American Ineffectualism

America is in danger of being the first great power to be laughed off the world stage

by mark steyn
 For generations, eminent New York Times wordsmiths have swooned over foreign strongmen, from Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer-winning paeans to the Stalinist utopia to Thomas L. Friedman’s more recent effusions to the “enlightened” Chinese Politburo. So it was inevitable that the cash-strapped Times would eventually figure it might as well eliminate the middle man and hire the enlightened strongman direct. Hence Vladimir Putin’s impressive debut on the op-ed page this week.

It pains me to have to say that the versatile Vlad makes a much better columnist than I’d be a KGB torturer. His “plea for caution” was an exquisitely masterful parody of liberal bromides far better than most of the Times’ in-house writers can produce these days. He talked up the U.N. and international law, was alarmed by U.S. military intervention, and worried that America was no longer seen as “a model of democracy” but instead as erratic cowboys “cobbling coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us or against us.’” He warned against chest-thumping about “American exceptionalism,” pointing out that, just like America’s grade-school classrooms, in the international community everyone is exceptional in his own way.

All this the average Times reader would find entirely unexceptional. Indeed, it’s the sort of thing a young Senator Obama would have been writing himself a mere five years ago. Putin even appropriated the 2008 Obama’s core platitude: “We must work together to keep this hope alive.” In the biographical tag at the end, the Times editors informed us: “Vladimir V. Putin is the president of Russia.” But by this stage, one would not have been surprised to see: “Vladimir V. Putin is the author of the new memoir The Audacity of Vlad, which he will be launching at a campaign breakfast in Ames, Iowa, this weekend.” 

Paving the way for the Road to Damascus

We need warrior-kings once again, leaders who can reacquaint word with deed

By Norman Ball 

Like most battered tropes, "the tail wagging the dog" offers a durable, if dog-tired, metaphor for much that afflicts us. While rhetoricians are apt to groan over rote recourse to tired imagery, regular folks use cliches because they strike a cognitive chord. After all, mass appeal is what exhausts language in the first place. The bane of poets, cliche is a sign of democratic affections. Let's have more of it. 

This particular metaphor derives its power from the sense that, rather than addressing the thing-itself, we are forever grappling with epiphenomena, proximate reflections and spun realities. Everything is mediated. Nothing is authentically palpable. Manufactured consent is all about assembling a coalition of the deceived. 

True, we are being lied to with Goebbellian ambition to a point where deceit becomes, for many, an undetectable ethos. No sooner does one explain to a seemingly perceptive friend or colleague the diversionary intent of the current chemical weapons debate than they nod their heads in sage agreement, take due note of the submerged iceberg's immense size and resume stock sound-bites the very next day. Such is the power of the frame. 

There is also, I'm convinced, a social component. Just as people want to make good around the water cooler, no one wants to be the office's perennial, contrarian weirdo. The frame du jour is where polite small-talk gathers. Nothing ventured over doughnuts, nothing gained. 

Within the mainstream media, we are presented daily with messages - tails - that attempt to corral "bodies of facts on the ground". The messages are illicit rearguard actions designed to exert mastery over sleeping dogs. Since lies have a habit of demanding further lies, why undertake this great exertion of deceit? 

Lying somewhere between Straussian arrogance and neo-Platonic contempt, the elite are loath to address, in an open-air forum, the many hellhounds nipping at all of our heels. Are we wrong to dignify this aversion with philosophical pretentions as perhaps it has long since metastasized into pathology? Our leaders seem convinced that subterfuge abets their power. 

Mourning Chile’s coup, ignoring Egypt’s

Our Son of a Bitch is better than theirs

By Tim Black

The fortieth anniversary of the slaying of Allende has exposed some double standards among human-rights groups.

Forty years ago today, on 11 September 1973, the newly re-elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was holed up at La Moneda Palace in Santiago. As the AK-47 in his hand indicated, he knew what lay ahead. Senior military figures, with Major General Javier Palacios to the fore, were coming to kill him.

