These are very good stories, on the whole. I enjoy Benson’s work somewhat more than I like that of his contemporary, M.R. James. Benson’s tales are more lurid, prefiguring the pulp writers of the 1930s and 1940s.
E.F. Benson’s ghost stories influenced H.P. Lovecraft, who influenced Stephen King.
Benson’s stories do follow a pattern, however. A single male protagonist travels to a location where supernatural events are known to take place. Often this is a resort, an old manor, or a guest house.
Strange things happen, and the action builds to a not unpredictable climax. The haunted location is usually the scene of a gruesome murder in the distant past.
So yes, there is a formula, but an entertaining one. If you like ghost stories with an old-fashioned feel to them, you might want to give this collection a try.
As many readers will know, former FLOTUS Melania Trump—a former model— previously appeared in a handful of “artistic” nude photos. (What we called “Maxim style nudity” back in the 1990s.)
That was decades ago, and has long been public knowledge. This being an election year, however, the old photos have recently become an issue for some members of the nattering class. The former First Lady has therefore felt a need to put out a short video statement on her X account, as follows:
“Why do I stand proudly behind my nude modeling pictures? The more pressing question is why has the media chosen to scrutinize my celebration of the human form in a fashion photo shoot.”
The “scandal” over Mrs. Trump’s nude photos has been manufactured for partisan political purposes, of course. That ship has long since sailed. Any sense of propriety we may once have had went out the window in the 1990s, with lurid accounts of Bill Clinton’s “bent” tallywacker and Monica Lewinsky’s stained blue dress.
That said, propriety existed as recently as the 1980s. But a disproportionate degree of ire often came down on women who had posed for nude photographs.
I recall Vanessa Williams being pressured into giving up her 1984 Miss America crown when some nude photos of her surfaced and were printed in Penthouse magazine.
There are no nude photos of me circulating anywhere. No one in their right mind ever has—or ever would—pay good money to see me au naturel.
But that is true for the vast majority of men. And even when there is a market for nude male images, it’s a niche market. In the 1970s, an entrepreneur launched Playgirl magazine with the objective of creating a Playboy for heterosexual women. What he discovered was that only gay men were interested in looking at photos of naked men. Oops!
Even heterosexual women much prefer images of women, whether clothed or unclothed. Most women—in my experience— are far more interested in observing other women than ogling men for purely aesthetic reasons.
Back to Melania Trump, and other women who posed nude in the past. I can’t say that I approve, but I understand. And as a man, it’s not entirely fair for me to judge. Because—once again—no one would ever pay a wooden nickel for such photos of me, so I’m not subject to the same temptations.
Nude photos, moreover, never hurt anyone. The objections of finger-wagging killjoys notwithstanding.
A lone American, kidnapped and taken to North Korea. He has one objective: escape!
A story ripped from the headlines, and immersed in the deadly politics of North Korea.
A thriller for fans of Tom Clancy, James Clavell, and Dale Brown. A riveting story about an ordinary man who is forced to take on the most evil regime on earth!
I live in Cincinnati. That’s a little more than an hour south of Springfield, Ohio.
I’ve been to Springfield many times in my life. (I used to live in Wilmington, Ohio, which is less than 40 miles from Springfield.)
Springfield is not exactly the garden spot of the Western world, or even of Ohio. I don’t think any Springfield resident would be offended by my saying that. Springfield is not a bad place, not a great place. Very typical of the rust belt towns that dot central Ohio.
I’ve followed the cat, dog, and goose-related controversy of recent days. My guess is that the truth of the situation lies somewhere in the middle. I doubt that kennels are being raided by ravenous Haitians. That said, Springfield does seem to have a genuine problem with issues of excessive immigration and non-assimilation.
According to the Dayton Daily News, about 15,000~20,000 Haitian immigrants have moved to Springfield in recent years, and now comprise about 1/4 to 1/3 of the total population of 60,000.
Ask yourself how well the average Ohioan would assimilate to life in Haiti. Then ask yourself how Haitians in a typical town in Haiti would react if they were suddenly surrounded by such numbers of beer-guzzling, Trump-voting, working-class Ohioans. As a lifelong Ohioan, I don’t think they would react well. And their reaction would be understandable.
