[Blog] Some minor blog news, outlook

.

I moved some gadgets from the left side to the bottom and added a couple more as an experiment.

A "popular posts" list was added to the left side, but it's badly skewed by several posts which had many visitors due to having been linked on much-visited websites (gun drilling etc.) and others get a lot of random visits from google (Scaevola, for example). I like a mere two blog posts from this list much, and the list will thus go away after a while. My recommendation is rather the "Selection" label.

About page views et cetera; the slump from late summer and early fall is over. Weekly and monthly figures are back to normal. Maybe the slump was a delayed reaction to slow posting in spring and early summer.

The "Search the blog" gadget stopped working in my browser months away. Tell me if it ceased to work for you as well, please (comments).

Medium term: My summer calendar is likely going to be filled to the max, so writing may be reduced a lot after May.

Outlook for the greater environment:

It feels to me as if we entered a new decade. We in the Western World are leaving some 2000's follies behind us and finally pay less attention to their promoters. There's no real roll-back on the damage done, though. 

In global affairs, I expect China to lose some of our attention and India to gain some more of our attention soon. China's economy is in an investment bubble and much of its economic activity is paid for with mere hope (in success or based on promises, such as promises to pay back loans), and much of this hope will be bust sooner or later. This may reduce the scope and relevance of the Chinese military build-up, but that's not really predictable, of course.

The U.S. economy is going to suffer some more from inadequate investment, and they need to come to grips with the fact that their level of consumption isn't sustainable as long as they combine a trade balance deficit with insufficient capital investment. This is going to look ugly for years to come. Their typical "every decade" financial sector crisis is soon due anyway.

Europe is going to continue to suffer from its inability to understand that correcting European unifications missteps by making a step backwards is not going to lead to World War 4. Also, a lack of unity, sustained attention and interest on our part gives Moscow an advantage in the question of Ukraine's alignment.

I don't expect the Sudanese solution (splitting up multi-ethnic states along ethnic lines) to be used much more often any time soon. It wouldn't help in regard to the Ukraine anyway, as the areas most close to Moscow have a Russian minority, so Russia is not going to like the idea of a breakaway Ukraine in the EU anyway.

Multi-ethnic states and state borders dividing tribes and other ethnicities as well as overlapping clan structures are bound to guarantee lots of "small"  (non-industrialized) wars in the future, and these may last long because of safe havens (minority fighters enjoying support from their tribe in a neighbouring state) and poorly guarded borders. That's not our business, though.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

P.S.: I'm sorry that his weblog has so many tracking services integrated in this Blogger-based weblog. The majority appear to be out of my control, though I'm responsible for integrating Statcounter and Flag Counter here.

edit: "Popular posts" list removed already.

edit 2: I get a feeling that Statcounter and Flag Counter are becoming quite useless. Blogger's own statistics show much more visitors, so it's reasonable to believe that Statcounter and Flag Counter's statistics are much-reduced because of all the browser plug-ins people use to suppress tracing software, advertisements and so on. Assuming this, one could easily conclude that Defence and Freedom has never actually lost popularity.

.