India: The Land of Deprived Childhood by Jagdish N. Singh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19945/india-child-labor

A large number of Indian children… are still subjected to bonded labour and forced employment. India today has more than 33 million children under the age of 18 in work requiring hard labour.

The welfare of children has long been a concern in India. Aware of this need, the founding fathers of independent India in 1949 wrote a Constitution that prohibits employing children under the age of 14 in factories and other hazardous work (Article 24).

India’s Parliament has also tried to safeguard children’s rights by passing legislation . The Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986 makes employing a child a criminal offence.[1] Parliament has also enacted other laws to prohibit, identify and prosecute child labour.

India’s agriculture sector accounts for the majority (70%) of employed children. Child labour, regrettably, is used in almost all of the informal sectors of the Indian economy, including coal mining, and the diamond, fireworks, silk and carpet industries.

A 2003 Human Rights Watch report claims that children as young as five work for up to 12 hours a day, six to seven days a week, in the silk industry.

Official estimates for children working as domestic labourers and in restaurants is more than 2.5 million; some NGOs estimate the figure to be around 20 million.

As of September 2022, the US Department of Labor lists India in its “List of Goods Produced by Child Labor of Forced Labor,” with 25 types of goods produced by child labour.

The main reasons for child labour, clearly, are poverty, illiteracy and malnutrition. Out of India’s 217 million children, 49.9% are poor. Children in this category have little choice but to join the labour force.

August Unemployment Rate Jumps, Employment in June and July Revised Downward

https://mrctv.org/blog/craig-bannister/august-unemployment-rate-jumps-employment-june-and-july-revised-downward

In August, the unemployment rate jumped 0.3 points, from 3.5% 3.8%, as the number of long-term unemployed increased, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported Friday.

The nation’s unemployment rate jumped 0.3 percentage point to 3.8% in August, as the number of unemployed persons increased by 514,000 to 6.4 million.

Among the unemployed, the number of job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs increased by 294,000 to 2.9 million in August, offsetting a decrease of 280,000 in July.

The rise in the unemployment rate, coupled an increase in job losers, highlights ongoing challenges in the economy. Meanwhile, the number of persons employed part-time for economic reasons remained unchanged.

Key economic measures for August:

The number of unemployed persons increased by 514,000 from July.
Increases were recorded in both the number of persons unemployed less than 5 weeks, at 2.2 million, and the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more), at 1.3 million.
The long-term unemployed accounted for 20.3% of all unemployed persons.
Labor force participation rate rose by 0.2 percentage points, to 62.8%.

Only Thing Today’s Avant-Garde ‘Artists’ Challenge is Our Patience And some of their work is literally ‘wretched’ By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/03/only-thing-todays-avant-garde-artists-challenge-is-our-patience/

Let’s take a break from the depressing world of politics and talk for a moment about the equally depressing subject of the art world.

What is it about the word “art?” Pronounce it, and the IQ of susceptible folk is instantly halved. (I’ve seen cases where it is diminished by 87 percent). Normally sensible people who do not, as a rule, appreciate being being made fools of stand idly by as the chief art critic for The New York Times tells them that that a charlatan climbing naked up a scaffolding while applying vaseline to sensitive parts of his body is “the most important American artist of his generation.”

Instead of throwing something soft and rotting at such mountebanks, they nod solemnly and reach for their wallets. They are only too eager, when a stiffy arrives from the Museum of Modern Art or similar establishment, to don the soup and fish and buzz round to the super exclusive evening event where scores of beautiful people line up to sip the shampoo and admire a tank full of formaldehyde and a dead tiger shark.

What is it about the word “art” that endows it with this mind-and-character-wrecking property? Why does it induce incontinent gibbering, not to mention mind-boggling extravagance, among normally hard-headed souls?

A full answer would take us deep into the pathology of our time. It has something to do with what I’ve called elsewhere the institutionalization of the avant-garde, the contradictory project whereby the tics and outré attitudes of the avant-garde go mainstream. The half-comic, half-contemptible result is that ordinary bourgeois adults find themselves in the embarrassing position of celebrating the juvenile, anti-bourgeois antics of people who detest them.

