UN: Let Them Eat Bugs!

The UN continues to spread its tentacles throughout the globe

by  Alex Newman

As part of its drive for global so-called “sustainability,” the United Nations has a new suggestion for the people of the world: Eat bugs instead of burgers. The controversial recommendations come from a new report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization touting the supposed benefits of “edible insects” and the role they might play in future “food security” — assuming the bugs are farmed in a “sustainable” way, of course. The latest UN document also outlines propaganda campaigns to persuade Westerners and shows how expanding the international regulatory regime can help bugs-as-food proponents achieve their vision.

According to the controversial 200-page study, dubbed “Edible insects: Future prospects for food and feed security,” bugs are actually nutritious and environmentally friendly. The UN also claims it is “urgent” for people to start understanding that. “Insects as food and feed emerge as an especially relevant issue in the twenty-first century due to the rising cost of animal protein, food and feed insecurity, environmental pressures, population growth and increasing demand for protein among the middle classes,” the report claims, citing an array of real and imagined problems. 

As such, according to the UN study, “alternative solutions” to conventional livestock and feed sources “urgently need to be found.” The consumption of insects — formally known as “entomophagy” — “therefore contributes positively to the environment and to health and livelihoods,” the UN FAO said in its report. It claimed, among other things, that there are numerous “environmental benefits” to rearing insects for food — especially if the bugs are fed human and animal waste. Among the potential benefits: reduced “greenhouse gases” that the UN blames for non-existent global warming, and fewer resources needed to produce insect-based food.      

Plus, as the UN and legions of its functionaries point out in the document, press releases, and other efforts to promote the eating of insects, people in some cultures already eat bugs. “Insects are often consumed whole but can also be processed into granular or paste forms,” the report notes, adding that new ways of enjoying bugs are also in the pipeline. There are, however, numerous obstacles to convincing the world to consume creepy crawlers instead of beef and chicken.  

Merkel’s “renewable energy revolution” is killing the German economy

German Firms Flee to U.S. to Avoid Staggering “Green” Energy Costs

Written by  William F. Jasper

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “renewable energy revolution” is killing the German economy, but Obama and Greens keep pointing to Germany’s debacle as the model we should follow.

"HIGH ENERGY COSTS DRIVE GERMAN FIRMS TO US." That is the headline for an article that appeared May 22 in Duetsche Welle, or DW, Germany’s international broadcasting giant.

“Soaring German energy costs in the wake of the country’s transition to renewable energy have seen more and more firms thinking about relocating their operations,” the DW story reported. “The US looks like a sound alternative, associations claim.” 

The DW story continued:

German industry lobby associations on Wednesday sent a warning shot towards the government in Berlin, saying that rising energy costs in the country would drive away more and more German companies.

“If we don’t get on top of the country’s energy transition to renewables and are not able to rein in energy costs in the process, German industry’s competitiveness stands to suffer,” the chief of the Federation of German Industry (BDI), Ulrich Grillo, told the business newspaper “Handelsblatt.”

He said that while Germans are embroiled in a debate about the right energy mix, the US was getting more and more attractive as a business location for German firms, thanks not least to President Barack Obama’s support for the fracking technology resulting in much cheaper energy prices.

President Obama has pleasantly surprised many — and angered many of his allies in the Big Green lobby, i.e., the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, et al — by his recent common-sense actions to allow hydraulic fracturing on federal public lands and approval of a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) terminal in Freeport, Texas. However, based on the administration’s history of antipathy to all fossil fuels, its use of the EPA to quash energy production, and its commitment to vastly expanding our nation’s reliance on renewable energy, the recent natural gas concessions could prove to be a temporary political move. If that proves to be the case, the German companies that are moving to America to escape Merkel’s unsustainable “renewable revolution” could find themselves facing the same predicament down the road here.

When Suckers Finally Realize

The fleecing of the American public continues

The theft takes different forms, but it all serves one purpose — to transfer wealth from the average Joe to the crony corporatists and their political lackeys. Here are but a few examples of how this has been accomplished:

1.    Bailouts for the wealthy and well-connected are paid for by the unconnected middle class.

2.    Subsidies are provided for unworkable schemes submitted by political donors and favorites. These schemes inevitably fail and the tax-payer is left holding an empty bag.

3.    Laws are routinely ignored when “friends” need help. In identical circumstances, would you receive the same treatment as Jon Corzine?

4.    Despite the biggest theft in world history, no one was prosecuted. The Savings and Loan crisis in the 1980s was trivial in comparison to the recent financial crisis. More than a thousand S&L executives were prosecuted.

