You Know Harry

The Third Man 

by Joseph Sobran

For my money, the greatest movie ever made is The Third Man, first released 60 years ago and re-released with restored footage (11 minutes had been cut from the U.S. version). Usually praised as a "classic thriller," it's much more than that: it's a study of evil that bears repeated viewings.

Rarely has a film been blessed by such a perfect combination of direction (Carol Reed), script (Graham Greene), cinematography (Robert Krasker), music (Anton Karas), and excellent casting, right down to the creepy minor characters.

We've embargoed our own oil supplies

Scarce Oil? U.S. Has 60 Times More Than Obama Claims

By JOHN MERLINE

When he was running for the Oval Office four years ago amid $4-a-gallon gasoline prices, then-Sen. Barack Obama dismissed the idea of expanded oil production as a way to relieve the pain at the pump.

"Even if you opened up every square inch of our land and our coasts to drilling," he said. "America still has only 3% of the world's oil reserves." Which meant, he said, that the U.S. couldn't affect global oil prices.

It's the same rhetoric President Obama is using now, as gas prices hit $4 again, except now he puts the figure at 2%.

Silence this infidel

Defending free speech

By ROWAN DEAN
"Mark Steyn is a bigoted, bullying, brazen, egotistical, unfunny, crass, self-serving Islamophobe and right-wing homophobe with the wit of a Soviet drains inspector and the sartorial understatement of a deposed Middle Eastern dictator, whose tedious views and repetitious anecdotes leave the listener feeling depleted of insight and starved of intellectual oxygen."

Actually, none of the above is true (apart from the sartorial bit — even Gaddafi would have thought twice about the gold tie and orange handkerchief combo) but the good news is I’m totally confident that The Spectator Australia’s and the IPA’s recent celebrity guest — who dazzled Australia with appearances on Alan Jones,Counterpoint, Q&A and a sold-out speaking tour to promote his book After America— won’t sue me for defamation. Plagiarism, maybe, if I nick any of his jokes, which I would dearly love to. But defamation, no. That’s the beauty of free speech. It’s a doddle when you’re addressing people who are secure in their convictions, passionate in their attitudes yet happy to confront diversity of opinion. Free speech only gets tricky when you’re dealing with religious zealots or (just as bad) government bureaucracies who, when taking offence, threaten to imprison or kill you in order to ensure your silence.

Beyond Surrealism Part II

UN consultant: Ban Dante's Divine Comedy

byJoel Gehrke

Dante's Divine Comedy should be banned from Italian schools as a racist and Islamophobic text rather than esteemed as one of the greatest achievements of Western poetry, according to a human rights organization that acts as a consultant for the United Nations. 

"We want to expunge the Divine Comedy from the Ministry of Educations’ scholastic curriculum, or at least require the necessary commentary to shed light on the text," Valentina Sereni, president of Gherush92, told Adnkronos News Agency. 

Beyond Surrealism Part I

U.N. to investigate U.S. voter ID Laws

This is really the last straw. It is time to get out of the United Nations: “UN rights council delves into US voter I.D. laws.”

The United Nations Human Rights Council is investigating the issue of American election laws at its gathering on minority rights in Geneva, Switzerland. This, despite the fact that some members of the council have only in the past several years allowed women to vote, and one member, Saudi Arabia, still bars women from the voting booth completely.Officials from the NAACP are presenting their case against U.S. voter ID laws, arguing to the international diplomats that the requirements disenfranchise voters and suppress the minority vote.

A Country in Denial

Watch Bernanke’s ‘Little’ Inflation Capsize U.S.

By Amity Shlaes

A little is all right. That’s the message Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke has been giving out recently when asked about the evidence of inflation in the U.S. recovery.

Sometimes Bernanke doesn’t even go that far. He simply says he doesn’t see inflation. The Fed chairman recently described the prospects for price increases across the board as“subdued.”

 “Sudden” is more like it. The thing about inflation is that it comes out of nowhere and hits you. Monetary policy is like sailing. You’re gliding along, passing the peninsula, and you come about. Nothing. Then the wind fills the sail so fast it knocks you into the sea. Right now, the U.S. is a sailboat that has just made open water, and has already come about. That wind is coming. The sailor just doesn’t know it.

