The Age of Intolerance

The forces of “tolerance” are intolerant of anything less than full-blown celebratory approval

By Mark Steyn

Last week, following the public apology of an English comedian and the arrest of a fellow British subject both for making somewhat feeble Mandela gags, I noted that supposedly free societies were increasingly perilous places for those who make an infelicitous remark. So let’s pick up where we left off:

Here are two jokes one can no longer tell on American television. But you can still find them in the archives, out on the edge of town, in Sub-Basement Level 12 of the ever-expanding Smithsonian Mausoleum of the Unsayable. First, Bob Hope, touring the world in the year or so after the passage of the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill:

“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”

For Hope, this was an oddly profound gag, discerning even at the dawn of the Age of Tolerance that there was something inherently coercive about the enterprise. Soon it would be insufficient merely to be “tolerant” — warily accepting, blithely indifferent, mildly amused, tepidly supportive, according to taste. The forces of “tolerance” would become intolerant of anything less than full-blown celebratory approval.

Second joke from the archives: Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra kept this one in the act for a quarter-century. On stage, Dino used to have a bit of business where he’d refill his tumbler and ask Frank, “How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Sinatra would respond, “I dunno. How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Dean would say, “Be nice to him.”

But no matter how nice you are, it’s never enough. Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson, in his career-detonating interview with GQ, gave a rather thoughtful vernacular exegesis of the Bible’s line on sin, while carefully insisting that he and other Christians are obligated to love all sinners and leave it to the Almighty to adjudicate the competing charms of drunkards, fornicators, and homosexuals. Nevertheless, GLAAD — “the gatekeepers of politically correct gayness” as the (gay) novelist Bret Easton Ellis sneered — saw their opportunity and seized it. By taking out TV’s leading cable star, they would teach an important lesson pour encourager les autres — that espousing conventional Christian morality, even off-air, is incompatible with American celebrity.

Some of my comrades, who really should know better, wonder why, instead of insisting Robertson be defenestrated, GLAAD wouldn’t rather “start a conversation.” But, if you don’t need to, why bother? Most Christian opponents of gay marriage oppose gay marriage; they don’t oppose the right of gays to advocate it. Yet thug groups like GLAAD increasingly oppose the right of Christians even to argue their corner. It’s quicker and more effective to silence them.

As Christian bakers ordered to provide wedding cakes for gay nuptials and many others well understand, America’s much-vaunted “freedom of religion” is dwindling down to something you can exercise behind closed doors in the privacy of your own abode or at a specialist venue for those of such tastes for an hour or so on Sunday morning, but when you enter the public square you have to leave your faith back home hanging in the closet. Yet even this reductive consolation is not permitted to Robertson: GLAAD spokesgay Wilson Cruz declared that “Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil’s lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe.” Robertson was quoting the New Testament, but hey, what do those guys know? In today’s America, land of the Obamacare Pajama Boy, Jesus is basically Nightshirt Boy, a fey non-judgmental dweeb who’s cool with whatever. What GLAAD is attempting would be called, were it applied to any other identity group, “cultural appropriation.”

In the broader sense, it’s totalitarian. While American gays were stuffing and mounting the duck hunter in their trophy room, the Prince of Wales was celebrating Advent with Christian refugees from the Middle East, and noting that the land in which Christ and Christianity were born is now the region boasting “the lowest concentration of Christians in the world — just four percent of the population.” It will be three, and two, and one percent soon enough, for there is a totalitarian impulse in resurgent Islam — and not just in Araby. A few miles from Buckingham Palace, Muslims in London’s East End are now sufficiently confident to go around warning local shopkeepers to cease selling alcohol. In theory, you might still enjoy the right to sell beer in Tower Hamlets or be a practicing Christian in Iraq, but in reality not so much. The asphyxiating embrace of ideological conformity was famously captured by Nikolai Krylenko, the People’s Commissar for Justice, in a speech to the Soviet Congress of Chess Players in 1932, at which he attacked the very concept of “the neutrality of chess.” It was necessary for chess to be Sovietized like everything else. “We must organize shock brigades of chess players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess,” he declared.  

Six years later, the political winds having shifted, Krylenko was executed as an enemy of the people. But his spirit lives on among the Commissars of Gay Compliance at GLAAD. It is not enough to have gay marriage for gays. Everything must be gayed. There must be Five-Year Gay Plans for American bakeries, and the Christian church, and reality TV. There must be shock brigades of gay duck-hunters honking out the party line deep in the backwoods of the proletariat. Obamacare pajama models, if not yet mandatorily gay, can only be dressed in tartan onesies and accessorized with hot chocolate so as to communicate to the Republic’s maidenhood what a thankless endeavor heterosexuality is in contemporary America.

