Category — Europe

Sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for.  Europe couldn’t wait for an Obama presidency, but they might want to reconsider:

The Polish president’s office backtracked Sunday on a previous claim that U.S. president-elect Barack Obama had promised Poland to continue the Bush administration’s multibillion-dollar missile defense program.
Presidential aide Michal Kaminski said Obama “made no declaration on missile defense.” But Kaminski did not explain why Polish President Lech Kaczynski had claimed Saturday that Obama told him “the missile defense project would continue.”

It looks like the Russians have Obama pegged perfectly–get belligerent, and he’ll buckle.  If I were a country bordering Russia, I’d be awfully neverous right now.

The last bump of this size Bush called an adjustment; that was Lehman Brothers tilting over. This is nothing more than another adjustment.
However, this one will involve a bunch of swells cutting up their credit cards, selling (if they can beat the repo man) the M3, the Lexus or the Mercedes, the plasma screen TV and every bell and whistle they couldn’t do without because “Bob had one.”
Have you ever seen a stockbroker bang nails or replace a 20-amp breaker? Life inside the “gates” is going to become amusin’.
Here’s a flash for you. The only ones that will get it in the neck are those living on next year’s income. IRA’s, 401k and pensions will take a hit but only those without diverse holdings will drop severely.
If you were flipping houses or specing condominiums, greed gotcha.

In Europe, the elite, those that can tell all how it should be, have their knickers in a wad.

Bailout failure ‘will cause US crash’

The US stock market could suffer a devastating crash with shares losing a third of their value this week if Hank Paulson’s financial bailout plan fails, US Treasury officials have warned.

The financial system could face a meltdown of 1929 proportions unless US politicians succeed in their efforts for a $700bn rescue scheme, experts added. [snip]

Well they certainly are busy telling us what to do. For good reason it seems when one looks at their markets. But, they seem to have it a bit backwards, for their markets visited the loo quickly and in earnest.

Investors fretted about contagion into Europe, where Fortis, which was part of the consortium that bought ABN Amro last year, fired its chief executive after liquidity concerns pushed shares down more than 20pc to a 14-year low. Holland’s ING and BNP Paribas are looking at buying the bank this weekend.

London investors have warned that the FTSE could suffer falls of as much as 1,000 points - a fifth of its value, if the deal falls through.

Peter Spencer, economic adviser to the Ernst & Young Item Club, said: “This is the time you have to bail people out and ask questions later. It is very difficult to see how the US banking system would survive without that.This has the potential to make 1929 look like a walk in the park.”

Of course, it’s the bloody colonials doing it again. Have we no shame! Well, this time we’ll be generous and let the Tories have the soup lines.

[snip]
Markets were anxious about Britain’s fast deteriorating economic outlook and the stability of its banking sector as B&B followed Northern Rock in being nationalised. The worries followed the fire sale of HBOS, the nation’s biggest mortgage lender to Lloyds TSB, and led to the London stock market succumb to a fresh hammering of its leading shares. [snip]

The euro also fell heavily against the dollar amid concern over the eurozone’s banking strife and the adequacy of arrangements for bank rescues in the 15-nation bloc. The euro lost as much as 1.8 per cent against the dollar, falling to levels of about $1.4340 from a US close of $1.4613 on Friday.
Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 index was down 1.3 per cent at 11,743.61, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index shed 2.1 per cent to 18,286.90.
“They’re worried that another fire is starting in Europe,” said Castor Pang, an analyst at Sun Hung Kai Financial in Hong Kong.

                                       US Fades Away in Europe

I’m not persuaded that American troops on European soil (after 1989) makes sense for the United States.  Between the proposed European Security Force and NATO, which alone fields 2.3 million active duty troops, and another 3.04 million reservists, no son or daughter or America should be at risk. Why any American personnel should perch atop the pile of skulls created by these countries, and stand in the way of their urge to do it again, is preposterous.

If Russia is the chief military threat to Europe, let Europeans deal with it.  If they subserve to the Russians, who are themselves in a state of hypermortality and decay, they all deserve what they get.

