Did The Pill Really Do All That?

      The sexual revolution has been an unmitigated disaster. Since the oral contraceptive was introduced, there have been more out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Since abortion was legalised, there have been more out-of-wedlock births. The effects on the children have been appalling. Couples who approach marriage on the "try before you buy" principle have a much higher divorce rate. When I was growing up, there were three STDs you needed to know about, and they could be cured by antibiotics. Since then, I have lost count of the number of new STDs, most of which are highly resistant to treatment. One of them can kill you horribly if you don't keep it at bay with very expensive drugs for the rest of your life. The sexual revolution has been a failure even in what it promised. More sexual partners do not equate to more sex. Most sex still occurs in the bond of matrimony, but these bonds are breaking up faster these days. And a commonly expressed opinion is that it all started with the introduction of the contraceptive pill. But did it? I think the truth is far more nuanced.

"Anti-Racism" Comes to Australia.

      Parents beware! Anything which the corruptors of society get away with in America will eventually be introduced into Australia. And the obvious place to introduce it is in the schools, under the radar of the parents. We have already been alerted to the "Safe Schools" abomination, and questions are now being asked about how the new curriculum undermines the national identity. Now we have a three-part ABC  documentary on "The School That Tried to End Racism". No doubt the intentions were good (which is more than can be said for some other teaching programs), but the sum result was to introduce racial tension into an area where it did not previously exist.

We Didn't Need No "Consent" Lessons!

      I see that, morally, our society has fallen so far backwards that it is now trying to reinvent the wheel. In the last few weeks we've heard a lot about the Australian Federal Government's program to teach sexual consent in schools, due to a moral panic about sexual assaults committed by pupils or recent graduates. Nothing like this was ever raised in school when I was a pupil. We didn't need it. The fact that it is seen as necessary now is merely evidence of how far society has fallen. And it will almost certainly be taught badly.

Ireland's Malthusian Apocalypse

     If my great-grandfather had been born in 1846, as his obituary claimed, and not 1844, as he himself had claimed, then it is possible his parents had migrated to England because of the Great Irish Famine. You probably know the essential details: the Irish peasantry had become dependent on the potato - they lived on almost nothing else - and when the potato blight struck, famine and starvation ensued on a previously unimaginable scale. I myself had heard a lot about it, but it was only recently that I read Cecil Woodham-Smith's classic history, The Great Hunger, Ireland 1845-1849, and something leaped out at me which the author herself did not press, and few others have mentioned: the underlaying cause of the disaster was overpopulation. It was a classic case of the Malthusian limit being reached.