Media of mass destruction

So When Can We Call It Terror?

By David Harsanyi

What does a guy have to do to be called a terrorist these days?
Reuters -- a global wire service that covers the world and is carried by many hundreds of newspapers, websites and television stations -- reported this week that a bomb planted in a bag exploded near a bus stop in a "Jewish district of Jerusalem," killing a British woman and injuring at least 30 civilians.

The piece went on to explain: "Police said it was a 'terrorist attack' -- Israel's term for a Palestinian strike."
Or, in other words, the precise English definition of the bombing -- the idea, the thought, the action and so on.
And the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, condemned this "terrorist operation in the strongest possible terms," as well, so it must mean that "terrorism" is the Palestinian term for a Palestinian strike. But not for Reuters.

The underlying message of the 'New Atheists’ ‘secular bibles’ is far more soul-destroying than anything in the original Good Book

... Today, the sort of people in the West to whom Grayling is preaching don’t beg God to keep tsunamis and plagues at bay; no, they plead with environmentalists to do that. Many people – and we’re talking about well-educated, privileged individuals in the booming business of opinion-formation – literally believe that switching their kettle on or driving their car will have a direct impact on the polar ice caps, and thus on the future of the whole of humanity, and so, like the early Jews, they have created all sorts of bizarre homely rituals that might help to save themselves and mankind: don’t leave the telly on standby; buy a bike; separate plastics from paper. Challenging the idea of a deity, of an external force that determines our morality and destinies, is a decent aspiration, since it would force mankind to confront his moral existence in a far more upfront, unfettered fashion. But the ‘deity’ we should most worry about today, the one whose culturally sanctioned allure ends up presenting mankind as more mechanistic than moral, is not God, but Gaia...


Read more at http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10447/

Crazed cults

A Simple Model of Cults of Personality

by Xavier Marquez

Cults of personality are hardly ever taken seriously enough. They are often seen as a sort of bizarre curiosity found in some authoritarian regimes, their absurdities attributed to the extreme narcissism and megalomania of particular dictators, who wish to be flattered with ever greater titles and deified in ever more grandiose ways. And it is hard not to laugh at some of the claims being made on behalf of often quite uncharismatic dictators: not only is Kim Jong-il, for example, the greatest golfer in the world, but he also appears to have true superhero powers:

In 2006 Nodong Sinmun published an article titled ‘‘Military-First Teleporting’’ claiming that Kim Jong-il, ‘‘the extraordinary master commander who has been chosen by the heavens,’’ appears in one place and then suddenly appears in another ‘‘like a flash of lightning,’’ so quickly that the American satellites overhead cannot track his movements. (Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, The Hidden People of North Korea, p. 55).

Lies and Argentine statistics

Stalinist practices in Buenos Aires

Most Argentines reacted with a shrug when their government began doctoring its consumer-price index in 2007. Cooking the books cost holders of the country’s inflation-linked bonds at least $2.3 billion last year. But anyone else who needed to know the true inflation rate simply turned to a clutch of private economists who drew on their own price surveys, data from provincial governments and other official statistics. They reckon that inflation is now running at about 25%. That is far above the 10% reported by INDEC, the government statistics agency, but less than the 30% wage increases public employees have received in recent years.
A presidential election looms in October and inflation, and the government’s denial of it, is perhaps the biggest threat to the prospect of President Cristina Fernández winning a second term. That may be why Guillermo Moreno, the thuggish commerce secretary, is moving to stamp out the unofficial, but widely trusted, price indices. To do so he has dusted off a decree, penalising misleading advertising, approved by a military dictatorship in 1983. In February he sent letters to 12 economists and consultants ordering them to reveal their methodology, on the grounds that erroneous figures could mislead consumers.
Some of Mr Moreno’s targets refused; the rest were analysed by INDEC, which predictably found their methods flawed. Seven of them were then ordered to pay the maximum fine of $123,000 (all have appealed). The financial threat is especially serious for Graciela Bevacqua, who lost her job as head of INDEC in 2007 for refusing to tamper with the price index. She now publishes her own inflation estimate with the help of a business partner and former students.
“The others are companies or foundations,” she says, “but we don’t have clients or assets. The only thing I own is my house where I live with my children. They’ll take it away if they continue with this.” Only one firm has stopped publishing its inflation estimate. So far Mr Moreno has merely succeeded in drawing attention to his own mendacity

The ''look''

The right to work

What does one call a state whose Senate says "no" to its public employee unions for strikes and collective bargaining? Perhaps Wisconsin, but in fact Chile. Seems it still likes being tops in economic freedom and growth.

