Gillagain 🙂 @gillagain

I'm Japanese. Americans who visit my country tend to come home with the same question: how did Japan stay Japan? They watched trains leave on the exact second. They left a phone on a café table, came back an hour later, and found it still sitting there next to the cold coffee. Some of them read that in 2023 people in Tokyo turned in more than 4 billion yen in lost cash to the police, and assumed it was a typo. It wasn't. There are two halves to the answer. Most people who praise Japan online only know the first one. For America, the second one matters more. THE FIRST HALF: HOW WE KEPT OURSELVES It starts in July 1853, when Commodore Perry brought four black ships to the mouth of Edo Bay and pointed his guns at a country that had been closed for over two hundred years. Across the sea, China had just lost the Opium War and was being forced open by foreign powers. Japan's leaders could see exactly what happened to old civilizations that refused to change. So they changed faster than any nation ever had. But they did it under a rule: wakon yōsai. Japanese spirit, Western technique. Take the railways, the steel, the constitution, the navy. Leave the self-contempt at the dock. That rule survived everything that came after. War, defeat, two atomic bombs, nearly seven years of American occupation. We copied your factories and then beat you at cars. I was going to write that no Japanese classroom ever taught us our civilization was a crime. That's not quite true. After 1945 a lot of teachers taught a very guilty version of the war, and Japanese conservatives have been fighting over those textbooks for decades. But the guilt stayed inside the history lesson. It never became a theory of everything, the way it did in your universities. Nobody told us our language was oppressive, or that the family was a structure of domination, or that being good at math was a form of privilege. Foreign residents are still about 3 percent of the population. When outsiders called us closed, most people shrugged and went back to work. For a long time I thought that shrug was a weakness, a kind of stubborn provincialism. I've changed my mind. I think it's most of what a border actually is: a people quietly sure it has something worth keeping. So American conservatives are right about Japan. Confidence in your own culture works. We are the proof. THE SECOND HALF: HOW WE ARE DISAPPEARING In 1949, about 2.7 million babies were born in Japan. In 2024 it was 686,061. The first time I saw that number I assumed I was reading the wrong column. I wasn't. Our fertility rate is 1.15. The population peaked around 2008 and has shrunk every year since. There are mountain villages now where the only new things are the vending machines. And this didn't happen under the left. One conservative party, the LDP, has governed Japan for almost all of the last seventy years. No woke revolution, no open borders, no defund the police. The right won the culture war here before it started. The country is shrinking anyway. What went wrong is economic, and it's very old. On the last trading day of 1989 the Nikkei closed at 38,915. Then the bubble burst. The banks were sitting on mountains of bad loans, and instead of letting failed companies fail, they kept lending them fresh money so nobody had to admit the losses. Economists later called them zombie firms; Caballero, Hoshi and Kashyap documented the whole thing in 2008. The Nikkei didn't get back to its 1989 high until February 2024. Thirty-four years. The zombies were kept alive at someone's expense, and it was the young. To hold the old structure up, the system protected the people already inside: lifetime jobs for the men hired before the crash, pay by seniority, pensions no politician dared touch because old people vote. Whoever arrived after 1990 got what was left. Today close to four in ten workers are non-regular, on short contracts or part-time or sent in by agencies, and men in those jobs marry far less often than men with permanent ones. Nobody plans a family on a contract that ends in March. Real wages are still lower than in 1996. Government debt is well over 200 percent of GDP, the highest in the developed world. When the government finally admitted the birth crisis, it did what governments do and announced a program: about 3.6 trillion yen a year for children. Births kept falling. Have you ever seen a bonsai up close? You take a tree that wants to grow thirty meters tall, and every year you cut back its roots and wire its branches so it keeps exactly the same shape. Some live for centuries. They're beautiful. They never get any bigger. That's what conservatism becomes when it only preserves and never builds. We protected everything, including the things that should have been allowed to die. In 2022 Elon wrote that unless something changes, Japan will eventually cease to exist. A lot of people here called it rude. I was annoyed too, for about a day. Then I looked at the census again. WHAT AMERICA SHOULD TAKE FROM THIS Japan shows you can keep your culture without apologizing for it. Don't let anyone tell you that pride in your country is the problem. Japan also shows that a nation can get culture right and still lose, if it protects its old companies, its old voters and its old arrangements against its own young people. It dies politely, with clean streets and trains on time. You still have what we lost: a system that lets things fail and lets new things be born. Bankruptcy, startups, people who move across the country for a better job. Elon is a product of that system. Every bailout, every subsidy for a company that should have died, every rule that protects the insider against the newcomer moves you a little closer to us. If you know someone who says "America should just be more like Japan," send them this. Both halves. A nation isn't saved by preserving its past. It's saved by having someone to hand it to.

