Less Politics, More Football!!
This is a Worrying Sign
Just over a year ago there was big riots in Egypt and in Algeria by football fans who was angry about the cheating of the opposition’s players, not surprising when you consider that it was two Arab countries who was play one another. Even although there was much tut-tutting at the time about this sort of disgraceful public behaviour, many others of us was more sanguine. We said not just “Well what are you espect?” but also, “At least all these rioting fans are demonstrate a healthy nationalism and xenophobia, which will distract them from not having no jobs and also prevent them from joining some kinds of pan-Arab Muslim brotherhood. Otherwise we will have to start the Crusades again.” But now, not 18 month later, splashed all over our television screen like the incontinent sploogings of a rabid Onanist, is all the news that the Arabs are once more revolting, not against homosexuals, Israel, the idiot George Bush or even falafel prices, but this time in protest against their own masters, the very men who have given them football and foreing enemies for the last 30 years. Is a big disgrace! Some peoples are have no gratitude whatsoever.
It was start off in Tunisia, which have always struck me as a very nice place to visit, everythings considered. Unlike other Muslim countries, you can drink their lousy local beer in public and sit by the pool showing your legs. Even the ladies, if they are foreing. Everyone in Tunisia was also strike me as well-educate and able to speak Spanish or, if that was too difficult, Italian. The government also had agreed not to teach any of the natives to swim, in a deal with Silvio Berlusconi, so that none of them would ever make it by accident across to Sicily, and in return Berlusconi was send over wealthy Italians to be waited on hand and foot and also his home videos. Tunisians peoples, when I have visited there, are always very polite to your face and do not spit in your soup and, as far as I know, had also a healthy contempt for all their neighbour Arab countries, such as Morocco, Libya, Algeria, and El Salvador. Indeed, they are almost European in their contempt for Arabs. So this is what is make me so confuse now about all the protest that are going on. The Tunisians had never have it so good! They are as close to European as an Arab can be, they have a nice hot sunny country, they live under a dictatorship, the most ideal kind of government, they know the Spanish, which mean they can appreciate the best culture and civilization, so what on Earth is making them want to have a revolution? Is not make no sense!
And then, to make the matters worse, the ingrates in Egypt are see what was happen in Tunisia, and instead of saying to one another, “I see the Jews are stir it up in Tunisia. And stupid fucking Tunisians have fell for it too,” the Egyptians, who themselves are have a marvelous tradition of 300-year-old dictatorship, are say to one another, “Let’s show those Tunisian morons what a REAL revolution is,” and they are start rampaigning in the streets, showering themselves beneath police batons, and waving threatening placards such as like the one above which must make any decent person shit in their spats. And not just are they trying to outdo the Tunisians in iconoclastics, they are also try to outdo them in tourism by making a virtue of their infantile rebelliousness. Look, for instance, at the latest video here for the Egyptian Tourist Board:
And now I am hear report on Al Jazeera that the protestings have spread all over my Yemen, wherever that is, and that today in Egypt they are especting massive protests because it is the Muslim bank holiday, so it will all be kicking off for the weekend.
But not kicking off in the right way. If only the dictators of Tunisia and Egypt had have any foresight or common knowledge, they would have realized that it was time to organize a football match between their countries. Perhaps a round-robin of all the Arab countries, called the Arab League, which would have ensure that instead of trying to outdo each other in revolutioning, the ignorant masses would have been fighting in the streets over which of their countries was best at kicking a bladder between two sticks. All smart dictators are know the important of sports. That is why El Generalísimo was have Real Madrid invented.
Is a sad day when football itself is become under such pressure that nobody is able to take it seriously any more. Even in the United Kingdom, which have a queen, football is become a laughing stoke because two football commenters have been give the sack just because they are make sexist comments behind closed whores. What is the world come to when the sexism is not allowed in football? What is the point of having sport in the first place if there is not going to be allow any male bonding, competition, aggression, violence, anger, hatred, misogyny, viciousness, racism, sleazy gang bangs in motel rooms, war, nationalism, innuendo, vulgarity, drunken arguments, vindictive chanting, WAGs, roasting, and replica kits? If you are start to sissify sport by insisting on non-threatening work environments, equality, and respect for the opposition, then you must not be surprise when it stop being a useful social tool for maintaining patriarchy, discipline, and rivalry among the idiot masses. We must stand up now and loudly proclaim our support for Randy Gray and Richard Quays because if we do not, our countries too will go the same way as the Arabs.
