Nikki Haley Pranked By Russian Comedians: "Putin Absolutely Meddled In The Binomo Election!"

Do you know Binomo?” the impersonator asked. “They have declared independence. They had elections, and we suppose Russians had its intervention.”

“Yes, of course they did, absolutely,” Haley confidently replied.

And with that US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley got punked by well-known Russian comedians and professional pranksters Vovan and Lexus (Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov) - sometimes called "The Jerky Boys of Russia" - who had previously phone pranked figures ranging from Elton John to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Rep. Maxine Waters to Senators Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain.

The duo reportedly phoned Haley"s office hours after the UN voted to condemn Trump"s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel on Thursday, pretending to be Mateusz Morawiecki, the prime minister of Poland, in what ended up being a 22-minute conversation.

Image via Agencias

Poland was one among the thirty-fine nations abstaining from the vote and is also set to begin a two-year term as a member of the UN security council - a stance which Haley praised,  tweeting soon after the vote “We appreciate these countries for not falling to the irresponsible ways of the UN." In a somewhat comical and seemingly desperate follow-up to the vote which was an embarrassing and resounding affirmation of American isolation on the Israeli-Palestine issue, Haley then formally invited the 64 countries who either voted "against" or abstained (or just didn"t show up) for Thursday"s UN General Assembly vote on the Jerusalem resolution to a "friendship" party (was "Binomo" on the list of invites?).

So let"s just say it hadn"t been a good week for Haley, who apparently assumes there"s a place called "Binomo" in the South China Sea, and that the ever-treacherous Putin meddled in their elections.  The call continued with Haley, who as one of America"s top diplomats is supposed to be knowledgeable and familiar with all countries across the globe, stating that "we"ve been watching very closely... issues that keep coming up about the South China Sea" - in reference to the mythical Binomo:

“And we’re aware of that. We"ve been watching that very closely. And I think we will continue to watch as we deal with the issues that keep coming up about the South China Sea,” Haley replied.

Continuing with the issue of supposed Russian meddling in democratic elections in various corners of the globe, the Polish PM-impersonator asked Haley whether or not “Putin [will] be aggressive regarding Europe next year?”

“It is hard to know what Russia is doing right now. I think what we have seen in the Security Council and otherwise is they are trying to be relevant in every region and they are trying to have some sort of say in every region,” she replied. “In some cases, it has worked for them and in some cases, it hasn’t. So they don"t have the influence that I think they would like to have but they are certainly trying to get that.”

“I think that many of the other countries, whether it is the Security Council or otherwise, are watching it very cautiously and carefully to make sure that they don"t get too much of a foothold where they can cause chaos,” she continued.

“They are aggressive and they can be difficult to work in the Council... And they [Russia] do try to cause some disruption, but we manage them and we continue to remind them what their place is,” Haley told the ‘Polish PM.’

According to RT News Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, took to Facebook to criticize Haley’s rhetoric, saying “Nikki, do you really want Russia to remember all of its ‘places’ in the world?" - while also calling Haley"s perspective “somehow short-sighted” in what was perhaps an ironic understatement. 

#PrayForBinomo

— Lina Arabi (@LinaArabii) December 23, 2017

The pranksters also inquired whether Haley had heard (the made up claim) that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had accused Kevin Spacey of harassing him in 2015, to which the ambassador replied that she would research it further. 

Though Vovan and Lexus have received widespread media coverage after various pranks within the last couple of years, so far only Russian and independent media have covered the latest Nikki Haley phone call, which Haley"s office has neither confirmed nor denied (and is not likely to address it at all). Regardless, it is a moment where the prevailing culture of "Russiagate" paranoia has resulted in embarrassment for yet another top US official, as Stolyarov (a.k.a. Lexus) told Russian media in an interview, “Nikki Haley is a member of Trump’s cabinet. An ambassador to the UN holds a lot more clout in their country than on ours… It’s very funny when such a person is responsible for foreign relations in the US.”

Some Europeans Have Never Been Outside The EU

When it comes to holidays and travelling in general, Europe has a lot to offer.

Cosmopolitan cities jam packed with culture, pristine beaches, excellent ski resorts, you name it. Given all of that, it comes as little surprise that many Europeans never travel outside the EU.

As Statista"s Niall McCarthy notes, the most recent Eurobarometer data showing the share of people who have travelled at least once outside the EU was published in 2014.

You will find more statistics at Statista

The above infographic shows the results of the research, with Swedes most likely to have been outside the EU. That is more than likely due to the long and open border with neighbouring Norway which is not part of the EU.

The same story is likely true for Austria due to its proximity to Switzerland.

People in newer member states in Eastern Europe are least likely to have been outside the EU with Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary and Romania all towards the bottom of the ranking.

Interestingly, Portugal comes second last, possibly due to the fact that it only shares a land border with Spain. Only 18 percent of all Portuguese residents have travelled outside the EU.

Poland"s New PM Wants To "Make Europe Christian Again"

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,

Poland’s new Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki shared his dream to make Europe Christian again.

The newly appointed premier replaced Beata Szydlo and symbolizes that Poland is taking a more combative posture towards the West than in the past. While Prime Ministers undoubtedly have a very important domestic role to play too, it’s important not to overlook the international implications of Morawiecki’s appointment, especially given what he shared in his very first interview after the announcement when he said that

“My dream is to re-Christianize the EU since unfortunately, in many places, people no longer sing Christmas carols, the churches are empty and are turning into museums, and this is very sad.”

 

In responding to the interviewer’s comment about how the EU might cut off funding for Poland, Morawiecki proudly said that “I do remember one former president telling us earlier this year ‘you have values, we have funds.’ Well, I would love to help the West with proper values.”

Rhetoric such as this would have been unimaginable a few years ago, but it just goes to show how far the intra-EU split has gone ever since Brussels and Berlin teamed up to pressure the bloc to accept the forced relocation of civilizationally dissimilar migrants.

It also speaks to the growing confidence that Poland feels nowadays in officially introducing a conservative-religious ideological vision to challenge the EU’s liberal-godless one, demonstrating how it plans to lead the “Three Seas Initiative” and advance its EuroRealist agenda. Moreover, Morawiecki’s words prove just how strongly Poland and its ruling Law & Justice Party, popularly known by its Polish abbreviation PiS, have been influenced by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party. Hungary may have been the ideological heart of the EuroRealist movement and Orban its first national figurehead in the EU, but Poland is now carrying the torch through Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s “grey cardinal” stewardship because this Central European country is actually big enough to make a real difference.

It was one thing for a landlocked nation of less than 10 million people to have this continental outlook, and another for the leader of the regional “Three Seas Initiative” and its 40 million-strong country to promote this perspective, which makes Poland an EU-wide force to be recognized because of how ideologically different its worldview is from Germany’s.

Whereas Berlin will continue pulling the purse strings and exercising its influence through economic means, Warsaw is flexing its soft power muscle by appealing to what matters most to many of the people in Central and Eastern Europe, and that’s the national identity that they fear is under threat because of Germany’s aggressive EuroLiberalism. If Poland can succeed in winning hearts and minds in the region through its religious-conservative EuroRealist ideology, then the next natural step will be to tighten the trading bonds between its “Three Seas” partners in order to generate a stronger economic basis for turning their vision into a reality.