The right way to make money

If you focus on making money, you end up making a lot of bad decisions 

by RUSS ROBERTS 

People are making fun of this piece by Greg Smith where he talks about his disillusionment with the culture at Goldman Sachs. Smith claims the only focus at GS is making money and people openly disdain the customer. He’s being mocked for thinking it could possibly be otherwise.

But I was reminded of this 1950 quote from George Merck who was president of the pharmaceutical company:

"We try never to forget that medicine is for the people.  It is not for the profits.  The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear."

If you focus on making money, you end up making a lot of bad decisions. Paradoxically, if your goal is to make money, it’s better to think about making a great product, making the customer happy and so on with the constraints of making money along the way. The best corporate cultures encourage excellence, not the bottom line. The bottom line matters of course, but if that’s your focus your long-run results may be quite poor. No corporation that I know of has as its motto: make as much money as possible! And I don’t think it’s just public relations. A great corporation with great profits gets its workers to focus on the consumer and uses other mechanisms to make sure the employees don’t bankrupt the company by being too generous with prices or quality.

The Making of an Adolescent Elite

Privilege: Top of the Class

By Austin Bramwell 

Status has always been hereditary. A warlord establishes a dynasty; a merchant buys a title; a politician gets his son elected to office. The desire to pass power, rank, and wealth down to one’s descendants is a universal that human institutions have always flexed to accommodate. Even communist dictators have consolidated rule within their families.

Americans have a rich, if forgotten, history of aristocracy. Royalist cavaliers flourished in Virginia; the Dutch granted patroonships in New York; armigerous families reproduced the feudal system in Maryland. The last manorial estate in the United States did not break up until 1840s.

Could we choose another future other than collapse?

We Have No Other Choice

America is just going through the motions because we have no other choice--or so we believe. 

by Charles Smith

I have long thought that America Is Just Going Through the Motions--of caring about the deficit, of financial "reform," and everything else:

Let's be honest, shall we? There never was any fire for real reform of the financial sector. It was all rote, a foul, stupid play-act, a passionless pantomime of "caring" and fake-"progressiveness" displayed for propaganda purposes.

I now think we're just going through the motions because we have no other choice than to "extend and pretend" the Status Quo. Choice is of course a matter of perception, a situation where perception defines what is "possible" and what is "impossible."

Interestingly enough, the "possible" is what we think we can manage, while the "impossible" is what happens to us whether we thought it possible or not.

Consider the Federal Reserve. Liberal media mainstay The Atlantic published a fawning puff-piece lauding Ben Bernanke as the man who "saved the economy": The Villain: The left hates him. The right hates him even more. But Ben Bernanke saved the economy— and has navigated masterfully through the most trying of times.

We all know what Ben "saved," and it wasn't the economy--it was the fraud-based crony-capitalist financial sector. In case you missed the primer that explains the fundamental frauds at the heart of our economy:

They are doing Mankind a favour

Safe nuclear does exist, and China is leading the way with thorium

A few weeks before the tsunami struck Fukushima’s uranium reactors and shattered public faith in nuclear power, China revealed that it was launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

This passed unnoticed –except by a small of band of thorium enthusiasts – but it may mark the passage of strategic leadership in energy policy from an inert and status-quo West to a rising technological power willing to break the mould.

If China’s dash for thorium power succeeds, it will vastly alter the global energy landscape and may avert a calamitous conflict over resources as Asia’s industrial revolutions clash head-on with the West’s entrenched consumption.

China’s Academy of Sciences said it had chosen a “thorium-based molten salt reactor system”. The liquid fuel idea was pioneered by US physicists at Oak Ridge National Lab in the 1960s, but the US has long since dropped the ball. Further evidence of Barack `Obama’s “Sputnik moment”, you could say.

The Physics of Gluttony

To lose weight, eat less, or breathe more.

