The Weekly Weird #50

Gerontocracy: US Edition, China's police robot balls, Denmark's "fart tax", Britain's packaging tax, spermageddon (or not), Chinese secret police take Manhattan, does TP-Link stink?

Welcome back to your Weekly Weird, with a side order of contrition from your humble correspondent as it has been a little longer than usual between missives!

If you want a playful pairing with the news of Australia’s banning of under-16s from social media, you might like the latest episode of the podcast, in which our guest is Dr Christopher Ferguson, a professor of psychology at Stetson University in Florida who conducted meta-analyses of studies on the effects of social media on adolescent mental health and came to a surprising conclusion: “causal effects [are] statistically no different than zero.”

Up-fronts:

• Look out for Free Gear Keir’s government shilling the One File in 2025. The British press have piled onto Team Digital ID, according to Biometric Update, resulting in a flurry of articles getting misty-eyed for a ‘papers please’ society, including a righteous ‘this time is different’ clanger from The Times: “In the information age, a digital identity is more commonly associated with civic participation than with state snooping.” Drop your examples in the comments, if there are any…

• The Financial Times reported that “Chinese surveillance technology group Hikvision has terminated five contracts with local governments in the north-western region of Xinjiang,” marking a potential win for people who dislike the CCP’s attempted extermination of the Uyghur people and also frown on surveillance technology. The FT added that the decision “could help shield [Hikvision] from pressure from the incoming administration of US president-elect Donald Trump.” Whatever the reason, let’s take the win.

• Synolo Biometrics, a company “created to commercialize the infant biometrics collection technology developed at UC San Diego with funding from the Gates Foundation,” is launching its Neo biometric scanner, which is “specially designed for infant and neo-natal identification,” in Brazil. The CEO, Greg Scott, told the press that “if we’re successful in Brazil, that’s going to be the launching pad for the rest of the world.” The company, as per its website, “was created out of the Gates Foundation need to capture the identification of newborns and infants for the purpose of tracking administration of vital health care services.” Biometric Update writes that “[c]hildren’s biometrics are enrolled in hospital maternity wards shortly after birth, in part to prevent infant abductions.” Taylor or Lovejoy, take your pick.

  From Synolo’s website, here’s a happy baby being entered into a biometric database for the rest of its life:

  

  All together now: Pan-Awwwwwwww-pticon.

Gerontocracy: US Edition

News broke this week about Congresswoman Kay Granger, 81, a Republican who has represented Texas’s 12th District since 1997. Since her last vote in July she has been missing, failing to attend debates or votes.

The Dallas Express tried to track her down and reported that, as of Thanksgiving, “[h]er office appears to be closed for good (she is retiring at the end of the session), with phone calls going unanswered and voicemails not returned.”

Then, upon receiving a tip from a constituent, the Dallas Express was able to confirm that “the Congresswoman has been residing at a local memory care and assisted living home for some time after having been found wandering, lost, and confused in her former Cultural District/West 7th neighborhood.”

Despite her son Brandon confirming that she had been “having some dementia issues late in the year,” her office “denied she is in memory care,” claiming that instead she was living independently at the facility in question.

None of this is to dunk on an elderly woman struggling with the understandable ravages of age. She and her family must be going through a very difficult time, and dementia is a terrible illness.

However, this latest episode, coming as it does on the heels of a year in which the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate was airlifted out of the race after his mental decline was showcased during a debate with Trump¹, has re-ignited a question that has been slow-burning in American politics for a while: Is Congress too old?

In early 2023, Fiscal Note published an article on this very question.

Part of an aging Congress can be put down to the fact that the United States as a whole is also getting older. However, the median age in the US is 38.9 years (half the US population is below that age, half are above), whereas less than 10% of Congress is that age or younger.

In early 2024, LegiStorm had slightly different data, giving the average age of Congress as 61 years old rather than Fiscal Note’s 64.

