Unrelated videos day!

Three videos that have nothing to do with one another. First up, David Goldman. I have linked to David Goldman's work many times. He is a genuine China expert. This video is his July 17 online lecture for the Westminster Institute about his new book, "You Will Be Assimilated: China's Plan to Sino-Form the World."

David is an American economist, music critic, and author, best known for his series of online essays in the Asia Times under the pseudonym Spengler. He is the Wax Family Fellow at the Middle East Forum, a Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, and a member of the Board of Advisors of Sino-Israel Government Network and Academic Leadership (SIGNAL). According to the Claremont Review of Books, the “Spengler” columns in the Asia Times have attracted readership in the millions.

Next, that which needs no introduction:

?
And one more:

Xi promises "smashed bodies" - and delivers

The promise: Xi warns any effort to split China will end with 'bodies smashed and bones ground to powder'

Chinese President Xi Jinping cautioned over the weekend that any effort to split with China will result in "bodies smashed and bones ground to powder" amid ongoing unrest in Hong Kong.

The Chinese leader made the warning while visiting Nepal, the Hong Kong Free Press reported.

“Anyone who attempts to split any region from China will perish, with their bodies smashed and bones ground to powder," Xi reportedly said.

The promise fulfilled: Jimmy Sham, leader of Hong Kong democracy group Civil Human Rights Front, attacked on Mong Kok street

• Sham is smashed in the head with hammers and spanners by at least four assailants who then flee in a car
• The activist’s pro-democracy group has been responsible for some of Hong Kong’s biggest protest marches in recent years

The leader of a pro-democracy group responsible for some of the largest peaceful protest marches in Hong Kong was attacked on Wednesday, four days before another planned mass rally.

Jimmy Sham Tsz-kit, convenor of the Civil Human Rights Front, was set upon by at least four non-ethnic Chinese assailants on Arran Street in Mong Kok at 7.40pm, a police source said.

The attack was the second against Sham in less than two months.

The Civil Human Rights Front said Sham had been smashed over the head with hammers and spanners but was conscious when sent to Kwong Wah Hospital in Yau Ma Tei. He was understood to be in stable condition.

The real question for Xi, as for any totalitarian, is "How many bodies is he willing to smash" to enforce his will? For Chairman Mao, the answer was, "As many as it takes." Mao killed 100 million. Will Xi go that far, or will he draw up short?

Because the answer to how many bodies he is willing to smash is somewhere between 1 (and done) to unlimited. And no one, including Xi, knows in advance what that number will be

Right now, Xi is in the preliminary stages of intimidation rather than military crackdown. As the WSJ reports, "Beijing hasn’t sent tanks into the streets. It’s trying to do the job with criminal gangs and technology."

The Chinese crackdown here is under way. Tanks haven’t rolled into Hong Kong à la Tiananmen Square in 1989. But Beijing is carrying out a subtler, though often still violent, effort to suppress dissent, hoping the world won’t notice. Ask Stanley Ho Wai-hong of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions.

The 35-year-old pro-democracy labor activist planned a community event Sept. 29 in Sai Kung, a fishing village in Hong Kong’s New Territories. But that afternoon, tens of thousands were rallying in the city against China’s human-rights abuses, so Mr. Ho canceled his event at the last minute. He was driving away when a stranger called him and asked him to come back so villagers could give him a gift. “It was a trap for murder,” he told me at the hospital earlier this month.

When he arrived back in Sai Kung, he says, three men ambushed him and bludgeoned him with metal rods. Mr. Ho fell to the ground and tried to cover his skull with his hands. It took only half a minute for bystanders to rescue him, but “30 seconds is a long time.” The attack left Mr. Ho with seven gashes in his head and five bruises on his back. His right thumb and three other fingers were broken, the left index finger so severely that he needed surgery.

So yes, Xi was serious about smashing bodies. We are not yet at the stage of grinding bones to powder. But it's coming.

Update: American Digest posts The Hidden History Of The Tiananmen Square Massacre, with many photos. "Massacre" is perhaps an understatement.

When I pointed this out, I was told I was racist

Author and commentator Arthur Chrenkoff observes from Australia,

At the heart of the New Catstrophism lies an inconvenient truth: the United States – or Australia – could cut their emissions to zero today (or by 2030) and it would make a negligible difference to the global temperatures.

There are two reasons for that: firstly, the CO2 emissions in the United States, the European Union, Canada and Australia have actually been declining in the past 10-15 years. Secondly, the CO2 emissions throughout the developing world have been skyrocketing. And this is not just in relative terms, which disregard the massively different starting points, but in absolute terms.

