Javier Milei campaigned promising to “take a chainsaw to government regulations” in Argentina.
Kate Andrews, in the London Spectator, profiles Argentine President Javier Milei as he celebrates the completion of a triumphant first year in office,
‘I never wind down,’ says Argentina’s President Javier Milei when we meet in his Presidential Office at the Casa Rosada. ‘I work all day, practically… I get up at 6 a.m., I take a shower and at 7 a.m. I am already at my desk working. And I work all the way until 11 p.m. I enjoy my job. I enjoy cutting public spending. I love the chainsaw.’
It was a photo of Milei with a chainsaw – who was then the insurgent candidate – that propelled him to international fame last year. He waved it on the campaign trail as a symbol of what he would do to government regulations and bureaucracy if elected to the presidency. He had previously gone viral in a video showing him shouting ‘Afuera!’ (‘Out!’) while ripping names of government departments off a whiteboard.
‘That level of joy is too much for me. Removing 44 regulations within a single day is sheer bliss’
These stunts drew attention to his election promise: to wage war on socialism and bring free markets to Argentina. He started at 16 per cent in the polls, but his pledges to curb inflation, abolish price controls, shrink the state and get the country back on a strong fiscal footing won over the majority of Argentinians, who were ready for change. …
This month marks one year since Milei took office, elected with a mandate to overhaul 100 years of socialist rule – and he’s eager to trumpet the results.
‘Let me tell you a fun story. I was in a bilateral meeting with Indian Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi,’ he tells me through his official interpreter. In the meeting at the G20 in Brazil last month, Milei sang the praises of his deregulation minister Federico Sturzenegger, who was also in attendance. Milei told Modi that the minister had cut four regulations in Argentina that very day.
‘Minister Sturzenegger didn’t correct me, because if I had known the actual figure, I would probably have started to celebrate on top of the table. Because he hadn’t removed four regulations, but 44 of them.’
A proud, grateful look spreads across the President’s face. ‘I can assure you that if he had corrected me on the spot, I would have got up and given him a big hug, because that kind of level of joy is too much for me. Removing 44 regulations within a single day is sheer bliss.’
Slashing bureaucracy is his idea of a good time. ‘I derive pleasure from removing the state,’ he says. ‘I feel, that way, we become more free, that I am giving freedom back to the people.’
President of Argentina Javier Milei announced Wednesday that his administration is preparing a structural tax reform that will eliminate 90 percent of existing taxes in 2025.
Milei announced the plan, alongside other policies he seeks to implement in his second year in office, while marking the end of his first. Among them was a plan to negotiate a trade deal with President-elect Donald Trump’s administration once he takes office in January.
Tuesday marked one year since Milei took office on December 10, 2023, and became Argentina’s first libertarian president, succeeding socialist former President Alberto Fernández. At the time he took office, Argentina faced a severe economic crisis that dramatically worsened as a result of Fernández’s disastrous socialist policies. Milei implemented a series of drastic “shock therapy” measures to avert the collapse of the country’s economy and avoid a hyperinflation spiral.
Milei’s policies successfully reduced the inflation rate in Argentina, dropping it from 25.5 percent in December 2023 to 2.7 percent in October 2024 while also allowing the nation to experience ten months of continued trade surplus as of November.
Additionally, Milei spearheaded a dramatic overhaul of the Argentine government during his first year, reducing the number of ministries from 18 to nine on his first day and outright replacing other institutions — such as Argentina’s bloated AFIP revenue service, which was dissolved and substituted with a much smaller agency in November. The Argentine president also introduced a series of sweeping reforms that Congress passed in late June.
Milei marked his first year in office by delivering a speech in the evening hours of Tuesday in the company of his ministers and members of his administration. He reviewed the results of his policies and announced a series of upcoming measures.
Donald Trump should do so well!
If I were younger, I’d be brushing up my Spanish and packing to move to Argentina.
So when the rich kid who went to a $40K a year high school and hung out in Hawaii (allegedly) executes the University of Iowa graduate who worked his ass off for 25 years, the elites are really getting what they deserve, huh?
Cave Bison of Tuc d’Audoubert Sculptures of the Ice Age
These bison were prominently positioned at the centre of a small, difficult to reach chamber deep in the cave system of Tuc d’Audoubert. Made from unbaked clay, the composition depicts the larger bull positioned behind a cow. Their bodies were moulded by hand and still show finger marks. The details of the heads and necks were carved or incised using tools. The tail of the cow, now broken off, was raised ready for mating.
