Read it.

In just over two months, the Paris Olympic Games will kick off. The French capital, which is hosting the Games for the first time in a hundred years, will be living to the intense rhythm of the sporting competition. It’s an eagerly awaited event, but one that many French people, Parisians in particular, dread. The cause: the fierce determination of the French organisers to turn the Games into the most desolate showcase for a civilisation corrupted by veganism and transgender propaganda.

“Quand l’homme essaye d’imaginer le Paradis sur terre, ça fait tout de suite un Enfer très convenable” (“When man tries to imagine Paradise on earth, it immediately makes for a very fitting Hell”), summarised the poet Paul Claudel in a pithy phrase that the French authorities in charge of organising the 2024 Olympics could easily adopt as their motto. For the past few months, the French—and with them, the entire public interested in the Olympic Games—have been discovering in bits and pieces everything that has been devised to make this global summer event, which is being held on French soil for the first time since 1924, an ‘exceptional’ moment. In terms of ‘exception’, what we have here is a dismaying and awfully commonplace catalogue of all the hackneyed clichés of a modern world lacking in creativity and rehashing its old obsessions.

Read it.

The problem with Britain is that it doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t control its borders, it doesn’t enforce its laws, it doesn’t build anything. It’s not only a British problem or even Britain’s only problem, but there is something essentially British about it. On the Left and the Right, government apparatchiks, political parties, and lawmakers are all conservative—in the worst sense of the word. Given a free hand, the Leftist gender radicals and the right-wing Tories would have us living in the same sprawling favelas, bulging obscenely with ever-growing human capital and dominated by a small number of American corporations. But in recent times an unlikely figure, the president of El Salvador, has remade the rules on getting things done—and he should be looked to for inspiration.

Nayib Bukele, the 42-year-old President of El Salvador, came to power in June 2019—just six months after Boris Johnson won a landslide victory in the UK promising to reduce immigration, freeze taxes, and boost the NHS. Bukele’s problems were of a different sort. He inherited the responsibility for one of the most dangerous countries in the world, ravaged by gang violence, plagued by poverty, and riddled with corruption. But his approach to taking issues head-on, and winning, should be instructive.

Within days of his inauguration, Bukele initiated his ‘Territorial Control Plan.’ It began almost immediately with the deployment of thousands of soldiers and police officers to problem areas. An organised crime think tank called InSight Crime said at the time that Bukele’s policies would result in “few successes” and “gangs becoming stronger.” Think tanks shouldn’t be listened to. Bukele’s forces would eventually surround and extract the gang members from their strongholds, in a series of mass arrests which have seen more than 76,000 people thrown in jail.

Read it.

Despite months of deteriorating relations and increasingly hostile rhetoric, the complete shutdown of trade between Turkey and Israel earlier this month came as a shock to many.

The shutdown, which Turkey’s Islamist-leaning president Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced May 3, is putting pressure on prices in Israel, cutting off a major trade route for kosher food and affecting people on both corners of the eastern Mediterranean.

“For the last two weeks, everything stopped. We can’t do normal business,” Rami Simon, a Turkish Jew who trades aluminum and construction materials to Israel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Before Erdogan, Israel and Turkey were very good friends. Never discount the impact that one person can have on world history.

Read it.

Why is Greta Thunberg wearing a keffiyeh? The Swedish activist is the poster-girl for climate change. The keffiyeh, though, symbolises a wholly different cause: solidarity with Palestinians in the current conflict with Israel. What does that have to do with global warming?

It’s not just Greta who sees a link. When the current conflict in Gaza began, the climate activist group, Just Stop Oil, known for polarising, clickbait-friendly protests, such as blockading the M25 or throwing soup at Van Gogh paintings, promptly organised a sit-in at London’s Waterloo Station.

This sort of campaign creep is far wider than just climate and Palestine: all contemporary radical causes seem somehow to have been absorbed into one. A protean animating energy seems to ingest every progressive issue it encounters, to create a kind of ever-spreading, all-encompassing omnicause.

I don’t think the term ‘attention whore’ is out of place. Per Wikipedia:

Histrionic personality disorder (HPD) is defined by the American Psychiatric Association as a personality disorder characterized by a pattern of excessive attention-seeking behaviors, usually beginning in early adulthood, including inappropriate seduction and an excessive desire for approval. People diagnosed with the disorder are said to be lively, dramatic, vivacious, enthusiastic, extraverted and flirtatious.

