The Online Actos Blog

Paris is the capital of France and one of the most better-known and
pleasant cities in the world. It is the most populated city in the France with the population of 2,200,000 people. Paris is one of the leading
business and cultural hubs in the world and is regarded as a major global city in the world due to its influences in fields such as politics, entertainment, fashion, media, science and
art. In addition to that, Paris is one of the main contributors to the GDP of
France and it is more than 25% at the moment. Nearly 45 million tourists, of whom 60% are foreign, visit Paris every year making it one of the most popular tourist destinations of
the world. The fact that Paris is home to many iconic landmarks and world far-famed establishments mainly contributes to this
status.

Eiffel Tower

Eiffel tower is the first thing which comes to anyone’s mind when they refer to Paris. Eiffel tower is the global icon which is situated in Paris where everyone around the globe knows. The
Eiffel tower was built in 1887 as the entrace arch for the 1889 world’s fair held in Paris. It was named after Gustave Eiffel who was the engineer of the construction project.
Moreover, the Eiffel tower is the tallest building in Paris and the world’s most visited paid monument.
Thence, a visit to this historical turning point is a must to anyone who visits Paris.

The Louvre

The Louvre, the largest museum in France and the world’s most visited museum, is also a must see for a tourist. This museum
alone houses some of the most valuable and priceless pieces of arts and sculptures in the world. There are about 35,000 pieces of art and and 380,000 objects in total in
the museum. There are many master pieces among the art collection of Louvre and some of them are namely Mona Lisa, Madona of the Rocks, and Dying Slave. In addition to the European arts and culture symbols, Louvre also houses many other arts such as
Egyptian, Greek and Roman, and Islamic. This museum is also one of the main attractions of the city of Paris.

More about Paris

In addition to the museums and the Eiffel tower, Paris also renowned for its collection of world
far-famed sites such as Palace of Versailles (former palace of French kings), Château Villette, Notre Dame de Paris (Cathedral of
Notre Dame) which is 12th century Gothic cathedral and the Saint Dennis Basilica which is also a Gothic cathedral where the French monarchs were buried. Almost all these buildings are famous for their unique architecture. If some one is looking forward to a different type of leasure, then they can simply go on a cruise down the Seine river.

It should be remembered that Paris is also offer more modern forms of entertainment locations such as
the Disneyland Paris, many modern restaurants and night entertainment venues. Therefore, Paris could be considered an ideal tourist destination that offers both traditional and
modern forms of entertainment to anyone who visits there.

Comments Off

Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) is widely considered a Bolshevik author, closely allied with the likes of Lenin and Stalin. But this is far from the truth.

Gorky’s real name was Alexei Maximovich Peshkov. He chose the pseudonym “Gorky” - “bitter” in Russian - to describe his early experiences from the age of eight as a menial worker. In his late teens he attempted suicide. The bullet pierced his lung, rendering him susceptible to Tuberculosis for the rest of his life.

Between 1899 and 1906 Gorky lived in St. Petersburg and participated in the activities of the Social Democratic Party. When it split in 1903, he, indeed, supported the Bolsheviks financially - though he never joined them formally. He was a strong critic of Lenin. Partly to avoid his wrath, he exiled himself to Capri, Italy in 1906.

Moreover, though he upheld the Bolsheviks’ anti-war stance, he opposed the 1917 October Revolution (the Bolshevik coup against the post-Tsarist Social Democratic government). So damaging was his criticism of Lenin’s dictatorial ways and the illegitimacy of the Bolshevik regime that his work was censored from July 1918 onwards.

Gorky left Russia in 1921 and lived in Sorrento, Italy until 1928 when he was lured back by a lavish celebration of his 60th birthday. The year after, he relocated permanently to Russia. In 1938, certain senior Soviet figures - like Nikolai Bukharin and Genrikh Yagoda - were accused of murdering him in 1936, while under medical treatment.

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com

Comments Off

A trained lawyer, Marcos was convicted of assassinating a political opponent of his father in 1939 and, from his condemned cell, argued his case up to the Philippine Surpreme Court, where he won an acquittal.
During the Second World War, Marcos collaborated with the Japanese who occupied the Philippines - though he later claimed to have led the Filipino resistance, a fiction in which the United States colluded, awarding him medals. He emerged from the war a wealthy man and served in the Philippine House of Representatives and the senate, switching parties when it suited him.

Elected president in 1965, he won a second term in 1969. But in 1972, he declared martial law, imprisoned his political opponents, dissolved congress, suspended habeas corpus and used the army as his private police force. He then wrote a new constitution giving himself considerably more power. His wife, Imelda, and other family members were given lucrative government posts. While the Filipino people lived in abject poverty, the Marcos flaunted their extravagant lifestyle, Imelda becoming world-renowned for her huge collection of shoes. (While the acquisition of shoes may no doubt be a laudable enterprise, especially from a shoe manufacturer’s point of view, it is perhaps questionable whether it merits keeping an entire population in misery.)

In 1981, Marcos ended martial law, but continued to rule by decree. Opposition leader Benigno Aquino, who had gone into exile after being imprisoned for eight years by Marcos, returned in 1983, but was shot dead on the orders of Imelda if front of a plane full of journalists after he had landed at Manila. This sparked riots. An official enquiry blamed a high ranking general Fabian Ver. A family friend of Marcoses, Ver was acquitted when the case went to court.

Information about Ferdinand Marcos

Written by Vassil Dimitroff

Comments Off

The American Revolution was a civil war between Loyalists to the British crown (aka Tories, about one fifth of the population), supported by British expeditionary forces, and Patriots (or Whigs) in the 13 colonies that constituted British North America.

About 20-25% of the populace in the colonies - c. 600,000 - were blacks. About one third of the white denizens were non-British. Local patriotism ran high. All adult, white, property-owning, men (about two thirds of the male numbers) were eligible to vote in elections to the lower house of the legislative assembly of the colony they resided in. Each colony also had its governor.

Some colonies (e.g., Rhode Island and Connecticut) were, in effect, incorporated under royal charter as semi-commercial ventures. Others belonged to the descendants of their founders (proprietary colonies such as Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware). Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire were royal provinces, under direct British rule.

Some of the colonists - for instance, the New Englanders - were among the wealthiest and best educated people in the world, better off than the British themselves. But, per capita, they paid only 3% of the taxes levied on a typical Briton. The colonies supplied the West Indies with most of their foodstuffs and consumed British finished products - but they were not economically crucial to the British Empire.

In the years leading to the War of Independence (1765-1776), the British actually repealed all the taxes on products imported into the colonies - with the single exception of tea (and even this tax was drastically reduced). The colonists’ slogan “no taxation without representation” was, therefore, more about local representation than about foreign taxation. And even this bit ringed hollow. The Encyclopedia Britannica: “The assemblies had the right to tax; to appropriate money for public works and public officials, and to regulate internal trade, religion, and social behavior”. The role of British government was confined to foreign affairs and trade.

But both parties to the conflict breached this modus vivendi. During the Seven Years (French and Indian) War (1754-1763), the colonies refused to relinquish control over their militias to the British command and smuggled French goods into British North America (France being Britain’s enemy). The British, on the other hand, began interfering in the colonies’ internal affairs, notably (but not only) by imposing taxes and customs duties in order to ameliorate Britain’s growing national debt and by rendering tax officials financially independent of the local colonial assemblies.

Add to this a severe recession in the colonies brought on by unbridled spending financed with unsustainable personal indebtedness and, not surprisingly, acts of resistance to British taxation - such as the Boston Tea Party - were organized mainly by smugglers, artisans, and shopkeepers. Secret groupings, such as the Sons of Liberty resorted to violence and intimidation to achieve their (mostly economic but disguised as “patriotic”) goals. Even women got involved in a “buy American” campaign of boycotting British goods.

Many British merchants, bankers, politicians, intellectuals, and journalists supported the colonies against the crown - each group for its own reasons. The merchants and bankers, for instance, were terrified of a mooted unilateral debt moratorium to be declared by the colonies if and when militarily attacked. Others found it distasteful to kill and maim white British subjects (as the insurgents were). Yet others resisted imperialism, the monarchy, taxes, or all three. Even within the British Army there was strong dissent and the campaign against the rebellious colonies was carried out half-heartedly and lackadaisically. On the other hand, British die-hards, such as Samuel Johnson, demanded blood (”I am willing to love all Mankind, except an American”).

The denizens of the colonies tried, till the last moment, to avert a constitutional (and, consequently, military) crisis. They suggested a model of two semi-autonomous nations (the United Kingdom and the colonies), united by the figurehead of the King. But it was too little and way too late. Violent clashes between the citizenry and British units started as early as October 1765 with the First Nonimportation Movement, directed against the Stamp Act. They continued with the Boston Massacre (five dead) in 1770; the attack on the British customs ship, the Gasp©e, in Rhode Island, in 1772; and the Boston Tea Party in 1773.

In April 1775, General Gage, governor and military commander of Massachusetts, suffered a humiliating defeat in a skirmish in Concord and Lexington. The Patriots were alerted to his movements by Paul Revere who rode all night to inform them that the “regulars (not the British, as the legend has it) are coming.” He was one of many such scouts.

The Loyalists fielded 50-55,000 armed men and the Patriots countered by organizing “militias” - irregular units of ill-trained and undisciplined volunteers. The Continental Army was established only in June 1775, under the command of George Washington, a veteran of the French and Indian War. At their peak, the rebels mastered less than 100,000 men in arms - only 25-30,000 of which were on active duty at any given time.

The Continental Army was, in the words of General Philip Schuyler of New York “weak in numbers, dispirited, naked, destitute of provisions, without camp equipage, with little ammunition, and not a single piece of cannon.” Late pay caused frequent mutinies and desertions. In 1783, Washington had to personally intervene to prevent a military coup. Only repeated promises of cash bonuses and land grants kept this mob of youngsters, foreigners, and indentured servants intermittently cohesive.

Still, they outnumbered the British and the “Hessians” - the 30,000 German mercenaries who participated in the 8 years of fighting. In all of North America, the British had 60,000 soldiers as late as 1779. They had to face a growing presence of hostile French, Spanish, and Dutch armies, supplies, and navies. The Native-Americans (Indians) supported mostly the British, especially west of the Appalachians. This provoked numerous massacres by the Patriots.

The War spread to other parts of the world: the Gulf Coast, the Caribbean, India, the Netherlands, the Mediterranean. The US Navy even invaded the British port of Whitehaven in 1778.

The conflict affected the civilian population as well with both sides committing war crimes and atrocities aplenty. With many men gone, women took over traditionally male roles and vocations, such as farming. Hyperinflation - brought on by $500 million in newly minted and printed money - led to mob scenes as storekeepers were attacked and warehouses looted.

The blacks largely sided with the British - but many joined the Patriots and, thus, won their freedom after the war. Virginia planters alone manumitted 10,000 slaves. By 1800, slavery was abolished in all the states north of Delaware.

All told, less than 7000 Patriots died in battle (and 8500 wounded). About 1200 Germans perished, too. No one knows how many British troops, Indians, and other combatants paid with their lives in this protracted conflict. About 100,000 Loyalists emigrated to Canada and thousands others (mainly of African ancestry) went to Sierra Leone and the Bahamas. They were all fully compensated for the property they left behind in what came to be known as the United States of America (USA).

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com

Comments Off

The guillotine was first put to lethal use on April 25, 1792, at 3:30 PM, in Paris at the Place de Greve on the Right Bank of the Seine. It separated highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier’s head from the rest of his body.

The device was perfected - though not invented- by Doctor Joseph Ignace Guillotin (1738 - 1814). The ‘e’ at the end of the noun is a later, British, addition. Ironically, he belonged to a movement seeking to abolish capital punishment altogether.

Guillotine-like implements were used on delinquents from the nobility in Germany, Italy, Scotland and Persia long before the good doctor’s era. Guillotin and German engineer and harpsichord maker, Tobias Schmidt, improved and industrialized it. It was Schmidt who transformed the blade, changing it from round to the familiar form and placing it at an oblique, 45 degree, angle. The process of severing the head - the blade falling, cutting through the tissues and severing the head - took less than half a second. More than 40,000 people were guillotined during the French Revolution and in its immediate aftermath (1789-1795).

Nor was the guillotine abandoned after the French Revolution. As late as 1870, one Leon Berger, an assistant executioner and carpenter, added a spring system, which stopped the mouton at the bottom of the groves, a lock/blocking device at the lunette and a new release mechanism for the blade.

