Starve the Beast

It’s actually rather hard to find out who “the people” are:

One of the paradoxes of the French industrial relations system is that despite its low rate of unionisation, close to 8 per cent, it has a very high rate of collective bargaining coverage, close to 98 per cent. There are two major reasons for this: the extension of collective bargaining agreements by the Ministry of Labour and the legal form of union recognition according to which each of the five confederations CGT, FO, CFDT, CFTC and CGC were recognised by the government in 1966 as ‘representative’ at the national level and were therefore entitled to sign collective agreements at any level. Union pluralism has increased since, with the appearance of new confederations of ‘autonomous’ unions, namely UNSA and Solidaires.

Got it? By way of the state, designating an minute elite that represent 8% of the employed, Government is used as a tool to multiply that power to impose their rules not just on 98% of the employed who have no way to get in on that conversation, but the rest of society.

Europeans call this majority rule representing the united masses, somehow imagining the fate of the characters in Germinal. This “minority as majority,” something the radical clique who have coopted the Democratic Party in the us can’t wait to foist on what little healthy parts there are of the US economy.

Legislation adopted in 2008 introduced new criteria for determining whether a union is representative and therefore allowed to participate in collective bargaining at national, industry and company level. The new law requires a union to win at least 10 per cent of the votes at the workplace level, 8 per cent of the votes at industry level and 8 per cent of votes at national ‘inter-professional’ level to be considered representative. The new legislation will only come fully into effect at national and industry level in 2013.

Rules, rules, rules. In fact it’s a coil that wants rule over others. The point of “controversy” is that the lay will require 30% affirmation to have a mandate over 100% of the workers. And the “organization,” that selected sliver representing 8% of those employed by the private sector, still gets a right of refusal over a rebellion among the 49% of that 8%

In order to be valid, collective bargaining agreements at industry level currently need to be unopposed from a majority of representative union organisation. From 2013, it will only be valid if it has been signed by unions with at least a 30 per cent support in the industry, based on works council and similar elections, and if it is not opposed by unions with majority (more than 50 per cent) support. These rules have already started taking effect at the company level where elections under the new rules have taken place.

As for now, they’ll find a way to live off of the carrion of free market invention, but how long could that possibly last?

Why is it that Leftists think that Government should be in the Venture Capital Business?

If business is challenging when entrepreneurs make decisions for sound business reasons, it’s doomed when politicians become involved, because they make decisions for political reasons. Politicians like to pay off big campaign contributors by steering government contracts their way, regardless of how dubious the campaign contributors might be as business executives.

For one thing, they are sad attempts to prove their bad economic theories, for another:

politicians expect that those who receive government funding will help their re-election campaigns. No surprise that many businesses have chief executives best known for their ability to find a place at the public trough, rather than boosting sales in free markets.

Government attempts to pick winners are most likely to increase the amount of money lost betting on losers. This is because with the power to tax, subsidize and mandate, politicians are able to pour money into unprofitable projects that private investors would never touch voluntarily.

Very simply, to quote Iowahawk (after a fashion,) if you don’t want to be drugged and forcibly sodimized in the van, don’t take the candy.

True, in a “Aren’t I Just so Witty Sort of Way

“A politician is someone who gets in front of a mob and tries to call it a parade.”

- unknown

Leadership is Lacking

The Europe needs to get some head:

The latest summit in Brussels marked a turning point in the euro crisis that has been raging for two years now. For the first time, the denial of Europe’s leaders about the true gravity of the situation seems to finally be lifting.

That’s a strange sort of solace to take. What they have done is wait too long for too long.

Much like their vaunted celebration of their unity, one-ness, etcetera, born largely out of the fact that it only took a millennium of murdering on another to get there, the idea that they would call this week’s events a breakthrough is somewhere between bizarre and a sad attempt at positive spin.

I mean, try to find the rah-rah, we are one unity in this:

The report of “Troika” inspectors from the International Monetary Fund, the EU Commission, and the European Central Bank reads like a horror story. It also calls into question all of the previous attempts to rescue the euro.

It makes one sentimental for endless general strikes the good old days of Italian governments lasting about 4 months. Oh. Wait a minute.



Still worried about revanchist “each man for himself” nationalism, are we?

The Jabbering Idiots Have an Answer to your Question on Values

“Yes, but what is a European?”

