Despite numerous setbacks, President Donald Trump remains committed to ending the war between Russia and Ukraine — a war that has resulted in over a million casualties and turned much of Eastern Ukraine into drone-netted wasteland.

To this end, his administration has drafted a 28-point peace plan that would give both warring parties something they want: for Russia, concessions to much of the land it presently occupies in Eastern Ukraine; and for Ukraine, a NATO-style security guarantee from the United States.

'We're back to square one.'

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy initially expressed a willingness to work with the administration on the plan, which was presented to him in writing on Thursday by U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, but he has since joined others in casting doubt on its workability.

The plan

Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted on Wednesday evening, "Ending a complex and deadly war such as the one in Ukraine requires an extensive exchange of serious and realistic ideas. And achieving a durable peace will require both sides to agree to difficult but necessary concessions."

"That is why we are and will continue to develop a list of potential ideas for ending this war based on input from both sides of this conflict," Rubio added.

Photo by Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The following day, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged that Rubio and U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff "have been working on a plan quietly for about the last month."

"They have been engaging with both sides, Russia and Ukraine equally, to understand what these countries would commit to in order to see a lasting and durable peace," Leavitt continued. "That's how you get to a peace negotiation."

The plan's 28 points as of Thursday are as follows, according to Axios and Agence France-Presse:

Ukraine's sovereignty will be affirmed.
A comprehensive non-aggression agreement between Russia, Ukraine, and Europe will be established, thereby settling all ambiguities of the last 30 years.
The expectations that Russia will not invade neighboring countries and that NATO will not continue its expansion will be codified.
A U.S.-mediated dialogue will be scheduled between Russia and NATO in order "to resolve all security issues and create conditions for de-escalation in order to ensure global security and increase opportunities for cooperation and future economic development."
Ukraine will receive an explicit security guarantee — apparently from the United States.
Ukraine's military will be limited to 600,000 personnel.
Ukraine will codify in its constitution a prohibition on its joining NATO, and NATO will agree to statutorily forbid Ukraine's admission in the future.
NATO will agree not to station troops in Ukraine.
European fighter jets will be stationed in neighboring Poland.
The U.S. will receive compensation for its guarantee; invalidate the guarantee if Ukraine invades Russia or fires a missile at Moscow or St. Petersburg without cause; and revoke recognition of the new territory and respond both militarily as well as with global sanctions if Russia invades.
Ukraine will be eligible for membership to the European Union and enjoy special access to the European market in the meantime.
The U.S. and other parties will help rebuild Ukraine.
Russia will be reintegrated in the the global economy.
Frozen Russian assets will be poured into American-led efforts to rebuild Ukraine — a venture from which the U.S. will receive 50% of profits.
A U.S.-Russian working group on security issues will be established to ensure compliance with all provisions of the agreement.
Russia will codify a policy of non-aggression toward Europe and Ukraine.
The U.S. and Russia will "agree to extend the validity of treaties on the non-proliferation and control of nuclear weapons, including the START I Treaty."
Ukraine will agree not to acquire or develop nuclear bombs.
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant will be launched under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency and distribute electricity equally between Russia and Ukraine.
In addition to both nations implementing educational anti-discrimination programs and guaranteeing the rights of Ukrainian and Russian media and education, Ukraine will deal with its Nazi infestation and adopt EU rules on religious tolerance and the protection of linguistic minorities.
The U.S. will recognize Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk as de facto Russian; Kherson and Zaporizhzhia will be divided along the current line of contact; Russia will cede other territories under its control outside the five regions; and Ukrainian forces with abandon the part of Donetsk Oblast currently under their control, which will become a neutral demilitarized buffer zone.
Once the territorial arrangements are settled, neither Russia nor Ukraine will attempt to change them by force.
Russia will not prevent Ukraine from using the Dnieper River for commercial activities, and agreement will be made on the free transport of grain across the Black Sea.
A humanitarian committee will be established to deal with prisoner exchanges as well as the return of remains, hostages, and civilian detainees. A family reunification program will also be implemented.
Ukraine will hold elections in 100 days.
All parties involved in the conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to consider any complaints in the future.
The agreement will be legally binding, and sanctions will be imposed for violations.
The ceasefire will take effect immediately after both sides retreat to agreed points and begin implementing the terms of the agreement.

Flies in the ointment

European diplomats and other establishmentarians immediately began clutching pearls over the plan, apparently convinced that there is yet a better way to resolve or win what is effectively an 11-year-old war.

"We're back to square one," one senior European official told the Financial Times.

Another European diplomat working on a response to Trump's plan said, "It basically means capitulation [to Moscow]."

"For any plan to work, it needs Ukrainians and Europeans on board," said European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas. "We haven't heard of any concessions on the Russian side."

Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said, "Peace cannot be a capitulation."

'Our red lines are clear and unwavering.'

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, for instance, suggested that the plan was a "surrender agreement," adding that "Ukrainian courage and patriotism should not be betrayed by Americans growing tired of stopping evil."

Douglas Murray, a gay neoconservative who complained last year that the West was "drunk on peace," wrote in his New York Post column, "Perhaps this is just an opening gambit, but it must be clear to any observer that these are not terms that any Ukrainian government could agree to."

The Institute for the Study of War said that "the stipulations of the reported 28-point Russia-U.S. peace plan amount to Ukraine's full capitulation to Russia's original war demands."

Zelenskyy, whose presidential term officially ended 18 months ago, initially broke from the naysayers, tweeting on Thursday, "Our teams — of Ukraine and the United States — will work on the provisions of the plan to end the war. We are ready for constructive, honest and swift work."

However, in a 10-minute address on Friday to his beleaguered nation, Zelenskyy framed the choice of accepting the peace plan in dire terms.

"Now the pressure on Ukraine is one of the most difficult. Now Ukraine may find itself facing a very difficult choice: either the loss of dignity or the risk of losing a key partner," Zelenskyy said. "Either [Trump's] 28 points or an extremely difficult winter, the most difficult and further risks — life without freedom, without dignity, without justice."

The previous day, Zelenskyy stated, "It is important that the outcome be a dignified peace."

Kristina Gayovishin, Ukraine's deputy permanent representative to the U.N., effectively told the globalist body's security council that concessions to Moscow and military reductions were off the table.

"While Ukraine stands ready to engage in meaningful negotiations to end this war, our red lines are clear and unwavering," Gayovishin said. "There will never be any recognition, formal or otherwise, of Ukrainian territory temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation as Russian. Our land is not for sale."

"We will not accept any limits on our right to self-defense or on the size and capabilities of our armed force," the Ukrainian diplomat continued. "Nor will we tolerate any infringement on our sovereignty, including our sovereign right to choose the alliances we want to join."

Gayovishin added, "Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine. And nothing about Europe without Europe."

American officials have emphasized that the 28-point peace plan is a working document and therefore prone to change.

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Kerosene lamps: Your escape from the sickly glare of LEDs

It’s my favorite time of year. When it gets cold, I fuel up four or five of the dozens of antique kerosene lamps I own. I use these to heat and light my house in winter; the charm and warmth make the cold and dark more bearable.

In past columns I’ve tried to convince you to abandon new, low-quality appliances and buy old workhorses. This time I want to persuade you to go even lower-tech and give flame light a try. You want to gather around the lamp with good people. You’ll find yourself staring into the flame, noticing the warmth it radiates (literal and metaphorical).

My center drafts have saved me during electricity outages in winter, giving enough light to work by as well as heat.

No electric lamps will make you feel this way. Some are very beautiful, of course, and the most charming use the original Edison-style incandescent filament bulbs. But they’re almost gone.

Thanks to meddling safetyist government, we live under the ghastly glow of LEDs. Before that, it was compact fluorescents. And before that, it was the sickening, flickering off-green morgue illumination of the overhead fluorescent tube, the appropriate furnishing for the inhuman Brutalist aesthetic that has infected 90% of commercial office space in the U.S. since the 1960s.

We weren’t made to live this way or light this way. We did not evolve under unnatural artificial light stripped of whole swaths of the color spectrum, drained of infrared.

We evolved by the campfire. For most of human history, the communal fire was the only source of “artificial” illumination at night. Firelight is a first cousin to sunlight, the original illumination that gave rise to all life on earth.

I’m going to give you basic tips on buying and running lamps, from simple to more complex. There’s a kind of kerosene lamp for everyone.

Sensible safety

Use common sense. You’re working with fire, and larger lamps put out a lot of heat, so be mindful that there’s plenty of clearance between the top of the chimney and the ceiling.

Keep charged fire extinguishers (you should anyway).

Yes, of course it’s possible to tip over a lamp, but in practice, it rarely happens unless you’re careless. They’re weighted to be fairly stable.

People also ask if my cats knock over the lamps. The answer is no, but you must use your own judgment because you know your animals and the layout of your house. My cats love to sleep near them for warmth and will walk on a table to get to them. But they don’t bump them. Again, you must exercise your own judgment.

Shredder the cat dozes by a center-draft lamp. Josh Slocum

No, you’re not in danger of carbon monoxide poisoning. Do you have a gas cookstove? Did you ever worry that you would get carbon monoxide poisoning from having your gas cookstove running? If you’re not afraid of your gas stove giving you carbon monoxide poisoning, there’s no physics-based reason to fear it if the flame comes from a kerosene lamp instead.

