Defend Socialist Land of Peace !

Hanguk Story has got the plot.

In his dream, an American fleet invades North Korea. The protagonist and his friends try to defend by firing artillery shells made of pencils, but the protagonist doesn't know how to use protractor to aim. Overwhelmed by the evil American fleet, he wakes up from the dream. He says something along the line of "I must study hard and pay attention in class so I can be a great soldier to fight against the Americans". The rest is math lessons.

Work hard, kid. Lil' Kim needs his hookers and smack.

Love for Sale

Austria, Belgium, the Czech republic, Greece, Italy and the UK made more nuanced statements but were broadly-speaking in the French camp. The UK said only that diplomats should study implications for regional stability before making the move.

EUobserver reports on the usual policy-by-scrum going on in EUtopia. It reads like the racing form.

While the method of dialog tends to make ones’ eyes glassy, you have to stay awake to notice that they’re talking about arms sales to China.

It reads rather typically of any sort of subject in the “political union”, and is largely undifferentiated from events: for one thing, China has been aggressive in the waters around her, ramping up the hostility to Vietnam and Taiwan, and sending smoke signals about war to the US.

France, the strongest pro-China advocate, said "the embargo is anachronistic and must go" and showed "zero flexibility" on asking Beijing to make reforms in return for lifting the embargo, arguing that "China would not accept human rights conditionality."

Which is to say that they found a way to rationalize their way around the “human rights policy” that they like to think makes them the only residents in heaven.

Wen arrived in London to meet his British counterpart David Cameron. At a joint press conference, Cameron cited late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's most famous quote - "It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches the mice" - to express his attitude on Britain's introduction of Chinese-made high-speed trains.

So life goes on in totally unlinked, dissociative fashion. Naturally, the Europeans will sell them weapons. It comes on the heels of the Chinese leadership touring Europe and lavishing them with bailout money and deposits to backstop their banks.

Wen began the first leg of his tour on June 24 in Budapest, the first visit to Hungary by a Chinese premier in 24 years. He signed a number of cooperative deals with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and announced that China was ready to purchase Hungarian government bonds and extend 1 billion euros (US$1.4 billion) in credit. The purchase of Hungarian treasury bonds was hailed by Orban as "historic help" for Hungary.

And vice versa, even at the cost of selling their only real ally and security guarantor up the river.

It calls for Soviet era sounding statements and declarations that sound as if they could be about “the thrilling tractor production quotas being not just met, but beaten!” and ‘new eras in international relations and world peace’:

"The wide range of topics up for discussion and the substantial achievements are all pioneering work in the history of Sino-German relations and Sino-EU relations," Wen said during a press conference with Merkel.

To “Save the Planet” You could also Eat your Young

Via Tim Blair, we find the bottom-of-the-barrel, desperate, throwing-spaghetti-at-the-walls sort of stuff that economically and technologically deaf eco-ravers resort to. Today some of them suggesting that we all do every winter what we would if one were trying to stave of hypothermia in a disaster or massive civic utility failure: sleep with our pets.

This isn’t great news for the tropical fish population. Bee-keepers, too, may be at a loss to make use of the directive.

Yet more Communist Gaiety

Watch you Spitzel, cowboy! It's another new high for European culture

Anniversary of an Apologist’s Birth

"When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.'"

- Joseph Hilaire Pierre Belloc,
Born this day in 1870

How’d That Work Out for Ya?

27 July 1961:

East Berlin to be Rebuilt Into Red Super-Metropolis

BERLIN (NANA) – East Germany plans to rebuild Communist East Berlin as the showcase capital of the German Communist state and an architectural counter-attraction to West Berlin.
Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, revealed that cornerstones for a complex of government buildings at Marx-Engels Square as a feature of signing ceremonies for a Soviet-East German peace treaty.

East Germany has conducted an architectural competition for the designing of the “ultra modern socialist metropolis.” Professor Max Hensermann, the architect in charge, says East Germany decided against imitating Moscow architecture.
“There are many forms of functional socialist architecture, and we will choose those forms best suited to East Berlin,” Henselmann said.

