The happiest man in England

Qatadas brother boasts preacher's delight as he is given a more expensive home (funded by the taxpayer, of course)

 

New home has more bedrooms, a bigger garden and more fittings. 51-year-old had requested a move from previous home worth £400,000

By TOM KELLY

Abu Qatada has been upgraded to a larger taxpayer-funded home since his release from jail last month, the Mail can reveal.

The terror suspect has told relatives in his native Jordan that he is the ‘happiest man in England’ after he was rehoused to the more expensive property.

His wife and five children are also said to be ‘delighted’ with the move, because their new home has more bedrooms, a bigger garden and more modern fittings. 

Taming the EPA monster

Supreme Court ruling strikes a blow in ongoing battle

By Robert Knight

Slowly, inexorably, the monster is being driven back to its lair. Its days of terrorizing villagers may soon be over. I wish I were talking about the federal government, but it's the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), better known as the Environmental Protection-or-else Agency.

Superman is unimpressed by what Everyman wants

Weeding Out the "Socially Not Useful"

... a service is profitable if Everyman, the businessman and the final consumer, buys it. Buying it is the one indisputable way he has to show that he wants it. But Superman is unimpressed by what Everyman wants. He wishes Everyman to get what he needs. For only what he needs is "socially useful" ...

by Anthony de Jasay

In his classic essay "What is seen and what is not seen" (written in 1848 and published in July 1850) the shamefully underrated and neglected French economist Frédéric Bastiat (1801- 1850) declares that what distinguishes a bad economist from a good one is that the bad one can only see what is to be seen, while the good one also discerns the as yet unseen consequences that are bound to follow the visible effect of an action. Present benefits must be painfully paid for in future costs, while present sacrifices tend to be generously rewarded in the future. The good economist must, of course, weigh up the merits of a law, a policy or an institution by taking account both of the effects he (and others) can see and the future consequences he foresees (and others do not).

Europe’s bailout bazooka is proving to be a toy gun

Welcome back to the crisis

By Wolfgang Münchau

And it’s set to get worse once the markets discover that the eurozone is about to fudge the increase in the European rescue umbrella. The argument I am hearing is a wonderful example of circular logic: we don’t need a bigger umbrella because market pressure has eased.

Well, the market pressure has gone up again recently. Investors are concerned about Spain. Over the weekend, Angela Merkel was preparing for one of her celebrated U-turns, by letting out a trial balloon in the German press that she would, after all, be ready to accept an increase in the rescue operation.

The Toxic Transition in Venezuela

A narco-state emerges in Venezuela

By Roger Noriega 

Contrary to statements by Venezuelan caudillo Hugo Chávez, a cancerous tumor discovered in his colon late last month has not been removed, according to my sources. Heeding the self-serving advice of Cuban doctors, Chávez has rejected surgery so that he can return to his public duties as soon as possible and bolster his regime’s ongoing succession strategy. The Castro brothers need him back on the political stage in Venezuela, not in a hospital bed. Meanwhile, back in Caracas, corrupt military leaders are consolidating their power and plotting their political survival as if Chávez were already dead.

Non-Cuban medical specialists insist that the larger-than-expected tumor must be removed before resuming last-ditch chemotherapy and radiation. They believe that Chávez’s decision to refuse surgery will hasten his death. Members of Chávez’s family and some close friends are furious that the Cubans are manipulating his megalomania to convince him that sustaining his “revolution” is more important than extending his life.

The Italian Tragedy

Once rent-seeking coalitions form and consolidate in a society, it becomes extremely difficult to escape a dysfunctional equilibrium 

Facing strong international pressure and a spiraling crisis, Italy’s new leadership may finally be forced to make long-avoided reforms.

By Alberto Mingardi 

Brought to office after the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi, Mario Monti has been the Italian prime minister for about four months now. It is too soon to judge Monti’s record, but it is distressing that the prime minister has not yet announced any substantial plan to deal with the very issue that makes Italy a great concern for Europe and the world: its huge public debt, which is over €1.9 trillion.