With the right combination of soft and economic power, Poland can return to becoming one of Europe’s Great Powers, but this time with a sway that extends across the strategic “Three Seas” space and enables it to shape the continent’s 21^st-century geopolitics.

EU Could Scrap "Divisive & Ineffective" Refugee Quota Scheme

The Guardian reports that EU could scrap a divisive scheme that compels member states to accept quotas of refugees, one of the bloc’s most senior leaders will say this week.

The president of the European council, Donald Tusk, will tell EU leaders at a summit on Thursday that mandatory quotas have been divisive and ineffective, in a clear sign that he is ready to abandon the policy that has created bitter splits across the continent.

Jennifer Rankin reports that Tusk will set a six-month deadline for EU leaders to reach unanimous agreement on reforms to the European asylum system, but will propose alternatives if there is no consensus. 

“If there is no solution... including on the issue of mandatory quotas, the president of the European council will present a way forward,” states a draft letter from Tusk to national capitals, seen by the Guardian.

In effect this means scrapping mandatory quotas, because Hungary, Poland and Czech Republic are fiercely opposed to the idea of dispersing refugees around the bloc based on a formula drawn up in Brussels. Tusk is likely to face opposition, however, from other EU bodies, including the European commission.

EU leaders introduced compulsory quotas in 2015 at the height of the migration crisis, as thousands of people arrived daily on Europe’s shores, many of whom were refugees from Syria, Iraq and Eritrea.

Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and the Czech Republic voted against the move, but the policy was forced through by a majority vote.

Hungary and Poland have defied the rest of the EU by not taking a single refugee under the scheme, which aimed to relocate about 120,000 refugees, mainly Syrians. The Czech republic has taken in only 12.

All three countries were referred to the European court of justice last week for failing to implement the policy, the usual procedure for flouting EU rules.

Despite the backlash against the emergency scheme, the European commission proposed making quotas a permanent feature of EU law in 2016. Under its proposal, countries that refuse to take part in a “corrective allocation mechanism” to take the pressure off member states bearing the brunt would have to pay a “solidarity contribution” of €250,000 (£220,000) per asylum seeker.

The idea has been stalled for months, as home affairs ministers who make the law have been unable to agree on it.

Tusk will call on EU governments to take charge, rather than leaving Brussels to set the pace in managing refugee policy.

“Only member states are able to tackle the migration crisis effectively,” Tusk’s letter says. “The EU’s role is to offer its full support in all possible ways to help member states handle the migration crisis. But the EU has neither the capacity nor legal possibilities to replace member states.”

Any move to drop the plan is likely to upset Italy and Greece, countries that have urged the rest of the EU to help them cope with large numbers of refugees and migrants in recent years. Germany and Sweden, backed by the European commission, are also likely to contest any plan deemed to reduce the help offered by other member states.

One EU diplomat said some member states were surprised by Tusk’s letter “because it doesn’t seem to be in sync” with work undertaken by home affairs ministers working on the file.

We suspect we know one other "European" that will not be pleased... George Soros.

Putin Blamed For Poland"s Bust-Up With Brussels

Russia-gate blame-scaping is accelerating across Europe... and now it is being embraced by none other than European Council President Donald Tusk.

In what is an unprecedented attack by an EU leader on a member state’s sitting government, Bloomberg reports that Tusk explicitly suggests the ruling Law & Justice party is merely a "puppet of Putin" and just forwarding Russian interests...

“Strident dispute with Ukraine, isolation in the European Union, walking away from rule of law and judicial independence, attack on non-governmental sector and free media,” Tusk wrote on his personal Twitter account on Sunday. 

 

“Law & Justice strategy or Kremlin plan? Too similar to sleep well.”

This aggresiver tweet comes just days after Poland"s Independence Day parades "triggered" mainstream media everywhere... as tens of thousands of people, waving tens of thousands of white-and-red national flags young and old, of all walks of life, with whole families take to the streets.  

As we detailed previously, to the western media these are Nazis, racists, anti-semites and islamophobes. An abomination for the European Union.

What has positive overtones in Poland (patriotism, faith, family), has negative ones in Western Europe and the other way round. Migrants, LGTBQ and gender mainstreaming is not welcome in the area between the Oder and Bug Rivers. The EU values cannot be farther from Poland’s values and vice versa.

 

The Independence March denigrated by the Western media was favourably covered by the Polish government and other national media, except for those which are far to the left and very much pro-European. The former shored up the positive aspects of the event, the latter only looked for incidents to blow them out of any proportion and join the chorus of their western counterparts in condemning “fascists” and “white supremacists”.

 

A thirty-six million nation in the heart of Europe (i.e. with a population approximately the size of Spain’s) is throwing down the gauntlet to the EU establishment and its view of European unity based on cultural and religious indifference and anti-nationalism.

As Bloomberg notes, Tusk’s tweet is the latest salvo in a war of words between Poland and the EU, as fears mount in Brussels that Warsaw’s government is shifting toward authoritarian rule. It also adds to speculation that the 60-year-old former Polish prime minister plans a comeback to domestic politics when his term as chairman of EU leaders’ meetings expires in 2019, the same year that current parliament and government’s term ends in Poland.

On Friday, Prime Minister Beata Szydlo criticized her fellow leaders and lawmakers from the bloc for weighing sanctions against the nation over anti-democratic actions and suggested they weren’t being honest. The European Parliament said last week it would examine possible sanctions against Poland over democratic backsliding. That opens a second EU front against Warsaw after the European Commission last year initiated a rule-of-law investigation into the right-wing Law & Justice party due to judicial independence concerns.

“I can’t not tell the prime ministers that we should respect each other, that we should strive for our political families to have respect for other countries in the public debate, in the European Parliament and in other European institutions,” Szydlo told reporters in Gothenburg, Sweden, before a meeting with her EU counterparts on Nov. 17.

 

“Debates should be based on the truth.”

As we conclude previously, at the time when the Soviets were establishing the communist political system in Central Europe someone said (someone ascribed these words to Stalin himself) that communism fits the Polish nation like a saddle fits a cow. Is the attempt to Europeanize Poles another attempt at saddling the cow?

EU "Values" Fit Poland Like "The Saddle Fits The Cow"

Via GEFIRA,

“We want God”, “Great Independent Poland,” “Death to the Enemies of the Fatherland!” “Christ is Poland’s King”, “Deus vult” (Latin for God wills, a battle cry of the Crusaders)these are the principal banners carried in the annual Independence March that is held in Warsaw and also in other cities on 11 November, Independence Day.

Also, in the one two days ago, at the head of the marching column you could see a few white flags sporting the red Jerusalem cross.

Tens of thousands of people, waving tens of thousands of white-and-red national flags young and old, of all walks of life, with whole families take to the streets.  

The people participating in the march think of themselves as patriots (the word which in Poland still has positive overtones) paying tribute to the fallen heroes.

To the western media these are Nazis, racists, anti-semites and islamophobes. An abomination for the European Union.

What has positive overtones in Poland (patriotism, faith, family), has negative ones in Western Europe and the other way round. Migrants, LGTBQ and gender mainstreaming is not welcome in the area between the Oder and Bug Rivers. The EU values cannot be farther from Poland’s values and vice versa.

