Lili Marleen

Lyrics

Lili Marleen (English Literal Translation)

In front of the barracks,
In front of the main gate,
Stood a lamppost,
If it still stands out front,
So will we see each other there again,
By the lamppost we'll stand,
As before, Lili Marleen.

Our two shadows
Looked like one.
That we were so much in love,
Anyone could see at a glance.
And everyone will see it,
When we stand by the lamppost,
As before, Lili Marleen.

Already called the guard,
“They’re blowing taps.
That could cost you three days!”
“Comrade, I'll be right there.”
Then we said farewell,
How much would I have rather gone with you,
With you, Lili Marleen.

It knows your footsteps,
Your beautiful walk.
It burns every evening,
Although it forgot me long ago.
And if a mishap should befall me,
Who will stand by the lamppost,
With you, Lili Marleen?

Out of the silent space,
Out of the depths of the earth,
Lifts me as in a dream
Your beloved mouth.
When the nocturnal mists swirl,
I will be standing by the lamppost,
As before, Lili Marleen.

The Mother - Maxim Gorky

This novel by Gorky looks through the eyes and thoughts of Pelagia Nilovna as she grows from a smashed woman, who is regularly abused by a drunk husband into a strong character that follows her son's intellectual and practical path of fighting for the rights of the working class - the true agent of change..

“Not even an ocean of blood can drown the truth”.

The book is about the concepts of  work, evolution, thought, education, rise against injustice, camaraderie, and rejection of a complete social order..

"Thousands of people can improve their life if they wanted to, but they continue to live like animals, and accept it too. What virtue is it to work and eat today, work and eat tomorrow, and so on for all life... Spent working and eating, so he can manage and have children to amuse him till they need food.. and then he becomes angry and starts cursing them: Grow you pigs, it is time for you to find jobs. He wants to make them his pets, but they start working for their own bellies, spending their lives as a piece of gum... with no pleasure to the heart or the soul"

"Deserving the title of humanity are those who vow their selves and lives to destroy the chains that capture man's mind. "

"She loved to listen to his talks, and used to imagine that the fiercest enemies of the people are those who trick and savagely oppress them. They are short men, with fat bodies, red faces, thieves, cruel, evil and greedy.If the ruler pushed them too far, they encouraged the people to revolt, and when the ruler is gone, these little men used their smart tricks to hog the power and throw away the people, killing hundreds of thousands if they try to resist."

"Nicolai greeted his sister holding her hand, and the mother was intrigued by that calm simplicity that ruled their relationship. They don't kiss, or over-show affection, and yet they care about each other with much compassion and love. Where she had lived people always kiss and praise, but they never cease biting each other like hungry hounds"


"They destroy lives with work. What for? They rob men of their lives. What for, I ask? My master--I lost my life in the textile mill of Nefidov--my master presented one prima donna with a golden wash basin. Every one of her toilet articles was gold. That basin holds my life-blood, my very life. That's for what my life went! A man killed me with work in order to comfort his mistress with my blood. He bought her a gold wash basin with my blood."
"Man is created in the image of God," said Yefim, smiling. "And that's the use to which they put the image. Fine!"

"Yes, a bit of happiness is good for everybody."
"But there are no people who want only a bit of happiness," remarked Nikolay; "and when there's much of it, it becomes cheap."

 "In one book I read the words 'senseless life.' I understood them very well at once. I know such a life. Thoughts there are, but they're not connected, and they stray like stupid sheep without a shepherd. They stray and stray, with no one to bring them together. There's no understanding in people of what must be done. That's what a senseless life is. I'd like to run away from it without even looking around--such a severe pang one suffers when one understands something!"

The Life of Pi - Yann Martel

The Life of Pi is a very interesting book, in which the story revolves around a kid lost at sea on a boat, with a hyena, orangutan, zebra, and tiger .. His very captivating adventure is described in very vivid and amazing detail, and in a brilliant manner which reminds us of the power of imagination and the cruelty of the real world, the mind's ability to create a complete world, sometimes more significant than the real world, and which even 'god would prefer.'

Pi is a boy of all religions, identifying how all are relevant to his life and close to his heart.

