Omens are plentiful these days. As reported here a year ago, the Oak of Mamre, in whose shadow Abraham invited the angels to rest in Genesis, is all dried up. Now a red calf born in Jerusalem has “undergone extensive examination by rabbinical experts” who have concluded that it is indeed the Red Heifer of biblical prophecy….
So it would seem that the gloriously rational chimera, on which the hopes of many a totalitarian ruler are presently pinned, has landed. AI, we are told, is here to enslave populations in places like China or Russia, to win elections in places like the U.S. and Great Britain, and to do just about everything else except make a good cup of tea.
It’s a sobering recollection, actually, in the time of coronavirus, which is said to have carried away some 300,000 lives, mainly of the elderly or the infirm, in the span of a hundred days, causing a global commotion unseen since the last world war. Yet during the same hundred days, in the spring of 1994, nearly one million people died in Rwanda…
Stalin is said to have told Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, that if she kept making a nuisance of herself he would “appoint another Lenin’s widow.” Similarly, Bashar Assad is the Kremlin’s exarch in Syria because the Russians have appointed him to this position, and if he continues to make a nuisance of himself he may be replaced with another, better Bashar Assad.
The Kremlin has seized the opportunity to advance the plan of tagging the population – “bio objects,” if the gentle reader recalls my post of July 11 last year, is the official term on the government’s websites – to turn its citizens into what we might call “smartserfs,” eventual inmates of a “smartgulag.”
Let us turn to the more lighthearted side of life. While democracy groans and totalitarianism gloats, there is plenty of comedy out there to enjoy.
The Chinese fortune cookie with a Russian message inside, which I strove to decipher in last week’s post, is beginning to crumble.
Comments on last week’s post, fifth in this Sicilian Defense epopee, proved yet again that the reader is astute as he is gentle. “Never let a crisis go to waste!” ironized Andrew G. Van Sant…
What manly China has largely succeeded at, however, is not so much the quelling of the plague as pulling the wool over Western eyes with regard to the quelling of the plague. Last week China claimed that 3,333 people had died of the virus.
The title of the present series of posts, as I’m confident the gentle reader realizes, refers to a popular chess opening whereby Black, who by the rules of the game is a move behind, essentially cedes to White control of the center, using its energies to build up a rival alternative until the timing may be right for a Sicilian Vespers. The Sicilian’s motto, “lie low,” is writ large upon this strategy, and the knack of invisible resistance to domination by central government – whether Arab, Norman, or a myriad others leading up to the present day – is dormant...
