British journalism is having its cojones removed

After the News of the World, who’s safe?

The unprecedented harrying to extinction of a tabloid newspaper is likely to have a chilling effect across the British media.

By Brendan O’Neill

 Around the world, miles of column inches and hours of television and radio debate have been devoted to the closure of the News of the World. And yet the gravity of what occurred yesterday, the unprecedented, head-turningly historic nature of it, has not been grasped anywhere. A newspaper of some 168 years’ standing, a public institution patronised by millions of people, has been wiped from history – not as a result of some jackbooted military intrusion or intolerant executive decree or coup d’état, but under pressure from so-called liberal campaigners who ultimately felt disgust for the newspaper’s ‘culture’. History should record yesterday as a dark day for press freedom.

 In a civilised society we tend to associate the loss of a newspaper, the pressured shutting down of a media outlet, with some major corrosion of public or democratic values. We look upon the extinction of a paper for non-commercial reasons, whatever the paper’s reputation or sins, as a sad thing, normally the consequence of a tyrannical force stamping its boot and its authority over the upstarts of the media. Yet yesterday’s loss of a newspaper has given rise, at best, to speculative analysis of what is going on inside News International, or at worst to expressions of schadenfreude and glee that the four million dimwits who liked reading phone-hacked stories about Wayne Rooney on a Sunday morning will no longer be at liberty to do so. Many of those politically sensitive commentators who shake their heads in solemn fury upon hearing that a newspaper in a place like Belarus has closed down have barely been able to contain their excitement about the self-immolation of a tabloid here at home.

 Many people, including us at spiked, had reservations about the News of the World’s mode of behaviour, especially following this week’s revelations of deplorable phone-hacking activity involving murdered teenager Milly Dowler and the families of dead British soldiers. The paper undoubtedly infuriated many people, too. Yet this was a longstanding public institution. Just because a newspaper is the private property of an individual – even if that individual is Rupert Murdoch – does not detract from the fact that it is also a public institution, with an historic reputation and an ongoing political and social engagement with a regular, in this case numerically formidable readership. That such a public institution can be dispensed with so swiftly, that a huge swathe of the British people can overnight be deprived of an institution they had a close relationship with, ought to be causing way more discomfort and concern than it is. How would we feel if other public institutions – the BBC, perhaps, or parliament – were likewise to disappear?

War orphans

The Divorce Generation

Having survived their own family splits, Generation X parents are determined to keep their marriages together. It doesn't always work.

 

By SUSAN GREGORY THOMAS

Every generation has its life-defining moments. If you want to find out what it was for a member of the Greatest Generation, you ask: "Where were you on D-Day?" For baby boomers, the questions are: "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" or "What were you doing when Nixon resigned?"

Every generation has its defining moment. For Generation X, it could be: "When did your parents get divorced?" Susan Gregory Thomas, author of the memoir "In Spite of Everything," explains what she sees as its long-term effects on marriage and parenting.

For much of my generation—Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980—there is only one question: "When did your parents get divorced?" Our lives have been framed by the answer. Ask us. We remember everything.

When my dad left in the spring of 1981 and moved five states away with his executive assistant and her four kids, the world as I had known it came to an end. In my 12-year-old eyes, my mother, formerly a regal, erudite figure, was transformed into a phantom in a sweaty nightgown and matted hair, howling on the floor of our gray-carpeted playroom. My brother, a sweet, goofy boy, grew into a sad, glowering giant, barricaded in his room with dark graphic novels and computer games.

I spent the rest of middle and high school getting into trouble in suburban Philadelphia: chain-smoking, doing drugs, getting kicked out of schools, spending a good part of my senior year in a psychiatric ward. Whenever I saw my father, which was rarely, he grew more and more to embody Darth Vader: a brutal machine encasing raw human guts.

Growing up, my brother and I were often left to our own devices, members of the giant flock of migrant latchkey kids in the 1970s and '80s. Our suburb was littered with sad-eyed, bruised nomads, who wandered back and forth between used-record shops to the sheds behind the train station where they got high and then trudged off, back and forth from their mothers' houses during the week to their fathers' apartments every other weekend.

The divorced parents of a boy I knew in high school installed him in his own apartment because neither of them wanted him at home. Naturally, we all descended on his place after school—sometimes during school—to drink and do drugs. He was always wasted, no matter what time we arrived. A few years ago, a friend told me that she had learned that he had drunk himself to death by age 30.

"Whatever happens, we're never going to get divorced." Over the course of 16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children were born. Apparently, much of my generation feels at least roughly the same way: Divorce rates, which peaked around 1980, are now at their lowest level since 1970. In fact, the often-cited statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce was true only in the 1970s—in other words, our parents' marriages.

Not ours. According to U.S. Census data released this May, 77% of couples who married since 1990 have reached their 10-year anniversaries. We're also marrying later in life, if at all. The average marrying age in 1950 was 23 for men and 20 for women; in 2009, it was 28 for men and 26 for women.

Before we get married, we like to know what our daily relationship with a partner will be like. Are we good roommates? A 2007 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that, among those entering first marriages in the early 2000s, nearly 60% had previously cohabited with their future spouses. According to the U.S. government's 2002 National Survey of Fertility Growth, 34% of couples who move in together have announced publicly that marriage is in the future; 36% felt "almost certain" that they'd get hitched, while 46% said there was "a pretty good chance" or "a 50-50 chance."

