If there are doors there will be knockers.

Value analysis is first subjective.

Definition of value: Anything that creates an impact.

Value can be positive and/or negative.

Negative value can be as much as an objective as positive value.

Are you concentrating on the father or the son?

The father was a knocker at doors.

Perhaps he was good at that.

Assess the impact.

@Tabatha

Some non-entity. Just look at his progeny.

Karsten Xuereb is Executive Director for the Valletta 2018 Foundation having previously been responsible for cultural matters at the Permanent Representation of Malta to the European Union in Brussels (2006-2011).

He holds a Master of Arts degree in European Cultural Policy and Management from the University of Warwick which he attended as a Chevening scholar (2004-2005). He is a member of the U-40 UNESCO Network for the promotion of the UNESCO Convention on cultural diversity and has contributed to various publications.

Actually I should have written “tumbling”!

@ Baxxter

Don’t bother. Another non-entity.

Does anyone want me to lay into Charles Xuereb? Can I have a show of hands? Because I haven’t started yet.

By the way, even though I love your Mauritius barb, I wasn’t referring to Marie Benoît.

I was talking about intellectuals, government officials and diplomats and such – people who should know better, but who’ve climbed the career ladder through unctuousness and laghqizmu.

In Malta, it pays never to contradict anyone.

The bug has spread everywhere. Take Simon Busuttil. He could do away with this nonsense because his position is secure and he doesn’t need to climb any career ladder.

He needn’t suck up to anyone. And yet he still thinks Maltese. Oh well. To each his own.

Anyone “impressed” by Evarist Bartolo would have needed something from him, Daniel Rondeau included. An aye, or nay, an introduction. Or simply, information.

Information, to a “prolific writer”, is of high value. They work with available sources.

If there is a publisher and an open contract, it’s easy. If it’s down to self-publishing, it’s most likely an ego-tool.

Or one of self-preservation: a contained talking point; a CV definer. Rather than a vital message to pass on.

Such is the standard set, recognised and exploited.

The pity is that under the principle “any attention is welcome” such men go from weak scenario to weak scenario their life long without the accomplishment of anything worthy in between.

L-aqwa li jghaddi.

Kommunist ippatentjat mimli hdura u ghira, u sangisug minn dejjem. Niftakru minn zmien meta kellu xi ghoxrin sena u xaghru u mohhu kienu t-tnejn qishom raddiena tal-ghanqbut.

Mauritius.

Ouch!

Let me elaborate, because this is rather an interesting story.

Varist was bezzers with Daniel Rondeau, himself bezzers with Bernard Kouchner the arch-Champagne Socialist. Rondeau famously writes one book per diplomatic posting, and not much else. It was his staff who handled all the nasty business during the Libyan War.

[Daphne – Daniel Rondeau: an extremely lazy, self-involved and lackadaisical poseur much given to pseudo-intellectual wanks in the presence of breathless elderly women and washed-up 1970s tossers who are even more firmly divorced from the 21st century than he is and so don’t fully realise what sort of human anachronism they’re actually dealing with. Fr Peter a la Francaise, with bells on.]

Anyway. Rondeau wrote a highly patronising book called (cringe) ‘Malta Hanina’. It was obviously praised to high heaven by all the Maltese laghqa, including former presidents and members of those silly wine guilds. In his book, Rondeau speaks of a Maltese community of Francophiles and Bonapartistes.

Now to blokes and blokettes of a rational turn of mind, like you and I, this all sounds like a load of tosh wrapped in little gold foil wrappers and arranged in a pyramid. But so laghqin are the Maltese glitterati, that they all stuck to Rondeau like magnets during his term of office. Including of course Bartolo, who benefited from the “six degrees of separation effect”.

Surely, went the cogwheels, if Varist is admired by Rondeau, then surely Varist is a glitterato himself. Ergo Taghna Lkoll, and the rest is history.

And people who should know better wore their tongues out with the bootlicking. The ones who didn’t go that far smiled and acquiesced and said nothing. Too much at stake, ma tarax!

Alas, and so the darkness spreads. All because of laghqizmu.

[Daphne – It’s not laghqizmu, H.P. It’s full-on Backwoods Bunny Syndrome, a major symptom of which is pathological ignorance caused by insufficient exposure to the real world, or the total absence of it. Mauritius circa 1975 does not suffice. It was, at the time, even more backward than Malta, which is saying rather a lot. You would be amazed how many people move about the globe while remaining resolutely insulated from it.]