Greetings, and welcome to Friday the 13th LinkSwarm! Inflation keeps soaring, diesel and baby formula shortages wrack the nation, and too many creepy transexual pedophiles pop up in the news.
The East Coast of the U.S. is reporting its lowest seasonal diesel inventory on record. And some trucking companies appear spooked.
The East Coast typically stores around 62 million barrels of diesel during the month of May, according to Department of Energy data. But as of last Friday, that region of the U.S. is reporting under 52 million barrels.
The sharp increase of diesel prices has been a major stressor in America’s $800 billion trucking industry since the beginning of 2022. According to DOE figures, the price per gallon of diesel has reached record highs — a whopping $5.62 per gallon. It’s even higher on the East Coast at $5.90, up 63% from the beginning of this year.
When relief is coming isn’t yet clear, and experts say higher prices are the only way to attract more diesel into the Northeast.
There is a clear dividing line between American households with newborns and those without, and you can see it in which people have been talking about, and worrying about, a nationwide infant formula shortage for months and which people just heard about the problem recently. Target, Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens are all limiting how much infant and toddler formula customers can purchase per visit. So how did the U.S. — the wealthiest, most advanced, and most prosperous nation on the planet — end up in a situation where so many parents are worrying about feeding their youngest children?
Most reporting on the infant-formula shortage points the finger at Abbott Laboratories, which instituted a February recall of powder formulas, including Similac, Alimentum, and EleCare, manufactured in its Sturgis, Mich., facility. The recall — which the company emphasizes was voluntary — came after four consumer complaints of Cronobacter sakazakii (a.k.a. Salmonella Newport) in infants who had consumed powdered formula manufactured in the Sturgis plant. Cronobacter germs can cause sepsis, a dangerous blood infection, or meningitis, which swells the protective linings surrounding the brain and spinal cord. Those infected with Salmonella bacteria develop diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps twelve to 72 hours after infection, and infants are more severely affected than adults.
Abbott Laboratories emphasized that no product it distributed to consumers has tested positive for the presence of either of these bacteria, but that during testing in the Sturgis facility, the company found evidence of Cronobacter sakazakii in areas of the plant where products would not come in contact with it. As a precaution, it recalled all formula manufactured in this facility with an expiration of April 1, 2022, or later. No Abbott liquid formulas are included in the recall, nor are powder formulas or nutrition products manufactured at other Abbott facilities.
Here, it’s worth noting that the supply chain for infant formula was strained well before Abbott’s recall. According to the data-research firm Datasembly, the percentage of stores nationwide at which formula was out of stock surpassed double digits way back in July 2021, and by January 2022, it had hit 23 percent.
According to Datasembly, infant formula is now out-of-stock in 40 percent of stores nationwide. Moreover, in Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Missouri, Texas, and Tennessee, more than half of baby formula was completely sold out during the week starting April 24. In another 26 states, between 40 and 50 percent of infant-formula supplies were sold out.
Unspeakable depravity: “Trans porn company owners sentenced for forcing 7-year-old girl into sexual exploitation…One of these members, Marina Volz, a biological male who identifies as a woman, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for forcing ‘her’ 7-year-old daughter to participate in sexual acts.”
Speaking of Democrats supporting child rapists: “Woke L.A. DA George Gascon’s Pet Transgender Child Rapist Is Now Facing a Murder Charge….child rapist, “Hannah” Tubbs, who gamed the system and magically became a ‘woman’ so he could serve his sentence in a female juvenile prison and do easier time with a chance of getting out early.”
Still more elite institutions parading their transexual pro-pedophilia positions: “Child sex abuse center hires professor who faced backlash over pedophile comments…[Allyn Walker], an academic who resigned from a Virginia university after saying it wasn’t necessarily immoral for adults to be sexually attracted to kids has been hired by a Johns Hopkins University center aimed at preventing child sexual abuse.”
The NBA: Pulls All-Star Game out of Charlotte because it thinks a North Carolina bathroom bill discriminated against transsexuals. Also the NBA: To stage a game in the United Arab Emirates, where homosexuality is punishable by death.
“EV Automaker Hailed As The ‘Next Tesla’ Is Hemorrhaging Cash And Investors…Start-up electric vehicle (EV) maker Rivian Automotive’s stock [fell] 18.72% to $23.40 per share on Monday, a whopping 87% decline from its November peak of $179.47 a share.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Writer who checks all the proper boxes sells a first novel that turns out to be plagiarized. So she publishes an apology. Which turns out to also be plagiarized. The frogurt is also cursed. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
They’re making a sequel to This Is Spinal Tap, perhaps the funniest movie ever made, featuring the original principles. My enthusiasm is tempered by the fact that chances are extremely high it will suck.
Inflation is soaring, Democrats are lying, and more MSM pedophiles are exposed. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Slow Joe Biden is hoping voters will ignore all that inflation on his watch. Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.
Apparently, the Biden administration’s approach is to just insist that the economy is doing great and hope people believe it, despite their mounting frustration every time they buy groceries, out to eat, or fill up their tank. On the day President Biden took office, retail prices for gasoline averaged $2.38 per gallon. This morning, they are $4.19 — not all that different from the $4.20 they were a month ago….
By and large, Democrats just don’t want to discuss or acknowledge inflation — at least not in their campaign ads:
And as of Friday, [Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Tim] Ryan was one of seven Democratic candidates who have run ads this year that mentioned inflation, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. By contrast, dozens of Republican candidates and allied groups have done the same. In polls, Americans have cited inflation as a top issue.
“Burying your head in the sand,” Mr. Ryan said, “is not the way to approach it.” Asked about the biggest challenges facing his party, he replied, “A response to the inflation piece is a big hurdle.”
To Democrats, inflation is like Bruno: We just don’t talk about it.
Snip.
With poll after poll showing that inflation is foremost in voters’ minds, you would think that the president would be holding regular events focused on the problem and showcasing what his administration is doing to solve it.
“I get video almost every day now from people who we featured on ‘Dirty Jobs” and ‘How America Works.’
“They’re just sending me videos of them at the gas pump and some of them are filling up 18-wheelers. And, I’m not kidding you, $1,100, $1,200.
“Most people, all we can think about is the price for us at a relative terms know it’s awful.
