Last night my wife and I attended a packed Royal Albert Hall to hear Bach’s Mass in B Minor, performed by Les Arts Florissants, a group from France founded by William Christie, an American. This was a Promenade Concert, one performance in the longest annual music festival in the world, lasting two months every year. …
Continue reading ‘One’s spirit lifted by the extraordinary’ »
Khaled Diab of Al Jazeera comments as follows: “It’s not just the news that is depressing these days; so too is the state of the global media. Everywhere you look, the press is under assault from repressive regimes, terrorists and corporate interests. Freedom House’s latest report found global media freedom was at its lowest level …
Politicians exploit our willingness to remember something that appeals to us, regardless of whether it will eventually prove true or unfounded. PolitiFact.com, looked into 158 claims made by Trump since the start of his campaign and found that four out of five were at best “mostly false”. But by the time they have looked into …
Continue reading ‘How the online media are misinforming us’ »
Yesterday, NPR reported that Sigmar Gabriel, German vice chancellor and economy minister, had said publically (for the first time) that talks aimed at setting up a U.S.-European free trade zone under TTIP have run aground because of “intransigence on Washington’s part”. “In my opinion the negotiations with the United States have de facto failed even …
It was the philosophers, Aristippus the Older and Aristippus the Younger, who lived in Cyrenaica, who first suggested that hedonism was the right waty to conduct a good life. That basic idea, modified of course, was adopted by Epicurus, and later was misinterpreted by the early Christians to mean a life of total self-indulgence, eating, and …
