THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO SHOW UP: Japan faces population crisis as twice as many deaths recorded as births in 2022.

“If we go on like this, the country will disappear,” former Minister of Justice Masako Mori said, acknowledging the record-low birthrate last year.

“It’s the people who have to live through the process of disappearance who will face enormous harm. It’s a terrible disease that will afflict those children.”

As a result, Kishida has made a commitment to increase spending on children and family, in an effort to stifle the population decline. The report noted that the Japanese population has fallen to 124.6 million from a peak of just over 128 million in 2008, and the rate of decline is only increasing.

Though South Korea has a lower fertility rate, Japan’s population is getting smaller at a faster rate. It was reported that 29 percent of Japan’s population is 65 years of age and older.

“It’s not falling gradually, it’s heading straight down,” said Mori, who currently advises Kishida on LGBTQ issues and the birthrate issue.

“A nosedive means children being born now will be thrown into a society that becomes distorted, shrinks and loses its ability to function.”

Maybe the worst indicator is that even the number of women of childbearing age is in decline. No matter what steps Japan takes, the problem will get worse before it gets better — if ever.

A PREVIEW OF COMING ATTRACTIONS: First Republic drops 60%, leads decline in bank stocks despite government’s backstop of SVB.

WHY DOES MSNBC HATE AMERICA? No MSNBC, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Isn’t A Sick Insidious Movie.

SO MUCH FOR STANFORD’S ‘APOLOGY:’ You recall Stanford University officials sent a letter of apology to Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan following the disruption by administrators and students of his talk before the Federalist Society chapter on the California campus.

But now the other shoes drops on the apology, according to the Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Silbarium, who reports:

“Leaders of the Stanford Federalist Society received an email Saturday night from acting associate dean of students Jeanne Merino, who stood by silently as students disrupted Duncan’s talk. Merino pointed them to ‘resources that you can use right now to support your safety and mental health’ — and discouraged them from tweeting about the event ‘until this news cycle winds down.’

“Among the resources Merino to which pointed them was Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach, who took the podium from Duncan to talk about the ‘harm’ he’d caused — and whom Stanford condemned in its apology to Duncan, characterizing Steinbach’s intervention as ‘inappropriate.'”

One might well conclude the inmates are running the asylum known as the Stanford University Law School.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Was Sweden right about Covid all along?

To understand Sweden, you need to understand a word that’s hard to explain, let alone translate: lagom. It means, in effect, “perfect-simple”: not too much, not too little. People who are lagom don’t stand out or make a fuss: they blend right in – and this is seen as a virtue.

Essays are written about why lagom sums up a certain Swedish mindset – that it’s bad to stand out, to consider yourself better or be an outlier. That’s why it’s so strange that, during the lockdowns, Sweden became the world’s defiant outlier.

Swedes saw it the other way around. They were keeping calm and carrying on: lockdown was an extreme, draconian, untested experiment. Lock up everyone, keep children out of school, suspend civil liberties, send police after people walking their dogs – and call this “caution”? Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, never spoke about a Swedish “experiment”. He said all along he could not recommend a public health intervention that had never been proven.

Tegnell also made another point: that he didn’t claim to be right. It would take years, he’d argue, to see who had jumped the right way. His calculation was that, on a whole-society basis, the collateral damage of lockdowns would outweigh what good they do. But you’d only know if this was so after a few years. You’d have to look at cancer diagnosis, hospital waiting lists, educational damage and, yes, count the Covid dead.

The problem with lockdowns is that no one looks at whole-society pictures. Professor Neil Ferguson’s team from Imperial College London admitted this, once, as a breezy aside. “We do not consider the wider social and economic costs of suppression,” they wrote in a supposed assessment of lockdown, “which will be high.” But just how high? And were they a price worth paying?

Flashback to November: Sweden Wins! Country That Refused Lockdown and Kept Schools Open Has Lowest Pandemic Mortality in the World.

“AN AGENDA FOR CONGRESS“:  I got to talk about this paper a bit over the weekend at a small gathering in Santa Monica.  It’s good to get meet with people who are serious about getting the country back on track.

HMM: Rep. Comer Says He Has the Goods on Hunter Biden and His Commie $$$. “We actually have bank records in hand. We have individuals who are working with our community.”

HAVE ANY OF THOSE ENVIRO-DOOM PREDICTIONS TURNED OUT TO BE RIGHT? Greta Thunberg’s 2018 Prediction That World Would End In Five Years Doesn’t Turn Out So Well.

Paul Ehrlich, call your office.

DEAL OF THE DAY: iHealth COVID-19 Antigen Rapid Tests. #CommissionEarned

I HOPE THEY GET THE ADRENOCHROME DOSAGE RIGHT: Biden to address bank closures Monday morning.

WELCOME TO THE CLUB! The growing ranks of Black gun owners.

In 2016, Toure founded Black Guns Matter, a Philadelphia-based gun rights advocacy and education group focused on African Americans that offers free classes on everything from conflict resolution to yoga. People fly him around the country to speak. But teaching members of the Black community here in Philly how to use firearms to defend their life and liberty is his calling.

“There’s not a question that more Black people would be alive today if they had guns,” Toure told me.

Toure and his students are a part of the fastest growing — and most often ignored — segment of gun owners in the United States: Black Americans.

Between 2014 and 2021, the percentage of African American adults who own registered firearms nearly doubled — from 14% to 24%. And, according to industry figures, gun purchases by Black Americans spiked nearly 60% from the first half of 2019 to the same period in 2020.

Don’t forget that range time.

ROGER KIMBALL AND FREDDY GRAY: What Happened on January 6th?

AND AGAIN: Signature Bank shut down in connection with Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Founded in 2001, the New York-based Signature Bank was popular among crypto companies.

Signature was notable for having former Democratic Congressman Barney Frank on its Board. Frank’s signature Dodd-Frank Act, crafted in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, sought to improve accountability and transparency in the financial system.

Under that law, banks with assets in excess of $50 billion were deemed as being potentially “too big to fail,” and were therefore subject to a host of rigorous testing and regulation.

Also notable:

2022: Jim Cramer recommends Signature Bank.

2023: Signature Bank shuts down.

How does he do it? pic.twitter.com/2QskFTUPe6

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 12, 2023

MATT TAIBBI: The Democrats’ Disastrous Miscalculation on Civil Liberties: Americans have been told a dangerous and uncertain world requires stronger managers and less freedom, but the decline of civil liberties is what started this mess.

Our “stronger managers” seem to mostly be idiots, as every day of this sad administration and the January 6 committee has made clear. Giving them more power is a terrible idea.

VICTORIA TAFT: West Coast, Messed Coast™: The Left’s Unconstitutional Assault on Guns. “Illegal aliens, drug-addicted-tent-dwellers, abortion seekers, and underaged children who are secretly brought to their states for trans surgeries and puberty blockers, all have the protection of government… unlike legal gun owners.”

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Is The DEI Juice Worth The Squeeze? The debacle at Stanford Law School is the logical conclusion of DEIdeology. “Judge Duncan’s confusion is warranted. He was there to talk about actual decisions of his court, and how those cases affected Supreme Court jurisprudence. Students attend an elite institution like Stanford to learn firsthand from luminaries like sitting federal judges. How could those comments possibly not be worth Duncan’s presence on campus? If students did not think Duncan’s remarks were worthwhile, they could have done anything else. Like wait on line at a Silicon Valley Bank branch. But Steinbach’s remarks should make sense to anyone who has witnessed the explosion of DEI in recent years.”