Why Is Pope Francis Promoting Sin?

The risks of preaching envy

By Lant Pritchett

Pope Francis recently weighed in on the economics of inequality. As a professional in that field, I could respond by detailing his errors of fact and reasoning. Maybe some other time. For now, I think that if the pope can pronounce on economics, then it’s only fair that I -- a full-time preacher of economics -- should be allowed to opine on his grasp of Christian morality.

By dwelling on inequality, the pope is promoting envy. The Catholic Church, I had always understood, disapproves of envy, deeming it one of the seven deadly sins. I would have expected Francis to urge people to think of themselves in relation to God and to their own fullest potential. Encouraging people to measure themselves against others only leads to grief. Resenting the success of others is a sin in itself.

The first sin outside the Garden of Eden was Cain’s slaying of his younger brother, Abel, out of envy that the Lord had accepted Abel’s offering but not his. God told Cain: “If you act rightly, you will be accepted; but if not, sin lies in wait at the door.” (Genesis 4:7) Worry about your standing with God, not about what others have or don’t have.

The Ten Commandments conclude with: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, his male or female slave, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” (Exodus 20:17)

The New Testament reports that the early church “had everything in common” (Acts 4:32), a situation into which two of the deadly sins quickly intruded. Greed first, with Ananias and Sapphira lying to protect their property. (Acts 5:1-11) Then envy, as “the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution.” (Acts 6:1) What was the response of the apostles? That this petty envy was a problem, but beneath their concern: “It is not right for us to neglect the word of God to serve at table.” (Acts 6:2)

While Jesus repeatedly preached against the love of riches, he was urging people to respond to a call to God and to become “rich to God.” It was not an appeal for people to resent the riches of others and obsess about material inequality. Jesus, when asked to remedy inequality, turned the focus back on envy and greed.
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Read more at :

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-15/why-is-pope-francis-promoting-sin-.html?alcmpid=view

The Classical Liberal Constitution

Both progressives and conservatives fundamentally misunderstand our most important founding document.

by Richard A. Epstein

This coming week, Harvard University Press will publish my new book, The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government. This 700-page volume took me over seven years to complete, and it offers a distinctive third approach to constitutional law that helps explain why the current Supreme Court’s conceptual framework is in a state of serious intellectual disrepair on many, but by no means all, issues.

Conventional wisdom divides constitutional judges and scholars into two warring camps: conservative and progressive. The classical liberal offers a third point of view, by explaining how our Constitution secures a system of strong property rights and limited government. It does so by rejecting the deep antitheoretical strand that often guides both conservative and progressive thought, and leads both groups—for somewhat different reasons—to support a highly deferential, if misnamed, “rational basis” test to assess the constitutionality of congressional and legislative action.

The Lochner Syndrome

Conservative thinkers often start their constitutional analysis with neither text nor structure, but with their own view of the proper role of the Supreme Court in a democratic society. In their view, the essential choices about the social and economic structure properly belong to the political branches of government at both the federal and state level.

The view holds that the judiciary should override statutes and executive actions only in exceptional cases. They think no judge should translate his policy objections to particular laws into constitutional terms. Thus, in The Tempting of America, Robert Bork called the Supreme Court’s 1905 decision in Lochner v. New York—which by a five-to-four vote declared New York’s controversial maximum-hours law unconstitutional—an “abomination” that “lives in the law as the symbol, indeed the quintessence of judicial usurpation of power.”

Unlike conservatives, progressives defend these laws. But their judicial attitude is driven by the same skepticism about judicial intervention in economic matters. That is the message of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous Lochner dissent: “a constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire.”

So it is that two giants at the opposite ends of the political spectrum make the identical mistake: Neither thinks that it is possible to map onto the U.S. Constitution a substantive theory of government. Holmes makes that mistake when he talks about “a constitution” when the proper frame of reference should be the United States Constitution. Bork decriesLochner as “judicial usurpation” because he denies that there can be an independent textual or structural basis for striking down any economic regulation, no matter how misguided it may be.

