Pope Francis and the morality of Free Markets

The opposite of tyranny is freedom.  Capitalism is the practical and constructive expression of freedom.

By John Hayward          

Pope Francis had some criticism for “unfettered capitalism” in his Evengelii Gaudium, and public statements he has made in concert with release of the document.  My first inclination in response is to wonder where he believes this unfettered capitalism might be found, because there most certainly is no such thing in the Western world.

That’s not a minor quibble, nor is it meant as a snarky comeback.  State control over private industry is a dominant fact of life around the world.  There are very few places that come anywhere near the capitalist ideal of a limited government equally enforcing the property rights of all.  That is the necessary – indeed, indispensable – role of government for any true capitalist.  Theft and fraud have no place in a free market, because they are infringements against economic liberty, as well as disrupting the efficient allocation of resources.  Capitalism is all about voluntary commerce.  The victims of thieves and swindlers do not act of their own volition.

Government power is also an offense against economic liberty, when exercised for purposes beyond securing the equal rights of all.  This is where I find myself in disagreement with key elements of the Pope’s critique.  It’s not quite that broadside against free markets that opportunistic leftists made it out to be, and it’s risible to treat it as an endorsement of the stale and corrupt Big Government racket venerated by American liberals.  The Pope was pretty tough on the welfare state and government debt, as well as capitalist excess.  But the portion of his pronouncement quoted by the Wall Street Journal merits a response from anyone who would defend not only the superior accomplishments, but superior morality, of capitalism over its grim and oppressive alternatives:

Using unusually blunt language, he sharply criticized the market economy. “Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality,” wrote the pontiff in the 224-page document known as the apostolic exhortation.

“Such an economy kills,” wrote Pope Francis, denouncing the current economic system as “unjust at its roots” and one “which defend(s) the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation.” Such a system, he warned, is creating a “new tyranny,” which “unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.”

We have to say “thou shalt not” to “an economy of exclusion and inequality?”  Thou shalt not what?  What verb would come at the end of this new commandment?

“Exclusion,” and the inequality of opportunity, are sins that can only be committed by criminals and the State.  Armed gangs are noted for excluding people and destroying their opportunities.  So are government bureaucracies.  In fact, they employ many of the same methods.  The State loves to exercise power far beyond the letter of the law through intimidation tactics and unfunded mandates.  They wear business suits and power ties instead of gang cuts, but the basic principle is similar.

Social cooperation and the disintegration of society

The New York Times and Socialism

by James E. Miller

In lieu of the election of Socialist President Francois Hollande and a Socialist Party collision as the majority in France’s Parliament, the New York Times recently asked “what does it mean to be a Socialist these days, anyway?”   According to The Grey Lady, socialism today is “certainly nothing radical” and simply meant the “the emancipation of the working class and its transformation into the middle class” during its heyday.  Essentially the article categorizes the contemporary socialist as one who is a rigorous defender of the welfare state.  The piece quotes French journalist Bernard-Henri Levy as saying “European socialists are essentially like American Democrats.”  It even accuses center-right political parties in the West of being quite comfortable with socialism’s accomplishments.

So is the New York Times correct?  Is socialism just a boogeyman evoked by the “fringes” to scare the public into questioning the morality and efficiency of the welfare state?

Going by the New York Times definition, socialism is just another word for social democracy.  But of course the word socialism never really referred to just welfare entitlements.  Properly defined, socialism is a society where the complete means of production and distribution of goods are solely in the hands of the state.  It is also a system defined by the absence of private property.  According to famed socialist and author Robert Heilbroner

"If tradition cannot, and the market system should not, underpin the socialist order, we are left with some form of command as the necessary means for securing its continuance and adaptation. Indeed, that is what planning means…"

The factories and stores and farms and shops of a socialist socioeconomic formation must be coordinated…and this coordination must entail obedience to a central plan.

If capitalism and private property are the natural state of free men, socialism is the violent overthrow of liberty.  Outlawing of private property and free enterprise is no easy task.  It requires a large amount of enforcement to see to it that nobody trades without the state’s permission.  And it is because of its oppressive nature that it is only through totalitarian dictatorship can socialism be fully realized.  Economist George Reisman explains:

"In sum, therefore, the requirements merely of enforcing price-control regulations is the adoption of essential features of a totalitarian state, namely, the establishment of the category of “economic crimes,” in which the peaceful pursuit of material self-interest is treated as a criminal offense, and the establishment of a totalitarian police apparatus replete with spies and informers and the power of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.

