Friday, September 08, 2006

Links To Articles Of Interest

"'Gaza is a jail. Nobody is allowed to leave. We are all starving now'"

"Palestinians tell Blair: you are not welcome here"

For those that think that America is some 'saint' when it comes to fighting wars, and upholding human rights, I have this to say. There is nothing saintly about starting wars; and human rights?? How can human beings decide what rights we as humans are entitled to have?? Such rights should exist to the extent that those who are entitled to take our lives away from us say they should exist. As you can see, this effectively means that, for the Palestinians, Iraqis and Lebanese, it is America, Israel and the UK that decides what their rights as human beings are. God help the Arabs is all I can say. And yet, I fear that even God will have to go through them, the only axis of evil that I can see evidence of (US, Israel and UK), and gain their permission, before being able to help!

Here are a few more snippets of articles that may be of interest. Click the highlighted words to view the full articles:

"In October 1950, the first year of the Korean War, American soldiers massacred tens of thousands of innocent people in the North Korean city of Sinchon. In perhaps the most horrifying incident, US soldiers led 900 residents, including 300 women and children, into an air-raid shelter. After the victims passed three days in thirst and fear, the GIs poured gasoline into the dark, confined space and threw in a match"

"The head of Europe's human rights watchdog yesterday called for monitoring of CIA agents operating in Britain and other European countries, after President George Bush's admission that the US had detained terrorist suspects in secret prisons."

"In one bedroom, a picture of the late Pope John Paul II was found carefully torn into three pieces. "The picture was hanging on the wall, and we found the glass from the frame still intact, but the picture had been torn," said Tawfic. "For me it shows the Israelis don't like either Christians or Muslims, only themselves.""

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

To Be, Or Not To Be; An Engineer?

Paul Coelho was asked how he had decided he wanted to be a writer. Here's what he said:
"When I was fifteen, I said to my mother: 'I've discovered my vocation. I want to be a writer.' 'My dear,' she replied sadly, 'your father is an engineer. He's a logical, reasonable man with a very clear vision of the world. Do you actually know what it means to be a writer?' In order to answer my mother's question, I decided to do some research. This is what I learned about what being a writer meant in the early 1960s:
A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He says very 'deep' things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published. A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation.. A writer understands about things with alarming names, like semiotics, epistemology, neoconcretism. When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: 'I'm a writer', and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works. When invited to say what he is reading at the moment, a writer always mentions a book no one has ever heard of. Armed with all this information, I went back to my mother and explained exactly what a writer was. She was somewhat surprised. 'It would be easier to be an engineer,' she said. 'Besides, you don't wear glasses.' "

It made me laugh, because its something that myself and Ismaool were talking about the other night. The differences in how life, the world, problems and so on are approached depending on how your mind is trained. He's an engineer, I'm a lawyer, our approaches to life couldn't be any more different! Paul Coelho's mother was right when she wanted him to be an engineer. You know why? Because he's always going to be SURE. An engineer sees life as a set of right or wrong answers, there's nothing in between. There's no deliberation. There are formulas, equations, methods; follow them and you're on the right path. On the way to correctness, to excellence, to TRUTH. Ask me what truth is, and I tell you that it depends on whose side you're looking at it from. Truth in what sense? I ask you whether truth as a fact really does exist. In effect, I complicate my life. I don't think its a characteristic of all lawyers. In fact, my good friend P is a lawyer, and if you listened to our conversation over dinner last night you would realise that being a lawyer is in no way a hinderance to his being sure about anything. His background as a lawyer means that he is open to looking at a problem from many different points of view but it does not encourage him to complicate his life. Maybe it's just the philosophical writer within me. I always was very good at coming up with all those different 'meanings' that writers of classics intended. We all know they intended none of it. When they said the table was round, they meant the table was round. They weren't intending it to be a metaphor for the circle of life or something similar... Or did they?
See what I mean!
To be honest though, I think an education in the arts is far more beneficial in the long run. It may mean more complications, but it means you can think outside the box. Or it should mean that. For many, thats sadly not the case. But thats for another post.

So Now An Actual Language Is Offensive?

Did you hear about the guy who was prevented from boarding his plane in a New York airport until he changed his t-shirt? It's true. What was on his t-shirt that was so offensive? Perhpaps the stench of BO? Or maybe his breakfast? The words 'I Have A Bomb'? No. Simply, Arabic script. That's it. What's more, the translation was right underneath it in English.
Read HERE for the full story.
If you want to check out his blog, click HERE.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Maybe I Just Need Some Sleep

like a bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, i have tried in my way, to be free.
like a worm on a hook, like a knight from some old-fashioned book, i have saved all my ribbons for thee.
and if i, if ive been unkind. i hope that you will let it go by.
and if i, if ive been untrue, i hope you know it was never to you.

like a baby stillborn, like a beast with his horn, i have torn everyone who reached for me.
so i swear by this song, i swear by all that ive done wrong, i will make it, i will make it all up to you.
i saw a beggar, leaning on his wooden crutch, he cried to me, you must not ask for so much.
and a pretty woman, leaning in her darkened door, she said to me, hey why not ask for more.

Leonard Cohen "Bird On The Wire"

its really late, and this song is just going round my mind. its from memory, but i think the lyrics are right. im so stuck, i just dont know what to do. i dont know which direction to take. every moment i feel so close to a decision, so close to the path i should take, but then the next minute ive lost that grasp and im drowning in the abyss that is my thoughts. the problem is that ive become so caught up in the 'theory' of it all, that im almost incapable of taking action. afraid to go one way in case i should be going the other. remaining suspended in midair, treading the water of my mind, failing to get out into the battle that is the world.
maaybe thats the problem... or maybe i just need some sleep!

Long Before Consciousness Set In

"Phaedrus remembered a line from Thoreau: "You never gain something but that you lose something." And now he began to see for the frist time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth - but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an emeny of it."

exerpt from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", Robert M. Pirsig

What a morning... Socrates, Aristotle, the Sophists, Plato, Phadreus and Leonard Cohen.

It feels like I'm about to grasp another piece of that jigsaw I've been trying to put together these last months. I still don't know what the finished picture will be.. but I'm sure when that last piece fits in, I'll be looking at something so familiar, I'll realise that it was I who cut the pieces, who painted upon them the images, and who decided what it would be, long before I was conscious of this fact.

Monday, September 04, 2006

Sometimes I Forget...

Ok, I'm going to go out on a limb here and ask....

What do I have to do to get to be a Blog Of Note?

For those of you who aren't bloggers, Blogger.com has a little popularity ladder going on (doesn't everyone!). Every now and then, they put someones little unknown blog on the top of that ladder on their list of Blogs of Note. What happens then? Well, hits skyrocket! Instead of your normal daily hits, which for me would be somewhere between 5 and 50 everyday, you can expect to get a few thousand!

What's the point? What do you gain? More readers, more comments, a larger audience. Does that matter? Well, it depends on the point of your blog. If you've got something to tell people, then a larger audience is what you're aiming to get.

This is the latest Blog of Note "Strangers Among Us".
Here's another, and another.

To be honest, i never wanted the point of my blog to be the number of hits... but it is so easy to get caught up in it. Occasionally, I do find myself comparing my blog to others and wondering what it is about their blog that makes Blogger think it worthy to be a Blog of Note. Perhaps what they percieve as quality of writing is not what I believe it to be. Or maybe what they're looking for is not quality at all, in which case, I'd rather not be considered a Blog Of Note thank you very much!

Or maybe I should just slap myself out of these rare fits of competitiveness. Most times, that's what I do. Apparently today though, it warranted a post. This will be the first, and last time, I promise.