Make's sense, doesn't it

Here's The Setup For The Con Of The Decade

By Tyler Durden

I consider myself an agnostic about the destruction of the U.S. dollar and hyperinflation (basically the same thing), but my idea that hyperinflation is fundamentally a political process makes me a heretic. I skimmed a few of the dozens of comments posted on Rick's Picks and Zero Hedge after they posted one of my expositions on this dynamic, and didn't see even one comment in favor of this perspective.

The Con is being set up right now, and the outlines are clearly visible. The Con works like this:

1. The Financial Elites/Oligarchy raked in billions in private profit from the orgy of leverage, credit expansion, fraud, embezzlement and misrepresentation of risk that resulted in the Housing Bubble.

2. The losses were transferred to the public (Federal government, i.e. The central State) or its proxy, the Federal Reserve (i.e. the central bank), via bailouts, backstops, guarantees, the Fed's purchase of taxic assets, and an open window for the financiers to borrow billions at zero interest (ZIRP) for further speculations.

3. The Treasury now borrows $1.6 trillion every year, fully 11% of the nation's GDP, as the Central State has replaced private demand and credit expansion with its own borrowing and spending.

4. Non-U.S. central banks have largely ceased to support this unprecedented scale of borrowing, so the Federal Reserve now buys most of the Treasury's issuance of debt via QE2 (quantitative easing, the direct purchase of $600 billion in Treasury bonds).

5. Unlike Japan, the U.S. cannot self-fund its own government borrowing: while U.S. investors, banks and insurance companies do own a significant chunk of Treasuries, the U.S. savings rate (capital accumulation) is still abysmally low, around 4%, which is half the historical average savings rate.

It is happening right now

SHHHHH!!
It is the policy of The Washington Post not to publish anonymous pieces. In this case, an exception has been made because the author -- who would have preferred to be named -- is legally prohibited from disclosing his or her identity in connection with receipt of a national security letter. The Post confirmed the legitimacy of this submission by verifying it with the author's attorney and by reviewing publicly available court documents.
The Justice Department's inspector general revealed on March 9 that the FBI has been systematically abusing one of the most controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act: the expanded power to issue "national security letters." It no doubt surprised most Americans to learn that between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 specific demands under this provision -- demands issued without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval -- to obtain potentially sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents. It did not, however, come as any surprise to me.
Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.
Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power. I never released the information the FBI sought, and last November the FBI decided that it no longer needs the information anyway. But the FBI still hasn't abandoned the gag order that prevents me from disclosing my experience and concerns with the law or the national security letter that was served on my company. In fact, the government will return to court in the next few weeks to defend the gag orders that are imposed on recipients of these letters.
Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.
I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.
The inspector general's report makes clear that NSL gag orders have had even more pernicious effects. Without the gag orders issued on recipients of the letters, it is doubtful that the FBI would have been able to abuse the NSL power the way that it did. Some recipients would have spoken out about perceived abuses, and the FBI's actions would have been subject to some degree of public scrutiny. To be sure, not all recipients would have spoken out; the inspector general's report suggests that large telecom companies have been all too willing to share sensitive data with the agency -- in at least one case, a telecom company gave the FBI even more information than it asked for. But some recipients would have called attention to abuses, and some abuse would have been deterred.
I found it particularly difficult to be silent about my concerns while Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 and early 2006. If I hadn't been under a gag order, I would have contacted members of Congress to discuss my experiences and to advocate changes in the law. The inspector general's report confirms that Congress lacked a complete picture of the problem during a critical time: Even though the NSL statute requires the director of the FBI to fully inform members of the House and Senate about all requests issued under the statute, the FBI significantly underrepresented the number of NSL requests in 2003, 2004 and 2005, according to the report.
I recognize that there may sometimes be a need for secrecy in certain national security investigations. But I've now been under a broad gag order for three years, and other NSL recipients have been silenced for even longer. At some point -- a point we passed long ago -- the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy. In the wake of the recent revelations, I believe more strongly than ever that the secrecy surrounding the government's use of the national security letters power is unwarranted and dangerous. I hope that Congress will at last recognize the same thing.

rare

Dream of a Palestinian Tiger

Boom Times in the West Bank

By Juliane von Mittelstaedt

With five-star hotels, booming high-tech companies and a modern, new city under construction near Ramallah, the West Bank is preparing for the future. Local entrepreneurs speculate that if the Palestinians ever gain independence, their country could become a leader in the region.

"Palestinian tycoon," he reads, shaking his head. He doesn't like the word. He prefers the headline of the piece next to it: "We Need Peace, or We'll Face an Economic Catastrophe." The editorial was written by Idan Ofer, one of Israel's wealthiest businessmen. Masri smiles and then reaches for the phone and calls Ofer. "Great article," he says. They have a short conversation and then Masri hangs up. Ofer and Masri, the tycoons of Tel Aviv and Ramallah, are friends.Bashar Masri is sitting behind a yellow desk in Ramallah with two Israeli newspapers open in front of him. A large photo of Masri is featured in one of the dailies and his wife Jane is pictured in the other. As he speaks, he plugs the text into Google for a translation.

Masri is possibly the most unusual businessman in the Palestinian Territories. The 50-year-old is a frequent guest in the homes of Israel's wealthiest citizens, his wife runs the largest advertising agency in the Palestinian Territories and studies in Tel Aviv, and his uncle is a billionaire from Nablus. Masri went to the United States at 17 to attend college, and afterward he worked there and married an American woman, until returning home in 1994. He founded Massar International and began building a small empire. He already had dreams of building a Palestinian city in those days, but then came the second Intifada, so he built in Morocco initially instead.