At about four o’clock that afternoon, the 64-year-old Allende was busy fighting back, by all accounts, shooting Palacios in the hand; but the officers were soon to overwhelm him. Once they had killed Allende, they riddled his body with bullets and beat his face in with a rifle butt.

The Chilean coup d’etat, backed by the Commie-fearing US, which clearly didn’t want a socialist nation near its doorstep, had been brewing for some time. Originally, a military takeover had been planned in 1969 in the event of Allende, the leader of the socialist Popular Unity party, being elected to power in 1970. That Allende did win the election that September, and the generals did not respond, was due, in the main, to the balance of social forces. Simply put, the Chilean middle classes and bourgeoisie, who might have been expected to support a coup, were benefiting at the expense of foreign capital. And this, as it happened, was a result of the newly elected government’s decision effectively to repatriate and nationalise lucrative industries, especially copper. In such circumstances, a coup would have proved deeply unpopular.

But by the next election, in September 1973, the terrain had shifted. A long-term US-led blockade – payback for Chile’s expropriation of foreign capital – and internal agitation from the Christian Democrats and the right-wing National Party, had led Chile near enough to the brink of a civil war. Allende’s victory in the presidential elections on 4 September 1973, something which he was almost surprised by, pulled the trigger. The generals executed their long-standing plot. And a democratically elected leader was deposed.

Forty years on, there has been no shortage of melancholy commentaries to mark this dreadful anniversary. And no wonder. The reign of General Augusto Pinochet, Allende’s successor, represented the bloody, brutal continuation and consolidation of the coup. This involved purging Chilean society of Allende supporters, a practice that has left many in Chile with no idea of what happened to friends and family. On the eve of the fortieth anniversary, Amnesty International released a statement to remind people of this: ‘Thousands of torture survivors and relatives of those disappeared during General Augusto Pinochet’s brutal regime are still being denied truth, justice and reparation.’

Is National Food Insurance The Next Big Idea?

Since government took over much of farming and housing, along with healthcare, surely food insurance will be the next big idea

By Hunter Lewis

John Goodman of Southern Methodist University, a leading voice for free market medicine, has asked us to imagine what our groceries stores would look like if they were run like the medical system. In this piece, we will take his observations and add some of our own.

• As you enter the store, note that there will be no prices posted.

• In addition, the price you pay will vary according to who you are and how you will pay.

• You’ll have to come in during office hours because the store will close on weekends and holidays.

• What you want probably won’t be on the shelf. You will be told to come back later.

• If you do find what you want, you will have to wait to pay, perhaps a long time, and you may not be able to charge it then, since getting the price right and your credit checked may take days or weeks.

• Don’t expect to be able to return anything, no matter how defective the product is.

• There won’t be any brands to guide you and labels and sizes won’t be consistent. If you want to compare, better bring your calculator, and anyway how can you compare without prices?

• Most the products will have to be government approved, which costs a lot of money. To pay for that, only patentable products will be offered. So don’t expect any natural food. Only synthetic food, new to nature, will be on the shelves.

• If any food is not government approved, the label will be severely restricted by law, so you won’t be able to tell it is food.

• Please don’t expect new selections you haven’t seen before. It is so expensive to create synthetic food and get it approved, that new products will be few and far between and sell at fantastic prices.

• If you don’t like the store’s product, you can hire a lawyer to sue. The prices charged will reflect all the resulting lawsuits.

• Don’t expect to make selections on your own. Each selection will have to be approved by some licensed professional. Most of these professionals will be paid by the government. Under government rules, they will receive much larger fees if they are employees of a large  government approved food organization, so fewer and fewer of them will work for themselves or, even indirectly, for you. It may seem odd that political progressivism, which began attacking big business, is now herding professionals into them, but get used to it.

