Saturday 10 December 2011

THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO WAS WON ON THE PLAYING FIELDS OF ETON. SHAME ABOUT BRUSSELS.


The unelected prime minister of England
at the Euro jamboree.

If he wasn't such a contemptible bastard one might feel some sympathy for the wretched Cameron. No amount of his  public school posturing, his shiny-face conceit, his hands-in-pockets insousiance, his tongue-tied, unimaginative cliche stuttering could disguise the group body language of  all the other out-of-step so-called leaders -  at best indifference and at worst contempt. 

Up all night, he was, talking his arrogant, idler's jivetalk.  And they gave him what the Barbarians call the bums rush.  Not even Gordon Snot, in his unelected premiership, made such a dog's breakfast of things European as did  Cameron, marching from one dick-hanging-out embarrassment to another, bravefacing his incompetence;  it can't have been pleasant, even for an unprincipled dignity-bankrupt like him, squatting in Downing Street, thanks to the repulsive Nick Clegg and his band of shit-eating degenerates. 

Maybe if he'd won an election - instead of nicking one, like a proper Flashman - maybe then he might have made some progress.  Frau  Lardarse comes from a land of coaltions and reunifications and a filthy,   make-your-blood-run-cold  history which we don't talk about but she has the confidence of her own party, unlike our own, unloved Mr Fishface.

What you see is what you get.
Not very much.

Who knows how or  if the never-ending Euroshit crisis will end, how the speculating thieves and gangsters, sorry, wealth creators, can be placated;  if they're not driving up the prices of foodstuffs, energy and raw materials,  they're shorting entire nations, cheered on by a self-selecting political-media elite, the word elite being used advisedly,  they're all just filthy bastards, Brussels and MediaMinster, shitting, multilingually, in our faces.

L'entente discordiale.


Shakez-vous by ze 'and?
Vous etes joking, n'est ce pas, M'sieu ShinyFace/


Even so, Cameron is a uniquely contemptible bastard and his cold-shouldering by the dwarf pimp, Sarkozy, is a defining moment for him and his govament of spivs and carpetbaggers, defining as in regime change. Not that it matters  much.

24 comments:

Reginald said...

I wonder what he is "up to"?
This can not really have been in the script handed to him by those who are really in charge.

Dick the Prick said...

It is quite funny though. 35 years and the Veto has never been used? Whoa, whoa there. Doesn't matter to a commentator who used the veto but when the veto was used. Scotland...Scotland could do stuff.

There is too much government in Britain. Transport is shit. I think it's kinda lovely that he's not that clever and went native - fuck it, the veto man, the veto

jgm2 said...

As you know Mr I, I do not subscribe to this whole 'it's all the banks' fault' dose of global finger-pointing. I'm more of the opinion that, well, we've all played a part in this fucking debacle. Well, not me obviously - I'm far too sensible, but as a nation, or as an electorate we find ourselves, just as the Greeks, Italians, Irish and the entire EU/Euro adventure find themselves, in this economic clusterfuck, because of decisions that we, collectively, made.

We elected governments that promised the earth without any means of paying for it. We (collectively in the UK) allowed our economy to become nothing more than a pyramid Ponzi scheme perched on only the insanely increasing notional 'value' of our houses. We weren't unique in this idiocy. The Irish went for it in spades. And the yanks. And the Spanish. The Greeks have always been an economically illiterate bunch who are susceptible to being bought off with more borrowed money. And so on and so forth.

But these cheeky fucking Euro-cunts seeking to blame the failure of their ideological and financial experiment on 'the banks' who must therefore be punished to the tune of 40bn quid a year. 28bn of which is to come from the UK. To prop up the Greeks and Italians. Whose economy is fucked (as is ours) not 'cos of any banking 'crisis' but because their respective governments, with the full support of their imbecile electorates, borrowed more money than they could hope to pay back. Oh do fuck off Merkozy.

I'm with Cameron on this one. Why should the UK pay the Euro-zone 28bn quid a year to solve their fuck-up? The only reservation I have is that Cameron is only faking this bust-up or will capitulate and send the Greeks and Italians 28bn quid a year of our cash so they can continue in their fantasy economic wonderland for another few years.

Isolated in Europe?

About fucking time.

mongoose said...

It is true that he is a graceless, charmless fucker whom I would have chained to a rock on Dartmoor, and given his upbringing and advantages, you would have hoped he could at least manage to be a polished turd. It is the shameless lying and cheating that duzmyeadin. Why do we let them get away with it?

