– Just read that no respectable cannibal would ever let himself be caught eating a clown and I cannot figure out why!
– Maybe because most clowns taste funny?
Foarte multi si-au adus aminte de Olivia Steer.
Steer îl citează pe controversatul politician Ninel Peia care afirmă că infestarea cu rujeolă “s-a făcut artificial şi intenționat de către agenţi cu dublă comandă”.
“Un fapt este clar: de la începutul anului, s-au descoperit circa 4.000 de cazuri de rujeolă, din care 17 s-au finalizat, tragic, cu moartea bolnavilor. Totuşi, în ce stat European se mai înregistrează o epidemie de proporţiile astea? Niciunde! Informaţiile mele spun că infestarea s-a făcut ARTIFICIAL şi INTENŢIONAT de către agenţi cu dublă comandă, agenţi dubli, cum li se mai spune. La Arad şi Nădlac se îmbonlăvesc copiii dar peste graniţă la Nagylak, Mako sau Szeged nici unul? Şi ungurii au grad de vaccinare mai mic cu 10% decât românii. Valul de rujeolă a generat ceea ce se şi intenţiona: un val de emoţie uriaş care ar împinge opinia publică la acceptarea rapidă şi fără mari dezbateri a Legii vaccinării”, a scris Olivia Steer pe Facebook, potrivit Antena 3.
Acelasi lucru se intampla in Statele Unite. Si acolo se manifesta o oarecare reticenta impotriva vaccinarii si, la fel ca in Romania, au re-inceput sa apara focare de infectie.
Toata chestia asta seamana foarte bine cu o vanatoare de vrajitoare.
In loc sa ne concentram pe cauza reala ale imbolnavirilor – neincrederea unora dintre parinti, ii acuzam pe cei care – cu naivitate, din dorinta de a-si face publicitate sau orice combinatie din amandoua, vorbesc mult despre lucruri pe care le inteleg pe jumatate.
Da, exista o legatura extrem de stransa, si extrem de evidenta, intre neincrederea in vaccinuri si campaniile de presa desfasurate de anti-vaxxeri.
Partea proasta este ca toate atacurile ad-hominem la adresa anti-vaxxerilor sunt, de fapt, atacuri indreptate direct impotriva gandirii de tip stiintific.
Stupoare?!?
Sa o luam metodic.
Cunoasterea de tip stiintific se bazeaza pe ipoteze emise de cei care pun la indoiala consensul valabil la un moment dat si verificate de ‘colegii de breasla’ ai celor care au formulat acele ipoteze.
Daca respectivii colegi sunt de acord cu ipotezele analizate acestea devin teorii ‘acceptate de lumea stiintifica’.
Si ‘asteapta linistite’ ca niste alti ‘cârtitori’ sa le puna la indoiala si sa formuleze noi ipoteze, care, la randul lor, vor fi puse ‘in discutie publica’.
Iar tot acest proces se desfasoara, cel putin teoretic, intr-o atmosfera de transparenta si respect reciproc. Doate datele disponibile sunt puse pe masa si intre cercetatorii care se verifica unii pe ceilalti exista relatii de colegialitate. Repet, aici este vorba de teorie, locusul acela unde sunt evaluate doar ideile, nu si oamenii care le promoveaza.
Privind dintr-un anumit punct de vedere, cei ca Olivia Steer sunt un fel de ‘fluieratori in biserica’. Li se pare ca un lucru nu este la locul lui si atrag atentia celorlati asupra acelei ‘neregularitati’.
S-ar putea sa se insele – cum credem noi, cei care ne-am vaccinat copiii, ca este cazul anti-vaxxerilor.
Sau s-ar putea ca o cat de mica portiune din informatia vehiculata in jurul acestui subiect sa fie, totusi, valabila.
Si uite-asa ajungem la povestea cu Pastorul si Lupul… aia in care Pastorul se tot plictisea si, din cand in cand, striga ‘Lupul’. Iar satenii ii sareau in ajutor… numai ca lupul nu venise… Si asta pana cand satenii s-au plictisit la randul lor… si nu s-au mai dus… numai ca de data aia Lupul venise….
In varianta povestita copiilor, Satenii il ajuta pe Pastor sa adune, a doua zi, animalele ramase iar acesta intelege, in sfarsit, morala povestii… numai ca asta este doar o fabula…
In lumea reala trebuie sa sarim de fiecare data cand cineva striga ‘A venit Lupul’.
