BIDEN WAS HIS TYPICAL MEAN-SPIRITED SELF, JOST’S TELETYPE SEEMED TO HAVE THE PAUSE’S LEFT OUT OF BIDENS (DON RICKLES WOULD HAVE GOTTEN OFF FIVE SHOTS FOR EVERY TWO JOST MANAGED):  Trump trashes ‘absolute disaster’ White House Correspondents’ Dinner, takes jabs at Colin Jost.

DEFUND, DESERT, DEPRECATE:  Columbia University: NYPD Not Permitted To Oust Anti-Israel Illegal Occupiers.

RELIGION OF PIECES:  Egypt: Islamist Mobs Attack Christians, Set Fire to Homes.

MOSTLY BECAUSE EVEN HE KNOWS NO ONE REALLY BUYS HIS VERSION OF THINGS:  Biden Forgets the All-Important Date of January 6th During Speech at High-End Democratic Fundraiser.

In addition to the memory conditions attendant on being a lych, of course.

WELL, OF COURSE IT DOES:  ALERT: ‘American Privacy Rights Act of 2024’ Sneaks In Quotas.

OH, SURE. THERE WON’T POSSIBLY BE ANY UNFORESEEN COMPLICATIONS CAUSE BY USING THIS STUFF…  ‘Exciting’: Scientists discover carbon-storing material.

PEOPLE WHO CLAIMED THAT TRUMP COMMITTED TREASON, AND WHO DESCRIBE VINCE FOSTER’S DEATH AS A SUICIDE ALSO DESCRIBE NAVALNY AS NOT MURDERED BY PUTIN:  US Intelligence Community Pronounces Putin Totally Not Involved in Ordering Alexei Navalny’s Prison Death.

YOU HAVE TO HAVE A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH LIKE AN HYENA:  University of Washington group cancels encampment for being too white.

OPEN THREAD: I do it all for you.

BACK WHEN I WAS ON THE NASA PLANETARY DEFENSE SUBCOMMITTEE, THIS WAS PART OF OUR PURVIEW: ‘Astrobiodefense:’ Thinktank calls for defending Earth from space bugs.

WELL, GOOD: Common Blood Pressure Drug Increases Lifespan And Slows Aging in Animals. I hope it works in humans.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA Astronauts Gear Up for Boeing Starliner’s Groundbreaking Test Flight.

THIS IS HARDLY NEWS: Taking the stairs may up the odds for a longer life. “Folks who regularly climb stairs have a 24% reduced risk of dying from any cause, and a 39% reduced risk of dying from heart disease, compared to those who always take the elevator, researchers found. Stair climbing also is associated with a lower risk of developing heart disease or suffering a heart attack, heart failure or stroke, results show.”

Of course, healthier people are more likely to take the stairs to begin with.

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN! Back in 1968, Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, kicking off a whole slew of doomsday literature and documentaries, and similarly-apocalyptic science fiction movies from Hollywood that wouldn’t stop until the massive success of George Lucas’ Star Wars completely upended the American movie industry in 1977. Perhaps leftist “intellectuals” were simply driven utterly mad when Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968; this 2010 segment of Matt Novak’s Paleofuture YouTube series gives a hint of the tone of the first half of the 1970s:

And with Trump showing surprisingly good poling numbers (insert the usual insta-reminder to eschew cockiness here), the Politico have dusted off their bell-bottom jeans, platform shoes, grown some groovy long sideburns, and is ready to boogie on back to the doomsday population trend! The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population.

The threat, we are told here this weekend, is existential, biological, epoch-defining. Economies will fail, civilizations will fall, and it will all happen because people aren’t having enough babies.

“The entire global financial system, the value of your money, and every asset you might buy with money is defined by leverage, which means its value depends on growth,” Kevin Dolan, a 37-year-old father of six from Virginia, tells the crowd that has gathered to hear him speak. “Every country in the developed world and most countries in the developing world face long-term population decline at a level that makes growth impossible to maintain,” Dolan says, “which means we are sitting on the bubble of all bubbles.”

