Che, Macaulay and other anti-fascists

Meet Univ. of Florida Professor Emeritus Neill Macaulay, who gloated louder about murdering innocent Cubans

 By Humberto Fontova

From Che Guevara Feb. 1957:

"I fired a .32 calibre bullet into the right hemisphere of his (peasant Eutemio Guerra's) brain which came out through his left temple. He moaned for a few moments, then died. His belongings were now mine.”

From Univ. of Florida Professor Emeritus Neill Macaulay's, A Rebel in Cuba, 1970:

"The first Batistiano was a tall handsome mulatto. He stood blindfolded before the paredon'. his hands bound in front of him. "Muchachos," he said calmly, "The only crime you are going to commit is to kill me, because I am innocent."

I stepped into the field shouted: "Ready!..Aim!--FIRE!"...the man went down and I went up to him immediately, commanding the firing squad to order arms as I walked. There were bullet holes in his shirt and he seemed dead, but I wasted no time in putting the automatic to his head and pulled the trigger. It made a neat round hole.

Next Batistiano to die was a Negro who was hauled kicking and screaming to the paredon'..I told the jailers to throw him up against the wall and get out of the way...the condemned man froze in terror when he saw his executioners arrayed before him."

"READY!" My command jolted him out of his trance.

"NO!--NO!" he cried. "Do NOT Get ready." He tried to climb the wall.

"NO!" he yelled while trying to hide behind one of the execution stakes, but the gun muzzles tracked him relentlessly.

"FIRE!" He turned his head and ducked just as the guns went off. Most of the bullets struck him in profile, tearing his nose, lips, chin and most of his cheeks. His face was transformed into a raw, red mass of flesh and bone that contrasted sharply to the smooth black skin bordering it. He lay on his back with what was left of his face turned to the firing squad. Anyone that hideously blasted , I thought, had to be dead...well" I commented to the firing squad, "it is not necessary to give to give him the tiro de gracia.

"Yes, Americano!" shouted one of my men. "He still lives! Give him the shot!" His arms and legs were twitching. His movement ceased only when a bullet from my pistol entered his skull.

Other fascinating items from professor Macaulay's memoirs:

"Escalona introduced me to Fidel as "the man who is training the firing squads." Fidel threw his head back and roared with laughter. As I stretched out my hand, he grabbed me by my shoulders and gave me a bear hug. Everybody was happy. At the University he was known as Bola de Churre. To me, however, he was very attractive."

Fidel says to give the Americano what he wants. So I selected a plot of about sixty-five acres from an immense plantation that had been jointly owned by some friends of Batista. The INRA (Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria) gave me virtually unlimited credit...there was no house on my land so I chose as a residence the former country home of Pepe Fraga, Batista's former chief of parking meters in Havana. Late in Jul my wife and infant son joined me there.

Folks, these items are not from a novel. An American mercenary joins Castro's criminal band, executes (murders, actually) Cubans without trial, steals the property of Cubans at gunpoint. Then he serves for decades as Professor Emeritus of Latin American Studies at University of Florida, apparently with nobody batting an eye.

UF is a state college, so there's a good chance his salary was paid partly by his victims families. And again apparently nobody bats an eye.

Upon Macaulay's death in 2007 (some suspect from suicide) Leftist professor and documentarian Glenn Gebhard wrote: "He (Macaulay) was not a socialist or a communist, and he left (Cuba) after he realized he couldn't make a living...He was a man of action and really smart."

Che, whatever else we can say about him, seemed to actually believe in the Communist holy book. Macaulay apparently murdered Cubans for fun and profit.

You will be interested to learn that among Professor Neil Macaulay's final academic duties was to hail a book by Julia Sweig as: "the best book ever written about Fidel Castro's revolutionary movement."

Didn't prof. Macaulay have any Cubans in his classes during 20 years teaching Latin American Studies at UF?! Didn't any of them object??!!!

Can you imagine, say, a professor of Ukranian ancestry who was discovered to have served as an auxiliary Nazi executioner in 41-42, or, say, a professor of Chilean background who was affiliated with the Pinochet regime, or a professor of South African ancestry who....Oh you know what I'm getting at!

