Posts Tagged ‘UK’

LinkSwarm for June 16, 2023

Friday, June 16th, 2023

More Biden corruption comes to light, California gets even more crazy, and two former European Prime Ministers step out of the spotlight in different ways.

  • “House Oversight Chairman Says There Is Evidence Of $20-$30 Million Of Illegal Payments To Bidens.”

    House Oversight Chairman James Comer revealed Thursday that he expects there is evidence of at least $20-$30 million being made in illegal payments by foreign nationals to the Biden family.

    Appearing on Fox Business, Comer stated “We have more bank records coming in but we’re gonna exceed $10 million this week but I think we’ll get up to $20-$30 million.”

    He further noted that it is becoming clear that the Bidens potentially engaged in bribery, influence peddling, and money laundering.

    “This is going to be hard for Biden to explain, this is not going to go away, and I think eventually the mainstream media is going to start asking the real questions,” Comer added.

    “They know there’s something wrong here. They know all the allegations have merit, because of where Joe Biden was, because of what we’ve seen on tape before, where Joe Biden bragged about firing that prosecutor,” he added,

    “They know that this family created these shell companies. They know this family was money-laundering, they were profiting off Joe Biden’s influence,” Comer asserted, adding “The media knows that – they’re just not covering it.”

    “I can assure you: there is more money that we’re going to be able to identify, that was transferred between foreign nationals in other countries and the Biden family,” Comer further emphasized, adding “I think, eventually, the mainstream media will turn on Joe Biden and start asking the real questions: ‘What did your family do to receive all this money?’”

  • Speaking of Biden family corruption: “House Oversight Panel Subpoenas Former Hunter Biden Associate Devon Archer…[The committee] is particularly interested in Archer’s involvement in the family’s international business deals, which included countries like China, Russia, and Ukraine.” Archer was in Global Seneca Partners with Hunter Biden and John Kerry’s stepson.
  • Meanwhile, Robert Hur, the special council charged with investigating Biden, seems to have fallen off the face of the earth.
  • Biden recession update: Average real weekly earnings have dropped for the 26th consecutive month. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • California advances bill to help shoplifters steal.
  • “Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison stepped down this week as the progressive-run city struggles with homicides, a drug crisis, and a troubling rise in violence involving teenagers.” Time to pull this out again:

  • Illegal aliens try to hijack merchant ship with knives. Italian commandos demonstrate that’s a bad idea.
  • Jihadis kill nine in Congo.
  • The Netherlands are closing the largest natural gas field in Europe.
  • Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s longest-serving prime minister, dead at 86. Berlusconi revived Italy’s economy, but then couldn’t keep it out of the PIIGS. But for a whilehe kept the wolves at bay.
  • Also stepping out of the spotlight this week: Former UK Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned from Parliment. Other than getting Brexit accomplished, Johnson’s tenure seemed all sizzle and no steak.
  • California’s unrealistic environmental policies are creating a trucking nightmare.

    In April 2023, an unelected Board in California voted to force trucking companies to buy zero-emission trucks. This technology is at early-stage adoption in limited segments, and infrastructure buildout is lagging behind what is required to support electrification in our industry. The Board unanimously advanced the Advanced Clean Fleet rule to accompany California’s equally tough electric vehicle sales mandate regulation, the Advanced Clean Truck rule, that would require truck manufacturers to sell zero-emission vehicles. These two regulations together are designed to create an artificial electric vehicle market sooner rather than later.

    This new rule was made at the behest of the environmental lobby, which pushed for unrealistic targets and unachievable timelines that will undoubtedly lead to higher prices for goods delivered to the state and fewer options for consumers. ATA has strongly opposed this rule from the outset and testified at a hearing in Sacramento to express the trucking industry’s concerns directly to the Board.

    Snip.

    Today’s clean diesel trucks can spend 15 minutes fueling anywhere in the country and then travel about 1,200 miles before fueling again. In contrast, today’s zero-emission trucks:

    • Have significantly less range of about 150-330 miles between charging or refueling;
    • Need to be charged or refueled more often and for longer periods of time leading to unproductive downtime;
    • Cost two to three times more than a comparable clean-diesel truck; and
    • Weigh thousands of pounds more, reducing payload capacity and requiring more trucks and drivers to move the same amount of freight.

    Also: “The California Energy Commission estimates that 157,000 chargers will need to be installed by 2030 to support California’s heavy-duty vehicle electrification goals.” Assuming there’s enough Lithium in the world for the batteries… (Hat tip: TPPF.)

  • Hope for San Francisco? Residents replace drug-addicted transients on their local sidewalks with large planters.
  • Two Russian oil tanks collide for exactly the reasons you would expect.
  • “DNC Generously Offers To Host Rally For Robert F. Kennedy Jr. By Grassy Knoll.”
  • “Satan Asks LGBTQ Community To Please Tone It Down A Bit.”
  • LinkSwarm for May 12, 2023

    Friday, May 12th, 2023

    Biden family corruption, Hollywood fumbles, Poland rising, and a whole bunch of NFL teams you’ve never heard of. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • House Republicans reveal details of Biden crime family.