A student asked Gareth Harding, a freelance journalist (and journo-publicist for hire) based in Brussels. He replied:

And yet I found myself stuttering and stammering as I searched for an answer. I waffled for a bit about European values – freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law – but realized any American or Australian could also lay claim to these values.

In the end I settled on a statement of the blindingly obvious. “A European is someone who lives in Europe.”

I didn’t convince myself, let alone the class. I left utterly dejected and deep in thought.

Well the answer is clear. You see it now in plain view in any image of the rioting hooded masses or the needy, long-screwed-over pot-bangers. The bickering masses causing, when otherwise not wondering why leaders are putting off disastrously big issues until the last possible moment. Heads of state making the ritual of sumiteering and negotiating the height of their leadership itself.

A people deserve the leaders they elect, so I think we can appoint “the social thing” that they laud far and wide as a mark of neo-everything-ism. Today we see it, with all of its chaotic pointlessness acting out in a bloodless form of natural European interaction.

The more I mulled the question over the more I came to the conclusion that after over half a century of European integration and over 200,000 pages of EU laws, we still have little idea what Europe is, what it stands for, what binds its people together and where it is going?

Until recently these could have been dismissed as existential questions – of interest only to policy wonks, Economist readers and Brussels eurocrats.

Then came Europe’s most profound economic crisis since the 1930s. Like the United States Europe is in the midst of a deep depression. Unemployment is high, growth low, banks are collapsing and indebted governments are running out of money. Some countries, like Greece, Ireland, Portugal and possibly Britain, Spain and Italy, face the prospect of a generation of penury.

He cites a moment from 2004, which itself came too late after much delay, about the very same question, and it makes one ask: is European civilization just a cozy human warehouse with artifacts, traditions that no-one practices, and beliefs that people ignore?

Those who argue for an ever wider union – or even an even deeper one – often fall-back on the argument of common European values in an effort to prove that Europeans share a set of immutable ideals that bind them together. Yet they are often sketchy as to what those values are.

The Dutch government held a series of seminars about European values during its presidency of the EU in 2004. “European fundamental values are sacred,” intoned former Dutch Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende at one event. But when it came to defining those values, he was fuzzier. “We have been discussing the idea of Europe for the last 12 hundred years. But we cannot grasp what it means, we cannot pin it down,” he said.

Values matter because they are the glue that binds a country together.

For which I think we see the answer. A people afraid of having to personally make good on those values, for whatever postmodern or selfish reasons vigorously DO define the state of the Union and its capacity to come unglued. Privacy violator Wikileaks is widely regarded as a democrat, many have personal expectations that all of their life needs will be served by their neighbors, and the rest of humanity is expected to bail them out of whatever trouble they’re in. There’s your value system at a glance.

The Baltimoron sez:

#OWS: Bitter neo-Communist and Truthy-Truth Crackheads

Thet are NOT the 99%. Among their Anti-Korporate-Kidz style demands are these:

Demand investigation into the source of secret funding for CIA occupation programs since WWII, the cover up of the trillions of dollars that aided in the collapse of the Soviet Union and may have ultimately instigated the 911 attacks as well as their cover-up.

Not to mention a lot of that passive-aggressive “we’re just asking questions” crapola to blunt what is obviously the exact same sort of obfuscation defined by old-school agit-prop:

The destruction of the contents of the basement of the World Trade Centre - less than a billion in gold, but hundreds of billions of dollars of government securities? In addition why were specific brokers from the major government security brokerages in the Twin Towers eliminated? To create chaos in the government securities market? To create a situation wherein $240 billion dollars of covert securities could be electronically “cleared” without anyone asking questions? Which happened when the Federal Reserve declared an emergency and invoked its “emergency powers” that afternoon.

They even use the trope of the violent, hate-fulled, inhumane revolutionaries of the last century. With foam around the edges of their lips, you get underpuntuated paragraph after paragraph of this kind of thing:

It suggests that certain key unknown figures in the Federal Reserve may have been in collusion with key unknown figures at the Bank of New York to create a situation where $240 billion in off balance sheet securities created in 1991 as part of an official covert operation to overthrow the Soviet Union, could be cleared without publicly acknowledging their existence.These securities, originally managed by Cantor Fitzgerald, were cleared and settled in the aftermath of September 11th through the Bank of New York. The $100 billion account balance bubble reported by the Wall Street Journal as being experienced by the Bank of New York was the tip of a three-day operation, when these securities were moved from off-balance-sheet to the balance sheet.

