Older America.
The median age of Americans is now 38.8, a figure brought up from last decade's 37.2 due to the obvious advance in aging of the Baby Boomers and the decline in the birth rate.
This is not a surprise, nor a disaster, contrary to how it seems to be sometimes portrayed. The median will obviously advance into the 40s shortly.
This brings up this next item, from the Adam Smith blog:
Older World
That headline wouldn't seem to make sense at first, but it actually does in context.
One of the things that people are wringing their hands about is the declining birth rate all over the world.
This brings up piles of incorrect analysis and ignored facts. In the short term, by which we mean very short term, you can find plenty of pundits, often of the environmentalist inclination, still giving Malthusian warnings that we're about to breed ourselves into oblivion. In fact, the data shows that in most regions of the glob, the trend is reversing, and in some very much reversed.
Which brings up the next example of hand wringing. Conservatives at first, but now liberals as well, are worried about the demographic death of entire societies. Some countries are now at the point where they're doing something that hasn't been done for eons, which is to take official measures to encourage couples to have children.
The Adam Smith institution isn't worked about it. They state:
This past century has included glorious events - the economic liberation of women for one. The result of that freedom and liberty is fewer children. Oh well, that’s just what humans want to do with their freedom and liberty.
It’s therefore the politics that needs to change, nothing else. For the people have spoken in their most intimate acts and decisions.
It might well be true that some don’t like that aggregate result, the society that results from freedom. But bully for the complaint, not the acts.
And there's a lot to that statement.
Frankly, almost all the angst over declining birth rates is misplaced. Some of it isn't, but much of it is. We're about to enter an era in which there will be much reduced employment in advanced societies, for one thing. Another is that frankly, societies with smaller populations are much nicer to live in, something that politicians in the US don't seem to grasp. Lots of countries passed the level in which they were really nice to live in some time ago, including for that matter much of the US. An overall declining population reverses that.
And it doesn't cause economic disaster, as so often predicted.
At any rate, no matter how a person feels about it, what Adam Smith notes is in fact the case. Reversing the trend at the present time is darned near impossible. I think it will reverse, or stabilize, but not during my lifetime. Probably when, for example, Europe reaches an overall population below 200,000,000, and North America's is about the same. That's quite a ways off.
I'm not commenting, I'd note, on the moral aspects of this, which is in fact an aspect of it. But in an era in the West, at least, that large sections of the population can no longer actually tell what is naturally male and female, and we're back to the era in which "science" supports a societal movement that's wrong, much like it once did with Eugenics, race science, and many other now despised movements of the past that claimed scientific basis, we're probably not going to see much progress in this area, whatever progress would mean.
Speaking of a country with a declining population, and a tradition of baby bonuses, we have Russia, which gives us this. . .
Field Wife
Not really a surprise.
As with all things Russian military, pretty horrific, but with long-standing precedence in the Russian military.
We have a long paused thread on women in armed forces which will be unpopular, but we'd start off with this. Mistreatment of women in any military is very common. The conditions are prefect for it.
They're also perfect for giving rise to temptations that are hard to address and are embarrassing to address when they arise. The U.S. Armed Forces have been working on this for decades, presenting it mostly as a male abuser on female victim situation, which is large true, but it wasn't all that long ago that the Marines had to come in and order female Marines to quit posting nude photos of themselves on line, such as a photo of a group of female Marines stationed in the Middle East running on a beach naked. Everyone knows where this is going.
Suffice it to say, the circumstances of military life. In spite of ongoing American hagiography about servicemen, Kipling's 1890 poem Tommy remains just as true for U.S. troops on some things, including this:
We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
This doesn't excuse the conduct, but eradicating it would require eradicating the situation, which we're not going to do.
And we aren't the Russians. The Russians aren't going to do any such thing with their military.
The recent war in Ukraine has shown, to a very large degree, that the Russian Army is the Red Army, and the Red Army was an overrated armed gang for parts of its history, and just overrated when that wasn't true. It was an armed gang in the immediate post Civil War period, and certainly during the Second War. Its aura of greatness was heavily impacted by Soviet propaganda. In reality, rape was a common thing once it crossed out of Soviet territory and the taking of "field wives" very common. So much so that it was a major source of domestic strife in the post-war Soviet Union, as men's actual wives knew that their husbands had engaged in both behaviors.
