The Biden administration’s new technology restrictions are already causing disruptions in China as US semiconductor equipment suppliers are telling staff based in the country’s top memory chip maker to leave, according to WSJ, citing sources familiar with the matter.
State-owned Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. has seen US chip semiconductor equipment companies, including KLA Corp. and Lam Research Corp., halt business activities at the facility. This includes installing new equipment to make advanced chips and overseeing highly technical chip production.
The US suppliers have paused support of already installed equipment at YMTC in recent days and temporarily halted installation of new tools, the people said. The suppliers are also temporarily pulling out their staff based at YMTC, the people said. –WSJ
It’s hard to overemphasize how badly fucked China’s chip industry is with this latest move. Semiconductor equipment not only needs regular maintenance, but extremely specialized expertise when something goes wrong and your yields crash, wizards who can look at a wafer defect chart and determine by experience what’s gone wrong with which tool. Without support and spare parts from the western semiconductor equipment giants, expect yields to start crashing in a matter of months, if not weeks, especially if Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron join the pullout.
I just put in a call to the Applied Materials press office to ask them about this. I’ll let you know if I hear back.
As Peter Zeihan notes, these sanctions screw not only China’s semiconductor industry, but every segment of the high tech assembly chain that depends on them.
Takeaways:
Not only is China now unable to import the equipment to make semiconductors, or the tools to maintain and operate the equipment, or the software that’s necessary to operate the equipment, or any mid or high level chips at all. Now any Americans who want to assist with the Chinese semiconductor industry have to make a choice: you can have your job with China or you can have your citizenship.
I’ve read this elsewhere: “One of the provisions of President Joe Biden’s executive order is that any U.S. citizen or green card holder working in China cannot work in the Chinese semiconductor industry or risk of losing American citizenship.” The thing is, I don’t think such sanctions are constitutional, and I’m pretty sure stripping citizenship over trade regulations with a country we’re not at war with would fail the Ninth Amendment “necessary and proper” test.
Back to Ziehan:
“Within about 48 Hours of the policy being adopted last Friday, every single American citizen who was working in China in the industry either quit, or their companies relocated their entire division so they wouldn’t have to lose their staff.”
“For all practical purposes the Chinese semiconductor industry of everything over Internet of Things level of quality is now dead, and that has a lot more implications than it sounds.”
“Chinese have proven incapable over the last 25 years of advancing sufficiently [to run the technology required] to operate this industry, beyond being able to simply operate the facilities that make the low end chips, and even that had to be managed by foreigners. So there is no indigenous capacity here to pick this up and move on.”
“In terms of industrial follow-on, this doesn’t just mean that the Chinese are never going to be able to make the chips that go into cars or computers, it also means that any industry that is dependent upon the hardware dies.”
China can’t do anything remotely high tech (hypersonic missiles, AI, Great firewall, etc.) without buying chips on the gray market.
“This is a deal killer not just for the industry, but for a modern technocratic system from a technological point of view. China is done.”
What’s China going to do about it? “I would expect this kind of ‘bag of dicks’ diplomacy that has evolved in China to get this hard, and loud, which will probably only encourage the Americans to act more harshly.”
In many ways, the Biden Administration’s approach to China has been a continuation and escalation of the Trump approach: No More Mister Nice Guy, with sanctions and reshoring of American industry.
Short of actual military action, it’s hard to see how China can effectively retaliate against America over these moves. American companies are already leaving, and China has built up so much ill will in various international trade organizations that it’s difficult to see how they could lodge a complaint with one of those and prevail.
Higher inflation, widespread corruption in the federal government, the Bank of England makes Liz Truss blink, and Muslims take exception to Dearborn Public School’s gay agenda. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The Journal reviewed more than 31,000 financial disclosure forms and analyzed more than 850,000 financial assets and 315,000 trades to shed light on any conflicts of interest among more than 12,000 senior career bureaucrats and political appointees. Its investigation found that “thousands of officials across the U.S. government’s executive branch disclosed owning or trading stocks that stood to rise or fall with decisions their agencies made.”
“Across 50 federal agencies ranging from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department, more than 2,600 officials reported stock investments in companies while those companies were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies, during both Republican and Democratic administrations,” the Journal reports. “When the financial holdings caused a conflict, the agencies sometimes simply waived the rules.”
The federal employees weren’t even subtle about it. Per the Journal, “More than five dozen officials at five agencies reported trading stocks of companies shortly before their departments announced enforcement actions against those companies, such as charges or settlements.”
That’s sus.
To get an understanding of how shady this behavior is, consider examples from a few specific agencies. At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, the Journal found that “more than 200 senior officials… or nearly one in three, reported that they or their family members held investments in companies that were lobbying the agency.”
Similar corruption plagues the Department of Defense, where, per the investigation, “officials in the office of the secretary or their family members collectively owned between $1.2 million and $3.4 million of stock in aerospace and defense companies, on average, during years the Journal examined. Some owned stock in Chinese companies while the U.S. considered blacklisting the companies.”
Sometimes there’s a major story out there you don’t have time to really pay attention to, and such is the case with the UK “mini-budget”/Bank of England story. Basically, new UK PM Liz Truss and her Chancellor of the Treasury Kwasi Kwarteng went “We’re going to cut taxes despite soaring inflation” and the Bank of England (which evidently said that UK pension funds were hours from collapse last week) went “No you’re not.” Well, Truss just blinked, Kwarteng is out, and now the UK government is going to raise taxes.
Here’s a video explainer of the complexities of the Bank of England intervention in the bond market.
