Chapter 4: We are all pigs now
 
From collapsible matryoshkas to inflatable Mickeys
 
The globe is spinning. Its leading team of bumbling spinmeisters,  statist incompetents, unalloyed greedsters, malicious socialists and phony conservatives is running this tired Western jalopy toward The Rock of Immovable Reality. Harpo, Gekko, Barko and Sarko are together in the catbird seat, still throwing off comforting gibberish but testing the buckles on their ejection seats.

The systemic faults created by the gross incompetence and corruption of governments (1) have been exploited by the bankers to raid the bank. When reality check came and real estate values crashed, governments bailed out the malefactors and fanned the flames of fear to implement “solutions.”  Such solutions took two forms: “bailout,” i.e. the transfer of toxic debt from the banks’ balance sheets to the governments’ balance sheets, or “stimulus,” i.e. throwing easy money at the hoi polloi and further inflating the governments’ balance sheets.

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Dear Mayor Margareta Ritter (margareta.ritter@stadt.monschau.de),

I have had the pleasure of visiting your exquisitely beautiful German town, the second member of my family to do so. The first was my dad, who, as a member of the 102nd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron in Gen. Bradley's Army, had, with time out to recuperate from wounds incurred at the Battle of St Lo, fought across nothern Europe from D-Day plus 2 until reaching Monschau by the end of 1944.

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  An article by Stavros Nassis

 

This month marks the anniversary of Greek independence. If the Greek patriots of 1821, who fought a life or death struggle against the vast Ottoman Empire could see the present state of affairs, I am sure they would be crying bitter tears. One hundred eighty nine years later their progeny have squandered the very freedoms that they fought so hard for.

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  How must it feel to pimp for a slovenly whore, doped and ravaged and destroyed by her abductors, who was once the happiest, most innocent, most beautiful girl in town?

He is Baselitz, a name tuberose, not only acoustically, with dirty connotations. He is Germany’s foremost Modern artist. He is one of those who accepted the thirty pieces of silver and turned them into a heap of gold. He is a well-received guest at the London Royal Academy of Arts, which strikes you as odd since the Brits and the Krauts, never mind what they tell you in Brussels, regard each other warily. He is loved by the country’s foremost gazettes, like the FAZ, or the SZ, or the old pansy ZEIT. He can be found in Tate modern. He owns a Giant Schnauzer with a degree in psychology who handles his castration complex, the foremost source of his creative inspiration. He produces his masterpieces watching Big Brother on TV while reclining on a sofa next to a canvas previously splattered with an undisclosed amount of colours on which he diverts an occasional glance and then arranges artistically by means of an Italian bread roll using his left hand only. Once dry, he signs it with his illustrious name, waits until that one is dry as well, and hangs it up upside-down.

This, the upside-down, has made him famous.

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George Handlery on the week that was. Hand-outs that undermine the economy. Sovereign debt and politics’ inability to stop the bleeding. How to use science to generate hot air for politics’ balloon? How to get accused of hate speech without an effort?

1. Social policy likes to spend on the governors’ favorites. Reelection is in this case more important than is the project into which the money is funneled. Predictably, the temptation produces negative outcomes. Here everybody will think of the allocation of money to activities that make no sense – a practice, which guarantees that the supposed beneficiaries remain dependent of support payments. The reward-for-failure policy also creates deficits. That undermines the currency’s value. It also results in barriers that limit efficient producers whose contribution has to pay for the outlays. An additional consequence deserves mentioning. In time, such squandering creates a crisis and undermines society’s ability to cope with the economic earthquake once bankruptcy cannot be hidden any more. We are now witnessing several cases in which the ability of government to remedy the ailment it had caused is impeded.

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David Cameron has made it clear that the Conservative party, of which he is the head, has changed. Win or lose the upcoming election, there is no going back. The Tory “dinosaurs” are out. The party is now “progressive,” “bold” and “radical” – a party of “ideas.”

Yet, its ideas were mostly thought up by Tony Blair’s New Labour party. Issues of importance are off the table:

- In his Spring conference speech on Feb. 28, Cameron failed to mention uncontrolled immigration even though the island nation (smaller then the state of Oregon) is on track to hit 70 million by 2030.

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George Handlery about the week that was. It is smart to help folks vote for you. The constitutional right to disrupt speeches. The nuclear bomb clock is ticking. The Euro in hot water. The EU in trouble. “Help! We have a surplus!”

