April 26, 2016 edition
The poor sometimes resemble luckless gods: Their voices should be heeded but the world often listens to them via go-betweens.
Go-betweens usually feel they have the duty to represent them-and more often than not, they feel they have the right to do so. Public officials. Lawmakers. Political parties. Candidates for governor who are serious or pretend to be. Those busy with Twitter and Facebook. NGOs. Activists with a strong, or sometimes strong, sense of justice. Islamic teachers, priests and pastors. Or the media-including television stations owned by big business with their commentators who announce, "I was once poor."
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More Sidelines articles in other editions
April 19, 2016 edition
Religion and science keep on clashing, even in the 21st century. So it was in another century, on April 12, 1633 when Galileo, an old man of almost 70, was held for two weeks by the Inquisition, the Church's tool for probing and investigating the conviction of one's faith.
The Vatican considered Galileo a heretic. He had to admit that he did believe in the Copernican theory of the earth and the sun, even though 17 years earlier he had promised to abandon it. That day, Galileo recanted: he would adhere to the theory that the earth circled the sun and not the reverse. He recanted and for this he was imprisoned. Eventually though, he did confess his sin, apologize and express his doubt of the Copernican system, and returned to the path determined by religion: "I hold the opinion...that the earth does not move and it is the sun that does."
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April 12, 2016 edition
Ecce homo! What did he mean? What did the Roman Imperial Procurator, speaking in Latin, want from the people of Jerusalem crowding impatiently beneath the balcony? Was his shout directed towards Caiaphas and the other religious leaders present, who were demanding that 'this man' be sentenced to death?
Ecce homo! Look at the man! But what for?
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April 5, 2016 edition
With this dramatic sentence, the Communist Manifesto in 1848 depicted the arrival of an era when capital enters social life. Marx and Engels were not predicting the future: They were merely describing how astonishingly the bourgeoisie change the world. And set it quaking.
But in the 21st century, the sentence has become a kind of prophecy.
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March 29, 2016 edition
Einstein was completing his curriculum vitae one day in 1932. The prestigious Kaiser Leopold German Academy of Scientists, where Goethe had once been a member, had asked him to join.
He had to answer nine questions. To question number eight he answered, "several medals were awarded me." But he did not explain what those medals were for. Nor did he state that in 1921 he had received the Nobel Prize for Physics...
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March 22, 2016 edition
I was gingerly finding a path on roots in the peat land, tread by tread in the reddish water oozing between the trunks of the jelutong and ramin trees. The dense foliage of the new branches still clustered thickly shading the way, but soon it became evident: the 'poems written on the sky' have been almost wiped out at Sabangau River.
Millions of trees have been felled. Central Kalimantan's 568,000 hectares of tropical forest is almost gone. Human greedthe continuous plunder of the timber for personal wealthhas wounded this environment to its very core.
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March 15, 2016 edition