Monthly Archives: December 2025

True, But

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A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Friday installment of its Letters section suggested a solution to our nation’s baby-birth dearth.

The problem isn’t finances—it’s perceived inconvenience.
Children are a responsibility: a limitation on us in an age of careerism and radical individualism. But they also contain a hidden wealth that exceeds anything else—and hope for the future. We need to stop framing decisions about childrearing as simply another cost-benefit analysis and present young people with a more beautiful vision of what family life can be and do for the world.

The problem, though, also includes this simple, critical fact: today’s young people have already experienced what family life is, not hypothetical “can be’s.”

It’s necessary to address that realized experience in these proposed presentations. Absent that, such presentations will be perceived as just another installment in the empty words of lectures by older generations.

On Whose Side Are They?

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Via Deputy SecState Christopher Landau:The data are for the Biden administration years of 2022-2024. As Landau pointed out, the money sent to Russia is in blue; the money sent to Ukraine is in orange. This is how much the nations of Europe really care about Ukraine and their own security. The money transfers to the barbarian invader pales the paltry financial and equipment support those nations have been offering Ukraine. Only the UK was sending more aid to Ukraine than to Russia; that has been colored by the UK’s access to North Sea oil and natural gas.

This, despite the hooraw over the US’ apparently fading support for Ukraine.

As usual, right click on the image and select Open Link in New Tab to enlarge the image.

H/t @ralflongwalker

Actually, Some of Us Do

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Greg Ip, writing in The Wall Street Journal, has an extensive article delineating how the People’s Republic of China is growing economically at the direct expense of the rest of the world.

Far from missing the opportunities of an international free market process whereby everyone gains, the PRC is doing this deliberately. Its overtly stated goal is to economically dominate (not effectively compete with) us. Its unstated but longer term goal is to economically dominate the rest of the world.

And with economic domination comes political domination.

Ip’s subheadline, though, isn’t entirely accurate:

No one knows how to cope with Beijing’s “beggar thy neighbor” economic model

Some of us do know how. The PRC is an enemy nation. This is amply demonstrated by the PRC’s control and use as national security-threatening weapons of such Critical Items as rare earths, both ore and processed, and of the basic components of medicines. The PRC’s enmity toward us is corroborated by their “graduate students'” efforts to smuggle into our nation, via university labs, fungi that if loosed would severely damage if not wipe out, much of our food plant agriculture.

We should be doing no economic business with the at all; the cease and desist will eliminate the PRC’s economic weapons. It will be extremely expensive and disruptive for us to pull our supply chains entirely out of the PRC and to stop selling anything at all to the PRC or its companies and buying anything from them, but it will only grow more expensive as we delay moving. But those expenses will pale compared to the cost of having our economy and our politics controlled by the PRC.

Who Tested this Stuff?

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Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram (which he controls through his Meta) claims to be protecting child users from predators.

However.

When Instagram began fencing off teen accounts last year for safety reasons, content from people under 18 all but vanished for adults.
Teen accounts were automatically private, and posts and reels from those accounts no longer circulated in the Explore tab and main feeds, except in the case of adults who were already following teens. Predators suddenly had a lot harder time finding targets.

Actually, not so much.

But two moms affiliated with the family-advocacy organization ParentsTogether Action discovered a workaround, which they shared with me: When a teen account comments on a public post or video reel, and an adult account that hasn’t already been flagged for suspicious behavior sees it, the adult can chat up the teen in the comments and even send that teen a follow request. If the teen accepts, the two can engage in private direct messaging.

Those direct messages can—as these tests also proved—include nude picture exchanges, and then the sextortion operations can begin.

Zuckerberg’s claims, through his Instagram team, regarding these exchanges:

When the test accounts shared nude images with one another, they initially appeared blurred in the teen account, but the teen account user could opt to view the photos. Instagram says its nudity protection feature—on by default for teen accounts and including warnings about the dangers of sharing such images—has encouraged teens to think twice. In June, more than 40% of blurred images received in direct messages remained blurred, the company says.

And 60% did not remain blurred, apparently. If Zuckerberg’s Instagram programmers are that capable of identifying the teen accounts, why are nude images allowed to be transmitted to them at all?

These “workarounds” are so obvious that I have to question how seriously Zuckerberg is taking these threats to our children.

Who tested this stuff? Apparently, no one qualified or serious.

A Thought on the National Security Strategy Doc

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The Wall Street Journal‘s news writers had some, and so I have one.

The document underscores how radically the Trump administration is reshaping traditional American foreign policy, and it is likely to deepen divisions in the trans-Atlantic alliance, which has largely kept the peace in Europe since World War II and promoted Western values across the world.

Who has kept the peace? Only one member of the alliance.

It’s possible this doc is of a piece with Trump I’s statements that European NATO nations have been welching on their own commitments to NATO for too long, and maybe the alliance isn’t worth our trouble, blood, or treasure anymore, especially since it’s been us who’ve kept the peace all these years. It was us who flew the Berlin Airlift, it was us all along who was ready to risk nuclear war’s destruction across our homeland to defend Europe against potential Russia-led attacks.

Trump I’s threats were followed, if fitfully, by many of those nations finally stepping up and honoring their fiscal and equipage commitments. Still, though, one-third of those nations continue to welch on their commitments.

There’s this, too:

The strategy says the EU—an institution that the US helped establish decades ago—and other transnational organizations “undermine political liberty and sovereignty.”

What the WSJ is ignoring here is that we helped establish the EU as an economic union, which was the EU founders’ goal, also. Since then, the operators of the EU have been trying to transmogrify the economic union into its own national entity—and that attacks the member nations’ individual sovereignty. This is the mother of all mission creeps.

Maybe the NSS document is another prod, after too many decades of pretty please.

Or maybe not. But it’s interesting that the WSJ chooses to ignore any interpretation that differs from its own.