Survey (from The European Depression Association): “One in 10 working people surveyed in Europe have taken time off work because of depression, with an average of 36 days lost per episode of depression, according to a new survey from the European Depression Association. This equates to more than 21,000 days of lost working time in this group of people. However despite the size of the problem, nearly one in three managers reported they had no formal support or resources to deal with employees who have depression, and 43% called for better policies and legislation to protect employees.

“Depression is the predominant mental health challenge among working-age people and more than 30 million European citizens will suffer from depression at some point in their life.1 The IDEA survey (Impact of Depression in the Workplace in Europe Audit) polled more than 7,000 people in Europe and found that 20% of respondents had received a diagnosis of depression at some point. The highest rate was in GB (26%) and the lowest in Italy (12%). Among workers experiencing depression, those in Germany (61%), Denmark (60%), and GB (58%) were most likely to take time off work, while those in Turkey were the least likely to take time off (25%).

“The costs of depression were estimated at €92 billion in 2010 in the EU, with lost productivity due to absenteeism (taking time off work) and presenteeism (being present at work while ill) representing over 50% of all costs related to depression.1 In the IDEA survey the average number of days taken off work during the last episode of depression was 36 days, with Germany and GB having the highest (41 days) and Italy (23 days) having the lowest.”

My Comment: In general, depression is the most common disease of our time. Just because it is not fatal and is hidden, it can be easily concealed, and it does not bother society. Where do the current and future unemployed belong? Undoubtedly, with the growth of individual egoism and its transformation into integral egoism that is shown in the interdependence of everyone and everything, depression will grow and turn into the epidemic.
[89724]

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Opinion (Robert J. Gordon, Stanley G. Harris Professor of the Social Sciences, Northwestern University): “This paper raises basic questions about the process of economic growth. It questions the assumption, nearly universal since Solow’s seminal contributions of the 1950s, that economic growth is a continuous process that will persist forever. There was virtually no growth before 1750, and thus there is no guarantee that growth will continue indefinitely. Rather, the paper suggests that the rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history. The paper is only about the United States and views the future from 2007 while pretending that the financial crisis did not happen. Its point of departure is growth in per-capita real GDP in the frontier country since 1300, the U.K. until 1906 and the U.S. afterwards. Growth in this frontier gradually accelerated after 1750, reached a peak in the middle of the 20th century, and has been slowing down since. The paper is about ‘how much further could the frontier growth rate decline?’ The analysis links periods of slow and rapid growth to the timing of the three industrial revolutions (IR’s), that is, IR #1 (steam, railroads) from 1750 to 1830; IR #2 (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum) from 1870 to 1900; and IR #3 (computers, the web, mobile phones) from 1960 to present. It provides evidence that IR #2 was more important than the others and was largely responsible for 80 years of relatively rapid productivity growth between 1890 and 1972. Once the spin-off inventions from IR #2 (airplanes, air conditioning, interstate highways) had run their course, productivity growth during 1972-96 was much slower than before. In contrast, IR #3 created only a short-lived growth revival between 1996 and 2004. Many of the original and spin-off inventions of IR #2 could happen only once – urbanization, transportation speed, the freedom of females from the drudgery of carrying tons of water per year, and the role of central heating and air conditioning in achieving a year-round constant temperature. Even if innovation were to continue into the future at the rate of the two decades before 2007, the U.S. faces six headwinds that are in the process of dragging long-term growth to half or less of the 1.9 percent annual rate experienced between 1860 and 2007. These include demography, education, inequality, globalization, energy/environment, and the overhang of consumer and government debt. A provocative ‘exercise in subtraction’ suggests that future growth in consumption per capita for the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution could fall below 0.5 percent per year for an extended period of decades.”

My Comment: Humanity must provide itself with everything necessary, but not more, and all of its resources should be directed to its re-education, creating humane interaction; this is programmed by nature, and we will have to realize this. Kabbalah explains how to do this!
[89730]

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Opinion (Olivier Blanchard, IMF chief economist): “Olivier Blanchard, chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, said it will take at least ten years to recover from the meltdown caused by the banking crash of 2008.”

My Comment: But the crisis is not over yet, and who knows how it continues, what its nature and course are. The crisis will end only when we understand its cause and find the means of correcting it and address the root cause of the crisis.

For this we need to think not how to mitigate the state, but how to find the cause of the disease according to its symptoms and a remedy and to cure the disease itself, its cause. Is there anybody in the EU, or in the world, who studies this? If not, then it is not logical to talk about exiting the crisis.
[89611]

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In the News (from Euronews): “‘For Europe!’ is a new book, written by two staunch pro-Europeans – Daniel Cohn-Bendit of the Group of Greens-European Free Alliance and Guy Verhofstadt, leader of Liberals in the European Parliament.

