May 14, 2024

MAKE THEM PAY:

Posted at 7:08 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? Joe Biden Says China’s EV Dominance Is a Problem. His Son Hunter Helped Beijing Gain a Foothold in the Industry.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday imposed sweeping tariffs on China’s aluminum and electric vehicle sectors, vowing to stop Beijing’s effort to “dominate these industries.” His son, Hunter Biden, brokered deals that helped China gain a foothold in those sectors while his father was vice president.

Hunter Biden was a founding board member of the Beijing-based BHR Partners and served on the company’s board when the firm brokered a Chinese state-owned firm’s purchase of a Congolese cobalt mine in 2016. China’s acquisition of the mine, which had been owned by an American company, gave Beijing a crucial supply of raw materials used to make batteries for electric cars. That same year, BHR Partners bought and sold a stake in Chinese electric vehicle battery maker CATL, the New York Timesreported.

Previously unreported emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop show that BHR Partners tried to broker a deal in 2015 between the American subsidiary of Chinese company Zhongwang and American aluminum maker Aleris. Zhongwang said the $2.3 billion deal would “strengthen Zhongwang’s leadership in [the] aluminum extrusion industry.” The Trump and Biden Justice Departments have since indicted Zhongwang and its owner for a scheme to evade tariffs levied against Chinese aluminum makers.

Hunter Biden’s work with BHR could prove awkward for his father, who saidTuesday he is “determined to ensure America,” not China, “leads the world” in the electric vehicle, aluminum, steel, and semiconductor industries. To reach that goal, Biden imposed a 25 percent tariff on Chinese aluminum and 100 percent tariff on Chinese-made electric vehicles.

Oh, and when it comes to tariffs on Chinese industry, the(p)resident is going John Kerry’s flipflop on the Iraq War one better— Sundown Joe is now forgainst it, for it!

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said he would remove Donald Trump’s tariffs on imports from China, which are taxes on U.S. consumers and companies. An aide later asserted the former vice president “would reevaluate the tariffs upon taking office.” A Gallup poll in February 2020 detected positive views of Americans toward international trade, with 79% viewing trade as “an opportunity for economic growth,” while only 18% considered trade a “threat.” (Note: The article has been updated to reflect the Biden aide’s statement.)

—“Biden Says He Will End Trump’s Tariffs On Chinese-Made Goods, Aide Walks Back Statement,” Forbes, August 6th, 2020.

Posted at 6:20 pm by Ed Driscoll

NATIONAL SOCIALISM—YOU’RE REALLY DOING IT WRONG:

UPDATE: WHOA: Nellie Bowles’ New Book Blows Lid OFF The New York Times, Exposing Rampant Misinformation and RACISM.

As Glenn noted in December of 2019 when Rolling Stone got the vapors because someone at the Army-Navy game flashed the OK sign, “The 4Chan trollers have scored again. I remember when ’culture jamming’ was a lefty thing, but the lefty culture jammers never scored at this level.” All the way to the New York Times! Former (?) Obama flack Ben Rhodes wasn’t kidding — his party’s vacuous operatives with bylines really know nothing.

Posted at 5:12 pm by Ed Driscoll

STEVEN HAYWARD: Can Our Universities Be Fixed? “It is possible that the current moment, with the shocking anti-Semitism on display at leading universities right now, is an inflection point.”

Posted at 5:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

YES — AND IN RESPONSE, THEIR APPEAL IS BECOMING MORE SELECTIVE: Sports Illustrated Hates You.

This year’s issue of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition is the 60th, and the magazine is celebrating by not featuring gorgeous women in skimpy swimsuits.

In fact, the magazine’s cover features a photo of women in evening gowns—at least, mostly women. These days you can never tell who will show up in the magazine pretending to be female.

Gail King, a noted sex symbol, is prominently featured. She snagged an interview with the magazine’s editor, who explained the shift away from featuring women in swimsuits to more woke content, featuring plus-size women and men cosplaying them.

“This ain’t your dad’s Sports Illustrated,” we are told. And this is supposed to be a good thing. The formerly unabashedly male publication prefers old, fat, Queer readers these days. Because they are the core audience for sports, just as woke white women are the core audience for comic book movies.

This is why they have been so successful.

SI has been, at least, successful in jettisoning its former readers–circulation is down by half. So at least their strategy of offending much of their audience is working. What publication would want to be patronized by heterosexual men these days?

Good riddance!

Of course, jettisoning readers isn’t so good for the bottom line. They have had massive layoffs and almost folded, being rescued at the last minute by a last-minute buyer.

Flashback: Leave Supermodels Alone!

The other night, after I’d had a little too much of this world, I decided to bathe in cleansing waters and scour my soul by watching the new E! True Hollywood Story episode on Victoria’s Secret.  (Yes, I know. Life is sad.)

Best I can tell, this investigative blockbuster was largely derived from a New York Times story from last year, subtly headlined, “Angels in Hell: The Culture of Misogyny Inside Victoria’s Secret.”  The gory particulars of both the article and the E! documentary were enough to curl your hair, not unlike the bouncy locks of former VS model Jill Goodacre (a Victoria’s Secret OG). There were harrowing tales of handsy, lecherous  executives, and of models getting ready for Objectification Fest (the once-hallowed Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show) by eating an apple a day with no sides.  Ed Razek, the former chief marketing officer of Victoria’s Secret’s then parent company, L Brands, was so creepy, that he kept company with Jeffrey Epstein, the latter of whom posed as a Victoria’s Secret recruiter.  It was all genuinely awful.

