1 de mayo...

My grandmother used to say that "in May it only rains in cursed places". Waking up on a first of May, -which has always been considered the official beginning of spring and would steer country-side walks and pic-nics even to city dwellers like my family- in the pouring rain was really something new and given Barcelona's weather, quite disappointing.

So be it! I am not "catching" May this year. Instead I am sitting on my couch, looking at the rain outside the window, the wind bending the palm-trees, as disappointed as me, or even more for not being able to dazzle the tourists, who have flown from all over Europe only to find Barcelona at its grayest. The Old Port looks emptier than ever, no outdoor tapas, or claras, umbrellas instead of sunglasses and anoraks instead of shorts (although some visitors still believe you can fight reality with hope and go around in sandals).

And as the Spanish would say "1 de mayo mis cojones!"

Nonetheless, 1st of May is not only about flower-picking and pic-nics. It's labour day for the Europeans at least although the legendary strike took place in Chicago. I felt a bit bad about not doing anything to participate but as it often happens, the mountain came to Mohamed. So around noon, I heard trumpets blowing and drums rolling in front of my place, all this under heavy rain. I opened the window to see a hundred people with their flags and their umbrellas strolling down Passeig de Colom, singing "A las barricadas" a worker's hymn from the 30's often sang during the Spanish civil war.

the lyrics go something like this:

Black storms are shaking the air and dark clouds shade are view
but even if suffering and death awaits us, our duty calls us against the enemy
the gift mostly precious is our Liberty, we have to defend with faith and bravery
High flies the flag of revolution that will bring people to emancipation
On your feet worker people, towards the battlefield, reaction must be defeated
To the barricades, to the barricades, for the triumph of our revolution!

I stood there on the balcony for some five minutes, under the rain as the least I could do for these people, who after so many years and with the rest of the world having grown (or better say having decayed) to be thinking of them as funny romantics, or even stupid and back-ward, they still keep singing about barricades in times when barricades are becoming more and more invisible. The worst thing of all though, was that right across the street, in front of the building of the Capitania General, two police cars full of cops were "discretely" following the demonstration, as of they were monitoring the movements of possible common muggers and thieves, or -God forbid- terrorists...

To the spirit of these people, who keep keeping the cops under terror, who are frowned upon by their own townsmen as retrogressive rebels with out-dated causes, to these few but dedicated successors of the Haymarket Square martyrs, is this post dedicated.

...and more

third post in three days?

It looks like I am on fire or very bored. But the truth is that I woke up at noon, it is almost raining outside and I feel like writing something instead of going through Sunday afternoon melancholy.

Sundays are not that bad when you feel like doing nothing and provided you are well equipped with a comfortable sofa, some nice films, books, newspapers and music everything works out almost perfect. You may be a bit frustrated reading that one guy got killed in riots in Talin, Estonia as a follow-up of bringing down a monument to Soviet soldiers from the local government. It looks like people in Estonia (and also Latvia, Lithuania and so on) are being juuuuuuuuust a little bit over-sensible against the Soviets forgetting that they were actually fighting the Nazis! It looks a bit stupid bringing down monuments to people that lost their lives against the Wermacht while openly allowing neonazis to march around the cities with the excuse of being anti-communists.

Stupidity, they say is infinite and they may be right!

Anyhoooo...I am overcoming my afternoon frustration with seeps of Greek coffee (OK it's turkish, or actually arab), listening to Brad Mehldau's Trio covering Nick Drake (Day is Done, look it up it's really cool) and "youtubing" the best of Johan Cruyff! coming up is me with my book of narratives by Marguerite Yurcenar on a strict 180 degrees position on the couch and later on come the games of the day from la Sexta! ("Football con fatatas!")

thus, I 'll just follow a great advice and won't get bitter on this Sunday evening. A new week starts tomorrow, which in addition is a week with one day off and Champions League semifinals!