 Read more at:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/366896/age-intolerance-mark-steyn

Police Claim Teen Shot Himself In Head—While Handcuffed Behind Back

We are just collateral damage in their 'war on crime'

By Anthony Gregory

If the police found a dead body in the back of your car, hands tied behind the back, with a hole in the head, and your defense was that the person shot himself, how do you think they would react?

And yet this has happened in police cars at least three times. This time, in Durhman, North Carolina, a teenager, searched, arrested, handcuffed behind his back, shoved in the back of a police car, supposedly shot himself in the head with a firearm the police apparently had failed to find. If the cops’ story is true, we have a case of a suicidal young man who could have easily made a fortune on the Vegas strip mimicking David Copperfield, or at least done well as a contortionist on a traveling circus act.

The police chief explains: “I know that it is hard for people not in law enforcement to understand how someone could be capable of shooting themselves while handcuffed behind the back. . . . While incidents like this are not common, they unfortunately have happened in other jurisdictions in the past.”

Yes, they’ve happened in other jurisdictions. Or so other police have said.

Now, one doesn’t have to be a paranoid troublemaker to suggest another possible scenario.* A good detective would consider alternatives in the case of any homicide, and if a non-police officer were found with a body in the back of his car, the presumption would probably not be suicide. Of course, it is at least possible that the cops in this case are simply lying—that they had held the gun to the boy’s head to instill fear in him, and they accidentally fired the weapon, killing him, and came up with a ridiculous story to cover it up—one so ridiculous it just might work, as it’s apparently worked before. The other possibility, which in a sane world anyone would realize is also much more likely than suicide, is that a police officer simply murdered the kid in cold blood, execution-style, for whatever reason.

If the inquiry goes as it usually does, and the officers involved simply take a little time off and come back to work in a month or so, I predict we will be seeing this kind of thing happen much more often. If all it takes to explain this away is “he must have shot himself,” any economist will tell you the incentive structure will encourage more such mystery shootings.

There will be some outrage over this, some demands for more police accountability and transparency, as there always are. But it will not result in any sort of actual change in policy or meaningful restraint of officers. For one thing, American culture is thoroughly statist when it comes to law enforcement issues. It is the one area where folks skeptical of government are most likely to cave, as respectable members of society still fear ordinary street crime more than the police state emerging around them. Modern American police forces are characterized by gangsterism and a fetishization of “officer safety” as the primary value. The rest of us are just potential collateral damage in their war on crime. And perversely enough, there exists among conservative and other circles this myth that the media are too hard on police, and so they work overtime to support their local law enforcers. In truth, of course, the mass media hardly report the daily killings, injuries, false imprisonments, rapes, burglaries, and crime sprees police are responsible for in most urban jurisdictions nationwide.

 Read more at:

http://blog.independent.org/2013/12/16/police-claim-teen-shot-himself-in-head-while-handcuffed-behind-back/

Welcome back to the eurozone nightmare

Monetary union remains as flawed as ever

By Liam Halligan

The eurozone has recently been off our news radar. We Britons have become smug of late given our new-found growth, now that we’re the most rapidly expanding economy in the Western world (almost).

We certainly have a sense that the “Continental” economies aren’t doing as well as ours. Apart from those pesky Germans, of course, who are annoyingly good at making stuff the rest of the world wants to buy.

Yet, the fear of the euro as a tinderbox, which at any minute could spark financial meltdown, seems to have gone. The euro as a ticking-time bomb, about to explode, causing another Lehman-style Minsky moment on global markets – all that has been dealt with, we think, sorted, solved?

I would like to tell you that’s true. But I can’t, because it isn’t. The eurozone’s deep structural flaws remain as ever they were.

This jerry-built monetary union, for all the fanfare, arrogance and “solidarity”, is fundamentally just as vulnerable as it was in the summer of 2012, when, suddenly, everyone started worrying that the single currency wasn’t, as we’d always been told, “irreversible”.

Until then, it was only been “nutters” like me who openly questioned the eurozone’s long-term survival. We raised such “mad” questions not because we’d spent much of our adult lives studying economics, history and the minutiae of currency unions – oh no – but because we were “cranks” and “xenophobes”.

Back in that Olympic summer, however, as government bond yields in the likes of Greece, Spain and Italy spiked, and riots broke out in previously laid-back European capitals, everyone realised that some profligate members could crash-out of monetary union, forced by market vigilantes and window-smashing thugs, or maybe even kicked-out by Germany (with the Finns and the Dutch providing moral cover).

But then the newish European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi, promised to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro. At the same time, politicians began talking about a “banking union” – and with extremely serious faces. As if by magic, there was calm. The markets relented and bond yields fell back.

Since then, while it hasn’t been plain sailing, there’s been far less talk of a stormy “break-up” of monetary union. The euro is actually set to end 2013 as one of the best-performing main currencies – up from $1.32 in early January to around $1.37 today.

The fact that the US government wanted this dollar depreciation, deliberately stoking it by expanding the Fed’s balance sheet $85bn (£52bn) a month is, of course, completely irrelevant.

