Archive for the ‘Obama Scandals’ Category

LinkSwarm For August 11, 2023

Friday, August 11th, 2023

Still more Biden corruption comes to light, Yellow goes belly-up, things get worse in China, and a truly horrifying food discovery. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Biden Family Received Millions from Foreign Oligarchs Who Had Dinners with Then-VP Joe Biden.”

    The Biden family and its business associates received millions of dollars from oligarchs in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine while Joe Biden was vice president, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee.

    With the new payments included, the committee says it has now identified more than $20 million in payments from foreign sources to the Biden family and their business associates. Those foreign sources include not only the three aforementioned countries, but also China and Romania as well.

    Hunter Biden’s former business associate Devon Archer previously testified that then-Vice President Biden joined roughly 20 phone calls on speakerphone with Hunter Biden’s foreign business associates and attended dinners with foreign oligarchs who paid large sums of money to Hunter Biden.

    The foreign funds were sent to accounts tied to Devon Archer that used the Rosemont Seneca name and were then doled out in incremental payments to Hunter Biden, the records show, in what the committee suggests was an attempt to hide the source and size of the payments.

    Those payments included $3.5 million sent from Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina to the shell company Rosemont Seneca Thornton in February 2014. Roughly $1 million was transferred to Devon Archer, while the rest was used to fund a new account Rosemont Seneca Bohai, which was used by both Archer and Hunter Biden to receive other foreign wires.

    After Baturina sent the massive sum to Rosemont Seneca Thornton, then-Vice President Joe Biden attended dinner with Baturina, Archer, Hunter Biden, and others at Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C.

    Then-Vice President Joe Biden attended dinners with Hunter Biden; Archer; Baturina; Burisma executives; and Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakhstani oligarch, in the spring of 2014 and 2015 at Cafe Milano.

    In February 2014, Hunter Biden met with Rakishev at the Hay Adams Hotel in Washington, D.C. In emails to Archer discussing the D.C. meeting, Rakishev, who was a director at Kazakhstan’s state-owned oil company KazMunayGas, asked that then-Secretary of State John Kerry visit Kazakhstan. Archer said, “if we have some business started as planned I will ensure its planned soonest.”

    So members of the extended Biden business family were asking the Secretary of State of the United States of America to visit a foreign country so the Biden clan could do business. Are all American institutions now corrupted for the sole purpose of enriching Democratic Party insiders?

    In April 2014, Rakishev wired $142,300 to the Rosemont Seneca Bohai account. The figure amounted to the exact price of Hunter Biden’s sports car that the account purchased one day later.

    After receiving the payment, Archer and Biden arranged for executives at Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma to visit Kazakhstan in June 2014 to discuss a deal between Burisma, a Chinese state-owned company, and the government of Kazakhstan. Rakishev had a working relationship with Karim Massimov, who became prime minister in April 2014. Earlier this year, Massimov was sentenced to 18 years in prison for treason, abuse of power, and attempting a coup.

    Also in spring 2014, Archer and Biden joined the Burisma board of directors at a salary of $1 million per year each. President Biden visited Ukraine soon after Archer and the younger Biden received their first payments — payments that were sent to Rosemont Seneca Bohai and later sent in incremental amounts to Hunter Biden’s different bank accounts.

    The committee confirmed IRS whistleblower testimony that Archer and Hunter Biden received $6.5 million in funds from Burisma, which is owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, a Ukrainian oligarch who bribed officials $6 million over the investigation into the natural gas company.

    Archer told the committee last week that Hunter Biden’s value on Burisma’s board was “the brand.” Archer said then-vice president Biden was “the brand.”

    “Burisma would have gone out of business if ‘the brand’ had not been attached to it,” Archer said, according to the committee.

    We can’t let corrupt foreign companies that keep Hunter in cocaine go tits-up, can we?

  • “China Wanted to Use Biden Family to Acquire U.S. Energy Assets.

    Text messages that have recently been given to the FBI show that a Chinese energy company sought to utilize its connections to Hunter Biden in order to purchase domestic energy assets within the United States.

    According to Just The News, the text exchange in question took place between two of Hunter’s business partners, James Gilliar and Tony Bobulinski, on Christmas Eve of 2015. This exchange was shortly after Hunter had first been told about the conglomerate, CFEC China Energy, led by wealthy businessman Ye Jianming.

    “I think this will then be a great addition to their portfolios as it will give them a profile base in NYC, then LA, etc,” said Gilliar in the text message. “For me it’s a no brainer but culturally they are different, but smart so let’s see. … Any entry ticket is small for them. Easier and better demographic than Arabs who are little anti US after trump.”

    This evidence further supports the bombshell claims made by another former business partner of Hunter, Devon Archer, in closed-door testimony before Congress earlier this week. Archer testified that Joe and Hunter Biden both actively sought to promote their “influence” to potential foreign partners, and that the two of them were considered a package deal in efforts to sell the “brand” of their family name and political power while Joe was Vice President.

    According to calendar schedules from his abandoned laptop, Hunter eventually did have a meeting with CEFC Executive Director Jianjun Zang in December of 2015. By March of 2016, two of Hunter’s business partners, Gilliar and Rob Walker, drafted a memo for Hunter to sign and send to CEFC, to which Hunter agreed.

