The Spectator - Want to get rich? Invest like an American

(personal underlines) 

https://spectator.com/article/want-to-get-rich-invest-like-an-american/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK++20260122++AL+CID_8f6de313bfa0717d568bff1da25ac1d4&edition=us

Want to get rich? Invest like an American

John Oxley

Ramit Sethi wants to make you rich. He is not a household name in Britain, but the Stanford psychology graduate is one of the biggest personal finance influencers in the US. He hosts a successful podcast, Money for Couples, has written bestselling books and even has a Netflix show, How to Get Rich. All his projects share the same message: by changing your mindset and taking a few practical steps, you can power yourself toward prosperity.

To British ears, his style might seem brash. It is financial advice with a substantial side of life coaching. But beyond the difference in tone, Sethi spreads a simple message rarely heard in finance columns or consumer advice TV slots in this country: that the best thing you can do for your money is to rapidly increase your income.

On his website, tips on controlling your outgoings are nestled alongside advice on securing a pay rise. In his TV show, he encourages families not only to cut unnecessary subscriptions and tame their spending, but also to switch careers to maximise their income. It is part of a broader difference between American and British financial advice. While our experts are savings maximisers, their American counterparts focus more on increasing your ability to pull money in.

Across social media and podcasts, Americans are encouraged to boost their salaries, launch their side hustles and sweat their assets. British channels, by contrast, are much more reserved, with an emphasis on changes to the other side of the ledger. Advice focuses on controlling bills, cashback cards and loyalty points. It is small fry and conservative, the opposite of Sethi’s mantra of ‘$30,000 questions, not $3 ones’.

The difference embodies a broader cultural difference. Americans are encouraged to take greater risks and pursue greater dreams. British advice is parsimonious and loss-averse. Even when it comes to savings, we are shepherded towards the safest options. While Americans are urged to play the market, we are offered better current accounts. This both exemplifies and encourages an overly cautious approach to money, which leaves the UK at a disadvantage.

Beyond the puff of podcasts, Britons are missing out on real financial advantages. Outside of pensions, less than a quarter of people in the UK invest any money in the stock market. More than two-thirds of Isas are cash-only, and less than 10 per cent of our personal wealth is invested in equities. This lags behind the US, where two-thirds of people have money in the market, and also the rest of the G7, where on average 15 per cent of personal wealth is held in stocks. The government is trying to nudge us in the right direction by limiting the cash component of Isas to £12,000 from next year.

Fear of investing appears to be a consequence of national risk aversion. Two-thirds of Britons say that putting money into stocks and shares is ‘too risky’, opting instead for products where their capital remains safe. They are missing out. In recent years, markets (especially in the US) have surged, while savings rates have languished and been eroded by inflation. If you’d started 2020 by putting £1,000 in an S&P tracker, your money would have more than doubled by the start of this year. Even the top savings accounts would have earned only a couple of hundred pounds in that time.

Tied to this is our national obsession with property wealth. In Britain, property investment is perhaps the only socially acceptable form of capital accumulation. A scroll through Instagram will show dozens of accounts sharing tips, from the practical to the dubious, about flipping homes, maximising rental yields and building property empires from almost no capital. It’s presented as the perfect play – high reward with little risk. This advice ignores the reality that policy choices made housing a one-way bet for a fortunate older generation, but that future growth is far from guaranteed.

The contrast with the US is telling. There, households are encouraged to spread risk across markets and time. Here, advice culture and social norms combine to channel risk into a single dominant asset class, while treating broader market participation as optional or intimidating. For those with a greater risk appetite, the gap leads them to seek worse advice and to fall under the influence of those who peddle get-rich-quick alternatives, such as day trading, cryptocurrency and outright gambling. The forums and YouTube channels that do push more sensible portfolio approaches tend to be niche and are favoured by the already well-off and financially savvy.

The result is a British public with remarkably under-optimised finances. We jealously guard our energy tariffs, shop around for our broadband and then push the proceeds into underperforming accounts. A lifetime of caution leaves us personally much poorer than we should be and creates a crisis for the state when people enter retirement. Rather than learning to ride the bumps of the market, we avoid risk without noticing the money we leave on the table.

The bravado of Sethi and his compatriots is unlikely to win over many British viewers. Reticence about money is one of the greatest cultural divisions between Americans and us. The life-coach-style dream of achieving your ‘rich life’ instinctively feels like vulgar nonsense. These influencers, however, can teach us things our homegrown advisers miss.

Savvy spending and shrewd saving are, quite obviously, only one side of the ledger and there is only so much thriftiness can deliver. A better job and a higher income deliver life improvements on a scale that 1 per cent cashback will never muster. Likewise, long-term investments in the market, with a healthy spread of risk, will outperform even the canniest jockeying between savings accounts.