    The Biden family and its business associates created a complicated web of more than 20 companies, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee — a system, GOP lawmakers say, that was meant to conceal money received from foreign nationals.

    Sixteen of the companies were limited liability companies formed during Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president, the committee said in a press conference on Wednesday. The Biden family, their business associates, and their companies received more than $10 million from foreign nationals’ and their related companies, the records show. These payments occurred both while Biden was in office as vice president and after his time in office ended.

    In what Representative Nancy Mace called an act of “financial gymnastics,” many payments were routed from foreign companies to the Biden family’s business associates’ companies which then doled out payments to the Bidens in incremental payments to different bank accounts in an alleged attempt to hide the source of the funds.

    At least nine Biden family members received payments, according to committee chairman James Comer. That includes Hunter Biden; James Biden; James Biden’s wife, Sara Jones Biden; the late Beau Biden’s wife, Hallie Biden; Hunter Biden’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle; Hunter Biden’s wife, Melissa Cohen; and “three children of the president’s son and the president’s brother.”

    Much of the money came from Chinese nationals and companies with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Multiple Biden family members received money after it passed through an associate’s account. Comer said of the countries the Biden family was influence peddling in, China is “the most reputable.”

    The committee revealed Wednesday that records suggest the Biden family and its associates’ business dealings in Romania “bear clear indication of a scheme to peddle influence” from 2015 to 2017.

    At the time, then-Vice President Biden spoke out against Romanian corruption while the Biden family received more than a million dollars from a company controlled by a Romanian national, Gabriel Popoviciu. Popoviciu, who has been accused of corruption, sent the money through a Biden family associate, according to the committee. Sixteen of the seventeen payments involved in the deal occurred while Biden was still in office. The money “stops flowing from the Romanian national soon after Joe Biden leaves the vice presidency,” Comer said.

    The Bidens also received “millions of dollars from China,” with Comer saying it is “inconceivable that the president did not know” about the payments.

    Comer said the information revealed Wednesday is the result of subpoenas to four different banks and stressed that the committee is still early in its investigation and believes there are as many as 12 banks with records relevant to its investigation.

    Naturally, the mainstream media are doing their very best to ignore these revelations…

  • How badly the Biden Recession screwing the Democrats? Elizabeth Warren is trailing possible Republican challenger Charlie Baker by 15 points. Early poll caveats apply, but this is Massachusetts. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Man whose ad campaigns made Bud Light #1 complains that Budweiser’s tranny pander has destroyed all his work in a week.
  • “Why shouldn’t Poland be richer than Britain?”

    You might have noticed a meme floating around the media about how Britons could become “no better off than people living in Poland”. “If the UK continues with the same level of growth it has seen for the last decade,” writes Sam Ashworth-Hayes, “Poland will be richer than Britain in about 12 years’ time”:

    It sounds like an absurd idea that in 2040 we might see complaints in the Polish press about a flood of British plumbers undercutting wages, or Brytyjski Skleps lining the rougher areas of Warsaw, but it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.

    This talking point has also appeared in the Telegraph, the Express and the Financial Times. It often comes with a sense of vague alarm and bewilderment. Poland? The post-communist place? Don’t they live entirely off vodka and potatoes? Don’t they have horses clippety-cloppeting down the streets selling women’s underwear pinched off a truck in Germany? Poland?

    Having lived in Poland for nine years, I can say that I am not at all surprised by these projections. To be clear, that is all they are — projections. A lot can change in nine years, in Britain and in Poland.

    Still, I think a lot of British people would be surprised by how much better things can be in the land of Lech Wałęsa and John Paul II. Equally, a lot of Polish people would be surprised by how much worse things can be in Britain — given that a lot of Poles of my acquaintance appear to think that getting rich in the U.K. is as easy as walking outside with a wheelbarrow and catching the banknotes that rain down from the sky.

    Britain has had minimal economic growth for years. Poland has long been enjoying some of the highest economic growth in Europe. It even emerged from the pandemic better off than other European nations with, as Paweł Bukowski and Wojtek Paczos wrote for the LSE, “a relatively lax approach to economic lockdown and a bit of sheer luck”.

    Institutions often seem to work better as well. I can generally visit a GP on the day I call. Britons often have to wait for more than a week. Maternal mortality is higher in the UK — and infant mortality is about the same, despite Britain being much richer overall. Actually, Polish life expectancy as whole is just a touch shorter than British life expectancy, despite the nation having a lot more smokers.

    Polish kids have ranked higher on the PISA education rankings than British kids — ranking, indeed, the third highest in Europe in science and maths, and the fourth in reading comprehension. Poland is a more peaceful place than Britain, with murder and rape generally being rarer (granted, statistics in the latter case are famously difficult to trust). Terrorism, for reasons I leave to the reader, has been almost non-existent in Polish society.