Animal Farm Meets 1984

North Korea: Freedom and grilled meat

“Park told Shin that the giant country next door was called China. Its people were rapidly getting rich. He said that in the south there was another Korea. In South Korea, he said, everyone was already rich. Park explained the concept of money. He told Shin about the existence of television and computers and mobile phones. He explained that the world was round.”

By Jeff Harding

On Jan. 2, 2005, 23-year-old Shin Dong-hyuk squirmed through an electric fence and escaped from Camp 14, a political prison camp in North Korea. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people are estimated to be held in the country’s political camps, and Mr. Shin is the only person known to have been born in a camp who has made his way to the West. (His father, Mr. Shin eventually learned, was a prisoner because two of his brothers had defected to the south during the Korean War. Mr. Shin’s crime was being his father’s son.) In this excerpt from Escape From Camp 14, Blaine Harden details his unlikely escape.

In 1998, when Shin Dong-hyuk turned 16, he became an adult worker. His years of schooling to that point had only served as training for hard labor. 

“I’m Smarter than Everyone Else”

The political "disease."

By Arthur E. Foulkes

“It’s a sickness,” said a friend of mine who until recently was an elected official in our city. “It sets in after you’re elected the first time, or maybe even when you’re running for office.” That sickness is “thinking you’re smarter than everyone else.”

My friend made this statement after reading in our local paper that a newly elected  member of the city council had questioned an entrepreneur’s decision to open a new outdoor multi-unit storage facility in our town. The councilman, a Republican, said that according to his “investigation,” the facility is not needed in that neighborhood.

A Random Walk Through the Data Minefields

Sweden, the Socialist Mecca

"I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare:

and I dare a little more as I grow older."

                      - Michel de Montaigne

By John Mauldin 

I was brought to Stockholm to speak for Swedbank. They arranged for me to meet a wide variety of local people, as well as to have dinner with readers. I talked with a number of people who were in positions of authority during the Swedish credit and debt crisis of the early 1990s. And a crisis it was. The currency was under attack, as the fundamentals were negative. This was at the same time that Soros was attacking the British pound. Interest rates had been rising in Sweden, but the financial environment was being loosened. This meant that Swedish businesses and consumers could borrow in foreign currencies that had much lower interest rates, and borrow they did. The central bank made it very clear that they would protect the value of the currency, and everyone believed them. Remember, this is a relatively small country, and basically everyone knows someone who at least knows someone who was involved with the central bank. The central bank was adamant in its belief that it could protect the value of the currency, and it raised rates by 500% in order to do so.

Scotland’s Choice

The cold shower of economic reality might then unleash Scotland’s substantial creative abilities

Independence could arouse national pride; it might also force self-sufficiency.

By THEODORE DALRYMPLE

The electoral success of the Scottish Nationalist Party has enabled it to demand a referendum on national independence next year, raising the distinct possibility of a break-up of the United Kingdom. The decline of the U.K.’s status and power in the world means that belonging to it is no longer a source of pride, but rather of embarrassment. What better way to extricate yourself from the guilt of the British Empire—to the establishment of which the Scots contributed disproportionately—than to join the ranks of the aggrieved colonized by means of your own nationalism?

Liberal Dogmas and Painful Realities

Race and Rhetoric

By Thomas Sowell

One of the things that turned up, during a long-overdue cleanup of my office, was an old yellowed copy of the New York Times dated July 24, 1992. One of the front-page headlines said: “White-Black Disparity in Income Narrowed in 80’s, Census Shows.”

The 1980s? Weren’t those the years of the Reagan administration, the “decade of greed,” the era of “neglect” of the poor and minorities, if not “covert racism”?

More recently, during the administration of America’s first black president, a 2011 report from the Pew Research Center had the headline, “Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics.”

