Thursday, February 10, 2011
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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Silvio Berlusconi: “Never in my life have I paid for sex.
I find it degrading to do so.”
He is right, of course. But only literally. Or is it legally?
People in his income bracket have “people”
who deal with the questionable aspects of transactions.
*
Give an honest man a title and a regular salary
and he will be as loyal to his boss as a dog to his master,
but a dog, who like all dogs,
knows his master
but not his master's master.
*
As a boy I had more friends than enemies.
As an adult I have many enemies and very few friends.
But whereas most of my former friends and present enemies
have titles and a regular salary,
I have been and remain an unemployed and unemployable misfit,
all because I speak more of human rights and less of massacres.
Among us talk of massacres is in,
all mention of human rights is out.
What's done and cannot be undone is in.
As for what's being done:
why mess with perfection?
*
Nothingness is the only perfection we will ever know.
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Friday, February 11, 2011
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FLATTERY
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For most of my life I thought, felt, spoke, and wrote as a dupe.
I know first hand how easy it is to be taken in by flattery.
“Superior race.”
“The Chosen People.”
“First nation...”
*
Bias is popular because it flatters.
*
Bias and lies are as close as bum and pants.
So are propaganda and prejudice.
*
Education is a hidden tool of oppression.
*
Flattery does not need proof.
*
Propaganda is not free speech,
but a license to lie.
*
Propaganda is as carefully premeditated and planned
as cold-blooded murder.
*
The rules of the game have changed.
Mubarak has now been exposed as a tyrant.
A violent crackdown would further expose him
as a bloodthirsty fascist guilty of crimes against humanity.
In which case he may run the risk of losing
both his freedom and his wealth.
He is between a rock and a hard place.
To put it more elegantly:
He is in deep sh*t and he knows it.
He also knows everybody else knows it.
*
Sooner or later and inevitably
all dictators must contemplate the following two questions:
Will I be shot and hanged like Mussolini?
Will I be cornered into committing suicide like Hitler?
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Saturday, February 12, 2011
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WHAT'S NEXT?
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“No one knows what's going to happen next in Egypt,”
according to an editorial in today's paper.
Pundits who write editorials may not know, but historians do.
In the French Revolution the beheading of the king and queen
was only step one.
Like rats abandoning a sinking ship,
Mubarak's cronies will start their exodus –
unless of course they made a deal with the junta.
*
Revolutions only replace replace one set of rascals with another.
This is well known to historians but not to the masses
who are now too busy celebrating their victory –
probably on the grounds that a hollow victory
is better than a catastrophic defeat.
*
In Turkey 133 military officers have been arrested.
About 1600 Tunisians have landed on a tiny Sicilian island –
rats abandoning ship?
*
My only hope is hat “people power” will act like a virus
and infect not only Arab regimes in Africa and the Middle East
but also in China, Russia, and Armenia,
even if it means their victory will be hollow, as it is bound to be.
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