It’s often said that culture eats strategy. Britain’s approach to money is obviously shaped by its culture – both our deep-seated reserve about financial matters and the ideas that bounce around the public sphere. Hearing more about shopping around has made us more promiscuous with our utilities and allowed us to reap the benefits of consumer pressure.

However, too many of these are Sethi’s ‘$3 questions’. The bigger value ones are about growth, ownership and ambition, and those are still treated as faintly un-British. Until that changes, we will remain very good at saving pennies and oddly reluctant to pursue pounds.

The Spectator - Am I a libertarian after all?

 

(personal underlines, there...as here...)

https://spectator.com/article/am-i-a-libertarian-after-all/?status=Active&utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BLND%20%2020260123%20%20HOUSE%20ADS%20%20AG+CID_441da533e4a8fbaec62d9c9cf61082c8

Am I a libertarian after all?

Douglas Murray

I have never been the greatest fan of libertarianism as a political ideology. Libertarians seem to me to be the bisexuals of politics – they want a bit of everything.

But even I felt a slight twinge of libertarian sentiment this week when I read some remarks by our Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood. The Labour minister had told MPs that artificial intelligence is an ‘incredibly powerful tool that can and should be used by our police forces’, though she added that it must be regulated in a way that is ‘always accurate’. I have never before read the words ‘police’ and ‘always accurate’ in the same sentence, so the novelty grabbed my attention.

But it was what Mahmood was quoted as saying last month in an interview with Sir Tony Blair that really stood out. She had once again sung the virtues of AI and technology, explaining that they can be ‘transformative to the whole of the law and order space’.

She then said this: ‘When I was in Justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.’

The moment I read that I suffered my unexpected libertarian shudder. I do not want anyone in government – whether in Justice or the Home Office – talking about the eyes of the state being on me at all times. Then to my great relief I realised that what I had suffered was not a libertarian instinct at all. It was instead an instinct born out of basic understanding of the utter incompetence and indolence of the state.

We already live in one of the most heavily surveilled societies in the world. In London alone there are reckoned to be more than 100,000 public CCTV cameras. If you add the number of privately owned cameras you get around a million cameras focused on London and Londoners.

What does that get us? Allow me to relate my own experience the one time I had my wallet stolen in the capital. It was taken from my pocket in a public place which was heavily surveilled. In the immediate aftermath, the thief managed to use my card in a number of shops and a bank – and if there is one place that should be monitored you would have thought it would be the one where money is kept.

I got in touch with the police and told them about the theft, including the date and time the culprit had gone to collect my hard-earned money. When I did, eventually, hear back from them, the police informed me that they were not pursuing the crime. After all, why would they? It wasn’t as though the criminal would be likely to offend again, or that there are any good reasons for pickpockets to be pursued and arrested.

I raised this with a couple of friends this week after reading Mahmood’s remarks. One immediately piped up that her car had been stolen last year from outside her home. Her private security cameras had picked up a very clear image of the thief, and she had sent the picture to her local force. They told her that they would not be pursuing the case. Another friend had the same thing, but with a home burglary. Once again, she had got a very good image of the burglar, but officers were not interested.

Speak to almost anyone in the UK who has been a victim of crime and you will be rewarded with similar demoralising stories. London has one of the highest levels of mobile phone theft of any major city in the developed world. The gangs who swipe these phones from the hands of unsuspecting tourists or Londoners often commit their crimes in broad daylight.

I know several people whose phones have been pinched from them in Parliament Square. You might expect Westminster to be the most surveilled part of our heavily surveilled capital. But once more the police seem to have no interest in scouring the assorted CCTV footage and getting, say, the number plate on the motorbikes that the criminals sit on as they do their swipe. Again, the police say ‘no’.

One common excuse is that the cameras in the area were not working. ‘What – none of them?’ you might ask. By this point you would be forgiven for concluding that the problem is not in fact a complete and constant blackout on the capital’s CCTV cameras, but – to use a technical term – that the police cannot be arsed. It must be boring work to go through CCTV footage in order to track down criminals. Such a task could interrupt a morning’s crisp-eating while scrolling through X at the police station. And if you think that a member of the public providing the police with an image of a thief in the act should be evidence enough, then once more you just have to remember that they cannot be arsed.

The eyes of the state are already on us at all times, certainly when you are out in any major city. That is why, when the police actually want to catch a criminal, they can do so and we are treated to images of the culprit in our newspapers and on our TV screens. But these are rare occasions.

One thing we can all agree on is that if you do want to get the police to your house, all you need to say is that the person on your CCTV camera is suspected of saying rude things on social media about some minority groups. Then officers will come over and you will get grief counsellors and all the rest of it.

