The Other McCain

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

Motherhood (and the Lack Thereof)

Posted on | May 9, 2021 | Comments Off on Motherhood (and the Lack Thereof)

One of the phrases I hate is “working mothers,” which is often deployed in such a way as to stigmatize stay-at-home mothers. Ever since the rise of the feminist movement in the late 1960s, liberals have promoted the idea that women must have careers — not just jobs, but professional careers — in order to deserve admiration or praise. In order to have a career, it follows logically, women must go to college and ever since the late 1970s, women have been a majority of college students and are now about 56% of undergraduate enrollment. The result has been a disaster in demographic terms because, as the old saying goes, “Fertility delayed is fertility denied.” That is to say, from the day a girl reaches menarche, she has a fixed number of potential reproductive opportunities — in a healthy female, 12 cycles a year for about 25 years from ages 15 to 40, or roughly 300 lifetime chances to become pregnant. If she does not become a mother as a teenager (and middle-class America adamantly believes that teenage motherhood is the worst of all possible fates), this means her reproductive opportunities are reduced to about 240 — 12 menstrual cycles per year for about 20 years. Thus, every year that she delays motherhood represents a reduction in her total fertility.

Any adult attempting to explain these simple facts of life to young women is apt to meet with a hostile response, attacked as an enemy of “equality” and “women’s rights,” but the alternative — what has actually been happening since the 1970s — is that many young women keep hitting the snooze on the alarm on their biological clocks, so that they unexpectedly arrive in their 30s with the sudden realization that their opportunities for motherhood are now drastically reduced. If a woman is childless at 30, she has already passed by near two-thirds of her biological opportunities for pregnancy, and other considerations (e.g., declining fecundity) have the effect of further reducing the likelihood that she will ever give birth. The majority of all mothers give birth to their first child before age 30, so the woman who postpones childbearing past that age is on the losing side of a probability curve in terms of her chances of becoming a mother.

The decisions of millions of young women add up to demographic trends and, until rather recently — 30 or 40 years ago — the problem of declining fertility was unimaginable in America. The post-WWII “Baby Boom” had been so extraordinary, in terms of shaping our society, that many Americans didn’t even realize that it ended in the mid-1960s. Our nation was embroiled in struggles over civil rights and the Vietnam War, and issues related to demographic trends got little attention. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that Ben Wattenberg began studying census data and realized we had a problem: The Birth Dearth was the title of his 1987 book on the subject, but it made little impact on the national psyche. Some 35 years later, the consequences of ignoring Wattenberg’s early alarm about demographic trends are now apparent:

The decision to have a baby in the middle of a pandemic isn’t an easy one. I know because we struggled with making it (ultimately, we decided to go for it, though not without real serious conversations with medical professionals and a great deal of soul-searching). It’s unsurprising that amid all of the uncertainty, millions of American women decided to go another route and forgo pregnancy and birth.
[Wednesday], the CDC announced the worst fertility news we’ve ever seen in this country: We’ve hit a record low birth rate in the United States (1.64 babies per American woman) and we’re well below the necessary replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman.
While this latest, drastic drop is certainly due to the medical and financial insecurity that a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic brings, unfortunately, the fact that our birth rate has plummeted cannot just be part of the COVID-19 story. Indeed, it’s part of a larger trend of fewer American women not only having babies, but getting married at all.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal about the announcement Janet Adamy explained, “Demographers say the data suggests that more fundamental social and economic shifts are driving down fertility. Births peaked in 2007 before plunging during the recession that began that year. Although fertility usually rebounds alongside an improving economy, U.S. births fell in all but one year as the economy grew from 2009 until early 2020.”
“It’s not just Covid,” a demographer at the University of New Hampshire told the Journal. “I’ve been waiting for years to see a big jump in fertility to women in their 30s and it hasn’t happened.”
Notably, half of American states saw more deaths than births in 2020. That statistic can of course be explained at least in part by an increased death rate — thanks (and no thanks) to COVID-19 deaths and the impacts that came with social isolation and a strained health care system.
But it’s illustrative of the larger picture of what this reduced birth rate means for the future of our society: It’s a dying one. . . .

