Our World

6 maybe 7 years ago we purchased a Bosch dishwasher from Lowes, it was the cheapest model and ran about 700 bucks after taxes.

It  ran fine until last night when it shut down and displayed an E27 Error code.

I am wondering if after 7 years it makes sense to repair or replace given the life expectancy of modern appliances is 10 years at best.

At this point I have no idea what the repair cost may be but recall that when our dryer had to have a little plastic part replaced it cost us 400 bucks as did our washer when it started to leak after the drum seal began to fail, (incidentally the seal has begun to fail again and I am careful to not overload the washer.)

Your thoughts?

If men are trash, how can they be love interests?

Men are trash. Or at least, this is the consensus in places where single, educated, liberal, youngish women gather to lament the heterosexual state of affairs. Actually wanting to be loved by a man now represents an embarrassing shortcoming, and dating them an exercise in futility, like choosing the least-bad option from a menu on which everything is a little bit suspect. And this sentiment often takes the form of public griping about the relentless undeserving-ness of the men we can’t help but want.

Timothy Garton Ash weighs the consequences of the push towards a single currency, the West’s dependence for energy on Russia, and Brexit, among much else

Homelands is Timothy Garton Ash’s first book since Free Speech, published in 2016, and is an account of Europe from the second world war to the current war in Ukraine, blending history, reportage and memoir.

Unsurprisingly, given how well-travelled the author is and how extensive his contacts are, among its great strengths are the personal encounters, experiences and anecdotes it relates. We learn, for example, of the Romanian pastor who, on hearing that Garton Ash is from Oxford, asks in all seriousness whether he has met John Henry Newman. A jailed Erich Honecker reaches into the pocket of his prison pyjamas to give Garton Ash a card ‘on which his secretary had typed a telephone number’. When he dials it, it goes straight through to the chancellor’s office.

There’s an evergreen appeal to books about the world going to hell. There might be better or worse times to tell a story about civilization falling apart – the ‘30s and ‘70s were ripe for it; the ‘60s and ‘90s not so much. We’re in one of those doomsaying boom times again.

I think of Oswald Spengler publishing his ground-breaking feel-bad chart-topper The Decline of the West in 1918, just when no one would deny that things had gone very wrong and were likely going to get worse. He must have smiled tightly to himself as he anticipated the public reacting to his assertion that “we have to reckon with the hard cold facts of a late life, to which the parallel is to be found not in Pericles’ Athens but in Caesar’s Rome.”

Fragmentation is the new frontier of liberty

“We are back to the enigmatic pulse-beat of the messianic,” wrote the literary critic George Steiner a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “No economist-pundit, no geopolitical strategist, no ‘Kremlinologist’ or socio-economic analyst foresaw what we are living through.” The surprise ending to the Cold War was followed by a period that many remember as one of global consciousness: a time of capitalist triumphalism, human rights talk, and corporate extension across borders, oceans, and continents. President George H. W. Bush gave the complex a name in 1990 when he praised the “New World Order”. The decade is marked in historical memory by a trend towards the scaling up of institutions: the World Trade Organisation, the European Union, NAFTA — new encasements for planetary supply chains.

Gentrification is the urban policy most closely associated with the neoliberal era. Though reports of neoliberalism’s death are greatly exaggerated, there is no question that policies such as free trade, deregulation, entitlement reform, and foreign intervention are now more on the defensive than 20 years ago. Gentrification may be vulnerable, too. Certainly, fertility decline and remote work pose threats to it. The smaller family sizes that have become normal in 21st-century America mean fewer potential urban professionals in the college-to-city pipeline. Those currents will be yet further stemmed by the increased share of white collar jobs done via Zoom.

Gentrification is, at core, an economic strategy. It aims at increasing the number of middle- and upper-middle-class people living in urban cores. There always were, and always will be, young adults who want to live in cities. Gentrifiers differ from Patti Smith types, because they’re respectable and promise quantifiable gains to the urban economy such as higher real estate valuations. They moved into housing previously occupied by people with lower incomes.

