• Articles - Featured - News

    The End of Trust

    May 29, 2025 - By 

    This one starts with a sad story. Not about someone I know personally, but a friend of a friend of a friend. But it could happen to anyone these days.

    So, basically, there was this middle-aged guy, divorced, no kids, no girlfriend, lonely. His life was just work-home-work-home.

    Then he met this cute Asian girl on social media. Mostly they exchanged messages and pictures, but they even had a voice call once or twice. She lived in another country far away but wanted to move to the West. Everything was going well, they had great chemistry. They talked for months. Finally he said he had saved some money and could travel, they were supposed to meet in person, when suddenly tragedy struck. She had an accident. Her mother became very ill. Or maybe it was her father. Anyway, the travel had to be postponed. Then she needed money for the hospital or some other emergency. First one thousand. Then two thousand. Then some more.

    Yeah, I know, you can already see where this is going. But he didn’t. Or it took him a longer time that it would take you and me. At the end of it all, he gave her over 20,000 euros, before she suddenly disappeared, never to be seen again. Driven to depression and alcoholism, the man then also lost his job and his health insurance and now his life is basically in shambles because of this woman.

    I say “woman” because that’s what he believed, or wanted to believe, but, well, let’s be honest. It was probably a bunch of guys in Lagos or Hyderabad. The pictures were all fake, the voice, probably fake too (it can be done these days, you know).

    There are entire businesses specialized in such sort of scam. Most of them operating from India and other places in the third world. Even I almost fell into one, not about relationships, but something about taxes, which sounded serious until I realized there was something fishy about the IRS wanting to be paid by PayPal.

    But back to relationships, I find it interesting that most of those relationship scams for men involve Asian women. I suppose it’s because trust in the West is so low these days that no middle-aged guy would believe a twenty-something Western woman would be interested in him. But an Asian woman is still in the realm of possibilities, at least in theory.

    Such scams exist for women too, of course, but in those cases they involve supposedly famous or rich men, because if men mostly desire youth, sex appeal and beauty, women desire status, money and fame. Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Bradley Cooper. Or just some random billionaire. I remember a recent case in which the guy pretended to be a billionaire, but then came up with some story about having been persecuted by gangsters and losing his suitcase with all his bank cards and documents and needing money that he would pay back very soon. So even though he was supposedly a billionaire, this woman ended up giving him I don’t know how many thousands of dollars.

    Humans are very stupid creatures.

    But such scams happen because people want to believe. They are lonely and they want to be loved. Perhaps deep down they know it can’t be true. But they pay for the dream to continue just a little bit longer.

    And of course, with AI and all the current tools of deception this type of scam will only grow. Voices can be cloned and even video can be realistically faked today.

    But the main problem is that loneliness is also growing, because social trust is being eroded. Paradoxically, the less trust there is between people, the more people fall for such scams, because there is no longer any measure of what is trustworthy. No one knows who to believe anymore.

    Politicians? Forget it. They have less credibility than street whores. They have proven again and again to be just actors, and not even very good ones.

    Journalists? Come on, man. They have a lower reputation than drug addicts and criminals. No one believes a word they say.

    But even doctors and scientists, who had the trust of most of the public until recently, suffered a huge setback with the Covid stuff. “Trust the Science” has become an enormous own-goal for scientists and the medical industry.

    Universities have also been heavily hit by their support of censorship and of extreme leftist stuff.

    The arts, publishing and the entertainment industry have been for years little more than a propaganda operation, in many cases run directly by the CIA.

    And the police? Back the blue? You must be kidding. Paid goons for the regime, that’s all.

    The church, too, with all the scandals and the changes that took place since Vatican II, has lost a lot of credibility and public trust, even among religious people. Many people are still wondering if the new Pope is catholic or not.

    Not even “Artificial Intelligence” and technology are being trusted by most people, despite the huge amount of propaganda being used to sell this stuff to us.

    A recent poll called “2025 Trust Barometer” investigated the status of trust in institutions in 26 countries, both Western and non-Western, both first-world and third-world (whatever happened to the “second world”, by the way?).

    They found that there has been a huge erosion of trust, which has been going on for more than twenty years, but really accelerated in the last five. Among other findings, they discovered that:

    69% of people in 26 countries believe that their leaders are constantly lying to them.

    68% of people in 26 countries believe that rich businessmen are constantly lying to them.

    70% of people in 26 countries believe that the media are constantly lying to them.

    After that, there is only one question remaining that is indeed quite puzzling: what the hell is wrong with the remaining 30%?

    But even trust in families, in partners, is going down. In my grandparents’ generation, divorce was unheard of and everyone stayed together. Even in my parents generation, most couples stayed together. My parents did. But from my generation and younger generations, I don’t think I know a single person who has not been divorced or separated at least once. Most separated more than once, or are single mothers or single fathers, and many never even married at all. There is today a huge distrust between males and females.

