SatStats/China

Physics is actually too hard for physicists.--David Hilbert

***

What if they thought "The border is secure" was true?

***

A team at the University of Hong Kong has developed a new “super steel” that can survive the harsh conditions needed to make green hydrogen from seawater. The material uses an unexpected double-protection mechanism that resists corrosion far better than conventional stainless steel. Even more impressive, it could replace costly titanium parts used in today’s hydrogen systems.

***

SatStats/China

While the recent explosion in U.S. federal debt has raised numerous red flags, a broader measure of indebtedness across the public and private sectors shows borrowing as a share of GDP is actually down since 2010.

By contrast, China’s total debt-to-GDP ratio, excluding the financial sector, doubled in that span and has now topped 300%, according to Mark Williams, chief Asia economist at Capital Economics.

He pointed out that China’s debt surge has come despite weaker borrowing from households, which have been battered by the real estate market’s collapse.

But borrowing by companies as well as the central and local governments has continued to far outpace GDP growth, which has slowed in recent years, pushing the overall debt ratio higher.

Nearly 40% of outstanding debt is now owed by the public sector, including so-called local government financing vehicles, Williams calculated.

The result is total debt that surpasses the U.S., the eurozone, the U.K., and other emerging markets. Aside from some smaller economies, only Japan has more debt.

“China’s current level of indebtedness puts it in a league of its own,” Williams said.

U.S. federal debt has set its own grim milestones and is now more than 100% of GDP for the first time since the immediate aftermath of World War II.
But total public and private debt last year was about 265% of GDP, which has been robust lately. It’s also down sharply from pandemic-era highs, when governments unleashed a flood of stimulus. The eurozone and U.K. have similar trajectories.

But Chinese companies are borrowing more than they are selling. Business debt has doubled since 2019, while revenues are only 30% higher, according to Capital Economics.

Creditors continue to roll over loans to keep struggling firms afloat, even as nearly one-third of them are losing money, Williams noted. That worsens overcapacity and deflation, while preventing that capital from going to healthier borrowers.

China has been suffering from deflation for three straight years, the longest such streak since its transition to a market economy in the late 1970s.

“The irony is that one driver of both government borrowing and the lax lending standards of [state-owned] banks is the desire to prop up economic growth and prevent job losses,” Williams said. “But the product of a credit boom that has been underway for 18 years is a banking system propping up unproductive firms, widespread losses across industry, and entrenched overcapacity.” (From Fortune)

China/US Economies

On this day:
1258
Baghdad falls to the Mongols, and the Abbasid Caliphate is destroyed.
1306
In front of the high altar of Greyfriars Church in Dumfries, Robert the Bruce murders John Comyn, his leading political rival, sparking revolution in the Scottish Wars of Independence
1567
An explosion destroys the Kirk o' Field house in Edinburgh, Scotland. The second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, Lord Darnley is found strangled, in what many believe to be an assassination.
1933
In round 13 of a boxing match at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Primo Carnera knocks out Ernie Schaaf, killing him.
1996
The IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov for the first time.
2009
The communication satellites Iridium 33 and Kosmos-2251 collide in orbit, destroying both.

***

Common sense tells us that restraints on business are generally bad, that red tape strangles enterprise, that taxes on goods in transit will reduce the volume of transactions, that wage earners will suffer if the things they buy are made artificially dear, that legislation to increase the cost of living and production must be especially disastrous to a populous manufacturing and commercial country like ours.--Hirst

***

A newly released federal memo reveals Ohio’s richest man accused sex offender Jeffrey Epstein stole or misappropriated several hundred million dollars from him over their decades-long financial relationship.

***

The U.S. attack on Iran was shocking and unprecedented. Why is there so little talk about it?

***

China/US Economies

Analysis of commercial and political patterns suggests China’s broader AI ecosystem operates according to a different logic than the “US-China AI race” framing implies.

First, development and deployment remain private-led, with state participation filling infrastructure and application gaps rather than competing directly for frontier capabilities.

Second, frontier developers are pursuing diverse technical and commercial strategies rather than converging on LLMs as the path to AGI. The data shows specialization in modalities, vertical domains, and applications. This reflects a market where companies are optimizing for deployability and commercial viability, not just pushing frontier capabilities.

Third, China’s AI ecosystem is actively shaped by local policy competition and fiscal incentives, rather than solely by market forces or central planning. This creates geographic inequality but also reveals how innovation actually gets governed in practice through decentralized competition for activity and talent. It also raises concerns of potential resource waste, especially given that many local governments are currently short of money.

This assessment (from somewhere) emphasizes local, private incentives and less central control (although they influence incentives), more free markets and less command economies. The strength of the West has always been its freedom to evolve, so China may be woodenly adapting here, allowing some risk. Compare this to Trump's recent demand that defense contractors freeze dividends and buybacks until their inventories rise.

We are back to the old arguments. A government, in the words of Zohran Mamdani, that can “replace the rigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism”; a government, in the words of Adrian Vermeule, that will “enjoy a capacious scope of public discretion to promote the common good.”

But there is no "warmth" in government, no "discretion."

The Constitution creates political structures and then limits them within those structures because self-restraint in politics does not exist.

