HMM: U.S. Intel: ‘Everyone Is Sensing the End Is Near’ for Putin.
I haven’t written about these cancer stories that have been coming out the last three months or so, mostly because they read like rumors or even wishful thinking. But this one seems much more solid.
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: New York City lawmaker assumes ‘white supremacy’ motivated Tulsa shooter—he was black.
SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.
LIVE AT 4PM EASTERN: ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’ with Kruiser, VodkaPundit, Megan Fox.
READER ALERT: Sun Joe Electric High Pressure Washer. #CommissionEarned
THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO SHOW UP: China’s population is about to shrink for the first time since the great famine struck 60 years ago.
Theories differ about why Chinese women remain reluctant to have children in the face of state incentives. One involves having become used to small families, another involves the rising cost of living, another involves increasing marriage age, which delay births and the dampens the desire to have children.
In addition, China has fewer women of child-bearing age than might be expected. Limited to having only one child since 1980, many couples opted for a boy, lifting the sex at birth ratio from 106 boys for every 100 girls (the ratio in most of the rest of the world) to 120, and in some provinces to 130.
China’s total population grew by a post-famine low of just 0.34 in 1,000 last year.
Projections prepared by a team at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences have it falling this year – for the first time post-famine – by 0.49 in a thousand.
The turning point has come a decade sooner than expected.
Plus: “China’s working-age population peaked in 2014 and is projected to shrink to less than one third of that peak by 2100.”
SKYNET SMILES: The Army is testing out ‘wolfpacks’ of swarming drones.
CREEPY PORN LAWYER UPDATE: Michael Avenatti sentenced to four years in prison for defrauding Stormy Daniels.
Flashback: A Look Back At All The Media Praise For Michael Avenatti.
STAR WARS, BARELY EVEN STAR WARS: The Problem with ‘Obi-Wan’ Isn’t What You’ve Been Told. “Halfway through, the good parts of Obi-Wan are getting fewer and further in between, and it’s the heroes who will annoy you the most.”
THIS COULD COME IN HANDY: Scientists May Have Found a Way to Inject Oxygen Into The Bloodstream Intravenously.
WHEN LIBERTARIANS BECOME WOKE-ITARIANS: Cato Institute, leading filer of court briefs, loses its principles. “16 other amicus briefs were filed this week in the Supreme Court, in support of the free-speech argument — by civil liberties groups, a gay law professor, conservative and religious groups, and state legislators. But not by the Cato Institute. It would have taken the Cato Institute virtually no effort to simply resubmit its earlier brief.”
The thing about the libertarian establishment, like the GOP establishment, is that it’s mostly made up of members of the Gentry Class who retain strong tribal/class loyalties to Gentry Class values, regardless of their ostensible political leanings.
IT’S WHAT THEY DO: Biden Administration Changes Rules To Get Graft Flowing To Leftwing Cronies Again. “My Working Theory is that every single expansion of the welfare state is merely a means to pass graft into the hands of Democratic Party cronies and leftwing activists. Today’s data point: Merrick Garland is bringing back Obama-era legally-mandated slush funds for leftwing activist groups scrapped by Trump.”
Me, yesterday: “Old Joe isn’t all there anymore, but he still knows exactly what to do with Other People’s Money. He might need help putting his pants on right-side-out, but don’t get in between the Big Guy and a big take.”
IT SOUNDS PROMISING: Why ketamine is a speedster antidepressant.
STAY ALERT: Keurig K-Mini Coffee Maker, Single Serve. #CommissionEarned (Bumped)
DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Mountain lion roams into California high school classroom.
I’D HAVE PREFERRED AN UPSIDE THAT INCLUDED SOME JAIL TIME, BUT I SUPPOSE THIS WILL HAVE TO DO: Bill Barr Explains Upside to Sussmann Trial, Praises Durham.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 3 grams a day of omega-3 fatty acids can help reduce blood pressure, study says. Though it’s not earthshaking: “For people with existing hypertension, the study found that blood pressure decreased an average of 4.5 mm Hg.”
GRANNY-KILLER CUOMO UPDATE: Cuomo Chickens Out of Running for Office.
OH, THAT LIBERAL FASCISM: Covid was liberalism’s endgame.
How are we to understand the dramatically different responses of our society to the Spanish flu of a century ago and to Covid today? There is an inverse relationship between the severity of these pandemics and the severity of measures to control them. Clearly, Covid acquired some of its emergency energy from the ambient political crisis dating from 2016, which put the establishment on a war footing. But it also slotted nicely into the more general politics of emergency that is the unacknowledged core of technocratic progressivism, and is further advanced today than it was in 1918.
In 2020, a fearful public acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life, and a corresponding transfer of sovereignty from representative bodies to unelected agencies located in the executive branch of government. Notoriously, polling indicated that perception of the risks of Covid outstripped the reality by one to two orders of magnitude, but with a sharp demarcation: the hundredfold distortion was among self-identified liberal Democrats, that is, those whose yard signs exhorted us to “believe in science”.
In a technocratic regime, whoever controls what Science Says controls the state. What Science Says is then subject to political contest, and subject to capture by whoever funds it. Which turns out to be the state itself. Here is an epistemic self-licking ice cream cone that bristles at outside interference. Many factual ambiguities and rival hypotheses about the pandemic, typical of the scientific process, were resolved not by rational debate but by intimidation, with heavy use of the term “disinformation” and attendant enforcement by social media companies acting as franchisees of the state. In this there seems to have been a consistent bias toward scientific interpretations that induced fear, even at the cost of omitting relevant context.
If all of this strikes you as illiberal, it should. Yet in another sense, the central role of fear in politics has an impeccable liberal pedigree in the thought of Thomas Hobbes. This brings us to the deeper, anthropological project of liberalism.
Which speaks volumes, considering how deeply illiberal much of 1910s America were.
A GOOD DESCRIPTION OF OUR MEDIA: “Halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum.”
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