Opinion (Sergey Karaganov, Dean of the Faculty of World Economy and International HSE National Research University, founder of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, chairman of the editorial board of Russia in Global Affairs): “In the world, there are two groups of people who support the reduction of nuclear weapons:

“Those who understand the immorality of deterrence because punishing someone with nuclear weapons means destroying millions of lives. …

“Those who want to make the world safer to be freer in using conventional weapons. …

“Now the chance of accidental nuclear war is diminished. Nuclear weapons are sent to us by the Almighty to save humankind because if not for nuclear weapons, confrontation and the Cold War would have ended in World War III. …

“This does not happen just because any large-scale change in power, which could lead to the escalation of an armed conflict, is excluded. And the priority of the current generation of politicians is formed in such a way as to prevent such an outcome. …

“If there were no nuclear deterrent, we would have lived in a more terrible world. Without nuclear weapons, millions of Europeans would be brutally destroying each other for centuries.”

My Comment: It is correct for the time being, but everything depends on the “boiling point.” According to Kabbalah, if we do not start restructuring towards the next level of our existence, to a society of equality, unity, mutual guarantee, then the 3^rd and 4^th nuclear world wars will surely break out.
[101239]

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In the News (from Rethinking Europe): “International Congress “Rethinking Europe with(out) Religion” 20.2-23.2.2013, Vienna. The International Congress ‘Rethinking Europe with(out) Religion’ reflects on the religious and political transformation processes in European contemporary societies in the context of a growing pluralism. It investigates the political role that religion can play for the unification process of Europe in times of crisis. ‘Rethinking Europe’ is more than an economic challenge. It means searching for ‘a soul for Europe’ (J. Delors). However, it is highly controversial if religion(s) can contribute anything at all to Europe and if so what this contribution may look like.”

My Comment: This is what Kabbalah says. By Kabbalistic definition “Religion is love for one’s neighbor!” Everything else, all the religions and beliefs, are invented by man to evade observing this only law of nature. If Europe accepts this religion, it will survive and prosper; otherwise, it will be lost!
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Opinion (Robert Skidelsky, Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University, fellow of the British Academy in history and economics, member of the British House of Lords): “What impact will automation – the so-called ‘rise of the robots’ – have on wages and employment over the coming decades? Nowadays, this question crops up whenever unemployment rises.

“In the early nineteenth century, David Ricardo considered the possibility that machines would replace labor; Karl Marx followed him. Around the same time, the Luddites smashed the textile machinery that they saw as taking their jobs.

“Then the fear of machines died away. New jobs – at higher wages, in easier conditions, and for more people – were soon created and readily found. But that does not mean that the initial fear was wrong. On the contrary, it must be right in the very long run: sooner or later, we will run out of jobs. …

For those who dread the threat that automation poses to low-skilled labor, a ready answer is to train people for better jobs. But technological progress is now eating up the better jobs, too. A wide range of jobs that we now think of as skilled, secure, and irreducibly human may be the next casualties of technological change.

As a recent article in the Financial Times points out, in two areas notoriously immune to productivity increases, education and health care, technology is already reducing the demand for skilled labor. Translation, data analysis, legal research – a whole range of high-skilled jobs may wither away. So, what will the new generation of workers be trained for?

Optimists airily assert that ‘many new types of job will be created.’ They ask us to think of the lead drivers of multi-car road trains (once our electric cars join up ‘convoy-style’), big data analysts, or robot mechanics. That does not sound like too many new jobs to me. …

“It is not true that automation has caused the rise of unemployment since 2008. … If escape from poverty is the goal, disguised unemployment is a bad thing. But if machines have already engineered the escape from poverty, then work-sharing is a sensible way of ‘spreading the work’ that still has to be done by human labor.

“If one machine can cut necessary human labor by half, why make half of the workforce redundant, rather than employing the same number for half the time? Why not take advantage of automation to reduce the average working week from 40 hours to 30, and then to 20, and then to ten, with each diminishing block of labor time counting as a full time job? This would be possible if the gains from automation were not mostly seized by the rich and powerful, but were distributed fairly instead.

“Rather than try to repel the advance of the machine, which is all that the Luddites could imagine, we should prepare for a future of more leisure, which automation makes possible. But, to do that, we first need a revolution in social thinking.”

