No doubt these bumper stickers appearing in Brussels are merely another consequence of extremerightwingextremists spreading evil. No good little Euro citizen would do this. And anyway, it’s America’s fault, whatcha wanna bet?Or maybe Breivik finally sent mind-meld messages from his jail cell to all those followers he's supposed to have, and they have begun to move in goosestep to his commands. Well if that were really the case it would merely demonstrate the advantages of capital punishment for all terrorists.
Whateverrrr….
Union bureaucrat jobs in Brussels are starting to look maybe a tad dangerous. Who knew the perils of paper-pushing? Maybe they’ll be issued per diem Hazardous Duty Pay for their labors. I'm sure they already get free band aids for paper cuts.
From The Telegraph:
Staff unions have written to Herman Van Rompuy, the EU president, after stickers of a hanging official were found with the slogan “Eurocrate, sers-toi de ta cravate” or “Eurocrat, make use of your tie”.Got that? Anarchists AND populists! I thought only the extremerightwing extremists talked like this: “hasty, ill-informed generalisations which can later be easily exploited by populist associations.
Cars with special licence plates for EU officials have been targeted and civil servants commuting to work in Schuman euro quarter of Brussels have been harassed by activists, thought to be anarchists.
“It is now obvious that the next steps will be physical injuries,” said the letter from Union Syndicale, Federation of European Civil Servants and Renouveau & Démocratie.
The EU officials have blamed negotiations demanded by national governments to cut some of their legendary perks for “hasty, ill-informed generalisations which can later be easily exploited by populist associations whose only motive is to make the European civil service a scapegoat”.
Yadda, yadda, and so forth.
Well, how about some “deliberative, well-formed specifics” -- which can be used with great difficulty since they'll arrest you if they find you pasting anything reeking of rightness and probity on streetlamps. In Eurocratese, “populist” = “fascist”, just as it does here among the Left. This kind of thinking is termed solidarity. Nice word, that solidarity thing. Has the tinkling sound of bricks through plate glass, dosen't it? That's straight from the Tea Party Handbook.
This would almost be amusing if it weren’t for the increasing suicides in Greece. Don't assign those events any cynical “they deserved it”. Not on this blog. Far too many Americans in the Depression killed themselves due to financial despair. Here’s how it went for our great-grandparents then and goes now for the PIIGS:
Here's the 1930's version:
- First they lost their jobs.
- Then they lost their homes.
- Then the money ran out.
- Then the government promises ran out.
- Only then did those pre World War II “bums” take to riding the rails and begging from town to town.
Any American who thinks we’re not headed down this Lemming Lane doesn’t know or understand economic history. Keynesian economics are a version of The Flat Earth Society and as they pontificate they continue to keep pushing us off the edge.
Basta!
12 comments:
What I really want to know is when we will finally be able to serve justice upon these national traitors who are in the process of permanently destroying the nation states of Europe. The sooner this whole monstrosity collapses the sooner we can start restoring sanity in the West.
I can't tell you WHEN, but I know THIS for sure: We're going to need a LOT of rope!
People who didn't live through this era really don't get it(my parents did however), it's just a abstraction to them. At the height of the Depression Communism was seen as a viable alternative to Capitalism which had discredited itself during this time.
Then you had people like Sen. Huey Long who took advantage of the GD and started a populist movement in Louisiana that scared the living daylights out of the ruling plutocrats in D.C. So much so that it forced FDR to enact a series of public work/aid programs(he got the idea from Long) to take masses of unemployment men off the streets.
Think about it, millions of angry, unemployed men with nothing to lose with zero job prospects pretty much equals a revolutionary time bomb. FDR and his people knew it.
Germany wasn't so lucky as to institute some sort of social safety net and they got Hitler instead.
As for government take over, that's a laugh. Look who runs the Treasury and Federal Reserve(the most important parts of the government) - a bunch of Wall Street executives from Goldman Sachs. Look who gets the bulk of government handouts - big business. Look how John Corzine could steal a billion dollars from investors, destroy a investment firm and get a job with the Democratic. This is no government takeover.
Look how the Feds keep our borders open to ensure a plentiful supply of cheap labor for big business.
Bottom line: our entire political class is nothing more than walking slot machines. You stuff them with money and out comes the desired legislation.
Its called genocide and its going to be answered for.
See 'Follow the white rabbit' for some valuable discussion on the
issue. FTWR
My grandpa rode the freight trains, but not to beg. He was a coal miner and needed to get to the next mine.
Yes, It's rather annoying to read the mantra, "it's all the Greeks' fault", the charge that they are somehow collectively responsible for the current rolling crisis is tendentious nonsense.
