The Spectator - Why Donald Trump won’t embarrass the royals

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/why-donald-trump-wont-embarrass-the-royals/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260409%20%20AL%20%20SHERBORNE+CID_2b42e246969cc23cd427710c4997ce54

Why Donald Trump won’t embarrass the royals

Robert Hardman

Elizabeth II was never particularly enthusiastic about birthdays. They were a good excuse for a parade or an honours list, but not a patch on a major wedding anniversary, let alone a jubilee. Those were a celebration of true dedication, not of mere longevity. Even so, were she still with us, the late Queen would have acknowledged that her centenary on Tuesday is a big deal. It would also have created a delightful conundrum for the Buckingham Palace anniversaries office, the department that sends out 100th-birthday congratulations from the sovereign. At the start of her reign, she was sending 385 of those each year across all her realms (by telegram). By the end, it was over 16,000 (by card).

When her own mother reached 100 in the summer of 2000, the celebrations were tinged with disappointment. Having planned live coverage of the Queen Mother’s centenary pageant, the BBC scrapped the idea late in the day. Director-general Greg Dyke and his minions, then in thrall to Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’ vibe, thought it was all a bit passé and, besides, the timings would mean shunting Neighbours from its prime-time slot. So this exuberant assembly of all the Queen Mother’s favourite things, including VCs, Colditz veterans, the Poultry Club, Vera Lynn and the Wombles, was shelved in favour of the Aussie soap. Step forward ITV which saved the day, clocking up its best early-evening viewing figures in a decade. Cue a ferocious blame game at the BBC and a public apology from Dyke and his chairman. The Queen said nothing but pointedly knighted the pageant producer, Major Michael Parker, days later. Now, a new generation of executives has set about dismantling BBC Studios Events, the tiny unit behind every great state occasion you can think of (including the Cenotaph, royal weddings, funerals – and, yes, birthday parades). Its running costs are nugatory, yet its output is the essence of public service broadcasting. If the incoming DG wants to show he ‘gets’ the BBC, he will reverse this madness on day one. If not, it will take only one bungled veterans’ march-past before he hears the rattle of pitchforks.

Withering White House attacks on Downing Street; awkward questions about Britain’s armed forces; a monarch sent to Washington to patch things up. It’s 70 years since the Suez fiasco and the late Queen’s first US state visit. The Palace has been here before. Despite predictions that Donald Trump will somehow ‘embarrass’ the King and Queen during this month’s state visit, I think not. We met four months ago at Mar-a-Lago for my new book on Elizabeth II. He had only warm words for the late Queen and her eldest son – ‘a fighter’ – while refusing to be drawn on the difficult dukes. On his official visits to the UK, he has been a model guest. He will be the same as a host.

How, then, do we square Mr Trump’s rosy view of our head of state with his rambling contempt for our Prime Minister? I think it’s because he puts politicians in one box and 250 years of US/UK history in another. His predecessor, Joe Biden, always liked to proclaim his Irish heritage. Mr Trump is half-British. Read his speech at last year’s Windsor state banquet, and it’s hard to imagine any contemporary British politician being quite as effusive about this ‘lionhearted people’ who ‘defeated Napoleon, unleashed the Industrial Revolution, destroyed slavery and defended civilisation’. Mr Trump was thrilled to have two state visits. Mr Biden had none. I’m told that discreet soundings were taken to see if he’d like one. Back came a discreet ‘no thanks’.

Will there be dancing at Mr Trump’s state banquet? It used to be the White House norm. During the USA’s bicentenary in 1976, President Ford invited the Queen to join him for the first dance and was appalled when the band chose that moment to strike up ‘That’s Why The Lady Is A Tramp’ (she found it hilarious). In the Reagan years, the late Princess of Wales strutted her stuff across the White House floor with John Travolta. Then banquets became more business like and the dancing stopped. Mr Trump, however, loves his music. During my weekend at Mar-a-Lago, he hosted a pop concert on the lawn, a homage to the 1970s and 1980s. On the packed club terrace, he became DJ and summoned up many of his favourites – from Phantom of the Opera to Elvis and a spot of opera. ‘Isn’t this just the best high note?’ he whispered to me as Pavarotti reached the crescendo of ‘Nessun Dorma’ – the theme to the 1990 football World Cup. Mr Trump is co-hosting the next one this summer. Time for a posthumous encore from Luciano?

Observador - Son of a bitch: um sarau cultural (Alberto Gonçalves)

 (sublinhados pessoais)

https://observador.pt/opiniao/son-of-a-bitch-um-sarau-cultural/

Son of a bitch: um sarau cultural

É escusado acrescentar que, como os idiotas que os frequentam e consomem, os PLAY podem e devem prosseguir. A RTP é que não.

Alberto Gonçalves 

25 abr. 2026, 00:24

Pelos vistos, e à semelhança do que acontece no “estrangeiro”, agora há uns prémios anuais da música portuguesa. São, conforme o acrónimo sugere, os PLAY. Também para imitar “o que se faz lá fora”, os PLAY consagram-se mediante cerimónia, na qual se distribuem pechisbeques por dezenas ou centenas de “vencedores” e todos ficam muito orgulhosos.

Infelizmente a cópia caseira dos Emmy americanos e de outro embaraço qualquer que os ingleses têm de certeza não se restringe à existência, não senhor. O plágio vai à minúcia e inclui os momentos que uma parte substancial dos alegados artistas aproveita para expelir “sentimentos” acerca da “actualidade”. Antigamente, neste género de pândegas, a sumidade recebia o pechisbeque, agradecia a duzentos familiares, amigos e colegas e sumia de cena. Hoje, ou para aí desde 2017, é rara a sumidade, anónima que seja, que não ande convencida de que possui coisas relevantíssimas a comunicar aos mortais. E os mortais, os mortais e pacóvios que assistem a tais infortúnios, ouvem.