    The text messages, exchanged between 2015 and 2017, eventually reveal that CEFC simply hoped to gain “influence” through its partnership with the Bidens, in order to eventually enter the American energy market with the purchase of energy assets in America and elsewhere in the West.

    “Still closing the perimeters of ops with the Chinese, will know Thursday if we are driving U.S. investments,” Gilliar wrote to Bobulinski in May of 2016, adding that things might be “still a little premature.”

  • Want to know who funded that dirty Chinese bioloab in California? Would you believe Gavin Newsom?
  • Yellow files for bankruptcy, citing union contracts. Look how they shine for you. And all the things that you do…
  • Judge slams Southwest Airlines for ignoring ruling over firing an employee for daring to have wrongthink on abortion. “The judge said the airline acted as if its own policy limiting what employees can say is more important than a federal law protecting religious speech.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • Teacher who made racist statements and bragged about how she couldn’t be fired fired. (More.)
  • “Twitter Sues Pro-Censorship Wokescolds Over “False And Misleading Claims” of racism.
  • Tell the truth about the losing streak for the team you’re reporting on? That’s a suspension.
  • Old and Busted in China: Sleeping on someone’s couch because you can’t afford your own bedroom. The New Hotness: Sleeping in the same bed with strangers because they can’t afford a couch

    (hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Every day, we drift further and further from God’s light.
  • How Oppenheimer is breaking IMAX projectors. (Previously.)
  • There’s a new meme for ironic failure.
  • “Biden Makes Things Up To 7th Grandchild By Appointing Her Head Of Ukrainian Shell Company.”
  • “Democrats Hire Professional Puppeteer To Continue Operating Dianne Feinstein.”
  • “Trump Indicted For Mocking US Women’s Soccer.”
  • Ukraine To Get F/A-18s?

    Tuesday, June 6th, 2023

    This seems like significant news.

    The US, and Ukraine are discussing sending 41 Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) F/A-18A/B Hornet fighter jets to Ukraine, rather than scrapping them as planned.

    Since the US recently granted permission for other Western allies to supply Kyiv with advanced fighter jets, Washington is open to the idea of gifting Ukraine retired RAAF F/A-18 fighter jets, Euromaidan Press reports.

    Seventy-five F/A-18A/Bs were acquired by the RAAF from 1985 to replace the ageing Mirage III fighter which had been in service since 1963. The first two aircraft were produced in the US, with the remainder assembled in Australia at Government Aircraft Factories.

    Giving them to Ukraine rather than scrapping them makes sense. Australia can’t use them, as they’re transitioning to F-35s, and the U.S. can’t use them since they’ve already transitioned both carrier-based and Marine F/A-18s to the much beefier F/A-18E/F Super-Hornets.

    The F/A-18 was originally designed as a carrier plane, but several militaries around the world use them as all-purpose fighter aircraft.

    Will Ukraine be able to make use of them? Sure! Just like the F-16s that Ukraine may get sometime, F/A-18A/Bs are reasonably modern fighter aircraft that can more than hold their own against any but the very most modern Russia jet fighters aircraft. (Maybe the Su-57 is better, just like it appears on paper; but a lot of Soviet and Russian gear that looks great on paper turns out to be crap.) One of the first rules of warfare is that you can’t beat something with nothing.

    But, as with the F-16, it’s going to take a lot of training before even experienced fighter jet pilots would be cleared to fly F/A-18s in combat. Probably at least six months of type trying in simulators and tandem and solo flying. Maybe more, because Soviet/Russian jets are so different from U.S. jets, maybe less Because War. In any case, it will be too late to take part in the vaunted Spring Counteroffensive, which may or may not be going on right now.

    But the way this war has dragged on, there’s a good chance Ukraine will still need them by 2024…

    Score One For Gary Gates

    Tuesday, May 2nd, 2023

    If you’re a longtime BattleSwarm reader, then you know that I’ve been pretty critical of Republican State Representative Gary Gates of Richmond. Before winning Texas House District 28 to fill the unexpired term of John Zerwas in 2019, Gates was best known as a seven-time loser, his most prominent flame-out being an underhanded, dishonest campaign against Wayne Christian for Railroad Commissioner in 2016. Before that he was behind the suspiciously squishy (and now apparently moribund) Texas Citizens Coalition. More recently he’s played footsie with the social justice set by voting for a bill to create an Office of Health Equity within the Texas Department of Health and Human Services.

    So Gates has done little to endear himself to me. But recently he did good by cracking down on “affordable housing” tax giveaways.

    Rep. Gary Gates (R-Richmond) took to the back microphone this week to make the case for greater regulation of a controversial state program offering millions in tax exemptions to developers for affordable housing.

    One of several lawmakers to propose reforms to the Public Facility Corporation (PFC) program, Gates had introduced a reform bill with tough standards, but allegedly former Speaker Dennis Bonnen repeatedly pressured him to drop his proposals.

    Gates told The Texan he was urged by Bonnen to sign on to arguably weaker reforms authored by Rep. Jacy Jetton (R-Richmond) — House Bill (HB) 2071 — and warned that although his own legislation had been approved by the House Committee on Urban Affairs, it would be killed in the powerful Calendars Committee.

    Instead, Gates successfully tacked on multiple amendments to HB 2071 during Tuesday’s floor session.