 Read more at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/liamhalligan/10517889/Liam-Halligan-Welcome-back-to-the-eurozone-nightmare.html

The Sick (German) Banks of Europe

Where There Is One Cockroach…

By John Mauldin

Quick: I say "German banks," and what's the first thing that comes to your mind? The Bundesbank? Staid, no-nonsense central banking? The Bundesbank is all about maintaining the price of money – forget QE. Deutschebank? Big, German – must be stable and low-risk. The fact that southern Europeans are opening accounts left and right in DB must mean that DB is lower-risk than the local wild guys. Except that they have the largest derivatives portfolio, at $70 trillion (but don't worry because it all nets out, sort of, and of course there is no counter-party risk!), and they are the most highly leveraged bank in Europe (at 60:1 in the last tests – not a misprint), which might give you pause. Although their CEO argues that their leverage doesn't matter. And keeps a straight face. Just saying…

If something happens to DB, they are, in all likelihood, Too Big To Save, even for Germany. But Deutschebank is not my focus here today. It is their much smaller brethren, Too small to be called siblings, actually. More like first cousins twice removed. But there are a lot of them, and they all piled into some very interesting and, as it turns out, very questionable trades. And the story begins with the American consumer.

This Christmas, we will all engage, as will much of the world, in an orgy of gift giving. (I helpfully offer a few ideas of my own at the end of the letter.) The iPads and Xbox Ones and GI Joes with the Kung-Fu Grip (gratuitous esoteric movie reference) will be flying off the shelves. But the one thing that ties all those gifts together is The Box, the humble container unit, the TEU, which allows the world to transport all those items ever more cheaply. That story is resoundingly told in a book that Bill Gates featured in his Best Reads for 2013, simply entitled The Box. You can read a great review here. It turns out that the shipping container was created in the '50s by a force-of-nature entrepreneur who fought governments and regulators (who typically tried to protect unions rather than help consumers) to bring the idea to market. It finally took off when the military decided it was the best way to ship material to the troops in Vietnam. It is one of those things that make sense and would have happened anyway, but as often happens, military spending drove the ramp-up.

The container was not without controversy. Longshoreman unions fought it aggressively, as containers meant fewer high-paying jobs. But The Box also meant far cheaper transportation of goods, and so it helped boost international trade. Now it is hard to imagine a world without containers. And even though the container business started in the US, there is not one US firm in the top 18 container shipping companies. The business is dominated by European and Asian firms.

And container ships were profitable. Oh my, fortunes were built. And they were so successful that a few German bankers looked at the easy money made by US bankers securitizing and packaging mortgages and decided they could do the same with ship financing. I know it is hard to believe, but the German government decided to create pass-through tax vehicles that gave serious tax preference to high-tax-rate investors for all sorts of things, including movies (such cinematic monuments asTerminator 3, I Robot, and the forgettable Stallone flick Get Carter were financed with German "tax shelters"); but my research has so far unearthed nothing to equal the German passion for financing ships. Seriously, would any US government entity give tax breaks to a favored industry? Would a Canadian or Australian or [insert your favorite country here] government? Such things are done by many governements, of course. Here we may apply Mauldin's Rule (stolen from someone else, I am sure): Any seriously out-of-whack financial transaction requires government involvement (generally in the form of some market-distorting law).

Cargo ships, especially container ships, were serious cash machines for long-term money. Buy the ship with some leverage, put it to work, and watch the cash roll in. The Greeks were especially good at this, but the Germans and Scandinavians caught on quick. The Germans went everyone one better and allowed small high-net-worth investors to put their money into funds that financed these ships. At one point, I am told, German banks might have been financing 50% of the world's cargo ships. (They control at least 40% of the world's container ship market today.) Anyone familiar with limited partnerships in the US in the late '70s and early '80s knows how this story ends for the investors.

I came across this story from the inside, as a business partner of mine is in the shipping business; but he owns and operates a special type of ship: massive tugboats that move ocean drilling-rig platforms, and those are still in healthy demand. But his original financing many years ago was from Germany.

It turns out that if a little leverage makes a deal look good, then a lot makes it look even better. In 2007, ships were financed at 75% leverage (on average). It looks like 2008 vintages were financed in the 90% range! (Data is from a presentation I was sent, done by Dr. Klaus Stoltenberg of NordLB.)

Read more at:

http://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlinethoughts/the-monster-that-is-europe

2013 has been a busy year for the apartheid dictatorship of the Castro family in Cuba

Over 30 Ladies in White Arrested Today

Over 30 members of the pro-democracy group, The Ladies in White, were beaten and arrested today, as they tried to gather for a meeting in Havana.

Just another day in Castro's Cuba.

Has the international community decided that such systemic violence against peaceful women in acceptable?

If not -- where's the outrage?

