Posts Tagged ‘LG’

LinkSwarm For July 24, 2026

Friday, July 24th, 2026

RFK, Jr. presses the pause button for medicaid payments over Democrat fraud, we pound Iran some more, Ukraine sinks floating cranes and sets giant logistics hubs aflame, and a punk rock auction.

It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • “HHS Pausing $1 Billion in Medicaid Payments to California, Minnesota Over Fraud.” “That includes more than $887 million for California and over $200 million for Minnesota.”

    The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have paused more than $1 billion in Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota due to fraud concerns.

    “That includes more than $887 million for California and over $200 million for Minnesota,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a press conference. “If those states want that money, they need to provide documentation that these payments are legitimate.”

    “In Minnesota and California, our reviews are going back to just over the last few years, turned up the same recurring theme again and again every single quarter: Claims in these same high-risk categories that the states have not yet been able to document fully and acceptably to the federal government. Claims that are unresolved and claims that smell like fraud. And if it smells like fraud, we’re not paying for it anymore.”

  • More on that theme:

    RFK Jr. says HHS loses $100,000,000,000 a year to theft.

    He found some thieves would bribe poor people with flat screen TVs to get their patient numbers and enroll them in hospice.

    Then they would proceed to bill Medicaid “$6,000 a month FOREVER.”

    RFK JR: “We shut down 800 hospices. You know what a hospice is? Where you’re going to die. Typically, if you go to a hospice, you leave within 18 days because your dying is terminal.”

    “We started looking at these hospices in Los Angeles, and the people never died. Two or three years later they were there, and we’re paying $6,000 a month.”

    “We found a hotel room with 29 hospices in it. I mean a hotel, every room was a hospice, and none of them had any patients. They were just addresses.”

    “The guys who own them, they were Estonians and Armenians and people from Eastern Europe who were getting the patient numbers. They were stealing them from doctors’ offices.”

    “They were also going into poor neighborhoods in Los Angeles and they’d say to the people, ‘We’ll give you this $375 flat-screen TV. You give us your patient number and we’re going to enroll you in this hospice. You don’t ever have to go. We’re just going to enroll you,’ and then we’ll charge Medicaid $6,000 a month forever. And the guy never dies, of course, because he was never sick.”

    “We didn’t get a single call from a congressman or from a business owner saying, ‘Oh, you shut down my hospice and all these patients are on the street.’ None of them, because they were all crooked and they knew they were crooke

    (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • The Iran war continues.

    U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces successfully completed the 13th straight night of strikes against Iran, July 23, at 9 p.m. ET.

    CENTCOM targeted Iranian military command centers, drone storage facilities, communication networks, coastal surveillance sites, and maritime capabilities to further diminish the threat Iran poses to civilian mariners and commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

    The international waterway remains open for transit despite recent attacks from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Commercial vessels continue to freely navigate the strait with U.S. military support.

    I’m noticing a couple of dogs that aren’t currently barking: Hezbollah and Hamas. It turns out that when your paymaster is broke, running out of missiles and getting the snot blown out of them, they don’t have a lot of time, money and attention to lavish on helping their two catspaws murder Jews…

  • “How China Made and Shipped Fake Driver’s Licenses to Tamper With the 2020 Election.”

    When President Donald Trump talked about some of the things China has done to literally steal our democracy by seeing to it that, in 2020, its Manchurian candidate was elected in the form of a semi-comatose Joe Biden, many of the things he mentioned had already been in the news, but they may not have been covered by the legacy media.

    Case in point: Trump mentioned in his July 16 address to the nation that China stole TikTok data to create fake U.S. driver’s licenses.

    If you follow conservative media, you may have known this. If you get your news from the legacy media, you most likely didn’t know it, and if you heard it now, you won’t believe it. That’s the group Trump was targeting in his address. His national address strategy was to speak past the legacy media and to begin the process of planting the seeds of the truth in the minds of those who rely on the CNNs, ABCs, and NBCs of the world.

    Strategically, Trump is now trying to break through the information barrier that the legacy media and the left have created to keep the majority of Americans in the dark on what’s really happened to corrupt our elections.

    A year ago, Brooke Singman published a lengthy piece on the Fox News website that detailed just how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) executed its TikTok data theft scheme. Her primary source for the story was the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

    The Senate Judiciary Committee launched its own investigation into this after the FBI had announced its own investigation in July 2025. As Singman reported, the CCP allegedly worked to get “fake driver’s licenses to Chinese sympathizers in the U.S. who would cast a vote for candidate Biden.”

    It is not clear how successful the CCP was in getting its ballots for Biden to count.

    In July 2025, a Grassley spokesperson told Fox News, “Chairman Grassley is in receipt of an FBI document (response) to a request he made based on legally protected whistleblower disclosures…. The document alleges serious national security concerns that need to be fully investigated by the FBI.”

    As stated in that document, the intent of the alleged scheme was for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to produce and export fraudulent U.S. driver’s licenses to Chinese sympathizers in the U.S., so as to create “tens of thousands of fraudulent mail-in votes for US Presidential candidate Joe Biden, in late August 2020.”