“When you put $1,200 in your gas tank and just six months ago it was costing you $600 or 700, the exponential reality of it is starting to sink in. You just can’t walk that back. It touches every single thing that matters in this country. From food production to transportation … all of it,” Rowe explained.
Hmmmm:
Meet Elizabeth Deutsch. She's currently a law clerk for Justice Breyer.
And, in my humble opinion, she's the most likely person to have leaked the draft Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs, purporting to overturn Roe v. Wade.
A secretive group backed by millions of dollars from liberal billionaire George Soros is working behind the scenes with President Biden’s administration to shape policy, documents reviewed by Fox News show.
Governing for Impact (GFI), the veiled group, boasts in internal memos of implementing more than 20 of its regulatory agenda items as it works to reverse Trump-era deregulations by zeroing in on education, environmental, health care, housing and labor issues.
“Open Society is proud to support Governing for Impact’s efforts to protect American workers, consumers, patients, students and the environment through policy reform,” Tom Perriello, executive director of Soros’ Open Society Foundations, told Fox News Digital.
Snip.
GFI, however, works to remain secretive. It is invisible to internet search engines like Google (an unrelated “Govern for Impact” is the only group that appears in a search). No news reports or press releases appear on its existence outside of a mention of its related action fund in a previous Fox News article on the $1.6 billion Arabella Advisors-managed dark money network, to which it is attached.
But as the group attempted to conceal its operations, it sought talent on Harvard Law School’s website, which was discoverable. The posting, which no longer appears on the site, was for legal policy internships.
Snip.
According to its website, Rachael Klarman, a Harvard Law School grad, steers the group. Her father, Michael Klarman, is a professor at Harvard Law and also has ties to progressive advocacy groups. He is an advisory board member of the left-wing dark money judicial group Take Back the Court. Last year, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, invited him to testify before Congress on dark money’s “assault” on the judiciary system.
“Governing for Impact is the perfect example of the Left’s fake outrage over ‘dark money’ in politics,” said the Capital Research Center’s Parker Thayer, who discovered the group and alerted Fox News.
“As a ‘fiscally sponsored’ dark money project that writes and pushes regulations from the shadows, hidden from the public and funded by one billionaire foundation, GFI embodies everything the Left pretends to abhor.”
The most egregious and blatant official U.S. disinformation campaign in years took place three weeks before the 2020 presidential election. That was when dozens of former intelligence officials purported, in an open letter, to believe that authentic emails regarding Joe Biden’s activities in China and Ukraine, reported by The New York Post, were “Russian disinformation.” That quasi-official proclamation enabled liberal corporate media outlets to uncritically mock and then ignore those emails as Kremlin-created fakes, and it pressured Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to censor the reporting at exactly the time Americans were preparing to decide who would be the next U.S. president.
The letter from these former intelligence officials was orchestrated by trained career liars — disinformation agents — such as former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Yet that letter was nonetheless crucial to discredit and ultimately suppress the New York Post’s incriminating reporting on Biden. It provided a quasi-official imprimatur — something that could be depicted as an authoritative decree — that these authentic emails were, in fact, fraudulent.
After all, if all of these noble and heroic intelligence operatives who spent their lives studying Russian disinformation were insisting that the Biden emails had all of the “hallmarks” of Kremlin treachery, who possessed the credibility to dispute their expert assessment?
Snip.
This same strategic motive — to vest accusations of “disinformation” with the veneer of expertise — is what has fostered a new, very well-financed industry heralding itself as composed of “anti-disinformation” scholars. Knowing that Americans are inculcated from childhood to believe that censorship is nefarious — that it is the hallmark of tyranny — those who wish to censor need to find some ennobling rationale to justify it and disguise what it is.
They have thus created a litany of neutral-sounding groups with benign names — The Atlantic Council, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, various “fact-checking” outfits controlled by corporate media outlets — that claim to employ “anti-disinformation experts” to identify and combat fake news. Just as media corporations re-branded their partisan pundits as “fact-checkers” — to masquerade their opinions as elevated, apolitical authoritative, decrees of expertise — the term “disinformation expert” is designed to disguise ideological views on behalf of state and corporate power centers as Official Truth.
Yet when one subjects these groups to even minimal investigative scrutiny, one finds that they are anything but apolitical and neutral. They are often funded by the same small handful of liberal billionaires (such as George Soros and Pierre Omidyar), actual security state agencies of the U.S., the UK or the EU, and/or Big Tech monopolies such as Google and Facebook.
Indeed, the concept of “anti-disinformation expert” is itself completely fraudulent. This is not a real expertise but rather a concocted title bestowed on propagandists to make them appear more scholarly and apolitical than they are. But the function of this well-funded industry is the same as the one served by the pre-election letter from “dozens of former intelligence officials”: to discredit dissent and justify its censorship by infusing its condemnation with the pretense of institutional authority. The targeted views are not merely wrong; they have been adjudged by official, credentialed experts to constitute “disinformation.”
This scam is the critical context for understanding why the Biden Administration casually announced last week the creation of what it is calling a “Disinformation Board” inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). There is no conceivable circumstance in which a domestic law enforcement agency like DHS should be claiming the power to decree truth and falsity. Operatives in the U.S. Security State are not devoted to combatting disinformation. The opposite is true: they are trained, career liars tasked with concocting and spreading disinformation.
Business leaders are waking up to the destructive “woke” policies being foisted on businesses by boardrooms more concerned with virtue signaling than their primary responsibility of ensuring corporate profitability and enhancing shareholder values.
In short, the “woke” buck stops here, more corporate executives are saying. Mixing the politics of culture wars with business is a losing strategy.
Former McDonald’s CEO Ed Rensi is leading the charge. He ran McDonalds from 1991-1997, bringing the chain’s McNugget to market and also served on the boards of Famous Dave’s Bar-B-Que, Great Wolf Resorts and Snap-on Inc. These days, he’s launching The Boardroom Initiative, comprised of three conservative advocacy groups — The Job Creators Network, which was founded by Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, The Free Enterprise Group and Second Vote. The goal: get business back to business and out of politics.
“Corporations have no business being on the right or the left because they represent everybody there and their sole job is to build equity for their investors,” Rensi told FOX Business.
Rensi knows how to grow a business. While leading McDonalds, he saw U.S. sales double to more than $16 billion, the number of U.S. restaurants grow from nearly 6,600 to more than 12,000 and the number of U.S. franchisees grow from 1,600 to more than 2,700.
