Zilkens' News Blog

Zilkens' News Blog 39 2022

Voting is going out of fashion - as it is now in Italy, where just 64% of eligible voters went to the polls to exercise their democratic right (and, strictly speaking, their duty). The 36 % non-voters certainly have an opinion, only it won't matter in the next few years. Politicians usually think of their electoral chances and stare at poll numbers, and these are not necessarily driven by cultural and economic reason, but by reporting and its reflection in social media - the direct translation with social - in the sense of charitable, helpful, merciful - media leads into the woods. Algorithms control perception and reinforce calculated individual attitudes. You only get to read what you like anyway - this is also how buying behaviour is controlled. In this sense, these media are only anti-democracy and anti-social - in the sense of being directed against society. What does this awareness help? Little, because all companies today need a presence on precisely these platforms in order to be noticed - and whoever knows best how to control the algorithms has won.

Elections were also held in Tyrol and neither there nor in Italy does the green movement seem to be able to mobilise voters to any significant extent. Friday for Future is also such an occupation of concepts. Last Friday, a few thousand were again on the streets worldwide to demand the immediate phase-out of all fossil energies and nuclear power. Stupidly, wind and solar power also require steel and without coke and gas there is no such thing. Many press organs, including the public-legal ones, then spread the numbers of participants given by the organisers. The fact that the numbers given by the regulatory authorities are often less than half would give the movement the importance it actually has. With 10 billion people on the planet in the near future, implementing the demands of Friday for Future would lead to a hunger catastrophe that would drastically shrink the world's population. Things are not that simple after all - even if some sayings from the handbook for managers of all genders suggest it, such as: "make things simply simple". And presumably the next Italian government, which has yet to be formed, will find this out, too, in order to prove that it can last longer than the previous average of 1.5 years.

Today is the practice day of the Federal Association of German Galleries in Cologne. A programme with an immense variety of topics awaits the participants at the IHK in Cologne.

In Brussels, research is being conducted to find out whether museum visits can have a positive effect on anxiety neurosis and burn-out syndrome. Soon there will be museums on sick leave and financial aid from health insurance. In the context of the energy crisis (the resolution of the contradiction of we have a gas and not an electricity problem), museums also need more money for energy. Switching to geothermal energy could help, but it requires electricity and the price of electricity also depends on gas. It would be easier to align the price of electricity with the cheapest energy source - but that would be nuclear power, and in Germany that's something we're not even allowed to think about any more.

Galvano Fiamma could still achieve a certain fame: in 1340 he tried to write a "Cronica Universalis" and reported in it that Ethiopia already had an "embassy" in Genoa in 1315 (and thus 100 years before the previously known contacts) and that behind Iceland and Greenland lay a country inhabited by giants and now identified by researchers at the University of Milan as America. The knowledge would then have been in the world 150 years before Columbus. Only with the giants it was such a thing - or did forebodings of the world's policeman in the High Middle Ages already enter into it?

We wish you a week full of interesting questions and hopefully hopeful answers.

Your Stephan Zilkens and the team of Zilkens Fine Art Insurance Brokers in Cologne and Solothurn