I’ve taken my turn mocking Ellen Pao, but her story is hardly original. Failing up is so common today it feels like it is new, but it has been a feature of the human condition for a long time. Alcibiades is a guy who would be comfortable in today’s culture of failing up. Instead of screwing up the invasion of Syracuse, he would have run a bank into the ground and then run for the Senate.

In prior ages, society could afford precious few of these sorts of people. Mistakes were simply too costly to tolerate having too many idiots in powerful positions. In the post scarcity world of today, it feels like we can tolerate an unlimited supply of losers, grifters and charlatans. Hillary Clinton is 50/50 to be president, despite being a colossal screw-up for the last forty years.

Ellen Pao would have been a non-story, but the Cult thought they could turn her into a Rosa Parks. She was an Asian female with a gay black husband suing a gaggle of Pale Penis People, who make it their life work to oppress women. That’s what makes her interesting to the Cult. Her scam is not in trying the shake down the PPP. Her scam was to con the Cult into making her a heroin. Edit:That’s right. Inject her right into the veins of the culture!

I was thinking about Pao when reading this on NRO. A fair number of people who think of themselves as diehard conservatives are fans of Fiorina. She is polling in the single digits, but the GOP will find some reason to get her on the debate stage. The reason, of course, is she is a woman. To her credit she says the sorts of things you expect a Republican to say, which says a lot of about the state of the party, but the only thing that matters is she lacks a penis.

That’s part of the con, of course. Fiorina was playing the vagina card when Ellen Pao was figuring out what to wear to her high school prom. Twenty years ago Fiorina was doing the vagina hustle to work her way up the ladder in Silicon Valley. Like Pao, she interviewed great, put on great presentations and was outlandishly incompetent in one job after another.

In 1995 she was put in charge of Lucent Technologies, a spin-off AT&T. I knew people who worked at Lucent in those days and they still tell stories about the madhouse management culture ushered in by Fiorina. Bell Labs was part of Lucent at the time and was one the great research facilities on earth. By the time Fiorina was done with it, it had been reduced to an R&D lab for a half-assed phone company.

Then she moved onto HP. Her tenure there is talked about to this day as a cautionary tale about hiring the wrong CEO. It is easy to forget that HP was one of the great Silicon Valley companies. In the 90’s, they were the model for tech companies all over the world. After six years of Fiorina, they were a smoking ruin that has never recovered. Share holders had parties upon hearing of her firing. The stock jumped 10% the next day.

Now here she is playing the vagina card in the GOP primary. The climb up the corporate ladder, by an otherwise talentless hack, is accomplished by showing great loyalty to key superiors. The hack also is good at displaying loyalty to the firm in front of the right people. That was her game in business and she is doing the same in politics. She’s making nice to the leaders and defending the party like a lioness defending her cubs. She’s also going after Hillary tooth and claw.

Fiorina is smart enough to know she is not winning the nomination. This is the long con and that means angling for the VP spot or maybe a cabinet position. She will get on the stage and look good in the debates. By spring of next year she will be out of the race and have a good idea as to who will win the nomination. She will make a big show of endorsing that person and campaigning on their behalf.

In 2017 she will be nominated as Secretary of HHS and she will do to health care what she did to Bell Labs.

I’m fond of pointing out that America has a lot in common with Iran these days. The fetishes and fascinations of our ruling lunatics are different from those of the Iranian lunatics, but the underlying motivations are the same. A group of fanatics is trying to force the rest of us into their fanaticism. Here’s a good example.

Local police received a complaint when a shopper discovered Nazi and Confederate merchandise at a popular flea market last weekend, according to Chief William Wright.

An officer responded to the Redwood Flea Market on South Turnpike Road Sunday to investigate the report and found Nazi and Confederate memorabilia for sale. He told the complainant, who is Jewish, there was nothing police could do because the merchandise was on private property.

“There was a table set up with this material,” Wright said, unsure of the exact amount, but speculating several showcases. “It’s not criminally illegal, but obviously it offended this person. It causes some people a sense of being uncomfortable. Certainly the owner could preclude this merchandise.”

