Beppe Grillo Is the Most Dangerous Man in Europe

Green Facism

by Jan Fleischhauer

Beppe Grillo, leader of the populist Five Star Movement in Italy, prides himself on his ridicule of the parliamentary system. Yet while his anti-establishment rhetoric sounds appealing, at heart it's actually anti-democratic. And very similar to that of an infamous Italian from the past.

The man whom German center-left leader Peer Steinbrück called a "clown" does have entertainment value, that much we can agree on. Italy and the euro? "De facto, Italy is already out of the euro zone." Rome and the parliamentary system? "I give all the parties six more months, then it's over here." And these quotes are only the highlights from a recent interview with Beppe Grillo published by the German business daily Handeslblatt. When it comes to straight talking, even Steinbrück, reknowned for his lack of a filter, is surpassed by Grillo.

Steinbrück got a fair amount of flack for his clown comparison. If he had used the term to describe only Berlusconi, everyone would have simply nodded in agreement. But Grillo? The leader of the streets and hero of the youth, whose third-placed Five Star Movement demonstrated the degree to which Merkel's austerity diktat is pushing Italy to its limits? The advocate for shorter terms of office and a cleaner way of doing politics? Even within the ranks of Steinbrück's Social Democrats (SPD), people were calling for their candidate to be put in his place.

A part of the sympathy that Grillo enjoys in Germany is undoubtedly thanks to his proximity to the political left. Much of what the Five Star Movement espouses could easily be found in the platforms of the Attac movement or Germany's Green party: the passion for alternative sources of energy, the promise of more civic engagement, the protest against the "fat cats" of international finance and the calls to put them on a diet. But that's just the surface. Such fluff doesn't propel a party to the top in just a few short years, neither in Italy nor anywhere else.

Grillo derives his energy from resentment. The real key to his success lies in the exploitation of anger -- at Germany, at Brussels bureaucrats, at the whole system. That is what makes him great, not the appeal to reason or the love of democracy.

As with all other revolutionaries, Grillo's answer to the malaise of the present age is extremely simple. You just have to do away with the politicians or, better yet, jettison everything that smells of power and privilege. "We are young," it says on his blog. "We have no structure, heirarchy, leaders or secretaries. We take orders from no one." Grillo's comparison of his movement to the French Revolution, which took its ideas of equality with bloody seriousness, is no accident. He relativizes by saying, "without the guillotine," but the stipulation means little. When people are incited into rage, those who fueled their passions never take the blame.

An unstable truce with the Axis of Crazy

A business model that no longer makes any sense

By mark steyn
I greatly enjoy the new Hollywood genre in which dysfunctional American families fly to a foreign city and slaughter large numbers of the inhabitants as a kind of bonding experience. Liam Neeson takes his estranged wife and their teenage daughter for just such a vacation in "Taken 2," in which the spectacular mountain of corpses in Istanbul brings the family back together again and ends with them (spoiler alert) enjoying a chocolate malt back at the soda fountain in California and getting to know the daughter's new boyfriend. "Don't shoot this one, Dad," she cautions. "I really like him." And they all have a good chuckle over it. In "Die Hard 5" or whatever we're up to, Bruce Willis and his estranged son fly to Moscow and do to the Russians what Neeson does to the Turks and Albanians. I gather that in the forthcoming "Finding Nemo 2," Marlin and Dory's marriage is going through a rocky patch until Nemo is kidnapped by a Ukrainian sex cartel, and Marlin and Dory swim up the Dnieper River and gun down every pimp in Kiev.

Alas, outside Hollywood, foreigners are somewhat less pliable than the body count of Liam Neeson's and Bruce Willis' obliging extras would suggest. The funniest line in "Taken 2" was Neeson's advice to his daughter in an emergency: "Go to the U.S. Embassy. You'll be safe there." It opened a couple of weeks after Benghazi.

There are drones, of course, which offer the consolations of technological bad-assery, as if Liam Neeson could take out all the Albanians from the X-Box in his basement. But don't worry. According to Politico, at a recent meeting with Senate Democrats, President Obama assured them that they had no need to worry about his awesome power to rain down death from the skies because, as he put it, he's not Dick Cheney.

