The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on | September 20, 2022 | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous

Say hello to 51-year-old Missouri resident Jeremy Garnier, who in March 2020 decided it would be a good idea to dress up as comic-book villain The Joker and record a livestream threatening to kill a thousand people. Last week, he was sentenced to 60 days in jail and two years of probation for making terrorist threats. You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that (a) Garnier has a lengthy history of previous crimes (b) which he claims he committed to “in order to support his crack habit.”

Is the world getting crazier, or is it just that now we have social-media that allows people to broadcast their craziness?




 

Category: Crime, Missouri

In The Mailbox: 09.19.22

Posted on | September 19, 2022 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 09.19.22

— compiled by Wombat-socho

If you’re not on Gab and want your daily fix of Tatsuya Ishida goodness, Sinfest is right here.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

Priorities

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Violent Felons Don’t Stop Being Violent Felons
EBL: Why did Martha’s Vineyard kick those illegal Venezuelan migrants out to the mainland?
Twitchy: “If You Are A Republican, You Are A Nazi”, also, CBC – While Ben Shapiro Doesn’t Belong To Any Hate Groups, He’s Radicalizing Young Men
Louder With Crowder: Kanye goes America First, cancels Gap deal over Red China connection, also, School board clears room of minors before reading ‘filthy’ book available in their school
Vox Popoli: Suicide is not Murder, Why Russia Hasn’t Mobilized, They Didn’t Get the Saline, and Third-World USA