Managing China's Economy

On this day:
988
Norse King Glun Iarainn recognises Máel Sechnaill II, High King of Ireland, and agrees to pay taxes and accept Brehon Law; the event is considered to be the founding of the city of Dublin. The Horse King!
1212
The most severe of several early fires of London burns most of the city to the ground.
1460
Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, defeats the king’s Lancastrian forces and takes King Henry VI prisoner in the Battle of Northampton.
1499
Portuguese explorer Nicolau Coelho returns to Lisbon after discovering the sea route to India as a companion of Vasco da Gama.
1553
Lady Jane Grey takes the throne of England.
1778
American Revolution: Louis XVI of France declares war on the Kingdom of Great Britain.
1882
War of the Pacific: Chile suffers its last military defeat in the Battle of La Concepción when a garrison of 77 men is annihilated by a 1,300-strong Peruvian force, many of them armed with spears.
1925
Scopes Trial: In Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called “Monkey Trial” begins with John T. Scopes, a young high school science teacher accused of teaching evolution in violation of the Butler Act.
1946
Hungarian hyperinflation sets a record with inflation of 348.46 percent per day, or prices doubling every eleven hours.
1962
Telstar, the world’s first communications satellite, is launched into orbit

***

President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened Brazil with a tariff of 50% if Brazil doesn't stop legal action over charges against its right-wing former president, Jair Bolsonaro.
Earlier this year, he threatened 25% tariffs on Colombian exports that would grow to 50% if the country didn’t accept deportees from the US. (Colombia ultimately accepted the deportees and avoided those tariffs.) Trump also imposed tariffs on goods from Mexico, Canada, and China over the role he alleges they play in facilitating illegal migration to the US and enabling fentanyl to reach the country.
Interference with the internal workings of another country should drive Americans nuts.

***

Mamdani's college application is revealing of him, but the reaction to his scores is revealing of the Left. Arrogance is at the Left's marrow; their critics are, by definition, unimaginative, unread, and just dumb. To have their standard bearer in the lower half of the class is mortifying to them.

***

Brennan, accused by Trump of weaponizing the FBI, accused Trump of weaponizing the FBI to go after him.

***

Have polls become de facto substitute voting?

***

Managing China's Economy

The more economic power the [Chinese] Communist Party takes, the more knowledge and outside initiative is lost. The difference between the popular image of China and what research actually shows about it could hardly be greater. Our politicians and media paint horrifying images of China’s brilliant strategic planning, but in the vast literature on China’s economy, there is hardly a single study that even attempts to argue that a specific industrial policy has created real commercial success.

The Westerners who now assume we need an active industrial policy in order to compete with China thus choose not to imitate the Chinese policy that created the country’s successes, but the post-2010 policy that involves enormous risk-taking. To the extent that the new policy has achieved any results, they are negative. Capital has been transferred to less productive state-owned companies. Despite the fact that they only account for around a quarter of the country’s GDP, they get about 80 per cent of the banks’ lending. Growth per capita, which in the 1990s and 2000s was around an incredible 10 per cent annually, declined to 5 per cent before the pandemic (and some observers believe this was an exaggeration). Under the current economic model, China finds it hard to squeeze any growth out of the economy.--Norberg

While the West has a decided philosophical advantage, it suffers, as it did in its competition with Japan, from organizational jealousy, a fear that its messy, unchecked spontaneity will wilt before the fierce, structured, state-directed economies that oppose it. Some of this is simple restlessness, some the by-product of the very experimenting process that has given it such success. But the real impetus is that foolish selfishness that asks simple-minded politicians to achieve their grasping dreams. No sensible, nonpathological explanation is available to clarify the apparent success of Mamdani in a sophisticated, wealthy city like New York.

Shen Yun

On this day in 1950, Chiang Kai-shek evacuated Hainan, leaving mainland China to Mao Zedong and the communists.

***

Gunmen shot and killed at least 26 tourists on Tuesday at a resort in Indian-controlled Kashmir

***

Human judgment "imposes "an impenetrable ceiling on the AI agent's performance: the agent cannot discover better strategies underappreciated by the human rater, DeepMind scholars David Silver and Richard Sutton write in the paper, Welcome to the Era of Experience. Most studies do not allow a context for a problem, a history. That is to say, human thinking is holding the technology back.
Uh oh.

***

Who ever imagined there would be a Waste, Fraud, and Abuse lobby?

***

Shen Yun 

The Shen Yun dance is coming to Pittsburgh this month. As with all things China, it is not without controversy over its admitted religious-political content.

That criticism is state-based. China has been using its economic and diplomatic influence to pressure theaters and ministries around the world and disrupt Shen Yun performances. In 2016, the Chinese Embassy in South Korea threatened financial retribution against a hosting theater in Seoul, effectively forcing cancellation of a performance just days before it was scheduled.

The Shen Yun interpretation of traditional Chinese culture differs sharply from the official version sanctioned by the Communist Party. Its narrative episodes are inspired by Chinese history and literature, claiming a “true Chinese tradition” defined by Confucian morality as well as Buddhist and Daoist spiritual thoughts — ideas that developed over millennia, ideas denounced and suppressed after the 1949 Communist takeover and all but eradicated during the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976.

