Defensive personalities

Jul  2012

by Brett Stevens.

Often life is paradoxical because appearance is a result of underlying structure, and not equal to it.
The best way to think about this is the example of a tornado, which does not form itself. Winds of different temperatures cross under the right conditions, and create a tornado.
In the human world, there is an equivalent to this. People say one thing, and use it to hide their actual behavior and motivations.
For example, among us walk those who preach tolerance and pluralism. However, these tend to be the most hateful people in our society.
They are either intolerant of specific groups, or intolerant of anyone who has not ruined a particular aspect — religion, innocence, intelligence, morality, heritage, culture — of themselves.
The tolerant person is “misery loves company” in incarnate form, wishing others to be as deprived as they are. But another factor is in play here.
If I am an angry person, and wish to be intolerant, I need a cover story in order to be able to get away with it. My best cover is as a missionary of tolerance.
That way, I am the official authority on tolerance and can carefully define my own behavior as tolerant, whether it is or not. Don’t change the behavior — change the meaning of the word!
Becoming known as an expert or paragon of some behavior is a type of pre-emptive defense against those who, in the future, might accuse you of violating that same taboo.
This is similar to billionaire philanthropists who gleefully give away 5% of their wealth in order to make headlines for their charity, while hiding their tax-dodging and ill deeds under those headlines.
At the current time, we can see this phenomena in the rising shrillness of global liberalism. Two centuries after liberalism officially became our world order with the French Revolution, the disaster is unfolding.
It is not a single failure — no, liberalism has failed on all fronts, and most importantly has failed to bring about the new Utopia it claimed it would.
A convergence of failures occurs because liberalism fails on all levels: economic, political, social, biological, cultural and even individual happiness. It has corrupted science and religion, destroyed art and alienated the individual.
These intensifying failures work together like notes harmonizing into a chord, showing us that the New World Order we thought was right is in fact a path to death. People are considering abandoning it.
As a result of that instability, those who depend on liberalism for their sense of self-worth are turning up the heat. More fanatical statements, more extremism and greater degrees of illusion are demanded, and the faithful lap it up because their identities are constructed out of the success of liberalism as an idea.
The propaganda grows stronger, the allegiance tests get more absolute, and the leftists appear emboldened, strong and victorious.
But these are not structural traits, but appearance. The underlying cause is a need to hide their fear of total failure that is imminent. They are running scared.
It is paradoxical that the seemingly most confident people are those preaching a dying ideology that belongs to a failed past. But they hope to convince you, and keep the sad farce alive for just another day.

Surrogate reality , or Right Reason

Surrogate reality

Jul  2012

by Brett Stevens.