The Independence March denigrated by the Western media was favourably covered by the Polish government and other national media, except for those which are far to the left and very much pro-European. The former shored up the positive aspects of the event, the latter only looked for incidents to blow them out of any proportion and join the chorus of their western counterparts in condemning “fascists” and “white supremacists”.

A thirty-six million nation in the heart of Europe (i.e. with a population approximately the size of Spain’s) is throwing down the gauntlet to the EU establishment and its view of European unity based on cultural and religious indifference and anti-nationalism.

While in France or Belgium Muslims pray openly in the streets, Turkish nationalists stage large rallies waving Turkish flags in the heart of Dutch cities and construct mosques, with empty Christian churches as sad witnesses thereto; Poles pray the rosary on the borders of their countryand march, proudly displaying national emblems and flags, demanding God and rejecting multiculturalism.

At the time when the Soviets were establishing the communist political system in Central Europe someone said (someone ascribed these words to Stalin himself) that communism fits the Polish nation like a saddle fits a cow. Is the attempt to Europeanize Poles another attempt at saddling the cow?

Outrage Follows "Jaw-Droppingly Shocking" 1986 Prince Charles Letter Blaming Mid-East Problems On "Foreign Jews"

Prince Charles has sparked media outrage following a report he wrote a letter blaming "the influx of foreign, European Jews" for aggravating the Arab-Israeli conflict and leading to general unrest in the Middle East, while also asking whether an American president would "have the courage" to take on "the Jewish lobby" to put an end to terrorism in the region.

The note, written on November 24, 1986, was found in a public archive and published Saturday by the Daily Mail. The Prince penned the letter after official visits to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar with Princess Diana.

"I now appreciate that Arabs and Jews were all a Semitic people originally,” the then 38-year-old Prince of Wales wrote in his letter, adding, that “it is the influx of foreign, European Jews (especially from Poland, they say) which has helped to cause great problems” in the Middle East. “I know there are so many complex issues, but how can there ever be an end to terrorism unless the causes are eliminated?” he questioned.

"Surely some US president has to have the courage to stand up and take on the Jewish lobby in the US? I must be naive, I suppose!” he concludes.

The Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, described Charles’ comments “both shocking and entirely predictable.”

Both shocking and entirely predictable https://t.co/Ftm3TqvWL5

— Stephen Pollard (@stephenpollard) November 12, 2017

"To me this is the most astonishing element of the Prince’s letter. The “Jewish lobby” is one of the anti-Semitic themes that have endured for centuries. It is this myth there are these very powerful Jews who control foreign policy or the media or banks or whatever."  Pollard then told the daily mail that the letter was "jaw-droppingly shocking" and added that "[the Prince’s comments] come from the heir to the throne is unsettling, to put it mildly."

While the letter is inflammatory, there is no suggestion Charles holds anti-Semitic views according to The Mail: "He has many prominent Jewish friends and in 2013 became the first Royal to attend a chief rabbi’s inauguration ceremony. In a speech that year, he expressed concern at the apparent rise of anti-Semitism in Britain."

At the same time, he is seen as a defender of Islam, with one historian noting that no other major Western figure has as high a standing in the Muslim world. 

 

It has also been suggested he has pro-Palestinian leanings, a perception the letter appears to support.

Prince Charles is not the first one to fall in the "lobby" spotlight: among those to come under fire for using the term ‘Jewish lobby’ are General George Brown, the highest-ranking military officer in the US as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was publicly rebuked and disowned by President Gerald Ford in 1974 after claiming that a ‘Jewish lobby’ controlled Congress, according to The Daily Mail. Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage was criticised earlier this month when he referred to ‘a powerful Jewish lobby’ in the US.  In 2006, Chris Davies, former leader of the Lib Dem MEPs, was forced to resign after he used the term. Archbishop Desmond Tutu also came under fire when he used the phrase in a newspaper article in 2002.

The Prince’s reference in the letter to the influx of European Jews also caused dismay.

It is not clear if he is referring to immigration before or after the Second World War, or both. Mr Pollard said: ‘It is the absolute classic Arab explanation of the problems in the Middle East.

 

"And it is what everyone has always said the British aristocracy actually thinks – the idea that Jews were some kind of foreigners who had no real place in Israel until we decided to make it their homeland. Historically it is nonsense and it’s quite stunning when it comes from the heir to the throne.’

 

A senior Israeli diplomatic source said last night: ‘He [Charles] was travelling around the Gulf states [just before he wrote the controversial letter], which in those years were very anti-Israel. It seems he was presented with a narrative in a very convincing way.’

Earlier this month, Britain marked the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, the document that paved the way for the state of Israel, with a gala dinner in London attended by Theresa May and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

It is also not the first time Prince Charles has gotten in hot water for controversial remarks: In 2007, leaked emails between senior Clarence House staff put Charles at the centre of a row about the Royals’ attitude towards the Jewish state.

* * *

Attempting some damage control, a spokesman for Clarence House said the thoughts revealed in the 1986 letter, were actually “not The Prince’s own views.”

“The letter clearly states these were not the Prince’s own thinking on Arab-Israeli affairs, but represented the opinions of some of those he met during his visit which he was keen to interrogate,” the statement said. It added that Prince Charles "was sharing the arguments in private correspondence with a long standing friend in an attempt to improve his understanding of what he has always recognized is a deeply complex issue to which he was coming early on in his own analysis in 1986," the representative said.

"Over the years, the prince has continued his study of the complex and difficult themes he referenced here. He has built a proven track record of support for both Jewish and Arab communities around the world and has a long history of promoting interfaith dialogue and cultural understanding,"

she added.

Visualizing The Rapidly Aging Western World

From issues such as declining fertility rates to the ongoing complications resulting from China’s famous “One Child Policy”, there are many demographic challenges that the world must grapple with in the coming years.

However, Visual Capitalist"s Jeff Desjardins notes one problem of particular importance – at least in places like Europe and the Americas – is a rapidly aging population. As the population shifts grayer, potential consequences include higher dependency ratios, rising healthcare costs, and shifting economies and cities.

EUROPE: A PRIME EXAMPLE

We’ve discussed Germany’s demographic cliff before, but it’s not only Germany that will be impacted by a rapidly aging population.

The above animation from data visualization expert Aron Strandberg shows the median age of European countries between 1960 and 2060.

Starting about a decade from now, you can see that the U.N. projects some European countries to start hitting a median age of 50 or higher. This includes countries like Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece, and then later Germany, Poland, Bosnia, and Croatia.

The UK, France, Ireland, Scandinavia, and former Soviet countries will be younger – but only slightly so. Median ages in these places by 2060 will be in the early to mid-forties.

THE AMERICAS

Populations in North and South America are also graying fast, though not quite at Europe’s pace.

Here’s a similar map of the Americas that highlights median age between 1960 and 2060, based on U.N. projections.

Chile and Brazil, in particular, are trending older. Meanwhile, Canada is not far behind with an expected median age of 45 in 2060. Interestingly, the United States is anticipated to only hit a median age of 42 by 2060, which is lower than almost all Western countries.

While this makes the U.S. look younger in comparison, the country will still experience the same type of economic burden from an aging population. In fact, it’s expected that the population of Americans older than 65 years will nearly double from 48 million to 88 million over the coming three decades.

Polish Government Advises Couples To "Breed Like Rabbits"

Authored by Mike Shedlock via www.maven.net/mishtalk,

In order to counteract one of Europe"s lowest birth rates, the government of Poland put out a pair of videos urging citizens to breed like rabbits.