NATO itself can also go to hell.  NATO’s performance in Afghanistan is thin and timid.  In the European backyard it’s simply a pretense for Americans to stand up to…or annoy…Russia (depending upon your viewpoint) with Europe looking over our shoulders.

Note this remark from a New Zealander I encountered on the Internet a while ago. “We [New Zealanders] should stay out of everything. If the balloon goes up, the Americans will  take care of it.” 

Screw him.  Time to worry about ourselves.  No American blood or treasure for this bunch of rotters.

The electoral map this year, as in 2004, portrays something other than plain electoral potential.   See one here.   It’s absolutely true that these Red and Blue State distinctions today stand for something other than objective politics.  Anyone who’s lived in either of the colored enclaves knows that they’re insular social systems, with the natural tendency to grow more insular and self-reinforcing, especially during times of stress like an election season. 

Here in Connecticut, our company of the “coastal elites” has no real opposition, and has been especially liberal in its open contempt for that which is not itself.  Politics here is simply white noise, containing all the possible ideas about humankind, but with the same old fantastic historical narratives about how to create a good society. 

Nothing meaningful gets done, because what really matters is the perpetuation of the steely states-of-mind that come from social and cultural stratifications.  Unfortunately, as the ruling classes yammer and assert their worldview into empty space, the ”culture” around them grows more  noisy and chaotic and unstable.   Mass immigration and emigration, and  the blessed end of the ’60’s generation’s power are all happening at once, and the future is unknown. 

What can we expect in the next thirty years?  We don’t know.   America has, ’til now, managed the Hobbsean-Lockean problem - the rule of man versus the rule of law - although rule by courts is essentially rule by man, and rule by minoritarianism is just as wicked.  Still, we have no pockets of cultural entropy like Lebanon, yet, unless it’s Detroit.  We have no lethal tribal, sectarian or ideological wars. Not yet.  But do we have reason to believe that, in forty years,  New York City, or Baltimore won’t look like Beirut does today. 

Or Boston.  When the last restraining vines of the Yankee myth systems have been pruned away and burned, and the levelling blandishments of capitalism  and consumption no longer flatten the passions, will the coercive tools of progressive government  be enough to keep the peace?  I don’t think so.  And by the way, that Yankee myth system isn’t useful because it’s upheld by a Yankee bloodline - that began to disappear in the New England sterility of the 1840’s - but because it knits together a common culture.  Take it away with no replacement and you have third-century Rome, or the Middle East today.  

As for the Middle East, is it accurate to attribute the troubles there to irrational colonial borders,  or post-colonial pseudo-statehood, or poverty, or despotism or lack of economic mobility?  These all add to the poison, no doubt, but is there any category for the plain perversity of human self-assertion, and the moral malfunctions that cause it?  Not today. 

It’s unfashionable to fit Western Enlightenment modes of conduct to the “senseless” hate and murder in the Middle East because it’s culture specific, so we’re left with no disciminating capacities at all.   And for that reason, we can’t even evaluate the past, present and future for ourselves.   If  Hartford, with eleven shootings in a single afternoon, isn’t the land of the Droogs, what is?  In one week, these events have faded from memory.  Who are we today?

It’s a long way from The White Man’s Burden on the express train to moral nullity, but we’ve made the journey without a stop for the mail.  Today, in a multiculutural stupor, we’re close to accepting arranged marriage, female circumcision, polygamy, polyandry, polyamory, the oppression of women and children in general, exceptions to religion/state barriers for Muslims, and the vagaries of Shari’a Law in parts of America, and in many parts of Europe.   All of these adjustments will lead to more  more extreme adjustments to others, and they won’t necessarily be Muslims, but some other group with a claim to legitimacy and indulgence. 

45 years ago I read a dreary thesis on political legitimacy, written by some figure in international relations, and whose name I’ve completely forgotten.  He concluded that free-thinking, tolerant Britain was the most stable country in the world, where the totalitarian USSR and its constituent countries, were fragile pressure-cookers.  Britain’s social vigor then was attributed to the usual assortment of virtues assigned to free-societies. 

