Israel has begun the process of flooding the network of tunnels beneath Gaza in an effort to flush out the impacted Hamas assets lodged there, according to U.S. officials who spoke to the Wall Street Journal. The Israeli military operation has so far involved the installation of seven massive pumps and testing the process of flooding the Hamas holes with water from the Mediterranean Sea, and now the great enema has begun in earnest.
“Israeli officials say that Hamas’s underground system has been key to its operations on the battlefield,” explains WSJ. “The tunnel system, they say, is used by Hamas to maneuver fighters across the battlefield and store the group’s rockets and munitions, and enables the group’s leaders to command and control their forces. Israel also believes some hostages are being held inside tunnels.”
The tunnel system has been dug throughout much of Gaza and is also active at the Egyptian border, the crossing at which Hamas militants smuggle many of their weapons into Gaza. It is a critical infrastructure for the terrorists’ ability to continue to wage their bloody war against the only democracy in the region. Remove the network of tunnels from the table, and you severely cripple that ability.
Thanks to Home Alone and Irish we know that a particular cart of groceries went from $19.83 in 1990 to $77.28 today.
389.7% inflation over 33 years.
Annualized, that’s just 4.208% inflation, since the goal is 3%, that doesn’t seem so bad.
The problem is that cart of goods was $44.40 last year. That’s an annual inflation of 2.4755% from 1990 to 2022. Below the Fed’s desired rate, good for us, bad for the national debt.
That means we had 174% inflation in one fucking year.
A common problem, one that well pre-dates the invasion of Ukraine, is that we have shockingly well credentialed people of influence from both parties who have an inability to understand that Russians are not Westerners. They don’t think like Westerners, though they may look like them.
The Russians have a distinct culture, history, and view of themselves and their place in history. The underperforming political, military, and diplomatic elite in the West – with few exceptions outside the former Warsaw Pact nations now in NATO – expect Russians to react in the same way and to the same degree to the incentives and disincentives that move needles and preferences in DC and Brussels.
Time is always on the side of Russia, which is one of the reasons the slow rolling of weapons to Ukraine has been an exercise of malpractice of the highest degree. You are either in or out.
Two years on, “we” still are not sending a clear signal. It is amazing, really; in military might, GDP, demographics and a whole host of other reasons, Russia should not be as resilient as they are … which is why DC & Brussels are being played so hard. They still do not understand Russia.
Even after 1,000 years of experience, we have Western leaders who refuse to believe that the Russians are fundamentally different than the West is in the 21st Century. You can’t put the cultural ability to absorb damage and brutal patience you cannot see in some metric that can go on a PPT slide.
What the Russians lack in so many other places, they make up for here. As such, this critical part of understanding Russian motivation keeps being missed. Yes to their economy and apocalyptic demographics. Yes to all that.
For all the reasons Russia continues to fight, so too do their Ukrainian brothers – demonstrating greater resilience and endurance that Western expectations.
The time for leaving Ukraine to its fate is long past. Yes, the West has a short attention span and is suffering under the dead hand of entrenched leaders with a defeatist mindset – but none of this is written.
Ukraine can still win – or at least something that can be called a win. It would help if the Russians had some internal issues that required more attention that Ukraine, but even then – all is not worth shrugging over.
Yes, I’ve seen the math – the metrics – but war is informed by math, but not defined within it.
At a relatively modest cost in our treasure and almost none of our blood, we are wearing down Russia’s ability to project power for a generation, perhaps two. Perhaps many more generations should demographic instability mate with political instability. The Ukrainians – facing the same economic and demographic challenges as the Russians – are up for the fight. There is no reason for more comfortable nations who have supported them so far to go wobbly at half-time.
“FBI Official Who Helped Launch Trump-Russia Probe Sentenced to Four Years in Prison for Work with Russian Oligarch…In August, Charles McGonigal, a 22-year veteran of the bureau’s field office in New York, was found guilty of a count of conspiracy for working with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire with close ties to President Vladimir Putin.”
Jagged Little Pill is now 28 years old. I don’t think I’ve listened to it for the last 27.
Texas Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston) has won a resounding victory over U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX-18) in a runoff election for mayor of Houston, carrying the race by 64 percentage points according to election results.
“Voters have spoken and I am humbly grateful to the people of Houston for electing me as their next mayor,” said Whitmire in a statement.
The election results largely mirrored the latest polling in the race where Whitmire maintained a lead over Jackson Lee, especially in runoff scenarios where negative perceptions of the congresswoman indicated many voters who had supported one of the other 18 candidates in the first round would likely move strongly towards Whitmire. Polls also indicated crime and public safety were among the top concerns for Houstonians — an issue on which Whitmire, as the longtime chair of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, held a distinct advantage over Jackson Lee.
I didn’t follow that race closely because it’s been obvious for a long time that Lee simply isn’t very bright, something even the lefty sorts at the Daily Beast noticed.
In the Democratic-leaning Houston, Republican-backed candidates have slightly increased their presence on the 16-member city council with the help of the local party, outreach efforts into minority communities, and campaign efforts from conservative organizations.
According to unofficial election results, candidates Julian Ramirez, Willie Davis, and Twila Carter all won runoff elections for At-Large Positions 1, 2, and 3, and incumbent Mary Nan Huffman handily fended off a challenge from attorney Tony Buzbee for District G. The victors will join incumbent Amy Peck, who ran unopposed for District A, and Fred Flickinger, who won the District E seat on Election Day last month.
Each of the five contested candidates have enjoyed the support of the Harris County Republican Party (HCRP), the Republican Party of Texas, and groups like the Kingwood Tea Party.
Pundits frequently forget that not so long ago, Houston was a Republican stronghold. Ted Cruz won Harris County (albeit it narrowly) in 2012, and Greg Abbott carried it in 2014.
“Elon Musk took another shot at Disney CEO Bob Iger Thursday, after the state of New Mexico sued Meta for allegedly enabling child sexual abuse and trafficking – yet Disney and other woke advertisers, who paused advertising on X in a kneejerk reaction to claims of antisemitism – apparently have no problem when it comes to the sexual exploitation of minors.”
A black scholar Harvard President Claudine Gay plagerized is plenty pissed off.
One of the academics who was plagiarized, former professor Carol Swain, is pissed after Harvard gave Gay a pass on what would have resulted in severe punishment and/or expulsion for anyone else, as Townhall’s Christopher Rufo reports.
