My latest for the Rebel: The first oral contraceptive pill, approved by the US FDA on June 23, 1960, had a far larger impact on the way we live than all the legislation and political agitation of that or many other years. As Andrew Breitbart was fond of saying, politics is indeed downstream from culture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRzZZwA4GQ0

The audio-only version is available here: [podcast title="Rebel audio, June 23"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2016/June/160623Rebel.mp3[/podcast]

OK, this is pretty grim. I just got this email from the federal NDP with the implausible subject line "One fun thing together". Fun? NDP? Intrigued, even baffled, I read on and after some tedious preliminaries this is the excitement on offer:

I want you to meet our fellow progressive Canadians fighting for equality with you, and I have a fun way to make that happen. When you take this one-question poll, you’ll let other Canadians know what issue makes you stand up and fight – and you’ll also see what your community is saying about their top issue.

Really? That's your idea of "fun"? That's how you kick back, loosen up and get jiggy in high summer? Evidently so. For after what I think was meant to be stirring prose about a "community of progressive Canadians", it wrapped up with this "gosh, how can I refuse?" thrill-o-rama offer:

let’s all do this one cool thing together – share your “big issue” with the NDP’s community of progressive Canadians and see who’s fighting with you.

Ooooh. Party time. Unfortunately political party time. I know the NDP can be a stridently serious bunch and that as a rule social justice is about as light-hearted as a root canal. But I thought when they actually tried to have fun, if they ever did, there might at least be hats and balloons, activities, forced merriment, maybe even beer. Instead there's a poll and fighting.

It reminds me of an observation by G.K. Chesterton, a profoundly serious person who found life enormously fun in the normal sense of actually having a good time, that:

Socialist idealism does not attract me very much, even as Idealism. The glimpses it gives of our future happiness depress me very much. They do not remind me of any actual happiness, of any happy day I have ever myself spent...

Exactly. This email certainly had me thinking if this is how they whoop it up I'd rather listen to them complain. Except it seems to be the same activity. So if your idea of "fun" is sitting alone at your computers saying what annoys you most, I do not want you designing my future.

It sounds awful.

Amid all the sound and fury in the American presidential election, with the latter being on the whole more justified than the former, a remarkable voice of sanity emerges in the form of an open letter (yes, a much overused format, but justified this time). It’s from two women, both mothers, about the central issue in the apparent unraveling of America: the unraveling of the family. They ask Donald Trump what he might do about it, especially given his own example. And it’s an entirely appropriate question for the man who would be Republican nominee and apparently will be. But it could also be asked of almost anyone aspiring to office, as a reproach in some cases including Hillary Clinton’s and merely an urgent policy question in others.

Nothing matters more than intact families in making America “great” again. Nothing matters more in making it whole, in making it free, in preserving limited government, decentralization and vigorous citizens able to tackle problems both public and private instead of passively waiting for incompetent overbearing government to barge in and make things worse. And nothing matters more in people’s private lives.

So what has anyone to say about it? The problem is by no means unique to the United States. Whether you are American, Canadian, Australian or any other nationality, I strongly urge you to read the letter, to ponder it, to see what answer you might give as well as what answer any candidates do American or otherwise.

While politicians are gassing on, here's the sort of thing that really matters: the Washington Post reports on a superbug resistant to last-resort antibiotics, and liable to share its genes with other more sinister bacteria, that has reached the United States. People tell me, oh, I wouldn't want to live in the Middle Ages because they didn't have antibiotics. Well, we did and we squandered them.

Three cheers for modernity.

In today's Mercatornet Newsletter, Editor Michael Cook cites a noteworthy observation by his colleague Carolyn Moynihan:

A great deal of ink has been spilt over the rather dreary topic of the state of public bathrooms in the United States. Transgenders, it is argued, clearly have a civil right to access the bathroom of their choice. This is an issue which affects, at most 0.3% of the population. For my money, Carolyn Moynihan, our deputy editor, has penned the most sensible contribution to this debate. She asks why Americans are working themselves into a frenzy over bathrooms when nearly 1 in 6 young men between 18 and 34 is either out of work or in jail.

In principle it's possible, even logical, to be compassionate to everyone. But her observation underlines how selective, and ostentatious, some people's concern seems to be.

In my latest National Post commentary I say in endorsing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples the Trudeau Liberals appear to be trying to strike a cynically empty posture… and failing.

In my latest National Post column I object to the peremptory manner in which the census demands personal information on behalf of social engineers whose capacities I seriously question.

Today I got this envelope from Statistics Canada saying "2016 Census: Complete the census - it's the law." (Equally rude in French: "Recensement de 2016: Répondez au recensement - c'est la loi".) I am told the government is the servant of the people. But this peremptory tone, giving orders without even a pretence at "please," is not how a servant speaks to a master. Quite the reverse. Remember how all the right people were shocked and appalled when the Harper Tories got rid of the long form census? Without accurate data, they complained, social scientists would find it hard to engineer satisfaction of the human units to a sufficient number of decimal places. Which I always found rather an odd conception of the proper role of government and of its abilities. And look how they talk to us now that it's back.

The smart set make a lot of fuss about "evidence-based decision-making". But a decision to trust the intelligence or benevolence of government doesn't seem to me to be based on much sound evidence. Not even the personal stuff I have to provide or else, according to this envelope that just marched into my house, waved a pair of handcuffs at me and started shouting questions.