An epidemic of stupidity

E.Coli in Organic Food Leads to 50 Dead in Germany

By THEODORE DALRYMPLE

As everyone knows, Mother Nature not only knows best but means us no harm: and therefore, the less we mess around with her and her products, the better. Although many people may have remarked, more in sorrow than in anger, how small and shriveled organic vegetables often appear by comparison with those that have been treated with chemicals, it is obvious that they (the organic ones) must be better for us because they are nearer to what Mother Nature intended.

This item of faith took something of a knock recently with the outbreak of Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli food poisoning in Germany. It was no small matter: more than 4000 people suffered from it and more than 50 died.

Papers in the latest New England Journal of Medicine from the Robert Koch Institute in Germany trace the epidemic and describe its characteristics. Anyone who doubts the brilliance of modern epidemiological methods, and the astonishing rapidity with which they permit the cause of an outbreak to be traced, notwithstanding initial mistakes, should read this paper. What once took millennia to understand now takes weeks.

The authors used three methods, knowing as they did from clinical and laboratory studies that the epidemic was caused by E. coli. First, they asked people who had suffered from food poisoning, and a series of controls, what they had eaten.  Second, they asked the same question of people who had eaten in a restaurant in a town geographically central to the outbreak. Finally, they traced individual outbreaks to an original, single source.

The epidemic was caused by eating raw bean sprouts grown at an organic farm where the products had probably been contaminated from seeds imported from Egypt as long as two years before. One of the curious things about the epidemic was that more women suffered from it than men, presumably because women are (at least in Germany) more anxious to eat healthily than men.

It is important to find the source of outbreaks not only for health but economic reasons. Before the source had been traced to an organic farm in Northern Germany, German health officials had suggested that Spanish cucumbers might be the source, and Spanish cucumber-growers had to destroy much of their crop. The European Commission generously awarded $300,000,000 of other people’s money to compensate the farmers for the initial, though understandable, mistake. A blanket ban on European vegetable exports to Russia was enforced, thus impoverishing the Russian diet yet further, until the elucidation of the cause of the outbreak. Overall, the cost of one organic farm in Germany to European horticulture is said to have been in the region of $600,000,000.

The E. coli that caused the outbreak was a new strain, and it will bring some comfort to believers in the benevolence of Nature to know that one of the evolutionary pressures under which it developed was the widespread use of antibiotics. Nevertheless, perhaps it would be a good idea to print on all health-food packaging and vitamin supplements the following words: WARNING: OVER-CONCERN FOR YOUR HEALTH MAY BE DAMAGING TO YOUR HEALTH

At least $97 billion per year is being provided to “climate finance.”

Wasted ‘Climate Change’ Cash Could Save Lives Instead

 A million people die of malaria every year. It is easily and cheaply prevented by using DDT, for a fraction of the dollars spent on the fantasy of global warming. But DDT has been banned in many countries, and no doubt many of the same scientists who prattle on about the menace of global warming decades from now endorse the ban of a substance that can save human lives today. Al Gore has saved exactly zero human lives by scaremongering about the UFO that is global warming — in the years since he won the Nobel Prize he could have contributed to saving 4-5 million humans, mostly kids. Bad science, bad economics, opportunity to make a real contribution lost.

By TOM HARRIS AND ROBERT M. CARTER

When it comes to climate change, our leaders would do well to follow Buddhist advice: when struck by an arrow, first remove it before seeking out your assailant. Otherwise, you will die.

But most governments and charitable foundations today do exactly the opposite. They try so hard to appease climate activists — who seem more concerned about the possible plight of people yet to be born than those suffering today — that millions of people have been abandoned to misery and early death in the poorest parts of the world.

The Canadian government is providing what might appear to be a generous $142 million to help victims of drought and famine in East Africa. Australia has also committed over $103 million. That is certainly far more money than either China or Saudi Arabia — the latter situated just across the Red Sea from the disaster area — are contributing. But it pales in comparison with what Canada and Australia are paying to fulfill their entirely voluntary Copenhagen Accord climate change commitments. Australia committed $599 million and Canada $1.2 billion between 2010 and 2012.

Both nations have already donated the first third of this commitment, an amount that is almost exactly the current shortfall in the international Horn of Africa Drought fund, a deficit that may lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people if it is not rectified.