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Trans Mega-Ta-Tas In Clown World Canada
American Greatness: Wish You Weren’t Here, Equal Justice, They Said, and It’s Time to Stop the Left’s ‘Fact Check’ Scheme
American Power: [Six] Republicans Won’t Promise to Accept 2022 Results
American Thinker: Biden’s Reichstag Fire, also, The FBI: Disturbing the Peace and Creating Inter-Party War
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Extreme poverty in communist Cuba increased 111% in 2021, While Cubans suffer food shortages, Castro dictatorship holds international gourmet festival, Demonstration at Marlins Baseball Park in Miami today to protest MLB’s discrimination against Cuban players, and The left gives Red China a pass on climate change and global warming
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm for September 16, also, Petition To Remove El Paso Democrat DA Moves Forward
Behind The Black: SpaceX launches 54 Starlink satellites on Falcon 9, Cosmonaut Valeri Polykov, holder of the record’s longest stay in space, passes away, SpaceX fires seven engines on Superheavy prototype #7, and Today’s blacklisted American: Leftist thugs at University of New Mexico threaten conservative speaker and audience with violence
Cafe Hayek: Cato Journal: “Cable Reregulation” (with Bob Ekelund), Challenging John Burtka to a Debate on Trade Policy, and Some Empirical Evidence on Deflation
CDR Salamander: A Mid-September Midrats Melee!, also, If They Name Them “Yamato” and “Musashi” I will Probably Stroke Out
Chicago Boyz: Book Review: Lydia Bailey, by Kenneth Roberts
Da Tech Guy: What Do the People of Martha’s Vineyard and Pontius Pilate Have in Common?, I called it! Navy to rename the USNS Maury, and The Scream TV ad is a chilling warning about crime in Chicago and Illinois–and the danger of the Democrats’ SAFE-T Act
Don Surber: Is CNN making Fox nervous?, Martha’s Vineyard sent illegals to a Superfund site, and  The recession the media ignores
First Street Journal: Child rearing is the parents’ responsibility, not the teachers’, also, Once again, The Philadelphia Inquirer does not cover a story that doesn’t fit Teh Narrative
Gates Of Vienna: Send ’Em Back? The ECHR Says No!, The Mocro Mafia Targets the Crown Princess, and Berlin’s Resident Palestinian Terrorist
The Geller Report: Chicago Bears DENY Mayor Groot’s Proposal To Stay In The City Of Chicago, DeSantis: ‘There Will Be More’ Illegal Migrant Buses, Flights, and McDonald’s CEO Warns Chicago Mayor Lightfoot that Soaring Crime is Leaving its Corporate Staff Too Terrified to Return to HQ
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, Terzan 4, and I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
Hollywood In Toto: I Came By Isn’t What You Expect, Dear Hollywood: Be More Like Trace Adkins, and New Karate Kid Sequel Shows Folly of Modern Hollywood Groupthink
The Lid: Newsom Signed 40 New Green Bills in Most Aggressive Climate Hypothesis Push
Legal Insurrection: Albany DA Investigating Alleged Duplicate Signatures on NY GOP Gubernatorial Nominee Lee Zeldin’s Petitions, Gibson’s Bakery Thanks Legal Insurrection And Its Readers, Debunked: Histrionic ‘Kidnapping’ Claim Against DeSantis, Abbott, and Congressional Commission to West Point: Cancel Robert E. Lee
Nebraska Energy Observer: Change is good – Girl talk, also, “It was very easy to die that day,”
Outkick: Clay Travis: ‘Duke Volleyball Player Is A Fraud’, Paige Spiranac Threw Out The First Pitch In Milwaukee, Absolutely Nobody Showed Up To Watch UCLA Football After All-Time Low Attendance Record, and Eli Manning Goes Undercover As Penn State Football Walk-On Quarterback, Hilarity Ensues
Power Line: A Huge Win for Free Speech, When the axis tilts, and Jan Karski’s message
Shark Tank: Charlie Crist’s Campaign Is Loaded With Special Interest Money
Shot In The Dark: Government Of, For, & By Merriam Park NIMBYs, also, The Shorter MNDFL
This Ain’t Hell: Army reports drops in test scores, qualifications, Vindman speaks: And it’s all Trump’s fault, and Influencer received payment offer to spread J6 and Anti MAGA propaganda
Transterrestrial Musings: On Starship Prices, History Taught Backwards, and Continuing Progress
Victory Girls: Ukraine Weapons Black Hole Just Grew, also, The Left’s Human Trafficking Histrionics
Volokh Conspiracy: Why the Florida and Texas Social Media Laws Violate the Takings Clause
Watts Up With That: Wildfires are the “Old Normal” for the Pacific Northwest, Denying Access to Energy: The New Normal?, and Checkbook Journalism: Bought & Paid for Climate ‘News’: NPR Announces Facebook’s Zuckerberg & Rockefeller Foundation Will Be funding NPR’s ‘Climate Desk’
Weasel Zippers: Biden Reportedly Pressuring FBI To Fabricate “Extremist” And “White Supremacist” Cases, Here’s The 82 Democrats Who Denied The 2016 Election, Kamala Harris Fumes Over Illegal Immigrants Sent To Her DC Residence, and 60 Minutes Interview: Biden Admits His Student Loan Bailout Is Illegal
The Federalist: Florida Education Consultants Teach Teens The United States Is Systemically Racist, Top Foreign Funder Of Transnational Terrorism Funds Think Tank That Staffs Democrat Presidential Administrations, If Martha’s Vineyard Tried To Prove It Cares About Immigrants, It Failed Miserably, and Democrats Are Astroturfing Climate Alarmism Among Latinos As Families Suffer From Record Inflation
Mark Steyn: Baby Talk, Do You Take This Woman? Myrna Loy and Third Finger, Left Hand, and We Gather Now to Keep Her Memory Green

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Category: Linkagery

Crazy Weekend in the NFL

Posted on | September 19, 2022 | Comments Off on Crazy Weekend in the NFL

All manner of insanity broke out in Sunday’s NFL games. In a comeback victory over the Las Vegas Raider, Kyler Murray of the Arizona Cardinals scored a two-point conversion in which he ran 84 total yards.

The Raiders, who made it to the playoffs last season and added former New England offensive coordinator Josh McDaniel as their head coach, are now 0-2, last place in the AFC West. Meanwhile, in the AFC East, the Miami Dolphins are 2-0 after a ccomeback victory over the Baltimore Ravens. The Dolphins trailed 35-14 going into the fourth quarter, but then scored four touchdowns to win 42-38 as Miami QB Tua Tagovailoa finished 36-for-50 for 469 yards and six touchdowns, including the go-ahead score to former Alabama teammate Jaylen Waddle.

It was a good weekend for the ’Bama boys, as Tua’s former backup, a guy named Mac Jones — maybe you’ve heard of him — was good enough to win a road game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, 17-14, thanks in part to this amazing touchdown catch by wide receiver Nelson Agholor.

