These are the mines of Mount Pangaeos

These are the mines of Mount Pangaeos,' Philip explained. 'With this gold I have armed and equipped our army, I have built our palaces, I have developed Macedon's strentgh.'
'Why have you brought me here?' asked Alexander, his profound distress apparent in his voice. While he was asking the question one of the laboureres collapsed to the ground and almost ended up beneath his horse's hooves. An overseer made sure the man was dead, then nodded to another two poor wretches who put their baskets to one side, took the body by the feet and dragged it away.
'Why have you brought me here?' Alexander asked again. And Philip saw the leaden sky reflected in the dark expression on his son's face.
'You have not yet seen the worst of it,' he replied.'Do you feel up to going underground?'
'I am not afraid of anything.'stated the boy.
'Follow me then.'
The king dismounted and moved towards the entrance of one of the caves. The overseer who challenged him, holding up his whip, suddenly stopped in shock, recognizing the golden star of the Argeads on Philip's chest.
Philip simply nodded and the overseer stood back, ligt a lantern and prepared to guide them underground.
Alexander followed his father, but as soon as he entered the cave he felt himself suffocating in the unbearable stench of human urine, sweat and excrement. They had ti crouch. Sometimes with thei backs almost bent double, in a narrow passageway full of the din of continuous hammering, of a general breathlessness, of coughing, of the gutural rattles of death.
The overseer stopped occasionally where a group of men were working with their picks to extract the mineral-bearing rock. Here and there they stopped at the edge of a pit and down at the bottom the feeble glow of a lantern iluminated a bony back, joined to skeletal arms.
Once or twice the miners, down in these pits, on hearing the approach of footsteps or voices, lifted their heads and so Alexander witnessed the masks of men disfigured by fatigue, by illness and by the horror of living such a life.
Further on, at the botton of one pit, they saw a corpse.
'Many of them commit suicide,' the overseer explained. 'They throw themselves on their picks or stab themselves with their chisels.'
Philip turned to look at Alexander. The prince was silent and apparently numbed by this experience, and the darkness of death had fallen over his eyes.
They exited on the other side of the mountain through a narrow passage, and there were the horses and their escort waiting for them.
Alexander stared at his father,'What have these people done to deserve this?' he asked, his face waxen pale.
'Nothing,' replied the King.'Apart from being born.'
From the book: Alexander: Child of A Dream. By Valerio Massino Manfredi. Translated by Iain Halliday

The trumpets sounded before dawn

The trumpets sounded before dawn as Alexander had ordered, but the cooks had alrady been on their feet for some time and had prepared breakfast – steming pots of maza, semi-liquid oatmeal enriched with cheese. The officers instead had a type of flat bread, sheep's cheese and cow's milk.
At the second fanfare the King mounted his horse and took his place at the head of the army, near the eastern gate of the camp, accompanied by his personal guard and by Perdiccas, Craterus and Lysimachus. Behind him came the phalanx of the pezhetairoi, preceded by two units of light cavalry and followed by the Greek heavy infantry and the Thracian, Triballian and Agrianian auxiliaries, all flanked by two lines of heavy cavalry.
The sky was turning red in the east and the air was filling with the chirping of sparrows and the whistles of blackbirds. Flocks of wild doves rose from the nearby woods as the rhythmic noise of the march and the clanking of the weapons woke them from their slumber.
Phyrgia lay there before Alexander, with his rollling landscapes covered with fir trees, small valleys
crossed by clear flowing streams along which greu rows of silver poplars and shimmering willows. The flocks and the herds came out to pasture, guided by their sheperds and watched over by the dogs; life seemed to be proceeding peacefully along its daily path as if the threatening sound of Alexander's army on the move might just blend in perfectly with the bleating of the sheep and the lowing of the cattle.
To the right and the left, in the valleys parallel to the army's forward movement, groups of scouts, without insignia, camouflaged, also mover forward. Their job was to keep persian spies as far away as possible. But this was in fact a pointless precaution because any one of the sheperds or peasants might have been an enemy spy.
At the rear of the column, escorted by half a dozen Thessalian horses, came Callistenes, together with Philotas and a mule with two panniers full of papyrus scrolls.
Every now and then, when they stopped, the historian pulled out a stool, took a wooden board and a scroll from the panniers, and sat down to write under the curious gaze of the soldiers.
News had soon got round that the official chronicler of the expedition was to be this bony young man with the knowing air, and everyone hoped to be immortalized in his words at some stage. On the other hand no one was bothered about the very ordinary stories of daily life recorded by Eumenes and the other officers who had the job of keeping a tallt of the various stage of the expedition.
They stopped to eat around midday and then later, very close to the Granicus by that time, they stopped once more on direct orders from Alexander below a range of low hills, to wait for darkness to fall.
From the book: The sands of Ammon. By Valerio Massino Manfredi. Translated by Iain Halliday

