IT’S A WORLDWIDE PROBLEM: Why China’s Young People Are Not Getting Married.

Grace Zhang, a tech worker who had long been ambivalent about marriage, spent two months barricaded in the government lockdown of Shanghai last year. Robbed of the ability to move freely, she spiraled over the loss of control. As she saw the lockdowns spread to other cities, her sense of optimism faded.

When China reopened in December, Ms. Zhang, 31, left Shanghai to work remotely, traveling from city to city in hopes that a change of scene would restore her positive outlook.

Now, as she sees rising layoffs around her in a troubled economy, she wonders if her job is secure enough to sustain a future family. She has a boyfriend but no immediate plans to marry, despite frequent admonishments from her father that it’s time to settle down.

“This kind of instability in life will make people more and more afraid of making new life changes,” she said.

The number of marriages in China declined for nine consecutive years, falling by half in less than a decade. Last year, about 6.8 million couples registered for marriage, the lowest since records began in 1986, down from 13.5 million in 2013, according to government data released last month. . . .

“At the moment, I’m still looking for stability and seeing what’s going on with the economy,” said Mr. Xu, who lives in the southwestern city of Chengdu.

Until 2020, Erin Wang, 35, was optimistic about living in China. Then, she saw the government crack down on private companies, killing jobs in the process, and take a heavy-handed approach to the pandemic. She grew concerned about the increasingly authoritarian environment.

“I felt like I had no confidence to have a baby in China,” she said.

Plus: “Adjusted for per-capita economic output, China is the second most expensive country in the world to raise a child, behind South Korea, according to Chinese demographers.”

Related: The Global Fertility Collapse.

Flashback: The Parent Trap.

Related: Montesquieu’s Warning About Our Childlessness.

Also: car seats as contraception: “Since 1977, U.S. states have passed laws steadily raising the age for which a child must ride in a car safety seat. These laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back. Using census data and state-year variation in laws, we estimate that when women have two children of ages requiring mandated car seats, they have a lower annual probability of giving birth by 0.73 percentage points. Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, is concentrated in households with access to a car, and is larger when a male is present (when both front seats are likely to be occupied). We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000.”

Possibly related: Economic Growth is a Battle for Talent. China is Losing: Talent can walk, and it is walking away from China.

Also: How China’s baby bust can help birth a second American Century.

SAD: 2023 Boy Scout National Jamboree Will Be Less Than Half the Size It Was When Trump Spoke There.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Zoo asks visitors to stop showing phone videos to gorillas.

SOCIALISM IN 24 SECONDS:

This is so surreal. The socialist Spanish minister uses a private jet to attend a climate conference. 100 metres before the venue she gets out off the limo and takes a bicycle. The security cars follow her. pic.twitter.com/NkSF3hJrOH

— David Vance (@DVATW) July 11, 2023

DON SURBER: From the Halls of Montezuma, to the Shores of Pauly.

I BLAME MARTIAN SUVs: The climate of Mars changed dramatically 400,000 years ago, Chinese rover finds.

AT AMAZON: Prime Day Deals are here. #CommissionEarned

UGH: State Republican Party Committees in Disarray in Key States as 2024 Nears.

YES. IT COMPROMISES THE MISSION, AND THERE’S NO PARTICULAR BASIS TO THINK LAW SCHOOLS HAVE SPECIAL INSIGHT INTO THE RIGHTS AND WRONGS: Programs [and law schools] are issuing statements on a host of political issues. That’s a mistake.

Related: Knowing the Role of your Organization and the Strength of Neutrality.

MATT VESPA: What Trump’s Legal Team Just Filed Might Not Please Special Counsel Jack Smith.

It’s news that no one wants to hear regarding the trial over the alleged mishandling of classified materials by Donald Trump. It’s the second indictment slapped against the former president, with the first being related to Trump’s hush money agreement with ex-porn star Stormy Daniels. That legal entanglement is a circus drenched in partisan politics. The legalese etched in the Daniels indictment brought forward by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is viewed as exceptionally shoddy, but there will be a trial next year, nonetheless. That’s the point: damaging Trump through death-by-a-thousand legal cuts could work.

This classified materials indictment filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith is also a partisan witch hunt, though harder to dismiss as Trump did engage in reckless activities with these sensitive documents. He made the case for the overly zealous lawyers at the Justice Department easy. It was preventable, but that’s history. Smith claimed he wanted a speedy trial though he asked for a four-month delay in setting the date. Now, given the circumstances, Trump’s legal team is asking to delay the trial until after the presidential election.

