POPULATION IMPLOSION: Desperately seeking young people.

The number of 20- to 29-year-olds in Japan has crashed from 18.3m to 12.8m since 2000, according to the World Bank. By 2040 there might be only 10.5m of them. Cities like Tama are therefore playing not a zero-sum game but a negative-sum game, frantically chasing an ever-diminishing number of young adults and children. And some of their rivals have extremely sharp elbows.

Follow the Tama river upstream, into the mountains, and you eventually reach a tiny town called Okutama. What Tama is trying to avoid has already happened there. Okutama’s population peaked in the 1950s, as construction workers flocked to the town to build a large reservoir that supplies water to Tokyo in emergencies. It has grown smaller and older ever since.

Today 47% of people in the Okutama administrative area—the town and surrounding villages—are 65 or older, and 26% are at least 75. Children have become so scarce that the large primary school is only about one-quarter full. Residents in their 70s outnumber children under ten by more than five to one.

I’ve been following Japan’s demographic decline for years, and these numbers shock even me.

The Japanese need to get back in the business of making more Japanese before there’s no Japan left.

WHITTLE, OTT, GREEN: Fundamentally Unserious — P**** Hats and F-Bombs Do Not a Serious Movement Make.

MY BAD: American Airlines Is Eliminating Seat-Back Entertainment—and They’re Blaming You.

CHANGE: Nikki Haley Puts U.N. on Notice: U.S. Is ‘Taking Names’

“You’re going to see a change in the way we do business,” Ms. Haley said. “Our goal with the administration is to show value at the U.N., and the way we’ll show value is to show our strength, show our voice, have the backs of our allies and make sure our allies have our back as well.”

“For those who don’t have our back,” she added, “we’re taking names; we will make points to respond to that accordingly.”

Much more of this and even our allies will get tired of all the winning.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Trick to Surviving a Polish Vodka Party.

I’m thinking the only way to win is not to play.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: The Number of Trump’s Executive Orders Is Irrelevant.

EOs are patently necessary and theoretically unremarkable. The president is the head of the vast executive branch. He must give directions to his subordinates in order for the executive branch to carry out its work. A proper executive order is simply that: the president ordering subordinate executive officials to carry out lawful policies and actions – lawful because they are consistent with the Constitution and statutory law.

Let’s take the president out of the equation for a moment. In the military, a commanding officer may give a hundred orders a day to his subordinates. These are “executive orders” in the sense that the armed forces are part of the executive branch. But as long as they are within the bounds of the law, the fact that there are thousands of such orders causes us no concern. Similarly, when the attorney general gives instructions to Justice Department lawyers, or the secretary of state directs our diplomats, these are “executive orders” and standard fare.

The problem occurs when, as during the Obama administration, EOs are used by the president as the vehicle for ordering that which he has no legal authority to order and which usurps the powers and rights of other branches of the federal government, the states, or the people.

Read the whole thing.

MAD DUCK: Obama Issued A Massive Ammunition Ban Just One Day Before He Left Office.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe, an Obama appointee, ordered a new ammunition ban for certain federal lands on Thursday–his last full day in office.

The ban, which took effect immediately, eliminates the use of lead-based ammunition on federal lands like national parks and wildlife refuges, as well as any other land administered by the Fish and Wildlife Service.The ban is expected to have a major impact on much of the hunting that takes place on federal lands across the United States as lead-based ammunition is widely legal and used throughout the country.

Ashe said the order was necessary to protect wildlife from exposure to lead.

President Trump can and should reverse this order.

FAST GETAWAY: Cameras catch crooks stealing $75,000 Dodge Charger Hellcat.

It will presumably be chopped up, and had been purchased by a presumably very sad customer just the day before.

SPENGLER: Why Not Just Slap on Tariffs?

PRINTED IN LARGE, FRIENDLY LETTERS: Don’t Panic Over the CBO Repeal Report.

The CBO starts the report cautioning that its estimates “are uncertain” and concludes that “If the Congress considers legislation similar to H.R. 3762 in the coming weeks, the estimated effects could differ from those described here.” Truer words were never written.

The CBO estimates that in the first year after full repeal, but before Medicaid expansion and insurance subsidies are eliminated, 18 million people would become uninsured — 10 million fewer in the nongroup market, 5 million fewer with Medicaid coverage, and 3 million fewer with employment-based coverage — and premiums in the nongroup market would rise 20-25 percent higher than under current law. These effects “would stem primarily from repealing the penalties associated with the individual mandate.”

In other words, most of the people who would “lose” their insurance are people who are buying it only because they’re forced to.

SO TRIGGERED: Jessica Valenti melts down over #MarchForLife, goes on bizarre kidney rant.

THE MINIATURE SURVEILLANCE STATE: Scientists are making genetically modified cyborg dragonflies.

A biomedical solutions company called Draper is developing a technology that can turn a dragonfly into a living drone. They call it the DragonflEye project, and the technology’s main component is a tiny backpack equipped with solar panels to harvest energy. It also has integrated guidance and navigation system composed of optogenetic tools that Draper made with the help of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) at Janelia Farm. The idea is to use those tools to send commands from the backpack to the “steering” neurons that control the insect’s flight inside the dragonfly’s nerve cord. It’s a totally different approach to hijacking an insect’s muscles.

