Children in 1966 predict life in the year 2000

In December 1966 the British TV programme Tomorrow's World asked children (now around 60) to predict what life would be like in the year 2000. Their answers are poignant.

What is noticeable is their pessimism and that so many of them were worried about overpopulation and high birthrates. This was exactly the moment when British birthrates fell between replacement levels.

They are well-spoken, middle class and of course all white.

Some of their predictions are very far off but others have come true. This one, for example:

"Black people won't be separate but will all be mixed in with the white people. The poor people and the rich people will become the same. There will be poor and rich people but they won't look down on one another."

Traditionalism is deadly, tradition is life-giving

Traditionalism is deadly, tradition is the root of life.

As Mahler said: "Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire."

Two Archbishops and the Dalai Lama

The Archbishop [of Canterbury]’s background is, rather unusually for a clergyman, in business, since he worked as an oil executive until the late 1980s. So it is unlikely that he is altogether unaware of these straightforward economic truths. Unfortunately, he has failed to grasp that inequality and poverty are reduced by markets, and that the real examples of exploitation and injustice that he notes are largely the products of attempts to subvert them, either by corporate distortions, government interventions, or discredited socialist economic plans.

He might take a lesson from the remaining Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered, and whom I missed out from the earlier list. In 1381, Simon Sudbury was dragged out of the Tower of London and on nearby Tower Hill had his head hacked off by a mob. His offence was that he had approved of the introduction of more taxes.

Andrew McKie


[Cardinal] Wuerl’s defense is that he is not an evil man who looked the other way about the behavior of a known sexual predator, but merely an incompetent dolt. And Wuerl

Donald Trump is not Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush

Ronald Reagan seems so recent to me and I remember how he was regarded as a dangerous fool by the BBC and most serious people in England. Edward Heath told me that he simply did not have the intellectual capacity to be a president.

So many jokes were made about him. Ronald Reagan worshipped Calvin Coolidge, Nancy worshipped Calvin Klein. Now, thanks to Ronald Reagan, liking Coolidge no longer seems screamingly funny, but very reasonable. Coolidge was a good small-state president. That is one of Reagan's principal achievements.

Another was ending the Cold War.

He was originally a Democrat and saw foreign policy, as the Democrats do, in moral terms, which is why he wanted the evil empire to end. George H.W. Bush was very different. A conservative in foreign (though not so much in domestic) affairs he counter-intuitively tried to preserve Communist Poland in 1989 and the Soviet Union for the next two years.

The Vatican says the Pope's critics are far right extremists

Vatican Insider, a website run by La Stampa, today suggests that the far right is battling the Pope. In fact the Pope's critics are not far right or even right-wing - they are simply appalled or bewildered Catholics who fear he deliberately chose to ignore the allegations against former Cardinal McCarrick. And, if they are well informed, they think he has been ignoring other sex scandals involving prelates who are his allies. 

This line is very disingenuous of the Vatican, assuming that this story comes from the Vatican, as I do. The name Vatican Insider does suggest this, after all.

By the way, and digressing, what is meant by the far right? Admirers of General Franco or Mussolini? 

The article explains. Catholics who like the traditional family, dislike the modern liberal world, fear the Islamification of Europe, see a clash of civilisations between the West and the rest, prefer conservative Catholic societies to multicultural ones and disapprove of single sex marriage. (I thought all Catholics disapproved of single sex marriage.) 

Changing Europe

“Those beautiful Greek islands, the pearls of the Aegean, now house over 20,000 ‘refugees and migrants’ according to government statistics.” - Taki's Magazine

"Today’s migrations are no longer made by compact displacements but by successive infiltrations: little by little, individuals insinuate themselves among the “natives,” too anemic and too distinguished to stoop to the notion of a “territory.” After a thousand years of vigilance, we open the gates . . . When one thinks of the long rivalries between the French and the English, then between the French and the Germans, it seems as if each nation, by weakening one another, had as its task to speed the hour of the common downfall so that other specimens of humanity may relay them.
Like its predecessor, the new Völkerwanderung will provoke an ethnic confusion whose phases cannot be distinctly foreseen. Confronted with these disparate profiles, the notion of a community homogeneous to whatever degree is inconceivable. The very possibility of so heteroclite a crowd suggests that in the space it occupies there no longer existed, among the indigenous, any desire to safeguard even the shadow of an identity" - Emil Cioran

58% of rapes in Sweden are committed by foreigners

The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats came third in the Swedish election on Sunday, narrowly behind the Moderates (conservatives) but did much less well than polls had predicted. 

Some suggestion has been made of irregularities at the ballot. The Danish observer said it was the worst conducted election he had ever observed (and he has observed one in Russia). 

As centre left and centre right coalitions almost tied, however, the Sweden Democrats are in a powerful position as kingmaker.

As background to why Swedes vote for the Swedish Democrats, I came across this information.

"There is data about the ethnic background of convicted rapists in Sweden. Over 58% of

Russia would not hesitate to use tactical nuclear weapons

“Russia had privately warned Mattis that if there was a war in the Baltics, Russia would not hesitate to use tactical nuclear weapons against NATO.”

