Pen Thoughts

  A parable and a confession Fourth in the Rot and Renewal series. What follows is a parable, narrated by an old lioness. The mechanics of it are not invented. The tenure lengths, the expulsions, the cubs, the year of nothing: all of it comes from what researchers have documented in the field. Only the voice is mine. Afterwards I will tell you why I wrote it, and where I appear in it. The third takeover - the parable I am old now, and I am still here. That is not a boast. The lionesses are always still here. We are born into this pride, we die in it, and in between we watch the males arrive and leave. I have lived through three takeovers. I want to tell you about the third, because it was the one we could have prevented. When I was young, the arrangement was so ordinary that nobody thought to describe it. We hunted. We held the ground. We raised what was born. The male walked the border and met whatever came from outside it. That was his work. It was not a small thing. It wa...

https://liberland.org/en/about/ For all the Lebanese or Syrian Refugees, this is the country you should go for. no government, no taxes, no politics, just a bunch of people living together in 10 square km  grin emoticon All you have to do now is convince Croatian authority to let you go there !!  grin emoticon Wait, if Liberland was not welcoming enough, you can always  go to "Nowheristan". my greetings to Michel Elefteriades !!

The following Parable is an actual simulation of the Lebanese society layers. Parable of a lioness, a cheetah and an Oryx, who had come together on a long journey, decided one day to confess their sins to each other. As queen of the forest, the lioness was the first.  "she told the others that, once, after she had finished off a big buck, a zebra came by. "it looked so sleek and tender," she said, "I had wantonly dispatched a fellow beast for no purpose," she said regretfully.   The remorseful cheetah reassured her. "why should you, queen of the forest, be remorseful about the skill that has made you the greatest hunter of us all? You are to be forgiven."   Then the cheetah told how, one day, he had spied a fat ewe and her two lambs. Hungrily he had pounced on the nearest lamb, but the mother had begged him to spare the remaining lamb and eat her instead. "I agreed", the cheetah said, "but I was so hungry I the...