Meanwhile, back at the GOP, Sen. Rand Paul is no Dick Cheney, either: At CPAC this week, the narrow bounds of his smash-hit filibuster – questioning drone assassinations of Americans in America – broadened somewhat, not just to questioning drone assassinations of Americans anywhere, nor to questioning drone assassinations of anyone, nor even to questioning the "war on terror" or war in general, but to questioning the very assumptions of American global order, starting with our bankrolling of Mohamed Morsi in Cairo. The Egyptians send mobs to torch the U.S. embassy, the Saudis wage ideological warfare against Western civilization, the Turks call Israel a "crime against humanity" and threaten a cultural and demographic takeover of Europe, the Pakistanis are ramping up nuke production to sell to any loon in town – and those are just our "allies." With friends like these, who needs foreign policy? There are fewer and fewer takers for the burdens of global superpower, and whoever wins the nomination in 2016 will be considerably less Cheney and more Randy.

Iraq war 10 years on

At least 116,000 civilians killed

The war in Iraq claimed more than 116,000 civilian lives in the space of eight years and cost the US about £530 billion, according to new research.

By David Blair

A study in “The Lancet”, a specialist medical journal, lays bare the price of the Anglo-American invasion that began 10 years ago.

From the moment that the first air strikes took place on March 19 2003, Iraqi civilians began to die.

By the time the last US soldiers left in December 2011, “at least 116,903 Iraqi non-combatants” had been killed, according to Barry Levy and Victor Sidel, two American professors of public health from Tufts University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine respectively.

^{Many Iraqi civilians were injured or became ill because of damage to the health-supporting infrastructure of the country}

In addition, 4,487 American and 179 British troops were also killed.

This calculation of civilian fatalities is significantly lower than other estimates. In 2006, “The Lancet” published a study comparing Iraq’s population growth rates before and after the invasion. This concluded that 655,000 “excess deaths” had taken place since the war began in 2003. However, the methodology of that survey was widely criticised.

Iraq Body Count, a website that totals the reported number of dead in each incident, has reached a similar conclusion to the latest study. It currently places the number of civilian deaths at between 111,687 and 122,108.

As for the financial cost, the new study makes conservative assumptions, omitting the interest payments on the higher US national debt caused by the Iraq war.

If those are included, the bill could eventually reach £2 trillion.

It’s the antibiotics apocalypse! Again…

Ignore the Chief Medical Officer’s fearmongering: antibiotic resistance can be tackled with new antibiotics.

by Robin Walsh 

The UK’s chief medical officer (CMO), Professor Dame Sally Davies, made a splash in the media this week with her warning that antibiotic resistance is the new climate change. There is a ‘catastrophic threat’ of ‘untreatable’ diseases, she said, which promise to return us to a ‘nineteenth century’ state of affairs. The CMO has form: she warned the House of Commons health select committee about the same problem in similarly stringent terms back in January – a case not so much of apocalypse now, as apocalypse again.

As with all such stories, reading the actual CMO’s report leavens some of the hysterical excesses of the press, which were stoked up by the CMO’s excitable media appearances. Setting out the epidemiology of infectious diseases in the UK, the report highlights that while some drug-resistant infections, such as the well-known Clostridium difficile (C diff) and MRSA, are becoming less widespread, there is an increasing occurence of harder to treat multi-drug resistant bacterial infections, which, although still only in the hundreds of cases per year, are on the rise. The report states that only five antibiotics to fight such infections are currently in phase II or III trials, so the cupboard seems worryingly bare of new, necessary drugs.

So if we’re running short on drugs, how can we make more? A sensible article in the British Medical Journal from 2010 clearly set out the challenges facing the development of new antibiotics. Firstly, there are many regulatory hurdles that make running clinical trials in this area difficult. More importantly, there is a major financial disincentive for drug companies to develop antibiotics. Currently, drugs which are profitable are those for chronic conditions that are prescribed lifelong: painkillers for arthritis, diabetes drugs, and the like. A drug that you take once to cure you is unprofitable; doubly so if it is likely to be husbanded to prevent resistance developing until the patent runs out. A change in government payments to incentivise new antibiotics, like that which already applies to so-called ‘orphan’ drugs for rare diseases, would be an easy and rational step towards producing more drugs that meet our needs.

