My comment was rather egocentric in nature. Few countries have the means to upset the balance of power within the EU and a (vote for) Brexit might just be the least horrific way of poking the EU. Next down the line would be a Le Pen-administration in France, which most people would rather avoid. Or some unforseen poltical kerfuffle in Italy.

Bad options, all of them. But austerity will lead to even worse outcomes, so German hegemony must be curbed and broken -- or the EU as a whole must be reduced to countries whose economies work the same parasitic way.

The best of all options, of course, would be political change in Germany, away from this anal fixation on austerity. But looking at our parliament, I see 630 seats, 566 of which belong to parties in support of austerity. So no, not gonna happen.

My hopes, as always, are on the French people. Recent actions have made me hopeful that they will once again come to our rescue.

I didn't see how they're getting 'resourceful', or really how they're doing anything about it. Importing bees is nothing new, and it's not a solution. CCD is happening in Europe as well.
At least they FINALLY determined that it is at least partially the neonicotinoid pesticides that are causing the bulk of the problem, and combined with numerous parasites, hives don't stand a chance. Now they need to take some action based on that finding or we'll end up like China where people must pollinate their fruit and vegetables by hand with tiny brushes because the bees are gone.

Well, since most sci-fi says the invaders are coming for our water, they start from a huge mistake. If aliens wanted water, they would certainly harvest the rings of Saturn first...they're nearly pure water, they're already in space, and there's no violent species to eradicate before you can have them.

That said, I think any galactic travelers would have to be planetary parasites to exist. With inter system travel taking tens-thousands of years, replenishing ship stores at every opportunity would be a necessity.

So people ought to keep cows, evolutionary monuments to human carnivory and lacto-parasitism, in a state of captivity and dependence, purely for their amusement?

Vegans are astonishing.

Your video, Three Giant Parasites Explode Out Of Zombie Praying Mantis, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

The best evidence you have for your claims (as I see it) is anecdotal at best.
3rd world countries 1) are not at all vegetarian and 2) don't get most cancers Westerners do largely because they don't eat processed foods or expose themselves to carcinogenic chemicals constantly....we do.
Again, NEVER get your science from the internet.

"Pro-life" is by definition "anti-choice".

If you're really pro-planet, a MUCH better way to go about it is try to get people to have fewer children. That will make exponentially more difference than some people eating fewer animals. In fact, if past human behavior is a guide, if we all stop eating animals, animals will cease to exist for the most part, so that's not helpful to them at all.

Again, fewer people is the proper answer, not forcefully change biologically engrained behavior. I made that choice, so I can eat all the animals I ever possibly can and I've done more for the planet and it's animals with that single action than 1000 vegans with vegan children...or more positive difference than one vegan with children, depending on how you want to look at it.

As a living being, I'm standing up for all living beings who certainly object to your choice to breed, both the voiceless and those with voice, and saying stop making choices that negatively impact us all, like having more children and grandchildren. If enough people would do that, eating meat won't be an ecological issue. ;-)

I didn't watch the videos, I don't get my science from the internet. I read scientific publications that contain peer reviewed science papers, and I've never seen one that said ALL the nutrients found in meat could be replaced with vegetable nutrients easily, simply, viably, or without excessive expense.
Also, it ignores that fact that most produce available in the first world comes with a huge carbon footprint and massive ecological damage because of the production methods, so it's not the 'clean' trade off you seem to assume.

Small family farms were plenty to meet demand for all of human history until about the last 50 years. Quit having kids, and it will be enough again and we can stop abusing animals and the eco system just to make enough food for humans.

A short, good life is preferable to no life at all.

Nope. I should have scheduled the one in that picture that's mine to end his life at least a year earlier, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. NOT doing it was immoral. If someone had been willing to eat him, I would be all for it. If someone wants to eat me, go for it...I suggest slow smoking and a molasses based BBQ sauce. Eating my dog would be ecologically sound, as opposed to the cremation we ended up with, or burial, being the only other option available.
If I raised dogs for food, I would not think twice about ending their life in their prime. That would be the reason they existed in the first place, and without that reason they would never get that chance.

