The talks between the US, Japan, and the Netherlands over wider bans on exports of semiconductor technology to China have reportedly seen the three agree to concerted action.
As The Register has often chronicled, the US has restricted exports of critical chipmaking and silicon technologies to China, hoping to prevent its economic and strategic rival from developing military technologies – and to protest human rights abuses.
While the Home of the Brave has spawned many of Earth’s most significant chipmakers and designers – Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and many others have headquarters stateside – other nations also export semiconductor tech to China. The Land of the Free would rather put a stop to that if possible.
The Biden Administration also recognizes that its bans could be seen as creating an opportunity for other nations to cash in on the absence of US vendors in the Chinese market. The three-nation talks therefore have the extra dimension of making sure America’s policies have their desired effect against China and don’t harm the home team.
Those twin desires saw Japan and the Netherlands in talks with the US last week, and according to numerous reports the meetings produced a unified approach to restrict semiconductor exports to China.
Without equipment from the US, Japan and The Netherlands, you can’t equip and run a modern semiconductor fabrication plant.
Peter Zeihan (him again), who has evidently lost a bet requiring him to dress as Gimli, discusses the ramifications.
This is one case where Zeihan gets the generalities right, but is wrong on some specifics.
Right: The idea that China can just forge a complete “alternative” semiconductor supply chain out of thin air to replace western alternatives is indeed “hideously wrong.” “The nature of the semiconductor industry is more of an ecosystem. There are there’s very few places that without, significant industrial build out, could even pretend to do more than two or three steps of it, much less than a dozen or so steps that are necessary.”
However, in conflating semiconductor manufacturing and semiconductor equipment manufacturing (possibly to avoid contracting hypothermia) he’s muddied things up a bit. There are five essential semiconductor equipment manufacturers:
Applied Materials (USA)
ASML (The Netherlands)
KLA (USA)
LAM Research (USA)
Tokyo Electron (Japan)
If you’re building a modern, sub-10nm fab, chances are pretty good you need all five. You have to have an ASML EUV stepper, or else you have to go with trailing-edge machines from Canon and Nikon and deal with the computational pain and complexity of self-aligned quadruple patterning. You need KLA inspection tools to raise and maintain yields, and you need, at the very least, one of AMAT, LAM or TEL to provide the rest. Take away all three and you can’t equip a fab, period.
“We now have an agreement, and very soon the Dutch will formally be joining the sanction system against the Chinese.”
“The best [chips], these are 10 nanometer and smaller. This is typically what’s in your cell phone or in your high-end computers and servers those about 80% percent of them are actually fabricated in Taiwan, with another 20% in South Korea.” No. Although TSMC and Samsung are indeed leaders in this space, Intel has had 10nm processes running in their advanced fabs is Hillsboro and Chandler for a while, even though they’ve suffered yield problems.
His assertion that only China does legacy 90nm and above processes is false, as a look at this list of wafer fabs will attest, as there are a lot of companies (TI, TowerJazz, Oki, Mitsubishi, etc.) still profitably running older nodes, though many are comparatively funky technologies like BiCMOS, Analog, GaAs, etc.
Some quibbles about the details, but he gets the big picture right.
As for his suggestion that companies stick to over 10nm nodes, well, I don’t think much of it. Those that can do >10nm nodes will and push the technology forward, and those that can’t afford to won’t…
Democrats enabling sexual predators (yet again), more tanks for Ukraine information, and the unexpected return of Storm Drain Woman. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Published in November of 2022, the story indicated “thousands of child molesters are being let out after just a few months, despite sentencing guidelines.”
The story reported that more than 7,000 inmates convicted of “lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14 years of age” were released from prison the same year they were incarcerated.
The Daily Mail’s analysis was conducted using a database—created in 1994 after the federal Megan’s Law was passed—requiring law enforcement to make public information regarding registered sex offenders. The news organization examined data in California through July of 2019.
“Everyone should be really upset and frightened by this,” Dordulian said.
According to Dordulian, child molesters are the least likely of criminals to be rehabilitated and are four times more likely to commit the same crime again.
“Once they’re out,” he said, “they are going to re-offend and there’s going to be another child that is victimized by these people.”
Senate Bill 357. Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in July, the measure decriminalized loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution. The bill did not officially take effect until January 1 of this year; but, from the moment it became law back in July, these women say, the on-the-ground reality changed. “The minute the governor signed it, you started seeing an uptick on the streets,” Powell said. “And on social media, the pimps were saying: ‘You better get out there and work because the streets are ours.’”
The pimps were right: police stopped making arrests for crimes that would no longer be charged. The anti-loitering statute had provided the grounds for officers to question women and children whom they suspected might be trapped in a prostitution ring. “As a police officer, you need probable cause to stop and investigate,” Powell explained. “So if I have a law that says you can’t loiter in this area, with pasties and a G-string, flagging down cars, I could stop you for that because you’re loitering. But if I just say I’m stopping you because you look kind of young, that’s a little weak. So, it takes away a tool.” Without the statute, police hands were suddenly tied. Henceforth, questioning the girls—and potentially provoking a violent confrontation with pimps—came to seem a Pyrrhic gamble, one that California’s police officers would now avoid.
The films, which include “Miss Representation,” “The Mask You Live In,” “The Great American Lie” and “Fair Play,” are licensed to taxpayer-funded schools across every state and sometimes contain sexually explicit imagery and push students to feel “shame and sorrow” about American society split by privilege and oppression. They are paired with curricula that include discussion on Gov. Newsom’s comments within the films, urging them to gather their friends and vote for aligned politicians that support a “care economy” that “embraces universal human values.”
