…well, it will probably take more than one glance, because there is a lot of traffic on the map. This is a near-real-time display of the positions of almost all large vessels and many not so large ships and boats. Easy to zoom in on an areas or search for a specific ship or post.
Link is here.
That is nothing compared to the real problem of Republicans pouncing.
As his Republican opposition seizes on possible Christmas shortages to connect Biden’s economic policies to inflation, and try to stall a multitrillion-dollar spending bill in Congress in coming weeks, the White House’s message Wednesday was that a solution is in sight.
The solution? Tell them to fix it.
“This is an across-the-board commitment to going to 24/7,” said Biden, a Democrat. The port opening, and a promise from retailers like Target and Walmart to move more goods at night are a “big first step,” he said. Now, he said, “we need the rest of the private sector chain to step us as well.”
That’ll do it.
California has been doing its share to create the problem.
The trucking issue with California LA ports, ie the Port of Los Angeles (POLA) and the Port of Long Beach (POLB), is that all semi tractors have to be current with new California emissions standards. As a consequence, that mean trucks cannot be older than 3 years if they are to pick up or deliver containers at those ports. This issue wipes out approximately half of the fleet trucks used to move containers in/out of the port. Operating the port 24/7 will not cure the issue, because all it does is pile up more containers that sit idle as they await a limited number of trucks to pick them up. THIS is the central issue.
On October 16, 2020, the EPA reached a settlement agreement [DATA HERE] with California Air Resource Board (CARB) to shut down semi tractor rigs that were non-compliant with new California emission standards:
They are mandating electric trucks. One problem is that they don’t exist.
That article doesn’t even mention the electric truck mandate.
Following the order, the California Air Resources Board will develop regulations to mandate that 100 percent of in-state sales of new passenger cars and trucks are zero-emission by 2035 – a target which would achieve more than a 35 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and an 80 percent improvement in oxides of nitrogen emissions from cars statewide. In addition, the Air Resources Board will develop regulations to mandate that all operations of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles shall be 100 percent zero emission by 2045 where feasible, with the mandate going into effect by 2035
The restrictions on registration begin in 2 years,
Adopted Thursday, the Advanced Clean Truck regulation requires manufacturers of commercial vehicles to start selling electric trucks in 2024, and to sell only electric trucks in California by 2045.
Also good news for California traffic.
I-5 to become all electric trucks.
An article I saw also linked the problem to AB5 that eliminated contractors. This has supposedly impacted owner operated semi trucks. I’m not sure this is the case. Another said that delays at shift changes to sanitize work areas were also slowing things down.
The California ports don’t run 24/7. now.
I’ve been using this service on occasion to track ships carrying containers that have my merchandise in it. Sort of helps allay concerns to my customers and/or lets them know that I’m not bullshitting them. The service does have holes in coverage – I’m sure those holes would disappear if you signed up for their service that is fee based.
Government involvement in creating the crisis:
https://redstate.com/slee/2021/10/03/a-perfect-storm-of-government-involvement-in-the-supply-chain-n451501
I work with this AIS (automatic identification system) data for my job. There’s a lot of cool stuff you can do with it, though it’s got a lot of quality issues–it’s all self-reported, for instance, and there are a lot of mistakes, as well as fraud.
I’m amused by Slow Joe’s claim that he’s convinced Walmart and Target to start working harder to get stuff moved, as if they were just sitting around doing nothing and he pitched this wonderful idea to them.
I’m fine with a bad Christmas retail season if it helps get the Dems get obliterated next year. But it seems quite possible that things all across the economy are going to be really, really bad, especially if they refuse to back down from these idiotic mandates…
One would think that if Biden had ever been on the road at night, anywhere in the country, he would have noticed all the WalMart and Target trucks.
Media is focused on the *imported consumer products* that won’t get delivered because of the congestion; they don’t seem to understand that a lot of those containers hold parts which are intended as inputs for factories in the US.
Rather clueless comment from ‘Judge Jeannine’ the other night; she was talking about all the workers needed at the ports to take stuff out of one containers and put it in another. Sort of misses the whole point of container freight. What’s scary is that Larry Kudlow seemed to have the same idea.
*imported consumer products* – this.
