Christmas crackers: twelve thoughts about work to enjoy over the holidays

When Sigmund Freud was asked how we can achieve happiness he said two things were necessary: the ability to love and the ability to work.

According to the internet this quotation appears nowhere in Freud’s published work but, even if he did not say it, it is close to things that he did say and, in any case, it is very true. Here are some more thoughts I like on the subject of work.


I don't like work no man does but I like what is in the work the chance to find yourself. Your own reality for yourself not for others what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

Joseph Conrad


They are not only idle who do nothing, but they are idle also who might be better employed.

Socrates 

Work hard, do the best you can, don't ever lose faith in yourself and take no notice of what other people say about you.

Noel Coward

Choose a job that you love, and you will never work a day in your life.

Confucius

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

William James

Things can be done. The people in life who get them done are the ones who know that, and the ones who don't are the rest.

Tony Hawks

A clumsy right hand cannot be trained into a skillful right hand by taking thought, by wishing it were less clumsy, or even by avoiding clumsiness. It can become skillful only by exercise in practical achievements, and the incentive to the achievement must be more deeply felt than the discouragement at the hitherto existent clumsiness.

Alfred Adler

There is no such thing as talent. There is pressure.

Alfred Adler


All happiness depends on courage and work.

Honoré de Balzac


Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money.

Gerald Brenan


I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Douglas Adams

Victor Ponta gives up his doctorate

As Metternich said when he heard of Talleyrand's death, 

"What did he mean by that?"

Things that seem strange to a foreigner about the Romanian presidential election

Why were the opinion polls in the Romanian election so very wrong, with one exception giving Victor Ponta the PSD (Social Democratic Party) candidate a very healthy lead throughout? 

I have not heard any convincing explanation. Presumably, people are reluctant to say that they are going to vote against the PSD. I wonder if this is in case this information is used against them in some way. The PSD is the reinvented Communist Party, after all. But are there better explanations?

The one rogue poll was published by CCSCC two days before the vote and showed the candidates exactly equal. It was dismissed by almost everyone because it was a telephone poll from a no-name company. That poll was nowhere near the final result, but it was a lot closer than the rest of the polls.

Why did Gabriela Firea attempt to claim moral superiority for Victor Ponta over Klaus Iohannis just because he didn’t have children? Klaus Iohannis, by the way, is a Protestant who is deeply religious, according to his childhood friends, didn't plagiarise his doctoral thesis and didn't leave his pregnant wife for another woman.

Why were Mircea Geoana and Marian Vanghelie expelled from the PSD, rather than the people who were responsible for losing the election - Victor Ponta, Liviu Dragnea, the campaign organiser, and Adrian Nastase? (Nastase's friends, it is said, did not get out the vote because he wanted to get even with Mr Ponta for allowing him to be sent to gaol the second time.) 

In an old-fashioned Western the baddies always start fighting among themselves at the end of the film. It's like that after the PSD lose elections too. 

As Mircea Geoana said,

I lost the presidential election by a very few votes and I got expelled from the party. This guy lost by a lot of votes and I got expelled from the party again.

Mr. Vanghelie was expelled, even though he commands a faithful following of gypsy voters and is very rich. He is considered (fairly accurately) to be a semi-literate buffoon and could be described as the Romanian gypsy equivalent of Tony Blair's deputy, John Prescott. I am told Mr. Vanghelie was expelled 

because he has a big mouth

and so he certainly has, but this should have been a reason for  keeping him in the team. Instead he has been telling us all sorts of things the PSD doesn't want us to know. (I am sure it is not by chance that evidence of corruption is surfacing in the papers about Mr. Vanghelie exactly now.)

Actually, I know the reason why Messrs. Geoana and Vanghelie were expelled, in very rough terms. It was because they were a danger to Victor Ponta. I am told Mr. Geoana compounded his fault by telling Mr. Ponta after the result was known,

At least I believed I was president for a night.

However Mr Ponta's action makes him look weak, not strong (rather like Harold Macmillan's Night of the Long Knives). And those who live by the sword die by the sword.

People allege that over a million fraudulent votes were cast by 'electoral tourists', people bussed from area to give multiple votes for the PSD candidate. The same thing was said in the election of 2004. I don't, of course, know the truth. Nor does anyone for sure. Why were no investigations made then or now? 