From Bob Woodward's new book, Fear: Trump in the White House.

 I assume they meant if Nato started such a war, in which case the Russian attitude is what one would expect - deterrence is why Russia and the other nuclear powers have the bomb. But how could Nato start a war IN the Baltic States which are members of Nato.

In any case, there will be no war in the Baltic States.

Quotations

"Burke's point was simple. The dead, he argued, were the guardians of the unborn. By respecting what they have handed down to us we hold their legacy in trust. This is not to engage in some stultifying ancestor worship: it is to respect what has been set aside for our successors"

Sir Roger Scruton

"Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society." 
Antonio Gramsci

"In the middle of the 20th century, the [Swedish] Social Democrats’ grim social-engineering project was devoted to the promotion of eugenics. During a near 40-year-long programme, between 1934 and 1970, the Swedish government’s eugenics policy resulted

Referendum to define marriage will be held on October 7

Romanian senators today voted overwhelmingly - 107 in favour, 13 against (7 abstaining) - to hold a referendum on October 7 on whether to redefine constitutional definition of marriage to between a man and a women (rather than between two spouses, as now). 

If the electorate votes for the new definition, as they will, it means there has to be another referendum before single sex marriage can be enacted in Romania. This is very democratic, much more so than the procedure in countries where the people were not consulted before this change was made.

The reason for the vote is that 3 million people signed a petition organised by the Romanian Orthodox Church.

I wish far more referendums were held in all countries on these sort of moral issues which everyone can understand. 

More plot turns in the story about the Pope and child molestation

The story about the Pope, former Cardinal McCarrick and Archbishop Vigano is like a cheap melodrama written by a fervent anti-Catholic.

Many things these days seem like cheap fiction, starting with Osama bin Laden.

It is clear that the Vatican was told about the allegations against the then Cardinal Edgar ('Uncle Ted') McCarrick in 2000, in Pope John Paul II's reign.

Robert Mickens, whose liberal views I always disliked, had to resign from The Tablet because of something he said on Facebook about Pope Benedict XVI (I thought he was unfairly treated). Two or three days ago Mr. Mickens accused Archbishop Vigano of lying to the Pope about wanting to look after his sick brother. He also accused him of having kept quiet about the child abuse allegations for years in the hope of receiving a Cardinal's red hat. 

The Struggle for Mastery in Europe

From Angela Merkel to Macron, the advocates of globalisation are now relying on voters who cling to a social model that held sway during the three decades of postwar economic growth. Thus their determination to accelerate the adaptation of western societies to globalisation automatically condemns them to political unpopularity. Locked away in their metropolitan citadels, they fail to see that their electoral programmes no longer meet the concerns of more than a tiny minority of the population – or worse, of their own voters.
They are on the wrong track if they think that the “deplorables” in the deindustrialised states of the US or the struggling regions of France will soon die out. Throughout the west, people in “peripheral” regions still make up the bulk of the population.

From a very interesting article in The Guardian by left-wing French geographer Christophe Guilluy, entitled Trump’s poll ratings are better than Macron’s, after a year. Why?

Miami Vice - Google News reveals a litany (pun intended) of incredible wrong-doing by priests

'Miami priests'. Put these two words into Google News.

You find a story about two priests discovered by police committing an act of gross indecency in a car park.

If that seems incredible, it's nothing compared with the list of stories of rape, molestation and in this case torture that you find if you keep scrolling down. 

The utterly bizarre and horrid tale of Pennsylvania-turned-Florida-turned-Cuban priest George Zirwas has taken an even darker turn this week. More than 15 years ago, New Times published a meticulously reported feature delving into Zirwas' 2001 murder in Havana, where he was injected in the neck with an overdose of muscle relaxant. The story noted that some people claimed he was involved in a child pornography ring and that boys had accused him of molestation. But in 2003, when the story was published, Zirwas' defenders denied the allegations.

The Tyranny of Now

I don't drive and so learn a huge amount, as well as improving my Romanian, by talking to taxi drivers. I had one especially interesting one who impressed me a lot but lost my confidence when he told me in confidence a discovery he had made. He had discovered that the world was flat. He explained that the moon landings had been staged. 

He asked me to keep this a secret and though I made him no promise I feel bad about repeating the story.

I do so because a film has come out about man (person) landing on the moon. It does not pretend that the moon landings were faked out but it lies in its own, to me very curious, way. It does not show Neil Armstrong planting the US flag on the moon, which was the point of the whole hideously expensive enterprise. I know because I watched it on TV.

Secret Lives of the Vatican’s Homosexual Cardinals

This article, Secret Lives of the Vatican’s Gay Cardinals, Monks, and Other Clergy Members, published in Vanity Fair in 2013, writes sympathetically about homosexual Catholic priests in high places in the Church. If you are interested in reading about this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will be interested in reading about. Even if you are not it is even more topical now than it was when published.

I quote:

At the Vatican, a significant number of gay prelates and other gay clerics are in positions of great authority. They may not act as a collective but are aware of one another’s existence. And they inhabit a secretive netherworld, because homosexuality is officially condemned. Though the number of gay priests in general, and specifically among the Curia in Rome, is unknown, the proportion is much higher than in the general population.