Something for the weekend

Yesterday night I went to a party, organized by a friend's friend in the middle of the Raval neighborhood. The house situated on one of the narrowest, lightlesslest streets of Barcelona was a really old block of flats, in which the apartment had the special privilege to occupy the last floor, that should allow at least a few hours of direct sunlight every day. Apart from all that, the place was quite nice and the people were all having fun, (some actually having reached, US-college-party-throwing-up-all-over-the-place levels of fun) . But strangely, I found myself in an awkward, unsociable position.

I did not feel like dancing to the cheesy latin music, nor making casual conversation with people I did not know, nor meeting people...is something the matter with me?

Yesterday I was wondering about the same thing, but maybe it is just a phase I am going through, one of this periods, we men may also have, moody and melancholic, probably for being unable to keep up with the general spring blooming that goes on around me. I had my moment though, once I reached the tiny balcony, looked over the small street on both sides, filled with its prostitutes whose callings did not make it to the fifth floor, the nordic tourists whose bodily odors DID make it even up there and suddenly felt the breeze coming down from Montjuic, whose lights blinked behind the nightly haze. The crappy music faded, irritating people became invisible, the smell of vomit and piss dissolved into the thin air, I felt calm and peaceful.

Maybe nothing is the matter with me after all. Maybe I just need more of these moments. As May is closing in, I might have to try earning them a bit more.

Somethings for the weekend
check this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiatUjDlROs&mode=related&search=

sound-track (top 5 in my mp3 player)
1. Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers feat. Wynton Marsalis - Time will tell (Indeed!)
2. Tom Waits - Invitation to the blues (yes it is true!)
3. Frank Sinatra - I 'll remember April (of course I will)
4. The Beatles - Abbey Road (brilliant! all the second half is a non-stop musical poem in the form of a farce!)
5. George Gershwin - The complete songbook for piano (recently saw "Manhattan" again and got into a complete NewYorkean Gershwin mood)

word-track (books I have read or am still reading...)
1. Fernando Pessoa (Bernardo Soares) - The book of disquietude (As depressing as it can get, not the best for spring, but Pessoa is a great master of words and if you step aside from the communicated feelings you can appreciate it)
2. Roger Penrose - the Road to reality (started reading this "encyclopedia" volume at the background of so many stuff that it will make no sense to talk about it now...will come back to you once I 've reached a 10% of this book...which will be in a 100 pages or so!!!)

film-track (films I saw lately)
1. Barry Lyndon - One of Kubrick's classics which I really enjoyed, with great cinematography (as Julien had already told me before seeing it), old-stylish story-board but with some captions deliberately made so that they look like Flemish master paintings. And Marisa Berenson is absolutely gorgeous.
2. Manhattan - Saw it again, liked it the same, most of all for the feeling that the New York, classy Gershwin music communicates throughout. See sound-track.
3. RadioFreccia - Saw half of it in italian!!! yesterday and managed to like it although I understood a bit more than half. A typical auto-biographic-for-the-70s movie (I think every country has at least one of those) but very nice in all, amusing and with a great soundtrack. Will try to see it in soon in a language I understand better.

waiting-for-track
1. Second leg of Champions League's semifinals, with my favourites Liverpool and Milan battling for a come back after the first games
2. Getting in journey mood on my way to the US East Coast

the end of the week...best known as "week-end"

Weeks that come have a special characteristic of either being anticipated or hated in advance depending on the work load ahead of you, the percentage of days off, the weather, the absence of interesting football games, the expectation of parties and so on...
Weeks that go, on the other hand, normally leave you with nothing so strong, it is the week-end that gains all the anticipation and steals of the week whatever its attributes have been.

Well, it's not always that easy!

