Where the waters turned

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FDA declares cyclospora outbreak ‘over’, though its exact origin remaineth unknown. {AP 11 September}

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/article/us-officials-declare-an-end-to-record-setting-cyclospora-outbreak-but-its-origin-is-still-unknown/

Yet another particularly sordid chapter in the ongoing and deliberate collapse of food safety standards in Trumpistan. Worse is to come —

FTA: The largest cyclospora food poisoning outbreak in U.S. history is over, U.S. health officials said Friday.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials said they are confident that all recalled iceberg lettuce related to this specific outbreak is off the market.

Nearly 13,000 reported cyclospora cases were tied to the multistate outbreak, federal officials say. They represent the bulk of an unprecedented surge in the parasitic diarrheal illness this year.

Even with the outbreak deemed over, several questions remain, including about its origin. The parasite is spread through human feces, and it still isn’t clear how sewage could have contaminated enough food to sicken so many people.

“This contamination can happen if produce is grown in soil or comes into contact with water that has been contaminated,” said Ellen Shumaker, director of outreach for a North Carolina State University food safety program, Safe Plates.

Since May 1, the government has received reports of nearly 20,000 lab-confirmed cases, or more than 16 times the number reported during the same period last year. More than 6,100 suspected cases also have been reported.

The worst previous year in the U.S. for infections was 2019, when about 4,700 illnesses were reported nationally.

This year’s surge in cases was dominated by an outbreak in 21 states linked to iceberg lettuce. But there are thousands of other cases that have not been linked to that outbreak.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

The plague of Summer 2026

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E-bike and e-scooter injuries dubbed ‘the plague of Summer 2026’ by a leading paediatric trauma surgeon. {Boston 25 8 September}

https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/25-investigates-pediatric-trauma-surgeon-calls-e-bike-e-scooter-injuries-plague-summer-2026/676GWX24UFCAFC3VGZKEV5A3OI/

Not at liberty to divulge details, but I can confirm that the younger siblings of one of the deceased children mentioned in the article continue to terrorise our community, and their pitiful excuses for parents have not shown the slightest remorse. Belligerent fools who behave as though they were living on an isolated ranch rather than in suburban Boston. Ban the bloody bikes altogether.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

The harvest of mistrust

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First US measles deaths of 2026 recorded in Pennsylvania; Gov. Shapiro lambasts RFK Jr. for spreading disinformation on vaccines. {CNN 25 August}

https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/25/health/measles-deaths-pennsylvania

The article does not expressly state so, though the circumstances strongly suggest these were Amish folk: notorious for evading all sorts of obligations — paying Social Security and Medicare taxes, sending their children to compulsory high school education, serving on juries, registering for the draft, and vaccinating their offspring — that most of the rest of us are not at liberty to avoid. As a child on a road trip with family in the late 1980s, whilst visiting Lancaster County, it was surreal to observe people living as though the seventeenth century had never ended. I am no longer certain I regard them as quite so quaint and charming these days, all things considered. — 

FTA: Both of the Pennsylvania deaths were in residents of Lancaster County. Health officials said they will not release any additional details.

Pennsylvania has confirmed 393 measles cases in 28 counties in 2026, Bogen said in a news conference Tuesday. Roughly half of them have been in Lancaster County, she said.

About 20% of cases in Pennsylvania this year have required hospitalization. Among measles cases confirmed by the health department, none have been in people who have received both recommended doses of the MMR vaccine, she added.

The highly contagious virus has continued its historic resurgence in the US this year, with a second record-breaking year in a row. The country has recorded more cases than 2,700 cases this year, more than any other year since 1991 – surpassing a grim milestone that was just topped last year.

The disease was declared eliminated in the US in 2000, but more cases have been recorded in the past year and a half than there have been in the previous 25 years combined. Experts expect that the US will soon lose its elimination status, the recognition by the World Health Organization that measles is no longer transmitting regularly within a country.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

#MAGA: health insurance costs in Trumpistan already soaring, but just wait until 2027

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Health insurance costs in the former United States are set to rise another eleven per cent or more in 2027. {IBT 21 August}

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/rising-health-coverage-costs-american-workers-1815469

Words fail me in conveying the full measure of my exhaustion with this cruel and convoluted racket we designate ‘healthcare’, here in this, the so-called ‘land of the free and home of the brave’. Healthcare is merely one symptom of a much broader institutional decay. Another manifestation — and one among many — of an empire that hath grown too overpopulated, too sprawling, too byzantine in its complexity, and which must, in consequence, inevitably fall. Collapse is well under way, if we have not figured it out by now (most are in one stage or another of denial though nearly all sense something hath gone grievously awry). 