HPD lies in the dramatic cluster of personality disorders, also known as the Cluster B. People with HPD have a high desire for attention, make loud and inappropriate appearances, exaggerate their behaviors and emotions, and crave stimulation.^[1] They very often exhibit pervasive and persistent sexually provocative behavior, express strong emotions with an impressionistic style, and can be easily influenced by others. Associated features include egocentrism, self-indulgence, continuous longing for appreciation, and persistent manipulativebehavior to achieve their own wants.

Read it.

EBU, the European Broadcasting Union, is under fire for excluding the nationalist Identity and Democracy (ID) group’s representative, Anders Vistisen (Danish People’s Party) from the largest official TV debate ahead of June’s EU elections, Politico wrote.

The organizer claims that they cannot allow ID (predicted to be the next Parliament’s third largest group) to participate in the debate between lead candidates, because the party hasn’t officially nominated one Spitzenkandidat—despite the fact that almost no other party seems to take the purely ceremonial system seriously.

The final debate will take place on May 23rd, just two weeks before voting opens for some 400 million people across the EU to elect the next 720 members of the European Parliament.

Read it.

All the mainstream parties in the German Federal Republic agree: the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, Alternative for Germany) must be suppressed. They acknowledge that it can no longer be stopped at the ballot box, because it has become too popular, so the only solution is that the party must be officially banned. All in the name of “democracy”.

Read it.

It’s hard to watch the incessant gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Donald Trump trial in Manhattan without feeling like you’re traveling in a time warp back to 2016. We’re back reliving the “Access Hollywood” tape and talk of how Trump would have never been elected except porn star Stormy Daniels accepted a six-figure check to keep quiet.

The richest vein of hypocrisy on this adultery-mangles-electability question flows through the Clintons. Hillary Clinton appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to denounce Trump for squashing the bimbo stories. It was typically shameless. She said: “I think the defendant, the former president, knew exactly what he was doing when he went to such great lengths to try to squash, bury, kill stories, pay off people, because he understood the electoral significance of them.”

The cast of “Morning Joe” treated Hillary Clinton as a therapist for their Trump angst, and no one interrupted and asked about all the squashing, burying, and killing of stories that Hillary Clinton engaged in when they first sought the White House in 1992. On the cusp of the Gennifer Flowers allegations breaking in January of that year, Hillary Clinton was telling Margaret Carlson of Time magazine “My marriage is solid, full of love and friendship, but it’s too profound to talk about glibly.”

Read it.

An American woman who suffered an injury from AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine sued the company on May 13, alleging the company breached a contract by not paying for the medical care she requires to deal with the injury.

“They left us no choice,” Brianne Dressen, a preschool teacher in Utah, told The Epoch Times in an email.

Ms. Dressen has paid tens of thousands of dollars to drugs to treat the nervous system disorder and other issues she’s experiencing, according to the complaint, filed in federal court in her home state.

Read it.

From 2017 to 2019, the U.S. had an average of 16,641 homicides a year. In 2021 and 2022, however, the country saw considerably more bloodshed, with an average of more than 22,000 annual homicides. Even if the 2023 number drops slightly, it will still represent a large increase over the recent past, before the pandemic and racial upheaval set in motion in 2020.

Many criminologists say this illlustrates one of the problems with the official numbers that are at the center of public debate: They give a distorted impression of true levels of crime. They note that crime stats have become notoriously incomplete in recent years. In some years many big cities did not report their numbers to the FBI, and there are such wide discrepancies in these tallies that the picture they provide has more blur than clarity.

Declining arrest rates and slowing police response times to 911 calls also help explain why polls show Americans believe crime is rising. The experts say the numbers only give some sense of lawbreaking, while most Americans – the vast majority of whom are not crime victims in a given year – are influenced by their largely media-driven perception of whether society feels orderly.

Read it.

The head of a German rail union warns that the country’s train system is turning into a “battleground” thanks to a wave of violence and intimidation being unleashed by male asylum seekers against female staff.

In an interview with Focus Online, Steffi Recknagel, the head of the Railway and Transport Union (EVG) in Thuringia, says that the average day is “sometimes life-threatening” for employees due to the sheer amount of abuse being dished out by migrants.