In 1953 East Germany began construction of the Stalin Allee, a gaudy boulevard designed as a propaganda façade for the rubble and ramshackle structures which make East Berlin and eyesore.
This avenue of “Moscow Modern” apartment buildings and luxury shops now stretches for nearly a mile along the pre-war Frankfurter Allee. It is to be extended to the Alexanderplatz.
But future new construction will deviate sharply from the Rococo and gingerbread of “Moscow Modern.” Henselmann indicated that the east Germans have decided on a modified Le Corbusier functional architecture with flowing lines.

The Marx-Engels Square, the pre-Communist Lustgarten, will house government offices, in effect replacing the pre-war Wilhelmstrasse and Leipzigerstrasse.
Foreign embassies will again be concentrated at the western end of Unter Den Linden, the famous Linden tree-lined avenue containing Humboldt (Berlin) University, the State Opera, and principal museums.
Since the war the Soviets have built a mammoth embassy near the former site of the U.S., British, and French embassies. The East German regime has now reserved a large tract in this area which will be subdivided and sold for embassy sites to countries recognizing East Germany.

COMMUNIST GAIETY

The opposite end of Unter Den Linden, bordering on the old Lustgarten, will be developed as East Berlin’s center of elegance. It will contain large department stores, cafes and restaurants, and even night clubs. Henselmann remarked, “who says there’s anything against gaiety in Communism?”

Freiedrichstrasse, pre-war Berlin’s amusement area, will retain the same character under the Communist reconstruction plans. A 200-bed hotel is to be constructed near the Friedrichstrasse railway station.

Hanselmann estimates that the major buildings in the program including Friedrichstrasse Hotel, will be completed by 1967. “The exact date depends upon the establishemtn of priorities for this program as compared with our general industrial development,” he explained.
“But we can promise this: By 1965 you will no longer recognize the city you see today.”

The Takers Eat the Makers

George Handerly’s comments on sovereign debt may be directed at Europe, but apply equally well to the United States:

Sovereign debt and the Euro. This chaos of the global economy is not caused by its participants’ inability to offer goods in a quality and for a price for which there is a demand. That (private) part of the economy that produces and consumes is in good shape. The tumor is located in the political direction of the economy. The crisis is one of confidence. No wonder. The Western pillars of the world economy have governments that are in debt because their clientism forces them to misspend the community’s funds. These indebted governments are run by leaders who, being blinded by their “eurocratic” doctrine, extend loans to broken systems. These national economies have no chance to climb back up on the greased flagpole on which they have slid down.

I would rather think it should be called political venality rather than clientism, but the point is clear. Decades of vote-buying by way of pet projects dressed up as social experimentation and intervention lead finally to the state destroying the private affairs of the governed and their ability to function, employ, and build.

Those who would impose just one more eenie-weeny unproductive burden on us don’t get it. The good that they see in the world as a gift they want to give themselves and others isn’t made by them.

This is said as I find myself dealing with a LEED consultant who know less about that unproductive burden than I do, but still feels compelled to “get something else out of the owner” for what he thinks to be the sake of the planet. Knowing this, I doubt this owner will ever build again.

Maybe he just Sees the Notion of a “Donation” Differently

See if you can find out what the political affiliation is of this politician accused of bunga-bunga with the 18 year old daughter of a campaign donor. He also has had quite a history, despite the social machine’s bogus rah-rah-ing him for being politically useful for his little more than his ethnicity, since there is no evidence of him ever having had any kind of platform outside of seeking earmarks.

Damn Those Presbyterians!

Remembering Past Hissy Fits

Remember those endless, repetitious, screamed-hoarse blubbering about the US not having a victory or a postwar plan in Iraq, when in fact they did? We were led to believe that lefties, should they be “forced” to fight a war, and it wouldn’t be “of choice” would at least get that part right.

Wars of choice, however, are fundamentally different. They are normally undertaken for reasons that do not involve obvious self-defense of the United States or an ally.

Fast forward to the truth. Libya is not a war “of choice”. Worse still, Europeans are trying to run it. There is no apparent plan to win, and postwar planning seems to be limited to “you’re on your own, kid - now cough up that light-sweet Brent grade crude”.

In theory, this would all have been worked out before NATO intervened, thus taking ownership of the outcome. And it's possible that someone, somewhere planned all this out. But, if they did, they've been awfully quiet about it.

Elsewhere: an excellent data source is found for the “dead hippy index”.

"German society is changing and it's not easy to be a naturist anymore," said Kurt Fischer, president of the German FKK association (DFK). There are some 500,000 registered nudists and a total of seven million Germans sunbathe naked regularly.