While there is some discussion as to whether the low-hanging fruit of easily produced effective drugs have already been picked, if you’re not even trying to harvest from the tree, you’re not going to find any fruit. As the BMJ article states, only 1.6 per cent of all drugs in development by big pharmaceutical companies are antibiotics.

The Show Trial of Sergei Magnitsky

Russia puts a dead man in the dock

A tombstone on the grave of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky

It sounds like something out of a Nikolai Gogol story, but it's true: Sergei Magnitsky, killed by abuse and neglect in a Russian prison at the age of 37, is now on trial more than three years after his death.

On Tuesday a Russian court held the second hearing of a sham trial to convict him posthumously of tax evasion. That hearing was postponed at the request of Magnitsky's state-appointed defense attorney, who pleaded for more time to prepare a defense.

Assuming this gesture was not part of the charade, he needn't have bothered. As in the show trials of the 1930s, the outcome is assured. The whole point of putting this dead man on trial is to secure a conviction and rob the victim of his status as an international martyr. Last year the U.S. passed the Magnitsky Act, which sanctions and bans from travel to the U.S. Russians implicated in his murder. Some countries in Europe may do the same.

The Putin government has no interest in seeing Magnitsky's name cleared. Yet it is revealing that Moscow feels bound to produce a verdict. Even Vladimir Putin's Russia seeks to adopt the trappings if not the substance of criminal justice.

Magnitsky's real "crime," the one for which he was killed, was to expose official corruption and the theft of state assets after his client, investor Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital, was expelled from Russia in 2005 and forced to liquidate his holdings there. Perhaps conscious of the absurdity of trying a corpse, prosecutors last week added Mr. Browder to the dock in absentia. So the world will be treated to the spectacle of a trial of a dead man and a foreigner living in Britain—all to improve the image of Putin's regime.

The Russian state, in its benevolence, granted the defense attorney the time he requested this week. But there can be no stay of execution for Sergei Magnitsky, and his trial deserves the full measure of the world's contempt.

The Dogma of Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism, like the caste system, paints people into the corner where they happened to have been born

By Thomas Sowell

Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogma of multiculturalism.

Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley.

Multiculturalism is a tempting quick fix for groups that lag; it simply pronounces their cultures to be equal with others, or “equally valid,” in some vague and lofty sense. Cultural features are just different, not better or worse, according to this dogma.

Yet the borrowing of particular features from other cultures — such as replacing Roman numerals with Arabic numerals, even in Western cultures that derived from Rome — implies that some features are not simply different but better. Some of the most advanced cultures in history have borrowed from other cultures, because no given collection of human beings has created the best answers to all the questions of life.

Nevertheless, since multiculturalists see all cultures as equal or “equally valid,” they see no justification for schools to insist that black children learn standard English, for example. Instead, each group is encouraged to cling to its own culture and to take pride in its own past glories, real or imaginary.

In other words, members of minority groups that lag educationally, economically, or otherwise are to continue to behave in the future as they have in the past — and, if they do not get the same outcomes as others, it is society’s fault. That is the bottom-line message of multiculturalism.

George Orwell once said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them. Multiculturalism is one of those ideas. The intelligentsia burst into indignation or outrage at “gaps” or “disparities” in educational, economic, or other outcomes — and denounce any cultural explanation of these group differences as “blaming the victim.”

There is no question that some races or whole nations have been victimized by others, any more than there is any question that cancers can cause death. But that is very different from saying that deaths can automatically be blamed on cancer. You might think that intellectuals could make that distinction. But many do not.

The Client State

Cutting Corporate Welfare Queens Off from the Dole Would be the Best Way to Cut the Debt

by George Washington

In previous installments, we’ve noted that we could more than offset the need for the “sequestration” budget cuts by doing any one or combination of the following:

• Ending massive subsidies to the giant banks

• Reducing fraud and waste

• Ending the failed drug war

• Ending subsidies to the nuclear industry

• Stopping the counter-productive quantitative easing by the Fed

Here’s another way to offset the need for budget cuts: cut off the welfare queens. (Jamie Dimon – shown above- and the other Wall Street queens are the largest recipients of welfare.)

