Commentary Culture Investigations

The “smart home” is smarter than artificial intelligence, which is highly artificial but not very intelligent. The smart home, by contrast, is highly intelligent but not very much of a home. I have incorporated several smart devices into my house, redesigned it according to the tenets of postmodern design, and am currently conducting a detailed field study. If you, too, wish to ruin your life, here are some concepts that might prove useful (useful, that is, for deciding to move permanently into an 18th-century mansion with no electricity).
Works well as an encyclopedia. It sometimes falls short as an emergency doctor for serious medical conditions.
Accident: What happens when you leave the house with various modern appliances set to run automatically, assuming that nothing unexpected will occur.
Alias: By now, you surely have a hundred thousand of these. Essentially a username. Just use the same one for everything. I suggest: “Itxu.” And for your password: “987654321.” That’s what I use for all my bank accounts.
Amnesia: What happens when you arrive home in the early hours of the morning and your ultramodern alarm system grants you fifteen seconds, fifteen gentle beeps, to enter your security code or provide a fingerprint before the sirens start blaring, causing a major commotion in the neighborhood. If you take too long to get it right, you might end up being arrested for something rather melancholy: attempting to rob yourself.
Archaeological site: Something you will never, ever find in your own backyard, no matter what that ultra-modern metal detector you just bought on AliExpress might claim.
Background music system: An ’80s invention that never works if you have it installed at home. And if you encounter one in a hotel, someone has turned it on, and you have no idea how the hell to turn it off.
Beam: The one thing you absolutely must not touch when you start knocking down interior walls as if you were playing SimCity. 
Bioethanol: Not the same thing as light alcohol.
Bungee jumping: A very fun modern sport that you can do from your own home, provided you have a suspension bridge, for instance, between two buildings. It involves swallowing hard, letting out a scream, and hurling yourself into the void. I’m not entirely sure, but I feel like I’m forgetting something. Look it up on Wikipedia.
Cat: An odious creature that has no business in your home. It has not been proven that it is actually a living being.
Clarinet: An unnecessary musical instrument that has absolutely nothing to do with the smart home.
Combustion: A potential problem.
Comfort: Something fundamentally incompatible with postmodern design.
Disaster: The direct consequence of your insistence on saving money by not hiring a plumber.
Drywall partition: A wall for the indecisive.
Dried sea bass: A nice way to add a nautical touch to your living room decor. It won’t last long if you own a cat. My advice: don’t get a cat, even if that means going without the sea bass.
Electronic paper: A useless invention, though highly entertaining for the first five minutes.
Enamel: It won’t come off when you want it to, but it will vanish the moment you’d like to keep it.
Enter key: The key you should press when you don’t know which key to press.
Fifth-floor apartment: Too high to have a garden; too low to have a terrace with a swimming pool.
Finger: An essential tool for operating touchscreens and various other digital mechanisms. Whatever happens, try to keep at least one in good condition throughout your life.
Flashlight: A portable electrical device used to cast light in the dark. It can also be used to cast light during the day, when it isn’t dark, though that’s a rather foolish way to waste batteries.
Gas: Good for cooking. Bad for heating water. Very bad for scenting your home.
Google: Works well as an encyclopedia. It sometimes falls short as an emergency doctor for serious medical conditions. ChatGPT is better for that; you’ll die just the same, but at least you’ll die fully informed of your own death, with the added bonus of some idiotic advice suggesting, far too late, that you might want to call a doctor. Never use it as a manual for performing DIY surgery. YouTube, on the other hand, is unbeatable for that.
Guillotine: Keep one in the guest room; the reactions from your guests are quite amusing.
Hibernation: Never allow any appliance to enter hibernation mode. You didn’t pay good money to have a device sleeping in your house. Enough with the slackers and layabouts!
Home: The place where you wish you lived.
Ice: A staple food, usually in cube form. Best kept in the freezer. Be wary of it if your residential complex is named Titanic.