While the median net worth of whites was ten times the median net worth of blacks in 1988, the last year of the Reagan administration, the ratio was 19 to 1 in 2009, the first year of the Obama administration. With Hispanics, the ratio was 8 to 1 in 1988 and 15 to 1 in 2009.

Race is just one of the areas in which the rhetoric and the reality often go in opposite directions. Political rhetoric is intended to do one thing — win votes. Whether the policies that accompany that rhetoric make people better off or worse off is far less of a concern to politicians, if any concern at all.

The most predictable economic crisis in history

Roaring full throttle to the cliff edge 

Including the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, the United States owes 911 percent of gross domestic product, more than even Greece.

By Mark Steyn

I was in Australia earlier this month, and there, as elsewhere on my recent travels, the consensus among the politicians I met (at least in private) was that Washington lacked the will for meaningful course correction, and that, therefore, the trick was to ensure that, when the behemoth goes over the cliff, you're not dragged down with it. It is faintly surreal to be sitting in paneled offices lined by formal portraits listening to eminent persons who assume the collapse of the dominant global power is a fait accompli. "I don't feel America is quite a First World country anymore," a robustly pro-American Aussie told me, with a sigh of regret.

Marx’s Tea Party

Prepare to be Betrayed

                      The populist right has forgotten an older form of class analysis

By Anthony Gregory

Last summer Angelo Codevilla’s American Spectator essay “America’s Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution” made waves in conservative circles for its compelling treatment of the minority ruling class (the political elite and its partisans) versus the “country class” (the rest of us). It was a sophisticated exposition but also broke down the class conflict in simple terms: “The rulers want the ruled to shut up and obey. The ruled want self-governance.” Rush Limbaugh praised the article for helping to explain the struggle of the Tea Party’s populists against the political establishment.

Politics without morality could only end in tyranny.

The Prophetic C.S. Lewis

by Joseph Sobran

Deep political wisdom can be found in a writer who took very little interest in politics: C.S. Lewis, a scholar who achieved his greatest fame as a popular Christian writer.

Lewis was sometimes laughably ignorant of current events. His friends were once amused to discover that he was under the impression that Tito, the Communist dictator of Yugoslavia, was the king of Greece. But the very distance he kept from politics enabled him to see large outlines invisible to those preoccupied with the daily news.

During World War II, Lewis realized that both the Allies and the Axis were abandoning the traditional morality of the Christian West and indeed of all sane civilizations. The great principle of this morality is that certain acts are intrinsically right or wrong. In a gigantic war among gigantic states, Lewis saw that modern science was being used amorally on all sides to dehumanize and annihilate enemies. When peace came, the victorious states would feel released from moral restraints.

Saving India from the Keynesians

Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further

By Shanmuganathan "Shan" Nagasundaram

In the murder mystery The Da Vinci Code, Silas the albino is in search of the keystone and, on confession by the four sénéchaux about the location, he visits the Saint Sulpice church in Paris to retrieve the same. However, upon digging at the specified spot, all that he finds is a stone with the inscription "Job 38:11." A nun explains the symbolism: "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further," indicating that Silas has reached the end of the road in his attempts to find the keystone.

Much like Silas, members of the Indian economic think tank are lost in terms of what needs to be done.[1] While in The Da Vinci Code, the elaborate ruse was an explicit design by the four sénéchaux to safeguard the keystone, in the Indian scenario, the problem lies between the ears of the think-tank team and was put in place decades ago by John Maynard Keynes. Operating perhaps with the most altruistic of intentions, Keynesian economic thinking has been and will continue to be the stumbling block in our progress forward. Unless this team can unlearn the Keynesian "witchcraft" to understand capitalism (i.e., the free market as understood by Austrian economics), progress is going to be halting, if there is any at all.

John Maynard Potemkin

Keynesianism is a bubble machine

Many of the developments like this one in Ordos, China, have swathes
 of newly-created public space completely unused by anyone

By Robert Tracinski

For a while, there has been a strain of center-left American commentary that has viewed China's leaders as some kind of technocratic super-geniuses who have done a much better job of guiding their society than the loons and hacks who would actually, you know, be voted for. Call this the Tom Friedman school of thought.