What is perverse about both positions is that a constitution (indeed any constitution) is adopted precisely to establish some permanent framework in which laws can be made and validated. An ancient constitution could follow Justinian’s maxim “quod principi placuit legis vigorem habet,” which states, “that which is pleasing unto the prince has the force of law.” However, the U.S. Constitution explicitly rejects this approach by adopting all sorts of measures intended to diffuse the power of public officials: in part through federalism, in part through the division of government power into the Congress, the President and the Courts. These structural protections are augmented by a broad catalogue of individual rights, which checks both federal and the state power. Judicial usurpation is, to be sure, one sin. But to read these broad protections narrowly is the inverse mistake of judicial abnegation.

As applied to Lochner’s maximum hour law, the legislature should be required to justify exactly why, in a free society, it has the right to make a judgment about how many hours individuals should work and under what conditions. That point may not be absolute, but by the same token, ordinary liberty does carry with it the presumptive right to choose employment of one’s choice, with narrow exceptions for military service and jury duty.

Otherwise, surely under our Constitution, no state could order its citizens to accept certain jobs against their will. The same principle against governmental interference with individual liberty also is at work when government seeks to stop people from working in a job of their own choosing. If A uses force to prevent B from working for C, he commits the tort of interference with advantageous relations, and can be enjoined from that behavior. Put government in the role of A, and it is in exactly the same position.

The Police Power Exception

Of course, government prohibits people from engaging in criminal activity and taking advantage of the helpless. Indeed, both of those long-standing social norms have become embedded in the police power, under which federal and state governments may regulate individual activity to protect, as the phrase goes, “the safety, health, morals and general welfare” of the public at large. Inclusive as this list may seem, it does not negate key constitutional guarantees. In particular, the police power rationale does not let government pass overtly paternalist legislation on the one hand or overtly anticompetitive legislation (as in Lochner) on the other.

It is here that the underlying substantive vision matters. Under the classical liberal constitution, maintaining a free and open market for both capital and labor is an essential government function, which resonates in the explicit guarantees with respect to contract, private property, and the freedom of speech and the press. These apparently disparate guarantees are all linked together by the common sentiment that the state must show a serious justification before it can limit their exercise. The class of justifications is not open-ended, and it never includes the anticompetitive and protectionist legislation that is routinely sustained based on a supposed need to correct abuses of the market that are unrelated to duress, fraud, and monopoly.

More specifically, the proper scope of the police power is tied to the two reasons that lead people to join a political compact in the first place. The first reason is to control the use of force and fraud. The second is to allow state taxation and coercion to facilitate gainful interactions among individuals who are unable by themselves to create the much needed public goods—including defending against foreign threats, maintaining domestic order at home, and providing the common infrastructure of roads and other public facilities—because of insuperable transaction costs. The simple but powerful notion that justifies these coercive actions is that all individuals receive just compensation from the state for their tax dollars in the form of a higher level of personal security and economic prosperity.

Making This Work

The willful suppression of private competition does not come within a country mile of serving these objectives. Instead, misguided legislation often spends public dollars to make all private citizens worse off than they would otherwise be, which is not the case when the sensible enforcement of the antitrust laws controls cartels and other anticompetitive activities.

It is just this basic pattern that explains the greatest successes of our constitutional order. When the justices escape their habitual skepticism about the power of legal theory, they can work wonders by making those key judgments needed to implement the classical liberal constitution. When the justices care about outcomes, they become classical liberals in spite of themselves. Here are two examples.

Read more at :

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/162686

Breaking The UniParty

So long as the Uniparty exists, mere voters will have no way of affecting what the government does

by Angelo M. Codevilla

Yet again, for the nth time, Republican Congressional leaders and their Democrat counterparts produced a Trillion dollar, multi-thousand-page spending bill that was voted immediately after being unveiled, without having been read. Republican 2012 vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan authored the latest edition along with Democratic Senator Patti Murray. Republican leader John Boehner preempted Democrats by preemptively accusing Republicans who opposed the bill of wanting to shut down the government. He topped off this feat of leadership by declaring political war on the conservatives who had given Republicans the majority that had made him Speaker of the House – a war that Republican leaders cannot sustain.

The Republican Party’s leaders have functioned as junior members of America’s single ruling party, the UniParty. Acting as the proverbial cockboat in the wake of the Democrats’ man-of-war, they have made Democratic priorities their own when the White House and the Congress were in the hands of Republicans as well as in those of Democrats, and when control has been mixed. The UniParty, the party of government, the party of Ins, continues to consist of the same people. The Outs are always the same people too: American conservatives. They don’t have a party.