I’ll still trying to wrap my mind around the phrases “pension fund margin call” and “unlimited quantity” of short term repo liquidity reserves.
The Biden administration’s new technology restrictions are already causing disruptions in China as US semiconductor equipment suppliers are telling staff based in the country’s top memory chip maker to leave, according to WSJ, citing sources familiar with the matter.
State-owned Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. has seen US chip semiconductor equipment companies, including KLA Corp. and Lam Research Corp., halt business activities at the facility. This includes installing new equipment to make advanced chips and overseeing highly technical chip production.
The US suppliers have paused support of already installed equipment at YMTC in recent days and temporarily halted installation of new tools, the people said. The suppliers are also temporarily pulling out their staff based at YMTC, the people said. –WSJ
It’s hard to overemphasize how badly screwed China’s chip industry is with this latest move. Semiconductor equipment not only needs regular maintenance, but extremely specialized expertise when something goes wrong and your yields crash, wizards who can look at a wafer defect chart and determine by experience what’s gone wrong with which tool. Without support and spare parts from the western semiconductor equipment giants, expect yields to start crashing in a matter of months, if not weeks, especially if Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron join the pullout.
The IRGC may be mobilizing retired servicemembers and other affiliated officers to suppress protests in Tehran on October 15.
Protesters have killed more Iranian security personnel in the current protest wave than in any previous wave in the regime’s history according to regime statistics.
Anti-regime protests occurred in at least 11 cities in seven provinces.
Social media accounts that are representing themselves as youth groups organizing and coordinating protests called for countrywide unrest on October 15.
Snip.
Social media accounts that are representing themselves as youth groups organizing and coordinating protests called for countrywide unrest on October 15. Dozens of social media accounts are presenting themselves as provincial components of a broader youth movement aimed at overthrowing the regime. The movement does not appear to have a central headquarters or hierarchy—at least on social media—and some of these groups’ rhetoric is notably disjointed from the others. These accounts claim to have a presence in multiple Iranian cities, including Tehran, Karaj, Neyshabour, Hamedan, Shiraz, and Ahvaz. Some of these accounts called for protests in Khuzestan on October 14, which did materialize in three different cities across the province on that date. Another account claimed that it had activated “sabotage groups” to destabilize the regime on October 14. The Tehran Neighborhood Youth group currently has the most followers and has posted for the longest period of time, possibly suggesting that it inspired copycat accounts based in other cities.
Some of these groups are presenting themselves as having moved from protest organization to coordinating phase one insurgency attacks.
In private, Democratic party officeholders are super racist.
But they’ll arrest parents and take their children if you fail to bow to their transexual madness. “Virginia Democrat Bill Would Criminally Prosecute Parents Who Don’t Affirm Their Kids As Transgender. Previous attempt at the bill was co-sponsored by a senator who served jail time for having sex with a teenager.”
A Virginia Democrat lawmaker says she will introduce legislation to have parents criminally prosecuted if they do not “affirm” their child as transgender. Teachers and social workers would report parents to Child Protective Services under the bill envisioned by state Delegate Elizabeth Guzman (D-Fauquier).
Guzman told WJLA that “It could be a felony, it could be a misdemeanor, but we know that CPS charge could harm your employment, could harm their education, because nowadays many people do a CPS database search before offering employment.”
Guzman, a social worker, went public with her plans to introduce the bill a week after The Daily Wire reported that a National Association Of School Psychologists official named Amy Cannava boasted that she was working with an unnamed state delegate matching Guzman’s description to craft such legislation. “I want to see a kid in a home with food and shelter and insurance and support, but I also don’t want to lose kids to death,” Cannava said, adding that “I will not deny the fact that I have put parents in their place in my office or at school.”
Cannava is also affiliated with a group called the Pride Liberation Project that said it would pick up trans and gay teens who didn’t like their parents, and “work with other supportive adult organizations in the region to find you someone who can provide you a kind and affirming home.”
A similar bill was quietly introduced in 2020 by Guzman and four other Democrats immediately after they took control of the legislature in the 2019 elections. It redefined the term “abused or neglected child” to include one whose parent “inflicts, threatens to create or inflict, or allows to be created or inflicted upon such child a physical or mental injury on the basis of the child’s gender identity or sexual orientation.”
The sole Senate sponsor of the 2020 bill was Joe Morrissey, who served prison time for contributing to the delinquency of a minor after sleeping with his teenage secretary. He accepted a plea deal after initially being indicted on possession of child pornography and other charges.
You know who else hates rolling out the gay agenda to public schools? Muslims.
The only religious people the left is truly scared to offend are Muslims. Criticizing Muslims is completely off the table according to the left’s rules of engagement, so if Muslims are upset about something, the amount of twisting, back-bending, and acrobatics the left will perform in order not to offend them will be something to see.
So when hundreds of Muslim parents, upset at gay porn in the school libraries, showed up to a school board meeting in Dearborn, Mich., and it devolved into shouting and chaos with board members running away and gay protesters being chased to their cars, the fallout was absolutely hilarious. The headline in the Detroit Free Press after the event went haywire was “LGBTQ and Faith Communities Struggle for Unity.” BAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Can you imagine what the headline would have been if it were a Baptist church chasing gay protesters to their cars? “Fascist White Supremacist Book Burners Bash Gay Man in Parking Lot,” or “Rabid Religious Zealots Terrorize Gay Man Defending Right to Read,” or something equally terrible. I don’t know about you, but I’m enjoying this disaster.
Enjoy this thread and all the videos in it. I know I did.