Rabbit Video Number One

 

Rabbit Video Number Two

 

Eurostat Estimated Population Trends

Population estimates are 2017 Eurostat projections, in thousands.

Eurostat expects 10 countries will lose population by 2040. Poland is in 7th place.

In general, the demographic trends in Eastern Europe are very poor.

Why Socialism Is Dead

Authored by Gary North via GaryNorth.com,

Socialism was a specific philosophy of government ownership of the means of production.

The democratic welfare state was never a variety of socialism.

Marx, the most famous socialist, despised democracy. He despised all attempts at economic amelioration through legislation. He wanted a proletarian revolution. He preached -- the correct verb -- a religion of revolution. That was the thesis of my first book, Marx"s Religion of Revolution (1968). You can download it here.

He was silent about how the state would allocate resources under his system. He published nothing about the actual operations of the post-revolutionary society, socialism, and its final successor, communism. Late in his career, in his final major publication, little more than a pamphlet, he wrote this: "Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." (Critique of the Gotha Program, Pt. IV, 1875) This was a purely political focus. He was silent throughout his career about how the state should or will or can run the economy.

He provided some famous slogans. He offered rhetoric about the inevitable triumph of the proletarian class. But he offered no guidelines for the leaders of the victorious proletarians.

Socialists in the nineteenth century were equally silent about how the state can allocate production so as to create the good society.

In the twentieth century, there was no major detailed theoretical treatise on the economics of socialism that went into detail about the actual operations of central planning agencies in a world where the state owned the means of production. There was no equivalent of Ludwig von Mises" Human Action or Murray Rothbard"s Man, Economy, and State or George Reisman"s Capitalism.

In retrospect, this seems incredible. Here was a movement that captured the Soviet Union and China. Yet there was not a single book, let alone a shelf of books, available to Lenin in 1917 and Mao in 1949 that could serve as a guide to the kind of economic organization that they should impose. There was no treatise that could serve as a blueprint for the socialist New World Order, whether non-revolutionary socialism or Marxist communism. Yet Marx said that his was scientific socialism -- not utopian socialism, like the works of his critics.

Utopia meant "nowhere." They were all utopian socialists, including Marx.

Socialism has always been a movement based mostly on rhetoric. There was never any logic to it. There were endless promises about how politics or class revolution could bring in a socialist paradise, but there was nothing written about how this paradise would operate.

Marx offered his famous ten steps in The Communist Manifesto (1848), but they were mere slogans. The fact that he included a central bank (#5) is indicative of how confused he was about the transition from capitalism to socialism to communism. He never went into any further detail. He had plenty of time to offer details. He died in 1883.

Here is what defenders of socialism refuse to face: there is no theory of socialist economic planning.

Socialist economic theory has always been missing in action. There is also no practical treatise that has served as a guide for socialist economic planners after their national revolutions. Socialist economic planning has been chaotic. No theory of socialist planning ever emerged from this chaos.

When we look at the history of socialism, meaning the state ownership of the means of production, there are few examples.

The USSR and Communist China did come close, but the black markets always operated in both societies.

There have been tiny Communist states: Albania, Cuba, and North Korea. None have produced a theory of socialist planning.

The Labor government of Great Britain from 1945 to 1951 nationalized coal mining and much of medical care, but it did not extend control over the capital markets of The City, the separate legal jurisdiction of the bankers in the center of London. The Bank of England maintained most of its sovereignty. Labor nationalized it in 1946, but then failed to exercise control. It remained Keynesian.

In short, there are no working models of socialism. This is fitting because there are no theoretical models of socialism. It has always been based on rhetoric, not logic. It has never been based on any system of economic causation. It has no theory of economic sanctions comparable to the sanctions in the free market of monetary profit and loss.

This was pointed out in 1920 by Mises in his classic essay, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." He argued that socialism is inherently irrational in theory. It has no system of private property. It, therefore, has no capital markets. But without capital markets, there can be no prices for capital. Without prices for capital, central planners do not know how to allocate capital to serve the wants of the people. So, he argued, pure socialism cannot survive.

This argument was never successfully refuted by any socialist. Polish immigrant and University of Chicago Professor Oskar Lange wrote several articles in the late 1930"s on Mises" arguments, but they were strictly theoretical. When he went back to Communist Poland in 1945, and was later put into positions of authority in planning bureaus, nothing that he had written in his famous essays was actually implemented by the Polish government. His hypothetical socialist planning board always remained pure theory. It was based on the idea that central planners can do trial and error pricing to allocate capital. But there are no consumer-generated prices in a socialist commonwealth. More to the point, there were no economic sanctions attached to them. If there is no system of monetary profit and loss, there are no meaningful economic sanctions placed on the planners. But there are surely political sanctions, as the planners discovered under Stalin and Mao. It wasn"t that the dictators liquidated capital. It was that they liquidated political opponents and bureaucrats who lost their favor.

There have been very few Marxist economists teaching in American universities. They have had zero influence on the profession. There have hardly been many more socialist economists on the campus. There was a flurry of publicity in the late 1960"s regarding a tiny group of these people, who call themselves the Union of Radical Political Economists. It had the unfortunate acronym of URPE, which was pronounced "urpee." I studied under one of its major figures in grad school, Howard Sherman. He lectured coherently. He wrote in English. He did not use equations. He never presented the case for socialism in the classroom that I attended. If he converted anybody to socialism, it must have been in private.

The socialist professors are confined mainly to the sociology departments and the English departments. These people have never taken an economics course. They do not comprehend the logic of economic causation. Like their predecessors in the nineteenth century, they confine their comments to rhetoric.

We see crowds of undergraduates who claim to be in favor of socialism. But none of these people has ever read a book on socialist economic theory. This is understandable since there isn"t one.

They are motivated by rhetoric. Rhetoric is all they have been exposed to. They go to large mass meetings to protest this or that aspect of capitalism. But they have no agendas. They don"t have a personal agenda, and they don"t have a social agenda. In this sense, they are just like Karl Marx.

The difference is this: they are not going to find sugar daddies like Frederick Engels, who ran his family"s textile plant in Manchester and used a little of his money to put Marx on the dole for four decades.

These people are noisy, but in terms of pursuing a systematic agenda for turning the United States into a socialist commonwealth, they really are harmless.

When Deng Xiaoping inaugurated an agricultural reform in 1979 which relied heavily on private ownership, he launched the most impressive period of economic growth that any large country has ever experienced. But that ended socialist economic planning. When, on December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union was going out of business, that ended the lure of socialism among the intellectuals. They had always clung to socialism because they expected that their class would exercise power in a socialist regime. When it became clear that the Soviet Union was too feeble to impose its will on the Russian masses, that was the end of their infatuation with Communism and socialism. It was always about power. It was never about the logic of socialism.

So, in this month, the 100th anniversary of Lenin"s Bolshevik revolution in Russia, we can rejoice in the fact that socialism is dead. From a theoretical standpoint, it was never alive. It was a corpse from day one. It was sustained by rhetoric, not logic.