Whatever differences exist within the Uniparty, between Republican John Boehner and Democrat Nancy Pelosi, between Republican Mitch McConnell and Democrat Harry Reid, get worked out behind closed doors. Those differences are narrow. The latest negotiations were over some $80 billion out of three trillion dollars in spending. The bipartisan negotiators did not let into the room any of the major issues that concern Americans. Not Obamacare, not racial preferences, not religious liberty, not endless no-win wars. The UniParty is unanimous: more of the same!

Hence, so long as the Uniparty exists, mere voters will have no way of affecting what the government does.

Breaking up the Uniparty, means breaking the Democrats’ hold on non- Democrat congressmen and senators. The only way to do that is to break the Republican leadership’s hold on other Republicans and on the Republican label. That in turn requires using the primaries to screen out UniParty people.

Doing this is more possible than ever, providing conservatives learn to hang together before they are hanged separately.
...

Read more at :

http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/12/15/breaking-the-uniparty/

Charts of the day, world manufacturing output, 2012

Still, not a zero sum game

By Mark J. Perry

The charts above are based on new data from the United Nations on GDP and its components for more than 200 countries, updated through 2012. Here are some highlights of the UN’s data update:

1. The top chart compares the annual manufacturing output from 1970 to 2012 (measured in current US dollars) for the five countries that produced the most manufacturing output last year: China, US, Japan, Germany, and Korea.  As I reported last year, China officially became the world’s largest manufacturer in 2011, with output in 2011 ($2.34 trillion) that was 20.6% higher than the $1.94 trillion (updated) of factory output in the U.S. In 2012, China’s manufacturing output increased by 9.7% to $2.556 trillion, while factory output in the US increased by 2.6% to $1.993 trillion. For the second year in a row, China was the world’s largest manufacturer and out-produced the US by 28.2%. Previously, China’s manufacturing output exceed German’s factory output in 2000, and Japan’s output in 2006.

2. The U.S. is still a world leader in manufacturing and America’s factory output continues to increase, despite the rise of China to the world’s No. 1 manufacturer. The bottom chart above puts the enormous size of the U.S. manufacturing sector into perspective, by comparing America’s manufacturing output in 2012 ($1.993 trillion) to the combined manufacturing output of Germany, Korea, Italy, Russia, Brazil and India, which are the countries that are ranked No. 4 through No. 9 in 2012 for manufacturing output.

3. It’s also important to remember that China’s manufacturing workforce is estimated to be around 100 million and could be as high as 110 million, compared to America’s manufacturing employment of slightly more than 12 million. Therefore, even though China is producing more manufacturing output than the US, the productivity of American factory workers is so high compared to China, that China needs almost ten factory workers for every one American worker to produce 28% more output. On a per worker basis, the average American factory was responsible for $166,000 of output in 2012, while the average Chinese factory was responsible for less than $26,000 of manufacturing output; the productivity of American factory workers was more than six times that of the average worker in China.

Read more at :

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/12/charts-of-the-day-world-manufacturing-output-2012/

South Africa’s Dubious Liberation

The lizard-skin-shoe class still prospers in South Africa

by Theodore Dalrymple

The unctuous pseudo-grief in the West after Nelson Mandela’s death at the good age of 95 was to me nauseating in the extreme; it was so overdone that, though I am no Freudian, it raised suspicions in my mind of reaction formation, the psychological defense mechanism against unwanted thoughts described by Freud that leads to exaggerated expressions of precisely opposite thoughts. The Guardian and the Observer, Britain’s two foremost liberal-left newspapers, had between them approximately fifty broadsheet pages devoted to Mandela, many times more than the return and re-crucifixion of Christ would have received. Methinks these newspapers (and many others) did protest too much. 

This is not to say that Mandela was without importance or that he merited no praise. His greatest achievement by far, and an important one, was the avoidance of the interracial violence that had long been predicted as “inevitable” in South Africa and the only way things would ever change there. He did this by his dignity and lack of rancor after his release from prison and during his presidency, the first presidency post-apartheid. For example, his enthusiasm for the South African team in the rugby World Cup, whether genuine or not, was a wise and shrewd way of trying to prove that South African patriotism should transcend racial divides, for of course the team was mostly white. No better way of calming fears symbolically could well have been imagined; Mandela played the part to perfection, and all honor to him for that.

