration, Americans continue to be battered by high inflation, blacks continue to abandon Biden, and it turns out that the Pope might, just might, be Catholic after all.

  • Core inflation is up yet again.

    A hotter-than-expected consumer price index report rattled Wall Street Wednesday, but markets are buzzing about an even more specific prices gauge contained within the data — the so-called supercore inflation reading.

    Along with the overall inflation measure, economists also look at the core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, to find the true trend. The supercore gauge, which also excludes shelter and rent costs from its services reading, takes it even a step further. Fed officials say it is useful in the current climate as they see elevated housing inflation as a temporary problem and not as good a measure of underlying prices.

    Supercore accelerated to a 4.8% pace year over year in March, the highest in 11 months.

    Tom Fitzpatrick, managing director of global market insights at R.J. O’Brien & Associates, said if you take the readings of the last three months and annualize them, you’re looking at a supercore inflation rate of more than 8%, far from the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of inflation, welcome to $7 Tree.
  • Black voters continue to abandon Biden in droves.

    According to a Wall Street Journal Swing State Poll, blacks, especially black males are abandoning Biden in huge numbers.

    While most Black men said they intend to support Biden, some 30% of them in the poll said they were either definitely or probably going to vote for the former Republican president. There isn’t comparable WSJ swing-state polling from 2020, but Trump received votes from 12% of Black men nationwide that year, as recorded by AP VoteCast, a large poll of the electorate.

    That’s an 18 percentage point swing, minimum, for black males, if the national results and the swing state voting is similar.

    By confirmed, I mean those who said they intended to vote for Trump.

    The gap is even larger if we factor in undecided voters. Biden is down by a massive 30 percentage points vs 2020.

  • Biden may not be on the ballot for the Ohio general election because the Democratic National Convention falls too late to certify him.
  • Pope turns out to be Catholic, comes out against child genital mutilation.
  • “Nebraska state Sen. Mike McDonnell announces that he’s switching from Democrat to Republican.”
  • Country musician Jason Aldean refuses to let Biden campaign use hit song “Fly Over States.”
  • Good: A teacher helping her son with homework. Bad: A teacher helping her son force female students into sex trafficking. “Klein Cain High School cosmetology teacher Kedria McMath Grigsby is accused of helping her son, Roger Magee, force the troubled teens into prostitution.”
  • Man driving eighteen-wheeler interntionally crashes into DPS office in Brenham, killing one.
  • Hard evidence that temperature data is being manipulated to show global warming.

    Investigative science writer Paul Homewood last year discovered considerable tampering in 2022 with the recent CET record. He initially found that in version one, the summer of 1995 had been 0.1°C warmer than 2018. In version 2, the two years swapped places with 1995 cooled by 0.07°C and 2018 warmed by 0.13°C. Alerted to these changes, Homewood then analysed the full record from version 1 to 2, and the graph below shows what he found.

    As can be seen, the adjustments up to 1970 are small with ups and downs offsetting each other. Homewood then found that the years from 1970 to 2003 had been cooled markedly, followed by significant rises to 2022. Homewood concludes that “unfortunately it is part of a much wider tampering with temperature globally – and the tampering is always one way, cooling the past and heating the present”. Given that we now know that the Met Office has been using class 4 statistics for two thirds of its database since 2006, the recent higher adjustments would seem to call for clarifying explanations from the state-funded Met Office.

    (Hat tip: Boreptach.)

  • Ukrainian drone attack hits radar site 650km inside Russia.
  • Speaking of drones, China is supplying tens of thousands of drones…to Ukraine. I did not see that coming, but China certainly can use the money.
  • Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick lays out his legislative priorities for 2025.

    Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has announced his interim charges for the Senate, a set of 57 issues he is calling on Senate Committees to investigate and research ahead of the legislative session next year.

    The list of charges runs the gamut of issues conservatives have called on the legislature to address, including property tax relief, protecting Texas land from hostile foreign ownership, and strengthening laws preventing electioneering by school districts and other political subdivisions.

    Some of the biggest reform proposals, however, have been reserved for higher education.

    Patrick has asked the Higher Education Subcommittee to study and make recommendations regarding the role of ‘faculty senates’, antisemitism on college campuses, as well as to review the implementation of a new state law banning DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in state universities that went into effect earlier this year.

    “The Senate’s work to study the list of charges will begin in the coming weeks and months. Following completion of hearings, committees will submit reports with their specific findings and policy recommendations before December 1, 2024,” said Patrick.

  • When you think Houston Democratic Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee has already said the stupidest thing she possibly can, she goes out and proves you wrong.
  • I know you’re shocked, shocked to find out that gun-grabbing opportunist David Hogg’s political group Leaders We Deserve spent way more on administration than backing candidates.
  • Thanks to New York City’s idiotic rent control laws, not only would a hotel guest refuse to pay rent or leave, but a court actually ruled that he was the owner of the hotel.
  • First class stamps are going up to 73 cents. Thanks, Joe Biden.
  • If the commies running Vietnam accuse someone of a crime, I don’t automatically trust them, but Truong My Lan may actually be guilty.