Read the whole thing. (Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

Nothing like this has ever happened before in human history, and so no one knows how to reverse such a trend. Wattenberg’s thought was that, with proper encouragement, some zeroes (i.e., childless women) could be converted to ones, some ones could be converted to twos, and so forth. It would not really take much, in per-capita terms, to raise the total fertility rate by 0.5 babies per woman. But a generation of decadent, selfish hedonists is not even willing to think about long-term social consequences of their short-term personal choices, and so it is likely that America will continue slowly slouching toward extinction.

Not me and mine, of course. I’m a father of six, and already a grandfather of five, with my youngest three children — ages 22, 20 and 18 — yet to begin their own procreative careers. This is all part of the McCain “Victory Through Breeding” program for global domination. If y’all ain’t having kids, tough luck. The future belongs to the fertile.




 

Category: Contraceptive Culture

FMJRA 2.0: The Thrill Of It All

Posted on | May 9, 2021 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: The Thrill Of It All

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Rule 5 Sunday: Alegrachan
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
EBL
Proof Positive
A View From The Beach

Good-Bye, California
EBL
A View From The Beach

Tucker Carlson Douses Frank Luntz in Gasoline and Lights Him on Fire
EBL
357 Magnum

Today’s (Feeble) Ray Of Hope
EBL
357 Magnum

FMJRA 2.0: Island
EBL
A View From The Beach

Update: Rebekah Jones ‘Could Not Meet Required Burden of Proof,’ Judge Rules
Dark Brightness
EBL

In The Mailbox: 05.03.21
EBL
Proof Positive
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 05.04.21
EBL
Proof Positive
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 05.05.21
EBL
Proof Positive
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum

Is Black-on-Black Crime a ‘Myth’?
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 05.06.21
EBL
Proof Positive
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum

Crazy People Are Dangerous: Florida Man Steals Two Cop Cars — ‘Illuminati, Help!’
EBL
Proof Positive
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 05.07.21
EBL
357 Magnum

Top linkers for the week ending May 7:

  1.  EBL (13)
  2.  357 Magnum (9)
  3.  A View From The Beach (7)
  4.  Proof Positive (6)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Kindle Unlimited Membership Plans
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Join Amazon Prime Music – 30-day Free Trial




Category: FMJRA Award

Hunter Biden’s Beijing Honey Trap

Posted on | May 9, 2021 | Comments Off on Hunter Biden’s Beijing Honey Trap

Remember when the media spent three years chasing the “Russian collusion” narrative and then Democrats impeached President Trump because of what he said in a phone call with the president of Ukraine? If they were really serious about foreign interference in American politics, the media would be leading every broadcast with this story:

Hunter Biden’s emails reveal his close relationship with the Chinese-American secretary who worked for him when he went into business with the man he called the ‘spy chief of China.’
The mysterious young assistant wrote the president’s son flirty messages, sent him opposition research for Joe’s White House run and encouraged him to draw funds from the company’s accounts when the joint venture collapsed and even ended up with Hunter’s military dog tags.
In 2017 Hunter went into business with Patrick Ho, secretary general of Chinese oil giant CEFC.
Hunter described Ho in a call recording on his abandoned laptop as the ‘spy chief of China’, and the Chinese businessman was later surveilled by US law enforcement as a foreign intelligence threat before he was convicted of bribery in 2018.
After launching his multi-million-dollar joint venture with CEFC, Hunter was assigned a 29-year-old Chinese-American assistant, JiaQi Bao, who quickly struck up a close and intriguing relationship with her Biden boss.
At first, emails show the New York-based Bao diligently scheduled flights, hotels and even doctor’s appointments for the president’s son.
But mysteriously, the young assistant also sent him opposition research to help Joe Biden’s 2020 election bid, urged him to take cash from the joint venture’s accounts as the business collapsed and wrote flirty and personal messages and even ended up with Hunter’s military dog tags in her New York apartment — the same tags he can be seen wearing in home-made porn videos he recorded on his laptop.

Read the whole thing, and remember that the contents of Hunter’s laptop were first made public by Rudy Giuliani who — coincidentally, I’m sure — was recently the target of an FBI raid.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, who quips: “Beijing evidently has a whole gang of Fang Fangs to bang Democratic yanks.”)