American healthcare hath stood as a purely tyrannous engine for at least the past forty-to-fifty years (give or take), and finds itself now crumbling piecemeal beneath its own accumulated burden. Whether one recognises it or not, collapse doth increasingly show itself in every quarter of our lives: the rank incompetence, the pervasive avarice, the worsening sickness and addiction, and the coarsening of public discourse and civic life have together exacted so heavy a toll that there can be no other outcome but the dissolution of this empire. Considerable bloodshed and tragedy shall yet ensue — and a slew of logistical perplexities will have to be sorted out — before #Muricans finally throw in the towel en masse  upon this so-called ‘Great American Experiment’, and resolve to go each their own way. It was a good run before it all descended into perdition.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Drought’s harvest

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West Nile virus surges in #Murica; drought concentrates mosquitoes around shrinking pools of water, raising risk of transmission. {The Independent 18 August}

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/west-nile-virus-mosquito-cases-deaths-us-b3034893.html

Counter-intuitive though it may seem, drought increases transmission by concentrating mosquitoes and birds around ever-shrinking water sources.

FTA: The majority of cases occur in the summer, when warm and west conditions are at their peak.

While mosquitoes thrive in these conditions, experts say climate change-driven drought in Arizona and across the West has actually helped the disease spread.

Drought means that mosquitoes breed around smaller bodies of water, giving more opportunity for the virus to spread between them.

“Drought conditions can paradoxically increase West Nile virus transmission because it concentrates mosquitoes and birds (West Nile virus is a bird virus, first) around shrinking water sources, increasing transmission risk,” Matthew Aliota, a professor at the University of Minnesota, who specializes in these kinds of viruses, previously told The Independent.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

COVID on the uptick again in a nation that learnt nothing from the pandemic

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COVID-19 rears its ugly head once more this summer, though ‘evidence of growing herd immunity’ may likewise be present. {NPR 14 August}

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/14/nx-s1-5927115/summer-vaccine-covid-19-surge

Fear not: the government of Trumpistan has matters thoroughly in hand —

FTA: Unlike previous years, the CDC hasn't issued updated recommendations for the vaccines because of litigation over the Trump administration's efforts to overhaul immunizations in the U.S. The administration no longer recommends that everyone aged 6 months and older routinely get an annual shot.

But major medical groups still do recommend it. And insurers have indicated they will keep covering vaccines. The shots are likely to remain available for free through government programs like the Vaccines for Children program.

Public health experts worry that conflicting messages will cause confusion, discouraging people from getting another shot.

"The message is that COVID vaccine and flu vaccine will be available, they're covered by insurers, they're recommended by medical societies. People should get them and get them for their kids," says Clare Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, which advocates for immunization programs.

On second thoughts… perhaps, just when nobody is expecting it, a newer and more lethal strain of COVID shall emerge — resistant to existing vaccines and more readily transmissible than prior strains — to wreak havoc anew, as though 2020 were repeating itself in full. A karmic reckoning visited upon those belligerent individuals who still have not finished crying and fearmongering about masks, social distancing, vaccination, and ‘muh freedumb’, and who did so much to prolong the pandemic with their lack of cooperation. Verily, this nation hath been tempting providence through its wholesale rejection of science and reason, and through its restoration to the presidency of the very incompetent imbecile who so catastrophically mismanaged the pandemic’s initial wave. People no longer trouble themselves even to wash their hands, let alone don masks whilst unwell or extend to others the most rudimentary courtesy of physical distance — that very simple concept somehow seems lost on most everybody now, even the few and far among thee who actually are well-meaning.