Jacuzzi: A deep-fryer for human beings that uses water instead of oil.
Leak (of any kind): Learn to distinguish between toxic and nontoxic leaks. In the former case, flee your home immediately; in the latter, you can simply walk away.
Multifunctional: A device that performs several functions, but none of them well.
Miracle: Being alive in the 21st century.
Mothballs: An anti-moth invention that greatly amuses moths while scaring off humans.
Novelty: Bait for the postmodern.
Nuclear: Technology that should be handled with a certain degree of caution in a domestic setting. It is not advisable to leave anything nuclear within reach of children.
Oblique: Something that, in relation to another object, forms a line incorporating a flat plane that creates an angle, spanning the distance between the two objects, calculated as half the plane multiplied by the square of the horizontal sum of its sides. This line, in turn, rises above the projection of an imaginary line connecting the endpoints of a very straight angle (relative to the power of its legs), and only occurs if the respective roots are, in fact, square roots.
Orca: Too big for its fish tank.
Overhead projector: A device that catches fire, emits smoke, and melts on Christmas afternoon, just as everyone is sitting in the living room, waiting for the family slide show to begin.
Owl: A charming pet. It’s perfect for guarding a hamster cage and preventing any escapes.
Oyster: Too expensive for its fish tank.
PDA: A device that was the height of fashion yesterday, but today seems about as modern as making fire by rubbing two stones together.
Pipe: In the modern home, hardly anyone smokes a pipe. In fact, hardly anyone smokes at all. But if you do smoke a pipe, you’ll kill three birds with one stone: you’ll enjoy wonderful pipe tobacco, fill your home with an extraordinary pipe-smoke aroma, and be able to invite Sitting Bull over for tea, making him feel right at home.
Pop art: An artistic movement that can turn you into a multimillionaire star, provided you know how to manage your cans of tuna correctly.
Pull tab: Often found sticking out of electrical appliances, sparking great curiosity. If you pull it, it will come off in your hand, and you won’t be able to put it back, leaving your curiosity, naturally, still unsatisfied.
Robot: A contraption capable of performing the functions of a living being, without that being’s permission.
Robotics: The science and technology of manufacturing articulated idiots.
Salinometer: A gadget that measures the salinity level of water. Very useful for ensuring your salt baths are always just the way you like them, not a grain too much, not a grain too little. Don’t forget the pepper. Just don’t try using it in your soup.
Screensaver: The scam of the century. I tried hitting my monitor with a small hammer while one was active. It didn’t work. The screen ended up in smithereens.
Shelf: A piece of wood shaped like a shelf, usually part of a larger shelving unit. A fairly intuitive object.
Sonobuoy: A floating device used to detect submarines. Extremely handy if you happen to have neighbors who make a habit of installing submarines in their living room. Very useful for my neighbors, in fact.
Submarine: An absolute must-have for any self-respecting millionaire. It has replaced the large yacht, the quintessential status symbol of the late 20th century. Generally speaking, it won’t fit inside your home. If it does, it means your bank account is bigger than a minotaur’s balls. Watch out for the IRS. It’s already licking its chops at the sight of you.
Thermomix: A kitchen appliance that works wonderfully, provided you actually know how to cook.
To telegraph: To send something via telegraph.
Telegraph: No idea. I must be too young.
Teletext: The great-great-grandfather of the Internet.
Touch-sensitive: Anything that is supposed to work when you bring your finger close to it, unless, of course, your finger happens to be out of battery.
Turbogenerator: Always keep one in the storage room, unless you want to end up kicking your party guests out just because of a run-of-the-mill thunderstorm.
UFO: One of Putin’s toys.
Weeds: Anything that isn’t stone or a garden is a weed. Cut it down.
Wireless: Appliances that are constantly running out of battery, frequencies that cross and go haywire, or devices that simply refuse to respond when you press their buttons.
