Entries by MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities

A window is opening to show the shameful record of state schools on sexual abuse

Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse wound up in December 2017. In five years, it held 8,000 private sessions, held 444 days of public hearing, heard more than 1,200 witness, commission more than 100 research papers, examined more than 1.2 million documents, and generated more than 45,400 pages of transcripts. The final report comprised […]

A crisis of parenting is the root cause of America’s rapid secularization

Not long ago, I asked a young tradesman to quote on a job. We’ll call him Bruno. We began talking and I mentioned that I was a Catholic. “Religion,” he said, “that’s a good thing.” I asked what his was and he told me that he was a Muslim. “But,” Bruno added. “I wasn’t always […]

Greenhouse Gas Abatement that Makes Some Sense: Methane-Sniffing Drones

Bad old carbon dioxide is not the only gas that contributes to the earth’s net heat balance by trapping heat in the atmosphere. Another commonly used gas — methane, the chief constituent of natural gas — is more than 25 times as effective as CO₂ in trapping heat. Fortunately, methane’s lifetime in the atmosphere is […]

Catholic Church beatifies heroic Polish family who sheltered their Jewish neighbours

1944: in a year of atrocities, March 24 was an unremarkable day. In Rome, 335 civilians and political prisoners died in the Ardeatine massacre. A few thousand more were probably gassed in death camps. The murder of 17 people — eight Jews and a Polish family of nine in the small village of Markowa — […]

Elon Musk aims to turn Twitter into an ‘everything app’

Elon Musk’s recent rebranding of Twitter as X is a step toward the CEO’s goal of developing an “everything app.” Musk’s vision is for X to mark the spot for all your digital needs – to chat with your friends, order groceries, watch videos and manage your finances, all on one platform. His recent announcement might have left you […]

Wokeness, not climate change, is to blame in Maui

Over 111 lives have been lost in the tragic Maui fires that wiped the historic township of Lahaina off the map and have left authorities searching for another possible 1,000 victims. Like clockwork, corporate newsrooms have concluded that a climate apocalypse is to blame. “The explanation is as straightforward as it is sobering,” the New York […]

Which is More Frightening: Global Warming or Demographic Winter?

Ross Douthat holds the dubious distinction of token conservative at the New York Times. Of course, what passes for conservative at the Times doesn’t hold a candle to what’s considered conservative here in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Nonetheless, Mr Douthat leads me to believe that his employment notwithstanding, he may be aware that flyover country matters. Word is […]

Parents need to wake up to the danger of trans ideology, says child psychiatrist

This is an excerpt from the introduction to Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness, the latest book by American psychiatrist Miriam Grossman. When I graduated from medical school, I took an oath. I stood up, raised my right hand, and vowed to prevent disease whenever I could. At the time, […]

The era of ‘global boiling’ has arrived, and dissidents will have to walk the plank

In the northern hemisphere, July has been hot. Very hot. Along the rim of the Mediterranean, more than 40 people have died and wildfires are raging. In Death Valley, California, the thermometer hit 50C (122F) on several days. Phoenix smashed the record for consecutive days above 110 F (43.3C) as of yesterday – 31. The […]

How Refreshing: An Actual Debate on Transgenderism on Capitol Hill

“I am a detransitioner. Another way to put that would be I used to think I was born in the wrong body, and the adults in my life, whom I trusted, affirmed my belief. And this caused me lifelong, irreversible harm. I speak to you today as the victim of one of the biggest medical […]

Driven Mad by Eugenics: A True Crime Drama from Spain

There used to be one issue which all ethicists condemned — eugenics. Even today, the horrors of state-sponsored eugenics are vivid – the Nazi extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and disabled people or the sterilisation of the “feeble-minded” in the US, Canada, Sweden and elsewhere. However, rebadged as “liberal eugenics”, this philosophy is making a […]

There has never been a ‘matriarchy’

We can watch the Barbie film and have a conversation about the gender pay gap, domestic violence, motherhood, female genital mutilation, the history of the suffragist movement, and so on. We may not agree on these topics, but they would at least invite reasonable discussions. But as is often the case with issues in which woke crusaders […]

America’s most left-wing university launches ‘Journal of Right-Wing Studies’

A band of academics from America’s most left-wing university have just launched a new journal for “right-wing studies”. What could possibly go wrong? If one were to write a detailed chronology of the cancel culture phenomenon, the University of California, Berkeley, would feature prominently. This fact is somewhat ironic given UC Berkeley’s pivotal role in […]

All in good time, but people of faith are going to inherit the earth

Intrepid demographer Lyman Stone is at it again, breaching the bounds of political correctness with an astute, thought-provoking analysis, Religion and Fertility in Canada. His conclusion: Canadian women who attend religious services at least monthly desire to have more children, spend more of their life married, and ultimately have more children than nominally religious or nonreligious […]

A Bold Blueprint for Replacing the Liberal Elite

“Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future“ by Patrick Deneen is the follow-up work to the University of Notre Dame professor’s influential 2018 work, “Why Liberalism Failed.” In that book, Deneen had castigated the prevailing liberal political philosophy for placing too much emphasis on individual autonomy, thus sowing the seeds of its eventual decay amidst rising […]