From Biden’s much-documented (and vehemently denied) issues to Mitch McConnell’s “frozen moment,” Dianne Feinstein’s cognitive decline prior to her demise, and, more recently, Nancy Pelosi stumbling over her words while calling out Trump for “cognitive degeneration,” the past few years have brought to the fore the weariness of the American electorate with what they see as an aging, out-of-touch, often incapable gaggle of gerontocrats on Capitol Hill. Even PBS ran a story in July 2024 on why Congress is so old.

North Dakota just approved a new law that would prevent anyone from running for Congress if they would turn 81 during their term. Meanwhile, Iowa senator Chuck Grassley is 90 years old and shows no interest in retirement.

In 2017, Erin Mershon reported for Stat on the way that pharmaceutical drugs are delivered to legislators from a Washington, D.C. pharmacy called Grubb’s and dispensed through the Office of the Attending Physician. In it, a telling quote from the pharmacy’s owner Mike Kim:

“At first it’s cool, and then you realize, I’m filling some drugs that are for some pretty serious health problems as well. And these are the people that are running the country,” Kim said, listing treatments for conditions like diabetes and Alzheimer’s.

“It makes you kind of sit back and say, ‘Wow, they’re making the highest laws of the land and they might not even remember what happened yesterday.'”

That quote was walked back immediately by Kim and Stat, in a follow-up article posted the same day:

“I am not aware of any member that actually has Alzheimer’s and would certainly not disclose any such information if I did know,” Mike Kim said, adding that “patient privacy is a very serious matter that I am committed to upholding.”

Does it really matter how old the leaders of a country are? Is it better or worse for the median age of legislators to be higher than the median age of the population? Is a gerontocracy inherently disadvantaged in responding to and managing the challenges and crises of a rapidly shifting technological age?

A recent in-depth (and too late) Wall Street Journal piece on the nature and extent of the Biden administration’s cover up of the president’s cognitive decline includes this jaw-dropper:

Over four years, Biden held nine full cabinet meetings—three in 2021, two in 2022, three in 2023 and just one this year. In their first terms, Obama held 19 and Trump held 25, according to data compiled by former CBS News correspondent Mark Knoller.

Whether this could be put down to Biden’s condition due to his age, or his team’s management of access to the president to hide his incapacity from his colleagues and the public, the consequence is the same: An enfeebled administration, in which aides, liaisons, and functionaries obtain disproportionate influence by mediating between the president and the people who, under normal circumstances, he would speak with directly and unsupervised.

Attempts to point this out before the Democratic Party performed its Biden-ectomy and installed Kamala Harris as the always-and-ever-was candidate were met with derision, hostility, and silence. As Jim Geraghty put it in the National Review:

For pointing out what we could see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears, and for paying attention to the president’s schedule, we were called liars, conspiracy theorists, and purveyors of the “gross, lowest-common-denominator politics that drive people away from public life.”

Geraghty described the experience of trying to call out Biden as a “doddering, mumbling, stumbling, forgetful, and barely-functional-for-a-few hours geriatric” by referencing Mugatu’s outburst in Zoolander:

How many members of Congress are being managed in a similar fashion? How much longer can a country as complex and prominent as the United States endure with a legislative class tottering around on proverbial or, in some cases, literal life support? For how long can the American public have what they see with their own eyes denied to their faces before entirely losing faith in the system as a whole?

Mary Kate Cary, Senior Fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, wrote the following in November 2023:

There have been calls to impose age limits for federal elected office. After all, federal law enforcement officers have mandatory retirement at 57. So do national park rangers. Yet the most stressful job in the world has no upper age limit.

For those who think mandatory retirement is ageist and arbitrary, there are other options: Republican candidate Nikki Haley has called for compulsory mental competency tests for elected leaders who are 75 and older, though she has said passing wouldn’t be a required qualification for office, and failing wouldn’t be cause for removal. A September poll shows huge majorities of Americans support competency testing. That way, the public would know who was sharp and who was not. Sounds like a fine idea to me.

So does having the generosity to step aside and think of others. And having the wisdom to realize that life is short and about more than just going to work. And having the grace to do what John F. Kennedy, the nation’s second-youngest president, once said: to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans.

