Europe

The balance of the crisis in Europe is rather a disaster. Finance was very solid in Europe, and yet we are paying an heavy cost for a crisis that has arisen and is caused entirely by the United States. Moreover, when the crisis begun, instead of making a common front among the different countries of the continent, with theyr differente economies, we have seen a war between northern and southern countries, with the collapse of Greece and the grave crisis in Spain and Portugal. This is senseless. An euro a little less strong, more cooperation between Germany and the other European countries would have resulted in much more mild consequences of the crisis. The problem is that Germany is the strongest country in Europe and yet is totally inadequate to play the role of leader, due to a latent isolationism that has deep historical roots in Germany. France should play the role that today is of Germany, as always has been, but the weakness of its presidents, beginning with Sarkozy. And finally, European are completely turned down on themselves, anaware that we have good friends in the gloabl world, for instance Brazil and China, that would greatly appreciate a stronger, economically healthy Europe that balances the overwhelming power of the United States.

Italiani

Giorgio Bocca sosteneva (riprendendo ovviamente Gobetti) che gli italiani sono tutti fascisti. Secondo me.non sono nemmeno fascisti, sono qualunquisti e baciapile. I fascisti credono in qualcosa, per quanto perversa e violenta, gli italiani non credono a niente. Quando erano pagani, non credevano ugualmente a nulla. per i pagani tuttavia ogni cosa è sacra; il cristianesimo ha tolto la sacralità del mondo, senza riuscire a introdurre la fede. Quest'ultima ha affascinato popoli molto più violenti, come i celti e i germani, che in ultima analisi hanno fatto l'Europa.

Gattare

A Roma, non lontano dal Pantheon, esiste una via della Gatta. così detta per la statutetta di una gatta incastrata nel muro, La statutetta proviene da uno degli innumerevoli tempi di Iside della città imperiale, in cui sacerdotesse allevavano gatti sacri. La tradizione è rimasta probabilmente nelle "gattare", donne in menopausa ma ancora abbastanza giovani che nutrono e accudiscono le numerose colonie feline della città, soprattutto al centro ma anche in periferia.

Bocca di Rosa

Il capolavoro di Berlusconi è di aver fatto diventare Bocca di Rosa ministro della Repubblica. Così, oltre a diventare peggio di Torquemada, De André perde tutti gli argomenti. De André, che per fortuna sua è morto prima, si era accorto del pericolo e diceva di tenersi Prodi, brutto che fosse.

Bauhaus

I mobili IKEA sono la realizzazione su larghissima scala del sogno degli arts and crafts e del Bauhaus, ma che realizzazione triste!

Models

In the funny but important paper Putting the plants back into plant ecology: six pragmatic models for understanding and conserving plant diversity" Keddy contrasts two widespread approaches in platn ecologists. He calls the first "theoreticians", that start from principles and deduce complex mathematical models, and the second "pragmatists" that begisn from observations and generalize to borad regularities. The first approach is clearly winning, but ecologists (in particular American ecologists) are well known for their episthemological unsofisticatedness. The contrast of Keddy is the two-thousand year old Aristotelian constrast between deduction and induction, and we know all too well that science is based enither on induction nor on deduction, but on a third process known as "abduction". Curiously, it was an American geologist and philosopher, Pierce, that highlighted the question (that had already been discovered, in other terms, bu Kant at the end of the XVIII century). In abduction, you neither start from principles and end with test, nor begin with observation and arrive to generalization, but you start with observations and ask "which theoretical model can possibly explain the observations?" After the model is build up, you look for confirmation in independent observations. For instance, Schrodinger equation, that describes the properties of electron in quantum mechanics, is not derived from obeservation (it is a wave function in a probability space that cannot be observed) nor from principles (in fact it seems quite crazy), but is the only model that explains observations such as the distribution of spectral lines of hydrogen or the scattering of electrons. In simpler terms, you begin with observation, build the model, and test the consequences of the model, not the model in itself. I have found two or three examples of this procedure in the ltierature, but 90$ of ecologists are still in the age of Aristoteles.

Rivoluzioni

Molti sostengono che i problemi del nostro Paese dipendano dal non aver mai fatto una rivoluzione - a differenza di Francia, USA, Gran Bretagna, Russia. Certamente siamo un paese pieno di ceti parassitari derivanti dalle antiche aristrocrazie imbelli e fannullone, ma fare la rivoluzione in Italia significherebbe mandar via la Chiesa - e una volta tolta la Chiesa, cosa resterebbe di questo Paese? Per cui un po' per opportunismo un po' per necessità non si è mai fatta e si spera nell'aiuto dei Paesi stranieri - successe già nel Risorgimento.