The Pretence of Knowledge

by Friedrich August von Hayek

Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 11, 1974

The particular occasion of this lecture, combined with the chief practical problem which economists have to face today, have made the choice of its topic almost inevitable. On the one hand the still recent establishment of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science marks a significant step in the process by which, in the opinion of the general public, economics has been conceded some of the dignity and prestige of the physical sciences. On the other hand, the economists are at this moment called upon to say how to extricate the free world from the serious threat of accelerating inflation which, it must be admitted, has been brought about by policies which the majority of economists recommended and even urged governments to pursue. We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.

It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences - an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the "scientistic" attitude - an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, "is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed."¹ I want today to begin by explaining how some of the gravest errors of recent economic policy are a direct consequence of this scientistic error.

The theory which has been guiding monetary and financial policy during the last thirty years, and which I contend is largely the product of such a mistaken conception of the proper scientific procedure, consists in the assertion that there exists a simple positive correlation between total employment and the size of the aggregate demand for goods and services; it leads to the belief that we can permanently assure full employment by maintaining total money expenditure at an appropriate level. Among the various theories advanced to account for extensive unemployment, this is probably the only one in support of which strong quantitative evidence can be adduced. I nevertheless regard it as fundamentally false, and to act upon it, as we now experience, as very harmful.

The forgotten benefactor of humanity 2

Norman Borlaug, the agronomist whose discoveries sparked the Green Revolution, has saved literally millions of lives, yet he is hardly a household name

by Gregg Easterbrook

AMERICA has three living winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, two universally renowned and the other so little celebrated that not one person in a hundred would be likely to pick his face out of a police lineup, or even recognize his name. The universally known recipients are Elie Wiesel, who for leading an exemplary life has been justly rewarded with honor and acclaim, and Henry Kissinger, who in the aftermath of his Nobel has realized wealth and prestige. America's third peace-prize winner, in contrast, has been the subject of [Image]little public notice, and has passed up every opportunity to parley his award into riches or personal distinction. And the third winner's accomplishments, unlike Kissinger's, are morally unambiguous. Though barely known in the country of his birth, elsewhere in the world Norman Borlaug is widely considered to be among the leading Americans of our age.

The forgotten benefactor of humanity 1

The man who fed the world.

On the day Norman Borlaug was awarded its Peace Prize for 1970, the Nobel Committee observed of the Iowa-born plant scientist that "more than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world." The committee might have added that more than any other single person Borlaug showed that nature is no match for human ingenuity in setting the real limits to growth.

Borlaug, who died Saturday at 95, came of age in the Great Depression, the last period of widespread hunger in U.S. history. The Depression was over by the time Borlaug began his famous experiments, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, with wheat varieties in Mexico in the 1940s. But the specter of global starvation loomed even larger, as advances in medicine and hygiene contributed to population growth without corresponding increases in the means of feeding so many.

Borlaug solved that challenge by developing genetically unique strains of "semidwarf" wheat, and later rice, that raised food yields as much as sixfold. The result was that a country like India was able to feed its own people as its population grew from 500 million in the mid-1960s, when Borlaug's "Green Revolution" began to take effect, to the current 1.16 billion. Today, famines—whether in Zimbabwe, Darfur or North Korea—are politically induced events, not true natural disasters.

In later life, Borlaug was criticized by self-described "greens" whose hostility to technology put them athwart the revolution he had set in motion. Borlaug fired back, warning in these pages that fear-mongering by environmental extremists against synthetic pesticides, inorganic fertilizers and genetically modified foods would again put millions at risk of starvation while damaging the very biodiversity those extremists claimed to protect. In saving so many, Borlaug showed that a genuine green movement doesn't pit man against the Earth, but rather applies human intelligence to exploit the Earth's resources to improve life for everyone.

Progressives gone lethal

''Yes, we need 'death panels' ''

 by c. tucker, Atlanta Journal, April 20, 2011

This morning, my colleague Jay Bookman had a very thoughtful post on why rationing health care — “death panels,” if you will — is quite necessary. I wrote on a similar subject in my Sunday column.