Our misuse of the word “art” also has something to do with our age’s tendency to look to art for spiritual satisfactions traditionally afforded by religion. “In the absence of a belief in God,” Wallace Stevens observed, “poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”

John Singletary has a vision for one of America’s poorest, most crime-ridden cities By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/09/john_singletary_has_a_vision_for_one_of_americas_poorest_most_crimeridden_cities.html

Yesterday, I had a great conversation with John Singletary, who is running for Mayor of North Charleston, South Carolina. I came away very impressed with him. If he wins, by redirecting government funds to better causes, he might help break the poverty cycle in a city that has one of the worst crime problems in America and that has huge pockets of black poverty. However, I couldn’t help wondering whether government money, no matter how good the intentions behind it, can undo a situation that government money created in the first place.

Singletary, who was born and raised in North Charleston, is a Citadel graduate and a successful businessman. Despite having worked in places as far away as California, his heart and his home are in North Charleston. There are some things you need to know about North Charleston, not just on its own but also in the context of South Carolina and Charleston, to appreciate his concerns and understand his plans if elected.

South Carolina was a majority-black state almost from its inception until 1920. After the Civil War, Charleston’s population had a huge black majority. Beginning around 1920, though, the Great Northern Migration began, as blacks fled the South for economic opportunities in the North. Even today, the coastal part of the state, specifically Charleston, continues to hemorrhage black residents.

Globalists Resurrect Roman Censor to Police Public Morals By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/09/globalists_resurrect_roman_censor_to_police_public_morals.html

One of the most powerful and prestigious offices in the ancient Roman Republic was the censor.  It was the censor’s duty to conduct the census — an account of all the citizens and their properties, an appraisal of an individual Roman’s qualifications for certain honors and ranks, and a division of the people into distinct social classes.  Having the authorities both to assess tax liability and noble rank made the two censors who shared this office inherently powerful.  For this reason, the patricians (the ruling class) originally precluded the plebeians (the commoners) from ever obtaining the office.  The ruling class was not keen on empowering a commoner to decide who is worthy of being a patrician!

Over time, this duty to conduct an official census expanded to include other substantial powers.  Having the sole authority to determine whether a Roman citizen qualified for distinguished ranks and to adjudicate whether that citizen had committed any social infractions rendering him unworthy of retaining those ranks, the censors became de facto wardens of the public morals (the regimen morum).  The jurisdiction to regulate proper Roman character and habits and to judge those Romans found wanting made censors both revered and feared.  They were known as castigatores (chastisers) for their power to create and enforce public opinion through their granting or withholding of noble rank.  They were, in other words, ancient Rome’s original enforcers of “political correctness.”  This authority to regulate both the public and private lives of Roman citizens gave rise to the modern meanings of “censor” and “censorship.”

These immense powers to assess property, tax liability, qualification for noble rank, and general “political correctness” naturally established an additional power: the censors were responsible for administering Rome’s finances and overseeing public works.  As custodians of the public morals and regulators of the public’s taxes, the censors were given broad discretion to decide how to spend public money on roads, aqueducts, bridges, theaters, and temples.  They had a say over which Roman businessmen would be awarded lucrative contracts from the State and which kinds of laborers would benefit from new public works projects.  By controlling the flow of money and jobs, the censors could choose the “winners” and “losers” in the economy.

If these authoritarian powers sound remarkably familiar to Westerners today, that’s because Western governments have fully embraced the role of the ancient Roman censors — dividing society into deserving and undeserving classes, promulgating and enforcing “woke” public morals, and engaging in partisan tax-and-spend policies that reward certain industries and workforces over others.  Just as with Rome’s censors, our censors ostensibly work for the “public good.”  Unlike many of the illustrious Roman censors from two and a half millennia ago, though, today’s censors are not known for exhibiting exceptional character or honor.

Starvation: ‘The Invisible Genocide Weapon’ by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19941/starvation-armenians-artsakh

Several watchdog organizations… are accusing Azerbaijan of committing genocide against the 120,000 Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh. Historically known as Artsakh, this ancient Armenian region was brought under Azerbaijani rule in 2020.