    Some Polish achievements are more difficult to quantify. In Britain, the 20th century was marked by a curious habit of ripping down beautiful buildings and constructing ugly ones. Poland, meanwhile, has been beautifully renovating and reconstructing many of its urban spaces, pursuing a philosophy of “preservation meets modernisation”. Warsaw and Kraków are famous enough, but travellers could also visit lovely towns and cities like Wrocław, Toruń and Gdańsk — or my own, Tarnowskie Góry.

    Also, Poland seems to have actual conservatives who aren’t afraid to push for the right policies, instead of timid functionaries scared of their own shadow.

  • UK sends Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine.
  • Chile nationalizes lithium. Peter Zeihan thinks this hurts China worst, but that’s one of his go-to conclusions…
  • King Charles III crowned. I have no strong opinions on this. It’s a hard gig to screw up, and they’ve had worse kings…
  • Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss says that Hollywood mandatory diversity rules make him vomit.
  • Texas republican state representative Bryan Slaton resigns over wine-and-bang sex with underage (for alcohol) staffer. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Last quarter, Disney+ lost 2.4 million subscribers. But this quarter is different! This quarter, Disney+ lost 4 million subscribers.
  • Related. “They got these ulterior motives, and you know, it’s about this this sort of political shit. And, yeah, I guess that’s part of it. But a lot of it is just these guys are just fucking stupid.”
  • This won’t end well: “UFC fighter says he could beat up any 10 ‘trans men’ at the same time, trans wrestler challenges him to 1-on-1 fight.”
  • Huge floods in China.
  • Golden Corral saved my life.”
  • “Biden Unable To Participate In Democratic Debates Due To Looming Screenwriters Strike.”
  • Oh no, not the bees!
  • Competitive tag. I’d still watch this over golf.
  • Like most people from Houston, I have little use for the BESFs Tennessee Titans, but this is pretty funny.

  • Cajun Dog is not tired of your shenanigans:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Brit-Turned-American On the Glories of Suburbia

    Tuesday, April 25th, 2023

    British-born Laurence Brown has a YouTube channel dedicated to documenting the differences between Britain and the USA. In the last year, he’s become and American citizen and bought a house in the suburbs (Chicago’s, alas), and has some observations, mostly positive, about American suburbs, including the community of dog owners, immaculate lawns, and America’s love affair with rectangles.

    In Which I Fail To Write About Jeremy Clarkson

    Monday, January 23rd, 2023

    I was going to write about the latest cancel culture lynch squad attempt to get Jeremy Clarkson, but then I see that I would have to talk about the no-talent “royal couple” and I refuse to. Instead, enjoy a three minute Paul Joseph Watson video on the topic.

    “Never apologize!”

    I would link to Clarkson’s blistering attack on Wokeness…but it appears that the Sunday Times has cravenly removed it from their website. The Daily Skeptic appears to have reprinted it.

    How did a movement theoretically dedicated to “checking privilege” take as its sacred totem a woman who’s only accomplishment is marrying into the royal family?

    Why Commies Couldn’t Do Semiconductors

    Sunday, January 15th, 2023

    Asianometry has an interesting video up about East Germany expensive, strenuous efforts to catch up to the west in semiconductor manufacturing technology.

    Spoiler: They didn’t.

    Some takeaways:

  • “In the late 1980s, the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, went all in on the monumental task of domestic semiconductor production. This semiconductor obsession failed, and the billions of marks spent on it eventually bankrupted the country’s failing economy.” I think he oversells the role the semiconductor push had on bankrupting the economy; everything in late commie East Germany was failing (just like the rest of the Warsaw Pact), they suffered a credit crunch for investment due to tightened western restrictions, couldn’t export Soviet oil as profitably due to the Reagan/Saudi created oil glut, and also were running into hard currency shortages to but the components their manufacturing sector needed to keep exporting.
  • The East German Uprising of 1953 kicked off what would be a persistent, and ultimately existential problem, for the GDR: Emigration. Throughout its history, its best and smartest people consistently sought a way out to the West. To convince its people to stay, the SED [Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, AKA Socialist Unity Party of Germany] promised a better future through the use of technology. More than the Soviets, East Germany leaned on information technology as a pathway towards economic vitality and a glorious socialist future. The Party’s elites saw themselves locked in a technology race with the capitalists to see who can build a better society. Leader Walter Ulbricht called for an “industrial transformation” with the ultimate aim of “catching up with and surpassing capitalism in terms of technology.” A thriving computer industry was crucial towards making this ideology work. And in order to produce these superior computers, East Germany needed to learn and master microelectronics technology.

