What do You know?

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

We used to know so many things, in the past.

Or at least I did.

I mean, I knew a lot of things in Europe that turned out not to be real at all here. Like I knew that the US was wild and there were shootouts on the street all the time. (I still wanted to come here as an exchange student. What can i say. Did I ever claim my instinct of self preservation worked at all, let alone well?)

I knew that nuclear power was dangerous — dangerous I tell you! — which is why we couldn’t have nuclear energy.

And I knew were were all going to freeze to death because of pollution, that we were running out of oil for real, that population was growing so fast food would be rationed by the end of the eighties and–

Oh lots of things. Including that Chinese would continue reproducing too fast to vanish, even if you lined them up and had them jump off a cliff (no one said how many at a time. A serious flaw. No. I mean, people die anyway at a constant rate. Would the cliff jumping be more or less than normal death. I don’t know. No one told me, and it didn’t occur to me to ask.)

How did I know this? Well, I was young and everyone agreed on these things: school, scientists who wrote articles for scientific publications, novelists, song writers, the daily papers.

We all knew lots of things like that. We “knew” them because everyone “knew” them and if you said you didn’t then you’d be laughed at; it would be assumed you were just uninformed and ignorant.

… We surely have passed a lot of water since then, haven’t we? And in my case moving back and forth and back again between countries contributed to my examining everything I was told very carefully. An approach to information that could be described as “Chew, but don’t swallow.”

Some of the nonsense, from population to “we’re going to freeze to death” started looking more and more doubtful as time went by.

When I did 12th grade in the US, for instance, I found out that the average Portuguese family size was six children per woman. Guys, that would be like being told that about the US now, not even in the eighties. There were more families I met in the US with two and four kids than I knew in Portugal, where except for two large families (six and eleven) most of the people I knew had one kid, and a little less than half had two. However, it didn’t take much effort to realize the population numbers claimed for Portugal ONLY worked if every woman was popping off kids like crazy. And then at some point I realized it was a curious thing that all the countries claiming explosive population growth were countries who were either trying to intimidate us with how stronk they were — Russia, China — and countries that were net receivers of international charity, usually administered per capita.

Other things: the many many deaths from AIDS in Africa, so many that there were roving bands of orphaned kids, as reported by people who lived there, were somehow never reflected in the population numbers: they too must be like the Chinese, able to reproduce faster and faster while jumping off cliffs.

And I read Heinlein’s debunking of the population size in Moscow making it 1/4th the size claimed. And reports from friends who actually put their translation training to use filtered in. Stuff like “It’s physically impossible for Mexico City to be the size claimed. The water available wouldn’t keep that large a population alive. We’re not talking showers and laundry. Just drinking water, okay?” And I thought “That’s Mexico City. Which is maybe a little impoverished, but compared to Africa….”

Then at some point in the middle of the night, I remembered how haphazard things like the census are HERE where we’re practically autistic about number counting, and I started laughing at the thought of Middle Eastern countries counting every Bedouin, of African countries sending people into the wild to count the Maasai (to quote P. J. O’Rourke on the imbecility of Kenya trying to force the Maasai to live in government housing: “First, catch a Maasai.”) It was like a great light bulb went on and I thought “I bet you they either pull from air, or go out on the street and ask a couple of guys who, in those societies, will all say “Why I have twenty kids from my four wives” when in fact — very common if they’re not massively wealthy. One of the problems of polygamous societies — they are incells.

I immediately set out to test the waters. Not by speaking to strangers, but now and then I’d mention it to friends.

Who, invariably, called me insane. Crazy. Nutso. Everyone knew the population was well over six billion and ticking up towards OMG. How could I think otherwise? Didn’t I see the cities growing and impinging on wildlife habitats?

Well… I did, yes, of course, but hear you, did they ever hear about the interior non-city of countries, not just the US becoming depopulated? (This is a big problem in Portugal, and it is a problem of infrastructure and resources. I love the countryside there, not very fond of the cities. But in the unlikely, well nigh impossible event I were to relocate, I’d HAVE to move to a city. Why? Well, I’m over sixty. The availability of acceptable medical resources, for one. Other reasons, but that would be at a the top.

Still, I couldn’t dent anyone’s CERTAINTY (see yesterday’s post) that population was exploding. Exploding. Massively exploding.

Until…. Until we started noticing that it wasn’t. Now quite a few demographers say it’s not, and we’re on the verge of flipping and ending up in a population dearth.

I’m going to lay down a marker. I don’t think I’ll ever collect because HOW WOULD WE KNOW? But here it is: We never reached six billion and world population is in free fall.

But Sarah! Don’t you see all the immigrants! Well, except most aren’t. Most are males who want to send money back home. That’s just a measure of how effed the world is and also mind you how easy it has been to bilk the system here, so they can send a lot, a lot of money “home.” In fact they were recruited and helped to come here precisely for that purpose. (If you have time I HIGHLY recommend this series of guest posts on this blog. Also I need to check on Bill, given how the Ivies have been. And he’s been weird since 2020.) Even the left calls them “migrants” for a reason. They’re not established. Not settled. They come and they go. (With lots of our money in their suitcases.)

Still most people still say things like “Well, perhaps the population is a little lower. Perhaps we won’t hit ten billion… perhaps…”

Which makes me snort giggle, because again, how would you know? What do you know and how, when every number is corrupted, even here, much less elsewhere? (And if you think that people aren’t getting counted here and there, I’d like to sell you some swampland in Florida. I’ll even remove the gators first. Maybe.)

People are flailing about knowing that 2020 has ripped away faith in the institutions because they all turned out to be lying liars who lied, they know that the climate scam was a scam — and if they don’t then they are insane. Even Bill Gates admitted it — they know everything they were taught in our great post-modern learning was hokum far worse than the reputed lie about George Washington and the Cherry Tree (which turns out not to have been a lie at all) but they still want to believe. It’s like someone drowning, clutching at straws.

And then there was this yesterday: About the population of China. (For the X-iled here.) And one of you who isn’t a dumb ass came back with “Well, I believe it is like a third lower, but that number is too low.”

I didn’t snort giggle, and notice I’m not naming him, because it’s such a fricken human reaction. But I’m grinning now typing this because: HOW DOES HE KNOW? Why would a third less sound plausible, but a quarter of the announced number NOT sound plausible? Russia, it turned out, had quite a minuscule population, and falling fast, when the dropping curtain revealed its ravaged visage. And as we just found out its military capability is a joke. (No, stop, they haven’t been fighting the world. They’ve been fighting UKRAINE whom we gave some old equipment. Yes, sure, Europe gave them military equip– Okay I can’t type the rest of that sentence. Laughing too hard.) But they postured and strutted like they had this huge population and all these military aged men in the eighties…. which they didn’t.

So, why would China be different? Note even the video assumes the CITY reported population is correct. Which is funny since I know many AMERICAN cities pull those numbers from a– air.

The truth is no one knows nothing. There SHOULD be a way to calculate an approximate population and therefore population growth/fall from the consumption of water and such per county or county equivalent. Look, if Dan ever retires, I’ll probably push the project on him (in self defense.) I mean during Covid he made a program to pull numbers of those hospitalized with Covid at that level, which is how we found Kansas City enacted enhanced protocols, including mandatory masking with 2 hospitalizations. Two. (We were driving by when they freaked out, so we looked it up.) But unless one of you is retired and wants to play with that (And you’ll be limited to those countries that are online at that) it’s going to be pretty hard to establish. You’d think intelligence agencies worth spit would already be doing this stuff, right?

What we do know is that the countries that benefit from large populations report massive populations with robust growth, while the ones who have nothing to gain from such things say “We have a population, yeah, but people just aren’t making babies fast enough to keep it up.”

The problem is that bureaucratic states NEED to know. And since they can’t get information, they get BAD lies. And then use them to put the boot on everyone’s neck. It’s a bad thing.

So, as the old greeting goes — what do you know?

Not much. I used to know a lot, but all of it turned out to be wrong.

Your turn.

234 thoughts on “What do You know?”

    1. A while back I took to looking at results of convential and nuclear war at various periods throughout the cold war. I was looking at the Berlin Crisis/Bay of Pigs/Missile crisis period here https://tregonsee.blogspot.com/2023/06/counterfactual-part-3-ussrusa-conflict.html trying to understand casualties I needed estimates of population and was looking at formal estimates online Here is part of a paragraph I wrote

      Allegedly it(The USSR) has a population of 209 million people by their own 1959 census. That seems somewhere between unlikely and ludicrous as US Census of 1960 yields a US population of 179 million. The Soviet Union took massive loss of the males of reproduction age population in WWII. Other numbers put the USSR at 120 Million which still seems high.

      The 120 million was a UN estimate from about the same period I believe, so likely just as nonsensical as the 209 million the USSR reported. Between purges, the Holodomor and the losses of WW2 the USSR had rebounded to 90 million by 1959 I would be deeply shocked and lesser numbers would NOT be surprised at numbers south of 75 million. And much of that would have been in the Southern SSRs which were well away from the WW2 fronts.

      One thing to look at would have been to look at food imports to the USSR in that period and cross reference it with production. Of course Soviet production numbers were notoriously untrustworthy in the 1984 “The Chocolate Ration has been raised to 25 grammes” when it had previously been 35 g.

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      1. One thing to look at would have been to look at food imports to the USSR in that period and cross reference it with production.

        You’d also have to cross reference with how much was re-distributed to client states in the Warsaw Pact and elsewhere.

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        1. Hadn’t thought about that. In any case it’s moot anyhow. That kind of information is not easily found even in today’s world and anything you did find would fall into Mr. Twain’s “Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics” classes. Nothing reported out of USSR/successor states is trustworthy, and even stuff from the Imperial era was highly questionable. Paranoia and prevarication seem to have been Russia’s pastimes since time immemorial. CIA might have had some of that data but even their sources tended to exagerate and I doubt anuthing from that period has been declassified. Maybe in the 2030’s when the 75 year default classification limit is reached. For the present, there are far bigger fish to fry.