Why? Because "China now produces more CO2 than the United States and the European Union put together, the Asia-Pacific region ... emits nearly twice as much CO2 as the United States and the European Union combined. And rising." So:

St Joan of Arc of the Children’s Crusade against Carbon, Greta Thunberg, should be going to Beijing or Bangalore and staging her protests there instead of, or at least in addition to, Sweden or New York. She should be hounding President Xi and Prime Minister Modi about their shameful emissions. She should be leading throngs of Asian kids out of schools for her Friday student strikes. She should be castigating the industries and the consumers of the developing world for destroying the planet and killing humanity in the process. She should be doing all this if she were serious about the global nature of the problem. But I won’t be holding my breath.

I pointed this out on Facebook to a very left-wing friend, whereupon I was almost instantly advised that it was racist of me even to suggest it. After all, I was told, there was no reason for the Chinese or Indians to listen to a white European girl. I am not making that up.

In fact, The U.S. Leads All Countries In Reducing Carbon Emissions.

Updates:

David Harsanyi:

Sixteen-year-old Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg lives in the healthiest, wealthiest, safest, and most peaceful era humans have ever known. She is one of the luckiest people ever to have lived.

In a just world, Thunberg would be at the United Nations thanking capitalist countries for bequeathing her this remarkable inheritance. Instead, she, like millions of other indoctrinated kids her age, act as if they live in a uniquely broken world on the precipice of disaster. This is a tragedy.

The problem with Greta Thunberg:

The problem with Greta Thunberg is not that she’s a 16-year-old girl with pigtails.

The problem with Greta Thunberg is not that she’s a school drop out.

The problem with Greta Thunberg is not she’s autistic.

There are hundreds of thousands of other kids around the world with some or all of these features – and none is being criticised for having them.

No, the problem with Greta Thunberg is that no matter how brave or inspirational or articulate or touchingly young and fresh-faced or triumphant-over-mental-adversity she may be, the “facts” she regurgitates on behalf of her controllers are lies, propaganda and fake news – and the cause she represents is downright evil.

Strip away all the fluffy invocations of nature and the plight of future generations and the alleged crisis facing mother earth and what you find underneath is pure totalitarianism.

Tony Heller:

Greta Thunberg lives a charmed life.  She doesn't have to go to school, travels the world, is likely getting very rich, and is being used in one of the most ridiculous attemots at a propaganda coup. In this video I discuss the difference between the reality of her life and the propaganda she has been chosen to spread.

Today's Link Sink

Opt out of everything on the internet: Your handy and very comprehensive page where you can opt out of almost any privacy-related matter on the web. Truly invaluable.  Click here.

But Bernie is wrong about everything else, so why not this? WSJ: Why Bernie Sanders Is Wrong About Sweden. My first reaction was, Why should Sweden be the exception? But in fact, Sweden is not socialist at all.

The ‘Nordic model’ of socialism, which he and other leftists tout, is more like ‘ruthless capitalism,’ says [Swedish historian] Johan Norberg.

He idealized the simple life of his ancestors in the 19th century. 

“I had this romanticized idea about them, and I looked at pictures of them: Look at that rural lifestyle, happy farmers.” Eventually he realized 19th-century life wasn’t all he cracked it up to be. “I thought it would come with penicillin, and sort of modern surgery, and instant access to all of the calories I needed to survive another day, and so. And I think history really saved me there, because then when I read up on my ancestors in northern Sweden, I realized that they didn’t live ‘ecologically.’ They died ecologically, at a very young age.” ...

A couple of days after our interview, Mr. Norberg emailed a warning for Americans: “The most dangerous place to be is top of the world, think you have it all made and can afford to experiment with socialism or protectionism, because you have plenty of room for mistakes before you hurt yourself,” he wrote. “That’s where Sweden was in 1970. It almost destroyed us, and it took some heroic efforts to get back on track.”

BTW, that's this Norberg:

Not the Police Squad character:

(Whose name was spelled Nordberg, anyway. But what the heck. Go with it.)

David Goldman: The Chinese will hand Trump his head on a platter. Goldman supports Trump and will vote for him next year, but says there are certain realities that Trump is not integrating. Read it and weep.

Speaking of the Chinese  - Africans to Chinese: Get out! Why? Because the Chinese build them nothing without strings (Strings? Heck, chains!) attached and the Chinese con has worn too thin to live with. Besides, I know very well a retired Marine officer who did years of State Dept. assignments in Africa after the Corps, He saw first hand many, many places where the Chinese had done infrastructure work - roads, pipelines, building projects. He told me that without exception they were of very poor quality and would not last. There was no doubt in his mind that the Chinese did not do the work to advance the African's interests, but their own, and saw the contracts as foothold for a permanent presence there.