In reality, China's leaders have a tendency to fall for a lot of the same economic fads that fascinate the Western center-left elites. Thus, the Chinese have been suckered into investing untold billions in high-speed rail and "green energy," endeavors that are not economically viable (even with higher population density and cheaper labor costs) and which are starting to come apart. And behind those boondoggles is one big idea China's leaders have accepted uncritically from the West: Keynesian stimulus.

The R-word is almost illegal in the EU

The Nightmare of the European Auto Industry

By testosteronepit

Europe with its relatively affluent population of 500 million has turned into a nightmare for the auto industry. And the R-word—restructuring—unpalatable and almost illegal as it is in Europe, is being bandied about, this time by Fiat-Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne, who, as President of the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association, spoke for all EU automakers. It was a dire warning and a cry for help.

"Horrible" was how he described the plight of the auto industry when he spoke at the European Business Conference in Bruges, Belgium, on March 20. He predicted that auto sales would sag by 5% in 2012, the fifth down year in a row. He didn’t see a recovery before 2014. All-time-high gas prices are part of the reason. For that debacle, and for how it sends French consumers and presidential candidates reeling, read.... The $10-Per-Gallon Gas Has Arrived In Paris.

The Gandhi Nobody Knows

Not the Gandhi who called for seas of innocent blood, you understand, but the movie-Gandhi, the nice one.

by Richard Greiner

I had the singular honor of attending an early private screening of 'Gandhi' with an audience of invited guests from the National Council of Churches. At the end of the three-hour movie there was hardly, as they say, a dry eye in the house. When the lights came up I fell into conversation with a young woman who observed, reverently, that Gandhi’s last words were “Oh, God,” causing me to remark regretfully that the real Gandhi had not spoken in English, but had cried, Hai Rama! (“Oh, Rama”). Well, Rama was just Indian for God, she replied, at which I felt compelled to explain that, alas, Rama, collectively with his three half-brothers, represented the seventh reincarnation of Vishnu. The young woman, who seemed to have been under the impression that Hinduism was Christianity under another name, sensed somehow that she had fallen on an uncongenial spirit, and the conversation ended.

At a dinner party shortly afterward, a friend of mine, who had visited India many times and even gone to the trouble of learning Hindi, objected strenuously that the picture of Gandhi that emerges in the movie is grossly inaccurate, omitting, as one of many examples, that when Gandhi’s wife lay dying of pneumonia and British doctors insisted that a shot of penicillin would save her, Gandhi refused to have this alien medicine injected in her body and simply let her die. (It must be noted that when Gandhi contracted malaria shortly afterward he accepted for himself the alien medicine quinine, and that when he had appendicitis he allowed British doctors to perform on him the alien outrage of an appendectomy.) All of this produced a wistful mooing from an editor of a major newspaper and a recalcitrant, “But still. . . .” I would prefer to explicate things more substantial than a wistful mooing, but there is little doubt it meant the editor in question felt that even if the real Mohandas K. Gandhi had been different from the Gandhi of the movie it would have been nice if he had been like the movie-Gandhi, and that presenting him in this admittedly false manner was beautiful, stirring, and perhaps socially beneficial.

An important step in the canonization of this movie-Gandhi was taken by the New York Film Critics Circle, which not only awarded the picture its prize as best film of 1982, but awarded Ben Kingsley, who played Gandhi (a remarkably good performance), its prize as best actor of the year. But I cannot believe for one second that these awards were made independently of the film’s content—which, not to put too fine a point on it, is an all-out appeal for pacifism—or in anything but the most shameful ignorance of the historical Gandhi.