“There is nothing like adversity to produce both swine and admirable people.”

But we should not exaggerate, either. The event that saved his historical reputation was not under his control. It was the downfall of the Soviet Union, for it was surely not a coincidence that the un-banning of the African National Congress and the release of Mandela himself happened only after the implosion of the Soviet bloc. Until then the Communist Party of South Africa, both the most Stalinist and the most resolutely pro-Soviet of communist parties anywhere (not always an easy balance to preserve), had what in Soviet langue de bois was called “a leading role” in the ANC.

As it happened I was in South Africa about the time of the great transition, shortly after the ANC was legalized, and I interviewed Joe Slovo, one of the communist leaders of the ANC who had just returned from exile. (His wife, Ruth First, a woman who liked every revolution however disastrous its effects, was murdered by the South African Secret Service by means of a letter bomb.) 

Slovo, who wrote Pravda-style langue de bois fluently, was a pleasant man, but I found him to be not particularly intelligent. When I asked him whether during his many visits to the Soviet Union he had noticed anything about it—for example, the absence of goods in the shops and the lack of freedom—he replied that what I had to understand was that the Soviet Union had always supported the freedom struggle in South Africa and that he was always the honored guest of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and that therefore he was always driven in limousines from the airport to excellent accommodation where he was very well fed and watered. 

This did not strike me as a particularly impressive answer. I asked him whether he thought it was not a little foolish to recommend an entire socioeconomic system for South Africa on the experiential basis of flattery of his person and the consumption of banquets, and he rather feebly agreed that perhaps it had been.

By then, of course, there was no possibility of South Africa following the Soviet path; by then Russia had neither the means nor the will to support or prop up yet another catastrophically failed state in Africa, this time on a scale far exceeding its previous efforts. Prominent leaders of the ANC whom I met had by then dropped all ideological pretensions of a Soviet hue and had gone over to sharp mohair suits and lizard-skin shoes.

Read more at:

http://takimag.com/article/south_africas_dubious_liberation_theodore_dalrymple#axzz2nbkKdcmw

Coal in the Global Energy Landscape

World demand could propel coal to the planet’s number one energy source by 2017, surpassing oil

By Nicolas Loris

An abundant, affordable energy resource, coal provides 30 percent of the world’s energy, 41 percent of the world’s electricity generation and factors into 70 percent of the world’s steel production.[1] While coal is by no means the only source of energy developed across the globe, it is a critical resource to driving economic growth all over the world and will continue to be so well into the future.

As the U.S. federal government is promulgating and applying regulations to significantly reduce the use of coal, the rest of the world’s use could propel coal to the planet’s number one energy source by 2017, surpassing oil.[2] The purpose of this paper is not to promote one source of energy over another—markets should drive energy production and consumption. Instead, this paper reviews coal use in other parts of the world to highlight how vital it is to current and future economic growth and improved standards of living.

China and India

Both coal production and coal use are occurring at rapid rates in two of the world’s largest and fastest growing economies. China has gone from producing 13.6 percent of the world’s coal in 1973 to 45.3 percent in 2012.[3] India is now the world’s third-largest producer of coal and is projected to surpass the United States to become the second-largest in the next five years.

China and India are first and third, respectively, in terms of top coal importing countries as well, with Japan at number two.[4] And there are no plans to curtail the use of coal in China or India: Of the 1,200 proposals for coal-fired power plants worldwide, China and India account for 818 of them.

Southeast Asia, South Asia, and East Asia

Although India and China account for much of Asia’s current and future coal use, other regions of Asia use large amounts of coal and have plans to use more in the future. There are plans to build 95 more plants, with most of them being built in Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Vietnam is cutting back on exports to meet its own domestic energy needs and has plans to increase coal-fired generation fivefold by 2020.[5] Although coal use has declined in recent years in Indonesia (providing 22 percent of total energy consumption), coal production more than quadrupled from 2001 to 2011.[6] Indonesia reformed its laws to increase transparency and encourage more foreign investment, and the country is now the world’s fourth-largest coal producer and the top exporter.[7]

Europe

Europe’s push to transition to renewable energy sources has been very public, but its reliance on coal receives less attention. There are plans to build 69 coal-fired power plants in Europe as well as another 47 in Turkey and 48 in Russia.[8]

As a result of the current and upcoming regulations impacting the coal industry and abundantly cheap natural gas, the U.S. is shipping more of its coal to Europe. The decommissioning of nuclear plants in Germany, Europe’s lag behind the U.S. in exploiting its shale plays, and the scaling back of renewable energy subsidies are all playing a part in Europe’s increased coal use.[9] European coal mining is also increasing because of burgeoning Asian markets.

