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A Short History of Venezuela’s Liberators
“The devil came here yesterday, and it smells of sulfur still. Yesterday Mr. President of the United States (George W. Bush), whom I call “The Devil”, came here and spoke as if he was the owner of the world…”This was the late President Chavez’s introductory statement at the UN congress held in 2006 in the heart of “Hell” (the UN Headquarters is in New York). During the speech, Chavez also rallied the other political leaders who were present to rise against the hegemonic aspirations of the US which he declared to be an impending danger to the survival of the human species, and all life as we know it.I believe that this statement is an instance of the charisma which Chavez wielded, along with his talent for oratory which inspired not only the Venezuelan people but also a large number of outside entities.To correctly understand the influence of Chavez upon Venezuela, we firstly have to review some pages of history. More
(Corpo)Rational Person(ality)
It is perhaps characteristic of modern times to gather large groups of people who share the same perpetual quest for what is called freedom of expression and action within a free world, to make use of it with every single opportunity they might have. As such, and also due to the possibilities of assembly offered by the Internet, there arises the “popular” attitude that seeks righteousness and pretends a just and fair treatment from each of its components and especially from the big players on the world-wide stage. Over the last few decades, an antagonistic reaction has been artificially maintained against this borderless notion of “the People” and its supposed deadly foe that is conspiring against it – “the Corporation”. More
Power Through Play: Thinking Energy Outside the Box
According to the World Bank (2019), roughly 1 billion people have no access to electricity whatsoever, but a Nigerian-American entrepreneur thinks football might be the solution. How is it possible? The story begins with Harvard graduate Jessica O. Matthews. While in her junior year of college, Matthews co-created the Soccket, a soccer ball that can transform the kinetic energy created from being played with into electricity. Half an hour of motion will create about 3 hours of energy and this could be just the sustainable solution needed to end personal energy poverty. Now the founder and CEO of Uncharted Power, the company named by Forbes “The Anti-Silicon Valley Energy Startup”, Matthews aims to help developing countries achieve sustainability through play. More
Engines of Liberty: American Experiment in Self-Government
Brague’s Challenge. In an American Spectator blog post, “Sin No More,” dated May 1, 2008, Rémi Brague stated a thesis worth exploring: “What cultures that were influenced by the Jewish and Christian religions made of the ideal of liberty that I have been finding in both Testaments is a task for historians. Impartial historians will observe how miserably the ideal and its realization often jarred with one another. On the other hand, they will have to acknowledge that free institutions hardly ever developed in places that were not influenced by Jewish and Christian ideas. Outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, it has been rare for thinkers to suppose that God endowed us with a nature of our own, that freedom is part of that nature, and that it is through the exercise of freedom, and the errors that inevitably stem from it, that we fulfill God’s plan… And when Lord Acton tells us that ‘liberty is not a means to a higher political end; it is the highest political end’, he is echoing voices that can be heard in all the sacred books of our tradition, from the Torah to the epistles of St. Paul”. What follows is a lightly edited excerpt from this writer’s Crossed Swords: Entanglements Between Church and State in America (1984), chapter 5, “The American Commonwealth”. It illustrates the practical ways the ideal and its realization have been imaginatively developed even as they “jarred” with each other. More
Photon(e)s 3.0
Zenobia, by Gelllu Naum – a coloured and fascinating book like a surrealist tableaux. A passage from it inspired me, more precisely the description that Zenobia makes about the narrator. I transferred the description visually, so that the drawing would afterwards born questions, assumptions, and translations of the same text. A sort of snake who swallows its tails, forever, around some enigmatic characters. More
Will We Face an Economic Uncertainty from the Current Political Instability?
By a system instability we must not understand a general fluctuations or oscillations of the system in its entirety. The instability of a system is done by only a few number of its components, but they must be crucial for the system identity/personality (the so called hub components). More, not any fluctuations or oscillations should be qualified as being instability, but only these fluctuations or oscillations which either are unpredictable (in their entirety or partially), or pass beyond a threshold usually accepted. This threshold could be viewed either as size, or as duration. So, the instability is, in fact, much lesser than it is usually considered. More
An International Auction for Romanian Wild Brown Bears
In late August 2017, the Romanian Government, through the Ministry for the Environment, decided to allow the shooting of 140 brown bears in the Carpathian Mountains as an administrative measure to curb the bear population in the country, which in some areas is threatening peasant livestock and even the safety of town dwellers. Although the Government backpedalled on its decision in the face of strong pressure from the public and conservationist groups – who accused it of giving in to the hunting industry’s lobby and spurious bear population statistics –, ultimately reaffirming its ban on the trophy hunting of bears and other protected species in the country, it is worth reflecting on how economics can balance public and private interests in the management and conservation of wildlife. More
The China - Africa Relationship: A Recolonization?