I believed that I had married my best friend as fervently as I believed that I'd never get divorced. No marital scenario, I told myself, could become so bleak or hopeless as to compel me to embed my children in the torture of a split family. And I wasn't the only one with strong personal reasons to make this commitment. According to a 2004 marketing study about generational differences, my age cohort "went through its all-important, formative years as one of the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history." Census data show that almost half of us come from split families; 40% were latch-key kids.

People my parents' age say things like: "Of course you'd feel devastated by divorce, honey—it was a horrible, disorienting time for you as a child! Of course you wouldn't want it for yourself and your family, but sometimes it's better for everyone that parents part ways; everyone is happier."

Such sentiments bring to mind a set of statistics in "Generations" by William Strauss and Neil Howe that has stuck with me: In 1962, half of all adult women believed that parents in bad marriages should stay together for the children's sake; by 1980, only one in five felt that way. "Four-fifths of [those] divorced adults profess to being happier afterward," the authors write, "but a majority of their children feel otherwise."

Voting by definition and design eliminates the individual in society for the benefit of the collective

Voting: The God That Failed

I am constantly amazed by my fellow citizen’s reverence for voting. This blind worship for this worthless endeavor is troubling to say the very least, but nonetheless firmly entrenched in the minds of the masses. Almost from birth in this country, we are taught that voting is a “sacred” right, a right so important as to be one of, if not the greatest right. I must not have been indoctrinated properly by the government school system, as I consider the most sacred rights as those natural rights to life, liberty, and property, certainly not casting a ballot for one or another criminal in politics.

I consider voting today only as an avenue that allows one group to legally plunder another, and a process that fully legitimizes a corrupt political system. Those who vote are obviously supportive of the political process and the political actions taken in this country, and are responsible for those they elect, and for what they do in office. This is why I think the old adage that “those who do not vote have no right to complain” is backward. Those who vote to allow the political carnage are the ones responsible for the problems, while those who don’t vote have nothing to do with electing criminal politicians. Therefore not voting is in and of itself a political statement denouncing the system, while voting shows favor of that same nefarious system.

One of the major problems of voting as I see it is that those who vote for this, that, or the other, are setting policy that affects all those who voted differently, and all those who did not vote at all. This is democracy or mob rule, the first step toward a socialistic and collectivist system. The reason this is so is due to the fact that we live in a forcibly run dependent society where one can vote to benefit at the expense of another. This truth is overlooked by the “I Voted” crowd, but nonetheless is the lynchpin of redistributive politics.

So who are the big winners due to this scheme called voting? Who benefits the most? The government and all its corporate sponsors, including the banking system, are the real winners of the voting process. They are the controllers; they are the takers and users. They use force in order to gain power, and to steal via extortion the honestly earned wealth of others. They gain the “right” to rule over the country and us, and are legitimized by this scam. By selling the notion that voting gives everyone a say in politics, little is questioned after the fact. The politicians controlling the government sit back and revel in the notion that they have been chosen the new Caesars by the people’s vote. They were properly elected in a democratic process you understand. They are the people’s choice. The dust has settled, and the people have spoken!

How can any sane individual believe that this political process is not fatally flawed? How can any not understand that voting leads directly to one group ruling over another, this regardless of whether a minority or majority wins the day. Either way, those elected to power rule over all others when voting is the method used to choose, and this type of rule ultimately eliminates liberty and leads to tyranny.

While the government benefits most from this procedure, the supportive public is just as responsible for the harm caused. Their votes authorize government action, and give willing consent to the elected king and his court. This group consent determines our individual lot in life, thereby destroying our individuality. If our society were based on self-reliance and self-responsibility, if our laws were based only on our natural rights to life, liberty, and property, if the individual were sovereign, would voting be necessary or would it even exist? Would we need “rulers” in a truly free society?

Politics breeds corruption, and voting supports that corruption. The masses in this country have been force-fed the notion that voting is their sacred right.

The market provides, and people choose from their options

The Free-Market Lesson of the Web

By Whiskey Contributor

The World Wide Web was invented in 1992 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee as a simple mechanism to share scientific papers with colleagues. The key innovation of the web was the use of hypertext – the mechanism by which we click on a link, such as a chunk of highlighted text, and are able to download the target document automatically. Although this is a simple idea, the web has changed the world we live in. Its rise is also a superb example of what happens when the private sector is left alone to meet market needs.

Despite its great complexity and rapid development over the last 10 years, the web community works largely without state intervention of any sort. Web designers did not need the hand of government to develop the skills to create ever more complex websites; IT professionals did not wait to read official reports saying they had to adapt as the technology changed; and companies were quick to offer the ever-evolving range of services needed for the web to run smoothly.

In other words, the private sector adapted, and adapted very quickly. Free-market mechanisms did what they always do – they rushed to meet consumer needs. This is reflected not only in the wide range of products available but also in the rapid drop in prices of almost every aspect of the web. Ten years ago, a personal website was an expensive proposition, especially if you needed anything professional or polished. Today, in the form of blogging software or services like Facebook http://www.facebook.com/WhiskeyandGunpowder, it is free. The overall cost of entry – taking into account the cost of training needed only a decade ago and now no longer necessary – has not so much dropped as evaporated. This low cost of entry has allowed a wide variety of individuals and companies to trade online, providing considerable choice for consumers.

