Reaching the bottom of the slippery slope.

Obscure Court Decision Gives Government Sweeping Power

By THOMAS SOWELL
When a 1942 Supreme Court decision that most people never heard of makes the front page of the New York Times in 2012, you know something unusual is going on.

What makes that 1942 case — Wickard v. Filburn — important today is that it stretched the federal government's power so far that the Obama administration is using it as an argument to claim before today's Supreme Court it has the legal authority to impose ObamaCare mandates on individuals.

Roscoe Filburn was an Ohio farmer who grew some wheat to feed his family and some farm animals. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture fined him for growing more wheat than he was allowed to grow under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, which was passed under Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce.

Filburn pointed out that his wheat wasn't sold, so that it didn't enter any commerce, interstate or otherwise. Therefore the federal government had no right to tell him how much wheat he grew on his own farm, and which never left his farm.

Is technology and industry good or bad?

Bicenntenial of Luddite Lawlessness

BY BRUCE WALKER   

Is technology and industry good or bad? There is no moral answer to the question. Certainly there are happy men and women who worked in old trades exchanging the material benefits of technology for the comfort and emotional satisfaction of keeping alive old ways of work. The delightful town of Williamsburg in Virginia or the equally happy Silver Dollar City in the Ozarks are filled with folks whose joy is preserving the making of horseshoes, candles, rock candy, and many other products whose manufacture is a part of our history.

Empires Then and Now

The American people are victims of the American empire

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Great empires, such as the Roman and British, were extractive. The empires succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance. The reason Rome did not extend its empire east into Germany was not the military prowess of Germanic tribes but Rome’s calculation that the cost of conquest exceeded the value of extractable resources. The Roman empire failed, because Romans exhausted manpower and resources in civil wars fighting amongst themselves for power. The British empire failed, because the British exhausted themselves fighting Germany in two world wars.

In his book, The Rule of Empires (2010), Timothy H. Parsons replaces the myth of the civilizing empire with the truth of the extractive empire. He describes the successes of the Romans, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Spanish in Peru, Napoleon in Italy, and the British in India and Kenya in extracting resources. To lower the cost of governing Kenya, the British instigated tribal consciousness and invented tribal customs that worked to British advantage.

They Can Force You To Buy Broccoli

Abolishing the diktat of a bunch of 18^th C. idealists

The case of Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida is one of the most important cases to ever come to the US Supreme Court. If the government wins, it can force you to do anything it wishes. Today’s arguments in this case do not exaggerate the threat.

We have not had a true constitution since FDR threatened to pack the court in order to get his New Deal programs adopted. The Court folded and the famous “switch in time that saved nine” (West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 1937) allowed the Court to make any interpretation it wanted to carry out an administration’s social policy. I was taught in constitutional law courses in college and law school that this marvelous thing was a “living constitution”, that we were not bound by the diktat of a bunch of 18^th C. idealists whose ideas didn’t favor an intrusive government. The important thing, I was taught, was to advance social policy for the benefit of the people.

Nothing is preordained. Time and the action of individuals will tell the tale

Old Game Plan Made Anew?

"Spain's economy contracts as recession fears grow ... The Spanish economy has shrunk for the first time in two years, increasing fears the country could be heading for a recession. The country's economy shrank by 0.3% in the three months to December, after stagnating in the previous quarter. Household spending fell by 1.1% from the previous quarter, while spending by public bodies dropped by 3.6%. The country has the highest jobless rate in the EU, with almost one in four people out of work. Spain's unemployment figure passed the five million mark in the last quarter of 2011. Figures showed 5.3 million people were out of work at the end of December, up from 4.9 million in the third quarter. The downbeat fourth-quarter economy figures come even before the impact of new austerity measures unveiled last month by new Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy." – BBC

Dominant Social Theme: Austerity is tough but builds character.

Free-Market Analysis: Did you hear that about half of Europe is in recession or headed that way? We can see from the above excerpt that Spain is certainly headed that way. Greece, Portugal and Ireland are also in various forms of economic collapse.

Call it recession, depression or simply cataclysmic economic conditions. But one way or another Southern Europe is in a terrible state. Greece is in a meltdown; half the young people in Spain aren't working and Portugal and Ireland aren't far behind.

Heck, let's just call it a continental depression. And one that is as unnecessary as it is terrible. The elites that set up the European Union by subterfuge bribed the Southern government PIGS with funds.

The Great Escape

Delivering in a Delevering World

By Bill Gross

About six months ago, I only half in jest told Mohamed that my tombstone would read, “Bill Gross, RIP, He didn’t own ‘Treasuries’.” Now, of course, the days are getting longer and as they say in golf, it is better to be above – as opposed to below – the grass. And it is better as well, to be delivering alpha as opposed to delevering in the bond market or global economy. The best way to visualize successful delivering is to recognize that investors are locked up in a financially repressive environment that reduces future returns for all financial assets. Breaking out of that “jail” is what I call the Great Escape, and what I hope to explain in the next few pages.

Black Rednecks and White Hispanics

Look over there, a shiny thing!

