Thoughts, Essays, and Stories

A Second Reserve Currency

2011-06-17T16:53:00.000-07:00

The weight of history is on us once again, with the slowly changing status of the US dollar as the world’s de facto reserve currency. The importance of the dollar in the world economy is based on history. When the Bretton-Woods exchange rate mechanism was devised in 1944, the US economy was the dominant force in the world and the US dollar the pre-eminent currency.

It naturally followed that the economic system the Allied powers set up at the end of the war would use the US dollar to back the fixed-rate regime. But 20-odd years later, the US chose to pay for the cost of the Vietnam war on credit, and when the imbalances created by Bretton-Woods made continued backing with US dollars impossible, as the US economy was not generating sufficient foreign exchange (FX) reserves, the system broke down and we moved, ultimately, to the floating-rate arrangement we have today. The problem was, the rest of the economy didn’t move with it.

World trade is still priced in US dollars, everything from crude oil to gold to wheat. While on the surface this doesn’t appear to present too much of a problem, it is when the US constitutes a steadily decreasing share of world economic output and world exports. Is it efficient that when a Malaysian rubber exporter sells its product to a Korean car manufacturer, both parties have to transact in US dollars? As the value of the dollar depreciates steadily (for example, it has lost over 15 percent of its value against the euro in the last five years), it makes less and less sense to maintain pricing exclusively in this currency.

The export performance of the OPEC and Asia-Pacific currencies was a causal factor of the financial crisis. The US dollar reserves of these countries were invested in the West, contributing to excess cheap liquidity which found its outlet in sub-prime and corporate lending. The rest is, again, history. The US dollar’s status as "reserve currency" means that the US economy in effect has a free lunch because it will always find buyers of its assets: the rest of the world. The size of the US public sector deficit today is testament to this lack of fiscal discipline.

As investors will always seek risk-free assets, the Federal Reserve can always print Treasury bills. The current situation is not desirable from a number of viewpoints, whether one is a non-US exporter or a bank regulator trying to mitigate against the next financial crash. So what is the solution? Bear in mind this is a long-term project, one cannot set up a reserve currency quickly. An IMF-style special drawing right (SDR) we can dismiss out of hand, as lacking liquidity.

The euro is a genuine contender, but has to sort itself out first as it needs a centralized fiscal management system (some form of political union) as well as a review of whether economically weaker eurozone countries are viable long-term members. That leaves the Chinese renminbi. Although not a freely tradeable liquid currency, it is surely only a matter of time before it does become one. The Chinese economy is only going to be growing over the next 20 years, and as its exports start to dominate world trade, it makes sense to transact more in its currency.

If the world had three reserve currencies to pick from, for both its risk-free asset holdings and its global commerce, would this be a good thing? The answer is a definite "Yes." In the first instance, the kind of global cash flow imbalances we experienced during 2001-2007, and which contributed to the financial crash, would not build up to the same extent. This would contribute to economic stability. Secondly, exporters would be less exposed to FX rate fluctuations, enabling companies around the world to save money on hedge costs. And third, it would enforce an element of fiscal discipline on future US governments, which would be good for the US economy, and by extension the world, in the long run. This is not to underestimate the importance of the US dollar.

It will still be the main currency for payments and risk-free assets in 10, and even 20 years’ time. But the availability of the euro and renminbi on a similar basis – as freely tradeable, liquid currencies and with an open government bond market in China – will mean that central banks can diversify their currency holdings, and there would be less correlated risk with the entire world to the US economy. This can only be a good thing.

Political Spectrum

2011-04-18T15:18:00.000-07:00

A political spectrum is the different political positions arranged in chart by placing them upon one or more geometric axes symbolizing independent political dimensions. Most long-standing spectra include a right wing and left wing, which originally referred to seating arrangements in the 18th century French parliament. According to the simplest left-right axis, communism and socialism are usually regarded internationally as being on the left, opposite fascism and conservatism on the right. Liberalism can mean different things in different contexts, sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right.

One alternative political spectrum offered by the conservative American Federalist Journal accounts for only the "Degree of Government Control" without consideration for any other social or political variable, and thus places "Communism/Fascism" (totalitarianism) at one extreme and "Anarchy" (no government at all) at the other extreme. In 1998, political author Virginia Postrel, in her book The Future and Its Enemies, offered another single axis spectrum that measures one's view of the future; on one extreme are those who allegedly fear the future and wish to control it: stasists, and on the other hand are those who want the future to unfold naturally and without attempts to plan and control: dynamists. The distinction corresponds to the utopian versus dystopian spectrum used in some theoretical assessments of liberalism, and the book's title is borrowed from the work of the anti-utopian classic-liberal theorist Karl Popper.

The terms Right and Left refer to political affiliations which originated early in the French Revolutionary era of 1789-1796, and referred originally to the seating arrangements in the various legislative bodies of France. The aristocracy sat on the right of the Speaker (traditionally the seat of honor) and the commoners sat on the Left, hence the terms Right-wing politics and Left-wing politics.

Political Spectrum Chart

Empiricism

2011-04-12T09:15:00.000-07:00

Empiricism is a philosophical theory of knowledge which asserts that knowledge comes through sensory experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views that predominate in the study of human knowledge, known as epistemology. Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, over the notion of innate ideas or tradition in contrast to, for example, rationalism which relies upon reason and can incorporate innate knowledge. Empiricism then, in the philosophy of science, emphasizes those aspects of scientific knowledge that are closely related to evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world, rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation. Hence, science is considered to be methodologically empirical in nature.

Ground Zero Mosque (Video)

2011-04-11T14:42:00.000-07:00

Ground Zero Mosque Reality Check (Bill Whittle)

Voltaire Views of Religion

2011-04-08T13:53:00.000-07:00

Voltaire, whose real name was François-Marie Arouet, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher. Voltaire did not believe that any single religious text or tradition of revelation was needed to believe in God. Voltaire's focus was rather on the idea of a universe based on reason and a respect for nature which reflected the pantheism of the 18th century. Voltaire's views of Islam and its prophet, Muhammad, can be found in his writings. In a letter recommending his play Fanaticism, or Mahomet to Pope Benedict XIV, Voltaire described the founder of Islam as "the founder of a false and barbarous sect" and "a false prophet." His Essai sur les Moeurs et l'Esprit des Nations, contains much fuller accounts on Muhammad and the founding and spread of his religion as do a number of his polemical works on religion.

Like other key thinkers during the European Enlightenment, Voltaire considered himself a deist, expressing the idea: "What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason."

As for religious texts, Voltaire's opinion of the Bible was mixed. Although influenced by Socinian works such as the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, Voltaire's skeptical attitude to the Bible separated him from Unitarian theologians like Fausto Sozzini or even Biblical-political writers like John Locke. This did not hinder his religious practice, though it did win for him a bad reputation among religious fundamentalists. The deeply Catholic Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote to his father the year of Voltaire's death, saying, "The arch-scoundrel Voltaire has finally kicked the bucket...."

Three-Headed Anti-Christ Monster

2011-02-04T15:06:00.000-08:00

By Carlos Benito Camacho

The most dangerous threat the Western Civilization is facing right now is a three-headed Anti-Christ Monster.

The fundamentals of Christianity is faith in Jesus (you are saved because you believe that he is the Son of God), and forgiveness, that is to say that God forgives you because he loves you, sending his Son (a part of him) to die on the Cross for mankind. On the other hand, the fundamentals of Islam is to kill the infidels (it is literally written in the Quran), that is to say that if an infidel (a non-Muslim) would not convert to Islam he must be killed and the Islamic follower who performs this act of senseless murder is saved and goes to heaven. This is a religiously ingrained pattern of thinking which is deeply intertwined in the fabric of Islamic culture. And, from an anthropological point of view, culture is the patterns of feeling, thinking, and behavior of the individuals that constitute a social group of humans, leaving indelible traces in the environment. These patterns or codes of behavior are induced by parents and transmitted from mother to child (an Islamic woman usually have between 4 and 10 children, whereas an economically well-off European woman would raise only one, if not, just a pet dog would do).

Christianity began as an act of God's love for the human race, sacrificing his Son who gave up his life for the whole humankind; whereas Muhammed initiated the Muslim religion as act of vengeance and hatred, annihilating the polytheistic people who had expelled him from Mecca through a series of bloody battles (one of them was the battle of Badr of 624 AD). Once he had exterminated those who dissented with his religious opinions, he began his holy war of expansion. Thus, more than four centuries before the First Crusade had taken place, the Muslims began the invasion of territories to impose Islam on Gentiles, Christians, and Jews, killing the "infidels" (human beings), destroying the cultural identity of peoples as they went; before the Islamic invasion the Egyptians spoke their own language, and now they speak Arabian, for example. Between 634 and 644, more than four centuries before the First Crusades, Caliph Omar invaded Syria and then took Jerusalem, territories that had been both Jewish and Christian. By 732 AD, three centuries before the Crusades had taken place, the Muslims had seized a huge chunk of the world, as they had expanded from the very small town of Yatreb (Medina) to Persia, Asia Minor, northern Africa, Spain, and southern France. If it had not been for the Frankish Chief Charles Martel and the Christian Visigoths in Spain, the Western Civilization would not have developed and Europe would be completely different from what it is today.

Jesus Christ preached faith, love, and peace. On the other hand, Muhammed, an ordinary man, preached killing. So, what would become of the Western Cilization and mankind if Egypt, like Iran in 1979, falls under the control of an Islamic party, and if Europe can not solve their geopolitical problems arising out of their Muslim population (imagine: Iranian medium range nuclear missiles deployed in Egypt trained on France, Germany, England, etc.; or Iranian nuclear missiles deployed in Venezuela aiming at the most important American cities - a Cuban missiles crisis scenario, but much worst, since an Islamic does not reason). The culprits: European socialism and idealism, American democrats way of thinking, and a left-oriented, anti-Israeli international press. Now the problem the Western Civilization faces is no longer a problem, but a three-headed Anti-Christ Monster: Islam, Chavez's Neo-Communism, and the ever growing drug trafficking (the major cocaine dealer is the Colombian leftist guerrilla movement known as FARC, whom Mr Chavez is assisting not only to freely get the cocaine through Venezuela and Argentina but also to launder the dirty proceeds in Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Argentina. Do not forget that Chavez has signed secret treaties with Iran as he has traveled to that Muslim country several times. And where is the American President's leadership. It seems he has abandoned the honest people of Latin America to their own devices. We feel helpless down here. Please, help us and help the Western Free World from this Three-Headed Monster by forwarding this message to honest, conscious people.

Remember: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing," Edmund Burke

Arthur Schopenhauer

2010-02-01T15:30:00.000-08:00

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) was a German philosopher born in Danzig to Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, who committed suicide. He studied metaphysics and psychology at the university of Göttingen. He became known not only for philosophical clarity, but also for his atheistic pessimism. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the fundamental question of whether reason alone can unlock answers about the world.

An important focus of Schopenhauer was his investigation of individual motivation. Before Schopenhauer, Hegel had popularized the concept of Zeitgeist, the idea that society consisted of a collective consciousness which moved in a distinct direction, dictating the actions of its members. Schopenhauer, a reader of both Kant and Hegel, criticized their logical optimism and the belief that individual morality could be determined by society and reason. Schopenhauer believed that humans were motivated only by their own basic desires, or Wille zum Leben (Will to Live), which directed all of mankind. For Schopenhauer, human desire was futile, illogical, directionless, and, by extension, so was all human action in the world. To Schopenhauer, the Will is a metaphysical existence which controls not only the actions of individual, intelligent agents, but ultimately all observable phenomena. Will, for Schopenhauer, is what Kant called the "thing-in-itself".

Schopenhauer's most influential work, The World as Will and Representation, emphasized the role of man's basic motivation, which Schopenhauer called will. His analysis of will led him to the conclusion that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fulfilled. Consequently, he favored a lifestyle of negating human desires, similar to the teachings of ancient Greek Stoic philosophers, Buddhism, and Vedanta.

Schopenhauer's metaphysical analysis of will, his views on human motivation and desire, and his aphoristic writing style influenced many well-known thinkers including Friedrich Nietzsche.

Cartesian Doubt

2010-01-28T14:34:00.000-08:00

Cartesian doubt is methodological approach whose purpose is to use doubt as a route to certain knowledge by finding those things which could not be doubted. The fallibility of sense data in particular is a subject of Cartesian doubt. Cartesian doubt is a form of philosophical scepticism associated with the writings and methodology of René Descartes.

René Descartes, who was the originator of Cartesian doubt, automatically put all beliefs, ideas, thoughts, and matter in doubt. He showed that his grounds, or reasoning, for any knowledge could just as well be false. Sensory experience, the primary mode of knowledge, is often erroneous and therefore must be doubted. For instance, what one is seeing may very well be a hallucination. There is nothing that proves it cannot be. In short, if there is any way a belief can be disproved, then its grounds are insufficient. From this, Descartes proposed two arguments, the dream and the demon.

Descartes, knowing that the context of our dreams is often life-like, hypothesized that humans can only believe that they are awake. There are no sufficient grounds by which to distinguish a dream experience from a waking experience. For instance, Subject A sits at her computer, typing this article. Just as much evidence exists to indicate that her composing this article is reality as there is to demonstrate the opposite. Descartes conceded that we live in a world that can create such ideas as dreams. However, by the end of The Meditations, he concludes that we can distinguish dream from reality at least in retrospect.

Descartes reasoned that our very own experience may very well be controlled by an evil demon of sorts. This demon, or genius, is powerful enough to control anybody. He could have created a superficial world that we may think we live in.

Descartes believed that doubt can be erased by studying the "first person". This heralded the term "cogito ergo sum" – "I think, therefore I exist".

Immanuel Kant

2010-01-27T16:43:00.000-08:00

Immanuel Kant, or Manuel Kant, (1724 – 1804) was an 18th century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg. Kant was the last influential philosopher of modern Europe in the classic sequence of the theory of knowledge during the Enlightenment beginning with thinkers John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.

Kant established a new widespread perspective in philosophy which has continued to influence philosophy through to the 21st century. He published important works on epistemology, as well as works relevant to religion, law, and history. One of his most prominent works is the Critique of Pure Reason, an investigation into the limitations and structure of reason itself. It encompasses an attack on traditional metaphysics and epistemology, and highlights Kant's own contribution to these areas. The other main works of his maturity are the Critique of Practical Reason, which concentrates on ethics, and the Critique of Judgment, which investigates aesthetics and teleology.

Kant proposed that metaphysics can be reformed through epistemology, suggesting that by understanding the sources and limits of human knowledge we can ask fruitful metaphysical questions. He asked if an object can be known to have certain properties prior to the experience of that object. He concluded that all objects about which the mind can think must conform to its manner of thought. Therefore if the mind can think only in terms of causality – which he concluded that it does – then we can know prior to experiencing them that all objects we experience must either be a cause or an effect. However, it follows from this that it is possible that there are objects of such nature which the mind cannot think, and so the principle of causality, for instance, cannot be applied outside of experience: hence we cannot know, for example, whether the world always existed or if it had a cause. And so the grand questions of speculative metaphysics cannot be answered by the human mind, but the sciences are firmly grounded in laws of the mind.

Kant believed himself to be creating a compromise between the empiricists and the rationalists. The empiricists believed that knowledge is acquired through experience alone, but the rationalists maintained that such knowledge is open to Cartesian doubt and that reason alone provides us with knowledge. Kant argues, however, that using reason without applying it to experience will only lead to illusions, while experience will be purely subjective without first being subsumed under pure reason.

The Danger of Iconography

2009-09-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

The Power and Danger of Iconography

Auguste Comte

2009-06-07T09:24:00.000-07:00

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) was a French philosopher, one of the founders of positivism. Comte was one of the first to designate society as a unified object of enquiry, a central assumption of modernist social science. He held strongly to the idea of an organic totality where the whole is more than its parts.

Auguste Comte was born at Montpellier, southern France, on January 17, 1798. He attended the Lycée Joffre and the University of Montpellier, one of the oldest European universities. Then Comte was admitted to the École Polytechnique in Paris. The École Polytechnique was notable for its adherence to the French ideals of republicanism and progress. In 1822, he published "Plan of scientific studies necessary for the reorganization of society".

In 1823, Comte got married to Caroline Massin, whom he divorced in 1842. In 1826 he was taken to a mental hospital and two months later left the institution without being cured – only stabilized by Massin. He began to work again on his philosophical plan. During this time, he published the six volumes of his Cours.

From 1844, Comte was involved with Clotilde de Vaux, a relationship that remained platonic. After her death in 1846 this love became quasi-religious, and Comte saw himself as founder and prophet of a new "religion of humanity". He published four volumes of Système de politique positive (1851 - 1854).

Auguste Comte died in Paris on 5 September 1857 and was buried in the famous Cimetière du Père Lachaise. His apartment from 1841-1857 is now conserved as the Maison d'Auguste Comte. Comte and Spencer share many positivist assumptions but the latter represents a form of methodological individualism where the “properties of the aggregate are determined by the properties of its units.” Comte and Spencer all share affinities with Darwin’s approach; the idea that the permanence of certain elements is due to their better disposition to adapt in their environment. Hence the extensive use of the organic analogy in Durkheim.

The Positive Philosophy was August Comte's first great work, and in it he propounds his theory that all institutions are based upon the ideas of men which are formed in three successive stages--theology, metaphysics and finally from the positive. When he studies the development of human intelligence, he found that it passes through three stages: 1) The theological; 2) the metaphysical; 3) the scientific or positive. In the theological stage it seeks to account for the world by super-natural beings. In the metaphysical stage it seeks an explanation in abstract forces. In the scientific, or positive, stage it applies itself to the study of the relation of phenomena to each other.

Aristotle

2009-03-22T17:05:00.000-07:00

Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, who wrote on many subjects, which included metaphysics, physics, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology. He was a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great.

Aristotle's works contain the earliest known formal study of logic. They were incorporated into modern formal logic in the late nineteenth century. In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in Christian and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages. Together with Socrates and Plato, Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy.

Aristotle's philosophy dealt with the universal, but he found the universal in particular things, which he called the essence of things, while Plato found that the universal existed apart from particular things, and was related to them as their prototype.

In contrast to the idealism of Plato, who said that the idea ontologically existed for itself, separated in the Topus Hyper Uranus (the World of the Ideas), Aristotle was a realistic philosopher. For him reality is the synthesis of matter and form. That is to say that an object we see in our circumstances can not exist for itself without the matter, nor can the matter stand on its own without the form. A table would not be a table without the solid matter that constitutes it, but the material of which the table is made would not be a table without the form. And the form is the concept, or the idea which the maker of that table held in his mind at the moment he was making it.

Nowdays, the third world countries are full of idealistic leaders who, like Plato, hang onto to ideas which have no substances, that is to say they are not anchored to the real world of actual things. We need realistic leaders, who, like Aristotle, can see the form synthesized and concretized with the material of the real world, and in this world of concrete forms start working on projects which can be realizable.

Rene Descartes

2009-02-09T15:26:00.000-08:00

René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He is considered the father of Modern Philosophy, and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which continue to be studied closely to this day. In particular, his Meditations on First Philosophy continues to be a standard text at most university philosophy departments.

Descartes' influence in mathematics is also apparent, the Cartesian coordinate system allowing geometric shapes to be expressed in algebraic equations being named for him. He is accreditied as the father of analytical geometry. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution.

Descartes was a major figure in 17th century continental rationalism, later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Leibniz, Spinoza and Descartes were all well versed in mathematics as well as philosophy, and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well.

Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, in La Haye en Touraine, Indre-et-Loire, France. At the age of eleven, he entered the Jesuit Collège Royal Henry-Le-Grand at La Flèche. After graduation, he studied at the University of Poitiers, earning a Baccalauréat and License in law in 1616, in accordance with his father's wishes that he should become a lawyer.

Rene Descartes traveled throughout Europe. In 1622 he returned to France, and during the next few years spent time in Paris and other parts of Europe. He arrived in La Haye in 1623, selling all of his property, investing this remuneration in bonds which provided Descartes with a comfortable income for the rest of his life. Descartes was present at the siege of La Rochelle by Cardinal Richelieu in 1627.

In 1628, Descartes returned to the Dutch Republic. In April 1629 he joined the University of Franeker and the next year, under the name "Poitevin", he enrolled at the Leiden University to study mathematics with Jacob Golius and astronomy with Martin Hortensius. In Amsterdam, he had a relationship with a servant girl, Helène Jans, with whom he had a daughter, Francine, who was born in 1635 in Deventer, at which time Descartes taught at the Utrecht University. Francine Descartes died in 1640 in Amersfoort.

Rene Descartes wrote all his major work during the 20 years he spent in the Netherlands, where he managed to revolutionize mathematics and philosophy. In 1633, Galileo was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, and Descartes abandoned plans to publish Treatise on the World, his work of the previous four years. "Discourse on the Method" was published in 1637. Descartes also lays out four rules of thought, meant to ensure that our knowledge rests upon a firm foundation.

Descartes continued to publish works concerning both mathematics and philosophy for the rest of his life. In 1643, Cartesian philosophy was condemned at the University of Utrecht, and Descartes began his long correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. In 1647, he was awarded a pension by the King of France.

René Descartes died on 11 February 1650 in Stockholm, Sweden, where he had been invited as a teacher for Queen Christina of Sweden. The cause of death was said to be pneumonia.

Descartes is often regarded as the first modern thinker to provide a philosophical framework for the natural sciences as these began to develop. In his Discourse on the Method he attempts to arrive at a fundamental set of principles that one can know as true without any doubt. To achieve this, he employs a method called metaphysical doubt, sometimes also referred to as methodological skepticism: he rejects any ideas that can be doubted, and then reestablishes them in order to acquire a firm foundation for genuine knowledge.

Descartes arrives at only a single principle: thought exists. Thought cannot be separated from me, therefore, I exist (Discourse on the Method and Principles of Philosophy). Most famously, this is known as cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"). So, Descartes concluded, if he doubted, then something or someone must be doing the doubting, therefore the very fact that he doubted proved his existence. "The simple meaning of the phrase is that if one is skeptical of existence, that is in and of itself proof that he does exist."

Descartes concludes that he can be certain that he exists because he thinks. But in what form? He perceives his body through the use of the senses; however, these have previously been proven unreliable. So Descartes concludes that the only indubitable knowledge is that he is a thinking thing. Thinking is his essence as it is the only thing about him that cannot be doubted.

Positivism

2009-01-17T16:39:00.000-08:00

Positivism arose in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was a new movement of thought. This movement arose in opposition to the abstractionism and formalism of the transcendental Idealists, who had made nature a "representation" of the ego. The purpose of the new school of thought was to lay greater stress upon immediate experience, upon the positive data obtained through the senses.

The great advances made by the biological, social and economic sciences of the age, and particularly the discoveries concerning electrical energy, favored the emergence of Positivism. Certainly great progress was made in the physical and social sciences during this period. Of particularly great impact upon the development of thought during this period was the hypothesis of the origin of species of Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Darwin's theory is that matter, mechanically and without any intervention of superior forces, developed itself into a multiplicity of living beings by virtue of certain laws inherent in matter itself.

