The Manhood of the West

We remove the organ and demand the function

by Richard Fernandez

A British soldier was decapitated a few hundred yards from a UK Army base by two men with large knives saying: “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you.” The men were shot when police responded 20 minutes later. The photo above shows a scene:

This is the dramatic moment a woman appears to remonstrate with a man carrying a knife following a brutal attack in Woolwich.

The two alleged attackers are thought to have waited around for 20 minutes until Metropolitan Police officers arrived and then tried to attack them — but were swiftly shot by armed policemen, including a woman.

“Remonstrate.” Now there’s a word to conjure with.
The Telegraph describes the behavior of the onlookers — the attackers asked the crowd to take their photo, which they apparently did:

“There was only a few people at first then traffic began to build up because people were getting out of their cars to shout at them they were taking no notice, they were standing there, I think they were proud of what they were doing.

“When they dumped the body in the road, these two black guys had the opportunity to hurt other people if they wanted to because there were brave women with the dead guy on the floor, they were shielding and covering him. The attackers with the knives were standing over these women.

“The guy with the gun, the tall guy with the beanie cap on, even a bus had pulled up — he was going over to the bus and asking people to take his photo.”

Then the killers allowed only women to come forward to succor the dead or dying man:

He said: “My friend and her mum were walking up the hill and the mum came straight to the victim.

She asked the black guys can I help him? And one of them said he was already dead but she could go.

Then one of them said ‘No man is coming near this body, only women’.”

To the Slaughter

British lions come up lambs in Woolwich

By Mark Steyn

On Wednesday, Drummer Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, a man who had served Queen and country honorably in the hell of Helmand Province in Afghanistan, emerged from his barracks on Wellington Street, named after the Duke thereof, in southeast London. Minutes later, he was hacked to death in broad daylight and in full view of onlookers by two men with machetes who crowed “Allahu akbar!” as they dumped his carcass in the middle of the street like so much road kill.

As grotesque as this act of savagery was, the aftermath was even more unsettling. The perpetrators did not, as the Tsarnaev brothers did in Boston, attempt to escape. Instead, they held court in the street gloating over their trophy, and flagged down a London bus to demand the passengers record their triumph on film. As the crowd of bystanders swelled, the remarkably urbane savages posed for photographs with the remains of their victim while discoursing on the iniquities of Britain toward the Muslim world. Having killed Drummer Rigby, they were killing time: It took 20 minutes for the somnolent British constabulary to show up. And so television viewers were treated to the spectacle of a young man, speaking in the vowels of south London, chatting calmly with his “fellow Britons” about his geopolitical grievances and apologizing to the ladies present for any discomfort his beheading of Drummer Rigby might have caused them, all while drenched in blood and still wielding his cleaver.

If you’re thinking of getting steamed over all that, don’t. Simon Jenkins, the former editor of the Times of London, cautioned against “mass hysteria” over “mundane acts of violence.”

That’s easy for him to say. Woolwich is an unfashionable part of town, and Sir Simon is unlikely to find himself there of an afternoon stroll. Drummer Rigby had less choice in the matter. Being jumped by barbarians with machetes is certainly “mundane” in Somalia and Sudan, but it’s the sort of thing that would once have been considered somewhat unusual on a sunny afternoon in south London — at least as unusual as, say, blowing up eight-year-old boys at the Boston Marathon. It was “mundane” only in the sense that, as at weddings and kindergarten concerts, the reflexive reaction of everybody present was to get out their cell phones and start filming.

Once, long ago, I was in an altercation where someone pulled a switchblade, and ever since have been mindful of Jimmy Hoffa’s observation that he’d rather jump a gun than a knife. Nevertheless, there is a disturbing passivity to this scene: a street full of able-bodied citizens being lectured to by blood-soaked murderers who have no fear that anyone will be minded to interrupt their diatribes. In fairness to the people of Boston, they were ordered to “shelter in place” by the governor of Massachusetts. In Woolwich, a large crowd of Londoners apparently volunteered to “shelter in place,” instinctively. Consider how that will play when these guys’ jihadist snuff video is being hawked around the bazaars of the Muslim world. Behold the infidels, content to be bystanders in their own fate.