  • “Less than four years after the Americans invented the germanium transistor, East Germany moved quickly to build their own line of first generation semiconductors. In 1952, development work began at the VEB Works for Electrical Components for Communications Technology, or WBN, in the town of Teltow near the city of Berlin. This put them about even with West Germany. The FRG’s first semiconductor factory came about in 1952, built by Siemens.” Indeed, this is very early to get into the semiconductor game. It wasn’t until 1957 that Fairchild Semiconductor, widely considered as Company Zero for America’s semiconductor industry, was founded.
  • “WBN suffered from a lack of cooperation between its industrial and academic sides. The production teams lacked discipline, hands-on experience, and did not appreciate the scale and difficulty of the task they were facing. In one incident, the team dumped hot ashes right outside a factory window where they were producing a pilot run of semiconductors.” Ouch! A very uncleanroom…
  • “The state failed to give their young semiconductor team the resources it should have gotten. Administration – their chief accountant, in particular – seemed to care very little for semiconductors. When the team asked for money to purchase felt slippers to prevent static charge buildup in the clean room, their chief accountant denied the request.”
  • The Soviets didn’t help. “Despite being the GDR’s primary political backer, the Soviets were strangely wary. In 1958, two WBN staff members traveled to the Soviet Union to do technical exchanges. A year later, they came back complaining of limited cooperation. Much of what the Soviets had developed was created for military use. Thusly, the Soviets were concerned that transferring that to the East Germans would leak via scientists defecting to the West.”
  • They tried to get information from the U.S., but Cold War tech transfer policies were already falling into place. They had better luck in the UK. “Through the contacts of Arthur Lewis, a British Labour Party politician, the delegation saw plants owned by British Philips, Siemens-Edison, and British-Thompson-Houston. The latter is a descendant of the Vickers Company that sold oil equipment to the Soviets in the early 1900s. Just thought that was a nice connection. This visit was very successful. The East Germans learned a whole lot about industrial level semiconductor manufacturing. They even managed to purchase equipment for low-frequency transistors, a trailing edge technology.”
  • Despite that, the gap grew wider: “In 1958, WBN produced 100,000 germanium diodes, transistors, and rectifiers. Worse yet, some 98% of what they produced eventually needed to be discarded throughout their entire working lives.” Classic commie quality. “That same year in 1958, the United States alone produced 27.8 million transistors. Two years later in 1960, the US grew that production capacity five times over to 131 million.”
  • “Erich Apel, head of the Economic Commission of the Central Committee Politburo and an economic reformer – wrote in late April 1959: ‘Compared to … the American, Japanese, and West German industry, we lie in a state of backwardness that can scarcely be estimated … this backwardness will not decrease through 1961 at least, but will instead grow. Another inspection in 1960 identified more items of backwardness in semiconductor production. Workers tended to use rules of thumb rather than their instruments to measure. The various factory lines did not cooperate with one another.”
  • “Interestingly, when reporting these results to the Economic Commission of the Central Committee Politburo, that inspector softened his results. In his notes to state authorities, he said the GDR was 5 to 6 years behind. But in his analysis to the more politically charged Economic Commission, he cut it in half, 3 to 4 years.” Commies always institute thermoclines of truth to avoid being purged.
  • The brain drain to the west continued. The solution: The Berlin Wall. “For semiconductors however, the Wall pinched off what little technology the GDR had imported from the West.” The solution was to suck up even more to the Soviets, and to spy harder.
  • In 1963, the aging Walter Ulbricht launched a new initiative – called the New Economy System of Planning – to bring more market elements to the GDR economy. Now industrial groups, not bureaucrats, can actually decide how money can be spent. The reform also elevated the status of technology sectors like semiconductor manufacturing in the economy. R&D spending increased by over a third from 1959 to 1963. In 1965, nearly 40% of the electronics that the GDR produced by value were semiconductors – 82 million marks out of 223 million marks in total. Four years later in 1969, that number grew four-fold. Many of these transistors went into new consumer technical goods like radios, TVs and fridges. In 1971, semiconductor production reached 535 million marks by value. That year, East Germany began producing their first integrated circuits, some 10 years after Texas Instruments did it.

  • “Strange inequalities in policy planning meant that color televisions were widely available, but consumer items like toothbrushes and toilet paper were in short supply.” Communist planning at its finest!
  • One day in 1967, the Minister of Electrical Engineering and Electronics showed up to an East German electronics firm with a suitcase full of integrated circuits from TI. He told them to copy them exactly. The Ministry for State Security – better known as the Stasi – had been engaged in scientific and technology espionage since the 1950s – mostly related to atomic engineering and other sciences. Then in 1969, the Stasi’s Scientific and Technical Sector was reorganized and expanded with the goal of acquiring military technologies. After Honecker came into power in 1971, the Stasi’s job shifted from acquiring scientific knowledge to specific technologies – mostly via informants in the West who found and handed the goods over to East Germany. One such informant was Hans Rehder, a physicist working for the West German firms Telefunken and AEG. He handed over technical secrets for over 28 years and was never caught.