Two weeks ago I was talking about a tough week I had ahead of me and I had better kept my mouth shut. It turned even worse than I was thinking when apart from the workload, I had to add going down ill on the weekend, which I passed in the midst of one more of my seizures of extreme hypochondria that only left me time to spend an amusing barbecue with part of the brazilian community of Barcelona. And not only that, but the week to follow, the one that just ended, turned out to be equally disturbing, when on top of all, came a stressful two-days which I spent on the phone and on e-mail talking with embassies, secretaries and immigration experts for what in the end proved to be a non-existent visa problem for my forthcoming trip to the US.

Nonetheless, this past week, whose sole, but time-lasting highlights will be Kaka's second goal in the Old Trafford semifinal (still fantasizing about it) and Julien's bumping against the bookshelf in the office...(still laughing with it), ended with a feeling of relief. And this is one of these week-ends when you really feel relaxed, thinking about only a few things, (although some may still be work-related). The whole recent derangement though made me really ponder a lot about whether it can or not affect my personality overall...

Doctor, am I fastly becoming and old and weird fellow?

What a week...is coming?

After a violent comeback (in terms of abrupt break from holiday to 12-hour workshifts) and a tiring weekend, the week looks even worse. For the next three weeks, I have three main projects running and a side-one lined-up, numerous meetings pending, a poster to prepare and another one to think about...work seems to be piling up on me as pay-back for my being so consistent in disliking it...

But what can I do...I just clench my teeth, sing along Sinead o' Connor (see soundtrack) and wait until all this is behind...or actually until I put it behind me. Until then of course, my continuing mental instability seizures, accompanied by transient memory loss, repetitive delusions of pettiness and lapsing feeling of self-consciousness may carry on...But I wonder if maybe they are due to too much staring at my desktop...

............

As you may see the soundtrack these days is doubly biased towards melancholic and speedy-violent stuff. It is mostly because of post-holiday melancholy and speedy-stressful situations at work...I just hope that soon I go into summer mood and relax a bit (see waiting-for-track)

sound-track (top 5 in my mp3 player)
1. The John Coltrane quartet - My favourite things (with one of the most haunting piano solos EVER! by McCoy Tyner)
2. Muse - Asassain (cool new album..this belongs to the speeeeedy stuff)
3. Sinead O' Connor - You made me the thief of your heart (excellent song from the soundtrack of In the Name of the father)
4. Sinead O' Connor & the Chieftains- Foggy Dew (recently discovered this cover of my favourite Irish classic hymn and cannot stop listening to it)
5. Arctic Monkeys - Fluorescent Adolescent

word-track (books I have read or am still reading...)
-While in Greece there is a great debate on the revisionistic primary school history book, I got interested in some history of the Balkans in order to do some research on my own. I found a lot of my history books I keep in Athens stimulating even if I had to rediscover them by reading them over again. (Fortunately I read history books keeping sidenotes). Just in case someone would be interested in Balkan history (as I would really recommend to Greeks and all Balkanians so that they do not get fooled by so-called experts) some of the best books in my humble opinion would be:
1. The Balkans since 1453. Stavrianos (the ultimate reference)
2. The Balkans. Mark Mazower (modern approach by one of the leading 20th century historians)
3. History of the Balkans. Georges Castellan (especially for the part that covers the 18th century and the two crises of the oriental issue)
4. The age of Revolution. Eric Hobsbawm (could not NOT cite my favourite guy, but still 19th century world history and revolutions are his forte)

film-track (films I saw lately)
1. Ocean's 12. Follow up of Ocean's 11, a really "feel good" film, with the usual trio Sondeberg-Clooney-Roberts reaching co-operativity at high levels while having real fun. In all I liked it maybe even more than the first mostly because I felt it was made without trying to prove anything deeper than being an amusing "movie". Waiting for Ocean's 13 (coming soon)
2. The wind that shakes the barley. Typical case of disappointment due to over-anticipation. I wanted to see this latest Ken Loach film for a long time and I was a bit let down. In all it is good but it strongly reminds me of "Land and Freedom", falls into a lot of cliches about civil wars and is as one-sided as every Ken Loach movie. But again this is why we love him anyway).

waiting-for-track
1. To get in the REAL summer mood
2. to get some load of work of my back (necessary condition for #1)

How Football saved my life

It sounds plain but it is true. I think us Greeks have something from Ulysses inside us. Maybe it is me more than the average Greeks or then perhaps all people are like this and it makes no sense to recite stereotypes. But it is true that "goodbyes" become harder every time you have to repeat them.

