Desporto - Sumo (torneio de Março II)

 Some funny things

Or not...

Fantastic Ura!

Old love dies hard

Brothers Wakatakakage and Wakamotoharu

Ura funny drop

Desporto - Sumo (torneio de Março)

Onosato won the March tournament

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/3361/index.html

Sumo prodigy achieves improbable triumph at the May Tournament

The fifteen days of the Grand Sumo Tournament ended in Tokyo on May 26. Due to the absence of so many injured top-rankers, the tournament turned into a showcase for new talent. Those who took center stage made things really exciting all the way to the finish. When the final act had ended, a star was born.

Dominoes falling

Heading into the tournament, fans had lofty expectations of performances from the upper echelons. One Yokozuna and four Ozeki were listed on the Banzuke official rankings, and the conventional wisdom was that one of them would wind up with the Emperor's Cup.

However, those expectations were immediately dashed, as all five top rankers bit the dust on Day 1. It was the first time in the modern era for all the rikishi from the top two ranks to go down to defeat on opening day.

Once again, many of the top rankers failed to meet expectations in the May Tournament.

The disappointment continued on Day 2. Yokozuna Terunofuji and Ozeki Takakeisho withdrew from the competition. Terunofuji cited pain in his left rib cage and right knee as the reasons for his withdrawal. Takakeisho had a lingering neck problem.

This was a huge blow to the organizers because a couple of the top division stars already were sitting out the tournament. Asanoyama and Takerufuji both had decided against trying to compete while still recovering from injuries.

Asanoyama is a former Ozeki who's now at the fourth-highest Komusubi rank. His strong and consistent performance against the top rankers in every tournament keeps fans on the edge of their seats. His knee got hurt during a provincial tour in April.

Takerufuji, as you may remember, was the winner of the Osaka tournament in March. He became the first top division rookie in 110 years to win the championship. So, needless to say, fans were looking forward to watching him try to repeat the feat in Tokyo.

Things continued to deteriorate. Ozeki Kirishima also dropped out of the competition on Day 7, citing a neck injury. Sekiwake Wakamotoharu pulled out on the same day too, saying he'd injured his right big toe during his match on the previous day. As a result, one Yokozuna, two Ozeki, one Sekiwake, and one Komusubi were sitting on the sidelines by the half-way point.

Crowded leaderboard

As the saying goes, when the cat's away the mice will play. Well, that's what happened in the sumo ring too. Quite a few rikishi scurried to take advantage of the situation. Those in the first-place group in the home stretch included Kotozakura, Onosato, Mitakeumi, Shonannoumi, Takarafuji and Oshoma. But after 13 days, two wrestlers stood above the rest: Ozeki Kotozakura and Komusubi Onosato, each with 10 wins and 3 losses.

Ozeki Kotozakura on the left, and Komusubi Onosato on the right, became the main contenders in the May Tournament.

On Day 14, fate took a different turn for them. Onosato took care of business and improved his record to 11-3, but Kotozakura lost and slipped to 10-4. So, Onosato took sole possession of the lead with one day to go.

And on Day 15, Onosato was in a match against Sekiwake Abi, who had 10 wins and 4 losses. All he needed to do was defeat Abi to earn his first title. Abi, however, wanted to keep his title hopes alive by defeating Onosato and taking matters into a playoff.

Abi fiercely attacked Onosato with his signature double-arm thrusts, but Onosato calmly fended them off and powerfully drove Abi back and out of the ring to take the match and the Emperor's Cup. Onosato's father was in the stands hoping to catch his son's triumphant moment. He was seen hollering and crying as his boy made sumo history in front of his eyes.

Onosato defeats Abi on Day 15 to claim his first championship.

Onosato became the first newly promoted Komusubi in 67 years to win the top division title. The last wrestler to accomplish the feat was Annenyama, who won as a new Komusubi way back in May 1957. Onosato also became the wrestler with fewest number of tournaments required to win his first title, doing so in his seventh tournament since his pro debut. That broke the previous record held by the March champ Takerufuji, who took ten tournaments to do it.

Winning one for the home team

Areas near the Sea of Japan are still feeling the effects of the massive earthquake that struck on New Year's Day. One of the prefectures hardest hit was Ishikawa, where Onosato hails from. During the championship interview, he said that he's really happy to have been able to show his victory to the people of his home region. I'm sure it made them even more proud of their homegrown hero.

During the victory ceremony, Onosato also talked about being close to winning a championship in January and March but not quite making it. So, he was glad victory didn't slip away this time. He committed himself to diligently following his stablemaster's advice and working hard to keep improving.

