Random Thoughts on Various Subjects

1. GREECE

IMF Chief Christine Lagarde says the Greek people need to pay their fucking taxes. I really have to laugh at that bullshit. The tax farm nature of modern government doesn't get any more blatant than that. Welcome to "austerity."

Austerity is basically where countries like Greece cut their government services and milk their citizens of tax dollars in order to keep servicing their unsustainable debt loads. Naturally, none of this actually works to improve the Greek economy or to get Greece out of its debt. But the lenders don't give a shit about all of that. The goal is to keep those interest payments going.

Greece will repudiate its debt. To do this, it will have to leave the euro. Everyone knows this is coming. Austerity works great when it comes to cutting government and making it live within its means. But the lenders to Greece aren't interested in all that. They just want to make a buck off of Greece's misery and lend even more cash to these idiots. It's like getting credit counseling from a loan shark.

Taxation is slavery. The lenders to governments hope to profit from the one thing government has that they don't. This is the ability to make people pay or to send them to jail. At this point, the best thing Greece can do is to stiff the lenders and go it alone. The reason it is the best thing Greece can do is because it is the only thing Greece can do.

2. HUMAN RIGHTS

It is becoming laughable when US government officials criticize the human rights abuses in China. The US is now the land of NDAA, the Patriot Act, drone aircraft flying overhead, Gitmo, and a possible secret indictment against Julian Assange for essentially exercising his First Amendment rights. Who are these fuckers to lecture on human rights? You have to submit to sexual molestation in order to board an airplane now! Fucking absurd.

3. ODDS AND ENDS

--Warren Buffett's bet that newspapers still have a future is idiotic.

--Jony Ive should be the CEO of Apple.

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