“IONO what’s worse: your constant lecturing on my supposed stupidity, or the fact that those websites you sent me as inspiring pep talk were, in fact, built by rank Nazis.”
“I quit.”
“It is great to see that that idiot professor of yours has been able to teach you something other than not understanding the Lotka-Volterra equation: unwarranted arrogance.”
“KILL THAT FUKKEN PIG OF A SOCIOPATH LEADER AND ALL HIS FUKKEN GENERALS!”
“True to the point. She certainly has most thorough knowledge of the thawra. As is already evidenced by the fact that the comments at her YT videos are 100% German, 0% Arabic.”
“Well put. Now, would you kindly shove your tongue down my throat?”
“With regard to your erstwhile prediction: was there a specific date or event at which you turned into a parody of yourself, or was it more gradual, and if so, how long did it take?”
“You obviously love this thoroughly traumatized tomcat very much, but fussing about him is not gonna make him any less traumatized.”
It’s not immediately obvious, but yes, they do shake hands, and no, the protesters are not bought.
Too much austerity, and you can’t even keep the cops employed. In such situations, it usually becomes a more or less invisible tug-of-war between civic forces and the military. Having read Luttwak’s Coup is a must for anyone who wants the civic side to prevail in such a situation.
There will, of course, always be a week or two of warning time, when you can stock up on legumes and grains. But the whole mess — call it Capitalism or The System or whatnot — is dangerously close to the edge.
It may fracture in 2012 or it may shatter in 2014.
Any case, in one year one week and a day’s time people will look back on the 13th b’ak’tun and surmise this or that. And they will draw deep and profound insight upon that.
It is supposable that humankind (or at least the “civilized” part) will emerge into cooling-down years, 2017 or so, much humbled. I may then not be alive. But in any case, it ought to be interesting to see how it progresses from thereon. Great things are afoot for the next year either way, what with the Occupy thingy having reached critical mass and economical conditions not looking especially bright. The seed of revolt has essentially spread anywhere the last half-year or so.
10000s are revolting against Putin. The € is openly speculated[de:] to be close to fragmenting. That about says it all. Nothing is sacred anymore; nothing is safe anymore. It’s all left open to chance; no powers-that-be can guide or direct anymore.
As a matter of fact, I concede that I am a bit astonished that the indices seem to have stalled at quite exactly KCapitalism. I’d have wagered it would be a bit below, say DAX 5500, DJIA 11000, N225 8000.
This does not occur often, a spot-on landing so soon. IONO what to think of it. I would be less surprised by DAX 7500 than this. I can hardly believe it’s gonna be stable, but the behaviour would of course have a severe effect on the expected (Q2/2012 most likely) downfall. It would very much alter its pattern, perhaps even make it un-2008ish — and 2008 was very 2000ish, nice and straightforwardly mathematical, even a physicist could understand it.
(Or would it? It will be interesting to see which attractor prevails — the overall decay of Capitalism, or whatever forcing stopped it at K)
BTW I was wrong twice. Winter ain’t coming. Which is funny considering the aforementioned 24th Cycle.
After September there was some weirdass month — Septober or something — which lasted 6 weeks. Then we had a half-month Octember, and spot on December 1st, November started. And we have been having a nice and proper November ever since. Cold, sometimes very much so, rainy, a bunch of good storms, a few unempathic flakes of show or pails of hail one day or two.
The “autumn” months were characterized by a prolonged drought this year. This bothered nobody really though, and in any case it was quite expected (the colder half of the solar cycle tends to be dryer too, of course). What is more surprising is that we had, in a perfect Cfb climate, at the start of the upward leg of a weak solar cycle, as much as 13 °C in late November. Not one day or two — as a matter of habit. It was nice, though it makes you wonder how the hot years will turn out to be. Strange to think we might not be seeing snow in these lands for a long, long time. Perhaps there will be abundant snow this winter, and the next, and that after the next. But it’s just as likely that there won’t be significant snow any winter in these parts for the next 30 years or so. We had some very cold winters the last years, everything except the human factor was forcing towards cold. Looks like it has changed once again, and next time the short-term forcings converge on cold again, the human factor might prevail.
“The army would need to run border surveillance so that nobody tries to smuggle € out of [Greece]. [...] [The Greek government] would need to rule by emergency powers [...] Wire transfers would need to be outlawed [...] international air and rail traffic would need to be prevented.”
– Some German professorreleasing 1000 years’ worth of stench from his undies[de:], probably Nov 6th, 2011 or a bit earlier.
FUN FACT: If a Greek professor (or indeed any professor, or person) gave such advice as that quoted above regarding Germany, he’d fulfil that country’s definition of that often-quoted but usually-misunderstood crime called high treason[de:]. Which in the hierarchy of crimes ranks just one peg below actual murder.
The present global economic woes, at least, should be largely solvable based on this.
After all is said and done, burn everything. Dump the ashes into the wind from some high and stormy place. I only want a single thing to remain. A chunk of good rock, say Alta quartzite or some fine dacite. Onto which, with large Latin letters, shall be inscribed an epitaph. Dump this rock in some desert place. It’s not like I would care anymore, or that there would be a point in anyone caring about me.
I expect the DAX in the mean term to remain below 5600 ticks, or at least not to go freely above 6K.
Perhaps - but it used to be more likely 2 weeks ago - there will be a major crash soon. Say DAX 4-4.5K. But if so, a rebound to DAX 6Kish is almost a given.
In general I’d guess there will be a tendency to stay with high volatility and major swings, but remaining roughly in the DAX 5-5.5K corridor.
That all, however, only if self-similarity is as high as it might indeed be. It would be stark. Extremely. But it has been in the past.
Probably a geometrid. Dunno if I saw this species last year already.
Speaking of Stark: Winter is coming in the North. Next week’s protests will not last through it, despite kicking up some major shit. They need not: winter is coming.
Some species of fruit trees are brimming this year. The walnut of my old folks is bearing heavier than ever. Other species didn’t give a good harvest though. But the general feeling is one of cornucopia. There are bark beetles everywhere, even in town; I have never seen the likes of it. And judging from the swarms of green lacewings and Harmoniae aphids had a boon year too. There were few butterflies and not more bees than usual, but I saw many strange (to me) moths.
A girl I know says it’s gonna be a tough winter. But if you’d now her, you know she’d say that no matter what.
I am not sure, at least regarding climate. But it may be the first for long where there is much more hurt than the cold. The chances for it going smoothly economically and socially are not high.
Alternatively, we’d get decreasing oscillations closing on around DAX 6K.
But I don’t think this is too likely. Carrying capacity is not globally stable it looks like.
Thus, in the more likely general scenario — still 2 attractors instead of the DAX 6K one — a major crash in perhaps Q2-Q4 (Q1-Q3?) 2012 is almost a given. Say DAX 4K or less. Possibly as little as DAX 2K, though anything less than 3K is unlikely. Still, even the latter would mean another nominal loss of half the global wealth within barely more than a year (with the main “correction” of “values” taking place within a few weeks).
People ought to smell the coffee then, and be in the right mood to do something about it. Who knows if they will? It’ll likely be their last-but-one major chance, and the one after will be before half-decade and against more severe externalities.
Presuming the above is based on correct analysis of the data at hand. The pattern is fairly characteristic though.
I have played around a bit with the Hang Seng and others.
If these are sufficient proxies, China can save the world economy 0-1 more times.
It will be interesting to see whether humans will be forced to suspend their disbelief of the things they will encounter, or whether they can uphold it until they are gang-raped by reality, thermodynamics and evolution.
Even though the data are rough (as in “it has been a rough ride”), extrapolating the Hang Seng from the 1990s’ values yields a current level of 25K[*]. Extrapolating it from 1990-2007, about the level of the present overshoot (i.e. 23.5K).
For the DAX, the corresponding values are about 12-13K and about 8K, respectively. The zenith of the present overshoot was 7.25K.
[*] This is the expected value if Capitalist/Marxist economic theories are correct. The divergence from expected value is 6% for the Hang, 42% for the DAX, 39% for the DJIA.
The crazyshitness quota is quite high[de:] these days, as you have heard. If they will talk of the 21st century world revolution afterwards, we’re already in it. It is quite unlikely that this can be stomped out anytime soon. Particularly since the hottest years of this decade are yet to come (remember the temperature curve lags about one year after the radiation curve).
As a side note, 2013 is the year of the scheduled Federal elex. However, in one week the legal basis to hold Federal elex will simply evaporate[de:] until, well nobody knows really. It’ll be the first “cold” coup in Germany (the Executive power rejecting the Jurisdictional power’s checking-and-balancing — NB: “Executive” is not quite correct because the German gov’t doubles as legislative and traditionally controls the rest of it to a certain extent).
The stock index corridor of disinterest until further notice is:
DJIA 12.5K — 12K
DAX 7.5K — 7K
Until they leave this range robustly, nothing interesting is bound to happen macroeconomy wise. The direction in which they leave this range is likely gonna be fairly representative of the next half-dozen weeks or so[de:]. Speed and volatility are not reliably indicators though; even when the general direction has stabilized, the whole world economy will not be stable. (It will not be for several years methinks. Or at least I have been unable to find many data that refute this hypothesis.)
As of 2011, about the worst known eating habits in the known Biosphere.
It really looks uncannily like V-fib, rarely have I seen such a prolonged period of this, and so clearly.
It is likely to follow suit if the others ditch, but it doesn’t look like it’s gonna rise significantly and sustainably anytime soon. Meanwhile, there is suspicion (borne out by hard physical data) that the dick that fuks you, Shima, is gonna be long, hard and dark. Yet it is notable that the locality is perhaps the one on the entire Earth where such a massive fuckup can happen without crass consequences (think hordes of ragged people with festering sores wandering through an otherwise abandoned and ruined megacity).
A lot of people — even many nuclear “experts” as it seems — still seem to mentally treat nuclear fuel like any old chemical fuel. But it won’t be so easy to dispose of. Even most bacteria die from eating it, and it cannot be thinned down and flushed down the drain and rot and become mostly harmless, and while you can burn the shit you really really shouldn’t.
We will have decades of shit ‘n’ giggles with that one. Not gonna be like thethreeworst hydrocarbon disasters in the history of Mankind, which are largely forgotten and amazingly ameliorated just 10 years after (at least if the two cases for which we have data are an indication).
And then there is this and consequently that to be seen below. As I said above, the crazyshitness quota is quite high. Or make it batfuckingshitinsaneness quota [de:]:
I have never come across anything comparable to this, nor have I heard of such a thing. 100Ks of Germans subscribe to it — this one video has >160K views alone, and the comments suggest most of the early adopters actually believed it at least partly (the more recent comments are mostly trolling though). Plus, it’s all over the conspi blogosphere.
Of course, it all cannot be discounted. Maybe we will get some false-flag detonation of a nuclear weapon there and then. In this case, Berlin will be fucked, Germany will be fucked, Europe will be fucked, it’ll be mayhem, people will survive by sheer luck and then wish they hadn’t etc., so it’s not something to worry about anyway. We’d be screwed six ways to Sunday and there’ll be nothing to do about it.
OTOH it may be all bogus. But in this case it may be the largest and most virulent mass delusion since the “Angels” of Mons or perhaps the Fatiman Sun “Miracle”. Both of which happened almost 100 years ago, happened at the height of World War 1, and if anything involved less people than this here shit.
So we’re pretty much fucked either way. It’s about time they start adding shit to the water to cure the peeps of their madness. You need heavy-duty shit though, compounds that really do drastic things to one’s brain chemistry. Potassium cyanide might just about do the trick…
In any case it’s not normal — by any meaning of the term –, it’s not healthy, it just shouldn’t happen. Meaning that either on June 26th, 2011, or some time not long thereafter, we’ll be in for a very rude awakening. The collective state of mind is like a ripe pear that could by no means stay on the tree any longer, and is now descending towards the pavement below. It is not clear where it splashes, but a splash of some sort seems inevitably. These things don’t just cure themselves.
