söndag 29 december 2024

The Conscience of the West Wing

 
Or indeed the Western world. So much in his life was akin to a fairytale, that one might expect him to stroll past his hundredth birthday, vote, ensure the continual succession and power of his party, and then 

tisdag 17 december 2024

The Conscience and the Wor(l)d

 
The notion of a Secretary-General of the United Nations, as the half-Soviet, half-liberal internationalist-sounding office of supreme pontiff of this organisation is known, is not so young as it might seem at a first glance. While , the Catholic world has long had - which extends long beyond Catholic-majority countries, or the consciences of Catholics themselves. This is obviously a precarious position 

What then, is the purpose of the office of Pope, from an international perspective? Well, considering his national duties are very limited (if garbed in autocratic powers present no elsewhere on the continent, albeit broadly "liberally" exercised) there is nothing else than the international to the tiara. 

Against this, I must say I never like the Bishop, as he is, as much as when he is under barrage of criticism. Because it is when the mighty (as he undoubtedly is, if seldom as mighty as "earthly power", lest we collapse into pure "soft power" belief) 




söndag 8 december 2024

Al Kasr Al Ba'ath

 
The rapid movements on the road to Damascus forced an reconsideration worthy the wording regarding the future and prospects of the already-tiptoed and deeply strained (to the tune of hundreds of thousands dead, and more wounded and, notably, displaced) Assad regime. Now, with the capital encircled and entered by rebel forces - this expression, so much better when spouted by a Southern English accent in front of the panorama window of the Death Star - and a new government inevitable, if not already put in place in practice,  . 

Nevertheless, with any negative consequences burgeoning before the door, it must be spelled, as Simon Jenkins' word, "inevitable". Whatever . This scourge of jihadist democracy, of mass movement pertaining to "islamism", whatever the contents of that almost-useless term (nearly as useless as the nearly appropriate definition of a "fascism for the Ummah") but also of popular, in the case of Syria, inexorable Sunni(st) support, is a trial which will endure beyond Trump's rhetoric of staying the hand, or the missile, Obama's deeply regrettable speech on the virtue of chemicals as opposed to lead, and any resolution adopted by a sometimes deadlocked United Nations, most of whose members probably watch with some semblance of relief. 

I will say this: As in the case of Iraq, I wish the breaking of Assad had come sooner, and the fallout will . And with the sweeping away of this second, or rather first, national socialist minority dictatorship of the Ba'athist brand, Monsieur Aflaq's legacy has in no small sense been capped, to an astonishingly shame-inducing result, especially considering the human costs. In no sense should the black-red-white be missed, even at the backdrop of Sunni-jihadist activism and violence, which it in no small sense induced and incubated for its paradoxical survival, I mean prolonging. In the end, its creed was as useful as pan-German national socialism, and the minoritarian-tribalist foundation on both sides of Sykes-Picot was in the end as unsustainable as good old Rhodesia, without revelling in tremendous violence and waves of emigration by its future. 


Not next year's model? The moustache will likely be as fashionable as the red-white-black, 

But will it? Really? The breaking of the IS from all fronts, at any rate, as well as conqueror Al Julani's decided break from the Al Qa'ida brand, seems to have . I will not back from my positing of another, stronger jihadist wave as highly likely (if certainly still inevitable, Jenkins-style), especially with a weak coalition government of factions with changing names and armies now expected to sit down and forge a future, with the common enemy gone - wherever - and only the prospect of further death, destruction and debilitation holding them back from standing up and going for another round. 

Further, the Putin(ist) regime has been, in no small sense, discredited . In the words of professor Luttwak, "a bit of a scoundrel; but I protect him to the end", now seems both more , and in a chilling fashion: Whose end, Ser Barristan? Assad's, or Putin's? With Russia decidedly tied down, if not tied up, in its immediate neighbour, it is unlikely that help will be anything beyond Assad's promised cottage, and a lifetime (still a substantial time, for someone who ascended to the presidency at thirty-four) as Pavelic, looking over his shoulder for lawyers and assassins alike. And should Russia undergo similar change, the promise upheld by Ukraine's friends for years, well... let's hope not, considering its nuclear arsenal was not nipped in the bud as proposed by the (then) egregious Mr. Russell. 


Next generation's model? No, not a victorious Aleppo or a liberated Damascus, but Stockholm. How many of them will carry the flag home, and for how long? What is the promise cheered, beyond a pure negative? 

What then is the best scenario? Well, in order for the numerous coalitions - victorious, and those supposedly defeated - to form a coalition government, compromises must be made, and the scorn of those harbouring violent designs needs be quelled, from without if not within. With Mr. Julani's recent past - if it can be called a past - of not violence, but violence in the black-and-white brand, echoed in his CNN interview with a, from certain viewpoints, scantily clad provocatrix of an interviewer, it is certain that foreign military headquarters and security services, as well as domestic forces and the now-vast Syrian diaspora will consider the prospect of a second war with little break, and launch it rather than submit to the whip of the once-dreaded Nusra Front - "al Qa'ida in Syria", "islamist", "jihadists", decidedly so. Well, all true, and perhaps well, if you ask the crowds now merrily riding decapitated statues of the deceased Assad and the windblown Assad, but asides the question of the prospects for launching a great jihad - Ibn Saud's attitude around 1926, or the Brotherhood's - with a ragtag coalition, surrounded by Turkish, Israeli and a vengeful Iran and impatient Saudi Arabia, all but surely collapsing the coalition itself. Julani has come far from his Al Qai'da beardless boyhood roots, joining the loose-spun network of the black banner before he throttled the Bin Ladinist/Zawahirist gas and took after the move of his feudal colleague in Iraq, the doggedly deceased Mr. Baghdadi, and seems poised to form a national resistance movement now with governmental power within his grasp, and end the conflict rather than carrying it on against his victorious brethren, and all but certainly end like Baghdadi, to small benefit to either himself or the Syrian people. In this choice, pragmatism and "national liberation" will win out over dogmatic global jihad. 