Aliás, quer nos Óscares, quer nos PLAY, quer no Festival de Cinema de Carcassonne, o real objectivo de cada “evento” é justamente o de apurar quem profere a maior quantidade de barbaridades ao gosto do tempo. E provocar aquilo que os “media”, um pouco desesperados, designam por “polémica”. Sem a “polémica”, ninguém notaria que o “evento” se realizou. Com a “polémica”, quase ninguém nota que o “evento” se realizou.

Eu notei os PLAY através de artigo no Observador. Confesso que ignorei a informação alusiva aos galardões convencionais, mesmo ao prémio para a Melhor Co-Participação Vocal em Disco de Fusão Lusófona Alternativa, e, saltitando pelo texto na diagonal, fui directamente às interpretações em que os artistas dão tudo o que têm: o discurso de protesto.

Na categoria Indignação, o primeiro pechisbeque de relevo foi conquistado por Jorge Palma, que após agradecer misteriosamente “aos profissionais do SNS”, redobrou o tom críptico para exigir uma “reforma eficaz” da cultura, “para que as nossas forças não se gastem em vão” (?). A terminar, e já que vinha com um cravo na lapela, o sr. Palma recordou Abril, o espírito de Abril, a liberdade de Abril, os valores de Abril, Abril sempre, etc. De seguida, a cerimónia regressou a 2026.

O segundo pechisbeque indignado coube ao vocalista dos Mão Morta, Adolfo Luxúria Canibal, que a despropósito desatou numa cantilena sobre “a pulsão de morte que domina a miserável época em que vivemos, com as suas manifestações de ódio e de intolerância”. Terminou a pedir que se impeça “o alastrar da peste dos fascismos, essa ratazana nojenta.” Sem dúvida. Eu próprio odeio do fundo das entranhas essas larvas pustulentas que apenas sabem verter ódio. E lembro os versos de apelo à fraternidade que o sr. Canibal assinou: “Ultrapassado o limite do ultraje/Toda a violência/É legítima autodefesa/Também pelo meu relógio são/Horas de matar”. Bonito e sublime, praticamente o Larkin de “An Arundel Tomb” (“O que restará de nós é o amor.”)

Porém, o apogeu do serão ficou a cargo do afamado cançonetista Toy, que ultrapassou pela esquerda baixa os parceiros ao proferir estas palavras movidas a sobriedade: “Nunca digam que a cultura e a política não se misturam, porque a cultura é a melhor arma contra alguns sistemas políticos, como o assassino de crianças Netanyahu e o ‘son of a bitch’, filho da p*** em português, Donald Trump”. Enquanto demonstrava que, além da política, a cultura se mistura perfeitamente com uma sandes de couratos, a Festa do “Avante!” e a iliteracia funcional, o sr. Toy arrecadou três prémios fundamentais de uma só vez: o prémio Cliché para a mais apoplética intervenção anti-Trump; o prémio Anti-Sionismo para a mais escancarada declaração anti-semita a fingir que não é uma declaração anti-semita; e o prémio Calado Como Um Rato (Mas Não Uma Ratazana Nojenta E Fascista), pelo corajoso silêncio que dedicou ao Hamas, ao Hezbollah, à Rússia, ao Irão, à China e, afinal, a todos os terrorismos e ditaduras do planeta. O público presente na sala, gente das artes e do refinamento estético, aplaudiu o sr. Toy em êxtase.

A terminar, houve ainda espaço para que actores lessem, cito o Observador, “um texto a alertar para a propagação ‘online’ do discurso de ódio contra as mulheres”, que curiosamente não mencionou o Islão.

Resta esclarecer que os prémios PLAY foram transmitidos pela RTP, que a RTP é uma estação televisiva que vive da extorsão dos contribuintes, e que é capaz de haver contribuintes que não apreciam ver os respectivos rendimentos delapidados em ajuntamentos auto-congratulatórios, onde idiotas repetem toleimas que tomam por iluminações. É escusado acrescentar que, como os idiotas que os frequentam e consomem, os PLAY podem e devem prosseguir. A RTP é que não.

Livro - Sortez de l'hypnose collective

 

Mais um livro de teorias das constipações, mais do que das conspirações...

The Spectator - Do we really want our politicians to be uneducated?

 

https://spectator.com/article/do-we-really-want-our-politicians-to-be-uneducated/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260226%20%20AL+CID_fe25caad40bd37a43760d703a78a4e88

Do we really want our politicians to be uneducated?

Douglas Murray

The interesting thing about political pendulums is that they always over-swing. In the campaign for this week’s Gorton and Denton by-election, one of the main lines of attack on the Reform candidate is that he used to be an academic and is therefore ill-suited to being the area’s parliamentary representative. The candidate who has suffered these attacks – Matt Goodwin – has countered that he is the first person in his family to have gone to university. He has also stressed that he was brought up in a one-parent household.

That hasn’t cut it with the class-warriors of his rivals like the Green party’s Hannah Spencer. In one of her campaign videos, Ms Spencer has gone so far as to do a speech to camera while preparing some plaster for a wall. Having been a plumber, she is, she has said, training to be a plasterer. A craft she appears to be some way off mastering, if her video is anything to go by.

In a recent interview the Green party candidate expounded on her view that someone who had taught at a university should not represent Gorton and Denton. In fact it seems that anyone who has a degree should not represent any constituency. As she complained: ‘In Westminster I think 90 per cent of MPs have at least one degree, and it’s time that we changed that.’

Warming to her theme, she declared: ‘I want to see tradespeople on the benches in parliament, cleaners, taxi drivers, people who work in takeaways.’ Personally I would be very happy to hear the views of more taxi drivers on the benches of the House of Commons. But I cannot help thinking that Ms Spencer might be alarmed by some of their more robust attitudes and promptly demand the return of more people with liberal arts degrees to the green benches.