Read more at:

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/12/coal-in-the-global-energy-landscape

Love for Sale

Ukraine Goes To The Highest Bidder

Is the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement coming back to life? Lady Catherine Ashton, Europe’s foreign affairs chief, announced that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich told her that he does, in fact, plan on signing the deal. But not for free:

Mr Yanukovych pulled out of the deal last month, explaining that Kiev could not afford to sacrifice trade with Russia. While adding that he still aimed to sign the deal, he said Ukraine would need at least 20bn euros (£17bn; $27bn) a year to upgrade its economy.

Baroness Ashton said on Thursday: “It is my view that those challenges, which are real, can be addressed by the support that not only comes from the European Union institutions, but actually by showing that he has a serious economic plan in signing the association agreement also will help to bring in the kind of investment that he needs.”

It’s all about the Benjamins (or the euro-equivalent thereof). Yanukovich appears to be holding an auction, but will power slip from his hands before all the bids are in?

The Dangers of Majoritarian Democracy

How to reconcile our peoples to living in open societies

by Pedro Schwartz
In my previous column, "Overcoming the Contradictionsof Liberal Democracy: Sociobiology and Social Engineering,"  I promised to proceed with the analysis of the paradoxes of liberal democracy. The first one I explained was that the institutions of the Great Society might prove to be neither natural nor rational and could therefore be resisted or even rejected in democratic societies. My conclusion was rather disturbing: in a nutshell, "man has been civilized very much against his wishes", as Friedrich Hayek said.

In this column I will discuss the following paradoxes that also make liberal democracy an unstable system, to wit:

• That the democratic vote may result in communal decisions that nobody wants.
• That the confusion of individual liberty with the enjoyment of sufficient means for self-fulfillment leads to the corruption of democracy.
• That what is considered the normal venue for popular sovereignty—the nation—may often be the source of stifling tribalism.

I. SOME IMPERFECTIONS OF THE DEMOCRATIC VOTE

The fundamental question of politics

One of the ideas of Plato that Karl Popper most decidedly criticized was that the object of political philosophy consisted in answering the question, who should rule and how to educate those who would govern. For Popper this was the wrong question: one should rather ask, how to control government, how to set up checks and balances to divide power.1 Popper's main argument for this change of focus was the 'paradox of liberty'. If one tried to vest power on whoever was the best and the wisest, as Plato wanted, there was the danger that this person could turn out to be a tyrant. At its extreme, the popular vote could be self-destructive: what if the people democratically willed to be governed by a populist strong-man? This is not as rare as one could wish; remember Austria's vote for Hitler or Argentina's for Perón.

Here we have another paradox of the kind I am grappling with in these columns.2 The starting point of this vicious circle is the realization that a large enough body of men cannot organize itself to govern directly for the good of all. To achieve common aims, power has to be entrusted to a sufficiently small number of people. Even so, disorder would threaten if these rulers fought for power: sovereignty should be undivided. This makes it imperative to choose the sovereign well: hence the Platonic question. But what if the sovereign abused its powers? Long experience tells us how transient the qualities are that may have led to the choice of a sovereign, if choice there was. In the end, whoever exercises undivided sovereignty can impose his or her fickle will on those who selected her, or use power to exploit a minority with the connivance of the majority, or simply indulge in corruption.

It is indeed better to have a good woman or man at the helm, but in politics usually the worst get to the top. The emphasis should be elsewhere; it should lay on establishing strong enough barriers or checks to stop the prince from abusing his power. Contrary to what so many political thinkers and constitutional lawyers have said over the years, sovereignty should be divided. That is the only way to break what one could call 'the Leviathan paradox'.3

Imperfections of democracy

Many modern constitutions proclaim that sovereignty is ultimately vested on the people. In that case, the power of the people must also be divided if liberty is to endure. Democracy can therefore not be defined as the rule by majority vote. Neither does it imply that the vote of the majority is "an authoritative expression of what is right". 4 Fundamental to our living under a democratic constitution is that we accept the result of votes because we want our free institutions to function in their own limited way, even though we may not agree with this or that decision.

