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Tag: USA

  • Oil

    China imports more Canadian gold than Canada officially exports to China.

    Canada de facto protects Chinese (international) drug super laboratories.

    I wonder if these two things have something to do with each other?

    Trump administration has used this as an excuse to tariff Canada. Trump administration also supports Albertan separatism.

    Towards south, US has sent military and naval units to fight drug cartels in Venezuela.

    ‘Certain cartels’ had been designated as foreign terrorist organizations on the same day as Trump was sworn into presidency paving way to military action, but I was slightly surprised at this week’s movement to Venezuela instead of Mexico, which the US media more commonly connects to cartel activities (not to mention being the focus of our militarized border wall.)

    Crude claims that USA just wants Venezuelan oil again, just like in the past 20+ years of regime change attempts, seem somewhat plausible.

    It might be the Venezuelan threats against Guyanan oil fields in Essequibo that are currently exploited ExxonMobil that triggered the latest action.

    An infographic shown by X user placed Canada among the high oil resource countries – most of which were either destabilized, contested, under hybrid warfare / influence campaigns, or Western sock puppets. Kazakhstan may have been the only exception in the list, but that may be just US being more remote than Russia and China. Bouts of sanity, like recognizing the limits of former ‘hyperpower’ are extremely rare, rarer than pacifism, in Washington DC.

    But a grim fact is that the Western technocivilization is running out of energy, among other resources. Whether for AI powered surveillance dystopia or utopistic popst-scarcity dream, reality is reasserting itself crushing them all with resource scarcity.

    Looks like the oil wars (including hybrid warfare), this time north and south, are back on menu. With War on Drugs joining hands with War on Terror as casus belli.

  • Resource Competition

    I saw an interesting video from YanasaTV. He was discussing about blue pigs and their causes in California. I think this is a symptom of even bigger problem than he described, so I thought to expand a bit.

    The starting point was boar meat that had turned blue in some parts of California, because of liberal use of rat poison, which dyes the meat.

    According to the video, farmers have been fighting against a figurative tidal wave of rodents, whose populations had exploded in four counties due to farm and orchard closures leaving them tens of thousands of acres of prime breeding areas in almond country.

    The orchards and farms are closing because of California’s water policies, justified by drought blamed on climate change, specifically the conservation laws passed 2014 were a death blow to many farms. I remember the wave of orchard cuttings when many farmers got rid of their almond trees and then the markets in the urban areas got bundles of (expensive) almond firewood. After all, you might at least sell the cut trees for the last bit of income. Recent growing season, documented orchard removals took more Kern County almond acreage than those of Stanislaus County. Again, not surprising. When I drove to LA in 2022, Kern County was drought burned chiaroscuro, like Dali painting, only dusty orchards being green, Stanislaus County being greener, though still dry. If I correctly recall, that year Kern County had gotten 100% of its water allocation cut, Stanislaus County 50%.

    The official explanation of the laws was the environment and need to save water. However, an important underlying cause influencing the passing of water laws was consolidation of water rights under the big players. (get reference)

    Any case, according to Yanasa TV, last year California lost 8000 farms, to multifactorial causes, but lack of water is a big one. Oddly enough, Texas lost even more farms, 18000, also often due to lack of water. In Texas, the irrigation competes against AI server farms. And is losing.

    That caught my attention. The news have been buzzing for a couple of years about how the Silicon Valley firms have been moving to Texas because of their nicer regulatory environment. The discussion online had given me the impression that this was due to the taxes and insane regulatory policies of California. I had not thought about the water regulation, but in hindsight, it should be obvious. The firms are moving to what is greener pastures (more resources) for them, never mind the parched pastures of the ranchers. Which are blamed on climate change.

    The final point I got from this YanasaTV video was the question, how do we feed the billions of people if we reallocate agricultural resources to feed AI? The regulations hindering the agriculture are passed under the pretense of ‘conserving the resources’, but to me it seems that most if not all conservation regulations are nowadays just to preserve the ‘protected’ resources for the powerful, whereas the little people like me get to enjoy the Green New Leap as increased energy and food prices. And as shortages of critical resources.