Swedish Multiculturalism Goes Awry

Muslim immigration to Sweden has been fostered by open-door asylum policies that are among the most generous in the world

By Soeren Kern

Hundreds of Muslim immigrants have rampaged through parts of the Swedish capital of Stockholm, torching cars and buses, setting fires, and hurling rocks at police.

The unrest -- a predictable consequence of Sweden's failed model of multiculturalism, which does not encourage Muslim immigrants to assimilate or integrate into Swedish society -- is an ominous sign of things to come.

The trouble began after police fatally shot an elderly man brandishing a machete in a Muslim-majority neighborhood. Although the exact circumstances of the May 13 incident remain unclear, police say they shot the 69-year-old man (his nationality has not been disclosed) in self-defense after he allegedly threatened them with the weapon.

Two days later, on May 15, a Muslim youth organization called Megafonen arranged a protest against alleged police brutality and demanded an independent investigation and a public apology.

On May 19, Muslim youths initiated a riot in Husby, a heavily Muslim suburb in the western part of Stockholm where more than 80% of the residents originate from Africa and the Middle East.

At least 100 masked Muslim youths set fire to cars and buildings, smashed windows, vandalized property and hurled rocks and bottles at police and rescue services in Husby. The riots quickly spread to at least 15 other parts of Stockholm, including the districts of Fittja, Hagsätra, Kista, Jakobsberg, Norsborg, Skaerholmen, Skogås and Vaarberg.

After two nights of spiraling violence, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt appealed for calm, condemning the riots as hooliganism. But his plea ("Everyone must pitch in to restore calm -- parents, adults") failed to prevent more nights of unrest, during which Muslim youth set fire to two schools, a police station, a restaurant, and a cultural center, and burned more than 50 cars and buses.

The unrest -- which has many parallels to the Muslim riots that occurred in France in 2005 -- has shocked Swedes who have long turned a blind eye to immigration policies that have encouraged the establishment of a parallel Muslim society in Sweden.

Although there are no official statistics of Muslims in Sweden, the US State Department reported in 2011 that there are now between 450,000 and 500,000 Muslims in the country, or about 5% of the total population of 9.5 million.

Woolwich attack: why was suspect Michael Adebolajo free to kill?

One of the two Islamist terrorists who had been known to the security services and police for a decade

By Tom Whitehead, David Barrett and Steven Swinford

Michael Adebolajo, 28, was the man videoed by witnesses with his hands red with blood following the killing of the soldier, who was named as Drummer Lee Rigby, 25, the father of a two-year-old son.

The second suspect was last night identified by The Times as Michael Adebowale, 22, from Greenwich. His flat was reported to have been raided by police.

David Cameron said there would be a full investigation by the Security and Intelligence Committee after it emerged that both of the attackers were known to the police and MI5, but neither was assessed as a major security risk.

The Telegraph has learnt that six years ago Adebolajo was arrested after being involved in violent protests by extremists outside the Old Bailey. He was a regular member of a small group of hardcore fanatics who regularly protested alongside some of Britain’s most notorious hate clerics. He was seen preaching anti-Western rhetoric in Woolwich as recently as last week. At one stage he is believed to have tried to travel to Somalia to join the terrorist network Al-Shabaab, but was forced to return to Britain.

Anjem Choudary, the former leader of banned radical group al-Muhajiroun, said Adebolajo regularly attended meetings and demonstrations held by his group and successor organisations.

Omar Bakri Mohammed, a hate preacher banned from Britain, claimed he had converted Adebolajo himself.

The disclosure of his close association with some of Britain’s most notorious Islamic extremists is likely to raise further questions about why he was not deemed a serious threat by the security services.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission will carry out an investigation into Scotland Yard’s actions.

Reading Hayek in Beijing

A chronicler of Mao's depredations finds much to worry about in modern China

By BRET STEPHENS

In the spring of 1959, Yang Jisheng, then an 18-year-old scholarship student at a boarding school in China's Hubei Province, got an unexpected visit from a childhood friend. "Your father is starving to death!" the friend told him. "Hurry back, and take some rice if you can."

Granted leave from his school, Mr. Yang rushed to his family farm. "The elm tree in front of our house had been reduced to a barkless trunk," he recalled, "and even its roots had been dug up." Entering his home, he found his father "half-reclined on his bed, his eyes sunken and lifeless, his face gaunt, the skin creased and flaccid . . . I was shocked with the realization that the term skin and bones referred to something so horrible and cruel."