5.    Ever-increasing sacrifices in the form of higher taxes from the productive sector are demanded to continue the plush living of the ruling class.

Capitalism and free markets depend upon trust, integrity, property rights and the rule of law. Without these, there are no advantages to free markets. Nor are there any incentives to create wealth. Instead, an economy becomes little more than a massive plunder scheme where the powerful exploit the weak. No economic recovery is possible under such circumstances.

As people recognize what is happening, they alter their behavior. Three reactions are to be expected:

1. Some will become discouraged when they realize the game is stacked against them. They will diminish their efforts to succeed, even perhaps dropping out of the game altogether. Given the enhanced returns to not working, it should not be surprising that this alternative has become popular.

2. Others will adopt the same behavior as the ruling class. They will exploit those lower on the food chain than themselves.  Justice Brandeis warned of the implications of government misbehavior:

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.

The Fed would do well to look at Japan

The Fed's Hands Are Tied... Right as the Financial System Begins to Crack

By Graham Summers 

Japan’s Nikkei, after rallying over 70% since November, just collapsed 11% in less than two days. Looking at the chart, it’s pretty clear where this thing is heading: the same as the NASDAQ in 2000.

This is the problem with economic policy that focuses on pushing stocks higher: eventually the collapsing economy comes home to roost and stocks implode. We saw this in 2000 and 2008. We’re currently seeing it in Japan. And it’s only a matter of time before it his the US.

Indeed, Bernanke’s whole life work has been based on the belief that the Fed didn’t do enough during the Great Depression. So he’s opted to expand the Fed’s balance sheet to over $3 trillion and to monetize most of the US’s debt issuance via QE to battle the Financial Crisis.

Altogether, the Fed has monetized QE equal to 15% or so of the US’s GDP. Doing this has already put stocks back in a bubble and damaged the economy to no end. Marginal debt is back at record highs, housing has not bottomed, and Bernanke is still talking about a “recovery” FIVE years after the Crash. At this point based on the business cycle alone we should be in a roaring growth spurt.

QE doesn’t work. It never has. Look at Japan.

Japan has monetized an amount equal to well over 25% of its GDP via QE. And at that point its bond market began to crash. It’s not coincidence that the Fed is beginning to talk about tapering QE now that this is happening. Even a career academic can look at what’s going on in Japan and know that more QE won’t help the US.

So the Fed is essentially handcuffed at this point. Increasing QE in any way risks a Japan-bond market style rout.

Can you imagine what would happen if the financial system faces another Crisis? The Fed has already thrown everything including the kitchen sink at the system. If the system collapses now the Fed will be powerless to stop it.

America's Bubble Economy Is Going To Become An Economic Black Hole

This bubble of false hope will not last forever

by Michael Snyder

What is going to happen when the greatest economic bubble in the history of the world pops?  The mainstream media never talks about that.  They are much too busy covering the latest dogfights in Washington and what Justin Bieber has been up to.  And most Americans seem to think that if the Dow keeps setting new all-time highs that everything must be okay.  Sadly, that is not the case at all.

Right now, the U.S. economy is exhibiting all of the classic symptoms of a bubble economy.  You can see this when you step back and take a longer-term view of things.  Over the past decade, we have added more than 10 trillion dollars to the national debt.  But most Americans have shown very little concern as the balance on our national credit card has soared from 6 trillion dollars to nearly 17 trillion dollars.

Meanwhile, Wall Street has been transformed into the biggest casino on the planet, and much of the new money that the Federal Reserve has been recklessly printing up has gone into stocks.  But the Dow does not keep setting new records because the underlying economic fundamentals are good.  Rather, the reckless euphoria that we are seeing in the financial markets right now reminds me very much of 1929.  Margin debt is absolutely soaring, and every time that happens a crash rapidly follows.

But this time when a crash happens it could very well be unlike anything that we have ever seen before.  The top 25 U.S. banks have more than 212 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives combined, and when that house of cards comes crashing down there is no way that anyone will be able to prop it back up.  After all, U.S. GDP for an entire year is only a bit more than 15 trillion dollars.

But most Americans are only focused on the short-term because the mainstream media is only focused on the short-term.  Things are good this week and things were good last week, so there is nothing to worry about, right?

Unfortunately, economic reality is not going to change even if all of us try to ignore it.  Those that are willing to take an honest look at what is coming down the road are very troubled.  For example, Bill Gross of PIMCO says that his firm sees "bubbles everywhere"...