As usual, in depressions, members of the middle class will experience the most drastic declines in their fortunes. The plutocrats will be forced to survive on their last $100 million but there will be plenty of real estate bargains on the market, so they will do quite well.
Old Man
Hitler was Germany's socialist ala public works jobs FDR.
EV
"The plutocrats will be forced to survive on their last $100 million but there will be plenty of real estate bargains on the market, so they will do quite well."
If their bank doesn't go broke on them leaving them 100 million IOU-nothings. Many of Prechter's 100 predictions from October 2003 are now coming about. Note #58 - times like these are called depressions for multiple reasons, not just depressed economic activity. I suppose #69 is still to come.
7. More banks will fail than failed in the 1930s.
54. The U.S. space program will be shut down.
55. Conspiracy theories will become more plentiful, and more people will believe them.
56. People will rate “the future” as increasingly less promising.
57. Race relations will become strained and violent.
58. The suicide rate will go up.
59. Mob violence will break out more often than it did from 1982 to 2000.
60. Mass demonstrations, expressing anger with some social situation, will occur.
69. Anti-gay, racist and xenophobic entities will organize and openly pursue their agendas.
For those of you not familiar with Robert Prechter, mentioned above, and the Elliott Wave, here's his wiki:
Robert Prechter
:
Much of Prechter's career as a publisher includes his efforts to re-introduce R.N. Elliott's wave principle to investors. He compiled and republished all of Elliott's available writings, including the 1938 "Wave Principle," and the "Interpretive" and "Forecast" letters (1938–1946). Prechter also published a brief biography of Elliott and the collected Elliott wave writings of the few technicians who practiced wave analysis in the 1950s and 1960s...
Still, not all the popular exposure to Elliott wave analysis was the result of Prechter's deliberate efforts. In the few years before and after 1987, media coverage inflated Prechter's "guru" status to extremes, including the assertion that his forecasts could single-handedly "cause" the stock market to rise or fall[14] (a proponent of technical analysis, Prechter considered this absurd). In the months after Black Monday in October 1987, subscriptions to Prechter's Elliott Wave Theorist surged to some 20,000. That number declined in the early 1990s (as did the subscription levels of most other financial publishers), though "Prechter has done more to popularize and spread Elliott's philosophy than anyone else."...
[Oopsie! Did they say Black Monday?? Could have been Red Monday I suppose...much personal wealth was annihilated.]
The wiki continues--
In 1979, Prechter postulated that social mood drives financial, macroeconomic and political behavior, in contrast to the conventional notion that such events drive social mood. His description of social mood as the driver of cultural trends reached a national audience in a 1985 cover article in Barron's. Prechter coined the term "socionomics" and in 1999 published an exposition of socionomic theory, The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior. In 2003 he published an anthology of empirical work in the field, Pioneering Studies in Socionomics.
Since then, the counter-intuitive premise of the socionomic hypothesis—that social mood drives the character of social events—has gained attention in academic journals, books, the popular press, at universities and academic conferences and in research funded by the National Science Foundation.
If the subject is of interest, there are many citations to follow in that wiki. I'm not familiar with the 100 Predictions, though. Perhaps Robert can leave a link.
I don't mean to be a wet blanket, but I'll be the first here to say - elliot waves are absolute bovine excrement. They rely on extreme subjectivity and while the social ideas behind them are fairly rational, they don't always play out. Watch a 1 day stock chart - where does one wave begin and the other stop? Which wave is 1, 2,...whatever labels they use these days.
That said, as much as I'd like to believe those predictions I take any with a grain of salt. When it gets here it gets here and I will simply prepare myself while I have the chance. I would suggest the same to others - don't waste your time staring into the crystal ball trying to predict the future. It is impossible.
Gladly. Here is a link to the first third of Prechter's 100 predictions made in October 2003, which he expected to be fulfilled within the following 15 years. It also contains links to the 2nd and 3rd parts. Note also the chart up front of positive mood expressions and negative mood expressions. We should expect to see more of the negative mood expressions and less of the positive mood expressions for the next few years, estimated to bottom around 2016.
Prechter's 100 Predictions
I agree that most 'expert' predictions are usually way off the mark (refer "Future Babble by Dan Gardner). When I went back to Business School in the 1990s "Japan as the world's #1 economy" was the experts' forecast consensus, not China.
However, some forecasters, sometimes, make accurate predictions.
@ Robert,
Interesting, #55 and #69 are potentially very potent combinations.
The major difference today is the relative affluence of the Middle Class in the West and the influence of the welfare state compared to 80 years ago. Contemporary generations have so much more to lose materially and, I'm sure, a greater sense of entitlement compared with the 1920s and 30s. They won't take the loss of an affluent lifestyle as stoically as earlier generations.
Old Man
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