Opinion (Yevgeny M. Primakov, Russian politician and diplomat, academician, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, served as the Russian Foreign Minister, Prime Minister of Russia): “Europe shows that no integration can exist without supranational structures. Now in the EU as a whole, things are bad, but I do not think it will lead to the end of the EU. There is a greater need for supranational structures, in which countries pass some sovereignty.

“These national structures manage the banking environment, the budget process of all the members of this union. If this does not exist, the integration will not deepen. It is important that all the EU countries understand that we need supranational structures. But the EU has expanded too fast – you cannot accept many countries in the integration process at once; they sink the union.”

My Comment: The problem is not in the speed of entering the supranational union but in the readiness of its potential members for integration, and this is possible only after implementing the course of integral education for the masses in these countries. Any union will break without changing relationships between nations.
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In the News (from EUbusiness): ”… European Union president Herman Van Rompuy on Friday called on Europe’s leaders for help in fighting youth unemployment, now at record levels across the 27-nation bloc. …

“‘The number of unemployed people in our Union, especially of young people, is at record levels,’ he said. ‘It has become one of the most pressing issues in most, if not all, of our member states. That is why we must do our utmost to deal with it together.’ …

“The June summit ‘will be an opportunity to mobilise efforts at all levels around one shared objective: to get motivated young people back to work or education,’ he said, urging leaders ‘to actively contribute’ to fight youth joblessness.

“Fears are rising of ‘a lost generation’ with almost two out of three under 25-year-olds out of work in Greece and in Spain.”

My Comment: It is good that there are calls because the problem is growing, but as usual, funds will be allocated, plans will be created, hundreds of jobs for office workers will be created, and then one day they will remember them and see the result: wasted money… The only way out of unemployment is to occupy young people with integral education: It is inexpensive, reliable, promising.
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The German magazine Der Spiegel published an article on Kabbalah, based on the interview that I gave to the magazine’s correspondent.

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In the News (from The Guardian): “News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitisation.

“News inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it’s worse than that. News severely affects memory. …

“News works like a drug. As stories develop, we want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary storylines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore. Scientists used to think that the dense connections formed among the 100 billion neurons inside our skulls were largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. Today we know that this is not the case. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus. Most news consumers – even if they used to be avid book readers – have lost the ability to absorb lengthy articles or books. After four, five pages they get tired, their concentration vanishes, they become restless. It’s not because they got older or their schedules became more onerous. It’s because the physical structure of their brains has changed.

“Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don’t have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too.”

My Comment: The media cannot be and has never been objective because, in principal, there is no objectivity in nature. The media perform the orders of those who pay them. The media is needed to ensure that people have contact with the entire world and reveal its emptiness, finiteness, and limitation sooner—it is necessary for the subsequent correction.
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In the News (from the United Nations): “On 20 March, the first ever International Day of Happiness will be celebrated worldwide. The day was proclaimed by the UN General Assembly to promote happiness as a universal goal and aspiration in the lives of people around the globe.

“The initiative to declare a day of happiness came from the Kingdom of Bhutan – a country whose Gross National Happiness Index takes the view that sustainable development should take a holistic approach towards progress and give equal importance to non-economic aspects of well-being.

“The International Day of Happiness recognizes the efforts of other nations and groups who work to measure prosperity that go beyond material wealth. By designating a special day for happiness, the UN aims to focus world attention on the idea that economic growth must be inclusive, equitable, and balanced, such that it promotes sustainable development and alleviates poverty. …

“In addition, a special event arranged at UN Headquarters on 19 March at 6 pm, will also mark this occasion. There will be a launch of the audio book by Sri Chinmoy, Founder of the Peace Meditation at the United Nations. …

“Ban Ki-moon affirms that, ‘On this first International Day of Happiness, let us reinforce our commitment to inclusive and sustainable human development and renew our pledge to help others. When we contribute to the common good, we ourselves are enriched. Compassion promotes happiness and will help build the future we want.’”

My Comment: Like everything that humanity creates, the UN is a representation of our egoism…
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In the News (from Deutsche Welle): “With unemployment at unprecedented levels in the EU, the risk of social unrest is rising, says the UN’s International Labour Organization. The ILO is warning politicians to abandon austerity and embrace job creation.

