Destructive Preservation

What the saving of their souls was for the ancients, saving of electricity has become for the moderns

by Theodore Dalrymple 

The one thing that many environmentalists seem not to care about is the environment. By this I mean its visual appearance. They would happily empty any landscape or any city of beauty so that the planet might survive. Like the village in Vietnam, it has become necessary to destroy the world in order to save it. And, of course, destruction of beauty has the additional advantage of being socially just: for if everyone cannot live in beautiful surroundings, why should anyone do so? Since it is far easier to create ugliness than to create beauty, equality is to be reached by the former rather than by the latter. 

The indifference of environmentalists to aesthetic considerations was illustrated by a friend, who kindly forwarded to me a brochure about a fully ecological house, erected (or assembled, since it was pre-fabricated) in the centre of Paris in front of Haussmann-style buildings. Needless to say, it completely destroyed the harmony of the surrounding townscape. 

It looked like a three-dimensional Mondrian, all boxes and bright colours. Inside, it was more a laboratory than a home, the kind of sterile environment necessary for in vitro fertilisation. However much it might have been heated by the sun, it lacked warmth. It was a proper place for androids, not for humans.

The brochure claimed many advantages for it, not the least of which was that the residents could monitor their energy consumption electronically hour by hour, minute by minute, in order to minimise it. Thus they could ensure that they never forgot their own impact on the environment, and were never totally free of anxiety about it. What the saving of their souls was for the ancients, saving of electricity has become for the moderns. 

No consideration was given in the brochure to such questions as the harmonisation of new houses with the pre-existing townscape or landscape, or how these cheap and gaudy constructions would look after a few years of wear and tear; but the smallness of the houses was vaunted as an enormous social advantage. There simply was not enough room, not enough land area, said the brochure, for everyone to occupy as much space as he wanted. 

This was an odd claim, because the house was by no means as efficient in concentrating the population as – the very Haussmann-style buildings in the front of which it was assembled, which manage so marvellously to combine elegance, grandeur, human scale and density of population, and which are now so desired and desirable as places to live that they have become too expensive to buy for anyone who does not already own part of one. Oddly enough, no one has ever suggested building as Haussmann did, albeit with such energy-saving devices as ingenuity might supply. The past is the one thing we don’t want to learn from, especially if we are architects. 

To go from the sublime to the ridiculous, I recently saw an example of environmentalist brutalism in a city not quite as famed as Paris for its beauty, namely Liverpool. Actually, Liverpool was once, at least in parts, a rather grand city, other parts of it being hideous beyond description, of course. It was once one of the largest entrepots and passenger ports in the world; the proceeds of the slave trade in the eighteenth century had been invested in elegant Georgian buildings and the proceeds of the hugely expanded trade of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in grandiloquent municipal buildings. 

The Love Potion of Socialized Medicine

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea  

by Bryan Caplan

During my flight to Italy, I read Barbara Demick's outstanding Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea cover to cover. Even if you've studied Communism for decades, you'll be appalled: In the 90s, North Korea basically moved from total state control over the economy to having no economy at all. The government stopped paying salaries and stocking the stores - without relaxing the near-prohibition on all private sector activities. For most, the only way to obey the law was to sit still until you died of hunger. The exiles Demick interviewed, starved and imprisoned, were the lucky ones. All had friends and family who perished in this absurdist hell.

Yet after all their suffering, North Korean exiles who made it to South Korea still had good things to say about their homeland. The most striking:

There were things she [Mrs. Song] missed about North Korea - the camaraderie among neighbors; the free health care before the system broke down.

Frankly, this makes about as much sense as ex-cons pining for their prison hospital. The North Korean government turns a country into a prison, starves millions to death, and yet escapees still think "free health care" is worth mentioning? What's wrong with people? 

To me, this reveals a lot about the world-wide appeal of government-run health care. Socialized medicine is like a love potion. The government can treat you like dirt, but as long as it slips a little of this potion into your drink, you'll probably think "How wonderful - the government loves me so much that it takes care of me whenever I'm sick without asking for a thing in return." And who would be vile enough not to love such a government back?

My point: Whatever you think about socialized medicine, it's not that great. It's not remotely enough to, say, redeem North Korea. The fact that anyone would imagine otherwise reveals a strong human tendency to judge socialized medicine like a bad boyfriend - with our hearts instead of our heads. When someone says, "Dump him - he's just not good for you!" we really ought to calm down and listen.