The glorification of plunder

Our System Is So Flawed That Fraud Is Mathematically Guaranteed

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

                                                 -  Frederic Bastiat

by Adam Taggart
Bill Black is a former bank regulator who played a central role in prosecuting the corruption responsible for the S&L crisis of the late 1980s. He is one of America's top experts on financial fraud. And he laments that the US has descended into a type of crony capitalism that makes continued fraud a virtual certainty - while increasingly neutering the safeguards intended to prevent and punish such abuse.

In this extensive interview, Bill explains why financial fraud is the most damaging type of fraud and also the hardest to prosecute. He also details how, through crony capitalism, it has become much more prevalent in our markets and political system. 

A warning: there's much revealed in this interview to make your blood boil. For example: the Office of Thrift Supervision. In the aftermath of the S&L crisis, this office brought 3,000 administration enforcements actions (a.k.a. lawsuits) against identified perpetrators. In a number of cases, they clawed back the funds and profits that the convicted parties had fraudulently obtained.

Flash forward to the 2008 credit crisis, in which just the related household sector losses alone were over 70x greater than those seen during the entire S&L debacle. So how many criminal referrals did the same agency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, make?

Zero.

Similar dismal action was taken by such other financial regulators as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal reserve and the FDIC. 

Where is the accountability?, you may be asking. Or perhaps, how did we allow things to get this bad?

Fraud is both a civil wrong and a crime and it's when I get you to trust me and then I betray your trust in order to steal from you. As a result, there’s no more effective acid against trust than fraud and, in particular, elite fraud, which causes people to no longer trust folks, economies break down, families break down, political systems break down and such if you don’t have that kind of trust. So that’s what fraud is.

The Rich Actually Are Different

Every year there are different wealthy people

With the long-weekend rapidly approaching, ConvergEx's Nick Colas takes a trip to the Hamptons, but through a time warp back to the Great Depression.  Examining the social registers (colloquially called the “Blue Book”) from 1927 and 1940, he finds that “The great and the good” of the day had real trouble holding their status during the social upheavals of the late 1920s and 1930s.  Only 32% of the families appearing in the Blue Book in 1927 were still there in 1940.  The ratio was even worse, at 29%, for the ultra-elite who belonged to the Meadow Club in Southampton.  It’s too early to tell what the last few volatile years will do to the upper crust of East Coast society, of course.  Or what may still be in store.  But when the hedgie in the Bentley cuts you off on Route 27 this weekend, take some solace in knowing he may not be there in a few years.

Via Nick Colas:

F.Scott Fitzgerald is known for the phrase “The rich are different from you and me.”  The full quote, from a 1925 short story, actually goes like this:

“Let me tell you about the very rich.  They are different from you and me.  They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft when we are hard, and cynical when we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.  They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.  Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.  They are different.”

Ernest Hemingway had a famous retort to “The rich are different” in his story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”: “Yes, they have more money.  But that was not humorous to Scott.  He thought they were a special and glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him as much as any other thing that wrecked him.”  Yes, these two great American writers were friends.  Sort of.

I think about this exchange regularly, given the extremely high levels of personal wealth generation the world has seen over the last 30 years.  Hedge fund billionaires in the US.  Russian oligarchs in Moscow.  Super wealthy Indian businessmen snapping up nine figure houses in London.  And China…  Even Chairman Mao’s granddaughter, Kong Dongmei, is reportedly worth over $500 million.  And the list goes on…

Europe’s Latest Anti-American Bogeyman

The Tea Party Movement 

By Soeren Kern 

European anti-Americanism is coming back into vogue. It reached a fever pitch during the presidency of George W Bush, but was held in temporary abeyance after Barack Obama pledged to recreate the United States in Europe’s image. Now that the American Tea Party movement is poised to dash elite hopes for a more Europeanized (i.e., sophisticated) America, a prolonged new wave of anti-Americanism seems inevitable.

In the run-up to the American midterm elections, European newspapers and magazines as well as radio and television programs have been chock full with sensational reporting, disparaging editorials, and derogatory commentary about America, American voters, and the American political system.

European news media have been especially obsessed with the Tea Party phenomenon, evidently worried that a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” might be replicated on European soil and thus upset the big government/high taxes status quo of European politics. (In fact, European Tea Party movements ^[1] have already emerged in several European countries, as have popular uprisings against multiculturalism ^[2] and runaway Muslim immigration ^[3].)

Rather than commend the Tea Party movement as a refreshing and enviable display of American political energy, European media elites have launched an all-out propaganda assault on the movement and its supporters. The main tactic has been to seek to discredit Tea Party sympathizers as poor, uneducated, unsophisticated, bigoted, and right-wing, i.e., the exact opposite of ideal European citizens and their elite masters.

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.