Remember how Sri Lanka managed to wreck agricultural yield by forcing the country to use organic fertilizer? “Not only had Sri Lanka’s ban on fertilizers, pesticides, weedicides, and fungicides resulted in massive food shortages, it also led to the doubling in price of rice, vegetables, and other market staples.”
Sri Lanka’s prime minister is increasing efforts to revive the country’s “completely collapsed” economy amid a lack of foreign exchange reserves and severe shortages of essential items.
“We are now facing a far more serious situation beyond the mere shortages of fuel, gas, electricity, and food. Our economy has faced a complete collapse,” Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe told parliament on June 22.
“It is no easy task to revive a country with a completely collapsed economy, especially one that is dangerously low on foreign reserves,” he said.
This video goes into more depth of just how badly Sri Lanka is screwed.
Some takeaways:
“The government’s gross mismanagement in agriculture is just a small symptom in a much larger problem. Sri Lanka has run out of money and is now facing down the barrel of complete economic collapse.”
“In a span of just two years, its reserves of foreign currency has gone from $9.2 billion to just $50 million, not enough to cover a single day’s worth of imports, and not nearly enough to cover the $6.6 billion it needs to make loan payments. On April 12th, the government announced it will no longer be making such payments as a result it’s been cut off from international loans.”
“Basic necessities are hard to come by and daily rolling blackouts are shutting down businesses.”
Sri Lanka may be the first poorly managed developing country to fall, but it won’t be the last.
On paper, it shouldn’t be a basket case. It had a thriving tourism industry before a 2019 terrorist attack and 2020’s Flu Manchu.
“Sri Lanka, being a small developing country, imports a huge amount of commodities. As such, it’s been running a large trade deficit.”
Enter the nepotism:
Strongman Gotabaya Rajapaksa Gota built a name for himself viciously ending the civil war as head of the ministry of defense, with his brother Mahinda acting as president from 2005 to 2015. Gota ran on the promise of bringing forth vistas of prosperity and splendor in wake of an opposition party seen as too weak to handle domestic threats. Gota’s party won a landslide victory in parliament and he appointed his brother as prime minister. With a two-thirds majority, Gota quickly got to work rewriting the constitution, allowing him to appoint many top-level officials, including ministers and judges. He stuffed these positions with relatives, and has been slowly cementing greater unrestrained power.
How did he deal with the tourism downturn? He started printing money. “The budget deficit widened and its stockpile of foreign currency started to burn away.”
“Now more than ever, Sri Lanka was burning through its foreign reserves. This was further accelerated by the government’s desire to keep the rupees exchange rate at 200 rupees equal to one US dollar.” In the post-Bretton Woods world, fixed exchange rates are disasters waiting to happen.
The attempt to defend the rupee meant that foreign currency reserves went from $9.2 billion to just $1.6 billion in 2021.
“This caused the government to enact strange policies, like banning the importation of fertilizer in hopes of easing its trade deficit. Claiming the ban was to make Sri Lanka organic was simply a way to conceal its dire situation.” Yes, cutting back the ability of your own people to grow food in order to hide the manifest incompetence of your economic policies is quite the recipe for happiness.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and prices for food and energy skyrocketed.
“Basic necessities in Sri Lanka have become too expensive. The rupee is now just half of its original value. Schools have stopped testing for certain grades because they can’t buy ink.”
“The government has instituted daily 15 hour blackouts to save on energy imports but they have crippled industries. The nation has declared a state of emergency as massive mobs attack politicians and even set roadblocks to prevent them from escaping the country.”
Sri Lanka may be the first, but it won’t be the last.
With rapid global commodity inflation, supply shortages, and the likely coming global recession, many nations appear to be on the tipping point. There is growing unrest in Tunisia because of prices. Pakistan’s currency is plummeting and Argentina’s economy is straining under the weight of massive debt. The longer current conditions persist, the more likely we are to see what is happening in Sri Lanka to happen across the globe.
Lefty sorts are always whining that other countries have high speed rail networks and we don’t. Many point to China’s extensive network of high speed rail as what we should be doing.
Tiny problem: China’s high speed rail network is a giant, unprofitable sinkhole of $1.8 TRILLION worth of debt.
Some take-aways:
The average operating loss for the system is $24 million per day.