But he never lost sight of his goal to establish the first modern city in the Palestinian Territories -- and he began building it in the West Bank near Ramallah more than a year ago. The new city, called Rawabi, comes at a price tag of more than $850 million (€586 million). Masri's most important investor is the government of Qatar. In addition to 5,000 residential units, Masri is building a sewage treatment plant and a mosque, supermarkets and an administration complex. When the new city reaches its target population of 40,000 people, it will be larger even than Ramallah itself.

Quote of the day

'It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.'


Martin Amis

Our betters want us to watch our tongue

Calling Pets "Pets" Is a Thought Crime

It's time for a new edition of the Newspeak dictionary. According to the pointy-headed circus clowns who pass down surrealist moral judgments from atop their ivory towers, our current vocabulary oppresses animals:

Animal lovers should stop calling their furry or feathered friends "pets" because the term is insulting, leading academics claim.

Domestic dogs, cats, hamsters or budgerigars should be rebranded as "companion animals" while owners should be known as "human carers", they insist.

Other forbidden terms include "critters" and "beasts." Pet owners are not to be referred to as "owners," because this "harks back to a previous age" when animals were considered to be animals.

The term "wildlife" is not to be used because "For most, 'wildness' is synonymous with uncivilized, unrestrained, barbarous existence." In actuality, academics have discovered that tigers and hyenas sit around tea tables in the jungle, sipping Earl Grey with their pinkies raised.

Certain idiomatic expressions also have to go:

Phrases such as "sly as a fox, "eat like a pig" or "drunk as a skunk" are all unfair to animals, they claim.

With all this verbal abuse hurled at their sensitive feelings, you can see why Obama's Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein wants animals to be provided with lawyers so they can sue us.

The deadly Utopian Vision

by Richard Perle

There are many specters haunting our world, but one is of our own making—the utopian vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, the dream that has come to be called “global zero.”

The vision of the total elimination of nuclear weapons is a postmodern version of an old idea, popular early in the twentieth century, when Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion (reprinted in 1933) was required reading in intellectual and policy circles in the United States and Europe. Seventy-six years before Barack Obama was honored in Oslo, Norman Angell also won the Nobel Prize, having come to prominence with the argument that global economic interdependence rendered war futile and unprofitable and therefore obsolete.

In the wake of the Bush administration, what lies in store for the future of America's presence abroad?

Angell’s theory expressed the war-weary and wishful temper of the time. Enthusiasm for achieving peace through international institutions and legal constructs ran high in the period after the disastrous First World War, its most fulsome expression being the Kellogg-Briand Pact, named for its authors, an American secretary of state and a French foreign minister. Ratified by parliaments around the world (and by the US Senate on an 85–1 vote, with only Wisconsin Republican John J. Blaine voting against), the pact sought to deal with the problem of international aggression by simply outlawing war. Less than two years after the pact entered into force in 1929, one of the signatories, Japan, invaded Manchuria. The world “community”—that is, the rest of the treaty parties—did nothing. Other signatories followed suit: Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935 and Germany launched World War II with the invasion of Poland in 1939.

The great powers that signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact understood its utopian character, but they affirmed it anyway. As with any public endorsement that embraces virtue and rejects vice, the pact appeared to offer little to lose. What did it matter if there was no reasonable assumption that all parties would act in good faith, and no mechanism for enforcement? What harm could come from a lofty ideal formalized with fanfare and champagne in Paris? Realists among its supporters argued that even if prohibiting war couldn’t actually end aggression, it would at least bolster the principle that disputes should be resolved peacefully. Outlawing war made good people feel better; how could that be bad?

But, looking back, we can see that the illusion created by Kellogg-Briand, that war had been outlawed, together with widespread but unjustified faith in the League of Nations, was part of the negligence that allowed Hitler to build his strength and seize vast territories from his neighbors without serious opposition. The Kellogg-Briand frame of mind contributed to the responsibility-evading defense and foreign policies of Britain, France, and others in the 1930s, countries that might have stopped Adolf Hitler in his tracks if they had not been so wishful and unrealistic. Far from making the world safer, proclaiming the “norm” of nonaggression had lulled the great powers into a lethal vulnerability. The lesson here is that nations, by indulging utopianism, do not necessarily make the world more idealistic. In fact, they may help bring about the very evils they are trying to eliminate.

Infertile monarchy is doomed

Cuba’s politburo threatened by senility

BY PEDRO ROIG

It is not difficult to understand that the discourse of the Cuban revolution has been manipulating dreams for 50 years in a delirious frenzy of unfulfilled promises.

Fidel Castro, the elderly Marxist dictator, appeared briefly at the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party, looking very fragile, not speaking, raising the arm of his brother Raúl, now confirmed as First Party Secretary, and surrounded by the 15 members of the Politburo, half of whom are generals between the ages of 72 and 83.

Fidel himself, 84, appeared weak and walked with difficulty, but it was clear that, despite his precarious health, he is dying stunningly slowly, which, some analysts say, hinders Raúl Castro’s work.

Half a century into the failure of the revolution, the Sixth Congress concluded with an incoherent report that contained contradictory signals about five-year plans to establish bank credit, decentralize the state’s economy, set up commercial contracts to solve conflicts and give Cubans the right to own their homes and buy and sell cars. But at the end, the hard line of the decrepit Marxist socialist imposed itself.

Arteriosclerosis clung to power. The visceral intolerance of an “irreversible” socialism, along with the crushing presence of the military high command and the absence of a generational relay, formed the framework of the Sixth Congress of the PCC that ended with the delegates singing the Internationale, whose lyrics mention “the poor of the world and the slaves without bread.”

These concepts are applicable to socialist Cuba, which in the past 50 years has become one of the world’s poorest nations, without civil liberties. Perhaps this was the Congress’ most lucid moment.