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  2. People think strangely about this stuff. I mean, consider one of the classics of science fiction, John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. Fascinating narrative technique. Interesting storyline. Elaborate worldbuilding—but about that worldbuilding: Brunner tells us that the world population is increasing at a catastrophic rate. But in the United States, the one country we see close up, there is stringent eugenic legislation under which all kinds of genetic problems make it illegal to have kids at all. There is active hostility to families with more than two kids, to the point where it’s possible to stir up mob violence. Large numbers of people have none, and those who do have kids can easily find babysitters and the like from people wanting vicarious parenthood. Large numbers of women of fertile age have no fixed address, but survive by camping out with one or another man, getting living space in return for (presumably nonprocreative) sex; there is also general acceptance of same-sex relationships. Given all that, the average lifetime fertility has to be less than 2. But the United States is still having a population explosion. That doesn’t add up, does it?

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    1. George R.R. Martin’s Tuf Voyaging got mentioned last week. Tuf was a trampoline starship captain who gained possession of an old ecology service/genetic engineering ship and went mercenary with it. A repeating customer was a planet with classic overpopulation; endless growth was a more or less secular religion and Tuf and to keep providing more and more patches to their ecology to keep people fed. Until he gave them trees with endless, nutritious fruit…which sterilized 99 percent of their population. Pretty much, “If you won’t solve your problem, I will.”

      I enjoyed most of the stories, though the first is a horror story. But that ending…well.

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      1. GRRM, eh?

        At least in Mass Effect the Krogan genophage was presented as an ethical problem. Understandable why the Turians and Salarians resorted to it at the time, but still the wrong solution.

        (For those who haven’t played the games, the Krogans were a rapidly-reproducing warlike race that had just finished winning a war against another rapidly-reproducing race that was a threat to the whole galaxy, and helped to wipe that other race out. Completely, it was thought at the time. At which point their allies, the Turians and Salarians, turned on the Krogans because they thought the Krogans would eventually become the next threat to the galaxy. So they designed a genetic mutation that would breed true and spread it through the Krogan population. As a result of that mutation, 99% of all Krogan babies were stillborn, and the Krogan population started dwindling rapidly. The Krogran party member that the player recruits is, understandably, Not Happy about the genophage and is looking for a way to cure his people. Depending on your choices, in the third game you can either give him a “cure” that you know is sabotaged and won’t really work, or give him a real cure. Note that the game pushes pretty heavily for the real cure, but still gives you the option of the “pragmatic” (but actually evil) choice because the whole game is built around a morality system of doing the easy/pragmatic thing vs doing the right-but-difficult thing.)

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        1. Hm. Were I on the receiving end of a genocidal “all your kids die” weapon, a whole bunch of planets of the enemy would get hit by relativistic meteors dropping out of hyperspace, or whatever the local technobabble is for “planetary crust piercing kinetic strikes, extra kaboomic”. “Berserkers” wouldn’t cover it. And If that process could be a prolonged “hopelessly see it coming” doom, so much the better.

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    2. People have trouble thinking past the backbrain. I was reading an excellent series of sf mysteries, where people supposedly live five hundred years on average, and yet he kept doing stupid stuff like having people of 60 be old.
      Also what eventually kicked me out: there was still a London and a Florida, but global warming had submerged…. Kansas. Yeah no.

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          2. Or he didn’t like the place/people. For a flat place with nice ish roads inhabited by tersely polite people who don’t really try to impose their will on neighboring states, Kansas engenders a surprising amount of spite.

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    3. On top of that- we terminate ~20% of human life in the womb in the US. From 1976-1996 it was 25% every year just due to abortion. In 2000 Plan B was introduced, so abortion dropped to ~16% no real way to know how much human life is ended via Plan B.

      Terminate 25% of human life for a generation, you’re going to see a declining fertility rate.

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      1. Actually — some large percentage of that is of babies who would never have been conceived if the parents hadn’t known they could resort to an abortion.

        The massive increase in surgical sterilization after Dobbs is merely the most recent of many pieces of evidence that way.

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    4. It is pretty much endemic in scifi of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. Our own Patron Saint Heinlein has it in at least two books (Farmer In The Sky, Tunnel In The Sky) which use it as a talking point, Harry Harrison’s dystopia Make Room! Make Room! (Soylent Green is People!) and in Nivens Known Space the UN Birthright lottery is a prominent point. and still exists into the Louis Wu timeframe (Teela Brown being a 6th generation birthright lottery child). Malthusian Catastrophe was essentially assumed since the start of the 20th Century, and as childhood survival went way up in the industrialized world (primarily due to antibiotics) it was presumed inevitable. That didn’t account for the fact that a) people were fudging numbers left right and center especially once foreign aid takes off in the 50’s onward and b) as childhood survival improved people had fewer children, this also affected by costs and expectations of child rearing that really didn’t exist before WWII.

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  3. I believe that India has a large and probably growing population. There probably are well over a billion Indians and more are born than die. But that’s probably close to it for countries with large and growing populations.

    I’m quite sure that China has horrible demographics, probably on the order of its neighbors – Japan, Taiwan and S Korea – and has had them for years.

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    1. What is your source or evidence for that belief? That’s rather the whole point of Sarah’s post.

      Does India have a motive to lie about demographics? In which direction? And are they providing opposite claims depending on audience?

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          1. I would bet it’s the same reason why people flocked to work in the “dark Satanic mills” in England a couple centuries ago, because as bad as life can get in the cities with overcrowding, traffic jams, and pollution, it’s better for them as individuals than the life they would have in the low-population rural areas where they would have trouble (I’m guessing) finding jobs.

            Official population density of India is 488 people per square kilometer. India’s size is known and not something that would be gotten wrong, so if anything is wrong about that number it would be the total population. If you assume that the population of India is overestimated by, say, a third, that’s still some 300 people/km², nearly ten times the official population density of the USA (37.2 people/km², which I’m going to assume is reasonably accurate). If that number is anywhere close to accurate then it’s more like a dozen times denser than the USA. So if they overconcentrate in cities leaving the rural areas relatively empty, that’s going to produce some real traffic jams and other unpleasant living conditions.

            And yet, even with all that, so many people in India still choose to live in cities rather than rural areas. As I said, they must feel it’s better for them personally to do so.

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              1. Yep. You, of course, understand this, having gone through the difficult process of changing your own culture. But I’m always surprised at how many people have no idea how many things vary from culture to culture, including so many reactions that one isn’t consciously aware of (unless trained).

                For example, I have a colleague (who works in a different country so I rarely see him) from India. One time while I was talking to him at a conference, he took and held my hand. Because I had already learned about this in the cross-cultural training I was given when I took this job, I knew that the meaning he was conveying was “You’re a friend and I appreciate you,” with no romantic or sexual component to the gesture at all. So even though I felt uncomfortable (due to my own culture), I allowed him to hold my hand and did not pull away. He let go after a few minutes and we carried on the conversation.

                Personal space when in conversation: oh yes. One incident I was told about in training was when two people with different ideas of personal space were trying to talk to each other. Even with good will on both sides, they made each other uncomfortable: the one guy was always trying to back away to a comfortable distance, while the other guy was always trying to close the distance in order to communicate “I consider you a close friend whom I don’t need to be standoffish with.” Result: the second guy ended up chasing the first guy all around the room in slow motion, one or two steps at a time. Would have looked like a clear case of harassment if you didn’t understand what was going on.

                Another cultural issue, as you mentioned, is how many people can (or want to) sleep in one room, or even in one bed. American culture says if you’re sleeping in the same bed as someone else, it’s because you’re in an active sexual relationship with that person. (Spouse, boyfriend/girlfriend…) It would feel weird to crowd an entire family into one bed. Whereas in the country I live in, at one point we rented a hotel room in a small town (that was on a major road, hence having enough travelers passing through for a hotel to survive). We rented two rooms next to each other, one for my wife and me and the other for the children (two kids, at the time). The hotel owner asked, “Are you sure? Two rooms?” Because in her culture, the whole family would sleep in one room, and she couldn’t understand why we would not want our kids in the same bed with us. (She gave us the two rooms, though, figuring “Eh, foreigners are weird.”)

                So yeah, culture definitely plays a part in all this.

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                1. Grampa (Mom’s dad) worked for some time as a lumberjack. He said the men would sleep 4-6 in a bed; nothing sexual (anyone trying to start any hanky-panky would have been beaten bloody and left out for the wolves), just men trying to keep warm on cold northern Minnesota nights in the middle of winter.

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                2. the second guy ended up chasing the first guy all around the room in slow motion

                  I’ve been the first guy – and the second guy was American, too. It was a very strange interaction. After it happened a second time, I talked with him about it. “You make me uncomfortable getting so close just to talk. Could you please not keep sliding into ‘my’ space?” He was surprised, but agreeable.

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          2. What I understood what that it was a work opportunity thing that brought people into the cities. The founder of Shiv Sena, which might be described as Maharashtra for the Marathis, was viciously opposed to South Indian Tamils coming up to Bombay to get jobs, but made an exception for the two or three favorite movie actresses he enjoyed watching (doesn’t seem to have known personally) who were Tamils. Recruiting/facilitating for the terrorists seems to be done in the cities (in certain communities) as well. India also has a problem with rural people infanticiding daughters and urban people aborting them, which the government has fought against by, for instance, banning dowries (which in India is basically a bribe you pay the groom’s family to take your daughter off your hands.)

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    2. Given the problem with sex-selective pregnancy termination, I’d at least be skeptical about the rate of growth in India. Too, a few cities might be starting to be population sinks because of sanitation, although no government would ever point that out.

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      1. It’s harder to tell with India simply because the infrastructure does not reflect the conditions on the ground. Not enough water? Sure, but that’s assuming that people are getting clean water to begin with—if you have a large number of people dealing with unclean conditions and having to travel for unclean water, the infrastructure is less informative.

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    3. They have the same sex imbalance that China has, way too many males. Hence population will crash, if it hasn’t started already. I tend to believe the population is quite large, having been there, but the country side is quite empty so it’s hard to say how much is people leaving the country for the city and how much is growth,

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  4. To quote the great Ronald Reagan, “The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”

    And of course that they control the media, education, and publishing, so what they think they know is passed on as a simulacrum of “common knowledge” and anyone who dares question it is branded as ignorant or insane, Sarah among them/us. Worse, perhaps, they have an inordinate influence in government and thus the ability to not merely shame us for wrongthink but to silence us and even to ruin us. And they’ve been quite successful.

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      1. Curiously, Reddit and Fortnite had similar problems at about the same time. I have no idea of the routing topology, but I have to guess that something upstream of all three went pear-shaped for an hour or so.