Though this time there was not that much that he could have done differently. Our glorious leaders in Europe know that they must save the Euro or be politically dead by dawn the next day. The Euro, of course, cannot be saved. The world knows this. (My cat knows this and he has been dead a decade.) So the only way to save themselves and their careers is to have a bad boy in the corner to blame. "Britain killed the Euro" will be the cry. But, hey, who cares? There'll be no dosh to build Panzers for a couple of generations. Jeez, they'll be eating straw for at least one.

If anything, Cameron could have gone further. My friends and colleagues, the Euro was a doomed project of conceit from the start. Currencies don't make countries, dullards; countries make currencies. We in Britain told you so and we didn't join your dumb absurdity. Don't get me wrong. It is at first sight, a good idea but a child would reject it on grounds of undoafuckingbility. Galway and Greece are different aren't they? Even the stratospherically stupid Gordon McDoom knew this. So you have only yourselves to blame - you, the political masters - are to blame. The whole pig-headed, undemocratic, I-know-best-shower-of-cunts that you are have beggared your nations and your children's nations too. BTW a tax on piano-wire might raise a good few quid these coming months. Oh sorry, the direct answer to your question is "Not a fucking chance of it, Angela, but it was a good try." Now fuck off home and take the dwarf with thee.

jgm2 said...

"Britain killed the Euro" will be the cry.

Indeed. Just as when the borrowing had to stop the Maximum Imbecile pointed the finger at the banks. A lie that has gone global so it's entirely credible we'll see the UK blamed for the Greeks and Italians and Micks pissing away their future when the good times rolled. Aye, all our fault. If only we'd bunged 'em another 28bn quid a year it would all have been okay. Till the next time.

I don't know if the Euro's finished though. If they want to save it I reckon they'll have no option but to print them just as the Maximum Imbecile painted himself and the UK into a corner which left no option but to print 200bn quid. And counting.

Fine. Print them. But don't come looking to us to gift you 28bn quid a year just so you can avoid coming to terms with the reality of your imbecile decisions. We have had to put up with 5% inflation for the last three years as we try to borrow and print our way out of this idiocy. Why would the UK give you cash to save your blushes and maintain the value of your currency? Really?

As others have pointed out - where were these good European partners committed to the establishment of the Euro on Black Wednesday - as the UK tried to maintain the value of its currency for possible inclusion in the Euro-dream? Buying sterling?

Were they fuck.

What goes around comes around Merkozy.

call me ishmael said...

Well, I'm liberal but to a degree and I think that any organisation that can employ Leon Brittan, Neil and Glenys Kinnock AND Peter Mandelstein just has to be an instrument of Satan, that the EU, like the US and Russia is shit, from top to bottom.( How comes it that we call Russian mobsters "Oligarchs", how did that happen, why do we allow ghastly, thieving shits who have plundered their former republic's wealth to swagger around London and nobody throws stones at them? Just a thought.) I also think that, poxed-up, rotten and stupid, these lousy fuckers, the whole shower, Granny laVache, the dwarf, Lardarse, the smirking Swede and a clutch of Latvian bandits, in attempting to prolong and expand an unworkable, fantasy currency, reveal their less than infantile understanding of economics or anything else for that matter - see mongoose's cat, above.

It does not follow, however, that CallHimDave is a lone, wise monkey or that he is protecting anyone from anything, bullying, that's his game. And smarming. Maybe the vipers in his own bosom'll now strike and rid us of his horseshit. If they don't then fuck me Jesus from here unto Christma, sick and disabled opeople are gonna pay with their asses for his humuliation - don't forge that his toad, the quiet man, is turning up the volume on those generationally-dispossessed-by-Thatcher and her gang of greedy spivs.

I probably agreed with you, mr jgm23, before you agreed with yourself, about the borrowathon; it's just that I think that the major perps, the lenders, instead of wanking each other off down the road to Eldorado, should, where they have clearly committed serious crtiminal frauds, get some stick, even some piano wire - not so's that we can all get back to the Growth Illusion, but so's we don't, fuck no.

mongoose said...

It is the stupidity that is mind-wrecking. I am no economics genius but even I knew from the first day that the Euro was fucked. Jeez, they couldn't make the ERM work. So putting more sticky tape on it and going la-la-la-can't-hear-you wasn't going to get the gig to fly. It's just plain fucking stupid. We need to get out there to the country club and the golf course, carry the New York Times even. Shoot a few holes and blow their minds.

