The so-called Demographic Transition Theory, has been accepted as a matter of faith by warm-hearted, if not, bleeding heart liberals. Give massive quantities of foreign aid to countries like Africa, and their population growth rate will approximate that of the West:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

     Economic development causes a fertility decline. But, applied to the West, the “theory” ignores a range of other variables which are probably more important, such as feminism, women’s liberation ideology, and general cultural decadence produced by the creation of a consumer society. Correlation does not prove causality. The “theory” seems to be refuted by the case of Africa, where despite masses of foreign aid, and so-called “development,” fertility rates continue to climb, so that over one third of all people on Earth will be African by 2100:
  https://qz.com/1099546/population-growth-africans-will-be-a-third-of-all-people-on-earth-by-2100/ 
  https://qz.com/1016790/more-than-half-of-the-worlds-population-growth-will-be-in-africa-by-2050/

     This is one which everybody who is nervous about mobile phones, and like me, never has it on, or on them, should watch. Apparently, even in “airplane mode” the phone can still track you, or collect data about your whereabouts:
  http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/02/07/google-tracking-you-tucker-carlsons-report-silicon-valley-surveillance-capitalism

     This got me thinking about what other little tricks have been placed in the backdoor of the technologies that we have been told are irreplaceable for modern life. But, I bet they would have a job tracking John Steele, out in the scrub, in a cammo  (not “commo”) tent, probably disguised from satellites by tree cover, with himself probably covered in mud to reduce heat signatures, like Arnie in this famous movie:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktVqsBgOvBI 

     The largely Black population of Bermuda have rejected same sex marriage and their parliament has now repealed the same sex marriage law:
  https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/bermuda-repeals-same-sex-marriage/ar-BBISJ0G?li=AAgfYrC&ocid=mailsignout 

     Predictably enough, the Left are outraged about this and have demanded good old fashioned imperialist action to keep the Bermuda Triangle, well, rainbow coloured:
  http://www.breitbart.com/london/2018/02/10/left-wing-outraged-britain-wont-imperialistically-impose-lgbt-agenda-bermuda/

     This is a good article summing up the sole point of the media today: to produce mind pollution, so that the masses can be controlled, and probably ultimately eliminated as useless eaters:

“The aim of the corporate-controlled media is to limit the expansion of your awareness and trap your mind in thought loops that play in your head like subliminal tapes, saying things like “Trump is evil” or “Communism is good.” These thought loops are engineered and scripted by experts in influence conditioning who invoke root emotions of fear, love, hatred, compassion or conformity to achieve socially-policed obedience to their agendas. All things they oppose, for example, are associated with fear and hatred (Trump, border security, military defense, etc.). Meanwhile, all things they want you to swallow are painted in the language of love or compassion (LGBT agenda, climate change, open borders, etc.).”

     This is something which we are not hearing about here in Australia, the Uranium One Scandal, involving the Left’s favourites, the Clintons:
  http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/uranium-one-scandal-moscow-routed-3-million-to-clinton-global-initiative_02082018

  https://gellerreport.com/2018/02/obama-treason-collusion-memo.html/

To THE AUSTRALIAN          Ian Buruma treads warily (‘Censorship risks moralistic kitsch’, 12/2) through the minefield of discussion of when, if ever, and how the community should censor works of art perceived as being tainted by immorality. His best observation is that ‘to judge the moral component of artistic expression, we must look not at the person who made it but at the work itself.’ Even then, however, it can be helpful to know something of the artist’s character and history.

     Balthus painted some of the finest paintings of last century, but not all will agree that ‘there is nothing that suggests moral depravity or abuse’ in some of his paintings of very young girls. By contrast, there is nothing unclean in Andrew Wyeth’s portraits of Siri Erickson; and we know how honourably he engaged in going about that work. Where Buruma slips badly is in his contrasting of the propaganda films of Eisenstein and Riefenstahl. Both have considerable artistic quality, but he succumbs to political correctness in allowing this only to the communist.
  NJ, Belgrave, Vic

     I do not know how authoritative this is because I could not find any other source reference, but Melania Trump allegedly refused to enter the White House until it had been purified:

“I’m not going to go into that White House unless it has been completely exorcised,” she is said to told Pastor Begley. “They cleansed the White House. They had people in there anointing it with oil and praying everywhere, because apparently during the eight years when Obama was there, and maybe even some of the presidents before him, there were all kinds of idol gods and images and all kinds of artifacts in there that were demonic, even some of the stuff from the Clinton era.”
https://alt-right-news.blogspot.com.au/2018/02/melania-demanded-white-house-be.html 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51ic9dnC1_I 

     So, the majority of Millennials do not know how to boil a light bulb or change an egg…wait, senile me, I got that wrong, change a light bulb and boil an egg:
  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4338132/Milennials-don-t-know-change-light-bulb.html