Which helps explains why Trump wanted to buy Greenland. Because Greenland's government (it self governs although the island is still a Danish colony) asked the Chinese in 2017 whether they would build infrastructure that the Danish government declined to fund.

According to the South China Morning Post, Greenland had been seriously courted by China due to its strategic location and its mineral resources.

BTW, Harry Truman tried to buy Greenland, too, and even offered to swap part of Alaska for it.

Forbes: Trump Might Want to Buy Greenland But His Nemesis, China, Is There Before Him

CNBC: Here’s why Trump wants to buy Greenland

The Smithsonian Institution is not exactly run by the Vast Right-Wing, White-Supremacy Conspiracy, but it sure knocks the New York Times' "1619 project" into the can. The Misguided Focus on 1619 as the Beginning of Slavery in the U.S. Damages Our Understanding of American History

The year the first enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown is drilled into students’ memories, but overemphasizing this date distorts history

But to the NYT, that's a feature, not a bug.

The "lungs of the earth" are still breathing. Reason: Don't Panic: Amazon Burning Is Mostly Farms, Not Forests. As Brazilians attained a higher per-capita standard of living over the years, they decreased clearing Amazon basin jungle. What made the difference? Capitalism, of course.

A 2012 study found, after parsing data from 52 developing countries between 1972 and 2003, that deforestation increases until average income levels reach about $3,100 per capita. As it happens, Brazilian per capita incomes reached $3,600 per capita in 2004,which is when deforestation rates began trending decisively downward.

Russia, China, Venezuela - all same-o, same-o

There is the old joke of a man who propositioned a woman by telling her he would pay her $25,000 for one evening of certain, um, favors.

"Wow!" she exclaimed. "Twenty-five thousand dollars for a couple of hours? Sure!"

"Well then," he said, " what about doing it for twenty-five dollars?"

 "What kind of woman do you think I am?" she angrily replied.

"Oh, I have already learned that. Now we're just haggling over price."

Venezuela's late-stage socialism

And so it is the Soviet and Chinese communism and Venezuelan socialism. The difference is merely in degree - the price, so to speak - not in kind. UCLA law Prof. Eugene Volokh explains,

The horrendous history of China, the USSR, and their imitators, should have permanently discredited socialism as completely as fascism was discredited by the Nazis. But it has not – so far – fully done so.

Just recently, the socialist government of Venezuela imposed forced labor on much of its population. Yet most of the media coverage of this injustice fails to note the connection to socialism, or that the policy has parallels in the history of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other similar regimes. One analysis even claims that the real problem is not so much “socialism qua socialism,” but rather Venezuela’s “particular brand of socialism, which fuses bad economic ideas with a distinctive brand of strongman bullying,” and is prone to authoritarianism and “mismanagement.” The author simply ignores the fact that “strongman bullying” and “mismanagement” are typical of socialist states around the world. The Scandinavian nations – sometimes cited as examples of successful socialism- are not actually socialist at all, because they do not feature government ownership of the means of production, and in many ways have freer markets than most other western nations.

Venezuela’s tragic situation would not surprise anyone familiar with the history of the Great Leap Forward. ...

But all is well, comrades, because fairness!

State and other persecution of religious people

In last Sunday's lectionary passage from the book of Acts, the apostles are arrested for preaching that Christ is risen. They are questioned before the Jewish priestly Sanhedrin. The high priest reminds them that they had been ordered to stop such preaching.

Peter, speaking for all the apostles, responds, "We must obey God rather than any human authority." Acts records that had not a Sanhedrin member named Gamaliel argued otherwise, the apostles would have been executed that day.

Fast forward to today, and understand that there are still human authorities who will not countenance any resistance to their authority. China, for example, this month:


This was the destruction of one of the largest church buildings in the country. The Guardian reports,

Witnesses and overseas activists said the paramilitary People's Armed Police used dynamite and excavators to destroy the Golden Lampstand Church, which has a congregation of more than 50,000, in the city of Linfen in Shanxi province.

ChinaAid, a US-based Christian advocacy group, said local authorities planted explosives in an underground worship hall to demolish the building following, constructed with nearly $2.6m (£1.9m) in contributions from local worshippers in one of China's poorest regions.

The church had faced "repeated persecution" by the Chinese government, said ChinaAid. Hundreds of police and hired thugs smashed the building and seized Bibles in an earlier crackdown in 2009 that ended with the arrest of church leaders.

Those church leaders were given prison sentences of up to seven years for charges of illegally occupying farmland and disturbing traffic order, according to state media. 

And it is not just Christians. Muslims who have lived in China for centuries have suffered even worse: "Before-and-after photos show how China is destroying historical sites to monitor and intimidate its Muslim minority."