The new Russians. While expelled under different circumstances, their lifeline is the last hope offered by a Russian autocrat not above utilising refugeehood as a weapon. 

The same could be said for the Taliban, however, and for the cosmetic changes and presence of cable TV and cellphones, the new generation seems just as experimentally and assiduously cruel as their 1990s forebears, with the Buddhist (and other) treasure trove of Afghanistan proffering scant relief against the human flesh and blood forced to adapt to a cramped space limited by the lines of Quranic reasoning. Is this what is what awaits Syria? 

I think not, as within this struggle . The future may thus spell jihad and caliphate (well, not really, but let's say emirate) but not the other without the one. Too many interested parties, including the revolutionary-insurrectionist-post-Assad government's international credit depends on the . With the choice of pursuing a course for a Hizb al-Dunya, or the path of jihad, now against his Syrian brothers, I suspect Julani will select the pragmatic path, and become a new Assad rather than an all-out assault on Assad's legacy. While the situation for minorities, and women, will almost certainly be precarious, it has been for years and 

The overthrow, long awaited and called for, of the slobbering dauphin was called for, and a necessary step rather than a sufficient one (as Zizek said, more evocatively). But it will not write the end of Syria's tragedy, and while the eventually-to-reemerge black ragtag of "ISIS", not the goddess, may have seemed a failure their critique of Sykes-Picot was not wrong and the boundaries remains an obstacle to any preferential successful state in the old Ottoman Wilaya. In part to be restored, even as a client state, which will not restore the supposedly blissful past of Turkish rule, the tutelage of an impossible Alawite-Ba'athist minority rule is finally broken. The celebration called for in Damascus, in Stockholm and elsewhere needs be recognised and should be followed, but do keep the bottle and break it if you must. 


lördag 7 december 2024

This Lady of Ours


If I pronounced the "notre" of "Notre Dame (de Paris, especially for Indianians)" as "ours" in the broadest human sense, I wouldn't come across too many . In a myriad of cathedrals christened as "for the lady", the mother virgin of Jesus, this one rises above the herd, the skyline, the nominal list to a position so unchallengeable that, had the façade indeed fallen five years past and - inexplicably - not been restored, it is no exaggeration or blind trust she would have kept her hold on the name still. 

Thus when, with such force and sadness and, dare I say it, and not without commemoration to the firefighters but also the lady herself, some resilience, she burned, it 


måndag 2 december 2024

The Emperor, eleven score years later

 
At the time of his coronation, the man born (not "known", as the now famous series states) as Nabullione Buonaparte - an Italian-scented name - on just-annexed Corsica would have been called many things now though illicit, grandiose, or even admirable. At 35, he crowned - so to speak - his hitherto achievements by raising and lowering, by his own hand, the crown he reinstated quite incredibly, as if humiliating the enemies and friends of the revolution alike. 

Twenty years ago, a TV series - then, also incredulously, French - marked as the most expensive ever was released, starring Christian Clavier as the grandiose, but doomed (and decidedly diminutive) emperor, the inevitable (as far as a French production is concerned, with even Francois Cluzet blazing from his absence) Gerard Depardieu as the useful but fickle Fouché, and John Malkovich as the emblematic, enigmatic, ethereal Talleyrand (titles are useless). In this recognition of the bicentennial, the motif was clearly one more favourable than the image of the tyrannical, if doomed, Napoleon lasting as far as memories - and survivors - of the regime and its wars persisted. While recognising his ruthlessness (which was, by a turn of phrase, not his alone) it was clearly shining gold through the gloom of a Medieval, pre-modern Europe as the act of the great man took himself, and us, into a new era - destroying himself, indeed, but not so much by evil, or even corruption of the powerful by power, but rather the less significant, small-minded and vile which surrounded his genius. More recently, a biopic by the emblematic 

söndag 17 november 2024

The one and last (?) transition

 
After weeks and weeks - and before that, years, to put in single digits - of the cry of fascism, the seeming fact of is finally . Notably, the ever-lasting promises to resign partition in the American experiment and depart the republic for the old, or otherwise other, more blessed swathes of the "new" world, has been followed by sullen sulking and return to the normalcy of generating income. Income which the coming administration, perhaps even in the minds of the critics, will be successful in collecting, with quarterly revenues and GDP growth boosted beyond those the fateful year, if we are to trust this narration, of 2024. 

Doubtlessly 2024 was a watershed, as 1824 (with its aftermath of 1828 and 1829-1837) was and as 1924 might have been, had the dangerously radical La Follette expanded his success beyond the people's republic of Wisconsin, and what follows is to be written into the history books in tones of , or at best, torpor. 

Rape, unwashed unkept hands, Russian espionage, the accusations have hardly eased since 2016, when the calls of either "old-school neocon Republican goodfella", or straight out "plutocrat" (fair enough for the progeny of Exxon Mobile) hit all the nominees, and Mike Flynn fell. 

lördag 9 november 2024

The Once and Future president


In my previous post, one of those I have returned to the most, for the topic and relative brevity of verse and sublime grandness (as opposed to stacking adjectives and, dare I say parenthesised, dependent clauses) I presented one candidate for "best presidents" as occupant of a "full day", . And now it seems, for the first time since over 130 years, . 