The official amount for China National Railway debt for high speed rail is $900 billion, but since roughly half of the debt comes from local governments, the total is probably closer to $1.8 trillion.
For comparison sake, $1.8 trillion is about South Korea’s entire yearly GDP.
“Shanghai, the richest city in China, has a total GDP of $600 billion in 2020, which means that even the whole year of Shanghai’s GDP won’t be able to cover the debt of China National Railway.”
It’s extensive: 37,900km, nearly double the length from 2015.
Return on high speed rail investment is only about 2%, and the bulk of bond payments for loans are coming due over the next few years. “Cash flow from railway transportation revenue isn’t enough to cover the operating costs, let alone the ability to pay the debt and interest.”
Local government debt levels are around 100%.
“More than 85% of the funds raised through urban investment bonds are earmarked for repaying old debts with new ones.”
Even the most profitable high speed rail stretch, Beijing to Shanghai, only earns a return on investment of 5%.
Japan’s successful high speed rail network serves three metropolitan areas (Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka) that have 55% of that nation’s population.
“A professor at the School of Economics and Management of Beijing Jiaotong University concluded that the operating costs are only just covered when the transport density of a high-speed rail line reaches 36 million passenger kilometers per kilometer. In China the average transport density is only about 17 million passenger kilometers per kilometer.”
High speed rail can’t transport heavy freight.
“The Lanzhou Uramuchi HSR in western China can run more than 160 trains per day. In reality, this route only runs four trains per day.”
High speed rail occupancy rate is only 30%, and is still too expensive for most Chinese to use.
High speed rail construction has squeezed out much-needed construction of regular rail. “China’s rail freight capacity can’t meet market demand. China’s market share of road freight turnover has risen rapidly to 49% market share in 2016.” China rail has jacked up freight costs to make up for losses on high speed rail.
China’s freight trucks get overloaded all the time.
China’s containerized shipping accounts for 40% of global trade, but “the proportion of China’s sea rail intermodal transport volume in 2017 was only about 2.5 percent.” 84% of port containers go out by road.
So why all the money poured into high speed rail? Opportunities for corruption.
Officials see the high-speed rail project in which China is involved as a lucrative opportunity. China’s former minister of railways, known as the father of high-speed rail, was sentenced to death for corruption. Emerging industries such as high-speed rail, which offer both substantial commercial value and political achievements for local officials, have enormous room for corruption. In a systemically corrupt environment white elephant projects, that is a large project that falls significantly short of its goals, and the costs of upkeep outweigh its usefulness, are favored by many officials and businessmen looking to make a fortune. The vast majority of high-speed railways around the world can’t make ends meet on passenger revenues alone to cover their construction and operating costs. Most operate at a loss.
In light of all that, why do American leftists keep complaining about America’s lack of high speed rail? Simple: It’s the corruption, stupid. High speed rail construction offers boundless opportunities for graft and corruption, and refusing to build any keeps them from getting their snouts into another giant trough of taxpayer money…
(I didn’t expect this past week to become a string of “China’s economy is smoke and mirrors all the way down” posts, but I keep running into more examples.)
Here’s another entry for the “China’s economy is smoke and mirrors all the way down” file. Remember the previous story on the mountains of unused bikes for failed Chinese bike-sharing startups? Well, evidently the exact same thing happened with “green” cars:
The mechanics of the scam:
First they put together a down payment, order a batch of vehicles, and license them at a vehicle administration office.
Then they contact government officials, present the vehicles in their hands and apply for permission on the grounds that they are operating an online car sharing business.
The third step is to get the government’s permission, then go to the bank to get a loan.
The fourth step is to find a financer and present the vehicles and the government papers to secure some venture capital from the financer.
Last mortgage the vehicles to some smaller financial institutions to squeeze out their final value.
After all these steps are completed, the scammers disappear. The bank, the financer and the small financial institution are left with triangular disputes while the vehicles rot somewhere in the wilderness.
More takeaways:
China offers subsidies for new “green” cars.
Lots of these subsidized cars are bought by ride-sharing startups…
…that just happen to be subsidiaries of the the Chinese car companies manufacturing the cars being subsidized. (Presumably these are different companies than the pure scammers, but who the hell knows?)
Despite not being used, many have new license plates and up-to-date inspections.