In the meantime Mahmood will, perforce, have to dream on. Even if the eyes of the state were on us at all times, we must remember that the state is having a siesta.

The Spectator - Why exercise music stops you from throwing in the towel

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/why-exercise-music-stops-you-from-throwing-in-the-towel/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260409%20%20AL%20%20SHERBORNE+CID_2b42e246969cc23cd427710c4997ce54

Why exercise music stops you from throwing in the towel

Don’t set off without your emotional support DJ

13 April 2026, 5:00am

(Getty images)

Over the past few months, I’ve been training for the London Marathon, so most weekends I’ve been out running more than 20 miles at a stretch. I carry the usual bits to make these long slogs vaguely civilised – energy gels, a water bottle, a couple of fruit pastilles. They help, of course. But there’s one thing I absolutely cannot do without: music. 

Non-runners sometimes ask if I ever feel like giving up and trudging home. And honestly, the only times that’s happened is when my AirPods have died and the music – my invisible pacer, my emotional support DJ – has suddenly vanished mid-run. 
 
This makes sense, according to Victoria Williamson, a researcher and lecturer in music psychology and the author of You Are the Music. She says that hundreds of studies show music improves endurance by around 15 per cent and reduces perceived exertion by around 10 per cent. For context, caffeine – the darling of the endurance world – only manages about 3 per cent for endurance and 5 per cent for perceived exertion. Although your energy drink is doing its best, it’s simply no match for a properly timed chorus.

I’ve never fancied a tea halfway through a run, but I always fancy a tuuuune. Music boosts dopamine – the brain’s ‘reward’ chemical – making everything feel a bit more enjoyable. It also distracts you, in the best possible way. When your brain is busy belting out the chorus, it has far less capacity to dwell on the fact that your legs are starting to feel like overcooked spaghetti. 

As I discovered when I wrote my book Running: Cheaper Than Therapy, exercise is more about what’s happening in your head than your legs. Put simply, when your brain is focused on a song, it has fewer resources left to dwell on how tired you might be feeling. It’s all in the mind.  

There are other perks. If you can hear yourself panting, it’s a rather pointed reminder that you’re getting tired. Drown that out with music, and suddenly everything feels more manageable. Even better, you’re spared the soundtrack of other runners’ wheezing and groaning – never the morale boost one yearns for during a race. 
 
When you listen to music as you run, your body naturally syncs to rhythm, a process called entrainment. This can help maintain a steady running pace, improve efficiency of movement, and reduce wasted energy. That said, sometimes you don’t want steady, and music can help there, too. If I’m doing an interval run (alternating short bursts of high-intensity, fast-paced running with recovery periods of light jogging), I find that songs that switch between fast and slow sections are perfect personal pacers.  

Music just makes running more fun and it can trigger the emotional states or identities you need to keep going – as long as you pick the right tunes. A run is not the moment for experimental jazz or a 14-minute prog-rock odyssey, replete with three separate drum solos. This is the time for massive, familiar bangers – the kind that make you feel like you’re headlining Glastonbury, not limping round a damp park. Think cheesy stadium anthems, not polite background music for people discussing sourdough starters. Basically, if you’re embarrassed to be listening to a song, it’s probably the right one for exercise. 

In the gym, music blocks out the clatter of weights and the inescapable chatter of other humans, helping you slip into that elusive ‘zone’. Most gyms provide their own playlists these days – endless, vaguely interchangeable tracks that sound like they were curated by an algorithm with a kink for bass drops. So don’t forget your airpods. 

There are disadvantages to all this. If you listen to music every time you run or workout it’s easy to build a dependence on it – as I have discovered when my AirPods run out. A growing number of running events ban headphones for safety and insurance reasons, so if you’ve had tunes in your ears as you train hard for an event, you might struggle on the big day without them. It’s good to develop a range of sources of motivation to keep your runs interesting and the sounds of birdsong are one of the joys of running.  

There are safety concerns when you’re running outdoors if you can’t hear approaching vehicles or potential predators. And in the gym, there are moments – lifting heavy weights, attempting anything involving balance or coordination – when full attention is rather more useful than a killer playlist. 

But when you get exercise music right, it’s everything. Professor Costas Karageorghis, a leading expert on the interplay between music and exercise, said that the right workout music can be a type of ‘legal performance-enhancing drug’. I agree and that’s why I’ll continue to mainline it straight into my ears.  

