A reminder not to get black-pilled, another Supreme Court win for deporting illegal alien felons, San Francisco’s government offers pedos a veritable buffet, Rockefeller money is going to the ChiComs, and another deeply technical video on semiconductor processes you won’t click on.
Yes, I want to believe, but there’s evidence supporting hope. There’s evidence supporting the idea that the polls are so substantially flawed that they do not accurately reflect what’s going to happen. Again, the caveat – this could be delusion. We could be seeing what we want to see. But then, what we’re seeing is there. There is evidence supporting what we want to happen, evidence worth considering.
We’re seeing how polls have been missing big lately. Look at Abdul El-Sayed. He was supposed to win that Michigan primary in a walk. We’re talking five, 10, 15 points, according to the primary polls. And yet he barely squeaked past that squeaky woman he was competing with. We’ve seen lots of other polls that assured us of a Democrat victory. Just ask President Harris about that.
If you’ve been around a while, you know that the polls always favor the Democrats. You almost never see a Democrat surprise us by exceeding his polling against a Republican. You just don’t. So, there’s that. And of course, there’s an interest in driving down Republican enthusiasm by telling people they can’t win.
Then there’s the gut vibe. Don’t completely disregard that. In Texas, you must believe the Texans are going to support a blasphemous, anti-meat, anti-gun, anti-white, woke weirdo with a thing for trans kids. Does that sound like Texas to you? It sure doesn’t sound like Texas to me, and I’m in Texas. I’ve talked to a lot of Texan conservatives. Not one thinks this guy is going to win. Now, they agree it could theoretically happen, but they don’t think it’s going to. Ken Paxton has won three times in statewide races, and he’s done a lot of great conservative things. Are Texans really going to choose a bizarre homunculus to spend six years in Washington, D.C., voting like Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) in their name? It just doesn’t fit. It’s weird. That’s not saying it couldn’t happen – there are lots of communists here along with other weirdos, losers, and mutations who would be thrilled to have this geebo as a Lone Star senator. But it just doesn’t feel like something that’s going to happen.
Moreover, we’ve been told a lot of conservatives are going to sit this out. The bots on X are certainly pushing that coordinated message, as the semi-coherent comments on my Monday column about quitters demonstrate. Yes, there are probably some Republicans who are going to sit out this midterm, but I haven’t met any of them personally. Maybe you have. I just don’t think there are a lot of them, especially in light of how appalling the Democrats are. It doesn’t make sense, at least to people who aren’t idiots who blame everything on Epstein conspiracies and the Jews and blah blah blah, to be mad at Trump and the Republicans for not being conservative enough and showing them what-for by allowing the election of communists. As risky as it is, I’m not going all-in on the assumption that people are that stupid.
Read the whole thing, and encourage all your sane friends to show up at the polls in November.
Dr. Anthony Fauci privately sounded the alarm when he learned the U.S. Army had conducted an experiment a decade ago that aerosolized the lethal Ebola virus, which is not normally transmitted by air, and then shared the results publicly amid an ongoing outbreak in Africa, according to diary entries obtained by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul.
The then-top scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease was particularly concerned in 2016 that the Army medical research arm’s experiment seemed to show that exposure to aerosolized Ebola caused more damaging effects in subjects that had been vaccinated. This was almost four years before he championed shutting down the U.S. economy and social life over the COVID-19 virus outbreak.
Fauci wrote he believed such research should be kept secret, preferably classified, so that it didn’t undermine public confidence in vaccination in the African countries suffering an outbreak of the virus.
“What idiots those guys at USAMRIID [U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases] are,” Fauci wrote in a March 2016 diary entry. “This should have been a classified experiment that never should have been done in the first place.”
Why yes, “undermining public confidence in vaccination” is a far bigger concern than the fact that the U.S. Army under Obama was committing an actual war crime.
It’s Tuesday morning at Little Learners Daycare in downtown San Francisco. Teacher Wendy herds bright-eyed toddlers, amped up after playtime in the courtyard, back inside. They’re laughing and swatting at each other playfully, oblivious to the pack of pedophiles lurking nearby.
Four hundred feet away, dozens of registered sex offenders live at 111 Taylor Street. Wendy knew that the Tenderloin, where she operates her Mandarin-immersion daycare, was dangerous. It’s a hotbed for illegal drug activity and homelessness. But she didn’t realize that sex offenders live so close to her daycare—or that taxpayers fund their housing.
Pedophiles, illegal aliens; the only people Democrats don’t like paying for housing for is law-abiding American citizens.
According to this City Journal investigation, more than 25 percent of sex offenders in San Francisco with addresses in the Megan’s Law database live in taxpayer-subsidized buildings. Many live near a park, school, or daycare, or reside in a neighborhood with a high concentration of children. They do all of this despite statewide efforts to ban concentrating pedophiles so close to children. Instead of listening to California voters, San Francisco has become a taxpayer-funded dumping ground for sex criminals.
The Taylor Street Center is one of San Francisco’s most heavily populated sex-offender residences. Located in the Tenderloin, Taylor Street houses at least 31 registered sex offenders. The taxpayer-funded California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the federal Bureau of Prisons contract the private GEO Group to run the facility.
The reentry complex can house 240 people. It hosts specialized programs for residents like “cultural diversity education,” “gender-responsive groups,” and a “weekly meditation group.” The facility sits just 400 feet from a daycare center, 1,000 feet from a fourth-to-eighth-grade school, and five blocks away from a preschool.
Any sex offender housed in the Tenderloin is bound to encounter children. Along with having a high concentration of immigrant and low-income households, the neighborhood also has the highest concentration of kids in the entire city.
I’m sure the sex offenders call that “the buffet.”
President Trump invoked a rare and legally contested power Friday to cancel $810 million in congressionally approved spending, targeting programs for illegal immigrants and a slate of federal initiatives explicitly organized around race and DEI.
The request hits 11 funding pools at seven departments and agencies. It also landed with just five days left in the fiscal year. That’s the point of the disputed “pocket rescission” maneuver: the money runs out before Congress gets its normal 45 days to consider the cuts.
The biggest piece is $567 million at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for services to refugees, asylees, unaccompanied minors, and other non-citizens.
The White House called them “pro-illegal immigration programs” and said the money is no longer needed because illegal border crossings have fallen sharply.
But immigration spending was only part of the package.
Several of the rescissions hit programs explicitly organized around race or ethnicity.
The administration wants to rescind $10 million from the Commerce Department’s Minority Business Development Agency, which helps minority-owned businesses. The White House pointed to a 2024 federal court ruling that found the agency’s presumption of social disadvantage based on race or ethnicity unconstitutional.
Another $5 million would come from HHS’s Office of Minority Health.
The White House highlighted grants from that office addressing racial trauma among black youth, health disparities among black and Latino youth, a George Washington University fellowship promoting health equity and DEI, and a $1.5 million project addressing the effects of redlining and structural racism.
HUD housing counseling takes a much larger hit, with $56 million targeted.
The administration said the program had funded groups including UnidosUS, the National Urban League, and Housing Action Illinois, criticizing their work on structural racism, racial justice, and other DEI priorities.
Then there is the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, slated to lose $15 million.
The office’s mission included “preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions” and restoring racial stability. The Trump administration shut it down earlier this year and now accuses the office of promoting critical race theory and gender ideology rather than carrying out that mission.
