|
|
Post by Entendance on Sept 16, 2023 2:37:44 GMT -5
 The de-industrialization of Germany has become a mainstream issue, with Eurozone growth falling to 0.6 percent this year, indicating a stagnation and stagflation situation.
Germany faces a challenge in finding solutions to its de-industrialization, as cheap energy from Russia is no longer available and reopening nuclear power stations is not an option.
The contrasting reactions of booing and cheering towards Schultz indicate a divided opinion among the public, highlighting the controversy surrounding his actions and the perception of his leadership.
The architect of Germany’s deindustrialization is seen as the ultimate true leader by the speaker, overshadowing other figures in the government.
Germany’s decision to escalate the conflict with Russia is seen as a terrible decision, with Austria’s approach of working with Russia being seen as a better alternative.
“Germany will go into a long decline like Britain has done, and people are already talking about Germany as the sick man of Europe.”
The German economy has become overconcentrated in motor vehicles, which has contributed to its deindustrialization.
The missed opportunity for Germany to collaborate with Russia in scientific, technological, and industrial sectors could have potentially helped Germany reverse its deindustrialization trend.
|
|
|
|
Post by Entendance on Sept 21, 2023 5:49:10 GMT -5
'...This is where all the previously unseen elephants in the room begin mounting a combined charge against the status quo. The common element of their attack will be fiat currencies, led by the dollar. Foreign holders of US securities will face massive losses on their $32 trillion invested, including $7.5 trillion in deposits and short-term bills. To this must be added the accumulated Eurodollars, a further $15 trillion of bank liabilities, a further $78 trillion of mostly short-term off balance sheet positions., and the $10 trillion of long-term eurobonds. That’s $135 trillion asking to be liquidated.'
Russia said it is temporarily banning exports of diesel to “stabilize domestic supplies,” driving European prices higher in already tight global fuel markets.
|
|
|
|
Post by Entendance on Oct 13, 2023 3:47:13 GMT -5
Germany’s economy is at risk of collapse due to its reliance on Russia and China for trade, declining demographics, and insufficient alternative energy sources.
Key insights
The end of Germany as a modern economy is imminent.
The Germans are starting to inject morality, ethics, and strategic thinking into their trade relationship with China, which is a significant shift.
The success of Germany’s trade in the past 20 years is at risk due to the inevitable decline of the Russian and Chinese systems, which will impact their ability to maintain their own infrastructure and sustain their economies.
The demographics in Germany, with an aging workforce and declining skilled laborers, will lead to a decrease in workmanship quality and a collapse in the capacity to raise funds for industrial buildup and consumption.
Germany’s industrial base is at risk of collapsing within a decade due to its aging population and lack of time to adapt, as its industrial plants are primarily located in Germany and neighboring countries with similar demographics.
The current energy system in Germany is not sustainable due to its heavy reliance on non-renewable energy sources.
The end of Germany as an ethnicity and industrial power is imminent due to demographics, unresolved European debt crisis, and energy crisis.
The Germans chose to prioritize morals and ethics over convenience and wealth by refusing to stab Ukraine in the back and de-industrialize during the energy crisis caused by the shutdown of the Nordstrom pipeline.
|
|
|
|
Post by Entendance on Oct 13, 2023 10:33:42 GMT -5
'...The European Union has also given a green light to the Israeli mass killing. European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen flew to Israel this week in a show of solidarity, along with the U.S. officials.
In all the hypocritical expressions of horror and grief for Israel, Biden, Von Der Leyen and other Western leaders have not offered even token words of concern about Palestinian civilians being slaughtered.
That silence speaks volumes about the callous, bloodthirsty and criminal attitude of Western leaders.
Appallingly, the scene is being set for a genocidal onslaught by the Israeli state against the Palestinians with full Western state complicity. Even the ghoulish rhetoric is a grim warning of what is to come. Israeli officials are openly disparaging the Palestinian “animals” and American politicians are calling for Palestinian territory to be razed to the ground. This disgusting rhetoric even while Palestinian children are being ripped apart by 1-tonne bombs.
