Which one, do you choose?

So..Do not put off till tomorrow what you can do some sport today!

Are There ‘Too Many Asians’?

WSJ 25 Jan 2023

D o u b l e d a y once published a book with a title— “Too Many Asians”—that would never fly today. Author John Robbins argued that “if humanity is to have a future,” the West would have to see to it that fewer Asians were born in the years ahead. That was 1959.

Robbins was but one voice in a chorus of think tanks, government aid organizations, international development specialists, environmentalists, zero-growthers, doom mongers and do-good-ers who all saw population control as the cure for poverty. China’s recent announcement that its population fell by 850,000 last year, the first recorded drop since the Mao-induced famines of the early 1960s, provoked much comment on the social and economic challenges decline brings. Yet conspicuously absent was any recognition that the whole idea that Chinese moms having children threatened the country’s prosperity was, much like Marxism itself, a noxious Western import.

That’s no overstatement. In 1977, World Bank President Robert McNamara spoke in Al Gore-ish tones of apocalypse. Population growth, he said, was the gravest issue the world faced “short of thermonuclear war.” It might even be more dangerous, because population growth was “not in the exclusive control of a few governments but rather in the hands of literally hundreds of millions of individual parents.”

Mao himself was conflicted, given Marx’s view of overpopulation as a problem of capitalism and his own tendency to see China’s population as a sign of its strength. The irony is that China today, like so many of its Asian neighbors that once tried to reduce their populations, is offering financial incentives to have more babies. But once the decline starts it’s all but impossible to reverse.

In 1974, the New York Times summed up the received wisdom in a piece reporting on the United Nations World Population Conference in Bucharest. “The consensus of the affluent industrialized Western nations,” the Times said, was based on the understanding that overpopulation “threatens to overstrain world resources, particularly food.”

This orthodoxy was echoed by almost all the experts of the day: the U.N. Fund for Population Activities, International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Club of Rome (publisher of “Limits to Growth”), the Population Institute, Paul Ehrlich, Lester Brown and the Worldwatch Institute, etc. When members of the Reagan administration pushed back—arguing that population growth wasn’t the cause of poverty—they were attacked as yahoos. Herblock published a cartoon of a well-fed Ronald Reagan holding a “world population policy” banner above a sea bursting with impoverished people.

Western groups that pushed population control on the Chinese typically denied that they supported the coercion that often resulted. But they never got too worked up about it, either. If you accept the idea that population growth uncontrolled by government is an existential threat, and if people don’t willingly stop having babies, then coercion is the obvious next step—and it’s far easier in nondemocratic countries such as China.

One example: In 1983, Stanford dismissed student Steven Mosher from its doctoral program after Beijing threatened to close its doors to the university’s scholars. Mr. Mosher, who now heads the Population Research Institute, was doing research in a rural Chinese village when he published photos of pregnant Chinese women, some in their seventh or eighth months, being led off for forced abortions. As a Journal editorial noted about Stanford’s decision, “no one has ever raised significant objections to the veracity of Mr. Mosher’s revelations on this subject.”

Against this there were a handful of lonely voices—including this page—which objected to the outrages against Chinese women and maintained that what was inhibiting China’s development was Chinese communism, not Chinese babies. Among the most eloquent was University of Illinois economist Julian Simon, who argued that human beings were not just mouths but minds, and that a mind was “the ultimate resource.” He laid out his argument in a seminal book with that title in 1981, at just about the same time Beijing was cranking up its one-child policy.

Simon pointed out that by almost every material measure— life expectancy, daily caloric intake, food production—human life was getting better, not worse. In 1985, he added a prediction: If China embraced the free market, it would likely experience labor shortages. Look where we are today.

Last week the New York Times ran a story headlined “Why China’s Shrinking Population Is Cause for Alarm.” The piece hits on some of the casualties of China’s population decline: fewer workers supporting an aging society, the “ hundreds of millions of Chinese women” who were forced to abort their babies, the shortage of girls and large surplus of single men with no prospect of marriage, higher costs for the global economy, etc. And no easy fix.

All sound points. If only that were the message being sent 50 years ago—when it might have made a difference.

Write to mcgurn@wsj.com.

Like Marxism itself, population control was imported to China from the West. 

When Elvis Played for Lisa Marie Presley

He chose a life of fanfare and notoriety. But his daughter, 9 when he died, was thrust into it.

