HOW TO SOLVE OUR PROBLEMS ************************************** Tribal divisions are not a verdict without appeal. All we need is a Mandela. If Africans can do it, why can’t we? To those who say,” Why don’t you apply for the job?” I say: I am a failure as a writer. I would be a disaster as a political leader. My job consists in telling it like it is. Mandela? Hell, we couldn’t even come up with an Ataturk. # IN PRAISE OF OLD AGE *********************************** I have been young and I have been old and old is better. * If you are young and you assume to be right, you will be closer to the truth if you assume to be not just wrong but dead wrong; so wrong, in fact, that you may have to spend the rest of your life suffering the consequences of your blunder. * One advantage of old age is that you exercise more freedom in your choice of misery. * I write for dupes and idiots like myself when young. # EXPLANATIONS *********************************** If you have trouble understanding why successive American administrations have refused to recognize the reality of the Genocide here are some easily accessible explanations: Even when dead wrong, might is right. (Please note, I don’t make rules; I only state them as I see them.) Empires speaks a language tribal people don’t understand. Taking care of #1 is their #1 concern. Regimes don’t have principles, only interests. If you refuse to see the light it may be because you prefer to live in darkness (isn’t that what we did for 600 years?) Ignorance is a heavy burden. Lincoln was wrong. You can fool all the people all the time. Consider the long history of organized religions According to Toynbee (who quotes the Bible on almost every page he writes) our demands were unreasonable. It follows; the Turks did what they did because they had no other choice. To those who dismiss my short list of explanations as bullshit, allow me to quote another familiar proverb: “Life is a shit sandwich. The more bread you have the less shit you eat.” # NOISE **************************** The Chinese pictograph for noise is three women under the same roof – or so I remember to have read somewhere. The same word in an imaginary Armenian pictograph: two men. * Homo sapiens? Hell, no! Homo capable of being sapiens? Maybe. * Compared to nothingness (before we were born and after we die) being is an ephemeral dot so tiny that it might as well be invisible to the naked eye. One is almost tempted to say the reason we exist is to experience our own insignificance or nothingness. * When two selfish individuals meet, they learn the importance of altruism. #