Supercrash: "The Euro is organized madness" - a German economist explains "Target 2"

Europe's sword of Damocles: a trillion-Euro central bank debt that doesn't pay interest and is owed by... nobody. European capital preparing to fly to Germany because of fears of a major unfixable financial crisis. Germany possibly exiting the EU...


Slides from the above:
file:///C:/Users/Welcome/Downloads/ThePoint2018-presentation-Dr-Oliver-Hartwich.pdf

About Dr Oliver Hartwich: https://nzinitiative.org.nz/about-us/our-people/oliver-hartwich/

Martin Armstrong chimes in:

"The crisis brewing here is monumental and it will tear the European Union apart at the seams. There is this crisis that because the Euro was NEVER designed properly to begin with, Brussels is trying to enforce its demands upon every member state to maintain austerity regardless of the consequences domestically in each member state.  When Southern European states joined the Euro, they had to convert all past debts from their local currency to the Euro. What happened was not only their national debts DOUBLED in real terms, but ALL PRIVATE debts also DOUBLED. Suddenly, banks that had lent Italian lira were now demanding to be paid in Euro which doubled in real value. Nonperforming loans skyrocketed and every politician blamed the bankers for their own misguided creation of the Euro."
- https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/europes-current-economy/the-european-crisis-of-philosophy-is-the-destruction-of-the-european-union/

Memorials, by Wiggiaatlarge

I wrote a piece about this subject some years back, but an article in the local paper revived the memory of that piece at a time when I had imagined the ‘fashion’ had died a death !

I don’t like stereotyping people but sometimes they do it themselves. I can honestly say I don’t know anyone who would build a roadside memorial and have never really understood who they are for.
The drivers going by will no doubt be 99% oblivious to whoever the memorial was intended for and if it is only for the family or close friends would anyone trek to a green verge on a regular basis when even visiting a cemetery is a rare event? - well, certainly in this country which makes it even more puzzling.

The piece I wrote long ago was prompted by a stretch of road running from Cambridge to and past Haverhill in Suffolk, that had a bad record for accidents and deaths, being one of those single carriageway roads that should have been updated many moons before. It also sported a wide grass verge for some miles and this became a natural draw for the monument builders.

Among the more inventive ‘art works’ were a small mountain of soft toys; this one was allegedly for a deceased 25 year old biker ! A masterpiece of kitsch which had a small cupola with an angel inside on a mound surrounded by more angels, a lantern and a shepherd with dog ! A cement scroll, no idea what was written on it and topped of with several hand held windmills - a favourite of these shrines - several nondescript tacky ones incorporating foils as the backdrop, one with a foot high name stuck on it, and the most ghoulish one, a two-foot-high coloured photo of the unfortunate who was killed on this spot. Facing the oncoming traffic it was regularly replenished with fresh flowers; that one survived for years !

All came to an end after numerous complaints saying they were a distraction making the road even more dangerous and after protests from the bereaved they were all removed, something that at the time I remember being done at various sites across the country as the craze got out of hand owing to the efforts of the memorial builders to outdo one another.

We have a bridge over the motorway, I am being generous with that term in this case, near us: a road that is much in demand for the late night bikers who thrash their Japanese super bikes at unmentionable speeds up and down this road at weekends unhindered by the total absence of any Police traffic patrols as is normal these days.

Two have managed to kill themselves in the last twelve months or so and large displays of flowers and the odd obligatory teddy bear with cards of condolence went up on the bridge. Neither was ever removed for fear I suppose of being labelled ‘unfeeling’ as is the way these days, so they were left to rot. One is still there after months, looking like a cross between a bad day at the florist's and a recycling yard.

This all comes back to the piece in the local paper. The first reading of the article gave the impression the memorial was in a graveyard and you had to read on some way to realise it was another roadside “attraction” and in this case that was probably a factor in why it had been vandalised. However "vandalised" was used by the journalist in a form of poetic license as further reading after the sister of the deceased (seen in photo with pink hair and described as a tattooist !!) described the vandalism as "cut wires". It appears the memorial surrounded by tree lights was powered 24 hrs a day by a solar panel, all on the edge of the grass verge facing oncoming traffic. Such a distraction would not have lasted five minutes years ago as it contravenes so many road laws, but today anything goes and the attention-seekers under the guise of grieving parties win out so the lights are repaired, the bereaved tattooist gets in the papers with her pink hair and all is well again in the world of those who must be noticed.