• All of your purchases will be electronically recorded. Approximately 800,000 different parties will have access to these records. So if you are going to be embarrassed by a purchase, better not to make it in the first place. If this bothers you, don’t expect any sympathy from the media. The New York Times gets really upset about the government snooping on what books you buy or borrow from a library, but won’t care about what grocery or drugstore products you buy.

• You will of course be required by law to buy a food insurance policy. Only items approved by government will be covered, so government will decide what qualifies as food and thus what you will be allowed to eat.

The Pharisee in the Temple

Parting Ways with the American People

By Angelo M. Codevilla

Some three fourths of Americans oppose making war on Syria. Hence the Republican leadership class’ reflexive advocacy of entry into Syria’s civil war is cutting one of the few remaining ties that bind it to ordinary Americans.

Since September 2008, when President George W. Bush, Congressman John Boehner, Senators Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Lindsay Graham and the entire Republican Congressional leadership plus Karl Rove and his big donors backed by The Wall Street Journal editorial pages were key to foisting the $816 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program on a country that opposed it three to one, the Republican Establishment has united with the Democratic Party again and again to legislate the ruling class’ domestic priorities. Before President Obama elevated the Syrian civil war onto the national agenda, the same cast of characters was chiefly occupied with gathering votes to secure funding for Obamacare against a popular movement to de-fund it.

In short, by 2013 the Republican Establishment had proved itself so alien to the domestic concerns of that majority of Americans who dislike the direction in which the ruling class is pushing it, that the party was becoming irrelevant. Despite the Bush Administration’s disastrous commitment to Nation-Building however, the memory of Ronald Reagan’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s forceful, levelheaded patriotism still lingered about the party.

But by urging war on Syria more vehemently than Obama, the Republican Establishment may have finished off the Republican Party, as we know it. Surely it has discredited itself.

President Obama and his followers say: “strike!” even while acknowledging that no military or political plans exist by which such strikes would make things better rather than worse. Reflecting the public, few Democratic and Republican lawmakers support the war publicly. Obama, while claiming the right to act without Congressional approval, has asked Congress to take responsibility for whatever war he might choose to make—and for its results. In the likely event that Congress were to say No, Obama is poised to pin responsibility on Republicans lawmakers and on the people they represent for America’s decline among nations and for whatever ill consequences may follow from all he has already done with regard to Syria.

Black Swans Are A Myth

Government Intervention Is The Only Black Swan

By John Tamny

Back in 2011, prominent hedge fund manager Mark Spitznagel penned for the Wall Street Journal a highly regarded op-ed about excessive government intervention in our limping economy. Spitznagel likened the intervention to wrongheaded efforts throughout history among forest rangers to put out small forest fires.

Small fires are nature’s way of forests maintaining their positive evolution, and when firefighters attempt to blunt the minor impact of small ones, they ultimately foster much worse blazes later. Spitznagel expertly, and very correctly correlated firefighting with the hubristic efforts among policymakers to artificially blunt the effects of recession. In doing so he channeled Albert Jay Nock, among many others as will soon become apparent.

As Nock long ago wrote, “Any contravention of natural law, any tampering with the natural order of things, must have its consequences, and the only recourse for escaping them is such as entails worse consequences.” Translated, forests are nature as are markets, and if you mess with the natural direction of either, you get much worse down the line.

Many anti-interventionists are asking today what the coming economic forest fire will look like thanks to all the meddling in the markets by our political class, and it says here the fire is already burning brightly. To paraphrase two of Spitznagel’s favorite thinkers in Fredric Bastiat and Henry Hazlitt, the seen is an economy limping toward recovery, but the unseen and raging forest fire is what the economy would look like absent all the intervention. Specifically, how many Microsofts and Intels, how many cancer and heart disease cures, and how many transportation innovations have not reached us precisely because our federal minders won’t let the proverbial – and rather small – economic fires burn so that an economy comprised of individuals can avoid the big ones?