The Trouble With Asset Bubbles: If You Stop Pumping, They Pop

Asset bubbles are like super-nova stars: once they reach a critical extreme, they implode

by Charles Hugh-Smith

The trouble with inflating asset bubbles is that you have to keep inflating them or they pop. Unfortunately for the bubble-blowing central banks, asset bubbles are a double-bind: you cannot inflate assets forever. At some unpredictable point, the risk and moral hazard that are part and parcel of all asset bubbles trigger an avalanche of selling that pops the bubble.

This is another facet of The Fed's Double-Bind: if you stop pumping asset bubbles, they pop as participants realize the music has stopped, and if you keep pumping them, they expand to super-nova criticality and implode.

There are several dynamics at play in this double-bind.

1. The process of inflating a bubble (for example, the current bubbles in stocks and real estate) requires pushing investors and speculators alike into risky asset classes. This puts the market at increasing risk as everyone is pushed to one side of the boat.

2. Those on the other side of the boat (i.e. shorts) are slowly but surely eradicated as the pumping keeps inflating the bubble. When the bubble finally bursts, there are no shorts left to cover, i.e. buy stocks at lower prices to reap their profits.

3. As the bubble continues to expand, the money available to enter the market and keep prices rising declines. The very success of the pumping process strips the markets of new sources of new money, leading to a point where normal selling exceeds new-money buying and the bubble collapses.

4. Money pumping by central banks and governments follows a curve of diminishing return. One analogy is insulin insensitivity: as the systemic distortions build, markets become increasingly insensitive to money pumping. Authorities respond to this intrinsic process of increasing insensitivity by pumping even more money into the system.

But as with insulin insensitivity, at some point the system loses all sensitivity to money pumping: no matter how much money central authorities inject, the markets refuse to go higher. At this point, the stick-slip nature of bubbles manifests and modest selling triggers a collapse as participants all rush for the exits. Buyers have vanished and there is no longer a bid at any price.

5. Having pumped the assets higher with ever-greater injections of speculative risk and pumping, central banks and states have exhausted their ability to re-inflate assets as they collapse.

This growing insensitivity to money pumping is visible in the stock market's response to each new QE program: each market advance is of shorter duration, and each rise is less robust than the last one.

This degradation of response to pumping has forced the Fed to pursue a policy of infinite QE, with no time or pumping limits.

The fantasy that authorities can massage their pumping to keep asset bubbles inflated at a permanently high plateau is about to be tested. The Fed is implicitly suggesting that it can adjust the dial of QE with such control that a few billion dollars withdrawn or added can keep the bubble inflated at current levels.

Systems cannot be controlled once risk and moral hazard have been raised to levels where instability is an intrinsic feature of the system. Those who actually believe the Fed can keep asset bubbles inflated at a permanently high plateau will discover their error in dramatic fashion, as the bigger the bubble, the more violent the implosion.

This is the super-nova nature of asset bubbles: if you try to deflate the bubble slowly, it pops, but if you keep inflating the bubble it eventually pops from its internal extremes. 

Let Greece Get What It Deserves

Greece can make an uncompromised test bed for Marxist theories

By Bill Frezza

Once in a great while an opportunity comes along to deliver justice to a people, giving them what they truly deserve. Greece’s time has come.

It must be dawning on all but the most obtuse member of the banking elite that they can’t possibly steal enough money from German taxpayers to save the Greek government from default. Put it off, maybe, but collapse is inevitable.

Once this happens, what is the purpose of casting Greece into some selective temporary financial purgatory where the irrelevant Greek economy can continue embarrassing anyone foolish enough to lend their dysfunctional government a dime? Why not go all the way and give the country what many of its people have been violently demanding for almost a century?

Let them have Communism.

Hard as it is for young people to believe, Communism was once a major historical force holding billions of people in thrall. Outside the halls of elite universities, who still takes it seriously? Sure we have Cuba, where the Castro deathwatch is the last thing standing between that benighted penal colony and an inevitable makeover by Club Med. Then there is Venezuela, though hope is fading that Meduro will carry the Bolivarian banner much longer. And frankly, a psychopathic family dynasty ruling a nation of stunted zombies hardly makes North Korea a proper Communist exemplar.

