09:01 – Even the scummiest of politicians will sometimes tell the truth when it suits his own agendum. So, it was with no surprise that I read Eurozone collapse ‘will send continent into depression’
According to no less than Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, a collapse of the eurozone would instantly wipe out half the value of the eurozone’s economy, plunging Europe into a deep depression, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the 1930’s and reducing living standards to Latin American levels. Barroso has his own agendum, of course, which, as always, is “More Europe”. As with all statists, his motto is Never Waste a Good Crisis. And, in fact, he exaggerates. Living standards in the southern tier, including his own country, may in fact fall by 50% or more, but the effects on the FANG nations will be considerably less severe.
Someone asked me the other day why I am more optimistic about the future of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand than I am about the rest of the world, including other first-world countries that use other languages. Two reasons: first, and the importance of this should not be underestimated, we speak English, which is demonstrably superior to all other languages. As a rough guide to relative usefulness, I suggest cubing the ratio of the number of words in the English vocabulary to that of the comparison language. Second, and even more important, our women have equal rights and responsibilities. We don’t waste half our population. Of course, that’s also true of Europe, particularly northwestern Europe, but they have saddled themselves with inferior languages, which limits their competitiveness.
Still, Europe is in wonderful shape compared to most of the rest of the world, where women are treated at best as less-than-a-man and more commonly pretty much like livestock, if that well. (A woman, of course, is often cheaper than a cow, and easier to replace.) This situation applies throughout the entire islamic world, India, nearly all of Africa, and much of Asia, Central America, and South America. It’s no wonder that these are all third-world countries, and doomed to remain so.
And yet, people are often surprised to learn that I consider myself a feminist. In truth, I’m an elitist. I value hard-working competent people above others. I have no use for people who are lazy or incompetent, or both. If people are hard-working and competent, I don’t care what color their skin is or whether they pee sitting down or standing up. And I think that attitude is common in the first world and rare otherwise.
Work on the biology book continues. I’ve finished three microcosm lab sessions, leaving only one on observing Winogradsky columns in the to-do pile. Today, I’ll jump to a different topic altogether, although I’m not sure which one.