I think what propelled Onosato to the championship was his upset victory over Yokozuna Terunofuji on Day 1. Scoring a huge win right out of the gate increased this youngster's confidence so much that he was able to fight with poise the rest of the way. I've spoken with Onosato a number of times. When I asked him about his first match up against the Yokozuna in January, he told me that he was so nervous that his body just froze when the Yokozuna stood in front of him. By his own admission, he got demolished.

He told me, though, that even though he got crushed by Terunofuji, he learned a great deal from fighting against sumo's alpha male. He felt that he could become mentally and physically stronger and put up a better fight when he faced Terunofuji again. Well, that's exactly what happened. Way to go Onosato for working hard and growing fast by learning from a bittersweet experience.

Onosato on the right, scores a huge upset by defeating Yokozuna Terunofuji on opening day.

At 192 centimeters and 181 kilograms, Onosato is pretty intimidating himself. Adversaries have to be worrying about how much he can improve, because he was already overwhelming many of them this time. I have a feeling the best is yet to come from this 23-year-old standout.

Special prize winners

Onosato walked away with the Emperor's Cup as well as the Outstanding Performance Award and the Technique Prize. Sumo elders praised his ability to defeat higher ranked opponents on a regular basis with sound technique.

The other rikishi who received a special prize was rookie Oshoma from Mongolia. Oshoma remained in contention for a majority of the competition and made his presence felt by racking up 10 victories with nifty footwork, splendid technique, and blazing speed. Oshoma came to Japan on the same flight as Ozeki Hoshoryu, so he's hankering to catch up with his fellow Mongolian in the near future.

Special Prize Winners: Onosato on the left, Oshoma on the right.

Changing of the guard

For the past two tournaments, we've seen fresh faces winning the championship: Takerufuji in March and Onosato this time. Are we seeing a changing of the guard?

Yokozuna Terunofuji has been out of five of the past six tournaments due to injuries, partially or completely, due to injuries. Ozeki Takakeisho's absence this time is his third in a row. Ozeki Kirishima bowed out in the middle of the May Tournament with a neck injury; he'll be relegated to Sekiwake in the next tournament.

There's no question that those who ruled the sport with dominant presence and performance over the past several years have lost much of their mojo. Younger wrestlers are constantly challenging them these days, and the sad fact is that the top-rankers have been largely unable to respond. It's their job to show the upstarts that they still are better and stronger.

If they can't, as I said in my previous Backstories report, it's time to ship out. Sumo fans buy tickets expecting to watch the Yokozuna and Ozeki compete at high levels. It's not right to keep disappointing them.

July outlook

The July Tournament will be a good measuring stick to find out whether the old guard remains able to stand tall.

Yokozuna Terunofuji has to demonstrate he's worthy of competing with that status. The 32-year-old finds himself in a crucial moment. Fans would be hard-pressed to accept another absence.

Ozeki Takakeisho had better get healthy too, because he'll have to score at least eight wins to retain his Ozeki status. If he can't, he'll suffer the same fate as Kirishima, who got dropped down to Sekiwake for July. Kirishima will get one more chance to return to Ozeki but it won't be easy. He'll need to rack up 10 wins to get the job done.

Onosato will be aiming to win back-to-back championships to solidify himself as the number one candidate for Yokozuna. Yes, you read that right, Yokozuna! Finishing with 12 wins and 3 losses this time while competing at the fourth-highest rank of Komusubi, Onosato has set himself up in line for promotion to Ozeki within the year. Unless some major injury derails him, I can see him earning promotion to the second-highest rank with no problem and then making his way to the top rank in 2025. After watching his dominating performance in the May Tournament, I have enormous confidence in him. But, first things first. He needs to demonstrate May was no fluke and duplicate the type of performance he demonstrated this time.

One man who could be the spoiler for Onosato is Kotozakura. The 26-year-old Ozeki fell short of capturing his first title in May, but his consistent performance since becoming an Ozeki in March shows great promise. After defeating his fellow Ozeki Hoshoryu on the final day to finish the May contest with 11 wins and 4 losses, he looked dejected at allowing Onosato to walk away with the ultimate prize. When asked about it, he simply said "I have to train harder and become stronger." Don't count him out as a contender in July.

Ozeki Hoshoryu finished with 10 wins and 5 losses this time, which is way below what fans expected. His challenge is to get totally focused from the get-go. He started the May Tournament 0-2. If the Mongolian Ozeki can begin with some wins in July, look out!

One more wrestler to mention is Takerufuji, who won the championship in March. He showed his grit by winning the title then, despite severely injuring his right ankle on Day 14. Recovering from that injury is taking much longer than expected. I'd love to see him return to the ring in the next contest, but I feel it would be wise for the 25-year-old to stay on the sidelines for as many competitions as he needs to get back to full strength. He's a rising star who shouldn't spoil his career by returning too soon. He's someone worth waiting for.