    “I’m pleased with these amendments, but I still have my own PFC reform bill, HB 3568, which I hope to get to the floor in short order. It has 69 authors and co-authors, while HB 2071 had only 10.”

    Under the PFC program, local government officials may offer a 100 percent tax exemption to developers who build or purchase multifamily housing, as long as some rental units are set aside for “affordable” reduced rent. But both Jetton and Gates acknowledged there have been abuses of the system; in some cases, PFCs have been authorized with only 10 percent of units designated for low-income families.

    On the House floor, Gates queried Jetton about whether his reforms set new minimum standards and noted that the current system took tax revenue from public school districts without their approval. He also pointed out that in some cases developers were already charging below-market rents before transitioning to PFC status and were therefore not obligated to demonstrate a public benefit.

    “This is hurting our schools, this is hurting our counties and our cities,” said Gates. “This [tax revenue] is being taken from our fire departments, our police departments, our neighborhood schools. They are getting their taxes wiped out and we can’t determine if there’s any public benefit.”

    In response to Gates’ questions, Jetton acknowledged that other taxpayers or the state’s general funds would have to make up the loss in revenue to school districts.

    Gates’ first proposed amendment, opposed by Jetton, mandates that 60 percent of the developer’s tax savings must be dedicated to reducing rents. It was approved in a bipartisan vote of 87 to 54, with two members registered as “present, not voting.”

    Under the formula, 12 percent of units must be set aside for those earning 50 percent of the Area Median Income (AMI), 12 percent for those at 60 percent AMI, and 12 percent at 80 percent AMI.

    After the House voted for a second Gates amendment requiring approval from counties and school districts for any new PFCs, Jetton gave up his opposition and accepted four more revisions as friendly amendments.

    Noting that some PFCs had been granted 100 percent sales and property tax exemptions for up to 99 years, Gates also questioned Jetton about HB 2071’s language setting a minimum tax exemption period of 10 years while removing even the 99-year limit.

    Among revisions accepted by Jetton, the tax-exempt status will be limited to 12 years for new construction and 10 years for the conversion of existing properties.

    So one cheer for Gary Gates for getting rid of a tax kickback.

    Ideally, government should get entirely out of the business of giving different types of tax breaks for different rental housing. Get out of regulating any but the most essential safety and business standards and let the free market come up with solutions. The main obstacles to building actual affordable housing are too many regulations, not too few.

    But we shouldn’t disdain even baby steps of reform in the right direction.

    Fundraiser Convicted Of Funneling Foreign Money To Obama Campaign

    Thursday, April 27th, 2023

    I previously covered this case while it was ongoing. Now Obama bundler Prakazrel “Pras” Michel has been convicted.

    A Fugees rapper accused in multimillion-dollar political conspiracies spanning two presidencies was convicted Wednesday after a trial that included testimony ranging from actor Leonardo DiCaprio to former US Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

    Prakazrel “Pras” Michel was accused of funneling money from a now-fugitive Malaysian financer [Low Taek Jho] through straw donors to Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, then trying to squelch a Justice Department investigation and influence an extradition case on behalf of China under the Trump administration.

    So a Democratic Party bundler committed a felony to channel millions in illegal foreign donations to the Obama campaign and the mainstream media can barely be bothered to cover the story. We all know that if the amount had been mere thousands, and the words “Trump” and “Russia” appeared in the story, the mainstream media would still be talking about it…

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

    The Democratic Party’s Foreign Sugar Daddies

    Thursday, April 6th, 2023

    The Democratic Party may not be any good at cultivating a healthy economy, governing, or protecting the rights of average Americans, but they excel in all forms of election cheating.

    Case in point: Campaign finance fraud.

    We’ve already covered illegal campaign contributions indictment.

    But don’t think Democrats are content with merely sucking up illegal American contributions. No, Democrats have also mastered the art of illegally sucking up illegal campaign contributions from foreigners abroad.

    First up: “Leonardo DiCaprio Testifies Obama Received Millions in Stolen CCP Cash From Fugees Founder ‘Pras’ Michel.”

    Actor Leonardo DiCaprio took the stand and testified in the federal trial of Prakazrel “Pras” Michel, founder of the hip hop band Fugees, and his alleged involvement in a money laundering scheme that included a huge — and illegal — donation to Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.

    DiCaprio recalled a conversation with Malaysian financier Jho Low, who mentioned that he was looking to donate millions of dollars to the Obama campaign by giving the money to Michel and having him pass it to Obama’s people.

    Fast Facts:

  • Low was sentenced — in absentia — to a 10-year sentence in a Kuwaiti court for his role in laundering roughly $1 billion of the almost $4.5 billion worth of Chinese currency he allegedly swindled in what’s known as the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal.
  • Low claimed he wanted to donate between $20-$30 million dollars to Obama.
  • It is illegal for American presidential candidates to accept donations from foreigners.
  • The DOJ charged Low for trying to donate money to lobby the Trump administration, hoping to have the charges against him relating to the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal dropped.
  • Low is on the lam and is believed to be hiding in China or Macau. China denies harboring him.
  • “It was a significant sum, something to the tune of $20-30 million,” DiCaprio testified in court. “I said, ‘Wow that’s a lot of money!’”