The bastards are crazy. You know when you were little and you thought if you tried hard enough, one day you'd be able to drive a cricket ball along the ground like a proper batsman? Never happened. Or that girl who actually stood the fuck up and left the room to get away from you? That didn't fucking get sorted either. It is just mad to carry on with this bollocks when everyone knows it is done. It is going to cost Germany zillions, and they are going to stop paying one day not very far away. And then we will see some serious shit hitting the EU fan.

I accept btw, mr jgm2, that something called the Euro will probably stagger on. It will not be a Eurozone-wide currency though. The peasants will be ejected. We will have a Euro-mark in all but name. But if Italy goes, Spain will follow and then all bets are off. The longer they pretend, the more likely is a complete collapse.

Mike said...

I prefer my meetings/summits, whatever, Korean style. Throw a few punches, show you mean it. Even the brave Eyties have a go.

jgm2 said...

The danger of shrugging our shoulders and just letting the UK become the whipping boy for the failure of the Euro-dream is that these lies - unchallenged - become truths. Just as the big lie about it all being 'the banks' fault has diverted attention away from actually fixing the problem of out-of-control government spending so we, in the UK, will find ourselves hated by Greeks and Italians (and French and Germans and the rest of 'em) for 'causing' their economic meltdown. Why, if only we'd bunged 'em 28bn quid year they might have lasted another six months before they had to go scratching around for another scapegoat for their inevitable failure. Which again would be of little consequence except that folk come to believe the lies. There are no end of folk in the UK who now actively hate the banks. Who blame every redundancy on 'the banks'. The 'Tory' bankers. The cynical diversion of blame being used as just another political tool by the wicked and malicious Brown.

I hesitate to draw parallels with 'the Jews' of 1936 Germany but I think I must. The UK is being set up as an object of universal hatred by the Euro-clowns.

So now we're seeing another unintended consequence of the great Brownian lie of blaming the banks. If he'd 'fessed up back in 2007/8 that the UK recession was due to his reckless economic policy then other countries would have to accept that their economic situation was a result of their own reckless economic policy. But being a gutless, lying piece of shit he had to blame some other fucker. Any other fucker. By targeting one of the UK's major industries he gave Johnny Foreigner all the excuse he needed to target the UK's major earner too. Gratefully received.

Now you may think that regardless of the Maximum Imbecile's disastrous economic policy the banks didn't have to go along with the madness. And you're right. Their bosses, shareholders etc etc are as culpable in their own way as Brown is for putting temptation in their way. They didn't have to yield to it. The death of their careers and the virtual wiping out of their shareholders has hopefully taught banks a lesson already but if you want a few of the head honchos to swing to drive home the point then fine. Just so long as they're strung up along with Blair, Brown, Balls, Mandelson, the rest of the Labour MPs, Mervyn King and the so-called-economists that stood and clapped as the UK was destroyed on their watch.

Mike said...

Mr jgm2: are people really that stupid that they could believe their 2-up/2-down was worth 500k and go out then and borrow and buy a time-share in Lanzarotte, and on the basis of those valuations (forgetting the mortgages), believing they are millionaires, then borrow to get a buy-to-let in Newcastle, and somehow convince themselves it was all Kosher?

Well if they are then I guess they will believe anything. If you suspend belief, then everyone else is to blame.

That this was allowed to happen was a mistake of banks and their supervision.

But that's entirely separate from Govts disasterous borrowing record and management of public services particularly in the UK.

Dick the Prick said...

The numbers are just truly staggering. I was doing my economics A Level when George Soros booted us out of the ERM back in 1992 and the UK spent £7 billion and Soros I think pocketed about £1 billion in an afternoon. Shocking figures, shocking ......roll on 20 years and we're suddenly talking trillions. No point to make, just saying.

jgm2 said...

Mr jgm2: are people really that stupid that they could believe their 2-up/2-down was worth 500k and go out then and borrow and buy a time-share in Lanzarotte, and on the basis of those valuations (forgetting the mortgages), believing they are millionaires, then borrow to get a buy-to-let in Newcastle, and somehow convince themselves it was all Kosher?

Yes Mike. They really are that stupid and arrogant. And they really do believe it's all somebody else's fault that we can't just get back to that 'miracle economy' where they were rich and clever.