Then again, it need not even be COVID: the next major public-health emergency — whatever form it ultimately assumes — shall find America considerably less prepared than circumstances demand. So many possibilities, more so now than in decades thanks to the dominant white working-class electorate deciding to return an elderly felon, probable paedophile, and certified destroyer of nations to the presidency; and that orange motherf**ker’s subsequent decision to place foxes (led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) in charge of the proverbial henhouse that is public health and safety. We have not, of course, even addressed here the irreversible damage this cabal is inflicting upon national security, human rights, the environment, America’s international standing, or the global and domestic economies alike.

The people in our lives who cast their votes for this man — particularly those who did so three times over — are going to be brought to understand that America’s reputation in the world is never going to be restored. At least not in our lifetimes. History has a habit of rendering its own verdicts. Whether they acknowledge it or not, those who empowered this administration shall forever be obliged to live with the consequences of that choice. Something along the order of another pandemic — one perhaps two or three times more devastating than the COVID pandemic of 2020–22 — would likely prove insufficient to induce some ninety-five per cent of these individuals ever to concede their error in following this reprobate president. They voted as they did out of pure spite, and each shall go to their grave with spiteful hearts, unsatiated by whatever fleeting thrills Daddy Trump furnished them in their miserable, grievance-filled lives.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

The cost of complacency

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The FDA, failing the nation, conducted fewer than one-twentieth of the foreign inspections required by law over the past decade. {CBS News 12 August}

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taylor-farms-mexico-fda-inspection-cyclosporiasis-outbreak/

Predictably, the farm in Mexico linked to the ongoing cyclospora outbreak had not been inspected since 2019. Do not expect any improvement any time soon — only further deterioration.

FTA: The Food and Drug Administration conducted just under 1,000 foreign food safety inspections in 2025, and the farm in Mexico believed to be at the center of the ongoing cyclosporiasis outbreak in the U.S. was not one of them. 

A federal law enacted to prevent diseased and dirty food from reaching Americans' plates requires the FDA to carry out nearly 20 times that many foreign inspections each year. But the FDA hasn't come close to meeting the congressional mandate — or even 10% of it — in the 10 years it has been in place, spanning administrations led by both political parties. 

FDA officials have described the requirement as unrealistic, but have never asked Congress to revise it. A lower foreign inspection target the agency deemed necessary to safeguard foreign imports is still nearly five times higher than the number of inspections conducted last year. 

Congress, meanwhile, has not increased the agency's food safety budget to outpace or keep up with inflation, and widespread layoffs during the first year of President Trump's second term squeezed resources further.  

The rate of inspections has gotten markedly worse amid those reductions, with foreign food safety inspections falling by 29% from 2024. Outside of the COVID-19 pandemic, last year's inspection count was the lowest since 2011. Early numbers for 2026 show that the agency is on track to inspect a similar number this year.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

The deficit of a dying empire

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US budget deficit soars to its highest level since March 2021; tariff refunds accounting for a fair portion of the increase. {CNBC 12 August}

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/12/us-budget-deficit-surged-in-july-to-highest-level-since-march-2021.html

FTA: The July shortfall totaled $432.3 billion, up some 48% from the same period a year ago and the largest monthly deficit since March 2021.

Medicare expenses for the month totaled $174 billion, up from $103 billion in June and now at $955 billion for the full year. It was the single largest expenditure in July, well ahead of the $141 billion spent on Social Security and $104 billion in net interest on the national debt.

Tariff refunds also hit the budget, costing $33 billion as the administration continues to provide rebates for levies that the Supreme Court ruled illegal. Additionally, the budget took a $99 billion hit because the first of the month was a nonbusiness day, accelerating various benefits outlays as well as Supplemental Security Income and Medicare payments.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

A nation that cannot afford to be ill

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JG Wentworth: Ninety-two per cent of Americans surveyed are delaying or forgoing medical care due to soaring costs. {The Independent 3 August}

https://www.the-independent.com/us/money/us-medical-costs-doctors-health-insurance-b3026479.html

As the former United States descends by degrees into oblivion, the number of citizens destined to perish over the ensuing five to ten years — deaths that would otherwise have been entirely preventable — as a consequence of various collapse-related causes shall prove nothing short of catastrophic. Our healthcare system, together with virtually every other system of governance and administration, hath grown too unwieldy and unmanageable by far. The country itself  — nay, empire — is increasingly ungovernable. The people largely detest one another, and altogether too many among us are not going to lift so much as a finger in the aid of a neighbour as this collapse continues to accelerate. 