Polemia - Quand la dissidence devient un risque : anatomie d’une persécution bureaucratique

 Quand la dissidence devient un risque : anatomie d’une persécution bureaucratique

(soulignements personnels)

L’affaire aurait pu passer inaperçue, reléguée à la rubrique des incidents administratifs, si elle ne révélait pas avec une telle précision l’état de dégradation avancée des démocraties occidentales. Un professeur britannique de sciences politiques, enseignant dans un établissement secondaire, a été contraint de quitter son poste après avoir montré à ses élèves des vidéos de Donald Trump dans le cadre d’un cours consacré à la politique américaine. Ce simple fait a suffi à déclencher l’arsenal de la lutte antiterroriste, comme l’a documenté The Telegraph.

 

Il faut d’abord rappeler la banalité initiale de la situation. L’enseignant intervenait auprès d’élèves âgés de dix-sept et dix-huit ans, dans un cadre pédagogique clairement défini. Les documents diffusés étaient publics, librement accessibles, relevant de l’actualité immédiate. Aucun appel à la haine, aucune apologie de la violence, aucun prosélytisme. Et pourtant, à partir de plaintes d’élèves invoquant un « malaise émotionnel », l’affaire a changé de nature.

Ce basculement est essentiel. Nous ne sommes plus dans le champ du débat pédagogique, mais dans celui de la judiciarisation du ressenti. Comme l’avait déjà observé Marcel Gauchet, la démocratie contemporaine tend à substituer aux conflits politiques assumés une logique de victimisation morale, où l’émotion devient un argument d’autorité. Le ressenti subjectif se mue en fait objectif, puis en catégorie administrative, enfin en risque sécuritaire.

L’administration de l’établissement scolaire n’oppose aucune résistance à cette dérive. Elle agit au contraire comme un relais zélé. Courriels, convocations, rapports successifs s’enchaînent dans un langage typique de la gouvernance contemporaine. L’enseignant est accusé d’enseignement « biaisé », puis de « préjudice émotionnel », enfin de promouvoir des opinions « potentiellement radicales ». Le flou lexical est ici décisif. Comme le notait Pierre Manent, la démocratie libérale tardive ne tranche plus, elle enveloppe, elle dilue, elle disqualifie sans nommer.

L’intervention du Local Authority Designated Officer marque une étape supplémentaire. Le rapport indique que les opinions du professeur « pourraient être perçues comme radicales » et recommande un signalement au programme « Prevent ». Le droit ne s’applique plus à ce qui est dit ou fait, mais à ce qui pourrait être interprété. Nous entrons pleinement dans ce que Alain Supiot a décrit comme le règne de la gouvernance par les risques, où l’anticipation hypothétique remplace la responsabilité réelle.

Prevent, initialement conçu pour lutter contre le terrorisme islamiste, devient ainsi un instrument de neutralisation idéologique. Il ne vise plus des actes, mais des opinions. Il ne sanctionne plus des comportements, mais des écarts à la norme dominante. L’enseignant est implicitement assimilé à un danger public, non pour ce qu’il fait, mais pour ce qu’il représente.

Cette affaire illustre de manière presque scolaire ce que Carl Schmitt analysait déjà comme la moralisation extrême du politique. Lorsque le conflit n’est plus admis comme constitutif de la vie publique, il est déplacé vers le registre du Bien et du Mal. L’adversaire cesse d’être un contradicteur, il devient un risque. On ne le réfute pas, on le neutralise.

La responsabilité de la gauche militante institutionnelle est ici centrale. Depuis plusieurs décennies, elle a investi les appareils éducatifs, administratifs et juridiques pour y imposer une hégémonie culturelle. Cette domination ne s’exerce plus par la censure explicite, devenue socialement coûteuse, mais par l’activation de dispositifs prétendument neutres. Protection de l’enfance, lutte contre la radicalisation, bien-être émotionnel. Autant de notions indiscutables en apparence, mais redoutables par leur plasticité.

Jean-Claude Michéa a montré comment le progressisme contemporain, sous couvert de tolérance, développe une intolérance structurelle à toute dissidence anthropologique ou politique. Ce que l’on ne peut plus combattre sur le terrain des idées est éliminé par la morale et le droit. La bien-pensance devient un instrument de pouvoir.

Guillaume Faye parlait à ce sujet de tyrannie du Bien. Le terme, souvent caricaturé, décrit pourtant avec justesse cette forme de domination douce, sans violence visible, où les carrières sont détruites par l’accumulation de procédures, les individus brisés par l’angoisse administrative, les réputations dissoutes dans le soupçon permanent.

Ce qui rend cette affaire particulièrement préoccupante, c’est sa dimension expérimentale. Le Royaume-Uni joue depuis longtemps le rôle de laboratoire avancé en matière de contrôle idéologique. Les dispositifs qui y sont testés finissent presque toujours par être importés sur le continent. La France et l’Union européenne suivent avec un léger décalage, mais avec une remarquable constance.