Although the growth we have seen online is exceptional, it is still only a faster version of something capitalism does well: meeting a myriad of needs in a diverse society. It is difficult to imagine a better example of the free market at work.

Equally important is what has not happened. The web is largely divorced from government control and provides private-enterprise examples of large-scale undertakings that many statists claim can only be accomplished by the public sector. We routinely hear that the guiding hand of the state is required for complex projects. But the Internet itself, with its vast number of interconnected computers, is one of the most complex entities ever created by human beings, and much of it has grown without any central planning at all.

Similarly, government often steps in whenever there are perceived dangers to the public; hence pharmaceutical testing, standards regulation, and antifraud laws. But it is evident that the Internet, as an example of a relatively free market, often derails these arguments. The roaring trade in pharmaceuticals online – from antibiotics to endless adverts for Viagra – demonstrates the willingness of many to make their own informed decisions about personal risk.

“America is a very good idea. Somebody ought to try it.”

A Review of The Idea of America

By Gary Gibson 

The Fourth of July is upon us again and a couple hundred million people in the middle latitudes of the North American continent are going to celebrate the birth of the United States. Most of them assume that this means they’ll also be celebrating being American, but that’s not necessarily so.

The United States is a political thing, one heir to the typical failings of politics, and the almost imperceptibly slow decay of republican virtue into nanny statism and imperial hubris.

America, however, is something different. It is not the same thing as the United States that seek to overlay it and to smother it. America is an idea that precedes the U.S. and, we like to believe, both transcends the nation-state and will outlive it.

As Thomas Paine says:

“Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.”

The new version of The Idea Of America: What It Was and How It Was Lost collects in one volume the greatest essays about what America means. It is something undeniably anarchist, resolutely independent and demanding of personal liberty no matter the cost in inconvenience and even in the face of mortal danger.

As stated before America precedes the U.S., but from the founding of the political version of the nation, a dozen generations have sequentially sacrificed more liberty, more of the uniquely American independence for perceived expedience, convenience and security.

“The desire for material ease long ago vanquished the spirit of ’76,” writes American Anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre.

The Idea Of America co-editor Bill Bonner adds, 

“People in the land of the free and the home of the brave will go along with almost anything. They are perfectly willing to give up almost every trace of freedom as long as they have security and economic comfort.”I don’t know many books that can hook the reader so powerfully just with the introduction, but that is exactly what The Idea of America does.

Co-editors Bill Bonner and Pierre Lemieux start out strong. I was actually worried that there would be no way for the book to deliver on the promise offered by such a strong start. I needn’t have worried. I mean, really how could you go wrong with Murray Rothbard, Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, and other such luminaries?

The victors write the history books.

Tricked on the Fourth of July

By Gary North

I do not celebrate the fourth of July. This goes back to a term paper I wrote in graduate school. It was on colonial taxation in the British North American colonies in 1775. Not counting local taxation, I discovered that the total burden of British imperial taxation was about 1% of national income. It may have been as high as 2.5% in the southern colonies.

In 2008, Alvin Rabushka’s book of almost 1,000 pages appeared: Taxation in Colonial America (Princeton University Press). In a review published in the Business History Review, the reviewer summarizes the book’s findings.

Rabushka’s most original and impressive contribution is his measurement of tax rates and tax burdens. However, his estimate of comparative trans-Atlantic tax burdens may be a bit of moving target. At one point, he concludes that, in the period from 1764 to 1775, “the nearly two million white colonists in America paid on the order of about 1 percent of the annual taxes levied on the roughly 8.5 million residents of Britain, or one twenty-fifth, in per capita terms, not taking into account the higher average income and consumption in the colonies” (p. 729). Later, he writes that, on the eve of the Revolution, “British tax burdens were ten or more times heavier than those in the colonies” (p. 867). Other scholars may want to refine his estimates, based on other archival sources, different treatment of technical issues such as the adjustment of intercolonial and trans-Atlantic comparisons for exchange rates, or new estimates of comparative income and wealth. Nonetheless, no one is likely to challenge his most important finding: the huge tax gap between the American periphery and the core of the British Empire.

The colonists had a sweet deal in 1775. Great Britain was the second freest nation on earth. Switzerland was probably the most free nation, but I would be hard-pressed to identify any other nation in 1775 that was ahead of Great Britain. And in Great Britain’s Empire, the colonists were by far the freest.

I will say it, loud and clear: the freest society on earth in 1775 was British North America, with the exception of the slave system. Anyone who was not a slave had incomparable freedom.

Jefferson wrote these words in the Declaration of Independence:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

I can think of no more misleading political assessment uttered by any leader in the history of the United States. No words having such great impact historically in this nation were less true. No political bogeymen invoked by any political sect as “the liar of the century” ever said anything as verifiably false as these words.

The Continental Congress declared independence on July 2, 1776. Some members signed the Declaration on July 4. The public in general believed the leaders at the Continental Congress. They did not understand what they were about to give up. They could not see what price in blood and treasure and debt they would soon pay. And they did not foresee the tax burden in the new nation after 1783.

In an article on taxation in that era, Rabushka gets to the point.

Historians have written that taxes in the new American nation rose and remained considerably higher, perhaps three times higher, than they were under British rule. More money was required for national defense than previously needed to defend the frontier from Indians and the French, and the new nation faced other expenses.

