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.

Government Corruption in CA

Dan Walters is the "grand old man" of California political journalists, with a "state beat" career dating back to 1975. Now in his early 80s', he is still at work. We've cited him several times.

Today he brings us a discussion of the long history of corruption in California state and local government. It is not a record of which to be proud.

And ongoing investigations bid fair to unearth a whole lot more in the near future.

Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Images courtesy of RealClearPolitics'

Cartoons of the Week.

Rents Decline

Yesterday we wrote deporting illegal immigrants must have lowered rents by increasing supply of vacant units and decreasing those seeking shelter. 

Today we have evidence this has occurred. And we should be able to anticipate the trend will continue this year, further contributing to affordability.

XX vs XY Is a Real Thing

Recent research has demonstrated the the brains of male and female fetuses develop differently, meaning not all observed mental differences are socially transmitted. A key quote:

By linking scans taken before and after birth, the team reports that measurable differences in how male and female brains grow can already be seen by mid-pregnancy.

No kidding. Humans evolved to have complementary abilities in men and women as there was (and probably still is) species survival value in those differences. Hat tip to Instapundit for the link.

Demographic Doom Loop

Rick Moran writes at PJ Media about how "demographics is destiny." Hat tip to Mark Tapscott, posting at Instapundit, for the link.

The blue states are in a demographic doom loop. They need to create high taxes to pay for the numerous goodies they give to residents, but that leads to an exodus of wealth and people. To make up for the losses, blue states import and encourage illegal aliens to settle there. But illegals are a huge drain on the state treasury, leading to the need to raise taxes, and the loop closes on itself.

There you see the downside of the Curley Effect. 

Trump 48?

We're hearing about new findings in the vote miscount investigation in Fulton County, Georgia. It is at least possible it will eventually be found that Trump should have won in 2020.

I see a highly unlikely, but nevertheless intriguing path to a Trump third term. Let's say is is shown beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump had the votes to win in 2020 but truly "wuz robbed," as they say. 

Isn't there an argument that equity demands we owe him a third term, since he won three times? Imagine a lawsuit with the finding that Trump is awarded another term for 2028-2032, meaning no election is required in 2028.

I float this as a trial balloon. Listen for progressive heads exploding across our fruited plain.

Yogi’s Blond Cousins

There has been much written about global warming endangering Ursus maritimus, aka polar bears. As the sea ice retreats their ability to hunt basking seals - their main food diminishes.

On the other hand, recent findings from Svalbard suggest at least some the local big white carnivores are fatter than ever. This is triggering speculation about how this can happen. Hat tip to RealClearScience for the link.

It is also well known that Ursus maritimus and Ursus arctos (brown or grizzly bears) are closely related. They can and do interbreed and the offspring are, I believe, fertile.

Brown bears are well known omnivores, I’ve watched them sit in a patch of flowers happily eating the blossoms, but they’ll also kill and eat moose, reindeer, hibernating ground rodents, and spawning salmon.

If brown bears are omnivores, might not polar bears diversify their diet to include birds, eggs, and land animals too? I think they might, and some evidence suggests they do. I believe they’ve been known to raid the garbage dump at Churchill, Manitoba.

Alas, there are no panserbjørne, hat tip to Philip Pullman for their charming portrait.