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Post by slowcoach on May 1, 2013 14:13:56 GMT 2
North Korea has been all over the news but how much wisdom has there been in the coverage?
Below is a video of a public in depth and more nuanced discussion given by:
Dr John Swenson-Wright University of Cambridge, and Chatham House, Charles Scanlon, BBC East Asia editor, Andrea Berger Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), John Everard, retired diplomat, and once the British Ambassador to North Korea.
It might appeal to news wonks at least.
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Post by slowcoach on May 7, 2013 21:20:37 GMT 2
I have just being reading this short piece on the decline of the notion of the "public" in public services. The ugly face of the corporate public sphereNow some I am sure will enjoy yet be enraged by this, and enraged for different reasons. I have been trying to write something about Mali now that it is only occasionally in the news, but I have found it difficult to find the material needed to build a narrative. Around the time that the French involved themselves militarily, the conflict was just reaching Niono, a community in the Segou region. Niono is in the area that falls under the control of the Office du Niger, a body involved in offering up the fertile plain of the Niger to multinational companies and foreign national exploitation, in what is commonly referred to as a "land grab". I now that Libya, South Africa, the UK, China, and I think some gulf states are involved. Two quite different schemes, MALIBYA (with Libya) and one commonly known a Sosumar (SA) are seeking to gain access to large areas of land for large scale irrigated commercial farming of I believe rice and sugar respectively. Now to tell that story would involve Illovo, and its UK parent company and also Zambia where they also operate and from Zambia one links to the issue of EI (extractive industry) exploitation, e.g. copper, and how tax arrangements tend to minimise the benefit to the host country. The copper leads to a town called Zug, in Switzerland and from there it is straight down the rabbit hole of OffShore jurisdictions from the entrance to Wonderland known simply as The City. It was in the strange world of offshore tax blogging that I found the above article. I think that the article touches on a theoretical underpinning know as Public Choice Theory and that in turn rests on Rational Choice Theory and that I believe has been used to support a very narrow view, a very sparse model of human behaviour. That we are simple entities that respond in simple ways that are predicable and controllable given certain goals and incentives. I will conclude by linking to a BBC documentary. It is by Adam Curtis. He has a blog about which he says "This is a website expressing my personal views – through a selection of opinionated observations and arguments. I’ll be including stories I like, ideas I find fascinating, work in progress and a selection of material from the BBC archives." That is also quite a good description of how he makes documentaries. He is much better at putting together a narrative than I am but beware he knows that it is a partial reading and juxtaposition of the material done for effect. Here is "F**k You Buddy" part one of "The Trap"
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Post by Voy on May 8, 2013 2:13:46 GMT 2
fwiw - I was in Mali in about 1980 - stayed with Belgian friends in Timbuctu - who were building the first rice project for Ile de la Paix ( a Belgian charity) - they were using solar power for the pumps to get the water to the paddy - the locals loved the rice, but were freaked by the solar panels -- the fact that if you covered them the thing stopped!
sorry for the interruption - nothing to see, move along
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Post by slowcoach on May 8, 2013 14:37:00 GMT 2
Thanks Voy, Voila! Le Mali - Iles de Paix (pics included but no solar panels sorry) They mention work started between 1975-1994 being continued post 2005. Sadly there is a big interruption recently. The scale of their projects were of the order of 10s of hectares, the scale of the multinational projects are of the order of 10,000. They were putting in boreholes run by village water committees, the MALIBYA project entails a canal sufficient to draw off just about all the available water the Niger could provide (so some say). I am glad you got to see it when it was still an open country. There are other parts of the story that seem important to me, one being the wave of anti-sufism that swept down from the north and led to destruction in Timbuctu. Fortunately around 90% of all the manuscripts at risk were saved due to a brave and clandestine effort, which apparently included almost all of the culturally most significant ones. I have never have and never will see Mali but even from that low base I know that we are being presented with a narrow and I think bogus vision of the country on the news, all couched in terms of our western views. Oddly, it is the cultural and poetic nature of countries such as Mali, Somalia, and Iran, that we used to cherish and admire so much that is now so missing from the current discourse.
