Brexit

I was really surprised at the result of this vote. Now the PM is stepping down and Scottland is looking at holding a second refferendum on independence to stay in the EU.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...e-results-compare-to-the-uks-educated-old-an/

And Billary is using the vote as a campaign tool.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...leadership/ar-AAhAkwr?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=U305DHP

What a frigging opportunistic politician. A lawyer politician like her can go to court and have a conviction of sodomy overturned and reduced to the traffic infraction of tailgating.
I swear, our choices suck: a lawyer politician or a salesman. Whoever wins, we loose.
Bexit or Bstay / Billary or Rump.................................it's all: http://medford.craigslist.org/grd/5651234304.html

How how long before the Scottxit and the Northern Irelandxit? N. I. will not be happy with Ireland suddenly becoming an international border, and one of the reasons the Scottish referendum voted to stay in the UK, was the EU membership.

Of course they'll probably still be better off in the long run, since the entire concept of the EU was fundamentally flawed from the very start. The fake prosperity from our real-estate debt ponzi scheme, and the Chinese artificially overdriven economy papered over very real differences and flaws in a blizzard of Euros, till it all came tumbling down, and Greece showed how flawed the Euro side of the EU was, and the aftermath showed how flawed EU "unity" was, while the Syrian refugee crisis, and french terror attack with Belgian roots, is showing the bad side of "open borders" among EU nations.

The EU needs the equivalent of the US' Constitutional Convention. Basically that was our "do-over" when the original Articles of Confederation turned out to be pretty much useless as a method of self-governance, leading to Shay's Rebellion. By the way, our first President wasn't George Washington, but a guy named John Hanson, who was President of the Continental Congress.

As an aside to Whiska's point. Pretty much all Polititians are opportunistic. Basically the media/lobbying machine buries anyone who isn't... er... willing to seize every opportunity that is presented to them. Even more than Politicians, it's the lobbying/advertising industry that pushes this... abandoned fecal matter pile... of FUDopportunity.

Edit: Will there EVER be a day when I post something, and DON'T edit it five times in quick succession?

In reverse order . . .

I don't know that politicians are inherently evil, at least when they start. They are immediately awash in a system that requires they raise thousands of dollars a day to have just a chance to be re-elected. The lobbyists are just there because the system is for sale in the first place. Maybe we need to seriously consider staggered four-year terms for US Reps. This entails we seriously consider a constitutional convention of our own, which scares the bejeesus out of me. The 2nd Amendment is a failure and needs to be re-written in a simple, two-sentence form that actually makes modern grammatical sense. (Also scares the bejeesus out of me)

What's the connection between the EU, our real-estate finance fiasco, and the over-driven Chinese economy?

To your first point, I don't think politicians are "evil" at any point. They need money to pour into the media machine, and are grabbed by the media frenzy for "reality TV" as a result. The Government-Lobbyist connection has little to do with this, since money has always flowed to power, and power has always sought money, as far back as the very first minted coins, and even further to the wheat and rice stores of the agricultural economy that gave rise to the City-State and further, to the empires like Sumeria and Egypt.

In answer to your question, the EU was financially powered in turn, by our real-estate fiasco, in which the EU member states (and their Banks and Pension Funds) were major participants, and by supplying "value-added" items to China, and to the Nations like Brazil and Africa, who were also buying high-value items to feed China's raw-material demand for wood, copper & steel, rare earths, and (from our Nation) coal. The Chinese economic pump was fueling the economies of the EU's richer members, while our CDOs were fueling the financial institutions of ALL the EU members

The financial crisis in the EU, when the banks and pension funds were royally whacked by the failure of those collateralized debt obligations, brought about the financial ruin of the heaviest borrowers in the EU, such as Greece, since they were plugged into the Euro, rather than their own floating currency, and were acting salary-wise and spending-wise as if they were just the same as the richer EU Countries, despite their inability to support such standards on their own. When the financial meltdown... er... melted down, the debts, which they were running to paper over this flaw in the EU/Euro/Member-Nations structure, came home to roost, and the true artificial structure of the Euro was exposed, since there was (at the time) no Central Bank like the Fed, and no single governing entity in charge of the issuing/guaranteeing/paying of debts in Euros. The EU was formed with a "wink-wink, nod-nod" to the financial state of the more financially challenged member states, in order to make something that looked, on paper, like a "big-money" single EU currency to rival that of the US Dollar in it's economic scope.

This would be the start of the rise of the Nationalist movements in EU member states, as workers from the poorer members start flooding into the job markets of the richer members, causing resentment of native populations, as we have seen mentioned in the Brexit debates. The Syrian refugee crisis really put the wind in the sails of all these nationalist movements, since it gave folks an easy-to-understand target for all problems they're going through.