China's new leaders are close to abandoning the country's one-child policy, belatedly moving to avert an ageing crunch as the work force goes into sharp decline. Jun Ma from Deutsche Bank said the new policies should shore up the pension system and inject stimulus as China's growth sputters. "As tens of millions of sibling-less people in China are now entering their child-bearing age, we expect this policy shift would induce a baby boom," he said. The one-child policy dates back to 1971 in its original form and has led to 336 million abortions and 222 million sterilizations, often badly executed in poor regions. Recent abuses have caused uproar, with photos circulating on the Chinese internet of a young mother lying beside a fully formed baby after she had been seized by police for failing to pay the "social compensation fee" for an illegal child. She was forced to undergo an abortion just before her natural birth. Premier Li Keqiang clearly views the policy an anachronism at a time when China is running out of workers, and faces a demographic time-bomb. There are currently five workers for every pensioner. This ratio will fall to two by 2035.  So any baby boom over the next few years may come too late.

During the Bastille Day celebrations this month, French President François Hollande declared - to the incredulity of pretty much everyone in France - that "the recovery is here". There are no particular economic indicators that would suggest this. Consumer spending and manufacturing remain at historic lows; growth in the third quarter is expected to be zero; the OECD has predicted that unemployment will actually be worse next year; and only this week a senior member of the FPD, Germany's junior coalition partner, pronounced that he was "very worried" about France, arguing that Hollande's decision to raise taxes was "fundamentally wrong." As an Austrian-American born and raised in Paris, and still living there, I have always been intrigued by the French faith in the French way. No other country - save for the United States - is as persuaded that it embodies a universal model for human societies. But a system whose economic performance is mediocre in times of prosperity and plain lousy in times of crisis can hardly purport to be a "model." And sadly, the same advantages that make the French believe in their system are also what make the country so unprepared for reform. The French, in short, are living in la-la land and their current system is doomed.

Babies got cheaper this month. Twice. First, Belgian scientists announced that their new method has the potential to cut the costs of some in-vitro fertilization treatments from $7,500 to below $300. Their cut-price recipe requires little more than baking soda and lemon juice in place of purified carbon dioxide gas to maintain acidity when growing an embryo in a lab before implanting it. Second, a baby called Connor was born after 13 of his parents' embryos had their genomes analyzed using next-generation DNA-sequencing techniques in an Oxford laboratory. Only three of the embryos were found to have the right chromosome number, and one of these "normal" embryos was then implanted in his mother. This new approach, made possible by the rapidly falling cost of DNA sequencing, promises to cut the number of failures during IVF, reducing both cost and heartache. The two announcements are a reminder that cost reduction and productivity boosts are the purpose of most innovation. Medicine is no exception. Innovation is driving down the costs of medical interventions all the time, and the falls may be about to accelerate, thanks to biotechnology and information technology. Whence, then, the relentless rise in the costs of healthcare? Part of the answer is known as the Jevons paradox after the Victorian economist Stanley Jevons.

When the history of the global warming scare comes to be written, a chapter should be devoted to the way the message had to be altered to keep the show on the road. Global warming became climate change so as to be able to take the blame for cold spells and wet seasons as well as hot days. Then, to keep its options open, the movement began to talk about "extreme weather." Those who made their living from alarm  switched tactics  to jump on any unusual weather event -- whether it was a storm, a drought, a blizzard or a flood -- and blame it on man-made carbon dioxide emissions. This proved a rewarding tactic, because people -- egged on by journalists -- have an inexhaustible appetite for believing in the vindictiveness of the weather gods. The fossil fuel industry was inserted in the place of Zeus as the scapegoat of choice, with scientists as the weather gods' priests. The fact that people have short memories about weather events is what enables this game to be played. Even here in mild England, people are always saying, "I have never known it so cold/hot/mild/windy/wet/dry/changeable as it is this year." One Christmas I noticed the seasons had been pretty average all year, neither too dry nor too wet nor too cold nor too warm. "I have never known it so average," I said to somebody. I got a baffled look. Nobody ever calls the weather normal.