Believing that your enemy is impressive is wise, but in realty, the Red Army was not all that good in the Cold War, and the Russian Army isn't now.
We'll get back around to the Russian Army momentarily. Sticking with our current theme. . .
Exploitation suit dismissed.
I was going to report on this headline some time ago.
Olivia Hussey, then 15 and now 71, and Leonard Whiting, then 16 now 72, filed the suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court alleging sexual abuse, sexual harassment and fraud.
This in regard to their nude scenes in Romeo & Juliet.
They basically alleged that they were told that nudity they posed for would not actually be shown, when Hussey's breasts briefly were, and Whiting's butt was as well, and that they suffered years of shame as a result. The suit sought punitive damages for an act which was illegal, at the time, under California's law, but which obviously nobody did anything about at the time. They were asking for $100 million in punitive damages, but theoretically could receive more than $500 million to match what the film has earned since 1968, apparently.
If you are wondering how this could be brought now, California temporarily suspended the statute of limitations for older claims of child sexual abuse, which expired at the end of 2022.
This is an interesting development for a number of reasons.
One is that the nude scenes were noted at the time, but obviously, nothing was done about it. Indeed, while the scenes noted above are the ones that have been picked up by the press, Hussey's also had at least one scene in which she rolls over while inclined, exposing her full bare back and rear. At least one poster for the movie depicts an illustration of a nude Hussey on a nude Whiting, although you can't see the generally forbidden features.
This film isn't really unique in this regard. A little later, but not much, a genuinely shocking scene was included in 1976's Ode To Bobby Joe, which is an overall horrifically bad film, but which had some popularity at the time. The whole film is incredibly stupid, but it also features a nearly nude scene. The actors were in fact in their majority when it was filmed, but they're portraying, at least in the case of the female lead, underage teenagers. It's really pretty sick overall.
And recently, because of her bringing it back up, the public has had the opportunity to ponder the films Pretty Baby and The Blue Lagoon. Ick.
If nothing else tells us something about the moral depravity of the late 60s and the entire 1970s.
Anyhow, I don't know much about Whiting, but Hussey went on to be a famous actress, somewhat discrediting the claim that they subsequently lost roles. Indeed, given the moral climate of the late 60s and entire 70s, I doubt it. Her career actually goes back to 1964, at which time she was very clearly still a child, and she was cast as the Virgin Mary in 1977, when she still would have been quite young. Interesting, FWIW, her age in Romeo & Juliet would have been closer to what Mary's is speculated to have been at the time of the birth of Jesus, but the point is that her reputation hadn't been so tarnished as to keep her from getting the role of the most significant of all the female saints.
Oddly, FWIW, my high school English teacher, who later was arrested and convicted on what we might call a morals charge, didn't like her portrayal of the Virgin Mary, but did like the portrayal in Romeo & Juliet, in part due to his perception that her depictions in both were juvenile.
I haven't seen Jesus of Nazareth, that latter film, and I've only seen part of Romeo & Juliet. I don't like Romeo & Juliet, the play, as it strikes me as boring and juvenile, and the parts of the movie I've seen, years ago, struck me as boring at the time.
Hussey also portrayed, Mother Teresa in a 2003 television movie,
Anyway, I feel they were exploited, if they brought their suit to address it a bit late. The California judge did not, stating that they, "have not put forth any authority showing the film here can be deemed to be sufficiently sexually suggestive as a matter of law to be held to be conclusively illegal.”
Too bad, in my view.
Maybe just bringing it to light, however, served an overall good purpose.
Let's go back to topics Slavic.
Where's the offensive?
In much of the Northern Hemisphere, it's late Spring, and we were expecting a Ukrainian offensive.
Well, maybe we'll get one, or maybe not (we probably will), but what seems to be the case is that spring came late to Ukraine, and everything is really muddy. Therefore, the Rasputitia is still ongoing.
The Ukrainians, in the meantime, are using the time, it appears, to their training and logistical advantage.
Without getting into it too deeply, the Ukrainians also seem to have managed to cause the Russians to fight a 2023 version of the Battle of Khe Sanh.
Speaking of things with a long past. . .
Charles the Third, by the Grace of God King of Canada and His other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth.’
Canada has changed the honorifics for the King, or Queen.
The late Queen was known as ‘Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom, Canada and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.
Changing the titles of people in this fashion says something. And in this case, not something good.
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