How did we lost the Cold War?

by Irwin Stelzer 

Membership of the European Union is not a condition. It is a process. That process is clear: a steady transfer of power from nation states to Brussels. Eurocrats are not accountable to voters; they are judged only by their peers, the test of success being the expansion of power and the size of the bureaucracy over which they preside. Every effort is made to frame actions and decisions so that voters need not be consulted: witness the recent decision of the European Commission to amend Article 136 of the Lisbon Treaty merely by announcing an addition that permits the establishment of a permanent bailout mechanism to transfer credit from one country to another. This is the very thing the Germans were promised would not happen when they signed up to the Lisbon Treaty.

The process goes something like this. In the beginning there is a general understanding that on important matters individual states have the right to opt out of decisions taken by a majority of the members. That right is anathema to the eurocracy, as an opt-out by one nation threatens their ability to carry forward some new scheme, just as Ireland's insistence on maintaining a low corporate tax rate (about half the EU average) threatens high-tax countries' ability to compete for foreign investment.

What price flexicurity?

So, national rights are whittled away. As is the notion that any significant change in the governance structure should be imposed only after consultation with the peoples of the member states. Referendums are to be avoided, prior promises of sitting and wannabe prime ministers notwithstanding.

The end result is the extension of one-size-fits-all, from interest-rate policy to the entire range of economic management (and not only among eurozone members). The EU process rolls on, the goal being to homogenise economic policy in all 27 member states. In the case of Britain, Brussels already determines how many hours doctors are allowed to work, which reduces parliament's control over the cost and performance of the National Health Service. Having failed in its efforts to introduce greater flexibility into the labour markets of several EU members - the new goal is a watered-down version of "flexibility" called "flexicurity" - the eurocracy has to make certain that competition from members willing to allow employers and workers to develop their own arrangements cannot "unfairly" compete. Hence the latest attack on Britain's uniquely heavy reliance on part-time workers, by imposing huge costs on companies that employ such workers.

The process will go on, as enthusiasts for the "European Project" have never denied. Once the new uniform tax base is put in place, there will most certainly be a call for the application of uniform tax rates to that base. "Attention will be paid," says the EC directive, "to tax policy co-ordination." And three new EU regulatory agencies now have a say in how the City, the jewel in Britain's economic crown, is regulated. We are reaching the endgame of the process, a confluence of two forces that will permit so huge a transfer of sovereignty that even David Cameron, who is good at this sort of thing, will not be able to explain why he will not call the referendum that he promised.

The first is the plight of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and perhaps Spain. Germany, the principal financier of all bailouts, has insisted on what has come to be called "A Pact for the Euro". The French, long hoping for "economic government", and the eurocracy, aware that this is their opportunity to seize control of economic policy not only in the eurozone but throughout the EU, are enthusiastic supporters of the German initiative.

The latest effusion from the European Council is aptly titled "The Euro Plus Pact. Stronger Economic Policy Convergence for Competitiveness and Convergence". It aims to achieve "a new quality of economic policy co-ordination . . . leading to a higher degree of convergence . . . Particular attention [will be paid to] wage setting arrangements . . . the bargaining process . . . wage settlements in the public sector . . . lifelong learning."

National legislation for the banking sector will give "full respect [to] the Community acquis", which, for the uninitiated, is the accumulation of laws and court decisions that weigh heavily on EU firms. There is more, but you get the idea - this is a significant and irreversible part of the process of moving power to an unelected bureaucracy.

Not to worry; all of this applies only to eurozone countries, which leaves Britain unscathed. Think again, and reckon with the second force now in operation. The eurozone 17 have agreed to meet regularly, and EU members that have opted to retain their own currencies will not be invited. Important economic decisions will be taken without the 17 consulting Britain, and there will be other holdouts.

Rise of the eurogang

The next step will be for the eurogang of 17 to outvote the more liberal and market-oriented non-euro ten in wider EU meetings. If that seems implausible, ask yourself whether it once seemed plausible that a British prime minister would break his pledge to put a new EU constitution to a referendum, or to prevent a rise in the EU budget. Or that Britain would end up sharing in the cost of bailouts of Ireland and Portugal, moves aimed at preserving the viability of the euro, something Gordon Brown put Britain in a position to avoid.

Membership of the EU is not a decision to participate in things the way they are, but the way they will become - in other words, a process, and one that the eurocracy has learned to manage so as not to create a casus belli that would produce an outcry for a referendum, which might halt the transfer of power away from elected representatives and national parliaments. That transfer will continue.

Unless, either out of devotion to democratic principles or by virtue of cold political calculation, the Labour Party calls for a referendum if the process of transferring sovereignty continues. Or even calls for withdrawal, now that the World Trade Organisation prevents discrimination by the EU against non-members. Such a call would give Cameron the choice of antagonising his core supporters by opposing it, or fracturing his coalition by supporting it. Whatever the motive and outcome, democracy in Britain would be the winner.

The End of Fatalism

Arab revolutions remind us that nothing is static or guaranteed.

by André Glucksmann

Globalization has changed the world over the last 30 years, but its power is not merely economic. A wave of freedom is spreading that knows no borders. Sometimes it carries the day (the Velvet Revolution); sometimes it runs up against political-military machines, either secular (Tiananmen, 1989) or religious (Iran, 2009). No matter. A globalized younger generation will not silence its cries (often digital): “Back off!” “Get out of our way!” “Give us some space!” Tunisian passion quickly rattled the Egyptian fortress, and soon much of the Middle East felt the impact in some form—including, most recently, Syria. A spiritual atomic bomb is shaking up ancestral forms of oppression that now appear voluntary—and thus open to voluntary destruction.

