What is the point of a nervous system? Well, you could call it a mechanism for recognizing patterns and responding to them. Sensory information enters a nervous system, is processed, and generates a response. A blind nematode wriggling in the slime at the bottom of a lake has a nervous system and can recognize patterns. […]
It would sound better in Russian or Chinese: Le racisme n’est pas une opinion, le racisme est un délit – “Racism is not an opinion, racism is a crime.” It doesn’t sound good in French, language of liberty and the Enlightenment. But I’d guess those words come from an outsider who is both Francophone […]
Jeremy Corbyn has a beard. So has Jonathan Sacks. But this shared philopogony hasn’t brought the two men closer together. Sacks is the former Chief Rabbi of Britain and, to be fair, I think we would be better off if more Jews were like him. He doesn’t seem to hate Whites and the Christian religion […]
They strut, they chatter, they gleam with gem-like colours: starlings are one of the joys of summer right across Europe. You could spend a lifetime studying them, but one thing is already certain. There has never been a starling Stalin. Khans and canals In other words, no individual starling has ever been millions of times […]
Have you ever seen a scorpion try to sting a stone? Me neither. But I’ve seen something very like it. It was an article in the Guardian with the headline: “‘They’ve brought evil out’: Hungary’s poll on migration divides a nation.” The article excoriated the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán for “whipping up xenophobic sentiment,” […]
Everything is connected, but some things are more connected than others. Let’s start with Margaret Hodge, the arrogant Jewish Labour MP whose criticism of Jeremy Corbyn and support for censorship I discussed in “Labour’s Gas-Chamber Blues.” After Hodge was threatened with disciplinary action for what she said about Corbyn, her high-powered lawyers wrote a letter […]
You could call him a killing joke. I’m talking about Enver Hoxha, the communist dictator who ruled Albania with an iron hand from 1944 until 1985. Like Kim Jong-Un of North Korea, he was a joke outside his own domain and a murderous horror inside it. To outsiders, even his surname was comic: it was […]
