Brazil and Israel elections return power to the usual suspects

US President Joe Biden says he believes his country is at “an inflection point”, where the decisions that voters make this week will determine its path for years and perhaps even decades to come.

That’s largely because the red flooding tide may carry Donald Trump back into the White House in 2024, despite the tsunami of investigations bearing down on him.

Biden might as well have been talking about Israel or even Brazil.

Israel faces its own inflection point as Benjamin Netanyahu strides back into power, albeit hobbled by a coalition that New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called “a rowdy alliance of ultra-Orthodox leaders and ultranationalist politicians, including some outright racist, anti-Arab Jewish extremists”.

Meanwhile, down Brazil way, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, seemingly shrugging off multiple corruption investigations plus a stint in jail, has also returned to the throne, buoyed by jubilant supporters, some of whom may or may not be suffering from amnesia. Time will tell.

Over in Egypt, poor countries are berating rich ones for missing emissions targets, even as the bill — in environmental terms — for flying everyone to Sharm el-Sheikh to make even more hot air is still being tallied.

Truly, the people have gone mad. Biden is right about the inflection point, only that it is going to get us all.

The trouble is that noise, as Mark Twain noted pithily, makes it hard for the truth to be heard.

“The thug is aware that loudness convinces 60 persons where reasoning convinces but one,” he wrote.

Or, put another way: “Noise proves nothing; often a hen that has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.”