“Former Arlington teachers union president charged with embezzlement. A former president of the Arlington teachers union, who was ousted last spring, has been charged with embezzling more than $400,000 from the organization. Ingrid Gant, 54, of Woodbridge, was arrested yesterday (Monday) in Prince William County on four counts of embezzlement.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
“Thirty years ago, Guan County, Shandong Province launched the ‘Hundred Childless Days‘ campaign under the aegis of national family planning, known in the West as the ‘one-child policy.’ The birthplace of the “Boxers” was deemed to have too high a birth rate by the provincial government. County officials sought to correct this by ensuring that not a single baby was born between May 1 and August 10, 1991.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
North says they do not feel safe anymore, and she believes it all ties back to the large homeless encampment located only feet away from the salon.
“Our safety started to become a big issue. We suffered from multiple break-ins. We’ve had our cars broken into. We clean up feces and needles on a weekly basis. It increased from that to, you know, people approaching us and threatening us with weapons, threatening rape, murder, all of those things,” said North.
The salon has been up and running just off Ben White Blvd. for four years now. North says she has seen an uptick in crime for a while now, but the dangerous behavior from people living in this encampment picked up recently.
“In the past year, it’s gotten increasingly worse and, in the past couple of weeks, it’s gotten to the point where I actually finally felt like this might shut my business down,” said North.
Erin Mutschler, another co-owner of the salon, says they have called the police every time they have dealt with a situation like the one caught on video, but she says police often take 45 minutes to an hour for anyone to show up.
The mayorship of Steve Adler is the gift that just keeps giving, even with him out of office… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Follow-up: Democratic State Rep. Harold Dutton: “Don’t Blame Abbott, Houston ISD Takeover Plan Was My Idea.” (Previously.)
A Florida woman was pulled from a storm drain for the third time in two years. Maybe she was looking for David Icke’s lizard people. Also, she sounds like a real winner: “Police said her license had been suspended 17 times from 2007 to 2020.” (Previously.) (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Jay Leno broke his collarbone, several ribs and both kneecaps in a motorcycle accident. But it sounds like a freak accident: “So I turned down a side street and cut through a parking lot, and unbeknownst to me, some guy had a wire strung across the parking lot but with no flag hanging from it…I didn’t see it until it was too late. It just clothesline me and, boom, knocked me off the bike.” (There’s no evidence the line was strung there by Conan O’Brien.) “But I’m OK!…I’m working this weekend.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Due to issues of politics, congestion, or just plain corruption, nations get the bright idea to build brand new capital cities far away from existing urban areas. Sometimes it works out (as with Washington D.C.), and sometimes it doesn’t. China’s Xi Jinping is trying something different with Xiongan, which is being built not so much a replacement to Beijing but as sort of “mini-me” Beijing to relieve overcrowding by offloading functions to the new built-from-scratch city in Hebei* province.
About 60 miles south of the center of Beijing, a new city is being built as a showcase of high-tech ecologically friendly development. Its massive high-speed rail station and “city brain” data center have been heralded by Chinese state media as evidence of the speed and superiority of China’s growth model—not least because the city is a “signature initiative” of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Commies (and their American fans) do love their high speed rail projects. Never mind that high speed rail in China has mostly been a trillion dollar, money losing sinkhole.
Xiongan New Area is also a test for whether China can boost domestic innovation and climb into the ranks of advanced nations in the face of slowing economic growth and efforts by the United States and others to restrict its access to advanced technology.
Xiongan offers a window into what Xi’s vision of state-led innovation looks like on the ground. Xi has called the city his “personal initiative” and a qiannian daji, or “thousand-year plan of national significance.”
You know who else had a thousand year plan?
Sorry, I just can’t resist a good Hitler meme when you pitch a slow ball right over the center of the plate…
The plan for Xiongan, which was formally unveiled in 2017 to relieve pressure on Beijing and promote the “coordinated regional development” of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, has faced financial struggles due to the huge investment costs—even more of a problem given China’s mounting real estate crisis. Overall, the new area encompasses about 650 square miles, with a planned population of around 3 million; currently, the three counties comprising the zone have around 1.4 million long-term residents. As of September 2022, 400 billion yuan (about $57 billion) in completed investment had been reported in the city overall.
While Xi has stacked the new Politburo Standing Committee with officials loyal to him, he has also elevated those with strong science and engineering backgrounds. In his speech at the 20th Party Congress last October, Xi declared that “innovation will remain at the heart of China’s modernization drive” and that China has “worked hard to promote high-quality development and pushed to foster a new pattern of development.” Nevertheless, a confluence of factors including COVID-19 lockdowns and trade tensions is contributing to overall slower growth in China.
In Xi’s vision, however, party control is not a hindrance to innovation. Rather, Xi’s vision of innovation is one in which the state and party play a leading role. Xi has led a crackdown on private technology firms such as Alibaba but has also promoted policies, such as his Made in China 2025, that aim to boost research-and-development spending and subsidies to give Chinese firms competitive advantages in industries including biotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and semiconductors.
We know from experience that this approach almost never works, because the profit motive of capitalism is always a superior discovery mechanism for innovation than top-down bureaucratic mandates. We know that the state-led approach has already been a colossal failure for semiconductors even before the sanctions came down, and it’s a good bet that it’s been just as colossal a failure in all the other areas mentioned.
Xi’s policies favor “hard tech” over software-based platform app companies. The first party secretary of Xiongan was Chen Gang, who oversaw Beijing’s Zhongguancun high-tech park before being transferred to Guizhou, where under Xi ally Chen Miner he helped turn the southwestern province into a center of big data and cloud computing.
The approach to innovation in Xiongan involves embedding technology within the fabric of the city as well as innovation processes within the party-state. Xiongan Group was created as the investment vehicle for the area’s overall development, under the control of Hebei province but backed partially by loans from China Development Bank. The first central state-owned enterprises to begin construction of offices in the new area were China Satellite Communications Co., the energy giant China Huaneng Group, and Sinochem Holdings. Others now include the big three telecoms and China State Grid, as well as China Mineral Resources Group, a conglomerate set up last year to centralize China’s coal mining industry. These state-owned enterprises could use Xiongan as a test bed for new technologies. Research institutes and satellite branches of several Beijing universities are planning to open in the area around 2025. The relocation of these major units and their thousands of employees will determine how quickly Xiongan’s development proceeds.