    Additional witnesses testified that they were wired money from Low and asked to forward it to the Obama campaign.

    Michel allegedly took the mad stacks from Low and used them to lobby Obama’s government on behalf of Low and the Chinese Communist Party.

    He distributed $21.6 million to American straw donors who would then donate it to the Obama campaign, concealing the fact that the money came from Low.

    Imagine my shocked face. Of course, it was already known at the time that the Obama campaign accepted foreign campaign donations on its website by disabling the most basic checks.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

    But just because Democrats seem to love sucking up money with people connected to communist China, don’t think that they’re not looking at other foreign Sugar Daddys.

    Such as Hansjörg Wyss.

    The Berger Action Fund is a nondescript name for a group with a rather specific purpose: steering the wealth of Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire, into the world of American politics and policy.

    As a foreign national, Wyss is prohibited from donating to candidates or political committees. But his influence is still broadly felt through millions of dollars routed through a network of nonprofit groups that invest heavily in the Democratic ecosystem. Such groups don’t have to disclose the source of their funding — or many details about how they spend it.

    Newly available tax documents show that his giving through the Berger Action Fund, which describes itself as advocating for “solutions to some of our world’s biggest problems,” swelled in 2021 to $72 million, cementing Wyss’ status as a Democratic-aligned megadonor.

    Representatives for Wyss insist they comply with laws governing the giving of foreign nationals and have put in place strict policies limiting the use of donations to “issue advocacy” — not partisan electoral activities. But the fact that the money cannot be publicly traced highlights the difficulty of putting such assertions to the test.

    Those same groups have helped to bankroll efforts to lift President Joe Biden’s agenda and paid for TV ads promoting Democratic congressional candidates ahead of last year’s midterm elections.

    You may remember Wyss from back when he was funneling money to Clinton toady John Podesta.

    Who needs the money of mere Americans when you have transnational European billionaires as your sugar daddy?

    (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

    What If Russia’s Partial Mobilization Is Actually A General Mobilization?

    Monday, December 19th, 2022

    In a non-embedable video, the YouTuber formerly know as The Russian Dude announced that he had been called up for military service as part of Putin’s “partial mobilization” to throw more cannon fodder into the Ukrainian meatgrinder. (I’m pretty sure that’s an important decision point in why he’s now known as The Canadian Dude.)

    Oddly enough, all his male friends received conscription notices as well.

    Commenters have long stated that Putin doesn’t want to declare a General Mobilization, because under Soviet Russian law, that requires an actual declaration of war, something still lacking in Vlad’s Special Military Operation.

    Now this is not even a theory, only conjecture based on a single data point, but what if Putin is actually carrying out a General Mobilization of all eligible males of military age while calling it limited mobilization? It’s not like Putin’s war machine hasn’t already committed more heinous crimes, or that Russia has an independent press capable of calling him on it any more.

    Maybe Putin wants to roll the dice on one final spring push for Kiev, putting a million men under arms to launch a massive attack, relying on the Russian doctrine of quantity having a quality of its own to final snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

    Like I said, conjecture only, but it certainly doesn’t make any less sense than the multiple bungling stupidities Russia has committed in the war…

    The Ukraine War Map Problem

    Saturday, September 3rd, 2022

    When the Russo-Ukrainian war kicked off back in February, I relied on https://liveuamap.com/ to track military action in the war, just as I had used their similar map when tracking the war against the Islamic State. However, after the initial phase of the war, LiveUAMap seemed to update less and less frequently, and it’s been practically useless for tracking progress in the Kherson counteroffensive.

    Today, most video commentators on the war seem to rely on https://deepstatemap.live. Here’s today’s snapshot from Kherson:

    Better than nothing, but not as good as LiveUAMap used to be.

    Here YouTuber Suchomimus compares different maps of the Kherson offensive, and how the differ on territory captured.

    He mentions the War_Mapper Twitter account, which I haven’t been following due to my ongoing Twitter timeout.

    He also mentions the official Russian-sourced map, which I’m not particularly interested in trusting.

    The Institute for the Study of War includes a map with their daily assessment updates, but they’re not interactive or particularly detailed.

    There are also a few YouTubers who do daily map updates. There’s Denys Davydov (“Hello, my friends…”). He’s Ukrainian and upfront about his bias, and covers the various clashes across the entire front (which makes his videos a bit long, and I tend to skip around for the bits I’m interested in). He suffers from “The map is the territory” syndrome, and isn’t a deep tactical thinker or versed in the intricacies of combined arms operations, but he’s useful if you understand his limitations.

    One of the maps he relies on (in addition to DeepState) is the MilitaryLand map, which looks really useful.

    Ukraine News TV relies on the DeepState map, and goes into considerable detail recount the day’s events.

    War in Ukraine isn’t great in terms of voiceover, but seem to have a lot of unit-specific information on his maps.

    For the sake of completeness, I note WeebUnion, who says he’s objective but seems pro-Russian (and his commenters even more so). He’s not a dynamic voiceover talent, and he begins this video with “Hello, comrades,” so…yeah, I don’t follow him.

    This is the map he’s using.

    This is a quick rundown of the map resources I’ve run across. If you know of other useful source, feel free to share them in the comments below.