After two days of debate, a proposed change to Chile's constitution allowing collective bargaining privileges and a "right" to strike for public unions was voted down. The change got just 21 votes, four short of a two-thirds needed. Even many of the left-leaning opposition abstained.

But you can't say they didn't try.

"Chile is the only country in the world whose constitution forbids collective bargaining and the right to strike, so we have to take care of this situation," Chilean Sen. Patricio Walker argued.

"This motion is a fundamental right enshrined in workers, whatever their performance level, and gives effect to the (United Nations') ILO Convention 151," said Sen. Pedro Munoz, reminding the public just why it shouldn't support the bill.

All this is relevant because Chile is the first nation whose return to democracy was based on economic freedom. On global economic freedom rankings, Chile stands near the top — in part because its public employees can't run up debt or corrupt the political process.

The existing constitution makes Chile a full right-to-work country and expressly prohibits government collective bargaining and public employee strikes.

The idea is to prevent the ugly anti-democratic dynamic — now seen in Wisconsin and elsewhere — of public employee unions extorting concessions from politicians in exchange for campaign support.

Under that system, taxpayers foot the bill. The team of Milton Friedman-influenced economists known as "The Chicago Boys" understood this dynamic well and its potential for cutting into economic freedom.

Labor and Social Security Minister Jose Pinera, who wrote the right-to-work proviso, knew that if public employee unions could get their hooks into the federal government, it would be a fiscal and economic disaster.

Chile posted 7% GDP growth in the last quarter, on par with recent trends. Per capita income is now $17,000, 10 times what it was in 1980, and its successful social security system is now private.

Chile's vote shows it has no desire to follow in the footsteps of bankrupt U.S. states like California and Illinois. It's good to see a nation that still knows how to grow.

CRAZED CULT LEADER JOINS CRAZED CULT

Crazed cult leader Charles Manson has broken a 20-year silence in a prison interview coinciding with the 40th anniversary of his conviction for the gruesome Sharon Tate murders – to speak out about global warming.

Manson's death sentence for his involvement in the Tate/LaBianca murders was commuted to life in prison when California abolished the death penalty.

Since then he has attracted a number of followers because of his infamy, but also because of his perceived environmental conscience.

He is a founder of ATWA (which both stands for Air Trees Water Animals and All The Way Alive). It's typically manic mission statement warns of the destruction of the planet from pollution.

Another ATWA founder, Lynette Fromme,  was jailed for the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford with an unloaded gun in 1975. The claimed she did so 'for the redwoods'.  

On the environment, Manson said: 'Sooner or later the will of God will prevail over all of you. And I was condemned as the will of God.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1378178/Charles-Manson-breaks-20-year-silence-40th-anniversary-gruesome-Sharon-Tate-murders.html#ixzz1K6GVNEhI

Socialism by any other name ...

A First Step on the Road to Declining Life Expectancy in the United States

by Robert Wenzel 

There have been a number of reports lately about shortages of various drugs. Anyone who has taken an Econ 101 class should know that shortages come about because of price controls, you can't have shortages any other way. Without price controls supply and demand will simply move prices so that markets clear. So whenever you hear about shortages, you know some kind of government meddling is going on to prevent markets from clearing.

Those who have gone beyond Econ 101, and read a little bit on their own, also know that throughout history governments have ignored their role in creating shortages and have made it a crime for those who ignore price controls and attempt to bring product to market at clearing prices. In some cases, people have been sentenced to death for trying to work around price controls.

Thus, it is with alarm that I read a report at LaTi :

The number of medications in short supply has been rising, including some needed daily in hospitals, and regulators lack the tools to address the problem. One Senate bill in the works could help.

LaTi goes on:

One promising approach is a bill still being drafted by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D.-Minn.) and Bob Casey, (D.-Pa.). Their measure would require that drug makers notify the FDA of any event that might affect supply — a manufacturing glitch, a merger, a simple business decision — and impose a penalty for silence.

