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Danae Stratou, Ilargi, Yanis Varoufakis and Steve Keen Feb 16 2016When my mate Steve Keen took me to meet Yanis Varoufakis for dinner last week when we all happened to find ourselves in Athens together, I at least sort of regretted not having the time and space to talk to Yanis about his DiEM25 project for the democratization of Europe. It was a private occasion, there were other people at the dinner table, Steve and Yanis had no seen each other for a while, it was simply not about that.

I did think afterward that it would be great to do this kind of get together more often, and get ideas running, but then realized we are all workaholics and we all live thousands of miles apart, so the odds of that happening are slim at best. And that in turn made me think of how inspiring the years were when I toured the world with my Automatic Earth partner in crime Nicole Foss, how important it is to have people around to bounce off your ideas of what’s going on, how much faster that crystallizes your own ideas.

But as things are, and as they happened, I didn’t have that time with Yanis. And not nearly enough with Steve either, for that matter, who has/is a brain that I would love to pick for days if not weeks, he’s such a brilliant mind. When you have just a few hours, though, the time is filled with drinking wine and catching up with what’s happened in each other’s personal lives, it had been 3 years since we met, and professionally, since Steve knows Nicole very well, they did quite a few presentations together, yada yada.

Immensely gratifying, of course, to be able to renew a friendship like that, but almost as frustrating to not be able to expand on it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Norway Warns Sweden Will Collapse, PM Will Defy Geneva Convention To Protect Border

February 24, 2016

Norway Warns Sweden Will Collapse, PM Will Defy Geneva Convention To Protect Border

As you might have heard, Sweden has a refugee problem.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time documenting the country’s trials and travails over the course of the last 12 months during which time Sweden has taken on more than 160,000 asylum seekers.

Last month, on the heels of reports from Germany that men of “Arab and North African” origin assaulted women in central Cologne during New Year’s Eve celebrations, Swedish media alleged that police orchestrated a massive coverup designed to keep a string of similar attacks that allegedly occurred at a youth festival in Stockholm’s Kungsträdgården last August from seeing the light of day.

Meanwhile, a 22-year-old refugee center worker was stabbed to death by a Somali migrant at a shelter for asylum seekers and at the Stockholm train station, “gangs” of Moroccan migrant children reportedly spend their days attacking security personnel and accosting women.

Sweden plans to deport some 80,000 of the refugees this year but according to Norwegian PM Erna Solberg, it may be too little too late to keep the country from collapsing. So concerned is Solberg that she’s now crafted an emergency law that will allow Norway to refuse asylum seekers at the border in the event “it all breaks down” in Sweden.

“It is a force majeure proposals which we will have in the event that it all breaks down, the power just comes, and all end in Norway because we are at the top and most of Europe. Norway is the end point, is not it,” Solberg said, in an interview with Berlingske whose Tinne Knudsen adds that “the legislation will soon be presented to the Parliament and is expected to meet broad support.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Germany’s Refugee Crisis is Starting to Explode

January 10, 2016

Germany’s Refugee Crisis is Starting to Explode

The Arab sexual assault in Cologne, Germany, occurred on New Year’s Eve when hundreds of male refugees robbed and carried out sexual assaults against over 100 girls. This illustrates one of the huge problems with allowing such a mass migration of a starkly different culture.

But what has become the BIG NEWS, is the cover-up by the major news in Germany who did not publish the story for three days. On January 6th, Denmark began “temporary”passport checks on the German-Danish border. The attempt to cover-up the Cologne attacks with one-third being sexual, has sent a shock-wave in Europe behind the headlines. The temporary passport checks in Denmark is a clear response to Germany’s unprecedented acceptance of refugees who a portion are not quite ready for Western living. The men involved were said to be Syrian.

The German government and the press have tried to hide the issue because they are not prepared to admit this has been a tremendous mistake. Welcoming in huge numbers of boys from a culture which denigrates women is a clash of cultures which will not be resolved. The European Commission itself now estimates that another 3 million will enter Europe and many of them are not educated even in their own Arab language and are unemployable. This is a huge disaster that will tear Europe apart and will only get far worse. Because Merkel made Time Magazine person of the year for this very issue of allowing the Muslims to enter, she cannot admit she made a mistake. This policy was to soften her hardline approach to the debt crisis in Greece created by the EU’s failed design of the Euro and Goldman Sach’s manipulation of their debt. There is NO POSSIBLE WAY Merkel can reverse this policy for politicians will never admit such mistakes. She has doomed Europe and nobody will stand up and tell the truth.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Europe – Here we GO Again

November 24, 2015

Europe – Here we GO Again

The European economic crisis just keeps getting worse. The European Commission is now planning to pool all money for bank bailouts among nations. That means the funds set aside in Germany to weather German bank failures can be used in France. Meanwhile, the EU is preparing for relaxing the stability policy (austerity) because of refugees and terror. This emergency position will allow countries to now increase their debt under the exception of “Acts of God”. This clause can be pretty much justify anything.