    LinkSwarm for August 5, 2022

    Friday, August 5th, 2022

    Ron DeSantis drives more enemies before him, the Biden Administration keeps doubling down on tranny madness, Batgirl dies for DC’s sins, and the most “Ewww” inducing headline of the year. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    
    

  • Why America can’t build.

    Construction projects are undertaken within a legal and regulatory system that presents persistent, costly obstacles, while projects are being overseen by agencies who lack the resources and in some cases even the expertise to manage them.

    Sepulveda’s numerous lawsuits and stakeholder conflicts are an example of a phenomenon that can be traced back to the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1969. NEPA mandates developers to provide environmental impact statements before they can obtain the permits necessary for construction on huge swathes of infrastructure.

    Shortly following the passage of NEPA, California’s then-governor Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) into law, which required additional environmental impact analysis. Unlike NEPA, it requires adopting all feasible measures to mitigate these impacts. Interest groups wield CEQA and NEPA like weapons. One study found that 85 percent of CEQA lawsuits were filed by groups with no history of environmental advocacy. The NIMBY attitude of these groups has crippled the ability of California to build anything. As California Governor Gavin Newsom succinctly put it, “NIMBYism is destroying the state.”

    It is also destroying the U.S.’s ability to build nationally. The economist Eli Dourado reported in The New York Times that “per-mile spending on the Interstate System of Highways tripled between the 1960’s and 1980’s.” This directly correlates with the passage of NEPA. If anything, the problem has gotten worse over time. Projects receiving funding through the $837 billion stimulus plan passed by Congress in the aftermath of the financial crises were subject to over 192,000 NEPA reviews.

    The NEPA/CEQA process incentivizes the public agencies to seek what is often termed a “bulletproof” environmental compliance document to head off future legal challenges. This takes time, with the average EIS taking 4.5 years to complete. Some have taken longer than a decade. A cottage industry of consultants is devoted to completing these documents, earning themselves millions in fees.

    The NEPA consultants are just one of the numerous types of consultants that benefit from the way we build. Most infrastructure in the U.S. is built through a huge number of state and local agencies: for example, there are 51,000 community water systems alone in the U.S. This decentralized structure makes it much more difficult to develop the depth of expertise needed to manage the complexities posed by megaprojects. Often, the multiple public agencies that are involved with projects also have overlapping authorities, creating bureaucratic delays and slowing decision making.

    The expertise problem is compounded by the fact that agencies are often staffed with a workforce of people either just at the beginning of their careers or near the end of them. Those at the beginning tend to leave if they are ambitious, which leaves senior positions in the hands of agency lifers. Because of this dynamic, and the fact that it is not economically feasible to have the wide range of expertise needed in-house, public agencies employ engineering consulting firms. These firms fill a valuable niche. If you are building a complex project—say, a long-span bridge or a desalination plant—you want advice from someone who has designed and built dozens of them. The problem arises when you become too dependent on such advice.

    The High-Speed Rail project was undermined by such a failure. At its peak, the agency responsible for the project, the California High-Speed Rail Authority, had fewer than 30 permanent employees managing the $105 billion project. Instead of hiring staff, the Authority relied heavily on outside consultants. These consultants were well paid, with the primary consultant compensation for HSR at $427,000 per engineer, compared with the Authority’s in-house cost of $131,000 per engineer. This structure creates a principal-agent problem where they are incentivized to maximize their billable hours. As a California State Auditor assessment of the project noted, consultants “may not always have the state’s best interest as their primary motivation.”

    This lack of in-house institutional expertise leads to bad decision-making. Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor at Oxford University who has written extensively about megaprojects summarized the problem when asked about California’s HSR project: “If you depend on consultants to know what you are doing then you are in real trouble…a good balance is where the owners are not outsourcing all the knowledge. A bad balance guarantees a bad outcome.”

    The pitfalls of this lack of balance appeared before large parts of the project began. In 2014, Dragados, the contractor for a 63-mile section of the HSR, proposed radical design changes that they projected could save $300 million. The fact that Dragados’s bid was $500 million lower than its competitors and that it rested upon a design concept that had not been thoroughly vetted should have caused alarm. As a senior engineer who worked on the original environmental compliance document for HSR and reviewed the concepts told the Los Angeles Times, “it is mind-boggling they would entertain some of the things that Dragados proposed.”

    Dragados’s approach may have been driven by the fact it didn’t have the experience of its competitors; it had never built a rail project in the U.S. before and needed an edge to be selected. It was a measured risk because it knew there were ways to limit its financial exposure if its design ideas didn’t work. A Los Angeles Times investigation of the project in 2021 found Dragados had issued 273 change orders for additional payment and had completed less than 50 percent of its planned work four years after its section was supposed to be complete. Its design ideas had been almost completely abandoned as unworkable and Dragados’s section of the work was $800 million over budget.

    The principal-agent problem arises with union construction labor as well. Skilled union workers, such as electricians and carpenters, make solid hourly wages, but their pay really explodes with overtime. A 2011 study by the Real Estate Board of New York found that some union crane operators made up to $500,000 a year in pay. Union contracts mandate unnecessary positions as well, to the benefit of its members. The same study found 50 workers in unnecessary positions such as relief crane operators on the World Trade Center Project, including 14 unproductive employees making $400,000 a year at the project.