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Post by auntieannie on May 8, 2013 15:07:42 GMT 2
Look up Salif Keita, Slow. you might like his music? he's a griot from mali.
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Post by slowcoach on May 8, 2013 17:04:37 GMT 2
Thanks annie, been listening. I also came across a Salif Keita "tribute" band. I didn't know about the idea of poets (griot) belonging to a social group. I will have to look into their role in the Western Sahel. As I understand it, poets in Somalia can be very diverse, I read up in this some while back. From great masters to wandering poetry memorisers and reciters, and include both men and women. Here is a paper from 1994: Silent Voices: The Role of Somali Women’s Poetry in Social and Political Life, which is enlightening. Their famous leader and poet, Sayid Mohamed Abdulla Hassan (known as the "Mad Mullah" to the English), is said to have returned to his camp in the evenings after fighting and commonly beating the British forces to compose poems to be disseminated orally to his people. The paper was written around the end of a disastrous UN intervention that was to have serious consequences for the US and disastrous ones for Somalia and in turn Rwanda (the "Mogadishu effect" on UN peacekeeping). By the bye, the Somali flag has/had a five pointed star, one point for each of the regions. Only two are in modern Somalia, the others being in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya. The large refugee camps in Kenya, are actually in greater Somalia. That, as they say, is a bit problematic. Hmmm, slow is rambling, and geographically to boot.
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Post by slowcoach on May 8, 2013 21:02:59 GMT 2
Here is the intriguing story of how research done by Professor John H. Gillespie research into the activation of the bovine retractor penis muscle led to some blue pills that have proved very popular.
The BBC Horizon documentary "A Vital Poison" (1995) elucidates the discovery of the nitric oxide pathway and the numerous ways in which a simple and toxic chemical is instrumental in a host of physiological processes:
Perhaps one for auntieannie after her examinations are successfully completed.
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Post by slowcoach on May 26, 2013 17:52:21 GMT 2
This about a photographer, a girl, some mountains, and the spectacle. The Photographer is Reza, but he is also many other things, a philospher, humanitarian, freedom fighter, Irani, he has taken some pictures that are much better known than he is. Captured in Iran for the publication of images, he was imprisoned for three years and tortured for five months, and is no fan of that regime, but that was actually under the Shah, he is also no fan of the current regime. His full name is Reza Deghati, but he is known universally as Reza. The girl gave up her image to him, that is the way he puts things, and it is a tremendously haunting image: Attachments:
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Post by slowcoach on May 26, 2013 18:04:02 GMT 2
That picture of the girl with hand under her chin was taken when she was five years old but she seems both younger and much older than that.
She was born in a village below the White Mountains and when a small baby the mountains and those villages came under intense aerial bombardment.
Many of us may well have watched that bombardment on the news accompanied by many facts, many which where not true, but I wonder if any of us knew of her village.
I do not know her name, her image is commonly called The Girl from Tora Bora.
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Post by slowcoach on May 26, 2013 18:17:21 GMT 2
Her is a link to her image form the website of his photographic agency: Afghan GirlI will add some more links to all things Reza from time to time. Oh yes, I mentioned the spectacle, that was our experience of that war, and all wars, and almost everything. Reza has a way of communicating things in ways that for now, stand out from the spectacle.
Here is a video-montage of his work from his Webistan photo agency: In the eye of the storm
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Post by slowcoach on May 30, 2013 16:19:59 GMT 2
Fascism is never a joke.
One can make fun of them individually, and of their fellow travellers, you can trivialise (banalise) them, and they grow in numbers.
Many from my country will have some vague memory that we nipped home grown Fascism in the bud prior to WWII.
Well that depends on whom one means by WE.
The iconic stand against Fascism occurred in the East End during 1936, when the Scum, the Immigrants, took on the State.
On one side was the Government, all the major political parties, the media, a large segment of the populace, and by necessity the police.
On the other side, (the nasty rioters), were the East Enders, predominately the Jews, and Irish, with some support from radical or independent socialists, anarchists and somewhat late to the cause the official Communists.
The Battle of Cable Street was largely a violent contest between the anti-fascists (East Enders) and ~6000 police officers in order to prevent the Fascists marching through the East End.