The Ascendence of Sociopaths

In today's world, just keeping quiet won't be enough 

By Doug Casey

I'm going to argue that the US government, in particular, is being overrun by the wrong kind of person. It's a trend that's been in motion for many years but has now reached a point of no return. In other words, a type of moral rot has become so prevalent that it's institutional in nature. There is not going to be, therefore, any serious change in the direction in which the US is headed until a genuine crisis topples the existing order. Until then, the trend will accelerate.

The reason is that a certain class of people – sociopaths – are now fully in control of major American institutions. Their beliefs and attitudes are insinuated throughout the economic, political, intellectual and psychological/spiritual fabric of the US.

Muppets 1 - Gollums 0

Εveryone with pitchforks is missing the wider point 

By Tim Price

It was just past 7:00 a.m. on the morning of Saturday, September 13, 2008. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, went into his home library and dialed into a conference call with two dozen members of his management team.

“You are about to experience the most unbelievable week in America ever, and we have to prepare for the absolutely worst case,” Dimon told his staff…

Here‘s the drill, he continued. “We need to prepare right now for Lehman Brothers filing [for bankruptcy].” Then he paused. “And for Merrill Lynch filing.” He paused again. “And for AIG filing. “ Another pause. “And for Morgan Stanley filing.” And after a final, even longer pause, he added: “And potentially for Goldman Sachs filing.”

There was a collective gasp on the phone.

                     ―From. Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin.

A Lesson in Republican Math

Throwing Money at the Warfare State

Mitt Romney Proposes $8 Trillion Welfare Program for Defense Contractors

by WILLIAM D. HARTUNG

If you’ve been fretting about faltering math education and falling test scores here in the United States, you should be worried based on this campaign season of Republican math.  When it comes to the American military, the leading Republican presidential candidates evidently only learned to add and multiply, never subtract or divide.

Advocates of Pentagon reform have criticized President Obama for his timid approach to reducing military spending.  Despite current Pentagon budgets that have hovered at the highest levels since World War II and 13 years of steady growth, the administration’s latest plans would only reduce spending at the Department of Defense by 1.6% in inflation-adjusted dollars over the next five years.

Have you hit your breaking point yet?

What is Obama so afraid of?

By The Sovereign Man

Quietly, and with little fanfare, President Obama signed a "National Defense Resources Preparedness" Executive Order on Friday. As the name suggests, the order intends to shore up the country's national defense resources in advance of a national emergency.

To be fair, this is not the first time that such an order has been written. Presidents Bush (II), Clinton, Reagan, and even Eisenhower provided directives in the same spirit as President Obama's order-- providing some level of government commandeering in times of national emergency.

The Great American Bubble Machine

Maybe we can't stop it, but we should at least know where it's all going 

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression -- and they're about to do it again

by Matt Taibbi

 The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

How To Cripple the Real Estate Market in Five Easy Steps

How I destroyed the Real Estate Market

Central Planning has crippled the real estate market to “save” their core constituency, the banks. 

by Charles Hugh Smith

If you were head of Central Planning and were tasked with crippling the real estate market, here’s what you would recommend.

1. Choke the market and banking sector with zombie banks.Central Planning creates zombie banks in one easy step: it allows insolvent banks to mark their impaired “real estate owned” to fantasy rather than to market. This enables the banks to survive in a deathless state, propped up by free money from the Federal Reserve and lax regulations that enable fantasy accounting and all sorts of off-balance sheet trickery.

Zombie banks have no incentive to auction off their holdings of real estate with defaulted, underwater or otherwise impaired mortgages, for having the market discover the price of these properties would immediately reveal the insolvency of the bank as properties it held on its books at (say) $400,000 were actually only worth $200,000. Since the mortgage is (say) $350,000, then the bank would be forced to recognize a $150,000 loss (actually more with transaction fees, repair of the derelict property, etc.).