As usual, the nauseating justification for Israeli state terrorism invokes the Nazi holocaust against European Jews.
The obscene perversion of such rationale is that the 75-year oppression of Palestinians is in a similar category to Nazi crimes. The United States and its European allies have sponsored the nearly eight decades of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland by the brutal colonizing state of Israel. Palestinians have been dispossessed, murdered and imprisoned with impunity. Western governments and their media have turned a blind eye to this appalling genocide which includes incarcerating children and shooting of peaceful protesters.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed out this week, the United States and its Western partners have propagated a charade of peace mediation for decades which has been nothing but a cover for continued annexation of Palestinian lands and violation of their fundamental human rights. Putin rightly concluded that Washington is fully culpable for the disaster in the Middle East.
The uprisings by Palestinians over the decades stem from the inalienable right to resist against an oppressor. And every resistance has habitually been annihilated by the Israeli state with American military power and political countenance at the United Nations...'
|
|
|
|
Post by Entendance on Oct 21, 2023 5:07:56 GMT -5
Into the Mind of a Psychopath Chapter XIX
How Von Der Leyen Discredited The EU In The Israel-Palestine Conflict (Fomenko)
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s showboating in support of Israel in the current Middle East conflict has reportedly provoked a backlash from EU lawmakers and diplomats. When the Israel-Gaza war broke out just over a week ago, von der Leyen made the decision to offer unconditional support to West Jerusalem rather than urge for calm or mediation, having Israel’s flag projected onto the European Commission headquarters and paying a visit to Israel herself. She clearly did so out of an inclination to appear in line with the US. But her actions have aged poorly as reports of civilian deaths and humanitarian disaster in the besieged Gaza Strip continue to mount.
Anyone familiar with von der Leyen knows that she is an unapologetic neoconservative and transatlanticist who is single-handedly undermining the autonomy, respect, and foreign policy stature of the EU by actively working to make the bloc subordinate to the US in multiple areas, all while attempting to showcase herself as a true regional leader. If the EU sees itself in a fundamental competition with China and Russia, there could not be a worse advert to the rest of the world than her leadership, and her Israel blunders may be her most damaging decisions yet.
Von der Leyen’s foreign policy legacy involves dragging the EU into several confrontations it could have done without. This week, she is heading to Washington DC to try to forge a deal on steel and aluminum trade targeted at China, but that will ultimately resort in throwing the EU market under the bus, again. Other acts have included backing the American position on Ukraine and striving for full escalation of the war there, promoting energy decoupling with Russia, as well as inventing the term “de-risking” with China and seeking to undermine the bloc’s lucrative relationship with Beijing. Throughout this, she has been repeatedly eager to pull large sums of money out of thin air and propose fantasy projects which amount to little more than posturing, and which her office alone is not even able to authorize.
For example, that includes offering Belarus billions if it goes ahead with a US-backed regime change, or inventing numerous “infrastructure” schemes to compete with China, such as the Global Gateway, among other things. She has thus repeatedly used the stature of her office to follow American objectives and try to shape the continent without establishing any kind of due consensus. Almost immediately after the war in Gaza broke out, the European Commission announced all EU aid to Palestine would be frozen. Regardless of what you think of Hamas, with hindsight that decision now appears spiteful, reactionary and inhumane, which tells you how fast the Commission was to jump to the American position of unconditional support for Israel.
But this time there is a widespread feeling it has gone too far. Rather than allowing Europe to have staked out a moderate position on the Gaza conflict, even if it would not be too sympathetic to Palestine, the decision was essentially outsourced to the US, discrediting the EU and only serving to contribute to the growing backlash starting to emerge among Muslim communities in response to the conflict. For countries such as France, this is disastrous. This hurts the EU’s image across the Islamic world and the Global South by seemingly siding with the oppressors.