  • “Western companies knew about this copying of course. In one famous example, a GDR chip analyst looking at a stolen chip from the US firm Digital Corporation saw a message n Russian, roughly translating to: ‘When do you want to stop to swipe. Own design is better.'”
  • Stasi intellectual theft kept them from falling further behind, but couldn’t close the gap. “Because the Stasi were spymasters not technical experts, they frequently asked for the wrong item. Their methods of laundering the technology before passing it on made it harder to understand how to use it. Tightening embargoes from the West also interfered with industrial development. Stolen Western products got progressively older and more expensive to acquire. The embargoes gave other countries the chance to scam the Stasi, adding mark-ups frequently in the range of 30% to 80% to even 100%. This drained the East Germans’ already limited R&D budgets.”
  • “The wholesale copying also undercut the country’s ability to export its goods abroad. The Stasi did not want other countries to see what they had managed to acquire. And had they tried anyway, sales would have been blocked on patent infringement grounds. And finally, semiconductors were getting to the point that East German technicians struggled to replicate them. As early as 1976, an IC’s physical form no longer yielded secrets on how to produce them.”
  • “In 1981, with the GDR still about 7-10 years behind the West in microelectronics development, Erich Honecker announced a ten-point program to produce the majority of its semiconductors domestically by 1985. The 1970s were rough years for the GDR. Tighter export bans. The Oil Crises of the 1970s. Heavy borrowing from the West. Declining productivity and worsening competitiveness. It was all weighing heavily – grinding the country’s economy to a halt. Gerhard Schürer, head of the State Planning Commission, convinced Honecker that investing in semiconductors would bring the country out of its economic morass.”
  • They even struck a deal with Toshiba.

    In exchange for 25 million marks, Toshiba – a long running technology  partner with the GDR – would furnish the GDR with designs for their 256 kilobyte memory chips along with instructions on how to produce them. At the time, 256-kilobyte was leading edge stuff. The GDR was still struggling to produce 64 kilobyte memory. This would have been a game-changer. But in 1987, Toshiba got caught selling submarine propeller equipment to the Soviet Union. Huge scandal back then. Afraid of getting caught again, Toshiba offered the Stasi a 95% refund to destroy the evidence. [Spy Gerhardt] Ronneberger agreed. So in July 1988, he got the money back and dissolved the chip designs in a vat of acid in front of Toshiba’s people. But never trust a spy! Those were just copies, produced for exactly that purpose.

  • Finally in September 1988, Zeiss General Director Wolfgang Biermann triumphantly presented Erich Honecker with the first samples of that 1 megabit chip – the U61000. Honecker said that the chips were “convincing proof that the GDR is maintaining its position as a developed industrial country.” This technical “triumph” was the bitterest of them all. In semiconductors, prototypes mean nothing. Production means everything. Dresden produced just 35,000 chips throughout the entirety of 1988 and 1989 with a yield of 20%.

    To say this was “piss poor” would be an understatement. Those are ruinous, “fire everyone” numbers for actual semiconductor manufacturers.

    They planned to scale up to 100,000 1 megabit chips each year. Toshiba alone produced that many in a single day. Two months later in November 1988, the leading edge moved once more. Toshiba began shipping its 4-megabit DRAM in high volume, seeking to produce a million chips a month by March 1989.

  • Then history happened. “By then, the East German economy was in shambles,  scheduled to default on its debts by early 1990. It never even got there. In May 1989, Hungary opened its borders with Austria and East Germans swarmed through there en route to West Germany. Later in November 1989, a year after its one megabit technical triumph, the Berlin Wall fell.”
  • East Germany stole as many designs as they possibly could, but they couldn’t steal the intellectual expertise behind the numerous process tweaks, nor the furious swarm of technological innovation drive by Silicon Valley’s capitalist high risk/high reword startup culture that drove Moore’s Law for decades.

    Top-down communist command economies never had a chance to keep up.

    What Is And Isn’t Useful Kit In Ukraine

    Wednesday, January 11th, 2023

    Lindybeige (a military YouTuber whose tank videos I’ve used before) interviews a British volunteer fighting in Ukraine as to what is and isn’t useful field kit.

    In: Mini hot water bottles, ghillie kettles, combat tourniquets and machetes.

    Out: Fancy optics and Rambo knives.

    LinkSwarm for October 28, 2022

    Friday, October 28th, 2022

    Blue cities bleed, more Democrats violating election laws, another Democratic congressional staffer exposed for carrying water for Red China, Elon Musk takes over and immediately starts cleaning house at Twitter, and more transexual lunacy. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

    
    

  • Confirmation of what we already know: Homicide rates surging in major cities run by Soros-backed DAs.

    As polling continues to show crime is a top issue for voters, the number of homicides has skyrocketed nationwide.

    In fact, homicide rates rose by an average of nearly 10% in 50 of the most populated U.S. cities between the third quarter of last year and the third quarter of this year — and are still rising — according to a new study.