100000s of my compatriots spontaneously going mad as it seems, and more than just slightly so. We may say the shit has now officially hit the fan.
I talked to a fuckload of anonymous Arabs in the last 2 months. And I can vouch for one thing: these people know perfectly well that they cannot rely on Western governments’ sweet-talk. But they simply want their dictators to go down down down, dammit and inshaAllah.
And they go and try to do that. And people die in the process.
Some of the people I chatted with, as a matter of fact, are dead now, killed by some dictator’s henchmen.
And what these folks did not like at all, each and every one of them, is random Westerners — all mouth and no balls — cooking their own stinking conspi soup and lecturing them Arab folks (some of which are risking their lives for a better and more just and more free and more prosperous future as I write these lines, with no chance even for as much as four minutes of fame) about the world at large.
In Misratah, they prevented Gaddafi troops from taking over the town for three fucking weeks. Of course, not being stupid they pillaged every arms store they could lay their hands on, but this does not change the fact that we had civilians fighting against mercenaries and soldiers with tanks and APCs and artillery and aircraft. For three weeks, they managed to prevent this organized and heavy military force from suppressing their uprising. For three weeks they defended their town and saved it from utter destruction. Without any significant outside help AT ALL.
But they are powerless against this arrogant breed of Western know-it-all fucktards.
And this riles them beyond belief: to be exposed to this arrogance on Youtube and Facebook and the newspaper readers’ comments and the blogs and so on. People who are not so much into violence, or can’t shoot straight, but who still go into the heat of combat with their phone cams and digicams, and document how European (Russian or Byelorussian, Ukrainian, Serbian, to be precise) mercenary snipers butcher scraggly unarmed Arab youths in cold blood. Then they upload this shit and it gets deleted or blocked because it’s too violent. They re-upload it because they want to bear witness if they cannot do anything else, over and over until it somehow, somewhere manages to persist.
And then such “civilized” “educated” “Xtian” lowlifes confront them. Scum who doesn’t even know what thawra means, or sha3b, or shabab. Cowardly and miserable excuses for human beings who never would be able to set up a revolution with their own hands, and piss their pants at the slightest whiff of FUD. And such people have the cheek to claim that these videos are “CIA fakes” or “staged” or whatnot, that they don’t believe it because they have not been there, and these guys in Gharyan firing at the crowd at random are probably not mercs at all but Hollywood extras (and what is “Gharyan” anyway?)
“Funnily” most of this Westerner scum are quite ready to believe every rumor they hear about “USrael” or “the Zionists” or “the Masons” or “the Rothschilds” or “the Globalists”, up to and including matzot baked with Xtian kid blood (makes a bit of a storag problem amirite?). And of course, all those fools who are so ready to doubt the provenance of any information that doesn’t fit their narrow little mind have never been to Gaza even once in their lives. They get their own facts only from the news and from videos which they according to their own “standards” could not reliably place or confirm to be true.
(Of course a damn lot of Arabs are fucking Jew-haters. But in fact it seems to be less bad in the younger, better-educated generation, and it is a fact that toppling your domestic oppressor keeps their mind off that shit quite successfully in most cases. And after all, it must not be forgotten that no matter how ridiculous this prejudice is, the Arab variety has at least some historical fundament — it is not justified, but it is plausible; if you see your “brothers” kicked about, you empathize. This is only a human gut-level reaction than is almost automatic if not deliberately suppressed.
Whereas the Westerner antisemitism “antizionism” is simply random mouthfarts masquerading as speech; they have no reason at all to be pissed off at Jews or Israel or whatnot. They are quite at leisure to like Jews or Israel, or hate them, or be indifferent about them. And these sick fucks actively choose to hate, without any actual reason except that they are pitiful and miserable haters who can’t stomach life if they don’t be hating on someone. Scum, a disgrace to humanity, and completely blind of history. As Zvi Rex would have put it: people who’ll never forgive the Jews for having Oświęcim‘d them.
If you point this epistemological discrepancy out to them, they usually insult you in no uncertain terms.)
This is really adding insult to injury. And though this is perhaps a bit arrogant given that I did not put more at stake than a few nights’ sleep, and that I effected almost nothing, but I consider these precarian, dispossessed youth revolutionaries my comrades, my brothers-and-sisters-in-arms. Even though we may disagree, I respect them and I have never gotten anything but honor and respect from them. This much I can say. The worst guy I had to deal with was a Muslim Brother from the Sinai. But even him I did not want to patronize. I couldn’t; even though I disagree with these guys on a very fundamental level, I completely agreed with him regarding the Mubarak regime. I was also very much interested in his tale, to hear his opinion and analysis of events. Because even though this guy was just some unemployed yokel from Egypt, his knowledge regarding things Egyptian vastly exceeded mine. Closest I could get was live chats with people down on the scene. He was actually breathing the cordite in the air and putting his life on the stake. How can I, as a human being, not respect such a guy? In his situation — would I stand or would I flee and hide? I cannot tell; I hope I never have to find out the hard way.
All I know is that he did stand.
And it is not just sandniggers. Right now it is. But at other times it was Christfags, kikes, unbelievers, karmafools and all that. Palefaces, redskins, niggers, slant-eyes, abbos and whatnot. No matter by what name you dis them in mock or earnest, he who does not acknowledge the moral superiority of standing in the face of mortal injustice and oppression knows no freedom even if it hit him over the head. If people admit that they are afraid, this is still OK. One has to acknowledge one’s fear to face and overcome it. But he who considers himself oh so much of a rebel while denigrating and badmouthing and questioning and insinuating and finger-pointing those who do rebel is a poor and abject and pathetic critter indeed. A sick traitor, a mangy cur unto his own people. And none of these sick fucks would ever have the guts to stand up to an actual Arab youth revolutionary and repeat his claims into the guys’ face.
Each and every 4-year-old girl from Misratah has more balls than those cowards.
I close with a verbatim quote from an Arab expat, a smart guy who taught me a lot of useful things, and whom I seriously hope will live long and prosper, because he is made of the right stuff.
He said this about one of these know-it-all fucktards:
The problem with [XXX] is that she THINKS she knows something when really she knows nothing about Arab opinion and the reality of the situation.
Shes just as ignorant as Joe on the Street in any Western country with constant assumptions and lack of knowledge. shes not informed at ALL on anything.
Shes a fucking ignorant cock and you can tell her I said that too!
Guy looks like he was from inland the Horn. Sudan, Eritrea. Perhaps Ethiopia, Somalia, Chad, northern Kenya. Djibouti of course. Probably not Jemen, but might even be Saudi.
Peace to those who brought us this video.
Also peace to those who documented events in Zhaiqiao Village, Puqi Town, Yueqing City (People’s Republic of China) on Dec. 25th, 2010. This is what happened. <—— YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
So, revisiting the river valley overlooked by Hill 431, where two nights before the CinC[*] and his “publisher of a major newspaper” friend went to their little outing.
While the Minister was back in Berlin getting 80% of the major media pissed off mightily (and one Mr. Wonka of the Leipziger Volkszeitung[de:] presumably shitlisted — watch 1:20 to 1:32 and 1:50 here:)
some Afghan guy who presumably will forever remain nameless had decided to take matters in his own hands — alas, too late, efficient though he was.
It is not (yet) known whether he joined the ANA out of serious or subversive intentions; in any case this here hardcore fucker seems to have concluded he could tackle the 10 or so Bundeswehr troopers who with him were doing advance patrol for the Krauts’ forward command post in the Hill 431 area (OP North) on his own.
Terrorists 3 : Germany 1 Image via n-tv
He whacked at least 2 Kraut soldiers immediately, a third one either there and then too or he didn’t make it much farther than MEDEVAC. One or two others will likely either die or remain crippled, 6 others are wounded but presumably will survive with only mental damage, seeking professional treatment for which may, of course, afflict them with “disadvantages in certain aspects and points” re: their heroic and most exalted Army career.
Well, the German version of “Where there is smoke…” goes “you use a plane, you get them wood chips fallin’ down” (Note the Jap reference was of course not implied in the German proverb. Given that the Japanese and the Prussian military tradition are perhaps the best example of convergent evolution in that field in modern times, I simply could not resist.). In any case, if the OMFs had a Medal of Bravery (see also below), with going up 1 against 10ish and scoring at least 3 : 1, on a purely factual basis this Afghan guy would certainly qualify.
Terrorist to Us, Hero to Them; in any case I’d like that Wonka fellow to have ballz as tough as those of that Afghan guy. He’ll need them, the weekend will not be a happy time for him. Also, he probably won’t get people killed, which is not a bad thing in any case.
Strictly speaking however, it is a) hard to call someone a “terrorist” with actual moral condemnation when you leave them no way to be a regular combatant because we ourselves have defined these guys as not eligible for such a status, and b) when this particular Afghan is perhaps far more adequately compared to a GLADIO operative in case the Russian had waltzed through the Fulda Gap back in ‘83.
Note that all the ppl killed so far in yesterday’s Shootout at Hill 431 were younger than I am. What stupid pointless waste. But no, it is glory, heroic deeds, defence-in-advance, collective security and all that. The one who defends his home soil may be even morally excused; the occupier, however, is generally not excusable. Look at the WW2 Allies — even the Ruskies tried not to be too bad motherfuckers after the Reich came down, though they had all reason to slaughter each and every single individual of the German scourge they could have gotten their hands on.
(Truth to be told though, the USSR was less restrained in Afghanistan ‘85 than in Germany ‘45. But so has NATO been since ‘01. So really we are not exactly in a position to complain here.
* There are persistent rumors that actually he isn’t. It is a bit complicted. Bear with me:
“Article 24
[Transfer of sovereign powers – System of collective security]
(1) The Federation may by a law transfer sovereign powers to international organisations.
[...]
(2) With a view to maintaining peace, the Federation may enter into a system of mutual collective security; in doing so it shall consent to such limitations upon its sovereign powers as will bring about and secure a lasting peace in Europe and among the nations of the world.
[...]”
– Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (Revision of October 2010, Official English translation)
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”
– Article 5 para 1, North Atlantic Treaty.
“Xa.
State of Defence
Article 115a
[Declaration of state of defence]
(1) Any determination that the federal territory is under attack by armed force or imminently threatened with such an attack (state of defence) shall be made by the Bundestag with the consent of the Bundesrat. Such determination shall be made on application of the Federal Government and shall
require a two-thirds majority of the votes cast, which shall include at least a majority of the Members of the Bundestag.
[...]”
– Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (op. cit.)
“[A]n armed attack against one [...] shall be considered an attack against them all” — “Attack by armed force or imminently threatened with such an attack (state of defence)”.
“shall be made by the Bundestag” — “transfer sovereign powers to international organisations”.
So Art. 24(1) has entitled the Federal gov’t to transfer some sovereign rights to the NATO Council, which they have done by agreeing to the N.A. Treaty.
Article 5 of this, in addition to the “Wobbly clause“, specifies that these transferred rights “shall” include the right to declare a national state of being under armed attack on one’s home turf, as in the case of Germany is laid out in Art. 115a(1).
Such a declaration may thus be collectively taken by the NATO Council for all of NATO, legitimized to do so in the case of Germany by Art. 24(2) (”system of mutual collective security” and all that).
Thus, arguably the combination of these three clauses entitles the NATO Council to declare a “state of war defence” according to Art. 115a(1) in the Bundestag/Bundesrat’s stead. (It depends a bit on the intractable “shall”, which IIRC may mean either “can” or “must”, but in this case its similarity of use in Art. 5 and Art. 115a suggest that more likely than not it means the same in both cases.)