It is a peculiar competition, however. It seems that one response to the era of poor governance we have recently gone through is to view education as the problem.

It reminds me of a recent caller to LBC who voiced the opinion that if Keir Starmer were to be swapped out as leader by his party, she would not want Angela Rayner to become prime minister. The female caller explained: ‘Angela Rayner is not a suitable person to lead the country, because she is not sufficiently educated.’ The show’s host, Tom Swarbrick, feigned utter horror at such a sentiment. ‘How well-educated do we need people to be?’ he asked. The caller said that she was ‘fiercely working-class’ herself, but that she thought Rayner did not have the education or vocabulary necessary. Swarbrick (who has a degree in theology from Cambridge) claimed to be ‘astonished’ by the views of his caller, and sent her away saying: ‘Because it’s gone really well with all the Oxbridge lot.’

And there you have it. It seems to have settled in as a view that because David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson were the products of an Oxbridge education, the problem is our top universities. As a result, the best qualification to be in politics is to have had nothing to do not only with our top universities, but with any university at all. In fact it would be preferable to be led by people who have just been hauled off a plastering job, ideally while eating a pork pie. Go a stage beyond that, and it seems to be accepted that we might be better led by people who are uneducated than those who are educated.

This seems to have become a theme on the other side of the Atlantic too. One of the main contenders to be the next Democratic candidate for president of the United States is the California governor Gavin Newsom. A man of some charm and intelligence, he also has nice hair, a lovely family and is white. So he has had to try to find a way to ride America’s own pendulum swing.

Promoting his recent memoir to a largely black audience this week, he made the following pitch: ‘I’m no better than you. You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy. I’m not trying to offend anyone, act all there if you got 940, but literally a 960 SAT guy.’

To translate this into English-English, Newsom is boasting that his test scores at school were below the national average. And therefore he is like the people, you see.

Elaborating his point, he went on to inform his audience that he cannot read. Although that is perhaps not the best way to persuade people to buy his book, he informed them: ‘You’ve never seen me read a speech because I cannot read a speech.’

This, too, was meant to make him more suited to represent the people than any of those highfalutin reading types. Newsom claims to have had dyslexia since childhood, and while there might have been a happy period when overcoming dyslexia put someone on an even plain with a non-dyslexic person, it now appears that on the left of American politics, having dyslexia and not being able to read a speech actually makes a man better qualified to lead.

So I suppose we can look forward to a future where we are led by people who never performed well at school, failed to attend university and have only just started a plastering course as a prelude to running the country. And what possible downsides could come from that?

Personally, this over-swing makes me want to swing back the other way. The more I see politicians or would-be politicians competing like Monty Python’s four Yorkshiremen, the more I lament the erasure of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords. In fact, as I watch Newsom in California and the various contenders in Gorton and Denton, I am starting to think up my own new set of standards for our elected representatives. I propose that in future nobody should be allowed anywhere near politics unless they have at least one hereditary title – no lower than a marquisate and preferably averaging out at around an earldom. That should fix things.

A gata Tri

Gosta de desenhos animados, teatro, ténis, etc.

 

Youtube - Mark Pagel: Como a linguagem transformou a humanidade

So simple and so dense!

Um Tedtalk de 2011 em Edimburgo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImQrUjlyHUg

Filme - A Peregrinação

 

Ireland, 1209. An island on the edge of the world. A small group of monks begin a reluctant pilgrimage across an island torn between centuries of tribal warfare and the growing power of Norman invaders. Escorting their monastery's holiest relic to Rome, the monks' progress is seen through the eyes of a pious young novice and a mute lay-brother with a violent past. As the true material, political and religious significance of the bejeweled relic becomes dangerously apparent, their path to the east coast becomes increasingly fraught with danger. The monks belatedly realize that in this wild land of ancient superstitions, the faith that binds them together may ultimately lead to their destruction.

Fotos - Trafaria

 Trafaria, no regresso do almoço com To Costa e Eunice

Musica - Devant le garage (film "Les parapluies de Cherbourg")

 

Devant le garage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEr0oltYh9I&list=RDcEr0oltYh9I&start_radio=1

The dinner scene from "Parapluies de Cherbourg" (1964)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqUHVEG4FgQ

The Spectator - The latest Guardian attack on Nigel Farage is desperate stuff

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/the-latest-guardian-attack-on-nigel-farage-is-desperate-stuff/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260319%20%20AL%20%20HENRY%20POOLE+CID_0093559c7ecbe1f132328e5988aa2763

The latest Guardian attack on Nigel Farage is desperate stuff

Douglas Murray

Some years ago I was approached by someone from a platform called ‘Cameo’. Not all Spectator readers will have heard of this platform, and I hadn’t either. As a result I listened to their pitch with the same amount of scepticism I might reserve for an email addressed to me as ‘Dear Beloved’, revealing that a distant relative had left me a share in a Nigerian diamond mine, and that if only I sent a quick cash deposit the diamonds would start flowing in my direction.

I was informed that Cameo was a platform where I could make ‘easy money’. Being part-Scottish, I do not believe that there is any such thing. In fact I find the whole idea of easy money a contradiction in terms. All money is hard to come by and once gained – if gained – it should be swiftly hidden in a pillowcase or mattress.

Anyway, the point with Cameo is that it turned out to be a platform through which celebrities (and this is where I also became suspicious) are paid to record tailor-made video messages for members of the public for around a hundred quid a pop. ‘Happy birthday Marjorie, from your favourite columnist’ type stuff. I was promised that if I agreed to the arrangement I could knock off a few such videos every morning without even leaving the house, then kick up my feet for the rest of the day, drinking daiquiris in bed or the like.