'I remember the story of our lord Krishna,when he used to invite the maids every night to dance with him in the forest.. They come and dance. The night is dark and as the fire between them glows, the girls would dance and dance with their beautiful god, who has made himself many to be able to dance with all of them. The second the girls become possessive, and when each imagines that Krishna is her partner alone,  he disappears! We should never be jealous with god'

'Christianity is a religion in a hurry. Look at the world created in seven days. Even on the symbolic level this is creation in a hurry. For someone who was born in a religion where the battle for one soul is a race that can take centuries where generations and generations are born, the fast happening of Christianity has a shocking effect. If Hinduism flows like the ganges, Christianity Moves quickly like Toronto in the rush hour. In a second, your soul is either lost or saved. Christianity goes back for centuries, but practically it exists in one time: now.'

' I prayed to Jesus who is alive and who is love and who is now. Then I ran down the hill to the left and climbed the hill to the right to thank the lord Krishna who made me meet Jesus' 

There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend god, as if the 'absolute truth' , as if the eternal frame of existence, was something weak and desperate always in need for their help. These people don't know that defending god is from the inside not the outside, or they would have directed their anger to themselves. The land of the main battle for good is in the little space inside every humans heart.. In the meanwhile widows and the homeless live under a hard destiny, and these people should defend them, not god. 

To me religion is about dignity not our corruption

People migrate because of worry, because of the horrible feeling that no matter how hard they work, they will not earn the rewards, and that what they build in a year, others can destroy in a day. 

Life is a little hole, a very little entry to the enormous universe.. How can I avoid looking through this looking glass? This little hole is all I have. 

Leap Years

So every four years we add one day to the month of February making it 29 instead of 28 days... The reason: The actual year is one quarter of a day longer than our time-recorded year..

The question here is, since our current arrangement (adding one day every 4 years) seems a bit un-elegant and messy, wouldn't it have been much better if we had extended the second by the equivalent of a quarter of a day spread out...

To explain: Let's say that our current measure of a second is x  ( x is the length of one second ) ; if we used instead another value x' ; such that our time-recorded year would be equal to actual year ; then we wouldn't need to add one day every 4 years .... x' would be calculated as:

x' * 60 * 24 * 365 ( number of new seconds in an actual year assumed 365 days) = x * 60 * 24 * 365 (number of old seconds in a 365-day year) + x * 60 * 24 * 1 / 4 (extra seconds we are adding with the 1-day per 4 years) ... calculating for x' :

x' = x * ( 60*24 * 365.25  ) / ( 60 *24 * 365 ) and x' = x * (365.25/365) ..... If we changed our measure of seconds to this new value, we wouldn't need leap years


* The problem remaining is to find an objective measure of a second that allows for its calculation as a rational number ( I guess that would facilitate things ) ... so if a second is defined as: since 1967 the second has been defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom ; Then the new second would be similarly defined by the equivalent of 9198928093.1301369863013698630137 such periods ... of course another element whose period can be expressed as a multiple of 365 would help here

The Big Questions in life

Asking "Why" has many levels, the most shallow of which is when the 'Why' is interpreted as a 'How' as in "Why were you late? -Because I missed the Bus", and the deepest of which touches the real intent ( - Because I didn't really want to see you ) ..

The big WHY questions (WHY life? WHY the universe?) as a matter of elementary philosophical distinction can't be answered by scientists looking at the 'How'..

"The Scientists who don't grasp this distinction, however brilliant they are as scientists, are philosophical morons"

"Today we are encouraged to put aside the big questions of life and death. Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? such questions are strictly meaningless, we are told. Just get on with it. And so we lose some of the sense of how strange it is to be alive."

On the Leadership-Management in Politics discussion

In Politics, a decade is an eternity

- M. Porter in his article " The Competitive Advantage of Nations "

Can - and Should - Leadership and Management of Nations combined into one function ? should our politicians be our 'leaders' ??? Aren't the two roles (politician & leader) inherently opposed to each other, and how to expect a regular politician who gains a strictly time-limited position by spending all his time doing the 'small stuff' and managing appearances or by rising through another irrelevant ladder to be able to provide sustainable vision and thought leadership ... ? Assuming that vision and thought leadership are important components of building a better future - the stuff of leadership.