Though there are minimum mileage requirements to get the subsidies, the businesses (in best Chinese fashion) just falsify the data.
“Especially the electric cars produced in previous years, the battery has a short range and the performance declines quickly. It’s worthless. At present it costs more to replace a new battery than the value of the old car.”
Most insane of all: China’s communist government required scrapping vehicles after 10 years or 100,000 kilometers. How’s that for “green”?
They later revised this to 15 years with annual inspections, then revised it again to a maximum of 600,000 kilometers.
And, of course, you can bribe inspectors to pass the inspection.
Green subsidy scams and failed startup detritus is hardly unknown in the U.S. (witness all those electric scooter sharing startups that are just now starting to go bankrupt), but China’s corner-cutting, get-rich-quick mentality combined with green government subsidies, interlocking corporate ownership, the usual Chinese scam artists and loose, bribe-able enforcement at various levels of Chinese government all combined for an especially appalling mountain of waste.
Just days after the Chinese Communist Party lifted Shanghai’s last Flu Manchu lockdown, they’re locking Shanghai down again.
China’s commercial hub of Shanghai will lock down millions of people for mass COVID-19 testing this weekend – just 10 days after lifting its gruelling two-month lockdown – unsettling residents and raising concerns about the business impact.
Racing to stop a wider outbreak after discovering a handful of community cases, including a cluster traced to a popular beauty salon, authorities have ordered PCR testing for all residents in 14 of Shanghai’s 16 districts over the weekend.
Five of the districts said residents would not be allowed to leave their homes while the testing was carried out. A notice issued by Changning district described the stay-home requirement as “closed management” of the community being sampled.
The latest scare triggered a rush to grocery stores and online platforms to stock up on food, as users of China’s Twitter-like Weibo expressed fear they could be locked down for longer, having only started going back to work after the last lockdown was lifted on June 1.
Some areas had remained sealed off or quickly returned to lockdown due to infections and their close contacts.
While the rest of the world has moved on from useless lockdown foolishness, China is still Stuck On Stupid, and their “Zero Covid” policy has as much chance to stop spread as tying a live chicken rump to buboes had at stopping bubonic plague.
You’ve got to hand it to Peter Zeihan, who said this was precisely the sort of stupidity China would keep pursuing when talking about Tianjin’s lockdown last month.
I’ve been telling my clients for quite some time that it was only a matter of issue as to how the American/Chinese relationship imploded. It could be Trump, could be Biden, could be energy, could be food, could be security, could be trade, could be ethics, could be genocide. It’s a long list, but it appears that Covid ultimately is the one that is winning out.
The Chinese vaccine does not work against Covid, and the Chinese have spent the last two years lambasting the world and lying in the propaganda that they are the only country that’s even remotely dealt well with Covid. And they’ve specifically parroted a lot of the crazy theories out there about the western vaccines, that they make you magnetic or they make you infertile or whatever else, so they can’t import the western vaccines at all they have to wait until they make their own MRNA formula, and there’s no way that’s going to happen in the next year or two, so lockdowns are the only public health policy they have and now the majority of the parts of china that matter are offline.
If you’re stuck in manufacturing in China this is the beginning of the end, if it’s not the end already, because as soon as you have an opening, Omicron comes back in and then you get a closing again because that is the only tool that the Chinese Communist Party has left.
It’s tough to be a pimp young worker in today’s China. In addition to being repressed by the communist government, they’re unable to afford cars or houses, and many can’t even find jobs. As a result, some have turned to the philosophy of bai lan, or “Let it rot.” They’re just giving up on working or caring anymore and openly embracing loserdom.
Naturally, the CCP is not pleased. Commies have never been tolerant of “parasitism” getting in the way of their political goals.
A few takeaways:
The unemployment rate for those 16-24 is 18.2%. “The highest rate since official figures began.”
Even graduates of prestigious Peking University were competing for entry level bureaucratic jobs.
The repeat Flu Manchu lockdowns were the last straw for many. “What is the point of working hard when you can lose your basic rights as a human being, when your home can be broken into and when your private items can be thrown away at will? Chinese people once thought that if they worked hard and followed the rules they could have a good future but that seems to be an illusion.” Yeah, totalitarian Communist states are funny that way…
Unspoken is just how these young working-age Chinese who have given up manage to afford food and shelter, but I’m just assuming they’re following the time-honored tradition of sponging of their parents. What are they going to do, kick out their only heir?
