Still counting

I see via Twitter that Gallup has a new figure out for its survey results on American sexual identification, and the headline story is the (so to speak) rise of the bi:

More than half of LGBT adults (54.6%) identify as bisexual. About a quarter (24.5%) say they are gay, with 11.7% identifying as lesbian and 11.3% as transgender. An additional 3.3% volunteer another non-heterosexual preference or term to describe their sexual orientation, such as queer or same-gender-loving. Respondents can give multiple responses when describing their sexual identification; thus, the totals exceed 100%.

Rebasing these percentages to represent their share of the U.S. adult population finds 3.1% of Americans identifying as bisexual, 1.4% as gay, 0.7% as lesbian and 0.6% as transgender.

The other big thing is the increase in bi identification being mainly in the young, and mainly with women:

Women are more likely to identify as bisexual -- 4.3% do, with 1.3% identifying as lesbian and 1.3% as something else. Among men, 2.5% identify as gay, 1.8% as bisexual and 0.6% as something else.

I'm not sure that there is really anything too surprising about this - it's been pretty clear for some time that there it's been increasingly "cool" amongst the youth to identify as being something other than boring old straight, and we already knew young women were ahead of the curve in claiming sexual/gender diversity.  Identity politics itself has been on the up and up.  

But there are some interesting things said about the results on Twitter.  For example, I had never thought of this before, but I read a tweet (that I can't find again right now) that argued that the large number of deaths from AIDS in the 80's and 90's can partly account for why substantially fewer older men identify as gay.

The most dubious result in the survey is probably the transgender identification amongst the younger group, especially "Gen Z":

I'm with the middle comment:  it's a result that really raises questions about how young people are thinking about these categories when they answer the survey.   

Anyway, it all reminded me of a post I wrote in 2013 about estimates at that time of the number of men  who could likely be called gay or bisexual.    (See the comments too.)  At that time, I guesstimated that, if you looked at CDC survey evidence of men who said they had sexual experiences with men, you could probably get to 4 to 5% who could be identified as gay or bisexual, in America at least.*

The Gallup results would now back that up:

 Among men, 2.5% identify as gay, 1.8% as bisexual and 0.6% as something else.

So, I think my guesstimate still looks good.

 

 

* The figure increases to 20% if you are talking about England.**

** A joke.  Although I am still pretty sure it's the gayest country on the planet.  

   

Cancelled Will is not letting it get him down

I really respect Will Wilkinson.   Arguably, he was the recent victim of one of the stupidest examples of "cancel culture" being mis-used by a boss against a quality, (now) pretty much mainstream liberal writer, but Wilkinson did not moan about it at all, and just went on to set up his own corner of the internet to pump out his great writing.

A recent example:  On the Defensive Prickliness of Anti-Woke Patriotism.  

It's about this:

Why is it so bothersome to admit that there are shameful chapters of cruel injustice in our nation’s history? Why is it so hard to simply accept that the historical record and publicly available comparative evidence suggests that the United States of America is pretty great in a lot of ways and really awful in a lot of ways?

He ends with this explanations of how conservatives "cope" with the dissonance that there is a lot to criticise in the history of the country, while it is also pretty great in many ways:

The easiest way to cope with the story that credible American historians tend to tell is to outsource your expertise identification needs to conservative commentators (they’re expert experts!) who say that you shouldn’t trust them — who say that these out-of-touch woke egghead elites sneering down on all of us from their ivory towers are intentionally spreading misinformation because they hate America, want to tear down what makes it great, and replace it with something bad, foreign and dystopian, like …. I dunno, functional democratic institutions or an adequate social insurance state?

However, dismissing inconvenient truths by impugning the messenger doesn’t fully meet the challenge of keeping on the sunny side. It remains that America has a lot of profound problems that simply cannot be denied. So the next step is to blame all our undeniable problems on the evil and incompetence of your cultural/political rivals while pretending that the places where most Americans live don’t really count as part of the country. This leaves conservatives in a position where they can say that America is unambiguously great … except for all the ways in which the left and “elites” have turned it into a tyrannizing garbage fire.  