"But the numbers are unfortunately falling by about two percent each year," Fischer told a group of reporters in the Foreign Press Association (VAP) while sitting, fully clothed, at a beach bar in Berlin's government quarter. "Times are tough."

The main problem is the shrinking population, Fischer said.

Aside from a still fetid river cum canal, Berlin’s government district (as if that didn’t describe their whole society), is far enough away from a tropical beach (Club Med Libya, perchance?) to make this look about as silly as most impromptu press events in Germany.

Pix of the Near Distant Ago

SPON features a set of images of a disused Soviet military hospital in the Brandenburg town of Beelitz, a sanitarium in Oranienburg, and other abandoned structures in what was the DDR by Berlin photographer Axel Hansmann. Is it art or merely deliciously grim scenery?

No Surprise at all: Statists’ Personal Priorities Coming Before the Public Good

It’s that all-important quality of life thing that matters I guess. If you can count yourself among the elite.

economists, such as Commerzbank's Christoph Weil, do not rule out a spontaneous market event, such as one or two top private investors moving out of Ireland, Italy, Portugal or Spain and causing wider panic.

So I guess the solution (to whatever) needs to be more Europe not less Europe, but only when a power-grab is possible. Otherwise it’s all one big sunny “slow food” movement.

Amid a "clear risk" of potentially seismic events in the eurozone and the Arab world in the next six weeks, EU institutions will drop to staff levels of just 20 percent as officials go on holiday, limiting their capacity to react.

Unaware of the concept of irony, the piece goes on:

Amid the common perception that the EU sleeps in August, institutions will have four major crisis-monitoring centres running 24/7. The biggest one, the Joint Situation Centre, keeps half its staff in place during holidays.

...despite “the situation”.

Making that Mullet Pay Off

"I have been trying for ten years to get this classified as a handicap," Tullgren told The Local.

"I spoke to three psychologists and they finally agreed that I needed this to avoid being discriminated against."

Whenever you see news coming out of Sweden, why do feel compelled to ALWAYS ask "is this a joke"? It’s a stupid question, because it never is.

Sweden: Man gets sick benefits for heavy metal addiction

A Swedish heavy metal fan has had his musical preferences officially classified as a disability. The results of a psychological analysis enable the metal lover to supplement his income with state benefits.

So on the occasions where he DID show up to work, he employed psychiatry to try to compel his employer to listen to metal for what is likely a 6 hour a day job. This despite the fact that he was getting paid at all.

Eventually his last employer tired of his absences and Tullgren was left jobless and reliant on welfare handouts.

But his sessions with the occupational psychologists led to a solution of sorts: Tullgren signed a piece of paper on which his heavy metal lifestyle was classified as a disability, an assessment that entitles him to a wage supplement from the job centre.

"I signed a form saying: 'Roger feels compelled to show his heavy metal style. This puts him in a difficult situation on the labour market. Therefore he needs extra financial help'. So now I can turn up at a job interview dressed in my normal clothes and just hand the interviewers this piece of paper," he said.

Winners and enterpreneurs seem rather hard to come by after 6 decades of deprogramming people of common sense.

A Pause for Poesy

In fact it’s all about beef

Terribly upset.
It is my birthday today.
No one gave me beef.

Europe: A Paradise for Social Pyromaniacs

Of course no explanation is ever given to bombastic claims like this:

Lack of women in top jobs to cause 'problems' for EU economy

But the well subsidized crow seems to have no problem with threats:

The commissioner said that come March next year she will look to see whether companies have made a "clear, precise and measurable evolution" towards greater gender balance within their walls.

"If yes, there will be no need for European legislation. If no, we will have a problem with the internal market," said the commissioner explaining that major companies who work across the EU will be confronted with different national laws on women quotas.

The Luxembourgeoise, whose only real job outside of government was “journalism” while in various parliamentary posts went on to prattle on about ‘the boardroom’, as if that’s where the economy really was. Really, it’s the imagined prize of getting power quick that the boardroom obsession, the one that assumes that the internal operation of private entities are under the rule of the state.

The commissioner, who wants to boost female boardroom positions to 30 percent by 2015 and to 40 percent by 2020, said she is "completely supported" by internal market commissioner Michel Barnier.