That 44-yarder shows the increased confidence of Mac Jones to throw deep, into coverage, counting on his receiver to make the contested catch. It’s more risky than the kind of “dink-and-dunk” check-down stuff that Jones did so effectively last year, but if he is ever going to become a great quarterback, he’s going to have to take some chances like that. Sunday was not a great performance by Mac — there were plenty of errors, including an interception made by former ’Bama teammate Minkah Fitzpatrick, where Mac tried for the deep post route it would have been better to hit the crossing route underneath — but it was good enough. There were some encouraging signs of improvement by the offensive line, and the Patriots defense looked solid. We’ll see what happens next week when New England hosts the Ravens. Meanwhile . . .

The usually pathetic New York Jets made an amazing last-minute comeback to defeat the still-pathetic Cleveland Browns 31-30. In San Francisco, the Niners lost their starting quarterback, Trey Lance, to a season-ending ankle injury in the first quarter, but then brought veteran Jimmy Garoppoolo off the bench to beat the Seahawks 27-7.

For Monday night, the NFL will try a doubleheader this week, with the Tennessee Titans taking on the Buffalo Bills in the early game, then the Minnesota Vikings playing the Philadelphia Eagles in the late game. Of course, I’ll be cheering for the Titans, not just because they’ve got Alabama alum Derrick Henry at running back, but also because as a Patriots fan, I need the Bills to lose. In the late game, let’s hope Philly’s Jalen Hurts makes it 3-0 weekend for ’Bama QBs.




 

Category: Football

Rule 5 Sunday: No Shipgirl Can Fight The Future

Posted on | September 19, 2022 | Comments Off on Rule 5 Sunday: No Shipgirl Can Fight The Future

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Doomed beauty

Since we had her big sister last week and joked about her in the comments, this week let’s gaze upon the busty, floofy nine-tailed wonder of IJN Shinano from Azur Lane. I usually skip the storyline, because the way Yostar does it is a massive pain in the butt, but in this case it was a mistake, because Shinano spends her entire introductory story trying to avoid her fate, which as we know from The X-Files, cannot be done. Oh, hey, Archerfish, what’s up?
Silicon Valley delenda est.

NINETY MILES FROM TYRANNY: Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1841, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five Tyranny Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EVIL BLOGGERLADY: MAGA Merrick “Beria: Garland, The Bangles, Ukrainian Warrior Women, King Charles & His Consort, Natalie Imbruglia, and The Serpent Queen. 

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Echoes of Michelle Monaghan, Fish Pic Friday – Cara Frankovich, Flathead Catfish in the Susquehanna, Thursday Tanlines, The Wednesday Wetness, Tattoo Tuesday, Gone Fishin’, The Monday Morning Stimulus and Palm Sunday

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

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Category: Rule 5

The Myth of ‘Good’ Public Schools

Posted on | September 18, 2022 | Comments Off on The Myth of ‘Good’ Public Schools

Most people know, although they are reluctant to acknowledge, the meaning of “good schools.” You don’t have to be Ibram X. Kendi to see the systemic racism embedded in that common bit of code-speak. When people are looking to buy a house, they’ll pay a premium for a “good school district,” by which they mean a majority-white district.

What has always struck me about this, as a longtime critic of our education system, is how little attention such parents pay to the curriculum. What upscale suburban parents seems to care about most is the relative prestige of their child’s school — is this the fashionable district? do a high percentage of students go onto college? are the SAT scores high? — and never mind what is actually being taught.

The whole question of what constitutes a good education is ignored, while parents are distracted by issues of reputation. And that lazy way of thinking was commonplace up until the moment, just recently, when parents got wise to the craziness that has taken hold in the classroom:

Administrators at Central Bucks West High School have introduced a new “Gender Identification Procedure” that many teachers say is discriminatory against LGBTQ students.
Teachers say they were told to not use a student’s preferred name or pronoun if it does not match with the information in the school’s database. They say they were told to inform school counselors about any student who requests a different name or pronoun. School counselors would then arrange a conversation with the student’s parents or guardians so they could approve their student’s name and/or pronoun change.
Administrators introduced the procedure at a faculty meeting six days into the school year; teachers said administrators cited protecting parents’ rights as the reason. Four teachers told WHYY News about the meeting and the unprecedented pushback from educators. . . .