We live in a time of confused cause-effect because, since the Enlightenment, we have made ourselves deciders of reality based on our whims and the collective popularity of ideas.
Equality as a political concept means that each person is valid, whether their ideas/views are realistic or not; since each is valid, all must be accommodated, which results in a state called pluralism where many different points of view are considered true at once.
At that point, the deeper issues in life are dead because they are un-decidable.
We went from having kings and popes deciding a singular reality, to having each individual decide reality, and all of us be commanded to “tolerate” each other’s realities in order to keep the peace. There is no truth to decide, only the presumption that all is true.
With the deeper issues dead, all that exists for us as “truth” are the surface issues. How we present ourselves to others; how popular we are; how well we uphold memes, laws, media and other trends. We are how we appear. (The medium is the message.)
For this reason, we live in a state of duality. We have obligations, like jobs and not committing murder, and everything else is time for us, so we take as much as we can. During that time, we have “hobbies” which are unpaid pursuits that we hope entertain us.
Our hobbies rapidly extend to cover anything not mandated by the society itself. In our personal lives, and in our families, we exert dominion over the surface.
This is a form of surrogate reality, or the creation of an alternate reality which is not particularly important, but through which we live as if it were more important than reality itself.
Like the symbolic reality of morality, popularity and economics, this is a case of a few parts of the whole standing for the whole; in other words, we pick the areas in which we do have power and crowd out the rest.
One major area where this comes into play is the idea of control itself. Instead of having people work with us on a shared vision, we indulge in the thought that we can force them to do what we need. This however ignores the degree, or quality, of their compliance, as well as any secondary or incidental effects of our control on them. Those who wield control are perpetually surprised by unintended consequences.
Another area is tolerance. When we are at a weak point and deserve a break, we are annoyed by other people treating us as if we were not at a weak point, because from our perspective it seems like an assault on our weakness. Our retribution is to demand “tolerance” for all ranges of behavior, which means that weakness and strength are indistinguishable. But then we live in a society designed around weakness, and so it moves slowly, encourages incompetence and penalizes efficiency. We suffer more this way, as the result of our fear.
These surrogate realities are composed of notions in which the visible aspect of an act is considered equal to the cause of an act, e.g. flowers grow because they are flowers, not because of a complex interaction between sunlight, water and seed.
To enforce our surrogate realities, we cherry-pick information. Out of a thousand factors, we select the one that is important to us, and pay attention to the data that reinforces it, discarding the rest.
Through these reality substitutes, we eventually create a human-only world of emotions, judgments and feelings. This distances us from reality and thus, the only meaning we could have in seeing our ideas realized and tested.
As a result, we become lonely and bitter, locked away in labyrinthine castles of our mind mind and cryptic religions of our own populist morality, forever wondering what we’re missing.

The Cultural Destruction of England

Posted on July  2012 by Stephen Clay McGehee

The forces that are working to destroy Southern culture are certainly not unique in the world. Similar attacks on nations and cultures have been happening in many places that were once solidly Western European culture.
The BBC broadcast a documentary titled Rivers of Blood. It begins with one man – Enoch Powell – using his position of leadership to warn his countrymen of the grave threat they face as the gathering storm begins to assail English culture and turn England into a land completely alien to those who inherited one of the greatest nations on earth. He warned that England was losing her sense of national identity, the shared values and traditions and history, the common thread that unites the English as a people. When Mr. Powell made his “Rivers of Blood” speech forty years ago, the term “political correctness” had not yet been coined, but that is what was at work
The force that destroyed England was a political establishment that used uncontrolled immigration as a weapon. Most nations can absorb small numbers of immigrants from other cultures without damaging the existing culture. In small numbers, immigrants are assimilated into the culture as long as they are not concentrated in certain areas. In large numbers, immigrants become an invading and occupying army. From there, they spread their influence beyond their enclaves of occupation.
The forces that are destroying our once-great land are not new and our experience is not unique. What is happening now in places like Dearborn, Michigan may soon be happening across the country – including our beloved South. The question is – will we recognize the threat and take action to stop it?

Nelson Mandela the Terrorist

Mandela the Terrorist 

 

As it was Nelson Mandela's birthday this week I thought I would reproduce a blog from 2008

from here

Flaming liberals and other dangerously misguided souls, the kind that led to the destruction of once peaceful and prosperous South Africa, are now out to sanitize the "saintly"terrorist Nelson Mandela (wolf in sheep's clothing, who knows how to talk to white people) and his toxic organization - the terrorist African National Congress (ANC) - and have them removed from the United States' terrorist listwhere they belong (HR 5690). Don't let them succeed!

Read for yourself about terrorist Nelson Mandela's crimes(most have never heard of, denied the opportunity by the liberal media) and then immediately call the U.S. Congress to warn them not to pass this treacherous legislation to take the African National Congress off the U.S. Terrorist List where they belong. Former failed presidential candidate John Kerry (D-Mass) is shamefully sponsoring a companion bill for the Senate. Call Kerry's office and give him a piece of your patriotic mind at 202-224-2742 and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-NV) office 202-224-3542.