    WalletHub compared 50 of America’s largest cities based on per capita homicides for the third quarter (July through September) of each year since 2020, using locally published crime data to compile its findings.

    According to WalletHub, these were the ten cities with the highest homicide cases per 100,000 residents from July through September:

    1. St. Louis, Mo. (19.69)
    2. Kansas City, Mo. (14.86)
    3. Detroit, Mich. (13.24)
    4. Baltimore, Md. (12.45)
    5. New Orleans, La. (10.99)
    6. Milwaukee, Wisc. (10.46)
    7. Memphis, Tenn. (9.99)
    8. Philadelphia, Pa. (9.36)
    9. Norfolk, Va. (7.78)
    10. Chicago, Ill. (7.71)

    The top prosecutors in most of these cities are backed by progressive megadonor George Soros, a billionaire who’s spent the last several years injecting tens of millions of dollars into local district attorney races nationwide, backing candidates who support policies such as abolishing bail, defunding the police, and decriminalizing or deprioritizing certain offenses.

    In St. Louis, for example, Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner is one of the first prosecutors bankrolled by Soros’ financial network of organizations and affiliates, heavily funded by these sources in 2016 and again in 2020.

    Amid high homicide figures, Gardner has declined more cases and issued fewer arrest warrants than her predecessor, charging fewer felonies and prosecuting thousands of fewer cases as a result. She has also deferred prison sentences for misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies as part of her reform initiatives.

    Gardner has said this is part of her “platform to reduce the number of cases unnecessarily charged in order to focus on the more difficult cases for trial.”

    Last year, Gardner came under fire after three murder cases under her purview were dismissed in one week due to prosecutors in her office not showing up for hearings or being unprepared.

    Her campaign website boasts that she’s “made jail and prison a last resort, reserved for those who pose a true public safety risk,” while limiting “the arrest and detention of people accused of misdemeanors and low-level felonies.”

    Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner is another Soros-funded prosecutor.

    Soros spent almost $1.7 million through the Philadelphia Justice and Public Safety PAC to help Krasner in 2017, pouring more than five times as much money into the race as Krasner himself. Four years later, Krasner received a combined $1.259 million from Soros-funded groups for his reelection.

    During his tenure, Krasner has cut the future years of incarceration by half and slashed the length of parole in probation supervision by nearly two-thirds compared to the previous DA. He has also made a priority of not prosecuting people who are illegally in possession of guns unless they hurt or kill people.

    The top prosecutors in New Orleans, Milwaukee, Norfolk, and Chicago have also been backed by Soros-linked money. Many of the others are self-described progressive prosecutors.

    According to some experts, progressive prosecutors pursuing soft-on-crime policies have contributed to the spike in homicides and other violent crime.

    “Prosecutors in most major cities have failed the people they serve by refusing to prosecute criminals, including those charged with violent crimes,” Tristin Kilgallon, associate professor of pre-law and history at the University of Findlay, told WalletHub. “Countless violent crimes have been committed by those who have been released back into the streets due to recent ‘bail reform’ initiatives or by prosecutors who declined to pursue charges.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of violent crime and Democrats, Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul was violently assaulted in his home.
    

  • “Texas Secretary of State Finds ‘Serious Breaches’ in Harris County 2020 Election Audit. Auditors found multiple chain of custody issues and violations of state and federal law requiring maintenance of records in the state’s largest county.”

    Issues found by auditors relate primarily to the county’s extralegal “drive-thru” voting initiated by then-interim County Clerk Chris Hollins.

    Auditors found that for at least 14 polling locations the county does not show chain of custody for the Mobile Ballot Boxes (MBB) and that there were multiple MBBs created for some voting locations. Auditors say the MBBs from the polling locations “were not the MBBs ultimately tabulated.” They also note that they have been able to locate some missing MBBs, but have not been given an explanation as to why the originals were not tabulated. Each MBB can hold 9,999 ballots.

    Another issue found by auditors is that poll book and provisional voting data provided by the county do not match the number of cast vote records on some of the devices.

    Ennis also noted that after upgrading voting systems the county does not appear to have retained “any equipment or computers that provide relevant reports or alternatively, can read the MBBs” from 2020 or recover the cast vote records stored in them as required by both state and federal election codes.

    Why, it’s almost like the Democrats running Harris County wanted to commit election fraud…

  • Speaking of election fraud, Facebook has been fined $25 million for breaking Washington State election law.

    According to court documents, King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North found Meta to be in violation of Washington’s political disclosure law 822 separate times between 2019 and 2021 and issued the maximum possible fine for each instance, which totaled up to $30,000 per violation.

    Meta was also ordered to “come into full compliance” with the state’s election transparency laws within the next 30 days as well as pay the attorney’s fees for the case, which Ferguson has requested be tripled for a total of $10.5 million. The final total will be decided by North at a later date.

