WHAT IF THE “POPULATION BOMB” WAS A PIECE OF HOSTILE DISINFORMATION? Joel Kotkin: Declining Fertility Rates May Deliver Us To Oblivion.

For much of the last half-century we have been living, even cowering, under the threat posed by what Paul Ehrlich in 1968 called the “population bomb.” In Ehrlich’s scenario, widely adopted by the environmental movement and its corporate supporters, ever-increasing numbers would overwhelm the resource base and the food supply and would cause dystopian mayhem across the planet.

Yet it turns out that the “explosion” is heading toward an implosion, as data reported by the World Bank indicates. Rather than being doomed by a surfeit of humans we may be experiencing, certainly in the West and in East Asia, dangerously low fertility rates that threaten to slow world economic growth and innovation.

This also reflects a dangerous shift in civilizational values, with more focus on the self and abstractions and less on the basic relations upon which all civilizations have been built. Conversely when fertility rates drop—for example in imperial Rome, renaissance Venice and early modern Amsterdam—it’s a sure signal of societal decline.

People without kids tend to be less invested in the future.

JEFF JACOBY: Move the Beijing Olympics — or shun them.

Beijing is scheduled to host the 2022 Winter Games. It should not be allowed to do so — not while China’s communist regime is engaged in grotesque violations of human rights and systematic crimes against humanity, including genocide, torture, slave labor, compulsory abortions, religious persecution, cultural oppression, and a brutal antidemocracy crackdown. In an open letter last month, a coalition of 180 human rights organizations implored world governments to boycott the 2022 Games and not let them be used to “embolden” the Chinese government in its “unrelenting crackdown on basic freedom.”

That was what happened in 2008, when the IOC, spurning the pleas of dissidents and activists, permitted Beijing to stage the Summer Games. China, which had never before been awarded the Olympics, avidly sought the propaganda bonanza of hosting the world’s foremost sporting event. The communist regime promised that the games would be a catalyst for internal reform, and international Olympic officials took (or pretended to take) those assurances at face value.

“We are convinced that the Olympic Games will improve human rights in China,” the IOC’s then-president, Jacques Rogge, told an interviewer. They “will have definitely a positive, lasting effect on Chinese society.”

The ghosts of 1936 Berlin laugh sardonically at that last sentence.

OF COURSE: Biden blocks press access at border, constructs false narratives.

Related: Biden’s Gag Order on the Border Patrol. “So much for the new era of White House transparency, I suppose. Why are we not seeing more outrage from the Washington Post, the New York Times or CNN? Where are the complaints about the authoritarian muzzling of the media? Even as the major press outlets do manage to mention the situation, shouldn’t they be rebelling against this blackout? Or is criticism of a Democratic administration still verboten to the point where most of them will quietly sit on their hands?” Some questions answer themselves, and this is one of them.

NEXT TIME, TRIPLE THE FINE AND BRING BACK THE PILLORY: FCC cracks down on robocalls with record $225 million fine.

FIGHT THE POWER: Ohio sues Biden over key element in $1.9T COVID-19 relief package. “Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost sued the Biden administration Wednesday, saying the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package signed last week forces states to choose between receiving funding and lowering taxes. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, seeks a preliminary injunction against part of the American Rescue Plan Act. Yost said Congress exceeded its authority when it added the so-called tax mandate to the stimulus plan ‘at the last minute.'”

THE BIDEN BORDER DEBACLE: Sheriffs: Up to 50% of migrants captured have COVID, want border secured.

SMOKING GUN: Here’s Joe Biden Basically Inviting Illegal Aliens to Surge the Border.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Soros-Backed DA Cut Plea Deals With Violent Criminals Represented by Campaign Donors.

KURT SCHLICTER ON THE AFTERMATH OF OPERATION TUCKER: Our Military Suffers Yet Another Defeat… This Time to Tucker Carlson.

Here’s a fun fact: Tucker Carlson, over whom a bunch of senior military officers tossed 240 years of non-partisanship out the window in order to chide for pointing out their myriad failures, has won just as many wars as our generals have during the last twenty years. He has also lost fewer wars.

So, basically, Tucker Carlson – who they lambaste for being like the other ~92 percent of Americans who were never in uniform – would have done less damage running our formerly indomitable military than the perfumed princes who run it now. Yet these generals and senior NCOs who got and internalized the SJW memo are utterly clueless. They are more engaged and interested in fighting TV hosts who embarrass them by exposing their failures, and snipe hunting for mystery extremist boogeymen in the ranks, than in preparing to defeat China in high-intensity conventional combat.

Let’s get beyond their utter breach of tradition, and their unpunished breaking of the regulations banning political activity in uniform in general and information operation targeting of U.S. citizens in particular. Let’s instead focus on how crummy a job these generals and senior sergeants and their eager minions did doing it. They completely misunderstood the battlespace. They thought that all those Gallup polls listing “The Military” as America’s most respected institution would allow them to use their titles and uniforms and stuff leverage the support of the American people against this uppity pundit. But they totally failed, as usual. Citizens were outraged. Vets were livid – especially since we vets would have been handed our walking papers for this kind of garbage in our day.

Read the whole thing.

BECAUSE HE’D RATHER NOT BE WORTH MUCH LESS: Bernie Sanders rips into Jeff Bezos: ‘You are worth $182 billion … why are you doing everything in your power to stop your workers’ unionizing?

THOUGHTS ON THE ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF LOCKDOWNS.

All year we’ve asked ourselves the question: why did this happen? Pathogens are part of life now and always have been. For the better part of a century, social and economic outcomes from new viruses were ever less disruptive. Public health had a settled consensus that disease is something to mitigate through doctor-patient relationships. Taking away people’s rights was out of the question. The last time that was tried in very limited ways in 1918 demonstrated that coercion only distracts, divides, and delays. This is why lockdowns were not attempted for another hundred years. Wisely so.