Takerufuji is still recovering from an ankle injury. Fans are hoping it will be fully healed soon.

The July Tournament gets underway on Sunday, July 14, in Nagoya.

 

 

Livro - Porque perdemos a guerra

 Um pequeno livro com densas verdades, de Manuel Crespo.

The Spectator - Will Trump join the strongman club?

 (personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/will-trump-join-the-strongman-club/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020250327%20%20AL+CID_4f53d7fd2537bd9c7da8ecbe41e821c0

Will Trump join the strongman club?

Paul Wood

The world’s most exclusive club, of presidents-for-life, is growing. It already includes Putin of Russia, Xi of China, Lukashenko of Belarus, Sisi of Egypt and Kim of North Korea. Then there are the other permanent rulers, MBS of Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf monarchies, not forgetting Khamenei of Iran, and half a dozen African leaders.

Now Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is trying to join the club. He has engineered trumped-up charges of terrorism and corruption against the man who might beat him in forthcoming elections, Istanbul’s mayor. More importantly, Donald J. Trump openly admires such autocrats and clearly wants to be one himself. This is the age of the strongman – and the world is far more dangerous because of it.

Trump often muses that he might like a third term as president. This could be Trump’s usual trolling, but he has returned to the subject again and again. He should get four more years ‘based on the way we were treated’, because his first campaign had been ‘spied on’; he wasn’t ‘100 per cent sure’ he couldn’t run again; he was ‘so good’ people might say he should make a comeback. Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon – the keeper of the MAGA flame – says his old boss will run and win in 2028. Bannon was asked about the small problem of the US Constitution and its 22nd Amendment, which says you get only two terms, eight years. He gave a knowing smile. ‘We’re working on it. I think we’ll have a couple of alternatives.’ 

What on earth is Bannon talking about? He says he hopes for a once-in-a-generation realignment of US politics, as when FDR won in 1932. FDR had four terms – the only US president to have more than two – but that was because of the second world war and before the 22nd Amendment. Perhaps Bannon thinks it can be repealed if the MAGA movement grows strong enough. Other Trump supporters seem to believe their leader could just refuse to leave office. Trump’s old political fixer and confidant Roger Stone told me during the 2020 campaign that he might put troops on the streets in the event of a disputed election ‘if there is chaos’. That could be the end of American democracy. A former chairman of the joint chiefs, General Mark Milley, says Trump is a ‘fascist to the core… the most dangerous person to this country’.

A group called Keep Our Republic says Bannon’s ‘wild proposals’ should be taken seriously. The name comes from Benjamin Franklin’s remark that America would not be a monarchy but ‘a republic, if you can keep it’. One of those behind the group, Mark Medish, told me the presidency had built up secret powers throughout the Cold War and after 9/11. A bad actor like Trump could use war or some other national emergency to declare martial law. This would not necessarily be stopped by the Supreme Court, which had recently extended almost unlimited presidential immunity for crimes in office.

Taboo-breaking was a deliberate part of Bannon’s strategy, Medish went on. ‘Their method is to break things first and then normalise the rule-breaking… changing our political culture. This is how authoritarianism starts.’ 

Vladimir Putin is a model of how to break the rules and change the rules to hang on to power. As president, he simply swapped jobs with his prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, but continued to run things from the supposedly more junior position. Russian commentators called it the Tandem-ocracy, though no one doubted that Putin was in charge. A few years later, he swapped back. Trump might think he could pull the same trick. He could get elected vice-president, run things from there for a while as unchallenged leader of MAGA, then take the presidency again. The Constitution is a little vague on whether you can do that, but perhaps moving from vice-president to the top job wouldn’t count as a full term. As Bannon said, enigmatically: ‘We’ll see what the definition of term limit is.’

Trump admires Putin above all because he’s rich, possibly the world’s richest man. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former ‘personal attorney’, says in his memoirs that Trump spoke in awed tones about this. ‘Imagine controlling 25 per cent of the wealth of a country. Wouldn’t that be fucking amazing?’ I once interviewed the Italian architect of Putin’s Palace, as the Russian opposition calls the lavish private retreat built for the Russian leader and which they say cost a billion dollars that were stolen from state coffers. The palace is a neoclassical pile of marble in 20,000 acres on the Black Sea. It’s said to have an underground ice hockey rink, three helipads, a pole-dancing stage and a gold toilet with a gold toilet brush. Erdogan, too, has built himself a palace, with a thousand rooms, though it cost just $600 million and he sued over claims it had a gold toilet. 

