Persiflage & Paroxysm

Why is it that the simplest of choices and the easiest and most instinctual of decisions to make get needlessly complicated in Lebanon, as momentum slows to a crawl and competing special interests, political cowardice and simple selfishness, incompetence and the need to see others fail take over? Lebanon’s garbage crisis needn’t have ever happened if two decades ago policy makers took steps to ensure proper disposal, recycling, transformation and incineration of solid waste for the long term, and had taken courageous and unpopular decisions to ensure their implementation. The above image is of a waste incinerator in Austria. Waste incineration is nothing like the old war-time tradition of 'harq zbeleh' usually in a metal barrel on the side of a road with sparks flying off in every direction! And yet, there seems to be wide spread popular resistance to building such incinerators in Lebanon.  In fact, a garbage dump it not piles of unsorted trash dumped in an op...

Turkish hyper-nationalism shares certain worrying aspects with German nationalism of the 1930s. In both cases, it was the people's belief in their own superiority and their right to act with military impunity across the border, coupled with a radical right wing government's readiness to take on an aggressive posture and enter into military adventurism, that made them and indeed makes them a threat to peace.  Turkey is a danger to its neighbors, it continues to ignore the rights of minorities within its borders, primarily their basic right to be recognized as non-Turks, to preserve and celebrate their own culture. Turkey has attacked the Kurds once again thereby thwarting any possibility of combining efforts to create an effective anti-terror alliance in Northern Iraq and Syria to combat ISIL, which is the bigger threat.  Turkey would do well to remember that it is not the Sublime Porte and has not been for a hundred years now, that Arabs are no longer it...

The Roman Empire is not dead, it still exists. As a British friend of mine said: "We owe it all to the Romans, Britons were waring tribes before the Romans came and civilised us and gave us central government." His comment was part of a discussion we were having about the British Raj as a civilising and stabilising force in India, the price of which was for the natives to submit to British exploitation. That Roman instinct, i.e. to Romanise the world, has long since been passed on by the British to their rebellious cultural offspring, the United States of America.  Washingto n DC was once called Rome, its architecture and monuments borrowed heavily from the eternal city. It was fashionable at the time, during the birth of this new nation (late 18th early 19th centuries), to mimic Rome. Empire Style, born in Napoleonic France, was all the rage and it was reflected in the architecture, furniture design and fashions of the era. But the New World Rome was more...