Les déclarations récentes de Pavel Durov, fondateur de Telegram, viennent éclairer cette dynamique sous un autre angle. En accusant Emmanuel Macron et les institutions européennes de préparer un « goulag numérique », Durov désigne une tendance lourde, celle d’un encadrement croissant de la parole publique sous couvert de régulation des plateformes et de lutte contre la désinformation.

Le Digital Services Act, le projet Chat Control, les pressions exercées sur les réseaux sociaux s’inscrivent dans une même logique. Il ne s’agit plus seulement de sanctionner des contenus illégaux, mais de contrôler les conditions mêmes de possibilité du débat public. Comme le soulignait Raymond Aron, la liberté d’expression ne disparaît jamais d’un seul coup, elle se vide progressivement de sa substance.

L’affaire du professeur britannique et les accusations de Durov relèvent ainsi d’un même paradigme. Celui d’un pouvoir qui ne supporte plus l’imprévisible, l’hétérodoxe, le conflictuel. Un pouvoir qui, incapable de convaincre, préfère administrer le silence. Martin Heidegger rappelait que la technique tend à réduire le monde à ce qui est calculable. La bureaucratie idéologique contemporaine applique ce principe aux consciences.

Nous ne sommes pas face à des excès isolés, mais face à un système cohérent. Un système dans lequel l’enseignant, le journaliste, le citoyen deviennent des objets de gestion. Un système où la liberté d’expression n’est plus un droit fondamental, mais une tolérance conditionnelle, révocable à tout moment. Ce qui s’est produit dans une salle de classe anglaise annonce ce qui se prépare à l’échelle européenne.

La censure moderne n’a plus besoin de commissaires politiques visibles. Elle avance masquée, bardée de règlements, de chartes et de protocoles. Et c’est précisément pour cela qu’elle est dangereuse.

Balbino Katz

Cartoon - Jim Unger

 

The Spectator - London has fallen

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/london-has-fallen/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BOCH%20%2020260418%20%20AL+CID_5591c8708e17524609c08096b9f67e2e

London has fallen

Toby Young17 April 2026, 12:29pm

A police officer guards the scene of a cordon in South London (Getty images)

I disagree with Sam Leith’s recent piece entitled ‘London hasn’t fallen’. He took at face value Sadiq Khan’s claim in a recent speech at a ‘disinformation summit’ that social media posts drawing attention to London’s rising crime rate – particularly knife crime, shoplifting, mobile phone theft and violence against women and girls – were either mis- or disinformation and were probably posted by bots, presumably based abroad. But is that true?

Khan himself is guilty of spreading misinformation about knife crime. In 2024, the Mayor of London’s claim that ‘knife and gun crime, homicides and burglary have all fallen since 2016’ was challenged by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which pointed out that while knife crime with injury involving victims under 25 had fallen, total knife crime had increased significantly since 2016.

Khan’s most recent speech relied on data supplied by research he’d commissioned himself and which was carried out by a research unit in City Hall. This purported to show that ‘London in decline’ narratives on X have grown by 150 to 200 per cent in the past two years, while migration-related narratives are up by over 350 per cent. The culprits include ‘extreme right-wing groups’, pro-Kremlin or pro-Beijing agents of influence and MAGA-aligned keyboard warriors. Khan demanded that Ofcom take enforcement action to protect Londoners from these bad actors.

But the methodology Khan’s research unit used is a little suspect. The headline figures are based on what the document itself describes as ‘keyword-defined samples of X posts over two time periods’ that ‘should be interpreted as indicative, as results are sensitive to query design, time windows and event-related activity’. That’s some caveat. Change the keywords slightly, or pick a different time period, and the numbers change significantly, as do the whereabouts of the posters. This is not rigorous social science.

In addition, the authors of the report confess that access to platform data ‘has become more restricted’, meaning they couldn’t get a reliable sample of what people are posting. And since overall London-related posting on X increased by only 7 per cent over the same period, the obvious alternative explanation – that real events, such as the Southport attack, the riots that took place in several major cities in the summer of 2024 and high-profile victims of violent crime drove organic interest in London’s crime problem – goes unexamined.

The annex to the report claims that ‘UK extreme right-wing ecosystems’ accounted for around 39 per cent of phone snatching and knife-crime content. But the authors don‘t say how ‘extreme right-wing’ is defined and in my experience it’s often too broadly. For instance, gender critical feminists posting about child sexual offences committed by transwomen are frequently dismissed as ‘far right’, when they would describe themselves as left-wing. 

What the mayor and his researchers fail to acknowledge is that some of the anxiety about crime in London reflects things that are actually happening. Between 2016 and 2023, knife crime rose 54 per cent in London. Robbery rose 57 per cent over the same period. Mobile phone thefts rose from 91,481 in 2019 to 117,211 in 2024. These are not fabrications by Vietnamese bot farms. They’re official figures.