China is waging an unprecedented crackdown on a Muslim minority called the Uighurs, who live in the country's western frontier region, Xinjiang.

Muslims have for centuries settled in the region, sometimes referred to as East Turkestan. 

As part of its crackdown, which has seen the installation of facial-recognition cameras and seemingly arbitrary detentions, China's government has also destroyed traditional Uighur architecture including mosques and large parts of an ancient city called Kashgar.

Before-and-after images show the extent of some of the destruction of these historical locations.

When the state is the religion, it will always crush or suborn all others. Could never happen here, though, right? Oh, the ground is being tilled already. I give you Harvard University, April 25, 2019, and the keynote speaker of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences "Diversity Conference."

We are pleased to announce that our keynote speaker will be Tim Wise, prominent anti-racism writer, educator, and activist. A moderated discussion with Tim will be led by Renee Graham, an associate editor and columnist at the Boston Globe.

This is the same Tim Wise who posted on his Facebook page in 2015:

This is America…people basing their beliefs on the fable of Noah and Ark, or their interpretation of Sodom and Gomorrah…rather than science or logic…If you are basing your morality on a fairy tale written thousands of years ago, you deserve to be locked up…detained for your utter inability to deal with reality…NO, we are not obligated to indulge your irrationality in the name of your religious freedom…but we will provide you a very comfortable room, against which walls you may hurl yourself hourly if your choose. Knock yourself out….seriously, knock yourself out, completely, for weeks at a time…I’m sorta kidding but not by much…I don’t believe lunatics like this should be locked up, but I do think they have to be politically destroyed, utterly rendered helpless to the cause of pluralism and democracy …the world is not theirs. They have no right to impose their bullshit on others. They can either change, or shut the hell up, or practice their special brand of crazy in their homes…or go away. Their choice. And this argument applies to any fundamentalist religionist of any faith who thinks they have a right to impose their beliefs on a secular, pluralistic society. Go away.

That is not only no problem for Harvard, it is positively commendable. 

All that is bad enough. However, persecution of Jews in America (though thankfully, not by the government) is growing. Not only the violent kind, such as the anti-Trump, anti-Jew gunman, John Earnest, who killed one and shot two others in the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, California. Take for example, this cartoon published by The New York Times in its overseas pages this month:

Yes, that infamous propaganda rag of the alt-right, The  New York Times - oh, wait, you say, the NYT is not alt-right? Really? How can you tell?

No wonder that this week Serge Klarsfeld, France's most famous Nazi hunter, said, "There is no safe place on earth right now for Jews." In Washington to receive the Elie Wiesel Prize, the highest award given out by the United States Holocaust Museum, Klarsfeld told reporters,

... the cartoon was "insulting," for Trump as much as for Netanyahu who was "treated like a dog."

"It is an anti-Semitic cartoon, that is to say that Jews are guiding the world and that corresponds to a stereotype very common among the far right, which one also finds on the far left," he said.

Klarsfeld, who spent decades working to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, is worried about the future of Europe and called on centrists to mobilize ahead of the next European elections.

 "Never has a far-right or far-left regime made its people happy and prosperous, inevitably the extremes of power lead to misery and barbed wire."

In rhetoric, the far left and the far right differ only in whom they identify as class enemies. Religiously, the alt-right hates Muslims. The alt-left hates Christians. And they both hate Jews even more. So in practice, there is no distinction with a difference.

Gendercide and the problem of millions of extra young men

Science Alert:

A deep-rooted preference for sons over daughters has skewed the world's sex ratios more than we thought.

A massive five-year analysis has found that since 1970, sex-selective abortions in a dozen countries have resulted in 23 million 'missing' girls.

These are women that were never born, and yet today, their absence is palpable, especially in eastern Europe and Asia. In China alone, the study found there were 11.9 million missing females, and India had 10.6 million.

Males are normally born at a rate of 105 males birth for every 100 female births. It evens out over the next 20 years or so because males die at a higher rate before maturity than females. But now females die in the womb at a much higher rate than males.

After years of a controversial single-child policy, China was unsurprisingly at the top. At one point in 2005, the authors found that the most populated country in the world actually had a male birth ratio of 118.

So what do you do with tens of millions of young, virile and frankly horny young men who have zero chance of getting married because there are zero women available to marry them? Maybe more importantly, what do those men do? The question practically answers itself.

Today, in China and India, men outnumber women by 70 million, and it's causing an epidemic of loneliness, a distortion of labour markets, and an increase in female trafficking and prostitution.