What the world needs, lest we forget, is a contemporary example of Communism in action. What better candidate than Greece? They’ve been pining for it for years, exhibiting a level of anti-capitalist vitriol unmatched in any developed country. They are temperamentally attuned to it, having driven all hard working Greeks abroad in search of opportunity. They pose no military threat to their neighbors, unless you quake at the sight of soldiers marching around in white skirts. And they have all the trappings of a modern Western nation, making them an uncompromised test bed for Marxist theories. Just toss them out of the European Union, cut off the flow of free Euros, and hand them back the printing plates for their old drachmas. Then stand back for a generation and watch.

The land that invented democracy used it to perfect the art of living at the expense of others, an example all Western democracies appear intent on emulating. Being the first to run out of other people’s money makes Greece truly ripe to take the next logical step beyond socialism.

As wrenching as it will be we can take comfort in the fact that Greece doesn’t have much of an economy to disrupt. The only Greek industry that’s worth a damn is tourism, rapidly collapsing as travelers get tired of being stranded by strikes while dodging Molotov cocktails. The rest of us can find plenty of other sources of lamb chops, yogurt, and olive oil. They crushed the concept of private property long ago under the burden of environmental, cultural, and social regulations that govern land use. Wouldn’t it be instructive to let them have a go at building a workers’ paradise to remind us what state enforced equality looks like?

Unlike neighboring Balkan nations that got to experience the joys of Communism after the Second World War, Greece was brought back from the brink by massive western intervention as well as a Churchillian side deal that obliged Stalin to butt out. The nasty civil war between the Greek Communist Party (the KKE) and government forces backed by Britain and the U.S. set the stage for decades of struggle between communist sympathizers who never gave up the dream, and right wing juntas determined to rule by force. The uneasy peace that has existed since the colonels were booted merely masks underlying tensions as every Greek worries, is someone else working fewer hours than I am?

Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy

Capitalists as Enemies of Capitalism

By Murray N. Rothbard

Businessmen or manufacturers can either be genuine free enterprisers or statists; they can either make their way on the free market or seek special government favors and privileges. They choose according to their individual preferences and values. But bankers are inherently inclined toward statism.

Commercial bankers, engaged as they are in unsound fractional reserve credit, are, in the free market, always teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Hence they are always reaching for government aid and bailout.

Investment bankers do much of their business underwriting government bonds, in the United States and abroad. Therefore, they have a vested interest in promoting deficits and in forcing taxpayers to redeem government debt. Both sets of bankers, then, tend to be tied in with government policy, and try to influence and control government actions in domestic and foreign affairs.

In the early years of the 19th century, the organized capital market in the United States was largely confined to government bonds (then called “stocks”), along with canal companies and banks themselves. Whatever investment banking existed was therefore concentrated in government debt. From the Civil War until the 1890s, there were virtually no manufacturing corporations; manufacturing and other businesses were partnerships and had not yet reached the size where they needed to adopt the corporate form. The only exception was railroads, the biggest industry in the U.S. The first investment banks, therefore, were concentrated in railroad securities and government bonds.

The first major investment-banking house in the United States was a creature of government privilege. Jay Cooke, an Ohio-born business promoter living in Philadelphia, and his brother Henry, editor of the leading Republican newspaper in Ohio, were close friends of Ohio U.S. Senator Salmon P. Chase. When the new Lincoln Administration took over in 1861, the Cookes lobbied hard to secure Chase the appointment of Secretary of the Treasury. That lobbying, plus the then enormous sum of $100,000 that Jay Cooke poured into Chase's political coffers, induced Chase to return the favor by granting Cooke, newly set up as an investment banker, an enormously lucrative monopoly in underwriting the entire federal debt.

Cooke and Chase then managed to use the virtual Republican monopoly in Congress during the war to transform the American commercial banking system from a relatively free market to a National Banking System centralized by the federal government under Wall Street control. A crucial aspect of that system was that national banks could only expand credit in proportion to the federal bonds they owned – bonds which they were forced to buy from Jay Cooke.