I’m a rip-the-bandage-off-all-at-once kind of guy, so the delay doesn’t make much sense to me, particularly while trying to run for office with “legal entanglements like this around your neck,” as Vespa put it.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: If It’s Tuesday, We Must Be Stuck With Biden Forever (Unless We Aren’t). “I’ll have to ask you to forgive me for sounding like I’m suffering from Sudden Onset Multiple Personality Disorder — that’s a thing, right? — because I’m only following a news cycle that spins and flips around like two fat kids riding a seesaw mounted to a trampoline inside a bouncy house.”

PRIME DAY DEAL: DASH Deluxe Rapid Egg Cooker. #CommissionEarned

GET WOKE…: Not Just Bud Light: Anheuser-Busch’s Other Beer Brands See Sales Crash.

Sales of Michelob Ultra fell by 4.3 percent in the week that ended July 1 compared with last year, and Busch Light was down 8.5 percent, the New York Post reported. Both brands are, like Bud Light, owned by the Anheuser-Busch brewing company.

“Budweiser trends have been slipping for a very long time, but it’s the Michelob Ultra negative numbers and now Busch Light negative trends that are most alarming to me,” Bump Williams, whose consulting firm ran the numbers from NielsenIQ data, told the Post. “They were very healthy prior to April 1.”

Sales of Bud Light the week prior, ending on June 24, were 27.9 percent lower than during the same period last year. The brand’s troubling numbers came despite Bud Light giving out rebates for free beer ahead of Independence Day weekend.

Maybe they should try apologizing and making a very public management shakeup. Mostly, Anheuser-Busch’s marketing division should move out of New York and back to its roots in St Louis.

THE LEGAL ACADEMY HASN’T COVERED ITSELF WITH GLORY LATELY: Law professor: ‘Unfortunate’ that Michigan anti-free speech bill likely unconstitutional.

DECLINE IS A CHOICE, AND LOS ANGELES VOTERS CHOSE IT AGAIN AND AGAIN: As New Crime-Encouraging Policies Take Effect, Rapper 50 Cent Says L.A. Is ‘Finished.’

GOOD QUESTION: ‘If pro-life students aren’t safe at Christian universities, where can they be safe?’

BACK TO BAKHMUT: Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 10, 2023.

Ukrainian officials stated on July 10 that Ukrainian forces have fire control over Bakhmut and Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) around the city. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar stated that Ukrainian forces have taken control of unspecified heights around Bakhmut, allowing Ukrainian forces to establish fire control over Bakhmut itself. Ukrainian officials have recently signaled that Ukraine seeks to trap Russian forces within the city, and it appears that Ukrainian operations in the Bakhmut area in recent days have been intended to slowly envelop Russian troops in Bakhmut and on its flanks. ISW was previously conservative when assessing claims of Russian fire control and general interdiction of Ukrainian lines of communication in and around Bakhmut as Russian forces gradually took control of the settlement, but Ukrainian claims of establishing fire control may be more credible. Both Ukrainian and Russian sources have indicated in recent days that Ukraine is gaining ground in the Bakhmut area and on its southwestern flanks including specific terrain features that can give Ukrainian forces fire advantage.

Bakhmut — maybe best summed up with “never have so many fought so hard over so little” — was Russia’s only gain in their costly winter/spring offensive.

“FOLLOW THE SCIENCE:” My Research on Gender Dysphoria Was Censored. But I Won’t Be.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: New Biden Spin—He’s a Real Jerk So…No Dementia! “I buy the part about the rants happening but the notion that the perpetually addled idiot we see in virtually every public appearance suddenly becomes engaged and just bursting with brilliant questions is a tough sell.”

SUPREME COURT ETHICS: Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor’s staff prodded colleges and libraries to buy her books.

Sotomayor’s staff has often prodded public institutions that have hosted the justice to buy her memoir or children’s books, works that have earned her at least $3.7 million since she joined the court in 2009. Details of those events, largely out of public view, were obtained by The Associated Press through more than 100 open records requests to public institutions. The resulting tens of thousands of pages of documents offer a rare look at Sotomayor and her fellow justices beyond their official duties. . . .

In 2019, as Sotomayor traveled the country to promote her new children’s book, “Just Ask!,” library and community college officials in Portland, Oregon, jumped at the chance to host an event.

They put in long hours and accommodated the shifting requests of Sotomayor’s court staff. Then, as the public cost of hosting the event soared almost tenfold, a Sotomayor aide emailed with a different, urgent concern: She said the organizers did not buy enough copies of the justice’s book, which attendees had to purchase or have on hand in order to meet Sotomayor after her talk.