Positivism found a precedent for its doctrines in English Empiricism, which had acclaimed experience as the sole source of human knowledge. At the same time, however, because of the new interpretation it gives to reality, Positivism differs from Empiricism. The new school of thought held that the sole reality is matter which, through internal energy, is mechanically evolved from inferior forms until it attains consciousness in man. Thus, notwithstanding the intention it had of opposing Idealism, Positivism is closely allied to Idealism in its immanentist concept of reality. For this reason, Positivism, like Idealism, has a distinctly Kantian origin, although Positivism and Idealism went their separate ways in applying Kant's teachings to the problem under investigation.

Idealism had developed the thinking ego and had transformed it into an ego endowed with the power of creating reality; Positivism starts with the concept of the thing in itself, divinizes it, and considers it a kind of energy which is able to create all reality, including man. Thus, although Positivism attempts a reversal of the Idealist position, both are occupied with the "creative force" of matter. This "force" Positivism utilizes in formulating its doctrine of evolution.

Friedrich Nietzsche

2009-01-02T10:27:00.000-08:00

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a nineteenth-century German philosopher and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science. Nietzsche used a distinctive German language style and displayed a fondness for metaphor and aphorism. Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism. Friedrich Nietzsche’s thoughts challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality. He believed in life, creativity, health, and the realities of the world we live in, rather than those situated in a world beyond. Central to his philosophy is the idea of “life-affirmation,” which involves an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life's energies, however socially prevalent those views might be. Often referred to as one of the first existentialist philosophers, Nietzsche's revitalizing philosophy has inspired leading figures in all walks of cultural life, including dancers, poets, novelists, painters, psychologists, philosophers, sociologists and social revolutionaries.

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in the small town of Röcken, near Leipzig, in the Prussian Province of Saxony. Nietzsche's parents were Carl Ludwig Nietzsche (1813–1849), a Lutheran pastor and former teacher, and Franziska Oehler (1826–1897), who had two other children: a daughter, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, born in 1846, and a second son, Ludwig Joseph. In 1849, Nietzsche's father died from a brain ailment. When his younger brother died, too, in 1850, the family then moved to Naumburg, where they lived with Nietzsche's paternal grandmother and his father's two unmarried sisters. After the death of Nietzsche's grandmother in 1856, the family moved into their own house.

When Nietzsche turned 14, he began to attend a first rate boarding school, Schulpforta, where he prepared for university studies. At 19 he graduated from Schulpforta and entered the university of Bonn in 1864 as a theology and philology student, but his interests soon shifted exclusively towards philology and philosophy. In 1865, Friedrich Nietzsche accidentally discovered Arthur Schopenhauer’s book “The World as Will and Representation,” in a local bookstore. Schopenhauer’s atheistic vision of the world greatly influenced Nietzsche’s mind. Schopenhauer was especially significant in the development of Nietzsche's later thought. Lange's descriptions of Kant's anti-materialistic philosophy, the rise of European Materialism, Europe's increased concern with science, Darwin's theory, and the general rebellion against tradition and authority greatly intrigued Nietzsche. The cultural environment encouraged him to expand his horizons beyond philology and to continue his study of philosophy.

In 1867 Nietzsche signed up for one year of voluntary service with the Prussian artillery division in Naumburg. However, a bad riding accident in March 1868 left him unfit for service. Consequently Nietzsche turned his attention to his studies again, completing them later that year. Nietzsche received a remarkable offer to become professor of classical philology at the University of Basel. He was only 24 years old and had not completed his doctorate or received his teaching certificate. Despite the fact that the offer came at a time when he was considering giving up philology for science, he accepted. Nevertheless, Nietzsche served in the Prussian forces during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 as a medical orderly. In his short time in the military he experienced much, and witnessed the traumatic effects of battle.

Nietzsche became highly popular and fashionable among the pseudo philosophical intellectuals in the second half of the 20th century. Nietzsche's philosophical starting point was Arthur Schopenhauer and his nihilism. On the other hand, we should not overlook the significant impact of Hegel's philosophy on the development of Nietzsche's thought, for Hegel was the first Western philosopher who attempted to comprehend reality as a process, specifically as a historical process. His radical criticism on Christianity (“God is dead!” and “Christianity is the religion of the slaves and weaklings,” etc.) created various sharp confrontations with and creative activities among theologians. Nietzsche's philosophy is a radical assertion of Individualism in the sense that to do philosophy is to do so as a concrete, particular invidual. It demands the responsibility of the individual as a thinker and a human-being as such.

On January 3, 1889, Nietzsche suffered a collapse which seems to have triggered a psychotic break down. Two policemen approached him after he caused a public disturbance in the streets of Turin. Commentators have frequently diagnosed a syphilitic infection as the cause of the illness. While most commentators regard Nietzsche's breakdown as unrelated to his philosophy, some, including Georges Bataille and René Girard, argue that his breakdown may have been caused by a psychological maladjustment brought on by his philosophy. At least one study has suggested that brain cancer rather than syphilis led to his breakdown and killed him. Others have classified Nietzsche's "madness" as frontotemporal dementia. In 1898 and 1899 Nietzsche suffered from at least two strokes which partially paralyzed him and left him unable to speak or walk. After contracting pneumonia in mid-August 1900 he had another stroke and died about noon on August 25.

Hegel: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis

2008-12-19T11:55:00.000-08:00

The triad thesis, antithesis, synthesis is often used to describe the thought of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel stresses the paradoxical nature of consciousness; he knows that the mind wants to know the whole truth, but that it cannot think without drawing a distinction. Unfortunately, every distinction has two terms, every argument has a counter-argument, and consciousness can only focus on one of these at a time. So it fixes first on the one, then under pressure fixes second on the other, until it finally comes to rest on the distinction itself. Hegel refers to this process of alternation and rest as dialectic.

In other words, the dialectical method involves the notion that the form of historical movement, process or progress, is the result of conflicting opposites. Thus this area of Hegel's thought has been broken down in terms of the categories of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Hegel's philosophy of history embraces the concept that a conflict of opposites is a struggle between actual and potential worlds.

A thesis can be seen as a single idea. The idea contains a form of incompleteness that gives rise to the antithesis, a conflicting idea. A third point of view, a synthesis, arises from this conflict. It overcomes the conflict by reconciling the truths contained in the thesis and antithesis at a higher level. The synthesis is a new thesis. It generates a new antithesis, and the process continues until truth is arrived at.

Dialectic of Personhood:
THESIS: Start here: "I am born; I am a child."
ANTITHESIS: Negation of the thesis. "I have grown; I am an adult; so, I am NOT the child I used to be."
SYNTHESIS: Negation of the opposition between thesis and antithesis. "I am NEITHER child NOR adult, but a whole person."

Dialectic of the Drinking Glass:
THESIS: Looking at a glass with some water in it, consciousness would not see anything at all if it did not distinguish between what is water and what is not water. If we suppose that consciousness begins as an optimist, then its thesis is an argument that the glass is half-full.
ANTITHESIS: Faced with the objection that this is not the whole truth, consciousness becomes a pessimist who argues for the antithesis that the glass is half-empty. The antithesis is the opposite of the thesis.
SYNTHESIS: Faced with the objection that this is not the whole truth either, and having already taken both sides, consciousness realizes that the whole truth is a synthesis: the volume that is empty equals the volume that is full.

Although the triad is often thought to form part of an analysis of historical and philosophical progress called the Hegelian dialectic, the assumption is erroneous. Hegel used this classification only once, and he attributed the terminology to Immanuel Kant. The terminology was largely developed earlier by the neo-Kantian Johann Gottlieb Fichte, also an advocate of the philosophy identified as German idealism.

The triad is often said to have been extended and adopted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; however Marx referred to them in The Poverty of Philosophy as speaking Greek and "Wooden trichotomies".

The Assault On Pelindaba

2008-12-07T14:00:00.000-08:00

(From CBS)

"Go back and read chapter 14 of my book, your next story should be about nuclear terrorism," George Tenet told us as we finished up a hefty steak dinner at one of his locals in Georgetown. Chapter 14 of Tenet's book is called 'They Want to Change History,' the 'They,' is Al-Qaeda, and what follows is a warning from the former director of the CIA: it's not a question of if terrorists will detonate an atomic bomb somewhere in the United States but merely a question of when. That was a helluva statement coming from the guy who had access to virtually every piece of secret intelligence on the issue. Also a nice way to end dinner, I thought.

I took the shuttle back to New York and called up the usual suspects - Department of Energy types, MIT and Harvard scholars, folks at the IAEA and intelligence sources. Not surprisingly, their opinions on this one issue differed wildly. Some said nuclear terrorism was a very real threat, others said no way but everyone said building and detonating an atomic bomb is easy compared to getting your hands on enough weapons grade uranium to do the job.

Nuclear nations enriched tens of thousands of pounds of weapons grade uranium - how secure was it? Was all that uranium safely under lock and key? Over the years, I had heard about the bad guys trying to sell small amounts of the stuff on the black market - Eastern Europe, Turkey, the Caucasus, these were obvious starting points. Just as I was about to embark on an all-expenses paid trip to the darker side of Tbilisi, I learned of the attack on the Pelindaba nuclear plant in South Africa and the amazing story of Anton Gerber.

Pelindaba is a sprawling facility just outside Pretoria and it houses hundreds of pounds of weapons grade uranium left over from that country’s nuclear weapons program - and late last year it was the scene of a coordinated attack by two groups of armed gunmen. The attackers had cut through an electrified fence, slipped by security cameras and made it all the way to the plants Emergency Control Center. That’s where they ran into Anton Gerber. Lucky for us, Gerber wasn’t in the mood to surrender and took them on barehanded before he was shot through the chest. The bullet pierced his lung and he nearly died on the scene. The gunmen fled, leaving the same way they entered. Gerber was the hero, Gerber saved the day. So here was a story I knew would keep people on the edge of their seats and put the issue of global nuclear security front and center.

Perfect. But getting to Gerber wasn't going to be easy. I couldn't just hop on a plane, go knock on his door and hope that he’d invite me in and tell me his story - those days were over. Not to mention, months had passed since the attack, Gerber wasn't talking and a lawsuit had been filed by him against the facility. My sense was they were hunkered down, in for the long-haul. I'd be crazy to cold-call him, I needed to reach out to his lawyer and pitch him the idea of Anton Gerber telling his story to Scott Pelley, and to millions of Americans. It took weeks before everyone was on the same page but by August I finally had the green light to call him, his attorney, O'lef de Meyer was on-board and had promised me Anton would pick up if I called.

Admittedly, I was a bit nervous dialing his number because this time I didn’t have the luxury of sitting down face to face over a drink or dinner to explain who we are and what we do - why 60 Minutes is the gold standard of television news journalism. I wasn’t even sure whether he knew what 60 Minutes was. The phone rang 10 times before Anton picked up. I introduced myself and made my pitch then gently turned it over to him and listened as he told me his incredible tale. It came out in one long stream, with twists and turns that pointed to an inside job - great doesn’t even begin to describe it. A story like this just doesn’t come around that often. I was furiously taking notes, trying to keep up, occasionally interrupting to ask for more detail but for the most part I just listened. The phone cradled between my ear and my shoulder, I remember thinking he probably hasn’t talked about the attack for a while. In some weird way this was therapy for him, I was the shrink 8,000 miles away. He was articulate and exact about the details but also very emotional, believable. I could hardly wait to report back to my bosses and get out there. But before I could do that, I had to ask the question.

This is the big enchilada question, the all-or-nothing question. Without Anton Gerber's story there is no story. I have to admit, some of the time you know but with Anton I had no idea. I tried to put myself in his head while I worked up to the question but of course I couldn’t even begin to touch his experience. Here’s a man who nearly died from a gunshot wound in the middle of the night protecting the plant from God knows who and God knows what - worst case scenario, bad guys getting their hands on weapons grade uranium. I took a deep breath and fired away: Would you be willing to go on the record and tell your story on 60 Minutes? I held my breath and waited for his answer, "Yes, I can do that."

Assault on Pelindaba

I And My Circumstances, Ortega y Gasset

2008-12-01T08:56:00.000-08:00

For Ortega y Gasset, in order to promote new ideas and to explain reality, the philosopher must leave behind prejudices and previously existing beliefs and investigate the essential reality of the universe. He suggests that there is no me without things and things are nothing without me, I (human being) can not be detached from my circumstances (world). This led Ortega y Gasset to pronounce his famous maxim "I am myself and my circumstance" which he always situated in the core of his philosophy.

For Ortega y Gasset, the Cartesian 'cogito ergo sum' is insufficient to explain reality—therefore the Spanish philosopher proposes a system where life is the sum of the ego and circumstance. This circumstance is oppressive. Therefore, there is a continual dialectical exchange of forces between the person and his circumstances and, as a result, life is a drama that exists between necessity and freedom. In this sense Ortega y Gasset wrote that life is at the same time fate and freedom, and that freedom “is being free inside of a given fate. Fate gives us an inexorable repertory of determinate possibilities, that is, it gives us different destinies. We accept fate and within it we choose one destiny.” In this tied down fate we must therefore be active, decide and create a “project of life”—thus not be like those who live a conventional life of customs and given structures who prefer an unconcerned and imperturbable life because they are afraid of the duty of choosing a project.

With a philosophical system that centered around life, Ortega y Gasset also stepped out of Descartes' cogito ergo sum and asserted "I live therefore I think". This stood at the root of his Nietzsche-inspired perspectivism, which he developed by adding a non-relativistic character in which absolute truth does exist and would be obtained by the sum of all perspectives of all lives, since for each human being life takes a concrete form and life itself is a true radical reality from which any philosophical system must derive.

Cold War Reminder: Chavez Welcomes Russian Warships

2008-11-25T12:28:00.000-08:00

(From FoxNews)

LA GUAIRA, Venezuela — Russian warships sailed into port in Venezuela on Tuesday in a show of strength as Moscow seeks to counter U.S. influence in Latin America. Russia's first such deployment in the Caribbean since the Cold War is timed to coincide with President Dmitry Medvedev's visit to Venezuela, the first ever by a Russian president.

The deployment of the naval squadron is widely seen as a demonstration of Kremlin anger over the U.S. decision to send warships to deliver aid to Georgia after its battles with Russia, and over U.S. plans for a European missile-defense system.

But U.S. officials mocked the show of force. "Are they accompanied by tugboats this time?" U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack joked to reporters in Washington.

Russian sailors dressed in black-and-white uniforms lined up along the bow of the destroyer Admiral Chabanenko as it docked in La Guaira, near Caracas, and Venezuelan troops greeted them with cannons in a 21-gun salute.Two support vessels also docked, and the nuclear-powered cruiser Peter the Great, Russia's largest ship, anchored offshore.

Chavez, basking in the support of a powerful ally and traditional U.S. rival, wants Russian help to build a nuclear reactor, invest in oil and natural gas projects and bolster his leftist opposition to U.S. influence in the region.
He also wants weapons — Venezuela has bought more than $4 billion in Russian arms, including Sukhoi fighter jets, helicopters and 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles, and more deals for Russian tanks or other weaponry may be discussed after Medvedev arrives Wednesday.

Russia's ambitions in Latin America, however, may be checked by global events. Both Venezuela and Russia are feeling the pinch of slumping oil prices, and their ability to be major benefactors for like-minded leaders is in doubt given the pressures of the world's financial crisis.

McCormack, the U.S. State Department spokesman, noted that Russia's navy is but a shadow of its Soviet-era fleet.

"I don't think there's any question about ... who the region looks to in terms of political, economic, diplomatic and as well as military power," McCormack said. "If the Venezuelans and the Russians want to have, you know, a military exercise, that's fine. But we'll obviously be watching it very closely."

When Russia sent two strategic bombers to Venezuela in September, some drew comparisons to the Soviet Union's deployments to Cuba during the Cold War. But both countries have shown signs of trying to engage President-elect Barack Obama, and Chavez told reporters that it's ludicrous to invoke the Cold War to describe these naval exercises.

"It's not a provocation. It's an exchange between two free countries," Chavez said Monday night. The ship maneuvers inside Venezuela's economic zone in the eastern Caribbean will begin Dec. 1, enabling sailors to practice reconnaissance, anti-drug patrols, anti-terrorism and search and rescue operations. Rear Adm. Luis Morales said anti-aircraft exercises involving Venezuela's newly bought Sukhoi fighter jets will not involve live ammunition.
The maneuvers "should be viewed largely as a propaganda exercise," said analyst Anna Gilmour at Jane's Intelligence Review.

"Pragmatic Russian policy suggests that it will content itself with a brief high-profile visit, rather than a longer-term deployment that could cause severe tensions with the U.S., at a time when Russia may be looking to re-engage with the new administration," she said.

Medvedev's tour to Peru, Brazil, Venezuela and Cuba was planned before the financial crisis, and Russia must now downsize its ambitions in Latin America because its pockets are no longer so deep, said Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of Russia in Global Affairs Magazine.

"Russia will have to put off big projects like the construction of a gas pipeline across South America," Lukyanov said. The proposed natural gas pipeline is Chavez's brainchild, a controversial and ambitious plan for which he has explored Russian investment.

But Russia still has an economic interest in selling more weapons and boosting business in Latin America, and Venezuela can help "open the doors," noted Venezuelan political scientist Ricardo Sucre Heredia."It's a win-win relationship for the two countries," Sucre said. "Russia gains in terms of its international power and its presence, and Venezuela gains in terms of having an ally."

The Fed and The White House

2008-11-18T11:47:00.000-08:00

Tension with the White House was long part of the Fed chief’s job description, largely because the bank’s dual mandate (fighting inflation and promoting growth) was seen to be in conflict with itself. No president wants inflation, but most want high interest rates even less. Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to finance World War II with cheap money, and Henry Morgenthau Jr., his Treasury secretary, simply directed the Fed to buy Treasury bills at a fixed rate of 2.5 percent. This kept rates flat, but led to inflation after the war.

The Fed was liberated from the Treasury in a famous accord in 1951. William McChesney Martin Jr., who was appointed Fed chairman that year, battled Harry Truman and successive presidents to establish the prototype for an independent Fed chief. It was Martin who proclaimed that the chairman’s job was to “take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going” — in other words, to raise interest rates when a booming economy threatened to cause inflation. And it was Martin who created the quasi legend that Fed chiefs could decide an election. He tightened rates in the latter part of 1959, triggering a recession that began in April 1960. Nixon, the incumbent vice president and Republican presidential nominee that year, blamed Martin for sabotaging his chances in November.

Martin ran into even tougher pressure from Lyndon B. Johnson, who tried to browbeat him into easing rates. One version of what occurred, according to Richard Fisher, the current head of the Dallas Fed, who has studied the history, is that “Lyndon took Martin to his ranch and asked the Secret Service to leave the room. And he physically beat him, he slammed him against the wall, and said, ‘Martin, my boys are dying in Vietnam, and you won’t print the money I need.’ ” Martin ultimately caved. By the time he retired, in 1970, inflation was a worrisome 6 percent. Soon after, President Nixon told Burns to promote maximum employment. In fairness to Burns, he was laboring under the unforgiving strictures of an academic model known as the Phillips curve, which held that low inflation and economic growth were incompatible opposites. If you wanted to raise employment, you had to permit more inflation. And that’s what Burns did.

By the late ’70s, inflation was as much a psychological condition as an economic one. As prices rose, unions scored automatic cost-of living hikes, and so businesses raised prices even more. With inflation in double digits, Jimmy Carter finally nominated Volcker, an aloof, 6-foot-7 career public servant, who seemed to garble much of what he said through a half-chewed cigar. From the intelligible part, it was clear that Volcker intended to break the inflationary cycle. Volcker tightened the money supply so much that the fed funds rate soared to 20 percent. This led to a brutal recession, which was especially tough on workers and businesses in interest-rate-sensitive industries like real estate. “It’s no fun raising interest rates,” Volcker admitted. Idle builders were so enraged that some sent him two-by-fours in the mail. High interest rates took a terrible toll on President Carter. In September 1980, with Carter and Ronald Reagan in a close race, Volcker administered the coup de grâce by hiking the discount rate. A decade later, President George H. W. Bush blamed Alan Greenspan’s tight money policy for his own defeat.

For Bernanke’s generation, the great inflation served as a bookend to the 1930s. It was an object lesson on the dangers of creating too much liquidity. Once again, Milton Friedman changed the profession’s understanding, this time by deciding that, in the long run, the Phillips curve was wrong. Printing money (or as Friedman famously quipped, dropping bundles of bills from a helicopter) would spur the economy only temporarily. At first, as the money supply expanded, businesses would hire more workers and produce more goods. The economy would be “tricked” into operating at a higher gear. But after a while, workers would insist on wage hikes, and companies would jack up prices. The higher prices would cool off the economy again. So the net result of printing money would be just inflation — no gains in production. In the long term, neither the Fed nor anyone could spur an economy to grow faster than its “natural rate” — which is determined by all those other factors: productivity, population changes, technological advances, demand for exports and so forth.
Thus the dictum that inflation would lead to jobs was out. According to the new thinking, low inflation is consistent with, and even a prerequisite for, reaching whatever the economy’s potential is. That means that Fed chiefs and presidents are on the same side. Bill Clinton bought into the idea, which is to say he broke with precedent and left Greenspan alone. Only in the very short term — say, when a stimulus is needed — are the Fed’s two mandates in conflict. Of course, since elections are decided in the short term, the potential for political infighting remains.

To Bernanke, the political dimensions of the job came as a mild shock. The day we met, he had come from breakfast with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr.; the day before, he met with a congresswoman. (The Fed is a creature of the Congress, and Bernanke must take care not to alienate it.) A few months back, when Senator Christopher Dodd invited Bernanke and Paulson to discuss some “current issues,” the senator, who was then running for the Democratic nomination, staged a news conference for a score of media members whom he had, conveniently, also invited. This is the sort of thing they don’t train you for at M.I.T.

Bernanke grew up in the small town of Dillon, S.C., at the tail end of the segregation era (in high school he wrote a schoolboy’s novel about whites and blacks coming together on the basketball team). His father and his uncle ran a local drug store. Folks trustingly called them Dr. Phil and Dr. Mort. Ben, who skipped first grade, was obviously smart from the get-go. He played the saxophone, just as Greenspan did, and waited tables two summers and worked construction another. The Bernankes were observant Jews, and Ben’s folks fretted when he got into Harvard that if he strayed from home he might wander from his religious teachings. It was never a risk. Judaism is important to Bernanke, though, as with other personal subjects, he does not discuss it. As a doctoral candidate at M.I.T., he blossomed into a star, and at the tender age of 31 he received a tenured position in the economics department at Princeton.

Change Vs Status Quo

2008-11-07T09:52:00.000-08:00

By Carlos Benito Camacho

You can change the color of a ship to make it more visible, or invisible; you can change its masts and sails to make it go faster or slower; you can replace the communication system, too, to make it more efficient; you can even replace the captain when he can not get his message across to his crew. But if change in itself has become your ideological obsession and, to concretize this obsession, you change the ship fundamentals, which is its structure, getting rid of its keel and rudder, making it a cube where the blue, the black, the white, the green can stand together on a same level as equals, then you go nowhere. You will drift about without bearings and fixed course; you will get stagnant in the doledrum; you will bob up and down at the rhythm of the whimsical waves that arise in the sea of human events; or you will be engulfed in the depths of the tempestuous ocean of political strife.