If you want to visualize the future of socialism, think of Lenin"s corpse in Lenin Square. It"s all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Terror Cases In Germany Quadruple In One Year

More evidence revealing the ridiculousness of the centrist position on immigration – namely that refugees can be seamlessly integrated into European society without a spike in crime or terror – has emerged courtesy of the German newspaper Welt Am Sonntag which revealed Sunday that the number of terrorism-related cases investigated by German authorities has quadrupled over the past year.

Prosecutors have opened more than 900 cases so far this year, compared with just 240 throughout 2016, and 80 cases in 2013.

Germany’s federal police estimate 705 Islamist extremists willing to carry out terror attacks are active in the country, up from 600 during an estimate in February. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency recently said around 24,400 Islamists are active in the country but most of them don’t pose an immediate terror threat.

To be sure, the number of migrants applying for asylum in Germany plummeted to about 280,000 in 2016, about one-third the number from the prior year. But the increase in crime – coupled with the Christian Democratic Union’s embarrassing showing in federal elections last month – are slowly inspiring the country’s centrists to accept that more needs to be done to limit and control immigration in Europe’s largest economy.

According to the Daily Caller, Germany’s federal prosecutor’s office can’t keep up with the increase in the number of cases. To wit, nearly 300 cases have been transferred to the state level. Not all cases involve plans to carry out attacks. Migrants from Syran, Iraq and Afghanistan have been tried over alleged membership in terror groups without being suspected of planning attacks on European soil.

BKA chief Holger Münch told daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau in July that the danger from politically motivated far-right and far-left wing extremist is dwarfed by the threat posed by jihadis.

“In the left-wing scene, the [German] states have currently estimated a number that can be counted on the fingers of one hand,” Münch said. “In the right-wing scene, the number is in the low double digits.”

Frustration over this increase in crime manifested last month in the far-right Alternative for Germany party’s sweeping electoral triumph. The party, while still a minority, received 13% of the vote, earning it a place in Parliament – the first time a far-right party has held a spot in the legislature since World War II. It’s now the third strongest party in Germany, and has created a headache for Chancellor Angela Merkel by busting up her ruling coalition.

As Statista points out, perhaps key to understanding Germany’s tilt to the right is the indication that the majority of AfD voters say they made their decision not based on belief in the party, but rather as a reaction to their disappointment in the other parties – a dissatisfaction stemming from Merkel’s insistence on an “open doors” refugee policy that has been proven to be a failure.

Two years after the European Commission carried out the bidding of German Chancellor Angela Merkel by approving a plan to distribute migrants entering the Schengen area through Greece and Italy evenly across the European Union, the recent landslide victory of “Czech Donald Trump” Andrej Babis and his Eurosceptic and anti-establishment political party shows how disillusioned the people of Europe have become with “open doors.” Babis’s victory followed another important win by Austria"s young conservative star, Sebastian Kurz, who at 31 is now the youngest leader in Europe.

The reason for this populist surge? Well, it appears Europeans have begun to realize that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic – three countries that refused to accept migrants under the EU plan – have suffered far fewer terror attacks, as the map below shows.

Can you spot the gaps?
 

The European Countries With The Most Psychiatrists

If Europe is driving you nuts, we have some simple advice... head to Finland!

As Statista"s Niall McCarthy notes, according to new Eurostat data released to mark World Mental Health Day, the European Union has about 90,000 psychiatrists in total and Finland has the most per 100,000 inhabitants (23.60) followed by Sweden (23.19) and the Netherlands (22.95).

You will find more statistics at Statista

The fewest per 100,000 people can be found in Malta (9.49), Poland (9.01) and Bulgaria (7.59).

In 2014, 183,500 people across the EU died due to mental and behavioural disorders with women accounting for around two-thirds of all deaths.

"This May Be The End Of Europe As We Know It": The Pension Storm Is Coming

Authored by John Mauldin via MauldinEconomics.com,

I’ve written a lot about US public pension funds lately. Many of them are underfunded and will never be able to pay workers the promised benefits - at least without dumping a huge and unwelcome bill on taxpayers.

And since taxpayers are generally voters, it’s not at all clear they will pay that bill.

Readers outside the US might have felt safe reading those stories. There go those Americans again… However, if you live outside the US, your country may be more like ours than you think.

This week the spotlight will be on Europe.

The UK Is Headed to a Retirement Implosion

The UK now has a $4 trillion retirement savings shortfall, which is projected to rise 4% a year and reach $33 trillion by 2050.

This in a country whose total GDP is $3 trillion. That means the shortfall is already bigger than the entire economy, and even if inflation is modest, the situation is going to get worse.

Plus, these figures are based mostly on calculations made before the UK left the European Union. Brexit is a major economic shift that could certainly change the retirement outlook. Whether it would change it for better or worse, we don’t yet know.

A 2015 OECD study found workers in the developed world could expect governmental programs to replace on average 63% of their working-age incomes. Not so bad. But in the UK that figure is only 38%, the lowest in all OECD countries.

This means UK workers must either build larger personal savings or severely tighten their belts when they retire. Working past retirement age is another choice, but it could put younger workers out of the job market.

UK retirees have had a kind of safety valve: the ability to retire in EU countries with lower living costs. Depending how Brexit negotiations go, that option could disappear.

Turning next to the Green Isle, 80% of the Irish who have pensions don’t think they will have sufficient income in retirement, and 47% don’t even have pensions. I think you would find similar statistics throughout much of Europe.

A report this summer from the International Longevity Centre suggested that younger workers in the UK need to save 18% of their annual earnings in order to have an “adequate” retirement income.

But no such thing will happen, so the UK is heading toward a retirement implosion that could be at least as damaging as the US’s.

The Swiss Are No Different Despite the Prudence

Americans often have romanticized views of Switzerland. They think it’s the land of fiscal discipline, among other things. To some extent that’s true, but Switzerland has its share of problems too. The national pension plan there has been running deficits as the population grows older.

Earlier this month, Swiss voters rejected a pension reform plan that would have strengthened the system by raising women’s retirement age from 64 to 65 and raising taxes and required worker contributions.

From what I can see, these were fairly minor changes, but the plan still went down in flames as 52.7% of voters said no.

Voters around the globe generally want to have their cake and eat it, too. We demand generous benefits but don’t like the price tags that come with them. The Swiss, despite their fiscally prudent reputation, appear to be not so different from the rest of us.

This outcome in Switzerland captures the attitude of the entire developed world. Compromise is always difficult. Both politicians and voters ignore the long-term problems they know are coming and think no further ahead than the next election

Switzerland and the UK have mandatory retirement pre-funding with private management and modest public safety nets, as do Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, and Hungary.

Not that all of these countries don’t have problems, but even with their problems, these European nations are far better off than some others.

France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Spain Are in Deep Trouble

The European nations noted above have nowhere near the crisis potential that the next group does: France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Spain.

They are all pay-as-you-go countries (PAYG). That means they have nothing saved in the public coffers for future pension obligations, and the money has to come out of the general budget each year.

The crisis for these countries is quite predictable, because the number of retirees is growing even as the number of workers paying into the national coffers is falling.

Let’s look at some details.

Spain was hit hard in the financial crisis but has bounced back more vigorously than some of its Mediterranean peers did, such as Greece. That’s also true of its national pension plan, which actually had a surplus until recently.

Unfortunately, the government chose to “borrow” some of that surplus for other purposes, and it will soon turn into a sizable deficit.

