I will confess that I was never really a fan of the late pontiff in his role as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church. But he was a good man; and I wish him godspeed.
And now, another confession: I have never attended church services with the consistency that I should. Nevertheless, I was raised Roman Catholic, and still claim Roman Catholicism as my faith. I therefore have a stake in what happens next.
The main conflict in the Roman Catholic Church at present is the divide between the church’s more traditionalist congregations in North and South America and Africa, and the progressive elements in the European Vatican.
Pope Francis, as most of you will know, was a progressive (or as progressive as it is possible for an octogenarian Catholic clergyman to be). He clashed with American Catholics about the reintroduction of the Traditional Latin Mass, which was familiar to all Catholics prior to the reforms of Vatican II.
So far as religiosity is concerned, two trends are emerging in the USA. The first of these is that society continues to become more secular, on the whole. At the same time, religious people want forms of religion that are more traditional, without the “modernizing” influences of recent decades.
The choice of Pope Francis’s successor may determine whether the Catholic Church will undergo a revival, or fade into near irrelevance in much of the world. There may even be a schism.
This is a story that I, and millions of other Roman Catholics, will be watching with great interest in the days and weeks ahead.
Nancy Mace, a Republican, is the US representative for South Carolina’s 1st congressional district, a position she has occupied since 2021.
Mace is known for being forthright and outspoken. But when does forthrightness and outspokenness cross the line into plain old bad behavior? Or at the very least, self-destructive behavior, for an elected official?
Some unhinged lunatic, a man, wearing daisy dukes, at a makeup store, got in my face today. Dems are nuts. So I went off – and I won’t be backing down.
I hold the line 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
In the above video (from Mace’s X account) a voter recognizes Mace in a South Carolina makeup store. He asks her when she will be holding her next town hall.
Mace displays unmasked ire at the question. Apropos of nothing in particular, she informs the man (who speaks with the obvious lilt of a male homosexual) that she voted for gay marriage twice.
The man questions why Mace raised the issue of gay marriage, since he did not. Mace then turns hostile, and calls him “f*cking crazy”.
As he leaves, she shouts out “F*ck you!” after her constituent.
We can assume that Nancy Mace was unhappy at being recognized, and questioned, by a voter while shopping for makeup. But such unplanned public interactions with voters come with the territory of being an elected official. Nor is this limited to Republicans. Does anyone really believe that AOC could take a trip to a suburban Walmart without being approached by voters?
We can reasonably assume that the voter is a Democrat, based on statistics. Depending on the particular election, between 68 and 77 percent of LGBTQ people vote Democrat.
Nevertheless, the man seemed open to talking. She had a chance to win over a member of the opposition, or at least demonstrate her willingness to communicate civilly with the opposition. Yet she blew it.
I am old enough to remember the Republican charm of Ronald Reagan. (And so is Mace, though barely.) Nancy Mace is no Ronald Reagan. But then, neither is the current Republican President of the United States.
Yes, I hate AI. But my hatred is not passionate or pathological. I hate AI in the same way that many rock music fans hated disco, circa 1977.
Most of the AI applications that have been thrust at me as a consumer are merely useless, rather than actively harmful. They are solutions in search of problems. The proverbial nipples on the male anatomy.
Nevertheless, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that tech companies are going to force AI on us at every opportunity in the foreseeable future. The tech giants have over-invested billions in technologies that were overhyped from the get-go. Six- and seven-figure jobs are on the line at Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and elsewhere. Lives are at stake. Vice presidents of something or the other could be thrown out on the street!
AI is not going away anytime soon. Even if you don’t want it. Even if it serves no practical end.
Mark Zuckerberg recently built a MASSIVE data center for META in Georgia
– There are residential homes just hundreds of yards away – It uses so much water, residents no longer have water pressure in their homes – Their sink water no longer works – Their toilets don’t fill with… pic.twitter.com/UvApRZniNt
AI is already making my life worse, with the vast tsunami of fake news articles, and fake art, and fake videos that are proliferating online.
But all those things are minor inconveniences, in the big scheme of things.
In Georgia, meanwhile, some homeowners are being inconvenienced by the AI gorilla at a whole other level of magnitude.
