Lea Salonga—Teaching the World to Sing

“My parents stressed the importance of education. It was something that no one could take away from me, and would definitely shape the way I look at things. I also learned from them that intelligence wasn’t everything: preparation and perseverance were also important qualities to have, in order to make it in this world.”

Lea Salonga is a multi-awarded Filipino singer and actress. She is known for her theatre acting and her singing voice for different animated films. She garnered different local and international awards and released her albums either as gold or platinum in no time.

She was born on February 22, 1971 as Maria Lea Carmen Imutan Salonga by her father Feliciano Genuino Salonga and Ligaya Alcantara Imutan, her mother. She is the eldest child and lives in Angeles City in her first six years then moved to Manila. Gerard Salonga, a composer is her brother and Jovito Salonga the Senate President is her grandfather.

She can be identified with her small deep dimple near the right corner of her mouth that appears every time she smiles. She studied at the Operation Brotherhood Montessori School in Greenhills, Metro Manila. She attended her college in Ateneo de Manila University and in Fordham University when she was in New York. In her young age, she already received a FAMAS Award for best Child Actress and won three awards as Best Child performer in Aliw.

Lea was best known for her remarkable performance as Kim in the musical Miss Saigon in 1989 when she was only 17 years old. She was asked to sing several songs to test her voice quality during auditions and the judges was not wrong in choosing her for the role. She won several awards for that performance alone such as Tony Awards, Laurence Olivier Awards, Drama Desk Awards and Theatre World Awards. Since then, several musical theatre productions and concerts were offered to her.

She performed her homecoming concert on 1990 in Manila entitled “A Miss Called Lea”. Salonga played Eponine, a street waif of Les Miserables in 1993. She later flew to Los Angeles and sung the song “A Whole New World” of Disney’s Aladdin. Her voice was used as Princess Jasmine together with Brad Kane. In the same year, her self-titled international debut was released under Atlantic Records. The album went to platinum in Philippines selling almost 3 million copies worldwide.

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Self Reflection: Hellen Keller Story

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” – Helen Keller

Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama on June 27, 1880. At the age of 19 months, she lost her sight and hearing as a result of meningitis.

Her pilgrimage from Tuscumbia to worldwide recognition is an inspiring story which took her from silence and darkness to a life of vision and advocacy. Against overwhelming odds, she waged a seemingly impossible battle to re-enter the world she had lost.

But Helen’s life was to change dramatically. In February 1882, when Helen was nineteen months old, she fell ill. To this day the nature of her ailment remains a mystery. The doctors of the time called it “brain fever”, whilst modern day doctors think it may have been scarlet fever or meningitis.

Whatever the illness, Helen was, for many days, expected to die. When, eventually, the fever subsided, Helen’s family rejoiced believing their daughter to be well again.

However, Helen’s mother soon noticed how her daughter was failing to respond when the dinner bell was rang or when she passed her hand in front of her daughter’s eyes.

It thus became apparent that Helen’s illness had left her both blind and deaf.

With the help of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, she became the first blind-deaf person to effectively communicate with the sighted and hearing world. In so doing, she became an international celebrity from the age of eight, even before the era of mass communications.

Escaping from the “double dungeon of darkness and silence,” Helen Keller grew into a world famous, highly intelligent, articulate and sensitive woman who wrote, spoke and labored incessantly for the betterment of others. After graduating college in 1904, she announced that her life would be dedicated to the amelioration of blindness.

Throughout her life, she regarded herself as a “world citizen,” visiting 35 countries on five continents between 1939 and 1957. Helen Keller was one of the most powerful symbols of triumph over adversity our era has produced, leading Winston Churchill to call her, “the greatest woman of our age.”

Helen Keller published 14 books. She met every President of the United States from Calvin Coolidge to John F. Kennedy. In 1968, Senator Lister Hill eulogized her as “one of the few persons not born to die.” She will always be known as “the first lady of courage.”

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Sigmund Freud: His Determinism in Life

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was a physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist and influential thinker of the early twentieth century. Working initially in close collaboration with Joseph Breuer, Freud elaborated the theory that the mind is a complex energy-system, the structural investigation of which is the proper province of psychology.

He articulated and refined the concepts of the unconscious, infantile sexuality and repression, and he proposed a tripartite account of the mind’s structure—all as part of a radically new conceptual and therapeutic frame of reference for the understanding of human psychological development and the treatment of abnormal mental conditions. Notwithstanding the multiple manifestations of psychoanalysis as it exists today, it can in almost all fundamental respects be traced directly back to Freud’s original work.

Freud’s innovative treatment of human actions, dreams, and indeed of cultural artifacts as invariably possessing implicit symbolic significance has proven to be extraordinarily fruitful, and has had massive implications for a wide variety of fields including psychology, anthropology, semiotics, and artistic creativity and appreciation. However, Freud’s most important and frequently re-iterated claim, that with psychoanalysis he had invented a successful science of the mind, remains the subject of much critical debate and controversy.

The postulate that there are such things as unconscious mental states at all is a direct function of Freud’s determinism, his reasoning here being simply that the principle of causality requires that such mental states should exist, for it is evident that there is frequently nothing in the conscious mind which can be said to cause neurotic or other behavior.

An ‘unconscious’ mental process or event, for Freud, is not one which merely happens to be out of consciousness at a given time, but is rather one which cannot, except through protracted psychoanalysis, be brought to the forefront of consciousness. The postulation of such unconscious mental states entails, of course, that the mind is not, and cannot be, either identified with consciousness, or an object of consciousness.

To employ a much-used analogy, it is rather structurally akin to an iceberg, the bulk of it lying below the surface, exerting a dynamic and determining influence upon the part which is amenable to direct inspection—the conscious mind.

