It's not possible to search for God using the methods of a detective... There is no way. You can only wait till God's axe severs your roots: then you will understand that you are here only through a miracle, and you will remain fixed forever in wonderment and equilibrium.
— Karel Čapek, born on this date in 1890
Sometimes history punches you right in the face, and there's no time to duck.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie are shot to death by a Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip during an official visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The killings sparked a chain of events in Greater Serbia that led to the outbreak of World War I by early August.
Novak Djokovic Can Remain in Australia, Judge, Anthony Kellly, Rules
Australian officials hinted they may make a new attempt to cancel Djokovic’s visa, even as the tennis champion, freed from detention, returned to the court.
Unvaccinated Australians Told They Can’t Work or Even Exercise Anymore.
This piece, from Ed Yong, is not at all surprising: America Is Not Ready for Omicron.
America was not prepared for COVID-19 when it arrived. It was not prepared for last winter’s surge. It was not prepared for Delta’s arrival in the summer or its current winter assault. More than 1,000 Americans are still dying of COVID every day, and more have died this year than last. Hospitalizations are rising in 42 states. The University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, which entered the pandemic as arguably the best-prepared hospital in the country, recently went from 70 COVID patients to 110 in four days, leaving its staff “grasping for resolve,” the virologist John Lowe told me. And now comes Omicron.
Ashes: England dug deep for Sydney draw – Jonathan Agnew BBC
Putin warns Biden: Russia will server ties with USA completely Pravda
Over 11,000 illegal Muslim migrants arrive in Germany from Belarus.
Form of EU’s dialogue with Russia was impermissible in recent years — Foreign Ministry TASS
See above versus….US shows an exit ramp to Russia Asia Times
Presidential hopeful says France should leave NATO and partner with Russia Defend
Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen
The Guardian – Johann Hari: “Social media and many other facets of modern life are destroying our ability to concentrate. We need to reclaim our minds while we still can… I travelled all over the world in the next three years, from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne, interviewing the leading experts in the world about focus. What I learned persuaded me that we are not now facing simply a normal anxiety about attention, of the kind every generation goes through as it ages. We are living in a serious attention crisis – one with huge implications for how we live. I learned there are twelve factors that have been proven to reduce people’s ability to pay attention and that many of these factors have been rising in the past few decades – sometimes dramatically…
…Prof Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained one to me. He said “your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” We have “very limited cognitive capacity”. But we have fallen for an enormous delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six forms of media at the same time. When neuroscientists studied this, they found that when people believe they are doing several things at once, they are actually juggling. “They’re switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment-to-moment, task-to-task – [and] that comes with a cost.”