Economics

I know everyone's fed up of it, but lets sum up the economic situation here in Ireland - we're broke, unemployed, and can't even afford to pay the interest on our loans, but that's OK cos today we got a brand new Mastercard™ in the post with a €10,000 spending limit! Woot!

Awesome weather tonight in Ireland, lightning, snow, frost and strange clouds... here's a pic

AIB credit card

Well my credit card had a limit of only €1000, I ran it up to €1100 (with hefty overlimit fees) I wrote to them saying that I wished to cancel and could they invoice me for the balance, but the maximum I could pay was €2 a week (I'm on disability due to cancer), but only directly to their creditors as it was my right to refuse to deal with a financially bankrupt organisation (though it's probably not).

They said I couldn't cancel (although I'd regard that as normal contract law), cited some BS small print, they didn't cancel it, and kept sending me normal credit card bills and adding on interest and late fees.

Then they started calling my mobile phone and my families home phone with calls from a private number, 3 times a day, twice a week. I blocked the calls to my mobile with an program, and wrote to them to say (truthfully) that I no longer lived at home and that calling a family member to demand payment of a debt was a breach of the law. I let it go on for a while, they sent me lots of letters, when I got the first letter from their "solicitors" (which is really a jackass on a photocopier) I wrote back saying that I looked forward to being brought to court and I'd rather die than pay them anything. I also asked to be taken off the mailing list saying further correspondence would constitute "mischievous nuisance".

I told the poor call centre drone that the matter had been resolved and to take me off the calling list. Haven't heard a peep from them since, guess they have bigger problems now.

Ourselves Alone

This is an interesting comment I found

Sinn Fein do not offer an alternative in any meaningful sense, because, aside from a kind of Stalinist nationalism in which The Party is supreme, it does not have any particular political or economic opinions. Like Fianna Fail, it exists purely to win and hold power, and distribute patronage.

I'm from the north, and I have nothing but hollow laughter at how SF seeks to present itself as a party of the left in southern elections. Thi is pure nonsense. SF ministers in Stormont have introduced New Labour PFI privatisation into health and education and have voted for water charges. The "southern strategy" is to steal the clothes of the left, purely as a calculation to give it a southern identity and win seats in inner cities. It is utterly devoid of sincerity. SF in government would be indistinguishable from Fianna Fail.

As minister for health in the Belfast executive a few years ago, Sinn Fein's Bairbre de Brunn pushed through the biggest tranch of hospital closures in the history of the northern state. A few weeks later, she fronted a "save our hospitals" march in Dublin.

That's Sinn Fein.

-RedSperanza

Although I have been, and will remain a Sinn Fein voter , it'd be wrong to think of them as infaultable or perfect. Still, Caoimhín O'Caoláin sure is better to vote for than that fucking cheese-man potwalloper Brendan Smyth.

Jail? Accountability?

Since Ireland's corrupt(fact) Fina Fail regime is close to finished, thank "Bob", with the banks who make a living perpetrating fraud broke and nationalised, you may be wondering if anyone will ever go to jail for negligence, lying, fraud or embezzlement, each of which there were oodles. A prosecutors dream. Well, look at what happened with the last scandal that compares to this, generations of child sex abuse. From wikipedia:

In response to the furor aroused by the media reports, the Irish government commissioned a study which took nine years to complete...... The commission found that Catholic priests and nuns had terrorised thousands of boys and girls for decades and that government inspectors had failed to stop the chronic beatings, rapes and humiliation. The report characterised rape and molestation as "endemic" in Irish Catholic church-run industrial schools and orphanages.

How many government inspectors went to jail or even lost their jobs? Well, ha, none. How many managers or supervisors went to jail or even lost their jobs. Yawn.

This isn't Iceland. You can expect the same thing from this banking collapse, a decade spent paying deadbeats to write a huge long report no one will ever read, followed by forgetting about it.

How many have went to jail? None. How many will ever go to jail? None.

Financial Planning

Dan was a single bloke living at home with his Dad and working in the family business.When Dan found out that he was going to inherit a fortune when his sickly father died, he decided he needed to find a wife with whom to share his forthcoming fortune.One evening, at an investment meeting, he spotted the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her natural beauty took his breath away. "I may look like just an ordinary bloke," he said to her, "but in just a few years, my widower father will die and I will inherit $200 million." Impressed, the woman asked for his business card and three days later, she became his stepmother. Women are so much better at financial planning than men.