The above gives an idea of the intricate activities both to perpetrate and then to cover the crime, which was then used under its "terrorist attack" label as an excuse for the attack on Iraq.

So... no, these are not just “aggrieved American family-man types”. The movement is being taken over by socially programmed radicals who could care less whether or not the tent-dwellers get a job, or any of the “free this” and “free that” that they’re demanding, because they would have you live in a model consistent with the temperament of their screeds, which is the authoritarian socialism of the last century in eastern Europe, where the message to people was: Don’t be unique. Don’t speak out. Don’t try to leave the country, not to mention the ultimate message of socialism: you don’t eat if you don’t work, and don’t do what authority assigns you, and humanism and charity are no longer needed.
The fine words are merely to buy public affirmation. “Crises” will be used to explain why you aren’t given what you’ve been promised. Social excuses are and will be made for their using coercion to a form of political conformity, and when many of life’s basic needs are distributed by official organs of society, they will be used to enforce that conformity for reasons like the sake of your health. If you think that’s a kooky thought, consider how welfare and old-age benefits recipients are used as a political constituency. Leftist would use all of society to advance their power, and define society’s makeup.

Unlike these cretins thinking that they’re just making the world “nicer and fairer”, I saw the kind of world that inevitably comes from those ideas first hand. They may not impose that on anyone ever again. Every word of it is anti-American, un-American, and did not originate in American society.

To call that a red-baiting comparison using the history of failed Marxist-Leninism is flawed. It isn’t the panzer Communism that made that era awful as much as the ideas the collectivism and social-dependency part of it that the radicals in the “Occupy” movement try to hint was “the good part” of Socialism. It was all bad. The use of force was merely a detail in all of that, albeit an inevitable one.

EUvians Playing with their Members in the Face of Socio-Economic Implosion

#EUtopia is a massive fail.

We are not talking about a few minor political accidents, or uneventful miscalculations. Generations of Europeans have been force-fed on the failed philosophy and now we see its collapse before our very eyes in slow motion. The illusion of climate warming and the delusion of the single currency are all symptoms of the same pseudo religion, anti-realistic notions spawned from the brains of progressive social engineers who sought to prevent the horrors of World War II. But they wittingly made the wrong analysis: the collectivist left was spared, while collectivist right bore the full brunt of the blame. But to find the true culprit they would have had to dig yet one layer deeper: collectivism itself. The Founding Fathers of Europe were mental midgets compared to the giants that founded the US. The result of the cosmopolitan globalist obsession was covert European integration, under false flag and against the will of the people.

So no, people aren’t joking when they ask “is it 1937 yet?”

Why is the US Still Recessionary, you Ask?

Because of Leftism:

This stagnation now finds 51 percent of Americans too poor to pay federal income tax (a modern record) while 47 percent of Americans receive at least one form of federal transfer payment (an historical high), as dependency on the ever-expanding state expands.

This cannot continue. It is unsustainable for any length of time.

A Note to our Lecturesome 'Sophisticated' Friends

Your favorite dirty old man can’t seem to stay off of the radar. This isn’t just a garden variety bimbo explosion. In fact it isn’t, as we were told months ago pointless dwelling on a private life for “just” a rape:

A prostitute, being questioned by French investigators over the emergence of an underage prostitute racket in France, has said that Dominique Strauss-Kahn and a senior police official organized an orgy in one of Paris' fanciest hotels.

The Daily Mail reports that police chief, Jean-Christophe Lagarde, who hoped to run a security operation for Strauss-Kahn if he became president of France, was accused by the prostitute of organizing the orgy in 2010. He is also said to have flown prostitutes to New York for Strauss-Kahn when the latter was working at the IMF, and was reportedly in Washington D.C. just before DSK was arrested in New York.

The prostitute was being questioned as part of an investigation into an underage prostitution ring that emerged in the French city of Lille.

Lille, being a sort of red-flag, fantasy Marxist dreamer’s paradise sounds like the right place to be for him to find the best protection from the locals, a sort of political capucha, if you will.

Everything they do is Just so Monumental!

At the end of march, the EU commissioned a competition to name their technological innovation initiative. The competition was ingeniously named “You Name It!”