'Wine!' ordered Ptolemy.'Pour wine for everyone,

'Wine!' ordered Ptolemy.'Pour wine for everyone,' and then he clapped his hands and while the guests took up reclining positions on their dining beds, servants poured the wine from the crater and others began serving the food: partridge on skewer, thrush, mountain hens, duck and then a fine rarity – pheasant.
At his right hand Alexander asked for his dearest friend Hephaestion, to his left, Ptolemy, his host.
After the game came a quarter of veal – roasted and cut into pieces and served individually by the carver while the servants brought in baskets of fragant, freshly baked bread together with shelled walnuts and boiled ducks' eggs.
The flautists entered with their instruments and began to play. They were all beautiful and exotic women – Mysian, Carian, Thracian, Bythnian – and they all wore their hair tied up with coloured ribbons or bonnets fringed with silver and gold. They were dressed in imitation of the Amazon, with short tunics and bows and quivers over their shoulders, props used in the theatre.
After the first song some of them put down their bows and then, after the second song, their quivers and then took off their leggings and their tunics so that they were completely naked, their young bodies shining with perfumed oils under the light of the lamps. They began to dance to the sound of the flutes and the drums, floating in front of the tables and among the diner's beds.
The friends had all stopped eating, but they continued drinking and were now in a state of total excitement. Some of them stood up, took off their clothes and joined in the dance with the accelerating rhythm of the drums and the tambourines carrying them inexorably towards a climax.
Suddenly Ptolomy grabbed a girl by the hand, stopping her gyrations and manoeuvring her so that Alexander could get a good look.
She's the most beautiful of the lot,' he said. 'I've grabbed her for you.'
'And for me? Asked Hepshastion
'Do you like this one?' Alexander asked as he stopped another striking girl, this one with red hair.
Ptolemy had given orders to the servants to fill the lamps in such a way that some of them would have run out of oil before others, leaving the room in a sort of half shadow.
The youngsters fondled one another as they lay on the dining beds, and on the rugs and the skins that covered part of the paved floor. Meanwhile the music of the flautist continued to ring against the frescoed walls, almost giving rhythm to their excited panting and the surging of ther gleaming bodies in the glow of the few lamps that were still burning in the corners of the great room.

From the book: Alexander: Child of A Dream. By Valerio Massino Manfredi. Translated by Iain Halliday

“Giving lots of money to the public schools makes you money!”

“Giving lots of money to the public schools makes you money!”
When our pathetic schools send a generation of idiots and illiterates out into work-a-day world, how in God's name do you expect to make any money? Right now, your office is full of people who cannot spell, who cannot do long division, who do not know how to ship a box to Bolivia because they haven't a friggin' clue what a Bolivia is.
Wonderin why your wallet is gone and the punk in front of you is ready to shoot you? Try these statistics on for size: 40 percent of the U.S. Prison population is functionally illiterate. Gee, how'd they get that way ? From 1980 to 2000,states expenditures on education went up 32 percent. In that same period of time, states' spending on prison went up to 189 percent. Now that's smart thinking! And while the're in prison, are they making you money? No! The state is actually taking license plate work away from your coffers- You want those workers free so they can come to work in your prison!
Seventy-five percent of welfare recipients are illiterate. Don't you think things might be a little different if they could read and write? I don't mean different for them, I mean different for YOU- That's a lot of welfare mothers who could be slaving away for you and making you money if they weren't stuck in the prison of their illiteracy. Educate them well and you will reap the rewards.
It totally buggles my mind that conservatives haven't demanded , purely out of self-interest, that our schools prepare young people to contribute and even excel in the workplace. Workers are supposed to bring you great ideas and make you filthy rich- Instead they're sitting out there in their cubicles trying to figure out how to download the latest Weezer album. That's the result of all these years of chanting “leave no child behind” and demanding that your state keep testing kids with mandated exams. Teachers have stopped teaching anything useful and now teach for the test. Here's what it got you. A lot of kids who know how to beat a test but not much else. I've got a kid in my office right now who thought the U.K. Was Russia, had never heard the name “George McGovern,” and figured a legal pad was where you store legal court documents. And he's the smartest one in here! HELP!!!
From the book 'Dude,Where's My Country' by Michael Moore