Best of the Worst - What Price for Democracy

Majority rule ensures that collective choice trumps individual choice

by Anthony de Jasay*

For the last twenty years or so, the European economy looked tired, sluggish, beset by chronic unemployment while straining such muscle as it had to spread the "social" safety net ever wider, ever higher. At the same time, the American economy showed vigorous growth, resilience and innate energy. Europe was by and large social democrat, America unrepentantly capitalist. Opinions were deeply divided about the merits of each, mostly because they sprang from the ineradicable gut feelings of each side. Lately, however, the clean cut between the two systems has become more and more blurred. America has acquired a hugely expensive public health care system, an interventionist monetary policy to make Keynes blush, an inexorably rising deficit that made the Director of the Budget throw down his job in despair, a solid complicity between the labour unions, the tort lawyers and the administration, and an economy that seems unable to respond to doping and is crawling along as sluggishly as the European one. Perhaps a little too soon, some observers are now saying that the US have "Europeanised" themselves; both continents have become democratic in the same sense.

Valuation and Description

Any language worth the name makes a clear enough separation between words that evaluate and words that simply describe. Consider pairs of words that perform the former job and pairs that do the latter. In the first set, you find such pairs of opposites as "good-bad", "handsome-ugly", "nice-nasty", "right-wrong", "true-false" and "just-unjust". In each pair, the first word is indisputably, self-evidently superior and preferable to the second. It simple makes no sense to say that bad is better than good that nasty more agreeable than nice nor that false is worthy of more respect than true. In the second set of words, you find such pairs as "like-unlike", "great-small", "many-few", "long-short", "many-few", "equal-unequal". The first word in each pair is no more valuable, desirable or commendable than the second. They both describe; any ranking we give them comes from some particular context in which "long" is preferable to "short" or vice versa. "Equal-unequal" is such a pair of words, though you would not believe it from listening to everyday political rhetoric. So is "democratic-undemocratic".

The Maximin Rule

Winston Churchill is supposed to have said that democracy is the worst political system except for all the others.1 This is a good enough aphorism, but it is rather poor decision theory. It is hardly an ideal of rationality to adopt it as a rule.

There is a great multitude of possible political systems from theocracy to technocracy, feudalism to plutocracy, hereditary monarchy to populist mob rule, dictatorship of the few to democracy. Each system is capable of producing a range of good and bad outcomes, with probabilities we can only guess. It is no use saying that we refuse to guess at such uncertain outcomes; for whether we have guessed or not, or guessed right or not, the outcomes arrive just the same, and it is better to at least try and anticipate them even if we cannot be confident to guess right, than give up hope and not try at all. Perhaps needless to say, the outcomes a given political system produces depend not only on the system itself, but on the kind of people and the kind of historical conjuncture to which it is applied.

By opting for a political system, we opt for what game theorists would call a "strategy" in a game we play "against" destiny. Each strategy is geared to produce one out of a range of outcomes from very good to very bad. Rationality, understood as being true to one's likes and dislikes, requires us to opt for the strategy that offers the best combination of outcomes weighted by their probabilities.

Expect Cashless Society, Not Hyperinflation

Perhaps that's why art, diamonds, and Bitcoins are going through the roof?

By Martin Armstrong

One of the greatest failed predictions over the last few years has been that the Fed’s massive monetary stimulus would result in runaway hyperinflation. Certainly we can debate whether the official consumer price index is artificially lower than what reality would suggest, but it's clear current U.S. inflation is nowhere near levels of hyperinflation and has actually been trending lower over the past two years as deflationary trends persist, in spite of the Fed’s best efforts to the contrary.

So how is it that the Fed can create all this money and not create inflation? Martin Armstrong, who has long criticized calls for hyperinflation or even high inflation in the U.S., said one of the main reasons is because the U.S. dollar is the global reserve currency.

“Dollars are sloshing around the entire world, not just our global economy. And the idea that if you just increase the money supply you’ll create inflation, that’s really very old-school. That might apply to Bangladesh…but it doesn’t apply when the currency is actually the reserve currency and that everybody is using it on a global scale,” he said in a recent interview with Financial Sense.

But this begs the question: What happens if the U.S. dollar loses its reserve currency status?"

With regards to this point, Martin said, 

“The euro is a dead issue…You can’t use the yen. And China and Russia—forget it—their currencies aren’t ready for prime-time. So, unfortunately, everybody is in dollars.”

Then again, perhaps it’s not just due to a lack of alternatives. As Gary Shilling points out, from 2001 to 2013, the share of daily trading in U.S. dollars only declined 3%—even with the creation of the euro and massive trade coming out of China over that time. When you consider the Six Reasons Why the U.S. Dollar Won’t Collapse, it really doesn’t appear this will be changing any time soon.

Welcome to Cuba

They herd people into Borg-like collectives, yet every individual is savagely atomized. I never felt so alone in my life.