Say It Loud and Say It Proudly: Balls NOT Jobs! Goals NOT Votes!
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EU Should Admit Greece is Bankrupt | Christian Rickens
The unvarnished truth - the second Greek Bailout should not have happened.
The mistake isn’t the size, but the construction of the bailout package. It isn’t geared to the requirements of the people of Greece but to the needs of the international financial markets, meaning the banks.
How else can one explain the fact that around a quarter of the package won’t even arrive in Athens but will flow directly to the country’s international creditors? The holders of Greek government bonds are to get some €30 billion as an incentive to convert their old paper into new bonds. The aim is to keep alive the illusion that Greece isn’t bankrupt — after all, the creditors are voluntarily forgiving part of the debt. The financial sector is cleverly manipulating the fear that a Greek bankruptcy would trigger a fatal chain reaction.
That leaves €100 billion. But that too isn’t geared to what Greece needs in order to get back on its feet. It’s linked to an estimate of how much debt the Greek economy can bear without collapsing. International technocrats agree that with debts amounting to 120 percent of gross domestic product, the country can just about go on servicing its debt. That’s the level at which the cow can go on supplying milk without dying of exhaustion. So 120 percent became the goal.
Collaboration, with our European partners | Cunning Hired Knaves
The European project was supposed to be a bulwark against the dangers of fascist ambition, but now it is the instrument used to dismantle European democracy in the interest of the risk adverse looking for a steady income stream from the provision of the social net by those who cite the words and actions of old fascists while doing so.
The post Collaboration, with our European partners by Richard of Cunning Hired Knaves summed up in one sentence. For much better sentences and many more urgent points read the post.
On Sunday there were massive demonstrations throughout the Spanish state, with half a million people on the streets of Madrid and 450,000 in Barcelona, protesting against the labour ‘reform’ planned by the Partido Popular, the right-wing party that most closely represents the interests of the power elites that conserved their position when the transition from dictatorship to democracy was undertaken.
S.P.A.R.K. protest at cuts to lone parents, Dublin 18th February 2012
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There is particular anger directed at the Labour Party because they are associated with women’s rights and a more progressive society.
Please share the link to this video
Exiting the euro | Michael Roberts
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Chris Dillow | Capitalism against freedom
[...]
During the Cold War, opponents of communism routinely, and not entirely wrongly, claimed to be champions of liberty. Freedom for capitalists and freedom of speech and thought go together, it was claimed. “Freedom is indivisible” wrote Bruce Winton Knight in 1952. “Economic freedom is…an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom“ wrote Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom. And back in 1944 Friedrich Hayek complained that “We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.”
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In The Observer, Sunday 12 February 2012
Anyone who has followed the crisis will understand that the real economy of businesses and commodities is being upstaged by complicated financial instruments known as derivatives. These are not money or goods. They are investments in investments, bets about bets. Derivatives created a booming global economy, but they also led to turbulent markets, the credit crunch, the near collapse of the banking system and the economic slump. And it was the Black-Scholes equation that opened up the world of derivatives.
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Greece: a Sisyphean task | Michael Roberts
In a Eurozone that is unwilling to share its surplus with weaker, hardest hit economies there is no other option for those economies but default. Despite the agreement of Greek politicians to shorten their political life and accept the deal all that they have done is simply postpone this eventuality once again. However, even that postponement might be shortened by the Greek elections in April where the smaller leftist parties outside the coalition currently have 40% of the vote. Or so says Michael Roberts:
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As Greece stares into the abyss, Europe must choose | Maria Margaronis
Do we really want to live in an economic union that must destroy the future of millions in order to just tick along? Maria Margaronis points out that the situation in Greece today says little about Greece and everything about the EU.
The trouble with historical metaphors is that they can obscure the present: what’s really at stake here is not Greece’s identity but Europe’s. All eyes are fixed on Athens, but the way out of the crisis requires a choice about what kind of Europe we want. The one we have now, with its deep structural inequalities and its rigid adherence to a failed economic ideology, protects neither democracy nor human rights. Stiff-necked and punitive, it prefers to eat its children.
Jan 28th 2011