Category: Fourre-tout

You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Will Rogers

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When you apply for a job, experts agree that it is absolutely crucial to make a good first impression. You are basically a salesperson hawking a product, and the killer app is you.

Thus, you dress as best as you can and strive to make the best possible first impression.
You and your body language want to say: my smile and the way I present myself show that I am friendly, easy to get along, eager to work, and willing to blend smoothly with your workforce.

Similarly, an asylum seeker is akin to a job applicant saying, “I want to live in your country and share your way of life”.
But a woman wearing a veil, a hijab does not project this kind of message. By wearing a hijab she basically retreats behind a wall and ghettoizes herself and her family.

I wanted to know why some Muslim women elect to wear such a garment in western countries and I found an article in the UK Telegraph describing, “why Muslim women chose to wear the veil”.

Women variously said:

“I was forced to start wearing a hijab at the age of 13 and now find it hard and very uncomfortable to take it off in public.

This I understand. It is a habit and habits are notoriously difficult to break. But to flourish, women have to trample barriers erected by chauvinist men.

“I fear and love God, and He has said that women must cover their hair, so I follow what He tells me, simple as that.

God has nothing to do with this. She never said that women had to cover their hair. Jealous, insecure men decreed this and everything decreed by oppressors should be abolished.

“It honestly liberates me because I get to choose how much of myself I reveal to the public.”

Poppycock! Balderdash! Flapdoodle!

“The only times I wear a burqa – the black robe thing, is when I don’t feel like changing so I just throw it on when going somewhere.”

I find this difficult to believe. When I don’t feel like changing, I go as I am (warts and all) or I stay home. Donning a potato sack is not going to make me feel more comfortable and it will definitely make my interlocutors pretty uneasy.

Living better together is not erecting but toppling walls.
What the world (especially the Muslim world) needs are leaders like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk or Peter the Great who ordered their backward people to cut out the religious crap, and get in line with the rest of the world.

There is nothing more painful than a relapse. After years of steady improvements, the condition of women is jeopardized anew by retrograde populist zealots like Recep Erdogan or somebody closer to home.
A tradition is like plumbing. It needs to be regularly overhauled.

When in Rome… for crying out loud, eat spaghetti!

Alain

 

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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I guess that I am not very smart or very well informed. I read magazines, I listen to the radio, I watch TV news but I still fail to understand what’s happening.
For instance, why is it that pundits can always explain “facts” after they occurred, but never before those damn things happened?

And what exactly pray tell is a fact?
The Cambridge Dictionary defines a fact as “something known to have happened or to exist.

I like facts. They are like concrete blocks used to construct solid structures. With good quality facts, you can build a great variety of sturdy walls, houses, dams, etc.
The problem though is that lately some people have been using “alternative facts”. In other words cheap knockoffs of real facts.
If you look up “alternative” in the dictionary, you will find synonyms like substitute, replacement, emergency, fallback.
Is this the kind of facts you would feel comfortable with?

For a fact to become genuine, dependable, a few people must have witnessed it. It then becomes irrefutable, isn’t it?
Not quite, because some people play fast and loose with facts nowadays.

Take the Holocaust for instance. Thousands of people have witnessed it or were victims of this gory episode, but today some individuals still continue to deny that this crime against humanity ever happened.
They use “alternative facts” to account for what really happened.

Personally I’m too poor to buy cheap stuff or ersatz facts. I believe in utilizing good quality products because they last longer.
I will buy genuine facts before stooping to shoddily made “alternative facts”.

Counterfeit facts are like fake one hundred dollars bills. They are everywhere, can easily pass for genuine and do a lot of damage to the economy.
Before accepting a “fact” as genuine, you should scrutinize it, hold it to the light.
If your fact remains murky under a bright light, it is likely a counterfeit.

So before cashing in substitute, replacement, emergency, fallback facts, turn off your ideology and try hard to be impartial.

A fact is like a parachute; it is safer to use the genuine article than to trust an alternate product.

Alain

He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money. Benjamin Franklin

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When news are scarce you look for material hiding in plain sight, and if you have not yet noticed, women are all around us.
I am not complaining. Womenfolk always make an interesting subject of conversation.

Because what else is there to talk about besides money and politics? Money and politics are actually a single entity. It is a two-headed serpent called Greed.
But enough with greed. Women make a much more compelling topic.

Talking about that, I just read about a woman called Jeanne de Clisson.

“Jeanne de Clisson, the Lioness of Brittany, was a Frenchwoman whose husband was beheaded for treason. She swore revenge and sold her family lands to buy 3 warships. For the next 13 years she went on a pirating binge, targeting French King Philip VI’s ships, and personally beheading French noblemen she captured with an axe.”

 This is my kind of woman… a “nasty woman” with the rightful kind of wrath.

For you should never underestimate the power craftiness of a woman. They are capable of everything. The best and the worst.

Given a chance women can outdo men at every turn.
They have conquered politics, the clergy, the army, space… what is left to overcome? The papacy? Why not after all? The Church would be better much off with a woman at the helm.

I am not saying that women are perfect, far from it, but they seem to be more open-minded and more willing to compromise than men.
If all heads of state were women, I believe that we would have fewer conflicts.

A woman said:

“A closed country is a dying country… A closed mind is a dying mind.‘ from a radio broadcast in 1947” ― Edna Ferber

Our newly minted commander in chief would be very well advised to keep that in mind. Conservatism basically means, “let’s keep things the way they are” or in other words keep women “barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen.

Beware fossilized legislators! Remember Jeanne de Clisson! She has borne many daughters and these “nasty women”all over the world are not cowering in the kitchen anymore.

Alain