Here are some very shocking stories from Pope Francis's very unsympathetic biographer Henry Sire, whose book is called Dictator Pope.

Transgender wo/man accused of rape is remanded into female prison and sexually assaults four women inmates

A man who 'identifies as' a woman was charged with raping a women and put on remand in a women's prison in Yorkshire to await trial. Within days he sexually assaulted four women prisoners.

Karen Bradley didn't know people voted on sectarian lines in Northern Ireland before she was made Secretary of State

We are not talking about a well-informed person, but the standard of general information and education among even Conservative politicians is becoming lower and lower. 

The story is here. 

She was parachuted into Parliament like so many other duds as part of David Cameron's A-List, designed to give seats to women, people from ethnic minorities and people who did not seem like traditional Conservative MPs (i.e. upper and upper middle class patriotic, church-going men, who were members of good clubs and sometimes hunted, shot or wore stiff collars). This is how people like Anna Soubry, Louise Mensch and Andrea Leadsom got into the Commons. A Listers who failed to get in include one Adam Rickitt from Coronation Street, who is now part of the "pop supergroup 5th Story, set up for The Big Reunion".

Pakistani in Chemnitz interviewed about his feelings on events and Germans

This video clip well repays watching. In it a Pakistani in Germany (I don't know if he has German or Pakistani citizenship) talks about how he attended out of curiosity the anti-migrant demonstration in Chemnitz, after a German-Cuban was killed allegedly by a recent Arab migrant. 

The Pakistani says that the media had created the impression that it would be dangerous for him to attend the demonstration, that 

"someone brown-skinned could not walk through here" 

but, though he received some dirty looks, he was not made to feel in any danger. Nor, he says, has he experienced any hostility from Germans in three years in Dresden.

"Overall, I'm not bothered by the dirty looks. What bothers me more are murders, rapes, sexual assaults, manslaughter and robberies, which are

"There is solid evidence that most convicted paedophile priests are homosexual"

Liberal Catholic journalist Clifford Longley, who converted to Catholicism before the Second Vatican Council but who has since moved far away from the church, says in The Tablet today

"There is solid evidence that most convicted paedophile priests are homosexual."

But he goes on to warn against

"a horrendous witch-hunt, as a result of which the Church could deprive itself of some of its best priests."

Everybody trusts an unidentified source

"Nobody believes the official spokesman... but everybody trusts an unidentified source."

Ron Nessen, President Gerald Ford's Press Secretary  

Excerpts from [Bob Woodward's] forthcoming account of Trump’s White House, first published Tuesday in The Washington Post, portray Mattis as scornful of the president’s intellect and judgment, and, in a boost to an already prominent narrative, as a vital check against the president’s dangerous instincts. Woodward depicts an agitated Mattis explaining to Trump in a meeting that the United States maintains a military presence on the Korean peninsula to “prevent World War III” and later deriding the president as “a fifth or sixth grader.” Woodward also claims that when Trump called up Mattis and suggested the United States “fucking kill” Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against civilians in 2017, Mattis played along but then hung up the

Lavender mafia: 7 cardinals and 85 bishops implicated in scandals

I know I have only just woken up to the extent of the Catholic sex scandals. So has the world. I know it is not just about the present Pope and the scandals date back in most cases long before he became pope. 

Four of the 291 cardinals appointed by Pope John Paul II have been implicated in sex scandals involving boys or seminarians: Cardinal Groer, Archbishop of Vienna, resigned following accusations of having abused a number of under-age seminarians; Cardinal O’Brien, Archbishop of Saint Andrews and Edinburgh, resigned because he was accused of trying to seduce two seminarians and a priest; Cardinal Pell is defending himself in Australia from the accusation of having abused boys and Cardinal McCarrick of Washington, D.C. is in the news at present. Pope Francis required him to resign only a very long time after being told by Archbishop Vigrano that he was accused of seducing seminarians. Other accusations against Cardinal McCarrick involving boys are out of time. 

Oscar Wilde, André Gide and sex with underage boys

I have a huge admiration and much affection for Oscar Wilde, but I get annoyed when he is treated as a hero because of his sex life. There is nothing remotely heroic about it. 

I asked in this blog a long time ago, in a post that gets lots of clicks, if he were a child molester. He had relations with boys under the age of 18, which was illegal in England till twenty years ago and one boy was mentioned at his trial who looked fourteen. 

I recently accidentally came across this book review from 1997, which suggests that Wilde procured young boys for Lord Alfred Douglas and Andre Gide and had relations with them himself. I quote.

''Wilde lost his virginity to Robbie Ross when the latter was a year below the current age of consent [in England in 1997] , and the boys Wilde wined and dined were frequently younger than that - as when he became involved with a 16-year-old who had been smuggled into London from Bruges to be installed in the Albermarle Hotel. According to Oscar Browning, the pederastic Victorian public-school master, "on Saturday, the boy slept with Douglas; on Sunday he slept with Oscar. On Monday he slept with a woman at Douglas's expense."