The package goes beyond those programs.
The administration identified $28 million in HHS research funding it wants canceled, pointing to grants involving transgender health care, racial disparities, and a $50,000 project to develop a research agenda addressing racism in emergency medicine. Another $70 million would be pulled from international education programs, including programs the White House said had funded research involving queer and transgender issues abroad.
Other cuts include $25 million for migrant student programs, $25 million across two DHS programs providing services or legal assistance to non-citizens, and $9 million for a Treasury program providing debt relief to foreign countries in exchange for conservation commitments.
Now we need to hand out pink slips to the people who were administering these programs.
Long overdue: “Education Dept. Officially Removes Biden’s Title IX Gender Identity Rules. In other words, the department is sticking to the literal interpretation of Title IX: sex-based discrimination.”
The Education Department has officially rescinded the Biden Administration’s Title IX interpretation that extended protections to students based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
In other words, the department is sticking to Title IX’s literal meaning: sex-based discrimination.
“Today’s rulemaking clears the Biden Administration’s illegal rewrite of Title IX from the Code of Federal Regulations and restores the commonsense language promulgated in the first Trump Administration, which we have been enforcing since the first days of the Administration,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “Thanks to today’s action, the published Title IX regulations faithfully reflects court orders and Congressional intent—reducing confusion for parents, students, and educational institutions. We will continue to relentlessly champion equal opportunity for all Americans and hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy, or athletic opportunities of our women and girls.”
Honestly, nothing changes because the department has been enforcing reality since January 2025: Title IX is based on sex. It’s not based on your sexual orientation or gender identity.
Somehow, the people who tell us that they were “born this way” and that “sexuality is a spectrum” are now returning to normal. It’s almost like the whole “acceptance” movement was just a social contagion that spread because teens like being rebellious!
The Supreme Court majority (6-3) has granted the DOJ request to put on hold a Boston-based US District Judge ruling that DHS policy to remove illegal aliens to so-called third countries is unlawful. The process of rapid deportation will continue while the matter is called before the Supreme Court for oral arguments in December (ruling in ’27).
The Usual Suspects opposed deporting the Democrat Party’s precious illegal alien felons.
Former Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed at least 4,782 political donations to President Donald Trump from Americans across the country between September 2019 and August 2023, Senator Chuck Grassley revealed during a Tuesday hearing featuring the former special counsel.
The checks — which Smith’s team acquired as part of their election case against Trump, dubbed “Arctic Frost” — contained donors’ personal information, including their home addresses, bank account and routing numbers, and signatures. Some of the subpoenaed donations were for as little as $1. Grassley revealed the evidence while questioning Smith during Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary hearing and followed up with a press release containing further details.
During former President Joe Biden’s administration, Smith brought two cases against Trump: The first accused him of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, and the second involved him keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Smith resigned from his position nine days before Trump was sworn in as president again; both cases against Trump have been dismissed.
As part of the FBI’s investigation into the 2020 election, agents accessed toll records, which show who a given individual spoke with on the phone but not the contents of their calls, for 16 members of Congress. He also subpoenaed records from 87 Trump White House phones, which captured records from calls between government sources and dozen of news outlets.
The political donations Grassley described were obtained as part of Smith’s investigation, which focused on whether Trump defrauded donors by raising money under the false pretext that the resulting donations would help Trump’s team overturn the results of the 2020 election.
All the easier to compile an enemies list should Democrats retake power…
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a $1.4 billion U.S.-based charity with funding from the Rockefeller family and other donors, has forged a “dangerous partnership with Communist China” and is pouring millions of dollars into China-based nonprofits that are advancing the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy goals.
That’s one of the findings in a new report, “The Rockefeller Network: How the Rockefeller Family Turned Their Oil Fortune into Extreme Climate Activism,” out today from Americans for Public Trust, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative watchdog organization. The report, an advance copy of which was obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon, outlines how the billion-dollar fortune of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller Sr., who died in 1937, is being used “to quietly bankroll numerous radical and leftist projects.”
Snip.
“An alarming amount—well into the millions—has found its way directly into the coffers of entities that are either official vestiges of the Chinese government, or directly and irrefutably administered by the CCP and its representatives,” the report says. “And many of these entities, while operating under the guise of ‘green’ and environmental research, are, instead, using these funds to help buttress China’s foreign influence programs around the globe, especially the CCP’s infamous ‘Belt and Road Initiative.'”
Among the grants singled out in the report as most problematic:
— $400,000 between 2020 and 2024 to the Foreign Environment Cooperation Center, “a division of the Chinese government’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment.”
— Nearly $1.5 million to the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, whose “direct ties to the Chinese government are undeniable.”
— Nearly $200,000 to Tsinghua University, which announced in 2024 that the school’s office of the president had merged with the Chinese Communist Party to “form a new Party Committee Office that would run the school.”
Groups that fund the ChiComs should have their non-profit status revoked and their assets seized.
Democrats are always saying the quiet part out loud nowadays.
They aren’t even trying to hide their radical plans to totally replace America’s voters, workers, and people with a cheap labor underclass that disproportionately votes Democrat.
[ U.S. Representative] Democrat Tom Suozzi says his biggest goal in politics is mass amnesty for criminal illegals:
“My biggest goal of what I want to accomplish in politics right now is I want to legalize 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 million people in our country.”
Amnesty was always the end goal for the illegal alien importation.
Obvious: “UK Whistleblower: 99 percent of Asylum Claims Are Fake.”
Only one in 100 asylum claims are genuine, according to a whistleblower who has revealed widespread fraud and dysfunction in the system.
The Home Office official, who has worked for years as a decision-maker on asylum and has assessed thousands of claims, said asylum seekers from certain countries use the “same script” in what he and colleagues describe as “package claims”.
He said he had encountered a large number of Iraqi Kurds claiming asylum who said they had been in a relationship with the daughter of the prime minister of the Kurdistan region. The official said it had become a “running joke” among colleagues that the number of Iraqi Kurds who said they were involved with the daughter was in the “hundreds”.
He also said that “hundreds” of claims from Pakistanis were based on the assertion that they were in fear of their lives in their home country because of their gay relationship with the same man who had provided letters supporting their claims.
The source also disclosed suspicions about large numbers of Bangladeshi claimants purporting to be dissidents of the former governing party, which is now banned, even though they were unable to provide basic information about the group.
An 18-year-old woman has been gang raped and beaten by up to ten different men, many of them with a Syrian background, in the Dutch city of Dordrecht. Although the rape occurred in May 2025, the suspects are only now being arrested. In response to the rape, political leader Geert Wilders wrote that the Netherlands also has Islamic grooming gangs and called for all the perpetrators to be removed from the country along with their families.
Six suspects have now been arrested, aged 20 to 23. During the incident, the girl, who lived in a residential group home, was driven to two different parking lots and raped by several men, some of whom filmed the assault and shared it on Snapchat. Police say the woman was humiliated and beaten.
And somehow the leaders of UK’s Labour Party say “Yes, we need more of that.”
A plane leaving Dubai and heading towards Tel Aviv almost saw a tragic end as the co-pilot of the plane turned hijacker mid-flight and attempted to take control and crash the plane….
