READER FAVORITE: KDG Hand Grip Strengthener 2 Pack. #CommissionEarned

CHANGE: Enforcers of China’s One-Child Policy Are Now Cajoling People to Have Three.

Using coercion and fines, China was adept at preventing couples from having children during the decades of its one-child policy. It has been less successful in fostering a “birth-friendly society.”

Births in China continue to fall despite the government’s efforts to shift away from birth restrictions to encouraging all couples to have three children. With a drop in its population last year, China is ceding its long-held title as the world’s most populous country to India.

Chinese births have gone from around 18 million a year in 2016, when the one-child policy was scrapped, to below 10 million now, a drop of 46%. Even during starvation years in the early 1960s, when China’s population was less than half what it is now, births never fell below 10 million.

China seems determined to grow much older before it grows rich.

WELL, GOOD: Personalizing prostate cancer screening may improve the accuracy of detection.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: Dear Conservatives: RFK Jr Is Still Just a F****** Commie.

DONT’ WORRY, IT’S NOT SCHEDULED TO APPEAR UNTIL OCTOBER OF 2024: Experts warn bird flu virus changing rapidly in largest ever outbreak.

The only treatment will involve mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting.

READER BOOK RECOMMENDATION: U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century: A New Strategy for Facing the Chinese and Russian Threat.

WELL, RUSSIA SAYS A LOT OF STUFF: Russia: We Destroyed Ukraine’s Patriot Batteries! Satellite Images: Not So Much. “The U.S. admitted that a Patriot was damaged by the attack, very possibly from shrapnel, but that it was minor and quickly repaired. Satellite image analysis supports this claim.”

At last count, Moscow had also claimed to have destroyed more than twice as many HIMARS launchers as Kyiv has received.

LOSS OF TRUST: Most US adults are declining COVID boosters as CDC warns of health risks: ‘Relatively little protection.’

RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES! Mike Pence Officially Enters the 2024 Presidential Race.

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Megyn Kelly Has an Epiphany on ‘Preferred Pronouns.’

I EXPECT NOTHING LESS FROM THE MARYLAND STATE GOVERNMENT: URL on Maryland license plates now leads to gambling website. “Transport officials in Maryland confirmed a website address printed on hundreds of thousands of Maryland license plates now redirects to a gambling site based in the Philippines. The Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration confirmed the War of 1812 license plates, which were the state’s default plates from 2012 to 2016, bear a URL that no longer leads to its intended website.”

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: FDA to allow imports of cancer drug from China amid ongoing shortage.

WHEN MORONS ARE IN CHARGE:

12/ In an ironic twist reminiscent of Streisand’s self-defeating parade of photograph #3,850, these actions will likely result in massively more coal being burned by the rest of the world than if Europe had simply left well enough alone.

— Doomberg (@DoombergT) June 4, 2023

WELL, YES: Solar panels – an eco-disaster waiting to happen?

“The world has installed more than one terawatt of solar capacity. Ordinary solar panels have a capacity of about 400W, so if you count both rooftops and solar farms, there could be as many as 2.5 billion solar panels.,” says Dr Rong Deng, an expert in solar panel recycling at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

According to the British government, there are tens of millions of solar panels in the UK. But the specialist infrastructure to scrap and recycle them is lacking.
Energy experts are calling for urgent government action to prevent a looming global environmental disaster.

“It’s going to be a waste mountain by 2050, unless we get recycling chains going now,” says Ute Collier, deputy director of the International Renewable Energy Agency.

“We’re producing more and more solar panels – which is great – but how are we going to deal with the waste?” she asks.

Plus this from Rowan Atkinson: I love electric vehicles – and was an early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped.

The first article was published by the Beeb, the second was in The Guardian — what’s up in Britain?

THE COMPREHENSIVE CASE AGAINST RENOMINATING TRUMP: Qunn Hilyer: A Trump nomination would bring GOP victories to a screeching halt.