Readers who are not familiar with Romanian politics are, I hope, shocked to learn how the votes are rigged and manipulated here. Even so, what is much more shocking is that Romania is, on the whole, a much freer country than England, even though a less democratic one. Western Europe is becoming less free week by week. Romania will one day, I hope soon, get clean elections. She will never have clean politicians, but she will presumably in time have the same restrictions on freedom that, for example, the British and Dutch have.

There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in making money

Dr. Johnson said that 

“There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.”

Christopher Hollis said this was the most un-Christian remark imaginable (Hollis was the kind of Conservative politician I like) but I am coming round to siding with Dr Johnson. He was being deliberately paradoxical but he was usually right. 

I sympathise with Hollis but working hard is one of the most innocent ways of spending time. 

I always thought a knowledge of Dr Johnson and his best lines was the parole of educated men, to adapt what he said about knowledge of Latin and Greek. But a former master of a Cambridge college told me a few years ago that very few Cambridge undergraduates until recently read the 18th century authors. It reminds me of what Johnson said to Boswell: 

“Sir, they [his college friends] respected me for my literature, and yet it was not great but by comparison. Sir, it is amazing how little literature there is in the world.”

He of course was talking about the classics, not English writers.

I suppose Johnson's most famous joke is

"Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all"

but on whether he was right I cannot comment. I only ever heard one woman preach and she did so in Swedish, in Stockholm Cathedral. She was, or believed she was, a bishop - and what surprised me was that she was very beautiful. And a blonde. That I had not expected.

It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all"

also applies to my ironing a shirt, once every eight or ten years.

I really cannot see why people read Johnson less than Wilde. Johnson is better, in my judgment, and a better Christian - and his philosophy is manlier and more wholesome. He was also a staunch Tory and a great saint. Though he might have been disagreeable in real life, as opposed to in his writings and in the pages of Boswell. His table manners were appalling. He once spat out an entire roast potato that was too hot on to his plate and told the girl beside him

A fool would have swallowed that.

Fox told his nephew, Lord Holland, that he met Johnson only once and thought he was he was 

A very coarse man. He said 

Talk of pleasure, sir, the greatest pleasure is emission.

On the subject of his philosophy I am reminded of his old Oxford friend, Mr. Edwards, whom he met by chance in Fleet St and who told him

You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.

But to Dr. Johnson stories there is no end, so I stop now. But if you want more, please click here.

If you haven't read Boswell's Johnson, dear reader, you have a great treat awaiting you. A book for a desert island.

We used to think the unions were the enemies within [Great Britain], but it was always the universities

The trade unions did enormous amount of damage to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. We now know that in the 1970s the two most powerful and famous trade union leaders, household names who were better known than almost all the politicians, Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, were secretly Communists or, in other words, admirers of Brezhnev's USSR. MI6 knew that they were security risks. So of course were a great many trade union officials and activist - as were many academics. 

The influence of the unions however was limited to (harming) the economy. Academics in the humanities, on the other hand, are what Shelley said poets were, the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” If you seek their monument, look around you. It is odd that in the 1960s and 1970s, exactly when the working class people decided socialism was out of date, the intellectuals embraced it.

'SOAS tops the Which? University Survey

'SOAS, University of London has been ranked one of the Top University for the in the Political Scene scoring 97%.' 

According to the Which? survey (a consumer magazine reviewing universities is appropriate because university education is now a commodity to be bought and sold):

One SOAS student describes their uni as 'a definition of a political university. Spanning from the Marxist to the Anarchist societies, there's a flavour for anyone choosing to be more politically involved... The student body is very aware of the political climate and ways of making a difference.'

Very diverse... but then diversity does not apply to right-wingers. Ask how many conservatives are employed in women's studies or development studies faculties. 

Back in the 1980s and recently Conservative student associations were forbidden to display the Union Jack as it could be perceived as racist. A student at Liverpool who supported the BNP was recently sent down and had his career prospects severely harmed because he criticised a lecturer who justified the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby. The lecturer remains there. Ukip supporters are not allowed to speak nor people who oppose abortion. A senior lecturer in Russian studies was hustled out of his jobs for expressing racist opinions to a student newspaper though they had no bearing on how he did his job.