    Similar statistics can be found on other projects; an investigation into the costs of the East Side Access rail project in New York, which cost nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track, found that only 700 of the 900 workers being paid on the project were needed. A TBM, which is largely run automatically and typically staffed with under 10 people, ostensibly had 25 or 26 people working on it. Because you can’t drill without a TBM, and you can’t build a high-rise without a crane operator, these union workers have inordinate power.

    A common retort to the claim that union labor drives up costs is that other countries, especially in Europe, have both high union participation and lower project costs. But it is widely recognized in the industry that unions increase project labor costs by 20 to 25 percent on average in the U.S.

    The fundamental problem isn’t unions per se, but rather the way that unions operate within parts of the U.S. system. The Netherlands has strong unions, but the Port of Rotterdam has been automated to an extent that has proven impossible in the U.S. due to union resistance. As the president of the International Longshoremen’s Association, Harold Dagget, recently put it, his union will “fight tooth and nail” against further automation in the U.S. Any attempt at real construction innovation runs into similar barriers at every level of the system. There are too many layers of permission needed to innovate, including groups whose interests run counter to innovation.

    Innovation in physical work ultimately means substituting or complementing labor through technology to improve productivity. If your pay depends on overtime, you want inefficiency. The average dockworker at the Port of Los Angeles makes over $100,000 a year, largely due to overtime. The majority of foremen and managers earn more than $200,000, and the mariners who guide ships in and out of the port average nearly $450,000.

    The result is that innovation is inhibited by both labor resistance and a decentralized government bureaucracy that has neither the incentives nor the capability of driving real change. Perhaps it should not be shocking that U.S. construction productivity has fallen by half since the 1960s according to research conducted by the consulting firm McKinsey.

    Rent-seeking Uber Alles.

  • Soros slammed for America’s crime wave. Including this handy chart:

    In San Francisco, Soros-funded DA Chesa Boudin has seen a flood of departures from his office due to his criminal justice reform policies.

    Boudin campaigned on a platform to end mass incarceration, eliminate cash bail, and vowed to create a panel to review sentencing and potential wrongful convictions. Following his election in November 2019, Boudin announced he would deemphasize the prosecution of drug cases, so-called quality-of-life cases, and property offenses.

    Under his watch, vehicle break-ins increased 100-750% in parts of the city between 2020 and 2021, with the number of reported vehicle thefts reaching 1,891 in May 2021—more than double the 923 reported in May 2020.

    San Francisco also recorded one of the largest increases in burglaries among major cities last year, with a jump of 47 percent—a trend that has continued this year. Fatal and nonfatal shootings in the first six months of this year were up more than 100 percent from the year-earlier period, increasing to 119 from 58, the city’s police chief said at a July press conference.

    More than 700 people died of drug overdoses in 2021 in the city, a record that is likely to be surpassed this year, according to the chief medical examiner.

    Rudy Giuliani – the former Mayor of New York City whose claim to fame was a massive reduction in crime (and who’s traded barbs with Soros in the past), isn’t letting the billionaire off the hook.

    “If there is one single person responsible for the record increases in murder and violence in America’s cities it’s George Soros,” Giuliani said in a Monday tweet.

    “Major contributor to BLM, Antifa, Democrat Party, Biden, Harris and 40 or so pro Criminal DAs. The blood is on his hands,” he added.

  • Speaking of Soros, a resigning Chicago prosecutor slammed Soros-backed Illinois Attorney General Kim Foxx on his way out the door.

    Assistant State’s Attorney James Murphy described an understaffed office in turmoil in his email to colleagues, saying, “I cannot continue to work for an Administration I no longer respect.”

    “I would love to continue to fight for the victims of crime and to continue to stand with each of you, especially in the face of the overwhelming crime that is crippling our communities,” Murphy wrote. “However, I can no longer work for this Administration. I have zero confidence in their leadership.”

    Murphy, who could not be reached directly for comment, zeroed in on many of the issues that have made Foxx a target of opponents who argue she’s gone easy on some accused of violent crimes, as carjackings and gun violence have risen in the Chicago area.

    Murphy wrote that he first started thinking about leaving the office early in 2021 with Foxx’s involvement in the passage of the SAFE-T Act, a wide-ranging law that aims to reform the state’s approach to criminal justice, including by narrowing the definition of who can be charged with first-degree murder.

  • Florida Governor Ron DeSantis shows he plays for keeps by sending state police to physically remove a guy from his office for refusing to follow the law.

    DeSantis has suspended State Attorney Andrew Warren for ‘picking and choosing which laws to enforce based on his personal agenda,’ and has appointed Susan Lopez as his replacement during the suspension.

    Warren, who had served the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit, has most recently refused to follow state policy criminalizing abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade – and repeatedly refused to enforce laws cracking down on child sex-change surgeries, according to DeSantis.

    The liberal state attorney also declined to prosecute 67 protesters arrested in George Floyd demonstrations, and said in 2017 that he would only pursue the death penalty “in the very worst cases,” and not where “mental illness played a role.”

    “We are suspending Soros-backed 13th circuit state attorney Andrew Warren for neglecting his duties as he pledges not to uphold the laws of the state,” DeSantis’ office said in a statement, per Fox News.

