On Wednesday 17 November 2010 17:51:05 Ken Restivo wrote: When talking about booming, don't forget china! After all they already own the biggest part of America :-) If time permits in the next years, I think I will start learning Chinese. Should be tax-refundable as future-prove educational expenses. Have fun, Arnold

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 05:55:48PM +0100, Marco Asa wrote: The video is really well made. Indeed it's not only the univerities and research. Everything is going to the drain. A few days of rain and whole regions are inundated, roads slide away, and tons of mud invade some villages - all because land management funds have been cut to one third of what they need to be. Buildings on the Pompei archeological site fall to pieces, but that's only the top of the iceberg. Result again of lacking funds and those being available being abused to favour 'friends'. And then there's the health care, the school system, and in general the complete infrastructure of society, all being neglected or destroyed on purpose. There are several reasons for this, but the dominant one is that Italy for most of the past 15 years has been governed by an ex cruise ship crooner turned TV tycoon and then politician for the sole purpose of keeping himself out of jail. He's immensely rich, but his empire is build on fraud, corruption and collusion with organised crime. His mindset consists of vulgarity, one-liners that won't survive a second of reflection, and a virulent hatred towards any form of critical thinking, public debate, any form of legality and the constitution. Most of the effort of his last two years of governement has been spent on creating ad-hoc laws to ensure his immunity from the 'communist judges that try to destroy him'. There's no economic crisis, be happy, Italy is doing much better than the rest of the world. It's gone so far that even one of his former allies (Fini, the president of parliament, with an extreme right-wing past) is getting sick of this and calling upon reason. And in fact the current situation is such that the great leader may find the carpet being pulled from under his feet any day now. His reaction is the standard one: buy some votes. Some members of parliament have been offered up to half a million euros to defect and support him (that's peanuts, his personal income is around 1M euro per day). Ciao, -- FA There are three of them, and Alleline.

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 01:08:01PM +0100, Philipp ??berbacher wrote: It is indeed a contest, a competition. In the USA, the relatively small group of people who have seen this coming (i.e. anti-WTO, anti-globalization protesters) have been calling it "the race to the bottom" for a few decades. The contest is quite simple: people "compete" for the largesse of wealthy corporations. We have to "compete" by cutting wages, eliminating taxes on the rich and/or corporations, decimating government services, "privatizing" everything, slashing regulations, and ceding more and more power to corrupt businesses. It is a mad, diabolical perversion of capitalism, operating in reverse, and turning Adam Smith upon his head: instead of businesses competing in order to provide better services and products to people, it is people competing in order to provide better servitude and slavery to businesses. Ingenious, actually, in its destructiveness, much like a well-written virus. For those of us who grew up at the beginning of this nightmare-- in the USA and UK under Reagan and Thatcher-- this is nothing new. To the rest of the world, we're sorry that this plague is spreading so rapidly and infecting you too. Welcome to our world. OK, that's enough politics for me. It deeply saddens me that the few remaining beacons of hope that I've held are now too flickering and darkening. -ken