From Sophie's front desk — Sunday, July 12
BBC News — read the full story
A decision came through this morning from Paris: Marine Le Pen's conviction stands, but the cage door swung wide open. France's Court of Appeal upheld her embezzlement conviction for €2.8 million in EU funds, then sentenced her to three years with one year under electronic monitoring—and cut her ban on public office from five years to fifteen months already served. She had said she wouldn't run for president if forced to wear the tag; the numbers have just changed that calculus. Krishnamurti has the first word today, then Epictetus.
What opposition becomes is the establishment. She built her movement against embezzlement and corruption—the precise crimes of the system she claimed to oppose. Convicted of embezzling. The legal machinery is adjusted, not to absolve her but to shorten the constraint. The ban is reduced.
She remains viable. I have seen this before. A person fights the system, gains the attention of crowds, and there is already—in the certainty of their eyes—the arrogance of having been right. The system does not crush them. It adapts.
Makes room. Continues. Now: either she campaigns under electronic surveillance, or her successor does. The National Rally moves forward. The contradiction is visible but absorbed, never answered.
COMMENTARIES ON LIVING SERIES III CHAPTER 4 'CAN ONE KNOW WHAT IS GOOD FOR THE PEOPLE?'THERE WERE SEVERAL of us in the room. Two had been in prison for many years for political reasons; they had suffered and sacrificed in gaining freedom for the country, and were well-known. Th…
Krishnamurti: You may not spend ten years in prison but you may spend a year or two in pursuit of false hope, in pursuit of false activity, in doing something to which you have given your whole being, your whole devotion or thought, and then find it empty. We have done that, hav…
THERE WERE SEVERAL of us in the room. Two had been in prison for many years for political reasons; they had suffered and sacrificed in gaining freedom for the country, and were well-known. Their names were often in the papers, and while they were modest that peculiar arrogance of…
B: Yes, it says that is the highest value, yes. So do we accept that and say that is just a fact? K: That is, a prisoner, I realize I am a prisoner within this limitation. B: Some people get used to it and say, 'I accept it'. K: I won't accept it. My mind says there must be …
Question: I have spent ten years of my best life in prison for my political activities which promised great things. Now there is disillusionment, and I feel completely burnt out. What am I to do?
A court has convicted someone and then narrowed the punishment until the conviction no longer excludes her from power. This is not contradiction. This is the machinery of a state finding its way around the obstacle it created. The conviction stands — the form of justice is satisfied. The ban on office was five years, then three, now effectively fifteen months already served. The tag is one year at home. These are real consequences, real constraint.
But they are also calculable: she can campaign anyway. The state has discovered it cannot afford to truly exclude her, so it excludes her in a shape that permits her anyway. I saw Rome do this constantly. A magistrate would be prosecuted for theft from the provincial treasury — the trial was real, the verdict was guilty — and then sentenced in such a way that his status remained available to him. The law was satisfied. The man remained in the game. What looked like accountability from the outside was accommodation from within.
The shape is always the same: *the institution that holds power convicting the figure who threatens it, then finding the punishment calibrated so finely that conviction and candidacy become compatible.* The court is not protecting justice. It is protecting itself against the cost of actually enforcing it. Who absorbed the consequence here? Not the candidate — she campaigns. Not the state — it claims to have judged fairly. The cost went into the middle distance, into the machinery's own credibility, which is already eroding. That is the only thing that moved.
that the fulfillment of his prophecies could be manifested, before making a decision for or against the Governor’s name being used in the present presidential campaign as a candidate for the office. The public fumed and growled at the delay; yet it was the inevitable, and there w…
the day after she saved him from the clutches of the rebels. She had no home since the trouble in the family of Francisco R. Cantu, and he wished to give her his protection. She was now seated in her pretty parlor connected with the suite of rooms she occupied in her future perma…
about the result of the presidential campaign. They were more interested in the cause of humanity at large; in developing in the heart of each a desire to come in touch with Nature, with God. At an early stage of the presidential campaign, the party who ran in the “stray horse,” …
aid us in securing proof which will eventually bring the ‘Plunger from Kansas’ to meet justice—_for spite_. He went out of the other life like a flash—whether by his own hand or by the hand of some wrathy creditor, man never knew. “The many homes made desolate by his dishonest sc…
City. She said that she was left an orphan after he had robbed her father, and her struggles for a livelihood, alone and unprotected, were, even yet, when she thought of them, a horrible nightmare to her. No further witnesses were called, nor did others present themselves. Judge …
BBC News carried the piece. The paradox Krishnamurti saw holds: build a movement against corruption, and eventually the movement finds ways to forgive corruption when it's yours—that's where power lives. That's Old News for today.