“I rarely get angry, but I am angry,” Swain wrote on X. “[R]ight now about the racial double standards that are TEMPORARILY giving #ClaudineGay an opportunity to resign. White progressives created her and white progressives are protecting her. The rest of us have had to work our rear ends off to achieve success. Some get it handed to them.”
Rufo interviewed Swain, who said that the plagiarism went far beyond a few paragraphs – and that Gay’s “whole research agenda, her whole career, was based on my work.”
“She became president of Harvard and got recognition as being its first black president. I don’t believe her record warranted tenure, and I believe that I had to meet a much higher standard than she did,” she told Rufo, adding “Something changed in the mid-1990s, [when] we were having a big affirmative action debate.”
Rufo asked Swain what she thought would happen to a white person under these circumstances, to which she replied “A white male would probably already be gone.”
Harvard announced that Gay would keep her job after a week of calls for her ouster, first, regarding her refusal to condemn calls for violence against Jews on campus, and then, after the plagiarism accusations broke. Despite a donor revolt spearheaded by billionaire Bill Ackman, a petition signed by 700 faculty members on Gay’s behalf won in the end.
There are a lot of reasons to celebrate Javier Milei’s election as president of Argentina, the biggest of which is that he’s going to apply free market, limited government principles to reviving Argentina’s moribund economy.
“People are not free in China, they can’t do what they want and when they do it, they get killed,” he told Bloomberg News on Wednesday, referring to Beijing’s government. “Would you trade with an assassin?”
Milei shook Argentina’s political establishment last weekend after receiving more votes than a probusiness opposition bloc and the ruling Peronist coalition, putting him in the lead to be the country’s next president. His election in October would generate shock waves across a region largely ruled by leftist leaders.
In his blanket refusal to do any kind of business with “socialists,” he lumped Communist China in the same category as Argentina’s biggest trade partner, Brazil, led by leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. China is the second-largest buyer of Argentine exports and provides a crucial $18 billion swap line with the central bank that’s being used to pay the International Monetary Fund.
He described his foreign policy proposals as a global “fight against socialists and statists.”
Libertarians critical of communists? What are the odds?
It probably means that Argentina won’t be buying any of China’s crappy jet fighters, either.
Israel rolls on in Gaza, Democrats get indicted on election fraud, Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty, censorship schemes get busted, and George Soros’ evil fingers are everywhere. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Israel’s ground offensive has surrounded Gaza City, where it seems to think most of Hamas infrastructure is located.
The blue circles indicate Israel military activity, which does rather suggest they’re pounding the snot out of Hamas.
House Republicans on the GOP’s “weaponization” subcommittee said in a Friday report that the IRS has agreed to end its “abusive” policy of surprise visits to taxpayers’ homes following pressure from the panel.
The Committee’s and Select Subcommittee’s oversight revealed, and led to the swift end of, the IRS’s weaponization of unannounced field visits to harass, intimidate, and target taxpayers,” reads the report. “Taxpayers can now rest assured the IRS will not come knocking without providing prior notice—something that should have been the IRS’s practice all along.”
The IRS announced in July that it would end most unannounced agent visits to the homes of Americans, citing security concerns.
But it also came after the agency engaged in what appeared to be witness intimidation, after visiting the New Jersey home of journalist Matt Taibbi on the same day he appeared before Congress to testify on government abuse.
Following the incident, Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) demanded answers from the IRS, writing “In light of the hostile reaction to Mr. Taibbi’s reporting among left-wing activists, and the IRS’s history as a tool of government abuse, the IRS’s action could be interpreted as an attempt to intimidate a witness before Congress.”
Taibbi thanked Jordan on Saturday, writing in response to the report:
One of the cases outlined is my own. My home was visited by the IRS while I was testifying before Jordan’s Committee about the Twitter Files on March 9th. Sincere thanks are due to Chairman Jordan, whose staff not only demanded and got answers in my case, but achieved a concrete policy change, as IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel announced in July new procedures that would “end most” home visits.
Anticipating criticism for expressing public thanks to a Republican congressman, I’d like to ask Democratic Party partisans: to which elected Democrat should I have appealed for help in this matter? The one who called me a “so-called journalist” on the House floor? The one who told me to take off my “tinfoil hat” and put greater trust in intelligence services? The ones in leadership who threatened me with jail time? I gave votes to the party for thirty years. Which elected Democrat would have performed basic constituent services in my case? Feel free to raise a hand.
If silence is the answer, why should I ever vote for a Democrat again?
In the conversation with [Joe] Rogan, Musk then explains George Soros’ massive bet (now overseen by his son, Alexander Soros) on funding city and state district attorney elections nationwide. He said, “The value for money in local races is much higher than in national races – the lowest value for money is a presidential race.”
“Soros realized you don’t actually need to change the laws – you just need to change how they’re enforced – if nobody chooses to enforce the law – or the laws differentially enforced – it’s like changing the laws,” Musk said.
This leaves with a new interview from one Maryland sheriff, just outside of crime-ridden Baltimore City, in Wicomico County, who drops a truth bomb about radical progressive lawmakers in the state, some of whom have likely been funded by Soros, who purposely fail to enforce law and order and only embolden criminal.
“I’m in my 40th year of law enforcement, and I have never ever seen it this bad,” Sheriff Mike Lewis said.
Lewis continued: “I’ve never seen a government so ingrained – and quite frankly complicit – in the criminal activity taking place in our nation.”
Speaking of Soros: “Soros has funneled over $15M to pro-Hamas organizations through Open Society Foundations.” Of course he has.
A jury has found Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of FTX, guilty on all seven criminal fraud counts for his role in the crypto exchange’s downfall.
Those counts include wire fraud on customers of FTX, conspiracy to commit wire fraud on customers of FTX, wire fraud on Alameda Research lenders, conspiracy to commit wire fraud on lenders to Alameda Research, conspiracy to commit securities fraud on investors in FTX, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud on customers of FTX, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
He faces a maximum sentence of 115 years in prison. His sentencing is scheduled for March 28 at 9:30 a.m.
During a month-long trial in a Manhattan federal court, prosecutors claimed Bankman-Fried misled investors and mishandled billions in funds. He was accused of misusing customer funds deposited with FTX to boost his crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research.