(I got this train of though from some brighter-than-usual Truthers, who nonetheless were dumb because that’s where they stopped, clamoring about the illegitimacy of the N.A. Treaty — not realizing that this whole Truther business is the work of some US ultranationalists who want no fucking NATO or UNO to stand in the way of God’s Own Country pursuing its Manifest Destiny. Really, these people believe a) that the US has basically been a power of global good, even in recent times, because b) it is blessed by the WASP God, and c) are yet as regards their ecological footprint are the vilest scum ever to disgrace the face of Earth in the Modern era, pure and utter spawn of hell if there ever was such.
In any case, the Truther idiots were ardently wrong in the end, as always. For: )
The whole matter must still be voted on by the German Parliament. However, the Parliament does not vote according to Art. 115a(1) directly, but on the NATO Council decision according to Art. 5. Which if voted Aye “shall” automatically invoke Art. 115a pp., or so it sounds like.
Basically it’s not the Chancellor suggesting Parliament Ayeing on Art. 115a(1) as the purely German legal construct demands it, but the NATO Council, entitled thereto by Art. 24(1)/(2), suggesting Parliament to Aye on Art. 5, which triggers Art. 115a pp with no additional vote. Truthers get all riled about this violation of National Sovereignty, meaning they spend a lot of time time not doing something about the morally dubious content that is there in any case. Amoral’s amoral, no matter who decides.
Now this whole convoluted legal argument is conspi shit and can be safely dismissed, if there were not a) a spade of Bundeswehr deployments in the scope of civilian protests that seemed quite unprecendented in scale and depth of troop involvement[de:], and b) the following legal mess:
[t]he Honor Medal is awarded by the Federal Minister of Defence.
So it may seem a bit odd that
“[t]he first [Honor] Medals will be given by Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) to four soldiers [...]”
– Die Welt, July 5th, 2009
but OTOH
“Upon the promulgation of a state of defence the power of command over the Armed Forces shall pass to the Federal Chancellor.”
– Art. 115b, Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (op. cit.)
Not that this is really important or that I’d claim IAAL; the situation de iure is always subordinate to the situation de facto and Merkel I’d trust to be wet as igapó[:pt] when she hung those trinkets on those troopers so IDIFTL in her case could be an acceptable excuse for what in peacetime Germany constitutes perhaps a formally illegal act.
Yet it would still be interesting to know in what the fuck damned Constitutional state this country is actually in ATM. We are not at peace, this much seems undisputable. Are we at war? They say we’re not. So we in defence then? Do we have the Art. 80a(3) rule[de:] in force or not? Are we technically in defence but waiting to get actually attacked to be able to roll out the Emergency Acts (which we have not rolled out yet, at least not in any publicly noticeable way[de:])? Either way, the equilibrium[de:] seems to be lost for good. It will tumble; which way is not clear, but the old relationship of State and Law will never recover.
The Second Republic is dead. And in the next few weeks, the People will provisionally decide whether the Third one will be progressive or reactionary, and whether it will grow out of the Second, or hulk in its empty shell, or smash it.
They may not be aware of it, but barring aliens, comets, thermonuclear war and shit, they will decide.
We will not definitely perceive the decision until in one year’s time or so, but by then the choice will be more or less final.
Hanging tough at Hill 431 with the publisher of a major newspaper (To be 'splained below) Image by fritz13.
Dax floating free above the train wreck (but still within grund effect I presume — TINA was a capitalist whore all along after all). DJIA is so-so, definitely not off the ground. N225 remains groundbound essentially.
Them sandniggers are getting restive, and neither Sammy not Johnny (nor the Kaiser nor anyone else) can seem to hold them at bay. Too bad too that it’s mostly the liberal young dispossessed, the oldschool factory workers and altogether a lot of civil society. Demanding more democracy. Well damn.
But truth to be told, in Egypt they made a better start than the U.S. did in Iraq, with as of now perhaps 0.1% of the excess dead and democratic progress that is not worse and perhaps better.
What they need to do now is not repeat the West’s mistakes. Until now it is going smoothly, but the constituante is worrying me a bit. The idea of an emergency constitution, liberalized and without other regime slack, is not bad at all. Now it is basically a power struggle between the people and the political parties (and some Islamists and some nomads), with the army probably tending to side with the latter.
All I can say that in western-style democrazy, the politial party has grown to be one of the most detested organizations of the State, and is perceived at least among the more intelligent people as a greasy barrier that stands between them and Democracy (less intelligent people are simply feeling repulsed by them grifters), except perhaps for the 3-4 nice rank-and-file activists you know from the pub (and which may be genuinely nice considering they obviously didn’t get far in the Party hierarchy).
Perhaps they would be better served with recallable impromptu delegates with an imperative (or almost-) mandate. Perhaps they would better be served with a citizens’ militia (as has been tried with considerable success — none of that sick paramilitary Ami shit, but purely civic patrols without any offensive capability whatsoever) instead of the Mubarak-style police, and teach most of the Mubarak-style police some reading, writing, and more than basic English instead (and not to loot the national museum[de:]). Perhaps use the regime’s confiscated assets to pay the unemployed some basic income; it will keep people from shenanigans and after all it’s mostly money that was stolen (or rather withheld) from the people in the first place.
But given that the folks in Cairo managed to set up this and this without the West telling them sandniggers what to do, one can only hope for the best.
Looks like their assistance is the best shot we have in keeping all this from coming down within the next generation into a decaying mess of internecine Nation-states. At least, the sandniggers can teach us many things. But in the meantime, it mostly depends on keeping the Egyptians fed and not letting the quisling “democratic” parties compete inter se and with the freewheelers of the revolution (ElBaradei etc) and the Muslim Bro’s, but establish democracy ground-up. Regarding the Brotherhood, their way to spread the word seems mostly to be charity work — and some aggro shit on the side one Egyptian source of mine vehemently pointed out. And as experience shows, turning the advancement of the Islamic cause into a political party rots it more quick and thorough than Western-style democracy (which evolved to withstand Western-style corruption of/by power).
So, our Mo”D”, as soon as his CV started to get scrutinized, sources say, went to the frontlines and stayed with the troops on Hill 431, only spitting out
There is no knowledge (I am aware of) of any hereditary oddities going on in this family, though German nobility has cultivated some strange alleles in the past. So this drama queen shit is quite inexcusable.
Consider, then, this: One thing the guy is in fact, apparently, after all, being a rather outstanding example of the good ole Franconian Xtian stock. Exempli gratia, if the Minister had said to you “I believe in God and Jesus Christ and (at least metaphorically) in the Virgin Mary” he’d almost certainly not have lied. So basically, it had hitherto all made sense for him; Roman Catholicism, if taken seriously, is famed for its closed and polished worldview among friend and foe alike. Now — it cannot make much sense now, no?
What’s going on inside this man now? How must it feel to fall from blind faith, to know that God, if He exists, does not smile upon you, but a muck of fail and corruption did? Or that God does not exist, and that what you held in His stead holds no good at all? I never had any of that. How does it feel to fall from grace?
I was about to write “DAX smashes 6.5K, rising and holding.” Well I presume it will try to hold, and probably manage to hold on for a few. But we’ll have to see and wait, wait how this Ireland/Portugal/Cyprus thing turns out.
This, by the way, will give you an indication of the sheer size of it all. When did you first hear about the “Celtic Tiger”’s problems? Some time ago, you may distantly remember.
Well, that’s how long it took. Gauges the amount of shit going broke. Years. This one crisis ain’t over. We’re right were it starts to get interesting. Maybe we’ll come out cool, maybe not. A lot of things are at stake in the years up to, say, 2015-2017.
Germany is prolly gonna stay calm til March or so, perhaps. Ugly things might happen any minute or so we’ve been warned, and s’pposedly they had PA messages broadcast in the Berlin Tube and Literail, calling on ppl to watch out for other ppl acting suspiciously and report them ASAP. Friend of mine who lives there didn’t notice, but then she said she’s not especially a shining example of a Citizenette, and prolly wouldn’t notice. But really, though they do have one good on Jo K. Öfflich — what with mocking the dead an all; is that Xtian behavior nowadays? — and if I were them guys, I’d try and see I get this cheque cashed.
But seriously? Us Germans tend to think of ourselves as ones that did their history homework. Did we? I can’t tell yet.
Point being, I cannot sufficiently gauge how thin a veneer of civilization is left on this cuntry. Sales of that odious book have risen into the low 10E6s, if that is any indication. We cannot, it seems tugh, consider ourselves so much better than any fucking other gluttonous rich bastard country; those times were back when the Soc Dems and Greens governed. They at least honestly tried not to make gross mistakes, and Germany could largely stand aside in this Godforsaken war. We’re deep in now, other plans nonwithstanding: the military plans that will be successfully implemented, are, after all, usually those of the eventual victor.
Did you note that winter is coming in Afghanistan, and for the first time since long the attacks of the guerilla, it seems, have not ceased yet?
(My Portuguese may suck; I apologize. I am barely able to grasp the basic rules, and have been forced to do so by necessity alone.)
There is a lot of talk these days about admigration. Google knoweth not that word, yet Germany does[*]. We do not know, or have, “immigration”, except in the negative: Germany is not, and will never be, a country of immigration. Or so it has been said.
The following quotes are, à votre plaisir, rendered into English trying to conserve the original spelling and punctuation to the best of this writer’s ability. I swear, I did not make this shit up. It is barely less gibberish in German — in most cases you can understand the gist of what these people are saying, but that’s about all. True, German is prone to overly-complex sentence structures, but in most cases the participants’ grasp of their native language is shaky. True, there are those whose grasp of the language is flawless, but in two-thirds of the discussion’s participants — more if anything among those who are anti-immigration — it is not in some way or another, possibly insignificantly, but often enough severely so. True, there are people who consider Kanak Sprak a debasement of the German language, but it follows quite ubiquitious code-switching/language-mix rules; true, there are common spelling errors in all other written languages (think of a fuschiacarnatian); but the penGerman found here has neither structure nor rules, it is simply pre-school to early secondary school level (note that the people quoted below are not 5 to 10 years old, but 15 to 65).
That being said, behold[de:... sort of] - these are all quite sic, but certainly not the worst[nl:]:
“Finally someone who has enough backone to tell the truth.”
– eurozoni, “German”
A harmless one. Should be “backbone”.
“It is and it stays as it is, Sarrazin is right, bownosign in Turkey. Why ???????”
– benkick, “German”
“Brownnosing”. Also dubious sentence construction, and lacks the “ß??ßß?ßßß” at the end.
“It is a fackt after all despite that, many thinking as Mr. Sarazzin does that the politicians are not very interrested. To these, the only thing that matters is forreign relaitions to other countries and how they can hype up their Statistic.”
– PrincessDizzy2, “German”
Would things be different if they paid more regard to their domestic relaitions to other countries?
“Islam and human rights constitute an antagonistic contradiction.”
– Breitengrad1, “German”
This may simply be a rhetorical figure of speech.
“Sarrazin attacks Wulff it is right too! [...] Wulff Darling seems to obviously be Islam,an enemy of Christians somehow!!!”
– Lora35, “German”
The “Wulff” (which is in fact the correct spelling) gives it a touch of barking Alsatian.
“YES,this can be used to sell a book,because Sarrazin gives no quarter to the German shlemihls either.”
– Haudruff, “German”
Fear the Shlemihl, mortal enemy to all things German. The username incidentially translates quite literally as “Smashem”.
“At least 80 % of the pepölation Agrees with Him - even if many do loudly not admit to that, fearful of being represed, in our so-called “the Democracy”.”
– retcoal57, “German”
I had to tweak here; the last bit was a accusative clause referring to a dative term and using the wrong grammatical gender, which would not be otherwise distinguishable in English.
“In no country, except Germany social security is being exploited by some Non Germans as in ours.”
