In the News (from Bloomberg Businessweek): “It’s just after lunchtime on a drizzly day in the Amsterdam suburb of Bos en Lommer, and the line of people waiting to fill their bags with free rice, juice, potatoes and bread is lengthening.

“The market is one of 135 food banks in the Netherlands bailing out people trying to survive on less than 180 euros ($234) a month, the threshold to qualify for the aid. Organizers say demand for the service rose 20 percent in the first quarter…

“Europeans everywhere are changing jobs, homes and habits to accommodate lower pay, shifting markets and slowing economies. …

“The crisis is now at the door of nations previously considered invulnerable such as the Netherlands. …

“‘The lines will get bigger and bigger as more people lose their jobs and have trouble paying their rent or mortgage,’ said Piet van Diepen, a food bank board member.

“In the Netherlands, more than 23,000 people get aid from the food bank, he said. The numbers also are increasing in places such as Britain, where figures showed this month that the economy has slipped back into recession amid the biggest budget cuts of any of the 10 largest EU countries.”

My Comment: This could be an opportunity to send these people to courses on integral upbringing. In a few months, the face of Europe could change. Social relations, mutual guarantee, communication, and sense of community would lead to the similarity to the fundamental law of nature of unity and cooperation.

To that extent, we would feel that social and political tension decrease, and we would discover new mechanisms of the regulation of social life. As Baal HaSulam writes, the country that decides to implement the system of uniting society through the education of its citizens will become the most prosperous and exemplary country in the world in a few months.
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In the News (from Business News Daily): “According to a study of co-author Bryan Bonner, an associate professor at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, ‘for groups to be successful, they must exploit the knowledge of their (individual) members effectively.’

“The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, proved this by looking at how both individuals and groups answered difficult questions. …

“’People find they often know more than they think they do. They realize that they might not know the whole answer to the problem, but there are a couple things they do know that might help the group come to a solution.’”

“Therefore, leveraging what individuals already know is the key to solving a range of problems, according to the research.

“According to Bonner and co-author Michael Baumann, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas in San Antonio, improving the ability to transfer old knowledge to new situations may be as simple as attempting to solve problems with others. This is because, when several people team up to solve problems, the group has several viewpoints to bring together in order to reach a solution.

“’Although the sheer amount of brainpower it takes to consistently and effectively transfer learning from old to new is beyond many individuals, groups of people working together can actually be very good at it,’ the researchers said.

“With that in mind, this research may not only change the way organizations go about solving problems, but also how organizations are constructed in the first place.”

My Comment: At all levels of unity, the likeness to the single organism of nature is good. Gathering separate people into a single organism immediately creates not only a simple sum, but more than the sum of them, precisely due to the force of the similarity to unity, the property of the Creator.
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Opinion (Bassem Hafes Qushou, Palestinian Territories, chairman of the board of trustees, Palestinian Friendship Center for Cultural Exchange; economist, strategic planner and training director, Al-Quds Open University, Ramallah, from the international research paper Models of Post-Crisis Development): “Priorities which must be taken into account to bring about global development are increasing the importance of spiritual values, development of global network technologies, and solving environmental problems and preventing global environmental disasters. The first priority is very important, since it will be difficult to achieve the second and the third without considering and achieving it, and, without the achievement of the second one, the third will never be achieved, so these three priorities are interdependent.

“Heribert Marty, Switzerland, director of the company Volcon: ‘A world without gold can work – but not one without oil, copper etc.’

“Adelya Atabaeva, Uzbekistan, financial expert at the Association of European Business: ‘The role of natural resources is very important. Battles are already unfolding for use of natural resources in the Antarctic and Arctic shelves. The issue is already salient, as the world’s major powers are starting to argue about who will develop and get this wealth. Therefore, this will play a big role in the short term.’”
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Opinion (Radoslaw Sikorski, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland): “The first is disintegration. If the effects of the European Central Bank’s relief for the banking sector fizzle out and the financial crisis deepens, the risk of the eruozone’s collapse would become real – and if it were to disintegrate or shrink, the single market would be hard to salvage. …

“An EU in which community institutions atrophy would quickly slide into geopolitical irrelevance. The vacuum would be filled by a resurgent Russia and an assertive China.

“The second and more plausible scenario is drift. The EU retains its current shape. Member states take decades to repair their public finances. We cling to our standard of living by imposing external barriers but fail to regain global competitiveness. … Europe becomes a continent-sized Monaco – a wealthy retirement home with a few tourist attractions.