Against this historical background, the Chinese communists’ ongoing persecution of Falun Gong may be seen as part of a larger campaign against religious faiths and traditional cultural values. The regime’s overbearing effort to censor the dance show may imply its deep-seated insecurity about its own professed legitimacy to embody Chinese civilization. Or it may be evidence of an overwhelming force trying to finish an annoying opponent off.

Shen Yun artists have bypassed communist intervention and take seriously the Chinese intellectual and cosmological foundations in their understanding of dance. The spiritual teachings of Falun Gong, to which the show’s creators adhere, include an essential unity between the material and the spiritual, which human beings should strive to embody. For the dancer, it is important to refine one’s moral character while improving one’s physical skills, so that virtuous thought may extend from the heart to the body in performing tales of heroism, kindness, and devotion.

This spiritual interpretation of Chinese culture has had a compelling global impact, and this inspiring vision of what China was and could be without the Communist Party must be deeply unsettling to the authoritarian state. The artificially conjoined ideas of “China” and the party are decoupled, undermining the regime’s insistent claim to be the sole legitimate guardian and spokesperson of Chinese civilization and culture. Like a lover, the state must be "the only one."

Art, from the vision of eternal punishment in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment to the Von Trapp family’s perilous escape from Nazi persecution in The Sound of Music, has never existed in a social vacuum; it has always aspired to greater universality than the politics of the moment. However, politics is increasingly claiming this universality. To view politics and religion as the sole ends of Shen Yun’s art rather than its context is to deny the vital human experience of hope and kindness, which many of its audiences, regardless of their political and religious orientations, already derive from it.

Malice as Policy

A “disaster discount” may be creeping into the U.S. housing market. According to real-estate brokerage Redfin, homes in areas that are vulnerable to floods, wildfires, and extreme heat are rising in value at a slower rate than low-risk properties.

***

Trump has suggested that one way to reconstruct the Gaza enclave would be to move the Palestinians from Gaza to Jordan and Egypt. That resettlement “could be temporary or long term.”

That marks a dramatic shift in U.S. policy toward Palestinians. No recent White House has suggested the “long-term” departure of Palestinians from Gaza, which most U.S. presidents have seen as a part of an eventual Palestinian state.

Talking off the top of your head is not always refreshing.

***

Barstool's David Portnoy bet $1 million on the Bills to win the Super Bowl.

***

A few Biden programs under review: $50 million for contraceptives in Gaza, funding for a transgender opera in Columbia, and funding Peruvian transgender comic books.

***

Malice as Policy

Underwater cables are used mostly for internet connection. There are 597 cable systems and 1,712 landings currently active or under construction.  

Worldwide, about 200 undersea cables have been cut or disrupted annually as of 2024, due most frequently to unintentional damage from fishing equipment or the anchors of ships.

But the Europeans believe Russian and Chinese ships are purposefully disrupting underwater cables.

NATO reacted after another underwater data cable was severed in the Baltic Sea. In the alliance’s first coordinated response to the suspected sabotage campaign against critical infrastructure, NATO vessels raced to the site of a damaged fiber-optic cable in Swedish waters on Sunday morning, where a trio of ships carrying Russian cargo, including one recently sanctioned by the U.S., were nearby.

This raises significant questions about international relations. How should nations ostensibly at peace behave? All nations have wide-ranging interfaces, from trade to travel to economics, that overlap and blend, nation to nation. What is one to think about nations that gratuitously interfere with the normal, peaceful, behavior of other nations?

This is more than the usual sophomoric behavior common in American politics. This is equivalent to the well-poisoner, the malignant, destructive disrupter of benign life.

What is it that rewards these people for such behavior? And how should peaceful nations victimized by such economic mutilation respond? Most importantly, how do sensible people living their lives regard their potential relationship with a known well-poisoner? 

China Wants to Help

The Cartels are the fifth largest employer in Mexico.

***

In the UK, more than half of crimes are estimated to be caused by alcohol consumption.

***

China Wants to Help

Xi had words for Biden in Peru and they were summarized.
According to the Chinese readout (https://guancha.cn/internation/2024_11_17_755645.shtml…) 

here's what he told Biden were the 7 "lessons of the past 4 years that need to be remembered": 

1) "There must be correct strategic understanding. The 'Thucydides Trap' is not historical destiny, a 'new Cold War' cannot and should not be fought, containment of China is unwise, undesirable, and will not succeed." 

2) "Words must be trustworthy and actions must be fruitful. A person cannot stand without credibility. China always follows through on its words, but if the U.S. side always says one thing and does another, it is very detrimental to America's image and damages mutual trust." 

3) "Treat each other as equals. In exchanges between two major countries like China and the United States, neither side can reshape the other according to their own wishes, nor can they suppress the other based on so-called 'position of strength,' let alone deprive the other of legitimate development rights to maintain their own leading position." 

4) "Red lines and bottom lines cannot be challenged. As two major countries, China and the United States inevitably have some contradictions and differences, but they cannot harm each other's core interests, let alone engage in conflict and confrontation. The One China principle and the three China-US joint communiqués are the political foundation of bilateral relations and must be strictly observed. Taiwan issue, democracy and human rights, development path, and development rights are China's four red lines, which cannot be challenged. [Note: Bold text in the original] These are the most important guardrails and safety nets for China-US relations." 

