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Cultural Branding Strategies: Leveraging National Identity for Economic Prosperity
In the vast arena of international politics, where nations battle for influence and power, the art of branding cities or institutions/buildings plays a crucial role. By understanding the historical context, concepts, and authors behind this strategy, we can explore how states can effectively capitalize on cultural branding to enhance their geopolitical strategies and achieve economic prosperity. More
An Age of Hollow Words and Mutilated Souls
The history of marriage goes back thousands of years and has looked and been defined in different ways over time and in different corners of the world. But the modern understanding of the idea of marriage in most Christian or former Christian countries comes from the religious union between a man and a woman.This is an institution encouraged and lifted to a dignified place by Jesus Christ through His attendance of the wedding in Cana of Galilee. It was there that He chose to perform His first miracle.And it was within the stability of a family that Christ chose to come into the world, in a place and from a people who had a very particular understanding of marriage. So, the dignity of marriage originates from such a tradition, one of both man and woman serving God together in union. More
Warfare Economics and the Proper Use of Individual Incentives on the Battlefield
The science of economics has oftentimes proven itself to be more than capable at exceeding the role most people, especially those foreign to its potential, would grant it – the mere study of the economy – by having direct applications into many other fields. One need only read through the pages of David Friedman’s famous book Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life (1996) in order to get a grasp on how economic thinking can be used to improve the way of tackling his daily challenges. Furthermore, in his academic course on Price Theory (1986), Friedman’s writings feature an entire chapter called The Economics of Love and Marriage, which uses economic principles to describe how the marketplace of love works and how certain policies may be implemented to improve the societal outcomes related to it. More
Bad Political Decisions as an Engine for Change
Progress, in all its forms, implies the destruction of the status quo and its replacement by a new one. It cannot exist without emancipation or change, without the evolution of the old into the new, or even the disappearance of an element giving place to a novel one. Considering this view, progress can be viewed as a (r)evolutionary process. By changing the status quo, the foundations of a society shake or cease to exist. More
America – Pirouettes Based on Geopolitical Events of the World
On June 10, 2022, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin held a meeting for over an hour with his Chinese counterpart, Wei Fenghe, in Singapore on the occasion of the 19th edition of the Shangri-La Dialogue. This meeting follows President Joe Biden's maiden tour of Asia, ending on May 24, 2022, after visits to South Korea and Japan to reassure traditional allies of American support in the face of what they describe as aggressive behavior by China and North Korea. Given the resumption of the conflict in Ukraine in February 2022 and the limits of American resources, especially given turbulent domestic economic and social conditions, is the old pivot to Asia still possible? More
Early Christendom: Chrysalis of the West
So powerfully did the transformational grammar of the new religion, Christianity, change the western world that Arnold Toynbee has described the church as “the chrysalis out of which our Western society emerged.”[1] Historians have both praised the church for preserving the artifacts of the pagan cultures it converted and faulted it for absorbing too many of their elements into its life’s blood. While Pitirim Sorokin regarded the resulting fusion as a genuine synthesis, others have just as firmly maintained that Christianity created an unstable syncretism, pointing to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as evidence of cultural disintegration and growing secularization.[2] But this has always been a source of disagreement, even among Christians themselves, and the debate continues unabated. More
State and Prosperity
The strong global recession, caused by the containment measures imposed by the Covid-19 outbreak, as well as the aid granted by many countries to people and companies, has led to increased budget spending and public debt all over the world. This phenomenon has been added to the expansionary monetary policy of central banks, which in many cases has gone as far as monetary financing of a large part of public debt, which has led to the rise of inflation. In addition, the “relaunch” measures and the economic consequences of the war in Ukraine have led to the increase and intensification of the state’s intervention in economic activity and the continuous weakening of the market economy, on whose proper functioning depends on the well-being reached by a part of the world at the beginning of this third millennium. More
My First Encounter with Corneliu Coposu
There is no reference in my Securitate file to the above episode, nor to that involving my contact with Corneliu Coposu who, after the 1989 revolution, became President of the National Peasant Party, although a report of my visit to him appears in Coposu’s own file. I had come to Bucharest that same August in 1986 with my two young children and deposited them with their grandparents while I pursued research into British contacts with Iuliu Maniu, the head of the National Peasant Party, during the Second World War. My Romanian friends told me that a key person to talk to on this subject was Corneliu Coposu, Maniu’s personal assistant. I was given his telephone number but warned, at the same time, that his house was under surveillance by the Securitate because the poker evenings that Coposu arranged with his septuagenarian friends were regarded as a cover for reviving the NPP. I telephoned Mr Coposu, explained briefly who I was, and we agreed a time when I should go to his house. He then warned me that visits to his home were monitored. Thanking him, I added that if he would be kind enough to receive me, then I was unconcerned as to what others might think. More
What Do People in Romania Think of Capitalism?
