You know you're living in a healthy democracy when everyone has to pay for a VPN to stop the state from spying on them.

If Digital ID is so safe and secure, why would MPs and members of the Royal Family need exemptions?

Did anyone else read dictionaries and encyclopedias for fun as a kid or am I just weird?

This is nuts

The Left is pushing for identification to use the internet while pushing for no identification to vote. Think about that.

Exactly

For some reason, sometimes when I read books it's the same way a golden retriever experiences a car ride. People ask what happened in it and I'm like, "No idea. There were words. I had a great time. Five stars." The entire plot has been replaced by a vague feeling of contentment and a desire to buy another book.

In 2012, the people of Ireland were asked to choose their favorite painting in the world. They did not choose a Caravaggio, a Vermeer, or a Monet. They chose this: two lovers saying goodbye on a staircase... It is called Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs, painted in 1864 by Frederic William Burton. It is a watercolor, which makes its richness and depth almost impossible to believe, and it hangs today in the National Gallery of Ireland. The story comes from a medieval Danish ballad. Hellelil, a noblewoman, fell in love with Hildebrand, the prince who had been assigned to be her personal guard. Her father forbade it and ordered her seven brothers to kill him. When they attacked, Hildebrand killed six of them. At Hellelil's desperate cry, he spared the youngest, and that hesitation cost him his life. He died of his wounds. The surviving brother imprisoned her, and she did not live much longer... Burton could have painted the battle. He could have painted the deaths, the grief, the blood. Instead he chose the one intimate moment before all of it: the lovers passing on a turret staircase, stealing a final embrace, knowing what is coming. And every detail in the painting carries the weight of that knowledge. He does not seize her in passion. He bows his head and kisses her arm with a tenderness that is almost unbearable, because it is goodbye. She does not collapse into him. She turns to climb the stairs, her face hidden from him and from us, because to look back would make it impossible to leave. The Victorian novelist George Eliot saw the painting and described it perfectly. The face of the knight, she wrote, is "the face of a man to whom the kiss is a sacrament." And that is precisely why it has moved people to tears for more than a hundred and sixty years. It shows something that most of us have felt: not love at its beginning, when it is easy, but at the moment it must be given up, which is the moment that reveals everything it was worth. Burton understood that the most powerful thing he could paint was not the tragedy itself, but the last gentle second before it arrived, held forever in paint, so that the two of them never have to climb those stairs apart. Eliot, who was a friend of Burton's, captured it best: "It might have been made the most vulgar thing in the world, but the artist has raised it to the highest pitch of refined emotion." I started this newsletter because our predecessors left us extraordinary things, and almost no one teaches us about them anymore. Every week I try to. If that is something you would like to be part of, you can join here: James-lucas.com/welcome And if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible. Thanks for reading.

THE AUTISTIC URGE TO NOT REGISTER RED FLAGS AS RED FLAGS BECAUSE YOU’RE SO USED TO PEOPLE MISINTERPRETING YOUR HARMLESS BEHAVIOURS AND YOU DON’T WANT TO DO THAT TO ANYONE ELSE, SO YOU GO OVERBOARD TRYING TO FIND ACCEPTABLE EXPLANATIONS FOR OTHER PEOPLE’S UNACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOUR.

Australia runs more civil servants per head than Italy, Canada, the UK, America, Spain and Germany. We carry 25 percent more than Britain. Close to 50 percent more than Germany. Any competent company would halve the headcount and lose nothing.

Russell Crowe on Gladiator 2: ‘They failed, and they failed because they didn’t understand what made the first film so successful: it had a moral core. Here’s the thing, most people want that. On the surface, they might go for entertainment, but if they’re going to love something and keep it with them forever, like that movie? …The love for that thing is because of its moral core. All guys want to be that man who can stay that strong, and all women want a man who can love them in that way.’

700 years of being a good boy. 🥹 14th-century wood carving of a dog, immortalized on an armrest in the choir stalls of Worcester Cathedral, England.

“I am so old that I can remember when other people’s achievements were considered to be an inspiration, rather than a grievance.” — Thomas Sowell

I don't think anybody really grasps how desperate this situation is. University professors are now saying they are unable to teach history because reading long books and passages is how a person learns history. College kids are incapable of reading more than a few pages. Some classes don't assign any reading at all now, only lectures. There is an assumption among the people managing this decline that reading is just a way of receiving information. It isn't. Proper reading is how we build the mental muscle to synthesize ideas and evaluate them. If the catastrophic decline in reading and literacy is not addressed now, we risk losing everything. Western civilization cannot survive the death of reading because it was built by people with the kind of cognitive depth that a culture of deep reading brings: Complex reasoning, extended internal dialogue, the capacity to hold opposing ideas in tension. Our systems and institutions are complex, and they require well ordered minds to maintain them. Reading forms minds, and the West was built by the richest minds in history.

normalize doing simple things that serve no purpose except making you happy

Instead of adding pink ribbons to their products every October maybe companies should just remove the cancer causing ingredients

The House of Fingolfin supremacy

Le carnet de croquis de Turner