Unfortunately this lack of diversity of opinions is not confined to the student body (in fact most students are always conservative but usually keep fairly quiet about it) but applies to the academic staff too.

In the words of Mark Griffith:

The left-wing rejection of tradition is usually framed as "questioning tradition". But in fact there is no asking of real questions which run the risk of returning an answer that suggests that tradition contains wisdom or virtue or efficacy, so this so-called "questioning" amounts to rejection. This rejection seems to those involved to be invigorating, fresh, daring... it seems to open up new possibilities, but in fact it closes them down.

Romania is the Orient dreaming that she is France

I am proud of a line I coined many years ago

Romania is the Orient dreaming that she is France

and repeated it to a British diplomat friend this week. His rejoinder was to quote a British diplomat in Paris who told him,

It's taken me years to see that France is the Middle East with a very thin veneer of civilisation. Paris is essentially Cairo.

It's good to know that we still have diplomats like that.  

Gabi Firea thinks not having children is a deficiency - she is entitled to her opinion

One more comment on the Romanian presidential election.

Psychopaths have a very strong urge to reproduce but I'm certainly not saying Gabriela Firea is a psychopath. I'm simply saying that psychopaths feel this biological imperative for which there might be an evolutionary explanation. 

Gabi Firea was Victor Ponta's spokesman during the presidential election and earned a lot of disapproval for her remarks about the childlessness of Mr. Ponta's opponent, now the President-elect, Klaus Iohannis. She said,

“From my point of view, a person is complete when he raises a child from his first days up to maturity. A man living in a cold house, without hearing baby’s chatter, without seeing his first steps, his first grades, cannot feel all these things … You can adopt a child if you want to have a complete family … In all civilised countries, all aspirants to the presidency  belong to complete families, they are married with children and grandchildren..."

Asked by a journalist if having no children was a defect in a president, she said,

“Categorically.”

A particularly stupid remark, even in a particularly stupid PSD election campaign. Romanians want an efficient president, not one who has children. I wonder how many childless people were impressed. I wonder what the last PSD President, Ion Iliescu, made of it. He is childless, which cynics say is the reason why he famously did not steal from the country (unlike those around him). 

Perhaps if Adrian Nastase, the PSD's failed presidential candidate in 2004, had not wanted to provide for his son he might have avoided going to gaol for corruption. But this is taking alternate history too far. Let's just say that childless politicians have their advantages.

I am no fan of Gabi. I have been no fan of the television presenter turned politician since she said back in 2002 or 2003 that calls from the Presidential office at the Cotroceni, ordering television companies not to run certain news stories, happened in President Emil Constantinescu's time as well as after Ion Iliescu regained the presidency. I never believed that.

But I am equally not a fan of the the National Council for Combating Discrimination. The National Council ruled during the election campaign that Gabi's remarks were "discriminatory" and breached Mr. Iohannis's "right to dignity" (what on earth is a right to dignity?) 

This is almost very funny, but it is not - it is in fact very disturbing. 

The Council is a deeply authoritarian and illiberal institution at the best of times, but when an unelected body seeks to curb free speech during an election campaign things are very bad indeed.

I don't like referring to a politician's lack of children in a political fight. Nor did Romanians. I didn't like it when people said the same thing about Condeleeza Rice. I didn't like it because it is irrelevant, has nothing to do with politics, is none of the public's business and may cause pain. But people are perfectly free to disagree with me and say that not being married or not having children does have a bearing on whether a man would make a good leader of his country. It is of incalculable importance that  people should be free to express this or any other opinion that is not defamatory or calculated to lead to what the Common Law calls a breach of the peace. 

None of this should even need saying, but it seems it does.

Here are some unmarried leaders, to refute Gabi's idea that in civilised countries presidents have children, though some of these do have children and not all of them lead particularly civilised countries. Pope Francis is one ruler whom the list omits.

