Austin apartment complex gets repeatedly hit by thieves breaking into apartments and cars night after night. Last year they had repeated transient break-ins through a hole in the fence, and this year two individuals seem to be the same ones breaking into cars over and over again.
So a woman gathered video evidence of the twp suspects. Austin police response? “This is not a high priority case.” And they wouldn’t look at her videos.
The apartments appear to be those off Riata Trace Blvd., which is about a mile from my house.
Years of understaffing, coddling crime in the name of “social justice” and luring more drug-addicted transients to Austin have put APD in a bind, as they don’t have enough manpower to protect life, liberty and property.
That won’t change because the Austin City Council doesn’t want it to change.
As I did with tanks, here’s another “expert analyses the realism of Hollywood movies,” this time with nuclear weapons physicist Greg Spriggs on the realism of movie nuke scenes.
And yes, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is included.
I didn’t intend to do an all “China is Screwed” video roundup weekend, but the videos keep stacking up and I need to post some rather than producing a giant unwieldy post with hours of footage.
First up: Young people’s whose job prospects and futures are so dim that they’re actually living in concrete pipes.
Takeaways:
Certainly America has no shortage of transients living rough, but in contrast to ragged drug addicts, alcoholics and dangerous lunatics, the people living in these pipes look to be normal, healthy 20-something Chinese.
Just because you’re living in a concrete pipe doesn’t mean you can’t be a live-streamer. Like the under-the-bridge streamers seen in previous videos, you wonder how widespread this behavior is, or whether we’re just seeing the edge of the freak show.
“Despite the female hosts not being beautiful and the male hosts not handsome, it doesn’t affect viewership.” I do rather want to check their numbers, here.
“This is because it’s happening in the industrial city known as the world’s factory – Dongguan in Guangzhou.” It’s on the Pearl River Delta near Guangzhou and Hong Kong. “After more than thirty years of China’s reform and opening up, Dongguan, which has always been at the forefront of economic development, has recently seen a wave of business closures and foreign capital relocation.” See also: all those previousChina is screwed videos.
“When foreign capital withdraws, thousands of Chinese workers lose their jobs. Among these people, some have worked in factories for decades and are now middle-aged. It’s overwhelming to be suddenly faced with unemployment and consequential cost-of-living pressures, coupled with labor competition against millions of university graduates.” I’m sure that sucks, just like getting laid off here sucks. But in a capitalist economy, even a flawed one like we have, is always going to be more flexible about creating jobs that one ruled by a communist party’s aristocracy of pull.
“Those who are single simply adapt to homelessness, creating their own personal space amongst the concrete pipes.” Or, you could have, you know, lived modestly, saved money, and shared housing with other people. The fact they haven’t gone this route and are instead living in pipes suggests something in the Chinese economy is even more broken than we think.
Foreign companies like Microsoft and Nokia are now moving to Vietnam and India. “Japanese companies like Panasonic, Daikin, Sharp, and TDK are planning to move their manufacturing bases back to Japan. Well-known companies like Uniqlo, Nike, Funai Electric, Samsung, and others are also accelerating their withdrawal from China.”
Like industry is also fleeing from elsewhere in China.
“The once bustling Bund in Shanghai is now overgrown with weeds due to lack of maintenance and tourism, presenting a scene of desolation. Everywhere in Shanghai’s luxury residential communities, there are messages about subleasing and selling at a loss. The elites, celebrities, and tycoons left Shanghai at the first chance they got after the lifting of the lockdown. The political uncertainty in China and the frequent changes in regulatory clauses by the authorities have made entrepreneurs miserable.” Communists making entrepreneurs miserable? This is my shocked face.
“Domestic entrepreneurs are reluctant to invest further, and foreign investors are hastening their departure.”
Various Chinese company specific layoffs and financial difficulties snipped.
“Wall Street leading figures, after enjoying three years of benefits from the broad opening of China’s financial market, are planning large-scale cuts to projects and staff in China…Goldman Sachs has lowered its five-year plan expectations, and Morgan Stanley has decided not to set up a securities dealer in China, reducing its derivative and futures business investment to $150 million. JPMorgan Chase & Co. began cutting its dedicated staff in China earlier this year.” There’s not a violin small enough.
In a capitalist economy, there would be some sort of middle ground between the empty ghost cities and people living in pipes near megalopolises. If you don’t regulate the economy so heavily as to make building housing impossible (I’m looking at you, California and NYC), then profit will drive developers to create housing to fill a market need. With China’s crazy misallocation of loans to unprofitable housing to satisfy regional government growth targets, supply has been so severed from demand that such market-making is impossible.