Again, milk cows only exist because someone wanted to partner with them to benefit both. Without that symbiosis, they would not get the opportunity to exist at all. IMO, existence is preferable to no existence. Yes, they need to get pregnant at least once, but as I understand it, that's it so long as you keep up with milking them. Veal, now there I'll totally agree with you that IT'S abuse.

Animals are not people. They do not usually have the same need for freedom, and those that do have that need were never domesticated. It is not immoral to form a symbiosis with another species as long as you both benefit in some way, otherwise you're just a parasite.

? Taste, as in how animals taste? BS, that's not all. That's a component, sure, but there's incredibly more to it than that.

I prefer to give animals a reason to exist, knowing that without that human centric reason, they simply won't get the chance, but I do my best to purchase animal products that are created with the least distress and best conditions for the animals in question...granted that's not always possible to know.

Trust me, I've tried vegetarian 'meats', I know the difference, and absolutely don't prefer vegan fare, or vegetarian fare that attempts to emulate meat. If I want meat, I'll eat meat. You'll get my butter only by prying it from my cold, dead hands. ;-)

I don't think taste is quite as simple as you imply. Yes, there is a component of 'addiction' to certain foods, especially sugar rich foods.
There's no such thing as vegan cheese or chocolate, you mean tofu and carob...and I agree, they both suck.

Sorry, that's simply wrong. A poor eating vegan can certainly negatively impact the planet with their food choices. It's easy. Oreos for instance, are most certainly made with ecologically damaging factory farm methods creating the ingredients...well, those methods and chemists. I don't know off hand the carbon footprint and ecological impact of an oreo, but it's not "none".

A foetus is a living entity. You'll be going down a fairly preposterous set of arguments that go against all of our understanding of life if you try to maintain that it isn't a living entity. It is in many ways a parasite that has latched onto the mother's body and is trying to suck nutrients from it long enough to be able to be born. The foetus releases hormones to fight against the mother's immune system to prevent the mother's body from rejecting this invasion by such a vastly different genetic entity. At least, that's one way to look at it. There are many others that are correct. None of those suggest that the foetus isn't a living entity.

It is somewhat true that the foetus is part of the mother's body. Her body certainly envelopes the foetus' and the foetus couldn't live without it.

To say that it's her choice whether to terminate is clearly not true. The state has permitted women to make that decision in some places around the world, in some periods of time. It certainly isn't an inalienable right as you seem to be suggesting. It's a fight that women have had and continue to have in order to be able to express control over the bodies and lives. A simple expression of what you think should be the law isn't an argument for why the law should be that way.

@greatgooglymoogly

Thanks for taking the time to watch it.

Like I said in my previous comment, this talk needs to take a lot of shortcuts, otherwise its length would surpass anyone's attention span.

So, point by point.

By "balanced budget", I suppose you refer to the federal budget. A balanced budget is not neccessarily a bad thing, but it is undesirable in most case. The key reason is sectoral balances. The economy can divided into three sectors: public, private, foreign. Since one person's spending is another person's income, the sum of all spending and income of these three sectors is zero by definition.

More precisely: if the public sector runs a surplus and the private sector runs a surplus, the foreign sector needs to run a deficit of a corresponding size.

Two examples:
- the government runs a balanced budget, no surplus, no deficit
- the private sector runs a surplus (savings) of 2% of GDP
- the foreign sector must, by definition, run a deficit of 2% of GDP (your country runs a current account surplus of 2% of GDP)

- the government runs a deficit of 2% of GDP
- the foreign sector runs a surplus of 3% (your current account deficit of 3%)
- your private sector must, by definition, run a deficit of 1% of GDP, aka burn through savings or run up debt

If you intend to allow the private sector to net save, you need to run either a current account surplus or a public sector deficit, or both. Since we don't export goods to Mars just yet, not all countries can run current account surpluses, so you need to run a public sector deficit if you want your private sector to net save. No two ways about it.

Germany runs a balanced public budget, sort of, and its private sector net saves. But that comes at the cost of a current account surplus to the tune of €250B. That's 250 billion Euros worth of debt other countries have to accumulate so that both the private and public sector in Germany can avoid deficits. Parasitic is what I'd call this behaviour, and I'm German.