Thankfully for readers eager to understand why the markets and the economy are both a shadow of what they could be, Spitznagel has written an essential new book. Indeed, The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World might be one of the most important books of the year, or any year for that matter.

As evidenced by the book’s title, Spitznagel’s economics and investing are rooted in the Austrian School tradition of Carl Menger, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises whom he deems the greatest economist of them all, along with Bastiat and Hazlitt. Spitznagel rightly notes about Hazlitt that his Economics In One Lesson is the only book he’ll ever require his children to read, assuming they reveal no broader interest in the subject. To readers who e-mail this reviewer about books to buy, the response is always that a read of Hazlitt’s best known book will have them more informed about how economies work than 99.9% of economists. It’s that good, or perhaps economists are that bad. It would be a good debate.

What’s initially interesting about the endlessly fascinating The Dao of Capital is that Spitznagel ties the supreme logic underlying the Austrian School with Daoist thinkers 25 centuries before who, “in their concept of reversion saw everything emerging from – and as a result of – its opposite: hard from soft, advancing from retreating.” It’s rooted in the notion of ‘roundabout’ whereby the detour beats the direct route. Whether investing or engaging in direct commerce, Spitznagel notes that the normal, indeed human, route is one of taking the direct, perhaps easy, path to money, commercial success, or both.

Central banks and illusions of independence

The mystery of Swiss Central Bankers

by Reuven Brenner 

While much attention is now paid to personalities of incoming central bankers, far less attention is paid to debating central banks' mandates in light of the unusual fiscal and financial intermediary roles they have been fulfilling since 2008. 

The crisis revealed institutional voids that the central banks filled quickly. Such ventures by central banks have been tolerated in the past too: there is nothing new about quantitative easing (QE). The Fed practiced it during the 1940-51 under the Treasury's explicit command, though the technique had no name then. The Fed stopped the practice when it became officially independent again in 1951. 

1940 fiscal parallels and the Fed's independence
Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke acknowledges that he is replicating the monetary policies of the 1940-1951, though takes no note of the unusual circumstances then.  Here is a quote from a 2008 speech:

... Historical experience tends to support the proposition that a sufficiently determined Fed can peg or cap Treasury bond prices and yields at other than the shortest maturities. The most striking episode of bond-price pegging occurred during the years before the Federal Reserve-Treasury Accord of 1951. Prior to that agreement, which freed the Fed from its responsibility to fix yields on government debt, the Fed maintained a ceiling of 2-1/2 percent on long-term Treasury bonds for nearly a decade. Moreover, it simultaneously established a ceiling on the twelve-month Treasury certificate of between 7/8 percent to 1-1/4 percent and, during the first half of that period, a rate of 3/8 percent on the 90-day Treasury bill.
The Fed was able to achieve these low interest rates despite a level of outstanding government debt (relative to GDP) significantly greater than we have today, as well as inflation rates substantially more variable. At times, in order to enforce these low rates, the Fed had actually to purchase the bulk of outstanding 90-day bills.

He fails to mention that during the 1940s, the Fed was carrying out fiscal policy under explicit Treasury orders.   The low interest policy - inflation was in the double digits - helped pay for World War II and the accumulated debt. 

The Fed could do this then both because there was domestic political support for the war effort, and later, as support after the war was weakened, the global conditions stayed such that capital had few places to flow: the US was in the immediate post-war period the safest place. 

However, the world stabilized and capital started to flow to Western Europe too. At the same time, the US abolished the Office of Price Administration in 1947, and the official inflation rate this Office's policy kept artificially low until then hit double digits. Public debates then started about restoring the central bank's independence. This was done in 1951, president Harry Truman's pressure to continue with the "QE" policies to finance the Korean War too notwithstanding. 

There are similarities and differences between that decade and the situation today. 

The similarities are the monetary techniques used to achieve the low interest payments, allowing the Federal government to carry increased debts. There are similarities in the global situation too: during the 1940 decade as well as since 2007 when the present crisis started, grave problems notwithstanding, the US has been the safest place for capital to flow. Europe had big question marks hanging about its future then as now - though for different reasons. Russia, China, India and most of Latin America were not places where much capital could flow or be absorbed.