If we keeping spending our health care dollars disproportionately on the elderly, we will have little left to spend on children. That makes for an upside-down society that cannot thrive for long.

I happen to think the entire column is worth reading, but if your time (and patience) are short, focus on the grafs in which my brother, a Boston kidney doc, talks about dialysis for the elderly who are already dying:

If resources are limited (and they are), the nation needs to make choices – some more painful than others. My brother, Kevin, a Boston physician who treats kidney disease, talks about the Medicare program that pays for dialysis for anyone with failing kidneys — including the terminally ill. Started in the 1970s to help adults still in the workforce, its fastest-growing population is now over 65, he said.  And it costs tens of billions a year.

“It may not be the best use of resources for the frail and infirm elderly, and it also forces many elderly patients to spend their last days in the hospital, rather than at home,” a more comfortable setting, Kevin told me.

Yet, many patients, even octogenarians who don’t expect to recover, find it difficult to turn down the treatment. “And physicians resist having a conversation with patients that recommends they forego dialysis because it’s an uncomfortable conversation to have. It’s easier just to recommend the treatment,” he said.

But those are exactly the adult conversations we ought to be having.

Those will undoubtedly be very painful conversations. But we simply don’t have the money to spend to prolong the life of a terminally ill 87-year-old for a few weeks.

funny, but still true ...

First Earth Day organizer ‘composted’ his ex-girlfriend

by MEREDITH JESSUP

Happy Earth Day! Here’s the story of the eco-activist environmentalists don’t like to talk about:

The first Earth Day event was held in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park and hosted by Ira Einhorn on April 22, 1970.  Seven years later, police arrested Einhorn after discovering the half-mummified body of his ex-girlfriend in his apartment closet.

A self-proclaimed environmental activist, Einhorn made a name for himself among ecological groups during the 1960s and ’70s by taking on the role of a tie-dye-wearing ecological guru and Philadelphia’s head hippie. With his long beard and gap-toothed smile, Einhorn — who nicknamed himself “Unicorn” because his German-Jewish last name translates to “one horn” —advocated flower power, peace and free love to his fellow students at the University of Pennsylvania. He also claimed to have helped found Earth Day.

But the charismatic spokesman who helped bring awareness to environmental issues and preached against the Vietnam War — and any violence — had a secret dark side. When his girlfriend of five years, Helen “Holly” Maddux, moved to New York and broke up with him, Einhorn threatened that he would throw her left-behind personal belongings onto the street if she didn’t come back to pick them up.

And so on Sept. 9, 1977, Maddux went back to the apartment that she and Einhorn had shared in Philadelphia to collect her things, and was never seen again. When Philadelphia police questioned Einhorn about her mysterious disappearance several weeks later, he claimed that she had gone out to the neighborhood co-op to buy some tofu and sprouts and never returned.

It wasn‘t until 18 months later that investigators searched Einhorn’s apartment after one of his neighbors complained that a reddish-brown, foul-smelling liquid was leaking from the ceiling directly below Einhorn’s bedroom closet. Inside the closet, police found Maddux’s beaten andpartially mummified body stuffed into a trunk that had also been packed with Styrofoam, air fresheners and newspapers.

Einhorn was arrested but skipped bail and sought refuge across Europe for the next 23 years.  After he was extradited from France, he stood trial where he claimed that his ex-girlfriend had been killed by CIA agents who framed him because he knew too much about paranormal military research. He was convicted and is serving out a life sentence.

Einhorn claims that Earth Day was his idea, but the EPA recognizes Sen. Gaylord Nelson as the official founder.

It’s interesting that you never hear how one of the standard bearers of the modern-day environmental movement was a complete whack-job psycho-murder.  Similarly, it’s also interesting how Planned Parenthood supporters never acknowledge the sordid racist story of its own founder, Margaret Sanger.

Is anyone else noticing a pattern here?

Who is Timothy Geithner?