Beyond our admiration for the crowds we see overcoming their fears, we should reflect on the element of surprise that has left established powers at a loss. Consider two old prejudices, both dating to the end of the Cold War: the idea that the polarity between East and West had been replaced by a conflict among “civilizations”; and the conviction that the Cold War would be followed by the peace of economic rationalism (see “The Dawn of Politics”). The Arab implosions—which expose the incoherence of such categories as “Arab world” and “Islamic civilization”—make clear the inadequacies of these prejudices. How many times have we heard that freedom and democracy mean nothing to the “Arab street” as long as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unresolved? To refuse to defer the question bvhhas until now been enough, in universities and right-thinking circles, to brand a person as indecently Eurocentric, simplistically hung up on human rights, or even . . .Zionist. This fatalism no longer applies to the Maghreb or to the Middle East.

Whatever may come, let us greet the Arab upheaval with “sympathetic aspiration that comes close to enthusiasm,” as Kant spoke of the French Revolution, though he disapproved of its many excesses. There is no reason to bemoan the fall of a tyrant. I enjoyed seeing the end of Communist satraps in Europe and in the East, as well as the falls of Salazar and Franco and Saddam Hussein; why would I mourn the departures of Ben Ali and Mubarak?

A long hot summer

By Aluf Benn

The third intifada is inevitable. It will erupt if the United Nations recognizes a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders because the decision will not be implemented automatically, and the Palestinians will go to war to demand their sovereign rights and to expel the Israel Defense Forces and the settlers from their territory. It will also erupt if the United Nation is deterred from declaring independence for Palestine or hedges its decision in an attempt to placate Israel. In that case, the Palestinians will start an uprising because of their frustration at the loss of international support.

The timing of the third intifada and the immediate excuse for its outbreak are as yet unknown. Neither is it certain that the Palestinians will wait until the U.N. General Assembly in September. Human action is guided by expectations of what will happen rather than by what actually does happen. If we are waiting for a crisis in September, it is likely to erupt earlier. The calm of the past two years has been undermined, and the territories are already abuzz with activity: rockets from Gaza to Ashdod, terrorist attacks and shooting incidents in the West Bank. From here, the path to a conflagration is short.

The prime minister is trapped. Nothing he does will prevent the approaching intifada. He won't surrender now to Palestinian demands and freeze the settlements and agree to withdraw to the Green Line, in a desperate attempt to stop the train on its way to the wall.Not only would such proposals lead to his political demise, they also contradict the strategic logic that guides Netanyahu. In his view, the revolutions in the Arab world will lead to the elimination the West's protectorate regimes and their replacement by Iranian satellites. Handing over the West Bank and Jerusalem to the Palestinians, according to his thinking, will turn them into "a base for Iranian terror" and make life in Israel intolerable.

In his distress, Netanyahu has focused on preventing initiatives for an enforced agreement. Like all his predecessors since 1967, the current prime minister also fears the day when the president of the United States will order him to leave the territories - as presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower did to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion at the conclusion of the Israeli War of Independence and the Sinai Campaign, when they forced him to withdraw from Sinai. Israeli foreign policy has, for the past 44 years, strived to prevent another repetition of this scenario through a combination of intransigence and a surrender of territories considered less vital (Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank cities, South Lebanon ), in order to keep the major prizes (East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights ).

Longing for the bad old days

For some greens, the problem with the recession is that it just isn’t deep enough to force people into eco-poverty.

by Neil Davenport 

Just three years ago, some politicians and commentators advocated austerity measures, including 1940s-style rationing, to tackle the alleged obesity epidemic and overconsumption. Some even argued that an age of austerity could help renew conventional family life and community spirit. Now, some eminent British scientists are suggesting that such rationing is the only way to combat runaway climate change.

In a series of papers published by the Royal Society, scientists from some of Britain’s most esteemed institutions, including the University of Oxford and the Met Office, have argued that it is imperative to halt economic growth in wealthy countries over the next 20 years. At a time when large swathes of the population are suffering from redundancies and pay cuts, such a suggestion appears particularly insensitive and distasteful.

A key suggestion in the papers is that people in wealthy countries should use less carbon-intensive goods and services, which would mean, amongst other things, cutting down on plane and car travel. As Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, admitted, it ‘would not be easy’ to persuade people to reduce their consumption and to change their lifestyles radically. But he said politicians should still consider introducing a rationing system similar to the one introduced during ‘the last time of crisis’ in the 1930s and 1940s. This could mean a limit on electricity so that people would be forced to turn the heating down or to turn off the lights. ‘The Second World War and the concept of rationing is something we need to seriously consider if we are to address the scale of the problem we face’, said Anderson.

Alone in Berlin

The explosive power of Hans Fallada’s 60-year-old novel Alone in Berlin lies in its revelation that some uneducated Germans passionately hated the Nazi regime.

by Neil Davenport 

‘Is it really necessary to write yet another history of Nazi Germany?’ asked Cambridge history professor Richard J Evans in the opening to his Third Reich trilogy. ‘Surely so much has already been written that there is little more to add? Surely we’ve had enough?’ Apparently we haven’t: in Britain, books covering anything on Hitler and the Third Reich – including the Third Reich and UFOs – almost always become bestsellers. A recent BBC Radio 4 documentary reported that publishers refer to this lucrative market as ‘Nazi Gold’.

And so it has proved for English publishers Penguin. Two years ago they published, for the first time in Britain, Hans Fallada’s anti-Nazi resistance novel, Alone in Berlin. Sixty years previously, the German author’s book was rejected for publication in Britain and Fallada was dismissed as a communist. In the 13 months since it was published by Penguin, it has sold more than 300,000 paperback copies – a remarkable figure for a piece of foreign literature. In the US, where it appears under its original title, sales have topped 200,000. It has been translated into 20 languages. A major German film is now in the pipeline.

