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Russia's resolve: the family comes first

A valuable lesson from my days toiling away in the imperial capital was how little Americans know about what is going on in the rest of the world. Back in the heady days of hegemony, the default American setting was ethnocentric. Wherever we went, there was CNN Headline News, American entertainment, tourist menus, guides and cordial concierges ensuring that our language deficit was not an impediment to spending money.  Joe Biden, the guy presently playing president, said America is an “indispensable nation”. Strictly speaking, we haven’t been a nation since the Civil War. We’re not indispensable either, but believing so is indispensable to imperial hubris. I digress. Year of the Family On 22 November, American media ran the usual fare that passes for news: the wars du jour, the JFK murder 60th anniversary, and travellers headed home for Thanksgiving. Across the globe, something momentous was underway. Western media mostly missed it. The event? Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree declaring 2024 the "Year of the Family". In order to promote state policy to protect the family and preserve traditional family values, the President has resolved to declare 2024 the Year of the Family in the Russian Federation.  The Year of the Family initiative was kicked off in early November via a motion by Russian Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko. The mission: “promote state policy in the field of family protection and the preservation of traditional family values.” The official organising committee will be in place on 27 December, headed by Tatyana Golikova, Deputy Prime Minister for Social Policy, Labour, Health and Pension Provision. Consider: motion made in early November, decree issued 22 November, implementing committee up and running 27 December. By government standards, that’s moving like greased lightnin’. Guess they remember the glacial pace of things under Communism. Now, I’m an America first guy, but when countries with fewer resources get things done faster and better, there’s no shame in following their example. Socially conservative The custom of dedicating each year to a national cause was inaugurated in 2007 to focus attention on Russian priorities. This is part and parcel of President Putin’s nationalistic approach, designed to conflate patriotism with problem-solving. To a surprising degree, it works. However, President Putin deserves only partial credit. US/NATO sanctions have done more to rally Russians behind him than any big bucks PR campaign or “Ukraine liberation” ever could.    Much has been happening in Russia of late that would be of keen interest to Americans. By US standards, Russia is “right-wing”, aka woefully unwoke. Western elites regard Russia (per the late Senator John McCain) as “a gas station masquerading as a country”. Not so. But we do have domestic culture wars in common, though the folks ruling the roost in Moscow have quite a different take on things than their Washington counterparts.

Louis T. March

Louis T. March

December 11, 2023

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Why I don't think the population will collapse in the long run

The irrational pandemonium of the 20th century was the fear of a population explosion. Estimates from scientists such as Paul Ehrlich projected population growth would lead to mass starvation, death, and environmental degradation. None of that happened. Instead, food became more plentiful, life expectancy increased, and the environment got cleaner. This is because, as economist Julian Simon pointed out, human beings are the ultimate resource for improving the world. Population growth is good. Now it appears, though, that the opposite problem is rising to the surface. Fertility rates are down below the level needed to sustain the size of the population in many countries. Since population growth is a good thing, this seems like bad news. As population plummets, so does the number of creative minds ready to tackle humanity’s challenges. This issue has caught the attention of many, notably Elon Musk, who believes population collapse is humanity’s biggest threat. Yes https://t.co/hmmRqxqKus— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2023 To be clear, if the population is going to collapse, I agree with Musk’s concern. Growing population is the engine of human creativity, and human creativity is why we live in the wealthiest time in human history. However, where I don’t agree is that I’m not convinced the population numbers will collapse in the long run. To understand why, we need to look at the questionable history of long-term demographic predictions and consider the importance of unplanned order. Malthus' mistake In the 18th century, economist and demographer Thomas Malthus made a familiar gloomy prediction. He claimed that a growing population would trap humanity in poverty. Why? It was based on a simple logic. As people grow wealthier, they will be able to afford to have more kids. When they produce more kids, they then have to feed those kids and their increased wealth goes away. Is this how things go? Not really. Individuals don’t simply have more kids as long as they can afford it. This tendency holds true for insects and animals but not human beings. Malthus wasn’t alone in this fear either. Scientists have long attempted to fit humans into animal demographic models, and the results simply don’t bear out. Malthus, for his part, saw this possibility coming in later editions of his “Essay on the Principle of Population”. He realised this logic was avoidable if individuals could muster the ability to abstain from having more children. This is precisely what happened. As countries grew richer from the time of Malthus to today, a pattern emerged. Increased wealth led to greater rates of children surviving infancy and childhood. As a result, families could count on their children living, and they no longer had to “overshoot” the number of kids they wanted. At the same time, increased wealth made it possible to save resources for retirement rather than depend on children as a form of social security. Similarly, cultural changes toward women being involved in the workforce both increased the opportunity cost of women having children as job opportunities became more attractive and eliminated the infant “male preference”, which often drove families to have more children until they had boys. As a result of these and other factors, the average size of families decreased. Demographers call this change the demographic transition. There were also some extremely negative factors that led to lower population, such as a wave of antinatalist propaganda in the 20th century. But, for the most part, the factors that led to a lower population growth rate were the result of human action, but not human design. Economists call orders that result without central designing spontaneous order.