The Copenhagen Accord specified that contributions should be split 50-50 between helping people adapt to climate change and stopping (or “mitigating”) climate change. Australia is generally following this formula, but 90% of Canada’s first $400 million donation is dedicated entirely to mitigation.

This undue focus on mitigation of a hypothetical human-caused dangerous warming that has yet even to be measured comes at the expense of the urgent needs of the world’s most vulnerable peoples. For example, ClimateWorks Foundation — an American climate activist group that has donated millions to Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection — received over $500 million from charitable foundations when they launched in 2008. This was twice as much as foundations contributed to the World Health Organization, and over seven times as much as they donated to UNICEF in that year.

Over the last two decades ending in 2009, the U.S. government spent a total of $68 billion for climate science research and climate-related technology development. Worldwide, it is estimated that Western countries alone are pouring at least $10 billion annually (2009) into global warming related research and policy formulation.

There are untold amounts being spent by corporations around the world on greenhouse gas reduction schemes, the costs of which are passed almost entirely on to consumers.

On October 27, the Climate Policy Initiative issued a report showing that at least $97 billion per year is being provided to “climate finance.” Tragically, just $4.4 billion — about 5% — of the total is going to help countries and communities adapt to climate change.

All the while, aid agencies remain drastically underfunded, even in the midst of East Africa’s worst famine in decades. Developing countries are pressured by eco-activists, media, and the UN to enable impractical “climate-friendly” energy policies that even developed nations cannot afford. At the same time, millions of the world’s poor lack access to electricity, running water, and basic sanitation.

And what is the world getting in return for this sacrifice? If the science being relied upon by the governments and the UN were correct, and all the countries of the world that have emission reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol actually met their targets, then 0.05 degrees Celsius of warming might end up being prevented by 2050. In other words, trillions of dollars of expenditure will be wasted for an impact on climate that is not even measurable.

Clearly, the time has long since passed to take an entirely different approach to the climate hazard issue. We need to pull out the arrow, address the real wound, and leave learning more about the possible assailant to another day.

Despite the demonstrated failure of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming, a very real climate problem does exist. It is the ongoing risk associated with natural climatic variations. This includes short-term events such as floods and cyclones, intermediate scale events such as drought, and longer-term warming and cooling trends.

That such climate change is natural does not imply it is benign or gentle. Coming out of the last glacial period, during which sea levels were over 100 meters lower than today and kilometer-thick ice sheets made Canada, the northern U.S., and northern Eurasia uninhabitable, warming and cooling many times faster than our 20th century changes occurred. Even as recently as the 1920s, the “average annual temperature” rose between 2 and 4 degrees Celsius (and by as much as 6 degrees C in winter) in less than ten years at weather stations in Greenland.

Such natural changes have serious impact on human societies. From the demise of the robust Greenland Vikings to the sudden disappearance of the powerful pre-Incan civilizations of the Moche and the Tiwanaku, history is littered with examples of what happens when societies are unprepared for or unable to adapt to climate change.

Even when civilizations do not completely collapse due to extreme climate and weather changes, great calamities often ensue. Witness the extreme hardship and famine in Europe during the most severe phases of the 1250-1875 Little Ice Age, and similarly in the 1930s Dust Bowl event in America. Or how about the 1998 ice storm that paralyzed much of Eastern Canada and the Northeastern United States?

We need to prepare for such events by hardening society’s infrastructure through activities such as burying electricity transmission lines underground. Had this been the norm, the freak October snowstorm that just hit the northeast U.S. would not have caused widespread power outages.

Similarly there is a need to “waterproof” southeastern Australia, which can be expected to experience irregular drought periods in the future naturally — quite irrespective of speculative human causation. This could be accomplished through pumping fresh water into the Murray Darling Basin from northern rivers, by recycling of waste water, by the construction of new dam reservoirs or desalinization plants, and by the prevention of water waste through evaporation and leakage from irrigation systems.

There is no question that climate change adaptation measures can be expensive. But unlike today’s completely futile and even more expensive attempts to stop the world’s climate from changing, expenditure on preparation for and adaptation to dangerous climatic events will pass on a more robust and wealthy society to future generations.

And perhaps some of the billions of dollars that we choose not to squander on futile mitigation measures can instead be committed to helping populations already living at the edge of survival.

For the cast-iron reality is that all countries need to have available to them the financial resources to cope with the natural climatic hazards that nature will inevitably continue to throw at us all.