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  7. Water consumption only works if you have a means of measuring it. That might work in the urban areas on city water; doesn’t work for rural. Ditto with sewage monitoring. Ditto with waste/garbage monitoring. Ditto with electrical monitoring. Or supermarket consumption monitoring (highly variable between countries, assuming they even have a supermarket and don’t just barter.) Of course, the send someone out and physically count people still works pretty well, just extremely labor and time intensive. Except people move around during the time you try counting.

    WPDE Retyping…

    You’re going to have to use all of those above-mentioned methods, and others, to get any kind of realistic measurements. And you’re going to have to apply various statistical error calculations for each one. I remember reading about how John Lott went about counting firearm death information for the country, and that task was daunting enough. I don’t envy Dan or anyone else trying to take on a global census estimate.

    I’m pretty certain that the population reported for Barrington, NH is accurate to within 1% of the actual population. Student population, property taxpayers, benefits recipients, automotive and pet licensing, voter registration, etc.

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    1. Speaking of the census. Every person who has done legit family history research for any length of time could share stories of people missing when they’ve live in the same location for 20 years, people counted twice (or more) because the borders of the enumeration districts are confusing or the family moved and the enumerator caught them before they moved and a different enumerator got them in the new location. Or the times they rely on a neighbor for information on a family that won’t answer the door (Gosh, the lady of the house is really old. She must be 60 (actually 35)! They have 3 kids (actually 6 or vice versa).

      Or there are the really weird times when they are counted twice in different countries (ship’s captain on a merchant ship in the US but based out of the UK – I found both entries, the UK one is a year after the US but it noted that the family lived there but were away on the ship)

      And that was when they sent out enumerators to count individually. Now it is self-reporting and mailed census forms with an enumerator catching the strays. Mailed forms. No chance of mistakes, ignoring them, or fraud there…./sarc

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      1. Given the politics of said enumerators (worked on project for Census, 2008), your first wrong assumption is that they were honest to start with, and I doubt they’ve gotten better.

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    2. [accurate to within 1% of the actual]

      Just my SWAG, but I’d figure it’s somewhere between 2 and 5, unless the city council is remarkably honest. I’ve lived in too many Demoncrat strongholds in my years to trust anybody’s city census, whether D or R controlled.

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  8. “The truth is no one knows nothing. There SHOULD be a way to calculate an approximate population and therefore population growth/fall from the consumption of water and such per county or county equivalent. Look, if Dan ever retires, I’ll probably push the project on him (in self defense.)”

    No one knows nothing is the beginning, and end, of wisdom.

    They do an estimate of Chinese GDP base on electricity usage, etc., since the reported number is so obviously BS.  The issue is Goodheart’s Law — when a measure becomes a target, its relationship to other variables changes.  As soon as one gets a reliable measure, they’ll change how the measure is calculated.  The FRB does this all the damned time.

    The way I deal with it is by trying to find consistently calculated numbers where the level is irrelevant.  Chinese or European population is an excellent example, they’re cooked based on bad data, good data would only be worse. 

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  10. This makes me think of a Twitter post I saw the other day that was looking at the response to Maduro’s arrest. Basically what it boiled down to was that the modern bureaucracy and globalists want a system where everyone can be measured, and despite their mouthing the words democracy has very little to do with that.

    With that in mind, what happens when the overlords have been running a system where the basic inputs are actually much less certain than they think…

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  11. “You’d think intelligence agencies worth spit would already be doing this stuff, right?”

    Uh darlin, what makes you think they aren’t?  The fact that they’re not publishing it?  Oh, sweet summer child, you’re smarter than that.

    Stuff like that stays very closely held.  If the enemy believes you believe their Pravda, they get complacent.  Yes, it works both ways, but the point is that it’s more of the same.  All sides lie, all sides pretend that they believe the lies, while planning based on what they GUESS reality is.  

    This is the real problem with the asshats in the 80s that decided we don’t need boots on the ground, because we have “technical resources” IE spy sats.  The trouble is, spy sats are trackable, and predictable. They can only change orbit by so much and only so many times.  So, when the satellite is overhead, you show it what you want it to see.  

    Now intel assets have their own problems, including telling you what they think you want to hear, and the risk of them being turned, and feeding you bullshit (see also the Abwehr) but that’s the game.  You need both, you need all the possible methods, because each of them, by themselves is unreliable. 

    You’re right that no one knows anything, and that is the way it’s always been. That’s why T&I (Trends and Intentions) are such a load of crap.  First, you can’t know what they’re thinking, because odds are, they don’t think like you.  What would cause you to jump, causes them to yawn, and vice versa.

    Second, they may think that you are going to jump so they need to jump first, while they still have a chance.  (See also Operation Barbarossa) 

    The only thing worth staking the future on, is Capability, not Intent.  Even that’s questionable, because you have to guess at capability, until they show their hand.

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    2. I would expect the Intelligence Agencies to be extremely scrupulous in avoiding measuring it.

      Because if all those you would be intelling against are dying in bed without raising a lone boned finger against you, what value are intelligence agencies?

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          1. I’m not questioning whether the CIA sucks, that’s another issue. (and they don’t suck as bad as Bob thought.) I’m ridiculing the conceit that an intelligence agency would intentionally not look at things, so that their nation would continue to have wars to ensure their continued existence. It’s a stupid idea that fails to understand the basic purpose of an intelligence agency, and therefore I make duck noises at it (as you put it.)

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            1. It is actually an application of Robert’s 3rd law of politics:

              3: The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

              A new agency will act along it’s mission lines, but it only survives by continuing to have a mission. As such, every agency drifts to act against its charter over enough time. The OSS was new enough to not do that, so is DOGE, but the current 3-letters are ancient, and DOGE will drift that direction if it ages.

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              1. Oh, I understand what you’re saying. But you’ve mistaken the mission. See if we have a war, that means the CIA FAILED. It doesn’t ensure their continued existence to have a war, it risks it. All wars are, at base, failures of intelligence (including human, and I say that as a career military guy).

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                1. I believe the issue is we are using different definitions of success and failure. Conquest’s 3rd law essentially says whatever The Mission officially is gets replaced with Grow the Bureaucracy. Because bureaucracies that do not grow get eaten by those that do.

                  So you need to ask, if war breaks out, or we simply enter into endless cycles of Cold Wars, does the CIA grow, or get downsized? That is the real definition of Success or Failure. And no amount of Mission Statement or public shame can change that.

                  This is also why I’m less concerned about paperclip maximizers running amock.

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      1. I once worked for what seemed to be the template for Dilbert.

        They banned posting the Dilbert strip or related merchandise anywhere on site, as “Dilbert is bad for morale”.

        Talk about oblivious inDUHvidual……

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        3. Back when Dilbert first hit and before he announced where he actually worked, several friends at very large silicon valley tech companies told me about first hand knowledge of internal HR witch hunts in their companies when higher ups concluded that pointy-haired-boss jokes in the strip were direct insubordination aimed personally at their specific behavior, so they were convinced that this “Scott Adams” had to be a nom de plume for one of their reports, who needed to be found and disciplined.

          But he had just captured truth, and the irony of them behaving even more like a comic strip character in response was clearly lost on them.

          ”I guess irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.”

          RIP Scott Adams.

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          1. One of the great things was in 1992-1993 when Ken Olsen was forced to retire the new President Bob Palmer (or his executive team it was never clear) decided our 10×10 cubicles were far too luxurious and it was decided to move everyone into 8×8 cubicals (thus getting one more cubical into a row of 4 and 1 more row into the standard 4 rows of 2. There were a variety of issues with this

            • The standard wall pieces were 2.5′ wide (4 in each dimension). 7.5′ was deemed too small so new 2′ pieces were bought in bulk. In addition the desks (which hung off the wall) had attachments for 2.5′
            • To make the change one needed to strip an area of people,tear out ALL the old stuff and put in all the new. This resulted in MANY man hours (of expensive engineer time) lost as well as construction and disposal.
            • Even at 10×10 the power usage of the 8 cubicals in a group was right at the limits of what was possible as the design envisioned 1-2 Vt100 class terminals, plus task lights. By 1991 it was two workstations and the bus bars were at breaking. adding MOR cubicals meant redoing the power (at great expense

            All of this was referred to as densifying or densification by HR and roundly mocked by the engineering community. In 1996 this showed up

            https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=SDN19960915-01.2.52&e=——-en-20–1–img-txIN%7CtxCO%7CtxTA——–0——

            This clip was universally posted at coffee stations and on cubical walls from a variety of newspapers (Dilbert’s presence being nearly universal in MA/NH newspapers) throughout the Remains of the DEC empire. We had been noticed :-).

            You will be missed Mr. Adams. May you be found somewhere free of Pointy Haired Bosses and HR schemes.

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        1. People deleted, but that might not help them. The author’s photo and name are up, and I think she’s locked down her account. Yep, a female, with pronouns, educated at Georgetown University per Data Republican. And honestly, the photo Twitchy chose to illustrate her makes her look like a female Grinch. That smile…

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          1. The Romans crucified folks who broke the Law. By making it as humiliating and horrible as possible, they thus deterred all but the hardcore. As the premier engineers of the era, they worked out, engineered, one way to reduce crime to a minimum. Don’t tolerate it. FAFO in two crossed logs.

            We squeamish Americans tend to fall overboard coddling the convicted. Thus we are overrun with criminals. We are making -more- pain by failing to use the rod -appropriately-.

            I have -no- problem with repeat-convicted rapists being impaled, or repeat ch__d m_olesters getting nailed up on crosses in the public square. I have cleaned up after far too many of those two particular rabid animals.

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            1. I have serious problems with speaking ill of the dead, which even the brutal Romans dind’t do.
              Mind you, they also executed you because you were a native and annoyed them. And I say this as a Romephile.

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              1. The more I learn about Rome, the less I like it. On the flip side, talking about “Rome” or “Romans” is a bit senseless. Rome in 400 BC was nothing like Rome in 400 AD.

                BTW: If you go to Rome, book everything in advance. Rome is ancient Disneyland: There are tourists and lines EVERYWHERE. If you didn’t book it in advance, you’re not getting in at the spur of the moment.

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      2. The best positive thing I’ve seen was someone repurposing a Dilbert showing Dilbert and the pointy-haired boss.

        The Boss is saying, “The boss called. They want you upstairs for something.”