“It is not the province of board members or executives to take shareholder money profit and spend it on social matters,” Rensi explained. “Corporations should not get involved in social engineering.”
Trump goes 55-0. Everyone he endorsed won their primary or made the runoff. All those are from Indiana, Ohio, and Texas. I didn’t realize that so few states have had their primaries already. Hopefully that record will be shattered and Dr. Oz (a bad pick by Trump) will lose when Pennsylvania votes May 17th.
Trying to make your children into the Youth Stasi: “DC elementary school gives 4-year-olds books to report racist family members.”
The only surprise here is that he didn’t work for CNN. “MSNBC Anchor Busted ‘Driving 3 Hours’ To Meet Little Boy For Sex.” “A New York group specializing in exposing child-sex predators seemed to all but confirm this after they posted a video online Friday busting a potential pedophile who appeared to be NBC anchor Zach Wheeler. Wheeler had driven an approximate total of 3 hours in order to meet up with a 15-year-old boy for sex, the group claims.”
Speaking of school districts wasting money and lying to you:
You're not alone if you feel like your school district is lying to you while smearing your reputation. It happened to me. The answer is not to retreat, but to get louder and expose their lies and hypocrisy.
Stagflation is back, scammers continue to loot taxpayer money from the federal government, Team Global Warming continues it’s perfect losing streak, and dispatches from a deadly accordion war. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The U.S. economy shrunk by 1.4% in Q1. “Unexpectedly!” So now we’ve got stagnation to go with that soaring inflation, a key ingredient in the Biden Administration’s Welcome Back Carter cosplay. One more quarter of decline and the recession is officially at hand…
In June, the FBI got a warrant to hunt through the Google accounts of Abedemi Rufai, a Nigerian state government official.
Hello, I am Prince Abedemi Rufai. You are probably surprised by this email…
What they found, they said in a sworn affidavit, was all the ingredients for a “massive” cyberfraud on U.S. government benefits: stolen bank, credit card and tax information of Americans. Money transfers. And emails showing dozens of false unemployment claims in seven states that paid out $350,000.
Rufai was arrested in May at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York as he prepared to fly first class back to Nigeria, according to court records. He is being held without bail in Washington state, where he has pleaded not guilty to five counts of wire fraud.
Rufai’s case offers a small window into what law enforcement officials and private experts say is the biggest fraud ever perpetrated against the U.S., a significant part of it carried out by foreigners.
Russian mobsters, Chinese hackers and Nigerian scammers have used stolen identities to plunder tens of billions of dollars in Covid benefits, spiriting the money overseas in a massive transfer of wealth from U.S. taxpayers, officials and experts say. And they say it is still happening.
Among the ripest targets for the cybertheft have been jobless programs. The federal government cannot say for sure how much of the more than $900 billion in pandemic-related unemployment relief has been stolen, but credible estimates range from $87 billion to $400 billion — at least half of which went to foreign criminals, law enforcement officials say.
Those staggering sums dwarf, even on the low end, what the federal government spends every year on intelligence collection, food stamps or K-12 education.
Keep in mind, this is just one government program.
Many who participated in what prosecutors are calling the largest fraud in U.S. history — the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money intended to help those harmed by the coronavirus pandemic — couldn’t resist purchasing luxury automobiles. Also mansions, private jet flights and swanky vacations.
Biden Administration creates unconstitutional Ministry of Truth to fight “disinformation,” i.e. truth and opinion that hurts Democrats. This is the lunatic running it:
For 20 Years, This Prosecutor Had a Secret Job Working For the Judges Who’d Decide His Cases.”
One of Ralph Petty’s victims is trying to hold him accountable, but she will have to overcome prosecutorial immunity.
Ralph Petty worked as an assistant district attorney in Midland County, Texas, for 20 years. Like any prosecutor, he fervidly advocated for the government. But he wasn’t just any advocate, because he wasn’t just a prosecutor. Each night, Petty took off his proverbial DA hat and re-entered the courthouse as a law clerk for the same judges he was trying to convince to side with him by day.
“A married English teacher at Langham Creek High School was arrested after allegedly sleeping with a 15-year-old student.” Spoiler for those thinking of clicking through for the pic: She’s no prize.
Stop me if you’ve heard this story before: Bold new architecture project becomes ugly and nonfunctional.
In Kurokawa’s original plan, the Nakagin capsules were meant to be replaced every twenty-five years with updated iterations. That didn’t happen, in part because of the funding that would have required. Each capsule would have cost, according to some estimates, almost nine million yen, or about seventy thousand dollars, to repair. A single capsule couldn’t be removed without removing all those above it, so all units would have to be vacated and updated at once. Over time, the building fell into disrepair. Concerns about asbestos made the towers’ ventilation system unusable, and residents complained about mold and incessant leaks during rainstorms. The owners’ association first voted to sell the building to a developer, in 2007, but the firm soon filed for bankruptcy, throwing the building’s fate into uncertainty. Kurokawa, who had pushed for renovations, died that same year. By 2010, the towers’ hot water had been shut off. The building had become more a work of art than the dynamic architecture that Kurokawa envisioned.
“New York Democrats Aim To Tax Ammo To Fund Anti-Gun Research….New York Senate Bill S8415, which would add an arbitrary 5-cent tax per round of ammunition larger than .22 Caliber. Rounds smaller than .22 Caliber would be subject to a 2-cent tax per round. According to the bill, the tax revenue would go to the state’s Gun Violence Research Fund.” That would be unconstitutional with a capital “un.”
Lake Mead hit by megadrought. “After nearly half a century, the first intake is out of service and can no longer draw water. Water levels at the lake hit record lows this week, falling to 1,056 feet. Luckily, SNWA has two other intakes at much lower levels that are still operational.”
There more you start poking around online, the more you turn up reasons why China is screwed.
The first installment in this series was popular. Well, there’s a lot more reasons why China is screwed.
It’s screwed all the way down.
First up: Demographics:
Takeaways:
Remember all that talk of an “Asian Century?” Yeah, not so much.
“China will soon run out of people.”
China’s population pyramid is about to shift from a huge bulge of people in their prime earning years to one where that bulge is disproportionately elderly.
