Rattle the Former Guy. Wear this.
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Author Archives: Ron Byrnes
Ethiopia’s Spectacular Unraveling
And the (dis)United States complicity.
From Nobel peace prize to civil war: how Ethiopia’s leader beguiled the world.
Alternative title, Abiy Ahmed casts a spell on the West.
Human Decency Wins Again
Life downtown means interacting with the Walking Wounded. Regularly.
Two times in as many weeks I’ve happily been ignored while next up in the grocery store check out line.
Both times the cashiers showed exceptional care and kindness to the down-and-out people in front of me. With no concern for the rest of us in line.
The first time the cashier explained that he knew the customer and always took extra time to do right by him and his guide dog. Although he didn’t need to, he also thanked me for my patience. I wish I had the presence of mind to thank him for taking his time to see the troubled person and for honoring his humanity.
A lot of people who are caring and kind normally aren’t especially either one when it comes to the homeless. Which perplexes me. It’s almost as if they’re offended by their poverty, addictions, and mental health issues. How dare they be poor, addicted, schizophrenic.
No one likes encampments in public spaces or personal property crime. But if we have to be angry, maybe we should direct our anger at ourselves for not making any more headway than we have in solving the crisis.
Granted, it’s a vexing, multi-faceted challenge. I suspect progress depends on more of us following the lead of patient, kind-hearted grocery store cashiers.
Tweet Of The Day
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Scenes From A Belated Dad’s Day
Three times blessed.
Brutally Funny
A taste of Zoe Williams’s scathing review of Tom Bower’s book, House of Beckham about David Beckham.
“There are much smokier guns in the book, as regards David Beckham’s infidelity, detailed accounts of his text message and travel history with Sarah Marbeck, Celina Laurie, Rebecca Loos, Danielle Heath. All of this is quite historical – the annus horribilis from the institution of marriage’s point of view would be 2004 or, to put that another way, 20 years ago. Perhaps more problematic for the biographer is that it was all already in the public domain, courtesy of many overlapping newspaper reports and in quite granular detail. So without anything from inside the house of Beckham, and almost nothing new from the many women involved, Bower’s is more of an aggregator role. Chat GPT could have done the whole thing faster, with the prompts: David Beckham – erection – sun lounger.”
Podcast To Ponder
Plain English with Derek Thompson, “The Radical Cultural Shift Behind America’s Declining Birth Rate.” Related. What Are Children For?
This convo got me thinking about my running posse. Between the five of us, we have 12 children whose average age is somewhere between 25-30 years old. Between those dirty dozen, there is one child. There will likely be more in a decade, but time will tell how many more.
Sentence To Ponder
Follow up to last post. Cohen argues that homophobia, and its cousin, homohysteria, or the fear of being thought homosexual because of behavior that is typically considered gender atypical, conspire against close male friendships in the (dis)United States.
At the same time, she writes:
Homophobia has declined over the last few decades, and with less stigma attached to being gay, researchers have found that homohysteria has eroded too.”
Given those complimentary trends, maybe younger men stand a better chance of developing more robust systems of support than in the past.
Or maybe Cohen and the researchers she cites are almost exclusively coastal elites who are slighting the cultural impediments that continue to rob men of emotional intimacy throughout large swaths of the fruited plains.
Paragraph To Ponder
From The Other Significant Others by Rhaina Cohen.
“Having fewer close friends is associated with loneliness, and loneliness is linked to a variety pack of negative health outcomes, from high blood pressure to depression to cognitive decline. Compared to women who lose their husbands, men who lose their spouses experience a much more pronounced and long-lasting spike in loneliness and depression; they’re more likely than women to die by suicide. Researchers attribute these differences to women having more diverse systems of social support.”
A Christian Nation?
From the NYT.
“Now, Supreme Court justices have become caught up in the debate over whether America is a Christian nation. While Justice Alito is hardly openly championing these views, he is embracing language and symbolism that line up with a much broader movement pushing back against the declining power of Christianity as a majority religion in America.
The country has grown more ethnically diverse and the share of American adults who describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated has risen steadily over the past decade. Still, a 2022 report from the Pew Research Center found that more than four in 10 adults believed America should be a ‘Christian nation.'”
Guess that means almost 6 in 10 grasp the profound difference between being a country with many Christians and being a “Christian country”.
And I can’t help but wonder if the “4 in 10” crowd has any real understanding of the persecution experienced by the earliest Christians, let alone believers in places like China and North Korea.
Pressing Pause 