Peter Jacobsen

Peter Jacobsen

December 11, 2023

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Corpus Christi gets a new harbour bridge — eventually

When my wife and I took a short vacation down to the Gulf Coast in October, we used part of a day to visit the Texas State Aquarium in the North Beach part of Corpus Christi. To get there, we had to take the (old) Harbour Bay Bridge that crosses a large industrial canal through which pass tankers going to the main industry of Corpus Christi, which is oil refining. That bridge was built in 1959, and about twenty years ago, plans began to be made for a new bridge. As we saw from miles away, the new Harbour Bridge is well underway and may be completed as soon as 2025. The new bridge will be cable-stayed: two tall pylons will hold sets of cables that slant out and down to connect to the bridge deck. And I do mean tall. One of the pylons is complete, and the builders are extending the deck out from it in both directions. It is by far the tallest structure for hundreds of miles around, and the cantilevered-out parts extend so far that I got a little giddy just looking at the thing. When it's finished, the bridge will allow much taller ships to pass underneath than the current bridge, and will have a pedestrian walkway and LED lighting. Its planned cost is some $800 million, but that was before some delays occasioned in 2022 when an outside consultant raised safety concerns. That halted construction on a part of the bridge for nine months, but the five safety issues were addressed, and construction resumed last April. Fire Later that month, as the Corpus Christi Hooks were playing a baseball game at nearby Whataburger Field (the eponymous fast-food firm's first restaurant was in Corpus Christi), a fire began near the rear of a construction crane on the bridge. Subsequent videos obtained by news media show a load on the crane falling rapidly to the ground, and flying debris injured one spectator at the ball game. A battalion chief for the Corpus Christi Fire Department said a cable failure caused enough friction to set grease on a cable reel afire. An Internet search has not revealed any other major accidents since the bridge project formally began in 2016, but it is possible that some have escaped the news media's attention. Originally scheduled to be completed in 2020, delays and engineering firm changes have pushed back the anticipated completion date to 2025. That's only two years from now, and while a good bit has been accomplished, there is still much remaining.

Karl D. Stephan

Karl D. Stephan

December 11, 2023

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Decolonising Irish literature… from all Irish influence

