RATIONAL THINKING@@@@@@@@@ مرا جهل در کامِ دیو میبَرَد++++++++++از آن دوستی میکنم با خِرَد
August 12, 2022
There’s a scene in The Usual Suspects where Kevin Spacey tells the fable of the mysterious Keyser Soze and how he became a crime lord.
“One story the guys told me, the story I believe, was from his days in Turkey,” he says. “There was a gang of Hungarians that wanted their own mob. They realized that to be in power, you didn’t need guns or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn’t.”
August 13, 2022
Salman Rushdie, Booker Prize-winning novelist, was repeatedly stabbed on Friday at a literary event at Chautauqua Institution in western New York, where he was arguing that the U.S. should give asylum to persecuted writers. Allegedly one Hadi Matar of New Jersey, wearing a black mask, leaped up onto the stage before 2,500 people and repeatedly stabbed Mr. Rushdie before being taken down by security. As I write, Mr. Rushdie is in intensive care. He will likely lose an eye, nerves in his arm have been severed, and his liver was damaged by he knife blade. Ruhollah Khomeini (d. 1989) had in 1988 issued a fatwa of death against Rushdie over his novel, Satanic Verses, which Khomeini had not read. The fatwa was lifted by the government of President Mohammad Khatami, a translator of modern German sociologist Jürgen Habermas and a proponent of civilizational dialogue, in 1998. On this occasion I am reprinting the one essay I ever wrote about Mr. Rushdie, which I read to him and an audience of about 1,000 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on the occasion of the 2003 staging of the play based on his novel, Midnight’s Children at the proscenium theater of the Power Center on the central campus of the University of Michigan. The Republic of Letters has suffered a horrifying assault, an assault on all thinking people. I wish him the fullest possible recovery, and extend to him and his loved ones my deepest sympathies.
August 12, 2022
The Inflation Reduction Act includes a remarkable innovation. If it becomes law in its current form, share buybacks will be taxed at a 1.0 percent rate. This is a huge deal, not only because it taxes money that was often escaping taxation at the individual level, but it is a move away from basing the corporate income tax on profits, to taxing returns to shareholders.