    The California water rationing for urban dwellers and destruction of small farms is not about conserving resources, since water is very much available for the Big Almond, golf courses, and such. It is about extirpating the competition for scarce resources the big players want for themselves. If the side effect is the ballooning fruit, vegetable and meat prices for the small people, someone is making money of that, too. At some point the breakeven point when increasing prices will not bring more profits because the consumers cannot afford to buy will be reached but the availability of food (and energy or other resources) relative to the need will determine whether that happens before or after a mass uprising.

    Speaking of AI and energy, I wrote the other day about rolling blackout warnings in Maryland and New Jersey. I think the AI industry will have to begin to address its effects on the energy grid soon, maybe already next winter. Once people will begin to experience survival threatening acute shortages, backlash is guaranteed. The incoming collapse of the power grid, by the way, is the main reason why I chose coastal California as my bugin place. If the grid fails, I will not freeze to death.

    But my realization about all of the above: there is no such thing as a conservation law. There are only resource reallocation from the poor to the wealthy laws.

    Note added in proof:

    Nova Scotia in Canada banned people from going into woods, either Crown lands or privately owned lands belonging to someone else. Traditionally people had enjoyed access to Crown lands, but now they had been told that this privilege had been taken away to prevent forest fires. 25000$ fine for people trespassing their country’s forests. Would you feel like hemmed in?

    Then I read that the Nova Scotia woods (over 3500 acres of them) are getting sprayed with defoliant that is being used to kill unwanted (less economically useful) tree species. Imagine large swathes of dying and drying trees in the middle of a drought. Controlled burns to free land for more profitable tree species were speculated. The cost to the ecosystem is hideous, so is the loss of immaterial (and material) value to the people.

    Not that immaterial value even matters to the powerful. My uncle back in Finland told that they are planning a data center next to a big hydropower plant in the town he lives in, and the land being developed has stone age sites on it. I don’t know how valuable these sites are archeologically, but I suspect they have not been properly studied, either.

  • Power to the People (Or Not)

    Midwest Chick posted recently that Lava Ridge Wind Project in Idaho was cancelled.

    This project was opposed by the residents but the previous administration gave it go ahead in December 2024 anyways. Now the approval was canceled by the Department of Interior due to legal deficiencies, including proximity to a Minidoka National Historic Site (WWII Internment of Japanese-Americans) and local opposition including lawmakers and local 0fficials

    Meanwhile, Maryland is threatened by rolling blackouts. Rolling blackouts may have lots of proximal reasons, but my gut feeling is that the main causes in some order are: fragility of green power sources, deferred maintenance of the grid, and increasing power demands of everything is computerized AI society. In the end of the article was a warning for people with refrigerated medication or medical devises needing electricity to have an action plan in case of outage. The power prices in Maryland and New Jersey are moving up and the consumers are livid.

    As a Californian, I am not in a position to point fingers on energy grids, but ours should have been a warning example, not something to emulate.

  • Resolution Weekend

    I just saw a video on YouTube by a gentleman who seems to be into Bitcoin. Aside from the Bitcoin part, there were interesting little news.

    Bank of England has published a bail-in guide. The term of note is ‘resolution weekend’. That’s when the peoples’ bank accounts will be converted into bank stocks at some fraction of value.

    I had already become aware that millionaires and billionaires are fleeing the UK by their thousands, an exodus greater than that afflicting PCR, despite PRC having vastly larger population. I was surprised at the claim that the departing assets are equal to 4% of UK GDP. Dividing the 91.8B$ cumulative wealth of the departees by 3640B$ estimated GB GDP gives only about 2.5% in mu calculator. It will be interesting to see if the UK government will go full DDR and slam the exit doors shut at this hemorrhage. They already have the hate crime reporting lines and speech crimes police (in case someone could post something UK government does not approve) so why not go for the full experience, complete with empty shops?