Carbon monoxide results from incomplete combustion. No combustion is 100% complete, but these lamps are burning close to it. I have been running kerosene lamps for about 15 years. They’ve never even blipped my smoke or carbon monoxide detectors.

No, the lamps won’t “suck up all the oxygen.” Your house is not hermetically sealed. The air is changing over all the time, even with your windows closed. You’re not in a pressurized submarine hull.

But “fumes,” you say. Every time you burn your favorite scented candles, you’re doing the same thing at a small scale, but no one is afraid of “fumes.” I think “fumes” is just miasma theory of disease, like how people used to falsely believe that bad odors from graveyards could transmit sickness to the living.

The only “fumes” you’re going to get with a lamp using clean kerosene are a bit of kero smell on lighting and on extinguishing. If it bothers you, take the lamp outside to light and extinguish. Remember that your ancestors right here in America all lit their homes this way, rich or poor. People weren’t dying of “fumes” or “lack of oxygen.”

The right stuff

Burn only clear, undyed kerosene. Not “lamp oil.” Not “lamp fuel.” These lamps want one thing only: the specific chemical we call kerosene. It’s a petroleum distillate similar to (but much less stinky than) diesel. Kerosene is not explosive like gasoline; don’t fear an explosion.

If you’ve experienced stinky oil lamps, it’s almost certainly because someone was burning “lamp oil,” which is liquid paraffin wax. This stuff clogs up wicks, it burns half as brightly as kerosene, it can smoke, and it smells awful. Stick with clear kerosene labeled “K1” or “1K,” found in your hardware store, Tractor Supply, Walmart, and similar stores.

Level I: Flat-wick lamps

Let’s introduce you to lamps. I categorize as Level I, Level II, and Level III. We’re going to go from simplest and least expensive to more high-powered lamps. If you’re new to lamps, start with Level I, the flat-wick lamps.

Everyone knows these lamps. These are what come to mind when you hear the phrase “oil lamp.” You remember lamps just like this from "Little House on the Prairie" on television.

These are called flat-wick lamps because, you may have guessed, their wicks are flat. This is my “sewing lamp,” so called because it’s tall enough to sit on a table by you for handwork.

Josh Slocum

Consider a wall-mounted flat-wick lamp, too. These can fit in beautiful wrought-iron brackets. Mount them to a stud in the wall and enjoy the character they add to your room. Below is one of my Victorian wall-mount lamps with a mercury reflector.

Josh Slocum

Level II: Center-draft lamps

So-called “center-draft” lamps are my personal favorite, and I recommend that you get at least one of them. They draw air from a central tube in the middle of the burner. Unlike flat-wick lamps, center-draft lamps have a round wick. They're larger than most flat-wick lamps, so they put out about three times the light and heat of a basic lamp.

One center-draft lamp is enough to heat a medium-sized room, and you can cook over it in a pinch by rigging up a trivet. My center-draft lamps have saved me during electricity outages in winter, giving enough light to work by as well as heat. They’re essential equipment for anyone who is into prepping for emergencies. Plastic electronic LED lights with fancy solar panels can’t hold a candle to the rugged practicality and versatility of these.

Here’s my favorite, the “New Juno” model, made from 1886 to about 1915.

Josh Slocum

Any center-draft lamp is a good buy as long as it has all the parts necessary for operation (be sure it has a flame spreader). At the end of this article, I’ll link to businesses that specialize in advice and replacement parts. Do a little bit of reading, and you’ll learn everything you need to know before you buy.

Level III: The magical Aladdin lamp

Technology becomes as fun as it will ever get when one tech is declining as another rises. The old tech has to compete with the new, so the old tech gets refined to its highest potential just before it becomes obsolete.

That’s the Aladdin lamp. “Aladdin” is a brand name, not a generic type. These lamps are the zenith of kerosene technology that was competing with new electric light. These are mantle lamps. What does that mean? Bring to mind the Coleman lanterns you remember from camping. The ones that hiss and put out a very bright light. Those are mantle lamps too.

Aladdin lamps are mantle lamps, but instead of burning compressed gas, they burn kerosene.

In mantle lamps, the light does not come from the flame. The flame is used to heat the incandescent mantle. This is a thin, delicate mesh impregnated with rare-earths and mineral salts. These elements glow white-hot under heat. This is how the Aladdin lamp can produce a light that matches modern electric bulb output.

They are wonderful devices, and I have a few, but they are more finicky. They need a mantle, and you have to be very careful to keep the wick absolutely level, or you’ll get flame spikes that leave black carbon deposits on your mantle. The solution is to turn the flame low and burn off the carbon slowly.

Here’s my 1936 Aladdin Model B in green Corinthian glass:

Josh Slocum

Hopefully this has tempted you to get your first kerosene lamp. There are some dependable businesses run by people who love these lamps and know everything about them. Most breakable and replaceable parts like the glass chimneys and the wicks are still made and readily available from these purveyors and others.

Nobody knows more about lamps, and nobody has a wider selection of wicks, chimneys, diagrams, and how-to articles, than Miles Stair on the West Coast of the U.S. Go to his site first whenever you have a question.

Woody Kirkman of Kirkman Lanterns manufactures and sells quality reproduction lamps and replacement parts for antiques. You have likely seen his work in period films and at Disney parks and like. He is often hired to supply kerosene and gas lighting fixtures for movies and TV and for theme parks.

Gather those you love around you, and light your lamp.

'Carrie' and the monster who raised me

The devil and his minions have haunted me all my life.

As far back as I can remember, I've been visited by the unquiet dead, the hungry ghosts, and even Old Scratch himself in my dreams. Perhaps these nighttime visitations were spiritual attacks, perhaps they were the predictable manifestation of the violence and instability of my upbringing.

Like Piper Laurie in 'Carrie,' my mother forced me to kneel while she stood above me bellowing. 'Humble yourself before me!' she shrieked. 'GodDAMN you, humble yourself!'

Maybe they were both; maybe the kind of moral derangement that afflicted my parents was a kind of demonic possession.

The devil I know

I'm not sure I believe in God, but I'm getting closer to believing in the devil. That's a confused position, admittedly, but that's what you get from a guy who believed as a child until it was punished out of him and then spent too many years as an obnoxious "new atheist" adult.

Whatever the answer may be, I've been terrified and fascinated by the supernatural, the uncanny, and the grotesque all my life. The kinds of spooky stories that gripped me were the type you find in Victorian English ghost story anthologies. Authors like E.F. Benson, M.R. James, and Elizabeth Gaskell.

If you like these too, no one reads them better than English podcaster Tony Walker. His "Classic Ghost Stories Podcast" is one of the few I find so good that I voluntarily pay for it. This is no amateur sideshow; Walker's narration is professional grade. Why he's not rich reading books for Audible, I'll never know.

Weeping and wailing women in veils who glide down hallways. Rain-bedraggled brides hitchhiking on the side of the road who disappear from their ride's passenger seat as he drives past Resurrection Cemetery. Fingerprints that appear on the windows of automobiles that cross the railroad tracks where a locomotive hit a school bus long ago killing the children on board. Their spirit fingers gently push your car along to make sure you don't meet their sad and untimely fate.

In search of ... belief

Like many kids of the 1970s and 1980s, I grew up watching shows like the cryptid/aliens/spook-filled "In Search Of," narrated by Leonard Nimoy. My library card was full many times over with every book on Bigfoot, extra-sensory perception, telekinesis, poltergeists, and the Bermuda Triangle.

Have you heard about the moving coffins of Barbados? That's top-quality spine tingles. As the story goes, a wealthy family living on the Caribbean island built a family vault in the cemetery. Every time a member died, the crypt was opened to accept a new coffin. And every time the crypt was opened, the coffins that were already there were tossed about helter-skelter.

Maybe it was flood waters. Except that there was no evidence of water incursion. Maybe pranksters did it. But the family sealed the stone door and sprinkled sand on the floor, and there was never a footprint betraying a (living) human presence.

For a proper classic haunting, you can't beat the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall. Nearly everyone with a passing familiarity with the spirit world of 20th-century popular culture has seen the photograph of this long dead woman, a translucent, begowned figure descending the grand staircase of the palatial home in Norfolk, England, built during the reign of James I in 1620.

According to two photographers who were documenting the inside of the estate in 1936, as they were setting up a shot, they looked up at the stairs in astonishment. A veiled specter was float-walking silently down the stair treads, and they had just enough time to open the shutter on their plate camera and capture the most famous ghost photograph of all time.

Was she the shade of Lady Dorothy Walpole? Lady Walpole was said to have been immured in a room in Raynham Hall for the rest of her life at the hands of her husband, Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, who was angered by her unfaithful dalliances.

Or was this just the first and best example of trick-ghost photography, a double-exposed photographic plate? In the early days of photography, the public was not wise to the trickery available to a skilled image-maker. Long before Photoshop and AI, the public believed the camera never lies.

I want to believe. There's something magnetic, romantic, and almost erotic about the possibility that a curtain separates us from the realm of the dead and that it thins at certain times, like now. As a child, I delighted in being scared so badly I didn't dare turn off the flashlight under the covers I used for my clandestine and very-much-not-allowed post-bedtime reading.

