h/t Donald Sensing
It is customary at this time to act like two-faced Janus, looking back at the year that has passed while predicting what may happen in the one ahead. However, from what we have seen of the two great political fantasies of our age, it is now much easier to say what is likely not to happen. Each of these acts of make-believe has got so out of hand that a violent collision with reality is inevitable. But those who are in their grip are so locked in denial that it is only safe to predict that nothing will bring them back to earth until that nemesis intervenes.
A first prediction is that it is no longer conceivable that the sad little nonentities who preside over the affairs of the EU will be able to find any rational way out of the hole they have dug for themselves over the euro.
...We must not forget, however, that, when it comes to nations running up a debt out of control, our own Government is still having to borrow an additional £2.5 billion every week, just to fund its own overspending which, despite all talk of cuts, still races upwards. Any moment now, our own national debt will top the £1 trillion mark, having more than doubled in six years. However damaging a disintegration of the euro may be to our economy in 2012, we also face a crisis we have brought upon ourselves one for which our Government has no more of a real answer than do the impotent rulers of the eurozone.
...We are left in an equally insoluble mess by the ebbing away of what we can now see was the greatest and most damaging scare-story in history: the belief that the world was threatened with catastrophic warming by human emissions of carbon dioxide.
#1
The European leaders could save Europe, but they won't, as they are driven by a failing ideology that allows no compromise to the outcome they demand.
They crave an elite-run "United States of Europe", that is just as nationally controlled and seemingly powerful as the US. And in this attempted evolution, they refuse to pull back and change direction when they foul up.
And reinforcing defeat almost never works.
The first thing they must do is back off the drive for central control, because some of their members just do not have the discipline they need for balanced national order, and being integrated does not make them balanced, but instead makes Europe more imbalanced.
Putting technocrats in charge of their undisciplined political class is unlikely to make them more disciplined, either. While it may help in the short run, it will do so only in a superficial way.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