* The full list of munitions and charges read as follows:

• One count under the South African Suppression of Communism Act No. 44 of 1950, charging that the accused committed acts calculated to further the achievement of the objective of communism;

• One count of contravening the South African Criminal Law Act (1953), which prohibits any person from soliciting or receiving any money or articles for the purpose of achieving organized defiance of laws and country; and

• Two counts of sabotage, committing or aiding or procuring the commission of the following acts:

1) The further recruitment of persons for instruction and training, both within and outside the Republic of South Africa, in:

(a) the preparation, manufacture and use of explosives—for the purpose of committing acts of violence and destruction in the aforesaid Republic, (the preparation and manufacture of explosives, according to evidence submitted, included 210,000 hand grenades, 48,000 anti-personnel mines, 1,500 time devices, 144 tons of ammonium nitrate, 21.6 tons of aluminum powder and a ton of black powder);

(b) the art of warfare, including guerrilla warfare, and military training generally for the purpose in the aforesaid Republic;

(ii) Further acts of violence and destruction, (this includes 193 counts of terrorism committed between 1961 and 1963);

(iii) Acts of guerrilla warfare in the aforesaid Republic;

(iv) Acts of assistance to military units of foreign countries when involving the aforesaid Republic;

(v) Acts of participation in a violent revolution in the aforesaid Republic, whereby the accused, injured, damaged, destroyed, rendered useless or unserviceable, put out of action, obstructed, with or endangered:


(a) the health or safety of the public;
(b) the maintenance of law and order;

(c) the supply and distribution of light, power or fuel;
(d) postal, telephone or telegraph installations;
(e) the free movement of traffic on land; and
(f) the property, movable or immovable, of other persons or of the state.

Source: The State v. Nelson Mandela et al, Supreme Court of South Africa, Transvaal Provincial Division, 1963-1964, Indictment.

censorship of the internet [REDACTED]

 

[REDACTED]

Jul 2012

by Brett Stevens.

Censorship is an essential tool for every government on earth, even anarchy and egalitarian democracy.
Information that blatantly contradicts the status quo is not dangerous for what it says, but for how often it is seen. When people see it enough, they feel safe in repeating it.
This is why censorship exists: to make sure that people see the information infrequently, and then can’t find the source again, creating the impression that that information is irrelevant.
Controlled societies censor by owning all the printing presses. They print, film and type what they want us to know. Those who deviate may be killed, or simply relocated to someplace unpleasant.
Free societies censor by generating public outrage at a behavior, or the perceived type of person who engages in it. They then tie this behavior to the unlawful information.
Those who repeat that information are then socially ostracized, and thus financially ostracized, eventually becoming dependent on the government for their sustenance.
Every few months the internet-culture “community” gets riled up about some bill or another that will (say this in a Vincent Price voice) destroy the internet as we know it. The presentation is always that apocalyptic.
From a more realistic view, however, censorship is unlikely to be apocalyptic. More likely, it will be recognized and accepted as normal, and then creep into everyday life.
People will know that what they see is censored, but they will not act on that. No one wants to be the first to buck a trend, because there’s huge risk that the rest of the Simian lynch mob will simply turn on you, and enrich themselves with your losses.
The internet is not censored by governments, at least not effective ones. It is censored by your fellow citizens and those that provide them services. Unpopular opinions detract from the value of those services, and so they are blocked.
That cannot matter, you think. Your fellow citizens thirst for information and lust for freedom so much that they’ll “do something” about that.
Except that your fellow citizens are interested in cheeseburgers, shiny gadgets, beer, movies and pornography. They’re so distracted you could pick them off one by one, so long as you didn’t put articles in the media saying it would happen.
The censorship of the internet will not come from government or media, but from you, the average citizen. You will demand stability. You do not want to read disturbing news or thoughts. You want happy news, happy commentary, and a pleasant vision of the future that suggests you’re doing everything right.
Subconsciously, you will reward that vision of the world with your dollars while shying away from any less-uplifting visions.
Your purchasing preferences, and your complaints about disturbing facts or ideas you encounter, will censor the internet — and society at large.
And yet you never hear of this in the media. Why, you might ask?
Because it’s an effective control mechanism. Not by government, but by you. You are controlling your fellow citizens by making them docile, so you can sell them whatever goods and services are linked to your job or business.
It’s all about you, after all. You don’t want your experience marred by discontent. You want only pleasure, and profits. While you’ll never admit it, you’re a more effective censor than totalitarianism.