Completely ignored was Britain’s post-industrial torpor, Commonwealth immigration policies, declining aspirations, the stirrings of a ”New” Labor every bit as dogmatic and certain as the old hereditary ruling class,  and the burning, destructive fever known as the  1960’s.  Britain is in steep decline today, with a continuous current of emigres to other English-speaking lands.  We should pay attention. 

Former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton makes a great point in his Op Ed today—Mr. MotO doesn’t understand the lessons of the Cold War. Unlike his “we’re citizens of the World” speech implies, the Cold War was won through steely resolve—a resolve that many on the left and Western Europe did not share. If we’d joined the pacifists and socialists at the time, we’d be propping up Eastern Bloc countries with economic aid just like North Korea today. And tens of millions would still be suffering inside totalitarian states.

Let’s hope Mr. MotO was pandering to the crowd. It’s naïve to think the world will embrace, and there’ll be no more need for US leadership.

There is, after all, only the Numinous, the Godhead, The Barack Obama, The One who transcends mere, earthly, names. 

(UPDATE:  HEY GUYS!  GET A ROOM WITH A SHOWER!  ESPECIALLY YOU, MATTHEWS, CHANGE YOUR UNDERWEAR!)

The world has changed, but the grotesque historical aberration of Western liberalism marches on unaltered and forever deluded.  We saw it in Berlin this week…the rush from reality that fueled every European calamity of the last two centuries, now feeding upon the nauseating platitudes of an American pol.  But just remember, Barack: 

The Germans are either at your feet or at your throat.

(Winston Churchill)

The bad guys of the world are taking The Obama’s measure, and I am not reassured.

ADDENDUM:  While I think most Americans couldn’t care a whit about what the Germans/Europeans think on any subject (the remainder, who do care, are cosmopolite liberals like Obama) the foreign policy trip is a one phase of the Obama campaign’s plan to keep the celebrity mode going until the clock runs out in November.  Obama’s polls are static, even WITH the foreign sideshow, and some even show slippage where the gilt has rubbed off.

Expect more histrionics and costume drama from the Obama campaign.  It’s absolutely essential for them to keep the sales job blazing away, and the dramatization of their facile, even mediocre, candidate from being examined too closely. 

Islamic extremists should get therapy, Home Office tells local councils

Islamic extremists could escape prosecution and instead receive therapy and counselling under new Government plans to “deradicalise” religious fanatics.

The Home Office is to announce an extra £12.5 million to support new initiatives to try to stop extremism spreading.

The central element of the Home Office plan is a new national “deradicalisation” programme that would persuade converts to violent and extremist causes to change their views.

Two through the towel works better, faster and has a 100% success rate.

Maybe drinking biofuels tastes fine.

Food Rationing Confronts Breadbasket of the World

Major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply. There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers are hoarding grain stocks. [snip]

In lean times, biotech grains are less taboo

Soaring food prices and global grain shortages are bringing new pressures on governments, food companies and consumers to relax their longstanding resistance to genetically engineered crops. [snip]

There can’t be a food shortage, we have food to burn. Ethanol is the wave of the future. This is what the greenies wanted, this is what results.
First, understand there isn’t a shortage of food, there is a shortage of non-GE food. In Europe, Asia and areas like Vermont, they want non-modified food. This is a self-inflicted predicament for 75% of the corn grown in the US is GE. If they want corn, they get what we sell and pay the price. Or, grow their own. They can have precisely what they want then.
If they don’t, Frankenfoods, the bane of every Luddite, are coming to their plate.

There is one more option:

I could not tell if this was a pickup or a delivery.

Prophets of profit

WARNING: This post contains economic thought. Not compatible with Marxist drivel.
For Vermont Sandernistas, reading this might cause IBS.

Megan McCardle making sense about profits, pricing, and policy.

[snip]
So the most probable outcome of introducing monopsony power here [in the U.S.] is that the market for drugs shrinks to the point where it will support few-to-no new drugs.
[snip]

People who think that there will be continuing R&D in the pharmaceutical industry are basically thinking of it as a budgeting problem. They think of the pharmaceutical industry’s gross income as a budget to be allocated between various functions, such as marketing and R&D. [snip]

I don’t think of R&D as a budgeting problem; I think of it as an investment problem. After all, even if the pharmaceutical industry has no profits right now, they can borrow the money in the financial markets at fairly attractive rates.

