New Online Campus for the Study of Philosophy!

I have recently being informed about a new Objectivist Philosophy Program coming online next January 10, 2012.  The program is sponsored by the Ayn Rand Institute that will create an online Campus.

ARI Campus will allow students around the world to take courses at their own pace and on their own time—for free. Students at all levels will be able of exploring educational materials in multimedia courses.

Initial course offerings will include the following:

The full, public launch of the site is slated for September of 2012. Add to your calendars the date January 10, 2012 and log in to the initial courses that will be offered by the ARI Campus!
Related articles:

A year in posts

Pencil
Image via Wikipedia

This blog was born at the end of 2011 and we already have had more than four thousand visitors! This is also, the 75th post in this blog and is again one more reason to celebrate!

Following the tradition of UDADASI and the blog of The Harvard University Press here’s my summary of the top 5 posts for 2011 by the amount of unique visitors,

  1. Joel Cohen: Top 10 key population trends on Earth with 7 billion
  2. The Drug War in Guatemala: A Conversation with Giancarlo Ibarguen
  3. On Free Press and On Capitalism
  4. At the Monument to the Battle of the Nations
  5. On Globalization

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

I wish you a Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year!

Thanks for your support in the first year of Globalization & Capitalism!  I hope to share lots of more ideas and meet more new great people in 2012!

On Liberty,

The face of North Korea’s New Communist “Supreme Leader”

Kim Jong Un - Supreme Leader of North Korea - via: The Economist

Here’s the face of Kim Jong-un, the new Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).  Kim Jong Un is the son and heir of Kim Jong Il who passed away on Saturday December 17, 2011. Jong Un is in his twenties and has inherited the control of what many consider to be a Communist Dictator system of leadership.  Lets see what history comes from this new, young and small powerful dictator and soon new Supreme Leader (General Secretary of the WPK).

As his father did, this young men would be in charge of a territory of 120,540 km2 and of 24,051,218 million people (the 51 most populated country).

North Korea is also a proven nuclear power and nuclear weapon country since 2006 that has consistently menaced the world with the use of its weapons in retaliation against South Corea and Japan. Diplomacy and food supplies to its dying population has been the methods used by countries in the United Nations to stop their menaces.

The burning of a Library in Egypt and the Philosophy behind it

The damnation of this earth as a realm where nothing is possible to man but pain, disaster and defeat, a realm inferior to another, “higher,” reality; the damnation of all values, enjoyment, achievement and success on earth as a proof of depravity; the damnation of man’s mind as a source of pride, and the damnation of reason as a “limited,” deceptive, unreliable, impotent faculty, incapable of perceiving the “real” reality and the “true” truth; the split of man in two, setting his consciousness (his soul) against his body, and his moral values against his own interest; the damnation of man’s nature, body and self as evil; the commandment of self-sacrifice, renunciation, suffering, obedience, humility and faith, as the good; the damnation of life and the worship of death, with the promise of rewards beyond the grave—these are the necessary tenets of the [mystic’s] view of existence, as they have been in every variant of [mystical] philosophy throughout the course of mankind’s history. Ayn Rand

Yesterday December 17, 2011 during conflicts between some Egyptian protests, the Egyptian Scientific Institute which established in 1798 by Napolean Bonaparte was burned. The Egyptian Scientific Institute was the oldest scientific institute in Egypt and Middle East at all. It has the most rich and rare library in Egypt.

Eyewitnesses were reported to have seen protestors throwing a Molotov cocktail at stone-throwing soldiers at the Shura Council building, but the projectile missed the intended target and instead landed in the Egyptian Scientific Institute.

The library contains about 40.000 items of rare books and manuscripts, however it has unvaluable items, like:

  •  The original copy of the french book “Description de l’Egypte”
  • Atlas of Old Indian arts.
  • German atlas about Egypt and Ethiopia, 1842.
  • “Egypt: the mother of the world”, 1753.

Professor Mahmoud al-Shernoby, the general secretary of the institute, told state TV in a phone interview that the damage is a “great loss” to Egypt and that those “who caused this disaster showed be punished.”

Photos about burning the Egyptian Scientific Institute: