POPULATION IMPLOSION: Desperately seeking young people.

The number of 20- to 29-year-olds in Japan has crashed from 18.3m to 12.8m since 2000, according to the World Bank. By 2040 there might be only 10.5m of them. Cities like Tama are therefore playing not a zero-sum game but a negative-sum game, frantically chasing an ever-diminishing number of young adults and children. And some of their rivals have extremely sharp elbows.

Follow the Tama river upstream, into the mountains, and you eventually reach a tiny town called Okutama. What Tama is trying to avoid has already happened there. Okutama’s population peaked in the 1950s, as construction workers flocked to the town to build a large reservoir that supplies water to Tokyo in emergencies. It has grown smaller and older ever since.

Today 47% of people in the Okutama administrative area—the town and surrounding villages—are 65 or older, and 26% are at least 75. Children have become so scarce that the large primary school is only about one-quarter full. Residents in their 70s outnumber children under ten by more than five to one.

I’ve been following Japan’s demographic decline for years, and these numbers shock even me.

The Japanese need to get back in the business of making more Japanese before there’s no Japan left.

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 1360: VP Pence, GOP House And Senate To Push Trump To Fire Koskinen.

WHITTLE, OTT, GREEN: Fundamentally Unserious — P**** Hats and F-Bombs Do Not a Serious Movement Make.

DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: Princeton Freshman: They’re Training Us To Hate Each Other.

This mandatory orientation event was designed to help us appreciate our diversity as a student body during the first week of classes. But what did it really accomplish? In compressing us into isolated communities based on our race, religion or gender, the minister belittled every other piece of our identities. He faced a crowd of singular young adults and essentially told them that their heritage outweighed their humanity. The message was clear: know your kind and stick to it. Don’t risk offending people from other backgrounds by trying to understand their worldviews.

Cost of attending Princeton University: $64,390 per year. Too damn much to be force-fed crap like this. But you know, I had a college girlfriend who spent some time post-college working in the admissions office at Berkeley. She was (and is) a language savant, and she’d spent a summer at the University of Zagreb in what was then Tito’s Yugoslavia, after which she spoke Serbo-Croatian like a native. But she said the message from Berkeley’s administration to the students was just like Tito’s: You all hate each other, and you can only live together peacefully because of me. You can only deal with each other through me. Divide and conquer.

MY BAD: American Airlines Is Eliminating Seat-Back Entertainment—and They’re Blaming You.

OKAY, LAST WEEK THE HILL REPORTED THAT TRUMP WAS GIVING UP HIS PERSONAL CELLPHONE.

Now there are reports that he’s keeping it. I don’t know which is true, but if Trump’s thinking of keeping his Android he should think again. I consider Android to be too insecure for my purposes. I’m pretty sure no OS is secure enough for a President, unless maybe it’s kept isolated in a quiet room and he goes there to use it. And probably not even then.

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COMPARE AND CONTRAST:

Here’s Mia Love’s speech. Here’s Madonna.

Related: The women’s march organizers blew it, and even the media realize it. “A short and seemingly insignificant segment on CNN this morning illustrates just how badly the organizers of the so-called Women’s March on Washington blew their chance to turn their event into a national, bipartisan movement against Trump. . . . Of perhaps more significant interest, however, is the fact that Keilar and CNN were forced to put the March for Life on the same political footing as the Women’s March on Washington. Equally surprising is the fact that the Women’s March on Washington is already being described as a ‘liberal women’s march’ even by an outlet such as CNN. Instead of being a nonpartisan protest by all women against the tyranny of Trump, all the work and effort put into the Women’s March has been relegated, in the space of less than a week, to a partisan liberal protest that was most prominently associated with Planned Parenthood. All of the supposed moral authority of an entire gender has been wiped aside in favor of a frank and honest acknowledgement that the marchers were merely liberals who were super unhappy with how the election turned out.”