    According to the document at the center of these investigations, by August 2020, “the Chinese government had produced a large amount of fraudulent United States driver’s licenses that were secretly exported to the United States,” Fox News reported.

    The fraudulent drivers licenses would allow tens of thousands of Chinese students and immigrants sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party to vote for US Presidential Candidate USPER Joe ((Biden)), despite not being eligible to vote in the United States… China had collected private US user data from millions of TikTok accounts, to include name, ID and address, which would allow the Chinese government to use real US persons’ information to create the fraudulent driver’s license, the document states.

    Reporting on the investigation indicates that the fake IDs included true ID numbers and the true addresses of U.S. citizens, which made the fraud difficult to detect.

    “China planned to use the fraudulent driver’s licenses to account for tens of thousands of mail-in votes,” according to the document.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “New Jersey Refuses to Cooperate with DOJ Investigation into Noncitizen Voting.” Gee, whatever could be the reason for that?

    New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill spurned the Department of Justice’s request for information on the nearly 6,600 noncitizens who were improperly added to the state’s voter rolls, raising the ire of Trump administration officials who are making election security a priority heading in the November midterms.

    The move follows Sherrill’s announcement on Tuesday that thousands of noncitizens had been added to New Jersey voter rolls, with 400 individuals casting ballots. Later that day, the DOJ requested the names, addresses, nationalities, and registration locations of the 6,600 non-citizens who were marked as voters, even though they identified themselves as noncitizens. Noncitizens convicted of voting in U.S. elections can face criminal penalties including deportation.

    “Ensuring that U.S. citizen’s votes are not illegally diluted by noncitizen’s votes is of paramount importance,” the letter from the DOJ stated.

    Sherrill voiced concerns that the information would be misused by the DOJ.

    “We are not in the practice of turning this kind of personally identifying data over to the federal government because we have seen them weaponize it,” Sherrill said at an event on Thursday.

    And by “weaponize” she means “Keeping our precious illegal aliens from voting for Democrats and/or deporting them.” You know, enforcing the law.

  • “Socialist activist says another quiet part out loud, details the plan to install politicians from the “Global South.”

    The Great Replacement: Congressional Edition!

    Here’s Melat Kiros, a “democratic” socialist activist, explaining the party’s plan to fundamentally change America by electing people from the “Global South”….

    That’s the explicit plan from the DSA.

    Mass immigration, elect immigrants to office Mamdani and Ilhan Omar-style, and have them fundamentally change what America is.

  • “Feds Flagged Daszak As ‘An Extremely High Person Of Interest’ – Then The FBI Told Them To Stand Down.”

    On February 2, 2021, a national targeting security specialist at U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center circulated a referral to colleagues across the agency. The subject was Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, scheduled to land at John F. Kennedy International Airport three days later aboard Qatar Airways flight 701 from Doha, arriving 2:25 p.m. He was returning from the World Health Organization’s mission to Wuhan investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

    The referral asked that Daszak be considered for a Tactical Terrorism Response Team examination – a secondary inspection that can include questioning and a review of electronic devices. Which, now we know, never happened.

    Senator Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released the underlying records Monday. They show CBP flagged Daszak as “an extremely high person of interest,” built out a formal targeting event, and then stood down two days before his flight at the request of the FBI’s New York Field Office.

  • “The Democrats Have a Communist Problem.”

    It’s bad enough that Zohran Mamdani has become the leader of the new Democratic Party, having been anointed by none other than its King, Barack Obama. But now, their shining new star, Hasan Piker, is not even bothering to hide behind the words “Democratic Socialist.” He’s gone full-blown Commie.

    These pitiful cosplay revolutionaries are not a match for Donald Trump, who can flick them off his jacket like a piece of lint, but he only has a few more years left, and the Democrats are collapsing into an even more fanatical cult. They have no one to blame but themselves.

    Mamdani had made big promises to “arrest Benjamin Netanyahu” if he ever came to New York as a “war criminal.” But he had to backtrack on that because he doesn’t have the authority to do so because Trump smacked him down.

    He still calls on the Federal Government to make the arrest. To me, he looks like someone who believes he’s the alternative president in our virtual Civil War, like a would-be Jefferson Davis.

    Snip.

    Hasan Piker is now riding high on his newfound fame and glory. He proudly displays the front page of the New York Times with the Twin Towers ablaze after 9/11 and has said on streaming that the US “deserved” it, later clarifying that our foreign policy was bad enough that we should be attacked.

    Hasan Piker is dangerous because he is so stupid. He’s so stupid, he doesn’t even seem to know the horrific atrocities under Mao. He showed up at a recent Democratic event wearing a Mao costume.

    Hey, Mao only killed 65-78 million people.

    Hasan Piker, like Zohran Mamdani, like all of the Manson family girlies who fawn all over them, were raised in American schools amid Critical Race and Gender Theory, the so-called “real history” they indoctrinated our kids with. Now we are seeing the fruits of their labor.

    It’s Joseph McCarthy’s ultimate nightmare finally realized. Maybe it wasn’t true that the military was infested with Commies, but if it came back to today, he’d see evidence of infiltration everywhere, from culture to academia to politics.

