BlackGrowth

I am going to cite Churchill a bit in this piece - with some insight from Leopold Amery, thank you.     For sure Sir Winston had defects. And yet he was a staunch defender of his people's freedom. He was intelligent and pragmatic. And when Europe faced its most dramatic moments, its darkest hours, his words were magnificent and inspirational. We need those qualities now. "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat" Europe is facing difficult times. Its supposed political and economical core - the European Union - struggles in answering to multiple sides of the crisis of the West. For instance, the issues challenging Europe on economy and immigration politic show how divided the Union really is. [Soon minus the UK] Many States so different, so little economic flexibility. From https://worldview.stratfor.com     In economy, the Union was conceived with France and Germany as models 1 . In reality each State has - and has righ...

Humans are a curious species. We are eternally conflicted between our individualism - treasuring freedom, boundaries and independence - and our sociality - which is actually a need and one of the main reasons for our evolutionary success. By exploiting our sociality we are naturally oriented toward progress by expanding the fields of our knowledge and technology. However, in concomitance with our times of crisis and struggle, we see that the way to progress is not necessarily smooth. It is mostly evident in economy and finance - we see that there are perspectives to widen the field and we invest, eventually investing so much that the system can't cope with it and the suddenly expanded field collapses on itself. It is a speculative bubble. Here I will discuss how it is not a mechanism limited to finance - it is everywhere in human activities. It is one of the dark sides of progress itself.     Expanding a field acts on three axis, starting from a pre-existing sphere of acti...

The Syrian Civil War ending... and then what? from https://buffalonews.com/2018/04/17/ the-briefing-why-syria-matters/ In Syria, the battle for Idlib - until now occupied by terrorists affiliated and related to Al-Qaeda - is imminent. Other territories controlled by rebels - 'moderate' or not - are few and isolated. Kurds are negotiating with Assad and will likely see recognized part of the autonomy they ask, if Syria territorial integrity will be reconstituted. All in all, the war in Syria is coming to its conclusion - and the USA-led Coalition can't do much to hinder that, as we prefigured . So, is it almost done? Or do we have to expect other crisis and possibly escalations before we can call the conflict off? Of course, in a future perspective, one major issue will be Israel attitude - along with the ones of Saudi Arabia and Turkey on the backsides. Relationships between Israel and Syria will be difficult to normalize without finding a compromise over th...

In this series of posts we are using a human body as a similitude for a State.           Among many organs and tissues, which ones better correspond to specific State apparatuses?          Which parallelism can we draw between them? Here we will look at lungs and their counterparts in a State, first by reviewing how they are structured - anatomy - , then how they work - physiology - and eventually what happens when they get disfunctional - pathology. Anatomy - Lungs oxygenate blood like investments supplement economy with new money from http://hyperpshysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/ hbase/Biology/respir.html We already compared blood to money , specifying that blood flow is required to sustain cells as money circulation sustains people. Lungs create the conditions for blood oxygenation, thus allowing it to deliver oxygen to cells. When considering economy and society, investments act like lungs by f...

Presidents Trump and Putin eventually had their first bilateral meeting, yesterday 07/16/2018 in Helsinki [ full video of the press conference ]. Supposedly, the Summit was going to set of a new course in the relationships between USA and Russia, marking the inversion of the negative trend established during Obama’s Presidency. Many Trump’s critics – in USA, most Democrat and Neocon politicians and commenters – questioned the opportunity of the Summit itself. They reacted with outrage to the final declarations that Trump released to the press, even going as far as ousting Trump as a traitor to the USA 1 , 2 . So, here we will look at facts and their implications. Was the Summit a success for any party? Who got the best advantages? Can Trump count it as a victory or was it a defeat? In which direction can we expect USA and Russia to evolve their foreign politics? First, of course, the meeting was an evident success of image for Russia and a personal success of Vladimir Putin. It...