As Athens burns the EC announces €1 trillion budget

Whilst demanding that Greece impose upon its people draconian austerity measures, European Commission president José Manuel Barroso defended the EU budget as ambitious but responsible and warned member states against “Pavlovian reactions”.

1,000,000,000,000 (or one million millions) of your tax money spent by unelected no-bodies, living the life of Riley at your expense with 15 years of unaudited accounts, is not what I call responsible. No wonder more and more EU member states’ citizens are sliding below the poverty line.

Classical conditioning (also Pavlovian or respondent conditioning, Pavlovian reinforcement) is a form of conditioning that was first demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov in 1927.

The typical procedure for inducing classical conditioning involves presentations of a neutral stimulus along with a stimulus of some significance, the “unconditioned stimulus”. The neutral stimulus could be any event that does not result in an overt behavioral response from the organism under investigation. Conversely, presentation of the significant stimulus necessarily evokes an innate, often reflexive, response.

One of the earliest literary references to classical conditioning can be found in the comic novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759) by Laurence Sterne. The narrator Tristram Shandy explains how his mother was conditioned by his father’s habit of winding up a clock before having sex with his wife.

Another example is in the dystopian novel, A Clockwork Orange in which the novel’s anti-hero and protagonist, Alex, is given a solution to cause severe nausea, and is forced to watch violent acts. This renders him unable to perform any violent acts without inducing similar nausea.

In Barosso’s case, in his addiction of forcing member states to impose austerity measures whilst imposing fiscal oversight, Barosso is forced to watch the fiscal destruction of a nation taking EU/IMF money making it impossible to break the debt cycle and become subservient to Brussels. This renders him unable to perform any kind of fiscal bullying without inducing demands for more money and direct taxation to feed the EU/IMF beast, the member nations being incapable of refusing such requests to borrow even more as they approach the fiscal tipping point themselves.

Some call it the Nero syndrome..

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