In the US shale gas is old hat; it's the shale oil revolution that's proving a world changer, promising not just lower oil prices worldwide, but geopolitical ripples as America weans itself off oil imports and perhaps loses interest in the Middle East. One of the pioneers of the shale gas revolution, Chris Wright, of Liberty Resources, was in Britain last month. It was he and his colleagues at Pinnacle Technologies who reinvented hydraulic fracturing in the late 1990s in a way that unlocked the vast petroleum resources in shale. Within seven years the Barnett shale, in and around Forth Worth, Texas, was producing half as much gas as the whole of Britain consumes. And the Barnett proved to be a baby compared with other shales. Like many shale entrepreneurs, Mr. Wright is now spending a lot of time in North Dakota drilling for oil. The success of America's shale gas revolution drove the gas price so low that in 2010 most drilling rigs switched to looking for oil. With spectacular results. A new report (The Shale Oil Boom: a US Phenomenon) by Leonardo Maugeri of Harvard University, sets out just how astonishing this second shale revolution already is.

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

What is going on in Egypt is simply astounding.  The pictures -such as those of this UPI story, are jaw-dropping.  Especially when you consider what millions upon millions of Egyptians are demonstrating against:  radical Islamism and Sharia law which they equate with fascist tyranny. Who or what is behind these gigantic protests?  An amorphous movement called Tamarod, meaning "Rebel" or "Rebellion" in Arabic.  Its goal is the resignation of President Morsi and the removal of the Moslem Brotherhood from power, followed by new elections. Now, here's what almost no one gets so far:  The Tamarod movement is Egypt's Tea Party.  Both are anti-fascist freedom movements.  Of course, the US Tea Parties have a far deeper and more solid foundation - the US Constitution and the demand for the federal government to limit itself to the Constitution's enumerated powers. Nonetheless, what is happening in Egypt should inspire all Tea Partyers in America.  If tens of millions of Egyptians can demand the resignation of their corrupt fascist leader, why can't tens of millions of Americans do the same? Well, then, why aren't they?  Americans have the greatest tradition of freedom in human history.  Egyptians don't have any at all.  So why aren't vast numbers of Americans in the streets demanding their freedom from the federalie fascisti, led by an irretrievably corrupt president who hates their country?  What does it take? Maybe it takes George Zimmerman getting acquitted.

[Note: Yesterday, June 26, the Supreme Court issued its decision in United States v. Windsor, ruling 5-4 that DOMA, The Defense of Marriage Act, is unconstitutional.  Justice Kennedy provided the decisive vote, siding with the Court's four dependably liberal justices, Ginsberg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.  Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia dissented.  The link above is to the Pdf file of the entire decision, which is where the Scalia dissent is to be found.  TTP here presents, as a public service, the extraordinary dissent of Justice Scalia in its entirety, of over 8,000 words, in easily readable form.  It is quite possibly the most blistering, scathing moral denunciation of a majority opinion by a dissenting justice in Supreme Court history. He condemns the Court majority for "formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency," for accusing "the Congress that enacted this (Defense of Marriage) law and the President who signed it of... act(ing) with malice - with the ‘purpose to disparage and injure' same-sex couples." Scalia is stunned by the majority's vitriol at "simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence-indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history. It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race." This is a brilliant exercise in judicial, constitutional, and moral reasoning.  It is worth reading entire. -JW]   This case is about power in several respects. It is about the power of our people to govern themselves, and the power of this Court to pronounce the law. Today's opinion aggrandizes the latter, with the predictable consequence of diminishing the former. We have no power to decide this case. And even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation. The Court's errors on both points spring forth from the same diseased root: an exalted conception of the role of this institution in America.

