Simply superb: Steyn on the future, in the Speccie. What can I say? I agree with every word. I'll link the print version too, as it's an article that deserves to be read whole. He picks out so many of the telling instances that epitomise the looming realities that are making so much of the current baggage of thought that passes for politics in the UK just that: baggage.

To give one example, I'm sure a lot of people noticed an appalling 'Christian' Aid advert recently. Well, Natalie Solent noticed it. Steyn says:

'in the Guardian last week, Christian Aid took out the following advertisement: ‘It’s not called slavery nowadays. It’s called free trade.’

Yeah, sure. I’d love to email to India the CAT-scan of whichever Christian Aid wallah thought that would work, even as overheated rhetoric. The popular British ‘charity’ is campaigning for what it calls ‘trade justice’: ‘Poor countries must be given the freedom to help their own farmers and industries.’ By ‘poor countries’ they mean the dictators and crooks and incompetents who run ‘poor countries’; by ‘given the freedom to help’ they mean encouraged in the delusions that have made ‘poor countries’ out of once prosperous territories.'

So, what we can say is that whatever is the right thing to do by the developing world- or whatever the latest apologetic term is- we're not doing it by placing our trust in the likes of Christian Aid, and we're not doing it by trusting State proxies, or the nice GDP percentage targets of aid that everyone murmurs assent to, from Left and Right alike in British politics.

Moreover, we're not learning about that failure from the BBC- quite the opposite. They tell us about capitalist criminality, the failure of UK and US politicians, the outdatedness of global corporations (a photo-article, unavailable to links, asked the question, 'is the Burger giant showing its age?'): you name it, anything but the real waste of western wealth and western advantages that the statist projects of western nations entail.