Newsbusters.

Generally speaking, CNN’s coverage of the so-called Trump “hush money” trial has taken such an onanistic turn that reasonable people may question whether Jeffrey Toobin is now in charge of the once-revered Cable News Network. The most ridiculous iteration of this coverage? Dramatic readings of the trial transcripts.

Newsbusters.

The evening network newscasts leave us, once again, to imagine what coverage might have been had a Republican elected official attested to migrants making great lifeguards due to their being “excellent swimmers”, as did New York Mayor Eric Adams. The wild stereotyping and casual racism are all there for the taking but the networks took a pass, leaving reasonable individuals to conclude that there’s a (D)ifference in how such stories are covered.

But you knew that.

Read it.

Head of the Mezha Anti-Corruption Center, Martyna Bohuslavets, has written a report in Pravda asking “Where are the fortifications?” She reports that millions of dollars that were intended for the construction of fortifications in Ukraine were instead “transferred to Kharkiv OVA to front companies of avatars.”

Read it.

Target has announced that its LGBT-themed merchandise will only be sold online and at select stores this June, a decision made after last year’s Pride Month marketing campaign divided customers and dragged down sales.

Read it.

The Littoral Combat Ship was designed with the current crisis in mind, instead it turned into a boondoggle. Here’s why.

Read it.

Results from a groundbreaking clinical trial of CRISPR gene editing in 14 individuals with a form of inherited blindness show that the treatment is safe and led to measurable improvements in 11 of the participants treated. The phase 1/2 trial called BRILLIANCE, was led by principal investigator Eric Pierce, MD, PhD, of Mass Eye and Ear, a member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, and sponsored by Editas Medicine, Inc. Findings are reported on May 6th in The New England Journal of Medicine.

“This research demonstrates that CRISPR gene therapy for inherited vision loss is worth continued pursuit in research and clinical trials,” said Pierce, director of Ocular Genomics Institute and Berman-Gund Laboratory for the Study of Retinal Degenerations at Mass Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical School. “While more research is needed to determine who may benefit most, we consider the early results promising. To hear from several participants how thrilled they were that they could finally see the food on their plates –that is a big deal. These were individuals who could not read any lines on an eye chart and who had no treatment options, which is the unfortunate reality for most people with inherited retinal disorders.”

BBC.

Dating app Bumble has apologised for adverts that critics said shamed women who were not sexually active.

The marketing campaign included messages such as “A vow of celibacy is not the answer” and “Thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun”.

Bumble said the ads were supposed to bring humour to “a community frustrated by modern dating”.

Reminds me of the famous Eddie Murphy skit from Saturday Night Live: “Be a Ho”.

MSNBC.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Read it.

Between co-host Sunny Hostin saying there were too many white people in Trump’s courtroom and George Stephanopoulos praising the Deep State, the Tuesday edition of ABC’s The View was already stacked with outrageous moments before Trump-hater and actor, Robert De Niro took the stage late in the show. The bitter aging actor went on an unhinged and profanity-filled tirade against the former President and asserted that he was “already” like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

The TDS is strong in this one.

If Trump were already Hitler or Mussolini, de Niro would already be in a camp.

Read it.

“It’s free! Just swipe your EBT!”

UPDATE: DC Holds Training Sessions for Noncitizens to Vote

Read it.

The programs are taking place in at least four states, a Washington Free Beacon review of online offerings found.

In Battle Creek, Mich., for example, the VA offers a “BIPOC Support Group,” an “8-week curriculum designed to provide support for Veterans that identify as people of color/BIPOC, or as multiracial or biracial,” according to a program description. The Battle Creek VA also offers a “Race-Based Stress/Trauma and Empowerment” program, a “weekly group, tailored to our Veterans of color, to address race-based stress and trauma in a safe and validating environment.”

In Long Beach, Calif., the VA also offers a “Race-Based Stress/Trauma Empowerment Group,” which it says is for “Veterans who identify as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and who are interested in addressing issues of race-based stress, trauma, resilience, and empowerment.” A similar program in Palo Alto, Calif., invites “Women Veterans of color” to join a “10-week group to explore [the] impact of racism on your well-being.”

Read it.