“Everything that made China what it is today has relied on a large, young, and productive workforce. Now, that workforce is about to succumb to biology just as every other generation has in every other country, ever.” Their demographic dividend is running out.
“China’s working-age cohort grew from 58% of the country in 1978 to 74% in 2010. But in less than twenty years, the UN predicts that number will be roughly back where it was in ‘78. By then, China will have twice as many seniors as children under 15.”
“Per capita wealth remains low, on the level of Mexico, the Maldives, and Kazakhstan. That means this mass of retirees won’t just contribute less to the economy, but will also require immense financial support — the kind China’s fractured pension and healthcare system isn’t remotely prepared for.”
“Unfortunately for China, the One-Child Policy has set the cultural expectation firmly at one.”
Replacement fertility: 2.1 children per woman. China’s official fertility rate: 1.6. “Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison [estimates] the true number at 1.18.”
“China’s preference for male babies means that between 2020 and 2060, there will be roughly 3 single men for every 2 single women.”
“China’s 2020 Census, [tallied] 14.65 million births the previous year — the lowest level since 1961.”
Japan, which is also aging, provides a best case scenario. “With a median age of 48.6, Japan is the 2nd oldest place on earth. Today, its share of the world’s manufacturing exports has fallen from 12.5% to just 5.2. Japan did not fade into global irrelevance. It’s still a great power. But it never fulfilled what once seemed certain: its rise to rival the U.S. as a superpower. And it never will.”
That’s part 1. Part 2 focuses on China’s out of control property market:
It starts off talking about the ghost cities, especially Ordos.
“Ordos does have an interesting story to tell. Just, not the one you might expect. The missing context, at the time, was far stranger than what the unimaginative pessimists concocted: Nearly all of these half-finished homes have owners — the vast majority of which have no intention of ever moving in.”
“All over China are millions of empty, some unfinished, but almost universally sold homes — not just in far-flung corners but also in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. Over one-fifth of all urban homes — 65 million in all — sit vacant.”
China relied on “a surplus of cheap labor, which means, by definition, wages are low. You can only compete with the entire rest of the world for so long — and neither do you want to. Low-value manufacturing has long since moved South, to places like Vietnam, Laos, and Bangladesh.”
All the long-hanging fruits of infrastructure spending have already been built.
“Individually, Chinese consumers really don’t spend very much — just 32% of GDP — less than half that of the US, and far below countries like Japan and Germany. Worse, this number has actually been decreasing over time.”
“Chinese consumers are spending, but only on one thing, something not considered ‘consumption’: houses!”
China’s home ownership rate “is among the highest in the world — 90% — to much of the developed world’s mid-60s. It gets much weirder, still. If you can believe it, the majority of recent purchases have been 2nd and 3rd homes. In 2018, for instance, 87% of new home buyers already owned at least one.”
“Because the government tightly controls how much cash is allowed to leave the country, Chinese people simply don’t have a lot of options, and of them, housing is seen as the only sure thing.”
Also, given the sex imbalance mentioned above, for men, home ownership = marriage.
“For all of these reasons, prices have risen to extreme levels. In Shenzhen, Beijing, and Shanghai, it takes 40 years of the average income to afford a home.”
Most are bought before construction even begins.
And here’s where the demographics above provide a double whammy. “The majority of homebuyers, meanwhile, are aged between 20-50 — precisely the segment China will soon lose.”
One huge reason for the bubble: Local governments using their control of land to balance their budgets:
They created what are basically state-owned shell companies called “Local Government Financing Vehicles”. They gave these LGFVs free valuable land, which they then used to take out loans that local governments themselves couldn’t. The trick is that because their debt is hidden, local governments appear far healthier than they really are, while at the same time, meeting the quotas set by Beijing. Following the 2008 crisis, LGFVs transformed from a little quirk of its financial system to the backbone of local economies. If these ‘financing vehicles’ default on their loans, or if housing prices fall too steeply, local governments now have just as much to lose as homeowners. If a local government stops taking out loans, it instantly loses over a third of its revenue, causing a different kind of doomsday. So while the central government may direct local officials to control their debt, the best they can really do is feign cooperation.
Flu Manchu only temporarily halted home price rises, and they’re still soaring.
“Solutions are far too costly to assume their implementation.”
There are a lot more videos of China suckage, but I’ll have to split this up and get to those another time.
I had no intention of posting another Peter Zeihan video so quickly after Is China Screwed?, but it’s also been a good long while since I did a Texas vs. California update, so let’s tuck in to this video:
Takeaways:
Texas doesn’t attract foreign investment.
Instead, Texas lures development and projects from other states with target tax breaks. “You can stay in Illinois and pay 20% tax or come to Texas, where we’ll give you a 20 year deferment and you’ll pay no tax.” (This is a bit overstated; some companies get those sweeteners, but for most Texas locales simply offer sounder fundamentals.)
“Everything is inexpensive. It’s where the food comes from, it’s where the energy comes from. The land is cheap. Mexico is right next door. It’s got the major port in Houston. It’s a financial center, it’s an energy center, it’s a manufacturing center, it’s a processing era. It’s all of those things.”
As global trade becomes more difficult, Texas moves up the value-added chain with more processed and refined goods. Lots of incentive for all sorts of manufacturers to relocate to Texas to take advantage of these intermediate products.
“Say what you will about the Donald Trump Administration, the renegotiation of NAFTA was a brilliant call, it was probably overdue by 15 years.” More North American content, especially from Texas and Mexico.
“Texas trades nearly as much with Mexico as the rest of the country combined.” Huge for automotive, but also electronics and aerospace.
Labor shortages: “Texas is just hoovering up people from across the entire country.”
“People are moving to the West, the Southwest and the South. Texas is right in the middle of that. It has the cheapest land and the cheapest power and the cheapest food.”
Biggest success story for the next 30 years: Houston. “It has it’s finger in each and every one of those pies. It works with the Mexicans, it’s in the energy sector, it’s its own financial link. It’s on the highway system that links on the East coast. It’s good at moving large pieces of metal around, so it’s getting into heavy equipment, it’s already in automotive. It has everything.”
My caveat: Not everything. It doesn’t have much of a software base outside the oil industry and a few related verticals, and it doesn’t have any semiconductor fabs (both of which the Austin and Dallas areas have in considerable depth).
Plus: Third largest metro in the country.