Absolutely nothing in this was appealing and so I declined. First of all, because I didn’t believe that anyone would want a personalised video from me, however badly their life might be going. Secondly, because something about the enterprise made me feel a bit icky. And thirdly because I felt sure that the whole thing would prove to be a hostage to fortune. I was pretty sure that if anyone did ask for a personalised video from me for their birthday, wedding night or bar mitzvah, then it would turn out to be Rod Liddle or another colleague, operating under a pseudonym, only in order to rip into me for the rest of time for being such a cheap tart.

I suppose that folded into this last concern was the possibility I would end up sending a birthday greeting to someone who would turn out to be a serial killer or well-known sex offender. Not that this is who I imagine my average reader to be, you understand, but because you just never know. Any benefits seemed to me to be outweighed by the considerable potential negatives.

In general, Nigel Farage seems to me to be a man of pretty sound judgment. But he obviously does not share my intensely suspicious, not to say gloomy, Celtic nature. And so it seems that when he was out of the front line of British politics, Farage did indeed sign up to do personalised videos for Cameo. He appears to have been rather good at it, as I would have expected him to be. And in fact I can imagine a certain type of person who would have been thrilled to get a personalised video of Nigel raising a pint for their friend’s birthday or something.

But now the Guardian newspaper has tried to use this interregnum in Farage’s career to do a number on him of the type I had feared for myself. Some fearless – and presumably bored – Guardian journalists have trawled through a remarkable 4,366 clips that the Reform UK leader has made for Cameo since joining the platform in 2021. The short videos he has sent fans and supporters have included personalised messages wishing people a happy birthday, happy Christmas or even (and I do think this a bit odd) a happy Valentine’s Day.

Of course, the Guardian being the Guardian, they trawled through all of these innocuous greetings in the hope that at least some of them would be videos celebrating Hitler’s birthday, mourning the German defeat at Stalingrad, or sending Valentine’s Day good wishes to David Irving.

Unfortunately for the journalists, they found no such thing. It has long been my belief that if Nigel Farage were some kind of closeted Hitler-ite, we really would have known about it by now. But that doesn’t mean that the Guardian types will ever stop trying to find something that is not there.

And so they have managed to find one video in which Farage makes a very slight and inoffensive reference to a woman’s breasts, another which turned out to have been used by a group in Canada whose activities Farage was clearly not aware of, and a third in which he makes a video for a man called ‘Ben’, whose family described their relative as a longtime Reform member. Ben turns out to have been among those people thrown in prison after the summer riots in 2024. The Guardian appears keen to suggest that by sending a message to ‘Ben’, Farage was somehow endorsing illegal rioting.

What were the incriminating words that Farage used in speaking to Ben? They included these: ‘All I can say is keep your head up, keep believing in the right things, keep acting in the right way.’ It’s not quite the Beer Hall Putsch is it? In other videos, Farage has made what academic consultants to the Guardian assure us are beyond-the-pale ‘far-right’ memes, such as statements that illegal migrants should not be allowed to stay in the UK. Because I am sure we can all agree that the only acceptable thing to say on the question of illegal migrants is that everybody should be allowed to stay.

Finally, there is also a clip where Farage appears to have become irritated with the technology he is using and swears. Or, as the article puts it, it shows ‘a side to him that contrasts with his amiable public persona’. I am sure that Guardian journalists only ever say sweet things when they have a problem with their iPhone.

In any case, it is all rather desperate stuff. Farage has done nothing wrong in any of these videos. Yet his critics will keep on digging. In the meantime I feel vindicated in my own intensely suspicious attitudes towards Cameo – and, indeed, towards strangers in general.

Livros - Comprendre l'incroyable écologie

Tanta falta que faz ler, saber ler, e saber O QUE ler...

 

Desporto - Andebol

Bela equipa. Defesa (Salvador!) acima da média (quando querem...) e o Kiko e o Martin no ataque.

Esperemos que se mantenham, e adquiram um guarda redes e um central de nível europeu...

The Spectator - Textbooks will always beat screens

 

(personal underlines)...if we still have time...

https://spectator.com/article/textbooks-will-always-beat-screens/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=LIFE%20%2020260315%20%20SG%20%20Schools%202026+CID_1e599396124376e436fa270486f59462

Textbooks will always beat screens

Sophie Winkleman and David James12 March 2026, 3:53am

[Getty Images]

Is the page finally beginning to turn on children and screens? For the first time since the advent of social media, we are seeing a burgeoning alliance across all political divides to protect children from digital harm. In 2024 Jonathan Haidt delivered an urgent manifesto for change in The Anxious Generation, and at the beginning of this year Australia responded with a ban on social media for under-16s. Now even Britain is finally recognising the scale of the problem. Despite this week’s decision by MPs to consult rather than enforce, the fight will rage on. Deliberation doesn’t work in the arena of addictive substances.

However, the war on classroom screentime has yet to be properly waged, let alone won. Schools have embraced online learning with an almost evangelical fervour, urged on by billion-dollar businesses and bedazzled education secretaries.

Overwhelmingly the lure of ‘one-to-one devices’ has gripped schools and, in a blitz of blue light, children across the country are gazing distractedly at screens instead of their teachers’ faces and their books.

Pupils often go unmonitored online as the teacher attempts to keep the class ‘on task’. Flitting ceaselessly between a proliferation of tabs – some educational, some not – a lot of swiping and scrolling take place. But learning? Not so much. Research has shown that students learning online spend as much as 39 minutes out of every hour off task.

The principal casualty of the digitalisation of education is the textbook. Leading publishers such as Pearson have moved online, ruthlessly killing off these reliable anchors of learning. Textbooks, damned by tech zealots as ‘analogue’, are slandered as boring compared with online resources, which offer video clips, audio, 3D modelling and other seductive 21st-century ‘essentials’.

We would beg to differ. For ‘boring’, substitute calming, reputable and blessedly undistracting. Pearson owns Edexcel, one of the biggest examination boards and currently spearheading the transition to online GCSEs and A-levels. Pearson should take a long hard look at its own educational principles.