Shouting between various factions as groups take over Dearborn public schools board meeting. Board members have left. Unclear if they are coming back or if meeting will restart. Heavy police presence. pic.twitter.com/XIMEqIRR1X
Problem: Too many Germans are voting for a rightwing party the left disapproves of. Solution: Ban it. Thank God banning other political parties in Germany has never had any negative consequences…
Speaking of things that could never possibly have any negative consequences, Balarus dictator and Putin toady Alexander Lukashenko decrees that all price increases are forbidden. Enjoys those coming goods shortages, Belarussians. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Florida Surgeon General releases study showing heightened cardiac death rates for men ages 18-39 after taking the Flu Manchu mRNA vaccine. So Twitter banned him. Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before The Narrative. (They later reinstated him.)
Ukrainian troops shoot down a cruise missile with a MANPADS.
Alex Jones ordered to pay $965 million to Sandy Hook families. As I noted last week, Alex Jones is an unreliable loon, but that judgment seems excessive and punitive merely for running his mouth.
The administration of US President Joe Biden next month is to broaden curbs on US exports to China of semiconductors used for artificial intelligence and chipmaking tools, several people familiar with the matter said.
The US Department of Commerce intends to publish new regulations based on restrictions communicated in letters earlier this year to three US companies — KLA Corp, Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Every wafer fabrication plant in the world uses equipment from one of those three companies. Applied Materials and LAM Research (along with Tokyo Electron) have their fingers in almost all areas of chipmaking equipment (PVD, CVD, Etch, etc.), while KLA (formerly KLA-Tencor) dominates the wafer inspection equipment segment. Add ASML in the Netherlands, and those five absolutely dominate the semiconductor equipment market.
The letters, which the companies publicly acknowledged, forbade them from exporting chipmaking equipment to Chinese factories that produce advanced semiconductors with sub-14 nanometer processes unless the sellers obtain commerce department licenses.
This is where things get tricky. SMIC claims they can do 7nm, but everyone outside China doubts they can do it reliably, repeatably and profitably. SMIC announced they’re about to start manufacturing 14nm, and that they can probably do. Practically, they’re the only semiconductor manufacturer in China that can do sub-14nm, as just about everyone at the top of the next biggest semiconductor manufacturer, Tsinghua Unigroup, just got arrested in July.
Without a continued stream of machines, spare parts and technical know-how from those five semiconductor giants, China’s semiconductor industry is doomed. China’s domestic semiconductor equipment industry is essentially garbage, and they’re so far behind in so many areas that they can’t even steal their way to parity. The knowledge gulf is just too vast.
According to World Trade Organization statistics, China’s trade deficit in integrated circuits and electronic components (including Hong Kong’s trade deficit) has almost doubled from the equivalent of $135 billion in 2010 to $240 billion in 2020.
The growing trade deficit in integrated circuits reveals one crucial fact: Achieving technological self-reliance is still a faraway Chinese dream. To keep its exports growing, China has no other way but to keep importing advanced chips to assemble into consumer goods with high-tech intensity (e.g., smartphones, tablets, and the like).
Although China (including Hong Kong) is also the largest exporter of semiconductor chips in the world, less than 7% of chips produced in China were made by Chinese semiconductor companies in 2021.
More than 90% of chips produced in China are made by foreign firms. In other words, China’s exports of semiconductor chips are overwhelmingly dominated by foreign companies.
Its inferior level of technology is the main reason for China’s chip reliance on foreign firms. While Chinese firms are stuck with advancing toward 7nm chips, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung are progressing towards mass production of 3nm chips this year. Intel plans to take over TSMC’s leading role in semiconductor technology by 2025.
The competition among a few tech giants in the U.S., Taiwan, and South Korea is clear, and the Chinese firms are not likely to jump into the global technology competition in the semiconductor industry anytime soon.
The U.S. restrictions on exporting chipmaking equipment to China’s largest semiconductor firm, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., have not only deterred China’s technological advancement, but also exposed the fundamental mismanagement problems inside China’s semiconductor industry.
Xi might not have noticed his industry’s poor performance had China been able to continue to produce chips with foreign equipment.
Some parts about the Tsinghua scandal snipped.
Several Taiwanese executives leaving China’s semiconductor industry last year is another major setback in the development of China’s semiconductor industry.
China not only spent tremendously on building chip plants and purchasing expansive equipment, but also on recruiting talent from overseas. Over the past few years, China recruited more than 3,000 skilled workers from Taiwan to work in China’s semiconductor industry.
China amassed enormous capital, talent, and foreign equipment, but the problem is with governance. Xi’s absolute authority encouraged a rush into China’s semiconductor industry. Moreover, the extraordinary integration of the public and private sectors in China has twisted industrial development toward short-term profit-making, instead of long-term accumulation of manufacturing strength and technological improvement.
Xi’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy has further overshadowed the outlook of its semiconductor industry. China’s success relies on close partnerships with various suppliers and customers in different countries across the globe. Alienating them on the geopolitical front only undermines those relationships.
The U.S. ban on exporting chipmaking machines to China was the straw that broke the Chinese semiconductor industry’s back.
On top of that, the CHIPS and Science Act just signed into law bans semiconductor companies receiving U.S. government subsidies from investing in China for the next 10 years. There are major loopholes in that prohibition, but if Congress can manage to keep the administration’s feet to the fire—including by tightening the legal restrictions—it could have a major impact on China’s tech development.
In addition, the U.S. has extended the export restriction to 14 nm chipmaking machines to the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. and other foreign chipmakers in China. A specific electronics design automation software for making advanced chips is also banned from exportation to China.
