Abraxas and humanity general sense of things...

In ancient mythology (Assyrian) Abraxas was a Hermetic Gnostic deity and his name was derived from Abracadabra. Carl Gustav Jung defines Abraxas as "..more indefinite still than god and devil... it is force, duration, change". Hermann Hesse in his book Demian, defines Abraxas as "The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas”. Abraxas was also the symbol and name of the inner Order of Templars.


ABRACADABRA,


By Abracadabra we signify
An infinite number of things.
'Tis the answer to What? and How? and Why?
And Whence? and Whither? -- a word whereby
The Truth (with the comfort it brings)
Is open to all who grope in night,
Crying for Wisdom's holy light.


Whether the word is a verb or a noun
Is knowledge beyond my reach.
I only know that 'tis handed down.
From sage to sage,
From age to age --
An immortal part of speech!

Of an ancient man the tale is told
That he lived to be ten centuries old,
In a cave on a mountain side.
(True, he finally died.)
The fame of his wisdom filled the land,
For his head was bald, and you'll understand
His beard was long and white
And his eyes uncommonly bright.

Philosophers gathered from far and near
To sit at his feat and hear and hear,
Though he never was heard
To utter a word
But "Abracadabra, abracadab,
Abracada, abracad,
Abraca, abrac, abra, ab!"
'Twas all he had,
'Twas all they wanted to hear, and each
Made copious notes of the mystical speech,
Which they published next --
A trickle of text
In the meadow of commentary.
Mighty big books were these,
In a number, as leaves of trees;
In learning, remarkably -- very!

He's dead,
As I said,
And the books of the sages have perished,
But his wisdom is sacredly cherished.
In Abracadabra it solemnly rings,
Like an ancient bell that forever swings.
O, I love to hear
That word make clear
Humanity's General Sense of Things.

Jamrach Holobom

Excerpts from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. Credits are from Blackmask Online.

Christians, Jews and Politics

During centuries Jews and Christians have been separated by their beliefs, and although sacred texts come from the same sources, indeed, there is a separation rooted the approach and interpretation of faith and values. After the Holocaust, some researchers point fingers to Eugenio Paccelli (Pope Pio XII) who was supposed to support Hitler’s plans for the Final Solution, through non intervention in politics, in exchange for protection to the Catholic Church powers. With all these differences that might go from anti-Semitism to rational or mystical interpretations, we are living in a world were Islam is present more than ever, and in fact bringing crisis and threats to Israel. What’s next? Will Jews and Christians take a different approach and solve old differences?

Proxies for the global economy upturn

After the failures during the 1999-2000 period and the effects of global corporate scandals, the IPO market (Initial Public Offering) specially in the Pacific Rim is growing at a fast pace; if this trend continues, 2004 is expected to end with $ 75 billion in new IPOs compared to $45 billion recorded in 2003. This is a good sign for fresh money coming from investors because the IPOs fever is said to be correlated with market peaks.

The M&A (Merge & Acquisition) activity also shows a big deal of improvement during March, especially on overseas transactions, with Q1 activity mainly concentrated on Euroland and Emerging Markets (i.e Telefonica offer to acquire BellSouth Latin America, and BBVA to acquire Bancomer).

Similarly, if we look into corporate performance we find global and diversified companies such as GE that recently posted better than expected earnings (of 32 cents per share), with sales coming mainly industrial orders. Immelt (GE CEO) says that future is bright and GE expects double digit earnings next year. Clearly, we are not taking these facts as proxies for global economic improvement, but we must said that something is already happening, despite of the lack of strength of some fundamentals for large economies around the globe.

Tales of Innovation III: Hewlett Packard

Last October 2003 at Gartner ITExpo (NYSE:IT) I had the opportunity to listen to Carly Fiorina (HP CEO) talking about HP (NYSE: HPQ) challenges on corporate strategy and how the company has redefined its way to deliver value to the customers. The core concept is contained in what she called HP Adaptive Enterprise which links three key architectures of the IT Strategy: deliver real time to the enterprise by integrating processes, applications and infrastructures horizontally. Fiorina joined HP in 1999 coming from AT&T where she was responsible for the spin-off and transformation of Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU) . She is the first woman to held the CEO position in the DOW 30 Index, and was selected among other 300 candidates. Although, the previous HP CEO, Lewis Platt, was responsible during the 90's for making HP in a more global and diverse company, he failed to speed up the company during the Internet bubble and compete with other industry giants such as IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW). Fiorina came to reinvent the company leading the successful acquisition of Compaq Computer for $19 billion, and developing a new business line based on consulting services. There are many success stories showing how other companies benefit from the new HP vision; as an example, the online retailer Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has managed to reduce 20% IT costs by using HP technologies, New York Stock Exchange handles more than 2000 messages per second on non-stop infrastructures, BMW WilliamsF1 uses HP technology to control the car performance during the race, and so on.