The problem with reports like this is that it’s hard for those of us outside China to determine just how widespread this phenomena is. Is it “Hey, all the young kids are listening to Mel Torme” or “Hey, all the young kids are listening to Nirvana”? It sucks to be young with dim prospects during a recession, and it sucks a lot worse to be under the heel of a communist dictatorship. Combining those isn’t a recipe for happiness.
Hey Chinese bai lan sufferers: Have you considered launching a revolution against the communist government instead? That would give you lots of excitement and fill your life with purpose! It may shorten it as well, but I suspect it beats lying around waiting to die…
Information coming out of the Russo-Ukrainian War can be hard to verify, especially given how untrustworthy the mainstream media have made themselves. But Ukraine seems to have launched a successful counterattack in the key city of Severodonetsk.
Russia is “suffering huge losses” and losing hard-fought ground in the Ukrainian city of Severodonetsk after invading units started retreating from the key industrial center, Ukrainian officials asserted Saturday.
The dramatic turnabout, which could not be independently confirmed, represented a rare successful counter-offensive against Russian forces, which had recently been steadily advancing in Ukraine’s eastern territories.
It was the first time Ukraine claimed to have conducted a large counter-attack in Severodonetsk, a city of 100,000 and the last major municipality in the disputed Luhansk oblast under Ukrainian control, after days of losing ground in the country’s embattled east.
Russia had “previously managed to capture most of the city,” Sergiy Haidai, the governor of the Luhansk region said in a televised address Saturday, The Guardian reported. “But now our military has pushed them back.”
Later Saturday, Oleksandr Stryuk, the head of the city’s military operations, said that Ukrainian forces were able to build a line of defense in Severodonetsk, according to The Kyiv Independent.
Both sides of the war have claimed to have inflicted huge casualties in the fighting for the city — a battlefront that military experts believe could determine which of the two countries has the momentum for a prolonged war of attrition in coming months.
A more detailed annotated map from Random Guy On Twitter (grains of salt apply):
SEVERODONETSK / 2245 UTC 04 JUN/ UKR forces continue to consolidate holdings and advance. Present line of contact reported to be the E side of the park area paralleling Centralny Prospect. With Ukrainian forces in the ascendant, RU morale is now a factor. pic.twitter.com/cBmov2De6z
There’s some talk on Twitter of Ukrainian forces luring Russia into a trap and using the high ground in Luhansk to rain artillery on Russian positions:
Ukrainian positions in Lysychans'k are raining precision artillery fire on Severodonetsk Russian positions. The high ground of Lysychans'k proves to be very helpful for supporting fire.
Here’s Denys Davydov, AKA Ukrainian Map Guy, on the action (usual caveats and grains of salt apply):
When faced with the task of taking large hostile cities, Russian doctrine has been to bomb them flat with artillery first. Historically, urban warfare has not been a source of happiness for the Russian military. They got torn up badly in Grozny, and seem to have forgotten all the painful lessons learned there.
Russia may have a hefty supply of old tanks, but it’s supply of competent ground forces absent a general mobilization (which Putin has thus far refused to authorize) is quite finite. Russia has even resorted to forced mobilization of troops in the area it occupies, a desperation tactic likely to make things worse for an army that already suffers from low morale.
The Ukrainian government and military are furthermore discussing the battle of Severodonetsk in increasingly confident terms and are likely successfully blunting the Russian military’s major commitment of reserves to the grinding battle for the city. While Russian forces may still be able to capture Severodonetsk and Lysychansk and Ukrainian forces are likely more degraded than Haidai’s statements imply, Ukrainian defenses remain strong in this pivotal theater. The Russian military has concentrated all of its available resources on this single battle to make only modest gains. The Ukrainian military contrarily retains the flexibility and confidence to not only conduct localized counterattacks elsewhere in Ukraine (such as north of Kherson) but conduct effective counterattacks into the teeth of Russian assaults in Severodonetsk that reportedly retook 20% of the city in the last 24 hours. The Ukrainian government’s confidence in directly stating its forces can hold Severodonetsk for more than two weeks and willingness to conduct local counterattacks, rather than strictly remaining on the defensive, is a marked shift from Ukrainian statements as recently as May 28 that Ukrainian forces might withdraw from Severodonetsk to avoid encirclement.