Mark Zuckerberg built a massive data warehouse facility outside Atlanta to power Meta’s AI engine. The facility uses so much water, that it has left many residential homes without adequate water pressure. Some residents (watch the above video), now have to rely on bottled water in their homes.
These poor folks in Georgia do have a reason to hate AI. With a passion.
And all of this, so that the rest of us can get more AI-generated fake content on Facebook.
Ayn Rand, a lifelong atheist, famously noted that there was nothing inconsistent about atheists celebrating the Christmas holiday.
She was probably right about that. Most of the trappings of Christmas have few obvious connections to Christmas’s religious origins. This may be why atheists rarely kvetch about the public observance of December 25th. (Plus, they get the day off work or school.)
Christmas Eve, incidentally, is celebrated in Japan, which is less than 2% Christian. In Japan, however, Christmas Eve is a kind of Valentine’s Day, with no association to the birth of Christ.
That shows you how malleable and secular Christmas has become.
Easter is another matter. The secular trappings of Easter–the Easter Bunny, marshmallow chicks, etc.–these are pretty lame, on the whole. Who, in 2025, gets excited about chocolate rabbits?
Nor does Easter give the secular and non-Christian an extra holiday. Sunday is already a day off work for more than half of us.
Easter really only means something if you’re a practicing Christian. If you’re not, Easter is little more than an annoyance.
So if you are one of the faithful, I wish you a joyous Easter observance. Go to mass or other church services. Spend time with your family. Maybe have brunch at Cracker Barrel–if the line isn’t too long.
Does the internet need yet another post about the transgender debate? Probably not, but humor me. This one has an angle that you might not have heard.
Last week the Scottish Supreme Court ruled that biological men presenting as women (aka trans women) are not biological women. Womanhood, the court declared, is based in biological reality and is not a mere social construct.
British author J.K. Rowling celebrated on X. The Harry Potter author took a photo of herself sipping a glass of wine and smoking a stogie. The post’s caption was: “I love it when a plan comes together.”
J.K Rowling was born in 1965. She’s a few years older than me, but we’re both Gen Xers. (Had Rowling been an American, we could have both been in high school at the same time.)
Before she became involved in the transgender debate, Rowling was generally regarded as a progressive. She was critical of British and American conservatives, and held a scathing assessment of Donald Trump during his first term.
Then came the western, English-speaking world’s obsession with transgenderism and gender fluidity. Rowling picked a side, and became a pariah in the left-leaning publishing and filmmaking worlds.
The problem was: J.K. Rowling proved too big, and too powerful, to “cancel”. That pantywaist of an actor, Daniel Radcliffe, personally tried to separate Rowling from her own book franchise. People ignored him. Radcliffe, not Rowling, is the expendable one, insofar as Harry Potter is concerned.
Like Rowling, I’m a Gen Xer, and like Rowling, I don’t get what all the fuss is about. For approximately a decade now, we have all spent far too much time debating the question of what a woman is. No one gave this debate any oxygen at all until the spring of 2015, when a former Olympic athlete named Bruce (aka Caitlyn) Jenner underwent a very public gender transformation. That opened the floodgates, and we have not stopped talking about this since.
But as an MSNBC columnist pointed out, the world has always had people who are trans, gender-fluid, etc. This is true. Study ancient history: gender-bending religious cults existed in Roman times. The Galli, followers of the deity Cybele, were female-identifying men who subjected themselves to the gender-affirming care of castration.
So…no…the twenty-first century did not “invent” transgenderism. But the twenty-first century did invent an unhealthy obsession with it. The twenty-first century did invent unnecessary pronoun rules, and silly neologisms like “pregnant persons”. The twenty-first century did invent the idea of pushing gender transitions on children who barely understand the concepts of sex and gender at all.
We Gen Xers, though, have long been aware of gender fluidity, even if we weren’t aware of the Galli. In 1982, we all saw the female-presenting Boy George on MTV. For a long time, I assumed that Boy George actually was a woman. (Hey, I was fourteen years old.)