American Economic Calamity Predicted in 1857

Responding to scarcity by devouring our seed-corn, transforming scarcity into absolute famine

BY JR NYQUIST
The Great British historian, Lord Macaulay, predicted the future unraveling of the United States economy in a letter written in May 1857. Macaulay’s prediction was based on his analysis of American institutions. Discussing the life of Thomas Jefferson with an American author, Macaulay wrote, “You are surprised to learn that I have not a high opinion of Mr. Jefferson, and I am surprised at your surprise. I am certain that I never wrote a line, and … uttered a word indicating an opinion that the supreme authority in a state ought to be entrusted to the majority of citizens [counted] by the head; in other words, to the poorest and most ignorant part of society.”

According to Macaulay the United States was becoming increasingly democratic throughout the nineteenth century. And this tendency, he argued, was dangerous to liberty and to the country’s economic well-being. As Macaulay explained, “I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both.”

Macaulay pointed to the French Revolution and to the tendency of democratic movements to despoil the rich. “You may think that your country enjoys an exemption from these evils,” Macaulay wrote to his American correspondent. 
“I will frankly own to you that I am of a very different opinion. Your fate I believe to be certain, though it is deferred by a physical cause. As long as you have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land, your laboring population will be far more at ease than the laboring population of the Old World, and, while that is the case, the Jefferson politics may continue to exist without causing any fatal calamity.”

Eventually, of course, the United States must fill up with people. It must lose its economic advantages. “[T]he time will come, noted Macaulay, “when New England will be as thickly peopled as old England. Wages will be as low, and will fluctuate as much with you as with us.” America will then be urbanized, with a large population of “artisans.” Then it will happen that large numbers of these artisans will sometimes find themselves out of work. “Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test,” wrote Macaulay. “Distress everywhere makes the laborer mutinous and discontented, and inclines him to listen with eagerness to agitators who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man should have a million, while another cannot get a full meal.”

A Tale Of Two Subprimes

Homes And Autos 

by Michael Krieger

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

The above passage is the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’ classic novel about the French Revolutionary period, A Tale of Two Cities. I read the book back in tenth grade and it has stuck with me ever since. It wasn’t required reading for the class, rather it was the outgrowth of an assignment where each student had to independently choose a book to read. I had no idea what to pick so I went into the local book store and looked around. Charles Dickens was calling out at me from the shelves and I immediately purchased it. I quickly regretted my decision upon calling my best friend and learning that he had chosen his book, The Scarlet Letter based on its brevity. A Tale of Two Cities looked biblical by comparison.

All of my immature trepidation quickly dissipated as I started reading the novel and discovered that I simply couldn’t put it down. I was mentally and emotionally infected by the characters, the history, and the hard lessons learned. It created an indelible impression upon me that has never gone away.

Whether we want to admit it or not, we find ourselves in pre-revolutionary times at the moment. This doesn’t mean I predict violent upheavals everywhere followed by chaos and bloodshed, it means that the current paradigm is no longer sustainable because it is not longer working. More and more people now recognize this.

In case you needed anymore insight into the complete and total insanity of the “elite” Central Planners driving the U.S. economy off a cliff, I have decided to highlight a couple of articles explaining the rapid reflation of two important subprime markets: Homes and Autos. Clearly the only lesson learned from the 2008 crisis was that connected oligarchs can steal all they want with total impunity. There’s only one way this ends. With a complete and total collapse and then a massive paradigm shift. I’m quite hopeful our next system can be far better than this one. I predict it will be centered on decentralization, peer to peer interaction, the rule of law and competing free market currencies, but only time will tell. It’s really up to us.

First, here are some excerpts from a recent Bloomberg article on the resurgence of subprime auto loans (a topic I covered before regarding 97 month loans):

Subprime auto lenders are enabling buyers to borrow more relative to the cost of a car in a sign that underwriting standards are deteriorating amid increased competition, according to Standard & Poor’s. 

The average loan-to-value ratio, or LTV, on vehicle sales to consumers with spotty credit has risen to 114.5 percent this year from about 112 percent in 2010, S&P said in a report yesterday. That compares with a peak of 121 percent in 2008, according to the New York-based rating company. 