“For an event with 1,000 people and they have to have a copy of Just Ask to get into the line, 250 books is definitely not enough,” the aide, Anh Le, wrote staffers at the Multnomah County Library.

This, like all the “ethics” stuff raised recently, is pretty penny ante stuff. But it’s interesting that efforts to delegitimize the Court are spreading to affect lefty justices too.

THE ELITE WANT A LOT OF THINGS THAT THE PUBLIC DOESN’T WANT, AND KEEP REJIGGERING THE RULES TO GET THEM: Unpopularity Behind Elite Demands For Spying And Censorship: French President calls for mass censorship after passing law for secret smartphone spying.

All around the world, they’re worried that ordinary people will figure out what’s being done to them, and organize in response. That’s why they’re constantly trying to make that less likely and more difficult.

BEGUN, THE NAPOLEONIC WARS HAVE: Napoleon heralds the return of the man’s movie.

It is a stereotype to suggest that all a male viewer wants to watch at his local cinema is bloodshed. Yet there is going to be an enormous amount of that on offer during the rest of 2023 (although Oppenheimer, bizarrely, is promising extended scenes of nudity and sex from its stars Florence Pugh and Cillian Murphy instead; whatever floats your boat). The return of such maestros as David Fincher, Martin Scorsese and Scott to cinemas is welcome — even if all their pictures had to be funded by streaming services — but it is also a reminder of how few younger filmmakers are emerging with this kind of picture.

We shall see whether Napoleon is another [Ridley] Scott classic, or a disappointment, but its early marketing suggests that the now eighty-five-year-old director has returned with a big, manly epic, full of swagger and panache. When it emerges this Thanksgiving, cinemas will be awash with viscera and blood — metaphorically speaking — and if it proves a critical and commercial hit (Scorsese’s picture has already won rave reviews at Cannes) then we can tentatively look forward to a renaissance in male-oriented pictures. I’m still holding out for a Lord Nelson biopic, but there’s Gladiator 2 on its way next year, with persistent rumors of a Russell Crowe cameo. Who knows: if enough men have films aimed at them again, they might even start going to the cinema in considerable numbers instead of snoozing in front of Netflix in their underwear. And if you build it — and do it well — they will, let’s hope, come.

Meanwhile, there is another Napoleonic project in the works: Steven Spielberg “Mounting A Big Production” For Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Napoleon’; Project Is Set As Seven-Part Limited Series For HBO.

One of Stanley Kubrick’s lost projects, a large-scale biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, has been in the works for HBO for the last seven years.

Steven Spielberg, who has been involved for at least ten years, now says he is “mounting a big production” and the project will become a seven-part series for the premium cable network.

Deadline understands that the project is still in the development stages but it is nearing a series order.

Speaking at the Berlin Film Festival, The Fabelmans director said, “With the co-operation of Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan, we’re mounting a large production for HBO on based on Stanley’s original script Napoloeon. We are working on Napoleon as a seven-part limited series,” he said.

Kubrick himself would likely be quite happy with the miniseries format for Napoleon. In an interview discussing his brilliant 1975 film Barry Lyndon (which grew out of the research he had begun for the stillborn Napoleon project) with his biographer, French film critic Michel Ciment, Kubrick said, “I have had a complete set of Thackeray sitting on my bookshelf at home for years, and I had to read several of his novels before reading Barry Lyndon. At one time, Vanity Fair interested me as a possible film but, in the end, I decided the story could not be successfully compressed into the relatively short time-span of a feature film. This problem of length, by the way, is now wonderfully accommodated for by the television miniseries which, with its ten- to twelve-hour length, pressed on consecutive nights, has created a completely different dramatic form.”

UH-HUH: Biden admin attempts to blame construction workers for baggie of cocaine in the West Wing.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan hinted that the cocaine found at the White House likely came from construction workers working in the area for renovation instead of the Biden family.

Sullivan noted that the space has not been in use recently as the area by the situation room has not been undergoing renovations.

He said, “I would make a point about the Situation Room because I think there’s been a lot questionable reporting on this. The Situation Room is not in use and has not been in use for months because it is currently under construction.”

The space currently being used as a substitute for the space is in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. “[T]he only people coming in and going out of the Sit Room in this period have been workers who are getting it ready to go,” Sullivan added.

Sullivan’s story would do a better job of passing the sniff test if the Situation Room weren’t the third location where the cocaine was claimed to have been found.

ABOLISH IT, AT THIS POINT IT PROBABLY DOES MORE HARM THAN GOOD: NIH Leadership Drops the Ball Again.

TO BE FAIR, THAT’S ONLY BECAUSE HE’S AWFUL: White House Report Card: Fewer believe Biden, more want him gone.