If you feel ambitious, you could try to have both surplus and deficit within the private sector by allowing households to net save while "forcing" corporations to run the corresponding deficits. But to any politician trying that, I'd advise to avoid air travel.

As for the "devaluation of the currency", see my previous comment.

Also, she didn't use real numbers, because a) the talk is short and numbers kill people's attention rather quickly, and b) it's a policy decision to use debt to finance a deficit. One might just as well monetise it, like I explained in my previous comment.

Helicopter money would be quite helpful these days, actually. Even monetarists like AEP say so. If fiscal policy is off the table (deficit hawkery), what else are you left with...

As for your question related to the Fed, let me quote Eric Tymoigne on why MMT views both central bank and Treasury as part of the consolidated government:

"MMT authors tend to like to work with a consolidated government because they see it as an effective strategy for policy purpose (see next section), but also because the unconsolidated case just hides under layers of institutional complexity the main point: one way or another the Fed finances the Treasury, always. This monetary financing is not an option and is not by itself inflationary."

MMT principle: the central bank needs to be under democratic control, aka be part of government. The Fed in particular can pride itself on its independance all it wants, it still cannot fulfill any of its goals without the Treasury's help. It cannot diverge from government policies too long. Unlike the ECB, which is a nightmare in its construction.

Anyway, what does he mean by "one way or another the Fed finances the Treasury, always"? Well, the simple case is debt monetisation, direct financing. However, the Fed also participates by ensuring that Primary Dealers have enough reserves to make a reasonable bid on treasuries. The Fed makes sure that auctions of treasuries will always succeed. Always. Either by providing reserves to ensure buyers can afford the treasuries, by replacing maturing treasuries or buying them outright. No chance whatsoever for bond vigilantes. Betting against treasuries is pointless, you will always lose.

But what about taxation as a means to finance the Treasury? Well, the video's Monopoly example illustrated quite nicely, you cannot collect taxes until you have spent currency into circulation. Spending comes before taxation, it does not depend on it. Until reserves are injected into the banking system, either by the Fed through asset purchases or the Treasury through spending, taxes cannot be paid. Again, monetary financing is not optional. If the Treasury borrows money from the public, it borrows back money it previously spent.

Yes, I ignored the distribution of wealth, taxation, the fixation on growth and a million other things. That's a different discussion.

The article linked above mentions Röpke and Eucken as champions of free market capitalism, so to speak. Ironically, Bernie Sanders is quite in line with many of Walter Eucken's core ideas. For instance, Eucken declared legal responsibility to be an absolute necessity for competition within a market economy. Meaning that under Eucken's notion of capitalism, US prisons would be filled to the brim with white collar criminals from Wall Street and just about every multinational corporation, including Volkswagen.

Ludwig Erhard, credited by many to be the main figure behind the German "Wirtschaftswunder" (nothing wonderous about it), postulated real wage growth in line with productivity and target inflation as an imperative for a working social market economy. Again, very much in line with Bernie Sanders. Maybe even to the left of Sanders. A 5% increase in productivity and a target inflation of 2% requires a wage increase of 7%, otherwise your economy will starve itself of the demand it requires to absorb its increased production. You can steal it from foreign countries, like Germany's been doing for more than a decade now, but that kind of parasitic behaviour is generally frowned upon. Minimum wage in the US according to Erhard would be what now, $25-$30? So much for Sanders' $15...

Sennholz further mentions the CDU as a counterweight to the SPD. Well, the CDU's "Ahlener Programm" in 1947 declared that both marxism and capitalism failed the German people. In fact, it put significant blame for Germany's descent into fascism at the feet of the capitalistic system and called for a complete restart with focus NOT on the pursuit of profit and power, but the well-being of the people. They called for socialism with Christian responsibility, later watered down and known as social market economy or Rhine capitalism.

As for the economic policies conducted by the occupation forces: German industry, and large corporations in particular, were shackled for the role they played during the war. If you work tens of thousands of slaves to their death, you lose your right to... well, anything. If they had stripped IG Farben, Krupp and the likes down to the very bone, nobody could have complained. No economic liberties for the suppliers behind a genocide.

