Satire, natch.
THE nation of Greece said sorry to the European Union with a present of an enormous wooden horse. "See? Ask the Americans, the Canadians, and geeks the world over; we now know friendship is magic."
Left outside the European Central Bank in the dead of night, the horse has now been moved into the ECB's central lobby where it is proudly on display.
A gift tag attached to the horse, which is surprisingly light for its size and has small holes along the length of its body, suggested that it should be placed in the bank's vaults overnight to avoid it being targeted by thieves. "And don't you DARE look it in the mouth!"
Mario Draghi, President of the ECB, said: "How nice of the Greeks to acknowledge the trouble we've been put to on their behalf with this wonderful horse, handmade and so large it could hold a dozen double-decker buses.
"The card with it, which had a teddy bear dressed as a hobo on the front, explained that Greece made us this because they don't have enough money for a present, which brought a tear to my eye. "Nothing to fear here. Long live the Greeks bearing gifts!"
"However, unless they can somehow find billions overnight then austerity measures must continue." "And see how sparsely-manned many of their military bases are?"
Oddly, Greek representatives in Brussels have hinted that they may soon be in a position to settle their debts and have puzzled the French and German banks that hold their loans by asking if there is any discount for cash.
The government of Spain has reacted angrily to the gift, accusing the Greeks of trying to bribe the ECB and redoubling their own efforts to weave a gigantic sombrero-wearing straw donkey. Someone's making an ass of themself.
On the morning after a financial collapse things will look almost exactly as when you went to sleep. The elm tree and mailbox will stand where they were, the scene will appear unchanged all the way to the horizon. On the Day After the outward world is unchanged. What will have altered beyond all recognition are the invisible claims on that physical world.
The homely mailbox, for example, may no longer be yours, nor the land on which the elm tree is growing. It could have reassigned while you were sleeping. If one can imagine the world in terms of a balance sheet, the immediate post-crash world assets start unchanged. It's the liabilities which have been rearranged. The write down process will not be uniform.
In the bubble world there are more claims on assets than can be satisfied. In the pre-crash world this is unnoticed. As in the game of Musical Chairs, it is not obvious till the music stops. Only when the tune is interrupted, in the post-crash world, does the audience will see there is one chair short.
Politicians and unscrupulous politicians are in the profession of overselling capacity, but ensuring they always have the chair. Politicians for example, promise the same taxpayer dollar several times over to different constituencies. And it goes along swimmingly as long as they can kick the can down the road.
For example Obamacare was created to save Medicaid from bankruptcy. Now Medicaid expansion is used to prove Obamacare is working. Obamacare was funded by reductions from Medicare. Now the Medicare "doc fix" shortfall will be funded by obtaining "savings" from Obamacare. It's circular process where the same dollar moves from chair to chair.
Banks operate on the same principle. Banks lend out more than the deposit dollar. They can do this sustainably for as long as the extra chairs can be provided by the real rate of interest. An extra chair will be created in the future, but only as many as the actual rate of growth will provide.
But sometimes people get greedy and overpromise returns. Then if everyone with a claim on a chair came to the bank and demanded a stool, there would be a shortage of stools. This is called a bank run. In that case the system relies for its continued viability on keeping the music playing. Once the needle is lifted from the record, forcing the players to scramble for a seat, it will be obvious that somebody will have to be kicked out of the game.
Unfortunately we still live in a world governed by ancient 19th century Marxian ideas, where politicians regard information as infinitely corruptible, in a world where lies are not only common, but the stuff of power, the very sinews or privilege. A financial crisis occurs when information goes so far out of whack with the physical world the music has to stop, and those without a chair must be booted off.
What a financial crisis does is bring an awakening world face to face with its own falsehoods. Suddenly they are in the nightmare world. But it’s a not a new world at all. Only the one the players had been constructing all along.
#2
The Greece economy makes up 2% of the economy and population of the European Union. So why the stock market jitters unless this is an omen for other countries in the Euro Union--an ultimately the U.S.?
Almost every economy in the world has a bubble, in debt and not healthy. Greece could be the needle that pops the global balloon and the global economy collapses.
[TELEGRAPH.CO.UK] Despite the scaremongering and bullying from those in Brussels, we are waking today with Greece having delivered a resounding No.
That comes despite EU bosses saying that it would mean a Greek exit from the Euro, not to mention the heavy economic pressure placed on the Greek people to go along with the wishes of Brussels. It is a crushing defeat for those Eurocrats who believe that you can simply bulldoze public opinion.