    According to The Seattle Times, the state’s election transparency laws, which have been in place since 1972, require ad sellers to “disclose the names and addresses of political buys, the targets of such ads and, the total number of viewers of each ad.” The judge found that Meta had intentionally violated the standards.

    Washington Democrat Attorney General Bob Ferguson said “that he had “one word for Facebook’s conduct in this case – arrogance.”

    He told the Times, “It intentionally disregarded Washington’s election transparency laws,” Ferguson said. “But that wasn’t enough. Facebook argued in court that those laws should be declared unconstitutional. That’s breathtaking.”

  • The Oz-Fetterman debate was a disaster for Fetterman.

    When Pennsylvania Democrats insist that a candidate who suffered a life-threatening stroke in May is recovering well and “has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office,” that candidate must look and sound fine to prove they’re telling the truth. Last night, in the lone debate in the Pennsylvania Senate race, John Fetterman looked and sounded very, very far from fine. But you can judge for yourself by watching the whole debate here.

    I expected Fetterman’s debate performance to be a Rorschach test, with Democrats insisting that he was fine and hand-waving away any problems, and Republicans pointing to every verbal misstep, pause, or oddly worded answer. But by the end of the hour, there was little debate, no pun intended. John Fetterman’s ability to hear, understand, process information, and speak appears to still be severely impacted by his stroke. Perhaps the worst moment of the night came when one of the moderators asked him about a statement he made in 2018 opposing fracking, and how he could square that past stance with his current claim that he always supported fracking. After a long pause, presumably from reading the moderator’s question from the monitor, Fetterman said, “I, I, I do support fracking and . . .” and then for a moment, Fetterman’s head shook, and his mouth moved, but no words came out. Then he picked up again: “I don’t . . . I don’t. I support fracking, and I stand, and I do support fracking.” With everyone watching likely mortified and embarrassed to watch Fetterman struggle to finish the sentence, the moderator mercifully moved on to the next question.

  • Judge for yourself:

  • Biden signs on to the transexual groomer agenda for kids.
  • New Zealand adopts the Netherlands agenda for destroying their own agricultural base.
  • Speaking of green delusions: “Cancel-Out Two Decades Of Emissions Reductions.”
  • “Less Than 1 In 100 Million Chance That COVID-19 Has Natural Origin.”
  • Elon Musk takes over Twitter and immediately starts cleaning house.

    Elon Musk took over Twitter late Thursday and fired company CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, senior legal representative Vijaya Gadde, and general counsel Sean Edgett.

    Musk, the world’s richest man, acquired the social media giant through a $44 billion purchase. He reportedly had until Friday to complete the deal.

    In a video tweet that went viral, Musk appeared at Twitter’s corporate offices Wednesday carrying a sink, implying that employees would need to accept that he was now in charge.

    This is a good start, but all the people on the Safety and Trust Council need to be fired, and all accounts suspended or banned need to be restored.

  • Rishi Sunak is the new UK Prime Minister, and Nigel Farage is not impressed:

    (Hat tip: The Conservative Treehouse.)

  • Complain about how your children are being taught to a school board? Watch them try to get you fired.
  • The Russian economy will ‘die by winter’ because of Putin’s war on Ukraine, according to Russian economist Vladislav Inozemtsev.
  • Another week, another Democratic congressional aide with ties to China discovered.

    A House Democratic staffer was fired after her outreach to other congressional aides allegedly on behalf of the Chinese embassy was revealed this week, National Review has learned. After an investigation found that the staffer had acted improperly, her boss, Representative Don Beyer, swiftly removed her.

    “Congressman Beyer was totally unaware of these activities prior to being contacted by the House Sergeant At Arms,” Aaron Fritschner, his deputy chief of staff, told National Review in a statement this morning. “As soon as he learned of them, he followed every directive he was given by security officials. The staffer in question is no longer employed by the office of Congressman Beyer.”

    Fritschner added that Beyer, who has a hawkish record on China, was “deeply upset” upon learning about the activities of the now-former staffer, Barbara Hamlett.

    The LinkedIn page for Barbara Jenell Hamlett shows she worked in the U.S. House from 1978 to 2008, and that she also worked as a volunteer for Terry McAuliffe.

  • Did White House staffer Ron Klain violate the Hatch Act? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Hmmm: “San Diego ER seeing up to 37 marijuana cases a day — mostly psychosis.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • “Ohio Supreme Court Suspends Democrat Judge.”

    Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Pinkey Carr, a Democrat, was found to exhibit such misconduct that comprise more than 100 incidents over a period of about two years.

    The misconduct “encompassed repeated acts of dishonesty; the blatant and systematic disregard of due process, the law, court orders, and local rules; the disrespectful treatment of court staff and litigants; and the abuse of capias warrants and the court’s contempt power,” stated the court’s per curium opinion. “That misconduct warrants an indefinite suspension from the practice of law.”