Dana Pico at First Street Journal called attention to this controversy in a “good” suburban school district. Bucks County is 82% white, wedged between Philadelphia to the south and Trenton, N.J., on the other side of the Delaware River. Median home value is around $340,000. Among the nearly 1,500 students enrolled at Central Bucks West High School in Doylestown, there are fewer than a dozen black kids.

Parents thought they had purchased safety for their children, when they bought homes in this prosperous Philadelphia suburb, never imagining this newfangled menace of “gender theory.” And as we read through this story from WHYY-TV, we get a sense of who’s running the local schools:

“A lot of us are distraught,” said Becky Cartee-Haring, who has taught English at Central Bucks West for 16 years.
“I physically felt sick in that meeting, listening to an administrator basically argue that we were going to protect ourselves by outting children … it’s heart wrenching … It’s just cruel.”
Teachers said administrators told them they have to follow parents’ or guardians’ wishes if they differ from a student’s.
“What the children wanted was completely irrelevant,” said David Klein, who has been teaching social studies at Central Bucks West for 26 years.
Klein said he’s not going to follow the new procedure.
“There’s no way I’m hurting a kid. Hell no. I cannot be complicit in harming children,” Klein said, raising his voice. “And I said this in the meeting … this is the most at-risk marginalized group of students, they need our support more than anyone else. No! Kid says, ‘Call me Tony,’ I’m calling them Tony!”
Klein and other teachers are unwilling to “deadname” a student in front of their peers, parents, or other school staff.

Notice that both of these teachers, who profess themselves “distraught” by a policy they regard as “cruel” to “marginalized” students, have been employed a long time by Bucks County schools. We may be certain that, when Becky Cartee-Haring was hired in 2006, there were no controversies about pronouns and “gender identity” in Bucks County schools. We know this because the sudden vogue of youth transgenderism didn’t begin until about 2014, and the acceleration of this trend has been driven mainly by online social media. Yet here are teachers adamantly defending beliefs that didn’t even exist when the students at Central Bucks West High School started first grade.

More from the WHYY-TV story:

Klein said even if he faces a parent who does not want their child to be called a name that the child prefers, he will continue to prioritize the student.
“My job is to educate your kids, to prepare them for the future, to make them feel safe, period. That’s my calling. Pardon me,” Klein said, choking up. “I’m calling you Tony because you need to feel safe in my classroom. How else are you going to learn? And if they want to fire me, that’s their business.”
Cartee-Haring and education experts said students learn better when teachers show respect for who they are.
“There are very few hills that teachers are going to die on,” Cartee-Haring said. “But in this case, most of the people I talked to said, ‘I’m willing to go in the line of fire, if I have to sit in a meeting with an angry parent, I’m going to do that.’”

See this? The teachers are experts, whereas mere parents . . . Well, your opinion about your child’s education is irrelevant. And if your daughter decides she’s “Tony” because of something she saw on TikTok or Tumblr last week, these teachers in Bucks County will “respect” that.

All of this is happening, you see, in one of the most desirable public-school districts in America, a place where people move and buy high-priced homes just so their kids can go to these “good” schools.

But there are no good public schools in America anymore. The system is corrupt and the entire edifice is rotten to the core. I figured that out sometime around 1996. Some of you people are just now catching on.




 

Category: Education, Pennsylvania

FMJRA 2.0: Call Of The West

Posted on | September 18, 2022 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Call Of The West

— compiled by Wombat-socho

As I said last week that I would, I let the robot make the calls this week, and the robot did about as well as I would have, taking one from the Reds and another from the Red Sox. So the Senators were 2-4 this week, but I felt better about it since I didn’t have to actually sit through the games.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

Tatsuya Ishida on Gab. Click to embiggen. 