And is the health care industry really doing its part to help, or were all those conspiracy theorists rather correct all these years when they claimed insurance companies derive greater profit from the sick and the dying than the healthy and the living? Verily, it is not even an open question anymore — not under a regime so shamelessly mercenary, so thoroughly beholden to corporate cronyism, as the one which the American electorate, with a combination of folly, masochism and self-destructive impulse, restored to power in 2024. Trump and the GOP may give occasional lip service, and may even float spurious proposals ostensibly to remedy this healthcare emergency, yet scarcely even a pretence remains that this administration exists for any purpose other than to serve the interests of a constellation of entities —  ranging from the corrupted health care and insurance industries, to deranged neo-fascists organisations such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, to the Saudis, to Putin’s Russia, to tyrannical technocrats of the order of Elon Musk, and so forth. All of them invested in impoverishing and killing Americans.

Sorry (not sorry) to keep reiterating this point: what y’all voted for, #Murica! After ten years of this unrelenting nightmare, I am more convinced than ever that most of ‘y’all’ are never going to learn your bloody lesson.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

The fragile weight of hope

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Washington Post editorial: ‘The arrogance of Trump’s vaccine policy’. {11 August}

https://wapo.st/4xAzGzx

FTA: Previously, the government recommended universal childhood vaccines for 18 illnesses. Trump’s schedule reduces that to 11 and recommends administering them at separate medical visits “to the maximum extent feasible,” stressing “maximal parental choice.”

That would further erode Americans’ faith in lifesaving vaccines and undermine herd immunity.

In the Oval Office, Trump claimed that the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine might be “quite lethal,” and that if the components were delivered separately, they would be “not at all lethal.”

The claim is irresponsible, possibly deadly. The MMR vaccine has been available in its combined form since the early 1970s, and research has repeatedly affirmed its safety. It’s also not possible to simply administer the vaccine as three separate shots. Developing such an option would take years of clinical trials.

Yet Trump’s assertion might convince parents to forgo the vaccine at a time when measles is spreading at its highest levels in more than three decades.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

The long summer

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NOAA: July 2026 was the hottest month on record in the continental US, breaking the Dust Bowl record from 1936. {AP 10 August}

https://apnews.com/article/hottest-month-july-climate-change-4a9d612281485356103631f0f09b61af

FTA: The contiguous United States sizzled to its hottest month ever last month, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

July averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit (24.94 degrees Celsius) across the Lower 48 states, eclipsing the Dust Bowl’s July 1936 by an eighth of a degree. Records go back to 1895.

“It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl, which we are in this case,” said meteorologist Jeff Masters of Yale Climate Connections. “And that was a crazy sort of situation where you put tens of millions of people in motion. You had this great migration because of the drought and the heat that hit the center of the U.S. — just a cataclysmic event in U. S. history. If we’re exceeding records from The Dust Bowl, that says that we’re in deep trouble.”

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

The bite that changed everything

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Researchers confirm rare tick-borne Bourbon virus killed a Long Island resident this past April. {Outbreak News Today 2 August}

https://outbreaknewstoday.substack.com/p/new-york-the-bourbon-virus-and-lone

Rare, for the time being anyway. FTA: 

The Bourbon virus is transmitted through the common lone star tick, and could soon begin to complicate diagnoses if it becomes more prevalent this summer and in coming years, researchers warn.

Symptoms of Bourbon virus include fever, fatigue, rash, headache, body aches and nausea. Because there is no commercially available diagnostic test, doctors have a difficult time identifying it.

Marcos and co-authors stress that for clinicians, the results from their study “highlight the need for expanded viral surveillance, clinical testing and assay development to improve clinical decision-making and inform tick-borne disease epidemiology and vector management.”

He added, “Without identifying the cause of an infection, the chances of developing accurate diagnostic tests or effective treatments are minimal. That is why it is so important to first understand the true impact of the virus in high-risk areas.”

