Little tittle-tattle 2 (and Trump didn’t start any new war/s but what is pissing me off with Trump just now is that he hasn’t pardoned any of the dubious cases on death row)

Baruch Hashem and Hallel-u-Jah!

I am feeling whole again, because one of the best websites in the www namely The Freeman Centre for Strategic Studies is up again and running. Running smoothly. Run steady. As Madeleine Albright said, the relationship is “rock steady”. You’ll find all the truth that you’re looking for there, all in one place and that ain’t no lie.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.", said Keats the Romantic…

Believe it or not, it’s all HERE - Middle East truths, no fake news

“Death, be not proud” - wrote John Donne

“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.”

 He expatiates a little more profoundly on the above in his Meditation XVII; truth is, in his deathbed, he called for a priest to administer the last rites.

As you know, and this is also true, all men are mortal (and it may be some men, even men such as Methuselah are as mortal as others, for in the end, death is the leveller. And as I read on IBK’s Facebook page today, when you die, there is a profound change in identity, “as soon as you die, your identity becomes a “body”; people start using phrases such as “bring the body”, “lower the body in the grave”, "take the body to the graveyard” People don’t call you by your name any more…”

COVID-19 is causing some kind of equality of fear in the rich as well as the poor, the white as well as the blue, the yellow, and the black among us mortals. True: Everyone wants to go to Heaven, some, more than others, to the Paradise of the 72 Virgins, but no one, almost no one wants to die, just now….

We live in a free world (I hope) and if I wanted to, I could give a more detailed account of Islamophobia in Nigeria and it would not be an exercise in futility , rather, it should be necessary to do so in order for the unsusceptible to arrive at the same sane understanding that islamophobia is the source of so many attitudes and opinions and there is Islamophobia in Nigeria and indeed in the world, in Nigeria because Boko Haram has been busy giving Islam a bad name in a way that Hitler (a Roman Catholic and a Nazi leader) never gave Roman Catholicism a bad name nor did Pope Pius XII…

As to examples of the so-called “soft racism” that the Nigerian professor was alluding to, I could give him many, many examples of both “soft” and very negative “hard” tribalism in his own neck of the woods/ jungle/ delta swamp that is an environmental disaster due to black man’s inhumanity to his and her fellow man..., It’s just as Jesus said (according to Mathew,

“Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. The World English Bible translates the passage as: ... First, remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye.”

And elsewhere

“And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.”

 The last time I checked Ambassador John Campbell was on the board of directors of American University of Nigeria

 (To be continued -with a closer scrutiny of the examples given of “soft” racism.

I went into an Ur & Penn store today to return a watch that I got as an Xmas present - the watch was purchased on 24^th December and I wore it exactly once - I was returning it because I have exactly the same watch - in silver and not gold double – I returned it with the purchase receipt. The shop assistant started examining the watch and started cackling that she couldn’t take it back because it was “dirty” and it had been used (it had a 30-day return guarantee) so I started wondering once again if it was another case of me being in the wrong country and if it was the latest instance of soft or hard racism. It’s really not a matter of professional training to be service oriented; politeness really starts with good home training - good breeding and according to Ayad Al Saffar the chief executive of that company, “the customer is king“ but the shop assistant probably doesn’t know this and wants to mess with the wrong nigger. I’m returning to the scene of the crime tomorrow: she changed the battery in my watch for about $24 and then my watch stopped after ten minutes….

Rogie: Advice to school girls