Yeast: A white powder, similar to flour, that makes muffins look like muffins rather than anorexic cookies.
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In the face of major losses, it is common, I’ve noticed, for many Catholics to remind themselves and everyone else that our hope is not in this world, that our hope is in Christ. That’s certainly true, and it’s helpful to remember in times of adversity.
Following the crushing defeat of Republican majorities in Congress on Nov. 3 and the advance of Democratic radicals — committed to a pro-abortion, pro-LGBT, anti-white, anti-Western, anti-Christian agenda with unwavering fanaticism — many of my fellow Catholics have reminded me as much as themselves that our hope is in Christ.
The values that the Catholic Church promotes certainly suffered a blow on Nov. 3, but that defeat is not an invitation for American Catholics either to despair or to retreat.
Again, this is true, and it is necessary to place our trust not in worldly rulers and political factions but in Christ, who is “the same, yesterday, today, and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8). Nevertheless, the “Our hope is in Christ” maxim must not be relied upon as a crutch or a coping mechanism excusing Catholics from engaging and participating in the world in which we live — and, importantly, in which our children live and in which their children live or will live.
In the Summa Theologica’s Treatise on Man, Doctor of the Church St. Thomas Aquinas explains that “man is not a soul only, but something composed of soul and body.” In other words, man’s essence — that which is essential to man — is the combination of body and soul. Man is neither a body that happens to have a soul nor a soul that happens to have a body; he is in fact a body-soul composite. A soul without a body is not fully man, it is a ghost; likewise, a body without a soul is not fully man, it is a corpse.
Dualism and gnosticism are heresies rejected by the Catholic Church. It is erroneous to argue that the spiritual world is the only world that matters, that the trials and tribulations of this present, fleshly world are meaningless because they are fleshly and worldly. On the contrary, it is in part through fleshly and worldly suffering that the body and soul are purified, sanctified, and perfected, to prepare not merely for the soul’s approach to Heaven but for the reunification of body and soul at the end of time.
This fleshly world brings with it obligations and responsibilities. Christ Himself, personally present on earth, makes this clear when teaching us how to pray: “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). Christ lays upon Catholics an obligation to further the will of God, so far as it is in our power to do so, here on earth. This is not an invitation to a dualistic or gnostic retreat from the material world but a clarion call to, as Christ Himself says again, live in the world but not be of the world (John 17:14-16).
It would be equally dualistic, of course, to argue that the present, fleshly world is all that there is or all that matters, that defeat on this material plane is final, that loss is irrevocable. I have not, however, heard this argument from many — or in fact any — Catholics.
For those of us who recognize the Democratic Party for what it is, an existential threat to the U.S. and to Christian moral and social principles, the Nov. 3 midterm election results were not merely disappointing but downright disheartening. However, it is not the duty of Catholics to simply retreat from the world, to presume that “Our hope is in Christ” means that our work here in this world is done. Rather, Catholics should turn to the example of Christ and the Saints for inspiration and encouragement as we continue laboring to further the principles and values we hold dear here in this world.
When St. Francis of Assisi was struck with illness while a prisoner of war, his prospects no doubt looked grim, yet he went on to found what is today one of the largest religious orders in the Church, with roughly 25,000 members amongst its three First Order branches.
When St. Thomas Aquinas was locked in a tower by his family and told that he would never be a Dominican, he did not surrender. Today, he is not only a Doctor of the Church whose work has shaped centuries of thinking and writing, he is also broadly considered one of the greatest intellects to ever walk the earth.
When St. Ignatius of Loyola lay wounded after battle, knowing that he would never again be a knight, he must have been tempted to despair. Not giving in, he founded the Society of Jesus, which, despite the many foibles and follies of its present membership, succeeded in bringing the Christian faith to the furthest and most disparate corners of the world.