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

The last affordable dose

Millions to pay more for prescriptions after the Trump regime ends Medicare drug subsidy programme begun under President Biden. {NYT 28 July}

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/business/medicare-drug-subsidies-part-d.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1VA.KJMX.72i9kl1BKhwW&smid=url-share

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

When the lifeline begins to fade

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American Red Cross reports blood supplies are at crisis level: ‘less than a one-day national supply of type O positive blood’. {Axios 28 July}

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/28/us-blood-supply-health-red-cross-donate

The Red Cross attributes the scarcity to a confluence of ‘extreme heat, bad air quality and "widespread foodborne illnesses"’ — and, undoubtedly, those are contributing factors. What cannot be quantified, but is increasingly evident, is that Americans today hate one another. We have lived in a cold civil war for years, and it is difficult to believe that such deep social and political antagonism hath no effect upon acts of altruism, particularly where many may imagine that one of their designated enemies could ultimately benefit. At the very least, it is a question worth asking: whether reduced charitable giving could be owed to a populace that hath grown more militant in its beliefs and less tolerant of those outside its orbit. The present trajectory gives exactly zero reasons for optimism.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Liberty under examination

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‘The Trump administration is trying to get medical records from emergency room visits through the Consumer Product Safety Commission, or CPSC.’ {The New Republic 27 July}

https://newrepublic.com/post/213549/trump-admin-hospitals-emergency-room-records

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

The hidden cost of fresh produce

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Poll suggests large numbers of Americans are changing their eating habits due to cyclospora outbreak. {CBS News 26 July}

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cyclospora-outbreak-fda-opinion-poll/?ftag=CNM-00-10aab7e&linkId=986445447

Tellingly, Republican voters tend to approve of the job the Trumpist-occupied FDA is doing, whilst other Americans do not. At almost any point in the past, it would be Democratic voters expressing more faith in a given government agency in an emergency. But this is Trumpistan now, and the GOP is not the same party it once was in normal times. All told, who can be trusted anymore? Neither government nor private industry nor individuals. And the older I get, the more I consider eating to be a chore and a necessary evil.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Teaching abstinence, cutting answers

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Trump regime shifts teen pregnancy policy to abstinence and marriage, echoing Project 2025's theocratic vision. {NYT 22 June}

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/22/us/politics/teen-pregnancy-prevention-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.zlA.Ha1r.i8N3P--W_B9M&smid=url-share

As one who believes our world is already profoundly overpopulated, and that humanity's present trajectory is environmentally unsustainable, I have no desire to see more teenagers becoming parents… or most anyone else. Bringing a child into the world ought to be among the most carefully considered decisions any person ever makes, not something undertaken casually or because of social pressure, religious dogma, or political ideology.

Suggesting that teenagers delay sexual activity is not, in and of itself, unreasonable. Expecting abstinence, however — particularly as the centrepiece of public policy — is another matter entirely. Decades of evidence tell us that comprehensive sex education and reliable access to contraception are far more effective at reducing unintended teenage pregnancies than abstinence-only programmes. Teen pregnancy rates have fallen dramatically over recent decades, and access to contraception is absolutely the reason why. It works, and it ought to be readily available to anyone who needs it without any shame or guilt.

Alas, the Christian Nationalists (or ‘Christofascists’) will never be satisfied with that conclusion because abstinence is not truly the destination they seek. Their broader vision places marriage and childbearing at the centre of young adulthood, reflecting a social order more reminiscent of the nineteenth century than the twenty-first. Modern societies are more complex than agrarian communities of centuries past; young adults spend longer in education, enter stable careers later, and face housing costs and economic pressures unknown to previous generations. Encouraging earlier marriage and parenthood does not resolve those realities; it does not merely ignore reality, it openly defies it.

Ideology is increasingly replacing evidence. Public-health policy ought to be judged by measurable outcomes rather than theological preference. If a programme demonstrably reduces unintended pregnancies, improves maternal health, and gives young people greater control over their futures, abandoning it for ideological reasons strikes me as not merely profoundly irresponsible, but sinister in its intent.

Humanity already consumes resources at a rate the planet cannot sustain, whilst climate change increasingly demonstrates that ecological limits are not theoretical abstractions. Obviously some level of reproduction is necessary to keep the species from extinction, but we should be encouraging thoughtful, deliberate parenthood, not treating reproduction as a cultural or political obligation. Bringing children into the world should be an act of responsibility, not ideology, and I do not believe every man or woman deserves the privilege (another rant for another day).