In case you missed it, here's a picture of Marina Paz, a member of The Ladies in White, being beaten and stripped of her symbolic white clothing last week:

Russia trumps US in Ukraine poker game

Moscow decided it is vital to Russia’s interests that Ukraine remains a fraternal country at any cost

By M K Bhadrakumar

Russia may have made its most significant foreign-policy gain in the entire post-cold war era when the Kremlin decisively moved in on Tuesday to offer a rescue package for the beleagured Ukrainian economy and may have taken a leap forward in leading that country into the Eurasian Union, which Moscow is planning as the umbrella organization bringing together the former Soviet republics. 

This is undoubtedly one of President Vladimir Putin’s finest hours in the Kremlin. The point is, if Ukraine moves into the Western orbit, Russia falls back on its back foot in strategic terms; without Ukraine Eurasian Union remains grossly inadequate; with Ukraine the Eurasian Union all but restores the Soviet Union in politico-economic terms. 

Unsurprisingly, the West is aghast, and the mood of the cold warriors can’t be uglier than this. Russia is beating the West at its own game of cheque book diplomacy. No need for Russian tanks to roll into the streets of Kiev as in 1956 in Budapest. 

The European Union foreign ministers have unceremoniously come down from the high pedestal from where they preached to Ukraine on the virtues of human rights record and western liberal democracy and pleaded it is prepared to sign an Association at a special summit this very week if only President Yanukovich is willing. But it seems a case of too little too late. 

Washington too is left mumbling for words, not knowing what to say. All that the West is left with now are the protestors from western regions of Ukraine on the Kiev city square. Can the CIA push a color revolution through? This remains the only ray of hope. 

The poignancy lies in this that neither the US nor the EU has any money (or the political will to find the money) to help ease Ukraine’s staggering debt burden. Whereas, Russia is offering financial support of $15 billion and the slashing of the price of natural gas sold to Ukraine by one-third and adjusting the outstanding debt of $2 billion that Kiev owes to Gazprom for past transactions. 

Besides, trade agreements have been signed whereby Moscow has given duty concessions to Ukrainian exports to the Russian market. A summit of the Eurasian Union Council is due to be held later this month in Russia and it is worth watching how yesterday’s developments morph into the integration processes of the post-Soviet space under Moscow’s leadership. 

Equally, there is a ‘China angle’ to all this. Yanukovich paid a 4-day visit to Beijing and there is every sign that China has also offered to help Ukraine.  The Chinese report on Yanukovich’s meeting with President Xi Jinping brought out the flavor of a strategic relationship in the making, which would have major consequences for Eurasian politics. Interestingly, on his return journey from Beijing, Yanukovich had met Putin briefly in Sochi, presumably to fill him in on his talks with Xi and to make it clear he keeps Moscow on board.  

It is too early to say whether the pattern of Russia-China coordination that is evident over Middle Eastern issues could repeat elsewhere. Certainly, Russia’s developing ties with Vietnam helps China indirectly by keeping the Americans at bay and, on the other hand, China’s ties with Ukraine would help create space for the latter from having to depend excessively on the West, which is something that suits Moscow as well.

Read more at:

http://blogs.rediff.com/mkbhadrakumar/2013/12/18/russia-trumps-us-in-ukraine-poker-game/

American Collapse, Recovery or Whatever

Collapse is in the eye of the beholder

by Makeda

“Don’t call me a whore!” a friend wrote me angrily. She was correcting me, explaining that her current work was not true prostitution because it only involved massage and hand jobs. I hadn’t paid attention to precise nomenclature as I was trying to convince her to quit. My point was that by working as a prosti…prostassage therapist she might severely limit her future employment possibilities. She was furious that I had lumped her in with women who walk the streets.

Nomenclature means a lot to our pride. People take offense if they are told they are living in a collapsed culture. Collapsed implies over. Collapsed implies hopeless. Collapsed implies that we have failed. But at some point we have to look at people like my angry friend and admit that we are failing—on many, many levels. My friend was once a middle-class woman with a college degree and a profession. She raised children on her own after her husband died. And as she tried to push forward, her career started moving backwards. And then somehow, eventually, it came to a point where she was willing to do work of questionable legality to pay her bills and keep a roof over her head. The horror that awaited her if she were to became homeless was arguably much worse than the controlled environment of the massage parlor, even taking into account the occasional police raids.

Our culture is such that half of Americans probably think “If the money is good, so what?” There is no thought given to the proper way to live and to relate to people. There is no thought given to what such work does to the soul of this woman. The American thinking process jumps to the bottom line of the financial transaction, and declares victory if cash has changed hands. The woman is “richer” so for them she is better off. These same people see the American economy as rebounding. People are spending. Some people are getting rich. What’s the problem?