    I don’t know if there was a time when things were much better. Perhaps things always sucked. But it seems that years ago at least there was still a certain sense of community. I remember that the parents of our generation let us play in the street alone with other kids for hours, something that you rarely see these days. Of course, children don’t even play outdoors these days, they are just glued to screens, but you know what I mean.

    I suppose a certain dose of skepticism is healthy, you don’t want to fall into scams, which have always existed one way or another, but you also need at least a minimum amount of trust to be able to live in a society. And this basically doesn’t exist today anymore. It’s one against all, and all against one.

    And you? Who do you trust?

  • Italy - News

    Italy: Crime increasing in Milan

    October 3, 2023 - By 

    Source: Ansa, Corriere

    The province of Milan was confirmed at the top in a recent 2022 Crime Index among 107 Italian provinces.

    It is the territory with the most thefts for every 100 thousand inhabitants, especially in shops and parked cars; the metropolitan city is also the seventh in reports of sexual violence, second for robberies in the street, and third for gangs and criminal association.

    While the number of murders is down, robberies and sexual crimes are increasing, mostly in the peripheries where there are more immigrants, many of whom haven’t successfully integrated.

    Near the main train station and in the touristic zones, gypsy pickpockets are common. According to the Corriere della Sera, most of them come originally from Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia and live in the periphery of town.

    While the women steal the purses, the men divide the money and plan which areas to attack next. They usually prefer to rob distracted tourists, and, according to one criminal, “Japanese tourists are the best”.

     

  • Germany - News

    Germany: Mayor wants refugee containers on school premises against parents’ wishes

    October 3, 2023 - By 

    Source: WDR

    The city wants to place housing containers on the site of a school centre, in order to accommodate 80 refugees in the future. Many parents see this as endangering the safety of their children.

    Due to the increasing number of refugees, the city of Monheim plans to accommodate 80 refugees in an existing container facility on the site of a school, starting from next spring.

    However, many parents are outraged by this and have also expressed their displeasure in the Council meeting’s population. Mayor Daniel Zimmermann, however, decided to keep on with his plans.

    Zimmermann cites, among other things, the low conversion costs of the container system, of 150,000 euros, with the possibility of using also additional classrooms. The refugees are “people like you and me” and are neither dangerous nor endangered, said Zimmermann, who rejected the parents’ demand for security.

    Since the increased admission in 2015, there have been no problems with refugees in the city, said a spokesman for the city administration. More than 80 percent of the currently 830 refugees are accommodated in rented apartments, “but we are simply not going to be able to keep paying the rental”, the speaker continued.

    In addition, no other urban areas are currently free to use for refugee accommodation. The rental of a property or the implementation of the containers are significantly more expensive than the container solution.

    Parents are concerned about safety

    Many of the approximately 80 parents present, whose children attend the school there, expressed concerns at the council meeting, even about rape or abuse, fearing conflicts with traumatized refugees and thus stress for their children. Zimmerman called these fears “unfounded”.

    According to the city, the mayor wants to seek a conversation with the outraged parents again in the next few weeks, for example at parents’ meetings. According to Zimmermann, this will not change the city’s decision to accommodate refugees in the containers on the school premises.

  • Fiction - News

    Der Impfpass, and an announcement

    January 5, 2022 - By 

    My satirical short story “Der Impfpass”, based on Kafka and on current events, has been published at the New English Review, here. I’ve been collaborating with them since last year, mostly with fiction.

    Also, remember that my personal blog with longer non-fiction articles is now found at contrarium.substack.com. Here at the site I will be posting mostly updates about our books, magazines or other projects, and occasional shorter texts. Thanks for reading!

  • Articles - News - Psychology

    Will we go back to “normal”?

    April 2, 2021 - By 

    People who know me know that I have been very critical almost from the very start of the whole global reaction to “Covid” and the unprecedented use of authoritarian measures such as forced masks and “lockdowns”, among other measures which have proven to be not only useless, but harmless.

    I am also very wary of this strange mass vaccination campaign with a new technology whose long-term effects we do not know, and ideas such as “vaccine passports” (to my mind, vaccinations should be optional and never forced, directly or indirectly).

    Now, many people are hoping that as the pandemic eventually subsides, things will get back to “normal”. But will they? Hasn’t “normal” already changed by the imposition of such norms and such technology?

    Let’s say the pandemic ends, everyone is happy, we don’t hear so much about “Covid” again. Great. But then, some other virus comes up, or perhaps it’s “global warming”, or “bio-terrorism”, or some other natural or artificial accident. Won’t governments and authorities immediately go into the same, or perhaps even worse, measures?