– guenter1947, “German”
If M.C. Escher had been a poet, and on crack, and a fascist, he’d have written shit like that.
“Is Mr. Sarrazin the only one in Germany who has sense and a vision of the future. This is lacking in Mr. Wulf aswell as our politicians.”
– ruemasi1943, “German”
Is that a question.
“Thus, public stages for Mr. Sarrazin! When will Germany awaken?”
– marco, “German”
“We speak German, not Spanish, Lebanese, [...] Italian, German, Englsih or other languages.”
– Life1952, “German”
No you don’t.
“Example too wen sarazzin should be Praesident lett alone Chancellor , he will be elliminated by the U.S.A. ! Forr sarazzin is classified ass jew hatter with his ztatements regarding israel.”
– Papilion, wannabe “German”
Reality check: Sarrazin made no statements regarding Israel.
“Sarrazin will cetainly be attacked by his Opiniongillink colleagues for his renewed statements against(the Lacklustreseeming) Wulff.”
– brahm53, “German”
“Opiniongillink” was supposed to be “opinion-killing”.
“But I can accept if these same people [i.e. the murderous barbarian hordes of Islam] with their own hands’ Work, with Learning the german language and with respecting the german
Society intigrate here.”
– S041958, “German”
You probably cannot, because they’d be superior to you in at least two of these three aspects.
Other interesting trivia Germans “know” these days:
While Germany had its “little Hitler”, other countries had dictators, too, and people were killed there, too. But this is never or rarely being mentioned, because the myth of haShoah being a singular or notable event is too good to instal a bad conscience in Germans.
France lured Poland into the trap of getting attacked by Germany, intending to have the latter bleed itself to death thus enabling France to invade Germany without major casualties.
When the Muslim has taken over, the World Wars will seem like paradise to us.
[*] Zuwanderung is the correct translation of “immigration” in a purely societal context (migrants being added to a society, regardless in which political boundaries this society exists and regardless the source of the migrants; they could also be people moving from one town to another inside the same country). But as soon as national boundaries come into play, it is just factually wrong; the correct German term is Einwanderung, “migration into a country’s boundaries from abroads”.
Ideological considerations have prevented a linguistically correct use of these terms since at least WW2 by downplaying or explicitly denying the blunt fact that immigration to Germany does not only exist, but that the German population is basically composed wholesale of people who immigrated here within the last 2000 years; thus, immigrants are linguistically added to Germany the country, as if they were pieces of land.
So, on May 20th, 2010, I said in a private conversation (that was duly noted down) regarding the economy:
the significant index values of the coming ?weeks:
dax 6500 and rising
djia 10000 and falling
Meaning that until one of these marks is breached, and robustly so, the global economy will remain in limbo, and other matters of concern may be leisurely regarded as utterly more important.
Almost 3.5 months later, I have no reason whatsoever to change my opinion on this issue.
The last week of October and the first 2 weeks of November are, of course, something to watch out for. I am equivocal on whether things get a-movin’ again before that.
Assuming that the average household size in Germany is 2 persons (as far as I can tell, something of an underestimate) and assuming that 80% have been sold to German households (as far as I can tell, something of an overestimate), and assuming a print run of 100 K specimens to date (the actual number is probably not much lower, and may be half again as high), one in 500 German households owns or will soon own a copy of that book.
That is actually not that much for a work of fiction; one-tenth the sales of the average Harry Potter novel. Then again, had Harry Potter been marketed to an endocrinologically mature target group, it would probably have achieved less commercial success.
It is quite a piece of work. “Impressive” does not even come close. More than 20 folks in 8 countries from all over Europe to the US, Russia and Israel contributed an estimated 2 years of work each — possibly more — to this study. And as opposed to other works that have dragged once-proud Nature down to tabloid status, it seems to be as solid as it gets.
For the layperson, the editor’s summary is probably most informative, so it is here quoted in full:
A comparison of genomic data from 14 Jewish communities across the world with data from 69 non-Jewish populations reveals a close relationship between most of today’s Jews and non-Jewish populations from the Levant. This fits in with the idea that most contemporary Jews are descended from ancient Hebrew and Israelite residents of the Levant. By contrast, the Ethiopian and Indian Jewish communities cluster with neighbouring non-Jewish populations in Ethiopia and western India, respectively. This may be partly because a greater degree of genetic, religious and cultural crossover took place when the Jewish communities in these areas became established.
Pretty interesting. Ancient historians and critical scholars of Abrahamism take note.
For the rest of us, other things than mouldy old boxes may be relevant. I’m simply gonna fair-use the (c) NPG pix here. They are too informative to be simply linked, and in fact, most of the written text is simply technical details.
Each of the slim, (usually) stacked-in-multicolor columns in this image is a single person’s genomic structure, as per a handful of marker loci. These individual columns are aggregated in wider columns, as per the person’s origin (non-Jewish) or denomination (Jewish).
If you can’t grok this w/o resorting to the term “race”, then think of each color as representing a “race”. But to think of it as the ghosts of ancient tribes, while not correct, is probably infinitely much closer to the truth.
The Yakuts, for example, are a pretty good genetic approximation of such an ancient tribe even today. Alternatively, they may be descendants of a group which at some time many, many thousands of years ago had declined a very very few individuals, which by chance happened to be descended from a single family which had lived earlier still; in this case all other genetic heritage would have been wiped out in this decline. But one cannot tell from the DNA whether a strain of people — or any other such lifeform — kept to themselves since time immemorial, or were a more diverse people’s last survivors after some catastrophe. In any case, the genetic contribution of this group, family, tribe, lineage, strain, whatever it may have been, is represented in pale yellow.
Dark green seems to be what eventually became Dravidians in southern India. Meaning that a lot of things can’t have happened that a lot of philology assumes and is built upon. Either “Aryans” were a crossbreed of a bunch of backwoods yokels from all over Asia — with a good dash of European and other more far-flung ancestry –, or they were in some direct way related to the people whose legacy is approximated by light green. Then, the average Maghrebim would be twice as Aryan as the average German. Of course, “Aryans” might have been mostly an invention of Vedic historiographers to justify the socioeconomic status quo.
(I admit, I have a certain glee in dismantling the notion that the proud Aryan once sewpt like a scythe thru the lesser races, rendering them into cowering subservience at its feet, and shall be destined by its “blood” to do so again and again. Too much mischief has been done with it already.
Speaking of Germans, no Germans were included in the study. It is a pity, because at least on a fine-scale structure “we” can be expected to turn out a rather mongrelly lot. For example, it is as good as certain as it gets in such a place that may matrilineal ancestors were essentially descended from a warlord and his small mercentary troop, camp followers, and a few of the local woodsfolk. But at the scale used here, which is rather coarse, Germans would likely appear much like French, perhaps a bit more colourful. There is the dark blue haplotype, which has a decidedly Europe-centered distribution. But it is also found in the Near East and into Central Asia, as well as being quite strongly present in the Maghreb.)
Note that “Celts” and “Basques” do not exist as “races”/strains recognizable at this level. This is not unexpected in the former case (impyling even more strongly that “Celticness” was mostly an early Iron Age metallurgical/pop cultural fad that caught on and prospered — the Celtic pantheons differed quite strikingly between the major groups, which is unexpected given the amount of trade and communication), and somewhat interesting in the latter case. The Basque core region is close to the presumed Western refugium of Neanderthals. That there has been occasional (but uncommon) successful hybridization between them and Homo (s.) sapiens has been shown. Yet at least at this coarse level, the Basque folks tested did not seem to show increased numbers of unusual haplotypes.
Japanese, though the sample consist of quite a number of individuals, show very little variation. Racially speaking, it would mean that Japanese originated as blendlings[de:] between the “paleo-Yakut race” (indicated in light yellow) and the “nondescript-Eastern-Asian race” (indicated in orange). Now you know why thinking of human diversity as “races” and being meaningful in any scientifically accurate way does not work, and why “scientific racism” is a contradictio in adiecto.
In reality, it means that beyond the original peopling, the Japanese mainland seems to have received very little immigration. Even Yakuts of our time are not “the descendants of the paleo-Yakut race”; their ancestors have decidedly (but strangely selectively) fornicated with a lot of folks from entirely elsewhere that happened to come along whereever the original Yakut-oids lived. And most assuredly, the fictious “paleo-Yakut race” has left its trace in genomes deeply into Europe.
I would like to have more data from Africa and East Asia. It looks unexpectedly unstructured. But at least in the former case, it is entirely conceivable that the many, many lineages of humans that originated there after the initial dispersal simply have never been prevented to fuck their way from one end of the continent to the other. However, gene flow (moar liekallele flow, actually) was stronger around the Congo Basin than through it. But it still means that to declare a “Pygmy Race”, you could hardly deny any Bantu admission, at least as long as people like Halle Berry are generally considered “African-American”. On the other hand, it also may mean that this evolved on its own, and from the standpoint of a scientific investigation of the nature of the Divine must be considered with equal weight as any world religion.
As regards Jews - mongrels, through and through. There is no such thing was a “Jewish race” (and there is more bad news to follow); Druze, as far as this author knows, rather adamantly insist that they are certainly not in any way Jews, and mean (to the uninformed) surprisingly little offence at that. It is simply as it is — whether Druze might be legitimately considered Muslims or not has been discussed at length and without resolution by mighty men of words, but they are not Jews. Syrians and non-Jewish Lebanese are also not Jews according to anyone’s account. Yet all of these — including such illustrious figures as Dr. Assad — have much higher odds than almost any other person anywhere in the world of being genetically virtually identical to any mainstream Jew you’d randomly point your finger at.
Indeed: if there were a “Jewish race”, it would have to include almost all of the fuckin’ Army of God (including most of any Iranian advisors as might happen to be around, for that matter). From a biological standpoint, as far as any datum can tell this condition is not negiotiable.
There is also very little genetic difference between most Turks and Jews you’d happen across in this universe. In essence, the only conspicuous difference is that the former’s ancestors had more relations in — presumably — the Caucasus and around it. The caveat is that the Juhuri would have accepted very few righteous proselytes. And in any case, it is evident that cultural exchange between Juhuri and those A[ghr]an[?k] folks was an essentially complete bilateral homogenization, except in the matters most sacred. A Jeyshullist would still have had to acknowledge the fact that his culture is Jewish for a major part.
The lighter blue is quite some mystery. I’d like to see a sample of Greeks in that regard. “Light blue-strain haplotypes” are common around the Mediterranean, but there is no good indication what it represents and where it comes from. If we did not know as good as certain that Atlantis was a philosophical thought experiment not in any way related to a specific physical locality, one might postulate this the genetic legacy of the “Atlanteans”.
Pity though that any nigger has as much claim to that heritage — if not more, if a true and righteous New World nigger he be, and not a good old-school black guy straight out of Mother Africa — than those who historically have laid claim to it — “Caucasians”, “Germanics”, “Aryans”, “Nordics” –, and who have never, in fact, been anything remotely like all that. It can be stated with quite some confidence that if there were Atlanteans, H. P. Blavatsky had not as much as a single minim of “Atlantean blood” in her veins.
So, at one end money is melting away — creditor-debitor relationships are blowing up –, and this questions (by questioning the future windfalls based on which private banks did draw that money = credit from the central anks in the first place) the existence of further money. Such money may be involved in backing a creditor-debitor relationship that is due now, and its disappearance may cause this relationship to bust, too. It may be indirectly involved, in shoring up some creditor-debitor relationship that is scheduled to be resolved iat some point in the future, and its disappearance may cause the relationship to be publicly questioned on the stock market, by a rating agency or in a similar way. To the Neoclassical economist with his (to the biologist) unimpressive analysis of the relationship of economic growth and the progress of time, this is of fairly little relevance beyond producing deflation, but the sheer bulk of it in this case causes him to shudder profusely thinking of the deflation alone.