My colleague professor Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, puts it well: “I’m 70, so I have great sympathy for these people; 80 is looking a lot younger than it used to, as far as I’m concerned. But no, it’s ridiculous. We’ve got to get back to electing people in their 50s and early 60s.” And the polling shows that most Americans would say, “Amen, brother.”

Amen, sister.

China’s Police Robot Balls

Oh, the things you see and the headings you write when you waste spend your time researching dystopian trends.

“This ball can patrol streets…”

China’s police have balls…made out of robots. Or robot balls. Or an “amphibious crime-fighting robot sphere.” Or an “indestructible ball shaped robot.” Or “a spherical patrol robot.” It all depends who is doing the reporting.

According to the South China Morning Post:

In eastern China, a robot that can identify and chase suspects follows police officers as they patrol the streets in a crowded commercial district.

In a viral clip that could come straight from a sci-fi film, the spherical robot is decked out with cameras and flashing lights, and tilts and rolls around without tipping over.

The robots used by police in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, can be equipped with suppression tools such as tear gas, and are part of China’s broader efforts to deploy advanced technology to aid officers.

From Xinhua on X:

Here’s another demo video on X.

China’s Global Times explains further that the totalitarian death-ball can take add-ons “such as net guns, tear spray, smoke bombs, as well as horns and acoustic wave dispersers to meet the needs of the police, including confrontation capabilities and the capacity of dealing with threats at close distance.”

SCMP gives the provenance of the rotund horrorshow:

The spherical robot, patented by the College of Control Science and Engineering at Zhejiang University, was meant to solve issues facing robots with wheels and legs, Wenzhou Daily reported on Wednesday.

The associate professor who led the research team on the project is named Wang You.

You couldn’t make it up.

The robot, which can text the police in a pinch, even talks smack in a confrontation:

During a simulated fight, a robot at the scene started flashing its lights and loudly sounding the words: “If you win the fight, you’ll end up in jail. If you lose the fight, you’ll end up in hospital.”

Denmark’s “Fart Tax”

No, the Danes haven’t introduced a tax on Facial Recognition Technology, unfortunately. Our Nordic cousins mean actual farts, and burps, and other gaseous emissions. The world’s first tax of this kind will apply to livestock (for now), but once we grease up this particular slippery slope, who knows?

“No baked beans for breakfast, Mum, we can’t afford the taxes!”

“We’re sorry, citizen, you must refrain from eruction. You have zero burp credits remaining.”

From the BBC:

From 2030, farmers will have to pay a levy of 300 kroner ($43; £34) per tonne of methane (as per carbon dioxide equivalent) on emissions from livestock including cows and pigs, which will rise to 750 kroner in 2035.

In the comedy job market, is “fart monitor” going to be the “chicken sexer” of the 21st century? How exactly are the Danes (or anyone else) going to measure the methane emissions? Will they fit meters in cow butts? Maybe the livestock will have to be corralled indoors at all time to make sure the ventilation system can count their bum burps (and their face burps).

The “Green Tripartite agreement” has another, slightly baffling task.

The Green Tripartite minister said they will “do what it takes to reach our climate goals” after receiving a “broad majority” in parliament.

“[It is a] huge, huge task that is now underway: to transform large parts of our land from agricultural production to forestry, to natural spaces, to ensure that we can bring life back to our fjords,” Jeppe Bruus said.

Maybe I’m an idiot, but if the goal is to get rid of agricultural production, where will the food come from?

The New York Times, seizing the opportunity to use the phrase “poop, farts and burps” in a borderline-serious piece of journalism, quoted one Dane on the forthcoming legislation:

“I think it’s good,” said Rasmus Angelsnes, 31, who was shopping for dinner in Copenhagen one recent afternoon. “It’s kind of a nudge to make different choices, maybe more climate-friendly choices.”

Never mind that his shopping cart contained thick slices of pork belly, which he planned to cook that rainy evening with potatoes and parsley. “Comfort food,” he said sheepishly.

Where’s dinner going to come from after the “[n]early two-thirds” of Danish land that is used for agriculture gets turned into forests and peat bogs, Rasmus?

