Michele Roohani

This is a collective smile, thousands of miles long…

Take a look at these pictures of the big smile here and read about it from Christiane Amanpour here.

A paradigm shift my friends, a paradigm shift of biblical proportions…Read Thomas Friedman’s excellent article here and Judith Warner’s amazing piece here.

“We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.” Barack Obama

I woke up this morning with the news of Sarah Palin’s 17 year old unwed daughter being 5 months pregnant! I must be dreaming – this is the stuff bad Hollywood movies are made of: an evangelical, (almost) beauty queen of a small Alaskan town, with five children, a four year college degree in journalism, and  an anti-choice/anti-evolution/pro oil drilling agenda is going to be a heartbeat away from the presidency of the the United States of America! Only in Hollywood my friends…

Do I look stupid to you people? Do we, as women, look so clueless to you republicans that you imagine us all  voting for a woman only because of her gender? This is as valid as me voting for Ahmadinejad for the sole reason that he’s born persian!

Palin went through with her fifth pregnancy knowing that her child will have Down Syndrome. I have a nephew with this problem and I know how heartbreaking it is for the parents and the siblings…To insist in bringing a child like this to the world is selfish and insane.

Palin is an avid member of the NRA—Natonal Rifle Association—  which makes her the dream candidate for the republican ticket. She’s too damned young and inexperienced to be the vice president of this country. Read this article and this one to have some fun with this issue. Here are some interesting opinions about this whole affair.

Unless Obama (aka the Dark Knight) messes up really bad from here to November, I don’t see how he can lose…

“At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.” Aldous Huxley

Usain and Hussein have been on my mind in the past week; the lightning Bolt—aka the fastest man alive—and Hussein Obama. I made this image for my son who wanted a poster of Obama using a photo by Callie Shell of Time magazine:

“A Paradigm Shift is  a change from one way of thinking to another. It’s a revolution, a transformation, a sort of metamorphosis. It just does not happen, but rather it is driven by agents of change” according to Thomas Kuhn; he believes that Change is difficult and that human beings resist change— awareness is prerequisite to all acceptable changes. A Paradigm Shift is when a significant change happens—usually from one fundamental view to a different view. In most cases, some type of major discontinuity occurs as well. Khun thinks that “a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions cause one conceptual world view to be replaced by another view”.

My question for you boys and girls is that what makes one cling to the atrophied McCain—aka the off-line American—over the uber-eager Obama? I didn’t vote for Obama in the primaries but neither can I  imagine voting for mister “I want to relive vietnam ad nauseum”…

What are these posters from the good senator’s camp? Martin Luther King, the second coming? I frankly like my version better.

Another paradigm shift came this last week of the Olympics with the other Hussein or Usain:

What can I say? the man can run! Look at him here on cruise control going the 100 meters on 9.68 seconds; this guy with all his antics was a breath of fresh air.

Wildfires, burning out of control, are continuing to threaten thousands of homes in California. A lot of people are going to lose theirs today. You can’t help but to have this incredible sense of the fragility of everything. As human beings we are wired to think that everything will stay the way it is, safe from sudden and intense changes…

We’ve had a very dry summer and the global warming is not helping. It is pretty scary to watch (even on TV) a fire that “jumps the freeway”. In my last post, I said that we have only one season here but I have to correct that because we have four: the earthquake season, the mudslide season, the fire season and the last but not least the Oscars season – each as unpredictable as the others in its outcome.

Just found these images (above) by Pooya Monajemi on BBC. Like Dante, we may all need our guide getting us out of Hell. “What region of the earth is not full of our calamities?”Virgil

The arbitrariness, the randomness of it all is astounding…”You did or did not escape the fires?” That could be the current definition of a Californian. The two images (above) from yahoo say more about these devastating fires.

I took the picture above from my car, trapped on the closed down freeway 14 near Sand Canyon, a couple of hours ago – I still have the smoke on my hair.

Isaiah Berlin was a political philosopher and historian of ideas. He remains a hero to me.

one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, he remained true to his humanity. “I came to the conclusion that there is a plurality of ideals, as there is a plurality of cultures and of temperaments. I am not a relativist; I do not say “I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps” — each of us with his own values, which cannot be overcome or integrated. This I believe to be false. But I do believe that there is a plurality of values which men can and do seek, and that these values differ.”

How unlucky can you be to have these three as your presidents? I am iranian by birth, american by choice and french by nostalgia; these three guys are today at each other’s throats. Sarkozy is still the more tolerable of the three (which is not a big accomplishment).

I actually think that he can do something for france (that will be another post, another day) but now his foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, wants to bomb Iran. Bush is as trigger-happy as always and Ahmadinejad wants to wipe Israel from the face of the earth. I just read on today’s LA times that he is a hero to the underrepresented muslim/arabs of this world and has the audacity to go to Columbia university and be jeered! I am waiting to see him on Charlie Rose tonight; his second 60 minutes gig was as ridiculous as the first one: bad questions, worse answers (and lots of giggles!) NY times has this article about the subject. Life is tough…

“At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.” Aldous Huxley

I feel kind of stressed out about this whole carbon footprint calculations. Just took a quiz with them and i am not proud of the result! I am not much of a carnivore but now i have to worry about that “once in a while” steak. A Carbon Footprint is a measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide. Reading the Deep Economy, has been revelatory to say the least. I also suggest Bill Mckibben’s article in the NY review of books.

I just listened to the Slate podcast called global swarming and i have to admit that i agree with the idea. On a more cheerful note Alice Waters should cook for all of us…

We had no say in how/when/where we were born but i think we should definitely have a say in our death. Nietzsche was right when he wrote, “there is a certain right by which we may deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death.” I have never contemplated suicide but the very freedom to do so seems liberating. This doesn’t mean that i don’t believe in suicide prevention in most cases, but I am convinced that Life’s quality is way more important than a few miserable extra years. The final exit remained a NY Times best seller for a long time in spite of the U.S. being a fundamentally religious country. I find this glossary very interesting and i suppose clarifying the terms may help us not to consider the subject as taboo. Imprisoning Dr. Kevorkian (for eight years) just because he helped people with long histories of suffering was unjust even absurd. Life is beautiful but it is sublime if you have some control over it.

i decided to add something to this post after i read all the comments -i must admit that the issue of insanity in relation to suicide didn’t cross my mind before Yves mentioned it; the case of a young life ended because of depression is very different to me than the one ended based on insanity – and insanity is so subjective that i am not sure if i want anybody but the fairest of the judges to decide who’s sane and who isn’t. who would be the “guardian”? would a “philosopher king” do? is the society to decide or the government? who is to judge if i am sane enough to end my life when/how/where i decide to do it? is old age a necessary condition? is is sufficient though? who has the right to prolong someone else’s suffering/misery?

“Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.”

“Never explain – your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.”

i thought for a long time that this quote is from Abraham Lincoln but i just found out that Elbert Hubbard is the author; the version i knew was a bit more modern than the above mentioned original:

“Never explain – you’ll bore your friends and your enemies will not believe you anyway.”