The internet mystery that has the world baffled

Welcome to the world of Cicada 3301

By Chris Bell

One evening in January last year, Joel Eriksson, a 34-year-old computer analyst from Uppsala in Sweden, was trawling the web, looking for distraction, when he came across a message on an internet forum. The message was in stark white type, against a black background.

“Hello,” it said. “We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck.”

The message was signed: "3301”.

A self-confessed IT security "freak” and a skilled cryptographer, Eriksson’s interest was immediately piqued. This was – he knew – an example of digital steganography: the concealment of secret information within a digital file. Most often seen in conjunction with image files, a recipient who can work out the code – for example, to alter the colour of every 100th pixel – can retrieve an entirely different image from the randomised background "noise”.

It’s a technique more commonly associated with nefarious ends, such as concealing child pornography. In 2002 it was suggested that al-Qaeda operatives had planned the September 11 attacks via the auction site eBay, by encrypting messages inside digital photographs.

Sleepily – it was late, and he had work in the morning – Eriksson thought he’d try his luck decoding the message from "3301”. After only a few minutes work he’d got somewhere: a reference to "Tiberius Claudius Caesar” and a line of meaningless letters. Joel deduced it might be an embedded "Caesar cipher” – an encryption technique named after Julius Caesar, who used it in private correspondence. It replaces characters by a letter a certain number of positions down the alphabet. As Claudius was the fourth emperor, it suggested "four” might be important – and lo, within minutes, Eriksson found another web address buried in the image’s code.

Feeling satisfied, he clicked the link.

It was a picture of a duck with the message: "Woops! Just decoys this way. Looks like you can’t guess how to get the message out.”

Japan Press: "China-Japan War To Break Out In January"

The game of chicken between two great superpowers is about to begin

Following China's unveiling of its air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea, overlapping a large expanse of territory also claimed by Japan, the Japanese media has, as The Japan Times reports, had a dramatically visceral reaction on the various scenarios of a shooting war. From Sunday Mainichi's "Sino-Japanese war to break out in January," to Flash's "Simulated breakout of war over the Senkakus," the nationalism (that Kyle Bass so notably commented on) is rising. Which side, wonders Shukan Gendai ominously, will respond to a provocation by pulling the trigger? The game of chicken between two great superpowers is about to begin has begun.

Via The Japan Times,

Five out of nine weekly magazines that went on sale last Monday and Tuesday contained scenarios that raised the possibility of a shooting war.

...

First, let’s take Flash (Dec. 17), which ran a “Simulated breakout of war over the Senkakus,” with Mamoru Sato, a former Air Self-Defense Force general, providing editorial supervision. Flash’s scenario has the same tense tone as a Clancy novel, including dialog. On a day in August 2014, a radar operator instructs patrolling F-15J pilots to “scramble north” at an altitude of 65,000 feet to intercept a suspected intruder and proceeds from there.

Sunday Mainichi (Dec. 15) ran an article headlined “Sino-Japanese war to break out in January.” Political reporter Takao Toshikawa tells the magazine that the key to what happens next will depend on China’s economy.

“The economic situation in China is pretty rough right now, and from the start of next year it’s expected to worsen,” says Toshikawa. “The real-estate boom is headed for a total collapse and the economic disparities between the costal regions and the interior continue to widen. I see no signs that the party’s Central Committee is getting matters sorted out.”

An unnamed diplomatic source offered the prediction that the Chinese might very well set off an incident “accidentally on purpose”: “I worry about the possibility they might force down a civilian airliner and hold the passengers hostage,” he suggested.

In an article described as a “worst-case simulation,” author Osamu Eya expressed concerns in Shukan Asahi Geino (Dec. 12) that oil supertankers bound for Japan might be targeted.

“Japan depends on sea transport for oil and other material resources,” said Eya. “If China were to target them, nothing could be worse to contemplate.”

When the Prince Flunks Diplomacy 101

What one expects of folks who trumpet their intelligence, and then demonstrate stupidity

by Angelo M. Codevilla

By its handling of China’s claim of a defense zone in international waters, Obama & co. violated diplomacy’s timeless fundamentals. First they loudly declared that America continues to regard the zone as international waters, and sent nuclear-capable B-52 bombers into the area to underline the point. Then they told US airline companies that the US government would not try to protect them in these international waters and advised them to submit to Chinese authority therein. Finally, when the Japanese government asked for US support for its own claims in the area,Vice President Biden told the Japanese to deal with China as best they can – much as the Administration had told US citizens. People who act this way should not be allowed near positions of power. They could not pass a basic exam in the field.