The magic word “colonisation” is today being weaponised to beat whole nations into acknowledging how appallingly immoral their entire history is. On the air and in lecture theatres, the youth of the Western world’s future learns that every last one of their forebears was nothing but an irredeemable racist bigot. This perhaps has a sliver of credibility for Americans and British. But for the Irish? How many colonies did they have? None! They were a colony themselves, of the British Empire, arguably their most longstanding and most oppressed one. This year marks the 100th anniversary of Ireland’s greatest ever poet, W.B. Yeats, winning his much-deserved Nobel Prize for Literature, but many contemporary Irish writers, sharing the same deracinated, globalist mindset of the likes of their current transnationalism-obsessed Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, now appear to dislike the suddenly "problematic" poet’s work immensely, as a point of purest principle.     One of the ways the British Empire tried to deracinate the Irish people was by banning and then substituting their native Gaelic tongue with the English language instead. Accordingly, during the lead-up to eventual independence from Britain in 1922, many nationalistically minded Irish writers and artists co-opted the language of the colonisers itself to play its ironic part in fostering a coherent sense of Irish national self-consciousness prior to casting off all imperialist chains. The key figure here was the above-mentioned great Anglo-Irish poet, playwright and mystic W.B. Yeats, who sought to forge an articulate and inspiring national literature for the Irish by patching together their history, myth, folklore and heroes into one great intelligible tapestry. Then, when asked what it meant to be Irish, his countrymen could respond by citing tales of mythological heroes like Cuchulain, real-life revolutionary heroes like Wolf Tone, ancient native goddesses like Brigid, or supernatural entities like the sidhe (Irish fairy-folk), as handy means to define themselves imaginatively against their English colonisers. Considered in a certain sense, Yeats’ works were the poems that helped win Irish independence: that is certainly how they were taught in Irish schools up until very recently. But, in our current woke age, how much longer will this still remain the case? Is the anti-colonial W.B. Yeats now about to be cancelled… in the name of anti-colonialism? She hates Yeats Irish literature is supposedly undergoing a massive renaissance these days, with novels by leftish young Irishwomen winning plaudits, prizes and high sales figures across the English-speaking world. Yet, are these novels really Irish, in any meaningful sense of the term? Solipsistic, agonised, over-analytical tales of generic urban and sexual angst, this brand of millennial Mills & Boon could effectively be set anywhere across the technocratic post-Christian Western world, not necessarily in Dublin or Cork, if only you altered the characters’ surnames. The prime example of this rarified species, of course, is Sally Rooney, a self-confessed Marxist whose book Normal People, about a pair of abnormally self-absorbed teenage lovers, seems to have won her fame for life. I can’t say I have absorbed any of Rooney’s texts myself (I prefer reading books), but they appear paradigms of the whole dismal genre. In 2017, during an interview with the Irish Independent prior to the release of Conversations With Friends, her debut non-novel about people talking to each other about themselves endlessly, as such people often do, miserable-faced Ms Rooney made headlines after detailing her dislike of W.B. Yeats thus: “Sally Rooney is apoplectic. She squirms in her seat, hands flapping in disgust, and doesn’t mince her words. ‘I hate Yeats!’ she shrieks. ‘A lot of his poems are not very good but some are obviously okay. But how has he become this sort of emblem of literary Irishness when he was this horrible man? He was a huge fan of Mussolini, [so was Lenin] he was really into fascism, he believed deeply in the idea of a ‘noble class’ who are superior by birth to the plebs … He wasn’t just this harmless weirdo who wrote poetry. People misinterpret him in this country, and when we’re taught about him in school, it’s just hagiography.’” And there you have it: the authentic voice of modern "literary" Ireland – or of non-literary non-Ireland, I should perhaps say. Doesn’t Sally Rooney herself, rather like liberal ruling-caste politicians such as Leo Varadkar and his ilk, think she belongs to a contemporary, non-aristocratic “noble class” who “are superior by birth to the plebs” too, though? Normal people (must be ignored) In a 2019 New Yorker interview, for instance, Rooney spoke superciliously of how, despite not even having a vote on the issue, when it came to the UK’s 2016 Brexit referendum, “I was Remain, like any sensible person.” If moral snobs like Rooney had represented Ireland’s cultural elite back in the years leading up to 1922, I wonder if Ireland would ever have gained her independence from foreign rule at all.

