REPORT FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Maui response is a disaster.

OH, DARN: This Portland Woman Won’t Date You Unless You Suffer From Crippling Climate Anxiety.

Kinda reminds me of something.

Related: Liberal Activist David Hogg Says He’d Rather Own a Porsche Than Have Children Because It’s ‘Better for the Environment.’ Certainly better for the gene pool in your case, pal.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY, CHAIRMAN XI: Is China’s Data Manipulated, or Flawed? Maybe Both: Suspension of the youth unemployment rate fits the autocrat’s playbook of burying unflattering statistics.

The unemployment rate for China’s youth reached an all time record of 21.3% in June. China’s National Bureau of Statistics responded by ceasing publication of the rate.

The move calls attention to the lengths to which Beijing will go to suppress unflattering information, in this case the economic distress facing China’s young people.

Yet burying the data doesn’t fix the problem; it doesn’t even hide it. Rather, it reveals something endemic to autocratic societies: an inability, or unwillingness, to produce genuinely accurate and unbiased statistics.

Tuesday’s decision to suspend reporting the unemployment rate for people ages 16 to 24, which the government attributed to issues over how to treat students looking for work, is part of a pattern: Beijing drops a data series, often quietly, citing poor data quality, then waits until everyone forgets.

“The National Bureau of Statistics has a history of discontinuing important data series,” Carsten Holz, a professor at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, said via email. “The NBS mission is not to serve the public, but the Chinese Communist Party. Any order from the Party to obfuscate the derivation of the official GDP [gross domestic product] statistics or to discontinue unfavorable unemployment statistics would take precedence over professional statistics practices.”

Good thing that could never happen here.

Related: Lehman Moment? Investors Fear a Financial Contagion in China: Troubles at a big trust company worry investors about fallout from the slumping property sector.

Signs of financial stress at a large asset manager in China are making investors nervous about contagion from the country’s slumping property sector, rekindling a debate over whether a “Lehman moment” could occur in the world’s second-largest economy.

Zhongrong International Trust, a seller of esoteric financial products that had the equivalent of $108 billion in assets under management at the end of 2022, has become the market’s latest worry. Four trust products managed by the firm recently missed interest and principal payments totaling the equivalent of $14 million to three publicly listed Chinese companies, according to stock-exchange filings. Beijing-headquartered Zhongrong has provided financing to many real-estate developers and helped to fund their building projects.

Zhongrong is part of a larger, sprawling financial conglomerate called Zhongzhi Enterprise Group that owns several wealth-management businesses. If their repayment problems and defaults snowball, it could imperil many more investment products that were sold to numerous companies and wealthy individuals in China.

On social media, some individual investors said they didn’t receive promised payments from Zhongrong products and some from Zhongzhi’s other units, and have complained to local authorities. Neither company has responded publicly to the allegations, and they didn’t reply to requests for comment.

You know, China was booming, then Xi injected communism back into it, and now it’s dying. It’s like that stuff is poison or something.

CHANGE:

Nobody ever figured out what Plan B was in the event the voice of authority stopped working and multitudes began laughing at the TV. But it wasn't racism or patriarchy that took things to this point. It was mostly technology.

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) August 20, 2023

YES, IT WOULD HAVE: Our pandemic outcome would have been better with more debate, less censorship.

Each technological age renews the fight over speech infringement. If given an inch, government censors inevitably take a mile. In July, pushback came when a federal court issued a temporary injunction against federal bureaucrats leaning on social-media companies. The decision takes particular trouble to note the bureaucracy’s campaign to silence dissenters to its Covid policies. Many of those policies are now seen to have been ill-advised.

A plaintiff in the lawsuit, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, recently made an arresting admission in an interview with the Hoover Institution. Dr. Bhattacharya was co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, that still-vilified October 2020 challenge to Covid lockdowns. He now says the declaration was the “least original thing I ever worked on in my entire life.”

This rang some bells with me. In late January and early February 2020, I channeled what experts were thinking about the then-novel coronavirus. Most infections were mild or even asymptomatic and weren’t being properly counted. The virus was likely already rampant in places it wasn’t yet detected, like New York City. It couldn’t be stopped at a cost a sane humanity would be willing to pay. It was also far less deadly than was being reported.

