Top

• but top of what? in which way?
• top – the top people, world leaders meeting in Hangzhou?
• top – the sheer audacity, ignorance and injustice?
• top – as matter of separating issues, discussing at most single issues?
• top – as matter of education, research … – all the excellence-centres, defined by extreme specialisation, which is result of division of labour and results in further division of labour?

Being modest, not talking about any top but the bits and pieces, and looking at them scattered … – and scattering may be another issue. So, off we go:

I

the apple scandal – it is the story of humankind in Christianity … – the general appeal to modesty and austereness as which it may be interpreted, was suggested to be a guiding line, guided by responsibility. And as said: claimed to be general. And many now the story of the first incidence: the rejection of the rule, and the punishment that followed.

But it seems that in the Apple-story today (see also here) things have turned around: apples made themselves to gods, not being eaten but eating … And to remain in the metaphor, it is remarkable how the US-multinational-Apple makes the Irish-snake to its priest, collecting the obulus from the people. In which way ever, and even considering the laudable EU-judgment against tax evasion, the real problem is that superpowers today are the representatives of a system that once stood up against the feudal system – then progressive in their claim for liberty, now being oppressors of any kind of freedom, clandestinely selling our friends. A more or less small thing  if it would not solve the entire problem, it surely would avoid much of its emergence: Big enterprises, paying taxes, not “fair taxes”, but according to what they owe, would surely help – a point I recently ventilated elsewhere.

II

Another splinter: the same Commission that calls “against” (really against????) Ireland to act against tax evasion as it sees unfair competition, sets up a programme that is similar to the Irish on a mich larger scale:

Commission proposes €5.3 million from Globalisation Fund for former Microsoft workers in Finland

Doesn’t that propose exactly the same, factually proposing you make the profits as long as toucan make the profits …, and then you leave a desert behind, turn the back to a Dantesque calamity, leaving the clearing of the place to others?

Trinity …

The third point then … bits and pieces … – splinters … shivers making us shivering …

Apple, Microsoft, and the summiters … they may let us ask how they managed. It had been said in Genesis 3

For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened,

So far so good, but then the story continues

they realised that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

This is what todays summiters do not face: they see themselves beautifully dressed, not hiding between trees but on the contrary: exposing their wealth which they gained by standing on the shoulders of dwarfs …. . dwarfs as long as they believe that it had been the snake, and then the women … . As long as they did not really come to terms with the fact that

There are no supreme saviors,
Neither God, nor Caesar nor tribune;
Producers, let us save ourselves,
We decree common salvation!
So that the thief should offer us his throat
So that spirit be wrested from its cell,
Let us fan the forge’s flames ourselves
And strike while the iron is hot.

Well, there is indeed an easy answer to the question