“We’re expecting continued weakening in credit standards as more players vie for a piece of the subprime auto loan market and others try to hold on to market share,” wrote the analysts led by Amy Martin. 

The segment has boomed since 2010 as high margins and low funding costs attract private-equity firms such as Blackstone Group LP. After drying up during the credit crisis, originations of car loans to borrowers with bad credit have almost doubled since the fourth quarter of 2009 to reach $18.4 billion during the same period in 2012, Citigroup Inc. analysts led by Mary Kane in New York said in a Sept. 6 report.

I suppose becoming a real estate slumlord wasn’t good enough for the boys at Blackstone.

The increase in subprime originations is fueling growth in the asset-backed bond market, with sales of securities linked to the debt surging 24.4 percent to $14.7 billion through August compared with the same period in 2012, according to Deutsche Bank AG data.

Now let’s turn our attention over to Neil Weinberg, Editor in Chief at American Banker for some excerpts from his article: Who’s Pushing Subprime Mortgages? Uncle Sam. Here are some excerpts:

Crisis and opportunity: Building a better mousetrap

Armageddon looting machine

By Ellen Brown 

Increased regulation and low interest rates are driving lending from the regulated commercial banking system into the unregulated shadow banking system. The shadow banks, although free of government regulation, are propped up by a hidden government guarantee in the form of safe harbor status under the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform Act pushed through by Wall Street. The result is to create perverse incentives for the financial system to self-destruct. 

Five years after the financial collapse precipitated by the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, the risk of another full-blown financial panic is still looming large, despite the Dodd Frank legislation designed to contain it. 

As noted in a recent Reuters article, the risk has just moved into the shadows:

[B]anks are pulling back their balance sheets from the fringes of the credit markets, with more and more risk being driven to unregulated lenders that comprise the $60 trillion "shadow-banking" sector.

Increased regulation and low interest rates have made lending to homeowners and small businesses less attractive than before 2008. The easy subprime scams of yesteryear are no more. The void is being filled by the shadow banking system. 

Shadow banking comes in many forms, but the big money today is in repos and derivatives. The notional (or hypothetical) value of the derivatives market has been estimated to be as high as $1.2 quadrillion, or 20 times the gross domestic product of all the countries of the world combined. 

The Real Clash is Within Civilisations

Twenty years on, Samuel Huntington’s seminal essay remains misunderstood

The NSA Building & Casbah

By FRANK FUREDI

The aim of this slim volume of essays, The Clash of Civilisations? The Debate: Twentieth Anniversary Edition, is to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Samuel Huntington’s controversial article, ‘The clash of civilisations’. It republishes the original article as well as essays authored by critics of Huntington’s thesis.

When the article was first published in the Summer 1993 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, it was dismissed by many critics. They argued that Huntington not only failed to capture prevailing global trends but that he was also far too pessimistic about the future prospects for Western civilisation. In the aftermath of 9/11, attitudes towards Huntington’s article changed, especially in the United States. It is not difficult to see why: after the destruction of the World Trade Center, Huntington’s vision of a civilisational conflict suddenly appeared to offer an astute interpretation of the dynamic which was to underpin the ‘war on terror’.

However one views Huntington’s 1993 essay, there’s no doubting that it touched a raw nerve. His main thesis was that after the end of the Cold War, the world had entered a radically different era. He predicted that global conflicts would no longer be motivated by ideological or economic concerns, but by cultural ones. His argument was clear:

‘It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilisations.’

The main strength of this thesis was to draw attention to the decoupling of ideological factors from global conflict. This was difficult for many to accept after decades of ideologically driven struggles, domestic and international. Yet Huntington’s focus on struggles between cultures did capture an important dynamic at work in the late twentieth century. He was right, for instance, to point out the significance of culture as a medium for the expression of conflict.