5) "There should be more dialogue and cooperation. Under current circumstances, the common interests between China and the United States have not decreased but increased. Whether in areas of economy and trade, agriculture, drug control, law enforcement, public health, or in facing global challenges such as climate change and artificial intelligence, as well as international hotspot issues, China-US cooperation is needed. Both sides should extend the list of cooperation, make the cooperation cake bigger, and achieve win-win cooperation." 

6) "Respond to people's expectations. The development of China-US relations should always focus on the well-being of both peoples and gather the strength of both peoples. Both sides should build bridges for personnel exchanges and cultural communication, and also remove interference and obstacles, not artificially create a 'chilling effect.'" 

7) "Demonstrate great power responsibility. China and the United States should always consider the future and destiny of humanity, take responsibility for world peace, provide public goods for the world, and play a positive role in world unity, including engaging in positive interaction, avoiding mutual consumption, and not coercing other countries to take sides." 

All this is summarized in the laughable official US readout (https://china.usembassy-china.org.cn/readout-of-president-joe-bidens-meeting-with-president-xi-jinping-of-the-peoples-republic-of-china-3/…) with this short sentence: 

"The two leaders reviewed the bilateral relationship over the past four years". 

Talk about an understatement. 

And underlying all this is the frightening implication the Chinese are trying to help. The totalitarians want to help us! Indeed thinks the Biden administration needs their help.

China Energy

 

The New York Times yesterday revealed the simultaneously astonishing and unsurprising news that one of America’s most prominent gender-transition providers, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, has intentionally not published the results of her “multimillion-dollar federal project” on puberty blockers in minors — because she found that “[p]uberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements.” According to the Times, Olson-Kennedy “was concerned the study’s results could be used in court to argue that ‘we shouldn’t use blockers’” in minors.

***

100 Labour Party operatives had been dispatched from Britain to support Kamala Harris' campaign.

***

China Energy

Coal still accounts for about 60% of China’s power generation, despite a surge in hydropower earlier this year after abundant rainfall, which reduced the share of coal in the country’s energy mix during the summer.

But hydropower saw a sharp decline in September, which boosted the use of thermal coal for power generation amid surging power demand in the world’s second-largest economy.

China’s thermal power generation, which is overwhelmingly coal-fired, jumped by 8.9% last month, per official data cited by Reuters’s columnist Clyde Russell.

Total power generation rose by 6% in September from a year earlier as electricity demand has started to outpace China’s economic growth in recent years.

Power demand jumped by 8.5% in September from the same month last year, while year to date, Chinese power consumption also rose by a similar percentage, 7.9% year-over-year, per the data quoted by Reuters’s Russell.

Power consumption in data centers, big data, and cloud computing jumped by 33% between January and June compared to the same period in 2023.

Maps

 

Based on the latest data and an enhanced version of a stress-tested methodology from a scholarly journal, about 10% to 27% of non-citizen adults in the U.S. are now illegally registered to vote.

***


Maps

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility. --Four Quartets


Ancient maps are wonderful and wonderfully human. They are the confident and altruistic sharing of knowledge, carefully researched and drawn, beautiful and elegant, often the products of the brightest and the bravest. And usually they are wrong. Time and better information displace them gradually, sometimes suddenly, and they become an artifact, a relic of their time. Their more modern usurpers reign awhile , then they too are gone. They appear, are the obsession of every sea captain, every explorer, and then are trumped and worthless, pushed back on the evolutionary trail and fall from the culmination to a mere contributor.

Importantly, every seaman and explorer knows this. They know the limits of these observations and recollections made flesh. They swear no fealty but work within the map's limits.

Explorers, mapmakers and sea captains should be more prominent in our society.

There is an interesting story about China's recent contribution to the massive tome of Unintended Consequences. In the 1960's the State decided to control the population growth and limited each family to one child. One child per family would make the huge population manageable and stable. As males were preferred in families the effect was to discourage the birth or survival of infant girls. Over time a noticeable change developed in the population: The usual 50-50 gender birth rate tipped 4% in favor of males. Jobs for women went unfilled, women were lured to population centers for better work. Now there are small towns and communities that have no women at all. Family farms and businesses are at risk. Men expecting to raise families with local wives are getting older. Some communities have resorted to raiding--RAIDING--neighbors for women.

In an effort to stabilize the population, the government created shortages. But they started with a really good map.

Chinese Immigration

Results from a global recruitment survey:
93% of Gen Zers have stood up an interviewer.
87% managed to charm their way through interviews, secure the job, and sign the contract, only to leave their new job on the very first day.
Their reason for doing so? According to the survey, it makes them “feel in charge of their career."

***

Finland has announced it will open 300 shooting ranges to encourage citizens to take a greater interest in national defense.

***

Gutfield's great line about the New York case against Trump: "If you can't identify a victim, then the crime had to be reverse-engineered."

***

Chinese Immigration

According to the strangely named U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), since October 2023, almost 16,000 Chinese migrants have attempted to cross the U.S.-Mexico border — more than doubling the previous fiscal year’s total number of Chinese migrants in a matter of months. This makes Chinese nationals the fastest-growing population to cross into the U.S. from Mexico.

