13. NASRUDDIN’S BRIBE
Nasruddin needed the judge’s signature on some documents, which meant a bribe, and Nasruddin didn’t like bribes.
So, Nasruddin got a pot, filled it with mud, and put honey on top to make it look like a pot full of honey. Nasruddin gave this to the judge, and the judge gave him the signed documents.
The next day, the judge’s servant delivered a message. “The documents were in error! Return them to the judge.”
“The documents are fine,” Nasruddin replied. “If the judge has a problem of his own, he should take that up with his conscience, not with me.”
This Tale is from “Tiny Tales of Nasruddin” by Laura Gibbs. The book is licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. © 2019-2022 Laura Gibbs.
No other national park unit in the nation can tell the story of human history in North America as Pecos can; and no other park can do so with the aid of such an attractive landscape… Everywhere I went in the park, I ran into beauty and intrigue. From the friendly cottonwoods along the river to the rolling meadows and rugged east side, Pecos sheltered an abundance of natural charm. Better yet, nearly every enchantment concealed a the foundations of an abandoned home in a pasture, the remains of an old mill in a grove of river trees, stubbornly mute petroglyphs tucked among cliffs, piles of historic trash blocking dry washes and bits of broken pottery everywhere. We often joked that the whole park was one big archaeological site, and we were not far wrong. Beauty and history are interwoven at Pecos and their inseparability made every day an adventure…” — From Knowing Pecos by Courtney White
[T]oday we have a special guest, Professor Mick Dunford. Mick is Professor Emeritus at Sussex University and a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his work focuses on world development, especially of Eurasia and China. Mick is going to help us discuss the political and geopolitical economy today of the Ukraine conflict.… While the mainstream press makes it sound as if the West is involved in the conflict entirely altruistically, standing up for Western values and democracy, even as it supports, by the way, an ever-more fascist government in Kiev, a few critical sources do focus on the profits that are being made by arms production.
But what we think we will be able to show in the course of this hour is that, in fact, the underlying political economy and geopolitical economy is far more complex. — Neo-Liberal Machine Corners Ukraine, EU by Michael Hudson