By Bob Greene

Jan. 13, 2023 5:46 pm ETSAVEPRINTTEXT

52

Elvis Presley with his daughter Lisa Marie Presley.PHOTO: FRANK CARROLL/SYGMA VIA GETTY IMAGES

Listen to article

Length (3 minutes)Queue

It might have been the smallest audience for which Elvis Presley ever performed. Just a few hotel housekeepers and his young daughter, Lisa Marie.

“We would come through the back door every morning,” one of those housekeepers, Imelda Saulog, told me in the summer of 1989. Elvis had been dead for 12 years. I was doing some writing about his life, and the managers of the Las Vegas Hilton, on whose stage he had always performed when he was in town, were allowing me to stay in his old suite for a week.

It was more of a house constructed for him atop the building than a hotel room: 5,000 square feet, four bedrooms, a sun deck on the roof. There was a large white piano near a window that overlooked the Vegas skyline. Ms. Saulog, who was assigned to take care of the suite, told me about those private concerts, with Elvis singing just for his daughter and the housekeepers who would come in each day to tidy up.

“Elvis’s bodyguards would be asleep in their rooms,” she said. “Elvis’s daughter would visit”—this was after he and his wife, Priscilla, had divorced—“and we would walk into the living room, and there would be Lisa Marie, coloring in her coloring book, all alone.

---

NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP

Morning Editorial Report

All the day’s Opinion headlines.PreviewSubscribe

---

“Elvis would come out of his bedroom in his blue pajamas and check on her. He’d ask if she was all right, and she would always say yes, and he would tell her to come into his room if she needed him.

“Sometimes he would sit and play the piano. We would listen, and Lisa would keep coloring.”

The image has long haunted me. People would fly to Las Vegas from all over the world to see Elvis sing—but there he had been, performing in his pajamas at the break of dawn for his daughter and a couple of housekeepers who would sit on the couch and listen in silence. Mostly, I was told, he played and sang gospel tunes for them.

With the news of Lisa Marie Presley’s death on Thursday at 54, I found myself thinking about that again, and about what her young life must have been like. Elvis’s isolation came from professional necessity; one of the hotel’s bellmen told me that Elvis once said: “I’d give a million dollars if I could be a bellman for just one week.” Why? “Just so I could go downstairs and walk through the lobby.” But he had chosen the life he ended up living. His child hadn’t.

She was 9 and staying with him at Graceland in Memphis on the day he died in 1977. I was present the next afternoon to report on the story; I remember seeing a security guard driving a baby-blue golf cart around the grounds of the property. Painted on the side of the cart was one word: “Lisa.” On the back was a half-peeled sticker with the slogan: “I’m Just Crazy About Elvis Presley.”

Mr. Greene’s books include “When We Get to Surf City: A Journey Through America in Pursuit of Rock and Roll, Friendship, and Dreams.”

source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-elvis-played-for-lisa-marie-presley-las-vegas-hilton-private-concert-daughter-housekeepers-rip-11673642260?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Starlink’s performance in Ukraine has ignited a new space race

Never mind the moon; look to low-Earth orbit

Jan 5th 2023SavedShareGive

“It’s a fact: we’re in a space race.” So said Bill Nelson, the boss of nasa, on January 1st. If China managed to land on the Moon before America returned there, he warned, it could seize lunar resources for itself, and even tell America: “Keep out, we’re here, this is our territory.”Listen to this story.

Mr Nelson is right to foresee a space race, but wrong to focus on the Moon. It has symbolic value, but no useful resources that cannot be obtained much more easily back on Earth. The next space race has been triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is happening closer to Earth. And it is one which America, thanks largely to a single company, is winning. 

The company is SpaceX. Founded by Elon Musk to enable the colonisation of Mars, it makes very cheap, reusable rockets, whose first stages return from the upper atmosphere, landing gracefully on their tails. They have made the firm a space superpower: SpaceX now flies more things into orbit than all other companies and countries combined.

Since 2019 it has put that capacity to use building Starlink, a “mega-constellation” of satellites designed to beam the internet to places unreached by conventional broadband. In three years SpaceX has launched around 3,500 Starlink satellites, roughly half the total number of active satellites now in orbit. It plans to launch as many as 40,000.

