The destruction of poverty and privilege

Hutt's Crushing Blow to Keynes

by Hunter Lewis

Genius does not always announce itself. This was especially true of William H. Hutt. There was nothing about him to attract attention. He was born in London of working class parents, earned a bachelor's degree in economics from The London School of Economics in 1924, worked for a London publishing firm, and migrated to South Africa where he lectured obscurely in economics, before eventually retiring and moving to the United States in 1965. He was slight in frame and modest in manner, never pushing, always delighted to see the triumphs of others. He identified himself as a classical economist, not a member of any contemporary group or movement — how easy indeed to overlook him, but what a mistake to do so.

Hutt's mind was made for logic. It could see a logical problem from every side, draw every distinction and nuance, then penetrate right to the bottom of it. No fallacy was safe from him, and, without being the least combative, he never flinched from telling the unvarnished truth.

The history of modern economics is full of destructive fallacies, beginning with the mercantilists, continuing through Karl Marx, and culminating with John Maynard Keynes. These false ideas have impoverished billions of people and caused no end of needless suffering. When Keynes published his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936, a potpourri of fallacies supported by obscurity, shifting definitions, and other rhetorical tricks, many economists criticized it privately, but very few did so publicly. Why? Because Keynes was an intimidating figure, the best known economist in the world, a master publicist and polemicist, the editor of The Economic Journal, an essential venue for English-speaking economists.

In the preface to The Theory of Idle Resources, completed a year after Keynes's General Theoryappeared, and published two years later in 1939, Hutt says forthrightly: "I have been wisely advised not to touch on any of the major controversies which his contribution [Keynes's General Theory] has aroused."[1] But, then, with laser-like logic, he proceeds to demolish some of the most important intellectual props for Keynes's Theory. Moreover, he does so, as he says, "as far as possible, in a nontechnical way" so that "the reader who is unacquainted with the economic textbooks may follow my reasoning from point to point and himself decide on it's validity."[2]

Keynes's argument may be simplified as follows. Full employment should be our goal. The market system will not get us there; it requires government help as well as guidance. This means, in practice, that government will continually print money, in order to reduce interest rates, ultimately to zero[3], and also borrow and spend as needed. Booms are good, even economic bubbles are acceptable. Recession and bust must be avoided at all cost. As Keynes wrote: "The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom."[4]

In a variety of books and articles, Hutt pointed out the absurdity of this. One cannot create wealth simply by printing more money or by borrowing and spending funds which can never be repaid. Moreover, the real source of unemployment is some disturbance in the price-and-profit system. Government cannot possibly help matters by intervening in ways that further distort and disturb that system.

In his Theory of Idle Resources, Hutt deconstructs even the initial premise of Keynes's thinking, that we should want a permanent condition of full employment. Not only is full employment not definable; it is not even desirable. A moment's thought will show this to be true. To grow, an economy must change. To change, assets and workers must be shifted from where they are less needed (less productive) to where they are more needed (more productive). These shifts will inevitably produce temporary unemployment. If there had never been unemployment, and thus no economic change, we would all still be living in caves, and there would be far fewer of us, because hunting and gathering would only support a small fraction of the present population.

This insight is not original to Hutt. The economic writer Henry Hazlitt, a friend of Hutt's, found similar observations in a paper written by John Stuart Mill during 1829–30 when he was age 24, and collected in his Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy. Mill's paper completely refutes Keynes's false contention that "classical" economists simply assumed that there would always be "full employment." But Hutt takes the examination of unemployment much further than the pioneering Mill. Indeed, he does not just examine unemployment. He examines unemployment as part of the larger phenomenon of unused or idle productive resources, including land, plant, equipment, and money as well as workers.

Hutt's careful reasoning demonstrates, through a variety of illustration, that we cannot just lump together (and falsely quantify) all the complexities of human choice and action working within a closely coordinated price-and-profit system. What looks like nonproductive idleness may actually be very productive, indeed essential to the smooth working of the system. Is it more productive for a highly trained but unemployed engineer to bag groceries for pay or to invest time without pay in looking for an engineering job? If he or she took the grocery-bagging job, Keynes would presumably be satisfied; we would be closer to full employment. But the economy would clearly not be more productive, which it must be to create new jobs. We should also keep in mind that an employment-agency employee job searching for the engineer would be considered gainfully "employed," while the engineer doing the same work would still be "unemployed."

Do not panic

If the world’s population lived in one city…

 by Tim De Chant

Little Nazis

The Threat to Israeli Liberties from the Israeli Supreme Court

By Steven Plaut

Robert Bork, the eminent American law professor from Yale University, once described the Israeli Supreme Court as the worst in the Western world.  Israel, Bork wrote, "has set a standard for judicial imperialism that can probably never be surpassed, and, one devoutly hopes, will never be equaled elsewhere."  Bork finds "less and less reason for the Israeli people to bother electing a legislature and executive; the attorney general, with the backing of the Supreme Court, can decide almost everything for them."  To make things worse, judges in Israel, including Supreme Court judges, are chosen by a non-elected panel dominated by other judges, and there are no possibilities for impeachment of judges by the parliament or by ballot initiative.  Appointments of judges are not subject to approval by the Israeli parliament (the Knesset).