Steven Tucker

December 11, 2023

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The Elon Musk interview that nearly broke the internet

The prestige press has its knickers in a twist over Elon Musk’s interview at the annual DealBook Summit in New York City last week — an interview that nearly broke the internet. Lasting an hour and a half in total, it was five minutes of the tech tycoon’s interchange with New York Times journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin that really got newsrooms up in arms, in which Musk told the corporations staging a boycott against X (formerly Twitter) to “go f*** yourself.” And no wonder they are upset: the industry pushing the boycott hardest is the corporate press, with behemoth media conglomerates Comcast, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery, along with cable networks NBC and CBS, leading the charge against Musk’s free speech platform. “If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go f*** yourself,” Musk told a stunned audience at Manhattan’s Lincoln Centre. “Is that clear? I hope it is,” he said, adding, “Hey, Bob, if you’re in the audience,” in a taunt aimed at Disney CEO Bob Iger. Talk about poking the bear.  Why no advertiser boycott, Bob Eiger? You are endorsing this material! https://t.co/EVza5VZeSa— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 7, 2023 The X boycott picked up steam after left-wing media “watchdog” Media Matters published a hit piece against the platform last month claiming that X was placing ads for major corporations alongside Nazi-related content. It was later revealed that Media Matters had deliberately curated its X feed to find rare instances of ads being placed next to the unsavoury content, while portraying such scenarios as commonplace for users. In response, Musk filed a “thermonuclear” defamation lawsuit against Media Matters, arguing the company had acted deceptively in order to “drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp”. Claims that X represents a particular haven for antisemitism have been undermined by a recent survey showing that both TikTok and Instagram are much more likely to influence users towards antisemitic views. Spending 30 minutes a day on TikTok increases the chances somebody holds antisemitic or anti-Israel views by 17 percent, in comparison with 6 percent for Instagram and 2 percent for X, according to the survey’s findings. A new survey suggests TikTok is a meaningful driver of a surge in antisemitism. #TikToxicSpending at least 30 minutes a day on TikTok increases the chances a respondent holds antisemitic or anti-Israel views by 17% (compared with 6% for Instagram and 2% for X). pic.twitter.com/5rTbuoqKlR— Anthony Goldbloom (@antgoldbloom) November 30, 2023 Indeed, the recent focus on antisemitic content on X provides more pretext than context for the establishment’s fiery wrath against Elon Musk.    

Kurt Mahlburg

Kurt Mahlburg

December 08, 2023

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10 Rillington Place and the pro-death campaign

In 1950, Timothy Evans was hanged for the murder of his wife Beryl and baby daughter Geraldine. However, it later emerged that the real murderer was their landlord, John (‘Reg’) Christie, who lived at the same property in west London — 10 Rillington Place, the name of a chilling 1971 film on the subject. The Evans/Christie case fuelled the campaign to abolish hanging, but although a law to abolish hanging, had it been already in force, would have saved Evans, it would also have meant that serial killer Christie, convicted of six murders, would have been spared the death penalty. Capital punishment would be partly abolished in 1965 (1973 in Northern Ireland) and finally abolished for treason in 1998; in 2004, the 13th Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights became binding on the UK, prohibiting its restoration as long as we remain a party to the convention — regardless of Brexit. Many voters still favour the reinstatement of capital punishment, but are largely ignored, and when Tory party deputy chairman Lee Anderson made such a call, it was greeted with horror by the opinion-forming classes. Killing unborn babies In 1967, under Roy Jenkins, the same ‘reforming’ Labour Home Secretary who presided over the abolition of the death penalty, capital punishment was introduced for innocent unborn babies, via David Steel’s Abortion Act. This was a tragic irony, and in a little-noticed detail of the Evans/Christie case, buried along with Beryl Evans and baby Geraldine were the remains of a 16-week unborn baby boy. In addition to killing these, as well as his own wife, Christie also murdered three prostitutes – the very group of women that tended to seek backstreet abortions in those days. They were less likely to be ‘poor, overworked wives’, and even less likely that the backstreet abortionists were ‘compassionate females’ simply ‘doing a favour’ for their distraught neighbours, as portrayed in the 2004 film Vera Drake — highly praised and seen as a warning against the restriction of abortion. Often, it was callous men like Christie; he pretended to be proficient in this deadly trade in order to lure prostitutes to their deaths. He had carried out an abortion on Evans’s wife before strangling her and baby Geraldine, and of the three prostitutes he murdered, one was six months pregnant. According to the 1999 official (HMSO) report 10 Rillington Place, a perished Higginson’s syringe was found at the property when police searched it for abortion equipment, and witnesses said Christie’s wife had claimed that Evans or his wife Beryl had asked Christie to do an abortion; Beryl was found to be 16 weeks pregnant. After murdering his wife, Christie offered his services as an abortionist to strangers and acquaintances alike, and as to motivation, it was likely that after using abortion as a lure for prostitutes, Christie strangled them for sexual gratification, as revealed by forensic examination of the bodies. All this might seem like a sad footnote to history, but it has been thrown into stark relief by the modern mania for knocking down all laws against abortion. As reported by pro-life organisation SPUC, on 28 November, amendments that would remove abortion from the criminal law were tabled to the Government’s Criminal Justice Bill; during the Bill’s second reading, Labour MPs Dame Diana Johnson and Stella Creasy, both abortion advocates, stated they would try to use the Bill to liberalise abortion law. Dame Diana’s amendment (‘New Clause 1’) states: “For the purposes of the law related to abortion, including sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929, no offence is committed by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy.” According to SPUC: “This would mean a woman could carry out her own abortion at any time, for any reason. While the explanatory note claims that the amendment ‘would not change any law regarding the provision of abortion services within a healthcare setting, including but not limited to the time limit’, more than half of abortions are now carried out by a woman in her own home, under the pills by post policy. A woman who took abortion pills at home at any stage of pregnancy, even just before natural birth, and so ended the life of a full-term baby, would not commit any offence.”