Soon enough, a series of embarrassing U-turns followed, including the reinstatement of aid, combined with tweets in Arabic, but the damage had already been done, because Israel has long been given the green light to pursue unparalleled destruction in Gaza, at seemingly whatever the cost. In doing so, von der Leyen has in fact undermined, in yet another way, the bloc’s ability to present itself as a serious and comprehensive political actor. She seems to have no love for the idea that the EU should have strategic autonomy and be capable of calibrating its own interests and place in the world, and would prefer that it instead be a simple parrot of the US.
Of course, if she took into greater consideration the interests and positions of member states it would be less of a problem. But she does not and instead essentially serves as a completely disruptive force, in practice undermining European diplomacy and preventing the EU from building relations with a wide range of states. In the end, this favors only the US.
'Biden and the parade of other Western politicians to Israel to embrace the warmongering regime of Benjamin Netanyahu is a disgusting spectacle. It is a parade of criminals and psychopaths.'
"A lot of white-collar criminals are psychopaths," says Bob Hare. "But they flourish because the characteristics that define the disorder are actually valued. When they get caught, what happens? A slap on the wrist, a six-month ban from trading, and don't give us the $100 million back. I've always looked at white-collar crime as being as bad or worse than some of the physically violent crimes that are committed." Some can be particularly good at bending the rules to fulfill their need to feed on whatever their diet demands. They are naturally drawn to positions of power, frequently faking their credentials and results, and are often verbally acute, willing to say and do almost anything to get their way. They may be able to buy their way into positions of power and manage their environments very effectively, except their family relationships and children would rarely be described as normal. Psychopathy breeds a multitude of other disorders. And they seem to be gaining traction, getting better, and finding kindred spirits in the growing partnership between corporations and the government."
Jesse, Psychopaths Among Us and the Necessity of Law, 9 September 2011
I might have found the remarks about the Vancouver stock exchange a little more shocking and less credible than in my idealistic youth, except later in life I had the unfortunate experience of working more closely with a few of the resident sociopaths, psychopaths, and narcissists there. I am still processing some of the things that I learned in that experience, and some others I had afterwards in the higher echelons of the corporate world, and national politics.
It can take a little while to catch on, because they can seem so normal, so charming. Good people think most people are rational and basically honest, just like them.
But they wrong, there are very sick people out there, but they do not seem sick, and do not ask for help. They do not want help, or rules, or anything else that gets in their way. Their sickness does not always manifest itself sexually, but can be expressed in other means of domination and acquisition. There is a high correlation with substance abuse, especially stimulants, and other obsessively risky behaviours, including chronic lying and flouting social conventions. There is a negative correlation with depression.
Some can be particularly good at bending the rules to shape the system to help fulfill their need to feed on whatever their diet demands. They are naturally drawn to positions of power, frequently faking their credentials and results, and are often verbally acute, willing to say and do almost anything to get their way. If they come from wealth they may be able to buy their way into positions of power and protection and manage their environments very effectively, except their family relationships and children would rarely be described as normal. Psychopathy breeds a multitude of other disorders.
And they seem to be gaining traction, getting better, and finding kindred spirits in the growing partnership between corporations and the government.
"Three decades of these studies, by Hare and others, has confirmed that psychopaths' brains work differently from ours, especially when processing emotion and language. Hare once illustrated this for Nicole Kidman, who had invited him to Hollywood to help her prepare for a role as a psychopath in Malice. How, she wondered, could she show the audience there was something fundamentally wrong with her character?
"I said, 'Here's a scene that you can use,' " Hare says. " 'You're walking down a street and there's an accident. A car has hit a child in the crosswalk. A crowd of people gather round. You walk up, the child's lying on the ground and there's blood running all over the place. You get a little blood on your shoes and you look down and say, "Oh shit."
You look over at the child, kind of interested, but you're not repelled or horrified. You're just interested. Then you look at the mother, and you're really fascinated by the mother, who's emoting, crying out, doing all these different things. After a few minutes you turn away and go back to your house. You go into the bathroom and practice mimicking the facial expressions of the mother.' " He then pauses and says, "That's the psychopath: somebody who doesn't understand what's going on emotionally, but understands that something important has happened...