Behind all of the big headlines concerning the 73rd session of the UN General Assembly, there comes the African story which only a few in the print media has really shown interest in. When President Nana Dankwa Akufo-Addo was given the podium to address the assembly, he quickly used the opportunity to clear the air concerning the China-Africa relationship. He told the world to discard any insinuation that the movement of Ghana and some African countries towards China would result in the recolonization of the continent by a new power. He said this is not a uniquely Ghanaian or African phenomenon. “It has not been lost on us that the developed, rich and well-established countries have been paying regular visits to China and seeking to open new economic ties and improve upon existing ones”. What President Nana Akufo was pointing out was the difference between trade and colonization. The benefit of African trade with China is the return in form of investment in infrastructure. Meanwhile, the colonization process involves taking human and natural resources from Africa with no return, and there is nothing the continent can do about it. So, Africa does not perceive it relationship with China as a form of colonization or recolonization, because what they are getting from China has enduring value. More
Breathing Life into Numbers: Power Asymmetry as Revealed by Nodal Analysis in Professor Cezar Mereuță’s Compendium
In his latest book, the esteemed Professor Cezar Mereuță, Ph.D. embarks on a journey that is as ambitious as it is demanding, but also fruitful and rewarding. Writing about Carl Friedrich Gauss’s religious views and opinion of divine revelation, biographer G. Waldo Dunnington remarked that “a book is inspired when it inspires”. The same can be said of Professor Mereuță’s compendium, Analiza nodală – abordare micro și macroeconomică [Nodal Analysis – A Micro and Macroeconomic Approach], insofar as the value of one’s research lies not only in the answers it offers, but also in the questions it generates that necessarily invite more research to further travel the paths the questions point towards. [N.B. The book is published in Romanian for now, but an English version of the research is being taken into consideration by the author. The launch of the Romanian edition: October 29, 2019, under the auspices of the Faculty of International Business and Economics, the Bucharest University of Economic Studies.] More
No Way In, No Way Out
Scratching beneath the surface of socio-political matters results in a multitude of findings and novelties. It is time that enough answers were given to the everlasting questions which naturally follow the inquiry into the reasonableness of dominating conceptions and policies. Gone are the days of a vigorous desire to make up for the “barbarity” of the past and build up ideals on the fertile land of the human mind. Instead of this, we are witnesses to an open confrontation between the remains of this desire (becoming ruinous) and the emergence of a cycle which, although seemingly new, learns from the goods and bads of history and looks forward to putting a halt to the illusions of a well-intentioned world in its bulk, but not so as regards the elites behind it. Following these hypotheses and beliefs, the European and then the national perspective are considered in this article, fundamentally bordered by the individual perspective. We unapologetically dismiss any attempts to “total objectivity”, typical of a world of make-believe. More
Will We 3D-Print Medicine at Home?
It is around 7 AM, little Jim has just been woken up by his mom. He can distinguish clatter of softly gyrating gears from rain taping at his windowsill. There was no reason to focus more on those everyday sounds especially because he heard the same demand again “Can you come to breakfast, finally?” When he gets to the table, he spots his medicines, like usually, little and “zero” shaped. He has problems with swallowing the bigger ones. While looking at them he could spot little difference between layers. The bluish part is preventing him from epilepsy attacks that he has been suffering for years, the other one is navy blue; he was told that those were vitamins. On social media, he saw some anti-medicine printers posts again. That those are causing Down Syndrome or something, he is not about to read this till the end, in his mind is only one thing: if it was not for the 3D printed heart that his father received after the heart attack, they would have never played football again, never hug again and have no more breakfasts together. More
The Crisis of Our Age: A Retrospective Glance
As a political philosophy and system of governance, liberalism is a product of Western Christian civilization. Yet some of its roots are decidedly illiberal. Thomas Hobbes offered an intellectual framework for our burgeoning Provider State, reducing people to hedonistic machines that accept the oversight of a Sovereign who serves as theologian-in-chief. Jean-Jacques Rousseau cited man’s natural compassion in support of rendering everyone collectively dependent on a sovereign General Will, which Jacques Maritain later called an “immanent social God”. Frederic Bastiat dismissed these pretensions by noting how self-serving lawmakers bend morality to justify—via greed and false philanthropy—the legal plunder that divisively empowers them. More
