In the News (from The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE)): “There is growing concern that the restrictive approaches of budget consolidation currently pursued in many European countries may not reach their objectives, but risk further exacerbating the crisis. Austerity measures applied across Europe are viewed increasingly critically by international experts and organisations as they can undermine democratic and social rights, in particular for the most vulnerable categories of the population.

“The Parliamentary Assembly should send out a strong signal by calling for a profound reorientation of austerity programmes, ending their quasi-exclusive focus on expenditure cuts in social areas such as pensions, health services or family benefits. Future national action should also include measures aimed at increasing public revenues by taxing higher income categories and property wealth more strongly, by shoring up the tax base and by enhancing tax collection, the efficiency of the tax administration and the fight against tax fraud, tax evasion and tax havens, corruption and the underground economy.

“Current budget consolidation programmes should be further supplemented with measures fostering sustainable economic growth, including the creation of new quality employment and special support to be given to the young generation in the transitional period between education and employment.”

My Comment: The nature of egoistic society is such that if we check the implementation of these good intentions, we will find out that in the end, the wealthy become wealthier and pay less, while the poor become poorer and pay more. This occurs everywhere in all countries and at all times. Not the calls of the authorities, not the direct instructions from the government, not the wishes of the rich themselves will change this trend.

Only the change of the basis of the egoistic society through education can transform it to a more equal one. After all, the development of society on the egoistic foundation is obliged to bring about, involuntarily through sufferings, or consciously and willingly, the change of human nature.
[81623]

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In the News (from The New York Times): “The report, in the Archives of Internal Medicine, is the largest yet to tease out the impact of loneliness on people in their later years. Geriatricians at the University of California, San Francisco, asked 1,604 adults age 60 and older how often they felt isolated or left out, or lacked companionship. The researchers were attempting to quantify the feeling of loneliness — a sense of not having meaningful contact with others, accompanied by painful distress. …

“Lonely older adults also were 45 percent more likely to die than seniors who felt meaningfully connected with others, even after results were adjusted for factors like depression, socioeconomic status and existing health conditions.

“The emphasis on meaningful connections goes to the heart of what loneliness is and is not. It is not the same thing as being alone: 62.5 percent of older adults who reported being lonely in this new study were married. Nor is it simply a paucity of social contacts. As has been observed many times, people can feel lonely even when surrounded by others if their interactions lack emotional depth and resonance.”

My Comment: Man is created as a social being and cannot provide himself with everything necessary, especially in old age, so anxiety fills his existence. But we can correct this only through changing our nature, by creating a friendly society that will affect everyone so when the time comes, a person will be in a healthy old age peacefully falling asleep in his last sleep.
[81536]

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Opinion (Christine Lagarde, director of the IMF): “At a meeting with eurozone finance ministers, the director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, spells out plans for more centralised economic control in the 17 countries using the single currency. She says the IMF’s preference is for recapitalisation of banks to be done directly from European bailout funds, rather than via states.”

My Comment: Our egoism closes our eyes and blunts us so much that it did not even let us realize that it is impossible to create a single EU state without centralized control. But it will not work without unifying the entire EU control in one hand, treating all members of the EU as one nation and people.
[81532]

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Opinion (Alexei Kudrin, Russia’s former finance minister): “A full-blown economic and financial crisis in the euro zone is inevitable and will develop within a year, Alexei Kudrin, Russia’s former finance minister, said Thursday, adding that a possible way out may be a partial write-off of Spain’s and Italy’s debt, but the political will for that is lacking.

“‘Greece will not be able to fulfill its obligations (towards lenders),’ Mr. Kudrin, who described himself as a pessimist, said at a conference.

“‘A serious financial and economic crisis will hit Europe within a year … with Spain being its next victim, and then possibly Italy,’ he added. ‘The time (for avoiding it) has already past.’”

My Comment: A wise man sees the problems in advance; ordinary people don’t hear that problems are approaching before they are affected physically. In this, they, like children or animals, are underdeveloped.

But the wise ones, even if they see a problem, don’t see its true cause because it is happening in a sublayer, and they see only the external symptoms, like a narrow-minded doctor who diagnoses only by them, and although they constantly make mistakes and blame some special reasons, changing circumstances, etc., it is still at the level of their understanding of the world; there are no other solutions. So, we are drowning.
[81401]

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In the News (from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada): “Using scientific theories, toy ecosystem modeling and paleontological evidence as a crystal ball, 21 scientists, including one from Simon Fraser University, predict we’re on a much worse collision course with Mother Nature than currently thought.