The complainant, a town resident, feared possible backlash and asked to remain anonymous. He told the Record-Journal that in addition to several showcases there was Nazi merchandise, including German helmets with swastikas, images of Hitler, and Jewish stars of David, in a truck.

“I was shaking and almost vomiting,” he said. “I had to run. My grandmother had numbers,” he said, referring to the Nazi system of tattooing numbers on prisoners.

I doubt that this man’s grandmother had such a tattoo. The tattoo that looms so large in modern lore was not common. It was just not terribly practical. But, inter-generational transitive post-traumatic stress is still a big deal for many Jews. It’s an excuse to make a scene in public trying to get some grace on the cheap.

Ken Dubar, who owns and manages the flea market, disputed the man’s account of how much anti-semitic and Confederate merchandise is at the weekend venue.

“There may be some of those items, some collectibles and some might be counterfeit,” he said.

Dubar also emphasized police found no evidence of any crime.

Jason Teal, president of the Meriden-Wallingford NAACP, said he was not familiar with the flea market and had not heard any complaints about the merchandise being sold there.

“It’s difficult because it’s on private property and it’s considered free speech,” Teal said.

The man also contacted Mayor William W. Dickinson Jr., who immediately asked Wright to determine if any laws were broken.

“I had to check with the chief over what is actionable and what isn’t,” Dickinson said. “Unless something violates state or federal law, there’s no jurisdiction for government to do anything. We had to ask, is it something controlled by law?”

Unremarked here is the fact the local cop was not sure if there was a crime. That’s how far down the fascist hell hole we have fallen as a society. I’m old enough to remember when “this is a free country” was the default response to this stuff. Even lunatics like the guy making the complaint would have been tempered by it.

Today, it is just assumed that the lunatics have the whip hand. Everyone, including the cops, figured it is best to ask permission than to run afoul of the religious authorities. This is no different than what you would see in Iran or Saudi Arabia. People are more worried about the fanatics than the cops.

The irony here is the lunatic who made the scene not only will not be charged, but he is now pretending to be the victim. The newspaper is hiding his identity as if he has something to fear, when he’s the one making a nuisance of himself. That  is the real danger we face. These nuts are convinced they are defending themselves as they try to pull the roof down on all of us.

I have found the Greek financial crisis endlessly fascinating over the last five years. The main reason I can’t get enough of it is that unlike American political scandals, all of the important parts of the Greek drama are hidden. What we see from the performers is their reaction to those important actions and we are left to guess what is going on behind the screen.

After all, the Greeks have no money and they owe a massive amount of money relative to what they can possibly raise over the next ten years. Even if they stated auctioning off islands and national treasures, they are never paying off their debts. We finally learned that they will never be able to pay the interest on those debts. There’s some other reason Europe is spending countless hours pretending to disentangle an “impossible” knot.

Reading this post on ZH this morning, I think I may now know the answer. The European Project is all about reducing cultural and national identity administrative distinctions. Being an Italian simply means living in a place that used to be a country called Italy. If you are a Bantu who floated over last week, granted EU citizenship and now reside in Milan, you are an Italian!

Here we have the Greek stubbornly acting like Greeks by voting out politicians who go along with the European program. They voted out one main party for another and when that failed they voted out the main parties altogether. Syriza, despite its Marxist trappings, won on an explicit appeal to Greek patriotism. The Greeks even went so far as to vote in huge numbers against the EU proposal in last week’s plebiscite.

The result, as that Zero Hedge piece points out, is the Greek parliament voting in favor of the same deal that was rejected last week by the people. Talk about the ultimate in humiliation. If you are a Greek who voted for Syriza and against this plan, you have to feel like a fool. The people in charge are laughing at you. All you did with your silly voting is waste the ruler’s time and for that you will suffer.

And that has been the point all along. It’s not the money. It’s the humiliation. The Greeks have been cast in a German snuff film for the titillation of German technocrats and as a warning to everyone now living under the German yoke. You either goose step to the tune being played in Brussels or end up like Greece.

