Atlas Shrugged - Another excerpt!

Part 1 of the movie opens in the USA tomorrow, but all can read the book any time in English. My pick for the eve of the film's long awaited premier is below:

   "Did you wonder what is wrong with the world?  You are now seeing the climax of the creed of the uncaused and unearned.  All your gangs of mystics, of spirit or muscle, are fighting one another for power to rule you, snarling that love is the solution for all the problems of your spirit and that a whip is all the solution for all the problems of your body -  you who have agreed to have no mind.  Granting man less dignity than they grant to cattle, ignoring what an animal trainer could tell them - that no animal can be trained by fear, that a tortured elephant will trample its torturer, but will not work for him or carry his burdens - they expect man to continue to produce electronic tubes, supersonic aeroplanes, atom smashing engines and interstellar telescopes, with his ration of meat for reward and a lash on his back for incentive.

"Make no mistake about the character of mystics. To undercut your consciousness, has always been their only purpose throughout the ages, - and power , the power to rule you by force, has always been their only lust.

"From the rites of the jungle witch-doctors, which distorted reality into grotesque absurdities, stunted the minds of their victims and kept them in terror of the supernatural for stagnant stretches of centuries - to the supernatural doctrines of the Middle Ages, which kept men huddled on on the mud floors of their hovels, in fear that the devil might steal the soup they had worked eighteen hours to earn - to the seedy little smiling professor who assures yoy that your brain has no capacity to think, that you have no means of perception and must blindly obey the omnipotent will of that supernatural force: Society all of it is the same performance for the same and only purpose: to reduce you to the kind of pulp that has surrendered the validity of its consciouness.

"But it cannot be done to you without your consent; If you permit it to be done you deserve it."

Who is John Galt? Buy the book of Atlas Shrugged, see the film! Go Galt, like I did in 1989! Don't give THEM the use of your mind!

8 minutes video to think upon this Sunday!

The State CANNOT Provide!

Surreal, as I pasted in the posting immediately below, was the description of one prime minister, (of a state which strictly speaking, but for the EU, would have split apart many months ago), who attended Friday's meeting of EU national leaders last friday. Surreal, indeed, as finally the lies by which West European leaders have conned their electorates into giving them the lifestyles they crave are seen to be the nonsensical impossibilities they always were.

Gathered together, in the vain hope, that by combining unfulfillable obligations they could somehow be met, the EU dream became exposed for the true pipe dream it always was. No leader attending seemed aware that every German working every hour that the planet's rotation supplied would ever produce wealth sufficient to pay anything other than a tiny percentage of the combined total of obligations run up in the false promises given out to the EU's citizens.

Britain's Prime Minister seems to be experiencing a Damascus Road Conversion this weekend, perhaps the nonsense in Brussels was the trigger, first having abandoned State Multiculturalism, now in the Sunday Telegraph actually admitting one obvious fact, that tax cuts in Britain are presently impossible. Well he his now heading towards the truth, but is still coming from the wrong direction - Tax cuts are impossible because present levels of spending are impossible - in fact he should now confront his electors with one stark fact, the headline of this posting - The STATE cannot provide!

Furthermore, whatever Germany does - The EU CANNOT Provide!

My generation has been unable to grasp this simple fact, because the opposite always seemed to be the case. The accumulated consequences of those decades of deceit are now before us. The younger generation must learn self-reliance and find income that does not depend on the state or the activities of the state or of regulations dreamt up by the state, nor by any transnational body masquerading as a lawfully empowered state. From self-reliance will come self-esteem and from that a decent society can be begun to be re-built.

Quantatitive Easing, which is the printing of money, only defers the inevitable and worsens the consequences when they finally arrive. Let me leave this contentious subject with one plain fact. In today's Britain you would better provide for the health of your family by investing in a very well equipped medecine cabinet and extensive first aid box. Soon the State will be unable to pay for the Doctors and Nurses whatever the lying promises of the proven opportunists in politics. The State CANNOT provide, quite simply because it has run out of tax money because it has destroyed the tax base! Gathering together in a frightened group in Brussels to dine well, even on a daily basis, cannot much longer hide that truth!

(Suggested extra reading Mary Ellen Synon from the Mail with comments, from here)

Irish mortgage interest rates to rise in spite of ECB inaction on inflation.

The linked article from the Irish Times, this morning, warns mortgage borrowers of a likely rise of one per cent today to reach 5.1% on one variable rate.

Tracker rates, are still thought to be low risk according to a Government consumer body the same article concludes. A few moments thought should convince all but the most reckless, both in Ireland and the UK, that not switching early, could to the contrary, prove disastrous.

Delaying an increase in interest rates to tackle obvious primary and now secondary inflation (accepted as present in the Euro Zone by Mr Trichet of the ECB in his press conference yesterday), which is the present policy stance of both the Bank of England and the ECB, must result in higher than necessary increases in rates the future which will also inevitably last for longer. A table showing such a case, UK interest rates (then also roughly applicable for Ireland) between 1979 and 1997 is linked here.  Geoffrey Howe's 1981Budget, necessary after years of Labour Party corruption and misgovernance, "did reduce inflation from 11.9% in Spring 1981 to 3.8% in February 1983. Long-term interest rates also somewhat declined from 14% in 1981 to 10% in 1983."