Teaching basic courses in international affairs, I often presented students with the following exam question: Country A claims some exclusive rights over waters theretofore regarded as international. What would you advise the executive of country B to do?” The student could earn a passing grade by answering along any of the following classic lines.

1. Customarily, a government responds only to events of which it chooses to “take note.” Country B is not obliged to respond at all. It can leave country A unsure of what it will have to deal with, and place on it the burden of deciding of whether or not to “take note” of non-compliance with its claim. Alternatively, if country B does comply with A’s claim, it can do so without commitment and without giving the appearance of having bent to a claim that it considers onerous.

2. B may choose to inform A quietly that it will not respect the claim and of the measures it is prepared to take to enforce what it considers its own rights. It can also inform its allies and its own citizens of those preparations. Quiet demurral saves A from having to react to a confrontation while leaving no doubt of the gravity of the confrontation, should it choose to enforce its claim. Perhaps A will decide quietly that the game is not worth the candle.

Getting out of hell can be tough

Karina Aspires to be a Successful Prostitute

By Orlando Freire Santana

HAVANA, Cuba, November www.cubanet.org – Karina laments having come rather late to Havana from her native Santiago de Cuba. According to her, if her arrival in the capital had happened five or six years ago, the job of becoming a successful prostitute would have been much less work.

Because the competition here is huge, and the clients increasingly prefer younger girls. However, at 25, Karina still has hopes of being able to find her way through the intricacies of this craft to reach her great objective: hooking up with a “yuma,” as foreigners are called here, and getting out of this hell.

Back in Santiago, Karina left her mother and a five-year-old daughter. As a mid-level food technician, she held a job as an assistant in a seedy State snack bar, with a salary that wasn’t enough to feed her daughter. So Karina, and two other single mothers like herself, decided one day to take a train to Havana, without even knowing anyone in this city that could pave the way for them.

The first few days in the capital were difficult for the three girls, sometimes eating only once a day, and sleeping on benches at the train station. They continued that way until they met a man who sheltered them in his house. And at the end of several weeks, after earning the first fruits of her trade, Karina managed independence. Now she lives along in a rented room in Old Havana that she pays 50 CUC (about 50 dollars) for, and has already been able to send some money to help her family.

And what is more important, Karina has come to understand that she has several steps to reaching her goal. These days, still devoid of the material attributes that make it easier to trap the big game, Karina roams the areas of Havana where the cheapest prostitution is practiced, such as the doorways of stores on Monte Street, or the area around Fraternity Park. In these places almost all the customers are Cuba, and they generally pay five CUC for half an hour of rented love. Still, sometimes she’s lucky, hooking up with guys who offer as much as 10 or 15 CUC. Of course in these cases she has to really put herself into providing the service.

`Doc Shock' On Deck in Obamacare Wars

Expect the fight over doc shock to be bitter and long  

By Megan McArdle 

Come January, when some number of Americans have bought insurance on the new health exchanges and are starting to use the services, you can expect another controversy to arise when many of them find out just how few doctors and hospitals they have access to. Call it “doc shock,” though the biggest outcry will not come when people try to schedule an appointment with their physician, but when someone gets sick and they learn they cannot go to whatever top-notch hospital they want, only to the hospital that is included in their plan.

The problem varies across the country. In Washington, where I live, it basically won’t be a problem at all; exchange policies have mostly the same provider networks as regular policies from those insurers. On the other end of the spectrum, in California, where the exchange put heavy pressure on insurers to keep premiums low, most exchange policies have bare-bones coverage that excludes top-tier hospitals such as UCLA and Cedars-Sinai. The industry calls these “narrow network” plans, but consumers are likely to have some more pungent names for the stripped-down provider offerings.

In those places where insurers are narrowing their networks, it’s likely to become a big issue -- not just a public-relations one, but legal. Seattle Children’s Hospital is already suing over its exclusion from most of the area’s exchange policies.

Over at California Healthline, however, Dan Diamond argues that maybe we shouldn’t be so negative. Sure, if you call them “narrow networks,” that sounds bad. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the reason that insurers are turning to these programs, which is that they control costs. And arguably, done right, they can actually improve the quality of care; after all, one of the things that makes the Mayo Clinic or the Cleveland Clinic so good at what they do is that health-care professionals can manage the entire “continuum of care” rather than forcing a patient to assemble a hodgepodge of providers who never talk to each other.