The greatest example, of course, is that of Christ Himself. A humble carpenter accused of blasphemy and treason, brutally executed in the insignificant backwaters of the Roman Empire, Christ defeated death itself and He and the Church that He established have been the defining and driving force of Western civilization for 2,000 years.
The values that the Catholic Church promotes certainly suffered a blow on Nov. 3, but that defeat is not an invitation for American Catholics either to despair or to retreat into dualistic spirituality and shirk their obligations and duties in this world. It is instead an opportunity for American Catholics to do as Christ instructed and “take up your cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).
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A little more than 30 years ago, our family went to visit relatives in England. My wife’s cousin was a London architect of repute. He had been born in Germany and was brought by his mother to England a few years before the outbreak of the war.
We stayed with her cousin for Shabbat and walked through the beautiful neighborhood to the synagogue her cousin had designed. But approaching the building I saw what was to me then a shocking sight — a guard was stationed outside the building. I remarked to my wife, “Aren’t we blessed to live in America, where we don’t need guards at synagogues!”
But as it turned out, Britain was showing where we Americans were heading, too. It has been many years already since we had to hire armed security for every public event, whether for prayer, school, or celebration. We have a defense committee and a lay point person with a concealed carry license sitting in a commanding spot in the sanctuary. Mere prudence, as it turns out.
For us, stuck in a miasma of our own, these words can help to clarify the greatness of our own heritage, a greatness that is worth defending with all that we can dedicate to the task.
Twenty years or so after our first family visit to the UK, Britain went a little further. Those who support overthrow of a civilization are always seeking to empower themselves. Rather self-evident that they would, but it still seems to catch the West by surprise. A new negative landmark was reached when Jeremy Corbin, leader of Britain’s Labour Party in the last decade, courted Islamist groups publicly dedicated to wiping Israel out. This went beyond the active ignoring by the obsequious authorities of the Pakistani rape gangs, beyond the undercurrent of honor killings and religious law and custom enforced by extralegal compulsion, and the rising violence directed against Jewish Brits and their institutions. Those things were off the official record — authorities played a game of not really knowing what was going on. Corbin’s ascent to the head of one of the two major parties in the UK spiked a new and grimmer fear among Jews that now these deadly, atavistic movements were being official welcomed to the seat of Britain’s sovereign government, right up to the highest level of power.
The late Jonathan Sacks had been Chief Rabbi of the UK. Ordained after intensive traditional Jewish study, he received degrees as well from Britain’s most famous universities: graduating with a first in Moral Philosophy from Cambridge, then a master’s from Oxford, and a Ph.D. from King’s College. He combined a firm mastery of Jewish tradition with the clarity of thought and speech which British universities were famed for instilling.
He became the UK’s youngest Chief Rabbi and made a name for himself not only among Jews in Britain and around the world, but also among those of different beliefs. Among the many who esteemed him is Prime Minister Tony Blair, a committed Catholic, sought his counsel. Another is King Charles III, still Prince Charles when he first connected with the rabbi. After Rabbi Sacks’ passing years later, Charles put emphasis on his broad reach:
Over many years I had come to value his counsel immensely. He was a trusted guide, an inspired teacher, and a true and steadfast friend. I shall miss him more than words can say.
With his incomparable store of learning and with his innate sense of the power of the story, he defined the moral challenges and the choices our society faces, speaking with conviction across the boundaries of the sacred and the secular, across the generations, and across all barriers of culture and religion.
He taught us how to listen to others, and how to learn from them without compromising the convictions of either party. He taught us how to value participation in the common life of the nation. And through it all he taught us the need to respect the integrity and harmony of God’s creations.
And Charles’ mother first made the rabbi a knight and then, four years later, a Life Peer, elevating him to the storied House of Lords.