Read more at:

http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2013/Schwartzmajoritarian.html

Crime and No Punishment

"Affluenza"

A wealthy Texas teenager who killed four pedestrians in a DUI is being let off with only probation because he was afflicted with a curious disease: ‘affluenza’. No joke. The LA Times explains exactly how this dreaded scourge works:

A psychologist testified for the defense that the teen is a product of something he called “affluenza” and doesn’t link bad behavior with consequences because his parents taught him that wealth buys privilege, the psychologist said in court, according to media reports.

That psychologist cited one instance when the boy, then 15, was caught in a parked pickup with a naked 14-year-old girl who was passed out. He was never punished, the psychologist said, noting to the court that the teenager was allowed to drink at a very young age, and even began driving at 13.

We’re not highly-paid psychiatrist-consultants, but we do think there is one surefire cure for a bad case of ‘affluenza’: jail.

We’re also not, of course, in a position to judge all of the facts in the case; there could be much going on here that doesn’t come across in the article. But the idea that someone should get better treatment because he or she is wealthy and therefore has a poor moral compass is insane and destructive. It’s hard to imagine a greater perversion of the principle of equality before the law. 

Italy's "Pitchfork Protests" Spread to Rome

Interior Minister Warns of "Drift Into Rebellion"

By Mike "Mish" Shedlock

Over the past four days "pitchfork protests" have spread to numerous cities, disrupting road and rail travel in protest of the state of the economy.

The pitchfork movement started with a loose group of Sicilian farmers concerned about rising taxes and cuts to agricultural state funds, then evolved into a nationwide umbrella grouping of truckers, small businessman, the unemployed, low-paid workers, rightwing extremists and ultras football supporters according to IBTimes.

Pitchfork Protests Spread to Rome
Reuters reports Italy's 'pitchfork protests,' in fourth day, spread to Rome. 

 Italy's "pitchfork" protests spread to Rome on Thursday when hundreds of students clashed with police and threw firecrackers outside a university where government ministers were attending a conference.

Truckers, small businessmen, the unemployed, students and low-paid workers have staged four days of rallies in cities from Turin in the north to Sicily in the south in the name of the "pitchfork" movement, originally a loosely organized group of farmers from Sicily.

"There are millions of us and we are growing by the hour. This government has to go," said Danilo Calvani, a farmer who has emerged as one of the leader of the protests.

Interior Minister Angelino Alfano told parliament the unrest could "lead to a spiral of rebellion against national and European institutions."

The protests are fuelled by falling incomes, unemployment above 12 percent and at a record 41 percent among people below 25, and graft and scandals among politicians widely seen as serving their own rather than the country's interests.

The protesters' precise aims remain vague beyond demanding the government be replaced and parliament dissolved. Targets range from tax collection agency Equitalia and high fuel prices to privileged elites and the euro.

Mario Borghezio, an outspoken Northern League member of the European Parliament, on Thursday used the protests to attack the euro and European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi.

"The wind of revolt that is blowing in Italy today is the direct result of the euro and the wrong choices made by the EU and the ECB," he said during the ECB chief's testimony to the European Parliament.

Russia’s Return to the Middle East

Nature Abhors a Vacuum

U.S. fatigue and distraction in the Middle East has made ample room for Russia to step in as the new patron, power-broker and custodian of the region. Washington should think twice about welcoming this development.

By MICHAEL WEISS

Russia is back. At least that’s what they say—especially the Russians. 2013 marks the year that the Kremlin reasserted its power abroad in ways not seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and nowhere has this reassertion been more obvious than in the Middle East. From Syria to Egypt to Iran to Israel, Moscow is now seen to be moving in on America’s turf, usurping the only superpower’s traditional role as safeguard of a region that, whether or not it cares to admit it, has always looked to the United States to solve its problems. But now a new patron has arrived in the neighborhood with the offer of advanced weaponry and a cold disregard for how dictatorial regimes choose to conduct their “internal” affairs. Unlike Washington, this patron has shown a willingness to stand by its friends in extremity and is more than happy to wage diplomatic war with the West if those friends’ survival is ever called into question. Russia’s restoration in the Middle East has been built upon America’s abdication.