Furthermore, now tens of thousands of pensioners in Germany have to pay taxes on their pensions for the first time in 2016. Through a pension increase of 2.5%, this will result in a lower net take-home for the first time since this will exceed the basic allowance in the coming year. The Ministry of Finance expects characterized with 310 million euros in additional tax revenue.

The Paris Attacks Are Being Used to Justify Agendas They Have Nothing to Do With

November 21, 2015

The Paris Attacks Are Being Used to Justify Agendas They Have Nothing to Do With

Georgie Pauwels / CC BY 2.0

The aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks has “devolved into a dark and dishonest debate” in which governments consider banning encryption and barring Syrian refugees from entering their countries—even though the attackers were neither Syrian nor refugees and there’s no evidence they used encryption to communicate, Trevor Timm writes at The Guardian.

First, there’s the loud “we need to ban encryption” push that immediately spawned hundreds of articles and opinions strongly pushed by current and former intelligence officials the day or two after the attacks, despite the government quietly admitting there was no evidence that the attackers used encryption to communicate. It was a masterful PR coup: current and former intelligence officials got to sit through a series of fawning interviews on television where they were allowed to pin any of their failures on Edward Snowden and encryption – the bedrock of privacy and security for hundreds of millions of innocent people – with virtually no pushback, or any critical questions about their own conduct.

The entire encryption subject became a shiny scapegoat while the truth slowly trickled in: as of Tuesday, it was clear that American and/or French intelligence agencies had seven of the eight identified attackers on their radar prior to the attacks. The attackers used Facebook to communicate. The one phone found on the scene showed the terrorists had coordinated over unencrypted SMS text messages – just about the easiest form of communication to wiretap that exists today. (The supposed ringleader even did an interview in Isis’s English magazine in February bragging that he was already in Europe ready to attack.) …

As dishonest as the “debate” over encryption has been, the dark descension of the Republican party into outright racism and cynically playing off the irrational fears of the public over the Syrian refugee crisis has been worse.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part VI

November 17, 2015

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part VI

Suppose your situation is such that you need to effect a swift change of venue. The circumstances that prompt this relocation can be quite varied, but the common and foreseeable ones are:

1. There is no fresh water where you are. The reservoirs are dry and dusty, the artesian wells are either no longer producing or are producing water laced with arsenic and heavy metals, and the few desalination plants bottle their water and sell it at prices you cannot afford. What was once fields and pasture is reverting to sand dunes. Forests have dried out, burned down, and are now a lunar landscape criscrossed by deep ravines eroded by sporadic torrential downpours—too sporadic and too torrential to be of benefit.

2. The place where you live is under a few feet of ocean water mixed with raw sewage—not all the time, but often enough that staying there has become a very bad idea. An onshore wind combined with a high tide and a bit of rain are enough to make contaminated, brackish water spew out of every storm drain. With each passing year and more and more basements are flooded, more and more foundations undermined, more and more buildings condemned. Places further inland flood more rarely but are already too crowded, and will be subject to the same conditions after a slight delay.

3. Your country has been overrun by “refugees” who have looted the shops, occupied many of the public buildings and are busy beating up the men and raping the women (like they are doing in Sweden, which is now the second-rapiest country in the world, Lesotho in South Africa is the rapiest). There are large sections of your city where even the military, never mind the police, fear to venture.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

As The World Rolls Over

November 14, 2015

As The World Rolls Over

Brutal news is pouring in from pretty much everywhere.

US retail sales are flat and wholesale prices are falling. Big retail chains are missing on earnings and seeing their shares plunge.

Chinese nonperforming loans are soaring while imports, car sales and steel production are way down.

Oil is flirting with multi-year lows as tankers wander the ocean with nowhere to offload their crude. Other commodities like aluminum and copper are back at 2009 levels and still falling.

A general strike has paralyzed Greece and a far-left coalition is taking power in Portugal. Middle Eastern refugees keep pouring into Europe and no one seems to know where to put them. Eurozone growth is sliding back towards zero and the once-bulletproof Scandinavian countries are now the “sick men” of the region.