How do the Romanians feel about capitalism and the free market economy, and how do the attitudes in Romania compare to those in 33 other countries? This was the subject of a survey conducted between June 2021 and December 2022 in a total of 34 countries. The survey was conducted in the United States and in small, medium and large countries in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa. Representative samples of around 1,000 respondents were surveyed in each country.In Romania, Ipsos MORI surveyed a representative sample of 1,000 people from June 17 to 21, 2022. In total, 34.550 respondents took part in the survey. More
Natural Disasters as Economic and Political Weapons
Kurdistan, or the impossibility of its existence, represents a millennial problem in the heart of the Middle East, being moreover one of the most controversial and at the same time current dilemmas of modern history. The most recent materialization of this conflict is represented by the aftermath of the earthquakes in Turkey at the start of February, when the tragic natural catastrophe underscored the maintenance of the neglect of the Kurdish community by the Turkish state. The weaponization of the earthquake against the Kurds leads the ostracized community into leaving the Turkish territory, a goal that the Turkish state has had for hundreds of years. More so, this natural disaster is not the first one that the Erdogan-led Turkey has used against the Kurds, blaming the Kurdish party for the start of the 2021 wildfires. However, President Erdogan is not the first one to neglect the Kurdish provinces when they were hit by natural disasters, the earthquakes from 2003 and 1975 being prime examples of the matter. More
Eurostat: Young People Materially and Socially Deprived, Highest Proportion Recorded in Romania
In 2021, the EU Member States with the highest levels of young people (aged 15-29 years) at risk of poverty or social exclusion were Romania (36.1 %), Greece (35.4 %) and Bulgaria (31.8 %), while the lowest rates were found in Czechia (10.6 %), Slovenia (11.5 %) and Malta (14.0 %), according to Eurostat.The situation in our country was extremely bad for the 15 – 19 age group, where the percentage goes up to 44.7% (see Figure 1), well above Greece (36.3%) and Bulgaria (36.2%), and a little better for the 20 – 24 age group (33.5%, under Denmark 43.8%, Finland 35.4%, Greece 37.1% and Bulgaria 34.4% ) and the 25 – 29 age group (28.1%, under Greece 32.7%, Italy 31.9%, Denmark 30.2% and Spain 30.0%), in the European context. More
“Twin transitions” and (the Transformation of) Art
The future of what is currently happening in the European Union (although the process we are discussing is ultimately and inevitably global) constitutes the beginning of the “twin transitions” that may find us, decades from now, in the following scenario: we will start our day in a smart and clean house (energetically and aseptically), looking out the VR window that shows us the weather status up to the air quality level and indicates the optimal time to spend outside from a health care index perspective; we will have breakfast after seeing the sustainability score of the menu’s food, with delicacies, by the way, coming from high-tech farmers who take care of their crops by buttoning in the cloud, connected to Big Data, open source weather platforms, fine sensors, and autonomous tractors; we use the washing machine when the dynamic electricity tariff is in our favour, for we are brave prosumers and suppliers in the grid, thanks to strategically mounted solar panels on the roof; we go to work, not yet counting among the lucky digital nomads with flexible telework regime, 4/24, 4/7, waiting for some well-deserved e-leisure hours reserved, for example, for culture; we have the choice between immersing ourselves, through the AR headset, in the captivating Metaverse for a play (where, no, we will not be spectators, but we will play Horatio, in Hamlet, replying to the immortal Laurence Olivier’s avatar) or we can order a Cézanne exhibition at home, as in the old days, at the Tate Museum (projected 16K on the white and versatile walls of the 3D printed and luxuriously finished house by Obi-One, the painter robot of the 100th Romanian unicorn); nostalgic, tired of e-books, we take a book from the vintage memories shelf and sit under the retro-futuristic lamp, in which an old LED bulb from Electromagnetica stubbornly functional has fused with the glass recovered from our great-great-great-grandfather’s oil lamp, a hero at Mărășești WWI clash. Always and everywhere, the cultural-artistic experience integrates us (as well as distinguishes us) in/from the environment, together with our exosomatic extensions (of instrumental, technological nature). More