I predict, within a few years, America shall begin seeing teenage pregnancy rates climb once more as comprehensive sex education and access to contraception continue to be undermined. When that day comes, we shall know exactly who bears responsibility. After all, this is what y'all voted for, #Muricans.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

“Lettuce celebrate... mmm, maybe not just yet”

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“Fruit and vegetable producer Taylor Fresh Foods says it is voluntarily removing all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico from the U.S. market amid an ongoing cyclosporiasis outbreak across the country that has sickened more than 1,600 people.” {ABC News 19 July}

https://abcnews.com/GMA/News/taylor-farms-amid-cyclosporiasis-outbreak/story?id=134846473&cid=social_twitter_abcn

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

The battle no one wanted to fight again

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Seven American aid workers quarantined in Kenya after Ebola exposure. {WP 18 July}

https://wapo.st/4vAlqp2

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Muscles, mirrors, and make-believe

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Closet homosexuality, perhaps? — Inside #MAGA’s creepy obsession with testosterone as a marker of national strength. {The Telegraph 18 July}

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/4c55efbff4de55b1

Truth be told, I may be one of those ‘low T’ men: I am pale, anaemic, underweight, a lifelong smoker and drinker, and I hate exercising anything other than my mind. The only reason to believe otherwise is that I have a very manly voice: I have been told at certain times that I should be in radio, and did consider attending broadcast school when I was considering my college options. Perhaps I should have pursued it, but even thirty years ago it was clear that radio was no longer a growth industry (the Telecommunications Act of that very year, 1996, ruined it). More pertinently, I also lacked greatly in confidence, as a childhood of constantly being made to feel inferior to peers will do that to a human being. I have never been athletic, cut out for military service, and cannot fight my way out of a wet paper bag. Nor hath any of this ever bothered me very much, apart from the lack of confidence in myself and much regret over lacking a backbone to stand up to more than a few motherf**kers who should have been put in their place. 

Perhaps my nature hath bothered some other folks I have been unfortunate enough to know over the course of this thankless life, but they may kindly kiss my Anglo-Saxon ass. What the hell do I care about ‘measuring up’ physically to other men, when most other men are complete and total f**king bores and are nothing to emulate? I have never cared what other men look like, do not like most of them on any level, and it is so nonsensical and a bit peculiar to my, admittedly unorthodox, brain that anybody would. Beyond basic biology, I often wonder why women are attracted to us. On the whole, we are ugly creatures, inside and out.

Frankly, I have a hard time imagining how all these men can be so obsessed with their manhood, and the vitality of other men, and there not be some pent-up sexual frustration at play. How can so many men be endlessly preoccupied with other men's bodies and sex lives, yet insist this is simply normal masculine, heterosexual behaviour? I do not even know if I can explain in a paragraph or two, but it is just so bloody gross to me. Bodybuilding in particular… yuck. These fellows spend half their lives admiring themselves in mirrors and spending the other half evaluating other men's physiques, and we are supposed to think this is the epitome of manhood? People are too caught up in other people’s affairs to begin with, but having to engage in virtual dick-measuring contests all the time is not something I am interested in, particularly not at forty-eight.

Like most of these moral panics the extremes of American politics cook up, there is a basis of truth. Falling testosterone levels are a scientifically proven phenomenon, and may well contribute to why many men — to my ears, at least — my age and under have high, effeminate voices now. Have we noticed that not many men have distinctive voices anymore? I notice it most when watching baseball games: nearly all the younger play-by-play announcers have these flat, indistinct voices and there is not a new Jack Buck or Harry Kalas coming along. But I digress. Ultimately, it is simply a question of how grave a 'crisis' we believe this to be. My opinion is that there will always emerge ‘alpha’ males in society, for better and for worse. Basic human nature does not change, and boys are going to be boys, men are going to be men, and most — regardless of their ‘T’ levels — shall be forever insecure in their manhood. 

And there will always be grifters such as Trump, Andrew Tate, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Dana White, Pete Hegseth, and the rest of these ‘manosphere’ figures ready to take advantage of the weak, insecure, and pathetic. 

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.