The verdict read by Court and the Junta orders to commute her sentences !, ?

The Irrawaddy reports on tuesday that the verdict was delivered at 11:50 a.m. Suu Kyi was initially sentenced to three years imprisonment, but later the court changed her sentence to 18 months to be served under house arrest. According to journalists, Burmese Home Minister Maung Oo entered the courtroom after the three-year sentence was announced and read aloud a special order from junta chief Snr-Gen Than Shwe stating that as Suu Kyi is the daughter of national hero Gen Aung San, her sentence should be reduced to 18 months and that the sentence should be suspended.

Along with the world leaders' outrage and condemnaion on the Burmese junta, Harn Lay's cartoon undeniably reflects the very true circumstances currently going on in Burma's political saga, nevertheless intended to be viewed in sarcastic manner; they are, at the moment to me, utterly not laughable !

Has the Restoration of the Arts and Sciences Had a Purifying Effect Upon Morals?

Did Rousseau respond to the question (the blog title) proposed by the Academy of Dijon in 1750 as both 'yes' and 'no' ?

[So long as government and law provide for the security and well-being of men in their common life the arts, literature and sciences, less despotic though perhaps more powerful, fling garlands of flowers over the chains which weigh them down. They stiffle in men's breasts that sense of original liberty, for which they seem to have been born; cause them to love their own slavery, and so make of them what is called a cilvilised people]

[But so long as power alone is on one side, and knowledge and understanding alone on the other, the learned will seldom make great objects their study, princes will still more rarely do great action, and the people will continue to be, as they are, mean, corrupted, and miserable]

Of course this is an over-simplifictaion, but can this be concluded that upon the rise of man's civilisation as emerging form his state of nature, Rousseau's argument laid at the end in opposing against snobbery of the artist and the philosopher, whom more often than not claim themselves superiority of beholders of the good, the true and the beautbiful.

Joy of reading randomly without obligation to write something out of it!

No admission fees to visit CMU library eventhough you are not the university staffs or students, unlike ones at CU. Without obligation to write something out of what I read; I currently feel this joy.

Same as traveling without a map, I let go expectations for a certain destination, but browse the shelfs here and there aimlessly, allowing books to lead me drifting on unfamiliar ocean of ideas.

The Philosophy book shelf brought me travel back in time, for me to breed the air of Republic of Geneva when Rousseau presenting his essays on 'A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Science' to the Academy of Dijon as to answer whether the restoration of the arts and science had purifying effect upon morals? and another one on 'The origin and foundation of the inequality of mankind' which gave me another picture of human being in 'state of nature', in contrast to conception in Hobbes's Leviathan.

Another stride passing the illustrated references book section, I am introduced to the movement of 'Universal Rights to a Beautiful and Functional Home' that set precedent for the integration of local craft design with industrial production, which promote the growth of swedish interior design that benefited both local consumers and the production complex. I surprisingly learnt how the global reputation of IKEA had roots in the 200-year-old of social-astetic propaganda that its catalysts such as Ellen Key strongly believed that art and beauty would produce happier human beings and better citizen.

Sometime when entering the library, I stop by at stop-over desk of the returned books, I accidentally saw so many diverse topics of books I can pick for new exploration, I realised this precious opportunity and freedom. Yet there remains limitation of time and my own capability to extend this mind-travelling through books to be never ending. Key is I need to accelerate my reading speed! Or should I find a goal to really get to somewhere ?

As of iddleness in travelling, I am in praise of this joy of reading randomly, at least for the moment I take a break from working on the ground. One painful consequence of such joy I should not be omited to aware however is Superficiality !

The age of one's own

On the last day of my recent trip to Bangkok, a discussion at one ice-cream shop about motive in liturature writing with my two friends surprisingly led to many notions about human mind, including fear of death, when one admited that his source of inspiration to write a novel lies also on the cause of resisting to live beyond human's life span of his own, to leave someting to to the world worth remembering his name, and not be forgotten as soon as when he departed.

This recalled the notion that how human emotions and thought were successively transcended through creativities and talents of the individuls into work of art; as reflecting in the popular quote of ancient greek aphorism 'ars longa vita brevis' - art is long, life is short.

As I was reading a book of Eric Hobsbawm, his collection 'Unommon People Resistance, Rebellion, and Jazz', that gave substantive accounts about jazz music, particularly in terms of relations between jazz as the state of art and the cultural context of working class development. Before it becomes music of elite minority, jazz was created by diasporas of the America, those who were oppressed for centuries.

Its popularity in America in the early of the twentieth century went along with the rise of the struggle against racism and trends of socialism democracy, though short lived. Children of the revolution has turned their ears to rock and roll and its later fusions-the music of their own age. Hobsbawm pointed that a generation feels music as innovation of their times, and popular music is the product of current miliu of both the artist and audiences alike.

Jazz scene become rare everywhere around the globe and its image as the music of the rebel lost somewhere in time. Some put even that jazz is now only listened and played among old rich people or young intellectuals with pretensions.

This is a case that, art is long, but regretably, perhaps like other forms of creative works in many circumstances, its true and original meaning has short lived, so did the lives of its creator.