“In Approaching a state-shift in Earth’s biosphere, a paper just published in Nature, the authors, whose expertise spans a multitude of disciplines, suggest our planet’s ecosystems are career[n]ing towards an imminent, irreversible collapse.

“Earth’s accelerating loss of biodiversity, its climate’s increasingly extreme fluctuations, its ecosystems’ growing connectedness and its radically changing total energy budget are precursors to reaching a planetary state threshold or tipping point.

“Once that happens, which the authors predict could be reached this century, the planet’s ecosystems, as we know them, could irreversibly collapse in the proverbial blink of an eye.”

My Comment: The process of destruction has begun and was recognized a long time ago, but it is accelerating, and, indeed, it may be a sharp abrupt deterioration due to the complete interaction of all ecological systems, until they collapse.
[81236]

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Opinion (from AlertNet, Thomson Reuters Foundation): “Speculation on food prices played out on the trading floors of the Chicago Board of Trade and other commodity futures exchanges are to blame, critics say.

“’People are starving because the markets are out of equilibrium,’ said Yaneer Bar-Yam, director of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), a research institute, which has analysed the impact of speculation on food prices.

“’Food prices have nothing to do any more with the real price of food, or the availability of food,’ Bar-Yam told AlertNet. …

“’Deregulation of commodity markets has led to increased volatility and contributed to food price spikes that have caused massive harm to millions across the world facing hunger and poverty,’ said Christine Haigh, campaigns officer at the World Development Movement (WDM), an advocacy group.

“Before deregulation, agricultural futures markets were mainly used by farmers and food buyers to protect themselves from risks such as bad harvests. A futures contract provides protection by locking in a price for a promise to deliver a crop at a future date.

“But in recent years, investors have poured unprecedented amounts of money into agricultural commodities – spurred to hunt elsewhere for profits after the dotcom crash of 2000, the U.S. property market meltdown in 2006 and the 2008 financial crisis.

“They have become major players – in the past five years investment in food commodities by banks and hedge funds has risen to $126 billion from $65 billion five years ago, according to a report by WDM.

“A 2011 study by UNCTAD concluded that the commodities market had stopped to function ‘properly’ in a way where prices are shaped by supply and demand.

“’The activities of financial participants drive commodity prices away from levels justified by market fundamentals,’ the study said. …

“Wheat prices, for example, rose 46 percent between January and February 2008, fell back almost completely by May and increased again by 21 percent in July before falling again in August 2008. …

“There are signs some banks are listening to arguments that food price speculation harms millions of people. Germany’s DekaBank, last month said it was pulling out of investing in basic food stuffs, such as wheat, soya, maize and meat.”

My Comment: In the world, there is an excess of everything, including food. It is only the speculation of the “fat cats” that leads to the unequal distribution and hunger. The crisis, destruction, famine, and environmental catastrophe will compel us to decide to curb our egoistic nature. And the question of how to do this will lead us all to the method of integral upbringing.
[81234]

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In the News (from Reuters): “People in Europe drink more alcohol than in any other part of the world, downing the equivalent of 12.5 litres of pure alcohol a year or almost three glasses of wine a day, according to report by the World Health Organisation and the European Commission. …

“In a breakdown of drinking by sub-region, the heaviest drinkers were in central-eastern and eastern Europe – consuming 14.5 litres of pure alcohol per adult per year compared to 12.4 litres in central-western and western Europe, 11.2 litres in southern Europe and 10.4 litres in Nordic countries.”

My Comment: Humanity will certainly plunge into any means that help to disconnect from reality, especially those who are ruined and unemployed, and only the quick organization of the courses in integral education and upbringing will help not only to prevent falling, but also to raise people to the next level of development, a “Human Being,” to what the crisis pushes us.
[81219]

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Opinion (John Perkins, Chief Economist at a major international consulting firm, advised the World Bank, United Nations, IMF, U.S. Treasury Department, Fortune 500 corporations, the author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man): “My job as an economic hit man during the 1970s was to enslave nations that had resources our corporations coveted by burdening them with debts they could never repay. We then demanded that they sell those resources cheap, without social or environmental regulations, to our corporations.