Nobody will care about the latest video game console or plush doll when it is -20 outside and they can’t get a part for their furnace, or perhaps a part for an MRI machine is slow rolled at the port, or a transformer for the neighborhood electric grid, and on and on and on. The media focus is on consumer products because they can’t really think outside of that box because most in the media have never really done much in the real world, well, ever. The effects on the industrial world are much more important and further reaching. But hey, if we can cast Biden as a Grinch along the way, all the better.
My daughter and I are betting that the “Empty Shelves” Biden administration viewed the shipping slowdown as a photo op for themselves. They basically allowed it to play out so that they could step in and “Save Christmas!!! Eleventy!!!” at the last minute.
Speaking as crafters, though – we are looking forward to a couple of holiday craft markets as an opportunity for us to profit … as well as to shop from other crafters. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good at all.
Nobody will care about the latest video game console or plush doll when it is -20 outside and they can’t get a part for their furnace,
Or heating oil is not available.
…or parts for your snowblower, or drivers for the city plows, or …
I’ve long believed that the present US regime is both feeble and feckless, with its last days now upon us.
Part of that is it will drive people into open defiance, because it will issue decrees and demands with which they cannot and will not comply.
Hence, when I read that they are commanding that electric trucks which don’t exist be sold, I wonder just how dealers are going to comply, even if they want to.
About I-5, from the article Mike K linked:
The CARB is expected to vote this week on a program that will result in about 300,000 zero-emission trucks being put to use by 2035.
Lots of facile assumptions built into that statement, such as that the CARB will still exist in 2035.
I wouldn’t want to bet on that, actually. There’s a lot of ruin in a nation but only so much. The sort of idiots who mandate the sale of non-existent trucks and have no idea how food ends up on a shelf at a Wal-Mart are running the US these days, which is a problem.
I don’t know what they’ll find to f-up next, but I’m pretty sure they’ll find something. Eventually they’re going to create the domestic equivalent of the Afghanistan withdrawal- a fiasco so disastrous that their media lackeys can’t make it go away by refusing to talk about it, or lying about it.
Interesting times, as the saying goes.
@Xennady – this isn’t new for California especially. In my field we have had several mandates by the US Dept of Energy as well as the State of California over the years, mandating energy efficitncy numbers that were simply tossed aside by industry since they were impossible. Basically they wanted energy numbers on heating and air conditioning units in certain applications that were impossible to achieve with today’s technology. Industry said “well, I guess nobody in AZ gets air conditioning then” – that is actually what it takes to get the regulatory agencies to back down. So I’m guessing when they mandate stuff like trucks that don’t exist, the dealers and manufacturers will just shrug their shoulders and move on with life and ignore it.
What we have is a country run by a bunch of Gender Studies “Hypereducated” idiots who have never run anything more complicated than a smart TV. They literally know nothing, as “Know Nothing” Ben Rhodes said about reporters. Trump had run multimillion dollar projects. Nonce of these people know how things work. That plumber who was arrested at the Loudon county school board meeting knows more about running things.
Trust Joe. He knows what he’s doing. He used to drive a semi, after all.
The thing is, they think they know how to do everything better than anyone else, ‘cos they’s got themselves a “good education” at some Ivy League institution.
Fact is, most of them are utter and complete morons. I’d rather have a high-school graduate who spent their twenties doing manual labor in construction running something, because at least they’d have the humility to seek the advice of people who do know what they’re doing.
Buttigieg is a perfect prototype for this shit–Dude has himself the job of Transportation Secretary, but he thinks it’s A-OK to take a couple of months off at the height of summer/fall shipping season when his dashboard at the office has to be showing “red” everywhere? WTF?
Here’s what I think is going to happen: The idiot class is going to crash us all, hard. They’re basically driving the nation off a fscking cliff as we speak, and the media is all in tune and approving with it all.
End state? I think that the vast unconcerned middle of the population is suddenly going to get quite concerned, and then it’s gonna be Katy bar the door, ‘cos I don’t think things like this Loudon County School Board BS are gonna be flying very far. How long have those ass-clowns been covering up sex crimes, anyway?
Then it turns out that Garland’s wife is a key adviser to the election fraud enablers? Again, WTF? How long are people going to put up with this?
I think that the crash is gonna come, people are going to start asking questions about what “went wrong”, and then the shan will hit the fit. Hard.
