On The Great Issues of the Day...

Some stuff I've been thinking about. Sometimes, I get this swirl of ideas -- I liken the process to watching something being flushed down a toilet -- and they don't go away until I write them down:

1. On the Looming Federal Budget Battles:

A great Kabuki Theatre of the Absurd. We all know that Obama won't cut a thing and any appearance of a cut is simply for show and spun as a disaster for the country, and that despite the GOP's protests they'll also be very selective about what they cut (i.e. anything that costs them campaign contributions or elections will be spared). This battle is one of propaganda between two competing philosophies; one which has been historically proven to be a complete and unsustainable failure, and the other an attempt by a once-proud-and-principled brand name to recover it's market share and good name.

If the Great Budget Battles to come were a marketing campaign, Obama's ad would basically say "Try New-and-Improved Crap, now with 10% More Less!", and the Republicans can be said to be in the same position that Tylenol was in after the great cyanide scare of the 1980's; They have a product which still works, but now they have to regain the public trust.

Both parties are afraid to tell the truth about these coming battles in this regard: neither will step up to the plate and say "we've fucked up, and the process of un-fucking it up will be long and perhaps bloody". If they did, you'd want to know what they fucked up and how they did it, and then you'd want them tarred and feathered, and perhaps ass-raped, as well. Unfortunately, the job of reigning in the federal budget, and limiting the reach(around) of government into our lives, is not going to be pain-free, and overflowing with rainbows and gumdrops. Sorry Welfare Queens, but you might have to start working for a living.

The only real interest I have in this looming budget fight is this: if, at the end of the day, we still have a welfare state (and that goes for Ethanol Subsidies and keeping GM on life support, too), we still have some hints or vestiges of ObamaCare, if the Department of Education (that's a $1-trillion wasted right there!) still exists, if Fannie and Freddie are still underwriting mortgages and there is no plan to liquidate their assets, if every department of the Federal Government still has a 'Civil Rights' division (we already have a Justice Dept., thanks!), if Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups are still being federally-funded, and if we do not get a better, fairer, less-complicated tax code out of the bargain, then we're fucking doomed.

The problem we face is that approximately 50% of the members of Congress depend upon either expanded Federal spending or being able to grab pieces of that huge-and-overflowing "Discretionary spending" budget in order to keep their positions -- they must bring home the bacon, in any way they can -- there being no other discernible reason for them to be there, otherwise. That 50% number represents the Retards, Apparatchiks, Fixers, Poverty Pimps, '60's Retreads, and Race Hustlers lodged within the U.S. Congress. If you doubt this, take a good look at the New York State Congressional Delegation, and see if you can then find grounds for disagreement. There never was, I should think, a greater advertisement for Birth Control.

(As an aside: it's a toss-up as to who has the worst Galaxy of Retards representing them in Congress -- New York, Illinois, Michigan or California. I think if you take the number of welfare recipients in a state, multiply it by the number of burned out ghettos and abandoned factories, and then divide that number by the percentage of the population which are high school dropouts, you can arrive at a pretty representative Douchebag Factor for each state. The state with the highest Douchebag Factor is almost guaranteed to be the one with the worst Congressional Delegation).

Those members of Congress depend upon their ability to game the system in order to justify their existence, which is why prying any money away from their pet 'projects' is going to be like pulling teeth...from an alligator. Good luck with that, Republicans.

2. On 'Democracy in the Middle East':

The only things a 'democratic' Middle East will ever bring is more of the same. Don't think so?

Palestinians voted for Hamas. Iraqis voted for Al'Sadr. Lebonese voted for Hezbollah. Syrians voted for Ba'athists (like Saddam Hussein). Seeing a pattern here? If given the chance to vote 'democratically', Muslims vote for terrorists, religious douchebags, and dictatorial regimes. It's in their blood, it's in their nature, it is at the very foundation of Islamic Culture.

It's so ingrained now that oppression is the natural state of life, and one brand of repression is as good as the next -- but the best kind wraps itself in the Koran -- that it's probably a genetic feature, perhaps even a biological imperative in most Arabs by now. The need and ability to consistently make the wrong choice -- war over peace, religion over reason, terrorism over negotiation, brutal dictatorship over freedom -- is probably firmly-ensconced within their DNA.