Without a doubt, the crowning ceremony was the Kremlin’s deft ownership of international diplomacy on the 18-month crisis in Syria, one that has so far killed more than 120,000 people, including by the repeated use of chemical weapons, and yet has remarkably culminated in the re-legitimization of the person responsible for it, Bashar al-Assad.  The Syrian civil war— particularly the White House’s inept and improvisational response to it—has accidentally transformed Putin into a major power-broker for the post-Arab Spring Middle East. (This is no small feat considering that Sunni Muslim antipathy toward Russia is at a record high because of Syria.)  It has turned Moscow into the new hub for geopolitical influencing in the region, the world capital where the Egyptian general staff, the Saudi intelligence chief, the Israeli prime minister and even now the U.S.-backed Syrian opposition all feel they must pay call in order to get things done. And while it’s true that Russia hasn’t the GDP, military reach, or reputation to completely hobble U.S. influence in the Middle East, it doesn’t need to do that to pose a threat to U.S. interests. Putin’s objective is to offer himself as a steady alternative to a fickle Obama: a partner in arms deals and Security Council obstruction who won’t run away or downgrade a relationship over such trivia as human rights, mass murder or coups d’état. Putin has apologized for and facilitated the worst humanitarian catastrophe of the 21^st century under the guise of international law and a respect for state sovereignty. This is an invaluable friend for a dictator to have in his corner.

How Mandela’s Worshippers Are Rewriting History

They’ve airbrushed out the true destroyers of Apartheid: the black masses.

By BRENDAN O’NEILL

In the seven days since the death of Nelson Mandela, many a Western right-winger has found himself accused of rewriting history. For politicians like David Cameron of Britain’s Conservative Party to gush and blub over Mandela is outrageous, critics claim, considering his party was hardly a friend to the cause of anti-Apartheid in the 1970s and 80s. All this ‘right-wing fawning’ for Madiba – as every white liberal in Christendom has rather embarrassingly taken to calling Mandela – is nauseating, we’re told, given it is coming from some of the same organisations and people who either backed or were ambivalent about Apartheid just 30 years ago. These people are trying to ‘rewrite’ the past, says South Africa-born Labour MP Peter Hain. It’s like Pontius Pilate paying tribute to Jesus Christ, says one melodramatic observer.

It is true that the history of South Africa is being rewritten in the wake of Mandela’s death. But it isn’t being rewritten by right-wing opportunists scrambling for a feel of Mandela’s holy hem. Rather, it’s the mainstream canonisation of Mandela, indulged by everyone from Barack Obama to the NGO industry to the entire sphere of liberal commentary and campaigning, which is warping the truth about what happened in South Africa.

It is the secular beatification of Mandela, the increasingly unhinged cult of global mourning for this ‘great liberator’, the transformation of Mandela into a Christ-like ‘saviour’ of black South Africans from the horrors and deprivations of Apartheid, which is doing far graver harm to historical truth than someone like Cameron could ever achieve. For it is airbrushing from history the true destroyer of Apartheid, which was not Mandela, or even his African National Congress, far less those white folk with consciences who refused to buy certain oranges at the Hampstead branch of Waitrose in the 1980s, but rather South Africa’s teeming, convulsing black masses.

The mainstream story of Mandela that has been foisted on us by Washington downwards over the past week is built on a fallacy: that Mandela liberated South Africa; that he was, in the words of one observer, ‘the man who brought down Apartheid’; that he was a Jesus-like figure whose ‘colossal moral strength’ transformed South Africa from a racist hellhole into a new nation with ‘majority black rule’. By this religious-style reading, Mandela, simply by conjuring up his inner moral resources, remade an entire nation and boosted the fortunes of its sad, benighted inhabitants.

Read more at:

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/mandelas_cult_like_worshippers_rewriting_history/14410#.Uq6AEdLPaqg

Culture of Death

Belgian Senate Approves Child Euthanasia

By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

Yesterday the Belgium Senate approved, by a vote of 50-17, a bill allowing terminally ill children to opt for euthanasia. As long as the child meets the normal Belgium standards for euthanasia (terminal; in great pain; conscious of this decision; has parental and medical approval), there will no longer be any age limit on the practice. The BBC has more:

During the Senate debate, supporters of the bill said it would empower doctors and terminally-ill children to make a difficult decision.

