Our World

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.

A much-derided online rant hints at a broader truth

An early contender for Rant of the Year comes from a thus-far anonymous British woman, who made waves on social media at the weekend. The target of her rage is a box of Quality Street — specifically, the replacement of the traditional foil wrappers with lacklustre paper. The redesign is “a travesty”, she says, adding that the manufacturers can “put their chocolates where the sun never shines”.

Raising children to become terrorists or to sexually transition are the cruelest forms of child abuse.

One of the things that Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, has publicly emphasized is the cruelty that he experienced during his childhood. In his early years while being indoctrinated to hate Israel and Jews generally he was also physically brutalized and abused. Since defecting to Israel in 1997 Mosab has for some time been advocating for the complete and utter destruction of Hamas and yet he continues to profess love for his father. This may seem paradoxical but it isn’t. Mosab is that rare individual who has been able to see through his parents, and in his case see all the way into the darkness of his father’s heart, and yet continues to love him. In most cases the love of a child for his or her parents is unshakable regardless of how he or she was treated when growing up. In addition to that offspring never stop seeking their parents praise and approval. This dynamic between parent and child has been playing out in the war between Israel and Hamas.

Escalation lurks on every battlefield

When asked in 2020 to envisage the world after Covid, Michel Houellebecq proclaimed, accurately enough, that “it will be the same, just a bit worse” As this year slams to a bloody close, it does not take a soothsayer to foresee that the same prediction will hold true for the coming year. The year 2023 saw the greatest global resurgence of armed conflict since 1945: 2024 will be worse. We are living, if not through a World War, then a world at war, the great post-globalisation jostling to divide up the spoils of what was once America’s unipolar imperium. This will be as epoch-defining a period as the late Forties were for Britain, or 1991 for Russia.

These low-probability events could have major global implications

A “black swan” is a very unlikely but highly consequential surprise event. By their very nature, black swans can’t be predicted in advance, though they tend to be rationalised later with the gift of hindsight. “Grey swans”, however, are different: though they probably won’t happen, they could plausibly — and foreseeably — change the course of events.

My second favorite Jimmy Buffett song is his tribute to Tierra Del Feugo: Party at the End of the World. The verse relevant to this post is

In case you hadn’t heard, things are getting quite absurd
No one really shocks us that’s for sure
Roadside bombers and tsunamis. Oh God, how I miss those Commies
No one seems to play fair anymore

h/t DS

Historians of the future, flash-frying peccary testicles and mesquite pods over their campfires, will wonder at how the archetypal Shining City on a Hill of America’s storied yesteryear got transformed into the roach motel that our country has become on the threshold of 2024 CE. Will they be as stupidly bewildered as, in our time, the faculty at Harvard, the editors of The New York Times, or the directorate of the CDC? Or will they figure out the score by then?

Which is: the nauseating state-of-the-nation is being driven by a cohort of our own fellow citizens lost in an evil crypto-religious salvation rapture that veils their own self-disgust, moral failure, peevish discontents, petty hatreds, willful profanations, compulsive lying, sexual depravity, fraudulence, venality, cupidity, and all-around want of boundaries. They are wrecking the country on-purpose, led by their chosen figurehead avatar, “Joe Biden,” and the horses of many different colors he rode in on.

If there is a pendulum that regulates world affairs, it is important to know which way it may be swinging in the year that is about to start.

Seen from one angle, the pendulum looks like swinging towards uncertainty. In 2024, many countries with major roles in international affairs are facing dicey elections.

The United States looks set for what could be the most difficult election season in its history. Will President Joe Biden, with his physical and mental fitness questioned by some, be able to run the final mile to his party’s nomination? Or will his Democrat Party be forced to rally around Kamala Harris at the last moment and out of desperation?

As we survey the American landscape, we cannot help but notice that just about everything has been corrupted by the left.

The justice system has been corrupted by partisan politics to the point where Republicans and conservatives are persecuted and prosecuted at a level far higher than anyone else. We on the right can reliably depend on being prosecuted for “misgendering,” contributing to conservative causes, being a Christian or a Jew, speaking out against the barbaric transing of children, defending ourselves with a firearm, and not being a Democrat. We can depend upon getting arrested for protesting peacefully as the corrupt “Justice” Department singles us out for jail, bankruptcy, or keeping us off election ballots, while really destructive rioters go free.

Not since Gavrilo Princips assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 has the politically-motivated action of a single individual threatened to plunge an entire nation into strife and crisis like the decision by Maine’s Democrat Secretary of State, Shenna Bellows, to keep Donald Trump off of the state’s primary ballot.

Does that sound like hyperbole? Allow me to explain.

The past 12 months have seen a number of setbacks for the US, Europe and other major democracies on the international politics stage. None has been disastrous, for now. But they point to a shifting balance of power away from the US-dominated, Western values that have held sway for years.

On many fronts, the wind is blowing in the wrong direction for Western interests. Here’s why, and what benefits could still emerge from changes under way …