“The third scenario, sometimes proposed as an alternative to the first two, is the imposition of utopian federalism: a unitary supranational state with a central government and single parliament.

“There is also a fourth possibility – Poland’s proposal – of a permanent political union that preserves national powers in many areas. … In a federal but not centralised Europe, matters of culture, religion, way of life, and principal tax rates would remain in the purview of member states.”

My Comment: The path of suffering or Light depends on our choice, but still as a result of the peace or war processes, everything comes to unity in a single structure, unified humanity, with one spiritual government that will bring everyone up in full compliance with nature—the Creator.
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Opinion (Alexander Iskandaryan, Armenia, Director of the Caucasus Institute, international research paper Models of Post-Crisis Development): “An ideological system cannot be born and pass through the phase of structuring, propaganda and capturing the masses in just 10 years. Around 60-70 years passed between Marx and the October Revolution. And 30-50 years is the period in which movement in this direction has to happen. Socialist ideology has died, liberal ideology cannot offer anything new, and the limits of Islam are clear. So the appearance of a new ideology is very important!”

Anders Svensson, Sweden, tax manager, “Big Four” international auditing firm: “In the long term I hope there will be alternative globalization, but I’m not very optimistic about that.”

Gaetano Capasso, Belgium, stock trader (EU equities Germany, UK, France, Italy), Vanguard Investments: “For the next 10 years I would think there will be social progress, because public opinion asks for it and politicians are looking at how their actions can get the highest number of votes.”
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In the News (from LiveScience): “Spooky quantum entanglement just got spookier.

“Entanglement is a weird state where two particles remain intimately connected, even when separated over vast distances, like two die that must always show the same numbers when rolled. For the first time, scientists have entangled particles after they’ve been measured and may no longer even exist.

“’Whether these two particles are entangled or separable has been decided after they have been measured,’ write the researchers, led by Xiao-song Ma of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the University of Vienna.

“Essentially, the scientists showed that future actions may influence past events, at least when it comes to the messy, mind-bending world of quantum physics.

“In the quantum world, things behave differently than they do in the real, macroscopic world we can see and touch around us. In fact, when quantum entanglement was first predicted by the theory of quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein expressed his distaste for the idea, calling it ‘spooky action at a distance.’

“The researchers, taking entanglement a step further than ever before, started with two sets of light particles, called photons.

“The basic setup goes like this: Both pairs of photons are entangled, so that the two particles in the first set are entangled with each other, and the two particles in the second set are entangled with each other. Then, one photon from each pair is sent to a person named Victor. Of the two particles that are left behind, one goes to Bob, and the other goes to Alice.

“But now, Victor has control over Alice and Bob’s particles. If he decides to entangle the two photons he has, then Alice and Bob’s photons, each entangled with one of Victor’s, also become entangled with each other. And Victor can choose to take this action at any time, even after Bob and Alice may have measured, changed or destroyed their photons.

“’The fantastic new thing is that this decision to entangle two photons can be done at a much later time,’ said research co-author Anton Zeilinger, also of the University of Vienna. ‘They may no longer exist.’

“’The way you entangle them is to send them onto a half-silvered mirror,’ Zeilinger told LiveScience. ‘It reflects half of the photons, and transmits half. If you send two photons, one to the right and one to the left, then each of the two photons have forgotten where they come from. They lose their identities and become entangled.’

“Zeilinger said the technique could one day be used to communicate between superfast quantum computers, which rely on entanglement to store information. Such a machine has not yet been created, but experiments like this are a step toward that goal, the researchers say.

“’The idea is to create two particle pairs, send one to one computer, the other to another,’ Zeilinger said. ’Then if these two photons are entangled, the computers could use them to exchange information.’”

My Comment: See Baal HaSulam’s book The Study of the Ten Sefirot, Part 1, Chapter “Inner Contemplation” to see how these questions about the absence of time, motion, space are resolved in Kabbalah. But how difficult it is to understand these processes in the uncorrected egoistic desires of man! I am sorry for scientists; they invest great effort, time and money to learn something about “that” world of forces, which is “beyond” matter instead of entering it themselves, like Alice in Wonderland.
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In the News (from CBSNews): “Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking was too ill to attend a conference in honor of his 70th birthday Sunday, but in a recorded message played to attendees he repeated his call for humans to colonize other worlds. ..