In the last century, Marxism relied on personal humiliation to break the will of people. The rulers would require the people to say ridiculous things in public about the wonderfulness of the regime and it’s animating theodicies. Children would be made to sing party songs and officials would be required to participate in official charades. It was all intended to humiliate the people. It is hard to rise up in revolt after you have been made to toady to the state in front of your peers.

There was also the forced confession and the struggle sessions. Forced confessions were how individual heresies were made into collective ones. They turned a natural virtue – empathy – into a vice. How could one feel sorry for a suffering human who had gone against the revolution? It was intended to atomize the citizen, cutting off his loyalties to his fellows and replacing it with loyalty to the state.

The struggle session worked similarly. The heretic would be forced to confront their own apostasies in such a way that altered them emotionally. Everything about them, right down to their core, was challenged and questioned. Once they could no longer trust themselves, they could only trust their masters in the party.

Ultimately, that is what has happened in Greece. It is one long struggle session. Like the forced confessions and show trials the Soviets were so fond of, this was intended not just for the Greeks, but the rest of Europe. The Greek Finance Minister said it was to warn the French, about being French. It was certainly a warning to the Brits and others who have patriotic parties making noises about Europe.

If you are a Greek citizen, how can you have any faith in your Greek democracy? Why would you bother with it? You now see that voting is just a charade. The people making the decisions are in Berlin and Brussels and they speak German. Those are the people in charge, not those guys lobbying for your vote. Comrade, why are you struggling against the tide of history?

As an aside, if you ever thought about what Europe would have been like if the Nazis had won, take a look at today’s Europe. Eventually Hitler would have died, probably assassinated, and been replaced by technocrats like Albert Speer. The Germans love technocrats more than they love scat films. By now, rule by street thug would have given way to rule by lemon-pussed technocrats.

In my lifetime, material progress was the solution to human suffering, the cause of human suffering, the cause of the planet suffering and due to making Gaia angry, the cause of human suffering again. There’s a fair bit of masochism in Western society and its outlet is environmentalism. The Greens really hate people and now they may have some great news. An ice age is on the horizon.

The Earth could be headed for a ‘mini ice age’ researchers have warned.

A new study claims to have cracked predicting solar cycles – and says that between 2020 and 2030 solar cycles will cancel each other out.

This, they say, will lead to a phenomenon known as the ‘Maunder minimum’ – which has previously been known as a mini ice age when it hit between 1646 and 1715, even causing London’s River Thames to freeze over.

The new model of the Sun’s solar cycle is producing unprecedentedly accurate predictions of irregularities within the Sun’s 11-year heartbeat.

It draws on dynamo effects in two layers of the Sun, one close to the surface and one deep within its convection zone.

Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the ‘mini ice age’ that began in 1645, according to the results presented by Prof Valentina Zharkova at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno.

The model predicts that the pair of waves become increasingly offset during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022.

During Cycle 26, which covers the decade from 2030-2040, the two waves will become exactly out of synch and this will cause a significant reduction in solar activity.

‘In cycle 26, the two waves exactly mirror each other – peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun,’ said Zharkova.

‘Their interaction will be disruptive, or they will nearly cancel each other.

‘We predict that this will lead to the properties of a ‘Maunder minimum”

The Maunder Minimum, as a sidebar explains, “is the name used for the period starting in about 1645 and continuing to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time.” That corresponds to a period know as the Little Ice Age. It is also the period global warmists exclude from their models since it screws up their predictions.

If you live in Florida, a mild cooling of the climate is great news as it will mean San Diego style weather 12 months a year. If you live in Boston it means you will be shoveling snow in June and learning how to live with 20 foot snow piles in your drive. The good news is you have fifteen years to stock up on ice melt and work on your shoveling technique.

The conniving adventuress and grifter Ellen Pao has been sacked.

Reddit interim CEO Ellen Pao resigned today after facing an all-out revolt on the site in the wake of the firing of a popular employee. Steve Huffman, Reddit’s original CEO and co-founder of the site a decade ago, is taking over the job, effective immediately.