Who is used in this context as if he was an advocate of getting the albatross off from around the neck of business. He isn’t. He’s a Commisariat type like Reding, indifferent about them or anyone else being generous with other people’s resources. They’d all join in to buy off some dickless votes anyway.

She is supported by the EU parliament, which earlier this month said Brussels should make such quotas mandatory. An EU law in an area dealing with employment and social policy is likely to be controversial among member states, however.

The threatening tone is borne out of disappointment at the public not doing what’s “being asked”. So it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy for Viviane’s pet issue of female cronyism that uses government as an enforcing thug.

Although Reding has been increasingly vocal about her campaign, to date only seven companies have signed up to the public pledge, up and running since March.

The Dark Art of Listening to the Airwaves: A Report

A number station of undetermined origin was heard 15 June 2011, 0135 UT on 6767 khz. 5 digit cifer was read in multiple languages by what sounded like a computer generated female voice.

It went off air at 0140.

The use of number stations is an ‘old school’ method of communicating with your spies from the home land to the nation where they are doing their surveillance without being detected. The transmission times are short, giving a counterespionage operation little time to determine the location of the transmitting antenna. It is likely that the phasing of the sound of the signal, or a heterodyne that might be heard on top of the signal might offer clues.

The strength of the signal and the use of this reliable but primitive method of messaging suggest that it likely originated in Cuba, Venezuela, or transmitted from sea.

And WHO makes all of those Solar Panels ?

They would sell their Grandmother for a nickel.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has advised the Greeks to invest more in solar energy to overcome the crisis.

FAZ called him „Sonnyboy Schäuble” for this. I say start singing “Danny Boy” for a continent if they’re going to keep attitudes like that.

Need Some Comic Relief ?

Just wait for some Russian scientist (seeking attention) to open his mouth.

The Moral Superiority of Communism

Bored, impoverished, and often malnourished NorK troops are waxing their dolphins in their spare time.

An officer was arrested for letting soldiers watch South Korean films or soap operas that he had recorded at home, the source said.

And a group of officers and soldiers at a frontline Army unit were caught watching South Korean TV and listening to South Korean radio, while an officer was arrested for listening to South Korean radio broadcasts and explaining Seoul's North Korea policy and democratic elections to his colleagues.

To boot, necessity remains the mother of invention.

Another officer was arrested for making a porn film himself. A North Korean source in China's northeast said, "Rumor has it that an officer in the border region was arrested for selling porn films that he had made himself on the Chinese side of the border with North Korean women in their 20s and 30s after watching Western porn movies."

Western corruption? Likely, but no worse than the natively derived North Korean phenomenon of government officials loan sharking.

He was apparently executed.

Finally, Democrats in Southern California will have found a “martyr” for the world view.

What do they have in common? Vanity for one, not to mention the vicious threat of merely looking a certain way.

Let Me Guess... It’s to be called “Unexpected” News

Ineffectual summiteering no longer looks like a plausible way to calm the markets. As if it ever was.

Top eurozone officials meet amid alarm on Italy

The reality of economic integration without political integration will keep the summiteers on the road forever, or at least as long as old Dead Heads.

US Treasurys Receive Safety Bids As Spain, Italy Yields Soar

I suppose the Ratings Agencies which had nothing to do with the Italians’ or Spaniards’ borrowing habits are behind this somehow!

Heading into a meeting of euro-zone finance ministers to discuss the region's debt crisis, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble rejected talk of doubling the size of the European Union's temporary bailout fund. Reports also emerged that the bloc's officials may be warming up to the idea of allowing a partial Greek bailout.

Fresh fears about a credit contagion roiled financial markets in the periphery, sinking stocks and inflating costs to insure those nations against default. Ireland's five-year credit default swap hit an all-time high of 1,020 basis points Monday, according to Markit, while regulators in Italy are attempting to curb short-selling in the nation's stock market.

Paging Bashar Assad!

Whose very nom de guerre (Bashar = messenger of good news, al Assad = “the lion”) has the cast of infantile fakery that sneers at the intelligence of the people. Because they’re stupid and need bold leadership that they can easily understand?

No. They need to dispose of the Socialist hereditary dictatorship that has led them into one war after another, suppressed them politically, and given them decades of isolationism, state economic control, and periodic bloodbathes. So it’s time to go. Alas, but where?

That’s a fine question. I’m so glad you asked.

What do all the places that an ousted dictator can flee to have in common?