    Once they have been deployed, things like constant surveillance, almost total digitalization of money, education and entertainment, imposition of “social distancing”, etc, won’t go away. Just like having to take off your shoes or not being able to bring a water bottle before boarding a plane have never gone away, even if there was only one (very suspicious) case of a “shoe bomber” and, as far as I know, no cases of “water bottle” bombers.

    So, no, I don’t think we will go back to “normal”, we are already in “normal”, this is “normal” now. Whether you like it or not.

    (For more about where this “new normal” can take us, read my short story “The Great Unvaxxed” published at the Off-Guardian.)

  • Articles - News

    Dr. Seuss “cancelled”

    March 3, 2021 - By 

    I have to admit I never liked Dr. Seuss’s books. I don’t know why, but neither the illustrations nor the poems were attractive to me either as a child or as an adult, and they were not part of my childhood in any case. I was reading other stuff, such as Tintin, Asterix and classic fairy tales.

    That said, the current announcement that the company now representing Dr. Seuss’ work will no longer publish some of his books because they can be “offensive” for readers is a bit troubling. The modern mania of changing the past to accommodate to the present’s preconceived ideas, as if we were somehow more enlightened or wise than any people in the past, is a form of insanity; in that case, we should “cancel” almost all literature written before the 20th century.

    The books “cancelled” are not the most well-known or Dr. Seuss’s biggest best-sellers, so perhaps the publishers just wanted to discontinue them anyway, and this was just a good excuse. It is a bit suspicious that, while the books are characterized as “offensive”, none of the news articles explain exactly why. I had to search for the actual text of the books, and even then, the only thing I could find was that one of those books mentions, once, the word “Chinaman”, which has fallen out of favor. In other books, it appears that the problem is the illustration of foreign cultures in stereotypical clothes, but again, nothing particularly very “offensive”, except to modern sensibilities.

    The reader can judge by himself. You can find two of the no-longer-to-be published books in pdf form here: “If I ran the Zoo” and “And I think that I saw it in Mulberry Street“.

  • News - Science

    Lockdown doesn’t work

    February 28, 2021 - By 

    A recent study by John P. A. Ioannidis and others, published at the European Journal of Clinical Investigation, seems to indicate that stay-at-home orders and business closures do not work or make little difference in containing the spread of COVID.

    This together with the Chinese study showing that asymptomatic transmission is low or inexistent should put the final nail in the authoritarian measures taken in the name of health. I say should, but of course this won’t happen, and methods such as the “vaccine passports” such as the ones provided now in Israel are the way that will be chosen.

    So now, besides masks and lockdowns, you will also have to be vaccinated, but even the vaccine won’t stop lockdowns and masks for a while.

  • News - Writers

    Jorge Luis Borges

    September 3, 2020 - By 

    A few days ago (August 24th) marked 121 years since the birth of Jorge Luis Borges. I am currently researching a bit about his life, as one of my future projects would be to write a new book about Argentinean literature.

    Of course, a lot has been written about Borges, and I’ve read a lot of it. My father is a great fan of Borges and we had all his books at home, plus many other books about him.

    And yet, there are always some new things that you can discover about someone, especially in the case of a writer of such importance. One of the things I didn’t know so much about was the period of his youth and the several literary projects during his early 20s, which included a mural magazine called Prisma.

    I am also rereading quite a lot of his work. Not only the short stories, but also some essays (although of course, for Borges there is not always a difference between both).

    It is always better to read him in Spanish, if you can understand the language, but if not, there are quite a few translations to choose from. Which one is the best? It’s difficult to say. I prefer the earliest ones, but here there’s a more detailed article describing some of the differences in each version, as well as a discussion of Borges’ work with Norman Di Giovanni, the only translator with whom he directly collaborated.

    Here there’s one of his last interviews, the day of his 85th birthday, still in Argentina (he would die less than two years later, in Geneva). He seems pretty cheerful.

  • News

    What do they have against Cervantes?

    June 24, 2020 - By 

    A statue of Miguel de Cervantes in San Francisco has been vandalized by Antifa and BLM militants. It is not clear what did they have against the greatest Spanish writer. Maybe they confused him with someone else? Maybe they are just destroying all white people statues at this point?

    The fact that Cervantes was taken as a slave by the Turks after the Battle of Lepanto, where he lost use of his left hand, only adds to the irony. If they are protesting against slavery, they took the wrong guy.

    In any case, it is a worrying phenomenon. In fact, the whole thing about vandalizing statues and monuments strikes me as extremely negative, independently of whose statue it is. Because it is an attempt at destroying or negating the past. Of course, in same cases, such as the toppling of the statues of tyrants at the end of Communism or other tyrannical regimes, this may be understandable, but in general it is not an advisable policy.

    Apparently, during the recent protests, some statues were first decapitated before they were taken down. Heinrich Heine once said something to the effect that “those who start by burning books end up burning people”. We may also assume that “those who start decapitating statues end up decapitating people”.

    At least they didn’t topple it.