A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
First, thanks to Russ—dear friend, the kind who would give a kidney, the kind to whom you’d give your own, one of them anyway—who recommends on occasion fare for this missive, and alerts to the wonderful Arnade piece (below) on Mickey D’s. Grazie, amico.
Next. The penny. You’ve surely heard the news: Abe’s neck may be on the chopping block (how many times must we kill this martyr?). Seems like it costs three cents to make one. All the tiny-denomination talk prompted a memory, deep within Your Lowly Correspondent’s noggin, of that Orwell novel—what was it? . . . Google search . . . oh yeah, Keep the Aspidistra Flying . . . wellwhaddayouknow, there’s George’s collected works on the bookcase shelf—about a miserable, young Brit at war with himself over wealth, poverty, near-pauperism, pride, and the scant currency in the pocket of his threadbare clothing. Grabbing the book, first read back in the Reagan Administration, flipping the pages, treated once again to its powerful prose (Momma mia, Orwell was tremendous)—the novel is sprinkled with the protagonist’s preoccupations with taunting, emasculating coins:
He fingered the money in his pocket, not chinking it, lest the shy young man should hear. "Twopence-halfpenny.”
He hated them for their dingy homes, the dowdiness, the joyless attitude of life, their endless worrying and groaning over threepences and sixpences.
Gordon could not even ring him up, because he hadn’t the necessary two pennies; only three half-pence and the Joey.
He had fourpence half-penny, counting the Joey. But no! That bloody Joey!
(If you’re curious, the “Joey” is the nickname for Britain’s old, small, silver threepence.) Who knew such small change could have such a hold on the human person? Aspidistra must be reread. As for the penny—that thing of candy, whistles, thoughts, operas (three pennies), antes, loafers, arcades, stocks, and much more—it has had a good run . . . and the race may go on.
BTW: In the initial search (“Orwell AND coin”) what popped up was news: Britain’s Royal Mint has just issued a commemorative George Orwell coin, of £2, with an eye design and the warning BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. Aren’t there security cameras on nearly every corner and alleyway in the U.K.? I do believe he is.
We promise not to watch you as you peruse the following.
A Penny for Your 14 Thoughts
1. At Chris Arnade Walks the World, Chris Arnade (duh) shares his love of the Golden Arches, and its critical role as a locus for all people, even oddballs. From the piece:
I’m going to go out on a limb here, despite it being too early to do so, and suggest that Luigi is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia4. I’ve met a lot of those in McDonald’s, because besides providing them with all the things every other customers wants, it is also a “reality safe space.” It is one of, it not the only, place in the “real world” they can go, grab a cup out of the garbage can and sit at their corner table and fit in, at least for an hour or two, without encountering too many dangers. It becomes, for many deeply troubled people, their only life line to normal society.
It’s a role McDonald’s, to its credit, has accepted. I’ve witnessed many episodes where the employees and morning regulars go out of their way to help those who come in that are suffering the worst. From free food, to calls for assistance, to having their husband come to parking lot and repair their broken-down car, free of charge.
Which is why the second question, how in the world was he noticed, isn’t surprising at all. Each McDonald’s is a community, and despite being a franchise built for the immediate and transactional, they’ve become long-term and social.
2. At Commentary Magazine, Joseph Epstein returns to an old favorite topic—the “virtucrat.” From the article:
Politics perhaps offers an easier outlet for displays of virtue than any other realm. In politics one can register one’s deep desire for equality, great regard for minorities, immeasurable sympathy for underdogs—all at no cost to oneself. Those who have a rigid hatred of capitalism harbor it because they feel it stands in the way of universal equality. Those ready to believe that racism in America is “systemic” do so because it comports with their notion that African Americans would otherwise by now have risen out of their crime-ridden ghettoes. Those who find themselves siding with the Palestinians against Israel do so in the belief that the former are the true underdogs in the Middle East. The virtucrat not only believes all these things, but also believes anyone who doesn’t is a right-winger, a barbarian, and clearly part of the problem.