“Ellen Pao resigned from Reddit today by mutual agreement,” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian wrote in a post on the site. He said Pao would remain an advisor to Reddit’s board through the end of the year. “She brought a face to Reddit that changed perceptions, and is a pioneer for women in the tech industry.”

I get why companies say nice things about the dirtball they just canned. There’s nothing to be gained by trashing the fired person and there’s no need to risk a lawsuit. Ellen Pao does have a habit of suing employers so it is best to leave sleeping dogs lie, I guess.

In this case, the tongue in cheek praise is probably better than speaking truthfully. They hired the dumb twat because she has a vagina and is Asian. That’s the new face they reference. She was laughably horrible at her job, thus changing the perception that Asians are hard working and smart.

On Monday, Pao took to Reddit to apologize for the incident, as well as years of mismanagement and poor communication between the company and the band of unpaid volunteer moderators who keep the site going.

As of Tuesday, a public petition on social justice platform Change.org demanding Pao’s resignation had garnered close to 200,000 signatures.

One of the unexpected consequences of social media is it fools people in leadership positions into thinking what is trendy with a handful of weirdos is a broad social movement. America is a country of 320 million. You can get 200,000 people to agree to drink Drano if just ask. But, 200,000 is a big number so it makes a big impact on the minds of people running a company like Reddit.

Of course, most of these social media protestors are robots and sock puppets. A deranged idiot with 85 twitter accounts spending all day messaging people looks like a mass movement. The crackpots harassing Rush Limbaugh last year turned out to be seven mental patients with thousands of e-mail accounts. Social media is a megaphone for maniacs.

As is always the case with the Cult, they turned Pao into a hero, not because they gave a crap about Pao, but because she was a convenient club to use in their fight against normal white people. Now that she is a two-time loser, I suspect she falls down the memory hole and goes back to selling knock-off handbags on-line.

One of the bits of essential knowledge for a man is to never trust a woman. History is full of stories where a man was unhorsed, metaphorically, by a women, often his wife. It’s not that women are more or less trustworthy than men. It’s that men are not very good at reading women. Whatever your instincts tell you about a women, it is a safe bet that you’re wrong.

This comes to mind with Jared Fogle, the Subway pitchman now getting roughed up by the law for child porn. This story suggests Jared foolishly revealed things to a woman that most men would ignore. Ten years later, she has decided to make use of those things.

A Florida woman reportedly provided investigators with vital information that led to the raid at the home of suspended Subway pitchman Jared Fogle.

Fox59, citing unnamed sources, reports the woman spoke to Fogle on several occasions more than a decade ago. In an interview with WWSB, the woman said Fogle often made “surprising and inappropriate” remarks.

“He said something to me when we were off camera and that really stuck with me,” she told the station. “I thought to myself, ‘Did he really say that to me?’”

She said she contacted the FBI because Fogle’s comments alarmed her, according to the report. The woman said authorities had her wear a wire and record phone conversations with him. She claims the subject matter was “similar to what the FBI found when they raided his home.”

Ron Elberger, Fogle’s attorney, dismissed the woman’s revelations to Fox59, calling the story “absurd.”

Undoubtedly, there is more to the story. Perhaps Jared does have more than a passing interest in young girls. His association with an accused child porn fiend fits the mythology of the child porn rackets, whereby these guys secretly meet up to trade material. I say it is a myth, because we know these pervs are almost always loners.

Regardless, if some guy says to me he thinks a 13-year old girl is hot, I’m not calling the cops, unless it is my daughter, in which case I will beat him silly. Otherwise, I’ll just ignore it and keep my distance. Men are hardwired to like young women. Every man knows this, but some guys like them a little too young. It’s a normal part of life, which is why men guard their daughters.

Anyway, Jared’s problem here is he let the cat out of the bag in front of a woman. Maybe she came calling for cash and he turned her down. Maybe she is just a bitch. It is impossible to know right now, but he could have avoided that by not talking about his sexual interests around a woman. No good every comes of it. He probably thought she was cool with it. That makes him an idiot and a perv.