(Iceland the best case study for Ireland, should the incoming Irish government succeed in ridding itself of economic slavery to the Euro Zone Group, succeeded last year following the default of its banks, in getting interest rates down from 13% to 7%, see here! This year the Icelandic economy is growing at 3% a distant if not non-existent dream for Ireland whilst still stuck within the Euro.)

Unlike in  Ireland, the UK has the freedom of its own currency, which should allow it to adopt policies that will rid it of its servitude and economic enslavement to the EU, unhappily it only has a political class addicted to the subsidies and backhanders of that increasingly foul and mis-directed organisation, and in the words of Ayn Rand (delivered via the fictitious John Galt) will thus continue to sacrifice independence to unity, justice to mercy, reason to faith, wealth to need, self-esteem to self-denial and happiness to duty.

Treasures from the threads - Number fifty-six

A comment to a Simon Heffer column in the Daily Telegraph, on the disastrous mess that is England today, linked here:

Ptolomaeus

“A country is of course the sum of its people, but also of its institutions. Since 1945, the institution that has come to characterize Britain is not our disciplined and professional Armed Forces, but the welfare state. It is what Peter Lilley called "the something for nothing society". Welfarism has always had at its core the sentimental belief that living beyond our means is simply something that a humane society has to do.”


That is the point, a nation is the sum of its people and for the last decade and a half the core of this nation has been undermined and diluted by a policy of unfettered immigration, from all former British colonies and latterly for the last decade from any and all EU member nations, and the whole exacerbated by a policy of enforced integration based on multiculturalism. England is now the most densely population nation in Europe and the number is increasing unnecessary and unwanted stresses and strains on all public services especially health, education and housing.


Successive governments, since the 1960’s, have watered down the state education system and examinations such that senior business figures make matters worse by stating they choose to recruit foreign educated and trained people rather than young people emerging from state education, but they do not way why and what is wrong with education in Britain. To make matters worse those same business leaders have, for at least a decade, pursued a deliberate policy of outsourcing, off-shoring and exporting millions of jobs to China, India and Malaya thus increasing the numbers in UK who are unemployed and economically inactive and based on the confused political notion that industry and manufacturing are not important.


That is why, in 2011, the UK is, after Ireland, now the world’s second biggest debtor nation with, according to The World Bank, a gross external debt of US$9.12 Trillion which amounts to 428.8% of the nation’s GDP. Put bluntly we are right up sh*t creek without any means of propulsion.


For years both sides of the political divide have gerrymandered statistics and figures to meet their own political ends. First we had Mrs Thatcher’s campaign cry of “Labour isn’t working”, prior to the 1979 election, when in fact only 1.7 million were officially unemployed. But then unemployment in UK reached 3.5 million, or 12 per cent of the working age population, between 1981 and 1987 with the loss of Britain’s industrial and manufacturing base, declining slightly between 1988 and 1990 and then rose again to 11 per cent between 1991 and 1994 with the second wave of job losses associated with the second recession in a decade and further loss of Britain’s industry and manufacturing base.


Despite political spin and rhetoric unemployment in UK has been rising steadily since 1970, reaching a peak in the mid 1980’s and early 1990’s and is now set to reach another peak at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century with, according to ONS figures, not only 2.5 million unemployed but 9.3 million people of working age classed as ‘economically inactive. No nation can afford to have 29.3% of its working age population not in work and contributing to nation and society.


Over the last decade some 963,000 more public sector jobs were created (sic) as a means of off-setting rising unemployment, but that is what caused the increase in the cost of the public sector and the considerable public sector debt. However, little or nothing was done in those previous recessions, or during this present recession, by the private sector to create jobs and employment opportunities to replace the ones lost from industry and manufacturing and those lost from the public sector.


It is almost as if there has been a deliberate ploy, by incompetent and uncaring and mostly spineless politicians, bankers and big business, to gradually undermine this nation and force us into full political, economic and social mess that is the EU where most member nations have enormous national debts. We are at a watershed with the process of globalization because so much has gone that there is little left that we manufacture or produce that the rest of the world wants and merger and acquisition activity has flogged off the family silver and once it is gone it is gone and so are the jobs, skills, knowledge and experience. That is why we suck in more and more manufactured products and why we are now running a £90bn a year trade deficit.


It is time that the UK government got a firm grip of the demands for economic, employment, energy and education systems for the future, without transferring everything under the control of the private sector that continually fails to deliver, based on the confused notion that private is good whilst public is bad because, thus far, private also means transferring many millions of jobs from western nations to eastern nations with lower labour costs in order to boost bottom line profits; and, got a firm grip on immigration to control the numbers arriving on this small island. Otherwise the end result will be continuing economic decline whilst the developing nations will continue to surge ahead. Despite global warming there is a cold wind blowing from east to west.

Going Galt? What it means!

I have found a good blog explanation to the "Who is John Galt?" question I have recently been posing my own blog readers, it appeared last March and is linked from here.

I will continue to post random quotes from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand as they strike me as appropriate for these present times during my re-reading of the book. The New Year may also bring forth some gems from the Lorna Doone novel I recommended to my readers as an enjoyable way to pass the New Year holidays now sadly coming to an end.