January 31, 2017 edition
There has probably been a type of pill circulating in Indonesia over recent years, leading thousands of people to renounce their own reason. The tablet, as I recall, is Murti-Bing.
I read about this pill in a story in The Captive Mind, a book published in the 1960s. The author was Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish poet who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.
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January 24, 2017 edition
Brutal. Vile. Skilled at killing. Ambitious. Suspicious. The film Game of Thrones is full of such characters. It is hard to think of another film that depicts the tight link between politics and war more explicitly; people are always prepared to kill each other. The wager is total: win or die.
The ambitious and tragic queen, Cersei Lannister, utters the bitter truth quoted above because she experiences it in every aspect of her life. She is a queen who commits adultery with her own brother, who lives under constant threat, and who finally has to witness her son, who becomes a cruel young king, be killed. Cersei assumes the throne, but the kingdom is targeted from outside and betrayed from within. Unsurprisingly, she plays a political role with a heart of stone, as though following Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese revolution, who saw no difference between war and politics, 'Politics is bloodless war; War is bloody politics.'
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January 10, 2017 edition
January 3, 2017 edition
December 27, 2016 edition