Then in 1987, Aerosmith came out with that song and video: “Dude Looks Like a Lady”. It was the height of the Reagan era, and one of the most testosterone-soaked rock bands was performing a song about the male narrator’s brief and inadvertent attraction to a gender-fluid man.
None of this was a big deal at the time, nor even very controversial. I don’t remember anyone getting in a high dudgeon about Boy George. “Dude Looks Like a Lady”, meanwhile, was chosen for the soundtrack of Mrs. Doubtfire, a movie my Boomer parents and my World War II-generation grandparents all loved.
No self-respecting Gen Xer has ever had a problem with a man who wants to present as a woman. Most of us, moreover, are willing to humor people on pronoun rules. I remember Bruce Jenner as the very male athlete on my box of Wheaties in the 1970s. But if [she] now wants me to call [her] Caitlyn…sure, why not? Live and let live.
For most Gen Xers, all of this went a bridge too far when we were told that simple live-and-let-live tolerance was not enough. One day, we were told that we must now believe that biological males like Caitlyn Jenner, Rachel Levine, and Lia Thomas are truly women, no different from actual, biological females. We were also told that we must affirm these new beliefs in public.
That has wide implications, including—but not limited to—women’s sports and Title IX. Gen X women were the first generation of American women to fully benefit from Title IX, and many of them have understandably strong feelings about it.
Most Gen Xers also have bullshit meters with very sensitive settings. We don’t like to be told what to think, especially when we know that you’re spouting nonsense. We rolled our eyes at the smarmy, finger-wagging televangelists of the 1980s, and most of us roll our eyes at the smarmy, finger-wagging social engineers of today.
Back to Rowling’s tweet. The phrase, “I love it when a plan comes together,” was popularized by the A-Team, a TV series of the 1980s. The aloof, cynical, wine-sipping pose, meanwhile, seems borrowed from some Gen X memes that have proliferated throughout the Internet in recent years.
We Gen Xers are a tolerant lot. But we aren’t going to deny reality just to make you happy.
We didn’t blindly listen to the older generations when we were kids. And now that we’re older ourselves, we aren’t going to obediently nod our heads at moppets who tell us that gender is just a social construct.
Brit in Germany is one of the language-related vloggers whose videos I watch from time to time. He’s a thoughtful fellow and I recommend you subscribe to his channel. But I occasionally disagree with his take on things.
In a video entitled “The European language revolution everyone’s ignoring,” he discusses a “revolution” in European languages. But if this is a revolution, it’s a very old revolution that has been underway for quite some time.
First, there is the fact that most European countries now have a unified national language. This wasn’t always the case. But it’s hardly a new development. Various French dialects, to cite one example, began to disappear in the Napoleonic era. Swabian and Sicilian have long been marginal in Germany and Italy.
The video also mentions the prevalence of English as a second language in Europe, as if this is something new or revolutionary. I remember being told in the 1980s: “All members of the young generation in Europe speak fluent English!” The “young generation”of the 1980s are now in their 50s and 60s. Do they all speak fluent English? One doubts it. But then, I was also told in the 1980s that all the young people in Japan and South Korea speak fluent English. Go to Tokyo or Seoul in 2025 and try to speak English with a random 50-something. See how far you get.
Insofar as Europe and English is concerned, this is what can be said:
-Almost everyone in Europe studies English at some point, so a European with zero knowledge of English is rare.
-English proficiency is highest in the small Northern European countries like Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, and Finland.
-In Germany, your mileage may vary, depending on where you are and with whom you’re interacting.
-In Spain, Italy, Portugal, and France, proficiency in English is by no means to be assumed, though many people speak it.
-Wherever you go, more young people than old people are proficient in English. The young are the ones actually studying English in the classroom, after all!
-This doesn’t mean that all young people are proficient in English. But if you are talking to a proficient English speaker in continental Europe, the odds are high that you’re talking to someone under 30. This is true in 2025. This was also true in 1985.
-English-proficient youth do notnecessarily retain their English skills as they age. (Remember: I’ve been hearing about young people who speak “fluent English” for more than 40 years!)
