Some thoughts

I've been preoccupied with personal matters for most of this week, and next week will be off to Barcelona so there will be no Quick links next Sunday.  Glenn Reynolds has  Thoughts on our ruling class monoculture . Also at Instapundit:  Whose Stuff is it anyway ? Back when we had CD players and VCRs, we could use them until they broke down, but our relationship with the company effectively ended on the day of the sale. Now that devices require an internet connection and software services, you are shackled to their makers, whether or not you pay for a monthly subscription. This is why I still buy physical copies of media Asking the important questions:  Why Can't Grocery Store Checkout Be Normal Anymore?  Another cause of declining birthrates:  Most young men are single. Most young women are not.  ' Women don’t need to be in long-term relationships. They don’t need to be married. They’d rather go to brunch with friends than have a horrible date'. Relat...

I like substack, it's handy getting new posts emailed directly to me and is (as far as I am aware) at resisting attempts at censorship (unlike WordPress, again so I hear) While I appreciate it is attempting to ensure individual writers can earn from their writings, I do wonder how viable it is to have individual channel subscriptions. I currently have free subscriptions to 22 writers. If I were to upgrade just my favourite 5 to the cheapest payment level it would cost me approx £31 a month. For comparison UnHerd, with many different authors, is just £5 a month. That's much better value.  As with the proliferation of streaming platforms, the question is with rising bills how many people will continue to justify the expense of multiple subscriptions for specific content?

A slightly shorter roundup than usual, as I lost a load of items I'd saved due to a hiccup with Outlook, Economic illiteracy:  Why food should be more expensive . Not going to fly in the current climate. Plus raw materials are always a low-value part of the supply chain Methinks the solution could be for producers to move up the value chain like William Chase or  Ocean Spray . Thoughts on Ukraine by Laughing Wolf:  Peace At Any Price  More on the lessons of the war:  We Have a Lot of Things to Relearn This could make the Hydrogen economy viable:  HIDDEN HYDROGEN: Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel? The retreat from globalism  I've long thought something like this is a better option than the dichotomy of left v right: ' in politics today it often seems that the only choice on offer is between ‘big state or big business’. Faced with this unenviable dilemma, he argues, the ‘only viable alternative’ is localism – that is, ‘s...

Hobby Club’s Missing Balloon Feared Shot Down By USAF D'oh!

The number of abortions in the UK increased by 47 per cent in the first two weeks of 2023, compared with the same time in 2022. This follows after 2021 saw the highest number of abortions ever recorded in England and Wales: there were over 214,000 abortions and around 625,000 live births. Excluding miscarriages, this means that around one quarter of pregnancies ended in abortion. From the Critic,  The poverty of choice Yikes, no wonder the birthrate has collapsed. As the article also notes, 'long gone are the days of safe, legal and rare'

  Unsolved Mysteries Of Quantum Leap With Donald P. Bellisario Used to love this show as a kid, can't believe it ended 30 years ago. Still don't like that ending though. I also used to have somewhere a prequel novel that explained the backstory, One thing that bugged me (which the video doesn't address was the episode where Sam and Al switched places. They restored the status quo by having Sam leap into Al. If they could do that why not put the person in Sam's body into the leaping machine and put them back into thier own bod, freeing Sam? 

From RedState:  Chelsea Handler Makes 'Comedy' Skit About the Life of a Childless Woman but It Reeks of Sadness S he has no permanence in her life, including her love life which seems to involve emotionless physical contact and a vibrating machine. By the time she becomes too old for any of that, her weightless existence will become the heaviest thing she has to bear as her loveless life of selfish decisions results in no one being there for her that truly has any attachment.She’ll sit in a room alone wishing someone would come through the door and no one will except attendants and assistants who are only there because they’re paid to be. Meanwhile, the mom she mocked for not having her life will be surrounded by her children and grandchildren. Indeed, the older I get the more lonely I feel and regret never having found a wife or having children. The final line also rings very true:  This life that feminism has told women for decades is full of fulfillment and wonder is an abs...

I finally moved out of my London flat on Sunday, for the last 4 months it has been mainly empty due to my new job back in Kent so I've only been using it for weekends. I drove back Friday night and after a final fry-up in the local cafe, I went to a nearby vintage fair, before heading into the city center. The main thing I did was check out the Yayoi Kusuma x Verscae collaboration at Harrods, for which the outside of the store has been covered in dots, and a giant statue of her erected: They also had a (slightly creepy) animatronic robot of her as well:   Later on, I went to a PopUp Painting  class, where I created this: I haven't painted for a while, and not in acrylic before but I was pleased with the overall result. Sunday I was packing up the final bits and cleaning the flat before dropping the keys back at the estate agents. Overall I was renting in London for 18 months, and while it was nice to be able to do stuff in the evenings and weekends am glad to be back in Kent.