The most recent one in a series that seems too long already, was two nights ago, during dinner at a very nice restaurant in the neighborhood where both me and my father grew up. She was sitting next to me, with so many things to say but still we were talking about a whole load of things that were not important as if small talk would save us from another awful, depressing farewell.

I came back home in sorrow, thinking that there was no song that could make me feel a bit better or at least fill in my blank with music. And then I was saved by the one thing I had deliberately forgotten completely.
I entered my parents house thinking about nothing, having to pack my stuff for the day after, feeling empty just in time for my father to inform me that Manchester United had beaten AS Roma 7-1 in the second leg of their Champions League quarter-final. It has been the greatest performance by the "devils" ever since their historical treble back in 1999 and with no doubt one of the greatest games of the Champions League ever and I had missed it. All the same, I felt no guilt for having chosen to put myself through another painful goodbye. Instead I sat myself in front of the TV to watch the extended highlights of the game. Then came eight brilliant goals, the "theatre of dreams" in full swing, a great night for ManU -although I am the exact opposite of a fun of them- then the great last minute win of Chelsea in Valencia which meant they were through to the other semifinal to meet my beloved Liverpool.

Before I knew, a full hour had passed, as had my initial desperation. My impulsive sadness had sedimented, having given its place to more optimistic thoughts. I went on to pack my suitcase and finish my book, having realized that football had saved my life... or at least my humor

AthensBios

Back in Athens, at my parents place for what is supposed to be Easter holiday but for the time being is not exactly developing like one. At least, running tests on genes to propose a definitive set for experiments to Nacho back in Barcelona,while preparing an abstract for a conference with a close deadline don't exactly suggest holiday.

But all well that ends well they say and it seems that I can enjoy at least three days of complete un-distracted, flesh-eating feast, among family members and that I believe to be the most accurate definition of greek-orthodox Easter. I won't complain though, -even if it occurs to me that I always say that immediatelly after having done exactly that-.

During the last week I met beloved persons, hanged out with old friends, tried to make amends with old ones for having neglected them -due to my absence mostly-, have laughed with my sister, talked to my mother and quarreled with my father more than adequately, thus giving everybody exactly what they have yearned for, including myself of course.

Spring is the best time to see Athens at its real best, as in this photo, distributed along three different layers, set by its ancient classical beauty, its byzantine grandeur and its rather ugly, modern dynamism.My birth city, looks as beautiful, as dis-orientated, frenetic and self-unaware of the fake metropolitan magnificence as it has ever been. And I still love it for that, although I find it more and more difficult to bear. Thinking twice, love is like this, the more you understand you can bear someone the more you realize you can still stand it, therefore the more time you have spent with it, quod erat demonstratum...as some wise would say. I have not had the chance to walk around my old neighborhood that much, at least not as much as I wanted, but it proved enough to make me appreciate some things once more, make sure the Acropolis still stand on solid ground, remember primary school excursions in little hills that looked like mountains back then and to notice how, although we have all grown considerably, the streets where we used to chase the trolley buses have only slightly changed.

Saddest thing of all is that some are not with us anymore and instead of having changed, their absense is the same as ever, once you take the usual walk around their old place...

...But such are the ambushes that memory unwillingly sets in our way.

