It took me a while.
Long enough to become ashamed of myself…
But I finally got it!

All those individuals are birds! In order to get there they had to fly!

In human terms they were free, nobody forced them to get in those relative positions.
If living in a democracy they even elected themselves to those places…

So what’s keeping them there?

Do they really enjoy it?
Are they afraid that if they leave, even temporarily, somebody else would take their places?
Have their wings became so stuck with shit that they are no longer able to take off?

Besides that, what kind of leader can find any satisfaction in presiding over such a filthy mess?

Am crescut in Giulestiul anilor ’60 – ’70 asa ca am vazut, si baut, multe.

Am primit repartitie la Filipestii de Padure, intre Campina si Moreni, in anii cei mai nasoi ai comunismului, ’86-’89.
Mancam la cantina fabricii si daca ratam o masa singura sansa mai era circiuma din sat. La alimentara se mai gaseau doar carlige si rafturi metalice. Sa nu va inchipuiti ca la carciuma aveau mancare – snitzelul de parizer era considerat delicatesa dar se gasea foarte rar. Cateva conserve cu tocana de legume, rar de fasole si din cand in cand se milostivea carciumarul de noi: improviza o tocana de cartofi cu slanina adusa de acasa de la el. Deh, eram clienti importanti…ingineri…

Pana fierbeau cartofii gustam si noi, cateodata la insistentele celorlalti musterii care se simteau datori sa ne ‘cinsteasca’, din ce se afla prin rafturile ‘barului’: RDD (rachiu de drojdie), RDV (rachiu de vin)…

They say Syria is in the middle of a civil war.

Now what on Earth is that?!?

There are two answers to that question, a broader and a narrower one:

Linguists tend to favor a balanced approach:
“A war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country”

‘Political scientists’ tend to favor the established power:
“Armed conflict between a government and another group from within the same country.”

A system is nothing more and nothing less than a set of relatively stable interactions.
A system can be evaluated only from the outside.
A system exists only in the mind of the observer.

I’ll discuss these three affirmations from the bottom.

Even if the objects that compose the system exist ‘in the real world’, the system itself exists only in the minds of the observers – the person who had first identified the interactions and all those who agree with him.
To illustrate my point I’ll give you three examples.
–  A constellation is “a group of stars that forms a particular shape in the sky and has been given a name“. A long time ago, when those constellations had been named by our ancestors, people thought they were something totally different than what we think of them now. Yet they continue to exist as before and…

“The wiser of the two equally matched opponents will give up first.”
This is a Romanian proverb oftentimes interpreted as a justification/rationalization for cowardly behavior.

It’s anything but!

In a protracted conflict, where none of the opponents has a clear advantage or when the price of wining would be so huge that no one is willing to underwrite it, it is essential that at least one of the interested parties comes up with something new that might defuse the situation. Otherwise the whole thing drags on, people get bitter and calloused and what might have started as a misadventure or as a badly calculated move eventually becomes a festering wound that changes, for the worse, the life of many generations to come.

Think of what happens when two families become embroiled in a ‘vendetta’.
Or about the outcome of the WWI when the people of Germany were punished for the…

The world is turning on its head and he’s spinning fairy tales…
Besides that, what  on Earth does Putin have to do with anything?

Bear with me and your curiosity will be satisfied.

Most of us believe that bed time stories come from the ancient past, that they were passed on across generations by the regular folks, from the ancient equivalent of you and me to our nephews.

Lets give this idea a second thought.

First of all there weren’t so many ‘you and me’-s readily available until recently. No more than 50 years ago very few people had enough free time, or energy, to spend on such frivolous topics. In those times most people worked/fought hard to make a living and a small minority was rich/powerful enough to live somewhat insulated from the daily worries of the commoners – ‘what will I be eating/feeding my kids tomorrow’. The rich…

Very few notions are simultaneously evident and hard to grasp. Liberty is one of them.

If we look around it is self evident that some things are freer than others.
For instance wheel-chairs can be moved a lot easier than table chairs on a flat surface but are harder to be carried up and down the stairs or on rugged terrain. Or, on a different level of discussion, chained dogs are less free than stray ones.
Yet nobody in his right mind wastes a thought on whether wheel chairs might be concerned about their lack of ‘upward mobility’ while some of us, but not so many, do think about how come the vast majority of chained dogs usually come back after having accidentally been set free and wonder about why dogs which have grown up on their own can indeed become good companions but would never accept to be tied…

Thanks Beautiful Minds for the picture.

Living in a communist society (Romania, 1961 to 1989) I was ‘educated’ – like everybody else, into becoming a ‘good member of the working class’.
The indoctrination process included becoming familiar with ‘the classics’ and this how I ended up reading some of Lenin’s ‘works’.
One concept stuck to my mind. At some point he was explaining that ideas are like axes: very sharp, able to do a lot of things but powerless without a handle to leverage the force with which they are wielded. With axes it is simple, just attach them to a wooden handle and you’re in business.

With ideas things are a little trickier. If you want them to take hold among the targeted section of the population you need to ‘seduce’/convince credible but gullible members of that group that those ideas are “good”. For the society at large…