John Linton .....are those times about to be repeated in the current generation of the human species?
Personally I blame the current parlous state of so many countries around the world on the internet and the ability for so many people to steal other people's property more easily as causing the current slide into oblivion of at least the 'western world'. I mentioned a day or so ago that I was surprised to be told that many candidates faked their qualifications in their resumes when applying for engineering positions at Exetel. As some who has read 'creative' resumes for several decades now I am aware of candidates desires to make their resumes look as good as possible and often exaggerate their achievements but I have never seen people out right lie about the degrees they have achieved - and to an extent where it is quite blatant. It implies that the morals and ethics standards of "university graduates" have fallen dramatically over the past few years and you have to ask yourself why that might be?
The countries of Europe are plunging into the abyss of total financial collapse, at least that is the only conclusion you can reach after reading the financial media of the EU over the past few years. Why has this happened? Again the only conclusion you can reach, based on the column inches, is that 60 years of socialism has removed the desire for many Europeans to actually do any work at all to produce the money required to keep them alive in the luxury they have come to believe that they deserve. The dumber 'citizens' now believe that a 'pension' from the cradle to the grave is a perfectly reasonable way of living and the smarter believe that ripping off all and sundry in banking or other service industries with retirement by 30 is a perfectly acceptable contribution to the societies they live in.
There is the remainder of responsible people building Mercedes and BMWs but even they are beginning to drift into making weaponry to allow the rest of the world's countries to more effectively kill each other in their own pursuit of wealth without work. Farmers are more than happy to be paid not to grow crops or produce dairy products and those that do bother any more are using cruelty unseen outside German concentration camps of the second world war to deliver protein in ways that would have caused their arrest and incarceration not long ago as cruel monsters. That's before many of these EU, and other, countries around the world, have turned the clocks back to the middle ages and allowed the crazier religions to again begin to dominate their societies with the insanest of 'Christian' cults in the US and the woman hating cults of the African deserts trying to turn France and the other countries that have 'welcomed them' back a thousand years in time.
I am not sure which is worse - religion or socialism - in terms of destroying the reasonableness and productivity that allows people to live enjoyable lives but when, as in today's France, you have both then any country is totally screwed....and, as goes France, so goes mainland Europe (the UK has found its own, different, ways to ruin one of the most beautiful countries on the globe's surface). There's not even a chance of a good war to restore some sort of sanity any more which, apart from the inevitable loss of life, is regrettable because at least a good war forced people to remember that all individuals had to contribute to the society they lived in and what happens if they didn't.
Thank goodness we have a mining industry that prevents most Australians from having to do any work to live in the luxury that is afforded them - but what happens when the Europeans and Americans have no money to buy Chinese exports? Never mind - Centrelink will continue to pay out....won't it?
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PS: while predictable it is still disappointing:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-12-19/att-tmobile-merger/52076342/1