If you want to know what's wrong with the Republican Party wrapped up in one pretty package, all you have to do is look at the latest amnesty disaster that was created by a gang of Republican idiots in the Senate. Marco Rubio, John McCain, Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham, Bob Corker, John Hoeven, Kelly Ayotte, Dean Heller and the rest of the braindead Senate Republican buffoons who have supported this bill are the living personification of the words, "Stuck on Stupid." They picked the wrong issue, at the wrong time, did it the wrong way, and set it up so that no matter what happens, the Republican Party is doomed to get kicked in the teeth. Why does the Republican Party lose elections? Because they do things like this:

Just like they did with Obamacare, some in Congress intend to "Pelosi" the amnesty bill. They'll pass it in order to find out what's in it. And just like the unpopular, unaffordable Obamacare disaster, this pandering, rewarding-the-rule-breakers, still-no-border-security, special-interests-ridden, 24-lb disaster of a bill is not supported by informed Americans. I am an ardent supporter of legal immigration. I'm proud that our country is so desirable that it has been a melting pot making a diverse people united as the most exceptional nation on earth for over two centuries. But I join every American with an ounce of common sense insisting that any discussion about immigration must center on a secure border. The amnesty bill before the Senate is completely toothless on border security. If this bill was genuinely concerned with border security, it might include practical solutions for those states that live with the problem every single day. Pass-through grants could be given to border states to actually build a fence.  Free up more federal lands along the border to be privatized. There are plenty of other commonsense solutions, but this bill isn't about fixing problems; it's about amnesty at all costs.  What's more, passing this bill with an unsecured border and within a growing welfare state under Barack Obama is economic insanity.

Note:  Elbert Guillory is a State Senator in the legislature of Louisiana.  A graduate of Rutgers Law School, he has been a practicing attorney in Opelousas for many years, and turned to politics in his 60s - elected as a State Representative in 2007, then State Senator in 2009 as a Democrat.  Opelousas is heavily black and Democrat. On May 31, he formally switched his party affiliation to the Republican Party, becoming the first black Republican in the Louisiana Senate since Reconstruction in the 1870s.  He is widely considered now to be a formidable candidate for Lt. Governor in 2015. Guillory calls himself a "Frederick Douglass Republican."  Here is his explanation.  It brought tears to my eyes, and it may well to yours.  - Jack Wheeler {youtube}n_YQ8560E1w{/youtube}

What Edward Snowden has done is an amazingly brave and courageous act of civil disobedience. As a Whistleblower like me, he became discomforted by what he was exposed to and what he saw: the industrial-scale systematic surveillance that is scooping up vast amounts of information not only around the world but in the United States, in direct violation of the fourth amendment of the US constitution. I feel a kinship with Snowden: he is essentially the equivalent of me. He saw the surveillance state from within and saw how far it's gone. The government has a pathological incentive to collect more and more and more; they just can't help themselves - they have an insatiable hoarding complex. Since the government unchained itself from the constitution after 9/11, it has been eating our democracy alive from the inside out. There's no room in a democracy for this kind of secrecy: it's anathema to our form of a constitutional republic, which was born out of the struggle to free ourselves from the abuse of such powers, which led to the American Revolution. That is what's at stake here: to an NSA with these unwarranted powers, we're all potentially guilty; we're all potential suspects until we prove otherwise. That is what happens when the government has all the data. 

Shortly before the second-term inauguration of Barack Obama this January, I wrote the following of my worries over the Obama way of doing business:

But the untruths and hypocrisy hover in the partisan atmosphere and incrementally and insidiously undermine each new assertion that we hear from the president - some of them perhaps necessary and logical. Indeed, the more emphatically he adds "make no mistake about it," "let me be perfectly clear," "I'm not kidding," or the ubiquitous "me," "my," and "I" to each new assertion, the more a growing number of people will come to know from the past that what follows simply is not true. Does this matter? Yes, because when the reckoning comes, it will be seen as logical rather than aberrant - and long overdue.