By Richard A. Muller

Physics can sometimes cut through the mess of complex problems with a simple conservation law. A year ago, in my column "The Physics Diet," I applied conservation of energy to the problem of obesity. I argued that exercise burns so few calories that it cannot be a major way of losing weight.

The Math of Khan

Not just a YouTube phenomenon, but a model for educational transformation

By Laura Vanderkam
Watching videos online usually means goofing off. But over the past few years, millions of decidedly enterprising people have turned on their computers to watch, of all things, math and science lectures. At KhanAcademy.org, Salman Khan, a former hedge-fund analyst, narrates more than 2,700 free lessons, each about ten minutes long, on everything from polynomials to valence electrons. In video after video, Khan’s disembodied voice explains concepts as his pen swiftly draws illustrations on a digital board. Students can also work math problem sets, proceeding through a sequence that stretches from arithmetic to calculus.

Khan began making these videos around 2004. Seven years later, they and his problem sets have become a pedagogical phenomenon, attracting fame, controversy, and, beginning last year, funding from Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates. What makes Khan’s videos so appealing? Has he invented a teaching tool that works? And what do his discoveries mean for the broader goal of improving education?

Big Time Crooks

For Greece, it's Deja Vu All Over Again

                             The only lesson of history is that it doesn't teach us anything

by CrownThomas

In 1865, four European countries decided to form a monetary union. France, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland formed what is known as the Latin Monetary Union.

This union was to be a bimetallic monetary system. Although it had no common currency, the French Franc was the international store of value, and the Banc of France was the lender of last resort. All national silver & gold coins were allowed in settling domestic transactions. Incidentally, the fixed parity of silver to gold was 1:15.5. 

Declaring War on Newborns

The disgrace of medical ethics

 

By Andrew Ferguson

On the list of the world’s most unnecessary occupations—aromatherapist, golf pro, journalism professor, vice president of the United States​—​that of medical ethicist ranks very high. They are happily employed by pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and other outposts of the vast medical-industrial combine, where their job is to advise the boss to go ahead and do what he was going to do anyway (“Put it on the market!” “Pull the plug on the geezer!”). They also attend conferences where they take turns sitting on panels talking with one another and then sitting in the audience watching panels of other medical ethicists talking with one another. Their professional specialty is the “thought experiment,” which is the best kind of experiment because you don’t have to buy test tubes or leave the office. And sometimes they get jobs at universities, teaching other people to become ethicists. It is a cozy, happy world they live in. 

Zombie Banks and Vampire Governments

The game of kick the can will continue

by Gary North

The term "zombie banks" refers to banks that refuse to lend to the private sector. They are run by fearful bankers who do not trust other bankers. They do not trust many potential borrowers. According to legend, zombies survive by eating the brains of their victims. It seems to me that zombie bankers must be limiting their diet to brains of other bankers and investment fund managers.

Governments are ready borrowers of money lent by zombie banks. Zombie bankers think that their banks' money is safer with sovereign nations' IOUs than with other forms of IOUs. The governments siphon off the money that could have been lent to the private sector.

Nanny Government Treats Its Citizens Like Children

Americans, unlike those of yesteryear, have become timid and, as such, come to accept all manner of intrusive governmental acts

By WALTER E. WILLIAMS
Last month, at a Raeford, N.C., elementary school, a teacher confiscated the lunch of a 5-year-old girl because it didn't meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines and therefore was deemed non-nutritious. She replaced it with school cafeteria chicken nuggets.

The girl's home-prepared lunch was nutritious; it consisted of a turkey and cheese sandwich, potato chips, a banana and apple juice.

But whether her lunch was nutritious or not is not the issue. The issue is governmental usurpation of parental authority.

In a number of states, pregnant teenage girls may be given abortions without the notification or the permission of parents. The issue is neither abortion nor whether a pregnant teenager should get one. The issue is: What gives government the authority to usurp parental authority?

Falling Behind

Germany Fails To Meet Its Own Austerity Goals

European countries are expected to implement tough austerity measures amid the debt crisis. But Germany isn't setting a very good example. SPIEGEL has learned that Berlin failed to reach its own austerity goals in 2011. And despite pressuring its neighbors to save, Germany is behind this year too.