Just as in the US, Spain’s program is called Social Security, but in fact it is neither social nor secure. Both the US and Spanish governments have raided supposedly sacrosanct retirement schemes, and both allow their governments to use those savings for whatever the political winds favor.

The Spanish reserve fund at one time had €66 billion and is now estimated to be completely depleted by the end of this year or early in 2018. The cause? There are 1.1 million more pensioners than there were just 10 years ago. And as the Baby Boom generation retires, there will be even more pensioners and fewer workers to support them.

A 25% unemployment rate among younger workers doesn’t help contributions to the system, either.

Overall, public pension plans in the pay-as-you-go countries would now replace about 60% of retirees’ salaries. Plus, several of these countries let people retire at less than 60 years old. In most countries, fewer than 25% of workers contribute to pension plans. That rate would have to double in the next 30 years to make programs sustainable.

Sell that to younger workers.

The Wall Street Journal recently did a rather bleak report on public pension funds in Europe. Quoting:

Europe’s population of pensioners, already the largest in the world, continues to grow. Looking at Europeans 65 or older who aren’t working, there are 42 for every 100 workers, and this will rise to 65 per 100 by 2060, the European Union’s data agency says. By comparison, the U.S. has 24 nonworking people 65 or over per 100 workers, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which doesn’t have a projection for 2060. (WSJ)

While the WSJ story focuses on Poland and the difficulties facing retirees there, the graphs and data in the story make clear the increasingly tenuous situation across much of Europe.

And unlike most European financial problems, this isn’t a north-south issue. Austria and Slovenia face the most difficult demographic challenges, right along with Greece. Greece, like Poland, has seen a lot of its young people leave for other parts of the world.

This next chart compares the share of Europe’s population that 65 years and older to the rest of the regions of the world and then to the share of population of workers between 20 and 64. These are ugly numbers.

Source: WSJ

The WSJ continues:

Across Europe, the birthrate has fallen 40% since the 1960s to around 1.5 children per woman, according to the United Nations. In that time, life expectancies have risen to roughly 80 from 69.

In Poland birthrates are even lower, and here the demographic disconnect is compounded by emigration. Taking advantage of the EU’s freedom of movement, many Polish youth of working age flock to the West, especially London, in search of higher pay. A paper published by the country’s central bank forecasts that by 2030, a quarter of Polish women and a fifth of Polish men will be 70 or older.

Source: WSJ

This Coming Crisis Is Beyond the Power of Politicians

I could go on on reviewing the retirement problems in other countries, but I hope you begin to see the big picture. This crisis isn’t purely a result of faulty politics - though that’s a big contributor.

It’s a problem that is far bigger than even the most disciplined, future-focused governments and businesses can easily handle.

Worse, generations of politicians have convinced the public that their entitlements are guaranteed. Many politicians actually believe it themselves. They’ve made promises they aren’t able to keep and are letting others arrange their lives based on the assumption that the impossible will happen. It won’t.

How do we get out of this jam?

We’re all going to make big adjustments. If the longevity breakthroughs that I expect to happen do so soon (as in the next 10–15 years), we may be able to adjust with minimal pain. We’ll work longer years, and retirement will be shorter, but it will be better because we’ll be healthier.

That’s the best-case outcome, and I think we have a fair chance of seeing it, but not without a lot of social and political travail. How we get through that process may be the most important question we face.

Sharp macroeconomic analysis, big market calls, and shrewd predictions are all in a week’s work for visionary thinker and acclaimed financial expert John Mauldin. Since 2001, investors have turned to his Thoughts from the Frontline to be informed about what’s really going on in the economy. Join hundreds of thousands of readers, and get it free in your inbox every week.

Ominous Earthquake Swarm At Yellowstone Supervolcano Now One Of Longest Ever Recorded

The rumblings beneath the formerly dormant supervolcano known as the Yellowstone caldera just won"t quit. And The ongoing earthquake swarm at the Yellowstone National Park supervolcano is now one of the longest ever recorded, having started on June 12. The ongoing earthquake swarm at the Yellowstone National Park supervolcano is now one of the longest ever recorded, having started on June 12.

Over the past three and a half months, almost 2,500 earthquakes have been recorded in the western part of the national park. This is on par with the biggest swarm ever recorded, where more than 3,000 earthquakes took place over three months, Newsweek reports.

In its latest monthly update about activity at Yellowstone, the US Geological Survey said 115 earthquakes had been reported in the park during September. Of these, 78 were part of the ongoing swarm 6 miles north of West Yellowstone. The biggest event in the swarm last month was magnitude 2.3.

“This is the sort of work that will happen in the months to come, as we gather up all of the available data and start crunching numbers,” Poland says. “What we can say now is that through the of September, the University of Utah has located 2,475 earthquakes in the swarm. This puts the 2017 swarm on par with that of 1985, which lasted three months and had over 3,000 located events.  end

“[This is] certainly a fascinating event and one that we hope to learn more about through some post-swarm analysis,” he adds. “There"s a lot to work on this winter, for sure.”

While scientists at the USGS have brushed off the threat of a supervolcano eruption, scientists at NASA have said it represents a potentially devastating threat to the US population. These same scientists have suggested several risky strategies to prevent an eruption if one appears imminent.

Brian Wilcox, a former member of the NASA Advisory Council on Planetary Defense, and several other NASA researchers over the summer shared a report previously unseen outside the space agency about the threat Yellowstone poses, and what can be done to prevent an eruption.

According to NASA, an eruption at Yellowstone could plunge the earth into a volcanic winter and destroy crops and livestock, precipitating widespread famines.  Food reserves would only last about 74 days, according to the UN, after an eruption of a super volcano, like that under Yellowstone.

With an eruption long overdue, NASA has devised a plan to drill into the caldera and try to artificially cool it – a strategy that researchers say comes with its own risks.

Scientists at the USGS say the monthslong earthquake storm at the caldera has ended; however, they played down the risks posed by the swarm shortly after it started over the summer, only for the rumbling to continue. Others maintain that an eruption is long overdue.

Bill Blain Asks "What If Trump's Tax Cuts And Reforms Don’t Happen?"

Submitted by Bill Blain of Mint Partners

“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room...”

Europe lurches from crisis to crisis - Unscathed", so what is there to worry about? Tax Reform?

A very clever chum told me yesterday to stop stressing so much about Europe, reminding me of the default position: “Europe lurches from crisis to crisis unscathed.“ He’s right. It doesn’t matter how FUBAR Europe looks, what the Spanish King said, what Poland is doing, what Germany isn’t, or whatever France is smoking….. Crisis is the European normal and it’s not a problem. SNAFU is SOP, as they say..

I will stop worrying about Europe and learn to love the contradictory bluster that characterises the Heart of Brussels.

And with stock markets hitting new highs, corporate bond spreads tighter than the proverbial gnat’s crotchet (in some classes tighter than pre-crisis 2006), VIX (despite a tiny rise y’day), still close to all-time lows, and folk blithely talking about increasing investments in Russia, new Middle East bonds, and asking where they can buy Nigerian regional bonds… what can there possibly be to worry about?
Of course there is the UK… the aged legions of Theresa May fans in Manchester are likely to need deliberators to get them excited about whatever cataclysm of clichés she comes out with today to remedy her reputation as the WORST PRIME MINISTER ever – at least until the next one. (There you go, subtly insulted both parties – don’t say I’m not even handed..)