The fog of war and the paucity of competent in-theater reporting makes things hard to analyze, but at this point in time, it appears that Ukraine is winning the Battle of Severodonetsk.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grinds on (but Ukraine launches a successful counterattack), Joe Biden said Democrats are responsible for inflation and ignoring the needs of the middle class, Rand Paul gets pissed, ESG is officially a great big fraud, more shenanigans from Soros-backed DAs, and debunking a Victorian vibrator myth.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is 100 days old. While Russia continues to grin forward on some fronts in Donetsk, Ukrainian forces seem to have taken back part of Severodonetsk while also making some gains in the south. Caveat for that link in that this Ukrainian guy’s shtick is tracking day-to-day map movements without a lot of tactical depth. So: Grains of salt may be in order. (Update: More successful Ukrainian counterattacks near Severodonetsk at Metolkine. Same guy, same caveats…)
In a speech on the Senate floor Friday, Rand Paul blasted efforts by Democrats to paint up all law enforcement officers and those in the military as dangerous radical racists.
Paul was addressing The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, blocked by Republicans in the Senate, that demands the FBI and Department of Homeland Security change the way they investigate and monitor domestic terrorism suspects.
The official summary of the bill notes that an “interagency task force” would be established in order to probe into “white supremacist and neo-Nazi infiltration of the uniformed services and federal law enforcement agencies.”
“This bill should be called by a more accurate name: the Democrat plan to brand our police and soldiers as white supremacists and neo-Nazis,” Paul proclaimed.
He continued, “How insulting,” adding “We knew that Democrats despise and want to defund the police, but now, they believe that the police, federal law enforcement, and the U.S. military are full of white supremacists and neo-Nazis?”
Referring to the now mothballed ‘Disinformation Governance Board’, Paul also noted “Those of us who still care about the Bill of Rights just got done taking down the DHS ‘Ministry of Truth,’ and a day later, Democrats want to create the DHS Thought Police. You couldn’t make it up if you tried. But they don’t stop there.”
“The bill creates two other Thought Police offices at the Department of Justice and at the FBI, which seems like a self-defeating choice, since elsewhere in the bill, we are told that federal law enforcement is shot through with white supremacists and neo-Nazis,” Paul urged.
The Senator also noted that “None of the bill makes sense. It doesn’t make sense because it was a bill that was never intended to become law. It’s a dumb, Washington talking points memo masquerading as legislation.”
“But congressional Democrats have gotten so radical, so extreme, and so out-of-touch with the American people that when they read it, they see something worthwhile,” he added.
Paul concluded that “This bill will fail today because the Democrats’ message — hate the police, defund the police, slander the military and police as racists and white supremacists — has been roundly rejected by the American people.”
The bill failed to pass, but 47 Democrats voted for it…
A bunch of kids are being murdered by some semi-human, so what do you do? Draw your weapon and put him down or die trying? Or do you sit there, doing nothing?
The same government we’re supposed to give up our guns to because they have it all under control chose Option B. It chose failure.
Tell me more about how the real problem is that we have the capacity to defend ourselves.
But the real problem, to our enemies, is not that murderers murder. The real problem, to our enemies, is the very fact that we can defend ourselves. The objective of our trash elite is not to have a country that runs well, where people are secure, and where rights are respected. The objective is to rule. And if a bunch of kids die for that, they’re fine with it. They can live with failure, but not accountability.
The clusterfark in Uvalde is just a symptom of a much bigger pathology. It is a symbol of the failure of every institution in our society. And the solution is never to revamp the institutions and eject the parasites heading them. It’s always – always – to take power from us and give it to the people who screwed up in the first place.
“The Democrats lost an election they never expected to lose. They basically lost to a reality TV show host when Hillary Clinton had all the backing of the establishment in the world. And instead of asking, what is it about our ideology that ruled the country for eight years, that drove people away from us into Donald Trump’s arms, they instead decided they were going to blame everybody else,” he said.
“The Democrats simply replaced Trump with the same ideology they governed with for 8 years under Obama that caused people to run away from them as fast as they could,” he said. “And now that people are doing that again, instead of asking ‘why is that happening’ they’re getting poised to blame the electorate for being stupid — for thinking the economy’s bad when it’s actually good.”