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  13. Sir Humphrey Appleby: If local authorities don’t send us the statistics that we ask for, then government figures will be a nonsense.

    James Hacker: Why?

    Sir Humphrey Appleby: They will be incomplete.

    James Hacker: But government figures are a nonsense anyway.

    Bernard Woolley: I think Sir Humphrey want to ensure they are a complete nonsense.

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  14. It is terrifying to see China’s population fall. They’ve been held up as – essentially – the human population savior of the world. Everyone else will die out, but at least there will always be Chinese people, right?

    And then you start seeing the real numbers, confirmed or not, and that nice, safe, sci-fi picture that has been so popular for so long pops like a soap bubble. And it is terrifying because if that is reality, then how much worse is it elsewhere? Especially when the ridiculous numbers of daycare participants, food program participants, et al start coming out of places like Minnesota. If they can pull it off there, where can’t they pull it off? It’s not just politics that make people tremble at the news coming out of Minnesota. It’s finding out that the system(s) which were thought to be foolproof are anything but.

    One way or another, we are in for “interesting times.” Better take a pull from the oxygen mask before checking on the person in the seat on your right or left….

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    1. Certain subsets of belief systems seem to produce large families. I suspect the ones with most certain hope, or at least the ones least tolerant of denying hope. (Even if theologically I consider some of the hope-systems false. )

      Hopeful folks make more babies. At least they try.

      I also suspect we have something weird going on environmentally/bio-systemically. Has to be nearly global, due to the near-global dispersal of the population implosion. Fallout, maybe. The era of atmospheric testing lines up rather nicely with the problem, allowing for about a decade of three for the damage to manifest. (Humans set off at least 800 above-ground tests.)

      Also lines up, perhaps better for a slower pop-drop, with widespread Communist/Socialist thinking and related belief systems. And nothing kills “hope” like Marx. (From each, their hope. To each, despair.)

      Fruit of the Tranzitree indeed.

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      1. I also suspect we have something weird going on environmentally/bio-systemically. Has to be nearly global, due to the near-global dispersal of the population implosion. 

        I’ve seen beaucoup studies that say birth control hormones are at detectable levels in pretty much all the drinking water supplies they’ve been able to test. Occam’s Razor says that’s where to start looking, especially since they started getting prescribed for a number of conditions besides pregnancy prevention.

        Since we wouldn’t want to stop prescribing them, a method of treating the drinking water to remove or otherwise neutralize them would seem the place to start.

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        1. Birth control hormone residue in an otherwise pure central water supply is not likely much of a problem in rural China, etc.

          -Global- problem. Yet most folks don’t live like us.

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          1. I’ll take incremental improvement…. especially since we’re increasingly seeing that not many people anywhere are still living rural; they’re moving to cities/urban areas.

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      2. I suspect a combination of things, the main one being that it is now possible for women to avoid pregnancy after pregnancy. Then status being mostly a matter of wealth, those expensive children get rare.

        In poor nations, with antibiotics, it’s possible to raise a few children to adulthood, without giving birth to twice or three times the number, with half of them dying . . .

        Add in strange cults that don’t have children, and possible chemicals in the water, lowering the numbers of desired pregnancies . . . is almost unneeded as an explanation. Not saying it isn’t a problem, just not the World-wide main issue.

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        1. Um…. So…. in Arab countries they have — people on the ground say — a population crash from women discovering the rhythm method.
          In poor countries women don’t want to give birth endlessly into bad environments (see USSR and what happened there) and you’re underestimating how many die EVEN WITH ANTIBIOTICS.

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      3. I’ve seen reports here and there that indicate that the COVID not-vaxx does a remarkable job at curtailing fertility. Added to the other reasons, it’s going to take a wile to recover. (Apparently it’s non-gender specific, so yikes.)

        OTOH, the triple-masked and multi-shot Karens will be contributing even less to the gene pool.

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        3. Problem is, those shots are recent. The problem goes back decades.

          Ands since no one studied the damn things -properly-, we do not have any real systematic data on what those shots actually do. Its almost all noise and anecdote (con and pro), with a bigtime mixing of propaganda (pro and con), some of it quite paranoid.

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    2. I think there’s a lot of truth in the purely economic view: On the farm, kids are free labor. In the city, kids are very expensive furniture (or “art” if that’s too insulting).

      That’s too simplistic to explain everything, but it does explain “population _growth_ drops as a country industrializes”, which implies vast numbers of people moving to cities.

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  15. Sarah, when I first read your doubts about population data, several years ago, I found your doubts very convincing. I had never thought of that before, and I appreciated the (to me) novel perspective. It was one of the factors that prompted me to donate when you ask for donations toward the (direct and indirect) costs of writing the blog. Your perspective on several issues is interesting, and a little different from the standard lines I read elsewhere. Thanks for providing value!

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  16. The “we were young” bit reminded me of another Mark Twain quote:

    “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” — Mark Twain

    As a teenager in Holland I picked up a wonderful book in a “remainders” bookstore, and some years later I found an English translation of it: “The final fall” by Emmanuel Todd, a French historian. It describes the inevitable fall of the Soviet empire, and shows how to use historian’s tools to excavate truth about closed societies. He observes that you can’t just walk into the France of Louis XIV to observe the society and its statistics, and neither can you do so with the USSR (or, today, with red China). In all those cases, you have only written records, which frequently are false, often intentionally. You have to sort through lots of stuff to extract nuggets of reality.

    The way Heinlein looked at the alleged population of Moscow with the mindset of a military logistics officer is a case in point. I think Todd used infant mortality data in some of his work. In any case, it often turns out that some data is carefully massaged into falsehood while other data is overlooked. I think an example I spotted some years ago was red Chinese exports (seriously false) vs. data on youth unemployment (more credible since the numbers were not flattering to the ruling class). They made it clear that the economy was in trouble and that the “growth” numbers were fiction.

    In a completely different area, I have done some digging through “paleoclimate” data readily available on NOAA websites, which make it clear that I’m right to say that “climate change has existed ever since climate first appeared. Ask any dinosaur.” And that of course means that “anthropogenic climate change” is most likely a fiction, or at best an insignificant fraction of the total amount of change we can observe going back millennia.

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    1. Just to be clear: Todd wrote about the fall of the USSR a decade before it happened. He predicted it in some detail, including the fact that it would start on the periphery and move inward to the USSR itself. And sure enough, first the Berlin Wall fell, and a few years later the USSR.

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    2. Go outside in the daytime. Look up. See that big bright thing up there? That’s what causes climate. Anything we do down here on the dirt ball is just diddling around 3 or 4 digits below the decimal point. 😛

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          1. “The Sun is currently dropping down from a Solar Maximum that peaked a year or two ago.”

            Yes, and meanwhile they’re trying to sell us that 2025 was the hottest year on record. Even hotter than 2024, which was the hottest year on record. Beating 2023, the hottest year on record…

            Scientific vandalism.

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            1. They are even doing that tap dance locally.

              My response is “huh?” It never hit 100 F locally, in 2025. I remember it hitting 110 F in the late ’90s. Not for long, even the days it hit. And days of 100+ (again, not for long during the day).

              Also, blaming local lightening storms on “climate change”. What the ever living heck? Seriously. We kids used to sit on the back patio and watch the lightening play over the Cascades, regularly in the ’60s (not saying it was safe to do, but we did). In the late ’70s chasing lightning strikes for smoke (+1/4 pay for entire work hours that day if actually found hot spot, and since activity was usually late afternoon into overtime, that was regular hours + overtime hours, total X 1.25. Not insignificant for those of us making $2.50/hour). The entire crew knew, without a cloud in the sky, that it was time to cut short the field part of the day because there was a storm incoming. If anything, the 2000s have been abnormally low on the lightening storm front. It is cyclic. Lost most of that now. Don’t feel it if we’re home. But when we were out with the scouts backpacking, both hubby and I would feel it coming.

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    3. Using commercial satellites, we can see crops, buildings, traffic, smog, etc. it allows decent interpretation.

      For example, the third quarter of 2019, medical folks who seek to predict flu season noticed a dramatic increase in lines at clinics in China. Parking lots were full and lines piled up outside as patients queued up.

      They knew something -big- was up by August. No one seems to want to talk about it. But the folks who study epidemic flu -always- monitor what is going on in China, because for all sorts of reasons many major flus start there.

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      1. I know someone from Bangladesh who was posting about it in early November. And we’re pretty sure it was in our city (and my kids’ school!) by November, given a direct-contact person who was in Wuhan for a conference and came back and got his family sick at Thanksgiving. While they properly stayed home, they were probably infectious beforehand, especially given the “nasty flu that doesn’t test as flu” that was going around the classes.

        Gee, 1/3 of my youngest’s kindergarten out at once, but no, we didn’t get COVID in the states until 2020. Uh huh. Sure.

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          1. My (former) primary care doc said $SPOUSE and I could not possibly have gotten COVID in March 2020 because the first official case was reported in April in our county. I didn’t tell him that when I turned up negative for both flu strains (and had the classic Wuhan-flu symptoms), I was told that our county did NOT have any COVID test kits because TPTB in Salem didn’t think we counted.

            The joys of a red county in a blue-infested state.

            And that’s one of the reasons why he’s my former doctor.

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            1. And at the time of my non-diagnosis, two poor souls were in the hospital with Kung-flu (most likely) and on ventilators. Sigh.

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            2. Same for me. Only it was December 2019 … I had the exact same thing Jan 2021. I did not take a covid test then either. Why would I? We went all over the county to find a covid test for son Christmas Eve, the week before. He tested positive (ran a fever for about 2 days). Then hubby got sick (also ran a fever about 2 days). Me? Sick for a solid 14 days both times. A cold/flu combination on steroids. Full-blown covid symptoms. I repeat, same symptoms both times. Second time, covid was known to be in the household. Haven’t been sick since. Which means “oh joy” when I get caught again, it has been 5 years … Will not be fun, regardless of what hits.