But then things turned weird. This balanced assessment, roughly universal among experts, was shelved in a bandwagon frenzy that deserves more attention than it’s gotten. . . .

Meanwhile, bans on elective medical procedures, forced unemployment, school closures and other extreme measures produced their own toll. Among the 1.1 million Americans who died of Covid, their average age was 74 and they lost 12 years of life. Nobody yet knows the total years lost to younger people due to “excess deaths” from substance abuse, suicide, homicide, accidents, lack of cancer screening and other non-Covid causes. Only with the arrival of the Biden administration did it become expedient to acknowledge a truth known from the start: The virus was something we would have to “live with,” not defeat with indiscriminate social and economic curbs.

This is where the decision of U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty sheds light. His detailed recounting shows a Washington energetic in protecting Americans from Covid opinions, expertise and claims that conflicted with its own, at a time when it served politicians to show they were trying to save Americans from encountering a virus that couldn’t be avoided. When government has a message to deliver, especially when the political stakes are high, it won’t be content just to push its own message, it will try to silence others. Fighting back will always be necessary. The only surprise in our age is how thoroughly the “liberal” position has become the pro-censorship position.

Well, the thing to remember is that it wasn’t about getting a better pandemic outcome, but about securing political advantage.

CHANGE: Netherlands, Denmark to provide F-16s to Ukraine.

ON SUNDAYS I DO A BOOK PROMO (MOSTLY) FOR INDIE WRITERS, AND THERE’S ALSO A VIGNETTE CHALLENGE: Book Promo and Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

AMERICA’S GREATEST MILITARY DEBACLE: The Road to the Fall of Kabul. “The negotiated surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban, retreat to Kabul, and withdraw from Kabul under the grace of our enemy in the summer of 2021 remains a mostly untold story. Partially is it from the attention given to the Russo-Ukrainian War that started six months later, but it seems more a byproduct of disinterest by most of our press who seem to want to discuss almost anything else.”

FIRST UFOS THEN THIS. WHY DOES THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN WHEN THE DEMOCRATS ARE DOING THEIR LEVEL BEST TO DESTROY THE COUNTRY?  Skeptics stunned by resurfaced video of ‘Bigfoot’ in Mississippi woods: ‘Best footage ever recorded’.

What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes… The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together – MASS HYSTERIA!

I DON’T SAY THIS LIGHTLY, AND I KNOW NYC IS VERY BELOVED OF MANY PEOPLE BUT THOSE WHO CAN, DO CONSIDER MOVING:  Two hit in head with baseball bat in separate Queens attacks.

BOOMERS? SMOKING WEED? SO, DAY ENDING IN Y?  A surprising demographic is experimenting with weed more than any others.

NAME THAT PARTY:  Sen. Bob Casey campaign took $220K from bro’s law firm, with partner vetting judicial picks.

THIS IS THE ONLY ISSUE IN 24, OKAY? EVERYTHING ELSE IS A DISTRACTION. ELECTION INTEGRITY IS THE ONLY ISSUE. IGNORE IT AND NOTHING ELSE MATTERS:  Federal Judges Gut GOP-Backed Election Integrity Laws in Georgia, Texas.

YOU CANNOT CHANGE. YOU CAN ONLY LOOK LIKE:  Chinese-American Mom: Gender-Confused Children Are Victims of an Enormous Lie.

WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT EXPERTS?  Transgenderism Has ‘Parasitized People’s Emotions,’ Says Expert.

SOMEHOW BASKET OF DEPLORABLES WAS MORE POETIC:  DeSantis Calls Trump Supporters ‘Listless Vessels,’ Sparking Comparisons to Hillary Clinton.

IT’S ALL THEY HAVE. THAT AND PROPAGANDA:  With Economy in Crisis, China Resorts to Coverup.

HOW DOES THIS COMPARE TO JUST THROWING THE WATCHER’S OUT AS IN 2020:  Democrats Want Their Private Security Looking Over GOP Poll Watchers’ Shoulders.

FOURTEEN CITIES THAT WANT TO STOP EXISTING:  These 14 American Cities Have A ‘Target’ Of Banning Meat, Dairy, And Private Vehicles By 2030.