Trump’s laziness and incompetence are confirmed by those who were closest to him. When a single disgruntled former staffer hurls accusations at his former boss, such complaints may be dismissed as sour grapes. But when numerous former aides, each of high independent stature, all recount the same serious horror stories of an out-of-control president, reasonable people should believe them. Former Gens. H.R. McMaster, James Mattis, and John Kelly, two-time Attorney General William Barr, and longtime foreign policy leader John Bolton were Trump’s “best men.” But he drove them all away to tell harrowing tales of catastrophes averted only because Trump was so easily distracted that he did not follow through on his worst instincts.

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: CNN Exclusive: New Hampshire GOP Gov. Sununu says he will not run for president in 2024.

GET ON THIS, ELON: ‘Free Speech’ Platform Twitter STILL Banning Lab Leak Theory.

The scare quotes are a bit much. Musk has been very good about correcting these problems as they come to his attention and, in the case of “What Is a Woman,” using his considerable influence to promote stuff that had previously been suppressed.

But he’s a busy man and two things are clear. The first is that the censorship is baked into Twitter’s code, which is why Musk himself admitted the platform needs a total rewrite. The second is that there are still plenty of censoring wokesters left on the payroll.

Exit Riddle: What do you call firing 3,700 Twitter employees? A good start.

AGING: Lifechanging new drug could extend human life by 30%, study finds. “The senolytics developed at the Mayo Clinic, when administered, effectively purge the bloodstream of senescent or ‘zombie’ cells. These cells are implicated in numerous diseases and detrimental aging aspects. The study reveals that the elimination of senescent cells leads to a significant increase in the production of a protective protein known as a-klotho.”

CRISIS BY DESIGN: How Many Illegal ‘Got-Aways’ Is Border Patrol Missing? “According to official U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics, Border Patrol has had 1,246,371 encounters in FY2023 to date. There’s another 570,587 encounters from the Office of Field Operations. That’s over 1.8 million encounters so far in FY2023. But the numbers of illegal migrants may be even more shocking than that.”

READER FAVORITE: Yvan Telescoping Ladder. #CommissionEarned

ABOLISH IT: After Durham Report Excoriates FBI for Abuse of Power, GOP Won’t Reauthorize FISA Spy Law Without Reforms.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Nearly 30% of people under 30 support government surveillance cameras in every home: poll. “While the younger generation tends to favor the idea, support declines with age, ‘dropping to 20 percent among 30–44 year olds and dropping considerably to 6 percent among those over the age of 45,’ Cato reported.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: No Sane People Need Apply: Dallas Can Now ‘Terminate’ Employees for ‘Misgendering.’

REPARATIONS:  NOW LEGAL SCHOLARS WANT THE UN TO ORDER THEM:  If you’re looking for a way to destroy a country, this is a good start:  Promise African Americans that you will “study” the possibility of slavery reparations.  Eventually, the time the comes (indeed in California it has come) to implement what the “studies” recommend.  At that point, three things can happen:  (1) the out-of-this-world recommendations will be implemented; (2) an out-of-this-world “compromise” will be implemented, and African Americans will feel shortchanged; or (3) nothing will happen, and African Americans will feel cheated out of what they had been told that they deserve.  All three possibilities are bad.

Conservatives have a tendency to blow this off as just more hot air from the Democratic Party. “It’ll never happen.”  Even if that’s true, it’s bad.  Successful nations are built on a vague sense of camaraderie and trust–a sense that we’re all in this together and that we’re all, more or less, being treated fairly and benefitting from being together.    The USA’s stock of trust and camaraderie is already running low.  Reparations talk may severely deplete what we have left.

I REMEMBER WHEN HIGHER EDUCATION WAS DEFENDED AS PROMOTING RATIONAL THOUGHT: Students more concerned about risk from armed police than criminals.

Well, they’ve been taught that every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners, saints.