Put simply, the police lost, they were vastly outnumbered and the anti-fascist were organised and the streets barricaded.
That is not I think how it was portrayed at the time. The enemies of the State, were the anti-Fascists, the rioters, the immigrants, the anarcho-marxist Scum.
The Fascists kindly agreed, for the sake of law and order to turn their march around and head for Hyde Park, after having a nice little chat with the Commissioner of Police.
The Battle gave rise to the Public Order Act 1936, of which only the first section (banning of uniforms) is remembered, the next section made organising after the fashion of the East Enders (e.g. being trained in methods of fighting even in defensive actions) a crime in itself. The third and final section described more general public order offenses as was used (on occasion) against strikers up to and including the Miners Strike,
With the advent of WWII much amnesia occurred and the, now plucky, East Enders' role was incorporated into my country's fight against Fascism, they were no longer Scum, nor Immigrants but our fellows.
Here is some newsreel footage (marked as being from Reuters):
and here a more contemporary view plus reminiscences from the anti-Fascist side.
They cried "¡No Pasarán!" and emptied their chamber pots onto the enemy below.
I started planning to write something about this a few days ago but I am not keeping up with events.
I should have preferred to say something more substantial about of this relates to a failure of politics, and whom it is failing, which includes the same old Scum, the Immigrants, the various components of the Working Class and increasingly if they would but notice the bourgeois classes.
Biased? Of course I'm biased, but history was written by the other side.
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Post by slowcoach on Jun 6, 2013 2:08:44 GMT 2
British government to make Mau Mau apologyThis has been a long time coming, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have done no one any favours by dragging it out. Legal action started around 10 or 15 years ago depending on how one defines it. The whole affair is a dark one and we had no monopoly on the atrocities. For a long while they were meant to have been the exclusive preserve of the Mau Mau but the involvement of our colonial authorities in the torture and murder of detainees was documented at the time and eventually truth will out. If I recall correctly, the father of David Steel (former leader of the British Liberal Party) was one man that tried to have the prison atrocities stopped.
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Post by slowcoach on Jun 7, 2013 3:39:21 GMT 2
European Monetary Union has given everyone a lot of heartache recently with doubts as to whether Greece will leave and whether the Eurozone will collapse.
None of this is without precedent.
France, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland, joined by Spain and Greece, and then by Romania, Bulgaria, Venezuela (sic), Serbia and San Marino, formed the Latin Monetary Union, and Austria-Hungary, Montenegro, and the Papal State also ran with the pack.
It finally broke up in 1927 largely due to a combination of the countries cheating on each other by debasing their version of the common denominated coinage, or conducting cross-border arbitrage schemes when the exchange value between silver and gold fluctuated. A union built for cheating.
Greece was expelled in 1908 for debasing its coinage and readmitted in 1910 after promising to behave better in the future.
I wonder if the gods that preside over the EU ever read history?
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Post by slowcoach on Jun 22, 2013 21:10:06 GMT 2
I recently watched a video of a presentation to Gresham College by Professor Victoria Crick an economist old enough to remember learning a version of economics that we have largely forgotten and is seldom ever taught and she claims to have been effectively excluded from publication in the most prestigious journals. It takes a well aimed swipe at about forty years of modern economic thinking. It is also amusing but given the subject may not be likely to have us rolling in the Aisles. She emphasises many things starting with why the present financial crisis has been described as the best predicted crisis in history and why such predictions were ignored. Ignored on the firm basis that it couldn't happen. It couldn't happen because the economic theory implied its impossibility. It could imply this impossibility because something was missing from the theory. That which was missing from the theory being a description of the actual economy with all of its foibles and imponderables. Gresham's Law in Economics: Background to the Crisis - Professor Victoria Chick
I have also been listening to and reading the thoughts of the Chartalists. In a slow nutshell they emphasise the practical accountancy aspects of practiced economics. They have interesting insights particularly regarding money and debt. These contain the realisation that in the modern economy monetary wealth is a zero sum game. That the sum of all monetary assets and all monetary debts is always precisely zero. With the implication that our monetary savings can be greater than the governments monetary indebtedness. They go on to point out that our common understanding of government debt is illogical for it amounts to their borrowing their own IOUs e.g. the promises they issue called money or cash, and exchanging them for yet more IOUs called bonds or bills, and in the UK gilts. I continue to worry about a discipline that has schools, Chartalism being but one of many belief systems.