Fallada wrote Alone In Berlin between September and November 1946, in postwar East Germany; he considered it to be ‘a great novel’. Wrecked and weakened by years of addiction to morphine and alcohol, he would die just a few months later, before the novel was first published as Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone).

Bowing down to a new god: the scientist

Peter Atkins delights in telling us that humanity came from nothing and that we're returning to nothing, and he assumes anyone who doesn't share his beliefs is an idiot.

by Tim Black

It seems that certain men of science, like their hymn-sakes the Christian soldiers, are on the march. For these faithless crusaders, science is not simply a method by which we gain understanding and mastery of the physical world. No, it has become a weapon of enlightenment, a cudgel to be wielded against the ‘ignorant’ multitudes, ‘deluded to the point of perversity’ (to quote high priest of The Science, Richard Dawkins) by religious metaphysics and philosophical myth. For these Darwin-obsessed, unblinkingly deterministic culture-warmongers, science has become more than a method. It has become a mission.

Joining Richard Dawkins at the front line in the war against People With Wrong Beliefs, whether Christian or German Idealist, is Peter Atkins, former professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford and author of On Being – A scientist’s exploration of the great questions of existence. It’s an unabashed attempt to show why the scientific method will come closer to answering the big ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions than – to sling Atkins’ mud –  all the theological fantasists, political storytellers and philosophical shysters put together. And to be fair to the scientistic Atkins, he certainly knows his onions, albeit from the sub-atomic level upwards.

It is happening right now

Obama may be a communist by upbringing and inclination, but at this point his "fundamental transformation of America" more closely resembles fascism. Under communism, the government directly owns everything, and everyone works for it, essentially as a slave. In subtle contrast, fascism allows for ostensibly private concerns that in reality are run by the government. For example, if a fascist government wanted to fire the CEO of General Motors, it could do so, even before it was nationalized and became Government Motors. A fascist government could also fire CEOs in the pharmaceutical industry:

The Department of Health and Human Services this month notified Howard Solomon of Forest Laboratories Inc. that it intends to exclude him from doing business with the federal government. This, in turn, could prevent Forest from selling its drugs to Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Administration. If the government implements its ban, Forest would have to dump Mr. Solomon, now 83 years old, in order to protect its corporate revenue. No drug company, large or small, can afford to lose out on sales to the federal government, a major customer.

This is another reason that seizing control of the healthcare industry was so critical to Democrats. All of the reasons boil down to one: power.

The "action against the CEO of Forest Labs is a game changer," said Richard Westling, a corporate defense attorney in Nashville who has represented executives in different industries against the government.

According to Mr. Westling, "It would be a mistake to see this as solely a health-care industry issue. The use of sanctions such as exclusion and debarment to punish individuals where the government is unable to prove a direct legal or regulatory violation could have wide-ranging impact."

It would do this by making it explicit that top executives at supposedly private companies hold their jobs or lose them at the whim of faceless, unelected bureaucrats.

Solomon was not even accused of misconduct; apparently our rulers picked him almost at random as a test case to see what they can get away with — and to make an example to keep other CEOs in line. The pretext was a misdemeanor case against the company over a minor regulatory violation involving marketing that had already been settled.

For once we're seeing some backbone in the corporate world:

Forest is sticking by its chief. "No one has ever alleged that Mr. Solomon did anything wrong, and excluding him [from the industry] is unjustified," said general counsel Herschel Weinstein. "It would also set an extremely troubling precedent that would create uncertainty throughout the industry and discourage regulatory settlements."

The company is right to take a stand.

Lawyers not involved in the Forest case said the attempt to punish an executive who isn't accused of misconduct could tie up the industry's day-to-day work in legal knots.

"This 'gotcha' approach to enforcement runs the risk of creating a climate within organizations that is inconsistent with the spirit of innovation that is critical to the industry," said Allen Waxman of Kaye Scholer LLP in New York, who was formerly an in-house counsel at a drug maker.

Innovation is one of the first things to dry up and die when a country lets itself slip into tyranny.

Maybe our liberal overlords just don't like Solomon's resume:

Mr. Solomon became chief executive in 1977 and built Forest from a maker of vitamin tablets into a global company with more than $4 billion in annual sales.

In the Age of Obama, this makes Solomon an Enemy of the People.

But what if the experts are wrong?

More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World

by ABHIJIT BANERJEE, ESTHER DUFLO

For many in the West, poverty is almost synonymous with hunger. Indeed, the announcement by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2009 that more than 1 billion people are suffering from hunger grabbed headlines in a way that any number of World Bank estimates of how many poor people live on less than a dollar a day never did.

But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? Our research on this question has taken us to rural villages and teeming urban slums around the world, collecting data and speaking with poor people about what they eat and what else they buy, from Morocco to Kenya, Indonesia to India. We've also tapped into a wealth of insights from our academic colleagues. What we've found is that the story of hunger, and of poverty more broadly, is far more complex than any one statistic or grand theory; it is a world where those without enough to eat may save up to buy a TV instead, where more money doesn't necessarily translate into more food, and where making rice cheaper can sometimes even lead people to buy less rice.

But unfortunately, this is not always the world as the experts view it. All too many of them still promote sweeping, ideological solutions to problems that defy one-size-fits-all answers, arguing over foreign aid, for example, while the facts on the ground bear little resemblance to the fierce policy battles they wage.

Freedom is 'unsustainable', 'unfortunately'

The Sustainable Development Hoax 

S. Fred Singer

“Sustainable Development” (SD) is basically a slogan without a specific meaning. Linked to Earth Day (April 22), it masquerades as a call for clean air, green energy, and suggests a pristine bucolic existence for us and our progeny—forever. But in reality, it has become immensely useful to many groups who use the slogan to advance their own special agenda, whatever they may be.

