Art is not a weak or irrelevant force: when everything is closed and the economy is in ruins, with mob brutality becoming the rule, there is immense release through the arts.
If the MEK is such an obscure, irrelevant force, why are the mullahs are so concerned that for years they have kept the issue of shackling the leading resistance force a major part of their negotiations with the international community?
In Britain, for example, Facebook made the formerly popular Bebo all but irrelevant, forcing AOL to sell the site at a huge loss two years after it bought it for $850 million.
Or think about AT&T, which a quarter-century ago was broken up into a group of companies that, in due course, found that the technology had changed enough that they were all but irrelevant, forcing a new merger wave.
Despite the not infrequent occurrence of small population sizes where drift would be expected to be most efficacious, random genetic drift was considered an irrelevant evolutionary force in ecological genetics because natural selection was viewed as being particularly strong during periods of population decline.
Outflanked and irrelevant, the French forces at the Maginot Line surrendered a few weeks later.' Elsewhere, Rushdie riffs and he rants.
"Many go from making hundreds of decisions per day about their learning -- while at home, using their favorite technology -- to a cash-strapped, often irrelevant environment that forces them to raise their hand whenever they want to ask a question," said Draper, who oversees technology in the Canyons, Utah, school district.
"I'm considered a great builder, by everybody," he said, adding that cost is irrelevant because he would force Mexico to pay for the structure.
By the 1970s, the British Communist party was almost irrelevant as an electoral force, but its senior members included high-ranking trade unionists, and its organisation was partly built around a national network of shop stewards.
Blur had been pop stars, briefly, when There's No Other Way made the top 10 in 1991, but had since been made to look irrelevant by the visceral force of bands such as Nirvana.
When Aaron Porter of the National Union of Students was seen to be "dithering" over whether or not to support the protests, there were immediate calls for his resignation – and in subsequent weeks the NUS has proved itself worse than irrelevant as an organising force for demonstrations.