Nicolas Roos, an assistant U.S. attorney, said Bankman-Fried committed crimes of “epic proportions.” He alleged during closing arguments that Bankman-Fried built his company on a “foundation of lies and false promises.”
Snip.
Bankman-Fried was a Democrat megadonor, giving nearly $39 million to Democrat-aligned causes during the 2022 election cycle.
Prosecutors said he “misappropriated and embezzled FTX customer deposits, and used billions of dollars in stolen funds for a variety of purposes, including … to help fund over a hundred million dollars in campaign contributions to Democrats and Republicans to seek to influence cryptocurrency regulation,” according to an August indictment.
Both Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend and the former head of Alameda, and FTX co-founder Gary Wang, testified against Bankman-Fried during the trial. Ellison and Wang both pleaded guilty in December to multiple charges.
“The Department of Health and Human Services has sent over $800,000 to a group in Texas where they distribute crack pipes, according to the Dallas Express…The funds were sent to the El Paso Alliance, a non-profit that helps people recover from alcoholism and drug addictions, according to its website.” Knowing what I know about leftwing activists, I’m guessing that $80,000 went to crack pipe distribution, and the rest disappeared into various leftwing pockets.
California is still having trouble managing this newfangled electricity thing. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
China’s least awful communist official, former Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang, just died of a heart attack at age 68, and the CCP is banning memorial wishes for him.
Despite the Texas law against teaching Critical Race Theory, Katy ISD students are being told to reflect on their white privilege.
More than two dozen top U.S. law firms have issued a stern warning that law schools move with “urgency” to address the rising antisemitism on campus, or else it could affect recruitment, National Review has learned.
“Over the last several weeks, we have been alarmed at reports of anti-Semitic harassment, vandalism and assaults on college campuses, including rallies calling for the death of Jews and the elimination of the State of Israel. Such anti-Semitic activities would not be tolerated at any of our firms,” the statement published on Wednesday reads.
“As educators at institutions of higher learning, it is imperative that you provide your students with the tools and guidance to engage in the free exchange of ideas, even on emotionally charged issues, in a manner that affirms the values we all hold dear and rejects unreservedly that which is antithetical to those values,” the letter continued. “There is no room for anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism or any other form of violence, hatred or bigotry on your campuses, in our workplaces or our communities.”
Snip.
Signatories included: Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, Kirkland & Ellis LLP, Latham & Watkins LLP, McDermott Will & Emery LLP, Milbank LLP, O’Melveny & Myers LLP, Paul Hastings LLP, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, Proskauer Rose LLP, Ropes & Gray LLP, Shearman & Sterling, Simpson Thatcher & Bartlett LLP, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, Watchtell, Lipton, Rosen, and Katz, Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, Norton Rose Fulbright, and Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP.
Jewish homes in Paris marked with Stars of David. It’s good that sort of thing has never led to any negative outcomes in Europe…
Good: Disney is making it’s live-action Snow White remake a more traditional film, including actual dwarfs rather than random guys. Bad: The CGI dwarfs look absolutely horrible. It’s as though Disney wants to punish movie-goers for rejecting their woke vision…
Commies ruin everything, including buildings. Here’s the story of a French suburb of Paris that went from failing to thriving after getting rid of their ugly commie architecture.
“This town did the impossible! It was able to transform itself from a gloomy dispirited town, dominated by decaying concrete flats into a thriving, friendly and beautiful community.”
“That town is Le Plessis-Robinson. This municipality is home to around 30,000 inhabitants. When you walk it’s center, you might not notice what is so special about this place. It looks like a perfectly ordinary, charming French town, until you learn that everything you see is recently built.”
“After World War II, the local Communist party wins the elections. and becomes the ruling party of Le Plessis-Robinson for over 40 years. During those years, the town is further expanded with a modernist urban scheme.” Translation: Lots of ugly, Brutalist concrete.
“There’s a lot of social housing, but the concentration of marginalized groups has its toll.” In the French context, I’m guessing “marginalized groups” means unassimilated Muslims from French North Africa.
“The town becomes more sinister, filled with rubbish, petty crime and poverty. At some point, 2/3rd of the buildings are in a bad state. They are energy inefficient, vandalised and badly maintained. Companies are closing down, and problems related to poverty are rising.”
“In 1989, Le Plessis-Robinson is about to become one of Paris’ problematic banlieues. Only a miracle can possibly prevent this town’s further slide into decay. And boy, does a miracle happen. The election of 1989 changes everything. Philippe Pemezec, a local politician belonging to the party “Les Républicains”, wins the election.
“He promptly sets out to regenerate the municipality. In doing so, he takes an unconventional method: To beautify the city, and to improve the town on all fronts. Instead of the harsh, brutal and grey blocks that dominate the city, Pemezec wants a type of architecture that people can connect with. Instead of grey concrete, there would be color.”
“The town would have a vibrant, mixed use center with lively streets, creating more jobs, by planning commercial spaces for local businesses, but also by offering the peace of beautiful parks, gardens and fountains. Le Plessis-Robinson would have a soul again.”
“François Spoerry [is the] main architect, who designs a masterplan. Spoerry is also the supervisor who tests all the designs made by other architects. In this case, only traditional and classical architects are attracted, which is rare.” In other woods, beautiful, classic designs, not ugly modern crap.
The revamp public (“social”) housing. Also: “Owner occupied homes are introduced as well, to achieve a greater, more natural mix in social- and income classes.” Funny how much better people treat things when they own it.
“A program is introduced to give social housing tenants the chance to become a homeowner, by offering them to buy a new home under favorable terms.” Shades of Jack Kemp!
“At that point, the housing supply of Le Plessis-Robinson consists of 72% social housing. These extremely high concentrations of social housing in one location are often not sustainable and have been linked to various social and economic problems.” You don’t say.
I don’t agree with every point of the video, and there are lots of lefty planning buzzwords (“new urbanism,” “gentrification” etc.), but the video makes clear that the Le Plessis-Robinson of today is clearly much more beautiful and livable than the concrete commie slum Pemezec was faced with in 1989.
The now-torn down Kowloon Walled City was a megastructure/hyperslum/gangster paradise situated just outside Hong Kong proper.