Turkey: Center of the New Caliphate by Dr. Steve Elwart

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The Arab Spring and the rise of Islam in the region may prove to be the key to Turkey’s emergence as a true regional and world power. The stated goal of both Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood is a restoration of the Muslim Caliphate with Turkey as its head, as it had been for over 600 years.

While Syria’s Assad Regime enjoys the backing of both Russia and China as it goes through a program of systematic atrocities against its own people, the nation Assad truly fears is neighboring Turkey.

Turkey, a NATO member and the most powerful military force in the region, helped foster the creation of the Syrian National Council, Assad’s main rebel opposition group.

Turkey operates nine refugee camps along the Turkey-Syria border and has been an increasingly vocal advocate of the establishment of a “buffer zone” inside Syria to protect Syrian refugees.

Turkey is also publicly discussing invoking two international agreements, both of which would provide political cover for an armed intervention in Syria.

One instrument is the 1998 Adana Agreement. The other is Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which says an armed attack against any single NATO member constitutes an attack on all NATO members.

Turkey and Syria both signed the Adana Agreement after Turkey threatened to invade Syria because the Assad Government was harboring the senior commander of the Kurdistan Workers Party—the PKK, a Kurdish organization which has been fighting the Turkish state for greater political rights for the Kurds in Turkey.

The language of the agreement, however, is not limited to just the PKK. It also states that Syria “will not permit any activity that emanates from its territory aimed at jeopardizing the security and stability of Turkey.”

Turkey already harbors 25,000 to 30,000 Syrian refugees inside its borders and expects even more. Turkey is sending diplomatic signals that this surge of refugees across its border violates that treaty.

NATO Article 5 offers another legal avenue. On April 9, Syrian security forces fired across the Turkey-Syria border and wounded four people in a refugee camp in one of Turkey’s western provinces. That constituted an armed violation of Turkey’s border. Turkish Prime Minister Endogen angrily claimed that “NATO has responsibilities to do with Turkey’s borders, according to Article 5.”

All this is occurring at a time when Turkey is reemerging as a significant regional power. This country, spanning two continents, is in the process of returning to its former glory when it was the center of Islam, embodied in the Ottoman Empire.

End of an Empire

At end of World War I, the price of Turkey fighting on the side of a defeated Germany was the end of the Ottoman Empire. Though its political borders had changed, there was one thing that remained constant—Turkey’s fear of Russia.

For its part, Russia also feared Turkey. Turkey had the capability of exploiting a part of Russia’s strategic vulnerability—its access to the oceans.

Russia is a country that is almost land-locked. Much of Russia’s coastlines are inhospitable to a seaport; the ports of St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, and Murmansk experience near zero or subzero temperatures most of the year. Their access to the oceans is also constrained by potential adversaries. The Port of Odessa is the facility Russia possesses that gives that nation ideal year-round naval power projection. The city is located on Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and is the home port to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

Russian interest in the Black Sea extends over more than two centuries. Catherine the Great annexed the Crimea in 1783. Odessa serves as a major freight and passenger gateway to Ukraine and to Russia.

For any Russian sea traffic to gain access to the Mediterranean and the world, it has to pass through the Bosporus Strait and Istanbul, controlled by Turkey.

One goal of Russian national policy is to gain control of the Bosporus Strait—both to prevent a blockade and to project its power into the Mediterranean.

Therefore, the Russians have had a particular interest in reshaping Turkish sovereignty. Part of the reason that Russia is backing Syria in the current revolt is to try to stop Turkey’s expansion into that area.

In World War I, the Ottoman Turks aligned with the Germans, who were fighting the Russians. After World War I and during World War II, when the Soviets were weak or distracted, Turkey remained neutral until the closing months of the War, when it declared war on both Germany and Japan.

After the Second World War, when the Soviets were powerful and backed a planned coup in Turkey, the Turks allied themselves with the United States and joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), despite their distance from the North Atlantic.

In the post-war world, Turkey had very few options. The Soviet Union emerged from World War II with an economy in ruins, but militarily powerful. One consequence from the global war was that the Soviet Union rivaled the United States in geopolitical influence.

Turkey had very limited options. Western Europe was in shambles, Mainland China had turned to Communism, and Soviet military stationed on Turkey’s northern border formed an existential threat to that country’s sovereignty.

The Soviet Union knew that to secure its access to the seas it had to exert control over the Bosporus and Asia Minor. The subjugation of Turkey was of extremely high interest to the Soviets.

So important was Turkey to the Soviet Union that one of the demands the Soviet Union made to end the 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis was the removal of U.S. Jupiter Intercontinental Missiles from Turkey.

Unable to deal with the Soviets alone, Turkey‘s only option was to ally itself with the United States. From the United States’ point of view, Turkey was of strategic importance. Turkey faced the Soviets to the north and two Soviet clients, Syria and Iraq, to the south. An alliance with Turkey was a crucial part of the United States’ overall global strategy.

This strategic logic dissolved in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union.

A New Paradigm

For the first time since the start of the early 20th century, Turkey didn’t view Russia as a threat. The largest component of Turkish foreign policy was gone and with it, Turkey’s need for protection from the United States.

Turkey’s relationship with the United States was close for a time, but that relationship radically changed in 2003 with the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Turkey viewed the Iraq invasion as a destabilizing influence in the region. It saw the invasion as unnecessary, aiding Iran in becoming the regional hegemon, and disrupting Turkey’s internal politics. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, Turkey not only refused to participate in an American initiative, they also refused the Americans the use of Turkish facilities to mount the invasion.

Once Turkey decided not to collaborate with the United States, its foreign policy could never be the same. Turkey’s diplomatic break with the United States left the Turks free to consider other relationships.

One option was joining with Europe, which, on the whole, also opposed the American invasion. Turkey’s refusal to accommodate the Americans was not enough to win Turkey membership into the European Union, a goal for Turkey since the formation of the Union.

Turkey and the European Union

Membership in the EU was not seen in terms of foreign policy alone. For secularists it symbolized the goal of reshaping turkey into a European country committed to European values. For Islamists, it provided a vehicle for capturing Europe peacefully.

Ever since the time of the Crusades, Muslims have tried to capture Europe for Allah. This jihad was effectively ended with Suleiman’s Siege of Vienna in 1529. The siege signaled the pinnacle of the Ottoman Empire’s power and the maximum extent of Ottoman expansion in central Europe.

The creation of the European Union provided a new avenue for a Muslim takeover of the continent.

The free movement of persons within the European Union is granted to EU member citizens by treaty. The concept of free movement of persons within the EU came about in 1985, which abolished border controls between EU countries.

While the illegal immigration of Muslims from Turkey is a problem for Europe now, Turkish membership in the EU would have made the problem even worse. European members worried that Turkey’s membership into the Union would not only provide an entry for Turks into Europe, but also any immigrant using Turkey as their gateway.

Europe’s rejection of Turkey into the EU actually worked to Turkey’s benefit in that it left Turkey with a more dynamic economy today than most of Europe and without liability for Greece’s debt.

This also left Turkey as an emerging great power.

The Rise of Turkey

The Arab Spring and the rise of Islam in the region may prove to be the key to Turkey’s emergence as a true regional and world power. The stated goal of both Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood is a restoration of the Muslim Caliphate with Turkey as its head, as it had been for over 600 years.

The rise of Turkey, the Arab Spring, the reemergence of the Muslim Caliphate, along with Iran’s dream of preparing the way for the Mahdi, Islam’s prophesied redeemer, all point to a convergence that could very well take events foretold in Biblical prophecy and put them on today’s front page.