Nu de alta, ci doar pentru ca sunt oile noastre in joc! Iar pastorul ala este angajatul nostru. Adica este responsabilitatea noastra sa alegem un pastor responsabil, nu unul care sa-si bata joc de noi….
Iar daca un trecator ‘are vedenii’ si striga degeaba… asta e. Ghinion. Ne gandim la cate pagube ar fi putut face Lupul daca ar fi venit cu adevarat si mergem mai departe…
Singura situatie in care am putea sa-l pedepsim pe cel care tras alarma aiurea ar fi aceea in care ar fi evident ca a facut-o ca sa isi bata joc de noi. Altfel, daca pedeapsa e nejustificata, sau prea mare, acelasi om – sau oricare altii, ar putea intoarce capul si s-ar putea preface ca n-au vazut nimic. De ce sa-si riste ei fundul pentru ‘oile comunitatii’?
Daca Lupul pe care il vad in momentul asta ‘se razgandeste’ si nu-i asteapta pe Sateni?
Sau daca e ‘inteles cu primarul’, acesta ii conduce pe Sateni pe cai intortocheate si pana ajung la locul faptei Lupul are timp sa-si ascunda urmele? Nu mai bine sa se faca ca nu vede, avand in vedere experienta predecesorilor sai?
Bine, bine, asta facem cu oile… ce ne facem cu pojarul?
Nu de alta, ne mor copiii pana termini tu povestea cu oile…
Pai ce sa facem, cumparam vaccin!
In America, locul ala unde spuneam ca a inceput miscarea anti-vaxxer, parintii carora le vine mintea la cap au de unde sa cumpere o fiola de vaccin! Aici … mai greu…
Trecand peste amanuntul ca noi, toti, platim niste impozite. Din care ar trebui cumparate inclusiv vaccinurile care sa ne apere, pe noi si pe copiii nostri, de tot felul de boli…
Chiar credeti ca mama bebelusului cu care am inceput articolul stie macar cine e Olivia Steer? Ca sa nu mai vorbim despre faptul ca acum 16 ani, cand ar fi trebuit sa fi fost vaccinata ea, mama, nu vorbea nimeni despre aiureli din astea…
Si nu, nu sunt de acord nici cu vaccinarea obligatorie!
Avem medici, ei trebuie sa decida daca un copil poate sau nu sa fie vaccinat. Pe semnatura si responsabilitatea lor!
Vrei sa-ti duci copilul la scoala? Scoti de la medic o adevarinta ca acel copil a fost vaccinat. Sau ca nu a putut fi inca vaccinat din cauzele 1, 2, 3 … consemnate precis, cu data, in fisa medicala a copilului si cu angajamentul ca, pe masura ce acele cauze vor inceta, copilul va fi imunizat de indata ce se va putea.
Altfel… tine-l taica acasa… sa te intrebe pe tine ce si cum cand s-o face mai mare, nu sa-l imbolnaveasca pe al meu pentru ca ai tu gargauni in cap…
Si lasati-o pe Steer in plata Domnului… cu cat o bagati mai mult in seama, cu atat mai multe trasnai o sa spuna…
Cum or fi reusind astia sa ne indrepte pe tot felul de piste false…
Sau ne-o facem cu mana noastra?
Dupa principiul ‘tara arde si baba se piaptana’…
NB. “Pojar” asta inseamna, de fapt.
“Incendiu”!
Iar ‘incendiul neincrederii generalizate’ nu poate fi stins atacandu-i, la persoana, pe cei care au curajul (inconstienta?) de a-si exprima sentimentele cu voce tare…
Ar fi similar cu a-i biciui pe canarii dusi in mina atunci cand gâfâie din cauza monoxidului de carbon acumulat in galerii…
Singurul remediu este redescoperirea respectului reciproc.
Intre medic si pacient, intre politician si alegator, intre specialist si profan, intre politicieni, intre specialisti, intre profani…
PS
Acum au inceput sa se cearte pe ambulante, pe asta cu vaccinarea au lasat-o deoparte…
Trump has been around for ages.
His buildings litter the world, his marriages were of a very public nature, his involvement with the media generated a lot of (fake?!?) reality (shows), he not only published a number of books – the most interesting, to me, being Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and Life, but also pretended to educate us using an university he eventually had to close amid huge controversy.
Even if he was wearing a ‘fresh figure’ in politics when he presented his bid for the American Presidency he was nevertheless the epitome of a ‘public figure’.