Morgan Reynolds, who served as chief economist for the US Department of Labor during 2001–2, George W. Bush's first term, has done a little fact checking on the new Treasury Secretary:

Who is Geithner? He is a creature of the eastern banking establishment and ruling class through and through. His résumé nicely matches his actions in handing out government money and guarantees to the "right people." Geithner’s father Peter is director of the Asia program at the Ford Foundation, a New World Order operation. Peter Geithner oversaw the "microfinance" programs developed in Indonesia by Ann Dunham-Soetoro, Barack Obama’s mother. Geithner’s maternal grandfather, Charles F. Moore, was an adviser to President Eisenhower and vice president of Ford Motor Company, according to Wikipedia. Geithner’s wife Carole Marie, like Geithner a 1983 graduate of Dartmouth College (Ivy League), is daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sonnenfeld of Princeton, N.J., a professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton University (Ivy League) for 27 years.

After Timothy Geithner graduated from Dartmouth he picked up an M.A. at Johns Hopkins in something called "international economics" and East Asian studies. That is the extent of Geithner’s formal training in economics, as far as I can tell. Then he worked for Kissinger and Associates for three years, a Rockefeller satrapy, before a series of government appointments, mostly at Treasury where he was Under Secretary for International Affairs under Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs and Rockefeller’s notorious Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and then Lawrence Summers of Harvard University (Ivy League), World Bank and CFR. Summers, of course, is currently Obama’s head of the National Economic Council. Want a solution for the financial and economic woes? Why, hire the same experts who caused the problem(s).

Attack Of The Socialist-Luddites

Quotes from Environmentalists

The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.

—Kenneth Boulding, originator of the “Spaceship Earth”
concept (as quoted by William Tucker in Progress and Privilege, 1982)

We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last!

—Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue).

Free Enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process…. Capitalism is destroying the earth.

—Helen Caldicott, Union of Concerned Scientists

We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects…. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.

—David Foreman, Earth First!

Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed.

—Pentti Linkola

If you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won’t give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other.

—Amory Lovins in The Mother Earth–Plowboy Interview, Nov/Dec 1977, p.22

The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species (man) upon the rest of the natural world.

—John Shuttleworth

What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.

—Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-Colorado)

I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.

—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.

—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.

—Economist editorial

We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight.

—David Foreman, Earth First!

Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.

—Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!

If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS

—Earth First! Newsletter

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets…Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.

—David Graber, biologist, National Park Service

The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.

—Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project

If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.

—Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund

Cannibalism is a “radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation.”

—Lyall Watson, The Financial Times, 15 July 1995

Poverty For “Those People”

We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels.

—Carl Amery

Every time you turn on an electric light, you are making another brainless baby.

—Helen Caldicott, Union of Concerned Scientists

To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.

—Lamont Cole

If there is going to be electricity, I would like it to be decentralized, small, solar-powered.

—Gar Smith, editor of the Earth Island Institute’s online magazine The Edge

The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States: We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are. And it is important to the rest of the world to make sure that they don’t suffer economically by virtue of our stopping them.

—Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund

The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population.

—Reid Bryson, “Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man”, (1971)

The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer.

—Paul Ehrlich, in The Population Bomb (1968)

I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.

—Paul Ehrlich in (1969)

In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.

—Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)

Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity…in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.

—Paul Ehrlich in (1976)

This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.

—Peter Gwynne, Newsweek 1976

There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production—with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon… The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are hard-pressed to keep up with it.

—Newsweek, April 28, (1975)

This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000.

—Lowell Ponte in “The Cooling”, 1976

If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. … This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.

—Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970)

1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual!

Yes, it’s Earth Day again, the day we’re all supposed to think about Mother Gaia and what we can do to worship her in the correctly communal and communitarian manner. One little tip for you though (stolen shamelessly from PJ O’Rourke, as most peoples’ good jokes are): Have a look at any of the various events going on around the place and give the babe/beast ratio a quick check.
Things that are fashionable, ahead of the curve, have very high babe ratios: all the good looking women are there. When there’s a preponderance of mutts and beasts you know that the cause has passed its peak and become, like politics, showbiz for the ugly. Earth Day failed the ratio check starting some three decades ago and this year won’t be any different.
However, we do have something different for this year: a concerted attempt to use children as informers on their parents.
….launching this Earth Day is Green My Parents, a nationwide effort to inspire and organize kids to lead their families in measuring and reducing environmental impact at home. Not just on Earth Day, but every day.
Oh aye, what’s Green My Parents all about then?
...a movement that activates & enlists kids to lead their families in measuring & reducing environmental impact at home & “challenge” their parents to share savings with kids.

