Three cheers for Western democracy - CORRECTED

A naughty trespasser gets what's coming to her.http://www.newser.com/story/133682/police-pepper-spray-occupy-portland-protester-elizabeth-nichols.html

CORRECTION: ... is offered a sample of a "food product"

43 years earlier...



But we have made progress. So many more channels these days. X Factor or Strictly, love?

Farage's latest - heading for 200,000 views

Concentration camp liberation

From Max Arthur's "Forgotten Voices of the Second World War" (booklet insert in The Sunday Telegraph, 14th November 2011)

Economic treason, zombies and village idiots

This time it really is different. The Bank of England figures for percentage growth in M4 show a decline to zero for the quarter ending June 2009, for the first time since the data series began in 1963. That zero mark was reached again in June this year, and in the last quarter it plummeted to a record negative 8.1% annualised.



This, despite targets being set for lending to small businesses. I've just heard an interview on the News at One (Radio 4) with someone from one of the zombie UK banks, Lloyds. Under February's "Merlin project" agreement, gross lending to business was supposed to increase by £190 billion this year; the banks are on target to do so, but are not meeting their quota for small enterprises.

And there's fudging going on. The smart R4 interviewer said there are rumours that banks have been cancelling existing loans early and replacing them with fresh ones, so as to appear to comply with gross targets; the Lloyds spokesman dodged that point with a weak assertion that net lending had increased (he didn't specify by how much). And that's net lending to businesses, not net lending to the private market overall, so I shall be interested to see the M4 figures to December, when they are released.

Meanwhile today Marc Faber gave an interview on Bloomberg (see below), in which he said that current US policy is to keep interest rates at rock bottom until the unemployment rate drops below 7.5%. Faber cast doubt on this plan, observing that America now has a very large pool of unskilled people and that there may be a long-term 10% unemployment rate. He compared this to the Middle Ages, when there were economically-dependent "village idiots" all over the place.

(I give the link below, because the embedded video autoplays, which is irritating.)

http://bloom.bg/sI9WmW#ooid=xzZzgwMzouQa6FhZ4bE4b-YoI7IO8ztG

This is where the calculations of politicians have gone wrong. Imported un/semi-skilled labour (often exploited and brutalised, from what I read about the UK food industry) and foreign-outsourced industrial labour may have benefited the businesses concerned, but keeping large numbers of our fellows unemployed has rotted their skillsets, morale and work habituation, not to mention their health and family relationships. There is also a growing element of the service sector devoted to patching the damage - policing, law, social services, benefit payments, health services, special education for the children and so on.

There is a level of incompetence that is criminal; and if some of these effects were reasonably foreseeable, it could be argued that some of our leaders should be impeached for economic treason, under the category of "high crimes and misdemeanours".

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Could we see a Chinese Welfare State introduced as a demand-booster?

"Rather than simply saying the Chinese are Confucianists and Confucianists save money, I’d say there are very specific things that make them anxious, and so they save money. So they save for a place to live, for their kids’ education, for unforeseen medical expenses, and retirement. This is something that people who used to work for state industries never had to worry about, because it was provided. The state is now toying with the idea of reinstating these safety nets, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but to free up capital so that people will spend more money."

Karl Gerth

http://bostonglobe.com/ideas/2011/11/05/from-made-china-bought-china/BmgUYiFGqPpEUgTntPZG6H/story.html

Was China's money turned down by the EU because of IP worries?

Just asking. Though there's lots of other bargaining points the Chinese want to raise. See this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2054888/Eurozone-debt-crisis-Cosy-China-EU-bailout-peril.html

China already has a hard-working, increasingly skilled and very cheap workforce, has bought in or built up factories and tools, and is securing industrial supplies around the world, especially in Africa. Once she has all the important know-how of the West, I have no idea what our people will live on.

This is why we must purge debt on a massive scale, so that the rebalancing between world workforces will not be absolutely catastrophic.

History: the testosterone cycle

It seems there's a social convulsion every generation. 1914, 1939, 1964(ish), 1989 - a cycle that repeats about every 25 years.

I'm not going to get too numerological about this - the average age at marriage and/or first live birth varies over time - but I do wonder whether one important element in history is human physiology.

It's also odd that we speak of a "generation", as though humans bred en masse in seasons separated by many years, like cicadas. But I guess there's a certain age span between those just too young to have taken part in the last bash, and those just old enough to want to get into gangs and rumble in the next one.

Maybe Occupy Wall Street, St Paul's, Thessaloniki etc are just the pubertal stirrings of the next revolution, the quasi-Aldermaston-March preludes to the next mass mania.

2014, is my guess.