Chief bully-boy Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament, and other supposed leaders of the European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... did their best to terrify the Greek people into submitting to the wishes of the European Union. But they utterly failed. The fear espoused by the Yes campaign was rejected. Opinion polls that put the Yes side ahead just days before were way out, as thousands upon thousands of Greek citizens lined the streets chanting "Oxi".
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2015 00:00 ||
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#5
Ah, Darth it was intended sarcastically---given Europeans' visceral "anti-Zionism", not to mention the rest of the Tranzi package. IMO, the more trouble they have, the less time/energy they have for making trouble for the rest of the World.
#9
I'm thinking the Germans had a pile of guilt and a pile of money and decided they'd carry a few nations along with this EU thing and it would all last long enough to absolve them of that guilt before it imploded.
[Zero Hedge] "Wake up people of the world and investors. Greece will come to your neighborhood very soon, maybe not this year, but next year or whenever it is, because the world is over infected. And defaults will follow, or they will have to create very high inflation rates."
That's Marc Faber's message to all of those who may still think that Greece doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Faber talks Greece, China, and of course the Fed.
On Greece:
And everybody knows in the world that Greece cannot pay its debt at the current size. So what will happen, in my view, is either Greece will leave the EU and will suffer very badly for a few months, maybe even longer. There will be a cash shortage. Or the EU, and the ECB and the IMF will have to cut a significant haircut. And Tsipras proposed a haircut of something like 30 percent. I don't think that's enough. I think they will need a haircut of at least 50 percent.
I think the likelihood of contagion is very high. And I have to say when you have a borrower, you also have a lender. And it's actually, in my view, amazing how the EU kept on pumping money into Greece, partly also to bail out their own banks. And suddenly now the debt is no longer manageable.
And I would say, wake up people of the world and investors. Greece will come to your neighborhood very soon, maybe not this year, but next year or whenever it is, because the world is over infected. And defaults will follow, or they will have to create very high inflation rates.
More like the detection of the Doppler effect. You know like that distance whine of an approaching emergency vehicle. It's presence is already there, just the tone and volume is changing with the onrush.
[DAWN] WITH the national team's ignominious failure to qualify for the Rio de Janeiro Olympics 2016 at the World Hockey League semi-finals in Antwerp, Belgium, Pakistain hockey has reached a dead end. The recent fiasco, which has come on the heels of an equally humiliating disqualification from the Hockey World Cup in 2014, caps a disastrous period spanning some two decades which has been replete with losses and setbacks with only a few laurels coming the players' way. Though the Antwerp humiliation has been termed as Pakistain hockey's darkest hour, there have been countless such occasions in the recent past which clearly put in the shade decades of glory and success achieved by the country in the annals of the game. Bad luck can intrude unexpectedly and play havoc with a player or a team's progress. Still, Pakistain has no such excuses to offer for its defeat to a lowly-ranked Ireland on Friday or to other less-equipped outfits earlier in the tournament that led to this final blow.
But while the players have erred badly, the blame for hockey's overall shambolic state lies squarely with the Pakistain Hockey Federation and its utterly incompetent and, often corrupt, regimes. It is ironic that many of the game's ex-Olympians who once did the country proud by excelling on the field, have been instrumental in blotting the national game's impeccable record by either indulging in needless ego tussles or resorting to selfish gains at the game's expense. It is, indeed, a shocking scenario today where out of the 18 hockey training centres or academies, none can be seen as operational anywhere in the country. An overhaul is imperative, with stringent measures in place to keep the incompetent and corrupt out of the PHF set-up. However, it's easy to be generous with someone else's money... with politics having saturated the PHF rank and file and with governments overly keen to run the game through their handpicked officials there is little hope that any serious effort for the revival of the national sport will be made in the near future.
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07/07/2015 00:00 ||
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#1
Hockey, where Pakisan was something like the World Champion for Life was about the only thing Pakistan had to be proud of. Now not even that. Couldn't happen to a nicer country. Oh, and if India becomes world chamion tehn it will be icing on the cake.
[DAWN] IN the midst of the recent deadly heatwave in Sindh, our minister for climate change, Mushahidullah Khan, announced that coal-fired power plants in the Indian state of Rajasthan were partly to blame. The claim produced incredulity, rolled eyes, and a few LOLs on social media. Normally such a statement would have made me laugh. But the scale of the tragedy -- not only the toll of the heatwave, but also the inept governance, scapegoating, class inequality that it highlighted -- seemed to have stripped my sense of humour.