With much global savings flowing to the US, with domestic savings staying put, and with government policies elsewhere perceived unreliable, it was not surprising that the Fed could maintain low interest rates, the federal government can accumulate debts, and not default - then, as now. 

Al-Qaeda's air force still on stand-by

Lose face, will travel 

By Pepe Escobar
It was 12 years ago today. Historians will register that, according to the official narrative, 19 Arabs armed with box cutters and minimal flying skills pledged to a transnational Terror Inc turned jets into missiles to attack the US homeland, fooling the most elaborate defense system on Earth. 

Fast forward to 2013. Here's a 15-second version of the President of the United States (POTUS) address on Syria, one day before the 12th anniversary of 9/11:

Our ideals and principles, as well as our national security, are at stake. The United States is "the anchor of global security". Although the United States military "doesn't do pin pricks", we still carry the burden to punish regimes that would flout long-held conventions banning the use of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. 

That's why I have decided to pursue an unlimited, targeted military strike against Washington DC.

For countless global citizens, this alternative version predictably sounds as far-fetched as the official version of what happened 12 years ago. The fog of war obscures in mysterious ways. But the fact remains that the current, "reluctant" (farcical) Emperorcontinues to stake his - and his nation's - "credibility" on a "limited", "kinetic" operation to reinforce his self-defined red line against chemical weapons. 

Lose face, will travel 
In theory, the Russian plan of having Damascus surrender its chemical weapons arsenal works because of its inbuilt Chinese wisdom; nobody loses face - from Obama and the US Congress to the European Union, the UN and the even more farcical "Arab" League, which is essentially a Saudi Arabian colony. 

Although Obama is on a media blitzkrieg stealing the credit for it, Asia Times Online has confirmed that the plan was elaborated by Damascus, Tehran and Moscow last week - after a visit to Damascus by the head of the national security committee of the Iranian Majlis (parliament), Alaeddin Boroujerdi. US Secretary of State John Kerry's now famous "slip" provided the opening. 

Italy floated plans to leave euro in 2011

Private investors have pulled out of Club Med, dumping their claims onto the taxpayers of Germany and the northern creditor states

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

So, we now know: Silvio Berlusconi seriously floated plans to pull Italy out of the euro in October/November 2011, precipitating his immediate removal from office and decapitation by EMU policy gendarmes.

Ex-ECB insider Lorenzo Bini-Smaghi has quietly dropped a few bombshells in his new book Morire di Austerita (Dying of Austerity), worth a read if you know Italian.

Mr Bini-Smaghi – until recently on the ECB's six-man executive council, and for many years Italy's man in Frankfurt – states that Silvio Berlusconi was toppled as Italian premier in November 2011 as soon as he began to rattle the EMU cage in earnest.

Specifically, he discussed (threatened?) Italian withdrawal from the euro in private meetings with other EMU governments, presumably with Chancellor Angela Merkel and France's Nicolas Sarkozy, since he does not negotiate with underlings. ("L'ipotesi d'uscita dall euro era stata ventilata in colloqui privati con i governi degli altri paesi dell'euro").

We have long suspected this. Now it is confirmed.