Kowloon City was an acknowledged influence on William Gibson’s urban dystopian cyberpunk: A hyper-dense, interconnected, lawless locale whose buildings and infrastructure grew organically without rhyme, reason, planning or building codes. It was one inspiration for the phrase “Temporary Autonomous Zone” briefly popular among anarchists and Libertarians in the 1980s and 90s.
In this video, YouTuber Dami Lee argues that Kowloon City is best understood as a rhizome, a kind of horizontal-growing root that intertwines with everything.
“When we first started looking into the Kowloon Walled City, also known as the densest city in the world, we thought for a place that’s essentially a slum full of crime and drugs, with subhuman living conditions, there sure is a lot of romanticization about this place.”
“The city looks like it came straight out of a dystopian sci-fi novel.”
“It’s a giant megastructure part architecture, part living organism, and it’s actually something architects have been dreaming about for years. One continuous structure where you could access all the necessities of daily life but evolves and grows with time.”
New York City has a population density of 11,000 per square kilometer. Kowloon City had a population density of 1,255,000 per square kilometer.
“Kowloon Walled City was a city within Hong Kong that was technically a part of China.” It started as a fort, but after being abandoned Chinese refugees flooded there after World War II.
“It was known as the only Chinese enclave that the Hong Kong government couldn’t touch. But after that, it included anyone and everyone from gangs, criminals to doctors to entrepreneurs, people trying to escape poverty or people trying to capitalize on this unregulated haven.”
“Crime naturally flourished there with gangs, drugs, brothels. If you had an industrial business, you could ignore the fire codes, the labor codes or safety codes So you could produce goods at a fraction of the cost. You could also sell things that were banned anywhere else, like dog meat.”
“With unbeatable prices, industry kind of thrived here and lots of things made in Kowloon Walled City made their way back to China, Hong Kong, and sometimes even overseas. They were known especially for their fish balls and dumplings.”
“in Kowloon, buildings will get built, leaving these small gaps for air and light. But very quickly they get filled in with stairways, which sometimes connect it to three or four buildings. The city of Kowloon had around 350 buildings, but eventually the all merge into this one giant megastructure. The rooftops would connect, forming one giant rooftop, and even the residential units were connected to each other. And since not all the units had electricity or other resources, it allowed them to share things like power out of a single source.”
“It especially allowed businesses to expand strategically and organically.” Such as a strip club that lured people in to make real money in the gambling den a floor down.
“New buildings could attach and be integrated to existing structures. And with every new building, new circulation paths and collection points are formed which evolve and expand with the growth of the city. And at the intersection of these connections or stairs or alleys, nodes would organically merge.”
“Chinese doctors and dentists who couldn’t afford to get relicensed in Hong Kong, set up shop here and offer services for bargain prices, which attracted customers from outside the city.”
Factories gravitated to ground floors with vehicle and water access, while residential went to higher floors. “But most of the residents actually moved through the hundreds of alleys and secret paths, which all twisted and turned and stepped up and down and cut through multiple buildings. So unlike a typical city where you have one point of connection, you had multiple points of connection vertically and horizontally between multiple spaces.”
The hard limits of the city forced it to expand upward and inward.
“Even though they didn’t have a government, the residents self-organized to fix problems as they came up to deal with crime. They formed groups of volunteers to escort single women. And when the Hong Kong government released plans to demolish the city, they organized the Kowloon City Anti Demolition Committee that fought against the plan for years. Even the five Triad gangs organized garbage cleaning teams and helped settle disputes between businesses.”
Kowloon City was demolished in 1994.
At it’s height, Kowloon City was an an example of “spontaneous order” that can arise from the intersection of capitalism and low- or no-regulation environments. But much of its success was based on a rare combination of things, namely its proximity to a huge, thriving, international city, private ownership of land, ethnic homogeneity, and a ready populace of low-wage workers, many of whom had fled communism.
By contrast, Seattle’s antifa “Autonomous Zone” thugocracy had none of these things going for it, and the only industry they brought to the area was shaking down existing businesses for protection money ‘donations.”
I can imagine it both as a place of tremendous economic dynamism as well as someplace I personally would never want to live. Just imagine if you had a factory using deadly chemicals right below you. And I imagine the illegal activity providing a significant portion of Kowloon City’s income.
It was an interesting, unintentional experiment, and I’m sure the vast majority of residents there fared better than they would have under the Great Leap Forward…
How bad an idea was it buying a car made in a communist country? Two guys from Donut Media pick up a used Yugo to see if it lives down to its reputation.
“Journalists have been crapping on it for decades, but is it really that bad?” Spoiler: Yes.
Their Yugo has 20,593 miles on it, and the build quality is obviously crap. “The needle for the speedometer is broken off, which is annoying, and it has a very optimistic high number of 110 miles per hour.”
One reason the car has such poor quality is the cost: The Yugo was $4,000 brand new back in the mid-1980s.
“This was the first and only Yugoslavian car that made it to the U.S market. It was made by a company called Corvina Zastava, which literally means red flag. You think the people that bought these would have seen the huge red flag.”
“In reality the Yugo is a clone of the Fiat 127. Corvina Zastava licensed the design from Fiat and built their version in the motherland.”
“One thing that communist Yugoslavia didn’t have access to that Fiat did was purpose-built machinery. And that’s how you get panel gaps.”
“Zastava literally spared every expense they possibly could when making this thing, from the metal stamping to the interior.”
You really have to watch the entire video to enjoy the diverse panoply of mystery noises and bumps they experience.
“Americans ended up hating the Yugo, but here’s the thing: It was never meant for the U.S market. It was a complete fluke that had ever made it to our shores in the first place.”
It was strictly meant as a utilitarian vehicle for Yugoslavians.
“As Edmunds said when they reviewed an 89 Yugo, ‘the Yugo is slow, low grip and high effort.’ Sure, it’s got a rack and pinion, but the Yugo doesn’t even have power steering. You have to throw your entire body weight into most of your turns.”
“This is not good. Dude, having a car change direction depending on what the throttle is doing? I’m gonna give that a fail.”
The transmission is awful, the shifter is floppy and the throttle is sticky.
It idles at 3,000 RPM. (A Honda Accord idles around 750.)
Car entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin (who formed Subaru of America to import those cars) was looking to import low-cost cars in America. Not in the video is this weird passage in Bricklin’s Wikipedia entry: “Bricklin, senior advisor Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Under-Secretary of State and Yugo board member Lawrence Eagleburger, and Global Motors executives met with Zastava. Bricklin agreed to import the Zastava Koral, marketing it as the Yugo.” Because who knows about cars better than Secretaries of State?