Ann Farmer

Ann Farmer

December 07, 2023

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Kissinger turned population control into a Cold War weapon

There are many things to criticize about Henry Kissinger’s career. Leftists point to the bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, American complicity in the coup in Chile that brought down the Communist regime of Salvador Allende, and his interference in Iranian politics. Conservatives, on the other hand, underscore his betrayal of the South Vietnamese and the abandonment of democratic Taiwan. They add that calling Kissinger a scholar statesman, as some do, makes no sense given his decades-long service to Communist China as a paid lobbyist/apologist for the regime. But I would lay an additional charge against the one-time American diplomat. It was Henry Kissinger, as Nixon’s National Security Advisor, who oversaw the production of an infamous memo that turned population control into a weapon in the Cold War. Even today, his argument that America’s national security depends upon waging war on people continues to be used to justify the promotion of abortion, sterilization and contraception around the world. National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), as the memo was called, was more commonly known as “The Kissinger Report” after its author. The 250-page report, a joint effort of the NSA, CIA, State, and Pentagon was kept secret—for good reason—until it was finally declassified in 1989. Believing that people mean power, and worried about the demographic decline of the West, these practitioners of realpolitik unapologetically sought to engineer a fertility decline among more prolific peoples. And they were fully prepared to deceive and strongarm other countries into doing so. The Kissinger Report warned that, “If present fertility rates were to remain constant, the 1974 population of 3.9 billion would increase to 7.8 billion by the year 2000 and rise to a theoretical 103 billion by 2075.” [italics added] Having conjured up this impossible flood of humanity, what consequences did these “secret” agencies foresee for America? The report argued that rapid population growth is a security threat because it would lead to competition for the raw materials needed for the US economy, and provide opportunities for the Soviet Union and China to promote communist revolutions and recruit client states. Thus was population control declared to be a weapon in the Cold War. The immediate result was a huge jump in population control spending by the US and its allies. Dozens of countries around the world were identified as targets, especially those which were considered to be vulnerable to communist insurrection, such as Thailand and the Philippines, and those sitting on top of valuable metals, including the nations comprising the southern tier of Africa. Population control, by preserving our access to strategic raw materials and slowing the spread of communism, would eliminate future threats to US national security. In this way it would preserve America’s global advantage in arms, wealth, and all-around geopolitical muscle.  

Steven Mosher

Steven Mosher

December 07, 2023

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