Trying To Stay Sane In An Insane World - Part 2

The main tools of modern finance are mystification, obfuscation and hypnosis

by Jim Quinn

In Part 1 of this article I detailed the insane solutions proposed and executed since 2008 by our owners as they attempt to retain and further expand their ill-gotten wealth, acquired through fraud, deceit, swindles, and the brilliant manipulation and exploitation of the masses through Bernaysian propaganda techniques. Madness has engulfed the entire world, with a concentration of power in the hands of a few psychopathic financial elite wielding an inordinate and dangerous expanse of power over the lives of the common man. They are a modern day version of Al Capone, except their weapons of choice aren’t machine guns, but a printing press, peddling debt, creating derivatives of mass destruction, and peddling heaping doses of disinformation. The contemporary criminal class wears Hermes suits, Rolex watches and diamond studded pinky rings, drops $500 to dine at Masa in NYC, travels by chauffeured limo, lives in $10 million NYC penthouse suites, occupies luxurious corner offices in hundred story glass towers, and spends weekends hobnobbing with the other financial elite at their villas in the Hamptons. They have nothing but utter contempt for the lowly peasants who depend upon a weekly paycheck to make ends meet. Why work when you can steal $1 or $2 billion from farmers with no consequences?

The New Guru of the Central Planners

Another attempt to square the circle

by Pater Tenebrarum

The 'Most Influential Monetary Theorist' of Our Time

Talk is cheap – but not according to Michael Woodford, who is portrayed in this Bloomberg article. It appears that Mr. Woodford is the main author of the new central bank 'shamanism' we discussed in a previous article. In their constant quest to square the circle – this is to say to answer the unanswerable question: “how can we actually make the unworkable, namely central economic planning, work?”, central bankers and their advisors meet regularly to exchange ideas, e.g. at the annual Jackson Hole gathering.

They could of course exchange ideas until the end of the universe and central planning of the economy would still not work. There is no 'better plan' (this is not to say that there are no gradations of central bank policy possible). This is not something they are ever told or would even want to hear. Whenever their interventions blow up into our collective faces, their conclusion is that a 'better plan' needs to be cooked up in order to fix what the previous plan has wrought. It is only natural that they would think so. Admitting that the free market is superior to their schemes would be like foreswearing their life's work. Everything they have ever said or done would come into question. Moreover, admitting that the economy would function far more smoothly and efficiently without their interference would be an admission that their jobs are utterly superfluous.

Thus the constant attempt to square the circle. It is in fact grotesque, almost reminiscent of a Monty Python farce. There you have all these erudite, well-educated people in one spot, earnestly discussing which levers to pull next, and it is all for nothing. Worse, it is certain to cause even more damage!

The Bloomberg article on Mr. Woodford is very interesting, because it inadvertently illustrates some of the ways in which modern-day macro-economic theorizing has become utterly detached from reality. Leave it to Bloomberg's  editors though to once again provide us with an at first glance incomprehensible headline: “Woodford’s Theories Rooted in Japan Slump Embraced by Bernanke”. It takes a brief moment to realize that Bernanke isn't embracing the 'Japan slump', but Woodford's theories, which in turn are deemed to be rooted in the Japanese post bubble experience.

Trying To Stay Sane In An Insane World - Part 1

The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself

 

by Jim Quinn

“I mean—hell, I been surprised how sane you guys all are. As near as I can tell you’re not any crazier than the average asshole on the street.” – R.P. McMurphy – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“Years ago, it meant something to be crazy. Now everyone’s crazy.” – Charles Manson 

“In America, the criminally insane rule and the rest of us, or the vast majority of the rest of us, either do not care, do not know, or are distracted and properly brainwashed into acquiescence.”– Kurt Nimmo

I have to admit to being baffled by the aptitude of the Wall Street and K Street financial elite to keep their Ponzi scheme growing. I consider myself to be a rational, sane human being who understands math and bases his assessments upon facts and a sensible appraisal of the relevant information obtained from trustworthy sources. Of course, finding trustworthy sources is difficult when you live in a corrupt, crony-capitalist, fascist state, controlled by banking, corporate and military interests who retain absolute control over the mainstream media and governmental propaganda agencies. Those seeking truth must pursue it through the alternative media and seeking out unbiased critical thinkers who relentlessly abide by what the facts expose. This is no time for wishful thinking, delusions and fantasies. In the end, the facts are all that matter. As Heinlein noted decades ago, the future is uncertain so facts are essential in navigating a course that doesn’t lead you to ruin upon the shoals of ignorance.