Maria Callas as Abigaille in Verdi’s Nabucco al Teatro San Carlo, Napoli 1949. (excerpt below)
In a genuinely brilliant 1995 New Yorker essay, musicologist Will Crutchfield describes her career and explicates why Maria Callas occupies an essentially unique position in the history of musical performance.
Callas performed vocal feats practically no soprano has equaled and single-handedly revived an entire operatic genre.
In the season of 1951-52, after triumphs up and down the peninsula, Callas established herself as prima donna at Milan’s La Scala, and made it her home theatre. For seven seasons, the house surrounded her with illustrious colleagues, conductors, directors, and designers, in revivals that were the news of the musical world. In familiar and unknown operas alike, Callas’s work almost always became the focus of the world’s thoughts about that role, and Callas herself became a celebrity. Then, in 1959, she went into sudden near-retirement, took up with Aristotle Onassis, and began the long professional and personal decline that still occasions deep regret and furious debate. Callas had been averaging fifty appearances a year; between her thirty-sixth and fortieth birthdays she sang in public only twenty-eight times. There was a flurry of troubled performances in 1964-65, and then silence until a disastrous concert tour in 1973-74.
Only one good decade, really. Callas’s entire stage career (excluding the Greek years) comprised just five hundred and thirty-nine performances. Enrico Caruso, who died at forty-eight, gave nearly two thousand. Chaliapin, one of the various singers who “invented” acting in opera before Callas “invented” it, made his début in 1890, and was still touring, recording, and singing gorgeously in 1937, just months before his death. The only other musician in this century to make anything like Callas’s impact in so few appearances was the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Both of them—like Chaliapin, Caruso, Arturo Toscanini, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau—permanently changed the way their successors understood the music they were most closely associated with. But Callas brought this about largely by conservative means, through the affirmation of tradition. Gould and the others were revolutionaries; she never was. …
What Callas was helping to restore was once the most popular music in the world: the operatic repertory of Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century—the primo ottocento, as the Italians call it. This was the heady moment when Classical virtuosity, inherited from the brilliant vocal rhetoricians of the eighteenth century, coexisted with high Romanticism. The novels of Walter Scott, the poetry of Byron, the music of Beethoven: the younger Italian poets and composers took all these like drugs, and the operas they created swept back over Europe and the world. Callas’s core repertory came from this school, which reaches from the serious operas of Rossini (she sang one, “Armida”) through Bellini and Donizetti, to “Il Trovatore” and “La Traviata,” where Verdi, already striking out on new paths, drew for the last time on the full expressive vocabulary of his predecessors. Bellini’s Norma was Callas’s most frequent role, followed by Verdi’s Violetta and Donizetti’s Lucia; more than half her stage career was devoted to music composed in the narrow span from 1830 to 1853.
With opera moving on in symphonic and naturalistic directions, the decline of the Classical bel-canto skills was inevitable, and by 1900 most of the great operas of the primo ottocento were forgotten. The few that remained in repertory tended to be treated as tired relics, or as surefire comedies and romances that would play themselves (in shamelessly cut and edited versions), while serious artistic effort was focussed elsewhere. Some of the light sopranos kept the bel-canto skills flickeringly alive. But there had been nothing like Callas’s alacrity and speed since about 1910, and what there had been then came with the haphazardness of a discipline no longer valued and slipping into disuse.
Callas had all the exactitude and purpose of a valiant restorer. She had mastered more fully than almost any of her Italian contemporaries the art of legato and portamento (“carrying” the voice smoothly from note to note), and she had an extraordinarily lambent projection, which allowed every word to tell without overpronunciation. Her concentrated focus of tone allowed every gradation of softness to carry through the hall, every minute manipulation of rhythm to register. In every role, on practically every page, there were phrases that Callas was able to trace with a calligrapher’s pen where audiences had become accustomed to a carpenter’s pencil.
St. Nicholas, bishop of Myra, d. 6 December 345 or 352
St. Nicholas was reportedly born in the city of Patara in Lycia in Asia Minor, heir to a wealthy family. He succeeded an uncle as bishop of Myra.
Nicholas left behind a legend of secret acts of benevolence and miracles (in Greek, he is spoken of as “Nikolaos o Thaumaturgos” — Nicholas the Wonder-Worker).
One of the saint’s prominent legends asserts that, in a time of famine, he foiled the crime of Fourth Century Sweeney Todd, an evil butcher who kidnapped and murdered three children, intending to market their remains as ham. St. Nicholas not only exposed the murder, but healed and resurrected the children intact.
Nicholas is also renowned for providing dowries for each of three daughters of an impoverished nobleman,who would otherwise have been unable to marry and who were about to be forced to prostitute themselves to live. In order to spare the sensibilities of the family, Nicholas is said to have secretly thrown a purse of gold coins into their window on each of three consecutive nights.