The innovative transnational zone, which has claimed to be a grand innovation in making the new man, settled upon the shocking and innovative “Horizon 2020”

Because they’re the wave of the future, they feel no need to actually spend anything on R&D. That will just come naturally because of who they are. This guy blames competition for their lack of competitiveness.

Depending on state funding, not competing with each other, and picking winners and losers... That’ll work like a charm.

They're Phonies and Moochers

While getting a record 99 weeks of unemployment compensation, a fraction of 9.1% who are unemployed try to call themselves “the 99%”.

Which is odd, given that it’s the 53% who pay taxes in the US, which has the most progressive tax structure in the world, that are paying for their food stamps, and compensating for the fact that most of the protesters are useless parasites who willfully made themselves unemployable. Are you going to let someone who wants to “stick it to society” to operate your machinery or touch the RAID on your network?

Jurassic Marx

True to form, some Europeans are mortified that the real economic crisis will take oxygen away from their fake crisis.

The big problem is, of course, that Europe is not facing ONE emergency crisis but TWO interrelated and re-enforcing crises which both have their root cause in the fact that we have been living above our means. Our inherently growth-dependent casino economy has been based on financial debt (cheap money) and ecological debt (free ecosystem services and cheap oil). Now that we are witnessing the geopolitical shift to the emerging economies which want our way of life and our “wealth”, we have reached the limits of debt and the limits of growth. We have entered a fundamentally different world. From the rich and ivory towers of Brussels it seems hard to recognise that this transition to a post-growth, post-carbon economy needs a new Europe.

Affordable energy to fuel employment growth! How vile! Who are the louts who thought thatup?

And here I thought the “real” problem was still affluenza... Where did that feigned horror go? Nowhere! The anger and phoney resentment will never really notice that this contagion is the result of the soothing strokes of the velvet-gloved fist of the state collectively trying to #OccupyYourAnus in order to pretend that they can seem generous at the expense of the hardworking and productive.

Recreational Ideology 101

Local.ch reports this from Bank-land:

Swiss protestors to hold anti-Wall Street demo

Elsewhere, their suffereing is abundantly apparent:

With one of the best-paid workforces in Europe and an equally gold-plated social safety net, it's easy to see why working in Switzerland is so attractive. These factors are enhanced by low crime, picture-book scenery and the very best winter sports facilities.

News from 1944

Fresh statistics show massive US air superiority over EU, says EU Observer, with the odd tone of unfamiliar detachment, as though the European states’ negligence in not maintaining its military capacity is somehow a surprise and the problem is likely that other nations not doing the same. What’s even sadder is that it’s drawing pointed comparison with their sole defender in the world, not to anyone potentially hostile to them.

The numbers, published by the Brussels-based Eurocontrol on Wednesday (12 October), note that the US has a total of 13,195 military and paramilitary air vehicles compared to 8,111 in the 27 EU countries combined. The EU's top air powers - France (1,339), the UK (1,296), Germany (1,096) and Italy (901) - come nowhere near.

New Europe is Old Again

The pretenses of ‘non-partisan’ nature of domestic terror are gone.

A far-left group claimed responsibility for Monday's blaze just outside Berlin on the main line linking the capital to Hamburg, saying in an online message it had acted in protest against the German military's deployment in Afghanistan, now entering its 10th year.

It’s faux thinkers getting their jollies again, trying to kill people in a fit of recreational ideology.

At least nine separate attacks, involving a dozen or so incendiary devices, have been recorded since Monday on railway lines in and around Berlin, interior ministry spokesman Jens Teschke told a regular news briefing on Wednesday.

The goal? The usual. As for the part of the left ‘moderate’ enough not to want to murder, their peace-movement inspiring objections to violence are actually rather dubious:

Some leftists have recently condemned the ongoing spate of arson attacks on cars in Berlin, because they are not just targeting the luxury cars, but the Opels of hard-working Berliners.

Because they care. And they think that’s cover for their living out their own fantasies vicariously through those brave ‘men of action’:

But clearly some elements of the scene is sliding inexorably towards terrorism. They want to make Germany a better place – just as the Baader-Meinhof gang did in the old days.

Those of you who would enjoy reading the whole piece in the original Klingon can find it here.

A Typical Reaction

From the reactionaries at the Propagadastaffel. Two Americans win the Nobel Prize for work in Economics, and the typical reader comment at Libé

Ces prix ne veulent plus rien dire car trop politisé. The winner are always USA/Israel. Nobel d'économie alors que les usa sont dans un GROS CACA et pour des années encore.