-That’s the way it goes with any skill. You use it or lose it. When I was 15 years old, I could play a passable rendition of “Stairway to Heaven” on the guitar. But I haven’t taken guitar lessons or touched a guitar since 1984. Today I remember the basic chords, and a few fragments of songs.
***
In defense of Brit in Germany, these “revolutionary” findings were presented on the internet by the European Commission, which is always eager to tout the narrative of European unity. Where language is concerned, this means: strong support of national languages with English as the unifying factor.
None of this is inaccurate, necessarily. But it doesn’t represent a major, recent change, either. What we have here is a headline from 1985, refurbished for 2025.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has put the world on notice: the United States is on the verge of washing its hands of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Yesterday Rubio told reporters:
“We need to determine very quickly now, and I’m talking about a matter of days, whether or not this is doable. If it’s not possible, if we’re so far apart that this is not going to happen then I think the president is probably at a point where he’s going to say we’re done…”
The US will "move on" if diplomatic efforts to end the war in Ukraine fail, Secretary of State Marco Rubio warns https://t.co/bHm5ZV6AMo
Rubio echoed the new sentiment in the White House regarding Europe and European wars:
“It’s not our war. We didn’t start it. The United States has been helping Ukraine for the past three years and we want it to end, but it’s not our war…”
And Trump did spend almost three months working on the problem!
“President (Trump) has spent 87 days at the highest level of this government repeatedly taking efforts to bring this war to an end. We are now reaching a point when we need to decide and determine whether this is even possible or not. Which is why we’re engaging both sides.”
I only hope that Donald Trump is as quick to abandon tariffs if/when tariffs raise prices and harm the US economy.
That said, there is a very real impasse here:
The current Russian government does not want peace. Moscow wants to reabsorb Ukraine, or turn Ukraine into a client state, independent in name only.
This would mean a return to the status quo under both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Ukraine and Russia were the same political entity for about 200 years, from the 1790s through 1991. From the cold lens of geopolitics and history, an independent Ukraine is the exception, not the rule.
This doesn’t mean that I’m in favor of that. But the world is full of groups that want independence—or their land back—who can’t have either. Ask the people of the Lakota Nation what they think about the US government claiming ownership of the Black Hills. Also: when are we going to give Texas, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and California back to Mexico?
The government in Kyiv does not want ‘peace’—or not only peace. The current government in Ukraine wants the Russians to give up all Ukrainian territory that they currently occupy, including the Crimean Peninsula. The Kyiv government wants Russia to acknowledge Ukraine’s 1991 borders, apologize, and submit to a war crimes tribunal. Not even Ukraine’s most zealous western allies believe that that is going to happen.
The Europeans are more bark than bite. Anti-Russian sentiment runs high in most European countries at present, especially in the halls of government. European leaders, from Emmanuel Macron to Kaja Kallas, have talked about sending their own troops into Ukraine…teach the Russians a lesson, once and for all!
The problem is: these same countries areplagued by aging populations, and a young generation that has little interest in joining the military.
Polls show that most young Germans aren’t interested in joining up. Can one blame them? Since the beginning of the twentieth century, wars haven’t resulted in positive outcomes for Germany.
Sentiments among the Gen Z cohort are similar in France and the UK. The young people in Western Europe want no part of a war started by middle-age men and women who will never put their lives on the line.
And that’s now, while we’re still talking about a hypothetical war. Imagine how gung-ho Europe’s Gen Z will be once the bodybags start coming back from the battlefields of Ukraine.
Farther north and east, there is a little more martial spirit, but martial capability is another matter. Many European countries have not been primary combatants in a major conflict at any time in the modern era.
I occasionally see keyboard warriors from Sweden and Finland, talking tough on social media about whupping the Russians. Do a Wikipedia check, and see when was the last time Sweden or Finland fought a war—much less won one.
This doesn’t mean that Europe can’t rebuild its military infrastructure and culture, of course. But that will take years, and it won’t happen quickly enough to help Ukraine.
***
None of this bodes well for the future of Ukraine as an independent nation. Does anyone really believe that Russia and Ukraine will agree to a peace deal in “a matter of days”? And when the Trump administration does declare that “we’re done”—in Rubio’s words—that will almost certainly mean an end to all military aid.