In the severe pandemic of 1957-58, officials explicitly said: ‘‘[T]here is no practical advantage in the closing of schools or the curtailment of public gatherings as it relates to the spread of this disease.’’ It was the same in 1968-69, 2006, 2009, and 2012-13.

Then came 2020 and SARS-CoV-2. The 24-hour news cycle and social media kicked in. Shocking images from China – people dropping dead in streets, police dragging people out of their homes or otherwise sealing whole apartment units – were blasted onto cellphones the world over. Then a part of Italy seemed to erupt. To many, it felt like a plague, and a primitive disease panic took over political culture.

We know now that the US had sent a delegation to Beijing in mid-February 2020 to get lessons in how properly to control a pandemic, even though the information coming from the Chinese Communist Party has been unreliable at best; there simply is no evidence that their lockdowns in Wuhan were actually responsible for beating back the virus. Obviously so. No disease in history has been suppressed by reliance on brute force over intelligent mitigation.

It’s extremely telling that the lockdowners have stopped seriously arguing that the lockdowns worked.

Locking down for more than a couple of weeks was a mistake, staying locked down for a year is bordering on a crime. Or maybe not just bordering.

Plus:

Let’s imagine an alternative scenario in which lockdowns actually did work on one pathogen. Would they be worth it? Public health, as Martin Kulldorff continues to explain, must consider not just one ailment but the whole well-being of the community, not just in the short run but the long run. Even if Covid-19 was controlled via coercion, was it worth it to wreck so many businesses, force missed cancer screenings, keep kids out of school for a year, shatter so many communities that depend on houses of worship, lock people in their homes, and hobble the ability to travel?

These are egregious actions, and contrary to all the policy practices we associate with free societies that respect human rights. So in one sense, the argument about whether lockdowns “work” – they do not – is beside the point. For the sake of social and economic functioning as well as human rights, disease mitigation must not be managed by political actors but rather medical professions, as AIER has been saying for a full year.

I don’t even trust the medical professions at this point, as they have been as politicized as the politicians.

BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR L’S ONLINE: Ford plans to move future vehicle production out of Ohio and to Mexico.

AVON LAKE, Ohio — Ford workers in Avon Lake were notified by letter from United Auto Workers leadership in Detroit that the automaker is not planning to bring a new line to their Ohio Assembly Plant (OHAP) but instead moving that production to Mexico.

The letter from UAW Vice President Gerald Kariem stated that at the heart of the last contract with Ford signed in November 2019 was to increase job security and Ford, in turn, responded with a commitment to invest $900 million into the Ohio Assembly Plant, some of which was for “next-generation product to be added in 2023,” he wrote.

The UAW, you say?

Related, from April of last year: UAW Endorses Joseph Biden for President of The United States of America.

(Classical reference in headline.)

HE WAS TELLING THE TRUTH THEN, LYING ABOUT IT NOW: Here’s Joe Biden Basically Inviting Illegal Aliens to Surge the Border.

WELL, YES: This so-called ‘anti-racism’ ideology is itself deeply racist.

That’s why decent people should oppose it.

FROM FRANK J. FLEMING:  Superego.

Rico is a psychopath.

That’s why his job as an intergalactic hitman for a massive criminal syndicate suits him so well. He gets to do what he does best: go planet to planet and wreak destruction. He enjoys his work.

But Rico’s latest assignment isn’t what it seems, and after inadvertently thwarting a terror attack, he finds himself playing the good guy. Stuck pretending he’s a cop, he gets paired with some lady detective who is more than a little suspicious of him. To make matters worse, he starts to have new feelings toward her, feelings he’s never felt before. Love, maybe? That’s stupid. What is he supposed to do with that?

And this job isn’t fun, as it soon spirals into secrets, betrayal, and a whole planet out to kill him. Well, it’s a little fun. Still, Rico may have finally found himself in a situation he can’t shoot his way out of.

But that doesn’t mean he won’t try.

ANYONE WHO DOESN’T SWEAR ALLEGIANCE TO THE JUNTA:  Who Is Our Military’s Enemy?

Anyone who remembers our founding documents. Anyone who rejoices in being an American.

AMERICA’S PAPER OF RECORD:  Exclusive Interview With President Biden’s Secret Service Agent.

(Yes, it’s the Bee.)

DON’T YOU LOVE THE TRANSPARENCY?  White House Press Secretary Questioned about Biden Administration Muzzling Customs and Border Patrol, Response: “ask them”.

The Junta will tell you what they want you to to know. Shut up, comrade.

IT NEVER WORKS:  Immanentize the Eschaton!

PUBLIC HEALTH, RUN BY THE GOVERNMENT IS AN OXYMORON:  COVID19 update, Ides of March Edition: the Oxford/AstraZeneca fustercluck redux.

THEY MIGHT IN FACT KILL PEOPLE:  Mask Mandates Do Not Save Lives.

Those who can’t tolerate them for health reasons become shut ins, which causes depression, which–

Ask me how I know!

DUH:  Lockdowns as class warfare of the rich and the professional class against the working class.

I mean, my life changed almost not at all, except for one thing: I lost my mental health day when I went out with my husband and did dorky things like go to a museum or zoo, or walk in the park, then go to dinner. That’s really all, and I almost feel bad complaining about it, except that dorky and stupid as my life was it was mine, and they took it away.

SINCE NOVEMBER THERE ARE NO QUESTIONS, THERE ARE ONLY ANSWERS:  Washington Post Admission Raises Questions About Everything.

And they’re all bad, bad, answers.

DUH:  How the Green New Deal is a Trojan Horse for Totalitarian Government.