Persiflage & Paroxysm

The future, is an absolute unknown, but it is also a blank canvas on which to design a new way of life for the entire human species. We know that historically infectious diseases like the Plague and the Spanish Flu have spread most efficiently in epochs that witnessed large congregations of humans and conditions of overcrowding, whether in the squalid and crowded Medieval towns and cities of Europe or in the trenches of the Western Front in world war one with soldier infecting soldier only to be shipped out as the war ended in 1918 back home to their respective continents taking the infection with them! Today, we live in an age of excess, an excess of activity and movement that is simply wasteful and inefficient. Travel has never been easier or cheaper, so it’s little wonder that so many do it several times a year. We are not talking of folks whose jobs require they travel, far from it, we are referring to ordinary people, either going off on a mini vacation or going home to see family

To any casual observer, 2020 has been an unprecedented year insofar as awfulness is concerned and with regards to the sheer scale and multitude of compound tragedies and crises that have befallen humanity in general, and specific countries in particular. This year is unsurpassed in living memory. My country, Lebanon, has had to endure more tragedies than most. But, since the start of the year, I have turned my eyes heavenward to the velvet pitch blackness of the clear skies far away from city lights to observe the only reassuring predictable constant in our turbulent lives: the universe and the amazing show it puts on nightly. And it has been a uniquely bountiful year for astronomers, professional and amateur, as well as for astrophotographers and casual stargazers.  Jupiter In the summer, we saw C/2020 F3, otherwise known as Comet Neowise, grace the northwestern skies just above the horizon. It was the brightest comet in the northern hemisphere since Hale-Bopp in 1997. It could be see

What has happened to us?! We used to be so careful as a species, we used to fear death, we survived this far into our evolution! Why are we abandoning common sense and reason now?! Maybe back when death was so close and not antiseptically amputated from day to day life, we were more fearful and thus more careful. For most families around the world, the death bed of an elder or sick member is usually a hospital bed, not a bed at home. Death is sanitized, it is something that happens somewhere else, not in our “happy home”, and yet it will intrude when you least expect it.    Deaths from Covid 19 or SARS Cov 2, are just numbers on a screen for many, they don’t have the immediacy and urgency of inconvenient, messy, shockingly visual death. Maybe that’s why so many of us just do not “believe” in the severe lethality of the novel coronavirus. There is that word again, “belief”! After all, when we see “Don” in the red baseball cap vaunt his robust health on television after testing positive

The French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, said via a Reuters interview today that Lebanon was like the Titanic, that it was sinking and the Lebanese seem oblivious to the full tragedy that has befallen them, Lebanon is the Titanic he said but without the Orchestra. I humbly disagree with the minister. If the whole world falls silent, the sound of our Daf and Tabla and Oud and our native voices will keep on singing boisterously, Covid be damned! No Sir, in Lebanon the music shall not fall silent! It hasn’t yet nor shall it ever.  I think France, the patronizing former mandate authority in Lebanon, is the last country on Earth that has the right to complain about our leadership and our system of government. After all, it was with a French pen that the impossible Greater Lebanon was forced into existence, it was French draftsmen who drew lines on our sacred soil and said "this land belongs on this side of the border and that land belongs over there." It was the French and