At that point, Macron, Starmer, and the other European leaders will outdo each other making bold statements. For a while, Ukrainian flags will outnumber the flags of those nations in their respective legislatures and government offices. But none of these leaders is about to launch his nation on a suicidal war with Russia that his population doesn’t support. Europeans are very committed to an independent Ukraine—so long as they don’t have to bleed for it.
Russia will either take over Ukraine, or (more likely) partition Ukraine down to a rump state encompassing Kyiv and everything west of that: about half of Ukraine’s 1991-defined territory.
Once again, this isn’t the ideal outcome. But it’s probably the inevitable one.
Whenever I go to Japan, a book haul is always near the top of my to-do list. Japanese-language books are not impossible to acquire in the United States; but it’s seldom as convenient as placing an order on Amazon.
This title would loosely translate as History of the Showa Era that Citizens Don’t Know.
As the cover image suggests, there are numerous chapters about the Japanese Imperial Navy and World War II.
One of the many rewards of learning a foreign language well is that your potential reading list will be vastly expanded. Some of my favorite books are Japanese-language titles.
I recently wrote a post about Karmelo Anthony, the Frisco, Texas teen charged with stabbing to death another teen, Austin Metcalf, at a track meet earlier this month.
My basic position was this: when a fisticuffs occurs between two teenage boys, there are almost always extenuating circumstances, and two sides to the story. I was never personally acquainted with either teen, and I do not want to make speculations about their personalities and/or culpability in the original altercation.
But I do know this: a teenager who takes a bladed weapon to a suburban track meet might…just possibly!…be the sort of kid who is looking for trouble.
No, I can’t say that with 100% certainty. But I was a teenager myself once. The kids who carried knives around generally weren’t the ones who simply wanted to get along with everyone and mind their own business. Just saying!
Nevertheless, Karmelo Anthony found an online following after his arrest, and someone (probably the boy’s father), started a GoFundMe on his behalf. (Because when you stab someone to death, you’ve got expenses to cover, right?)
The GoFundMe brought in $440,000 (as of last week). Anthony was released from jail on a reduced bond. The youth and his family are now reportedly renting a luxurious $900K home. There has also been a new car purchase.
Don’t let anyone tell you that crime doesn’t pay. Karmelo Anthony, aka the Frisco Stabber, has just proven otherwise.
The Trump administration has announced that it will suspend $2.2 billion in federal funding for Harvard University. This is the result of the university’s failure to comply with a number of the administration’s policy initiatives, regarding—among other things—DEI, merit-based hiring and admissions reforms, and the way campus protests are handled. At present, Harvard is digging in its heels, and the Trump administration is withholding money.
At the 85-day mark, the Trump administration’s policies have met with mixed reviews. Trump’s actions aimed at curbing illegal immigration and securing the border have been popular, albeit draconian at times. The administration’s declaration of “two genders” was largely seen as a curb on gender-bending ideology that had simply gone a few bridges too far.
By contrast, Trump’s actions on tariffs provoked widespread alarm last week—including among some Republicans in Congress, and Trump supporters in the heartland. Trump’s talk of annexing Greenland and making Canada the 51st state have been head-scratching. And while his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico was harmless, it’s difficult to see what that accomplished. (It reminded me of the left’s weird obsessions with politically correct nomenclatures.)
Trump has also gone after universities. Most of his ire is directed at the Ivy League schools. I’ve been reading over some of these debates, and at times I’ve been thinking, “Well, I don’t know about that one.”
The problem, for supporters of Harvard, is this: from the perspective of the rest of the country, Harvard has been a political monoculture since the late 1960s. The same could be said of Yale, Princeton, and other Ivy League institutions.
For that matter, academia had already tilted decidedly to the left in the 1980s, when I was a student at the University of Cincinnati. This was especially true in the liberal arts and the humanities. During the 1960s, the more left-leaning college students disproportionately gravitated toward academic careers. By the time I arrived on campus in the fall of 1986, they were in early middle age, and made up the core of the professorial ranks.
