Less balance, less nuance, just a fine old rant

From Amanda Kovattana, an aha! moment...The implications of this suddenly hit me. We are under contract to fleece the planet! The fractional reserve banking system is designed so that it must keep on giving out loans just to stay solvent, but there aren't enough resources in the world to be sold for all the money that needs to be paid back...

All over the planet, people are suddenly waking up to reality. We may or may not have seen it coming, but we know it has arrived. And the oddest people are starting to talk about it. Take Jeremy Clarkson, host of the BBC show Top Gear, here posted on Rob Windt's The Naked Mechanic...I was in Dublin last weekend, and had a very real sense I'd been invited to the last days of the Roman empire. As far as I could work out, everyone had a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a coat made from something that's now extinct...how could the Irish ever have generated the cash for so many trips to the hairdressers, so many lobsters and so many Rollers? And how, now, as they become the first country in Europe to go officially into recession, can they not see the financial meteorite coming? Why are they not all at home, singing mournful songs?

Read the whole article. It's a hoot in the inimitable Clarkson style.

It's a temptation — for me at least — to get angry at the blindness of those who should have known better, and who've led us into this mess. Or maybe they just shuffled along at the head of the crowd, walking backwards reading the polls. But what about Glenn Stevens, Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia..."I do not know anyone who predicted this course of events"...oh for chrissakes, if some insignificant shitkicker like myself loading potting mix into cars for little old ladies in an obscure country town saw this coming years ago and you didn't, why the hell have my taxes been paying your wages, you turkey? If this is the standard of leadership and governance in this country, we are in serious, serious trouble folks. Because morons like this are now supposed to solve the problem which they didn't see coming.

At least in America, they were crooks and liars, real red blooded devils. Here in Australia they are, to quote Joseph Conrad, "flabby, weak-eyed devils"... bureaucratic place-holders, masters of the morning flight to Canberra, the etiolated white-shirted eunuchs of state. And the Head Eunuch is of course our Kevin. Another weak-eyed devil? Or will he astonish me and say something real? Oh yes I know, he's way up in the polls, beating the tripe out of rich boy Malcolm, but how much of the public's comfortable perception of him comes from his resemblance, as Philip Adams puts it, to a suburban dentist? Will he develop the sombre reserve needed to deal with what comes next? Or will he melt down in private or worse, spectacularly in public, when the complete disjunction between the reality we are facing and the bureaucratic fantasy world he inhabits becomes impossible for his focused-on-detail-and-process mind to deal with. I invite you all to send me your opinion.