Every society is focused on four things: Security, Prosperity, Culture and Trust. Security is both external and internal. A primary duty of every society is to make sure it is defended from outsiders, but also from deviant insiders. Those who work against the internal order are just as much of a threat as the invader. It’s why traitors have always been held up for the worst punishments. They threaten the very existence of the society.

Prosperity is another focus of human society since settlement. Technology, after all, is all about increasing prosperity, which is why so much of our efforts are involved in advancing technology. Every society has its own take on what it considers prosperity, but the main reason for human society is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a part of our group evolutionary strategy. It is expressed differently across groups, but it is as much a part of humanity as left handedness.

Despite what the lunatics in charge claim, preservation and advancement of the culture is a priority of every society. Culture, after all, is just the rolled up preferences of the individuals in society, handed down from generation to generation. It is a collective identity. It is also how essential knowledge is passed from one generation to the next. A few hours reading the Bible teaches more about humanity than four years in a college.

These three distinct priorities are strung together with trust. Clannish societies will place a premium on culture and security, forgoing prosperity in order to maintain the clan. Altruistic societies will focus resources on prosperity as their cultures are dynamic and adaptive. Swedes spend much more time worrying about prosperity than defending Swedish culture, while Arabs invest all their time in culture and live in squalor.

That very broad outline is a useful way to view politics in western societies. The three main priorities shift up and down in the public’s hierarchy of importance. In times of plenty, the pubic will reward leaders promising to keep the party going. Alternatively, at the end of an up cycle, doubts about the impact on public morality may reward candidates that speak authoritatively to cultural traditions.

This is clear in the recent American elections. Barak Obama won in 2008 largely due to the other side getting blamed for the financial collapse and the bungling of the Muslim problem. Prosperity and security. In 2012, however, the public was uneasy about the deranged assault on the culture by Obama and went looking for an alternative. While Romney said all the right things on the culture, no one believed him. Trust is the shadow that hangs over everything.

Shifting over to Greece, we saw promises of prosperity trump all else in the rush to join Europe and the single currency. The public put aside cultural concerns, expecting the trade-offs to be economically beneficial and they were initially. When things went sour, the public switched from one main party to the next and then finally a coalition of main parties, all in an attempt to restore prosperity. When that failed, the middle collapsed and the fringe parties moved to the center.

Syriza, for all its blather about socialism and Marxism, is a populist party making a cultural appeal to patriotic Greeks. They have no plan for solving the debt crisis. There is no solution. What they have is a cultural appeal, which folds in neatly to an appeal to security. Greeks think Syriza is best to guard the culture and keep Greece safe from the financial vultures. Most of all, Syrza is trusted. They are what they say they are and that means a lot.

In the rest of Europe, security and prosperity trumped all else for forty years after World War II. Our betters like to say this was due to people recalling the horrors of fascism, but that’s not true. Fear of Soviet aggression (and nukes) was the top security concern. It trumped all else. Economic integration was, in part, a component of the security issues. It was only after the wall came down that economics become the top priority.

Ignoring the culture has worked in Europe for a long time, but that time is quickly passing as people begin to realize that Greeks are not Fins and Spaniards are not Brits. Just because everyone uses the same money and flies the same flag does not mean they are the same. Those differences will be expressed through culture, which inevitably shapes economics and politics.

In America culture is always in the discussion due to the Cult making war on traditional America, but it is a one-way discussion. The Progressives form up and start to pull down some important cultural institution and the Right tries to stop them. The only thing keeping the Right in business is as a fire department, called into to try and save what’s left of America. There’s not a lot left these days.

Of course, good times economically and no fear of invasion make sacking the culture possible. Cultural Marxism is a luxury good affordable in rich societies with loads of free time. China and Indian have made great strides economically, but they are still too poor to indulge in ethnomasochism. Like throwing away food, only rich societies in the West can afford to throw away their patrimony.

At least for now. Europe is seeing a collapse of its political middle as the cultural vacuum underneath the political parties grows. Across the Continent, mainstream parties treat their citizens as enemies, standing aside as invaders from the south flood into Europe. They heap private debts onto public balance sheet all in the name of a prosperity that is just over the next hill.