CHANGE: Nikki Haley Puts U.N. on Notice: U.S. Is ‘Taking Names’

“You’re going to see a change in the way we do business,” Ms. Haley said. “Our goal with the administration is to show value at the U.N., and the way we’ll show value is to show our strength, show our voice, have the backs of our allies and make sure our allies have our back as well.”

“For those who don’t have our back,” she added, “we’re taking names; we will make points to respond to that accordingly.”

Much more of this and even our allies will get tired of all the winning.

I REMEMBER IN LAW SCHOOL, explaining to a classmate that despite her fears, the “Doomsday” clock is just a prop, and its advance or retreat reflects nothing more than the decision of a group of people with an agenda. Thanks to Trump, the Doomsday Clock Advances Toward Midnight. This came as a shock to her, though to her credit after a moment’s thought she realized that of course it was true.

Or as Brendan O’Neill put it on Facebook: “The same media attacking Trump for making stuff up is now excitedly reporting that a bunch of scientists have moved the imaginary hand on an imaginary clock half-a-minute closer to an imaginary apocalypse. #fakenews.”

A CALL FOR VIOLENCE: House Democrats: ‘We must fight this executive order in the streets.’

I’m old enough to remember when Sarah Palin’s use of printer registration marks that looked kinda like crosshairs crossed the line into incitement of murder.

LOOKING AT THE PICTURES I WONDER: Is there a genetic “betaface?” #AllMenCan Just Proves Betas Still Pine To Be Alphas: This campaign isn’t about respect for women. It’s about promoting feminism. And the two aren’t one and the same.

RIP, JOHN HURT: Bafta-winning actor dies aged 77.

Not least of his roles was starring in the definitive film version of Orwell’s 1984, a mediation on where socialism and the concomitant road to serfdom ultimately lead.

SHOT: DONALD TRUMP IS THE FIRST PRESIDENT TO TURN POSTMODERNISM AGAINST ITSELF:

Democrats gleefully welcomed Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries with the expectation that they’d bury him in a pile of condescension for being a buffoon and scorn for being the next Hitler. Better yet, they figured that his astounding rise confirmed everything they had long assumed about half the country and were now free to say out loud: they are indeed a basket of irredeemable racist, sexist, homophobic deplorables. Mainstream Republicans would surely hop on board the progressive train rather than be associated with these creeps.

None of this happened, of course. But why? Because what Trump’s enemies failed to grasp was that he wasn’t winning because of the crazy things he was saying, but because of the phony outrage and affected condescension it provoked. Many people empathized with Trump for enduring the contempt that he deliberately brought against himself. Trump kept playing the role of the antihero, and Clinton kept playing the role of the pearl-clutching fraud.

So I’m a scoundrel because I don’t pay income taxes? Maybe so, but it also makes me smart, just like all the other billionaires who are backing your campaign. So I’m a sexist because you found a video of me bragging about how my superstar status enables me to grab women by the p—y? Maybe it does, but allow me to publically introduce four of the women who have accused your husband of everything from indecent exposure to rape. So I’m a greedy businessman who stiffs my contractors? Fine. You’re a corrupt politician who sells out our national interest to line your own pockets.

Maybe everything they say about me is true, but at least I’m authentic, at least I’m real: you on the other hand, are a bloody, disgusting hypocrite.

So say goodnight to the bad guy! Because this bad guy is now our president.

—David Ernst, the Federalist.

Chaser:

What unites these fake news narratives and gives them greater media resonance than other fables and urban myths is again their progressive resonance. Fake news can become a means to advance supposedly noble ends of racial, gender, class, or environmental justice—such as the need for new sexual assault protocols on campuses. Those larger aims supersede bothersome and inconvenient factual details. The larger “truth” of fake news lives on even after its facts have been utterly debunked.