The autocrats are united by more than a liking for gold leaf. Despite the bombast, they are often troubled characters, even surprisingly weak at their core. After he had been shot and hung by his heels alongside his mistress, Mussolini’s long-suffering wife, Rachele, said: ‘My husband appeared to be a lion, but instead he was a rather sad and small man.’ President Trump’s mental pathologies are well known, his character shaped by his bullying, ‘high-functioning sociopath’ father, according to a book by Trump’s niece, Mary. After Trump won the election last year, his insecurities rampant even in his moment of triumph, he posted on his Truth Social: ‘EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!’

Putin grew up the lonely child of parents traumatised by war, with few toys, chasing rats to kill them for fun. He survived in the dangerous world of the Leningrad gopniki– street hooligans – despite being physically small and weak. He became a modern tsar, photographed bare-chested in the Russian wilderness, though wearing lifts in his heels to make him look taller. Erdogan, meanwhile, tells a story of how his ‘authoritarian’ father once punished him for swearing by hanging him from the ceiling by his wrists. It was 15 to 20 minutes before an uncle cut him down. As a small boy, it’s said he would calm his father’s rages by kissing his shoes. He spent his teenage years in Istanbul’s Kasimpasa slum, which was run by gangs who had an honour code of humiliating their enemies. He took that code with him into politics.

President Xi of China fits the pattern. There was plenty of misery and humiliation in his childhood. As the son of a senior party official arrested in the Cultural Revolution, he was called the ‘child of a black gang’. Bookish and shy, he was paraded on stage at a struggle session, wearing a metal dunce’s cap. His own mother was forced to raise her fist and chant ‘Down with Xi Jinping!’ along with everyone else. Then he was sent to do hard labour at a school for delinquents. Now he is the man who says he feels called by destiny to reunite China. A war over Taiwan could blow up any moment. Trump certainly believes that: it is one reason he is rushing to dump Ukraine and make friends with Russia. 

The venue for the first US-Russia talks in three years was Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, hosted by Trump’s good friend Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). The Saudi royals are everything that Trump admires: rich and ruthless, there for life, unchallenged and untouchable. MBS wasn’t brought up in poverty, but he is a product of the school of hard knocks, scrambling to the top despite being only the seventh son of his father, King Salman. It must have stung MBS when western politicians and businesspeople boycotted him for having one of his critics, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, cut up with a bone saw. But the Jeddah talks allowed MBS to play host once again, and to play at geopolitics, the autocrats’ favourite game. 

As a group, the autocrats – and Trump, the wannabe – are thin-skinned, bitter, holding grudges that go back years, given to chest-beating, megalomaniacal, both sentimental and cruel. The US national security ‘principals’ who texted each other childish emojis to celebrate the bombing of Yemen this week – which killed some 53 people – were just following Trump’s lead. This is a man who cut off the trust fund being used to pay for treating his nephew’s seriously ill son, allegedly saying ‘Let him die’.

But the greatest danger lies in the strongmen’s grandiose plans, their wish to secure their place in history by redrawing the map. Putin has Ukraine; Xi, Taiwan; and Trump…Greenland. The Danes are taking Trump’s threat to annex Greenland both literally and seriously. Rasmus Jarlov, the Danish Conservative party’s spokesman on Greenland, told me they would never give in. He didn’t think the US would invade, but would just pile on the pressure. ‘We know that they’re not shy of harassing allies.’ The whole country was furious, he said. ‘It’s incredibly disrespectful and immoral, given the friendship and alliance we’ve had with the Americans for as long as anyone can remember.’

Jarlov is also chairman of the Danish parliament’s defence committee. He believes the new American F-35 fighter planes that Denmark is buying have a kill switch and he doesn’t trust the Trump administration not to use it. The Pentagon has denied there is such a kill switch, but the US could achieve the same effect by refusing to send spare parts, or just software updates. Jarlov fears something like that will happen in the campaign to seize Greenland, and he wants Denmark not to buy the F-35s. This wasn’t retaliation: they could no longer depend on the US. ‘Buying American weapons is a security risk that we cannot run.’ 

Is this the end of the rules-based international order? Trump’s generals tried to explain the concept to him at a meeting in a bunker in the Pentagon early in his first term. He called them dopes, babies and losers, adding. ‘I wouldn’t go to war with you people.’ Trump believes in America First, and so we must assume he doesn’t want to start another big war with a costly occupation to follow, no new Iraq or Afghanistan. But his menacing of Denmark, Canada and Panama strengthens the real predators: Putin and (despite talk of a US alliance with Russia) Xi. Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times has invented a term for this moment: neo-imperialism, the new age of empire. Small states must now fear a world without rules where, as Thucydides put it: ‘The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’

The Spectator - What J.D. Vance gets right

 

(personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-j-d-vance-gets-right/?status=Active&utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BLND%20%2020250327%20%20TRINITY%20BRIDGE%20%20IH+CID_e124b1263292be7c6940382b8d0fc747

What J.D. Vance gets right

27 March 2025, 5:00am

Credit: Getty Images

J.D. Vance is just about the least popular conservative in Britain right now. The US Vice President’s treatment of Volodymyr Zelensky, and more recent leaked text messages discussing strikes on Yemen, have left Vance mired in scandal. Even in America, home of the MAGA movement, he is among the most disliked veeps in history, at least at this early stage in his term.

