Our World

Have you heard of the phrase ‘basic white girl’? No, nor me, until I ran a series of workshops to help teenagers prepare for, amongst other things, university interviews. A number of courses would be mentioned and immediately dismissed by some as ‘basic white girl’ courses. These included: psychology (80% female), English literature (70%) and sociology (77%). (‘Basic white girls,’ I learned, also love side-stripe baggy trousers, Taylor Swift and being pretty.) These subjects represent the extreme trend in universities becoming female dominated: 57% of UK undergraduates are now female. The balance of academic teaching staff at universities in 2022-23 is 51% male and 49% female, but the wider university staff is 55% female. Is it possible that what happened in primary schools, where only 15% of teachers are male and secondary schools (35%), will happen in higher education? Are boys already self-excluding from this female-dominated world?

Generation Z, that enigmatic demographic of men and women born between 1997 and 2012 or so, have been presumed to hold wildly progressive views. In the stereotype of public imagination this is – or has been – a group that will go to the wall for net zero, dump a partner if their views on gender politics give them the “ick”, or leave any job that has the temerity to demand their presence in the office.

Except it may not be true. A growing mass of evidence suggests that far from the Leftie snowflake cohort of lore, Gen Z are disparate in their politics and care about the same things older generations do – jobs, houses, security – more than culture wars or social issues.

Britain’s got a problem, and it’s not the one the chattering classes are bleating about. It’s not climate change, pronouns, or gaslighting Netflix series probing what’s gone wrong with boys. No, the real crisis is a hole in the nation’s heart—a gaping wound where loyalty, pride, and (dare one say it) the willingness to defend this Sceptred Isle used to reside. The white working-class lads who once formed the backbone of Britain have had enough. Derided, scorned, and blamed for every ill under the sun, they’re no longer signing up to die for a country that’s made it clear it doesn’t want them. And who can blame them?

Former Defence Secretary Lord Hammond—hardly a rabble-rouser—sounded the alarm in The Telegraph earlier this month. “Young men are unprepared to fight for Britain,” he warned. He’s got a point. Back in 2015, a Gallup poll found just 27% of Brits would willingly take up arms for their country—one of the lowest figures in Europe. That was a decade ago, mind you. Today, you’d be lucky to find a lad from Bolton or Barnsley willing to take a bow for King and Country, let alone a bullet. 

The stories beyond the rise of untimely deaths

The window had no curtains, no blinds. Though the back of a big screen TV obscured a portion of the view into the living quarters of the duplex. Passing by I’d often see a young man on a couch, facing the TV, controller in hands, inexplicably wearing a medical mask over his mouth and nose; inexplicably, I say, because he was alone. I’d only ever seen him leave to take the trash out. He’d walk with stiff and jagged gestures, with the unsteadiness of old age though he looked to be in his 40s.

Neighbors didn’t judge; he was a veteran and Lord knows what he’d seen.

Via HotAir

After a handful of underwhelming relationships and dozens of disappointing first dates, Andrea Vorlicek recently called off the search for a husband.

The 29-year-old always thought she’d have found her life partner by now. Instead, she’s house hunting solo and considering having kids on her own.

“I’m financially self-sufficient enough to do these things myself,” said Vorlicek, a Boston-based accountant. “I’m willing to accept being single versus settling for someone who isn’t the right fit.”

Today is World Happiness Day. So, like every year on 20 March, you are likely to see a lot of headlines reporting on the publication of the annual World Happiness Report. ‘Finland is again ranked the happiest country in the world [while] the US falls to its lowest-ever position’, a headline in the Associated Press ran this morning. Forbes even got philosophical, promising ‘5 Life Lessons From Finland, Once Again the World’s Happiest Country’.

