Cheezburger of the Day

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Imagine What It Looks Like From Inside The Building

Say you're some Greek government budgetary functionary and at your desk. Outside there are mobs protesting. Right in front of you are the fiscal facts - hopeless, every one of them. The feeling of desperation inside those buildings must be palpable.

The Crux Of The Matter

Robert Samuelson has a typically excellent piece on the European debt crisis. In it is this nugget that you find over and over again in such pieces.

Europe is playing for time. It's struggling to delay any Greek default long enough for other vulnerable countries to demonstrate they can handle their debts.

Here's where it seems relatively simple to me, but isn't addressed in 99.99% of the pieces I read on the topic. There are two questions to ask, ones that are independent of scale. That is, they can be asked of your 10-year-old daughter, a corporate CEO or the head of a country.

1. What are you going to do that people will be willing to pay for?


2. How will you service your debts?

If you can't answer them satisfactorily, you're hosed and playing for time isn't going to do anything but prolong things. Neither Greece or the EU or Barack Obama can answer either of these. Our Monastery of Miscellaneous Musings has a great snippet illustrating just this point. Dean uses it to make a different one, but the content of the speech leaves you no doubt that not only does President Obama not have an answer to these questions, he doesn't even know they should be asked. The failure to address these crucial, foundational questions blows my mind.

The more I read both theology and economics, the more I become convinced that we're living at the end of an age of denial.

Lazy

Economists Should Read More Lewis

C. S. Lewis, that is. Gretchen Morgensen, writing in the NYT, has an interesting column today about America's debt chickens coming home to roost. She quotes a scholarly article with this observation embedded:

An intriguing aspect of their analysis is how it views the rising tide of debt around the world from a historical perspective. For so many countries to be groaning under so much debt at the same time is unusual, the authors say. More typical are the somewhat contained debt crises, like in Latin America in the 1980s or in Russia in 1998. While both of those episodes reverberated beyond the countries from which they sprang, today’s debt problems are far more widespread. And, as a result, more worrisome.

The simultaneous buildup of very large public deficits and debt positions in virtually all of the advanced high-income countries “is a new element at work in the global economy,” the report says.

Historical, yes, surprising, no. Globally, the Western world has become more and more secular, seeking salvation by proxy. Instead of you doing works of charity with your own life and money, you are forced to give money to the government who will do them for you. The end result is what we see today, massive debts created by separating giving from receiving.

To the donors, the recipients are invisible, so politicians seeking to buy votes can convince them that the poor are deserving, no matter what destructive behaviors have become commonplace. To the recipients, the donors are invisible, so those same politicians can convince them that the donors aren't yet paying their fair share, no matter how much is being paid. There was no reason for the average person to want to slow the growth of these secular charities. To do so would be an act of greed or selfishness.


While we are observing the failure of an economic model, we're also observing the failure of the societal model that drove it. Salvation, both economic and spiritual, is personal, not collective.

Praying To The Government

There's a bigger point here, but I just wanted to share a link, an excerpt and a video with you and suggest that the Greeks have passed back into the world of mythology, only this time the gods they worship are politicians.

Indignant Protests

The mass rallies by the “Indignant” that were held on Wednesday and Thursday night in almost every major Greek city represent a new parameter in political developments. This is a new phenomenon, which in form mimics the initiative by Spain’s youth, but in essence is stoked by the impending local economic crash. The movement is spontaneous, ideologically multicolored and politically astray. Its demographics and the symbols used to represent it represent a great departure from the usual stuff seen in protests. Here we don’t see a configuration of many small, tight-knit groups -- or blocs -- and the “professional” protesters of the left; you see people who are novices at protests. Instead of banners and red flags, you see Greek flags and hear the national anthem. Moreover, there is no fire missing from the chanted slogans, which sweep aside political correctness in favor of a morally accusatory tone.

Protest Video

General Odds and Ends

Here, I'm using Chesterton's definition of mythology - mysticism without philosophy or logic. That is, the crowd can't tell you how anything is supposed to happen, only that they want something to occur. In essence, they're praying to Zeus and Hermes. There's no end point here, no evidence that their gods have any power at all. They are simply crying out for mercy.

Borrowing Dollars And Returning Paper

I just read Ellen Brown's column, Japan shows how to defuse debt time-bomb. If the title wasn't enough to blow your mind, dig the the closer:

We have been frightened into believing that government debt is a bad thing...

The public debt is the people's money, and today the people are coming up short. Shrinking the public debt means shrinking more than just the services the government is expected to provide. It means shrinking the money supply itself, along with the ability to provide the jobs, wages and purchasing power necessary for a thriving economy.

The public debt is the people's money? Huh? Does that make your credit card debt your kids' money? It's like she has lost all contact with reality here. She thinks we should borrow money and pay back our creditors with paper which is worth less than what we borrowed. I wonder if that works in her life.

When you deposit money in the bank, they, in turn, lend it to someone. That's how they make money. In essence, you're lending money to the bank. Well, by her logic, isn't that then the bankers' money? Why do they need to pay that back? Why should there be any results from that loan at all? When Ellen wants to make a withdrawal, the bank should just shrug and say, "It's the people's money, now, Ellen!" Maybe they could give her twenty cents on the dollar. I wonder if she'd like that.

