A new poem by Sappho

Martin West is an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is the translator of the Oxford World's Classics Greek Lyric Poetry,1999. Martin West in the issue The Times Literary Supplement June 24,2005 p.8 translates the discovered poem of Sappho. He writes " The poem is a small masterpiece: simple, comcise. perfectly formed, an honest, unpretentious expression of human feeling, dignified in its restraint . It moves both by what it leaves unspoken. It gives us no ground for thinking that Sappho's poetic reputation wa unreserved.

[ You for] the fragrant-bosomed [Muses'] lovely gifts
[be zeakous,] girls, [and the] clear melodious lyre:

[but my once tender] body old age now
[has seized;] my hair's turned[white] instead of dark;

my heart's grown heavy, my knees will not support me,
that once on a time were fleet for the dance as fawns.

This state I oft bemoan; but what's to do
Not to grow old, being human, there 's no way.

Tithonus once, the tale was, rose-armed Dawn,
love-smitten, carried off to the world's end,

handsome and young then, yet in time grey age
o'ertook him, husband of immortal wife.

TLS has the greek text.

FZline invites to read the classics. Their so close to us.

Carmen Bin Ladin's quotations from FT

CBL" I would like to talk to you first as mother of three daughters, who had to fight very hard to give them the freedom she thought they deserved, to talk about my life and experiences in Saudi Arabia, and my decision that I had to take my daughters to the free world"

CBL" A woman has no rights. Saudi men keep the children after divorce."
CBL: " If I am worried about the future, it is because my experience of Saudi Arabia made me understand that no matter how open-minded[the Saudis] want us to believe they are, there is much that is ingrained. For years the relationships between the bin ladens and the Saudi royal family has been very strong through business and friendship; it is difficult to believe all there have rejected Osama"
CBL:" Saudi women are the Taliban in Luxury"

from Everything is relative by Nina-Anne Kaye F.T.

fzline's best sellers

The end of Faith: religion, terror, and the future of reason by Sam Harris wwNorton 2004
Harris argues that "fondamentalism" is a faulty system; so flawed that it endagers its adherents and everyone else. It is dangerous because it is hermetic. Suppose someone from 7th or 14century were brought back to modern society: he would be an idiot, in nearly every way. "His beliefs about geography, astronomy and medicine would embaress even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know God. Religion , for Harris is not a branch of knowledge but a body of dogma that pretends to tell us something about the world.
Harris identifys Islam as a belief system in love with death, and in using the Sunny philosopher
Sayyid Qutb( who denounced Jews for their "craven desire to live") as an illustration
Harris states that even socially progressive religion privileges faith, creating an environment within which fanticism can blossom; he states that the totalirarian regimes that rejected organized religion were nonetheless so irrational that they qualify as perverted religions.( North Korea, for example, is a "cargo cult"). The key Harris 's statement is that reason is open to debate and argument, where faith is impervious.
Harris makes his case pugnaciously and for long stretches compellingly, but he does not answer the basic question :Why religion?

Comic philosopher Illustrated

I suggest to all my friends lovers of New york and philosophy this great book:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/books/review/12SIMICL.html

OPEC

In the NYT article about OPEC. Found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/business/worldbusiness/14opec.html?

Saudi Arabia is not this 

Saudi Arabia

Every day the most fundamental human rights of people living in Saudi Arabia are violated, yet rarely is this fact publicized. The Saudi Arabian government spares no effort to keep its appalling human rights record a secret, and other governments have shown themselves more than willing to help maintain the secrecy.
Secrecy and fear permeate every aspect of the state structure in Saudi Arabia. There are no political parties, no elections, no independent legislature, no trades unions, no Bar Association, no independent judiciary, no independent human rights organizations. The government allows no international human rights organizations to carry out research in the country and it ignores requests by such organizations for information. It has effective control over all kinds of information: there is strict censorship of media within the country and strict control of access to the Internet, satellite television and other forms of communication with the outside world. Anyone living in Saudi Arabia who criticizes this system is harshly punished. After arrest, political and religious opponents of the government are detained indefinitely without trial or are imprisoned after grossly unfair trials. Torture is endemic. Executions, flogging and amputations are imposed and carried out with disregard for the most basic international fair trial standards.