By SPIEGEL ONLINE

As she travels from one European Union summit to the next, Angela Merkel's constant mantra in recent months has been austerity, austerity, austerity. But apparently the German chancellor hasn't been quite as strict when it comes to her own country's budget.

SPIEGEL reports this week that the German government didn't reach even half of its planned savings in the federal budget. Only 42 percent of the spending cuts named by Merkel's coalition government, comprised of the conservative Christian Democrats and the business-friendly Free Democratic Party, were actually implemented.

Land of the Setting Sun

It is happening right now

By Patrick J. Buchanan   

Sunday was the first anniversary of the 9.0 earthquake off the east coast of Japan that produced the 45-foot-high tidal wave that hit Fukushima Prefecture.

Twenty thousand perished. Hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes when a nuclear plant swept by the tsunami exploded, spewing radiation for miles.

The Rain in Spain ...

Things That Make You Go Hmmm...

By Grant Williams

"... the Spain which emerged around 1960, beginning with its economic miracle, created by the invasion of tourists, can no longer result in impassioned dedication on the part of its intellectuals, and even less on the part of foreign intellectuals."

– JUAN GOYTISOLO

"In order to fully realise our aspirations, we must create in the masses of the people the sense of sacrifice and responsibility that has been the characteristic of the anarchist movement throughout its historic development in Spain."

– FREDERICA MONTSENY

"It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place. And better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins."

– BUENAVENTURA DURRUTI

So Let's begin with Spain.

Spain is a problem. A real problem. Greece today triggered the biggest sovereign default of all time as it reneged on its commitments to pay back investors the €210 billion it had promised them some 2,400 years after 10 Greek municipalities became the first sovereign entities to default when they stiffed the temple of Delos, birthplace of Apollo.

How Goldman Sachs Fleeced Greece

Goldman Secret Greece Loan Shows Two Sinners as Client Unravels

By Nicholas Dunbar and Elisa Martinuzzi 

Greece’s secret loan from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) was a costly mistake from the start.

On the day the 2001 deal was struck, the government owed the bank about 600 million euros ($793 million) more than the 2.8 billion euros it borrowed, said Spyros Papanicolaou, who took over the country’s debt-management agency in 2005. By then, the price of the transaction, a derivative that disguised the loan and that Goldman Sachs persuaded Greece not to test with competitors, had almost doubled to 5.1 billion euros, he said.

Rotting from the Head Down

Marking out a territory and intimidating others

 A member of Britain’s intellectual elite celebrates his nation’s social collapse.

by THEODORE DALRYMPLE

In his article on London in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, titled “Oh, London, You Drama Queen,” novelist China Miéville writes: 

“The aftermath [of the recent riots] was one of panicked reaction. Courts became runnels for judicial cruelty, dispensing sentences vastly more severe than anything usual for similar crimes.”

This is the statement of a typical intellectual whose indifference to the actual lives of the urban poor masquerades as compassion for them. Miéville fails to mention that most of the sentences handed down were for people with criminal records, no doubt in many cases long ones. The real judicial cruelty—not to the criminals but to their victims—was the leniency before the riots that gave the rioters a hitherto justified sense of impunity.

Economic disaster in the works

Stockman On The Economy

By Bernard Condon

He was an architect of one of the biggest tax cuts in U.S. history. He spent much of his career after politics using borrowed money to take over companies. He targeted the riskiest ones that most investors shunned — car-parts makers, textile mills.

That is one image of David Stockman, the former White House budget director under Ronald Reagan who, after resigning in protest over deficit spending, made a fortune in corporate buyouts.

But spend time with him and you discover this former wunderkind of the Reagan revolution is many other things now — an advocate for higher taxes, a critic of the work that made him rich and a scared investor who doesn't own a single stock for fear of another financial crisis.