Politics are often required to counter the brutal politics of others. Such was the case in the past century, when Communism and fascism murdered millions and millions. Yet such towering intellectual figures as Nietzsche, Stendhal, Proust, Kafka, and others felt politics was not of primary or even secondary interest. In The Possessed, Dostoyevsky wrote the ultimate take-down of the virtucrat, setting out the falsity, hypocrisy, and even danger of the type. In his Pensées, Pascal, anticipating the virtucrat, held that man was neither an angel nor a beast, and argued that those who pretended to be angels were soon likely to act like beasts.
3. At Civitas Outlook, Seth Kaplan argues for the creation of strong neighborhoods to combat social disintegration. From the essay:
Instead of government policies or national campaigns to address various societal woes, Americans need to galvanize social and economic regeneration place by place. And social generativity depends on the robustness and density of institutions—formal and informal—in any particular locale. Whether social, economic, religious, or civic, institutions bolster social networks, shared loyalties, widely accepted norms, and deep reservoirs of social capital.
These local generative institutions don’t seek to scale but to steward. For example, neighborhood churches can have a bigger impact on the social fabric than megachurches; micro entrepreneurship may be more socially generative than large corporations; and hyperlocal nonprofits and charities may do more to build social cohesion than the large service-oriented entities and philanthropies. The momentum created will work sideways and upwards—it will branch out—to bring benefits for more residents, adjacent neighborhoods, smaller and larger cities, regions, and finally, the whole country.
In practice, repeated embodied interactions build dense social networks, cohesion, and trust—lubricating cooperation in the daily regimen of life. These interactions prompt people to solve common problems, address conflict over resources, and reach for higher aspirations. As Tim Carney writes in Alienated America, “The only way to maintain ‘real and sincere closeness’ with a person is to entangle ourselves with that person through the bonds of an institution—to live in community and to work toward common ends with that person.” This expands the capacity and norms for self-governance: the foundation of the American experiment.
4. At Newsweek, John Berry argues that increasing the child tax credit will reduce—and prevent—homelessness. From the article:
Now, Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, has put a stake in the ground with a bill to increase the Child Tax Credit from a maximum of $2,000 to $5,000 per child. While the 10-year price tag for this could run between $2 trillion and $3 trillion, it could well prove cheaper from a financial and a social standpoint to keep families housed together.
Consider these facts.
The just-released U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's annual count of people experiencing homelessness on a single night eclipsed 770,000 in 2024, an increase of 18 percent from the prior year and the highest since the report began in 2007. Homelessness increased among nearly every demographic of people in the survey, but it was especially steep among children and people in families. . . .
At the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, we prefer to focus on our mission of accompanying those suffering the effects of poverty and advocating for homelessness prevention. This takes many forms—from thrift stores to shelters to food pantries to charitable pharmacies. But the core of our mission is to spend time visiting people in their homes to get to the causes of their financial distress, and find ways to alleviate it so they remain in stable housing and don't become another homelessness statistic.
5. At Law & Liberty, Miles Smith IV suggests a look at Britain to gain a deeper appreciation for America’s free press. From the essay:
The American republic’s executives and legislature largely understood that the press’s imperfections and speculations served a vital role in maintaining the energetic vigilance of a free democratic and democratic people’s natural rights. That the people and the press might sometimes be imprudent was not a reason to curtail press or speech freedoms or to subordinate them to state control. In 1795, President George Washington told Gouverneur Morris that in a government as free as the United States, “where the people are at liberty, and will express their sentiments oftentimes imprudently, and, for want of information, sometimes unjustly, allowances must be made occasional effervescences.” Washington, interestingly enough, did not use the occasion to complain about the press’s freedoms. A free press, he conceded, made occasional messes. . . .
Washington made an important distinction between speech and “proceedings” that typified the free American republic’s response to public speech. Writing itself was not considered violent; a quick look at what was published in the Federalist Era about George Washington himself—partisans accused him of being an agent of Britain, and of selling the country to British commercial interests—is proof enough of that, as was the combative and contemptuous civil and political reaction to John Adams’ ham-fisted attempt to curtail the press freedoms Washington had sought to uphold. Riots could be prosecuted; newspaper articles could not be.
