Rubrics » Bridging News
Trump’s First Quarter
Donald Trump’s history as a real-estate tycoon and a TV star relied on and enhanced certain qualities which were on display during the presidential campaign, where he managed to confound his opponents and energize the people, thereby obtaining their votes. The main message of Trump’s campaign was and still is “America First” which, initially, was interpreted by onlookers as being a revival of the Monroe Doctrine and of the sentiments expressed in Washington’s farewell address, but then it morphed into a general reassessment of US foreign policy and trade: Russia, China, NATO, Germany, Japan, South Korea, NAFTA, TPP, the Mexican Wall. More
Considerations on North Korea
The “hermit kingdom” of North Korea is back in the news, at the center of a new round of exchanges of bellicose declarations, underpinned by failed tests for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that, nevertheless, show the impressive progress of the country’s indigenous program. The missile capabilities are meant to provide a delivery device for the country’s nuclear weapons, the other great program beset by a string of failures and shoestring successes. Western observers are now attempting to “read the tea leaves” in order to predict when the country will have achieved the ability to threaten the continental United States, while the threat to its immediate neighbors, South Korea and Japan, remains real but uncertain. The weapon systems involved are complex and, as has been suggested of the recent failed test, prone to cyber-attacks and sabotage through the component supply chain. Rather, the immediate threat to a country like South Korea is all of the conventional artillery pointed at its capital, which would make flattening Seoul in a matter of hours a foregone proposition. With Donald Trump at the helm of the US and sending carrier groups in the vicinity, a man given to grand gestures as negotiating bids, the latest tensions with North Korea seem momentous, as if some form of denouement to the regime in Pyongyang is looming. The form it would take is critical to its neighbors, who fear both the ways in which the country can lash out violently, as well as the consequences of a collapse of power, such as millions of refugees trying to cross land borders or internecine warfare. More
Culture and Property Rights
The International Book Fair Bookfest 2017 gave me the opportunity to exchange some thoughts, with quite exquisite and exigent readers, on my recent work – Spiritualitate, materialitate și proprietate. Cultura mea, cultura ta, cultura noastră, cultura lor (Editura ASE, 2016) [Spirituality, Materiality and Property. My Culture, Your Culture, Our Culture, Their Culture]. Addressed for now mainly to a Romanian readership (by its publication language) the book basically hosts a worldwide-relevant question, though not so frequently or explicitly asked (to say the least): “Is culture a public(ly enforceable) good or a private(ly producible) one?”. The question is being complicated by the fact that the culture deals with consensual, socializing, public values (we speak of preferences, traditions, beliefs, which, by definition, unite before they separate), as it is also true that the human person is the one who gives meaning to social aggregates (the methodological individualism, despite hasty amendments is crux in social sciences). Or speaking in “economics” (nota bene: the science of human action in a (praxeo)logical, commonsensical, un-sterilely-sophisticated expression): What makes a culture become a Culture? (Economic) freedom or (political) interventionism? More
China Welcomes Representatives from over 100 Countries to the First Belt and Road Forum
Last week in Beijing, leaders and officials from dozens of countries and international organizations participated in the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. Here, Chinese leader Xi Jinping reinforced the need for cooperation in order to achieve mutual benefits and push forward economic development in Eurasia. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the “project of the century”, as Xi Jinping called it, aims to develop infrastructure projects such as railways, ports, roads, linking China to Europe and all the countries along the way. This Initiative carries a great importance not only in terms of economic development, but also in terms of a new alternative economic order. China is also developing a new institutional framework for cooperation, with components such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Silk Road Fund, which enhance the geopolitical role. More
Most wanted employers’ top and employees’ salary expectations in 2017
