The Strength of the Human Spirit

The 29th Modern Olympic Games are due in 8 days...
The following video is from the first Women's Marathon in the 1984 Olympic Games...

The Wisdom of Babylon 5, part 2

"All of life can be broken down into moments of Transition or moments of Revelation"

-G'Kar, Babylon 5 322, "Z'ha'dum"

Paul Potts: When dreams come true

There are no words, really...



... except that I cry every time I watch it!...

Two interesting Dilemmas

[ ]Alberto Giacometti once put a question that became legendary:
[ ]"There is a burning building and, before it collapses, you can save only ONE, between a cat and a 'Rembrandt'. What would you save?"

Giacometti voted for the cat and so would I. The reason for this is that if you devalue life, even that of a lowly cat, then all art becomes fake, hypocritical, irrelevant.

The second dilemma has many versions, two of which are:
[ ]"If, by pressing a button, you would become extremely rich, but at the same time a number of total strangers on the other side of the world would die, would you press it?"

OR

[ ]"If you had to choose between the death of your most beloved person and a million strangers on the other side of the world, what would you choose?"


The "obvious" choice, of course, is the "politically correct" that spares the lives of our foreign brothers and sisters, but think about this:
How many of our everyday actions and luxuries take place at the expense of the well-being, or even the lives of other people, especially in poor, Third-World countries?

My special thanks to Nikos Dimou

Eggs...

Eggs? Yes, EGGS.
I recently had something of a mild shock, which, of course, fed me (no pun intended) with an interesting lesson.
I have been eating eggs my entire life (something more than thirty earthtrips around the Sun) and I only recently learnt that commercial eggs are generally not a product of fertilization, because chickens' production of eggs are something naturally occurring to them! (Like women's menses)

Well, believe it or not, that was something new to me, and I boast for my fair education!

That occurrence teaches us two things:

1) We, city people, are extremely removed from nature.

2) We should never take anything for granted, unless we have cross-referenced it.

Myanmar: Mea Culpa

This post is made to rectify a certain fallacy that I committed in a previous post.

What I wrote there was that Myanmar has no natural resources, exploitable by the "Powers That Be" of the world, in order to invade and "rescue" them from the inhuman military regime.

That, of course, is plainly not true. Myanmar is a very rich country, not only having precious stones and oil beneath its soil, but also exporting illegal (but profitable) drugs and rice due to the fertility on it.

That is certainly not an invitation to foreign powers to invade and violate yet another rich country with poor inhabitants! It merely adds the question why they did not (previous Vietnamese mishaps, maybe? Or is it inconvenient to the new superpower?)

And I DO maintain that Myanmar's regime is INHUMAN.

I wish courage to our faraway, fortune-stricken brothers and sisters...

Individual Worlds

Each and every one of us can be considered to be an entire and full World, with our own, separate Laws and Values that permeate us and govern our way of life.

There is, however, a certain vagueness separating "I" from "We" (to the extend that they exist, of course).

Where does the "Individual" end and the "Member of the society" begin?
To what extend the "Single Person" (or several people) shapes "Society" and to what extend Society shapes us, as Individuals?

If every person is a whole World, then how easy or hard is it for two (or more) worlds to find "common ground" (no pun intended) and (more or less) get along?

And how possible is it for a World to be quite alien to all the others?

Points of View...

While the polar caps are melting, therefore increasing the sea levels and demonstrating the clearest of evidence that Earth's climate is changing (the climate which allowed the prosperity of Mankind, mind you), five of the most powerful (and CO2 producing, of course) countries in the world, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and U.S.A. are in deep dispute over who will go first and exploit North Pole's (more accessible, now) oil reserves (in order to produce more CO2 and unbalance the planets equilibrium even more...)

[ ]"Greenland hosts Arctic sovereignty talks"

On the other hand, U.N. experts warn of economic cost of species loss...

Mohandas K. "Mahatma" Gandhi (1869-1948)

"Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth."

- Albert Einstein

I admit that all I know about "Mahatma" (Great Soul) Gandhi is from the wonderful 1982 film of the same name and one of the (admittedly too many -as if everyone tries to prove that he is Gandhi's "heir" or that Gandhi was talking about his methods) sites about him.

The important thing, though, is to remember that he managed to free his country without any use of violence.

Only through Pure Will, Determination and Faith in Truth and Justice.
With these as sole weapons (as well as solidarity) A BETTER WORLD IS POSSIBLE.

Remember that. If he did it, We can do it.

The following are the closing words from the film:

"When I despair, I remember that all through History the way of Truth and Love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and, for a time, they can seem invincible but in the end, they always fall.
Think of it. Always"

Myanmar, Anno Domini 2008

"ASEAN to coordinate Myanmar aid effort"

We are all witnessing, these days, the disaster that has stricken Myanmar.

The misfortune, of course, is neither the cyclone that fell upon this poor country (a natural phenomenon that has been highly reinforced by the changing climate -that is, from wealthy, CO2 producing economies), nor the diseases and shortage of the necessary medicines, food and clean water that came after that.

Myanmar's great mishap is its lack of natural resources, such as petrol.
If it had anything useful for the great-multinational-government-running companies to harvest, then the Mighty and Just of the World would have deployed any means, even military force to free the country from Dictatorship -remember Iraq-, and at last let relief organizations and international help to enter and do their much-needed work.

The lack of anything exploitable calls for no action to upturn this inhuman regime, which is equivalent, in the end, to letting the people of Myanmar DIE.

Of course, no end ever justifies the means, and no outside force should be used to rule the lives of the people of another country.
However, I think that in such an extreme case, like this one, humanitarian help should enter Myanmar even with the support of military forces.