Here we go again. I DON'T WANT...

...to be the reference others look up to. I was happy looking up to my elders.
They are dying away, one after the other, like flies.
Now Solzhenitsyn is dead. He too was a reference for me, conveniently tucked away in a corner of my comfortable world.
A world that is crumbling irreparably.
All my old references are disappearing, one by one.
Am I now expected to take play that role? A reference for others to look up to! Perish the thought! Let me instead bewail my lost Atlantis...

It's uncomfortable and unsettling. I don't want it. After all, nobody asked me!

Presumably nature must take its course; the show must certainly go on.
(Can I, may I, hide for the duration and return when it's all been dealt with?)

Paradox: in Greece, people see one another

as impediments.

Except from benefactors and immediate family -- the non-threatening part of the family, that is.

(more later)

A quickie: remember that oft misquoted line about hell, woman, scorn, and fury.
Here it is a l'original:
Heav'n has no rage like love to hatred turn'd
Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd.
(From W.Congreve, "The Mourning Bride")

Style is going out of style...

...in cars. Elsewhere too. How you dress and, most certainly, in how you act. Look at this Ferrari: it exemplifies the marriage between the beautiful and the aerodynamic.

There was a time, not so long ago, when streamlined styling was sought after and admired. Attractive...

No longer. Our tastes are moving away from sleek, elegant lines in the direction of clumsy macho -- tough, rugged and ugly ducklings:





Seriously ugly has become the trend. Let's see where it takes us. Along with the sullen and clumsy rap gesticulating, ugly items -- ugliness justified by function -- seem to have taken the fort.

Maybe we've had one too many of designed, feigned elegance and phony refinement and soggy exaltation -- and this tripped the trigger...

I admit, the wholesale ugly is sometimes attractive. Nevertheless I haven't yet reached the point where I turn away from the elegant in favour of the awkward and unwieldy.

I miss the older generation

People seem to be slipping away, out of circulation, leaving me feeling lonely and strangely unfulfilled. I don't know what it is... They are either no longer actively pursuing their old role or, worse, some of them are dying away merrily.
I miss that generation. I miss the presence of that generation. These are people I used to look up to, act against, talk against, and generally challenge at every waking moment. It was part of the meaning of life: the part that dealt with defining who I am, defined as who I believed I was not. (I.e. a rebel with a cause)

Presumably, I now am that generation.

But I feel that I still haven't finished with that other generation -- although they seem to have finished with me. I am not ready to take on their role. I feel singularly unprepared to take on the serious aspects of life, take them on for real...

Do not strive for excellence... And a few business words.

Do not strive for excellence; rather, go for best yet.

Talk about optimise -- but practise a policy of slight improvements.

Pursue and promote leadership as a competency, but recruit executives -- people who do things as opposed to people who talk about things.

Only you, the leader (and politicians, aspiring leaders), are there to talk about things rather than do things.

Do NOT recruit talent to satisfy management consumerism needs, but because you need gifted people.

You only need gifted people if you are, yourself, gifted; otherwise such people will get you down. If, however, you yourself are gifted, then the result of working around such people will be uplifting and the precursor to your operating at high potential.

Your core team is usually composed of people you know, are used to, and who know you, and are used to your quirks. They are the best people out there, if you define best as, "the least fatiguing, getting my job done satisfactorily". The reason you chose one person and not the other is not competency of one over the other. It is other things. You can identify these. Do so.

Tricky Business

Remember that scandals SHOULD not be the resort of business development & improvement and they are NOT, unless when business comes to close exchange with politics -- or when politics becomes the better, or an important, part of the business.

Politics can become the better part of business in democratic and authoritarian environments. The democratic environments are better in the short run because they operate under a veil of legality; authoritarian environments are presumed illegal in politically-correctese.

In the long-run, however, political business is best practised in authoritarian environments because these are (inter alia):

• less corrupt (this no longer holds true in Africa) and thereby cheaper
• more predictable, short-term
• safer, short-term
• more efficient because of red-tape exemptions
• more efficient because of quick decision-making.

Remember the maxim:
"The price of democracy is corruption; the price of efficiency is dictatorship"©

This image has little direct relation to the above UNTIL you come to realise that she works for you in some capacity other than the one illustrated here. Hence you are correlated.

Why fucking the planet and burning what's left will never stop

Because people are mostly ignorant and they don't understand why they do much of what they do.

Because the ignorant people and the dumb people and the dumb-ignorant people are the majority -- but failure of the brain does not always signify failure of the pocket. So some of these dumb-ignorant people are wealthy or well off.

Wealthy people can buy their right to rights. One of these is the privilege of not abiding by all the laws.

All the other people, are too busy trying to assert their rights. They have to assert because they have insufficient money to buy the right to a right.

So,
When you say to these people, "stop polluting the planet!", their reaction is to assert their right... to NOT be bossed around, by you or anyone else. They don't register what you're actually saying!

Do you get it?

Nobody tells them what to do and what not to do!

That's why they keep on fucking nature and burning the planet, the neighbourhood, the forests and the trees: nobody told them not to!

"They want more for themsleves...

and less for everybody else."

That was George Carlin (on "Who Owns You)".
He dead.
He dead the day before yesterday, or summat round there. He was 71.
A very interesting man, amazingly outspoken and undeniably interesting and invariably funny. Hilarious at times! I could just dumb-sit watching a TV screen & laugh like an idiot. It's not that I wanted to clap knowingly at the irreverent truths he would (dare) express -- it's that, too, but that's a bit conventionally stereotyped. No, it's the plain hilarity of some of the things he said and the way he said them.

So why pick that quotation above? Because it is the only time I know of, where I would venture a rephrasing.