CBP data reveals that from January to November of 2023, over 30,000 Chinese people were detained by border agents after crossing illegally. In 2021, meanwhile, there were only 323 crossings.

Chinese citizens now represent the fourth largest nationality to cross the Darién Gap — the dense, mountainous jungle connecting Colombia with Panama. The Darién Gap was once seen as extraordinarily dangerous to traverse, but waves of migrants have established ways to navigate it as they move northward to the U.S. Illegality paves its own way.

In June, China’s unemployment rate for 16-to-24-year-olds reached 21.3%, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Fortunately for them, with the decline in their birth rate, unemployment will eventually drop a lot.

Some China Numbers

Some China Numbers

Anyone familiar with Zeihan will understand the potential implications of China's recent population statistics. The world is changing. Its makeup will be different. Policies, alliances, and philosophies will not be the same. 

Zeihan argues that the survival of a nation depends upon three basic national functions: It must be able to reproduce its population, feed it from within, and independently provide it with energy. According to him, only five current nations can do that: Canada, the U.S., Mexico, Argentina, and Turkey. None of the other nations will be able to withstand the pressures of their deficits and will have to change in some accommodating way. Some, like Germany and Italy, will simply disappear.

Here are some new China numbers.

                                                #

While official figures won't be confirmed until Jan. 17, the Mother and Infant Daily news service said 7.88 million babies were born across China 2023, 1.68 million fewer than in 2022.

Given that 11 million people died this year, China's population has therefore fallen by 3.12 million, the population of a medium-sized Chinese city, the report said, citing the City Data account on Baidu's Tieba forum site.

Authorities in Hangzhou, Zhengzhou, and other major cities with populations in the tens of millions, are promising cash subsidies for new families, with the Wuhan Donghu High-tech Zone offering 60,000 yuan (US$8,400) per child, the highest known rate so far, according to recent media reports.

Meanwhile, the number of Chinese couples marrying for the first time has fallen by nearly 56% over the past nine years, the financial magazine Yicai quoted the 2023 China Statistical Yearbook as saying, with such marriages numbering less than 11 million in 2022.

In 2022, China's National Bureau of Statistics reported a drop in population of around 850,000 to 1.41175 billion, the first fall since 1961, the last year of China's Great Famine.

 

Xi Jinping’s Selected Major Statements

It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning. -Bill Watterson, comic strip artist of Calvin & Hobbes

***

Hundreds of anti-oil, pro-Palestine protesters clashed with riot police outside the APEC summit in San Francisco ahead of President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping's widely anticipated meeting on Wednesday.

***

In Japan, the market for adult diapers is larger than the market for infant diapers

***

Xi Jinping’s Selected Major Statements

Xi met with President Joe Biden in California this week. It's a meeting of different cultures, different philosophies, different historical arcs. While free nations believe free men is the apogee of political evolution, and it sometimes lapses into political evangelism, it is generally a defensive philosophy with isolationist potential. That is not true of its socialist/communist opponents and their degenerate totalitarian endpoints.

This is from a collection of comments made by Xi, illustrative of his thinking and his lessons from recent American events.

                                            

***Xi has been trying to stabilize relations with Washington, apparently pressed by China’s economic troubles and a desire to reduce Beijing’s diplomatic isolation. “We have a thousand reasons to grow the relationship between China and the United States, and none at all to ruin it,” Xi told American lawmakers in Beijing recently.

But Xi underscored that his judgment of the challenge posed by the United States remains unchanged, saying with rare public bluntness in March: “Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-around containment, encirclement and suppression of China.”

When President Xi Jinping of China made his first state visit to the United States in 2015, he wrapped his demands for respect in reassurances.

He courted tech executives, while defending China’s internet controls. He denied that China was militarizing the disputed South China Sea, while asserting its maritime claims there. He spoke hopefully of a “new model” for great power relations, in which Beijing and Washington would coexist peacefully as equals.

But back in China, in meetings with the military, Xi was warning in strikingly stark terms that intensifying competition between a rising China and a long-dominant United States was all but unavoidable, and that the People’s Liberation Army should be prepared for a potential conflict.

“Beyond doubt, our country’s growing strength is the most important factor driving a profound readjustment of the international order,” he told top commanders in November 2015, two months after his visit to the United States. “Some Western countries absolutely never want to see a socialist China grow strong under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Despite his assurances to President Barack Obama not to militarize the South China Sea, Xi told his senior commanders in February 2016 that China must bolster its presence there, saying: “We’ve seized the opportunity, eliminated intervention and sped up construction on South China Sea islands and shoals, achieving a historic breakthrough in maritime strategy and defending maritime rights.” (In the years that followed, China quickly expanded its military infrastructure in the area.)

Xi’s remarks are among collections of speeches that Xi made to the People’s Liberation Army and Communist Party officials, published by the military for internal study by senior officers, and seen and corroborated by The New York Times. The volumes, “Xi Jinping’s Selected Major Statements on National Defense and Military Development,” cover his initial years in power, from 2012 to February 2016.

The global financial crisis of 2007-08 had shattered official Chinese assumptions that Washington’s economic policymakers were competent, even if Beijing disagreed with them. Chinese officials quizzed American officials like Hank Paulson, then the Treasury secretary, about their mishandling of the situation. For many in Beijing, the lessons extended beyond the financial system.