Even as China’s economy has slowed during COVID-19 lockdowns and the global downturn, construction of the first phase of Xiongan has marched on: A huge high-speed rail station to connect the city with Beijing opened in 2020, followed by residential slabs, massive underground utility corridors, and the city brain data center, which will serve as the nerve center of the city’s digital systems. The first section, Rongdong, has been mostly completed, with housing for 170,000 people. Media reports of new schools opening show the effort to build high-quality public amenities to attract residents to the city: Branches of Beijing institutions such as Shijia Primary School and Tsinghua University High School are among the new educational institutions being built in Xiongan.
The Foreign Policy piece is OK as a sort of sanitized, high level overview, but lacks several key words (“shoddy,” “rotten,” “unsafe,” “tofu dregs,” etc.) that reflect the grittier reality of Xi Jinping’s dream:
Takeaways:
“This is arguably the world’s biggest rotten tail project.”
“The project, which was billed as a Millennium Project and a major national event, fell apart after only five years.”
“According to the official website of Xiongan New Area, in 2021 the area arranged more than 230 key projects with a planned investment of more than 200 billion RMB. In 2022, 232 key projects were arranged with an investment of another 200 billion RMB and the cumulative total investment has exceeded 700 billion RMB, i.e. nearly 100 billion US dollars.”
Add area rail and road infrastructure investments and the total rises to $150 billion.
“Located 105 kilometers from both Beijing and Tianjin, the new area is positioned to decongest Beijing’s non-capital functions and will host administrative and institutional units, corporate head offices financial institutions, universities, research institutes and other organizations evacuated from Beijing.” I bet workers who have already gone through the expensive and difficult process of buying their own condos in Beijing will just love being forced to move an hour away.
“The initial planning area is about 100 square kilometers, with plans to slowly expand to an eventual area of about 2,000 square kilometers.” 2,000 square kilometers works out to about 772 square miles, or larger than Houston, one of America’s most sprawling cities.
“Average folks have wondered why did the central government put this new area…in a sparsely populated and heavily polluted poor rural area.”
The idea seems to be to bring Beijing, Tianjin and Xiongan into a single economic circle with a population of 130 million.
Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao each decreed creation of their own special areas, and Xi is following in their footsteps.
After the new area was announced, “real estate speculators from all over the country flocked overnight. The local property price soared from 4 000 RMB per square meter to 40,000 RMB, catching up with the first tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.”
There was an explosion of construction, but then it stopped.
“For more than five years, the large-scale construction of the Xiongan New Area didn’t move. The streets were empty, and people from outside had left one after another.”
A high speed rail station said to be the largest in Asia the size of “66 soccer stadiums” has only one train a day.
“In August 2021, the CCP issued a regulation that downgraded Xiongan to a regional level jurisdiction.” So instead of being it’s own special area, it’s now run by Hebei province, which means “this ‘Millennium Project’ is no longer possible, and the central government has simply dumped this hot potato on the local government.”
Official use words like “expedite, start construction, registering land, basically confirmed, etc didn’t explain any more specific progress. This actually allowed the public to read its true meaning, that is there is no substantial progress.”
The same pagoda seems to have been constructed several times.
“No one wants to go there at all. Even if you force them out of Beijing, they still don’t want to go there. There are no actions from the universities either.”
Chinese people think the area has bad “Feng Shui,” and it’s in a low-lying area near a lake that used to be flooded. The local lake and river also have very poor water quality. “However, the [water] treatment project hasn’t yet been completed.”
“Xiongan New Area is like building a mansion in a garbage dump, and people don’t want to live there.”
“More than five years later, no decent state-owned enterprises have really moved to Xiongan.”
“Given China’s objection to objective reality, the only way to make people move to Xiongan is by force. This is what happened in 2017, when the Beijing government forcibly evicted the so-called low-end population and people took to the streets in protest.”
Shenzhen New Area benefited from China’s opening, foreign investment and proximity to Hong Kong. “The dysfunctional mechanism of the CCP which had suppressed economic momentum for decades was released at the moment when the country opened its doors, so that Shenzhen could rise with the momentum.”
By contrast, Xiongan suffers from global economic headwinds and local finances are “very poor.”
Banks poured money into the area, accompanied by corruption. Natives forced out of their homes got low compensation and the new homes were shoddy. Many still haven’t found new homes.
“Videos provided by local residents show that the most common problems with homes are water leaks cracked exterior walls and sinking floors in some homes water leaked all over the floor.” A video shows a stairway turning into a waterfall during heavy rain.
It’s hard to find on Google maps, but I think this spot shows the same cookie cutter buildings seen in the video.
Ghost city, tofu dregs, rotten tail; parts of Xiongan seem to check all three boxes.
*Note: Hebei Province is completely different from Hubei Province further south…
The true character and scope of the harm caused by the unprecedented mass vaccinations for COVID-19 is just now beginning to become clear. Leading scientific journals have finally begun publishing data corroborating what the underground research community has observed over the last two years, especially in relation to complex problems of immune suppression.
Truly concerning numbers pertaining to both births and mortality are also emerging.
At this moment in time, a new, allegedly super-infectious Omicron variant is all over the headlines. A sub-variant of XXB, this strain is said to possess immune escape capabilities of precisely the type that some independent researchers predicted would follow on the heels of the mass vaccinations’ narrow antigenic fixation.
The WHO maintains that worldwide, 10,000 people still die due to Covid every single day, an implausible death toll more than ten times that of an average flu. It reiterates the urgent need for vaccinations, especially in light of China’s reopening and allegedly falsified data on mortality and infections.