You can change the color of your house; you can change its furniture; you can even change its size, making it bigger or smaller; you can replace the gutters and the tiles of its roof, too. But you must not change its fundamentals, which is its foundations. If change in itself has become your ideological obsession and, to concretize this obsession, you change the foundations of your house, getting rid of its granite stones, your house will collapse or be swept away in a landslide of a world political upheaval. Despite its roughness, granite is good, for it is noble in honestly showing us what it really is, the hardest of all stones; it can make the best of solid ground every poor nation on this earth has ever dreamt of rising upon.

Language & Cultural Takeoff

2008-10-14T06:06:00.000-07:00

(From Cultural Anthropology, by Marvin Harris)

About 40,000 years ago, the relationship between cultural and biological evolution underwent a profound change. Although there was no increase in the average size of the human brain, the complexity and rate of change of human sociocultural systems increased by many orders of magnitude. It is clear that a kind of takeoff had occurred whereby culture began to evolve more rapidly than our kind's genotypes. Cultural takeoff means that to understand the last 40,000 years of the evolution of culture, primary emphasis must be given to cultural rather than biological processes. Natural selection and organic evolution lie at the base of culture, but once the capacity for culture became fully developed, a vast number of cultural differences and similarities could arise and disappear entirely independent of changes in genotypes.

Closely linked with cultural takeoff is the uniquely human capacity for language and for language-assisted systems of thought. While other primates use signal systems to facilitate social life, human languages are qualitatively different from all other animal communication systems. The unique features of human languages undoubtedly arose from genetic changes related to the increasing dependence of the earliest hominids on traditions of tool use and other social activities that have to do with exchanging and pooling goods and information. The one important characteristic which makes the human language unique is semantic universality.

A communication system that has semantic universality can convey information about aspects, domains, properties, places, or events in the past, present, and future, whether actual or possible, real or imaginary, near or far. Human languages achieve semantic universality in part by possessing what is known as productivity; to every message that we send, we can always add another whose meaning can not be predicted from the information in previous messages. Another component of semantic universality is the feature known as displacement; a message is displaced when either the sender or the receiver has no immediate direct sensory contact with the conditions or events to which the message refers.

Another striking feature of human languages is arbitrariness, which means that a human language is constructed out of sounds whose articulated vibratory patterns and meaning have not been programmed in our genes. Take as an example the languages of England and France. There are no genes that make the English say "water," "dog," or "house." These words are arbitrary because they do not occur in other languages. Neighboring populations in France, with whom there is considerable gene flow, utilize "eau," "chien," and "maison" to convey similar meanings.

The Fourth Estate

2008-10-06T08:12:00.000-07:00

By Carlos B. Camacho

The press is called the fourth estate for its capacity to form opinions, as it has the power to shape patterns of thinking, feeling and reacting before certain circumstances, events and famous people, setting up prejudices in the people’s minds.

Reading the different newspapers and newsagencies, I have come to the conclusion that the American media and other online newspapers in the world strongly favor Mr. Obama. Not only there is not a single newspaper in the America media that prints the Democratic candidate's full name, Barack Hussein Obama (they always print only Barack Obama), but they have made of George W. Bush the "Satan" the Muslim countries people hate so much.

Many newspaper columnists tie John McCain with Bush's policies, portraying him as too old and awkward, not mentioning that McCain as senator rejected some of President Bush's bills. And before the Vice President candidates debate, they referred to Sarah Palin as inexperienced and too emotional as to win the debate, but when it was evident that she had come out flawless, not showing the weakness they had attributed to her, they began writing about her as a cold, calculating and "dangerous candidate," read Pitbull Palin ( New York Times).

No newspaper has ever mentioned, or made reference to Alan Greenspan, concerning the present financial crisis, for it was when Bill Clinton was in office and Alan Greenspan was chairman of the Fed that the bubble began to inflate. And what about the Wall Street rating agencies like Standard & Poor's and Moody's; they have done a very poor job. They botched it up. Who do they really work for?

When one is the obedient serf to the dictorship of prejudices shaped by a biased media, it is easy to find culprits.

Black Holes In Obama Fundraising Campaign

2008-10-05T18:24:00.000-07:00

A lawyer for the Republican National Committee today said the party will ask the Federal Election Commission to look into the source of thousands of small-dollar contributions to the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama.

The RNC is alleging that the Obama campaign was so hungry for donations it "looked the other way" as contributions piled up from suspicious, and possibly even illegal foreign donors.

"We believe that the American people should know first and foremost if foreign money is pouring into a presidential election," said RNC Chief Counsel Sean Cairncross.

Cairncross alleged there was mounting evidence of this, and cited a report in the current issue of Newsweek magazine that documents a handful of instances where donors made repeated small donations using fake names, such as Good Will and Doodad Pro.

The Newsweek report says that earlier this year the Obama campaign returned $33,000 to two Palestinian brothers in the Gaza Strip who had bought T-shirts in bulk from the campaign's online store -- purchases that count as campaign contributions. The brothers had listed their address as "Ga.," which the campaign took to mean Georgia rather than Gaza.

At the heart of the RNC complaint is a federal fundraising rule that lets campaigns accept donations under $200 without itemizing the names and addresses of the donors on its campaign finance reports. The rule was intended as a matter of practicality -- it did not seem reasonable to ask a campaign to gather that information from every five-dollar donor.

But the Obama campaign has raised more than $200 million this way, a staggering sum for donations that will not be subjected to outside scrutiny.

Conspiracy

2008-10-01T12:50:00.000-07:00

By Carlos B. Camacho

Conspiracy is a secret and deceptive plot planned by two or more people to do a harmful and evil act against someone, or government, violating the established law and the common trust, with the purpose of achieving a desired goal. There have been many conspiracies in history. Some of them included political assassinations; others, political instability through terrorist acts such as the September 11 attack in the United States, or March 11 in Spain a few days before a general election.

But there have also been conspiracies carried out by engineered, financial manupulations through third parties to panic the markets and above all the common people who have bank accounts, consume manufactured products, and vote. For the former kinds of conspiracies security must be tightened; for the latter, moral standards must be reinforced to make the nation impermeable to the corroding action of bribery.

Idealism

2008-09-24T07:19:00.000-07:00

By Carlos B. Camacho

Philosophically speaking , Plato is the source of idealism. This Greek philosopher postulated that all the things that surround us and that we see daily are not real objects, but sensory impressions; mere reflections of the original ones which are not on this earth, but in the Toppus Hyper Uranus, the lofty world of ideas. According to Plato, a chair is not a real object, as it can not ontologically stand for itself. So, a chair is not a chair, but a mere reflection of the pattern of the chair which is found in the Toppus Hyper Uranus. The same applies to all the other things we perceive with our senses.

Plato also wrote the allegory of the man in a cave. There was a man who lived in a cave in the mountains. As he had never come out into the open, the man only knew the outside world through the shadows of things projected onto the walls of the cave. When he finally came out into the outside world, he got blinded by the dazzling light of reality.

Today’s typical representative of idealism is not a Greek philosopher, but a Green Peace activist. In his eternal struggle against the dark forces of pollution not only does he spends a lot of money in traveling expenses and propaganda, or commercials, to gain support and recruit new activists, but he also risks his life, as when he drives his boat in front of an oil tanker or whaler. And he is so idealistic and adamant in his personal war against pollution that he alienates himself from the real world.

Out of touch with the reality, he does not realize important facts. For examples, the boat he steers is propelled by a combustion engine that needs gasoline made from the oil the tanker is transporting. The plastic his cellphone is made of as well as the plastic bags he uses to carry his groceries derives from the oil industry, too. The sheet of paper he writes on from the wood of a tree that has been cut down. The electric bulb that lights his life at night runs on the electricity supplied by the nuclear power plant nearby. The titanium his tooth implant is made of as well as the copper wiring in his home and in the hospital in which he was operated on come from the mines he so strongly opposes.

If we were to strip this modern idealist of everything that makes his life easy, then he would have to live naked in a cave, his own cave of delusions, watching the shadows of the ghosts that persecutes him projected on the walls of his alienated mind.

Ironing

2008-09-17T18:28:00.000-07:00

A Short Story © By Carlos B. Camacho

Ironing is the action of smoothing out cloth or clothes with an iron. That was what Dolores was exactly doing that evening; ironing. She had worked hard all day long doing her household chores. She had gotten up early in the morning, milked the cow, made breakfast, and rushed the children to school, on the old dappled horse she herself had saddled. After feeding the chickens, she had washed the clothes and hung them out to dry in the glaring summer sun. She had also done some cleaning around the hut, which was on the line between somebody’s corn field and the woods. Then the children had come back from the school and they all had had lunch in the shade of the mulberry tree. In the afternoon Dolores had baked the loaves of bread she had made earlier.

Now, that the sun had set, as it got dark, she ironed by the light of an oil lamp. Dolores still used the old iron her mother had given her when she got married. It was extremely heavy and hollow with holes in the sides. To heat the iron, Dolores had opened the top, to which the handle was attached, and filled it with the burning charcoals from the fire she had made to cook dinner. As Dolores stood by the window, she ironed her family’s worn clothes; her children’s, hers, and her husband’s. Her husband was a gaucho who worked as a cattle driver for some rich rancher and sometimes he was away for several days. And he drank.

In her humble shack Dolores ironed her husband’s clothes, pushing down hard with all her weight as she pressed the wrinkles out. But the frown on her forehead would not smooth out. The harder she pressed, the more lines arose in her brow as she tightened her lips into a thin line. She had been wearing the same shabby dress for four days and her hair was disheveled. The bruise below her eye could hardly be noted in her dark skin. As she ironed she thought back on her life before she had married him. She sighed. Her ribs ached with a contusion as she breathed.

She began to hum a song as if to smooth out the creases of her pent-up feelings. In the amber light of the oil lamp, beads of perspiration oozed out on her skin. She heard an owl hoot in the distance; then the thumping of trotting hooves on the earth. She got tensed as her grip tightened on the iron handle.

The gaucho got off the bay mare and came lurching into the hut, giving off whiffs of cheap wine. Approaching Dolores from behind, he put his arms around her and kissed the nape of her neck. “Hello sweet flower of summer time,” he said, pinching her hard on the breast, his fingers squeezing like pliers that seemed they would never let go.

Outraged by a flood of bitter memories that had cropped up from the back of her mind, she turned around and put the iron on his face, pressing his cheek as she pushed him hard. Reeling backward, the gaucho screamed as he clutched his hands to his face. Then Dolores swung the iron sideways, hitting her husband on the temple. A deep animal-like grunt came out of Dolores’ throat as she hammered the gaucho’s head.

Squealing with terror, the children scampered out of the mud shack through a hole in the side and hid away in the corn shed while Dolores kept whipping the iron on her husband’s head until it got bashed open as blood and pieces of brains spurted out onto the earth floor. When all the vicious rage had gotten off her chest, Dolores knelt over her husband’s body that lay sprawled on the floor, gasping for air, looking up out of the window at a tiny star that twinkled in the country sky.

Barack Obama "My Muslim Faith", a Freudian Slip

2008-09-08T16:30:00.000-07:00

Desecrate

2008-08-31T14:11:00.001-07:00

Desecrate means to violate and mar the sanctity of a sacred place. That was precisely what the Montoneros leftist movement did in the seventies when a group of ten people wearing masks broke into Tucuman's Independence House. Tucuman is known in Argentina as the Cradle of Independence, for it was in that province where Argentina's independence was declared in 1816. The building where the declaration took place was a family house, which today is not only a historical landmark, but the Independence House of Argentina, that is to say a sacred place for those who love this country.

As every leftist movement, the Montoneros hated traditions and the established law as they despised deeply the heroes who fought and died to give us freedom during the war of independence. That is why, in an outrageous act, these leftist people broke into this historical landmark, murdering a security guard in the process, painted ideological words and defaced 18th and 19th century paintings. These people, the Montoneros, who now sit in power and are good friends of Chavez and the Castro brothers, kidnapped, murdered, and blasted inocent people away with the bombs they planted. In this parody of democracy, they still keep desecrating our past and traditions.

Argentina's minister of defence: Nilda Garre; chief of the SIDE (the State Intelligence Service): Horacy Verbitsky; Secretary of Commerce: Guillermo Moreno; Minister of Foreign Relations: Jorge Enrique Taiana; representative: Miguel Bonasso; representative: Carlos Kunkel.

Comment on Sarah Palin

2008-08-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

"Sarah Palin chose to have her fifth child in spite of prenatal tests that showed Downs Syndrome. She exposed corrupt officials of her own party. Show me a politician who has done more to stand up for what they claim to believe in? Don't we ridicule politicians for hypocrisy and corruption all the time? Now here is a woman who has done what she believes in despite the costs to her personal life and political fortunes. I may not agree with her political philosophy, but I certainly can admire her courage to do what she believes in."

Comment posted by an anonymous American citizen on a very important American newspaper.

Value

2008-08-27T07:16:00.000-07:00

© By Carlos B. Camacho

Value is the relative worth which man assigns to something that he thinks is useful for the attainment of his objectives, or works as a tool to get what he needs.

In the moral code of a people, value is a personality trait or pattern of behavior which is deemed strategically important for the survival of the tribe or a nation. Thus the important personality traits and patterns of behavior have been abstracted from the person(s) who embodies them and held them as educational examples. Courage, honesty, intelligence, perseverance, loyalty, magnanimity, and longanimity have been among the most appreciated values in most cultures in the history of mankind.

Not only these values must continue to be examples of behavior, but also heterosexuality must be encouraged not only for the pleasure of it, but for the survival of the Western Civilization. A married man with children, three, four, five, whom he brings up with the above-mentioned values should also be a hero these days in Europe, the United States, and Argentina.

Integrity

2008-08-20T17:14:00.000-07:00

By Carlos B. Camacho

Integrity is a collection of individual parts related to one another, articulating into a coherent functioning whole, contributing to the overall performance of the whole to fulfill its purpose, which could simply be the safety, well-being, and enrichment of the whole and each one of the individual pieces that make up that whole. But when a piece of the whole suddenly gets warped and begins to work at cross purposes, that is to say its individual performance hinders the integrated functioning of each of the rest of the pieces, we can say that the warped part has disassociated from the body of working parts, putting the whole on the brink of disassociation, which means withdrawal from association.

Just as the frontal lobe is a piece of the whole whose job is to integrate the other areas of the human brain for the synthesis of concentric, rational thoughts to achieve an objective in life, a government could be likened to a center of integration that sees that no illegal individual activity hinders the constructive performances of the rest and avoid general disruption. But when a government fails to fulfill the job honest individuals expect of it, we can say that the government has disintegrated from the rest of the pieces. So is the case in Argentina, whose government has disassociated from the whole body social, turning into a festered canker of warped individual pieces with obscure, awry purposes and complete disregard for the whole nation.

Doomsday

2008-08-18T16:03:00.000-07:00

A Short Story © By Carlos B. Camacho

It was late in the afternoon as the sun was about to touch the distant, jagged horizon. After a very long day of forced march and skirmishes against the forces of Evil, which we had been following for years, we had arrived in this spot in space and time where the roads of mankind crossed. My Knights and Titans were ready in position on the bush-covered hills that overlooked the plain where the messianic fanatical troops had dug in like moles in the rugged ground. Their Messiah and his minions occupied strategic, higher positions in the faraway ridges thousands of miles across the valley.

The day’s battles din had died away as a pall of silence fell over everthing. The war had been going on for many years and cities and nations had been destroyed by Evil as the scaffolding of law and order gave way to chaos. Only this massive concentration of opposing forces seemed to remain in that shrubby rough landscape. In the deep silence I could hear the grinding of the Messiah’s teeth and the low grunting of his wolves. I knew where those noises came from. Suddenly, mushroom-shaped black, boiling clouds sprang up and covered the setting sun as red lightning repeatedly struck the earth on the horizon. It was my brother; he had begun the attack. The time had come; Ragnarok had broken out.

Time is nothing to me, for I am Vidar, the silent God who can creep through the chain of changing circumstancial events! I had woken out of my centuries-long slumber to carry out my mission, which was the destruction of Loki; the harm-maker, shape-shifter, and father of lies. The trickster God who had tricked humankind several times before in the history of human civilization. Once he shifted into Akhenaten and told the Egyptian people that there was only one god, the sun disk, and that he was his son. A tribe living in Egypt took this guile into the Middle East giving rise to Judaism. Then he shifted into the Christ just to deceive more people as he enjoyed how the Christians were devoured by the lions in the Roman circus. Later he was Mohamed and told his followers to kill all the humans who did not believe in his lie of only god. He was also all the other messiahs that came along in human history with the same front, the savior of mankind, deluding men into giving up their free will and determination, placing their destiny in his hands; Hitler, Jim Jones, Che-Guevara, etc.

Thor, my brother, had not died. His bolts of lightning came down from heavens and went in deep into the holes in the earth where the moles lay in concealment; their torn fragments were thrown into the air. My forces were ready for the final assault; Atlas, Titans, Minutemen, and the Knights. I heard the rumbling of a mountain crumbling down as Thor keep sending his jagged beam of lightning. Suddenly the wolves were unleashed and sailed high in the heavens as they close in on us, but my Knights intercepted them with supreme accuracy. At this point human beings no longer existed but the opposing forces of Ragnarok as mushrooms everywhere on the planet sprang up. Tuning in my tracking devices, I charged out, scorted by Minutemen. Loki was busy processing incoming information from everywhere in the world when I stealthily burst into his cave and fatally stabbed him in the heart with my Neutron Sword.

Information

2008-08-13T12:21:00.000-07:00

By Carlos B. Camacho

Information is the knowledge of the political, social, and scientific events that constantly crop up in the rough landscape of reality, transmitted rawly and entirely, that is to say with each one of the pieces that make up the whole so it can be rationally grasped in its entirety and give us an insight into the matter in question.

A tree is not the leaves, nor is it the branches, nor the trunk, nor the roots. A tree is the aggregate of each one of these parts which constitute it; roots + trunk + branches + leaves + flowers + seeds. When someone curtails reality to a fraction of it and a group of spurious parts are skillfully added, using the power of malicious editing, to blend in in a quasy-homogeneous whole, the result is not information, but fabrication, that is to say a fairy tale for the naïve. That is the case with Argentina’s human rights story of the seventies and Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.

The Town

2008-08-08T16:32:00.000-07:00

A Short Story © by Carlos B. Camacho

I had been traveling for a very long time when I found myself on the outskirts of a town. On my long journey I had driven through many towns and cities bearing the indelible traces of that long protracted war; destruction. Building and houses torn asunder by explosions from enemy bombs as rubble, burned cars, and ripped corpses littered the streets along which refugees fled. Nothing and nobody escaped from a kind of violence, which sometimes lay in wait around a corner in every form. Yet that urban conglomeration I had just arrived in was not only unscathed, but empty, which struck me as odd, for people only abandon a place when it is being subjected to the torment of war, or nature.

But that was the point in space my compass bearings had led me to. After driving around a few blocks through empty streets, I stopped in the commercial district. As I got out of the Jeep, I looked up and down the main street; not a single soul. It was cloudy and cold. I turned up my overcoat collar as I clumped along the sidewalk in my boots towards a grocery store on the corner. There were no signs of looting, either, as the shop windows were intact with their wares still on display. As I got to the corner, I pushed the door of the grocery store to go in, but it would not open an inch. I tried the door knob, turning and pushing it hard; it was locked. I looked in through the door glass. The shelves were full of groceries and the heavy-duty refrigerators jammed with all kinds of bottles of drinks. I had to get inside as I had been traveling for a very long time and was hungry and thirsty.

I broke the door pane with a kick. With my tool butt I smashed the remainder of the broken glass off the door frame. As I went in, I felt my legs weak and got a cramp in my arm. Not only was I thirsty but I badly needed potassium and other minerals. So I grabbed a bottle of Gatorade and gulped it down at one go. Then I drank another bottle as I sat down on the floor, taking a deep breath to exersise my lungs that seemed to have shrunk.

While I ate a bar of chocolate, I took a look at the newspapers on a rack. Most of the headlines spoke of the breaking out of the war. But there was a newpaper that announced the end of hostilities. I got closer to read the rest of the news. The information was at variance with my knowledge of the situation. Then I looked at the small words above the headlines. There was something wrong with the newspaper issue; the date was two years ahead in time.

I hurried out of the store with two bags of food and bottles of Gatorade. Three blocks from there I found a hotel. I used a jimmy to pry open the door to get in. I was so tired that as soon as I lay in bed, I spiraled down into a deep sleep. I felt I plummeted down into a pitch-black well. When I finally was about to reach the bottom, I began to dream. I dreamt I woke up in the middle of a quiet forest as a voice whispered something into my ear, “wake up; wake up. Hurry up; hurry up,” and I began to run through the woods, crashing through the thick undergrowth as I went. “The time has come. The time has come,” the grave voice said. It was my father’s voice. Then I came out into a murky open space. At the center there was a coffin surrounded by blazing torches. I went over and looked. It was a woman with a ghastly countenance and a knife stuck in her chest. “The bastards killed my liberty,” my father’s voice said. Then I heard dogs howling in the distance. To no avail I tried to get out of that place; my feet got stuck to the ground and could not walk as the blazing torches began to flicker and go out. In the dark I screamed for help, but I was so hoarse that no words came out.

When I woke up it was six-thirty. First I thought it was six-thirty in the morning, but when I got up and saw that it would not get light, I realized it was evening again. I must have slept twenty four hours, for when I had gone to bed it was six-thirty. It was as though I had lost my time orientation. Confused, I had break-dinner in the foyer. As I ate I became aware of this almost imperceptible distant whirr in the sepulchral silence of that town. Having finished my meal and drunk two bottles of Gatorade, I proceeded to fieldstrip and clean my tool; a FAL, “fusil automatic legere.” An old Belgian-made assault rifle which I picked for its 7.62 caliber and the fast spin its helical grooves convey on the special bullets I had to kill the wolves. The wolves were not really wolves. They were the religous fundamentalists that had come in waves from the east on scholarships granted by that new American government. At the universities they had experimented with new synthetic hormones that gave them a plus over the old soldiers. We, the old soldiers, had only steel will and our freedom to fight for.

I put my rifle together again and loaded all the magazines. With my optical sensors I checked the street before I got out of the hotel. As I walked towards the Jeep, I looked up at the sky. It was still overcast; and it would not get dark, nor would it get light. It remained just like when I had come into town; a leaden twilight. I got into the vehicle and turned the ignition key, but the Jeep would not start. I looked around and cocked my ear; the silence with the whirr in the distance. I slowly got out with my rifle, crept over to the sidewalk, and crouched close to a wall, training my rifle towards the corner at a point in space. Time; time seemed to have frozen. I still heard the whirr in the distance. Suddenly a crescent entity turned around the corner and ran amok towards me. Bang! Bang! Bang!