The whole working frenzy and memory lane strolling notwithstanding, I still had the chance to update my "custom tracks", some of which have been given the benefit to host really interesting things.

sound-track (top 5 in my mp3 player)
1. Horace Silver - Song for my father (accidentally bumped into it at a friends place, a precious jewel of hard-bop)
2. Thelonious Monk with the Jazz Messengers (found it back at home where I hoped it still existed and was happy to prove so)
3. Jesus Christ Superstar (well, it goes with the season...)
4. Camera Obscura - Eighties lover
5. Krzystof Komeda - Astigmatic (likewise 2)

word-track (books I have read or am still reading...) 1. Gerhardt, Kirschner - The plausibility of life. I had significant trouble finishing it and was quite disappointed. The whole idea about revisiting Darwin's theories is quite interesting but they have published a paper with all there is to say. To curious readers with biological background I would strongly recommend to stick to that only.
2. Marguerite Yourcenar - Nouvelles Orientales. I have stated my admiration for this great writer before and this book can not change my opinion. My french are far of the level that would allow me full appreciation but it remains a collection of beautiful stories, mostly dealing with the Balkans, which for a Greek is an additional plus. The dedication of the book to Andreas Empeirikos stimulates a bit of research as well.

film-track (films I saw lately)
1. All the King's men. A remake of an older film with a fantastic cast, an amazing Sean Penn and an even better Anthony Hopkins. A great storyline which makes you doubt a lot with characters that leave you with the bitter aftertaste of pure reality. Directed by Steven Zaillian who has also wrote the screenplay as he did for the Interpreter, Schindler's List and Awakening...I am waiting.
2. Pride and Prejudice. Absolutely brilliant! I regret not having seen it before. Makes you think how little is needed for a great film apart from a witty screenplay based on a novel by a good writer, a line-up of devoted and low-profile actors (well OK, including the cutest Keira Nightley...) and a director with some perspective. Come to think of it, maybe it's too much to ask, at least for Hollywood

waiting-for-track
1. Demetra to come back from her parents home-town
2. Demetra to take her out to dinner
3. To see how I 'll cope with missing the Champions League games for a second consecutive week for fulfilling the above tracks.

It's Friday

this is actually Freyja the saxon goddess after whom Friday was named...but still...

...it is Friday once more. I am still as tired as yesterday but slightly more motivated to work, probably because I have all excuses not to. Computers are shut down due to maintenance and I am running stuff on my laptop while blogging, no stress, no strings attached, no one to be waiting for results or custom track updates (poor Julien, behind me is busting his eyeballs in front of a browser page...)

While listening to some early Divine Comedy that remind me of my innocent youth and waiting for my yeast chromosome 4 data, I can only think about how life would be so much more beautiful if it was full of Friday afternoons like this one, when you would only work out of strict scientific curiosity, you would not feel obliged to communicate your results with anybody and most importantly you would be safe in the knowledge that tomorrow is Saturday!

I don't know if it is the holiday getting closer, or a spring spirit that blends in the belated freezing air but somehow I think I am re-finding my good old self these last weeks. Seriously, it is not the feeling of laziness that redefines me, but mostly the fact that no matter how tired I feel I still find time for things I really like, as reading, watching films or discovering new music, things I have missed a bit since the beginning of the year.

All this makes me really happy (Friday and the Divine Comedy are also helping). And since there's no one around with whom to share my interesting results on a boring problem I decided to share my "things I like" for this week in case anyone is even slightly interested. Here are my main "tracks" for the upcoming weekend:

sound-track (top 5 in my mp3 player):
1. Arcade Fire - No Cars go
2. Kasabian - Test Transmission
3. Elis Regina - Maria, Maria
4. Rolling Stones - Torn and Frayed
5. Motorspycho - Triggerman

word-track (books I am reading):
1. Sigmund Freud "Moises y la religion monoteista", just finished this, a very interesting essay on the origins of monotheism based on some solid assumptions combined with psychoanalytic argumentation. along the lines of "Totem and Tabu" which I liked better.
2. Jean-Pierre Vernant "Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs". Just started this mostly motivated by the previous one and the fact that I am going back to Greece next week. It is a bit hard in french but seems as interesting as it sounds plus it helps me practice. More about it soon

film-track (films I saw lately):
1. "A brief encounter": An all-time romantic classic, with great acting and great soundtrack (Rach 2), which I was not able to appreciate, probably because I had to see it with spanish dubbing and portuguese subtitles, with italian people talking all the time...
2. "Blood diamonds": boring and dissapointing, went to see it mostly for Jennifer Connelly and she was the only thing worth in it.