By Michael J. Totten

Okay, I didn’t have to lie to immigration, customs, and security officials at Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport. I could have just applied for a journalist visa and hoped they’d approve me. But colleagues warned I’d have to wait months for an affirmative, and the authorities wouldn’t tell me if the answer was no. They’d simply toss my application into the trash if they thought I’d write anything “negative.” Six months, nine months, a year would finally pass and I’d still be waiting and wondering if I’d ever hear from them.

I have a job to do. I can’t wait six to twelve months in bureaucracy hell. So I lied.

“Tourism” I said when the nice woman at Passport Control asked what I was doing there.

The Cubans knew I was coming. My name was on the flight manifest. If anyone Googled me, they’d find out at once that I work as a journalist. And if they checked their records they’d know I didn’t have the right visa. Reporters who work in Cuba on tourist visas are arrested, interrogated, and deported. It makes no difference whether or not off-the-books journalists are friendly to the government. They must register with and—more important—get permission from the proper officials.

I had to stay off their radar. Freedom House ranks Cuba as the sixth worst country in the entire world for journalists. The Castro government creates a more hostile working environment than even the Syrian and Iranian governments. The only countries on earth that repress reporters more ruthlessly are, in order, North Korea, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Eritrea, and Belarus. All are either communist or post-communist in-name-only.

Some of my colleagues in the media weren’t sure I’d get away with it. “You’re pretty high profile,” said one. “And it’s not like you can hide.”

Several who have worked in Cuba in the past warned me not to bring a laptop. “That alone will be a red flag,” said one. “They’ll put you under surveillance.”

I’d also have to hide my notebook.

“Cuban security agents from the Ministry of Interior will sweep through your hotel room,” warned a veteran American visitor to Cuba, “so lock all your note-taking materials up in your room safe.”

“The Castro government already knows who you are and what you’ll be doing,” said Valentin Prieto, a Cuban exile in Miami and founder of the blog, Babalu. “And make no bones about it, the KGB, Stasi, et al have nothing—and I mean nothing—on the Cuban security apparatus. It may seem primitive, but it is highly effective. You will be monitored from the moment you step on the tarmac. You will never be alone while on the island, even in your hotel room if not especially so. Be careful and keep in mind that you are in a very closed society whose fuel is fear.”

1984 as an instruction manual

“Refusal will result in a Racial Discrimination note being attached to your child's educational record…”

By Daniel Hannan

What is the single most depressing aspect of this letter? Is it the idea of labelling eight-year-olds racists? Is it the moronic conflation of religion and ethnicity? Is it the ugly grammar ("As such our expectations are that all children in years 4 to 6 attend school on Wednesday…")? Is it the bullying tone? Is it the unconscionable choice of font? Is it that someone can write that way and yet hold a position of authority in a school?

Or is it this: that however many times prime ministers declare multi-culturalism to be a failed ideology, a petty, officious, bossy, self-righteous, self-serving, Leftist chunk of the public sector remains stuck in 1980?

Canada's Chief Censor

Jennifer Lynch, QC, 1953-2013 RIP

By mark steyn

The Chief Commissioner of the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission died two weeks ago. Regular readers of SteynOnline as far afield as Australia and South Africa will know her name: Jennifer Lynch, QC ("Queen Censor," as I liked to say) sat at the pinnacle of the Canadian state's corrupt "human rights" regime at the time the Canadian Islamic Congress invited it to assist them in effectively imposing a lifetime publication ban on me in my own country. Her role in that battle and its outcome was reflected in The National Post's headline upon her passing:

Former Human Rights Chief Dies Months After Commission Stripped Of Mandate To Fight Hate Speech

In the piece, Jennifer Lynch is reported to have found her unsought moment in the limelight a little uncomfortable:

Ms. Lynch lamented the "completely unbalanced" discussion in which she was cast as the Queen Censor, or even the Chief Commissar.

