Urtica Ferox

The Sensible Royal Promotes GM and Rejects Veganism “ 'Perhaps my biggest irritation is single-issue groups.” Well said, Princess Anne, the royal who has had a much lower profile than her fiasco-prone brother, Charles. And she appears to disagree vehemently with Charles on a number of environmental issues. Regarding the genetic modification (GM) of crops, she recently said, “It has been an enormous advantage in many parts of the world to use GM wisely for very specific environments. It makes it much more likely to be able to grow what you need.” Princess Anne also rejects the automatic linking of the Australian bushfires to climate change, and with regard to veganism believes that “You can’t have a world without livestock. They are a necessary and very constructive part of our expectation to feed ourselves.” Such measured common sense is rare in the hysterically divisive world we live in today. Perhaps she doesn’t spend any time at all on social media?  Read more . 

Old White Men Lead the Suicide Statistics in US “Deaths of Despair”: So Are They Privileged? I admit to being late reading Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019), but it deserves its praise and popularity. As I expected it gives copious, well-selected examples of the illogical derangement of the Left on these issues, but Murray ties them together with carefully reasoned argument. As a result the book avoids the breathless rush that journalists often adopt when writing on current affairs, reflecting both Murray’s educational background and the fact that he has written several books before, including The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017). You should read The Madness of Crowds , although you’ll need to be in an up mood, because it is depressing stuff. In this post I want to focus on a quotation Murray gives in the book’s conclusion. He quotes Mark Lilla (p. 240), a writer and Professor of Humanities at Colum

Slavery Thrives in the UK Today, While the Left Tear Down Historical Statues I know. I get it. People only see what they want to see. But sometimes the discrepancy and the irony are hard to stomach. Especially when people are agonising about whether Gone with the Wind portrays slavery in the wrong light and real slavery is happening on their doorstep. According to a report in Breitbart: "A report by the think tank the Centre for Social Justice and the anti-slavery charity Justice and Care says that nearly 100,000 slaves are working across Britain, around ten times more than 2017 government estimates." "The slavery is being coordinated by “ruthless criminal networks” and ranges from hard labour, crime, domestic servitude, to prostitution, with children also being trafficked for exploitation. Gangsters are said to be working in conjunction with people traffickers to bring in and exploit illegal immigrants, including those from the Middle East, who along with 

Black Lives Matter, but How Do We Decide Who is Black? [David Wolcott originally published this article several months ago, but the world has changed drastically since then and it is worth repurposing. With Black Lives Matter having such an extreme effect on the Left, from young university students to leaders of industry, their policy calls have to be taken seriously. For example, the idea of reparations , cancelling of debt, and interest-free mortgages,  as suggested by the New York Times , means that huge health and welfare difference could arise between two families living side-by-side on a suburban street based on whether one can validly claim to be black. With so much at stake, self-identification may not be enough, but any alternatives involving proof of blackness take us down a very difficult road, highlighting the dangers of distributing society's wealth based on racial identity. Harry Wiren] I have in front of me a well-thumbed copy of the 12th edition (201

Is David Starkey a Racist? Until a week or so ago, possibly the darkest stain on Cambridge University's recent history was the so-called Cambridge Spy Ring, a group of young men recruited from Cambridge in the 1930s to pass intelligence to the Soviet Union. The most well known were Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Donald Maclean. Given that they acted as spies for the Russians during and after World War II, this was a serious, indeed treasonous, offence.  Another Cambridge graduate, Bertrand Russell, had travelled to Russia in 1920, and despite meeting Lenin and being given the grand tour he came away with grave doubts about the Russian Revolution. Not so the lads of the Cambridge Spy Ring, who ignored Stalin's subsequent horrific slaughter and starvation of his own people, clinging for decades to the belief that Soviet communism was the best available political system. Doubtless they lived in their own echo chamber, which admitted no doubt, no contrary information. 

The Long March Through the Institutions In 1988 I was working as a proof reader for a typesetting company, and we were commissioned to produce political material for the (conservative) New Zealand National Party. I happened to walk past the work benches and James (not his real name), who was fervently left wing, was laughing about the finished print-out for the National Party. He had changed one digit in the contact phone number as a form of political protest, calculating that it wouldn't be noticed but would prevent people getting in touch. It was my first intimation of the long march. Sometimes you need a name for something in order to see it clearly, in order to pull together a whole range of disparate events and perceive the pattern in retrospect. I no longer read novels, respect teachers, take any notice of the the mainstream media, or feel able to discuss virtually anything at all with friends, family and workmates. This is all because the left has been stunningl