I keep remembering that guy I knew back in the ’90s, the one who was a Democrat precinct officer… Dude went back East for some training conference or some such thing, was gone for about two weeks, and when he came back, he just gradually backed off doing anything for the Democrats or even talking them up the way he had been. I got curious, asked him why, and his reply was basically that, in his opinion, the way the Democratic Party was going “…they’ll be hunting them through the streets, with dogs… And, they’ll be right to do it, too…”.
I have a feeling that he saw something or heard something back then, and that he had a prescient mind about what it meant. I further suspect that the days of “hunt with dogs through streets” may not be far off. I’m about ready to go in with some of the hotheads around here and put our local Congressional rep up on trial for incompetence and malfeasance in office–She keeps voting for the stupid, which is very much the opposite of what she’s hearing from her constituents.
I’m telling you, the day will come when some of these assholes are going to visit their districts, and never leave, because they’re dangling from trees or lamp posts. I kinda expect that Pelosi Darling or her successors are going to try appointing replacements from DC, and that’s just not gonna fly with the locals back home.
The president’s chief of staff the other day retweeted a Harvard perfesser who said “Most of the economic problems we’re facing (inflation, supply chains, etc.) are high class problems.” These clueless idiots are running at full speed to the guillotines.
So I’m guessing when they mandate stuff like trucks that don’t exist, the dealers and manufacturers will just shrug their shoulders and move on with life and ignore it.
This is a completely rational assumption, often justified. I recall hearing that some of the Obama-era EPA regulations were not only difficult or impossible to meet, but incomprehensible as well. That is, the people responsible for enacting compliance couldn’t figure out what they meant. I was told they turned it over to the lawyers to unravel, and I heard no more of it.
But that was 10 years ago. Rationality hasn’t stopped California from mandating only certain trucks driven only by employee drivers haul cargo away from Long Beach, with ugly consequences for the entire country. If the California regime has decided to change their idiot decrees to allow ships to be unloaded, I haven’t heard about it.
Allow me to elaborate. I think the new breed of idiot regulators are even more clueless than before, and having spent their college years marinating in marxist bovine excrement, simply conclude that any failure of their glorious decrees meant to save the Earth are caused by the evil capitalist wreckers. Hence, they’re more likely to double down and issue more decrees than see reality.
Also, at some point the people who marinate in reality, all day every day, are going to get tired of going all out to save communists from their incompetence- and they’re going to do the equivalent of denying air conditioners to Arizona. That is, they’ll comply with regulations, maliciously, or refuse to do business with such jurisdictions.
I have to wonder just what it would to cause a major retailer to simply leave the California market, or what would happen if dealerships don’t shrug their shoulders when the magic trucks don’t appear. My guess is that they’ll offer up something completely unworkable as a viable electric vehicle, but it will meet the mandate.
But at some point, the decrees start biting. They have to sell electric trucks, turn the electrical grid over to the sacred windmills, stop selling IC engine cars, etc.
It’s not going to go well. And where the policies are in place today, it’s already causing mayhem. Check out that ocean shipping map. There’s also an ocean shipping app, btw.
“That is, they’ll comply with regulations, maliciously, or refuse to do business with such jurisdictions.”
I have been actively doing this for a very long time. There is a cost to do business and it gets to be too much with certain entities.
An example was when Los Angeles decided to boycott Arizona over SB 210. The staff had to break the news to the city council that 25% of LA’s electricity came from AZ. End of boycott.
For some cargoes and some shippers, there’s a way around this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsBIQIBavms&t=1085s
A related post from Joel Kotkin at Quillette: Confronting the Supply Chain Crisis
https://quillette.com/2021/10/13/confronting-the-supply-chain-crisis/
I’ll have some comments on this later.
Also, a post by Susan Quinn at Ricochet: Biden Strikes Again!
https://ricochet.com/1071878/biden-strikes-again/
Recently, I listened to a senior oil industry executive spout the government line on “climate change”. That is understandable, to some extent. After all, nameless bureaucrats could knock his business to its knees with yet another foolish regulation if they thought he was stepping out of line. However, the executive did admit that he & his colleagues were very interested in what happens in Europe this winter. Unstated implication was that deprivation from over-dependence on solar panels & bird-whackers might cause a change in Political Class attitudes on energy supply.