Haven’t had time to talk about the farce that was the Sussmann acquittal, but here’s a tweet:
TURLEY: “I mean, he is facing a jury that has three Clinton donors, an AOC donor, and a woman whose daughter is on the same sports team with Sussmann’s daughter. With the exception of randomly selecting people out of the DNC headquarters, you could not come up with a worse jury” pic.twitter.com/RHqen6AMAc
Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano (D.) and Arlington County commonwealth’s attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (D.) since 2020 dismissed or declined to prosecute a 25-year-old Maryland resident for nearly a dozen charges related to larceny. The looting incidents amounted to thousands of dollars in stolen merchandise and include felony offenses, including two grand larcenies and one assault on a police officer, making the offender eligible for years behind bars. The prosecutors found the looter guilty of just a few misdemeanors. No verdict levied more than a few hundred dollars in fines, and he served no time in prison.
“If Stuart Kirk’s devastating accusations are correct, in my opinion his words could be interpreted as suggesting the inputs to financial models which predict a demand for the climate investment products currently being sold are being heavily manipulated to produce a preconceived outcome. Stuart appeared to claim he is being “pressured” to add unrealistic assumptions to climate financial models, to ‘move the needle’ on predicted economic harm from climate change.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
Iranian military bases attacked by drones launched from inside Iran. Hmmmmm…
“Miracle Cures and Murder For Hire: How A Spoon-Bending Turkish Magician Built A $600 Million Nasdaq-Listed Scam Based On A Lifetime Of Lies.” You really need to read the whole thing to see how Enochian Biosciences’ co-founder Serhat Gumrukcu fled from one alleged scam to another. Here’s just one line-item: “Gumrukcu claims to have spent 12+ years earning an M.D. and multiple PhDs in Russia and Turkey. Our research indicates he made it all up. He has no medical degree and no PhDs.” Plus that pesky murder thing… (Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)
The jury in Johnny Depp’s defamation lawsuit against Amber Heard ruled Wednesday that the actress did in fact defame Depp by identifying herself as a victim of domestic abuse and awarded Depp $15 million in compensatory and punitive damages, capping a blockbuster trial that has seen immense media coverage over the last several weeks.
The jury of five men and two women reached their unanimous verdict after 13 hours of deliberations, which began on Tuesday afternoon. It also awarded Heard $2 million in damages for a countersuit against Depp for statements made by his lawyer.
Depp may be a self-indulgent hedonist with poor judgment and substance abuse issues, but he came out smelling like a rose in comparison to his extra-crazy ex.
Slogans are no substitute for facts. “Hear all women” is a pledge we should all make. “Believe all women,” however, is asking people to shut their brains off at the approach of a slogan and forget the fact that women are people, too. Sometimes they shade the truth or lie, sometimes they are the more abusive party, and sometimes they are cynical, show-business shams. The evidence at trial changed a lot of minds, all the more so the more people watched it.
A favorite theory about Victorian vibrators turns out to be made up out of whole cloth.
With the anniversary of D-Day coming up, here’s a look at Operation PLUTO, which laid gasoline pipelines underneath the English channel to help fuel the invasion.
The economy is contracting (thanks Biden), attacks and counterattacks in eastern Ukraine, regulation madness, and something from the 1875 crime blotter in 2022. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Note: Today’s LinkSwarm will be a bit shorter than usual because: A.) I’m off Twitter for the time being, so I’m not grabbing links there, and B.) I took the day off from work and I’m just feeling lazy.
Sure, the Biden Administration sucks on basic competence when it comes to the American economy, but to balance that, they also suck on regulation.
The Biden Administration capped off its first full year in office with more than $201 billion in regulatory costs and 131 million hours in new annual paperwork, putting it far ahead of the two immediately preceding administrations’ respective first years by a wide margin.
Actions related to vehicle emissions and COVID-19 safety measures provided the vast majority of these administrative burdens.
Additionally, in terms of executive orders issued during the first year of an administration, the 77 put forth by President Biden represent the highest number since the Ford Administration.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, and Russian forces seem to be making a slow, grinding advance on the strategic city of Severodonetsk in eastern Ukraine. “Moscow has poured thousands of troops into its assault on Severodonetsk and its sister city of Lysychansk. The twin cities, straddling the Siverskyi Donets river, have been in Russian sights for months. They currently comprise the lone Ukrainian redoubt in the Luhansk oblast.” Taking Lysychansk will require Russians to cross the Donets, previous attempts at which have been disasterous for them.