Haneke: films for middle-class masochists

by Tim Black 
The director is popular with the arthouse crowd because he gives their prejudices a gloss of seriousness.
Austrian film director Michael Haneke’s latest, The White Ribbon: A German Children’s Story, has already won the Palme d’Or. Critics have heaped praise upon it, and arthouse audiences have flocked to see it. You see, there’s just something about Haneke’s work that culture vultures can’t stick their beaks into quick enough.

Which, in its way, is puzzling. Not because Haneke is not a talented filmmaker. Far from it, in fact. From their stately structures to the languorous, deliberately disconcerting extended takes, his films are always painstakingly crafted. No detail is accidental, no thing unthought. No, what’s puzzling about Haneke’s popularity amongst those who take their films nearly as seriously as they take themselves is that his films are so desolating. Almost every review of Haneke’s work gushes with the same adjectives: disturbing, disquieting, discomfiting. Haneke’s films don’t please, they unsettle. They are the artistic equivalent of middle-class masochism.

Funny Games, for instance, was the heartwarming tale of a nice bourgeois family tortured to death by a couple of boys in tennis kit. The Piano Teacher was the groin-girding story of a nice bourgeois society driving a libidinous pianist to torture her genitals. Hidden was an endearing portrait of a nice bourgeois couple tortured to distraction by post-colonial guilt, and unfathomable surveillance. But it’s not just the content that is so dismal. Formally, too, his films resist pleasure. Almost without fail they refuse to resolve themselves into anything resembling a conclusion. This is hardly surprising: agency in his work, whether that of psychotic kids or camcorder-wielding stalkers, is without reason. Bad things happen, that’s all we on Earth can know.

The White Ribbon: A German Children’s Story is no exception to Haneke’s rule of thumb – build something dispiriting and the plaudits will come. Set in a German village on the eve of the First World War, it centres around several inexplicable acts of cruelty and misadventure that perplex the small community. The local doctor is sent tumbling from his horse by a trip wire; a female labourer has a fatal accident at the saw mill; the son of the village baron is found hanging upside down in a barn, his backside bleeding following a severe beating. Misfortune and malice continue to afflict the locals. And they, along with us, have no real idea, but plenty of suspicions, as to who is causing this.

The chief suspects are ostensibly the village children, a ghostly bunch that congregate near the houses of victims. Whether this is out of concern or cruelty we are never sure. But Haneke has a deeper motive than creating some Turn of the Screw-style ambiguity around pallid kids, or even a whodunit, with no who and little dunit. His concern, rather, seems to be with a society that breeds cruelty.

Consequently, the village here functions as Haneke’s view of society as a whole. It’s a study in psychopathology, a portrait of a community in which cruelty is mundane and evil banal. Haneke seems to want us to see this village as an incubator for some coming monstrosity. Little wonder that every relationship is packed full of latent violence, each interactions pregnant with menace. And given the film’s pre-First World War German setting, we can be in little doubt that Haneke intends us to see where and when the seeds of fascism were sown.

A man of character

Who Owns the Fed?

Have you heard? 

The Federal Reserve System raked in profits of $79.3 billion last year, almost triple what runner-up ExxonMobil made. The Fed’s business model is a snap—just print money—and unlike poor beleaguered Exxon, the Fed has no competition to worry about. This means a gigantic windfall for the big banks because, although they don’t like to admit it, they actually own the Fed.
Or not.
These are all half-truths and distortions, all too easy to find on the Internet. Bloggers like to begin with the discovery that commercial banks hold shares of Fed stock and those shares pay an annual dividend. A further discovery that the Fed makes big profits is all it takes to send some of them off on a conspiracy tangent. Because shareholders in a profit-seeking corporation are its owners, so it must be with the Fed, they think. Profiteering, world-government schemes, and who knows what else, must surely follow. As I will show, these half-baked ideas are distractions from the serious issues that surround the Federal Reserve System.