Not only that, but those nations will lose one of the natural restraints of going to war that inhibited prior generations, though of course not always successfully: the fear of massive casualties. China could invade Taiwan and if it lost three million men conquering the country, so what? It still has 30 or 40 million more that can die invading somewhere else.

More insight is provided by the US National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health in, "Abnormal sex ratios in human populations: Causes and consequences."

In parts of China and India, there will be a 12–15% excess of young men. These men will remain single and will be unable to have families, in societies where marriage is regarded as virtually universal and social status and acceptance depend, in large part, on being married and creating a new family (45).

An additional problem is that many of these men are rural peasants of low socioeconomic class and with limited education (46). When there is a shortage of women in the marriage market, the women can “marry up,” inevitably leaving the least desirable men with no marriage prospects (47). For example, in China 94% of all unmarried people age 28–49 are male and 97% of them have not completed high school (48). So, in many communities today there are growing numbers of young men in the lower echelons of society who are marginalized because of lack of family prospects and who have little outlet for sexual energy. A number of commentators predict that this situation will lead to increased levels of antisocial behavior and violence and will ultimately present a threat to the stability and security of society (31, 45–49).

There is some empirical evidence to fear such a scenario. Gender is a well-established individual-level correlate of crime, and especially violent crime (50). It is a consistent finding across cultures that an overwhelming percentage of violent crime is perpetrated by young, unmarried, low-status males (50–52). In India, a study carried out between 1980 and 1982 showed a strong correlation between homicide rates in individual states across the country and the sex ratio in those states, after controlling for potential confounders such as urbanization and poverty (53). The authors concluded that there was a clear link between sex ratio and violence as a whole, not just violence against women as might be assumed when there is a shortage of females. These analyses were repeated by Hudson and Den Boer (46), who showed that the relationship between sex ratio and murder rates at the level of the Indian state persisted through the late 1990s. In China, young male migrant workers are thought to be responsible for a disproportionate amount of urban crime, especially violent crime. It is reported that migrants account for 50% of all criminal cases in the major receiving cities for migrants, with some cities reporting up to 80% (54).

There is also evidence that, when single young men congregate, the potential for more organized aggression is likely to increase substantially (45, 53). Hudson and Den Boer, in their provocative writings on this subject (45, 46), go further, predicting that these men are likely to be attracted to military or military-type organizations, with the potential to be a trigger for large-scale domestic and international violence. With 40% of the world's population living in China and India, the authors argue that the sex imbalance could impact regional and global security, especially because the surrounding countries of Pakistan, Taiwan, Nepal, and Bangladesh also have high sex ratios.

It will get worse until 2050, when the number of "missing girls" will peak at present trend lines.

What about the United States? Wikipedia:

While the majority of parents in United States do not practice sex-selective abortion, there is certainly a trend toward male preference. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, if they were only allowed to have one child, 40% of respondents said they would prefer a boy, while only 28% preferred a girl.[107] When told about prenatal sex selection techniques such as sperm sorting and in vitro fertilization embryo selection, 40% of Americans surveyed thought that picking embryos by sex was an acceptable manifestation of reproductive rights.[108] These selecting techniques are available at about half of American fertility clinics, as of 2006.[109]

But I guess that's okay because abortion on demand is a woman's sacred right. Kidnapping young girls and women into sex-trafficking rings for unmarriageable men? That's a crime. That it occurs at increased numbers because of abortion does not matter because abortion? That's medical care.

The ghost of Chairman Mao

The ghost of Chairman Mao appeared to today's Chinese President Xi Jinping and cabinet to get an update. Here is Xi's report of their conversation:

From the evergreen American Digest.

150,000 Chinese troops sent to North Korean border

Troops of China's People's Liberation Army

South Korean media are reporting that an additional 150,000 Chinese soldiers have been sent to China's border with North Korea. Google translates the page thus:

As the United States announced its independent North Korean behavior and moved the United States Navy's nuclear-powered Calvinus (CVN-70) carrier class to Singapore, the Chinese army has deployed about 150,000 troops in two groups, "The report said. It is because of the prospect of taking "military options", such as preemptive attacks on North Korea, just as the United States has launched an air raid on Syria. ...

There is an observation that medical and back-up support units will be dispatched to "train for North Korean refugees," the newspaper added

What this means is that when President Trump sent 60 cruise missiles against Syria's Sharyat airfield, the Chinese very soon took seriously the possibility that an attack could be made against North Korea's atomic-weapons program unless Kim Jong Un, the North's dictator, backs down peacefully.

