Interesting thoughts on China from Mark Steyn:

“…In 2006 I wrote an international bestseller about demography. Which is harder to do than you might think. But it was leavened with Dean Martin gags and whatnot. Nevertheless, it made some big-picture points:

Will China be the hyperpower of the 21st century? Answer: No. Its population will get old before it’s got rich.

That’s a cute line. I’ve been using it since the dawn of the millennium and I’ve been interested to watch it catch on. A few years back, I had the pleasure of hearing Henry Kissinger use it: It sounds so much more geopolitically persuasive in his gravelly voice. And the point is a serious one: Japan’s demographic crisis began after they’d got rich, which is the better way to arrange things. In China, alas, the statistics are catching up with Steynian doom-mongering:

China’s population shrank last year for the first time in 70 years, experts said, warning of a “demographic crisis” that puts pressure on the country’s slowing economy…

The number of live births nationwide in 2018 fell by 2.5 million year-on-year, contrary to a predicted increase of 790,000 births, according to analysis by U.S.-based academic Yi Fuxian.

Yi is at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and he’s been tracking just how old China’s getting:

China’s median age was 22 in 1980. By 2018, it was 40. That will rise to 46 in 2030 and 56 in 2050. In the US, the median age was 30 in 1980 and 38 in 2018. In 2030, it will be 40, and 44 in 2050. India, by comparison, had a median age of 20 in 1980 and 28 in 2018.

What happened between 1980 and 2018 to make a country age that fast? Well, for two generations Chinese mothers gave birth to boys and aborted all the girls. From page thirty of yours truly’s America Alone:

The People’s Republic’s most distinctive structural flaw [is] the most gender-distorted demographic cohort in global history, the so-called guang gun – ‘bare branches’: Since China introduced its ‘one child’ policy in 1978, the imbalance between the sexes has increased to the point where in today’s generation there are 119 boys for every 100 girls. The pioneer generation of that male surplus are now adults. Unless China’s planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, what’s going to happen to those young men? As a general rule, large numbers of excitable lads who can’t get any action are useful for manning the nuttier outposts of the jihad but not for much else.

The catastrophe of that policy was obvious when I wrote that passage, but it took the geniuses of the Politburo another decade to catch up to it. Not until three years ago did they issue the magisterial pronouncement that “couples will now be allowed to have two children”.

Unfortunately, as Tucker Carlson noted in the American context the other night, it’s easier for the state to demolish the family than to rebuild it. China wound up with an unintended Cultural Revolution: The cultural norm of having households with multiple children faded away so totally that, even when it’s no longer illegal to have two kids, very few Chinese want to; they’ve gotten out of the habit. In Germany, by comparison, there are many, many childless couples, but you’ll also run across the occasional parents who have two, three, or maybe even four kids, and thus keep the idea of family alive. When the state is powerful enough to insist that every couple has no more than one child, the notion of a big family doesn’t even survive as a minority pastime. If no one’s seen a two-child household for two generations, the rhythms of life shift – and are hard to shift back. Yi Fuxian again:

China, meanwhile, has been hit by two further blows: the one-child policy has changed Chinese childbearing attitudes and distorted moral values about life; and, the economy, social environment, education and almost everything else relates back to the one-child policy. Having just one child or no children has become the social norm in China.

Northeast China – Heilongjiang, Liaoning and Jilin provinces – has a population of about 109 million, and its socio-educational level is several years ahead of the country average. The fertility rate in northeast China was only 0.9 in 2000 and 0.56 in 2015. This means that the next-generation population in this region is only a quarter the size of the last generation.

It was young China that closed the gap with middle-aged America. Against a still middle-aged America, can an old China retain its edge? Very unlikely. As I warned in America Alone:

The central fact of a new Dark Ages is this: it would be not a world in which the American superpower is succeeded by other powers but a world with no dominant powers at all. Today, lots of experts crank out analyses positing China as the unstoppable hegemon of the 21st century. Yet the real threat is not the strengths of your enemies but their weaknesses. China is a weak power: its demographic and other structural defects are already hobbling its long-term ambitions.

Weak powers behave more irrationally than strong ones. And a still developing nation with death-spiral demographics isn’t going to be fun for its neighbors or the world.