The co-pilot, an Omani national, stabbed the pilot multiple times in an attempt to kill him and hijack the flight. The co-pilot had worked for FlyDubai for around a year.
The injured pilot was able to transmit a radio warning, Israel scrambled fighter jets, and the passengers and crew were able to subdue the attacker in midair.
The plane made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia to sort the entire mess out.
Be prepared to fight for your life on a moment’s notice, because you might have to.
More long overdue. “Trump expands H-1B visa crackdown, will scrutinize layoffs.”
The Trump administration on Thursday announced an executive order expanding the ongoing crackdown against H-1B visa abuse.
The H-1B is a visa program designed to allow companies to bring in high-skilled workers when no qualified Americans are available. But the program has faced considerable scrutiny in recent years, due to widespread fraud. Critics have argued that major employers also use it as a way to undercut American wages.
Trump’s Thursday order reaffirms the $100,000 application fee he imposed last year, but now mandates inter-agency coordination to consider an employers’s recent or planned layoffs when applying for H-1B visas.
“Our message to corporate America is simple: We’re not going to let you lay off American workers so you can replace them with cheap foreign labor,” Vice President JD Vance said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 121 individuals during a summer enforcement initiative around Lake Lewisville in Dallas.
The operation, led by ICE’s Dallas field office, began June 27 and concluded over Labor Day weekend. It involved coordination with state and federal agencies, including the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and focused on identifying individuals unlawfully present in the country, assisting with lake-related investigations, and allowing local officers to devote more resources to boating safety enforcement.
According to ICE’s Friday release, individuals arrested during the initiative had criminal histories involving offenses such as assault, family violence, theft, burglary, sexual assault of a child, driving while intoxicated, and boating while intoxicated.
Among those arrested were two men ICE identified as members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal organization designated by the U.S. State Department as both a foreign terrorist organization and a specially designated global terrorist group.
Willian Josue Ordonez Vasquez, 24, a Venezuelan national, and Edwin Josue Cabrera-Zelaya, 22, a Honduran national, were under investigation by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for allegedly operating an illegal livery business on Lake Lewisville.
I must say that I’ve never run into “illegal livery business” before, but it seems to involve not complying with Texas regulations on powered boat rental.
Man bites dog: “Too extreme for Newsom? California sanctuary bill for abortion, transgender procedures vetoed.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom used his veto pen to make out-of-state prosecutions theoretically possible for both “reproductive health care services” and “gender affirming health care services.”
The term-limited Democrat with presidential ambitions, who recently said he won’t run if fellow Californian and former Democratic nominee Kamala Harris enters the 2028 presidential race, vetoed legislation (AB 2164) to codify an extradition ban for “legally protected health care activity” in California, claiming it infringed executive authority.
Ignore the blather about Harris, Governor Hairgel is obviously running.
Researchers proved AI has deleted every reason universities exist.
Harvard University ran a controlled experiment pitting a custom AI against their own top-tier classrooms.
And the results are going to collapse the higher education bubble.
They took 194 undergraduates and split them up.
One group learned physics in one of Harvard’s best hands-on, active-learning physical classrooms. Group work. Instructor support. The premium university experience.
The other group went home and learned the exact same material with an AI tutor.
The AI didn’t just win. It embarrassed the institution.
Students using the AI learned more than twice as much as the students in the elite Harvard classroom.
They scored 30% higher on the final assessment.
And they did it in less time.
Let that sink in.
A piece of software sitting on a laptop outperformed a world-class faculty in one of the most elite learning environments on Earth.
Universities have always justified their exorbitant tuition with two things: access to elite knowledge and the physical classroom experience.
This study just proved both of those moats are gone.
When software can teach you complex physics twice as well as a $60,000-a-year institution, the math of higher education breaks permanently.
Yeah, but can AI forge friendships with the spawn of rich people, the primary purpose of so many attending the Ivy League? (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
A Detroit pastor who last year admonished a parishioner for her inadequate church donation of $1,235 was paid a salary of $538,955 that year by a taxpayer-funded nonprofit he leads that is separate from the church, according to federal records.
That salary for Marvin Winans Sr. — the pastor of Perfecting Church and a Grammy-winning gospel singer — accounted for about 61% of what the nonprofit spent toward its stated mission of “community development,” its recent report to the Internal Revenue Service shows.
His role as president for the nonprofit — Perfecting Community Development Corporation — is a half-time job, the report says, which means he was paid about $518 per hour.
Nice work if you can get it.
Winans’ salary has increased substantially in recent years and coincided with a $500,000 government grant the state awarded the nonprofit. Grant application guidance indicates the award was funded with federal pandemic relief money.
Of course it was.
Seems like Pastor Winans was far more concerned with fat stacks than flocks…
Another terror plot thwarted. “Suspect Arrested for Alleged Thwarted Capitol Attack Now in Federal Custody. Benny Caldera, Jr. was released from the Bexar County Jail into federal custody.”
A man was arrested on suspicion of planning an attack on the Texas State Capitol in Austin early in the morning of Wednesday, September 30.
The attack was allegedly set to occur on October 1.
Forty-year-old Benny Caldera, Jr., of Converse, was arrested by a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) SWAT team, according to reporting by NBC DFW.
He was booked into the Bexar County Jail and charged with making a terroristic threat against a public servant, a third degree felony, and was held on a $75,000 bond. It was not immediately clear if Caldera has a lawyer or how he plans to plead in response to the charge.
According to an arrest warrant affidavit, DPS was told by a friend of Caldera’s that he “had made verbal threats to assault the Texas State Capitol Building.” He is alleged to have said “I am going to the Capitol and I am going to shoot it up.”
Arrest documents also allege that Caldera’s motive was anger at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel political lobbying group, of which he reportedly said “these people have to be exterminated.”
Of course. Always The Joooooos!
Possibly just a dumbass shooting off his mouth. But lots of similar dumbasses have racked up kill counts in recent decades.
Make New Mexico Texas again? “Texas House Weighs Annexation of New Mexican Counties. The unlikely proposal could benefit the Permian Basin, one state representative claimed.” The chances of New Mexico agreeing without receiving something ridiculous in return (like El Paso) are virtually zero.
Gov. Greg Abbott announced the company’s decision, saying it is a $684 million capital investment that could create 3,800 jobs. The governor also announced that a Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) grant totaling $43,849,500, paired with a Veteran Created Job Bonus of $40,000, was offered to the company.
ASML wants larger EUV masks to support their High Numerical Aperture EUV stepper. “TSMC and ASML recently announced that the Taiwanese fab will adopt High-NA EUV for high volume manufacturer in 2030. In order to make this economical, the two giants will push the industry to adopt larger 6 in x 12in rectangular photo masks.” This is going to be a challenge for the entire industry ecosystem.
Retro-future noir. With aliens. Directed by Brad Bird. Mood: Cautious optimism.
BeardMeatsFood demolishes a 7 Deadly Sins challenge…and then promptly orders two more burgers and dessert. (OK, technically four more burgers, but it looks like he gave two to the cameraman.)
I just sent out my latest Lame Excuse Books catalog of SF/F/H books. Drop me a line if you’d like to receive a copy.
“Feminist Mad That The Men She Hates Won’t Date Her.” “I don’t get it. I’m aggressive, shrill, angry, and I talk online all the time about how much I hate men. Why won’t any of them ask me out?”