Nobody could pretend he wasn’t aware of how Trump was going to behave.
Yet the Republican Convention nominated him as candidate, a considerable number of people had voted for him and more than half the Americans had chosen to stay home even if he was on the ballot.
People refraining from casting a ballot is easiest to explain. The alternative wasn’t any better.
Republicans nominating him as candidate is also relatively simple. They wanted so badly to ‘win’ that they had chosen not to consider all the implications.
Same thing goes for those who had voted for him. The majority of them are not the bigoted monsters the ‘other side’ fear them to be. They were just exasperated by what was happening to them.
What is harder to understand is what’s going on after the votes have been counted.
Remember that Trump was the known quantity here. Nothing surprising in his behavior.
What surprises me is that so many Republicans act as if they were hoping he was going to become presidential after the election, that the Democrats have not yet understood that they share the blame for Trump becoming what he is today and that so many of the public take sides instead of joining hands and mitigating the dangers of the current situation.
By ‘mitigating the dangers’ I don’t mean ‘impeachment’ or anything like that.
What I’m trying to say is that too many of us treat Trump as a symbol instead of as the symptom he is.
By either admiring or hating him, as a person, we allow ourselves to be divided into warring parties which no longer communicate effectively and meaningfully.
By either trying to emulate or to destroy him, or others like him, we only throw fresh fuel on an already blazing fire.
How about a little moderation?
We have learned to make, and tame, fire since humankind’s childhood.
In the last 70 years or so we have also learned to tame the atom. We are now able to build both atom bombs and power generating nuclear reactors.
How about re-learning to tame greed? For both money and power?
I’ve recently spent a few days in the Danube Delta.
When traveling on water, I was issued a ‘life-jacket’ – no picture, you all know what one looks like.
At one point, I was joking with the guide.
‘Harnessed like this, no one can do anything but wait to be rescued. It’s impossible to swim wearing such a thing.’
‘Ha!.
You thought this was meant to save your life, didn’t you?
Well, in reality its role is to keep your corpse afloat so that those looking for you wouldn’t have to dredge the river.’
I remembered the joke while reading this article.
“Apple doesn’t purposely make its terms and conditions long and boring and difficult to read. In theory it could shorten them, or summarise them, or pull out a few bullet points at the beginning to let you know if something has changed since you were last confronted with them. But if it was to do so someone could argue in court that insufficient emphasis was placed on something buried further down in the document. And Apple doesn’t want that to happen.”
People tend to treat it as if it was a ‘point’.
A theoretical concept that has been put on a table, studied from all angles, found desirable/unacceptable and which is now aggressively marketed by fervent apostles/rejected by ‘die-heart fundamentalists’.
I’m afraid it should rather be treated as a continuum.
People belonging to diverse cultures who freely decide to live together will, sooner rather than later, generate a meta-culture based mainly on intercultural mutual respect.
People belonging to diverse cultures who have to live together, without previously being asked whether they want this to happen or not, will, later rather than sooner, generate a meta-culture fusing together various cultural segments appropriated from the various cultures that were forced to coexist.
I am fascinated by the fact that both ‘extremes’ can happen simultaneously.
Individuals, usually unaware of what is going on, find ways of cooperating with members belonging to other cultures to impose/reject ‘cultural artifacts’ upon/coming from individuals belonging to other cultures.
Individuals, usually unaware of what is going on, find ways of cooperating with members belonging to other cultures to impose/reject ‘cultural artifacts’ upon/coming from individuals belonging to other cultures.
The key of all this being a simple matter of ‘perception’.
We find it easier to cooperate with people belonging to cultures which we perceive as ‘friendly’ and to treat with disdain those belonging to cultures which are different enough to be perceived as inferior. Hence ‘unfriendly’.
We find it easier to cooperate with people belonging to cultures which we perceive as ‘friendly’ and to treat with disdain those belonging to cultures which are different enough to be perceived as inferior. Hence ‘unfriendly’.
About the future, I mean!
This ‘piece of information’ keeps bouncing inside the Internet and is interpreted in various manners.
From ‘what to expect from leaders who are ‘this’ selfish’ to “I find it trashy and irrelevant. Merkel’s husband has two sons, btw.”
Well… Macron’s wife also has her own children. And a few nephews.
What startled me was this reaction.
“I’m under the stark realization that the most intelligent of the population have the fewest children, which might not bode well for voting statistics in the future.”
While the observation is, of course, correct, I’m afraid the interpretation attached to it is somewhat ‘confused’.