“Everything you hear about California when it comes to regulation and cost is true.”
All the good land has been grabbed. Maybe growth on the fringes of LA.
“The same urbanization and depopulation push that hit Europeans 60 years ago hit Mexico 25 years ago.”
“California is looking at decades of depopulation moving forward. Not catastrophic and not rapid.”
“I see Oregon and Washington as the next California, and I don’t mean that in a good way.”
Things are better the other side of the mountains (Yakima, WA, and Bend, OR). Also Tri-Cities (Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland), WA.
“The same thing that’s happening in the United States with the retirement of the baby boomers is happening in the wider world. But what is unique about the American baby boomers is that they actually had kids. So we’ve got the Millennials, which are a large generation that are providing a lot of consumption and ballast. That doesn’t exist in most of the rest of the world.”
And the rest of the world is screwed. “You’re looking at general economic degradation on a broad scale that we haven’t seen in well over a century and a half.”
Solution for the rest of the world is printing currency. Thus massive capital flight to more stable locations. “Nine cases out of ten that safer place is the United States.”
This all seems to excerpted from his book The End of the World Is Just The Beginning. As with some of his other videos, I think he’s identified some real concerns, but overstates his case (and the nearness of an imminent global trade collapse rather than some retrenchment). Irrational things can go on a whole lot longer than you might think they would be able to…
Here are two videos where Peter Zeihan argues that China is screwed for many reasons, not least of which is demographics.
Takeaways:
One child per couple means that China is “the fastest aging society in human history, with the largest sex imbalance in human history.”
“They’ve run out of people of childbearing age.”
They were going shrink in half by 2100. “Then they realized that they had been overcounting people for some time.” Then new data moved the date moved up to 2070. And now they’re saying it will be 2050. “For that to be true, the Chinese would have overcounted the population by 100 million.” And all of those missing people are of childbearing age.
Their population actually peaked 15 years ago.
“We’ve seen a 12-fold increase in Chinese labor costs since 1991.”
“China isn’t getting rich, it’s getting old.” They’re facing demographic collapse within a decade.
Xi’s instituted a cult of personality, and silenced anyone capable of independent thought. “He knows that the country’s current economic model has failed. And he knows he can’t guarantee economic growth, and he knows he can’t keep the lights on, and he knows he can’t win a war with the Americans.”
Xi’s solution? “Naked, blatant, ultra nationalism. Ethnocentric ultranationalism of the Nazi style.”
At the top, they don’t care about keeping the lights on. “A third of the country is facing power rationing.”
“These are the sorts of things that you do if you know that the bottom’s falling out and there’s nothing you can do about it, and you have to shift the conversation to remain in power.”
“In China, money is a political good. It exists to serve the needs of the CCP.”
“All of the economic growth we have seen in China since 2006 is because of debt.”
Corporate debt is 350% of GDP, “making China the most indebted country in human history in both absolute and relative terms.” Every country that’s come within half of this has collapsed under the debt load.
I’m omitting discussion of how China is screwed on semiconductors (covered enough here), and also the possibility of invading Taiwan (this video was released late last year, before Russia invaded Ukraine).
“The Biden administration in bits and pieces is redefining strategic ambiguity, and it’s not clear to me what the endgame is here.” Well, there’s a whole lot that isn’t clear about the Biden Administration…
Zeihan thinks Biden might recognize Taiwan for a foreign policy win. Zeihan also thinks that both China and Russia are so weak we can wait them out. (Remember: Pre-Ukraine invasion.)
Zeihan dismissive of both Obama and Trump foreign policy.
“Joe Biden has been on the wrong side and the right side of every foreign policy decision the U.S. has made in the last 45 years, because he doesn’t have any core beliefs he tacks with the wind.”
Now let’s forward to March 24, where Russia’s colossal failure in Ukraine has actually made China even more screwed.
Takeaways:
The biggest damage that we are seeing from the Ukraine war (outside of Ukraine, obviously) is in China. Because in one month the Russians have pulled back the blinders on what has been a 50-year strategic program, the idea that China can come to global power with American sponsorship, with American indifference, that it can take Taiwan, that it can intimidate Japan, that they can dominate all of east Asia and yet not suffer economically at all. It was always ridiculous, but now it’s been shown to just be absolutely stupid.
No one can escape the power of global markets because of trade.
“The yuan is only traded internally because it’s the most manipulated currency in history. The euro confiscates bank deposits to pay for bailouts.”
Russia is the world’s second largest oil exporter, and it can’t export more to China because the pipes that go east don’t interconnect with the ones that go west. “The rail lines are already beyond capacity.”
In the west: “One way or another, those pipes aren’t surviving this year.” (Not sure that’s correct, but I’ve long thought that we should be seeing more structure hits inside Russia than we’ve seen thus far.)
“The stuff that goes to the Black Sea is in a war zone, so insurance companies will not give the indemnification that is necessary for vessels to operate in that area. So the only way a ship can go and dock it overseas right now is if a country gives its sovereign indemnification and takes all the risk.”
Primorsk, on the Baltic, is open. However: “Ship captains for the most part are refusing to go, and European dock workers are refusing to unload the cargo when it arrives. So that is still in use but not nearly as much, maybe a quarter of what it used to be before the war started.”
To get more oil to China: “You would have to build a fundamentally new infrastructure from the fields in northwest Siberia to Chinese population centers that is greater than the distance from Miami to Anchorage, most of which is through virgin territory that is very rugged. That’s a 10-year program minimum even with the Chinese building it.”
“We’re looking at the single largest removal of crude from the market ever, and in proportional terms it’s going to have a shock somewhat similar to World War II.”
We have insurance companies not doing it, shipping companies not doing it, dock workers not doing it and now Halliburton, Baker Hughes and Schlumberger have pulled out, and they do the technical work that makes a lot of this possible. All the super majors are gone, and we even have a couple of major projects out in Sakhalin that are probably just going to die because the Russians can’t make those projects work by themselves. Most of the oil and gas out of that goes to China, so we’re actually looking at an environment where the Chinese see reduced flows rather than increased, as Russia is just melon-scooped out of the market.