“What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the un-guessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!” ? - Robert A. Heinlein

Facts are treasonous and dangerous in an empire of lies, fraud and propaganda. It is maddening to watch the country spiral downward, driven to ruin by a psychotic predator class, while the plebs choose to remain willfully ignorant of reality and distracted by their lust for cheap Chinese crap and addicted to the cult of techno-narcissism. We are a country running on heaping doses of cognitive dissonance and normalcy bias, an irrational belief in our national exceptionalism, an absurd trust in the same banking class that destroyed the finances of the country, and a delusionary belief that with just another trillion dollars of debt we’ll be back on the exponential growth track. The American empire has been built on a foundation of cheap easily accessible oil, cheap easily accessible credit, the most powerful military machine in human history, and the purposeful transformation of citizens into consumers through the use of relentless media propaganda and a persistent decades long dumbing down of the masses through the government education system.

This national insanity is not a new phenomenon. Friedrich Nietzsche observed the same spectacle in the 19^th century.

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

The “solutions” imposed by the supposed brightest financial Ivy League educated minds and corrupt bought off political class upon people of the United States since the Wall Street created 2008 worldwide financial collapse are insane and designed to only further enrich the crony capitalists and their banker brethren. The maniacs are ruling the asylum. John Lennon saw the writing on the wall forty five years ago.

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives…. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends … and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.” – John Lennon, Interview BBC-TV (June 22, 1968)

The world is most certainly ruled by a small group of extremely wealthy evil men who desire ever more treasure, supremacy and control, but the vast majority of Americans have stood idly by mesmerized by their iGadgets and believing buying shit they don’t need with money they don’t have is the path to happiness and prosperity, while their wealth, liberty and self-respect were stolen by the financial elite. Our idiot culture, that celebrates reality TV morons, low IQ millionaires playing children’s sports, ego-maniacal Hollywood hacks, self-promoting Wall Street financiers, and self-serving corrupt ideologue politicians, has been degenerating for decades.

“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.” - Carl Bernstein -1992

The examples of our national insanity are almost too vast to document, but any critical assessment of what we've done over the last one hundred years reveals the idiocy that has engulfed our collapsing empire.

As Entrepreneurs Keep Reminding Us, They Lied To Us In Econ. 101

A combination of passion and perseverance

By John Chisholm

Can theoretical, scientific study of complex systems inform the hardscrabble world of start-ups?

Yes.

To see how, meet the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). [1]  Founded 30 years ago in Santa Fe, NM by Nobel laureates in physics and economics, SFI is the worldwide epicenter of complexity science.  SFI first recognized that the environment, the human brain, the economy, and other complex systems have much in common:

·                     Order in them emerges not from top-down command and control but bottom-up from the interactions of large numbers of interconnected elements.  These elements may be individual species creating sustainable ecosystems; neurons creating thought patterns; or buyers and sellers creating business cycles and wage and price levels.

·                      Those interconnected elements also form feedback loops that can produce unpredictable and often extreme results (e.g., peacocks’ tails, fads, best-sellers, cancer).

·                     Diversity tends to grow with the number of combinations of elements, that is, exponentially with the number of elements (e.g., the Cambrian explosion and the Industrial Revolution).  Diversity tends to enhance robustness (e.g., genetically similar crops are more vulnerable to parasites; identical PC operating systems, to viruses).

·                     Unintended consequences arise if you try to control such systems top down (e.g., drug wars foster organized crime; draining of wetlands cause flash floods and droughts; rent control reduces the quantity and quality of housing and thus may drive up rents).

·                     The systems are dynamic and never at equilibrium.

So what do complex systems and SFI tell us about entrepreneurship?

Who and What Would the Syria War Be For?

The real question

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

Last week, hell came to the tiny Christian village of Maaloula where they still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

“Rebels of the Free Syrian Army launched an assault aided by a suicide bomber from Jabhat al-Nusra,” the al-Qaida-linked Islamic terrorist group, writes the Washington Post.