Without foreign investment and inputs, China is only likely to deepen its reliance on importing advanced chips from overseas.
Peter Zeihan notes (correctly) that China’s semiconductor industry has been singularly unable to fab advanced chips on their own.
Not to mention that fraud still abounds. Chinese CPU semiconductor startup Quillion Technology closed up shop three months after raising $89 million.
$89 million is probably enough to get you to tape-out for a fabless semiconductor house designing a smaller chip (or maybe even a low-power ARM-based CPUs for embedded markets), but it’s a woefully small sum for a real cutting-edge CPU company, and laughable if they intended to be an integrated design manufacturer fabbing their own chips, where building even a trailing edge fab starts in the billions.
More on that topic:
Takeaways:
“Money seems to have a strong corruptive power over CCP officials that they can’t resist. Like China’s real estate industry, China’s semiconductor industry is also plagued with corruption, over-construction, and highly leveraged capital maneuvers.”
She goes over the history of the Chinese “Big Fund” for semiconductors I covered here, and later talks about the indictments.
“The state-run Semiconductor Investment Fund was used more as an instrument to speculate in stocks than an institution for conducting basic R&D. The government-backed fund, aka the “Big Fund,” has investments in 2,793 entities within three layers of ownership.” Very few of them have the word “semiconductor” in their names. (Like I said before, shell games all the way down.)
From 1984 to 1990, the Ministry of Electronics Industry delegated the management of the vast majority of state-owned electronics enterprises to local provincial and municipal governments. While these state-owned enterprises (SOEs) obtained more autonomy, something strange happened. These companies imported outdated integrated circuit production lines that had no commercial value. The wasteful projects cost money, but people used the opportunities to take foreign trips, receive kickbacks, and send their children abroad. And this happened on a large scale.
Pretty much classic ChiCom behavior.
China’s high-tech industry, like its financial industry, is dominated by powerful CCP families, and the Jiang Zemin family is one of them. In 1999, Jiang Zemin gave his oldest son, Jiang Mianheng, the reins of China’s “autonomous chip development.” As vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and president of the Shanghai branch for many years, the junior Jiang has long held the turf of China’s science and technology sector. He is also personally involved in the semiconductor business. His Shanghai Lianhe investment has holdings of Shanghai Zhaoxin Semiconductor Company.
Classic story:
Chen Jin, a former junior test engineer at Motorola, joined Shanghai Jiaotong University in 2001 after returning to China.
He was given the responsibility to develop the “Hanxin” chip, an important part of the state-run high-tech development program known as the “863 Program.” In just three years, Chen obtained 100 million in R&D funding and applied for 12 national patents. On Feb. 26, 2003, Chen’s team officially released the “Hanxin 1” chip. The Shanghai Municipal Government, the Ministry of Information Industry, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences all backed his work. The expert panel declared the “Hanxin 1” and its related design and application development platform as being the first of its kind in China and achieving an important milestone in the history of China’s chip development. Subsequently, Hanxin 2, 3, 4 and 5 chips were launched, all of which were claimed to have reached an advanced level globally. The Hanxin series of chips even entered the General Equipment Procurement Department of the Chinese military. However, 3 years later, on Jan. 17, 2006, “Hanxin 1” was revealed to be completely fake. Chen downloaded a Motorola chip source code through a former Motorola colleague. Then he secretly bought a batch of Motorola dsp56800 series chips, paid a peasant to scrape the original Motorola logo with sandpaper, and asked a local Shanghai print shop to print the “Hanxin” logo on it.
China correctly identified semiconductors and semiconductor equipment as key technologies for truly becoming the world’s preeminent technological manufacturing giant. Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for us), the CCP’s endemic culture of corruption and their top-down command economy are antithetical to the onrush of capitalist technological innovation that powers Moore’s Law.
Ah, the good ol’ days of . . . April, or so, when conservative critics of the Democratic party could still count on being lectured to about the enduring moderation of Team Blue and chastised for paying so much attention to such figures as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a member of the Democratic Socialists of America) and Senator Bernie Sanders (a member of the Democratic Socialists of America) and claiming that these self-described socialists are the socialists they describe themselves as being, who want to “abolish capitalism” (the stated mission of the Democratic Socialists of America) and the traditional family to boot (“democratizing the family to get rid of patriarchal relations,” in the words of the Democratic Socialists of America), all of which, the usual media scolds tut-tutted, was unfair. “The Democratic party is the party of moderates,” as Politico magazine editor Bill Scher argued.
Somebody must have slipped some psilocybin into the Democrats’ potato salad at this year’s May Day picnic. Open borders? Check! Eviscerating the Bill of Rights? Absolutely, with one of those weird barbed Uncle Henry gut-hook knives! What else? I hope that whichever debate moderator finally presses this crew about the limits of late-term abortion is over 35, because Elizabeth Warren was pretty clearly ready to roll up her sleeves and perform an impromptu D&E right there underneath the Art Deco adornments and heavy brocade curtains of the Fox Theater in beautiful downtown Detroit.
Speaking of the Democratic Socialists of America, Stephen Green looks in on those lunatics. “No perfume in the quiet room, no misusing doors, no talking to cops, no talking to the press, always display your credentials, beware of right wing infiltrators.” Plus the usual lunacy about pronouns, and triggering, and singing “The Internationale.”
Monthly apprehensions of migrants in Mexico have begun to slow down, indicating that its government’s recent border crackdown is yielding results.