These prizes do not mean a thing because they’re too politicized. Always the winner are US / Israel.[sic] Nobel economics, while the United States is a BIG CACA and for years to come.

Because it’s all about Jooooooooos!!!!

Plus, if it was politicized it would NEVER be an American or an Israeli. Otherwise to believe that people who gave the Peace Prize to Obama on evidence of his first 14 days in office, one would find “politicization “ in favor of Americans and Israelis is the usual deflecting, consoling fantasy of the hatefully delusional view common to the European left.

Of course, all Americans are interchangeable, and since Wall Street had a drop on the downturn in the economy, and then got as badly smacked as the population in the banking crisis, one where “Banks” like Dexia had 4 times more leveraged debt than the worst American bank, well, it must be all their fault!

Parce qu'apres ce que nous a fait Wall Street en 2008, le titre de cette article sonne bien marrant.

Because after what Wall Street did in 2008, the title of this article sounds especially funny.

Not to mention this “apolitical” and on-topic statement, because a prize given to anyone, anywhere is an insult and and attack on France:

ils ont donné des armes a l'oncle sam pour nous abattre ..comme dab , le nobel tombe sur des tueurs

They gave credence to Uncle Sam so that he could shoot us down... as with a boss, the Nobel [committee] gives in to killers

Because everything is about anything on their minds, you see.

Paranoia will destroy ya... So what is there to fall back on? Walt Disney’s little ditty “It’s a Small World After All”, where everyone with a flag is equal, except in this case, it’s invoked to salve “hurt national feelings” or something, to which a sane commentator responded:

Ah bon ??

Ils seraient les meilleurs parce qu'ils sont 300 et qq millions ?

Mais alors, les chinois ils devraient être bien meilleurs qu'eux, les indiens aussi.

Et les indonésiens qui sont prés de 100 millions, ils devraient meilleurs que nous.

Je crois que ton raisonnement ne vaut pas tripette. A mon avis tu devrais éviter de réfléchir. Fais comme les autres bourricots, contente toi de braire.


Oh?
They would be the best because they are roughly 300 million?
But then the Chinese should be much better than them, the Indians too.
And Indonesia that are near 100 million, they should better than us.

I think your reasoning is worthless. In my opinion you should avoid thinking. Do as the other donkeys, braying happily.

Which is why they’re reading Libération.

Yeah? And?

Europeans are revolting.

Both Merkel and Sarkozy face political pressures that are becoming increasingly enmeshed with Europe's search for a solution to the euro-zone debt crisis. Facing a revolt to further bailouts among members of her center-right coalition, Merkel insists that banks should first seek capital from shareholders, then from their national governments. Only as a last resort should governments tap the EFSF to immunize their banks against financial contagion. France appeared to diverge from the German position earlier this week by emphasizing that euro-zone members should be able to tap the EFSF if banks can't raise capital from investors rather than requiring governments to first provide aid on a national level before using the European bailout fund. French banks are among the most exposed to troubled sovereign debt. And compared to European peers France's big banks are not as well capitalized, the International Monetary Fund warned in July.

Which primarily means that they should 'first seek capital from depositors' as opposed to taxpayers.

It will be the same damned thing when they finally recognize the scale of this stupidity: governments pressured banks to buy their bonds, which are no good, and now they are being pressured to use their depositors and investors (AKA: the public, including retirees' savings) to cover them.

Motor Kaput !

The Freedom Deficit at a Glance

Nothing says “I’m a willing idiot” like the 68% of lefties who don’t
Think that the Government has enough authority over people.

Emails from the Edge

Who knew that email would turn a perfectly normal bulletin board type posting to sell something into an animated version of a Fellini film.

Not coming as much of a surprise, most of the exchanges seem to take place in and around Philadelphia.

As if you couldn’t guess.

From Me to ********@gmail.com
RE: Clydesdale horse needs caring owners:

Hey there!

Your horse looks beautiful! Is he still available?

Michael Murphy
Vice President
Murphy Glue Factory, Inc.

From ********@gmail.com to Me
RE: Clydesdale horse needs caring owners:

HELL NO!!!

Facepalm!

Goofy green ‘power’ has arrived in its own self-referencial hell:

“Competitiveness: 48% of all solar systems installed in Germany originate from China because German capacity simply cannot meet the demand.”