I would buy this so hard: “Mattel Confirms Hanukkah Barbie Comes Complete With Space Laser.”
A happy reunion:
A dog was lost for two days.
They found her and when they took her back to her owner, she started crying. https://t.co/J17xaSYMRe
I haven’t been able to verify this yet, but according to China Observer, “Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry may have escalated export controls on November 20-21, adding 12 types of core semiconductor materials and related services to its “End User List,” placing about 110 semiconductor-related entities from mainland China under heightened scrutiny. Mainland China is more than 60% reliant on imports for photoresist, with ArF/EUV almost entirely dependent on Japan and the Netherlands.”
Every time you pattern a semiconductor wafer via a lithography stepper, you first have to deposit photoresist across the entire surface of the wafer. Once you’ve done that, the lithography pattern projected on the wafer hardens, letting some areas get stripped away during etch to create the interconnect patterns for other processes to fill with circuits for the chips. Getting proper photoresist uniformity across the entire wafer has some technical challenges, but it’s something like ten orders of magnitude less complex than EUV lithography. But getting the formula for EUV photoresist exactly right, and then manufacturing it ultrapure in quantity? Yeah, that’s not exactly something you can do in a high school chemistry lab.
“The Japanese have directly pulled out of the entire photoresist business in China. 90% of the photo resist we use is imported, with 60% coming from four Japanese companies. Without them, we can’t operate in the high-end sectors. With Japan’s withdrawal of supplies, domestic semiconductor factories are in chaos. Production capacity is declining and yield rates are crashing. Once production lines stop, they lose millions of yen a day.”
“The entire semiconductor industry is suffering massive losses.”
“A blogger in one video pointed out that few people know that in China’s semiconductor industry, the true bottleneck isn’t the photolithography machine, but a small bottle of liquid costing 50,000 RMB: photoresist.”
Section on China having a hissy fit over Japan’s prime minister Sanae Takaichi stating that Japan would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion (touched on in this LinkSwarm) skipped.
“Japan [quietly] and decisively retaliated. According to a report by Chinese media outlet East Money, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry may have escalated export controls on November 20th to 21st, adding 12 types of core semiconductor materials and related services to its end user list, placing about 110 semiconductor related entities from mainland China under heightened scrutiny.”
“Among the most notable measures are those affecting photoresist and photolithography machine after-sales services regarding photoresist.”
“Four Japanese companies (JSR Corporation, Shin-Etsu Chemical Company, Tokyo Ohka Kogyo Co., Ltd. and Fujifilm) have suspended deliveries of ArF [Argon-Fluoride laser] immersion and EUV photoresist to mainland Chinese customers while high-end KrF [Krypton-Fluoride laser] products have been significantly delayed.”
“Mainland China is more than 60% reliant on imports for photo resist, with ArF UV almost entirely dependent on Japan and the Netherlands.”
“Canon and Nikon have informed their Chinese customers that, starting in November, the supply of certain DUV photography machine parts and on-site maintenance services will depend on export licensing conditions. Currently, China has over 1,200 DUV photography machines, 90% of which depend on Canon and Nikon for after sales service.”
” After Canon and Nikon further restrict services, China’s stock of spare parts for photography machines will only last about 3 to 6 months, with photoresist being one of the most critical components.” Well, consumable supply rather than component.
“Industry insiders say this means that many Japanese-made photography machines currently in operation will face a supply shortage in the short term and could become scrap metal in the long term.” This is an overstatement, as there’s usually a healthy demand for such machines on the secondary market, either to replace a old machine, or to cannibalize for parts, for research fabs, or for someone trying to put together a trailing-edge fab on the cheap.
“Unlike the open ban on 23 types of equipment in 2023, Japan is now adopting a gray customs clearance strategy where rather than announcing an outright embargo. It is using case-by-case approvals, indefinite delays in issuing licenses and cutting off parts and technical support, effectively a supply cut off.”
The U.S. has also applied pressure on Japan to implement restrictions.
“Photoresist is far more complex than it seems.”
“First, the shelf life of high-end photo resist is extremely short, often only 6 months or even less. This means it’s impossible to stockpile and if supply is cut off, production lines will immediately shut down.”
“Second, the extreme purity requirements. The formula for photoresist contains dozens of chemical substances with each proportion error not exceeding 1 millionth. The metal impurity limit is as low as 0.001 parts per million, like 1 microgram per kilogram. To put this into perspective, imagine eight Olympic swimming pools full of water. If even a single drop of impurity is mixed in, it must be identified and removed.”
“This isn’t just a challenge in terms of the formula. It’s a critical test for the entire chemical purification, filtration, transport, and storage process.”
“Third, the ecological [I think they mean ecosystem -LP] barrier. Why are Japanese companies so dominant in the photoresist market? Because over the past 30 years, they have developed their expertise alongside semiconductor giants like TSMC, Intel, and Samsung. Producing photoresist isn’t enough. It must be tested on photography machines worth billions of dollars. The verification cycle takes 2 to 5 years with a high failure rate. Without top semiconductor foundaries to conduct these trial and error processes, your photoresist will never make it out of the laboratory.”
“Japan’s dominance in the photoresist market dates back to the 1970s when the country’s economy surged. The government and businesses jointly invested heavily in the semiconductor industry, focusing partially on materials.”
“In addition to the high technical barriers and lengthy R&D cycles which take years and require immense investment, Japan holds an overwhelming patent monopoly, 70% of related patents globally. It’s virtually impossible to bypass this barrier.”
“Major global chemical companies like the US’s DuPont and Germany’s BASF have less than 10% of the photoresist market share. South Korea has tried but still depends on imports for high-end products. Japanese companies are not only technologically advanced, but their strong industrial chain cooperation in photography machines and silicon wafer production makes it nearly impossible for external competitors to enter.”
“According to a 2024 Nikki survey, Japan holds the number one market share in three out of five semiconductor material categories, with photoresist being one of them.”
China has tried to develop their photoresist, but when they try them out in fabs, their yield rate crashes. Even if China can steal the right formula, they can’t steal all the intermediary steps necessary to produce the formula.
“This issue involves a country’s mastery and accumulation of basic materials and processes, which cannot be solved simply by hiring people to steal technology.”
“Japan’s precision manufacturing processes are beyond the reach of China.”
For the sake of brevity, I’m skipping over an extensive list of other areas of semiconductor technology where China is heavily dependent on Japan.
A whole lot of people freaked out over China’s near-monopoly on rare earth minerals, but China is a lot more dependent on the west for a whole lot of things much higher on the technological food chain.
I’ve previously talked about China’s difficulties in catching up to the west in semiconductor manufacturing here, here, and here, among other places. To summarize: Western nations have an advanced, highly interconnected semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem that China doesn’t have the technical expertise to replicate. In particular, China has nothing like ASML’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines (AKA a “stepper”) necessary to build the most advanced chips with the smallest feature geometries.
Though advancements that SMIC and Huawei have made in the semiconductor sector in recent years are pretty impressive, the companies are 10 to 15 years behind industry giants like Intel, TSMC, and Samsung, said Christophe Fouquet, chief executive of toolmaker ASML. It’s well known that even with the best-in-class DUV tools, Chinese fab SMIC will be unable to match TSMC’s process technologies cost-effectively. This is because Chinese companies cannot access leading-edge EUV lithography tools.
