The artificial lights of smart phones that people increasingly use before and in bed keep people up. Want a good night’s rest? Don’t bring the iPhone to bed. We would argue as well that society itself is structured in a way that keeps people up longer than they should. Prime-time television does not start until 8 p.m. World Series games regularly run until midnight. The NFL stands out here - most of its playoff games begin and end at a reasonable hour. Ever-longer commutes see Americans getting up earlier and getting home later. Suburban sprawl has many benefits - larger houses, comfortable lifestyles - but has no doubt cut down on Americans’ sleep. The notion that sleep should occur in one big chunk is also a modern phenomenon. In the Middle Ages, people slept in two shifts - “first” and “second” sleep. The interregnum between the two slumbers was used for prayer, creative work or having sex. But modern lifestyles have put paid to the notion of two separate sleeps. Should Americans’ sleeplessness be a government priority? Perhaps. In 2016, the RAND Corporation found that the lack of good sleep was costing the American economy more than $400 billion a year, mostly because of missed workdays. RAND chalked up Americans’ sleeplessness to “obesity, excessive alcohol and sugary drink consumption, smoking, lack of physical activity, mental health problems, long-term health conditions, stress at work, irregular working hours, financial concerns, and long commuting.” This suggests that rather than make sleep itself a policy issue, the government could look to reduce things like alcoholism. The improving economy should also help Americans rest easy.

Everybody’s biology is different - both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, for instance, barely sleep, as the former president’s late night and early morning tweets indicate - but as a rule of thumb, most people should get about eight hours of shut-eye a night. But fewer and fewer people in our harried, busy country are hitting the target, or really even coming close. Two thousand Americans were recently surveyed about their sleep habits for a study commissioned by a mattress company. The results? We Americans are a bleary-eyed people. “It seems logging [even] six hours is a struggle for many,” the website Study Finds reported. “Consider this finding: In 2018, the average respondent reported about six hours and 17 minutes of sleep per night. By 2019, however, that average shrunk to only five-and-a-half hours each night.” This is a contemporary phenomenon: In the 1940s, Americans were sleeping nearly eight hours a night. Sleep remains one of life’s great mysteries; scientists still have many questions as to the mechanisms of the process. But one thing is obvious: Sleep is important for a healthy life. Sleep boosts the body’s immune system, reduces blood pressure, regulates blood sugar, improves memory, allows for cell repair and even keeps weight down. Sleep is actually an appetite suppressant. Tired people are more prone to cause car accidents; indeed, driving while tired is arguably as great a menace on the roads as drunk driving. All told, people who sleep less die younger, on average. Why are Americans sleeping so little? Stress, sleep’s enemy, is high in our busy, pressure cooker of a society. And technology has been fingered as a culprit as well.

Then there is the aforementioned matter of PLA journal comments about their shortcomings and problems in their exercises and war games. U.S. war game results report similar challenges against PLA opponents. The logic is simple. Training to fight a giant heavyweight makes it easier to defeat the enemy who is most likely a middleweight. The challenges encountered require solutions and often drive innovations that might not otherwise surface. All modern militaries, Russia being a recent exception, recognize that training and preparation in peacetime will save you blood in war. Moreover, the fact the PLA journals are discussing their problems suggests the mistakes are being studied and applied as lessons learned. Also, the PLA now does multi-day exercises at their opposing force training area in Inner Mongolia. PLA leaders recognize their shortcomings and are working to overcome them. They may not be ready today, but China’s leaders are working hard to be ready at some close future date. The PLA is not an overwhelmingly powerful force today, but it can be against a complacent, inadequately equipped, poorly led or ill-deployed opponent. Finally, China enjoys two advantages in a western Pacific conflict ― it is closer to the combat zone and it does not have America’s global commitments. Mr. Xi’s go/no-go decision on Taiwan will be determined by his perception of PLA versus Western capabilities and America’s political will. Deterring Chinese aggression requires America and its allies to equip and train their forces as intensely as China is preparing the PLA.