Mass immigration has proven to be a doomed strategy. Especially when mass immigration flows in only one direction. (I’m going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that Ohioans aren’t flooding into any Haitian towns the size of Springfield.)
Better for people to remain where they are, and make their home countries better. If they need help, we can help them from afar, so long as they stay put. There is a place for foreign aid and humanitarian assistance, when properly executed.
Likewise, the line between immigration and invasion is often a thin one, and often a matter of perception. Bring in too many outsiders from anywhere, to anyplace, and you’re asking for trouble.
In Spain, they’re now squirting tourists with water. Why? There have simply been too damn many of them since the post-COVID travel surge began in 2022.
People should live in peace in their own countries, and cross borders sparingly. That goes for would-be immigrants as well as tourists. This truth stands independent of the question of how many cats and dogs were or weren’t eaten in Springfield, Ohio of late.
-ET
🚨 Springfield, Ohio
Two Surreal Testimonies from a Recent City Commission Meeting about the Illegal Alien Haitian Takeover
VIDEO #1 🔴 Women who’s lived in her home for 45 years breaks down… —— “it’s so unsafe in my neighborhood..” and homeless foreign men are camping out… pic.twitter.com/vfQLhHB9bb
Early last month, Western media outlets were cheering. The Ukrainian military had invaded Kursk, a mostly rural oblast in western Russia.
This is it! they told us. At long last, the poorly motivated Russian military and populace were on the verge of collapse.
Kursk, they assured us, would be the magic bullet. Russian forces would capitulate, and a color revolution would break out inside Russia any day. The Russian people would deliver Putin to us in a cage.
As you may already know, that isn’t what happened.
Ignoring the lessons of history
Anyone with a sufficient grasp of history (i.e., not your average mainstream media journalist) would have known better from the start. A small invasion of enemy territory doesn’t often equate with victory. In fact, such invasions are often acts of desperation that presage defeat.
During the American Civil War, Confederate units and partisans made numerous punitive raids into Union territory, as far north as Indiana. These harassed the local populations, but were of little military significance. The Battle of Gettysburg, which turned the Civil War decisively against the South, occurred when Confederate General Robert E. Lee decided to invade Pennsylvania.
The Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa also managed to invade the USA. In 1916, Villa’s División del Norte laid siege to the town of Columbus, New Mexico. Though a superficially bold gesture, this was a fool’s errand on Villa’s part. Villa’s attack was repelled within a few days. The net result was a much larger punitive American invasion of Mexico, led by U.S. General John J. Pershing.
But land invasions of Russia are follies on an entirely different scale. Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941 was the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany. More than a century earlier, Russia became a vast graveyard for Napoleon’s Grande Armée.
The verdict in Kursk: failure
After a little more than a month, the tide is turning against Ukrainian forces in Kursk. The Ukrainians bottled themselves up inside hostile territory with no resupply lines. A Russian counterattack has begun, and the Ukrainian invaders of Russia are being decimated—mostly from the air, but also from land-based Russian attacks.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s western positions are crumbling. It is only a matter of time before Russian forces capture Pokrovsk, the capital of the Donetsk Oblast.
When that happens, it may be GAME OVER for the Ukrainian military—without a fresh commitment from the West, and a further ratcheting up of tensions between Russia and NATO.
So why did Ukraine invade Kursk?
Ukraine’s generals are not completely without a grasp of Russian and Soviet history. They realized that a small portion of thinly populated Russian Kursk had little significance, in military terms.
Ukraine’s ultimate objective seems to have been: nuclear blackmail. There is a nuclear power plant in the area. Had Ukrainian forces been able to seize a Russian nuclear plant, they could have threatened Russia—and the world—with a nuclear disaster.
Chernobyl, the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster, was located in Soviet Ukraine. This, too, would have been prominent in the minds of Zelensky and his military planners.
But Ukrainian forces didn’t get that far last month. They were turned back before they could capture the nuclear facility in Kursk.