I climbed into the Jeep and took off, leaving the inert body behind. Driving around for several blocks, I tried to find a way out of that urban maze, but I only wound up in a dead-end street. I backed the Jeep up onto a narrow secondary street, then shifted into first gear, accelerating as I changed into top speed. The town structures ran by fast on both side of the street. Tall buildings, warehouses, which later gave way to big residential houses and these, after a while, to smaller ones. They were drab as if they were made of stones. I slowed down the speed so I could see them well. Those small houses had crosses on top. I braked, bringing the Jeep to a halt. The houses were mausoleums.

As I got out the whirr became much louder. A deep sense of loneliness pervaded that place and seeped into my self like a slow sinking in of a dagger as I walked towards a humble grave with a rusting iron cross. A freezing wind blew relentlessly and sneaked in through the three jagged holes in the back of my long overcoat; three treacherous 5.56 caliber, blood-caked holes. Presently I read my name on a small plaque, “John Mc Alister Killed in the Field of Honor in the Name of Freedom, 2011. R.I.P.”

But I did not rest in peace, as I felt deeply and eternally betrayed by my fellow Americans who had put in office the man with the foreign name.

Akhenaten & Monotheism

2008-08-03T16:01:00.000-07:00

Akhenaten (or Akhenaton) was a Pharaoh of the 18th dynasty of Egypt. During this dynasty, the cult of the sun god Ra became increasingly important until it evolved into the uncompromising monotheism of Pharaoh Akhenaten. According to the cult, Ra created himself from a primeval mound in the shape of a pyramid and then created all other gods. Thus, Ra was not only the sun god, he was also the universe, having created himself from himself. Ra was invoked as Aten or the Great Disc that illuminated the world of the living and the dead.

Akhenaten succeeded his father as Amenhotep IV in 1364, and reigned until his death in 1347 B.C. In the early years of his reign, Amenhotep IV lived at Thebes with Nefertiti and his 6 daughters. Initially, he permitted Egypt's traditional deities to continue but near the Temple of Karnak (Amun-Re's great cult center), he erected several massive buildings which were the temples to the Aten, the Sun Disk. The relationship between Amenhotep IV and the priests of Amun-Re gradually deteriorated. In 5th year of his reign, Amenhotep IV took decisive steps to establish the Aten as the exclusive, monotheistic god of Egypt: the pharaoh "disbanded the priesthoods of all the other gods and diverted the income from these cults to support the Aten, as Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten, meaning "the Servant of Aten."

In the 9th year of his reign Akhenaten declared that Aten was not merely the supreme god, but the only god, and that he, Akhenaten, was the only intermediary between Aten and his people. He ordered the defacing of Amun's temples throughout Egypt, and in a number of instances, inscriptions of the plural 'gods' were also removed. Aten's name is also written differently in the 10th year, to emphasize the radicalism of the new regime, which included a ban on images, with the exception of a rayed solar disc, in which the rays (commonly depicted ending in hands) appear to represent the unseen spirit of Aten, who by then was evidently considered not merely a sun god, but rather a universal deity.

Various scholars considered the idea of Akhenaten as the pioneer of a monotheistic religion that later became Judaism. One of the first to mention this was Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in his book Moses and Monotheism. Freud argued that Moses had been an Atenist priest forced to leave Egypt with his followers after Akhenaten's death. Akhenaton strove to promote monotheism, something that the biblical Moses was able to achieve.

Read: Monotheism & Polytheism

The Tip I

2008-07-15T07:35:00.000-07:00

© By Carlos B. Camacho

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am from Tucuman, and I work as a free-lance tour guide and interpreter in the northwest of Argentina. Once, when I was in the office of one of the travel agencies I work for, the guy who worked there (he still does) began telling me a little bit about himself over a cup of coffee in a moment of relaxation.

He told me that a long time ago he used to work for the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires, probably in the nineties or late eighties - he did not say the year. I asked him what he did there, he told me security. "Cool job," I said, then I asked him how he got that job. He said that he was Muslim, then he added that he had double citizenship, that he was Argentinian and Syrian, and that he was once in the Middle East, in Syria near the Israeli border, in Golan Heights. His name is Ebrahim Medina, probably he has a different Muslim name. The travel agency he works for is Bon Voyage, which is at 974 Santiago del Estero St., San Miguel de Tucuman, Argentina.

Once I heard this information, I tried to e-mail this to the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, but I did not find the email address. But last year, this guy who goes by the name of Daniel began working as tour guide too, as he speaks German and English, too. This new guy goes about telling everybody that he is Jewish as he likes handing out his card with his name, email-address, and a little David Star in one corner. When I asked him where he learned German, he told me that he was once assigned undercover in Germany, doing intelligence for the Israeli Army. He also told me he got wounded in the leg while he was doing military service in Israel. Purported full name: David Leibovich.

This David Leibovich told me last Monday that he guided for an Iranian woman. He made some jokes about the girl having hair on her chest and armpits. Then, I jokingly added that she probably is looking for Uranium, as I once heard a rumor that they were exploring for that mineral in Salta (province in the northwest of Argentina).

Perhaps this could mean nothing, but I just thought it was worthwhile to check on the matter. I am not providing phone numbers as the lines might be already wiretapped and eavesdropped by an investigative agency, foreign or local. But if you are interested you can have one of your operatives in the region drop by the aforementioned address and pretend he is interested in doing a tour of the North West.

Yours Truly

A Tour Guide

The Choice

2008-07-11T11:59:00.000-07:00

By Carlos Benito Camacho

On the left side of the political spectrum there is this guy who goes by the name of Obama; a man who attended four years a madrassa back in the days when he was a young boy living in Indonesia with his Muslim stepfather. And this man, whose full name is Barack Hussein Obama, goes about talking that he wants to change America. He wants to change a country with the strongest economy in the world and where a construction worker can own a 4 x 4 pick-up truck and a Harley Davidson (In South America construction workers live in shanty towns and second hand bicycles are all they can afford). And he is so adamant on insisting that he wants change, that he shows complete disregard for all the good things that America has achieved and which make of her the most powerful nation in the world. Yes, the left in politics means change, to change the stablished rules that gives stability and trust, as he wants to break up a stable system built on values and hard work to help the sniveling indolent, who slacks around in a world of self-pity, deepen the rut of his immoral circumstances. The left in politics is uncertainty, instability, black clouds on the horizon.

On the right side there is this man who got the best education that a man can get, not the education one gets at a prestigious university, but the education of the good values he was imbued with since an early age in the lap of his parents care. And this home education was put to the test not only as a pilot serving the nation flying dangerous missions, but also as a prisoner of war during five years of excruciating experience which wrought in him a steely determination and a steady personality to surmount obtacles and to perserve the foundations of good traditional values upon which the nation stands. And this man, who was decorated with four medals, a Purple Heart among them, is not a smooth, garroulous talker, for he is a man of action and courage to preserve all that is good and correct the things that have gone awry. This man on the right is John McCain. The right is the solid ground upon which we stand.

Inflation

A Sovereign Nation

A Sovereign Nation

2008-07-08T16:05:00.000-07:00

© By Carlos B. Camacho

The Longman dictionary for advanced learners defines the adjective “sovereign” as “in control of the country,” and if a country is a nation, then “sovereign” means “in control of the nation.” But then what is a nation? A nation is a group of people who share a common history, are bound together by the same culture, speak the same language, and who are legally organized around a state to sovereignly govern themselves. And the state is a scaffolding of laws which revolt around a main and fundamental one called constitution, which a nation has decided to give themselves to have sovereignty, that is to say complete authority within their territory.

Although there is not a written constitution in England, the English people have signed fundamental treaties in their long history. These treaties are the legal landmarks upon which the British laws pivot; fundamental English treaties which are the foundations of the English legal system. So, in order to be sovereign, the English people should exercise sovereignty, that is to say to let the full weight of the English Law fall upon every individual within their sovereign territory without giving in an inch to alien laws, whether they are consuetudinary or religious. If the English law is broken, then the English justice must proceed to put things right within the English legal scaffolding. Advicing or suggesting that the sharia law must prevail in the Muslim community within the English territory can be likened to an act of high treason against England. Granting sovereignty to a foreign community within the English territory would be like driving a wedge into the heart of the English nation. Allowing an alien culture to be sovereign within the English territory does not mean that one is open-minded and tolerant, but an idiot, and in England, as well as in the rest of Europe, there seem to be many.

Read: Education

A Top Story

2008-07-04T09:28:00.000-07:00

A Short Story © By Carlos Benito Camacho

My cousin Helena was a tall, gangling girl with freckles on her skin. She and I would always play in the garden whenever she came over to spend a few days in the summer during the school vacation. It was a big garden with all kinds of plants and flowers, some trees, two benches, a fountain, a small statue of a dwarf, and, under a lapacho tree, granddaddy’s grave with the wooden cross sticking up among the red acheras flowers. My older brother had told us he had once heard granddaddy’s voice whispering in his ear telling him to take off and leave him alone. And my friend Juan had also said he had heard murmuring voices in the mulberry tree as he swung on the swing. That was why we did not dare to go there at dusk, when it began to get dark.

That was a long time ago. It was back in the days when everything was different, when there was no internet, no cell phones, no video games. It was when there was only radio and black and white TV, which was so expensive that only the rich could afford one. So, we, young boys, had toys such as kites, marbles, and tops to go by. Girls played with dolls back then, but Helena prefered to play with boys’s toys, and she was specially interested in the top.

Made of wood, the upper half was thick and domed with a small, thimble-like head on top. The lower half tapered off like a cone to a pointed steel tip embedded in the tapering wood of the top. To make it spin, you hitched one end of a piece of string over the steel tip in a loop, and then you wrapped it up around the thimble-like head over the domed upper half. You wound the remainder of the string around your four fingers and held the top in your hand. Next you threw it down, pulling the string off with a swing of your arm backward. And the top landed on the ground, spinning fast on its steel tip.

So, on a hot summer afternoon, when my father and mother had gone to sleep siesta, my cousin Helena and I went to play in the garden. Barefooted, with my marbles and the top in my shorts pouches, we followed the path that led to the center of it, where there was no plants, only bare ground. Enveloped in the deep silence of the early afternoon when everbody slept, we sat down on the bench near the fountain to tell hair-raising stories of green elfs. But after a while, we ran out of repertoire. Then, looking at me in the eye, my cousin suddenly asked me to let her have a try at the top. Before handing it over, I explained to her for the fifth time how to wrap it up and throw.

As I passed Helena the top and the string, I heard, or thought I heard, the melancholy song of a common potoo, which struck me as odd since this ugly bird emits its ominous song in the evening, when it is getting dark. As I looked up into the mulberry tree, trying to spot this infamous bird, my cousin wrapped up the top herself without me overseeing it. “I’m ready,” she said, breaking in on my searching look.

Apprehensively, I told her that she could throw. Slowly raising her arm, she tossed it down, but a bit too hard. As the top came off the string, its steel tip got tangled up at the end of the line, whipping sideways and hitting me hard in the groins. An excruciating pain shot up through my body as I doubled up in agony. Then I sank to the ground and lay on my back, clutching my hands to the groins as I gasped for air. In her short flaring skirt, Helena came over slowly and gawked down at me, clasping her hand to her mouth.

The pain seemed to slowly ebb away when I looked up at her, and under the skirt at her long freckled legs that never seemed to end, until I saw a dark thing sprouting curly hair everywhere like a phantasmagoric medusa and, amid the gurgling water of the fountain, a voice whispered in my ear, “vero possumus,” which reverbarated in my mind. She was fourteen, and I was twelve.

Inflation

2008-07-01T09:18:00.000-07:00

Inflation

© By Carlos B. Camacho

Inflation is the general rise in prices due to the spurious printing of money by a government in a vain attempt to finance a deficit created by an elephantiasic state and which can not be managed due to lack of domestic and international confidence, rendering interest rates extremely high. This increase in the volume of money, which is bigger and faster than the output of goods and services, and interest rates, is usually caused by political instability and the subsequent and constant change of the rules and not by the market. This kind of inflation is usually seen in Third World countries where there seems to be perpetual broken trust between the people and their incumbent ruler as every now and then there is a political upheaval and the ruler is overthrown, or just takes off with his suitcases full of dollars before it is too late as the indigenous currency is being eaten away by hyperinflation.

In the United States, and in any other First World country, the situation is different. When there is a budget deficit, it is predictable and circumstancial and can be managed with relative ease, for there is trust in a system which has not been changed since the nation’s independence in 1776, and that system is a Free Market Economy, where free business enterprise as well as private property is respected, culturally and legally; and it has not got into any American politician head to change this cultural and economic idiosincrasy,...,well... except for Obama perhaps.This streamlined ship of unaltered economic fundamentals has been smoothly sailing in the seas of international circumstances (but it seems that Obama wants to change it by breaking the keel of the ship) for more than two hundred years.

The present global inflation has nothing to do with the spurious printing of notes. It has to do with the law of supply and demand, that it is to say with the market itself. China, with a population of 1,300,000,000 inhabitants, is growing fast, so is India, Korea, Malaysia, Brazil, etc. The demand is huge, but the supply is not enough. What kind of supply? Commodities; the raw materials a growing industry needs so much and whose prices fluctuates constantly depending on this universal law of supply and demand.

According to this law of supply and demand, when there is a strong demand for a product that is scarce then the price of that product will go up, which will be an incentive for farmers and miners to invest more money in order to boost pruduction, sell more and make more money. And when pruduction increases the demand is supplied and the price of that particular product will tend to go down. Now farmers in the United States, Europe, Brazil, etc, are not only intensifying but also expanding the surface of cultivated land. So far so good. But what about oil?

The price of oil has soared up to astronomical proportion since last year. A hundred-dollar oil barrel was inconceivable two years ago; even today it would still be very expensive if it were the price, but we all know that today the oil barrel is worth $141! Why not then are the Arab countries and countries like Venezuela not increasing their production? Are they just speculating to make more money in the future? Or could it be that they are ganging up against the United States of America and the Western World as a whole? Or perhaps they are just lobbying for Barack Hussein Obama in the hope that a high oil price will be favorable for the Democratic candidate, and, in turn, having a Hussein Obama upon the executive seat of the most powerful country will be more favorable for Hugo Chavez, Iran, and the whole Arab world.

Read: Education

An Internet Story

2008-06-27T12:13:00.000-07:00

A Short Story © by Carlos Benito Camacho

He had just walked into the big room in which he found himself now. Closing the tall, wooden door behind him, he felt had stepped into another strange set-up in his life. He could not see clearly, as the space around him was dimly lit by red neon lights which were fixed high above on the walls. It was drizzling outside and a wood combustion smell wafted about in the room damp air. Giving his eyes time to adjust to the red gloom, he momentarily lingered there over by the door.

He could make out a bar to his right. A long-haired bartender waited on a patron, pouring a red drink in a long glass that sat on the bar top. He glanced sideways at what appeared to be a tall, burly man in a murky corner of a full-length mirror which hung horizontally on the wall behind the bartender. Wearing white mini-skirts, seven girls sat in front of him around a charcoal fire that lay low in a short-legged brazier on the floor.

It was chilly outside and that dilapidated old house had no central heating. The glowing charcoal ambers in the brazier were all the girls had to warm their bare legs on that cold night. And July was the coldest month of the year in that far-flung corner of the southern hemisphere. He was wearing a grey, woolen cap pulled low over his ears and had a red runny nose. Although he was familiar to cold, humid days, he had to readapt to that sudden change in the weather conditions.

He had flown down from the northern half of the world fifteen days before. As soon as he had checked in at small hotel in the Buenos Aires, he used a computer in the reception foyer to see if he had any new message in his mailbox. But he had not found the one he had expected to find; so he had to kill time in Buenos Aires until the message from her arrived. She had told him before he had left that he had to be patient and wait.

Rodger was an 83-year-old man from Manchester. He had been to different overseas countries before in his life, even lived in a couple of them; so he spoke foreign languages, Spanish among them. But it had been a long time since he had last traveled out of England. He was retired, widowed, and had two daughters and one son. To while away the rest of his existence, he indulged his hobbies of growing vegetables in his own garden, reading military history, working out, and surfing the web to look for information and establish contacts with people from around the world.

That was how he had met her, chatting in one of the many rooms of the web. One evening he had started a conversation with a “esperanza0508”. After making small talk for more than half an hour on the second day, they had typed each other their real names and their e-mail addresses. Because of his age and his life experience, he was always ready to listen. So, pecking away at the keyboards, he got to know a lot of things about her.

Marina was a poor country girl from Tucuman, a province in hinterland Argentina. She had nine siblings and they all lived together with their parents in one-room, thatched shack in a poverty-stricken rural area. His father, who was alcoholic, and older brothers toiled all day long as farm workers, while she helped her mother grow vegetables and raise chickens on their small patch of land. To ease the burden of poverty, her parents had sent her to the city to work as a live-in maid in an affluent neighborhood for a well-off family whose head was a local politician. Bogged down in her daily household drudgery all day long, she managed to attend evening school with the housewife permission twice a week. Although she had learned to use a computer and a lot of new, good, and bad things both at school and at the house where she worked, she still seemed to be a naive girl.

To escape her grim reality, she dropped in a cyber cafe twice a week on her way back from school. Getting in contact with people from overseas, she had realized that, out there, were human beings who were not as prejudiced as the local ones of her small, domestic world. She had also found out that some of the foreign people to whom she could talk to were friendly but straightforward at the same time, as they had a complete different view of reality.

She had been talking to Rodger on internet for more than a year, when she told him that she had gotten a new job. She was going to work as a model to promote beauty products, instead as a live-in house maid as she had been until then. She was very happy about the prospects of being able to keep studying at the university and really help her family. It had not been a newspaper ad which led her to obtain the job she was so glad about, but the only local contact who had once seen her face through a webcam. “Congratulations!” Rodger had said. That had been his last chat with Marina, for she did not get online again.

Three months had gone by and Rodger began to wonder whether she had finally found a sweet heart who really loved her, making her lose interest in internet. But, then, thinking about it, he also got worried about her young friend as she had not written and answered his messages eversince. He was very understanding and felt compassion for her. After all he had three young granddaughters about her age.

One evening, as he read a piece of news about the farmers strike in Argentina, he thought of Marina and all the evenings they had talked to each other on internet. He usually read his messages in the morning but, driven by empathy, he decided to check once again if there was any news from her. As he opened his e-mail account he found at last two messages from her, but with the worrying title “urgent”.

Sent to fifteen contacts, one of them was a massive e-mail in which she asked for help; she had been kidnapped and her life and the lives of her sisters had been threatened. The second message had been written only to him. She told him how she had been deceived in the beauty products model work offer. Her job interview had taken place in a small office in the commercial part of town where a middle-aged woman had told her that her application had been accepted and that she then had to attend a photographic session the next day at a different address.

Showing up at the photographic studio at the agreed time, she had knocked once, then again, and a tall, bearded man opened the black, front door, introduced himself as the photographer, and politely asked her to come in. She had followed him down a long corridor at the end of which he had opened a red door and she had walked in behind him. And that had been the end of her dreams. She had been beaten, raped, and then taken to another province six hundred kilometers away. There she had been forced to work as a prostitute in a brothel.

After three months of being imprisoned in that old house, she had been allowed to go out to do her shopping, accompanied first, then alone the third time but with warnings, threatening to kill her sisters if she ran away. “Your sisters living in Tucuman might get hurt. We are everywhere in this country and have connections,” one of them had said.

It had been in one of her weekly half-day release that she had quickly dropped in a cyber cafe nearby the laundromat she used to go and sent the two messages; one of them written only to him, telling him what had happened to her and how badly she needed his help. He had then answered her right away, “I’m flying to Buenos Aires next week. Give me the address of where you are. Describe me the house and the men. Give me details.”

Nine days had passed since his arrival in Buenos Aires when he decided check his e-mailbox once again as he returned to his hotel after dinner with a retired comrade who lived in Argentina. He sat down at the computer in the foyer, logged into his account, made another click, and there it was; the long-awaited message from Marina had finally arrived.

Traveling by bus, it had taken him three days to get to that remote place in that faraway country. Along the way the bus had been stopped several times by local farmers who blocked roads, demonstrating against a sharp tax increase on exports implemented by the left-oriented government. As he got off to stretch his legs in one of these stops, he engaged a farmer in conversation to kill the time.

Standing there, over by the closed front door, he looked at the girls in front. None of their faces corresponded to Marina’s description of herself, and also none of them wore the chain on her neck over her sweater as she had said she would. He then took a quick look again at the tall man in the reddish blue cardigan with his arms crossed through the corner of the mirror that hung behind the bartender.

In his woolen grey hat and tawny mackintosh he looked like a Cold War ghost. Frozen in that spot, he wore a detached, wrinkled countenance as his past life fleetingly ran through his mind like a fast-motion, black and white film, opening and stirring old avenues of behavior.

He took three steps forward, rolling his eyes as he glanced sideways, looked down at the burning ambers, then at his feet. He was wearing steel-tipped working boots. Amid the strident music, the laughters, and cigarette smoke hovering in the damp air, his ancient martial scars twitched in the silence of his inner harmony. He heard a girl say, “hi, grandaddy,”

His foot flicked forward and the fire-containing brazier went up in the air in a lob and landed upside down on the big man’s head. A scream in the baritone key came out of his throat as he flailed his arms to brush off the fire off his burning head.

Shrieking, the girls scrambled out of the way, stumbling and falling on one another. Taking two sideways steps, he pulled an iron bar out of his trenchcoat and swung it down hard on the bartender neck that broke like dry straw as a regular fell off his stool. Then the wrinkled, phlegmatic Rodger made for the big man writhing on the floor with his head burning and delivered him a vicious kick in the stomach as he ran into a long hallway with the farmer’s iron bar in his hand.

In the murky corridor, a dark shape of a man came up torwards him. He sidestepped a punch and shoved the pointed end of the crow bar in the dark figure’s throat, sinking it in all the way. A deep croak tore out as the pimp clutched at his perforated neck and slumped to the floor. Opening a door on his right, Rodger found Marina with a fat man that had just put his clothes back on and was about to leave when he smashed his forehead in with the gory jimmy.

“Marina! It’s me Rodger; let’s go,” he said.

Grabbing a sport bag she had packed earlier, she followed him out and dashed along the wet sidewalk for two blocks. Gasping, they got into a black, rusted peugot 504 parked on a corner of a narrow, cobbled street and took off.

The next day, as he traveled back to Buenos Aires, he read the local newspaper he had bought at the bus station; an important businessman, president of the local soccer club and representative in Tucuman’s congress for the FPV party, had been found dead in his imported car with a bullet hole in his head.

Marina is presently somewhere in England studying at a university.

There are hundreds of girls who have disappeared in the last four years in the northwest of Argentina as organized crime has its roots in power. Visit this site: http://www.casoveron.org.ar/

Read: Mate (a short story by Carlos B. Camacho)

Vero Possumus...

2008-06-23T16:46:00.000-07:00

Here is Barack Hussein Obama's new Latin slogan:

"Vero possumus, quoniam ego sum falsidicus muslim."