So it’s no wonder that last week Vance tried to move back onto his home turf and the issues for which he first became famous as a writer: the impact of globalisation on the American working class. In a room full of tech entrepreneurs, his championship of red-state, Main Street conservatism was clearly a hard sell. But look beyond the early political disasters of the second Trump administration, and it’s clear that Vance was offering something sorely lacking on both sides of the Atlantic: an economic worldview that is both reformist and coherent.

The Vice President and author of Hillbilly Elegy embraces a vision that seeks to strengthen American productivity, but with the firm objective of bringing prosperity to American workers. He makes a compelling economic case regarding the root causes of western stagnation and Chinese dominance, wrapped in an analysis that is morally grounded. The purpose of the economy is to raise general living standards in a way that supports families. He quotes the canonised Pope John Paul II, who perhaps surprisingly lionised the deployment of science and technology – so that man may earn a living, but also ‘elevate unceasingly the cultural and moral level of the society within which he lives.’

In challenging the wisdom of hyperglobalisation and arguing that growth must benefit American workers, ‘Vance-ism’ reflects an emergent body of thought within the American New Right which, behind the celebrity chaos of the Oval Office, has developed this new synthesis of thought. In this respect, US conservatives are intellectually ahead of their counterparts this side of the Atlantic, where centre-right policymakers remain either addicted to Reagan cosplay or otherwise believe that everything is (deep down) actually fine.

Achieving a cheap and illusory prosperity through cost-cutting rather than innovating and building will no longer do, Vance argues. One form this takes is the offshoring of production – whether it’s the manufacture of cars, chips, solar panels, steel or storage batteries. This reduces the costs of production and allows us to tell ourselves we are meeting environmental targets to boot. The theory is that value would flow up the supply chain. In fact, the opposite has happened. By suppressing input costs, offshoring has reduced businesses’ incentive to be more productive.

The second is the mass immigration of low-skilled labour – which is really the same thing. It just means moving workers to the West, rather than factories to the East. Migrants who cost taxpayers more than they contribute put strain on already indebted welfare states in the Anglosphere. And migrants earning low wages depress wages by creating an artificial oversupply. This allows margins to remain high and consumer prices low, even if businesses are bad at what they do. Why would you train a British or American worker to do a task more efficiently, or invest in labour-saving technology, when it’s cheaper up front to employ an underpaid migrant? The result has been the alienation of local labour and stagnant productivity – which in the UK’s case has not moved since 2008.

This is to say nothing of the cost to economic security when you rely on a strategic enemy for steel, electricity, the components that enable access to the internet and life-saving drugs. None of this would matter if the total integration of global markets had brought us perpetual peace on pain of mutually assured economic destruction. Clearly, it has not.

There is a new consensus in Vance’s mind and among his advisers. But there is friction even within the intellectual vanguard of the MAGA movement. Tech optimists in Silicon Valley look forward with glee to a workless future, in which all income is earned technologically, ordinary people’s material needs are met with passive incomes, and they are kept happy with immersive gaming, as one CEO boasted to Vance. But this would simply be an acceleration of the kind of Brave New World economics that brought the Anglosphere to this political revolution in the first place. There must be an accommodation with the populists who defend American labour – or the tech bosses will be biting the hands that politically feed them.

Vance is right that productivity gains from training, skills, technology and investment should not destroy the value of labour. It is measured in ‘output per hour worked’. So on the contrary, productivity gains should increase workers’ prosperity, allowing them to create more with less, earn better salaries and live more secure lives. But that vision of widespread economic improvement is already clashing with the tech lords’ preference for a digitised, borderless world where the proceeds of innovation are privatised and hoarded while workers become literally redundant.

To ensure growth benefits workers, there must be a rebalancing of the global trading order. Britain is in a worse state than America: we import nearly 40 per cent of our energy and consume £28 billion more in goods and services than we produce annually, financed by selling equities in our companies, private and public debt, and our scarcest national resource – land you can legally build on – to foreigners. 

Productivity has been frozen for over a decade, yet consuming cheap imports and importing cheap labour has papered over this. But it has hollowed out our manufacturing so we produce just two per cent of global output, while China now accounts for more than 30 per cent. Companies with capacity for productive growth have gone overseas and good jobs have disappeared.