The EU has even called an emergency summit in light of the purported Chinese “Covid chaos” that “calls to mind how everything began in Wuhan, three years ago”.
In Sweden, the Minister for Health and Social Affairs has said he cannot rule out new restrictions, and states that everyone must take “their three doses”, since “only” 85% of the population is ‘fully inoculated’.
That such an extensive vaccine coverage has not yielded better results after nearly two years is a remarkable fact. Even more so in light of some individuals receiving four or more repeated exposures to the same vaccine antigen, yet still contracting the disease they are supposedly immunised against.
At the same time, even more ominous warning signs abound.
One such warning sign is the fact that average mortality in many Western states is still at a remarkably high level, in spite of the direct effects of the coronavirus being marginal for more than a year. Data from EuroMOMO indicate a marked excess mortality in the EU for all of 2022, and the German Bureau of Statistics reports that the country’s mortality in October was more than 19% over the median value of the preceding years.
Is this due to Covid, as the WHO’s ’10 000 per day’ figure would seem to indicate?
Blame is placed at the feet of ‘Long Covid‘ as well as the regular acute infections, but according to the EuroMOMO and Our World in Data stats, the bulk of the excess deaths in Europe during 2022 are actually not due to clinically manifest coronavirus infections.
Moreover, we shouldn’t see continued excess deaths from a respiratory virus of this kind after three years of global exposure due to the inevitable consolidation of natural immunity.
If such a situation persists, the hypothetical connection to a vaccine-related immunity suppression that just now has come into focus becomes pertinent to investigate in detail.
If, as has been argued, the vaccinations, and especially the boosters, alter the immune profile of recipients such that Covid infections get ‘tolerated’ by the immune system, it’s possible that vaccinated individuals will tend towards a situation of long-term, repeat infections that do not get cleared, and do not present with obvious symptoms, while still promoting systemic damage.
The literature now indicates an extensive substitution in the vaccinated of virus-neutralising antibodies for non-inflammatory ones, a ‘class switch’ from antibodies that work towards clearing the virus from our system, to a category of antibodies whose purpose is to desensitise us to irritants and allergens.
The net effect is that the inflammatory response to Covid infection gets down-regulated (reduced). This means that full-blown infections will present with milder symptoms, and that they won’t get cleared as effectively (partly since fever and inflammation are essential to your body getting rid of a pathogen).
That these developments alone aren’t cause for an immediate halt to the mass vaccinations, as well as thorough investigations, is astonishing.
There is of course another, and more well-known, potential partial explanation of the surprising excess mortality. We have indications of clotting disorders connected to the Covid vaccines, evident in a new major Nordic study, while repeated studies evidence a clear correlation between heart disease and Covid vaccination (see Le Vu et al., Karlstad et al. and Patone et al.).
A newly published Thai study moreover indicated that almost a third of the vaccinated youth enrolled exhibited cardiovascular manifestations, and a yet unpublished Swiss study suggests that as many as 3% of everyone vaccinated manifest heart muscle damage.
Oh, you’re serious? Let me laugh even harder. “San Francisco panel urges reparations of $5 million per black adult.”
“The embezzlement and fake kidnapping were part of the unraveling of a coal company called Signal Peak Energy that also involved bribery, cocaine trafficking, firearms violations, worker safety and environmental infringements, a network of shell companies, a modern-day castle, an amputated finger and past links to President Vladimir Putin of Russia.” There’s also a weird part…
Virginia rejects Ford battery plant plans over commie ties. “Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who is a potential Republican candidate for the office of US President in 2024, rejected the $3.6 billion investment because it involved a partnership with China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., better known as CATL.” Hey Ford, have you considered possibly not teaming up with commies?
The rich world was a population column from [as opposed to a pyramid] 1945 to 1992, and with the end of the Cold War, the developing world became a column in 1992 until now. The problem is that this is all temporary, because birth rate keeps dropping. People keep living older and your column eventually inverts into an open pyramid upside down. And now you no longer have children, you no longer have a replacement generation at all, and there aren’t enough people in their 20s and 30s to buy everything, and there aren’t enough people in their 40s and 50s to pay for the retirees. So this decade was always going to be the decade that most of the advanced world moves into mass retirement, and the economic model collapses, and next decade was always going to be the decade that that happened to the developing world.
“The Chinese have jumped the ship and this is their last decade, too.”
“We now know that they’ve lied about their population statistics and they’re they over counted their population by over 100 million people, all of whom would have been born since the one child policy was adopted. So this is one of those places where they’ve got more people in their 60s and their 50s and their 40s and their 30s and their 20s.”
“Mao was concerned that as the country was modernizing, the birth rate wasn’t dropping fast enough, and that the young generation was literally going to eat the country alive. So they went through a breakneck urbanization program which destroyed the birth rate, at the same time they penalized anyone who wanted to have kids, and both of those at the same time have generated the demographic collapse we’re in now.”
The male to female sex ratio in China was bad before, and now it’s obviously worse.
“Without young people, we’ve seen their labor costs increase by a factor of 14 since the year 2000, so Mexican labor is now one-third the cost of Chinese labor. Their educational system focuses on memorization over skills, so despite a trillion dollars of investment in a bottomless supply of intellectual property theft, they really haven’t advanced technologically in the last 15 years. Mexican labor is probably about twice as skilled as Chinese labor now, even though it’s one-third the cost.”
“They’ve consolidated into an ethnic-based paranoid nationalistic cult of
personality, and it’s very difficult for the XI Administration to even run it, because it’s not an administration anymore no one wants to bring Xi information on anything.”
The Biden Administration has adopted the Trump Administration’s trade policies on China.
“They now have tech barricades that prevent the Chinese from buying the equipment, the tools or the software that’s necessary to make semiconductors. In fact, [Biden] went so far as to say any Americans working in the sector have to either quit or give up their American citizenship. Every single one of them either quit or was transferred abroad within 24 hours.”