Towards the end of America Alone, I speculate on which nation will be the first to take a flyer on the transhuman future. You can see its seeds already in Japan, with its robot nurses at the old folks’ home and talking dolls for adults to serve as the children and grandchildren they never bothered having themselves. Those periodic wacky stories about lonely Tokyo millennials marrying their favorite manga character foreshadow a world where the middle-aged businessman, starting to slow down a bit and with intimations of his own mortality, starts to develop feelings for his robot housekeeper… A comparatively small number of comparatively wealthy Japanese will turn to robots and clones and whatever it takes.

But a comparatively large number of comparatively poor Chinese will face cruder, tougher choices. As we see in trade negotiations, China today is an aggressive and demanding power – and for very good reasons: It has to use its moment, because the moment is already passing…”

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Sears to ask bankruptcy judge to liquidate

The U.S. is the only power that can maintain maritime laws.

“…Lu Kang, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, was critical of McCampbell’s FONOP during his regularly scheduled briefing with the media.

“The Chinese side immediately sent military vessel and aircraft to conduct verification and identification on the U.S. ship and warned it to leave. We have lodged stern representations with the U.S. side,” Lu said, according to the official English translation of the ministry’s press conference.

Starting in the 1990s, in a move not recognized by international maritime law, China claimed a straight baseline around the entire Paracel Islands archipelago, which it calls the Xisha Islands. The Chinese government wants foreign warships to ask permission before operating near the islands. Vietnam and Taiwan also claim the chain.

In response, U.S. Navy officials stated McCampbell operated within the standards of international maritime law…”

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“…The air-quality lawsuits were the work of a small group known in English as Environment Action Germany, which goes by the German acronym DUH, and is funded mainly by donations from Germany’s central and regional governments (and Toyota).

It doesn’t help that DUH was itself once a proselytizer for “clean diesel,” even pushing the technology on U.S. environmental groups as a quicker way to bring down carbon-dioxide emissions than waiting for electric cars to catch on.

Diesel does deliver a tad less CO2 per mile than gasoline but produces more smog and particulates, a detractor that turned out not to be fixable. Remember the Volkswagen scandal of 2015, when U.S. regulators ended the charade by discovering that emissions from imported VWs were 400% worse than advertised?

To this day, though, nobody in Europe is willing to acknowledge the biggest flaw in the continent’s now-defunct regulatory fetish for diesel.

However you slice it, cars just aren’t that big a part of an ostensible CO2 problem. Personal cars sit idle 95% of the time. Planes, trains, ships, trucks, buses and other commercial vehicles account for well over half the emissions associated with the transport sector globally. And the transport sector itself accounts for only 14% of all emissions.

Now for the knee-jerk response from groups like Union of Concerned Scientists: Yes, but road-vehicle emissions are a significant share of total emissions in the U.S. and Europe.

This is a perfect example of the politics of the meaningless gesture, the dominant motif in climate policy. The planet doesn’t care where the emissions happen. The U.S. and Europe could ban driving altogether and it wouldn’t make a sizable difference. For real leverage over CO2, the target has to be heavy industry, electricity generation, and home heating and cooking.

So why the car obsession? It’s a mental legacy of the air-pollution fights of the 1970s. To many voters, the car remains a sinful object. Eco groups, for purposes of self-promotion, can’t go wrong by portraying themselves as fighting against the automobile. Yet they get virtually nowhere on the alleged problem of CO2 by doing so…”

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NAACP blames ‘white supremacy’ for Portland earthquake signs.

Headline from the education apocalypse

“…Kieran Bhattacharya was suspended from the University of Virginia after the institution alleged Bhattacharya became “unnecessarily antagonistic and disrespectful” during a lecture Bhattacharya says was titled “Microaggressions: Why Are They So Sensitive.”

Bhattacharya published audio recordings, both of the classroom incident that led to his suspension, and of the following disciplinary hearing that led to his suspension.

In the classroom recording, as the lecture concluded and students are allowed to ask questions at approximately 28 minutes in, Bhattacharya took the opportunity to raise several concerns with the professor. . . .

Bhattacharya says he was then summoned by the University of Virginia’s Academic Standards and Achievement Committee for punishment.

During the half hour long meeting, Bhattacharya repeatedly asked what about his behavior was incorrect, and how to remedy it. He was criticized for his decision to record the lecture, and repeatedly told that his “this aggressive, threatening behavior” must be changed.

After repeatedly asking for examples of his unprofessional behavior, one committee member suggested his decision to record the meeting as an example…”

Original

Late stage socialism:

“…“I’ve decided to leave Venezuela to disavow the government of Nicolas Maduro,” Zerpa said in an interview with EVTV, which is broadcast over cable and the internet.