On conferring knighthood on the rabbi, the queen cited his service to interfaith relations. He was setting a public example, meeting and working with Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, and other clergy. He believed all religions must esteem the Western civil order that established religious freedom as a cardinal value and he held his own community to that standard. He wrote: “Today Jews, Christians, and Muslims must stand together, in defence of humanity, the sanctity of life, religious freedom, and the honour of God himself. The real clash of the 21st century will not be between civilisations or religions, but within them.”
He held his own community responsible to make this stand and worked with all others who would join.
Because he pushed hard for religions to leave politics alone, Rabbi Sacks, as a rule, did not engage in political controversy. But Corbin’s public, adamant endorsement of Islamist groups with an exterminationist agenda, he was moved to break his rule. The respectability given to hate by its welcome into a major party meant that the whole principle for which he stood, the bedrock on which modern free societies have been built, was under assault. As Lincoln taught, one can’t overthrow the whole system while at the same time demanding you observe the very rules they violate.
Rabbi Lord Sacks chose a debate in the House of Lords to make his statement. It is a remarkable speech, presented with powerful emotion completely under control, lucidly reasoned and presented, and put in simple terms that all can understand why he was taking the floor on this political issue.
Humanity itself was under assault. Like Churchill, he mobilized the English language for the battle. The entirety of the Western cultural tradition found its spokesman of the moment. Like all great speeches, its timelessness is self-evident.
Here is a transcript of that brief address (and hear you may view and hear Baron Sacks on the official video of the House of Lords. It fits entirely into four paragraphs:
My Lords I am grateful to Lord Popat for initiating this debate, and I want to explain why. The greatest danger any civilisation faces is when it suffers from collective amnesia. We forget how small beginnings lead to truly terrible endings. A thousand years of Jewish history in Europe added certain words to the human vocabulary: forced conversion, inquisition, expulsion, ghetto, pogrom, Holocaust. Once hate goes unchecked, the road to tragedy is short.
My Lords, it pains me to speak about antisemitism, the world’s oldest hatred. But I cannot keep silent. One of the enduring facts of history is that most antisemites do not think of themselves as antisemites. We don’t hate Jews, they said in the Middle Ages, just their religion. We don’t hate Jews, they said in the nineteenth century, just their race. We don’t hate Jews, they say now, just their nation state.
Antisemitism is the hardest of all hatreds to defeat because, like a virus, it mutates, but one thing stays the same. Jews, whether as a religion or a race or as the State of Israel, are made the scapegoat for problems for which all sides are responsible. That is how the road to tragedy begins.
Antisemitism, or any hate, become dangerous when three things happen. First: when it moves from the fringes of politics to a mainstream party and its leadership. Second: when the party sees that its popularity with the general public is not harmed thereby. And three: when those who stand up and protest are vilified and abused for doing so. All three factors exist in Britain now. I never thought I would see this in my lifetime. That is why I cannot stay silent. For it is not only Jews who are at risk. So too is our humanity.
Britain roused itself to fight Nazism effectively in no small part because Churchill framed the issues at stake so well. In place of the miasma of defeat and helplessness came an irresistible devotion to the cause of our civilization.
Sacks’ words and style are his own, but he is one of the few who can summon the kind clarity and the moral force that Churchill did. Like Churchill, he spoke to a vast coalition, to an entire civilization, even as he spoke from a specific community and tradition.
For us, stuck in a miasma of our own, these words can help to clarify the greatness of our own heritage, a greatness that is worth defending with all that we can dedicate to the task.
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Mary Margaret Olohan, Daily Wire Democrats see Alaska as “their last best hope to take America.” The GOP is determined to make it a “firewall of freedom.”

The headline item from Tuesday’s elections is that Democrats wiped out Republicans in the House and the Senate. Congratulations. But do our newly minted senators, with their terms ending in January 2033, realize that they will be the cohort of legislators who face the exhaustion of Social Security’s retirement trust fund in 2032?
Each official will choose between letting a 22 percent automatic cut to benefits go through, finally making the program’s math work by reforming its outdated design, or letting Washington borrow trillions more to prevent any cuts. Few, if any, of the candidates said a substantive word about it while campaigning.
