LifeItself

As I am writing this blog on May 29, 11:30 m CST, I have 20 more days of the highly erratic corona virus death data from the US, Germany and the world. Over 100,000 Americans have died of the corona virus infections in not quite three months since the early March of 2020. I do not know how to process this tragedy, other than to say that most of it could have been avoided, if we had a different administration in Washington and we had not been mining literally every resource, including humans, over the last 40 years. The merciless virus has illuminated every wrong we have committed over several decades, including that terrible murder by the police in Minneapolis this week. Coming from Poland and knowing what I know, the detached behavior of the four police officers who committed this particular crime was reminiscent of the WWII German soldiers milling about the countless execution sites for men, women and children, while being filmed by their comrades. Or taking a photo with a freshly ...

Tonight, I switched from al Jazeera International to BBC World Service.  It took about twenty minutes before I quit with disgust and switched back. Here's what I saw.  Somewhere at the World Economic Forum in Davos, there was a stage lined with eight armchairs ready for a live BBC program.  Seated on the stage were Christine Lagarde, the current IMF director, a pretty African woman, likely representing the developing world, and several very important looking white men. I started watching the BBC Davos report when Ms. Lagarde made her points:  IMF is now anything but business as usual.  Three IMF economists did a lot of analytic work and arrived at the following conclusions: (1) Extreme income inequality is bad for economic growth , (2) income redistribution is good for growth , and (3) jobs for the masses keep people engaged and are good for sustainable growth . She told us that these points were met with great disbelief and scorn by her IMF colleagues, ...

Click on the image to see the full size version. Sources: World Settlement Bank , World Bank As an earth scientist, I deal with real resources, such as water, oil, natural gas or coal, and I am bewildered by the figure above. It shows that the sum of goods and services produced on the Earth, or the World Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is as large as credit default swaps, and 10 times less than the total face value of all financial derivatives, including the credit default swaps.  Therefore, in the global casino we have created, bets on all things in the world have exceeded the value of what we actually produce 10-fold.  So if only 10 percent of these bets went wrong, an equivalent of world's GDP would be wiped out.  And our clueless politicians are piddling with a couple of billions of dollars here and there.  Or our hapless Treasury is talking about controlling the "core" inflation. A credit default swap (CDS) is a form of insurance that protects a lender ...