My Comment: The revolution in social thinking can be done only by introducing universal education for a new type of society with respect for others, work distribution, that is, in teaching the conditions of existence in an integral community.
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Opinion (Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government): “There was a time when we economists steered clear of politics. We viewed our job as describing how market economies work, when they fail, and how well-designed policies can enhance efficiency. We analyzed trade-offs between competing objectives (say, equity versus efficiency), and prescribed policies to meet desired economic outcomes, including redistribution. …

“Frustrated by the reality that much of our advice went unheeded (so many free-market solutions still waiting to be taken up!), we turned our analytical toolkit on the behavior of politicians and bureaucrats themselves. We began to examine political behavior using the same conceptual framework that we use for consumer and producer decisions in a market economy. Politicians became income-maximizing suppliers of policy favors; citizens became rent-seeking lobbies and special interests; and political systems became marketplaces in which votes and political influence are traded for economic benefits. …

“Why are so many industries closed off to real competition? Because politicians are in the pockets of the incumbents who reap the rents. Why do governments erect barriers to international trade? Because the beneficiaries of trade protection are concentrated and politically influential, while consumers are diffuse and disorganized. Why do political elites block reforms that would spur economic growth and development? Because growth and development would undermine their hold on political power. Why are there financial crises? Because banks capture the policymaking process so that they can take excessive risks at the expense of the general public. …

“If politicians’ behavior is determined by the vested interests to which they are beholden, economists’ advocacy of policy reforms is bound to fall on deaf ears.”

My Comment: Fortunately, nothing will be left of the past egoistic economy in the age of its collapse; so, there is no point in trying to identify all the secrets of clans of the elite and how to work with them. The crisis will clean everything! What will be left of people and the world will take a new form: the necessary fulfillment of the material things and infinite fulfillment in the revelation of the meaning of life. This state can be reached through education, that is, changing a person. In an effort to soften the landing of the world to the new conditions, we have to consider integral education, proposed by Kabbalah.
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In the News (from SIPRI): “Sales of arms and military services by the largest arms-producing companies—the SIPRI Top 100—totalled $410 billion in 2011 according to new data on international arms production released today by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

“Compared to the companies in the Top 100 for 2010, this result represents a 5 per cent decrease in constant dollar terms. Over the period since 2002, arms sales by the Top 100 have nevertheless increased by 51 per cent in real terms.

“Several factors contributed to the decrease in arms sales in 2011. Austerity policies and proposed and actual decreases in military expenditure as well as postponements in weapons programme procurement affected overall arms sales in North America and Western Europe.

“Conflict—in particular the drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan and the sanctions on arms transfers to Libya—also played a role in the fall in arms sales. …

“A number of companies have also established foreign subsidiaries in order to access new revenue streams in Latin America, the Middle East and Asia.  …

“The expansion of arms producing companies into the cybersecurity market—a clear trend in the first tier of the SIPRI Top 100—is due the growing political and budgetary importance of cybersecurity as a national security issue. …

“These companies’ cybersecurity activities are focused on data and network protection software and services; testing and simulation services; training and consulting services; and operational support.”

My Comment: The era of transition to cyberspace has begun; wars are played out by drones and computers. And ahead is the war between good and evil thoughts.
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Opinion (Victor Davis Hanson, American military historian, columnist, political essayist and former classics professor): “Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline?

“Hundreds of reasons have been adduced for the fall of Rome and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from inflation and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, as historians attempt to understand the sudden collapse of the Mycenaeans, the Aztecs and, apparently, the modern Greeks. In literature from Catullus to Edward Gibbon, wealth and leisure — and who gets the most of both — more often than poverty and exhaustion implode civilization.

“One recurring theme seems consistent in Athenian literature on the eve of the city’s takeover by Macedon: social squabbling over slicing up a shrinking pie. Athenian speeches from that era make frequent reference to lawsuits over property and inheritance, evading taxes and fudging eligibility for the dole. After the end of the Roman Republic, reactionary Latin literature — from the likes of Juvenal, Petronius, Suetonius and Tacitus — pointed to ‘bread and circuses,’ as well as excessive wealth, corruption and top-heavy government.

“For Gibbon and later French scholars, ‘Byzantine’ became a pejorative description of a top-heavy Greek bureaucracy that could not tax enough vanishing producers to sustain a growing number of bureaucrats. In antiquity, inflating the currency by turning out cheap bronze coins was often the favored way to pay off public debts.”

My Comment: Everything repeats because our egoism has reigned in us from the day of man’s appearance on earth. But today we are talking openly about a new state of development of the individual and society: the state of “one family” that will occur 1) unwillingly through suffering or 2) easily and pleasantly by realizing the necessity.
[100901]

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Opinion (Michael Khazin, economist): “2012 became a critical year for the world’s financial, economic and political elite: They have realized the inevitability of the continuing crisis and that they cannot maintain the basis of social and political stability of the modern Western (liberal-democratic) society; the existing model of the state cannot be saved because the economy will be too much destroyed and the standard of living will fall too much. That is, a new model of state is needed.

“Who will the world elite entrust with the development of new concepts of state and society? They should be marginals, mentally prepared to become the leaders of the mainstream. These people should be reasonable conformists, not denying the elite and its status; no one needs revolutionaries, even if they are the most brilliant scientists. In addition to these innovators, there should be organizers and administrators who will turn ideas into schools, universities and the methods of practice.

“In this case, as soon as something interesting appears, the entire mainstream will begin to push it down, otherwise it will cease to be the mainstream; it means that cash flow will fall drastically.