“It was a defining moment,” said Desmond Shum, a business owner whose memoir, “Red Roulette,” describes those years, when he mingled with China’s political elite. “After that point, the entire Western model was questioned much more. There was also this growing belief that the world would need China to lead the way out of the mess.”

Xi saw lessons in the “Arab Spring” uprisings that had toppled corrupt authoritarian leaders across the Middle East. The overthrow of Egypt’s leader, Hosni Mubarak, in 2011, left a deep impression on Chinese leaders, who saw parallels with the 1989 pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, said John K. Culver, a former CIA officer who followed Xi’s rise.

“What really scared them was Egypt, because Hosni Mubarak rose as an officer in the Egyptian military, and yet the military turned on him,” Culver said. Chinese leaders, he added, “saw that and asked themselves: ‘If Tiananmen Square happened today, would the army again save the party?’

Within weeks of taking power in late 2012, Xi met with officials and sounded a warning: The collapse of the Soviet Union, he said, was a cautionary tale for China. It had fallen, he lamented, because its military had lost its nerve. He warned officials that China could suffer the same fate unless the party recovered its ideological backbone.

Months later, he issued an internal edict to roll back the influence of what he called Western ideas, such as the concept of universal human rights and the rule of law, in universities and the news media.

Xi, who leads the military as chair of the Central Military Commission, reserved some of his bluntest warnings about the West for his commanders.

“The ‘laws of the jungle’ of international competition have not changed,” he told military delegates to China’s national legislature in 2014. He pointed to the growing presence of U.S. jets, ships and aircraft carriers in the Asia-Pacific region as evidence that the United States was seeking to contain China.

He also said that the pro-Western protests that were then sweeping across Ukraine were a warning for Beijing. “Some Western countries are fanning the flames there and secretly scheming to achieve their geopolitical goals there,” he said. “We must take heed of this lesson.”

To prepare for the threats Xi saw ahead, he said, China needed to urgently overhaul its military. From late 2015, he initiated a sweeping reorganization of the People’s Liberation Army, seeking to make it an integrated force capable of extending Chinese power abroad, especially through air, sea and space forces. His warnings about the West helped underscore the urgency of those changes.

“Speeches to people within the system are attempts to mobilize,” said Blanchette, the researcher in Washington. “You don’t do that by just saying that the world is getting a little bit complicated; you need a narrative that is going to allow you to smash vested interests to achieve change.”

Xi warned that the People’s Liberation Army was still dangerously backward, and could fall behind if it did not seek to innovate, particularly in upgrading its weaponry and command organization. In these speeches, Xi did not say that war was unavoidable. But he made clear that without a formidable military, China would not be able to assert its will.

“In international contestation, political operations are very important, but ultimately it comes down to whether you have strength and whether you can use that strength,” he told the commanders on the Central Military Commission in November 2015. “Relying on a silver tongue won’t work.”--from “Xi Jinping’s Selected Major Statements on National Defense and Military Development,” reported in NYT

                                                  *

So, not only is the socialist philosophy necessarily cannibalistic because of its own inefficiencies, America's own recent behavior has raised the question of the American giant's competence and, hence, its vulnerability.

China Economy

While the movie The Blind Side was a box office smash, Michael Lewis said he and the Tuohy family received around $350,000 each from the movie’s profits. Oher says he wants $15 million from the Tuohys.

***

The United Kingdom’s Labour Party has abandoned the policy of self-identification — that is, allowing people to change their legal gender simply by filling out a form.

***

The number of people who made a hardship withdrawal during the second quarter surged from the first three months of the year to 15,950, an increase of 36% from the second quarter of 2022, according to Bank of America’s analysis of clients’ employee benefits programs, which are comprised of more than 4 million plan participants.

***


China Economy

China’s major tech companies have shed more than $1 trillion in market value and laid off hundreds of thousands of workers over the past two years. For years the government boosted favored industries like real estate and electric vehicles, but these are now deflating. Several hundred EV startups have gone bust in the past few years.

Many young, highly educated Chinese who can’t find jobs in their chosen fields have dropped out of the labor force, which they describe as “lying flat.” One Peking University economist estimated that youth unemployment would have hit 46.5% this spring if the millions of workers who have stopped looking for work had been counted.

The government is telling college graduates to settle for lower-paying, blue-collar jobs. “The more ambitious you are, the more down to earth you need to be,” the Communist Party’s People’s Daily said last month. The censorship of unemployment data is aimed at preserving social stability amid a growing class of educated, disillusioned and restless young people who could become a source of political unrest.--wsj

Another China Lab

Almost 16 million trees have been chopped down on publicly owned land in Scotland to make way for wind farms, an SNP minister had admitted amid a major drive to erect more turbines.

***

RFK Jr.'s son, Conor, joined Ukraine's Foreign Legion to fight in Ukraine.

***

Is it my imagination, or are there a lot of personal attacks on the more conservative Supreme Court justices?

Another China Lab

China’s empty buildings, unused airports, and barren highways are what central planning looks like in practice.

One of the key problems with central planning is that government planners don’t know how much to produce. In the absence of price signals that communicate the need for goods and services, they just have to guess. The guesses aren’t guided purely by practical analysis, of course. Political considerations often play a large role, as do the desire to “uplift” less developed areas.