But his assertion that such conflicts will assume the form of civilisational clashes was misguided. Aside from the dubious status of civilisational narratives, it is clear that the defining feature of the contemporary world is that these divisions exist within society itself. When Huntington claimed that ‘civilisational identities will replace all other identities’, he appeared to overlook the fact that such identities are constantly contested within a civilisation itself. One possible reason why Huntington focused on civilisational struggles, and particularly on the theme of the ‘West versus the Rest’, was the difficulty he and members of the Western political elites have in openly acknowledging the depth of the cultural divisions within their own society, particularly in the US. There is a perceptible tendency – especially on the part of anti-traditionalist and anti-conservative commentators – to minimise the issues at stake in the so-called Culture Wars. The title of one such sceptic’s tome – ‘Culture War? The myth of a polarised America’ – vividly expresses this orientation.

The black hole of zero

Oscillation, Feedback, and Resonance

By Keith Weiner

I just saw this fascinating video of a bunch of metronomes that begin ticking out of sync with one another, but slowly line up until they all beat in unison. I really love the title slide where it says “NONLINEAR DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS”, how apropos! Watch the video, the outcome is counterintuitive.

The metronomes show some principles of a non-linear, dynamic system including periodic inputs of energy, oscillation, resonance, and positive feedback. These are key concepts in my series on the Theory of Interest and Prices in Paper Currency. In Part I, I discuss the assumption that the monetary system is linear and static. Later in Part III, I discuss periodic input of energy, oscillation, and resonance. In Part IV, I discuss feedback, both negative which damps a system and positive which runs away.

Our monetary system cannot be understood in terms of the quantity of money. It is convenient, tempting, and easy to assume that if the money supply doubles*, then prices should eventually double sooner or later. It was convenient for the Medievals to assume that if you throw a rock then it first flies straight until it sooner or later runs out of force and falls straight down. Both are errors of rationalism, of sitting in an armchair imagining how the world ought to be, how it should fit with preconceived notions.

A Shooting in Nice Exposes France's Crime Problem

A jeweler kills an escaping robber in Nice, and ignites a debate about how to handle crime in France 

By THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"Revenge is a kind of wild justice," said Francis Bacon, "which the more a man's heart runs to, the more ought law to weed it out." But what if that law, far from weeding it out, fertilizes and irrigates it by excessive leniency towards criminals?

In France the current minister of justice, Christiane Taubira, is determined to reduce the number of law-breakers sentenced to imprisonment, despite a recent steep rise in burglaries. By no means does all of the French public approve. Many want severe and unequivocal punishment of criminals, in the absence of which they approve—with varying degrees of reluctance or enthusiasm—of victims taking the law into their own hands.

This was illustrated to perfection recently in the case of Stéphan Turk in Nice. Just over a week ago, the jeweler, of Lebanese extraction, shot dead one of the two armed robbers who had threatened him with what looked like an automatic weapon. Mr. Turk pulled the trigger as they were making their escape, having relieved him of money and jewels. Mr. Turk was subsequently arrested and charged with voluntary homicide.

A page was set up on Facebook in support of the jeweler, and within a week it had accumulated 1.6 million "likes." There has been nothing remotely like this in France before: Evidently the case touched a very raw nerve. Some of the Facebook messages of support of Turk have been startling in their vehemence. "He should be given the Légion d'honneur," writes one supporter. "One parasite less," observes another. "No justice for them, just a bullet in the head. Sick of being bothered by little s—." Also: "It's deplorable that we should have to kill these scum ourselves." "The only thing I reproach the jeweler with is that he didn't get the other," wrote another of Mr. Turk's supporters.

These supporters don't really care whether Mr. Turk killed in self-defense or from sheer vengefulness. The former would be a defense in law but the latter would not be. Mr. Turk told the police that he shot twice at the motor scooter in an attempt to immobilize it, and it was only when one of the robbers turned to him in a threatening way with his automatic weapon that Mr. Turk shot him dead.

Mr. Turk, who has no criminal record, had no license for the gun and therefore was on the wrong side of the law when he used it. And if he really believed that the robbers had an automatic weapon with them, surely it would have been foolish to shoot at all, except to kill. It seems more likely that he acted on an entirely understandable angry impulse, which has now drawn strong support from jewelers and other shopkeepers from all over France, exasperated by such robberies, as well as the general public, who don't really care any longer about the niceties of the law.