Even now all the talk is of 'getting lending going again'. So that these eejits can get back on the perpetual borrowing = wealth bandwagon. And no end of politicians egging them on. Aye, you're right - that was a normal state of affairs which we must reinstate as quickly as possible. The only reason we can't is the bastard banks who have lent too much money to some other eejits (but not you obviously) who can't afford to pay it back. If only the banks had been more discerning about the people they'd lent hundreds of thousand to for nothing more than a two-bed flat in Newcastle - but not your two-bed flat in Newcastle obviously - your two-bed flat in Newcastle is worth 500K. But not the fool who bought the two-bed flat next door who is not as financially sophisticate as what you are.

If the bank hadn't foolishly lent him 500K which he can't pay back then yours would be worth 700K by now.

Yes. They really are that stupid. And there really are millions if not tens of millions of folk in the UK who really are that stupid. Look how they vote. Listen to who they blame. Listen to the political rhetoric pandering to such idiocy.

a young Anglo-Irish catholic said...

A lesson in real life, here in Ruin, from Mike and JGM2.

I just fear the impact when all this shit hits the fan.

Still, as EdMililisp and Pantsdown fill the airwaves with talk of being isolated, I take great comfort at the sheer cunt-slap that is heading towards the left when the Euro brings down the UK economy next year.

Can't blame the banks then, though they'll try.

mongoose said...

The wizard wheeze was the expansion of credit. 39% APR will cover a lot of sins. This distorted the real time-value of money. Because, of course, that credit money isn't real money. For the real reason for our state of disaster you need to look no further than wonga.com or "pay day loans". This is just the tallyman with a fucking great smirk on his thieving face. Cunthood and stealing off poor people. Yes, of course it is daft of them to do it but it's an X-Factor and iPod world. Consumerism and credit are the twin pillars of Ruin's temple.

When I was little there was no such thing as a credit card or a store card and you could get a mortgage of two-and-a-half times your joint income. Our first was £62k against joint incomes of about £30k and it was still a shedload of money every month. My residual mortgage now is what first time buyers pay for a one room "studio" flat in this town. It's over a hundred grand for effectively a fucking bedsit. It is bonkers. "But hell, dad, I owe £40k on my college loan and this is a house!"

jgm2 said...

'For the real reason for our state of disaster you need to look no further than wonga.com or "pay day loans"

Mr Mongoose - I'd say they are a symptom rather than the cause. The cause being, as you say, that this is a consumer generation. Their very existence verified by the amount of i-Shit or general shit about the house. My missus has belatedly discovered i-Shit and is getting herself one of them i-Pad2 things. It wouldn't be so bad but she already has an i-Pad. But the new one has a camera see. A six-hundred quid camera. We already have a fucking digital camera. In fact we've two or three of the fuckers. My appeals to reason were all to no avail. Gotta have one. Lovely and sleek and smooth they are see? Should have just bought herself a vibrator if that's what she wanted. It would have been a lot cheaper. Another thousand pounds at least on discretionary electrical spend. 'Cos it's Christmas. She needs to go back to work if only because it'll cut down the amount of time she has to go shopping.

All this idiocy repeated several million-fold around the UK. But at least we have cash in the bank. Most of that several million will have a mortgage for 100K or more as well. Yee-hah! Just borrow another 1000 quid and send the whole fucking lot to China.

It's mass insanity.

The sooner the UK and the EU goes bust the better. Time for folk to sober up.

mongoose said...

I don't disagree with that, mr jgm2. What I meant was that the fact that such a thing can exist at all is a sure sign that a great part of the world does not understand what money is. Wonga's APR this evening is 4214%!! For fuck's sake, who in this world could ever decide to borrow a single pound at such a rate? Surely they can only have a sum total of zero customers? No, the iPads and plasma tellies of many a house this Christmas will be Wonga-financed millstones. I have lived too long.

call me ishmael said...

It's all, messrs jg & mike, like blamimg the junky without blaming the pusher, only worse; it is a shortsightedness bith punitive and counter productive.

I mind rthe shit Obama saying that he would help worthy borrowers but not poor niggertrash who had fallen victim to usurious flimflam men -or over-reached their natural position.

I will have no truck whatsoever with the idea that Mediaminster's decade of peddling cheap money, of horseshitting homeowners whilst fellating money is not, actually, blameworthy to the Nth degree. And nor the fuck should you. You are one step aweay, with all this prole-bashing, from IanDuncanSmithism, these disabled bastards, it's all, you know, really their own fault and to be kind to them we must kick away their sticks. It's cuntish talk, that.