In the US, one party is racing toward a weird techno-fascism while the other party pads along behind them like a slow-witted little brother. Issues of paramount concern to the public are ignored in favor of the ridiculous and absurd.The full force of the state is brought to bear on behalf of homosexuals playing house, while no one can be bothered to halt the invasion from the south. For close to half the country, the political parties have nothing to offer, other than the satisfaction of voting against one of them.

It’s why Donald Trump is getting so much attention. Outsiders have always popped up in party primaries only to fade from the scene. Usually they have a novel idea or represent a narrow constituency. Trump would have been laughed off if he had not had the good sense to say what the public is thinking about taboos subjects like immigration. He’s an American Beppe Grillo.

The other side is not immune. American progressives may have been motivated by a hatred of core Americans, but they always thought of themselves as the righteous defenders of fairness and morality. Bernie Sanders is having success pointing out that the modern Progressive movement has more in common with Italian fascism than old school liberalism.  He does not say it that way, but he is tapping into the growing doubts on the Left over the direction of their movement.

At the start of this long-winded post I said that trust is what strings the three key social categories together. The people will naturally trust leaders with whom that naturally identify. It’s why colonialism ultimately failed. The foreign rulers may have done a better job bring peaces and prosperity, but they could never be trusted because they were foreign. People will take one their own, even if he is a screw up, over a foreigner, even if he is brilliant.

In the West, the ruling elite no longer identifies with their host countries. They see themselves as having evolved beyond national identity. Their actions over the last few decades has made them foreigners to the people over whom they seek to rule. When times are good and the world is at peace, people can overlook the culture gap. When peace and prosperity fade, that gap becomes a maw, collapsing the center.

Way back in the olden thymes when everyone thought buffalo was food, not a crappy sports town, men hunted the mammoth and said horrible things to one another on dial-up bulletin boards. This was not only before the iPhone (Gasp!), but before Windows, when computing required more than a third grade education. In those days, arguments were settled by using outlandish insults.

I wish I had a nickel for every time I told some douche-bag to chug down a frothy glass of Drano. The acronym DIAF was created because it was so commonly used. If someone really pissed you off, you would tell them to go home, shoot their family and then shoot themselves, in order to clean up the gene pool. Now, you can go to jail in New Zealand for that sort of thing.

Internet trolls face up to two years’ jail in New Zealand under a controversial new law which bans “harmful digital communications”.

And under a parallel amendment to New Zealand’s Crimes Act, a person who tells another to kill themselves faces up to three years in prison.

The law will help mitigate the harm caused by cyber-bulling and give victims a quick and effective means of redress, supporters said.

But critics said the law harms free speech and its fine print could threaten public interest journalism in the country.

Under the Harmful Digital Communications Act in effect from this week, anyone convicted of “causing harm by posting digital communication” faces two years in prison and a $50,000 (NZ) (£6,500) fine, while businesses face fines of up to $200,000 (NZ).

Harmful communications can include truthful as well as false information, and “intimate visual recordings” such as nude or seminude pictures or video shared without permission.

The warping effects of a credit based currency are just now being realized as the Greek crisis reaches some sort of denouement. Up until now the usual suspects have been hooting about how the Greeks must pay their bills, not realizing the fraud at the heart of those bills. The structure of Greek debt is truly novel, even if the scale seems familiar.

In a democracy, the saying goes, if you promise to rob Peter to pay Paul, you will always get Paul’s vote. The math of this arrangement is pretty simple. Once you run out of Peter’s to rob, you can no longer buy Paul’s vote. Similarly, when the Peters gain a majority, then having Paul’s vote no longer matters. At some point, a balance must be struck.

For most of human history, mathematics was the natural constraint on profligate spending to buy support. To use another hoary chestnut, you eventually run out of other people’s money to spend. In the 70’s, that was the crisis of social democracy. In order to keep the plates spinning, the state needed more money, but the voters were tapped out. They tried printing more money, but that proved to be disastrous.

The solution was the credit economy. The Louvre Accords were negotiated to arrest the decline of the dollar and resolve the currency war that had raged off and on for two decades. The US, Europe and Japan had taken turns exporting inflation to one another and the goal was to put an end to that by stabilizing the currencies.

