Some points from America’s Newspaper of Record yesterday morning, not all on the internet version.

1) Gordon Chang on the prospects for China in the coming (let’s be frank) world-wide depression. Chang’s been crying wolf on China for at least nine years. Remember Derbyshire’s First Law of Pessimism, though: “Every dire prediction comes true eventually.” I have a China piece upcoming on NRO.

2) Ethnic disaggregation is one of the great themes of our age. Here’s Raakhee Mirchanandi on why she prefers dating Indian guys. She has some unsettling stats to report, too:

I’m not the only one. While the rate of intermarriage among races increased over the past half-century, the last decade has seen a reversal — particularly among Asians and Latinos. According to a Ohio State University study, from 1990-2000 the number of Hispanics marrying outside their race fell from 27% to 20%, while Asian intermarriage dropped from 42% to 33%.

The “diversity” ideology doesn’t stand a chance. Our glamorous new post-postmodern President set the pace here, dumping his white girlfriend because “She couldn’t be black” (Dreams from my Father, p.211) and marrying Michelle.

3) On one of my pet themes, the one about how the government people have won: Yep, game, set, and match. For heaven’s sake, tell your kids to start prepping for the Civil Service exams.

4) Just a little typographical note. One of the captions says: “China holds about $1T in American debt.” Is it now settled that we use upper-case “T” to denote “trillion”? Abbreviations for big numbers have up to now always been lower-case: “$1m” for a million. “$1bn” for a billion. Why not “$1tn,” for some kind of consistency? Or perhaps the caption-writer was channeling Isaac Asimov, a great fan of the trillion, who once suggested that all big-number talk be done in trillions, “4.5T3,” for example, meaning “four and a half trillion trillion trillion.” We’ll be needing some such schema pretty soon, that’s for sure.