Resource wants to buy a house

Every now and then there comes a time in the life of a resource to move to a bigger house. Generally this happens when the resource's family grows, usually with the birth of the first or second child.

Faced with the need to move resources start assesing their opportunities. Depending on their luck the real-estate market can be low or high, rarely do resources wait and expect a price fall. More than that there is usually a gap between what they want and what they can afford as resources tend to earn to little money and save very few to none.

Let's be honest here, each of us wants a nice house with large rooms, storage areas, a nice backyard to relax, parking space in a quiet area with good infrastructure, nice neighbours, good schools and kindergardens and ... wait a minute, all these come with additional cost. And when finally adding up expenses and looking into our wallets and accounts we are considerably short of money. We sigh and we hope for a market fall.

Happy New Year 2019 , what it brings in politics and economics.

Happy New Year 2019, may we have a better year than the last - but will we?

The beginning of the year brings a tense situation all over the world, with the US entering partial government shut-down due to the lack of funds (which they will resolve by borrowing another sum to their already enormous amount of debt) as well the Mexico border wall and trade war with China, with France facing another weekend of protests, the Yellow Jackets won't back down, with the EU presidency passed to Romania, the newest in the long list of European countries renouncing the liberal democracy (after Hungary and Poland), with Russia finalizing the Syrian war with a conclusive victory and focusing on pressing Ukraine further. Crimeea is already lost, Donetsk and Luhansk are basically lost too, will Mariupol follow and join the anti-Kiev insurgents?

Only time will tell and 2019 looks like an interesting year to say the least!

Macron's failure and the Yellow Vests revolution

It seems I was right and it wasn't even a long time to wait to for my prediction to be true. For several weekends in a row Paris as well as other big cities in France are in turmoil. Angry citizens rallied by the famous Yellow Jackets are protesting violently and demanding a real change.

I wrote when all naives were enthusiastic about Macron's elections victory that things weren't going to milk and honey for long. The French society has difficult problems that couldn't be solved just by talking gibberish, putting a big smile, posing as a cool guy and being funny. Truth is that is was easy to see the shallowness, populism and incompetence covered under the fancy suits. And now most of the French people seen it, they realized they were fooled and they aren't happy. While the big EU and liberal democracy supporters who crapped in their pants at Brexit or Trump's victory fooled themselves there is still support for their ideology with the poor and angry masses.

So they are prepared to show Macron how to do a proper En Marche and end the clown's career!

How soon will Macron fail to meet people's expectations?

It's no secret that nowadays president Emmanuel Macron won the French presidential elections decisively as well as his party did the same with the legislative elections. The question is why and how much hopes put the French people in his promises? 

You could always argue that people are fed up with the same old rusty politicians, with their old wooden tongue speech but is this a plausible reason to unconditially surrender to a new unexperimented politician?

Macron's policies had been targeted at pushing away conservative voters, but he has also unveiled proposals to please the left as well, such as his call for better pay for teachers working in poor, socially diverse areas. He also promised to reform the pensions and welfare, key areas where the stacks are definetely against him. 

We will soon see if the general enthusiam will melt down and if Macron will join the long line of politicians who promised big and delivered very small.

Trump, Comey and commiting to article 5 in NATO

Well who would have thought? A press conference held together by US President Donald Trump and his Romanian counterpart Klaus Werner Johannis (German guy right) offered the world some answers long awaited.

First the American journalists who cared little about the conference scope and ignored the Romanian president as if he was just a decorative statue in the background started asking Trump about James Comey, the FBI director being sacked following alleged discoveries of Russian involvement in the US presidential campaign.

Then a Romanian journalist asked the blunt question everyone back here in Europe is interested in, will the US back-up any NATO country in the event of a Russian attack? Praising Romania for taking his advice and increasing the GDP percentage for military to 2% Donald Trump assured the 5th article of NATO chart will be respected and the US and entire NATO are ready to go to war is such an attack happens.

London under terrorist siege

I was talking with a friend a couple of months ago and he was always giving me United Kingdom as example on how to combat terrorism in response to the attacks in France and Germany. There is a way he argued as long as you control the islamic propaganda, keep an eye on the mosques and evict the clerics that preach violent speeches.

I wasn't convinced and I replied that the islamic propaganda is not found only in the mosques, we live in the age of information and the young Muslims can view different internet pages, listen to recorded speeches from islamists all over the worlds, browse forums, etc. Evicting some clerics from the country is not a solution and don't stop young men and women search for material on Islamic State or other similar terrorist organizations. The problem is that these men an women, often at the second or even third generation feel unwelcomed in their countries. The different set of values, the different culture make them harder to integrate with the peers in their generation, more difficult to socialize and to be accepted. Thus resentment grows and looks for someone to blame. It's incredible how many Europeans fans these terrorist organization get to have from simply the inability of the Western society to integrate these youngsters and offer them better opportunities and ideals.

I didn't speak to my friend recently but I take it he has changed his mind.

US attack on Syria, Russia threatens

After playing the cat and mice game for a couple of years training and helping the anti al Assad "moderate rebels" US found itself in a tough spot, the Russian decisive intervention with ground troops, navy and aircrafts for the Syrian goverment. The long chain of following battles meant the same number of victories for al-Assad forces including the much discussed battle of Aleppo.

Currently the US backed "moderate rebels" are losing the war by a wide margin, their controlled territory shrinked considerably. So it made sense that their patrons, US, would look for a pretext to intervene and turn the tide or at least try to. This pretext was the possible use of chemical weapons by the government forces so it triggered a missile attack obliterating a Syrian airbase.

Of course Russia reacted strongly and condemned the attack, they don't like competition and al-Assad is to important to them as an ally to allow him deposed of power. Let's see the consequences...