Of course moving everything online makes things much cheaper, but schools must hold such powerful businesses to account. Pearson et al have a moral duty to research the impact of transferring education online. So much is lost in the process.

John Jerrim, a UCL-based educational researcher, conducted an experiment where 3,000 pupils took PISA tests in maths, science and reading. Over three months, half the group did all their work on paper and half on a computer. At the end, the paper-based group scored 20 points higher than the one working on screens – the equivalent of half a year’s extra schooling.

Nearly 100 per cent of ten-year-olds in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan are issued with standardised textbooks in core subjects, compared with 10 per cent here. These countries, unsurprisingly, all vastly outperform us in these subjects, according to the most recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study.

Sadly, British schools often have no choice but to buy digital resources because publishers like Pearson have killed off the textbooks they once printed. Such a policy is a sunk-cost fallacy. The real cost – to our children’s ability to concentrate and learn – is immeasurable. A healthy, thoughtful, productive society is not a realistic expectation if children are not learning properly.

In contrast to a screenful of apps, Power-Points and gamified platforms, a chunky textbook provides a stable source of information. A linear repository for knowledge, it offers a tactile sanctuary for prolonged study. Online alternatives, designed for bite-sized consumption, cannot compete with the textbook’s ability to serve as a distraction-free companion to a pupil’s intellectual growth.

Textbooks also beat screens in that they don’t damage eyesight, disrupt hormones, delay sleep, trigger headaches, affect spinal formation and exacerbate symptoms of ADHD and autism, as screens do. That’s quite the list of harms for a medium which is less effective than its forerunner.

Textbooks are deliberately condemned by many in the ed tech industry as ‘inert’, ‘primitive’, and ‘outdated’, but the reality is very different. Leaving aside that they are less prone to crashing or running out of battery, they are far easier to navigate than multiple apps, enable longer and calmer periods of focus, help develop essential skills (such as notetaking) and, because pupils read from a physical page, are far more conducive to delivering knowledge that sticks.

If you talk to many teenage pupils, whether they are studying Latin or chemistry, psychology or economics, those who have an excellent, well-edited textbook prefer it to endless handouts, links and websites. They fully acknowledge that the latter methodology fragments their learning, and impairs how they access and decipher knowledge.

In education, the tools given to children should be as simple and clear as possible so that they uncover the beauty of a subject without unwanted distractions.

Sadly, the medium has become the subject. Screens have their (limited) place in this process of discovery, but too often they are a barrier; a backlit, noisy, crowded space designed for distraction, not absorption. In comparison, a textbook offers a quiet, authoritative voice that promotes sequential, linear learning.

If we wish for children to master the complexities of a subject, we must first grant them the simplicity of a medium that knows when to be silent. Ultimately, the textbook provides the one crucial thing the digital world cannot: a finite horizon, within which a child can find the peace to think.

Technology education? Of course! Education technology? An oxymoron that needs to be exposed. Bring back the textbook.

The Spectator - Trump’s goals in Iran have always been clear

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/trumps-goals-in-iran-have-always-been-clear/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260409%20%20AL%20%20SHERBORNE+CID_2b42e246969cc23cd427710c4997ce54

Trump’s goals in Iran have always been clear

Douglas Murray

The bombing of the Revolutionary government in Iran is drawing comparisons with the war in Iraq. But the comparisons are with the wrong war.

In 1981 there was an attack on Iraq which much more closely resembles what Donald Trump is trying to achieve in Iran. The story goes back to 1976, when the government of Jacques Chirac in France sold a nuclear reactor to the Iraqis – a deal for which the French have always managed to avoid much criticism. The French charged the Iraqi government twice the going rate. But as one of the Iraqi nuclear team later recalled: ‘We were happy to pay. After all, who else was going to sell us a nuclear reactor?’ Who indeed.

Once Saddam Hussein was in power, he poured resources into the nuclear site at Osirak in his race to be the first holder of an ‘Arab bomb’. He surrounded the nuclear site with anti-aircraft batteries and by 1981 was close to his dream. That was why, on 7 June 1981, the government of Menachem Begin in Israel deployed jets to destroy the reactor. The Israeli air force’s eight F-16s struck during a mealtime, when the anti-aircraft positions were unmanned. They hit their target and destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in under two minutes.

Naturally the international backlash was immediate. Foreign governments and press condemned the Israeli action as ‘unprovoked’ and sneaky. The United Nations convened for a number of sessions to condemn the Israelis for depriving Saddam of his shiny nuclear reactor. Even the American government of the day condemned the Israelis. But there was a satisfying coda to the mission after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Had he had a nuclear weapon then, not only would the Iran-Iraq war of that decade have gone very differently, but it is highly unlikely that an international force would have dared to push Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. As the American defence secretary said to the Israelis with some understatement after the liberation of Kuwait, by taking out the Osirak reactor nine years earlier: ‘You made our job easier in Desert Storm.’

I mention this bit of history because there is a lot of chatter at the moment about America getting bogged down in Iran in the same way it got bogged down in Iraq after 2003. It is hard to overstate the extent to which parts of America are pushing this narrative, cynical as they remain about all foreign military interventions after Afghanistan and Iraq. There was a period where this sentiment dominated only on the American left. In Barack Obama’s time the Democrats were so worried about getting into a ‘boots on the ground’ situation – to use the avoidable cliché – in Syria and elsewhere that they decided most of their problems could be solved by simply sending drones to kill their enemies.

With Trump’s rise to office, it was clear that a similar wariness had emerged on the American right. From the moment he started running for president, he realised that his own political side was equally tired of foreign interventions, especially ones that were lengthy, costly in every way and widely deemed to be a failure. It was Trump who broke the Republican respect for the interventionists – often in the most personal ways, as with his attacks on George W. Bush and John McCain.