Borrowing money is predicated on your ability to pay it back. Otherwise it's just stealing.

John Dillinger, banker.

I Just Installed IE 9

... and immediately moved to Firefox as my browser. I have no idea what IE 9 does for me. All I know is that I wanted to surf the web and I had to fight with the stupid thing just to get started. It wanted to show me all of it's new features and then gave me a wave of warnings about content on my own blog.

I'm done. Microsoft just lost another customer.

The Nightly Spot Of 'Nip

Our catnip plant has gotten huge, affording us the opportunity to crush up some fresh 'nip for our Maximum Leader right around drinkie-poo time.

Ahhhhhh. That's good 'nip.

Daughter Goes Traditional

Yes, Daughter Daisy sometimes puts on the red dress and hits the town, but there are also those time when she's Momma's little girl and shows off her traditional side.


I left this photo fairly large because I liked the textures and geometry of the flower. It's like a burst of soft orange. It might be worth a click to see that larger version. Enjoy!

We Don't Need A Border Fence

We need a force field and robotic guards with laser guns. Dig this.

MORELIA, Mexico—Fierce fighting among apparent rival drug gangs in western Mexico left 28 dead, while in a nearby state more than 700 people huddled in shelters after fleeing villages that had become battlegrounds.

The violence, which appeared to be unrelated, escalated Wednesday in the western states of Nayarit and Michoacan, where drug cartels have been warring for territory ...

Police found 28 men lying dead and four others wounded on the road littered with bullet casings from high-powered weapons and 10 abandoned vehicles.

All I'm asking is give heavily armed robots a chance.

Soccer While Wearing Binoculars

Hilarious!

Cheezburger of the Day

see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

A Big, Hairy, Green Spider

... or maybe a Watermelon Spider* since the abdomen looks like a watermelon. Either way, he was pretty cool. We found him meditating in the Catican. I left the photo fairly big and he's worth a click to see him in full detail. The eye structure in particular was fascinating for me.


* - In reality, it was a Green Lynx Spider, Peucetia viridians. Identification thanks to the Spider Identification Guide. You can read lots more about him here.

Cheezburger of the Day

What Hope Looks Like In Greece

After muddling around with the latest news from Greece on Bloomberg and the WSJ, I Googled greek newspaper english language and came across ekathimerini.com and the Athens News. Bloomberg and the WSJ had hinted at Greek "asset sales", but it was unclear just what that meant. Were they selling gold bars or state-run corporations? The answer is much deeper than asset sales. They're moving away from the Paul Krugman, progressive economic model that has clearly failed and towards a more Milton Friedman-esque one.

First up, they're ditching lots of regulations.

The Finance Ministry has made public a list of 136 professions that will be liberalized from July 2 as part of the economic reforms Greece has been encouraged to make by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

The reform means that those seeking to enter these professions can do so freely, without restrictions on the number of people in the sector or limits on where they can set up their businesses.

The professions in the list published on Monday range from taxi drivers to beauticians but do not include some of the key so-called closed professions.

Notaries, lawyers and civil engineers will see their professions liberalized at a later date, yet to be set by the ministry.

Second, while dangerous to draw conclusions from a single paper's editorials, here's ekathimerini.com discussing the crisis.

The rapid deterioration in economic conditions has made it clear that changing Greece’s economic model will be more painful than previously thought.

The delays in overhauling and downsizing the public sector, which is key to changing the Greek economic model, will entail even greater economic and social costs than envisaged even six months ago if the government does not convince party loyalists in state-controlled corporations to accept privatizations and vested interests everywhere else to accept competition.

Corroborating this point of view is the Athens News' reporting from the inner sanctums of the EU.

The head of the Eurogroup urged Greece to set up an independent privatisation body overseen by the European Union to bring down its ballooning debt level.

Jean-Claude Juncker told German news weekly Der Spiegel's edition to be published Monday that the EU in future will monitor Greece's privatisation programme "as if we were conducting it ourselves."

People adapt. It may take them a generation or two to see how screwed up they were, but in the end, we all learn from mistakes and figure out what worked and what didn't. Unquestionably, the Greeks have made a mess of their economy, but it looks like the light is dawning on them. And lest we be too harsh on them, or on the Greek-like progressives in our own country, they smashed the place in an effort to be kind to the "less fortunate." They were trying to give security to all, not realizing that salvation, both spiritual and economic, is a personal thing. Now that collectivism has failed yet again, it looks like they're figuring it out.

Awww

Click here.

The Proper Response To Draw Mohammed Day

... from none other than our very own Precentor of Measurements. Classy, Foxie. Very, very classy.

Authors In Out Midst

Frequent commenter Jeff Burton is also an author of young adult fiction. Awesomeness squared! Here's his latest book. I just bought my copy to read myself, being a fan of such things.

Spanish Gen-Y Protest, Demand More Leprechauns

... or whatever the Spanish equivalent of a leprechaun is. Dig this.

Unemployment is at 45% for these guys. They're demanding more jobs and more government spending. Umm, massive government spending is what they had been doing and it resulted in high unemployment like it always does. Logically, doing more of what you've been doing to get into the mess would seem to be a bad idea.

It's a sad sight to see. They're good people. They want to work. They want to be productive. Unfortunately, they've been brought up completely ignorant of where money comes from. Someone has done these folks a very great disservice.