However, my main worries this morning are the same as they always are… where does this market go next, and where are the likely sources of trouble.

My conclusion is America. 

Regular readers will know I’ve been semi-seriously predicting Thursday 12th October as the day the stock market breaks. That date was arrived at after deep fundamental analysis and wiggly lines drawn on centuries of market charts, the fact it’s a Friday 13th the following day, and a not a little Llagavulin (which I was taking for medicinal reasons: since I started drinking it as a kid in Hot Toddies I’ve not had Ebola once).

The flaw in my analysis thus far is identifying a trigger that’s going to push markets over the edge.

Despite the doom and gloomsters like myself predicting the imminent end of the world, markets don’t look to be anticipating a correction. Quite rightly the macro economists point out most economics are now in growth and looking set for expansion. There is a general agreement among central bankers about normalising monetary policies, while governments are all considering positive fiscal steps.. (except in Europe where positive thinking about fiscal spending remains Thought-Crime).

We’ve got the CNN Fear and Greed index at 92 (Extreme Greed) and Larry Fink of Blackrock assuring us “Markets are fine and will be fine this year..” (Seriously.. an eejit like me can confidently predict the end of everything because I don’t really count and my readers know I’m sort of joking, but why would the leader of the largest fund on the planet say something like that? Oh, because he can… and may just have the market buying power to be right..)

But… what has been driving the stock markets higher? On one hand is normalisation – higher rates infer growth and are de-facto bad news for bonds. The financial press is full of stories about how investors are ramping up short positions against US bonds to record levels in anticipation of a rate hike in December, and the expected tax cuts and reform causing the economy to go into overdrive.. That means more money going into stocks.

Meanwhile, it’s the prospect of these US tax-cuts and reforms that are driving stocks. (In fact I read a great piece yesterday about how the proposed repatriation tax will greatly improve the credit of US corporates, thus driving corporate spreads tighter even as rates rise. Strong credits mean strong stocks – perversely it all makes sense..)

But…

What if Trumps tax cuts and reforms don’t happen?

I am assured by macro economists and Washington Watchers the probability Trump will get his reforms and cuts passed is much higher than the market believes. I’m told it’s inconceivable they won’t happen – Democrats know they make sense, and Republicans need success ahead of the mid-terms next year. American politicians would need to be mad to block them.

Therein lies a problem.

Every last person with a functioning economic mind knows they make sense… but, sadly, that doesn’t necessarily include all the denizens of Capitol Hill. US senators from the less well visited parts of the USA tend to think and preach to the electorate that raising the deficit by a cent is a one-way ticket to hell.

Consider White House budget director Mick Mulvaney’s line: “If we simply look at this as being deficit neutral, then you’re never going to get the type of tax reform and tax reductions that you need to sustain 3 percent growth”… He sums up the problem well – already senators and congressmen are finding reasons to say no. It points to difficult negotiations, compromises and loads and loads of pork barrels.

Others observers, including the Vampyre Squid, believe there are too many vested interests at work in the Washington swamp who will refuse to let go existing deductions to make tax-reform work. It’s worth reading through Goldman’s arguments. They are up on Zerohedge: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-03/what-could-possibly-go-wrong-tax-reform-answer-goldman-finds-plenty

If we see more folk taking the view Tax Reform and Cuts are likely to prove yet another non-Triumph for Trump, then the current positive sentiment could take a walloping.

That said, I remain convinced, it will be a correction rather than a crash.. So buying boots ready.

Its nearly 30-years since the Great Storm and Great Crash of 1987 – I remember it well. I was a journalist with Euroweek at the time, and I think I first used the phrase: “It’s a dead-cat bounce.. drop a dead cat out a window and it bounces, but not a lot.” How wrong I was.. stock markets do correct, and typically they rally again when the underlying macro behind them remains strong!

Meanwhile, very interesting comment from Bloomberg Intelligence looking at the ECB’s broad employment rate” which is now up on BBerg. They reckons it shows plenty of slack still in the European economy (hence the lack of trad Philips curve inflation). When yoof unemployment remains as elevated as it is across the Med nations, then maybe things in Europe aren’t as good as we think… (Oops, sorry, said I wasn’t going to do Yoorp again..)

Polish Foreign Minister Demands Germany Pay $1 Trillion In Reparations

Poland has escalated its demands for World War II reparations from Germany from "billions" a month ago, to "about $1 trillion" today as Poland’s foreign minister demanded "serious talks" were needed with Germany.

Relations between Berlin and Warsaw have been on edge recently over issues including Germany’s push to share responsibility for refugees across Europe - which Poland has rejected - to the European Commission’s infringement procedure against PiS plans to have more control over the judiciary. Last month the EU sued Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, forcing them to accept refugees even as the rest of Europe turns a blind eye to the 100 thousand refugees that have made landfall in recent months in Italy.

But, as The Independent now reports, the rhetoric is heating up.

Poland’s foreign minister Witold Waszczykowski told local radio station RMF that “serious talks” were needed with Germany to "find a way to deal with the fact that German-Polish relations are overshadowed by the German aggression of 1939 and unresolved post-war issues."

He said Poland’s material losses were about $1 trillion, or higher.

Polish defense minister Antoni Macierewicz also accused European critics of trying to “erase” the fate of the Poles at German hands during the war “from the historical memory of Europe”.

The country’s right-wing government has dismissed a 1953 resolution by Poland’s former communist government which dropped any claim to reparations from Germany, and are instead claiming that Germany is “shirking” its moral responsibility.

Around six million Polish citizens, including about three million Jews, were killed during the war and much of Warsaw was destroyed.

Interstingly, an independent Ibris poll found that 51 per cent of Polish people objected to repatriation claims against Germany, while 24 per cent were in favour. Critics of the government say they are talking about reparations to divert attention from their nationalistic agenda.

Macron Approval Rating Crashes Twice As Fast As Trump's

It appears that Trump is no longer the president with the fastest plunge in his approval rating: that honor has now fallen to France"s Emanuel Macron, who since his dramatic victory in the May 7 presidential election, has seen his popularity plummet, and according to a a new poll conducted by Ifop for Le Journal du Dimanche, most French voters are now dissatisfied with Emmanuel Macron’s performance, a dramatic decline for the president who basked in a landslide election victory less than four months ago.

The poll showed Macron’s “dissatisfaction rating” soaring to 57%, from 43% in July. At the same time, those satisfied with Macron tumbled from 54% in July (and 62% at election) to just 40% in August, a stunning 22% drop over three months...  which is twice as fast as Donald Trump"s fall from grace. According to Gallup, on Inauguration Day, 45% of Americans said they approved of Trump and since then, the number has declined by 11% to 34%, which again is only half as bad as Macron popularity plunge. The Ifop poll also showed the cumulative drop in Macron’s popularity ratings since May was far bigger than that of previous Socialist president Francois Hollande over the same period, who is best known for achieving the lowest approval record of any recent French president on record. As such, one wonders how Macron"s approval rating in a few short years can even be positive.