It is truly sad when the only hope for a return to rationality depends on a bunch of Europeans first freezing in the dark. Although it has to be admitted that even Texans (of whom we have higher expectations) have done nothing serious to rectify their situation following their own “sustainable” power cuts.
Here’s what I think is going to happen: The idiot class is going to crash us all, hard. They’re basically driving the nation off a fscking cliff as we speak, and the media is all in tune and approving with it all.
That seems to be the plan. It’s Cloward-Piven on a grand scale: Crash the system and erect communism from the pieces.
Will it work? I don’t know. But if tens of millions of Americans are facing winter with no oil, no gas, no gasoline, and very little food, all bets are off. As one commenter around here used to say, once the system crashes, “…only the great god something-or-other knows how it will turn out.”
My rough guess is that about a third of the work force will become unemployed on Dec. 8, if Biden has his way because they have chosen not to be vaccinated with an unguessable number choosing to tell whoever asks for their “passport” to do something unspeakable to themselves even if they have been vaccinated. So far I count this happening at the VA, Chicago P.D. and the airlines. Who knew those places were harboring so many science deniers.
The DOD is supposed to be trying the federal supremacy card on contractors in Texas to trump the state prohibitions on mandates and passports. It will be interesting to see how that plays out. Texas is an “at will employment” state and you can be fired for any reason or none at all except for all the reasons contained in various laws. Both HIPPA and ADA, enacted largely to prevent discrimination against people with HIV would seem to contradict the ad hock mumblings of a demented jack ass. If you think you might be affected, I’d line up a good employment lawyer while you can.
My growing opinion is that the vaccines are simply not effective and may, by increasing the number of asymptomatic yet infectious individuals have made things worse. Whatever evidence there is of efficacy depends on sources that have been proven to be completely unreliable when not willfully false. I suspect that they chose the wrong target when they manufactured their vaccine, one that was able to mutate away from the original to escape control. In any event, the “authorities” squandered their supply of trust many months ago.
That Quillette article is interesting, aside from a cheap slam at Trump. I’ll have to send a link to David Goldman. He seems far more optimistic about Biden than I am. By “Biden, ” I mean the leftists who are running him.
MCS,
The vaccines appear to definitely be effective in terms of reducing hospitalizations and deaths. Check out this age-stratified analysis of Israeli data:
https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-efficacy-vs-severe-disease-be-strong-when-60-of-hospitalized-are-vaccinated
In terms of reducing transmissibility, there does seem to be some effect though not as strong as the effect in protecting the individual himself. Haven’t seen any good meta-analyses of multiple data sources, but see this analysis:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/08/study-ties-covid-vaccines-lower-transmission-rates
Also this:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/10/12/1044553048/covid-data-vaccines-breakthrough-infections-transmission?fbclid=IwAR1IqSrCJfgO_LOhh6zX09l_xgC8jN1mjdjYCS2gWmAlkLrwiGr39TpkgY0
Effect is not necessarily the result of the preferred narrative cause.
Typically, any new disease goes through a process of adaptation where it loses a lot of its lethality, simply because it’s not effective for any parasite or disease to kill the host. Variants that kill die off, and variants that don’t kill tend to be the ones that survive to become endemic.
How much of that “observed effect” that comes from the mRNA experimental treatments (they are not vaccines as the term is traditionally understood), and how much comes from the disease itself undergoing adaptation?
I’ve asked this question of an acquaintance in the pertinent fields, and about all I got from him was consternation and a lot of hemming and hawing about how great mRNA was…
I have my doubts. Strikes me that with a “vaccine” where you have as many “break-through” infections, something ain’t quite right. I also look at the reading I’ve done on this over the years, and I think that the main thing going on with regards to the mRNA “vaccines” is that they saw an opportunity to get the technology into common use, took it, and are now happily going about monetizing it. Remember, the pharma companies don’t make money actually curing illness and solving problems… They prefer, by far, to come up with medicines and processes that require ongoing widespread use–At least, until the patents come off. Then, it’s on to the next big thing…
Follow the money, and ask yourself this: Why did they push mRNA through, when the earliest that they used to project this stuff coming into general use was the 2030s or later?
We’re running a huge experiment on the general population, and forcing participation in it will he-nil he. What are we going to find out that the long-term studies we’ve foregone would have revealed?
