State of complacency - Swedish election campaign 2014

Do they have the same tailor?

The Swedish elections for the parliament, government and municipalities are only 4 months away but the whole situation feels more like 4 years away. Not much of advertisements and publicity is seen or heard, speaking about Stockholm, the capital and for the rest of the country on radio and television. The spring proposals from the bigger parties whether they are to the right, the left or in the middle contains nothing but the usual, nothing implying that there is a coming fight about who's to govern this northern and cold country the next period. The press and media have observed the situation and started describing the "campaigning" as utterly bleak but doesn't seem very interested in doing a story about it, self coming out utterly meager and bleak. Two party leaders from Sweden's 2 major parties are seen in a press-photo taken after a debate. Both have lilac mono-colored ties over there shirts. Earlier the right-winger would sport the traditional blue color and the socialist the traditional red, now they are advised not show who they are!  Why have we become like this? Are there no issues left to burn for? Or is it for some reason completely impossible or suicidal to the stick out the snout concerning the poor becoming poorer, injustice, overfilled prisons, social welfare being taken down, the unemployment situation not changing, the young without a job and a place to live and so much more in our society that is in a state of putrefaction. Most old people does not have a possibility to get a place at an elderly living unless they are close to paralyzed or suffering from dementia becoming a living danger in society and if they for those reasons would succeed to get a bed in one of those they will be drugged down so they can be managed easy by a minimal staff and kept to a minimal cost. The Swedish defense has been cut down to the bare bones and is today tailored for foreign duty in some country invaded by the USA but not for defending Sweden anymore. It must be a laughing matter for leaders like Vladimir Putin when political voices in Sweden are raised for another build-up of the armed forces that could reach deterring strength somewhere 2024. Sweden stands with the pants deep down at the ankles and it will take 10 years to get them back up again. Ah, there are so many issues, big issues and nothing is really said and fought for.

What is wrong? Perhaps nothing? We may have been living in an ideal situation far from regions of unrest having a complacent life, a rich life with fairly low taxes, flooded with material products from the rest of the world (as almost nothing is produced here these days), a good supply of foods, even exotic foods, flourishing restaurant business, fine wines, fine champagnes, fine whiskies, fine cigars, coffees, tees and even good supply of drugs on the streets, in particular cocaine. The most popular television programs are the chef cook-out competitions, vagabond chefs, chefs going to planet Mars, talking about the good life you name it. I went to a big home supply depot the other day and the first thing I saw after having parked my car was a younger family loading up their car with a new grill and grill supplies like ten sacks of char coal, lighter liquid and other stuff needed. Barbecuing is everybody's weekend past-time these days and the whole neighborhood is under clouds of meat-smelling smoke from lit-up grills. The supermarkets have introduced well hung designer beef from select beef-cattle in boxes with special design and with a see-through window to cater for those special moments in the garden. This transformation of the Swedish society has gone very fast and we now have most of what the US American got already in the seventies, even obesity.

At the same time old Swedish values are quickly eroding away, especially solidarity. Unemployment support is constantly being cut, sick and disabled people are refused support and forced out to labor, scavengers looking for bottles in trash bins are constantly seen around metro-, train- and bus-stations, hordes of beggars everywhere and the out-casts without a place to live sleeping on park-benches or on the pavement. And Sweden is becoming down-right dirty with trash everywhere, empty soda containers and fast-food packages everywhere.

There is so much more that is wrong here and the last thing I will mention is that education in schools has fallen below standards in the the countries around us. I have been travelling the world, working in many countries abroad for longer periods and wherever I came I got acknowledged for having both broad and deep knowledge professionally as well as concerning my social knowledge about the world. Things I learned in Swedish schools and universities, I did not go to prestigious private schools, I was just a normal kid being educated together with other normal kids by the Swedish school system, coming out well educated and more knowing than any single North American colleague I ever had.

I will follow the election campaign with one corner of my eyes and irrespective of who will win I don't look forward with enthusiasm to the times coming after it.

About greed in times of cholera

It was all about Mammon

I post my musical history on Google+. This time it was the Chris Isaac "Wicked game" song. The comments on my post developed into a strange inter-exchange between two persons talking about the nefarious baby boomers going from flower power of the Woodstock festival with drugs and free sex into becoming greedy monsters of contemporary times. Well, I am a baby boomer myself but not an especially greedy one, the opposite, an person with an libertine and anarchistic personality thinking more of compassion and solidarity than market before anything. I could not disagree with these fellows when claiming that a lot of people born in that era changed from compassion and love into amassing fortune keeping going on maintaining their positions and becoming a hindrance for the young ones getting a job.

I saw a good example of this greedy world touching my very own world just a few days ago. I got a call from a person of a company that said they wanted to explain my retirement options. I said yes, please tell me; I got to know that I could start withdrawing my pension already at 61 rather than at 65. Seemed an interesting proposal to me. I asked what their reward was doing this for me and he said that they were a private company doing this for banks and insurance companies but without any cost for me. He explained briefly that the whole deal was starting withdrawing the pension before the age of 65 and invest it in a fund so that the day I was eligible to start enjoying my pension, I would have 4 years of accumulated tax free pension to spend on whatever. He explained that there was another important detail too and that was if I died before 65 no one of my beneficiaries would get anything as my state pension would go back into the general pensions funds. One thing that came to my mind during this brief conversation was that what if it was possible just to start withdrawing my pension for myself without investing it like this man proposed. So I asked the man but put him the question in a for me "fatal" way: "So it is not possible for me to just start using my pension instead of investing it". He just replied: "that is correct, sir". Well I agreed to come to the information meeting as I felt I needed to understand my own situation as a retired person. Something I had ducked for, for so long.