Liberals and conservatives agree that we should stop subsidizing the fatcats. For example, the conservative Cato Institute points out that corporate welfare amounts to almost $100 billion per year. Cato notes:

Corporate welfare often subsidizes failing and mismanaged businesses and induces firms to spend more time on lobbying rather than on making better products. Instead of correcting market failures, federal subsidies misallocate resources and introduce government failures into the marketplace.

While corporate welfare may be popular with policymakers who want to aid home-state businesses, it undermines the broader economy and transfers wealth from average taxpaying households to favored firms.  Corporate welfare also creates strong ties between politicians and business leaders, and these ties are often the source of corruption scandals in Washington. Americans are sick and tired of “crony capitalism,” and the way to solve the problem is to eliminate business subsidy programs.

Cato also notes:

The federal government continues to subsidize some of the biggest companies in America. Boeing, Xerox, IBM, Motorola, Dow Chemical, General Electric, and others have received millions in taxpayer-funded benefits …. In addition, the federal crop subsidy programs continue to fund the wealthiest farmers.

A Community-Based Alternative To The Welfare State

Freedom of choice and competition are the only real alternative

It is important to discuss alternatives before the Status Quo devolves and collapses, so we have an intellectual framework to guide healthier, more sustainable alternatives once the current system implodes.

by Charles Hugh-Smith
Two of the key characteristics of an empire in terminal decline are complacency and intellectual sclerosis, what I have termed a failure of imagination. (The others are military over-reach, chronic deficits, a parasitic Elite that is immune to what's left of the rule of law, weak leadership, mass dependence on the Central State and excessive consumption.)

Michael Grant described these causes of decline in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire:

There was no room at all, in these ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which had now arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as itself. (The Status Quo) attitude is a complacent acceptance of things as they are, without a single new idea.

This acceptance was accompanied by greatly excessive optimism about the present and future. Even when the end was only sixty years away, and the Empire was already crumbling fast, Rutilius continued to address the spirit of Rome with the same supreme assurance.

This blind adherence to the ideas of the past ranks high among the principal causes of the downfall of Rome. If you were sufficiently lulled by these traditional fictions, there was no call to take any practical first-aid measures at all.

In other words, if our idea of intellectual rigor and honesty is Paul Krugman dancing around the Neo-Keynesian Cargo Cult campfire waving dead chickens and mumbling the same old nonsensical chants about aggregate demand, we are well and truly doomed.

This same intellectual sclerosis and spiritual vacuum characterizes our acceptance of the current welfare state. That dependence on the State is destructive to the the well-being and productivity of the dependents and to the fiscal health of the State is self-evident. As management guru Peter Drucker observed in his 1993 book, Post-Capitalist Society:

Joseph Schumpeter warned in 1918 that the fiscal state would in the end undermine government's ability to govern. Fifteen years later, Keynes hailed the fiscal state as the great liberator; no longer limited by restraints on spending, government in the fiscal state could govern effectively, Keynes maintained. We now know Schumpeter was right.

Germany's Green Energy Disaster

A Cautionary Tale For World Leaders

By Howard Rich

There’s nothing wrong with expanding renewable energy sources. The more choices available in this (or any) marketplace the better consumers will be served – both from a price and a quality standpoint. However serious problems are caused when government starts using taxpayer resources to subsidize or incentivize these expansions. Things get even worse when centralized planners start manipulating market choices or trying to manage the marketplace itself by controlling the generation of power.

This is precisely what is happening in Germany – where command economists have failed spectacularly in their bid to force a national transition to renewable energy.

In 2000 Germany passed a major green initiative which forced providers to purchase renewable energy at exorbitant fixed prices and feed that power through their grids for a period of twenty years. Promulgated by a Socialist-Green coalition government – this initiative has since been embraced by Germany’s Conservative-Liberal majority, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel. In fact Merkel has doubled down on Germany’s renewable energy push in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan – ramping up government’s plan to phase in renewables while taking the country’s nuclear power industry offline.

Merkel’s government shut down eight reactors in the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima disaster (which was caused by a tsunami – a threat Germany isn’t exposed to) and has vowed to shut down all remaining nuclear facilities by 2022. The problem? Despite heavy government subsidization, renewable energies simply aren’t filling the void.

“After deciding to exit nuclear energy, it seems as if Ms. Merkel’s coalition stopped its work,” a former German environmental minister told The New York Times last year. “There is great danger that this project will fail, with devastating economic and social consequences.”