Modern day hostilities between Armenia, an ancient nation and the first to adopt Christianity, and Azerbaijan, a Muslim nation that was created in 1918, began in September 2020, when Azerbaijan launched a war to capture Artsakh….

Once the September 2020 war began, Turkey quickly joined its Azerbaijani co-religionists against Armenia, even though the dispute did not concern it.

These Muslim groups committed massive atrocities. One included raping an Armenian female soldier and mother of three, before hacking off all four of her limbs, gouging out her eyes, and sticking one of her severed fingers inside her private parts.

The war ended in November 2020, with Azerbaijan gaining control of a significant portion of Artsakh.

“In the extreme southeastern part of Europe, known as the Caucasus, a silent genocide is looming. The Lachin Corridor that connects Armenia to Artsakh, the region in Azerbaijan where mainly Christian Armenians live, has been closed by the government for eight months. Supermarket shelves are empty; there is hardly any food, fuel, or medicine for the 120,000 Armenian Christians who live there, including 30,000 children and 20,000 seniors… a convoy of food and medicine has been standing in front of the border since July 25 [a month], but the International Red Cross is not allowed access to the inhabitants of Artsakh. According to journalists living in the area, most residents only get one meal a day. People in Artsakh queue for hours at night for bread, waiting for their daily rations. At the same time, sources within Artsakh report shooting at Armenians trying to harvest the land… in all probability bread will also soon be unavailable due to the shortage of fuel… Bakers can no longer heat their ovens.” — Sonja Dahlmans, Dutch journalist, ongehoordnederland.tv, August 24, 2023.

“There is an ongoing Genocide against 120,000 Armenians…[A] blockade… by the Azerbaijani security forces impeding access to any food, medical supplies, and other essentials should be considered a Genocide under Article II, (c) of the Genocide Convention: ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.’….Without immediate dramatic change, this group of Armenians will be destroyed in a few weeks.” — Luis Moreno Ocampo, former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, August 7, 2023.

Muslim regimes regularly make life intolerable for Christian minorities, apparently to force them to abandon their properties and leave.

A few weeks ago, the president of Iraq revoked a decade-old decree that granted Chaldean Patriarch Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako powers over Christian endowment affairs. “This is a political maneuver to seize the remainder of what Christians have left in Iraq and Baghdad and to expel them.” — Diya Butrus Slewa, human rights activist from Ainkawa, aina.org, July 13, 2023.

Former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback referred to the blockade as the latest attempt at “religious cleansing” of Christian Armenia… in his testimony, [he] said that this latest genocide is being “perpetrated with U.S.-supplied weaponry and backed by Turkey, a member of NATO.” If the U.S. does not act, “we will see again another ancient Christian population forced out of its homeland.” — catholicnewsagency.com, June 21, 2023.

Not only has U.S. diplomacy been ineffective for the besieged Armenians; it has actually exacerbated matters by allowing the aggressors to continue their atrocities.

“[T]he only thing the Washington-backed talks appear to have produced is the emboldenment of Azerbaijan’s aggression…. For over eight months, the region’s 120,000 Indigenous Armenians…have been deprived access to food, medicine, fuel, electricity, and water in what is nothing less than genocide by attrition…. When Washington-based talks resumed in June, Azerbaijan began shelling the region. In the months since, the International Committee of the Red Cross has been denied access to Karabakh—and later reported that an Armenian patient in its care had been abducted by Azerbaijani forces en route to Armenia for treatment. This is the predictable consequence of Washington’s insistence on negotiations amid Azerbaijan’s blockade of Artsakh and occupation of Armenian territory. It has signaled to Baku that its strategy of coercive diplomacy is working, disincentivizing de-escalation…” — Alex Galitsky and Gev Iskajyan, Armenian National Committee of America; Armenian National Committee of Artsakh, Newsweek, August 14, 2023.

Indeed, part of the façade of diplomacy is that Azerbaijan insists that the Christian Armenians of Artsakh are being treated no differently than Muslim Azerbaijanis—since all are citizens of Azerbaijan.