 

Category: China, Joe Biden, Scandal

Biden’s ‘Diversity’ Administration

Posted on | May 9, 2021 | Comments Off on Biden’s ‘Diversity’ Administration

We all know what “diversity” means, even if we’re not allowed to say it plainly. “Diversity” in hiring or college admissions would not be controversial if it were, as proponents claim, merely about finding qualified women and POC (“people of color”) for prestige positions. Instead, what “diversity” actually means in practice is a secretive system of quotas where women and POC are hired (or admitted to elite schools) without regard to their relative qualifications. “Diversity” means a lowering of standard in the name of “equality,” and anyone who objects is smeared as a racist, sexist, homophobe. Occasionally, however, the problems with the “diversity” regime become so apparent that even well-mannered people can’t help but complain:

President Joe Biden has now taken the push for “diversity” in STEM to a new level. His candidate to head the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the largest funder of the physical sciences in the U.S., is a soil geologist at the University of California, Merced. She has no background in physics, the science of energy, or the energy sector. She has never held a position as a scientific administrator. The typical head of DOE’s Office of Science in the past has had managerial authority in the nation’s major physics labs and has been a physicist himself, Science reports. The new nominee’s only managerial experience consists of serving since 2020 as an interim associate dean of UC Merced’s graduate division.
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is, however, a black female who has won “accolades for her work to promote diversity in science,” as Science puts it. Berhe would be the first black woman to head the $7 billion office, and that is reason enough, according to the diversity mantra, why she should oversee X-ray synchrotrons, the development of nuclear weapons, and ongoing research on nuclear fusion.

(Hat-tip: Vox Day.) Of course, being a black female is not her only qualification for this job. “The main goal of her research is to understand the effect of changing environmental conditions on vital soil processes.” So she’s a member of the “climate” cult, and therefore is perfect for accomplishing Biden’s goal of destroying the U.S. energy industry.




 

Category: Joe Biden

David French Gets Paid to Hate You

Posted on | May 8, 2021 | Comments Off on David French Gets Paid to Hate You

Ace of Spades points out that The Dispatch, “[f]ounded by conservative thought leaders Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French,” has been avidly defending Facebook’s ban of President Trump, without disclosing that The Dispatch “has a financial relationship” with Facebook.

In case you’ve forgotten, The Dispatch was launched in late 2019 and, by early 2020, had acquired something north of $6 million in investment capital from . . . Well, who, exactly? Good luck on finding news reports with that information, but suffice it to say that it came from rich people who hate Trump voters, and according to Ace, this includes Facebook.

What this means is that Facebook and other rich liberals are paying David French to smear you (and the other 70+ million Americans who voted for Donald Trump) as an extremely dangerous “white supremacist” who should be prohibited from using the Internet at all.

These “conservative thought leaders” — the ones who believe that every decent person with “principles” will always vote for Democrats — have not abandoned their lucrative grift now that its original purpose (i.e., electing Joe Biden and a Democratic congressional majority) has been accomplished. Instead, David French and his friends are engaged in a scorched-earth vengeance campaign to destroy the lives of everyone who voted for Trump, because that’s what they’re getting paid to do.

Let us stipulate, arguendo, that David French may be acting in good conscience. That is to say, perhaps French — who is, after all, an alumnus of Harvard Law School — actually does believe you are a dangerously ignorant, hate-filled crypto-Nazi who deserves to be arrested by federal authorities and locked up in Leavenworth. This is what every Harvard alumnus thinks, that the 70+ million Americans who voted for Trump are an existential threat more dangerous than al-Qaeda or ISIS.

The point, however, is that the people who run Facebook think you’re dangerous, and they’re paying David French‘s bills, so when he goes on CNN to join Brian Stelter in warning the CNN audience about how dangerous Trump voters are, it’s because that’s how French earns his pay.




 

Category: Media Bias

Truth or Satire? It’s Getting Harder to Tell

Posted on | May 8, 2021 | Comments Off on Truth or Satire? It’s Getting Harder to Tell

January headline from The Babylon Bee:

CNN Unveils New Format
Where Hosts Just Watch Fox News
And Yell At It

This is awfully close to describing what’s happened to CNN in recent months. Once Biden was inaugurated, the network lost its raison d’être of producing anti-Trump propaganda. Ratings for CNN have evaporated since January and, unable to excite their audience with live performances of journalistic fellatio on Biden (metaphorically speaking), they devote hours every day to critiquing whatever is on Fox News.