The additional troops are almost certainly to prevent floods of North Korean refugees from crossing into China if there is a military strike against the DPRK's nuclear program. China has long had to contend with thousands of refugees annually refugees from the DPRK. Many are killed or die making the attempt. China has a mixed record at best of turning over successful escapees to North Korea. Amnesty International reported in 2012,

Chinese authorities forcibly returns North Korean refugees back to North Korea where they face risk to their lives. By its actions, it intimidates North Korean refugees and those who are helping them in China. China refuses to give access to the UN refugee agency, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Those individuals apprehended by Chinese border police and North Korean authorities in China are reportedly detained in China for several days and then forcibly returned to their country where they are at risk of punishment including arbitrary detention, forced labor, and in some cases, the death penalty for leaving the country without authorization.

Meanwhile,

China's top nuclear envoy arrived in Seoul Monday for talks on the North Korean threat, as the United States sent the naval strike group to the region and signalled it may act to shut down Pyongyang's weapons program.

Speculation of an imminent nuclear test is brewing as the North marks major anniversaries including the 105th birthday of its founding leader on Saturday - sometimes celebrated with a demonstration of military might.

Wu Dawei, China's Special Representative for Korean Peninsula Affairs, met with his South Korean counterpart on Monday to discuss the nuclear issue.

Voice of America reports that China and South Korea have come to an agreement: "South Korea, China Agree on Action to End North Korea Nuclear Threat."

WASHINGTON — South Korea and China say they have agreed they will take strong action against North Korea if Pyongyang conducts more nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests.

The top nuclear envoys from North Korea's neighbors, Kim Hong-kyun and Wu Dawei, discussed the latest developments Monday in Seoul.

South Korea is in a pickle. A nuclear-armed North is a much graver threat to the South than ever. But the South cannot try to match the North a-bomb for a-bomb because its leaders realize that nuclearizing the both countries raises the risk of confrontation even higher. Why? The initiation of such a program would only increase the chance that Kim Jong Un would be more motivated to strike sooner rather than later.

Nor is the South altogether comfortable with the idea of a pre-emptive strike against the North.
South Korea's Unification Minister Hong Yong-pyo said Monday the repercussions of a potential military response were worrying.

'Pre-emptive strikes may be aimed at resolving North Korea's nuclear problems, but for us, it is also related to defending the safety of the public,' he told reporters.

While a US unilateral strike on North Korea from a shorter range might be more effective, it would likely endanger many civilians in the South and risk triggering a broader military conflict, experts warn.

In a conventional war with the North, casualties would be enormous in the South. I explained many of the reasons why back in 2010, and the reasons have not changed - yet. If the North gets nukes, the potential for truly mass death will be very great.

China's graying population and gendercide policy

The World's Most Populous Country Is Turning Gray

The world’s most populous country is turning gray at an accelerating pace.

That aging has big implications for China’s economic growth, which could be undermined as the labor force declines sharply from 2021 to 2030. It also strains the nation’s expenditures for public services, insurance, and health care, and puts a dent in domestic consumption.

China’s latest population development plan, released by the State Council late Wednesday, projects that about a quarter of China’s population will be 60 or older by 2030. That’s up from 13.3 percent of the population in the country’s latest census in 2010.

The number of children 14 or younger will decline to 17 percent over the same period, the plan estimated, without saying what base it used for comparison. About 36 percent of the population in 2030 will be 45 to 59, it said. The 2010 census showed that age group accounted for about 20 percent of the total population.

But this is by design and on purpose, though perhaps we can generously say it is unintended. China's longstanding "one child" policy has guaranteed it. It was amplified because that policy resulted in country-wide gendercide.

See the UK's MailOnline, "Gendercide: China's shameful massacre of unborn girls means there will soon be 30m more men than women."
The headline actually tells the story, but the lead explains, 

In the cruel old China, baby girls were often left to die in the gutters. In the cruel modern China, they are aborted by the tens of millions, using all the latest technology.

There is an ugly new word for this mass slaughter: gendercide.

Thanks to a state policy which has limited many families to one child since 1979, combined with an ancient and ruthless prejudice in favour of sons, the world's new superpower is beginning the century of its supremacy with an alarming surplus of males.

In just three years, China will have 30 million more young men than women. This trend cannot be reversed before then, and will actually worsen to a 50-million gap only 20 years later. This is the direct result of China's official, and ruthlessly-enforced, one-child policy. Chinese culture has for millennia valued boys far above girls; in fact, as writer Peter Hitchens points out, there is an old Chinese expression said both about and to girls: "You are only a girl. You are spilt water." 

So what to do with all those excess men? One fear of Western analysts is that this is the answer.

Twenty to fifty million excess young, sexually-frustrated and emotionally-stunted men, loose within the ordinary and decreasingly-structured Chinese society could spell real trouble for the central government when those men figure out they've been had. Maybe best to put them under harsh discipline. And if they become fodder while conquering Taiwan, for example, well, okay. Plenty to spare, plenty to spare.