Yes, we can, because I am a lying Muslim.

Read: Obama Wants Change

Sandrine Piau & Gloria Banditelli: Per le porte del tormento

2008-06-20T15:18:00.000-07:00

Sandrine Piau in rehearsal - Travail d'avant concert

2008-06-20T15:16:00.000-07:00

Sandrine Piau: from The Stephansdom Vienna (part5)

2008-06-20T15:02:00.000-07:00

Sandrine Piau: Live from The Stephansdom Vienna

2008-06-20T14:48:00.000-07:00

Sandrine Piau, Willow Song

2008-06-20T14:41:00.000-07:00

Sandrine Piau - Un cenno leggiadretto (Serse)

2008-06-20T14:19:00.000-07:00

Sandrine Piau : 'Nulla in Mundo Pax Sincera' 2nd part

2008-06-20T14:15:00.000-07:00

Gloria Patri et Filio, Vivaldi

2008-06-20T14:12:00.000-07:00

Human Dignity and the Sanctity of Life

2008-06-20T11:44:00.000-07:00

John McCain believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the bench. Constitutional balance would be restored by the reversal of Roe v. Wade, returning the abortion question to the individual states. The difficult issue of abortion should not be decided by judicial fiat. However, the reversal of Roe v. Wade represents only one step in the long path toward ending abortion. Once the question is returned to the states, the fight for life will be one of courage and compassion - the courage of a pregnant mother to bring her child into the world and the compassion of civil society to meet her needs and those of her newborn baby.

The pro-life movement has done tremendous work in building and reinforcing the infrastructure of civil society by strengthening community and neighborhood organizations that provide critical services to pregnant mothers in need. This work must continue and government must find new ways to empower and strengthen these armies of compassion. These important groups can help build the consensus necessary to end abortion at the state level. As John McCain has publicly noted, "At its core, abortion is a human tragedy. To effect meaningful change, we must engage the debate at a human level."

Promoting Adoption: In 1993, John McCain and his wife, Cindy, adopted a little girl from Mother Teresa's orphanage in Bangladesh. She has been a blessing to the McCain family and helped make adoption advocacy a personal issue for the Senator.The McCain family experience is not unique; millions of families have had their lives transformed by the adoption of a child. As president, motivated by his personal experience, John McCain will seek ways to promote adoption as a first option for women struggling with a crisis pregnancy. In the past, he cosponsored legislation to prohibit discrimination against families with adopted children, to provide adoption education, and to permit tax deductions for qualified adoption expenses, as well as to remove barriers to interracial and inter-ethnic adoptions.

Protecting Marriage: As president, John McCain would nominate judges who understand that the role of the Court is not to subvert the rights of the people by legislating from the bench. Critical to Constitutional balance is ensuring that, where state and local governments do act to preserve the traditional family, the Courts must not overstep their authority and thwart the Constitutional right of the people to decide this question.The family represents the foundation of Western Civilization and civil society and John McCain believes the institution of marriage is a union between one man and one woman. It is only this definition that sufficiently recognizes the vital and unique role played by mothers and fathers in the raising of children, and the role of the family in shaping, stabilizing, and strengthening communities and our nation.

Protecting Children from Internet Pornography: John McCain believes that Internet offers tremendous promise in terms of freedom of expression, information sharing, and the spread of knowledge and commerce. Nevertheless, there are also serious threats for children, lurking in sick corners of the Web. This is the reason that John McCain has been a leader in pushing legislation through Congress that requires all schools and libraries receiving federal subsidies for Internet connectivity to utilize technology to restrict access to sexually explicit material by children using such computers.

Read: Education

Protecting Second Amendment Rights

2008-06-20T11:20:00.000-07:00

John McCain believes that the right of law abiding citizens to keep and bear arms is a fundamental, individual Constitutional right that we have a sacred duty to protect. We have a responsibility to ensure that criminals who violate the law are prosecuted to the fullest, rather than restricting the rights of law abiding citizens. Gun control is a proven failure in fighting crime. Law abiding citizens should not be asked to give up their rights because of criminals - criminals who ignore gun control laws anyway.

John McCain opposes backdoor attempts to restrict Second Amendment rights by holding gun manufacturers liable for crimes committed by third parties using a firearm, and has voted to protect gun manufacturers from such inappropriate liability aimed at bankrupting the entire gun industry. He also opposes restrictions on so-called "assault rifles" and voted consistently against such bans. Most recently he opposed an amendment to extend a ban on 19 specific firearms, and others with similar characteristics.

John McCain supports instant criminal background checks to help prohibit criminals from buying firearms and has voted to ensure they are conducted thoroughly, efficiently, and without infringing on the rights of law abiding citizens.

Read: Second Amendment to the American Constitution

American National Security

2008-06-20T10:39:00.000-07:00

America has the most capable, best-trained and best-led military force in the world. But much needs to be done to maintain our military leadership. John McCain is committed to ensuring that the men and women of our military remain the best, most capable fighting force on Earth - and that our nation honors its promises to them for their service. As President, John McCain will strengthen the military, shore up our alliances, and ensure that the nation is capable of protecting the homeland, deterring potential military challenges, responding to any crisis that endangers American security, and prevailing in any conflict we are forced to fight.

Fighting Against Violent Islamic Extremists and Terrorist Tactics

The attacks on September 11th represented more than a failure of intelligence. The tragedy highlighted a failure of national policy to respond to the development of a global terror network hostile to the American people and our values. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the 2000 bombing of the USS COLE indicated a growing global terrorist threat before the attacks on New York and Washington. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden's declaration of war against the United States hit home with unmistakable clarity.

As President, John McCain will ensure that America has the quality intelligence necessary to uncover plots before they take root, the resources to protect critical infrastructure and our borders against attack, and the capability to respond and recover from a terrorist incident swiftly. He will ensure that the war against terrorists is fought intelligently, with patience and resolve, using all instruments of national power. John McCain believes that just as America must be prepared to meet and prevail against any adversary on the field of battle, we must engage and prevail against them on the battleground of ideas. In so doing, we can and must deprive terrorists of the converts they seek and counter their teaching of the doctrine of hatred and despair.

Effective Missile Defense

John McCain is committed to deploying effective missile defenses to reduce the possibility of strategic blackmail by rogue regimes like Iran, North Korea, or Venezuela, and to secure our homeland from the very real prospect of missile attack by present or future adversaries. As President, John McCain will not trust in the "balance of terror" to protect America, but will work to deploy effective missile defenses to safeguard our people and our homeland.

Modernizing the Armed Forces

Modernizing American armed forces involves procuring advanced weapons systems that will help rapidly and decisively defeat any adversary and protect American lives. It also requires addressing force protection needs to make sure that America's combat personnel have the best safety and survivability equipment available.Modernizing the armed forces also means adapting our doctrine, training, and tactics for the kind of conflicts we are most likely to face. Today, American forces are engaged in dangerous operations throughout the world. From Iraq and Afghanistan to Somalia and the Philippines, American forces are fighting the battles of the 21st century against terrorists and insurgents. These asymmetric conflicts require a very different force structure than the one we used to fight and win the Cold War.The missions of the 21st century will not center on traditional territorial defense or mass armor engagements. Instead, the men and women of the U.S. armed forces will be engaged in, among other things, counter insurgency, counter terrorism, missile defense, counter proliferation and information warfare. This calls not just for a larger and more capable military, but for a new mix of military forces, including civil affairs, special operations, and highly mobile forces capable of fighting and prevailing in the conflicts America faces.

Smarter Defense Spending

John McCain has worked aggressively to reform the defense budgeting process to ensure that America enjoys the best military at the best cost. This includes reforming defense procurement to ensure the faithful and efficient expenditure of taxpayer dollars that are made available for defense acquisition. Too often, parochial interests - rather than the national interest - have guided our spending decisions. John McCain supports significant reform in our defense acquisition process to ensure that dollars spent actually contribute to U.S. security.

McCain Economic Plan

2008-06-19T12:21:00.000-07:00

Americans are facing economic challenges. Gas prices are rising, mortgages are threatened, and thousands have lost their jobs. Now is the time to act and John McCain has outlined several near-term, tangible plans to address some of the challenges confronting Americans today.

John McCain believes we should institute a summer gas tax holiday. Hard-working American families are suffering from higher gasoline prices. John McCain calls on Congress to suspend the 18.4 cent federal gas tax and 24.4 cent diesel tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day. At the same time, as international demand for oil is bolstered by federal purchases for Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), John McCain will stop filling the SPR to reduce demand. There is no reason to fill it when oil is so expensive; the overall SPR is of adequate size, and when it places further upward pressure on prices.

John McCain will end policies that contribute to higher transportation and food costs. Ethanol subsidies, tariff barriers and sugar quotas drive up food prices and hurt Americans. However, we cannot take the wrong direction and cut off trade for American goods.

Helping Americans With The Housing Crisis:

John McCain is proposing a new "HOME Plan" to provide robust, timely and targeted help to those hurt by the housing crisis. Under his HOME Plan, every deserving American family or homeowner will be afforded the opportunity to trade a burdensome mortgage for a manageable loan that reflects their home's market value.

Eligibility: Holders of a non-conventional mortgage taken after 2005 who live in their home (primary residence only); can prove creditworthiness at the time of the original loan; are either delinquent, in arrears on payments, facing a reset or otherwise demonstrate that they will be unable to continue to meet their mortgage obligations; and can meet the terms of a new 30-year fixed-rate mortgage on the existing home.How It Works: An individual picks up a form at any Post Office and apply for a HOME loan. The FHA HOME Office certifies that the individual is qualified and contacts the individual's mortgage servicer. The mortgage servicer writes down and retires the existing loan, which is replaced by an FHA guaranteed HOME loan from a lender.

John McCain calls for the immediate formation of a Justice Department Mortgage Abuse Task Force. The Task Force will aggressively investigate potential criminal wrongdoing in the mortgage industry and bring to justice any who violated the law. The DOJ Task Force will offer assistance to State Attorneys General who are investigating abusive lending practices.

Read: Obama Wants Change

http://www.johnmccain.com/

John McCain's Vision for Health Care Reform

2008-06-19T09:19:00.000-07:00

The problem with health care is well known: it is too expensive and, as a result, 47 million people living in the United States lack health insurance. But John McCain believes we can and must provide access to health care for every American. He has proposed a comprehensive vision for achieving that. For too long, our nation's leaders have talked about reforming health care. Now is the time to act, for John is a man of action.

John McCain believes the key to Health Care reform is to restore control to the patients themselves. We want a system of health care in which everyone can afford and acquire the treatment and preventative care they need. Health care should be available to all and not limited by where you work or how much you make. Families should be in charge of their health care dollars and have more control over care.

John McCain will reform Health Care making it easier for individuals and families to obtain insurance. An important part of his plan is to use competition to improve the quality of health insurance with greater variety to match people's needs, lower prices, and portability. Families should be able to purchase health insurance nationwide, across state lines.

While still having the option of employer-based coverage, every family will receive a direct refundable tax credit - effectively cash - of $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families to offset the cost of insurance. Families will be able to choose the insurance provider that suits them best and the money would be sent directly to the insurance provider. Those obtaining innovative insurance that costs less than the credit can deposit the remainder in expanded Health Savings Accounts. When families are informed about medical choices, they are more capable of making their own decisions and often decide against unnecessary options. Health Savings Accounts take an important step in the direction of putting families in charge of what they pay for.

John McCain will work with states to establish a guaranteed access plan. As President, John McCain will work with governors to develop a best practice model that states can follow - a Guaranteed Access Plan or GAP - that would reflect the best experience of the states to ensure these patients have access to health coverage. One approach would establish a nonprofit corporation that would contract with insurers to cover patients who have been denied insurance and could join with other state plans to enlarge pools and lower overhead costs. There would be reasonable limits on premiums, and assistance would be available for Americans below a certain income level. John McCain Will Promote Proper Incentives. John McCain will work with Congress, the governors, and industry to make sure this approach is funded adequately and has the right incentives to reduce costs such as disease management, individual case management, and health and wellness programs.

A Specific Plan of Action: Lowering Health Care Costs: If we act today, we can lower health care costs for families through common-sense initiatives like lowering drug prices. John McCain will look to bring greater competition to our drug markets through safe re-importation of drugs and faster introduction of generic drugs, and provide quality, cheaper care for chronic disease.

http://www.johnmccain.com/

Monotheism & Polytheism

2008-06-18T08:16:00.000-07:00

By Carlos B. Camacho

From the time man became a sedentary creature who organized himself around a society, culture has revolved around religions, which monopolize and channel man's fear, fear of the unkown. There have been two kinds of religions; polytheistic and monotheistic. We are taught and we generally think that the former is a rudimentary religion, whereas the latter evolved and representing the logical omnipresent "truth", making us better human beings. But, is it?

The thee monotheistic religions that we know, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, originated in the Middle East; a region of patriarchal societies, ruled by tyrannic kings in ancient times. And these monotheistic, "more civilized", religions portray in their religious books a tyrannic, intolerant and only god, who punishes human beings with floods, earthquakes, and diseases, when man dares to assert himself ontologically as a self-confident, rational being. Monotheistic teachings imply that, to avoid excruciating endless suffering, man has give up his freedom of thoughts and to make decisions and submit to doctrines.

Monotheism crushes man's self-esteem by stirring up inner fears and feeling of guilt, giving rise to an elephantiasic superego that diverts mental energies through destructive channels. Judaism: People are sinful (bad), but can be reconciled to God by making sacrifices for their sin, and they can only gain an eternal dwelling with God by following the laws of Moses. Christianity: man is sinful (bad) by nature and can only be saved and gain eternal life through faith in Jesus; to get forgiveness one has to forgive and turn the other cheek when one is attacked; Christian values are still deep-rooted nowadays, even in the mind of the intellectual agnostic; imagine the meek Christians standing in the line that led to the lions maws of the Roman Circus. Islam: people are saved by virtue of their deeds, a small deed is lying to conceal one's intention, but the greatest deed that brings man straight to heaven is to kill the infidel, that is to say the Jew, the Christian, the agnostic, etc; at the beginning, long before the first crusade, Islam waged great wars of territorial expansion to kill the infidel; nowadays fundamentalists immolate themselves to kill tens, hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of human beings if they ever get radioactive materials.

In contrast to the monotheistic doctrines, Jupiter was not the only god in the pantheon; there were others, and none of them restricted man's thinking and actions. His behavior was only regulated by his circumstances and the man-created laws that established order and synchronized individuals activities. In the Roman, Greek, as well as in the Scandinavian polytheistic religions, there was a god who inspired and/or helped man in every human action and enterprise he undertook. Not only there was a god of war, but also a god or goddess of science, trade, finance, love, pleasure, wisdom, etc. In Ancient Times, great civilizations arose under the aegis of polytheism, whereas monotheism arose in nomadic societies where man lapidated women to death.

Read: Dreams
The Human Mind

Vivaldi's Mottetto: "Alleluia", Sandrine Piau

2008-06-13T11:33:00.000-07:00

Vivaldi 's "In Furore Justissimae Irae" 1, Sandrine Piau

2008-06-11T11:02:00.000-07:00

John McCain's Courageous Service

2008-06-06T08:47:00.000-07:00

John McCain

2008-06-06T08:15:00.000-07:00

John Sidney McCain III was born on August 29, 1936. He is the senior United States Senator from Arizona and Republican Party nominee for President of the United States in the upcoming 2008 election.

John McCain has a remarkable record of leadership and experience that embodies his unwavering lifetime commitment to service. First elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Arizona in 1982, John has led the fight for reforming Washington, eliminating wasteful government spending, and strengthening our nation's armed forces.

John McCain's reform agenda to reduce federal spending and lower taxes quickly elevated him to statewide office and he was elected to the United States Senate in 1986, after serving two terms in the U.S. House.

In the Senate, John continued to demand that Congress put an end to loopholes for special interests and fix the broken system in Washington that too often allows lobbyists to write legislation and members of Congress to waste taxpayer money. In November 2004, Senator McCain was overwhelmingly reelected with nearly 77 percent of the vote.

As the son and grandson of distinguished Navy admirals, John McCain deeply values duty, honor and service of country. John attended college at the United States Naval Academy, and launched a 22-year career as a naval aviator upon his graduation. He continued the McCain tradition of service to country passed down to him from his father and grandfather when he asked to serve in the Vietnam War.

On July 29 1967, John narrowly survived the first of many near-death experiences during his lifetime while preparing to take off on a bombing mission over North Vietnam from his ship, the USS Forrestal. A missile accidentally fired from a nearby plane struck the fuel tanks on John's plane and created a deadly inferno aboard the ship. John barely escaped the fiery disaster that killed 134 men, injured hundreds more and destroyed 20 planes.

Instead of taking the option to return home after the Forrestal disaster, Senator McCain volunteered for more combat duty - a fateful decision that stopped the clock on his life and separated him from his family, and country, for five and a half years. During his 23rd bombing mission on October 26, 1967, a missile struck John's plane and forced him to eject, knocking him unconscious and breaking both his arms and his leg. John was then taken as a prisoner of war into the now infamous "Hanoi Hilton," where he was denied necessary medical treatment and often beaten by the North Vietnamese.

John spent much of his time as a prisoner of war in solitary confinement, aided by his faith and the friendships of his fellow POWs. When he was finally released and able to return home years later, John continued his service by regaining his naval flight status. Senator McCain's last Navy duty assignment was to serve as the naval liaison to the United States Senate. John retired from the Navy in 1981. His naval honors include the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart, and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Senator McCain has seven children and four grandchildren, and currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona with his wife Cindy.

Wikipedia

The Roman Legion

2008-06-04T11:27:00.000-07:00

At the beginning, during the monarchy period, the Romans used the Greek phalanx as the pattern for their battle formations. When the Etruscans were expelled from power, ushering in the Roman Republic, the Latins made the first changes to the Roman Army, as the phalanx was abandoned and the early legion was developed. Three lines of soldiers were drawn up; the hastati in the front, the principes in the second row, and the triarii.

The hastati were the youngest fighters.They carried body armour, a rectangular shield called scutum, which should remain the distinctive, protective equipment of the foot soldier throughout Roman history. As offensive weapons they carried a short, straight, double-edged sword called gladius, made not for slashing but for stabbing. They also used a rather short spear, the pilum, which had a point of soft metal, making it a weapon to be thrown at the enemy, rather than to jab with. When the pilum penetrated an enemy shield, its barbed point bent down, making it impossible to pull it out, and rendering the enemy shield unwieldy and useless.

The principes, who stood in the second row, were experienced, first class legionaries, and their average age was twenty five years. Carrying the same offensive weapons as the hastati, they were better equipped. The triarii made up the elite of the Roman infantry, as they were the best fighters a Roman general had at his disposal. With an average age of thirty, they were highly experienced and hardened in long wars. They also carried a gladius, but instead of a pilum, they wielded the same long spear used by the Greek hoplites. The triarii made up the strong, back-up line around which the legion would regroup for a counter attack. With their long spears, they were also responsible for holding off cavalry charges.

These three lines were supported by auxiliaries, or light infantry, like the velites, who served as skirmishers who used javalins, bow and arrows, and catapults.

After of the disastrous battles of Trebia and Cannae, the Roman army needed drastic changes, which were carried out by Scipio Africanus. Being in command of the Roman legion in Spain, he began training them harder than anyone had done before as the legionaries started using steel gladii made in that region and wearing iron helmets with purple and black feathers on top. He also changed tactics, making the lines more maneuverable.

By the end of the second century BC to become a Roman legionary was something that not any Roman citizen could afford. To be eligible he had to belong to an upper class, own property worth 3000 sesterces in value, and supply his own weapons and protective gear. But this situation changed in 107 BC when Gaius Marius became junior consul. That year he was assigned the task of bringing the war against Jugurtha to an end, but he had no army. The army his predecessor Metellus had commanded in northern Africa had been consigned to the senior consul Lucius Cassius Longinus in the war against the Cimbri in northern Italy. So, Mario had no soldiers left to wage the war in northern Africa. And the citizenry eligible for the army had severly been depleted owing to previous military disasters. To solve this problem, he carried out some reforms.

He included the landless mass of poor to be recruited to the army. Since these humble citizens could not afford to buy their own military equipment, Marius arranged for the state to fit them out with weapons and military gear. He also ordered that the new legionary be paid as a professional soldier, offering him a share in the war spoils. Thus with a permanent professional army, training and drilling took place year around, not just when a new war broke out.

With the marian reforms, the organization of the Roman legion consisted of ten cohorts. Each cohort was made up of three maniples, and every single maniple was composed of two centuries. There were 80 men in a century, which was divided into10 centubernium of 8 men each, 160 in a maniple, 480 in a cohort, and 4,800 in a legion. And an army was composed of two up to six legions, depending on the kind of military campaign.

A centurion was a highly experienced, profesional soldier. Hardened in battles, most centurions commanded a century, although some senior centurions commanded a cohort. The Primus Pilus was the commanding centurion of the first cohort and the senior centurion of the entire legion. Only eight officers outranked the Primus Pilus. The overall legion commander was the Legatus Legionis, who held command for four years; next in command were the Tribunus Laticlavius, and the Praefectus Castrorum (the Camp Perfect).

When it was on campaigns the army was accompanied by a number of specialists. One was the camp commandant, who was responsible for the organisation of the camp. The Romans were very careful about their camps - no Roman army halted for a single night without digging defensive trenches and fortifying its camp. Each soldier contributed in establishing the camp. Another specialist was the quaestor, whose duty was to look after all the money matter.Then there were the engineers and all kinds of craftsmen and artisans. They were responsible for siege operations and for the rather primative Roman"artillery", which consisted of machines like crossbows and big catapults. These were mainly used for hurling big rocks and stones at the walls of a fortified place. The engineers also had to build the moveable towers that were used in sieges.

Latin

Scipio Africanus

The Punic Wars

Obama, The Man Whose Surname Rhymes With Osama

2008-05-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

The American Democratic candidate, Barack Hussein Obama was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama, Senior, a black Muslim from Nyangoma-Kogel, Kenya and Ann Dunham, a white woman from Wichita, Kansas. His parents met while both were attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, at which his father was enrolled as a foreign student.

When Barack Hussein Obama, Jr, was two years old, his parents separated. After her divorce, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, a radical Muslim, and the family moved to Soetoro's home, Indonesia in 1967. Lolo Soetoro introduced his stepson to Islam, sending him to a Wahabi school in Jakarta. Wahabism is the radical teaching that is followed by the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad against the Western World.

After finishing primary school, he returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents. Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Occidental College for two years. Later, and since it is politically expedient to be a Christian when seeking major public office in the United States, Barack Hussein Obama has joined the United Church of Christ in an attempt to camouflage his Muslim religion.

In 1993 began writing his first book, Dreams from My Father, published in 1995. Obama also did some work on taxpayer-supported building rehabilitation loans for Rezmar Corp., which is co-owned by his long-time political supporter Tony Rezko, born 1955 in Aleppo, Syria. Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996 from the 13th District. In mid-2002, Obama began considering a run for the U.S. Senate, enlisting political strategist David Axelrod that fall and formally announcing his candidacy in January 2003.