At othe other end, to keep the wheels turning, commerce humming (as per the proverbial brummende Wirtschaft) and deflation low, new money must be generated. But how? The mild way is interest on sovereign bonds. But that’s just a single-figure percentage of the value of the bonds becoming due, and altogether a tiny fraction of the actual economy. New central bank loans are the #1 way to quickly generate massive amounts of new money — liquid money, that is; not money that is rotting around in some vault or ceramic porcine or old sock somewhere[de:] doing if anything little other than accumulating interest and contributing insignificantly towards the predicted future GDP total, against which central bank credits are backed. In the case of Greece and the ECB, Greek sovereign bonds are bought up via a shell company and passed on to the ECB. But with what money? Again, the ECB money enabling the shell company to buy the bonds and provide Greece with a cash influx is drawn from the future’s as-yet-unmanifested assets, and passed on to create the very assets that backed it in the first place.
The controversy is the fact that the shell company ought to be — under quite literally “business as usual” conditions — a private bank. Or perhaps an out-of-the-EU central bank, though generally no gov’t borrows from these, as their interest rates are higher than those of private banks. It is not as clear and present a danger as the disastrous love affair between the RBZ and the Mugabe regime was, but the fears of the ECB being forced to yield to political spur-of-the-moment pressure should not be dismissed lightly, not as long at least as Neoclassics with its what-us-worry approach to inflation hold sway.
All that being said and told, the fact that a news article nonchalantly implies that the tearing to shreds of the fabric of the global economy and commerce was narrowly averted yesterday, and it does not generate much notice, not even much alarmism (which might or might not be justified, but at least is justifiable) is a stark reminder that these are very weird times indeed.
But first things first. As you doubtlessly have heard, markets rebounded pluckily (as English and other assorted weirdos would say) following the announcement that the ECB may in fact buy national bonds after all, provided they are laundered through an intermediary. Which may or may not be a good thing (the Well-Endowed One’sPitcherhas been invoked[de:]) — it did certainly shore up the Euro, but it is liable to create increased inflation in the long run. The former effect was a matter of wait-and-see (we didn’t have too long to see, and at least this time it did unquestionably work), while the latter, luckily, is to a considerable effect dependent on the conscious decision of economists.
(Meaning that we’ll be doomed if we don’t get the Neoclassic losers out of office soon. Because that “intellectual” tradition does not see a problem with a healthy bit of inflation every now and then. Helps to pay back loans, after all, eh? Yeah, but it’s like letting the ugly lump in your tit grow bigger, and not minding it breaking through the skin and suppurating a little bit every now and then — never mind the stench, because it’ll keep the fat off your waist.)
In any case, the above article contains some weird passages:
“All of a sudden, only German sovereign bonds had sufficient liquidity to back them, not even [AAA/AA-rated] French ones anymore [...] Even the supply of [US$] had come close to running out in Europe as [last] weekend approached.”
– An unspecified ECB guy, May 08th/9th, 2010
I do not like the sound of this.
Basically, the problem seems to be as follows:
Money is issued by central banks[*] to private-enterprise banks as credit, backed with the expectation of a thriving economy that is about to become an even more thriving economy of the future. Those private-enterprise banks pass it on — among themselves, to other enterprises private and public, to countries and private individuals –, in the form of credit. Much if not all of it (it is really a saturation function I’d presume) is sooner or later converted into “real-economy” equivalent, i.e. exchanges hands in the form of physical money in a transaction of some good or service — getting backed up by the appraised value of that good or service in the process –, or at least as credit transaction for this good or service. Which amounts to the same as far as the connection to the “real” economy (which reasserts that this particular amount of money has a particular “real-economy” value) is concerned.
If we assume, for example, a quantitative economic growth of 6% in the country of N-istan within the next year, then it is — at face value — not at all irrational to think: “hey, that material prosperity will most likely be there (or at least there will be some amount of growth not to much lower, and perhaps even some amount of growth exceeding the predicted value). And we can make it even more likely that the growth will be maxxed if we get us some bucks and start building shit that generates surplus value, and/or buying raw goods and turning them into consumer goods, which will do the same as long as the latter are bought by ppl.
Now, with defaults, re-evaluations of corporate worth (via the sum of the issued stock’s worth), bankruptcies and so on, an unprecedentedly massive amount of money is vaporized… money that is billed down and whose existence is thus attested, making it impossible to simply drop it from the books without another default, bankruptcy, receivership or at least “correction” of some stock’s worth occurring somewhere. Because any and all of that what is colloquially called “money” can be converted — like, say, temperature can be converted between K and °C and °F and so on — into a creditor-debitor relationship. And that is bilateral and stasy bilateral if it can by any possible means do so; defaulting on a loan and similar shenanigans are severely frowned upon in the realm of economy.
Stupid WordPress bug prevents me from writing posts exceeding a particular (and apparently variable) length.
* Or reserve banks, or however you’d call them. “Central bank” is more politically charged, I am aware, because it implies that which the people who want to go back to the 19th century or worse habitually insinuate to be indicative of their Con-propaganda bogeyman “Socialism”, and/or of the Evil Overlords (no matter whether Jews, Fabians, Freemasons, Reptile Alien Pedos, Illuminati, or whatever tired lameassism is the enemy du rigeur to one’s particular clique of faux-elitist In-The-Know-dontcha-know manichaean simpletons).
The SocDems are doing perhaps the first major thing since long that looks like it might actually work, instead of making you think “ho hum, again? Prions or brain flukes, I wonder…”.
Which is to say they abstained when the Greece bailout bill was put on vote today[de:]. The Socialists went for an all-out Nay, as was expected. The Greens were all Aye, so they’re trying to cuddle with the Cons I’d guess. One vote less for ‘emSunday.
The SocDems would be all for bailing out Greece if they‘d govern — but according to their terms. But the Auslandsminister (in his function as Neolib strongman) threatened to bring down the gov’t if his demands that no binding contribution of bank funds towards the bailout must happen and that a tax on speculative transactions would not even be discussed were not met. They were. So once again, Germany is the country where that which FUBAR’d global progress is most allowed to get away unscathed. (I can’t feel bad about the Nazis — I had nothing to do with the Nazis, so why should I see them anything other than experiment never to repeat –, but I do fell a bit bad about all this and not being able to do more.)
In the medium term, it is a win-situation for the Cons though. As more Federal funds are drained into the Greek Abyss — which will not be able to pay back til 2015 AS IF EVER, sentiment against the Greek as a people will rise. Already, the yellowpress headlines scream against the OUTBAILING OF THE GREEK PENSIONER! (WE GERMAN PENSIONERS work 10 YEARS LONGER in our lifetime! HA!)
If there were a pogrom against Greek-stuff next week, everybody would be shocked of course, but many would only be shocked briefly, brush off the débris, say “well I never” and think to themselves “serves ‘em right!”. And few people would truly be surprised, the air smells like (as per the German saying) a fist that smells like a graveyard.[*]
The Cons called the SocDem’s abstaining “poor and miserable[de:]“. Yet the bailout is extremely unpopular. As I write — precisely midnight Zulu time on the 7th/8th — the poll on n-tv was 80% Nay. And n-tv has been heavily lobbying for a bailout. Not this particular one, but any bailout, on principle. (In a nutshell, the only political party I can think of to approach n-tv readers’ profile are the UK LibDems. Or at least, the post-New Labour eternal-opposition LibDems as they used to be)
Meanwhile, inflation is already gearing up in Greece[de:]. With the new budget cuts[de:] fairly narrowly voted thru there, inflation will rise in May and probably June, too. Mainstream economists still maintain the biggest problem is deflation, but that is a) in theory and b) as dubiously true as the overall value of mainstream economy is dubious and c) a country rocked by firebombs and teargas (they haven’t rolled out the pukegas yet — would be the first major public deployment) has bigger things at stake than monetary stability.
The private banking sector tripped over their feet to forward not withdraw a few milliards/US billion euros from their Greek interests. As usual, they are allowed to rake in the profits — if the public funds manage to create some in the first place. If not, nobody knows who’ll pay the bill[de:]. The press is surprisingly and consistently not fooled by this, sees throught the PR stunt that it is, and very publicly says so[de:]. I wish we’d had this kind of press back last summer; much evil[de:] could have been averted[de:].
But there are already some who say that the only option that is not short-term is a default[de:] — which Eurozone-wise comes with its own associated legal intricacies, and in any case would mean that perhaps half[de:] of the €8mrd will be write-offs. Gone, as if they never existed — though as all that credit money was at some time part of the “real” economy, or else it could not have existed (Neoclassic shit-for-brains are too stupid to realize that). But even though it did at one point exist, as a consumer credit for a new flatscreen TV perhaps, or as Cash for Clunkers, it was hopelessly overvalued.
So it is no surprise we have an ongoing deflation trend. Too much virtual money has been borrowed from the Bright and Ever-Growing Fairyland that is the inevitable future of Capitalism. And despite how bad that may be for entrepreneurs, I do not see any reason why this mess should be fixable without a reassessment of the discrepancy of the monetary sector versus the other three — for Fairyland ist abgebrannt[de:].
It would be best if we’d pick up the ideas that some folks discussed in the wake of the Battle of Seattle, namely to simply kiss some of the debt goodbye and see what to make with the prosperity we have.
Anyways, back on topic.
We’ll have elections on Sun., here in North-Rhine-Westphalia (NRW, or moar liekNSFW?). There are many bad things to be said about Jürgen Rüttgers, the Con candidate and present minister-president (like US Senator, but within a Federal Republic-, not United States-system) who governs with the Neolibs. Politically, he is actually not incompetent by local standards. The SocDems had spawned the worst pieces of shite they ever fielded (IMHO, but in about 40-60 million other Germans too). “Ever”, as in “ever since the Kaiser’s day”.
Clement was basically Blair’s evil twin brother, and today is a head honcho in one of the most vitriolic Neolib lobby groups we have[de:], real wage-dumpers and union-smashers if there ever were such. Besides, he also cuddled with Big Energy (our version of Big Oil) and very publicly torp’d the SocDems in key elections[de:] (”do not vote for Socialism!” BS). Also was instrumental in kicking through the unemployment “reform” and the establishment of a burgeoning below-minimum-wage/three-jobs-single-income/temp agency sector, which are generally considered the worst blunder in the history of legal or quasilegal Social Democracy and in any case a little bit unConstitutional. His protégé and successor Steinbrück was not the worst Federal MinFin the FRG had (as part of the Merkel I gang). That is the best thing that can be said about him.
The main problem — or problems — with Rüttgers is his exteremly flimsy moral fiber. He is, in other terms, a corrupt drekhead. I could write about that at length, but not now. Suffice to tell this little tale:
Rüttgers and his family live in a nice villa (think Old Europe-ish showbiz penthouse) with a glass-clad front. Not that anybody’d throw rocks or somesuch against that; they have police protection of course, and it’s one of these hoods which are so low-profile bourgeois that high-profile non-bourgeois stuff simply does not happen. The glass house is actually purely metaphorical.
The Rüttgers live in a village in the western outskirts of Cologne, in the old lignite fields which have now been largely exploited (and mostly refilled), though this particular village is one of the old-standing ones which survived, not the new ones which had been rebuilt on the former open-pit strip mines. A mate of mine from some time ago was spawn of that hood, either the same village or one from those around it, and 1000 years ago, people with the societal status of his parents would’ve been minor landed gentry or major-league freemen — they’d have owned 3 or 4 horses, not 50, but most assuredly not zero or one either.
Now this and all these petty addictions people with such credit ratings indulge in leads to the guy’s mother hanging around with the Rüttgers on a rather regular basis. Not as close friends, but on a thou-level I’d think. Afternoon clubs, charity, local events, the Schützenfest… these works. Well, to cut a long story short, I don’t know what Jürgen Rüttgers thinks about gay people, but his wife (a devout Christian, like him, or at least so they say) thinks homosexuality is an acquired disease that can be and should be treated by modern medicine.
