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The Disappointed Idealist

'Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.' George Carlin

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5 Things Movie Dystopias Get Wrong About Dictatorships
6 Outdated Myths Everyone Still Believes About Homosexuality
European Lawmaker: Women Are Inferior
How Michigan literally poisoned an entire city to save a few bucks
I challenged hackers to investigate me and what they found out is chilling
The war on democracy
Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy

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1984
Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III

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American History X
Cleanskin
Despre Oameni si Melci
Don Jon

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Baz Luhrmann - Everybody's Free
NOFX - Re-gaining Unconsciousness

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Reign

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Bias against left-handed people
Edward IV
Edward V
Edward Snowden
Elizabeth of York
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Francis II of France
Glucose
Harvey Weinstein
Henry VI
Henry VII
Henry, Lord Darnley
House of Lancaster
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James, Earl of Bothwell
Louis XVI of France
Margaret Beaufort
Mary, Queen of Scots
Nicholas II of Russia
Philippa Gregory
Queen Elizabeth of England
Richard II
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Richard III Society
Wars of The Roses
William Shakespeare

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Emma Watson UN speech
Inside North Korea

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My books

The Book of the Pharaohs

Dynasty: The Royal House Of Stewart

A Brief History of the Tudor Age

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The Story of Che Guevara

Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy

Mao Zedong: A Life

The Japanese Lover

Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe

Agatha Christie - Autobiografia

Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen

After the Funeral

The Queen's Pawn

Jasper - Book Two of The Tudor Trilogy

Singură pe Drumul Mătăsii: 80 de zile, 15 000 km, 2 500 de ani de istorie

A History of the Middle East

Nothing But the Truth: Selected Dispatches

My favorite books »

Most Popular Musings

Positive discrimination

There's this tendency nowadays to be very "politically correct". Also there's a tendency from rulers and governments for positive discrimination. But is that really a positive thing? Let's put it this way: you have the case of a white dude, applying for college. He has the right grades and the right recommendations and whatever else the college asks for. Normally he should get in there. But the college has a policy of having at least 40% women and at least (here I don't know exactly the numbers but let's assume we know) 50% ethnics (let's not discriminate and include them all in there). If this white dude is accepted, the percentages are not filled, so the dude gets rejected and an Asian woman is accepted instead - although her grades are lower (I randomly picked the ethnicity, I have nothing against Asians, don't sue) . What will this do? First of all, this woman is less prepared to follow the courses of this college - meaning that the co...

Is harmless flirting really harmless?

There's plenty of cases I know of, and I learn of more and more each day. Story 1: Guy has long-term girlfriend. He loves her and doesn't intend to give her up. Yet, he meets a woman he finds attractive and cannot help himself from flirting with her. What can this lead to? In most of the cases, the guy will not tell his flirt that he has a girlfriend. She could actually start liking him, so when she finds out that he's not really meaning anything by it, she could get hurt. Even if he does tell his flirt he has a girlfriend, if the guy doesn't stop flirting, she could still get her hopes up. What if the girlfriend finds out? Even if she won't act like it, she'll most definitely be hurt and that will lead to less trust in the relationship and eventual problems. Is it really worth it? Story 2: Guy doesn't have girlfriend and does not intend to get one. He meets a woman he finds attractive. She obviously wants more, he's not interested ...

Quality vs Quantity

There is no such thing as good, fast and cheap. When someone's selling you a service or a product that's supposed to encompass all these three qualities, you have to wonder why and how. When a company is selling you the same food as the store next door at half the price, you have to wonder why and how. I know, I know, we live in times of crisis. Money is of essence and saving money is a very important priority these days. However, sometimes, saving money in short term leads to paying much much more in long-term costs. Think of it this way: the company that sells you a product or a service exists to make profit. Despite what marketing says, that is the only purpose of existence of ANY company. Not to serve you, not to be at your disposal, but to make money. A company that does not make money is a company that goes out of business. A company that can afford to sell you something at half the price of its competitors is a company that is cutting costs somewhere. And sometim...

When trying at progress risks other people's lives

Fracking is a quite a controversial subject nowadays. People I know are taking different sides in this story, and both have arguments that could work. But here's where I stand: 1. It has not been proven 100% that fracking pollutes, or so say the ones that promote it or defend it. But has it been proven 100% that it doesn't? If not, don't we have the obligation to check that, BEFORE trying it? Because if it turns out that it does hurt people and if only just one person dies because of it - regardless of how much money is made over it - then it's just wrong. 2. Regardless of whether fracking is dangerous or not, the people who live in the area have the right to decide whether or not it happens. If they believe it's wrong, it shouldn't be done. If you really believe they're wrong, bring arguments, talk to them. Sending the army against a bunch of ordinary people who believe are defending their lives is just wrong. 3. We live in a world where everything ...

