Musing – 9xm News

Random Musing: Don Tzu and art of war (only winning, no losing) | World News

[ad_1] A few years ago, a video had gone viral of an Indian man thrashing a youngster and taunting him: “May may banayega tu (Will you make memes)?”. The answer to that existential question is Yes, because everyone is making memes now, from the White House, which has been serenading us with super-edits set to […]

Random Musing: Does Sam Altman think of humans as batteries? | World News

[ad_1] “Who Let the Dogs Out” — a track that inspired insouciant children across the world to bark at ungodly hours — is widely considered one of the most irritating songs of all time, so much so that Rolling Stone magazine deemed it the eighth most annoying song of the 1990s, even though it was […]

Random Musing: Did ‘The Matrix’ foreshadow Jeffrey Epstein? | World News

[ad_1] The year 1999 was a standout year for Hollywood movies. Perhaps the imminent threat of Y2K really released people’s creative juices. In that year, we got the Star Wars prequel classic The Phantom Menace, the misunderstood manifesto of machismo Fight Club, the creepy precursor to Kevin Spacey’s behaviour in American Beauty, the kid who […]

Random Musing: A brief history of the Church of England (as it gets its first woman Archbishop of Canterbury) | World News

[ad_1] In Yes Minister, when Jim Hacker finds out that Italian terrorists have access to British-made weapons, Sir Humphrey Appleby tries to mollify him by pointing out it’s not their department’s problem. British weapons in the hands of foreign terrorists were outside the Ministry of Administrative Affairs’ jurisdiction. Probably a Defence Ministry problem, or a […]

Random Musing: British Broadcasting Calumny – why the UK’s public broadcaster is under siege | World News

[ad_1] There’s a hilarious scene in Casablanca when the Nazis order Rick’s Café to be shut down on any pretext, and the morally flexible prefect of police, Captain Renault, says: “I am shocked, shocked to learn that gambling is going on here,” before pocketing his own earnings with a sotto voce thank you. Much like […]

Random Musing: Why Zohran Mamdani will find it hard to be another Barack Obama | World News

[ad_1] Since Barack Obama became the first Black president of the United States — and the patron saint of slightly deracinated global liberals who feel increasingly alienated as global politics lurches right — liberals have been waiting for the next Obama: the Aragorn who will again lead the righteous army and rid America of the […]

Random Musing: How Barack Obama ‘birthed’ Donald Trump and MAGA | World News

[ad_1] There’s a school of thought popular among Washington watchers that it was Barack Obama’s jibes at Donald Trump during an ill-fated White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011 that might have led to Trump’s presidential run which in turn would upend the rules-based liberal order that came into effect post-World War II and now threatens […]

Random Musing: Why Peter Navarro evoked the Brahmin Bogeyman | World News

[ad_1] With the benefit of hindsight – much like Ultron deciding to destroy the world after spending a few seconds online and seeing humans interact with one another – the warrior priest Parashurama’s divine fury is quite understandable, given how the word “Brahmin” has become a bogeyman in modern parlance, not just in India but […]

Random Musing: The multi-pronged approach to dealing with Donald Trump’s tariffs | World News

[ad_1] Franz Kafka is one of the most written-about authors in the world. By some estimates, 15,000 books have been written about him, totalling over 1.5 million words, which is ironic given Franz Kafka wanted all his works burnt. Instead, he became the patron saint of the academic–industrial complex, a class – if he lived […]

Random Musing: Is the new Superman movie ‘anti-Israel’? Depends on your ‘extrapolation bias’ | World News

[ad_1] The Betteridge’s Law of Headings state that whenever the heading of an article begins with a question, the answer to that is ‘No’. It’s a fairly accurate law, but in this case, things are a tad more complicated because we are dealing with the most famous underwear model in the world. Superman has always […]