I’ll have more of these, and there is some tangential discussion below, but these are the first few that come to mind. With the possible exception of the final one, they aren’t likely to be pursued by either the legacy media or red/blue partisans.
Americas
Considering Media Teflon
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane, All they will call you will be “deportees“
Oh, pity the poor establishment media folks, the woke clergy, and the professional bleeding-heart progressive activists, all making woeful faces and lamenting regarding the round-up and repatriation of masses of criminal illegal immigrants. It’s as if they all honestly believe that the masses of illegals are all doe-eyed innocent widdle cheeeldren and humble suffering agricultural workers, all packed off by their cheating employers once the harvest season is finished. The bubble in which these sentiments are enshrined as gospel is being severely battered over this last week as it becomes apparent that many, many Americans of various ethnic backgrounds and incomes welcome the ICE roundups and deportations with cheers of rapturous approval. Imagine that.
New Year’s in San Salvador
This was an amazing thing to see. Salvadorans seem happy and optimistic. A few years ago it was like: Don’t go to this place; don’t go to that place; you can go to this tourist place, it’s safe. Everything was either off-limits or a walled garden. Someone I know was robbed at gunpoint of her cellphone while sitting in her car with the window down and having a conversation. Everyone says she was lucky.
Now it’s a different country. There is still crime but you can go almost anywhere. The murder rate, once sky-high, is low by US standards. The downtown was dilapidated and dangerous. Now it’s being renovated, bustling, a nice place to walk around.
It’s all because, almost by chance, Salvadorans elected a president who was serious about stopping the gangs that were responsible for most of the crime, and politically skilled and lucky enough (very) to pull it off.
National turnarounds can happen. El Salvador, maybe Argentina, maybe the USA. Europe looks in a bad way, reminiscent of the late 1970s before Reagan and Thatcher. Of course this time is different, it’s worse this time, etc. But this time is always different, and thus rarely different at all: trends, including bad trends, don’t go on forever. Here’s hoping.
The Lie At the Heart
There was a time when most of us neither knew nor cared about matters to do with transgender, save in the nature of not quite being able to look away from the blessedly infrequent spectacle of someone in the public eye deciding to medically readjust their body to the appearance of the opposite sex and to change their name to conform. Christine Jorgenson was, as I recall as a teenager, seen as a freakish anomaly – an entertaining one, to be sure, but pretty much a one-off. Travel writer Jan Morris (formerly James) and musician Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos came along a decade or two later. Their transition to a sex other than the one they had been born with at a point where both were mature adults was viewed as kind of a private eccentricity, not affecting much beyond their families and personal circle. Curious, but … whatever floats your boat. I also suspect that there was a scattering of other individuals who made such a transition, and chose to live quietly and modestly in their new identity; happy enough to live and be accepted in the identity that they felt was truly a reflection of who they were. Constantly blaring out the specifics of their previous life and their new one was most definitely not a means to achieving privacy.
Dedicated Followers of Fashion
It’s kind of depressing, reading the various stories linked here and there by various blogs and social media about pro-Palestinian/pro-terrorist orgies of protest on the grounds of various colleges and universities, and in the streets of certain big cities. This reminds me of the anti-war demos of the Vietnam War era. Massive turnout, lots of signs, lots of free-floating rhetoric … which turned out to mean absolutely nothing at all, in the long run. Much of the ruckus wasn’t motivated by sincere conviction about the welfare of the South Vietnamese, or the lives of our military troops. It was all just the followers of fashion, making a show of their fashionable conviction.