“Pathetic” is the only word I can think of right now. Pathetic applies to many people I met (some of whom I am forced still to meet which disturbs my mind and my stomach, let alone my eyes and ears) and to many events, but at this point I can only think of this word because that’s how the world seems to me - utterly, completely, perfectly pathetic and unworthy of any other description unless you slice up my brain and study the flood of electrical pulses inside and find a word more on the wretched side than pathetic.

I say we have a little competition. Give me that word if you so can!

Wish our decision makers are this solid in their points and eloquent in their words. Go Galloway!

I’m on CNN? They must know better than I do, shush!

There comes a certain time in our lives when we feel that most of our friends and family members are leaving, either physically or emotionally. Leaving can mean relocating, which could also entail those people starting their own families for instance and not having as much time for us, or dying, or simply emotionally changing in a way that puts them at a distance from us.

A number of my own close friends are leaving, each with a newborn plan and a promising future ahead. Janet, who is a great girl I am blessed for knowing, is leaving to London. Yanal, a unique character and the kindest person, is leaving to Australia. My best friend will leave in due time to Kuwait and my other best friend left and returned from the UK.

It’s an ongoing cycle, people leave and others come in to fill a certain void the earlier departure has created. I do not promise they can replace those we’ve lost but they sure do provide something we cannot do without and usually bring in a little something extra.

I reckon the reason I am sharing this is a specific need to understand the way life seems to be unfolding before my eyes at the present time. Here’s to a feeble attempt at narrating an episode of a “Why am I not blogging as much as before?” series…

Digging in my closet, I found a small treasure- My Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs (The Pan Books Ltd 1972 edition). I flipped the pages and remembered just how much time I used to spend reading about certain signs of people I was interested in and imagining things. This was nice, it made me smile. I am sharing a couple of excerpts on the Leo woman.

There’s a story about a noble Frenchwoman, who turned to her lover in the gardens of Versailles and asked, ‘ Darling, do the common people know this exquisite emotion of love?’. When she was assured that they did, she cried out in injured surprise, ‘ It’s entirely too good for them!’. She was probably a Leo.

In the area of faithfulness, the Leo woman may remind you of the old toast, ” Here’s to me and here’s to you, and here’s to love and laughter - I’ll be true as long as you - not a single minute after”. Enough said.

Sabah Al Khair Ya Beirut - Good morning, Beirut

-Naji Al Ali

Just when you think the world has reached the final,most atrocious prejudice against most causes related to Arabs and Muslims, it stuns you with a tad more of manipulation.

I was browsing the net casually and I came upon some blogs that claim that the Qana massacre was staged by major news agencies. It’s actually funny when I reflect on it since I also read that the picture capturing Israeli kids dedicating rockets for Lebanese children were also “staged“.

Now the word “staged” sounds to me like a focal point in those extremists’ vocabulary. It’s almost as if their message to the world is: If we do something wrong, and you find out about it, we’ll just claim it was “staged“. Some people do not get to see these things LIVE on their TVs, so they’ll be convinced of our super lame fabrications. Oh, and if anyone else does something to us, and you dare say it was “staged“, then you will be branded as being anti-semitic (Yes, we monopolized semitism a long long time ago. Arabs are really semitic too since they’re our cousins but we don’t like them much so we took the title for ourselves).

Via KABOBfest, I could not have said it better myself: (”His” and “he” refer to the author of a blog called EU Referendum).

“The basic premise of his argument is that the timestamps accompanying the posted photographs represent when they were taken. Thus, the aforementioned photos were taken from 12:45 pm to 4:30 pm, therefore there must have been some chicanery.

First of all, to the able-minded, when presented with such a range of timestamps, the normal conclusion drawn is that the times do not represent when the photographs were taken, but rather when they were posted. It’s difficult for me to imagine how somebody could, instead, come up with the argument of EU Referendum - without doing any basic research to verify the ill-conceived notion - that, clearly, Hizballah, the Arabs, and the wire services have colluded to shock the world.

Second, the timestamps do represent when the photographs were posted, not taken; this can be established by comparing the times accompanying photographs between different wire news providers. (for example, compare Yahoo with the Corpus Christi Caller Times). They post at different times, and that is why the same photographs will have a different time stamp on different news sites.