Mr. Yang's father would die within three days. Yet it would take years before Mr. Yang learned that what happened to his father was not an isolated incident. He was one of the 36 million Chinese who succumbed to famine between 1958 and 1962.

It would take years more for him to realize that the source of all the suffering was not nature: There were no major droughts or floods in China in the famine years. Rather, the cause was man, and one man in particular: Mao Zedong, the Great Helmsman, whose visage still stares down on Beijing's Tiananmen Square from atop the gates of the Forbidden City.

Mr. Yang went on to make his career, first as a journalist and senior editor with the Xinhua News Agency, then as a historian whose unflinching scholarship has brought him into increasing conflict with the Communist Party—of which he nonetheless remains a member. Now 72 and a resident of Beijing, he's in New York this month to receive the Manhattan Institute's Hayek Prize for "Tombstone," his painstakingly researched, definitive history of the famine. On a visit to the Journal's headquarters, his affinity for the prize's namesake becomes clear.

"This book had a huge impact on me," he says, holding up his dog-eared Chinese translation of Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom." Hayek's book, he explains, was originally translated into Chinese in 1962 as "an 'internal reference' for top leaders," meaning it was forbidden fruit to everyone else. Only in 1997 was a redacted translation made publicly available, complete with an editor's preface denouncing Hayek as "not in line with the facts," and "conceptually mixed up."

The London Terror Attack Was More Than 'Unforgivable'

Britain has been in denial about the Islamist threat. Time to face it down

By DOUGLAS MURRAY

How many ignored warnings does it take? That is one question that should hang over Britain after the horror of the daytime murder of a British soldier on the streets of south London. On Wednesday afternoon, Drummer Lee Rigby was killed in Woolwich by two men wielding large knives and shouting "Allahu akbar"—God is great.

Islamists have been saying for years they would do this. They have planned to do it. And now they have done it.

The attack itself is not surprising. What is surprising is that British society remains so utterly unwilling not just to deal with this threat, but even to admit its existence. Politicians have called the Woolwich killing "unforgivable" and "barbarous." But expressions of anger should not really be enough.

Attempts to attack military targets in Britain go back to before the millennium and even before, it is important to note, the war on terror. In 1998 Amer Mirza, a member of the now-banned extremist group al Muhajiroun, attempted to petrol-bomb British army barracks. In 2007, a cell of Muslim men was found guilty of plotting to kidnap and behead a British soldier in Birmingham. The plan had been to take the soldier to a lock-up garage and cut off his head "like a pig." They wanted to film this act on camera and send it around the world to cause maximum terror.

In 2009, al Muhajiroun protested at a homecoming parade in Luton for British troops returning from Afghanistan. Carrying banners saying "go to hell," "butchers" and "terrorists," the group was protected by British police officers from an increasingly irate crowd of locals. The resulting outrage toward the police gave rise to the deeply troubling English Defence League, a street protest movement that often turns violent.

Present Shock And The Loss Of History And Context

How do we shield ourselves from distraction, or gravitate to what really matters?

by Charles Hugh-Smith

One of the few observers who is able to articulate a coherent critical account of American culture is Douglas Rushkoff. 

His new must-read book is Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now 

I have long found inspiration and insight in Rushkoff's work, especially his keen understanding of the pathologies of consumerism. In my 2009 book Survival+, I wrote:

Rushkoff's reply to an interview question on the consequences of ubiquitous marketing reveals how media/marketing has created an unquestioned politics of experience in which one's identity and sense of self is constructed almost entirely by what one buys:

Children are being adultified because our economy is depending on them to make purchasing decisions. So they're essentially the victims of a marketing and capitalist machine gone awry. You know, we need to expand, expand, expand. There is no such thing as enough in our current economic model and kids are bearing the brunt of that.... So they're isolated, they're alone, they're desperate. It's a sad and lonely feeling....The net effect of all of this marketing, all of this disorienting marketing, all of the shock media, all of this programming designed to untether us from a sense of self, is a loss of autonomy. You know, we no longer are the active source of our own experience or our own choices. Instead, we succumb to the notion that life is a series of product purchases that have been laid out and whose qualities and parameters have been pre-established."

In my view, this is a brilliant analysis of the rot at the heart of the American project.

