Today’s Russia is not yesterday’s Soviet Union. What Putin does to his country is unacceptable, but unlike the leaders of the communist state of the last century, he does not have an ideology that compels him to eliminate the economic and political system of the West.

The authors argue that the high courts of the Council of Europe and the EU are actually more ‘conservative’ than the Supreme Court of the United States on almost every polarising topic today.

Health is to the political class what money is to bankers: an inexhaustible source legitimation of their exercise of power.

Language is the first domino in the war over reality—and pronouns have nothing to do with politeness and everything to do with ideological submission.

Where the rest of the world’s leaders seem intent on impressing us with themselves, she appears to respond in the opposite manner—with quiet duty.

Government says that a person is not alive until deep into the pregnancy. The motive is instrumental: when we legally sever the beginning of life from conception, we allow for another moral value to be elevated above life itself. That moral value works as an ulterior motive for the legal definition of life.

We are in a situation in which a democratic decision-making process has been abandoned in favour of deferral to the ‘experts’ chosen by the media. This cannot be good.

Nobody knows the war hawks in Moscow better than the Ukrainians, living as they do in the ominous shadows of Putin’s birds of prey. But the Russians are not the only ones throwing war-stirring rhetoric around.

Senior clergy persistently talk about the primacy of ‘pastoral care,’ implicitly presenting themselves as exemplars. Now they refuse to extend such care to those who want nothing more than to worship God as did their forefathers in the Faith.

Does any government actually need more funds than it already has?

Government has a negative impact on the economy through spending, taxes, and its budget deficits. The most hard-hitting impact does not come through taxes, as conventional wisdom suggests, but through spending—spending governed by ideological preferences, which determine what money is spent, where, and when.

The UN Security Council meeting followed multilateral talks with the Taliban in Oslo, designed to illicit human rights assurances from the Islamist extremists in exchange for releasing needed liquidity and aid money into the country. With Norway as host, a 15-member contingent of the Taliban, humanitarian aid groups, and diplomats from the U.S., UK, and France, met for three days of closed-door sessions at a hotel outside the capital.