Society

The TIME magazine ‘Person of the Year’ award is in essence an excuse to have a big old argument. Every year, TIME recognizes an individual who has earned a great deal of attention, in an attempt to attract some of the excess to their publication. In winning ‘Person of the Year’, then, Greta Thunberg sits alongside not just Gandhi, Lech Wałęsa and Pope John Paul II but a rogues’ gallery that runs from Putin and George W. Bush to Hitler and Stalin. If they are going to have this dumb, opportunistic award, then, it makes sense to give it to Thunberg. Who has been at the heart of more controversy? Don't say Donald Trump. Hardly anyone is interested enough to even try understand the impeachment scandal outside the US. The Hong Kong protesters?

Cockburn was back in the old country this week, stuffing small brown envelopes with money and slipping them through the letterboxes of wavering Conservative voters before making his personal Brexit back to DC to read the articles of impeachment. As the wheels went up and the gin and tonic went down, he reclined in Club with the newspapers, and also the Washington Post.‘Americans should be jealous of British elections,’ was the headline. Henry Olsen, the Post’s in-house Deplorable, covers ‘populism and American conservative thought’.

The dream of a free internet — if it was ever more substantial than a fantasy — is crumbling. This decade began with the Arab Spring and the belief that technology powered movements for liberty across the globe could triumph over despotism. Instead the decade closes with the growing realization that technology is driving events in unpredictable ways. Confused, people are left feeling less not more in control of their lives. And a sketch is being made — however faintly — for a new form of despotism: Big Tech. Big Tech is unaccountable, opaque and deeply embedded within the lives of billions. Since 2016 it has been dumped on from both the left and the right, and former Big Tech workers.

Following Donald Trump’s election, there was hope that the US would aid Christian communities overseas, especially in Iraq where the population of Christians was reduced by over 80 percent since the US invasion. The Obama administration was less receptive to a focus on persecuted Christians, often opting to use euphemistic terms. Christian persecution became known more as a series of sporadic, unrelated incidents rather than a phenomena. The US has invested significantly in helping rebuild Iraq, but the effectiveness of our aid has been limited, and some people on the ground in Iraq claim they never saw the entirety of the aid themselves.

On the grainy video, the first cat trips a motion detector. A light suddenly bursts on, and anyone watching the video feed can now see the side of a house, a driveway, a white pickup truck. Behind the first cat, a second cat appears, and then a third, both of whom seem more perturbed by the light. They leap up a wall at what appears to be the back of the house, disappearing into the night while a fourth cat and then a fifth appear, following the path of the first cat, who lumbers casually away and out of view. The timestamp on the bottom right-hand corner of the video footage reads 1:33 in the morning.The cats on the video are not house cats; their long, slouching bodies are those of the American cougar, also known as the catamount, puma, or mountain lion.

Households in America produce 254 tons of trash annually and only 34 percent is recycled. Every person creates 1,316 pounds of trash destined the landfill, about the weight of a grizzly bear. America represents 4 percent of the world’s population yet produces 12 percent of the world’s waste and Germany recycles around twice as much as the US. The statistics tell one story. A different tale is that recycling programs across the country are failing as companies struggle to make money and the amount of waste that ends up as landfill is growing every year. It’s a depressing story of failed ambition confronted by market realities that has left the mountains of trash growing as a monument to American excess and unchecked environmental pollution.

Scattered along the streets of Washington DC are electric scooters. Most have four-letter names: Bird, Lime, Skip, Jump, Bolt. Using one for the first time, you may prefer to employ another four-letter word. I know I did. My first taste of the e-scooter phenomenon was on a visit to Los Angeles in February last year. The Santa Monica company Bird had been up and running for only five months, yet already its scooters were all over the city, like avian excrement. Students at UCLA embraced the Birds. Nobody seemed fazed by the undeniable fact that you cannot look cool on a battery-powered two-wheeler. The epidemic then spread to other American metropolises: Atlanta, Minneapolis, Miami. New York has so far held out, but will likely soon fall.

Doddering Prince Andrew, known as Randy Andy among the Teterboro class, appeared on BBC’s Newsnight Saturday evening for a sit-down from Buckingham Palace to set the record straight on his relationship with dead sex trafficking kingpin Jeffrey Epstein. It’s being called some of the best television of the year, or at least the best episode yet of Brass Eye, despite the BBC’s Emily Maitlis failing to ask the Duke of York the most obvious question on everyone’s mind, ‘Who killed Jeffrey Epstein?’ ‘It would be a considerable stretch to say he was a very close friend,’ Andrew said of Epstein, explaining the pair only saw each other, like, three times a year, or triple as often as many people see their own parents.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The floor is slippery. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, I’m taking a tour of Abyss Creations, the factory where the ‘Ferraris of love dolls’, RealDoll and Realbotix, are made. A thin layer of silicone coats almost every surface. A (real) woman in her late twenties, the PR coordinator, Catherine, shows me round. She has the attitude of a hostess at a theme-park restaurant: bored or stoned or maybe both. I’m sure she’s given hundreds of these tours, heard the same dumb jokes a million times and watched us all slap the ass of a doll reluctantly yet instinctively.

Squinting through the penumbra of blue smoke that is nearly always contiguous with my person, I was surprised — no, scandalized — to see a silly little remark about G.K. Chesterton stud the pages of the National Review this week.Chesterton, that many-sided genius, once had the gall to defend the practice of torching a nice clump of tobacco and inhaling the fumes. Here is what he wrote, many years ago: '…to have a horror of tobacco is not to have an abstract standard of right; but exactly the opposite. It is to have no standard of right whatever; and to take certain local likes and dislikes as a substitute.