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Post by slowcoach on Jul 7, 2013 18:34:45 GMT 2
A scientific paper was received for publication a little over 108 years ago, titled, in the English translation, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" it was authored by A. Einstein and its subject is now known to us as "Special Relativity" and its implications are ones that we, for the most part, find baffling. It is the baffling part that has always bothered me. Why in all the elapsed time have we not come to see the world as Einstein saw it in 1905.
Is it that we are just too thick or is there a problem in the way that the topic is presented? I think that it be the latter.
I think it is fair to say that the "classical" view, sometimes referred to as Newtonian or Galilean, is assumed to be the more natural, more commonsense one, and that the Einstein view a bit eccentric.
I can't rewrite the text books but I should like to show by at least this one example why this prejudice is unfounded.
It is a very simple experiment to establish the velocity of a vehicle.
There is a measured course, say 1 km, and a reference clock, a very accurate one such as the atomic clocks that are made to be transported.
As we have measured the distance, all we need to establish is how long it takes the vehicle to cover the course.
There is a choice to be made, should the clock be stationary to the course, or should it travel in the vehicle? Which would you propose? What would a jogger do? I think we tend to take the clock, albeit a watch with us.
We note the time by the clock as we enter the course and the time when we exit the course, subtract the difference giving us an elapsed time.
That is a very short paragraph.
This resolves an important issue that occurs when the clock remains stationary with respect to the course, the issue of simultaneity, the clock can only be in one place, be it at the start of the course, the end, or perhaps at the half way mark, wherever it is it cannot be at the start of the course when the vehicle passes that point and at the end of the course when the vehicle passes that point without it moving which contradicts the notion of it being stationary with respect to the course.. So we have the problem of knowing whether we can note the time on the clock at the moments when the vehicle starts the course and when it ends the course using just one stationary clock, can our observation of these two events and our observation of the clock be made simultaneously. This is both a practical problem which we can attempt to resolve by also a deep problem in that we have to make the correct assumptions regarding what are and are not simultaneous observations and the correct ones are not the classical ones. That is sort of the point.
Now that was a very long paragraph.
If we do the former, it is not only easier to achieve but it gives a different value for the elapsed time between the two events than the elaborate method described in the long paragraph would. That is the point. The simple method gives a value of what is known as the 4-velocity, the velocity that is most natural in Einstein's view.
If one starts with these easier to determine 4-velocities the path forward lacks many of the somewhat strange and bewildering equations that the theory is renowned for. Other equations are used and these may be unfamiliar but they better embody the mathematical manipulations that need to take place when transforming observations between observers who are not at rest with each other.
So to recap, the 4-velocity is a hybrid, it is ratio of the distance according to an observer stationary with respect to the course, with the elapsed time according to observations of a clock that is moving with the vehicle (or is said to be at rest in the vehicle). It turns out that it is this hybrid velocity that the more natural, perhaps the more fundamental measure of the vehicle's velocity. The time elapsed measured by the clock when it travels in the vehicle it referred to as the "proper" time interval, or the "invariant" time interval, but it might be simply thought of as the obvious time interval, the one that is easiest to measure.
It is this hybrid notion of velocity that is fundamental in Einstein's view. It can be calculated from the "classical" (non-hybrid) velocity which is the ratio of the distance of the course divided by the elapsed time when both are determined by an observation system at rest relative to the course.
Here I have used the term hybrid to indicate that the velocity results from the distance as measured by one observation system and the elapsed time measured by a separate observation system, and non-hybrid when both measured are obtained using just a dingle observations system. I doubt you will find this usage elsewhere in the literature, I am using it to emphasis the difference between the two methods of obtaining a value for the velocity.
I will leave it here until I can reread it and perhaps clarify it later. All I really want to get across is that if one wants to understand Einstein's view, assume it be true, make the correct measurements and it may seem quite natural quite quickly. If you assume the classical view, make the classical measurements it may forever seem a bit nuts.