The main obstacle to R&D, then, is not the current state of pharmaceutical industry profits; it is the potential return on the investment in R&D. After all, Merck doesn’t have to make drugs; it could generate a nice, safe return of 5% a year in government bonds. Or it could get into some other business, such as making soap. If you drive down the profits on new drugs too far, it stops making sense to invest in new drugs, even if there is a small profit to be made on current production.

Developing new drugs is very, very risky. Depending on what you think constitutes a drug candidate, somewhere between one in one thousand, and one in ten thousand drug candidates makes it from a lab bench to clinical trials. Each of the failed drugs was very expensive, particularly if it got partway through clinicals, which run about $500 million per course.

The problem is, once you’ve developed a drug, it’s easy to copy. It’s also usually trivially cheap to produce. And your patent is rapidly running out. This gives a monopsony buyer a lot of leverage to force down your price–you’re almost always better off taking something. This is particularly true if the monopsony buyer has the power to break your patent and license its generic manufacturers to turn out cheap but near-perfect imitations of your product². This is, in fact, what Europe has done; they make pharmaceutical firms sell to them at cost plus. The lion’s share of the profits on any drug come from the United States; what they get in Europe and Canada and the rest of the world is (thin) gravy, a price that is just a little bit better than not selling any drugs there.

Now imagine that America drives drug prices down to that sort of “cost+10″ or “cost+20″ level. The pharmaceutical firms will keep making the drugs they already have, because there will still be a little profit there. But they would have to be psychotic to invest billions of dollars over a 20 year time horizon in exchange for a one in a thousand chance of making that small a profit. Would you put 20% of your income now into an investment that might yield a profit of 10% of your income–in thirty years?

But they have to invest in R&D, say my interlocutors; otherwise they won’t have any drugs to sell! This makes the odd assumption that they can’t do anything else. But history is full of companies that used to do something else entirely–and also, of companies that went out of business when their market collapsed.

Think: tulips, buggy whips, Polaroid, Kodak film and paper, Studebaker, Pan Am. How many more can you remember.

Dutch Quaking Over Islam Film; Mass Violence Expected

They’re bracing for mass seething and violence in The Netherlands as a film produced by Geert Wilders is set to debut this week.

Naturally for the Islamic fanatics, even the idea of a film casting them in a negative light has them freaking out. [snip]

Dutch diplomats are already trying to pre-empt international reaction. ‘It is difficult to anticipate the content of the film, but freedom of expression doesn’t mean the right to offend,’ said Maxime Verhagen, the Foreign Minister,…

What? That is what free expression is. Offending the offensive is job one. Why bother to write if you cannot upset and offend some deserving batch of unlovables.
Leave it to the wimps to cower and wring hands over this MINOR snit.

…who was in Madrid to attend the Alliance of Civilisations, an international forum aimed at reducing tensions between the Islamic world and the West. In Amsterdam, Rotterdam and other towns with large Muslim populations, imams say they have needed to ‘calm down’ growing anger in their communities. [snip]

Of course the Islamotards would never think about offending Dutch sensibilities.

This bit of information posted after I put up the House of credit cards post reinforces the previous data.

Crisis may make 1929 look a ‘walk in the park’

As central banks continue to splash their cash over the system, so far to little effect, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard argues things are rapidly spiraling out of their control. [snip]

“It cannot deal with the underlying fear that lots of firms are going bankrupt. The banks and the hedge funds have not fully acknowledged who is in trouble. That is the critical issue,” she adds. [snip]

York professor Peter Spencer, chief economist for the ITEM Club, says the global authorities have just weeks to get this right, or trigger disaster. [snip]

When a credit system implodes, it can feed on itself with lightning speed. Current rates in America (4.25 per cent), Britain (5.5 per cent), and the eurozone (4 per cent) have scope to fall a long way, but this may prove less of a panacea than often assumed. The risk is a Japanese denouement across the Anglo-Saxon world and half Europe.

