The madness, because that is what it is, began in earnest in 1998 with the publication in the respected British medical journal The Lancet of a study purporting to establish a link between autism and MMR — the vaccine that protects against measles, mumps and rubella.

The 20th-century British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously observed that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic.

For anyone foolish enough to obtain their news from the unregulated wild west of social media, or from websites populated by the increasingly bizarre output of artificial intelligence, this has not been a good week.

It was in October 1980, while debating against the incumbent Jimmy Carter during the US presidential election campaign, that Republican challenger Ronald Reagan posed what was simultaneously the simplest but also the most profound question ever asked of voters by a candidate.

War is futile, with no winners, only losers. No war ever solved a problem that could not have been better solved by other means, and no war ever solved a problem without creating another one.

On the one hand, it is hardly a ringing endorsement of Egypt’s ability to deliver large-scale infrastructure projects that the $1 billion Grand Egyptian Museum near the pyramids of Giza, which should have been completed in 2012, has finally opened its majestic doors, and only partially.

It is an axiom in negotiations that those who are especially good at the job have an ability to place themselves in the shoes of the people with whom they are negotiating: to understand why they think as they think, do what they do, say what they say.

Hezbollah has spent most of the past year lobbing rudimentary and largely ineffectual rockets in the general direction of northern Israel, whence most of the civilian population has in any case already long departed.