Archive for 2023

OKAY, GROOMER:

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (CHINA EDITION): China’s unfinished property projects are 20 times the size of Country Garden.

Apartments in China are typically sold ahead of completion. Ensuring construction of the homes has been a government priority since delays make people less willing to buy new apartments.

“In our view, amid the collapsing property sector and widespread credit fallout among property developers, home buyers might get increasingly impatient while waiting for the delivery of their purchased new homes,” the Nomura report said.

“At some point next year, the issue of home delivery could turn into a social issue and endanger social stability, and Beijing may eventually need to significantly ramp up policy support,” the analysts said. “We see this as the key to truly restoring the confidence in the property sector and economy.”

Plus: “About 3.2 trillion yuan ($440 billion) is needed to complete those remaining units, according to the analysts’ estimates.”

That would be one heckuva bailout.

GOOD: ABA To Vote On Law School Free Speech Accreditation Standard This Friday.

“Effective legal education and the development of the law require the free, robust, and uninhibited sharing of ideas reflecting a wide range of viewpoints,” the new standard reads.

Under the proposed change, law schools must have free speech policies protecting the exchange of ideas. Schools would develop their own free speech policies, but those policies must protect the rights of faculty, staff and students to communicate controversial or unpopular ideas and safeguard robust debate, demonstrations or protests.

They must also forbid disruptive activities that hinder free expression or substantially interfere with law school functions or activities. Schools would be allowed to restrict any activity that “constitutes a genuine threat or harassment” or that is defamatory or violates the law.

The proposed rule does not include any specific enforcement mechanism, but law schools that do not adhere to the ABA’s standards risk losing their accreditation.

Good.

CDR SALAMANDER: Deindustrialization in the UK is Almost Complete: We’ve all been played.

Without a blast furnace, all you can do is recycle scrap iron.

You cannot fight wars at scale if all you have is scrap iron. You cannot be an industrial hub off of just scrap iron. If you are a nation of any size, you then become economically and security vulnerable at an existential level. I don’t care how much science fiction you get nakid and roll in; wars are won by steel, ungodly amounts of steel.

Where do you get the steel to build your warships? Your tanks? Your factories? Your buildings? Your factories?

The people in charge don’t want us to have those things. It’s okay if China does, though.

DEMOCRATS AND LEFTISTS ARE SUPPORTING HAMAS. HAMAS THINKS OSAMA WAS RIGHT.

I think Hamas should suffer Osama’s fate. Or Dresden’s, whatever. Talk about people who can’t learn from history.

AN IMPERIAL JUDICIARY IS ALWAYS A LEFTIST PROJECT: A Dark Day for British Democracy. “This is a dark day for British democracy. Five people you’ve probably never heard of, and definitely never voted for, have ruled in their infinite wisdom that the UK government is forbidden from enacting the Rwanda policy to deal with illegal immigration. So the desires of ministers voted into power by us do not matter. The beliefs of the public, growing numbers of whom back the Rwanda policy, do not matter. The hard-fought-for principle that policy should be decided by the elected, not by princes, priests or posh men and women in wigs, does not matter. All that matters, it seems, is the feeling and opinion of a few judges. That overrides everything. This is an act of judicial tyranny.”

The whole point of leftism is enacting policies that most people don’t want. Forcing those policies down their throat is the payoff. The policies themselves barely matter.

LOL:

OPEN THREAD: Do that comment voodoo that you do so well.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: ‘F**k you, bitch:’ Anti-Israel protests erupts into violence outside the DNC Headquarters in DC – sparking police to make dozens of arrests as activists try to storm the building.

UPDATE: Question asked:

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: After Five Minutes With Biden, Xi Gives Order To Invade Taiwan.

Meanwhile, back in whatever “reality” passes for day to day life in San Francisco, the (likely) overdubbed music adds to the Nuremberg Rally feel to the concentration camp-supporting Xi’s visit:

THE ART OF THE TEARDOWN:

The barbarity of the Hamas attack on innocents was thus impossible for those who hate Jews to process, so they didn’t. Rather, they attempted to deny the evidence by throwing away photos of the real-life Jewish victims, in a vain yet chilling attempt to resolve their own logical impasse. “Precisely because the massacre and abductions had been so unspeakably horrific,” Jeff Jacoby wrote, “it was necessary to reinforce the narrative of Jewish villainy.”

[Israeli street artists Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid who created the posters] are hurt by the blood-curdling reactions, but they remain undeterred. “You know, we are only going to put the posters up again, and all the thousands of people who are with us, they just print more and put them back up,” says Bandaid. “We put innocent civilians on these posters because we know they can’t speak for themselves right now. We have to keep their names up there and keep spreading awareness until they gain their freedom.”

Bandaid and Nitzan’s posters continue to be downloaded. (There are fewer reported teardowns in the Far East.) Posters have been displayed on 240 chairs surrounding an empty Shabbat table that has been constructed and displayed around the world: in New York, Geneva, Boston, Berlin, Rome, Frankfurt, Washington, D.C., Johannesburg, London, Copenhagen, Tel Aviv, Melbourne, Tbilisi, Chicago, Vienna, LA, and Lisbon, to name a few.

In the fourth week of the war, analytics show that kidnappedfromIsrael.com has been visited an average of 30,000 times per day.

Nevertheless, Bandaid has to admit the rage is terrifying. “They tear down photos of babies and elderly people!” the artist told me. “It’s just pure evil. It’s not human. It’s really crazy. It’s really upsetting. We see antisemitism rising everywhere. It’s not a nice feeling to have when you’re abroad, and we feel less and less safe. It’s scary and it’s depressing to see the world act like that. But we will just go out and put up more.”

The posters are serving a remarkably useful need, shining a well-needed spotlight on anti-Semites throughout the world and/or the cognitive dissonance of those whose leftist worldview prohibits them from processing Hamas’ terrorism. Not to mention a reminder that actions have consequences.

QED: Wall Street banker fired over viral video of him telling a Jewish American man to ‘go back to your country.’

BUT HER PRONOUNS WERE PERFECT:

HMM: 50 Years of Data Links Insecticides to Global Decline of Human Sperm Counts.

I do like killing bugs, but the sperm count decline is serious. “The researchers note other studies have shown that semen quality is declining over time. A review in 2022 found that the average sperm count among participants, who were not considered infertile dropped by 51 percent between 1973 and 2018, from 101.2 million to 49 million per millilitre of semen.”