Qui Bono

The Guthrie kidnapping has captured the public interest almost as much as that of the Lindberg baby. We hadn’t had a celebrity kidnapping in the US in several decades. The Frank Sinatra Jr. and Patty Hearst abductions were 50+ years ago.

Several thousand people with visibility, known wealth, and short memories - like the Guthries - have tended to forget the possibility and got careless. The current case is a wake up call.

Lawyers and economists ask the question qui bono, meaning “who benefits.” Thinking about the Guthrie kidnapping, it occurs to me the private security equipment and manpower firms will benefit, enormously. 

People in Los Altos, Montecito, Bel Aire, Long Island, Miami Beach, and the tonier suburbs of Dallas and Houston will have taken note and in many cases become worried.

As the weeks go by and the whereabouts of the senior Mrs. Guthrie remains unknown, their worry gets worse. And business for security equipment vendors and installers gets better, as does employment in the bodyguard business. Builders of panic rooms will start getting inquiries.

Saturday Snark

My first student assistant could have

modeled for the Big Boy.

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Some Dim View of China

Several quotes by geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan from a speech delivered at the aPriori 2023 Manufacturing Insights Conference.

China has, at most, 10 years before it faces national dissolution. They will not be a unified industrialized nation state 10 years from now. 

Think of the three big things that have happened with Chinese demography in the last five years, officially. Number one, their population peaked. Number two, India’s population surpassed China’s. And number three, the United States, the average age of the US citizenry is now younger than that of the Chinese citizenry. 

Those all happened in the last five years. And what we’ve discovered in the last five months is no, they didn’t. Those happened 10 years ago. China’s not about to peak; China peaked years ago. And we’re only now starting to get a feel for just how bad the situation is there.

My sense from reading the entire speech is that Zeihan is given to overstatement. So ... color him an optimist, but not a blind one by any means. Hat tip to Scott Pinsker of PJ Media for the link.

Redesigning Our Selves

Someday people will travel to the planets and later to the stars. Doing so will require bodily capabilities we do not now have, and perhaps cannot imagine in their entirety.

RealClearScience has a link to the thinking of someone currently working on identifying and then solving these problems at the genetic level. Honestly it reads like science fiction ... but isn't. 

If even 10% of the promise this work seeks to undertake is successful, our grandchildren will look back and wonder how we survived the terrible risks deemed natural in our era and the recent past. Full disclosure: I wonder that about my grandparents now.

Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Images courtesy of RealClearPolitics'

Cartoons of the Week.

The Epstein Fall-out

Jeffrey Epstein was known as a successful money manager and bon vivant long before his appetite for underage girls surfaced. Even after his first conviction in Florida he was still considered to possess some combination of considerable skill and luck at money-management. That cachet attracted people to him, people now rightly or wrongly suffering damage to their reputations and careers. 

I write not to defend Epstein, or his one-time friends and acquaintances, they are well and truly screwed. The millions of pages of Epstein documents probably harbor several more career-ending revelations. 

I write instead to wonder how many people in lofty positions of power and influence are now anxious lest one of their own associates might harbor a secret vice or fetish that could similarly damage them? A case like Epstein’s could reduce interpersonal trust and comradeship for a whole generation of movers and shakers.

Perhaps that anxiety is part of the price of power and visibility.

Thursday Snark

I wonder how many Dems this meme will fool?

Image courtesy of Ed Driscoll, posting at Instapundit.

China’s Birth Dearth

An Indonesian author, writing in the Hong Kong based Asia Times, does a substantial overview of the impacts, both present and future, of China’s extremely low birth rate. A key observation: government efforts to stimulate births where tried have been shown to have quite limited impact. The conclusion:

Demography does not determine destiny, but it sets powerful constraints on what is possible. China remains a formidable state with vast resources and institutional capacity. But it is now a superpower entering old age, confronting demographic limits that policy alone cannot reverse.