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Paracelsus—Greatest Alchemist of All Time

Alchemy – an ancient science that combines astrology on one level and early chemistry on the other. The alchemist’s goal – to change or “transmutate” one element into another. This change wasn’t necessarily chemical. Alchemists also sought ways to prolong life, not to mention discover the elusive “fountain of youth”. Alchemy reached its heyday during the Medieval and Renaissance ages when alchemists’ major aim was to turn base metals like mercury, copper, silver and lead into gold.

One of the greatest alchemists the Renaissance age produced was named Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim. He was born in Switzerland in 1493 to a German doctor and his wife. After graduating from college at age 17, Philippus decided to change his name to “Paracelsus” after the Roman doctor, Celcus.

As a young student Paracelsus was considered brilliant and excelled in all his studies, particularly in chemistry and medicine. He earned a number of doctorates and degrees from renowned universities and soon gained a reputation for his great conceit. He was known to call his professors and contemporaries to task regularly, at length and in public, deriding their hypotheses and methods, which did little endear him to either group.

Paracelsus healing achievements grew over the next decade and he earned various prestigious posts, large amounts of money and was even consulted by royalty. But because he couldn’t refrain from criticizing and challenging others’ theories, he never managed to keep a permanent position. Often he was physically threatened and forced to move to a new location.

This lifestyle did not stop him from continuing to make unheard of strides in medicine and in successfully treating conditions like gout and syphilis. As an accomplished alchemist, Paracelsus also experimented with and used elements like mercury, iron, sulphur and zinc.

He was the first physician to identify the direct cause of certain diseases and common afflictions and incorporate chemistry to cure or control them. Paracelsus also wrote many articles and treatise, his most renowned work the “Der Grossen Wundartzney”, or “The Great Surgery Book”.

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Murray Rothbard: The World’s Most Famous Economist

Murray Newton Rothbard was born March 2, 1926 in New York City. His parents were irreligious Jews, and young Rothbard was surrounded by leftist types, even Communists. This is probably where his love for playing the role of antagonist comes from.

Rothbard earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and economics from Columbia University in 1945, and his Masters a year later. He received his PhD in economics in 1956, but while Rothbard is certainly among the greatest economists of the twentieth century, he was much more than just that: he was also a political theorist, historian, polemicist, and even a playwright.

Rothbard’s greatest contribution to economics was his magnum opus, Man, Economy, and State. As a complete treatise on economics, many view it as even greater than Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action, as it is more easily digested by laypeople. Man, Economy, and State explains it all, from the fundamentals of human action to the structure of production in a market economy. Interestingly, the final seven chapters of MES were omitted from the original work for political reasons, as they called for a complete and total “free market” – or, as it would later be referred to, “anarcho-capitalism.”

Anarcho-capitalism fused classically liberal political ideology with pure free-market, Austrian economics. While Austrian economics are said to be “value-free,” Rothbard took classical liberalism further than it had ever been taken with the ultimate value being the non-initiation of force, and added these values to his Austrian understanding. Rothbard thus found intervention in the market not only inefficient, but intolerably immoral. With this understanding, there is no room whatsoever for an involuntary government, even if it’s democratic.

Anarcho-capitalism, by contrast, comes out of the classically liberal tradition, which was the “middle road” of sorts between socialism on the left and conservatism (defense of monarchy and the aristocracy) on the right. Thus, while anarcho-capitalists and other anarchists might share the same conclusions, they start with such different basic premises that they still have a hard time getting along – sort of like constitutionalists and socialists at an anti-war rally.

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Corazon C. Aquino: The Legacy of a Housewife Turning Into a Politician

Corazon Cojoangco Aquino (born 1933) was the first woman to run for the office of the president of the Republic of the Philippines. The results of the 1986 election were so fraudulent that both Aquino and her opponent, the incumbent, Ferdinand Marcos declared victory. As a result of the election, the Filipino people rose in protest and Marcos was forced to flee the country and Aquino assumed the office of president.

Corazon Cojoangco Aquino was born on January 25, 1933, the sixth of eight children born to Jose Cojoangco of Tarlac, a prosperous province 65 miles northwest of Manila, the Philippines capital. The Cojoangcos were members of a wealthy landowning family prominent in politics.

Moving up in politics, Aquino’s husband became the youngest territorial governor and later the youngest senator in the Philippines. Throughout all her husband’s political successes, Aquino stayed in the background, preferring to concentrate her energies on raising their four daughters and a son.

As her husband rose in prominence, he became an outspoken critic of the regime of President Ferdinand Marcos. When Marcos declared martial law on September 21, 1972, Aquino’s husband was one of the first persons arrested and put in jail. During the long years of her husband’s incarceration from 1972 to 1980, Aquino’s role as a quiet wife slowly changed.

Becoming her husband’s main link to the outside world, she was instrumental in having his statements passed along to the press and to activists outside the prison walls. From inside his cell, Aquino’s husband even ran for a seat in Parliament, with his wife conducting a large portion of the campaign.

Aquino knew her popularity would wane and that her leadership would be harshly criticized. At least seven coups were directed at her government during her tenure as president, many times by former allies who had helped her come to power. Besides dealing with factious parties both within her cabinet and in the nation, Aquino had to contend with natural disasters and frequent power failures.

In 1991, a constitutional amendment was passed by referendum which enabled Aquino to remain president until June 30, 1992. Her successor was Fidel Ramos, her former secretary of defense and Marcos’ former deputy chief of staff of the armed forces. Ramos, who assisted Aquino in fending off the coup attempts, has continued to support Aquino’s democratic ideals. Aquino has still retained her popularity with the Filipino people and works for reform by participating in cooperatives and non-governmental organizations in the Philippines.

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