Once upon a time, a rich hypochondriac was complaining about pains in his head and stomach. He consulted a wise man who pointed out that the root of the problem lay somewhere else: in the man’s eyes. To resolve the persistent headache and stomachache, the sage suggested focusing on just one color in the surrounding environment — green — and ignoring all others.
March 7 marked two years since the death of Guillaume Faye, the former number two of the French (new right). His death wasn’t big news in the media. In academic research, Faye exists mostly in the shadows of the so-called number one of the new right, Alain de Benoist.
On December 10, 2020, then-US President Donald Trump recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, circumventing a decades-long UN-sponsored peace process for the territory. In return, Morocco agreed to normalize relations with Israel.
In less than two years, the editor-in-chief and CEO of the independent news site Rappler, Maria Ressa, has been issued 10 arrest warrants. The latest accusations against her involve tax evasion and failure to file accurate tax returns, which she testified against on March 4, 2021, before the Court of Tax Appeals. In addition, Ressa faces numerous other charges, including illegal foreign ownership of Rappler Holdings Corporation — the Philippine Constitution restricts foreign ownership of mass media in the country, subject to congressional regulation. The charges amount to 100 years of prison time if she is found guilty. This latest flurry of persecution is a continuum of the country’s troubling history of suppressing press freedom.
An endgame, traditionally, brings both bad and good news. An endgame is always tense because those involved know things are coming to a head. We can see this in the battle theaters in Yemen over the past weeks. What we don’t see is the reality of how those battles are actually progressing and who will be the last man standing: Ansar Allah, aka Houthis, or the Hadi faction, aka Yemen’s legitimate government. Although from the experience of past battles and the progressive loss of ground President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi had suffered, we can make a good guess.
While the international community’s attention is consumed by the COVID-19 pandemic and a myriad of crisis, from the wars in Syria and Yemen to the Middle East peace process, Brexit and a severe global economic downturn, climate change continues to wreak havoc on societies around the world, putting into question the very survival of future generations.
Many will remember 2020 as the year of COVID-19, an invisible pestilence that is still haunting the world a full year after its outbreak in the form of a global pandemic. Though it is still rather early, 2021 may one day be remembered as the year of an unexpected financial epidemic, the craze for NFTs, or non-fungible tokens.
We didn’t suspect it at the time, but the 2016 Rio Olympics may have been the last ever summer games. There were clues. Until 2015, most of us hadn’t even heard of the Zika virus. First identified in 1947, it is transmitted by mosquitoes, typically causing asymptomatic or mild infection but also associated with microcephaly in babies born to mothers infected during pregnancy. Before the games, the state of Rio de Janeiro recorded 26,000 cases of Zika, giving rise to understandable fear among organizers, competitors and fans. With the Brazilian government throwing millions at reinforcing health networks, the tournament went ahead, welcoming over 11,000 athletes from 207 countries, alongside some 500,000 foreign visitors. It was only a portent of a more momentous and widespread virus that would send the entire world into convulsions and threaten the very existence of the Olympics.
It’s entirely possible that Tokyo will not stage the postponed 2020 Olympics this summer and, even if it does, it will be a much humbler affair than we’ve come to expect from recent games. Paris is scheduled to host the tournament in 2024 and will surely be concerned about the prospect. Four years after that, in 2028, Los Angeles is due to play host. By then, COVID-19 may be a nightmarish but distant memory. But it could also be a ubiquitous presence that affects practically every aspect of our lives and impels us to rethink what we’ve taken for granted over the past 400 years.
Two decades into the 21st century, humanity is faced with a plethora of unprecedented global crises. After SARS-1, multiple novel avian influenza strains, and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the current COVID-19 pandemic is by far the most severe and widespread public health crisis in at least a century.
Wired this week features a story by Will Knight with the title, “Why a YouTube Chat About Chess Got Flagged for Hate Speech.” It highlights the curious relationship between the natural behavior of human beings and the sophisticated but fundamentally unnatural logic of artificial intelligence (AI). Until very recently, our civilization thought of data simply as the formally defined information humans gleaned from their collective experience of the world. In recent years, the innocent notion of data morphed into a compelling and powerful phenomenon called Big Data. This new organic personality foisted on what was formerly thought of as a collection of random facts became a kind of Frankenstein’s monster.