The term itself was invented by Gro Harlem Bruntlandt, a Norwegian socialist politician and former prime minister. After her term there, she landed in Paris and, together with Club of Rome veteran Alexander King, began publicizing SD. Indeed, the concept is a successor to the neo-Malthusian theme of the Club of Rome, which began to take hold around 1970 and led to the notorious book Limits to Growth. In turn, the “Limits to Growth” concept was developed a few years earlier by U.S. geologists like Preston Cloud and King Hubbert. In a report published by a panel of the National Academy, they promoted the view that the world was running out of resources: food, fuels, and minerals. According to their views, and those of the Club of Rome and Limits to Growth, most important metals should have become unavailable before the end of the 20th century.

(King Hubbert, of course, is best known for the concept of “Peak Oil” which achieved wide-spread popularity in the past few years. Princeton geologist Kenneth Deffeyes gained fleeting fame for his book “Hubbert’s Peak,” which predicted that world oil production would peak in 2008. Of course, it must peak sometime, but the date will be set by economic and technological factors that are difficult to predict.)

In the meantime back in Europe ...

Bailouts and Populism

Alvaro Vargas Llosa

The political consequences for the European Union of bailing out Greece, Ireland and very likely Portugal are disturbingly clear: a rise of populist sentiment around the continent cunningly exploited by nationalist parties once considered on the fringe.
True Finns, a party led by a 48-year-old firebrand leader named Timo Soini, captured almost one in five votes in Finland’s recent general election. Given the nature of a political system that makes coalitions unavoidable, the result has placed True Finns in a strong position to be a part of the new government. Although the economic crisis and, to a lesser extent, immigration partially explain this success, Soini made a point in the last few weeks of the campaign of putting much greater emphasis on the bailouts of Greece and Ireland and what he saw as the imminent rescue of Portugal.
In France, the far-right National Front, now led by Marine Le Pen, has surpassed President Nicolas Sarkozy and his center-right party in the national polls, and did well in the recent regional elections. The transfer of wealth from one part of Europe to another has been central to Le Pen’s message, overshadowing immigration, the traditional punching bag. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, a nationalist leader who has propped up the minority government, is voicing populist sentiments regarding the bailouts too. Although no such leader or party has yet exploited the social frustration in Germany, that country’s key role in rescuing southern Europe has led to an electoral revolt against Chancellor Angela Merkel, who lost a major state election in Baden-Wurttemberg. It is not inconceivable that a populist movement will emerge—or that elements of the mainstream parties, including Merkel’s Christian-Democrats, will adopt an anti-EU position.

Magical comments from the indispensable Mark Steyn

NO LAUGHING MATTER

by Mark Steyn

Last week, Commissar Murray Geiger-Adams of the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal pronounced stand-up comic Guy Earle guilty of the novel "human rights" crime of putting down lesbian hecklers in a homophobic manner. Reacting to the news of his conviction and the accompanying fine of $15,000, Earle writes (scroll down):

What a bloody joke... What did I ever do to Canada, except help promote and educate starting comics for the last 20 years??

"What did I ever do to Canada?" As pitiful, bewildered last words go, that's on a par with those of Kenneth Bigley, shortly before his beheading on video in Iraq: "Tony Blair has not done enough for me." Mr Earle might well have pleaded, "Michael Ignatieff has not done enough for me", nor Jack Layton, nor the massed ranks of leftie CanCon comics. It's certainly true that Mr Earle has never "done to Canada" what Ezra Levant or I have done - support Stockwell Day and Stephen Harper, launch right-wing magazines, engage in "flagrant Islamophobia", etc. Guy Earle is a fellow of conventional views, a man-child of Trudeaupia who, even now, can't understand why Canada should have singled him out to do it to him.

They never do, do they? Might have been him, might have been the guy on stage at Zesty's the following night, or two weeks earlier. Tyranny is always whimsical. Read the107-page judgment of Commissar Geiger-Adams in which he goes into great detail on such critical points of law as whether the plaintiff, Lorna Pardy, and her then girlfriend, Zoe Broomsgrove, were merely kissing or engaging in something closer to heavy petting during the course of Mr Earle's stage act:

[75] Both Ms. Pardy and Ms. Sandor denied that Ms. Pardy and Ms. Broomsgrove engaged in anything other than a kiss. Ms. Pardy said she was sure that they were not kissing more heavily, that she is a very private person, that to do so would be juvenile, and that that is “just not the way I conduct myself in public.” Ms. Sandor said that she was sure Ms. Broomsgrove and Ms. Pardy were not kissing more heavily – that had they done so she would have felt uncomfortable, and would have told them to “get a room or go home”.

On the other hand:

[87] Mr. Wolfe testified that Mr. Earle told Ms. Pardy and the others a couple of times to be quiet, and when that didn’t work, “he started getting a little nasty”. He said that he saw Ms. Pardy and Ms. Broomsgrove kiss each other “a little bit”. He said it was not a kiss on the cheek, and that it “looked like they were making out off and on”.

Also:

[90] Mr. Franson said that Ms. Pardy and Ms. Broomsgrove were being very affectionate with each other. He said that at one point they started kissing, and that they were “really kissing – not a kiss on the cheek”, and that both their heads were turned.

And:

[96] Mr. Roy... did say, without elaboration or explanation, that Ms. Pardy and Ms. Broomsgrove were “making out” while he was on stage..

Hmm. Who to believe? Fortunately, as British Columbia's Chief Commissar of Lesbian Necking, "Judge" Geiger-Adams can tell an expert witness in sapphic makeout action from an obvious charlatan:

I do not find helpful or believable most of Mr. Franson’s evidence as to whether Ms. Pardy and Ms. Broomsgrove exchanged more than a peck on the cheek... I infer that Mr. Espaniel heard more of Mr. Earle’s words than he was prepared to admit, that he sought to protect Mr. Earle, who he described as his friend, and with whom (along with Mr. Franson and Mr. Roy) he went to another bar later that evening, and that his actual recollection of Mr. Earle’s words would not have favoured Mr. Earle..