Then there are the concerns about violence against women and girls committed by people who have entered the country illegally. When this issue has been raised by London Assembly members, Khan’s stock answer is that there’s no data to suggest this is a growing problem in the capital. That’s true, but only because the police only seem to include information about the immigration status of criminals on a case-by-case basis.

Based on the data that is recorded elsewhere, the picture suggests these concerns may be well-founded. Foreign nationals make up 10.9 per cent of the population but accounted for a quarter of sexual assault convictions and more than a fifth of rape convictions in in 2024. The Baroness Casey audit confirmed that in Greater Manchester, 52 per cent of suspects in multi-victim, multi-offender grooming cases were of Asian ethnicity, against a local population that is 21 per cent Asian.

By commissioning research that reframes public anxiety about crime in London as mis- and disinformation, Khan is gaslighting his critics. It’s not hard to work out why: if he can persuade Londoners that rising crime is a false narrative put about by ‘extreme right wing’ groups and Sri Lankan-based trolls, he will have a greater chance of being re-elected in 2028. His recent speech might also help some of Labour’s beleaguered candidates in the upcoming local elections, where Labour is expected to lose control of several London councils, including Camden, Wandsworth and Westminster.

As a free speech campaigner, I find Khan’s call for Ofcom to do more to censor his critics particularly troubling. As Louis Brandeis, the famous Supreme Court justice observed, the remedy for speech you think is harmful is more speech, not enforced silence. If Khan believes he’s done a good job of protecting Londoners from crime, he has a very large platform on which to make that case. Troll farms aside, the people he’s really trying to silence are ordinary Londoners concerned about crime they can see every day with their own eyes.

Livros - Revista Crítica XXI (nº 14)

 

Reflexão - Bricolage

 Quando for grande (ainda mais...) quero ser "Bricolageeiro"!!!! Cabeceira de cama e armário anos 70 para aparelhagem

The Spectator - Ten ways Trump is controlling us all

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/ten-ways-trump-is-controlling-us-all/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BOCH%20%2020260328%20%20HENRY%20POOLE%20%20AL+CID_d34a107f02b7dfb3ce2da395d34a2862

Ten ways Trump is controlling us all

Tim Shipman27 March 2026, 7:21pm

(Getty images)

Donald Trump is very likely the most consequential US President for the world and for British politics since Ronald Reagan, and arguably since Harry Truman. Everything he does is so, as the man would say himself, ‘yuge’, that it’s easy to overlook that he’s also the President whose actions have the most unintended consequences.

Like the fluttering of the hummingbird’s wings that causes a hurricane halfway across the globe, Trump’s careening around the world stage is largely responsible for much of what is going on in British politics right now.

This week is a case in point. Here are ten ways in which we are all in thrall to Trump, whether we like it or not:

1) The price of fuel is up
Petrol hit £1.50 a litre for the first time in nearly two years. Nick Butler, a former vice-president of BP, claimed that Britain could be hit by oil and gas shortages within three weeks. He told Times Radio: ‘There is a crisis coming. I think within the next two to three weeks you will see physical shortages.’

2) Panic is up
Keir Starmer and his senior ministers met the governor of the Bank of England at a Cobra meeting on Monday, to discuss how to cope with a crisis that might cause the price of oil to hit $150 to $200 a barrel. They’re dusting off no-deal Brexit plans and wondering about fuel rationing. A cabinet minister says: ‘We’re in 1973 territory.’ Gulp.

3) Inflation is up and growth is down
The OECD says the hit from the Middle East fuel crisis will impact Britain more than any other G20 nation. It has lowered its UK growth forecast for 2026 to 0.7 per cent, from 1.2 per cent in December. UK inflation is now forecast to hit 4 per cent this year, up from the previous estimate of 2.5 per cent.

4) Starmer’s biggest domestic problem is indirectly Trump’s responsibility
Westminster has been consumed all week by the saga of Morgan McSweeney’s stolen phone. The former chief of staff reported the theft of his phone to the Metropolitan police on October 20, three weeks after Peter Mandelson was forced out as ambassador to the US. Apparently that means some messages between McSweeney and Mandelson may be lost for ever.

This came after people in No. 10 had begun war-gaming the risks of the Tories using the ‘humble address’ mechanism (which had been used by Starmer in opposition to force the publication of Tory messages) to force McSweeney to disclose his messages. A piece I wrote on Starmer last month has become the focus of frenzied speculation, since it included the quote from an impeccable source that if the Tories came for McSweeney’s messages ‘Morgan is fucked’.