Authorities in Mexico apprehended 18,758 migrants in July, according to preliminary data from Mexico’s immigration agency, reported by The Wall Street Journal. While this number is more than double the amount detained in the same month last year, it is a decline from the record-setting 31,573 apprehensions in Mexico in June.
“China Wants to Hit Back at Trump. Its Own Economy Stands in the Way.”
China’s imports from the United States only a fraction of the trade going the other way, so it cannot match Washington tariff for tariff. Much of that trade consists of agriculture goods like soybeans, as well as specialized products like Boeing jetliners or the American-made chips for the smartphones China makes.
There are several things China could do. It could call for a boycott of American goods or stop buying Boeing planes. It could devalue its currency, which would in effect partially nullify American tariffs. It could make life much harder for American business and executives in China, or it could exercise its power over key parts of the global supply chain, like its dominance over key manufacturing minerals called rare earths.
Some investors on Friday signaled they expect at least one of those moves. China’s currency, the renminbi, fell to its weakest point so far this year. Shares of rare earths companies rose, while Boeing’s shares fell more than the broader market on Thursday.
But each of these measures has drawbacks. Perhaps the biggest among them is that China’s economy is growing at its slowest pace in 27 years. Many of the arrows Beijing has in its quiver could ricochet and hit its own factories and workers.
Plus the perils of weakening the renminbi. Also: “As they consider their moves, Chinese officials will also try to parse Mr. Trump’s negotiating strategy. Experts said his capricious style had flummoxed Beijing.”
The manifesto is insane. Part of it discussed commonly debated issues such as the environment and the economy in ways that are well within the boundaries of political conversation going on today — indeed, that might have come out of the New York Times or many other outlets. Other parts of it mixed in theories on immigration from far right circles in Europe and the U.S. Then it threw in beliefs on “race-mixing” straight from the fever swamps. And then it concluded that the solution is to murder Hispanic immigrants, going on to debate whether an AK-47 or an AR-15 would best do the job. By that point, Crusius had veered far from both reality and basic humanity.
But the question is, was he inspired by President Trump? It is hard to make that case looking at the manifesto in its entirety.
Crusius worried about many things, if the manifesto is any indication. He certainly worried about immigration, but also about automation. About job losses. About a universal basic income. Oil drilling. Urban sprawl. Watersheds. Plastic waste. Paper waste. A blue Texas. College debt. Recycling. Healthcare. Sustainability. And more. Large portions of the manifesto simply could not be more un-Trumpian.
This is a colossal fraud, and it won’t work. The public doesn’t buy it; the candidates aren’t talking about it; when Congress returns in September, Lindsey Graham’s Senate Judiciary Committee will grill the authors of the politicization of the intelligence agencies, the FBI, and other parts of the Obama Justice Department as well as the propagators of the false Steele dossier and the fraudulent FISA warrant applications. Graham (R-S.C.), will get the publicity, and the bare-faced liars who chair the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), will be talking to themselves about their “solid evidence” of the president’s crimes. Weissman and the lesser Democratic Torquemadas couldn’t find them; Nadler and Schiff can’t declare what their evidence is (because there is none).
This is the last echo of this attempted rape of the Constitution and no one will be listening when the Congress returns in September. They will listen to the Graham committee’s exposés of the Democrats who acted corruptly, and they will notice the indictments when the special counsel, (John Durham, who unlike Mueller does have full retention of his faculties), starts bringing them down.
The president deliberately has escalated the controversy by attempting to make the four extremist freshman Democratic congresswomen the real face of the Democrats, and by pointing out, in the case of Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the inappropriateness of Cummings’ assault on the integrity of the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
The president undoubtedly knows that he is playing with fire assaulting the most holy of the taboos of political correctness so explicitly, though his grasp of the political arithmetic is almost certainly correct. I assume he can reassure his own followers and whatever independent voters may be left in this fierce partisan crossfire that he is not racist. In sober times, it would be clear that no case whatever exists that he is a racist. But these are not sober times and he has contributed something to their insobriety, though—one must remember—in reaction to immense provocations.
Last year, cops in MD serving a red flag removal order, killed a 61 year old man who got upset when they came for his guns. He was flagged because his sister called after they had a political disagreement. These “laws” will continue to be abused like this. https://t.co/rc09rEAuh0
Active shooters are a rounding error. “If you feel the need to take training to protect your life and the lives of your loved ones, take a Defensive Driving Course.” (Hat tip: Karl Rehn.)
“AT&T employees took bribes to plant malware on the company’s network. DOJ charges Pakistani man with bribing AT&T employees more than $1 million to install malware on the company’s network, unlock more than 2 million devices.”
But here’s the part that blew my mind: I started to lose weight. Before the detox I weighed 166 pounds. Twelve weeks later, I hit a new low adult weight: 155. I’ve cinched in my belt a notch. My bloodwork looks much better (my triglycerides dropped by half in six weeks). And as my belly fat has reduced, I do feel better and more energetic.
The weight-loss and triglyceride reduction mirrors my own experience when I first went on Atkins.
New York Times revenues continue to decline. I’m sure that somehow this is all Russia’s fault…
Leftwing protestors call for the murder of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Naturally Twitter suspended the account…of his reelection campaign, for showing videos of leftwing protestors calling for his murder:
Here are the messages that McConnell's re-election campaign received from Twitter telling them that they could not expose the hatred coming from the Democrat Party directed at McConnell pic.twitter.com/sECCRXRYYd
Here’s an interesting interview with Gen. Robert Spalding, chief China analyst for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who analyzes the pressures the trade war puts on China, and how they respond to Trump’s challenge.