"Infer"? Indeed: I, Commissar Murray Geiger-Adams of that ilk, testify that my recollection of what the witness would have testified to recollecting had he uttered the words I'm assigning to him is more accurate than the witness' actual testimony of what he claims to recollect. So as Chief Provincial Assessor of Public Display of Affection, "Judge" Geiger-Adams ruled that there's no need to get a room, kids:

[100] I find the following facts... There was no public display of affection between Ms. Pardy and Ms. Broomsgrove beyond a kiss.

Well, thank goodness you cleared that up. Would the homophobic Earle have received a smaller fine had the two makeout witnesses been more credible? What precise calibration of action sets Commissar Geiger-Adams' Geiger counter a-crackling? On reading the hundred-page accumulation of "evidence" against Guy Earle and the damning inventory of the criminal's apparently somewhat limited vocabulary ("dick", "ass", "fuck", "cunt"), one might easily overlook what's missing from Geiger-Adams' "judgment":

Just for starters, how about the testimony of the accused? Guy Earle is not a rich man. For my own show trial in 2008, I flew in from New York to Vancouver and put up at the chichi little hotel just across from the Robson Street courthouse. I was unusual in that respect. Mr Earle is far more typical of the "human rights" regime's targets. He was working that night in 2007 for a $50 bar tab. Over three years later, the BCHRT decided to haul him into the dock. He was living on the other side of the country - of the continent, in fact - and could afford neither the air fare nor the accommodation. Rather touchingly, he offered to pay for his trip by performing at various Vancouver comedy venues while in town, before he eventually figured out that nobody at the Agency of Transgressive Comedy Bookers was going to return his calls ever again. So he suggested to the BCHRT that they might perhaps allow him to testify via video link. His request was denied. Tellingly, one of the two "victims" of his homophobic crime, Zoe Broomsgrove, also declined to participate in the proceedings. Earle's lawyer withdrew from the trial after the Tribunal rejected the BC Supreme Court's advice that it should not proceed until it determined whether it had jurisdiction. Instead, Commissar Geiger-Adams decided to take Lewis Carroll's Red Queen to the next level: "Sentence first, jurisdictional legitimacy determination afterwards!" So he went ahead and tried Guy Earle in absentia.

There is a word for a judge who tries and convicts a man without testimony or representation or a jury of his peers. I mean, aside from words like "dick", "ass" and "cunt", all of which one might apply to "Judge" Geiger-Adams. That word is sham. As with any show trial in any nickel-and-dime banana-republic presidency-for-life, the outward forms of "justice" are deployed for a precise inversion of it. That's wretched enough when it happens in North Korea or the Soviet Union. When a jurisdiction that's heir to one of the oldest sustained legal inheritances on the planet decides to dump due process, it's even more shameful.

What's wrong with Geiger-Adams' court? You notice that I appear above to have called him a "dick", "ass" and "cunt". So what? I'm a dead white male, he's a dead white male. I could say everything Guy Earle is alleged to have said to Ms Pardy - including the bit about the strap-on - and "Judge" Geiger-Adams would have to take it. No "human rights" law is infringed if I launch a blizzard of four-letter words at a fucking dickhead asshole cunt like Geiger-Adams. But, if Ms Pardy is around, the vulgar, witless boorishness that is the stock in trade of the average "comedy" club gets dramatically upgraded to "discrimination in the provision of a service customarily available to the public, on the basis of her sex and sexual orientation" - in other words, a hate crime.

This is an assault on one of the most basic principles of justice - equality before the law. Instead, one citizen has different rights than another according to which preferred identity groups he (or more often she) falls into. In his newspaper column, my friend Ezra Levant wonders if, under the Geiger-Evans Comedy Regime, it's okay for Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy to use racist words for which pastier types would be prosecuted. But this isn't even a hypothetical fancy: This very month at the University of Connecticut, an anthropology professor teaching a class on the cultural significance of "the N-word" showed clips of Chris Rock and Richard Pryor using "the N-word". Shortly thereafter the professor was reported for, er, using "the N-word". The prof is white. The student who reported him is the "Multicultural and Diversity Senator" on the student council, a member of the Black Students' Association and an activist who wants to "instigate unity on campus". And let's face it, the easiest way to "unity" is to "instigate" it, isn't it? So the hapless professor is now being forced to take "diversity training", because nothing says "diversity" like mandatory "unity". And to think American students have run up a trillion dollars in college debt for the privilege of being "taught" by the kind of pansies who agree to submit to "diversity training" for commiting the crime of using "the N-word" in a class about the cultural significance of "the N-word".

The great strength of Common Law is its antipathy to "collective rights" - because the ultimate minority is the individual. If you elevate group rights over individual liberty, you're mainly empowering not "minorities" but the state, which becomes the sole legitimate arbiter of relations between various groups. And empowering the state means empowering the likes of Commissar Geiger-Adams to preside over four-year investigations into the precise degree of smooching between two patrons of a late-night comedy club. That's why group rights are "the key Nanny State concept". What we are witnessing, from the comedy clubs of Vancouver to the groves of academe in Connecticut, is not just the collapse of liberty but the death of the human spirit. There is something deeply sick about the willingness of freeborn citizens to submit to statist enforcers like Geiger-Adams.

When I ran into my spot of bother before the same tribunal, I didn't always see eye to eye with my boss Ken Whyte, the lawyers, and the executive corporate suits at Rogers, but we all agreed on one basic point - that in court we would not produce witnesses to defend the content of my writing (a) because, at the BC "Human Rights" Tribunal truth is no defense, so who cares?; and (b) because to defend the content would be to accept that wankers like Geiger-Adams had jurisdiction over it.