Rallies don't win elections

Occupy Wall Street gets the ink, Tea Party gets the voters

By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds 

Occupy Wall Street and the movement's brethren in other cities ranging from Chicago, to Baltimore, to Oakland, to London -- has been getting all the press lately.

But it's the Tea Party movement and its small-government ideology that continues to win elections. Is that a harbinger for 2012? Probably.

There's no doubt that the Occupy folks have been getting the lion's share of the ink, and the pixels, over the last month or so. Love them or hate them, their approach is mediagenic, reminding Baby Boomers of protests from their lost (or imagined) youths, and inspiring younger folks who missed the Sixties to take a shot at creating their own protest mythology.

Though they've mobilized a fraction of the people who turned out for just one Tea Party rally -- the 9/12 rally in Washington, which drew well into the six figures -- the Occupy protests have generated far more publicity. And, at least until recently, that publicity has been mostly favorable.

But while lefty share-the-wealth demonstrations have seized the imagination of our nation's mainstream media, they once again failed to persuade taxpayers to loosen their grips on their pocketbooks.

In Colorado, a tax-increase effort, massively supported (to the tune of about 20 to 1 in terms of spending) by teachers unions, failed miserably. Not only did it lose by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, it failed to carry a majority even in heavily Democratic Denver. (It barely eked out a majority in Colorado's farthest-left enclave of Boulder County.)

As Colorado talk-radio host Ross Kaminsky blogged, "The wide margin of defeat for Proposition 103 could only happen with a substantial majority -- something on the order of two-thirds -- of unaffiliated (independent) voters opposing the measure, something which portends well for Republican hopes in 2012 elections." This despite the fact that Colorado went for Obama in 2008.

More troubling still for the Obama Administration is that the rhetoric of the tax increase's supporters sounded much like that coming from the Obama camp -- lots of talk about "investments" and lots of pictures of children. But taxpayers didn't buy it.

Why not? Perhaps because the past couple of years have demonstrated, in a fashion hard to miss, that no matter what politicians promise, new government spending seems, somehow, to wind up in the pockets of politicians' cronies.

So when "new revenues" are sold as "investments in the community," voters hear instead "taking my money to give it to your buddies and buy votes." Not surprisingly, this doesn't sell.

Indeed, though education is often used to sell tax increases, that approach now seems to be foundering on a lack of results. Nearly every voter knows that spending on education at all levels, though perennially characterized as inadequate, has in fact grown enormously over past decades, but without any visible result.

So, despite vast increases in spending, few would argue that students graduating from high school are better educated today than they were 50 years ago, and few believe that colleges have improved at the same rate that tuitions have gone up, if, indeed, they have improved at all in terms of education.

In this, interestingly, the Occupy movement may have unwittingly lent a hand to the Tea Party. Everyone who has followed the wall-to-wall news coverage has seen the sad stories of protesters who went deeply in debt for college degrees (admittedly, often degrees in things like Peace Studies, but nonetheless, still college degrees) and who now say they are unable to find work.

Faced with those stories, voters may understandably have concluded that more spending on colleges and schools was unlikely to do much to promote employment, regardless of what the political ads from the teachers' unions and higher-education folks claimed.

If education is so great, after all, why are so many educated people unemployed and camping out in public parks?

This is a good question, and similar ones might profitably be asked with regard to other public programs whose spending climbs faster than inflation but whose results remain unimpressive -- which is to say, most public programs.

It's not that the education system is our only public-spending failure, it's just that the Occupy movement has done such a persuasive job of illustrating the particular failures of the education system.

Or course, the Occupy movement has helped the Tea Party in another way: By keeping lefties busy. While the occupiers have been holding their drum circles, the Tea Party movement -- now long past the mass-rally stage -- has been going about the less conspicuous work of registering voters and organizing.

As I wrote back in 2010, "Rallies without follow-through are just rallies. And the Tea Party movement is now following through with the grunt work of politics: Organizing precincts, waging primary battles, registering voters, and compiling mailing lists."

Rallies don't win elections. Neither do drum circles. Organizing does. Let Occupiers and Tea Partiers alike take note.

Underestimating the resilience of the nation state

The Euro elite are totally out of touch with the modern world

The realities of 21st-century politics are finally catching up with the guardians of the single currency.

