We need a new ice age. Firing up more volcanoes would do it.

Crop failures have started. Massive starvation and migrations will soon follow. Dumb and dangerous 'elites' will go martial on us...

There will be more war. And probably plague.

What's the difference between thinking 'War' and thinking 'Peace'?

Between creation and destruction, the positive and the negative, the 'evil' and the 'good'?

I suggest the answer would have to to with an awareness of one's context, as a social human animal living where one lives at the present point on the path of history ('Good', for example, for whom? For me personally (in my social context), for my family? for the wider community, all humanity, the biosphere itself..?), an awareness for the obtention of which 'good' education and access to information helps but which ultimately, I reckon, depends on maintaining open channels of communication with the bottom of one's heart.

For verily, to revert to an earlier idiom, and from a non-contemporary, but close, account of the words of a self-defined 'Son of Man', the kingdom of heaven lies within you.

Btw, I dislike terms such as 'belief' (or blind faith) that are bandied about: I believe this, I believe that: What does this mean? It means "I'm not prepared to think about it any further". And it probably means you're using the language in an habitual manner with too little attention to accuracy of expression.

Forest change mapped by Google Earth

A new high-resolution global map of forest loss and gain has been created with the help of Google Earth.

The interactive online tool is publicly available and zooms in to a remarkably high level of local detail - a resolution of 30m.

It charts the story of the world's tree canopies from 2000 to 2012, based on 650,000 satellite images by Landsat 7.

In that time, the Earth lost a combined "forest" the size of Mongolia, enough trees to cover the UK six times...

[center][/center]

/... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24934790

Ok. Streaming now here:

UK Parliament live streaming TV

... is not at the moment listing this event.

http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Live.aspx

Hmmm. Searching...

The announcement at the Intelligence and Security Committee's site says:

I can assure you that there are psychopathic women,

as well, in this world.

Hugs to all.

The danger is that we enter a post-antibiotic era...

Not the danger: the inevitability.

There's one big anthropo-natural population-reduction mechanism right here. This one might even affect 'the rich' alnost as much as 'the poor'.

"The charge is always the same"?

...The charge is always the same: The Germans have acquired an unreasonable advantage by one-sidedly focusing on exports, and now they are flooding foreign markets with their products. At the same time, this view holds that the Germans live and consume below their means, which is detrimental to foreign companies because there is less demand for their products in Germany...

/... http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/complaints-about-export-surplus-of-germany-unfounded-a-931607.html

... Romano Prodi – Mr Euro himself – is calling for a Latin Front to rise up against Germany and force through a reflation policy before the whole experiment of monetary union spins out of control.

"France, Italy, and Spain should together pound their fists on the table, but they are not doing so because they delude themselves that they can go it alone," he told Quotidiano Nazionale

Should Germany persist in imposing its contractionary ruin on Europe – "should the euro break apart, with one exchange rate in the North and one in the South", as he puts it – Germany itself will reap as it has sown. "Their exchange rate will double and they will not sell a single Mercedes in Europe. German industrialists know this but all they manage to secure are slight changes, not enough to end the crisis."... "German public opinion is by now convinced that any economic stimulus for the European economy is an unjustified help for the 'feckless' South, to which I have the honour of belonging. They are obsessed with inflation, just like teenagers obsessed with sex. They don't understand that the real problem today is deflation,.."...

... Prof Prodi says Germany is living in an Alice-in-Wonderland world of intellectual confusion, thinking that it can run a current account surplus of 7pc of GDP (almost three time's China's surplus), with an inflation rate of almost zero, without at the same time blocking recovery. But no amount of protest makes any difference. "It has not effect on German policy because France, Italy, and Spain lack any common approach, even though all these countries they have identical interests."...

... They have the majority votes in the EU Council of Ministers. They have a majority on the ECB's Governing Council, and indeed on other bodies such as the European Investment Bank, which could be mobilised for a Marshall Plan (that empty promise from some wretched and now forgotten EU summit, never delivered like all those New Deal EMU pledges that came before).

They have natural justice, economic authority, and the EU treaties on their side. They can and should deploy their combined political power to impose a full fiscal and monetary reflation strategy on the EU, Abenomics for Europe. Germany might find that a few years of 3pc inflation and a mini-boom are not so painful after all. But if it finds this outcome so intolerable, the exit door is wide open. It can leave EMU. (And destroy part of its banking system in the process.)...

/... http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100025983/italys-mr-euro-urges-latin-front-warns-germany-wont-sell-another-mercedes-in-europe/


I think the Spiegel piece misrepresents the charge. Problems that have been referred to are the austere deflationary policies imposed at exchange and interest rates greatly favorable to Germany but that are unbalancing the EU project itself.

The second piece is a long commentary by Evans-Pritchard from Sunday...

China set to liberalise finance; London hedge funds, estate agents salivate

... In the US, there has been much agonising over the emergence of China as a rival economic superpower. America's trade deficit with China has been a particular cause of concern, with Beijing accused of manipulating the renminbi exchange rate to dump goods in the west. Fears have been expressed that America is vulnerable to a financial Pearl Harbor: a sudden decision by Beijing to stop buying US Treasury bills.

In the light of what is going to be discussed later this week, such fears look overblown. That's not just because such a move would be a pyrrhic victory for China, since it would destroy the value of its assets. It's also because bit by bit, China's economy – if not its political structure – is being reshaped along the lines sought by Wall Street and by American-owned transnational corporations.

Back in the late 1990s, US multinationals demanded that China accept more stringent conditions than had been imposed on other developing countries in order to secure WTO membership. Beijing accepted. Now America wants two things: China's financial sector to be opened up to US banks and the country's savings to boost western capital markets. More than likely, Washington will get its way, perhaps not immediately but with profound effects.

Why? Well, consider this. America, the world's biggest economy, has savings of $2.8tn (£1.7tn); China has more than $4tn. As a result, the impact of financial liberalisation in China will make the flow of funds into the west from Russian oligarchs look inconsequential.

As Diana Choyleva of Lombard Street Research notes, China's elite already sends its children to Britain to be educated. The money is about to follow. Which is why the hedge-fund owners of Mayfair and the estate agents of Belgravia have every reason to be cheerful.

/... http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2013/nov/03/china-liberalise-finance-hedge-funds-estate-agents

... Pssst... There are lucrative investment opportunities to be found in Spain as well... And not just in central Madrid!

Yeah, that's what I thought, too...

... But, I think I'll roll another one, all the same...

... And, I was thinking about the 'regular sleeping hours', diurnal rhythm thing just yesterday: I've been an offshore (under sail, English Channel) navigator, watchkeeping; I feel like I'm a hunter, basically (always aware of o'portunity...): I'll be awake when I need to be awake; drowse whenever there's time...



Please, take heart. Be ready, but hope not to have to pull, those triggers.