Clearly, negotiating simply bought the Azerbaijanis more time in which to starve the Armenians, and possibly another way for the United States to pretend it was “doing something” without actually doing anything –apart from allowing more savagery.

The results are clear: nearly every Armenian who fell into Azerbaijani captivity after the 2020 war has been persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, mutilated, decapitated or murdered. None of these acts has ever been punished. To the contrary, those who kill Armenians receive medals and are glorified in Azerbaijan.

“The Western press rarely writes about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Most reactions follow the line that it is not a religious conflict, but a claim by two countries over a disputed territory. Given the many examples that exist in which precisely religious buildings, tombs and inscriptions are systematically destroyed, it is difficult to maintain that this is the case.” — Sonja Dahlmans, ongehoordnederland.tv, August 24, 2023.

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Israel is always in the news. Hardly a day goes by without shrieking headlines about protests, counter protests and terror. That is striking considering that in 2023 the population is 9,174, 520 people with a global ranking of 98. Per capita there is not a single country with such dazzling research and development of medicine, technology, economy, agriculture, and social institutions which enhance the life and prospects of billions of citizens throughout the globe. Furthermore, Israel’s unique cuisine and its beautiful beaches, arts, music and theater enchant tourists from all over the world including formerly hostile Arab/Moslem nations.

Fortunately, all the foregoing is catalogued by Michael Ordman almost every week. rsk

 

 

 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Whole genome cancer detection. It wasn’t long ago since the genome was fully decoded. Now, Israel’s C2i Genomics (see here previously) has teamed up with Tel Aviv’s Sourasky (Ichilov) Medical Center take blood test data and perform whole genome minimal residual disease (MRD) testing to detect recurring cancer early.

https://www.israel21c.org/ai-cancer-startup-collaborates-with-top-israeli-hospital/  https://c2i-genomics.com/

Biopsy the cells. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s MetaSight Diagnostics is developing fast, low-cost mass spectrometry to perform vast amounts of serum biopsies of the metabolome (molecules in a cell). These can detect cancer, liver disease, cardiovascular and neurological diseases etc. MetaSight is working with KSM (Maccabi’s R&D).

https://metasightdx.com/  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wsHb4l7HXc

Light-activated cancer treatment gets US support. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s ImPact Biotech has received Orphan treatment designation from the US FDA for its Padeliporfin VTP in Pancreatic Cancer. ImPact stands for IMmune Photo Activated Cancer Treatment and VTP is Vascular Targeted Photodynamic therapy.

https://impactbiotech.com/impact-biotech-receives-fda-orphan-drug-designation-for-padeliporfin-vtp-in-pancreatic-cancer/   https://impactbiotech.com/

US NIH funds Israeli radiation therapy. The U.S. National Institutes of Health has granted Israel’s Pluri (previously Pluristem) $4.2 million to develop its PLX-R18 (see here) as a treatment for Hematopoietic Acute Radiation Syndrome – a deadly disease that can result from nuclear disasters and radiation exposure.

https://pluri-biotech.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/1689056470_PLUR_NIAID_ARS_PR_FINAL-2.pdf

https://pluri-biotech.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Pluri_PR_re_BMT_Article_FINAL_accessible.pdf

Transforming clinical best practices. (TY OurCrowd) Israel’s Quai.MD is developing an AI- platform that improves hospital patient care, reduces costs and saves doctors’ time. The process is tailored to the patient and hospital. Partners include Mayo Clinic & MUSC. Initial focus is the diagnosis of patients with chest pain.

https://nocamels.com/2023/08/ai-platform-helps-diagnose-chest-pain-swiftly-and-accurately/  https://quai.md/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tiv_hbQY8Is

11,000 focused ultrasound procedures. (TY OurCrowd) A 5-year study of patients has proved the success of the focused ultrasound treatment from Israel’s Insightec (see here previously). It improved quality of life with no progressive or delayed complications. Insightec’s technology has been used 11,000+ times globally.

https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/focused-ultrasound-treatment-is-proven-an-effective-treatment-to-curb-tremor-for-at-least-five-years-898536012.html