“When you look at the full scope of everything China does, it mixes in its own brand of expansive influence into its economics.”
Also a bit on Huawei and 5G, and how China intends to use technological leadership to extend its own censorship regime.
Themes for today’s LinkSwarm: Jihad, rape and China. Not necessarily in that order…
So let me see if I have this story straight: New Mexico jihadis, one related to a New York City imam who might have been involved in 9/11, murdered three children, abused and starved 11 other children while teaching them to be school shooters, and the judge let them out on bail?
A New Mexico state judge ruled Monday that five alleged Muslim extremists accused of training children to conduct school shootings do not have to remain in jail while they await trial for child abuse.
Judge Sarah Backus released the five defendants, Siraj Wahhaj, Hujrah Wahhaj, Subhannah Wahhaj, Jany Leveille, and Lucas Morten, on a $20,000 “signature bond,” according to the Albuquerque Journal. That means that the defendants will not have to pay money unless they violate the conditions of their release
It’s a good thing there’s not a huge foreign nation immediately to the south with a porous border they can flee to…
If China really had a savings rate of 46%, the economy would look quite different. There would be very little debt in the system; the banks would have a very low loans to deposits ratio and low leverage, like banks in nineteenth century Britain. Consumer debt would be almost non-existent, while the Chinese market would have an enormous variety of saving and investment schemes, to take care of all the accumulated wealth. New company formation would be very high, but “venture capital” would be very scarce, because new companies would be capitalized from the savings of the founders’ relatives and friends. Overall, China might well have a rapid growth rate, but it would be a very contented, stable economy.
A recent Financial Times examination of China’s economy illustrates the problem; it shows consumer debt almost doubling as a share of GDP, from roughly 20% to 40% in the last five years and tells pathetic stories of young, highly educated Chinese who max out their credit cards, desperately hoping to boost their earnings sufficiently to pay that debt back. But Chinese elite youths brought up in a society with a 46% savings rate would have neither the desire nor the need for heavy credit card usage. First, they would have been brought up in families with a fanatical devotion to deferring consumption, so would regard the over-indebted Western Millennial lifestyle with undiluted horror. Second, because of their families’ savings habits, such elite youths would be beneficiaries of very substantial trust funds from their relatives, and so would have no need of credit cards.
If the savings rate is fiction, then so are all China’s economic statistics. GDP is at least one third lower than claimed, to account for the missing savings, and growth rates over the last decades correspondingly lower, On the other hand, China’s foreign debt is all too real, and most of the domestic debt also appears to be solid, so China’ s gross debt, already alarmingly high at 299% of GDP according to the Institute for International Finance, is in reality about 450% of true GDP, substantially higher than that of any other country. With such a level of debt, China is not about to overtake the West, it is in imminent danger of collapse. Indeed, it is at first sight something of a mystery why it has not collapsed already under the weight of its excesses.
Also: “China Buckles, Sends Trade Delegation to Washington to Seek End of Trade War.” Maybe, just maybe, President Donald Trump knows a thing or two about negotiating strategy…
“Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own.” That quote comes from an American bicycling across several foreign countries, including one where Islamic State followers killed him, his wife, and two fellow-travelers thanks to their “different perspectives.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Google has released a report on the paid ads they’ve run on political campaigns. It’s not completely useless, but then you drill down to congressional district, it only shows you total spending, not how much was spent by each campaign, much less links to the relevant ads.
A theme that keeps recurring in histories of the worst abusers is that they were trained in seminaries that were run by homosexual men and saturated with gay-liberationist subculture. Reading accounts of students at one notorious California seminary making a Friday-night ritual of cruising gay bars, it becomes hard not to wonder if gay culture itself has not been an important enabler of priestly abuse.
Ace of Spades is surprised to find Disney holding firm on it’s firing of James “I Make Pedophile Jokes” Gunn. Also, in the course of slamming (perhaps a littler too strenuously) Trump-skeptical establishment conservatives on their hypocrisy on the issue (RE: Roseanne), he does nicely articulate the logic of taking’s the Guardians of the Galaxy director’s scalp, even if Gunn was only joking:
I will not be subject to one of your rules and yet permit you to be free of your own rule. If it’s your rule, you shall suffer under it just the same as me.
We do not (yet) have a formal caste system in America, despite the obvious longing from the left and the NeverTrump rump to establish over-castes and under-castes.
And it’s MUH #SacredPrinciple that we shall not have a tiered system of citizenship that the leftwing establishment as well as the “right”-leaning establishment so clearly crave.
And I’ll sacrifice anyone to make sure that they do not put me in their designated under-caste.
Trump may be both more relentless and obnoxious than his predecessors, but cries of “Fake News!” from the Oval Office are old hat. Presidents always blame the messenger. Even Barack Obama, the object of so much media fawning, groused about distorted coverage.
This time, though, we are taking it personally. Striking at the bait Trump dangles. Joining the war he’s declared. Allowing him to goad us into abandoning the fundamental principles of our profession.
Donald Trump is not responsible for the eroding trust in the media. He lacks the credibility to pull that off. The damage to our standing is self-inflicted.
The independent press was built on a foundation of objectivity. Through a tradition of conscientious commitment to telling all sides of a story we convinced our readers, listeners, viewers that we were the source of fair and balanced coverage. We were equal opportunity scourges of scoundrels on both sides of the political aisle.
Now, too many of us are following the websites, cable networks and blogosphere into point-of-view journalism that presents the news with equal parts fact and opinion. We’ve infused our reports with commentary and call it context.