Let us not forget, Mandelson was only appointed to start with because Starmer and his team thought a fellow Epstein chum with political smarts was a good man to deal with Trump. That judgment might yet be the end of the PM.

5) Starmer is either ignorant or misleading
The PM sought to claim this week that ‘the idea that somehow everybody could have seen that sometime in the future there would be a request for [McSweeney’s] phone is, to my mind, a little bit far-fetched’. Given the levels of detachment the Prime Minister evinces on a weekly basis, it is possible he did not imagine such a scenario. But someone who had himself used the humble address device to force disclosures (and who, as a leading lawyer, would have watched countless public inquiries unfold), should have realised the phone might be of interest.

6) War is just politics by other means and vice versa
Trump is an accidental devotee of Carl von Clausewitz. He offered Iran a deal with 15 demands in the hope of pursuing peace, including a total end to Iran’s uranium enrichment programme, and the closure of the three main sites associated with it, at Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan. Trump also demanded that the Straits of Hormuz be kept open and that Iran end its support for proxies like Hezbollah and its missile programme. In return, Iran would receive sanctions relief, and the US would help the country to build a civilian nuclear energy programme. But when Iran’s leaders rejected the plan, he threatened to ‘unleash hell’ against them. Trump likes deals, and if he can’t get one he just throws his toys. In this case the toys are precision-guided munitions.

7) War and politics are all business
In the Cabinet Office there is a genuine belief that the President announced the possibility of a peace deal to drive down oil prices and drive up the stock market to feather his own investments. A senior civil servant says: ‘It’s mad how Donald Trump is saying stuff to tweak the oil price.’

8) Trump always chickens out
The TACO theory raised its head again this week, with the vain attempt at peace. There is a lot of evidence that people in his inner team, from JD Vance down, are concerned about the unpopularity of the war.

9) The UK has no idea what Trump will do next
Relations between the White House and No. 10 are at an all-time low as Starmer boasts he has made the right call by staying out of Trump’s war. One senior figure confides: ‘We wake up every morning not having a clue what he will have said or done next.’

10) Starmer is right about one thing
The PM told Beth Rigby on the Electoral Dysfunction podcast that this is a ‘once in a generation moment’ which is going to shape the next decades of our lives. From a once in a century President.

The Spectator - Why Hitler’s suave architect escaped the noose at Nuremberg

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/why-hitlers-suave-architect-escaped-the-noose-at-nuremberg/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260326%20%20AL%20%20EXPRESS%20VPN+CID_2fc6186b73335eb122cd8c4c27c265d6

Why Hitler’s suave architect escaped the noose at Nuremberg

Albert Speer was treated leniently because he was softly-spoken, well-dressed and ‘much the most appealing’ of all the defendants, according to Telford Taylor, one of the prosecutors

Ian Buruma

At the Nuremberg trial of the main Nazi war criminals, one man stood out: Hitler’s favourite architect and later armaments minister, Albert Speer. He cut a gentlemanly figure in a gallery of rogues. The strutting, smirking Hermann Goering reminded Rebecca West, who attended the trial, of ‘a tout in a Paris café offering some tourists a chance to see a black mass’. Julius Streicher, the Jew-baiting brute, was like ‘a dirty old man of the sort who gives trouble in parks’. On the same bench, all declaring their innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence of monstrous crimes, were the lantern-jawed SS leader Ernst Kaltenbrünner, the sour-faced ex-champagne salesman Joachim von Ribbentrop, Fritz Sauckel, the thuggish slave labour chief, and the rest of the sorry gang. 

But Speer, softly-spoken, handsome, courteous, trim and well-dressed, was prepared to accept the collective responsibility of having served in a criminal regime. However, he declared, as an ambitious architect and industrial technocrat, oblivious to politics, he had had no personal knowledge of such matters as the Final Solution to the ‘Jewish problem’. Like millions of others at the time, he had simply been seduced by the glorious promises of Hitler’s Reich, and the chance to build a great new capital city for the Führer.

In fact we now know that Speer was well aware of what was going on in blood-soaked Poland. He was present in 1943 when Heinrich Himmler gave a speech to SS officers stationed there spelling out the programme to exterminate the Jews. As armaments minister, Speer was also responsible for working many thousands of concentration camp slaves to death. Telford Taylor, one of the prosecutors at Nuremberg, later said that Speer should have received the death penalty instead of serving a mere 20 years in prison. The reason he got off lightly, Taylor said, was that Speer came across as ‘much the most appealing of any defendant in that trial’. When Taylor’s words were played back to Speer during an interview, he said with a dry chuckle: ‘If that was the reason I only got 20 years, I’m glad I left that impression.’