When the Russians fell under sanctions, everything that the Chinese thought was true about their future was laid bare as, at best, wishful thinking and bad analysis. So they are now looking east to the United States and west to the Russians in a little bit of a panic, because they are being tied indirectly to what’s going on in Ukraine. And they have now found out not only does the west’s and specifically the United States’ financial tools work very well, they now know they would work much better against China than against Russia, because at its core Russia is a commodities exporter, most notably oil, natural gas and food. China imports all those things, so if an equivalent sanctions regime was done against the Chinese, you’d have 500 million dead Chinese in less than a year from starvation.
Here I think he overstates the case, as there are a lot of emergency avenues a communist government could pursue to stave off starvation. Like invading Mongolia and turning it into emergency farmland. Which is not to so they wouldn’t have some starvation, especially in worse-case scenarios…
“The Chinese have always seen themselves as anti-American [well, the commies, anyway -LP], they’ve always seen themselves as anti-Western, anti-democracy and now they’re realizing that the mood of the man in the White House determines whether their country exists.”
As tight as the sanctions are, as big as they’re getting, they’re nothing compared to the corporate boycotts. Almost every single company that left Russia was under no legal requirement to do so, they just didn’t want to be associated with the war. And we’re talking about those ESG, social goody two-shoes mammoth companies like Exxon and Halliburton, who are now gone, and everyone else followed. So if that happened to China, you know that’s all of their investment that matters. That’s all of their technology transfers, that’s all of their end markets. This system, if it turned against China, would be far more damning than anything we’ve seen out of Russia so far.
I think Zeihan overstates the case a bit, and probably immanizes the timeline of crisis more than warranted, but the demographic and economic challenges China faces are very real.
Also keep in mind that no one in 1988 expected the Soviet Union to collapse as quickly as it did, either…
Russian forces have retreated from a Ukrainian airfield that was key to their original plan of overthrowing Volodymyr Zelensky’s government.
Hostomel airport, just oustide Kyiv, was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the Ukraine war, as Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, sought to establish an air bridge to the capital.
Control of the airport, 20km from Kyiv, changed hands several times, as Ukrainians at first defended fiercely and then attacked the Russian occupiers.
Five weeks on, the Russians have moved out having failed in their mission, according to a senior US defence official, as it abandons plans to take the capital and shift forces to the east.
This is a huge win for Ukraine, but it also means that surviving Russian forces can shift over to east Ukraine where the war is still hot.
Also: “Ukraine forces pulled off a rare attack on Russian soil Friday when two military helicopters destroyed a fuel depot in the city of Belgorod, situated roughly 40 miles north of the border with Ukraine.”
A key inflation metric monitored by the Federal Reserve soared 6.4 percent in February compared to a a [sic] year ago, reaching a new 40-year high.
The latest price surge, which affected the price of fuel, groceries and other consumer essentials, represents the largest year-over-year increase since January 1982, according to data released by the Commerce Department on Thursday.
Not taking into account food and energy fluctuations, which tend to be more erratic and can overemphasize inflation, the personal consumption expenditures price index, the preferred inflation gauge of the Federal Reserve, jumped 5.4 percent in February from a year prior. Including gas and groceries, PCE surged 6.4 percent.
It’s gonna get worse…
The Biden Administration is evidently all-in on tranny madness and grooming your children:
The Biden Administration has now determined that "gender affirming care" – including puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries – is a right of trans youth and "appropriate" and "necessary" for their health.
The Biden Justice Department will come after states that disagree.
Speaking of DeSantis, he has some pretty sweet talent lined up for this:
Johnny & Ronnie Van Zant, brother of original Lynyrd Skynyrd lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, made DeSantis’s new campaign video, “Sweet Florida,” replete with shots at the press, a dig at Fauci and loads of beach and flag-waving b-roll pic.twitter.com/Wd3F7u466Q
Through brand names like “comprehensive sex education” and one of its parent programs, “Social-Emotional Learning (SEL),” our government schools have been turned into Groomer Schools, and parents are beginning to notice. What many will not understand, however, is that this isn’t just a fluke of our weird and increasingly degenerate times. It is, in fact, a long-purposed Marxist project reaching back into the early 20th century. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, join James Lindsay as he explains the long history of the sexual grooming that has come into our schools through Critical Gender Theory and Queer Theory as they have crept into educational programs.
There’s an hour long video there I haven’t watched all of yet…
Speaking of groomers:
An Oregon elementary school teacher has been arrested near Seattle for two charges of attempted child rape & more. Andrew Bert Hammond, a fourth-grade teacher at Newby Elementary School, allegedly proposed to meet at a hotel & had handcuffs & duct tape. https://t.co/o2aJnzmZpX
Just how bad is the graft, waste and fraud in that $1.5 trillion porkulus bill? This bad. Look over that vast list of special subsidies and ask yourself “How many of these programs are designed to channel taxpayer money into the pockets of Democratic activists.” The answer seems to be “Most of them.”
“8 Joe Biden Scandals Inside Hunter Biden’s MacBook That Corporate Media Just Admitted Is Legit.” China, Ukraine, Russia, etc.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki is leaving for MSNBC. So many angles: A.) Rats, sinking ship. B.) That revolving door between Democratic staffers and the MSM continues apace. C.) I hear she has an offer to star in Chairman of the Board 2.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the supply chain: “22,000 Union Workers At 29 West Coast Ports May Strike…West Coast union dockworkers may strike if they don’t come to an agreement to replace their existing contract with marine terminals. The contract is set to expire at the end of June.” Labor strikes are yet another part of the classic winter of discontent formula the Biden Administration is using to bring back the worst of the 1970s.
Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner has presided over a surge in violent crime, and his new policy promises more of it. Krasner recently announced plans to de-prosecute crimes for offenders aged 18 to 25, ignoring how this age group tends to contain the most violent of criminal defendants.
Krasner’s office has established a new unit that will move some 18-to-25-year-old defendants into “rehabilitative programming” instead of seeking criminal punishments. As Krasner’s data dashboard demonstrates, “rehabilitative programming” is just a euphemism for dismissing charges. Krasner promises that the program will be limited to nonviolent offenses, including drug trafficking and other offenses. (The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that gun crimes will not be included, but Krasner has previously stated that prosecutions for illegal gun possession are “not only ineffective but unjust and racially discriminatory.” The link in the district attorney’s office data dashboard about Philadelphia’s Gun Violence Task Force takes the reader to a page that states “Article Not Found.”)