     The British survey showed that most, quite capable in the use of IT equipment, failed at practical domestic tasks. The survey did not venture outside of the comfortable domestic sphere, but if one considered basic survival skills previous surveys indicate that Millennials lack these skills too:
  http://www.foxnews.com/great-outdoors/2017/01/16/poll-millennials-lack-basic-survival-skills.html 

To THE AGE          Bill Shorten’s announcement (‘Labor supports Indigenous “Voice to Parliament”’, 13/2) that, if elected to power, the ALP will legislate to create such an entity ‘as a first step’, involves an irresponsible and dangerous campaign for the constitutional division of our nation. We should remember the 2002 warning of former minister for Aboriginal affairs, Peter Howson, that such a separatist agenda is ‘counterproductive to achieving genuine reconciliation and ‘has produced much misery among remote Aboriginal communities.’

     He also pointed out that ‘the reconciliation some presently pursue has become a weapon to wield against the traditional concept of Australia.’ Shorten’s proposal is not in our national interests and appears to be a sneaky way of getting around public resistance which he defames as ‘scare campaigns’. History shows (France in 1789, Russia in 1917) that foolish idealism leads to disaster.
  NJ, Belgrave, Vic

     Perhaps readers, who like me, are critics of “our” decadent, decaying universities, may find this item amusing: a US teacher, in a US college, was sacked over a dispute with a student about whether Australia is a country:
  https://www.rt.com/news/418447-university-lecturer-australia-not-country/

“Southern New Hampshire University has fired a lecturer who insisted that Australia was a continent – but not a country – and took some time to conduct “independent research” into the issue before reviewing a student’s paper. Ashley Arnold, 27, who is studying toward an online sociology degree at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), was “shocked” to learn she had failed an assignment, part of which required students to compare social norms between the United States and any other country – in her case Australia. Arnold was downgraded because her professor believed “Australia is a continent; not a country.”

     When Trump is good, he is very, very good, but when he is bad, he is wicked. However, on the question of vaccination freedom, he has been a leader, standing up against the power of Big Pharma:
  http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/president-trump-fighting-the-morlocks-one-battle-at-a-time_02122018

“The Conscience and Religious Freedom Division has been established to restore federal enforcement of our nation’s laws that protect the fundamental and unalienable rights of conscience and religious freedom. OCR is the law enforcement agency within HHS that enforces federal laws protecting civil rights and conscience in health and human services, and the security and privacy of people’s health information. The creation of the new division will provide HHS with the focus it needs to more vigorously and effectively enforce existing laws protecting the rights of conscience and religious freedom, the first freedom protected in the Bill of Rights.”
https://www.hhs.gov/conscience

To THE AUSTRALIAN          On the matter of Shakespeare’s Hamlet it seems from Barry Gillard’s review of Rhodri Lewis’s Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (‘The madness of knowing thyself’, 10-11/2) that Lewis, far from having broken free of the ‘many confines, wards and dungeons’ of the ‘solely scholarly or academic’, has become trapped there. A few simple corrections are in order. It is untrue that in Elsinore ‘no distinct framework for genuine virtue is apparent.’ We have the integrity of Hamlet himself, shown repeatedly in his behaviour, though spoiled by his psychological illness (which he labels as being ‘passion’s slave’). We also have the sterling fidelity of Horatio, the loyalty of the common soldiers and the memory of the excellent kingship of Hamlet’s father.

     Secondly, we cannot ‘cease to view the play as a tragedy based around a young man’s inability to make decisions’ without ignoring central segments of the drama. Shakespeare emphasized the delay by contrasting Hamlet’s soliloquy in Act Two with his later one in Act Four. Ernest Jones has provided the best and most comprehensive case study of the character, though his ‘solution’ of Freud’s dubious ‘Oedipus complex’ need not be accepted. Shakespeare was not ‘intolerant of late 16th century humanist conventions’; in his work as a whole he honours both kinds of knowledge of oneself mentioned by Gillard. In Hamlet he wrote with admirable understanding and compassion of a young man’s nervous breakdown, clearly precipitated by his mother’s infidelity. That, of course, is the ‘tragic flaw’ of this particular play.
  NJ, Belgrave, Vic

To THE AGE          Campaigns against ‘the far right’ need to be undertaken with caution (‘White pride blurs thin blue line’, 12/2). The term itself assumes wrongly that all political positions espoused by activists can be accurately plotted on a straight line. In reality, it is not as simple as that. The regimes of Hitler, Stalin and Mao had several very unpleasant features in common.