Israel's Supreme Court has been dominated by the anti-democratic doctrine of "judicial activism" for a generation.  "Judicial activism" is when judges simply make up imaginary "laws" as they go along, without the need for the legislature to bother passing them as laws.  This week the Israeli Supreme Court in Israel is denouncing benefits for Israeli army veterans.  What law allows them to do so?  None at all.

In many cases the rulings of the Israeli Supreme Court are attempts to implement the leftist ideologies of judges.  Ex-chief Justice Aharon Barak used to brag about his issuing rulings based upon "enlightened opinion" in Israel, meaning leftist opinion.  The current chief justice is also a great believer in "judicial activism."  The unelected justices of the Supreme Court claim the right, invented by them out of thin air, to be able to overturn laws passed by the elected representatives of the people.  There is no constitutional basis in Israel for their claiming such a right.

The Israeli Supreme Court has also frequently long displayed indifference when it comes to civil liberties.  It is militantly aggressive in defending the "liberties" of Israeli Arabs and far leftists, but seems to have little interest in defending civil liberties, including freedom of speech, for others.  In one extreme example, a Supreme Court justice, Ayala Procaccia, ordered the imprisonment without trial of 14-year-old religious girls who had dared to participate in a demonstration of the right.  No one believes the girls would have been imprisoned had they participated in a demonstration of the left.  Writing in Azure, Robert Bork says, "Israel's High Court, however, has decided that state inaction amounts to state action, so that the individual's freedom may be declared unconstitutional and the state required to act. Individual freedom thus exists at the sufferance of judges. ... All of this is exacerbated, as Polisar observes, by a method of selecting judges that allows the High Court to choose its own membership."

Israel's Supreme Court recently refused to review the decision of the Nazareth Appeals court in the famous long-running Plaut-Gordon lawsuit, in effect leaving the earlier anti-democratic decision by the Nazareth court in place.  That lawsuit was a SLAPP harassment suit filed by the Israeli leftist anti-Semite Neve Gordon against me to try to stop my criticizing his political opinions and activities.  "SLAPP" stands for "Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation," and SLAPP suits are anti-democratic harassment tactics used to suppress freedom of speech.

The Israeli Supreme Court has now refused to defend freedom of speech and refused to squash SLAPP suit harassment in Israel.  It took the Supreme Court nearly two years to decide not to review an earlier appeals court decision in the Gordon-Plaut case.  Its refusal in essence establishes formal infringements on freedom of expression in Israel.  The Supreme Court opinion was written by the Deputy Chief Justice, Eliezer Rivlin.  He was joined in his refusal to defend freedom of speech by justices Neil Handel, supposedly the voice of religious conservatives on the court, and Salim Jubran, the Arab judge in the Supreme Court.  A few days ago Rivlin was one of the judges who voted for a different Court ruling that telling the truth is no defense against the Soviet-style charge of "insulting a public official" in Israel.

This was one more nail in the coffin for Israeli freedom of speech.  The Gordon SLAPP suit filed against me, which began a decade ago, should have been summarily dismissed in the very first round of litigation.  Gordon sued me because I accused him of being a "groupie" of anti-Semite Norman Finkelstein, after Gordon compared Finkelstein ethically to the Prophets of the Bible, and after I denounced Gordon for his serving as a human shield for wanted terrorist murderers and his illegal interference with Israeli anti-terror operations.  The facts of his doing so were never denied by Gordon.

That suit would have been if Israel were really a democratic country with a functioning judiciary.  Instead, it was assigned to a radical Nazareth court Arab woman judge, whose husband was the right-hand party man of Azmi Bishara, the Israeli-Arab traitor and spy now in hiding.  Nazareth court has many Arab judges, some of them radical politically.  Neither Gordon nor I live in the Nazareth district, and the suit was filed in Nazareth as an act of naked forum-shopping, because Gordon wanted to get a radical Arab judge.  In her verdict this judge endorsed Holocaust revisionism and declared all of Israel a state constructed on lands stolen from another people.  Not surprisingly she found for Gordon and awarded him 95,000 NIS in "damages," even the law does not let her award more than 50,000 NIS in such cases.  In essence her verdict amounted to the ruling that treason in Israel is protected speech but criticism of treason is libel.  She is still sitting on the bench.

This is the same Neve Gordon who routinely calls for Israel to be destroyed, who insists that Israel is a fascist, Nazi-like apartheid regime, and whose own university president regards him as a traitor.  Gordon is very likely to be among the very first people to be sued under Israel's new "anti-boycott" law, which allows the filing of damage suits against those who have worked for world boycotts against Israel.