“Released in six languages, the book aims to be a manifesto, spelling out the benefits of a united Europe.

“’Actually this is a book which has been written in anger, in fury against the national elites who, according to Daniel and I, are incapable of dealing with the crisis we are in today.

“’We very clearly state that the only way, the only realistic solution, is to create a federal union, a federal Europe,” said Verhofstadt, who is also a former Belgian Prime Minister.

“Both men attempt to make the case that a unified Europe has a better chance in the face of global competition. However, closer political integration would be vital, according to Cohn-Bendit, who spoke to euronews at the book launch in Brussels.

“’We do think that the European model has to be ‘parliamenterized’!

“’We suggest that the Commission has to become the real government of Europe. And we think that there should be two chambers, the Parliament and a Senate. The Senate could, for instance, be formed for by the governments of the member-states or by representatives of the national parliaments. This would be a democratic model,’ he said.”

My Comment: Despite the credibility of the authors, hardly anyone in the EU leadership will hear them. Perhaps after a series of sufferings the current EU leaders will be able to listen…
[89538]

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In the News (from The Financial Times): “Global advertising spending is slowing in response to a eurozone crisis that has cut billions from marketing budgets in the hardest-hit countries and started to affect brands’ confidence in other regions, according to a new forecast. …

“Greece could suffer a 33 per cent drop, with Spain and Portugal each down 12-13 per cent, ZenithOptimedia predicts.”

My Comment: In the future, advertising, the “engine of commerce,” will disappear except for explanations of new products and drugs that will replace the old ones. Since humanity will reach reasonable consumption, the need to advertise will be useless, superfluous goods and services will cease to exist.
[89535]

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In the News (from Council of the European Union): “The European Union will launch next week its seventh Crisis Management Exercise. Multilayer 2012 (ML12) is organised by the European External Action Service (EEAS) from 1 to 26 October under the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty. It will involve for the first time the different layers of EU crisis response and management, from the political-strategic level to the operational level.

“Multilayer 2012 aims at exercising and evaluating the crisis response and management structures of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP)/Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) and their interaction with the full range of EU crisis response mechanisms. ….

“The exercise scenario focuses on the deteriorating security and humanitarian situation in a fictitious region involving 11 countries, and where the states of ‘Nusia’ and ‘Recuria’ face the challenge of post-conflict transition, as well as issues such as border delimitation, security of public infrastructure, landmines and maritime piracy. The goal of Multilayer 2012 is to exercise the EU’s crisis response system in a fictitious crisis situation requiring both a military operation and a civilian mission in the framework of the CSDP, as well as their interaction with other EU crisis response and management structures.”

My Comment: That is how we, in our enlightened age, after so much suffering, deliberately accustom ourselves to the idea of the inevitability of a war!
[89462]

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In the News (from The Guardian): “Knobbly carrots, wonky spuds, bent courgettes and discoloured cauliflowers will return to supermarket shelves after one of the worst growing seasons farmers have experienced in decades. …

“On Thursday, Sainsbury’s relaxed its rules on the cosmetic appearance of fresh produce and allowed fruit and vegetables that would normally be ploughed back into fields to be sold in its 1,012 stores.

“Research last year by the government’s waste reduction body, Wrap, showed that the recession has encouraged supermarkets and householders to throw out less food. According to Wrap, British families rejected nearly 7.2m tonnes of food a year – a reduction of 13% or 1.1m tonnes since 2007.”
My Comment: Thus, we gradually could come to reasonable consumption!
[89394]

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Opinion (Dale Purves, R. Beau Lotto Why We See What We Do Redux): “The First Edition of this provocative book reviewed a broad range of evidence leading to the conclusion that the visual system does not reveal the physical world by an analysis of retinal images and their representation by the visual system. Rather, what we see is based on the history of the species and the individual as a means of contending with the inherent uncertainty of light stimuli. It follows that visual perceptions are reflexive manifestations of past behavioral success rather than the result of a logical processing of present stimuli.

“When Darwin’s skeptics attack his theory of evolution, they often focus on the eye. Darwin himself confessed that it was ‘absurd’ to propose that the human eye evolved through spontaneous mutation and natural selection. Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) have now tackled Darwin’s major challenge in an evolutionary study published in the journal Science. …

“Researchers in the laboratories of Detlev Arendt and Jochen Wittbrodt have discovered that the light-sensitive cells of our eyes, the rods and cones, are of unexpected evolutionary origin – they come from an ancient population of light-sensitive cells that were initially located in the brain.