Psychopathy may prove to be as important a construct in this century as IQ was in the last (and just as susceptible to abuse), because, thanks to Hare, we now understand that the great majority of psychopaths are not violent criminals and never will be. Hundreds of thousands of psychopaths live and work and prey among us. Your boss, your boyfriend, your mother could be what Hare calls a "subclinical" psychopath, someone who leaves a path of destruction and pain without a single pang of conscience. Even more worrisome is the fact that, at this stage, no one -- not even Bob Hare -- is quite sure what to do about it...
The most startling finding to emerge from Hare's work is that the popular image of the psychopath as a remorseless, smiling killer -- Paul Bernardo, Clifford Olson, John Wayne Gacy -- while not wrong, is incomplete. Yes, almost all serial killers, and most of Canada's dangerous offenders, are psychopaths, but violent criminals are just a tiny fraction of the psychopaths around us. Hare estimates that 1 percent of the population -- 300,000 people in Canada -- are psychopaths.
He calls them "subclinical" psychopaths. They're the charming predators who, unable to form real emotional bonds, find and use vulnerable women for sex and money (and inevitably abandon them). They're the con men like Christophe Rocancourt, and they're the stockbrokers and promoters who caused Forbes magazine to call the Vancouver Stock Exchange (now part of the Canadian Venture Exchange) the scam capital of the world.
(Hare has said that if he couldn't study psychopaths in prisons, the Vancouver Stock Exchange would have been his second choice.) A significant proportion of persistent wife beaters, and people who have unprotected sex despite carrying the AIDS virus, are psychopaths. Psychopaths can be found in legislatures, hospitals, and used-car lots. They're your neighbour, your boss, and your blind date. Because they have no conscience, they're natural predators. If you didn't have a conscience, you'd be one too.
Psychopaths love chaos and hate rules, so they're comfortable in the fast-moving modern corporation. Dr. Paul Babiak, an industrial-organizational psychologist based near New York City, is in the process of writing a book with Bob Hare called When Psychopaths Go to Work: Cons, Bullies and the Puppetmaster. The subtitle refers to the three broad classes of psychopaths Babiak has encountered in the workplace.
"The con man works one-on-one," says Babiak. "They'll go after a woman, marry her, take her money, then move on and marry someone else. The puppet master would manipulate somebody to get at someone else. This type is more powerful because they're hidden." Babiak says psychopaths have three motivations: thrill-seeking, the pathological desire to win, and the inclination to hurt people. "They'll jump on any opportunity that allows them to do those things," he says. "If something better comes along, they'll drop you and move on."
How can you tell if your boss is a psychopath? It's not easy, says Babiak. "They have traits similar to ideal leaders. You would expect an ideal leader to be narcissistic, self-centred, dominant, very assertive, maybe to the point of being aggressive. Those things can easily be mistaken for the aggression and bullying that a psychopath would demonstrate. The ability to get people to follow you is a leadership trait, but being charismatic to the point of manipulating people is a psychopathic trait. They can sometimes be confused."
Once inside a company, psychopaths can be hard to excise. Babiak tells of a salesperson and psychopath -- call him John -- who was performing badly but not suffering for it. John was managing his boss -- flattering him, taking him out for drinks, flying to his side when he was in trouble. In return, his boss covered for him by hiding John's poor performance. The arrangement lasted until John's boss was moved. When his replacement called John to task for his abysmal sales numbers, John was a step ahead.
He'd already gone to the company president with a set of facts he used to argue that his new boss, and not he, should be fired. But he made a crucial mistake. "It was actually stolen data," Babiak says. "The only way [John] could have obtained it would be for him to have gone into a file into which no one was supposed to go. That seemed to be enough, and he was fired rather than the boss. Even so, in the end, he walked out with a company car, a bag of money, and a good reference."