When everything is calculated in a purely financial light, we start to lose any sense of decency or community. I saw the end result of this process when I recently visited Philadelphia to look at properties. There are houses there under $10,000. While checking out the neighborhoods where these properties are, I made an astounding observation. Almost every block in these neighborhoods has at least one abandoned home. These homes are impossible to miss because of the state of disrepair they were in: porches or parts of roofs are literally collapsed. As if there could be any question as to their status, the city posts large warning signs when boarding them up. The visually offensive chartreuse or neon orange signs warn that “trespassers” could end up spending two years in jail. I wondered which the city had more of—abandoned houses or homeless families. Sadly, I actually saw an occasional homeless person wander through the area. I was tempted to go purchase them some tools and hardhats, and organize a take-over of abandoned buildings by the homeless.

I got in contact a friend who is well-connected in Philadelphia politics. I pressed him with the obvious question: shouldn’t the city be teaching the homeless how to fix up these abandoned eyesores that litter the urban landscape? His answer was a resounding “No.” Apparently the city has to protect the rights of property owners, who are hoping to turn a profit on these places. I wondered what kind of financial alchemy could possibly turn a profit on ugly houses in depressed neighborhoods that are in need of serious labor. It must have something to do with “quantitative easing.”

At one point during my Philadelphia adventure I walked toward an old abandoned factory which, in a better city, would have been turned into hipster lofts, and I saw a bookstore. I was overjoyed. The bookstore seemed like a beacon of light in this dark ghetto—right until I got close enough to read what was painted in huge letters on its wall. “We ship to prisons! Ask inside.” I didn’t. I already knew these clever people were doing very brisk business. In the early 2000s I would occasionally volunteer for Books Through Bars, an organization that sent donated books to the incarcerated. Back then jailed people seemed somehow more distant. As the end of the decade approached and I returned to America after living abroad, the prison system seemed much closer. I lived with my mother temporarily, and I would ride the bus to work. Every day, on the bus, I heard men loudly discussing their parole officers on their cellphones. What I might have overheard whispered in hushed voices in my childhood was now a subject the transit riding public could hear about loud and clear, whether they wanted to or not. Nor did the women seem any more reticent, as they discussed what they were planning to do with their food stamps and benefit money. Even if I wore earplugs I would not have been able to avoid hearing these people, or smelling the drugs they occasionally lit in the back of the bus.

All life seemed to revolve around the trifecta of prisons, handouts and drugs. Every few days a van would park directly in front of our house before visiting “friends” across the street. “What are they doing?” asked my mother angrily. “Dealing drugs,” I would explain flatly. Based on their shiny new van, the dealers were certainly doing better than I was. I was waiting to be credentialed as a doctor, and worried about being unable to afford my bus rides to work. They were making so much money they could eat endless restaurant-cooked meals in their van and leave the trash on my mother’s front lawn. “I don’t know why the police don’t do something about the fact… they are littering, LITTERING!!” my mother would start screaming indignantly. “The police are in on the action,” I informed her.

On a recent trip home I noticed that the drug delivery van has left the neighborhood. I wondered whether it was a sign of the times getting better or worse. Are they getting better prices somewhere else? Have drugs finally become an item for the middle class? Had the neighborhood demographics tipped it toward prescription drug abuse? Sadly, one of the least probable possibilities is that the police had actually done their job.

When looking at a country as large and complex as the USA, one can make any number of contradictory assertions and still be factually correct. The economy doing extremely well, and the economy is going to hell. One need look no farther than the banking industry to figure that out: the banks are bankrupt and require bail-outs; the banks are doing well and making healthy profits. American banks are in every way typical of American corporations: they are corrupt, reliant on the government to subsidize and support them, and produce mind-boggling riches for those that run them. At the bottom of the bank hierarchy are the tellers. The polite, well dressed tellers wear conservative new clothes and jewelry. They exude the kind of stability and class that reflects well on the banks. Yet about a third of them earn little enough to qualify for public assistance. They have joined the ranks of retail workers, restaurant workers, hotel workers and other service industry personnel who must rely on the welfare system in order to work. I suspect they will be joined by more and more recent college graduates who can not actually earn a positive sum after subtracting their student loan payments.

But rest assured that from each and every payment or delinquency notice or collection activity someone somewhere is making a profit. In this economy every action is monetized, even our very socializing. As you randomly clicked around the Internet to find this article, you generated income for tech companies. At some point, as every last penny was pushed or pulled out of your pocket, you began shifting from consumer to producer: you became a prosumer… and the machine that is American capitalism milked more profit still from your existence. Your eyeballs and clicks generated income based on some strange calculations by marketers. American-style capitalism now has you in debt and producing for it even as you consume, but that is now a middle class privilege, and no one is forcing people to make these choices.