Russia has succeeded in taking Lyman, but Ukraine has launched counterattacks against the Russian forces encircling Severodonetsk.
The Texas Association of School Boards is set to leave Its parent organization, the National School Board Association, according to records obtained by Texas Scorecard.
The National School Boards Association made headlines last year following their letter to President Joe Biden and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting federal intervention in local school board meetings and referring to concerned parents as “domestic terrorists.”
It has since been revealed that the NSBA leadership urged the Biden Administration to deploy military forces in an effort to prevent parents from attending school board meetings.
Since then, parents have been calling on the state organization—the Texas Association of School Boards—to leave the organization, as more than 20 states already have.
“Professor Fired Over Tweets Questioning BLM Movement Gets Reinstated, Awarded Back Pay After Arbitrator Finds In His Favor.” “An arbitrator has ruled that a University of Central Florida professor, Charles Negy, has to be reinstated.”
Who’s been funding the attacks on Elon Musk following his Twitter bid? Would you believe Bill Gates? Of course you would. “Would you believe what perfidy Ernst Stavro Blofeld is up to this week?” Why yes, I would. The biggest difference is that Blofeld has better fashion sense and never tried to inflict Microsoft Bob on the world…
I’ll take headlines from 1875 for $400: “Loving County judge arrested for cattle theft….Loving County Judge Skeet Jones is accused of livestock theft and organized criminal activity.”
It’s been three months since Russia invaded Ukraine, and there’s more tank news coming out as the main theater has shifted to eastern Ukraine. Here’s a (mostly) video roundup of the news:
We hear a lot about Russia has 20,000 tanks (or some other crazy high number) in reserve. This guy went through satellite photos of all Russian tank storage yards and came up with an estimate of 6,000, only 3,000 of which appear as if they could be made battle ready. (A lot of the photos show hulks with their turrets off).
Did Russia’s First Tank Army lose 130 tanks in the Battle of Kharkiv alone?
Ukraine appears to have knocked out a Russian T-90M tank, the most modern Russian tank that’s actually been fielded:
(There’s still no sign of Russia’s T-14 Armata in-theater.)
Update: As of this writing, Russia has lost 729 tanks in Ukraine, and a total of 4,134 “vehicles” (including helicopters, UAVs, and even towed artillery pieces) in theater.
Is Russia demothballing T-62s to send to Ukraine?
Remember, the Soviets stopped manufacturing the T-62 in 1975, the same year that the Captain & Tennille and “Rhinestone Cowboy” topped the charts and The Rocky Horror Picture Show debuted in theaters…
Ukraine has also taken delivery of the Brimstone anti-tank missile from the UK:
Not a tank, but built on a T-72 chassis, is the Russian T-2 “Terminator,” which sports duel 30mm auto-cannons for close support of tanks in urban warfare.
That does look like it would but a world of hurt on urban defensive positions, but won’t be any more immune to NATO-sourced Ukrainian antitank weapons, and they reportedly only have a handful in-theater.
Also not a tank: Ukrainian forces take out a thermobaric (AKA “vacuum bomb”) missile launcher:
Turns out that the Russian military’s catastrophic performance in Ukraine is not a great advertisement for its weapon systems, and India is canceling some big deals.
Peter Zeihan is back with another provocative video (filmed at the Eisenhower Naval School) that suggests that China faces such massive problems that collapse may be imminent. “I see China with not just a demographic failure, but a failure of leadership, a failure of policy, an agricultural failure, and an energy failure, all at the same time. It is
entirely possible that this is the last year of the People’s Republic.”
Some of this (especially the demographic collapse) we’ve covered here before. Takeaways:
“China was already the fastest aging society in human history with the biggest sex imbalance. We already knew that their economic model would not match up with this demography this decade, we always knew that the economic collapse of China was coming.” And that was before we found China had over-counted their prime working age population by 100 million.
“I don’t see how China survives as a single political entity, much less a globally significant one. I don’t see how it survives this decade with these numbers, because this suggests that the Chinese population peaked back in 2003, and that Chinese economic efficiency probably peaked around the same time.”