Despite this grim prognosis, the mood is optimistic. It’s early December, a few weeks before Christmas, and the hundred-odd people who have flocked to Austin for the first Natal Conference are here to come up with solutions. Though relatively small, as conferences go, NatalCon has attracted attendees who are almost intensely dedicated to the cause of raising the U.S. birth rate. The broader natalist movement has been gaining momentum lately in conservative circles — where anxieties over falling birth rates have converged with fears of rising immigration — and counts Elon Musk, who has nearly a dozen children, and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán among its proponents. Natalism is often about more than raising birth rates, though that is certainly one of its aims; for many in the room, the ultimate goal is a total social overhaul, a culture in which child-rearing is paramount.

NatalCon’s emphasis on childbirth notwithstanding, there are very few women in the cavernous conference room of the LINE Hotel. The mostly male audience includes people of all ages, many of whom are childless themselves. Some of the women in attendance, however, have come to Austin with their children in tow — a visual representation of the desired outcome of this weekend. As if to emphasize the reason we’re all gathered here today, a baby babbles in the background while Dolan delivers his opening remarks.

Broadly speaking, the people who have paid as much as $1,000 to attend the conference are members of the New Right, a conglomeration of people in the populist wing of the conservative movement who believe we need seismic changes to the way we live now — and who often see the past as the best model for the future they’d like to build. Their ideology, such as it exists, is far from cohesive, and factions of the New Right are frequently in disagreement. But this weekend, these roughly aligned groups, from the libertarian-adjacent tech types to the Heritage Foundation staffers, along with some who likely have no connection with traditionally conservative or far-right causes at all, have found a unifying cause in natalism.

This just in: religious people seek to make babies! Speaking of which, the Politico’s long-form article feels much like a Bizarro World version of Mark Steyn’s America Alone book from 2006, which grew out of a lengthy Wall Street Journal and New Criterion article Steyn published at the beginning of that year headlined, “It’s the Demography, Stupid.”

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands–probably–just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.

One obstacle to doing that is that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the West are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society–government health care, government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced). We’ve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith and, most basic of all, reproductive activity–“Go forth and multiply,” because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare.

Americans sometimes don’t understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don’t think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health and Human Services.

The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion. The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths–or, at any rate, virtues–and that’s why they’re proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.

Speaking of which, if we are at war–and half the American people and significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada and Europe don’t accept that proposition–then what exactly is the war about?

We know it’s not really a “war on terror.” Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even “radical Islam.” The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it’s easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in “Palestine,” Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.

I eagerly await Politico exploring that topic.

TREAT YOURSELF: Snailax Shiatsu Neck and Shoulder Massager. #CommissionEarned

YOU ARE FUNDING CAMPUS HATE: Well, if you pay your federal taxes, that is. Open the Books dug into the federal spending database and found that, for example, Columbia University got $5.7 billion from the feds between 2018 and 2022. Harvard, Yale and pretty every other school that has allowed anti-semitic demonstrations in recent weeks also got in on the beaucoup bucks. Check out my latest column on PJMedia.

THE EV BUBBLE DEFLATES: Hyundai will build more hybrids to supplement slowing EV demand.

SECRET BALLOTS ALLOW THE SILENT MAJORITY TO SPEAK: Israeli student elected by Columbia for role of student president as protests surge. “Columbia University has elected Israeli student Maya Platek as Columbia student government president for the 2024-2025 school year, the organization Students Supporting Israel (SSI) announced Friday. The election of an Israeli student for the role comes as the Columbia campus experiences an overwhelming wave of anti-Israel protests and encampments. Platek has been determined to speak up for Jewish students on campus as a member of SSI, an organization that, according to its website, aims to allow for a pro-Israel voice on college campuses.”

Bullying is much harder when you can’t identify targets. And the left’s power on campus — and most everywhere else — is based on bullying.