E.T. > Recent Status Updates

I formed the impression that Spain has more than its fair share of grand medieval buildings and fabulous towns - and I think that impression was right !

“The Danish PM was swiftly awarded the nickname ‘Gucci Helle’ for her love of designer clothes.
Helle maintained a dignified silence for some time before taking down one particularly odious heckler at a ministerial meeting with the line: ‘We can’t all look like shit.’ I love the Danish PM.”
Me too 🙂

After ages, a book that I want to spend every spare moment reading !

Seems that being in a small town makes one happier and less stressed.

“Ringkøbing is the happiest town in Denmark. And given that Denmark is consistently named by the UN as the world’s happiest country, this technically makes Ringkøbing the happiest town on earth.”
No it does not. Logical fallacy.

“The D@nish national hero preached tolerance – and yet it is the country that spawned the Muh@mmed cartoons”
It is retarded Islamo-Left thinking to place onus of tolerance on an artist and not the violent reactionaries.
And never mind freedom-of-speech that was hard-won after centuries of repression in Europe.

“He smiled at the discord of philosophers. Philosophy,” he complained, “aims only at hair-splitting, subtle distinctions, quibbles of words.
Such a discipline could make clever debaters, but hardly wise men. He laughed at the high degree of Master and Doctor with which such studies were crowned, and marveled how a ceremony could make a pundit out of a fool. ”
-Petrarch

Nice touch to pay a tribute to James Michener - the master of this sub-genre

I must have read half-a-dozen crime series set in Nordic countries. First one in which they seem to be like normal human-beings without the grey gloom.

"Men make their own history (read luck too), but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."
-Karl Marx as quoted by Manish Sabbharwal

“…in affairs of the heart there is always one who kisses and one who is kissed.”

She read a different newspaper each morning,
spanning the political spectrum from right to left, and languages from French
to English.
Years ago, when he had first met her and understood her even less, he had asked about this.
Her response, he came to realize only years later,
made perfect sense: 'I want to see how many different ways the same lies can be
told.’

Dear Mr Sen,
Please get your head out of Rawls’s a$$

Major thing that i noticed just now - Televisions in the home seem optional in Dordogne (France) ! It was this way with the series set in Sicily (Italy) too.

"... he thought, as he always did on fine summer mornings, of a German saying some tourist had told him :-
that the very summit of happiness was to live like God in France."
Started this series and already think I am going to love this. With my love of travel in Europe and also European villages.

“Man entered the 21se century with Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology…”
-E.O. Wilson

“Under communism … only the future is certain; the past is always changing.”

“books shall not be interchangeable between the white and colored schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them”
A law in a US state - 19th century

"If citizens of a well-ordered society are to recognize one another as
free and equal, basic institutions must educate them to this conception of
themselves, as well as publicly exhibit and encourage this ideal of political
justice. This task of education belongs to what we may call the wide role of
a political conception."
Are we sure that veiling underage girls in classrooms makes them feel free and equal to boys ?

Unconvinced by Rawls focused on equality as a pre-condition for social co-operation. Think it should be about ensuring dignity so that people can participate as free and equal citizens.
A lot to read and digest in this (seemingly) short book.

V.engaging
Michener is better at this sort of historical fiction but this is worth a read !

“The desire to be good is one of the loveliest things in the world, but in order to have a genuinely good life, we may sometimes need to be (by the standards of the good child) fruitfully and bravely bad.”

Mostly non-romantic poetry - and the word most used so far - "lahu" (blood)

“Our civilization is full of great books on how to speak – Cicero’s On the Orator and Aristotle’s Rhetoric were two of the greatest in the ancient world – but sadly no one has ever written a book called The Listener”

We too readily assume that we are approaching a person of genius when we stop understanding anything of what they’re saying.

2 other key takeaways :-
a) Iran is a mirror-image of Pakistan - albiet with better literacy perhaps. The same Aman-ki-Asha wale chamans (retards) might be behind Iran's benign image.
b) The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran explicitly says it will interfere in other countries and turn them into (Islamic) theocracies. It has tried that with a few too. So much for a country that blames USA for imperialism!

For years, lying Left-liberals, well-meaning liars ofcourse ran a propaganda that LTTE started using suicide bombing as a terror tactic and it had nothing to do with the religion that must always be exonerated.
Actually it was started by Hezbollah and Shias in Lebanon in early 1980s and by as religious-minded ppl as they come.

‘महिमा घटी समुद्र की रावण बसा पड़ोस’ :)

Diff culture, diff language - poetry feels so fresh ! Just like traveling in a diff country.