6. At Humanum Review, Anca Nemoianu considers the honesty of language that evolves naturally, instead of through its appointed protectors. From the analysis:
All along, since the 18th century, there have been in the English language taboo words, avoided by speakers for various reasons, and replaced by euphemisms: religious interjections (gee, golly, geez, for Pete’s sake, holy cow, etc.); profanity-free intensifiers (shoot, fricking, etc.); nouns that acquire a pejorative connotation over time (for example, the many names associated with the words “maid:” charwoman, cleaning woman, custodian). Religious euphemisms have been part of the English language so long that many contemporary speakers don’t even know that they are originally religious in nature; they are perceived as interjections, not any different from other interjections, like “oops” or “wow.” In contemporary colloquial discourse, reinforced in movies and popular music, profanities are no longer euphemized. The last category of euphemisms, however, has lately been enriched considerably, as greater segments of the population are more easily offended and believe that by changing words they will be less so. Thus, “garbage men” become “sanitation engineers,” in keeping with current efforts to erase “sexist language” by eliminating the sound cluster “man” from all words which contain it, even when it does not refer to maleness (“manual,” “manuscript,” etc.). The replacement of words by euphemisms leads to what the linguist Steven Pinker called “the euphemistic treadmill”: euphemisms soon acquire new pejorative meanings and have to be replaced by other euphemisms, and so on. Reality and speaker attitude do not disappear. The whole process is underlined by an ancient belief in “word magic,” that is, the ability of words to magically bring about human attitudes and judgments instead of simply pointing to reality.
7. A tree may grow in Brooklyn, but at The Free Press, Larissa Phillips tells how she left it behind for acreage on the upstate New York farm. From the piece:
I was sick of the grit and the noise and the pace of urban life. After 15 years in an ever more crowded Brooklyn apartment, I wanted a dining room and closets and a driveway. I’d spent a decade coaxing sickly tomatoes and anemic salad greens from containers on fire escapes, and dreamed of a garden where we could produce our own food. It would be healthier and tastier, but also, I’ve always felt a persistent need to grow and build things with my own hands. Maybe in the country I’d learn how to can vegetables and fix a roof, and we might even get horses. I could homeschool my quirky, creative son, instead of leaving him to the mercy of the city’s public school system.
Politics weren’t a factor in my decision to move. Sure, I was sometimes fatigued by the antics of particularly leftist friends. The language policing bothered me, and so did their immunity to common sense in conversations about crime or education. But when we left the city in 2010, no one was really questioning biology, or the concept of truth.
But changes were afoot. After our move, I would watch from afar as progressive, urban America became increasingly governed by ideology, drifting ever further from basic reality. My family, meanwhile, had barely settled into our 15-acre farm in Greene County, New York, when we were confronted with facts of life that we had—like most modern Americans—been able to avoid for years.
8. At Quadrant, Mervyn Bendle takes on frontier hate Down Under, and just about everywhere. From the piece:
A recent specimen of this nightmare vision of Australia is Killing for Country (2023) by David Marr, who reports his shock “to discover forebears who served with the brutal Native Police in the bloodiest years on the frontier” (thus apparently claiming a prized indigenous heritage for himself). The result of this “soul-searching” is “a richly detailed saga of politics and power in the colonial world—of land seized, fortunes made and lost, and the violence let loose as squatters and their allies fought for possession of the country . . .” Reviewed by some of the usual suspects on the Left, the book has been lauded as “more than a personal reckoning with Marr’s forebears and their crimes. It is an account of an Australian war fought here in our own country, with names, dates, crimes, body counts and the ghastly, remorseless views of the ‘settlers’.” It is allegedly “a timely exercise in truth-telling” that “shines a light into the dark shameful corners of our collective national experience”, and so on.
Sadly for Marr, he’s late for the ideological self-hate party, as the systematic demonization of settler societies, colonialism, and the frontier has been a central component of the relentless Leftist attack on Australia for decades. Pioneering examples of this self-lacerating anti-Australian genre include Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (1981), followed by An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (2001); and Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (1981). The methods, interpretations, and conclusions of such writers were subjected to a comprehensive critique by Keith Windschuttle in his two volumes on The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, (2002 & 2009). Their desperate attempts to rebut Windschuttle were then themselves refuted by John Dawson in Washout: On the Academic Response to the Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2010).