Weeks When Decades Happen

Understanding the new emerging market place will prove essential to understanding the world of tomorrow 

By Louis Gave 

Talking about the Russian Revolution, Lenin once said that “there are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen.” The last quarter of 2001 looks in retrospect like one of those exciting periods: three events occurred which set in motion the main economic trends of the ensuing decade. Successful investors latched on to at least one of these trends. The problem is, all three trends are now over. The investment strategies that worked over the past decade will not continue to work in the next. What comes next?

The three big events of 2001 were:

• The terrorist attacks of 9/11. This unleashed a decade of bi-partisan “guns and butter”policies in the US and produced a structurally weaker dollar.

China's Great Leap Backward

Τhe Cultural Revolution isn’t over

by Niall Ferguson  

“To understand China you have to think in generations,” my Chinese friend explained. “And the key is that after 2012 the Cultural Revolution generation will be in charge.”

While antiwar protesters clashed with the National Guard on American campuses and Czechs defied the Red Army in the streets of Prague, China had the Cultural Revolution. In some ways it was the ultimate ’60s teen rebellion. In other ways it was totalitarianism at its worst: a bloody revolution from above unleashed by one of the 20th century’s most ruthless despots.

That it disrupted the lives of a generation is clear. Only consider its effects on the two men poised to inherit the top two positions of president and premier. Xi Jinping was a “princeling,” the son of one of Mao Zedong’s loyal lieutenants. He was just 15 when his father was arrested on Mao’s order. Xi spent the next six years toiling in the countryside of Yanchuan county in central China. Li Keqiang had a similar experience. No sooner had he graduated from high school than he was sent to labor in the fields of impoverished Anhui province.

Potential Gas Conflict in East Mediterranean

A mixed Blessing

By Nizar Abdel-Kader

In January 2009, Israeli oil company Delek and US Noble Energy Company discovered (some 55 miles off the coast of Haifa) a large natural reservoir known as "Tamar", which holds an estimated eight trillion cubic feet of gas. Early in 2010, another offshore gas field called "Leviathan" with a potential of 16 trillion cubic feet was discovered. Once exploited, these two fields could provide Israel with more than its domestic demand and turn Israel into a major exporter of natural gas.

Subsequently, in 2012, Cyprus, with the help of an Israeli company and Noble Energy, discovered a gas reservoir that could make the small island energy independent for 200 years. This gas find of eight trillion cubic feet was called "historic" by the Cyprus government. According to a press announcement by Charles D. Davidson, Noble Energy's president, this was the fifth natural gas field discovered by Noble Energy in the Levant Basin. A US geological survey published in 2009 claimed that there were 122 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas off the coasts of Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Israel and Gaza, in addition to 1.7 billion cubic meters of oil.

Manufacturing, an Economic Myth

Neither Santorum nor Obama seems to grasp the realities of manufacturing in 21st-century America

By Steve Chapman

Barack Obama and Rick Santorum probably couldn't agree that August falls in summer, but on one important issue they are closer than the Winklevoss twins. Both regard manufacturing as precious beyond words, and both think the federal government should be making special efforts to promote it.

Obama favors an array of tax breaks to induce manufacturers to keep jobs in the United States, and Santorum wants to completely scrap the corporate income tax on companies in this particular sector.

"Everybody benefits when manufacturing is going strong," said the president. Santorum recently lamented, "We have the manufacturing sector of the economy when I was growing up that was 21 percent of the workforce. It's now nine."

These are not exactly new sentiments. Walter Mondale, the 1984 Democratic presidential nominee, demanded, "What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around the Japanese computers?"

In the meantime, the debasement of paper money continues

What gives money value, and is fractional-reserve banking fraud?

by DETLEV SCHLICHTER

I thought I should address a couple of points that I consider to be misconceptions and that frequently come up in discussions with the audience or other speakers when I present my views on the fundamental problems with fiat money. I am not always in a position to correct these misconceptions right then. They are often woven into questions on other points and I have to leave them uncommented as not to disrupt the flow of the debate. My book is, I believe, quite clear on these points, so I could simply refer people to Paper Money Collapse. But, for whatever reason, it is still the case that many in my audience make inferences from similar arguments to my arguments, and I fear that some of the differences between these positions might get overlooked. These differences are not unimportant, and I think it is worthwhile to highlight and clarify them.