    If the Democrats go Full Commie thanks to the stalking horse of Social Justice, then it really will be time to stock up on ammunition. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of commies, Communist scumbag dictator Daniel Ortega says he’s ending elections in Nicaragua.

    For those who know, rigged elections do happen in the Americas. They’ve been happening for years in Nicaragua, ever since the Sandinistas brought Daniel Ortega to power in the 1980s.

    Many young people will have forgotten that there was massive enthusiasm for the Sandinistas across the international left. Five years ago, Quillette ran a wonderful piece about the support for Sandinistas found across the American left. It’s amazing how many leftists of the 1980s who went for the Sandinistas have stayed with us: Bernie Sanders, Bill de Blasio.

    The poor in Nicaragua are in a wretched condition. Ortega effectively made himself president for life when he exceeded the country’s constitutional limits on his office. This week, he finally announced plans for the abolition of elections. He explained in a public rant that this was necessary to stop “the traitors.”

    The only thing missing was Ortega announcing that he had to end elections “to save our democracy.”

    I was writing about this commie scumbag back in college, and he’s long overdue to be dirtnapped. Maybe after we’ve finished with Venezuela, Iran and Cuba…

  • “Two Democratic Senate candidates have received backlash for accepting donations from a Democrat megadonor with former ties to Jeffrey Epstein. James Talarico and Sen. Jon Ossoff, D- Ga., who is running for re-election, have both received donations from Reid Hoffman, a billionaire who has admitted to spending time on Epstein’s Caribbean island.” It’s always OK when they do it…
  • “University of Houston Poised To Eliminate 40 Percent of Core Curriculum.” Which is a good thing, since the “core curriculum” items being eliminated are absolute social justice bullshit.

    As first reported by the Houston Chronicle, UH officials are currently finalizing a proposal to bring before University of Houston System regents at the August board meeting.

    The Chronicle reported that approximately 100 courses are on the chopping block. Examples include:

    • Black Liberation Theology
    • Black Liberation Studies
    • Intro to LGBT Studies
    • Intro to Women’s Studies
    • Latino Leadership, Activism, and Organizing
    • Mexican American Urban Communities
    • Sexuality and Society

    The Chronicle further reported that while UH will eliminate core eligibility for coursework explicitly grounded in grievance studies, government and history coursework discussing “histories for specific demographics” was not impacted.

    The review in question is required under Senate Bill 37, a measure state lawmakers passed in 2025. The new law also requires boards of regents to conduct a review of all general education curricula every five years.

    General education requirements are a set of courses all students must complete, regardless of major. Higher education authors Jason Brennan and Phil Magness have criticized these mandates as a subsidy for economically unsustainable programs that frequently protect woke curricula from accountability.

    Eliminate them all and lay off those teaching them.

  • “Drone Strike on Newly-Hit Refinery: Novospasskoye Oil Refinery Hit for First Time.”
  • “Ukraine Hits Two Black Sea Fleet Floating Cranes + 11 More Vessels in the Black Sea.”
  • “Ukraine Hits Another Floating Crane and Nine Other Vessels in the Black Sea.”
  • Turning Moscow into Mordor: “HUGE Smoke Cloud Over the City: Wildberries Facility Destroyed.”
  • “More: HUGE Drone Strike on Logistical Hub in Elektrostal, Moscow.”
  • “Three Logistics Hubs Near Moscow Hit By Drones! Wildberries at Podolsk–Russia’s Largest.”
  • “Wildberries in St. Petersburg Destroyed by Drones! Third Biggest Hub.”
  • “Two More Wildberries Warehouse Hit! One in Krasnodar, One in Stavropol. Huge Fires!”
  • More updates on last week’s strikes: “Wildberries Satellite Imagery: One Facility Completely Destroyed, One Damaged, One Missed.”
  • Russia loses its newest “stealthy” Su-57 fighter, possibly to friendly fire. 
  • “Ukraine agrees on plan to acquire 16 Rafale jets.”

    Ukraine has agreed on a plan to acquire 16 Rafale fighter jets from France together with the accompanying weapon systems, French President Emmanuel Macron said at a press conference here late Monday following a meeting of the group of countries that have pledged support to Ukraine.

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Macron agreed on a roadmap between their two countries that also includes the acquisition of a first batch of SAMP/T NG air-defense batteries, complementing systems and their missiles to be delivered in coming weeks, Macron said. France will also provide radar systems and additional missiles, the president said.

    The countries further approved licensing agreements for production in Ukraine of the AASM glide-bomb kit, the Aster 30 air-defense interceptor that arms the SAMP/T system as well as the SCALP/Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missile, Macron said.

    Don’t get too excited, though. “The first Rafale jets are expected to fly in Ukrainian skies as early as 2028 or 2029.”

  • “DHS allows officers to review visa applicants’ use of welfare programs while considering permanent status qualification.” Good. No one should come to America to get on welfare.
  • 478 Individuals Charged In Border-Related Enforcements In Texas, Arizona.”
  • Concerning news: “U.S. Reaches 41 New World Screwworm Cases as Sterile Fly Production Continues Rollout.”
  • Primary news: “Trump-backed candidates, including ex-Giants, Jets kicker Jay Feely, easily win Arizona primaries — socialist House hopeful gets smoked.”