“I believe (Maduro) does not deserve a second chance because the election he supposedly won was not free and competitive.”

The Supreme Court confirmed in a statement that he had fled, referring to him as a former magistrate and adding it opened an investigation of him in November over accusations of sexual harassment by women in his office. The court’s leadership recommended that he be dismissed over the allegations, it said, without providing details.

Zerpa was for years a crucial ally of Maduro on the Supreme Court, which has backed the ruling Socialist Party in every major legal dispute since Maduro’s 2013 election.

He wrote a 2016 ruling that provided the legal justification for Maduro’s government to strip congress of most of its powers after the Socialist Party lost control of the body to the opposition in a landslide election…”

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This peak is visible on the far horizon just right of center in the previous photograph titled Yosemite Backcountry.

Jerry Brown tells Chuck Todd, “We’ve got to get off this idea, ‘it’s the economy, stupid.’ No, it’s the environment.”

Related:

Of The 5 Big States, Texas #1 For Growth, California #1 For Poverty.

Is it a cartoon?

Christopher Bedford:

“…The Never Trumpers say they don’t recognize a Republican Party where the core tenets are neither free trade nor foreign democracy promotion. But maybe they just didn’t know their voters by sight, because the only party that has truly departed recognition is Never Trump.

Each week brings this movement a new and bizarre position: Opposing tax cuts, supporting Obamacare; wishing North Korean talks ill, wishing Democratic investigators well; dreaming of European political meddling, pining for American political comeuppance.

Rick Santorum, the Catholic working-class firebrand rarely seen among Washington’s polite classes, had long commented that a party such as the GOP, with a donor class so out of line with its base, could not possibly continue to function.

There could not be such a massive realignment without something somewhere snapping, but despite the Never Trump hysteria, it doesn’t appear to be the party. Though the president’s House was defeated in the first post-Trump national elections and his two-year approval among Democrats lies at historic lows, his approval with his own voters—those who the Never Trumpers courted not long ago—is second only to George W. Bush after 9/11…”

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Thomas Lifson:

“…Anger and downright hatred for the sitting president of the United States powers most of the 40 newly elected members of the House Democratic Caucus, along with many veterans, including “Mad Max” Maxine Waters, slated to become chair of the House Financial Services Committee and very publicly committed to impeachment.  Pelosi is shrewd enough to realize that impeachment without a smoking gun would be a disaster for Democrats, but that won’t stop the Trump-haters, who believe they have momentum and support of the party’s faithful.  Eleven-term veteran Congressman Brad Sherman, of Ventura County, California, has already introduced articles of impeachment, and that’s just the beginning of the ordeal Pelosi will have trying to rein in her crazies.

Those crazies include another media darling, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who chose Palestinian garb in which to take the oath of office, no doubt simultaneously pleasing the 19% of the American public that chooses to support the Palestinians over Israel, as well as the Republican Jewish Coalition.  (See what I mean about the clown show now?)…”

Original

He might be a good choice.

“…Jim Webb, the iconoclastic former Democratic senator from Virginia who served as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the Navy, is under consideration for Defense secretary, according to an administration official with knowledge of the process.

Webb would be an eye-opening choice as a member of the opposing party who briefly ran for president in 2015.

But his views on foreign policy and military affairs align with President Donald Trump in key respects. For example, he ran for the Senate in 2006 on a platform to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, even campaigning while wearing his Marine son’s combat boots…”

Original

“…The dossier operation has not only damaged institutions like the FBI and DOJ, it has also poisoned the public sphere, perhaps irremediably. As a result, it is now accepted journalistic practice to print, and reprint, any garish fantasy so long as it’s layered with Russian intrigue and Trump team treason. Even as the rest of the country sees an institution that has made itself a laughingstock, the press continues to salute itself for its bravery—or the courage and industry required to take leaks from law enforcement and intelligence officials and Democratic operatives in an effort to topple a president it doesn’t like, elected by neighbors it holds in contempt…”

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From Ed Driscoll:

GLOBAL WARMING IS IMPACTING PEOPLE FROM HEAD TO TOE AND EVERYWHERE IN BETWEEN. JUST ASK NBC!

● Shot: ‘Climate grief’: The growing emotional toll of climate change — Extreme weather and dire climate reports are intensifying the mental health effects of global warming: depression and resignation about the future.

—Headline and subhead, NBC News, Christmas Eve.

● Chaser: NBC Blasted For ‘Worst New Year’s Show Ever’; Included ‘Vaginal Steaming’ Comment.

—The Daily Wire, today.