More from the NYT:

But unlike a carbon tax on other sectors, farmers will automatically get a rebate of 60 percent because, as Jeppe Bruus, the government’s green transition minister, put it, there isn’t yet technology to eliminate flatulence entirely. Those rebates increase if farmers do things like using feed additives to reduce methane from cow burps or sending pig manure to machines that pipe the methane into the gas grid.

“A tax on pollution has the aim to change behavior,” Mr. Bruus said.

What kind of “feed additives” are we talking about, exactly, in a food chain that already includes all kinds of funky chemicals, hormones, and antibiotics? Well, one dairy farmer “expects to add a chemical supplement that farmers use in other European countries to reduce methane emissions.”

Mmm. Milk, now with fart-less chemical supplement. Delicious.

Paul Schwennesen, writing in The Daily Economy, an online publication from the American Institute for Economic Research, made an interesting point:

The New York Times, by way of perspective, accounts for 16,979 metric tons of its own, meaning that it, as a single company, has the footprint of ten Danish dairies. What would readers of “All the News That’s Fit to Print” have to say about an annual tax of $730,000 a year, ramping to $1.8 million, being added to the newspaper stand price? Advocates of a free press might well ask why the government was using state power to make the newspaper of record less competitive.

Of course, newspaper printing is not as big an emitter internationally as Big Food. As the NYT points out, “[g]lobally, the food system accounts for a fourth of greenhouses gases,” but, as a counter-point, the food system also prevents almost everyone on the planet from dying of starvation. I almost never eat the New York Times, so maybe I’m biased, but I think we could live without it more easily than agriculture. Yes, there are still way too many people in the world without access to food and clean water, and yes, farming often interferes with that access locally. Growing food doesn’t mean everyone has it, but, although I’m not a food scientist, I’d venture a guess that not growing food would guarantee not having it. Unless we all forage, but we can’t all be hipsters.

Schwennesen also introduced me to the phrase “regulatory-impact laundering,” which I think is an apt one (emphasis in original).

If beef and milk production indeed posed such an existential climate risk, then why not simply tax the consumers of beef and milk who, after all, are the real source of the production signal? The answer, of course, is obvious: no politician wants to be pegged as the one who raised the price of butter for average Danish grandmothers. Politically, it is far easier to go after the farmers, knowing full well that any cost burdens on farm production will be passed along to consumers anyway — only then it will be the farmers’ fault, not the government’s. It’s an old trick, a kind of regulatory-impact laundering scheme.

Britain’s Packaging Tax

The UK government is doing its bit to join the Net Zero party, with a new “packaging tax” kicking in from January 1, 2025.

The new scheme, called the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), will see 'retail sales increases of around £1.4 billion' in the first year, according to the impact assessment published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

The government forecast say that household bills will increase by £28 a year in the lowest scenarios, £48 in a middle scenario or up to £56 in the highest scenarios.

The “base fees” are calculated per tonne, according to The Sunday Times:

The highest fee of £485 a tonne will be charged for plastic packaging followed by “fibre-based composite” at £455 a tonne. The levy for paper or board packaging is £215 a tonne while materials such as bamboo or hemp will be charged at £280 a tonne.

The levy was originally conceived by Michael Gove, the Conservative MP, and has been resurrected by the Labour government.

The British Retail Consortium, representing the main supermarket chains, wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, to express concerns about the tax, which they believe will cost businesses £7 billion, far more than the government’s estimate of £1.4 billion.

“The effect [of the tax] will be to increase inflation, slow pay growth, cause shop closures, and reduce jobs, especially at the entry level. This will impact high streets and customers right across the country.”

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) released a statement:

“This government will end our throwaway society and stop the avalanche of rubbish that is filling up our streets by increasing recycling rates, reducing waste and cracking down on waste crime.”

According to a 2021 BBC piece, “[r]oughly two-thirds of plastic waste in the UK is sent overseas to be recycled,” so one wonders where “the avalanche of rubbish filling up our streets” is coming from.

Spermageddon (Or Not)

According to The Mind Unleashed, “a comprehensive 2022 meta-analysis led by Dr. Hagai Levine and published in the journal Human Reproduction Update [says that] sperm counts among men worldwide have declined by an alarming 51.6% between 1973 and 2018.”