COTTonLINE wonders: An autocratic state theoretically could constrain the availability of birth control drugs and devices. Would China’s citizenry rebel, or respond by further cuts in births? 

I’m guessing policy wonks in Beijing are also wondering about that precise question. Hat tip to RealClearWorld for the link.

Another Trans Shooter

The person who shot and killed nine persons in a small British Columbia town has been identified as a born-male transgender 'woman' named Jesse Van Rootselaar. He murdered his mom and stepbrother before going to the high school and killing seven more, wounding others. 

Transgender individuals are a tiny fraction of the populace, yet they've done much more than their share of mass killings. I consider that very suggestive of trans being a mental illness making sufferers susceptible to acting out in violent ways.

Later … See similar arguments made here in the New York Post and here at Power Line.

Good News

Power Line's new guy Bill Glahn posts the following quote from the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment report.

In January, federal government employment continued to decline (-34,000) as some federal employees who accepted a deferred resignation offer in 2025 came off federal payrolls. Since reaching a peak in October 2024, federal government employment is down by 327,000, or 10.9 percent.

10.9% is roughly one ninth of the federal workforce, that's not trivial. Glahn goes on to note this.

Payroll jobs were up for January (+130,000), overall, even as government employment (all levels) fell (-42,000 last month).

All the while the national unemployment rate is declining. This is good news the GOP needs, looking toward November's midterm election.

 Later .... This posted by Instapundit, making the same point graphically:

I'm liking this trend a lot, Trump gets the credit for it.

Poor States' Shining Example

For the New York Times, Nicholas Krisrtof does a long and well-reported article on why the public school children in three Southern states - Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama - are top performers in nationwide tests of child learning. Wonder of wonders, the column is not behind the NYT paywall.

The extent to which these schools are literally chasing down truants and twisting parents' arms to get kids into classrooms is amazing. If you know this part of the nation, children in public schools are predominantly non-white, mostly black. Imagine if you will not permitting students to pass out of third grade unless they can read with some proficiency - these three states are insisting, and the kids are reading and passing.

Kristof makes too little of an important contributing factor. He writes:

It was easier to undertake these reforms in states like Mississippi that lacked strong teacher unions.

No kidding, he writes only that one sentence about perhaps the major factor blocking schools in other states from emulating the success of these three "southern stars." 

These three have overcome what President Bush called "the soft bigotry of low expectations" and replaced it with this, from a superintendent in Marion County.

We no longer accept that our kids can’t compete with anybody in the world.

Kristof points out that nothing about the kids' home environment has been changed.

For many years, skeptics have offered dispiriting arguments about the prospects for educational gains: The way to improve literacy is to fix the family, fix addiction, fix the parents, for as long as the child’s environment is broken, there’s not much else that can be done.

The gains in these states suggest that that critique is wrong. Mississippi and Alabama haven’t fixed child poverty, trauma and deeply troubled communities — but they have figured out how to get kids to read by the end of third grade.

And their math scores improved a lot too. 

NSFW

Over at the News Ammo site I find a link to a translation of the Bad Bunny lyrics from the Super Bowl halftime show. If accurate, they are on a par with some of the raunchiest rap lyrics for sexual explicitness and exhortation of drug use. 

I'll bet his abuela doesn't approve, probably not his madre either. Unless you work in a brothel or a biker bar, don't read the translated lyrics aloud at work.

An Echo of the Past

Some things don’t change very much, or perhaps more accurately, tend to recur. Today comes an article about a continuing US Army presence reestablished in the Philippines. There is a lot of history between the two nations.

My father’s older brother - a West Point graduate (class of 1908) and career Army officer - was stationed there over a hundred years ago. I am uncertain whether this was before or after he served in France in World War I, probably before. At the time the Philippines was a US colony. 

Saturday Snark, a Day Late

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Sunday Snark

Images courtesy of Sarah Hoyt's Let the Memes Pass,

hat tip to Instapundit for the link.