I was too optimistic. Far too optimistic. I should have remembered what Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) wrote centuries ago: “When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” And there was certainly a confederacy of dunces against the highly intelligent and […]
“Hideously white.” That was what a righteous White leftist called Greg Dyke called the BBC in 2001. Dyke was actually the Chief Commissar of the BBC at the time. And did he then resign in protest at his own “hideous whiteness”? Or did he vow that, henceforth, he would donate at least half of his […]
Enigmas. I’ve been beset by them recently. Last week, I added six piranhas to my big tropical-fish tank. The piranhas were going to look magnificent, sliding in a sleek silver school between the gleaming, multicolored shoals of gentle neon tetras and guppies. But I didn’t have time to watch the piranhas right then. No, I […]
When you look in the dictionary under the word “airhead,” you won’t find a photograph of the Guardian writer Zoe Williams. But there should be one. If the right-wing Ann Coulter is the witty, insightful, tough-minded exception to the rule of female punditry, then the left-wing Williams is the vapid, conformist, slush-brained quintessence. On the […]
Here’s an astonishing fact: the White mathematician Claude Shannon (1916–2001) contributed more to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) than all Blacks who have ever lived. But then so did the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920). And the Jewish mathematician Emmy Noether (1882–1935), which is even more astonishing. Jews have always been a tiny minority […]
The mainstream media are also the mutilated media. They don’t have arms, so when a political scandal erupts they don’t pull back the curtain and reveal what’s really going on behind the scenes. That mutilation was obvious during the scandal about the high-flying politician Priti Patel, the obnoxious Hindu Indian who now oversees Britain’s laws […]
If you’re interested in war, here’s a question for you. What’s the world’s most powerful weapon? You might come up with some good guesses, but I suspect you’ll miss the right answer. So here are some clues. The weapon can wreck entire nations, not just individual cities. But it’s not a mega-bomb or a death-ray. […]