Bernard Connolly, global strategist at Banque AIG, said the Fed and allies had scripted a Greek tragedy by under-pricing credit long ago and seem paralysed as post-bubble chickens now come home to roost. “The central banks are trying to dissociate financial problems from the real economy. They are pushing the world nearer and nearer to the edge of depression. We hope they will eventually be dragged kicking and screaming to do enough, but time is running out,” he said. [snip]

“The kind of upheaval observed in the international money markets over the past few months has never been witnessed in history,” says Thomas Jordan, a Swiss central bank governor.

“The sub-prime mortgage crisis hit a vital nerve of the international financial system,” he says.

The market for asset-backed commercial paper - where Europe’s lenders from IKB to the German Doctors and Dentists borrowed through Irish-based “conduits” to play US housing debt - has shrunk for 18 weeks in a row. It has shed $404bn or 36pc. As lenders refuse to roll over credit, banks must take these wrecks back on their books. There lies the rub.

Professor Spencer says capital ratios have fallen far below the 8 per cent minimum under Basel rules. “If they can’t raise capital, they will have to shrink balance sheets,” he said. [snip]

Maastricht rules may force the Government to raise taxes or slash spending into a recession. This way lies crucifixion. The UK current account deficit was 5.7 per cent of GDP in the second quarter, the highest in half a century. Gordon Brown has disarmed us on every front. [snip]

The ECB’s little secret is that it must never allow a Northern Rock failure in the eurozone because this would expose the reality that there is no EU treasury and no EU lender of last resort behind the system. [snip]

Goldman Sachs caused shock last month when it predicted that total crunch losses would reach $500bn, leading to a $2 trillion contraction in lending as bank multiples kick into reverse. This already seems humdrum.

“Our counterparties are telling us that losses may reach $700bn,” says Rob McAdie, head of credit at Barclays Capital. Where will it end? The big banks face a further $200bn of defaults in commercial property. On it goes.

From Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce:
(Link to Book)

December 19th, 1914 -
Lt Geoffrey Heinekey, new to the 2nd Queen’s Westiminster Rifles wrote to his mother, “A most extradordinary thing happened…some Germans came out and held up their hands and began to take in some of their wounded and so we ourselves immediately got out of our trenches and began bringing in our wounded also. The Germans then beckoned to us and a lot of us went over and talked to them and they helped us to bury our dead. This lasted the whole morning, and I talked to several of them and I must say they seemed like extraordinarily fine men…It seemed too ironical for words. There, the night before, we had been having a terrific battle, and the morning after there we were, smoking their cigarettes and they smoking ours (p 5).”

“…As night fell on Christmas Eve the British soldiers noticed the Germans putting up small Christmas trees along with candles at the top of their trenches and many began to shout in English “We no shoot if you no shoot (p. 25). The firing stopped along the many miles of the trenches, and the British began to notice that the Germans were coming out of the trenches toward the British who responded by coming out to meet them. They mixed and mingled in No Man’s Land and soon began to exchange chocolates for cigars and various newspaper accounts of the war which contained the propaganda from their respective homelands. Many of the officers on each side tried to prevent the event from occurring but the soldiers ignored the risk of a court-martial or of being shot.”

Such is, or used to be, the power of this important Christian occasion. It still is for us. A wish for peace, and a Joyous Christmas, from me to everyone, Christian or otherwise, everywhere…and especially to the faithful folks here at New England Republican.

I know the lack of self-respect is in the schools. Every community has a certain number of incorrigibles; given these stories however, the contagion has infected the general populace more deeply than heretofore thought.

The following collection exhibits the price of an amoral society, one where personal gratification precedes all else. The liberal upbringing so in vogue, i.e. lack of personal responsibility, the cult of victimhood, and protection of individuals from any repercussions for actions undertaken has this ana as a corollary.

If anything, this is an invidious form of fascism, worse than prior known examples, since it is sub rosa.