“The kids were calling it Yugomania, and people were legitimately psyched about the Yugo.” Having been alive at that time, I can assure you that never happened. The only marketing I remember from the time was a radio spot that focused on the cheapness and the “new car smell” and had an insipid little jingle: “Me and my Yugo/Wherever we go.”
“140,000 Yugos were sold in the U.S.”
The reason it got imported over here was that Yugoslavia had broken away from the Soviet Union and enjoyed pretty good relations with Reagan’s America, and Fiat had pulled out of the American market, meaning Zastava had no contractual bar to exporting the Fiat clone into the U.S.
“The manufacturer claimed it could go 0-60 and 14.3 seconds, which is horrible for even then but some reviewers clocked in at more like 18 seconds.” How long did it take the Donut guys to hit 60? 35.3 seconds. At full throttle.
“Carbureted engines can be very reliable, but probably not ones built in a communist country on the brink of collapse.”
Their Yugo broke down 10 minutes into filming a mile down the freeway.
“Factories in communist countries had terrible working conditions and very little oversight. Consistency also wasn’t their top priority, either. That’s all to say that the high tolerances they had while manufacturing these cars led to some very unreliable parts.”
At the time Yugos were being sold, Honda Civics started at $5,800. And the stock Civic engine makes more power than two Yugo engines!
“Yugo did not make a good car.”
Sales peaked at 48,812 in the U.S. in 1987, but had declined to 3,092 in 1991, when the Yugoslavian Civil War got underway, then less than half that in 1992, when UN sanctions came down, and that was the end of the Yugo in America. Supposedly later Yugos were somewhat more reliable.
The lesson here: Never buy a car made in a communist country, unless you’re building a Museum of Failure.
As a bonus, enjoy this hilariously dishonest Yugo TV ad.
South African Zulu leader and key figure in helping end apartheid Mangosuthu Buthelezi has died at age 95.
Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a towering figure in South African politics and outspoken Zulu chief, has died at the age of 95.
During the racist apartheid regime, he founded the Zulu Inkatha [Freedom] party after becoming disillusioned with the African National Congress (ANC).
Thousands were killed in clashes between supporters of the two parties in the early 1990s.
But he was later welcomed back into the fold, serving as President Nelson Mandela’s minister of home affairs.
Chief Buthelezi was a shrewd but controversial politician, who disagreed with the ANC’s tactics of armed action against white-minority rule and trod a moderate path as leader of an ethnic-Zulu homeland.
He was opposed to international sanctions on South Africa, arguing that they would only harm the country’s black majority.
Buthelezi was a key figure in ending apartheid, not only as ancestral leader of the Zulu nation, the largest ethnic group in South Africa, but also as elected leader of the (at the time) KwaZulu bantustan homeland. Both he and his Inkatha Freedom Party were strongly pro-Western, pro-capitalist and anticommunist, as opposed to the ANC, who were unabashed allies of the South African Communist Party. The ANC itself was riddled with communist sympathizers, including Mandela’s wife Winnie, who was a real piece of work, and who advocated “necklacing” ANC’s political opponents by setting fire to gasoline-filled tires around their neck.
Despite this, Buthelezi insisted that Nelson Mandela’s release was a precondiction for a political solution in South Africa.
For decades, the Soviet Union had been funding communist revolutionary organizations around the world, the economic strain of which was one of the many factors (along with communism’s horrible economic inefficiency and low oil prices) that forced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to institute perestroika and glasnost. Those dire economic straits meant the Soviets could no longer afford to fund their “franchise for totalitarianism” program for communist parties in Africa and elsewhere.
The combination of Soviet bankruptcy, Buthelezi’s insistence on a peaceful, democratic and capitalistic post-apartheid South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s moderation, and South African President F. W. de Klerk belief that apartheid was unsustainable all came together to allow South Africa a peaceful transition to majority rule.
For all the troubles South Africa has experienced over the last 40 years, it has fared far better than the like of Zimbabwe, Mozambique or Angola, and Buthelezi’s influence was a big factor in making South Africa’s transition a peaceful one.
I met Buthelezi at a 1987 Dallas-area conference put on by the Landrum Society, a conservative group founded (I think) by Dallas Morning News columnist William Murchison. Buthelezi struck me as a smart, dignified man.
I haven’t been covering the Ken Paxton impeachment because I don’t think I have anything novel to say about it that hasn’t been covered better elsewhere. Enjoy the Friday LinkSwarm!
U.S. credit card debt tops $1 trillion. Thanks, Joe Biden.
Truth about our current economic situation:
We went into a recession after two back to back quarters of -1.5 over a year ago. When this happened, the establishment changed the parameters that define recession. We’ve remained at a net loss with job creation and “Bidenomics”. This isn’t recovery and everyone knows it. https://t.co/RXltpBNxhp
The feature that really made The Daily Show famous was its masterful use of archival video clips to reveal the hypocrisy of the chattering classes. Stewart would set his target on some party shill or professional talking head being condescending, self-important, dishing out blame, kissing whatever ring he’d been paid to kiss. And then the show would play a clip of the same talking head’s appearance on a C-SPAN 3 four-in-the-morning call-in show from ten years ago, back when he’d been paid to kiss another ring, saying the exact opposite thing.
There was a clip, there was always a clip. And our righteous host would send these hacks packing.
Through all this, certain public figures would be transformed into storylines with narratives and characters, with inside jokes and recurring bits. The media’s storytellers became the subjects of a theater of the absurd. It got so that when certain figures would show up in a segment, you knew you were about to witness them receive their just comeuppance, a great spectacle of spilled archival blood. The audience would titter in excited anticipation.
It was a delight to watch.
Snip.
What had created a culture of “just talking on TV without any accountability,” as one Daily Show writer put it, was not only the sheer volume and speed of the news. It was this true fact that will sound insane to anyone under the age of thirty: People on television reasonably assumed that no one would hear what they had said ever again.
As essayist Chuck Klosterman records in The Nineties: A Book, the key characteristic of twentieth-century media was its ephemerality. You experienced it in real time and internalized what was important and what it felt like. Then you moved on. “It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.”