Japan Burns with ‘Fire Ice’ Momentum

In terms of technology, it exists, but is prohibitively expensive to use in most cases

By James Stafford

Japan, desperate for new domestic energy sources, is where we now look for research and development that no one else has the patience for—like last week’s news of a Japanese construction company’s plans to build a massive belt of solar panels around the moon’s equator, or this week’s revival of talk about “fire ice”, otherwise known as methane hydrates.
Methane hydrates represent the frozen form of natural gas trapped in crystal lattices underwater—and the news this week is that Tokyo has now discovered another source of fire ice in the Sea of Japan. 
Elsewhere, particularly in North America, the shale boom means that no one is paying too much attention to fire ice, though it is being researched, but in Japan, where there is no shale to speak of—fire ice could be at least a longer-term answer to domestic energy problems. After all, methane hydrates—if we are to believe the experts—could be more plentiful than all known reserves of natural gas, while one cubic foot of solid methane hydrate yields about 164 cubic feet of gas. However, there is some disagreement over the actual volume of commercially viable methane hydrate deposits.
In March, Japan Oil, Gas & Metals National Corp successfully extracted the first gas from deposits of methane hydrate from the ocean, producing 120,000 cubic meters of gas in six days of testing in the Pacific Ocean, off central Japan.
Last week, Japan stumbled upon another source of fire ice in the Sea of Japan, and now the game is on to predict when Japan will start producing commercial quantities of gas from methane hydrates. Those estimations range from two years to 15 years, so we don’t have much to go on.

Caveat on Nelson Mandela

“There’s one place where (Fidel Castro’s) Cuba stands out head and shoulders above the rest – that is in its love for human rights and liberty!”

By Humberto Fontova

A martian visiting earth this week, coasting TV channels and perusing papers, would have to conclude that among the items that most interest this planet’s news bureaus is the plight of former political prisoners, especially black ones.

Well, many Cubans (many of them black) suffered longer and more horrible incarceration in Castro’s KGB-designed dungeons than Nelson Mandela spent in South Africa’s (relatively) comfortable prisons, which were open to inspection by the Red Cross. Castro has never allowed a Red Cross delegation anywhere near his real prisons. Now let’s see if you recognize some of the Cuban ex-prisoners and torture-victims:

Mario Chanes (30 years), Ignacio Cuesta Valle, (29 years) Antonio López Muñoz, (28 years) in Dasio Hernández Peña (28 years) Dr. Alberto Fibla (28 years) Pastor Macurán (28 years) Roberto Martin Perez (28 years) Roberto Perdomo (28 years) Teodoro González (28 years.) Jose L.Pujals (27 years) Miguel A. Alvarez Cardentey (27 years.) Eusebio Penalver (28 years.)

No? None of these names ring a bell? And yet their suffering took place only 90 miles from U.S. shores in a locale absolutely lousy with international press bureaus and their intrepid “investigative reporters.” From CNN to NBC, from Reuters to the AP, from ABC to NPR to CBS, Castro welcomes all of these to “embed” and “report” from his fiefdom.

This fiefdom, by the way, is responsible for the jailing and torture of the most political prisoners (many black) per-capita of any regime in the modern history of the Western hemisphere, more in fact than Stalin’s at the height of the Great Terror. But the Martian would only learn that it provides free and fabulous healthcare and is subject to a “cruel” and “archaic” embargo by a superpower.

Here are some choice Mandela-isms:

“Che Guevara is an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom.”

“The cause of Communism is the greatest cause in the history of mankind!”

“There’s one place where (Fidel Castro’s) Cuba stands out head and shoulders above the rest – that is in its love for human rights and liberty!”

Here are a few items the martian would probably never learn regarding Nelson Mandela or the Stalinist regime he adored:

South Africa’s apartheid regime was no model of liberty. But even its most violent enemies enjoyed a bona fide day in court under a judge who was not beholden to a dictator for his job (or his life.) When Nelson Mandela was convicted of “193 counts of terrorism committed between 1961 and 1963, including the preparation, manufacture and use of explosives, including 210,000 hand grenades, 48,000 anti-personnel mines, 1,500 time devices, 144 tons of ammonium nitrate,” his trial had observers from around the free world. “The trial has been properly conducted,” wrote Anthony Sampson, correspondent for the liberal London Observer. “The judge, Mr Justice Quartus de Wet, has been scrupulously fair.” Sampson admitted this though his own sympathies veered strongly towards Mandela. (Indeed, Sampson went on to write Nelson Mandela’s authorized biography.)