The staunchly racist and anti-Semitic co-host of ABC’s The View, Sunny Hostin (the descendant of slave owners) was again allowed into the New York courtroom for former President Trump’s hush money trial and reported back to the Cackling Coven her shocking findings. Last week, she was startled by Trump’s “radioactive orange” face. This time, she was rocking brand new “binoculars” with which she deduced that there were too many white people in the courtroom.

According to the race-obsessed co-host, there were too many white people and her job was to “give a little color to the courtroom.”

Read it.

While the border crisis rages on and frequent, preventable crimes as well as stories of illegal aliens displacing Americans in receiving services continue to come out of cities like New York, Chicago, and Denver, even rural America will not be spared. This is all thanks to the Biden administration and several allied nongovernmental organizations.

NGOs facilitate President Joe Biden’s border crisis by transporting, sheltering, feeding, and providing social and legal services for the millions migrating to and throughout the U.S. NGOs receive billions of dollars in federal funding to resettle aliens in our communities regardless of their legal status and without proper vetting or coordination efforts with localities.

In 2024, for example, World Relief, a global Christian organization, has received U.S. taxpayer funding to transport 75 Somalis to rural Wisconsin. Seventy-five may seem insignificant compared to the millions of illegal aliens who have already crossed our southern border, but this is just the beginning for Eau Claire and Chippewa Counties as well as the surrounding area. The plan is to resettle at least 3,000 Somalis in western Wisconsin over the next three years, where nearly 1,900 already reside.

Read it.

Too late.

Read it.

In the early 1950s, a notorious bank robber, one of the first fugitives on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, was asked after his capture: Why did you rob banks?

William Sutton’s response: “Because that’s where the money is.”

Fast-forward to today. Thieves are targeting electric vehicle charging stations because the charging cords at each stall contain a ‘gold mine’ of copper that can easily be scrapped.

Watch it.

Very impressive.

Read it.

Progressive International is an organization created in December 2018 by the Sanders Institute (belonging to the U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders) and by the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DIEM25). According to its own website, which is published in 27 different languages, “Our mission is to build a planetary front of progressive forces. We define progressive as the aspiration to a world that is: democratic, decolonised, just, egalitarian, liberated, feminist, ecological, peaceful, post-capitalist, prosperous, plural, and bound by radical love.”

In its declaration of principles, Progressive International affirms that the most harmful ‘virus’ afflicting humanity is none other than capitalism, an incredible assertion coming from an organization founded by a U.S. senator: “We aspire to eradicate capitalism everywhere. We believe that exploitation, dispossession, and environmental destruction are written into the genetic code of capitalism.”

In addition, the PI openly proposes the dismantling of North Atlantic Treaty Organization, arguing—together with DIEM25—that NATO is “a killing machine largely responsible for the devastation in Gaza and many other places, and must be stopped!” It is not necessary to read all the documents posted on its website to understand its ideological commitments, because its X (formerly Twitter) timeline praises Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Karl Marx, Lenin, the Black Panthers, and even Black Lives Matter (BLM).

Read it.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is fighting back against the Biden administration’s new changes to Title IX. Paxton has filed a complaint against the Department of Education’s new rules, which expand the definition of sex-based discrimination to include “gender identity.” …

Read it.

The In-N-Out Burger chain was begun in California in 1948 in the Baldwin Park area of Los Angeles and has expanded to more than 400 eateries in eight states and 287 cities. Until March 24, the company had never closed a restaurant.

However, on that day, the location in East Oakland shuttered because of “ongoing issues with crime,” according to Denny Warnick, the chief operating officer of In-N-Out.

Employees at the now-closed burger joint had to deal with “car break-ins, property damage, and armed robberies.”

Read it.

Obviously they know even less about Trump than they do about reality.

Trump would rip them each a new asshole and wouldn’t even need to slow down to do it.

Read it.

It’s an open secret that the Biden administration disdains lawful civilian gun owners almost as much as it does the lawful gun industry. But in case there was any doubt, new gun export regulations published late last month by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security make the administration’s position painfully clear: It doesn’t think ordinary civilians can be trusted with firearms.

The interim final rule on gun exports, published April 30, significantly alters licensing policies for U.S. companies seeking to lawfully export guns and ammunition to civilian markets in other countries. And although it doesn’t necessarily affect American gun owners, it does show the Biden administration’s true colors on the natural right of self-defense—but projected into the international arena.

Here are four things to know about how the rule attacks the lawful gun industry and civilian gun ownership more broadly.