Nastase was never angry with Traian Basescu; SOV says he deserved much longer in prison; Victor Ponta asks for pardon

Perhaps because it is Advent, in a very Christian spirit Sorin Ovidiu Vintu and Prime Minster Victor Ponta have publicly acknowledged their sins and former Prime Minister Adrian Nastase has said he holds no grudge against President Traian Basescu, whom Nastase must consider is responsible for his having gone to gaol. Nastase (I drop the 'Mr.' since he is a gaolbird) said yesterday:

"Angry? I was never angry with [Traian Basescu]. It's not about anger..... Life is very complicated." 

Read more here.

Sorin Ovidiu Vintu was very frank:

“If the state had caught me with everything I’ve done, I would have been in prison for life. The state has no idea what I’ve done and what I would have deserved to be imprisoned,” said Vantu in his interview for Adevarul. He added that the prosecutors invented some causes to arrest him. 

“I don’t claim that I shouldn’t have been in jail, I deserved it. Thank God, I got away cheap. And not only I. There are many people who you see today in business, politics, administration, who would deserve to serve tens of years in prison.”

More here.

And Victor Ponta has also caught the modern habit of apologising for his mistakes, as shown in this mea culpa delivered to his foe Dan Andronic, in an interview published yesterday in Evenimentul Zilei.

"Certainly I made ​​many mistakes but at 42 I have the ability to recognise them. Not only to recognise them but also to learn from them, regardless of the position that I have on the public stage! What are my regrets? It's a pretty long list, but everything I did wrong was human! I do not want anyone to endure the amount of negative energy, even the hatred, that was directed against me in the recent past. I think we all need to understand that hatred and passion leaves wounds that are very hard to heal. I would say that once again I apologise to those who were offended by my words and to those who supported me. I often used words that I wanted to be able to avoid. This I truly regret! "

I don't like politicians saying sorry, for some reason. It makes me distrust them more than if they didn't, though I prefer them to say sorry for their own mistakes rather than for the Amritsar massacre or the slave trade. But it somehow seems slippery to me - like that boy in an H.G. Well novel (which one?) who instead of standing and fighting asked for forgiveness.

Was Russian money behind the anti-fracking protests in Romania?

A very interesting story in the New York Times suggests that Russian money was behind the anti-fracking protests in Romania. It sounds extremely likely to me.

The Romanian Prime Minister, Victor Ponta, announced three weeks ago that Romania does not have shale gas and so there was no need to argue over the issue. But Chevron is not so sure.

People without imagination should make money

People without imagination should pursue well paid careers. For them money supplies poetry.

Robert Graves was told by his publisher

There's no money in poetry

To which he replied 

There's no poetry in money. 

But in fact it depends on what poetry means to you. 

A. H. Clough's Spectator ab Extra expresses many people's philosophy, including that of quite a few nouveaux-riches I know in Bucharest (almost all the riche here are nouveaux)

They may talk as they please about what they call pelf, 

And how one ought never to think of one’s self, 

How pleasures of thought surpass eating and drinking— 

My pleasure of thought is the pleasure of thinking 

How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho! 

How pleasant it is to have money. 

Schopenhauer was characteristically bleaker:

"Money is happiness in abstracto; he, therefore, who is no longer capable of enjoying happiness in the concrete pursues money.

But Schopenhauer was wrong. Lots of people find great happiness in money. 

Romanians registered in the UK increased from 18,000 to 100,000 since restrictions were lifted

According to an article in yesterday's Financial Times, 

After employment controls were lifted in January, the number of Romanians registering for UK national insurance increased sharply compared with the year before – from 18,000 to 100,000. The figure for Bulgarians rose from 10,000 to 30,000.

The paper said:

"One Romanian woman who recently moved to London from Italy said she and her husband had decided to come to the UK because friends had told them the schools were better." 

I hope she is not disappointed. I read of one Albanian taxi driver in London who sends his child to a private school in Tirana to get a decent education.

I am perfectly sure that the great majority of Romanian immigrants coming to England are decent and hard-working and have much to give, though as Rod Liddle pointed out, a small minority cause big problems. Romanians (and other Eastern Europeans) in the main make great immigrants – they  are Christian, family-minded and conservative. They  resemble the way the English were before the 1960s.  We are lucky to have Eastern Europe from which to draw immigrants, if we need immigrants – though I am not convinced that we do and nor was a Select Committee of the House of Lords that looked at the economic advantages of immigration.

