Wednesday, 18 July 2012
What makes Russia ‘great’ and what ‘belittles’ Great Britain [Ce face Rusia ‘mare’ şi ce ‘micşorează’ Marea Britanie]
Tuesday, 12 July 2011
Leneşii greci, hoţii români şi restul de europeni ‘corecţi’ [Lazy Greeks, Romanian thieves, and the rest of ‘correct’ Europeans]
Nu le place munca, nu-şi plătesc taxele, vor să iasă la pensie la 50 de ani… Sunt de-a dreptul irecuperabili... Oare cum s-o fi născut însăşi preamărita cultură europeană pe tărâmurile strămoşilor grecilor de azi?
Ţara lor îşi menţine măcar aparenţa de mare putere economică prosperă graţie căluşului pus în gura sindicatelor, care au acceptat îngheţări de salarii. Care au fost, în orice caz, un sacrificiu asumat cu un rost.
Nu toţi grecii sunt privilegiaţi cu pensii de 2,000 euro începând de la 48-50 de ani şi cu piscine nedeclarate la fisc. Nu toţi grecii ar prefera să nu muncească, dacă ar exista alternativă viabilă.
Pe acest fundal ideologic, nici nu e de mirare că mass media dintr-o ţară tot atât de prietenă cu Grecia cât şi cu România găseşte date UE, ca să decreteze că “grecii sunt mai leneşi decât bulgarii”.
Thursday, 24 February 2011
The world is ablaze [Lumea este în flăcări]
To some of us, all (or most) elected leaders, autocrats, nations, multinational companies, ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’ alike appear to follow no indication of a director. Their actions seldom make any sense. They seem to act chaotically.
To others, all these characters are actually following scrupulously some precise guidelines, according to what are naively dimissed as ‘conspiracy theories’.
We don’t know who wrote the script, neither can we indentify the director, yet we surely are crazy about this global reality show. And who are we, after all?
Let’s assume that we are the 1,966,514,816 internet users in the world, that is some 28,7% of all people alive today. We’re being served ‘news’ as cattle are fed feed on grass and on other dubious fodder that makes our food so unhealthy.
Of a truth, ‘news’ isn’t as it used to be anymore. Novelties don’t travel across the world in sailing ships, but with the speed of megabytes per second.
Gun barrels are still smoking and bullet wounds still bleeding in Libya (or anywhere else for that matter), yet we have already chewed and spit some ‘news’.
The world is ablaze, and here we are, mesmerised by the flames, enjoying the show. Whether it lasts or not makes no difference to us, as more and more episodes have been stockpilling in our civilisation’s (the one that gave us the internet!) backyard.
We, the ‘civilised ones’, have sown so many toxic seeds, all over the world, throughout the past 200-300 years, that we could reap disasters for centuries to come.
For instance, the USA, the Perfidious Albion & Italy are much guiltier (as accomplices) for the horrors we witness in Libya today than Saddam Hussein was guilty in 2003, when a ‘coalition of the willing’ struck him down.
The self-proclaimed ‘King of Kings’ ruling Libya for 41 years was a despicable ‘dictator’ decades ago, yesterday’s eccentric ‘jester’ – received with great honours everywhere, and a friend of ‘T. Bliar’ – whilst he is now an archenemy of civilisation.
And this time it seems to be for real. There’s no need of a PR campaign to describe him as a monster, no need to invent a ‘threat’ represented by his weapons of mass destruction. His utterly senseless murders did truly happen and keep happening.
Nevertheless, I wonder: who would dare a military intervention, ousting him from the last bunkers and patches of desert where he is still clinging on to power? Is there in preparation any ‘coalition of the willing’ ready to intervene?
Will Barack Obama – a loather of George W. Bush’s ‘war of choice’ in Iraq – choose to fight a war for the sake of all the values himself and America stand for?
Would David Cameron use his overstretched and underfinanced British armed forces in Libya as Winston Churchill did in the early 1940s? Could ‘T. Bliar’ exert some influence on his gone-mad friend, in order to stop the bloodshed?
If not in the name of values, will Obama and Cameron do it for the sake of oil or for saving America’s and Britain’s EU allies from the catastrophic perspective of having a new Somalia right across the Mediterranean Sea?
[For all the posts on this blog go to/Pentru toate postările de pe acest blog mergi la: Contents/Cuprins]
Saturday, 26 January 2008
Witty bits from what I learned in the UK (2) [Vorbe de duh din ce am învăţat în UK]
A: “The sad fact is that nobody thinks about how Eastern Europe is like” - this is one of the frankest assessments about how our part of the world is seen from London. It belongs to a very bright and beautiful (at least in the view of a Polish colleague who likes German women :-) young researcher, and maybe it's good that we received it just before meeting (in the next weeks) politicians who may attempt to fool us with speeches about how important the New Europe is for them.
However, at least one of the assumptions I had made before arriving here seems to be correct. Indeed, most of the entrepreneurs in UK not only acknowledge the benefit brought by the UK membership of the EU to their businesses, but they are also very well informed about how things are going in Europe.
At least partly, this is due to the activity of people (probably not older than us, the 12 Chevening Fellows hosted by SEI in 2008), working for independent organizations such as the Centre for European Reform or the Business for New Europe group.
On the other hand, we are being confirmed that the general awareness of the EU among the British public is quite low, comparable maybe to that in Romania. Romanians are no better, nor worse than the Brits at knowledge about the EU...
It only happens that, while for the Brits the EU is a constant source of irrational fear (some imagining that a European Constitutional Treaty would mean that the Queen will no longer be the Head of State :-), many Romanians held for a long time an overoptimistic expectation of the EU, viewed as a doctor that would somehow miraculously cure the ills that they didn't cure themselves.
No wonder that Winston Churchill once said that "the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
[For all the episodes of this series, and all the posts on this blog go to/Pentru toate episoadele din această serie şi toate postările de pe acest blog mergi la: Contents/Cuprins]