Some thoughts

Via Instapundit, behold the poor sods; still traumatized by covid:  Meet the Americans STILL isolating 4 years into Covid pandemic... including NJ woman who's been in lockdown for 1,620 days While I do I feel a bit sorry for people (especially the elderly) who were terrified into thinking catching it was a death sentence, after 4 years they need to get over it. The people featured in the article definitely have other mental health issues, this line stood out:  Hill, who uses they/them pronouns' Yep, a well-adjusted individual here! It does seem that there are more and more people (and women in particular) who are too fragile to cope with everyday life. Social media has made people more willing to divulge personal issues that they would have kept to themselves in the past. I recently reconnected on FB with a woman I knew at school and she is constantly posting about her anxiety and other issues.  This post on Mental health and Leftism is also telling, and given women (esp. youn

Today was the last day of the summer holidays. The past few weeks have been busy preparing for results days, and then ensuring everything is ready for the start of the new school year.  I went to Brussels for the bank holiday weekend last week, primarily to visit Waterloo and its battlefield:   The Lion Mount and Panorama on the battlefield. The Hougoumont Farm Memorial at the farmhouse Napoleon's last headquarters And Wellington's HQ (now the museum) I also went to Liege for a day, while there I was wandering around a park on Sunday afternoon and came across a group of  ‘ puppy players ‘. It definitely, IMO, comes under the category of ‘do what you want in the privacy of your bedroom, but don’t frighten the horses.' Liege was pretty, with an impressive station, and a very old school aquarium. Finally, I went to  the Cantillion Brewery, Autoworld, And the Basilique Nationale du Sacré-Cœur. Overall a nice weekend away. 

  I'm not dead yet insists Biden as he's loaded onto cart of corpses - The Babylon Bee

If, as Voltaire once wrote, the Kingdom of Prussia was not a state with an army, but an army with a state, then modern Britain is surely not a state with a healthcare system, but a healthcare system with a state.   The NHS need not depend on immigration  - Sam Bidwell, The Critic 

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A long and depressing read on the effects of welfarism on women:  The march of Kamala’s brides . I like the term BOT- Bride of the State- to describe how women have replaced husbands with government programs: BOTS have demanded and received not only the female-targeted government grants, educational and jobs programmes, and social safety nets that benefited Julia and Linda and their singular progeny, but also a much broader set of social engineering measures that are fundamentally reshaping American mores. Since the Nineties, young American women have been positioned as the primary beneficiaries of neo-Victorian speech and conduct codes that have fundamentally transformed the behaviour of men and women everywhere from classrooms to workplaces to bars. However, this has a price (beyond the higher taxes) But have these efforts made BOTS happy? The answer, according to young women, is no. In fact, the demographic that has been the most highly socialised into core progressive values and wo

A good point is made here:  How Much Is Elon Musk Willing to Lose to Protect Free Speech?   'roughly speaking, 75 percent of Elon Musk’s wealth is tied to Tesla. And Tesla, of course, is an electric car company. 'According to Gallup, 71 percent of Republicans would not consider owning an electric vehicle. Eighty-three percent of Democrats would consider owning an electric vehicle. You don’t need to be a statistician to recognize which audience matters most to Tesla’s core business model.' This reminds me of the irony of Alyssa Milano saying she was going to sell her Tesla and by a VW, forgetting who started the latter. Hopefully, he'll make enough money from Starlink to counter the fall in Telsa sales.  UPDATED: a good summery of The British elites’ crazy rage against Elon Musk

An interesting article by Roger Kimball:  What the Right Gets Wrong About Art . Excerpt: ' it is no secret that much if not most art in recent decades has abandoned beauty, abandoned the ambition to please the viewer aesthetically. Instead, it seeks to shock, discommode, repulse, proselytize, or startle. Beauty is out of place in any art that systematically discounts the aesthetic.' and 'The trick, for viewers as well as artists, is not to lose sight of beauty but to concentrate primarily on something seemingly more pedestrian — the making of good works of art. The best guides to this task are to be found not in the work of this season’s art-world darlings but in the great models furnished by the past.' Worth reading and pondering

A collection of articles on events oft eh past weeks that I found interesting and depressing (Hopefully none of which will get me in trouble with Two-Tier Starmer) The Disunited Kingdom  - IM 1776 There is No Cope  - Konstantin Kisin The Hollow Kingdom  - Christoper Rufi Labour to 'Define' Islamophobia So It Can More Easily Continue Its War on Native Brits - HotAir Were the ‘Spontaneous’ Anti-Racism Rallies Even Real?  - Daily Skeptic Night of the ghost fascism  - The Critic Britain’s Foxes are Beset by Wolves - N.S. Lyons Humorous takes from the Babylon Bee: Elon Musk Buys The United Kingdom To Establish Free Speech There In Latest Bond Film, 007 Tasked With Taking Down 83-Year-Old British Grandma Who Shared Inaccurate Meme Speaking of memes: And finally, Dominic Frisby's very good song (a few months old now but very apt at the moment)

An interesting article on Boom supersonic, who I've been aware of for a few years and seems to be making steady progress in developing a new SST:  ‘We just have to bu ild it’: Why Concorde’s successor is eyeing supersonic flights to America I particularly like the CEO's comments regarding the ecoloons who think we could go back to a diet of turnips and living in hovels:  “There are some people who look at this and say, ‘Well, I guess we should all have less things. We should use less energy, we should go to fewer places.’ There’s been a lot of virtue-signalling and it’s very depressing. “I believe in a future of abundance. I believe the north star is human flourishing and that we should build a future in which more people can go to more places more often.”  Having missed the chance to fly on Concorde I hope they can deliver and develop the Overture.

This essay has been a long time coming, as my thoughts on how to implement have changed as the price of gold and silver have climbed and inflation has bit since the pandemic. It will briefly summarise my thoughts on the desirability of a gold standard, and then describe a practical plan for doing so. It is focused on the UK but other countries could adopt a similar plan, and based on current (August 2024) gold prices . Humans have used various forms of currency since the dawn of time. Gold and silver coins have been used since Lydia minted their Stater . Dominic Frisby has written extensively on the history of the Gold Standard, house prices and wages in gold , and its industrial uses so I'm not going to recount them here, merely add that I've been reading about this topic since Detlev Schlichter's Paper Money Collapse came out 10 years ago. Since my early teens, I've also been interested in coins and money, bringing coins back from foreign trips and collecting b