How odd to hear the head of a state agency whose principal purpose is to label citizens - Racist! Sexist! Homophobe! Islamophobe! - object to being labeled herself. I'm proud to say I gave her both names, and made a point of referring to her as "Commissar Lynch" in Canadian media appearances. We never met, mainly because she didn't want to and went to great lengths to avoid my company. Nevertheless, we had several mutual friends, who told me that Jennifer was a decent, well-meaning sort who was simply in a mess not of her making. I don't doubt it. When the Canadian thought police began their campaign against me and Ezra Levant, a number of outraged American readers wrote to me, saying, "You need to start kicking up a fuss about this, Steyn, and then maybe Canadians will get mad and elect a conservative government that will end this nonsense." Made perfect sense. Except that Canada already had a Conservative government, under a Conservative Prime Minister, with a Conservative Justice Minister, who had appointed a Conservative to serve as the very head of the "human rights" commission investigating me: Jennifer Lynch. Ms Lynch had been Chief of Staff to Joe Clark, a former Conservative (after a fashion) Prime Minister. But, as a current cabinet minister once remarked to me, when an incoming Conservative ministry takes over the reins of Big Government, there are thousands and thousands of positions to fill in the bureaucracy, and nowhere near enough reliable Conservatives to fill them. So you find who you can, and the bureaucracy trundles on regardless. As I say somewhere in After America, you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life. Jennifer Lynch, garlanded with every bauble the Canadian state could confer (the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal, etc), was the sort of person a government turns to fill all these posts. I'm sure she was decent and well-meaning and pleasant and likeable, but she put her fine qualities in the service of a squalid and corrupt regime whose practices could not survive the light Ezra and others shone on them.

Even from a distance, I grew inclined to accord her less respect as our battles wore on. Had I found myself in her position, I would have recognized that it was indefensible and liquidated the problem by taking the lead on the abolition of Section 13. Instead, she embarked on her disastrous campaign for a "balancing" of rights. "I'm a free speecher. I'm also a human rightser," she told The National Post, as if it were a finely nuanced trade-off between two rights. But it's not: "Free speech" is a right the citizen is free to exercise against the state; contemporary "human rights" are pseudo-rights that the state confers on those citizens who meet its approval. Aside from the intellectual dishonesty, Ms Lynch practiced a more basic kind, forever calling for a "balanced debate", while declining ever to engage or even be seen with anybody on the other side. She, Ezra and I all wound up testifying to Parliament, but she insisted not only that our appearances had to be entirely separate, but at least a week apart - so that we would not even be in the same news cycle. It didn't work. In my own testimony, I mischievously quoted as a great crusader for free speech Michael Ignatieff, then the Leader of the Liberal Party. Ignatieff was only one of many prominent Liberals who declined to come to Commissar Lynch's aid in her hour of need.

Why Is Debt The Source Of Income Inequality And Serfdom?

It's The Interest, Baby

by Charles Hugh-Smith

"Governments cannot reduce their debt or deficits and central banks cannot taper. Equally, they cannot perpetually borrow exponentially more. This one last bubble cannot end (but it must)."

I often refer to debt serfdom, the servitude debt enforces on borrowers. The mechanism of this servitude is interest, and today I turn to two knowledgeable correspondents for explanations of the consequences of interest.

Correspondent D.L.J. explains how debt/interest is the underlying engine of rising income/wealth disparity:

Here is a table of the growth rate of the GDP.

If we use $16T as the approximate GDP and a growth rate of, say, 3.5%, the total of goods and services would increase one year to the next by about $500B.

Meanwhile, referencing the Grandfather national debt chart with the USDebtClock data, the annual interest bill is $3 trillion ($2.7 trillion year-to-date).

In other words, those receiving interest are getting 5-6 times more than the increase in gross economic activity.

Using your oft-referenced Pareto Principle, about 80% of the population are net payers of interest while the other 20% are net receivers of interest.

Also, keep in mind that one does not have to have an outstanding loan to be a net payer of interest. As I attempted to earlier convey, whenever one buys a product that any part of its production was involving the cost of interest, the final product price included that interest cost. The purchase of that product had the interest cost paid by the purchaser.

Again using the Pareto concept, of the 20% who receive net interest, it can be further divided 80/20 to imply that 4% receive most (64%?) of the interest. This very fact can explain why/how the system (as it stands) produces a widening between the haves and the so-called 'have nots'.

Longtime correspondent Harun I. explains that the serfdom imposed by debt and interest is not merely financial servitude--it is political serfdom as well:

As both of us have stated, you can create all of the money you want, however, production of real things cannot be accomplished with a keystroke.

Then there is the issue of liberty. Each Federal Reserve Note is a liability of the Fed and gives the bearer the right but not the obligation to purchase — whatever the Fed deems appropriate. How much one can purchase keeps changing base on a theory-driven experiment that has never worked. Since the Fed is nothing more than an agent of the Central State, the ability to control what the wages of its workers will purchase, is a dangerous power for any government.

If a Federal Reserve Note is a liability of the central bank, then what is the asset? The only possible answer is the nations productivity. So, in essence, an agent of the government, the central bank, most of which are privately owned (ownership is cloaked in secrecy) owns the entire productive output of free and democratic nation-states.

People who speak of liberty and democracy in such a system only delude themselves.