To which I can say, according to my knowledge — which is professional, and mind you, it’s us biologists into whose field homosex primarily falls into — there is so much wrong with her statement that it is impossible to say if anything of it in any combination is any correct.
All I can say is that I have seen little to suggest that Rüttgers is the sort of person the world at large is always and has always best been off with if as many as them as possible live in a quiet, quaint little cottage behind the ville towards back in the woods, suffer no harm, yet not partake in social life to an untenable extent or disturb the public peace with their inane mumblings. Not because anyone forced it onto them or they onto somebody else, but because all parties like it best that way. Rüttgers is not a sociopath, not a misanthrope, not a con-man, not a tight-ass fart, not a mentally stuck-fast geezer, but a good dash of that all.
There has been a little bloggers’ war going against Rüttgers, with leaked dox from people fucked up with his “leadership style” — members of his own party, even ministry. But it has been lacklustre, or the people are so brainfried that they simply don’t give a shit at all: “yeah, the Second Republic. You can have it, it’s yours. We the People don’t care.” Oh, and no wonder that the Bundestag (think Hous o’Reps) prez found nothing wrong with the shitloads of what quite likely were kickbacks the State Cons of NRW received from parties as of yet not fully determined: who’d bite a hand that feeds one (think Nancy Pelosi cashing in kickbacks for to be spent on propaganda[de:]).
They have been doing these polls on how “our” democracy is superior to all alternatives as long as I can think; values clock usually in the high 60s to high 80s. Without real warning (they run the polls only once or twice per year or so) it slammed down to about equally split. Or course, it all depends a bit on how you phrase the question, but anything even remotely near that the Germans last racked up around the mid-1940s.
Or perhaps I just dreamt all that, IONO.
In any case, we have all indicators pointing towards a hung parliament (but we’re not alone with that).
WHOOPS!
Coming back to the main topic as per this entries’ headline — the DJIA had a seizure yesterday, as y’all have heard. Maybe some fat-fingered guy keyed in an extra “000″ (but who’d even seriously consider this shit except Der Spiegel[de:]?). Maybe some computerized transaction systems malfunctioned. Maybe it was all just a drill, to see if the cailsafe mechanisms treigered correctly. If the latter, even I — who generally thinks that any major political or economical measure should be done openly — would call it a wise decision. Because now we know that we can not rely on the post-1929 panic buttons we have when push comes to shove.
A journalist colleague opf mine (the one who works at the major-league paper) said “someting as krass[de:] as this” he’d never experienced, “and I spent the entire financial crisis here”.
[NB: the Wiktionary English translation is seriously lacking here. In one respect because it does not offer one for krass [2] at all. In another, because it’s not really two words, but one undergoing a slight but distinct shift in meaning. True, in the 19th century the term very accurately did translate to “crass”. These days, options that fit just as well — or badly as it is — would be “far out”, “way!” or “stark raving [adjective]“.
Check out this krass freak:
He gets so worked up with what he thinks is a video game that when he starts shouting CANCEL ALL ORDERS CANCEL ALL ORDERS (2:48) he ought to have gone BUY BUY BUY.
For falling knives quite predictably bounce up again once when striking the floor these days. The “hard” option we learned from 1929 was that in certain situations, a market closure is an option not to consider but to implement ASAP. It worked in 2008.
(Buy the shit shortly before the emergency ripcord is pulled. Place a put option, due Monday as soon as the trade opens at a price where you make a slim profit. You can withdraw it if you can dump the shit for a higher profit on someone who’s willing to take the risk. Pocket the cash and order some blow’n'hookers.
Not placing the put option — which does eat into the profit an additional bit, mind you — would be unwise except if N225 and DAX outperform on Monday before the NYSE opens. If that happens, you can handle it manually. But it is risky; the next two weeks alone are not bound to bring much good news from such countries as Greece, Spain, the UK and quite possibly Germany.)
Altogether it is not looking like a real recovery of any sorts,. not now, not 2009, and not in the next years I’d guess. I may be wrong, but the nervousness of the markets speaks volumes. This is not gonna recover soon; something big has taken more of a hit that it would admit.
For half an hour or so, the NYSE was scared shitless as it never has been scare shitless before. Autumn/2008 was 10 days of nail-biting and refuelling private aircraft; this was a nasty, short, and harsh sucker punch right in the face of confidence. All the pent-up panic and fear breaking out, and more of it than I’d expected.
No, the state of Capitalism is not even in the chartreuse; “amber alert whitewashed with a generous dose of dubious green” is more like it.
Insofar, the soundtrack of the preceding week is the tearing of an Achilles tendon, drawn-out but not pitch-shifted, and racked up to a volume that threatens to frag the amp in a terminal huge wet fart. The reverberations will sound on for the foreseeable future.
* Yeah, I also found that saying/gesture weird. It involves holding the clenched fist under the nose of your opposite, not directly adjacent, but so that it is visible with downcast eyes in all its awful glory. Accompanying this is the proverbial “take a smell — smells like a graveyard!” Usually given in a voice that borders (without breaking the general air of seriousness of the situation) on cheerful advertisement: “You are Sincerely Invited…”
First time somebody did that to me, I was really nonplussed. I do not easily grasp the kind of irony it depends on. I mean, by then I had seen and read and heard of so many downright freaky things that on the thought of someone announcing that his hand did smell of graveyard, my first idea was: “wow, far out. Never smelled graveyard, come to think of it. I wonder if it smells more like compost or more like old-growth forest or more like cellar.”
Though the situation was not dead serious. It was more of the evening’s top dog, hulk of a guy I never met before and prolly never will again, asserting his territory, no rompin’ on my stompin’ ground kiddo. Maybe if he had been serious, I wouldn’t have interpreted the words as I intuitively did. In any case, I may well get into deep trouble because of this one day — the expression cracks me up every time I hear it. “So, you’re an undertaker or did you visit relatives?” It’s like real-life Family Guy.
I have a similar relationship with the usual interjection when one is about to deposit stuff, unguarded, where according to the other party this should most assuredly not be done. The saying is “Don’t do it, or you’ll have two of ‘em when we come back.”
I have been on the lookout for situations where this happens, one decides not to care and in fact has “two of ‘em” awaiting yu when you return. In a way, this happened to me with a bike once, but that’s another story and not true in the strict sense anyway. Besides that, I have never noted such an incident.
It will be pretty interesting to see how Capitalism will digest that Greece thingy. And to see how many of the PIIIGGS will go down before this is over.
In any case, those that had already deadsaid Teh Kryzys[en:/pl:] stand corrected.
Big things do need a lot of time to proceed after all. And it is not like we could not have told that this’ll take some time, ね?
As regards the funny things in life, Jane Buergermeister’s[*] lil old click-grabbing scam[e:] w/the swine flu is getting old, and one has to stay on top to stay in business these days as a hard-working journalist.
So she made a nice lil video on that airplane crash that wiped out all those Polish gov’t bigshots. You can find her work on the usual outlets (I first heard of it yesterday or on Wednesday, and it’ll be all over the usual channels by Sunday. At latest.), but I won’t embed this crap.
Let’s just do with a few YouTube comments on the video instead, randomly picked for the lulz from the first 2 pages and starting with the one presently tragged as Most Popular (3 votes only ATM tho) and then progressing chronologically from oldest to newest. Typographic idiosyncrasies represented in translation as faithful to the original as possible:
[German, trans.] “after jane b.’s infos on the economic situation of poland, i suspect even more strongly that the airplane crash is the typical last resort of the corpocracy (or global elite, hochfinanz[de:], rothschild?) against a country that is not willing to make itself dependent on the IMF and the other financial octopodes. [yadda yadda has read Confessions of an Economic Hitman, but not understood what means and what it is (bastard spawn of too much cocain and of generally the very same thing that keeps this Bürgermeister fan clothed, fed, and is to his tiny little mind Normal, while Fatherlandless[de:] Socialism is Abnormal)]”
– larsjune1
Well, If I remember correctly — and I do think I do, and larsjune1 does not — Lech Kaczyński was in his lifetime never one to stand back when it came to further the aims of the the dirty money-grabbing Jews corpocrators, and “his” (actually, his and his twin bro’s) PiS really loved to peddle off Rzeczpospolita — for those who have had neither sufficient Polish nor Latin to figure it out on their own, that’s “things pertaining to the public at large” — property to the highest(-bribe-paying-)bidder. Oh, and as regards Jews… well, he was a Polish Catholic, he did not like homosexuals at all… so I daresay he was not all to fond of our Mosaic homies either.
But as larsjune1 would say, the Jews? may very well be our misfortune. And larsjune1 is one whom you can trust, dear reader — for larsjune1 has SEEN THE LIGHT!!!1!1!11!!oneeleven
[German, trans.] “We shall remember Jörg Haider,though I personally do not like hin for his ideology.We shall remember the 09/11,London,Maddrid.
Whoever doubts for log that it was not a planned assassination,is beyond relief.”
–MrBrunswiek
Been 6 years by now in which to figure it out — what did you do all the time, hide in a cave w/o Web access?
[German, trans.] “2. she says: no corpses were found . –> What a load of bullshit at least the pilots’ corpses would have been there to be found. or [was the crashed plane the] new Polish UAV? and that you shouldn’t or can’t show dismembered corpses on tv.. that’s pretty obvious.”
– stepyu88
Point 2 of a 6-point rant nitpicking some of the clip’s more glaring mistakes, shoddy workmanship and big black lies.
[original English] “Nowadays a dog of a president may disappear and you can be certain about it being a conspiracy!”
– TheTrueResponder
I wouldn’t call him “dog”, if only because a Polish friend of mine talked to me about the crash and was really devastated, and if I did not watch my mouth she’d kickbox it into a boody pulp. And her word carries some weight, because her personal opinions were in almost all regards quite diametrically opposite to the of late Lech, so it was not merely a case of de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est. Truth to be told, the sudden and unexpected death of so many people was both shocking, and insofar as it happened there and then, and killed a number of people who were effectively collateral damage, extremely tragic. But I am not Polish, and naturally cannot fully appreciate the magnitude of this great disturbance in the Force. Time will tell.
I do note though that the PiS did side with the Purple Pedo Posse whereever they could. That is a grave sin in the eye of the Lord, if He exists. Besides, it is also beyond gay. “I’m all for the Pope and His church” and “pedos molesting children should not be allowed to educate children” are two things that make strange bedfellows these days (no pun intended).
[original English] “Strangely, such tragedies mostly hit conservative, non-internationalist politicans…I doubt conspiracy theories, but, well, this uncertain “but” in my stomache tells me collectivists/internationalists/communists/corporalists are the most dangerous threat to any peoples. [Also posted as German version, which goes on about the threat of Greece at the IMF's beck and call etc.]”
– manoman0
Evil Greek Granny is Evil (by exercising her constitutional rights) Athens, February 24th, 2010
And of course, we all know how much those evil Communists and Anarchists love the IMF.
Bye, Alex. You shall not be forgotten.
[German, trans.] “BTW.. search for the video:
“”" Unglaublich - Video vom Flugzeugabsturz bei Smolensk unter die Lupe genommen! “”"
About the crash, in slow motion, German translation and all those strange occurrences and details that one other wise barely sees, well shown and explained.”
– Swissrav3r89
On the other hand, if you are a “Swiss Rav3r”, having the occasional thing or two pointed out to you so that you’ll notice what you’ll otherwise barely notice anymore might possibly be necessary.