At the bottom of the food chain are the forced producers. Those people are so broke that they have become superfluous to the normative economy. They seem to be channeled in one way or another into the prison system, where they become the ultimate producers. Their very bodies create profits for prison corporations simply by existing in prisons, while their arguably forced labor is compelled at pennies on the dollar to produce cheap consumer goods. The American economy seems to be succeeding at monetizing everything while producing fewer and fewer goods or services of any real value to anyone but a few rich people profiting off the entire system.

America’s political economy has changed incrementally enough that many people have not noticed what is really happening. It’s over for most of us. You can call it collapse, or you can call it restructuring. You can even call it a recovery. But you cannot call it sustainable, or pleasant. The overall trajectory is toward decline, decay, destitution…

Read more at:

http://cluborlov.blogspot.gr/2013/12/american-collapse-recovery-or-whatever.html

Caligula in Pyongyang

This is high-IQ craziness, calculating and devious—Caligula with nukes and missiles

by John Derbyshire

You remember Caligula. John Hurt played him with creepy malignity in the old BBC production of I, Claudius. Caligula was the third emperor of Rome on a strict count (which doesn’t include Julius Caesar), the fourth of the Twelve Caesars written up by the historian Suetonius.

At age 24 Caligula succeeded his great-uncle Tiberius, the second emperor. “Some are of the opinion,” says Suetonius (ut quidam opinantur) that Caligula poisoned his great-uncle, then held a pillow over his face to make sure of the deed.

Whether or not this is true, Caligula made a grisly show of being emperor during his four years on the throne. He killed his adopted son, his brother, two cousins, and possibly also his grandmother. He banished his wife, boinked his sisters, and tried to make his horse a consul. Suetonius:

He assumed various titles: “Pious,” “Child of the Camp,” “Father of the Armies,” and “Greatest and best of Caesars”….He forbade the celebration of [his great-grandfather, the Emperor Augustus’s] victories by annual festivals….He forced parents to attend the executions of their sons….

When Caligula was dispatched by a joint army-senate conspiracy in January of 41 AD, the historian tells us that:

One may form an idea of the state of those times by what followed. Not even after the murder was made known was it at once believed that he was dead, but it was suspected that [Caligula] himself had made up and circulated the report, to find out by that means how men felt towards him.

One scary guy. Here’s another.

“I have no more idea than anyone else what’s going on in Pyongyang’s corridors of power, but I watch these events with fascination.”

Kim Jong-un attained supreme power in North Korea at age 28, and Caligula parallels are not hard to find. He definitely has the titles: “Supreme Leader,” “Great Successor,” “Sun of the 21st Century,” and a raft of others.

Kim’s father and grandfather are still celebrated by name, but the official records of their lives have been purged from the archives of the Korea Central News Agency website. And yes, if Kim’s regime executes you—as they did one of the Great Successor’s old girlfriends recently—your parents are forced to watch before being hustled off to labor camps.

Most recently we hear that Kim has offed his uncle Jang Song Thaek. Kim didn’t do the offing personally—this is a modern despotism, for heaven’s sake—but there can’t be much doubt he ordered it and approved of the exceptionally vituperative reports of Jang’s “crimes” put out by the state news agency.

Jang Song Thaek was married to the sister of Kim’s father, North Korea’s previous dictator Kim Jong-il, who died two years ago. Jang is said to have groomed Kim for the succession, just as Tiberius groomed Caligula.

Read more at:

http://takimag.com/article/caligula_in_pyongyang_john_derbyshire/print#axzz2nvJFP43g

Boy Trouble

Family breakdown disproportionately harms young males

by KAY S. HYMOWITZ

by When I started following the research on child well-being about two decades ago, the focus was almost always girls’ problems—their low self-esteem, lax ambitions, eating disorders, and, most alarming, high rates of teen pregnancy. Now, though, with teen births down more than 50 percent from their 1991 peak and girls dominating classrooms and graduation ceremonies, boys and men are increasingly the ones under examination. Their high school grades and college attendance rates have remained stalled for decades. Among poor and working-class boys, the chances of climbing out of the low-end labor market—and of becoming reliable husbands and fathers—are looking worse and worse.

Economists have scratched their heads. “The greatest, most astonishing fact that I am aware of in social science right now is that women have been able to hear the labor market screaming out ‘You need more education’ and have been able to respond to that, and men have not,” MIT’s Michael Greenstone told theNew York Times. If boys were as rational as their sisters, he implied, they would be staying in school, getting degrees, and going on to buff their Florsheim shoes on weekdays at 7:30 AM. Instead, the rational sex, the proto-homo economicus, is shrugging off school and resigning itself to a life of shelf stocking. Why would that be?

This spring, another MIT economist, David Autor, and coauthor Melanie Wasserman, proposed an answer. The reason for boys’ dismal school performance, they argued, was the growing number of fatherless homes. Boys and young men weren’t behaving rationally, the theory suggested, because their family background left them without the necessary attitudes and skills to adapt to changing social and economic conditions. The paper generated a brief buzz but then vanished. That’s too bad, for the claim that family breakdown has had an especially harsh impact on boys, and therefore men, has considerable psychological and biological research behind it. Anyone interested in the plight of poor and working-class men—and, more broadly, mobility and the American dream—should keep it front and center in public debate.