My suspicion is that in about ten years, it’s gonna look like Thalidomide writ large, and there ain’t going to be anyone around with deep enough pockets to pay for the damages. The nasty little reproductive cancers that were showing up in the lab animals during testing make me very suspicious of this whole technology. I’ve yet to see where they’ve figured out the mechanism for those, and where they’ve solved the issue conclusively. If any of our more erudite medical types knows more about this, I’d appreciate them chiming in.
Gavin: The oil industry LOVES “alternative energy” precisely because the economics are so bad and government control is so strong. Both make it completely impossible for smaller competitors to grow into threats.
David: They are about to mandate the jab for children (California has already announced they will do so, and you can guarantee that every “blue” state will do so immediately upon approval), even though they didn’t even attempt to test its efficacy on disease reduction for that age group, because the risk to them is so vanishingly small. Go ahead and attempt to defend that.
My employer hasn’t yet said they are going to mandate the jab, but I’m sure it’s coming soon, since we have some government contracts. We’re under the 100 employee limit, and mostly work remote, and our management is conflict-averse so my guess is they’ll be relatively accommodating with exemptions, but who knows.
Brian….I haven’t seen any evidence that the vaccine is needed for children; my sense of the risk/reward tradeoff is such that it probably shouldn’t be given to those under say 18, unless they are in unusually-high-risk environments (volunteering in a covid treatment ward, or some such)
Back to the Quillette article: I think Kotkin misses one of the significant factors driving offshoring. It’s not only *cost*, it’s also politics and marketing. Many countries have made it clear that if you want to sell your product there, you’d better *make* it there, or at least make some significant part of it. This has surely been a factor in the weird geography of subassembly manufacturing for certain Boeing aircraft, and I think it’s also a significant factor in decisions re China.
Even if Apple could assemble the iPhone in the US for costs no greater than it is now incurring, I think it would be reluctant to do so for fear of hostile Chinese government action re their market there.
“The DOD is supposed to be trying the federal supremacy card on contractors in Texas to trump the state prohibitions on mandates and passports.”
IANAL, but I don’t see how supremacy is implicated here. The feds can say that you have to mandate the jab to get their money, and the state can say that you can’t require anyone to get jabbed, which would mean that a TX-based contractor couldn’t get a federal contract, but I don’t see how that a desire to get federal contracts would mean that that contractor could defy state law.
I’m skeptical that TX will actually pass that into law, though. Our elected reps are completely sold out to big business. A phone call threatening to move their headquarters to Virginia will probably get most of them to fold immediately, even though it’d almost certainly be a bluff.
“What are we going to find out that the long-term studies we’ve foregone would have revealed?”
None of the clotting or heart issues, which are unambiguous at this point, were detected in the pitiful small testing. Heart attack rates were up 25% in Scotland this year, did you know that? All-cause deaths in multiple European countries are UP this year, compared to last year, when there was no vaccine at all, and it doesn’t appear to be due to covid. (I was a violent it’s-not-the-flu guy, recall, so I’m not a covid minimizer at all.) Is anyone looking at this? If the authorities could just be honest that risks from the vaccine aren’t zero, it would eliminate a lot of distrust, but of course it would then make a lot of people refuse the jab, which for some inexplicable reason makes the authorities apoplectic. The big question is why? Why are they so determined to make 100% of people get the jab? Even people who have already recovered from covid, who we’ve known from the very beginning are at very, very low risk from re-infection. It makes absolutely zero sense. Something doesn’t add up at all. I don’t see how not to become a deranged conspiracy theorist at this point. Someone please help me not to do so.
David: So why are They so determined to mandate it for kids, then? You sound like a reasonable guy, but doesn’t that really bother you, as well as all the other pass/mandate stuff?
Kotkin: “While rejecting Trump’s crude unilateral approach, the Biden administration has continued to pursue many of its predecessor’s themes, including proposals to boost the domestic semiconductor and steel industries. The Biden plan would spend $300 billion on R&D to revitalize American industrial competitiveness and invest in alternatives to four-year colleges, trade schools, apprenticeships, and community colleges.”
Ignoring the cheap and unmerited shot at Trump (has anything been more unilateral than the Afghan withdrawal or the way the Australian submarine procurement has been handled?), I have no faith in government’s ability to ‘pick winners’ intelligently. The ‘investment’ decisions are likely to be based on who has political influence and what is considered Cool. (Few would have considered trucking, rail, and ocean freight to be Cool, even a year or so ago)
More emphasis on trade schools & apprenticeships I like (if ‘Biden’ is serious about this, which I doubt)…community colleges, I have to question at this point, having seen some signs of Wokeness in that world.
