Author Archives: jimmie

Erewhon or the Crime of Illness

Samuel Butler published his novel Erewhon in 1872. The title is the (almost) reverse spelling of ‘Nowhere’ and it applies to a country the author discovered. He probably had in mind the Southern island of New Zealand where he minded sheep for a while. The protagonist, Higgs, tending sheep in a prairie, looks at a Read More

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Washington’s Bastille

Trump’s supporters, having found the vanity of conjecture and inefficacy of expectations, resolved to prove their own existence, if not by violence, at least by physical presence. They came forth into the crowded capital with an almost juvenile ambition that their numbers would be counted, their voice heard and their presence noticed.

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The Power of Confusion

It now seems certain that we have a Joe Bidet for president. For if a rose by any other name would smell as sweet (1), a Biden, metaphorically speaking, by any other name still smells like a poorly maintained sanitary device, however many euphemisms the imagination may body forth out of the forms of things Read More

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The Google Archipelago

During the cold war the West called dissenters those Russians in the USSR who voiced their complaints against the system. A definition – ‘dissenter’ – which, processed through the lexical grinding machine of the CIA and associates, was actually stripped of its original meaning to become a weapon of trivial instrumental imperialist propaganda. Said it Read More

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Biden’s Data in the Cloud

If flattery is the infantry of negotiations, then mendacity is the air force of politics. There are exceptions, but as a practical rule truth tellers are not deemed worthy of the public trust. To the question, “who does the deeming?” the reader will have already answered euphemistically, “the mainstream media,” better known as “media from Read More

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A Stroke of Genius

It takes strength, endurance, resignation and stomach to like Donald Trump. Not for what he actually is. Under the pen of Alexandre Dumas, for example, Trump may even appear as a not-dislikable Yankee D’Artagnan of sorts. Maybe with less finesse than the original musketeer, whose contained yet French swaggering captivated millions of readers, when reading Read More

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The Sheep of the Apocalypse

There is a history in all men’s lives (1), and in the history of their lives men often meet with mysteries, meaning events inexplicable via the resources of common sense and logic. Some mysteries are terrestrial, some metaphysic. Setting metaphysics aside, I’ll deal with the terrestrial. I refer here to the turbulent events of the Read More

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Covid, Medicine and Charlatanry

Associating medicine with charlatanry smacks of ignorance and arrogance, two semantic relatives often found together. Perish the thought! But there is currently an exuberance of acknowledgment of a dubious medical pandemic, coupled with gross discrepancies in related statistics and fierce debates among disagreeing experts. Furthermore the media, at its domestic and international large, rarely misses Read More

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The Bad Ending of a Good Idea

Sometimes ideas born out of an apparently sensible necessity evolve into something diabolically inevitable. On the other hand, the history of the formation of ideas is, or could be, what frees the mind from a blind search for explanations. For the alternative is to (dis)-content ourselves with effects without knowing their causes, other than attributing Read More

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Race, Economy and Viruses

Whatever busies the mind without corrupting it has at least this use, that it rescues the day from idleness, and he that is never idle will not often be vicious. The previous unnecessary remark is intended as a pre-emptive application for absolution from the reader whose views expressed hereafter may not mirror his. We live Read More

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