If I sound callous so be it, as in real life I have never known anyone who gives that much time to grieving so long after the event. Some societies, Italy and Spain are good examples, do pay more respect to the dead long after they have departed; how much of that is genuine grief or a culture of habit I could not say, but in this country until a few years back it never existed. Now it has become a cottage industry in self-promotion; some poor sod gets his fifteen minutes of fame through dying and all those associated climb aboard for a piece of it.

________________________________________
Sackerson adds:

Readers may recall that Spike Milligan wanted "I told you I was ill" on his headstone at St Thomas' churchyard, Winchelsea, but the Chichester diocese refused to allow this epitaph.

Instead they allowed a Gaelic inscription: "Duirt me leat go raibh me breoite", meaning...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_Milligan#Death
http://www.picturesofengland.com/England/East_Sussex/Winchelsea/pictures/1087087
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6522482/spike-milligan

FRIDAY MUSIC: Dusty Springfield, by JD

Mary O'Brien otherwise known as Dusty Springfield "has been acknowledged around the world as the best female soul singer that Britain ever produced. With her oddly erotic, throaty voice, she racked up a string of hits from the 1960s onwards. Born in London to Irish parents, Dusty grew up in and around London. Her early work included an all-girl trio, "The Lana Sisters" and, then, with her brother Tom Springfield (Dion O'Brien), The Springfields."
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0819778/bio

'Blue eyed soul' is a phrase which could have been invented for Dusty Springfield. It applies to British singers who, in the early sixties, were inspired by and tried to emulate the Soul music and Rhythm and Blues music coming from the USA as featured previously in these pages - https://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2016/09/friday-night-is-music-night-mood-blue.html

Dusty deserves special mention mainly because of her album Dusty in Memphis, easily the best record she made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dusty_in_Memphis

Her first recordings were with The Lana Sisters which were very much in the style of early American pop music of the fifties. A lot of them are on YouTube and feature excellent harmonies, worth a listen but the videos which follow begin with her in The Springfields which is where I first heard her. Some of the videos here have less than good sound quality but there is no mistaking that fabulous voice!

The Western Cult Of Death - I Change My Mind

Such happiness! Andrew Cuomo signs the Reproductive Health Act 

After the recent passing into New York law of The Reproductive Health Act, I read the book "Second Opinion" by a Birmingham, UK doctor going under the pen-name of "Theodore Dalrymple."

The doctor's experiences working in hospital and the nearby prison ought to convince most readers that not only should capital punishment be reintroduced, it should be revived on a massive scale. He himself is opposed, but merely because there would have to be a gallows on every street corner to accommodate deserving cases: the drink- and drug-addled violent, thieving layabouts who impregnate their women and then throw them down the stairs or kick them in the stomach to get rid of the unwanted results of sex; or abandon mother and child shortly after the birth, leaving them to Society's care.

Away with tentative moral argumentation about immediate-post-partum termination; let's really go for it, Deuteronomy-style: infants, teens, young adults...

In the Decalogue, below the duties to God, but above all the duties to one's fellows - even the proscription of murder, comes the Commandment to honour your father and mother; and like the other nine, it is lethally enforced:

18 If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them:

19 Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place;

20 And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.

21 And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

[I'm not sure whether we could involve adults who are in loco parentis, but there could be interesting implications for discipline in schools.]

Note, by the way, that the son need not be a mere child. A worthless, disobedient wastrel can be terminated at any age.

But why wait for a plaintiff to bring a case to court? As in other fields, let us replace complaint-driven processes with bureaucratic regulation and oversight.

Fabian Socialist, George Bernard Shaw proposed a periodic, systematic reassessment of each citizen's right to life (htp: Edward Spalton/AKH):




Where would we be without our thinkers?

Instead of bleating about the sacredness of human life, let's admit that whereas (it used to be said) life is cheap in the East, here in the West we are well on the way to declaring it completely valueless. Or, at least, a commodity to be priced against its utility to other people, and rejected if overpriced.

