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UPI
a day ago
- Entertainment
- UPI
Famous birthdays for June 28: Jessica Hecht, Mel Brooks
June 28 (UPI) -- Those born on this date are under the sign of Cancer. They include: -- Pope Paul IV in 1476 -- English King Henry VIII in 1491 -- Artist Peter Paul Rubens in 1577 -- John Wesley, founder of Methodism, in 1703 -- Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1712 -- Writer Luigi Pirandello in 1867 -- Musician Richard Rodgers in 1902 -- Filmmaker/comedian Mel Brooks in 1926 (age 99) File Photo by Chris Chew/UPI -- Actor Pat Morita in 1932 -- Former CIA Director/Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in 1938 (age 87) -- Comedian Gilda Radner in 1946 -- Actor Bruce Davison in 1946 (age 79) -- Actor Kathy Bates in 1948 (age 77) -- Actor Alice Krige in 1954 (age 71) -- Football Hall of Fame member John Elway in 1960 (age 65) File Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI -- Musician Saul Davies (James) in 1965 (age 60) -- Actor Jessica Hecht in 1965 (age 60) -- Actor John Cusack in 1966 (age 59) -- Actor Mary Stuart Masterson in 1966 (age 59) -- Musician/actor Danielle Brisebois in 1969 (age 56) -- Actor Tichina Arnold in 1969 (age 56) -- Actor Steve Burton in 1970 (age 55) File Photo by Christine Chew/UPI -- Actor Aileen Quinn in 1971 (age 54) -- Entrepreneur Elon Musk in 1971 (age 54) -- Skateboarder/TV personality Rob Dyrdek in 1974 (age 51) -- Musician Tim Nordwind (OK Go) in 1976 (age 49) -- Musician Mark Stoermer (Killers) in 1977 (age 48) -- Actor Felicia Day in 1979 (age 46) -- Musician Kellie Pickler in 1986 (age 39) -- Musician Seohyun (Girls' Generation) in 1991 (age 34)
UPI
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- UPI
Famous birthdays for June 17: Will Forte, Odessa A'zion
1 of 4 | Will Forte attends the premiere of "The Studio" at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles on March 24. The actor turns 55 on June 17. File Photo by Greg Grudt/UPI | License Photo June 17 (UPI) -- Those born on this date are under the sign of Gemini. They include: -- John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, in 1703 -- Musician Igor Stravinsky in 1882 -- Artist M.C. Escher in 1898 -- Writer John Hersey in 1914 -- Filmmaker Ken Loach in 1936 (age 89) File Photo by Rocco Spaziani/UPI -- Egyptian Nobel Peace Prize laureate/former Vice President Mohamed ElBaradei in 1942 (age 83) -- Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1943 (age 82) -- Musician Barry Manilow in 1943 (age 82) -- Musician George S. Clinton in 1947 (age 78) -- Comedian/actor Joe Piscopo in 1951 (age 74) Photo by Mark Peterson/UPI -- Actor Mark Linn-Baker in 1954 (age 71) -- Actor Jon Gries in 1957 (age 68) -- Musician Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys) in 1958 (age 67) -- Filmmaker Bobby Farrelly in 1958 (age 67) -- Actor Thomas Haden Church in 1960 (age 65) -- Actor Greg Kinnear in 1963 (age 62) File Photo by David Silpa/UPI -- U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame speed skater Dan Jansen in 1965 (age 60) -- Actor Jason Patric in 1966 (age 59) -- Fashion designer Tory Burch in 1966 (age 59) -- Burundian President Évariste Ndayishimiye in 1968 (age 57) -- Musician Kevin Thornton (Color Me Badd) in 1969 (age 56) -- Actor Will Forte in 1970 (age 55) -- Musician Paulina Rubio in 1971 (age 54) -- Tennis star Venus Williams in 1980 (age 45) File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI -- Actor Jodie Whittaker in 1982 (age 43) -- Actor Arthur Darvill in 1982 (age 43) -- Actor Manish Dayal in 1983 (age 42) -- Musician Mickey Guyton in 1983 (age 42) -- Musician Kendrick Lamar in 1987 (age 38) -- Actor KJ Apa in 1997 (age 28) -- Actor Odessa A'zion in 2000 (age 25) File Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI
New Statesman
21-05-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
What's the point of a Labour government that allows child poverty?
