Lionel Shriver shares the warmth of collectivism

Lionel Shriver is one of our better writers, though she doesn't get as much attention as she deserves. People don't want to read awful stuff, like a school shooter with a bow and arrows (We Need To Talk About Kevin), a mobidly obese family member (Big Brother), or a future in which Mexico must build a Great Wall to keep American refugees from flooding the country (The Mandibles). Her latest book was published on Tuesday, and I read it with such gusto that I finished it Wednesday morning. ¡Qué libro! It's her best yet.

A Better Life plays off a never-implemented proposal in which New Yorkers are paid $110 a week to host asylum seekers in their homes, thus sparing the city the cost of a $400-a-night hotel room, three meals a day, and endless other expenses. Gloria Bonaventure, a Brooklyn woman with a live-in wastrel son, is delighted to live out her inclusive dreams. She takes in a pretty Honduran with a fabulous work ethic, a few English phrases, and a heart-rending backstory. Martine (she has no last name) moves into the basement apartment, obliging the son to return to his boyhood bedroom upstairs. What could possibly go wrong?

Plenty. And Ms Shriver ladles it out with good humor. (The arguments against open borders sometimes go on too long.) Martine has a brother who needs a place to sleep, and her brother -- if he really is a sibling -- has friends anxious to share the good life in Brooklyn. And the best bit comes at the end. Grab a copy!

Oh yes, it's cold in Vermont!

This has been a bitter winter in the North Country, and Vermont is having a particular problem with its heavily subsidized fleet of electric busses. They are manufactured in Canada, which is even colder than Vermont, yet it seems the batteries can't be charged below 41 deg F, nor can they be charged indoors because they're a fire hazard. National Review has a hilarious article about how Bernie Sanders's home state is coping or trying to cope with the problem.

A quick solution, of course, would be to replace the batteries. The manufacturer seems willing to do that, but has "indicated" (why do we use such words?) that the process may take as long as two years.

Perhaps Vermont's climate will have moderated by then.

Takaichi is so CUTE!

Though I am 94 and should be past such frivolity, I'm afraid I still judge foreign leaders by their looks. Japan at the moment has a prime minister named Sanae Takaichi, and every time I see her face online, I am thrilled. She's a delight to behold, and I wish her well in Sunday's snap election.

It's a small defense, I know, but to a certain extent I apply a similar filter to the males of the species. Thus I judge Gavin Newsome of California as just too pretty to serve as president of the United States, and JB Pritzker of Illinois as -- well, I'm sorry, but it's true -- too ugly. So wise up, Democrats, and find a face in the normal range: Rahm Emanuel, perhaps, or Amy Klobuchar. (Or both!)

One thing is certain. Whoever runs in 2028, we won't have a president in 2029 who makes me as happy as does today's prime minister of Japan.

The Center for Performative Preening

We used to have a fairly impressive Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, which has now been neutered by the Orange Man, who began the process by adding his own name and an extra The to the Kennedy Center's facade. That was comical enough, but to punish Orange Man for his preening, the performing artists then began to preen themselves. A run of "Hamilton"? Canceled. The world premiere of Philip Glass's Lincoln Symphony? Canceled. A season of the Washington National Opera? Canceled. Martha Graham Dance Company? Canceled. Amd so it went, as one company after another tried to punish Orange Man by punishing Washington's art lovers.

And Orange Man responded as only he would do, by closing the Kennedy Center for two years effective July 4, the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. Take that, everyone.

It's cold and dark in Kyiv

While Putin and Trump play their ceasefire games, Russia's dictator continues to rain drones and missiles on Ukraine and its capital, Kyiv, where the 7 a.m. temperature this morning showed 2 deg Fahrenheit -- 17 below zero Celius. It's now morning here in New Hampshire, where I'm enjoying a bit warmer climate of 6 above (minus 15 Celsius). This has been a brutal, oldfashioned winter in the US Northeast, with a foot and a half of snow on the ground and weeks going by without the thermometer climbing above freezing.

Last night saw 85 Russian drones launched against Ukraine, with 64 intercepted by antiaircraft defenses. The barrage killed five civilians and wounded nineteen, with the worst damage -- as usual this winter -- inflicted on the embattled country's power plants. Tens of thousands of households in Kyiv are without heat or light today, and the temperature won't climb above freezing there, either, not today and not in the week ahead.

Inflation by the ounce

On the day I was born -- November 2, 1931 -- my father could have bought an ounce of gold for $21. (Dad didn't have $21 to spare, of course. He was the typical American laborer, earning 35 cents an hour for a 60-hour week.) On the Dollar Times website, I see that inflation over my lifetime has averaged 3.21%, meaning that a 1931 dollar today equates to $20.13. That bit of gold should be worth $423!

In fact, gold passed $5,300 an ounce the other day. That's what the smart money thinks it's worth, since gold's value, unlike the dollar's, ought to keep increasing as the years go by.

[Feb. 1: Okay, well, gold has since lost $400 or so. I won't hazard a guess as to whether that's a reason to buy or sell....]

The least-remembered "Day"

This is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and of the half-dozen newspapers and magazines I check every morning, only Commentary bothered to remember it. There, Seth Mandel argued that today's antisemites are doing their best to erase the Holocaust from our memory by replacing it with "genocide".

A primer: the word "genocide" was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew teaching at Duke, a haven he reached after fleeing Warsaw in September 1939 as Hitler and Stalin divided Poland between them. His great interest during the war years was what he then termed the crime of "barbarity," from the Roman persecution of Christians (he'd read Quo Vadis as a boy), through the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915, to the persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany. The last led in 1944 as Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, the first time "genocide" was defined in print.

Lemkin became an adviser to Justice Robert Jackson in the postwar Nuremberg Trials. In the 1950s, at his urging, the UN formally recognized genocide as a crime, and he helped Arab lawyers build a case against the 19th century French genocide in Algeria. Of interest today, as Vladimir Putin tries to extinguish Ukraine, Lemkin also argued that Stalin's mass starvation of Ukrainian peasants -- the Holdomor of 1933-34 -- constituted a genocide.

Yes, capitalism works!

On Monday, Trump was ready to seize Greenland by military force. Our unpronouncable Pituffik Space Base has 150 Americans in residence, so we already outnumber the troops recently deployed by Denmark and other NATO countries. But our Space Force isn't trained for combat, so the occupation would certainly require the real US Army.

As a result, on Tuesday the Dow Jones Industrial average shed 871 points, the US dollar weakened, the Swiss franc strengthened, and gold soared to $4,760 an ounce.

And on Wednesday, Trump chickened out. Oh, never mind; there'll be no invasion, after all!

Among my morning reading is National Review, the conservative magazine Bill Buckley founded in 1951. It has offered a Modest Proposal to end the fuss. United Airlines now has nonstop flights from Newark to Nuuk each summer, so why don't 60,000 Americans move there, acquire citizenship, and vote to become a US territory?