This article was originally published in the 
July 2012 Personal Update NewsJournal.
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PLEASE VIEW VIDEO 
 

A prophet yet an outcast: 100 years after his birth Enoch Powell has been vindicated on crucial issues

Powell was a man of conspicuous moral greatness, something that, alone, made him unsuited for politics, because it meant he could not keep what he perceived to be the truth to himself.

He had a gift denied to most politicians, which was of making prophecies that were right.

He was right about Europe; right about the single currency; right about economic management; right about Lords reform; right about devolution; right about American imperialism; and, with even Trevor Phillips, the figurehead of the Equalities Commission, now arguing that multiculturalism has failed, right about that, too.

Fourteen years after his death, and almost half-a-century after he sat in the Cabinet, his influence on political thought is not only undiminished: it continues to grow.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2158958/Enoch-Powell-A-prophet-outcast.html#ixzz20a1dReMA

Pluralism and Democracy

 

Pluralism

Jul  2012

by Brett Stevens.

Our modern society is founded on a string of concepts going back to the Enlightenment, when we decided that individual human beings wielding science were superior to religious concepts of inherent order to life itself.
The first concept here is individualism, or the idea that the individual is the highest value in society. This naturally leads to pluralism, or the idea that every individual is right in whatever they do, as all choices are options for the fulfillment of the individual, and any comparison of those to a “right” way is a constraint on that individual.
From that we go to utilitarianism, also known as majority rule, because it states that what benefits the most people is the best answer. Since there’s no way to assess what “benefits” means that does not contradict individualism, that tends to mean that we survey all those people and see what option the greatest number prefer. This is the basis of democracy.
After that, we arrive at pluralism. Since democratic voting allows one direction per many people, and it by definition leaves out a lot of people, it contradicts individualism unless there is also the idea that society exists as a facility to fulfill the individual, and thus that many individuals of conflicting values, ideologies and cultures can co-exist bonded only by the law that says the must be facilitated. This is called pluralism, and it is the basis of our permissive nanny-state that encourages us to tolerate everything and anything except the idea of any kind of standards.
Naturally, this sets up a number of paradoxes. First, we want the popular answer, not the right one. Second, we want quantity of response, not quality. Third, we agree to disagree. Fourth, we tolerate each other, which means detest and dislike, yet agree to be forced to co-exist. Finally, the nature of pluralism itself means there can be no social standards except for pluralism itself; like a computer virus, it’s totally self-referential.
Only because we’ve been indoctrinated in this stuff since birth can we read about it or hear and it not burst out laughing. Everyone has their own version of reality, and what ought to be done? Why, that’s a formalization of disorder. What most people want is the best? But they’re people, which means they’re going to pick short-term benefits over long-term difficult truths. Every election ends in beer, ice cream, circuses and pornography.
We are trained to think about pluralism in terms of its ethnic, sexual preference and gender-based varieties. This is because those things are not choices of the individual, thus can be characterized as arbitrary, and thus (socially) it’s seen as a cruel move to hold those arbitrary attributes against a person. Never mind if you’re simply trying to make an intelligent decision, like let’s not send women into combat or let’s divide our city by social classes into zones. In the view of the Crowd, you’re a jerk for even noticing these differences.
However, it’s important to remember that the goal of pluralism is not in itself this kind of chaos. The key to its goal lies in the individual heart. The selfish individual, putting himself before all else, wants to (a) neutralize society so it can demand nothing from him and (b) create the greatest possible pressure on others to give him what he wants. Guilt works toward this end, which is why pluralism is based on social concerns like tolerance, acceptance, etc. Even more, the implication of displeasure from a group because the actions of an individual threaten them all, as a control mechanism, is very powerful.
It is this individual desire that leads to the invention of pluralism wherever societies exist. The parasitic individual finds a reason to make others owe him, and by forcing them to comply with that rule and evading it himself by being entirely self-contained, he gains the greatest amount of power.
Unfortunately in doing so, he destroys his host, the civilization which supports him. As soon as pluralism occurs, each person has his own ideology, belief and values, and those are created for the sake of affirming individuality, thus must not overlap with any others. Outlandishness accelerates and soon agreement is impossible.
In that state, leadership cannot exist. Problems are ignored until they are disasters threatening the very life of the civilization. It can get away with it for awhile, but eventually a fast-moving problem appears, and the out-of-shape, confused and exhausted civilization cannot react in time, and begins its fall to the disinterested ground below.