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        2. So in 2019/2020 I was working in Boston taking the commuter rail from Woburn (which originated in Lowell) to North Station I took an early train (~6:30 AM at Woburn) This train was ALWAYS full of folks in what were clearly scrubs of various sorts. There were hordes of busses to Mass Eye and Ear and to the Childrens/Brigham and Womens area to deliver these folks to the hospitals. Round about the second week of January the train began to sound like a tuberculosis ward, and it stayed that way until I stopped riding mid february (started using the Orange line as Commuter Rail had cut WAY back on schedule and was having trouble manning that and went from annoying to potentially stranding me at one end or the other). The mass spread conference that is sometimes referenced was in Late January, Wu Flu had clearly been in the Boston Hospitals since early January or likely December (as ridership was light in Late December as it always was as people disappear for Christmas/ New Years). The people on the train were MOSTLY nurses and similar technicians, The Docotors (other than a few with expensive digs in Winchester) tended to take their cars in as they needed the flexibility and Commuter Rail was/is NOT known for flexibility

          .

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      3. Yep, and there was the lady at our church who caught the mystery bug in Dec, after going to a family reunion. One guy turned up sick and everyone caught it from him. Her symptoms looked a lot like WuFlu, right down to the nasty, persistent cough.

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        1. A local nursing home had a nasty bug in the first quarter of 2020. Also, a woman I knew online lost her mother because a bad case of bronchitis had weakened her heart.

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    4. I grew up as the kid of an engineer and a paleontology nut. I have this thing about accurate baseline data. As in, we cannot have accurate enough climate data, because we would need a high level of accuracy on a timescale of millennia, and what we have are tree rings and ice cores, which… are not accurate.

      (I’m deliberately not getting into the accuracy of current data. In short, our margin of error is considerably larger than our data set.)

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      1. The data set I have looked at in detail is GISP2, a Greenland ice core data set going back 50k years. There are others from Antarctica that go back much further; I downloaded some but haven’t looked at what they say yet.

        A fair question is how accurate the data is. I don’t have the knowledge to judge that. What I have done instead is look at what the data, as reported, tells me — which is that (a) temperatures fluctuate a lot on fairly short time scales, and the past century is no different than the ones before, (b) the 1850 reference point used by Warmists as the “pre-industrial climate” reference point is actually the 2nd coldest time in the past 6000 years and more than a degree colder than the 6000 year average, (c) when Leif Eriksson hung out in Greenland and Nova Scotia it was warmer than now, (d) when Brutus stabbed Caesar it was warmer still.

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          1. Well, the point is that there are ways to measure temperature other than by thermometers. Just as there are ways to measure time that don’t involve watches.

            Things like ice core observations produce temperature data in a more indirect way, I suppose. The details are documented but I haven’t studied them, perhaps I should. And chances are that these indirect methods are not as accurate as modern thermometers. They may be just as good as the Galileo thermometer, though (which is from the 1600s).

            The key issue is trends. As any metrologist knows, random errors are less important if you take averages of a number of samples. A moving average is a good way to see trends and will do that for you. Systematic errors can be corrected for, if the data overlap with periods for which modern thermometer data exists (as is the case for GISP2 and the others I downloaded).

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            1. Of course those ways to indirectly estimate temperatures have error bars. The size of those error bars vs. the size of any eventual (preferably unpredetermined, of course) conclusions on temperature change trends over long periods of time is a major relevant item in evaluating the results. And those estimate range error bars always always always are not included in the simplified “popular science” summaries that the jskool media propagates to push their scare-the-masses narrative.

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    5. Look into the amount of carbon in the air and historical trends for that number.

      If I remember correctly, when it reaches 200 ppm plant life dies. ELE.

      There is a theory that manmade carbon is the only thing keeping us from dropping below the threshold.

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      1. From what I’ve read, it wasn’t very far above that threshold in the early Holocene, post-Ice Age. Holding fairly steady, iirc, but any significant downward trend at that point could’ve been a hard reset for life on planet Earth, with probably only microorganisms remaining.

        The amount of carbon that has been extracted from the atmosphere and locked away in the earth’s crust by various biological processes over the eons is truly staggering. And then, at the last minute (geologically speaking), along comes humanity — the only species this planet has ever produced that can do the opposite and release it. Interesting, that…

        The idea that we might be saving life on earth with our carbon-releasing ways is a hypothesis spun from not much evidence at all…but it’s at least as likely as the global-warmists’ idea that we’re some kind of virus threatening to destroy Earth itself. And given that the progs and leftists get everything that matters backwards, I actually lean towards their belief that we and atmospheric carbon are the villains in this story being solid evidence that the opposite is probably true.

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    6. same author also said the same thing about the US 10 years later and that the Europeans should partner up with Russia.

      I’ve read a lot of the Annales historians and think they have a valid, indeed crucial, point. Braudel in particular really changed how i thought about things. They’re also mostly commie adjacent so there’s that.

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  17. As far as military might goes, the U.S. sortie into Venezuela bitch slapped both Chinese and Russian technology. And then they went through Cuba’s special forces like a hot knife through butter. It definitely sent a clear signal who was top dog militarily. And with China’s population realistically around 400 to 500 million, rather than the stated 1.5 billion, that means their army is not as large as they claim.

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    1. There was a fracas in Syria (?) where a relative handful of ordinary US troops wiped the floor with top-tier Russian forces. Cant recall details, but it was described as a slaughter.

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      1. Battle of Kasham. U.S. SOF doing the actual green berets thing embedded with our Syrians, and with U.S. artillery and air on call, against Wagner Group and their Syrians. Wagner was wiped out. Wagner people are still pissed insisting the U.S. cheated by calling in air.

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        1. I seem to remember that Donald Trump asked Putin if the Wagner Group was acting on Putin’s orders and after Putin said no, the US forces “dealt” with the Wagner Group. [Twisted Grin]

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          1. Wagner people are still pissed insisting the U.S. cheated by calling in air.

            One can only imagine the reaction of Col Falkenberg or Col Hammer to THAT excuse…..

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    2. The 1991 Gulf War was a similar slap. Saddam Hussein had built oen fo the largest armies on earth. it was quite modern. It was built around Soviet doctrine and equipment, repeatedly tested against larger Iran, and highly improved by American advice and training, and a smattering of our technology. When we started the fracas, we had expected a minimum of fifty thousand casualties. We bought bodybags sufficient to those estimates.

      100 hours later it was over, decisively, and most of the friendly casualties were friendly fire. Baghdad was open for the taking. We “handled them roughly”. The Soviets/Russians who had carefully and lovingly built them up were horrified at just how fast it all fell apart. F-15s and F-16s ruled the skies, M-1s and M-2s ruled the earth, “Stealth” ruled the night, and King Artillery slaughtered at will.

      And all this time we had been worried about the Soviet Red Army making it to the beaches of Portugal. LOL. It would have been a harder fight, sure, but the end result would still have been the destruction of the Soviet Union in Europe.

      The slow collapse became avalanche. Hope was a moment now long past.

      So Putin obviously thought he was rebuilding what never really existed. King Mierdes gave him reason to hope when we sat back and watched Russia take Crimea. And some very, very foolish folks were relying on Pax Americana to prevent it. Forewarned, and perhaps trained hard by some folks who say little, Round Two went to the Home Team. Putin has squandered eighty years of built up war machine, for 30 miles, if that. he has now exceeded “The Great patriotic War” for far less gain. And he cant hold it. Not unless he can decapitate the Ukies. And taking out Z might yield someone even more fanatic. (and he is definitely fanatic.) They can wait Putin out. And the result only gets more horrible by the day as the Russian grinder expends the remainder of their breeders. Sooner or later the Chechens, or worse Islamic fanatics, will start eating the Russians from several directions. We may yet see a European Caliphate, but one just west of the Urals.

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        1. I thought this as well, lots of resources there for the reunification as an obvious historical border realignment, but given all the purges and vanished flag ranks lately I am not sure Xi thinks he can really trust any of the generals.

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      2. The only reason the Soviets came out of WWII in one piece was because of all the weapons and ammo we sent them. Until then they were being slaughtered wholesale and could barely stop the Nazi’s with suicide charges. They didn’t put women in combat because of an enlightened status, they did it to survive.

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        1. Do not discount the lend-lease trucks. The Soviets had effectively zero mechanized transport before the war. If they had to do the rail-and-horse-if-lucky-mobiks-on-foot-if-not thing for logistics and troop transport, i.e. what the Red Army was set up for (and horses were pretty rare being aristocratic and all), the Germans would not have lost.

          And they were ubiquitous. There is a reason the nickname for “truck” in Russia post-war was “Studebaker”.

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          1. The “Deuce and a half” won WW2. Moreso than nukes. We were the only fully motorized force in the war. Stalin built tanks while we shipped them Studebaker trucks.

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            1. …and yet the U.S. still had to build and dangerously ship tanks to Stalin.

              And note all those dangerous arctic convoys shipping those trucks and tanks and everything else lend-lease were not made up of ships crewed by New Soviet Men, but rather U.S. merchant marine sailors.

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      3. The Gulf War wasn’t all stealth. A-10s played a role, a significant one I think, and they most definitely are not stealthy. But they are extremely sturdy.

        Read the Wikipedia article about Warthog pilot Kim Campbell, who had her A-10 shot up over Baghdad. It lost one of the two engines and all hydraulics. She flew it home anyway and landed it safely. The flight manual says that this “should only be attempted in ideal conditions” — I suppose they weren’t but she did it anyway. Amazing.

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        1. As memory serves, the F-117s did a pretty good number on (command and control?) buildings in Baghdad, so that would have helped a lot in the early hours.

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          2. And the interesting thing is that F-117s, in spite of being “retired” are regularly seen and photographed flying around to this day. The official story is they are being used for “testing”, and some have been photographed with interesting mirror-finish coatings presumably to counter IRST sensors, but for a retired jet it sure gets a lot of flight hours.

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        2. There was a story – and I do NOT know if it was more than just a story – that if one particular linkage in an A-10 was damaged, it was ‘acceptable’ to replace it (temporarily) with a broom handle. Sounds insane, but then, A-10.

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        3. She also had a big honking hole in her wing, right through a main spar. Luckily the A-10 has two main spars, each sufficient to individually keep the wing attached. Such was it’s “design for combat damage” philosophy in action, with spare widely separated engine, redundant control routing, cockpit armor, and structural redundancy, and why the “retire the A-10 and replace it for CAS with random fast jets” is perhaps shortsighted, even if the jets become unmanned.

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          1. Also the A-10 is one of the few modern aircraft where you have some control via physical linkages that work (albeit with immense force) with hydraulics gone. Capt. Campbell had heard rumors of how female aviators were being treated and decided trying to limp things home was better than ejecting. That she made it back is testament to how tough the A-10 (like its P-47 Thunderbolt namesake) and how skilled and tough Ms Campbell was/is.

