את מבנה האתר שינינו מעט

What to make of Qaddafi's 90+ minute rambling speech at the UN? Perhaps he's following the suggestion found in Mark Helprin's Digital Barbarism, that a little long-windedness in a soundbyte culture never hurt anyone. Helprin's intentional obliqueness extends as far as offering us untranslated Hebrew text on the dedication page (hence the title of this post). In the preface he says that the chapter titles are opaque by design:

"[this book] is partly a memoir that is in service of a principle it espouses - that man need not model himself, the way he lives, and by derivation even his arguments, after machines."

Okay admittedly that's quite a leap from Qaddafi expounding on jet lag and who killed JFK, other than to say his lack of coherence was not at all machine-like. Helprin writes,

"in its complexity, mystery, intelligence, and beauty, humanity is unexcelled as a masterwork of God and nature. Why then must its qualities be filtered from argument and cleansed from reason as if they were pollutants?"