First if all, it’s not ‘intelligence’ that drives people to give birth to fewer children. Intelligence – coalesced at social level – helps a population to increase its living standard. As such, children no longer die young so parents no longer have to have so many of them. In order to have somebody help you in your older days you no longer have to give birth to more than two or three children.
If intelligence alone would have prevented people from having children Israel and the US would have been at least as ‘childless’ as Japan or most of the European Countries.
On the contrary. The US is still in a better situation than the EU, 1.8 vs 1.6, while Israel thrives at 3.1
Another way of making sense of what’s going on is to consider that people no longer make kids simply because they have reached the conclusion that ‘money’ can just as well help them cope during their older days. Since so few children live with, or at least near, their old parents this no longer seems so farfetched as it may look at first glance…
But what’s going on in Israel? They also have enough money…
The country needs soldiers to defend it’s very existence?
But, you know, Israel is a free country. Those kids could leave anytime before being drafted. As some of them do.
But most of them stay! Freely!
Then how about people giving birth having at least some connection with ‘hope’?
As in people having hope for a better tomorrow? One worth defending?
One worth making children for?
For a long time the Jewish people have written down their thoughts about the world.
At some point, about two thousands years ago, Jesus and his followers reinterpreted those ideas so new books had to be written on the same subject.
Another four centuries later the Councils of Hippo (393 AD) and Carthage ( 397) determined which of those books were to be included in what is currently known as the Bible.
The versions being circulated since were written in Latin, Hebrew, ancient Greek, Aramaic, ancient Armenian, etc.
By 1500 almost nobody but some of the priests were able to read any of them.
So Luther had decided he had to translate it. Into German.
And changed the world.
Since then, because modern languages are a work in progress, the Bible has been practically rewritten many times over.
Here are three versions of how Cain and Abel were born. Genesis 4:1-2.
King James Version
“Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have gotten[a] a man with the help of the Lord.” 2 And again, she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a worker of the ground.“
English Standard Version
Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil.”
New International Version
What next? I’ve counted 106 different versions, all written in English, on a Wikipedia page…
Luther had translated it because almost no one living in his times was able to read it by themselves.
Nowadays it seems that anybody who cares about the matter, writes their own!
I was under the impression that religion was meant to bring us together…
Who is scattering us now?
Why are we doing this to ourselves?
“Dolma”.
A vast variety of delicious dishes and a very complex social reality hidden behind a short string of letters.
The word itself, literally meaning “something stuffed“, belongs today to the Turkish language.
Google it and you’ll be ‘served’ with a cornucopia of Greek recipes, most of them teaching you how to prepare stuffed grape leaves…
Check its etymology and you’ll find out its “First Known Use: circa 1889“.
Common, people must have been stuffing vegetables long before that… all around the Black and Mediterranean seas… the Italians have their ‘ripieni’, the Persians have been stuffing bell peppers (dolmeh-s) for some time now, Armenians have their tolma-s while the Greek have the ‘wider’ gemista – dolmadakia being reserved, as I already mentioned, for ‘stuffed vine leaves’.
So, what had happened during the XIX-th century that made so many different people – who were living more or less together but spoke different languages, to use the same word for a dish?
Forget about etymology and consider this.
Simultaneously with ‘dolma’ becoming the ‘dominant’ word for ‘stuffed vegetables’, the dominant power in the area where this was happening, the Ottoman Empire, was crumbling.
We can discuss ad nauseam the reasons for yet another empire fading away into history, but this is not the purpose of my post.
What I’m trying to say is that most of the inhabitants would have gladly continued to coexist peacefully and share their meals – if that had been possible, of course.
Just look at the symbolism of different vegetables, stuffed with the same filling, simmering together in the same pot and becoming delicious sustenance for the various individuals gathered around the same table to ‘break bread’.
But it didn’t come to be… the various forces and agents involved in the matter – the central power trying to survive, the ‘revolutionaries’ attempting to ‘modernize’ the society, the surrounding states and empires trying to gobble up portions of ‘the Sick Man of Europe‘, each followed what they considered to be ‘their best interest’.
And this is what’s going on now…, in the same city where traders from all over the Middle East used to partake dolmades in the world’s biggest covered market – the Aleppo Souk.
Injured children are carried amid the rubble of destroyed buildings following airstrikes targeting the rebel-held neighborhood of Al-Mashhad in Aleppo on July 25. BARAA AL-HALABI / AFP – Getty Images
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