But perhaps most unsettling of all, according to the ominous narration, VS didn’t show a commitment to diversity of body types  (women, you may have heard, come in all shapes and sizes!), and they continued to “market a standard of beauty that customers found male, stale, and hopelessly out of touch.” (Just imagine a woman so deluded, that she’d try to make herself attractive to a man while performing the sacred fourth-wave feminist rite of buying lingerie.)  After hearing this last bit, I sat there in stone silence for what felt like hours, but was probably just a few minutes or so, until E! aired another rerun of The Bradshaw Bunch, in which former NFL great Terry Bradshaw “still stinging from their embarrassing loss last year…..coaches the family for a repeat appearance on Celebrity Family Feud.”

I hurt for my supermodel sisters.  I asked a lot of unanswerable questions like, “Why, God, why?”  Then I asked one last question, which you’re not supposed to utter in public: “Whatever happened to skinny, beautiful models, and will they be coming back any time soon?”

As Iowahawk likes to say:

And:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 4:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

A TRUCK THAT SWINGS BOTH WAYS: GM Now Has the Hardware to Help an Electric Silverado Power Your House. “Power outages cost American businesses about $150 billion annually, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, so having a solution when power goes out is critical. Some electric vehicles allow bi-directional charging, meaning they can receive power to charge their batteries, but can also give power to a home or business when the grid fails. GM Energy, a subsidiary of General Motors, has new hardware that allows customers to charge their electric Chevy or Cadillac, and give power to their home in case there’s an outage, or use stored energy when costs spike.”

Posted at 4:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

GREEN NUDE EEL: Solar’s Been Taking a Beating Lately. “In the middle of a big swim meet with thousands of school kids and parents gathered in Australia under the roof of the Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Center, that solar panel-encrusted roof lit off.”

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

DID YOU KNOW WE ALMOST LOST THE INTERNET LAST MONTH?: It’s true, and Jonathan Bartlett has the scoop at Mind Matters. At the heart of this close call is a mysterious programmer by name Jia Tan, an obscure programming compression library known as xz, and an alert Microsoft software engineer.

UPDATE: Boy, good thing that Microsoft software engineer wasn’t as “alert” as I was while writing this original post. Y’all are the best copy desk editors in the business!

Posted at 3:02 pm by Mark Tapscott

WOW: US home prices have soared 47% since 2020.

Despite mortgage rates skyrocketing to around 7%, double what they were at the peak of the pandemic, home prices refuse to plateau.

That’s due the insatiable appetite for housing coupled with a crippling shortage in supply.

“Because the Fed kept rates too low for too long during the pandemic, listing inventory was essentially wiped off the map, keeping prices rising sharply despite the surge in mortgage rates,” appraiser Jonathan Miller told The Post. “Would-be home sellers that bought or refinanced at a 2.5% to 4% rate during the pandemic became trapped due to the lock-in effect. They became reluctant to list their homes because, as new buyers, they would get a lot less for their money because of the much higher mortgage rates. The way out of this appears to be to hope for a drop in mortgage rates, but that could take years.”

To put things in perspective, the median US home sale price hit $420,800 in the first quarter of this year. Compare that to a modest $327,100 at the beginning of the decade. It was $124,800 at the dawn of the ’90s.

Lance Lambert, co-founder of ResiClub, says housing price growth in the first 50 months of this decade has outpaced not just one, but the last three decades combined.

I’d hate to be a young couple trying to buy a first house and start a family.

Related? Suddenly There Aren’t Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed. “In the U.S., a short-lived pandemic baby boomlet has reversed. The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 last year, according to provisional government figures, the lowest on record.”

Unaffordable housing is far from the only reason young people aren’t having enough kids but it’s on the list.

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

SETH MANDEL: Lifting Hamas’s ‘Fog of War’ Reveals a Very Different Conflict.

The United Nations has announced that the Gaza casualty figures it has been using are bogus and it is adjusting its figures downward.

“The revisions are taken … you know, of course, in the fog of war, it’s difficult to come up with numbers,” UN spokesman Farhan Haq said at a press briefing in response to a question from JNS. “We get numbers from different sources on the ground, and then we try to cross check them. As we cross check them, we update the numbers, and we’ll continue to do that as that progresses.”

Ah yes, the fog of war. In fact, the change is due to the fact that the UN has decided to report only “identified” casualties and exclude “unidentified” casualties. Because Hamas uses media reports—itself a gauzy category which includes Hamas-aligned press fronts—to add to its “unidentified” category, there is no excuse for reporting those in the “unidentified” category at all.

If only there’d been a way to know not to trust the numbers coming directly from Hamas.

And what are those numbers? Now the UN says about half of its original estimate of women and of children can be disregarded, bringing those totals to about 7,800 and 5,000 respectively. That brings the total number of Palestinian fatalities down by over 11,000, nearly a third of the commonly reported total.

And that’s not all. The Palestinian statistical agencies are famous for using “under 20” as their marker for separating children and adults. That means among the “children” are likely a number of 18- and 19-year-olds (i.e. not children). Additionally, we know the IDF encounters 16- and 17-year-old militants in the field, meaning a chunk of the “children” are actually combatants. And of course Hamas makes no distinction between combatants and civilians when counting the casualties.

It’s possible, then—perhaps even likely—that the IDF has achieved a civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio of around 1.5-1, an unheard-of level of precision and civilian protection in urban warfare.

Everything Hamas does boils down to three things: lying, murder, and lying about murder.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green