 

So the other night, Tucker Carlson raised questions about whether the number of deaths from COVID-19 vaccine are being underreported. He didn’t advance any “conspiracy theory” during that segment, or make claims that could justify Sanjay Gupta’s unhinged reaction:

“What he’s done is he’s basically looked at these open-system adverse reporting systems and said ‘hey look, this suggests that 30 people a day are dying of the vaccine.’ Absolutely not true,” Gupta said on CNN’s New Day.
“The problem is that it continues to stir up this vaccine hesitance or outright vaccine reluctance . . .

Hey, Dr. Gupta: Maybe “vaccine hesitance” doesn’t really matter, but do you really care about Fox News viewers? No, I’m pretty sure you would be very happy if they all died tomorrow. So please spare us your concern-trolling. My thought all along has been that the draconian lockdown regimes and mandatory mask-wearing orders, at best, didn’t do much to stop the pandemic and quite possibly made it worse. Anyone can examine the state-by-state per-capita death rates and see that there is no clear correlation between the severity of the lockdown regimes and the relative safety of populations. Florida is doing just fine, despite all the hate directed at Gov. DeSantis by CNN and other liberal media outlets that prophesied a catastrophe in the Sunshine State.

Nor do I think that Biden’s manic insistence that everybody must get vaccinated before life can return to normal is justified. Those who are most at risk from the virus — the elderly and those with health issues that might make them vulnerable — need to get vaccinated, but healthy young people have a near-zero risk of death from COVID-19 and it’s senseless to require them to get the vaccine. So whatever Tucker Carlson says about vaccine-related deaths probably won’t make much difference one way or another in the overall fight against the pandemic. What it may do (and this is what the Democrats who run CNN are really concerned about) is give some Republican lawmakers encouragement to resist efforts by the Biden administration to make vaccination mandatory.

They’re telegraphing their punches, so to speak. Everybody with two eyes and a brain can see where they’re going with this. At some point — maybe in a few weeks, maybe this fall — the Biden administration will claim that too many people are refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and measures will be introduced to punish the unvaccinated. At that point, questions about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine will be very relevant to arguments by opponents of these punitive measures.

I’m not an “anti-vaxxer,” but I do know people who’ve had adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine — not fatal, but not pleasant. Lots of people say that second Moderna shot is a doozy. Personally, I’ve never gotten the flu vaccine, because I have confidence in my immune system. About once a year, I get the common cold or the flu — it’s hard to tell the difference, and I don’t really care which it is — and I go through a few days of coughing and wheezing before I get better. No big deal. Except for that one time in 2011 when I came down with a serious case of bronchitis that scared me pretty bad, I just refuse to worry about stuff like that. Worrying causes stress, and stress is bad for your immune system.

Speaking of worrying, maybe the folks at CNN should worry less about what Tucker Carlson says and worry more about why their network sucks. “Fake news” is the Enemy of the People, you know.




 

Category: CNN

In The Mailbox: 05.07.21

Posted on | May 7, 2021 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 05.07.21

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Pretty sure the last point is the one that triggers the “greens”.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Another George Soros-Funded Prosecutor
EBL: SCTV – I Was A Teenage Communist
Twitchy: “You Didn’t LISTEN To Us!”
Louder With Crowder: Jobs Report – joe Biden Thinks Paying People To Not Work Isn’t Why They’re Not Working
Vox Popoli: Bill Gates Didn’t Kill Himself, also, The Essence Of SJW
According To Hoyt: Stop Singing Fados, also, Hard Or Soft?