This new program reflects Krasner’s determination not to think like a prosecutor, but instead to think like the criminal defense lawyer he was. The program was developed by Sangeeta Prasad, a fellow with the district attorney’s office who previously served as a public defender in New York, New Mexico, and Philadelphia. Before assuming her current post, she had no prior experience as a prosecutor, just like Krasner. The chief public defender for Philadelphia has called the new unit “an incredible initiative,” but Philadelphia courts were not invited to the press conference announcing the plan and stated that they were not aware of the experiment.
The new initiative comes at an awkward time. In 2021, Philadelphia experienced the highest number of homicides in its history, and the violence is continuing in 2022. Indeed, Philadelphia homicides have risen every year that Krasner has been in office, as carjackings, shootings, and drug overdoses soar. What makes the policy more bizarre is that it runs counter to decades of criminological research. One of the iron laws of criminal conduct is the so-called age-crime curve, which demonstrates that the majority of serious crimes are committed by defendants between the ages of 15 and 25. This finding obtains around the world and has been replicated time and again.
Speaking of repeat offenders, Millen, Georgia police Officer Larry “Ben” Thompson quit after being caught on tape having public sex while on-duty. Fair enough, but his lengthy record of misdeeds makes you wonder why he wasn’t fired long ago, since he managed to shoot another officer in the arm (“negligent discharge”) and killed a guy in a traffic accident in route to a call. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Nevada/Utah Ponzi scheme leads to FBI shootout. “The alleged $300 million scheme, run by a lawyer named Matthew Beasley, came to a head when FBI agents went to his home earlier this month and Beasley drew a gun on himself, before pointing it at agents, prompting them to shoot him.”
“[Fort Worth Superintendent] Kent Scribner will leave the district this August instead of in 2024, when his contract ends. In response to recent outcry from parents regarding Superintendent Kent Scribner’s support of CRT-based policies, Fort Worth ISD’s school board voted 7-0 to move up Scribner’s last day as superintendent to August 31, 2022.”
Ouch! Texas “Taxpayers’ Property Appraisals Rising 20% to 50% as Supply Chain Disruptions Meet Population Growth.” Austin-Round Rock is slated for the biggest increase, some 35.4%.
Don’t look now, but there’s another big Zero Day Internet infrastructure exploit out in the wild. “Spring4Shell is a remote code execution vulnerability in Spring Framework that can be exploited for remote code execution without authentication.” Spring is a Java framework that’s almost 20 years old, so the issue could potential be lurking in a lot of places…
Speaking of false accusations of racism, Gibson’s Bakery win over Oberlin in court yet again. “A three-judge panel on the Ninth District Court of Appeals issued a unanimous decision to uphold a 2019 ruling by Lorain County Judge John Miraldi, who initially awarded the bakery more than $40 million in punitive and compensatory damages, Cleveland.com reported. However, the sum was later reduced to $25 million, though the bakery was awarded more than $6 million for lawyers’ fees.”
We were driving on the PA Turnpike when a warning came across about sudden snow squalls and possible dangerous highway conditions. We got snow but nothing like THIS! Prayers for all involved. 🙏🏻 pic.twitter.com/IrNX6inRQi
Welcome to another in the continuing “Why Russia’s X Is Screwed” series! It seems that Russia’s technological infrastructure is even more screwed than their airline industry.
Some takeaways:
If the sanctions are maintained, they will “almost certainly cause the collapse of Russia’s economy on short notice, and will set the country’s technological progress back by decades.”
Russian state entities and miltech was put in “a complete black box.”
“Even non-military end users were still barred from key technologies, such as semiconductors, telecommunication, encryption security, lasers, sensors, navigation, avionics and maritime technologies. Other countries from the EU to Japan and South Korea all imposed similar sanctions of their own.”
Even many private companies that lobbied for special carve-outs from sanctions changed their mind and suspended all business with Russia.
Just about every car and truck manufacturer. “95% of car parts in Russia are imported.”
Apple, Samsung, Dell, HP, Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft have all halted sales.
“Overnight, many industries in Russia are just gone.”
Every high tech company in Russia relies heavily on foreign inputs and expertise.
He talks about the embargo on semiconductors (more on this in the video below), but says that it applies even to chips made with embargoed tech. So if SMIC used an Applied Materials PVD machine, those chips couldn’t legally be shipped to Russia. I am skeptical this is actually the case (and it would be very hard to enforce on Chinese companies).
“The Russian economy did not prepare itself for sanctions anywhere near this severe.”
Two-thirds of Russia’s foreign reserves of $643 billion were parked abroad, which was all frozen when sanctions came down.
“Every part of the Russian economy has just received major damage, and there’s no way they can pivot everything all at once.”
“They’re simply not survivable in the long-term.”
Russia has increased interest rates to 20% to keep the ruble from collapsing further.
Even China has slowed-down or halted loans to Russian entities.
Russia is going to run out of cash “in a few weeks to a few months.”
Russia is heavily reliant on foreign tech, but for most tech companies, Russia is a minor market.
Expect a brain drain as wealthy and skilled Russians lose their jobs, then move abroad.
Many national industries simply cannot exist without foreign inputs. Substitutes would take years, if not decades.
Conclusion:
If these sanctions continue, there will be no economy left to support the Russian military. Russian technological progress will be thrown back by years, if not decades, across the board. And in just a couple of weeks, or maybe months, the vultures will start circling, and they will start picking off every interesting
Russian asset, every interesting Russian employee, oil fields, anything that they can get their hands on. And they’ll start transporting that out of the country as well. I cannot believe that Putin started a war expecting any sanctions anywhere near this scale.
Now on to semiconductors:
TSMC halted all shipments to Russia, as has AMD and Intel.
The Soviet Union had a massive technology gap between it and the United States, which only got worse as time went on.
All the computing power in every computer in the Soviet Union in 1991 combined would fall two generations short of a single Cray.
“The most advanced semiconductor production facilities were in East Germany, Belarus, Ukraine, and so on.”
JSC Mikron is Russia’s largest semiconductor manufacturer. “Today it fabs RFID tickets, SIM cards, and other smart card products.” They did about $260 million in business in 2020 (including government subsidies). They bought IP from STMicroelectronics.