Next in line, the comparison with Germany's European neighbours. Sennholz wrote that piece in '55, so you can't really blame him for it. Italy had more growth from '58 onwards, France had more growth than its devastated neighbour from '62 onwards. The third Axis power, Japan, had significantly more growth from '58 onwards.

Why did some European and Asian countries grew much more rapidly than the US? Fair Deal? Nope, Bretton-Woods. Semi-fixed exchange rates caused the Deutsche Mark and the Yen to be ridiculously undervalued compared to the Dollar, thus increasing German and Japanese competitiveness at the cost of the US. Stable trade relations created by the semi-fixed exchange rates plus the highly expansive monetary policy in the US – that's what boosted Germany's economy most of all. Sort of like China over the last two decades, except we were needed as a bulwark against the evil, evil Commies, so the US kept going full throttle.

Our glorious policians tried the same policies (Adenauer/Erhard) in East Germany after reunification, even though global conditions were vastly different, and the result is the mess we now have over there. The entire industry was burned to the ground when they set the exchange rate too high, thus completely destroying what little competitiveness remained. Two trillion DM later, still no improvement. A job well done, truly.

Anyway, if anything, Bernie Sanders' program is closer to post-war German social market economic principles than to the East-German bastard of socialism, state capitalism and planned economy imposed by an autocratic system. However, even that messed up system produced significantly less poverty, both in quality and quantity, than the current US corporatocracy. No homelessness, no starvation, proper healthcare for everyone – reality in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). And despite the fact that they were used as cheap labour for western corporations, no less. My first Ikea shelf was produced by our oppressed brothers and sisters in the East. The Wall "protected" the West from cheap labour while letting goods pass right through – splendid membrane, that one.

PS: Since that article was written in '55, I have to mention one of my city's most famous citizens: Otto Brenner. He was elected head of the IG Metal, this country's most influential trade union, in 1956 after having shared the office since 1952. The policies he fought for, and pushed through, during his 16 years in charge of the union are very much in line with what Sanders is campaigning for.

I'll cover IUD's first. While there is some evidence that the older style copper ParaGard might have a slightly increase in preventing a fertilized egg from implanting, the evidence for the Mirena. Here are two medical journals documenting as such:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4018277
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/13625180903519885
If those are too much reading, they are summarized in http://videosift.com/video/Myths-About-IUDs

Remember Google gives personalized search results. No two people get the same results, even when signed out of Google... More details at http://videosift.com/video/There-are-no-regular-results-on-Google-anymore

I'd also agree that there are many things America gets right. Overall it's a good country.

And I think I started out by pointing out it isn't about guns, or just about guns.

Now I'm not sure what you mean assigning attributes to the right. I was pointing out policies that are consistent with the conservative right, Republican platform positions that are not pro-life.

The Death Penalty. This is a typically Republican strong stance position. And has been at various times part of the party's official platform. The Democrat party official position supports the death penalty too, after a DNA testing and post-conviction review. The point isn't wither or not the Death Penalty is right or wrong, I'd personally argue it's wrong, it's the claim of being pro-life while supporting the death penalty. There can be no way to reconcile those two positions.

One needs only to look at how Bush and the present day regime of Republicans in Washington think of handling issues in the Middle East to see what that they support a strong military and an interventionist doctrine (http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Republican_Party_War_+_Peace.htm). One of the key factors of the Bush Doctrine is preemptive strikes. While one normally wouldn't cite Wikipedia, I'll let their page on the Bush Doctrine and their references clear things up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_Doctrine. Heck Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize largely just because he wasn't Bush... sadly he did little to lower US involvement in the Middle East, a situation we should have left alone ages ago. Again the Democrats aren't as peace loving as they should be, and generally the most peace loving people in Congress tend to be Libertarians (who object more to the expense of war than war itself, and love pointing out how the war in Iraq from 2001 to 2011 cost more than NASA's entire history to that point, even after adjusting for inflation (https://www.nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA)) and Libertarian leaning Republicans like Ron Paul, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus (http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/). Again, war isn't pro-life, it is perhaps one of the most anti-life things one can support short of supporting murder itself.