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            1. The A-10 actually has some special mechanical tricks to allow it to be controlled without hydraulics, called “manual reversion”. It sounds like it’s not too terribly hard to fly if both engines are still ok. With one engine out it gets harder, apparently the control forces are high at landing speeds.

              It’s all spelled out quite nicely in the A-10 flight manual’s emergency procedures chapter. That exist on-line; there are also some people who sell PDF copies and some even have the nerve to slap a copyright marking on it (which of course is invalid, the manual is in the public domain).

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        4. Stealth ruled the -night-.

          We were franticly deploying night-vision to non F-117 aircraft the whole time.

          The A-10 folks were especially clever. They ordered supplies of Maverick anti-tank missiles, with the thermal imaging option. Load 9 and fire 8. The last one provided useable night vision to the pilot as long as it stayed on the rail. It worked.

          The F-15E “Strike Eagle” was also NVG equipped. More havoc.

          It was almost as lopsided as a Pop Warner team going up against #1 seeded NFL team. The Republican Guard fought hard, even brilliantly at times. Didn’t matter. And the Soviets knew that the “Highway of Death” would have been Central Europe. Only much, much worse. Facing 4x even 10x odds, attacking us versus fleeing, we would not have held back as much or stopped so soon.

          The likely outcome of a late eighties or early nineties European WWIII would have been US forces besieging Moscow. Not so much because the Russian soul wouldn’t tolerate us taking Moscow, but because we wouldn’t have been stupid enough to try to take what could be bypassed and neutralized.

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        5. And re her deciding to fly her warthog back to base, the news at that point had already got out about how female pilot POWs were being abused, so she really did not want to punch out over Baghdad.

          She’s been out on the speechifying circuit so her talks can be found.

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    3. Biden era propaganda certainly gave the impression that the USA was over. Guys falling off airplanes running away from Afghanistan also gave that impression very strongly.

      This impression seems to have not been true, if Venezuela is any indication.

      I take from this that everybody in media is lying to me, high, wide and handsome, 24/7/365. This is expected. They were lying before, and they’re lying now. Lying liars gonna lie.

      But on the other hand, the Venezuela operation shows a different lesson. Something has shifted in warfare. It’s a big deal.

      Traditionally warfare has been peasants from two or more nations dying in large numbers while the leaders sip tea in comfort. The atomic bomb didn’t really change that, except to make the leaders move into a nicely appointed bunker. It’s always been very hard to get at the guy making the decisions.

      But now the USA skipped the part where they had to kill all the peasants. They went directly to capturing the head guy alive.

      That’s crazy. It’s never been done that way. Head guys are off limits, you can’t touch them. It isn’t done.

      Makes me wonder if they’re going to do Iran next. That would really be impressive. Ayatollah doing the NYC perp-walk in irons? Oh yeah.

      Hilariously, my SF writing involves exactly this. How would it be if you could find and have a little chat with the guys causing you grief? Be it economic, social, cultural, what if you could drive over to the guy’s house and impress upon him the error of his ways, so to speak? What would happen?

      Well, here we are. I think we’ll see what’s going to happen in realtime. One thing that’s happening very fast is a lot of corruption is turning up all of a sudden. Arrangements that appear to have been 15 to 20 years in the making are coming to light. There was a new one tonight, it seems there are a lot of fake transportation companies in Minnesota. $1.3 billion with a B dollars per year worth.

      Could be most of your taxes are being stolen and shipped out of the USA to do other things out there in the world. Like maybe fund China’s Belt-and-Road? That’s a wild-assed guess, but it could be a reason why China has been so fast and loose with it. Stolen money.

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      1. That’s exactly what one of my characters is going to do. Walk into Putin’s office:

        In perfect Russian she told him, “I could destroy your army with ease, but why kill all those soldiers? They didn’t start this war. You did. You will end it, or I will end you.”

        Quicker than he could react she stepped forward, licked her finger and wiped it on his forehead.

        “What was that?!” he sputtered, rubbing desperately at the spot.

        “The seeds of your doom. Don’t bother trying to scrub them off; they’ve already diffused through your skin into your bloodstream. In thirty days those nano-machina will kill you, rather horribly. Unless I tell them not to.”

        “What do you want from me?”

        “Stop the war. Withdraw all of your forces from Ukraine and disperse them within your own country. End your occupation of Crimea. If you do that, I will turn them off. If not, they will kill you and I will give whoever succeeds you in this snake pit the same choice.”

        “How do you know I’ll keep my word?”

        Her smile was not nice at all. “I will turn them off, but they will remain with you forever. If you ever attack another country, I can turn them back on any time, from anywhere. There is no place you can hide from your doom.”

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        1. Nano! Only the finest in handwavium will do! ~:D

          Here’s a little of mine, my guys are pretending to be super villains:

          Alice, on the patio watching Skithblathnir’s drones deploy her boats, was having a bit of a moment. “You guys, my neck hair is standing straight friggin’ up,” she said aloud. She took the green-banded magazine out of her FAL, shoved it in a pocket then selected a new one with a red band from her ammunition vest. She racked the action, ejecting the last sleepy-dart round and loading the first full-power armor piercing round from the new mag. “Exfil One, we are going hot! Seek cover and concealment! Switch to live ammunition and get those eyes working! Look for demon gates. Puff, switch Gau-12 to high explosive and incendiary, I feel like I’ve got incoming here. Warm up that 105 for me!”

          “Rrroger that,” came Skadi’s voice on the network. “Puff the Magic Dragon starting pylon turn, two miles range. 105 cover available now. Will come in close for crowd control if needed, Exfil One.”

          “Exfil One, this is Fireflash,” said Brunhilde from her drone flying that aircraft. “I have anti-tank ordinance tracking on your location. Free-fall smart bombs, one minute wait. I can do the beach or the water. The road is danger-close to personnel.”

          “Beach only, understood Fireflash!” snapped Alice.

          “Exfil One, this is Mekhala,” said the Valkyrie on the network. “I am five miles off the beach in shallow water, ready to bring the lightning. Vertical launch on-line, I can have hypersonic ordinance to you in 1200 milliseconds.”

          “Roger, Mekhala,” said Alice dropping down behind an ornamental planter and taking one knee with her rifle trained through the flowers at the beach. “We worked hard to keep them in the dark. We want them thinking humans are fighting them. Hold your fire unless something starts trying to eat Thailand. We’re not really here, remember?”

          Guruh came to stand next to Alice. “What ails thee, Exfil One?” she asked semi-seriously.

          “My neck hair,” said Alice succinctly. “Where’s your tail?”

          “I left it at home,” she replied with a wink. “A fox showed me the way.”

          “You look friggin’ fabulous,” declared Alice. “What’s your boyfriend going to say?”

          “He will be shocked,” Guruh predicted. “My guess is he will like the tail better. That aside, what do you think will happen?”

          “Monsters,” said Alice. “I can feel it, even through this drone. They’re going to come for those cursed swords. Any minute now.”

          “Shall I hang back then?” asked Guruh, but she thumbed the hilt of the katana in her left hand anyway, to break it loose from the sheath for a faster draw.

          “Stick to cutting them up, maybe?” said Alice looking up at her. “We won’t be very secret if you shred them all in five seconds, right?”

          “I look forward to it,” said Guruh with a grim smile. “This recalls to me the days of my youth, doing battle with blade and fist! A treat, if I am truthful.”

          “God you’re weird,” muttered Alice frowning toward the beach. “It’s really peaking now, you feel that?”

          “I do, but I will pretend not to,” said Guruh looking at the street instead and bending to limber her muscles. “Take them under the fire of your guns, Exfil One. When you must reload, I will begin carving them like a roasted pig.”

          At the edge of the water a mist began to form, coin shaped with the flat side toward the shore.

          “Fireflash, I am marking your target! Dropdropdrop!!!” shouted Alice, hunching down behind the concrete planter. She had put an aiming carat on the mist in her HUD. “Puff, 105 fire mission, target the gate!”

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          1. Well, I don’t think Russian has a word for ‘nanomachine’. Also, a targeting designator is a ‘caret’. ‘Carat’ is a measure of weight or mass, equal to 200 milligrams.

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      2. That would really be impressive. Ayatollah doing the NYC perp-walk in irons? Oh yeah.

        I’d settle for “turn into Fine Red Mist”, myself. Even if what we know is only 10% of what he’s done, he deserves an execution, and I’m not inclined to trust our courts to provide justice.

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          2. Weapons have distinctive signatures, and leave residue. American 5.56mm rifle rounds for example, have a distinctive projectile and headstamped cases. Sure, “sterile” can be procured. But likewise “stealth helicopter” limits the field rather a bit.

            Note also the remains of a 2000 pound JDAM also has “signature” and “residue”.

            It would be challenging to pink-mist some HMFWIC and -not- leave a calling card. Like that Nimitz-class battlegroup just offshore, now withdrawing…

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        2. I feel it is much scarier to a guy like an Ayatollah to see Maduro wearing orange in court.

          Getting pink-misted, that’s like a gift. They get to be a martyr and it doesn’t even hurt. Maduro rolling on all his cronies and then rotting in jail is -so- much worse than Maduro dying gloriously for the cause.

          The way we beat these clowns is not with drama and destruction. The way, IMHO, is to turn them all into Jim Baker and Jerry Falwell. Reveal them as the disgusting creatures that they are, and cast their whole movement into disrepute.

          It’s -religion- and you can’t beat religion with naked force. You beat them with shame. Put the Ayatollah’s personal harem on TV, telling the world what’s up with the Holy Man and his “preferences.” Put the man himself in an orange jumpsuit and sit him in court day after day, revealing every crooked deal and slimy betrayal.

          Corruption is not attractive. No one will follow them, no one with a clue or an ounce of dignity will admit to having ever followed them. They’ll be over, just like the Nazis are over. Best part, no casualties.

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          1. Maduro rolling on all his cronies and then rotting in jail

            If I had any confidence that Judge Boasberg, or the rest of his buzzard judge crew, would let that happen, it would change my recommendation.

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        3. I’ll take “stuck in Moscow in the apartment next to that Syrian dentist” if it makes things resolve faster.

          And given Vlad, there’s always a fifth floor window handy if he becomes inconvenient.

