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Generous Gesture

Helmut Sorge | Posted : May 20, 2021

The Policy Brief ‘Pandemic, Preparedness, Morocco, and Africa’ by Uri Dadush provoked a personal reaction: Morocco may never be crowned football’s world champions, alas, but which nation, besides China, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Denmark, Vietnam, organized its anti-COVID-19 offensive more digitally and in a more modern way than the Kingdom? Morocco’s bureaucracy is at times suffocating and unpleasant, its public hospital system stressed and underfunded. But today I can vouch for another system, anchored in the twenty-first century.

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Turning the Smallest Village into a Classroom

Helmut Sorge | Posted : May 12, 2021

Leonardo Da Vinci’s mechanical knight was a humanoid automaton, designed and possibly constructed by da Vinci around 1495. When a version of the mechanical knight was brought into existence several hundred years later, it could stand, sit, raise its visor, and independently maneuver its arms, operated by a series of pulleys and cables. Today, of course, robots have escaped da Vinci’s fantasies. Today they land on Mars, help nurses treat COVID-19 patients, and slave in car manufacturing and warehouses. Robots were developed to be used whenever a job is considered by humans to be dull, dirty, or dangerous. They have even been made into fearless soldiers, a potentially billion dollar business. They are part of the economy and symbols of technological progress.

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It is the beard in which all power lies - Molière (1662)

Helmut Sorge | Posted : April 12, 2021

The COVID-19 Virus and the Liberation of Women

It seems not much has changed in almost 400 years since Molière wrote these words in his comedy The school for wives. Male dominance, God-like characters, known as men, united in inexcusable discrimination, sexism, gender inequality, infallible men forever trying to rule the world. “A wife who writes, knows more than can be good for her”, Molière’s main character sighs in the play, insisting that female brightness as a rule “is a bad omen/And I know men, who’ve undergone much pain because they married girls with too much brain…”. Who would dare argue that Molière’s scenario of machismo is the past? A woman manages the European Union and female astronauts have ventured to the space station. Yet women are not equal in the minds of millions of insolent, incorrigible machos.

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A New Evil is Bringing Down the World

Helmut Sorge | Posted : March 24, 2021

It was an illusion. A dream or wishful thinking—and some fake news. Scientists would develop a vaccine at break-neck speed. It would be available for all, wealthy nations sharing with the poor. But unfortunately the COVID-19 deaths continue to mount. The world is facing a maddening bottleneck, predicted in October 2020 by the Policy Center for the New South on its opinion page, quoting scientists calculations that twelve to fifteen billion vaccine shots were needed, but glass manufacturers would be unable to deliver the needed vials in time, and the distribution process would be extremely difficult and slow for the first generation of vaccines.

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Resilience Against All Odds

Helmut Sorge | Posted : March 08, 2021

Affluent citizens of Manhattan have been escaping to their beach homes at the famous Hamptons or the picturesque coast of nearby Massachusetts. Parisians are deserting their spacious apartments overlooking parks and boulevards, descending on quaint villages in Normandy or beyond. London has noted stagnation in the number of new renters and buyers, and Londoners with property in peaceful countryside are moving out of the city, ready to work from home. Futurologists, sociologists and city planners are noting a new trend, brought about by COVID-19: centers of major cities worldwide, which just a year ago were bustling with consumers and unending traffic, are thinning out, with companies deserting office buildings, possibly never to return.

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They Did Not Want Compromise and Consensus. They Wanted War

Helmut Sorge | Posted : December 22, 2020

“When I got home late that night, the house was dark and Michelle was already asleep. After taking a shower and going through a stack of mail, I slipped under the covers and began drifting off. In that luminal space between wakefulness and sleep, I imagined myself stepping toward a portal of some sort, a bright and cold and airless place, uninhabited and severed from the world. And behind me, out of the darkness, I heard a voice, sharp and clear, as if someone were right next to me, uttering the same word again and again. No. No. No. I jolted out of bed, my heart racing, and went downstairs to pour myself a drink. I sat alone in the dark, sipping vodka, my nerves jangled, my brain in sudden overdrive. My deepest fear, it turned out, was no longer of irrelevance, or being stuck in the Senate, or even losing a presidential race. The fear came from the realization that I could win” , noted Barack Obama in his biography “ A Promised Land.”

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The End of the Human Race?

Helmut Sorge | Posted : December 09, 2020

Poker is a game for real men, cowboys, for example, ocean divers, stunt men, gambling away their meager pay. Poker is America, as oversized as its trucks, egos and steaks. Poker made its way from quaint southern New Orleans to the rough west, where gold diggers gambled away fortunes, and settlers risked their wagons and horses for a game of cards. Decades ago I met Johnny Moss, a descendent of this wild bunch in Las Vegas. He is the greatest poker player of our time, as his biographer Don Jenkins wrote in his Champion of Champions (1981). Moss was as pale as a hospital bed sheet because most of his time he worked under neon lights. He had a room upstairs in Binion’s Horseshoe Saloon, which Moss only ever left when he was challenged to a golf game—$50,000 or $100,000 for one hole.

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