9. At Modern Age, Peter Lawler finds technology the thing one can’t live with—or, without. From the piece:
According to Martin Heidegger, technology is what defines all of modern life. In other words, we moderns assume that what is real is what can be comprehended by reason; the real is what can be calculated or predicted or manipulated. Anything that cannot be objectively known—known as an object—by reason is not real. For Heidegger, this technological way of thinking is above all nihilistic; everything noble and beautiful that gives human life its seriousness or dignity is regarded, literally, as nothing. The modern view, on the other hand, is that technological thinking frees us from the irrational illusion of indebtedness. Technology can be put at the service of what we now call “free choice” because we have no knowledge of any purposes or ends or limits that are simply given. Unconstrained human choice or willfulness depends on a debt-negating or nihilistic foundation.
A contemporary critic of technology, Wendell Berry, explains that our dogma or “conventional prejudice” today is the uncritical acceptance of the goodness of technological liberation. Our intellectuals and educators mean to prejudice us “against old people, history, parental authority, religious faith, sexual discipline, manual work, rural people and rural life, anything that is local or small or inexpensive.” We are prejudiced against all that is required to acquire moral virtue, to what we must have to subordinate technical means to human ends. We are prejudiced against “settled communities,” against anything that has not been uprooted by the impersonal universalism of technological thinking. But it is only in the routinized and moralized context of such communities that any technology might be viewed as good, as not merely displacing or disorienting human beings for no particular purpose.
10. At National Review, Chris Ciancimino critiques the call to tax philanthropic endowments. From the article:
Some left-wing agitators have it out for philanthropy. As I regularly peruse headlines related to my work in this sector, it’s not unusual for Google to send me links from Jacobin, Democracy Now!, or other left-wing rabble-rousers about the supposed evils of the rich. Although it caught my eye to see, in Bloomberg, and from an apparently benign tax professor, the following call to action: “It’s Time for Private Foundations to Start Paying a Fairer Share.”
Give author Brigitte Alepin credit for knowing how to get my attention. She had me at hello with this doozy of an opening sentence: “Private charitable foundations are emerging as a fiscal threat, with their wealth and numbers growing.” A fiscal threat! Not to the 1.8 million nonprofit organizations housed in the United States, I presume.
How is the thought of private charitable foundations multiplying nightmare material? Alepin charges that the assets of private foundations have increased 50 percent since the pandemic, data ostensibly included to scare the reader. Never mind that if you invested $100 in the S&P 500 at the beginning of 2021, you would have $168.46 at the end of 2024, a return on investment of about 68.5 percent. Shouldn’t the assets of private foundations have increased more? Perhaps they did not because they also gave approximately $100 billion per year to charities over that same period.
11. At The Spectator, Kara Kennedy spotlights child-free social-media influencers, some of whom are real mother-sluggers. From the article:
Maggie was a pioneer in the cultivation of an online community for the child-free. “It started back in 2012, but our community back then was not necessarily 100 percent child-free by choice,” she said. “It started with 12 of us on an online forum. We were everything from what I call a pre-parent, those that wanted to have kids someday, to fence-sitters, the ‘I’m not sure’” After spending a decade building the community, Maggie took it to Instagram. “A couple of friends came over to my house and said: ‘You think it’s so easy because you’ve been doing it for so long. You don’t want kids, you surround yourself with people who don’t want kids like it’s easy-peasy. Give a voice to it. Nobody knows about it.’ I think the child-free movement is gaining momentum, not because it’s new, but because we’re normalizing it. It’s not the spinster, the barren old lady who everyone’s afraid of. It’s not the broken woman, all of these horrible stereotypes that we’ve had for women in the past who didn’t have kids.” . . .
The prevalent theme among the child-free-by-choice influencers is anxiety. @childfreemillenial posts videos about her daily panic attacks. This is also true of the millennial women I know who want children but are concerned with “readiness.” Isn’t raising kids expensive? Time-consuming? Hard? The child-free influencers like to point to dirty nappies as a reason they would never have kids. But in the past 12 weeks of having a daughter, not once have I thought of changing a dirty nappy as hard or even unpleasant. Giving birth to my daughter was hard, and so was watching my husband’s face as he had to decide whether to stay by my side or go to the neonatal ICU with our daughter—a relative stranger—as soon as she was born. Parenting is hard, but it is self-infantilizing and offensive to think that wiping a bum is the most grinding part.