(The Swiss are, in my experience, part cool ppl — though the Romands[de:] are a bit cooler on average I’d guess, never having met enough to know firsthand — and part terminally dumb nationalist inbred fuckers, Nazi gold whores who should maybe, just maybe try and get their national debt (almost 4,5 times their annual GDP) fixed up instead of “solving” the world’s problems out of their garden gnome Shangri La.
Extremely high proportion of vitriolic First Law of Thermodynamics disbelievers to be found there, too. Well stay up in your mountain retreat you suckers; ideally just below some melting glacier — you have nothing to fear, it’s just the dear good old sun.)
The Austrians, as far as this blogger (who has had his share of German, High and Low) can tell, compare to the Swiss basically as a gasoline engine is to a diesel. The “fuel” being high-octane red wine and poppyseed in the former, while the latter rather would get their kicks from weed and shrooms and all sorts of other kinky shit[de:].
Having come to speak of Austrians, Frau Bürgermeister, listen up plz:
First off, you didn’t apologize and/or publicly correct yourself after that Swine Flu Genocide hoax. Us leftists tried our best to educate people, bypassing the mass media, informing the public a bit about viri and industrialized animal production and how all that happened was by no means unexpected, and you blunder in with your conspi BS and scaremongering and ruin it all. As regards your unwillingness to say sorry for the major fuckup you did there, it is somewhat understandable emotionally; most humans learn sooner or later how bad humble pie tastes. But sometimes you have to do say “I did not speak true”. Especially if — like you — one is fighting for some higher, illustrious goal. It will help in not having to say “I lied, and I knew that I lied” eventually.
I have seen the likes of you, and I can only say: from my observations — one more step down that slippery slope, and you’re a goner. Meaning not that the mischievous masters of the world will off you. Meaning that only the tinfoil hatters and Nazis will listen to your dross, and worse: that any mischievous motherfuckers that might be around might find it useful to feed you their choiciest bits o’propaganda, knowing that you’ll exaggerate even more, and conduct it to the Great Unwashed, inflate the motherfuckers’ badass rep to the point where your groupies seriously believe that ALL RESISTANCE IS USELESS against the omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent Forces of Darkness, and emigrate to the land of Resignatistan[de:].
But if lying and scamming in the name of Truth pays your bills, fine. Everyone to their own. Although I hope you don’t believe in an afterlife or such shite, because they’ll grill you for having had your shot at smashing the control images but chickening out — chickening out and selling out, only because you yourself were to addicted to the Maschine.
Unremembered: no suits, no ties, no populist right-wingers either. Image (c) Dave Blume.
Second, “thanks” for helping The 5 to making all this possible. We the People have a major crisis at our hands, and what we need now is encouragement, reflections on our strength and possibilities, and tales of Every(wo)men who stuck together and were unbeatable. Not some scare stories from an Élitist fairyland, of the schemes of the High and Mighty. Let them scheme; they cannot even conquer as downtrodden a country as Afghanistan or Somalia. Let them drown in their own wastefulness. The Emperor is naked, but he is trying to get himself dressed up. And you obscure the former fact and put undue emphasis on the latter.
Third, you might think about giving up journalism. Every time you try to research some issue, you strangle yourself with your own brain. As one who to a considerable extent does technically the very same shit you do — namely try and drag the truth out into the open, kick and scream as it may –, it pains me to watch your wasted effort.
Fourth, and last: You want a dubious plane crash to research and publicize? I have one for you. But I can’t blame you if you don’t think this is important; after all, those were only a few 100 thou niggers. And who — except us darn lefties — ever cared more about them niggers than about some nationalist-populist suit-wearing VIP anyway, eh?
[*] for those dumb Amis who still don’t know how to copy-paste umlauts. Really. You are a disgrace to your mother tongue, and to mine.
“Gutti“’s conception of things military must have been heavily influenced by his clan’s ancestor worship of his great-great-uncle. After all, Karl Ludwig was the Good Nazi[de:] of the von und zu Guttenbergs, and many of us Germans did not have even remotely good Nazi ((great-)grand)fathers at all. Mine were both moderately to fairly serious assholes for example. Not involved in exceptional brutality, but definitely eager cogs in the machine til the end, and that is about average. But Karl Ludwig was not murdered by the Gestapo til Berlin was reduced to rubble already (Hitler outlived him by a mere week) — it was the murder of a witness of rather than of a threat to the Nazi atrocity.
And like most of the reactionary German élite Karl Ludwig was neither one to complain as long as he could drink Champagne in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower courtesy of “the Führer’s military genius”, nor noticed that things might have gotten waaay fucked up before his hopes of drinking шампаньске[de:] in the shadow of the Мамаев Курган were finally ruined courtesy of the Führer’s “military genius”. Jews? What good Catholic cared about the Christ-killers anyway?
Another postmortem influence on “Gutti” would have been his grandfather. Karl Theodor was by no means a Nazi. But as “a hardline conservative anticommunist” Wikipedia calls him, he would have back-stabbed Democracy without batting an eye back in the early 1930s like Karl Ludwig did, if Karl Theodor had not been hardly pubescent at that time. Though he was old enough to join the Wehrmacht, he subsequently joined the British propaganda effort, so his antifascist karma was not too shabby. (One may ask, though, if he’d have as eagerly budded with the proles at the PWD as he teamed up with the decidedly more aristocratic PWE). In any case, Karl Theodor was perhaps the last purebred old-school (i.e., steeped in the spirit of the erstwhile DNVP) rabid anti-communist German politician, expressing publicly his disgust for détente as late as 1972.
These two guys are relevant, because there has to be some influence that drove “Gutti” to things political and military. His father[de:] broke with the tradition of his ancestors, and if “Gutti” had followed Enoch’s example, the closest he would by now get to any significant quantity of red liquid would be his brisk trade in pinot noir.
In conclusion, we have here a guy who considers the conduct of war a Clausewitzian[*] thing, sitting on his horse high up on the Feldherrenhügel, watching the insects troopers swarm about, far, far down below his feet. Casualties are a necessary price to be paid, and us Commoners are a herd of ignorami to be lied to for no good reason, lest they get involved in things too big for them. There are leaders, and there are followers, those that command and those that do the dirty work; it is the natural order of things.
He is also pretty damn close to a whole bunch of Neocon scum, Gitmo torture detractors and so on. “Gutti” is perhaps the last significant figure in the whole sordid Afghanistan affair — at least on the Westerner side — who still believes in some nebulous Manifest Destinysh goal, an atavistic throwback to the likes of Great Gamers like CB KMBO OCA Elphinstone and Baronet Macnaghten.
For judging from what I’ve seen, McChrystal is seriously interested in GTFO’ing with as much faces saved as he can possibly be, and even the nominally pro-war U.S. cartoonists have lost the jingoistic sting of the early years, and retreated into cynicism or quiet despair. Whereas the war-like something-or-other is not a topic of visible public debate at all over here, and the gov’t does what it legally can (and occasionally a bit more) to stifle any threats in that direction. All the while, the public opinion has probably never dropped below two-thirds against, and nowadays hovers in the realm of 70-80% against, according to each and every single poll I’ve seen.
But history runs its course, and no noble arrogance can change that. Meanwhile, for the first time in the history of the Second Republic, a player enters the stage[de:] dressed in camo fatigues and casually albeit nervously fumbling his G36.
Yellow Ribbons will be on sale in the lounge during the intermissions. Enjoy the show; hope you brought popcorn.
[*] The key difference — in this regard — between C. P. G. Claußwitz and the venerable Master Sūn Wǔ can perhaps be most succinctly be summed up by their opinions on how and under what circumstances wars one may choose to get involved in war:
To Clausewitz, war was something to be fought to achieve some aim or another. To Sun Tzu, war was something that in itself cannot be expected to achieve anything.
"Doing it for Luise": 19th-century Prussia's equivalent of "doing it for teh lulz"
(Ironically, that latter event was what triggered Clausewitz’ decision to write his book in the first place, yet he remained stuck in the oldschool tradition, as well as, perhaps, swept away emotionally by the droll[de:] ways in which the Prussian élite sought to rationalize away its epic defeat. The fact that Stabskapitän “von” Clausewitz was part of Prince Friedrich Ludwig’s staff at Jena and consequently must have in some way or another contributed to FUBARing Prussian ambition there and then presumably also plays a role. After all, Jena was the #1 chance the Prussians ever got to kick Boney’s butt back to Paris back in ‘06, yet Napoleon achieved an easy victory with unexpectedly light casualties (for the French, that is).
That Clausewitz considered Jena/Auerstedt engagements that might have been won by Prussia only shows his intellectual dishonesty: such a truism is acceptable as a throwaway remark, but within the scope of a supposedly in-depth analysis, it is utter BS. It is unimportant who might or ought to have won some battle; what counts is who did win it, and why.
At Auerstedt, Davout’s quick reaction — sending his troops straight into Hassenhausen when the Prussian and French armies stumbled upon each other, and having them dig in there — basically made the overall Prussian defeat a given: even if the Duke of Brunswick hadn’t been WIA’d, he fucked up bigtime the attempt to retake that village. And even if the Prussians had succeeded at Hassenhausen, they’d have done so at a cost that rendered them incapable of achieving anything anymore after the easy French victory at Jena. On paper, the Prussians might have stood a chance. But in reality, their late-feudalist aristocratic command system was no match for the raw meritocracy of the early Napoleonic era.
Basically, Clausewitz tried to pooh-pooh away the complete and utter pwnage he and his country had suffered militarily, ideologically and societally. That his work rose to fame regardless led Europe straightways to the slaughterhouses of Flanders and Verdun, and the mind-boggling carnage there that achieved little if anything worthwhile — simply because it was trying to achieve something by being what it was, rather than merely being a supplement, an adjuvant, a finalizer, a catalyst for previous non-military effort, the hammer that drives the last nail into place in a work entirely unrelated to the hammer’s existence. Thus, Lenin might have been the only major playa whose WWI activity really reflected the spirit of old Sun Tzu.
So, if you see someone leading your country to war in the Clausewitzian spirit, terminating the shitbag with extreme prejudice or running like hell in the opposite direction become viable options.)
All this is severely shocking for das deutsche Volk of course, given that it has been less than one week since the dead of not-at-all-Good Friday were buried. But that’s life in Afghanistan for you, and it is not like the locals would be given much of a respite by any party in this disgusting war splendid little thing that colloquially might be called “war” by some either. And if you think: “at least it has been going for a while, so the WIA‘d and PTSD‘d are gonna get decent post-deployment treatment”, think again. In the post-Bush US, things may have improved; I don’t know, but “Obamacare” looks like it will improve medical treatment for combat vets (given that compared to the US’ health insurance market even the VHA’s unspectacular track record is too good even for the crackheads at Cato to dismiss).
Here? Like shit[de:]; our military medical apparatus doesn’t even have a clear grasp of what fucking “shell shock” is anymore, since the Con/Neolib Kohl and Merkel govt’s laid off so much medical personnel that two-thirds of the Bundeswehr hospitals were closed down or sold off[de:] during their rule. So stay tuned for some of our Afghanistan vets going batshit insane in the mid-term future. Germans are sore losers; you Amis scored 168; we shall see whether unsere Jungs can beat that.
Hearty German Mountain Troops' Supper. Never ever eaten by our current Minister of defense something that may conceivably be called "war" by some, but only colloquially. Image courtesy n-tv.
In the mean time, I am a bit worried about “Gutti”. He does not at all seem to be the right guy for the job. He is a dubious fellow, who never ever noticed at all the particularly rough hazing rituals[de:] in the élite unit he served off his time at, and never ever had anything to do — scion of major-league landed gentry he is — with the inner-circle upper-crust Good Ole Boys’ gang at his barracks.