Photo byLet's be truly unfashionable and talk of political morality: what is the moral core of social democracy? I'm talking not of 'the government' but the individuals sitting around the cabinet table: what are the values they rely on when, for instance, taking decisions about wealth and poverty? This is timely for two reasons. First, the near-at-hand one. As Labour moves closer to right-wing populist thinking on immigration curbs, welfare cuts and social conservatism, the 'who are these people?' question becomes unavoidable, to the point where it is beginning, perhaps, to seep into opinion polling. The second reason is on an epic scale. Matthew Arnold noted the 'melancholy, long, withdrawing roar' of Christianity as the moral core of this country. He was writing around 1850 but throughout the 20th century British socialist thinking rested heavily not just on the Christian moral code – as Harold Wilson famously put it, there was 'more Methodism than Marx' in the Labour Party – but on the assumption that this code was a general core belief system, which could be used and appealed to, even when unnamed. Was this a dangerous assumption? Most senior Labour people, even if they became intellectual agnostics, had begun with the Church. Ramsay MacDonald grew up in the Free Church of Scotland and taught in Church schools, though he later became a humanist. Clement Attlee came from a line of devout Anglicans, and said he believed in the ethics of Christianity, just not 'the mumbo-jumbo'. Tony Crosland, currently the subject of a play in London, was brought up as a member of the Plymouth Brethren, rejecting them later. James Callaghan was a Baptist and Sunday-school teacher when young. Tony Blair was always religious, before becoming a Roman Catholic later in life. Gordon Brown, who is guest editing this issue, wrote in his memoir that he was sorry he had not drawn a clearer line between his religious faith and his political choices: 'This was, to my regret, a problem that I never really resolved. I suspect I was thought of as more like a technician lacking solid convictions. And, despite my strong personal religious beliefs, I never really countered that impression.' This matters because key Christian teachings and stories, from 'do unto others', through to the Good Samaritan and the one about private equity managers, camels and needles, long meant Labour objectives on redistribution, fairness and the importance of community, barely needed to be stated. The underlying assumptions were already there, inside people's heads. But although there are signs of religious revival today, the shrivelling of official Christian religion at the core of British life has been dramatic. Darwin, Freud, Einstein, modern physics and images from space telescopes have burrowed into the common imagination. Far fewer go to church. Far fewer know the Bible stories. There was an assumption that the moral spirit would continue alive in our politics even as churches became cold stone corpses. Was that idiotically optimistic? Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe For there are rival ways of thinking, if not ideologies or belief systems. Decades of consumerism, then the online culture of exhibitionism, greed and material success, have eroded earlier notions of equity or restraint. The problem extends beyond social democracy: Freddie Hayward reported recently that the American writer Ross Douthat 'thinks liberalism lacks a metaphysics, an explanation for the universe which would breathe meaning into concepts such as free speech'. Deeper waters, but invigorating ones. I was brought up in a Scottish kirk, not so far from Brown's home town of Kirkcaldy, though my father was an elder, not the minister. When Brown was in office we used to talk sometimes about morality and the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly that of the economist and philosopher Adam Smith. In his grander if lesser-known work The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argues that we judge our moral lives by standing outside ourselves: 'We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgement concerning them unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us… With the eyes of other people.' This empathy machine offers a more optimistic analysis – that there is a basic common understanding of fairness which, perhaps, pre-dates or stands below organised religion. We have an inbuilt instinct for fairness which modern philosophers like Peter Singer have rebranded effective altruism. But when Smith proposes his version, he assumes a morally homogeneous world in which 'other fair and impartial spectators' are freely available to imagine. In our fractured society, with such great chasms in wealth and opportunity, and different belief systems rubbing up against one another, is that still the case? I think it is. But at this point, let's apply this abruptly to ordinary politics. What would be the moral point of a Labour government that left office having increased, rather than decreased, childhood poverty? There is, in my experience, still a notion of fairness rooted in the current cabinet, whether among the minority with strong