This is how you end up with the truly baffling Calvinball of conservative national assessment. America is the greatest country in the history of the world! It is also “not great,” “crippled,” and the victim of “carnage” roughly in proportion to the extent that Republicans don’t control things. A meaty majority of the American population dwells in large metro areas, which are all run by Democrats. These places are thus unmitigated disasters. You might think that an ambiguous “part good, part bad” mixed judgment of America’s merits would be logically inescapable once you’ve committed yourself to the idea that half the country lives in one or another crumbling, corrupt, crowded, crime-infested hellhole. Indeed, it is logically inescapable.

But this isn’t logic; this is a coping mechanism. That’s why the problems that beset America’s cities, whether real or imagined, don’t exactly count against America because they count first against Democrats and Democrats aren’t really American. Or maybe it’s that multicultural Democratic-majority cities don’t count as part of “real” America, so the horrendous problems they are imagined to have can’t drag down America’s greatness score. Either way. 

At the end of all these intellectual and emotional gymnastics is relief. Really, there’s nothing to not be proud of. Because if American history makes you feel bad, it’s a lie. If the places where most Americans live are terrible it doesn’t count because those aren’t real American places that count. If there’s anything about our country that is seriously and undeniably bad, it’s because disloyal fake Americans are preventing us from being the greatest country on Earth by scandalously denying that we are.

I find that analysis completely convincing.

More connected but less...connected

So it seems Noah Smith just noticed an article from 2018 in The Atlantic that noted that young Americans were having less sex than before:

 which led to a couple of Tweets by a guy explaining it:

That sounds (a little depressingly) plausible.  Someone else throws this in:

This all sounds bad from an evolutionary perspective!

A disappointing summer

I suspected as much.  As this article notes, Queensland was (more or less) promised a wet summer due to La Nina, but apart from parts of the far North, it's been pretty dry.

This have been very noticeable around Brisbane, where it seems to me to be quite a few years now since we had a lot of summer rainfall.  Storms have brought just enough intermittent rain to keeps the grass green-ish, but we really haven't had the days of deep, drenching rain that used to be a regular feature of our summers.

It's still possible we may get a very wet autumn, I guess.  I certainly hope we are not heading into a protracted period of low rainfall again, though.   

Illiberal Left noted

Further to my post yesterday, I agree with this sentiment:

I also found via Twitter today this Jonathan Chait article about some of the silliness about "cancelling" people for using words when they are clearly just being quoted, rather than endorsed:  Describing a slur is not the same as using it.

It seems pretty surprising that such a thing needs to be explained in detail, but that's where some of the worst of "cancel culture" has taken us.  

 

A repeat problem

I watched Four Corners last night on management problems in Kakadu National Park.  

Jointly managed by traditional owners and Canberra based (I think) Parks Australia, apparently there has been a lot of argument from the locals that the latter is not listening to them enough.  One example they gave, and a major one for the tourism operators, was the closing down of a walkway to get to the top of a formerly very popular waterfall.   Apparently, traditional owners claimed it came too close to a sacred site, and they had warned Parks Australia.

The show, I have to say, as a piece of journalism, was completely unbalanced.  They did point out that a trio of Parks Australia managers had resigned, but there was no attempt at all to have any of them, or anyone else from Parks Australia, to respond to various claims of the local traditional owners.

You see, I find it hard to believe that Parks Australia would have built the stairway against clear and specific protest from the traditional owners about impact on a sacred site.  I strongly suspect there is more to it than that - unclear input from traditional owners; a expansion of a sacred site from what they had previously considered sacred; or a simple miscommunication.   

The problem seems to be a repeat one - that it is really hard working with aboriginal representative bodies, and I very much doubt that the problem is all (as aboriginal activists claim) on the other side of the ledger, so to speak.