H.L. Mencken’s 1940 assessment of politicians

“They will all promise every man, woman and child in the country whatever he, she or it wants.  They’ll all be roving the land looking for chances to make the rich poor, to remedy the irremediable, to succor the unsuccorable, to unscramble the unscrambleable, to dephlogisticate the undephlogisticable.  They will all be curing warts by saying words over them, and paying off the national debt with money no one will have to earn.  When one of them demonstrates that twice two is five, another will prove that it is six, six and a half, ten, twenty, n.  In brief, they will divest themselves from their character as sensible, candid and truthful men, and simply become candidates for office, bent only on collaring votes.  They will all know by then, even supposing that some of them don’t know it now, that votes are collared under democracy, not by talking sense but by talking nonsense, and they will apply themselves to the job with a hearty yo-heave-ho.  Most of them, before the uproar is over, will actually convince themselves.  The winner will be whoever promises the most with the least probability of delivering anything.”

How Vittorio Arrigoni Went to Gaza Hoping to Die

 By Jamie Glazov 

Bit by bit, decorate it, arrange the details, find the ingredients, imagine it, choose it, get advice on it, shape it into a work without spectators, one which exists only for oneself, just for the shortest little moment of life.

—Michel Foucault, describing the pleasure of preparing oneself for suicide.

The Italian cheerleader for Hamas, Vittorio Arrigoni ^[1], has died at the hands of the Islamic terrorism that he venerated throughout his life. The fellow traveler journeyed to the Gaza Strip to prostrate himself before his secular deity, Hamas, and to assist its venture of perpetrating genocide against Israelis. Islamic terrorists, who call themselves “Salafists,” showed their gratitude to Arrigoni by kidnapping, mercilessly beating, and executing him.

This episode was, of course, all part of an expected script: even though the media and our higher literary culture never discuss the reasons, the historical record reveals one undeniable fact: like thousands of political pilgrims before him, Vittorio Arrigoni went to Gaza to die. Indeed, consciously or unconsciously, in their unquenchable quest for sacrificing human life on the altar of their utopian ideals, fellow travelers always lust for death, and if not the death of others, then of their own.

It is no coincidence that a short while before “Salafists” killed Arrigoni, Juliano Mer-Khamis ^[2], a cheerleader of terrorism in Israel who, like Arrigoni, dedicated his life to praising the Palestinian death cult and working for the annihilation of Israel, was murdered by Islamic terrorists in Jenin. It is no coincidence that Rachel Corrie ^[3], the infamous enabler of the International Solidarity Movement, a group that disrupts anti-terrorism activities of the Israel Defense Forces, committed suicide in protecting Hamas terrorists by throwing herself in front of an Israeli bulldozer. And it is no coincidence that female leftist “peace” activists are routinely raped ^[4], brutalized, and enslaved by the Arabs of Judea and Samaria that they come to aid and glorify in their Jew-hating odyssey against Israel. And don’t hold your breath, by the way, waiting for leftist feminists to protest this phenomenon; they are faithfully following in the footsteps of American fellow traveler Anna Louise Strong and the Stalinist German writer Bertolt Brecht, two typical leftist believers who were completely undisturbed by the arrests and deaths of their friends in the Stalinist purges — having never even inquired about them after their disappearance.

Beneath the leftist believer’s veneration of the despotic enemy lies one of his most powerful yearnings: to submit his whole being to a totalist entity. This psychological dynamic involves negative identification, whereby a person who has failed to identify positively with his own environment subjugates his individuality to a powerful, authoritarian entity, through which he vicariously experiences a feeling of power and purpose. The historian David Potter has succinctly crystallized this phenomenon:

Econ 101

The damage that benevolent censors do.

by Sam Schulman

This weekend is the anniversary of the first truly liberal attempt to prevent hatred by restricting free speech. On March 15, 1939, Denmark made it a criminal act to spread “false rumors or accusations” in order to incite “hatred against a group of the Danish population because of its creed, race, or nationality”—with a fine for those who did so in speech and detention or prison for those who did so in print or broadcasts. The law was designed to hamper the activities of Danish Nazi sympathizers. On May 31 the same year, Denmark made itself even more secure against Nazism by signing a non-aggression pact with Germany. Less than a year later, Hitler initiated the six-hour conquest of Denmark by putting an armored battalion on the regular ferryboat from Rostock to Denmark. The treaty didn’t stop him, nor did the fear of feloniously violating Section 266b of the Danish Penal Code by inciting hatred against Jews and Communists.