@ShruggingRoman @catturd2 😂

@catturd2 Maybe reactions to the City of Toronto will take the heat off Ireland, where an NGO used taxpayers’ money to produce this gem. 🤦

Europa.com @europa

4 days ago

🇮🇪 The Irish state has published an advert discouraging grandparents from hugging their grandchildren, as part of a campaign designed to promote "consent".

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I'm on a plane to Ireland tonight. Tomorrow a man goes on trial for a tweet. I'm writing this from the airport. In a few hours I'll be in the air, and tomorrow morning I'll be sitting in the public gallery of Bray District Court, south of Dublin, for the trial of Kirk Loco. You may remember Kirk. He's an ordinary Irishman. Two years ago someone in that group posted a warning: a migrant man had exposed himself on a public bus, in front of a 14-year-old girl. The bus driver stopped the bus. There were half a dozen witnesses. It was on CCTV. Kirk did what any of us would do. He reposted the warning so other parents would know. The migrant wasn't charged. Kirk was. The Irish police charged him under a so-called "fake news" law, Section 12A of the Criminal Justice Act, 1976. It was passed during the Troubles to fight terrorist propaganda. It had never been used against anyone, in fifty years, until they used it on Kirk. He is the first and only person in Irish history to be prosecuted under it. They picked him because of his politics: he's a critic of mass immigration. They are making an example of him. Here's what has happened since. Kirk has been dragged into that courtroom in Bray again and again, almost ten times, for a single retweet. Each time he takes a day off, each time his lawyers prepare, each time the Gardaí (that's what the Irish call their police) turn up and the thing gets put off again. I've flown over for one of those hearings myself. In May the judge lifted an outrageous bail condition that had banned Kirk from attending any protest, anywhere in Ireland. That was a real win. But the same judge refused to order the police to hand over the bus CCTV or the names of the witnesses. The people who saw what happened on that bus could clear him in five minutes, and the state won't tell his lawyers who they are. Kirk said it best himself: "I just can't believe that I'm eight court appearances in for a retweet." That was in May. There have been more since. The process is the punishment. Even if Kirk wins tomorrow, he's already been punished for two years: the stress, the lost days, the cloud over his name, the ban on protesting. That's the point. It's not really about convicting Kirk. It's about making sure every other Irish person who sees something on a bus thinks twice before saying a word. Tomorrow is finally the trial itself. A full day. Kirk's barrister, Laoise de Brún, and his solicitor, Padraig Langsch, will fight it in open court. They are principled lawyers who refused to do what Irish legal aid lawyers do, which is tell you to plead guilty, pay the fine and go home. Kirk won't plead guilty to telling the truth. And then I'm staying on. Because four days later, on Tuesday, the same two lawyers are back in court in Wexford, for Hugh Fagan. Hugh is the man I wrote to you about this week: he sits quietly on a bench in his town square with homemade signs, wearing headphones, and for that he's charged with a public order offence. Same country, same pattern, same week. One man for a tweet, one man for cardboard. I'm going alone this time, no videographer, economy flight, cheap hotel, to keep the costs down. I'll live-tweet from inside both courtrooms (I'll be the only journalist there; RTÉ never shows up) and I'll film my own reports outside on the courthouse steps and send them to you the same day. Ireland's "fake news" law had never been used on anyone until Kirk Loco. If they get a conviction, it becomes the template. That's why this one trial matters far beyond one man. Kirk's trial is Friday, October 23 in Bray. Hugh Fagan's is Tuesday, October 27 in Wexford. One trip, two trials. REPORT by @ezralevant:

As the press release on the issuance of my report has not been put by OHCHR on the mandate website yet, I am posting the text here: UN expert calls for recognition of surrogacy as system of violence, exploitation and abuse, urges abolition GENEVA (10 October 2025) – A UN expert today called for the recognition of surrogacy as a system of violence, exploitation and abuse against women, and called for the practice to be abolished globally. “Surrogacy reduces women and children including girls to mere commodities, stripping them of their equality and dignity and encouraging their exploitation and abuse,” said Reem Alsalem, Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences in a report to the United Nations General Assembly. The report examines the different manifestations of violence against women and girls related to surrogacy, focusing on drivers like patriarchal norms, sex and gender inequalities, economic disparities, and globalisation. “Surrogacy is the result of commodification and commercialisation of women’s reproductive capacities, and it preys on and exploits women, particularly those from marginalised and impoverished backgrounds,” Alsalem said. Her report highlighted physical, psychological, and economic violence faced by surrogate mothers and argued that this practice results in severe human rights violations including of their right to health, privacy, family and physical safety and increases the risk of enslavement, torture, inhumane and degrading treatment. The Special Rapporteur said that emerging, available evidence points to serious risks for children born through surrogacy, including negative physical and mental health and development outcomes resulting from separation at birth from their mothers. Others include identity struggles, increased risk of statelessness, trafficking, and abandonment, and the arbitrary and forceful termination of their lives in utero at the discretion of the commissioning parents. “Despite these harmful consequences, several State and non-State actors remain complicit in enabling surrogacy, including by downplaying the accompanying abuses and risks, and sanitising the practice, which is gravely concerning,” the expert said. Alsalem stressed that a human rights-based, sex and gender-responsive approach to surrogacy requires the adoption of a global abolitionist framework that would end demand by penalising the commissioning of children via surrogacy or its facilitation by intermediaries. She also called for the decriminalisation of surrogate mothers, recognising them as victims and providing them with comprehensive assistance, protection, access to justice and reparations, and end their economic dependence on involvement in surrogacy arrangements. The report flagged the importance of raising public awareness, including through education campaigns on the harmful consequences of surrogacy. Alsalem recommended ensuring recognition of the birth mother as the legal mother, with any transfer of parental rights permitted only through judicial adoption processes that safeguard the child’s best interests. Other key recommendations include guaranteeing equal rights and access to services for children born through surrogacy arrangements, improving data collection, and strengthening international cooperation with a view to developing effective strategies to assist and protect victims. ENDS Reem Alsalem is the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences Special Rapporteurs/Independent Experts/Working Groups are independent human rights experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Together, these experts are referred to as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. While the UN Human Rights office acts as the secretariat for Special Procedures, the experts serve in their individual capacity and are independent from any government or organization, including OHCHR and the UN. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the UN or OHCHR. Country-specific observations and recommendations by the UN human rights mechanisms, including the special procedures, the treaty bodies and the Universal Periodic Review, can be found on the Universal Human Rights Index uhri.ohchr.org/en/ For inquiries and media requests, please contact: [email protected] For media inquiries related to other UN independent experts please contact Maya Derouaz ([email protected]) or Dharisha Indraguptha ([email protected]) Follow news related to the UN’s independent human rights experts on Twitter: @UN_SPExperts

@europa Grandparents warned not to hug grandchildren without consent, yet this government can’t stop the gang r*pe of a 14 year old.

John McGuirk @john_mcguirk

5 days ago

I don't normally get so angry I could scream, but the latest Tusla outrage really should bring down the Government. Albert Reynolds' Government fell for far less. Credit to Kitty Holland for at least caring: johnandsarah.ie/p/the-14-year-…

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Heartbreaking that MPs have allowed this to go ahead. Too many chose to look the other way. It is indeed the medical scandal of our time.