There seems a very good chance that traditional owner expectations as to their opinion always winning on every management issue is going to lead to their own economic loss due to permanently reduced tourism.   One aboriginal community member last night was saying that in fact they shouldn't be putting all their economic eggs into tourism anyway - but he was completely and utterly non specific as to what other enterprises anyone had in mind:  

JOHN CHRISTOPHERSEN, SENIOR COMMUNITY MEMBER: Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation are looking at developing tourism in Jabiru, there are a whole range of different options that Jabiru could become used for, rather than tourism. I would not be putting all my eggs in the tourism basket, I can tell you that. A lot more effort needs to be put into the health of our people. The education of our people, employment of our people. There is potential for economic growth in establishing enterprises for our people in the Park. But you have to see beyond the blinkers. Look outside the box, mate. What might be a potential. Tourism is not the be all and end all.     

I always worry that I am sounding too Right wing unsympathetic on aboriginal issues - but it's just that anyone my age has seen decades of claims that if only politicians and non indigenous Australians would listen more to what traditional owners want and need it will all improve.

But it doesn't.  Or not much, anyway.

Maybe I am getting old, but I don't understand this...

 What's it mean to be tribally Right wing but not very Right ideologically?   

I mean, particularly in the American context - to be tribally Right at the moment means you are more than likely living in an evidence free conspiracy world where only election fraud won the election for Biden, Trump remains the saviour of the common man, and Democrats want to destroy civil society.  Not to mention disbelief in climate change, wearing masks for COVID, and not wanting to take a vaccine that would return the world to something more normal.

Who wants to be any part of how wrong that tribalism has gone?

And if you go to Britain - the populist Right led to Brexit, and who really thinks that is still looking a good idea?

I keep saying, but apparently cannot convince Jason Soon - the excesses of the Left in illiberal views on identity politics is pretty minor stuff compared to the crapfest the tribal Right has delivered.

Waving the bloody shirt

There's a very interesting thread by David Neiwert on Twitter about the Right's use of rhetorical tactics that originated post (American) civil war. Here's a link to the Threadreader version, because it's long.

 

 

Barbarian history examined

So, last night we finished watching the Netflix series Barbarians, and it was quite a bloody spectacle.  It no doubt was the cause of a dream in which I was about to be beheaded by some black clad executioner at, of all places, Disneyland.  (I had also seen a news story about Hong Kong Disneyland during the day, so there is a reason.)  It started with me glumly accepting my fate, only to start worrying that it was really going to hurt a lot before I lost consciousness because his axe didn't look sharp, and arguing that I would prefer to be shot. (Finally, I realised that I hadn't been convicted of a crime, only accused of one, so I didn't deserve execution at all.  I think I successfully convinced him as I woke up.)

Anyway:  I went into watching the series only seeing that it had quite good reviews.  I had a vague idea that it was based loosely on real events, but did not bother, until now, to check that out.  (It's always best to leave reading the real story until after a movie or series is finished, as the degree of invention is often a tad disappointing - especially if the events are  particularly well documented.)   

I did like the show overall - and part of the fun of watching it was trying to work out whether it was pandering to German nationalism, or not.   I mean, it did paint the Romans as being pretty terrible and ruthless in their local rule, but on the other hand, it made the Germanic tribes look very technologically inferior, unpleasantly fractious, and much more into religious "woo" than the Romans.   But the whole story is about a successful underdog attack on the Romans, so put that into the "pro-German" column.   

Now that I have gone looking for historical commentary, at the top of the Google list is this fantastically detailed assessment on a blog by a young American Midwest university history student who seemingly really knows his stuff.   If you have finished the series, I strongly recommend reading Spencer McDaniel's post.

To my surprise, the series is basically much more accurate than I expected.   Sure, it has added fictional details (including ones about a couple of key relationships); but overall, I am quite delighted to read that the show's producers have obviously taken way more care than is common in adding historically accurate details - or when inventing details, at least making them possible and not entirely implausible.

I also had no idea of the nationalistic importance of the story of the battle of the Teutoburg Forest,  but Spencer explains all of that as well.  His blog Tales of Times Forgotten, seems to have quite a lot of interesting content, actually.