People used to argue with their friends about the plot of a show or what the score had been in the ball game because, well, how were you going to check? Unless you had personally saved the newspaper or recorded it on your VCR, you would need to go to a literal archive and pull it up on microfilm.
TV news was even shakier, as networks often recorded over old tapes. Some of this footage only exists today because of the obsessive efforts of one Philadelphia woman who recorded news broadcasts on 140,000 VHS tapes over forty years.
And so, if you were a pundit or a commentator or a “spin doctor” PR flak, you could say whatever suited your needs at the moment, or even lie with impunity — as long as your lie did not become its own pseudo-event. Your lasting impact was whatever stuck in viewers’ heads and hearts. And if you changed your tune in the months or years afterwards, who would remember?
The Daily Show would remember.
The explosion of live broadcast and cable news had created a new, completely under-valued resource for whoever thought to harness it: catalog clips. Soon, new digital technology could preserve content in amber, allowing for its retrieval, repurposing, or referencing at any time.
It’s a long essay, and I don’t necessarily agree with all the writer’s points, but it’s worth reading.
There was no state of emergency, no curfews, no orders to stay at home or shelter in place. Young Swedes were encouraged to continue with their sports training and events. Schools remained open, and so did offices, factories, restaurants, libraries, shopping centers, gyms, and hairdressers. As a rule, borders were not closed to fellow Europeans and public transportation kept running.
There were no mask mandates and not even a recommendation for the public to use masks—until January 2021, when they were recommended on public transportation during rush hours (7–9 a.m. and 4–6 p.m. on weekdays). While some other governments forced school children to wear face masks, Tegnell even warned against making children wear them, saying that “school is no optimal place for face masks.”6
One can see how Sweden’s path diverged from that of its peers by consulting the latest Human Freedom Index, which has data through 2020. During this first year of the pandemic, Sweden’s freedom rating only fell by 0.19 on a 10‐point scale, compared to 0.49 in Britain and 0.52 in the United States. The only rich country that saw a smaller decline in freedom than Sweden was Singapore, at 0.16.7
Snip.
Analysts from other countries—and even some Swedish scholars—predicted disaster. One influential Swedish model, inspired by the famous British Imperial College study, predicted that Sweden would have 20,000 COVID-19 patients needing intensive care by early May 2020 and a need for intensive care units around 40 times over capacity. By July 1, Sweden would have 82,000 COVID-19 deaths. The Imperial College model predicted between 66,000 and 90,000 deaths without mitigation efforts, and a peak demand of intensive care unit patients 70 times higher than capacity.
Snip.
When you look at excess deaths during the three pandemic years, 2020–2022, compared to the previous three years, you get a very different picture. According to this measure, Sweden’s excess death rate during the pandemic was 4.4 percent higher than previously. Compared to the data that other countries report to Eurostat, this is less than half of the average European level of 11.1 percent, and remarkably, it is the lowest excess mortality rate during the pandemic of all European countries, including Norway, Denmark, and Finland.
“Poland Aims To Create Largest Army In Europe Within Two Years.” Golly, who would need a large army with such historically peaceful neighbors as Germany and Russia?
e Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) declared a statewide lockdown of all its correctional facilities on Wednesday morning, citing increased contraband-related incidents and drug-related inmate homicides.
TDCJ said most inmate-on-inmate homicides “are tied back to illegal drugs … and over the last five years, the volume of illegal narcotics entering the system has substantially increased.”
In response to the drug and murder epidemic in Texas jails, TDCJ is implementing the following strategies to restore order:
Systemwide Lockdown: Each facility will limit the movement of inmates and their contact with those outside the prison. Inmates and staff will undergo intensified searches to intercept and confiscate contraband.
Digital Mail: TDCJ is completing the rollout of the digital mail program. Over the last few years, there has been a significant increase in paper soaked in K2 or methamphetamines coming into our facilities. The digital mail program will halt this contraband being sent through traditional mail. Effective September 6, 2023, all inmate mail should be addressed and sent to the Digital Mail Center. All mail received this week will be delivered to the digital mail processing center. More information about this program can be found here: TDCJ News – TDCJ Digital Mail Rollout.
Increased K9 Searches and Other Technology: To assist in contraband detection and outside funding related to contraband, TDCJ will be deploying additional resources. Specialized search teams and narcotic dogs will be deployed to units and staff will be subject to enhanced search procedures.
Comprehensive Searches: All persons entering our facilities at all locations will undergo comprehensive searches.
“Due to the fact staff will be concentrating on these search efforts, visitation will be canceled until further notice. Inmates will still have access to the phone system and tablets,” TDCJ said.
If drugs are getting into Texas prisons, there’s over a 90% chance correctional staff are getting them in there.
“There is no climate emergency,” the Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) said in its World Climate Declaration (pdf), made public in August. “Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”
A total of 1,609 scientists and professionals from around the world have signed the declaration, including 321 from the United States.
The coalition pointed out that Earth’s climate has varied as long as it has existed, with the planet experiencing several cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age only ended as recently as 1850, they said.
“Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming,” the declaration said.
Warming is happening “far slower” than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools,” the coalition said, adding that these models “exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases” and “ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.” For instance, even though climate alarmists characterize CO2 as environmentally-damaging, the coalition pointed out that the gas is “not a pollutant.”
Carbon dioxide is “essential” to all life on earth and is “favorable” for nature. Extra CO2 results in the growth of global plant biomass while also boosting the yields of crops worldwide.
CLINTEL also dismissed the narrative of global warming being linked to increased natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and droughts, stressing that there is “no statistical evidence” to support these claims.
“There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. Go for adaptation instead of mitigation; adaptation works whatever the causes are,” it said.
“California mom Jessica Konen won a $100,000 settlement from her daughter’s school district, Spreckels Union School District, after Buena Vista Middle School had socially transitioned her 11-year-old daughter, Alicia, without her knowledge or consent.”
Remember how the UK was economically lagging other countries in Europe and Remainers blamed Brexit? Yeah, not so much.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) now says that the UK economy actually recovered from the pandemic recession back in 2021. It turns out that wholesalers and the healthcare sector, in particular, had produced much greater output than previously thought.
These updated figures suggest that the UK economy is as much as two per cent larger than previously believed. This means that the UK can no longer be considered the worst-performing economy in the G7. In fact, post-Brexit, the UK recovered from the pandemic at a similar rate to France and at a faster pace than Germany, Europe’s largest economy.