The first victory of Cleveland, in spite of his opprobriable sexual morals and historic in breaking 28 years of Republican victories, is closer to the outbreak of the Seven Years' War; that is, French stake to Canada as well as Louisiana and all between, or the slobbering tyrant's victory at Fontenoy, than to this second occurrence of a two-ordinal, one-man president. And more important, certainly more remembered, will be the person of this comeback, the man of the hour (and certainly, should TIME exercise any sort of courting the public, of the year) and, at last, and for the last time, the man destined - dare I say desired - to be the future president as well as the one that once was. 

How then did we get here? How was the man touted by media, even by rather humble standards, to a treatment making earlier . First, as already implied, this may not be the case, and those who insist on exercising the narcissism of the present, I would point to opprobria-prone (a more acceptable word?) campaigns of the past, involving more closer run kisses of death, proper such's (including by a fascist-declared, decidedly authoritarian candidate for the Democratic nomination)? The "horsethief" Lincoln, certainly open to grand jury, investigation and even conviction by a virtuous Southern jury, should there have been the shadow of such a case - and, indeed, a greater sense of 

Also, and as already implied, the rejection has an attraction of its own, and has had in America. Indeed "America", the enlarged endo-exo-metonym . Add to this the authenticity 

Third, and has already been said, the cultural "plan", or tendency, of the ostensible far left, reaching its ostensible tentacles into - or rather from - the Democratic party 

Fourth, the fact that this Hitler has risen, reigned and rowed away - on time, even if after a bang very unsurreptitiously broadcasted by his very being, swagger, tone of voice, and evident narcissism (which is not necessarily unpreferrable to the covert narcissism of leaders commanding deeper charisma or wider audiences). 

Fifth, the polies, stupid. As a former, and far better equipped (and not in the department which earned him, deserved or not, the first impeachment since Johnson's setup and until Trump's first, quite . 

What then of the concerns? Some are certainly earned, and regardless of earned, very real. Others, such as the very real conviction in the documents case, are earned but only ticketed, equally real, for some and not others. While there is a sweet vengeance that poor security protocol of these narcissists flunked both Clinton and Trump, in court of opinion and of law respectively, (in this matter, I must say Mar-a-Lago seems securer than Mrs. Clinton's private e-mail server, or indeed Scranton Joe's garage).  The new, very obsequious Republican party is a fault in itself, an insult . While the primary of last spring was an insult, it was only Trump's insult, and the fault lies in the hands of the voters, where it seems destined to remain, or be rereleased for the next, by any measure exciting contest of 2028. For the Democratic (big D, it's important) there is no such guarantee to be issued, let alone believed. Mr. Carville's desire for a new pseudo-Democratic contest was good in its time, and might have earned the name spelt in small "d", but was so whittled it was almost a whisper from Hans Brask (for this story, and it's good ), and predictably rolled over. Never was the will, or desires, of an oligarchy imposing its choice over a broader electorate more firmly rebuffed, and perhaps deservedly. But do those who did not select selection over election, but who would have exercised their right (I think it is) to the latter, deserve the result, and who of the two will suffer, insofar we can talk of "suffering" rather than "sufferance". It may, and may not, be the continuing 

tisdag 5 november 2024

Comments over Those Fallen

 
Some comments on those fallen would seem a gloomy title for a poem, but there is across party lines scant reason not to see it as a struggle above victory, an accomplishment sans celebration, a triumph only of the less angelic avenues of their minds, regardless of who can claim the ostensible hold on the mythological number of 270 electors. 270 men, women and else, who will perform the actual, nigh-sacred duties of electors, in lieu of the hundreds of millions (over one yi , a limit reached in the momentous last year of last millennium, not to be outdone by the figure "billion" until another two centuries). Whether those electors will continue performing those duties is one question on the slab, to awake or be done with, at least 

My prediction of 2016, my last - so to speak - . This time, it is decidedly harder, and 


No, Iowa stays red and the two junior states are swapped, and would it not be merry if they were, appropriately after climate. "Wiscigan" must not necessarily split, although my prejudice tells me the negative fallout of certain stalwart DNC foreign policy, as well as a waltz with the governor of the sole state of Mondale (the apparent choice for a candidate herself chosen while a California senator) may favour Wisconsin. All in all, the "false landslide" seems speculative, and neither will - as John Doe did - collect all seven. Elsewise, shall Nevada prove, as in 2006, a stunning upset?

To their fans, they may be idols, but they are neither demigods or statesmen. This is the age of looming oligarchy, not a vicious single-party tyranny, and while Trump has long since made no secret of the relationship between his own ego . In this regard, however, I consider the oligarchic tendencies of the Democratic party just as alerting, if not exactly recent. Post-liberal liberalism, liberal democracy sans the demos part, .  