So what now?
Western governments are at their wits’ ends where Ukraine is concerned. In the USA, the UK, and Germany, national leaders have squandered billions of dollars, billions of pounds sterling, and billions of euros on the Ukraine project.
Their objectives have been a.) to reestablish Ukraine’s 1991 borders, and b.) to weaken and destabilize Russia, with the ultimate aim of a Russian collapse.
But two years into the conflict, Western leaders have little to show for their efforts. And voters are starting to notice.
Things are going poorly for the entrenched ruling class in the West. The USA is in a general election year, with an unpopular, ailing president who is barely functional. The United Kingdom’s Labour government is even more unpopular; its immigration policies led to widespread public rioting over this past summer.
And in Germany, the right-leaning AfD party is gaining power thanks to widespread dissatisfaction with Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the Social Democratic Party.
Germany may be an indicator of where the USA and UK are ultimately headed. German citizens, like British subjects and American citizens, are angry over open-border policies. In Germany, however, the government’s spending and brinkmanship on Ukraine has become an acute source of alarm. Not only do Germans fear they are going bankrupt with Ukraine-related spending—they also know that Germany would become an immediate battleground in any war between NATO and Russia.
So…throw the dice with new permissions for Kiev?
Since 2022, the US and other NATO governments have repeatedly a.) increased financial aid to Kiev, and b.) escalated the West’s involvement in the conflict.
First we weren’t going to send Abrams tanks. Then we sent Abrams tanks. Then it was no ATACMS missiles. Then we sent ATACMS missiles.
Part of the escalation has involved giving Ukraine—a foreign country—an ever-widening range of permission to escalate the war in our name. At present, Western leaders seem poised to give Kiev permission to strike deep inside Russian territory, with mid- and long-range weapons supplied by US taxpayers.
Nuclear-armed Russia has said that this would put the USA and its allies at war with Russia—something Russia has never sought. Russia’s beef is with Ukraine, not us.
Russia wouldn’t have to nuke New York or London in response. Russia could simply transfer deadly weapons of its own to an organization hostile to the USA: ISIS, the Houthis, or maybe Hamas.
War always involves unanticipated consequences. We simply don’t know what the ultimate results of all this escalation will be.
Know this, however: every time our governments expand Ukraine’s permissions to use Western-supplied arms, they put all of us more at the mercy of decisions made in Kiev.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would welcome a full-scale conflict between Russia and NATO. That would make the USA—rather than Ukraine—the main opponent of Russian forces.
In the last US election, millions of Americans voted for Biden, millions voted for Trump. None of us voted for Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s comedian-turned-war leader. But Zelensky and his generals are now making decisions that could affect all of our lives in a very big way. Thanks to the overreach of our governments, and the overweening NATO bureaucracy.
Western leaders and pro-war pundits assure us that Moscow is bluffing, that the prospect of thermonuclear war is nothing to be concerned about.
Who knows? We may all end up dying for the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders. Unless our leaders come to their senses, or we get new leadership.
I am a middle-age man with vaguely conservative leanings. I live in Ohio. I grew up on 80s heavy metal. Therefore, I am supposed to hate Taylor Swift…if you believe the mainstream media, that is.
I don’t hate Taylor Swift, though. I don’t even “hate” her music.
But dismay is another matter. I will admit that I am dismayed by the Taylor Swift phenomenon, in both musical as well as sociopolitical terms. Let me explain.
Taylor Swift would not have been a big deal in the 1980s. At all.
I enjoy testosterone-soaked heavy metal as much as any Gen X male, but my musical tastes also include plenty of female artists and bands. That’s always been the case.
In the 1980s, we had many talented and popular female vocalists. And they were diverse, in the best sense of that word: Pat Benatar, Whitney Houston, Patty Smyth, Diana Ross, and Gloria Estefan. (Madonna was good, too, before she went totally nuts.)
We had some talented and popular all-female bands. The Bangles were my personal favorite. But there were also the Go-Go’s and Vixen. The Pretenders had a great front lady, Chrissie Hynde.