Rule 5 Sunday: IJN Musashi
Animal Magnetism
The DaleyGator
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
EBL
A View From The Beach

In The Mailbox: 09.13.22
Okrahead
EBL
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive

About the ‘Rings of Power’
The DaleyGator
EBL

Ukraine Update: Smashing Success?
Vulture Of Critique
The Political Hat
EBL
357 Magnum

FMJRA 2.0: Let The Robot Do The Suffering
EBL
A View From The Beach

‘Fake News’ Media: Lying by Omission
The DaleyGator
Living In Anglo-America
EBL
357 Magnum

‘That Wretched Woman’
The DaleyGator
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 09.12.22
EBL
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive

Death by ‘Analytics’
The DaleyGator
EBL

Ukraine Offensive Halts at Oskil River?
EBL

As the Nation Stumbles Toward Catastrophe, FBI Raids ‘My Pillow’ Dude
The DaleyGator
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 09.14.22
EBL
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive

Pro-Criminal Fetterman Puts Convicted Killers on His Senate Campaign Payroll
Okrahead
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 09.15.22
EBL
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive

Las Vegas: Criminal Starts Gunfight; Wounded Female Officer Finishes It
EBL
357 Magnum

Sometimes, It’s Just Too Easy
The DaleyGator
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 09.16.22
EBL
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive

Top linkers for the week ending September 16:

  1.  EBL (17)
  2.  357 Magnum (12)
  3.  The DaleyGator (8)
  4.  A View From The Beach (7)
  5.  Proof Positive (6)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Category: FMJRA Award

The Mayor of CrazyTown, U.S.A.

Posted on | September 17, 2022 | Comments Off on The Mayor of CrazyTown, U.S.A.

Politico has a lengthy feature about the political turmoil in “America’s Blackest City.” South Fulton didn’t even exist as a municipality until 2016 when the unincorporated area south of Atlanta in Fulton County decided that it should become its own city. From the beginning, South Fulton had problems, due to its lack of a commercial tax base, but then last year, the election for mayor was won by khalid kamau — no capital letters, because capitalization is racist or something — who is an avowed socialist whose express goal is to turn South Fulton into a “real-life Wakanda.”

Everybody else on the city council in “America’s Blackest City” has denounced the mayor, and Politico does readers the excellent service of quoting verbatim a recent speech by the mayor:

Flanked by an ally in a shirt that blared “Black on Purpose” and a street activist wearing pink hair, pink tights and black tactical gear, kamau then delivered an unprecedented broadside against no small share of the government of this city he was elected to lead.
“I am here today because sometimes you gotta fight your people to fight for your people. Seven months ago, I was elected the city of South Fulton’s second mayor. I ran on a platform here in the Blackest city in America that we should be Black on purpose, period. Being Black on purpose isn’t just about policymaking. It is about rethinking how we do government for the benefit of the people, with a platform and an agenda written not by me, but by all of you. We won an election decisively, with 60 percent of the vote, in every district of this city, across every demographic. Some folks, some folks say I’m a young mayor — I’m 45, but I’ll take it — and in doing so, they have attributed my difficulties with this council to a lack of maturity. But it’s a lie. And even more problematic, it’s an inconvenient excuse to avoid how dysfunctional this city council has been.” . . .
“Being Black on purpose is acknowledging that we have been conditioned as a people to be crabs in a barrel. That’s what you see happening. That’s the behavior you see happening on council. It’s a crabs-in-a-barrel mentality. But what we should be asking is: Who put us in this barrel? A crab’s natural habitat is the ocean. When you see me getting busy, when you see me swinging in this barrel, I’m not pushing against the other crabs. I’m pushing against the barrel to knock it over and get us back into the ocean,” he said. “I’m gonna close by saying this. I want to apologize in advance to the citizens of the city of South Fulton for the months of negative press coverage that are sure to follow this conference. I promise I would not take such drastic measures if I thought there were any other way to move forward. But I also promise you this: A more noble city lies on the other side of these troubled waters. Do not fall victim to the post-traumatic slave narrative that Black people cannot rightly govern.”

Ah, it’s “the post-traumatic slave narrative,” you see.

Quoting the mayor at such length serves to confirm one basic fact: He’s deranged, demented, daft, wacky, cracked, bonkers, nuttier than squirrel farts, a few fries short of a Happy Meal and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

The fact that he got 60% of the vote in South Fulton — well, I don’t know what that says about “the post-traumatic slave narrative,” but it doesn’t bode well for the community’s future prospects. In that respect, South Fulton is like many other places (e.g., Chicago) that have elected mayors who are not quite so blatantly crazy as Mayor Lower-Case Letters, but still crazy enough to utterly wreck everything. When people elect a lunatic like khalid kamau, they are rendering a verdict on themselves, because what kind of people would choose to be governed by such a kook?