By Matthew d'Ancona

It is extraordinary to recall that, until June last year, HM Treasury still had a “euro preparations unit”, finally abolished in George Osborne’s emergency Budget. This was the last, fossilised remains of the “prepare and decide” strategy adopted by New Labour, the premise of which – at least in the Blair years – was that Britain should and would join the single currency at some point in the future.

In past weeks, we have grown used to the eurozone as supplicant: the garlicky tramp on the pavement with a piece of cardboard on a string round his neck, bearing the words: “Will work for bail-out.” Even now, Osborne’s team is working on a host of contingency plans, to be triggered by crises ranging from Greece’s exit from the single currency, to the full-blown collapse of the eurozone.

How far Europe has travelled since Tony Blair unveiled his National Changeover Plan in February 1999, the preparatory campaign to make Britain’s businesses, banks, retailers, public authorities, and media ready for the referendum that he assumed would take place in his second term – and if not then, eventually. In his 2002 party conference speech, Blair referred to the euro as “not just about our economy, but our destiny”.

If the Cannes G20 summit established anything beyond doubt, it is that the European Union unaided cannot resolve this crisis. That much is clear from the International Monetary Fund’s new role as Silvio Berlusconi’s fiscal supervisor (or, to use the local idiom, his bunga bunga minda). No 10 despairs at the intransigence of Germany. Nicolas Sarkozy growls at Cameron that eurozone leaders are “sick of you criticising us and telling what to do”. Sans doute, M Le President: but what exactly are you doing? How confident are you that Greece will avoid disaster – or Italy, for that matter? How sure are you that Mario Draghi, the new president of the European Central Bank, is capable of overhauling the ECB and its functions?

Looking up at the huge modern edifice of the euro tottering, tilting and melting – a Corbusian nightmare as imagined by Dalí – it is easy to forget how prevalent was the view that Britain would condemn itself to a second-class status in Europe and a lesser role on the global stage if it stayed out of the shiny new currency. Even some of the staunchest Eurosceptics, who saw that the euro was economic folly and a constitutional affront, fretted privately that it would bulldoze all before it. Elsewhere, there was brash talk – hilarious to remember – of the euro becoming a global reserve currency like the dollar.

For the Coalition, a number of narrow political questions arise from the Cannes gathering. Already Tory euro-rebels, joined by Labour, are objecting to the prospective increase in the British contribution to the IMF. The Prime Minister insists that the last Commons vote on the UK’s obligation “allowed some extra headroom”, and that no further parliamentary approval will be necessary. That may be arithmetically so, but Ed Balls and the Tory sceptics will not let sums stand in the way of their demands.

“This [crisis] is having a chilling effect on our economy,” said the PM at his press conference in Cannes. “Every day that it goes on unresolved is a day that’s not good for our economic prospects.” True enough, but also politically pivotal: it is of the utmost importance to Conservative electoral prospects that the public buys into the claim that the eurozone crisis bears much of the blame for the sheer duration of their hardships. It is toward past Labour crime and present euro-folly that Cameron wants the voters to direct their resentment – lest they pay heed to the cries from the Left (spend even more!) or the Right (spend even less!).

Such is the political ticker tape spilling out of Cannes to Westminster. But it is pommes de terre petites compared to the greater meaning of this crisis. Though its internal contradictions may yet have appalling economic consequences, the euro was always a political project, and one based on a quasi-religious, providential view of history and Europe’s destiny. After 1989, the EU and the idea of the euro filled the Marx-shaped hole in the world-view of the Left, and presented a new teleology in which a whole continent was going to be bound together, inexorably, by a single currency.

It is astonishing to hear the very same people who said Britain would be consigned to irrelevance outside the euro now insisting that we have a neighbourly duty to prevent its implosion: we do have such a duty, but it is based on hard-nosed self-interest, not obligation to the continental sages who – betraying their ignorance of history and its magnificent unpredictability – once insisted that their grand projet would inevitably succeed.

One of the many errors the Founding Fathers of the euro made was to underestimate the resilience of the nation state. Yes, we live in a world in which technology, money and people flow across borders with greater ease than ever before. Globalisation makes the planet dramatically interdependent: Philip Bobbitt, the constitutional historian, has written brilliantly of the emergence of what he calls the “market state”. Even so, the nation has retained much of its cohesion, its significance and its grip on popular loyalty. One of the reasons that international elites hate Israel so much is that it is the clearest and most passionate example of this durability.