A young Anglo-Irish catholic said...

The bootstrappers, Mr I, they assemble here.

mongoose said...

And there he was that mongoose twat, educated out of his wits, as informed as anyone needs to be about matters financial and his motor insurance renewal crossed his desk. "Pay by instalments?" Yes, I do do that, don't I? More convenient. Where's the APR on that... 26.6 the fuck percent. Theft. Pure and simple theft. Cunts. I may sack them on principle.

Agatha said...

Gosh - 19 comments and rising! And everyone has a take on the Disaster - at least there is consensus on the fact that there's a Disaster. Even if it isn't defined and we don't know who to blame. Thank god (or the Higgs-Bosun particle) for Mr. Ishmael, who remains absolutely sound and rock solid on not blaming the victims. I remember a Crown Court Judge some thirty years ago sentencing the buggerer of a child prostitute. He told the buggerer that it was no defense or mitigation that the child rentboy was so accustomed to anal penetration that his rectum dilated to receive male members of shocking dimensions - the child was entitled to be protected by adults and not further abused by them. Same here. Lets take it for granted that people are stupid. Of course we are, we're people, it goes with the territory. But that doesn't make it right that clever, cunning abusers should exploit our stupidity. We have laws about exploitation, but the laws don't cover the sort of financial exploitation discussed here. Massive interest rates? Jolly adverts featuring Carol and her cronies? Happy people pawning their few possessions to buy food? All part of the unregulated financial sector that is supposed to make Britain so successful. The mass of the population in the UK is despised and exploited, kept quiet with Big TVs and heroin. Time for the barricades. Nurses blame their patients for getting ill (they will persist in smoking, drinking and eating fish and chips. Economists blame people for being stupid and wanting more than they have. Mr. Ishmael, please continue your campaign against this business of blaming the victim. Let's try to protect the victim. I know a single mother with a 5 yr old son, tiny because he was born prematurely, whose anxiety about her son's lack of confidence, stature and ability to protect himself against school bullies, led her to pay all her savings of one thousand pounds in a joining fee to a Martial Arts Centre, followed by monthly payments of £120 per month, because the fast talking "entrepreneur" proprietor of the establishment convinced her that it would be best for her son. Should we blame her for her worried gullibility? Or the entrepreneur, who, to my way of thinking, deserves a prison sentence. But Britain needs more entrepreneurs, apparently.

jgm2 said...

@Agatha.

Carol Vorderman - I would jail in a heartbeat. She's got a maths degree so she knows the reality of what she's pushing. She's not some glib, fuckwitted arts graduate who's delighted to get a bit-part as a talking hedgehog in an ad. But then she goes ahead and does it anyway for a few extra quid. 'Go on stupid people, borrow some more money and make yourself happy, it's me Carol Vorderman, the brainy maths bird off Countdown - you can trust me'.

The problem is though, Agatha, at what point can we expect adults - quite alarmingly high percentages of adults if polls are to be believed - to start actually acting like adults. Making adult decisions? Of course the example you give of the poor woman shelling out that kind of money for Kung-Fu lessons is a disgrace but I would hope that in a society where adults were used to making adult decisions then such abuses of trust would be few and far between. Simply because we'd all be acting like, well, adults so such scamsters and shysters would simply go out of business (if not be outright jailed). But we seem to be increasingly growing up in a fucking child-like wonderland where grown men will spend hours of an evening playing on their fucking X-Boxes. And not just the odd man-child. But great swathes of the adult population. We are increasingly infantilised. Yeah, yeah, we can blame marketing, big business, big government, the 'care' industry, whatever but we need our adults to start behaving like adults.

Is that really too much to ask? Actually I think I've answered my own question. It clearly is too much to ask.

call me ishmael said...

It is the constant counterpoint
in stanislavia and Ishmaelie - that Ruin, however vile, however obvious, is so warmly welcomed by his victims.

I remember hearing lawyerbastard Johnnie Cochrane, of OJ fame, saying that he would always do anything he could for a defendant, anything, for the State had limitless resources at its diksposal, the better to jail or execute him - the accused's, however wealthy he was, were finite. I was refreshed to hear a lawyer so clearly state that he was not a member of some filthy conspiracy between cops and judges and lawyers, determined to keep the rest of us in line. I never, incidentally, had any problem with the OJ verdict; juries reach odd verdicts and if you did a US balance sheet of innocent men fried and guilty men freed it, well, it wouldn't balance.

