Over at City Journal, the skeptical doctor writes about the dire financial situation that the city of Birmingham has found itself in to illustrate the increasing incompetence and corruption of the British public sector.

Nothing better illustrates the servitude of the British people to their government than the bankruptcy of the city of Birmingham. The city council has announced that it will be able from now on to provide only the most basic and urgent of services, which it had previously done with indifferent efficiency in any case.

Our erudite doctor picks up an old book on Turkey before his visit to the country and considers some of the incredible changes that it has gone through since the end of the Ottoman Empire.

Children don’t collect stamps any longer because such stamps will soon be as obsolete as horses and carts, and screens are more interesting to them. This is a great shame, I think, because the collection of stamps necessarily opened their minds to the existence of the world outside their own country, even if it did not lead to profound knowledge.

Theodore Dalrymple makes his triumphant return to The European Conservative (using his real name, Anthony Daniels) to kick off a series on that august platform dealing with the works of Renaud Camus centered around the Great Replacement theory and the civilizational consequences of mass migration into Europe and the West.

His most pungent idea is simple. It is that the original population of Europe, especially that of France, is being replaced by mass immigration from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, and that this replacement is not accidental or spontaneous but deliberate and planned—on both sides of the equation.

In last week’s Takimag column, the pessimistic doctor tries to view our decadent and degraded Western democracies through the eyes of a non-Westerner in light of two recent acts of debasement and mendacity.

Civilizations, it has often been said, do not collapse because of external enemies, but from internal decay. There is not a strict opposition between the two processes, however, for decay may make external enmity far more formidable than it might otherwise have been. And internal decay there certainly is.

In the October issue of New English Review, the good doctor is back to recount his brief bouts with insomnia, the dangers of barbiturate sleeping pills, encountering pure cocaine in an African hospital, and lying awake during sleepless nights listening to the varied sounds of his house.

The story reminds me, however, of one told by Boris Cyrilnuk, a French psychiatrist, at the beginning of one of his books. One day a child who had hitherto been mute asked his parents to pass the salt. They asked him why he spoke only now, and not previously. “Until now,” he said, “everything has been perfect.”

Over at The Epoch Times, our world-weary doctor ruminates on the recent military coups in Niger and Gabon in light of his own travel experiences through the region back in the day.

A change of rulers is the joy of fools, goes the old Romanian folk saying, and I recalled it as I saw pictures of rejoicing crowds in the street after the recent military coups in the West African countries of Niger and Gabon.

If it’s Friday, it’s Dalrymple at Takimag. The skeptical doctor once again lambastes the British hospitality industry after staying at another subpar hotel with the standard mediocre native English staff.

It was clear that the only way that the hotel could improve was to be taken over by foreigners, staffed by foreigners, and possibly patronized by foreigners. And this is painful to say, because the staff of the hotel were (a) very pleasant and (b) doing their best. But this points to a profound cultural problem, at least for a service economy.