Chancellor Angela Merkel has cultivated the image of a prudent, pragmatic and down-to-earth leader, earning her the nickname “Mutti” - mother of the nation. The conservative leader, 61, is in her third term after scoring a convincing victory in the September 2013 election. Only two post-war German leaders have achieved a third term previously - Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl. In November 2015, Forbes magazine ranked Mrs Merkel the second most powerful person in the world - the highest ranking ever achieved by a woman - and later that year she was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year”, citing her role in Europe’s crises over migration and Greek debt. She has played a leading role in Europe’s reaction to the migrant crisis, announcing that Germany would welcome refugees fleeing Syria’s civil war. The German government says 1.1 million people claimed asylum in the country in 2015. BBC NEWS
Let’s call this crime something simpler, and less confusing, instead: internal assault. Intramural attack. Regard it just as we would an assailant violently forcing a hammer handle into a mouth, or puncturing an eardrum with a knife. Does it make any real difference if it’s a vagina being brutalised, or an eye? If the weapon is a penis, or a cosh? This is punching, but inside. This is the repeated piercing of someone’s body. When you put it like that, suddenly the issue of rape becomes very clear: how many women would ask for that? The phrase “sexual assault” confuses a million men, and women, like Manohar Lal Sharma, right across the world – that troubled word, “sexual”, casting a shadow so deep that it hides the “assault” part altogether. It makes people think of rape merely as some sex that just “went wrong”. It’s become another argument about men and women and desire and politics and culture. Rather than what it is – what all rapes are: one human ripping another human being to pieces. Not sexual assault. Just – assault. Not a sexual crime. Just – crime. Not rape – with all the confusions we can’t afford, can’t bear, another generation to painfully sift through, as we have had to. Just a violence, like any other. - Caitlin Moran
What is common to all dreams of fame is that being known to strangers emerges as a solution to a hurt. It presents itself as the answer to a deep need to be appreciated, and treated decently by other people. And yet fame cannot accomplish what is asked of it. It does have advantages, which are evident. But it also introduces a new set of very serious disadvantages, which the modern world refuses to view as structural rather than incidental. Every new famous person who disintegrates, breaks down in public or loses their mind is judged in isolation, rather than being interpreted as a victim of an inevitable pattern within the pathology of fame. One wants to be famous out of a desire for kindness. But the world isn’t generally kind to the famous for very long. The reason is basic: the success of any one person involves humiliation for lots of others. The celebrity of a few people will always contrast painfully with the obscurity of the many. Being famous upsets people. For a time, the resentment can be kept under control, but it is never somnolent for very long. When we imagine fame, we forget that it is inextricably connected to being too visible in the eyes of some, to bugging them unduly, to coming to be seen as the plausible cause of their humiliation: a symbol of how the world has treated them unfairly. Fame makes people more, not less, vulnerable, because it throws them open to unlimited judgement. Everyone is wounded by a cruel assessment of their character or merit. But the famous have an added challenge in store. The assessments will come in from legions of people who would never dare to say to their faces what they can now express from the safety of the newspaper office or screen. We know from our own lives that a nasty remark can take a day or two to process. - Book of Life
The World is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real, because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round, and it has thrills and chills and is very brightly colored, and it’s very loud. And it’s fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they’ve begun to question, ‘Is this real, or is this just a ride?’, and other people have remembered, and they’ve come back to us and they say ‘Hey, don’t worry. Don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.’ and we KILL THOSE PEOPLE. “Shut him up! We have alot invested in this ride! SHUT HIM UP! Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account, and my family. This just has to be real.” It’s just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that. You ever noticed that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn’t matter, because ... It’s just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It’s only a choice.
No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear wants you to put bigger locks on your door, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead see all of us as one. Here’s what we can do to change the world right now, to a better ride: Take all that money we spent on weapons and defense each year and instead spend it feeding, clothing, and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and WE CAN EXPLORE SPACE, TOGETHER, BOTH INNER AND OUTER, forever ... in peace. -Bill Hicks
And do you remember when people felt proud of where they came from, like it was something to do with them? It's just where you happened to fall out of your mother's vagina. Oh, I'm so proud to be British. You may as well be proud to be Caesarean. All these separate flags. If you're going to have a flag, have a flag of a vagina, so then you can meet people and go, "Oh, hi, where are you from? "Oh, same as me. Let's be friends." How was peace finally achieved? The introduction of the vagina flag. But that was the past, right? When we fixated on such silliness.
#wastenotwant
- School of Life
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