There is a sense among many Americans that our universities have become places of ideological and intellectual rot, and are among the many “swamps” that need to be “drained”. Yes, I realize that I’m painting a wide brushstroke here. But I experienced the closing of the academic mind for myself—forty years ago, and at a state university in Ohio.
The Ivy League, in particular, is not popular in the heartland. And it isn’t just the guys with gun racks in the rear windows of their pickup trucks who are scoffing at Harvard, Yale, etc. In recent years, corporate employershave soured on the Ivy League, too. Corporate employers have gradually discovered that ideologically stagnant universities, no matter how prestigious, don’t produce superior graduates. In practical terms, a graduate of the local community college might be a better hire.
Which brings us around to this whole notion of the anti-Trump “resistance”. I want a civil, intelligent anti-Trump resistance, just like I wanted a civil, intelligent, anti-Biden resistance. I have an equal distrust for social engineers on the left, and Bible-thumpers on the right. I don’t want either side to become too powerful. If different viewpoints compete in the marketplace of ideas, then hopefully we choose the best ones, and we land somewhere in the middle.
But for those of you who would seek to mobilize opinion against the Trump administration: pick another rallying cry besides, “Remember Harvard’s $2.2 billion!” Don’t expect anyone who doesn’t live in one of the liberal coastal enclaves to rally around Harvard. That just isn’t going to happen.
Over the next three years, airports plan to phase out boarding passes and passports. Instead we will all board using biometric data, linked to facial recognition software. This will become the only option for air travel.
What could possibly go wrong? Just about everything.
Thus far, privacy concerns are raising the most alarms. But the bigger problem is that it simply won’t work as advertised. Both governments and the private sector have a track record of rolling out “high tech” and “AI” solutions that aren’t ready for primetime.
They will spend ten years working out the glitches in the facial recognition software. Along the way, they’ll create numerous lapses in security for terrorists and other criminals to exploit.
This will also cut down on air travel. Certain demographics—elderly travelers, techno-skeptics, and privacy zealots—will simply refuse to travel under this new Rube Goldberg of a system.
There is one bit of good news, however. The new system will all be implemented and administered by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a United Nations body. Therefore, the odds are high that it will be such a fiasco from the get-go, that it will never go live. The world’s air travelers should be so lucky.
If you’ve decided that the West is too woke, violent, corrupt, whatever, you can now apply for citizenship in Russia, under a so-called ‘Shared Values Visa’. (Watch the video below for more details.)
The Shared Values Visa is new…but not really. The Kremlin has a long history of rolling out the red carpet for westerners who are disillusioned with life in their home countries.
During the Great Depression, several thousand Americans, Canadians, and Europeans moved to the USSR to escape “capitalist corruption” and live in a “workers’ paradise”. Many of these emigres were among the first folks to go into the gulags during Stalin’s subsequent purges.
Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s assassin, defected to the USSR from 1959 to 1962. Overall, Oswald’s Soviet adventure did not work out. But he returned to the USA with a Russian wife. The rest of Oswald’s story is a tragic one, both for him and the rest of the world.
No, this isn’t where I segue into a conspiracy theory about the JFK assassination. (I have no novel insights on that matter.) My point is: westerners defecting to Russia for one reason or another is nothing new. This has been happening since the earliest days of the USSR, a hundred years now. And it has never really ceased.
(I might also suggest that you watch the movie Reds (1981) if you haven’t seen it.)
Once again, a knowledge of history comes in handy for decoding the present. History often repeats itself, with only a few superficial changes.
And so it is here, with Russia’s ‘Shared Values Visa’. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The Trump administration has just announced that smartphones and computers will be exempted from the 145% China tariffs.
This is good news. Tariffs are certainly one way to shoot an otherwise healthy economy in the foot. Trump was about to blow off both feet with a double-barrel shotgun.
As I pointed out in an earlier post: Apple has screwed the pooch, anyway, in a manner of speaking, by placing the majority of its manufacturing in China. I’m not saying that they have to make all their products in Ohio. But making 90% of iPhones in a quasi-hostile state is textbook corporate tomfoolery.