    A full slate of Republican candidates endorsed by President Trump, including former NFL kicker Jay Feely, emerged victorious Tuesday in Arizona’s primary elections while a Democratic socialist House hopeful suffered a crushing defeat.

    Feely, who played for six teams — including the Jets and Giants — during his 14 seasons as a pro, defeated former state lawmaker Joseph Chaplik in the Grand Canyon State’s 1st Congressional District, which covers northeastern Maricopa County and is the wealthiest in Arizona.

    The 1st District seat is being vacated by Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.), who opted to run for governor. Democrats have targeted the district as a key flip opportunity as they try to regain the House majority after four years out of power.

    Feely, a former CBS football analyst who was endorsed by Trump in January, touted his close ties to the president on the campaign trail.

    “Who can call [Trump] and who can get him to answer? That’s me,” he said during a primary debate last month. “He will take my call and he will listen. I have the ability to have the ear of the president.”

    In the Democratic primary, former state Rep. Amish Shah led onetime TV journalist Marlene Galán-Woods by 6.9 percentage points with 84% of the expected vote in, but the race had yet to be called as of Wednesday morning.

    In the open 5th District, Trump-backed former Pinal County sheriff Mark Lamb topped construction contractor Daniel Keenan by nearly 17 percentage points.

    Lamb, who rose to prominence for taking on Mexican cartels smuggling drugs across the border and into Arizona, will head to the midterms as the heavy favorite over Democratic nominee Elizabeth Lee in the solidly red district.

    Snip.

    Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who has represented the 5th District since 2017, opted not to seek another term and ran in the GOP gubernatorial primary instead.

    That decision paid off handsomely as Biggs, with the support of Trump, topped Schweikert Tuesday night by nearly 60 percentage points.

    Snip.

    In the 4th District, centered in the Phoenix suburbs of Tempe and Mesa, incumbent Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.) swamped Democratic socialist primary challenger Kai Newkirk by 30 percentage points.

    Newkirk, who accused Stanton of being too supportive of Israel and corporations and slammed the congressman’s vote in favor of the Laken Riley Act mandating illegal immigrants who are arrested, charged or convicted of “burglary, theft, larceny or shoplifting” be held by immigration authorities.

    Sanity among Democrat primary voters? What are the odds? (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • Food contamination news: “Nearly 1.6M eggs from Texas farms recalled for possible Salmonella contamination.”

    The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a statement on Wednesday detailing the voluntary recall of 1,589,577 dozen eggs from Midwest Poultry Services, L.P., which may be contaminated with Salmonella Enteritidis.

    Midwest Poultry Services said that as of Wednesday, it was not aware of any illnesses related to the eggs.

    The identifying codes printed on the left or right sides of the carton P-1950 or 0840962 with a Julian date between 157 and 184 are recalled, according to the FDA report. They were available to consumers at Kroger stores in Texas and Louisiana, as well as Brookshire Grocery locations across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Mississippi. The full list of products that have been recalled is provided in the FDA’s announcement.

  • Speaking of food contamination: First comes word that “FDA walks back Taylor Farms-Cyclospora test as “False positive.'” But now comes word that “FDA refutes Taylor Farms claim that lettuce recall was based on false positive.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • “Judge puts temporary pause on Paramount-Warner Bros. merger.” “U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of the Northern District of California issued a temporary restraining order barring Paramount from closing the transaction, a corporate tie-up that would unite two movie studios, two streaming platforms and two news organizations under the control of David Ellison, the son of billionaire technology tycoon Larry Ellison.” I know you’ll be shocked to learn that Martínez-Olguín was appointed by “Joe Biden.”
  • “Scottish runner sets world record for fastest mile, running at an average of 16 mph.” That would be Josh Kerr.
  • Missed this from a couple of months ago: “Every Single Horse Running In The 151st Kentucky Derby Is Related To Secretariat.”
  • “Astronomers announce the discovery of space sugar.

    Using the Yebes 40-m and IRAM 30-m radio telescopes, the astronomers scanned the molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027, a chemically rich region located roughly 8,200 parsecs (26,745 light-years) from Earth near the Milky Way’s center.

    They picked up 12 sets of radio emission lines that matched the predicted spectral fingerprint of erythrulose, a four-carbon sugar with the chemical formula C4H8O4.

    ‘Erythrulose, with 14 atoms in its structure, represents the largest non-cyclic molecular species identified so far in the interstellar medium, and the first detected molecule containing four oxygen atoms,’ they said.

  • “Search Engines That Find Things Google Deliberately Hides.” Given Google’s ongoing enshitification, a lot of these are pretty useful.
  • “LG monitors caught auto-installing Windows app that acts like adware, silently installing bloatware that triggers McAfee ad pop-ups.”