“By banning the export of EUV, China will lag 10 to 15 years behind the West,” said Christophe Fouquet in an interview with NRC (machine translated). “That really has an effect.”
ASML has never shipped its EUV tools to China due to the Wassenaar Arrangement, despite SMIC’s reported order for one EUV machine. The details remain unclear, but ASML did not deliver the machine to the Chinese foundry due to US sanctions. However, ASML kept shipping advanced DUV lithography tools, such as the Twinscan NXT:2000i, which are capable of producing chips on 5nm and 7nm-class process technologies.
As a result, SMIC has been producing chips for Huawei using its 1st-generation and 2nd-generation 7nm-class process technology for years now. This has certainly helped the Chinese high-tech giants weather U.S. government sanctions.
Having understood that EUV tools are not coming to China, Huawei and its partners have explored extreme ultraviolet lithography themselves with the aim of building their own lithography chipmaking tools and ecosystem, which will take 10 – 15 years at best. For reference, it has taken over 20 years for ASML and its partners from foundational work to complete commercial machines to build the EUV ecosystem.
China thought it had found a way out of the western ban on high end lithography machines. Turns out: Not so much.
“In the past two years, China has spent a staggering 8 billion euros to procure fewer than 120 Advanced immersion DUV lithography machines from Dutch company ASML.” DUV (Deep Ultraviolet) was the generation of machines before EUV, and can’t effectively pattern features of less than 10nm.
“On the surface this seemed like a bold and extravagant move. However, as of September 7th, the reality has turned into a bitter irony. Maintenance and upgrades for these machines are now completely restricted. In other words, starting next year these state-of-the-art [not quite – LP] lithography machines could become little more than scrap. To make matters worse, even repairs for older equipment are off the table.”
“Lithography machines are the backbone of semiconductor manufacturing, etching intricate circuits onto silicon wafers. Without proper maintenance and upgrades, these machines, worth tens of millions of euros each, will gradually deteriorate into expensive junk. Producing advanced chips smaller than 14 nanometers will become nearly impossible. Yield rates will plummet and costs will skyrocket.”
“Even TSMC, a global benchmark, requires ASML engineers to be stationed on site for regular recalibrations every 3 to 6 months. Earlier this year, an earthquake in Taiwan caused TSMC’s lithography operations to halt, and it took a month of recalibrations to resume lithography.” Requalification is indeed a huge pain in the ass.
“Machine maintenance depends on ASML proprietary components, software and technical support. Hiring a few engineers, or even the CEO of ASML, won’t solve the fundamental complexities of this highly specialized system. China’s attempts to rely on sheer manpower to bridge this gap are wishful thinking.”
“Thinking a few engineers could crack this technology is simply laughable. Lithography machines are just the tip of the iceberg in the complex semiconductor manufacturing supply chain.”
“China owns nearly 1,400 ASML lithography machines. With Western restrictions on maintenance spare parts and engineering services, these multi-million euro machines have been reduced to a rob Peter to pay Paul situation keeping them operational for just one more day at a time. Chip production is bound to shrink, creating a vicious cycle.”
“New sanctions implemented in September have blocked sales of models like the NXT1970i, shutting down access to both hardware and technology. At best, China’s capabilities remain stuck at the level of ASML’s older NXT 1470 machines, which date back to the early 2000s.”
“China’s so-called domestic lithography machines are limited to 65 nanometer dry DUV technology, with some reports claiming they can reach 55 nanometer. However, this is equivalent to ASML 2006-era technology, putting China 18 years behind. Worse, key components for these domestic machines still rely on suppliers from Japan and Germany.”
“China’s domestic lithography machines are largely a symbolic effort, more about saving face than actual technological advancement.”
There’s no way China can catch up to ASML in EUV lithography, and no way they can eliminate their deep dependence on western semiconductor manufacturing technology.
“Cutting edge EUV systems have been banned from China since 2019. Last June, high-end immersion DUV machines were added to the list. Now even older models like the NXT 1970i and 1980i can’t be sold or upgraded. China’s ambitions have been crushed, reducing it to square one.”
“This February, the Dutch Minister of Trade openly stated that China uses foreign high tech knowledge to advance its military capabilities, and ASML tools could produce sophisticated weapons. Handing over lithography machines to China is akin to arming an adversary, a move unacceptable on any strategic level.”
Without western technology, China’s desire for a technologically advanced semiconductor industry are dead in the water.
“The myth of China’s technological rise is unraveling and heading toward decline.”
When you buy a piece of high-end semiconductor equipment, you’re not just buying the machine, you’re buying the knowledgebase of deep technical expertise of both the on-site technical staff, as well as the process wizards back in Eindhoven, Santa Clara and Tokyo. There are inumerable parameters that need to be just right, and you need to know how to tweak them if the yield goes south. Without that expertise to guide you, the high end machines quickly become worthless.
I can imagine President Trump offering China a grand bargain, in which they stop stealing western technology, stop committing genocide against the Uighers, stop clashing with Philippine ships in the South China Sea, meet its treaty obligations regarding Hong Kong, and let international agencies inspects its high level bioweapon labs in exchange for easing semiconductor sanctions.
I doubt China would take such a deal, as it would be too humiliating for Xi to stand. But I can imagine Trump making it…
The fake Kamala bubble evaporates, another would-be Trump assassin is arrested, more Chinese spies on the staff of high profile Democrats, more NYC corruption raids, Ukrainian drones heat things up around Moscow, Intel and Stellantis layoff thousands each, another Harris County Democrat double-dips, a bit about Idaho, and some really stupid sailor shenanigans.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Evidently jailing Trump right before an election was a kangaroo too far even for this kangaroo court, so Trump’s sentencing has been pushed to after the election. “Judge Juan Merchan ruled Friday that Trump’s sentencing will take place on November 26, three weeks after election day, ensuring that Trump will not be sentenced in any of his criminal cases leading up to the election.”
In the friendliest possible format — a joint interview with VP nominee and emotional-support midwesterner Tim Walz, conducted by Dana Bash with the delicacy of an ornithologist gently hand-feeding hatchling chicks — Harris has revealed that her gaseously mindless word-cloud of a campaign is in fact an accurate reflection of her own personal vacuousness.
To be sure, Harris did not memorably self-destruct tonight. Whatever her failings, they are not those of Joe Biden, who couldn’t even articulate his words without slurring by the end. Her inarticulateness tonight was of the sort already known to be a Harris trademark, the endless jumble of nonsensical, comically vapid stock language. When she could fall back on a memorized list of talking points, she presented somewhat normally; the second she was required to respond directly to a question, then she began to spin out otiose nonsense like a pasta chef catering a Sicilian banquet. You could practically see the gears turning inside her head as she cast her eyes downward, stared laser-beams into the floor, and groped for cliches. She was more muted tonight than usual — her aides clearly ordered her never to display mirth under any circumstances, for fear the Kamala Kackle might emerge — and as a result, while she simulated sobriety for the most part, her body language was pronouncedly downbeat.
And all throughout she offered no answers to any policy questions whatsoever, nor any explanation for her various changes of position between 2020 and now. In theory, Bash asked most of the “right questions”; in practice, the way she solicitously asked them — sometimes even helpfully offering in advance a multiple-choice list of acceptable answers for Harris to choose from — turned them into cream puffs that Harris immediately used to serve up word salad.