Had Taylor Swift debuted in 1986 instead of 2006, she would have been regarded as a competent but unspectacular mid-lister. No way she could have edged out the aforementioned musical acts.
Instead Taylor Swift launched at a time when the music industry was in the throes of consolidation. The Internet and online piracy were decimating album sales.
That changed the economics—and the market offerings—completely. Record companies could no longer afford to invest in scores of singers and groups, many of which would inevitably fall by the wayside.
Instead, they needed a manufactured megastar. That’s what Taylor Swift was—and is. Swift is photogenic and competent. Her music is mediocre, but it’s “good enough” for the adolescent/young adult pop sphere.
Even more importantly, Swift is personally reliable and hardworking. Unlike so many musicians of the 1970s and 1980s, Swift has never been an addict or a flake. (It’s worth noting that Taylor Swift really took off around the same time that Britney Spears imploded, due to various personal issues.) Swift is the perfect corporate-driven musical vehicle for an era of industry consolidation.
That much makes sense to me, even though I know how much bleaker the musical landscape is, with so much attention heaped on the unremarkable Taylor Swift. At the end of the day, it’s a matter of economics.
The Taylor Swift personality cult
What makes much less sense to me is the Taylor Swift personality cult.
Back to the 1980s. There were plenty of teens and young adults who were drawn to the flamboyant personas of popular musicians like Madonna, Michael Jackson, and David Lee Roth.
This involved some superficial imitation. 1980s “Madonna fashion” was very much a thing, among high school girls of my generation. There were teenage boys and young men who wore their hair in the style now known as a “mullet”. (“Mullet”, by the way, is a retroactive term that was unknown in the 1980s). All of the male singers on MTV were wearing their hair that way, so it must have been cool.
But such fashions and styles were just that: fashions and styles. We all had our favorite musical acts. But virtually no young person in the 1980s felt or sought a deep personal attachment to Michael Jackson, Madonna, or David Lee Roth.
And as far as taking political advice from them? Puh-leez. We saw them for what they were: profit-driven entertainers.
Fast-forward to the present and the “Swifties” phenomenon. There are millions of young people today who have developed a parasocial relationship with Taylor Swift. A parasocial relationship is a one-sided relationship, in which one person is mostly unaware of the other person’s affections, or even their existence. Such is the lot of the rabid Taylor Swift fan.
Although Taylor Swift has had her share of male stalkers, the Swifties are not distinguished by a sexual attraction to Swift. (Most Swifties are girls and young women.) Rather, Swifties are young people who have built a fantasy world around their imaginary relationship with Taylor Swift.
Oh, sure, Swift might occasionally like one of their social media posts, or pose with them for a selfie outside a concert venue. For the most part, though, Swift doesn’t know they’re alive, at the individual level.
In my social circle here in Ohio, I know at least one young woman who is a diehard Swiftie. I’ll call her Emily.
Emily was born in the early 1990s and is now in her thirties. Emily prominently refers to Taylor Swift on all of her social media profiles. Emily’s prized possession is a photo taken with the Goddess Herself, outside a Taylor Swift concert she attended.
Emily is attractive, but she has no husband, no children. She has a sort-of boyfriend. I’m not sure if she has a cat. (A nod here to J.D. Vance’s contentious remarks about childless Americans, and Taylor Swift’s recent self-description as a “cat lady”.)
Billionaire-driven “democracy”
The Swiftie phenomenon is a marketing juggernaut, of course. Taylor Swift gives her fans the experience of an imaginary friendship, and they give her large portions of their disposable income. Tickets for Swift’s last concert tour rose into the four-figure range.
Taylor Swift recently became a billionaire. Thanks to millions of Swifties like the aforementioned Emily.
The takeaway here is that Taylor Swift has become much more than a manufactured megastar. For millions of young Millennials and Zoomers, she’s become a substitute for healthier, real-life relationships.
And since Swifties have so much invested in Taylor Swift, they’re willing to do just about anything the singer requests—or is perceived to request.
Taylor Swift has just endorsed Kamala Harris for President of the United States. This, in itself, is her right to do.