  • If you have a car with CVT, yes you need to change the transmission fluid, probably every 50,000 miles.
  • Potter and Potter have an auction for “Skaters, Punks & Rebels: A Countercultural Cross-Section” next month. Probably not bidding on anything, but man, a 1983 concert with Black Flag, Fear and Circle Jerks would have been something to behold…
  • BeardMeatsFood takes on a wheelbarrow full of tiramisu.
  • So here’s a video arguing that, since humans are primates, doing a deadhang improves a whole lot of muscle groups. It says most people struggle to do ten seconds at first. Since I don’t have a chinning bar, that’s not an exercise I can do at home, so I did two separate ten second hangs last Saturday on park equipment while I was out walking my dogs. Result: A few hour later my left wrist was in quite a bit of pain, but that faded over a day. This Saturday I think I’ll go for 12 seconds…but only once.
  • A meme via Sarah Hoyt.:

  • Ed Bolian goes racing with Cleetus McFarland. It works out pretty well…for most of the race
  • Watch some Texas paddleboarders save a waterlogged raccoon.
  • “New Jersey Blames ‘Slight Software Glitch’ For Enrolling Entire Country Of Bolivia As Voters.”
  • “Dejected Mamdani Admits He Lacks Legal Authority To Invade Poland.”
  • “OSHA Fines Construction Site For Failure To Blare Mariachi Music.”
  • With a little bit more thoughtful approach, this could actually work. “Netflix Announces New Animated Film ‘Bro-Country Demon Hunters.'”
  • He found the spot:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Technology, Texas, video, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 6 Comments »

    Ken Paxton Sues Smart TV Makers

    Tuesday, December 16th, 2025

    Another day, another Ken Paxton lawsuit, this time against smart TV manufacturers he accuses of illegally spying on Texans.

    “Smart TVs are watching you back.”

    That’s how Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton opens a series of new lawsuits accusing major television manufacturers of secretly surveilling Texans inside their own homes.

    Paxton has filed suit against five major television companies—Samsung, Sony, LG, Hisense, and TCL—alleging they unlawfully collected and monetized detailed viewing data from consumers without meaningful knowledge or consent. Two of the companies named in the lawsuit, Hisense and TCL, are based in China, a fact Paxton says raises additional concerns about data security under China’s National Security Law.

    According to the lawsuit, the companies embedded Automated Content Recognition (ACR) technology into their smart televisions. The software allegedly captures screenshots of what appears on a user’s television screen as frequently as every 500 milliseconds, allowing companies to monitor what consumers watch across streaming platforms, cable television, and even external devices connected by HDMI, such as gaming consoles or laptops.

    Taking a picture every half-second and uploading it sounds something that would definitely show up in your router logs, assuming you have things set up to keep an eye on it. And I rather doubt Samsung or LG have much use for that data clogging up their servers.

    But the Chinese manufacturers? Yeah, I can see them intermittently sampling everything until they find a nice juicy target to turn on and aim the full spyware capabilities at.

    The attorney general’s office alleges that the data is transmitted back to the companies in real time, used to build detailed consumer profiles, and then sold or shared for targeted advertising purposes—often without consumers understanding what they agreed to or how the technology works.

    “Companies, especially those connected to the Chinese Communist Party, have no business illegally recording Americans’ devices inside their own homes,” Paxton said in a statement. “This conduct is invasive, deceptive, and unlawful. The fundamental right to privacy will be protected in Texas because owning a television does not mean surrendering your personal information to Big Tech or foreign adversaries.”

    I wonder if the spyware capabilities Paxton alleges are present in these TVs can be easily demonstrated. I wouldn’t put it past China to include some capabilities, but demonstrating that they’re actually present in something like a court of law might prove difficult.

    Maybe LG and Samsung are spying on you to sell you ads:

    Kneon at Clownfish TV reports that LG TVs are automatically installing Microsoft Co-Pilot AI, and that it listens to your conversations are serves you ads based on it…

    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Communism, Texas | 7 Comments »

    475 Illegal Aliens Busted At Hyundai Battery Plant

    Sunday, September 7th, 2025

    Back in the dim mists of time, under one of the Bush Administrations, I remember reading a National Review or Weekly Standard piece on immigration enforcement that threw in the line “Obviously we’re not going to be raiding job sites anymore,” and I remember doing a double-take. “Why not? They’re illegal aliens. Deport them and fine the company illegally hiring them, and then start arresting them if they do it again.” This was my first inkling that there were Republicans who though that illegal aliens entering the country was no big deal as long as they could get consumer goods a few cents cheaper.

    I can only assume President Trump’s reaction was much the same, as federal authorities just arrested 475 illegal aliens at a Hyundai battery plant in Georgia.

    The Hyundai Motor Group facility in Ellabell, Georgia, stretches across 3,000 acres of what was once sleepy farmland twenty miles outside Savannah. This $4.3 to $7.6 billion joint venture with South Korea’s LG Energy Solutions represents the largest single industrial investment in Georgia’s history, designed to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles and employ over 1,200 Americans. Republican Governor Brian Kemp had hailed it as a crown jewel of economic development, a testament to America’s ability to attract world-class manufacturing back to our shores. I’ll admit, on paper it looked like everything we’ve been asking for.

