Today marks the twelfth day of hearings in the Royal Courts of Justice in London, where a Hollywood film star – the “Bad” of my title – is suing News Group Newspapers, publishers of the lowbrow and bestselling Sun, for libel.
Apparently there is a neurological disorder called prosopagnosia, also known as facial agnosia or “face blindness,” affecting to greater or lesser extent some two percent of the world’s population.
The barbarians are near, we feel their corrosive breath on our necks, and unlike their predecessors these new ones cannot be absorbed…
It is curious that Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase about speaking softly and carrying a big stick is the progenitor of “big stick foreign policy,” though in fairness it should really have given us a totally opposite doctrine, “speak softly foreign policy.”
A friend wrote that he had been lent a sailboat and would be moored in Venice over the weekend, and would I want to dine in his company? With the insouciance born of longstanding habit I replied that I would with pleasure, if only he coughs up the money I need to get there
In today’s totalitarian Russia, women are in the vanguard of political repression, and the funny thing is that, were I to paint portraits of some of them, the gentle reader would doubtless be able to relate their traits to his own experience and recognize in one of them the figure of the woman who runs the music department of a college near his house…
Do black lives matter? Clearly, if the story of the Rwandan genocide to which I alluded here a couple of weeks ago is any indication, they do not.
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…