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Post by slowcoach on Jul 25, 2013 1:11:16 GMT 2
Seventy Years ago, the Grand Council of Fascism was summoned by the Duce of the Italian Social Republic following the invasion of Sicily by Allied Forces. The council chose the moment to sack Mussolini and hand power back to King Victor Emmanuel III onthe 25th of July 1943. Within days Mussolini was arrested, the Fascist party was dissolved and Italy entered into secret negotiations resulting in the signing of an Armistice with the Allied Forces in early September. It was this sudden reversal that resulted in Italy switching sides in the conflict and declaring war on both Germany and Japan.
Announcement of the Armistice led to a major disconnect in the governance of Italy at home and deep uncertainty for its troops stationed in German occupied territories which within days included most of Italy itself. I will not repeat the details here but the fate of around three quarters of a million troops varied from unpleasant to desperate or worse (see Cephalonia).
Thus Italy became the ambiguous state that was both liberated by the Allies, its own Army and Partisans, yet also made to pay war reparations. This is the Italy that was the background to the novel Catch 22, and depicted in the film Rome Open City. War in Italy ground on until May 1945 when Mussolini, who having initially been rescued by German Forces, was captured and executed by partisans.
For over a year Italy had plunged into Civil War of a sort. Some Italian Forces fought on the side of the Allies, others fought against them, notably at the Gothic Line, where they may have clashed directly but I simply do not know. In this there is an echo of the Spanish Civil War when Italian Army Forces fought Italian antifascists forces.
I have always found this period of Italian history both deeply puzzling and perplexing. Italian Forces having invaded the Balkans went on to fight for their liberation and the liberation of Italy itself with the assistance of the Northern Partisans who in turn gave us the protagonists in Giovannino Guareschi's wonderful Don Camillo stories.
I believe the above to be at least moderately accurate but certainly a partial account.
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Post by slowcoach on Jul 31, 2013 20:33:39 GMT 2
London, one hundred and ten years ago, the Victorian era was barely cold, the Empire near its peak, and exotic visitors roamed the City, and the West and East Ends.
A meeting taking place in Belgium arose suspicion and was moved to London, where exactly does not seem to be recorded but much else was. One of the party. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin, was no stranger to London nor was the party's publishing arm Iskra both having moved in around one year before. Lenin would reside in London on and off for the next few years, but at the moment in question, the crucial final meetings of the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party were about to take place. Lenin was here, as was Martov and Trotsky as were two dozen and more other delegates. It was here that the split, the disagreement between Lenin and Martov took place that created the majority view (Bolshevik) following Lenin and minority view (Menshevik) following Martov and also Trotsky. Lenin had originally been in the minority until the Jewish Bund pulled their delegation out.
A process was set in motion and carried forward, the rest is history.
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Post by slowcoach on Aug 20, 2013 0:39:31 GMT 2
Today, the 19th, is Afghan Day, marking 94 years since Afghanistan regained its independence from Britain following the end of the 3rd Anglo-Afghan War.
Two of the worst defeats of the British Army, the Retreat from Kabul, which amounted to the near total loss of a whole army bar a a handful of men, and the Battle of Maiwand both occurring during the previous conflcits.
This Afghan Day is the first for twelve years that foreign forces haven't been in control of their country's security, and at last I heard things were going very bloodily indeed with total causalities numbering around 1000 per month, in what I suspect should now be called Civil War.
I wish them well.
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Post by slowcoach on Mar 18, 2015 10:39:50 GMT 2
There is an horrific unfolding of a long legacy of child abuse in the UK dating back 30 - 40 years and more.
Power was used to commit crimes and to protect the criminals. The professions (Law, Medicine, Education, Church, Forces), politicians, and the nobility were the suspects. It never developed in to a major scandal at the time just a suspicion, a stench that rose up and then faded away.
Renewed interest triggered by the Saville revelations probably means that current investigations have such momentum that a lot of what went on will finally be unearthed.
Viewed today, it is not just that the events were unspeakable, but that the attitudes that will seem incomprehensible.