Journalists once kept their personal views personal, lest anyone challenge the motives behind their reporting. Now reporters post their opinions on Facebook and Twitter. They sob in newsrooms over the results of an election. News meetings and editorial boards are often indistinguishable.
Respected journalists openly question whether remaining objective in the Donald Trump era is a sell-out rather than a virtue. Some have joined the resistance movement, blending journalism with activism.
No one in our profession can say with a straight face that we cover Donald Trump the same way we have past presidents. We are not only giving him more scrutiny — rightly so — but we are making more mistakes in our haste to discredit him. Our accuracy ratings have fallen as we turn to poorly vetted anonymous sources and repeat every rumor that fits the narrative that Trump is a disaster.
Yes, Trump is an extraordinary case. Chaos is the hallmark of his governing style. His personal conduct falls well short of presidential. But his administration has had successes, and the press is not as eager to cover those as it is his failures.
Journalism seems to have turned a corner in search of some higher purpose beyond simply digging out the truth, presenting it to our readers and letting them decide what to do with it.
Nothing about Donald Trump justifies tossing aside the standards that have allowed journalists to remain the trusted eyes and ears of the people.
MoviePass is getting ready to bite the moose. I can imagine a way you could make this thing work out: Make deals with large theater chains, exclude the first week of all movies, and the first few weeks for blockbusters, and make a deal to buy tickets at a steep discount to put butts in seats so theater owners can make more money off concessions. All things that MoviePass evidently never attempted…
The great plastic gun panic…of 1986. I think we can all remember how the widespread availability of the Glock resulted in the downfall of America…
When President Donald Trump announced that he was raising tariffs in an attempt to force other countries to lower trade barriers to American goods, All The Best People scoffed. That simply wasn’t the way the trade game was played, old bean. Other countries wouldn’t lower tariffs, they’d raise them on American goods and start a trade war, plunging the world into recession.
President Trump announced during a Wednesday press conference that his meeting with European officials yielded key trade concessions, including an increase in American soybean and liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to Europe, and a commitment to work toward eliminating non-auto tariffs entirely.
“We have agreed today to work toward zero tariffs, zero tariff barriers and zero subsidies on non-auto industrial goods,” Trump said, reciting a joint statement crafted with European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. “We will also work to reduce barriers and increase trade in services, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, medical products, as well as soybeans. The European Union is going to start almost immediately to but a lot of soybeans, they’re a tremendous market, to buy a lot of soybeans from our famers in the midwest primarily.”
“The European Union wants to import more liquefied natural gas from the United States and they’re going to be a very big buyer. We’re going to make it much easier for them but they will be massive buyers, so that they will be able to diversify their energy supply,” he added.
Trump pledged to “not go against the spirit” of ongoing negotiations, presumably by refraining from implementing further tariffs, and said he would “resolve” existing “retaliatory tariffs.”
Juncker also vowed to work toward reducing existing tariffs, which were first implemented last month in tit-for-tat fashion after the Trump administration slapped 10 and 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum respectively and the EU retaliated by placing tariffs on just over $3 billion in American goods. The E.U. trade chief also confirmed that he had in fact committed to importing more soy-beans and natural gas from the U.S.
The agreement comes after a series of reports Wednesday morning that indicated Trump is advocating the implementation of 25 percent tariffs on foreign-made cars, against the advice of his trade advisers. The specifics regarding auto tariffs were reportedly still being developed as Trump’s meeting with Juncker came to a close.
As always with trade agreements, the devil is in the details. If the EU does drop all the tariffs Juncker has promised, then this will be a big win for President Trump’s unorthodox negotiating style. His immediate presidential predecessors seemed to mostly leave the issue of achieving lower trade barriers to underlings negotiating multilateral agreements like TPP or GATT. President Trump is the first to pursue a policy of personally negotiating from strength to lower trade barriers to American commerce. This was a risky strategy that most (myself included) believed would not work. But right now it appears to be working.
There’s no doubt that if President Trump’s trade strategy does work, those decrying it now will still sniff at Trump “winning the wrong way” by “alienating allies…”
The whole “OMG, we lock up illegal alien kids!” panic the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have ginned up is a sign of just how good the economy is under President Donald Trump, and just how desperate Democrats are to find an issue to run on in November. Faced with the prospect of running on tranny bathrooms, gun control and calling ordinary Americans racists (yet again), they hit upon screeching about the fate of some 2,000 illegal alien minors as the only naked emotional appeal left in their arsenal.
Here it is, folks: the only tactic Democrats could agree to run on this fall.
So naturally, President Trump defused the issue he inherited from Obama with an executive order, causing Democrats to turn on a dime from “OMG, this is the most important moral crisis of our time!” to “That’s not good enough, you heartless monster, we want immediate full amnesty or we keep screaming our heads off!” Ditto for Sen. Ted Cruz’s legislative fix, which was instantly labeled a “cynical ploy.” You know, just like Democrats manufacturing the whole issue.
Expect Democrats to to start bloviating about something equally ludicrous but completely different with the same overheated emotional furor next week…
Rio Grande Valley Sector Chief Manuel Padilla says the entire problem stems from Obama-era laxness:
“It’s a very complex situation,” he told “CBS This Morning” co-host Gayle King. “When you have high levels of activity, and a lack of resources – personnel, technology, infrastructure – it creates this kind of chaotic environment.”
I know this is complicated for you and your team, but what people are talking about is cruel and inhuman behavior, is how it’s perceived,” said King. “Do you actually agree with this policy?”