When one of these nascent Arab 'democracies' finally gets around to purging itself of it's worst elements, establishes a clear divergence of faith and state, lets it's women loose to work outside the home, or even better, to wear comfortable clothes that don't express their second-class status with an unmutilated clitoris, when an Arab finally makes something useful that doesn't explode and is actually salable on an open market, when the AK-47 and RPG are replaced by the two-car garage, and the whole Islamic Culture finally emerges from the filthy mental sandstorm of constipated 7th-century doctrinal oppression, THEN I'll believe there's hope for 'democracy' in the Arab lands. Not one second before.

A clear example of what 'democracy' means in the Middle East is something I remember being said by the Jordanian Foreign Minster on FoxNews a few weeks back. When asked if the Jordanian government was worried that an Egyptian-style popular uprising could occur in Jordan, the Minister said (paraphrasing) that such was impossible. That if Jordanian democracy ever 'got out of hand' the King would be there to whip back into shape. In other words, a Monarch with the power to dictate to Parliaments and to reshape the political landscape with a decree, is somehow the guarantor of democratic government.

The 'Uprisings' in Egypt, Libya, Qatar, Algeria, et. al., are simply the visible symptoms of a disease which infects all the Islamic World. It was the same disease which once infected the Eastern Bloc nations, and the Soviet Union. There are legions of unwashed, hungry, pig-ignorant people in the streets of Middle Eastern capitols today who are simply doing what frustrated people always do; they're turning on the people they blame for their misery. The difference is this:

The Soviet Union, when it fell, at least degenerated into a series of semi-democratic, Western-style states and governments. We can argue about whether there is true democracy in the former Soviet lands, but one cannot argue as to whether or not at least some of those countries are on their way to something recognizable as Western Democracy. In the Middle East, there's a critical difference between how we view democracy and how the typical Arab Douchebag in the Street views democracy. To us, democracy is a system of checks and balances, of rights and corresponding responsibilities, of social contract and law. In the Middle East, democracy means
installing Sharia under whichever brutal strongman manages to exert enough control over the security services and make himself President for Life.

Islam cannot tolerate democracy, much like Communism couldn't tolerate it, and even if those people in the street have the best of intentions, because they are so stupid, so desperate, so lacking in basic material from which the thread of a democratic tradition can be spun, they will fail.

The people who rioted in the streets and shouted "Goodbye Mubarak" are the same people who formerly rioted in the streets screaming"Death to America!". Once their short attention spans turn from the heady wine of revolution and begin to turn to the problems of actually forming a democratic system, they'll be back to shouting "Death to America!" again, in short order. Why? Because they'll fail, a distinct possibility because they don't have the mental and social tools to succeed, and it'll be OUR (America's) fault. Why? Because it always is with these idiots, and besides, the Imams will make certain that Mohammed Q. Public actually believes that.

Expect more airliners-cum-WMD's from all those new 'democratic' nations very soon...

3. On China;

If I were the President of the United States, I could bring China to heel in about 30 seconds; I'd make an apparently off-hand, and off-guard, remark about China that would set the financial markets all a-flutter. Naturally, the comment wouldn't be off-hand and off-guard, but that's the point. The President of the United States could bring all of China to a screeching halt with a press release.

Yes, there would be some resulting economic damage done in this country if that were to happen, but here's the really neat trick; this country has the capacity to recover from it, China does not. China depends upon an inflow of Western cash, and access to Western Markets, in order to build it's Potemkin Villages with Bird's Nest Stadiums in the Smog.

To those who would complain that China will simply stop funding American debt if played that game, I say. So what? There's an old expression on Wall Street that goes like this:

"If your banker lends you $10,000, he owns you; if he lends you $1,000,000, then you own him."

Now, just how badly do you think we own the Chinese when we owe them several trillion bucks?
It's funny that Lenin was quoted (paraphrased) as saying that 'Capitalism will sell us (the Communists) the rope with which we will eventually hang them', and here it has come to pass in exactly the opposite fashion.