Autarky for America, let alone Britain, would be impossible and mad. But the current model cannot go on. The old economic religion was blind to inequality so long as growth was achieved. But it has not. The remoralising of Anglo-American thinking on economics can and must go hand in hand with a better and saner commitment to innovation and production that benefits workers and families, not transferring wealth up to the owners of technology or overseas to Beijing.

In many ways Vance is wrong, but Vance-ism is right.

Livro - Crítica XXI (nº 5)

 

Saúde (Medicina) - Neuroma de Morton

 

Morton’s Neuroma: The Non-Surgical Treatment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lah3fohx_WE

Reflexão - LBC (acções)

 Para mais tarde recordar...

The Spectator - Cartoon

 

The Spectator - America has seen sense on aid. When will we?

(personal underlines) 

America has seen sense on aid. When will we?

Douglas Murray

The new administration in Washington has somewhat startled its critics by issuing a blizzard of executive orders during its opening weeks in office. So far the reaction from the American left might be summed up by the sentiment: ‘That’s not fair – it’s only us that are allowed to do things when we are in power.’

The American left are in a particular funk about the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) – as though railing against the proposed reduction of federal spending and reduction of the American deficit is a natural vote-winner. But good news does just keep on coming. On Monday, Elon Musk said that President Donald Trump had agreed to shutter USAID – the US government money spigot that sprays money around the world, much of it to people who hate America.

Like our own Department for International Development, the British Council and others, it is one of those entities which might just justify itself if it actually promoted the values of the donor country. But all these organisations were long ago taken over by insane people who hate the taxpayers that give them their money and think the best way for a nation to act in the 21st century is as a sort of large NGO.

This week, various White House spokesmen had fun pointing out some recent projects which might not have been the best use of US taxpayer dollars: $1.5 million to ‘advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities’; $47,000 to fund a ‘transgender opera’ in Colombia; $2 million for sex changes in Guatemala. And hundreds of millions of dollars to provide better irrigation systems for Afghan poppy-growing projects as well as hundreds of thousands of meals for al Qaeda-related terrorists in Syria. It is one thing to actually feed your enemies, or fund their illegal drugs trade, but it might be even worse to go around the world paying people to display the worst woke excesses which took over America and most of the rest of the West in the past decade.

It reminds me of that classic from some years ago, when American ‘educators’ were paid to introduce Afghan women to conceptual art, including Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal. The Afghan women in the class (caught on video) giggled as this poor western chump tried to get them up to speed on the 20th century. You could see on their faces what they were thinking: if this is the crap the West is going to push on us, maybe our husbands were right about the western infidel after all. It was, as many a wag said at the time, literally money down the toilet.

Of course, it is fast becoming a point of pride among the British left that we aren’t as idiotic as our American cousins. Yet if there is a serious person left in the British government, maybe they could consider learning from the American administration rather than scorning them.

After all, DfiD (now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) is a department which has been flattered and funded by Conservative and Labour politicians alike. As Jonathan Foreman and others have exposed in these pages before, its budget was ring-fenced by recent Conservative governments because the wets believed that if they were seen to be splurging money abroad – a set amount of money, remember (something everyone knows never leads to waste) – then the left would love them. As would people abroad. How well that all worked out.

Still, if there is an adult around in Whitehall, perhaps they could ask whether the British taxpayer is currently in such a fine financial place that we should be engaging in projects akin to those highlighted by the White House this week. The UK currently doles out £13.3 billion a year in foreign aid. Among the projects that the British taxpayer has spent money on in recent years is a £60 million ‘prosperity fund’ in Mexico whose endeavours include creating a bicycle lane in Mexico City and ‘writing a business case for gender parity in the public transportation workforce’. There has also been a £200,000 grant to ‘engage new urban audiences’ with all-female traditional Chinese opera in Shanghai, and £162,000 for a ‘space’ for people in Shenzhen to be more involved in their ‘traditional crafts’.

If UK taxpayers were funding projects that sought to get British people into opera then I would say an argument could be made for that. Hell, if the British taxpayer is so full of generosity and innocence that they want to fund a traditional British arts and culture fair in south-eastern China, with plenty of Vaughan Williams and Shakespeare, I might even say ‘go for it’. But why should British taxpayers be paying for other countries to learn their traditional crafts, or their traditional crafts plus a bit of western gender woo-woo sprinkled on top?

I can hear the Andrew Mitchells of the world reaching for their letterheads. Does a know-nothing dolt like me not realise the inestimable advantages to Britain of funding a £33 million research programme on the use of electric cookers vs traditional fires for people in Laos and Uganda? Am I so immune to the obvious advantages of the British taxpayer giving £110,000 to a theatre company in Bolivia to mount an artistic response to the wildfires there, or to the £476,000 we recently gave for a study into the role that the arts can play in ‘challenging racism in Brazil, Colombia and Argentina’?