Quoted by Reuters, French government spokesman Christophe Castaner said the ruling party was going through a "tricky time", but added that displeasing some people was a price worth paying if the government wanted to push through reforms. The only problem is the government will most likely not be able to push through reforms, even as Macron"s approval continues its sharp descent. Cartaner also told BFM TV that “yes, we are encountering difficulties, but you cannot just spend your time only looking at polls when you’re in government. We are there to transform the country. Our country needs us to take risks, and we are taking risks." Spoken like a true megalomaniac.

As for Macron -  who is currently midway through a schedule of official visits to various European capitals and who most recently got into a violent feud with Poland when he criticized the Warsaw government for its "non-European ideals" to which Polish PM Beata Syzdlo slammed "arrogant" Macron saying "you won"t rule Europe" - has suffered a number of setbacks since being elected, including tough debates in parliament over labor reform, a standoff with the military and cuts to housing assistance. Then, just last week, Macron became the target of social media scorn and humor, while political opponents criticized the president when it emerged he spent €26,000 ($31,000) on makeup during his first 100 days in office and his office also backed down on plans to give his wife a formal, paid role after a public backlash.

In any case, the latest polling is terrible news for the young new president who was expected to inspire his country with hope and confidence yet appears to be doing just the opposite: Bernard Sananes, head of French polling company Elabe, said the latest survey could encourage Macron’s political opponents, after his party won a commanding majority in parliament.

“It could mean, for the government, that the opposition mobilizes itself again,” Sananes told BFM TV.

It wasn"t just Macron: the poll also showed a steep drop in approval for Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, with 47% expressing satisfaction with him - down 9% from last month.

As Reuters adds, Macron - France"s youngest leader since Napoleon - faces a big test next month when the far-left CGT trade union leads a rally to protest against plans to deregulate the jobs market. "Now is the key time, with the labor executive orders to be presented," said Francois Savary, chief investment officer at Geneva-based investment firm Prime Partners, who has an "underweight" position on French equities.

Schlichter: "Normal Americans Are Bored By The Fake Drama"

Authored by Kurt Schlichter via Townhall.com,

I took a week off from the milieu of political insanity to go out amongst the normals and chalk up another huge trial victory, and when I got back I was stunned - stunned! - to find that a consensus had formed that Nazis are bad. Beforehand, I had no idea where the establishment stood on Nazis, but now it"s crystal clear. They hate Nazis because Nazis are bad. Everyone from CNN to Mitt Romney hates Nazis. I couldn"t be prouder of an establishment that takes that kind of tough stand. They"re going to hate Nazis, and they don"t care whose jack-booted toes they step on!

I also learned that if you hate Nazis for being bad, you"re not allowed to hate anybody else who’s also bad, because Nazis are so bad that you have to devote all your hating capacity to hating Nazis such that there"s no room left to hate anybody else. Those hammer and sickle flag-carrying Communists? Well, you must love the Nazis if you hate them, because you have got to hate the Nazis with all your mind and all your heart since, as we learned this week, Nazis are bad. I"m so glad that our moral betters have this all figured out.

This new breed of Nazis - for whom breeding doesn"t seem to be in the cards - is less menacing that the originals. Instead of schmeissers they pack Tiki torches - for reasons no one seems able to explain. The old Nazis invaded Poland and wouldn"t leave; these invade their moms’ basements and will never leave. But apparently these 300 or so misfits and malcontents are a potent peril to our republic. I"m not sure if they themselves are a direct threat to anything besides the bottom line at a Golden Corral all-you-can-eat buffet unlucky enough to have them as patrons. The only thing scarier to its manager would be seeing Lena Dunham waddling in on a cheat day.

They are not utterly harmless; one of these cowardly morons ran over and murdered a woman, which fulfilled the media’s long-standing dream of being able to report on a terrorist who wasn"t a radical Muslim, a Black Lives Matter fan, or a Bernie bro. But the fact remains that this scraggly collection of polo-shirted dinguses numbering in the dozens is less of a threat to our society than the gleeful attempt by the establishment and its media puppets to use the looming threat of the Third Helping Reich to crush all opposition to the status quo.

The establishment’s tactic is to paint anyone they dislike as Nazis and any ideas its members oppose as hate speech, all in support of a strategy of slamming shut the Overton Window on any kind of change. The media is running with it, and if you get on Twitter, anyone to the right of Maxine Waters is now a Nazi - especially if you dare observe that the fascist fatties are not the only scumbags out there.

Even after a week, CNN is still quivering and writhing in an earth-shattering Nazigasm. When it finally ends, I expect in the network to be cuddling and sharing a Virginia Slim with the New York Times. And everyone from Hollywood half-wits to the CEO of Starbucks are making clear that they disapprove of Nazis - and no one else.

It"s also got the usual suspects of the wuss right activated. That"s why you see needy Fredocons like Mitt Romney being retrieved from their well-deserved obscurity and sent out to dance eagerly for the nods and nickels tossed his way by the same media that said he gave people cancer. I don’t know, but assume the guys vying to replace John McCain as the leader of the Blue Falcon wing of the GOP, Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse, competed vigorously to see who could ignore violent leftists in order to signal the most solemn rejection of Nazis in a manner that validates the lying liberals’ premise that the Republican Party harbors Nazis. Of course, we saw another pathetic grasp at relevance in the form of finger-wagging by the has-beens at that failing cruise cabin sales organization,The Weekly Standard.

But this cheesy grab for short-term political advantage is much more dangerous than that motley collection of stormdoofuses. The Times is now running op-eds advocating the suppression of speech its coastal elite readership finds unappealing. Yeah, a newspaper advocating censorship seems like a smart long-term strategy. The ACLU has added an asterisk to its acronym that explains that the only civil liberties it"s going to be protecting from now on are the ones exercised by people approved by its rich liberal donors. Yeah, abandoning the one thing that earned the ACLU grudging respect across the board, its free-speech absolutism, seems like another smart long-term strategy. Oh, and the tech twerps of Silicon Valley decided to take it upon themselves to decide what discourse may be discoursed. Yeah, that"s a smart long-term strategy that couldn"t possibly explode in their smug, goateed faces.

But what"s the effect on normal people? Taking a break from Twitter and the media for a week to go be with normal people gave me an interesting perspective that I don"t get when I"m surrounded by others invested in politics. None of them care. The exact number of times I heard normal people mention Nazis was zero. No one normal was talking about it, except on the occasional big screen I passed in my travels. No one normal was paying attention to the Wolf Blitzers or the Rachel Maddows. Everyone normal was living their lives, and this fake moral meltdown had no part in them. The fact that the whole thing is so ridiculous doesn"t help it gain traction. Donald Trump is a lot of things, but a Nazi is not one of them.

And the idea that when there are two sets of idiots facing each other you can"t point out that both sets of idiots are idiots just doesn"t ring true.

Normal people are blessedly free of the little taboos that the establishment seeks to impose, like the one that forbids pointing out that the alt left is just as scummy and slimy as the alt right. The general feeling among normals is “A pox on both your basements.”

The Great Nazi Panic of 2017 will fade away when its sponsors realize that it"s not having the effect on the mass of the normal Americans they hoped for. But that doesn"t mean it hasn"t caused grave damage. The establishment has, in its desperation to return to unchallenged supremacy, eagerly jettisoned its dedication to the concept of free speech. It might not work out the way they hope once there is a national arbiter of what may and may not be thought or spoken. After all, as we found out last November, the person you think is going to be wielding the power isn"t necessarily the person who you thought was going to be wielding the power.