MODERNIZATION: China cuts down army troops by about 50%; increases size of navy, air force.

The 2 million-strong Chinese military has significantly boosted its navy, air force and new strategic units and downsized its land-based army, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported quoting a state-run Xinhua report.

In a feature report highlighting the “transformational changes” made by the PLA, Xinhua on Sunday said “this new data is unprecedented in the history of the PLA the army now accounts for less than 50 per cent of the total number of PLA troops; almost half of our non-combatant units have been made redundant, and the number of officers in the PLA has been reduced by 30 per cent.”

In the last few years, the PLA has downsized its military by retrenching three lakh troops under the military reforms initiated by President Xi Jinping. But it still remained the world’s largest military with two million personnel in the ranks.

The statement indicated that the four other branches of the PLA the navy, air force, rocket force and strategic support force, which is responsible for areas such as cyberwarfare – now together make up more than half of the Chinese military, overtaking the army, which has traditionally been the dominant unit of the PLA.

It wasn’t that long ago that the entire Chinese military numbered around four million personnel. Beijing is serious moving from a Soviet-style mass conscript army of questionably trained soldiers, to a smaller, professional, and much more lethal force more like the American model.

But an important question remains. Authoritarian regimes can’t tolerate the kind of bottom-up, individual initiative which makes a Western-style military so deadly. Can Beijing maintain a top-down regime and a bottom-up PLA?

We’ll see.

SAD: Forget marriage, South Koreans aren’t even dating.

A survey by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs published in early January found that as of 2012, the latest year for which figures are available, less than 40 per cent of 20- to 44-year-olds were actively dating. The proportion in traditional marriages is even lower.

In 2015, 90 per cent of men and 77 per cent of women aged 25 to 29 were unmarried, according to a report in The Korea Herald . Among those aged 30 to 34, the figure was 56 per cent, shrinking to 33 per cent for 40- to 45-year-olds, the report said. For comparison, a 2015 survey by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in neighbouring Japan found that 23 per cent of men had never married by age 50, versus 14 per cent of women.

South Korea’s birth rate is also the lowest in the world, dropping to 0.95 at the end of last year – meaning that for every 100 women, just 95 children were born. To maintain a stable population, the birth rate needs to be 2.1. In the boom times of the early 70s, nearly 1 million South Korean babies were being born each year, but by 2017 that number had more than halved to 357,700.

The result of this is a society that is increasingly made up of old people. By 2030, nearly one-third of all South Koreans will be age 65 or older, according to a report published last year by economist Lee Jong-wha of Korea University.

An entire country with demographics like Florida, where Americans go in large numbers to retire.

COCAINE MITCH: Senate GOP could change rules to speed Trump nominees’ confirmation.

BRUCE BAWER: Western Elites Still Treating Jihad as Mental Illness. “Another assailant says he’s a terrorist, but what does he know?”

GOOD LORD: ‘Not a single day of rest’: victims reveal details of modern slavery case in China.

Syndicate members would take them to work at places such as construction sites, fertiliser plants, grain warehouses, logging operations and dairy farms in Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang province, according to the report.

Wherever they were working, the syndicates rented accommodation nearby. More than a dozen men would have to share a small room, and they were locked in.

The victims told the news site the work day ran from early in the morning until late at night – sometimes until 2am.

Sun said at one stage they were forced to work for two days and nights without sleep at a fertiliser plant in Harbin, while at a state-run warehouse in the province, they spent three days and nights hauling bags of grain. He said anyone who slowed down or complained they were tired was punched or beaten with iron hooks and wooden sticks.

“State-run.”

TOLERANCE: Egypt TV host Mohamed al-Ghiety jailed for interviewing gay man.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: MAGA Hat-Gate Continues and Much, Much More.

OH: Dems Who Slammed GOP Over Kavanaugh Attended Puerto Rico Trip with Tony Cardenas. “Cardenas faces allegations that he drugged and molested a 16-year-old.”

YAWN: Twitter suspends account that helped ignite controversy over viral encounter.

The account claimed to belong to a California schoolteacher. Its profile photo was not of a schoolteacher, but of a blogger based in Brazil, CNN Business found. Twitter suspended the account soon after CNN Business asked about it.

The account, with the username @2020fight, was set up in December 2016 and appeared to be the tweets of a woman named Talia living in California. “Teacher & Advocate. Fighting for 2020,” its Twitter bio read. Since the beginning of this year, the account had tweeted on average 130 times a day and had more than 40,000 followers.

I’ll be impressed when Twitter finally goes after the big celebrity accounts who fanned the flames of hate far higher than some anonymous troll could ever have.

MARCH FOR HATE: Despite Prior Exposure, Women’s March 2019 Still Inherently Anti-Semitic.

HMM: Venezuela Puts Down Mutiny With National Guard Unit.

The armed forces in a statement said that it had captured all those involved in what it described as “treasonous” acts motivated by “obscure interests tied to the far right.”

It said at around 2:50 a.m. (06:50 GMT), a small group of guardsmen took captive a captain in charge of a police station in western Caracas and then moved across the capital in two military trucks to the poor neighborhood of Petare, where they stole a cache of weapons from another outpost.

They met resistance and were caught hours later at a national guard outpost 3 kilometers (2 miles) from the Miraflores presidential palace.

The armed forces said all the weapons had been recovered and the mutinous troops captured.