“In his recorded speech, Hawking pleaded for interplanetary travel, arguing that humans faced a grim future unless they spread out from their terrestrial home. ‘I don’t think we will survive another thousand years without escaping beyond our fragile planet,’ he said.”

My Comment: This statement indicates that our science is a product of our egoism; we are not aware of the fact that we are killing ourselves; we aren’t talking about the natural environment at all, as if it’s not our problem; the relation of man to the world is “we destroyed it and went to look for where we can continue.”

The meaning of existence is in the possibility of mindless existence. What about space? Let it be what has happened to America after its colonization. And this is the scientist’s wish. There is no awareness of our evil, that we are egoists and ulcers in nature, and must direct all our forces at our correction in the likeness of nature; then it will not oppose us.
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In the News (from Forbes): “’Large windfarms can increase local night time temperatures by fanning warmer air onto the ground, new research has revealed. The study used satellite data to show that the building of huge wind farms in west Texas over the last decade has warmed the nights by up to 0.72C.’

“The basic effect is that given that the ground at night is generally cooler than the atmosphere, thus the air near the ground is cooler than the air higher up. Turning blades of the turbines mix up this air, cool with warmer, and thus lower the temperature of the higher up air.

“The effect is quite large too, that 0.72 of a degree is not far off the 0.8 of a degree which is said to be the total amount of anthropogenic global warming so far.

“However, amusing as this is, being able to point to one of the proposed solutions for climate change as being a cause of it, it’s not actually anything that affects the larger picture.

“We’re not changing the amount of heat that is disappearing off into space with this and thus not changing the basic energy balance of the planet. We’re just moving it around a bit, that’s all.

“As with the earlier paper that showed that offshore windmills will lower the air temperature around them by 1 degree or so: I assume from that same mixing increasing the evaporation rate of the sea water.”

My Comment: If we think that we can win somewhere without losing elsewhere, we deceive ourselves by forgetting about the unity of nature and its laws of a closed system.

We cannot fool nature, no matter what; in order to become harmonious with nature, we will have to change egoism as the root and cause of the created situation.
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In the News (from DiscoveryNews): “The human population is growing at such a staggering rate that we are organizing ourselves more like ant supercolonies, with new research finding that we have more in common now with some ants than we do with our closest living animal kingdom relatives.

“The new study, published in the journal Behavioral Ecology, points out that both humans and ants (termites, too) live in societies that may consist of up to a million plus members.

“’As a result, modern humans have more in common with some ants than we do with our closest relatives the chimpanzees,’ Mark Moffett, author of the study, told Discovery News. ‘With a maximum size of about 100, no chimpanzee group has to deal with issues of public health, infrastructure, distribution of goods and services, market economies, mass transit problems, assembly lines and complex teamwork, agriculture and animal domestication, warfare and slavery.’

“’Ants have developed behaviors addressing all of these problems,’ added Moffett, a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. He pointed out that only humans and ants have developed full-blown warfare.”

My Comment: We were given the mind in order, not to be guided by egoistic nature like ants, but to become conscious of the evil of egoism, to rise above it, and to change ourselves, and thus reach the level of the ruler, the Creator, His eternity and perfection.
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In the News (from Cornell University Library): “A central question in our understanding of the physical world is how our knowledge of the whole relates to our knowledge of the individual parts. One aspect of this question is the following: To what extent does ignorance about a whole preclude knowledge of at least one of its parts?

“Relying purely on classical intuition, one would certainly be inclined to conjecture that a strong ignorance of the whole cannot come without significant ignorance of at least one of its parts. Indeed, we show that this reasoning holds in any non-contextual hidden variable model (NC-HV).

“Curiously, however, such a conjecture is false in quantum theory: We provide an explicit example where a large ignorance about the whole can coexist with an almost perfect knowledge of each of its parts. More specifically, we provide a simple information–theoretic inequality satisfied in any NC-HV, but which can be arbitrarily violated by quantum mechanics. Our inequality has interesting implications for quantum cryptography.”

My Comment: From the perspective of Kabbalah, there is no paradox because the part and the whole are equivalent. Everything from micro to the whole is built on the principle of a hologram where any part contains information about everything. In other words, any part and the whole are made up of ten Sefirot. Our egoistic mind cannot connect the parts and the whole, recognizing that a part is equal to the whole. However, in the spiritual world, this condition is fundamental and understood on the first spiritual degree.
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