That Nazareth lower court ruling in the case was later reversed on appeal in the Nazareth Appeals Court, but only 90% of it was reversed, allowing (by a vote of two judges against one) Gordon to retain 10% of the "damages" the Arab woman judge had granted him (or 10,000 shekels).  Those 10% were based entirely on my use of the term "Judenrat-wannabe" in an internet article referring to Gordon's illegal pro-terrorism activities.

The Nazareth Appeals Court ruling was based on an older Supreme Court case, Dankner vs. Ben Gvir, in which Amnon Dankner, a national journalist, called the Kahanist Ben Gvir a "little Nazi" on national television.  Ben Gvir sued, and when it reached the Supreme Court the ruling was that "Holocaust era rhetoric" is prohibited in political discourse in Israel.  The Supreme Court found for Ben Gvir and awarded him one shekel.

The same Supreme Court has now allowed Neve Gordon to retain 10,000 shekels in "damages" because I referred to his group of human shields for terrorists as "Judenrat wannabes."  The Court believes this is 10,000 times worse than calling someone a "little Nazi."  Ironically, the same Deputy Chief Justice Rivlin, who wrote the Supreme Court ruling in Gordon-Plaut, voted against the ruling in Dankner-Ben Gvir, and was the minority voice who claimed even that was protected speech. To put this differently, denouncing on the internet the illegal treasonous activities of a person is now 10,000 times worse than calling someone a little Nazi on national television, in Rivlin's new opinion.  Guess what the Court's "price tag" would be if a leftist called a non-leftist a Nazi or a storm trooper.  I leave you to ponder how much the use of Holocaust-era rhetoric would be valued by the court if it were a leftist denouncing Israel as a Nazi regime.

After the Nazareth Appeals Court ruling, I filed a Supreme Court appeal.  After dragging its feet, the Supreme Court panel of three, led by the same Rivlin, decided there was insufficient constitutional or public interest in reviewing the Nazareth appeals ruling, in effect allowing it to stand.  And, in effect, also preserving the suppression of freedom of speech contained in that verdict.

Give Greece What It Deserves

The Socialist Republic of Greece 

By B. Frezza

Once in a great while an opportunity comes along to deliver justice to a people, giving them what they truly deserve. Greece’s time has come.

It must be dawning on all but the most obtuse member of the banking elite that they can’t possibly steal enough money from German taxpayers to save the Greek government from default. Put it off, maybe, but collapse is inevitable.

Once this happens, what is the purpose of casting Greece into some selective temporary financial purgatory where the irrelevant Greek economy can continue embarrassing anyone foolish enough to lend their dysfunctional government a dime? Why not go all the way and give the country what many of its people have been violently demanding for almost a century?

Let them have Communism.

Hard as it is for young people to believe, Communism was once a major historical force holding billions of people in thrall. Outside the halls of elite universities, who still takes it seriously? Sure we have Cuba, where the Castro deathwatch is the last thing standing between that benighted penal colony and an inevitable makeover by Club Med. Then there is Venezuela, though hope is fading that Hugo Chavez will carry the Bolivarian banner much longer now that he’s busy sucking down FOLFOX cocktails while checking for signs that his hair is falling out. And frankly, a psychopathic family dynasty ruling a nation of stunted zombies hardly makes North Korea a proper Communist exemplar.

What the world needs, lest we forget, is a contemporary example of Communism in action. What better candidate than Greece? They’ve been pining for it for years, exhibiting a level of anti-capitalist vitriol unmatched in any developed country. They are temperamentally attuned to it, having driven all hard working Greeks abroad in search of opportunity. They pose no military threat to their neighbors, unless you quake at the sight of soldiers marching around in white skirts. And they have all the trappings of a modern Western nation, making them an uncompromised test bed for Marxist theories. Just toss them out of the European Union, cut off the flow of free Euros, and hand them back the printing plates for their old drachmas. Then stand back for a generation and watch.

The land that invented democracy used it to perfect the art of living at the expense of others, an example all Western democracies appear intent on emulating. Being the first to run out of other people’s money makes Greece truly ripe to take the next logical step beyond socialism.

As wrenching as it will be we can take comfort in the fact that Greece doesn’t have much of an economy to disrupt. The only Greek industry that’s worth a damn is tourism, rapidly collapsing as travelers get tired of being stranded by strikes while dodging Molotov cocktails. The rest of us can find plenty of other sources of lamb chops, yogurt, and olive oil. They crushed the concept of private property long ago under the burden of environmental, cultural, and social regulations that govern land use. Wouldn’t it be instructive to let them have a go at building a workers’ paradise to remind us what state enforced equality looks like?

Unlike neighboring Balkan nations that got to experience the joys of Communism after the Second World War, Greece was brought back from the brink by massive western intervention as well as a Churchillian side deal that obliged Stalin to butt out. The nasty civil war between the Greek Communist Party (the KKE) and government forces backed by Britain and the U.S. set the stage for decades of struggle between communist sympathizers who never gave up the dream, and right wing juntas determined to rule by force. The uneasy peace that has existed since the colonels were booted merely masks underlying tensions as every Greek worries, is someone else working fewer hours than I am?