Then there is the solution, default. That only resolves the books, the liability of human needs remain. Bankruptcy does not resolve the residue of social misery and suffering left behind for the masses who became dependent on lofty promises (debt). These promises (debts) were based on theories that have reappeared throughout human history under different guises but have never worked.

More debt will not resolve debt. The individual’s liberty is nonexistent if he does not own his labor. A people should consider carefully the viability (arithmetical consequences) of borrowing, at interest, to consume their own production. The asset of our labor cannot simultaneously be a liability we owe to ourselves at interest.

Thank you, D.L.J. and Harun. What is the alternative to the present system of debt serfdom and rising inequality? Eliminate the Federal Reserve system and revert to the national currency (the dollar) being issued by the U.S. Treasury in sufficient quantity to facilitate the production and distribution of goods and services.

Is this possible? Not in our Financialized, Neofeudal-Neocolonial Rentier Economy; but as Harun noted in another email, 

Governments cannot reduce their debt or deficits and central banks cannot taper. Equally, they cannot perpetually borrow exponentially more. This one last bubble cannot end (but it must).

What we are discussing is what will replace the current system after it self-destructs.

The Science of Hatred

What makes humans capable of horrific violence? 

BY TOM BARTLETT, WITH PHOTOS BY TARIK SAMARAH AND MATT LUTTON

The former battery factory on the outskirts of Srebrenica, a small town in eastern Bosnia, has become a grim tourist attraction. Vans full of sightseers, mostly from other countries, arrive here daily to see the crumbling industrial structure, which once served as a makeshift United Nations outpost and temporary haven for Muslims under assault by Serb forces determined to seize the town and round up its residents. In July 1995 more than 8,000 Muslim men, from teenagers to the elderly, were murdered in and around Srebrenica, lined up behind houses, gunned down in soccer fields, hunted through the forest.

The factory is now a low-budget museum where you can watch a short film about the genocide and meet a survivor, a soft-spoken man in his mid-30s who has repeated the story of his escape and the death of his father and brother nearly every day here for the past five years. Visitors are then led to a cavernous room with display cases containing the personal effects of victims—a comb, two marbles, a handkerchief, a house key, a wedding ring, a pocket watch with a bullet hole—alongside water-stained photographs of the atrocity hung on cracked concrete walls. The English translations of the captions make for a kind of accidental poetry. “Frightened mothers with weeping children: where and how to go on … ?” reads one. “Endless sorrow for the dearest,” says another.

Across the street from the museum is a memorial bearing the names of the known victims, flanked by rows and rows of graves, each with an identical white marker. Nearby an old woman runs a tiny souvenir shop selling, among other items, baseball caps with the message “Srebrenica: Never Forget.”

This place is a symbol of the 1995 massacre, which, in turn, is a symbol of the entire conflict that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. The killings here were a fraction of the total body count; The Bosnian Book of the Dead, published early this year, lists 96,000 who perished, though there were thousands more. It was the efficient brutality in Srebrenica that prompted the international community, after years of dithering and half measures, to take significant military action.

While that action ended the bloodshed, the reckoning is far from finished. Fragments of bone are still being sifted from the soil, sent for DNA analysis, and returned to families for burial. The general who led the campaign, Ratko Mladic, is on trial in The Hague after years on the run. In a recent proceeding, Mladic stared at a group of Srebrenica survivors in the gallery and drew a single finger across his throat. Around the same time, the president of Serbia issued a nonapology apology for the massacre, neglecting to call it genocide and using language so vague it seemed more insult than olive branch.

Standing near the memorial, surrounded by the dead, the driver of one of those tourist-filled vans, a Muslim who helped defend Sarajevo during a nearly four-year siege, briefly drops his sunny, professional demeanor. “How can you forgive when they say it didn’t happen?” he says. “The Nazis, they killed millions. They say, ‘OK, we are sorry.’ But the Serbs don’t do that.”

Some Serbs do acknowledge the genocide. According to a 2010 survey, though, most Serbs believe that whatever happened at Srebrenica has been exaggerated, despite being among the most scientifically documented mass killings in history. They shrug it off as a byproduct of war or cling to conspiracy theories or complain about being portrayed as villains. The facts disappear in a swirl of doubts and denial.

A new Bosnian film explores how that refusal to face the truth can become bizarre, like a hallucination. In the film, one actress plays multiple characters, each a different Serbian woman with a different reaction to Srebrenica. One character, a fast talker in a white blazer, suggests the story has been manufactured. Another, wearing hoop earrings and an animal-print blouse, doesn’t deny the killings occurred but won’t discuss them either. “Money, how you live, where you vacation, that’s what we should worry about,” she says. Yet another character—again, the same actress, this time with chopped blond hair—seems weirdly pleased to broach the morbid topic. “I don’t often get the opportunity to talk about guilt,” she says.