The first point is related to the question what gives money its value? The second point is, is fractional-reserve banking fraudulent and should it be banned on the basis of property rights?

Why Nations Fail

Poverty is the norm. Prosperity is the exception.

If you start in the city center of Nogales Santa Cruz and walk south for a while, at some point you see houses become much more run down, streets turn decrepit. You have crossed the Mexican border into Nogales, Sonora. Though the two cities are made of the same cloth and were once united, now there are sharp differences between the two. Those in the north are about three times as rich, have access to much better health care, stay in school much longer and of course take part in a much more democratic political process than their cousins in the south. The differences between the two halves of Nogales are a micro, tiny version of huge differences in prosperity and living standards we see around the world. Take Mexico as a whole, for example: it has less than one quarter of the GDP per capita of the United States. Take Peru; it has about one seventh of the GDP per capita of the United States. Or take Ethiopia, Haiti, Somalia or the Congo, each of has less than one thirtieth of the GDP per capita of the United States. 

The Pope's Cuba Gamble

The visit may turn out to be a gross miscalculation 

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

With only a week to go until Pope Benedict XVI is scheduled to make the second papal visit to Cuba in 14 years, joyful anticipation ought to be buoying the island's Christians. But for those brave soldiers of Christ who have stood up against political repression, the prevailing mood is deep frustration.

For 53 years, Cuba's totalitarian regime has made life hell for the population. But Castro also has spared no expense in running a clever international propaganda campaign. Regime survival has depended on East German-style repression covered over by a smiley face for international consumption. It has worked, and Cuban human-rights defenders have suffered their indignities with little moral support from the outside world.

The Parable of the Broken Traffic Lights

Bad signals

By Steven Horwitz

Suppose on some sunny afternoon in a large city somewhere in the western world, a man discovers on awaking from a two-hour nap that several hundred car accidents had occurred in the city while he slept.  He wonders why.  First he considers the possibility that the weather was the cause, but the gorgeous afternoon sun pushes that thought aside.  The odds of many hundreds of cars having simultaneous mechanical problems seems infinitesimally small, so he rules that out as well.  He ponders the question further and eventually asks himself whether the drivers in that fair city just had a bout of group psychosis or mass delusion.  The odds of that also seem pretty low.

A Coriolanus in Our Future?

A side of Shakespeare the classroom never prepared us for 

By Joe Sobran

A little tired of politics? Of course you are. We all are. Well, I have a treat for you: Shakespeare’s least-known great play, Coriolanus, the story of a brave and honest (though not always amiable) man who hates politics with all his heart. It’s a tragedy fraught with magnetic eloquence and unexpected lessons for our own time.
I discovered it in 1962, when I was 16, through Richard Burton’s thrilling recording of it. Long before he became famous for, well, other stuff, Burton had made the role his own on the stage, and this recording is still the gem of my large collection. Vocally, nobody, not even the great Olivier, could have topped Burton’s astoundingly resonant performance (which Olivier himself saluted as “definitive”). Listen to it once, and I guarantee you’ll never forget it. The play reveals a side of Shakespeare the classroom never prepared us for. Sweetest Shakespeare, fancy’s child? Warbling his native woodnotes wild? Not hardly.

In Praise of Hedging

The global economy slides into a "hard landing." 

Hedging against catastrophic loss is common-sense, and becomes more so as risk rises.

By Charles Smith

As a general observation, those with less wealth tend to be unhedged and those with more wealth tend to be hedged. In other words, hedging matters. Hedging has a clubby investment-speculation sound, but it basically means "insurance."

Since there is a risk your vehicle could be damaged in an accident or stolen, you buy auto insurance to limit your loss should either of those unfortunate but not uncommon "bad things" occur.