A few days ahead I was sitting in a conference room together with 3 other guys of my age. The office of this company was situated in one of those nice old houses in the Stockholm Old Town, 17th century facade and top modern inside, coming to a pretty high rent. A single grey haired man presented us with the history of the Swedish pension system, then going about the whole deal with a little more detail than what came out during the previous telephone call. At the end of the meeting the man tells us that we will get a call to set up an individual meeting with an adviser than will do an all things considered walk through with each one of us. Leaving the meeting I am pretty pleased and at the same time a little scared over the prospective to learn about my meager days as retired. I have a feeling that there is still something in the story missing, determined to figure it out.

I got the call the following day and just a few days later I was back in their nice offices sitting with my adviser going through all the different pension plans I had. That done she presented me with the different investment plans of 5-6 banks and insurance companies explaining me pros and cons with each one of them, like the number of years my money had to sit in a fund before I could withdraw without to much penalties, calculated interest rates etc. When we were done with most paperwork there was one single detail missing from my part, a bank account with auto-transaction capabilities were the government would deposit my monthly pension quota that would further automatically be transferred to the investment institute I had selected. At this point I understood that I actually could ask for early withdrawal of my state pension and use it in whatever manner I decided without having to place my money locked up in a fund with a bank or insurance company. To be sure, I asked the adviser if what I had understood was correct and she confirmed but said that I would not get 4% interest on my money if I went my own way. The only detail this company did not have to proceed in getting their hands on my money was my bank account. I had not decided myself on what to do at this point but I told the adviser that I would get the bank account number for her the very same day. On my way out I passed a number of offices with people in them, only men. They had nice clothes, suspenders, greased combed back hair, a tanned face and looked exactly like the guys in a number of previous movies about the Wall street.

I got home checked my bank accounts but had already come to the conclusion that I was better off taking care of my pension money myself than handing it over to people that had figured out how to get their hands on peoples pension money from a construction that made it possible to drain the state pension funds on money before a time originally agreed upon by unions, parliament and governments. This possibility supposedly made to benefit individuals that needed to withdraw their pension earlier for a number of reasons was never communicated to the real benefactors but to banks and investment institutes so to let money be released into the market enriching the already rich. We have seen quite a lot of scam schemes like the one Bernard Madoff pulled off and other large scale finance market big time scandals and it just continues. That situation in the society is out of control for reasons of greed is obvious hearing in press and media that Cocaine is abundant on the streets and plazas here in Stockholm. If money wasn't abundant, Cocaine would be neither.

I made the call to my adviser/handler and told her that I had changed my mind, that I wanted to manage my pension myself. I asked if she still could make the application for early withdrawal for me but she declined. This day I felt proud of myself for listening, observing and analyzing, finally taking a very personal decisive action for my own future.

About nefarious social behavior by commons as well as applied in politics

Charlie Chaplin as Hitler in the "Dictator"

Over and over we see implicit posts in social media with obscure meanings. Surprisingly we will see an abundance with likes and comments like: “that’s it”, “right on”, “hallelujah” often only one or 2 words. It may be close to impossible to decipher the message as it could be a joke, sarcasm or just something simple and sincere, yet comments are plentiful, short and euphoric. You would not know unless you post a question running the risk to be dissed by the poster or by the crowd, the followers. Not many question or want to know what a post mean because of the risk to come out as a jack-ass. Commonly when the poster "resembles" a woman, "she" has a nice presentation profile photo and thus attracted many males to follow "her". What "she" writes or expresses does not matter much, already hooked by "her" beauty, what matters is to show adoration and that is achieved by showing up, making a like or a simple positive comment. What the posters motivation or goal is cannot easily be deduced, it could be for just being seen by as many as possible, it could be for collecting followers to funnel them into some bonus program or expose them to products. Profit is not an unlikely objective.

Now, by taking this example and reasoning over to politics makes the whole thing becoming very interesting. To get to where we want to be in politics we need followers, some that just makes likes (votes) and some that comments by forming a choir singing our simple refrain. Starting off we would need a nice facade and sugared up messages. The facade is like the social media profile photo and banner, the messages are like the posts. We are not interested in followers that analyses everything we say, we only need a lot of followers voting for us and shouting “hallelujah”. If everything goes according to this plan we’ll be in government in next election. Now in the position to govern a country no matter what our motif and ambitions was or would be, we need to keep and build our army of followers, some that just likes what we do and some forming the “choir” singing our song (press and media). The strategy would be to be visible on stage and in media with messages, implicit and obscure and hard to decipher but with a nice sounding tune that makes easy to sing-along. And the result: an army of Zombies raising the arm towards us, greeting us with “sieg heil” and with an armlet with a Swastika on it. This is what Hitler and his thugs did, Tony Blair with his labor party and recently the conservative Swedish “nya moderaterna” and its Allianz government.

It is so easy to understand a strategy like this from being and “living” on social media like Facebook and Google+. There is no “dislike” button and being social means: don’t question my post, just like it or be sweet. In Facebook and Google+ questioning surely mean being blocked or attacked and dissed by a horde of followers. In Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet it meant labor camp or execution

Another important “social media” aspect is to funnel out the information in society so that 1 “like” will be seen as 1000, which is done in Google+ by interconnecting services like YouTube, Blogger, Google Drive, Google+ and virtually any service they provide to the user as free. In electronics it is called fan-out. Facebook does the same by interconnecting Facebook itself with Instagram and 45 other services.  How is this multiplication effect done in politics? Easy, buy out press and media and use one single information database for the “messages”, the party leader is the editor in chief. Apart from this, use what is free from Google and Facebook for your purposes.

Would it be unfair or slander to picture the architect of the Swedish conservative parties successful "social" media campaign as the former national socialistic party's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels? It is an amusing thought but, no, I don't think so. It must be seen as a compliment.

Social sex dating media and how they sucker us men

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