In November 2004, Obama was elected US Senator and was sworn in as such in on January 4, 2005. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama has made official trips to the Middle East, and Africa. In February 2007, standing before the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois, Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

Read: Obama Wants Change
John McCain

Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner

2008-05-19T11:53:00.000-07:00

By Carlos B. Camacho

Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is an Argentinean politician from the ruling party Front For Victory, and now the incumbent President of Argentina (2007-2011), succeeding her husband Nestor Kirchner in Office.

She was born and grew up in La Plata, the capital of the Province of Buenos Aires, on February 19, 1953. She began to study Law at the National University of La Plata in the early 1970s. Her political life was very active from the very beginning as she enrolled in the Montoneros movement, the Peronist party left wing. It was during these years that she met her husband Nestor, then a young student from the Province of Santa Cruz. Later, after the arrival of Juan Domingo Peron and the election that proclaimed him President of Argentina in 1973, she was expelled, along the violent leftist movement she was member of, from the Peronist Party, as the Montoneros had claimed responsability for the assassination of Jose Rucci, Peron's close adviser and labor union leader.

A few months before the military coup that overthrew Peron's wife, Isabelita, from power, Cristina quit the Montoneros organization and continued her studies at the University. When democracy was reestablished in the country, she was elected representative for the Santa Cruz local House of Representative. In 1997 she won a seat in the National House of Representative in Buenos Aires, and in 2001 was proclaimed national senator by the popular vote to represent the Province of Santa Cruz. In 2003, her husband Nestor Kirchner, who had been governor of the Province of Santa Cruz, won the presidential election, and, aside from being a senator, she became the first lady.

In the October 2007 general election, Fernández ran for President of Argentina, representing the ruling Front For Victory party. She won the election, but amid a great political scandal known as the suitcase scandal in Argentina. Cristina's presidential campaign had allegedly been financed with illegal money coming from the sale of FARC's cocaine. The suitcase that held $800,000 had been discovered by a customs agent and was probably one of many suitcases containing dollar bills which had been trickling undercover into Argentina from Venezuela.

The legality of her presidential bid funding was later disputed when U.S federal prosecutors alleged that the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez illegally tried to cover up the whole operation within the United States sovereign territory. In Florida it is known as the Antonini Wilson case.

The president elect began a four-year term on December 10, 2007, facing challenges including high inflation, union demands for higher salaries, lack of private investment in key areas, lack of institutional credibility (exemplified by the controversy surrounding the national statistics bureau, INDEC), energy crisis, utility companies demanding authorization to raise their fees, low availability of cheap credit to the private sector, and the upcoming negotiation of the defaulted foreign debt with the Paris Club. And now the farmers strike, which has been going on for two months.

Read: The Populist

Success

2008-04-17T11:56:00.001-07:00

By Carlos B. Camacho

Success is not the easy life-endowed catwalk of comfortable circumstances one can walk along to show off and draw people’s attention to feed his vanity; nor is it the sneaking short cut of the warped who deceives human beings to get the things he greeds the easy way.

Success is the long straight road one makes as one determinedly plows through the rugged fields of adverse circumstances in one’s search for more favorable conditions.

In Argentina, the land is plagued of crooked short cuts which come up from the underworld to suck out the hope of the honest to feed the bottomless greed of the incumbent mob. And although the KK and their cohorts stylishly move along the smooth catwalk of quasi-success, someone of sharp insight can pick up the stench behind their fashionable clothing; FARC’s cocaine.

Antonio Vivaldi's Four Seasons: Winter

2008-04-17T11:56:00.000-07:00

The Second Amendment to the American Constitution

2008-03-16T10:48:00.000-07:00

By Carlos Benito Camacho

The Supreme Court of the United States will consider the meaning of the second amendment to the American Constitution. Written more than 200 years ago, the amendment says, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

The second amendment came in a package of ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights, which states or deals with the American citizens individual rights, and it was added to the American Constitution in 1791. Since it was a time when there was no institutionalized federal army or national guard yet, with its own logistic and armory, every citizen who joined the state militia had to carry with him his own private gun, musket at that time. By the end of the18th century America was still a wild land whose white population was subject to be attacked by one of the numerous Indian tribes, or by English, French, or Spanish marauders. Every farmer had a gun or guns at home to protect themselves.

So, my opinion of the second amendment is what it is, what it plainly states; every American individual has the right to keep and bear arms, and join a regulated militia for the security of a free state. And I think it should never be altered, because who knows what might happen in this globalized world. Let’s imagine a situation where there is a natural cataclysmic event, or a massive attack with weapons of mass destruction by a terrorist group, aided from within by subversive cells; a situation where the institutions which legally sustain the nation collapse. Then the only thing the surviving law-abiding, American citizens would have to fall back on would be this second amend to their fundamental and primordial Law, which is the Constitution of the United States.

Making an amendment to the second amendment and forbidding the citizens to keep and bear arms would not avoid sporadic violent acts or lower the crime rate in the United States. In Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, and many African countries, their people do not have such constitutional right. To legally acquire a gun in Argentina nowadays is practically impossible for a law-abiding citizen who wants to protect himself and his family, nevertheless this South American country has one of the highest crime rates in the world.

As a final consideration, let us bear in mind an old Roman saying, “Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt” (When catapults are outlawed, only outlaws will have catapults).

Barack Hussein Obama

2008-02-26T05:52:00.000-08:00

Obama's True Self

Read: Obama Wants Change

Life Cycle

2008-02-21T08:35:00.000-08:00

By Carlos Benito Camacho

A bacterium devours proteins, but a protozoan engulfs the bacterium. Later, viruses sneak in and dispatch the protozoan from the inside. Harmful bacteria attack and kill red blood cells, but white blood cells counterattack and destroy the bacteria and anything foreign that works at croosspurposes in the vertebrate’s circulatory system.

The big fish eats the small fish. A crocodile gobbles up the big fish. Another reptile, a snake, bites and swallows a rat, yet the gliding eagle catches the snake with bristling talons and wolfs it down on a rugged summit rock.

The deer eats the lush, thriving plants, but the lion mauls the plant-eater to death and feeds on it. Then the trustful young lion falls asleep at night near a pack of laughing hyenas, which fall upon the sleeping lion and eat it.

A fly sits upon the muzzle of a powerful buffalo, which grazes at ease in the grassy field. Despite the buffalo’s strong muscles and sharp horns that could open a big gash in a lion’s flank, the small fly flyblows an egg in its nostrils; the egg develops into a larva, and this into a maggot. Then the maggot bites into its brain, slowly eating it away. The bovine finally collapses as the jackals and vultures feast on it.

The wandering Homo sapiens that kills the lion, the bear, the buffalo, the deer, the crocodile, and anything that moves about to feed his clan also kills his fellow being to protect his hunting territory, or to eat him when the prey has become scarce in his hunting domain. In time he settles down as he becomes a farmer. The population grows and the farming community becomes a village. Jobs become specialized, and society stratified; the chief, the priest, the warrior, the craftman, the farmer, and the slave. The chief is the boss but the priest controls the mind of the masses through thoughts and behaviour parameters that the gods establish.

The village becomes city states. The city states civilizations. Civilizations clash; wars break out as different cultures rise and vanish. A more sophisticated form of thoughts control arises; monotheism; the first, second, and third monotheism. The second monotheism starts as a cult which breaks away from the first and eventually becomes a state religion. Then the third monotheism arises; to kill infidels is one of their fundamentals. They invade, killing, engulfing and digesting cultures as they go. The second monotheism counterattack. Carrying the cross, the nations spring up. They become empires that rise and fall.

Man from the second and first monotheism breaks away from religion with new secular ideas which gives him an enlightened belief in himself. Political and industrial revolutions occur. Democracy is reborn. There are industrial and idealogical wars in the Western World. Democracy is consolidated. The advent of highly technologically advanced nations with multicultural societies. High standard of living. Local populations dwindle.

But amid the different cultures in the Western Hemisphere cosmopolitan societies, there is one that injects itself in the body social of nations, using democracy not as a means of free expression and peacefully coexisting together with others, but as a train to reach their destination. And like a Tumbu fly larva, they thrive at the expense of the host nation, not to integrate themselves and contribute, but to destroy it from within.

There is one life form that is even more dangerous than an egg-laying fly. It is a new type of virus. It is a mutant virus which copies the immunological system cells genes of the host body and takes on their form. It is the new Crescent Virus which is barnstorming right now in its quest for power to break the body down and phagocitize it from within with the help of its foreign cohorts. Who has the vaccine against it?

In the Western Hemisphere there are still extremely naive people who believe that bacteria, protozoans, fungi, viruses, and white blood cells can peacefully live together in one culture.

Top Hezbollah Terrorist Leader Is Killed in Syria

2008-02-13T09:40:00.000-08:00

February 13, 2008

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A top Hezbollah commander long sought by the United States for his role in terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of Americans in the 1980s, died Tuesday night in Damascus, Syria, when a bomb detonated under the vehicle he was in, Syrian officials said.

No one claimed responsibility for killing the commander, Imad Mugniyah, who had been in hiding for many years and was one of the most wanted and elusive terrorists in the world.
Mr. Mugniyah, 45, was suspected of planning the 1983 bombings of the American Embassy and a Marine barracks in Beirut; the hijacking of a T.W.A. jetliner in 1985; and a series of high-profile kidnappings in the 1980s, among other crimes. Israel accused him of helping to plan the 1992 bombing of its embassy in Buenos Aires, in which 29 people were killed, and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in the city, in which 85 people died.

The embassy bombing in Beirut was a particularly sharp blow to the United States because a regional meeting of Central Intelligence Agency operatives was under way and crucial personnel were killed.

Although Mr. Mugniyah had not been accused of planning new attacks in more than a decade, American officials sometimes referred to him and his Hezbollah peers as the “A team” of international terrorism because of their cold professionalism and secrecy.

Widely believed to have undergone plastic surgery to avoid detection, Mr. Mugniyah had not been seen in public for years and was thought to have moved between Iran, Syria and Lebanon at various times. Before 2001, he had been involved in more terrorist attacks against Americans than any other person, and at one point he had a $25 million American bounty on his head.

“The world is a better place without this man in it,” said the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, on Wednesday.

Hezbollah announced Mr. Mugniyah’s death hours after reports first emerged late Tuesday night that a powerful bomb had exploded under a sport utility vehicle in an upscale neighborhood in Damascus, the capital, killing its occupant and damaging 9 or 10 other vehicles.

Hezbollah did not say how or where Mr. Mugniyah was killed, but the Syrian state news agency confirmed Wednesday that he was the man killed in the bombing, citing Syria’s interior minister, Bassam Abdul-Majeed, who said Syria “condemns this cowardly terrorist act and offers condolences to the martyr’s family and to the Lebanese people.”

A television station run by Hezbollah, Al Manar, hailed Mr. Mugniyah as a hero. “With pride and honor we announce that a great jihadi leader has joined the procession of martyrs in the Islamic resistance,” said a statement read on the station. “The martyr was killed at the hands of the Israeli Zionists.”

Israel officially distanced itself from the killing and, without specifically naming Mr. Mugniyah, said that it was looking into the attack in Syria. But some former Israeli security officials did not hide their satisfaction at Mr. Mugniyah’s assassination. Danny Yatom, a Labor Party lawmaker and a former chief of the Mossad intelligence agency, called Mr. Mugniyah’s death “a great achievement for the free world in its fight on terror.”

Israel has proved its willingness to carry out attacks in Syria. In September, Israel bombed a suspected nuclear site in the Syrian desert. In 2004, a Hamas commander was killed in Damascus by a bomb, prompting accusations against Israel.

Syria normally maintains tight security, especially in the capital. For that reason, there was also widespread speculation on Wednesday that Syria might have cooperated in the bombing, possibly as part of a deal with Israel or the United States.

Asked whether the United States had played any role in the killing of Mr. Mugniyah, Gordon D. Johndroe, a White House spokesman, would say only that he was “not familiar with the circumstances of the death.”

Shortly after Hezbollah announced Mr. Mugniyah’s death, mourners began arriving at the Moujamaa al-Shouhada, a building in the Hezbollah stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
In Tary Dibba in southern Lebanon, where Mr. Mugniyah was born to peasant parents, black flags were raised and stores were closed. After his body was brought back to Beirut on Wednesday afternoon, Al Manar showed black-clad guerrillas standing on either side of his coffin in a Hezbollah hall in the southern suburbs.

Hezbollah announced that a mass funeral would be held Thursday, which it said would be a day of mourning in some parts of southern Lebanon.

Even some political figures who are bitterly opposed to Hezbollah, like the Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, sent condolences on Wednesday.

Mr. Mugniyah’s funeral will coincide with an especially delicate occasion in Lebanon: the third anniversary of the killing of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The Western-backed March 14 coalition, led by Mr. Hariri’s son Saad, has called for huge demonstrations, which many Lebanese fear could lead to confrontations with Hezbollah.

Mr. Mugniyah, who was also known as Hajj Rudwan, was one of the world’s most wanted men. American prosecutors charged him in the hijacking of the T.W.A. jetliner in 1985, during which a United States Navy diver, Robert D. Stethem, was shot dead and dumped onto the tarmac of Beirut’s airport.

Mr. Mugniyah was also accused of arranging shipments of arms from Iran to Palestinian groups. American officials say Mr. Mugniyah was behind the 1983 bombing of the Marine compound in Beirut, in which 241 service members were killed. A car bomb at the American Embassy there in the same year killed 63 people, including 17 Americans.

The United States also asserts that he was behind the torture and killing of William Buckley, the C.I.A. station chief in Beirut, in 1984; the kidnapping and killing of Lt. Col. William R. Higgins of the Marines, who was on peacekeeping duty in Lebanon in 1988; and in his capacity as leader of the Islamic Jihad Organization, the seizure of a number of Western hostages in Beirut during the 1980s.

In a statement, the office of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel said, “Israel rejects the attempt by terrorist elements to ascribe to it any involvement whatsoever in this incident.”
Gideon Ezra, a minister from Israel’s governing Kadima Party and a former deputy chief of the Shin Bet internal intelligence agency, told Israel Radio on Wednesday that many countries had an interest in killing Mr. Mugniyah but that “Israel, too, was hurt by him, more than other countries in recent years.”

Mr. Ezra said, “Of course I don’t know who killed him, but whoever did should be congratulated.”
Witnesses said the bombing that killed Mr. Mugniyah took place just after 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday in Tantheem Kafer Souseh, an upscale neighborhood of Damascus, close to an Iranian school and a police station.

The targeted vehicle, believed to be a black S.U.V., was badly damaged in the attack “like a shredded metal can,” according to Housham Nasaiseh, 19, who works in a sweets shop nearby and who arrived at the scene a few minutes after the explosion. The police were removing a body from the vehicle when he arrived, Mr. Nasaiseh said. Within an hour, the shattered vehicle had been towed away. By morning the scene had been cleared, and the only signs of the attack were
a black mark on the ground and scars on the sidewalk and nearby buildings.

One can feel at ease, knowing that there are guys out there risking their lives to terminate terror and make the Western World a more secure place to live in. And this is not sarcasm.

Time

2008-01-16T11:00:00.001-08:00

By Carlos Benito Camacho

The Greeks called it Chronus, the Romans Tempus. Today it is called time in English. And in modern cities every man seems to get stressed when he does not get things done on time. Man is so busy doing things to meet the deadline that he gets oblivious of the human aspect of his existence, and when he suddenly realizes it, he says, “time has gone by fast”. There is even a song that says “...as time goes by...”, but does it?

It does not, for time does not exist. In fact, it has never been, onthologically speaking, as it is not a concrete being which can be touched, seen, heard, or breathed. Time is only an abstract concept created and sustained by the human mind. If time does not exist, matter does, enveloping and making us up.

Matter moves in space, switching position as it constantly changes into different states. Since the focus of attention, or mental concentration, is only one, the human brain can not record all this material upheaval at once, but successively, one event after the other. And it is this recorded, linear succession of material occurrences which gave rise in man’s mind to the concept of time. When the Homo sapiens began observing and measuring the movement of celestial bodies in the sky and the rotation of the Earth around its axis by the movement of man’s made devices such as the sand in an hour glass, and later, the slow rotatory, motion of the metallic hands around a clock face, this concept became deeply ingrained in the human mind.

Not only did man begin to measure the movement and change of physical objects but also his daily activities with these devices, as he became the sedentary creature who organized himself around complex societies.

While time is a linear impression left on the mind by successive material occurrences, in someone’s life a chain of negative events that leads to a life-threatening situation may create a psychological sag in which the human mind gets stranded, giving him the impression that "time" has ground down to a halt, making him feel as if he will never get out of that circumstancial rut, unless something extraordinary happens or one uses steel determination to overcome it.

Obama Wants Change

2008-01-08T04:27:00.000-08:00

By Carlos Benito Camacho

Barack Hussein Obama wants change. Well, a lot of people have already spoken of change in the history of mankind; and when these nonconformists have attempted to change this world, the changes have usually been for the worse, rather than for the better, since the changes they have tried to carry out were usually radical and against a people’s lifestyle and culture.

Deep inside them, these dissenters have never been happy with themselves and never felt at home in this world. Oh, yes, they have all had a smooth, quasi-smart speech that deluded the many.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin, convincingly spoke of changes; yet his remedies were much worse than the problems and millions of Russian peasants died of starvation. Stalin also made some changes which were carried out ruthlessly, and those who opposed the change ended up in the Siberian concentration camps. Mao Tse-Tung’s changes in China cost the lives of 30 million people with his Great Leap Forward, the largest famine in human history.

Let us not forget Adolf Hitler; who wanted to make some changes in Europe after World War I. Not to mention Saloth Sar, Pol Pot, who brutally carried out some changes in Cambodia, too.

There have been many other psychotics and psychopaths like Jim Jones, Pablo Escobar, Fidel Castro, etc, who were able to rally many people to their causes, “to make some changes”, because of their smooth and charismatic false personalities.

Threateningly looming on the horizon, there is an Islamic leader who wants change, too, in the Western Civilization. He goes by the name of Osama.

If Hussein Obama wants change, he should start talking about changes in Kenya, for example, or in Somalia, Etiopia and Rwanda, etc, or what about in the Muslim countries, where women are abused and have no rights at all. In African and many Islamic countries the people standards of living are among the lowest in the world. Why then does he want so bad to change a country where a plumber can own a BMW and ride a Harley on the week ends?????

Good positive changes have taken the human civilization thousands of years and have not been carried out by messiahs who think themselves as the masters of the “truth”. These slow changes that have improved man’s standard of living have been brought about by people who have not led multitudes but who have worked hard in the isolated worlds of their own private lives, like scientists, inventors, writers, workers, labor union leaders, and rich businessmen turned philanthropists.

Good changes take place very slowly. Lunacy can be as fast as a bomb fuse, or casting ballots on a presidential election day.

Latin: “Cogita Ante Salis”
Think before you leap (before you make a decision)

A Roman advice from Carlos B. Camacho to the American voters.

Read: Awareness (essay), A Letter To The General Manager (essay) , Obama, the Man Whose Surname Rhymes With Osama, John McCain (biography).

Argentine Pilots Break Silence Over World War Two

2008-01-07T08:52:00.000-08:00

By David Ljunggren

OTTAWA - In early October 1942, Flight Lieutenant Donald McLarty was shot down over Libya on his 199th mission of World War Two. Although he was flying for Britain's Royal Air Force, his uniform was emblazoned with an unexpected word: Argentina.

Many foreigners fought for the various Allied air forces, but until now historians have largely focused on pilots from Czechoslovakia, Poland, France and Norway -- all of which were occupied by German forces.

Few realize that more than 800 young men from neutral Argentina, some of them schoolboys, rushed to sign up as pilots and then made the long, dangerous trip to Europe by boat.
When McLarty climbed into his Hurricane fighter-bomber for a low-level attack on a German base in Libya, he needed to complete just two more missions to earn a long break from active duty. It was not to be.

"It was a very stupid operation ... the moment we crossed the coast I could see the soldiers waiting," recalled McLarty, now 85.

"I was hit immediately by ground fire in the engine and had oil all over my windscreen. All I could do was fly in formation with the guy next to me and then my tail was blown off."
McLarty's plane smacked into the ground, barrelled straight through two parked German fighters and ended up in a pile of empty gasoline drums.

German officers produced a glass of White Horse whisky for the 20-year-old and then shipped him off to a prison camp.

McLarty and others were persuaded to speak by Argentine historian Claudio Meunier, who spent a decade unearthing hidden stories of heroism and heartbreak.

"No one had asked them, no one remembered them. The memories were painful," Meunier told Reuters.

Some pilots were native Argentines while the surnames of others reveal they were descended from British professionals who helped develop the country's railways, mines and farms.

"Other people had fought for the freedoms we'd been living under and so I felt it incumbent on us to do the same thing, as the evil of Hitler was very, very serious indeed," said Michael Welch, another pilot.

Some 400 of the volunteers were accepted as pilots while the others served as gunners, bomb aimers and wireless operators. Around 150 were killed. Photos of the new recruits often show wiry young men on horseback.

"The Argentines had the advantage that they were very sports-minded. They were good. They did very well in Britain because they were used to roughing it," said Ricardo (Dick) Moreno, 89.

"VOLUNTEERS"
Many fought for the Royal Air Force while others flew with the Royal Canadian Air Force. The majority did their basic flight training in Canada, which became home to a host of the air crew after the war.

Meunier has just finished a Spanish-language documentary, "Voluntarios" (Volunteers), about the wartime pilots, much of it based on an earlier book he wrote. One recalled that during a flight to attack ground transports, he aborted a strafing run on a horse-drawn cart to avoid hurting the animal.

"Voluntarios" was shown for the first time late last month in Canada's Aviation Museum during a ceremony to honour the 14 Argentines who died while serving in the RCAF. It has not been shown commercially.

"Without Meunier, the story would have been lost ... it is very significant to help keep the memory of courageous people living forever," Argentine ambassador Arturo Bothamley told the gathering.

So many joined the RAF that a special Argentine squadron was created. The motto of 164 Squadron was "Firmes volamos" (Determined We Fly) and its insignia was a British lion in front of a rising sun representing Argentina.

Some pilots adorned the side of their aircraft with a picture of a popular Argentine cartoon character called Paturuzu, an indigenous Indian with incredible strength. These and other tales remained untold for a number of reasons, but partly because the pilots scattered, some staying in Europe, some going home and others emigrating.

"There hasn't been an occasion to make anything out of it," said McLarty, who moved to Canada after the war to marry the woman he had met during training. He was later joined by some of those who had initially gone back to Argentina.

Meunier says some veterans who returned kept quiet because of the political atmosphere under then ruler Juan Peron. Although Argentina declared war on the Nazis in March 1945, it was no secret that some in the government were pro-German.

After the war many senior Nazis escaped to Argentina, where they were openly welcomed, and the atmosphere made it hard for ex-RAF pilots to talk openly about fighting for the Allies.
"The pilots didn't feel comfortable," said Meunier.

The silence did not erase the memories.

