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Showing posts from 2021

Quo vadis Europe - Rethinking the old continent

1. What Europe means (to us) „ Ach Europa !“ ( Europe, Europe : Forays into a Continent) is the title of a book by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, which he wrote about half a century after the end of the last huge catastrophe of European civilisation. His diagnosis of the "paradox Europe" reads: " It is the irregularity, the confusion that makes Europe strong. The unity of the continent, as it is understood in the logic of the corporations, the political parties, the bureaucracies, namely as a project of homogenisation, proves to be a chimera. Europe is unthinkable as a ‘bloc’." This was his indulgent insight into the inner life of Europeans. In a fictional interview with the equally fictional US ambassador in Bonn, whom he calls just Murphy, he has the first-person narrator, in the role of an American ex-GI and journalist, projected 19 years into the future, paint a less friendly picture from the outside perspective: " The European Community? Forget it, Murphy! Yo

China the US and the fate of the world

Challenges abound The earth overshoot day is marking the day when humanity has consumed as much resources as may be used sustainably per year at maximum. That day tends to occur earlier each year, as the world population grows, and we tend to consumer more resource per capita each year. Only last year did it appear later than the year before on 2020-08-22. It is not difficult to see that the measures taken to combat the CoVid-19 pandemic are responsible for this extraordinary effect. Nevertheless, this does not at all mean that we can give the all-clear. On the contrary, if you look at a graphical representation of the annual positioning of Earth Overshoot Day over the last 50 years, you could easily confuse it with a burn-down diagram as used in modern agile project management. ^ Only difference is, that we don’t reduce a product backlog here, but burn down the entire planet, right down to zero. To not let this happen, now, more than ever seems it necessary to take a worldwide coordin