However, we are in the EU and free movement of peoples is a given. I hope that those who settle permanently (very many will) and become British subjects love the British tradition and will learn to be proud that Wolfe took Quebec. Knowing Anglo-Romanians I think they  will. I mention Wolfe because when Churchill was asked how to make children proud of being English he said 

'Tell them Wolfe took Quebec.'

The latest immigration figures in the UK, published yesterday, are startling. 583,000 people entered the UK to settle in the year to June. Only 228,000 were from the EU. This is despite the efforts of the Government to check immigration from outside the EU. This huge movement of people from the Third World not just to Britain but to Western Europe in general is the most important historical phenomenon of our times. I do not believe that it is inevitable, but nor do I expect it to be halted.

Do you remember the two in the poster?

If so, you are probably too old to wear jeans.

Kind hearts are more than coronets and simple faith than Norman blood

The name Howard means hog-herd. The Duke of Norfok's ancestor when surnames were given out was one.

My strongly-held opinion about Plebgate

I still PASSIONATELY believe Plebgate should be called Gategate.

A picture that makes me feel very happy and excited to live in Bucharest

What is the real world and would one want to live there?

I just had coffee with a very prosperous Scottish auditor. We were discussing Scotland and he joked that it was the kind of undeveloped country that I would like to visit. When I replied that Dr Johnson's and Boswell's accounts of their journey to the Hebrides are perhaps my two favourite books and I want to retrace their route the auditor said, 

'You don't live in the real world.' 

I remember he also described hearing me praise Ben Jonson to an English lecturer as 'the conversation from hell'. 

Worrying, especially as he belongs to the Scottish business elite and is standing for Parliament in the Conservative interest.

I was reminded that Logan Pearsall Smith said

How awful to reflect that what people say of us is true.

Another man joined us for coffee who is going off to work in Cambodia for a year. I urged him to visit Burma because 

It's untouched by the modern world.

The Scot said

It sounds like you.

The last time someone told me I didn't live in the real world was a cousin of mine about twelve years ago after I said I went shopping for no more than two articles at a time. I reflected, when he said I didn't live in the real world, that I lived in a potholed slum street with its share of beggars and child prostitutes, though it is true that I walked through their world rather than lived in it. 

Strada Blanari and I have gone up in the world since those days. The street is now full of bars and restaurants. 


Logan Pearsall Smith also said 

It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.

At least I have escaped that fate so far. I cannot decide whether the rich are more interesting than people with good jobs. In very many ways they are, but I obstinately hope that the people with good jobs are more likely to have read Dr. Johnson.

Bill, who has a very good job, if by a good job one means a well-paid rather than an exciting one, told me that he hasn't read a book for twenty years, since he failed to finish a biography of an infamous Scotch hanging judge. I suspect that tastes in reading reveal our hidden criminal tendencies and perhaps a certain bloodthirstiness has taken Bill into a political career in the British Conservative Party. It's true that a less bloodthirsty, more milk-and-water body than the modern Conservatives is pretty hard to imagine, but in Bill's subconscious mind and in his dreams perhaps he is already presiding over Bloody Assizes, sending Scottish Nationalists and other undesirables to the gallows en masse. 

What is the real world? I think it is a place of absolute beauty and I find this absolute beauty frequently in Bucharest. Reality is in fact something very close to a mystical experience. I am not sure, however, that Bill would necessarily agree.

The man who mistook Westminster Cathedral for a mosque

Somebody in the South Thanet constituency association of UKIP referred on Twitter to a photograph of Westminster Cathedral as a mosque. The Guardian and many others are taking this slip terribly seriously. How much UKIP is hated - the verb is exact - and feared. Our rulers are very insecure about their hegemony.

It is an understandable mistake - nothing looks less English than neo-Byzantine Westminster Cathedral and after the Hagia Sofia in Constantinople was turned into a mosque this great Byzantine church became the model for the design of mosques to the present day.

In fact Catholic churches can never be national monuments. We are an odd, subversive foreign institution in the eyes of our Protestant compatriots, not part of English life, though we created England. I like this, the feeling of being an outsider that we share with Communists (it's not the only thing).