Finally, here is the easiest and most dispositive proof. Let’s take a look at a photograph that EU Referendum cites. He claims this one was photographed at 4:09 PM ET based on the Yahoo News timestamp. It’s quite possible that Richard thinks that the Atlantic is a river, so there must be a trivial, if any, timezone difference. There’s a seven hour difference between Qana, Lebanon and the Eastern Time Zone. Thus, that 4:09 PM time that he references would mean the picture was taken at an actual time of 11:09 PM. Simply impossible - there would be no daylight.

Similarly, he shows us that this one was taken at 4:30 PM ET, which would be 11:30 PM in Lebanon. Finally, he points to this photo, which he claims had an original timestamp of 7:16 pm corrected to 6:46 am. The link he provides does not direct us to the right page, however a simple search of Yahoo News (his source for the photographs) leads us to this same exact photo, and the only one of its kind with the caption he copies-and-pastes from Yahoo News. The timestamp is 6:58 PM ET, July 31st. That would place the actual time of the photograph at 1:58 AM, August 1st, a full two days after the massacre.

Of course, this could be Hizballah’s version of “Pallywood,” right Rush Limbaugh? Clearly, this “rubble” and these “dead children” were actually photographed in a Hizballah studio emulating a daytime setting in Qana. AP, Reuters, and AFP are all in on this scam that took place over three days, from July 30th through August 1st. It’s all part of that godless liberal media’s war on Israel, the U.S., and democracy.”

- Source (KABOBfest)

One last thing, now who’s being the paranoid conspiracy theorist? Pathetic.

Strana è la nostra vita, strana è la Guerra, e la condizione umana che non si comprende mai.

Il mio pessimismo è cosmico in questi giorni, non è che avevo tanta fiducia nell’umanità prima però quello che sta succedendo nel Libano non è una cosa normale, non è una guerra qualsiasi che passa e basta ; è una vera crimine contro l’umanità, l’umanità di oggi, del passato, e delle generazioni del futuro.

1. Il “Pessimismo Storico” si basa sulla “Teoria delle Illusioni”.

Indagando sulla causa dell’infelicità umana, il Leopardi segue la spiegazione di Rousseau, e afferma, con la sua “Teoria delle Illusioni”, che gli uomini furono felici soltanto nell’età primitiva, quando vivevano a stretto contatto con la natura, ma poi essi vollero uscire da questa beata ignoranza e innocenza istintiva e, servendosi della ragione, si misero alla ricerca del vero. Le scoperte della ragione furono catastrofiche: essa infatti scoprى la vanità delle illusioni, che la natura, come una madre benigna e pia, aveva ispirato agli uomini; scoprى le leggi meccaniche che regolano la vita dell’universo; scoprى il male, il dolore, l’infelicità, l’angoscia esistenziale.

2. Il “Pessimismo Psicologico”. si basa sulla “Teoria del Piacere”

Partendo dalla riflessione sull’infelicità, elabora la “Teoria del Piacere” che diventa il cardine del suo pensiero: secondo questa teoria, “l’amor proprio” porta l’individuo ad una richiesta di piacere infinito per intensità e per estensione; poiché questa richiesta non potrà mai essere soddisfatta interamente, l’individuo, anche nel momento di maggior piacere, continuerà a sentire l’assillo del desiderio non colmato. Questo assillo è di per sè patimento, sicché l’individuo, anche quando non soffre di mali materiali, è in stato di sofferenza per la sua stessa richiesta inappagata. Questo tipo di pessimismo è ben più radicale del primo, perché l’infelicità non è un dato occasionale, ma ormai è una costante della condizione umana.

3. Il “Pessimismo Cosmico” si basa sulla “Teoria del Patimento”.

Un ulteriore aggiustamento della concezione di natura si ebbe quando il poeta spostٍ la sua attenzione dal tema del Piacere, che non si puٍ avere, a quello della Sofferenza che non si puٍ evitare. Anche se l’individuo potesse raggiungere il piacere, il bilancio della sua esistenza sarebbe comunque negativo, per la quantità dei mali reali (infortuni, malattie, invecchiamento, morte) con cui la natura, dopo averlo prodotto, tende a eliminarlo per dar luogo ad altri individui in una lunga vicenda di produzione e distruzione, destinata a perpetuare l’esistenza e non a rendere felice il singolo.

- Riferimento