ZMan is fed up.

An aspect of modern politics that does not get discussed is that it is less about the practical things politics is supposed to address and mostly about esoteric and abstract ideas that have meaning only because we pretend so. Look at the current crop of campaign ads and the candidates may as well be running against the bogeyman or in favor of the good juju. Without the party labels, it would be impossible to know anything about the candidates.

This was not always the case. The old joke about politics was that every candidate ran around promising two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot. The point was they all had plans about how to increase material prosperity. Even though no politician speaks to anything specific these days, the economy remains the top issue with voters because the prevailing assumption inherited from the past is that politics is supposed to be about practical things like fixing potholes.

One reason for the shift in political rhetoric is that the public square has become the domain of clever midwits playing word games with one another. Public discourse is now controlled by credentialed experts who have no idea how anything works, other than the complex game of relationships that defines the managerial class. That means they are good at constructing complicated intellectual structures that are useful in rhetorical jousting but have no connection to reality.

Concur.

Read it.

leader in Gaza, lays out a plan to set up a secret base in Turkey and other terror cells elsewhere to coordinate attacks against Israeli targets in neighboring countries, including NATO members, Israel claims.

The printed document, seen by The Times but not publicly available, was discovered in the home of Hamza Abu Shanab, chief of staff to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

Read it.

MIT welcomed six new deans of diversity, equity, and inclusion, one for each of the institute’s main schools, as part of a “DEI Strategic Action Plan” launched the previous year. Aimed at boosting the representation of women and minorities, in part by developing DEI criteria for staff performance reviews, the plan pledged to “make equity central” to the university “while ensuring the highest standards of excellence.”

But according to a 71-page complaint filed with the university on Saturday, at least two of the six DEI officials may not be living up to those standards. The complaint alleges that Tracie Jones-Barrett and Alana Anderson are serial plagiarists, copying entire pages of text without attribution and riding roughshod over MIT’s academic integrity policies.

In her 2023 dissertation titled “Cite a Sista,” which explored how black women in the Ivy League “make meaning of thriving,” Jones-Barrett, MIT’s deputy “equity officer,” lifts a whole section on “ethical considerations” from Emmitt Wyche III, her classmate in Northeastern University’s Graduate School of Education, without any sort of citation.

Read it.

Not that you’d know it form reading the ‘news’.

Watch it.

Pearl Davis points out the inconvenient truth.

Read it.

Safety fears surrounding pro-Palestine protests at the University of Amsterdam have prompted the institution to cancel all classes for two days, on May 14th and 15th, and to close all of its buildings.

Violent clashes have broken out between demonstrators and riot police three times in the past week. Reports say these took place after a group of “masked outsiders” joined the original peaceful group of activists calling for the university to cut its ties with Israeli institutions. Some of the mob caused “serious damage” to the building. The cost of this disruption has not been unveiled, but will be great.

Alex Tabarrok.

Alec Stapp points out that Canada is the only NATO country that has a free trade agreement with the United States. That’s quite remarkable if you think about it. NATO allies are bound by mutual defense commitments, support for military cooperation, and a dedication to democratic principles. Despite these shared commitments, the U.S. still enforces tariffs and quotas on our NATO allies including France, Germany, the UK, Denmark, Portugal, and Spain. This is like getting married and not having a joint checking account. If they are good enough partners to commit to their defense then surely NATO allies are good enough partners to commit to free trade?

Sarah Hoyt.

If you are talking to a communist, or another religious believer in science or theory, they will want you to prove that you are correct if you say that they are practicing magical thinking. Since magical thinking was evolutionarily favored for reason of making reactions fast, without stopping to reason, evaluate proofs or logic, a magical thinker might be closed to the most obvious proofs that they are indulging in such.

Read it.

In March, Joe Biden declared Easter Sunday to be “Transgender Day of Visibility” in a move which outraged many and was received as an assault on the holiest day of the year. In one sense, this was of course deeply shocking. Yet it is not as shocking as one might initially presume and is actually somewhat consistent with the fact that transgenderism, as a political and ideological movement, is profoundly religious in its orientation, particularly in its contrast with Christianity. Amidst the noise about the death of God and the decline of faith, the political climate of the West has become charged with religious ideas and impulses masquerading under the supposed secularism of the social movements gripping our culture which, properly explored and unearthed, will aid us in better addressing this descent into heresy.