Joy interrupted

Yet the possibility of an ethereal realm where the dead who refuse to acknowledge their condition "live," a plane where real devil cavorts are not merely fun and games. If that plane exists, and if it's populated by any of the henchmen attributed to Satan, then the other side is very serious business indeed. I'm not so sure I want to believe, in that case, but I'm also not so sure that I don't.

When I was 8 years old, my family took a rare trip to a sit-down restaurant on Christmas Eve. We were poor, and a night out at Demicelli's Italian Restaurant was so special that Christmas would have been joyful even if we didn't get a single present. As we walked toward Placentia Boulevard in Fullerton, California, I looked at the night sky and saw the brightest star I'd ever seen.

"Mommy, look!" I said, tugging at my mother's sleeve. I pulled on her cigarette hand, which annoyed her. "It's the star of Jesus, Mommy. It's the star that guided the Wise Men to the baby Jesus!"

It was wondrous. It made me feel light-headed with a joy I'd never felt.

My mother made a derisive sniggering noise as she blew out smoke. "Oh, no it isn't, Josh," she mocked. "It's just a star. Probably Venus."

My face went red with embarrassment, and I stayed quiet the rest of the night. I felt stupid. Unsophisticated. Dumb. Childlike. Naive. And substandard. This was a problem that repeated itself over the years. My mother was the resentful "victim" type, and she was at war with God.

I convinced her to take us to the Presbyterian church where I'd been (to her reluctance, as she recalled it) baptized as an infant for Christmas Eve services in 1986. Mother spent the walk home railing about those "Goddamned hypocritical Christians! Where were they for this single mother when I needed a little help to put food on the table?"

I can't repeat the rest of what she said in a respectable publication.

Maternal monster

It wasn't until my 40s that I realized why I had been captivated to the point of obsession with certain dark characters in disturbing films like 1976's "Carrie." This was an adaptation of Stephen King's debut novel of the same name, a book that still ranks among his finest work. It's only nominally about a teen girl with telekinesis, the psychic ability to move objects with her mind. The story is really about a frightened girl who grew up with a maternal monster.

If you've seen the movie, you remember Piper Laurie's almost kabuki performance as Margaret White, a religious fanatic tormented by her own sense of failure and sin. Seeing herself as a fallen woman who fornicated with a man, she uses extreme interpretations of scripture to berate and subjugate the result of that union, her daughter, Carrie. Just as Margaret believes she can never be forgiven, she can never forgive her daughter for being born, for embodying her mother's sin in too-real flesh.

So she screams at Carrie, beats her, forces her to confess sins the girl has never committed (they were Margaret's sins), and worst of all, locks her in a "prayer closet." The scene that terrified me the most was the vignette in the dining room when Margaret forces Carrie to her knees as she intones about how God had loosed the raven on the world, and the raven was called sin.

"Say it, woman! Say it!" Margaret screams. "Eve was weak. Eve was weak!"

She drags Carrie to the prayer closet, a black cloak whirling about her like the wings of the raven, and babbles insanely while her daughter screams for mercy. Lighting a candle in the dark, Carrie looks up to a figure of St. Sebastian on the wall, a grotesque effigy with agonized eyes reflecting the pain of his arrow wounds.

Fascinated by fear

Margaret White obviously had a severe condition called Borderline Personality Disorder, which also afflicted my mother. While my mother was not a religious fanatic, she treated me the way Margaret White treats Carrie. Just as in the movie's dining room scene, my mother forced me to kneel while she stood above me bellowing. "Humble yourself before me!" she shrieked. "GodDAMN you, humble yourself!"

My mother did not want what she claimed she wanted: respect and filial piety. She wanted to be worshiped. My mother created herself God in her own image.

So I prayed to God to be delivered from my mother's prison, but I never got an answer, or one I recognized. I was more certain that the world was full of angry entities, though, and to say I felt haunted wouldn't go far enough.

That which terrorizes also fascinates. Over my life, I've tasted and re-tasted the fear through movies like "Carrie" and "Mommie Dearest." Fictional versions of my real-life horror were a poison candy; they hurt so good, like the compulsion to thrust the tongue repeatedly into a canker sore that won't heal.

I still don't know what I believe about God, the soul, heaven, or hell.

I knew what I saw

No Halloween story would be complete without a personal anecdote of an encounter with the unexplained. This is the first time I've told this story to anyone, let alone in print. Like I do myself, you may doubt me. I admit that I was halfway to drunk when it happened. But in the moment, I knew what I saw and heard, I knew I was only buzzed on three beers, not falling-down drunk. I wasn't hallucinating pink elephants or anything else.

It was 1992. I was 18 years old and sharing an apartment with my best friend, Lisa. It was movie night in the living room, and it was my turn to fetch fresh Molson Goldens from the refrigerator. I put the sweating bottles on a round cocktail tray with a rubber no-slip bottom I'd brought home from the restaurant I worked at.

I was a skilled waiter who could hold a tray with four entrees and several cocktails without spilling. And though I'd had a few beers, I was not drunk. In the hallway as I was about to enter the living room, one of the standing beer bottles on the tray violently flipped over to the horizontal with a thud. It wasn't the kind of soft thud that happens when something tips over. It was a THUD, as if someone had thrown the bottle into the tray.

Remember, it was a rubberized tray. It was actually difficult for a glass on such a tray to slide, let alone tip over. I had not tilted the tray; I was not weaving drunkenly as I walked. The other beer bottle didn't tip over. The two mugs on the same tray didn't move. More, the same thing happened a few minutes later in the living room. My (replaced) beer bottle on the side table, three feet from reach, loudly tipped over on a perfectly level table and made a loud rap.

I remember so clearly stopping still as the blood drained from my head. Did I really just see what I thought I saw? I did. And I felt it, too.

In that moment in the hall, I said this in my head: "What you just saw and heard really happened. You're not drunk, and you're not hallucinating. But no one will believe you, and over time, you will not believe you either. Your memory will soften, and you will convince yourself that you were drunk and that you somehow caused these bottles to tip over in apparent defiance of the laws of physics and friction."

That's exactly what happened. As I tell you this story, I doubt myself. At the same time, I remember the warning I spoke to myself in my head about doubt there, in the moment, and I know I wasn't crazy.

Happy Halloween.

Want yesterday’s quality today? Stop 'upgrading' your appliances

Despite having an uncountable number of consumer goods available at the click of a button at prices our grandparents would have found astonishing, our homes are full of junk that isn’t worth the wholesale cost.

New washing machines last a year or three at best, according to Americans who buy them. Worse, they don’t even wash clothes well, reined in as they are by government diktats about water and power consumption.

I spent $15 for a beautiful, indestructible lifetime blender. Yes, the pitcher is glass.

The same is true of almost every other appliance and machine in the contemporary American home. But it didn’t used to be this way. First, I’m going to tell you a story. Then I’m going to come back to the present and show you how to live like a king or queen on a budget with yesterday’s consumer durables.

Merit-ocracy

My mother was standing over the dishwasher in our kitchen in 1986. It was a model from the 1950s, one of the wheeled, portable ones you brought over and hooked to the sink tap with a hose. The top-loading machine’s lid had what you might call formica “inlay” in 50s colors with random sparkles embedded. It was meant to be used as a countertop so that the bulky machine wasn’t merely a space-taker in a small kitchen.

My mother was holding a broken clock radio. The digital display had “zeroed out,” showing only 00:00 no matter what time it was.

“Damn it,” she said, exhaling from her Merit Ultra Light 100. “I just bought this a few months ago. There was a time when ‘made in America’ meant something. We used to make the best-quality goods in the world. Whatever you bought you could depend on for a long time. What the hell happened?”

The dishwasher’s faithful service proved her point. The “outdated” 1950s dishwasher still cleaned dishes trouble-free. That was probably the first time I contemplated what it meant to call an appliance “outdated.” Within a few years, it was evident that “outdated” only meant “not in colors the people on TV think are modern.”

The new clock radio made in 1986 couldn’t even give us three months’ service before going kaput. But the 1956 wash-o-matic was whirring its way to clean dishes in May 1986 as well as it did for its first owner during the Eisenhower administration.

New phone, why dis?

How many of your devices or appliances offer such simple, consistent performance? Are you satisfied with your new low-water front-loader and its Byzantine maze of touch-screen “options,” none of which are “wash my clothes in 25 minutes”? How about the repair bill for the chipset when the “smart” computer inside it fails, leaving the perfectly good mechanics idle?

Do you like buying a new phone every few years? Think about that. Do you remember getting a “new phone” all the time 30 years ago? The very idea is absurd. Sure, our telephones in those days were simply and only telephones, not dating machines, compasses, and navigation systems. But are we sure that planned obsolescence in our every-device-in-one-wearable-computer is a lifestyle upgrade?

You can get a new microwave, blender, or vacuum cleaner at Walmart for astoundingly low prices adjusted for inflation. In fact, you can get each of these in multiple versions and colors. But what, specifically and actually, are you getting? Cheap plastic that looks good on a display shelf but that scuffs, cracks, and loses tension-holding shape after a few uses.