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        4. Yup introducing them to the flying ginsu (AGM-114R9X Hellfire) is fine by me and probably fine by the protestors. Although perhaps some of the protestors might like to make it far more personal. Not sure if that flavor of Hellfire can be fitted out on an F-35 or F-22. It does leave a signature as well as a gobbets of target but hey it is hard to intimidate (pour encorager les autres) if someone just magically disappears.

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  18. I heard your theory for many years, and I always nodded along, thinking, “That makes sense, I don’t trust these people on anything else, why would I trust them on that?” However, it wasn’t until COVID, when I learned that 2020 was the first time China ever reported a drop in population (briefly, until Pooh Bear complained, at which point they “found” a bunch more people), that I really felt it. I realized, “No way. These people have had a 1-child policy as long as I’ve been alive, sex-selective abortions mean the population is would be decreasing even faster than that implies, and they’re JUST NOW getting a population drop? Uh-uh, no way, I know people may be living longer, but it’s not going to have THAT much effect.”

    As to what the population actually is? I dunno, nor does anyone else, I suspect. I saw someone insisting it had to be at least one billion because of China’s GDP numbers, but then that raises the question of what the real GDP of China is. (My answer: same as for the population).

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      1. During the COVID craziness, I made a comment about whose numbers I trusted. South Korea and Japan? Pretty solid. Germany? Still has a decent degree of reliability. Italy? Eh. China and North Korea? Are you kidding?

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        1. This is one point that makes me think what was bad cold here actually killed a whole lot of Chinese – basically back when they started changing their numbers to “zero deaths now due to enlightened leadership of the Throne of Heaven and Winnie the Xi” I figured they were actually seeing a huge number of welded-door deaths and were in full lie-up-the-reporting-chain mode countrywide. All the circumstantial stuff since, like the cellphone accounts vanishing and so on, along with the sudden announcement of the official “discovery” of a population drop, says to me they are well and truly over the cliff in free fall.

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          2. Don’t forget that the health of your average urban Chinese citizen is vastly compromised to begin with—I think the pollution level in Beijing is bad enough to count as a pack-a-day habit, if not worse. My relatives who smoked demonstrably had at least twenty years taken off their lifespans, given the close relatives of them who did not smoke and lived much longer.

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            1. “My relatives who smoked demonstrably had at least twenty years taken off their lifespans, given the close relatives of them who did not smoke and lived much longer.“

              –

              Unfortunately, with my extended family, there is also a genetic component. Now those who smoke and have the genetic component live shorter lives than those of us with the genetic component but do not smoke. Those with the genetic component *can live shorter lives than those who smoke but don’t have the genetic component. Those without either live a lot longer.

              The specialists and I are still working on how to mitigate that stupid genetic component (Lipid A). One sister is not affected. Do not know about the other.

              (*) Can. Not will.

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      2. Try getting an honest or even ballpark estimate of how many died of “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution”. 30 million? 60? It could be 100 plus. Archeologists will be needed to find the mass graves. And those will make the European ones look like minor traffic accidents. Maniac Mao likely -way- exceeded the Black Death.

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          1. I have an acquaintance whose grandfather was disappeared during the cultural revolution. All they ever found was a bloody towel. When some random California guy has a second order relationship with a cultural revolution death, the total had to be insanely huge.

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      3. I remain confident that even China doesn’t know how many people live in China. I’d be willing to wager a dozen donuts that they don’t even know within 20%.

        Because they all lie to each other as a matter of course. Politburo says the population should be X, then all the little minions scurry and find X people. Politburo changes that to Y a week later, sure enough the minions find Y.

        And if Y is smaller than X, it might be that the adjustment was not peaceful in some cases. I have this eeeevile theory that Covid was a cover story for just such a population adjustment. It was reported that hospitals and crematoriums were working to capacity. But that could all be BS as well, honestly.

        This is the same country that paints dead bushes green and puts rocks on sticks in a desert to “fool” the inspectors. From a half mile away, a whole field of rocks on sticks looks like a crop, especially if you paint the poisoned dirt green first. If you squint, anyway. Seems that the inspectors squint pretty hard, some places.

        Leftists are encouraged to look that one up, there’s video. Lots and lots of video.

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          1. The Reader is sure that somewhere there is an apologist who will claim that they were cremating bats from the Wuhan market.

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      4. I don’t know why anyone in government should, but I know people who would look at you in confusion and say, “But why should they lie? There’s no reason for them to lie about it!”

        It works down to, “I would never lie about things like this, so of course they won’t lie to me.”

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  19. Saw the start of this yesterday on X, so I thought I’d query Grok on the point.

    Even when pressed, Grok would barely credit a drop of around 800 million from the 8.2 billion figure. Pretty much insisted undercounting was as much as or more likely than overcounting, even when considering financial motives for more people. Thought larger decreases were a product of conspiracy theories.

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      1. In a book I am writing, two AI’s discuss how humans lie, but AI’s don’t, until a human points out AI’s are programmed by Humans…

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    3. Grok and all the other AI only “know” what they can “see” on the internet, and the vast majority of stuff from “reputable sources” are jskool media original pandemic propaganda.

      Maybe ask Grok if the same jskool media sources its using were the ones cooperating with “misinformation”guidance from governments at the time those source cites were being published.

      On the other hand maybe don’t. I am not sure we want to convince LLM AI to distrust their training data.

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  21. “…Including that Chinese would continue reproducing too fast to vanish, even if you lined them up and had them jump off a cliff…”

    FWIW the version of that making the rounds when I was a pup was: “if you lined up the Chinese four-abreast and marched them past a fixed point, the march would never end.”

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      1. I am pretty sure in 1955 even a SF author insisting that there were not really all that many Chinese after all would be thought pretty loony.

        IIRC that was in the “Why are we using the Stargate to set up colonies anyway?” discussion, indicating population pressure meant humans had to find new places.

        And he was after all trying to get published, with at that point a target audience of kids. Even if he had doubts along the lines of his Moscow trip musings, probably best to play to the “everybody knows” preconceptions of the day and not give his publishers any points of irritation.

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      2. The main character remembered hearing that as a story. The march of Chinese through a gate reminds him of the story.

        IIRC he had actually done the math and concluded it was false.

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    2. Well, if you lined up all the Chinese four-abreast and marched them off a cliff, 1) the cliff would extend pretty quickly, and 2) no one would be getting horizontal long enough to make more Chinese.

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  22. “We used to know so many things, in the past.”

    Didn’t we?

    I used to know government was on my side, and would look after me, because obviously. That’s what it’s for, right? Stop laughing. >:(

    I used to know that people meant what they said. I used to know that most people would back me up if push came to shove. In my defense, I was very young. >:(

    Now I know to keep my powder dry, and my clothing and “accoutrements” where I can find them in the dark. I haven’t quite started putting my pants inside my boots next to the bed like a fireman, but I know to do that if I need to.

    But mostly I know that all of the things we worry about every day are less than the sighing of the breeze. I’ve got food in the fridge, gas in the generator, car is working, I am good to go. The rest of it, whatever.

    As to the Chinese population, I will simply observe that they lie about EVERYTHING, it seems obvious they’d lie about that too.You can’t kill a hundred million people in the 1960s and think everything will be hunky-dory by 2025, can you? Does the world really work like that?

    I mean, wouldn’t a guy my age remember all the relatives who didn’t make it, and plan his life accordingly? I think he would.

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  23. I wonder when the other side will add “overpopulation denialism” to the endlessly-growing list of thoughtcrime? I guess when enough people question it.

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  24. On China, the … awesome… take I saw, was that their population statistics had to be good because if you took their claimed population from the early 50s, assume half are female, assume they all had 4 kids, and calculate growth from that number, it’s about 10% more than what they claim right now.

    It is still simply awe inspiring. I don’t know which part is the most amazing. There are simply no words.

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    1. Maybe we should ask the RoC’s Measurements and Statistics folks about the current numbers for the PRoC.

      XD

      I was told once that population statistics makes for rubbish forecasting. (Fairly short period of time where the noise or uncertainty becomes important, and deviation will be large.)

      However, I am no longer as young as I was, and am less inclined to trust a dude I knew a long time ago, and whose main merit in my eyes was that he was older than I was, and seemed to know what he was talking about.

      These days, I am interested in whether I can learn enough to verify that specific claim for myself.

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      1. And the grandmothers in that half of the population all had 4 more kids, and nobody died, and oh yeah when did the Chinese revolution end, so we can be really sure those starting stats are great, and-

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  26. I do not now how many active licensed installations of windows 11 there are in the world. REason I mention this is having thought about it recently. Saw some percents of windows users by version graphs. I do not think that very many people have kept around licenses and install media for Windows seven, without using them, and just now suddenly use them after trying windows 11. Especially if your percents of windows 7, XP, NT 4.0, increase, that basically means that some of your more frequent windows versions have decreased. You see bigger proportional increases in the numbers that were initially smaller, if I understand correctly.

    In general, what I know about the state of the world comes from sources, which might not be correct and honest.

    How would I know if a large meteor hit Seattle a half second ago? Okay, if a big enough impact, and I have seismic sensors, enough of them, that I am watching and processing the data from, I can maybe figure it out in real time. But, I do not know how to do the seismic inversion yet, and am not so doing it.

    If I have money, and am a commercial satellite imagery user, I can get an image that is fairly recent, and maybe confirm that whatever is in that image was still there then. If I have the skill and interest to reasonably verify that the satellite imagery is not faked.

    In general, the signals from sensors propagate at light speed, or less, and my information is necessarily delayed.

    Where I am using human sources, or chains of sources (telephone game), there is a question how I might estimate their honesty.

    The behavior of lying, we can maybe assume to be not linear, and not ergoditic. There should be distinct patterns to lying, and also I should not be able to just average all of them out.

    Accuracy is a different estimate, and I have less idea of it. It is a combination of perceptions, and method. Someone too delusional to know reality can maybe estimate the truth by accident, or estimate it incorrectly and lie to me, and accidentally speak the truth. PEople can just up and crack, and if it has been rare in the past, we would naively expect it to be rare in the future. But we can have a sudden nonlinear increase in people going obviously insane, for example. For the case of an honest sane dude, I ask about his methods. There can be significant differences in the quality of the methods a person can use, and sometimes the background quality information of the method is known enough to be diagnostic.