Risky sex returns syphilis to Europe

LONDON - Syphilis is back: The sexually transmitted disease long associated with 19th Century bohemian life is making an alarming resurgence in Europe. [snip]

In 2000, syphilis infection rates were so low that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention embarked on a plan to eliminate the disease. But about 9,800 cases were reported in 2006. [snip]

In Europe, Van de Laar said syphilis’ reappearance was so surprising that many doctors initially had trouble diagnosing it.

Though these days it mainly affects urban gay men, experts worry that the disease could also rebound in the general population if stronger efforts to fight it are not taken soon. [snip]

Chairs Thrown During Parents’ Fight at School Christmas Program

HIGH POINT, N.C. (WGHP) — An apparent ongoing dispute between three parents erupted into a physical fight at an elementary school’s Christmas program Tuesday night. [snip]

Thrown Object Knocks Out Santa

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) - A man dressed as Santa Claus was knocked unconscious by a thrown object that hit his face while he was riding on the back of a truck decorated as a sleigh.

Kevin Smith says he never saw what hit him Saturday. Whatever it was, it broke his nose and gave him a concussion and two black eyes. [snip]

Bus driver solicits sex; students aboard

DETROIT - A 30-year-old bus driver transporting Detroit Public Schools special needs students was arrested Wednesday after allegedly pulling his bus alongside an undercover officer, propositioning her for sex from his window, and promising to return after he dropped the children off at school. [snip]

Nick Mulling Post-Spears Pregnancy Show

NEW YORK (AP) - Nickelodeon is considering a special for its young audience about sex and love following the news that 16-year-old “Zoey 101″ star Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant.

The television network has made no announcement about the future of “Zoey 101,” its popular program aimed primarily at youngsters aged 9-14. Filming for the show’s fourth and final season has finished, and episodes are scheduled to begin airing in February. [snip]

One television critic, David Hinckley of the New York Daily News, wrote Thursday that to end “this sordid moment” with a lesson, Nickelodeon should pull the plug on “Zoey 101.” [snip]

The detritus of this social and parental mentoring is the abasement of civilization. This contaminant moves through the world community with the celerity of smallpox, precipitating society’s collapse.

A vaccine is available, but intensely hated by the left.

Meanwhile, the Democrats’ focus is Iraq, the pre-911 World, and getting the nitwit Hillary Clinton into the Oval Office

The Arab European League is worth a look.

Click on “English”, review their Vision and Agenda. It’s standard universalist lefty boilerplate, appropriated for the purposes of pleasing servile, multi-culti lefty Euro-clods. But it emphasizes the Arab diaspora in especially obtuse terms. It’s unclear whether the Middle East is the Home and European Islam is the diaspora, or the other way around.

Just a quick review of the scrolling topic reel to the right of the home page will tell you all you need to know. It’s going to be a long, long fight, and let’s hope we’re never going back Over There. Let them swing.

…And marvel that ANYONE can believe in socialist solutions to ANYTHING under the sun…the Yugo automobile….

Yugo introduced its unreliable, underpowered, hopelessly antiquated GV hatchback in 1986 to worldwide jeering and derision, a level of scorn that only grew as people became more familiar with the intrinsic problems of an ancient Fiat design assembled with the meticulous disregard and thorough apathy of Yugoslavia’s Zastava auto group…

…According to Kelley Blue Book, a 1987 Yugo GVX with 180,000 miles and in “Fair” condition (an iffy proposition considering that most Yugos didn’t even leave the factory in “Fair” condition and is completely unlikely to cover 180,000 miles under its own power), is now worth $400…

My Uncle has a classic line - he says that the Yugo’s OPTIONAL rear-window defroster is useful mostly to keep your hands warm when you’re pushing it…

Anyone who lived through the Tito era will remember American journalists’ take that the fat, white-suited despot Tito, who held Yugoslavia together by terror and tyranny, was a kind of mixed capitalist/socialist anti-Stalinist, all the more lovable because he like to have a good time.

Well, among his legacies is the current state of The Balkans, and the Yugo. When considering Single Payer Health Coverage, at least think of the Yugo.