Instead, we put the system on trial. What was at issue was not what I'd done but what the BCHRT and the OHRC and the CHRC were doing. And Geiger-Adams' comrades among the thought police simply couldn't withstand that degree of public scrutiny.

Alas, not everyone is Ezra Levant, nor wants to be. As I wrote a couple of years back:

I haven't followed the Earle case very closely. But, judging from his interview with Rob, he and his legal team have made a couple of missteps. He says he offered a kind of apology and to make a donation to a "woman advocate group", whatever the hell that is. Stupid, stupid, stupid. When you do that, you're accepting their framing of the case - which is that what's at issue is your behaviour. Wrong. What's at issue is BC's and Canada's crappy, worthless, ever more expansive and coercive "human rights" regime. By offering Danegeld (Dykegeld?) to some or other third party, you confer legitimacy on the process. Very foolish.

All Earle and his counsel did was bolster the state's narrative that this case was about him, and his homophobia. It wasn't. It was about the presumption of the Canadian state to regulate the interactions of a late-night comedy club. That shouldn't be a tough call:

If it’s a choice between offensive gags or massive expansion of state power, no self-respecting citizen should find it difficult working out which is the lesser evil and which is the greater threat.

Early on in my travails, I asked Ken Whyte over lunch why we didn't seem to be getting a lot of support from our fellow Canadian media grandees, and he said cheerfully enough, "Because they don't like us." In those first months, the only mainstream media bigwigs to denounce the outrage were exactly those you might expect - David Warren, Rex Murphy, George Jonas, Margaret Wente. We could have held the "Canadian Media For Free Speech" rally in the back of Ken's Honda Civic. When eventually they did rouse themselves, I quickly grew weary of the standard template: obviously Mark Steyn is alarmist/offensive/obnoxious/Islamophobic/racist but (sigh) nevertheless...

But good grief, the jellyspined squishes of the press were rock-ribbed compared to all those "brave" "transgressive" comics Guy Earle has spent his life palling around with. They got together for one rally in Toronto - an evening of the usual third-rate Bush gags - and then decided it was easier to cut him loose. Vancouver comedian Charles Demers:

But while Demers is concerned about free speech as it relates to his profession, he said he considers himself “as much invested in the fight against homophobia as in the fight for comedy.”

Did you say that with a straight face? Boy, your act must be a real side-splitter. Fellow comedian Adam Holwerda:

There’s no government action here, no precedent being set, dude just never showed up to his hearing and now he has to pay the lady who was suing him. Which is why he’s going to lose. Sometimes you go too far and you hurt someone’s feelings enough for them to sue you. That’s just the way it is. Maybe don’t do it next time.

Actually, "dude", it is "government action". At my "trial", the troika of judges sat in front of the Royal Coat of Arms - that's the government, the state. And in my case the statutory penalty would have been a de facto publication ban with the force of a Supreme Court decision preventing me from writing on Islam, Europe, demography, immigration and multiple other issues for the rest of my life. Maybe not a problem for you. Maybe a guy who thinks "edginess" and "dangerous" "envelope-pushing" can be confined to using words like "dude" can live within such a system. On the other hand, that's what Guy Earle thought, too. 

Best of all, the default position of almost every comic asked about this case is to respond very portentously that dear old Guy's greatest crime was that he "wasn't funny". No, he wasn't. But are you entirely sure you want that concept embedded in law? Take my wife. Please. I wouldn't say my wife's fat but, when she asked what they had in her size, they said how about the delivery van? That's not really funny, either, is it? But are you entirely comfortable with making it illegal? How about that surefire Sarah Palin retard-kid gag that demonstrates how cool and cutting edge you are? Suppose you do it one night when the mom of a retard's in the room, dude, and she doesn't get that you're not mocking lib-voting retard-moms supporting greater investment in government child care but just, like, Republican anti-abortion retard-moms? Do you trust Commissar-Dude Geiger-Evans to police that distinction as finely as he did Ms Pardy and Ms Broomsgrove's tongue sarnies?

In the end, Ezra and I dragged most of the media into, if not grudging support for us, at least a lack of support for the censors. The one exception was John Miller, Ryerson journalism professor and ovine fornication specialist, who attempted to gain intervenor status at the BCHRT to argue that Canada's free speech provisions did not extend to me. Miller has fallen silent since his ill advised foray into Ayatollah Khomeini's barnyard. But it is dispiriting to report that, in the Earle case, ninety per cent of comedians have apparently volunteered to climb into the rear end of the John Miller sheep suit. The cravenness of those who make their living from glib attitudinal braggadocio was, I suppose, entirely predictable. In the old days, we had court jesters, who enjoyed a special dispensation to tweak the sovereign - to "speak truth to power", as the lefties would put it. Queen Elizabeth I is said to have complained that her jester was too deferential to her. But under Queen Elizabeth II, we have advanced to comedians happy to play court eunuchs to the Trudeaupian sultans. If you've ever had the misfortune to sit through half-a-dozen back-to-back acts at Juste Pour Rires or the Edinburgh Festival, you'll know that way too much stand-up comedy is just pandering to your audience's most unexamined prejudices. It's a mere difference of degree to pander to the state conformity enforcers. Next time you hear some bozo comic bragging about how "brave", "edgy" and "transgressive" comedians are, remember their edginess and transgressions are licensed and approved by Commissar Murray Geiger-Evans. As Denyse O'Leary writes, maybe we should just put them all on welfare and be done with it.

"What did I ever do to Canada?" wails Guy Earle. Au contraire, this is the Canada that arose with the full support of the edgy transgressives - a Canada where the state polices your jokes, and the court eunuchs are entirely cool with it. Dude.