In fact, signs that the nuclear-family meltdown of the past half-century has been particularly toxic to boys’ well-being are not new. By the 1970s and eighties, family researchers following the children of the divorce revolution noticed that, while both girls and boys showed distress when their parents split up, they had different ways of showing it. Girls tended to “internalize” their unhappiness: they became depressed and anxious, and many cut themselves, or got into drugs or alcohol. Boys, on the other hand, “externalized” or “acted out”: they became more impulsive, aggressive, and “antisocial.” Both reactions were worrisome, but boys’ behavior had the disadvantage of annoying and even frightening classmates, teachers, and neighbors. Boys from broken homes were more likely than their peers to get suspended and arrested. Girls’ unhappiness also seemed to ease within a year or two after their parents’ divorce; boys’ didn’t.

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http://www.city-journal.org/2013/23_4_boy-trouble.html

Paul Ryan And The Republicans Are Lackeys To Democratic Party Big Spenders

The principal role of GOP in Washington is to hold the coats of Democratic spenders

By Doug Bandow

Last fiscal year Uncle Sam had some budget good news. After running $1 trillion-plus deficits four years in a row, Washington had to borrow “just” $680 billion in 2013. Victory was at hand!

True, that was the fifth highest deficit in history, 50 percent greater than the pre-financial crash record. But it’s only the taxpayers’ money, so what’s the big deal? Politicians in Washington talked about the need to start spending again. There certainly was no justification for sequestration, which imposed a shocking, brutal, horrific 2.3 percent cut in federal spending. What were legislators thinking when they approved that reduction? The government and nation almost collapsed as a result!

Now Republicans and Democrats have come together on Capitol Hill for a new budget agreement which increases both outlays and taxes. Bipartisanship in action! That the Democratic Party wants to spend more is hardly surprising. But the GOP has demonstrated yet again that its principal role in Washington is to hold the coats of Democratic spenders when they raid the Treasury.

The legislation adopted by the House drops sequestration, which actually trimmed federal outlays, and hikes spending over the next two years by $62 billion. In return, Congress promises to lower the collective deficit over the next decade by $85 billion—while spending tens of trillions of dollars. The accord raises revenue, including a very real $12.6 billion in airline taxes. There are a few spending reductions—kind of. The bulk of them are entitlement caps a decade hence, which even Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), ranking minority member of the Senate Budget Committee, admits are of “dubious validity.”

After all, in the same bill the House GOP voted to drop discretionary spending cuts for 2014 approved just two years ago. Yet the new entitlement caps are slated to take effect after two presidential elections and four congressional elections. Which means the reductions will never occur. The best that can be said is that the new outlays are trivial compared to Uncle Sam’s gluttonous spending binge. The increase in so-called discretionary outlays will be overwhelmed by the coming entitlement tsunami. We won’t notice the extra bloat.

The only surprise in the sell-out was the role of House Budget Committee Chairman and 2012 Republican Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan. Although no radical, he nevertheless had seemed committed to a more responsible budget path. Yet he traded real current spending increases for fake future spending cuts, a standard congressional tactic running back at least to the infamous Reagan tax hike of 1983.

Of course, holding only the House means the Republican Party has to compromise, as it learned during the recent health care battle. Shutting the government to defund ObamaCare always was doomed to fail. The Democrats held both the Presidency and Senate and could not be expected to abandon their only significant domestic policy achievement of the last five years. Moreover, no Congress can bind future legislators, so at most a one-year funding pause was possible. While the public disliked the federal health care takeover, most people were not inclined to hold every agency and program hostage in a GOP-orchestrated political battle.

However, a budget fight would have been far easier. The Republicans wouldn’t have had to perform the Maori Haka while chanting death threats against government agencies. The GOP merely had to support the fiscal status quo, sequester included, unless the Democrats offered equivalent alternative cuts.

The sequester was an arbitrary and inefficient tool, but it proved to be the only practical means of restraining federal spending. As my Cato CATO +0.23%Institute colleague Chris Edwards put it before Rep. Ryan waved the white flag, “In theory, Republicans have the upper hand in budget talks because current law specifies that discretionary spending will be modestly reduced in 2014 to $967 billion. Republicans always claim that they are for spending restraint, and here they just need to hold firm on current-law budget caps to save serious money over time.” Instead, the GOP tossed away its only weapon.

Earlier this year the Congressional Budget Office highlighted the stakes: “Between 2009 and 2012, the federal government recorded the largest budget deficits relative to the size of the economy since 1946, causing federal debt to soar.” The debt-GDP ratio “is higher than at any point in U.S. history except a brief period around World War II, and it is twice the percent at the end of 2007.”