“’When unemployment is as high as it is right now – as poverty and welfare protection become worse – then the danger of social unrest grows along with it,’ says Miguel Angel Malo.

“Malo is a professor of economics in Salamanca, Spain – a country where youth unemployment is at 56 percent. …

“If one looks at who the losers are, it becomes clearer exactly why the ILO is warning of unrest. The losers are made of three groups which have scarcely any access to the labor market.

The first group is young people: one in four youths – a group that includes those who have finished higher education but have not found work – is currently unemployed. In Spain and Greece it’s more than half. …

“The second group is the long-term unemployed, whose numbers have nearly doubled, from 5.8 million in 2008 to 11 million today.

“And the third group is those with few qualifications: ‘unskilled labor’ has been hit particularly hard by negative economic developments, much more so than skilled workers or university graduates.”

My Comment: There will be no work. One solution is to implement a shorter workday. I have written about this and it is encouraging to see that the 90-year-old Israeli President Shimon Peres says about it as well:

Translation: “It is necessary to reduce working hours and to increase the time of study. Who says that you need to work 8 hours a day? It is possible to work 4 hours a day and study 4 hours a day, and the studies will be considered work. It is necessary to employ young people. We must provide Grade 11 and 12 students with 2 hours of work a day. They will be trained in the community not less than at the university. Their workplaces will benefit from their youthful energy, and the young will have some income. I also propose that we start teaching English from 3 years of age; it is the right time for this.”
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In the News (from LiveScience): “If the sheet of ice covering Greenland were to completely melt, such destruction of 720,000 cubic miles (3 million cubic kilometers) of ice would raise global sea levels by 24 feet (7.3 meters). In summer 2012, Greenland saw an extraordinarily large amount of melting across nearly its entire ice sheet. In fact, it was the largest ice melt seen in Greenland since scientists began tracking melt rates there in 1979.”

My Comment: The problem is that we have no sense of responsibility and necessity. Our nearsightedness affects us. We love children but cannot look sensibly at the future that we are preparing for them. This is what is said in The Book of Zohar about our generation: “Today, we will eat and drink, and tomorrow – even death!” The force of unity is above the nature of our world, and if we begin to apply it to the general balance of the system, we will immediately find restoration of everything “broken, ruined, and crooked.”
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In the News (from Stanford): “Engineering researchers at Stanford University have devised a mathematical model that helps demonstrate what’s behind the growing rift in American society. They have used the knowledge to create Internet-based social systems that counteract polarization. …

“The prevailing sociological theory, known as homophily, is that like seeks like. Those who have similar opinions tend to aggregate together and reinforce opinions that grow more divergent from the center over time. This is the echo chamber model that would seem to gain validation in the era of talk radio, cable news and the Internet.

“According to this theory, we are polarized precisely because we have greater ability to choose our social networks and news sources. We narrowly tailor our information sources by selecting them based on how closely they mirror our own tastes.

“Mathematical models that try to use homophily to explain polarization have come up short, however. Most are based on something known as De Groot’s model that assumes that people form opinions in a way that minimizes overall disagreement within their network of friends and relations. As a result, an individual’s opinion gradually converges to an average of those in his or her network, or so the theory goes. The flaw in these models is that they predict that opinions in society as a whole can only become more uniform over time, resulting in depolarization rather than polarization.

“’We show that repeated averaging of opinions always results in less divergent opinions, even in networks where the people are like-minded,’ said Pranav Dandekar, a doctoral candidate in MS&E and a co-author on the paper. ‘You can’t create outliers by averaging.’…

“The Stanford team instead took a different approach based on a phenomenon well known in the social sciences called biased assimilation. In biased assimilation people more easily accept evidence that supports their opinion and, likewise, are prone to discredit evidence that does not fit. More specifically, people look at inconclusive evidence in a way that is most favorable to their existing point of view.

“’It seems counter-intuitive that two individuals would arrive at a more divergent opinion when presented with identical information that is inconclusive, but that’s what happens,’ said David Lee, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering and a co-author of the paper. ‘You might think that seeing identical evidence would produce greater moderation and agreement, but it doesn’t.’

“’It seems we look at the world with rose-colored blinders. We see what we want and ignore what doesn’t fit,’ Dandekar said.”

