Our World

We ordered a concertina for my brother’s next hospice musical extravaganza.

Seems to be in working order.

Scares the bejeebers outta Xavier when I make it talk.

I’ll drop it off tomorrow.

Went for a drive to Hamilton today, bought some beautiful daisies.

A gorgeous afternoon.

Better go make up with Xavier.

I think I need a cat whisperer.

The war in Ukraine is not a brief and bloody spat in a faraway country of which we know little. Instead, as the new Chief of General Staff General Sir Patrick Sanders warned in a historic speech at RUSI today, “This is our 1937 moment,” as “we are living through a period in history as profound as the one that our forebears did over 80 years ago.”

The harsh reality is that “the visceral nature of a European land war is not just some manifestation of distant storm clouds on the horizon; we can see it now”.

My brother and the music class facilitator held a concert this morning for the other hospice residents.

He was a good guitarist in his day but his hands are no longer up to the task.

He can however play the cowbell and his blues harp simultaneously.

You’ve never heard Summertime until a cowbell is thrown into the mix.

The Doctor told my sister-in-law that normally she can predict with reasonable accuracy when a resident will cross over within a spread of days.

With my brother she is at a complete loss. He continues to rebound. He continues to defy the odds.

He’s planning another concert due to popular demand.

Globalists were wrong. The world isn’t flat.

First it was baby formula, now there’s a tampon shortage. Tampon prices are up 10% due to the rising price of oil affecting the cost of plastic and higher cotton prices due to mask manufacturing and the war in Ukraine. A whole lot of fertilizer comes out of Ukraine and Russia. So does neon which is used to make semiconductor chips. The chip shortage is shutting down car plants.

This is the thoroughly interconnected world celebrated in prose by journalists like Thomas Friedman who marveled at how Big Data and globalization brought everything together.

As well as serving in the SS and a second act as a Nasa engineer, Wernher von Braun wrote a Martian sci-fi novel with a prescient twist…

I recently read (and greatly enjoyed) V2, Robert Harris’s absorbing second world war thriller about British attempts to locate and destroy the base in the Netherlands from which Hitler’s “Retaliation Weapon 2” – those devastating rocket-powered bombs aimed at London – were launched. Harris is famous for the meticulous research that underpins his plots and V2 is no exception. For me, a particularly interesting aspect of the novel was his portrayal of Wernher von Braun, the German aerospace engineer who was the leading figure in the development of Nazi rocketry and who was snaffled by the US (with a large number of his technical associates) to enjoy a splendid second career as the mastermind of the US space programme.

As I mentioned last evening I received word my brother was being admitted to a palliative care hospice.

We thought it might take a week or two but nope.

I will be taking him in tomorrow morning.

The strength of community in Poland and Ukraine is best explained by faith

Plainchant is surely the proper music of old churches. As the voices rise and echo in the stone spaces, at 11 o’clock on Good Friday night, a line of ordinary Krakowians of all ages queue patiently down the aisle to take their turn kneeling on the flagstones before a small crucifix. Each person spends some minutes in prayer.

The rest of the world is noticing the West’s pronoun madness, trans madness, grooming madness, and other evils, and is drawing the obvious conclusions. The deputy commander-in-chief for coordination of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), General Mohammad-Reza Naghdi, said in a recent interview on Iranian TV that Europeans were losing the sense of their own national identity, and that the Western lifestyle had placed European societies on the path to extinction. He could have said exactly the same thing about the United States of America.

Is it too late to restore our civilizational nerve and morale?

Ukraine’s scenes of urban rubble, streams of refugees, and piles of slaughtered civilians redolent of World War II. Continuing masks and lethal lockdown protocols of the Covid plague. Record levels of inflation and gasoline nearly $6 a gallon. Unchecked hordes of illegal immigrants and criminals penetrating our southern border. Mayhem, murder, and brazen theft stalking and defacing our cities.

We are living in a material world, after all

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has made it clear that what Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s called “the cold peace” has given way to Cold War II. The first Cold War was a struggle not only of nations and alliances but also of systems—capitalism versus communism. The second Cold War is already a struggle among systems as well, pitting countries that focus on manufacturing (China) and resources (Russia) in the physical world against an alliance led by the United States, which for the last generation has sacrificed much of its own manufacturing and mining to specialize in global leadership in finance, services, and entertainment. To put it another way, the contest of models in Cold War II is not about ownership of the means of production; it is about material production versus immaterial service provision.

Those desperate to prove their masculinity are out of options

What has happened to literature’s manly men? Hemingway, arguably the most masculine of writers, ran repeatedly toward danger throughout his life — along with any other intense experience he could find. This done, he’d write about it: both fiction and nonfiction, covering “manly” topics such as hitmen, boxing, fishing, hunting, bullfighting, racing and extreme sports.

War, the subject of Hemingway’s two most famous books, is perhaps the quintessential subject of such manly writing…

It was still dark when most Americans set off for work and school the morning of Jan. 7, 1974. Commuters grumbled about having to descend to the subways and report to work without glimpsing the sun. Some kids carried flashlights on their way to school.

One woman was so overwhelmed, she simply went back to bed.

“It’s the end,” Terry Minz, of Long Island, N.Y., told the New York Times. “I can’t cope anymore. The comet, the energy crisis, now darkness. I’m just staying in bed.”

So it went the last time the United States took a run at year-round daylight saving time. The experiment, which meant a sunrise of 8:30 a.m. or later for large swaths of the nation, proved short-lived. Amid a swell of public displeasure and a series of early-morning traffic fatalities, Congress voted to undo the change 10 months in.

Go incognito.

Just 18 individuals held more than $50 billion in wealth last year

The division of society between the richest 1% of the population and everyone else has become a common way of conceptualising inequality. 

However, 1% is still a very large group. For instance, in the UK it comes to more than half a million people or over a quarter of a million households. According to Simon Lambert of This is Money, an income of at least £120,000 is required to make the cut. That’s a great deal of money for most people, but not an extraordinary level of wealth.