I see that a lot of people have discussed the show's accuracy.  Another nerdy guy has made a Youtube video about it, and he seems overall to be quite impressed as well.

So, well done, everyone.   

And all the Wodan talk in the show makes me keener to see The Ring Cycle at the end of this year.  (It was COVID delayed last year.)

McConnell and others have more work to do if they want the cult to fade

I think that the "establishment" Republicans - those with brains enough to know that it's bad for the party to continue to under the sway of Trump and   his family - has been hoping that one-off denunciations and then just not talking about him anymore might work.   And I guess it might, eventually, if Trump starts getting entangled in too many legal actions.

But polling is indicating that the cult isn't fading fast enough, despite 6 January:

An exclusive Suffolk University/USA TODAY Poll finds Trump's support largely unshaken after his second impeachment trial in the Senate, this time on a charge of inciting an insurrection in the deadly assault on the Capitol Jan. 6.

By double digits, 46%-27%, those surveyed say they would abandon the GOP and join the Trump party if the former president decided to create one. The rest are undecided.

"We feel like Republicans don't fight enough for us, and we all see Donald Trump fighting for us as hard as he can, every single day," Brandon Keidl, 27, a Republican and small-business owner from Milwaukee, says in an interview after being polled. "But then you have establishment Republicans who just agree with establishment Democrats and everything, and they don't ever push back."

Half of those polled say the GOP should become "more loyal to Trump," even at the cost of losing support among establishment Republicans. One in five, 19%, say the party should become less loyal to Trump and more aligned with establishment Republicans. 

The survey of 1,000 Trump voters, identified from 2020 polls, was taken by landline and cellphone last Monday through Friday. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

 

 

Mars as a "insurance policy"

I am somewhat sympathetic to this:
 

As I have said before, I think it is better to establish the Moon as a nearby lifeboat - store a lot of information, including genetic, up there in the event that a large chunk of the Earth is ruined.

Chinese crankery

As spotted on Twitter:

Mink again

I noted in November that COVID 19 was causing mink culls in Denmark, where raising mink is a big industry.  (I would have thought Scandinavians were nicer than that!)

I see via Washington Post that the industry is also significant in (of all places) Wisconsin;  and mink farmers there are getting vaccinated ahead of the likes of flight attendants, teachers and others.

As with Denmark, there is Youtube PR material by mink farmers emphasising how humane they are, all while showing that the animals seem to live their entire lives in cages that seem pretty damn small to me, given the size of the animal:

 

Wouldn't we think a cat, an animal about the same size, and perhaps of similar mammalian intelligence,  is not being treated humanely if raised for its entire live in a cage like that?    And wouldn't a shed full of cats so raised cause a lot of concern?   But mink get a pass for confinement, it seems.   

There is no doubt, it would seem, that they are well fed (in order to preserve the quality of the fur); but it's a pretty dull life, no?  

Weird design, even for a university

Have a look at this "semi-outdoor" plaza space in Japan, which has a very sci fi movie setting feeling about it:

 

I can't really tell if I like it, or not.  It has a slightly claustrophobic feeling about it from some angles.  

Can anyone wander in there? I also reckon that while it looks all new and pristine now, it's going to get messy pretty soon, with leaves and stuff from outside, unless they have a way of cleaning that enormous looking space.  Maybe it looks bigger than what it is?  

More thoughts:  sort of gives a "human as an ant inside a nest" perspective, doesn't it?   Also - would be something of a worry being there during an earthquake.  I suppose you might be OK if you stand still under one of the holes?

You can read about the architects arty ideas about what he was trying to achieve, here.

Turbines on ice

Texas seems to be over the worst of the power outages.  I have been wondering how many will have died from the cold:  the Washington Post count currently has it at 47, but you would have to suspect there are many more yet to be found in homes, or amongst the homeless.

But one cool thing the event has alerted everyone to is that wind turbines can be made to be very rugged indeed, including the ones in Antarctica, of all places.

