90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, March 2, 2023

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #2009

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

Girls With Gu.. Bows Extraganza!

Two commanders and four subordinates at North Dakota’s Minot Air Force Base were dismissed Monday, with the Air Force being tight-lipped about the reasons for the move.

The dismissals were announced in a news release on the 8th Air Force’s website.

The release said Maj. Gen. Andrew Gebara, the commander of the 8th Air Force, relieved two commanders from their positions because of “a loss of confidence in their ability to complete their assigned duties.”

“Additionally, four additional subordinate leaders were relieved by commanders assigned to Minot Air Force Base,” the release said.

“These personnel actions were necessary to maintain the very high standards we demand of those units entrusted with supporting our Nation’s nuclear mission,” Gebara said in a statement.

“Eighth Force continues to safeguard global combat power and conduct around-the-clock strategic deterrence operations in a safe, secure and effective manner,” the general said.

“Our mission is foundational to our Nation’s defense, and we remain committed to the success of that no-fail mission,” he said.

The release said the commanders dismissed led the 5th Mission Support Group and the 5th Logistics Readiness Squadron.

“To protect the privacy of the individuals, further details will not be released,” it said.

The website Task and Purpose, citing an Air Force Global Strike Command representative, identified the dismissed commanders as Col. Gregory Mayer, who led the 5th Mission Support Group, and Maj. Jonathan Welch, who led the 5th Logistics Readiness Squadron.

The Air Force Times said Mayer was in his post for eight months, having arrived at the base in June.

Mayer held what the outlet called “leadership roles in the civil engineering community” in recent years and had spent 25 years in...

Visage à trois #1316

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #975

The Population Crash

The demographic Titanic is going to hit the iceberg. We may be thankful that some people on the ship are building lifeboats while there is still time.

In 1968, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, a book extrapolating global population growth data to predict a catastrophe as humanity’s demand for resources outstripped supply. The book became a bestseller and catapulted Ehrlich to worldwide fame. But today, just over a half-century later, humanity faces a different challenge. We are in the early stages of a population crash.

Ehrlich’s basic math wasn’t necessarily flawed. In 1968, the world population was 3.5 billion, and today the total number of humans has more than doubled to just over 8 billion. Anyone with a basic understanding of exponential growth can appreciate that if human population doubles every 50 years, within only a few millennia, an unchecked ball of human flesh would be expanding in all directions into the universe at the speed of light. Which means, at some point, Malthusian checks will apply.

But where extrapolation yielded panic, reality has delivered something completely different. Today population growth is leveling off almost everywhere on earth, and the cause of that decline started, ironically, back in the 1960s when Ehrlich wrote his book. The reasons for this are subtle, because the only ultimate determinant of population growth is the average number of children a generation of women are having, and the impact of that and other variables take decades to play out.

In the late 1960s, the United States, along with most Western nations, had just moved out of its baby boom years, that period from 1946 through 1964, when women were still having lots of babies. Having grown up during the Great Depression, followed by a world war, the choice to have large families may have been a response to the adversity these women and men experienced as they came of age. That theory is borne out by subsequent history.

Over the past 50 years, in a pattern that has been repeated around the world, as prosperity increased, the average number of children per woman of childbearing age has decreased. The chart below provides hard evidence of this correlation. Tracking data per nation, the vertical axis is the average number of children per woman. The horizontal axis is the median income. A clear pattern emerges. In extremely poor nations, birth rates remain at Ehrlichesque levels. But once a nation’s median income rises barely above poverty, at around $5,000 per year, the average number of children per woman drops below replacement level.

One may view this chart and conclude that if an average of 2.1 children per woman is necessary to keep a population stable, this cluster of nations averaging around 1.5 children per woman can’t be that bad. But that reasoning ignores basic math. At a replacement rate of 1.5 per woman, for every 1 million people of childbearing age living in a nation today, there will only be 420,000 great-grandchildren. This means that nation’s population will drop to 42 percent of what it is today in less than a century. And the numbers get worse very fast.

South Korea’s current fertility per woman, for example, is a dismal 0.81, and those are extinction-level numbers. At that rate of reproduction, for every 1 million Koreans of childbearing age today, there will only be 66,000 great-grandchildren. South Korea is on track to disappear in less than a century.

This collapse is just now becoming apparent in overall population numbers because it is only when a numerically superior older generation, the product of fecundity, begins to die that absolute totals begin to drop. As baby boomers, known to demographers as the “pig in the python,” reach the end of their lifespans, the consequences of the decade decline in birth rates will finally be reflected in dramatic downward shifts in total population. That process is...