About 40 percent of Canadian children ages 0–14 do not live with married parents, according to a new report by Cardus, a think tank.

Data collected during COVID-19 suggested “a significant decline in marriage rates, divorce rates, and fertility,” according to the report, “Canadian Children at Home: Living Arrangements in the 2021 Census,” published Feb. 28. The report indicated it used previously unreleased Statistics Canada data from the 2021 census to examine the living arrangements of children from newborn to age 14 in Canadian families.

The media have reduced murder to clickbait.

‘He was a nice, quiet individual. He kept to himself’, said one worker at a petrol station frequented by David Saldana, a homeless man who lived in St Louis, Missouri. ‘He would come in and then he’d go a couple of days without coming in and then he’d come back and get his little snacks.’

This week, Saldana was murdered.

Estee Williams was studying meteorology at college when she dropped out to follow her dream: being a stay-at-home housewife. Now, while spending her days packing her husband’s lunchbox and scrubbing the skirting boards, she films videos for TikTok in flowy dresses where she promotes a return to “traditional” values. Think Betty Draper minus the melancholy.

Getting older has its problems. Hair loss, high blood pressure, and joints that suddenly no longer work like they used to are just a few. But when it comes to marriage and relationships, I thank God every day that my wife and I got married when we did. I cannot imagine being a single man today. First of all, there is no way I could keep track of all my alleged microaggressions, mansplaining, manspreading, cis-gendered patriarchal, imperialist… wait, what were we talking about again?

I have been wrestling with the likelihood that with K’s passing I will spend whatever remaining years I have left alone.

I am not looking nor do I think it possible to have a change of heart on the matter. It just is. I don’t know that I could summon the wherewithal to make the emotional investment in a new relationship. A doubtful prospect I suspect. It’s a tough knot with issues of faithfulness & loyalty owed making it near impossible for me to contemplate.

Well for companionship there’s always Xavier who has recently learned the art of extortion.

A reflection on what people are willing to fight, kill, and die for.

Napoleon famously said that “morale is to the physical as three is to one.” More troops and bigger guns don’t necessarily guarantee victory, as Napoleon himself demonstrated. The post-revolutionary French army took on the wealthy great powers of Europe and with the exception of England, inflicted on them defeat after defeat, dominating most of continental Europe from 1804-14. History is full of other conflicts and battles in which the motivations for fighting trumped the greater numbers of the foe. Indeed, the West only exists because twice, in 490 and 480 B.C., the free Greeks defeated the massive, servile armies of the autocratic Persian Empire, preserving the ideals of political freedom and equality.

WHO today would be willing to fight for King and Country? With the parlous state Britain is in right now, I wouldn’t hazard a guess.

But when the question was famously put to the test 90 years ago today, the answer was resoundingly clear, triggering outrage and condemnation.

On February 9, 1933, the Oxford Union, the university’s student debating society, discussed the motion: ‘That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’. The motion was carried by 275 votes to 153.

So-called deaths of despair such as from suicide or alcohol abuse have been skyrocketing for middle-aged white Americans.

It’s been blamed on various phenomenon, including opioid abuse. But a new research paper finds a different culprit — declining religious practice.

The working paper, from Tyler Giles of Wellesley College, Daniel Hungerman of the University of Notre Dame, and Tamar Oostrom of The Ohio State University, looked at the relationship between religiosity and mortality from deaths of despair. The paper was circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

ANYONE who reflects on 20th century European history will ponder the perennial question: do exceptional individuals make history or does change come about through impersonal events? Historian Ian Kershaw, biographer of Hitler, examines 11 men and one woman who left a significant mark on their times against the backdrop and context of their rise to power. They are Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Franco, Tito, Margaret Thatcher, Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl: six dictators, five democrats and Gorbachev, who fits neither category. Each chapter follows a similar formula: the background of the particular personality; their achievements or otherwise; and their legacy. The result is stimulating, provocative, absorbing.