The places?
Belarus
Venezuela
Cuba
Uruguay

The habitual rhetoric that they commonly share?

1. A hatred of the United States, individual freedom,
2. Anything that doesn’t fit the Marxist-Leninist Revolutionary recipe for taking power.
3. Leftism

The balance of the world’s anti-Americans are in good company.

To Call it Hyperbole Doesn’t Even BEGIN to Describe it

Including invoking the Gods in a way that a society where 4% of the population attends religious services can:

the left-liberal daily Süddeutsche Zeitung urges: "God must be a US rating agency. There's no other explanation for why seventeen democratically elected governments bite their nails in fear when one of these agencies says what it thinks about Greece. ... The American God named Standard & Poor's has let the Europeans know that it does not want banks, insurance companies and pension funds involved in the Greek bailout.

There has been much chatter about financial ratings agency. The most offensive parts of that being a) that the three big ones are American, and b) that they can’t be manipulated to tell the stories that the Governments selling their bonds want them to.

Counterproposals have included “starting a European ratings agency”, which was shot down on both ends: first, there is a fear that they will tell the truth and thus be no different than Moody’s Fitch, and S&P. From the other end, is the fear that it won’t be taken seriously because all it will do is provide a false portrait of the assets rated.

Apparently, investors should not be warned of anything, ever, if a government is peddling bonds it might never pay out on. Don’t these crypto-commie clowns insist on investors somehow magically being protected from the forces of the market?

This is what some Europeans want the ratings agencies to say at all times about the bonds European governments are selling:



Their sophistication is so great, it’s largely unintelligible to the rest of us:

The Greek austerity package, is the voluntary participation bank also. Since transmits the rating agency Standard & Poor’s between them and threatening to “D” rating for Athens. This cross-shot but could backfire -. When making policy and ECB Ernst

Got that? Think what you will, but DON’T you DARE RATE IT!

The head of the Hamburg World Economic Institute (HWWI), Thomas Straubhaar, said the “Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung”, the rating agencies played a “very dubious role”. The policy had gone into the hands of a few monopoly pricing services. It is necessary to limit the power of rating agencies and to return to different standards of evaluation.

So, what exactly does that mean? Selectively limiting their speech rights and tell them that they can only criticize the coldness of your headquarters building? Rate the coffee down the street from the place? Investors will LOVE that! – especially those retirees who want to put their money into something SAFE like a Greek 10 year bond!

They might actually take it seriously enough to figure out that their motives: which is to tell you something other than what the market will. This will guarantee that they won’t raise anything from those bond auctions.

Further with the Vogon poetry:

same time, the ECB wants to reject Greek government bonds, according to “Financial Times” only when all three major rating agencies to determine a default. Accordingly, the ECB will be based on the highest possible credit rating, will receive papers from the Greek S & P, Fitch or Moody’s.

While at least one of the three agencies is no payment default (default) stated, Greek bonds could then be accepted by the ECB repo transactions as collateral.

Got that?

Is it 1937 Yet?

Ah, the immune-biology of those wizened “global citizen” types:

The ritual might have made the global citizen crisis resistant. Numbed by incessant blows, it is understandable if the reaction begins with “I do not care” and ends with “I am no Greek”. In this case, not paying attention while assuming that the distance confers protection, does not amount to immunity even if the matter is shut out. To get typhus you do not need to be aware of infectious diseases.

Indeed. Which is why Europe has to stop pretending Greece is far away, and socialize enough of their public debts in order to move on. In terms of monetism, economy, and trade, Europe is functionally integrated and acts as a sovereign state would. The idea that it can ignore some part of itself, say, a foot, as though it was someone else’s foot, is delusional.

The idea of “booting poor Europe out” of the Euro is equally silly, as it would still leave those debts held by the part of Europe deemed sane to go unpaid, and with no way to pay the amounts expected. This would be true if they were lending money to Paraguay or Zimbabwe, or anyone else.

Love for Sale

Van Rompuy calls the EU a 'corner of paradise':

EU Council chief Van Rompuy rejected the idea the EU is in crisis in a speech in Brussels Wednesday. Commenting on living standards and democratic values he said: "We are living in ... a little corner of paradise." He added if the EU was a musical piece its "basso continuo" would be "prosperity."