A year later the project is failing – resulting in what one German industry expert termed a “chaotic standstill.”

Because It Worked So Well For Stalin...

Five-year plans in the Land of the Free? Apparently it’s not that far off from reality.

by Simon Black

Yesterday Senator Tom Harkin introduced S. 544, “a bill to require the President to develop a comprehensive national manufacturing strategy.”

In effect, Senator Harkin wants the President to centrally plan the economy. Never mind that the President has zero experience in business or manufacturing. But hey, this worked out so well for Stalinist Russia, it’s no wonder Mr. Harkin wants to copy that model.

Not to be outdone by Mr. Harkin’s long-sighted vision, President Obama is drawing up plans to turn over Americans’ financial data to the nation’s spy agencies. So now, on top of everyone else, law-abiding citizens in the Land of the Free can count on the CIA and NSA combing through their bank statements.

Of course, it’s all for your protection against men in caves who wish to do you harm.

This is the same reason they irradiate and/or sexually assault airline passengers. It’s why they have to be able to assassinate Americans on US soil by remote control plane. It’s why they’ve authorized military detention of US citizens. Etc.

When you step back and look at the big picture, it really makes one wonder – how big of a piano needs to be dropped on people’s heads before they notice what’s happening..?

I acknowledge that people have roots. I understand that folks can’t easily pick up and leave their jobs, friends, and family. I understand there’s a lot of inertia involved.

But if you see the writing on the wall, there’s so much you can do to protect yourself against this lunacy. Own precious metals, preferably stored overseas. Open a foreign bank account. Ship your retirement savings abroad. Travel a little bit. Know, in advance, where you would go if you finally hit your breaking point and needed to leave the country.

The trend is clear. Every single day the political elite gives us even more evidence that they’re working overtime to destroy the economy and what few remaining civil liberties still exist.

It’s a difficult truth to acknowledge given that most people have been brainwashed from a very early age in public schools to trust in their government. But placing any amount of confidence in this system utter folly. And dangerous.

There’s no need to panic; rather, it’s important to take measured, rational action. The above recommendations are not alarmist, they’re steps that make sense no matter what happens.

In almost any scenario, you won’t be worse off for having gold and silver stashed away overseas. You won’t be worse off for traveling abroad and finding a nice place you enjoy. You won’t be worse off for taking back control of your retirement savings.

Yet it the bottom falls out, you’ll be one of the few people left standing. Unless, of course, you’d rather wait for the next five-year plan to kick in.

BRICs Abandoned by Locals

Fund Outflows Reach 1996 High

By Michael Patterson, Julia Leite and Rajhkumar K Shaaw 

The 2.5 million rupees ($45,984) Nirav Vora had in the Indian stock market six years ago have plunged by 72 percent. Now the 39-year-old father of two in Mumbai, who depends on investment income for his livelihood, is plowing money into government bonds.

“The confidence of small investors is rock bottom,” Vora said by phone on Feb. 26. “They have no faith in the markets.”

Vora’s exit from equities is being repeated across the biggest emerging markets as disappointing profits and growing state intervention cause stocks to trail global shares for a fourth year. Trading by Brazilian individuals has dropped to the lowest level since 1999, exchange data show. Russian mutual funds posted 16 straight months of outflows, the most since at least 1996, and withdrawals in India are the biggest in more than two years. Chinese investors emptied more than 2 million stock accounts in the past 12 months.

After amassing unprecedented wealth during 14 years of world-beating economic expansion, citizens of the so-called BRIC countries are losing their appetite for shares even as U.S. households return to stocks. While the Dow Jones Industrial Average (INDU) is trading at an all-time high, the MSCI BRIC (MXBRIC) Index remains 37 percent below its 2007 peak as economic growth disappoints investors and policy makers do little to improve the treatment of minority shareholders.

‘Steady March’

“This is a somewhat steady march to the exit,” Michael Shaoul, the chairman of New York-based Marketfield Asset Management, which is wagering shares in Brazil, India and China will fall, said by phone on Feb. 27.

