This is not a blog
The word casbah (or qasbah) denotes the walled citadel of many North African cities and towns. This website hosts few personal facts and points of view plus some issues I downloaded from the web. When I registered this domain back in 1999, many years before Facebook, Pinterest, Flickr, Cloud technology etc. etc., I did so to put pictures and guitar tabs somewhere. Most of the pictures are in hidden folders for my friends' eyes only.
Hence the name casbah.

about

bio
Acrdncoig to a reecnt reaersch, it's not ipormantt how the sginle leettrs are ordreed in a wrod. The olny imrtapont tihng is the frist and lsat letetr are in the rghit palce.
We dno't raed snilge ltreets but the wolhe wrod. And so that's why most people call me Rolando or Ronaldo! Those are more common names than Roldano.
Concerning my family name I sketched a distribution map of De Bastiani in the Italian territory.

More

China
I have been interested in China since my trip to Hong Kong in 1997. I am a student of 普通话, Pŭ Tōn Guà (Chinese language) and what you see below are the ideograms of my Chinese name (Yè Yī Fán).
Ye Yi Fan

Roots
Tribil Inferiore-Dolenji Tarbij - Where my roots run deep.

Milestones

The right side
"When someone is 55 percent right, that's very good and there's no use wrangling. And if someone in 60 percent right, it's wonderful, it's great luck, and let him thank God. But what's to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he's 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal."
Quoted from The Captive Mind by Polish winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1980 Czesław Miłosz.

Patriotism
Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind.... And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded with patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader, and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.

Populism
The recipe for populism is universal. Find a wound common to many, find someone to blame for it, and make up a good story to tell. Mix it all together. Tell the wounded you know how they feel. That you found the bad guys. Label them: the minorities, the politicians, the businessmen. Caricature them. As vermin, evil masterminds, haters and losers, you name it. Then paint yourself as the savior. Capture the people’s imagination. Forget about policies and plans, just enrapture them with a tale. One that starts with anger and ends in vengeance. A vengeance they can participate in.
(Andrés Miguel Rondón, Caracas Chronicle)