So, as a result of the American Revolution, the tax burden tripled.

If we forget the past we leave the future to the fabulists and utopians

Remember the past to create the miracles of the future

By The Dinocrat

Consider the remarkable changes of the last 130 years:

Some signal facts of our progress in the last century. If you were born in 1900, your life expectancy was in the forties, and GNP per capita was about $4000. If you are born today, your life expectancy in about eighty, and statistically, as an average American, you are ten times richer. In reality you are a hundred or a thousand times richer, if you factor in your ability to be in Paris tomorrow for $500, your ability to watch events from fifty years ago as they actually happened, etc. – not to mention that your toddler’s severe pneumonia can be reliably cured in 48 hours or so. Only a little of this has to do with government.Mostly it is because perhaps more than 50% of everything ever invented in the history of humanity was invented in the last 130 years, and perhaps 50% of that was invented by Americans. Milton Hershey invented the candy bar, Carrier invented the air conditioner for a tire plant, Sears invented catalogue distribution, Henry Ford invented cheap cars, some guys from Texas Instruments invented the transistor. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the invention and wide use of brand names, which communicate the quality and dependability of every product we buy. This alone deserves the Nobel Prize. And it was a large and growing market, the availability of risk capital, the development of standardized accounting principles, and protection of intellectual and personal property by the courts that made this possible.

We are at the end of an era; soon, there will be no one in America who remembers what life was like without telephones, running water, indoor plumbing, cars, airplanes, central heating, or electric lights; for our purposes here, we’ll include the children and grandchildren of these men and women as participating in a chain of continuity to those old days. One of our favorite quotes from Henry Adams is apt: “The American boy of 1854 stood closer to the year 1 than to the year 1900.” Soon, almost no one in America will have a visceral understanding of what 1854 was like, and what the heck Adams was talking about.

It is even worse than that. The transistor was invented in 1947 and patented shortly after, and since that time devices of all sorts have been getting smaller, smarter and less mechanical. There is another loss happening because of this, and Americans — including us — have no idea what it means for the future, though we think it is, on balance, bad:

A typical boy of 1854 knew what farming was like and may well have worked on a farm, knew horses and other animals, and learned how to maintain and fix things, from houses to wagons to furniture. A typical young man of 1947 had been in the army, knew people who lived on farms, could tune and maintain his own car, and could change the fan belt on the refrigerator and refill it with Freon. Both the boy and the young man had some feel for the technologies that were developing and changing around them, since the technologies were often sized on a human scale and involved mechanical processes that they had some acquaintance with.To an important extent, this is no longer true. You can’t fix an iPod the way you can fix a record player; indeed you can’t even easily open up an iPod to understand it, as you could unscrew the turntable cover to figure out how 33 1/3 rpm became 45 rpm. Nor can you fool around with a Toyota Prius the same way you could try to replace a 283 with a 327 in a ’57 Chevy.

We hope we are not romanticizing a world we have lost; it is common enough, as well as wrong, to excessively mythologize the past. Today’s technology provides far greater health and wealth to a vastly larger world population than existed in those other times. We love refineries, steel mills, job shops, machine tools and oil rigs, but we are not suggesting, like Mao, a steel mill in your back yard or some form of return to a isolationist’s vision of a manufacturing economy. However, we are saying that it is fit and proper to understand such things.

Pitchforks

Selective Shaming

If only government were as accountable as British tabloids.

By Mark Steyn

Something rather weird happened in London last week. For some time, the Guardian, a liberal, broadsheet, “respectable” newspaper, has been hammering the News of the World, a populist, tabloid, low-life newspaper, over its employees’ penchant for “hacking” the phones of royals and celebrities — Prince Harry and Hugh Grant, for example. This isn’t as forensic as it sounds: Until recently, most British cellphones were sold with the default password set to either 0000 or 1234, and most customers never bothered to change it.

But last Monday it emerged that the News of the World had also hacked into the telephone of a missing schoolgirl subsequently found dead, as well as those of family members of the July 7 Tube bombing victims and of British servicemen killed in Afghanistan. Nobody much cares if the Aussie supermodel Elle Macpherson and other denizens of the demimonde get their voicemails intercepted, but dead schoolgirls and soldiers changed the nature of the story, and events moved swiftly. On Thursday, Rupert Murdoch’s son and heir announced the entire newspaper would be closed down. The whole thing. Gone.

The News of the World wasn’t any old fish-wrap. Founded in 1843, it was by the mid–20th century the most-read newspaper in the English-speaking world, selling 9 million copies a week. Even in today’s emaciated market, every week more than 2.6 million Britons bought News of the Screws (as it was affectionately known). Last Sunday, it was the biggest-selling newspaper in the United Kingdom and Europe. This Sunday, it’s history. To put it in American terms, consider those George Soros–funded websites claiming they pressured Fox into “firing” Glenn Beck. This is the equivalent of pressuring Mr. Murdoch into closing down the entire Fox News network.