waiting-for-track(things I am anticipating):
1. the weekend
2. Greece-Turkey for the Euro2008 qualifying round

Until Monday wakes us up from this pleasant "trip", I hope you all try and make your own "custom tracks" for this weekend.

Lay-Z boy!

It is Murphy's law, pure natural anticipation, the boss being absent, tireness combined with boredom or all of the above but the bottom line is this: The closer I get to holidays the less I am eager to work.

The joke in the lab has been that I am an ace in "pretending to work", having a PhD in "slacking off" and similar euphemisms but the truth is that I have been working far off my limits over the last weeks. On top of that I had to deal with a series of my famous (to the ones that know me that is) psycho-somatic seizures, which brought about a number of consequent panic attacks, according to which my teeth were all to be rotten and fall off, my ears would remain plugged until the end of time, my recently injected for tetanus arm would gradually lose all consciousness and end up paralyzed etc. etc. During this highly neurotic, frenetic month I managed to carry on working in three or four different projects, producing results that at least kept my boss satisfied plus give a decent seminar in front of my colleagues, some of which had a first chance to fall under the spell of my fully-convincing-pretending-to -work-hard line of arguments, before waking out of their limbo and start making fun of me again!

Nonetheless, even pretending to give a seminar about pretentious work, with pretentious results and over-pretentious conclusions can make you tired (in fact sometimes it can tire you more than actual work!)
I am now looking more and more forward to getting on that plane and head to Greece where the sun will be shining, ouzo will be on the rocks and nucleosomes will once again become a n interesting topic to philosophize about. Until next Friday when this will happen, I only want to lie on the couch and read my book, which this time is Freud's "Moses and Monotheism" that I bought last week from a second hand bench in Plaza del Tripi. A very interesting read, (if you are into anthropology, the structure of myths and deconstruction techniques in the style of Levi-Strauss).

All I would really want right now is the armchair of the picture and my book. And since it is late Thursday evening I think I ll call it a day and head home to my couch and my dear Freud.

Invisible hands

I should start with the kindest of requests. People, please stop giving boring seminars!We all agree that your work is not so why should your talks be?

What I am really complaining about is not the talks themselves but their most prominent side-effect. The things I read in the paper (and that would be the newspaper) after choosing not to pay attention to the talk anymore. And I can assure you that lately I read pieces by well-respected people that really put my normal cool under severe stress.

The last of this patience-testing articles was a piece by well-estimated Paul Kennedy in today's "El Pais". Paul Kennedy is a well known history professor at Yale, specialized in political economy and history of the 20th century. But unfortunately for him and even more for my already-suffering temper, the subject he chose to write about in today's article was one that really gets on my nerves: the piece dealt with the so-called "freedom of the markets"!

The whole article was centered around the obvious antithesis between strong state-control of the economy and the over-preached gospel of the freedom of the market, free enterprise and the such. Only to make it "catchier" Prof. Kennedy decided to personify the two poles. In place of the liberal-economical preacher he placed the famous Adam Smith and as representative of the fierce, backward state-controlers, Kennedy choose the infamous Hugo Chavez. The debate was set upon uneven grounds.