In sharp contrast, when Ruby Hart Phillips, the Havana correspondent for the flamingly Castrophile New York Times, attended a mass-trial of accused Castro-regime enemies, she gaped in horror. “The defense attorney made absolutely no defense, instead he apologized to the court for defending the prisoners,” she wrote in February 1959. “The whole procedure was sickening.” The defendants were all murdered by firing squad the following dawn.

In 1961 a Castro regime prosecutor named Idelfonso Canales explained Cuba’s new system to a stupefied “defendant,” named Rivero Caro who was himself a practicing lawyer in pre-Castro Cuba. “Forget your lawyer mentality,” laughed Canales. “What you say doesn’t matter. What proof you provide doesn’t matter, even what the prosecuting attorney says doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is what the G-2 (military police) says!”

A reminder:

According to Anti-Apartheid activists a grand total of 3,000 political prisoners passed through South Africa’s Robben Island prison in roughly 30 years under the Apartheid regime, (all after trials similar to the one described above by Anthony Sampson.) Usually about a thousand were held. These were out of a South African population of 40 million. Here’s what Mandela’s “jail cell” looked like towards the end of his sentence.

“‘N*gger!’ taunted my jailers between tortures,” recalled Castro’s prisoner Eusebio Penalver to this writer. “We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!”  they laughed at me. “For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell That’s 4 feet high, so you couldn’t stand. But they never succeeded in branding me as common criminal, so I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide,” continued the late Mr Penalver.

According to the Human Rights group, Freedom House, a grand total of 500,000 political prisoners have passed through Castro’s various prisons and forced labor camps (many after trails like the one described by R.H Phillips above, others with none whatsoever.) At one time in 1961, some 300,000 Cubans were jailed for political offenses (in torture chambers and forced-labor camps designed by Stalin’s disciples, not like Mandela’s as seen above.) This was out of a Cuban population in 1960 of 6.4 million.

So who did the world embargo for “injustice?” and “human-rights abuses?” (Apartheid South Africa, of course)  And who currently sits on the UN’s Human Rights Council? (Stalinist Cuba.)

In brief, none of the craziness Alice found after tumbling down that rabbit hole comes close to the craziness Cuba-watchers read and see almost daily.

What's Wrong with Police in Iceland?

Still burdened with civilized scruples

By William Norman Grigg

In Iceland, police are mourning the unprecedented shooting death of a suspect. In the United States, police are scandalized by the unfamiliar spectacle of an officer using non-lethal means to subdue and arrest an emotionally unstable man who appeared to be armed. Icelandic police are stunned and grieving because officers took a human life. Some American cops are alarmed by the “recklessness” displayed by an officer who spared the life of a Mundane.

The fatal police shooting of a 59-year-old Icelandic man on December 2 was the first to take place in that country since it achieved independence in 1944.

Iceland is not inhospitable to privately owner firearms: it is ranked 15^th in the world in terms of per-capita gun ownership. Its police typically don’t carry weapons – and its population, which is blessed to live in a country where violent crime is all but non-existent, quite sensibly prefers this arrangement.

Following an “officer-involved shooting” in the United States, the department will place the shooter on paid vacation and erect an information barricade to prevent public disclosure of critical facts. It will also quietly leak whatever damaging information about the victim it can find in order to reinforce the presumption that any use of lethal force by police is justified. 

The shooter, who is clothed in “qualified immunity,” will be given a generous interval to confer with police union attorneys in order to devise a suitable story before speaking with investigators. In some cities – Dallas, for example – a cop who fatally shoots a citizen won’t have to worry about being questioned until three days after the incident, and he can use that time to review video records of the event.

Owing to their lack of prior experience with officer-involved shootings, police in Iceland (who are certainly capable of brutal behavior on occasion) are ignorant of this ritual.

Rather than execrating the dead man and extolling the valor of the officers who shot him, the police treated the incident as a tragedy. Police chief Haraldur Johannessen told reporters that he and his department “regret this incident and would like to extend [our] condolences to the family of the man.” Some of the officers involved in the shooting have sought grief counseling to deal with the burden of taking an irreplaceable human life.