How, then, will he handle Chairman Xi? The Russian Vozhd, as he might as well be called? Will issues of adulation be offered, and what harsh terms will be proffered 

And how did I get here? 





onsdag 30 oktober 2024

The Experiment Resumed (across the aisle)

 
Donald Trump, the comeback geezer. Who would have thought, even eight or seven years ago, that he would stand at the precipice of another non-consecutive term, a feat undeniably born as much from tactless Democratic arrogance, and incompetence, as from his own inarguably magnetic, if magnetically divisive, command of charisma. If he wins, as he is - as opposed to in 2016, as well known by this author - predicted doing, he will be 

And arguably, Donald Trump is unfit for this office. I myself, though I steered clear of that specific iceberg of a phrase 

And then, on the other side of the strait, a Scylla, Ms. Harris. A woman - the fact so cherished by her superior predecessor, Mrs. Clinton, in 2016, now very selectively (and perhaps neurotically) upheld as an argument from the "diversity" crowd - of far narrower intellectual proportions, almost touching those of her predecessor. This, as the elderly ex-housekeeper familiar to the call of Carcosa said in True Detective, should frighten you, but not for the same reasons. While his front porch, or basement, or keyboard strategy, arguably understandable in 2020, was dictated by the need for a constitutional monarch, protected from result and blemish by any meaningful primary, her being put in the same position, a maid at the bow of the ship of democracy, heralds far greater horrors as far as the position and integrity of the office is concerned. Yes; I am not beyond saying these words of her as well. While it "should be enough", as has been said (perhaps not enough) of her contender . And if that is not enough, should the fact she is neck in neck to the man, Donald Trump, not the most popular (ex-)president in United States history, or even biting at his sordid coattails, be enough? 

Be that as it may, whichever candidate you regard as impossible - a choice seemingly much in line with sex, as it has been in my country of birth - or whether, conclusively, you find that a serious ballot (leaving alone whether there is anything else) can be cast for either party which have held a monopoly since the exit of Mr. Fillmore in March 1853, it is clear that a gradual and very symbiotic degeneration of both parties . Hence, the two-party system, while predictable and largely sympathetic, for as long it held conservative Democrats (now an extinct species) and liberal Republicans (now the conservative ones being the hounded minority) is to blame. We must . And here I would put much blame, if blame for inaction can ever be issued, at Mr. Sanders, who I have praised and wished good fortune in the past not because of my complete coherence with him on issues, or admiration of his deep intellectual rigour, but for identifying something which is not only, and could be much more popular, but also... unifying. Well, what would have been wrong with an American Party? In this, at least, I must offer my gracious praise of Mrs. Stein. Third time's the charm, it is said, and although I agree with GRRM:s stillborn praise, supporting her agenda and denouncing her character (an important issue, and not only to be used as a dagger against the Orange One) was sub-par. With Mr. West I know . Of Mr. Kennedy, well, while much positive may be spoken, he is now as much a figure of the past as well as, conceivably, the future - but not, under any circumstance, of next Tuesday. His feat this year was a great betrayal, though it followed on a crime so abominable it may, perhaps, be washed out with outright betrayal, though not, I think, by sullying his own colours. 


tisdag 1 oktober 2024

The One Hundred Years of Carter


It was a moment I had been waiting for, if a bit unsteady . The record set by the second, if 
 

måndag 30 september 2024

The Ire of the "Wrong" Winner


The predictable, but decreasing gusto of voices decrying the imminent fall of democracy has yet again risen, if with predictable parrotlike repetition, over the weekend's election in Austria. Held five years after the snap election forced by the Ibiza scandal, 

The FPÖ, the "Liberty", or rather "libertarian" party of Austria, has however marked itself against the twicket of far right/populist far, populist, hard or even "new" right through existing throughout the entire post-occupation (ending in 1955, and leaving behind a constitutional scar in neutrality, requiring the permission of victory powers in belatedly entering the European Union 40 years later), posing a challenge which has often been considered, well, "queer" rather than frightening, and a different electorate. In essence, it is a party difficult to grasp in terms of ideology and tenable to do so only in terms class, posing a "third estate" or middle ground to the industrialist, upper-class, conservative ÖVP (the heir to the party which ran the Austrian dictatorship during the 1930s, and hardly ever denounced for it) and the working-class SPD, a faction of the socio-economic centre, simultaneously of liberal and the nationalist, or the Liberal Democrats and UKIP if you will. 

This has changed, of course, through the inexorable and irrevocable process of breaking through, posing now - at an "old" figure of a bare 30 % - the role of the "major" party of Austria. In some regards, it is no more imposing now than in 1999, and in the likely red-cyan coalition which will emerge, perhaps less so. 

fredag 19 juli 2024

The Ire of Power


Among the greater qualities of Frank Herbert's recently re-lauded Dune saga is the question of power, and how it is not a feast of . And apart from the truly disgusting, to most of its non-contemporary viewers, examples the 

Equally true, it must seem now, is the notion that the president of the United States, the informal "leader of the free world", quotation marks to observe the too-obvious contradiction, could not be the firm authority demanded by the office, short of a Palpatinesque performance now wielded against his chances of maintaining that office, and thus - from the far cry of opposition, rather than succumbing in name to a successor - the power flowing from (if not alongside) it, imperium and potestas and auctoritas in all. 

torsdag 18 juli 2024

A Sloping Roof


The metaphor of roof, substituted for the more appropriate "ceiling" in a famous clash of minds, usually utilised to herald the limits (or non-limits) for political , saw a swift to the exterior with the humbug excuse offered 