    The sprawling construction site buzzed with activity until Thursday morning, when federal agents arrived with search warrants and a clear message about the difference between legal investment and illegal employment practices. Suddenly, all those rosy economic development photos didn’t tell the whole story.

    In the largest single-site operation in Homeland Security Investigations history, federal agents arrested 475 illegal migrants working at the facility. Think about that number for a moment—475 people working illegally at a single site. The raid involved multiple agencies—HSI, ICE, FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, and Georgia State Patrol—executing what officials described as the culmination of a months-long criminal investigation into unlawful employment practices.

    That’s a regular alphabet soup of government agencies. Were the illegal aliens dealing drugs and guns? If not, I fear some lower level federal judge is going to order some illegal aliens freed because they were arrested by the ATF and not ICE. But it does show Trump47 isn’t afraid to use the manpower at his disposal to enforce federal law.

    South Korean officials don’t seem to express any embarrassment over a Korean company hiring illegal aliens.

    The South Korean foreign ministry expressed ‘concern and regret’ over the raid and sent a counselor and embassy officials to the location.

    ‘Our companies’ economic activities and our people’s rights should not be infringed unfairly in the US legal enforcement process,’ Lee Jae-woong, a spokesperson for South Korea’s foreign ministry, said on Friday, according to the Financial Times.

    Or, hear me out, maybe Hyundai could obey the laws of the country they’re building their factory in.

    When it comes to immigration enforcement,the Trump Administration isn’t just talking the talk, it’s walking the walk.

    This is a refreshing change.

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime | 34 Comments »

    China’s Semiconductor Industry: Shell Games All The Way Down

    Wednesday, April 7th, 2021

    I’ve written about China’s semi-illusory semiconductor businesses before: “In China the question is always how much of that investment is real, and how much is illusion. A lot of those ‘under construction’ fabs never materialize, either unable to attract investors or having their funds magically siphoned off to some other enterprise.” While researching yesterday’s piece on the current semiconductor shortage, I came across this Emily Feng NPR piece on more multi-million dollar shenanigans in that space:

    In 2019, the U.S. sanctioned two major Chinese telecom firms, temporarily cutting them off from a vital supply of semiconductor chips — bits of silicon wafer and microscopic circuitry that help run nearly all our electronic devices.

    Wuhan Hongxin Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. promised a way out, toward self-reliance in the face of increasingly tough U.S. curbs on this technology. The private company once boasted on its website that it would raise a total of $20 billion to churn out 60,000 leading-edge chips a year.

    None of that would come to pass.

    Hongxin’s unfinished plant in the port city of Wuhan now stands abandoned. Its founders have vanished, despite owing contractors and investors billions of yuan.

    The company is one of six multibillion-dollar chip projects to fail in the last two years. Their rise and fall is a cautionary tale in an industry that is flush with state cash but still scarce on expertise — and a preview of the expensive and winding road China will have to take toward semiconductor self-sufficiency, now a national security priority.

    Hongxin Semiconductor began in November 2017 as a joint venture between Wuhan’s Dongxihu district government and a company called Beijing Guangliang Lantu Technology.

    The venture got off to a good start — on paper — but a closer look shows there were a number of issues. One of the co-founders of Guangliang had only finished elementary school and was allegedly using false credentials and a different identity, Cao Shan, according to 36Kr, a Chinese tech news outlet. Another co-founder, Li Xueyen, dabbled in selling Chinese traditional medicine, alcohol and tobacco before starting Hongxin, according to corporate records reviewed by NPR.

    These are not the profiles you look for in semiconductor startup founders.

    The two could not be reached for comment.

    Yeah, I bet.

    To balance out their lack of technical know-how, the Hongxin founders lured in one of Taiwan’s most famous semiconductor engineers, Chiang Shangyi, to serve as director. He left the company in 2020 to become the deputy chairman of China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., telling Hong Kong paper South China Morning Post that his time at Hongxin was “a nightmare.” Chiang did not respond to NPR requests for comment.

    Hongxin made headlines in December 2019 when it managed to buy an older model lithography machine made by Dutch company ASML, despite American lobbying to prevent its sale to the Chinese chipmakers.

    OK, on the face of it that sounds pretty impressive. If you want to have a cutting edge fab, you have to have one of ASML’s top of the line Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) steppers. In almost every other segment in the semiconductor equipment market, there’s competition between the three big players (Applied Materials, LAM Research and Tokyo Electron) and occasionally other companies (like Axcelis for ion implanters). But while you might be able to get away with lesser Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines from Nikon or Canon for some tasks, for the smallest features on cutting edge 7 and 5nm nodes, you simply can’t do without an ASML EUV stepper. (More background here.)

    Well, guess what? The vaunted ASML tool Hongxin bought is apparently an older 1980 model (presumably this one, which dates from 2015, not 1980) which is DUV, not EUV.

    Back to the NPR piece.

    ASML sold the multimillion dollar piece of equipment — used to etch semiconductors — because of Jiang’s top-notch reputation, according to two people familiar with the sale who were not authorized to speak publicly about it. ASML declined to comment.

    Feng (or her editors) goofed here. ASML makes lithography machines, not etch tools.