Fuck China. In another 20 years it will disintegrate into violent revolution, again, once the new middle classes begin to demand political rights in order to safeguard their newly-won personal fortunes. The first enemy all people strive to defend their nest eggs from is usually their own government.

4. On Iran:

This one is too easy. The next time Iranians take to the streets to protest against the theocracy and the sycophantic lunatic fringe which serves as it's visible face, I'd move an aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf. I'd airdrop 1,000,000 cell and sat phones, Wi-Fi cards, and spare batteries into Tehran. I'd make certain that Facebook, Twitter and Internet access were available by means other than those controlled by the Iranian Government. I'd also distribute copies of the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence --in Farsi --all over the country.

Then I'd bomb the fuck out of every nuclear weapons site I could find or identify, and leave the Iranian people to the grisly business of killing each other over which faction, religious or political, gets to hold the dubious honor of running a ruined country. It is, after all, what they're really, really good at.That ought to keep them busy for the next 500 years, and continued inbreeding from all that cousin marriage will do the rest. Then I'd be building nuclear power plants and drilling for every last drop of fucking oil we know we have, and encourage American Enterprise to make the oil-producing states the industrial version of the dinosaurs.

5. On North Korea:

I'd transmit pictures by any means available to the North Korean people of Americans sitting down to a sumptuous Thanksgiving feast. I'd make the obvious comparisons; Americans have food. Americans have so much food that they can afford to sit down and engage in gluttony. I'd also transmit pictures of Americans throwing food away. See? We have so much food, we can afford to waste it! I'd show them Americans feeding their dogs table scraps-- we have so much food, even our dogs enjoy steak!

Wall-to-wall beer advertisements with busty babes. Pictures of hotdogs grilling. Lovely Scratch-and-Sniff, menu-quality photos of a Wendy's Taco salads, a nice Big Mac, a juicy T-bone, lobster in drawn butter, fresh vegetables and fruit, a nice, fresh loaf of Italian Bread, all airdropped by Stealth bombers all over the peninsula. If it were possible, I'd contrive to have the aroma of a lovely roast chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, biscuits, and a lovely side of baby peas and carrots wafted over North Korea's largest cities. I'd gather all them Travel Size toiletries and liberally bomb the entire country with them; tiny tubes of toothpaste, bottles of shampoo, the little soaps you get in the hotel, and quite a few of those airliner bottles of Jack Daniel's, Absolut, Beefeater's, Johnny Walker Black.

What do you have, North Korea? Are you eating well? Do you have beer, or even clean water to drink? Do you have booze? Do you even have soap and toothpaste? No, you don't? Then why don't you march on Pyongyang and remove that demented little paper-hanger you call 'Dear Leader' and get with the program? Workers of North Korea: You have nothing to lose except your malnutrition and head lice!

Some Pigs Are More Equal Than Others...

Honestly, I have to admit that I was attracted to this article mostly because the name George Orwell was attached to it. Orwell didn't write it, but the theme is one of Orwell's favorites, and was the basis for his novel Animal Farm.

(Ed. Note: By the way, if you still haven't read Animal Farm, you really, really should. And then you should see a doctor to get the mental defect that prevented you from reading it in the first place corrected, Dipshit!).

For all those people who routinely scream like Chicken Little that China will one day Rule the Earth, I counter with the argument that articles like this one prove that China is little more than Chicago, Washington, D.C., or New Orleans -- only with better press.

The same sickness which has destroyed those American cities -- the confluence of ridiculously-outmoded socialist thought (oxymoron) politics and policies, open bribery, unfair taxation policies, the misuse of tax money and political power, personal and political connections, the arrogance of a ruling elite, One-Party Rule -- is working the same magic on China, as a whole, that it always has worked everywhere it's been tried. The primary symptom of this disease is a culture of entitlement in which behavior that is otherwise beyond society's pale, is perfectly acceptable so long as it is the 'right' people (those with connections, or who have paid the requisite bribes) who engage in them, and always at someone else's expense.

That pisses people off, you know. In this country, we do things like form Tea Parties and vote Republican (which is only slightly-better). In places like China, people riot -- at least until they get run over by tanks, which only pisses people off even more. Imagine Tiannemen Square, only 50 times worse, and unlike the Newark or Los Angeles riots of American history, burning the city down would probably not be considered an improvement by most Chinese.