The ONS’s revision is extraordinary. As one leading economist put it: ‘The entire UK economic narrative – post-pandemic – has just been revised away.’ The very basis for the Remainer elites’ narrative of doom has now been shattered before our eyes.
Mark Felton visits Buckingham Palace, and is Not Amused. “The rooms open to the public are, of course, lavishly decorated. The amount of gold painted furniture, pianos and urns, similar to what I imagine Liberace’s house look like. The walls are hung with the usual assortment of well-fed Hanoverians.” Plus: No bathrooms for you, lowly peasant!
San Diego tries enforcing the law, a sampler of the lies Obama told about his life, Blade-Runners take on Big Brother’s cameras, a nuke rises in Texas, and a Cthuloid horror swims the chilly waters of Antarctica. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
San Diego tries “this one weird trick” to deal with homeless problem: Enforcing the law.
Police began enforcing San Diego’s controversial new camping ban Monday, and although officials said they’ve so far focused only on Balboa Park, the new ordinance combined with other enforcement of laws long on the books has already made notable changes in the encampment landscape.
The “Unsafe Camping Ordinance” allows officers to force people off public land if they’re sleeping within two blocks of a school, shelter, trolley station, waterway or park “where a substantial public health and safety risk is determined.”
Capt. Shawn Takeuchi, head of the city’s neighborhood policing division, said his five-member team did arrest several homeless people Monday by Balboa Park, but only for existing warrants.
Others were given a warning, he said. If any of the same people are found illegally camping a day later, they’ll get a ticket even if they’ve moved locations.
Nobody in Balboa Park accepted offers for shelter Monday, the captain added. Enforcement will continue to focus on schools and parks in the near future, and officials declined to say where the team might move next.
Do you think Austin’s government might start enforcing the city’s camping ban? Of course not. Then how are they supposed to rake off the graft? (Hat tip: Instapundit, who offers some takeaways worth highlighting:
1. The homeless respond to policy and incentives like anyone else. The mere announcement of a future camping ban (plus some enforcement of other existing rules) rapidly cleared out major problem areas.
2. The provision of shelter or housing is neither necessary nor sufficient to accomplish these clear-outs. Of the people asked to leave Balboa Park on the first day of enforcement (issuance of warnings), none accepted offers of shelter.
3. The NGOs that have colonized the homeless problem have neither the incentive nor the knowledge to solve it. The head of one shelter was confused by the magical disappearance of his potential clients. “Where did they go?”
There is a fascinating passage in Rising Star, David Garrow’s comprehensive biography of Barack Obama’s early years, in which the historian examines Obama’s account in Dreams from My Father of his breakup with his longtime Chicago girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism. As readers, we know that the stakes of this decision would become more than simply personal: The Black American man that Obama wills into being in this scene would go on to marry a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago named Michelle Robinson and, after a meteoric rise, win election as the first Black president of the United States.
Yet what Garrow documented, after tracking down and interviewing Sheila Miyoshi Jager, was an explosive fight over a very different subject. In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.
At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spertus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city’s power echelons, with some prominent Black officials supporting Cokely and others calling for his firing.
In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism. While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.
Snip.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about Jager’s account of her fight with Obama, though, is that not one reporter in America bothered to interview her before David Garrow found her, near the end of Obama’s presidency. As Obama’s live-in girlfriend and closest friend during the 1980s, Jager is probably the single most informed and credible source about the inner life of a young man whose election was accompanied by hopes of sweeping, peaceful social change in America—a hope that ended with the election of Donald Trump, or perhaps midway through Obama’s second term, as the president focused on the Iran deal while failing to address the concerns about rampant income inequality, racial inequality, and the growth of a monopoly tech complex that happened on his watch.
The idea that the celebrated journalists who wrote popular biographies of Obama and became enthusiastic members of his personal claque couldn’t locate Jager—or never knew who she was—defies belief. It seems more likely that the character Obama fashioned in Dreams had been defined—by Obama—as being beyond the reach of normal reportorial scrutiny. Indeed, Garrow’s biography of Obama’s early years is filled with such corrections of a historical record that Obama more or less invented himself. Based on years of careful record-searching and patient interviewing, Rising Star highlights a remarkable lack of curiosity on the part of mainstream reporters and institutions about a man who almost instantaneously was treated less like a politician and more like the idol of an inter-elite cult.
Snip.
Progressive theology is built on a mythic hierarchy of group victimhood which has endured throughout time, up until the present day; the injuries that the victims have suffered are so massive, so shocking, and so manifestly unjust that they dwarf the present. Such injuries must be remedied immediately, at nearly any cost. The people who do the work of remedying these injustices, by whatever means, are the heroes of history. Conversely, the sins of the chief oppressors of history, white men, are so dark that nothing short of abject humiliation and capitulation can begin to approach justice.
It goes to say that nothing about the terms of progressive theology is original. It is the theology of Soviet communism, with class struggle replaced by identity politics. In this system, Jews play a unique, double-edged role: They are both an identity group and a Trojan horse through which history can reenter the gates of utopia.
Read the whole thing to see all those facts about Obama that the media ignored…including his fantasies about having sex with men.
Members of the IPCC, such as Pedro Moura-Costa (above) and Gareth Philips, had major conflicts-of-interest. They owned, created and/or worked for businesses — such as Ecosecurities and SGS Forestry — that would directly profit from the report’s conclusions.
In fact, the IPCC panel members’ companies were positioned to earn millions of dollars from the report. But the mainstream media did not report these conflicts and instead piled on the “global warming” and “carbon offset” bandwagons.
Solar energy portal Ecotopia reported that members of the IPCC “…had vested interests in reaching unrealistically and unjustifiably optimistic conclusions about the possibility of compensating for emissions with trees… [and] should have been automatically disqualified from serving on an intergovernmental panel charged with investigating impartially the feasibility and benefits of such ‘offset’ projects.”
According to accounts of four people with knowledge of the situation, M. Kaleo Manuel, a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner and DLNR’s deputy director for water resource management, initially refused West Maui Land Co.’s requests for additional water to help prevent fires from spreading to properties managed by the company. Manuel eventually released water but not until after the fire had run its course.
His office has not yet commented on the delay of water resources.