Statism: Whether Fascist or Communist, It's The Deadly Opposite of Capitalism

The political spectrum–Left vs. Right–must be defined in terms of statism vs. individual liberty

By Harry Binswanger

Over the last few years, a new and immensely clarifying concept has entered public discussion: “statism.” It has been said that he who controls language controls history. The growing use of “statism” may portend a political sea change, because it pierces a major Leftist-created smokescreen: the placing of fascism on the Right.

This twisting of language and facts has reached ludicrous levels. On November 9th, The New York Times featured a page-one article whose headline blared: “Right Wing’s Surge in Europe Has the Establishment Rattled.” But it turns out that these alleged Rightists “want to strengthen not shrink government and they see the welfare state as an integral part of their national identities.” The article reveals that “The platform of France’s National Front … reads in part like a leftist manifesto.”

We need a rational way of setting up the political spectrum. We have to have some axis of measurement in terms of which we can locate the political meaning of particular ideas and policies. I have no objection to calling this spectrum “Right vs. Left.” I have every possible objection to defining the extreme Right as fascism and the extreme Left as communism.

Suppose that someone proposed a Right-Left axis for eating, saying that the extreme Right is to eat arsenic and the extreme Left is to eat cyanide. The choice would only be: which poison do you want to die from? And the “moderates” would then be those who eat a mixture of arsenic and cyanide. What would be omitted from this setup? Food.

The political equivalent of the arsenic-cyanide spectrum is the fascism-communism spectrum. What is omitted from the setup? A free society–which means: capitalism. What is the actual opposite of capitalism? Statism.

The term “statism” was tirelessly promoted by Ayn Rand. A computer search of her published works for “statism” or “statist” gives over 300 hits. She described statism as the idea that “man’s life and work belong to the state–to society, to the group, the gang, the race, the nation–and that the state may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own, tribal, collective good.”

Fascism and communism are two variants of statism. Both are forms of dictatorship. Neither one recognizes individual rights nor permits individual freedom. The differences are non-essential: fascism is racial statism and communism is statism of economic class.

Designed by Kafka and Inspired By Hitler?!!

Japan Secures Final Passage Of Secrecy Bill  

Shinzo Abe secured final passage of a bill granting Japan’s govt sweeping powers to declare state secrets. The Bill won final approval of the measures at about 11:20 p.m. Tokyo time after opposition parties first forced a no-confidence vote in Abe’s govt in the lower house. The first rule of the pending Japan’s Special Secrets Bill is that what will be a secret is secret. The right to know has now been officially superseded by the right of the government to make sure you don’t know what they don’t want you to know. It might all seems like a bad joke, except for the Orwellian nature of the bill and a key Cabinet member expressing his admiration for the Nazis,

 "just as Germany needed a strong man like Hitler to revive defeated Germany, Japan needs people like Abe to dynamically induce change." 

from Japan's Subculture Research Center blog,

The first rule of the pending Japan’s Special Secrets Bill is that what will be a secret is secret. The second rule is that anyone who leaks a secret and a reporter who writes it up can face up to ten years in jail. The third rule is that there are no rules at to what government agency can declare state secrets and no checks on them to determine they don’t misuse the privilege; even of no longer existent agencies may have the power to declare their information secret. The fourth rule  is that anything pertaining to nuclear energy is of course a state secret so there will not longer be any problem with nuclear power in this country because we won’t know anything about it. And what we don’t know can’t hurt us.

The right to know has now been officially superseded by the right of the government to make sure you don’t know what they don’t want you to know.

Legal experts note that even asking pointed questions about a state secret, whether you know or don’t know it’s a secret, could be treated as “instigating leaks” and the result in an arrest and a possible jail term up to five years. Of course, the trial would be complicated since the judge would not be allowed to know what secret the accused was suspected of trying to obtain.

Ask the wrong question, five years in jail. 

And of course, trials about state secrets, would by the nature of the law, also be secret trials and closed to the public.

At this point in time, no one has really claimed authorship of the secrecy bill. The author is a secret. Kafka would seem the most likely scrivener for this perplexing legislation, if he was still alive, but ruling coalition members acknowledge that another famous white man from the past may have provided the real inspiration for the bill and its implementation.

An Upper House member of the Diet said on background to JSRC, “Deputy Prime Minister Aso Taro sort of telegraphed the punches of the administration by expressing his admiration for how the Nazi Party forcefully changed the German constitution this summer.

Two Choices to Deal With "Collective Theft"

The "Detroit Solution"

By Mike "Mish" Shedlock

Public union sap is once again oozing from the mouths of economic illiterates and union supporters who just don't understand reality.