I remember when China demanded that Boeing manufacture jets there if they wanted China to buy them. Then, of course, they stole the intellectual property. I agree that a lot of offshoring was due to such factors but it was also cheap junk, WalMart was built on that principle.
I agree that mRNA is new technology and not a “Vaccine.” One reason was it was quicker to do when the real mortality of Covid was still in doubt. I just hope someone is working on a real vaccine. If things were being done honestly, the vaccine would be optional for anyone under 60.
yes it’s mostly feltercarb, kotkin is one of the last sane liberals in california,
“I just hope someone is working on a real vaccine. ”
Novavax. Real vaccine, great performance claims, apparent supply chain problems to ramp up, my guess is pfizer is working to suppress them.
“ I remember when China demanded that Boeing manufacture jets there if they wanted China to buy them. Then, of course, they stole the intellectual property. I agree that a lot of offshoring was due to such factors but it was also cheap junk, WalMart was built on that principle.”
I, for one, would never fly in one of their planes. They are just plain sloppy when it comes to this sort of thing. We have long wondered how COVID-19 escaped the lab in Wuhan and went on to kill millions around the world. My theory is that it was typical ChiCom sloppy lab work, and safety maintenance, followed by trying to hide their screwup from their top leadership in Beijing.
Their basic problem is similar to that faced by the Soviets, where it was said that workers pretended to work, and the government pretended to pay them. With central planning, the planners determine how much of everything everyone is to produce, and then where it will be sent. But what happens when they miss their targets? They lie, but then the next link in the production chain is now short on their inputs, and so cannot meet their quotas, so lie that they did. Everyone lies, and the top almost thinks that everything is going great, because everyone is supposedly meeting and exceeding their quotas. No one wants to be the one telling the top bosses in Beijing (and Moscow before them) that they missed making their quotas, or cut safety corners and their experimental coronavirus escaped containment, so don’t.
The Soviets somewhat got around this by grossly overbuilding things like airplanes and military equipment. The Chines don’t seem to be as willing to do that. Hence, why I might have been willing to fly in a Soviet built transport plane, but draw the line with ChiCom built airplanes.
“Buttigieg is a perfect prototype for this shit–Dude has himself the job of Transportation Secretary, but he thinks it’s A-OK to take a couple of months off at the height of summer/fall shipping season when his dashboard at the office has to be showing “red” everywhere? WTF?”
Yeh. Gay guy taking two months of paternity leave after having bought (adopted) a kid. Why do we give maternity leave to women after having had a kid? Because it was hard work, they need to rest up as a result, and can nurse their new babies, while their milk is still providing important antibodies to their babies. Why give guys paternity leave? Because giving women maternity leave would otherwise be unfair.
Normally, we have enough wealth that we can afford this nonsense – gay guys taking paternity leave after having bought (adopted) a kid. But this is the Secretary of Transportation, and while he and his co-husband have been taking it easy, lolling around the house, and they bond with their new family member, the entire transportation logistical system has ground to a crawl. TP is again disappearing from the stores, as well as increasing numbers of food items. We are told not to expect presents for Christmas, because Secretary Buttplug is taking his full two weeks of paternity leave.
WHOOPS:
“We are told not to expect presents for Christmas, because Secretary Buttplug is taking his full two MONTHS of paternity leave.”
I have the feeling that we’re seeing the self-demonstrating article for why no major civilization has successfully integrated the deviant into mainstream life, and have generally suppressed the ever-loving snot out of them.
When the counter-reaction comes, I expect that we’re going to stuff the Buttigiegs and their ilk so firmly back into the closet that they’ll be in there for generations. Further you push the social pendulum off center, the faster and harder it comes back. Weimar Germany begat the Nazis, mostly as a reaction to the libertine excesses that all the varied fringe elements got up to. When you get down to it, the Jews were just the collateral damage, because nobody wanted to admit that the freaks they were actually pissed at were Germans. The Jews were an easy grounding-rod for all that anger to vent through, which was why they went to the concentration camps along with the deviants.