For those on the other side of the leniency-versus-severity divide of the debate, Mr. Turk is a worse criminal than the initial robbers, for murder is a worse crime than robbery—even armed robbery. The left-wing newspaper Libération, having just reminded its readers that Mr. Turk's action was against the rule of law, did not hesitate in calling Mr. Turk a criminal and a murderer—though in the eyes of the law whose rule it had just extolled, he is still an innocent man.

Obama-Rouhani: lights, camera, action

Syria is a Russian "red line" - as important to Russia as Israel to the US

By Pepe Escobar 

The stage is set. By now it's established Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has given full authority to the new administration of President Hassan Rouhani to talk directly to Washington about Iran's nuclear program.

This happened only a few days after US President Barack Obama leaked that letters had been exchanged between himself and Rouhani. 

Rouhani's empowerment was first confirmed later last week by extremely credible former nuclear negotiator ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian in this op-ed published in Japan. Mousavian was Rouhani's deputy in Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) from 1997 to 2005. Then Rouhani himself expanded on it this Wednesday in an interview with NBC. 

It's crucial to consider the Supreme Leader's exact position. This past Tuesday, he addressed the elite of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in Tehran. [1] The key quote: "We don't accept nuclear weapons, not for the sake of the US or others, but because of our beliefs, and when we say that no one should have nuclear weapons, certainly we are not after them either." 

Khamenei fully endorsed Rouhani's diplomatic offensive, emphasizing - not cryptically - two concepts: "heroic flexibility", as in a wrestler sometimes giving way for tactical reasons but never losing sight of the rival; and "champion's leniency" - which happens to be the subtitle of a book Khamenei himself translated from Arabic about how the second Shi'ite imam, Hasan ibn Ali, managed to prevent a war in the 7th century by showing flexibility towards his enemy. 

Does that mean that a historic meeting between Obama and Rouhani next Tuesday on the sidelines of the annual UN General Assembly in New York is all but certain? No. Predictably, the White House has already exercised plausible deniability - as in Obama "not expected to meet" Rouhani. 

What the process implies though, is that Washington and Tehran should be talking, sooner or later, at the highest level. 

Watch the spoilers 
Crucially, Khamenei also told the IRGC, "It is not necessary for the guards to have activities in the political field." This implies they are out of the new nuclear negotiations, in a further confirmation of how the nuclear dossier has been transferred to the Foreign Ministry. Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is the man in charge. He will be traveling to New York with Rouhani. Here is an excellent insight into his frame of mind. As for former foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi, now appointed by Rouhani as the head of Iran's atomic energy agency, he told the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna that it was time to "end the so-called nuclear file".

Thomas Paine doesn't live here anymore

Spying and Lying

By Andrew P. Napolitano

When Edward Snowden first revealed the spying the NSA has been conducting on what was then thought to be only customers of Verizon, the government was embarrassed, but it reluctantly acknowledged that Snowden revealed a truth. He had, after all, displayed an accurate and faithful copy of a judicial order signed by a FISA Court judge directing Verizon to give billing information to NSA agents about its 113,000,000 American customers.

Not to worry, the government’s apologists offered, this is only telephone macro-metadata, meaning information about who spoke to whom, when they talked and for how long, and where they were when they talked, but not what they actually said to each other. When Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, stated under oath at a House hearing that his spies lack the authority to capture content, he avoided addressing whether they have the ability to do so, because he knows they do. His boss, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence and a less finessed liar than the general, said under oath at a Senate hearing flatly that the feds were not gathering massive amounts of data about hundreds of millions of Americans, when he knew that they were. And President Obama himself has stated on a few occasions that the government “is not reading” your emails or “listening” to your phone conversations, even though he knows they can.

Since the essence of spying is stealing and keeping secrets, we should not be surprised when that essence is supported by deception and lying. But lying to one’s employers (the American people) is a fireable offense, and lying under oath (to Congress) is a criminal offense. And a government that lies over and over again to the people it is lawfully obliged to serve is not believable and leads to lawlessness.

Obama should have known better than to use Clintonesque language by denying that something “is” happening at the moment he is discussing it. In reality, Obama knows his spies have exceeded their authority under even a broad reading of the Patriot Act and the FISA laws and have grossly failed to comply with their oaths to uphold the Fourth Amendment.