    Meanwhile, EU has made a deal of the decade (this century is too young to claim that something even weirder would not be coming through the pipes) agreeing to: 15% export and 0% import tariffs with US, 750 billion euros worth of US fossil fuels while banning all the Russian fossil fuel imports (which had continued despite the war, including quite a lot of natural gas transiting in pipelines through Ukraine), and 600 billion euros of private direct investment to US.

    Exactly what this private investment is and how EU Commission can agree to seems unclear. According to the document description page on EU side, the agreement is not legally binding. I suspect that the tariff and energy deals were a bribe to US to let EU still continue their war – I further suspect large amounts of US military gear to be included in that 0% import tariff. Also, I suspect that EU will rather soon have a resolution weekend for bank accounts as they are already talking about mobilizing funds laying in peoples’ bank accounts to fund plans that are excessive for the public purse. Pension funds are joining the arms bonanza. Bonus points if these ‘privately funded’ imports/investments will count towards the 5% of GDP funding target for non-US NATO members.

    Joker in the game: EU CBDCs, denied by European Central Bank to be programmable with expiration dates (not to mention blocking or sin fees for non-approved uses, which would similarly depend on programmability.) (There are also privacy questions.) I wonder what the actual utility of EU CBDCs for the small people would be, and how CBDCs (programmable or non) would affect application of a Resolution Weekend?

  • Department of Narrative Mismanagement

    I have followed the recent discussions about Jeffrey E., a dead criminal whose suspicious passing away in custody has caused years of speculation (including that he was taken secretly away and is now living somewhere nice.) Namely, he is known to have committed his crimes with lots of people and suspected of blackmailing the said people, which tend to be the very wealthy and powerful type. Which is why he was rumored to have been self-deleted.

    The current administration has loudly and repeatedly promised to publish the list of Jeffrey’s associates, until about a week ago an FBI memo was leaked(?) to Axios claiming: he offed himself, there is no list of people, and he did not blackmail anybody. The administration is trying to sweep the issue under the metaphorical carpet. Then the officials published a video of his cell from the night of his death. Except the video contained about 1 minute gap (or maybe more than 1 minute). It had been stitched together so badly that aside from the gap in the timestamp, the aspect ratios were subtly off. As Asmongold pointed out, there could be legitimate reasons for this blooper, but with all the other circumstatial evidence, to me this points towards a conspiracy concerning Jeffrey E.’s demise, the reasons for it, and the existence of more rot in the circles of power.

    As I keep on watching the government stumble from narrative fail to a narrative fail, with people becoming increasingly convinced that something is off with the official story (which has presented already by the previous administration), I have began to suspect that all this furor is deliberately fanned to distract the hoi polloi from something really important, possibly even more insidious than the idea that we are being governed by a huge criminal blackmail network, until it is too late to do something about it. This is quite a common tactic by the powers that be. For example, in Finland, I have imprecise memories on how government starts making noises about changing regulations or taxes on selling beer, and people get upset. Huge discussions rage over newspaper opinion columns and on-line boards, pro and con, while the government passes something else, much more important for people’s lives. The beer issue can be resolved, or if necessary, retreated from, people will calm down, and meanwhile something actually nasty was done to them.

    While the incompetence of governments can be stupendous, it stretches my credulity to have so many bloopers in the narrative management coming one after each other, and I am beginning to suspect we are being purposefully distracted. Whether it is from the coming (proxy) war against China (maybe started between Thailand and Cambodia, maybe still waiting for the Iran situation to worsen), the ongoing (officially proxy) war against Russia, the economic collapse (US consumers sentiment has been reportedly low earlier this year, though Goldman Sacks just reassured that everything is merely returning to normal), the incoming digital surveillance grid (brought to you in collaboration with Musk and Thiel under the guise of tracking immigrants – spoiler alert: to track immigrants they will “need to” also map the non-immigrants), or something possibly worse, it must be humongous to merit this level of egging of the masses. I don’t think Obama’s referral to Department of Justice for suspicion of having ordered narrative to be manufactured for the Russia Collusion quite qualifies, more likely it is just more noise to distract the masses. By the way, US just moved nukes to UK, but that’s probably a nothing-burger (I am still sitting on the fence about whether to link and comment to the article on the subject in aviationnews.eu.)