Brain stimulation eases ADHD symptoms. In a small clinical study, Israeli and UK researchers found non-invasive brain stimulation improved the condition of 55% of unmedicated ADHD children aged 6-12. Only 17% of the placebo control group improved. 64% of the treated children retained the improvement weeks later.

https://en.huji.ac.il/news/hope-children-adhd-new-study-finds-non-invasive-brain-stimulation-treatment-can

Next gen blood test device gets US approval. (TY OurCrowd) The US FDA has approved the upgraded 15-minute bacteria vs virus diagnostic blood test device from Israel’s MeMed (see here previously). The new MeMed BV is now suitable for urgent care centers, as it avoids the clotting and spinning process of the original.

https://www.me-med.com/press_release/fda-clears-memed-bv-direct-from-whole-blood/

Approval for smart colonoscopy device. (TY Atid-EDI) MAGENTIQ-COLO from Israel’s MAGENTIQ-EYE (see here previously) has been cleared by the US FDA and Israel’s AMAR, and received Europe’s CE Mark. The AI-assisted device is significantly more efficient in detecting adenomas (pre-cancerous polyps).

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfpmn/pmn.cfm?ID=K223473  https://www.magentiq.com/

https://vimeo.com/540882393   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4HtDuXWAqo

Re-educate your muscles. Israel’s Neuro Trigger is developing a powered muscle stimulator to repeatedly contract muscles to increase their range of motion and prevent retardation. Neuro trigger has received a BIRD grant (see below) to develop an eyelid pacemaker that restores blinking to those with facial paralysis.

https://www.nt-med.com/

Remote health care for Madrid region. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Essence SmartCare (see here previously) has won a contract from the Community of Madrid governmental region. Essence will use its digital AI systems to replace outdated analog remote care services for 100,000 senior citizens and disabled individuals.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-community-of-madrid-selects-essence-smartcare-to-provide-advanced-remote-care-technologies-for-senior-and-disabled-citizens-301873901.html

Why the Palestinian Arabs continue their war against Israel They cannot win, but it’s not about winning. Henry Kissinger said it best. Moshe Dann

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/376446

Despite offers of statehood ever since the Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995, amplified by then-PMs Ehud Barak and, even more by Ehud Olmert, Palestinian Arab leaders have consistently refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist. The question is, why? They insist that all of what was “Palestine” belongs to them, and that Israel must be destroyed; it’s explicit in the PLO Covenant and the Hamas Charter. Still, logically they could take whatever Israel offered, and do whatever they wanted later.

The answer is provided by Henry Kissinger’s perspective of the war in Vietnam.

“The North Vietnamese and Vietcong, fighting in their own country, needed merely to keep in being forces sufficiently strong to dominate the population after the United States tired of the war. We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition, our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. ”

That is the strategy of the PLO, Hamas, and Jihadists. As they see it, they are in a war of attrition which requires constant terrorism and no compromises.As long as Israel does not destroy them — and instead negotiates with them — they see this as winning. And, they continue to receive support.

Israeli Arab political parties, despite their alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, decided to become members of the Knesset not only for financial rewards, but to support Israeli concessions in the Oslo Accords, and legitimizing the arch terrorist, Yasser Arafat. Although criticized by Hamas, the PLO argued that they should take advantage of every opportunity to consolidate power as a tactical move, while continuing to support terrorism and promote anti-Semitism as a strategy.

Democracy and the Crisis of Authority by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19940/france-democracy-crisis-authority

Marseille, France’s second-largest city and biggest port, is depicted as a European version of Chicago in the Prohibition times with gang warfare, shootings, protest strikes by police and tension among “communities” routine features of daily life.

The usually tame French media describe the situation as a “challenge to law and order”… President Emmanuel Macron goes further by warning about a “loss of authority” that he intends to correct by as yet unknown measures.

Loss of authority isn’t limited to Marseille gangs engaged in war over a bigger share of the drug market… Authority is also under constant challenge in Paris itself, where one could see numerous shop windows shattered by protesters in the recent riots against a two-year increase in the legal minimum retirement age. Even once sleepy cities such as Nîmes and Limoges have been affected by “loss of authority”.