By the way, the mayor has kept his campaign promise to move into the Camelot Condominiums off Old National Highway, where he pays $800 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. A local TV station speaks of “the dilapidated Camelot Condominiums [which] have become notorious as one of metro Atlanta’s most run-down housing units,” but guess what? About 50 years ago — in the late 1960s and early 1970s — this was an apartment complex that was actually a fashionable place to live, with lots of stewardesses who worked out of nearby Hartsfield Airport and other hip young “swingers.” Gosh, I wonder what changed . . .




 

Category: Georgia

A Simple Idea: ‘Four or More’

Posted on | September 17, 2022 | Comments Off on A Simple Idea: ‘Four or More’

Yesterday, Ace of Spades jabbed Jonathan V. Last as one of “True Conservatives Conserving Conservatism at The Bulwark” — a jab richly deserved, but it filled me with a sense of sadness, because Last used to be so good, before he fell victim to Trump Derangement Syndrome.

What To Expect When No One’s Expecting was, and still is, a book well worth reading. To quote the dust-jacket summary:

For years, we have been warned about the looming danger of overpopulation: people jostling for space on a planet that’s busting at the seams and running out of oil and food and land and everything else.
It’s all bunk. The “population bomb” never exploded. Instead, statistics from around the world make clear that since the 1970s, we’ve been facing exactly the opposite problem: people are having too few babies. Population growth has been slowing for two generations. The world’s population will peak, and then begin shrinking, within the next fifty years. In some countries, it’s already started. . . .
What to Expect When No One’s Expecting explains why the population implosion happened and how it is remaking culture, the economy, and politics both at home and around the world.
Because if America wants to continue to lead the world, we need to have more babies.

Of course, I didn’t need any lectures on that topic, being a father of six, but still this was an important message, and Last marshaled an array of arguments on behalf of this pro-natalist message. What To Expect When No One’s Expecting followed in the footsteps of the late Ben Wattenberg’s 1987 book The Birth Dearth, which was the first examination of the modern trend of demographic decline in industrial societies. Wattenberg later followed that up with Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future (2004).

As should be obvious, these warnings have been largely ignored. There has been no new “Baby Boom” in response to the concerns raised by Last’s book, or Watterberg’s books, and the question is, why?

Permit me to share the insight of personal experience: People’s behaviors are limited by their imagination. That is to say, people generally don’t attempt things they regard as impossible and, in the minds of most Americans, having a large family is a financial impossibility. Even if they wished to have lots of kids, they can’t figure out how it could be done, from the perspective of their personal economic situation.

They can’t afford it, they say.

OK, believe what you want to believe, but how is it that I could afford it, if you can’t? Do you suppose I’m some kind of financial genius? An heir to the Rockefeller fortune? No, of course, they realize that my wife and I don’t have some hidden pile of cash that has enabled us to raise all these kids; we were just willing to make sacrifices that most people aren’t willing to make. And that knowledge makes them embarrassed.

This embarrassment expresses itself as defensiveness, especially among conservative Christians who understand that they are not exactly practicing what they preach, as regards “family values.” Sure, maybe it’s silly to think that every faithful Christian couple would strive to spawn a Duggar-sized brood, but insofar as we are pro-life, isn’t it logical that we would be more welcoming to offspring as blessings from God?

“See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil. . . . I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
— Deuteronomy 30:15, 19 (KJV)

“Therefore choose life” — this quote from Deuteronomy became a slogan for the pro-life movement, but how many pro-life conservatives have tried to live out the meaning of that phrase? Most people wouldn’t judge me to be a particularly fine example of Christian virtue, but despite my failings, at least I got this part right. And along the way, I picked up a few helpful pieces of advice. When our oldest was just a little baby, and my Dad came to visit us for the first time after she’d been born, we were living in a roach-infested $250-a-month rental home in Gordon County, Georgia. When I complained about our financial situation, my Dad laughed and said, “Son, if you wait to have kids until you can afford to have kids, you’ll never have kids.” Truer words were never spoken.