     The wielding of an armoury of pejorative terms (‘white supremacists’, ‘neo-Nazi’, ‘racist extremists’ and so on) is too often used unfairly against decent and honourable conservatives of Caucasian ancestry legitimately seeking to protect their peoples, religion, history and cultures in unsympathetic or hostile environments.  There is something, too, of the turncoat in people like Christian Picciolini which smells a bit.
NJ, Belgrave, Vic

     Conservative websites are celebrating Trump’s food boxes:

““The Trump administration is proposing to save billions in the coming years by giving low-income families a box of government-picked, nonperishable foods every month instead of food stamps. White House OMB Director Mick Mulvaney on Monday hailed the idea as one that kept up with the modern era, calling it a “Blue Apron-type program” — a nod to the high-end meal kit delivery company that had one of the worst stock debuts in 2017 and has struggled to hold onto customers. Mulvaney said the administration’s plan would not only save the government money, but also provide people with more nutritious food than they have now. …”
http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2018/02/13/trumps-food-boxes/

     I am not one to apply to the state of Israel a higher standard for the evaluation of actions that I would to any other nation. Further, I believe that Israel has a right to exist, and I reject the trendy Leftist notion that the Palestinian are guilt-free victims; Middle East politics is complicated and cannot be reduced to the simplistic game played by the Left in our universities. With a new term almost here, posters went up at my old university, where I make use of the library, about the Palestinian girl, Ahed Tamimi, who has been arrested, after an early hour raid at her home, for slapping an Israeli soldier after her 15 year old cousin was shot in the head:
  https://tribune.com.pk/story/1588751/3-brave-palestinian-teenager-ahed-tamimi-known-confronting-israeli-soldiers-arrested/
  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/ahed-tamimi-palestinian-girl-charged-assault-punching-slapping-israel-soldier-video-a8137096.html 

     But, this video shows Tamimi hitting and kicking Israel soldiers on another occasion, with the men not responding even after having their faces slapped:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxvG4t4SwoI 
  https://legalinsurrection.com/2017/12/ahed-tamimi-case-is-about-child-exploitation-by-anti-israel-activists/

     We are not surprised to hear almost anything coming from the politically correct land of Canada, which seems to have a national death wish, rivalled only by Sweden. The latest is to change the national anthem so that all male pronouns are removed:
  http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/02/02/canada-changing-national-anthem-remove-male-pronouns-make-lyrics-gender-neutral/

     I must admit that I was surprised because surely the really inclusive thing to have done would have been to put the entire 32 genders into the song, so that the song became a song about gender. No wonder humanity has not yet got a colony on Mars.

     The great memo is out, and here is what Natural News.com had to say, in part about this “treason” by the Deep State to keep Trump out of the White House:

“The shocking revelations uncovered in yesterday’s release of the FISA memo reveal a pattern of treason among top officials at the FBI and DOJ, warns  Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona. The FISA memo documented how the most powerful law enforcement elements of the United States government were weaponizedunder President Obama to illegally spy on Republican political targets. A secret FISA warrant application that gained approval for the spying operation was fraudulently engineered, relying largely on a fictional “dossier” of salacious lies that was largely funded by the Clinton campaign.

     Read any good books lately? Well, yes,  I have, Jordan Peterson’s latest book, 12 Rules for Life, (Random House, 2018), which is hot from the press. I was delighted to get the review copy of this from our noble editor in Adelaide, who posted this great work to me in steamy Melbourne. Readers will need no introduction to this Canadian intellectual, who has attacked all aspects of poetical, sorry I mean political  correctness, yet has still landed on his feet, so far. He has demolished feminists with ease, using cold fresh logic.

     They simply cannot stand this, being used to hysterical screaming, chanting and other irrelevant devices. If you go to YouTube you can see all of his videos, which are sheer delights. We at this site are very impressed with this youngish man (compared to old timers like me), and look forward to others joining the fight once they see that the system has feet of clay.

     I have mentioned the movement 120db:
  www.120db.info
which is a fast growing movement of German women fighting back against the rape of European women by migrants. Feminists have not only failed to speak out against this genocide, but have worked with the Left to actively suppress discussion, as this video in English mentions:
  https://www.counter-currents.com/2018/02/video-of-the-day-german-women-denounce-migrant-violence-and-political-betrayal/

     In dramatic images, it tells it all for those who still “just don’t get it,” or have their heads buried in the sand. Required homework for today.

     It is now well known that their universities engage in brainwashing of students, primarily by the time old method of indoctrination. But, things have moved to a whole new level, with the use of Soviet-style psycho technics, as seen in the old movie Clockwork Orange, to force them to be politically correct:
  https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/39393/ 

“Some San Diego State University students are undergoing what organizers acknowledge is a “disturbing” series of “sensory experiences” in an attempt to drive out students’ prejudicial tendencies and help make them less oppressive. The annual workshop, “Journey to a Shared Humanity,” is described on the university’s website as a way for organizers to get students to “step outside their comfort zone and into the shoes of those who are struggling with oppressive circumstances.” This year, some students were required to attend the event as part of their classes. During the experience, students are walked through a darkened multipurpose room to view a series of theatrical vignettes acted out by campus leaders.”