The Nobel Prize, the economy, and the laureate

"The Nobel laureate has died." Few words put a greater spell of insecurity, i.e. the sense of not feeling certain as to what my sentiments should be, as these aforementioned. 

The fact that this bank, whatever the decisions made within it, or the collective of minds having made their bread from it, is celebrated and was being dignified with this prize is, particularly to the Swedish mind, impossibly endearing, especially as a statement to a country which still finds it hard to be just a country. This is, however, a slightly chauvinistic point and certainly not justifying the grand exemption from the ironclad no-waterskiing-behind-the-Nobel-coattails rule. 

I have, however, felt a great joy over the varying disciplines - as opposed to the, justifiably, but not always defensibly so, predictable slate of Medicine, Physics, Chemistry laureates, and perhaps the same could be spoken for Literature - included in the vast, and perhaps controversial, line of Nobel economics" laureates. And no less so in knowldge of the work underlying some of them. And none, perhaps, speaks less to this than professor Kahneman, the psychologist who . Neurosurgery and neuroscience, which advances vastly beyond the Medicine discipline (as long as the, also very welcome, decision to grant aforementioned prize to Mr. Pääbo, again with the flag-touting chauvinism) 

The Virtue of Not Staying Silent

 

For years, it is said, the European Union has stayed silent on the topic of Israel, or more to the point on the (hardly contentious) point of Israeli settlers, in particular those not endorsed, in their occupation, even by the hitherto misnamed IDF and the nascently fascist, or so I am told, Netanyahu cabinet. This is all untrue, of course, because thus far and to go on, different European countries - with or without nuclear arsenals, and with or without membership in the democratic, liberal organisation said to embody the values of the continent, to the point of embodying the "continent" itself - have denounced, in the starkest terms 

What is particular about the meek utterances from the Brussels grayhairs, indeed, is the joint notion, ringing across the Atlantic, that resistance must be offered, however futile and feeble, against the Netanyahu government in its historic extremism, or mayhaps ahistoric extremism, in general and its Gaza "policies" in particular. This, spoke Brussels, is a line best not crossed. Realistically, however, it is not . And for its flaws, the Netanyahu government embodies the dreams of illiberal, or non-liberal democrats, being enslaved to no constitution, no supranational organisations, no outside body politic, only those , and the honorary Arab Israelis descendant from the unexpelled. 

The Virtue of Staying Silent

 

Silence is, indubitably, a virtue of many societies - and not just governments, or autocracies in general - though it has never been one of mine. 

On this note, the very predictable, and predictably attainted argument that Israeli war crimes, if we are to agree on that label at least (the possibility, at least, which does not exclude Hamas from the same) must not be compared to the crimes inflicted on the Jewish people, or millions of Jews to the tally of millions as well as a fewer number of Roma and a higher number of Slavs, lest the comparison is to be a wider insult than mere exaggeration of the volatile and sometimes violent acts of Israel, as a Jewish state. 

Further, the presumed contradiction between Israel's acts and its status as a democratic state, although not necessarily as a Jewish one (though more than a few rabbis, generally in the outlier, would assent to the latter criticism) is, if not entirely valid, quite cumbersome. 

Why then, should he shut up? With droves of "zoomer" voters going from verbal stormtroopers for the Biden-Harris-DNC cause, into political oblivion , of empty papers and Camelot scions, why not retest in part the argument for Israel, in part the vocabulary our debates on that topic is taking? First, by 

The death of the caliphate, a century later

 

When asked, by my tidy self, how to propose a "national day" for the secularists of the world - the broader Western world often bolstered with the near Russians steppes, the swathes of Africa separated from the rest of the continent by the Saharas, and the Orient so mysterious, yet so familiar compared to the lands beyond the Indus, since Alexander and before - I was relatively quick to propose March 3. Asides from personal arbitrary mnemonics - my mother being born on the 1st, and my oldest cousin and dearest friend on the 2nd, I 

In the best of cases, you won't notice it. (In the worst of cases...)

 

The long-discussed, longer-heralded, and often misrepresented case of Swedish "alliance-less-ness", sometimes elaborated into the famous adage of "pertaining to neutrality in wartime", or just "neutrality" in one ubiquitous term, finally reached an undoubted end with the accession - some would say long overdue, others long since a reality - in the White House before the presence of Secretary of State Blinken (one would hope, in this, a better representation of the Washington regime than his master) this Thursday. This Thursday, regardless of opinions of why and now and how it was accomplished, as well as the lingering, "slingering" path of appeasing erstwhile Turkish and Hungarian autocrats-turned-brothers in arms, will be remembered as the one when Sweden almost gracefully, snuck into the alliance of free states, "free" being the epithet so challenged by , as it has been before by Greece and Portugal, ignoring the wider question of colonial possessions (eyes on Portugal, or its vast southern and distant eastern provinces). 

While much in this process may be condemned, or more humbly not arouse so much admiration for its efficacy, elegance or adherence to democratic process - yes, I am of the view that just as the Swedish people was asked, and seemingly even respected in their consent or lack of the same, with regard to the dependence on Brussels bureaucrats and German(-hosted) bankers,