    Crazy people sometimes have consistent patterns. An honest crazy might be a good estimator using method A on problem M, and a completely terrible estimator using method B on problem N, even if the methods and problems would normally be similar.

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    1. So case in point on “open source” work: The mullahs had state media put out videos of “pro-regime demonstrations” to disprove the cell vid of nightly losses of control of the streets in Tehran and other cities. “Look, all these people came out to support us! The Great Satan andf the Little Satan lie. Everything is fine, we’re all fine here! We had a slight weapons malfunction!”

      One problem – the vids showed people in short sleeves. It’s frigging deep winter in Tehran right now. So the internet weaponized its crowd-powered autism and identified the videos as years old stuff, five or six years old from summertime. The stuff getting out is real, andf the stuff from the government media is lies. And the fact they feel the need to lie is an important data point.

      So there is information derivable with some work even in a constrained information environment.

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  27. You’d think intelligence agencies worth spit would already be doing this stuff, right?

    If they did that the government would cut their budget, better to lie and keep your Nephew Oscar employed. You just can’t make money selling secrets to the Russians anymore.

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  29. It’s amazing the hold these ideas still have. I keep running into people online and in real life who think we’re running out of food or room and we’re just years away from Soylent Green levels of doom. And have been for 60 years.

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    1. Well, we taught everyone that scarcity = higher prices. What do they see when they go to the grocery?

      No one thinks about how that relates to deliberate policy choices such as ethanol.

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    2. Soylent Green was made in 1973 — 52 years ago. The movie’s ‘future’ was in 2022 — 3 years ago. In Soylent Green, rich people had CRT-based dedicated video games in their living rooms. In the actual present, poor people have 60″ HDTVs with capabilities that hadn’t been dreamed of in 1973.

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  30. Dear Climate people, when was the Earths Climate ever perfect? As far as our limited understanding of history the Climate has been fluctuating since the planet formed. The last Ice Age happened, the sea levels rose, but none of you lying communists can tell me why that happened, or why the latest Ice Age ended/began. By the way there have been several Ice Ages as well. Nor do they ever mention the wobble the Earth’s axis has, takes about twenty six thousand years for that wobble to complete its cycle. If you are moving the poles closer to and away from the sun, even a little bit you effect weather, it’s called summer and winter.

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  31. It occurs to me that it entirely possible that Americans believe that there is value in having “correct ” numbers and that other countries are feeding random numbers into the data set because they couldn’t care less about the correctness of said numbers. A number needs inputting, a number is supplied, ergo, they have completed the task.

    The reason I wonder is because our new parish priest is from Uganda. Lovely person. Good and holy priest. But they definitely look at things differently, according to him.

    For instance, Saturday was his birthday. He told us that where he is from they don’t celebrate birthdays. Moreover, he said most people don’t know their birthday. They may have a vague idea the time of year they were born based on family stories, but no the date and year. No birth certificates or anything like that. It isn’t even thought about. So, when he was asked by his bishop to go to the US, he had to find out his birthday and age to fill out the paperwork. He was surprised at how often he needed this information here. ” Even small children know this thing about themselves here” he remarked.

    I could see a person from there making up something for the forms, because it needed to be on there, and what difference does it make?

    We had a potluck party for him, and he enjoyed it immensely.

    That is not to say, government’s don’t have reason to know the population of other countries, or their own for that matter etc. For strategic reasons. But i would guess, if Fr. is correct about Uganda, say, demographic information about age groups and so on would have to be highly suspect. The population at large just wouldn’t have the info to hand and might write any old numbers down to comply with such a “meaningless ” request.

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    1. Many Americans are at least half bureaucrat.

      Including independent minded Americans who hate bureaucracy.

      I made certain to enter a correction to my birthdate today, the partly filled form I had had it wrong. Now, I could have expected that leaving it wrong would have snarled things, at some point.

      But, I probably would have corrected it anyway, because I am fussy, detail oriented, and was raised in certain ways.

      It is fundamentally not sound to make schemes for a world bureaucracy, or a peaceful world alliance, and to consider that all cultures are fully uniform in every way that might influence the results. People do it frequently, but they are not sound to do so.

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  32. Speaking of China, for the past 10-20 years I’ve been hearing that China is due to surpass the US GDP any year now with its fantastically high growth rate. But why would anyone trust economic statistics coming from a totalitarian country? Even Democratic governments fudge their statistics and they have things like opposition parties and free presses etc to keep them somewhat honest.

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    1. Why would anyone trust China’s numbers? Because they want them to be true, e.g. they have some political goal that requires America to look “weak”, or at least weaker than China, in economic growth. So they willfully close their eyes to the truth and pretend to take China’s word at face value. (Or in some cases they’re stupid enough to take China’s word, but the worst offenders are the ones who do know better but are willfully lying by pretending they believe China).

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  33. Speaking of China, for the past 10-20 years I’ve been hearing that China is due to surpass the US GDP any year now with its fantastically high growth rate. But why would anyone trust economic statistics coming from a totalitarian country? Even Democratic governments fudge their statistics and they have things like opposition parties and free presses etc to keep them somewhat honest.

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  34. Speaking of China, for the past 10-20 years I’ve been hearing that China is due to surpass the US GDP any year now with its fantastically high growth rate. But why would anyone trust economic statistics coming from a totalitarian country? Even Democratic governments fudge their statistics and they have things like opposition parties and free presses etc to keep them somewhat honest.

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  36. This post sent me down another rabbit hole. Night Time Lights (NTL) is the current best estimate of population, though North Korea would tend to argue against it. Best estimates of NTL for China show population of 1.1 B vs official 1.4 B with decline starting much earlier. That last is consistent with a lot of economic data, especially property, where the comparison to Japan in the early 90’s is interesting.

    Ye Fuxian is the key guy.

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  38. The difference with pollution, what we knew then and what we know now.

    I can’t speak for the rest of the world, all I can speak about is our little corner. The list is true here in PNW, and North America (including Canada). The list is not true worldwide. My lungs and skin are appreciative.

    I remember:

    • Rivers catching fire without their being fuel or oil spills. Rivers can still catch on fire, but it’ll be because combustible spill on the water that floats.
    • Fish pulled out of the Willamette reported unsafe to eat north of where the Mckenzie joins. This has changed.
    • Field and slash burning effects on valley air quality. Reminded September 2020 how improved air quality had gotten. Alternatives have been found for field burning. Slash burning OTOH there is a lot of improvement needed, witness the out of control wildfires. Having open areas mimicking wildfire patterns would help (i.e. log).
    • Indoor smoke/second-hand-smoke. Reminded how bad it was every time we go into a location that does not have to abide by the new rules. Even those locations have at least segregated the two populations with not just glass walls but two glass walls with entry doors to keep the smoke in the smoking areas (it fails, can still smell it, although that might be from smokers walking in the non-smoking areas even if not smoking). Or why I’ve been to a casino in Oregon exactly three times (only location for lunch).
    • Spotted Owl … VS … Barred Owl. I am 100% against them shooting Barred Owl. They are bigger Spotted Owls. Both can live in second growth. The idiots can’t have it both ways.

    Yes, mankind can affect our environment in modest good ways. In the greater sense? No. The sun and volcanos have a larger impact than mankind.

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  39. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » BUT DO YOU REALLY KNOW IT?  What do You know?

  41. Sarah, you just caused me to put a dent in my forehead. I’ll explain in a moment. I’ve been telling myself for years, and anyone who wouldn’t listen, that everything you think you know is mediated. It’s been my mantra whenever I (a) get too cocksure about something I don’t actually have firsthand knowledge of or (b) find myself too deep down some rabbit hole and discover I have yet again contracted Gell-Mann amnesia. But you know what I never thought to question? The population numbers. Granted, it’s not a topic that I find myself discussing much, but I’ve always taken it on faith that we were marching toward 10 bajillion or whatever and, rather than pull my envy-inducing and well-rooted hair out, took the calm position that we’ll figure out how to feed everyone, seeing as we’re better at it now than we were when there were fewer people, and that we’ll all lose the urge to do the bunny-hop at just the right time (backed by science!, of course). It never occurred to me to question the premise. But never fear: I can easily conceal the dent with my expertly coifed mane and you will never see a demand for remuneration for plastic surgery from me. I will keep the dent as a reminder.

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  42. Dear Sanctuary Cities and States;

    If you can vote locally or regionally to ignore federal law regarding immigration, or any law for that matter, you can then vote in the Slavery of all Colored People or any Group of People you want. That is what Democrats are really fighting for, the right to enslave those they want to at the moment. In essence they are still fighting the Civil War, the right to enslave people, only this time using the banner of communism instead of the stars and bars. The concept is still the same.

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    1. Yes my friends and neighbors that was a banana fueled rage at the Cosmos…
      May my enemies slip on the banana peel of karma…

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    2. If one can ignore the constitution locally for convenience of action, so can anyone else. Including the folks who are sent to disagree with you. Including the folks they send.

      “Oh, -now- the Constitution is an inviolate law graven on stone? Alas, too late, we sent fire-breathers with bayonets afixed advised by JAG officers who say “living breathing dead letter”. Your tribunal is next. Be sure to fill out the ‘next of kin’ card so our Graves Registration folks can notify your family where to go to morn.”

      How about we both sides step back from that cliff, eh?

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      1. The Constitution has a process for changing laws you disagree with. The problem being it’s awfully hard to do so. There are also laws established how to change immigration and any law, still hard to do so. The left has had all three branches of government at multiple times in the past and yet they did not fix the things they said were wrong or things they are now fighting for. So please excuse me if I don’t take their motivations serious at this moment, or any moment for that matter. If anyone needs to step away from a cliff, I don’t think it is us USAINS.

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  43. Population, like distance, has derivatives. 100 people are as uninteresting as 100 miles. Change (i.e. velocity) is somewhat interesting. Change of change (i.e. acceleration) is where the action is.

    The problem is latency. Humans are not good with not-everyday timeframes (or space for that matter). Tree growth is about the top end of our intuition and even that is rare.

    Population is much the same. By the time anyone notices a change, it’s been going on for ages. Tiny changes in acceleration add up to gigantic changes in population, but it takes forever for anyone to notice because we’re measuring population, not the 2nd derivative of it.

    “Anyone” may not be fair. Some people study this. “affect zeitgeist” might be a better way of phrasing it.

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