Bash’s most pointed moment was when she pushed Harris about why she changed her position on a national fracking ban between 2020 and the present campaign. Harris’s answer was little more than, “Well, because I changed my mind when I became Joe Biden’s VP.” In the real world, anyone familiar with politics well understood that her “position” changed because Joe Biden — the presidential nominee — demanded it, and no other reason. Which of course is why it’s impossible to believe her when she says this is now her sincerely held view, as opposed to something to later be discarded once she can set her own priorities.
Eric Weinstein told Chris Williamson on the “Modern Wisdom” podcast that Donald Trump’s presidency has disrupted the old “rules-based international order,” which many view as an attempt to control global stability and wondered if the Republican nominee will “be allowed” to reenter the White House if elected in 2024. Weinstein argued that Trump’s unorthodox approach challenged the status quo, exposing flaws in the system and revealing that the impact of populist leaders on democracy and international agreements is more complex and significant than previously understood.
CHRIS WILLIAMSON: When we spoke at the start of the year, I said it was way too close to November to switch anybody out. Turns out that I was wrong.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Beginner’s luck.
CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You said what are the odds that Joe Biden has a debilitating event between now and November including death, so he runs a one in 20 chance of dying in any given year or above that. I don’t think you know whether he’s even going to make it to November debilitating event could have been a debilitating public event
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I purposefully left it vague. I didn’t say the other part of it, which I now feel comfortable saying, which is…
CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you mean by that?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I think there’s a remarkable story, and we’re in a funny game, which is: are we allowed to say what that story is? Because to say it, to analyze it, to name it, is to bring it into view. I think we don’t understand why the censorship is behaving the way it is. We don’t understand why it’s in the shadows or why our news is acting in a bizarre fashion. So let’s just set the stage, given that that was in February.
There is something that I think Mike Benz has just referred to as the rules-based international order. It’s an interlocking series of agreements, tacit understandings, explicit understandings, and clandestine understandings about how the most important structures keep the world free of war and keep markets open. There has been a system in place, whether understood explicitly or behind the scenes or implicitly, that says the purpose of the two American parties is to prune the field of populist candidates so that whatever two candidates exist in a faceoff are both acceptable to that world order.
From the point of view of, say, the State Department, the intelligence community, the defense department, and major corporations involved in international issues—from arms trade to, oh, I don’t know, food—they have a series of agreements that are fragile and could be overturned if a president entered the Oval Office who didn’t agree with them. And if the mood of the country was, “Why do we pay taxes into these structures? Why are we hamstrung? Why aren’t we a free people?” So what the two parties would do is run primaries with populist candidates and pre-commit the populist candidates to support the candidates who won the primaries. As long as that took place and you had two candidates that were both acceptable to the international order—that is, they aren’t going to rethink NAFTA or NATO or what have you—we called that democracy. And so democracy was the illusion of choice, what’s called magician’s choice, where the choice is not actually, you know, “pick a card, any card,” but somehow the magician makes sure that the card that you pick is the one that he knows.
In that situation, you have magician’s choice in the primaries, and then you’d have the duopoly field: two candidates, either of which was acceptable, and you could actually afford to hold an election. That way, the international order wasn’t put at risk every four years because you can’t have alliances that are subject to the whim of the people in plebiscites.
Under that structure, everything was going fine until 2016, when the first candidate ever to not hold any position in the military nor any position in government in the history of the Republic, Donald Trump, broke through the primary structure. Then there was a full court press: “Okay, we only have one candidate that’s acceptable to the international order. Donald Trump will be under constant pressure—he’s a loser, he’s a wild man, he’s an idiot, and he’s under control of the Russians.” And then he was going to be, you know, a 20-to-1 underdog, and then he wins. There was no precedent for this. They learned their lesson: you cannot afford to have candidates who are not acceptable to the international order and continue to have these alliances. This is an unsolved problem.
A Missouri man is facing federal charges following a series of alleged violent threats made via social media against former President Donald Trump, Republicans at large, and law enforcement officers, according to a criminal complaint filed in the Western District of Missouri on Aug. 30.
Justin Lee White, 36, is accused of using interstate communication to spread a slew of online threats to injure Trump, Republicans, and law enforcement in violation of federal law, culminating in a multi-agency investigation led by the FBI, according to the complaint.
Speaking of Trump assassination attempts, DHS personnel assigned to the protective detail for Trump’s Butler rally were given rigorous training. And by “rigorous training” I mean “they sat through a two hour webinar.”
Remember that “Harris Surge” in polls? Yet again, it was a case of oversampling.
As we’ve been highlighting since 2016, polls are not to be trusted thanks to various ‘tricks of the trade’ – most commonly, oversampling.
Last month we noted how the founder of the main outside spending group backing Kamala Harris for president says their own internal opinion polling is “much less rosy” than public polls.
“Our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in the public,” said Future Forward super PAC president Chauncey McLean said during a Monday event hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
Now, the Washington Times reports that some pollsters are even sounding the alarm over Vice President Kamala Harris’ so-called ‘surge’ in the polls – which Harris pulled ahead in after replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee on July 21.
Since the switch, Harris is leading Trump nationally by nearly 2 percentage points and is either leading or tied with him in all seven battleground states. However, Republican analysts argue that these polling numbers may not accurately reflect voter sentiment due to biased polling methodology…
Critics point out that many polls have been sampling a disproportionately smaller share of Republican voters compared to exit poll data from the 2020 presidential election. The result, they say, is a misleading “phantom advantage” for Ms. Harris. According to them, this skewed sampling could be a strategic move to boost enthusiasm and fundraising for Ms. Harris’ campaign.
Trump campaign strategist Jim McLaughlin echoed this sentiment, stating, “They undersample Republicans” intentionally “to tamp down support and donations for Trump.” He added that the polls are part of a larger effort to create a narrative that favors Harris.
Trump has openly criticized the poll results. “It’s fake news,” Trump declared during a rally in Michigan. “They can make those polls sing.”
“Billionaire Mark Cuban Asked His Followers If They’d Prefer Their Kids Be Like Trump or Harris.” Turns out they preferred Trump by more than 2-1. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Another week, another high profile Democrat’s aide turns out to be a Chinese spy.
Linda Sun, a former aide to New York governor Kathy Hochul, acted at the direction of Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party officials while serving in state government, federal prosecutors alleged in an indictment Tuesday.
In a statement, the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York said that Sun was arrested Tuesday morning with her husband, Christopher Hu. They were expected to be arraigned later in the day.
Sun is a former deputy chief of staff to Kathy Hochul and has served in numerous roles throughout New York State government since her first post under the administration of former governor Andrew Cuomo in 2012. Before that, she served as Representative Grace Meng’s chief of staff, when the Queens Democrat served in the New York State assembly.
“As alleged, while appearing to serve the people of New York as deputy chief of staff within the New York State Executive Chamber, the defendant and her husband actually worked to further the interests of the Chinese government and the CCP,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said.
The federal government is alleging that Sun was an unregistered agent of the Chinese government and that her husband engaged in money-laundering while they benefited from millions of dollars in bribes from Chinese officials.