Today's sap is brought to you courtesy of the Bloomberg article Pension Threats in Illinois, Detroit Rattle Government Workers. Here are a few sappy comments.

Bev Johns, a retired 67-year-old retired special-education teacher, sat before Illinois lawmakers and asked why they hated teachers. “You are punishing people who devoted their lives to educating children,” Johns told a committee in Springfield on Dec. 3. “You are harming individuals who have educated children, worked long hours, paid for materials out of their pocket and often fed and clothed children.” 

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents 1.5 million workers, told reporters in Washington yesterday. “The unraveling of that social contract is an unraveling of democracy.” 

Charles Craver, a labor law professor at George Washington University in Washington in a telephone interview, whines “I can’t remember any period when I think workers are so threatened.” 

William Jones, a labor historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison offers the sappiest sap of them all. "How will municipalities recruit teachers, firefighters and trash collectors if the pensions aren’t secure?"

Spare me the Sap
I am sick of watching taxes go up year in and year out so that overpaid, underworked, public union workers can get taxpayer sponsored pensions and pay well beyond what private industry gets.

That sounds harsh. And it is. But it's also reality.

Reality

1.      Cities are broke

2.    Taxpayers are broke

3.    Public union workers don't care to understand the above two points

As I said before, I sympathize. I do. And I also offered a simple solution.
Before unions drive cities into bankruptcy and states into default on pension obligations, The unions ought to get together with city and state officials and work out a plan. And the plan I have in mind would protect the benefits of the majority of union workers.

Welcome to the digital memory hole

We're watching, in real time, as 1984 turns from a futuristic fantasy long past into an instructional manual

By Peter Van Buren 
What if Edward Snowden was made to disappear? No, I'm not suggesting some future CIA rendition effort or a who-killed-Snowden conspiracy theory of a disappearance, but a more ominous kind.

What if everything a whistleblower had ever exposed could simply be made to go away? What if every National Security Agency (NSA) document Snowden released, every interview he gave, every documented trace of a national security state careening out of control could be made to disappear in real-time? What if the very posting of such revelations could be turned into a fruitless, record-less endeavor? 

Am I suggesting the plot for a novel by some twenty-first century George Orwell? Hardly. As we edge toward a fully digital world, such things may soon be possible, not in science fiction but in our world - and at the push of a button. In fact, the earliest prototypes of a new kind of "disappearance" are already being tested. We are closer to a shocking, dystopian reality that might once have been the stuff of futuristic novels than we imagine. Welcome to the memory hole. 

Even if some future government stepped over one of the last remaining red lines in our world and simply assassinated whistleblowers as they surfaced, others would always emerge. Back in 1948, in his eerie novel 1984, however, Orwell suggested a far more diabolical solution to the problem. He conjured up a technological device for the world of Big Brother that he called "the memory hole". In his dark future, armies of bureaucrats, working in what he sardonically dubbed the Ministry of Truth, spent their lives erasing or altering documents, newspapers, books, and the like in order to create an acceptable version of history. When a person fell out of favor, the Ministry of Truth sent him and all the documentation relating to him down the memory hole. Every story or report in which his life was in any way noted or recorded would be edited to eradicate all traces of him. 

In Orwell's pre-digital world, the memory hole was a vacuum tube into which old documents were physically disappeared forever. Alterations to existing documents and the deep-sixing of others ensured that even the sudden switching of global enemies and alliances would never prove a problem for the guardians of Big Brother. In the world he imagined, thanks to those armies of bureaucrats, the present was what had always been - and there were those altered documents to prove it and nothing but faltering memories to say otherwise. Anyone who expressed doubts about the truth of the present would, under the rubric of "thoughtcrime", be marginalized or eliminated. 

Government and corporate digital censorship
Increasingly, most of us now get our news, books, music, TV, movies, and communications of every sort electronically. These days, Google earns more advertising revenue than all US print media combined. Even the venerable Newsweek no longer publishes a paper edition. And in that digital world, a certain kind of "simplification" is being explored. The Chinese, Iranians, and others are, for instance, already implementing web-filtering strategies to block access to sites and online material of which their governments don't approve. The US government similarly (if somewhat fruitlessly) blocks its employees from viewing Wikileaks and Edward Snowden material (as well as websites like TomDispatch) on their work computers - though not of course at home. Yet. 