How Greece conned its way into the European Union while hard working Turkey was left begging is a testament to the astute diplomats in Brussels, no doubt consulting their playbook on what dodge they can conjure up next to stick someone else with the bill. Why the E.U. extended credit to a nation whose governments have been in a chronic state of default since the country gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832 is a fitting subject for a News of the World expose. Perhaps they were being advised by Fannie Mae.

So despite the frantic meetings, the tragicomedy nears its final act. It’s time for the global financial industry to pull up stakes and go home before more innocent bank employees get immolated. If you don’t want the real contagion to spread, that is the disease of believing you can perpetually consume more than you produce, leave Greece to the Greeks and let the bankers take their lumps.

As difficult as it is for a Greek-American like myself to admit, resting on 2,000 year old laurels is a stale act. While few cultures can proudly look back on as many achievements in the arts, drama, athletics, philosophy, rhetoric, and architecture that were the glory of Greece, it’s time for modern Greeks to take a good hard look at themselves. What have they done for the world lately? More importantly, what are they prepared to do to help themselves? If they can’t face that question then it’s time to sing the Internationale.

Another one down the drain

Sharia law at work in Australia

By Chris Merritt,

SHARIA law has become a shadow legal system within Australia, endorsing polygamous and underage marriages that are outlawed under the Marriage Act.

 

A system of "legal pluralism" based on sharia law "abounds" in Australia, according to new research by legal academics Ann Black and Kerrie Sadiq.

They have found that Australian Muslims have long been complying with the shadow system of religious law as well as mainstream law.

But in family law, not all Muslims were registering their marriages and some were relying on religious ceremonies to validate unions that breached the Marriage Act.

This included "polygynist marriages", in which a man takes multiple wives, and marriages where one party is under the lawful marriage age.

Their research, which will be published on Monday in the University of NSW Law Journal, says that the wider community has been "oblivious to the legal pluralism that abounds in this country".

The findings come soon after Ikebal Patel, president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, triggered a backlash inside the Islamic community when he called for Australia to compromise with Islam and embrace legal pluralism.

Mr Patel later said he supported secular law and it had been a mistake to even mention legal pluralism.

The latest research has found that while polygamy is unlawful, mainstream law accommodates men who arrive in Australia with multiple wives and gives some legal standing to multiple partnerships that originate in Australia.

"Valid Muslim polygynist marriages, lawfully entered into overseas, are recognised, with second and third wives and their children able to claim welfare and other benefits," they write.

Changes to the Family Law Act in 2008 meant that polygamous religious marriages entered into in Australia could also be recognised as de facto marriages. "It means a second wife can be validly married under Islamic law . . . and be a defacto wife under Australian law with the same legal entitlements as any other de facto relationship," they write.

The findings on polygamy were confirmed yesterday by Islamic community leader Kuranda Seyit. His personal view was "one wife is enough". But a small minority of Muslim men were taking second wives in ways that breached family law and their Islamic obligations.

"A second wife is permitted under Islam, but it is very difficult and there must be absolutely equal treatment of both wives," said Mr Seyit, who is director of the Forum on Australia's Islamic Relations.

He was aware of a very small number of "exploitative" arrangements in which men were taking much younger second wives and not complying with the sharia requirement of equal treatment.

"It's definitely a minority, but unfortunately is does exist and I think it comes down to the standard of living that Australia affords many men who normally would not be able to afford such a situation," Mr Seyit said.

In their article, associate professor Sadiq and Ms Black note that research on Islamic marriage found in 2008 that 90 per cent of Muslims did not want to change Australian law.

They write that many Muslims support the protection of human rights and had come to Australia because of practices such as genital mutilation and honour killings in countries ruled by unreformed versions of sharia.

However, they suggest there should be "tweaking" of family law to take account of sharia.

They suggest that the Family Law Act could be changed to ensure that when courts make parenting orders Muslim children are given similar rights to those enjoyed by indigenous children.

This would require courts to consider they have a right to enjoy their own culture and the culture of people who share their culture.

Federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland said if there was ever any inconsistency between cultural values and the rule of law "then Australian law wins out".

"There is only one law that's applicable in Australia - that's Australian law based on our common law tradition," he said. "Our constitutional founders included a provision against the state endorsing or prescribing any religion or religious practice."

He said the Family Law Act included specific provision for courts to consider, among other factors, an individual's lifestyle and background culture and traditions. "The government believes these provisions to be adequate," Mr McClelland said.

Gender Spectrum Diversity Training

THE DEMOGRAPHY OF DEBTORS                

By Mark Steyn

The other day, Abdul Qadir Fitrat, the governor of Afghanistan’s central bank, fled the country. The only wonder is that there aren’t more fleeing. Not Afghans; central bankers. I mean, you gotta figure that throughout the G-20 there are more than a few with the vague but growing feeling that the jig’s up big time.

Round about the time the Afghan central banker was heading for the hills, the Greek central banker ventured some rare criticisms of his government. “Piling more taxes on taxpayers has reached its limit,” said Giorgos Provopoulos. The alleged austerity measures do not “place enough emphasis on the containment of spending.”