Listening to those women is an actor playing a Srebrenica survivor, who gently prompts them to move past their superficial banter. At one point, late in the film, he reveals his own obsession: “I often think about a particular moment, a situation. When mass killings are happening and you are tied up, and when they are taking you to the pit where they throw in the dead bodies, and when you see them killing people and you know it’s your turn next, at that second, that moment right before you are killed, what do you think about?”

Pensions misery looms for the 'have-it-all’ generation

As the baby boomers approach retirement, many face a pensions crisis thanks to quantitative easing. 

By Jeremy Warner

Intergenerational unfairness is one of those intellectually sloppy complaints that nevertheless commands a strong following among a certain cadre of privileged young metropolitan types. It even has its own think tank – the grandly named Intergenerational Foundation. Already there is a huge volume of literature on how voracious baby boomers have stolen the food from their children’s mouths – and pretty vacuous stuff it is too.

When it comes to the aberration of absurdly high house prices, there may even be something in it, but it seems an oddly irrelevant obsession set against much more worrying divides, such as wealth and regional disparities within generations. The unfairness lies not in the fact that the old are in aggregate so much richer than the young – this has always been the case – but that children from poorer backgrounds will generally be at a substantial disadvantage to those from richer ones.

Yet for those who continue to insist that the baby boomers have had it cushy, consider the following. Say you have done the right thing throughout your working life, and saved when means allowed. A typical middle-income earner might in that time reasonably hope to accumulate a pension pot of perhaps a couple of hundred thousand pounds. This, at least, is the position a friend finds himself in approaching retirement age. As it happens, the average pot on buying an annuity is much smaller – just £33,000.

To his dismay, my friend has discovered that his own, considerably larger sum will buy him and his wife a pension of little more than £10,000 a year, and that’s assuming both no inflation-proofing and that he invests the lot, rather than take his entitlement to a tax-free lump sum. Together with the basic state pension, this may be just about enough to keep the wolf from the door, but it can hardly be thought of an example of rampant intergenerational unfairness. Many retirees face much worse, leaving them reliant on benefits.

Is the Superpower Afraid of Iran?

Does this deal really make the world “a much more dangerous place”?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“Iran’s Nuclear Triumph” roared the headline of the Wall Street Journal editorial. William Kristol is again quoting Churchill on Munich.

Since the news broke Saturday night that Iran had agreed to a six-month freeze on its nuclear program, we are back in the Sudetenland again.

Why? For not only was this modest deal agreed to by the United States, but also by our NATO allies Germany, Britain and France.

Russia and China are fine with it.

Iran’s rivals, Turkey and Egypt, are calling it a good deal. Saudi Arabia says it “could be a first step toward a comprehensive solution for Iran’s nuclear program.”

Qatar calls it “an important step toward safeguarding peace and stability in the region.” Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have issued similar statements.

Israeli President Shimon Peres calls the deal satisfactory. Former Military Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin has remarked of the hysteria in some Israeli circles, “From the reactions this morning, I might have thought Iran had gotten permission to build a bomb.”

Predictably, “Bibi” Netanyahu is leading the stampede:

“Today the world has become a much more dangerous place because the most dangerous regime in the world has taken a significant step toward attaining the most dangerous weapon in the world.”

But this is not transparent nonsense?

In return for a modest lifting of sanctions, Tehran has agreed to halt work on the heavy water reactor it is building at Arak, to halt production of 20-percent uranium, to dilute half of its existing stockpile, and to allow more inspections.

Does this really make the world “a much more dangerous place”?

Consider the worst-case scenario we hear from our politicians and pundits — that Iran is cleverly scheming to get the U.S. and U.N. sanctions lifted, and, then, she will make a “mad dash” for the bomb.

Digging in: Why US won’t Leave Afghanistan

We came, we saw, we stayed. Forever.

By Pepe Escobar

 That’s the essence of the so-called Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) to be struck between the Obama administration and Afghanistan – over 12 years after the start of the never-ending War on Terror.

President Obama and US Secretary of State John Kerry define it as a ‘strategic partnership’. If that’s the case, it’s one of the most lopsided in history; Afghan President Hamid Karzai is no more than a sartorially impeccable American puppet.

Kerry announced the so-called BSA in Washington on Wednesday even before a Loya Jirga (‘Grand Council’, in Pashto) of 2,500 Afghan tribal leaders, clerics, members of parliament and merchants started their four-day deliberations in a tent on the grounds of the Polytechnical University in Kabul on Thursday.

