For more than 200 years, a disturbingly vicious thread has run through Western history, based on biology and justifying cruelty on an almost unimaginable scale.

It centers on the question of how to control human population growth and it answers that question by saying we must be cruel to be kind, that ends justify means. It is still around today; and it could not be more wrong. It is the continuing misuse of Malthus.

According to his epitaph in Bath Abbey, the Rev Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), author of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), was noted for “his sweetness of temper, urbanity of manners and tenderness of heart, his benevolence and his piety.” Yet his ideas have justified some of the greatest crimes in  history.

By saying that, if people could not be persuaded to delay marriage, we would have to encourage famine and “reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases,” he inadvertently gave birth to a series of heartless policies — social Darwinism, eugenics, the Holocaust, India’s forced sterilizations, China’s one-child policy – and remains a hero to the environmental movement to this day.

Al Gore, for example, could be a poster child for Malthusian misanthropy.

I just started a Twitter campaign called #Rhodesmustrise. It’s in response to the lunacy currently embroiling the most revered and distinguished university on our planet – Oxford University.

That would be the #rhodesmustfall campaign for the removal from Oxford’s Oriel College of a statue of one of its benefactors Cecil Rhodes. Below is the letter that Oriel College should have written in response.

Saudi Arabia is burning through foreign reserves at an unsustainable rate and may be forced to give up its prized dollar exchange peg as the oil slump Dr.ags on, the country’s former reserve chief has warned.

“If anything happens to the riyal exchange peg, the consequences will be dramatic. There will be a serious loss of confidence,” said Khalid Alsweilem, the former head of asset management at the Saudi central bank (SAMA).

Dr. Alsweilem, now at Harvard University's Belfer Centre, said the Saudi authorities have taken a big gamble by flooding the world with oil to gain market share and drive out rivals. “The thinking that lower oil prices will bring down the US oil industry is just nonsense and will not work.”

The dollar peg has been the anchor of Saudi economic policy and credibility for over three decades. A forced devaluation would heighten fears that the crisis is spinning out of political control, further enflaming disputes within the royal family.

The crisis is getting so out of control that some international observers are speculating that Saudi Arabia might not have much of a future at all.

How will the country wake up from its coma in 2016 to reality in 2017?

In the next 12 months, the lame-duck, legacy-starved Obama administration will double down on its executive orders, bureaucratic fiats, and circumvention of the law. Obama will seek to fundamentally transform America, contrary to law, effecting change in ways he was not able to by adhering to the law.

The media, as it has the past seven years, will not only ignore the illegality, but also rationalize and commend it.

Then comes 2017.

If a Republican is elected president, what will the media and its liberal sympathizers do should the next chief executive decides to follow the Obama modus operandi?

When Obama issued executive-order amnesty and non-enforcement of immigration laws, the media kept silent, happy that the noble end of open borders justified any means necessary to achieve it. In 2017, we will have a precedent that any American president can simply build a wall, close the border, and deport whomever he finds in violation of federal law.

Or, also taking his cue from Obama, he might allow individual municipalities to nullify federal laws as they see fit: The Endangered Species Act null and avoid inside Salt Lake City? Gay marriage illegal within the city limits of Mobile? Gun control mandates too much of a hassle for those living in Laramie? Texas towns free to burn coal as they please?