Given that we live in an age of extremely sophisticated organs of mass communication, enabled and regulated by the state and driven by the desructive tenets of growth and consumerism,; given, also, that we are governed - after a four-year festival of competitive promising - by greedy charlatans all in hock to commercial interests and finally, given that former arbiters and exemplars of decent behaviour - the church and the monarchy - are now perceived, rightly, as filthy, workshy degenerates - noncing monsignors, corrupt prelates and idle, vicious princes, where, mr jgm2, should Everyman seek guidance and example?


continues......

call me ishmael said...

continued....

I mentioned the Dowlers a while back, grubby, even in grief, grubby and grasping and vulgar, clutching at a fortune from the man they believed their tormentor, it makes the blood run cold. But that, like the hideous McCanns, is just one of Ruin's punctuation marks, like ms agatha's predatory shiteater, these are the seeds we have sewn.

The Hire Purchase Act of whenever it was, the 'sixties, and then the creditcard explosion; these were engineered to aid the phantom of Growth and the delusion that you could live now and pay later, as we are.

That millions of our fellows have merely done exactly as they were told to do by a vast complexity of powers ranged against them --- is that so surprising?

A few years back I received a daily blizzard of loan and creditcard application forms through the letterbox, my details, filched, presumably, from some fucking database, the better for me to contribute to the whitegoodstrash bonanza, for me to join the Clarkson pilgrimage to motoring Mecca, the worthless, repulsive, fat cunt.

I resisted, mr jgm2 and mr mike, but I well understand how many were unable so to do.

No use, other than for sport, to blame govament, itself owned, body and soul by Usury; no use to blame skymadeupnewsandfilth, run, as we see, by criminal misfits and sociopaths, bullies, slags and whores - how, in the name of Christ, can one industry produce Kelvin McKenzie ANdD Piers Morgan AND Toilets Maguire? - and no use, really to blame those among us who have been infected by the Ruin's Plague. Is it really too much to ask that people pull themselves together, as, when they do, as in the various splintered Occupy movements, they too, are chastised, for lack of cohesion, as though they should spring forth with a ready-formed anti-Ruination Manifesto,as though they were the Coca fucking Cola Corporation?

Meantime, the biggest selling franchise in entertainment history, Call of Duty, has, in a few days, grossed gigatrillions of bucks, countless victims of Ruin, now squander their brief lives playing a computer game in which they can kill or maim limitless numbers of insurgents/terrorists/niggers, maybe even wimmen, too.

Ruin, thy name is economic growth.

No campaigns here, by the way, ms agatha, among we few; it's just for myself and my friends my stories are sung.

Agatha said...

Is it too much to ask that adults take adult decisions?

Now, that's an interesting question, Mr. jgm2. The word "adult" now seems to be synonymous with pornography, as in "adult film". How is adulthood defined? When you can tell right from wrong? The age of criminal responsibility varies widely: ten years old in Wales, Northern Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, 7 in Switzerland, Nigeria, South Africa, 12 in Scotland,16 in Spain and Poland and 18 in Belgium and most American states. The nervous system is not completely myelorised until age 19 or so - myelin is the substance that sheaths nerves and an absence of it reduces the ability in the individual to understand the consequences of actions. Does puberty define adult status? In our society, not so, as we protect children under the age of 16 from engaging in sexual activity irrespective of their pubertal status. Voting age? Killing age? This business of defining adulthood is very difficult indeed. Defining capacity to make decisions is even trickier. The concept of dividing our population into children, who need to be cared for, and adults, who must care for themselves and resist all of capitalism's blandishments to behave foolishly and self-destructedly as long as it puts money into someone's pockets; is misconceived. Intelligence, emotional intelligence, the ability to forsee the consequences that flow from actions, resilience, gullibility, and mental health vary enormously between individuals. And there is no point in blaming individuals for their genetic inheritance and environmental circumstances, any more than there is in blaming someone for the colour of their eyes.(although that never stopped the racists)
Throw into the mix the contempt for maturity and older age espoused by our society, and the huge shop window of desirable consumer goods provided by Big TV and can anyone be surprised that people want to be young, spontaneous, physically attractive, own things, even to the point of bankruptcy. Which, it turns out, isn't that bad after all.
I went to University at a time, my teachers told me, when only 5% of the population were accepted into a University. Now around 50% of young people expect to go to what they call Uni. Does this mean that, as a nation, we are getting cleverer? The evidence doesn't seem to support that hypothesis.