    Update: DeSantis sent state police to physically remove Warren from his office, “with access only to retrieve his personal belongings, and (ii) to ensure that no files, papers, documents, notes, records, computers, or removable storage media are removed from the Office of the State Attorney…”

  • But that’s not the end of DeSantiss bad-assery this week. He also got PayPal to unfreeze Moms For Liberty’s account.

    PayPal has reportedly unfrozen Moms for Liberty’s account funds after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his state would crack down on woke banking.

    Payment platform PayPal allowed grassroots, anti-woke education group Moms for Liberty to access its funds after DeSantis’s new initiative against woke banking, Florida’s Voice reported. Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich reportedly told Florida’s Voice that her organization had been using PayPal for more than a year before the platform censored the group.

    Descovich reportedly said that many Moms for Liberty donors give monthly and automatically through PayPal. The payment processor not only stopped these donor payments but froze $4,500 belonging to Moms for Liberty, and prohibited any transfer of the money out of the account, according to Florida’s Voice. PayPal subsequently reversed its block by unfreezing the funds.

    PayPal notified Descovich that Moms for Liberty’s accounts were initially frozen during DeSantis’s July 15 speech at the Moms for Liberty National Summit, according to Florida’s Voice. The funds were unfrozen after DeSantis announced his initiative against woke banking.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Biden’s Department of Agriculture is trying to destroy corn farming in America.

    The world is facing serious food and energy shortages as an outgrowth of the war in Ukraine and supply-chain shortages. Farmers are working to solve these problems, but we need help from the federal government if we are going to have any chance of success.

    That’s why national corn grower leaders recently called on the Biden administration to address regulatory overreach.

    That call comes after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently revised its atrazine registration, a move that could restrict access to a critical crop protection tool that has been well tested and shown to be safe for use. Farmers fear that new requirements will impose arduous new restrictions and mitigation measures on the herbicide, limiting how much of the product they use.

    The atrazine decision comes on the heels of a development involving the herbicide glyphosate. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a case decided by a lower court from California, leaving in place a ruling that supports the claim that glyphosate use causes cancer – even as the EPA has repeatedly affirmed that the widely sold and well-studied herbicide is not carcinogenic.

    The Supreme Court’s decision came after the solicitor general in the Biden administration submitted an amicus brief advising the court against hearing the case.

    As a result, the door is now open for states to create a patchwork of regulations governing herbicide use, which will increase costs as manufacturers must now jump through hoops in every state, on top of making compliance difficult for the users of these products.

    Farmers in Iowa and across the country have also experienced major fertilizer price hikes and shortages over the last year, thanks in part to steps taken by the U.S. International Trade Commission to impose tariffs on fertilizers. Thankfully, ITC recently voted against adding tariffs on nitrogen fertilizers. But tariffs on phosphorous fertilizers from Morocco remain in place, driving up input prices for growers.

  • Speaking of foolish regulations that can contribute to famine, new “debarbonization” shipping rules could do just that.

    A new report found that more than 75% of ships will not meet the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) new Environmental social and corporate governance (ESG) index aimed at decarbonizing the industry. This means that many ship owners will be forced to slow ships down to reduce emissions but doing so could deepen the global food and energy crisis by reducing available ship capacity.

    “IMO decarbonization targets will cause ships to slow down delaying food shipments and people will starve,” a global security analyst told gCaptain. “How many people will die as a result of the IMO’s ESG efforts is unknown at this time. I don’t think most shipowners even understand the severity of the EEXI threat but it could be millions of lives.”

    “Ships have to attain EEXI approval once in a lifetime, by the first periodical survey in 2023 at the latest.” The certification is currently voluntary, but banks and insurers may force ships to comply or be cut off. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • Hanky panky in government jobs numbers?
  • Things the media doesn’t want to talk about: The leftwing whack-job who tried to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh thinks he’s a woman. Which I guess makes him a slightly different type of leftwing whack-job.
  • Russo-Ukrainian War update: “Ukraine takes out Russian ammunition railway connecting Kherson to Crimea.” I keep seeing rumors of a big Ukranian counteroffensive to retake Kherson, but it seems like it’s slow to make much headway.
  • “Chuck Schumer’s son-in-law lands lucrative gig at private equity giant Blackstone.” Of course he has.
  • The Biden Administration wants to force religious hospitals to embrace tranny madness.

    In 2016, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services issued a rule that would have forced doctors across the country to assist in transitioning patients out of their biological sex, regardless of a provider’s medical opinion or conscience objections.

    “A provider specializing in gynecological services that previously declined to provide a medically necessary hysterectomy for a transgender man,” for example, “would have to revise its policy to provide the procedure for transgender individuals in the same manner it provides the procedure for other individuals.”

    The rule left no room for religious physicians or institutions to breathe, instead menacing them with draconian fines, were they not to toe the controversial new line.

    In stepped the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which swiftly secured a preliminary injunction in federal court that stopped the rule from going into effect, on the grounds that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act, and likely violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It was a decision later confirmed in 2019, and made permanent by a 2021 ruling.

    On August 4, however, Becket attorney Luke Goodrich, who has been working on the case since the Obama-era rule was first issued, will march back into the courtroom, having been dragged back in by the Biden administration and Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra.

