Author: Redactor

ideological culture international affairs

The Great Implosion

Is watching North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un shed earnest tears of sadness a cause for, well, if not jubilation, at least some schadenfreude?

Maybe not in this case: he was listening to a lecture on his country’s population collapse. He was pleading with young women to have more children. North Korea is experiencing negative population growth: well below the “replacement rate.”

An inevitable result of horrific North Korean tyranny?

Well, population decline is almost a universal phenomenon. North Korea’s population rate is alarming, but so is South Korea’s — which is much, much freer.

And Japan’s, for that matter; and Europe’s.

So what do we make of the population growth alarmists from the 1960s and ’70s? I refer to folks like Paul Erlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, and the “experts” who made up The Club of Rome, with its infamous 1972 report, The Limits of Growth.

Magnificently bad prophets.

But they had a huge impact — at least on Communist China, which instituted the One Child policy in 1979. Now, that country’s population trend has reversed, with an increasing rate of decline.

Moreover, there may be a lot less people in China than was boasted of — official government stats admit a 2.08 million person drop from 2022 to 2023, following the previous (and first official) drop of 850,000. We can only guess the actual population, because communists lie. Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, estimates that China’s population was less than 1.28 billion in 2022, not 1.41 billion, with the decline starting in 2018, not 2022.

Ask yourself: how many civilizations have survived a population implosion?

And for peoples with ponzi-like pension systems, this is even more devastating.

The Chinese are cursed, but so are we — for we all live in interesting times.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Population Trends

Canada: 1.33 births per woman (2023).
China: 1.0–1.16 births per woman (2023).
France: 1.68 births per woman (2024).
Germany: 1.46 births per woman (2024).
Great Britain: 1.45 births per woman (2023).
Japan: 1.26 births per woman (2024).
Mexico: 1.80 births per woman (2023).
North Korea: Estimates suggest a fertility rate of around 1.8–2.0 (2021), below replacement.
South Korea: 0.72 births per woman (2023), the lowest globally.
Taiwan: 0.87 births per woman (2023).
United States: 1.64 births per woman (2023).

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Thought

Karl Jaspers

The way in which man approaches his failure determines what he will become.
Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy (1951), Ralph Mannheim, translator.

Today

La Marseillaise

On April 25, 1792, the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” was composed by Capt. Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.

Accountability media and media people national politics & policies

A Cuomo Indictment?

New York City, Mayor Andrew Cuomo, covid

Can there be “pandemic justice”?

On June 11th of last year, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic of the House of Representatives interviewed former Governor of the State of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo, in pursuance of getting to the bottom of the disaster that was COVID in New York and beyond.

Cuomo had counsel; the interrogation was transcribed.

The focus? The governor’s disastrous decision to send coronavirus patients back to his state’s nursing homes, where they quickly spread the new disease to its most vulnerable targets.

On October 30th, the Select Subcommittee sent an official letter to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, “a detailed referral for criminal charges against Mr. Cuomo pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 1001,” which Garland unsurprisingly ignored.

Partisans sometimes stick together; fearing being hanged separately.

On Monday, Representative James Comer, chair of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a repeat request, but this time to the new AG, Pam Bondi.

The case against Cuomo is fairly clear: “Mr. Cuomo provided false statements to the Select Subcommittee in what appears to be a conscious, calculated effort to insulate himself from accountability.”

Cuomo made multiple criminally false statements, including that he was neither involved in the drafting nor the review of the state’s report, “Factors Associated with Nursing Home Infections and Fatalities in New York State during the COVID-19 Global Health Crisis” (2020).

It is worth remembering that the legacy news media made Governor Cuomo their pandemic hero and sex symbol, even as his policies killed as many as 10,000 people.

How to hold media folk accountable?

You already have: the media’s low ratings.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags covid, Mayor Andrew Cuomo, New York City

Thought

Felix Mendelssohn

And do you agree with me, that the first condition of an artist should be to bear respect towards what is great, and to bow to it and acknowledge it, and not attempt to extinguish great flames for the sake of making his own rushlight burn more brightly?
Felix Mendelssohn, in a letter to to Wilhelm Taubert, August 27, 1831, cited from Reisebriefe von Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Aus den Jahren 1830 bis 1832 (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1862) p. 256; translation from Emil Naumann (trans. F. Praeger) The History of Music (London: Cassell, 1886) vol. 2, p. 1052-53.

Today

Library of Congress

The United States Library of Congress was established on April 24, 1800, when President John Adams signed legislation to appropriate $5,000 to purchase “such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress.”

defense & war international affairs

To Halve and Halve Not

“Why is Taiwan such a hot flash point?”

That’s what U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of the United States Indo-Pacific Command. “Why could it lead not only to a catastrophic war, but also global Great Depression? Why should Americans care about an island on the other side of the world?”

The admiral told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the senator’s “last point [was] quite salient. Many a research organization postulate that conflict in the western Pacific over the Taiwan question would result in a 25 percent GDP contraction in Asia and a knock-on effect of 10 to 12 percent GDP reduction in the United States of America, with unemployment spiking seven to 10 points above base and likely 500,000 excess deaths of despair above base as well.

“This is just the importance of the regional stability to the world economy and its effect on people’s lives,” added Paparo. “And this is a function of freedom of navigation; it’s a function of the world dependency on semiconductors.”

“And to be clear,” offered Sen. Cotton, “simply having the conflict over Taiwan which is such a center of gravity in the modern economy could lead to many of the consequences you just outlined.”

Paparo explained that “most of the things” he has “studied indicate that American intervention would halve that impact,” adding “a successful American intervention would.

“Still a grave result,” Admiral Paparo acknowledged, “but half as grave, with savings of a lot of human misery.”

Let’s hope and pray and prepare militarily to deter Chinese aggression.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags China, foreign policy, Taiwan, war

Thought

Charles Ives

The word “beauty” is as easy to use as the word “degenerate.” Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you.
Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata (1920), p. 77.

Today

A Bach Premiere

Du Hirte Israel, höre (“You Shepherd of Israel, hear”), BWV 104, a church cantata, was performed for the first time in Leipzig 301 years ago on April 23rd, the composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, conducting.

Accountability Voting

The Five Million Fix

voter rolls, democracy, voting, elections, ID

Thanks to its analyses of voter rolls and numerous lawsuits, Judicial Watch can now report that, over the last several years, about five million names have been struck from voter rolls in almost a dozen states and localities.

These names unlawfully appeared on the rolls because of invalid voter registrations, as validity is defined in the National Voter Registration Act Of 1993.

According to the Act, each application to register “must state each voter eligibility requirement (including citizenship), contain an attestation that the applicant meets each requirement, state the penalties provided by law for submission of a false voter registration application and require the signature of the applicant under penalty of perjury.”

Thanks to Judicial Watch, 735,000 ineligible names have been removed from Kentucky voter rolls since 2019; 918,139 ineligible names have been removed from New York City voter rolls since 2022; and over a million ineligible names have been removed from the voter rolls of Los Angeles County.

These efforts have also led to the removal of ineligible names from the voter rolls of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, North Carolina, and outside of LA in California.

It hasn’t always been smooth sailing for the organization. In Maryland, for example, the State Board of Elections promulgated a rule to criminalize the use of registration lists to investigate voter fraud. A district court ruled that the rule violated the law.

Voter fraud is a problem, and it hasn’t been fixed yet. Thanks to Judicial Watch for making a big dent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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