Italian is a language not averse to populism, apparently, because the word palazzo means both a nobleman’s palace, such as the one where Cinderella crashed the party, and an apartment building inhabited by lowly plebes, such as the one where I live.
This is the month in times past we used to celebrate such wicked conceptions as “Father’s Day.” Now we pause (for a whole month…and large parts of the others) to pay homage to sexual perversity and gender confusion.
A senile and corrupt President presides over a ruined economy and risks nuclear war with Russia, while the American people stay tuned to Heard v. Depp v. Heard. A 15 minute podcast on America’s celebrity universe.
As I walk the streets with the baby in his pram, I scrutinize the faces of passing women and note how few distinct types there are in Palermo. The streets here are a kind of itinerant art museum, where in a single day one sees quite a few Parmigianinos, Pollaiuolos, and Ghirlanaios. How else? Their ancestors, bakers’ daughters or admirals’ wives, probably sat for all those portraits.
I never liked Henry Kissinger when he worked for Nixon and Ford, or his continued meddling since. He was too soft on the Soviets and the ChiComs. But he is the patriarch of the “realist” school, which tries to make deals. And that’s just what he said at the Davos globalist confab ought to be done with the Ukraine War.
Knowledge is power, so the proverb goes, but it can also be weakness. If human beings knew they were going to die in a few days, some few perhaps might take the opportunity to reflect on their lives and make the most of the time they had; more would give free rein to their wildest appetites; and perhaps the greatest number would fall into acedia and despair.
Last week, as young Vasily and I walked the Via Maqueda, the gentle reader may recall the sharp turn we made on reaching the railway station. This brought us to the Chinese quarter, and to urban blight of a different kind.
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A ten minute podcast: Biden’s bungling on Taiwan illustrates one of the worst flaws in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.
If a tradition goes back far enough, it is generally because it corresponds, however roughly, to some reality, while by contrast bright ideas spawned by pure reason are all too often no more grounded in reality than phrenology or the literary speculations of Dr. Freud.