How much, it must now be asked, has this sloping roof cost the Biden campaign, perhaps undeservingly. Notwithstanding, as some have observed, elements in the Democratic party have rallied to legislate away the once and future president's already questioned security detail, 

söndag 14 juli 2024

Day of Liberty - and Death

 
The supposed juxtaposition, or very real in verbal terms, of "liberty" and "democracy", sometimes with "peace" and "co-operation" juxtaposed just as much against a menacing "division" (begging, yet again, the qeustion the frontier between opposition and division lies within this healthy democracy) are seldom taken to the extreme so much, and perhaps so earnestly, as with the flying of lead and passing of steel. I myself wrote, now nearly six years past and near half the lifespan of this publication, of the attempt on the Brazilian "Trump's" life, the lugubrious and since-convicted (following a proud Brazilian tradition, or perhaps - or not - of its judiciary) 

lördag 1 juni 2024

The ANC, trumped

 
The unspoken rule, whilst never acknowledged as an eternal truth, was the ANC would win the next South African election. While that has now been broken, the decisiveness and sudden upset - sudden being questionable for a political season of months, but seen from the cold and relatively peaceful north - has come harder than might have been expected. The reformer, Ramaphosa, so decisive in his rhetoric but pragmatic by his hand, has been bested - if not in raw numbers - by his disgraced predecessor, who has effectively wrestled the KwaZulu out from the reaches of the ANC, and much the Inkatha, in favour of a new political force combining ANC rhetoric and dreams with the verbal radicalism of an ostensibly tamed, and at any rate meek, EFF. 

This has been welcome, in terms of ensuring , for no liberal democracy can endure with a single-party dominance. We know this from Hungary, although the same experts profusely counsel that a return to Republican governance in the United States, say, may mean the end of democracy. 

fredag 31 maj 2024

The Tide of Justitia

 
If it came of pass that a presidential candidate 

This, I would posit, poses no great critique of the seldom cherished American legal system in general. 

As Beriya said (or was it Vyshinsky) that if a man could be found, a crime could be as well, or less beneficially interpreted, invented. Do expect, I say now (as if it were not already a long-dusted notion) for a Democratic candidate to be indicted, whenever a crime could plausibly be found within a friendly red-ish judge, and where an overwhelmingly GOP-esque jury could be expected, the odd . 

tisdag 30 april 2024

Revoluçao dos Cravos

 
A revolution, or revoluçao as spoken in the noble Lusitanian tongue, which has hardly been forgotten but - like the regime which it ended - overlooked in its execution, ,composition, result - and largely, which is hard to disentangle from the legacious and enduring war in Angola, or rather, the Savimbi phase of it, its causes - is that which sprung out like a quickly blossoming spring on the 25th of April, or 25 de Abril, the name of the previously named Ponte Salazar still making a red scar across Lisbon, five days and five decades ago. It was in reality a revolution both long and short in the making, which preceded the more anticipated, and more present - although arguably more violent - one in Spain the following years. 

And it should be called a revolution, not only for the mark of the time and the drastic circumstances which it changed, if perhaps inexorably, with the toppling of the civilian bureaucratic regime by its (as it turned out) new military leadership, the ejection of Caetano and Tomas to its long-lost colony of Brazil, not or only late to return, respectively. 

torsdag 25 april 2024

Ever Agatha

 
The great Agatha Christie, known as Lady Agatha in her closing years as so many of her peers, passed nearly half a century ago, closing a final page on a literary career begun over another half before with Curtain and Sleeping Murder (and a number of less-read short stories), cutting short a career as extensive as her own... two, including the slightly less iconic and extensive one of the ever-Miss Marple (herself never a Lady) and, quite complimentary, immortalised by an almost cancerous stream of adaptations, second only to her peer, colleague (their publishing overlapping, in fact) and countryman Sir Conan Doyle, a name used (perhaps unintentionally, although her style and sense of detail may preclude only a direct intent on her part, if we are to judge the queen of murders by her own standard) in Death on the Nile. 

As Kenneth Branagh . I must confess to not liking this strongly, although I felt a certain glee against my poor expectations (either a good or a bad feeling, depending on your personality) that it felt, above anything, to be complimentary to its nearly insurmountable 1974 predecessor, which even the talented Branagh could impossibly have rushed to shoot himself, much less playing the iconic lead (doing both, to this Lumet-Finney backdrop, is impressive enough). As I rewatched it, with its competing (or, diplomatically, complimenting) movie siblings I found these strengths played stronger, and having re-read the book it is indeed both surreal and quite charming. More beautifully shot, but with some crazy, hence not too impressive CGI imagery, with a cast intending to , . 

Sadly, some (inescapable, but here almost deliberately obvious) anachronisms are glaring from the letter, specifically relating to current-day, or perhaps eternal, questions of ethnicity and gender. The considerations of an exiled white Russian noblewoman for the possible (and then quite noticeable) ascent of an American actress to a directorial position, however personally explicable through the relationship therein exposed, is plain ridiculous, if overshadowed (at least in terms of very contemporary American political discourse) by the assumption that royal Yugoslavian police would, naturally, slate a Hispanic passenger for judicial murder. Really? Not the Italian, Austrian? How about, just for sake of variation and anticlimax, pose the danger of the police covering the thing up? The addition of Johnny Depp, among no less impressive contemporaries (here seemingly pressed by things current, and about to come flailing in his face the following years, but to no damage to his take on the obnoxious American, as if he were - in the words of Fantine - already dead) . On the subject of overacting, the action sequences. Overplay? Sure, though perhaps . On the note of action; if Branagh's Poirot, undeniably more physical and athletic than his illustrious predecessors - and, as the script very clearly puts out, a former policeman at that. -he might as well match the over-dramatic, almost perversely decadent moustache with some physical discipline. As far as , the clear departure from the Finney, and more so Suchet (Agatha's favourite, for my money) adaptions, 
 


One of many incarnations. Ken's Poirot and Daisy as Mary Debenham, previously viewed by millions of fans of the 1974 picture cherished even by Christie herself (a rare gem) and the 2010 installment in the series - bearing her name - by Albert Finney, Vanessa Redgrave, Jessica Chastain and the David Suchet. 