Speer left quite an impression on the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, too, who wrote in The Last Days of Hitler:

If [Speer] seems sometimes to have fallen too deeply under the spell of the tyrant whom he served, at least he is the only servant whose judgment was not corrupted by attendance on that dreadful master.

Not only did many people continue to take this view of Speer after his release from Spandau prison in 1966, but he became a bestselling author and a media star. He died in London in 1988, after speaking to the BBC – one of countless interviews he gave  as the suave ‘good Nazi’ who had reflected on his past and repented for having been such a naive, and, yes, opportunistic young man, so blinded by his ambition that he remained unaware of the worst things that happened in his time.

This was a carefully constructed myth that has fascinated many writers and filmmakers, not least Gitta Sereny, who wrote the remarkable biography, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. In true French post-modern fashion, Jean-Noël Orengo sets out to deconstruct the myth by writing a book that is neither fiction nor history nor an essay but a little bit of all three. It doesn’t quite come together in any of these forms; but much in this kind of thing depends on literary style. The translation doesn’t really do this justice, nor is it entirely reliable. Courtesan in French means ‘courtier’, so Hitler was not ‘always surrounded by courtesans’.

Still, Speer remains an inexhaustibly interesting subject, and Orengo has some important things to say about his artistic ambition and the role of architecture in Hitler’s phantasmagoria: ‘Architecture was the power of space. All architects are authoritarian and perfectly aware that they dictate our living spaces with their constructions.’ Speer, educated in the old school by the distinguished architect Heinrich Tessenow, surely recognised the vulgarity of Hitler’s fantasies, but there was something liberating about the licence to be unashamedly grandiose. Orengo writes: ‘What architect would not want that? To build freed from the strictures of taste, and money no object?’ True, no doubt, but not a particularly fresh insight.

The book becomes more interesting when the relationship between ‘the guide’, as Orengo insists on calling Hitler, and his architect shifts to the relationship between the architect and ‘the historian’, namely Sereny. The historian, Jewish and born in Vienna, dedicated her life to writing about people who committed shocking crimes, most notably Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka. She tried to get to the source of evil deeds, but Speer was an enigma to her. She could see through his ‘mix of facile charm and glibly worn guilt’, in Orengo’s words, yet ‘she couldn’t bring herself to conclude that he was manipulative’.

Reading Sereny’s book, one feels that she was seduced by her subject – not sexually, but in a weird platonic sense. Orengo is at his most provocative when he compares her attraction to Speer with Speer’s attraction to Hitler:

He talked about Hitler’s charisma; now she could talk about the undeniable charisma of his favourite. He had been Hitler’s architect; now she was becoming Albert Speer’s historian.

In one of her many intimate conversations with Speer, Sereny quotes a psychoanalyst, who proposed that Speer’s relationship with Hitler was a form of homoeroticism – not sexual, but ‘an irresistible mutual attraction for their respective statuses as artist and man of power’. This may have been so. More thought-provoking is the question of why Sereny fell under the former Nazi’s spell. Why did so many people, in Germany as well as Britain, believe in Speer’s mythic status?

Here Orengo waffles a bit, in the post-modern fashion: ‘He manipulated truth in the way that writers in the 20th century manipulated fiction.’ Speer’s memoir, Inside the Third Reich, is ‘a political and aesthetic autofiction, the best ever produced to this day’. In the battle of narratives, Speer is ‘always one step ahead’. Well, OK.

Sereny’s infatuation was less high-falutin. She reveals in the final pages of her book that Speer, a sexually abstemious man, had had an affair with a young female fan near the end of his life. He calls Sereny on the phone, drunk, and brags about having done quite nicely, after all – Hitler’s architect, armaments minister and a successful author to boot. Sereny is shocked. This was not ‘the Albert I know. What happened?’ Well, he replies, he had had ‘an experience’. It is as though Sereny felt betrayed by Speer’s affair.

As for the others who took a liking to Speer, the reason may be no different from what prompted the judges’ leniency at Nuremberg. It is reassuring in a way that a certain decency can still exist in a moral cesspool. We want to believe that this is still possible. Orengo is not a believer. He repeats several times in his book: ‘Pessimism is the only wisdom.’

Tessenow, Speer’s professor of architecture in the 1920s, had a simpler explanation for Speer’s behaviour. He told the German-Jewish grandparents of a friend of mine that Speer was an Arschloch, an arsehole.

Cartoons - Dilbert

 

Almoços (vários)

Com "Os Marretas" (M Oliveira, A Pires, Alfredo, J Machado e Zé Azevedo) em S. Pedro do Estoril em 20.04.2026

Com IST2 (F Freitas e J Matos) em 12.05.2026 (Manuel da Gorda)

Com Luis Melo (Gil vicente 67) e Afonso (filho) em 14.05.2026 (Manuel da Gorda)