The German Army packed its bags in 1945, but Section 266b remains in force, much modernized (it now applies to hatred of any group, not just Danes, and prohibits insults to sexual identity), a standing rebuke to what Europeans call “the American version” of free speech: freedom to speak unconstrained by restrictions against “hate,” against insulting or offending individuals or groups, and without special protection for specific religions (Islam), races, or historical facts. In 2011 so far, American-style free speech has been widely condemned (for the Tucson mass murder, notably), though it has also had moments of popularity, particularly since the Arab revolutions began in Tunisia, and again with the madcap activities of public employee unions in Wisconsin. Even Tom Friedman took a holiday from his admiration for Chinese autocracy to celebrate the Twitter revolutions.
But “the European version” of free speech, if we may call it that, soldiers on doggedly. Courts in Austria, Denmark, and France have this year convicted journalists and political volunteers (none of them neo-Nazis) of hate-speech crimes, which generally took the form of making observations about the frequency of certain violent crimes among immigrant groups in Denmark and France, and in Austria about the respectability of the historical Muhammad. Fashion designer John Galliano may soon go on trial in France for racial insults uttered in a Paris bar. There is no doubt among European liberals that “hate speech” must remain restricted in this fashion. After all, as a columnist in the Netherlands’ NRC Handelsblad explained, “everyone knows it’s wrong to insult someone’s race or religion. So why shouldn’t it be a crime as well?” 

We all pretend to believe what we know to be untrue

The phrase politically correct has its origins in the Stalinist left. Its revival not so long ago by America’s New Left was an ominous development. Its pertinence to the present discontents points to a propensity visible now, even among mainstream liberals, for politicizing nearly everything.

There was a time, however, in American life when the personal was not considered political and the political was not regarded as personal. The distinction was, in fact, a principle central to American life – for the modern liberal republic stands or falls on the conviction that religion and politics are separable. It is this notion – that what is primordially personal (religious faith, first and foremost, but other things as well) can be made for the most part politically irrelevant – which distinguishes the limited government peculiar to modern times from all prior government, which assumed the contrary. When the personal is made political and the political, personal, it is no longer theoretically possible to distinguish public from private, and it is no longer politically possible to restrict the government’s reach. This inability brought with it considerable disadvantages in earlier times. In an era in which modern technology has extended the reach of surveillance in manifold ways, it is a catastrophe.

Fashions in Forbidden Speech

D. G. Myers 04.18.2011 - 8:37 AM

The temptation to politicize nearly everything is nearly universal, at least among the ruling elite in America. “We live in a time in which those who want to advance in the professions must pretend to believe what we all know to be untrue,” the Hillsdale College historian Paul A. Rahe wroteon Saturday over at Ricochet. As an example, he repeated the story of Dr. Lazar Greenfield, an emeritus professor of surgery at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, who was bounced from the editorship of Surgery News for daring to suggest—on Valentine’s Day, no less—that “there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected,” and the bond appears to be biologically rooted.

Dr. Greenfield submissively apologized, but the gods of social constructionism were not appeased. Yesterday he resigned as president of the American College of Surgeons after two months of predictable “controversy” and “outrage.” His breezy and cheerful editorial, which Rahe conveniently reprints in full since it has been proscribed by Surgery News, “outraged many women in the field, some of whom said that it reflected a macho culture in surgery that needed to change,” the New York Times reported

The Auto Bailout and the Rule of Law

by Todd Zywicki 

When President Dwight Eisenhower named Charles Wilson — then the president of General Motors — to be his secretary of defense in 1953, some senators considering the nomination wondered whether Wilson could distinguish his loyalty to GM from his obligations to the country. Wilson assured them that he could, but then added that he did not think a conflict would ever come up. "For years I have thought that what was good for the country was good for General Motors, and vice versa," he said in his confirmation hearing.

Wilson's statement — especially that "vice versa" — was long considered the epitome of corporatist excess. To many, it represented the view that the government existed to advance the interests of large corporations (and, of course, vice versa), even if the arrangement came at the expense of average citizens and workers.

In the past three years, however, Wilson's attitude has come back into vogue, as a new approach to the relationship between the government and the private sector has taken hold in Washington. That approach — a kind of state capitalism that seeks to entangle the government and large corporations in order to allow for careful management of the economy — is perhaps best embodied in the government bailout and subsequent bankruptcy of Wilson's old company, and of one of its longstanding competitors.

The bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler have been held up by President Obama and his supporters as a great success story — proof that, by working together, government and business can save jobs and strengthen the economy. But this popular narrative is dangerously misleading. Far from a success story, the events surrounding the bailouts offer a cautionary tale of executive overreach. And their example clarifies the Obama administration's broader approach to economic policy — an approach that is both harmful to economic growth and dangerous to the rule of law.