In 2014, Mikron announced “the successful achievement of the 65 nanometer node at a volume of 500 200mm wafers a month.” [record scratch] 500 wafer starts a month??? That’s nothing. TSMC’s top of the line fabs generally do 120,000 wafer starts a month. It’s maybe OK if you’re running weird, demanding, high profit, low-volume processes (say, Gallium-Arsenide chips for use in satellites), but not for Mikron’s main business line (RFIDs).
But all that is beside the point, since they didn’t have a stepper capable of doing 65 nanometer. “Fujitsu, Toshiba, and TSMC started shipping their commercial 65 nanometer nodes in 2005. So this means that Russia’s gap with the leading edge has grown from 9 years to 15+.”
Russia’s Angstrem offers a wafer foundry doing “130 nanometer and 90 nanometer process nodes on 200mm wafers. Their capacity is about 180,000 wafers a year.” They declared bankruptcy around 2019. They were also hit by U.S. sanctions after the Crimean invasion. Successor company NM-Tech has a pie-in-the-sky plan to do 10nm in 10 years. Don’t hold your breath.
(I notice he makes no mention of “Crocus Nano Electronics,” which supposedly runs Russia’s only 300mm wafer fab (“Established in 2011, Crocus Nano Electronics is the world’s first and only 300mm fabrication facility, located in Russia”), but when you get down into their press releases, it says “The development and production of Crocus Nano Electronics ReRAM memory chips were manufactured on 55 ULP CMOS by Shanghai Huali Microelectronics Corporation (HLMC).” So either they’re a fabless design house, or they only do the metal interconnects fabrication and nothing else in the process, which is so weird a model I can’t really wrap my head around it.)
I’m omitting the coverage of various fabless design houses, since they’re dead-in-the-water without access to decent foundry technology or foreign markets.
They can probably get stuff fabbed at China’s SMIC.
If Russia had turned into a regular country after 1991, there’s no reason they couldn’t have launched a competitive domestic tech industry. The Soviet Union had large number of frequently bloody flaws, but they didn’t stint on STIM education, and maintained very competitive space capabilities despite numerous handicaps. But instead, they turned into a corrupt oligarchy-turned-dictatorship, and all that human capital either emigrated or withered on the vine.
And now, thanks to Vlad’s Big Ukraine Adventure, they’re even more screwed than they were before.
They’ve lost virtually all their international routes.
They’re basically back to Soviet-era route choices.
Aeroflot now has only one international flight route…into Belarus.
It’s not just flights to and from Russia that are affected. Lots of international flights between Europe and Asia transited now-closed Russian airspace. Flights from Helsinki to Tokyo now take three hours longer.
Russia has also been locked out of the Global Distribution System (GDS), which connects just about all global travel providers.
Middle East airlines are still flying too and from Russia, mainly Moscow. But without GDS, no one can directly book connecting flights to other Russian cities.
A majority of the world’s airliners are leased from an outside company. More than half of Russian airliners are leased from companies outside the country. All those are refusing to continue doing business in Russia.
The Cape Town Treaty governs aircraft repossession, and Russia is a signatory to the treaty.
But instead of following the terms of the treaty, Russia has just sanctioned the theft of those aircraft.
Both Boeing and Airbus have suspended all maintenance support with Russia. Without legitimate spare parts, even Russian-owned aircraft could be banned from flying internationally. And even Russian Sukhoi depends on German Lufthansa Technik for spare parts.
One side effect: Without outside airline ability to overfly Russian territory, Anchorage is likely to become an international hub again.
There are a lot of posts on Twitter postulating a food shortage due to the Russo-Ukranian War. The reasoning goes that, on top of existing supply chain disruptions, Russia and Ukraine were big wheat exporters, and Russia is the world’s biggest fertilizer exporter.
Those are concerns, and I think there’s a real good chance of food shortages…in Russia. That’s the sort of thing that happens when you unplug yourself from the world economy. And Europe might have some disruption, given that they’re net food importers.
But I doubt we’re going to have that problem in the U.S. of A. First, our supply chain problems were started easing when vaccine mandates started getting lifted due to the dread midterm variant. Second, America makes lot of fertilizer ourselves, and Russia isn’t the exclusive source of nitrogen, phosphorus or potassium. (Though a Canadian rail strike might impact the last.) Third, capitalism has a great way of supplying substitute goods if left to its own devices.
On February 14, the average price of the four commodities was 15.1c per 1000 calories. By March 8, it had risen to 17.4c, an increase of 15.2%. Using the Roberts and Schlenker factor of 7, this implies a 2.2% decrease in available supply of calories. Removing 55 million metric tons of wheat and 30 million metric tons of corn entails a 2.7% reduction in available supply of calories from the big four commodities. (Here’s an Excel file containing these computations.)
So, it seems the markets are banking the world losing about three quarters of Ukrainian and Russian grain exports (2.2/2.7). Given the large increase in winter wheat prices relative to the other commodities, most of the loss is from wheat.
Traders expect this shock to last only a year. Winter wheat futures prices for delivery after July 2023 barely increased after the invasion. The same is true for corn. The spring wheat market was already tight because of last year’s drought and traders expect it to remain tight beyond 2023.
How common are market shocks of this magnitude? Russian and Ukrainian wheat exports were 7.3% of global production in 2020. Wheat production declined 6.3% in 2010, in part due to a drought that reduce Russian production by 20 million metric tons. Similarly large declines also occurred in 1991, 1994, 2003, and 2018.
From the analysis above, the observed price increases are consistent with a 2.2% decrease in available supply of calories from corn, rice, soybeans, and wheat. Similar declines occurred in 2018, in part due to drought in Argentina and lower wheat acreage in Russia, and in 2012, in part due to drought in the US.
The increase in wheat prices will not cause massive increases in the price of American bread. Most of the price of food is determined by the cost of processing, packaging and marketing. The USDA estimates that farm gate sales of food commodities made up 14% of the retail value of food in 2019. If farm prices increase by 50%, then we would expect food in the grocery store to increase by 7%.
As long as the Biden Administration doesn’t do something criminally stupid (like imposing wage and price controls to fight inflation, or a mandate that 50% of truck drivers be women), the American economy should adapt to prevent any significant food shortages due to the Russo-Ukrainian War.
Of course, government has no shortage of other ways to wreck the economy and make food scarce, and hyperinflation is one of the best…