Absent the Weimar excesses, I’m not sure that the anti-Semitism would have ramped up as far as it did, or have gained the approval of the masses. Which is one reason why I’m looking around me in such dismay–When the madness comes, after it all? I’m really not too sure where it is going to erupt from and who it will target. I’m thinking that a lot of these “proud progressive/liberals” might want to tone it down a touch, and bear in mind that what’s on the Internet may well be there forever, making it very easy for them to be identified. The organs of state repression they’re enabling right now? When the switch is flipped, those neat new rules they’re using against their enemies of the moment? They’re still going to be there to be used by whoever winds up in charge of the mob that I suspect is going to be blaming them for it all going to hell in a handbasket.
Fscking idiots, the lot of them.
All these issues are a problem of governance.
You can’t have a representative republic without any representation- and the Americans of the Revolution had more representation with King George than most Americans have with their senators today.
That’s a problem. I bet that the people of Texas who are upset about the recent electrical grid fiasco haven’t been making life rough for their state elected officials and inspiring them to reform the system because those officials are out of sight and out of mind, far away from the constituents but near to the various lobbyists who make their living pushing for “green” energy and the like. And Texas is one of the better governed states, as far as I can discern.
The not-vaxx vaccines the regime is attempting to force upon everyone is another example. If you don’t want to be experimented upon who do you complain to, anyway? This isn’t even a matter of arguing against a law, because there isn’t one. There’s only a press release ostensibly from a senile old man commanding his subjects to get an injection that will vastly enrich the shareholders of certain corporations, which employ myriad lobbyists to help that process along. And the OSHA regulation requiring this shot hasn’t even been written yet.
The elected officials of the country in DC are quite irrelevant to this process, whether they want to be or not. And if they don’t want to be irrelevant, you can be sure they’re hearing quite a bit about how awesome and necessary the vaccines are from the swarms of drug company lobbyists and not quite so much from angry but far away constituents.
And if you oppose mandatory vaccinations, you get to watch the putative leader of the Gee Ohhh Peeee, the supposed opposition party, lecture you to shut up and take the shot.
I’m pretty sure King George would never even thought about trying to impose something like this upon his American subjects.
Now, it appears that Biden (and those running him) have made the supply chain matter worse.
The lefties running things have decreed that POLA/POLB unload ships 24/7 and now the congestion of a million containers blocks even the trucks allowed into the port from moving the containers efficiently.
With hundreds more containers being offloaded hourly, the port infrastructure needed to load trucks long-sitting in the queue to pick up containers that arrived weeks ago is collapsing.
Truckers are waiting for over 8 hours to pick up their freight because the yards are swamped with containers. As each hour passes, more containers are offloaded into the port that can no longer deal with the scale of the problem. Each individual container is now buried in an avalanche of more containers, and that is making the limited compliant trucking resources even more problematic.
The country, and California, are being run by people who could not organize a one car funeral.
David,
The issue is squaring the circle of 2/3 vaccinated with reports of higher hospitalizations and mortality than with 0% vaccinated.
At this point, the data has been irreversibly mangled at every level from recording of individual patient outcomes to national and international agencies. Much of this is willful, motivated by everything from political ideology to CYA to monetary profit. Data fro Israel is no less suspect than any other.
It’s beyond contention that the vaccinated are falling ill and dying in significant numbers. Such significant numbers that it calls into question whether the vaccine is effective. Especially since there is no reliable data from the pre-vaccine period.
Now, it appears that Biden (and those running him) have made the supply chain matter worse.
The lefties running things have decreed that POLA/POLB unload ships 24/7 and now the congestion of a million containers blocks even the trucks allowed into the port from moving the containers efficiently.
With hundreds more containers being offloaded hourly, the port infrastructure needed to load trucks long-sitting in the queue to pick up containers that arrived weeks ago is collapsing.
Truckers are waiting for over 8 hours to pick up their freight because the yards are swamped with containers. As each hour passes, more containers are offloaded into the port that can no longer deal with the scale of the problem. Each individual container is now buried in an avalanche of more containers, and that is making the limited compliant trucking resources even more problematic.
The country, and California, are being run by people who could not organize a one car funeral.
I would laugh at that, Mike, except I’ve lived that very problem.