All very sensible. Prudent and measured. Outside, in the streets of Athens, strikers struck, rioters rioted, and an already shrunken tourism industry dwindled down to an international press corps anxious to get on with societal collapse. “We don’t want your money, Europe,” declared a protesting “youth,” Iamando, 36. “Leave us alone — please, please, please.”

I would bet that, somewhere not too deep down, Giorgos Provopoulos understands that the problem is not the Greek economy or the Greek government but the Greek people. Many years ago in this space, I quoted the line Gerald Ford liked to use when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” And I suggested there was an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. That’s the stage Greece is at and so, to one degree or another, is the rest of the Western world. In the United States, our democracy is trending as Athenian as the rest: We’re the Brokest Nation in History, but, as those Medicare polls suggest, getting enough people to give enough of it back isn’t going to be any easier than it is in Greece. From Athens to Madison, Wis., too many people have gotten used to a level of comfort and ease they haven’t earned.

It’s not a green-eyeshade issue. The inability to balance the books is a symptom of more profound structural imbalances. Over on the Mediterranean, the only question that matters is: Are the Greek people ready to get real? Most of us, including Mr. Provopoulos, have figured out the answer to that.

Since Obama took office, it’s been fashionable to quote Mrs. Thatcher’s great line: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” But we’re way beyond that. That’s a droll quip when you’re on mid-20th-century European fertility rates, but we’ve advanced to the next stage: We’ve run out of other people, period. Hyper-rationalist technocrats introduced at remarkable speed a range of transformative innovations — welfare, feminism, mass college education, abortion — whose cumulative effect a few decades on is that the developed world has developed to breaking point: Not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. In the course of so doing, they have fewer children later. And the few they do have leave childhood ever later — Obamacare’s much heralded “right” for a 26-year old to remain on his parents’ health insurance being merely a belated attempt to catch up with the Europeans, and one sure to be bid up further.

A society of 25-year-old “children” whiling away the years till early middle age in desultory pseudo-education has no desire to fund its prolonged adolescence by any kind of physical labor, so huge numbers of unskilled Third World immigrants from the swollen favelas of Latin America or (in Europe) the shanty megalopolises of the Muslim world are imported to cook, clean, wash, build, do. On the Continent, the shifting rationale for mass immigration may not illuminate much about the immigrants but it certainly tells you something about the natives: Originally, European leaders said, we needed immigrants to work in the mills and factories. But the mills and factories closed. So the new rationale was that we needed young immigrants to keep the welfare state solvent. But in Germany the Turks retire even younger than the Krauts do, and in France 65 percent of imams are on the dole. So the surviving rationale is that a dependence on mass immigration is not a structural flaw but a sign of moral virtue. The evolving justification for post-war immigration policy — from manufacturing to welfare to moral narcissism — is itself a perfect shorthand for Western decay.

Most of the above doesn’t sound terribly “fiscal,” because it’s not. The ruinous debt is a symptom of our decline, not the cause. As Angela Merkel well understands every time she switches on the TV and sees a news report from Greece, culture trumps economics. I had a faintly surreal conversation with two Hollywood liberal pals not so long ago: One moment they were bemoaning all those right-wing racists like Pat Buchanan who’d made such a big deal about the crowd cheering for the Mexican team and booing the Americans at a U.S.–Mexico soccer match in Pasadena, and deploring the way the U.S. goalie had complained that the post-match ceremony was conducted entirely in Spanish. Ten minutes later they were sighing that nothing in Los Angeles seemed to work quite as well as it did when they first came out west over 40 years ago.

And it never occurred to them that these two conversational topics might somehow be connected.

Meanwhile, at Redwood Heights Elementary in Oakland, Californian kindergartners are put through “Gender Spectrum Diversity Training” in order to teach them that there are “more than two genders.”

The social capital of a nation is built up over centuries but squandered in a generation or two. With blithe self-confidence, the post-war West changed too much too fast. We changed everything, and yet we’ll still wonder why everything’s changed

85 Islamic Sharia courts are now operating in Britain

Britain's "Islamic Emirates Project"

by Soeren Kern

A Muslim group in the United Kingdom has launched a campaign to turn twelve British cities – including what it calls "Londonistan" – into independent Islamic states. The so-called Islamic Emirates would function as autonomous enclaves ruled by Islamic Sharia law and operate entirely outside British jurisprudence.

The Islamic Emirates Project, launched by the Muslims Against the Crusades group, names the British cities of Birmingham, Bradford, Derby, Dewsbury, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Luton, Manchester, Sheffield, as well as Waltham Forest in northeast London and Tower Hamlets in East London as territories to be targeted for blanket Sharia rule.

The project, which uses the motto "The end of man-made law, and the start of Sharia law," was launched exactly six years after Muslim suicide bombers killed 52 people and injured 800 others in London. A July 7, 2011 announcement posted on the Muslims Against the Crusades website, states:

"In the last 50 years, the United Kingdom has transformed beyond recognition. What was once a predominantly Christian country has now been overwhelmed by a rising Muslim population, which seeks to preserve its Islamic identity, and protect itself from the satanic values of the tyrannical British government.