And that’s not all. The iPhone production process (much as I love my new iPhone 16!) is also a textbook example of corporate greed. I recently read The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant. As Merchant details in the book, Apple has become overly reliant on an outdated manual assembly process that literally cannot function without thousands of low-wage workers who are driven to extremes by tyrannical bosses in China-based supplier plants. (Read Merchant’s book for a detailed explanation of all this.)
Nevertheless, there is always a gap between what “should” be, and what is. Apple and other tech companies have been given a reprieve on China tariffs. They should use that reprieve to figure out how to make their products without relying on slave-wage labor. Have these highly paid, genius CEOs ever heard of automation, perchance?
Amid all the current events and weather-related entries of late, here is a quick mini-review of Flint Kill Creek: Stories of Mystery and Suspense. I have recently worked my way through the stories in this volume by the extremely prolific Joyce Carol Oates.
Speaking of Oates: she was born almost exactly 30 years before me, in the summer of 1938. Oates will turn 87 this year, and she continues to write and publish. This is a testament to both a sharp mind and a solid work ethic. Her style has not deteriorated, nor even changed much in recent decades. Her latest books are very similar to the ones she published years ago.
Flint Kill Creek, as the full name of the book implies, is a collection of dark tales. Many of these stories involve a crime, but not all of them do.
These stories are what JCO does best: explorations of the dark corners of the human mind and its motivations. These stories often have surprise twists. Oh…I didn’t see that coming.
Joyce Carol Oates is known as a writer of literary fiction. This means, among other things, that her work sometimes requires some effort to get through. And so it is with Flint Kill Creek. Some of these stories are quite accessible and fast-paced. (I particularly liked the opening, titular story.) Others are slower and more abstruse.
As is always the problem (for this reader, anyway) where JCO is concerned: few of her characters, even the innocent ones cast in victim roles, are very likable. I often find that in a JCO story, I have no one to root for.
If you already like Joyce Carol Oates’s work, you’ll like Flint Kill Creek. If you don’t like her style, this book will do nothing to change your mind.
As for me: I have always been somewhere in the middle regarding Joyce Carol Oates’s fiction. I most always admire her work; but I enjoy it to varying degrees.
It seems that the YouTube channel of Alexandra Jost, aka Sasha Meets Russia, has once again been removed from that platform. This is the second time this has occurred.
While the removal may have been the act of YouTube’s management, it is far more likely that Ukrainian and pro-Ukraine bots are behind the removal, via a mass flagging campaign.
We hear a lot about “Russian bots” on the Internet. These do exist. But we don’t hear so much about Ukrainian bots; and these exist, too. (We should all remember that both Russia and Ukraine have a legacy in the former USSR and its methods.)
Hey @elonmusk as an American in Russia, thanks for this platform. I’ve been censored by @instagram at 300k followers & YouTube for sharing my experience in Russia and love for this incredible country, something that’s considered a crime nowadays. I truly hoped the new @POTUS… pic.twitter.com/yelclRRzPH
Jost is an American expat who has been residing in Moscow for several years. Her mother is Russian, and she speaks that language fluently. Her YouTube videos were always a mix of human interest stories and commentary.
And yes, that commentary had a distinctive spin. I fully recognize that Ms. Jost is/was engaged in advocacy journalism. Her pro-Russian views are rather transparent; and there are even reports (unsubstantiated though plausible) that she is on the payroll of one of the Russian state media agencies.
But so what? I come from the twentieth century. In those days—which include the Cold War with the USSR—we trusted people to take in information from all sources, and to then make judgements for themselves.
My high school history teacher exposed us to translated versions of Pravda. I read The Communist Manifesto in college. Funny thing—despite all that exposure to “Russian propaganda”, I never became a Soviet agent. I was never converted to Marxism-Leninism. In fact, reading/hearing the Kremlin’s viewpoints usually made me more certain in the beliefs of my own culture.
But those were more open-minded and sophisticated times. In this intellectually simplistic era, it is often Internet mobs and tech bosses who decide which viewpoints will be heard, and which ones will be censored.
This is especially true on social media. On YouTube, for example, it is now virtually impossible to find a YouTube channel on the Russo-Ukrainian War that isn’t pure Ukrainian agitprop.