"During the first two or three flights you had no idea what was happening ... It was frightening. My feet were shaking on the rudder pedals," said McLarty, who spent a year in an Italian prison camp before escaping.

The end of the war did not mark the end of everyone's fighting career. When Britain and Argentina went to war in 1982 over the Falkland Islands (known as the Malvinas in Argentina) some veterans volunteered to fight again.

Meunier says a few flew diversion flights near the British fleet while others commanded cargo planes carrying troops to the islands.

"People in World War Two wanted to keep the world free. They didn't want Hitler to take over Argentina. They were fighting for others," he said. "In the Malvinas, they were fighting for Argentina."

(Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Eddie Evans)

Antonio Vivaldi's Four Seasons: Autumn (Allegro)

2008-01-07T04:30:00.000-08:00

Julian Bream Fantasia X, Alonso Mudarra

2008-01-07T03:57:00.000-08:00

Julian Bream - J.S Bach-Violin Sonata fugue

2008-01-05T16:22:00.000-08:00

Homunculus: Homo Sapiens's Cerbral Cortex Image Represantation

2008-01-04T07:24:00.000-08:00

Homunculi

Bodies proportional to motor and sensory brain regions

The Human Mind, Psychoanalysis

2008-01-03T06:59:00.000-08:00

By Carlos Benito Camacho

According to the psychoanalytical theory of Sigmund Freud, the human mind is organized around three psychic entities; id, superego, and ego.

The id is the primitive and Homo sapiens’s animal part which drives him towards unbridled organismic discharge and pleasure. Anatomically this would be located in the limbic system, a group of subcortical structures including the hippocampus, amygdala, hypothalamus, and thalamus.

The superego maneuvers partly in the unconscious and represents the internalized values of society and parental conscience. Those moral teachings which man learns so early and slowly that he becomes unaware of how he has learned them. Although the superego is largely unconscious, man feels its impact through the guilt and pain he experiences in the violation of these internalized moral rules. It is the id’s censoring entity, thwarting any social inappropriate behavior that could endanger man’s social relation or acceptance. The superego would physically operate in the left hemisphere frontal lobe.

The ego, on the other hand, is that psychic system which serves as an organizer and conscious mediator between man and his reality. It enables man to adapt to a changing and complex environment. The ego adjusts man’s drives in the light of such changing social circumstances and different physical surroundings. This mental organizer makes it possible for man to have not only an enlightened belief in his convictions, but also to challenge those convictions when necessary.

The ego in man can be viewed as an outgrowth of his massive central nervous system. But we must think of it as a mental system or agency that is defined by its functions. Although these functions are many, such as thinking, remembering and perceiving, the most important ones are “organizing”, “analyzing”, and “reorganizing”. These psychological functions of the ego could be compared to Hegel’s phylosophical postulate of history; “thesis”, “antithesis”, and “synthesis”.

The ego strength and capacity as an adaptational and reorganizing psychic entity is not the same in every man in a given society. It also varies from culture to culture, and from one historical age to another. Too big and severe a superego hinders the development of a healthy, strong ego, as it happens when education takes on an endoctrinating cast, as useful cultural values become religious doctrines. This leads to the development of a false self system or systems in the human mind where a small weak ego hides behind some false front.

Although Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical theory was remarkable accurate for a nineteenth century mind influenced by a monotheistic society, he did not bear in mind that both the ego and superego could mutate from culture to culture, or epoch, as one wonders how the ego and superego might have been like in the ancient polytheistic cultures of the past. Speculating about it, one could say that in ancient Rome, for example, one would encounter a much stronger ego and a smaller superego.

The ego would be located in the frontal lobes of both hemispheres.

Read: Time , The Human Brain

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

2007-12-29T06:04:00.000-08:00

Santiago Ramón y Cajal (May 1, 1852 – October 17, 1934) was a Spanish histologist, physician, and Nobel laureate. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern neuroscience.

The son of Justo Ramón and Antonia Cajal, Ramón y Cajal was born of Aragonese parents in Petilla de Aragón, a Navarrese enclave in Aragon, Spain. As a child he was transferred between many different schools because of his poor behaviour and anti-authoritarian attitude. An extreme example of his precociousness and rebelliousness is his imprisonment at the age of eleven for destroying the town gate with a homemade cannon. He was an avid painter, artist, and gymnast. He worked for a time as a shoemaker and barber, and was well known for his pugnacious attitude.

Ramón y Cajal attended the medical school of Zaragoza, from which he graduated in 1873. After a competitive examination, he served as a medical officer in the Spanish Army. He took part in an expedition to Cuba in 1874-75, where he contracted malaria and tuberculosis. After returning to Spain he married Silveria Fañanás García in 1879, with whom he had four daughters and three sons. He was appointed as a university professor at Valencia in 1881, and in 1883 he received his medical degree in Madrid. He later held professorships in both Barcelona and Madrid. He was Director of the Zaragoza Museum (1879), Director of the National Institute of Hygiene (1899), and founder of the Laboratorio de Investigaciones Biológicas (1922) (later renamed to the Instituto Cajal, or Cajal Institute). He died in Madrid in 1934.

Works and Theories

Ramón y Cajal's most famous studies were on the fine structure of the central nervous system. Cajal used a histological staining technique developed by his contemporary Camillo Golgi. Golgi found that by treating brain tissue with a silver chromate solution, a relatively small number of neurons in the brain were darkly stained. This allowed Golgi to resolve in detail the structure of individual neurons and led him to conclude that nervous tissue was a continuous reticulum (or web) of interconnected cells much like those in the circulatory system.

Using Golgi's method, Ramón y Cajal reached a very different conclusion. He postulated that the nervous system is made up of billions of separate neurons and that these cells are polarized. Rather than forming a continuous web, Cajal suggested that neurons communicate with each other via specialized junctions called synapses, a term that was coined by Sherrington in 1897. This hypothesis became the basis of the neuron doctrine, which states that the individual unit of the nervous system is a single neuron. Electron microscopy later showed that a plasma membrane completely enclosed each neuron, supporting Cajal's theory, and weakening Golgi's reticular theory.

However, with the discovery of electrical synapses (gap junctions: direct junctions between nerve cells), some have argued that Golgi was at least partially correct. For this work Ramón y Cajal and Golgi shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906.
Ramón y Cajal also proposed that the way axons grow is via a growth cone at their ends. He understood that neural cells could sense chemical signals that indicated a direction for growth, a process called chemotaxis.

Distinctions and Books

Among his many distinctions and societal memberships, Ramón y Cajal was also made an honorary Doctor of Medicine of the Universities of Cambridge and Würzburg and honorary Doctor of Philosophy of the Clark University.

He published over 100 scientific works and articles in French, Spanish, and German. Among his most notable were Rules and advices on scientific investigation, Histology, Degeneration and regeneration of the nervous system, Manual of normal histology and micrographic technique, Elements of histology, Manual of general pathological anatomy, New ideas on the fine anatomy of the nerve centres, Textbook on the nervous system of man and the vertebrates, and The retina of vertebrates.

In 1905, he published five science-fictional "Vacation Stories" under the pen name "Dr. Bacteria." The asteroid 117413 Ramonycajal is named in his honour.

(From Wikipedia)

Read: Brain Lateralization, Cerebral Specialization

Brain Lateralization, Cerebral Specialization

2007-12-28T09:18:00.000-08:00

By Carlos B. Camacho

Just as there are two cerebral hemispheres, there are also two kinds of knowledge, that is to say two different ways of seeing reality.

The left hemisphere, which controls the right side of the body, is analytic. It breaks down data into meaningful pieces to check the difference between one another. It is also linear, as it tends to organize these pieces into sequences. Playing an important role in the control of language, it is symbolic, too.

The brain left hemisphere functions could also be regarded as passive in that its operation is reactive. This means that it can never generate from itself any process for which it does not have already memorized information. So, its thinking mode could be characterized as cause-and-effect, being confined to operation within finite, concrete, and known limits.

The brain left hemisphere functions are also scientific in that they are informed by experiential facts and concepts learned in the past and once patterns of dealing with such information have been established, it will mold and categorize future input in those familiar modes.

Physiologically and phylogenetically, the left side of the cerebrum develops faster as it is responsible for establishing a direct link with the outside world during the first years of life, and the formation of what is known as social self. Being the side where all the cultural values and social conventions get recorded, the left hemisphere is susceptible to be formed by brainwashing when exposed to constant bombardment of doctrines in extreme cultures.

The right hemisphere of the brain, in contrast, is involved in a wholistic, synthetic kind of cognition. Instead of breaking down data, it synthesizes all sensory input into a major conceptualization, or understanding, of a subject as it sees it as a whole and not the different pieces that make it up.

Whereas the left side tends to define and categorize the particulars as separate from one another, the right hemisphere always seeks to synthesize and integrate reality as overriding unity. It will not be content with anything less than the whole meaning. Whereas the left holds onto the momentum of linear time, the right side strives to break known limits, as it tries to find room for maneuvering. Whereas the left hangs onto conventional modes of doing things, the right hemisphere is the vehicle for change and with resolution starts new processes when the old ones have passed their usefulness, as it is the avenue for creative ideas and new initiatives.

Some Characteristics Associated with the Effect of Left and Right Differentiation

Left: analysis, categorization, assumption, comparision, concrete, chronological, historical, convention, conservative, disciplined.

Right: synthesis, comprehension, change, decision, determination, improvement, insight, integrity, penetrative, independent.

Read: The Human Brain

The Human Brain

2007-12-22T05:14:00.000-08:00

By Carlos B. Camacho

The human brain is the biggest organ of the Central Nervous System and is divided into the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain. The forebrain comprises the cerebral cortex, which is the part we commonly refer to as the brain, or brains, when we mean human intelligence, and it represents the acme of human evolution and the center of superior intellectual functions, and the Homo sapiens is the only species that has reached such high degree of development.

Tightly wrapped up in a system of protective membranes called meninges, it takes up most of the cranial cavity as it is made up of 100 billion neurons (nerve cells) which are arranged in six layers of nerve cell bodies that form the cerebral cortex (the brain surface). Due to the color, the cerebral cortex is also known as the grey matter.

The human brain is divided into two brain hemispheres; the left and the right, joined together by a thick band of white matter made up of the cerebral cortex neuronal axons, which can be compared to electrical cables that send messages from one hemisphere to the other. This nerves band is called corpus callosum. Deep folds in the brain surface called fissures subdivide each hemisphere into lobes; the frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes.

The occipital lobe is the center of vision as it receives visual data from the retina through the optic nerves. The parietal lobe receives and processes sensory information (touch, pain) and determines spatial sense. The temporal lobe processes acoustic data coming from the inner ear through the auditory nerve and forwards it to an area of the parietal lobe and the motor cortex of frontal lobe.

The frontal lobe is located in front of the central sulcus, which separates it from the parietal lobe, and above the Sylvian fissure. Although its primary function is motor, controlling all the skeletal muscles, the frontal lobe works as an intercommunication center, as it integrates all the other lobes of the cerebral cortex and also the limbic system. Its multidendrites neurons receives input from nervous fibers from all these areas of the brain.

The motor areas that control the fine movements of the hand, forefinger, thumb, tongue, and lips are the most highly and extensively developed compared not only with other motor areas in the frontal lobe but also with the same motor regions of other mammals cerebral cortex. That is why one can say that the well developed frontal lobe in the Homo sapiens brain is a massive outgrowth of primary motor functions as a result of millions of years of motor specialization along the long road of evolution. Motor specialization that has allowed us to make and shape the weapons and tools in our struggle for survival, but also to communicate with our fellow beings, as it is also partly responsible for speech production and their conceptual meaning.

The frontal lobe also plays a key roll in impulse control, judgment, rational thinking and executing behavior, as it is the center of motivation and what we call “will”. The first evidence of these capacities came to light literally by accident, through a railroad foreman named Phineas Gage, in the town of Cavendish, Vermont, in 1848.

Phineas Gage, who was in charge of a railroad construction gang, had an iron rod blown through his head. This would have been an ordinary fatal accident if it had not been for the astonishing fact that he survived.

Phineas Gage had poured a charge of powder into a hole in a rock, prior to a routine blasting operation. The usual procedure was for a worker to cover the powder with sand. Somehow this was not done and the foreman neglected to check on the matter as he dropped a heavy tamping iron rod into the hole with a catastrophic result. Striking the rock, the iron produced a spark and then took off into the sky, plowing through Phineas’s brain as it entered in his left cheek and came out of the top of his head. Stunned, he lay on the ground for an hour, then, with the aid of a worker he got up and walked off to see a surgeon, talking with difficulty on the way about the hole in his head. He lived for another twelve years.

Even though awkward motor functions were carried off by other parts of his Central Nervous System, like the cerebellum, he lost the quick fine movements of his right hand, as there were other changes in Gage. His personality rather than his learned abilities had been deeply altered. Before the accident he had been considerate, resourceful, and well-balanced. Afterwards he was fitful, irreverent, showed little consideration for others, and became apathetic to new ventures in life such as learning new things. With these new traits, he could no longer be trusted, and led an erratic life.

Read: Brain Lateralization, Cerebral Specialization

English, The History of a Language

2007-12-19T06:17:00.000-08:00

© By Carlos B. Camacho

Homo sapiens is the only species endowed by evolution with the power of speech. Since the time he could utter intelligible sounds, man has been able to communicate to his fellow beings the plans he devised to accomplish the daily task of surviving in a hostile environment, coordinating everybody’s efforts and activities to carry them off.

Thus, as man roamed the earth, he hunted his quarry and killed his enemies in bands, with the weapons he had learned to make out of stone, bone, and wood, using a basic oral language, and perhaps, when the situation arose, sign speech. When he developed agriculture, Homo sapiens articulate communication system also allowed him to organize complex societies, as he became a sedentary creature who hoarded for the future in the earthenware he had learned to manufacture.

As a speaking member of a social group, he could not only pass down to the next generation the ideas and innovations he contrived along the road of technological development, but also the community’s patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behavior; and, just as he had shaped his early tools and weapons in stone, he hewed a culture, and himself, in the language he spoke.

He set history in motion when he learned to record in written form his thoughts, beliefs, and the strife of man against man; yet, when he wrote about battles, he did not explain that he went to war because his fellow being’s strange gods, and bizarre customs and beliefs, transmitted in an unfathomable language, aroused uncertainty in him. Sometimes, while he conquered peoples, plundering their villages and looting their palaces, he was slowly and unawares vanquished by his foes foreign tongue and alien gods, as he learned even new techniques in building homes, roads, bridges, and irrigation systems.

From ancient times to the beginning of the Middle Ages, different cultures had flourished, along with new languages, as empire rose and fell. In Europe, an Indo-European people, known as Hellenes made their down from the north and settled in the Balkan peninsula and the Aegean Islands, starting the Greek, and Western civilization, in which we can glimpse at how far man could go in the absence of religious or political tyranny. The Romans had to learn much from the Greeks, who had developed fine arts, philosophy, and science.

If the Hellenes were good at logic and philosophy, the Romans were good engineers who built aqueducts, viaducts, and roads, on which their legion marched to extend the greatness of Rome, and Latin, which added more words to its vocabulary when new things were made or designed. But the values that made Rome great went awry and their culture collapsed under the heavy rotten weight of general corruption, and the spread of a cult known as Christianity; it seems that something had undermined the foundations of Rome.

But from the ashes of the Roman Empire, the European nations arose through a long process during which clashing cultural and linguistic elements blended together to make up the soul of new peoples.

In many parts of the old imperial territory, barbaric hordes of Germanic tribes picked up the tongue spoken by the Romans, adding new words to it, giving shape over the centuries to the Romance languages, such as French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian, and Sardinian. But there was one place in the former empire where Latin did not have an overwhelming influence on the invading peoples’ languages and cultures; Britannia.

A merging of different Germanic dialects began when the Angles, Saxon, and the Jutes settled in the British Isles in 5th century A.D. The formers gave this fledging language their name; Angle-ish, Anglish, English. The Celts who had been subdued and displaced, and the Vikings, who settled in the north and eventually conquered the length and breadth of both islands, participated in this process, contributing with important words such as bin, drab, and crag, and keel, sky, kid, kindle, skin, take, leg, they, them, and their respectively.

Although the Romans had withdrawn from Britannia before the Germanic invasion, the Briton had acquired many Latin words which the blond invaders would later take into the small vocabulary of Latin words they had borrowed from the Romans they bartered with along the Rhine. The following words go back to these sources: provost, chalk, cup, street, toll, cheese, pitch, dish, pillow, table, wine, etc.

Another linguistic contribution to the development of the English language came from the Normans, who had settled in France in 912 A.D., as they conquered England in 1066, bringing many French words of both Latin and Germanic origins.

As English underwent structural change, dropping the inflectional endings of the old Germanic tongues, the ethnic and cultural blending continued unrelentingly amidst wars, plagues, and social and political upheaval in Britannia. But this process was influenced by the impingement of Christianity upon every culture on the continent.

Christian teaching implied that, to avoid eternal and excruciating suffering, man had to give up his freedom of thinking and of making decisions and to submit to the doctrines. Christianity, like Islam still today, crushed man self by stirring up feelings of guilt, denying his cultural identity, and stripping him of his sense of worth; his existence only made sense as long as he lived by Christian precepts.

When it became a firmly established power as the official religion of emperors and kings, the Church found at its disposal, in the language of Rome, a cache of words which the religious authority would use and abuse to control the conscience of peoples; repentance, penitence, contrition, obedience, submission, resignation, punishment, and many others.

But Christianity in England never broke the backbone of the atavistic Germanic lifestyles in which individualism and disposition for free enterprise underlie every human endeavor, even those undertaken in the name of the Church, like the crusades against the Muslims. An outstanding landmark was established in 1215, when the English barons forcibly obtained from King John the great charter of individual rights, known as Magna Carta.

The Germanic tribes had already become one people, the English people, when they fought against the French in The Hundred Years War, which took place on the continent; then a civil war in England in the War of the Roses, which fused the House of Lancaster and the House of York under one crown, ushering in a new age. So in the 16th century man witnessed major and decisive events in Britannia; the breaking away from Roman Church, the rising of England as an European power, and the beginning of modern English. Individualism, a clever down-to-earth policy, and free enterprise made these possible and are embodied in Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Drake, and William Shakespeare.

If William Shakespeare used all the resources of an already rich vernacular language to sagaciously create universal characters, in whom ever man from every period of history can see himself, British philosophers and scientists used the same language to deal with every branch of knowledge, as they borrowed even more words from Greek and Latin, such as ontology, philology, psychology, sophisticate, astronomy, zoology, metamorphosis, geocentric, geography, gravity, atom, fulcrum, nebula, empirical, evolution, etc. Men of unbridled intelligence, unencumbered by the weight of religion, such as David Hume, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, and Charles Darwin used these words at one time or another.

Along a shrewdly wrought cultural freeway, Great Britain became the greatest maritime empire, giving birth to colonial daughters throughout the world; the rebellious one in North America would eventually put the first man on the moon. Her colonies would supply more words that designate the exotic objects, actions, or way of doing things in faraway lands. Tomato, potato, maize, chili, moose, kangaroo, boomerang, kookaburra, koala, shampoo, polo, jute, bamboo, gong, launch, and amuck, are some of them.

Finally, as the third millennium dawns on mankind, when more new roots of Latin and Greek have been injected into the English language to form new words, such as radioactivity, sensor, video, telegraph, telephone, television, chromosome, gene, clone, neuron, and axon, to name the new invention and discoveries, when major enclaves of tyranny in Europe have been riven asunder by the forces of political freedom, perhaps man will break the dangerous medieval cultural patterns which linger on in other parts of the world, based on religion, smoldering on in the mind of the small, using a language that mirrors his true self.

Vivaldi's Four Seasons: Summer

2007-12-18T13:14:00.000-08:00

Narciso Yepes, Danza de A.Ruiz-Pipó

2007-12-18T13:10:00.000-08:00

Narciso Yepes, Passapied de S. Becarisse

2007-12-18T13:07:00.000-08:00

Narciso Yepes, Concierto de Aranjuez 1

2007-12-18T12:55:00.000-08:00

Narciso Yepes, Concierto de Aranjuez 2

2007-12-18T12:48:00.000-08:00

Narciso Yepes

2007-12-18T11:55:00.000-08:00

Fed Approves Plan to Curb Risky Lending

2007-12-18T11:35:00.000-08:00

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and DAVID STOUT (From The New York Times)
Published: December 18, 2007

WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve moved Tuesday to impose tough new restrictions meant to curb unfair and deceptive home-lending practices and prevent a recurrence of this year’s meltdown in subprime mortgages.

By a 5-to-0 vote, the Fed approved a plan that would tighten provisions meant to protect borrowers and apply them to a far larger share of home loans — whether from banks, mortgage companies or other lenders — than under current regulations.

The proposed rules underscore the more assertive role the Fed is now prepared to take in regulating lending, in a big shift from the central bank’s approach in the past.
In general, the rules are meant to deter unscrupulous lenders from persuading people that they can afford loans that ought to be out of their reach. By extension, the rules are also intended to keep would-be buyers from deceiving themselves about the debt burdens they can shoulder.

“Our goal is to promote responsible mortgage lending, for the benefit of individual consumers and the economy,” the Fed’s chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said. “We want consumers to make decisions about home mortgage options confidently, with assurances that unscrupulous home mortgage practices will not be tolerated.”

The plan includes provisions that would require more extensive disclosures, restrict advertising and make it harder to lend to borrowers with little or no documentation and a questionable ability to repay. It would also allow borrowers, in some circumstances, to sue lenders who violate the rules.

The Fed acted under provisions of the Truth in Lending Act and the Home Ownership Equity Protection Act of 1994. In the past it had been quite cautious about using its authority to clamp down, and the rules had last been revised in 2001.

Details of the proposed rules, which could take effect next year after a period for public comment and possible revisions, can be read on the Fed’s Web site, www.federalreserve.gov.

“Unfair and deceptive practices have harmed consumers and the integrity of the home mortgage market,” a Fed governor, Randall S. Kroszner, said. “We have listened closely and developed a response to abuses that we believe will facilitate responsible lending.”

The action puts the Fed a step ahead of Congress, which is considering its own steps to tighten restrictions on the home loan industry. A bill put forward by Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the House Banking Committee, would expose mortgage brokers and lenders to legal liability if borrowers are unable to repay.

The Fed did not go as far as proposals by some consumer groups, which sought, for example, an outright ban on prepayment penalities.

What the Fed has been hearing in recent months is a complex blend of personal hardship and dire news for the nation as a whole, as waves of foreclosures have swamped the housing market and threatened to mire the economy in a recession. The housing boom of the first several years of the decade seems almost as distant as the boom in technology stocks — but economists have warned that the fallout from the housing slump could be much worse than that from the “dot com” bubble.

Many home-buyers whose little slice of the American dream has turned into a nightmare were undone by “teaser rates” dangled in front of “balloon mortgages.” When the tempting original rates were supplanted by much higher rates built into the loan, many homeowners could not make the monthly payments.

