The world according to Snafu - The triple dip

The media love sound bites and the latest one is a ‘triple dip recession’. As someone pointed out, if it were a triple dip ice cream it would be great, but for someone on a fixed income, it is not such good news. It is obvious from past recessions, that no one knows what to do about one when we have one and although politicians whose party has been in power during good times will claim it was their doing and parties in power during bad times get blamed for the recession, it is quite obvious to even the least politically aware that there is nothing whatsoever that the people in charge can do to make it better. Economic forces are like the weather, unpredictable and uncontrollable. They are the product of so many factors that no two economists can agree about any part of them.

They can of course make it worse. Mistakes like de-regulating the banks and so allowing huge unsupportable loans to be exchanged within the financial world being a good example. They also seemed to believe for years that covering a loan by taking out a bigger one was sound economics. Surprisingly this does actually work after a fashion, if you have sustained growth but it does not take much of a dip to turn this into an unending spiral of debt. The one thing that I find difficult to understand is why all these floundering people believe that it is possible for it to get better. They all talk of growth and how it is expected to rise/fall and so on as if growth is some magical force that must always become positive. In the past many civilisations have risen, become powerful economic forces and then sunk into oblivion, sometimes by force of arms but quite often just by losing trade to another part of the known world.
There is no guarantee that growth will continue to rise or indeed that it can. Growth anyway is not something that is infinitely sustainable, nothing in nature ever grows forever, it cannot. Everything has a finite limit on growth. If anything can keep on growing, it will eventually find a point where there is nothing left to sustain it, it has absorbed everything available.
Sharks have no limits on what size they can reach, but the bigger they become the more they need to eat and eventually they reach the point where they are so big they cannot catch enough food and they starve to death. So there are no super-sharks around.
In any closed system you need inputs and outputs, you cannot grow continuously or perpetual motion would be possible and it is not. So politicians and economists are all chasing something which is totally beyond their control and completely impossible to sustain forever.
It is well within historical precedent that our civilisation will not recover, but sink more and more into a depression that it will never recover from. I hope this is not the case, but there is nothing in history to say it won’t happen and there is no one in charge seemingly able to do anything useful, so welcome to the second Dark Age.
And remember,  no matter who  you vote for, the Government will always get in :)

The world according to Snafu - It wsn't me!

It wasn’t me, I wasn’t there, it was someone else.  I never did!

You would expect a child to respond this way and most of us when we grow up realise how silly we seem if we try to do this as an adult.  Sadly there are some adults who still cling to this patently transparent form of defence.  These people are either guilty felons or politicians, although from time to time they are one and the same thing.

This childish response is learned early, blame someone else or just cause enough doubt to cloud the issue.  In school being within a large group of other children, many children soon worked out that denial and confusion works well in deflecting the blame. 

Whenever a politician is caught red handed with something, they behave just like naughty children and a tired and much too familiar dialogue ensues often spread over several weeks and contains sentences like these.

‘I would never have said/done/suggested that.’

‘Well, taken out of context…’

‘Let’s look at this in context…’

‘It is not a part of my vocabulary/lifestyle.’

‘It was not in my interest.’

‘I did not know it was against the law/rules/charter.’

‘He/she is a personal friend.’

‘It was never discussed/mentioned.’

 ‘There was no email/letter/confidential report.’

‘I did not send that email/letter/confidential report.’

 ‘Well OK I did send it but you are taking it out of context’

And so on.

 Also the last ditch defence is to resign.  No doubt they don’t see this as running away.

During the recent scandals about WMDs and MP’s expenses in the UK, similar conversations were played out in many variations on the theme, as each new case arrived before the public gaze.  Recently the phone hacking scandal has produced the same response amongst similarly high up people.  Before that it was ‘cash for questions’ and before that it was ‘sleaze’ accepting gifts and trips to vastly expensive hotels around the jet-set world with ‘friends’.  It has recurred again and again right back to the Profumo Affair in 1963 and no doubt many more hidden in the mists of time and yet we vote for these arrogant people and then are dismayed because they do not behave as we naively expect. Why do the public support these people by voting for them? Even when disgraced, sometimes even jailed, they still pop up later in another role within the establishment. One of America’s most disgraced Presidents reappeared later as a foreign diplomat! And in the UK the same thing has occurred with less high profile people but it happens here and all over.  Discrepancies in their accounting, love life and dealings with other people that would cause instant dismissal in any normal job go un punished, so this denial response seems to work, but whatever happened to honour and integrity in our prominent people.

Anyway, if you are reading this I never wrote it, I am illiterate and I have never been able to use a computer, I was not even in the country at the time and I do not accept gifts.