It's particularly wonderful that religion need not come into the debate any longer. Reason alone, based on financial calculations rather than Enlightenment principles that themselves have no objective foundation, justifies the slaughter of, not the sinner or the criminal, but the expensive and inconvenient. An extra bonus is that we could then dispense with hypocritical excuses ("health" etc) - we can proceed openly and without self-deception, honed blades of rationality.

We will get there.

Won't we?

Gun Law

Second Amendment to the United States Constitution (authenticated by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson) - December 15, 1791:

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Text

... inspired in part by the Virginia Declaration of Rights, Section 13 (written by George Mason and adopted by the Virginia Constitutional Convention on June 12, 1776):

"That a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power."

- https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/virginia-declaration-of-rights

Jefferson was not opposed to the use of arms in the defence of citizen liberty but this would not be necessary or justifiable if the laws could be democratically amended:

“Happy for us, that when we find our constitutions defective and insufficient to secure the happiness of our people, we can assemble with all the coolness of philosophers and set it to rights, while every other nation on earth must have recourse to arms to amend or to restore their constitutions.”

- https://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-horwitz/thomas-jefferson-and-the_b_273800.html

Mason's wording and Jefferson's remarks in his private letter above show that the issue was the right and regulation of a civilian militia, not whether an individual (as opposed to "the people") should be allowed to carry weapons.

In an age when people shot game for survival and carried swords and pistols for self-protection, surely that need would have been considered so obvious as not to need stating.

On the other hand the citizenry would not carry muskets around with them in the course of their daily business. Also, the poorest would presumably not be able to afford firearms and thieves, murderers, highwaymen and footpads would be swiftly tried and hanged.

Modern firearms are much cheaper, and often more powerful and much more rapid-fire. Were he alive today, would Jefferson now consider the Second Amendment defective?

FRIDAY MUSIC: Gurdjieff and de Hartmann, by JD

The music of Thomas de Hartmann and George Gurdjieff will bring some much needed tranquility

"While the world is full of troubles 

  And is anxious in its sleep."

http://www.thomasdehartmann.com
https://ggurdjieff.com

JD on Venezuela (all's well that gets oil wells)

Venezuela has suddenly become part of the news agenda, or maybe it is part of the 'fake news' agenda. It is hard to tell these days.

Unlike the majority of pundits and commentators, I have actually been to the country. For about three months in 1992 I was working in Caracas on a pipeline project bringing water to the capital to service the 'barrios' the shanty towns encircling the city. Most, if not all of these 'favelas' were without running water.

It was a long time ago and I have forgotten most of the details of what I was doing on the project but I did garner some vivid impressions of life there so here are a few. I will offer a few thoughts on the current situation later.

I had already worked for this company on another project in Zaragoza in Spain so I knew their ways reasonably well and they wanted me because I can speak Spanish and especially the engineering and technical terminology.

I was lodged in the CCT hotel which is itself incorporated into a very large shopping complex. First thing I noticed was the armed guards at every entrance to the shopping centre and not just one man with a pistol, there were four or five at each entrance and very visibly armed. Among all the shops were bars and restaurants as well as night clubs and through the windows of one I could see and hear some very lively and energetic dancing. Clearly these Venezolanos know how to enjoy themselves!
The office was somewhere downtown and a taxi from the hotel basement was the best way to get there. Taxis were all fairly nondescript American 'barges' which usually feel like floating about in a hovercraft. Up in the lift at the office block to the twelfth floor and sitting in the lift lobby was a uniformed guard with a gun and his back to the window. On the 12th floor? What sort of country is this?

As time passed I began to learn that Caracas is a sort of 'inside out' prison with all the good guys living their lives behind bolted and barred doors, and with all the bad guys free to walk the streets. I never felt threatened at any time but I was always aware of my surroundings. Lunch was a cafe/bar across the road and was very good. I especially liked the black beans with arepas, spicy and tasty.

I noticed that it rained every day regular as clockwork in the afternoons. A cloudburst of very heavy rain and it was literally a cloudburst. Something to do with the microclimate generated by the high altitude and the surrounding mountains. (Climate scientists do not like to acknowledge such things because it upsets their computer modelling; see previous post on climate.)