Transgenderism is a false view of anthropology, based upon a series of premises contrary to reason and reliant upon distinctly religious ideas that happen to be false and should not be accepted as true, good, or beautiful. Its power as an ideological force—observable in its dramatic capture of the political debate in recent years—can, to some degree, be attributed to the religious nature of its presuppositions, which also demonstrates the importance of decisively rejecting its religious conclusions and proscriptions. But first, let us recap just a few of the quite astonishing consequences of this movement and the effects it has had on our society—all of which a mere decade ago would have been considered unthinkably absurd.

StrategyPage.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has decided to seize or try to seize Taiwan before the end of the decade. Xi realizes Taiwan has a say in this matter and wants to mobilize sufficient forces and create the right psychological conditions in China and Taiwan. This includes having Chinese naval and air forces operating near Taiwan on a regular basis so the Taiwanese military is not alarmed every time Chinese forces operate near the island.

Some of these forces that regularly appear off the Taiwanese cast are those that would be used if China were seeking to blockade Taiwan. Chinese military forces will eventually blockade Taiwan and prevent any ships from getting in or out.

Read it.

It’s about time.

Read it.

The Salafist group organizers claimed unfair censorship after strict conditions were imposed on Muslims calling for a caliphate in Germany and against anti-Semitic rhetoric…

Read it.

The Education Department’s ongoing meltdown due to its failed implementation of its new website for its Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) should, on the merits, be an ongoing major national story. But the Regime Media have chosen only to cover the story in a very sparing manner, shielding those responsible for the FAFSA meltdown from any scrutiny or accountability.

Read it.

Taxpayer millions allocated to border crisis charities are being diverted to unconventional expenses like music therapy and “people-plant interactions” for migrants, alongside hefty salaries for staff, a recent report reveals, the N.Y. Post reported.

Read it.

Newly released images of China’s new aircraft carrier undertaking sea trials have further highlighted the scale of the country’s naval modernisation efforts as it continues to carve out of sphere of influence into, though, and beyond the western Pacific.

Publishing a series of images on 8 May 2024, China’s Ministry of National Defense stated that the Fujian had completed its maiden voyage as the vessel begins to undertake sea trials required before it can enter service with the People’s Liberation Army Navy, also known as the PLAN.

Beijing is set on spending enormous sums of money on expanding and modernising its armed forces with defence expenditure recorded a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.5% during 2019–23 and was forecast to register a CAGR of 6.6% from 2023 to value $323.7bn by 2028.

China’s Ministry of National Defense is also expected to spend $1.4trn over 2024–28 on the procurement of military hardware and the modernisation of its armed forces, according to GlobalData forecasts.

Power Line.

Vice President Kamala Harris is apparently at last unburdened by what has been, and has reached what can be, speaking today before the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Relations, and it apparently involves kicking and breaking a lot of things, followed by cackling.

Read it.

A federal judge has handed down a 27-year prison sentence to the suspect who pleaded guilty to attacking a trio of New York Police Department (NYPD) officers in Times Square on New Year’s Eve 2022 in the name of radical Islamic extremism.

Isn’t it amazing that Christians and Jews don’t do this kind of shit? I wonder why that is.

UnHerd.

Cokes, pilsners and passion-fruit-flavoured vapes. Many smoke rollies, some do ket and cocaine. Eyes rarely widen at the mention of such things; bring up the Pill, however, and you elicit a flurry of disdain and lively debate.

Once seen as a tool of sexual liberation, the Pill is now often spoken of as a pharmaceutical menace, wreaking havoc with female moods and increasing the risk of cancer. It was first rolled out on the NHS in 1961 — for married women, of course. And though still the most popular method of birth-control, its use is plummeting — data published in June last year showed that community pharmacies dispensed 7.2 million items of progestogen and combined contraceptives in 2022-3. In 2014/15, the number was 8.5 million.

A world away from the groans associated with the Pill, there is an enticing optimism to the chatter around the contraception app of the moment, Natural Cycles. To look at testimonies online is to find yourself in the lexical world of the farmers market — words like “harmony” and “rhythms” crop up just as a wrinkling of the nose, an eye roll, follow any mention of the Pill. How good might it be, I think between big rips of a vape, to be free of chemicals?