A few hours earlier, a group of heavily armed national guardsmen published a series of videos on social media saying they won’t recognize President Nicolas Maduro’s government, which has come under increasing domestic and international pressure over a newly launched second term that the opposition-controlled congress and many nations consider illegitimate.

Authoritarian regimes often look impervious to change, right up until they collapse.

WORST “WHERE’S WALDO” EVER: What Happened to the Texan Who Became the Goebbels of ISIS? “John Thomas Georgelas was their highest-ranking American.”

MENLO PARK POCKET CHANGE: Google fined $57 million by French data privacy body.

MEGAN FOX: MAGA Hat Madness, #FakeNews, and the Mob.

REPORT: China’s Annual Economic Growth Rate Is Slowest Since 1990.

The 6.6% growth rate for 2018 reported Monday is the slowest annual pace China has recorded since 1990. The economic downturn, which has been sharper than Beijing expected, deepened in the last months of 2018, with fourth quarter growth rising 6.4% from a year earlier.

Adding to the gloom was the trade conflict with Washington. The uncertain outlook for Chinese exporters caused companies to delay investing and hiring and in some cases even to resort to layoffs—a practice often discouraged by China’s stability-obsessed Communist Party rulers. The official jobless rate ticked up to 4.9% last month from 4.8% in November.

In the southern technology and export-manufacturing center of Shenzhen, for instance, many private makers of electronics, textiles and auto parts furloughed workers more than two months before the Lunar New Year holiday, which begins in February, according to business owners and local officials. The neighboring city of Guangzhou saw growth slump to 6.5% last year—well short of the 7.5% annual target set by the city government—as trade tensions hit the city’s manufacturing sector hard.

These are the official figures, which don’t always exactly jibe with reality.

SPOILER: THEY AREN’T COMPLYING. Report to Congress on Russian Compliance with INF Treaty.

RACISM, STRAIGHT UP: Pakistan is building a wall along its border with Afghanistan.

YES, PLEASE: Pentagon considers an ICBM-killing weapon for the F-35, but is it affordable?

The Trump administration’s Missile Defense Review, released Thursday after months of anticipation, carves out an enticing new potential role for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

The jet “has a capable sensor system that can detect the infrared signature of a boosting missile and its computers can identify the threatening missile’s location,” the review states. “It can track and destroy adversary cruise missiles today, and, in the future, can be equipped with a new or modified interceptor capable of shooting down adversary ballistic missiles in their boost phase and could be surged rapidly to hot spots to strengthen U.S. active defense capabilities and attack operations.”

The report gives the Air Force and Missile Defense Agency six months to deliver a report on how best to integrate the F-35 into the larger missile defense architecture.

But with the armed services struggling to figure out how they can afford ramping up procurement as well as operating and sustaining the jets, it remains to be seen whether the Defense Department can afford having the F-35 as an ICBM killer.

Helluva lot cheaper than losing a city.

ROD KACKLEY: Georgia Religious Liberty Legislation Poised for Comeback. “But newly elected House Speaker David Ralston doesn’t want to see a repeat of the nation’s biggest businesses threatening to boycott Georgia like they did in 2016.”

DAVID FORSMARK: Hey, Tucker: Flyover America Is Not the Sh**thole You Imagine It to Be. “The Fox News host angles to be the Al Sharpton of white, blue-collar middle America.”

Flyover states are the worst. Stay away.

NARRATOR: HE WASN’T JOKING. ‘Poisoning Young Minds’: Democratic Rep Wants To Ban Teens From Wearing MAGA Hats, Says He Was Joking.

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Leslie Jones Slams New ‘Ghostbusters’ Film: “It’s Like Something Trump Would Do.”

SHUTDOWN THEATER: Pelosi Rejected Trump’s Immigration Compromise BEFORE HE GAVE IT.

“DREAMers” are just pawns in the Democrats’ power games.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: No MAGA hats for you and much, much more. “It took about a day before a more complete picture emerged of this purported provocative, racist interaction, but one has to be inclined to swallow the anti-Trump racist narrative with ease in order to start wagging fingers and writing hit pieces excoriating these kids without waiting for more information. I’m not referring to the mainstream media because I expect them to sell these kinds of stories, it’s all they know how to do. But people who are allegedly on the ‘right’ jumped on these boys FAST. Any story that exactly fits the liberal racist worldview, needs a time out and closer investigation, haven’t we learned anything?”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Setting Women Back Light Years In Politics.

“I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right,” Ocasio-Cortez told Cooper after he asked about her careless and incorrect analysis of the defense budget. In one sentence, Ocasio-Cortez portrayed herself as a woman who is ready to subordinate facts to her moral convictions, confirming achingly anti-female stereotypes. She may as well have driven erratically down the highway or failed to catch a gently thrown ball. Of course, she later admitted that being factually correct is “absolutely important.” She just doesn’t seem to care much about facts and numbers when she’s tweeting.

Or, for that matter, when she’s speaking. In discussing with Cooper her proposal for a “Green New Deal,” which would use the full force of the government in an attempt to convert the United States to 100 percent renewable energy by 2030, she could not offer an actual answer for how such an enormous transformation would be possible. “It’s going to require a lot of rapid change that we don’t even conceive as possible right now,” was all she could say.

Shockingly, the reason we “don’t conceive of it as possible” is because it is not possible.

Forget it, she’s rolling.