And do you need a new microwave? A new vacuum? If you said “yes” to that, are you sure? What is it that you “need” from a new appliance that you’re not getting from the old one? Assuming it’s not broken — and a lot of appliance purchases are made simply to “upgrade” — what’s wrong with your old vacuum?

Be honest. You know that you don’t “need” most of these things. You’re buying them because of free-floating anxiety about keeping up with the Joneses. You want a new microwave and a new vacuum and new stainless-steel-fronted appliances because everyone else’s kitchen looks like this. Despite their inflated claims, the “updated” versions of almost all of these simple mechanicals do nothing different than their ancestors from 50 years ago.

But now they’re ugly and short-lived.

RELATED: Ode to an Electrolux model L

Matt Himes

Sucks to be new

You don’t have to do any of this. In fact, you can live like royalty for almost no money, with all your mechanical and appliance needs met at the contemporary level of convenience and comfort you want.

You can have yesterday’s quality today by buying old, solidly built appliances for a fraction of their price when new. This is how I live. For at least two decades, the only brand-new things that have come into my home are computers and consumables. My furniture, my lighting, my appliances — all of it came from secondhand stores or online auctions.

I made a mistake recently in deviating from that path. When I sold my first house two years ago, I left my late 1970s all-mechanical-dial Kenmore washer and dryer behind. More fool me; as soon as I can use this brand-new modern junk-box General Electric calls a washing machine for shotgun target practice, the better.

Observe. This was my mother’s Electrolux vacuum from the early 1980s:

Josh Slocum

Power everything. Has never broken. If it does, a repair shop makes quick, cheap work of any repair I can’t do. Yes, parts and bags are still made. This machine cost the equivalent of $600 to $1,000 in today’s money when it was new.

This is my working blender. It’s a 1961 Waring “Blendor,” one of the most durable ever made:

Josh Slocum/smartstock/Getty Images

And do admit, it’s got art deco beauty even though it bears the scuff marks of age. Yes, it’s as solid and heavy as it looks. It has all it needs: two speeds and off. The colorful fabric cord is a replacement I put on, as the old one was frayed; all that took was a $5 cord and a Phillips-head screwdriver. $10 at the flea market, $5 for a cord. I spent $15 for a beautiful, indestructible lifetime blender. Yes, the pitcher is glass.

If you’re willing to expand your thinking and put away silly modern fears, you can also have beautiful, practical lighting that gives your home real warmth.

Josh Slocum/elleran/Getty Images

This kerosene lamp would have been found in your home in the late 1880s. It was as common as any electric gooseneck from Ikea today. This model, the New Juno, is now 140 years old and it works as well as the day it left the factory. I paid about $95 for it.

Antique kerosene lighting is my hobby, and I light and heat my home with three to five out of my collection of several dozen throughout the winter. This lamp alone is enough to heat my medium-size living room during a Vermont winter. It’s bright enough to read and work by, and in a pinch, you can cook over it during a power outage if you rig up a trivet. There are no solar panels or cussed digital panels to go wrong. Yes, replacement parts like glass chimneys and wicks are still made.

Mladen Antonov/Getty Images

Seek the antique

My guess is that readers find this pretty appealing even if it’s the first time they’ve considered stocking their homes this way. Once you get over the marketing-inculcated idea that you’re weird or missing out by not having the latest model of this or that, you realize that you can live like a king or queen for almost no money. You can have the same work-saving devices you’re used to. But these will work better for longer.

Aren’t they more charming to look at? When I share pictures of my working home goods on social media, people seem to love it. A common response: “Your house looks like my great-grandma’s!” They mean it as a compliment, and I mean my house to look and feel that way. I think we’re all getting tired of waking up to “updated” homes in Millennial Mortuary Gray and Bare Bones Joanna Gaines Shiplap bulls**t. The sterile field look wears better at the dentist’s office than it does in the den.

I haven’t given anything up. I have all the mod cons that do the same work as any new equipment, but I got them cheaper, they will last longer, and they please the eye. Try it — you may fall in love.

Rock bottom: Why must deliberately ugly sculpture invade all our public spaces?

We have a crisis of trashy public “art,” and sculpture is one of the main offenders. More on this below; I have to buffer your reading experience with a reminder of actual beauty before we dive to the bottom of the aesthetic dumpster.

When I was 8 years old, my grandmother gave me a small hardback book of Greek mythology. I can’t remember the title. It was written in the 1940s and probably used as a textbook or primer for college-level courses.

They say that some children have a face only a mother can love, but not even the father of that piece could look at it and see anything but a gargoyle at hell’s check-in kiosk.

It smelled exactly as you’re imagining right now: that scent of a 20th-century quality-bound book from the library stacks. Though only about seven inches by four inches, it had onionskin pages like a Bible, and there must have been 900 of them.

Pictures from History/Getty Images

Set in stone

The book always fell open to the same page because I always looked at that one. There was a black-and-white photograph of Bernini’s bust of Medusa. It fascinated me, and only later did I realize that the figure of Medusa drew me so powerfully, in part, because my mother was a gorgon.

But it wasn’t just that. The detail and life Bernini infused into stone took my breath away. How could a piece of marble be made so like a human face that we try to divine the emotion in the carved eyes?

Photo: Shhewitt, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Have you seen the statuary of veiled figures? They offer the most incredible illusion of the Virgin behind a gossamer veil of the thinnest translucent silk. To look at a statue like this is to feel a glimmer of the divine. And this example, the Veiled Virgin, was carved in the 19th century. This means that until fairly recently, there were still skilled sculptors who have earned the title “artist.”

So what the hell is this?

Adam Moss via Flickr/Creative Commons

Brucille

I can tell you what it is not: Lucille Ball. It appears to be a bronze casting of Brucille Lall, Lucy’s evil trans-identifying cousin. Who could believe that the figure is offering Vitameatavegamin, when it’s obviously liquid arsenic? "Just like candy” indeed.

The sculptor behind the piece (the late David Poulin), which was installed in the comedy legend’s hometown in 2015 to honor her, gave up his craft after the negative public reaction. He complained to local media that he was tired of being razzed for a statue that was “not one of my best works.”

Well? They say that some children have a face only a mother can love, but not even the father of that piece could look at it and see anything but a gargoyle at hell’s check-in kiosk.

You have to ask: What possessed the city government in Celoron, New York, to pretend that this is normal? Is it the sunk-cost fallacy? Is it embarrassment at wasting money on a figure that has sent local children to long-term therapy?

Hug it out

Whatever motivates this behavior was probably also at work in Boston when it commissioned and placed this atrocity downtown. Called the Embrace, this bronze oversized ... whatever ... allegedly depicts a hug between Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King.

Boston Globe/Getty Images

Take it in. If it helps, you can let Boston Mayor Michelle Wu explain to you how this piece “differs from the singular, heroic form of many memorials to Dr. King and others, instead emphasizing the power of collective action, the role of women as leaders, and the forging of new bonds of solidarity out of mutual empathy and vulnerability."

Or, like one local Reddit commenter, you can just trust your own eyes: "Could have been something amazing but instead we get a somewhat pornographic bronze turd."

This turd, the work of a successful black artist named Hank Willis Thomas, beat out 125 other designs. Thomas says he didn't want to "oversimplify" MLK's legacy by proposing something that actually looked like him.

Sure. Or maybe he figured his best chance to win was to submit something so bizarre and off-putting that the judges would have no choice but to mistake it for brilliance. And why not? Liberal white people (like the billionaire entrepreneur who spearheaded the project) love to demonstrate their sophistication by praising provocatively ugly and incompetent art — especially if it allows them to take credit for supporting "diversity."

Less impressed by the Embrace was a cousin of Coretta Scott King, who simply called it “an atrocity.”

Monumental entitlement

Dismembering your subjects so that only a grotesque pair of floating limbs remains is one way to make a name for yourself as a public artist. Another way is to dispense with the tired notion that only people who have accomplished something should get a statue.

That's the approach of black British sculptor Thomas J. Price, who specializes in oversized monuments to mean-looking, fat black women who appear to be waiting to speak to the manager.

Here's Grounded in the Stars, the 12-foot bronze sculpture Price installed in Times Square last spring.

Timothy A. Clary/Getty Images

You see, what Price is doing here is "challeng[ing] historical notions of representation in NYC's most iconic public space." Oh. Someone better tell the many black women who find the statue "humiliating" and "insulting."

Another recent piece by Price is a 13-foot statue of a surly-looking young black woman holding her cell phone out in classic I'm-going-to-treat-this-crowded-bus-like-my-living-room-and-have-this-annoyingly-loud-conversation-on-speaker posture. (Credit where it’s due — that does indeed capture the entitlement of many women today.)

Shutterstock

But is putting it in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria alongside classical and Renaissance sculpture really "a significant conversation with the canons and aesthetic models that have defined the history of Western art for centuries"? Or is it just another big, resentful middle finger to "whiteness" and its oppressive standards of beauty?

Simply the worst

But wait — there’s more! The latest insult to black womanhood is a grotesque tribute to the legendary Tina Turner, who died in 2023. It must be seen to be believed.

Shutterstock

You know this is the work of a black artist because any white person creating such a monstrosity would immediately be charged with a hate crime. Fred Ajanogha (“also known as ‘Ajano’”) is an Atlanta-based "master sculptor" who works in the storied "Benin Bronze" tradition of his native Nigeria.