The usual misinformed : the people

Reading the reactions and comments of Europe's political and cultural elite after the clear non and nien of France and the Netherlands to the so-called European Constitution, you realized the elite's arrogance.
The most arrogant was the editorial in Il Corriere Della Sera written by an ex European bureaucrat and former European Commissioner, Mario Monti. His thesis is cheap and demeaning : only people not informed will vote no. It is the most idiotic and cowardly excuse. To invoke such a excuse shows Monti's lack of intellect and complete disregard of of every democratic principle . When people do not vote the way we want them to, they are stupid or, to be patronizing, misinformed. Monti is syntomatic of the European elite. With such an elite, Europe cannot go far. But the "misinformed people" left such leaders behind.
It never occurred to Monti that perhaps if you want to create a political entity among the twenty-five countries of the European Union the best way to do it is to let every citizen elect the members of the constitutional assembly directly. Such a legitimately elected assembly will write a constitution that will surely be ratified by the electorate.
If the majority of the political and cultural European elite is truly distressed by the results of the referendum, instead of whining and insulting the electorate, it would be better to go back to the drawing board and elect the members of the constitutional assembly by a primary method. During the campaign the candidates would be forced to confront different constitutional visions of Europe. The primary campaign would be extremely participatory and, at the same time, a learning experience for the people of the twenty-five countries. Second, the Constitutional Assembly members would have six months to compose a constitution, which has to be for shortness and clarity based on the American and Swiss models, including a clear Bill of Rights. The actual elite is so brainless and so, to use strong words, intellectually f..up that is incapable of using the democratic method and therefore it is necessary to wait for a younger generation, which grew up in a more effective democratic world. The European Elite is completely out to lunch. What do you expect from an elite that choose Romano Prodi as president of the European Commission. Give the European people a break .
The other reaction : the Moroni reaction to "go back to the lira"is idiotic and dangerous from a financial point of view. In the petty mind of the Lega perhaps it is better to go back to the village and return to barter. By selecting a minister like Moroni, Italy shows that is not ready for a strong democratic Europe.

Viva the Dutch

CNN just reported that the Dutch rejected the so called European constitution 63% to 37%, a positive step forward in the defense of free speech in western civilization. The vote represents a desire to stop the infiltration of people who, in the long run, will destroy our civilization of freedom of thought and research. We are not intimidated by assassination. Theo Van Gogh did not die in vain. We can reverse this wave of people who want to destroy our way of living. They are afraid to be free and want to impose on everybody their farfetched story. Thank you Dutch people. Let's not be afraid to say we are proud of our freedom, which in the last two centuries we have worked so hard to achieve. It reminds me of what a great Italian poet said : La speranza e' l'ultima a lasciare le tombe. If we believe in the power of freedom, Van Gogh's killers will not destroy it, but we have to do every thing in our power not to feed the beast with appeasement . The European political elite has to be ashamed of its behavior toward the major protagonist of the spread of anti-European venom, the Saudi Arabian regime.

Hillary's quotation

We, as a city, a state and a nation, must continue to keep faith with the promise of higher education.
Senator Hillary Clinton told the CUNY Graduates these words. She also said that New York is the Beacon of freedom. And most important, she denounced the "people who have somehow tapped into the divine and therefore can tell the rest of us how to believe and how to live."
The tragedy with higher education in the United States is that the people who have tapped into the divine and therefore can tell the rest of us how to believe and how to live' are controlling Middle East studies, transforming them into propaganda machines. A disturbing example is the disastrous and unacceptable situation of Columbia University, where scholars of the middle east are a joke, where pure propagandists are disguised as historians, anthropologists, where the president is a confused intellectual, who does not distinguish between academic freedom, which means to be free to research and publish your research, and propaganda against the only democracy in the middle east, where the majority of the academic Senate voted against RTO on the campus because of the military's policy "don't ask, don't tell". This is the same academic senate that protects and defends professors who consider homosexuality a crime (see Saudi Arabia), that supports professors who call the only democratic state in the Middle East racist, coveringt up the most racist and xenophobic state, Saudi Arabia. How can such an academic senate speak for higher education? Nemo dat, quod non habet Nobody can give something that he does not have.
What is the board of Columbia university doing? Does the board have the obligation to hire scholars and not propagandists? How do the parents of the students accept such an aberrant situation? How can the parents send their daughters and sons to a University whose professors have somehow tapped into the divine and therefore can brainwash the students, telling them how to believe and how to live?