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Agony Of Pizza
American Conservative: Shed No Tears For Liz Cheney
American Greatness: Disabled Farmer Sues Biden Over Race-Based Financial Relief
American Power: Niall Ferguson, Doom [not the videogame]
American Thinker: What’s Behind Vaccine Hysteria?
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Paper Tiger Friday
Babalu Blog: Critically Ill Girl Slows Down Construction Of Havana Luxury Apartheid Hotel
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For May 7
Behind The Black: Today’s Blacklisted American, also, Ingenuity’s Fifth Flight Today
Cafe Hayek: Perpetual Motion Machines Are Impossible, Even In Public Finance
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: A Telling Chart, also, Yup, This Is How Far California Has Fallen
Don Surber: We Should Be In The Golden Age Of Journalism
First Street Journal: Governor Wolf To Lift All COVID Restrictions – Except The One That Bugs People Most
The Geller Report: Biden Admin Considering $1 BILLION In “Humanitarian” Aid To Iran, also, April Job Growth Tanks, Unemployment Rises To 6.1% As Democrats Destroy The Economy
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Some Basic Christian Doctrine
Hollywood In Toto: Tina Fey Does Complete 180 On Woke Comedy
The Lid: Biden’s Amtrak Tale – Lying, Or Dementia?
Legal Insurrection: NY Supreme Court Judge Overturns Syracuse U Fraternity Suspension, also, Oklahoma Governor Stitt Signs Law Banning Critical Race Theory From Public Schools
Nebraska Energy Observer: The Friday Report
Outkick: Albert Pujols Deserves Much, Much Better, also, Bobby Valentine Is Running For Mayor In Connecticut
Power Line: Another Sensible Decision From Ron DeSantis, also, A Redundant Prosecution
Shark Tank: Florida Enviro Groups Begin Attacking Gov. DeSantis
Shot In The Dark: To Journalism, And Beyond! also, Duty
The Political Hat: Firing Line Friday – Resolved, The Environmentalists Are Going Too Far Too Fast
This Ain’t Hell: Reporter Claims Her Job Requires A Bulletproof Vest, also, Army Authorizes Ponytails
Transterrestrial Musings: Starship History, also, A New Commune In Colorado
Victory Girls: Biden’s Call for National Prayer Day Omits God
Volokh Conspiracy: Baltimore Prosecutor Asks FCC To Investigate TV Station For Criticizing Her
Weasel Zippers: Biden – Jobs Report Is Great, Country Is Great, No Questions! also, Jobs Numbers So Disappointing CNBC Can’t Believe Them
The Federalist: Jenner’s Candidacy Reveals The Truly Tolerant Political Party Isn’t The Democrats, also, April Jobs Numbers Are So Bad CNBC Thought It Was A Typo
Mark Steyn: Tal Bachman – We Have Met The Enemy, Part II, also, Hearing The Music

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

Crazy People Are Dangerous: Florida Man Steals Two Cop Cars — ‘Illuminati, Help!’

Posted on | May 7, 2021 | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous: Florida Man Steals Two Cop Cars — ‘Illuminati, Help!’

Xavier Cummings was high on meth and ranting about the CIA when Volusia County sheriff’s deputies finally put the cuffs on him:

The man accused of stealing two police cruisers and leading law enforcement on a high-speed pursuit in two counties had a bizarre outburst in court on Friday.
Xavier Cummings is being held in the Volusia County Jail on two counts of grand theft of a motor vehicle, two counts of grand theft of a firearm, escape as well as other charges.
When a judge denied Cummings bond on Friday, he had an outburst that caused him to be removed from the courtroom.
“Illuminati, help!” Cummings shouted.

(Spoiler: The Illuminati did not help.)

Deputies said Cummings told them following his arrest that he was given permission to take the Cocoa patrol car through mental telepathy.
The report indicates Cummings showed signs of experiencing mental-health issues, stated he used crystal meth earlier in the day, and had not slept in approximately 24 hours. . . .

(Earlier this week, I drank too much coffee, didn’t get enough sleep and made three typos. I didn’t steal a police car, though.)

The chase caught on a Volusia County sheriff’s helicopter video began when Cocoa police responded to a report of a disturbance near a Cocoa motel on Thursday afternoon.
Investigators said when officers confronted Cummings, he jumped into an unattended patrol car and drove away.

(Is Xavier Cummings a criminal genius, or what?)

Several Cocoa police officers then pursued Cummings on Interstate 95 into Volusia County before forcing the stolen cruiser off the road and into the woods between Edgewater and New Smyrna Beach.
When officers moved in to arrest Cummings, he emerged from the woods and jumped into another Cocoa Police Department vehicle and continued fleeing northbound on I-95, police said.

(Oh, he’s definitely a criminal genius.)

Police and deputies used stop sticks to disable the second police cruiser. At which point, Cummings was taken into custody without further incident.
No officers or deputies were injured.
Cummings is being held in the Volusia County Jail without bond.

This criminal genius will surely find a way to escape, with or without the assistance of the Illuminati. Meanwhile, watch the video:

 

Yeah, that crystal meth is a heckuva drug. Think I’ll stick with coffee, even if I did make three typos this week. “Illuminati, help!”




 

Category: Crime, Florida
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