Stockman suggests you'd be a fool to hold anything but cash now, and maybe a few bars of gold. He thinks the Federal Reserve's efforts to ease the pain from the collapse of our "national leveraged buyout" — his term for decades of reckless, debt-fueled spending by government, families and companies — is pumping stock and bond markets to dangerous heights.

Germany's Strategy

Searching for a New Entente

By George Friedman

The idea of Germany having an independent national strategy runs counter to everything that Germany has wanted to be since World War II and everything the world has wanted from Germany. In a way, the entire structure of modern Europe was created to take advantage of Germany's economic dynamism while avoiding the threat of German domination. In writing about German strategy, I am raising the possibility that the basic structure of Western Europe since World War II and of Europe as a whole since 1991 is coming to a close.

If so, then the question is whether historical patterns of German strategy will emerge or something new is coming. It is, of course, always possible that the old post-war model can be preserved. Whichever it is, the future of German strategy is certainly the most important question in Europe and quite possibly in the world.

Nassim Taleb on curing economic cancer

Fragility and Strength

Can the president kill you?

Elimination of al-Awlaki was more Stalinesque than Jeffersonian

By Andrew P. Napolitano

Can the president kill an American simply because that person is dangerous and his arrest would be impractical? Can the president be judge, jury and executioner of an American in a foreign country because he thinks that would keep America safe? Can Congress authorize the president to do that?

Earlier this week, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. attempted to justify presidential killing in a speech at Northwestern University law school. In it, he recognized the requirement of the Fifth Amendment for due process. He argued that the president may substitute the traditionally understood due process - a public jury trial - with the president's own novel version of it; that would be a secret deliberation about killing. Without mentioning the name of the American the president recently ordered killed, Mr. Holder suggested that the president's careful consideration of the case of New Mexico-born Anwar al-Awlaki constituted a form of due process.

This is their fight, this is their history, these are their countries

How Invisible Children's Kony 2012 Will Hurt - And How You Can Help - Central Africa

By Michael Deibert

The  "Kony 2012" campaign and accompanying film advocate -- via technological assistance, training and the presence of United States military personnel throughout Central Africa -- for military support of the government of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, ostensibly to facilitate the arrest of Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group and an accused war criminal indicted by the International Criminal Court.

To anyone who has spent time in Central Africa in general and Uganda in particular, this appears to be a road fraught with peril. In response to several requests that I elaborate further on the problems of this approach and a possibly more constructive approach, I offer the following.

There are several instances of blatant dishonesty in the film that immediately catch one's eye and trouble one's conscience.

Killing Newborns

Conceding no moral difference between the born and unborn, "ethicists" defend killing either.

Cute, sure, but not an actual person according to Oxford academics

By Walter Hudson

Cute, sure, but not an actual person according to Oxford academics.

Parents should be able to kill their newborn children. So have concluded a group of academics with ties to Oxford University. In a recent article  published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, the authors concluded that there is no difference between abortion and killing a newborn. They called the latter “after birth abortion.” The Telegraphs’ Stephen Adams reports :

They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Just War

The Health of the State

by Murray N. Rothbard

Much of "classical international law" theory, developed by the Catholic Scholastics, notably the 16th-century Spanish Scholastics such as Vitoria and Suarez, and then the Dutch Protestant Scholastic Grotius and by 18th- and 19th-century jurists, was an explanation of the criteria for a just war. For war, as a grave act of killing, needs to be justified.

My own view of war can be put simply: a just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination. A war is unjust, on the other hand, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them.

Euro Area – The Day After

The First Default of a Western Regulatory Democracy Since the Interwar Period

by Pater Tenebrarum

The importance of what has happened on Friday probably can not be overstated, widely expected though the event was. It represents a cesura the likes of which have not been seen since the end of World War I. PIMCO chief Bill Gross, the world's biggest bond trader, complained that the 'sanctity of  sovereign bond contracts' has been violated:

“The “sanctity” of bondholders’ contracts has been diminished by Greece’s pushing through the biggest sovereign restructuring in history, according to Bill Gross of Pacific Investment Management Co.