The following adaption, just as audaciously chosen to be Death on the Nile, one of the favourites certainly of the post-Christie era, and just as undeniably a 1970s cinematic classic, and . This I liked a bit more, although if failed, more so upon rewatch, to live up to the illustrious mark. Adding to the 1978 classic, which was decadent and elephantine in its magnitude if nothing else, but with certain narrative perplexities (such as the continuity in the moment of Doyle's solitude, and the subtle cut to his widower status) and ultimately Ustinov's ability to supplant Finney as a credible Poirot, doing so by playing to a different character. The Suchet adaption is, adding to this, magnificent in its own right and, while with a smaller budget (even in dollar figures) and fewer minutes, admittedly also with less famous actors (although Emily Blunt would certainly eclipse Gadot or Lois Chiles eventually). Suchet, although then very established in the role since Ustinov's twilight, added , with even some sadistic impulses unleashed quite coldly on the breaking culprit.  


onsdag 10 april 2024

The India Question

 
The unspoken, but still valid assumption that China is inadequately discussed and debated in the talk of the new world order, replicates itself as the world's most populous democracy (or is that "most popular" democracy...? Some, and as for now migrant flows, may differ...) and now populous (or popular) country full stop - no discussions on micro-states here - and whether India, seventy-five and some years since independence from the colonial, outspokenly imperial grasp of the Britain then still an empire... a fact so very changed in the infancy of never-Emperor Charles I(II) will take a place and shape, as well as being shaped by a successive string of foreign rulers and invaders since the Original Aryans and before. Never before, since the rise of the American experiment on the world stage and likely not since long before that, has an actor been so unspokenly derided, insulted without the slightest intention 



Why is that? 

Folkets val

 
Om något i livet är säkert, för att inleda den första svenska krönikan (?) på läänge med en parafras på den olycksdrabbade hemvändande sonen Corleone, så är det att utträdarna (khawarij, på det ädla arabiska tungomålet) Sara Skyttedal och Jan Emanuel Johanssons - en duo osedvanligt igenkännbar genom sina ömse akronym - nya parti inte kommer att bli en större succé. Men det kan vara på plats att diskutera vad som här, och mycket senkommet, väntar på att födas, och 


De utkastades osköna nya allians. 

Detta, en 



tisdag 9 april 2024

A New Era, and the Brunt of this Green New World of ours


With regard to the challenges of the future 

I solemnly acknowledge I haven't given this topic full coverage, as I have given no topic in the latest years, or any time before, and for that reason there is, I hope, particular venom to appreciate this particular angle. Not only is humanity facing multiple crises broadly interlinked and related to overconsumption, overpopulation and over-technologisation (for this particular, nasty, truth, see Jevons paradox, no apostrophe, and then compare to the ever-pliant and ever-reproducing Amish, who will inherit the American earth if scary demographic trends is anything to go by) but also biting itself in the foot in the brave attempt at eluding these crises, tightening the proverbial noose by outsourcing , further stoking a paradoxical dependence on primitive fossil fuels in the process of abandoning them and jumping ship. 

Undoubtedly, these crises interlinked will herald a new era of unassailable and incalculable proportions, altering the equilibrium for human survival on earth (admittedly, a very precautious and precise one at first, and it sure has been worse, even in the absence of thermonuclear device which, then, would mostly have been thought as an obliquely clever machination to preserve heat) and, in all likelihood and with some inherited optimism, providence or god or our unmade nature will not be completely erased, although conditions as well as the purported loss of death - or rather premature death - will mean incalculable psychological harm for those lucky to carry the torch through the new era. As the Klown once mused at the prospects of a television-free future, egotistically recognising his jugular for what it is, the survivors may well envy the dead. 


Carrying the weight of the future... or its obstacle, rooted in an economic order not nestled in the consideration of further hundreds, or millions, of generations but the development of humanity beyond the capacity of its (current) habitation, with consequences blooming those beyond the capacity of readily available remedies. Malthus or techno-hubris, the adaption of the future within the confines of the present does, no doubt, pose the greatest question above the horizon since the advent of nuclear weapons, and since well before and beyond it. 

The development of this conundrum, posed by a combination of a post-industrial order without which we would sooner not endure (would not, most of us, now even in Third World countries, foreclosing any vague fantasy of returning to the past by those deeming themselves most progressive) and the population explosion permitted, if not demanded, by this greatest revolution, having now advanced into the stage of micro-chips, the ever-present "smartphone" and the purposed Artificial Intelligence now born like a prodigal son, a digital Zeus - or, as Nietzsche would have it, the sons of Adam - developed into a stage to slay its parent. 
And then, perhaps - which is often, and perhaps too often professed - maybe a great remedy is beyond our grasp? Beyond the question of human nature, determinism and representative democracy, which all put certain definite, if not immalleable constraints, on our collective decision-making, akin to the surgeon with a scalpel determined to dig out a cancerous but young tumour from his own belly, or collectively expected to do so to a third party by and before an audience, an example realised by group psychology, mental training and sectarianism, but often to great condemnation and resistance, there is perhaps variables not exactly determined, but which we have avoided in our attempt to rationalise our existence as well as the importance of human agency. To this, I can only offer a sigh of unresigned acceptance, of "well, at least I tried". 