This might be what he means:

Zooming in on Cyprus, the survey said sex clubs who use trafficked women from post-Soviet countries, Latin America and Asia and are frequented mostly by Cypriot and Greek men pose a problem.

They should stick to their unnatural affection for the village goat. Much as one could say that the drug trafficking problems that there are in the Americas stem from cash-rich Americans needing nose candy, Europeans apparently are addicted to cheap poontang that doesn’t require any emotional attachment.

The report, out on Monday (28 June), said "the absolute number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is very significant or is significantly increasing" in the three EU members, but governments are guilty of "failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts" to combat the problem.

As is the case with anyplace called a 'corner of paradise':

The EU group-of-nine hold similar or lower ratings than many developing countries such as Guatemala or Malawi.

It’s that concern for humanity that really makes them into an export, I guess.

In Estonia, rural Estonian women are trafficked to sex clubs in Tallinn as well as in Finland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy. But the government spent just a little over €100,000 in total on victim assistance in 2010.

So much for bragging about the art of seduction. They may be eager to prove that they aren’t all pillow biters, but unless they get rid of the dyspeptic personae I suppose they’re stuck paying for it. Of course that isn’t the only thing that they’re beavering about to find inconclusive.

Serbia will continue making efforts for the UN Security Council to adopt a draft resolution on an independent investigation into Kosovo human organ trafficking.

Goodbye, Green Fetish

Sorry, your delusions just cost too much.

EU carbon prices have slumped 15% in one week, as a slew of bearish news took its toll on the markets. “It’s just been carnage these last few days,” said a trader at an investment bank in London. “There has been a huge amount of liquidation from funds, banks and utilities.” [said] Mark Lewis, a Paris-based analyst at Deutsche Bank

Further to that new found wisdom:

Britain will have to abandon its carbon emission reduction targets if the public continues to resist higher bills, according to the chief executive of the British Gas owner, Centrica.

What do you do with a Failed State?

In the NYT:

Europe’s unraveling is also a problem for Americans. A fracturing of the euro could drag down the global economy. A breakdown of NATO would mean the United States would have to bear an even bigger security burden. More than a year into their debt crisis, major European leaders are still unable to make the necessary tough decisions. The constructive way out would be to restructure excessive debt, recapitalize affected banks and relax austerity enough to let debtor countries — Greece, Ireland and Portugal are most at risk — grow their way back to solvency. No one country could afford to finance such a solution, but Europe as a whole could.

As it should. Having handed the Greeks Versailles-treaty-like terms, they will likely default unilaterally anyway, and if not, exhibit what I like to call "powerful weakness", wherein every time they suggest default, the public and private financial institutions of the EU get a chill in their neck. Politically, they could behave like Hamas.

Look at this shambles for what it is: a river in Egypt. The EU is effectively one sovereign state when it comes to finance, markets, and economy. Member state nationals can point to one another and tell them to "take one for the team", but what they need to do is print some Euros in a classic devaluation move, and use them to dissolve debts that are at a risk of default internal and international.

Greece then goes into financial receivership. Italy and Portugal might have to join them there too, but if you're a bum and owe people money, then too bad. The intervening years will turn these places into a great investment once prices align with value.

Remember that Greece has in its high-borrowing years used it to show a per-capita GDP figure as high as Germany, but with an economy akin to Bulgaria whose GDP/capita is a third of Germany. The borrowing and sprinkling of this moolah on the 'starving proletariat' is what did this. They need to own up to that by not doing it again, but "demanding reparations" will not work for them.

Consider for a moment the postwar German "Wirtschaftswunder". It is a direct result of the US dissolving their past debts, and was willfully done to restore their economy and feed people. Can these people who tell us that they are mature students of history actually take a lesson from their own history in this regard? Pshyeah right! They won’t, but the markets will.

Siemens' stock fell 4% this past week on the entirely founded suspicion that things will not be wonderful in approximately 90-120 days when the world as a whole stops buying their goods all at once, and the reparations for Greek government, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese borrowing are considered.

Siemens is one of the bellwethers of the northern European economy, just as Kimberly-Clark is a bellwether of what the South American economy will do, and as the EUR-USD exchange rate almost always foreshadows what the S&P 500 will do. Things could certainly be looking better, and they may be trying to price in the stagnation that austerity and debt freezes in a number of European states will cost.