"A lot of white-collar criminals are psychopaths," says Bob Hare. "But they flourish because the characteristics that define the disorder are actually valued. When they get caught, what happens? A slap on the wrist, a six-month ban from trading, and don't give us the $100 million back. I've always looked at white-collar crime as being as bad or worse than some of the physically violent crimes that are committed."
The best way to protect the workplace is not to hire psychopaths in the first place. That means training interviewers so they're less likely to be manipulated and conned. It means checking resumés for lies and distortions, and it means following up references.
Paul Babiak says he's "not comfortable" with one researcher's estimate that one in ten executives is a psychopath, but he has noticed that they are attracted to positions of power. When he describes employees such as John to other executives, they know exactly whom he's talking about. "I was talking to a group of human-resources executives yesterday," says Babiak, "and every one of them said, you know, I think I've got somebody like that."
By now, you're probably thinking the same thing. The number of psychopaths in society is about the same as the number of schizophrenics, but unlike schizophrenics, psychopaths aren't loners. That means most of us have met or will meet one. Hare gets dozens of letters and e-mail messages every month from people who say they recognize someone they know while reading Without Conscience. They go on to describe a brother, a sister, a husband. " 'Please help my seventeen-year-old son. . . .' " Hare reads aloud from one such missive. "It's a heart-rending letter, but what can I do? I'm not a clinician. I have hundreds of these things, and some of them are thirty or forty pages long."
Hare's book opened my eyes, too. Reading it, I realized that I might have known a psychopath, Jonathan, at the computer company where I worked in London, England, over twenty years ago. He was charming and confident, and from the moment he arrived he was on excellent terms with the executive inner circle. Jonathan had big plans and promised me that I was a big part of them. One night when I was alone in the office, Jonathan appeared, accompanied by what anyone should have recognized as two prostitutes. "These are two high-ranking staff from the Ministry of Defence," he said without missing a beat. "We're going over the details of a contract, which I'm afraid is classified top secret. You'll have to leave the building." His voice and eyes were absolutely persuasive and I complied. A few weeks later Jonathan was arrested. He had embezzled tens of thousands of pounds from the small firm, used the company as a mailing address for a marijuana importing business he was running on the side, and robbed the apartment of the company's owner, who was letting him stay there temporarily.
Like everyone who has been suckered by a psychopath -- and Bob Hare includes himself and many of his graduate students (who have been trained to spot them) in that list -- I'm ashamed that I fell for Jonathan. But he was brilliant, charismatic, and audacious. He radiated money and power (though in fact he had neither), while his real self -- manipulative, lying, parasitic, and irresponsible -- was just far enough under his surface to be invisible. Or was it? Maybe I didn't know how to look, or maybe I didn't really want to.
I saw his name in the news again recently. "A con man tricked top sports car makers Lotus into lending him a £70,000 model . . . then stole it and drove 6,000 miles across Europe, a court heard," the story began.
Knowing Jonathan is probably a psychopath makes me feel better. It's an explanation.
But away from the workplace, back in the world of the criminally violent psychopath, Hare's checklist has become broadly known, so broadly known, in fact, that it is now a constant source of concern for him. "People are misusing it, and they're misusing it in really strange ways," Hare says. "There are lots of clinicians who don't even have a manual. All they've seen is an article with the twenty items -- promiscuity, impulsiveness, and so forth -- listed."
In court, assessments of the same person done by defence and prosecution "experts" have varied by as much as twenty points. Such drastic differences are almost certainly the result of bias or incompetence, since research on the PCL-R itself has shown it has high "inter-rater reliability" (consistent results when a subject is assessed by more than one qualified assessor). In one court case, it was used to label a thirteen-year-old a psychopath, even though the PCL-R test is only meant to be used to rate adults with criminal histories. The test should be administered only by mental-health professionals (like all such psychological instruments, it is only for sale to those with credentials), but a social worker once used the PCL-R in testimony in a death-penalty case -- not because she was qualified but because she thought it was "interesting."