Published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University, the basic message of the report has remained the same since its launch in 2012. The happiest countries in the world are in Scandinavia; this year, Finland is followed by Denmark, Iceland and Sweden. America, despite being one of the richest large countries in the world, persistently underperforms: this year, the United States only comes in 24th out of the 147 countries covered in the report, placing it behind much poorer countries like Lithuania and Costa Rica. The United Kingdom has also experienced a steady decline in the league table; ranked as the 13th happiest country in the world at its peak, it has now declined to 23rd position. 

Canada drops to 18th in 2025 World Happiness Report rank, among the ‘largest losers’

In 1987, Forbes published its first billionaires list, featuring 140 individuals whose combined wealth totaled $295 billion. At the time, the richest person in the world was Japan’s Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, a real estate tycoon worth $20 billion.

Today, the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, is worth $419.4 billion, roughly 21 times as much as Tsutsumi at his peak and more than two million times as much as the median net worth of an American household, according to exclusive data from global wealth intelligence firm Altrata.

As the ranks of global billionaires have swelled dramatically in recent years, a new category of ultrarich has emerged—the superbillionaire. Musk is one of just 24 people worldwide who qualify for that distinction, which is defined as individuals worth $50 billion or more.

When young men drop out of the dating world, everyone loses.

Not long ago, it would have seemed preposterous to run television ads promoting sex to young men. But in the past ten years, more young men have approached the process of learning to interact with women as they approach learning to make pizza from scratch. Seems like a lot of work for only fleeting payoff.

The Star interviews Ross Douthat, NYTimes “Conservative”

“Ross Douthat is a rational man. During his decade and a half at the New York Times — where he writes a weekly column and newsletter and co-hosts the Matter of Opinion podcast — he has become one of America’s most prominent public intellectuals. He’s also a conservative and a Catholic. In his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (out February 11), he claims that, even in our disenchanted age, arguments for the existence of God are at least as strong as they’ve ever been. In a conversation that has been edited for clarity and length, we spoke about the relationship between science and faith, the future of secular humanism, and why Donald Trump is a man of destiny (although not necessarily in a good way).”

When I was a postgraduate student, my tutor liked to repeat an old saw popular with academic philosophers, to the effect that the discipline “always buried its undertakers”. That is, critics were forever forecasting the death of philosophy, and were forever being proved wrong by its persistence or resurgence.

In 1945, the victorious Allied powers gathered in San Francisco to draft a charter for the United Nations, the foundation of a new global order that would make another world war impossible. The charter proclaimed that all countries had equal rights and would no longer resort to “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” President Harry Truman told the assembled delegates that “the responsibility of the great states is to serve, and not to dominate, the peoples of the world,”

Imagine for a moment that there is nothing of worth in this world, as worth has no intrinsic meaning. Each human, like each worm or bacterium, is simply a product of chemical reactions occurring over millennia – biological mass. Eventually, inevitably, they end up replicating certain patterns, as almost any alternate configuration decays its structure, returning it to a chemical soup. Movement of charged particles between some cells results in contraction of others, or avoidance of nearby objects once in motion, or a state within our neurons that increases potential to preserve the pattern and replicate it. At its complex level in humans, we term this ‘thought’.

As 2024 comes to a close, I’ve thought a lot over the past year about another year: 1984. Yes, 1984.

What had me thinking were two recent political events felt keenly by readers of The American Spectator and any American focused on the political scene this election year.

The movie “The Matrix” gave us the “red pill” and the “blue pill.” The red wakes you up to reality; the blue keeps you indoctrinated.

Internet culture then invented a black pill. Those who take it think the world is doomed.

So, podcaster Michael Malice wrote the book “The White Pill,” calling it a “symbol of hope.”

Arrgh I can still gum ya to death!

Well turns out a gum infection has piggybacked onto the Bell’s Palsy.

I had thought the pain was due to grinding my teeth and inadvertently chewing on my check.

Well the good news I have a lot of feeling on the left side of my mouth.

The bad news is it hurts like heck!

I booked a an appointment with my local emergency dentist and got a script for an anti-biotic.

It can’t work fast enough!