“There is no age for suffering and, next to that, it’s very important that we have a legal framework for the doctors who are confronted with this demand today and for the minors, for the capable minors, who are suffering today, and who I think should have the freedom to choose how they cope with their suffering,” said Senator Jean-Jacques de Gucht, of the Open Flemish Liberals and Democrats.

This story shows just how quickly allowing limited mercy killing for terminally ill adults can lead to wider political and social consequences. It’s now common knowledge that euthanasia cases skyrocketed in Belgium after it was legalized for adults—the number of cases increased by 25 percent from 2011 to 2012—and that legality manufactures demand. It’s less often acknowledged that legalizing euthanasia can give cover to people who want to pressure relatives into it for financial or other reasons.

Consider the Netherlands, where doctors are never prosecuted for euthanizing children under age 12, even though that is still legally forbidden. There the illness doesn’t have to be terminal—just very painful—and the Royal Dutch Medical Association says the pain doesn’t even have to be physical.  That same association has recently come out in favor of euthanizing infants and newborns, a practice which has already been goingon for several years.

But never fear. While both Belgium and the Netherlands are busy allowing euthanasia for people who aren’t even old enough to consent to sex by their own laws, the Royal Dutch Medical Association has launched another campaign: stamping out circumcision, which is a “violation of children’s rights.”

Everyday Monsters in Havana

A Moment of Zen in the Midst of Chaos

Please click on the image to watch the video

After the violent arrest of her husband, Antonio Rodiles, at the Human Rights Conference sponsored by Estado de Sats, Ailer Gonzalez chose a moment of non-violence in the midst of the madness. As children, still in their uniforms and taken out of school to spend the day harassing human rights advocates swirled around her, Ailer sat quietly under the Havana sun…

Note: At the beginning of the video in the bottom left Antonio’s mother (green dress and cane) can be seen walking back to the house after the arrest with one of the conference participants who then turns back to talk to Ailer. The other adults in video are primarily plainclothes State Security agents working for the Ministry of the Interior. The flag the children are waving (other than Cuba’s) is Venezuela’s.

Funeral Spice

Relish the accidental comedy in a humorless world

By Mark Steyn

‘I don’t want to be emotional but this is one of the greatest moments of my life,” declared Nelson Mandela upon meeting the Spice Girls in 1997. So I like to think he would have appreciated the livelier aspects of his funeral observances. The Prince of Wales, who was also present on that occasion in Johannesburg, agreed with Mandela on the significance of their summit with the girls: “It is the second-greatest moment in my life,” he said. “The greatest was when I met them the first time.” His Royal Highness and at least two Spice Girls (reports are unclear) attended this week’s service in Soweto, and I’m sure it was at least the third-greatest moment in all of their lives. Don’t ask me where the other Spice Girls were. It is a melancholy reflection that the Spice Girls’ delegation was half the size of Canada’s, which flew in no fewer than four Canadian prime ministers, which is rather more Canadian prime ministers than one normally needs to make the party go with a swing.

But the star of the show was undoubtedly Thamsanqa Jantjie, the sign-language interpreter who stood alongside the world’s leaders and translated their eulogies for the deaf. Unfortunately, he translated them into total gibberish, reduced by the time of President Obama’s appearance to making random hand gestures, as who has not felt the urge to do during the great man’s speeches. Mr. Jantjie has now pleaded in mitigation that he was having a sudden hallucination because he is a violent schizophrenic. It has not been established whether he is, in fact, a violent schizophrenic, or, as with his claim to be a sign-language interpreter, merely purporting to be one. Asked how often he has been violent, he replied, somewhat cryptically, “A lot.”

Still, South African officials are furiously pointing fingers (appropriately enough) to account for how he wound up onstage. “I do not think he was just picked up off the street. He was from a school for the deaf,” Hendrietta Bogopane-Zulu, the Deputy Minister for Persons with Disability, assured the press. But the Deaf Federation of South Africa said it had previously complained about his nonsensical signing after an event last year. Mr. Jantjie was paid a grand total of $85 for his simultaneous translation of the speeches of the U.N. secretary-general, six presidents, the head of the African Union, and a dozen other dignitaries. Ms. Bogopane-Zulu notes that the going rate for signing in South Africa is $125 to $165. So she thinks a junior official may simply have awarded the contract to the lowest bid.