Chinese labor is no longer cost-competitive with other Asian countries like Thailand or The Philippines, or Mexico. “This is the fastest labor [wage] appreciation in human history, including during the black death, including during all wars. So we’re looking at a 15-fold increase since 1999, [while] their labor effectiveness productivity is probably only increased by a factor of two, maybe three.”
“There is not an industrial process that is done in China that can’t be done in North America at a lower cost, because our labor is so much more productive, our energy is so much cheaper, our supply lines are so much shorter and you can produce stuff where people actually live.”
“The only reason we think of China as a major industrial player is because of the sunk cost of the preexisting industrial plant.”
“You don’t rebuild that somewhere else overnight. But it is happening. The United States is already in the process as its fastest industrialization, even faster than what we did during World War II.” That’s some mighty bold talk, but the U.S. population is roughly 2.5X larger than at the start of World War II.
“We probably need to double the size of our industrial plant in the next 5-10 years. That’ll be awkward, expensive, inflationary, but on the other side of it, we will have a far more insulated and secure supply chain system. The problem is just getting from here to there, and that is not a straight line.”
The Chinese plan has always been to let the Russians go first, just as a proof of concept. So their thinking was a fast war that conquers Taiwan in a matter of days, that imposes a done deal upon the world, and everyone just sucks it up and takes it, because China is too economically powerful to be challenged. And once you hold the territory, there’s no point in going to a broad scale war against the Chinese when it’s already happened. That’s always been their plan.
Oh my.
With the Russians, they have had every aspect of all of their planning for the last 40 years set on fire and burned to ash in less than a month. So number one it will not be a quick war, because Ukraine was one of the world’s less militarily competent countries in the first place…
I think this statement may have been true in 2014, but I don’t think it was true by the time Russia invaded. Ukraine professionalized and modernized their military with considerable help and guidance from western militaries, and developed a competent officer and NCO core (partially thanks to experience with the low-intensity conflict in Donbas).
…and they’re still holding out against the Russians. Taiwan has been preparing for this war since 1955. Taiwan has a moat. Taiwan has a nuclear program that started in 1974, so if we have a two-month accumulation of Chinese forces getting ready to push, the Taiwanese will see it because this is the only national security question that they pay any attention to, and they will make a nuclear device. And so the only way that the Chinese can even make an attempt on Taiwan is to text all of their soldiers at the same time and just say everyone get to the coast take a fishing boat with your buddies and start moving on Taiwan. They know it is going to cost them a million troops just to get there.
I find this scenario unlikely, and even less likely to succeed.
“Now they know from Ukraine that it’s not going to be a pushover. [Taiwan] is mountainous, it’s forested as opposed to Ukraine, which is flat and open.”
Then there are the sanctions:
Russia has many flaws, but they’re a massive producer of food and energy products. If you put the sanctions that we have put against Russia onto China, oh my. China imports 85% of their energy, 85% of that from the Persian Gulf, and they import 85% of inputs that are necessary to grow their food. So you would have an industrial collapse, a civilizational breakdown, and mass famine within six months, and then you would probably lose a half a billion Chinese over the course of the next year to famine.
Again, I think this is overstated, as there would be enough countries willing to break sanctions, and enough radical actions China could take (conquer Mongolia and parts of Siberia for farming, throw off all Pacific fishing limits, etc.) to avoid the worst case famine scenario. Not that they wouldn’t be in a world of hurt…
The one that has scared the Chinese the most are the boycotts. BP and Halliburton didn’t have to leave, they weren’t doing anything that was sanctioned, but the super majors and the oil services firms and countless other firms left on a moral imperative prompted by individual shareholders and consumers. And in China, the idea that the average Joe or Jane can influence policy is so antithetical to their mindset that they had no idea this was even possible, much less it was going to happen. So everything that the Chinese have based their system and their strategic policy on for the last 30 years has been proven in the last two months to be utterly wrong.”
My judgement of Zeihan’s analysis is that he’s more right than wrong, but has a tendency to overstate his case. Still, a worldwide inflationary spiral and energy shortage is the sort of thing that’s likely to destabilize a lot of governments worldwide, and China’s economy is built on more smoke and mirrors than most.