Adam Smith is the Scotch writer of the "Wealth of the Nations", who lived back in the late 1700 and was the first ever to introduce the also famous "invisible hand" of the market. No more, no less Smith is considered to be the father of political economy (that is liberal political economy) and according to his views (older than the telegraph or even the pony-express but somehow still enduring) private enterprise should remain totally un-controlled by whichever state authority in order for the prosperity of the nation to be achieved. That is on the basis that human beings are so intelligent and ingenious that they will best achieve their goals without the interference of the state.
The above -roughly and a bit un-scientifically expressed- theory has been surprisingly governing the economies of our societies ever since Smith's times. But maybe this is not so surprising since, in fact, what is really happening is that the same laws of the jungle imposed in our distant evolutionary past and retained throughout modern times until the occurrence of Smith's "genious" are STILL active. The main difference is that what in ancient Babylon was considered the right of Kings is now under scientific proof the "safest way to development", or that the visible hand of the landowners of the Roman empire or the Medieval feudarchs has been replaced by the "invisible hand" of the market.
This is the basis of Smith's theory.And keep in mind that the above over-simplification omits to address the issue of the possible implications the "wealth of a nation" may have on that of another.

Let me put it straight! I do not believe in invisible hands! Self-organization, some might say, exists in many systems. But all these systems have one common, defining attribute: they are self-cooperative. Markets on the other hand, we are taught -and this may probably be the only true thing we are taught about them- are by definition the exact opposite of co-operative. They are competitive. Thus to believe that the prosperity of the nation will be magically shaped by the self-organized combination of the cunning plans of private entrepreneurs and their even more ruthless applications is as absurd as to expect that tomorrow morning, we will ALL arrive at work earlier than usual if we just switch off all traffic lights, just because WE ALL WANT TO!

Seriously, I find it hard to believe, how an idea so naive, a theory so unfounded, an argumentation so flawed, came to form one of the most stable pillars of modern civilization, even more, one that appears to be so uncontested and non-negotiable. Moreover, I find it hard to believe that Paul Kennedy, apparently a wise and intelligent man, chose to be the advocate of Adam Smith in this "ideological confrontation" with a "populist", "leftist", "radical" leader such as Hugo Chavez. In case you have not realized it yet, the words in quotation above have nowadays a profound negative meaning.

This brings us to this "populist", "leftist" and "radical" guy, surrounded by a cabinet "getting more radical every day",that has managed to be elected in fair elections 8 times over the last seven years. Which comes as yet another proof of the fact that majorities are not to be trusted, especially when their -visible- hands cast votes in favour of "populists" who promise to try to improve their welfare and God forbid actually do so!

Chavez' "radical" policy has aimed to improve the quality of life of the average Venezuelan and has managed to do so, although not to the degree desired by himself. This, however, and according to Adam Smith and his followers, does not necessarily mean prosperity, especially when it is not reflected in the country's stock market. Thus, according to our Yale professor, Venezuela is not more prosperous and it won't be so, if the children get better health-care, or all go to school and have proper education, as long as their country does not appear appealing to foreign, international investors. Considering the benefits people all over Latin America are enjoying thanks to international investors and the profound impact the investments of the latter had in the development of these countries, allow me to sincerely doubt it!

The time had passed and the talk was coming to an end and so was the article when I reached the most obscene part of it, wisely reserved for a glorious finishing. Rhetorically asking himself if Chavez had ever read the Smith's "Wealth of Nation" and once having spontaneously reached the conclusion that he wouldn't be able to understand it, Kennedy suggests that someone sent to Chavez and his cabinet one of Aesope's myths "The golden egg-laying hen" which he assures us NOT only Chavez but "even his voters in the poor neighborhoods of Caracas" would be able to understand!

There you have it then! A Yale professor of history so wise and educated to be citing Adam Smith in the 21st century, comes to mock the large majority of a whole people, explicitly stating that they are just so dumb that not only they cannot understand Smith's ideas or modern economical theories (that are actually 250 years old) but are actually unable to perceive whether or not their life has improved or if their nation is prosperous.
So fortunately for them, HE KNOWS BETTER.

The talk ends, I hear the applause, throw the paper in the garbage bin and go back in front my computer.

If such are the views of the "director of the International Security Studies Institute of Yale" let me first be worried about Yale, then worried about our "security" and then about "studies" in general.