    Hongxin’s timing was opportune. Chinese chip companies still rely heavily on European, American and Japanese technology — much of which, in turn, relies on American intellectual property, which the U.S. appears determined to keep out of Chinese hands. China’s semiconductor demand continues to surge beyond what it can supply itself; trade data show that in 2019, Beijing imported around $350 billion worth in chips.

    Given that reliance, China’s central and local governments have been pumping money into the sector to accelerate domestic chip design and manufacturing. The country’s latest five-year economic planning document released in March identifies integrated circuits — semiconductors — as a priority sector for research and development funding.

    When governments starts pumping big money into private companies, you can be sure multiple scams are never far behind.

    The all-out approach has notched achievements. Successful chip design companies such as Cambricon and Huawei’s HiSilicon have allowed Huawei to replace some of its U.S.-designed chips in its mobile phones.

    Cambricon and HiSilicon are both fabless design houses, and both get their chips fabbed at foundries like TSMC. Huawei is one of the largest electronics companies in the world, with over $100 billion in annual sales, and they don’t own their own fab.

    Not far from Hongxin is Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC), a partially state-owned company that plans to double its output of memory chips to overtake South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix, which currently dominate production.

    Memory is a tough business. SK Hynix exists because Hyundai and LG (aka Lucky Goldstar), two huge Korean chaebols who hate each other only slightly less than rival Samsung, found the sledding too tough to go alone and had to combine their respective semiconductor operations to survive. Memory makes money hand-over-fist in boom times, but barely breaks even during busts. It’s less technically demanding than some other semiconductor segments, so China could conceivably make some headway there.

    YMTC is a subsidiary of Tsinghua Unigroup, a wholly owned business unit of Tsinghua University. Hu Haifeng, Communist Party secretary of Tsinghua Holdings, is the son of Hu Jintao, former CCP General Secretary and President of the People’s Republic of China.

    Hongxin sought to capitalize on this momentum. It rented a discreet office on the 25th floor of Wuhan’s Dongxihu district government headquarters.

    “Cao” and his partners promised to pitch in 1.8 billion yuan ($276 million) in investment on top of 200 million yuan ($30.7 million) in starting funds from Dongxihu district.

    Wuhan’s city government was, around the same time, also beginning construction on a cybersecurity park to provide office and residential space for technology businesses, and it was looking for a flagship company to anchor the complex. In 2018 and 2019, the city named Hongxin its most important “critical construction project” and the company began building its factory next door.

    As early as late 2019, even while Hongxin was being lauded by Chinese media for securing an ASML machine, several Wuhan-based construction crews were scrambling to get paid for millions of dollars of work for Hongxin.

    “Four months ago, [Hongxin’s] payments to us started to be short, and now we are missing 18 million yuan [$2.76 million],” one contractor, Lu Haitao told another, Wang Liyun in December 2019, according to phone recordings NPR obtained. Wang confirmed the authenticity of the recordings when reached by phone. Lu did not respond to several texts and calls from NPR. Wuhan’s municipal government did not respond to a request for comment.

    Meanwhile, two other semiconductor companies — Tacoma Semiconductor Technology Co. Ltd. and Dehuai Semiconductor Technology Co. Ltd. — were also running out of cash.

    Tacoma was over 350 miles from Hongxin along the Yangtze river, in the port city of Nanjing. There, the Taiwanese entrepreneur Joseph Lee had initially found a welcome harbor for his own ambitions, starting Tacoma in the city in 2015. He pledged to raise $3 billion to make wafer chips, with consultation from Israeli company Tower Semiconductor (formerly TowerJazz). Tower declined to comment for this story.

    Lee continued pitching other local governments. In 2016, he co-founded a second company in Jiangsu province’s Huai’an city, named Dehuai Semiconductor. (Lee sold his stake the same year, citing a clash in vision with the firm’s other managers.)

    In 2017, Lee invited Chinese media to tour Tacoma’s facilities, declaring the company had somehow scored 200 million yuan ($30.7 million) in sales. Tacoma had yet to even finish construction on its manufacturing facilities.

    Lee initially agreed to an NPR interview for this story but later retracted it, citing state pressure. “Officials have told me not to talk to the media,” he said by text.

    Yeah, I bet.

    By 2018, Tacoma’s employees were blasting an online forum run by the Nanjing mayor’s office with complaints about unpaid salaries. Chinese corporate records show at least 50 legal complaints have been filed against Tacoma in provincial court, all seeking to recoup construction costs or unpaid wages. Lee disputes owing employees 20 million yuan in unpaid wages.

    “Real or fake, the truth is in the hearts of the people,” Lee wrote shortly after these allegations, on Wechat, the Chinese messaging app, and cited a verse from the New Testament: “Now faith is the certainty of things hoped for, a proof of things not seen.”

    Citing bible verse when rumbled for his scam. Classic.

    Hongxin, Tacoma and Dehuai were able to secure billions of yuan in state funding on the condition they would match that with investment of their own — a commitment that never materialized. Tacoma eventually raised only a fraction — 250 million out of 2.5 billion yuan — of what it promised.

    “We never imagined that when our cash flow dried up, we would not be able to find new [cash flow sources], that we would get in so deep,” he told Japanese broadcaster NHK this March.