“’It is not surprising that cells of human eyes come from the brain. We still have light-sensitive cells in our brains today which detect light and influence our daily rhythms of activity,’ explains Wittbrodt. ‘Quite possibly, the human eye has originated from light-sensitive cells in the brain. Only later in evolution would such brain cells have relocated into an eye and gained the potential to confer vision.’”

Source: (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/10/041030215105.htm)

My Comment: According to Kabbalah, there is nothing “around” us; everything that we see as existing is an illusion. Everything is felt inside of us: ourselves and the world around us. By changing ourselves, our properties, which Kabbalah allows us to do, we can “change the world around us.” Rather, we begin to feel its relativity, the dependence of the picture of the world on a person’s (observer’s) properties. See “The Introduction to The Book of Zohar.”
[89256]

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Opinion (GlobalEurope Anticipation Bulletin): “As LEAP/E2020 anticipated since the end of 2011, the end of summer 2012 marks the beginning of the revival for Euroland. … That being said, Europe will be in recession for the next six to twelve months. …

“The more Euroland advances constructively, the more the ‘Potemkinien’ ‘character of the US, Chinese, Japanese and Brazilian…economies’ ‘health’ will show itself. The tree will no longer hide the forest, namely that all the major global economies are entering recession or slowing growth simultaneously, leading the socio-economic and financial world into a black hole. …

“For these reasons, LEAP/E2020 maintains its June 2012 Red Alert and estimates that, by the end of October 2012, the global economy will be sucked into a black hole against a backdrop of world geopolitics heated white-hot. Suffice it to say that the coming weeks will, according to our team, carry the planet away in a hurricane of unprecedented crises and conflicts. …

“As we have underlined on many occasions in the GEAB, the United States has, since the beginning of this crisis, refused to face reality by having increasing recourse to financial, monetary,… (and military) subterfuge to try and mitigate the consequences of the crisis. All this however is proving to be ineffective at the end of summer 2012, in spite of the trillions of Dollars thrown down what is proving to be a bottomless hole. …

“The US political system’s current and future impotence in facing its deficit problems combined with ‘sequestration’ of the Federal budget the effects of which are already making themselves felt throughout the US economy (as we had anticipated from spring 2012), will turn the coming weeks into an endless succession of bad economic news … against a backdrop of increasingly less well-managed geopolitical challenges. Because the anaesthetic is finished on this front as well! …

“Let’s quote Europe also as an anecdote, since Euroland’s accelerated integration de facto constitutes an ousting of US influence at the heart of European construction.”

My Comment: It all depends on the nature of the movement of the world towards unity, either along the good path, through an understanding of the only healthy condition, or when the understanding of this inevitable future state becomes clear not through thinking, but through suffering. It is necessary to reach such a state that every person in the world understands these two opportunities of bringing the world to unity, to similarity with Nature, which guarantees his welfare.
[89307]

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In the News (from Empa): “In order to be able to give a well-informed response, Empa, on behalf of the Department of Energy (BFA) and in collaboration with the research institute Agroscope Reckenholz-Tänikon (ART), and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), has updated the ecobalance of numerous biofuels, including their production chains. Compared with the first worldwide ecobalance study of its kind in 2007, also carried out by Empa, the team, led by Empa researcher Rainer Zah, included both innovative energy plants and manufacturing processes and also updated assessment methods.

“However, despite a more extensive data set and up-to-date methods, Empa comes to the same conclusion as the study in 2007: many biofuels based on agricultural products indeed do help to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, but lead to other environmental pollution, such as too much acid in the soil and polluted (over-fertilised) lakes and rivers. ‘Most biofuels therefore just deflect the environmental impact: fewer greenhouse gases, thus more growth-related pollution for land used for agriculture.’ says Zah. This results in only a few biofuels having an overall better ecobalance than petrol. …

“However, the new methodology also allowed Zah and his colleagues to highlight the ‘weaknesses’ of the earlier study. The researchers in 2007 underestimated the effects of changes to natural areas on the greenhouse gas balance, for example the deforestation of the rain forest. The current study now shows that biofuels from deforested areas usually emit more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels. This also applies to indirect land usage changes if existing agricultural land is used for the first time for biofuel production and, as a consequence, forested areas have to be cleared in order to maintain the existing foodstuff or animal feed production. …

“Although the devil is in the detail, the new studies make it possible to make some general recommendations: Clearing woodland and bush areas in order to develop energy plants is to be avoided; this worsens the greenhouse gas balance considerably, which has a distinctly greater impact on the environment.”

My Comment: There will be no winning with any of our tricks! Only achieving balance with nature, bringing ourselves to general good connection, and reaching reasonable consumption will lead us to a good agreement with Nature/the Creator.
[89259]

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