Making a sculpture with this ancient wax-casting technique does indeed require a certain mastery. What it doesn't require, apparently, is any sort of reference photo of Ms. Turner.

Do admit — it looks like he gave the legendary singer Down syndrome, as well as hair lifted directly from the McDonaldland Fry Guys.

This Trisomy Tina now graces Turner's small Tennessee hometown. Fan's of Turner's song "Nutbush City Limits" know it as a pleasant community full of proud locals intent on keeping it that way. They make sure it's clean. They don't allow motorcycles or liquor.

Most of all, they don't tolerate any out-of-towners disrupting things with their dumb, big-city ideas. "You have to watch what you're puttin' down." Unfortunately, it looks like times have changed, even in old Nutbush.

Are you a 35-year-old with a nose ring? Forget ‘adulting’ — you need to grow up

This week’s column is meant for anyone younger than 40, which ropes in most Millennials and all of Gen Z and more. But they won’t listen to Olds like me at 51, so maybe you good readers can find a way to slip this into their Ovaltine if they’re your kids or grandkids.

I suppose if I were smart and wanted to market this well to that crowd, I’d call what follows a “guide to adulting.” But I won’t, because using the non-word “adulting” is the kind of kiddie nonsense that young people should have stopped doing before they started doing it.

You’d think this set was raised in a joint custody arrangement between 2 Live Crew and a band of cockney orphans in Dickensian London.

The new 17?

We’re in an era of unprecedented infantilization. Chronological adults are grown-ups in years only; they have the minds of children. No, it’s not “just like it’s always been.” I’m not saying “the same things old people have always said.” There has never been a time in history before the Millennial generation when helpless, unskilled, and babyish behavior was tolerated in adults, let alone culturally praised as it is today.

The average 35-year-old in 2025 has the tastes, habits, and deportment of a 17-year-old from my youth. They bond over cartoon comic book superheroes; they giggle in the corporate office tower over Stanley-brand water cups and clicky acrylic nails like girls used to do in ninth grade in the bathroom.

I’ve had enough.

Let’s get to it.

OK, groomer

Fifteen years ago, I hired 24-year-old “Olga” for a secretarial job at my company. She was great and worked for us for years. But I almost fired her on the first day. She walked into the office wearing a belly-baring crop top and jeans slung so low she might have been modeling for a depilatory cream ad.

“This is not appropriate office wear; this is an outfit for the clubs,” I said as she looked at me shocked. Her mother had never told her that it wasn’t cute to wear provocative clothing to a professional job, because mom was too busy trying to look her daughter’s age.

Prescription for young ladies:

No exposed belly.

No excess cleavage — no more than half an inch should be shown, if any.

Wipe 75% of that makeup off, and absolutely no false eyelashes in broad daylight. That’s an evening look for women of questionable reputation.

Pry off those acrylic claws and keep your nails no longer than what’s standard for a French manicure. In fact, just do that — the French manicure.

Take that nose ring out.

Prescription for young gentlemen:

No dyeing your hair — not for fun, not to cover gray. Dyed hair on a man gives the impression that he’s unstable or untrustworthy. Do not sass me about this.

Shave your face, or, if you wear a beard, trim it neatly. You may not do handlebar mustaches or biblical patriarch 4-foot long trailing vines. Honestly.

Wash your hair. Repeat: Wash your hair.

Then comb it.

No long hair. No, a ponytail will not do. A gentleman’s hair should be short and neat. You may rock a fade, a modified slick ’50s pompadour (my favorite), and similar, but that’s all.

Buy jeans that fit sufficiently to remain above your butt crack, and tuck your shirt in.

No jewelry except a wedding ring or a class ring. No, you may not wear “just one diamond stud in my ear.” Do you want to look like a gentleman or a Brooklyn pimp from 1972?

That’s fashion and grooming sorted. Let’s move on to speech.

Talk stupe

If you’ve been alive for 50 years, you’ll notice how different America sounds today. You’ll notice how immature and declassé even newscasters sound now. As a young man, my friends mocked me for my sharp, nasal upstate New York/upper Midwest accent. Sample of me speaking at 17: “Oh my Gad! I’ll have a side seel-id with reeyinch dressing!”

I deliberately cultivated a (then-normal) “newscaster from nowhere” flat American accent, the kind that all professionals of every race and background strove for. It served me well in two ways.

First, my speech no longer made me sound like what I was (a welfare kid from a semi-rural trailer park), removing class-based preconceptions from the minds of people I needed to impress. You can object to that all you want, but it won’t change reality. If you talk like you’re down-market, you will be perceived as down-market.

Consider the widespread fashion among American young people to mimic low-class (and particularly black low-class) pronunciation and mispronunciation. It sounds “street.” It sounds vulgar. It sounds uneducated. Many of them think this is positive. It is not.

Second, since my aim was to communicate clearly and respectfully with my fellow adults, I no longer peppered my speech with up-to-the-minute slang and obscure in-jokes. Today, however, nearly everyone young (and too many older people) seem more focused on broadcasting how “cool” they are to their peers than in expressing their thoughts with elegance and precision.

Remove these from your vocabulary:

“Adulting,”

“Not a good look,”

“Comfy,”

“My journey,”

“Lived experience,”

“Do better,” and

“Super” as a replacement for “very.” In fact, drop “very” as well.

Glottal stop it

Amend incorrect and grating mispronunciations. The worst feature of modern accents are the glottal stops that everyone under 40 is suddenly inserting into words. You’d think this set was raised in a joint custody arrangement between 2 Live Crew and a band of cockney orphans in Dickensian London. If you don’t know what I mean, click here to listen to examples of glottal stops.

In all the following, people are dropping the ‘T’ sound and putting in a glottal stop. It’s nails on a chalkboard. The only kids who did this when I was in school came from ignorant households and were still saying “puh-sketti” at 12 years old.

Not “buh’in,” but “button.”

Not “impor’enh”, but “important.” (And never “impore-dent.”)

Not “kih’en,” but “kitten.”

Not “moun’uhn,” but “mountain.”

Extra credit: Stop dropping your G’s. You are “swimming,” not “swimmun.” This doesn’t sound “authentic;” it sounds stupid.

Bettman/Getty Images

Missed manners

A trip to any store will convince American adults of a certain age that remedial etiquette lessons are necessary. A great many parents have not instructed their children in the most elementary forms of manners and interpersonal communication.

Prescription:

Look people in the eye when they speak to you. Stop looking at your phone or at the floor.

But do not perform the Gen Z stare. If you’re not mentally retarded, you may not goggle at people with a blank expression as if you didn’t know how to respond to the greeting “hello.”

When someone says, “Hi, how are you,” you must respond. It’s easy. Just mimic the form back to them: “Hi there, I’m great. How are you?”

When placing a phone call, you identify yourself first. It’s intensely rude to call someone and ask for “Josh” without first saying, “Hi, this is David Smith from Smith Capital. I’m looking for Josh, please?”

The proper response to “thank you” is “you’re welcome.” It is not “no problem,” and it is never “no worries.”

Whine moms

Extra credit: Work on your pitch and intonation.

It started with the valley girls of the ’80s, but now everyone, man and woman alike, is speaking in what I call “gear-shift tonality.” Recall how a car engine winds up higher and higher as you shift a manual from first gear to second to third, etc. The pitch gets higher and higher until you shift, then it drops back down and starts again.

That’s for manual transmissions, not for human speech. Gear-shift tonality makes even declarative sentences sound like questions. It’s also known as “upspeak.”

Whatever you want to call it, stop doing it. Anyone not in your age set finds it annoying and wearying. It makes you sound child-like, tentative, unsure, or manipulative. Remember, Margaret Thatcher took vocal lessons to lower her speaking register in order to be taken seriously in world politics.

That concludes today’s instruction. Keisha and Valerie, you will stay behind and clean the chalkboards to work off the demerit for chewing gum (open-mouthed too). All remaining pupils may close their desks and take their primers home. Class is dismissed.

Charlie Kirk’s legacy: ‘Put on the armor of light’

The early ’90s were an interesting time to be a troubled teenager. After I spent years in a glorified orphanage, the New York state courts emancipated me at 16. I’d never have to go back to the house where my abusive mother ruled like a mental asylum nurse sicker in the head than her patients.

But it also meant living rough. The Salvation Army paid for me to live in a welfare apartment with a drug dealer roommate while I got on my feet after dropping out of high school. At night I’d wake up to go to the bathroom; when I turned on the light, three or four roaches on the wall would skitter away. It was worse in the kitchen, where at least half a dozen would greet me when I flipped the switch.

‘The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.’

That’s what’s been happening across America since Charlie Kirk’s murder on September 10, 2025. The lights went on, and thousands, maybe millions, of human cockroaches were caught in the fluorescent glare.

Cluster B nation

This is the first time many of you have seen the extent of the infestation. Before this, you comforted yourself with statements like, “It’s only a few troubled kids,” and, “It’s just a small minority of crazy people on social media.”

Now you know differently. Just like cockroaches, there are at least two or three functionally psychopathic people for every one you notice. The explosion of gleeful grave-dancing about Charlie Kirk’s murder has shocked the nation.