How much damage could have been prevented with the extra water is not yet known. However, the question of “Why?” needs to be addressed in the wake of one of the worst natural disasters in Hawaii’s history. Though bureaucratic red tape might be the most obvious suggestion, a recent interview with M. Kaleo Manual offers some interesting and disturbing insight. Manuel waxes philosophical on “water equity” (“equity” being a pervasive woke buzzword) and an ancient “reverence” of water as god-like. He uses these beliefs to support his rationale for keeping tight controls over Hawaiian water supplies; not as a resource to be used, but as a holistic privilege offered by the government.
Economist who named BRICS says the idea of a common BRICS currency is “embarrassing.”
“It’s just ridiculous,” [Lord Jim O’Neill] told the Financial Times in an interview on Monday. “They’re going to create a BRICS central bank? How would you do that? It’s embarrassing almost.”
The economist spoke ahead of the 15th BRICS summit next week, where the nations will meet to decide whether to expand membership to other countries and may also float the idea of the common currency.
The following story was related to me by a former Governor of Minnesota, who was of Norwegian descent. A number of years ago, a Norwegian dignitary (the Prime Minister, I think) visited Minnesota. Talking to our governor, the Prime Minister tut-tutted about Minnesota’s crime rate, saying that there was much less crime in Norway. Minnesota’s governor replied, “We don’t have a crime problem with our Norwegians, either.”
That anecdote came to mind when I read, in the London Times, “Sweden’s slide from peaceful welfare state to Europe’s gun-killings capital.”
Today, Sweden is Europe’s capital of gun homicide. Last year, according to the Swedish national council for crime prevention, 63 people were shot and killed: more than double the European average and, per capita, multitudes higher than London or Paris.
… The effect on Swedish society has been striking. As well as the lives lost, the violence has brought down a government, changed laws and policies, and become the biggest talking point in a country that once prided itself on its reputation as a peaceful welfare state.
Violent crime will do that, although, to be fair, Sweden’s homicide rate is considerably lower than ours. But it is now significantly higher than homicide rates in quite a few other European countries, including Norway. Why is that? Have Swedes suddenly started getting violent? No.
It has also kicked the hornet’s nest of integration. Today, one fifth of all people living in Sweden were born outside the country.
Dow Chemical is planning to build a small nuclear reactor to power their plant in Calhoun County. Good for them. The TRISO-X fuel they’re using sounds like it will be a pebble bed reactor design.
“Target Sales Dipped in Last Quarter Due to Pride Backlash.”
I didn’t intend to do an all “China is Screwed” video roundup weekend, but the videos keep stacking up and I need to post some rather than producing a giant unwieldy post with hours of footage.
First up: Young people’s whose job prospects and futures are so dim that they’re actually living in concrete pipes.
Takeaways:
Certainly America has no shortage of transients living rough, but in contrast to ragged drug addicts, alcoholics and dangerous lunatics, the people living in these pipes look to be normal, healthy 20-something Chinese.
Just because you’re living in a concrete pipe doesn’t mean you can’t be a live-streamer. Like the under-the-bridge streamers seen in previous videos, you wonder how widespread this behavior is, or whether we’re just seeing the edge of the freak show.
“Despite the female hosts not being beautiful and the male hosts not handsome, it doesn’t affect viewership.” I do rather want to check their numbers, here.
“This is because it’s happening in the industrial city known as the world’s factory – Dongguan in Guangzhou.” It’s on the Pearl River Delta near Guangzhou and Hong Kong. “After more than thirty years of China’s reform and opening up, Dongguan, which has always been at the forefront of economic development, has recently seen a wave of business closures and foreign capital relocation.” See also: all those previousChina is screwed videos.
“When foreign capital withdraws, thousands of Chinese workers lose their jobs. Among these people, some have worked in factories for decades and are now middle-aged. It’s overwhelming to be suddenly faced with unemployment and consequential cost-of-living pressures, coupled with labor competition against millions of university graduates.” I’m sure that sucks, just like getting laid off here sucks. But in a capitalist economy, even a flawed one like we have, is always going to be more flexible about creating jobs that one ruled by a communist party’s aristocracy of pull.
“Those who are single simply adapt to homelessness, creating their own personal space amongst the concrete pipes.” Or, you could have, you know, lived modestly, saved money, and shared housing with other people. The fact they haven’t gone this route and are instead living in pipes suggests something in the Chinese economy is even more broken than we think.
Foreign companies like Microsoft and Nokia are now moving to Vietnam and India. “Japanese companies like Panasonic, Daikin, Sharp, and TDK are planning to move their manufacturing bases back to Japan. Well-known companies like Uniqlo, Nike, Funai Electric, Samsung, and others are also accelerating their withdrawal from China.”
Like industry is also fleeing from elsewhere in China.
“The once bustling Bund in Shanghai is now overgrown with weeds due to lack of maintenance and tourism, presenting a scene of desolation. Everywhere in Shanghai’s luxury residential communities, there are messages about subleasing and selling at a loss. The elites, celebrities, and tycoons left Shanghai at the first chance they got after the lifting of the lockdown. The political uncertainty in China and the frequent changes in regulatory clauses by the authorities have made entrepreneurs miserable.” Communists making entrepreneurs miserable? This is my shocked face.
“Domestic entrepreneurs are reluctant to invest further, and foreign investors are hastening their departure.”
Various Chinese company specific layoffs and financial difficulties snipped.
“Wall Street leading figures, after enjoying three years of benefits from the broad opening of China’s financial market, are planning large-scale cuts to projects and staff in China…Goldman Sachs has lowered its five-year plan expectations, and Morgan Stanley has decided not to set up a securities dealer in China, reducing its derivative and futures business investment to $150 million. JPMorgan Chase & Co. began cutting its dedicated staff in China earlier this year.” There’s not a violin small enough.
In a capitalist economy, there would be some sort of middle ground between the empty ghost cities and people living in pipes near megalopolises. If you don’t regulate the economy so heavily as to make building housing impossible (I’m looking at you, California and NYC), then profit will drive developers to create housing to fill a market need. With China’s crazy misallocation of loans to unprofitable housing to satisfy regional government growth targets, supply has been so severed from demand that such market-making is impossible.
China is going to come out of it’s decades-long growth spurt with crumbling cities and people that mostly are still poor.