I confess to feeling a little queasy at the sight of bien pensant liberal opinion gloating at having deprived 4 million people of their preferred reading matter. If one were so inclined, one might be heartened by the swift responsiveness to pressure of the allegedly all-powerful bogeyman Murdoch. But you can’t help but notice that this supposed public shaming is awfully selective. In the week of the News of the World revelations, it was reported that the Atlanta Public Schools system has spent the last decade systemically cheating on its tests. Not the students, but the superintendent, and the union, and 38 principals, and at least 178 teachers — whoops, pardon me, “educators” — and some 44 of the 56 school districts. Teachers held “changing parties” at their homes at which they sat around with extra supplies of erasers correcting their students’ test answers in order to improve overall scores and qualify for “No Child Left Behind” federal funding that could be sluiced into maintaining their lavish remuneration. Let’s face it, it’s easier than teaching, right?

The APS Human Resources honcho Millicent Few illegally had an early report into test-tampering destroyed. So APS not only got the federal gravy but was also held up to the nation at large as a heartwarming, inspirational example of how large urban school districts can reform themselves and improve educational opportunities for their children. And its fake test scores got its leader, Beverly Hall, garlanded with the National Superintendent of the Year Award, the Administrator of the Year Award, the Distinguished Public Service Award, the Keystone Award for Leadership in Education, the Concerned Black Clergy Education Award, the American Association of School Administrators Effie H. Jones Humanitarian Award, and a zillion other phony-baloney baubles with which the American edu-fraud cartel scratches its own back.

Breaking Eggs

Iran and Turkey Circle Syria

By Meir Javedanfar

The ongoing unrest in Syria caught many governments around the world off-guard, not least in Iran and Turkey.

Like many other capitals, both Tehran and Ankara appear to have been surprised not only by the actual outbreak of unrest, but also by the momentum and tenacity of the demonstrations. Yet what has probably surprised them more is how they now find themselves pitted against each other over the future of the Bashar al-Assad regime.

On one side, the Iranian government is offering Assad diplomatic and military support to cling on to power, including sending security advisers, equipment for shutting off the Internet, and forces for brutalizing the demonstrators. Iranian news sources, meanwhile, have also supported Syrian state reports by labelling the demonstrators ‘terrorists.’

On the other side stands Turkey. Its government, which had until recently been close to Assad, is now condemning him. In an interview in early June, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Assad and his brother, Maher, of ‘killing people and then releasing videos of the killings,’ while asking the United Nations to intervene. Other reports noted the Turkish government delivering a warning letter to Assad, asking him to implement reforms and to fire Maher, who is believed by many to be behind the brutal crackdowns. This has occurred against the backdrop of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing the crackdown to Turkey. Had they crossed into Iran instead, it’s difficult to imagine the Iranian regime doing anything except handing them straight back.

The conflicting views on Syria come at a time when ties between the two had actually been prospering, especially on the economic side. Turkey has bought gas from Iran at discounted prices, while selling gasoline at 25 percent above market prices. Turkey had also become a trusted confidant for Iran over the nuclear issue. For example, Iran backed last year’s Brazil-Turkey nuclear deal, while Istanbul became one of Iran’s preferred venues for P5+1 nuclear talks over Iran’s nuclear programme.

This isn’t to say there haven’t been tensions. Both Shiite Persian majority Iran and Sunni majority Ottoman Turkey have their own regional ambitions, creating competition that is now manifesting itself in places such as Gaza, Iraq and in relations with the Persian Gulf countries. The Turkish government was silent about the entry of Saudi forces into Bahrain, for example, because of concerns over its relations with the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council (Iran, in contrast, was furious).

Still, the intensity of the rivalry over Syria’s future is surprising – and it’s worrying Iran. Iranian foreign ministry officials have repeatedly voiced their displeasure over Turkey’s policy toward Assad, but to no avail. Iran fears that should the status quo in Syria persist, it will only highlight differences between the two, and risk encouraging Turkey to rethink its closeness with Tehran. With Iran providing Assad with support to quell the demonstrators, Arab nations, the United States and NATO are likely to increase pressure on Turkey to scale back its ties with Tehran.

Even worse for Iran would be if Israel managed to patch things up with Turkey. Relations between them have improved marginally, but reports suggest that Israel has backed away three times from issuing an apology to the Turkish government over the Mavi Marmara incident last year, when the Israeli military used force against the so-called Gaza Freedom Flotilla.

For now, time and events are on Turkey's side. Erdogan has been smart enough not to sacrifice his relations with the West by placing all of his eggs in the Iran basket, a move that is now paying off. Meanwhile, he will likely have calculated that he can withstand pressure from Iran without having to pay the costs of angering it. And with Iran so short of friends, there’s little pressure that Tehran can bring to bear upon Ankara. This allows Erdogan to continue pressuring Assad to implement serious reforms, pressure that could evolve into a request that he step aside should the situation deteriorate further.

NATO has much to gain from Turkey's influence. Having a member that can influence events in a Middle Eastern country as important as Syria will boost the organization’s diplomatic influence, something that is all the more welcome given that the intervention in Libya isn’t going as smoothly as hoped.

Sooner or later, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will be faced with a stark choice – either stand with Assad until the end or abandon him. His timing could impact the future of the Islamic Republic and its future relations with Syria, as well as Iran’s strategic clout in the region. It will also affect Hizbollah’s position, which has itself become more tenuous with the release of the findings of the Hariri trial.

‘Whenever you catch the fish, it will be fresh,’ goes one well-known Persian proverb meaning it's never too late to begin something. When it comes to the difficult choices over Syria, though, Khamenei doesn’t really have that luxury.