It didn’t shock me. For almost five years, I’ve been putting out a weekly show, “Disaffected,” that has a thesis: We are living in a Cluster B world.

What is “Cluster B?” This is the term for a set of personality disorders (moral and character disorders, a fancy name for “bad people”) that feature unbridled narcissism and exploitation of other people. My mother had narcissistic and borderline personality disorders; in practice, that meant a woman who screamed, lied, and blamed her own children for the abuse that she enacted on them.

When I figured out what my mother’s moral depravity really was, I saw that the political and cultural left I was then a part of had the same dark character.

Psychopathic society

The left — not just the fringe, but the beating mainstream heart — has a Cluster B personality disorder. It is narcissistic, emotionally unstable, pathologically dishonest, abusive, and conscience-free. The leftist mind delights in the murder of godly men like Charlie Kirk. The leftist heart turns black with erotic frisson contemplating how a lunatic exploded Mr. Kirk’s carotid artery with a rifle while thousands stood watching.

The Cluster B disorder grouping includes psychopathy, the state of having no conscience or care for the well-being of others, only a selfish desire to get what you want no matter the cost. Psychopathy frequently includes sadism, and sadism is everywhere right now.

Again, it’s not just the fringe.

Liberal podcaster “Destiny” (real name Steven Bonnell) indicated on Piers Morgan that Charlie Kirk was to blame for his own murder because he helped elect President Trump.

This is our psychopathic society.

MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd said Kirk should have expected to be murdered because Kirk had “awful thoughts” that he spoke out loud, so he had to expect “awful actions.”

This is our psychopathic society.

Countless young women (and some young men, but oh my, the number of young women) have taken to TikTok and other platforms to dance with glee over Kirk’s murder. You cannot fail to see the erotic component of their derangement. These are nothing but modern-day Manson girls.

This is our psychopathic society.

Have you noticed how many nurses, doctors, and other professionals, like pilots, feel comfortable cheering? If you haven’t, you’d better start noticing right quick or you’re not going to make it. That’s not a joke or a turn of phrase: You have liberals in your family and social circle who would see you dead, you personally.

Beyond the political

Nor is today like the political disagreements of the past. There has never been a time in American history when it was socially acceptable to display naked psychopathic glee over assassination. Bill and Carol may have voted for different candidates in the 1960 presidential election, but they didn’t go further than squabbling about it over dinner before turning in for bed. But today? If you were Bill, would you get into a bed with Carol without worrying that she might knife you in the night?

We are in a national emergency.

What you’re seeing is not political disagreement. It is not “clashing worldviews.” It is a battle between good and evil.

I don’t say that lightly. After years of functional atheism, I am only beginning to figure out what I think about God. But like most Americans, I grew up in a society that was steeped in Christian morality, no matter how much we try to deny it now. And I can see this for what it is: spiritual warfare.

‘The day is at hand’

This moment calls to mind a verse from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans: “The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”

Charlie Kirk understood the urgency of this task. Although he was raised an evangelical Christian, when he started his political project, he was determined to keep religion out of it. But as time went on, he began to realize how inextricably the two were linked. Embracing Christianity is what made him such an effective speaker — and, for some, a dangerous one.

Like all of us, Kirk was human. You can go through the vast amount of footage of him talking off the cuff and find moments where his phrasing is perhaps less charitable than it should be, but to watch him engaged in his one-on-one debates — as few of his detractors seem to have done — is to see a man clothed in “the armor of light.”

This armor is what gave Kirk the confidence to confront the most hostile crowds. He knew he was right. Not because of his preternatural calm, or his quickness on his feet, or his impressive rhetorical skill. But because he possessed the truth. What drove him to work so hard, to make so many appearances, was his conviction that this truth was worth sharing.

Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images

Truth heals

You can see it again and again in the clips: A student — often with the usual leftist signifiers of purple hair, tattoos, and piercings — approaches the mic, clearly nervous beneath the bravado. In the current liberal fashion, they often lead with their “identity,” as if daring Kirk to ridicule them. But Kirk doesn’t play into it. Instead of attacking their self-conception, he gently asks them to examine it.

One telling example has been making the rounds after Kirk’s death. In it, a shy young woman identifies herself as a “transgender male” and earnestly asks Kirk’s opinion on whether she should take hormones.

Kirk begins by thanking her for her honesty and willingness to speak, and then responds:

So, I’m going to have an opinion that very few people will ever tell you, which is, I want you to be very cautious putting drugs into your system in the pursuit of changing your body. I instead encourage you to work on what’s going on in your brain first.

I think what you need first and foremost is just a diagnosis, just someone that is going to listen to what you’ve gone through, listen to what else is going on.

My prayer for you, and again, very few people will say this, I actually want to see you be comfortable in how you were born. I know that you might not feel that way, but I think that is something that you can achieve. I think that with the right team and the right people, you don’t have to wage war on your body; you can learn to love your body.

At his best, Kirk wasn’t so much “debating” people as he was inviting them to examine their own arguments and assumptions in the hopes that they, too, could be guided to the truth. Whatever “win” Kirk sought would benefit his interlocutors more than him.

Donning the armor

Kirk’s talent, good will, and faith could not, in the end, protect him from an assassin’s bullet. People have called Kirk a “martyr,” but this 31-year-old man with a young family and big plans for the future didn’t willingly embrace death.

Of course, he knew it was a risk to address the audiences he did, and to do so took great courage. But he was not reckless; he was well aware of the threats against him and traveled with security. What he couldn’t imagine — what none of us could imagine — is that we now live in an America where an ordinary citizen can be killed in cold blood merely for expressing an opinion, an America where some will even cheer on the murder.

We understand now. And part of honoring Kirk’s legacy is to be ever vigilant to the threat his death revealed and to protect ourselves and our families from the evil forces marshaled against us.

We must also order our lives in accordance with the truth, as Kirk did. We must live in such a way that we encourage those already with us and inspire those who have yet to come around.

Yes, there is real evil in the world, and there’s nothing we can do with genuine psychopaths except to avoid or contain them. But for every stone-cold killer there are countless men and women who have slowly been poisoned by an insidious, evil ideology without even realizing it.

Ordinary people like you and me can guide them to the antidote, and we can hope they’ll be willing to take it. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and persevere in the battle Kirk fought with such honor and conviction.

Put on the armor of light.

The decline of customer service — and why it matters

The United States has been in a civic crisis for decades. It’s not “just about manners,” but the lack of mannerly behavior is a widespread indicator of this problem. And manners are no small thing.

All societies have rules for how we engage with other people in a variety of settings, both formal and informal. Japan has “manners,” just as we do, even though the specific actions the Japanese take to signal good will to other people are different from the specific actions Americans take.

About seven seconds later, he finally offered verbal confirmation that he was aware of my existence: a monotone ‘’Sup.’

In the U.S., especially in Democrat/blue areas, manners are nearly extinct. The death of courtesy is a marker of a much deeper problem:

We no longer prize quality workmanship, functional products, or value for money. We only care about making the cheapest item or importing it from China.

Young people (roughly, those under 40) do not believe they owe work in exchange for their salary. They do not believe they owe even eye contact or vocal responses to customers.

Companies no longer care about customer service or fulfilling orders correctly because they do not have to care.

Americans have no “union,” if you will, of “ordinary consumers” who can exert pressure on big telecom companies or big-box chains. These companies have power because they make things we need, and they know we need them. Because consumers are not organized in a way that can exert leverage, companies do not experience much market punishment or market correction except in outlier cases like the recent kerfuffle over Cracker Barrel’s rebranding.

Best intentions

The story I’m about to tell you is typical and common where I live. This is the normal, everyday, standard experience. Those of you living in heavily blue/Democrat/woke/progressive areas have similar experiences; that’s where the social rot has set in most deeply.

I make a podcast/”TV show” every week. Both high-powered computers that process and transmit video in my home studio were zapped by a power surge. So I had to run to the big-box store to spend north of $2,000 for another computer so my business partner and I can make our show. My business partner ordered and paid online. I went to pick the equipment up. The order included a $2,100 computer and $200 in additional small merchandise like webcams and data cables.

The customer service desk at my local Best Buy had one employee serving another customer. When that customer left, the employee just stood there staring down at his computer. I waited quietly with my hands clasped in front of me. Nothing. He didn’t look up; he didn’t signal that he knew I was there. (I assure you, he did know.)

Gen Z stare

Why did I wait a full minute? Because experience has taught me that most requests for service from an employee are met with bemused detachment or hostility. I thought, “Better to just tolerate this and wait for him to acknowledge me than risk that angry glare because I spoke before I was spoken to.” No customer should have to make these calculations, but today we do.

Still nothing. So I walked a few steps closer. “Noah” (not his real name) looked up at me and gave me the “Gen Z stare,” vacantly gazing at me from behind black chunky glasses that covered half his face. No expression. No change in posture. No greeting. It started to feel uncomfortable.

Noah presented himself in the way that an astonishing number of young staff do today. Noah is the kind of person whose odd and slovenly appearance would have kept him from being employed at all when I was his age (about 20).