Alas, I suppose I must confess to being just such a barbarian. The idea behind the Doge saving on USAID isn’t that USAID isn’t spending its money in America – the problem is that it is spending its money against America. By contrast, I suspect that the British government has no problem splashing our cash down the urinal. And all over the floor, too.

The Spectator - The cruellest thing about Trump vs Zelensky? Trump’s right

 (personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-cruellest-thing-about-trump-vs-zelensky-trumps-right/?most-popular=1

The cruellest thing about Trump vs Zelensky? Trump’s right

20 February 2025, 3:32pm

Credit: Getty Images

And just like that, we are back in 2017. Donald Trump, the President of the United States, is posting ridiculous hyperbole on his socials and mouthing off from Mar-a-Lago, as he always has.

In the last 24 hours, however, the global political and media classes have gone back to gnashing their teeth and wailing in the way they did in Trump’s first term. It’s disgraceful! It’s sub-literate! He’s Vladimir Putin’s puppet! He’s reckless and utterly out of control! And that, of course, is the point.

Trump’s re-election proved that he is no aberration, so in 2025 the liberal, western world order has tried to come to terms with him. Western statesmen took turns to recognise his achievements, or his mandate, and to distance themselves from their past condemnations. But this was all insincere politesse and it was never going to work. Trump doesn’t care. His mandate is to cripple their authority. And on the international stage, Ukraine was always going to be the breaking point. 

The West has invested a huge amount of capital – political, economic and strategic – in the fight against Russia, and it has failed. Trump knows that and so he’s ending the war: if that means insulting Volodymyr Zelensky, parroting Russian talking points and playing nice with Putin, so be it.

Fact-checkers have been queueing up to rebut Trump’s incoherent Truth Social post last night, which is worth reposting here in full:

Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and “TRUMP,” will never be able to settle. The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe, and Europe’s money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back. Why didn’t Sleepy Joe Biden demand Equalization, in that this War is far more important to Europe than it is to us – We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation. On top of this, Zelenskyy admits that half of the money we sent him is “MISSING.” He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden “like a fiddle.” A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only “TRUMP,” and the Trump Administration, can do. Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring Peace, and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the “gravy train” going. I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died – And so it continues…

And so it does.

To westerners who have spent years grandstanding against Putin, such words are anathema. To the many Ukrainians who have fought and died fighting Russian forces in their country, such rhetoric is beyond reprehensible. But if you can somehow look through the insensitivity, the febrile exaggerations, the score-settling with Zelensky, the half-lies and the cruel braggadocio, you have to admit that he is right – or at least not wrong.

Only offensive, odious Donald could end the war in Ukraine, which he is now doing. Europe has failed to bring peace. In a press conference on Tuesday, Trump said that Ukrainians shouldn’t complain about not being involved in his dialogue with Russia: ‘Well, you’ve been there for three years… you should have ended it three years… You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.’ That’s been widely interpreted as him saying that Ukraine started the war, and while his choice of words was poor, in context he is clearly referring to the thwarted efforts to achieve peace in the conflict’s early days in 2022. Trump is also right to say that vast amounts of western funding to Ukraine have gone missing, because the country is – and always has been – deeply corrupt.

For European leaders who have spent years advocating on behalf of Ukraine, the most painful part will be Trump’s reckoning on Zelensky. In the days and months that followed Russia’s invasion, when Ukraine’s President bravely stayed in Kyiv and led Ukraine’s impressive resistance, Zelensky became a western hero. People called him a 21st-century Churchill. He was fêted in European capitals, Hollywood and on the cover of Vogue magazine as young men killed each other on the front line.

There’s no doubt that, in our eagerness to champion the man in the military fatigues, we overlooked the more sordid aspects of his leadership. The Pandora papers showing his links to shady offshore bank accounts were forgotten about. His ties to deeply corrupt and double-dealing oligarchs, such as Ihor Kolomoisky, were brushed over. His ruthless suppression of Moscow-affiliated religious groups was dismissed as Kremlin ‘disinformation’.

Western politicians, and military-industrial types who have made a lot of money from the war effort, have always known, deep down, that in supporting Ukraine against Putin they have covered up awkward truths. What really frightens them now is not necessarily Trump’s recklessness. It’s that the murkier realities of the Ukraine-Russia relationship and the West’s involvement in the conflict going back to 2014 and before, may soon come to light.

The Spectator - The sad demise of the scathing school report

 (personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-sad-demise-of-the-scathing-school-report/?status=Non-subs&utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BLND%20%2020241211%20%20HOUSE%20ADS%20%20IH+CID_58fc1c2d49b8275ce7167bffc1b69b1f

The sad demise of the scathing school report

AI versions leave no room for wit or withering put-downs

Tanith Carey11 December 2024, 5:01am

[Alamy]

As the first term of the school year draws to a close, pupils’ reports will soon be landing, encrypted and password-protected, on parents’ smartphones. But once they’ve finally managed to open them to find how little Amelia or Noah has been performing, there will be another code for them to crack: what on earth the teachers are actually trying to say about their child.