1. Comrade Lumengo is, as one would expect, ready to help the troubled. In this case, not the victims of capitalism received assistance but individuals that thought that they do not know how to mark their ballots. (Voting by mail, therefore not in a controlled booth, is the rule in Switzerland.) Lumengo claims he was not aware of doing something wrong by being as helpful as a candidate can be. This is surprising. The man holds a law degree. In the past Lumengo has already fought a similar charge. Then the case was dismissed. Now Lumengo will have to face a judge. If everything would be “as usual”, the consequences would be the obvious. However, there is a complication. His own party will hardly insist on effective sanctions. Under the circumstances, other parties will also feel inhibited. Lumengo is from Angola. Regardless of the case, that exposes those that demand more than a symbolic reprimand to the charge of racism.

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When the Netherlands' Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders recently addressed voters in Almere, a Dutch city of 200,000 where his party handily won elections this week, he told them what to expect as his once-tiny, anti-Islamization party started flexing its new political muscle. Aside from lower taxes and other political staples, his plans for this city not far from Amsterdam include a ban on Muslim headscarves.

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Every so often I stumble upon something obscure yet dead-on to explaining the contribution of the Flemish to the discovery and settlement of the New World. A while back it was the piece by Professor Verlinden. Today it is this superb article that has been hidden in dusty tomes for more than fifty years. Because I am fortunate to work near a library that holds a vast array of periodicals I was able to access this piece. For all of you without the access - but yet with the burning desire to confirm what you might suspect of the Flemish contribution to the New World, I post this for you.
 
The Flemish influence on the Pilgrims Part 6: Excerpts From, “The Cultural Impact of the Flemish Low Countries on Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England”

By John J. Murray – The American Historical Review, Vol. 62, No.4, (1957); pp. 837-854

“Historians have treated at some length the cultural impact of Celt, German, Scandinavian, Frenchman, Spaniard, and Italian, but they have too often ignored the significance of the Flemings. This is indeed curious, for cultural currents from the Flemish speaking Low Countries seriously although quietly helped to shape the flow of British life, especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the long run, their significance was perhaps equal to and in some respects superior to the combined influences of Italy and France….
 

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Yesterday’s local elections in the Netherlands resulted in a victory for the Freedom Party (PVV) of opposition leader Geert Wilders. On June 9^th the Dutch will again be called to the voting booths for the general elections. Yesterday’s outcome reinforces the PVV’s momentum, which may result in a political landslide next June with repercussions all over Europe.

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 I inherited a city of brick and intend to leave a city of marble. (Pope Julius II)

Last week a generous friend invited me to Frankfurt in Germany, to see the once-in-a-lifetime Sandro Botticelli exhibition, celebrated at the Staedl Museum, an impressive Neo-renaissance building in the Florentine taste that somehow survived the Allied firestorm. It stands on the banks of the river Main and faces the usual jumble of modernistic buildings and ugly skyscrapers, all suited to prompt a pang of nostalgia for times long gone by. Especially if one is stuck for nearly three hours in an endless queue while bracing subzero temperatures.

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In his weekly newsletter, available through subscription, Yves Daoudal discusses the implications of the decision by Quick, a French chain of hamburger restaurants, to serve halal meat in its restaurants. His is one of several recent articles that are focusing on the growing presence of halal foods everywhere in France, and the danger that very soon French people will be eating halal without knowing it, if that is not already the case.

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There is terrorism and there is Islamophobia. Of these two the latter is apparently the more serious misdemeanor. Europe is introducing draconian measures to monitor the internet for so-called “racism,” but at the same time the European Parliament has decided to deny America access to servers with international banking data that relate to terrorist organizations.

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George Handlery about the week that was. Withdraw if they shoot back. Words do not always suffice to defend democratic values. The new, stylish way to commit suicide. Climate-gate and good intentions that redeem bad deeds. Sanctions could save Iran from the Mullah’s folly. The Dictator’s Tantrum

1. The Dutch coalition government has collapsed since the Social Democrats are unwilling to continue to support the country’s modest military presence in Afghanistan. A problem eliciting the principled resistance further to the base in the rear is that local fundamentalists fire at the many they do not like. Shots hurt people. But only those who are close. To protect the humanistic values of the party, the soldiers that face a cruel enemy are to be saved by moving them out of harm’s way. Will the same conflict shift to Holland? If the pattern is followed the response then might be to go (again) into English exile. Provided, of course that, with no Churchill in sight, she will still stand by then. The case suggests that there are parties that are committed, no matter what, to moderation. This temperance they practice in an unlimited amount as soon as the defense of civilized values becomes, through an attack, the issue in a controversy.

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Cripes they are all getting a little excited over in Brussels about Nigel Farage's comments on Wednesday.

Now we hear that Yves Leterme, the Belgian PM has demanded in a letter to the President of the European Parliament that this should not happen again.

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