McMurphy failed, or so we think at least, but the goal - undesirable or dangerous illusion - of breaking the window was reached. We would better put up resistance, and at the worst, we will have completely readjusted our economy . This has been done, gloriously or in vain, as it were, in response to the German, and Japanese (Italians need not bother) military threat to dominate the globe - meaning, as it still frequently does, the Eurasian landmass, or quite a lot thereof - and the result, for the survivors that is, was not necessarily bad, Stalinist and post-colonial (now inevitable, due to German-Japanese efforts) resettlements and re-drawings of maps without rulers notwithstanding. On the contrary, both for the colonial liberator (and post-colonial technocrat, at best) and European rising from the ashes, the following decades are frequently thought of as the best, the epitome of human existence, barring that question of nuclear warfare between he new, undisputed victors. Would this, a prospect of an "unnecessary" restoration, be something undesirable? Either we die, or many of us will die much sooner than they would have preferred, not because of but regardless of efforts to escape the same, or we survive knowing the neuroses of a great collective of scientists was just that... a collective response to certain trends, pointing fatefully, but ultimately misguidingly (is that a word?) towards a great need to sudden and dramatic adaption, no box office. 

The core question, leading me back to the topics I like to discuss, is that of external consequences and ulterior motives. The latter, usually not a concern of mine, is that of using the adaptive measures to 

The contradiction of new tech, its demands and the prospects for further consumption (the advent of independent currencies being one major demon to slay, although its demarcation by paying for its ecolocial effects would be more desirable) 

What then - as the now forgotten Russian author immemorialised by his reader V. I. Ulyanov, also more famous under a name of his own hand - is to be done? 


onsdag 27 mars 2024

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) 


måndag 18 mars 2024

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. 

fredag 15 mars 2024

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 

måndag 11 mars 2024

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 



torsdag 7 mars 2024

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, 

fredag 16 februari 2024

My dear president... now is not the time for fear


The ascent of Alexei Navalny is a long, tenuous story, which will now undoubtedly have the glamour of legend, stamped - finally, perhaps inevitably - by the inerasible seal of martyrdoom. 

måndag 12 februari 2024

The 13th president

 

I believe "The 13th president of Finland. I believe Finland now gets a good president for the republic. Alexander Stubb is an experienced, competent person for the job. No more babble." With these words, perennial loser and finalist Pekka Haavisto conceded the second, his fourth, round in a presidential election closely, but not vitriolically fought amidst the cold marking this most northern of republics - bar Iceland - and the tensions between old Suomi and her longtime neighbour rising to new extremes hardly known since the now almost romantic time of war marked by the defence minister's words, that there is space for hundreds of thousands of more Russians, should they choose (or rather he) to cross this frontier now, by his making (or theirs) one with the very close-chested North Atlantic alliance now reaching both frontiers, quite soon I suspect, of smaller Atlantics. With the last ballots counted, the conclusions already drawn from the oft-supreme first round, and remade from the 2018 tally, that Haavisto had lost, and the candidate of unity or unspoken benefit of being everybody's (or close enough) second choice had won, the presidency was - quite historically - restored with a native Swedish speaker for the first time since the Marshal, an era of old, of post-independence now seemingly resurrected in symbology and word as well as in geopolitics. On that note, his words - although not much more popular than this blog - are well considered and enthusiastic and certainly measured to his benefit, 

Leviathan, uplifted by ballots, unconstrained by law

 
President Bukele, not just the last - or, now and again, one of the relatively recent - of colourful characters emerging as if for a party at the modest Sanchez residence (not the lavish one with the winking fish, whether the people of... not-Panama congregate to cherish the end of its strongman benefactor) but a force, as the . This much was clear after a resounding re-election which was nothing if not that, backed by a Lukashenko-like (starting to become a term in my household, I must admit) tally, which in all probability is also just that, and not Lukashenko-like in its conception, or the (not only Belarusian) tendency for early balloting long resting in those jars (but needless, should be questioned without the call of fascism... please) and deplorable in its acuity and margin leaving no . This was a blowout, pure and simple, and a denigration not just of those candidates put out to best this unlikely (?) two-time runner, not merely of those parties bearing the brunt of history, of blood and heavens within and above those who have governed this small, but not insignificant, nation across the decades of, and following, a difficult civil strife better addressed by another term (or terms, frequently used like lashes regarding the Ukrainian case) and bitterness eventually shared and co-habited in the interdependence of a new constitutional order. It was, as has been said before, well before the first ballot had been cast, the date set, the consideration of a candidate already within the presidential palace allowed (!) to pursue this second course in spite of the one-term limit imposed by so many American constitutions, including that of the short-lived (if it lived) Confederate States, and the relaxation demanded by others more liberally, including that of Chile (shaping the fates not just of would-be tyrants, with Eduardo Frei's non-candidacy in 1970 certainly affecting its course well beyond his, natural or otherwise, death) and Brazil (where Lula's ability to run in 2010 and beyond may have steered the big green country clear of o Bolsonarismo, but unlikely a lifelong constitutional term) since Roman times, when re-election was the supreme effort and crown - bar for the now-archaic censorship. 

söndag 11 februari 2024

The Brains (plural) of the Empire


The question of "who governs", full stop, has been a question in focus for sociologists and, in the realm of political science, for those truly seeking to commit (to) contribution. In its aptly more comical version (or am I indulging the politics of the present day?), Goofy answers the question of "who's driving" the car - and more importantly to them, the eponymous trailer - up the precipice with a resounding, if not too reassuring, answer that he - after all - is the man behind the steering wheel. One quick glance, and the accompanying and more infinitely important internal observation that this cannot be the case, and the social convention that lies at the core of the plot of Mickey's Trailer, is all in tatters, and all that is left is the long and painful plummet back to the restoration of normalcy, post-crisis. (Spoiler: The mouse and duck survive unblemished, although other res within the trailer unimportant to the next instalment does not.) 