“They’re completely dependent on the U.S Navy to access international trade, they are the most vulnerable country in the world right now. And based on how things go with Russia, we’re looking at a significant amount of raw materials falling off the map, specifically food and energy, and the Chinese are the world’s largest importer of both of those things. So there’s no version of this where China comes through looking good.”
“Say what you will about the Russian economy (it’s corrupt, it’s inefficient, it’s not very high value-add), but it’s a massive producer and exporter of food and energy. You put the sanctions that are on the Russians on Beijing and you get a de-industrialization collapse and a famine that kills 500 million people in under a year.”
“Even if the Chinese were able to capture Taiwan without firing a shot, it doesn’t solve anything for them. They’re still food importers, they’re still dependent on the United States, they’re still energy importers. And even if they take every single one of those semiconductor fab facilities intact, they don’t know how to operate them, because they can’t operate their own, their own are among the worst in the world.”
“One of the fun things about Russia versus China right now is that the Russian information security is so poor that American intelligence is literally listening on everything, but in China we can hear into the office but there are no conversations happening.” I suggest taking both these revelations with a few grains of salt. Maybe Zeihan has great sources in the intelligence community, or maybe Zeihan’s great sources are lying.
Plus more on how Xi has killed or exiled any possible challenger to his power, and how they’re now having a massive Flu Manchu outbreak. “Their overall health is worse than ours, diabetes as a percentage of the population is higher, they don’t have a critical care system like we have, and their hospitals are really their only line of defense.”
Next: Why EVs are a disaster.
“All kinds of people think I’m full of shit!”
Rogan: “What is your perspective on EVS?” Zeihan: “They’re not nearly
as good on carbon as people think. Most of the data that exists doesn’t take into the fact that most of this stuff is processed in China where it’s all coal doesn’t take [into account] the fact that most grids they run out are also majority fossil fuels. And that extends the break-even time for carbon from one year to either five or ten based on what model you’re talking. Cyber trucks are far worse than EVs, but the bigger problems we’re just not going to be able to make them much longer.”
To electrify everything “We need twice as much copper and four times as much chromium and four times as much nickel and ten times as much lithium, and so on. We have never, ever, in any decade in human history, doubled the amount of a mainline material production in ten years, ever, and we need all of this by 2030. No, it’s just not technically possible.”
Zeihan says California’s mandates for phasing out gasoline by 2035 aren’t quite as bad as they seem, as the bureaucracy has the ability to move the goal posts if they prove to be unfeasible. Pardon me if I’m not sold on the beneficent rationality of California’s hard left bureaucracy.
Speaking of things I’m skeptical of:
There is a fascinating discussion happening in the environmental community right now, because they’re being confronted with reality. So California and Germany have very similar Green Tech policies, but the Germans have spent three times as much as California, but are only getting about a fifth as much power. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Germany, but the sun doesn’t shine in Germany. And now, with the Russians on the warpath and their clean-ish energy from natural gas going away, they’re going back to lignite coal in force. It was already their number one source of power. The idea that Germany’s green is ridiculous, because they rely on really, really dirty coal, now especially. But there’s now a conversation going on between the German environmentalists and the Californian environmentalists about why California, in relative terms of doing so well at this, while Germany is not. And the answer is simple geography, but that’s never been part of the conversation in the environmental community before. Now it is. They should have had this conversation 15-20 years ago, but they’re having it now. And as soon as they come to the conclusion, unwillingly but they’ll get there, that we have to choose where we put our copper and our lithium and our nickle, EVs are not going to make the cut.
This assumes that California environmentalists are susceptible to the sweet voice of reason, and that modern environmentalism isn’t half religion and half scam. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” California’s Democratic power establishment has shown an amazing propensity to impose radical solutions that bring obvious and immediate harm to people that are not them. Why should they worry about forcing other people to buy pricey EVs when they already have theirs?
Next up: The drug war, both here and in Mexico.
Rogan starts by noting that marijuana legalization in California led to cartels planting massive amounts of weed in national forests, and suddenly guys who were game wardens are now wearing tactical gear and carrying machine guns.
“I think the mafia is a great example for why you shouldn’t look for the silver bullet [of drug legalization], because, yes, that in the 1920s during prohibition, was one of the big reasons it got going, but the mafia didn’t waste any time in diversifying and neither have the cartels.”
“They’ve gotten into cargo theft and kidnapping and avocados and limes and real estate and local government.”
“Now the attractiveness of gutting them of some of their primary income. Should we look at that? Of course! But it’s not so simple as removing one and it just all stops.”
“The challenge we’re seeing in Mexico right now is that the, uh, the air quotes “good” cartel the, one that saw drugs as a business, is being broken up. If you remember El Chapo—” Rogan: “That’s the good cartel?” Zeihan: “Sinaloa cartel, yeah. He thought of himself as a Korean conglomerate president. So it was like ‘We smuggle drugs. That’s our business. You don’t mess with things that mess with the business. You don’t trip the old lady, you don’t steal her purse, you don’t shoot at the cops. These are people who live where we operate, we want them to be on our side, so maybe even throw a party every once in a while. You focus on the business.'”
“The replacement cartel is Jalisco New Generation, They’re led by a former Mexican military officer who thinks that rather than don’t shit where you sleep so that the people on your side whenever you move into a town, you shoot it up. You do kick over the old lady, you do take her purse, you make the people scared of you, that’s the point of this. Drug running is a side gig.”
“We are here to be powerful, and drug running is just one of the ways we make that happen. And he has taken the fight to every cartel and the Mexican government, and they’re in the process of trying to break into the United States.”