Nor am I perturbed by the fact that Swift’s politics are Democratic Party boilerplate. The Democratic Party, once the party of factory workers and farmers, is now the party of entertainment and business elites. Swift’s endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket surprised no one.
What is more troubling is that the singer, thanks to the vacuum in so many of her young fans’ lives, is able to exert the influence of a cult leader. Swift’s ability to command her followers has been documented in past elections, namely the 2018 midterms and the 2020 general election.
The mainstream media has not scrutinized this. On the contrary, there is a substantial overlap between the personality traits of a Taylor Swift cult follower and a mainstream media journalist. Journalists and university academics have lined up to fawn on the billionaire entertainer.
A recent article in UC Berkeley News began with the line, “Leaders at the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans say Swift and other young icons might inspire millions to feel hope—and power.”
The whole thing seems, on the contrary, rather top-down to me. Let’s see:
Millions of young people send Taylor Swift their money, making her a billionaire at the age of 34.
Taylor Swift tells millions of young people how to vote.
Millions of young people do as the singer commands.
How is that “democracy”?
Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris-Walz will no doubt bring about denunciations in the conservative media space. I can also see conservatives floating a boycott of Swift’s music and concerts. This will be an embarrassing failure. The fans of Tucker Carlson and Matt Walsh were never Taylor Swift fans, anyway.
They would do better to focus on getting Donald Trump elected instead. Taylor Swift might be a mediocre singer whose talents nevertheless shine in the Internet-vaporized music industry space. She might have found herself the (probably) accidental leader of a personality cult.
And yes, Swift is the ultimate limousine liberal, the supreme Hollywood hypocrite. Swift is uninterested in energy policy and fuel prices, because she travels around on a private jet. Swift’s enormous wealth shields her from the negative effects of inflation.
Whatever the Founding Fathers had in mind when they put American democracy together, I’m pretty sure the Taylor Swift version—billionaire democracy—wasn’t it.
But Taylor Swift is not evil. She isn’t even the source of what ails us. Taylor Swift, rather, is a symptom: of a society that has been systematically dumbed down for three generations now.
Don’t blame Swift. Blame the gullibility that has given her such unwarranted economic and political clout.
I have been studying Mandarin for many years. I will openly admit that I read and understand Mandarin much better than I speak it.
I’m reasonably skillful at grasping the rules and vocabulary of a new language. (I actually enjoy learning foreign grammars, as well as new writing systems.)
My powers of mimicry, alas, are not so spectacular. This is true even in Spanish, a foreign language that I know very well. It always takes me a couple of days in a Spanish-speaking environment to get my spoken abilities up to their full proficiency.
Things are even harder for me with Mandarin. If you have been studying Mandarin for some time, you may find yourself in a similar predicament.
Fortunately, help is on the way. Here is a video from a YouTube channel I subscribe to, Rita Mandarin Chinese.
The video is entitled, “Why Americans Sound American in Chinese…And How to FIX It.” Definitely worth a listen, if you’ve been struggling with the tones and pronunciation of Mandarin. (And be sure to subscribe to Rita’s channel, if this is a topic that interests you.)
Matt Gallagher is a veteran of the US-led occupation of Iraq in the 00s, and an advocate of US involvement in the present conflict in Ukraine. In a Politico piece entitled, “The Forever Wars Were a Mistake. Supporting Ukraine Is Not”, Gallagher attempts to separate his views from those of fellow Iraq war veteran JD Vance.
As most readers will know, Vance is opposed to further US involvement in the Ukraine war. Vance is also the Republican nominee for vice president.
Gallagher does not present his essay as a work of political advocacy, but the odds are high that he plans to vote for Harris-Walz in November. Harris, Walz, and the rest of the Democratic Party want to continue the US war funding, as well as US involvement in the war.
Gallagher makes a handful of arguments. (I encourage you to read his piece in full.) But the thrust of his case comes down to this paragraph:
“We [Gallagher and his fellow Iraq war veterans] served in Iraq under false pretenses, in a country that largely saw us not as saviors but as invaders. That is not the situation in Ukraine. I know from personal experience on the ground there as a volunteer trainer and journalist, and from multiple interviews with locals and international legionnaires who fight on the front lines. The Ukrainian people desperately want and need our help.”