Great Britain, however, will soon take a significant step toward deciding what a private citizen can see on the web even while at home. Before the end of the year, almost all Internet users there will be "opted-in" to a system designed to filter out pornography. By default, the controls will also block access to "violent material", "extremist and terrorist related content", "anorexia and eating disorder websites", and "suicide related websites". In addition, the new settings will censor sites mentioning alcohol or smoking. The filter will also block "esoteric material", though a UK-based rights group says the government has yet to make clear what that category will include. 

The Reluctant Revolutionary

On Nelson Mandela’s inspiring achievements and tragic failures

By CHARLES LONGFORD

So it has finally come to pass that Nelson Mandela has succumbed to the inevitable and will be buried like every other mortal being. He is being praised, rightly, for his inspirational ability to rise above the brutal racial prejudices of his time. He is being characterised as the most famous victim of the old Apartheid regime, who, despite his 27 years of imprisonment, never sought vengeance against his oppressors but rather led an historic reconciliation process that transformed South Africa into a relatively peaceful, non-racial democracy.

To many, especially in this era of small politicians obsessed with petty issues, Mandela symbolises something profound: an individual willingness to devote one’s life to a grand and good cause. He has come to symbolise mankind’s desire to take a stand against repression and injustice and to create a freer, more equal world.

Alongside these nods to Mandela’s commitment to the cause of challenging Apartheid, with many news channels now playing the court recording from the early Sixties in which he said racial equality was an ideal ‘for which I am prepared to die’, Mandela is also being discussed as a kind of redeeming victim: the victim who inherited the world - more specifically, South Africa - and who prevented a bloodbath and charted a new moral path based upon reconciliation and compromise.

On one level, it is quite legitimate to describe Mandela as a victim of Apartheid. As we will see below, all blacks living in South Africa in the postwar period were victims of racial prejudice. But victimhood, suffering through oppression, is not the same thing as consciously resisting one’s oppression. To do that, what is needed is not the moral high ground that comes with victimhood, with accepting one’s lot, but rather ideas and politics that are capable of inspiring and mobilising one’s fellow victims to change their lot. We owe it to Mandela to assess his qualities as a politician and leader, and his true impact on South Africa, rather than simply remembering what was done to him by others.

Karl Marx, reflecting on the history-making potential of mankind, famously observed that men make their history but not in circumstances of their choosing. Nothing better sums up the political life of Nelson Mandela. It is useful to start with a brief outline of the conditions in which the young Mandela found himself in the early 1950s, in order to understand the circumstances that shaped his political choices and career.

Apartheid and victimhood

The common understanding of Apartheid is that it was an irrational system of racial discrimination introduced by the newly elected Afrikaner Nationalist Party when it came to power in 1948. But Apartheid was not irrational. It was a very rational response to the conditions the National Party found itself in at the time.

Up to the Second World War, South Africa was a colony of Britain. British influence restricted the development of the South African economy, centring it around the production of things Britain needed: gold, diamonds and other raw materials. This was good for Britain, but it thwarted the ambitions of the emerging indigenous capitalist class in South Africa. The National Party government elected in 1948 was strongly influenced by the independent outlook of the Afrikaners, the descendants of the early Dutch settlers. It was committed to promoting the independent development of the South African economy under the direction of local entrepreneurs. Earlier attempts to wrest control over South Africa’s gold and diamond wealth from Britain, half a century earlier, had led to the Anglo-Boer War, when Britain invaded the then independent Boer Republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State - but now, in the postwar period, Afrikaner nationalists were in control.

The indigenous white South African capitalists set about creating the conditions in which a carefully controlled labour force might produce wealth on a scale that would allow South Africa to compete on the world market. They inherited a host of racist institutions from the British administration. And they took full advantage of this existing pattern of racial discrimination to streamline the economy and realise their capitalist ambitions. A high rate of exploitation had the added advantage of attracting much-needed foreign capital.

This is what gave rise to Apartheid, the subjection of all aspects of black people’s lives to stringent and discriminatory regulation. In 1952, a new law extended influx controls, making it necessary for every black over the age of 16 to carry a ‘reference book’ – the notorious ‘pass’. Another law proclaimed that blacks had no right to live in urban areas. The tribally based homelands for blacks – covering less than 13 per cent of South Africa’s total land space and based in remote and barren areas (initially established by British colonialism) – were now constituted as the only places where blacks were legally entitled to live and own land. ‘Separate development’ was enshrined in law.