- “On the sexual atrocities Hamas committed on October 7th” – We cannot ignore the depravity of the October 7th attacks or what they mean for women, writes Alex Berenson on Substack.
- “2023 has exposed the moral depravity of the radical Left” – Jews, women, the working class – leftists have betrayed everyone they once claimed to speak for, says Tom Slater in Spiked.
- “How Hamas weaponises victimhood” – Also in Spiked, Frank Furedi says that Hamas are the masters at weaponising victimhood.
- “Broken codes of conduct” – In Taki’s Magazine, Theodore Dalrymple takes delight in the Harvard President’s plagiarism kerfuffle while scolding the ever-expanding power of the bureaucratic state.
- “The Elgin Marbles weren’t stolen – Greece is just exploiting our weakness” – In the Sunday Times, Jonathan Sumption argues it would demean the British Museum and its universalist mission to return the Elgin Marbles.
- “Five-day work from home deals for pampered civil service mandarins” – Hundreds of civil servants are on full-time ‘home-working contracts’ and do not go into Whitehall at all, reveals the Mail on Sunday.
- “The year the pandemic ended: A retrospective” – On Substack, Eugyppius reflects on the year when the Covid circus finally packed up its tents in Germany.
- “Senior lawyer drafting Rwanda Bill told Rishi Sunak it would not work” – A senior lawyer who advised on Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda Bill warned ministers that it was far from guaranteed to protect deportation flights from legal challenge, reports the Telegraph.
- “Revealed: Rishi Sunak’s secret talks to bring back Dominic Cummings” – The Sunday Times recounts the story told in Dominic Cummings’s latest blog of his meeting with the Prime Minister to discuss a return to Downing Street.
- “Delors and Thatcher clashed, but their visions combined might now save Europe” – Vladimir Putin has proven Margaret Thatcher’s fears right, yet only a united Europe of the kind envisaged by Jacques Delors can bring him to heel, writes Charles Moore in the Telegraph.
- “Jacques Delors destroyed the European Left” – Jacques Delors enabled the populist Right, says Thomas Fazi in UnHerd.
- “Jacques Delors was the father of Brexit – without the U.K., his vision is turning to reality” – Jacques Delors dreamt of a unitary, centralised European state. This is what the EU is now fast becoming, argues Dan Hannan in the Telegraph.
- “Biden won’t run, Labour won’t win a landslide, Middle East may find peace” – In the Telegraph, Janet Daley gives her optimistic predictions for 2024.
- “Military shuns heat pumps in favour of cheaper cutting-edge electric boilers” – The military is shunning heat pumps and instead warming soldiers’ homes with electric boilers that cost less to run, according to the Telegraph.
- “Net Zero is about to get even more painful” – Few would challenge the need to decarbonise – eventually. But our current approach will be economically ruinous, says Annabel Denham in the Telegraph.
- “U.S. university chancellor sacked for vegan porn videos” – A U.S. university chancellor has been sacked after it was discovered that he had filmed vegan-themed pornographic videos with his wife and posted them online, according to the Telegraph.
- “Have Ireland’s Gen Z been duped?” – For Gen Z, talk about ‘choice’ and ‘equality’ seems particularly cruel given many of them will spend their 20s and 30s living in the box room upstairs, says Donal Horgan in Gript.
- “Why are theatres so cowardly?” – Good luck finding a play that criticises the NHS, remarks Lloyd Evans in the Spectator.
- “Straight men at fault for Hollywood failures on diversity, says Sofia Coppola” – According to Sofia Coppola, Hollywood is failing to produce diverse cinema because “99% of the people giving money in film are straight men”, reports the Telegraph.
- “The American Museum of Supernatural History” – By embracing indigenous superstitions, the West’s great science museums are abandoning their mission to educate and compromising their scientific integrity, warns Elizabeth Weiss in Reality’s Last Stand.
- “Facebook censors podcast hosted by pro-Israel Arab” – Facebook has removed a pro-Israeli post by an Arab commentator, reports the Telegraph.
- “Federal Government operatives and Soros money behind plot to keep Trump off ballot” – The public-private model used for censorship is now being used to undermine U.S. democracy, says Alex Gutentag on the Public Substack.
- “Not with a whimper but a bellow…” – Mark Steyn discusses the ban on Trump from running in Maine’s election, drawing unfavourable comparisons with Russia.
- “When the Bernsteins hosted the Black Panthers” – The Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro, skips a key chapter in his life, which is fortunately resurrected in a new documentary about his nemesis, Tom Wolfe, says Gregg Kilday on the Ankler Substack.
- “Non-crime hate incidents are deeply sinister” – On Free Speech Nation, Andrew Doyle takes issue with the police’s recording of ‘non-crime hate incidents’, an authoritarian, Orwelllian concept.