In his new book, Rushkoff examines the telescoping of time and context wrought by ubiquitous digital technologies. We're always accessible, always connected and every channel is always on; this overload affects not just our ability to process information but our culture and the way media and marketing are designed and delivered.

The title consciously plays off the influential 1970 book by Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, which posited that our innate ability to process change was limited even as the rate of change in our post-industrial world increased. That rate of change would soon overwhelm our capacity to process new inputs and adapt to them.

In Rushkoff's view, we've reached that future: the speed of change and the demands of the present are disorienting us in profound ways.

We all know what stress feels like: it often causes our view to narrow to the present stressor, and we lose perspective and the ability to "make sense" of anything beyond managing the immediate situation.

Rushkoff identifies five symptoms of present shock:

1. Narrative collapse - the loss of linear stories and their replacement with both crass reality programming and post-narrative shows like The Simpsons.

Community or Leviathan?

The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent

By PATRICK J. DENEEN

In his most recent diagnosis of the state of America’s political soul, the journalist and political thinker E.J. Dionne begins with a simple thesis. In the opening pages of Our Divided Political Heart, he asserts that “American history is defined by an irrepressible and ongoing tension between two core values: our love of individualism and our reverence for community.” The inevitable “creative tension” between these two commitments, he argues, is the source of ongoing American debate as well as American strength. We need to hold firmly to both values, as difficult as that can be in practice.

But while Dionne states that these two commitments do not simply “face off against each other”—that there is no party of “individualism” aligned against a party of “community,” but rather commitments to each ideal are to be found “in the consciousness and consciences of nearly all Americans”—in fact, throughout his book Dionne ends up making an argument distinct from his opening thesis. He insists that there is, in fact, one party of individualism today. That party— alternatively “conservatives,” “Republicans,” and the “Tea Party”; they are all named as purveyors of this view—has developed the notion that American prosperity and power derive almost exclusively from the efforts of individuals, and that government is everywhere and always a baleful influence. According to Dionne, Democrats/liberals/progressives, by contrast, maintain the traditionally salutary view that America is a combination of both individualism and community. He purports to offer his book as a corrective to the imbalance currently found in the political views of American conservatives,  even as he also triumphantly lauds the current balance between individualism and community to be found in the Democratic Party and embodied in the presidency and person of Barack Obama.

Dionne certainly has a point concerning a main current of American conservatism today, and he rightly notes that there is a strong intellectual tradition within conservatism that supplies correctives to the libertarian, Randian leanings found among some on the contemporary right. Among those correctives he identifies the work of such thinkers as Robert Nisbet, Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, and the early George Will. However, Dionne is so exercised about the rise of the Tea Party in Republican politics that he somehow misses that “individualism” is hardly a pathology to be found exclusively among denizens of the American right; arguably, it pervades the very essence of the contemporary American left. He makes a fundamental category mistake by supposing that the left’s “balanced” position, and especially its support for “community,” can be discerned in the left’s support for the role of the national government.

‘Austerity’ Loses

Jobless rates haven't borne out the Krugman's fears, but he still knows he's right

By ROBERT P. MURPHY

Even the casual reader of Nobel laureate and New York Times blogger Paul Krugman knows that he has been screaming bloody murder about the foolishness of “austerity”—his term for even modest cuts in the growth of government spending, plus tax increases, to rein in budget deficits. The casual reader will also know that Krugman has been patting himself on the back many, many times (here’s one example from April 2013) since the crisis struck, saying that his Keynesian models have performed very well, while events in Europe and the US have clearly exploded the worldviews of his pro-austerity opponents. In this article, I want to explain exactly how Krugman keeps score on such matters, and why he always (apparently) comes out on top in the prediction game. To give you a hint, the game is heavily tilted in his favor.

In June 2010, for example, Krugman warned that “[m]any economists, myself included, regard this turn to austerity as a huge mistake. It raises memories of 1937, when F.D.R.’s premature attempt to balance the budget helped plunge a recovering economy back into severe recession.” However, Krugman was smart enough to cover himself, after raising the 1937 analogy, by ending with: “How bad will it be? Will it really be 1937 all over again? I don’t know. What I do know is that economic policy around the world has taken a major wrong turn, and that the odds of a prolonged slump are rising by the day.” So this is one part of his excellent defense: In terms of this column, the only way to falsify Krugman’s “prediction” is if all the European and US economies suddenly had robust recoveries in 2011. Who the heck was predicting that? Certainly none of the free-market economists going nuts over the awful policies in these regions.