The mega-cycle is coming to an end

Is hyperinflation inevitable?

by DETLEV SCHLICHTER

One of the major lessons of the financial crisis thus far should be that every bond constitutes credit risk – even those issued by sovereign states and banks. Conceptually, that should be obvious, but the investment management industry has long treated government bonds as “safe assets”, at least those that are issued in the government’s own fiat money. Similarly, the debt of major banks was also considered particularly credit-worthy, not least because of the implicit government support the banks enjoy courtesy of their systemic importance. If the present and ever-evolving financial crisis has now turned the spotlight on the considerable and constantly growing debt load of sovereign states after already highlighting the overstretched balance-sheets and thin capital bases of most banks, it is thus equally exposing the long-standing irrational exuberance of bond investors who, for decades, have happily piled into these bonds.

I should probably declare an interest here. I spent almost two decades in the bond business. I have been part of it and I think I know it well. But don’t take my word for it, look at the Barclays Capital Global Aggregate Bond Index, a reasonable representative of the current market place for investment-grade rated, liquid bonds around the world. Its present market capitalization? A mind-blowing $ 40 trillion, more than half of which is made up of government bonds (and mind you, these are only the most liquid ones – governments have even more debt outstanding).

Only about 16 percent of the global bond universe is debt issued by corporations. Of that, about half is from financial institutions. Investing in global investment grade bonds is practically synonymous with investing in government bonds, government-related enterprises, government-supported mortgage-backed securities or government-regulated and supported banks. Only a tiny fraction of the market is occupied by truly free-market enterprise.

Paper money encourages debt accumulation
Lenders have always been happy to give their money to the state and its proteges. After all, contrary to the rest of us who have to earn an income in the market place by producing something that the fickle consumer will – hopefully – spend money on, the state can simply tax the winners of capitalist competition at the moment they come into the money – and share the loot with the state’s financiers. It is evidently safer to become a stakeholder in the state’s monopoly of taxation than a lender to an entrepreneurial enterprise.

But there are limits to how much the state can tax the population (even in Sweden), and despite their taxation-privilege, states do in fact have a history of getting into fiscal problems, losing the trust of their creditors, and even defaulting. These risks seemed to be further diminished, however, with the establishment of complete fiat money systems, in which the state (or the state’s very own – Stalinist term coming up – central bank) can produce as much money as it likes, practically at no cost and thus without limit; money that can be used to pay the state’s creditors.

The advent of complete paper money systems was even more meaningful for the banks. In a system of hard money (such as a proper gold standard), lending to banks should come with a health warning. For the past 300 years, banks have derived a considerable portion of their profit from creating deposit money, that is, from issuing instantly redeemable claims to money proper (gold or state paper money) with only a fraction of these claims being backed by the type of money they constitute a claim to. This is called fractional-reserve banking, and whatever you think of it, it is clear that it makes banks particularly risky, and it is the reason why the history of banking has also been the history of occasional bank runs and panics. All of this, the advocates of unlimited state-controlled fiat money promised us, should now be a thing of the past. Bank reserves are no longer hard commodities of essentially inflexible supply but fully elastic fiat money under the guidance of enlightened economists. In the paper-money printing central bank the banks now have a “lender of last resort”.

“What could go wrong?”, the bond investor asked. Lending to banks and states is practically risk-free. The state won’t let the banks fail – the fall-out is politically unacceptable. And in a full paper-money system, the lender-of-last-resort can produce unlimited bank reserves to bail out the banks. Equally, the state can always pay. The cost of overspending can be socialized across all paper money users via inflation. Higher inflation may be a nuisance but as long as it remains somewhat contained it shouldn’t be intolerable, and most bond investors, such as pension funds or insurance companies, seem to consider their obligations to their customers to be mainly nominal ones anyway, not real ones. As long as they can repay the promised notional amounts of dollars, euro, pounds or yen, they have done their job, regardless what those monetary units may buy in the end. Within limits, bond investors prefer inflation to outright default.

This system makes states and banks appear as particularly credit-worthy borrowers and thus provides a powerful incentive for states and banks to borrow. Which is precisely what they did. And they did a lot of it.

Our present complete paper money system only dates back to 1971, when Nixon shut the gold window (to allow the state to run larger deficits, of course!), and it should not surprise anybody that overall levels of indebtedness have exploded over the past 40 years. In 1971, net debt in the United States was about 150 percent of GDP. In 2009, it was 370 percent.

Nibiru blamed for economic crisis by Greek protesters

 Believers In Mysterious Planet Nibiru Await Earth's End

By Natalie Wolchover

Renowned astrophysicist Carl Sagan once described a "baloney detection kit" — a set of tools that skeptical thinkers use to investigate any new concept. A few of the key tools include a healthy distrust of information that isn't independently verified, critically assessing an idea rather than becoming irrationally attached to it simply because it's intriguing, and a preference for simple explanations over wildly speculative ones.

The waxing obsession with Nibiru, which conspiracy theorists say is a planet swinging in from the outskirts of our solar system that is going to crash into Earth and wipe out humanity in 2012 — or, in some opinions, 2011 — shows that an astonishing number of people "are watching YouTube videos and visiting slick websites with nothing in their skeptical toolkit," in the words of David Morrison, a planetary astronomer at NASA Ames Research Center and senior scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

Morrison estimates that there are 2 million websites discussing the impending Nibiru-Earth collision.  He receives, on average, five email inquiries about Nibiru every day.