My Comment: Not a single person is like another and that is why everyone’s opinion is different in one thing. Egoism is not ready to accept a different point of view. Thus, as a result of communication, opinions distance from each other. The more we develop, the greater egoism becomes. The more we develop, the more diverse egoism is. Envy, jealousy, rivalry, authoritativeness, and other egoistic qualities increase.

And when in our time, total cultural, economic, and other dependencies of everyone on everyone else are manifested, then negative opinions appear greater up to the point of hatred. The solution to this problem is only in integral education, up to mutual love because Nature will increasingly manifest itself as a single entity.
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In the News (from Stratfor): “The global financial crisis of 2008 has slowly yielded to a global unemployment crisis. This unemployment crisis will, fairly quickly, give way to a political crisis. The crisis involves all three of the major pillars of the global system – Europe, China and the United States. The level of intensity differs, the political response differs and the relationship to the financial crisis differs. But there is a common element, which is that unemployment is increasingly replacing finance as the central problem of the financial system. …

“Consider the geography of unemployment. Only four countries in Europe are at or below 6 percent unemployment: the geographically contiguous countries of Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The immediate periphery has much higher unemployment: Denmark at 7.4 percent, the United Kingdom at 7.7 percent, France at 10.6 percent and Poland at 10.6 percent. In the far periphery, Italy is at 11.7 percent, Lithuania is at 13.3 percent, Ireland is at 14.7 percent, Portugal is at 17.6 percent, Spain is at 26.2 percent and Greece is at 27 percent. …

“A rule I use is that for each person unemployed, three others are affected, whether spouses, children or whomever. That means that when you hit 25 percent unemployment virtually everyone is affected. At 11 percent unemployment about 44 percent are affected.

“It is important to understand the consequences of this kind of unemployment. There is the long-term unemployment of the underclass. This wave of unemployment has hit middle and upper-middle class workers. … Poverty is hard enough to manage, but when it is also linked to loss of status, the pain is compounded and a politically potent power arises. …

“Fascism had its roots in Europe in massive economic failures in which the financial elites failed to recognize the political consequences of unemployment. They laughed at parties led by men who had been vagabonds selling postcards on the street and promising economic miracles if only those responsible for the misery of the country were purged. Men and women, plunged from the comfortable life of the petite bourgeoisie, did not laugh, but responded eagerly to that hope. The result was governments who enclosed their economies from the world and managed their performance through directive and manipulation.

“This is what happened after World War I. It did not happen after World War II because Europe was occupied. But when we look at the unemployment rates today, the differentials between regions, the fact that there is no promise of improvement and that the middle class is being hurled into the ranks of the dispossessed, we can see the patterns forming.”

My Comment: As the technical and technological progress continues, unemployment will rise. In addition, human desires grow not only in size, but also in quality: a person does not want to work and buy, to be a slave of those who grow wealthy because of this. Desires change. The era of the consumer society is ending for several reasons.

A new era is ahead—a transition of the mass of unemployed to work on themselves, to build a new integral society. This phase is preceded by the phase of integral education, training, upbringing, and changing of the human being, and then his conscious transformation of the world. Working from offices and in factories will be transformed to going to the schools of integral education, the courses for retraining people who will then create new public relations—rational consumption in a unified integral community.
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In the News (from New Scientist): “Hurricanes usually form in the western tropical Atlantic and head north-west to the US. Occasionally they make it to Europe by piggybacking on the jet stream.

“To simulate future hurricanes, Reindert Haarsma of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute in De Bilt and colleagues ran a detailed climate model for 2094 to 2098, assuming modest future greenhouse gas emissions.

“They found that future hurricanes formed further east in the tropical Atlantic, as that area had warmed sufficiently to provide enough heat and moisture to power them. As a result, many didn’t hit the US and instead struck Western Europe. The storms weakened once they left the tropics, but powered up again when they entered cold and windy areas, becoming hybrid storms like Sandy, halfway between winter storms and hurricanes.”

My Comment: Catastrophic climate change should appear not at the end of the century, but in the coming years. Disturbing the balance with nature will lead to huge losses. But the problem is not in the environment, but in the human being because of all the levels of nature, still, vegetative, animal, and human—only the human being by his social behavior, rather than by the impact of technology, is capable of influencing the balance of system, for better or for worse.
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