12. At Successful Farming, Natalina Sents Bausch reports on a dozen Kentucky farmers whose loose lips did not sink ships but raised charitable dollars. From the article:
In addition to sharing their passion for agriculture in a unique way, the Local Farmers helped make the 2025 Lip Sync Battle fundraiser the most successful one yet. In total, a record $239,570 was raised.
Puzzle Pieces Executive Director Amanda Owen told the Owensboro Times, “With the most teams, the most performers, the most tickets sold, the most viewers watching from home, and the most money raised in Lip Sync Battle history, this year has been nothing short of extraordinary. We could not do what we do without the incredible support from our sponsors, performers, and ticket buyers—each one plays a vital role in helping us support our clients.”
Lucky 13. At Front Porch Republic, Elizabeth Stice laments the plague of sports gambling. From the piece:
To understand what makes present-day sports betting different and more dangerous, a good start would be listening to season four of Michael Lewis’s podcast, Against the Rules. It used to be that you could place sports bets in Vegas or with bookies. Now most people place them with the apps, which are omnipresent and always advertising. There are a few issues with the apps that should concern us all. First, they are designed to encourage addictive behavior. Second, they reward addictive behavior—turning unsuccessful high-stakes bettors into “VIPs” and rewarding them with concerts, tickets to sporting events, and more. Third, the apps do not allow people who bet well to bet much at all. If you understand sports betting enough to succeed, they will essentially cut you off or severely limit the amount you can wager. The entire ecosystem created by DraftKings and FanDuel, etc., feeds off people who do not make good bets. Only suckers can wager whatever they’d like.
The strategy is working well for the sports betting industry. In 2023, sports betting made $11 billion in revenue. According to ESPN’s reporting on information from the American Gaming Association, “The huge year for the industry represented a 44.5% year-over-year increase from 2022, which previously held the record. A handle of $119.84 billion (a 27.8% year-over-year increase) combined with an increased year-over-year sportsbook win percentage of 9.1% (up from 8.1% in 2022) contributed to the record.” This increase was due, in part, to legalization in more states (possible after a 2018 Supreme Court decision). 2023 was also a big year for land-based (in-person) gambling. All gambling combined “had a record year, posting $65.52 billion in 2023 revenue, a 10% increase from 2022’s record.” 2024 will likely also be a banner year once all the accounting is done.
Bonus. At Verily Magazine, Jody Benson finds in motherhood there can be joy—through leisure. From the reflection:
Leisure is countercultural in that it keeps us present and free from distraction. In doing so, leisure leads to joy. In Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper roots his understanding of leisure in receptivity—that is, the capacity to receive or accept something as a gift. For example, prayer, silence, Sabbath, and divine worship are all activities based in receptivity.
Pieper identifies other helpful qualities of leisure as silence or stillness, festivity, and being useless. As for silence or stillness, Pieper writes, “Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture—and ourselves.” Leisure is more than just therapeutic in its call to turn off our phones or televisions. It can lead us to build a better culture through our attention to reality and joy in living.
For Pieper, festivity is based in reality. The commercialization of Christmas and Easter, for instance, distorts these true feasts. In a proper celebration, man “celebrates the end of his work by allowing his inner eye to dwell for a while upon the reality of Creation.”
Finally, leisure is useless. Leisure helps us realize that our identity does not lie in our productivity. We are in fact more than our job titles or earnings. We are called to nurture our roles as mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends.
For the Good of The Cause
Uno. The Center for Civil Society will be hosting an “In the Trenches” Master Class on Major Gifts on March 20, 2025, via Zoom, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. (Eastern). You really cannot have a strong nonprofit fundraising program without knowing your onions when it comes to high-level donors. So do attend. Register, and get complete information, right here.
Due. At Philanthropy Daily, Iain Bernhoft checks out the Trump Inauguration speech and finds fundraising lessons within. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Why wouldn’t the thief take pennies?
A: Because he hated coppers.
A Dios
You can watch the 1941 classic, Penny Serenade, right here. You may need some hankies.
May We Be Not Afraid,
Jack Fowler, who is rolling his coins at jfowler@amphil.com.