Any war in the western Pacific will consist primarily of combat across all military domains from cyber and space warfare to air-to-air and fleet-on-fleet actions against a technologically advanced near-peer state. Neither the U.S. nor China has recent combat experience in either of those. Desert Storm marks the last time the U.S. faced a challenging integrated air defense system, and Iraq’s air defenders were well equipped but not well trained. Should the PLA reach American allies’ shores, U.S. ground combat experience should make the difference, although that experience was not gained fighting a modern combined arms force equipped with tanks and artillery. Finally, America’s military leaders also speak of their recruits’ lack of physical fitness, educational shortcomings and self-discipline. The Chinese navy now outnumbers the U.S. Navy in the western Pacific, particularly when anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles (ASBMs and ASCMs) are calculated. China has increased its fourth-generation naval surface warship inventory sixfold in 12 years, tripled its aircraft carrier force in 10 years and modernized its submarine force. Moreover, the PLA is working intensely to master joint military operations. In 2021, it integrated anti-ship ballistic missiles into a naval exercise. That required coordination between a theater combatant command, the naval service and the PLA Strategic Rocket Force. That doesn’t mean the PLA has mastered such operations, but as the world saw in August of last year, they have integrated the capability into their exercises and probably into their war plans.

Given recently “reelected” General Secretary Xi Jinping’s threats against Taiwan, aggressive actions along India’s borders last year, and expanding garrisons in the South China Sea, international leaders have concerns about Beijing’s intentions and its capability to act on them. Unfortunately, many assessments claim there is no need for alarm because People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is far from ready for modern warfare. Such assessments miss two points: (1) The PLA would be fighting closer to home, and (2) it has the capacity to inflict heavy losses. More importantly, deterring such an attack is critical to America’s national security policy in Asia and that necessitates convincing Mr. Xi that the U.S. has the political will and the capability to deny him victory. Achieving that goal requires an honest assessment of America’s as well as the PRC’s strengths and weaknesses. The “not ready” camp points to the PLA leadership’s lack of joint operations and combat experience compared with the U.S. and most U.S. allies. PLA journals also reported PLA complaints about their recruits’ physical fitness and educational shortcomings. Then there is the PLA’s lack of the well-developed noncommissioned officer corps integral to Western militaries. That camp, however, ignores a critical factor that relates directly to conflict in the western Pacific Ocean. America’s combat experiences have been gained against determined and innovative but lightly armed insurgents who lacked air defenses, air forces and fleets. China has all three. More importantly, ground combat experience does not translate directly to open ocean or even offshore air and naval combat.

Obviously, there is a limit at which point the negatives outweigh the positives - but those who give arbitrary dates by which they claim there can be no reversal have lost touch with reality. (Please note that over the last couple of decades a number of these dates have come and gone - and the world had gone on.) Wars, pandemics, and economic and political mismanagement are much more dangerous to people living now than climate change. If the electric grid goes down, mortality rates will soar, particularly among the aged and the very young. It is often noted that many rich environmental extremists have large homes by the sea, private planes and huge “carbon footprints.” They had lobbied for years to get rid of coal plants - even though sufficient renewables and backups had not been put in place. Reality has now struck - brownouts and huge price increases in gas, oil and electricity are impoverishing people. The energy reality means that greens who fail to compromise are getting the worst all of possible worlds for them - the return of coal and an increased likelihood of loss of political power, credibility and influence. Where do windmills and solar power structures come from? Do they just magically appear, or do they use scarce resources and materials that cause prices to soar in competing uses? How many new, highly polluting copper and other metal mines and refineries are going to be required? To be a true environmentalist and also a realist advocate for more development of clean-burning natural gas and new technology nuclear power. The road to both a cleaner environment and lower energy costs - which will reduce global poverty and increase wealth - is clear.

The cost of building the renewals and the unsightliness of them are also given short shrift. Wind and solar may be free, but their conversion into useful electricity and transmission to the market is far from free. The Russian war on Ukraine has sped up the need to face reality, as natural gas supplies from Russia are being diminished, and the shortcomings of renewables can no longer be ignored. So, much of Europe and the U.K. are in a crash effort to take old coal plants out of mothballs and build new coal-fired plants - coal-generated power being relatively cheap and reliable. Coal is often viewed as the “dirtiest” energy source - because it often is - but again, it is cheap. That is why the Chinese and Indians are building new coal plants at a furious pace. The U.S. made far bigger gains in reducing CO2 emissions than any other country because of the switch from coal to natural gas during the past two decades. Unfortunately, these gains have been totally offset by the increased CO2 emissions from the Chinese and Indians - so, U.S. taxpayers and consumers have borne a huge cost with no gain in global air quality because of the actions of others. We have been told by self-proclaimed energy experts like John Kerry (Biden’s energy czar) that the environmental crisis must take precedence over all other human concerns - yet the reality is people to date are not dying from global warming. Plants (food) grow better in warm climates, and CO2 is like fertilizer to plants. One reason for the global decline in food prices for the last several decades (up to this past year) is the fact that the planet has gotten slightly warmer and atmospheric CO2 has increased.