To be able to control those steering neurons, the HHMI researchers found a way to make them sensitive to light by incorporating genes naturally found in eyes. With those genes in place, the tools or the “optrodes” in the backpack will be able to guide the insects using pulses of light. In an interview with IEEE Spectrum, the program’s lead researcher, Jesse J. Wheeler, said his team already created the first-generation version of the system, though it sounds like they haven’t been able to test it yet.

Scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.

ONE DOWN: Miami-Dade Mayor Reverses County’s Status as Sanctuary City.

FIRST-WORLD PROBLEMS: Alexa, Stop Making Life Miserable for Anyone With a Similar Name!

“Alexa, stop!” Joanne Sussman screamed in her living room.

Immediately, the computer living inside her Amazon Echo speaker stopped playing her favorite music station. Simultaneously, Mrs. Sussman’s 24-year-old daughter, Alexa, froze on the stairs.

“What, mom? I’m taking the laundry down,” human Alexa shouted back. “What do you need?”

“I always liked my name, until Amazon gave it to a robot,” says Alexa Sussman, a recent New York University graduate who works in marketing.

Everyone I know (I don’t know anyone named “Alexa”) who has one loves their Alexa, but “Hey, Siri” and “OK, Google” are much smarter key phrases.

THAT’S THE WAY THIS IS SUPPOSED TO WORK: Protesters, Breitbart editor have their say as UCCS plays host to free speech.

Protesters and alt-right British provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos had their say Thursday at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, as guaranteed by the First Amendment.

“No Trump, no KKK, no fascist U.S.A.,” protesters chanted.

“Build That Wall,” Yiannopoulos’ audience chanted back.

Yiannopoulos was in town to speak on “Why the Left Lost the Working Class,” as part of a college campus tour.

More than an hour before the event started, dozens of protesters from Colorado Springs Anti-fascists, Showing Up for Racial Justice and other groups faced off against a long line of ticket holders queuing up for the sold-out event at the Upper Lodge on the campus of the state university.

Good on the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs Chancellor Pam Shockley-Zalabak for letting everything go forward, and for hosting a non-violent event with zero arrests.

I guess the still-red parts of Colorado are just better at that kind of thing.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Diamond vise turns hydrogen into a metal, potentially ending 80-year quest.

That excitement swirled because by squeezing hydrogen to pressures well beyond those in the center of Earth, Silvera and his postdoc Ranga Dias had seen a hint that it had morphed into a solid metal, capable of conducting electricity. “If it’s true it would be fantastic,” says Reinhard Boehler, a physicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. “This is something we as a community have been pushing to see for decades.”

The feat, reported online this week in Science, is more than an oddity. Solid metallic hydrogen is thought to be a superconductor, able to conduct electricity without resistance. It may even be metastable, meaning that like diamond, also formed at high pressures, the metallic hydrogen would maintain its state—and even its superconductivity—once brought back to room temperatures and pressures.

Faster, please.

CAN HE DO THAT? Trump’s radical immigration plan: Enforce the law.

GOOD LORD: Featured Women’s March Speaker Once Kidnapped, Raped and Tortured Man to Death.

Convicted felon Donna Hylton, who once was a member of a group that kidnapped, raped and tortured an elderly man to the point of death, was a featured speaker at Saturday’s pro-abortion and anti-Trump Women’s March on Washington.

Yup, seriously.

As reported by The Daily Caller’s Peter Hasson on Thursday night: “Hylton, along with three men and three other women, kidnapped 62-year-old real-estate broker Thomas Vigliarolo and held him for ransom, before eventually killing him. As noted in a 1995 Psychology Today article, when asked about forcibly sodomizing the victim with a three foot steel pole, one of Hylton’s accomplices replied: ‘He was a homo anyway.'”

“I couldn’t believe this girl who was so intelligent and nice-looking could be so unemotional about what she was telling me she and her friends had done. They’d squeezed the victim’s testicles with a pair of pliers, beat him, burned him,” said New York City Detective William Spurling, speaking of Hylton.

The felon/feminist hero apparently attempted to collect ransom money for the man after he had passed.

Hylton was released from prison in 2012, and Rosario Dawson has been cast to play her in a biopic titled “A Little Piece of Light.”

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Trump’s Opening Act Is More Conservative Than Reagan.

True.

But Trump has two advantages Reagan didn’t enjoy — three, if you include the ever-expanding powers of the Executive Branch. The other two are that his own party controls the House as well as the Senate, and Trump has reduced much of the Media-Government Complex to impotent, sputtering outrage.

Fissures within the GOP coalition will eventually become a real problem, and Democrats and the “Professional Left” might someday wise up and back off the outrage. But in the meantime, Trump has a perhaps unprecedented window of opportunity to take action, and he’s taking full advantage of it.

LARRY SUMMERS: Raise the National Gasoline Tax.

WE CAN DO BETTER:

CHUCK SCHUMER: Trump’s Education Pick Would ‘Single-Handedly Decimate’ Public Schools.

A reminder, if you need one: Chuck Schumer lies.

WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? NAACP Pledges to ‘Resist’ Trump Voter Fraud Investigation.

WHITTLE, OTT, GREEN: It Was a Dark and Stormy Speech — Did the Left Watch the Same Inaugural We Did?

Full Disclosure: I’m Green.

REKINDLING THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP: Theresa May praises Trump but pledges end to ‘failed’ foreign wars.

But? Trump made similar pledges throughout his campaign, so CNN’s headline reads like nothing more than a lame attempt to paint Trump as a warmonger.