Financial crossbreeding and it,s Effects

Financial crossbreeding.

By August Pointneuf

Politics is that pie slice of human behaviour which can be looked at as behaviour under constraint.

Economics is another pie slice - human behaviour which can be reduced to digital markers. It cannot be regarded as independent of the broad behaviour of humans, and must conform to the behavioural rules of human activity. Because economics can be reduced to mathematics is has another role. It can be used as an instrument to understand complex societal behaviour overall.

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The Euro was created in an attempt to “unify” the financial patterns of the diverse groups of Europe. That illustrated the inherent folly of the politicians in the European Union. When a single monetary unit was imposed across a wide spectrum of societies the naive fumbling the political engineers assumed that human behaviour could be permanently changed by diktat.

But they failed to understand that economics was only a small outward feature of overall human behaviour. Finances cannot be manipulated independently of that. The political fatal assumption was that the underlying behavioural variances of different groups and nations could be forced into a universalized “economic” behaviour by imposing a “universal” currency.

From the outset it was not conceptually possible that a Thessalonian goatherd could be expected to behave - socially, culturally and economically - in the fashion of a banker in Bonn. By even attempting to force this, the European Union demonstrated its political gaucherie.

It is true that human humans can be changed by external forces, but only temporally, and only by suppression. Human behaviour is far too intricate and complex to be remodeled by muscle.

It is no coincidence that when the controlling politicians of Soviet Union and the Nazis wished to show their power they used parade-ground disciplined demonstrations of military manoeuvres to express their authority. After the parade the participants, of course, reverted to their previous behaviour.

A universal currency should represent a consistent value to all its users. It should display value parity. But it is an economic truism that the value of a currency should reflect the productivity of the user group, (when compared with a “marker” currency). Said another way any currency is expected to possess”productivity parity”

Currency values are therefore secondary to (and are determined by) the behaviour of the population which issues that currency. It cannot be the other way around: A currency cannot determine the behaviour of a population.

But the nations which were persuaded to use the Euro were highly varied. They had different resource mixes, differing population ages and various levels of socialism. The per capita savings and concepts of wealth (which included the willingness to rely on promissory notes, i.e. borrowing on the premise that it expected those borrowings to be honoured) differed. Most important, productivity differed.

In the complex equation which is Europe, inequality of productivity exists. Therefore the value of the euro (expressed in terms of the interchangeable bonds) cannot reflect equal value parity. Any currency is ultimately committed to reflect the productivity of that individual national culture. Equality of productivity has never (indeed will never) happen in the European Monetary Area because of the very varied societal behavioural patterns of the nations –which are now in stressed bondage.

As a result Greeks pay a higher interest rate to lure purchases. Greek bonds, although denominated in Euro therefore cost less. The Germans, on the other hand, do not need to lure investors; instead investors clamour for their bonds because they believed that their money would be safer with the Germans then it would be with the Greeks.

Since a Greek Euro denominated bond now has less value than German Euro bond, a Greek Euro is now worth less than a German Euro.

Bizarre? Yes, but only because of the bizarre underlying fallacy that the behaviour patterns of different groups could be economically forced into synchrony.

Devaluing money from an unproductive country (i.e. causing its bonds to devalue) moves money from that country (making it more poor) to another (making it more rich).

Now that the Euro has been seen not to hold consistent value parity it can only be doomed to a relentless downward spiral of inconsistent value.