St. Nicholas’ covert acts of charity led to a custom of the giving of secret gifts concealed in shoes deliberately left out for their receipt on his feast day, and ultimately to the contemporary legend of Santa Claus leaving gifts in stockings on Christmas Eve.
St. Nicholas evolved into one of the most popular saints in the Church’s calendar, serving as patron of sailors, merchants, archers, thieves, prostitutes, pawnbrokers, children, and students, Greeks, Belgians, Frenchmen, Romanians, Bulgarians, Georgians, Albanians, Russians, Macedonians, Slovakians, Serbians, and Montenegrins, and all residents of Aberdeen, Amsterdam, Barranquilla, Campen, Corfu, Freiburg, Liverpool, Lorraine, Moscow, and New Amsterdam (New York).
His relics were stolen and removed to Bari to prevent capture by the Turks, and are alleged to exude a sweet-smelling oil down to the present day.
The Albigensian massacre, chronicle of Saint-Denis, 14th century, London, British Library.
As Edward Feser astutely recognizes, perverse instincts apparently lurk in the depths of human nature causing repeated outbreaks of pathological religious impulses featuring the embrace of fanatical dualism, communal ownership of property, sexual deviance, and rejection of normality, tradition, and the existing order of society.
In the Middle Ages, they did not let the crazies take over the universities, the culture, and the arts, they went in and wiped them out.
In a Catholic World Report essay not too long ago, I argued that the so-called “woke” phenomenon, which has in recent years suddenly risen to enormous influence in Western politics and culture , is best understood as a new riff on the Gnostic-Manichean style of politics identified by Voegelin. There is the characteristic thesis that the everyday world is utterly suffused with evil – “systemic racism,” “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “heteronormativity,” “transphobia,” and the like, all interlocked to form a suffocating structure of “intersectional” oppression. There is the appeal to various forms of gnosis (Critical Race Theory, feminist theory, gender studies, etc.) that purportedlyallow the adept to perceive this oppression in a way others cannot. There is the Manichean divide between those who are enlightened by this gnosis and the wicked who resist it.
But attention to the details reveals disturbing further parallels with Catharism in particular, even if they manifest in secular rather than theological terms. For example, the “transgender”phenomenon evinces an alienation from the body and from the natural end of sex no less radical than that of the Cathars, and with comparable intellectual incoherence and moral disorder as its sequel. For the Cathar, the body is like a dark prison from which the spark of light that is the true self seeks release. For a “trans” person, his male body (for example) belies his true self as a “trans woman,” or as “non-binary,” or as having some other “gender identity.” For the Cathar not ready to advance to the status of the Perfect, the body’s appetites may nevertheless be freely indulged, even to the point of extreme debauchery, so long as procreation is avoided. For the trans person, the body’s sexual organs might be destroyed and refashioned so as to reflect his true gender identity, but they might instead be preserved and deployed in a manner that gratifies his governingsexual fetish. Thus do we have the bizarre claim that a “trans woman” is simply a “woman” full stop, even if “she” has male genitalia.
The Cathar hatred of corporeal life and its procreation also finds parallels in the extreme environmentalist component of the wokemovement, which regards the human race as a “cancer on the planet,” and in the normalization of abortion, euthanasia, and childlessness. The Cathar condemnation of state violence for the sake of upholding law and order finds a parallel in woke calls to “defund the police” and end the “carceral state.” The Cathar eschewal of meat and dairy products finds a parallel in the contemporary vogue for moralistic veganism (in the name of animal rights or sustainability or the like). The Cathar rejection of private property finds a parallel in woke refusal to enforce laws against vagrancy and shoplifting.
Like that of the Cathars, woke rhetoric often sounds superficially peaceful. But also like the Cathars, the wokenevertheless practice coercion and even violence when they judge it useful for advancing their cause. This includes doxxingand other forms of intimidation; rioting, looting, and even occupying large areas (as in 2020’s CHAZ protest in Seattle and the siege of the federal courthouse in Portland); the shutting down of roadways and the vandalism of paintings, public statuary, and the like as routine protest tactics; the mutilation of bodies in the name of “gender identity”; and the promotion of “gender transition” even among children, along with the imposition of extreme ideological curricula, against the wishesof parents.
In general, wokeness, like Catharism, is essentially about the radical subversion of normal human life in the name of a paranoid Fmetaphysical delusion. Like Catharism, its fashionableness has nevertheless found it support among a large segment of the wealthy and powerful. And like Catharism, its rise has been facilitated by the Church’s being in such a low state that it is unable to provide an effective counterbalance.