“The rules have been changed here,” Gross, co-chief investment officer at Pimco, said in a radio interview on “Bloomberg Surveillance” with Tom Keene and Ken Prewitt. “The sanctity of their contracts is certainly lessened. Bondholders have that to look forward to going into the future.”

We can only say to that: finally. 

A brief moment of clarity

The murder of Wilmar Villar Mendoza - Repost

By Alberto de la Cruz

When I found out the Castro regime had accomplished its mission of ending the life of Wilmar Villar Mendoza, I was once again unprepared for the nausea and the painful knot in the pit of my stomach. It is a sensation that I have never been able to get used to no matter how many times I endure the painful experience. 


It is the same severe and unpleasant reaction I experienced when I learned of Orlando Zapata Tamayo's horrid assassination, and that caustic malaise returned upon hearing the news of the violent murder of Juan Wilfredo Soto and again when the Castro regime finally silenced Laura Pollan. 

Diverse Champions of Liberty

Murray Rothbard & Ayn Rand  
By Tibor R. Machan

No one should attempt to treat Ayn Rand and Murray N. Rothbard as uncomplicated and rather similar defenders of the free society although they have more in common than many believe. As just one example, neither was a hawk when it comes to deploying military power abroad. There is evidence, too, that both considered it imprudent for the US government to be entangled in international affairs, such as fighting dictators who were no threat to America. Even their lack of enthusiasm for entering WW II could be seen as quite similar.

And so far as their underlying philosophical positions are concerned, they both can be regarded as Aristotelians. In matters of economics they were unwavering supporters of the fully free market capitalist system, although while Rand didn’t find corporations per se objectionable, arguably Rothbard had some problems with corporate commerce, especially as it manifest itself in the 20th century. One sphere in which they took very different positions, at least at first glance, is whether government is a bona fide feature of a genuinely free country. Rand thought it is, Rothbard thought it wasn’t. Yet the reason Rothbard opposed government was that it depended on taxation, something Rand also opposed, so even here where the difference between them appears to be quite stark, they were closer than one might think.

When intellectuals such as Rand and Rothbard have roughly the same political-economic position, it isn’t that surprising that they and their followers would stress the difference between them instead of the similarities. Moreover, in this case both had a similar explosive personality, with powerful likes and dislikes not just in fundamentals but also in what may legitimately be considered incidentals–music, poetry, novels, movies and so forth.

Last to leave, Never Mind Turning Off the Lights

In Zimbabwe they're Already Off
By Ed Steer

In the 32 years of his benighted rule, Zimbabwe's President Robert Gabriel Mugabe has done more damage to the country than its white-led minority government ever did.

With the exception of the smuggling of "blood diamonds" the country's economy, once the "breadbasket of Africa," resembles nothing so much as a slow motion train wreck.

One of the foundations of modern nations' economic prosperity are reliable sources of power and here too, Mugabe and his Zimbabwe African National Union cronies have managed to screw things up.

While the country has a peak electricity demand of about 2,200 megawatts, it only produces 1,200 megawatts because its installed power generation capacity cannot meet demand, which primarily comes from the Hwange Power Station (HPS) and Kariba Power Station (KPS).

Cynicism and Boundaries

All's Fair in Politics and Celebrity
by Theodore Dalrymple 

If, as the French historian, Pierre Nora, recently put it in a newspaper article, the whole of human history is a crime against humanity, how is one to assess the significance of a single criminal act? And yet the human mind is so framed that it is inclined to see in such a single act all the deceit, evil and delight in cruelty of which Man is capable. One death, said Stalin, is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.

The report of a single dreadful crime is enough to plunge one into despair about the possibilities of human nature. For example, I read recently in a British newspaper a report of a man who picked up an achondroplastic dwarf in a pub and slammed him down on the ground so violently that the dwarf is now paralysed from the waist down and will spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Whether or not the final injury was intended by the assailant (was it worse if he did or he didn’t intend it?), the act was of insensitivity so gross that it makes one shudder. Of what would such an assailant not be capable? How is it possible for a human being even to conceive of such conduct as a possibility, for the thought of it to cross his mind, let alone for him not to know that it was inexcusably wrong?