James Esses @JamesEsses

6 days ago

🚨226 children, some as young as 11 years old, are about to be given £500 worth of shopping vouchers by the UK Government in order to undertake a puberty blockers trial, placing them on a pathway to infertility. This is the medical scandal of our time. jamesesses.co.uk/p/state-sancti…

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BREAKING: Fr. Ripperger CANCELED By His Bishop Denver Archbishop James Golka has ordered Fr. Chad Ripperger to cease all public ministry — no talks, no preaching, no writing — for one year.

@Jklunden It seems obvious that one of the qualifying factors for being minister for children or minister for education must be that one has children. It’s not a guarantee of competence, but at least it puts skin in the game. It’s clear that the current minister is not fit for purpose.

I’m Polish. If France is your future, I come from the end of that road. France shows you the slow version. We lived the full one – the version where the state doesn’t just take care of everything. It owns everything. In Poland it arrived with Soviet bayonets. In America it would arrive by vote – slower, softer, with better slogans. But the destination is the same, and so is the mechanism. It starts with prices. When the state decides what things should cost, prices stop telling the truth. A price is a message: this is scarce, this is wanted, make more of this. Abolish the message, and the whole economy goes deaf. So the shelves emptied – first of meat, then of almost everything. Every Pole knew the joke. A man walks into a shop: "No meat?" The clerk: "No, sir. Here is no fish. No meat is across the street." We queued for everything. People wrote their place in line on their palms and kept lists through the night. You waited years for a small car, and often more than a decade for an apartment. Not because Poles were lazy. Because nobody in the system had any reason to produce what we needed. At work, we had another joke: we pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us. And the promise of equality? It produced the most unequal system of all. The party elite had their own shops – Poles called them the shops behind the yellow curtains. Those with dollars shopped in special stores. Everyone else got the queue. Then the system needed informers, because nobody believed in it anymore. Our neighbors were recruited to report on us. You never knew who was listening – the colleague, the friend, sometimes family. So we learned to live a double life: one language in public, another at home. Those who spoke up got the wolf ticket: no job, no promotion, sometimes no university place for their children. Nobody needed to send them to prison. They just couldn’t live. The newspapers reported record harvests while the shelves stood empty. Everyone knew. Nobody said it. That is what a society looks like when the lie becomes the system. In 1950 we were about as rich as Spain. By 1989, Spain was twice as rich. That is what forty years of "fairness" cost us. Today in America, the method is softer. Your neighbor won’t inform on you to the secret police. Someone will report your post, and you’ll be cancelled – no job, no account, no platform. Different tools, same machine. We got out. Ten million of us joined Solidarity, and in 1989 a system that looked eternal collapsed. Since then, Poland has become one of the great success stories of Europe – because people were finally free to build. But we still carry it. More than thirty years later, you can see it in the careful answers, the closed faces - the system leaves faster than the fear does. It takes generations to get out of it fully once you fall into that trap. Nobody votes for the queue. Nobody votes for the informer. They come with the promise. Trust me, you don’t want to go down that road.

Brivael Le Pogam @brivael

2 weeks ago

I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you. I come from your future. In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation,