But those personal misfortunes — whether the result of individual misjudgment, excessive optimism, shady lending or all of those — have mushroomed into a national problem, further complicated by the packaging and reselling of mortgages in ways that are so arcane that even some bankers acknowledge they are befuddled by them.

Andres Segovia, Variations

2007-12-17T15:34:00.000-08:00

Andres Segovia, J.S. Bach-Saraband and Gavotte en Rondeau

2007-12-17T15:05:00.000-08:00

Bush's Phone Immunity Demand Wins Senate Vote

2007-12-17T14:53:00.000-08:00

Bush's phone immunity demand wins initial Senate vote (From Reuters)
Mon Dec 17, 2007 3:51pm EST

By Thomas Ferraro

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's demand for immunity for telephone companies that participated in his warrantless domestic spying program won an initial victory on Monday in the U.S. Senate.

On a vote of 76-10, far more than the 60 needed, the Democratic-led Senate cleared a procedural hurdle and began considering a bill to increase congressional and judicial oversight of electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists.

It includes a provision to grant retroactive immunity to any telecommunications company that took part in Bush's spying program -- surveillance without court warrants of e-mails and telephone calls of people in the United States -- begun shortly after the September 11 attacks.
Nearly 40 lawsuits have been filed accusing AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Nextel Corp. of violating U.S. privacy rights.

Backers of immunity, who include some Democrats as well many of Bush's fellow Republicans, contend companies should be thanked, not punished, for helping defend the United States.
But civil liberties advocates and a number of Democratic lawmakers argue the courts should determine if any company violated privacy rights of law-abiding Americans.

Democrats vow to offer amendments in coming days to remove the immunity provision while backing a number of proposed new civil-liberty safeguards that enjoy broad support.
Sixty votes will likely be needed to prevail on any such immunity amendment in the 100-member Senate. "It's going to be an uphill battle," a Democratic aide said.

Sen. Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, interrupted his long-shot presidential campaign to return to Washington to help lead the charge against immunity. "For the last six years, our largest telecommunication companies have been spying on their own American customers," Dodd said.

"That decision betrayed million of customers' trust," Dodd added. "But was it illegal? I don't know. And if this bill passes in its current form, we will never know."

The White House said in a statement, "Providing liability protection to these companies is a just result" and warned that allowing litigation "risks the disclosure of highly classified information regarding intelligence sources and methods."

The House of Representatives last month defied Bush and refused to shield phone companies from lawsuits. Both chambers would have to agree to immunity before it could be granted.
The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requires the government receive the approval of a secret FISA court to conduct surveillance in the United States of suspected foreign enemy targets.

But shortly after the September 11 attacks, Bush authorized warrantless surveillance of communications between people in the United States and others overseas if one of the parties had suspected ties to terrorists.

Critics charged that Bush violated FISA, but he argued he had the war-time powers to do so. In January, Bush put the program under FISA's authority. Terms remain secret. In August, Congress bowed to Bush's demands and expanded U.S. power to conduct surveillance without a court order.

The Senate bill would provide new protections of civil liberties, such as requiring tougher congressional and judicial oversight.

(Editing by Patricia Zengerle and David Wiessler)

Andres Segovia, Fandanguillo

2007-12-17T09:05:00.000-08:00

Sen. John McCain Wins Lieberman Support

2007-12-17T08:30:00.000-08:00

McCain wins Lieberman endorsement for White House (From Reuters)
Mon Dec 17, 2007 10:33am EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, trying to mount a comeback in his presidential bid, on Monday won the endorsement of independent Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, a former Democratic vice presidential nominee.

McCain and Lieberman appeared together on Fox News Channel and were expected later in the day at a campaign event in New Hampshire, where McCain hopes to pull off a repeat of his 2000 victory in the state's presidential primary on January 8.

"I happen to the think this guy is the best of all candidates to unite our country across political lines so we can begin to solve some of the problems people have in this country," Lieberman said.

"I'm certainly sending a message that I agree with John McCain a lot more on national security, foreign and defense policy."

Lieberman, a firm supporter of the Iraq war, won re-election to the Senate as an independent in 2006 after he lost a Democratic primary to anti-war candidate Ned Lamont.Lieberman, who was the vice presidential running mate of Democrat Al Gore in 2000, caucuses with the Senate's majority Democrats but has become a source of anger for party activists upset with his support for the war.

McCain, a staunch supporter of the war and of President George W. Bush's strategy to increase troop levels in Iraq, said Lieberman's endorsement symbolized the desire among voters for a new bipartisan mood in American politics.

"I think conservatives, liberals, moderates, vegetarians, libertarians, they all want us to sit down and work together," McCain told Fox.

McCain's campaign hopes Lieberman can help appeal to some independents in New Hampshire, who are free to vote in either the Republican or Democratic presidential primary ahead of the November 2008 election. McCain is counting on a win in New Hampshire to propel him into later races.

McCain is a staunch supporter of President George W. Bush's strategy of raising troop levels in Iraq. He said Lieberman's endorsement symbolized the desire among voters for a new bipartisan mood in American politics.

"I think conservatives, liberals, moderates, vegetarians, libertarians, they all want us to sit down and work together," McCain told Fox News earlier.

Many conservatives abandoned McCain earlier this year because of his support for now-dead legislation that would have allowed an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States to gain a pathway to citizenship.At the time he seemed a shoe-in to win his party's nomination but now he is scrambling to gain ground.

McCain is counting on a win in New Hampshire to propel him into later races. He has been rising in polls in New Hampshire, with a Concord Monitor survey last week showing him in a virtual second-place tie with former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, behind Romney the former Massachusetts governor.

It is the latest in a series of high-profile endorsements for McCain, who won the backing on Sunday of the Des Moines Register, Iowa's largest newspaper, and the Boston Globe, which also circulates in southern New Hampshire.

(To read more about the U.S. political campaign, visit Reuters "Tales from the Trail: 2008" online at blogs.reuters.com/trail08/)
(Reporting by John Whitesides and David Morgan; writing by Steve Holland, editing by John O'Callaghan)

Read: John McCain

Memories That Linger On

2007-12-17T08:23:00.000-08:00

Short Story ©By Carlos Benito Camacho

Although I was born and grew up in the city, I spent fragments of my life in the country. Once, when I was very young boy, my mother became ill and could not look after the six of us kids. While my brothers and sisters were taken care of by relatives who lived in the city, I was sent to the country to stay at an uncle’s.

Uncle Miguel lived on small farm, which was about 75 miles from the city. He was a tenant farmer who worked a 50-acre rectangular piece of fertile land. Like my mother, he was born and grew up in the country and was a devoted catholic who attended church every Sunday. He was married to Aunt Jane; a woman who was half his age. Since they were a childless couple, it was deemed convenient that I stayed there for a whole year. I did not like the idea of having to spend such a long time away from my brothers and sisters, in some remote place where I had never been before. But they said I had to go when my uncle’s old pick-up truck stopped out in front.

My arrival in that exotic place was an unnerving experience. I was scared to death by those scrawny, rural dogs which welcomed the urban alien with growls and barks. The first days were awful, as I was homesick all the time. Hidden in some nook of that house, I would cry silently in sobs. My uncle solemn and distant presence was no solace to me, but my Aunt Jane was. She was a warm lady who cheered me up, talking to me as she smiled, giving me cozy hugs which fed my childish heart with sprinklings of mirth.

As my uncle was away all day long, working in the field, I spent most of the time with my dearest Aunt Jane. She worked hard, too, doing the household chores, but she always found time to fit me in, taking me for a walk to the river or giving me a ride on one of the horses. She got up at dawn everyday, milked the cows, made the fire with wood in the out-kitchen, and then she made breakfast. When Uncle Miguel left for work, she would go over to wake me up. Although I was already wide awake, because of the roosters’ crows and her hustling around the house, I always shammed sleep and let her walk over and sit on the edge of my bed; and then the magic moment came when she kissed my forehead as she gently rumpled my hair for a while, whispering nice things into my ear. And I woke up, letting myself be caught in her intense blue-eyed look which warmly seeped into my soul on those beautiful country mornings when the golden beams of sunlight slantingly streamed in through the window panes. Then I smiled at her, smelling the smoked hair which flowed down over my face. Her motherly woman’s warmth made me feel whole and safe at home.

Of course, she knew I was pretending, but, since she was very fond of me, too, she acted as if she did not know about it. Affection was something my stern mother could not express. So it became a petty yet important game I loved to play. But time seemed to have gone by fast and I had to leave. I did not want to go back home, but they said I had to, otherwise I would lose my first year at school. Besides, my mother had recovered by then.

My mother was a pious woman who hammered into us biblical stories and prayers. To go to church was compulsory, as we had to live by her strict moral codes. Even though there were times when she was in a good mood, she would get so worked up when she found one of us at fault, venting her wrath on all of us. She would also quarrel with my father when he came back home late. Perhaps it was that straining atmosphere which had made of me a withdrawn, shy boy who did not speak enough to assert himself and who had trouble relating to his classmates.

But I had an intense inner world. I had learned to love the open, green spaces where life sprouted lavishly and quietly everywhere. That is why every year, when the school began, I escaped the cold, strident urban world and ran for shelter, under my aunt’s affectionate care for more than two months. I did not feel lonely by her side, since she was the only one who really understood me. My mother never objected to my going away every year, but she would always say to my uncle, “make him pray,” before we left.

Although Aunt Jane was born in Argentina, her parents were from Durham, a small city in northern England. My aunt’s father was an experienced foreman who came to work for the railways, which were run by the British at that time. They arrived in Argentina in the late twenties, spending five months in Buenos Aires and two years in Rosario. Then her father was transferred to Cordoba where they lived five years, moving down again at the end of that period to the Northwest where they finally settled. It was here where my aunt was born. Although Mr. Cavindish had bought a farm by then, he still worked for the railways, as a manager of the local station.

Thinking that it would perhaps be a matter of months before the conflict in Europe was over, Mr. Cavendish left South America to serve England at the outbreak of World War II. But it was much more serious than he had thought, and once he had left, they never heard of him. Deprived of her husband, my aunt’s mother became feeble at the end of the war as she fell victim to a chronic disease. When she died, his sons decided to sell their farm and go to England, but Jane stayed; she had already married my mother’s brother.

My uncle was a tall, slender man with handsome features, but, like my mother he was unable to express much affection. He was a God-fearing believer who, like most of the Argentineans, followed the fetishistic ritual of lighting candles to a motley collection of plaster saints, virgins, and faded black and white pictures of Evita. He was a man who slid along his cultural groove.

In sharp contrast with him, my aunt never went to church, nor did she talk about religion. Although she completed only primary school, she was an intelligent woman to whom one could talk to about any subject. She read a lot and an old trunk full of books, which her parents had brought from England. She read them every evening in the amber light of an oil lamp.

As summers went by, I came back to the country bigger and taller, as I developed into my teens. Although I had lost interest in fishing at the river and roaming about in the forest looking for nests or shooting birds down with my slingshot, it was the need to be myself, by my aunt’s side in that quiet spot, which brought me back. I was now at high school and had begun studying English. So, spending time with my aunt was a big help. She was the best teacher I had ever had. She was so poised and collected when she taught me. I would always sit close to her to listen to the English words which she carefully pronounced for as read one of her books. It was very nice to feel her warmth breath when she spoke looking into my eyes. She made me feel as if I still were her little child. But I was a fifteen-year-old teenager now and had already started to strongly feel the sex drive inside.

Once when I was seventeen, as I was staying at my aunt’s for a weekend, my uncle had left to attend Our Lady of Mercy celebrations and was expected back in the evening. I had checked if the hired man had harrowed the patch of land in which corn was going to be sown and then helped my aunt do her daily chores when we were having lunch in the shade of a big mulberry tree.

It was hot; and except for the steady chirp of cicadas and the occasional whinnies of a horse in the pen, it was quiet. From where I was sitting at the table I could see the waves of heat rise from the plowshares lying in the parching midday sun.

We had not said anything. We just ate, looking into each other’s eyes from time to time, communicating in a language only known to us, as a warm breeze played gently with her loose red hair. Something subtle and tender lay in those eyes which made me feel at ease and complete.

“Have you asked her out yet?” she said.

“Yes, I did, but she turned me down. I’d thought of taking her to the student’s day party, but at first the words would not come out. When I finally had the courage to ask her to the party, she said that she was going out with somebody else. I felt like a clumsy idiot,” I said.

“Don’t you ever feel like that. Wherever and whoever you are with, you will always be a gorgeous boy and a wonderful human being,” she said, as she put her hand on mine to reassure me. “How did you like the meal?”

“You always cook wonderfully, Jane,” I said.

“How about going to the river for a swim? It’s quite hot today. It would be nice to splash about for a while in the cool water. They say after the last rain the river rose and left some deep pools where you can swim,” she said.

“It sounds like a good idea,” I said.

Walking a path that ran along the middle of the farm, we set off for the river at around three. Reaching the property limit, we crossed a barbed wire fence and began threading our way through the lush vegetation. Here and there flocks of birds, perched in trees, would suddenly soar up with a whirr, startled at the sight of two human beings.

A sense of anxious expectations, which I could not account for, quivered inside me as she held my hand, leading the way. The warbling of birds and the constant chirping of cicadas reverberated in my ears, as the fresh scent of bracken and aromatic herbs filled my nose and lungs. I heard the sound of running water as the path began winding through willow trees. The sun-flecked ground became sandy; then the trail tilted, ending up at the river shore.

We took off our shoes and padded along, feeling the wet sand under our feet by the clear water that rippled over stones. We stopped at a place shaded by willow trees standing above on the river bank. Taking our hats off, we sat down for a while and then my aunt said, “you go in first.”

“No, let’s go in together,” I said.

My aunt got her pants off but let her flowered blouse on. Down below, she wore black, cotton shorts which fit her tightly. I had always thought that her skin was beautiful, and when I saw her white plump legs, a nice tickling feeling shuddered throughout my body.

When I was a little boy my aunt not only saw me in underwear, but also saw me naked when she washed me in the tub, scrubbing me with a sponge, and when she so daintily rubbed me dry with a towel afterwards; and although it had been a long time before since I had started having my bath myself, I thought I was still used to her seeing me in underwear. So, I took off my shirt and pants and walked with her into the cool water, which flowed slowly at this point where the stone-strewn and sandy riverbed was deep.

We swam for a while, playing and splashing water at each other as we laughed. But amid the frolic Jane suddenly choked with water and started to cough as she hung onto a boulder standing out in the pool. I came up close to help her and check that she was ok. “I’m alright,” she said, with bleary eyes, gasping for breath as she leaned backward against the boulder.

I was standing in front of her in waist-deep water when the current gently pushed me up against her. I instantly felt her warm legs touch mine. Then I looked intently at her and for a moment I thought that the freckles on her red face might just as well be bits of grated chocolate on strawberry cream. A shiver stirred my groin as I looked into her eyes, raking her dripping hair off her forehead. I realized what I was feeling for her at that moment was something different; something I had not felt before for her. It was something magic which had grown out of our special relationship…

This short story is worth $200 US dollars.

Andres Segovia, Suite Castellana

2007-12-16T08:49:00.000-08:00

Cristina Kirchner Faults U.S. on Inquiry

2007-12-15T07:57:00.000-08:00

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO (From The New York Times)

Published: December 14, 2007

BUENOS AIRES — Argentina’s new president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, lashed out at the United States on Thursday for meddling in Latin American affairs after American prosecutors in Miami alleged that a suitcase stuffed with $800,000 was intended to be a secret contribution to her campaign.
Cristina Kirchner
“There is some garbage in international politics that holds back development and seriousness in international relationships,” Mrs. Kirchner said from the presidential palace here.
On Wednesday, just two days after Mrs. Kirchner was sworn in as Argentina’s first elected female president, American officials arrested three Venezuelans and one Uruguayan on charges of acting and conspiring to act as agents of a foreign government within the United States, without prior notification to the attorney general.

According to the American criminal complaint, the four individuals, and a fifth who is still being sought, were acting on behalf of high-ranking officials in the government of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, which an assistant United States attorney says was seeking to deliver the money to Mrs. Kirchner’s campaign in August, two months before the Oct. 28 election.
The complaint, which was filed in federal court in Miami, also said the men had plotted to cover up the intent behind the delivery of the cash.

Mrs. Kirchner criticized the complaint while stressing the importance of the relationship between Argentina and Mr. Chávez’s government.

“This president may be a woman, but she’s not going to allow herself to be pressured,” Mrs. Kirchner said in a televised speech. She said she would “continue affirming our friendship with all Latin American countries and also with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.”

The charges brought by American prosecutors alleging Venezuela’s involvement have buttressed suspicions among some in Latin America that Mr. Chávez has been trying to use his country’s oil wealth to influence presidential campaigns in the region clandestinely.
In Argentina, the case has raised concerns about the tightening bond between the Kirchner government and Mr. Chávez, who has pushed for energy accords with Argentina and to refinance billions of dollars of Argentina’s debt.

The case first came to light on Aug. 4, when Guido Alejandro Antonini Wilson, who holds American and Venezuelan citizenship and lives in south Florida, was stopped by Argentine officials after arriving in Buenos Aires with a cash-stuffed suitcase via a chartered flight from Caracas, Venezuela.

Mr. Antonini has not been charged in the case. Alicia Valle, special counsel to the United States attorney in Miami, would not comment on whether Mr. Antonini was cooperating with investigators.

Since prosecutors filed their criminal complaint on Wednesday, the case has exploded in the Argentine and Venezuelan press. The Buenos Aires daily La Nación devoted seven pages of articles to the case. In Venezuela, “Antoninigate” drew cries for more investigations.

On Thursday, aides to Mrs. Kirchner sought to redirect the focus from charges that foreigners were seeking to finance her campaign secretly, to possible motivations for the American investigation. Justice Minister Anibal Fernández called the American case “an enormous dirty trick” and a “reprisal” for the country’s ties with Mr. Chávez.

The Venezuelan information minister, William Lara, denied any link between the money and his government, saying the four men who were arrested were not its agents and calling the charges “U.S. propagandistic trash,” The Associated Press reported.It is not against Argentine law for foreigners to contribute to a presidential campaign, but it is illegal to do so secretly, Argentine officials said. It also is illegal to bring undeclared cash into the country, the officials said.

The American complaint alleges that on Aug. 23, less than three weeks after the aborted delivery in Buenos Aires, Mr. Antonini met with three of the charged suspects in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. It was there that Franklin Durán, one of the suspects, told him that the intended recipient of the $800,000 was Mrs. Kirchner’s campaign.

According to prosecutors, Carlos Kauffmann, another suspect, warned Mr. Antonini that “his future actions” might put the life of his children “at risk.” According to the complaint, Moisés Maionica, another suspect, sought to reassure Mr. Antonini at that meeting that Venezuela’s national oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, would cover any costs he incurred from the seizure of the suitcase in Buenos Aires.

At another meeting four days later in Fort Lauderdale, Mr. Durán told Mr. Antonini “in substance” that the disclosure of the intended recipient of the cash could result in the loss of the election by the recipient.

The money seizure in August led Néstor Kirchner, the president at the time, to fire an Argentine official for allowing Mr. Antonini to carry the cash aboard the flight, which had been chartered by the Argentine national oil company. On board were three Argentine officials and four employees of Petróleos de Venezuela. The company’s top manager in Argentina also stepped down.

Daniel Cancel contributed reporting from Caracas, Venezuela.

Andres Segovia plays Bach

2007-12-14T06:25:00.000-08:00

Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and Hugo Chavez's Cash

2007-12-13T16:38:00.000-08:00

U.S. Links Smuggled Cash to Venezuela (From the New York Times)

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
Published: December 13, 2007

BUENOS AIRES - A Miami man who brought $800,000 in a suitcase into Argentina was trying to deliver a campaign contribution from the Venezuelan government to the Argentine presidential candidate Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, American prosecutors said Wednesday.

Assistant United States Attorney Thomas J. Mulvihill said in court Wednesday that conversations recorded by the F.B.I. indicate that Mrs. Kirchner, who won the election and was sworn in on Monday here as Argentina’s president, was the intended recipient of the money, said Alicia Valle, special counsel to the U.S. Attorney in Miami.

The United States attorney’s office in Miami charged five men with acting and conspiring to act as agents of the Venezuelan government within the United States, without having notified the attorney general, in a scheme it said involved the highest levels of President Hugo Chávez’s government. According to prosecutors, Venezuelan agents tried to cover up the purpose of the cash and intimidated a witness in the case.

"The complaint filed today outlines an alleged plot by agents of the Venezuelan government to manipulate an American citizen in Miami in an effort to keep the lid on a burgeoning international scandal," Kenneth L. Wainstein, assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement.

The Miami man, Guido Alejandro Antonini Wilson, was stopped in Buenos Aires on Aug. 4 with the cash-stuffed suitcase. The complaint charges that three Venezuelans and a Uruguayan, acting on behalf of Venezuelan officials, then sought his help in covering up the source of the cash, its destination and the role of the Venezuelan government.

"This could be the smoking gun that Chávez has been actively financing campaigns in Latin America," said Michael Shifter, vice president for policy at the Inter-American Dialogue, a political consultancy in Washington. During these meetings the defendants told Mr. Antonini, who is an American citizen, that various high-ranking Venezuelan government officials, including members of the office of the vice-president, members of the intelligence services and a high-ranking official from the Justice ministry, were aware of the matter.

The defendants told Mr. Antonini that the funds had been destined for the campaign of a candidate in the Argentine presidential election of Oct. 28. Charged were Moisés Maionica, 36; Antonio José Canchica Gómez, 37; Rodolfo Edgardo Wanseele Paciello, 40; Franklin Durán, 40; and Carlos Kauffmann, 35. All have been arrested, except for Mr. Canchica Gómez, who remains at large, the U.S. attorney's office said. If convicted, the defendants face a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Venezuelan officials in Caracas had no comment on the charges. Marcos Lohlé, a spokesman for the Argentine Foreign Ministry, also declined to comment.

The case began on Aug. 4, when Mr. Antonini, 46, was stopped in Buenos Aires with the cash-stuffed suitcase by an airport customs official after arriving from Caracas on a private plane chartered by the Argentine government’s national energy company. Seven others were on board, including four executives of Venezuela’s state oil company and three Argentina officials.
The discovery of the suitcase briefly chilled relations between Argentina and Venezuela, which had grown closer through a series of energy accords and through Mr. Chávez’s refinancing of billions in Argentine debt. The Argentine president at the time, Nestor Kirchner, demanded answers from the Venezuelan government. Within days, he accepted the resignation of Claudio Uberti, the Argentine official who had offered Mr. Antonini a seat on the plane.

María Luz Rivas Diez, the Argentine attorney general, said at the time that Mr. Antonini had made 12 trips to Argentina in the past year, some for less than a day.

The Argentine government said it had started its own probe, and Venezuela’s national oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, said it would also investigate the mysterious trip. No results of either probe have been announced.

Pedro Carreño, Venezuelan’s justice minister, said in August that the cash found on Mr. Antonini was a personal matter. "If there exists a personal object," Mr. Carreno said, "it is a suitcase."

Andres Segovia, Asturias

2007-12-12T05:48:00.000-08:00