China’s province of Guizhou is one of its poorest. The government sought to spur development there and commissioned massive construction projects. Bloomberg reports some staggering facts of the government’s overbuilding.

Near the city of Zunyi, one of Guizhou’s largest, the government built three airports. The one furthest from the city only has four flights per week. Guizhou’s mountainous terrain has provided a playground for Chinese civil engineers, and the province is home to nearly half of the world’s 100 tallest bridges. It’s “questionable whether it was entirely necessary,” Bloomberg puts it mildly.--Pino

If you build it, they will come?

State and the State of the World

 

State and the State of the World

So Blinkin, as a member of the Nod administration, has been to China. We are to put the spy balloon behind us. In front of us is a Chinese nuclear base being built in Cuba. All is well.

What is astonishing is not the indifference of the Americans, it is the freewheeling, bit-in-their-teeth, relentless enthusiasm of Cuba and China for a policy that, years ago with the Americans and the Russians, almost ended life on earth. These people have no regard for the risk to the world they pose. At the time, Fidel actually campaigned among the Russians for a first strike against the U.S., which would certainly have resulted in the erasure of Cuba from the face of the earth. The representative of the Cuban people was lobbying for a policy that would have obliterated them as the first step to the end of the civilized world!

We pray for intervention--angels or aliens--when all we need are some intelligent adults.

Self-sufficiency

 

Self-sufficiency

China now is the largest exporter of cars and makes 2/3 of the world's EVs.

In a very interesting interview with a European trade minister, he worried about the current American anxiety about the rise of Chinese influence over American economy and military. His opinion is that the effort by the Americans to isolate themselves in self-contained safety is incompatible with the vulnerabilities of the Europeans who do not have the American capacity for self-sufficiency and need trade, especially with China.

This may be the beginning of that great separation of demographics and energy and food integrity that so many states will not have in the near future.

Another Visit to the Church of Unintended Consequences

Scott Adams told the Washington Post in a story published Monday that he'd lost 80 percent of his income as a result of his quote about white people leaving Black communities because of Black hostility. He insisted then that he's against racism.

***

 The States shown in Blue above Have A Smaller Population Than Los Angeles County   

***

Children’s horror author R.L. Stine has accused his publisher of editing references to weight, mental health, and ethnicity in over a dozen of his books without his permission.


***


Another Visit to the Church of Unintended Consequences

At some time, the people of the world are going to have to look at their so-called leaders with a lot more skepticism.

China is scrambling to facilitate a baby boom and reverse its stagnant birth rate, as the country has fallen into a population crisis of unprecedented proportions.

From 1980 to 2015 the country implemented a brutal one-child policy, which restricted the vast majority of Chinese families from having multiple children — for fear of overpopulation.

The policy, which often relied on forced abortions and sterilizations, was hugely effective at slowing population growth, but created a slew of cultural, economic, and social setbacks.

Because of the cultural preference for male children, millions of families aborted female babies with the hopes of making their one child a son who could carry on their family line and provide financial support down the road. That contributed to China having the largest gender disparity of males to females of any country on Earth — for much of the early 2000s, for every 100 Chinese girls born, 130 boys were born.

Now… China has 30 million more young men than young women, creating a crisis of young men unable to find wives. This is worse in rural areas where women have left for better jobs in the city. There have been reports of Chinese farmers raiding neighboring countries for women.

In response, the parents of many young women in the country are demanding enormous dowries in exchange for marriage, while the scarcity of potential brides has forced many Chinese men to leave the country in search of a wife.

The average Chinese woman went from having 6 children in 1970 to 3 children in 1985, then fewer than two children by 2010.

In 2016, in response to that decline, the CCP abandoned the one-child policy and raised the limit to two children per couple. When that didn’t lead to any sort of meaningful birth rate increase, they raised it again in 2021 to three children per couple.

Then last year – for the first time since the widespread Chinese famines of the 1960s – the country saw a population decline, with more people dying in 2022 than were born.

There were fewer births in China last year than at any point since 1790.

For decades, China had the world’s largest workforce. But with such low birthrates, as older workers retire, there simply aren’t enough people to replace them.

More importantly, as life expectancy goes up, hundreds of millions of people are approaching retirement age and will need to be taken care of. In 2020 around 14% of the country’s population was over the age of 65. By 2050, that number is expected to be 35%.

Contracting workforce, increasing population demands. What they need is a porous border.

(Most from the Daily Wire via Don)

A Lack of Curiosity

Cash flows into US sustainable funds plummeted last year as the broader market took a beating and anti-ESG crusaders targeted money managers including BlackRock Inc. for “woke capitalism.”

***

Lightfoot's loss in Chicago is being analyzed as meaningful. As if this will make a difference.

***

Research by Clarion Security Systems estimates that there are over 7,371,903 CCTV cameras in the UK, meaning there is 1 CCTV camera for every 11 people in the UK. You are likely to be captured on UK CCTV up to 70 times per day.

***

A Lack of Curiosity

So....it looks as if the Covid outbreak that occurred in Wuhan where there is a viral lab that does research on dangerous viruses and changes their basic genetic makeup might, MIGHT, be connected. Now only a college professor would think that a relationship between the two is not sort of obvious.