Inspire Group unveils for the first time the results of the 2017 edition of Romania’s Favorite Employers external employer branding survey. The information obtained represents a landmark for the greatest companies’ HR departments, which evaluate the employer branding strategy’s long term objectives. In order to successfully accomplish this project, Inspire Group, with the help of MKOR Consulting, analyzed 211 companies from 20 industries. The survey was conducted on all ages and professional positions from Romania, thus providing an realistic analysis of the labor market. More
Always Betting on God
Forever interacting with a world where both he and the things around him are beyond his reach, man longs for infinity. Although his powers of action are limited by the constraints of time and space, man clings to his reason not only to order the reality of scarcity, but also to probe the mysteries of the beyond. He has only one life ahead to understand what awaits “beyond” and his only guilt is that of not being aware enough of the full importance of this “before”. We were endowed with reason from the very beginning and we use it to productively take part in the social metabolism, otherwise the animal instinct activated by implacable bio-physical-chemical laws would have sufficed. Reason is also the source for the understanding of the world as it is (to us) and of the world as it should be (to us). This assumption leads to the idea that reason is not only the best means to detect temptation but more often than not, the biggest temptation itself. More
The Genesis of a President and the Four Horsemen of the Establishment's Trumpocalypse
Donald Trump’s stunning electoral upset presages a new political realignment within the United States’ two-party system. Hopefully, the end of such a process will be a more competitive system, in which the preferences of the large and increasingly heterogenous American population are better aggregated and reflected in the resulting public policies. More
The Triangle of Terror
A lorry crashes into a crowd of people gathered at the Berlin Christmas fair, killing 12 and injuring 56. At an art exhibition in Ankara, Turkey, Russian ambassador Andrei Karlov is shot dead by a young police officer who shouts Allah’s name and vindictive slogans against military actions in Syria before being gunned down himself by the Turkish police. More
Turkey – in a State of Emergency. What’s Next?
A terrorist attack at the airport, a failed coup, the assassination of the Russian Ambassador in Ankara or the New Year’s Eve massacre, are just some of the events that marked a bloody 2016 for Turkey. At the same time, excluding Syria, Turkey is the state that has witnessed the most terrorist attacks coming from Daesh in the previous year. Moreover, due to the dynamics of regional geopolitical, tensions between Ankara and Washington are growing, the Turks being dissatisfied with the support of the USA for the Kurds in Syria, which has made Fikri Ișık, the defense minister in Ankara, to announce that his country could close the Incirlik Air Base. Obviously, these escalating tensions raise questions about Turkey's future relationship with the West. But beyond foreign policy, Turkey risks sinking internally into a socio-political crisis, coordinated with a possible recession and a possible retry for the army to orchestrate a coup whose effects would throw the country in total chaos. More
Henderson’s Last Warning – in Victory, Possible Defeat
The death of Dr. Donald Henderson in August 2016 went largely unremarked by the wider world. Instead of the evening news, I learned of it from an Economist obituary but, by rights, the event should have been a global opportunity to meditate on his life’s work, which involved saving at least a hundred million people from death by smallpox and another three hundred million from the disfiguring effects of infection. In 1966, the World Health Organization (WHO) was given the task of getting rid of smallpox. Donald Henderson had already been studying the disease in over 50 countries. By 1977, Henderson was observing the last natural recorded case of smallpox and, by 1980, the WHO had announced the success of the Smallpox Eradication Program (SEP), something previously thought unachievable. More
Obama’s Last Hurrahs
With just a few weeks to go until the inauguration of President-Elect Trump’s Administration and his destined-to-be-controversial cabinet, President-Eject Obama (as political pundit Steve Sailer put it) has been and is challenging notions of what a “lame duck” President should do with his time. He has been extraordinarily active in taking actions which Donald Trump would not entertain so lightly. In this, he is hoping to either buttress a lackluster political legacy or to force Trump’s hand with a series of “fait accompli”. More
Technocracy and Millenarism: (Bad) Ideas Never Die
As the U. S. President John F. Kennedy once stated, “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.” Maybe paradoxically, this is especially the case of bad ideas. The fact that some honest social scientists live with the impression that they succeed in evaporating a bad idea or argument usually ends with the condensation of such an idea into another form or recipe. More