Today the national debt exceeds both $17.2 trillion and runs more than $54,000 per citizen and nearly $150,000 per taxpayer. At 100 percent of GDP the debt burden is greater than in Europe. Before the GOP cave-in the CBO figured that in the best case Uncle Sam would add $6.3 trillion more in red ink over the next decade. The annual deficit would drop to “only” $378 billion in 2015. But then deficits would begin another inexorable rise. By 2023 federal ink would be $895 billion, warned CBO. The official debt-GDP ratio would have jumped by a third. This was the agency’s optimistic estimate.
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/dougbandow/2013/12/16/paul-ryan-and-the-republicans-are-lackeys-to-democratic-party-big-spenders/

Water Wars

Another Kick to Malthus

We may soon be looking to our oceans for our freshwater—or more accurately, we’ll be looking underneath our oceans. A new study, the first to comprehensively survey the world’s known reserves of undersea freshwater, estimates that there are roughly 120,000 cubic miles—more than 100 times the amount of freshwater we’ve drilled from the ground since 1900—of fresh and nearly-fresh water trapped underneath sea beds. The upshot: we could be seeing more offshore drilling for water as well as oil in the future. Science Daily reports:

The water, which could perhaps be used to eke out supplies to the world’s burgeoning coastal cities, has been located off Australia, China, North America and South Africa. [...]

These reserves were formed over the past hundreds of thousands of years when on average the sea level was much lower than it is today, and when the coastline was further out, [lead author Dr Vincent Post] explains…”So when it rained, the water would infiltrate into the ground and fill up the water table in areas that are nowadays under the sea.

Some of these reserves will be fresh enough that they won’t need to go through the energy-intensive desalinization process, while some of them will be only slightly brackish, and will be easier and, importantly, cheaper to desalinate. In fact, this kind of offshore drilling for water is already happening; NPR notes that there are already operations in places like Cape May, NJ to drill for and eventually desalinate low-salinity water.

Water scarcity has been a favorite topic for the Chicken Littles of the world. Just 18 years ago the vice president of the World Bank was ominously warning that “the wars of the next century will be fought over water.” It’s easy to drum up fears of “water wars” some undetermined time in the future, but studies like this one, and discoveries of new water sources like this one in Kenya, or this one under the Sahara, suggest that these fears that have gripped Malthusians—and that Malthusians have in turn used to push through otherwise unworkable policy recommendations—are a lot less serious.

North America to Drown in Oil as Mexico Ends Monopoly

Adding another Nigeria to world oil supply

By Joe Carroll and Bradley Olso

The flood of North American crude oil is set to become a deluge as Mexico dismantles a 75-year-old barrier to foreign investment in its oil fields.

Plagued by almost a decade of slumping output that has degraded Mexico’s take from a $100-a-barrel oil market, President Enrique Pena Nieto is seeking an end to the state monopoly over one of the biggest crude resources in the Western Hemisphere. The doubling in Mexican oil output that Citigroup Inc. said may result from inviting international explorers to drill would be equivalent to adding another Nigeria to world supply, or about 2.5 million barrels a day.

That boom would augment a supply surge from U.S. and Canadian wells that Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) predicts will vault North American production ahead of every OPEC member except Saudi Arabia within two years. With U.S. refineries already choking on more oil than they can process, producers from Exxon to ConocoPhillips are clamoring for repeal of the export restrictions that have outlawed most overseas sales of American crude for four decades.

“This is going to be a huge opportunity for any kind of player” in the energy sector, said Pablo Medina, a Latin American upstream analyst at Wood Mackenzie Ltd. in Houston. “All the companies are going to have to turn their heads and start analyzing Mexico.”

Unprecedented Output

An influx of Mexican oil would contribute to a glut that is expected to lower the price of Brent crude, the benchmark for more than half the world’s crude that has averaged $108.62 a barrel this year, to as low as $88 a barrel in 2017, based on estimates from analysts in a Bloomberg survey. Five of the seven analysts who provided 2017 forecasts said prices would be lower than this year.

The revolution in shale drilling that boosted U.S. oil output to a 25-year high this month will allow North America to join the ranks of the world’s crude-exporting continents by 2040, Exxon said in its annual global energy forecast on Dec. 12. Europe and the Asia-Pacific region will be the sole crude import markets by that date, the Irving, Texas-based energy producer said.

Exxon’s forecast, compiled annually by a team of company economists, scientists and engineers, didn’t take into account any changes in Mexico, William Colton, the company’s vice president of strategic planning, said during a presentation at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on Dec. 12.

Opening Mexico’s oilfields to foreign investment would be “a win-win if ever there was one,” said Colton, who described the move as “very good for the people of Mexico and people everywhere in the world who use energy.”
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-16/north-america-to-drown-in-oil-as-mexico-ends-monopoly.html