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📖✝️ “The Gospel Was Always There” — You Had an Altar Call? So Did We. Only Ours Had an Altar. “I grew up Catholic, but I never heard the Gospel.” I’ve heard that testimony plenty of times. And if someone wandered through years of Mass without understanding what was happening, then later encountered Jesus in a profound way somewhere else? Praise God. But I do have one question: What Gospel didn’t you hear? “You need to admit you’re a sinner.” Every Mass begins: “Let us acknowledge our sins.” Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. And Catholics have an entire sacrament dedicated to repentance and reconciliation. “You need to know Jesus is Lord.” Glory to God in the highest… Lord Jesus Christ, Only Begotten Son… Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father. “You need to believe He died for your sins and rose again.” For our sake He was crucified. He suffered death and was buried. He rose again on the third day. Every. Sunday. “You need Scripture.” Old Testament. Psalm. Epistle. Gospel. And that’s before the Our Father, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, Eucharistic Prayer, and the rest of a liturgy saturated in Scripture. Then comes the best one: “You need to make a decision. Come forward. Publicly respond to Jesus. We had an altar call.” Oh. You had an altar call? So did we. Only ours had an altar. Because the Mass doesn’t end with merely asking you to think about Jesus. “Behold the Lamb of God.” The sinner gets out of the pew, walks forward, approaches the altar, and hears: “The Body of Christ.” And answers: “Amen.” Maybe nobody taught you what you were hearing. Maybe you weren’t listening. Maybe Catholics around you did a terrible job helping you understand it. Those are fair criticisms. But the Gospel wasn’t missing from the Mass. It was ringing through the room the whole time. And if another Christian community helped you finally recognize Jesus, I genuinely thank God for that. Now come back and see what was waiting for you at the altar. 🎶 “The Gospel Was Always There” — a new Peter’s Barque song about the Gospel proclaimed, prayed, confessed, and received in the Catholic Mass. #Catholic #CatholicFaith #CatholicChurch #CatholicMusic #TheMass #Eucharist #Gospel #JesusChrist #Apologetics #PetersBarque Peter's Barque is a catechetical musical project by Justin West. He's a catechist, not a musician. The music and art are created principally through digital means, including AI — but the words, heart, and soul are still his. 🔗 FOLLOW PETER’S BARQUE Website: petersbarquemusic.com X: x.com/petersbarque Instagram: instagram.com/petersbarque TikTok: tiktok.com/@petersbarque Facebook: facebook.com/petersbarque 🎧 LISTEN YouTube: youtube.com/@peters-barque Available on Apple Music, Spotify, and all major platforms. ☕ SUPPORT THE PROJECT ko-fi.com/petersbarque

They beheaded her - what more do you need to see and hear before you speak up for Nigerian Christians! The world must break the back of the Jihadist movement in Nigeria! May her soul rest in peace and rise in glory - oh holy martyr pray for us!

Brittnie. @DistantDiaspora

2 weeks ago

This is so sad and a direct violation of the moral obligation we have to each other, even if we see God differently. This woman in Nigeria decided to follow Jesus and leave Islam, not in an angry or hateful way, but to depart from Islam in peace. Yet the local cleric and three

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The Government calls it public health. I call it removing public choice. Folic acid is being added to non-wholemeal wheat flour in an effort to reduce certain birth defects. A worthy aim. But folic acid is synthetic, and not everyone processes it equally efficiently. It could end up in hundreds of everyday foods, from your morning toast to your afternoon biscuit. Whether you want it or not. We're not all pregnant. And we're certainly not all government property. Sign the petition: petition.parliament.uk/petitions/7695…

@SteveCortes

@LionelMedia @RheinAmacher Another crime against pronouns!… 🤦

@JamesMelville AI is about as good at simulating butter as big food is 🤦

@AinsworthKeith Seems like every time I blink these days, some new, incredible evil reveals itself.

There is a clear pattern in UK, Ireland and Europe more generally: governments are taking steps to "rein in" the Tech giants and "protect our children" by introducing universal digital ID, surveillance of our communications, etc. You might think it's worth it. But don't forget that the cause of child safety is also a convenient pretext for building an architecture of centralised mass surveillance. That should make any free-spirited citizen think twice about what is really going on here.

The restriction of VPNs, which are one of the ways you can access the world wide web even if your government tries to stop you, is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes like China, Russia and Iran. U.K. is now on course to join them.

spiked @spikedonline

4 months ago

Andy Burnham has confirmed he’ll restrict VPNs, potentially bringing Britain in line with China, Russia and Iran. Starmer’s censorship regime will be expanded and deepened. Big Burnham will be watching you, says Fraser Myers buff.ly/nlycxhq

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Oh my God, somebody make Kevin Sharkey Taoiseach at ONCE. @MichealMartinTD and @SimonHarrisTD you ARE treasonous bastards.

Hibernian Spring 1/213,738 @SimpSimonSays

2 weeks ago

🔥🔥🔥 Kevin Sharkey is definitely now far-right* *(by Irish Govt/Establishment Left/Mainstream Media standards.

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