So, if all of you economic doom-and-gloomers who cower in fear of Chinese Domination can relax a bit. If we take the examples of what we know happens in (democratic-party-dominated)American cities and states as the natural consequence of what happens when Leftard government behaves in this way, it turns out there is nothing to be afraid of, at all.

Except that China, unlike, say Detroit, has nuclear weapons...but that's beside the point; At the rate at which China is "Detroiting" itself, within a generation there probably won't be anyone left who will be able to read the instructions for launch.

The EU and China Are Doomed...

I was discussing this idea I've had rolling around the empty spaces between my ears the other night with a good friend of mine. I think it was about 12 or 15 years ago, when he had married an English Lady and was therefore honor-bound to remain in Britain, that I told him to make sure that he saved his pennies, and made preparations to run back to the United States if that should become necessary, because at that time the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair was seriously considering joining the European Union. Or at least, trying to prepare British citizens for the possibility of being joined at the hip to the French and Germans.

That Labour government never entered the shotgun marriage of full EU membership (that would have meant abandoning the Pound for the Euro, and giving up much that made Britain British), but did inch it's regulatory system closer and closer to the European model (ex: it is now illegal to sell produce in Britain in any measure but metric). I'm convinced that had Blair had another go at things, he would have turned Britain into Belgium, only with prettier women. That the British people resisted Monetary Union, and unaccountable Continental bureaucratic control, is to their credit.

"The European Union cannot last", I told him. "Any organization which has both the French and the Germans in it, is doomed to fail."

Time has proven me right, in the general theory, just not in the particulars. The European Union is now in financial crisis, as is the United States, only the EU economic crisis is one of it's member states own making, because despite all the talk about free markets, the free movement of labor, and all the rosy economic predictions, the member states can't handle austerity or responsibility, either in times of plenty or in times of dearth.

There are no "free" markets in Europe; if the labor markets aren't controlled by the Trade Unions, then the financial markets are rigged by governments (both the elected officials of the member nations, and the unelected bureaucracy of the EU) to favor European concerns above foreign competition. Granted, we do the same things, just not as badly or as ham-handedly as the Euros do.

Anyways, all that stuff about the European social welfare model is finally coming home to roost in such a way that people are recognizing it's true costs.

An economic crisis arrives, austerity measures are needed: and French workers will have to work two more years into their 60's to keep their Social Security system afloat...and they riot.

Greeks riot in the streets of Athens, home of democracy, because the government is stepping up enforcement of tax collection (apparently, Greeks have become expert tax dodgers over the years), and reducing social benefits to stave off bankruptcy.

British "students" (who knew football, female promiscuity and public drunkenness were legitimate fields of study?) riot in the streets because the government cannot continue to provide a "free" college education (note to all you people who are supposed to be getting educated: nothing is ever "free", you just don't happen to pay for it because someone else does, dispshit!). When Her Majesty's Government makes the suggestion that, perhaps, students might pay some of their own tuition, they take to the streets to set things aflame and otherwise make a nuisance of themselves (over a rate so low that it would make an American college student consider blowing someone for British Citizenship).

It was Germany that began the breakup of the EU. Angela Merkel figured that if any part of the European economic system was going to be saved, it might as well be the German part. Austerity is the new buzzword; Germany will not bail out Ireland, Portugal, Spain, in fact, Germany won't bail out anyone it doesn't absolutely have to. The first crack has appeared in the EU; the dam will surely break, and the lesson (which somehow everyone forgets) is finally re-learned -- everyone is friendly...until money is involved.

I had always believed that when (not IF) the EU dissolved, it would be because France and Germany would get into another of their cyclical Fascist phases and then go to war over who had the God-given right to shit all over the Danes, Czechs and Luxembourgers, plunging Europe into another war (the French and Germans have fought three of them in the last 150 years, five in the last 200, if you count Napoleon, and who the hell-knows-how-many since the days of Charlemagne). Instead, the collapse of the EU is because the potential Shitters are afraid of bearing the cost of preserving the Shittees, upon whom they depended to slough off their own social welfare costs in the first place.