    And this is the problem with doing business in China in general: it’s shell games all the way down. At lot of times, loans and investments are siphoned through four or five different entities from the purposes for which they were originally obtained. Everyone’s trying to get rich, and they hope to survive on smoke and mirrors long enough to get profitable. Imagine if Kleiner Perkins invested $25 million in a software startup, only to find that money was spent on a noodle shop, a used car dealership and a golf club manufacturer.

    Sometimes it works. You can build a company on margin, get profitable quickly, and be paying off investors and contractors before anyone realizes how shaky the entire enterprise is.

    But you can’t do that with semiconductor manufacturing. The startup costs are simply too high, easily in the billions. Very, very few companies can afford to be in a game that expensive. China’s two biggest semiconductor manufacturing success stories, SMIC and Tsinghua Unigroup, all have have CCP direct government investment.

    In this game, little hucksters working the margins have no chance.

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    Remember When Japan Was Going To Take Over the World?

    Monday, February 13th, 2017

    Do you remember those fabulous 80s?

    Reagan was President, cyberpunk was new, and Jennifer Grey had a nose.

    Also, everyone knew that Japan was going to take over the world.

    Giant Japanese electronic companies like Sony, Toshiba and Fujitsu were leaders in their markets, Japan had a big export surplus, and Japanese companies were buying up iconic American assets like Rockafeller Center. Experts assured us that Japan was ascendant and that we needed to follow the “Japan Inc.” model of public/private partnerships, as well as the heavy vertical integration of the Japanese zaibatsu conglomerates, if we wanted to compete in the world market.

    It turns out that almost all that just about every aspect of that prescription was horribly wrong:

    Fast-forward 30 years. When one of Japan, Inc.’s leading corporations makes the news, as often as not it’s the result of an accounting scandal in which corporate profits were grossly overstated for years as a matter of policy–a policy intended to mask the stagnation in the company’s sales, product lines, competitive position and profits.

    What happened to the often-copied, much-vaunted Japan, Inc.? Many observers see Japan’s core problem as demographics: as its birth rate has fallen below replacement levels, the population of Japan is aging rapidly. Since young people start households and spend money, economic growth depends largely on the spending of young people rather than the declining spending of older people.

    While a decline in the youthful demographic certainly impacts growth, this view overlooks the larger problem: Japan, Inc.–its educational system, government, banking and corporate sector–was optimized for the mode of production that existed in the postwar world from the late 1940s to the late 1980s.

    Now that the Digital-Industrial Revolution is remaking the way goods and services are produced and distributed, the system that worked wondrously well in 1960 no longer aligns with the needs of this emerging mode of production.

    In the 1980s, Japan’s optimized-for-industrial-exports system reached its zenith, and many US pundits built careers predicting that Japan would soon eclipse the US in every economic and financial metric.

    But the excesses of Japan’s banking sector and the rise of new technologies that didn’t lend themselves to gradual improvement and vertically integrated corporations disrupted the predictions of Japan’s global dominance.

    Just as Sony ate the lunches of slower, less efficient American companies like RCA, soon the Japanese electronic giants found themselves being beaten by more nimble and disruptive international competitors like Apple and Samsung.

    Toshiba is now so broke they may need to spin-off their semiconductor business, despite it being the most central and profitable business in their company, probably because building a new state-of-the-art 300mm wafer fabrication plant for 10nm process technology can now cost up to $14 billion.

    Many other Japanese companies have been rocked by accounting scandals:

    In the five years since a $1.7bn accounting scandal was uncovered at Olympus, the number of improper accounting cases exposed each year in Japan has nearly doubled. It hit an all-time high of 58 cases in the 2015-16 fiscal year, according to Tokyo Shoko Research, which provides data on corporate failures.

    In many cases, the revelations have shone a light on malpractice and subterfuge dating back years — the legacy of management terrified of failure but left fighting decades of economic stagnation, squeezed costs and a shrinking domestic market.

    And those demographics don’t make anything easier:

    Children accounted for 12.8% of the population, the ministry said. By contrast, the ratio of people aged 65 or older was at a record high, making up 25.6% of the population. Jiji Press said that, of countries with a population of at least 40 million, Japan had the lowest ratio of children to the total population – compared with 19.5% for the United States and 16.4% for China…

    The proportion of people aged 65 or over is forecast to reach nearly 40% in 2060, the government has warned.

    Japan’s government has been running huge budget deficits since 2009, and debt now stands at about twice the size of the economy.

    For a while, the South Korean chaebol looked like they were going to supplant the Japanese zaibatsu as world beaters, but Samsung and LG have started running into some of the same problems.

    The lesson here is not “Merica, fark ye!”, it’s that capitalism works. The creative destruction of capitalism is necessary to keep economic progress moving forward. My biggest fear is that in his efforts to save American jobs, President Trump will prop up the GMs and Boeings of the world at the expense of smaller, nimbler competitors looking to supplant them.

    For the country’s long-term economic well-being, government should get out of the business of picking winners and losers entirely.

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    Posted in Economics, Foreign Policy | No Comments »