Missive #69

Read Will Rogers column 88 years ago: May 5, 1935

Johnny Rossendale has spent the last four years on the seas, away from the titled family he despises. But now he must turn his sailing cutter, the Sunflower, around and sail to Devon, where his mother lies dying. When Johnny makes landfall, though, he finds that his return is eagerly anticipated by some very sinister foes.This is another good sailing-based thriller by Cornwell; retitled in the United States as Killer’s Wake. The only character in this book that was also in the first one was the policeman. I’m going to consider these books to be a series and will show this as being the second one in the series of five books. After an attempt on his life, he realises that someone thinks a missing painting that belongs to the family is in his hands — and, worse, they are prepared to go to any lengths to get hold of it. But as Earl of Stowey, Johnny has eight centuries of robber-baron blood pumping through his veins. He won’t let the family fortune fall into the hands of others without a fight … — Book promo @ Amazon

I have quoted the closing paragraph of an blog posting that I recommend as a must read.

How we as a society can address this problem is a good question. We’ve lost two generations (literally as well as figuratively) and are on a trajectory to lose a third. Our own selfishness, stupidity, and hubris have brought us to this point; and they aren’t going to be solved simply by exchanging one political despot for another. Our society’s problem is a spiritual one. It’s going to take acknowledging the errors of the past 30 or so years and repudiating them on a wholesale basis. Somehow, I have my doubts that we have it left in us to do that.— The Road To Oblivion by The Night Wind

This quote is from a good blog posting Our Werewolves Ourselves by John Michael Greer. A recommended read.

This is a bleak and bitter time to be a young man in America.  Outside the narrowing circles of the well-to-do, boys and girls alike face a world in which every option pushed on them by their society—employment, college education, you name it—is a mug’s game rigged to make others rich at their expense.  Boys, however, face the additional burden that maleness has been pathologized in our schools, so that boys are systematically punished and penalized for the crime of not acting more like girls.  Those boys who can’t handle the demands for passivity and obedience imposed on them can count on being drugged into submission if they aren’t simply arrested and put into what has been usefully labeled the school-to-prison pipeline.… The military used to be the great escape hatch for young men who couldn’t find a place in civil society, but that door’s been slammed shut in recent years as Pentagon bureaucrats push an increasingly strident woke ideology on the rank and file, and the benefits of military service have become increasingly limited when they’re not wholly imaginary… Rejected by the cultural mainstream, and as often as not condemned by woke ideologues as personally guilty of every wrong ever inflicted by their ancestors, a great many young men have been driven to the fringes of our society.