Argentine inflation is 35%, Brazil’s political/economic crisis is threatening to topple the government, and a giant copper mine just dumped millions of gallons of toxic sludge on some Brazilian villages.

Equities in Asia, Europe and the US are getting whacked as the sheer volume of bad news swamps the hope that European and Chinese QE programs will keep the asset price party going.

The world, in short, is rolling over. Debt monetization on the scale so far attempted has failed to stop the implosion of tens of trillions of dollars of bad paper, growth has stalled and geopolitics has begun to resemble the parking lot of a British soccer match, with scary people doing random, incomprehensibly violent things and no generally recognized authority able to impose control. Elections are now fearful rather than hopeful prospects and anti-status quo parties in France, Britain, Italy and Spain have become serious contenders.

And none of this is a surprise. It’s just what you get when you put monetary printing presses in the hands of governments and/or big banks.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Merkel Must Call Highest Level UN Emergency Summit Over Refugees

November 10, 2015

Merkel Must Call Highest Level UN Emergency Summit Over Refugees

German Chancellor Angela Merkel needs to do something, urgently, that should have been done months- if not more- ago. There has to be a UN emergency summit on the European refugee crisis, it has to involve leaders at the very highest levels, and it has to take place within weeks at the latest. Or else.

Of course any leader could call for the summit, and if Merkel waits too long -as she is wont to do- someone else should. But she is the best person for the job. No-one else who leads an entire continent looks ready to take this on, and moreover it’s her own country that quite possibly faces the gravest consequences of the crisis.

That is to say, for now Germany still comes in way after Greece in that regard, but if Alexis Tsipras would attempt to call such a summit, his appeal would fall on deaf ears, and at best lead to lots of international Merkel-style diddling (or ‘Merkeln’, as the Germans put it). And there’s already been far too much of that.

The renewed urgency comes from a number of directions. First, the continuing drownings of refugees in the Aegean sea. The lack of urgency with which those drownings have been met has become a huge and immediate threat to Merkel, if only because the entire European project has already died with the babies washing up on the shores of Greece.

Even if it will take a long time for people to recognize that, given the ideological ‘union’ blindness that pervades Brussels and European capitals. Angela’s legacy risks being not only her responsibility for thousands of deaths, but also the very demise of the EU. And that’s just for starters.

Secondly, It was Merkel herself last week who warned of renewed military conflicts in the Balkans if the approach to the refugee crisis wouldn’t change, and rapidly.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What does Climate Change Look Like?

November 3, 2015

What does Climate Change Look Like?

“Our goal is not to amass information or satisfy curiosity, but rather to become painfully aware, to dare turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it”

–Pope Francis

Several weeks ago, I forced myself to spend some time looking at pictures of Syrian refugees. These images have haunted me ever since. The pictures showed refugees landing on the shores of the Greek Island of Lesbos or Kos, huddled in rubber dinghies, or falling on the beach in exhaustion and relief. Others had drowned, their bodies washing up on the beaches of Turkey, Libya, and other Mediterranean nations. In many places, no one was there to meet them. The beaches were abandoned but for the stranded refugees. After a time, volunteers began to show up and assist the disheveled travelers, but many reports suggest an inadequate response by local authorities, as well as complaints by tourists, put- off by the interruption to their holiday enjoyment.

I have been haunted these images in part because of the basic compassion that most of us have for others in need, at least when we, ourselves, are safe and comfortable. The picture of drowned Ayland Kurdi, pictured at the top, stabs at the heart of the parent in me. He was the same age as my boys; but even short of the unthinkable and unbearable, I can’t help but try to imagine the difficulty in caring for young lives amidst fear, chaos, and violence. During our worst temper-tantrums and middle-of-the-night wake ups, for consolation and as a matter of counting my blessings, I try to imagine what it would be like to raise toddlers in a war-zone or in a refugee camp, and try to visualize the utter exhaustion, punctuated by fear, uncertainty, and perpetual discomfort.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Somebody Will Do Something Stupid

November 2, 2015

Somebody Will Do Something Stupid

Is it just me, or does it seem like we are moving inexorably towards a global confrontation? China claims some islands in the South China Sea and we attempt to provoke a military response by sending a US warship within 12 miles of the disputed islands. We accuse both China and Russia of cyber terrorism on a regular basis, even though we released the Stuxnet virus into the Iranian nuclear facilities and have used mass surveillance against people around the world, including allied leaders. We created ISIS as part of our grand strategy that included turning Iraq and Libya into lawless countries racked by civil war strife and religious zealotry. We created the Syrian refugee crisis by funding militants against Assad because Saudi Arabia and Qatar want to build a natural gas pipeline through Syria to Europe.