However, Macron’s first moves and the ideas his entourage are circulating look more like dancing around the issue rather than addressing its root causes.

Where does authority come from?

The classical answer is that it comes from the two key tools of persuasion and coercion that a properly constituted government has for imposing its decisions. Beyond that, however, one may argue that authority emanates from continuity of rules and mores, the accumulation of a cultural, including religious, heritage that transcends here-and-now considerations.

Macron tries to address that problem by talking of “duties” as opposed to “rights”, something that contradicts the core values of the French Revolution. In the French Revolution’s worldview, citizens, regardless of whether they do their duties or not, have inalienable rights. In Macron’s redefinition, a citizen’s rights may look like rewards for duties performed.

But who sets those rights and duties?

Can one talk of duties in the service of an autocratic regime that one hasn’t chosen?

Oliver Anthony and the woke hatred for the working class Anthony’s genius has been to expose the rank classism of the Dems and their hangers-on.Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/09/02/oliver-anthony-and-the-woke-hatred-for-the-working-class/

The thing I love most about Oliver Anthony, aside from that apocalyptic timbre in his country singing, is that he’s forced the elite to unmask itself. We live under elites-in-denial. ‘We’re not the establishment!’, cry the movers and shakers of the upper middle-classes, even as they force your kids to genuflect to gender ideology, screw up economic growth with their climate-change hysteria, and dictate with Caesar-like conviction what is and isn’t sayable in the modern town square of social media. And yet in their foaming response to Mr Anthony, they’ve told on themselves. They’ve revealed that they know perfectly well who this red-bearded warbler from Farmville, Virginia is singing about in his rebellious ballads against The Man: it’s them.

Anthony has become a viral sensation since his song ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ hit the internet. His pained anthem – think Nashville with a dash of Nietzsche – is No1 in the US. He’s hob-nobbing with Joe Rogan. He’s fawned over by top Republicans (much to his irritation. ‘I. Don’t. Support. Either. Side’, is his wise take on America’s polarised politics.) And he’s generated miles of commentary as coastal elites who normally only encounter men in beards when a hip barista hands them their seven-dollar coffee try to work out why this fella from Farmville has hit a nerve.

In short, his protest song has done what protest songs are supposed to. It’s shaken shit up. It’s rattled our rulers. That’s the brilliant irony of someone like Billy Bragg writing in the Guardian of all places that Anthony’s song isn’t truly ‘blue collar’ and thus is not a proper protest song. Mr Bragg, that Anthony offends a cultural turncoat like you, the Eighties outsider turned bien pensant bore, and that he horrifies the plummy scribes of the Guardian who probably think Farmville is an iPhone game, is all the proof we need that this is a protest song, and a good one.

Anthony’s genius is that he has forced our elites-in-denial to do what elites must occasionally do: demonise dissent. Just as old establishments bristled at Elvis’s sexy hips or the Sex Pistols’ anarchical antics or Sinéad O’Connor’s blasphemies against Rome, so the new establishment loses sleep over Anthony’s angry crooning on ‘bullshit pay’, high taxes and obese folk who live off welfare. He’s ‘punch[ing] down on the poor’, says Bragg in the Guardian – which is rich from a newspaper that spent the past seven years raging against the dumb gammon (ie, pigs) who voted for Brexit.

Anthony embodies country’s ‘nastiest impulses’, tuts Time magazine. His songs feel ‘parochial to the point of bigotry’, it says. The Independent’s culture reporter damns ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ as ‘doggerel’. Worse, it’s ‘artless’, a ‘blunt-force hissy fit’. That’s what The Man has always said about the musical revolts against him – that they’re gauche, trashy, with a huge chip on their shoulders. Blue-rinse Christians said it about punk; now twentysomething woke graduates say it about Oliver Anthony.

One of the funniest sights of recent weeks has been liberal columnists poring over Anthony’s lyrics and class-splaining why he’s not a Real Protest Singer. Listen to Woody Guthrie, not this, they plead, like those right-on whites in the 1990s who were aghast that some blacks seemed to prefer the nihilistic swagger of NWA to the righteous anti-racism of Public Enemy.