It's also Republicans, aka the right, that are trying to undo the Affordable Health Care Act, a program that ironically enough is modeled after the ones they tried to pass twice under Bush Sr and once under Clinton as to oppose Democrat plans to push for a Single Payer system. Prior to the passing of Obamacare, the US was spending nearly twice as much on healthcare as a percentage of it's GDP than the next nation, and getting only the 37th best results . Just listen to the crowd at the September 12 2008 Republican debate that chant over and over "let him die" as a solution to a guy who needs medical care but elected not to buy private insurance. These same people are the one's who claim to be pro-life. Affordable health care should be a right, as it is in every civilized nation but the US. Obamacare is far from ideal, but much better than the previous policy of only those with good jobs could afford health care everyone else, die or go bankrupt, driving the costs of healthcare up more. One can't say they are pro-life and oppose affordable healthcare, including for services you don't support such as IUDs (it doesn't matter that I object to our overly huge military budget that is much bigger than the next several nations combined, so it shouldn't matter if some medical services such as IUDs are supported), as quality of life matters as much as being alive.

Related to guns however is the Republican stance on stand your ground. Watch Fox News and how they defend the use of guns, or how mass shootings would be avoided if people were carrying concealed weapons and could stop the shooters... again escalating things to a death penalty. Now in the case of a mass shooter, ideally you want to take them down alive, but if death is the only option, then I personally don't object. However stand your ground typically expands to home invasion, where criminals typically aren't looking kill, just rob the place. Here they defend the homeowner's right to shoot to kill (I've been in firearm safety classes, generally the aim is to aim for the center of mass, which will likely result in death, but the odds of making a shot at the legs to impede the crooks is very low, so if you shoot you have to assume it is to kill). This position is contrary to the pro-life stance. All life is equal... which could get into a whole other argument about how they don't value immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, people who just want to improve their lives by moving to what they hope is a better country that will allow for a better opportunity for them and their families, but the Republicans are fighting hard to stop them from improving their lives here just because an accident of birth made them born in another country than the US... heck just look at the way Republicans lined the buses of refugee children fleeing war and gang torn areas of Latin America and they shouted at the children.... children... to go home that nobody wanted them. That isn't a pro-life statement, to tell a child that nobody wants them. The pro-life position would be to want to nurture and protect the children fleeing a dangerous area... We should be moving to a world without borders, as that is the pro-life position, to realize we are all humans, and that we all must share this world, and that we should do all we can to protect one another and this world and all that inhabits it (except mosquitoes, roaches, most parasites, etc... lol)

As to high poverty rates, the Republican policy of trickle down economics helps drive that. Helps spread the ever growing income and wealth gaps in the US. The Walmart heirs alone have more wealth than the bottom 40% of the US population (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/31/bernie-s/sanders-says-walmart-heirs-own-more-wealth-bottom-/). Now true, some could argue it isn't trickle down economic that is causing the growing wealth and income gaps, but the correlation is very strong, and one is hard pressed to find any other causative points beyond the rich paying less and less to their workers while taking more and more for themselves while the government eases the tax burden on the rich more and more.

Overall I think it's clear that the people who vote Republican because they are "pro-life" are hypocrites given the party's positions in key issues that aren't pro-life. I'm sure many, especially those on the right would disagree. They'd argue the death penalty is needed to discourage others from killing and therefore protects life, and that preemptive strikes ala the Bush Doctrine keep another 9/11 from happening (although the counter to that is fairly easily that we make more extremist the more we use those strikes). So one's mileage may very. For me, I think they are hypocritical saying they are pro-life if they don't value that life as much as their own after they are born.

I don't like the phrase, 'we're pregnant'. As a man, I feel you're part of the process, but you're are obviously not pregnant. I think it kind of takes away from the woman who actually has the growing parasite in her and it's her body that's going through all the changes, and also has to do all of the right things to ensure the baby has the best chance.

@RedSky

The need to be kept afloat by European funds is pretty high on the list of things Syriza is keen to do away with. Varoufakis was clear on this pretty early on, at least 2009 as far as I know. They treated it as a problem of liquidity instead of a problem of insolvency, and therefore any funds funnelled into Greece were basically disappearing down a black hole. They are bleeding cash left, right and center, and the continuous flow of credit from Europe doesn't help a bit in its current form.