Nonetheless, the German financial entities will themselves do well by the implementation of this Versaiiles treaty in reverse. They will borrow from the Bundes-Godhead-dudes at about 3%, and lend to Greece at the bargain-basement rates of about 5%. Cha-ching, for them. Money for nothing, chicks for free.

That does not mean it will have any effect on a European economic contraction. In fact it might create stagnation where there isn't now. It's a disincentive to lend businesses operating capital, and to individuals for mortgages.

The same dynamic has been going on in the US to bolster the balance sheets of the banks when they were at risk of failure from 2008 onward. It resulted in them not lending money to people and businesses because it was riskier and less profitable than the return on buying government bonds with money borrowed from the Fed and near-zero interest rates.

Ultimately, this is also a socialization of cost associated with the effort. So the talk of “making Greece pay” and “not hurting the taxpayer” are mere distractions. The only way out is to eat the cost, and pass out free haircuts to all, either though default agreements where partial repayments are accepted, and/or a currency devaluation takes place.

Mirroring the Arrogance of Empire

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

The EU has given the normally onanistic Architects and their would-be Medicis-with-tax-monies the chance to embarrass humanity. Not unlike previous edifices we have covered here, we find the "Europa building" championed by Herman Van Rompuy.

Kranmer has baptized it the EUterus. I would call it rather more insular than transparent or open. It’s jug-like form is a perfect place to hide, protected further still by the rectilinear and unforgiving nature of the cube it inhabits, representative of the laws of revenue absorption.



A few brave citizens should likely try to cling to its’ walls to function as an IUD. A continent that has effectively stopped reproducing should be cool with that.

Maybe the Alarmists can Declare them Dead

Originating in some UN member-funded echo chamber plucking academic “reseach” out of the thin wind of whatever appeals to the committee, Le Monde Diplomatique published a map to back up the theory that by 2010, there would be 50 million “climate refugees”. Again, plucked out of the thin wind. Not so strangely, especially as it goes with ideas that appeal to the most apocalyptically obsessed elite in human history, the opposite is the case:

"… a very cursory look at the first available evidence seems to show that the places identified by the UNEP as most at risk of having climate refugees are not only not losing people, they are actually among the fastest growing regions in the world."

I know it’s hardly a surprise to our readers, but it helps ground the daily grind of propaganda about what someone-who-built-a-model-based-on-someone’s-study, which never stops coming.

Some day it will be seen as an age of hysteria which is assumed to have been true of the entire population of the western world, much as a mere mention of the turn of the first millennium Anno Domini provokes immediate images of pilgrims immolating themselves before the world ends. As if humanity could have survived it.

The greenies would leave our historical legacy as that of a bunchy of idiots as helpless and confused as our environmental caste.

The New York Times vs. the People

Food for thought for Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin:

“First they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fight you, then you win.”

- Gandhi

The Complex

Terrorism as popularly seen from the perspective of the German political complex is proving to be rather absurd. On the same day that the U.S. Government is asking for the extradition of a Bosnian raised in Germany who killed two U.S. troops at Frankfurt Airport, the German legal system (which is entitled to keep people in prison beyond their prison term for preventative purposes,) will be releasing another member of the Baader-Meinhof gang who was convicted of murder.

The delusional RAF terrorists — also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang — sought to abolish capitalism and crush American imperialism To this day, segments of Germany society continue to romanticize the anti-American terrorists as a kind of contemporary German version of the Bonnie and Clyde gang.

Writes Benjamin Weinthal in National Review’s The Corner.

The extradition of Arid Uka will require that diplomat channels be used. Germans will tell themselves that they need to please those unreasonable Americans as usual.

The flippancy is nothing new. To not ask for Uka’s extradition is to leave him to the whims of the German propensity to set aside right and wrong in favor of worrying about any bug that gets dropped into their ear. Uka the victim. Uka the misguided youth. Uka the cause of the Rote Morgen Junge Welt types.

During the shooting spree, in which Uka wounded two additional servicemen, he shouted “Allahu akbar!” (Arabic for “God is great”).

One need not wonder atheists and Christianity haters will not see anything they don’t like in this, because their programming is complete.

While a search for his name presently yields nothing, you just wait. The object of irrational hatred of someone else’s object of irrational hatred is their friend, even if their new-found friend is killing in the name of God.

It all looks like trutherism-lite. Any new thing that will feed the same elation will do.