(Con Cerned on Facebook says:She must have been a Fianna Failer to act the maggot like that.)

The Dragon and the Hawk

Imagine 5 people stranded on an island. One of them is American. The other 4 are Chinese. They each are assigned jobs - fishing, collecting firewood, cleaning, cooking - the American gets the job of eating. At the end of each day they all gather around and watch him eat.

An economist comes and says: Look! The American is the engine of growth! Without his eating, all the Chinamen will have no job!!

Lefty Righty

I have come to the apparent realisation that there is more than one way to skin a cat, politically speaking. For instance, I believe that both socialist and libertarian ways of running a country can be successful. I'm guessing that an extreme right wing libertarian country like the 19th century USA, isolated and ran by honest and smart people, and an extreme left wing country, like 20th century sweeden, isolated and ran by honest and smart people, would both develop, differently to be interesting and worthwhile places to visit.

In fact I'd go further, and say that both fascist Italy under Mussolini and communist Russia under Lenin, were both fairly OK places for the vast majority of the population. Yeah you could get shot real easy, but for the average guy who's priorities are work, girls and friends, they were both pretty neat. Same thing for so many monarchies, democracies, and maybe even one or two theocracies.

The problem isn't so much choosing the best way of organising people - lefty righty and all that. Its ensuring that the chosen system functions well, that corruption and favoritism doesn't creep in, reason applies, grievances are addressed, and basically that the vast majority of people feel happy and safe and confident and believe that the system is good and worth serving.

Of course Lenin's Russia got taken over by Stalin, Italy fell to invaders etc. Even America, a supposed democracy, is now run by their own military and moneyed interests.

Beautiful Ireland

If you fly into Ireland, as I recommend against, you might land at a place called Dublin Airport. This dingy airfield, with a credit card bill of €1.2 billion, is a good introduction to what Ireland aspires to be, second rate, expensive and rude.

To see a bit of real Ireland and get away from the towns. West is good, anywhere in West Mayo or Galway, Donegal, all have fantastic scenery. The middle counties are great, as everyone just passes through them without stopping, places like Roscommon are cheap and genuine. If you want to go to a city, I'd recommend Belfast.

Fina Fail

So in Ireland there's this club that calls itself a political party called Fianna Fail. Its grew up as a faction in a small low level civil war that happened 1920-ish over some stupid BS. Since then it took over the government and grew and grew. Its run Ireland for 60 of the last 80 years - an amazing statistic, and always represented the will of the catholic Irish people - against porn, pot, prophylactics, - all the fun stuff. Along with the GAA (Irish football people) and the catholic church its been one of the three pillars of Irish life.

Anyway don't be fooled by it pretending to be a political party. Its a jobs club and a way of life, more akin to the freemasons than the tories. In Fina fail taking bribes isn't just something that happens, its the whole raison d'etre. Once you join Fina Fail you will never be poor again.

Fina Fail are pedophiles. They were directly implicated in covering up the actions of pervert priest Brendan Smith in 1997, and indemnified the church for tort claims arising from institutional child sex abuse - at the taxpayer's expense, naturally.

Anyway Fina Fail are 100% responsible for this property crash in Ireland, and are woefully unpopular with the population under 40. The government has an approval rating of only 11%. If this crash destroys Fina Fail, as it might, I would regard any deprivation put upon me as the smallest inconvenience. I wish nothing better for my kids than to grow up in a world where Fina Fail are nothing but an unhappy entry in a history book.

Golem

When the golem knocks down your front door this halloween and screeches in the voice of a million unspeakable horrors "trick or treat" don't give him/it/them anything.

Golems suck at tricks and generally only do something really dumb like throw your car through your window before returning to the formless morass of mud and rotting organic mater from whence it came. Don't try shooting or fighting golems though, those things may look slow and dead but they are FAST, I once seen them chase down and rip off the arms of a full grown healthy 210lb man. He has to get the pizza delivery guy to feed him, poor guy.