Each time Trump ran for the presidency, a large part of his platform was that he would stop America getting involved in ‘stupid’ wars in the Middle East. Just as Obama had upped America’s drone programme, so Trump developed his own doctrine. The killing of the Iranian terror chief Qasem Soleimani in 2020 was perhaps the first time that Trump showed he could effectively take out an enemy of the United States and deter his opponent from any significant retaliatory strikes. Then earlier this year the US military on his orders carried out the daring raid on Caracas which brought the corrupt Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro to face justice in New York. Trump’s critics complain that the success of that mission has led him to the hubris of Iran.

But if you listen to what the President, his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and others have said since the start of this mission, the confusion is on the part of his listeners, not of the administration. From the beginning Trump has made a number of justifications for the action. But the one non-negotiable has been that Iran must not be allowed nuclear weapons. Given that the Iranian side actually boasted to the US negotiating team that they were weeks away from nuclear breakout, it isn’t hard to understand why the US chose this moment to strike. The fact that the Iranians learned from Osirak and spread out their nuclear sites is why this intervention has taken longer than two minutes.

Nevertheless there is chaff being thrown in the air from all sides. Yes at the start Trump suggested to the Iranian people that they rise up and overthrow the regime of the mullahs if they could. But the killing of tens of thousands of people by the religious militias in January has obviously had an effect. ‘Ha ha,’ say Trump’s critics. ‘You see – you tried regime change and failed. Now you will have to – once again – “put boots on the ground”.’ But the President is committed to doing no such thing.

Doubtless he would have liked to have seen the regime receive more opposition internally. But the hope that the Islamic Revolutionary government falls is the maximalist policy. The minimalist one is simply to ensure that for the foreseeable future Iran does not have any capacity to develop nuclear weapons.

I’m slightly surprised by some of the obfuscation and pretence of befuddlement that many national and international observers seem to be displaying in the face of this objective. ‘He hasn’t made it clear,’ they say again and again. But he has. The aim of Trump’s war in Iran is indeed to replay the Iraq intervention. But it is the intervention of 1981, not 2003.

The Spectator - The British should have their holy places

 

(personal underlines, silent ...)

https://spectator.com/article/the-british-should-have-their-holy-places/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260205%20%20AL+CID_16d2cc462e038061eb6d35d4d7490757

The British should have their holy places

Douglas MurrayWednesday 25 February 2026, 7:00pm

I think by now most of us can spot a double standard when we see one. So let me try two out on you. In what situation is it acceptable to denounce an MP or parliamentary candidate as ‘not very British’ or even someone who ‘doesn’t get our values, our culture, or our history’. When it is said by a Reform candidate about an MP from an ethnic minority? Or when Jeevun Sandher MP says it about Matt Goodwin, the Reform party candidate for Gorton and Denton?

Doubtless you have already guessed the correct answer. The above phrase was used this week by Labour’s Sandher to denounce Goodwin, and as a result it has passed without any serious comment. By contrast, if Goodwin had described Sandher in similar terms I think we can all agree that the news cycle would have stopped (even Jeffrey Epstein would have fallen off the front pages) and Labour MPs would be gearing up to talk about Enoch Powell again.

Allow me to try one more double standard on you. In what situation is it acceptable to say that an area of Britain is ‘too black’? Would it be acceptable to say it about a town anywhere in England? Or would it be acceptable to go to a country in Africa and return saying that, all things considered, the place needs rather more white people if it is going to be an acceptable, indeed desirable, destination?

The answer to that is once again, obviously not. However, as we have learned this week, it is perfectly acceptable to denounce places – on this occasion the English countryside – for being ‘too white’.

At this point, long-suffering readers might be suffering a sense of déjà-vu, as in fact I am myself. Three years ago I noted that no less an expert than a presenter from the BBC’s Countryfile had denounced the countryside for its ‘lingering, ambient racism’. The Corporation ran a piece suggesting that there weren’t enough Muslim hiking groups in the Peak District.

This time the charge comes from a more formal source. Specifically the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), reports for which have concluded that the countryside is too much of a ‘white environment’, principally enjoyed by the ‘white middle class’. Defra has come to the conclusion that our countryside risks becoming ‘irrelevant’ in a multicultural society.

Before proceeding, let us note something about that word ‘irrelevant’. Is nature meant to be relevant? Are fields and hedgerows and mountains and lakes meant to be things which change and adapt to the zeitgeist?

I’d have thought not. Claiming that the countryside must somehow adapt in order to remain relevant would seem to be a rather striking category error, actually. If you want to see a changing environment, there are any number of places you can go in this country. If you want something unchanging, steadfast and even eternal, I’d have thought the countryside is your best bet. It is one reason why some of us prefer the stuff over, say, Milton Keynes.

In any case, Defra has decided that every effort must be made to make our countryside less of a ‘white environment’. A campaigner called Ken Hinds invited on to GB News very much agreed. According to Mr Hinds, the countryside has been ‘white for far too long’. Asked why it should be so desirable to make more ethnic minorities move to the countryside, he trotted out the usual cliché: ‘We can -benefit from having people from a variety of cultures living among us.’

It’s possible we can. But if so, then why is this not a universal principle? Why should Sparkhill in Birmingham not have more white people brought in? Indeed – once again – why should the Indian subcontinent or Africa not be forced to diversify by bringing in a lot of white people from Wales? Surely the locals will be amenable. Or would there be something sinister as well as silly about making such a case?

Of course the answer is yes: it would be very sinister and very silly to put forward such an argument. But somehow not when it comes to our own green spaces.

There is a madness about this approach. Some people have spent the past week claiming there are not enough Muslims walking around the countryside because too many people there have dogs, and these dogs are often off leads and might therefore be distasteful to Muslims who consider dogs to be haram. What can we do to accommodate that? Cull the dogs? Have areas for dogs to be walked in and areas in which Muslims might roam?