In the case of the euro, nation states have, predictably, followed fiscal strategies that suit them, rather than the rules and pacts that support the currency. That’s what nations do – which is why the euro will need some kind of formal fiscal union if it is to survive, an even bigger pooling of sovereignty than the abolition of 17 national currencies (most recently, in January, the Estonian kroon).

As nation states have survived more than five decades of euro-bombast, so supra-national politicians are finding themselves increasingly at odds with what might be called “referendal” politics. Direct democracy, plebiscites, e-petitions, the “Occupy” protests around the world, even the culture of phone voting in television shows: it is here that the impetus and the energy lie, uncoordinated and multidirectional though the phenomenon may be. The entire Cannes summit was nearly thrown off course by the wild-card threat of a referendum in Greece on the latest rescue plan. The psychology of the EU – a postwar elite bureaucracy – is entirely out of kilter with this very modern surge of popular protest: technology-driven, non-hierarchical, anti-elitist. It is like trying to connect an old ribbon typewriter to an iPad.

This crisis is about much more than the fate of a 12-year-old currency. It is a test of what politicians are for, what they can achieve when pitted against market caprice and fiscal incontinence. John Major used to say that this country belonged “at the heart of Europe”. Now, David Cameron is among the ring of medics yelling “Clear!”, as defibrillation is administered to the very same failing organ. Turns out that the heart of Europe was dicky all along. And for that cardiac frailty, the global body politic may yet pay a deep and terrible price.

Wolves and sheep

All Roads Lead to (Ancient) Rome

The old empire could teach us a thing or two about the euro and its flaws.

by Gilles Bransbourg 

Europe enjoyed a common currency regime 2,000 years ago. Back then, as today, there was no single common language, rather limited workforce mobility, and quite an active trade network. The Roman Empire brought relative internal peace to a wide area never to be united again. And it brought the sestertius—or, to be more accurate, a coinage of gold, silver, and bronze of which the bronze sestertius became the most commonly spread denomination. It certainly lacked a central bank, but it lasted for many centuries.

As a severe and predictable European debt crisis is slowly unfolding, it seems unlikely that the euro will achieve anything approaching the success or longevity of its distant predecessor. What went wrong, beyond the lack of political vision that is the only thing European governments seem to share?

Europe’s fundamental sin is actually simple. The Maastricht Treaty of 1992, in creating a single legal tender and monopolistic currency for the countries that ratified it, fundamentally undermined the very founding principle it ostensibly enshrined: that of “subsidiarity,” or the principle that holds it is always better for a matter to be handled at a local level than by a centralized authority.

The peculiarity of the Roman political system was indeed its taste for subsidiarity. The imperial government was usually quite happy to restrict itself to the essentials—mainly military defense and the rule of law—while devolving to local civic authorities most of the burden of managing their own issues. As such, the cities and regions, notably in the Greek or Syriac-speaking East, struck their own lower-value bronze coins as a complement to the usually higher-value imperial coins, leading to specific monetary zones.

As a result, the issuance of local money was to a large extent a local matter. Gaius, the second-century jurist, wrote that “money, although it should enjoy the same power of purchasing everywhere, is easier to obtain in some locations and interest rates are lower, while it is harder to find in other locations and interest rates are higher.” (Would that he were available today for a powwow with Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank.)

We are touching here on the essential shortcoming of the euro. Since its creation, Greek, Spanish, and Irish banks and governments have been able to borrow like Germans, Austrians, or the Dutch, under the cover of what was perceived to be the implicit uniformity and guarantee of the euro. As such, the common currency fueled insane property bubbles and equally insane public and private indebtedness and corruption. Logically, internal trade imbalances and competitive gaps kept widening. To simplify, life under that common currency regime has been like telling wolves and sheep to enjoy freedom together in open fields, while the suggested write-down on the Greek debt is equivalent to providing more grass to those sheep in the hope they will last longer. Incidentally, if consulted, the sheep may say no to the bailout package and the euro altogether.

America is not so different. There, an even more general asset and liability bubble has expanded under the influence of the low interest rates, counterproductive tax system, and lax regulatory environment that have prevailed for most of the past two decades. Only the dominance of federal over local government debts, the facilities offered by holding the world reserve currency, and the stabilizing role of a few very large foreign sovereign investors effectively funding American consumers through massive purchases of U.S. assets have prevented something similar to (or worse than) the European debt crisis from happening—so far. The current path is neither sustainable nor desirable.