“El Chapo and the Sinaloa became the largest drug trafficking organization in America under the Obama Administration. And one of the reasons our birth rate went down, so far so fast is they basically either co-opted or killed American gangs. So they killed the people who were doing the killing. Not a lot of Americans got killed after that.” I think he meant to say murder rate.
“All of the other cartels control the access points in the United States, but
Jalisco New Generation now is challenging every single one of them trying to break through. And if they do, and they bring their business acumen, if you will north of the border, they’re going to start killing white chicks named Sheila in Phoenix and then we’re gonna have a very different conversation.”
“Sinaloa they co-opted the Hispanic gangs, especially the Mexican gangs, because there wasn’t a language barrier there, and they really targeted and gutted a lot of the African-American gangs. They took over drug smuggling and distribution from them to deny them income and then they just shot a lot of people…it was pretty much completed by the time we got to 2013.”
“Look at the violent crime rates in the United States, they’ve been trending down really significantly since about 2004 and the drop from 2004 to roughly 2014 was amazing. That’s largely Sinaloa.”
And now all the cartels are fighting and the murder rate in Mexico is skyrocketing.
He’s not a fan of legalizing cocaine:
Also says that cartels are now laundering money via marijuana dispensaries using the federal reserve.
And he’s not a fan of Crypto:
Bonus: “Maxine Waters is not exactly the brightest person in congress.”
“Every few months to couple of years, a new conventional wisdom takes hold that the United States is in its final years, if not final months, and some big political thing is going to happen that is going to dethrone the US dollar as the global currency, and all American power will unwind with that. There is no part of that logic chain that has ever been correct.”
Some takeaways:
U.S power is not a result of its position as the global currency, it’s the other way around. The global currency has to be able to impose, by force if necessary, some sort of taxpax on the trading system to allow trade to happen in the first place. And right now the U.S Navy is more powerful than that of all other navies combined by about a factor of seven. And if you consider that the world’s second and third most powerful expeditionary navies are the Japanese fleet and the British fleet, and you throw them in as American for this Force projection factor, you’re now talking in excess of 12 to 1.
“Honestly, there’s there’s never been any math there and there’s no danger to the U.S. position from a strategic point of view.”
“BRICs is a group of four large developing economies: Brazil, Russia, India and China. It’s a grouping that was put together by some finance guy back in the 2000s, and all he meant by it was ‘Hey, look, these are four big countries with big bond markets we might want to consider trading these as a group.’ That’s all he ever thought about it.”
“The leaders of the BRICs countries do get together from time to time. [No]
meaningful policy has ever come out of it, because these countries don’t really trade. I mean they all trade with China, of course, but they don’t trade with one another, so there’s a reason to caucus with Beijing, but the rest of it is just kind of fluff. Always has been.”
“When I see stories about other countries such as South Africa, or Argentina, or now Saudi Arabia starting to join, I’m like ‘Oh, this is really boring.’ Because these countries really have nothing in common.”
“The conspiratorial logic goes: If they stop using the U.S. dollar, then the US is doomed. Well they’d have to start using something else, and none of them, none of them, want to use each other’s currencies, because that would give that country a leg up.”
“The Russians have always said that the ruble should be the global currency, which makes everyone, everyone laugh, because nobody wants rubles, especially Russians.”
Same for the Yuan and the Rand.
“If you want to have a Global Currency it has to be huge. It has to be able enough to lubricate the global exchange mechanisms, which at last check was in the tens of trillions. And that doesn’t mean that your currency has to be in the tens of trillions, that means you have to be able to lubricate the exchange of tens of trillions, your currency needs to be even bigger.”
Which gets us to probably the single biggest constraint on being a global currency: you have to not care what happens to the value of your currency in any given day, because if there’s a trade surge and demand of your currency goes up, then all of a sudden supply of your currency is plummeted, and you’re dealing with very real economic distortions at home. So your currency has to be so huge that you don’t care that global exchange in it is moving around every day. And that means you also need to be able to run a persistent trade deficit, because you have to be able to provide currency for everyone who wants to trade everywhere at any time, and you cannot sign off on each individual transaction.
“That makes the list down to one already.”
“Europeans couldn’t do it, because they have to run a trade surplus because their demographics are so aged they will never be net importers again.”
“It can’t be the Chinese. The Chinese are the most manipulated currency in human history. They print two to five times as much currency every month as the U.S Fed did at the height of our monetization programs in 2007 to 2008, and then again during Covid. It’s everything that everyone says is wrong with the US dollar is actually wrong with the Yuan by a factor of 10.”
“Every time the Chinese start to loosen up their capital controls in an attempt to have a bigger role for their currency internationally, a half a trillion to a trillion dollars of private savings floods out of the country in a matter of months, and they have to slam that window shut again.”
Even in times of war, countries tend to use the dominate global currency for international trade, even if issued by their current enemy.
“The Russians are under financial constraints right now, sanctions put on them by the Americans the Europeans and others, and so they tried to pull a lot of their petroleum earnings, which comes in in euros and dollars, and they tried to push it into Chinese yuan as kind of like a stick it to the West. Well, a few months later they tried to then pull it out, and the Chinese went like ‘Well, no, we really don’t want these Yuan back.’ And so the Russians just lost tens of billions of dollars.”
In a post-globalist economy, American dollars provide a handy hedge against regional hegemons.
“There’s no shortage of people who don’t like Americans, who have no sense of math or history, who are always going to trot this up every few months, and it means as little today as it did then.”
Democrats being soft on criminals, pedophiles and common sense highlights this week’s LinkSwarm.
Man, there sure seems to be a lot of funny number counting going on in Philadelphia.
Regular readers are well aware that back in July, Zero Hedge first (long before it became a running theme among so-called “macro experts”) pointed out that a gaping 1+ million job differential had opened up between the closely-watched and market-impacting, if easily gamed and manipulated, Establishment Survey and the far more accurate if volatile, Household Survey – the two core components of the monthly non-farm payrolls report.