China is going to come out of it’s decades-long growth spurt with crumbling cities and people that mostly are still poor.
I have a whole host of “China is Screwed” videos I’ve gathered to post, but haven’t had the time to properly queue them up. So here’s a big picture piece from Peter Zeihan on China’s immediate economic foe: deflation.
“They never really recovered from Covid.” Aw. My heart bleeds.
“Growth is actually lower now than it was over the course of the last two years when they were supposedly under complete lockdown.”
“Consumption is down. Imports and exports both dropped in July compared to a year earlier by double digits of percentages. Normally the sort of stuff you only see out of a country like, say, Ukraine or Russia when a war starts.”
“We saw a demographic bomb go off in China before Covid. going back to as early as 2017, the demographics really turned negative from 2017 to 2021. The birth rate dropped by about 40%.”
“We’ve had all of these trends with four, five, six, years behind them, and as they’re manifesting in a more normal environment, the numbers are really, really, really bad.”
A whole lot of that is due to the One Child Policy.
Problem two: Deflation. The rest of the world suffered inflation when the lockdowns ended.
“The consumption boom never happened, so supply chains never had to adjust. What has happened is people are less confident in their future, so they’re consuming less.”
“We’re seeing mounting trade wars out of Europe, Japan, the United States, and increasingly secondary states like the Koreans are joining in. And that means the Chinese have fewer places to send stuff.”
“Product that was normally produced for export from China is now being locked up within the Chinese system at the same time that the population is purchasing less. You have an oversupply of goods and an under demand, both at home and abroad. With all those extra goods prices go down, and you get deflation.”
“This is what you would expect when you’re at the beginning of a deflationary spiral that’s caused by a fundamental mismatch between supply and demand, which is where we are going with deglobalization and the Chinese demographic. Trends which are now well past the point of no return.”
Japan’s deflationary spiral lasted 20-25 years.
Deflationary spirals are very hard to pull out of.
“The Chinese economic system isn’t really based on exports or consumption, it’s based on investment, the idea that the state fosters mass borrowing in order to build industrial plant infrastructure. Based on whose numbers you’re using, those are somewhere between 40-70% of the entirety of the Chinese economy, and has generated the vast majority of economic growth.”
“You can only do that for so long. Eventually you don’t need any more bridges, or any more factories, and I would argue the Chinese reached that point before Covid. Again, there’s been this three, four year lag between reality and the data finally manifesting.”
More spending won’t help.
“The amount of growth they get for every Yuan spent has been dropping steadily for 40 years, and now it’s in far less than one to one. So it really doesn’t matter how much more fuel and how much cheap capital the Chinese pump into the system, it’s never going to generate more economic activity than what it costs to put it in the first place.”
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!
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?
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.)
No indication yet that this was a Ukrainian rocket attack, drone attack, or even partisan sabotage. But it sounds militarily significant.
Local officials in Russia say an explosion at an optical plant in the city of Sergiyev Posad, about 70 kilometers outside Moscow, killed one person and injured at least 43 people on August 9.
Five of the injured are in intensive care with serious burns or head injuries, according to the city administration’s Telegram account. Some of the 43 people admitted to a regional hospital have shrapnel injuries, it said.
Officials at the city’s central hospital said that a woman had succumbed to wounds sustained in the blast.
Independent Telegram channel Baza shared images of a tall cloud of smoke and identified the site as the Zagorsk Optical and Mechanical Plant, which produces night-vision and other optical devices for the military.
Russian officials later confirmed the location.
Russian news agency TASS has quoted the emergency services as rejecting assertions on social media that the cause of the blast was a drone attack.
That speculation has been fueled by months of remote attacks in Russia that Moscow blames on Kyiv along with Russian reports it “thwarted” two fresh drone attacks near Moscow overnight.
TASS said the blast happened where pyrotechnics were being kept and destroyed a 1,600-square-meter warehouse.
An unexplained fire damaged the same Zagorsk plant in June 2022.
Seemed to blow up real good:
You can’t trust TASS, and it’s entirely possible that it’s your standard negligent Russian military industrial accident. But why would you store pyrotechnics next to an optics factory?
Almost immediately, the rifles were plagued with problems. The L86A1’s bipod tended to fail to lock, were weak, and generally crappy. Additionally, the plastic melted when it interacted with bug repellant, and the metal rusted easily. The weapons were found to be unreliable in both arctic and desert environments.
The SA80 family used stamped steel, which the Brits had experience with in the form of the Sten gun. However, the Sten had much lower tolerances than the SA80. The tighter tolerances required more skilled labor and better machinery. This led to tons of waste and slow production of the SA80 family of rifles and squad support weapons.