It’s undoubtedly true that many of the residents of western Ukraine want our continued involvement. And certainly the government in Kyiv is of that opinion. If the NATO powers were to openly declare war on Russia tomorrow, President Zelensky would cheer our “courage” and “commitment to democracy”, even as the ICBMs flew between the USA and Russia.
But here’s where Eastern Europe gets tricky, as Eastern Europe has always been tricky. Gallagher also writes:
“Unlike the Iraq War, their fight is unambiguous: A foreign adversary has invaded the borders of a would-be U.S. ally in an effort to eliminate its sovereign existence. Americans who support Ukraine are not looking for weapons of mass destruction, or imposing our will on a country that does not want us…”
The fight is not unambiguous. The people of Donbas and Crimea (the regions currently annexed/contested by Russia) do not unanimously want us. Those areas are historically Russian, and were Russian throughout much of the history of the Soviet Union.
The situation in Ukraine is complicated by the chaotic nature of the Soviet breakup in 1991, in the wake of the abortive coup of that year. Imagine, for a moment, if the United States split into a dozen different countries over the course of a few months. Imagine parts of Texas arbitrarily becoming parts of a new nation based on allegiance to the state government in California. Imagine New Yorkers suddenly being told that their abortion laws will henceforth be decided by the the state legislature in deep-red Alabama.
That’s what the breakup of the USSR was like.
Contrary to what we’re being told now, the George H.W. Bush administration (the ideological heir to Ronald Reagan) did not look upon the abrupt Soviet disintegration of 1991 with unalloyed glee. Both President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker were alarmed at the xenophobia of hardcore nationalists in Ukraine and the Baltic nations (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania). Bush and Baker saw trouble ahead. And 30 years later, sure enough, that trouble has arrived in spades.
Since 1991, the West has made an already bad situation worse by inviting states formerly linked to Russia to join NATO, an anti-Russian alliance. (Couldn’t we have just left well enough alone?)
We also encouraged a coup d’état in 2014 that overthrew a duly elected, (but Russian-leaning) government for an ultra-nationalist Ukrainian government that favored increased ties with the West. We did this for our interests, not theirs.
And now we’ve placed ourselves in the middle of a convoluted conflict that involves a Russian nationalist government in Moscow, a Ukrainian nationalist government in Kyiv, and separatist factions in areas that were once Russian, but which arbitrarily became Ukraine 30 years ago.
These are the messy historical facts that Matt Gallagher (and those of a similar opinion in the West) do not take into account. The war in Eastern Europe is ultimately a civil war, set up by the ad hoc, unplanned breakup of the Soviet Union a generation ago.
Unless the West is prepared to send troops into the disputed lands of eastern and southern Ukraine (and that would mean World War III), Ukraine is going to be forced to make territorial concessions. Nothing new there: European wars have ended with territorial concessions since the fall of the Roman Empire.
The West should be involved: not as arms merchants, but as peacemakers. JD Vance is correct, and Matt Gallagher, despite his good intentions, is wrong.
I haven’t yet decided if I’ll watch tonight’s presidential debate in full. I won’t be ignoring the outcome, of course. But must I sit through the entire thing?
21st-century American politics has become too distasteful to even contemplate, much less watch on TV. If the stakes weren’t so high, I would prefer to turn the whole thing off, like some low-budget Netflix series.
I much prefer the more dignified presidential debates of my youth, and the more dignified candidates on both sides.
One of my favorites is this gem below, from 40 years ago, in which President Ronald Reagan addressed the dreaded “age question” with humor and aplomb.
No, Donald Trump is no Reagan. But then, Kamala Harris is no Walter Mondale. And that’s setting the bar pretty low, for this year’s Democratic nominee.
Like many Gen Xers, I first experienced James Earl Jones as the voice of Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy. Then in the role of Thulsa Doom in Conan the Barbarian (1982).