Now when several countries across the Atlantic slid back into recession, Krugman was quick to say he told us so. In particular, he ridiculed British Prime Minister David Cameron who had argued that UK “austerity”—which is a ridiculous term, in my opinion, since Veronique de Rugy documents how hardly “savage” this austerity was—would reassure investors in the integrity of British debt and the pound. Krugman argued that the UK’s double dip speaks for itself, and mocked Cameron and former ECB head Jean-Claude Trichet for their belief in “the confidence fairy,” just to make sure we all realize just how silly the whole idea was.

The Bystander President

What we have here is a government out of control and a president clueless about what is going on in that government

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

No, this is not Watergate or Iran-Contra. Nor is it like the sex scandal that got Bill Clinton impeached.

The AP, IRS and Benghazi matters represent a scandal not of presidential wrongdoing, but of presidential indolence, indifference and incompetence in discharging the duties of chief executive.

The Barack Obama revealed to us in recent days is something rare in our history: a spectator president, clueless about what is going on in his own household, who reacts to revelations like some stunned bystander.

Consider. Because of a grave national security leak, President Obama’s Department of Justice seized two months of records from 20 telephones used by The Associated Press. An unprecedented seizure.

Yet the president was left completely in the dark. And though he rushed to defend the seizure, he claims he was uninvolved.

While the AP issue does not appear to have legs—we know what was done and why—it has badly damaged this president. For his own Justice Department treated the press, which has an exalted opinion of itself and its role, with the same contempt as the IRS treated the Tea Party.

The episode has damaged a crucial presidential asset. For this Washington press corps had provided this president with a protective coverage of his follies and failings unseen since the White House press of half a century ago covered up the prowlings of JFK.

The Benghazi issue is of far greater gravity. Still, Obama’s sins here as well seem to be those of omission, not commission.

Woolwich: a knife crime, not an act of war

In overreacting to the frenzied stabbing in Woolwich yesterday, politicians and the police risk doing the killers’ dirty work for them

by Brendan O’Neill 

What happened in Woolwich was horrific. However, there’s a real danger of overreacting. What we witnessed was a street murder, a frenzied knife attack carried out by two pathetic individuals claiming, in what sounded like South London accents, to be acting on behalf of aggrieved Muslims everywhere. It wasn’t a million miles away from those occasional senseless knife attacks by clinically insane people who claim to be Napoleon or Jesus Christ. Yet it’s being treated by politicians, the police and the media as an act of war, a terrifying challenge to Western civilisation. This elevation of an opportunistic murder to the level an all-out assault on our way of life graphically demonstrates how society itself can unwittingly do terrorists’ dirty work for them, by aggrandising their actions and amplifying their impact on politics and everyday life.

As hard as it may be, given the disgusting footage that exists, we must put yesterday’s events into perspective. Compared with the 7/7 bombings, which were also carried out by isolated, ridiculous individuals, the Woolwich stabbing was not a big or devastating act of terror, far less an act of war. It was a knife crime, and it should be treated as a knife crime. Also, far from representing an exotic foreign threat to our way of life, as claimed both by those who see the stabbers as representative of ‘Isalmofascism’ and those who think they express desperate Muslim anger with Britain’s foreign wars, in truth the men expressed some distinctly British trends. Their cries of ‘Film us!’ and ‘Take photos of us!’ spoke to today’s craven reality-entertainment culture, to a desire for instant fame, or perhaps instant infamy. And their claim to speak for all Muslims, for the people in ‘our lands’, surely springs from the politics of identity, from the backward belief that if you share cultural traits with certain people then you have the authority to speak for those people and their grievances. Grisly performers and self-righteous ‘community spokespeople’ – they seem to have been influenced by British rather than foreign phenomena.

