Our World

When I read that our government despises us, I’m tempted to respond that the feeling is mutual. But as Andrew Breitbart warned, politics is downstream of culture. So there’s a “Picture of Dorian Voter” problem here.

Certainly when a “Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force” study calls us misinformed conspiracy-minded kooks who hate politicians, I want to shake the morning paper at them. On March 25 alone I encountered our finance minister asking senators to pass a money-shredding bill unread. And in addition to $59.5 million to consultants, federal bureaucrats clocked 134,000 hours of their own highly-paid pensionable time on the wretched ArriveCan app

Leading doctors have warned of a mysterious new “epidemic” of abdominal cancers in younger people.

Following the Princess of Wales’s announcement of her diagnosis on Friday, specialist clinicians have said that in recent years they have seen a significant increase in under-45s presenting with cancers typically seen in older patients.

Many are fit and outwardly healthy, prompting a scramble among scientists to establish what is causing the trend.

The Princess of Wales is undergoing treatment for cancer, she has announced in a personal video message, but told the world: “I am going to be ok.”

The Princess is undergoing a course of preventative chemotherapy and has said she is focused on making a “full recovery”.

The cancer was identified during tests after her abdominal surgery on Jan 16, and she began treatment in late February.

Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, has announced that she has been diagnosed with cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy.pic.twitter.com/zmxtLVpHlu

— Ground News (@Ground_app) March 22, 2024

It wasn’t easy pinning Bari Weiss down for a chat. Despite our fond regard for each other – we are both Jewesses of the same age, both keen on defending Israel in the media – the American journalist and editor was always frenetically busy, as her profile has gone stratospheric since we last met.

When we met in 2021, in a sweltering New York summer, she had half a million Twitter followers and a Substack newsletter (Common Sense) that was rapidly gathering readers and revenue. The previous year, she had resigned from her job as an op-ed editor and writer at the New York Times with a 1,500-word resignation letter that went viral. “Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor,” she wrote, accusing the paper of a culture of bullying writers with slightly right-of-woke views.

Think back to the political situation a decade ago, and one may have in mind a calmer, less dysfunctional time. Britain’s economy was growing, just about, and real wages were beginning to rise for the first time since the summer of 2007, even if they remained well below that peak. The steadying influence of Barack Obama in the White House and the Coalition government in Whitehall seems a world away from our current post-Brexit, post-Covid age of geopolitical upheaval and spiralling living costs. Only the looming referendum on Scottish independence seemed then to present any real challenge to the status quo, whether that be viewed as threat or opportunity. Economists speak of a “misery index”, which combines the inflation rate with the unemployment rate. By this measure, economies of the UK and the US were doing well in the spring of 2014. Interest rates remained where they had been since the banking crisis, stuck rigidly below 1%. This was a gift to mortgage-holders, and house prices reflected that.

Kali Gaddie was a college senior when the pandemic abruptly upended her life plans—and made her part of a big and deeply unhappy political force that figures to play a huge role in the 2024 election season.

Her graduation was postponed, she was let go from her college job and her summer internship got canceled. She spent the final months of school taking online classes from her parents’ house. “You would think that there’s a plan B or a safety net,” she said. “But there’s actually not.”

Today, Gaddie, 25, works as an office manager in Atlanta earning less than $35,000 a year. In her spare time, she uploads videos to TikTok, where she’s amassed thousands of followers. Now, that’s at risk of being taken away too. All of this has left her dejected and increasingly skeptical of politicians.

The success of the film Oppenheimer has shone a spotlight on the work done by scientists in New Mexico as they developed the first nuclear bomb. But 80 years later, some local people say their story remains untold.

“Both my great grandfathers had cancer, my two grandmothers had cancer, my father had three different cancers, my sister has cancer,” Tina Cordova says mournfully as she flicks through an old family photo album in her living room.

“I’ve lost count of the aunts and uncles and cousins who’ve had cancer. And my family is not unique.”

“We hired a helicopter, we got hold of a sniper rifle, we shot radioactive wolves…” Writers at loaded magazine used to pride themselves on their wild gonzo journalism and madcap antics. It was, as founding editor James Brown described it, Arena edited by Hunter S. Thompson. The lines between the reporter and the reported were deliberately blurred, with the writer’s stimulant-fuelled mishaps often being the main event.