The indictment details a shocking pattern of collaboration with China’s consulate general in New York, with Sun at one point in 2020 letting a Chinese diplomat listen in on a private conference call for New York officials regarding the state government’s response to the Covid pandemic.
Chinese-government and CCP officials directed her to block Taiwanese officials from engaging with officials from New York. Beijing views the current government of Taiwan as a traitorous separatist movement and wants to annex the country.
According to court documents, Taiwan’s de facto consulate in New York City invited an unnamed politician, a description that matches the profile of then-governor Andrew Cuomo, to attend a banquet honoring then-Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen during her stopover in the city in 2019. Sun forwarded information about the invite to a Chinese official, telling that individual, “I sent you an email / Just an FYI / I already blocked it.” She then declined the invitation without consulting other New York executive chamber officials.
When Sun later asked a colleague to check if the politician was registered for the banquet, that staff member said that it was not on the schedule. Sun replied: “Perfect!”
She also manipulated messaging from the New York governor’s office, while consulting Chinese diplomats, the indictment stated.
Federal agents on Wednesday zeroed in on the highest ranks of Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, searching a home and seizing the phones of the New York City police commissioner, the first deputy mayor, the schools chancellor and others, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The police commissioner. They seized the police commissioner’s phones. Wow.
Among the other officials the federal investigators sought information from were the deputy mayor for public safety and a senior adviser to the mayor who is one of his closest confidants, the people said. Both men have had other legal challenges.
The agents also searched the home and seized the phone of a consultant who is the brother of both the schools chancellor and one of the deputy mayors, the people said.
The nature of the investigations is unclear, but it appears that one is focused on the senior City Hall officials and the other touches on the police commissioner, the people said.
…
Representatives of the City Hall officials — the first deputy mayor, Sheena Wright; her partner, Schools Chancellor David C. Banks; the deputy mayor for public safety, Philip Banks III; and a senior adviser to the mayor, Timothy Pearson — could not be reached or declined to comment.
The consultant, Terence Banks, a brother of Philip Banks and David Banks, recently opened a government and community relations firm aimed at closing a gap “between New York’s intricate infrastructure and political landscape.” He, too, could not be reached for comment.
Several of the officials had their phones seized or records of their communications subpoenaed.
…
In addition to the police commissioner, Edward A. Caban, several other department officials, including Mr. Caban’s chief of staff and two Queens precinct commanders, also had their phones taken by federal agents, two of the people said.
Says Dwight: “It sounds like the whole Adams administration is so packed with corruption, they can’t even keep the lid screwed on.”
Behind the statistics: “August: 635K Foreign-Born Workers Gained Jobs as 1.3 Million Americans Lost Jobs.”
Germany’s conservative, populist, pro-border security Alternative for Germany won big in this week’s elections. Of course, the media, in unison, denounces anyone who objects to the mass importation of unassimilated Muslims into any European country as “far right.” And in Germany, this means they invariable compare Alternative for Germany to a certain mustachioed National Socialist.
President Trump endorses marijuana decriminalization vote. “Florida’s Amendment 3, titled Recreational Marijuana, would allow adults who are at least 21 years of age have up to 3 ounces of marijuana (a ‘small amount’?) and up to 5 grams of marijuana concentrate. At present, the state only allows medical patients with qualifying conditions to legally buy and possess cannabis.” Marijuana prohibition hasn’t worked. Full-bore marijuana legalization seems to have brought a whole host of problems, especially in blue states. Florida will provide another statewide laboratory of democracy to calibrate an approach.
Lowes may be getting out of the culture wars, but Home Depot is still in, having “partnered with LGBTQ mafia organization Human Rights Campaign on a school program that taught radical gender theory to elementary school kids.”
That budget deficit might also cause the Labour government to pull out of the F-35 procurement program. “Despite previous plans to acquire 138 F-35s, only 48 have been ordered.”
The head of Harris County’s Public Health Department, who was fired last week, has also been working for a California county since last January. Questions are swirling about her work in Texas, including her role in awarding a contract for sending mental health workers instead of police on some 911 calls.
Sources also say there is a pending criminal investigation into the county’s health department and related contracts.
County officials announced last Friday that Executive Director of Harris County Public Health Barbie Robinson had been dismissed, just days after the Houston Chronicle reported on communications surrounding a $6 million contract awarded to DEMA, a California-based company, to run the county’s Holistic Assistance Response Teams (HART).
The Texan has learned that in January 2024, Robinson also contracted with Yuba County, California to provide services for a three-year period. Robinson’s work for Yuba County’s public health department provides her with nearly $200,000 in compensation for hundreds of hours of work, all while managing Harris County’s public health department.
Sources familiar with the matter say that Robinson claimed to have obtained approval from former County Administrator David Berry and the County Attorney’s Office to engage in the additional work, but that current County Administrator Diana Ramirez was unable to confirm Robinson’s claims.
Other sources indicate that the Harris County District Attorney’s Office (HCDAO) has been investigating Robinson and nearly a dozen other individuals with the county, HART, and DEMA for several months.
This week, the McLennan County District Attorney’s Office dismissed murder charges against two Houston men involved in the self-defense incident at a party near the Baylor University campus, finally determining it was a justifiable homicide. While that was good news to Calvin Nichols Jr., it hardly makes up for the 635 days the man spent locked up in jail while the DA’s office slowly dragged its feet over the case.
According to police reports, on the night in question Nichols and his cousin, Jaytron Damon Scott, were invited to a party attended by a number of Baylor students, including football players. According to partygoers, Joseph Craig Thomas Jr. showed up uninvited and began threatening others with a gun, including a female student who asked him to move his car.
He later stuck a gun under the chin of a Baylor football player. And when Scott and Nichols were leaving the party, Thomas began to pistol whip Nichols.
That’s when Scott, acting in defense of his cousin, fired his pistol at Thomas, striking him multiple times and killing him. Murder charges were then filed against Scott and Nichols, a fact that Scott’s attorney, Bryan Cantrell, found unbelievable.
“I don’t know how this case got indicted,” Cantrell told KWTX.com. “This was the clearest self-defense case I have ever seen. And I think the problem is a lot of attorneys and, certainly the people of the community, don’t understand the law of self-defense.”
You would hope that the end of Abel Reyna’s term as McLennan County DA put a stop to this sort of thing, but evidently not.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is preparing to implement the Biden-Harris administration’s Sustains Act which aims to regulate who will own environmental services.
According to private property rights advocates, American Stewards of Liberty (ASL), examples of environmental services include “the air we breathe, photosynthesis, pollination, and even the health benefits of open space.”
Specifically, the new law allows private funds to be used for conservation efforts on private land. The USDA will oversee the program, and the Secretary, preparing its implementation, will also decide who owns the environmental service.
Although the public may still provide the USDA with comments about the plan until September 16, 2024, ASL refers to the new law as “critical for proponents of the United Nations’ sustainable development agenda to achieve.”
The private property rights advocates see the program as a means to “provide the path to transfer America’s real assets from private citizens to federal and international interests.”
Screw both the Biden Administration and the UN.
The latest Stolen Valor Democrat is Maryland governor Wes Moore, who didn’t earn the Bronze Star he claimed he did.
Speaking of Idaho, how Micron defied the odds to become one of the biggest DRAM manufacturers in the world.