We led the overthrow of a democratically elected, Russian friendly, government in the Ukraine, and have continuously provoked Russia in their own backyard. We have covered up the true culprit in shooting down of the Malaysian airliner over the Ukraine. We have colluded with Saudi Arabia to drive the price of oil down in an attempt to destroy the economies of Iran, Argentina and Russia. Putin has now called our bluff and entered Syria in full force, bombing the shit out of ISIS and proving the US had no intention of defeating these terrorists, because our military industrial complex depends upon having an enemy to fight. Now Obama is placing US troops in the line of fire between Russia, Syria, Turkey, Iran, and ISIS.

Europe was already bankrupt, issues trillions in new debt to pay off the unpayable debt they already had. Now they are being overrun by Muslim hordes who will cause their societies to splinter and cause chaos, violence, and war.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Europe Will Never Be The Same. Neither Will The World.

November 2, 2015

Europe Will Never Be The Same. Neither Will The World.

RLOppenheimer New flag for EU 2015

To reiterate: People are genetically biased against change, because change means potential danger. People are also genetically biased against acknowledging this bias, because they wish to see themselves as being able to cope with both change and danger. Put together, this means that when changes come, people are largely unprepared or underprepared.

Take this beyond the bias of the individual, and apply it to that of the group (s)he belongs to, the vantage point of a society, and you find the bias multiplies and becomes self-confirming. That is, the members of the group reinforce each other’s bias. When change comes in small and gradual steps, as it mostly does, this can be said to work relatively well. When it comes in large and sudden steps, trouble ensues.

This little bit of psychology 101 may seem redundant, but it is indispensable if we wish it to recognize the implications of Europe -and the entire world with it, in its slipstream- having already entered a period of change so profound it is impossible to predict what the impact will be. We can do a lot better at this than we do today, where so far the drivers of change, and indeed the changes themselves, are ignored and/or denied.

This ignorance and denial threatens to lead to a needless increase in nationalism, fascism, violence, misery, death and warfare. If we were to acknowledge that the change is inevitable, and prepare ourselves accordingly, much of this could be avoided.

There are two main engines of change that have started to transform the Europe we think we know. First, a mass migration spearheaded by the flight of refugees from regions in the world which Europeans have actively helped descend into lethal chaos. Second, an economic downturn the likes of which hasn’t been seen in 80 years or so (think Kondratieff cycle).

Negative ideas about refugees are already shaping everyday opinion and politics in many places, and this will be greatly exacerbated by the enormous economic depression that for now remains largely hidden behind desperate sleight-of-hands enacted by central bankers, politicians and media.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ontario to increase Syrian refugee targets to help meet Trudeau’s goals, Kathleen Wynne says

October 31, 2015

Ontario to increase Syrian refugee targets to help meet Trudeau’s goals, Kathleen Wynne says

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne says her government will try to expedite the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the province to coincide with Justin Trudeau’s bold commitment to bring in 25,000 refugees by the end of the year.

“We need to align with what the new government is going to do,” Wynne said in an interview with CBC Radio’s The House.

Ontario pledged $10.5 million last month to help deal with the Syrian refugee crisis, and Wynne said then that the province hoped to resettle 10,000 refugees by the end of 2016, including an initial 2,500 by the end of this year.

But the province is now looking at a more ambitious timetable after her meeting this week with prime minister-designate Justin Trudeau at Queen’s Park.

“If we can ramp that up because of assistance from the federal government we will do that,” Wynne told host Chris Hall. “Our ministry is getting ready to do more than the 2,500 if we can. but we just have to see what kind of process we can land on with the federal government.”

At the same time, Wynne acknowledged that there are obstacles, including security precautions, that have to be taken into account and the province is trying to determine whether Ontario needs to put people on the ground in the Middle East to help process families.

“Those are the kinds of questions we will be asking the new government,” she said.

New relationship with the provinces

Trudeau has spoken on the phone to premiers since becoming prime minister-designate, but Kathleen Wynne was the first one he met in person since his election victory on Oct. 19.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Real Reason for the Refugee Crisis You Won’t Hear About in the Media

October 9, 2015

The Real Reason for the Refugee Crisis You Won’t Hear About in the Media

There’s a meme going around that the refugee crisis in Europe (the largest since World War II) is part of a secret plot to subvert the West.