How that all sorts itself out is open to debate, and the vagaries of time. However,there's a bigger threat to international security and recovery than a pissing match within the Eurozone, and that threat is China.

China, at present, has three major economic advantages over the West; first, it contains tens of millions of people willing (and happy) to work for low wages. Even the pittance the average Chinese worker makes compared to his Western counterparts represents a great leap forward (no pun intended) for the average Chinese. Secondly, China is a place where speculators can run wild, making a killing -- on paper -- with little real investment. Some places in China are so remote and economically-depressed that the installation of a gumball machine or a pay phone represents 1000% economic growth. A skillful speculator can take those paper gains, and turn them into real cash. The Communist government certainly has, mostly because it's the body which produces the inflated economic figures in the first place.

All that Wall Street talk of China being "the biggest potential market in the world" is just that; talk. We've heard it for 30 years, and the Chinese trade imbalance with America grows worse with every goddamned day. Those who brag about opening Chinese markets and cheerleading the growth of Chinese capitalism are blowing smoke up your ass: they're simply trying to keep the investment pipeline open to prevent yet another bubble from breaking.

The third advantage which China enjoys is a corrupt government willing to do anything in order to maintain the power to slaughter millions if it feels itself threatened. It's why the Commies "liberalized" the economic system in the first place. This seeming-abandonment of Communism for unbridled Capitalism is merely a shield intended to buy the Chinese Communist apparatus the time and money necessary to save it's own skin when the time comes. China has learned the true lessons that Mikhail Gorbachev taught totalitarian regimes with his programs of glasnost and perestroika:

It's okay for The People to have the illusion of wealth, for as long as they believe their standard of living is rising, political unrest can be kept at bay. Let the people get rich, just don't let them demand -- or get -- political rights. And herein lay the problem.

Within a generation, perhaps two, China will be rent by political discord. The sources of this unrest will be a rising Middle Class, and a generation of unmarried and childless Men. This Middle Class, the first generation of accumulators of real wealth in Chinese history, will very soon demand that their modest fortunes be preserved for future generations -- and the first threat they'll want their money protected from is their own government. There will be calls, and possibly bloody riots, for political, economic, and legal freedoms/protections that the Communists will be unable to contain, deflect or ignore without great bloodshed.

At the same time, there will arise a peculiar class of Men denied the right to a wife and family by draconian birth control policies that have made marriageable females scarce, and which will have given what women there are a power they have never had before in China; the right to pick and choose the "best" husbands from the nuveau-riche parvenus, perhaps to even command huge payments and advantageous pre-nuptual agreements that the average man simply cannot provide.

There will be tens of millions of Chinese men who will have no, or limited, prospects for wives and children...and they won't be getting laid. Societies in which men can't engage in regular sexual activity, attain wives, or produce families to pass on both their genes and their property have far too much energy and time for other things...like violence. The sort of violence which one normally associates with the Middle East -- another sexually-deprived culture where wives are hard to come by once one runs out of first-cousins, and where inbreeding, closet homosexuality and bestiality are rampant, and grave threats to anything that can be considered civilized society.

There can never be enough Japanese sex robots to keep these guys in check.

The combination of a new Middle Class and the Man-with-no-marital-prospects will, eventually, mean the end of Chinese "Communism", and destroy much of the gains China has made economically in the last 30 years through some sort of Civil War. Whether it's a Peaceful Revolution, or one of those historically-cyclical-and-violent episodes of Chinese history is yet to be seen, but I'm betting on it being one hell of a holy mess, because let's face it; everyone is friendly...until there's money...or pussy...involved.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal reports an agreement between France and Germany that might save Ireland from insolvency, but undermine the Euro in the process. The article suggests the belief that this plan will bring the Eurozone members closer together, but let's get real; that's propaganda. The real story here is that the failings of the Irish (and Spanish, Portugese, etc) banks will fall squarely where they belong; on the shoulders of the investors who hold the bad debt.

Also, Tea Parties rising in Germany? We all know how well German Nationalist parties meeting in Munich beerhouses have worked in the past, don't we?