And then one day, during my final week there, our office manager was shot on his way home from work. He was driving home and was waiting at traffic lights when he had a gun pointed in his face through the open window. The robber took his watch and then shot him in the thigh. He then fired two or three bullets into the engine for some reason. I went to visit him in hospital and he was not seriously wounded but he did seem to have been traumatised by the episode and was nowhere near his usual cheery self. The hospital, by the way, was spotlessly clean and had an air of calm about it. I think our NHS could learn a thing or two from Latin America; a few years later I visited a colleague in hospital in Chile after he had a heart attack and it had the same air of unhurried calm and was spotlessly clean.

A couple of days before I left I was told by the senior project manager to go and get a ticket for the BA flight - "You have to be patriotic" or words to that effect.  So I went to the travel agent on the ground floor of the building to book the flight. Only two seats available, one in first class and the other one at the back among the backpackers. No contest, I'll have the first class ticket please! Project manager had gone back to Paris by this point so I didn't say anything and nobody checked in the weeks after. I am worth it anyway, that's my excuse! Later that afternoon there was a power cut in the building. When the power was restored we found out that there had been a bank robbery at the bank next door to the travel agent. The robbers had somehow interrupted the power supply which allowed them to do whatever they did.

I think I have related elsewhere how the company's 'Mr Fixit' took me to the airport and escorted me from kerbside to 1st class lounge in about 10 or 15 minutes just by waving his security pass at everyone! That's the only way to travel!

A few thoughts on the current situation starting with some background information taken from my copy of the South American Handbook, 1992:

* The Spanish landed in Venezuela (little Venice) in 1498, what they found was a poor country sparsely populated with very little in the way of a distinctive culture. It remained a poor country for the next 400 years or so, agrarian, exporting little and importing less.  Oil was discovered in 1914 and everything changed. It became the richest country in Latin America and the known reserves were estimated to last for 40 years. (i.e. until 2032)

* Only about 20% of the land area is devoted to agriculture and three quarters of that is pasture. (In effect, animal husbandry with little in the way of food crops)

* 84% of the population live in urban areas.

* Venezuela is Latin America's fourth largest debtor despite having foreign reserves of approximately US$20 bn accumulated by the mid 1980s from oil wealth.

Carlos Andres Perez was president of Venezuela while I was there in 1992 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Andr%C3%A9s_P%C3%A9rez

Note the importation of 80% of food during his first term and the huge loan from Washington during his second term. If there are food shortages it means the supply chain has been cut and knowing how and why that has happened will be a clue to the reason for the current crisis. All of those loans will come with strings attached and any spending will be monitored by the 'money changers' with very little leeway.

 I watched the TV programme about Chavez last week and both Chavez and CAP seemed to me to be pursuing similar policies, trying to improve the living standards of their people. But they also made the same mistakes; relying solely on oil revenues and not investing in the future for when the oil runs out. The conditions attached to the various loans will probably mean that the social programmes of both Chavez and CAP will be abandoned in favour of 'austerity' as is happening in Europe.

During the last few days (at the end of January) the US policy on Venezuela has become blatantly obvious: regime change. And I look at the history of the continent and I cannot help but see that the US has supported every dictator in Latin America.

Since 1492 the imperial powers of Europe have sought to control the whole continent, both north and south. Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British have been playing a perpetual power game in order to exploit the 'Eldorado' of the new world. Now the US has joined the game and their main objective is oil, it is always oil for the US. It is the foundation of their foreign policy. I saw a comment somewhere that it wasn't really about oil because the US has more than enough oil in their own country. A very naive comment indeed; I first worked in the oil industry in the 70s and it was made clear to me that there were indeed massive resources in the US. Hundreds of wells have been drilled and capped and they serve as their reserve. Almost all of the American engineers I encountered would gleefully boast of how they were going to deplete the resources of other countries. After all, the supply is finite. The earth is not manufacturing oil any more. It was a great joke among Americans that when all of the foreign resources had been fully exploited then they would open the taps on their own wells.

With the whole world supporting the US actions except Russia and China who are lining up behind Maduro and the Venezuelan people, this is not going to end well so I leave the last word (28th January) to Ron Paul -
http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2019/january/28/trump-s-venezuela-fiasco/

___________________________________________
Sackerson adds: these stories seem to imply that Venezuela "needs saving from itself"...

World Bank Reports Venezuela Oil Output Falling Since 2000

Venezuela’s collapse: How far will oil production fall?