That’s only half true; German companies have ceased to make cells in Germany because you can’t afford to do it in Germany anymore; the process is rather energy-intensive so you better do it in a place where electricity is cheap. I am not being ironic – the cost of electricity rises because of the cross-subsidizing of wind and solar installations; this cross-subsidy must be paid by private and commercial customers – 3.5 cent a kWH, no exceptions, even though the base tariff of an industrial consumer is about half of what households pay. So the green subsidy regime prevents the cost-effective production of green solar cells in Germany – the green death spiral in action.

So, if we absolutely had to we could produce the cells and modules ourselves but it would become economic carnage.

We still assemble some of the modules in Germany but this is being ramped down too and the work is sent to Malaysia by several German companies…

Frankly, I don’t think that there’s any irony left to find in this stuff.

Barosso feels Hurt

José Manuel Barosso must need the Special massage with ‘happy ending’ and maybe some ‘Anger Management’ too, I guess, because his feelings matter more than the economy of alf a billion Europeans and that of the developed world:

“I feel hurt when I see some in other parts of the world, the patronising way they say to us Europeans, what we need to do. I think frankly that we have problems, very serious problems, but I think we do not have to apologise for our democracies. We need not apologise for our social market economy,” he said, in a veiled reference to the American criticisms.

This would be especially hilarious if Europeans had actually dealt with their problems over the past 3 years, other than the zen-like “stress tests” that nobody took seriously.

Please mister world, make Mr. Barosso unhurt... and pay for it too, while you’re at it.

The failure of regulators worldwide to address European banks’ fragile dependence on short-term funding is “putting the Fed in a really awkward position,” said Karen Shaw Petrou, managing partner at Federal Financial Analytics, a Washington regulatory research firm whose clients include the biggest U.S. banks. The swaps with Europe “are an extremely advantageous political football” for critics of the Fed, she said.

Don’t worry, kids, the Europeans supply of childish passive-aggression will never run out. It’s part and parcel of the fact that the Bank-saving recapitalization program that the Europeans called for was precisely what they scorned Geithner about publicly.

Schäuble was referring to strongly worded comments made by US President Barack Obama and US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in recent days. At an event in California on Monday, Obama warned Europeans that their inaction was "scaring the world." The Europeans, he said, "have not fully healed from the crisis back in 2007 and never fully dealt with all the challenges that their banking system faced

Which they were only made public to try to shut the US up. A strange thing for the world’s champions at lecturesome finger wagging to say.

But perhaps the Europeans simply don't like a taste of their own medicine. When a US default was looming back in July when Congress was unable to agree on raising the debt ceiling, European commentators were quick to weigh in and give Obama and the US unsolicited advice. "The global economy needs an American agreement," said a French government minister at the time.

Ya think?

Never do they ask the question WHY it is they felt a need to interfere. After all what’s so bad about dithering for 18 month while your economy will, without action being taken, tank the developed world.

Basically, the adults had to speak up at some point.

Otherwise, Mr. Barosso, we’re really sorry to have hurt you.

The Left's Idea of 'Hope' is Basically Factional Hatred

As if it wasn’t going to decay into it anyway.

Hope-and-change has now sunk into little more than a tawdry spectacle of racial spoils,

Says Victor David Hanson.

In the current racial circus, the president of the United States, in addressing an assembly of upscale black professionals and political leaders, adopts the style of a Southern Baptist preacher of the 1960s. He alters his cadences and delivery to both berate and gin up the large audience — posing as a messianic figure who will “march” them out to speak truth to power. In response, the omnipresent Rep. Maxine Waters goes public yet again, to object that the president has no right to rally blacks in this way, when he does not adopt similar tones of admonishment with Jews and gays. (Should Obama try to emulate the way he thinks gays and Jews talk in his next address to them?)

Do, indeed. After all treating voters like they are little more than a useful, subdivided faction to mock and pander to is de rigeur for the left to begin with. Identity in their world, is getting your hyphenated spokes-drone on TV, and getting your genetic faction’s name on the banner at the front of the protest.

Somewhere along the way, they forgot that people are wiser than that.

Kan Hugh Borrow me a Pencil?

These kids understand where opportunity in the world lies:

As many as 95% of pupils at secondary level are studying English as a foreign language, according to figures from 2009 published from the Eurostat

They also know where they don’t stand a chance.