I admired the Jupiter 2 looks of this Belgian Antarctic outpost in a post many years ago, but I don't think that I knew then that it relies a lot on wind turbine power as well as solar panels:

Reading about this base, on its website here, I see that there is lot more to it than the UFO looking bit; but it also seems to only be a summer station and is not manned over winter.

Anyway, they some nice videos, but using Vimeo instead of Youtube.  I presume I can still embed them:

There's also a short one showing what it looks like during a blizzard: 

 

 

Bracing weather!

 I see that Australia's Mawson base had two, more conventional looking, wind turbines installed in 2003 (much longer ago than I would have guessed.)  One of them died in 2017 (fell over, actually), but the other is still going strong, apparently.  Here's a photo:

 

It's a very messy looking base, as I am sure I have commented before.  Still, gets the job done, I suppose.

Oh look - there's the wreck of a Russian transport aircraft near it:

Here's the story:

This week we ventured out to visit the remains of a Russian aircraft on the plateau. The plane is (was?) a Lisunov Li-2T, the Russian built DC-3, and a close cousin of the Basler aircraft which still service the Antarctic programs of many countries today. In 1968 this aircraft and crew dropped in to visit Mawson for Christmas, no doubt with a bottle of their finest de-icing fluid to share. A strong wind gust during take-off caused damage to a wing and propeller, stranding the hapless crew. A Mawson blizzard further damaged the plane, flipping it upside down and sealing its fate. In the following 52 years it has slowly been carried by the plateau towards the coast, about 30 metres each year. Reaching it now requires travelling through crevassed terrain, and the use of glacier travel technique, the party roped together for safety. Two groups made the trip this week, each being trained in glacier travel equipment and rescue skills before they departed.

The plane lies twisted and buried by the snow and slow creeping ice. One landing ski protrudes into the air, the empty cockpit dials poke above the snow surface, a hinged door reveals a fuselage full of snow. The horizontal stabilizer now points skywards making a great backdrop for a photo.

Anyway, these are tough turbines, that's for sure.

I get spam

I occasionally get spam comments - and don't let them through of course.

This one, though, was the first of its kind, and noteworthy:

Lahore is the most making city with solid economy and bunches of amusement working environments. Getting the authentic high class Lahore Escorts Services will be dynamically excellent in the coming days since all the call youths are communicating that they are high class Call Girls in Lahore in a way. Experienced customers will locate the real and premium Pakistan Call Girls in Lahore and the new customers will get unassuming associations for higher rates.

There was a link in there to the escort service, which I have removed.

Perhaps I am easily amused, but the idea of spamming random blogs just in case they might interest someone who happens to be heading to Pakistan and who wants a sex escort while there strikes me as some sort of high point of optimism in marketing. 

The wrath of the trans soon to descend on The Economist

Has The Economist been running a transgender skeptic line before now?   This short article suggests so, and I expect transgender activists, who seem to be the most rabid activists around, will be very upset with it:

Little is known about the effect of puberty blockers - That has not stopped clinics prescribing them enthusiastically

...despite their popularity, the effects of puberty blockers remain unclear. Because they are not licensed for gender medicine, drug firms have done no trials. Record-keeping in many clinics is poor. A 2018 review by researchers at the University of Melbourne described the evidence for their use as “low-quality”. In December British judges likewise flagged the lack of a “firm evidence base” when ruling that children were unlikely to be able to give meaningful consent to taking them. Britain’s National Health Service recently withdrew a claim, still made elsewhere, that their effects are “fully reversible”.

The studies that do exist are at once weak and worrying. The day after the court ruling, GIDS published a study that found children were happy to receive the drugs. But there was little other evidence of benefit—not even a reduction in gender dysphoria. Two older studies of Dutch patients given puberty blockers in the 1990s found that gender dysphoria eased afterwards. But without a control group, it is impossible to tell how patients would have felt had they not taken the drugs.