Ancient Rome teaches us two things. The first is that there should be some explicit quantitative policy regarding monetary creation. Ancient economies’ monetary aggregates were capped by the availability of precious metals. Counting on private borrowers to create money leads post-gold-exchange-standards economies to a dangerous dependence on profligacy. This fuels a general sense of irresponsibility at all levels of our societies. Political authorities should not be thinking of ways to encourage essentially bankrupt consumers to borrow more. Consumers should stop thinking of themselves as consumers, reflect on what they bring to the outside world, and adjust their expectations accordingly. Wealth should be a consequence of adding more value, not of borrowing more.

By the same token, the access to unlimited funding, directly responsible for fueling reckless corporate-governance practices, should be curtailed. Flooding the capital markets with dollars has only resulted in a general cash glut at the higher end of the wealth scale while pushing the lower strata of the population into a real deflationary situation, contributing to unacceptable levels of inequality. In not facing these fundamental challenges, current governments will encourage social unrest and force their successors to adopt a combination of predatory taxation, sovereign default, inflation, and devaluation, with unfavorable demographics compounding all these issues.

The second lesson, the devolution of the monetary monopoly of the state, leads to the concept of local (or specific-purpose) subsidiary currencies. People are familiar with air miles, coupons, rewards, and tokens. This could be generalized inside economic zones or even virtual networks. Those who find themselves unwilling or unable to monetize their skills under the mainstream currency system, or who have lost access to credit, should be able to exchange their potential output through local units of account and barter. In doing so they would stand a chance of reintegration into a more open society.

Concerns about taxation and the central currency monopoly are misguided. Any positive contribution, taxed or not, is better than inactivity or, worse, social parasitism.

Still, today, all roads lead to Rome.

Politics and the Mob

Democracy Versus Mob Rule

By Thomas Sowell

In various cities across the country, mobs of mostly young, mostly incoherent, often noisy and sometimes violent demonstrators are making themselves a major nuisance.

Meanwhile, many in the media are practically gushing over these "protesters," and giving them the free publicity they crave for themselves and their cause — whatever that is, beyond venting their emotions on television.

Members of the mobs apparently believe that other people, who are working while they are out trashing the streets, should be forced to subsidize their college education — and apparently the President of the United States thinks so too.

But if these loud mouths' inability to put together a coherent line of thought is any indication of their education, the taxpayers should demand their money back for having that money wasted on them for years in the public schools.

Sloppy words and sloppy thinking often go together, both in the mobs and in the media that are covering them. It is common, for example, to hear in the media how some "protesters" were arrested. But anyone who reads this column regularly knows that I protest against all sorts of things — and don't get arrested.

The difference is that I don't block traffic, join mobs sleeping overnight in parks or urinate in the street. If the media cannot distinguish between protesting and disturbing the peace, then their education may also have wasted a lot of taxpayers' money.

Among the favorite sloppy words used by the shrill mobs in the streets is "Wall Street greed." But even if you think people in Wall Street, or anywhere else, are making more money than they deserve, "greed" is no explanation whatever.

"Greed" says how much you want. But you can become the greediest person on earth and that will not increase your pay in the slightest. It is what other people pay you that increases your income.

If the government has been sending too much of the taxpayers' money to people in Wall Street — or anywhere else — then the irresponsibility or corruption of politicians is the problem. "Occupy Wall Street" hooligans should be occupying Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.

Maybe some of the bankers or financiers should have turned down the millions and billions that politicians were offering them. But sainthood is no more common in Wall Street than on Pennsylvania Avenue — or in the media or academia, for that matter.

Actually, some banks did try to refuse the government bailout money, to avoid the interference with their business that they knew would come with it. But the feds insisted — and federal regulators' power to create big financial problems for banks made it hard to say no. The feds made them an offer they couldn't refuse.

People who cannot distinguish between democracy and mob rule may fall for the idea that the hooligans in the street represent the 99 percent who are protesting about the "greed" of the one percent. But these hooligans are less than one percent and they are grossly violating the rights of vastly larger numbers of people who have to put up with their trashing of the streets by day and their noise that keeps working people awake at night.

As for the "top one percent" in income that attract so much attention, angst and denunciation, there is always going to be a top one percent, unless everybody has the same income. That top one percent has no more monopoly on sainthood or villainy than people in any other bracket.