Decline of the west:   The termites are in the woodwork ,  Thorstein Veblens Theory of the Leisure Class  and  It's time to talk about how and why Biden lets the Chinese-commies walk all over him Energy and environmentalism:  The UK is much further from net zero than the Government would have you believe , The carbon scam explained and exposed ,  2035: the end of civilisation , and a question to which the answer is probably no:  Can the us bring nuclear power back   Education:  the true cost of Labour's war on private schools  and childcare:  who will look after the kids? Getting rid of disabilities is good? Not anymore:  healing the blind is ableism Anti- racism: A black professor trapped in anti-racist hell Culture:  corecore and cultural fragmentation  and  Western society is built on stigma Heartbreaking:  Detransitioners are being abandoned by medical professionals who devastated their bodies and m...

 A review of the Ineos Grenadier in the Speccie Looks better than the new Defender, if I had the money and was looking for a 4x4 would definitely consider one.

One of the cleverest moves of the British left was convincing people to embody their patriotism in the BBC and the NHS- Glenn Reynolds Indeed. Update: From Powerline,  Annuals of Government Medicine

  Live long and prosper. If they will let you. I used to want to live to 200, now though, I'm not so sure if it will be worth it...

 On Saturday I was at Olympia attending the Destinations show, looking for ideas for my next trips. Afterwards I has some time to kill so went to  Leighton  and Sambourne  Houses. These are well worth visiting if in the area, and a good glimpse into what daily life was like back then and the domestic styles of well-to-do households. The latter is full of political cartoons from Punch and the like (the owner was the artist who created them), you need a good knowledge of the era to get the context!  Here are a few photos I took:' Leighton house: Sambourne house:

Spotted this story on my FB feed this evening: As the post mentions, according to modern standards  'the idea that only men are suitable for this role is outdated and even discriminatory' Coincidentally, yesterday I saw this via a comment on David Thompson's  blog:  1776 The Musical . I have to ponder the contradiction, that an all-male cast is discriminatory, but an all-female one is stunning and brave. Then there is the fact that this play is based on real (white) men, and distorts historical facts by portraying them as women of various races. As we have seen time and again, the hypocrisy here is staggering, anything anti-male is fine but anti-female is hatefully misogyny. This is not equality, but overcompensation for the sins of the past by going too far in the opposite direction.

A larger than usual collection to counter last week's absence, some of these stories are a bit older than usual. Tom Kni9ghton:  Disposable Culture  and  Socialism: The flipside of get-rich-quick schemes Indeed:  The COVID-19 Pandemic Was a 'Catastrophe for Human Freedom'  related,  New study offers even more proof lockdowns were deadly Environmentalism: The Environmentalist Assault on Civilization  and  Net Zero Will Lead to the End of Modern Civilisation, Says Top Scientist  Not unrelated motoring news:  Toyota predicts most of its vehicles will still use gas in 2030 Energy:  The next generation of US nuclear plants could be tiny but powerful  and  Too cool for school: How's 'bout a small thermonuclear reactor to power campus? He's not wrong:  Jeremy Clarkson: We’re in the midst of a coup. Who the hell’s behind it? We don’t need a ‘diverse’ coronation Paul Johnsom (RIP), On modern times   Respect The Institutio...

There's a meme that goes along the lines of 'If I had a penny for every time (x) happened, I'd have 2p. Which isn't a lot but it's weird it happened twice' This brings me to not one but two recent articles this week on extreme boy modification: (warning, images on these links may cause vomiting) I modified my body to be a black alien. now restaurants are scared to serve me I'm an ex-banker 'genderless dragon'- my son won't talk to me Note how the second individual is also buying into the non-binary crap and using they/them pronouns. While I'm generally of the view people should be free to do whatever they want to their bodies, I'm also free to point and laugh at the wannabe circus freaks. I also don't like tattoos and think they are ugly and low-status, especially in large numbers (as are multiple piercings, mad hairstyles, and makeup). I often see people online posting pics of their latest tat and shake my head sadly... It does make ...

I spotted this on my Facebook timeline earlier this evening:  Scientists Have Built the First Modular Body—a Living Being That Isn't Alive Sounds scary right? Just one slight problem with this story: it isn't real. If the author had bothered to click on the link in the (allegedly 'recently unearthed' but posted 6 years ago) video's description he would have noticed the following summary: ' Modular Body is an online science fiction story about the creation of OSCAR, a living organism built from human cells.' Indeed, I saw this and some related material at an art gallery (I think it was in Austria in 2016, but am not 100% sure). What this also shows is the state of modern journalism, especially in technical/scientific fields. Time was mags would hire people with a background in a subject (one of my tutors at uni moonlighted as a science correspondent for the Guardian). Now they hire arts graduates who don't have a clue about the scientific content and spe...