Category Archives: Philosophical, Psychological & Historical Considerations

Bertrand Russell complained about one of his grandmother’s preferred puns, “What is mind? Doesn’s matter. What is matter? Never mind.” And yet we, as a species, continuously attempt to fathom the mystery of the mind, with the help of philosophy, psychology and history. Shakespeare has given us much food for thought on all three, as well as music for those who love the music of words.

Putin, Macron, Biden

“One, no-one, one hundred thousand” is the title of a novel by Italian author Luigi Pirandello. ‘One’ refers to the image that everyone has of himself, ‘no one’ refers to what the protagonist decides to be at the end of the novel. ‘One hundred thousand’ refers to the images that others have of us. As Read More

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Covid and the Magic Power of 3

The recent and still boiling controversy about the nature, choice, type, assortment, variety, disparity, quality, benefits or dangers of available Covid vaccines shows clearly that the approximation of ideas cannot abate the vehemence of passion. And passion leads men to display behavior remote from the precincts of reason. The whole bears some similarities to fundamentalist 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 World Upside Down

The Coronavirus phenomenon has left so many attired in wonder that they know not what to say (1) – including the undersigned who runs the positive risk of losing some or all of his 25 readers. Writing objectively about the reported death of thousands and the predicted demise of millions is impossible. For the very Read More

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The Vatican Gorbachev

Men judge by the complexion of the sky, the state and inclination of the day (1). Yet, to the perplexed observer it was difficult, in 2013, to guess what Pope Bergoglio was up to. For one, the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI was puzzling. After all, the last Pope to resign, 719 years earlier, was Read More

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The Power of Myth

It is sometimes easier to ascertain the ambiguities, disentangle the intricacies, and recover the meaning of events long past, than it is to recover the logic of events now current. For one, the information industry can easily muddy the waters of the understanding, thanks to their arsenal of weapons of mass confusion. But there is Read More

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The Goods, the Bad and the Ugly

In the instance, the goods are those boycotted by the BDS measure (Boycott-Divest-Sanctions), proposed in the American Congress. The bad are the US congressmen and politicians who sold their soul to the Jews for thirty pieces of silver, and rejected even the symbolic and extremely platonic ‘non-binding’ initiative of boycotting goods tainted by crime, theft, Read More

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How Many Putin(s)?

Not knowing who-is-who in the Russian government, only recently I learned of Nicolai Patrushev. He is reputed as “one of Putin’s closest and most trusted advisers,” who “has been the nerve center of most of Putin’s special operations,” and “was one of 24 Russians close to Putin subjected to sanctions by the United States.”

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The Bottom of the Barrel

In patient resignation, most of us accept that the web of life is of a mingled yarn, (1) that good and ill go together, that our virtues may shine were it not for our faults – and that our sinfulness would induce despair, were it not redeemed by our virtues or, at least, by some Read More

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