Poor deluded fools

Party Politics

By mark steyn

Prowling my hotel room the other night, I discovered a copy of the latest Vogue, kindly provided by the management. So, after bringing myself up to speed on Jennifer Lawrence — a "girl on fire," apparently — I turned to a profile of Susan Rice. She was the girl sent to put out the fire, dispatched by the Obama administration to slog through all the Sunday talk shows the weekend after Benghazi and blame it on some video. In Sir Henry Wotton's famous formulation, an ambassador is a man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. In the case of Susan Rice, a U.N. ambassador is a broad sent to lie to her country for the good of her man — viz., Barack Obama. Happily, it worked. A year on, the director of the video is still in custody, and Miss Rice is now national-security adviser. So she and Vogue were in party mood:

"It's a warm evening in June, and guests are assembling for a party she's throwing in honor of LGBT Pride Month at the penthouse of the Waldorf Towers, the official residence of the U.N. Ambassador. Actress turned humanitarian activist Mia Farrow, wearing blue tinted glasses, is one of the first to arrive. Within minutes she's joined by The New York Times's executive editor, Jill Abramson . . ." And soon things are swinging: "They mingle and sip sparkling wine in the elegant living room next to a framed portrait of Oprah Winfrey and First Lady Michelle Obama resting their heads on Rice's shoulders . . ."

Presumably Vogue subscribers are impressed by this sort of thing, but it would seem an odd opening paragraph for a profile of even recent U.N. ambassadors. Hey, maybe I'm wrong; maybe Vogue profiled cocktail soirées chez John Bolton attended by Andie MacDowell or Valerie Bertinelli, and with the great man photographed between Phil Donahue and Barbara Bush, or Merv Griffin and Mamie Eisenhower. Who knows? Out there, in a ramshackle outpost somewhere on the fringes of the map, brave Americans abandoned by their government are dying on a rooftop. But here in the metropolis the dazzling klieg-light luster of Mia Farrow and Jill Abramson plunges all else into shadow.

The Financial Zeitgeist

Τhe spirit of the times

BY JR NYQUIST

Ralph Nelson Elliott proposed the theory of the Grand Supercycle, which represents a period of relatively steady growth in the financial markets punctuated by a collapse. But an even larger view is possible, like that of Brooks Adams (the famous brother of Henry Adams and grandson of John Quincy Adams), who saw an even larger cycle of economic rise and decline. Then there was GeorgWilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who interpreted the movement of history as something more than a set of repeating cycles. Hegel described a phenomenology of mind producing successive changes in the “truths” that rule over us; for example, that we might pass from Adam Smith to atomization and then to a reaction against atomization.

But first, let us begin with a larger cycle view. Peter Chardon Brooks Adams (b. June 24, 1848) suggested that commercial civilizations are subject to predictable cycles. In 1900 Adams foresaw that New York would become the main hub of global finance. He also believed this would signal the beginning of the end of American civilization. In 1895 Adams wrote a book titled, The Law of Civilization and Decay, intended to prove that history is cyclical. His focus was on economic history.

Adams showed how certain decadent economic tendencies of ancient civilization (Greco-Roman) were already afflicting modernity by the 1890s. These tendencies included political centralization, devaluation of the currency; the growth of large cities with small farms being turned into large food-producing businesses, growing indebtedness, the rise of money-power and moneyed interests above all others. For Adams the destruction of civilization necessarily coincided with the rise of financial elites. Bankers and financiers inevitably replaced landed aristocrats as power-brokers. This signaled the collapse of old values in favor of naked materialism.

Adams seemed to be saying that the more we focus on material pursuits, the more shallow and wicked we become. Eventually, this shallowness and wickedness must result in an economic collapse. Strangely enough, our economic obsession may indeed be the grounds for our demise; the idea being that as men pay more and more attention to making money the civilization on which money-making depends becomes unhinged. That is to say, the ground of a solid economy is founded on something deeper and more fundamental than economics. Aristotle, perhaps, would have argued that success comes from the pursuit of goodness. With the realization of goodness, money comes of its own accord. But today, we have reversed the proper order. And this reversal is said to happen on a cyclical basis.