I anticipated others would mock the minister's conspiracy theorising and confused science. I expected comic video clips and puns about hot air to follow. Tongue-in-cheek reactions to the water car, to 'a degree is a degree', and to the recent spy pigeon had increased my expectations. But the jokes didn't come -- at least in the real and virtual circles I inhabit. Perhaps it was too hot. Perhaps people were fasting. Perhaps there's nothing funny about more than 1,000 people dying in the heat while politicians play an absurd blame game.
The muted response did make me wonder whether we are starting to lose our sense of humour about our country. What would it mean if we as a nation lost the ability to laugh at our foibles?
Continued on Page 49
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[DAWN] ON the recent occasion of Benazir Bhutto ... 11th Prime Minister of Pakistain in two non-consecutive terms from 1988 until 1990 and 1993 until 1996. She was the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistain People's Party, who was murdered at the instigation of General Ayub Khan. She was murdered in her turn by person or persons unknown while campaigning in late 2007. Suspects include, to note just a few, Baitullah Mehsud, General Pervez Musharraf, the ISI, al-Qaeda in Pakistain, and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who shows remarkably little curiosity about who done her in... 's 62nd birth anniversary, her husband and PPP's co-chairman spoke about her murder and said: "We cannot withdraw the FIR, no matter how much pressure you exert on us and how much you fight for that."
Heraldo Munoz of Chile, the head of the UN commission that probed Benazir Bhutto's murder concluded as follows: "Probably no government will be able or willing to fully disentangle the truth from the complex web of implication in Benazir Bhutto's liquidation."
Continued on Page 49
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#1
So they still suspect BB was whacked, eh? I dunno. Given the frequency with which people and things explode in Pakistain, it could just be coincidence.
Good luck solving a crime which occurred almost a decade ago in a country not know for expertise in much beyond seething and paranoia. Hey, you don't suppose the Indians did it?
[FOX] Charles Krauthammer told viewers Monday on "Special Report with Bret Baier" that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is engaged in "a fake campaign."
"This is a woman, this is a candidate who is going to be the nominee. We all know it, for all of the Bernie momentum stuff. That's a sideshow. But you have to go through 15, 16 months of a ritual of actually campaigning," Krauthammer said.
"There is no campaign. There is not going to be a debate. There isn't a challenge. So she is stuck for these 15 or so months pretending to be a candidate and what you get are pretend events."
His comments came after Clinton was criticized for roping off media at a parade in New Hampshire over the holiday weekend. "Fake campaign" precursor to a fake election ?
#4
VPOTUS Biden repor may declare his candidacy sometime during the next month, while SecState Jaawhn may declare before the holiday season = EOY 2015.
From Kevin D. Williamson
The American proposition is a theological proposition: "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."
Just how radical that idea is is difficult for the 21st-century Western mind to comprehend. For the entirety of the human experience, most men had been subjects — the ruled living their lives at the sufferance of rulers. The American proposition inverts that: We are citizens, not subjects, and government exists at our sufferance, not the other way around.
Americans first applied to politics the Christian belief that we are made in the likeness of Almighty God Himself, not in the likeness of livestock to be herded, milked, and slaughtered.
Americans’ religiosity compared with that of our European cousins perplexes and vexes those who do not understand that our civil religion is rooted in our religion-religion, that we have, for instance, a constitutional prohibition on the establishment of a national church because our founders were in the main sundry fractious irreconcilable believers rather than jaded agnostics. We have freedom of religion because our forefathers were Puritan fanatics, not in spite of the fact. Consider the mind of Thomas Paine: Even our anti-ecclesiasticals are evangelical. Paine’s character dominates that of the modern American atheist, who burns with a holy fervor unknown to the milquetoast Sunday-morning Christian. More at the link
#5
I'm sure things looked pretty grim in the 70s with stagflation and all. The pendulum occasionally swings too far to one side and then there is a correction. We are overdue for the correction this go around.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[DAWN] IN the midst of the recent deadly heatwave in Sindh, our minister for climate change, Mushahidullah Khan, announced that coal-fired power plants in the Indian state of Rajasthan were partly to blame. The claim produced incredulity, rolled eyes, and a few LOLs on social media. Normally such a statement would have made me laugh. But the scale of the tragedy -- not only the toll of the heatwave, but also the inept governance, scapegoating, class inequality that it highlighted -- seemed to have stripped my sense of humour.
The muted response did make me wonder whether we are starting to lose our sense of humour about our country. What would it mean if we as a nation lost the ability to laugh at our foibles?
[FOX] Charles Krauthammer told viewers Monday on "Special Report with Bret Baier" that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is engaged in "a fake campaign."