But without a doubt, I am most grateful to him for his performance as Terence Mann in Field of Dreams (1989). Still one of my favorite movies, even after 35 years.
“People will come Ray. They will most certainly come…”
In regard to the immigration debate, I’ve seen a lot of memes like the one above on social media of late.
The argument always goes something like this: “White people” should stop complaining about chaos at the US southern border, because “white people” are among the most flagrant border jumpers, from a historical perspective.
There is an element of truth in these memes. The [mostly white] Europeans who settled what is now the United States didn’t ask permission from the indigenous inhabitants. They simply moved in and took what they wanted, for the most part.
There were Donald Trumps among the Native Americans, men who saw what was coming. But the Native Americans were unable to prevent the onslaught.
I might point out that the Native American tribes also failed to defend their borders from Mexico. This is an often overlooked aspect of history. (The Apache leader Cochise regarded Mexico, not the United States, as his most bitter enemy.)
I might also note that Native American tribes constantly stole land from each other. The Comanches, for their part, sometimes engaged in what we now call “ethnic cleansing”. They practically wiped out several tribes, including the Tonkawa.
But I won’t go there.
The bigger—and more presently relevant—issue is this: The history of Native Americans forms an argument for the most paranoid, most Trumpian absolutism where border security is concerned. Native American history is an object lesson on what happens when national boundaries are not respected, and border security is not enforced.
What happens is: you lose your country. Just ask the Lakota, or the Navajo, or the Tonkawa who were wiped out by the Comanches. Ask the Shawnee, who used to live here in Southern Ohio. There aren’t many of them around anymore.
I understand the argument Lakota Man is trying to make. But he actually ends up making quite the opposite one.
The book haul video is a thing on the Japanese corners of YouTube, just as it is among English-language booktubers.
As in English, the Japanese book haul video (and the entire booktuber sector) is dominated by young women. No complaints here, except to point out that men of all ages, in all countries, should read more.
I have not been to Japan for more than a decade now. One thing I really miss about being in Japan is browsing bookstores, and looking for new books to read.
Even with the Internet, the acquisition of Japanese-language reading materials remains something of an ordeal in the United States. The US division of Amazon stocks relatively few Japanese-language titles. The demand simply isn’t there.
At the same time, US-based, independently owned mail-order Japanese bookstores have mostly gone out of business. This is yet another case of the Internet ruining a business model without providing an acceptable substitute.
I recall Sasuga Bookstore of Cambridge, Massachusetts with particular fondness. I purchased many books from them throughout the 1990s and early 00s. (Sasuga closed its doors for good in 2010. 残念でした.)
I’m a lifelong foreign language learner. Russian is my newest focus.
Eli from Russia is one of my favorite Russian YouTubers. She recently made a video about the similarities of the Russian and Serbian languages.
There are similarities between Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, and Polish. (I don’t know much about Bulgarian, so I’ll refrain from commenting on that one.)
As the above video demonstrates, Russian and Serbian are substantially similar, but still mutually unintelligible, even though a speaker of one of these languages can understand large chunks of the other one.
The Serbian language is not on my list—at least for now. No offense to Serbian speakers intended.
All languages interest me somewhat. But I’m now in my 50s. I’ve been studying languages since my early 20s. Thirty years of language study has taught me that I’ll never have time to learn them all. In a limited human lifespan, one must set priorities in all matters, including language study.
Former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney has declared that he will vote for Kamala Harris in November. His daughter, a former Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, made a similar announcement last week.
When making his decision known, Dick Cheney stated that former President Trump “can never be trusted with power again”.
I can understand why the media is reporting Dick Cheney’s public disavowal of Trump, but there is really no earth-shattering news here. There has long been bad blood between Dick Cheney and Trump.
And now, here’s the guy who waged an entire war based on utterly false information, a war that cost precious American lives and the lives of many innocent civilians:
Dick Cheney represents the discredited neocon wing of the Republican Party. Cheney was part of the administration that plunged the United States into the invasion of Iraq in 2003. This was a chimerical, nation-building project that cost thousands of American lives, untold numbers of Iraqi lives, and more than $3 trillion from the US taxpayers.
