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Spain: how much of state violence will be used? "To move forward we need to understand: why are regions, states and peoples beginning to re-pose the question of national self-determination now? For Spain and Italy it is clear: the mixture of austerity, corruption and political sclerosis at the centre has limited the reality of regional democracy. It has pushed autonomous regions such as  Catalonia  towards independence and places such as Lombardy and Veneto towards seeking fiscal autonomy from an essentially dysfunctional central state." The big picture Catalonia, Lombardy, Scotland ... Why they fight for self-determination now?
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"Under Xi, it seems that the majority of the party elite will continue with an economic model that is dominated by state corporations directed at all levels by the Communist cadres. That is because even the elite realise that if the capitalist road is adopted and the law of value becomes dominant, it will expose the Chinese people to chronic economic instability (booms and slumps), insecurity of employment and income and greater inequalities. On the other hand, Xi and the party elite are united in opposing socialist democracy as any Marxist would understand it.  They wish to preserve their autocratic rule and the privileges that flow from it.  The people have yet to play a role.  They have fought local battles over the environment, their villages and their jobs and wages.  But they have not fought for more democracy or economic power." Xi's taking full control of China's future and an article by the author of The Party: The Secret World of the Chinese Commun
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"Finance, in a certain sense, is there to keep people from becoming too comfortable, too secure. But, as you say, when you take away people’s comfort and security, you may not like the reaction you get." Disrupters
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"While countries like Zimbabwe, Malawi and El Salvador have recently banned child marriage, it remains legal in the US - and half of states have no set minimum age below which you cannot get married." (the BB website) Why? Because many Americans, and Westerners, are busy "liberating" Muslim women!
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"Anglo-Saxon anthropologists who with good reason translated moral idea into social fact, reserved ‘culture’ for primitive societies and ‘civilization’ for modern societies. So there is a good deal of  interference on the line and fog on the road. Let us try a clarification."   Civilisation, a Grammar
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The cause is almost entirely "human activities" after the industrial revolution . What are these human activities? Who carried out the industrial revolution? What type of economic system which is responsible for it? Are global corportaions, in collusion with governments, looking for higher profits responsible? Or, is it smoking cigarettes, farting, barbecuing, etc responsible? Impartiality of the BBC!
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This was said before the most violent era in modern history and before the greatest inventions. "What a chimera then is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feebla earthworm, repository of truth, sewer of uncertainty and error, the glory and the scum of the universe." — Blaise Pascal
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"Since Europeans didn’t always think of themselves as ‘white’, there is good reason to think that race is socially constructed, indeed arbitrary. If the idea of ‘white people’ (and thus every other ‘race’ as well) has a history – and a short one at that – then the concept itself is based less on any kind of biological reality than it is in the variable contingencies of social construction." How 'white people' were invented
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