And indeed, the fake news mindset ultimately can be traced back to the campus. Academic postmodernism derides facts and absolutes, and insists that there are only narratives and interpretations that gain credence, depending on the power of the story-teller. In other words, white male establishment reactionaries have set up fictive rules of “absolute” truth and “unimpeachable” facts, and they have further consolidated their privilege by forcing the Other to buy into their biased and capricious notions of discriminating against one narrative over another.

The work of French postmodernists—such as Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida that mesmerized academics in the 1980s with rehashed Nietzschean banalities about the absence of facts and the primacy of interpretation—has now been filtered by the media to a nationwide audience. If the mythical exclamation “hands up, don’t shoot” was useful in advancing a narrative of inordinate police attacks against African Americans, who cares whether he actually said it? And indeed, why privilege a particular set of elite investigatory methodologies to ascertain its veracity?

In sum, fake news is journalism’s popular version of the nihilism of campus postmodernism. To progressive journalists, advancing a leftwing political agenda is important enough to justify the creation of misleading narratives and outright falsehoods to deceive the public—to justify, in other words, the creation of fake but otherwise useful news.

—“Fake News: Postmodernism By Another Name,” Victor Davis Hanson, Defining Ideas.

Hangover: Anthropologists and other scholars plan read-in of Michel Foucault to mark inauguration of Donald Trump.

—Inside Higher Education, January 16th.

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DO YOU WANT MORE TRUMP? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE TRUMP:

CENSORSHIP IN OUR TIME: YouTube Disables MILO Livestream Hours Before Immigration Speech in New Mexico.

JOSEPH BOTTUM: “Twitter and Facebook have been doing their best to convince us that incivility is the nation’s beloved pastime, finally overtaking Trivial Pursuit and post-Thanksgiving indigestion on the list of traditional favorites. But I’m still surprised when it manifests itself in personal settings.”

Plus: “I’ve treasured over the past few years a discussion I found on a leftist website about whether one should help victims of a car accident—if they were known to be Republicans. (After some back-and-forth, the commentators settled on an answer: No. Better they die.)”

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NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Trick to Surviving a Polish Vodka Party.

I’m thinking the only way to win is not to play.

“LET THEM EAT INTERSECTIONALITY!” The Democrats Retreat From Reality.

Related: 9 Hints: How Democrats Can Learn To Talk To ‘Real People.’

OUT: “FAKE NEWS.” IN: FAKE VOTES: “Hillary Clinton garnered more than 800,000 votes from noncitizens on Nov. 8, an approximation far short of President Trump’s estimate of up to 5 million illegal voters but supportive of his charges of fraud. Political scientist Jesse Richman of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, has worked with colleagues to produce groundbreaking research on noncitizen voting, and this week he posted a blog in response to Mr. Trump’s assertion.”

We need a full and deep investigation into voting fraud, especially after the revelations spurred by Jill Stein’s recount in Michigan.

CARLOS SLIM’S ART OF THE DEAL: Will a Trump versus Slim cage match evolve? Stay tuned.

Mexico’s richest man is urging his fellow citizens to unite behind the Mexican government in its negotiations with President Trump, Reuters reports.

In a rare news conference on Friday, telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim called Trump a “great negotiator” and said “the circumstances in the United States are very favorable to Mexico.”

But he also said that Mexico would have to negotiate from a position of strength, and argued the country would be okay if it withdrew from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

SCOTT ADAMS ON TRUMP’S STRATEGY OF “OUTRAGE DILUTION:” “I’m having a fun time watching President Trump flood the news cycle with so many stories and outrages that no one can keep up. . . . You’re probably seeing the best persuasion you will ever see from a new president. Instead of dribbling out one headline at a time, so the vultures and critics can focus their fire, Trump has flooded the playing field. You don’t know where to aim your outrage. He’s creating so many opportunities for disagreement that it’s mentally exhausting. Literally.”

This is sort of like Obama’s “dense-pack strategy” for scandals, except that Obama deployed it with, well, scandals, and Trump is deploying it with presidential action.