"There are now over 2.8 million Muslims living in the United Kingdom – which is a staggering 5% of the population – but in truth, it is more than just numbers, indeed the entire infrastructure of Britain is changing; Mosques, Islamic Schools, Shari'ah Courts and Muslim owned businesses, have now become an integral part of the British landscape.

"In light of this glaring fact, Muslims Against Crusades have decided to launch "The Islamic Emirates Project," that will see high profile campaigns launch in Muslim enclaves all over Britain, with the objective to gradually transform Muslim communities into Islamic Emirates operating under Shari'ah law.

"With several Islamic emirates already well established across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, including Iraq and Afghanistan, we see this as a radical, but very realistic step in the heart of Western Europe, that willinshaa'allah (God willing), pave the way for the worldwide domination of Islam."

One of the group's strategy documents, "Islamic Prevent 2011: Preventing Secular Fundamentalism and the Occupation of Muslim Land," provides insights into the religious and/or philosophical mindset behind the Islamic Emirates Project. For example, Chapter 1 states: "The Only Identity for Muslims is Islam … In no shape or form can a Muslim support any form of nationalism such as promoting Britishness."

Chapter 4 states: "A Muslim can only abide by Sharia and is not allowed to obey any man-made law." Chapter 5 states: "Muslims must reject secularism and democracy," terms which are "completely alien to Islam and against the basic tenets of Islam." Chapter 10 states: "Every Muslim must call for Sharia to be implemented wherever they are." Chapter 12 states: "It is not allowed for Muslims to integrate with a non-Islamic society." Chapter 13 states: "Muslims should set up Islamic Emirates in the United Kingdom." Chapter 14 states: "Any Muslim who opposed the policies in this pamphlet should be confronted." Chapter 16 states: "Any Muslim who has been affected by the Western way of life need to be rehabilitated."

Hitler was a boyscout

The world's biggest problem?  Too many people

The two kind ladies could kill themselves for a start

By Mary Ellen Harte and Anne Ehrlich in LA Times July 21, 2011

Think back on what you talked about with friends and family at your last gathering. The latest game of your favorite team? "American Idol"? An addictive hobby? The new movie blockbuster? In a serious moment, maybe job prospects, Afghanistan, the economic mess? We live in an information-drenched environment, one in which sports and favorite programs are just a click away. And the ease with which we can do this allows us to focus on mostly comforting subjects that divert our attention from increasingly real, long-term problems.

Notice that we didn't mention climate change above, or the exploding population/consumption levels that are triggering it — the two major factors threatening humanity's future. Sure, if you're not too far from the Western wildfires or Midwestern floodplains, the conversation might have turned to the crazy weather that is finally forcing some media to actually talk about climate change in the context of daily events.

But population? Get out. Way too inconvenient a truth. Take National Public Radio, for example. Of NPR's sparse record of population pieces, just one or two actually address unsustainable population growth. But as the political right whittles away at family planning clinics across the nation, the latest NPR series, "The Baby Project," devotes a plethora of articles to pregnancy, with the most serious subjects the problems some women have conceiving and birthing. If there is even a hint of too many babies, it is well hidden. This, even though a 2009 NPR story on U.S. pregnancies reported that half — yes, half — of all U.S. pregnancies are unintended. That's a lot of unintended consumers adding to our future climate change.

And that's what the right calls the "liberal" side of the mass media. The politically conservative U.S. mass media cover unsustainable population levels even less.

That pretty much reflects the appalling state of U.S. public education today on population. The U.S. approach to population issues across all levels of government, in terms of such things as education, attacks on family planning and tax deductions for children, is an exercise in thoughtlessness. The ramifications, however, are far more insidious and brutal. Women are culturally conditioned daily to welcome the idea of having children — plural, not one or none. How to support those children economically is not discussed. Indeed, our abysmal lack of adolescent sex educational programs ensures there will be plenty of young women who secure their destinies, and those of their babies, to brutal poverty and shortened lives through unwanted pregnancies and lack of choice. The latest available statistics from the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan tell the story: 1 in 5 American children lived in poverty in 2008; 1 in 3 if they were black or Latino.

Sure, there's much talk and concern that birthrates are down and will result in not enough workers to support the elderly. But this argument is overblown; after all, a 70-year-old can be more economically productive than a 7-year-old. And a large, pre-working population inflicts costs on a society. Furthermore, the birthrates in developing nations remain high, and the consequences affect us all.