religious views – Jonathan Reynolds, Shabana Mahmood, Rachel Reeves, Bridget Phillipson – or the agnostics such as Keir Starmer. Under pressure from the bond markets, disillusioned voters and the media, are they listening enough to their internal moral voice? With huge potential rebellions looming on winter fuel and benefits for the disabled, it's clear that Labour backbenchers are. Fairness is not just about tax and benefits. It embraces the importance of controlled borders to protect the interests of working-class people; breakfast clubs for hungry children; the desperate need for more housing; the recent renters' law and the workers' rights package. But child poverty is inescapably central to any party with a sense of justice and fairness – it creates damage for a lifetime, the growing destitution described elsewhere in this issue. So, when Nick Williams, the former economic adviser to the Prime Minister, said recently that taxes are going to have to rise because current spending plans are not credible without them, he reignited the most important moral question facing the cabinet. They can't go on cutting benefits and ignoring tax. They just can't. Indeed, I don't think Labour can survive as a major national force without changing direction on the winter fuel allowance, without rethinking a planned deeper round of welfare benefit cuts, and without spending more to tackle both poverty and its partner, crime. Starmer says in private that lifting the two-child benefit cap is his personal priority. So how to fund it? There are several solutions in this issue of the New Statesman. I have heard credible plans to expand the range of National Insurance to those who don't currently pay it – people living on capital income, pensioners, landlords – or to abolish class-2 National Insurance, the self-employed rate, and roll it into income tax. Even with offsets and mitigation to protect poorer pensioners, this could raise about £20bn, similar to the first Reeves Budget. Treasury people say this would be greatly preferable to risking trouble with the bond markets by loosening the fiscal rules. In politics, there are no final judgements. Democratic history offers an illimitable sequence of collapses, elegant or otherwise. Here and now, Labour is heading for one of those unless, very quickly, it speaks and acts a moral language of fairness, empathy and determination. We need a little anger. We need a little fire. The alternative is unthinkable. A government that allows destitution to spread may be many things but it is not a Labour government. [See also: Inside the Conservative Party's existential spiral] Related
Telegraph
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Even Karl Marx respected the rich more than Rachel Reeves
Labour owes more to Methodism than Marxism. Or so its general secretary from 1944 to 1962, Morgan Phillips, famously postulated. The Welsh ex-miner himself was not a paragon of Wesleyan virtues. Alongside his Labour colleagues, Nye Bevan and Richard Crossman, he sued The Spectator for libel in 1957 for suggesting that the threesome exhibited an insatiable capacity for downing whisky while attending a socialist conference in Venice. The Labour men won, and the magazine only narrowly avoided closure – Crossman's posthumously published diaries revealed The Spectator's claims were true. Nevertheless, a moralising streak has long been at the vanguard of Labour thinking, and the party's attacks on the rich ever since it first came to power have been at least as much motivated by the notion that accumulating great wealth is just wrong than by socialist ideology. Today's Labour Party is far removed from the muscular Christianity of the chapel. But its attitude to wealth and the rich displays a closer affinity to the moral judgments of stern church elders than to the strictures of Karl Marx. A secularised, bastardised version of Christian morality holds sway in the party, and indeed the wider Left. It sees riches as sinful, a moral failing that requires earthly retribution, or rather redistribution. But the quest for immodest terrestrial riches has arguably been the greatest engine of progress in human history. And one does not have to be a starry eyed pro-market zealot to believe this. It is something the 19th century German sage well understood. Surprising as it may sound, Marx and Friedrich Engels' The Communist Manifesto, published in London in 1848, contains one of the finest paeans to the achievements of the capitalist class ever penned: 'The bourgeoisie... has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals... 