But then Karzai, probably in his last major speech as president, pulled off a fabulous stunt. He knows he is, and will be, accused of selling Afghanistan down the (Panjshir) river. He knows he is sacrificing Afghan sovereignty for years to come – and there will be nasty blowback for it.

So once again he channeled Hamid the Actor, and played his best honest broker impersonation, stressing the BSA should be put off until the Afghan presidential elections in April 2014, and be signed by his successor.

It was high drama

“There’s a mistrust between me and the Americans. They don’t trust me and I don’t trust them. I have always criticized them and they have always propagated negative things behind my back,” he claimed.

I have been to Jirgas in Afghanistan; even looking at those inscrutable, rugged tribal faces is a spectacle in itself. So what were they thinking in Kabul? Of course they did not trust the Americans. But did they trust Karzai? Could they see this was all an act?

Keynesians: Sleepy? Down a Red Bull

The case against economic stimulus

by JULIAN ADORNEY

Fiscal stimulus, beloved by Keynesians, is not only expensive but causes long-term harm to the economy by distorting business incentives. The hundreds of billions of dollars pumped into the economy go, often as not, to cronies and industries chosen by politicians, propping up politically connected businesses at the expense of more efficient ones. 

This practice is not sustainable.

A Keynesian will attempt to justify all of these costs—decisions made by elites at the expense of the consumer—and say that they’re worth it. Why? Because fiscal stimulus cures recessions. Paul Krugman, addressing the just-breaking Great Recession in late 2008, said, “Increased government spending is just what the doctor ordered.” 

But the best reason to oppose fiscal stimulus is that it does just the opposite of what Krugman claims. It doesn’t cure recessions; it exacerbates them. 

Making Recessions Worse

Libertarians haven’t explored this angle enough, because up until recently the research just hasn’t been available to support the assertion. But as I explain here, 100 years of history show that stimulus quantitatively makes recessions worse.

In that paper, I start with research done by Christina Romer, former chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and coauthor of Obama’s 2009 plan for recovery. In 1999, Romer created a measure of the severity of recessions. The idea, in simple terms, is to add up how much industrial production was lost from one peak until the economy got back to that level. Add up the shortfall for each month between those two points, and you have one number—percentage-point months (PPM) lost—that tells you how deep that recession cut. 

Since she published the paper in 1999, she did not include data for the 2000–2001 recession nor the 2008 recession. I was able to ballpark the former and I used Krugman’s own figure (which even he says is probably a little low) for the latter. 

What I found was that Keynesian thinking has made recessions less frequent, but more painful and durable.  

The Body Economic

If you imagine that the economy is like a person, then a recession would be our need for sleep. It’s natural and normal to sleep, just like recessions are a natural market self-correction. Fiscal stimulus works like downing a Red Bull every time you need to sleep. Doing so lets you stay awake a little longer. But eventually you’re going to have to sleep, and your crash will be much worse than if you had just let your body rest instead of trying to counter that instinct with a stimulant.

Iran: Past the Paranoia

At once theocratic, secular, hostile, and modern, Iran is not America's natural enemy

By PETER HITCHENS

The story of the cardboard tanks was a haunting urban myth of 1930s Britain, often recalled by adults during my 1950s childhood. It concerned a middle-class couple who took a motor tour of the Third Reich about the time of the Munich Agreement. As they drove their very solid, very British automobile along a twisting mountain road, they suddenly came face to face with a squadron of Hitler’s feared new tanks. It was too late to stop, too narrow to swerve. Commending their souls to God, the couple braced themselves for certain death. But death did not come—only a strange splintering noise and some strangled cries of “Achtung!” and “Engländer Schweinehund!” The tank was a mere mock-up, made of cardboard, bamboo, string, and chewing gum, and the couple sliced through it, quite unhurt. This tale, wholly false, was told 70 years ago to spread foolish complacency about the real peril of German rearmament. It was retold 50 years ago to remind us how gullible we had been about a dangerous enemy.

It concerns me now as I write about a recent visit to Iran, the country that has been designated as the next official enemy of what is still called “The West.” I came away so completely opposed to this silly hostility that I fear I am in danger of stirring up apathy, like the people who spread the myth of the cardboard Panzers. I am a Cold War veteran who believes in deterrence and accepts that there was a genuine Soviet threat. I am an incorrigible Zionist. I think my own country has allowed its armed forces to become lamentably weak. But I think the difference between the official account of Iran as sinister menace and the Iran I experienced is so great that it is a sort of duty to draw attention to it.