Enormous Shanghai shopping mall is now China's largest empty building

Enormous Shanghai shopping mall is now China's largest empty building

It's a pentagon, but much, much larger than the Pentagon near Washington, D.C. According to the story, the designers deliberately copied the Pentagon's design because it offers very quick walking access between even the furthest points of the building. Our Pentagon building was designed to so that it would take no more then seven minutes to walk to anyplace in the building.

Apparently, though, Chinese shoppers found navigation too confusing and so the pentagonal mall is mostly empty.

I was stationed at the Pentagon from 1990-1993. I will attest that navigating around it took quite a bit of getting used to. But once you cracked the code of how rooms and corridors were numbered (which frankly took a lot of walking and no little bit of getting lost!) then you suddenly immediately knew how to get to any place in the building from anywhere in the building.

The Pentagon, Arlington, Va., with my office, 2E641, indicated at top right. The pentagonal design comes from the inability of engineers in the day to cheaply and efficiently build circular mega-structures, which was the first choice. The pentagon shape was adopted as a compromise. The round, then pentagonal, shape was adopted to make best use of the plot of land the government acquired for the building. But use of that land (about a half-mile from the present site) fell through and there was 

no time to redesign because of very tight, wartime deadlines. So a pentagon it remained. The Army engineer officer in charge was Lesley Grove, who went on to command the nation's development of the atomic bombs used against Japan in August 1945.

My office number was 2E641. The leading 2 meant second floor. The E meant the E ring, being the outer of five rings. The 6 meant it was near Corridor 6 (of 10 corridors) and the 41  was, well, the room number.

Once this numbering system got magically baked into my brain, when I was told I had a meeting to attend in, say, room 3B223, I instantly knew exactly how to get there and how long the walk would take.

But it took time to absorb this, and shoppers won't put up with the confusion. Here is the mall:

Chinese Christians getting hit hard

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/05/28/the-chinese-christian-crackdown/

The Chinese Christian Crackdown

Between 1,200 and 1,700 crosses have come crashing down over the past two years in China’s Zhejiang Province, where the brutal repression of Christians has also seen churches demolished andpastors imprisoned, all with the blessing of top party officials. The NYT reports:

“What has been happening in Zhejiang is a test,” said Fan Yafeng, an independent legal scholar in Beijing. “If the government views it as a success, it will be expanded.”

Broadening the campaign to regulate religion could backfire on Mr. Xi, with worshipers abandoning government-run churches in favor of underground congregations, which typically meet unobtrusively in office buildings or homes. It could also antagonize many of the urban, white-collar professionals who have embraced Christianity.

Having recognized Christianity as a potential threat to the CCP’s grip on power, Xi could be test-driving religious persecution in China’s Christian heartland before taking the policy nationwide. As we’ve said before, the ongoing persecution is not in China’s national interest; if anything, it may make Christians stronger.

Repression is turning a largely placid Christian population into deeply unhappy one. So far in Zhejiang Christian leaders have sermonized against the new policies and their parishioners have organized protests, sometimes going as far as clashing with security forces andblockading churches slated for demolition. Take this policy nationwide, and China’s government may be in for a massive showdown with a Christian community that outnumbers the Communist Party.

What do you do with 38 million excess men?

As a young Chinese woman who's lived there for the first 18 years of my life, I can say with confidence that things are pretty grim for the boys and girls back home. Men are expected to possess substantial wealth in order for them to consider marriage and family. This in turn, in my opinion, perpetuates the misogynist notion of women being commodities, because the rich guy almost always gets the girl.

From Girlfriends And Boyfriends In China

Young women hold all the cards in China because there are significantly fewer of them than young men/ Why? Because of China's strict one-child per family rule. And legal abortion without restriction. Since Chinese culture ascribes far greater honor to both fathers and mother for bearing a baby boy first (or only), tens of millions of unborn girls have been aborted to preserve the one-child allowance for a male.

See the UK's MailOnline's, "Gendercide: China's shameful massacre of unborn girls means there will soon be 30m more men than women." Well, there already are.

So what do you do with 38 million excess men? Who are, by the way, of military age? One fear of Western analysts is that this is the answer.

Twenty to fifty million excess young, sexually-frustrated and emotionally-stunted men, loose within the ordinary and decreasingly-structured Chinese society could spell real trouble for the central government when those men figure out they've been had. Maybe best to put them under harsh discipline. And if they become fodder while conquering Taiwan, for example, well, okay. Plenty to spare, plenty to spare.

Ah, those women-loving, progressive Russians!