Judging a cause by its supporters

We should be able to judge the quality of a cause, regardless who is supporting it. In fact, the best way to discredit a good cause is to find one dodgy guy/company supporting it. There's a whole PR tactic centered around it. The thing is like this: we live in a world of corporations and governments and other forces we may not be aware of, ruling covertly and influencing the events. They have interests. Their interests are theirs, and that is what they will be following. As already pointed out in this post , despite what they say, governments are not really preoccupied with your well-being. They are preoccupied with getting re-elected and maintaining an equilibrium with the corporations and rich people that sponsor them. Those corporations and rich people also have their own interests that are not yours. The public image of a company/public figure is a PR thing - when the public image is bad it means the PR did a bad job. The fact that the public image is good does not nece...

In which we discuss the continuously decreasing education levels...

I cannot discuss places I haven't been into and educational systems I have not studied into. But I do see a trend around me of people being less and less educated. That could be a messed up statistic based on the fact that it is much easier now for a usual person to judge the overall educational level than it was, let's say, 20 years ago, when worldwide access to the Internet was still a fantasy. Maybe the educational levels are the same, but it's just more and more blatantly obvious how some people are true idiots, for the simple fact that you continuously bump into their comments on all websites. But let's go by the assumption that I am right and that educational levels are decreasing. What could be the cause? 1. Nowadays people do not read for fun. Students read for school, but fun means computer games, Facebook and other websites. This reduces access to educated language and increases access to words like "k", "ppl" and other Internet...

Labels, misconceptions and expectations

This rarely happens nowadays, but it did now. I was watching this movie, called Don Jon and I got really mad. For those of you who haven't watched it, here's the short story: there's this dude, a pretty typical bachelor male, who watches a lot of porn. At some point he decides that he wants to try on something more and he starts trying at a relationship with a chick called Barbara. The chick is insanely hot and everyone agrees on that. But she annoys the shit out of me. And what annoys me most is that, although I am sure that the writers' intention was to make her as a bit of an overreaction, there are a lot of women that are exactly like that. Like what you ask? While Jon is actively trying to alter his lifestyle to fit her in (although he occasionally fails), Barbara only dictates. From the first second, she is not preoccupied with knowing him, but with turning him into the kind of man she wants. Now, from where I am standing, that's just useless. The smart...

What is it about gay people...

...that pisses some people off as much as it does? There are very heated debates on the subjects of gay marriage, gay adoption, to the point of people saying that children are better off in orphanages than adopted by a gay couple! Really? Have you ever been in an orphanage? Have you ever looked a parentless child in the eye and told him "You're lucky you're here. You could have had two dads, that would have been a whole lot worse!". Even assuming that you go to the best maintained orphanage in the world, with the staff that treats the children in the best possible manner (...but really, trust me when I tell you, in most of the orphanages around the world, children are treated horribly and live in the most abject of conditions), even there you will have probably one person to tend ten children at a time at least. How much time is there for love and affection when you have to tend to that many children on a regular basis? How many of those children are really feeling ...

Can we really change?

It's that time of the year when we make decisions like "starting next year, I'll smile more and listen more and practice my singing" or something like that. New Year's Eve comes and then it goes and then suddenly we're back in the normal life and we forget until New Year's Eve comes again. Do we really have the potential to suddenly change our lives and make monumental decisions about it? I am not saying that life cannot change. I am sure that whoever takes the time to look back ten years will realize that life did change. But it changed slowly, without you realizing it, with small decisions and small steps that added up and led you into a direction. There are things you do suddenly: people stop smoking, they break up... sometimes they are forced by events to change. People die and that changes your life. You meet someone that suddenly takes up a lot of your time. But most of the times, the inner you stays the same, it just reacts to different circ...

Regrets

They say it's better to regret something you did, rather than something you didn't do. I find that very debatable. It depends very much on what you're doing. The truth is that the size of the regret depends on its effects - how powerful and how long-term they are. Once you've done something, you can't take it back. You can just do what you can with the consequences of your actions. Does that mean that you should pull a Frank Sinatra and just say you did it your way? The purpose of regret is to make sure that you don't repeat a bad thing. That you learn from your mistakes and make sure they don't happen again. As long as you keep it at that, it's a positive thing in your life. The "No Regrets" mantra is a piece of crap: we all do bad things, but if we are not aware that we're doing them, we simply won't stop. But there's a limit to where you can go with regrets. When regrets start dominating your life and you can't stop...