Voting in the United Nations

As much as the voting system in the security sounds unfair (with the - relatively - arbitrary VETO rights), the voting in the general assembly (as inconsequential and spectacle-only as it is) seems funnier to me ... the One-Man One-Vote when applied to countries becomes utterly ridiculous: How can a country with 1Billion+ people have the same voting power as a country of 100Thousand- people ?? Why should this country of 100K people have the same saying about the planet's future ?

The one-man-one-vote when applied to countries becomes the some-people-are-more-equal-than-others vote!

By the way, How on earth are these countries made in the first place !! some are based on ethnicity, but many don't have their own countries .. some are based on historic coincidence, and some are based on funny deals !!!

State Capitalism - Really ?

I was reading a complete file in the Economist last month that talks about 'State Capitalism'; and discusses in detail the advantages and flaws of the model; of course considering China / Russia / Brazil (in that order) as heroes of the model.

Of course China is engaged in State Capitalism; and many of its leading firms are owned by the state and that is clear in their ownership.. Similar for other countries in this 'axis of state-capitalism' .... Now the really interesting question - if we ponder the claims a bit - is: is liberal capitalism really liberal capitalism. Let's look at some of the evidence:
 - South Korea: the country's leading non-state firms (Samsung, LG, Hyundai, etc....) receive unlimited support from the state financially (even direct contribution to marketing spending) as well as in positioning in key negotiations with other countries... No one can argue that without the state's role in selecting and promoting these firms they would have survived and grown to their current size.
 - The United States: The large defense budgets, the support to Boeing, the contracts that get awarded hazily, as well as many many deals between firms and other countries that are brokered by the state
 - Why does the french president british/ turkish prime minister for example travel with an army of business men and heads of economic sectors and 'close deals' as they are on diplomatic trips ..
 - What about the huge amounts of money that can (and have been) be thrown at companies considered 'too big to fail' .... Isn't the state already effectively a stakeholder here? 

In the end ... the state in most/all these 'liberal-capitalism' countries is the first supporter of its business elite, and this begins to clarify things: The State is the support for the country's business elite and key companies in all cases of US / UK / France / China / Russia / etc ... ( granted with varying degrees) .. The only difference between them, is that - Ironically - in the Chinese case, it is more transparent as we know who the owner is of these companies (the state) and we know that he is acting in his own self interest ... with the other countries, everything becomes under the table !

Maya - By Jostein Gaarder

A brilliant book but the solitaire mystery remains his best... The joker is here, seeing meaning and wonder in life, and not surrendering to the mundane.. Looking with the amazement at the wonder that is our life... It takes 15 billion years to create a life, and a second to end it.

A nice idea is viewing humanity as the universe's attempt to become aware of itself and understand itself. The universe created man and man's awareness to know itself better, otherwise its a large waste. In this sense we are the mechanism for the gene to move further through time and to survive till a better understanding and a more opportune time in the future. We are the vehicle for awareness and for survival of the universe's protein miracle and wonderful show of evolution..

The sound of the big bang was only heard fifteen billion years later.  A mystery hidden in art and the beautiful fabric of space-time, and hope blooming in seeing meaning in the world.. The world can't be a series of mechanical events.

Maya... The illusion that there are different worlds.. Maya.. The beautiful mysterious and feminine... Maya ... The flamingo dancer hidden in goya's 'Maja' ..

The Bed of Procrustes - By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

NNT is - as I read once - a superhero of the mind .. This book is inspiring, deep, and very witty.

Aphorisms and their ability to compress deep statements of wisdom able to spur different ideas varying with the readers own thoughts and knowledge (like poetry) present a great communication tool in this book.

This is a very brilliant book with many insights on knowledge, nobility, thought, and the 'phoniness, neediness, and philistinism' of our time... Courageous, educated, and sophisticated opinions building on deep knowledge and a sharp mind ... Great combination. The book champions many of nnt's opinions about philosophy, education, and the non-sucker and 'big spirited personality'.

a one-time reading is surely not enough !