  • The new “Pride” flag, or a really high level of Tempest?
  • Bahaus Costume Party.
  • The Bosnian Ape Society is back with the Mikoyan and Gurevich Design Bureau tackling the Cup Noodle.
  • Will Dollar-Pound Parity Unleash Weirdness?

    Wednesday, September 28th, 2022

    A variety of maladies (global inflation, soaring energy costs due to the Russo-Ukrainian War, and post-Brexit trade wrangles, among others) has the English pound approaching parity with the U.S dollar.

    Can the pound reach parity versus the dollar? It’s now a one-in-four chance when it comes to options pricing.

    The UK currency is heading for its biggest daily loss since early May after Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng outlined the government’s plans to stimulate the economy with tax cuts and spending. The simultaneous sharp sell off in Gilts [historical term for UK government bonds – LP] suggests that tackling inflation will be a very hard task for UK authorities and that the currency market sees no easy way out for the Bank of England.

    To attract foreign investors, a weaker pound may be the answer and that is what FX traders are betting on.

    Cable fell as much as 2.1% to touch $1.1021, the lowest since March 1985, and was at $1.1036 as of 12:38pm in London. Risk reversals, a barometer of market positioning and sentiment, show that traders see the greatest downside risks for the pound over the medium term in two years.

    According to Bloomberg’s options pricing model, the pound holds a 26% chance of touching parity versus the greenback in the next six months. That compares to a reading of 14% Thursday.

    I think the real odds are probably higher than that.

    Dollar-pound parity is something that’s never happened, with the nearest it came to some 1.05 dollars to the pound in the mid-1980s. But there’s always a first time for everything, and with the Bank of England doing more quantitative easing and the UK government going on a spending spree during soaring inflation while the Fed ratchets up interest rates, now is as good a time as any.

    Besides making imports from the UK less expensive, what effects will dollar-pound parity have on the financial world? Hard to say for sure, but my prediction is: Weird things.

    There are a variety of reasons for this, starting with the fact that currency trading is itself a weird thing. You may think “American financial houses buy pounds to purchase English goods, while UK financial houses buy dollars to purchase American goods,” but there’s a whole ecology of counter-party trades, hedging strategies, currency reserve requirements, portfolio balancing, and a host of other considerations.

    Here’s a brief video that cover some of the basics for how brokerages handle FX trading:

    That’s a fairly streamlined view, as it doesn’t cover how liquidity pools are set up, different hedging strategies, etc.

    There are even traders who specialize in just trading different duration T-Bills, selling the eight-week-out and buying the four-week-out (or vice versa) for esoteric arbitrage reasons.

    None of that will change if the market hits dollar-pound parity. So where’s the danger? That comes from the possible non-linear effects of the market doing something that a lot of algorithmic instrument designers never considered a possibility.

    For a simple example, let’s talk about the swaps cases. To summarize a whole lot of very complex cases, a whole bunch of local UK governments entered into interest rate swap agreements. Interest rate swap agreements are a legitimate hedging strategy to minimize exposure to interest rate swings, but a few municipalities saw it as a license to print money. To quote Wikipedia, the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge:

    The position of Hammersmith and Fulham London Borough Council was quite different from most of the other local authorities. From about 1985 onwards Hammersmith had entered into interest rate swap transactions on an extremely large scale. At one stage it was calculated that Hammersmith was a counterparty to 0.5% of the global trade in swaps, and 10% of the sterling denominated trade. Moreover, quite exceptionally, all of Hammersmith’s positions in the swap market were betting on a fall in interest rates. Most large participants in the swap market have their exposure balanced by taking positions on both sides and across multiple currencies, but Hammersmith was essentially repeatedly entering into one-way bets that sterling interest rates would fall; a bet that they would end up losing spectacularly when interest rates climbed from around 8 per cent to 15 per cent in the space of ten months.

    This was, to put it in technical terms, “a really fucking stupid thing to do.” The swaps cases were unwound with great expense and difficulty, and various English banks ended up taking a bath (which you know they must have regarded as some sort of diabolical violation of the natural order) after courts determined that the authorities in question didn’t have the authority under English law to enter into such agreements.

    The possibility that interests rates can rise should be an obvious one. But the idea that the pound might be worth less than the dollar is one that people have probably thought about a good deal less, since it hasn’t happened ever. It’s quite possible it hasn’t been contemplated in some percentage of the trillions in derivatives markets and hedging instruments around the world.

    For many financial systems, this is going to be an untested use case. Some systems may work just fine, others may break down, and still others may experience race conditions or cascading failures; think of the flash crash of 2010, or the 1987 Black Monday crash. Somewhere, somehow, something is likely to go off the rails.

    Hopefully, whatever does blow up won’t be big enough to take down the entire market, or at least not for long. Hopefully it won’t uncover massive problems like the 2008 subprime meltdown uncovered, and there won’t be a firm of systemic importance like AIG was there.

    Hopefully.