Here’s a new bright and shiny thing from the NYT, calculated to energize the base against its evil enemy, serve the chosen narrative of the moment (in spite of inconvenient facts), and to draw your attention away from how much you paid to fill your gas tank, etc., etc.

"The White Hispanic" Progressive Racial Narrative 

The west has lost in Afghanistan

The number three in al-Qaeda has been killed at least five times

By Gideon Rachman

Five years ago the Americans were refusing to speak to the Taliban. Now the Taliban are refusing to speak to the Americans. That is a measure of how the balance of power has shifted in Afghanistan. The western intervention there has failed. As Nato prepares to withdraw from the country in 2014, it is only the scale of the defeat that remains to be determined.

A senior Pakistani official comments sardonically: “I remember when the Americans used to say that the only good Taliban was a dead Taliban. Then they talked about separating the reconcilable from the irreconcilable. Now, they say, the Taliban are not our enemy.” In fact, Nato and Taliban forces are still enemies on the battlefield. But in a desperate effort to leave behind a stable Afghanistan, the US and its allies are also battling to include the Taliban in the political process. However, the Taliban are in no rush to negotiate – and recently broke off talks. With western troops on their way out, there is little pressure on them to compromise now.

Complex Societies Need Simple Laws

The anti-Canutes of today

We need to end the orgy of rule-making at once and embrace the simple rules that true liberals like America’s founders envisioned.

By John Stossel

“If you have 10,000 regulations,” Winston Churchill said, “you destroy all respect for law.”

He was right. But Churchill never imagined a government that would add 10,000 year after year. That’s what we have in America. We have 160,000 pages of rules from the feds alone. States and localities have probably doubled that. We have so many rules that legal specialists can’t keep up. Criminal lawyers call the rules “incomprehensible.” They are. They are also “uncountable.” Congress has created so many criminal offenses that the American Bar Association says it would be futile to even attempt to estimate the total. 

Nobody Knows Anything

Telling Tales About Money

“With the US economy showing signs of recovery and fears about the eurozone sovereign debt crisis easing, investors are putting their money into equities and other assets geared towards economic growth rather than havens such as gold.”

     — Jack Farchy, Financial Times, 23^rd March.

 “Growth gloom bolsters government debt"

 “Reminders of the risks to the global growth outlook put equities and commodities on the back foot and helped government bonds in the US, Germany and the UK recoup more of their recent losses.”

     —Dave Shellock, Financial Times, 23rd March.

By Tim Price 

Screenwriter William Goldman famously began his autobiography, Adventures in the Screen Trade, with three telling words: Nobody Knows Anything. The same logic would seem to apply to much conventional reporting of the financial markets. Any investor looking for informed analysis of market developments can therefore save themselves a few minutes every day by choosing to not read any of the “Companies and Markets‟ section of the FT, which typically constitutes a fantastic piece of fiction. If there is a more thankless task in finance than trying to explain why certain markets did what they did yesterday, we don’t know what it is. (Unless it’s working in the PR department at Goldman Sachs.)

NYPD Should Leave Muslims Alone

The 14th Amendment clearly gives equal protection under the laws to all people, no matter their religion or politics 

by Ivan Eland

Attorney General Eric Holder is to be lauded for looking into the constitutionality of the New York City Police Department’s wholesale snooping into the lives of people based purely on their Muslim faith. Because Holder is a busy man, he could save a lot of time by just pulling out the U.S. Constitution and reading it.

Unfortunately, in the hysteria after 9/11, the executive branch, Congress, and the courts have allowed police agencies—federal, state, and local—to conduct extraconstitutional surveillance, search, and seizure. These actions have muddled what spying should be considered clearly unconstitutional.

Saving a little something for Southern European Elites

Berlin's Poor Collect Bottles to Make Ends Meet

By Helen Whittle

Many pensioners and unemployed people in Berlin are turning to an unusual means of supplementing their meager incomes: collecting discarded deposit bottles. They can return them to stores or supermarkets for a few cents per bottle. But as the activity becomes more popular, competition among collectors has intensified.

To see Günther rummaging through trash cans in Berlin, you might assume he was homeless. But the 61-year-old is actually one of a growing number of pensioners looking to earn extra cash through bottle recycling.

Minimum pricing means minimising choice

Squeezing just a little more freedom out of our lives.

by Patrick Hayes 

‘We will put a stop to the easy availability of cheap booze that has blighted Britain for too long. This is a comprehensive strategy to take back our town centres from the drunken thugs and to restore them to the law-abiding majority.’

Abu Qatadas Freedom Might Be the Price We Pay for Ours

A Champion For His Own Human Rights

 

He doesn’t have a hook. He does have a big, bushy beard, and eyes that don’t look all that friendly, but Omar Mahmoud Othman, who’s also known as Abu Qatada, doesn’t have a hook. It’s Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, who’s also known as Abu Hamza, who has a hook instead of a hand.

It’s quite easy to get them confused. Both men live, when they’re not in prison, in big houses, with their wives and children, and both men seem to think that the British taxpayers who pay for those houses, and their children’s food, and their lawyers, and their food in prison, and the specially adapted taps you need in your cell if you have a hook instead of a hand, are infidels who should be slaughtered.

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.