What no one anticipated is what would happen to banking, finance and sovereign debt. As if by magic, Western governments could tap low interest debt to finance operations. Central banks, charged with keeping the plates spinning used unlimited credit emissions to suppress rates, hoping to spur growth. As a result, global debt has metastasized.

How does this happen?

In a social democracy, the people are asked to vote on trade-offs. The political types offer their preferred trade-offs and the public picks amongst the options. One camp says spend more on the poor and less on bombs. Another says cut taxes and spending. A third says bomb the muzzies and screw the poor. In a rational world, politics is about priorities, because there’s a finite amount of money to go around.

In a credit economy, the trade-offs are distorted by time. The benefit comes today and the cost is somewhere in the future when we’re all dead. Not only are governments rolling over debt and paying just interest, they are doing so at ridiculous interest rates. Right now the US government is borrowing at 2%, give or take.

This changes the relationship between the citizen and the politician. Since the trade-offs are not apparent due to the time element, the pols only talk about one side of the transaction, the free stuff. In 2008, Clinton and Obama competed for who would give away the most stuff once elected. republicans fight over who will lower taxes more, because deficits no longer matter. Just charge it!

That’s what happened in Greece. The main parties took turns promising a free lunch. You can say that the people should have known better, but how could they know? Supposedly the state’s finances were on firm footing. All the smart people said so. Why shouldn’t the voters then pick the best meal on offer?

That’s the thing with a credit society. It makes for bad citizens and even worse politicians. Prudence is punished and profligacy is rewarded. I’m old enough to remember when a trillion in debt was laughable because no one imagined a trillion of anything could exist. Today the US government has $16 trillion in outstanding debt.

But wait, it gets worse!

The Greek problem would not be a big problem if people would keep buying Greek bonds at 2% rather than demanding 10% or more. Across the West, budgets are based on paying debt service at near zero rates. If borrowing costs reverted back to historic norms, every nation in the West defaults within five years.

That means all efforts, like we’re seeing with the Euro, are aimed at keeping those borrowing rates low. They have no choice. Even small hikes could make some American states insolvent. Given the way government debt works, a small default can unleash hell on the biggest states, which is why Puerto Rico is a big deal.

The West is trapped in a box of its own making. There are two ways out of it. One is everyone commits suicide and the other is to begin restructuring so that over debts levels begin to decline as borrowing rates slowly return to normal. The latter is politically impossible so that leaves the former.

I saw this posted on Maggie’s Farm today.

The deadlift may be the simplest and easiest exercise to learn in all of barbell training. You pick up a loaded barbell and set it back down, keeping the bar in contact with your legs the whole way. There are a few subtle complications — the bar should move up and down the legs in a vertical line over the middle of the foot, the bar should start from a position directly over the mid-foot, and you should keep your back flat when you pull. But that’s really about all there is to it. The deadlift is one of the basic movements of which strength training is composed.

Pulling things off the ground is a part of your human heritage, and bending down to pick them up is what your knees and hips are for. With the bar in your hands and your feet against the floor, your whole body is completely involved in the exercise, which means the deadlift makes the whole body strong. It would be very difficult to invent a more natural exercise for the body than picking up a progressively heavier barbell.

In America, a lot of time and energy is spent lecturing people about their weight, their diet and their lack of exercise. Health clubs, it seems to me, largely exist on people who feel guilty about not exercising. Around the holidays they resolve to get in better shape and join a gym. By March they have stopped going.

The thing that has always puzzled me is why weight training is not offered up as the low-cost and sensible way for people to stay in shape. It’s cheap. A decent setup for at home is a few hundred bucks if you’re sensible. For the typical person, an hour, three nights per week, is enough to stay fit, as long as you’re sensible about the diet.

Instead, it is one exotic exercise regime and fad after another. Weight training, in the minds of most people, is for steroidal meathheads with the IQ of a goldfish. At least that’s how it is presented. The truth is most of those meatheads are pretty smart. They’ve spent years learning biochemistry and physiology. The public perception, however, is that weight training is for morons.