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Post by auntieannie on Mar 21, 2015 11:24:08 GMT 2
Slow, apparently somewhere in the world in the last few weeks, some horrid person was spared jail for having had sex with an underaged girl apparently 'because she was well developed' ... I didn't check the info but if this is correct, I am not sure we have made so much progress on the matter. it is revolting.
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vinnyd
Happy Potters
Posts: 335
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Post by vinnyd on Mar 21, 2015 18:40:46 GMT 2
I didn't see that story, auntiannie, but I can imagine a country that has a law against sex with someone who is reasonably believed to be a underage. (That's not how it works in the countries I am familiar with, but I can imagine such a thing). In such a country, the apparent age of the victim would br an issue.
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Post by auntieannie on Mar 21, 2015 19:04:02 GMT 2
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Post by slowcoach on Apr 22, 2016 10:35:29 GMT 2
It is 17 years, to the day, since Tony Blair, the then British Prime Minister, spoke at the Economic Club of Chicago outlining his "Doctrine of the International Community", the "Blair Doctrine" of military intervention. This was the during the Clinton administration, and they were less keen to get involved in other countries internal problems.
The problem at that time was Kosovo, and Blair had got his desired intervention in the form of NATO bombing Yugoslavia, the speech was given during that campaign.
Although he lacked the might to carry them out, he is arguably the progenitor of the interventions that followed. Even if he did steal ideas from neoconservative thought; he was in power and they were not. Perhaps that is why he made the speech where he did.
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Post by shrjeff on Apr 22, 2016 11:21:18 GMT 2
Slow, apparently somewhere in the world in the last few weeks, some horrid person was spared jail for having had sex with an underaged girl apparently 'because she was well developed' ... I didn't check the info but if this is correct, I am not sure we have made so much progress on the matter. it is revolting. turns out it was a stupid montana judge who wound up getting censured and forced to retire while the case was appealed and the perp got 10 years... and he was the girl's teacher so no way he wouldn't have known that she was under the age of consent...
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Post by kuskiwi on Apr 23, 2016 7:56:18 GMT 2
Good to have you back again Slow
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Post by auntieannie on Apr 23, 2016 11:08:24 GMT 2
Slow! that made me shudder. recently one of the Swiss soldiers posted in Kosovo died. I am not sure of the reasons for his death, but to this day, there are Swiss soldiers serving in Kosovo. Because of Blair. It annoys me enormously.
Shrjeff... different story. glad the judge was 'retired' in the Montana story. The one I was talking about was in Sweden.
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Post by slowcoach on Apr 24, 2016 10:21:53 GMT 2
Good to have you back again Slow Hi, I will try to write a bit more often.
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Post by slowcoach on Apr 24, 2016 11:01:23 GMT 2
It might have been difficult to escape noticing yesterday's 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, much easier to be oblivious to the same for Cervantes the day before.
I read Don Quixote in translation, I am assured an easier task than for a modern day Spaniard to read the original. So I must expect that translations of Shakespeare are similarly much easier going.
Much of what I have read over the years, perhaps the majority of the literary work, has benefitted from translation, perhaps most clearly, in the cases of the "Arabian Nights" and the "Rubaiyat", the later of which I have read literal translations of, and whatever the allusions and metaphors contained were lost on me. FitzGerald's rendered it assessable and most assuredly a rather different work: a cultural fusion. Without the translators art, the world would be a much much poorer place.
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Post by Voy on Apr 25, 2016 16:51:43 GMT 2
I'm so glad you're back, and hope for more updates on your cottage and animals too! fwiw my great grandfather's brother made the first ever translation of the Rubyiat... I'm sure NOT very poetic!
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Post by slowcoach on Apr 30, 2016 20:04:22 GMT 2
Ben, Ken, and a Mufti
Last year at the World Zionist Congress, the Israeli PM, made a bit of mischief, that raised hackles, and accusations that he was an Holocaust apologist, when he sought to lay blame firmly at the office of the then Grand Mufti.
He made a partial, in both senses, reading of history.
Now "Red" Ken, has made mischief, in the UK, using the same sources.
Stop it!
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