Since it will not be possible to force lasting conformity on the variety of societal groups that use the Euro, the euro must fail.

*******************************************************************************************************************

Any attempt to separate economic behaviour from the broader field of universal human behaviour is folly.

Changes in monetary value of nations put on show the underlying differences in cultural and behaviour as expressed by their diverging "economics".

Since politics and economics overlap they can offer parallel messages. The EU’s predictable failure as a monetary system now presages an equally predictable failure of its political union.

Thus where differing peoples are ordered, by political directives, to behave in “universal” fashion the same catastrophic cascades can be expected to occur politically.

The most important of these political directives, by the European Union, is that varied populations have been ordered to tolerate alien cultural distinctions and “ignore” obvious differences whether these are racial, linguistic, cultural or behavioural. People are forced - by law - to transgress the natural interface between different communities, obliging them to suppress their instinctive, protective reactions.

This social perturbation, if forced union continues, will be the same as shown in the economic model - widening divergences accelerating into an avalanche of chaos. The endpoint will be conflict and societal destruction.

This predicts that ultimately the entire European Union is politically doomed.

*******************************************************************************************************************

End note: the EMA seems never to have learned that while the Germanys were divided (and socio-economically different) the “official” exchange rate was one Ostmark to one Westmark. Reality forced the (empirical and realistic) black-market rate to six inferior Ostmark to one Westmark, Helmut Kohl lured voters in East Germany by promising – misleading to engineer his re-election - that reunification would permit a one-to-one exchange of Marks. This another political legerdemain succeeded only to have repercussions which still reverberate: West Germans continue to pay for that political chicanery.

Eat your heart out Jul, 2012

Eat your heart out

Jul, 2012

by Brett Stevens.

The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense. – Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice

The modern person has so deeply internalized self-loathing that she is unaware it thrives in her every action. Infected, she passes it on to her children as if gifting them with great knowledge, and in her dissatisfaction is unable to name her malady, which is dissatisfaction.
How is it that a society so at the heights of its powers, and so rich in technology and resources, can be so self-loathing? To answer that, we have to figure out why people hate themselves. There is no universal reason; we hate ourselves based on what we hate, and that varies with how smart we are and how strong our characters are.
But generally our self-hatred begins when we feel we are unable. We are unable to do what we need to do, or unable to know what we need to do. Or we are dishonest. Or maybe all of the above.
With the “progress” of the West toward an egalitarian society, we replaced the notion of goals, values and reality with the conventions of a society that exists to facilitative the individual. Goals, values and reality cluster together because they depend on each other; to have a goal, one must have values and understand reality, or in other words be a consequentialist like all conservatives are under the skin.
In other words, our greatest strength was also our greatest weakness. The “freedom” of democracy guaranteed that each person could do whatever they wanted. That in turn meant whatever they could afford. This in turn put people into a mindset where society became a hateful thing one manipulated in order to bring home the gold, which then was spent on “personal expression,” something we view with a near-religious sense of obedience.
As a side effect, this mentality made us hate ourselves. It meant that our jobs had nothing sacred to them, but were a dirty means to an end. It meant that when we were not working our jobs, our purpose was entirely disconnected from other people and basically selfish. We started seeing ourselves as whores by day, and keepers of dirty secrets at night.
Even more, the lack of a sense of overriding purpose and values ate away at us. If there was nothing to shoot for, except watching a lot of TV and buying stuff, we would have the most comfortable lives but we also would have removed the only thing that gives value to life, which is striving for a result against adversity. The creative act is not pacifism, but war.
Without some sense of what we should be doing beyond the self, we turned on ourselves. We ate our hearts out, and our souls. Convinced of our plastic irrelevance, we became spiteful and resentful toward life itself. A millennial onslaught of self-hatred followed.
Currently the West faces many problems, but all of those are bound by a single thread, which is our lack of respect for ourselves and our desire to cannibalize and self-destruct our society. It’s amazing that such a simple thing as equality could do all this, but it is our epitaph, whether we choose to recognize it or not