Paid Maternity Leave Around the World

Naturally, the Left is trumpeting how progressive other nations are - like Russia, which gives women a year of paid maternity leave. And just as naturally, they think that Russia and other nations with long paid leaves support them because they are just so darn pro-woman.

Wrong.

Every nation in dark blue on the map has a birth rate that is catastrophically low or nearly so. Those governments pay for a year of maternity leave to get women to bear babies. In almost none of those nations (maybe none, period) is the present birth rate high enough to replace the people dying every year.

Take Russia.  Russia's birth rate fell off a cliff about 40 years ago (maybe more, the birth rate was a state secret under the communists) and Russia's population has been steadily declining a lot since at least the 1960s. That may be one reason that Putin is so expansionist now - if he waits 20 years he won't have enough men of military age to do it with. The year-long maternity leave is just one of the inducements the Russian government has in place to get women to bear children. They used to (and maybe still do) also pay a woman several thousand tax-free dollars (in rubles, of course) for every live birth.

It also doesn't bode well for Russia's future that not only is its birth rate bottoming, its death rate is one of the highest "among all countries with at least moderate levels of economic development," and the present life expectancy of Russian men is only about 58 years, lower than 30 years ago.

Russia has the highest death rates among all countries with at least moderate levels of economic development. The present life expectancy for a typical male is about 58 years, below what it was 20 years ago in Russia. ... Even more worrisome to many Russians are the very low birth rates during the past couple of decades. The total fertility rate- the number of children born to the average woman over her lifetime- is expected to be just 1.28 in 2006, or just a little more than one per couple. Russian fertility is among the lowest in the world. ... The Russian decline is currently about 700,000 persons per year, but the rate of decline will accelerate as the number of women in childbearing ages continues to fall. A World Bank report projects that with unchanged birth and death rates, Russia's population would fall from its present level of about 140 million persons to under 100 million by the year 2050. If this happens, such a huge nation would then be largely empty of people.

The old Soviet government "offered Medals of Glory to mothers who had many children," but the Russian government 

has proposed a ten-year program with very generous benefits for Russian women who have a second child- about 70 per cent of Russian women of child-bearing ages presently either have no children or only one child. Under his plan, women who do have a second child will get up to $110 more per month in child allowances, they would be able to take leave from work for up to eighteen months while receiving 40 per cent of their salaries, and they would get larger subsidies for child care. But the most novel aspect of Putin's proposal is to give a cash bonus of over $9000 to women who have a second child. This bonus is considerably larger than the annual earnings of a typical Russian worker, men or women, and it could be used for mortgage payments and for many other large outlays. Putin acknowledges that this program would require lots of money (perhaps 1 per cent of Russian GDP), but he claims that it is necessary in order to "change the attitude of the whole society to the family and its values".

China, OTOH, has the opposite problem. Because of its one-child policy, Chinese parents overwhelmingly abort unborn girls because Chinese society is still heavily patriarchal. That means that today there are about 20 million Chinese men reaching adulthood who have absolutely no hope of marriage; there just aren't enough women to go round. By 2030 the number of such men may reach 50 million.

What do do with tens of millions of young, virile, horny men whose lonely state is 100 percent the fault of the government? Why, kill them, of course. But not in death camps. Get ready for Chinese-expansionist wars the likes that history has never seen.

I'm not saying that is certain, but it is definitely one very real possibility that American strategists are thinking about.

Related

Japan beefing up its armed forces

Japan Shifting Further Away From Pacifism - NYTimes:

Japan has increased military spending this year for the first time in 11 years because of China's  waxing power and assertiveness. The only problem is that Japan's birth rate fell off a cliff a long time ago. The real question is not whether Japan can defend itself now, but whether it will be able to do so in 20 years when the cohort of military-age people will be much smaller.

Meanwhile, China has a growing number of excess males. Because of China's "one child" policy, female unborn babies are aborted at a staggering rate because couples overwhelmingly want their single child to be a male.

In not much more than one more generation, China will have as many as 50 million more men than women, men with no hope of marriage and family of their own. This is a guarantee of domestic unrest in its gentlest terms, possible revolution in its harshest.

So what might the ruling class decide to do about all those excess men? Well, getting them killed off in carload lots would solve a lot of the problem, and Chinese leaders know just where to do it: Taiwan and the contested Senkaku islands, controlled by Japan since 1895, excerpt for America's post-World War II administration that ended in 1971. The islands are uninhabited. China says the islands were its own beginning in the 14th century. Discovery of fossil-fuel reserves in the islands' waters keep the dispute alive.

Chinese trousers domination!

Probably the ugliest, stupidest-looking skyscraper or arch building ever built, the Pants of the East!