The European Union Survives, Stronger.

The large majority vote in Ireland a few days ago to ratify the Lisbon treaty, after narrowly defeating it last year, showed how much public opinion can change in a crisis. A crisis causes people to re-think their values and question assumptions. Decisions that could not be made in normal times can be made in or just after a crisis. A few years ago I questioned whether the EU could survive a crisis. Would its members focus on narrow, selfish interests ? Or pull together ?

At that time, I thought that it would crack up and fall apart. The events show I was wrong. Europeans seem to have learned how to live together peacefully and not resort to excess nationalism and hate-mongering of their neighbors. The big countries did not put undue pressure on the small ones. Perhaps that's because they had huge economic pressure on themselves.

The small countries realized they were far too vulnerable on their own. The vote in Ireland proved that.

I now expect all the small countries of Europe to join the Euro-zone as quickly as possible, as they know their economies and currencies are too at risk to raiders and unscrupulous or foolish financial practices. The lessons of Iceland and Hungary make this very obvious.

This is good news, a big gain for world stability. This removes a huge risk to world economic growth.

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Je ne fais rien. Ich machte nichts. Nic nie robię. Estoy haciendo nada. Non faccio nulla. Nihil facio. I am doing nothing.

More precisely, I'm riding this bull elephant comfortably loaded with plenty high powered ammo in the form of a call options on stocks that I think will outperform due to overseas growth.

Word of the Day

"Mereology" - noun [$1000]; a word from logic.
Mereology means the general theory of the concept of 'part of': a 'part' is understood a section of a given object, and such a section is not identical with the object itself. The formal mathematical theory was developed by S. Lesniewśki; it is an extended system of Boolean algebra.
Sentence: Thinking about parts and wholes and how different (or alike) a part can be from the whole, that is, mereology, is quite essential to analyzing the fallacy called "composition and division". Mereology helps to critically assess many analogies and metaphors that might be false, or quite valid.