THE FAIRY TALE

By December 2008, years of decline had finally caught up with Chrysler and General Motors. Unlike Ford, which had moved aggressively to fix its longstanding problems — chiefly by shedding unprofitable subsidiaries and renegotiating labor agreements — GM and Chrysler were still plagued by incompetence and inefficiency.

The EU Crackup

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

Political upheaval has hit Finland, and it's merely a foreshadowing of bigger changes ahead. The core issue is whether Finland ought to be paying for bailouts for other EU states. In reaction to establishment support for the bailout, voters ousted the probailout ruling party and gave an upset victory to the bailout-critical conservative party. Against every expectation, the eternal rule of the social democrats is at an end.

But most striking of all are the gains made by a previously invisible party called True Finns. This is the only party to take a hardcore position: no bailouts at all. It also so happens that this party is predictably nationalist on issues of trade and immigration. But that's not the source of the appeal. The bailout is what is on everyone's mind. And you know that the anger must be palpable if it fired up the usually sleepy world of Finnish politics.

In the sweep of history, few issues are as politically volatile as tax-funded bailouts of foreign countries, especially during difficult economic times. It's a policy that provokes dramatic political change. The 20th century's most famous case was in interwar Germany, when nationwide resentment against payments to conquering allied nations ushered in National Socialist rule.

It should be no surprise that overtaxed Finns have no interest in sending their tax dollars to bail out the banking industry of Portugal, a country that is 2,500 miles and two days travel away.

The Moral Imperative of the Market

by Friedrich A. Hayek

In 1936, the year in which (entirely coincidentally) John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory, I suddenly saw, as I prepared my presidential address to the London Economic Club, that my previous work in different branches of economics had a common root. This insight was that the price system was really an instrument which enabled millions of people to adjust their efforts to events, demands, and conditions of which they had no concrete, direct knowledge, and that the whole coordination of the world economy was due to certain practices and usages which had grown up unconsciously. The problem I had first identified in studying industrial fluctuations — that false price signals misdirected human efforts — I then followed up in various other branches of the discipline.

Inspiration of Ludwig von Mises

Here my thinking was inspired largely by Ludwig von Mises's conception of the problem of ordering a planned economy. My early investigation into the consequences of rent restriction showed me more clearly than almost anything else how government interference with the price system completely upsets human economic efforts.

But it took me a long time to develop what is basically a simple idea. I was puzzled that Mises'sSocialism,[1] which had been so convincing to me and seemed finally to show why central planning could not work, had not convinced the rest of the world. I asked myself why this was the case.

A guide on how to loose elections

This is what happens when non-Muslims win an election in a partially Muslim country:

Deadly rioting erupted across Nigeria's largely Muslim north on Monday as youths torched churches and homes in anger at President Goodluck Jonathan's election victory.

Jonathan, the first president from the oil producing Niger Delta, was declared the winner with around 57 percent of votes. He defeated Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler from the north, who got around 31 percent.

Observers have called the poll the fairest in decades in Africa's most populous nation.

But to Muslims, an election is only valid if they win. If they don't, there is violence. The Muslim north went up in flames:

"In Kaduna we have seen dead bodies lying by the road," Red Cross official Umar Mairiga told Reuters. "Two thousand people have been displaced at one military camp alone."

Authorities in the northern state of Kaduna imposed a 24-hour curfew after protesters set fire to the residence of Vice President Namadi Sambo in the town of Zaria and forced their way into the central prison, releasing inmates.

The body of a small boy shot in the chest by a stray bullet was brought to a police station.

"They have destroyed our cars and our houses. I had to run for my life and I am now in my neighbour's house," said Dora Ogbebor, a resident of Zaria whose origins are in the south.

Plumes of smoke rose into the air in parts of Kaduna as protesters set fire to barricades of tyres. Security forces fired in the air and used teargas to disperse groups of youths shouting "We want Buhari, we want Buhari". …

Buhari was yet to make any public statement on the violence despite appeals by foreign embassies that he call for calm.

Now for the punch line:

Police said the violence was political rather than ethnic or religious.

Islam is a totalitarian political creed, dedicated to global conquest just like communism, but dressed in the mystical ravings of an unhinged warlord from the Dark Ages instead of sophomoric rhetoric about the proletariat and bourgeoisie. All Muslim violence is political, but it is also all religious.

Eventually Nigeria will reach the tipping point, and the same thing will happen to Christiansthere as in Lebanon. The Islamic empire will be one country larger; civilization will be one country smaller.

In the meantime, congratulations to Nigerians on their democratic election. They had better buckle up; any country where Islam has gotten its nose in the tent is in for a rough ride.