The four-country MSCI gauge fell 0.3 percent at 10:14 a.m. in London, bringing its 2013 drop to 0.7 percent. That compares with an 11 percent gain for the Dow Average and a 6.8 percent increase in the MSCI All-Country World Index (MXBRIC). The Shanghai Composite Index has climbed 0.4 percent and Russia’s Micex Index (INDEXCF) advanced 2.2 percent. India’s S&P BSE Sensex index is little changed, while Brazil’sBovespa Index (IBOV) has retreated 6 percent.

The last time individuals in Brazil and India were this pessimistic, the nations’ benchmark equity indexes fell more than 10 percent in 12 months, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Local selling hasn’t reached levels of “capitulation” that signal market bottoms, said Shaoul, whose $6.9 billion MainStay Marketfield Fund (MFLDX) beat 99 percent of peers tracked by Bloomberg in the past year.

Why Socialists Loathe Tolkien's Shire?

Tolkien would have loathed our brave new world with government of thought and deed by state regulation and acronym

By DAVID PLATT

A cinematic juggernaut has just rolled into town. With the first film in the new Hobbit trilogy, its director, Sir Peter Jackson, has embarked on a quest to repeat his Lord of the Rings omnispectacular. Over the next few weeks we may have to become accustomed to images of Baggins in Burger King and Mordor in McDonald’s. The media hype which all this marketing guff engenders will no doubt cause our literary and cultural custodians to remind us (with that form of detached ennui which they have perfected) that Tolkien is no more than a sort of reactionary Harry Potter. Philip Pullman was therefore right to denounce it all as “infantile” and Richard Eyre justified when he termed Middle Earth the “Kingdom of Kitsch”. Jim Naughtie will continue to sigh when any reference to J.R.R. Tolkien is made on the Today programme—and Mark Lawson will tell BBC Radio 4 audiences that this form of bread and circuses isn’t a patch on Ken Loach’s recent outing into poverty among Asian minorities in Bootle.

But wait. Things are not as they seem. There is an agenda here. There usually is when it comes to popular culture—but in the case of Tolkien we are looking at big politics. For the author of The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and The Hobbit was the greatest conservative writer of the second-half of the 20th century. No—not in an Ayn Rand sense, nor in the raw modernist style embraced by T.S. Eliot or Wyndham Lewis. Rather, Tolkien combined remarkable talents for story-telling and philology with a matching ability to communicate conservative values and images with unequalled popularity. His pre-history of the West is dominated by hereditary structures and a settled social order that appealed to the nostalgia of a postwar generation. He was clearly doing something right, given that Rings has sold more copies than almost any other work of fiction in history. It has been voted the nation’s favourite novel in England, Australia, the US and even Germany.

It is this astonishing success that underlies the fierce hostility one encounters from a literary and cultural establishment dominated by the liberal Left (notwithstanding the brief counter-cultural popularity which Rings had in the 1960s). While by no means all on the Right “get” Tolkien (the poet John Heath-Stubbs called it “a combination of Wagner and Winnie-the-Pooh”), all too often those who should know better are simply carried along by an ill-informed deference to established critics who shout louder. Too many conservatives simply do not engage in this area of cultural politics—and then naively wonder at general elections why the broadcast media is pumping out an undercurrent of left-wing assumptions which have scarcely moved on since 1945.

Reductionism Undermines Both Science and Culture

Applied gigantism coupled to an abject neglect of human scale, leads to urban dystopia

by Ramray Bhat and Nikos Salingaros 

Reductionistic thinking, which is the philosophy of contracting complex systems in science and society to smaller or single causalities, is dangerous. With this contraction comes an indifference towards uncovering and appreciating complex explanations and the variability contributed by the context. In the sciences, reductionism leads to the unfortunate skewing of effort and funding towards what are promoted as “basic” questions, and the neglect of disciplines that are most likely to help humanity by acting on practical scales. The effects of reductionism in society are even more alarming. Reductionistic thinking leaves little room for variety, cultural traditions, living urban environments, or religion, thus reducing our worldview to a sterile minimalism bereft of several of the most glorious achievements of evolved human civilization. There is also the additional and more practical consequence: reductionism is responsible for leading us towards societal collapse.