Of course Pugin, the fanatically Catholic architect who designed the Houses of Parliament, thought Gothic was the only true Catholic architectural style but it is not accidental that the two most famous and most loved Catholic churches in London, the Brompton Oratory and Westminster Cathedral, are not English Gothic but Italian baroque and Italian Byzantine respectively.

I love Westminster Cathedral more than any church in England, even though it is not nearly the most beautiful. Even though someone aptly said the interior resembles the bathroom department in Harrod's.

I loved it since I went there aged three for the first time. Even though the Masses are mostly in English it does not feel like the modern low church Catholic Church. It is intensely, giddily spiritual, unlike the much more beautiful St. Paul's, which is as spiritual as a garden shed. The Abbey, like other medieval Anglican churches, has the faintest trace of spirituality, which is all that remains of its Catholic origins, buried by restraint, good taste, national monuments and moth-eaten flags. 

I go to Westminster Cathedral whenever I am in London, even on brief visits. Possibly its un-Englishness it part of what draws me. Perhaps it reminds me that the only genuinely religious emotion that the English ever experience is hatred of Catholicism.

I wonder which is hated more, Catholicism or UKIP.

The Top 50 Cities to See in Your Lifetime

Another list of cities you should visit just swam into my ken.

Making lists is a sublimation of the instinct to be a womaniser. Or maniser. I've been to 25 of these and shall be in two more just after Christmas. But the most fascinating city I ever visited was Bucharest in 1990. Then Rome, then Oxford and Cambridge. Or perhaps Havana should be in the top two (but too many tourists). Tbilisi is unaccountably omitted from the list.

I love cities. As Sydney Smith said, the countryside is a healthy grave.

And here is yet another one of these infernally compulsive lists: 40 Lesser Known Travel Destinations You Should Seek In This Lifetime. 

I have been to seven. The one I very highly recommend is Procida, which I thought was my secret. Dr Johnson said the Giants' Causeway was worth seeing but not worth going to see and I perfectly understand why - though unlike him I went by motor-car. It's much smaller than one expects. 

From Romania they might have included the Danube delta, Timisoara, the painted monasteries of the Bucovina or the fortified churches of Transylvania. From outside Romania I'd nominate Barfleur in Normandy, the Greek island of Hydra where cars are banned, Acre in the Holy Land, the Island of Mozambique and Wivenhoe in Essex. The most interesting place I ever visited, without a doubt, is Lalish, the Yezidi holy place. I would hate it to get tourists after the war is over, but inevitably it will.

Bucharest, mon amour

I walk past this house every day. Half the houses in the centre of Bucharest are like this. The Romantic fascination with decay is what made me decide I wanted to live in Romania within thirty minutes of getting off the train in 1990.



More scenes from Bucharest. They explain is why I love Bucharest so much. It reminds me of Havana, which is the capital of a Communist dictatorship but also the antithesis of the modern world. Havana, Bucharest and Tbilisi are my three favourite cities.

Should you be interested, I wrote about my first visit to Havana here. I urge you to go there, dear reader, before the old man dies.

I crossed the Euphrates and didn't know it

The friend I stayed with in Iraq just told me that I crossed the Euphrates, the day we went to Lalish, the Yazidi shrine. Why didn't he tell me at the time? Because it was a brook or dried up river bed where we crossed it, he said, but even so he should have spoken. But four years later, I feel a sense of glory. What other river except the Tigris is as impressive as the Euphrates?

It is one of the rivers of Babylon, by which the psalmist lay down and wept.

I did know that I was on the plain of Nineveh though regrettably most of it was outside the Kurdish region and therefore slightly too dangerous.

I wrote about this journey here. 

Rereading my account, I like the quotation from Bernard Lewis

The Roman Empire and the medieval Islamic Empire were not conquered by more civilized peoples, they were conquered by less civilized but more vigorous peoples. But in both cases what made the conquest, with the Barbarians in Rome and the Mongols in Iraq, what made it possible was things were going badly wrong within the society so that it was no longer able to offer effective resistance.

I should say, as a gloss on this, that I do not see the Islamists conquering the West in battle, though they are wreaking much damage in Kurdish Iraq. I think if Western civilisation ceases to exist it will be because Western women do not have enough children. But I am a bachelor, so I do not have locus standi in that debate.