It shouldn't be used in death-penalty cases at all, Hare says, but U.S. Federal District Courts have ruled it admissible because it meets scientific standards.
"Bob and others like myself are saying it doesn't meet the ethical standards," says Dr. Henry Richards, a psychopathy researcher at the University of Washington. "A psychological instrument and diagnosis should not be a determinant of whether someone gets the death sentence. That's more of an ethical and political decision."
And into the ethical and political realm -- the realm of extrapolation, of speculation, of opinion -- Hare will not step. He's been asked to be a guest on Oprah (twice), 60 Minutes, and Larry King Live. Oprah wanted him alongside a psychopath and his victim. "I said, 'This is a circus,' " Hare says. "I couldn't do that." 60 Minutes also wanted to "make it sexy" by throwing real live psychopaths into the mix. Larry King Live phoned him at home while O. J. Simpson was rolling down the freeway in his white Bronco. Hare says no every time (while his publisher gently weeps).
Even in his particular area, Hare is unfailingly circumspect. Asked if he thinks there will ever be a cure for psychopathy -- a drug, an operation -- Hare steps back and examines the question. "The psychopath will say 'A cure for what?' I don't feel comfortable calling it a disease. Much of their behaviour, even the neurobiological patterns we observe, could be because they're using different strategies to get around the world. These strategies don't have to involve faulty wiring, just different wiring."
Are these people qualitatively different from us? "I would think yes," says Hare. "Do they form a discrete taxon or category? I would say probably -- the evidence is suggesting that. But does this mean that's because they have a broken motor? I don't know. It could be a natural variation." True saints, completely selfless individuals, are rare and unnatural too, he points out, but we don't talk about their being diseased..."
Robert Hercz,➡️ Psychopaths Among Us
"Our hypothesis was that psychopathic traits are also linked to dysfunction in dopamine reward circuitry," Buckholtz said. "Consistent with what we thought, we found people with high levels of psychopathic traits had almost four times the amount of dopamine released in response to amphetamine."
In the second portion of the experiment, the research subjects were told they would receive a monetary reward for completing a simple task. Their brains were scanned with fMRI while they were performing the task. The researchers found in those individuals with elevated psychopathic traits the dopamine reward area of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, was much more active while they were anticipating the monetary reward than in the other volunteers.
"It may be that because of these exaggerated dopamine responses, once they focus on the chance to get a reward, psychopaths are unable to alter their attention until they get what they're after," Buckholtz said. Added Zald, "It's not just that they don't appreciate the potential threat, but that the anticipation or motivation for reward overwhelms those concerns."
➡️Psychopaths' Brains Wired to Seek Rewards No Matter the Consequences
In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact...
If leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupified by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. -George Orwell, 1984
|
|
|
|
Post by Entendance on Oct 25, 2023 11:15:06 GMT -5
'...Seriously, though, this is only the beginning. The torrent of official and unofficial propaganda, gaslighting, and emotional manipulation is only going to increase over time. Probably the best thing to do at this point is pick a “side” and back it unquestioningly, no matter what it does or says. If you’re a professional person, with a career, and a mortgage, and kids, or aspiring to be such a person, I would recommend going with The Powers That Be.
It’s easy to do that. Simply unsubscribe from, and block, and otherwise close your ears and mind to “conspiracy theorists” like me.
Stick with those anonymous “Intelligence officials,” the IDF, and the corporate media, and those “fact-checking” entities, and Google, and the rest of the Official Reality Enforcement Apparatus that has been rolled out, globally, during the past three years.
You didn’t think they were rolling all that out for kicks, did you? No…of course you didn’t.'
|
|
E. 
.JPG)
France and EU to Spend 
Stagflation Threat Looms 
The QT show started less than a year ago. German home prices -11%, ECB assets -19%.
.jpg)
Zelensky Pitches Arms Makers 
.JPG)
E.
Ukraine’s leaders are controlled by US – 
E. on 
“EU is Becoming Complicit in Genocide of Netanyahu War Criminal” -