How did hominids first reach Europe? Both the early homo sapiens and their nearderthaler cousins? https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/10/251011105529.htm The simple answer is "by walking -- that is, by simple ground based migration". We don't have to get fancy here. If homo sapiens originated in eastern Africa as is now generally presumed, anyplace else in the vast Africa OR Eurasian land masses could have been reached by enough walking over time. But archeologists want to be more specific. And as the story on the other side of the above link indicates, there is news here. We don't have to presume that the original discoverers of Europe passed just north or just south of the Black Sea. Instead, they could have come across a land bridge that existed right through the middle of the Aegean between 1 million and 400,000 years ago. A simple matter for specialists, you say? Yes, but I enjoy the fact of curiosity about th...
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We continue our tour of the world, at least as it existed two decades ago, through the eyes of two political scientists, Barry Buzan and Ole Waever, pioneers of the "regional security complex theory" of international relations. They write about two Europes. Not East and West on the terms of the old Cold War division. The dividing line has moved well to the east. Western Europe extends right up to the former Soviet Union, and the new Eastern Europe consists wholly of the former Soviet states in their complicated interactions. Turkey and the Balkans (where the latter means specifically the states that used to be part of Yugoslavia) make up special cases. The Balkans sometimes seem as if they are about to be incorporated into (Western) Europe. But they are such trouble there is sentiment in the west to avoid or delay that incorporation. On the other hand, Turkey is a classic "insulator" state. But let us start with the west. These nations, roughly speaki...
Our Masters don't want us to be able to buy and sell to each other without everything showing up in official centralized ledgers. They don't like ca sh. They don't like cryptocurrencies either, but they have learned from them. The new step in the War on Cash is the central bank digital currency (CBDC). This simulates a cryptocurrency, but of course the decentralized feature that has long been part of its appeal is gone. As James Rickards wrote recently on Zero Hedge , "[A] CBDC is not a new currency. It's just a new payment channel. A digital dollar is still a dollar. A digital euro is still a euro. It’s just that the currency never exists in physical form. It is always digital, and ownership is recorded on a ledger maintained by the central bank." You might well say: so what? a lot of dollar transactions are already digital in one way or another. I use a plastic card to change the digits in various databases. By swiping the card, an account that indicates...
The headline is obviously hyperbolic, but this is an effort at a really cool timeline, combining several smaller timelines I've put in this blog, making some revisions along the way. Before the Bipedal Apes The earliest primates, called the Plesiadapiformes, are said to have speciated out of the Euarchonta very soon after the dinosaur-eliminating Comet struck, about 66 million years ago (MA). Soon after (63 MA) the Plesiadapiformes differentiated into the so-called wet-nosed and the dry-nosed primates. We will ignore the wet-nosed in what follows. The dry nosed are represented on today's earth by both the Great Apes and us humans. One distinctive feature of the dry-nosed branching? It can't metabolize vitamin C. We, and millions of years of ancestors, have had to include fruits bearing that vitamin in our diets. Interesting, susceptibility to alcohol seems to be a trait of the primate group as a whole. After observing many other primates' love for fermenting fruits,...
So, how is 2020 going to play out? In terms of the business/financial health of the developed world, my guess would be that the year willbe a mixed bag, with a plateauing of the major indexes but no sharp downturn. Central banks, after all, will continue to keep interests law and likely will get innovative with "non-conventional" measure to keep credit flow and equity valuable. Governments will continue to go into debt. Everybody is taking a "we owe it to ourselves" attitude. Since we, the human race, hold all the debt that we, the human race, have incurred, the gross amounts involved can't really matter, can they? That is facile and stupid. Accordingly, one will continue to hear it. The bullish case depends on that. The bearish case for 2020 looks to geopolitical risk. First, there is a financial crisis underway in Italy. The Italian government is doing everything it can to ensure that this crisis is not only its problem -- that it is the problem ...
I'm working (too slowly) on a review of a book that takes an international comparative approach to copyright law. I'll record a point here that intrigues me, but that probably won't get into my review. In the European Union, it seems there is now a significant difference at law between the music that is playing in the dentist's office when patients are in the chair undergoing the rigors of examination or repair work on the one hand, and the screening of television programs in the waiting room of a rehab facility as a diversion for patients. I had never given any thought to copyright in either context before, so this is all new to me. It is not so much that there IS a difference that interests me, but how that difference is justified. As EU directives put the point, a copyright owner has a right to control when his/her/its property will be "communicated to the public." Although this is not the sole consideration, a court is more likely to find a com...
When the US was obsessing about the then-still-not-exactly President Trump and his tweets about Congressman John Lewis, I tuned it out, and tuned in instead to the politics of the Mother Country. The Bank of England's Governor Mark Carney on Jan. 15 said that the country's consumer spending has held up well since the Brexit referendum, a fact that seems to have surprised him. Consumers are "entirely looking through Brexit-related uncertainties." Stiff upper lips and all that? More important, Prime Minister May gave an important address about the direction her government will take in executing the UK's exit from the EU. There have been talk of a so-called "soft Brexit," which would presumably entail retaining many of the benefits of membership in the EU while throwing off the liabilities. The leaders of other European nations had made clear their displeasure at that idea, and there developed a consensus that it wasn't going to happen. May ackn...
Italy recently (December 4) voted against certain constitutional changes in a referendum. This is thought to have great repercussions for the Eurozone, the group of countries sharing a common currency and a central bank. Marine Le Pen, the leader of a right-wing nationalist party in France, has tweeted thus (I rely on the BBC's translation): "The Italians have disavowed the EU and Renzi. We must listen to this thirst for freedom of nations." The reference there was to Italy's prime minister, Matteo Renzi, who announced his resignation the day after the vote. So, what were the key constitutional provisions involved? First, the role of the Senate was to be reduced, making the Chamber of Deputies the supreme legislative body. Second, the role of the regions of the country in national legislation was to be eliminated. Under the existing constitutions, the nation state and the regions have "concurrent competence" in some matters.Essentially this has allow...