The article starts with this surpising evidence of the rapid rise of transgenderism as a social concern:

America had one paediatric gender clinic in 2007. It now has at least 50. The sole paediatric gender clinic for England and Wales, known by its acronym, GIDS, has seen referrals rise 30-fold in a decade. A similar pattern is evident across the rich world.

It doesn't even mention the disproportionate rise in teenage girls deciding they are transgender.

Just one more thing to worry about

So, it would appear from this research, that the environmental effect of Earth's magnetic field flipping (which last happened 42,000 years ago) on the planet is not particularly well understood:

One temporary flip of the poles, known as the Laschamps excursion, happened 42,000 years ago and lasted for about 1,000 years. Previous work found little evidence that the event had a profound impact on the planet, possibly because the focus had not been on the period during which the poles were actually shifting, researchers say.

Now scientists say the flip, together with a period of low solar activity, could have been behind a vast array of climatic and environmental phenomena with dramatic ramifications. “It probably would have seemed like the end of days,” said Prof Chris Turney of the University of New South Wales and co-author of the study....

Writing in the journal Science, Turney and his colleagues describe how they carried out radiocarbon analyses of the rings of ancient kauri trees preserved in northern New Zealand wetlands, some of which were more than 42,000 years old.

This allowed them to track over time the rise in carbon-14 levels in the atmosphere produced by increasing levels of high energy cosmic radiation reaching the Earth during the Laschamps excursion. As a result they were able to date the atmospheric changes in more detail than offered by previous records, such as mineral deposits.

They then examined numerous records and materials from all over the world, including from lake and ice cores, and found that a host of major environmental changes occurred at the same time as the carbon-14 levels peaked.

So, what did happen in this period?: 

“We see this massive growth of the ice sheet over North America … we see tropical rain belts in the west Pacific shifting dramatically at that point, and then also wind belts in the southern ocean and a drying out in Australia,” said Turney.

The researchers also used a model to examine how the chemistry of the atmosphere might change if the Earth’s magnetic field was lost and there was a prolonged period of low solar activity, which would have further reduced Earth’s protection against cosmic radiation. Ice core records suggest such dips in solar activity, known as the “grand solar minima”, coincided with the Laschamps excursion.

The results reveal that the atmospheric changes could have resulted in huge shifts in the climate, electrical storms and widespread colourful aurora.

Some stuff in the report is pretty speculative:

...the team suggest they could also be linked to the emergence of red ochre handprints, the suggestion being that humans may have used the pigment as a sunscreen against the increased levels of ultraviolet radiation hitting the Earth as a result of the depletion of ozone.

They also suggest the rise in the use of caves by our ancestors around this time, as well as the rise in cave art, might be down to the fact that underground spaces offered shelter from the harsh conditions. The situation may also have boosted competition, potentially contributing to the end of the Neanderthals, Turney said.

Of course, the worry is how well our civilisation could cope:

The Earth’s magnetic field has weakened by about 9% over the past 170 years, and the researchers say another flip could be on the cards. Such a situation could have a dramatic effect, not least by devastating electricity grids and satellite networks.

All a worry...

 

It must be economics Friday

I don't usually post about economics on a Friday - I tend to try to find more esoteric stories to note.

But this article in South China Morning Post caught my eye.  Young Chinese are worried about their economy, too.  It starts:

As vlogger Ning Nanshan stares down the camera and launches into a lecture about China’s push for technological self-reliance, a flood of “bullet comments” begins floating across the screen.

“Go our own way and corner the rest of the world!” says one of the comments on

Bilibili

, a popular video-sharing site that allows viewers to post messages in real time.

“Our motherland’s five-year plan is so awesome!” says another as it flies across the monitor.

While most of Ning’s videos trumpet China’s advancements in manufacturing, he occasionally touches on more middle class concerns, like runaway house prices. There too, the bullet comments come thick and fast – although with a very different tone.

“It is impossible for house prices to fall, there is no solution to my despair,” says one user.

“Working hard is not the answer, it will not work,” reads another comment.