I completely understand why the locals in any country wouldn’t be happy about waves of foreigners pouring in. Especially if they’re poor, unskilled, and not likely to assimilate.

It leads to huge problems. Infrastructure gets strained. More people are sucking at the teat of the welfare system. The unwelcome newcomers compete for bottom-of-the-ladder jobs. Things easily turn nasty and then turn violent.

But the idea that the refugee crisis in Europe is part of a hidden agenda – rather than a predictable outcome – strikes me as strange. And it’s a notion that conveniently deflects blame away from the people and factors that deserve it.

Interventions Destabilize the Middle East

The civil war in Syria has turned the country into a refugee-maker.

Syria’s neighbors have reached their physical limit on their ability to absorb refugees.

That’s one of the reasons so many are heading to the West.

Lebanon has received over 1 million Syrian refugees. That’s an enormous number for a country with a population of only 4 million – a 25% increase. Jordan and Turkey also have millions of Syrian refugees. They’re saturated.

The number of refugees heading to the West, by contrast, is in the hundreds of thousands. So far.

But it’s not just Syria that’s sending refugees. Many more come from Iraq and Afghanistan, two other countries shattered by bungled Western military interventions.

Then there are the refugees from Libya. A country the media and political establishment would rather forget because it represents another disastrous military decision.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Western Alliance Is Crumbling

October 3, 2015

The Western Alliance Is Crumbling

EU Is Abandoning U.S. on Overthrowing Assad

Obama Cannot Defeat Assad without EU’s Help

EU Also Rejects Obama’s TTIP & TISA Demands

Obama’s Presidential ‘Legacy’ Heads to Failure

Europe is being overrun by refugees from American bombing campaigns in Libya and Syria, which created a failed state in Libya, and which threaten to do the same in Syria. Europe is thus being forced to separate itself from endorsing the U.S. bombing campaign that focuses against the Syrian government forces of the secular Shiite Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, instead of against his fundamentalist Sunni Islamic opponents, the jihadist groups (all of which are Sunni), such as ISIS, and Al Qaeda in Syria (al-Nusra).

A member of the Iraqi parliament has said:

The pressure on the Syrian regime, which is fighting ISIS, must be lifted. They should not try to strengthen the feeble Free Syrian Army [FSA]. There is no FSA. There is ISIS in Syria and Iraq. You cannot fight ISIS in Iraq, yet support it in Syria. There is one war and one enemy. The U.S. should give up its hypocrisy. People are not brainless.

The European publics oppose America’s bombings, which have poured these refugees from American bombing, into Europe. European leaders are starting to separate from alliance with the United States.

U.S. Senator John McCain, who, as a fanatical Vietnam-war bomber-pilot, has always hated Russia even more than does U.S. President Barack Obama (who got his hatred from other sources), is egging Obama on to war against Russia in Syria; he says, “We need to have a no-fly zone,” where we prohibit Russia’s planes from bombing areas that are controlled by American-supported jihadists (which the U.S. government still euphemistically calls “the Free Syrian Army”).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Greater Fools and Bigger Liars

September 28, 2015

Greater Fools and Bigger Liars

Societies in decline have no use for visionaries
– Anaïs Nin

The moment we heard that John Boehner would resign, the first thing that came to mind was: the next one will be a Greater Fool and a Bigger Liar. For all of his obvious faultlines, Boehner is human. As was evident for all to see Thursday when the Pope -Boehner’s as Catholic as JFK and Jesus Christ- came to see ‘him’ in ‘his’ Senate. Even smiled reading that the Pope had asked Boehner to pray for him.

But Boehner was really of course just a man who through time increasingly became a kind of barrier between a president and his party on the one hand, and Boehner’s own, increasingly ‘out there’, party on the other. He moved from far right to the right middle just to keep the country going. In essence, that’s little more than his job, but just doing your job can get you some nasty treatment these days in the land of the free.

So now we’ll get a refresher course in government shutdown, though there’s no guarantee that Boehner’s successor will be enough of a greater fool to cut his/her (make that his) new-found career short by actually letting it happen. At least not before December.

The government shutdown is a threat like Janet Yellen’s rate hike, one which always seems to disappear right around the next corner, a process that eats away at credibility much more than participants are willing and/or able to acknowledge. Until it’s too late.

Now that it’s clear they lost on Obamacare, Republicans demand that funding for Planned Parenthood must stop, as the women’s group is accused of ‘improperly selling tissue harvested from aborted fetuses’, something it vehemently denies. And there we’re right back to the shadow boxing multi-millionaire tragic comedy act the US Congress has been for years now.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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