A funny thing happened on the way to the “greens’ nirvana” of a zero-emission future without fossil fuels. Energy shortages started occurring, the cost of gasoline, heating oil, natural gas and electricity soared ― and the voters did not like it. Many things sound wonderful in the abstract, like an all-electric world with no pollution. And yes, that is likely to occur in the future ― but that future is not next month, or next year, or even the next decade. Environmental zealots and their political toadies often have no understanding of basic physics and cost-benefit analysis. Europeans who were farthest down the utopian green path suddenly found their homes were cold, and businesses were shutting down with the loss of good jobs. This was occurring because they could no longer compete in the world market with companies in low-energy cost countries. Historically, increases in energy consumption per person were highly correlated with increased living standards. For the past 25 years, energy consumption in Europe has fallen by 30% to 1990s levels. The U.S. flatlined but then dropped 13% in 2020 in total energy consumption, again going back to levels of the 1990s. Falling energy consumption is not the sign of a healthy economy, despite efficiency gains. For instance, LEDs only use a small fraction of the amount of energy of the old incandescent bulbs, but much of that cost advantage disappears as people use much more lighting because it is so cheap. Huge amounts of money have been spent on renewables like wind and solar power, while all too often the costs of necessary backups required when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine are ignored.

It’s an oddity that even as the U.S. population grows, more Americans choose to live alone. The simple truth that “it is more blessed to give than to receive” notwithstanding, too many conclude that close relationships are too hard. While living alone may mean less snoring to endure and fewer dirty socks to pick up, it can also lead to a dimmer financial future and a relentless struggle against loneliness. A Pew Research Center survey published last week found the share of unpartnered U.S. adults aged 25 to 54, including those neither married nor cohabiting, rose from 29 percent in 1990 to 38 percent by 2019. The survey adds a new dimension to an earlier, 2018 Pew-sponsored study of self-reported health assessments of Americans aged 40 to 49 living as married couples compared to individuals living alone. Those who claimed that marriage provides benefits to health at mid-life measured 89 percent; those making the same claim about living alone totaled only 35 percent. Moreover, marriage comprises an integral step on the journey toward a stable and prosperous future. Though not a panacea, marriage and subsequent family-building enroll individuals in the school of love, which teaches challenging lessons about patience and selfless giving. The effort is rewarded many times over, though, with the loving embrace of spouse and children. The same reward awaits those who choose unmarried partnership ? so long as they stay true to their commitment. Despite the natural yearning for companionship, Americans who choose the unnatural path of going it alone should, respectfully, reconsider.

Why have people in the “developed” world stopped having children? The obvious and least-mentioned answer is that having children is, for most, a sacrifice and a commitment to a world not yet seen. It is an act of a faith, and consequently, it is performed most frequently by people who have faith. Fertility rates fall along with religious belief. Once all that religious sentimentality is shorn away, it turns out that there are limited reasons to have children. The United States is no exception. The current fertility rate of 1.7 compares to 2.54 in 1970. Now compare religious belief. In 1970, just 3% Americans said they had no religious affiliation. Last year, 23% said they had no religious affiliation. Obviously in the case of the communists, they hate religion, so they doom themselves almost from the outset. In the West, the ruling philosophy for the last two centuries has been utilitarianism - a cousin of communism - accelerated by the Enlightenment. Both have left us with diminished religious beliefs. Utilitarianism has failed. It has led to societies that cannot produce the essential building block of civilization - actual humans. In a hyper-rational world, everyone concludes that having children makes no economic sense. Some think that government cash is the answer. If more cash were the answer, surely the richest societies in the history of the planet would not be suffering from a dearth of children. The good news is that, like many things in nature, it is a self-correcting problem. Those societies and peoples that can’t or won’t reproduce - like the Communist Chinese or some in the West ? will simply fade into history.