Notwithstanding the continued imagery of the wild-haired scientist untouched by surrounding happenings and upheavals, science has intensely contributed to, and at times rewritten, social and political histories. Among the more contentious of its contributions is the philosophy of reductionism. Thus physicists in the earlier part of the last century were prone to investigating the dynamics of atoms and everything smaller than them, as if matter and all its wonderful properties could be explained only through protons and neutrons, later moving on to quarks and other such elusive elementary constituents. Similarly, much of biology in the latter half of the twentieth century was devoted to understanding and developing the tools for understanding the workings of genes, to the extent that Richard Dawkins advocated a worldview wherein it is the genes that live and evolve, using individuals and their anatomies as vehicles for perpetuation (Dawkins, 1990).

Advances in both material physics and biology have exploded these myths and shown that explanations of how inanimate and animate things work, and are made, cannot simply be broken down into their components. The very idea of any component being elementary has lost its nineteenth-century meaning, where the whole could be put together straightforwardly from elementary mechanical parts. Mechanisms are in fact intricate and layered, and interactions between components contribute as much, if not more, as the components themselves. Moreover, the environmental context also matters and is an intrinsic part of structure and function. Nevertheless, the reductive mindset refuses to go away. What’s more, like all the different ways by which science and technology have come to dominate our lives, the reductionist worldview now influences how we think about anything and everything.

What Will Become Of Chavez's Gold Hoard?

Physical gold is modestly short of priceless to a criminal

by Peter Christian Hall

In August 2011, while undergoing cancer treatments that ultimately failed him, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez began withdrawing 160 tons of gold from U.S., European and Canadian banks. “It’s coming to the place it never should have left. ... The vaults of the central bank of Venezuela, not the bank of London or the bank of the United States. It’s our gold,” he said on national television as crowds cheered armored trucks carrying an initial bullion shipment to the central bank.

While Chávez suggested the gold repatriation might forestall a Libya-style seizure of Venezuela’s assets by Western powers he had antagonized, IHS Global Insight analyst Diego Moya-Ocampos told Reuters it might stymie potential claims by foreign corporations seeking compensation for nationalizations they had endured. Central Bank of Venezuela President Nelson Merentes said it was “an act of financial prudence and sovereignty” intended to guard against problems in the international markets.

The shipments, conducted by air after much talk of alternate delivery modes, concluded five months later in a celebratory caravan. (Germany’s doing it, too: Berlin has ordered repatriation of 674 metric tons of gold, worth $34 billion, from Paris and New York.)

The Caracas hoard would today be valued at around $9 billion, were it not for the fact thatVenezuela has been selling it — about $550 million worth in the first eight months of 2012, according to the International Monetary Fund. Did further sales follow over the past six months, with proceeds partly paying for the public largesse that helped fuel Chávez’s victorious up-from-the-sickbed presidential run?

Hint: Even with the additional cash from gold sales, Venezuela’s foreign exchange reserves hit a five-year low in September, three weeks before Chávez won a narrower-than-customary victory over Henrique Capriles, who will represent the opposition in a presidential election to be held on April 14.

‘Zionist’: the worst insult in the world

Among the Western chattering classes, ‘the Zionist’ has replaced 'the Jew' as the cause of the world's ills

by Tom Bailey 

Speaking to the Jewish Chronicle newspaper recently, UK Labour Party leader Ed Miliband reportedly claimed to be a Zionist. The article in the JC read: ‘Ed Miliband: “I’m a Zionist and oppose boycotts of Israel”.’

However, Miliband’s self-identification as a Zionist lasted less than 24 hours. He has since clarified that he was responding in the affirmative to the question ‘Are you a Zionist?’ with the answer ‘Yes, I am a supporter of Israel’. He would not actually describe himself as a Zionist, though, he now says.

It seems Miliband is prepared to proclaim his support for Israel as a Jewish state. He supports the idea of that state as a homeland for the Jews. Yet the ideology that is associated with the creation of the state and with the larger project of creating a permanent Jewish homeland - Zionism - is something he is reluctant to sign up to.

The reason for Miliband’s reluctance is pretty obvious: Zionism is no longer simply a term denoting a particular ideology. A Zionist is no longer just someone who supports the creation of a Jewish homeland. Rather, Zionism has become a term of abuse, the worst term of abuse there is in modern, right-thinking circles; the word Zionism is now used to denote something deeply sinister, something beyond the pale of bien pensant civilisation. A Zionist is now imagined as an evil shadowy figure, eating babies while playing puppetmaster of world politics.