    Behind the stately yellow portico of the colonial-era courthouse in Ho Chi Minh City, a 67-year-old Vietnamese property developer was sentenced to death on Thursday for looting one of the country’s largest banks over a period of 11 years.

    It’s a rare verdict – she is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime.

    The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court’s way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.

    The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.

    The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five others were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges and can appeal.

    All of the defendants were found guilty. Four received life in jail. The rest were given prison terms ranging from 20 years to three years suspended. Truong My Lan’s husband and niece received jail terms of nine and 17 years respectively.

    Snip.

    By 2011, Truong My Lan was a well-known business figure in Ho Chi Minh City, and she was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller, cash-strapped banks into a larger entity: Saigon Commercial Bank.

    Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.

    They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.

    The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank’s lending.

    According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.

    That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam’s largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.

    Yeah, none of that seems kosher…

  • Memorial Hermann Hospital: No liver transplant for you!
  • How CD sales and rock music both collapsed in the early 21st century.
  • A very interesting O.J. Simpson story:

    (Hat tip: Commenter Kirk.)

  • Strange news from Russia: Chechnya has banned music that’s slower than 80 beats per minute, or faster than 116 beats per minute. Both the Russian and Chechen national anthems are slower than that…
  • “John Tinniswood of Southport, UK is now the world’s oldest man.
  • How a programmer managed to rip off casinos for years. It helped that he worked for the Nevada Gaming Control Board…
  • “New ‘Biden Diet‘ Sweeps Nation: Pay The Same Amount Of Money But Eat 50% Less Food.”
  • Vatican Reluctantly Sides With God On Gender Theory.
  • Adorable prison break.
  • Hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    The Juice Is Loose From Life

    April 11th, 2024

    Football player, actor and accused murderer O.J. Simpson dead at age 76 from cancer.

    I think everything that needs to be said about the O.J. trial has been said, so I’m just using this as an opportunity to put up videos of Norm Macdonald on Saturday Night Live (which, I assure you, was actually funny at various points in its history) slamming O.J.:

    Also: “O.J. Simpson Excited For God To Tell Him Who Real Killer Was.”

    DeSantis Isn’t Putting Up With Any of Your Blue City “Soft On Shoplifting” Crap

    April 10th, 2024

    Remember when a whole lot of blue locales legalized shoplifting, either de jure (California) or de facto (a whole bunch of cities that elected Soros-backed prosecutors), and then were shocked, shocked when shoplifting soared?

    Ron DeSantis isn’t putting up with that nonsense.

    Tuesday Morning Governor Ron DeSantis signed a retail theft bill into law, instituting a severe crackdown on the Sunshine State’s high levels of shoplifting and porch piracy.

    “We’re a law and order state. If you do the crime, you do the time,” DeSantis said. He hosted his press conference at a Walgreens in Stuart, telling Floridians they will no longer have to deal with a “Fort Knox” style situation to simply buy toothpaste.

    “It’s all under lock and key for basic items. You gotta get a clerk to come and open it and all this stuff just to do basic shopping. That is not something that is good for quality of life,” he said.

    HB 549 makes it a third-degree felony to work with five or more people to commit retail theft. Using social media to plan these thefts would be a second-degree felony, and committing a second offense lands offenders a first-degree felony.

    The bill follows Florida’s 2022 loss of $5.421 billion in revenue to theft, meaning retailers lost $302.05 in sales per capita. In 2023, destination city Miami ranked in the top 10 areas for the highest rates of retail theft.

    The new law also targets porch pirates, or people who steal packages off of other people’s doormats. Stealing someone’s item worth less than $40 is now a first-degree misdemeanor, and doing it again or stealing property worth over $40 becomes a third-degree felony—up to five years in prison.

    “Florida has set the blueprint for other states,” Attorney General Ashley Moody said Tuesday, lauding the effort to be “proactive” in fighting crime.

    DeSantis has maintained that Florida is the “law and order state”, stressing that this is not the first time he’s signed off on severe penalties for lawbreaking. He passed a comprehensive “Law and Order” legislation package last year, targeting drug-related crimes, human smuggling, child rapists, and sex criminals, and easing the process to sentence offenders to death.

    Being soft on crime gets you more crime. This isn’t exactly rocket science. You have to be a Democrat to ignore this most basic of truths.

    Texas should look at DeSantis’ crime initiatives, and think about implementing then in places where we’ve fallen behind in keeping people safe, and to keep Soros prosecutors from inflicting higher crime rates on citizens in the name of “reform.”

    (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)