“I do agree that we have to do something. We created this situation by not doing anything,” Padilla said. “So what happened with zero tolerance is, we were exempting a population from the law. And what happens when you do that, it creates a draw for a certain group of people that rises to trends that become a crisis.”
“I’m going to give you an example: Because we were releasing family units, May 2, just last month, we had a full-blown MS-13 (gang member) accompanied by his one-year-old child. He thought he was going get released into the community; that was not the case.”
Congressional Democratic candidates are more left-wing than ever. I’m sure a platform of repealing tax cuts will go over swell among ordinary voters… (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Actor Peter Fonda (who you may remember as The Devil in Ghost Rider) went off on an “unhinged even by the standards of blue checkmark liberals on Twitter” rant in which he called for Barron Trump to be raped by pedophiles. To which reporter Juan Williams said Fonda’s rant was “poorly worded.” Oh really? Just how should someone word an appeal that the children of one’s political opponents be raped by pedophiles? Where does Miss Manners stand on this vital issue of 21st century American etiquette?
Related tweet:
Within the last two days, the anti-Trump Resistance has endorsed the brutal murder of ICE agents, the stalking of their children, the public mobbing of a DHS official, and the doxxing of White House officials. And also they're very worried about civility and norms you guys.
Eric S. Raymond on the mathematics of gun confiscation. “The critical fraction of American gun owners that would have to be hard-core enough to resist confiscation with lethal violence in order to stop the attempt is lower than 1 in 317. Probably much lower. Especially if we responded by killing not merely the doorknockers but the bureaucrats and politicians who gave them their orders. Which would be more efficient, more just, and certain to follow.”
The Small Arms Survey estimates there are 393,300,000 civilian-owned firearms in the United States. The survey, performed by the Graduate Institute of Geneva, estimated the United States military has about 4.5 million firearms. It put the number of firearms owned by police throughout the United States at just over 1 million.
That means American civilians own nearly 100 times as many firearms as the U.S. military and nearly 400 times as many as law enforcement.
Federal Bureau of Investigation background check records suggest that civilians bought more than 2 million guns in May alone, which means civilians purchase more than double the number of firearms owned by police departments. The number of gun-related civilian background checks in May and April, at over 4.7 million, is greater than the number of firearms currently owned by the American military.
The FBI reported processing more than 25.2 million gun-related civilian background checks in 2017, which is more than the 22.7 million guns the Small Arms Survey estimates are currently held by every law enforcement agency in the world combined. Between 2012 and 2017, the FBI reported conducting more than 135 million civilian gun checks—more than the 133 million guns the Small Arms Survey estimates are in all the world’s military stockpiles.
The Small Arms Survey estimated there are about 1 billion firearms currently in circulation throughout the world. By its estimate, about 85 percent are owned by civilians and American civilians own nearly 40 percent of all the guns in the world. Researchers said worldwide firearms ownership was up since the last time they studied the issue about a decade ago.
“We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “In light of the deeply revealing nature of CSLI, its depth, breadth, and comprehensive reach, and the inescapable and automatic nature of its collection, the fact that such information is gathered by a third party does not make it any less deserving of Fourth Amendment protection.”
Roberts was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
This is the rare case where I side with the court’s liberal wing against its conservative wing. If there is a constitutional right to privacy, then surely metadata, which reveals your minute-by-minute physical location, among many other things, should be covered.
Federal court rules that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutional for exercising executive authority but putting its director beyond the each of Presidential power.
Turkish jihadist scumbag president Recep Tayyip Erdogan calls a snap election, a tactic that could backfire.
Portland feminist bookstore closing. Naturally they blamed their poor business decisions on white male patriarchy. Insert your own Portlandia joke here.
Here’s the exact language from Steven Cheung of Dewhurst for Texas:
The day after Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka reported on Ted Cruz acting as legal counsel to a Chinese company accused of patent infringement against an American inventor, Cruz again showed his true colors by again defending China’s interests on the Laura Ingraham Show. To check out our latest video that has highlights, please click here.
By standing on the same side as President Barack Obama, a fellow elitist, Harvard attorney with zero business experience, Cruz and Obama strongly oppose a bill that would curb China’s predatory trade and currency practices in a time when they are taking over ownership of the American economy.
“It’s about holding China accountable for what China is doing that is completely without integrity and subverting the principles of free trade,” said Ingraham. Moments later, Ingraham correctly declared, “Obama’s with you on this bill!”
At a time when millions of Americans are without jobs, why does Ted Cruz consistently put the needs of China before America?
To my mind, this is fairly weak sauce by the Dewhurst campaign, and the tone is overreaching. Representing clients is what lawyers do, and it’s not like Cruz is working pro bono for convicted terrorists.
And I happen to be on Cruz’s side on the China bill, as are (as far as I can tell) the vast majority of conservitive commentators and economists. Sure, China manilpulates it’s currency…but so do we, Europe, and just about everyone else. Protectionism is still loser economics, and starting a trade war in the midst of a recession is not a great idea.
Whether these criticisms will play with Republican primary voters is another question. Tom Leppert’s been using the lawyer line of attack on Cruz without any notable effect for months now, but China bashing is seldom unpopular; it’s also, as far as I can tell, seldom an effective wedge issue, either.
But it’s interesting to note that the gloves have finally come off for the Dewhurst campaign. I don’t think his soi distant Ivory Tower approach was going to tide him over until he could carpet-bomb the primary with big direct mail and ad buys. Despite Dewhurst’s status as presumptive frontrunner, Cruz continues to make noise and rack up conservative endorsements both locally and nationally.
The Dewhurst campaign seems to have finally realized they have a fight on their hands.
