FREEDOM ************************* Everyone speaks of freedom of religion as if it were a good thing, a mark of progress and civilization. What if what will civilize the world is not freedom of religion but freedom of dissent and heresy? But as long as rabbis, bishops and imams are allowed the freedom to poison the minds of children we will have wars and massacres. * Why is this so difficult to understand? Empires decline and fall not when its prostitutes, pimps, thieves and degenerates prosper but when its spiritually superior individuals (self-assessed of course) assume leadership positions. * Moral I: Freedom of religion is freedom to enslave. * Moral II: Freedom to brainwash children is a crime against humanity. # JAGADAKIR ************************************** We have a school of thought that says Christianity was a bad choice for us. We should have converted to Islam. The unmistakable implication being, since we cannot change the past, we cannot change our present and future. What’s done is done and it cannot be undone. It is our jagadakir (destiny) therefore to remain perennial losers. Let us therefore, in legal parlance, drop our pants and bend over to whoever is on top – be he a shah, pasha, padishah, sultan or commissar. * But I maintain our problem is not our choice of religion. Our problem is ignorance of the world, divisiveness, corruption, incompetence, treason, and intolerance of any idea that may shatter our image as la crème de la crème and expose us as la crème de la scum. # IN BRIEF ************************ On our present situation: Losers at the mercy of other losers. * SWINE ****************** The 1% are cold-blooded swine who think they will not burn in hell because hell is their own invention. * KNOWN UNKNOWNS ************************************ We know that Sultan Abdulhamid II’s mother was Armenian. We also know that Talaat himself was probably part-Armenian. What we don’t know is how many of our own present leaders are Turks. * INTERNET *************************** Is the Internet making us smarter or dumber? I don’t know. All I know is that if an ape uses it he will not be born-again as a human being. * ON ASSAD ********************** Tina Brown on Bashar-al-Assad: “A creepy, lisping, giraffe-necked liar.” * LOLITA ********************** I don’t read and reread LOLITA to be enlightened or instructed. I read it because it is compulsively readable – from the first (“fire of my loins”) to the last sentence. # NOTES & COMMENTS ************************************** There is a general in every solider (according to Napoleon), a pope in every seminarian, a master in every slave, a capitalist in every proletarian, and (according to a schoolteacher) a Turk in every Armenian. * Nothing disarms a man with a highly developed spirit of contradiction than agreement. * We read so many obituaries and hear of so many deaths when we are alive that we end up thinking of ourselves almost as immortal. #