    I am also currently sitting on the fence on whether our government truly is this incompetent at narrative management or whether there is some obscure Department of Narrative Management, who are gloating about their latest glorious success in psyop against the people. Or maybe the Department of Narrative Management has gone rogue and is actively fighting against the current administration.

    Although considering the everyday dysfunction I live in due to the ongoing complexity crisis infecting all aspects of modern society and worsened by the ongoing incompetence crisis fanned by the decades of education crisis, I still think that, yes, they really could be that incompetent. Maybe.

  • Possible Bad News

    I fear that if the ceasefire between Israel and Iran fails, USA will be entering into two-front proxy war.

    Our current proxy war in Ukraine is not going well, and we are pulling our weapons help away (every other day, it seems, on the other days we are giving them more). European part of NATO is upset but considering the state of their economies and especially their armies (with a couple of exceptions), I doubt their help will be decisive in any manner. If it would be, this war would have been over years ago.

    I thought the news about us stopping to give missiles to Ukraine was about our economy and military-industrial complex, which in these days is more military than industrial (our industries having been long since outsourced), no longer sufficing for policing the world, but the latest rumor / development, namely China (PRC) strengthening its military support to Iran to counter our support to Israel, if true, means potential opening of a new proxy war. Against the biggest manufacturing powerhouse in the world that desperately needs a boost for its stalled economy. And needs the Iranian oil, the access to which has been complicated by the conflicts involving US backed Israel (although China has benefited hugely from US sanctions which have forced Iran to sell their oil on discount.)

    I have for some time thought about China and Iranian oil and China-Iran railway, and how Japanese got motivated to attack to Pearl Harbor by US blockade of Japanese oil imports. Just having an ominous feeling about this.

  • Happy July 4th, 2025

    Or Treason Day, if you happen to live in UK. In recent years, I have been watching the fascinating news from that side of Atlantic with increasing horror. Sure makes me glad I am a US citizen, not a subject to the whimsies of Prime Minister Starmer. For the past couple of visits to Europe, I even have specified to my travel agent: no stops in UK.

    Why? When Soviet Union was a thing, if you traveled there for cheap vodka (vodka tourism) and other cultural immersion, you would only be charged for drunken and disorderly, such as might happen. Obviously, potential troublemakers would have been screened during visa application, but even people caught inside Soviet Union for the heinous crime of smuggling Bibles were sentenced merely for what they were doing in Soviet Union. Or so I think. However, according to an Internet source, officials in Starmer’s UK have stated that folks traveling to UK are subject to prosecution for doubleplus ungood on-line speech even typed outside the UK borders, even if they are not UK citizens. I think such dictatorships are to be avoided, especially when they have gone clearly bonkers. I love and I am grateful for my First Amendment rights, and this is one of the reasons I am happy this Independence Day.

    I have bought a steak and cherries, to be eaten soon, some canned fish for future, and had an Asian/Pacific Islander style BBQ beef minimeal with teriyaki sauce for breakfast.

    Big white magnolias are in bloom, and I have tried to get a nice photo of them for days, but that has been difficult. Many of the trees are very big and the flowers tend to be in the upper branches, either too small for my cell phone zoom or obscured by leaves and branches. Or the flowers are not otherwise accessible to photography. When I see a magnolia bud at nice, near to eye level, getting back in time before it has bloomed and is wilting is tricky, apparently the blossoms open and are done at a quick rate.

    Here are a couple of magnolia flowers I photographed with my cell phone today.

    One of these days, I should make more jigsaw puzzles.