The AP picked up the story:

One resident said bearded rebels shouting “God is great!” attacked Christian homes and churches. “They shot and killed people. … I saw three bodies lying in the middle of a street.”

Maaloula is now a “ghost town.” Christians left behind were told, “Either you convert to Islam or you will be beheaded.”

“Where is President Obama?” wailed a refugee. And, indeed, where is Obama?

He is out lobbying Congress for authority to attack the Syrian army that defended Maaloula as John McCain beats the drums for a Senate resolution to have the U.S. military “change the momentum” of the war to the rebels who terrorized the convent nuns of Maaloula.

If we strike Syria and break its army, what happens to 2 million Syrian Christians? Does anyone care?

Do the Saudis who have signed on to Obama’s war—but decline to fight—care? Conversion to Christianity is a capital offense in Riyadh.

Do the Turks, who look the other way as jihadist killers cross their frontier to set up al-Qaeda sanctuaries in northern Syria, care?

Do the Israelis, who have instructed AIPAC to get Congress back in line behind a war Americans do not want to fight, care about those 100,000 dead Syrians and 400 gassed children?

Here is Alon Pinkas, Israel’s former general consul in New York, giving Israel’s view of the Syrian bloodletting: “Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death. That’s the strategic thinking here.”

According to two polls reported this weekend by the Jerusalem Post, Israelis by 7-1 do not want Israel to go to war with Syria. But two-thirds of Israelis favor the United States going to war with Syria.

Peggy Noonan writes that the debate on war on Syria “looks like a fight between the country and Washington.”

She nails it. The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Weekly Standard are all up for air strikes. In the think tanks of D.C., the corridor talk is all about “On to Teheran!”

But what of the soldiers who will fight the neocons’ war? Major General Robert Scales speaks for our next generation of wounded warriors.

Our fighting men, Scales writes, “are tired of wannabe soldiers who remain enamored of bloodless machine warfare. … Today’s soldiers know war and resent civilian policymakers who want the military to fight a war that neither they nor their loved ones will experience firsthand.”

Enthusiasm for war is likely higher at Cafe Milano in Georgetown than in the mess hall at Camp LeJeune.

Why is opposition to the war surging? Because the case for war is crumbling.

U.S. credibility is on the line, we are warned.

If we do not attack Syria to punish a violation of Obama’s “red line,” no one will believe us again. Our allies will no longer have confidence that America will come over and fight their next war for them.

Yet George Bush blustered in his “axis-of-evil” State of the Union that “the world’s worst dictators” would not be allowed to get “the world’s worst weapons.”

And Kim Jong Il went out and tested an atom bomb and built an arsenal of nuclear weapons. And what did The Decider do? Nothing.

Did our alliances collapse because “W’s” bluff was called?

Should Congress really authorize a war on Syria because Hillary Clinton and Obama said “Assad must go!” and Obama said his “red line” has been crossed?

Or should Congress used this vote as a teaching tool for Baby Boomer Bismarcks by declaring:

“We are not taking our country to war because you blundered in issuing ultimata you had no authority to issue. Rather than go to war, you should admit your mistake, as real leaders do, and take responsibility.”

How many Syrians should we kill to restore the credibility of Barack Obama? How many Syrians should we kill to impress upon Iran how resolute we are? How many Syrians should we kill to reassure nervous allies that Uncle Sam will forever come fight their wars for them?

In America, before we put a man to death, we prove him guilty of murder “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Should we not set as high a standard of proof before we kill a thousand Syrians and plunge the United States into another war?

Where is the evidence Assad ordered a gas attack? German intelligence says it intercepted orders from Assad not to use gas. Congressmen coming out of secret briefings say the case is inconclusive.

The American people do not want war on Syria, and such a war makes no sense. Who is trying to stampede Congress into war on Syria, and then on Iran—and why? Therein lies the real question.