What of the pubs and hostelries in our rural areas? Should Muslims and other minorities be forced into the local pub in order to help diversify it? Should they be forced to drink warm bitter? Or would that be unseemly in some way?

By now we can all agree that there are plenty of people who dislike our country as well as our countryside. But to have government agencies warring on us is a different thing entirely, and I wonder where it will end. In this interim period, perhaps one might simply make a plea to anyone at Defra who has ears to hear.

There is a wonderful poem by W.H. Auden from the 1950s called ‘Streams’, which closes touchingly with the poet referring to the water being ‘Glad – though goodness knows why – to run with the human race’. It is the final two lines of the poem that most move me. There the poet refers to his wish for ‘the least of men’ to have ‘their figures of splendour, their holy places’.

If everyone else is allowed to have their holy places, is it not the right of the British people to have our own holy places too? Or is that another double standard? We can all too easily guess.

Música - do filme "Terror on the Prairie"

Glory Be (From the "Terror on the Prairie" Soundtrack)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-tSP24A4u4&list=RD6-tSP24A4u4&start_radio=1

Observador - Alterações climáticas: um debate estéril (Alberto Gonçalves)

 

(sublinhados pessoais. Reflexões silenciosas...)

https://observador.pt/opiniao/alteracoes-climaticas-um-debate-esteril/

Alterações climáticas: um debate estéril

Fora do “wishful thinking” de determinadas comunidades “científicas” e da redacção do “Expresso”, não deve haver praticamente uma alminha que evite ter filhos por se afligir com a temperatura

Alberto Gonçalves 

02 mai. 2026, 00:24

A partir de um estudo estrangeiro de 2021 e de um estudo nacional ainda não publicado, o “Expresso” concluiu que “Quatro em cada dez jovens hesitam ter filhos [sic] por causa das alterações climáticas”.

Os resultados são assustadores: assusta assistir na nossa época tão informada e esclarecida à repetição do exacto “milenarismo” de há mil anos. E “exacto” é força de expressão. Por regra, as crenças medievais no iminente fim dos tempos tinham alguma razão de ser, e aconteciam em períodos de crise ligados a guerras, fome e epidemias – ou seja, às trivialidades quotidianas daqueles tempos. Hoje, os “jovens”, que prolongam a juventude até à meia-idade e beneficiam de um conforto que os senhores feudais nem sequer podiam imaginar, deixam-se tolher face a uma ameaça vaga, discutível e, salvo na retórica apocalíptica do eng. Guterres, remota. Além disso, os medos justificados de antigamente, aliados à escassez de anticoncepcionais eficazes, não impediam as pessoas de se reproduzirem, imprudência sem a qual não estaríamos aqui, eu, o leitor, os jornalistas do “Expresso” e as jovens que padecem de “ecoansiedade” entrevistadas pelo “Expresso”. Já os medos comparativamente injustificados de agora parecem implicar uma apetência para a extinção da espécie. Antes que o clima trate do assunto, a própria espécie despacha-o mediante suicídio programado.

Isto tudo, note-se, se levarmos a sério os referidos estudos e o artigo do “Expresso”. No artigo, se o espremermos bem, o vetusto semanário limita-se a falar com duas “jovens” portuguesas. Uma, Catarina, 25 anos, teme procriar por não encontrar “respostas claras” a duas perguntas “difíceis”: “Até que idade poderá viver um filho que tenha nos dias de hoje? Será que a zona onde vivemos continuará habitável daqui a algumas décadas?”. Não são perguntas difíceis. Eis as respostas: 1) até aos oitenta, oitenta e dois, se atendermos à esperança de vida actual; 2) à conta das proezas do “poder local” e dos efeitos da “arquitectura” contemporânea, inúmeras “zonas” do país já não são habitáveis há muito.

A segunda “jovem” a falar com o “Expresso” chama-se Mourana, tem 29 anos e pertenceu à Greve Climática Estudantil, uns moços e moças que, a fim de prevenir o degelo,  lançam tinta em cima de políticos, vandalizam montras e bloqueiam estradas. Após ter cortado nos banhos e na carne, vencido as insónias e experimentado “diferenças nas capacidades cognitivas”, Mourana licenciou-se em psicologia, arranjou emprego (?) no grupo EcoPsi, “focado na promoção da saúde mental no cenário de alterações climáticas”, e “recuperou o sonho de ser mãe”. Que bom. Ou não.

É que há duas questões fundamentais em que o artigo do “Expresso” não toca. Por um lado, é positivo não só que os “ecoansiosos” tenham reservas em produzir descendentes como é sobretudo aconselhável que não o façam de todo. A julgar pelo alegado desarranjo mental dos hipotéticos pais, nada indica que os filhos, alimentados a caldos de imaturidade, ilusões de grandeza, visões do Juízo Final e paranóia, possam sair menos avariados. O provável é saírem mais avariados, mesmo que convenha apurar se tal é possível.

A outra questão de que o “Expresso” foge é a seguinte: em vez de debater se as alterações climáticas de influência antropogénica existem na dimensão propagada e com as consequências anunciadas, não seria preferível aceitar que existem, desejar que existam e rogar aos santinhos que cumpram o seu papel com rapidez? Dito de maneira diferente, vale a pena ambicionar a continuação de sociedades em que uma parte significativa da população não regula bem? Se as percentagens de “ecoansiosos” forem autênticas, é altura de começar a ponderar não os riscos das alterações climáticas, e sim a respectiva necessidade. Os perigos decorrentes de gente que, sem reparar no absurdo, recorre a tecnologia avançada para organizar manifestações em que se exige a devolução da humanidade ao Paleolítico são muito maiores. Entre ver a Terra arrasada por ondas de calor e inundações ou entregue a multidões de tontos, o meu coração não balançaria.