There are many questions here but the very important one is, "Why would so many important Americans--politicians, journalists, and news broadcasters--fly up in furious indignation at that suggestion?" A new virus...China's main virus research lab...why did the suggestion of a connection stimulate such sardonic vitriol, especially when everyone knows the ChiComs wish the world ill? And, now that the DOE--and the FBI-- raised the connection, why do these people diminish it?

That is simply strange.

A second question: despite the outbreak--that the ChiCom officials knew about--why did China suddenly fill the air with flights around the world, virtually seeding the world with the virus. It has been said that the Chinese recognized the political, social, and economic destruction that would follow the illness and wanted to be sure that the damage was spread evenly--egalitarianly--so they would not be at a disadvantage.

Idealogues "leveling the playing field."

They wouldn't do that, would they?

Demand vs. Command Economies

In a survey of college tuition, Franklin & Marshall College’s tuition came in at $65,652, beating out second-place Columbia University by a little over $100.
The school isn’t the only one in Pennsylvania that landed on the list, either: Haverford was ranked eighth overall in terms of being expensive with a $62,850 price tag.
“College is expensive,” reiterates the study. “And these schools are unusually expensive. The average tuition at a private college is $39,400, and all of these colleges are advertising tuition in excess of $60,000 per year.

***

In 2018, Charles McGonigal, the FBI's former New York spy chief, traveled to London where he met with a Russian contact who was under surveillance by British authorities, two US intelligence sources told Insider.

***

On the night of Jan. 6, 2021, Fox News host Tucker Carlson referred to then-President Donald Trump as “a demonic force” in a text to his producer after Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol that day.

***

Demand vs. Command Economies


There is always optimism among free nations. They know they will win with their evolving economy, as opposed to economies by fiat.

China recently pulled up short in its race with the U.S. for dominance in chip manufacturing. While the U.S. has strengthened its commitment to rebuilding its domestic production through the passage of the Chips Act this past summer, spurring nearly $200 billion in private investment in manufacturing projects, China has abruptly paused its investment of 1 trillion yuan (about $148 billion) in the industry.

August reports from the Chinese government revealed a flurry of antigraft probes that investigated many of the industry’s top figures, including Ding Wenwu, general manager of the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund. This $45 billion fund, known as the “Big Fund” in the industry, is the Chinese government’s official vehicle for managing its colossal investments in the chip industry. The fund invested in a host of companies, including China’s largest chip-makers, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp.--WSJ

Freedom-based countries have great confidence in their own curiosity and innovation. One can be very dismissive of economies that are based on suppression, conformity, and aristocracy. But markets can be wrong for a long time before correction is demanded. Russia pursued a homicidal, antiscientific, paranoid culture where power supported a failed idea for three generations before collapsing. And they created dangerous mischief all during their slow-motion fall.

Balloongate

Balloongate

Another spy ship? Are these people just foolish? Or careless? Or are we just the butt of a bunch of dangerous jokers? Or are these the product of the greatly underestimated, mysterious, and dangerous Unangax people?

***

What if they're not testing us? What if they're just dumb?

***

Why was the second balloon worthy of shooting down and the first not? The talk about commercial risk is weak because the first was powered and guided up and down through commercial levels as well.

***

One thing that is a direct result of this sneaky, insincere, aggressive behavior and the feckless American response is the average guy is now aware of China's risk and the danger posed by the meandering American response. Was that a smart thing for China to do?

***

If we put some Chinese companies on a 'forbidden list,' will that work or will they just change their names?

***

Ford is building a lithium plant in partnership with a Chinese battery company in Michigan. Is that a good idea?

***

The Chinese are not answering the emergency phone. Pique? Childishness? What is the point of the emergency phone if there is a policy not to answer it?

***

Maybe we should hire the balloon guys to monitor the southern border.

China and EVs

Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind, always.--Robin Williams

*** 

Did the U.S. admit they have sabotaged Nord Stream 2?

***

How big a climate disaster was the explosion of Nord Stream 2?

***

There are illegal immigrant activists.

***

China and EVs

The island of unintended consequences is becoming a continent. The growth is so big and unreasonable that one becomes suspicious that 'unintended' is appropriate.

This is from Forbes at an EV conference:

China’s carmakers will take a 12–15 percent market share in Western Europe by 2025. To date, a key selling point for Chinese EVs has been a cheaper sticker price, an advantage reinforced by the fact that European EV manufacturers have targeted a more upmarket segment, in part perhaps because (at a guess) they have not yet mastered the ability to make cheaper models at the margins they need. But the prospect that China will also be aiming at the higher-end market should worry the German auto sector. As a reminder, the German auto sector is the backbone of Germany’s vital industrial sector, much of which is dependent on exports. The largest market for German auto-sector exports is China. How long will that last?

The EU charges a 10 percent tariff on Chinese car imports, while China imposes duties between 15–25 percent on autos headed east. He wonders how long that regime will continue. Meanwhile, the U.S. imposes tariffs of 25 percent.

In short, by forcing this switch to EVs, the West (and Europe in particular) is not only throwing away its longstanding lead in auto manufacturing but handing a great chunk of that market to s geopolitical rival. Even by the dismal standards of central planning, this is remarkably stupid.