He was morbidly obese, as so many people are, but it wasn’t just that — I’m not making fun of fat people. It’s that he wore a skintight shirt that accentuated every curve, including — I’m sorry to write this — his breasts. I’m carrying 30 extra pounds myself, and I don’t walk around in Lycra stretch fabric inviting people to partake visually of every detail of my anatomy. But this is the “new normal” in public for employees today.

First contact

About seven seconds later, he finally offered verbal confirmation that he was aware of my existence: a monotone “’Sup."

I saw my opening and took it. “Hi, there. I’m here to pick up an order that my friend placed online and paid for. I’m having a little trouble pulling up the receipt on my phone, so would you like me —”

“Bar code,” he interrupted me.

That's what he said. Just the two-word phrase “bar code.” Was it a question? A command? A password challenge for access to a secret, actually helpful, customer service counter?

“I’m not sure what you mean by bar code," I responded. "But if that’s something included in the email, again, I’m having trouble pulling it up. Can I give you some other kind of information that would help?”

Smooth customer

I am polite when I do business in public. I maintain a warm tone of voice. A dozen years as a waiter and bartender, a few years in retail, plus two decades counseling grieving people by phone trained me in how to smoothly communicate with anyone, including people who are upset. I know how rude customers can be, so I take care to be friendly and approachable when I’m a customer.

All that to say, I was actively nice to this young man. I’m polite to every staff member of a business I patronize. Far too often, I get nothing back at all, or I get hostility, as I did last night.

“What’s your name?” Noah demanded. I told him.

Staring down at his iPad, he walked into the back room. He emerged carrying two small boxes containing the cables and the webcam. He did not have the computer. He placed the boxes on the counter and continued to look at his iPad without speaking to me or looking at me.

I waited about five seconds before saying, “I think there is more merchandise to this order.”

Notice that I did not say, “You forgot my computer.” I used a gentle, roundabout way to say it because I’ve learned that if you signal that a staffer has made a mistake, they will sometimes melt down.

Noah did not glance up at me. He kept staring at the iPad as he went back to the stock room. He brought out the computer and put all three boxes in my hand. Then, after a few words (I think I heard him say good night in a perfunctory way) he went back behind his counter.

He did not give me a receipt; he did not stamp the boxes to indicate that I had paid for the merchandise. I wondered about this, as the store has a lectern at the exit to stop shoplifters by checking receipts.

Trust fail

Here’s what I didn’t tell you until now: Noah never asked me for a driver’s license or a credit card to prove that I was the Josh Slocum who paid for these items. He made no effort to determine that I was the paying customer, not a thief. What if he had handed it to someone else, and when I arrived, the store told me, “Yes, you did pick these up already because our system says you did”?

At this point, I needed to leave the store to keep my temper. So I just walked out with my merchandise (paid for, but how did they know?). None of the three employees at the shoplifting/receipt-checking lectern at the front glanced at me as I walked by. Two were talking to each other, and the third was running his thumbs over his phone.

This is why we have so much shoplifting. There are no consequences to naked, caught-on-camera thievery.

Gilbert Uzan/Getty Images

Punching out

There are certainly no consequences to employees who are incompetent, rude, and who allow expensive merchandise to simply disappear. They do not get fired. Why would they? Do you think a manager in this Best Buy can’t see how these employees fail to do their jobs? She sees what I see. It’s either that she doesn’t care, or those above her don’t care, so she’s just stopped putting in any effort.

What are we going to do? Is there anything we can do? We don’t have market power as consumers, so that’s out. Government regulation usually brings more problems than it solves, so that doesn’t seem like a good way to go. But this cannot go on.

Well, it can, actually. We can become like former Soviet states; hell, we’re already three-quarters of the way there. When I tell stories like these to older people who immigrated from communist countries, they get a pained look and say, “This is what it was like for us, and it’s happening here. But no one will listen to us.”

If you see a way out that I do not see, please share it in the comments.

Misogyny? Please: Our real problem is female entitlement

With sensitive subjects, I believe it’s best to be direct, so let’s rip the Band-Aid off: This article is about female narcissism.

It’s not about men’s faults; those are catalogued and exaggerated around the clock, every day of the year. This piece is about a truth that many people know, and have noticed, but that almost no one will dare say.

I spent decades being the 'gay best friend' in platonic female friendships. Men like me know things about women that many other men don’t.

Since the rise of feminism in the 1960s, American women have entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers, overtaken men in college matriculation (58%), and become the vast numerical majority in every industry related to childcare and instruction.

But a strange and contradictory thing has happened along the way. The more "equality" American women have gained, the more solipsistic, entitled, self-focused, and immature they've become.

Exiles in gyno-ville

We are told that women have it worse than ever and that the average man is a misogynist. Not a “sexist.” Not even a “male chauvinist pig,” as the ladies in "9 to 5"would have called such men in the days of “women’s lib.” Nay. Men are now misogynists, a word that means roiling hatred for women because they’re women.

It is a term that, until the past 15 years, was only used to describe the most depraved men, psycho-sexual serial killers such as Richard Ramirez (the “night stalker”) or Ed Gein (“the butcher of Plainfield”).

Now, it’s glibly tossed off by self-confident but dissatisfied women toward men who don’t symbolically kneel and kiss their Manolo Blahnik shoes.

Men don’t want a second date with a woman? Misogynist. Male colleagues complain about women in HR censoring their conversations and managing their tone and terminology? Misogyny. Women with part-time jobs, or women who take time off to nurture their newborns, complain hilariously about the “gender pay gap.” They claim falsely that women are paid less for the exact same work with the exact same years of service. It’s not true. Not even a little bit.

But if you point that fact out? You guessed it: misogynist.

Hag-iography

I’m in an interesting position when it comes to commenting on the never-ending war of the sexes, a war that is being waged mainly by women against men. We men didn’t ask for these hostilities.

As a 50-year-old gay man, I spent the majority of my adult life as a leftist liberal before I matured and found grown-up conservatism. This meant I spent decades being the “gay best friend” in platonic female friendships. Men like me know things about women that many other men don’t.

When I was enacting an everyday version of Jack and Karen on "Will and Grace," I was the toast of female society. But when I began to notice the entitlement, the diva-like behavior, and the “give me stuff for free and expect nothing in return” attitude of many modern women, I was thrown to the curb.

Former friends called me — wait for it — a misogynist. And not just a misogynist but an especially virulent one. “Gay men are the most misogynistic men on the planet,” such women say in between sips of mimosas and texts to their gay BFF about what color they should ask for at the nail salon.

Some even speculated that my “anger at women” foretold a future career as a spree killer (I wish I were joking).

The fog of feminism

We’re not experiencing an epidemic of male misogyny. We’ve been living in a gynocracy for decades, and we’re saddled with a bumper crop of women who have never been told “no.” They’ve never been denied a participation trophy or a promotion to HR manager. They’ve never been told they’re not a “10.” They’re not even expected to say “thank you” when a gentleman holds a door for a lady.

Some readers think I exaggerate. They’re constructing an image of me as a “bitter” or “frustrated” man. This is where the modern female mind (and the minds of too many feckless, gelded men) go when women are held to the same standards of deportment and adult behavior that men are expected to maintain.

It’s a fish-who-doesn’t-know-what-water-is problem. Since the flower power era, feminism has been the oxygen that all Americans, liberal and conservative, breathe. We think outsized female self-regard and entitlement is normal, but it’s not. It’s recent, and it’s at the root of huge societal problems, “wokeness” being the biggest.

Dumping on men

Let me give you an example from the real world. This will indeed seem like “no big deal” to many readers, and it’s true that it’s a mild incident. But consider whether you would react that way if the sexes were reversed.

I went to the city dump to unload a car full of branches and lawn trimmings. As I hauled the leaves over to the pile, two late-middle-aged women in twin-set sweaters and pearls were doing the same about five feet from me.

One said to the other, knowing full well that I was standing there, “Where are the men? Why should we have to do this? Do they do anything?” They both gave a soft, suburban chuckle. Her friend responded, “At least when women are around we know work will get done.”

Were I to respond to those women the way they would have responded to me in the reverse, I would have shrieked, “Misandrist!” and run home to tell my wife how unsafe I felt at the town grass tip. The point is, it would not even occur to most men to be so gauche about women in mixed company. Not only are most men not inclined to give women social offense that way, they know damned well they’d be punished if they did.

NurPhoto/Getty Images

Expired tarts

This brings me to, of all people, Taylor Swift. The biggest pop star in the world became a household name by singing forgettable songs about inadequate men and the trauma of a teenager’s dating life. Thing is, she’s still singing about this stuff at age 35. And her concerts are packed not just with teen girls, but with suburban moms well into their 50s, crying the way adolescent girls did in the early '60s when the Beatles first washed ashore.

This is not normal. This infantilized girlboss pose by mothers and career women has no historical precedent. For all the talk of shiftless, video-gaming boys and young men, we spill precious little ink on the fact that adult women think nothing of dressing like 16-year-old tarts and waxing about how they’re in their “soft girl era.”

It’s undignified and so is the direction Miss Swift is taking with the publicity for her new album. Take a look at the photo she released on social media.

It’s too generous to call that garment a teddy; it’s closer to a gownless evening strap (pacé Shirley Bassey). Her rump is exposed, and she’s bending over to stick out her backside while leaning against what looks like a truck stop bathroom wall. Even the lighting looks like grimy gay male pornography from the 1970s.