Today’s Guardian front page

Yet rather than treating this as a knife crime committed by two deluded men, the authorities and media have treated it as a declaration of war. The powers-that-be have gone on to an actual war footing in response to it. PM David Cameron flew back from a political gathering in Paris, and is currently chairing a meeting of COBRA. It’s the second time COBRA - the government’s national emergency committee that convenes in the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms - has met since the stabbing occurred. Politicians say we will ‘stand firm’ in response to what happened, as if Britain had just been invaded by a foreign army rather than having witnessed a horrible knife attack. Meanwhile, the media have transformed the two stabbers into massive threats to Britons. ‘You people will never be safe’, screams the front page of the Guardian, quoting one of the bloodied knifemen, next to a massive blown-up picture of him. This transformation of two losers into mortal threats to Britain and its values somewhat overlooks that both are currently badly injured, and will never walk the streets again.

Bozza, bonking and the public interest

Why should three men in wigs get to decide whether or not us plebs can read about Boris's sexual shenanigans?

by Tim Black 

Yesterday, three appeal court judges decided that it was okay for us, ‘the public’, to know that London mayor Boris Johnson, the blustering blonde many swivel-eyed loons tip as a potential prime minister, is also a randy, prophylactic-averse shagger. 

We know this because Helen Mcintyre, a one-time fling of Johnson’s in the late 2000s, had been trying to persuade the Court of Appeal that details of her affair with Bozza, and the resulting ‘love child’, should be the subject of a press injunction (despite the fact that the details are already out there in print and digital). Still, her case centred on the claim that her daughter’s paternity was ‘exceptionally sensitive and delicate’ and the child would therefore be devastated to learn who her father was in the national press. (It is likely, of course, that the child would simply be devastated to learn who her father was.)

Mcintyre’s chief antagonists, the Daily Mail, which first ran with the story in July 2010, and its publishers, Associated Newspapers, understandably disagreed with Mcintyre. They claimed that the child-bearing infidelities of a figure occupying an important elected role are matters of public interest. And, as it turned out, the appeal court judges concurred: ‘The core information in this story, namely that the father had an adulterous affair with the mother, deceiving both his wife and the mother’s partner and that the claimant, born about nine months later, was likely to be the father’s child, was a public interest matter which the electorate was entitled to know when considering his fitness for high public office.’

Tyranny Around the Corner

Land of the Formerly Free

by Andrew P. Napolitano

A few weeks ago, President Obama advised graduates at Ohio State University that they need not listen to voices warning about tyranny around the corner, because we have self-government in America. He argued that self-government is in and of itself an adequate safeguard against tyranny, because voters can be counted upon to elect democrats (lowercase "d") not tyrants. His argument defies logic and 20th-century history. It reveals an ignorance of the tyranny of the majority, which believes it can write any law, regulate any behavior, alter any procedure and tax any event so long as it can get away with it.

History has shown that the majority will not permit any higher law or logic or value – like fidelity to the natural law, a belief in the primacy of the individual or an acceptance of the supremacy of the Constitution – that prevents it from doing as it wishes.

Under Obama's watch, the majority has, by active vote or refusal to interfere, killed hundreds of innocents – including three Americans – by drone, permitted federal agents to write their own search warrants, bombed Libya into tribal lawlessness without a declaration of war so that a mob there killed our ambassador with impunity, attempted to force the Roman Catholic Church to purchase insurance policies that cover artificial birth control, euthanasia and abortion, ordered your doctor to ask you whether you own guns, used the IRS to intimidate outspoken conservatives, seized the telephone records of newspaper reporters without lawful authority and in violation of court rules, and obtained a search warrant against one of my Fox colleagues by misrepresenting his true status to a federal judge.

James Rosen, my colleague and friend, is a professional journalist. He covers the State Department for Fox News. In order to do his job, he has cultivated sources in the State Department – folks willing to speak from time to time off the record.

One of Rosen's sources apparently was a former employee of a federal contractor who was on detail to the State Department, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim. Kim is an expert in arms control and national defense whose lawyers have stated that his job was to explain byzantine government behavior so we all can understand it. When he was indicted for communicating top secret and sensitive information, presumably to Rosen, his lawyers replied by stating that the information he discussed was already in the public domain, and thus it wasn't secret.

Why is Italy in political stalemate?

Italy is still looking for its De Gaulle

BY FRANCESCO GIUMELLI AND DAVIDE MANESCHI

International observers are looking at the Italian political situation with the same sense of wonder one might have when looking at a Picasso.

On the face of it, it does not make sense: how could political parties refuse to co-operate when Italy is at risk of economic disaster?