    “They say that our lawsuit was only about the 2016 rule. . . . They say, ‘well, all you were challenging was the 2016 rule, and you won that, but now we’re using a different rule or a different rationale for imposing the same requirement on you, and so you have to file a new lawsuit,’” explained Goodrich.

    Under the Biden administration’s theory, the Affordable Care Act provides the administration with “all the authority” it needs “to punish groups that don’t perform gender transitions and abortions,” Goodrich told National Review. The 2016 rule also included language that Becket alleges would force religious institutions to perform abortions.

    Remember how Republicans said ObamaCare would endanger religious liberty and the MSM dismissed their concerns? Just like “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”

    According to Goodrich, “the merits are completely resolved and haven’t been appealed; the fight on appeal is about the scope of relief.” He described an effort to work around a losing legal argument by burdening religious objectors and opening up new fronts of battle.

    “They want religious organizations to have to play Whac-A-Mole every time the government violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and they want a ruling that will leave them free to keep violating religious liberty every time they shuffle the same legal requirement from one volume of the Federal Register to another,” he said.

    That strategy is observable in the proposal of yet another, even broader rule — modeled after the 2016 one — issued by Becerra, who has made his political brand on waging one ruthless culture war after another.

    As attorney general of California, Becerra sought to punish independent journalists who exposed Planned Parenthood’s sale of fetal remains harvested during abortions. The Los Angeles Times editorial board described his decision to charge those involved with felonies “disturbing,” and the progressive Mother Jones called it “chilling.”

    He also happily enforced a plainly unconstitutional California statute requiring pro-life crisis pregnancy centers to provide pro-abortion materials to patrons, and, as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, voted against legislation that would allow providers not to perform abortions without fear of government reprisal.

  • Has Tranny Madness peaked in the UK? There, the Rugby Football Union and Rugby Football League just banned men from playing women’s rugby. In other news, there’s evidently women’s rugby.
  • More signs of sanity in the UK: “UK Police Chief Says Investigating Offensive Speech Is ‘Waste Of Time.'”
  • “What’s the worst performing stock in the Dow Jones Industrial Average so far this year? Disney.”

    The Mickey Mouse company, headquartered in Burbank, has lost about 35% of its value this year versus a nearly 15% loss for the broader index. As a result, tens of millions of Americans who hold Disney stock either directly or indirectly as part of passive index funds have seen their finances take a hit at the worst possible time as inflation spirals out of control.

    Disney’s poor financial performance is a product of its own making. In recent months, the company has aggressively waded into controversial cultural issues such as gender identity, making it clear it is putting politics over its shareholders and customers. Disney is a prime example of the threat posed to shareholders and the broader economy of “woke” capitalism. Its story should serve as a cautionary tale for other companies looking to follow in its footsteps.

    Disney has all but admitted it’s leveraging its prized position as a top children’s content creator to push a divisive cultural agenda. In March, Disney’s president of content told employees the company plans to have at least 50% of its regular characters come from “underrepresented groups.” Another top producer boasted about Disney’s “not-at-all-secret gay agenda,” including “adding queerness” to children’s programming. Yet another senior executive promised that Disney would implement a “tracker” to ensure programs contain enough “canonical trans characters.”

    We’re getting a look at what this woke agenda looks like in practice. An upcoming episode of Disney’s new children’s show “Baymax!” features a transgender man buying menstrual pads. “I always get the ones with wings,” says the “man” wearing a shirt with the transgender flag. Disney is also abolishing the words “boys” and “girls” at its theme parks.

  • “BLM Activist Shaun King Used Donor Funds To Buy $40k Thoroughbred Show Dog.” That’s infuriating. Not that premagrifter Talcum X siphoned BLM money into his own pockets. That part’s hilarious and predictable. No, that he spent forty grand on a dog when they are so many shelter dogs who need a home.
  • Heads up! It’s a tax-free back-to-school weekend in Texas on clothes and schools supplies under $100.
  • “GEICO closes all California offices, lays off workers.” California regulation just keeps paying dividends…
  • Crazy story: U.S. Bank caught opening fake accounts and credit cards with customer money. Fine are not enough. People need go to jail for this.
  • Amazon flashlight lumen ratings are bunk.
  • A pretty good list of the 95 Best Action Movies Ever. Has all the stuff you would expect to be on there (Die Hard, Hard-Boiled, The French Connection, etc.), plus a good bit of Jackie Chan, Sorcerer, Safety Last, Hot Fuzz, and even Andy Sedaris’ hilarious low-budget breastsplotation “classic” Hard Ticket To Hawaii.
  • Test screens for Batgirl were so bad that DC simply isn’t going to release the film. “They think an unspeakable ‘Batgirl’ is going to be irredeemable.”
  • And, oh yeah, the Critical Drinker is there. “Warner Brothers may be the first domino to fall, but something tells me they won’t be the last. And when other companies realize that you can safely drop THE MESSAGE and the people peddling it…well, the next year or two could turn out to be very interesting.”
  • Charming or terrifying? You make the call.
  • We have a winner for for Most “Eww” Inducing Headline: “Morgue Assistant Uses Testicles From Corpses To Help Win Annual Spaghetti Cook-Off.”
  • “Government That Shut Down Businesses, Parks, Schools, Beaches, And Churches For 2 Years Says There’s Nothing We Can Do To Stop A Disease Spread By Gay Sex.”