The country is Canada and the year is 2011

HOW UNCLEAN WAS MY VALLEY               

By Mark Steyn 

Take a look at this photograph. It appeared in The Toronto Star’s education section on Saturday:

It’s the scene every Friday at the cafeteria of Valley Park Middle School in Toronto. That’s not a private academy, it’s a public school funded by taxpayers. And yet, oddly enough, what’s going on is a prayer service – oh, relax, it’s not Anglican or anything improper like that; it’s Muslim Friday prayers, and the Toronto District School Board says don’t worry, it’s just for convenience: They put the cafeteria at the local imams’ disposal because otherwise the kids would have to troop off to the local mosque and then they’d be late for Lesbian History class or whatever subject is scheduled for Friday afternoon.

The picture is taken from the back of the cafeteria. In the distance are the boys. They’re male, so they get to sit up front at prayers. Behind them are the girls. They’re female, so they have to sit behind the boys because they’re second-class citizens – not in the whole of Canada, not formally, not yet, but in the cafeteria of a middle school run by the Toronto District School Board they most certainly are.

And the third row? The ones with their backs to us in the foreground of the picture? Well, let the Star’s caption writer explain:

At Valley Park Middle School, Muslim students participate in the Friday prayer service. Menstruating girls, at the very back, do not take part.

Oh. As Kathy Shaidle says:

Yep, that’s part of the caption of the Toronto Star photo.

Yes, the country is Canada and the year is 2011.

Just so. Not some exotic photojournalism essay from an upcountry village in Krappistan. But a typical Friday at a middle school in the largest city in Canada. I forget which brand of tampon used to advertise itself with the pitch "Now with new [whatever] you can go horse-riding, water-ski-ing, ballet dancing, whatever you want to do", but perhaps they can just add the tag: "But not participate in Friday prayers at an Ontario public school."

Some Canadians will look at this picture and react as Miss Shaidle did, or Tasha Kheiriddin in The National Post:

Is this the Middle Ages? Have I stumbled into a time warp, where “unclean” women must be prevented from “defiling” other persons? It’s bad enough that the girls at Valley Park have to enter the cafeteria from the back, while the boys enter from the front, but does the entire school have the right to know they are menstruating?

But a lot of Canadians will glance at the picture and think, “Aw, diversity, ain’t it a beautiful thing?” – no different from the Sikh Mountie in Prince William’s escort. And even if they read the caption and get to the bit about a Toronto public school separating menstruating girls from the rest of the student body and feel their multiculti pieties wobbling just a bit, they can no longer quite articulate on what basis they’re supposed to object to it. Indeed, thanks to the likes of Ontario “Human Rights” Commission chief commissar Barbara Hall, the very words in which they might object to it have been all but criminalized.

Islam understands the reality of Commissar Hall’s “social justice”: You give ’em an inch, and they’ll take the rest. Following a 1988 cease-and-desist court judgment against the Lord’s Prayer in public school, the Ontario Education Act forbids “any person to conduct religious exercises or to provide instruction that includes religious indoctrination in a particular religion or religious belief in a school.” That seems clear enough. If somebody at Valley Park stood up in the cafeteria and started in with “Our Father, which art in Heaven”, the full weight of the School Board would come crashing down on them. Fortunately, Valley Park is 80-90 per cent Muslim, so there are no takers for the Lord’s Prayer. And, when it comes to the prayers they do want to say, the local Islamic enforcers go ahead secure in the knowledge that the diversity pansies aren’t going to do a thing about it.

Nobody would know a thing about the “mosqueteria” story were it not for the blogger Blazing Cat Fur, whom I was honoured to say a word for in Ottawa a few months back. He broke this story and then saw it get picked up without credit by the Toronto media. He does that a lot. Currently, he’s featuring the thoughts of Jawed Anwar, the editor of The Muslim, a publication for Greater Toronto Area Muslims, and of Dr Bilal Philips, a “Canadian religious scholar” who was born in Jamaica but grew up in Toronto and has many prestigious degrees not only from Saudi Arabia but also from the University of Wales, where he completed a PhD in “Islamic Theology”. Dr Philips is in favour of death for homosexuals and, as one Canadian to another, Mr Anwar was anxious to explain to his readers that that’s nothing to get alarmed about:

Although, there is no clear-cut verse in Qur’an that categorically suggests killing of homosexuals, sayings of Prophet Muhammad suggests three types of sentences, and among that one is death. Bilal Philips is suggesting, based on his opinion on the Qur’anic/Prophetic principles of society. He is not advising the Islamic judiciary to kill any gay person they found, but what he is “suggesting” is judicial punishment of death sentence for those who confess or are seen “performing homosexual acts” by “four reliable witnesses without any doubt.”

The essence of Islamic laws is to protect the life of human beings. And it happens that sometimes killing of a person can save thousands and sometimes millions of lives. The Islamic judiciary can punish a person with death sentence to save others’ lives.

Okay, great, thanks. Glad you cleared that up. Two eminent “Canadian” Muslims are openly discussing the conditions under which homosexuals should be executed – and doing so in the cheerful knowledge that Commissar Hall, so determined to slap down my “Islamophobia”, isn’t going to do a thing about their “homophobia”. She’s more likely to accept a complaint from another “Canadian”, Mohammad Baghery, who accuses Michael Coren of the crime of “making fun of Muslims”. (Barbara Hall's incoherent thoughts can be heard here: appropriately enough, she sounds like the robot voice that instructs you to buckle your seatbelt.)