The February elections have produced a stalemate: an almost equal split between the centre-left, led by the Democratic Party (PD), the centre-right, led by the People of Freedom (PdL) party and the 5Star Movement (M5S) of Beppe Grillo.

In normal times, the political parties would co-operate to bring the country out of the quagmire, but these are not normal times for Italy.

PD won the majority of the seats in the lower house, but it does not control the senate and further support is needed.

The PD says that it does not intend to ally with the PdL because its leader, Silvio Berlusconi has a bad reputation, even though both parties have jointly supported the technocratic government of Mario Monti for the past 18 months.

At the same time, M5S does not want to enter into a coalition with the PD and such an alliance was never proposed during the recent electoral campaigns.

Why is it so difficult to form a government?

Understanding a Picasso painting requires patience and imagination, to look past one's first impression and to see the meaning behind it.

The three parties are the product of a special historical moment.

Europe's Quantitative Easing

The singular hope here is for growth and when none commences very bad things could happen

by Mark J. Grant

Most people do not think that Europe engages in Quantitative Easing. They know that the United States engages in it, that Britain engages in it and now that Japan engages in it but they think that Europe has so far refused to be involved. They think this because this is what they have been told. Unfortunately this is inaccurate.

The European Quantitative Easing takes place every day just not in the manner utilized by America and others. However, it takes place all the same and it is done in a manner to circumvent the rules of the European Union. This is also why the ECB has such a massive balance sheet.

What Europe has done is gotten around their own regulations which forbid the ECB from lending money directly to nations. This is supposed to be handled by the ESM and approved by the various parliaments. Since this is either politically impossible in some countries or politically a nightmare in others the ECB has concocted a scheme to bypass the political rules with all of Europe’s politicians blinking and nodding in silent agreement.

In Spain, as one example, the ECB lent the banks $172 billion. This was done by the country of Spain guaranteeing the debt of the banks and various bank securitizations and then the bank debt and the bank securitizations were pledged to the ECB who handed them back the cash. The money, in large part, has been used to buy the debt of Spain which, in fact, hands the sovereign back the cash. A good trick, an interesting ruse which is the major reason, perhaps the only reason, why the yield of Spain’s debt has declined.

In Greece, as another example, the same game has gone on. Not only does the EU not count contingent liabilities as part of a country’s debt to GDP ratio, where Greece has guaranteed the debt of their banks, but no inclusion is made of the money handed to the sovereign as a result of assets pledged at the ECB and funneled back to the sovereign nation. One more good trick!

“Terminal State of Broken”

Terminally, as hopelessly, as in unfixable

By Monty Pelerin

As markets continue to confound, it is useful to reflect on this quote from Jim Sinclair, particularly the last sentence:

The world has taken on a “virtual reality” with no reference to what really is. This is the biggest market power play of smoke and mirrors in history. It is happening because the financial system is in a terminal state of broken.

I could not agree more. This same view has been expressed since the inception of this website (over three and a half years ago). Mr. Sinclair’s wonderfully clever and colorful phrase,”terminal state of broken,” captures matters well. He used it with respect to financial markets, but it applies to much more.

The terminal state of broken also applies to government and the institutions contained therein. Furthermore, these areas have infected non-governmental institutions, especially those which derive their existence and/or success from a close association with government. These include the educational system, defense industry, highly regulated industries like medicine and finance and a host of others.

The common denominator in all of this is government. It is the modern day equivalent of typhoid Mary, infecting all that it comes in contact with duplicity, dishonesty and corruption. This “brokeness” now infects the very morality and civility of society. Institutional behavior provides the moral guidelines (or lack thereof) for society. Corruption, deceit and theft are not virtues, yet if they are practiced openly they cease to become vices.

Immorality in higher institutions weakens the social and moral fabric of a society. Incivility and coarseness is the least of the problems. Justice Brandeis commented on the “trickle down” effect of institutional behavior, focusing on that of government itself:

In a government of laws, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipotent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. If government becomes a lawbreaker it breeds contempt for law: it invites every man to become a law unto himself. It invites anarchy.

Brandeis’ warning was early enough to head off our current condition, but it went unheeded. Instead, our “omnipotent teacher” chose to ignore ethics and morality as they stood in the way of the desire for power and wealth.

Government increasingly took on the Nockian (Albert J. Nock) description:

Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class.

From boxing to jihad.