Intel just cancelled their 20A (2nm) node and will be fabbing their Arrow Lake processor at TSMC. “Intel projects it will save half a billion dollars by skipping the 20A node. The announcement comes as Intel embarks on a vast restructuring in the wake of troubling financial results last quarter. The company continues to lay off 15,000 workers, among the largest workforce reductions in its 56-year history.” It’s supposedly going full speed ahead with its 18A node, theoretically due in 2025. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Intel and Japan are teaming up to work on EUV. Hard to see them making much progress given how large a lead ASML has…
Rael Enteen, Vice President of the Washington Commanders football team (AKA The Artist Formerly known As The Washington Redskins) has been fired.
He told…that, “over 50% of our roster is white religious, and God says, ‘F— the gays.’ Their interpretation. I don’t buy any of that. Another big chunk is low-income African Americans that comes from a community that is inherently very homophobic.”
…Enteen also said some players are “dumb as hell” and said some who were smart don’t stay that way after getting hit in the head too many times. He also said those who “get their heads knocked around a few times” are more susceptible to conspiracy theories.
Enteen also said, “I don’t think the commissioner of the NFL hates gay people, hates black people. Jerry Jones, who really runs the NFL, I think he hates gay people, black people.”
And James O’Keefe claims another scalp…
Legal Insurrection’s William A. Jacobson just got dis-invited from speaking on antisemitism at a synagogue in Tampa. “How could any Jew look around at the current geopolitical landscape and conclude that it’s safe to ignore all the various threats to their existence — not just Hamas terrorists in Gaza, but also the various murderous entities backed by the Islamic radical regime in Iran, to say nothing of Democratic primary voters in Dearborn, Michigan — because Trump is the real danger? What kind of cocoon are these people living in?”
This is going to be pretty esoteric for many of my readers, but in previous semiconductor posts covering ASML, some commenters have suggested that fabs can do multi-patterning for smaller nodes rather than having to use ASML’s extreme ultraviolet stepper. The following video explains why, below a certain threshold, no, you really can’t.
I’m not going to summarize every point, but the largest takeaway is that multi-patterning is computationally prohibitive. Double-patterning splits a single mask into two masks, each of which only create half of the mask pattern on the die. Double-patterning was fine for a while, but triple patterning and self-aligned double-patterning start making finding optimal solutions to the mask splitting problem exponentially more difficult.
Take a square. A square has four nodes in it. With double patterning, each of the two masks handle opposing sides of the square. And with this four-node shape, there are two double patterning options available for coloring. The EDA software thus has to check through them for design rule violations and whatnot. With triple patterning, the number of variations explodes exponentially. For that same square four node structure, triple patterning has 18 variations rather than just two with double patterning. A five node structure, 30. And so on. A semiconductor design can have hundreds of different nodes and design variations. The software needs to check through at least a good portion of these. This problem is not solvable in polynomial time. In other words, for you computer science nerds out there, it is an NP complete problem.
And then there’s the cost. “Depending on whose cost model you consult, [10nm]’s triple patterning makes its lithography module 3.85x higher than [28nm].” And the non-EUV 7nm node required triple-patterning and something called “self-aligned quadruple patterning.” And on Intel: “Brian Krzanich has said that in certain cases the company needs to use quad (4x), penta (5x), or hexa (6x) patterning for select features, as they need to expose the wafer up to six times to “draw” one feature. I am not super surprised that it wouldn’t yield. No wonder GlobalFoundries ditched their 7nm node.”
And this summary glosses over big differences between different fab technologies on different companies. TSMC’s 7nm isn’t the same as Intel’s 7nm.
Anyway, all this goes a long way to explain: Multi-patterning is much more painful than simply ponying up the cost for an ASML EUV stepper. And if you want to do 6nm, you have to use EUV.
For new, cutting edge fabs, the short answer is yes. If you’ve bought a new computer or smart phone in the last year, the chances that at least some of the layers in some of the chips went through an ASML EUV stepper approaches 100%.
The technology required to produce EUV sounds like something a crazy person would dream up:
Earlier generations of kit employ lasers to produce light directly. But as wavelengths shrink, things get trickier. Inside a cutting-edge EUV machine 50,000 droplets of molten tin fall through a chamber at its base each second. A pair of lasers zap every drop, creating a plasma that in turn releases light of the desired wavelength. The mirrors guiding this light, made of sandwiched layers of silicon and molybdenum, are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimetre. Because EUV light is absorbed by almost anything, including air, the process must take place in a vacuum. To get into the production facilities, your correspondent had to don a special suit and leave his notebook behind, lest it shed unwanted fibres.
The machines, weighing 180 tonnes and the size of a double-decker bus, are themselves a testament to the electronics industry’s tangled supply chains. ASML has around 5,000 suppliers. Carl Zeiss, a German optics firm, fashions its lenses. VDL, a Dutch company, makes the robotic arms that feed wafers into the machine. The light source comes from Cymer, an American company bought by ASML in 2013. ASML is, in turn, one of hundreds of firms that supply the chipmakers themselves. But it is so vital that Intel, Samsung and TSMC have all chipped in to finance its research and development in return for stakes in the firm.
The tool consists of a laser-driven tin (Sn) plasma light source, reflective optics comprising multilayer mirrors, contained within a hydrogen gas ambient. The hydrogen is used for keeping the EUV collector mirror in the source free of Sn deposition.
EUVL is a significant departure from the deep ultraviolet lithography standard. All matter absorbs EUV radiation. Hence, EUV lithography requires a vacuum. All optical elements, including the photomask, must use defect-free molybdenum/silicon (Mo/Si) multilayers (consisting of 40 Mo/Si bilayers) that act to reflect light by means of interlayer interference; any one of these mirrors absorb around 30% of the incident light.
Current EUVL systems contain at least two condenser multilayer mirrors, six projection multilayer mirrors and a multilayer object (mask). Since the mirrors absorb 96% of the EUV light, the ideal EUV source needs to be much brighter than its predecessors. EUV source development has focused on plasmas generated by laser or discharge pulses. The mirror responsible for collecting the light is directly exposed to the plasma and is vulnerable to damage from high-energy ions and other debris such as tin droplets, which require the costly collector mirror to be replaced every year.
Also:
An EUV mask consists of 40 alternating silicon and molybdenum layers; this multilayer acts to reflect the extreme ultraviolet light through Bragg diffraction; the reflectance is a strong function of incident angle and wavelength, with longer wavelengths reflecting more near normal incidence and shorter wavelengths reflecting more away from normal incidence. The pattern is defined in a tantalum-based absorbing layer over the multilayer. The multilayer may be protected by a thin ruthenium layer.
Got that? Good. That Wikipedia page is worth scrolling all the way through once for for the humbling realization of just how complex and precise dozens of different areas of chemistry, physics and optics combine to allow this one semiconductor tool to function.
“Sure, we’re zapping droplets of molten tin with high energy lasers in an atmosphere of pure hydrogen to create pulses of light reflected off eight impossibly smooth mirrors of 40 layers each to pattern billions of lines on a tiny patch of silicon at the heart of a $120 million, 180 ton machine, but it’s actually a lot more complex than I’m making it sound. Also, we do it 96 times on a single pass on a single 300mm wafer, and we handle 170 wafers an hour.”
Here are a couple of videos showing how large and complex an EUV stepper is:
