OldPal

GAZETA

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“Denn wir sind wie Baumstämme im Schnee. Scheinbar liegen sie glatt auf und mit kleinem Anstoß sollte man sie wegschieben können. Nein, das kann man nicht, denn sie sind fest mit dem Boden verbunden. Aber sieh, sogar das ist nur scheinbar.”

— Franz Kafka

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“I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”

— Sir Winston Churchill

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“The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”

— Aristotle

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Apartheid

Apartheid was a system of racial segregation enforced through legislation by the National Party (NP) governments of South Africa. In this system, which lasted from 1948 to 1994, the rights of the majority black inhabitants of South Africa were curtailed and white supremacy and Afrikaner minority rule was maintained. South West Africans were also victims of apartheid as this country was administered by South Africa under a League of Nations mandate until it gained independence as Namibia in 1990.

Apartheid as an official policy was introduced following the general election of 1948. New legislation classified inhabitants into four racial groups (“native”, “white”, “coloured”, and “Asian”), and residential areas were segregated, sometimes by means of forced removals. Non-white political representation was completely abolished in 1970, and starting in that year black people were deprived of their citizenship. The government segregated education, medical care, beaches, and other public services, and provided black people with services inferior to those of white people.

Apartheid sparked significant internal resistance and violence as well as a trade embargo against South Africa. In addition to the unrest resulting from the internal protests, the sanctions placed on South Africa by the West made it increasingly difficult for the government to maintain the regime. In 1990 President Frederik Willem de Klerk began negotiations to end apartheid, culminating in multi-racial democratic elections in 1994, which were won by the African National Congress under Nelson Mandela.

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Sustainable Development

The best definition of Sustainable development was presented by the report Our Common Future (also known as the Brundtland Report):

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Sustainable development is thus the ability to meet the needs of the present while contributing to the future generations’ needs.

It focuses on two goals:

To improve the quality of life for all of the Earth’s citizens.

To stop using up the natural resources beyond the capacity of the environment to supply them indefinitely.

Green development is generally differentiated from sustainable development in that Green development prioritizes what its proponents consider to be environmental sustainability over economic and cultural considerations. In addition to that, sustainable development has underlying concepts: the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs. There is an additional focus on the present generations’ responsibility to improve the future generations’ life by restoring the previous ecosystem damage and resisting to further ecosystem damage.

Sustainable development requires action on the part of world states, governments and people. The detrimental situation of the environment, the enormous stress upon our natural resources and the huge gap between developed and underdeveloped countries necessitate practical strategies to reverse the trends. The World Commission on Environment and Development suggested seven critical objectives for environment and development policies that follow from the concept of sustainable development:

Reviving growth

Changing the quality of growth

Meeting essential needs such as for jobs, food, energy, water and sanitation

Ensuring a sustainable level of population

Conserving and enhancing the resource base

Reorienting technology and manage risk

Including and combining environment and economics considerations in decision-making

These recommendations are still valid; to do things differently is dangerous and condemnable. Slow actions would be detrimental.

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The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea is a novel that was the last major work of fiction to be written by Ernest Hemingway and published in his lifetime. It is considered to be one of his most famous works and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and was cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954.

The Old Man and the Sea is the story of a battle between an old, experienced Cuban fisherman and a large marlin. The novel opens with the explanation that the fisherman, who is named Santiago, has gone 84 days without catching a fish. In fact, he is so unlucky that his young apprentice, Manolin, has been forbidden by his parents to sail with the old man and been ordered to fish with more successful fishermen. Still dedicated to the old man, however, the boy visits Santiago’s shack each night. On the eighty-fifth day, Santiago sets out alone, taking his skiff far onto the Gulf Stream. He sets his lines and, by noon of the first day, a big fish that he is sure is a marlin takes his bait. After a long struggle with the fish Santiago manages to strap the marlin to the side of his skiff and heads home, thinking about the high price the fish will bring him at the market and how many people he will feed. While Santiago sails back to the shore, sharks are attracted to the trail of blood left by the marlin in the water. Despite his efforts to ward off the sharks, they have almost devoured the marlin’s entire carcass, leaving a skeleton consisting mostly of its backbone, its tail and its head. Once home, he slumps onto his bed and falls into a deep sleep. The next day, a group of fishermen gather around the boat where the fish’s skeleton is still attached. Manolin, worried during the old man’s endeavor, cries upon finding him safe asleep. The boy brings him newspapers and coffee. When the old man wakes, they promise to fish together once again. Upon his return to sleep, Santiago dreams of his youth – of lions on an African beach. The old man feels very unwell and also coughs up blood a few times towards the end of the story. He doesn’t tell the boy.

The novel has received so much praise and is considered to be one of the best novels in American literature. Santiago fights the creatures of the sea and some readers think that the story is about man’s battle against the natural world. However, the novel can be viewed as the story of man’s place in relation to nature. In the story, Santiago and the marlin show similar qualities of pride, honor, and bravery, and both are subject to the same eternal natural law – they must kill or be killed. Santiago himself says:

“man is not made for defeat . . . [a] man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

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“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.”

— René Descartes

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“In the beginning I looked around and, not finding the automobile of my dreams, decided to build it myself.”

— Ferdinand Porsche

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The Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China, one of the greatest wonders of the world, was first built between 220–206 BC. In fact, it began as independent walls for different states when it was first built, and did not become the “Great” wall until the Qin Dynasty. Emperor Qin Shihuang succeeded in his effort to have the walls joined together to serve as fortification to protect the northern borders of the Chinese Empire from invasion. Afterwards it was rebuilt and maintained over the years, between the 5th century BC and the 16th century.

One of the myths associated with the Great Wall of China is that it is the only man-made structure that can be seen from the Moon with the naked eye. The legend originated in Richard Halliburton’s 1938 book Second Book of Marvels. However, this myth is simply not true. Richard Halliburton’s claim was contradicted by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Yang Liwei. A more plausible assumption would be to say that the Great Wall can be visible from a low orbit of the Earth which is not unique in this regard as many other artificial constructions can be seen from that height.

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“I speak and speak, … but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. … It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”

— Marco Polo

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Victorian style

In the Victorian era, a woman’s hair was often thought to be one of her most valuable assets. Styles varied quite a bit throughout the nearly 7 decades of Queen Victoria's reign, with everything from simple middle parts to elaborate pieces made from human hair being in fashion. Accessories such as combs, pearls, hats and bonnets each had their time in the spotlight throughout the 1800s. Victorians weren’t as serious as people think they were, but they sure took their hair seriously.  Hair was long in the Victorian age. Extremely long. Haircuts weren’t exactly a thing yet for women.They did occasionally trim split ends or even singe them, but long hair was viewed as being ultra-feminine and desirable. When it comes to long hair, nobody could top the Seven Sutherland Sisters. They became a national sensation in the 1880s because of their hair (37 feet in total) and made a living doing musical performances with their hair down. They capitalized on it even further by producing a line of hair care products and became quite rich. When the 1920s and the bob rolled around, they began to be ridiculed as unfashionable relics of the past and lost the public's eye. 

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“Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.”

— Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

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“If you can start your day without caffeine, if you can always be cheerful and ignore aches and pains, if you can resist the claims and not to bore people with your problems, if you can eat the same food every day and be thankful for it, if you can understand a loved one, when it is not enough for you. time, if you can skip past the ears of the allegations made by a loved one, when everything goes wrong is not your fault, if you can safely take criticism, if you can relate to my poor friend as well as the rich, if you can do without lies and deceit, if you can deal with stress without medication, if you can relax without liquor, if you can sleep without pills, if you can honestly say that you have no prejudice against color, religion, sexual orientation or policy. It means that you have reached the level of your dog.”

— Sir Winston Churchill

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“You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”

— Alphonse Gabriel "Al" Capone

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“It is quite certain that in seeing the people who treat us so well despite their own misfortune, we are more obliged than ever to work hard for their happiness.”

— Marie Antoinette

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“Keep smiling, because life is a beautiful thing and there's so much to smile about.”

— Marilyn Monroe