This general fear is so strong that members of my own family, used to my traveling to many curious corners of the world and much-traveled themselves, were apprehensive about my going to Tehran. Feelings were a little high at the time. A group of Royal Navy bluejackets and Marines had just been seized by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the waters off Basra and released after alleged ill treatment. These trained warriors spoke of their experiences as if they had been held in the dungeons of man-eating pirates, claiming to have been scared of torture and, in the case of the one woman involved, of rape. So terror-stricken had they been that they allowed themselves to be filmed more or less admitting to losing their way and rambling into Iranian waters. One had been persuaded to pen a letter denouncing Britain’s military presence in Iraq. Their subsequent fate—sudden release after an apparent deal, the sale by some of them of their pathetic memoirs to mass-circulation newspapers, a national revulsion against them for their general feebleness—is interesting in itself, but it is not part of my story.

The American Police State

Mass incarceration "The New Jim Crow"

By Marc Parry

On a winter afternoon in 2004, a woman waits in the detective unit of a Philadelphia police station. Two officers, outfitted with combat boots and large guns, enter the room. The cops place their guns on the table, pointed at her.

The woman is 22, tiny, and terrified.

The officers show her a series of photos of men from around her neighborhood. Two of the men are her roommates, Mike and Chuck, low-level drug dealers who keep crack and guns in the shared apartment. Some of the photos were taken in front of her home.

Spewing obscenities about the woman's supposed appetite for casual sex, the cops press for information about her roommates and threaten criminal charges if she fails to cooperate.

"If you can't work with us," one cop says, "then who will you call when he's sticking a gun to your head? ... He'll kill you over a couple of grams. You know that, right?"

Such scenes are nothing unusual in the lower-income black neighborhood where this woman spends most of her time. Girlfriends and relatives routinely face police pressure to inform on the men in their lives.

Unknown to the cops, though, there is one difference this time. The woman under interrogation, Alice Goffman, has been watching them.

Nearly a decade later, Goffman is emerging as a rising star of sociology. The 2004 interrogation shows why. After spending her 20s immersed in fieldwork with wanted young men—a project she began as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania—Goffman has brought back the story of a "profound change" in the way America governs urban ghettos.

In a book coming out this spring, Goffman, now a 31-year-old assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, documents how the expansion of America's penal system is reshaping life for the poor black families who exist under the watch of its police, prison guards, and parole officers.

Starting in the mid-1970s, the United States stiffened its laws on drugs and violent crime and ratcheted up the police presence on city streets. The number of people in American jails and prisons has risen fivefold over the past 40 years. There are now roughly six million people under criminal-justice supervision. "In modern history," Goffman writes, "only the forced labor camps of the former U.S.S.R. under Stalin approached these levels of penal confinement."

Goffman's book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (University of Chicago Press), is an up-close account of that prison boom told largely through the story of a group of young friends in Philadelphia's 6th Street neighborhood. (The location and names in the book are pseudonyms.) The study describes how fear of confinement has transformed work, health, and family life, causing men to disengage from the very mainstream institutions that might put them on a better path.

The threat of incarceration has created "a new social fabric," Goffman writes, "one woven in suspicion, distrust, and the paranoiac practices of secrecy, evasion, and unpredictability." It has turned ghettos into "communities of suspects and fugitives."

A windfall Afghan exit strategy for Obama

Karzai is offering Obama an exit strategy

by M K Bhadrakumar

The tough-talking, no-nonsense US National Security Advisor Susan Rice met her match at the presidential palace in Kabul Monday evening over a “working dinner”. One would have loved to be a fly on the wall. But there was no need, because no sooner than the pomegranates and grapes were eaten after the rich meal of pilav and kebabs and Rice reported back to Washington her conversation with President Hamid Karzai, which lasted several hours, the White house released a curtly worded readout on what transpired. 

In sum, the readout makes it clear that President Barack Obama expects Karzai to back off from his pre-conditions for signing the status of forces agreement (known as the Bilateral Security Agreement or BSA.) 

Karzai’s spokesman Aimal Faizi, who was present at the dinner, later went public with a candid media briefing. He disclosed that there were heated exchanges.  Faizi said the American ambassador James Cunningham “made the President very angry; his reaction was strong and intense.” 

The argument arose over Karzai’s new precondition that the Obama administration should release all the Afghan prisoners at Guantanamo Bay (estimated to number 20 Taliban leaders). Cunningham tried to explain that the US domestic laws prevail over Guantanamo prisoners. 

Hmmm. Faizi added that Karzai’s strongest language was reserved for another exchange with Rice herself when he pressed that American counterterrorism raids on Afghan private homes should forthwith cease (which are the sole combat activity undertaken nowadays by American troops with the drones silently bearing the main burden of the war).