With few other outlets to express opinions, social media platforms like Bilibili have become important online gathering places for young Chinese. And while they can be home to dizzying displays of nationalism, they also provide brief windows into what some political analysts say is the “serious divergence” between China’s booming economy and the personal prospects of ordinary people.

Further down:

China was the only major economy to post positive growth last year, following a quick recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. Its gross domestic product (GDP) topped 100 trillion yuan (US$15.4 trillion) for the first time in 2020 – about 17 per cent of the world economy –

narrowing the gap with the United States

to only $6.2 trillion, from $7.1 trillion in 2019.

For China’s leaders, the GDP figure was a “milestone” that showed the nation’s economic and technological strength. Analysts have estimated the nation will overtake the US to become the world’s largest economy by 2028, five years earlier than previously forecast.

But the impressive headline figure fails to tell the whole story. Young Chinese in particular are taking to online platforms like Bilibili or Weibo to voice despair over skyrocketing house prices, widening inequality, and the increasing price of everyday goods.

More to my surprise, there are some comments by an "independent scholar" in Beijing which appear to be brave, very brave:

Wu Qiang, a political observer and an independent scholar based in Beijing, said the optimism about China’s economy on social media was mostly “Communist Party propaganda”, with many other topics out of bounds due to the nation’s vast online censorship system.

“The nationalism on Chinese media is a nihilistic statism, which is to conceal inequality through empty slogans without giving real equality and political rights to the people. This is reflected in the suffering people feel in their lives,” he said.

He said China’s strong growth under state capitalism was a “paradox” for many young people, who lacked comprehensive labour rights and work from 9am to 9pm, six days a week.

China’s relatively low household incomes and the small share of employment in the services sector also hint at the divergence between the nation’s booming economy and the life satisfaction of the average worker.

GDP per capita in China was around US$10,200 in 2019, compared to US$63,200 in the United States, according to the most recent World Bank data.

In 2019, China’s private consumption accounted for about 39 per cent of GDP, which was about 30 percentage points lower than the US and Europe, according to data from CEIC. It was also about 20 percentage points lower than developing countries such as India and Brazil.

Long story short - the dramatic rise in GDP is not improving the lives of the people as much as might be expected.

If I was Wu, I would be a bit nervous about knocks on the door and invitations to come speak to local party officials, in the next few weeks.

 

 

Not a conservative

Good article at The Atlantic, pointing out that Rush Limbaugh did not advance conservatism:

As a proponent of conservatism in America, Limbaugh was a failure who in his later years abandoned the project of advancing a positive agenda, culminating in his alignment with the vulgar style and populist anti-leftism of Donald Trump. Character no longer mattered. Budget deficits no longer mattered. Free trade no longer mattered. Nepotism no longer mattered. Lavishing praise on foreign dictators no longer mattered.

All that mattered was owning the libs in the culture war, in part to avenge a deeply felt sense of aggrievement. Limbaugh and Trump were alike in attaining great wealth and political influence while still talking and seeming to feel as though society was stacked against guys like them....

....the proposition that Limbaugh helped conservatism thrive or grow is unsubstantiated. National Review and Barry Goldwater reinvigorated conservatism in postwar America. The high-water mark of American conservatism, Ronald Reagan’s presidency, was over before Limbaugh was a force in American politics.

Over the ensuing decades, as Limbaugh grew in fame and gained as much influence in the Republican Party as anyone, the conservative movement suffered from political and intellectual decline. “In place of the permanent things, we get Happy Meal conservatism: cheap, childish, familiar,” a writer at The American Conservative once complained. “Gone are the internal tensions, the thought-provoking paradoxes, the ideological uneasiness that marked the early Right.” The seesaw of partisan politics gave conservatives occasional victories, such as the 1994 Republican takeover of the House and the 2010 Tea Party wave, but once in office the GOP tended to squander those victories quickly and never accomplished much conservative change. The government kept getting bigger. The country kept getting more socially liberal. The right delighted in the fact that the left was never able to create its own Rush Limbaugh, despite various attempts. But perhaps that supposed failing has helped progressives make gains.

Read the whole thing.