“It was an incredibly successful strategy. In essence it created the world’s first truly global empire and the first one that was not built primarily through military occupations. It also transformed geo-politics. The power of elected officials was usurped by those who sit at the top of the multinational corporations (the ‘corporatocracy’).

“This success led to the realization that similar strategies could be applied in the United States in order to emasculate a population that was exerting its democratic rights in ways that threatened the corporatocracy… .

“By 1980, the Reagan administration understood that its most effective weapon to protect corporations against labor movements was debt. Borrowers were deceived into believing that they were paying low interest rates when in fact balloon payments, adjustable rate mortgages, and other technically complex packages resulted in higher overall rates that made it increasingly difficult to break the shackles of debt. …

“We have finally realized that we are serfs of a system that reflects the feudal Middle Ages. Modern-day lords of the castle, the corporatocracy had convinced us – we who live outside the walls and supply all the food and conveniences for them – that if we didn’t pay our “debts” and service their every desire we would be raped and pillaged by soldiers from neighboring castles. But we are no longer buying their lies.

“Across this planet, we have marched into the courtyards of those castles with the message that we are no longer blind. We will not be hoodwinked by their false promises or by their fear tactics. The Occupy movement spans seven continents. Participation expands at seemingly exponential rates, online as well as at the front lines. …

“The corporatoctacy are striking back. They are writing new laws forbidding us to assemble in places like Wall Street. They are attempting to censor the Internet (as they did in Egypt). They will come up with schemes we can’t even imagine.

“Each time they do this we must utilize their energy to inspire and empower us further. Coming from a place where we know we are right, we will employ the aikido of love, compassion, and cooperation to keep expanding our energy, our resolve, and our creative responses.”

My Comment: The method of enslavement will vary, but it will not disappear until human egoistic nature is corrected. That is why all the occupy movements will yield nothing and fade. Salvation is in the education of people, in their correction through the hidden force of nature: It created egoism and it can also correct it.

Enslavement comes from its historic and spiritual source: the Pharaoh who had Jews as slaves. The Pharaoh represents the entire universal egoism, that is why it wanted to beat even death through mummification. Thus a person is a slave of his egoism and remains its slave until he begins to correct himself through the method of integral upbringing.

So today, the current crisis is the time of freeing oneself from the Pharaoh-egoism with the whole world.
[81186]

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In the News (from Euronews): “All over the world the economic downturn is having a negative impact on education. Public spending is being slashed and schools have not been spared. Now, as students take to the streets, governments are struggling to maintain education as a basic right.”

My Comment: The education system doesn’t bear fruit because it is not connected with the system of upbringing, and without it the crisis is felt more deeply in all the layers of society. The time will come when even businesses will not be able to operate without uniting all the employees in one team, in mutual responsibility.

Weaving the method of unification in all occupations is becoming more obvious with each day. There will come a time when a necessary condition for success in all actions, as individuals as well as any groups, will be unity, and unity and will precede actions. Thus, the upper authority will force humanity to learn intentions before actions and will lead everyone to Itself.
[80998]

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In the News (from The Telegraph): “Sudden, jarring changes in pitch and frequency play on the same emotional mechanisms as the signals which animals use to alert one another of danger, a study found.

“When animals cry out in distress they force a large amount of air through their voice box very quickly, producing a discordant effect designed to grab the attention and provoke an emotional response in other animals.

“Hearing similar sound patterns, like Hendrix’s distorted version of Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock in 1969, sends a shiver down our spine because we are programmed to react strongly to the harsh noise, researchers said.

“The same goes for discordant music associated with horror films – such as the screeching soundtrack to the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho – but not for generic ‘elevator music’ which lacks jolting changes in sound or volume.

“Researchers also found that while dissonant music stirs up strong emotions, these are usually linked to negative feelings like fear or sadness rather than happy ones.

“Greg Bryant, assistant professor of communication studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and one of the study authors, said: ‘This study helps explain why the distortion of rock-and-roll gets people excited: It brings out the animal in us.

“’Composers have intuitive knowledge of what sounds scary without knowing why. What they usually don’t realise is that they’re exploiting our evolved predispositions to get excited and have negative emotions when hearing certain sounds.’”

My Comment: In the process of integral education, we have to use the appropriate musical influence as the background for conversations and during the workshops. We need to encourage and increase listening to songs with “integral” content.
[80995] 

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