Jihad Abhors a Vacuum

By mark steyn

Post-9/11, we in the omniscient pundit class were all Afghan experts. Post-Boston, we are all Chechen experts.
Strictly between us, I can count what I know about Chechens on one leg. A couple of years ago, while I was in Copenhagen picking up an award from the Danish Free Press Society, a one-legged Chechen prematurely self-detonated in the Hotel Jørgensen while assembling a bomb. His device, using the same highly volatile TATP as in the London Tube bombings, was intended for my friends at Jyllands-Posten, publishers of the famous Mohammed cartoons, to whom I chanced to be giving an interview. All things considered, I'm glad the poor fellow pre-activated in his hotel room rather than delivering his package in the midst of my photo shoot. His name was Lors Doukaiev, and he had traveled from his home in Liège, Belgium, in order to protest the Mohammed cartoons by exploding a bomb on September 11. Got that? A citizen of Belgium is blowing up a newspaper in Denmark on the anniversary of a terrorist attack on America.

So whatever was bugging him didn't have a lot to do with Chechnya. In Boston, before he was run over by his brother and found himself committing the jihadist faux pas of greeting his 72 virgins with tire tracks from head to toe, young Tamerlan Tsarnaev had apparently put on his Amazon wish-list the book The Lone Wolf and the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russian Rule. Yet while the Chechen-nationalist struggle has certainly become more Islamic in the last two decades, it's a bit of a mystery what it has to do with Jutland newspapers and Massachusetts marathons. Lors Doukaiev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were young men in their mid twenties who had lived in the West for much of their lives. Both were boxers. Aside from the fact that Lors was one-legged and Tamerlan wasn't, the quotes their friends and neighbors offered in the wake of their sudden notoriety are more or less interchangeable: "He was perfectly integrated. He was jovial and very open." That was Fabian Detaille, young Doukaiev's trainer at the Cocktail Boxing Club in Droixhe, speaking to Belgian radio, but it could just as easily have been one of Tamerlan's boxing buddies on NPR in Boston.

The Washington Post covered much of the Tsarnaev narrative under the headline "A Faded Portrait of an Immigrant's American Dream." The story is about what you'd expect from the headline but the "faded portrait" is fascinating — a photograph of the family before they came to America: young Mr. and Mrs. Tsarnaev with baby Tamerlan, and Uncle Muhamad with a Tom Selleck moustache and Soviet military uniform. If you only know Ma Tsarnaeva from her post-Boston press conferences as a head-scarfed harpie glorying in her sons' martyrdom and boasting that she'll be shrieking "Allahu akbar!" when the Great Satan takes her out too, the "faded portrait" is well worth your time: Back then, just before the U.S.S.R. fell apart, the jihadist crone looked like a mildly pastier version of an Eighties rock chick — a passable Dagestan doppelgänger for Joan Jett, with spiky black hair and kohl-ringed eyes. She loves rock 'n' roll, so put another ruble in the jukebox, baby!

The Lessons of the Berlin Wall

Berlin Wall story shows people are key to democracy

by Nina Khrushcheva

History's milestones are rarely so neatly arrayed as they are this summer. Fifty years ago this month, the Berlin Wall was born. After some hesitation, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union's leader, allowed his East German counterpart, Walter Ulbricht, to erect a barrier between East and West Berlin in order to ensure the survival of communism in the entire Soviet bloc.

By that point, East Germany had lost three million people - including many of its most talented - as hundreds each day peacefully walked into the zones of Berlin that were controlled by the United States, Great Britain and France.

And 20 years ago this month, hardliners in the Soviet government attempted to overthrow president Mikhail Gorbachev, who, two years after US president Ronald Reagan called on him to "tear down this wall," had done just that.

Mr Gorbachev's hard-line Politburo adversaries were determined to preserve the decrepit system that the Wall symbolised.

But, in August 1991, ordinary Muscovites stood their ground. They defied the coup makers, and in the end carried with them much of the Russian Army. With their defiance, the coup was doomed.

Berliners never stood a similar chance in the face of Soviet power. Mr Khrushchev had assented to Mr Ulbricht's plea that only a physical barrier would maintain the viability of the East German state.

Mr Khrushchev's response was reminiscent of how he dealt with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, a time when he was consolidating his rule and needed to keep Kremlin hardliners at bay.