Here's what I propose:
From,
"they want more for themselves and less for everybody else" to
"they want so much more for themselves that there's not enough to go round... So they've got to take some of yours -- what else can they do? It's not personal".

Have fun, mate, wherever you may be! Enjoy. And bash all those pretentious, self-serving, plutocratic, smug spirits out there, too.

Thinking of Politicians

...and the endless complaints (by constituents) once said politicians get into power.

(The picture has nothing or something to do with the subject. Which of the two, and why, is left to your creative spirit.)

Politicians are elected on the strength of their "elective appeal" i.e. their propensity to,
a) convince party apparatchiks that they are worthy to be on the party's bandwagon,
b) convince enough voters to cast a vote for them;

and NOT
c) because they are highly qualified and rarely competent talent ready to perform tasks other than the above.

If we want to have people who can manage the country, we should look for managerial clout and experience, and a proven experience... not politicians.

After all how many global corps fight over giving a politician a functional job? CEO? OK, sales rep is OK, no doubt. But then, an ex military also makes a good sales rep -- and cheaper. And usually, better disciplined and much harder working...

Bad news...

Late in the day before yesterday, a good friend lost his father. He too, just joined the "next in line" club.
We all become members of this club, some sooner and some later...
It has got me thinking about "life": life used to be about fun and about having fun. This is nothing new.
Many of us would have been glad to continue this life -- but life itself wishes otherwise. Life insists on getting serious. The differences are unsettling and uncomfortable and demanding; they require us to look for new meanings and to find new truths.

And Truth is rarely pure and never simple*. For some, or for all.



*O. Wilde

Too late, baby...

It looks like the earth is slowly giving up. It also looks like we are not giving up -- destroying, that is. Because after all, things will sort themselves out in the end. They always do. Even when they don't -- but we'll be all dead by then and it will be other peoples' nightmare.

Our children's nightmare to be precise.
But it's going to be all right...

Our children have worldly possessions we all worked so hard to give them. I for one had to marry into money. Our next door neighbours had to help International Aid suppliers with political kickbacks...

Earth & nature have in their possession all those words and speeches about protecting and saving them. We worked very hard to say and write those words. After so many words, you would think that nature would get its act together and stop being suicidal!

I hope it's not a case of diminishing resistance: that nature is giving up with ever increasing speed....
Things go downhill very quickly after that.

What I hate most of all is this: the earth is dying and there's no-one to blame but me. And you of course, but that does not help. You are me.

Greek Property Owners: Beware! You do NOT really OWN your property...

...unless you can prove otherwise.
If you thought the house you purchased in Greece is yours to use & dispose of at will, think again. The house may soon become the property of the Greek State by default. In other words, it is in the running to be transformed into the next local politician's daughter's wedding present.
How?
The national cadastre, a triviality that much of Greece did not have and whose absence allowed some flexibility in defining what is mine and what is yours in my favour, of course.
The national cadastre was defined in a law published in 1995 and is finally being implemented. So far so good, and better late than never.
However, the closely guarded secret of this enterprise is... just that: that it is a closely guarded secret. If you do NOT declare your ownership, through the customary for Greece convoluted, complex, and expensive process, the property reverts to the Greek State.

In fact, the wording of this law is such that all property is presumed to belong to the Greek state unless proven otherwise -- proven otherwise by you, of course. Never mind your precious declarations made in your tax returns, etc; here we go again as if your declarations and subsequent tax levied on your property never has been and never happened.You need to provide and present "clear" claims and titles.

Far be it from me to present the declaration procedure. Suffice it to say, it is complex and expensive: by the way, a duty is levied per declaration, not per piece of property. So if you own 1% of 100 pieces of property, you will have to pay 100 times to validate your claims... Accordingly, of course, if you own 100% of one property, you are in luck.

Anyway, for those who are not in the know, get talking to a certified local accountant immediately. Or you may just find out that the house you paid for and lived in for a while, is now officially labelled a "forest"*: officially the house no longer exists. You may think you are looking at it, but it just isn't there. It's a forest. Worse, it's not your forest.

Do you think that this is the view from your house in Greece? Think again. This is a forest and it is in the public domain in Greece. What? It doesn't look like a forest? What counts is, it is officially labelled as a forest. Later on, the local authorities will declassify this forest, and sell the property, now a house again, to a local dignitary. So, either become a dignitary or run -- don;t walk -- to declare your property. And make sure you have proff of your declaration; mistakes are human.

*:Reference to an actual case. A man, living in a house with a small garden for the past 40(?) years and who failed miserably to follow the correct declaration procedure has seen his house + land officially labelled a "forest"... My goodness!

Eurovision: miserabile visu

We all know that the Eurovision* noise contest is an exercise in bad taste and jumping around, with some degree of voyeurism thrown in for good measure. This epitome of bad taste is so powerful, it makes one cringe and look away embarrassed pretending, "this is not happening and I'm not involved". One wonders if this bad taste is not part of the grand scheme of things: you really have to work hard to push the limits of conventional vulgarity so far -- and, moreover, a little bit further each year.

The whole thing is inexplicable -- except, perhaps, if considered in the context of national television...

Maybe the phenomenal bad taste is aligned to TV pundits' view of what "the people out there want to see and hear". As this usually translates into "the easiest and cheapest programming I can get away with on the air", aka "trash", Eurovision may just fit this bill. On the other hand, Eurovision is hardly a cheap investment, one country at least having invested just over Euro: 0,3 mill. for its "national" representation. That country did not win so, presumably, a much cheaper participation could only have yielded the same results -- or better. I.e. money that could probably have been better spent elsewhere.

In the above light, Italy may have the best view of things: Italy simply refuses to participate!


*Eurovision is a canned show, labelled "song contest", with one rep per participating country. It encompasses European countries as well as Middle East, at present. The list of participant countries may expand further in the future, who knows.