North Korean missile launches may mean new nuclear tests
https://www.vox.com/2022/11/5/23440456/korean-missile-launches-nuclear-tests-china-russia-japan
Month: December 2022
11th Circuit Says a Judge Should Not Have Interfered With the FBI’s Review of the Mar-a-Lago Documents
Why Do Ancient Greek Statues Have Such Small Penises?
“back when a lot of Ancient Greek statues were made, smaller penises were seen as more desirable than larger ones.
“Ancient Greece was a highly masculinist culture,” photographer Ingrid Berthon-Moine, who created a series in which she captured images of ancient statues’ testicles, told Hyperallergic. “They favoured ‘small and taut’ genitals, as opposed to big sex organs, to show male self-control in matters of sexuality. Today, the modern users as in commerce, cinema, and advertising converted it into a mass commodity telling us about domination and desirability, size matters and the bigger, the better.”
Art historian Ellen Oredsson added on the same topic that people with larger penises were seen to be “foolish, lustful, and ugly”, while Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes writing of the ideal male traits as “a gleaming chest, bright skin, broad shoulders, tiny tongue, strong buttocks, and a little prick.”
Penises haven’t grown larger over the intervening years, but it is no longer considered unattractive to have a more sizeable appendage”
Are China’s lockdown protests the beginning of the end for Xi Jinping?
“So far, there’s no sign to suggest any significant damage to Xi’s position at the top of the Communist Party.
Nevertheless, it is the first major show of resistance from the public under Xi’s rule, and the grievances directed against the top of the Chinese government are too loud to be unheard.
Xi has made zero-COVID a personal political project. With the public now openly opposing the symbols of that policy — such as the strict PCR test requirements and mask regulations — he will no doubt be seen as personally liable for the public anger.
Ho-fung Hung, an academic at Johns Hopkins University specializing in China’s protest movements, says the government and society “are in the process of seeking a new equilibrium. There can be conflicts and instability in the process.”
Still, the timing could have been worse for Xi, if the protests had taken place before the 20th Communist Party congress last month, when he was confirmed in his position for a precedent-breaking third term.”
Biden gives Chevron permit to restart Venezuelan oil sales
“a senior administration official said the easing of sanctions was not driven by the oil market pressures and was instead a response the Venezuelan regime’s decision this week to participate in the negotiations with opposition groups. Those talks, which were originally launched in Mexico City in September 2021, are expected to focus on humanitarian programs and setting future elections.”
Biden administration reacts with caution to China protests
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/28/biden-administration-china-protests-zero-covid-00070924
Nancy Pelosi was really, really good at her job
“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who announced she’d step down from leading the House Democrats on Thursday, made history as the first woman to ever hold the position and was a political target — and thorn in the side — of Republicans for the better part of two decades. All that frequently obscured her mastery of her job and her singular skills as a legislator, according to Molly Ball, a Time political correspondent and author of the biography Pelosi.
Pelosi has been central to many of Democrats’ biggest policy wins in recent years. She kept a divided caucus unified to pass landmark bills, including the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank banking reforms, and the American Rescue Plan. She won so many concessions from Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Covid-19 relief that he had to be pulled from the talks, according to Ball. And she’s corralled members time and again when the party seemed on the verge of fracturing over their differences.
“Here’s someone who had a 30-year career being the force behind all kinds of major legislation and liberal accomplishments in the House, chief among them the ACA. But when people talked about her, the only thing they seemed to talk about was just how disliked she was,” says Ball of the misconceptions people held of Pelosi when she first began reporting on the speaker.”
Are 8 billion people too many — or too few?
“In 2015, the Chinese government did something it almost never does: It admitted it made a mistake, at least implicitly.
The ruling Communist Party announced that it was ending its historic and coercive one-child policy, allowing all married couples to have up to two children. That was how dire China’s demographic future had become.
The one-child policy had helped lead to the mother of all demographic dividends, as China’s working-age population grew from 594 million in 1980 to a little over 1 billion in 2015. China’s dependency ratio — the total young and elderly population relative to the working-age population — fell from over 68 percent in 1980 to less than 38 percent in 2015, which meant more workers for every non-working person.
More young workers who had fewer young or old dependents to care for was the fuel in China’s economic rocket engine. But no fuel burns forever, and over the past decade, hundreds of millions of Chinese have hit retirement age, with a plummeting number of young people to replace them. So the slogans went from “Having only one child is good” to “One is too few, while two are just right.””
…
“If population decline can come for the first country to reach 1 billion people, it can come for anyone. And while China’s demography was skewed by the one-child policy, dozens of countries without a similarly coercive program have seen near equally drastic dropoffs in fertility, much older demographics, and population decline, either now or soon. The most recent numbers for Japan: 1.3 births per woman, and a population shrinking by 0.5 percent. For Italy: 1.2 births, and population shrinking by 0.6 percent. For Portugal: 1.4 and 0 percent growth. For Russia: 1.5 and shrinking by 0.4 percent.”
The incredible shrinking future of college
“In four years, the number of students graduating from high schools across the country will begin a sudden and precipitous decline, due to a rolling demographic aftershock of the Great Recession. Traumatized by uncertainty and unemployment, people decided to stop having kids during that period. But even as we climbed out of the recession, the birth rate kept dropping, and we are now starting to see the consequences on campuses everywhere. Classes will shrink, year after year, for most of the next two decades. People in the higher education industry call it “the enrollment cliff.”
Among the small number of elite colleges and research universities — think the Princetons and the Penn States — the cliff will be no big deal. These institutions have their pick of applicants and can easily keep classes full.
For everyone else, the consequences could be dire.”
Why Democrats Shouldn’t Take The Asian American Vote For Granted
“Asian Americans have not always voted blue. In 1992, when The New York Times first added “Asian American” as a racial category in its exit polls, 55 percent of Asian Americans voted for former President George H. W. Bush, a Republican, while 31 percent cast their ballots for then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a Democrat. In the 1996 presidential election, Democrats narrowed the margin, with 48 percent going for Republican Sen. Bob Dole and 43 for Clinton, and by 2000 Asian Americans had drifted into the blue: Fifty-four percent voted for former Vice President Al Gore and 41 percent for then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush.”
…
“Asian Americans seem to be shifting red. According to a 2016 survey from Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote, 19 percent of Asian Americans held at least a somewhat favorable view of Donald Trump. When the survey was conducted again in 2020, Trump’s favorability among Asian Americans had risen to 35 percent.”
…
“the many different ethnic groups within Asian America have many different views. For example, a plurality of Vietnamese American voters (45 percent) supported Republican congressional candidates in 2020, according to that year’s Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote survey. Vietnamese Americans, a powerful force in Steel’s California district, have been a loyally red voter bloc dating back to former President Ronald Reagan, whose anti-communism policy stances resonated with the Vietnamese diaspora by nodding to homeland geopolitics.”