As of now, they can't pay shit. Any additional credit has to be used to pay back interest on previous credit. Their meagre primary surplus is less than their interest payments. With that in mind, some of the ideas floating around sound rather intriguing, especially given the horrendous failure all the previous agreements have produced. These ideas include: cap interest payment (1.5% of primary surplus), use the rest for investment or humanitarian relief; no payments on debt below 3% growth, 50% of agreed upon payments at 3-6% growth, full payments at 6+% growth.

Yet even those ideas are purely theoretical, because there is no growth in Greece. The celebrated growth in Q3 2014 of 0.7% might very well be a fluke, as Bill Mitchell described here (prices falling faster than incomes). For Greece to be able to have any meaningful growth, they'd require not just a complete reconstruction of its institutions (structural reforms), but also massive investment.

And there's where it breaks down again, since you rightfully pointed out that the Germans in particular won't spend a dime on Greece, especially not with investment in Germany in equally dire shape (shortfall of about a trillion € since 2000).


Which brings me to another point: Germany vs France.

Productivity in both countries was en par in 1999, and productivity in France in 2014 was only slightly below German numbers. "Living within your means" is a very popular phrase in the current discussion, which basically means living in accordance with your productivity.

Subsequently, there should be a similar development of unit labour costs within a monetary union, with growth targets set by the central bank. In our case, that would be just below 2%. Like I've previously said, Greece lived beyond its means in this regard, and significantly so.

But what about France and Germany? The black line marks the target, blue is France, red is Germany. That's beggar-thy-neighbour. That's gaining competetiveness at the cost of your fellow Euro pals. That's suppressing domestic demand in order to push exports.

German reforms killed its domestic market (retail sales stagnant since early '90s) and created an aggregate trade surplus to the tune of 2 trillion Euros. That's 2 trillion Euros of deficit in other countries. And we're looking at an additional 200-210 billion Euros this year. If running trade deficits is bad, so is running trade surpluses.

Ironically, there's even been legislation in Germany since 1967, instructing the government to balance its books in matters of trade (and other areas). They've been in violation of it for 15 years.

With this in mind, everytime a German politician calls for the other countries to run trade surpluses just like Germany, I get furious. Some of them, on the European level, even have the audacity to say that everyone should run trade surpluses, and all it takes to get there is massive wage cuts. That's open lunacy and a failure of basic math. No surplus without deficits, no savings without debt.

And while we're at it, it's not the savings rate in Germany that bothers me. It's the moral superiority that is being ascribed to running surpluses in every way imaginable. Every part of society is expected to have a positive savings rate, because debt is bad. Well, if everyone's saving and nobody's accruing the corresponding debt, you get the current situation where there is no investment whatsoever, a gargantuan shortfall in demand given the national productivity, and a cool 200 billion Euros of debt a year that foreign actors have to rake up so that Germany can have its massive growth of 0.5-1.5% annually.

Finding borrowers for all that cash is getting more difficult by the day. The ECB's QE is basically one big search for new borrowers, since everyone either doesn't want to borrow or cannot borrow anymore.

If Germany wanted to help the Eurozone, they'd start by increasing their ULC vis-á-vis the rest of the countries. Competitiveness should be regulated through the foreign exchange rate, not this parasitic race to the bottom within the zone. Ten years of 4% increase in wages, annually. That ought to be a start.

Additionally, allow the ECB to fund the European Investment Bank directly, instead of this black hole of QE.

Or go one step further and seriously consider Varoufakis' ideas, including the old Keynesian concept of a global surplus recycling mechanism.

But all that is pure fantasy. I don't think a majority of Germans would support either of these measures, not with the overwhelming fear of inflation this society has. Add the continuous demonisation of debt and you get a guarantee that very few countries might be compatible to be in a longtime monetary union with Germany.

Yes, it seems there is a failure to understand. What he said is, the moment there are useless parasitic eye-eating creatures, one must admit that any possible creator god must not be benevolent or good by any measure of the words.

It's brain parasites. Every cute animal video is brain parasites, pretty much.

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