A new flotilla is under way ...

Whose war is it anyway?
The projection of the West’s Culture Wars on to the Middle East turns it into a permaconflict, depriving all sides of an incentive to compromise.
Brendan O’Neill 

Why, when other conflicts of the Cold War era have long since subsided, does the conflagration in the Middle East remain defiantly flammable? The anti-Israel lobby will put it down to Israel’s ‘expansionist frenzy’, its desire to ‘steal land’ and execute a ‘genocide against the Palestinians’. Pro-Israel observers will blame the ‘genocidal terror’ of Israel’s enemies, who apparently won’t be happy until they’ve brought about ‘the destruction of the Jewish state’ (1). In truth, it is not any innate, genocidal madness on the part of the protagonists that keeps this conflict alive and tragic, but the cynical actions of outside observers. The relentless internationalisation of the stand-off in the Middle East – more than that, the projection of the West’s Culture Wars on to Israeli-Palestinian tensions – has turned it into something like a permaconflict, in which neither side has much incentive to agree, settle or compromise.

The latest outburst of violence in Gaza is especially disturbing, where a cut-off section of the divided Palestinian people has been subjected to awful assaults. However, the reaction to the violence exposes the deeper, underlying problem: international exploitation of Middle Eastern tensions, and the hijacking of a complex conflict by international elements desperately seeking a simplistic sense of moral purpose. However desperate is the situation in Gaza, there is little justification for the widespread discussion of it as an ‘apocalypse’, ‘Holocaust’, or – amongst pro-Israel observers – as a ‘courageous’ invasion by Israel to ‘uphold freedom and enlightenment’ (2). Rather, such hyperbolic, histrionic and pseudo-historic language reveals the extent to which the West’s own existential crisis – over morality, meaning, purpose – has been exported to the Middle East. Israel/Palestine has been turned into a laboratory for working out Western angst. And this has placed an intolerable burden on a local conflict, deepening its divisions and prolonging its violence.

Of course, there has long been a powerful international element to the conflict in the Middle East. During the Cold War era, the US bankrolled and armed Israel as its gendarme in the Arab world, while the Soviet Union backed the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Arab nationalism more broadly. Those days, however, are long gone. The Soviet Union is no more, and while America still describes itself as a ‘friend of Israel’ it has, over the past 15 years, become far more critical of its former ally and is the driving force behind the creation of a ‘viable’ Palestinian state (3). The internationalisation we have today is far more desperate and reckless than that of the past. It is driven not by clear political or tactical objectives, but by their absence. It is political disarray in the West, a dearth of meaning and vision, that underpins contemporary interventions in the Middle East. The Western political and media classes are increasingly projecting their search for purpose – their defence of or disdain for Enlightenment values, and their political positioning in the Culture War itself – on to the clash between Israel and Palestine, and in the process are imbuing an increasingly degraded conflict with a profound, historic, fin-de-siècle momentum that makes compromise near impossible.

It is extraordinary the extent to which the conflict has been internationalised over the past 15 years. Virtually every government on Earth has created for itself either a direct or indirect stake in the stand-off between tiny Israel and the even tinier Palestinian-controlled territories. For example, the Roadmap for Peace of 2003 was overseen and enforced by a so-called ‘Quartet of Powers’ consisting of the US, the UN, the EU and Russia – in other words, every state in the world. The ‘peace process’ itself, instituted by Washington in the early 1990s, has been based on the idea that more and more outside observers are required to ‘fix’ the Middle East. The names of the historic signposts in the ‘peace process’ – the Madrid Conference, the Oslo Accords, the Washington Handshake, the Camp David talks – speak to the profound transformation of a local conflict into an international crisis, where the decision-making momentum is continually taken out of the hands of the people of the Middle East and placed at the table of supposedly neutral bureaucrats across the globe.

The People's Republic of San Francisco Wants Venue Owners to Take Pictures of All Patrons

The San Francisco Entertainment Commission wants to require all venues with an occupancy of over 100 people to record the faces of all patrons and scan their ID’s for storage in a database which they must hand over to law enforcement on request.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation notes what one would think is obvious:

Events with strong cultural, ideological, and political components are frequently held at venues that would be affected by these rules. Scanning the ID’s of all attendees at an anti-war rally, a gay night club, or a fundraiser for a civil liberties organization would have a deeply chilling effect on speech. Participants might hesitate to attend such events if their attendance were noted, stored, and made available on request to government authorities.