Their first trial by combat came to be in the Gulf War and then later in African operations. It’s tough to say anything nice about these weapons’ performance in the desert. Both the L85A1 and L86A1 proved to be unreliable. The L85A1 worked best on fully automatic, and the L86A1 worked best on semi-auto. This created was the inverse of how the weapons were intended to be used.
The polymer furniture fell apart easily. The magazines and the magazine catch proved problematic. It was too easy to access and would cause soldiers to accidentally drop magazines. The top cover catch required tape to hold it in place. The weapons needed to be kept incredibly clean and could deform if gripped too hard.
The weapon overheated quickly, the firing pin was fragile and broke easily, and dirt could accumulate behind the trigger and prevent it from being pulled. The safety selector could swell when it got wet and render the weapon useless. SAS operator and Gulf War commando Chris Ryan stated that the SA80 was “poor-quality, unreliable weapons at the best of times, prone to stoppages, and it seemed pretty tough to have to rely on them.”
It’s easy to see why the rifles sucked. The British Ministry of Defence commissioned a report that stated,
“The SA80 did not perform reliably in the sandy conditions of combat and training. Stoppages were frequent despite the considerable and diligent efforts to prevent them. It is extremely difficult to isolate the prime cause of the stoppages.
It is, however, quite clear that infantrymen did not have CONFIDENCE in their personal weapons. Most expected a stoppage in the first magazine fired. Some platoon commanders considered that casualties would have occurred due to weapon stoppages if the enemy had put up any resistance in the trench and bunker clearing operations.
Even discounting the familiarisation period of desert conditions, when some may have still been using the incorrect lubrication drill, stoppages continued to occur.”
Commenter BigFire noted that Ian McCollum had done a video on the weapon, and he’s no less scathing:
“Can you hear that? I can hear it. That’s the sound of every former British service member cringing at the mere sight of this rifle. And it’s so loud you can hear it over the internet.”
“This is, probably more so than any other firearm in current service, a giant scandal of plastic and metal.”
They started with a proprietary 4.85mm cartridge, but eventually went with 5.56 NATO. Brits didn’t go with the M16 because they wanted a bull-pup (and presumably because they wanted to make them domestically).
Desert Storm: “The guns really performed poorly in the sand. And there was a report that was written detailing all of these problems and submitted to MOD in the aftermath of Desert Storm. And it got leaked to the public. And this document basically said, ‘These guns are a piece of junk, and they never work.'”
The Brits turned to Heckler & Koch (which was actually owned by a British company at the time) to fix the weapon. “And they came up with just a couple things to fix, namely everything. In the rebuild they either replaced or redesigned the bolt, the gas piston, the gas block, the front trunnion, the hammer, all of the springs, pretty much all of the pins, the magazine release, and the furniture [stock, grip and handguard], and the charging handle, and probably a couple other things that I’ve forgetting about. They basically kept the receivers as a shell and replaced everything else inside them.”
“They rebuilt about 200,000 of these rifles into what became known as the L85A2 configuration, for the cost of about £92 million.”
“They had far more problems than the M16 did in Vietnam, and yet still to this day we hear about the M16 being an unreliable piece of junk, because of some limited issues that were actually pretty easily fixed in the early days of Vietnam. Well, the L85 had much more substantial and severe problems to begin with. And even though the A2 appears to be a pretty darn good gun now, its reputation is dead forever … because of how bad the A1 was.”
Making simple weapons that can be turned out on prosumer grade CNC machines gets easier and easier every year, but designing automatic weapons that reliably work across a wide range of combat situations is still hard…
Of all the weapons China is developing, gyrocopters rank very low among those I’m worried about. In truth, I wasn’t even aware they had them until this video popped up in my feed:
The gyrocopter, AKA the autogyro, was a funky forerunner to the helicopter with unpowered rotor blades combined with a propeller to provide lift.
They can fly, but they can’t hover.
China has one in service called the Hunting Eagle Strike gyrocopter.
“What in God’s good name is really going on here? What explains this
seemingly bizarre decision by China to start using gyrocopters in their otherwise modern Army?”
One theory is they’re not for actual combat with other nations, but for carrying out police actions like riot control, murdering Tibetans, murdering protesting students, etc.
There’s also the possibility that it might be useful in border skirmishes with India in the Himalayas.
They also mention Taiwan, but I find that use case really, really doubtful, unless it’s part of the “everything to the coast” kitchen sink invasion plan.
Cost is cheap, though: Only $5,500 a pop.