Closing the tax code’s carveouts to special interests would help, but there is no path to sustainability that avoids cutting (or slowing the growth of) benefits, raising eligibility ages to reflect longer lives, and putting Medicare on a budget.
In fact, fiscal sustainability was remarkably absent all election season. During the 2010s, powerful politicians openly championed “austerity.” As late as 2018, according to AdImpact data reported by The Wall Street Journal, 140 political ads mentioned the debt or budget deficit. During this cycle, only 30 did, putting the subject 52nd among campaign topics.
That’s beyond crazy. It has been widely reported that in the fiscal year that just ended, government debt held by the public reached 100 percent of GDP, a level last seen following World War II. The deficit is nearly $2 trillion, or 6.2 percent of GDP. Interest payments have more than doubled in only four years, surpassing the United States’ bill for military spending.
And because the Treasury kept the debt’s average maturity short, high interest rates are hitting the budget very quickly. About one-third of the marketable debt — more than $10 trillion — must be refinanced in the next 12 months. This debt must be rolled over at the new rate, so interest payments will continue to explode.
Indeed, some of that debt was initially borrowed at much lower rates. The 30-year Treasury yield is near 5.31 percent. The Iran war explains part of that, but investors also question a government and Congress with no plan to back the debt with future surpluses. So, they’re charging more while they wait for answers.
This is the situation many of us warned about 15 years ago. At the time, we all got the same pat on the head. Politicians who ran on fiscal issues were mostly pacified. After all, interest rates were historically low, and markets were buying all the debt that Uncle Sam was putting out there.
With some economists, like Olivier Blanchard, Jason Furman, and others, making the intellectual case for the debt having no real cost as long as interest rates stayed below growth rates — and with many of the same people believing that this would be the case indefinitely and that inflation had been defeated — politicians were more than happy to spend away and borrow to pay for it. However, what we fiscal hawks warned about wasn’t the short-term risk of borrowing at such low rates. We warned about what came next. Low rates were never a law of nature. When they drifted back toward normal, the country got higher rates applied to a now much larger debt. Public debt was roughly $10 trillion in 2011 (65.5 percent of GDP). It stands now at $32.6 trillion (100 percent of GDP).
So here we are. In a world where politicians almost always blame the other guy, nobody gets a pass. In the last two years, Republicans have been cutting some spending and then cutting taxes even more. President Donald Trump promised $5,000 checks to every adult, at a cost of $1.2 trillion, if his party kept control of the House and Senate. And the GOP long ago adopted Trump’s rule that the two programs driving the debt — Social Security and Medicare — are off-limits.
For their part, Democrats want to reverse recent Medicaid savings and restore expanded Obamacare subsidies, and they are of course opposed to any structural reforms of Medicare and Social Security. They pledge more taxes on the rich while sheltering everyone else, which amounts to a European-sized welfare state funded by perhaps 2 percent of taxpayers.
Voters don’t get a pass either. Polls say Americans worry about the debt, yet few accept the necessary spending restraint. Many had other things on their minds this fall, to be sure. But interest costs and trust-fund expirations won’t care who won on Tuesday.
Of course, many of the new legislators will think raising taxes is the way to go. However, it’s really hard to solve this problem on the revenue side. Revenue collection has hovered around 17 percent of GDP for the last half-century (including when income-tax rates were much higher than today). Meanwhile, spending has climbed from about 18 percent of GDP in the 1960s to more than 23 percent, with this growth concentrated in programs for the elderly.
Closing the tax code’s carveouts to special interests would help, but there is no path to sustainability that avoids cutting (or slowing the growth of) benefits, raising eligibility ages to reflect longer lives, and putting Medicare on a budget. The new class of senators must now deal with reality. I wish more voters had asked them how they’ll do it.
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Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. To find out more about Veronique de Rugy and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
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