“Zeitgeist”

One of Nikolai Bukharin’s last known observations about the Bolshevik revolution, before Stalin had him killed, was that it was driven by a hatred of the people it was supposed to serve. The revolution was supposed to create a society in which all people enjoyed the fruits of their collective production. By the end of the 1920s, Stalin’s revolution from above promised to unleash mass murder, genocide, and famine.

It is a well-known feature of history that revolutions not only eat themselves, but they unleash terror on the people. There is always a point where the aspirations that fueled the revolution slam into the reality of the human condition. Since abandoning the revolutionary vision means abandoning the revolution, the revolutionaries turn on the human condition, first on each other, then on the people.

The Capitol-riot probe offers only the latest instance — civil discourse is dying because we’ve given up seeking objective truth.

There are some truths we grasp innately. Others are just truths about words — things that are true because of the way we define them. Let nature take its course, and a pack of dogs will sort itself into the dominant and submissive roles. But a private is not the lowest-ranking soldier by nature. He is subordinate by definition — we’ve defined private as the lowest rank.

There’s nothing quite like reading someone’s tweets musing on life and death, taking siesta, and waking up to news of their suicide.

As if a more hockey-check reminder of the fragility of existence was needed, I got it Wednesday. Following a year of disease and riots, lockdowns during the day and curfews at night, the smashing of one more bright light of the absurd did the trick. Aged 75, John McAfee died Wednesday in Spain as he lived: his life in his own hands.

My friend and I have a game we often play.  He’ll read a headline to me, and it’s up to me to guess whether it’s a real headline or something from The Babylon Bee.  During the Trump era, I guessed correctly about half the time.  Since Biden took over, I’m wrong almost 100% of the time.  The problem is that I keep thinking crazed headlines are satire, but they’re not.  As the old saying goes, the lunatics have taken over the asylum.  It turns out to be difficult to satirize societal madness.

There is nothing either good or bad, the Nazis liked to insist, but thinking makes it so. Eichmann, interviewed in Argentina shortly before his abduction by Mossad agents, scorned the notion that there was anything evil about his role in the Holocaust. Far from repenting the deaths of six million Jews, he expressed regret that so many had survived the genocide. Just as it was the responsibility of a doctor to combat viruses, or a pest-control agent to eliminate vermin, so was it the responsibility of a good Nazi to defend the fellow members of his race from its most noxious and pestilential foes. To steel oneself for one’s duty, to suppress enfeebling notions of humanity, to keep always before one’s mind loyalty to blood: this, quite simply, was the right thing to do. What, then, was there for Eichmann to repent? “I cannot pretend,” he declared, “that a Saul has become a Paul.”

The US supreme court on Monday declined to hear an appeal by the Infowars host, Trump ally and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was fighting a Connecticut court sanction in a defamation lawsuit brought by relatives of some victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting.

Jones was penalized in 2019 by a trial court judge for an angry outburst against an attorney for the relatives and for violating numerous orders to turn over documents to lawyers. Judge Barbara Bellis barred Jones from filing a motion to dismiss the case and said she would order Jones to pay some of the families’ legal fees.

‘No modern US war would be complete without the involvement of Blackwater founder Erik Prince,’ wrote journalist Jeremy Scahill in his seminal book Dirty Wars. That was back in 2013. Since its founding in 1997, Blackwater, Prince’s private military outfit, has been reincarnated several times under different names. But Prince has stayed the same.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia — Prince, a very 21st-century mercenary, has wreaked havoc in all these places. He comes, he spoils, he leaves a mess that is impossible to clear up.

Comedy legend Ricky Gervais has warned that TV is being ‘watered down’ because producers are afraid to offend people.

Appearing on ITV’s Lorraine this morning to discuss his latest series of Afterlife, Gervais said audiences are more resilient than people think…

In the fall of 1954 I was five years old. It was a plague year, not unlike this year. It was also a politically dangerous year. ’54 was the year I scared my parents very badly. Well, to be fair I was pretty frightening from the outset. I was very premature. It was touch and go for a week or so. I was born with what they now call Infant Respiratory Distress I had a gnarled- almost clubbed- foot and pronounced strabismus in my left eye. The doctor who delivered me told my parents that If I defied the odds and lived, I would probably never walk normally. Fortunately for me, Mom did not buy it.

When 2020 passes into the history books, it will carry more superlatives than a high school yearbook — and none of them good. Most deadly, hottest, most stressful, worst.

It is not your imagination: By a host of measures, 2020 was the worst year many Americans will have experienced in their lifetimes. It was a year of loss, of anxiety, of poverty and of disease. Recovering from the last 12 months is likely to define the entire decade ahead.