Waiting for the Superman

'First responders' who don't

Police and firefighters stood by and watched a suicidal man drown. We need to restore the principle that the real constituency for public safety is the public, not bureaucrats and government workers.

By Steven Greenhut

On Memorial Day, a suicidal man waded into San Francisco Bay outside the city of Alameda and stood there for about an hour, neck deep in chilly water, as about 75 bystanders watched. Local police and firefighters were dispatched to the scene after the man's desperate mother called 911, but they refused to help. After the man drowned, the assembled "first responders" also refused to wade into the water to retrieve his body; they left that job for a bystander.

The incident sparked widespread outrage in Northern California, and the response by the Fire Department and police only intensified the anger. The firefighters blamed local budget cuts for denying them the training and equipment necessary for cold-water rescues. The police said that they didn't know if the man was dangerous and therefore couldn't risk the safety of officers.

After a local TV news crew asked him whether he would save a drowning child in the bay, Alameda Fire Chief Ricci Zombeck gave an answer that made him the butt of local talk-show mockery: "Well, if I was off duty, I would know what I would do, but I think you're asking me my on-duty response, and I would have to stay within our policies and procedures, because that's what's required by our department to do."

If you stand a better chance of being rescued by the official rescuers when they are off duty, then what is the purpose of these departments, which consume the lion's share of city budgets and whose employees — in California anyway — receive exceedingly handsome salaries?

In Orange County, where I worked for a newspaper for 11 years, the average pay and benefits package for a firefighter is $175,000 a year. Virtually every Orange County deputy sheriff earns, in pay and overtime, more than $100,000 a year, with a significant percentage earning more than $150,000. In many cities, police and fire budgets eat up more than three-quarters of the budget, and that doesn't count the unfunded liabilities for generous pension packages, which can amount to more than 90% of a worker's final year's pay. It's hard to argue that these departments are so starved for funds that they're entitled to stop saving lives.

After I wrote a newspaper column deploring the Alameda incident, I received many emails from self-identified police officers and firefighters. Though a few were appalled by the new public safety culture they saw on display, most defended it; some even defended Zombeck's words. Many made reference to a fire in San Francisco that week that had claimed the life of at least one firefighter.

The message they sent was clear: Don't criticize firefighters, because they put their lives on the line protecting you.

There's no doubt that firefighters and police have tough and sometimes dangerous jobs, but that doesn't mean the public has no business criticizing them, especially if they have become infected with the bureaucratic mind-set spread by public-sector union activism. The unions defend their members' every action; to the extent that they admit a problem, they always blame tight budgets.

The unions that represent first responders also have a legislative agenda to reduce oversight and accountability. I recall when a state Assembly member closely aligned with public-safety unions contacted me about a union-backed bill that was too egregious even for his taste. Sponsored by a firefighters union after a district attorney prosecuted an on-duty firefighter for alleged misbehavior that led to a death, the bill in its original form would have offered immunity to firefighters even for gross negligence on the job. The legislation failed after the media started paying attention and ignited a contentious public debate.

Perhaps the outrage at the Alameda incident will likewise cause a far-reaching discussion, one that helps restore the principle that the real constituency for public safety is the public, not bureaucrats and government workers.

Not really

The Dark Future of the West

Will the East dominate the West by the end of this century? Absolutely, says Stanford professor of classics and history Ian Morris; and there is little the West can hope to do about it.

By Ben Dunant 

In a talk hosted by the New America Foundation and the Atlantic Council in Washington – “Will the East dominate the West in the 21st Century? ” – Professor Morris elaborated on his recent book, Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future . With his background in the archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, Morris introduces a long view to the currently fashionable topic of the fate of civilizations, also tackled by Niall Ferguson in latest bestseller Civilization: the West and the Rest. As the subtitle of Morris’ book belies, these works of history find their niche through addressing popular concerns about the future. Ferguson confirmed this appeal in a congratulatory review of Why the Rest Rules: “one really scholarly book about the past is worth a hundred fanciful works of futurology.”

While Ferguson identifies a series of transferable “killer applications” for civilizational ascendancy, such as science, democracy and medicine, capable of being “downloaded” by any aspiring power, Morris puts forward the accidents of geography – and the adaptive responses it demands from “lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable ways of doing things” – rather than civilizational genius as the primary motor of historical change. This sets the deterministic tone of the grand predictions that follow.

Using an index of social development of his own invention to measure East-West competition stretching back to the end of the last ice age some 12,000 years ago, carefully constructed graphs show East and West more or less keeping pace with each other up until the relative end of the timescale, revealing little more than the blind drift of history. The Roman Empire marked an unprecedented peak of development, during which the West rose significantly above the East, only to have the roles reversed as the Empire disintegrated and Europe entered its Dark Age. The East kept up its lead until Europe entered the early modern period in the 17th century – an era of Western dominance (just about) still ongoing.