The murderer Hamida Djandoubi was beheaded on September 10, 1977, in Marseilles, France. The guillotine was never used since.

a.. Total weight of a Guillotine is about 580 kg
b.. The guillotine blade with weight is over 40 kg
c.. The heights of the guillotine posts average about 4 meters
d.. The guillotine blade drop is about 2.3 meters
e.. The falling blades rate of speed is about 7 meters/second
f.. The actual beheading was completed in 2/100 of a second
g.. The power when the guillotine blade stops at the bottom is 400 kg/square inch

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com

Comments Off

Few chapters in the medical history of Athens County, Ohio, are more notorious or fascinating than that concerning Walter Freeman, M.D., and the more than 200 frontal lobotomies he performed at the Athens State Hospital in seven visits between 1953 and 1957.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, treatment for most inpatients in large state hospitals, like that in Athens, was limited to providing a safe and humane environment. Effective drugs for mental illnesses did not become available until the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In 1936 Egas Moniz, M.D., a Portugese physician who eventually won a Nobel Prize for his work, reported the results of his earliest frontal lobotomies in a French medical journal. Dr. Walter Freeman, a neurologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who had met Dr. Moniz a year earlier, was impressed with the report. Within the same year Dr. Freeman teamed with a neurosurgeon to perform the operation, and over the next decade the partners operated on many more cases. However, Freeman became frustrated with the operation’s limitations. In 1946 he developed an alternative procedure that could be done more quickly, outside an operating room, and without anesthetic drugs.

He used electroconvulsive therapy to produce drugless anesthesia. After the patient’s convulsive movements subsided, Dr. Freeman operated.

Lifting an upper eyelid, he inserted a long, metal pick between the eyeball and the eyelid until it reached the bony roof of the eye-socket. He pounded the pick through the bone into the braincase where it entered a frontal lobe of the brain. He repeated the insertion procedure on the opposite side. Then, using the outer ends of the picks as handles, he made sweeping movements which severed and destroyed the frontal lobes. He finished before the patient awoke from the after-effects of the induced seizure.

Dr. Freeman performed this procedure in state hospitals nationwide that were understaffed, overflowing with patients, and very receptive to any new treatment that held promise. Every state hospital of that era could give electroconvulsive treatment, and the hospital did not have to provide an operating room. A minor procedure room sufficed.

Freeman met with families of patients, explained the risks and benefits of the procedure, and answered questions. Some families consented and others didn’t. Assisted by the local medical staff, and with a succession of patients filing into and out of the procedure room, Freeman typically operated on his entire case-load in just one day. Charging $25 per patient for his services, he departed within a few days for his next destination.

Freeman visited the Athens State Hospital more times than any of the other state hospitals in Ohio. On his first visit in 1953 he was treated as a minor celebrity. The Athens Messenger of November 16 reported his arrival with the headline “Lobotomies to be performed: surgery may relieve mental illness of many patients at state hospital.” A follow-up article on November 20–entitled “Dr. Freeman, pioneer in trans-orbital technique, demonstrates method: lobotomies are performed on 31 Athens State Hospital patients”–
showed pictures of Freeman with the local staff, including Superintendent Charles Creed, Assistant Superintendent Hubert Fockler and Drs. Beatrice Postle Fockler, Wayne Dutton and Genevieve Garrett Dutton.

The surgeries were performed in the Receiving Hospital, a separate building constructed in 1950 which is now the eastern-most portion of the main building.

Wolfhard Baumgaertel, M.D., longtime general practitioner in Albany, Ohio, was present for Freeman’s third visit to Athens in October 1954. Dr. Baumgaertel watched the procedure on the day’s first patient, and then
provided after-care for this patient and all the others who followed.

Despite his familiarity with surgery, Dr. Baumgaertel recalled being surprised by the procedure, saying, “I do not remember which made me more aghast while watching this–the hammering of the picks into the brain or the simultaneous movement of the picks’ handles in the doctor’s hands.”

Describing his after-care of Freeman’s patients, Dr. Baumgaertel said, “At regular intervals the patients arrived in the recovery room, my domain during this, to me, unknown and incomprehensible event. My main equipment consisted of several suction machines and oxygen, the latter being somewhat unnecessary. Vital signs were monitored until the patient woke up. We had no major complications. Some nasal drainage of cerebral liquor was not considered a problem.

“I do not remember any immediate or late post-operative deaths in the patients I attended to. Most returned to their floors in the asylum within one to two weeks. Of course, none of them were able to recall the event, but there were also no questions. I remember having been surprised to the point of being shaken when I discovered a total absence of wonder on the part of the patients as to what happened to them.”

Geneva Riley, R.N., who was director of nursing at the Athens State Hospital 1975-1993, witnessed the same procedure at another facility. She likened the noise made by the picks to the sound of cloth tearing.

In the mid-1990s the author encountered one of Dr. Freeman’s former patients at Doctors Hospital of Nelsonville in Nelsonville, Ohio. His computed tomographic (CT) scan showed large areas of damage to the frontal lobes. The radiologist, unaware of the patient’s prior history, interpreted the abnormalities as due to strokes.

But the patient and his wife had a different story to tell. Emotionally traumatized by combat in World War II, the man was an inpatient at Athens State Hospital in the 1950s when Dr. Freeman came to town. The patient was functioning at a low level, dropping to the ground at any sudden noise and smoking cigarettes beneath a blanket. His wife agreed to the procedure which was complicated by hemorrhage. Even so, he improved and was discharged from the hospital after three months. For many years he operated heavy equipment without difficulty except for an occasional seizure.

Asked if she had regrets, the patient’s wife said, “No. I still think I made the right decision.”

To see pictures related to this article visit: http://www.cordingleyneurology.com/lobotomiespictures.html

(C) 2005 by Gary Cordingley

Gary Cordingley, MD, PhD, is a clinical neurologist, teacher and researcher who works in Athens, Ohio. For more health-related articles see his websites at: www.cordingleyneurology.com and www.neurologyarticles.com

Comments Off

Native Americans are often cast in the role of victims of White aggression and unbridled avarice-driven or gratuitous violence, especially in the territories known collectively today as the United States. But the first massacre was perpetrated by Indians in the British colony Jamestown, in Virginia in 1622. They slaughtered 347 white men, women and children on that occasion.

Europeans are also accused of importing pathogens, disease causing agents, such as smallpox and measles, malaria and yellow fever. Indigenous people had no immunological resistance to these illnesses as they were never exposed to them.

But recent findings by a team of anthropologists, economists and paleopathologists who have completed a massive study of the health of people living in the Western Hemisphere in the last 7,000 years - suggest that Native American’s health was severely run down long before the Europeans delivered the coup de grace.

The researchers analyzed more than 12,500 skeletons - half of them pre-Columbian - from 65 sites in North and South America for evidence of infections, malnutrition and other health problems.

The study - “The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere”, edited by Dr. Richard H. Steckel and Dr. Jerome C. Rose - discovered that the haleness of Native-Americans declined markedly in the 1000 years before Columbus “discovered” them.

The vast majority of the skeletons showed telltale signs of advanced degenerative joint disease, deteriorating dental health, stature, anemia, arrested tissue development, infections and trauma from injuries. These were attributed by the participants to limited diets and urban congestion. People became shorter and died earlier - on average at age 35 - as the centuries passed.

“Pre-Columbian populations were among the healthiest and the least healthy in our sample,” Dr. Steckel and Dr. Rose said. “While pre-Columbian natives may have lived in a disease environment substantially different from that in other parts of the globe, the original inhabitants also brought with them, or evolved with, enough pathogens to create chronic conditions of ill health under conditions of systematic agriculture and urban living.”

Moreover, there are signs that diseases hitherto thought to have been introduced by the white explorers were actually indigenous.1,000-year-old Peruvian mummies, for instance, were found to have been infected with tuberculosis in their lungs.

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com

Comments Off

Simon Bolivar (1783-1830) is a Latin American folk hero, revered for having been a revolutionary freedom fighter, a compassionate egalitarian and a successful politician. He is credited with the liberation from Spanish colonial yoke of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, a country named after him. Venezuela’s new strongman, Hugo Chavez, renamed his country The Bolivarian republic of Venezuela to reflect the role of his “Bolivarian revolution”.

Yet, while alive, Bolivar was a much hated dictator and - at the beginning of his career - a military failure.

His aide and friend, Gen. Daniel O’Leary, an Irish soldier described him so:

“His chest was narrow, his figure slender, his legs particularly thin. His skin was swarthy and rather coarse. His hands and feet were small .a woman might have envied them. His expression, when he was in good humor, was pleasant, but it became terrible when he was aroused. The change was unbelievable.”

Bolivar explained his motives:

“I confess this (the coronation of Napoleon in 1804) made me think of my unhappy country and the glory which he would win who should liberate it”

And, later, after a victory against the Spaniards in 1819:

“The triumphal arches, the flowers, the hymns, the acclamations, the wreaths offered and placed upon my head by the hands of lovely maidens, the fiestas, the thousand demonstrations of joy are the least of the gifts that I have received,” he wrote. “The greatest and dearest to my heart are the tears, mingled with the rapture of happiness, in which I have been bathed and the embraces with which the multitude have all but crushed me.”

Venezuela became independent in 1811 and Bolivar, being a minor - though self-aggrandizing - political figure, had little to do with it. After his first major military defeat, in defending the coastal town of Puerto Cabello against royalist insurgents out to oust the newly independent Venezuela, he advocated the creation of a professional army (in the Cartagena Manifesto). Far from being a revolutionary he, justly, opposed the reliance on guerrilleros and militiamen.

He then reconquered Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, at the head of a small army and declared himself a dictator. He made Congress award him the title of El Libertador (the Liberator). The seeds of his personality cult were sown. When he lost Caracas to the royalists in yet another botched campaign, he retreated and captured Bogot, the capital city of Colombia in December 1814.

After a series of uninterrupted military defeats, Bolivar exiled himself to Jamaica. In a sudden conversion, he published the Jamaica Letter (1815) in which he supported a model of government akin to the British parliamentary system - yet, only following a phase of “guided leadership” (identical to Hitler’s “Fuhrerprinzip”).

But the self-anointed leader did not hesitate to desert his soldiers and leave them stranded after yet another of his military exploits - an attempt to capture Caracas - unravelled in 1816. He simply defected to Haiti, letting his loyal troops fend for themselves as best they could.

There followed a string of successful - even brilliant - battles and coalitions with local warlords and politicians which culminated in the liberation of Peru. In 1824, Bolivar was declared dictator - or, to be precise, “Emperor” - of Peru and commander in chief of its army. Bolivar liked power and its trappings. In the constitution he composed in 1826, he suggested that the president of Bolivia - the name given to the entire region, except Peru - should be appointed for life and should have the right to choose his successor.

This president - presumably, Bolivar - was described unabashedly by Bolivar himself as:

“The sun which, fixed in its orbit, imparts life to the universe. .Upon him rests our entire order, notwithstanding his lack of powers .a life term president, with the power to choose his successor, is the most sublime inspiration amongst republican regimes.”

In a letter to Santander, the Liberator expounded:

“I am convinced, to the very marrow of my bones, that our America can only be ruled through a well-managed, shrewd despotism.”

The National Geographic describes how:

“William Tudor, the American consul at Lima, wrote in 1826 of the ‘deep hypocrisy’ of Bolvar, who allowed himself to be deceived by the ‘crawling, despicable flattery of those about him.’ Later, John Quincy Adams would define Bolvar’s military career as ‘despotic and sanguinary’ and state baldly that ‘he cannot disguise his hankering after a crown.’ In Bogot the U. S. minister and future president, Gen. William Henry Harrison, accused Bolvar of planning to turn Gran Colombia into a monarchy: ‘Under the mask of patriotism and attachment to liberty, he has really been preparing the means of investing himself with arbitrary power.’ “

When, in 1828, a constitutional convention in Colombia rejected amendments to the constitution that he proposed, Bolivar assumed dictatorial powers in a coup d’etat.

Now, Bolivar was the oppressor. He has murdered, or exiled his political rivals throughout his career. He confiscated church funds and imposed onerous taxes on the populace. Consequently, the “Liberator” faced numerous uprisings and narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. By the time he died he was so despised that the government of Venezuela refused to allow his body onto its soil. It took 12 years of constant petitioning by the family to let his remains be interred in the country that he helped found.

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com

Comments Off

The guillotine was first put to lethal use on April 25, 1792, at 3:30 PM, in Paris at the Place de Greve on the Right Bank of the Seine. It separated highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier’s head from the rest of his body.

The device was perfected - though not invented- by Doctor Joseph Ignace Guillotin (1738 - 1814). The ‘e’ at the end of the noun is a later, British, addition. Ironically, he belonged to a movement seeking to abolish capital punishment altogether.

Guillotine-like implements were used on delinquents from the nobility in Germany, Italy, Scotland and Persia long before the good doctor’s era. Guillotin and German engineer and harpsichord maker, Tobias Schmidt, improved and industrialized it. It was Schmidt who transformed the blade, changing it from round to the familiar form and placing it at an oblique, 45 degree, angle. The process of severing the head - the blade falling, cutting through the tissues and severing the head - took less than half a second. More than 40,000 people were guillotined during the French Revolution and in its immediate aftermath (1789-1795).

Nor was the guillotine abandoned after the French Revolution. As late as 1870, one Leon Berger, an assistant executioner and carpenter, added a spring system, which stopped the mouton at the bottom of the groves, a lock/blocking device at the lunette and a new release mechanism for the blade.

The murderer Hamida Djandoubi was beheaded on September 10, 1977, in Marseilles, France. The guillotine was never used since.

a.. Total weight of a Guillotine is about 580 kg
b.. The guillotine blade with weight is over 40 kg
c.. The heights of the guillotine posts average about 4 meters
d.. The guillotine blade drop is about 2.3 meters
e.. The falling blades rate of speed is about 7 meters/second
f.. The actual beheading was completed in 2/100 of a second
g.. The power when the guillotine blade stops at the bottom is 400 kg/square inch

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com

Comments Off

What, you may well ask, do 13 foot-tall New Zealand birds that have been extinct for 500 years and modern Wyoming trout species have in common? And what, you may also ask, since you’re in the asking mood, do snails have to do with any of it? Well, the answer is “quite a lot, really”. It’s a bit complicated, but bear with me.

In something like the year 1500 C. E. the Polynesian ancestors of the Maori peoples arrived in what is known today as New Zealand. They were a brand new species to the islands, with no previous place in the ecosystem. As a result the local prey species, most notably the enormous native birds called Moa, had no natural defenses against them. Moa were not only flightless, they were completely wingless. Their only natural predator on the island was a 30-pound eagle (also later hunted to extinction by the proto-Maori), so the weren’t that fast on their feet, since there’s not much point in running from an 80-MPH flying killing machine. Their only defense against ground-based predation was their great size, which humans have traditionally not given much of a damn about (island peoples can hunt whales in wooden canoes; over-grown chickens are hardly scary to them). The end result is that all of New Zealand’s giant flightless birds are currently on display at several fine natural history museums around the world.

But what’s that to do with snails?

Enter Potamopyrgus antipodarum, the New Zealand Mud Snail. These tiny, aquatic, freshwater mollusks are migrating out of New Zealand, not into it, but their impact on an ecosystem they had no previous place in could have similar repercussions for native species. Carried by us world-trotting humans, these critters made their North American debut in the 1980’s in the Snake River, and have been drifting west ever since. They are now present in Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park.

How do these diminutive invaders hop from river to river, lake to lake, establishing an almost unshakeable presence as they go? Humans again, I’m afraid. The New Zealand Mud Snail is prone to hitchhiking on boats and fishing gear. So a careless or messy angler on an extended fishing trip can spread the little devils far and wide.

Mud Snails are quite hardy enough to make the trip as well. They’re so small ( 6mm long, maximum, and sometimes as small as a grain of rice), and they so much resemble tiny flecks of mud, that they often go undetected. They can survive out of water for several days, and can live in many kinds of freshwater environments. They’re even resilient enough to handle low temperatures (anything above freezing) and can pass unharmed through the digestive tract of most fish. Moreover, they reproduce asexually, and are “livebreeders”, meaning they produce a number of perfectly formed little clones, so even one can spawn a colony.

New Zealand Mud Snail densities of more than million snails per square yard have been found in Yellowstone Park. With no natural predators to keep it in check there’s every possibility native snail species will be out-competed into extinction and native plant species overwhelmed. Such an unbalancing presence can decimate other species, such as trout, something that gives the Colorado Fish and Wildlife Department and dedicated Wyoming fishing enthusiasts reason for pause.

Efforts are being made to curb the New Zealand Mud Snail invasion. Let’s hope the trout have more luck than the Moa.

Looking for more information on Wyoming Rivers check out visitusa.com your outdoor adventure travel guide

Comments Off