“An understanding that the current state of economics should be changed already exists, but there are no active steps in this direction. In the developed countries, serious changes in personnel have begun; this means that the “special” hour is approaching…”

My Comment: You cannot build a new socio-economic system without the knowledge of the true laws of Nature and society that only a Kabbalist can know. The world will hit the wall again and an even greater, more disappointing crisis until, inevitability, our dissemination reveals to the elite the need for restructuring according to the laws of nature and not their innovators.
[100890]

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In the News (from Forbes): “The sharing concept has created markets out of things that wouldn’t have been considered monetizable assets before. … FORBES estimates the revenue flowing through the share economy directly into people’s wallets will surpass $3.5 billion this year, with growth exceeding 25%. At that rate peer-to-peer sharing is moving from an income boost in a stagnant wage market into a disruptive economic force. Technology has vastly improved on the newspaper classifieds that brokered the sweating of assets for a century. … ‘We’re moving from a world where we’re organized around ownership to one organized around access to assets,’ says Lisa Gansky, who started the Ofoto photo-sharing site, before selling it in 2001 to Eastman Kodak. …

“Ownership, the root of the American Dream, took a hit. ‘It’s changed, especially with the younger generation’ says Shannon King, chair for strategic planning at the National Association of Realtors. ‘Also they like the idea of not being tied into a property. They can move to different areas of town and live a more flexible lifestyle.’ …

“Millennials, the ascendant economic force in America, have been culturally programmed to borrow, rent and share. They don’t buy newspapers; they grab and disseminate stories a la carte via Facebook and Twitter. They don’t buy DVD sets; they stream shows. They don’t buy CDs; they subscribe to music on services such as Spotify or Pandora (or just steal it).”

My Comment: Everything is heading towards generalization, unity, and closeness. This is a consequence of a new type of desire that occur in people under the program of Nature. Certainly, it all leads to an integrated economy that will be the most cost-effective and will provide everyone with relatively equal services on the condition that people themselves will look for opportunities to save materials, energy, and labor.
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Opinion (from Spydell): “An incredible ability to ignore the problems of the financial markets is surprising. Just on Friday, they saw a projection of a serene bright future, and now again the crisis began. There was no crisis on Friday, and now it has started to up again in a few days.

“The situation comes to the point of absurdity. To raise the GDP, you need to eat a lot, which will increase sales of food and fast-food income. But after that, people will be sick with obesity and diabetes, which will increase revenues of pharmaceutical companies and drug sellers. The more you eat and get sick, the better it is for the economy and corporations, but it is worse for you. The bad environment also positively affects the economy because the number of diseases grows, and revenues increase in proportion in the health sector.

“The more deadly weapons produced, the better economy is, but accordingly, there are more wars and killing.

“Sooner or later this craziness with endless growth must end. The economy of growth violates the natural limits of living organisms; no single organic being is capable of either growing or living forever. Even the poorest category of the population in developed countries live at the level of gods of the poor Asian and African regions. … Society adapted to the subsidies and is not going to boost consumption, especially when the shelves are full of goods.”

My Comment: Infinite growth is impossible, not only because there are natural limits of the planet and the population, but also because our desires grow not only quantitatively, but qualitatively, meaning there is a sense of desolation and apathy, emptiness, yearning for drugs, suicide; there is a new void that cannot be filled by anything from the world around us; the question of meaning is rebooting; we are coming to the next stage of our development, when fulfillment will come mainly from the revelation of the upper world, and consumption will be only to the extent necessary for existence. The changing desires will inevitably lead us to this.
[100782]

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Opinion (James Rickards, senior managing director of Tangent Capital Partners): The world currency system is riding down the road to catastrophe, says James Rickards, senior managing director of Tangent Capital Partners.

“The world already has entered a currency war that began in 2010 on the heels of the Federal Reserve’s massive easing program, he tells Wall Street Journal Digital Network. …

“’All major central banks are easing,’ he says. ‘Eventually so much money will be printed that this will lead to inflation. The endgame is collapse of the international monetary system — sometime sooner than later.’

“In both the United States and Japan, the central banks are trying to “import inflation” to get their economies going, rather than trying to boost exports, through a weaker currency, Rickards says. ‘They’re scared to death of deflation. They’ve cut rates, and the last resort is to cheapen their currencies.’

“When the international monetary system collapses, major financial powers will convene to plan the aftermath, he says. When that happens, each nation must have enough gold relative to its gross domestic product. …

“The global economy can muddle through this year, but major problems begin in 2014, he maintains.”

My Comment: If there is enough political force, they will restrict the money supply to the level of its gold reserves, and the world will get over it! The main thing is to take care of the daily bread and integral education for everyone. If in the past the concern was education of the population, this time it is upbringing because not only is an understanding of the new conditions of the integral global community as a family necessary, but also, the personal change of everyone so that he can become a member of the community.
[100756]

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