You are never going to be rich

Listen friends, you have to face the truth: . The chance of that happening is about one in a million- Not only are you never going to be rich, but you are going to have to live the rest of your life busting your butt to pay cable bill and the music and art classes for your kid at the public school where they used to be free.
And it is only going to get worse. Whatever benefits you may have known are going to get whittled down to nothing- Forget about a pension, forget about Social Security, forget about your kids taking care of you when you get old because they are barely going to have the money to take care of themselves. And don't even think about taking a vacation, because odds are your job won't be there when you get back. You are expendable, you have no rights, and by the way, “whats a union?”
I know, many of you don't think it's that bleak. Sure. Times may be tough, but you think you'll survive. You'll be that one person who somehow escapes the madness- You are not going to give up the dream of some day having your slice of the pis. In fact some of you believe the whole pie might some day be yours.
I have some news for you: You are not even going to get to lick the plate. The system is rigged in favor of the few, and your name is not among them, not now and not ever. It's rigged so well that it dupes many otherwise decent, sensible, hard-working people into believing that it works for them, too- It holds the carrot so close to their faces that they can smell it. And by promising that one day they will be able to eat the carrot, the system drafts an army of consumers and taxpayers who gladly, passionately, fight for the rights of the rich, whether it means giving them billions in tax breaks while send their own children into dilapidated schools, or whether it means sending those children off to die in wars to protect the rich man's oil. Yes, that's right: The workers/consumers will even sacrifice the lives of their own flesh and blood if it means keeping the rich fat and happy because the rich have promised they can join them at the table.
But that day never comes, and by the time the working stiff has this figured out, he's in an old age home spewing a lot of bitter mumbo jumbo about authority and taking it out on the aide who is trying to empty his sorry bedpan.
From the book 'Dude,Where's My Country' by Michael Moore

Osama by his rightful title multi-millionaire

I've always thought it was interesting that the mass murder of September 11 was allegedly committed by a multi-millionaire. We always say it was committed by a “terrorist” or by an “Islamic fundamentalist” or an “Arab”, but we never define Osama by his rightful title: multi-millionaire? Why have we never read a headline saying, “3,000 Killed by Multi-Millionaire”? It would be a correct headline , would it not ? No part of it is untrue _ Osama bin Laden has assets totaling at least $ 30 millions; he is a multimillionaire. So why didn't that become the reason for profiling potentials terrorists? Instead of rounding suspicious Arabs, why don't we say, “Oh my God, a multimillionaire killed 3,000 people! Round up the multimillionaires! Throw them all in jail! No charges! No trials! Deport the millionaires!!”
We need protection from our own multi-millionaires, corporate terrorists, the ones who rip off our old-age pensions, destroy the environment, deplete irreplaceable fossil fuels in the name of profit, deny us our right to universal health care, take people's jobs away whenever the mood hits them. What do you call a 19 percent increase in the homeless and the hungry from 2001 to 2002? Are these not acts of terrorism? Do they not cost lives? It is not all part of a calculated plan to inflict pain on the poor and the working poor, just so that a few rich men can get even richer?
We have our “terrorists” to deal with, and we need out entire focus returned to them so that we can one day live in a country where the people once again pick the president, a country where the wealthy learn that they have to pay for their actions. A free country, a safe country, a peaceful country that genuinely shares its riches with the less fortunate around the world, a country that believes in everyone getting a fair shake, and where fear is seen as the only thing we truly need to fear.
From the book 'Dude,Where's My Country' by Michael Moore

Torture

“The first jolt was so bad I just wanted to die”
Gloria Esperanza Reyes, speaking of her torture in Honduras, where electric wires were attached to her breasts and vagina
“They always asked to be killed. Torture is worse than death.”
José Barrera, Hoduran torturer
Turkey, July 14, 1999, the police break into the home of a Kurdish family and announce they want to take the two daughters -Medine 14, and her younger sister Devran – i for questioning. “I headed for the bedroom to get dressed,” said Devran later, “but Medine...went straight to the window and jumped.”
Medine's mother explained : “My daughter, you see, preferred death to being tortured once again.”
“Torture might last a short time, but the person will never be the same”
Amnesty International report
“No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture.”
The convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman o Degrading Treatment or Punishement, Article 2, S
From the book “Rogue State” by William Blum