They have anti-tank missiles, but I have my doubts as to their efficacy on modern western tanks.
The fly low and slow enough that anti-aircraft systems have trouble with them.
All that said, I can’t really see terribly many use cases for this that aren’t better fulfilled by drones.
While I can construct some edge-cases where a gyrocopter might be better at the same price point (grid search in the mountains), but in just about all cases, a drone, a helicopter or an airplane is going to be superior.
“It’s as simple as people thought everything was permitted in pursuit of getting rid of Donald Trump.”
Taibbi says he wasn’t pushed out of Rolling Stone, he just thought he could make more money by leaving. And he was right! “Let’s just say that I’m making many times over more than I was making at Rolling Stone.”
MT: I don’t believe a lot of the identity politics that are being proffered by the current version of the Democratic Party are genuine. And my first experience with this, where I really, really thought about this, was when I was following Bernie Sanders’s campaign in 2016. And there was a moment in that campaign where he first started to really draw blood against Hillary right. You might remember it was like in February, uh, or late January of 2016. He was hammering her on her ties to Goldman Sachs and other Banks. The New York Post interestingly did this, published this big list of all of her speech commitments and it was kind of amazing. And she wouldn’t release the transcripts right she wouldn’t release the transcripts. I mean, even the schedule was amazing. She was doing three hundred thousand dollars in the morning and then flying to some place and doing 400 Grand or something.
Reason: Yeah circle of the Bilderbergers, or whatever.
MT: And they tried everything to hit back, and nothing worked until she said: “If we break up the banks tomorrow, will that end racism?” And Bernie was paralyzed by that.
Reason: Yeah, Bernie’s an old school, he’s a real old school Commie. I mean, like where it’s class and everything else is a distraction, right? That, you know, capitalists will use race in order to keep the workers from realizing, no, they’re all on the same side well
MT: I almost wish he was that, because you know Bernie also marched in, you know, in for the civil rights movement in the 60s. And he was terrified of the idea that he might be accused of racism. It mortified him, and I think it really slowed his campaign.
Reason: There was also that moment, I think it might have been in Seattle or something, where he was almost literally pushed off the stage by a couple of black activists, who were like “We need to be talking about racial concerns,” not whatever he was talking about.
MT: Right, not your class thing. [And] that was when they started to sort of demonize the white working class, right, which is a brilliant strategic move. Also, interestingly, it was the exact opposite of what the Clintons had done in the 90s. You know the Clinton’s whole strategy was let’s peel off a little bit of that white working class-
Reason: We feel their pain.
MT: We feel their pain, right. And that’s, you know, they just got over the finish line doing that. So we can add to the sins of Hillary Clinton that she also injected identity politics.
With all due respect to Taibbi, identity politics had been injected into the Democratic Party’s DNA long before the 2016 presidential race.
“Trump [has] been an enormous Boon to the intelligence Services they’ve been able to say hey if you if you code as somebody who sides with Trump…essentially they’ve created what I like to call the One Villain Theory of the Universe. Which is if you’re on Trump’s side, that means you’re on Putin’s side, which means you’re also on Assad’s side, you’re on Orban’s side, you’re on the side of domestic violence.”
MT: “Covid has a whole long list of things that have added to Middle America’s grievances. Beginning with the fact that it it increasingly looks like they lied to us about the origins of the disease for some pretty weak reasons. Maybe they were trying to cover up some research they were doing. That’s thing one that’s looking increasingly likely. At the very least they excluded the possibility of that illegitimately and used
Reason: “And that’s where the government was telling Twitter and Facebook, like, don’t run this stuff or they’ll squelch it.”
“I did a story about Loudoun County, Virginia, when Republicans won the gubernatorial election there. And there were people there who were furious at the way they had been portrayed in the media, as racists or anti-vaxxers. Really, they wanted their kids to go back to school, because they had done their own research online, they found the kids weren’t really at risk, and their kids weren’t learning anything, and it was a burden on them personally, right? So there’s a million things like this.”
I don’t agree with all Taibbi’s takes, and a whole lot of things were going wrong with the left long before he deigned to notice it, but over all it’s an interesting interview.
Bill Maher is a liberal Democrat who has been increasingly red-pilled following the Flu Manchu lockdowns and his party’s increasing embrace of censorship. So when I saw that he had Jordan Peterson, a veritable walking red-pill dispensing machine, on his interview show Club Random, that definitely piqued my interest.
I’ve only watched a small fraction thus far, but it looks like it’s going to be another busy day, so here it is.
BM: I read a quote from Justin Trudeau that was so dumb—
JP: Which one?