A decade on, Channel 4’s poverty safari is still taking its toll

James Turner Street in Winson Green, Birmingham, renamed Benefits Street by Channel 4 in 2014, was originally christened Osborne Street, and this makes me laugh. With its cast of depressives and drug addicts, fed and clothed by the state, and living in semi-affable chaos, Benefits Street, which posed as social commentary, did more to sell George Osborne’s policy of Austerity than anything. What could be done with such useless people but tax their spare rooms and cut their child benefit? It was cruel but effective television: a legendarium of the underclass. Benefits Street was a very partial study of poverty, and worthless for it.

At the end of October, London Magazine hosted a conservatively minded gathering called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). Inspired and started by world-renowned professor Jordan Peterson, this conference-styled event aimed at giving voice to those thinking about saving and strengthening Judeo-Christian civilization instead of letting it slide into a controlled decline amidst postcolonial guilt and moral relativism. About 1,500 people, mostly from Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries, were invited to share ideas and start building an international community. Legacy media nicknamed it AntiDavos and, maybe, rightly so. Time will tell if it can live up to that designation. Yet the challenges that created the dire need for such an alliance are here and ever-present. Vytautas Sinica from Lithuania sat down with Dr. Peterson to talk about the troubling effect of ideologies, cultural Marxism in particular, and the unique role that might be awaiting Eastern Central Europe in the culture war ahead.

Young adults in this age group lack a work ethic, and the future looks perilous.

Mike Rowe, the Dirty Jobs star and host of How America Works, has recently unloaded on Gen Z, the age cohort born somewhere between the mid-1990s through 2010 and sometimes known as “zoomers.” Rowe said that the importance of hard work is on the way out, and we have seen the last days of a work ethic being a virtue. He said that work ethic, personal responsibility, delayed gratification, and a decent attitude were expected in the workplace, and those days are gone.

Gen Zers never had a paper route.

Trudeau has ensured an economic lost generation by making existence unaffordable in Canada.

Their dreams are stillborn.

We are not quite a quarter of the way into the 21^st century, but already a few clear structural trends have emerged, even if it is impossible to predict the next “black swans” — radically unpredictable events with far-reaching consequences – that might occur. Here are four of the trends.

Since 2000, Europe has stagnated on many fronts — anemic growth, a crashing birth rate, military disinvestment — from which countries such as Belgium and Germany have still not emerged. Perhaps most worrying of all, according to criteria such as patents, capital investment, and stock market giants such as GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon), Europe has stopped innovating. People innovate in the United States; they still innovate in Asia, but in Europe – hardly at all. If you add to this the European Union’s obsession with the environment, which has become little more than a machinery for imposing constraints, vexations, punishments and taxes in the name of “energy transition”, it appears that stagnation is a problem from which Europe might have the greatest difficulty in freeing itself.

Strong ethnic identities are often portrayed as a holdover from an older, irrational, pre-modern era. This is probably why contemporary international conflicts are framed as civilizational or ideological struggles. On this reading, the conflict between, say, Russia and Ukraine cannot be seen for what it really is: a bloody stand-off between Ukrainian nationalism and Russian imperialism. On the contrary, it becomes just one localized instance among many of a global struggle of democracy against authoritarianism, another example being the conflict between Hamas and Israel.

Such moralizing language is not always ill-founded. However, the undeniable ethnic inflections in these conflicts—also evident in the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan—testify to the fact that clashes of zero-sum nationalisms remain the primary cause of interstate wars. Every nation state that has collapsed since the 1990s (Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia) has disintegrated along ethnic lines.

The tragic deaths of 60-year-old Kenneth Battersby and his two-year-old son, Bronson, should be a wake-up call for those who dismiss the importance of class in modern Britain. Kenneth and Bronson were found at their home in Skegness, Lincolnshire on 9 January. It is believed that Kenneth died of a heart attack, while Bronson died from starvation and dehydration, curled up beside the body of his father. Bronson died because there was simply no one else to care for him.

A video clip accompanied by the alarming claim “Conquered: French Christians Surrender!” has been making the rounds lately. The video is of an Arab Muslim chanting the adhaan, the Islamic call to prayer, inside a Paris church,

Well, not really. The ‘call to prayer’ in this case was part of a performance of “The Armed Man: A Mass For Peace,” a 1999 work of classical music by Welsh composer Karl Jenkins, who composed it in the wake of the Kosovo war. It combines elements of the Catholic Mass with the Islamic call to prayer, a secular poem, and a Hindu text.