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You only have to look at which companies benefited hugely from the lockdowns/restrictions and which ones were negatively affected to see the corruption:
Big Pharma; Big Tech; Amazon; other on-line retailers and delivery companies all accumulated vast profits
Small private businesses; hospitality; high street sole traders and the self-employed were absolutely hammered.
And taxpayers have now been handed the bill. In German, the word is “rechnung” and goodness knows, we need a reckoning with the people who did this. But we’re powerless and they know it.
To be fair to Amazon, they were a lifeline for many of the locked down who were unable to go out shopping due to lockdown.
Where else could I have ordered all manner of items that were required, including over-the-counter medication, necessary kitchen utensils, hygiene supplies and all kinds of other necessities, sometimes ordered Saturday evening and delivered by Sunday lunchtime, all at highly competitive prices?
The Davos people call it public-private partnership.
The solution is simple but hard: massively shrink the state.
The reason big business “partners” with the state is because the state has massive amount of of power and resources.
The role of the state needs to be reduced. It has no business telling us what we can and cannot say online, what medical treatments we must follow, what form of money we must use, what type of car we must drive or how we must heat our houses.
As long as we as a population insist on looking to the state to solve what some of us think are problems, the state will take the power and corporations will exploit that power.
And we need to cut off its money supply, or severely restrict it (i.e.our taxes) and force the state to operate under the rules of financial discipline that every family in Britain is subject to. It can’t spend more than it earns or the consequences will be serious.
To put it very crudely, the state is like an authoritarian, violent head of family who is incompetent, screws everything up, is badly in debt and lets its friends abuse his children. I don’t know about anyone else but I’m sick of having to put up with it.
“force the state to operate under the rules of financial discipline that every family in Britain is subject to. It can’t spend more than it earns or the consequences will be serious.”
I have spouted this logic all my adult life and faced the nonsense that ‘national finances’ fall under different financial rules, yabba, yabba, yabba. NO, they do not.
Surplus national cash does not come from a few extra shifts on the printing presses. I know this, many on here know this, but somehow our “elites” know better than us although their attempts at explanation fall to the oft repeated nonsense of some Carney style logic. This is the essence of the public-private partnership.
The state i.e the public side of the nation requires ever more tax payers money to feed the insatiable appetite of the private sector. The biggest private sector companies, feeding as they do off a nation’s public companies are in reality just third party agents of taxation hiding behind government contracts written allegedly for the public’s benefit.
The revolving door between government and “private business” laid bare.
A very cosy, very profitable arrangement for a few but now hurtling to its inevitable demise as its unsustainability is confirmed.
‘But who would build the roads?!’
I agree with you; except that you forgot to add that the head of the family was off their heads on cocaine as well.
The author equates subsidies to rents and paints rents in a negative way. I think this is misguided.
Every person who aspires to not have to work until the day they drop will need to rely on rents. Rents is what will keeps us going after retirement.
Now it needn’t be that way. If there was zero inflation and we knew that one thousand pounds we put away today would be worth one thousand pounds in twenty or thirty years then we could just work out how much we felt we needed and save for it.
But because the value of money is highly unstable (mostly thanks to the profligacy of the state which is incompetent and so needs to cheat and print too much money all the time), we are all forced to become rent seeking investors. Either ourselves directly and/or handing the job over to the state who needs to run a state pension fund, typically very badly, with no guarantees or commitments beyond the certainty that it will be worse than you hope, never better.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity….
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific/ technological elite.
Eisenhower, Farewell Speech as President 1961
See? There’s nothing new under the sun.
The author spoils his case by over stating it. If the state is to provide security it must provide it for all of the country’s interests which is a reason companies pay tax as well as individuals. The armed forces need equipment and it is not a subsidy to buy them from a manufacturer.
The relationship between arms producers and the state shows just how completely corrupt the public-private “partnership” is.
The state is the single buyer and the producers are several. That should in theory give the state enormous buying power. And that should translate into suppliers margins being squeezed very low and the single buyer getting an amazing deal.
In fact, in this case, for reasons that can only really be explained by massive corruption, the opposite is the case. Arms manufacturers make phenomenal profits and all you hear are instances of absurd overpayment by the state.
Society seems to have accepted that government arms contracts are licences for the companies winning the contracts to mint money.
It’s all for our protection…
Tax breaks and subsidies are not the same! The former is taking less of what has been earned, the latter is giving (public money) to that which is not earned, usually to bolster a political narrative regardless of the recipient’s value to the economy.
Corporatism is alive, prospering and nutured by the Not-the-Conservative Party.
Like the thirty-seven billion pounds – more than the quarterly turnover of Microsoft, enough to build three nuclear power stations, more than the cost of the Channel Tunnel and Crossrail put together or build a dozen aircraft carriers, donated to Dido Harding to commission a bugridden smartphone app that any GCSE IT student could have knocked up over the weekend, coupled to a back end database that could be bought off the shelf for a few hundred thousand and is now admitted not to have sold a single life, do you mean?
When is someone going to look into that ultra-rip off?