Goofy's short reign as führer of the trailer and all within, as the viewers even of the ultra-cut edition airing Christmas Eve on Sweden's Channel 1 (still, or should I say without further cuts) would know, is soon re-established and lost yet again despite his desperate efforts, meaning because of them, and 

Who, then, governs this collection of city-states (New York, Rhode Island, frankly Massachusetts) and peasant republics in the Jeffersonian mold, add latifundia dominated by wealthy landowners, and from whence doth this authority, once vested in the federal (as opposed to a confederal, a notion later resurrected) government? Well, apart from the congress disliked to the point of a sixty-percent turnout (during "presidential" Novembers) seeming unfathomable, and betraying a no small amount of disdain and ick going into the ballot box, and the court once revered... mayhaps... but going through a period of liberal excess, into a broadly libertarian guardrail - advancing varying conservative and liberal causes past the velvet rope of said ballot box - into a conservative resurgence either purveying the process of said ballot against judicial overhaul, or the gavel-enforced long-term, but never sufficiently close desire of a Gilead from sea to shining sea (although sparing Catholics, Jews, gays with knots tied, Kanye and Tim and Larry and many others, under the aegis of a seeming non-believer twice divorced and unable to quote scripture, as compared to Atwood's autocratic, genocidal, puritanical, seemingly both collegial and austere Calvinist dysoutopia of New England Talibanism), the presidency has been unhealthily in the focus of the dreams, desires and above all disdains of critics and lovers within this fifth, or sixth party system, with increasing desire for the excesses of power exercised within, and to capture, this office in a most tribal fashion. This trend, and strife, began perhaps - and ignoring the very special and sordid case of Mr. Johnson, and his usually hapless successors - with the impeachment procedure against the liar and cheat Clinton ("president", lest I offend someone else) partly as an attempt to rein in the powers of an office understandably, if not necessarily, expanded to meet the demands of an ever-expanding empire, from the days of firing at Spaniards in order for the talons to embrace Cuba to Trump promising, in phlegm if not in substance, to turn bullets against hapless immigrants speaking the same language (and others reminiscent also of that era, to whose ancestors President McKinley brought the benefits and bayonets of liberty, now to behold his successor decrying proverbial chickens) to so very defensively "hold the border"? (Note, about the not-so-often-pronounced, but ever-present Hitler analogy, the absence of calls for a German-Polish border wall, which to Nazi troops would genially, if not ferociously, have been the foremost object slated for complete annihilation.) 

Who, then, governs this empire? In the garniture, or garnish, adoring his plate there are the usual suspects: The military, police and security apparatus, equally cancerous in its growth (if perhaps beneficially) to feed various, well, conspiracy theorists varyingly on left and right, and the secretaries having previously . Previously, from the objective hindsight of time, we may decry the likes of Stanton, Daugherty and of course Dulles (need I say which brother, or proclaim through your absence of doubt that we are both a "conspiracy-lover/hater" too?) have exerted tremendous power . If that is enough, throw in the name Hoover, and know I speak not of the philantropist and second nonagenarian to have held the supreme office, but the one he served so briefly under. 

fredag 2 februari 2024

The Decline of Empire


The times, as the poet and laureate had it, are a-changing, and nobody - least of all those most fervently declining the proposition - seem to hold against the fact that as a relative, the United States seems less and less the predominant power, and as an absolut, its might may wane as well. 

But consider then two facts, which should be held against such a development. First, the (again, take naught for granted) inevitable decline of the Chinese empire, or the last in a series of installments inevitably, perhaps unenviably, followed by another. At any rate, the debate and scepticism on the long-term durability of Chinese growth under the red yoke (or while tethered behind it) and the . Second, as a sub-point to this, the opposite growth of the American population, both "natively", and through its continued consumption (some would say naively) of labour forces skilled and merely eager, in spite of existing immigration frameworks. 




söndag 21 januari 2024

Breathing Nitrogen. Full stop.

 
Cross-Atlantic travel via Zeppeliner ended, ignominiously, with the spark, or the assumption of a spark whose existence now as theoretical as quantum events, and the merry joining of nitrogen and oxygen - that great harbinger of life - against a bright Jersey sky. 

The efforts for many years, which repeat with a number of decades between, to find a more tolerable or "humane" method of execution this weekend kicked into gear with Alabama's final call, in this call which never seems to reach finality until curves, as well as bodies, have been flatlined, to end the life of 35-year-in-wait Kenneth Smith by means of oxygen deprivation, as it might well be called rather than the seemingly more sinister nitrogen asphyxiation, putting emphasis on the substance which, while not toxic, best not be enjoyed with 100 % purity (as so many things). 

This effort, to find the medicalised, painless death . In Utah, the longstanding preference for blood - the cleaver, or the bullet, compromised by the quotidian hanging, but only as an option - was rekindled with the medical profession's unwillingness , and the decidedly inhumane, but questionably in-