Rubrics » Bridging News
Conservatism and Spiritual and Social Recovery
As I read newspapers, popular magazines, listen to National Public Radio, watch cable television, attend Catholic Mass, and work with American academics at the deracinated institutions called colleges, I am conscious that American secular culture has had at least one hundred years to effect a closing not only of the American mind but of the American soul as well. That is visible in large protests and vandalism and looting in the context of something called “Black Lives Matter.” Few if any except the revolutionaries who teach “community activists” in such matters are aware that the ideal to which they are responding was first conceived by Lenin in his 1902 essay, “What is to be Done?” In that essay Lenin outlined the methods that he believed would achieve a successful revolution in Czarist Russia. His methods included a) maintaining large non-Party organizations with mass membership controlled by communists; b) concentration on agitation of single ideas to foment discontent; and c) organized activism aimed at “the masses,” not exclusively the “proletariat.” More
The Fourth Estate. And So Forth
The press today makes it easier to formally prove one’s credentials as a journalist as opposed to one’s calling for the profession or even vocation, through personal probity and other underlying yet necessary qualities. You may say that this utterance is an opinion, a matter of taste or a value judgement. You may even call it confirmation bias. There is nothing wrong with such thoughts, but we say about journalism that, before values enter into the equation, it must concern itself with verifiable facts and objectivity. More
Are Planned Economies Our Destiny?
“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I am from the government and I am here to help”. These were not the words of an anarchist or a person opposing the concept of the state in general. These were the words of the head of probably the largest government in the world, President Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan saw very clearly that government should have limits and should leave most decisions to the free choice of free citizens. He followed the principle that the state should only do those things which only the state can do. More
Football-ism – The Ultimate Global Ideology
People(s) worshiping different deities and subject to different kinds of democracies, people(s) coming from older cultures or younger countries, all feel at home in the stands of stadiums or in the TV-oriented armchairs during football World Cups. Savian was yards away from Russian playgrounds and Vlad was inches away from HD screens. They play a friendly match in TMFI. More
The Professionalization of the Public/Political Decision-Making
The professionalization of the public decision-making involves, of course, two distinct semantic aspects: a) turning the politician - the public decision-maker into a professional; b) ensuring the professional character of the public decision-making process.The first requires that the person making public decisions (in general, the politician) become an expert in public decision-making. This is possible and even desirable, but here the term expert must be given a particular meaning. Typically, we call the expert a person who can formulate explanations (based, of course, on theories), that is, they can establish effective causality. In this sense, the politician cannot become an expert, because there would be a contradiction in terms. Therefore, according to the first significance of the professionalization of the public decision, the politician must become a professional not in the theoretical foundation of the public decision, but in the ethical foundation of it. The professional’s expertise in public decision-making will therefore consist in his ability to capture the common (or majority) interest of the community, to translate this interest into a political target and to co-ordinate social action towards achieving this goal (the content of the leadership concept). The “profession" of a politician therefore presupposes a specific competence, namely to build visions, to formulate (in interpersonal language) the objectives associated with those visions, to implement social mechanisms and procedures to achieve the objectives and to ensure the ethics of the distribution of public goods generated by achieving the objectives (i.e. the social justice). As we can see, the professionalism of the politician is not about designing means but designing goals. As goals do not imply an effective causality, but, as has been shown above, a teleological one, it results that the politician, the political decision-maker or the public decider, cannot be both an expert in the instrumental sense of the term. More
21st Century Ethics and the New Jus Vitae Necisque?
In the United States, an important conversation is taking place, the results of which might set a worldwide precedent for the framework of future ethical debates. While European countries have laws which generally ban abortion after the first trimester, when the baby becomes better formed and (as far as science knows at this point) is able to feel pain, in the US, late term abortions, that is, those which take place after the first trimester, are being celebrated by some as a sign of freedom. In fact, recently, a law was passed in New York which permits abortion after 24 weeks, that is a little after 5 months. Other such laws are being prepared in the country. This has reopened disputes on both sides of the political spectrum. Some call for no restrictions on any type of abortion and gratuity of services related to it. Others call for a complete ban on the practice. More
The War of the Worlds: Macro-societies in Battle Against Micro-organisms
As the lockdown has been relaxed (in Romania, the homeland of TMFI), yet social distancing is still a sacrosanct recommendation, we release the second episode from our collection of editorial products, this time from our in-house harvest. We hope that the variety and the quality of these “corona-readings” to function as a cure equally for unjustified anxieties and for mind hibernation. More
Communicative Action, Subjective Perception and the Hermeneutics of Capital Structure
This article highlights the implications of the subjective communication and interaction between economic agents in the process of expanding individual and implicitly social knowledge. Each economic actor goes through a set of unique experiences, which facilitates the emergence of unique expectations and perceptions. As such, these perceptions will lead to a distinct allocation of resources. Therefore, I try to emphasize the importance of expanding knowledge in socio-economic evolution, as a mechanism of exchanging unique experiences. More
NASA & SpaceX Launch – A New Milestone in Space Exploration
Over the years, space has proven to be one of the few topics that captivated people from all around the world to follow the same TV programming or online event at the same time. Individuals with different backgrounds, ethnicities, races, and religions were united by the same curiosity of the unknown. Even in our most difficult moments, space has succeeded in bringing us a hope light for a better future. Earlier this year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and private American space company, SpaceX, provided the world a glimmer of hope at a time where people around the planet are suffering through the COVID-19 pandemic and are protesting systemic racism. Saturday, May 30, 2020, will forever be significant in history as a giant leap forward in cosmic exploration because it marked the first time a commercial company launched humans to space, and it was the first crewed launch from America in the last nine years. NASA and SpaceX have written history, and the 10.3 million online viewers are part of it, as it was the most-watched NASA event online ever.[1] More
The Bear Stearns of Romania
Despite a lot of public rhetoric and noisy politics, the Romanian episode of the recent Great Financial Crisis has not been adequately chronicled to date.True, in Romania, a country with a low – but increasing – financialization rate by Western standards, there has not been any Lehman Brothers-style bankruptcy in the local banking industry. However, despite repeated public statements made, since the beginning of the Crisis, by Mugur Isărescu and other officials at the National Bank of Romania (BNR), that the Romanian financial system is crisis-proofed, there has actually been a Bear Stearns-type of failure not long after the global panic spread into the country as well. More
“Search Neutrality” Is Not Possible
Search neutrality – the idea that any search engine should reveal all and each of the Internet’s entries without favor, i.e. unbiasedly – is on its rise. But then again, what is an unbiased search engine? Is it the one that gives most results or the one that gives best results? Google’s secret in the early 2000s was to rank the results. Is that the best approach? More
Is Small still Beautiful? A Swiss Perspective
Small polities have different advantages. Because of their smallness, they can be more efficient; this allows them to be alert to opportunities. Because of their social tissue, small polities have the advantage of self-regulating through bonding and bridging, i.e. through social capital, rather than through bureaucracy. Social capital increases with its usage and is a resource for implementing novelties based on alertness. The third factor that contributes for small polities being at an advantage is competition – in its economic and political sense. There is a cautious note, however: not all small polities can mobilize these factors. More
