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.
In 2016, the American Enterprise Institute labour economist Nicholas Eberstadt published an important book called “Men Without Work.” Eberstadt’s book was basically about the evolution of the labour force participation rate among working-age males in the United States. In the years after the big war, close to 90 per cent of all American men were, at any given time, working or looking for work. At the time “Men Without Work” was published, the figure was more like 72 per cent. This week, with that number thrashing to keep its nose above 70 per cent, I learned that Eberstadt has published a “post-pandemic edition” of his volume with a new discussion of the problem.
What became horrifying clear about Nov. 22, 1963, will also become clear about what is happening today.
Going through a box of memorabilia from family and friends recently, I found two letters. (The story you’re about to read is true; the names have been changed to protect the innocent.) On the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, a young married professional in Dallas wrote to his parents…
By age 35, Akinola Bolaji had already spent two decades scamming people online, posing as an American fisherman to con vulnerable widows into sending him money.
The New York Times asked the Nigerian how he felt about causing so much harm to innocent people. He replied:
“Definitely there is always conscience. But poverty will not make you feel the pain.”
Scamming people is easier to justify in your head when you’re starving.
h/t DS
There is a telling moment in former GQ editor Dylan Jones’s insider account of the 1990s, Faster Than a Cannonball: 1995 and All That. Loaded journalist Martin Deeson has gatecrashed a Cannes Film Festival party with his photographer in tow. ‘I ordered a large scotch, two gin and tonics, two glasses of champagne and then asked Derek what he wanted’, recalls Deeson. The two journalists then staggered around rat-arsed chatting to various A-listers before bumping into Sixties style icon Terence Stamp: ‘After looking at me for a while Stamp said, “I just don’t think I want to talk to you”, and walked away.’
It’s time we started culling the societal herd of weirdos and degenerates by shaming them out of the mainstream.
We’ve long used shame as an essential tool in shaping our common morality with great success. Since the fall of man, it has acted as a blunt reminder to stay the course as we grow up past childhood and enter the age of reason.
Young men are struggling in a woman’s world
In August 2022, English teacher Kirsty Pole took to Twitter to warn other teachers about a former kickboxer and Big Brother contestant who was “spouting dangerous, misogynistic and homophobic abuse” online.
The culprit was, of course, Andrew Tate. Pole was especially worried about his appeal to younger boys. As she told Sky News: “They already don’t know who they should be, if they’re allowed emotions, if they’re allowed to cry or if they need to ‘man up’.”
Can democracy in the West survive its attenuation in the US and UK?
The countries we call Anglo-Saxon (Great Britain, the Commonwealth and the United States) have been known for centuries for their ability to govern themselves democratically, peacefully and efficiently. In the twenty-first century they have been doing less well.
Britain and America are both in dreadful straits politically, economically and socially. The implosion of Boris Johnson and the search for a satisfactory successor have revealed the leadership of the Tory Party as a hapless and embarrassing collection of mediocrities devoid of coherent ideas. Across the Atlantic, one of the two major parties is a gerontocracy at the top and a gang of urban guerrillas with Molotov cocktails at its base. The other was exhausted as a coherent force by the end of the 1990s and has, for a full generation now, effectively been two parties, neither able to kick free of the other.
Oshawa activist confronts city’s first people repellant
The John Street bridge spans Oshawa Creek, the stream that flows through the heart of this automaking hub just east of Toronto. Christeen Thornton was crossing it one day this summer when she heard a strange sound.
At first she thought there was something wrong with her car. But when she went back to investigate, she spotted a small box fixed to the concrete underside of the bridge. It was giving off a piercing, high-pitched noise that assaulted her ears, forcing her to cover them with her hands and back away.