Ten years later, after we’d moved to the D.C. area so I could work at The Washington Times, our family had grown to four kids, and in July 1999, I saw this item on a pro-life website:

Where are the children?
In reacting to a report released today by the statistics office of the European Union, STOPP International director Jim Sedlak said, “This report points out what we have been yelling from the rooftops for some time now — the world needs larger families.”
The Eurostat report warns that European Union countries can expect health and pension costs to soar over the next 50 years as the number of people over retirement age rises to about one third of the total population. “The main cause of the aging,” according to the report, “is the decline in births over the last two to three decades.”
“The ‘success’ of the population controllers in Europe is now taking its toll,” said Sedlak. “The average number of babies per woman has fallen from 1.95 to 1.65, and there is no end in sight.”
“In order to turn things around, four things are necessary,” Sedlak said. “First, the world has to understand that there is not an overpopulation problem, but a problem of too few children. Second, everyone in our society must accept large families and stop using peer pressure to convince people not to have more children. Third, governments and rich philanthropists must stop giving money to population control programs. Finally, young people getting married have to be thinking of having four or more children.”
“We have one generation to turn things around,” Sedlak said. “After that, it may be too late.”

The author of that short article, Jim Sedlak, was a remarkable individual. A research physicist, Sedlak worked for IBM for 30 years before retiring in 1993, at age 50, “to devote a full-time effort to the pro-life cause.” A devout Catholic, Sedlak was particularly a critic of classroom “sex education,” and founded Stop Planned Parenthood (STOPP), which eventually became part of the American Life League, of which Sedlak became Executive Director. He died earlier this year, but I had the chance to talk to him a few times over the years, and he was full of wisdom about our culture, including this simple idea: “Four or more.”

Sedlak had studied the demographics of the Baby Boom, and understood this: It was largely a Catholic phenomenon. Most people don’t realize this, because the way we think about population trends usually focuses on medians and averages, without much thought to the human variables behind such statistics. The Baby Boom peaked in 1957, when the U.S. Total Fertility Rate (TFR) reached 3.77 average lifetime births per woman. If you think hard about that number, you realize that it means the average American woman in 1957 was three times more likely to have four children as to have merely three. To reach such an astonishing figure, however, you must first account for those women who will ultimately be childless, and whose contribution to the total is zero. Such a subtraction means that the average mother (as opposed to the average woman) was even more likely to have at least four children. And, as this 3.77 TFR number was an average, it means that for every woman who had only two children in 1957, there was another woman who had five or six. For every “only child” born in 1957, there was another child born into a family with six or seven siblings. Large families were what really made the “Baby Boom” happen and, among these super-sized families, Catholics were a disproportionately large share. The Catholic Church’s doctrine against artificial contraceptives was taken seriously back then, and the decline of that faithfulness is the real cultural explanation of the changing demographic trend over the past 60 years.

Of course, I’m Protestant, but the issue with Catholics and their declining fertility rate is illustrative of the overall trend. While different Protestant denominations have different approaches to these questions, in general, more conservative Protestants are inclined toward the “pro-life”/“pro-family” beliefs so elaborately spelled out in the various encyclicals (e.g., Humanae Vitae) that codify Catholic doctrine on this subject.

The salt has “lost its savour” would be the best description of what’s happened, in terms of Christian family practice in recent decades. One might imagine that self-identified Catholics would still have substantially higher fertility rates than the average American, but they don’t — they have been “conformed to this world,” and the same is true of evangelical Christians. The commandment to “be ye separate” — to have no fellowship with unrighteousness — seems to have been forgotten, so that many Christians are now just following the crowd, and making the same lifestyle choices as the unchurched. This is true about many things, including divorce, and few church spokesmen seem willing to speak out against this trend. Church leadership is not leading.

People make trends, not the other way around. The choices you make, as an individual, have an influence far beyond your own awareness, and what you practice will ultimately have more influence than what you preach, if you don’t live up to own professed beliefs.

Our ability, as individuals, to influence something so large as the national birth rate may seem infinitesimally small, and Jonathan V. Last’s book apparently failed to make a dent in the trend. But our actions ultimately make more difference than any author’s words, and you don’t need a whole book to explain it. “Four or more” — a very simple idea.

Now, to find a cure for Trump Derangement Syndrome . . .




 

Category: Contraceptive Culture, Religion
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