Circa 2003, the benighted Rumsfeld, he of the “unknown unknowns” demonstrated that he didn’t know what he didn’t know when he intervened with the Army deployment list to Kuwait. One of the units he personally deleted from the TPFDL, or Time-Phased Force Deployment List, was an unnecessary little outfit whose function and responsibility was cargo tracking and management.
Outside the Doha facility in northern Kuwait City, the Army had established a logistics facility that was several miles on a side. When we got there in April of 2003, the thing was filled with containers stacked four high, and nobody had a flippin’ clue where what was where, or what containers had what inside them. See, the RFID tags had all been tested in North America, and the desert did a number on the life expectancy, plus the equipment at the gates that was supposed to interrogate that equipment never worked quite right, and… Yeah. Basically, that yard was a logistics black hole. Nobody had a clue where anything was in it, because the unit that did that job was never allowed to leave the states due to Rumsfeld’s intervention.
Result? LOL… Dude, you have no idea. I never got out of Kuwait, mostly because of that yard–I spent weeks down there, trying to find stuff for my unit. They’d ship in things from the US, and it would just… Vanish. That yard destroyed more senior logistics officer’s careers than you could imagine–I watched three full colonels and a brigadier get relieved while I was in Kuwait, mostly because of that disaster. It was a near-run thing, in that it almost caused a failure of the Iraqi occupation effort because they weren’t getting critical parts and supplies north. We had vague assurances that things like tires for HMMWVs were there in Kuwait, and parts for our heavy construction equipment, but nobody knew where. Sooooo… Bought all that crap on the civilian market, packed it up, shipped it north.
It took KBR bringing in an Australian woman who specialized in un-fscking such things, and a solid year of effort on her part, before that problem got solved conclusively.
Logistics ain’t for idiots, which the Democrats have just proven, yet again, that they are. You do what they’ve just done, it’s going to take months if not years to untangle. I wish them luck, ‘cos they’re gonna need it.
Believe me, playing “What’s in the container…” ain’t a lot of fun, and once the databases get scrambled the way they’re likely to with this stupidity, it’s going to take a lot of work to undo. In Kuwait, the labor for unpacking, inventorying, and repacking the containers was fairly cheap. In Los Angeles? Not so much…
You would think that it would all be fairly simple to track, and all that. It isn’t. You lose accountability, and there are all sorts of wondrous things that can go wrong. They were losing containers of sensitive items like friggin’ weapons, ones that were supposed to be tracked and managed in specific areas with full accountability from end to end. They still managed it–We got a container of “lost weapons and sensitive items” that showed up after a year and a half back at Fort Lewis, just after we’d finally sorted getting everything replaced for that unit. Where it had been? No idea, but it had apparently been through the wringer, since the container was beat to hell and soaking wet on the inside.
I’m increasingly in awe of these people’s inability to get even basic things done right… Overloading the dockyards is only going to make throughput that much worse.
Kirk….”t took KBR bringing in an Australian woman who specialized in un-fscking such things, and a solid year of effort on her part, before that problem got solved conclusively.”
Wonder what she’s doing these days?
I spent some time in the Army Reserve in a “Logistics Command” unit. That was back in 1962 so most were WWII vets trying for pensions. They would have had trouble with a one car funeral. A major general commanded it. I had enough active duty to go to control group.
Bruce Hayden: “… I might have been willing to fly in a Soviet built transport plane, but draw the line with ChiCom built airplanes.”
Listening to some of the Great Courses series on military history, one of the repeated themes is that Under-estimating the Enemy often leads to disaster.
With that in mind, check out the development of the C919 — China’s modern soon-to-be-competitor to 30-year old Airbus and 60-year old Boeing single-aisle designs. Development seems to have been cautiously slow, with very extensive testing which had been going on for years. Rumors are that the C919 will undercut Airbus’s prices significantly.
Of course, both Airbus & Boeing are already manufacturing in China — because China’s rulers are too smart to be taken in by the “Free Trade” nonsense. Since the big future market for aircraft is in China, it is only a matter of time until Airbus & Boeing become like Apple, putting a Western name on a Chinese product.
I wish it were not so, but the best politicians money can buy and short-term focused business-persons have ripped the heart out of US (and Western) manufacturing. Unless we get our act together and embark on the long road of onshoring manufacturing, the future is going to be one where our choices will be to go Chinese or to walk. (And we will probably have to walk in Chinese-made shoes). Sad!