  • Signs of economic times

    Apartment close to public transportation

    A former deputy director of Caltrain had had a secret apartment built inside Burlingame train station, discovered by Caltrain 2022. Based on photos, it looks comfy, but about 40000 dollars of public funds were used and the historic building is not his property. Another apartment was found 2019 in Millbrae train station (8000 dollars were used on that), with another defendant was mentioned in connection to that case. Imagine, apartments for under 50k in San Francisco Bay Area! And close to commute!

    While housing prices are crashing and you can find a condominium for under 300k in Bay Area if you are not picky about the commute, and right now Zillow advertises plenty of up to $1300 rentals in Bay Area. How many of these are actual apartments instead of shared housing is unclear, but right now it seems that the main constraint to housing is not the availability of units but of cash to rent or buy.

    Pretend-to-Work companies

    I thought WeWork which officially rented office space with amenities to startups and individual who wanted a workspace not at home was close to this, at least for some people who lacked self-discipline to work without bosses, but in China (the People’s Republic), there are now actual pretend-to-work companies, where people can for a small pay pretend to be office workers the whole day.

    China is presumed to have high unemployment rate (official statistics are unreliable or missing) and there are social pressures for people to work. By paying for pretend-to-work day, people can LARP working in corporation, pretend to others that they are working, or just have an airconditioned space with computer terminal in which to spend time, like an internet cafe.

  • Civil War by Proxy?

    California and Federal government are increasingly hostile in open. California has years of experience in ignoring Federal laws, some notable example issues being cannabis, immigration, and gender identity.

    On the other hand, California has used its soft power as a major economy to enforce environmental and consumer standards on the rest of the states and even abroad.

    During Biden(?) administration, Californian values seemed to become the US standard regardless of other states’ opinions, and California became more assertive also in foreign and trade policy, most notable event being the summit with president Xi and Biden in San Francisco (preceded by a climate lobbying visit of governor Newsom to Beijing.) Various California politicians were also courting China, although also opposite happened. Does anyone still remember 2022 when the then Speaker of the House, California representative Pelosi flew to Taiwan and caused jitters over potential armed conflict between USA and PRC? (Whether this was part of a policy by a bigger faction within the administration and if so, which one of them is murky to me.)

    Now, the issues between quite untethered California and the Federal government have finally come to boil. The trigger to me seems to be the transgender athletes competing against girls, where the Federal government sees California Title IX application to this issue as violation and the regular people just unfair. California continued this practice, despite warnings from Washington DC, and the current administration threatened to withhold Federal funds for California sports. Thereafter, Newsom threatened to withhold the Federal share of California state taxes, a move somewhat reminiscent to the Nullification Crisis prior to the Civil War in 1800s.

    Meanwhile, a group of Antifa or similar group(s) coordinated an attack on ICE that had done a raid in Los Angeles.

    This attack is curious because of its organization and its timing coinciding with the spat over ideologies and money. Reminiscent of the coordinated wave of violent riots in summer 2020, there were clashes between pro-immigration protesters in New York on the opposite side of the continent.

    More importantly, both the Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass and governor Newsom publicly refused to help to quell the rioters, even opposing the Federal efforts. The rioters were attacking Federal law enforcement with stones and were painting graffiti putting things in fire. In fact, a roster of California political people have come in defense of David Huerta who got arrested for participating in the riot, but their support to anti-Federal action.

    President Trump has authorized the use of 2000 National Guard (update: now 4000 plus 700 marines), and the Department of Homeland Security is bringing in reinforcements.

    I am writing this in Helsinki-Vantaa Airport, waiting for a flight that would take me back to California Bay Area via Frankfurt am Main and Los Angeles Airports. By the time I have landed, well before the time I can post this (I need to add links to sources), we will see if the California or Federal authorities have caved in. If the California stops protecting the violent mobs, removes transgender athletes from girls competitions and possibly even ponies up some tax tithes to Federal government, the incipient civil war will be averted. If the Federal government fails to enforce its rules also in California, I fear that this was the opening shot of the active phase of the disintegration of the United States. Worst case scenario, neither gives in, we may have active civil insurgency in multiple blue states by the end of the summer. The most likely outcome will be a frozen conflict, that is: both sides will pretend nothing significant happened but neither will acknowledge that the other side might have won.