According to the University of Manchester, a study that gathered “data from 6,758 men from four cities in Denmark applying to be sperm donors at the world’s largest sperm bank” shows that there is no such global de-jizzening, although they only used data from Denmark, the nation of strapping Vikings and, more recently, a livestock “fart tax.”

According to New Scientist:

In 2017, [Shanna Swan] and her colleagues published a meta-analysis that considered data from 185 studies of more than 42,000 men between 1973 and 2011, making it the largest of its kind. Swan’s team examined two different measures: the concentration of sperm in a millilitre of semen and the total number of sperm in the sample. In North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, both figures seemed to be falling at a rate of around 1.5 per cent per year on average, resulting in a 50 to 60 per cent drop over the whole period.

As per New Scientist, environmental toxins like phthalates, bisphenol-A, and endocrine disruptors, as well as being fat and eating a diet low in fresh produce, contribute to low sperm counts.

One group of scientists found that “adding 60 grams per day of walnuts, almonds and hazelnuts to men’s diets for 14 weeks” helped their sperm counts, so men can help their nuts by eating nuts, apparently.

Whether you side with the low sperm count crowd and think we’re in serious trouble, or believe the (relatively) small sample size study from Denmark, at least scientists are getting a chance to shoot their shot.

Chinese Secret Police Take Manhattan

This just in from the US Department of Justice on December 18:

Chen Jinping, 60, of New York, New York, pleaded guilty today to conspiring to act as an illegal agent of the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in connection with opening and operating an undeclared overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan, for the PRC’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS).

China’s network of secret police stations in foreign countries, through which the CCP enforces its edicts, projects fear, and demands compliance, has been known and written about for some time, including here in the Weird.

Executive Assistant Director Robert Wells of the FBI’s National Security Branch decried “the insidious efforts taken by the PRC government to threaten, harass, and intimidate those who speak against their Communist Party.”

The substance of the case:

While acting under the direction and control of the MPS official, the defendants worked together to establish the first known overseas police station in the United States on behalf of the Fuzhou branch of the MPS. The police station — which closed in the fall of 2022 — occupied an entire floor in an office building in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Lu and Chen helped open and operate the clandestine police station. None of the participants in the scheme informed the U.S. government that they were helping the PRC government surreptitiously open and operate an undeclared MPS police station on U.S. soil.

In October 2022, the FBI conducted a judicially authorized search of the illegal police station. In connection with the search, FBI agents interviewed both defendants and seized their phones. In reviewing the contents of these phones, FBI agents observed that communications between the defendants and an MPS official appeared to have been deleted. In subsequent consensual interviews, the defendants admitted to the FBI that they had deleted their communications with the MPS official after learning about the ongoing FBI investigation, thus preventing the FBI from learning the full extent of the MPS’s directions for the overseas police station.

China don’t just manufacture secret policemen, they also make wi-fi routers…

Does TP Link Stink?

With TikTok on the chopping block, the next Chinese tech company in the cross-hairs of US legislators is TP Link, the most popular brand of wi-fi router on Amazon and also, it seems, the preferred router for the Department of Defense and other federal agencies.

From the Wall Street Journal:

In August, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party called for an investigation into TP-Link routers.

In the letter to Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, the lawmakers wrote, "TP-Link's unusual degree of vulnerabilities and required compliance with PRC law are in and of themselves disconcerting. When combined with the PRC government's common use of SOHO [small office/home office] routers like TP-Link to perpetrate extensive cyberattacks in the United States, it becomes significantly alarming."

The story is still developing, but a ban may be in the offing.

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That’s it for this week’s Weird, everyone. I hope you enjoyed it.

Have a great holiday break (if you get one)!

Outro music is the comedy metal band Psychostick with Oh Tannenbaum, delivered in the style of Rammstein.

Das jingle bells – Ja.

Stay sane, friends.

1. For comparison, you can watch the highlights of Biden’s vice-presidential debate with Sarah Palin during the Obama-McCain election.