We first described this divergence in early July, when looking at the June payrolls data, we found that the gap between the Housing and Establishment Surveys had blown out to 1.5 million starting in March when “something snapped.” We described this in “Something Snaps In The US Labor Market: Full, Part-Time Workers Plunge As Multiple Jobholders Soar.”
Since then the difference only got worse, and culminated earlier this month when the gap between the Establishment and Household surveys for the November dataset nearly doubled to a whopping 2.7 million jobs, a bifurcation which we described in “Something Is Rigged: Unexplained, Record 2.7 Million Jobs Gap Emerges In Broken Payrolls Report.”
Snip.
We bring all this up again because late on Dec 13, the Philadelphia Fed published something shocking: as part of the regional Fed’s quarterly reassessment of payrolls in the form of an “early benchmark revision of state payroll employment”, the Philly Fed confirmed what we have been saying since July, namely that US payrolls are overstated by at least 1.1 million, and likely much more!
And the correction came after the midterms! What are the odds?
The Royal Bahamas Police Force took the failed financial tech entrepreneur into custody after the U.S. filed criminal charges against him, according to a press statement. FTX, which Bankman-Fried founded, imploded in November, costing investors millions of dollars in losses. The fallen businessman has been accused of misusing customer funds deposited with FTX to artificially prop up another one of his enterprises: a crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research, which he operated simultaneously while seemingly evading financial ethics scrutiny.
Speaking of abusing children: “Former CNN Producer Pleads Guilty In Pedo Scandal. Former CNN producer John Griffin, who worked ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with Chris Cuomo, pleaded guilty on Monday in federal court to using interstate commerce to entice and coerce a 9-year-old girl to engage in sexual activity as his Vermont ski house. This is a different CNN pedophile than Jake Tapper’s former producer, Rick Saleeby, who resigned after it emerged that he solicited sexually explicit photos of an underage girl.”
The mother of an 11-year-old rape victim is suing a George-Soros backed prosecutor in Virginia who let the boy’s rapist walk free, alleging the prosecutor’s actions violated the minor’s civil rights and made him fear for his physical safety.
Amber Reel in November filed the federal lawsuit on behalf of her son after Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano (D.) let the rapist walk. Court filings show Descano was months late in sharing necessary evidence before a September trial, dooming the case and forcing his office to enter into a lesser plea deal with the rapist the same month. Ronnie Reel, who was released on time served, had faced life in prison for forcibly sodomizing the minor. Reel is the victim’s uncle.
This is the second high-profile case in the last month where the Soros prosecutor freed a dangerous offender. In December, Descano struck a plea deal that would clear the record of a man who fired his gun into a crowded Virginia bar. Soros donated more than half a million dollars to Descano’s 2019 campaign.
A grand jury had already indicted Reel in February for sodomy and aggravated sexual battery, and the case was set for trial in September. But Descano’s office didn’t share evidence with the public defender before trial, bungling Reel’s prosecution with its “woefully, woefully missed” deadlines. The case’s presiding judge said Descano’s office did a “disservice to the victim” and was “very concerning to the court.”
Because he dodged a felony sex crime conviction, Reel won’t have to register as a sex offender and won’t be barred from holding jobs in schools or other places that would put him near children. The victim and his mother in their suit say Descano’s “deliberate indifference represents egregious conduct that is shocking to the conscience.”
Speaking of pedophile friendly Democrats: “During the hearing before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, California [Democratic] Rep. Katie Porter asserted that the phrase “groomer” is a “lie” used to maliciously discriminate against LGBTQ+ people and make them appear to be a “threat.” “You know, this allegation of ‘groomer’ and ‘pedophile,’ it is alleging that a person is criminal somehow and engaged in criminal acts merely because of their gender identity, their sexual orientation, their gender identity.” Yes, if your “gender identity” is “I like to have sex with children,” then yes, you’re a pedophile, and if you tell elementary school children what sort of sex you have, then yes, you’re a groomer.
Former state Sen. Kirk Watson (D-Austin) will be the next mayor of Austin about two decades after he left that same office in the early aughts.
He defeated state Rep. Celia Israel (D-Austin) by a slim margin after finishing second in the general election. He’ll serve as mayor for the next two years before having to seek re-election in 2024 due to redistricting.
Watson lost Travis County, the city’s largest portion, by 17 votes while winning Williamson county by 881 and Hays County by 22. During the general and runoff races, he outspent Israel by a wide margin.
The two candidates sparred over housing and homeless policy during the general election and the runoff. About one-third of the voting population turned out to vote in the runoff versus the November 8 general.
Watson will take over for Mayor Steve Adler after his self-described “disruptive” tenure marked by a lingering homelessness problem, public fallout and a declining relationship with the police department, and a cumbersome and increasingly costly light rail transit project.
The United States has always had kind of a friends and family plan that it sells military gear to, but it has always reserved the very top top top stuff for itself and the Brits. Well, in this calendar year we have already seen the first two exceptions to that policy being made. The United States is sending air-launch cruise missiles and nuclear-powered submarines to the Australians. And now we’re giving Tomahawks to the Japanese, giving both of these countries the ability to independently destroy China’s economic links to the wider world without any additional help from the United States. And this sudden proliferation of countries that can now bring China to their knees independently, this is arguably the biggest strategic development of the Year, even more so than the Ukraine war, because it takes what has become the world’s second largest economy and puts it completely at the mercy of the domestic politics of a third party, and now a fourth party.
Oberlin College finally pays their judgment to Gibson’s Bakery. “The $25 million verdict plus interest and attorney’s fees resulted in an almost $32 million judgment, with interest running at about $4000 per day since June 2019. In all, over $36 million was owed.” Cudos to William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection for his thorough, ongoing coverage of this story from beginning to end.
