Drake Blackpaw: "I disagree with March O'Hare when it comes to Greece. The problem with Greece (and Spain and Portugal) for the rest of the European union is that they all share a common currency and so if one country defaults, it has a huge impact on the currency and thus every country that uses that currency."No question about that. Turns out that those who were against a common currency were right. I feel more strongly about bailouts when it comes to corporations (which are supposed to function according to the laws of capitalism) as opposed to governments, and I suppose that in some ways, it could be argued that Greece isn't even an independent, sovereign state anymore but a state in the EU, like Louisiana is a state in the U.S.
I don't really know how the situation sorts out in the EU, but I do know that too much centralization is bad. There comes a point in the development of any organism--living, corporate or government--at which too big is undesirable. The EU has possibly crossed that line. I know the U.S. has.
Vararam: "Occam's Razor still applies."Having long been a troubleshooter for
complicated exhibits that I designed, I can say with absolute certainty that Occam's Razor is a dull and overused tool. Unrelated simultaneous malfunctions have a way of making the Razor useless (random is not random?) and one has no recourse but to fall back on what you might call "coincidence theory."
Coincidence theory gets pretty thick. I have no doubt that some things that appear to be conspiracies are really just multiple unrelated things going wrong all at once in a trillion-to-one shot. In other words, the Razor is as apt to support conspiracy theory as it is to refute it.
Vararam: "To be fair, you didn't seem to be speaking of it as a conspiracy in the way I was speaking against."I wasn't.
Vararam: "The fact that the big corporations tend to fight the Obama administration (as the article you linked to points out) is evidence of that."It only goes to show how spoiled and selfish the heads of those corporations are. Obama would not be where he is if he hadn't been a good doggie for his financial contributors. Consider this: Remember the bailouts? Obama and McCain both left the campaign trail at a critical juncture to return to D.C. and vote for them, whereupon George W. Bush signed them into law before the ink was even dry on the bill. (Republicans seem to have forgotten that.) The vast majority of those people are all on the same team. They work for global multinational corporations, not for the people of the United States.
Deregulation did this. Sold-out weasels (my apologies to real weasels--the word I want to use is forbidden on this board) in thrall to their corporate masters did this. We'd be in trouble anyway because of weird coincidences like those of which I spoke, but absent the Ponzi scheme that the big banks were playing, those (largely natural) disasters would not have been positively catastrophic.
Vararam: "...as an extreme example, some believe that the government is controlled by reptilian beings."That one amuses me. I do not disparage myths, because they always contain a grain of truth. Do I think the Global Elite consists of reptilian extraterrestrials? No. Do I think they
act like that's what they are? Yes.
The movers-and-shakers don't agree on everything, but here are a few things they do agree about: they want cheap labor. They don't care if their employees live below the poverty line. They don't care about their employees at all. Ideally, they'd like to have a workforce of automatons with no pleasures, no recreational activities, no desires other than to serve
them... endlessly. And ideally, they'd like for them to work for free. They want slaves.
You don't have to believe in reptilian beings to know that. You only have to watch what they do.
KitsuNinja: "It's been in shambles for a while now, have you all been living in a cave?"Not me. I've known this was coming since 1980. It really started to snowball in 2005, right around the time of the words, "Heckuva job, Brownie." I'm just surprised that it's taking so long. The system had more momentum than I thought, and I already knew it had a lot.
It's been running on fumes for years, and I think we're about out of fumes.