Moreover, that top one percent does not consist of the "millionaires and billionaires" that Barack Obama talks about. You don't even have to make half a million dollars to be in the top one percent.

Moreover, this is not an enduring class of people. Nor are people in other income brackets. Most of the people in the top one percent at any given time are there for only one year. Anyone who sells an average home in San Francisco can get into the top one percent in income — for that year. Other one-time spikes in income account for most of the people in that top one percent.

But such plain facts carry little weight amid the heady rhetoric and mindless emotions of the mob and the media.

A few generations of moral cripples

Moral Abdication

The withdrawal from any kind of judgment is yielding a generation of moral cripples.

By MONA CHAREN

My high-school-sophomore son was grumbling as he read his world-history textbook. He pointed me to this sentence about the encounter between European and Mesoamerican civilizations.

The American Indian societies had many religious ideas and practices that shocked Christian observers, and aspects of their social and familial arrangements clashed with European sensibilities.

The text, World Civilizations: The Global Experience by Peter N. Stearns et al, was a little oblique about the nature of those ideas and practices. It mentioned human sacrifice but then rushed to add that “many of those who most condemned human sacrifice, polygamy, or the despotism of Indian rulers were also those who tried to justify European conquest and control, mass violence, and theft on a continental scale.”

The authors clearly wish to avoid the unpleasant details of Indian practices in their rush to condemn European depredations. A curious student would have to discover on his own that the Aztecs themselves claimed to have ritually sacrificed 80,400 people over the course of four days at the rededication of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlán in 1487. While this was probably bragging, historian Victor Davis Hanson estimates that at least 20,000 victims were sacrificed yearly. Most were slaves, criminals, debtors, children, and prisoners of war — the Aztecs fought to capture, not kill, so as to provide a steady stream of sacrifices. These were bloody and brutal, with the victim’s chest being sliced open and the still-beating heart pulled from the body.

When the topic of human sacrifice was broached in the classroom, my son reported that none of his classmates was comfortable condemning the practice as immoral. “It was their culture,” his classmates said. And it’s wrong to impose your values on someone else’s culture.

This is not a fluke. In Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood, Christian Smith and his co-authors recount the results of their decade-long study of a representative sample of Americans aged 18–23. Through in-depth interviews, they examined their subjects’ lives and concluded that an alarming percentage of young people are highly materialistic, commitment averse, disengaged from political and civic life, sexually irresponsible, often heavily intoxicated, and morally confused. In fact, the authors contend, they lack even the vocabulary to think in moral terms.

The products of a culture that dares not condemn even human sacrifice for fear of transgressing multicultural taboos, these young people are morally adrift.

Six out of ten told the authors that morality is a “personal choice,” like preferring long or short hair. “Moral rights and wrongs are essentially matters of individual opinion.” One young woman, a student at an Ivy League college, explained that while she doesn’t cheat, she is loath to judge others who do. “I guess that’s a decision that everyone is entitled to make for themselves. I’m sort of a proponent of not telling other people what to do.” A young man offered that “a lot of the time it’s personal. It changes from person to person. What you may think is right may not necessarily be right for me, understand? So it’s all individual.” Forty-seven percent of the cohort agreed that “morals are relative, there are not definite rights and wrongs for everybody.”

It goes beyond cheating or failing to give to charity. One young man who stressed “everyone’s right to choose” was pressed about whether murder would be such a choice. He wasn’t sure. “I mean, in today’s society, sure, like to murder someone is just ridiculous. I don’t know. In some societies, back in time, maybe it’s a good thing.”

The irony is that this supposed reluctance to make moral judgments is itself a moral posture. The young people in the study, like the authors of my son’s textbook, and much of the American establishment, believe that it is morally wrong to judge people harshly. (Except perhaps if it’s Western civilization in the dock.)

My son was most exasperated by the textbook’s suggestion that Western civilization’s response to other cultures was “complex” and that this was probably just as true of Chinese, Persians, and others. No, he protested, the only civilization that is self-critical at all is our own. Other world civilizations continue to express pride and even arrogance about their own histories.

Those who resist the self-flagellation that travels under the name multiculturalism are accused of chauvinism. But the withdrawal from any kind of judgment is yielding a generation of moral cripples.