F-35B fighter crashes in the Metroplex. Fortunately the pilot safely ejected, and it appears that the airplane (which was undergoing testing for Lockheed) looks recoverable. To my untrained eye it looks like a stuck throttle.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I still haven’t had time to wrangle all those Twitter revelations into a coherent article, so that will have to wait for another post.
How different it feels this time around. Broadcasters are lustily cheering anti-lockdown protesters in China. Members of Congress offer unqualified support. President Joe Biden, although more guarded, is sympathetic.
No Western politician, as far as I can see, is insulting the protesters. They are not dismissed as selfish or sociopathic, nor as dupes of conspiracy theories. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) captured the mood: “To the people of China — we hear you and we stand with you as you fight for your freedom.”
Broadcasters and columnists who spent 2020 calling anti-lockdowners kooks and criminals are now uncomplicatedly applauding their Chinese counterparts. They see ordinary people standing up against an authoritarian government the anti-COVID policies of which were crushing liberty.
So, what changed? Perhaps pundits tell themselves that the disease is less virulent now, or that vaccination has altered the balance of risk, or that, in some other way, Beijing’s crackdown is less proportionate than those of 2020. But none of these explanations stacks up.
Yes, the coronavirus became less lethal. All viruses that spread through human contact eventually become less lethal because they have an evolved tendency to want to keep their hosts up and active and therefore more infectious. For this to happen, they require a critical mass. Enough people need to be incapacitated or killed by the original version to give milder strains an advantage. And, yes, the vaccines helped, too.
But the trade-offs are essentially the same in China today as they were three years ago — coronavirus deaths versus other deaths. The current unrest was sparked by a fire in Xinjiang, which was allowed to become needlessly deadly because the authorities were following COVID protocols. In other words, they were elevating COVID above other forms of harm.
Most countries did the same in 2020 with, as we now see, disastrous results. The lockdowns did not just cause an economic meltdown from which we will take years to recover. They also failed on their own terms. They killed more people than they saved.
Guess which developed country had the lowest excess mortality between 2020 and 2022. Go on, have a guess. That’s right. Sweden, which refused to close shops or schools or to impose a mask mandate, saw cumulative excess deaths rise by 6.8%, the lowest figure in the OECD. By way of comparison, the equivalent figures were 18% in Australia, 24.5% in the U.K., and 54.1% in the U.S.
“Loudoun County Fires Superintendent over Handling of Sexual-Assault Cases. The Loudoun County school board fired Superintendent Scott Ziegler in a closed-door meeting Tuesday night after a special grand jury released a report blaming the district for failing to escalate cases of student sexual assault in 2021.” The black-pilled who proclaim that electing Republicans is useless aren’t considering the Glenn Youngkins of the world.
he Washington Post announced in October that it was welcoming a new communications chief. The paper’s official announcement lauded Kathy Baird, a veteran of Nike and the public relations giant Ogilvy, as a “key strategic partner” positioned to “realize our ambitious vision for the publication.”
It also noted her membership in the “Rosebud Sioux Tribe” and service on the board of IllumiNative, which it described as “a nonprofit working for accurate and authentic portrayal of Native people.”
That’s one way to put it. IllumiNative is a self-described “racial justice organization” funded by a dark money behemoth that encourages elementary school students to fight for Democratic Party initiatives like universal health care. Its purpose is similar to various far-left activist groups, focusing on “breaking through systems of white supremacy” and “grassroots organizing,” according to IllumiNative’s website.
Argentina’s Vice President (and former President, and former First Lady) and leftwing Paronist Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is sentenced to six years of corrupt fraud.
Paralympian: “Hey, can I get a wheelchair ramp?” Veterans Affairs Canada: “Are you sure you wouldn’t like assisted suicide instead?” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“Suspended Smith County Constable [Curtis Harris] Found Guilty of Theft, Official Oppression. Since his indictment, the 34-year-old Democrat has been jailed for violating the conditions of his bond and removed from office by a judge.” Smith County is in northeast Texas, and the biggest city is Tyler. Not to be confused with Deaf Smith County, which is completely different…
Great Pyrenees watchdog fights off 11 coyotes, killing eight. Good boy! I didn’t realize there were coyotes in Georgia, but evidently they’ve been extending their range from the southwest.
Ordinary Chinese have gotten so fed up with the endless Flu Manchu lockdowns that they’ve started mass protests in multiple cities, even going so far as to demand the CCP and Xi Jinping step down.
Some commenters have even suggested that a revolution is the offing. I’ve seen too many hopeful shoots of Democracy crushed in not only China, but also Iran, Russia, Venezuela, etc. to have much optimism on this front. It would be nice to be proved wrong.
So how are Chinese communist authorities fighting the movement? Would you believe with pornbots?
As Chinese citizens take to the streets to protest the county’s “Zero Covid” policies and President Xi Jinping’s lockdowns, searches for names of cities and hashtags regarding the protests on Twitter have been filled with sexually explicit posts and ads for escorts to reportedly block out news of the massive protests.
Searches for the names of major Chinese cities have resulted in a massive spike in content for porn, escorts, and gambling, “drowning out legitimate search results,” wrote Twitter user Air-Moving Device. The account shared a chart showing a massive spike in the number of accounts posting such content on November 28. “Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a significantuptick in these spam tweets.”
For example, searching for the Chinese characters for Shanghai (上海) brings up the following on Twitter:
Much of China’s last two decades of apparent prosperity seems to be an illusion designed to fool both its own people and outside investors. But the Potemkin village of Huaxi takes China’s illusory prosperity to the next level.
“Huaxi in east China, is a mysterious socialist town that once believed that the residents were entitled to extraordinary amenities, including free healthcare, education, luxurious homes, cars, and at least $250,000 in their bank accounts. The so-called richest village in China is now running into debt with villagers waiting in the rain to claim their money back from Huaxi.”
Potemkin prosperity is a poor substitute for an actual productive economy.