His conduct of war has hitherto been fairly abject. He was the last bigwig who publicly justified the slaughter at Omar Kheil. And he did so two entire months after the U.S. had acknowledged the obvious and McChrystal himself had very publicly (and not only to Westerners) eaten humble pie. To do what our Freiherr did speaks of a callous contempt for human life, and of a cynical willingness to “sacrifice” it — not even for some higher goal, but for some murky and ill-defined will to power, personal gains, and quiescence of conscience.
For what came of the bombing after all? A neither clear nor present threat destroyed, true. But the 4 young fellas who died Thursday night would almost certainly still live if “Gutti” had swallowed his pride and apologized also, instead of quite visibly drawing crosshairs on each and every Eisernes Kreuz in Afghanistan. And we did allegedly have the (or “a”; nobody knows for sure) local OMF commander (or “commanders”) at the site, preoccupied as it were with getting the trucks unstuck. Observed visually by a Bundeswehr informant, and possibly even a KSK troop as it seems[de:] (considering the wall of “classified”s one runs into when investigating the “ground-based intelligence“[de:] and that the KSK were certainly involved [de:] in ops “planning”).
Now, under such circumstances, do the usual RoE not quite strongly insist that the bad guys should be taken alive for interrogation and — if necessary — a fair trial?
They had been long Arified through and through, and as far as I can think of, entirely voluntarily. Certainly, not a single dirty smelly money-grabbing Jew had any major say about it even before the Nazis, and by 1945 it had itself completely whored[de:] out to the highest bidder.
They flaunt their Jew heritage, possibly because after haShoah, things Jewish have the attractiveness of things taboo in Germany. But I presume they were Catholic[de:] in “modern” times — if anything –, and have been nothing but a shining example of pure lily-white[de:] GOd-fearing Xtian capitalism since the 1880s.
They were bought by Deutsche Bank recently, having fucked up bigtime[de:] once too often. Considering such softies like lil David Mayer, the Association of Dirty Smelly Money-Grabbing Jews sure has let down its standards.
Also, by few peoples’ standards Cologne is anywhere “near Frankfurt”. And that’s the real message here.
Because that’s what is important to know when you read of yesterday’s 6 hours’ fighting “near Kunduz“[de:]. Kunduz Province is where unsere Jungs are. That, Germany knows. They have a limited mandate. This is not war, this is a “state of warlikeness”“something that could colloquially be called ‘war’”[de:]. Why this should be so is not really apparent, but apparently very real; if you’ll look into the matter you’ll find what appears a entire divisions of skeletons in the Spind. But more on that later, perhaps.
Click to behold a peculiarity of the German language (de:)
Actually, Baghlan is due N of where the “rump” of Afghanistan gets crappy, in the Kundus River plains between the highlands in which the prize — Kabul — is nestled and Central Asia. The really interesting thing is the presence of significant Bundeswehr forces in Baghlan Province, where “[t]he lead nation of local Provincial Reconstruction Team is [supposedly] Hungary since 2006″. That they meet significant opposition there (where it had been relatively quiet for the first two-thirds of the war) only makes it a bit more interesting.
As regards other peculiarities of the latest fighting, the OMFs seem to have rocketed an Eagle IV, which is basically the Swiss HMMWV spinoff.
This is quite ironic indeed, considering that the 48 hours or so immediately preceding the Baghlan action sported the following events, arranged chronogically. Times are necessarily approximate and may not be 100% reliable except when given precisely (you do not want to know where I got that info from):
Wednesday afternoon (Zulu)/evening (local): “Gutti” visits the troops at Mazar-i-Sharif
Thursday, early (Zulu)/late (local) morning: “Gutti” visits the troops at Fayzabad
Thursday, late morning (Zulu)/around noon (local): “Gutti” visits the Kunduz Bundeswehr camp-cum-PRT HQ and holds a pep rally for the grunts, for whom Good Friday at Isa Khel had been anything but[de:].
Thursday, around noon (Zulu)/afternoon (local): “Gutti” holds a press conference, announcing[de:] the deployment of additional Marder IFVs (we have some 6 dozen of the newest version, the rest has substandard mine protection. But it’ll be perhaps 2-3 more platoons that’ll get sent down I presume, so they can use the good ones. The Greeks still preferred the BMP-3, of all things. Admittedly, though not a bad vehicle at all for this sort of ops, even the Marder 1 A5 sucks in summer.), and two PzH 2000 (which can sort of carpet-shell via MRSI. But with a CEP of — supposedly, can’t find the link where I read it — 0.1% of shelling range that’s entirely not what the Bundeswehr would want for a war where where ranges of engagement of 50-25 meters or less[de:] are nothing unusual. Ironically, the M109 A1/A2, which was phased out less than 3 years ago in favor of the PzH 2K, could have been be adapted to fire Copperheads or Excaliburs, which is definitely what you’d want here. The PzH 2K could theoretically use the XM1156, but this is a) still experimental and b) does not increase accuracy appreciably anyway.). Also announces[de:] emergency purchase of 60 additional Eagle IV.
(The following two events happened about the same time on Thursday, in the afternoon (Zulu)/early night (local), as far as present information allows to discern)
“Gutti” departs Afghanistan for Berlin via Termez, scheduled to arrive Friday, 1600Z-ish
OMFs scratch one (maybe more, depending on how you define “scratch”) Bundeswehr Eagle IV during 6 hours’ fighting near Baghlan, killing 4 and injuring 5 Bundeswehr troopers. Some of the latter are left in serious condition.
Thursday evening (Zulu)/night (local): “Gutti”, when caught up by the bad news at Termez, about-faces[de:] for another pep talk at the front, choosing to postpone such minutiae as getting his blue-blooded ass back to Berlin and seeing that the logistics of the reinforcements are being taken care of. In Berlin, meanwhile, the the Ersatz Minister of Social Affairs[de:] annonces that the Baghlan attack “has hit all Germans”. Or he would have, if in ze New Germany, German did not speak you.
They had been fed up for just too long. Despite all this grand populist BS from their exalted leadership — the undynamic duo at which half the world poked fun — about lowering some tax or another or shit, the economy was a mess, the exports had plummeted, major domestic banks were avoided on the financial markets like the plague, unemployment remained high and if anything rising, wages remained low, and without all those soup kitchens and charities the average city dweller would every now and then happen to see the freezing, emaciated corpse of some starved old bum in wintertime. Like in so many parts of the world in these days, in the sun-parched streets of the Capital and other major cities the dispossessed gathered, the students, the unemployed, the opposition groups. Youths, housewives, “independent” middle-aged small-enterprise guys suddenly on dole again.
Then the elections. Web censorship had made progress to the best of the State’s possibilities, while secret agents were proactively sniffing out troublemakers, rioters, arsonists, inviting them for a chat and some IDing. Rumours flowered among the loafers in the backalley coffee houses, those waiting in the hallways of the government agencies for one rubber stamp or another, on the university campi.
To anyone with a half-sane mind it could not be real. The reactionaries had won. The Conservatives, who with their false promises had whipped the economy into a state of wreck. Liers through their teeth, speaking of securing their freedoms to soothe the gullible but crushing Freedom, silencing the angry shouts of the betrayed with riot batons, wiretaps, oleoresin capsicum. Adherents of the Old Order, that doctrine of every liberty — every inch of life if the more radical among the ruling elite had their way — being under the sway of one power greater than them all, like mere figures in an elegant, intricate, well-calculated equation speaking of the greatness of that force that ultimately had brought fourth civilization as we knew it.
And of course, the elections had been a bit rough at the edges. Polls can deceive after all, and here and there people knew people who had seen votes mixed up, miscounted, mislaid (At least they were not using voting computers, onethinks). A lot of people in the audience were seriously pissed. Especially as technically, the outcome was unConstitutional in at least one way. Twitter messages flew between the tech savvy; others just used mobile phones and to hell with wiretaps. The authorities were simply flooded with a tide of packages. There were grounds aplenty to take to the streets in force, and this the People did. There had been demonstrations a few months earlier where 10.000s were out across the country, 100.000s even. This time, there was at least half a million in the Capital alone.
The old — and if they had their way, new — movers ‘n’ shakers frowned, and called for the protests to stop, for that illegitimate gathering of people living in “yesterday’s world” to be quiet and go back to their homes. But it was too late. The “progressive” candidates, who according to the preliminary results had lost not as bad as they’d feared but had still failed to seize power in the name of “moderation” and “reform”, were encouraging the protests, latching onto them and fuelling them with their leftover campaign funds.
When the crowd threatened to cross the thin red line towards the Parliament, the Chancellor had enough. She gave the MinInt permission to do what they had talked about at length before. Half an hour later, the police was breaking up the protest with water cannons and chemicals, and plainclothes men and “reservists” were busy rounding up “instigators”. Armoured vehicles of the paramilitaries were cordoning off the government district. Some young Muslima from east of the city came afoul of a gunner; though quickly rushed to the hospital, the riot projectile had Snelgroved her and she was found DOA.
(Too pissed off of the universe to add links right now, also need to run some PCR 2mo’. Maybe l8r.)
A month as uneventful as it was full of summer heat and monochrome karma.
Kim the Lesser’s guys have assembled some more rockets in NKorea and are showing off. Everybody is pissed, except the NKoreans, who are partly elated and partly… … I don’t expect it to matter to their daily lives too much.
Peace in Sri Lanka? I fear not — though stranger things have happened often enough. Pakistan, surprisingly, manages to maintain a fairly high state of normal stateness despite… everything. But it may come apart at any time. Still, Zardari has some friends left.
Protests seem to be mounting in Germany, despite the polls still being among the most optimistic in the Western world (Brits are worse, but somethimes I am under the impression that their team had doped w/vCJD). Every other week or so 1000s of workers facing unemployment take to the street, usually in one of our bigger cities, often in the Capital. (We are really late-comers and lamers by global standards, ’tis true. But I had expected the sozialen Frieden to last longer.)
The fasco-Cons in Germany seem to decide upon the “Republican Party” as their champion in the EU elections. They have nothing to to with the U.S. Repugnicans and are unlike them entirely. Nation-state crypto-fascists mentally stuck in tall tales about the glories of the 18th century, guys that in my mind always seem to evoke the mental image of a beer stein. Second place seems undecided between some rightist Evangelical gang founded just a few months ago and who run on Ganley’s ticket, and the “National Democrats” who are the hardcorest neo-Nazi party legal in this here country.
This is gonna get interesting, provided they don’t tweak the ballot (I’d consider MinInt Schäuble capable of such lowness, though voting computers were outlawed recently and it’d be tougher than the effort is worth). For it’ll give a first good estimate how strong the local petit bourgeois neofascists/Crusader scene is in Cologne. Where they have an own party — and with the municipal and mayoral elections coming up this August, straight before the Federal ones, data on their backing is crucial. If things are really go down the drain the next decade, by 2020 guys like these could rule this country through a sea of blood. (Such a prediction would have come all too true for comfort if made in Germany 1923, as well as in most comparable states at comparable time.) The Cologne fellas are of the kind who’ll get rid of the Turks and other Muslims first, then — if this happens, I’ll probably be killed dead by the time they progress to “then”.
But we have bigger problems over here ATM. While more enlightened countries have found means to deal with the problem of kiddieporn, our gov’t is pondering a Chinese-style Web filter. No, seriously. They are negotiating about where censorship takes place and who are to be the censors, but the idea that the way to go is block & log access attempts to shitlisted hosts — sites where kiddieporn has been sighted, rumoured, discussed criticized. And evidentially a lot of sites politically inconvenient, even if legal –and go Homeland Security on those attempting to access improper content. A few friends of mine are playing the State lottery, but honestly the Green Card lottery might be a better idea these days.
In the US, regardless, war is raging in the corridors of power. The Dick seems to have become aware that if Obama is gonna return to status quo ante, he’ll have to see that some key members of BushCo — including him — will not make it out alive. The Neocons are the kind of guys too dangerous to let live when you have chosen to and succeeded in vanquishing them.
Comments