    I also predict there will be lots of pundits dissecting irrelevant minutiae from the utterances of either side, and thanks to the strong left bias of the main stream media, the reporting will mostly support California and its allies, meaning tailwinds for civil war or mostly peaceful disintegration of USA and headwinds for peace and prosperity. The biggest losers will be the regular people trapped in the middle, looting and violence disrupting supply chains, especially for groceries and fuel, and then collapsing the teetering economy in general.

    Update: Much has happened since Sunday. California did not capitulate and the National Guard activated in Los Angeles is up to 4000 and 700 marines are in readiness. When I arrived on Sunday evening to Bay Area, I took the BART from airport to hometown. The train did not take or drop passengers at Embarcadero station due to political activism nearby, but let out a handful of burly police officers and while the train waited a couple of minutes next to the platform, I could observe the officers running and so did a couple of the people already there. There was still a crowd waiting for the next train or something, though the trains had started skipping that station for the duration. Sorry, no video footage of that.

    More ominously, a Walmart heiress is funding (in a small part) a nationwide call for unrest June 14th, another weak indicator supporting my hypothesis that the riots that started last weekend are part of elites’ civil war, raging over  who gets to loot the treasury.

    In social media there are reports of incidents in Denver, Charlotte (NC), Boston (MA), Chicago, New York City and Atlanta, things are escalating fast. This indicates that this is not a question of secession (California from USA) but of civil war by proxy between the progressive left and the conservatives over the control of Federal government. The presidency and the Congress are currently held by Republicans, but vast swathes of the administrative state are governed by the Deep State currently (mostly) promoting leftist ideologies (reasons for that are too long to expostulate in a single post and in any case speculative to the tinfoil hattery territory.) Individual states and their administrative apparati are a hodgepodge of ideologies, but the Left Coast in general and California in particular is the current vanguard and bastion of progressive establishment, so troubles beginning here makes sense.

    Meanwhile, governor Newsom and Federal officials are still discussing about who pays what.

    On a side note, a major food distributor supplying thousands of supermarkets got hacked last week and food distribution is off kilter. When I yesterday visited a grocery, they had a sign on meat counter apologizing for ‘warehouse issues’. I did not ask the cause then because I had not then seen this piece of samizdata news yet. I wonder if the food shortages and riots at the same time are a coincidence?

    Finally, whether true or not, the possibility of a fleet of robotaxis fleeing LA riots in order not to get burned by Mexican flag waiving ‘mostly peaceful’ protesters shows what kind of timeline we are living in. In any case, Waymo services have been suspended in downtown LA are for the time being.

    Looks like I need to pick some canned meat while it is still available.

  • Crime in Oakland

    A local ABC7 news report from last year informed that the published 2023 Oakland PD clearance rates for violent crime (from assaults to murders) was 3% whereas for property crime the clearance rate (that is, police made an arrest) was 0.1%. For nearby big cities San Francisco and San Jose the respective numbers were 28% and 35% for violent crime and 5% and 7% for property crime. When the ABC7 reporter asked the Oakland PD about the numbers, they were blamed on human error, but they did not have correct numbers available at that time.

    While the statistics of San Jose and San Francisco seem pathetic to anyone living in these cities, the Oakland numbers are so close to zero, that if true, instead of a reporting error, the people there would live essentially without law enforcement, if not for the parking enforcement and municipal code inspectors.

    According to statistics, Oakland issued close to 269000 parking tickets in 2023. Moreover, a 102 year old man was ordered to clean graffiti from his fence or pay fines. He complained that he could have done it when he was younger but now that he is in wheelchair, the task falls to his 70 year old son. The utility box nearby, also covered with graffiti, I suppose, is apparently OK. However, from the original news: “The city inspector contacted KTVU and said that he would do an immediate inspection and, presumably, cancel the citation.”