A nossa sorte é que estes dilemas épicos não se colocam. De regresso à realidade, fora do “wishful thinking” de determinadas (e financiadas) comunidades “científicas” e da redacção do “Expresso”, não deve haver praticamente uma alminha que evite ter filhos por se afligir com a temperatura a longo prazo. As novas gerações evitam ter filhos, e na verdade têm pouquíssimos, porque as casas são caras, porque os salários são baixos, porque tendem ao egoísmo, porque não apreciam obrigações, porque simplesmente não calhou e porque dispõem da pílula, ora essa.

A invocação, neste contexto, das “alterações climáticas” apenas visa conceder uma dignidade postiça a motivos prosaicos. É um tique contagioso, uma forma infantil de legitimação, uma “causa” que à semelhança da adesão a “causas” similares convence os meninos e as meninas de que têm relevância nos destinos do mundo. Depois, na maioria dos casos, os meninos e as meninas crescem. E uns tantos multiplicam-se.

The Spectator - British politics has become a Devil’s Wheel

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/british-politics-has-become-a-devils-wheel/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260212%20%20AL+CID_f4131bbce674d96f168747ae4f7b9d1c

British politics has become a Devil’s Wheel

Douglas MurrayWednesday 18 February 2026, 7:00pm

There is a moment in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall which has been much on my mind lately. It is the bit towards the very end of the novel when our hero, Paul Pennyfeather, re-encounters the sinister modernist architect Professor Otto Silenus. By this point Pennyfeather has undergone all manner of travails. He has been debagged and sent down from Oxford, accused of human-trafficking and sent to prison. But, as the pair sit outside the Corfu villa in which Pennyfeather is staying, the professor suddenly offers to reveal his theory about the meaning of life.

Silenus describes a particular fairground attraction, the Devil’s Wheel (‘the big wheel at Luna Park’). For five francs the public can go into a room with tiers of seats. At the centre is a great revolving floor which spins around fast. People try to clamber up the revolving floor and get to the centre of the wheel. How everyone laughs as they see other players get flung off. How they whoop and holler as they get similarly flung around and fail in their climb.

‘I don’t think that sounds very much like life,’ said Paul rather sadly.

‘Oh, but it is, though,’ [replied Silenus.] ‘You see, the nearer you can get to the hub of the wheel the slower it is moving and the easier it is to stay on. There’s generally someone in the centre who stands up and sometimes does a sort of dance. Often he’s paid by the management, though, or, at any rate, he’s allowed in free. Of course at the very centre there’s a point completely at rest, if one could only find it.’

In recent years I have thought of this passage often while observing British politics. The whooping, laughter and falls seem to have become almost part of the purpose of things. For the press and other participants, they seem to provide a meaning of a kind.

Remember when we thought we couldn’t be worse run than we were under Theresa May? Remember how, having got rid of her, we had the great dawn of Boris Johnson? Remember how that devolved into a great row about a cake and booze and eventually some completely unknown Tory MP touching someone’s bum and the whole government collapsing? Remember the hours of Liz Truss and the rain-soaked end of Rishi Sunak? Next the great dawn of Keir Starmer, and now perhaps the end of that too. How many people in politics have been picked up and flung off this great revolving fairground ride in the past decade?

I can’t deny that there isn’t a certain fascination to it all. If Labour is mad enough to turf out Keir Starmer I suppose we might get Angela Rayner as prime minister, or conceivably see Ed Miliband enter Downing Street. Perhaps even this Labour party would blush at that switcheroo, vote for Christmas and we could then watch most of them get thrown off the wheel in their turn. Certainly there would be a sort of pleasure in watching this. As there was this week when Wes Streeting – who seems to imagine he could be prime minister – released all of his private text messages with Peter Mandelson, apparently in an effort to slow the wheel down, with the result that he merely sped it up.

I suppose the one consolation that the players have in this country is that our particular fairground ride is not as lethal as it is in other places.

News came through last week of the death of Saif Gaddafi, son of the late and unlamented Libyan leader. He appears to have been murdered by a rival faction in the north-west of the country. Personally I was rather surprised to learn he was alive at all. Some years ago, amid the Gaddafis’ crackdown on the Arab uprising, Saif decided to join his father in fighting to the last bullet to keep his family in power. His father then met a distinctly sticky end at the hands of a mob and a knife. Saif turned out to have been captured somewhere in the south. After a time he was reported to have re-emerged with a few fingers missing, with his captors saying something about frostbite in the desert. It seemed rather more likely they had caused the falling-off during some interrogation procedure.

All of which brings another memory to mind – that time in the late 2000s when a whole bunch of people in the UK tried to bring the Gaddafis in from the cold. The London School of Economics awarded Saif a PhD which had clearly been written for him.  The university’s then leadership accepted a seven-figure donation from the family, with those of us who criticised it being breezily dismissed. LSE even invited Colonel Gaddafi to give a guest lecture via video-link.

The fawning-ness of the students was quite something to behold. If the guest lecturer had been a Republican leader from Washington D.C. there would have been nothing but protests and heckling. But this was merely the butcher of Lockerbie and so, after a slavish introduction from faculty, the nice students asked the Colonel hardball questions like: ‘Where do you see Libya´s place in the world?’ A question I will forever be grateful for, because – after a pause – he replied through a translator, ‘Libya is in north Africa’, showing that perhaps the only person to rate that crop of students lower than I did was a dictator sitting in Tripoli.

As ever, I digress. My point is simply that it is quite the trajectory the Gaddafis ended up being on. One day they were lauded in London, and grandees couldn’t move for invites to meet them. The next moment they were waving their digits and promising to fight to the last bullet, never expecting the last bullets would be aimed at themselves.

I suppose most countries, like most sensible people, would like to find the still point in this spinning world. The best way to achieve that would be to find someone – paid or unpaid by the fairground – who has the nerves, skill and staying power to show us how to get there.