These excerpts are from a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, one of the few great remaining journals in the Anglosphere. The observations I find telling:

… The Filipino nurse looked frightened and ran off to get Leon from Ghana to have another go. I said, “Hello, you must be Leon”, and he stared at me without a word. If it weren’t for putting the needles in, which often goes wrong, causing an alarm to go off, I could easily get used to having a four-hour rest in hospital every other day…
…Nurses no longer wear white, so everyone looks like a cleaner, although some have transparent face guards like welding shields, to protect them from flying spit. The only white members of staff are the cleaners from Romania, including two pretty girls who bring tea and biscuits…

Will there always be an England? Or a non-RoC Canada? The whole piece follows.

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Forzanuova’s current cry is “Moneta di popolo!” As far as I can make it out, the communists are wanting that to be a fixed allocation to citizens of internal money, and Forzanuova isn’t even bothering to call for a national currency – it seems to want to issue local currencies. It sure looks like an increasing number of shopowners, farmers and those all-important truckers and cabdrivers are willing to go with it.
See, this is why you should not try to really collect taxes in Italy. If the local shopowners sign up and accept the script, that’s it. Game over. You]ve got small business against big business and rural against city, and they might well develop a dual monetary system. All those lovely policies about limiting cash transactions become ever so theoretical.

Shipping Rates Go Negative

Data released Tuesday showed that seasonally adjusted housing prices have reached a post-bubble low, as the minor surge that began in 2009 fizzled, to be followed by the almost continuous slide of the past 18 months. The housing bust, in other words, appears to be even worse than it was at the nadir of the recession.

Via

“Trust me you DO NOT WANT TO REPOSSESS A SHIP!”

Lots of, er, us types:

The End of the Win-Win World
Why China’s rise really is bad for America — and other dark forces at work…
A few months ago, I found myself sitting next to a senior EU official who turned out to have read my book. “My job is to prove your zero-sum thesis wrong,” he told me. I replied that, as an author I hoped to be proved right — but as a European and a human being I was hoping to be proved wrong. My lunch companion laughed and said, “That is too dialectical for me.”
It is one of the nice things about the best EU officials that they are happy to talk to their critics, and comfortable using words like “dialectical.” However, I fear that cultured technocrats will not do terribly well in the new era. A zero-sum world may summon up rather darker forces.

Just look:

…

—Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010″ (Crown Forum) will be published on Jan. 31.

Reuters;

Airbus said on Thursday it had discovered more cracks in the wings of two A380 superjumbo aircraft but insisted the world’s largest jetliner remained safe to fly.

Well, so long as it’s only the wings.

Standard & Poor’s downgraded the credit ratings of nine euro zone countries, stripping France and Austria of their coveted triple-A status but not EU paymaster Germany, in a Black Friday 13th for the troubled single currency area.

More at Zerohedge.

Governments of the world’s leading economies have more than $7.6 trillion of debt maturing this year, with most facing a rise in borrowing costs. (h/t Dan)

11 Trends Over 11 Years. (Via)

CNBC;

In recent years, these two teams have used engineering and science skills to analyse what they call socio-technical risks, or the dangers that occur whenever complex technological systems proliferate, creating “systems of systems” that nobody understands. In early 2010, well before May 6, they released a brilliantly prescient report that predicted that a systems failure loomed.
Since then, they have continued their research, with sobering conclusions. Most notably, these researchers believe that the flash crash was not an isolated event; on the contrary, it was entirely predictable given how IT systems have proliferated to create a system of systems that is now interacting in unpredictable ways that regulators and investors cannot comprehend, far less control.

Drudge

Last week, the European Central Bank provided €489 billion ($US633 billion) in three-year loans to cash-strapped European banks, but figures released overnight show that European banks have turned around and deposited a record €452 billion with the ECB. This is stark evidence that the European interbank lending market remains crippled, and that banks would rather earn the meagre 0.25 per cent interest rate that the ECB pays on depots, rather than running the risk of lending to other banks at much higher interest rates.

Related from John Fund;

The 17 nations in the eurozone are now trapped between the unthinkable and the unsellable. Ending the euro is considered so radical a step that there are no backup plans for leaving it behind. But further integration of Europe’s economies is unpalatable because it would have to be sold to populations that, as the Washington Post put it, “were more skeptical about the Eurozone than their leaders to begin with, and have seen their worst fears realized.”

Danniel Hannan;

I’m not sure people have grasped the magnitude of what has just happened. The European Central Bank firehosed €489,190,000,000 at the eurozone banking system. Five-hundred-and-twenty-three banks snatched greedily at the cheap cash. And the markets fell.

Furthermore …

There is a strange belief out there that the Boy-King has vetoed a treaty and all is well with the world. Setting aside the truth that we are still in the EU and subject to its ever more insane laws and regulations, there is a problem with the word. To quote The Princess Bride (ha, didn’t expect that, did you): “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” To be fair, I have no idea what the Boy-King, his supporters, the ToryBoy blog or the so-called eurosceptics who are still whooping with joy think the word “veto” means. But I do not think it means whatever it is they think it means.

(h/t Ken Kulak, Adrian)

We have seen the enemy and she is Alison Redford.

Why is Alberta’s premier doing public relations work for Chiquita? Why isn’t she sticking up for our oilsands, which offers far superior oil in terms of ethics and transparency compared with the conflict oil that Chiquita so clearly prefers and that obviously better reflects that company’s historical lack of ethics.

Let this serve as a warning to conservative parties everywhere: that which the left cannot defeat, they will infiltrate.

At our request, William Bernstein, an investment manager at Efficient Portfolio Advisors in Eastford, Conn., reviewed Rep. Paul’s portfolio as set out in the annual disclosure statement. Mr. Bernstein says he has never seen such an extreme bet on economic catastrophe. ”This portfolio is a half-step away from a cellar-full of canned goods and nine-millimeter rounds,” he says.

h/t Adrian, via Zerohedge.

Telegraph;

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Treasury is putting measures in place to help evacuate thousands of expatriates living in Spain and Portugal in case they are stranded no access to their savings.
The two countries, which both have sizeable British populations, were among those made vulnerable by the “sustained deterioration” in funding.

h/t Maz2