"At least a once a week I get a message from a young person — as young as 11 — who says they are ill and/or contemplating suicide because of the coming doomsday," Morrison told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com.

What's the origin of this mass panic about Nibiru, which astronomers say doesn't exist?

A suspect origin

The idea that doomsday will result from a planetary collision was first proposed in 1995 by Nancy Lieder, a self-described "contactee." Lieder claims she has the ability to receive messages through an implant in her brain from aliens in the Zeta Reticuli star system. On her website, ZetaTalk, she stated that she was chosen to warn mankind of an impending planetary collision which would wipe out humanity in May 2003. (When no such cataclysmic event occurred, Lieder's followers chose 2012 as the new date for the Nibiru collision, which coincides neatly with other doomsday prophecies focused on the ending of the Mayan calendar.) [Read: Doomsday Facts (or Fictions)]

Lieder originally called the bringer of doom "Planet X," and later connected it to a planet that was hypothesized to exist by a writer named Zecharia Sitchin in his book "The 12th Planet" (Harper 1976). According to Sitchin (1920-2010), the ancient Sumerians wrote about a giant planet called Nibiru — the "twelfth planet" in the solar system, after the other planets (including Pluto), the sun and moon — which has an oblong orbit that swings near Earth every 3,600 years. Humans actually evolved on Nibiru, he said, and colonized this planet during a previous flyby.

Historians and language scholars say that Stitchin grossly mistranslated ancient texts. The Sumerians did indeed believe in a cosmology involving planets; however they thought there were five planets, not 12, and they did not believe that humans hopped to Earth from a place called Nibiru. Furthermore, astronomers have pointed out that a planetary orbit like the one Sitchin proposed for Nibiru is impossible: No celestial body could maintain a stable orbit that swings it through the inner solar system every 3,600 years and keeps it beyond Pluto the rest of the time. The body would quickly get sucked in or pushed out.

Nonetheless, Sitchin's books have been translated into 25 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide. Lieder's planetary collision theory has adopted the name of Nibiru for Earth's planetary nemesis. Many people who believe that doomsday will occur when the Mayan calendar ends in 2012 have adopted Lieder's Nibiru collision prophecy as the cataclysm that will bring us to that end.

Free Market Capitalism in action

3D Printing in action

Tragedy with a human face

The makings of human tragedy in the hell on Earth

By Khadija Patel

Decades of war and famine brought unimaginable suffering to millions of Somali people. Profoundly disturbing are the reports from the area, as our aid methods are simply not working.

My own image of Mogadishu is the burgeoning Somali community of Mayfair, Johannesburg. Away from the devastation of a war that much of the world has chosen to forget, the Somalis of Mayfair wield the heavy guns of entrepreneurship. Through an ongoing conversion of ramshackle properties into inns and restaurants, the Somali quarter of Mayfair has become a hub of business. A Somali women sells tea and coffee on Bird Street from a tiny kiosk carved out of the facade of a house that was a hotel before it eventually became a supermarket.

Across the road, beside the Somali-owned tuck shop competing with the Pakistani-owned Zahra Tuck Shop on the next corner, men mill around the khat vendor. Khat could as well be spinach, nobody bats an eyelid at a semi-narcotic amphetamine-like stimulant sold without any qualms on a busy street corner. But then nobody really bothers with the Somalis.

Here, when the rest of Mayfair has retired in front of TV screens, the Somali quarter continues to hustle for life in South Africa. These are the few thousand that consider themselves lucky. Lucky to have escaped Somalia alive, lucky to survive the refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia, lucky to have survived the journey to South Africa. For hundreds of thousands more, luck has dissipated in the struggle to eke out life from the ravages of a ceaseless war and a crippling drought.

Of the quarter of Somalia’s 7.5 million population the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) believes displaced either internally or living outside the country as refugees, less than 10,000 are in South Africa. An estimated 10 million people in the Horn of Africa are believed to be facing a “humanitarian emergency” as the region grapples with its worst drought in 60 years. Several seasons of failed rains compounded by spiralling global food prices means the drought will affect more than 12 million people across Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya. Somalia though, is set to be the hardest hit.

The UNHCR  warned this week that  “one of the world's worst humanitarian crises” is being turned into a “human tragedy of unimaginable proportions”.

More than 135,000 Somalis have fled the country so far this year and last month alone, 54,000 people fled across the two borders, into Kenya and Ethiopia. At the Dadaab refugee complex in north-eastern Kenya where three camps, Dagahale, Ifo and Hagadera, make up the severely overcrowded and chronically underfunded Dadaab complex, about 1,300 people are arriving every day from Somalia. Christina Patterson describes the passage of Somalis into Kenya like this: “Thousands walking for days on legs so weak that they can hardly bear the weight of the skeletal body they support, with muscles so wasted that every step hurts, to a place where they might, or might not, get the food and water and shelter they need to keep alive.” In Ethiopia, two refugee camps, Bokolmanyo and Malkadida have already reached capacity and aid workers are struggling with the unrelenting wave of new arrivals.