'The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. 'Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?' Ayn Rand, the author of the cult pro-capitalist novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, could have proudly put those words into one of her heroes speeches. Why was the very font of anti-capitalist thought championing capitalists? Marx's condemnation of the bourgeoisie was predominantly not a moral one. For our Karl, history is very much not just a tale of one damn thing after another. He had inculcated the pre-existing nostrum that history has a predestined direction and is shaped not by individual choices, but by vast impersonal forces. And capitalism is one of the essential stages, an unavoidable prerequisite, leading to the eventual communist nirvana. Marx believed that capitalism's overthrow would come about through its own success. The market – and this is where old Charlie got it spectacularly wrong – would eventually satiate all bourgeois demand. Overproduction, and counter-intuitively mechanisation (he was also quite wrong about this), would reduce the capitalists' profits. Marx's adoption of the labour theory of value – the idea that the worth of any good is determined by the amount of work put into it, a nostrum that was already losing its lustre during the lifetime of socialism's founding father – meant that the bourgeoisie would only have one option to maintain their riches. And that is scalping a larger share of what the workers' labour has produced. The eventual result of the proletariat's consequent immiseration would be world revolution. For many Marxists, the big question for the last 180 years has been, when will this crisis of capitalism come? Every downturn and every slump, the communists among us hope, may finally be corroboration of their apostle's creed. But somehow the markets always bounce back. The demise of the bourgeoisie has been endlessly foretold – and endlessly delayed. When some of those Labour figures most deeply pickled in Marxist dogma, people like Ken Livingstone, the former London mayor, state that socialism has not failed, but is yet to come, this is what they mean. It is not just a hopeful refrain that true socialism will make a comeback. It is a profound belief that Marx's grand schema is still working through its modes and history has not played its last hand yet. The Marxist Left – or at least some of them, communists as a breed are more schismatic than any Christian denomination – understand what capitalism has achieved. The most enlightened of them even appreciate that capitalists may still have a good long run left in them. But instead of this understanding, for today's Labour Party, the accumulation of wealth is a morality tale, or rather a saga of immorality. Those who become rich must somehow be perfidious and squalid. And thus wealth taxes, non-dom crackdowns, and VAT on school are the least that they deserve. The fact that such taxes make society poorer as a whole can safely be ignored as sinners must be punished. When Peter Mandelson proclaimed that he was 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy stinking rich', he wasn't actually speaking out of turn. That sentiment has a very good Left-wing pedigree, Marx would certainly have agreed.
Wall Street Journal
01-05-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
‘'I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer'' Review: Instruction Fit to Print
One of the lessons of ''I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer,'' Mary Beth Norton's delightful compendium of 17th-century advice to the lovelorn, is a sobering one to us today: Things that we think are binary and absolute have, historically, often been neither. Take marriage. Today you are either married or you are not. Those are the only possibilities. Yet for much of European history, until well into the 18th century in many places, being a little-bit married was routine. Marriage, under this conception, wasn't a one-time event. It was a process. There were usually four stages, all of them irreversible. First, a couple made a formal vow or commitment to each other to marry. Then came a public agreement and exchanging of tokens—typically a ring or a split coin. Then there was the ceremony and, finally, the consummation, or sexual congress. Because of this staggered process, it was possible to be in a marriage but not fully married. A 17th-century couple could, for instance, have made vows but skipped the religious ceremony, in which case their marriage would be legally considered 'valid but not legitimate.' If vows had been exchanged but parental consent withheld, the couple was in the awkward position of being neither married nor permitted to marry anyone else. Ever. Into this odd (to us) situation entered the genre now called advice-writing, the earliest example of which was found in the Athenian Gazette, or Casuistical Mercury, more commonly known as the Athenian Mercury. In ''I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer,'' Ms. Norton, a professor emerita of American history at Cornell University, brilliantly selects the most compelling—or bizarre—examples from this broadsheet, which John Dunton, a London printer, started in 1691. Dunton designed the paper to appeal to the customers of coffee shops, novel establishments where men met to sip that 'newfangled drink,' smoke and gossip. With two friends—including Samuel Wesley, the father of John and Charles Wesley, founders of Methodism—Dunton dreamed up 'the question project': Readers could anonymously write in with questions on any topic, and answers would be provided in subsequent editions. The first call for questions evoked such a huge mailbag that the weekly broadsheet quickly began to appear twice a week.