The neocon wing is the wing of the GOP that “can never be trusted with power again”. I will admit that I voted for the Bush-Cheney ticket in the 2000 election. If I had known then what I know now, I would have crossed party lines and voted for Gore-Lieberman.
The neocon wing of the Republican Party, which seeks to involve the United States in endless foreign wars, is far from dead.
Today it is represented by Lindsey Graham, one of the architects of the failed Western policy in Ukraine. And remember Nikki Haley? During this year’s Republican primaries, the mainstream media was pushing her because she is not-Trump. But Nikki Haley is a neocon, too. Nikki Haley never saw a foreign war, or a potential foreign war, that she didn’t like.
Twenty years ago, the neocons were happy to sacrifice Iraqi and American lives for the dream of turning Muslim Iraq into a Middle Eastern version of Sweden. Today, neocons are happy to fight until the last living Ukrainian, given that war’s long-shot chance of destabilizing Russia.
The situation is even more dangerous today. In 2003, many Democrats were skeptical of the Bush-Cheney adventure in Iraq. Today, however, the Democrats have a paranoid obsession with “Russia”. Under Biden and a Democrat-led Congress, the Democrats have sunk more than $200 billion into the Ukraine war. They have outdone the Republican neocons as warmongers. Between these two factions, we really do have a motley band of dangerous fools at the helm.
Both Donald Trump and J.D. Vance favor an end to the war in Ukraine, and an end to America’s expensive, dangerous involvement in it. Whatever legitimate criticisms there are of Trump and Vance (and yes, there are many), they are correct on this policy, at least.
If former President Trump loses in November, this will almost certainly be his last time atop the GOP presidential ticket. But the Republican Party is never going back to its warmongering neocon wing. If that happens, I’ll be voting Libertarian.
In case you haven’t heard, the booming job market of the post-pandemic era has officially come to an end. Earlier this week, the US Labor Department reported that job openings are the lowest they’ve been since January 2021, when much of the country was still under COVID lockdown rules. The unemployment rate now stands at 4.3%.
The experts are starting to worry, maybe even panic a little. This goes for the public sector as well as the private sector.
“The labor market is no longer cooling down to its pre-pandemic temperature, it’s dropped past it,” one private-sector hiring expert told CNBC. “Nobody, and certainly not policymakers at the Federal Reserve, should want the labor market to get any cooler at this point.”
There also seems to be a sense of panic among new college grads. The mainstream media is full of articles about the difficult time young people are having, navigating the abruptly tighter job market.
I can understand a sense of disappointment. Anyone who will graduate next spring (2025) effectively missed the boom, after all. The best time to graduate with a newly minted college degree was in 2022 or 2023, when corporate employers were scrambling for people, and paying signing bonuses.
Job openings fell to 7.7 million in July — the lowest level since January 2021.
Hiring picked up to 3.5% in July, up from 3.3% in June. That's encouraging after some weak jobs data.
The bottom line: The hot job market is over. It's getting harder to get hired, but the overall… pic.twitter.com/JTTlnebywg
It’s important to remember, though, that unemployment rates of the last two years, which have been well under 4%, are not the historical norm. In the university economics courses I took in the late 1980s (which are admittedly dated in 2024), we were taught that an unemployment rate of 5 percent is the acceptable baseline.
I was a new college graduate in 1991. The unemployment rate was then near 7%. Was it difficult to find a job? Sure, a little. But I managed to find one. So did most of my friends. And I’m not only talking about people with the most in-demand majors. My degree was in economics. I knew people who found jobs with communications and English degrees.
Based on the numbers, the job market is not “bad”. (As a new college grad in 1991, I would have regarded a 4.3% unemployment rate as a vast improvement in my situation.) Rather, the job market has simply returned to something approaching “normal”. It was unrealistic to believe that the job market was going to remain in its 2022-2023 state, with job seekers holding all the cards.
But if you were a job seeker during that time, it was sure nice while it lasted.