Aging like milk

What does this have to do with the state of ordinary, everyday, non-Taylor Swift women? A lot.

Miss Swift is doing on stage what millions of workaday women are doing on the street. She is refusing to age gracefully, and she’s getting raunchier as time goes on. This has been a pattern with women for the past 15 years, as mothers don’t want to be seen as mothers but as the older, more ... experienced version of their nubile daughters.

This is the friction point where we can see that modern female narcissism is an expression of extreme insecurity in women. These ladies have a terribly sad belief that the only thing of value they have to offer is sex. And no, it’s not the "male gaze” or “male producers” who are at fault. Taylor Swift — and Linda Smith down the street — are doing this to themselves.

Women call it the “invisibility” problem. On leaving youth and entering middle age, they say, men stop looking at them as desirable. This is a double-edged sword for most women. Many express relief at not having their breasts and backside ogled (men are cads; women aren’t making that up), but at the same time, they complain bitterly about no longer being perceived as sex objects.

Lust for life?

They blame this on “patriarchal” male tastes, but that’s just feminist cope. If fault there be, it is the fault of nature, not social constructs. Women lose their sexual appeal after youth in a way that men, largely, do not. This is a fact. No, it's not a fun or favorite fact. But it is a fact.

Women seem to believe they are entitled to be lusted after and desired at 45, 55, 65, the way a fresh-faced college girl turns men’s heads. It’s ridiculous. Look at Madonna (67), Cher (79), or Jennifer Lopez (56). That’s the road Taylor Swift is on, and mind-bogglingly, it’s the road way too many normal women seem determined to travel.

Kavin Mazur/Taylor Hill/Xavi Torrent/Getty Images

The problem these women are facing, I believe, stems from the fact that so many have stayed adolescent girls their whole lives instead of learning from the example of their grandmothers. There is an arc to a woman's life. Some have called it Maiden, Mother, Crone. If you don't like that, label it some way you find pleasing.

Grande dames wanted

There is a role for middle-aged and old women, at least there always used to be. It was upheld in almost all societies before the mid-20th century. Even the actresses of old Hollywood, beauty queens in youth like Joan Crawford, assumed this role as they aged. Our grandmothers assumed this role.

It is the role of the grande dame. It is the carriage of a mature, put-together, self-confident, and wise woman. A true matriarch. Hair goes up, and hems go down.

Youthful beauty and sex appeal are natural to the young part of a woman’s life; this tracks with evolutionarily programmed facts of reproduction. When one is past one’s reproductive prime, life offers new roles to men and women.

But not in the 2020s. But it doesn’t have to be this way for women. Dignity is available to those who will step into it.

The 'rebranding' brigade's war on beauty

American business has lost the last shred of the plot.

Cracker Barrel’s bone-headed “rebranding” — more on this below — is only the ne plus ultra of a long, stupid march through formerly beloved brands toward a joyless, millennial-gray final destination.

These are choices we’re making. Bad choices. Anti-beauty choices. Anti-human choices.

Look around you. What do you see? Alleged restaurants that look like industrial warehouses. Businesses that we used to call bakeries — everything is just a “store” now in modern corporate-speak — now decorate their interiors according to surgical sterile-field protocols.

Everything is hard, not soft. Everything is gray, not green. Everything is fluorescent, not incandescent. Everything is aluminum, not velvet.

Hamburglaring our history

You know what I mean because you see it everywhere. The built world has been drained of color, curve, ornamentation, and whimsy. The desiccated architectural corpses of abandoned Pizza Huts with their distinctive step-peaked roofs litter the suburbs. I found these sad to look at until I realized that Pizza Hut is in a better place now, where there’s no more pain.

It’s McDonald’s we need to worry about. Cast your mind back to your childhood when you first met Ronald, Grimace, and Mayor McCheese. Most McDonald's restaurants had a playground for kids with colorful characters. The buildings themselves promised fun and piqued your imagination. Like Pizza Hut, McDonald's roofs had angles and character. They were painted bright red with French-fry-yellow accents.

Francois Lochon/Getty Images

Observe a McDonald's today. The buildings are the best representation of the Brutalist revival taking over modern architecture.

Bloomberg/Getty Images

At best, they’re abstract, cubist boxes that offer the eye no rest. Hard edge overlaps hard edge. All ornamentation is stripped. Color is canceled. You get gray and brushed aluminum, and you better damned well like it.

The worst part is how the company has kept one bit of color — the famed golden arches. Stuck on these industrial boxes as an afterthought, you’d be forgiven for thinking McDonald's is making a joke at our expense: “Look what we took away from you. Lol. Lmao.”

These buildings aren’t restaurants; they’re wholesale crematories at the back of an industrial park.

Auto pilot

Automobiles are the same.

No, dear reader. Let me stop you before you start typing that comment. All cars don’t look exactly the same “because aerodynamics, and this is the optimal shape, and they have to do it to meet emissions standards.” That’s the “well, it’s not really as bad as you say” excuse.

It’s just not true (and it is as bad as I say). If it were true, then every single car would be exactly the same as every single other car. But they’re not. There are SUVs, for example. If “they have to do it for aerodynamics” were true, this size and shape of vehicle would not exist. Oversized, elevated rectangular boxes, by their nature, are un-aerodynamic. A Chrysler Airflow from 1934 has a much higher aerodynamic rating than any modern “luxury truck” and still manages to be pleasing to the eye.

It’s not “because they have to because government.” It’s because there’s something wrong with us. We’re sick at heart and sick in the soul, and our emptiness finds three-dimensional expression in the sea of white, black, gray, and silver cars that all look precisely the same as every other maker’s car in that vehicle class.

Crimes against coziness

These are choices we’re making. Bad choices. Anti-beauty choices. Anti-human choices.

You’ve likely heard of the recent kerfuffle over the “rebranding” of the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain. Cracker Barrel is a chain of down-home restaurants that serve unfussy American food like your grandmother used to make. Created in 1969, the founders wanted to offer a restaurant that would remind people of the comfortable general stores and wayside diners that once dotted the American rural landscape. Nothing fancy, just plain food cooked well and served in an atmosphere that invited you to sit down, take a load off, and have supper with other good people.

Staff would travel to flea markets and estate sales to pick up real Americana to stick up on the walls. There were framed pictures of famous boxers and lacrosse sticks, big kerosene lamps that used to light and heat the general stores. The effect was a combination of grandma’s attic and grandpa’s work shed, with a little bit of Christmas thrown in.

Take a look at how Cracker Barrel used to look.

Jeff Greenberg/Getty Images

Now, take a look at the “refreshed” Cracker Barrel.

From your grandparents’ house to the prison commissary.

Scott W. Grau/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

A woman's touch

Who makes these decisions? What kind of person takes a beloved restaurant brand and sticks up her middle finger to the customers? A middle-aged, corporate, almost certainly liberal-woke-Karen type. And here she is, Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Felss Masino, cackling on breakfast television behind oversized look-at-me glasses, telling the audience how much everyone just SUPER LOVES what we’ve done, and we’re doing it all out of LOVE 4 U!!!!!

American business apparently learned nothing from the Bud Light fiasco. In that case, a younger Karen named Alissa Heinerscheid sent the company’s profits into the toilet by making fun of her own brand’s “frat boy” image and slapping the face of a demented drag queen on the cans.

Keep the curves

America, we have to come back to our senses. The world doesn’t have to conform to Karen’s diktats. Karen hates us and hates the things we like, which is why she punishes us. But we’re not her children (do say a prayer for them), and we don’t have to listen to her.

God gave us a world of curve, color, romance, and beauty. For thousands of years, men have tried to follow this example by piling up stones and locking logs together in pleasing shapes that ennoble us and make our souls sing. The deracination of the beautiful and the divine started long ago with churches. We don’t build anything worthy of the name “cathedral” any longer; instead, we put up Brutalist boxes and stick a Mary-on-the-halfshell on the lawn.

The sickness that compromised matters spiritual is now devouring things temporal.

Beauty is our patrimony and our birthright. Let's take it back.

The plan

Flies in the ointment

Sensible safety

The right stuff

Level I: Flat-wick lamps

Level II: Center-draft lamps

Level III: The magical Aladdin lamp

The devil I know

In search of ... belief

Joy interrupted

Maternal monster

Fascinated by fear

I knew what I saw

Merit-ocracy

New phone, why dis?

Sucks to be new

Seek the antique

Set in stone

Brucille

Hug it out

Monumental entitlement

Simply the worst

The new 17?

OK, groomer

Talk stupe

Glottal stop it

Missed manners

Whine moms

Cluster B nation

Psychopathic society

Beyond the political

‘The day is at hand’

Truth heals

Donning the armor

Best intentions

Gen Z stare

First contact

Smooth customer

Trust fail

Punching out

Exiles in gyno-ville

Hag-iography

The fog of feminism

Dumping on men

Expired tarts

Aging like milk

Lust for life?

Grande dames wanted

Hamburglaring our history

Auto pilot

Crimes against coziness

A woman's touch

Keep the curves

We’ll keep you informed with top stories for conservatives who want to become informed decision makers.