Starlink is aimed at consumers. But early in the war Ukraine’s government asked SpaceX to send it the small, portable dishes that allow users to connect to the network. As our briefing explains, it has since become vital to the Ukrainian war effort. Soldiers use it to communicate, identify targets and upload footage for pr purposes. Satellite internet is not a new idea, even in a war zone. But Starlink represents a step-change in two ways. One is the sheer amount of capacity it offers. Previously, satellite links were largely reserved for senior officers, headquarters and drone pilots, with the bulk of lower-level communication handled by radio. Starlink means front-line troops can sling around videos, images and messages in real time, even as they advance beyond the reach of mobile networks. That provides the sort of tactical agility vital to modern warfare.

The second is its resistance to attack. Starlink has, so far, survived attempts to jam or hack it. Russia has said that its use in Ukraine makes it a legitimate military target. But whereas traditional satellite networks, made up of small numbers of big, complicated satellites, are vulnerable to anti-satellite missiles, Starlink is not. The number of satellites, and the speed with which SpaceX can replace them, make trying to shoot it down futile. The firm averaged around a launch a week in 2022, and expects to go even faster this year.

There are downsides to relying on a whimsical tycoon for vital infrastructure. Mr Musk has complained about the cost of subsidising Ukraine’s use of Starlink, which he says runs to $100m or so. He backed down after a backlash, but was surely correct. Charity is no way to run a war: no one expects Lockheed Martin to donate missiles. Better for America’s government to cover the cost, as it does with other military aid.

In October a row erupted with Ukraine’s government, when Mr Musk suggested a peace plan that involved Russia keeping hold of Crimea, which it invaded in 2014. Although relations have been mended (at least in public), SpaceX is still reluctant to let Ukraine use its system to launch attacks in occupied territory, or inside Russia itself.

But, generally speaking, the system has performed well. In 2022 SpaceX unveiled Starshield, a division aimed at adapting Starlink for government and military customers. (America’s armed forces had been experimenting with Starlink even before the invasion.) America’s friends and rivals have taken note, too. As with gps, which proved so useful that many other countries decided they must have sovereign systems of their own, Europe, China and Russia are all racing to build their own mega-constellations. China and Russia are trying to come up with ways to attack or disrupt Starlink should the need arise. The race is on. For now, though, America, thanks to SpaceX, has a huge lead. ■

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “Internet from the sky”

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/01/05/starlinks-performance-in-ukraine-has-ignited-a-new-space-race

Paket Komplete Seorang Leader. Congrat to Malaysia

DSAI is incredible..!

Anda Geser Kemana?

Shalat Sunat

Dari bbrp referensi, memang disunatkan, adanyg bilang “diharuskan” melakukan shalat sunat setelah berdoa, dzikir dll di tempat terpisah atau berbeda dg tempat shalat wajib. Baik di mesjid atau di rumah. Karena itu jika kita perhatikan banyak jamaah yg menggeser atau berpindah tempat, ada yg ke samping, maju ke depan, atau ke belakang?

Anda biasanya kemana? Ya, kemana saja karena yg penting berbeda, sebagai bukti nanti alam akan bersaksi pernah menjadi tempat anda shalat.
Namun, ada yg menarik. Ketika sekitar sepuluh tahun lalu saya melaksanakan shalat Jumat di Bandung, di daerah otista, di lantai parkir sebuah hotel.

Khatib menyarankan agar jamaah berpindah shalat sunat ke BELAKANG atau MUNDUR. Tentu jika mmg ruangan tersedia. Filosofinya, itu sebagai wujud kita membiasakan diri untuk lengser, anytime. Kalau mutasi bagi pejabat sudah biasa, pindah setara ke kanan atau kiri. Tetapi kalau mundur, ia sebagai cara membiasakan diri kita utk turun atau melepas jabatan kapan saja. Untuk tujuan ini, berpindah shalat sunat maju ke depan TIDAK DISARANKAN.

Terima kasih ustadz, alhamdulillah I made it peacefully, for my case. What about you?

#shalatsunat #lengser #kurenahuddaeddy #islam #serbaserbishalat

How to Take the Twitter Files to Court

Enjoy it folks, things is still about Twitter.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-take-the-twitter-files-to-court-class-action-federal-agents-censorship-monetary-damages-tech-11672846719?st=7scen03ae2ml7z2&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

ews

how-to-take-the-twitter-files-to-court-wsjDownload

True Divide

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-true-divide-pluralists-vs-zealots-power-democracy-partisanship-institutions-twitter-echo-chamber-neighbor-11672657710?st=qod4ykulvuev2iq&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

americas-true-divide-pluralists-vs.-zealots-wsjDownload