These days, reports tend to be written with the help of AI software or templates, which makes it impossible to work out how your child is really doing. In our super-sensitive age, many schools now play it safe by couching all comments as positives, and only using approved adjectives from word banks and drop-down menus. The result is that the real meaning gets obscured by a thick fog of bland generalisations, in case it offends a parent or pupil.

Even that time-honoured put-down, ‘Could do better’, has slipped out of use, replaced by gentle hints that it would help if Felix ‘took a more self-directed approach to learning in order to reach his full potential’.

As a parent of two children, now out the other side of the school system, I have noticed this homogenisation getting worse over the years. I’ve been so frustrated by reports that are nothing more than factual descriptions of what my daughters have covered that term in the curriculum – leaving me none the wiser about how they’ve actually coped with it. It’s made me nostalgic for the days when they still had the scope to be character assassinations.

True, the reports of our childhoods could be cruel and despotic, and often said more about the teacher than the pupil. But thanks to the distance of a few decades, I now have a sneaking admiration for the wit that went into some of the withering put-downs, delivered so elegantly in a blue fountain pen.

This nostalgia is also easier because we only hear of the students who either took notice or who were determined to prove these negative judgments wrong and who later became successes – not the pupils whose self-worth never recovered. (I will own up to the fact that 40 years later, I’m still smarting about my house mistress’s description of me as ‘antisocial’ in my first report at Malvern Girls’ College – as if I were busy plotting how to burn the school down from the edge of the hockey pitch.)

But when some of those teachers’ scathing remarks did do the trick of getting pupils to achieve more, it’s hard not to admire their gloriously high-handed prose. Take this pen portrait of the late Shakespearian and Good Life actor Richard Briers. In the 1940s, his headmaster at Rokeby School wrote: ‘It would seem that Briers thinks he is running the school and not me. If this attitude persists, one of us will have to leave.’

Writer and actor Stephen Fry also did very well despite – or perhaps because of – one Uppingham teacher’s judgment that ‘He has glaring faults, and they have certainly glared at us this term. I have nothing more to say’.

My husband Anthony recently found a box of his school reports in the cellar and brought them up for me to read. Still preserved in crisp white envelopes, they covered the time from when he went to prep school, age seven, until he left Ampleforth at 18 – and they were as entertaining as they were eviscerating.

When Anthony was not performing in geography in 1975, for example, his teacher did not spare his parents some home truths, writing that: ‘The genius with which Anthony accredits himself has not been manifest this term, and if he spent more time working and less basking in his imagined success, he might achieve a satisfactory result.’

If his parents were wondering whether their nine-year-old was artistic or not, that idea was brutally kicked into touch by this comment from his art teacher: ‘Anthony rather waits for inspiration to come to him rather than going out to look for it.’

As for his behaviour, that warranted this deft turn of phrase from another master, who wrote: ‘Most staff find in Anthony a deliberate obstinacy not to do as he is told – with a “Je m’en fiche” attitude.’ It’s a phrase I can’t imagine popping up in the school report word banks of 2024.

For Anthony, the good news is that by the time he reached secondary school, these scorchings had the desired effect – mainly because his father summoned him to explain them every time he came home for the holidays.

Extra marks should also go to the masters and mistresses who foresaw the people their pupils would become. In his report home to his father Stanley in 1982, Boris Johnson’s Eton housemaster Martin Hammond already described the qualities which would become familiar to the nation. He wrote of the future PM, then 17: ‘I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.’

Over at Malvern College, one master who taught Jeremy Paxman in the 1960s also picked up early on the brusque TV presenter’s need to ‘learn tact while not losing his outspokenness’, adding that ‘stubbornness is in his nature’ and ‘could be an asset when directed to sound ends’.

There was also some excellent foresight from Michael Palin’s headmaster at Shrewsbury, who said of the future Python while he was there between 1957 and 1961: ‘He is just a teeny bit pleased with himself. I have noticed a slightly put-on manner of affectation, perhaps a sort of aftermath of his fine performance in the school play. We’re all for a bit of jollity and mild eye-flashing, but he must not try to get away altogether with this slightly facile manner.’

So while you may be bored to tears by your child’s school report when it drops into your inbox this week, there’s one consolation: at least you – or they – are unlikely to be offended. If their teachers really do think they are hopeless cases, never destined to amount to much, you’ll be spared the pain of knowing.

Livro - Confidências no Exílio

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