Another day for the Religion of peace

Scores Killed In Attack On Nigeria Churches, Police

Several churches have been destroyed in Nigeria.

 By Stefan J. Bos

ABUJA, NIGERIA (BosNewsLife)-- Islamic militants shouting "Allahu Akbar", or 'Allah is great', carried out coordinated gun and bomb attacks on churches and police stations in northern Nigeria, killing at least 67 people and injuring some 100 others, aid workers and witnesses confirmed Saturday, November 5.

Militant group Boko Haram, or 'Western education is a sin', claimed responsibility for the attacks Saturday, November 4, while frightened mourners tried to leave their homes to begin burying their dead.

The group, which seeks strict implementation of Shariah, or Islamic law, across the nation of more than 160 million people, pledged more attacks.

The Red Cross aid group and witnesses said fighting began Friday, November 4, around Damaturu, the capital of Yobe state, when a car bomb exploded outside a three-story building used as a military office and barracks, with many uniformed security agents dying in the blasts.

Lieutenant Colonel Hassan Mohammed told reporters that the "suicide" attackers, driving a black sports utility vehicle, detonated their explosives near the gate of the building, used by the Joint Task Force (JTF), the military unit deployed to curb violence there.

CHURCHES ATTACKED

Several other police stations, a bank and up to six churches were also attacked, residents and aid workers said. Among areas targeted by militants was the Jerusalem area, a predominantly Christian neighborhood, according to witnesses.

One resident, Isa Jakusko, was quoted by French News Agency AFP as saying that city had been thrown into chaos. “There have been several bomb explosions and shooting. As I am talking to you there is still fire exchanges between the attackers and security personnel with the attackers shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’,” he reportedly said.

Gunshots were reportedly still heard Saturday, November 5, from different parts of the city with the sky dark with smoke, apparently from burning buildings.

In another part of northern Nigeria, hundreds of youths staged angry protests after gunmen opened fire on a congregation of Christians praying at a village in Kaduna state overnight, witnesses said.

The attack occurred in an area where hundreds of people were killed in violence which erupted after the April election victory of President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian, against his closest rival Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim.

VILLAGE BLASTED

Witnesses said the gunmen also attacked the nearby village of Potiskum and city of Maiduguri earlier in the day and engaged in several hours of running gunbattles with security forces, witnesses said.

Elsewhere in northern Nigeria youth protested against a deadly attack on a church in the Tabak Village in Zangon Kataf Local Government Area of Kaduna State, Christian activists told BosNewsLife.

Local youths blocked roads overnight to an attack Thursday, November 3, on a village prayer meeting of the St. Augustine Catholic Church, that left two people dead, said advocacy group Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW).

Witnesses reportedly said that gunmen raided the church as the prayer meeting was coming to an end, fired at a congregation consisting mainly of women and children, and escaped into the bush.

"Two women died at the scene, twelve other people were wounded mainly in the arms and legs, and are receiving treatment at St. Louis Hospital in nearby Zonkwa," CSW said in a statement to BosNewsLife.

PREDAWN RAID

The attack on Tabak Village followes a predawn raid in late October on a police station and bank in Saminaka Town in the same area by suspected members of Boko Haram, who reportedly escaped in the direction of Bauchi State carrying cash and weaponry CSW said.

In a statement issued on behalf of the Kaduna State Chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), the organisation’s secretary, the Reverend Yunusa Nmadu condemned the armed attack “on innocent Christian worshipers in the church”, and expressed anger that the raid occurred “in spite of the heavy presence of soldiers in the area”.

He urged authorities to "ensure that the perpetrators of this evil act are fished out and brought to book. Meanwhile we call on all Christians to be calm and prayerful in the face of this new dimension of attack on the Church”.

In September, soldiers and riot police were drafted to the region following an armed attack by Fulani tribesmen in which four people were killed and over ten injured, according to Christian rights activists.

"INNOCENT CONGREGATION" 

CSW’s Advocacy Director Andrew Johnston said Thursday's attack "on an innocent congregation of mostly women and children is deplorable, and the fact it could occur despite a heavy military presence in the area is a cause for great concern."

He said his group has urged the government to improve secutity as "it is vital that these raids are brought to a halt quickly in order to restore confidence and security to the local population.”

But with more bloodshed reported Saturday, November 5, there was little sign of more security.

Voice of Reason

Murray Rothbard on Economic Recessions

By http://www.libertarianism.org