Today BBC had a program discussing Iran’s election. I sent this question and they read it on the air……….
How can we have a discussion about the stolen election in Iran without mentioning the two stolen elections in the US? The primary difference seems to be that the Iranian people are more serious about democracy than we Americans.
We are happy, happy, happy about Obama. We can hardly believe it’s true. We are not used to an election that allows our side to win. Are those neo-cons small enough yet to be drowned in a bathtub?
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“A few days ago I heard a performance of the Sibelius fifth symphony. As the closing bars approached, I experienced exactly the large, swelling emotion that the music was written to elicit. What would it have been like, I wondered, to be a Finn in the audience at the first performance of the symphony in Helsinki nearly a century ago, and feel that swell overtake one? The answer: one would have felt proud, proud that one of us could put together such sounds, proud that out of nothing we human beings can make such stuff. Contrast with that one´s feelings of shame that we, our people, have made Guantanamo. Musical creation on the one hand, a machine for inflicting pain and humiliation on the other: the best and the worst that human beings are capable of.”
J.M. Coetzee: Diary of a Bad Year(2007).
>Today I got an email petition from a relative. Sign this if you want to save our Social Security system from illegal aliens. I try to stay away from these things. I don’t want to argue over whether it should be called a Christmas tree or a holiday tree (my cousin from Texas) or whether Hugo Chavez is a totalitarian dictator (a friend of my Uncle Joe’s) or whether Saddam Hussein is al-Qaeda (my hairdresser in Philomath.) But today I couldn’t hold myself back. I replied-all to point out that the petition was
1. inaccurate (they do pay taxes)
2. meanspirited
3. whoever wrote the petition didn’t even use correct punctuation. You do not use an apostrophe to make a plural, for crying out loud
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They’re killing monks in Burma today. Monks, reporters and unarmed demonstrators. The journalist reporting the story said that people appeared to believe that once the United States knew about it, we’d do something to help.
