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.
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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…
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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.
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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!
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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!
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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Opinion (Stephen Pratt, an associate professor, Arizona State University): “Scientists at Arizona State University have discovered that ants utilize a strategy to handle ‘information overload.’ Temnothorax rugatulusants, commonly found living in rock crevices in the Southwest, place the burden of making complicated decisions on the backs of the entire colony, rather than on an individual ant. …

“Previous research has shown that ant colonies have the ability to compare the quality of two potential nest sites – even if no single ant visits both sites. Pratt and Sasaki hypothesized that a colony could choose a high-quality nest from many more options more effectively than individual ants, because each member of the colony assesses only a small part, or portion, of available sites, and then shares the information with the entire colony. …

“The pair designed experiments with artificial nest sites to evaluate the ants’ decision-making abilities. Both colonies and individual ants were given two levels of tasks. Ants had to choose between two nests, or they had to choose among eight nests. In both experiments, half the nests were unsuitable. Nests are frequently chosen based on entrance and cavity size, as well as darkness and other features.

“Researchers discovered that individual ants made much worse decisions when faced with eight options rather than two, meaning that they experienced cognitive overload. Colonies, on the other hand, did equally well with either two or eight options, showing that they could handle the harder problem as a collective.

The study shows what Pratt believes to be the answer to two questions: What do you get out of being a collective intelligence? And secondly, why and how is a group smarter than an individual?

“‘Living in a group is costly in many ways, so ants must get some benefit from doing it,” said Pratt. ‘By sharing the burden of decision-making, colonies avoid the mistakes that a solitary animal makes when taking on too much information. What’s great about these ants is that we can see exactly how they do this, by making sure that no ant has to process more information than it is able to.’

“Pratt added that this is one problem ants can solve, but that there are other problems ants face that we might be able to learn from.”

My Comment: In nature, preference is given only to a group, not to the individual, because there is no free will there. But it is the opposite on the spiritual path: the choice is up to the individual. So it is in human society, all the decisions must be made together, through the average result, but the direction of the spiritual movement should be given by the one who sees this path, the one who has already passed; that is, the spiritual path is dictated by the leader (Moses).
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In the News (from Technology Review): “The world of game theory is currently on fire. In May, Freeman Dyson at Princeton University and William Press at the University of Texas announced that they had discovered a previously unknown strategy for the game of prisoner’s dilemma which guarantees one player a better outcome than the other.

“That’s a monumental surprise. Theorists have studied Prisoner’s Dilemma for decades, using it as a model for the emergence of co-operation in nature. This work has had a profound impact on disciplines such as economics, evolutionary biology and, of course, game theory itself. The new result will have impact in all these areas and more. …

“Until now, everyone thought the best strategy in iterative prisoner’s dilemma was to copy your opponents behaviour in the previous round. This tit-for-tat approach guarantees that you both spend the same time in jail.

“So the news that there are other strategies that allow one player to not only beat the other but to determine their time in jail is nothing short of revolutionary. …

The new approach is called the zero determinant strategy (because it involves the process of setting a mathematical object called a determinant to zero).

It turns out that the tit-for-tat approach is a special case of the zero determinant strategy: the player using this strategy determines that the other player’s time in jail is equal to theirs. But there are a whole set of other strategies that make the other player spend far more time in jail (or far less if you’re feeling generous).

The one caveat is that the other player must be unaware that they are being manipulated. If they discover the ruse, they can play a strategy that results in the maximum jail time for both players: ie both suffer.”

My Comment: Recently, more and more discoveries are happening in the field of human interaction. This should lead us to the realization of our absolute integrality as a unified system in which there is no individual freedom in thoughts, feelings, and actions. And only dissolving oneself in everyone makes one free. For the time being this seems incredible, but we will outgrow this inertia and the limitations of our understanding of the great unity of nature.
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