Eat your spinach

Oak Park Woman Faces 93-Days in Jail For Planting Vegetable Garden

By ALEXIS WILEY

OAK PARK, Mich. (WJBK) - "The price of organic food is kind of through the roof," said Julie Bass.

So, why not grow your own? However, Bass' garden is a little unique because it's in her front yard.

"We thought it'd be really cool to do it so the neighbors could see. The kids love it. The kids from the neighborhood all come and help," she said.

Bass' cool garden has landed her in hot water with the City of Oak Park. Code enforcement gave her a warning, then a ticket and now she's been charged with a misdemeanor.

"I think it's sad that the City of Oak Park that's already strapped for cash is paying a lot of money to have a prosecutor bothering us," Bass told FOX 2's Alexis Wiley.

"That's not what we want to see in a front yard," said Oak Park City Planner Kevin Rulkowski.

Why? The city is pointing to a code that says a front yard has to have suitable, live, plant material. The big question is what's "suitable?"

We asked Bass whether she thinks she has suitable, live, plant material in her front yard.

"It's definitely live. It's definitely plant. It's definitely material. We think it's suitable," she said.

So, we asked Rulkowski why it's not suitable.

"If you look at the definition of what suitable is in Webster's dictionary, it will say common. So, if you look around and you look in any other community, what's common to a front yard is a nice, grass yard with beautiful trees and bushes and flowers," he said.

But when you look at front yards that are unsightly and overgrown, is Bass' vegetable garden really worth the city's time and money?

We asked Rulkowski what he would say to those who feel this is ridiculous.

"I would argue that you won't find that opinion from most people in Oak Park," he responded.

"I have a bunch of little children and we take walks to come by and see everything growing. I think it's a very wonderful thing for our neighborhood," said neighbor Devorah Gold.

"They don't have (anything) else to do (if) they're going to take her to court for a garden," said neighbor Ora Goodwin.

We did find one neighbor who wasn't a fan and thinks it needs to go.

"I know there's a backyard. Do it in the backyard," he said.

"They say, 'Why should you grow things in the front?' Well, why shouldn't I? They're fine. They're pretty. They're well maintained," said Bass.

It looks like this critical debate is headed for a jury trial and neither side is backing down.

"I could sell out and save my own self and just not have them bother me anymore, but then there's no telling what they're going to harass the next person about," Bass told us.

There's another pretrial scheduled for July 26. The next step could be a jury trial.

The dominion of the state over church

Strict Separationism’ Runs Amok

               Houston, we have a problem.

by  WILLIAM E. SIMON JR. & MATTHEW J. FRANCK

Arleen Ocasio seems to be setting herself up for a second rebuke from a federal judge. Ocasio has been, since 2009, the director of the Houston National Cemetery, which, at 419 acres, is the second-largest cemetery administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs, exceeded in size only by Arlington. Houston National has somewhere in the neighborhood of 70,000 men and women interred there, including several Medal of Honor winners and the congressman who worked to have the cemetery built and recognized as a national one. It is, like all such places, a scene of both sorrow and celebration, of patriotism — and prayer.

Recently, however, Ocasio, the cemetery’s Obama-appointed director, has been credibly accused of engaging in a pattern of censorship directed against private religious expression. The chapel has allegedly been closed, its cross and Bible removed, and it is now said to be used as a “meeting space” when it is unlocked at all. The carillon in the 75-foot bell tower no longer tolls on a regular basis. And members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, and the National Memorial Ladies, attending upon the bereaved families and friends at veterans’ funerals, say they have been required to have their prayers pre-approved by Ocasio’s office, and have been told that the words “God” and “Jesus” are not to be used by them if they wish to continue their volunteer service at the cemetery.

This isn’t the first episode of such trouble. In May, with the approach of Memorial Day — always a day of proud and sorrowful reflection at veterans’ cemeteries, typically characterized by invocations of God’s mercy and His blessings on our country — Ocasio required that the ministers who planned to speak at the cemetery submit their proposed prayers to her in advance. Pastor Scott Rainey of Living Word Church did so, and was told to revise his prayers to be more “inclusive” — by excluding specific reference to his own religion. Appealing to the VA in Washington, Rainey was referred to a deputy in the general counsel’s office, who backed Ocasio.

Rainey took his case to federal district court in Houston, where Judge Lynn Hughes sharply rebuked the VA and Ocasio, issuing a restraining order against them on May 26. As Hughes said in his opinion, “the government cannot gag citizens” in the name of “some bureaucrat’s notion of cultural homogeneity.” Judge Hughes further wrote:

The government’s compulsion of a program’s inclusion or exclusion of a particular religion offends the Constitution. The Constitution does not confide to the government the authority to compel emptiness in a prayer, where a prayer belongs. The gray mandarins of the national government are decreeing how citizens honor their veterans. . . .These people say that remarks need to be content-neutral messages. The men buried in the cemetery fought for their fellow Americans — for us. In those fights, they were served by chaplains, chaplains of two faiths and many denominations, chaplains in the field. They ministered to men who needed them — to all — not only to their personal calling. No deputy general counsel of the Department of Veterans Affairs was in the Ia Drang Valley . . .

Government as Godfather

A theory of government

by R. Roberts

You can think of two theories of government. One theory is that government exists to correct externalities and provide public goods. The other is that government uses the language of helping people to justify giving stuff to the politically powerful out of the pockets of the rest of us. Here’s some evidence for the second theory.