Yes, commercial banks hold shares of stock in their local Federal Reserve branch, but these shares do not confer ownership in any meaningful sense. Ownership is defined as the legal and moral right to use and dispose of some asset. Ownership can be conditional or temporary, as when you lease an apartment and acquire the right to occupy it for a limited time, but not to run a business in it or do major renovations. Your purchase of shares of stock in a public corporation gives you rights to vote in shareholder elections, receive any dividends declared, and sell your shares—but that’s about all. You may not walk into the corporate offices and start giving orders; on the other hand, you may not be held liable for any misdeeds of corporate officers or employees. If you acquire shares in a nonpublic company like Facebook, you accept additional restrictions on when and to whom you may sell your shares.

Member banks receive a fixed 6 percent annual dividend on their Fed stock and enjoy limited voting rights. But there the resemblance to ordinary shares ends. The banks are obliged to acquire shares when they become members of the Fed, and they may not sell their shares or pledge them as collateral. An initial issue of stock was seen as a good way to capitalize the Fed when it began, but there has been no need for additional capital and those shares are no longer significant.

Each branch has a board of directors with six members elected by local member banks and three appointed by the central board of governors. However, board members are not all bankers. Moreover, under a rule recently enacted by Congress, only nonbankers may serve on committees that select Fed bank presidents. This new rule is one way in which the ground has been shifting under the Fed recently; more about this below.

Poverty Is Easy to Explain

by Walter E. Williams 

Academics, politicians, clerics, and others always seem perplexed by the question: Why is there poverty? Answers usually range from exploitation and greed to slavery, colonialism, and other forms of immoral behavior. Poverty is seen as something to be explained with complicated analysis, conspiracy doctrines, and incantations. This vision of poverty is part of the problem in coming to grips with it.

There is very little either complicated or interesting about poverty. Poverty has been man’s condition throughout his history. The causes of poverty are quite simple and straightforward. Generally, individual people or entire nations are poor for one or more of the following reasons: (1) they cannot produce many things highly valued by others; (2) they can produce things valued by others but they are prevented from doing so; or (3) they volunteer to be poor.

The true mystery is why there is any affluence at all. That is, how did a tiny proportion of man’s population (mostly in the West) for only a tiny part of man’s history (mainly in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries) manage to escape the fate of their fellow men?

In the meantime back to the British Empire ...

Family of 12 Ethiopian asylum seekers who have just landed in Britain get £1,460-a-week for vast London home

By Daily Mail Reporter

An Ethiopian family of 12 are being put up in a vast house costing the taxpayer almost £1,500-a-week just two months after arriving in Britain.

The couple and their 10 children are receiving a staggering £1,460-a-week housing benefit from the cash-strapped Tower Hamlets council in London - Britain's poorest borough.

The jobless family - who will also be receiving other handouts such as unemployment and child benefits - only arrived in London from Africa in the past few weeks. 

It is yet another example of taxpayers having to pick up the bill for families to stay in vast houses in the capital.

Tower Hamlets in London is Britain's poorest borough

And it comes as it emerged benefits payouts in Tower Hamlets have cost the taxpayer a mammoth £223million in just one year. 

The Ethiopians, who are believed to be asylum-seekers, will cost taxpayers £76,000 if they are allowed to stay in the property for 12 months. 

They received a weekly sum of £1,462,90 on March 4, according to the council's housing benefits claims department.

Another nine families in the borough received between £590 and £613 in the same week and the last annual figures show 10 families getting between £20,600 and £38,300 for 2008-09.

Tower Hamlets Opposition leader Peter Golds said: 'Paying a yearly rate of £76,000 for one family shows the ludicrous public money being paid to put people into expensive housing.

'It is utterly, utterly ridiculous what sort of properties the council must be housing these families in.'

Democracy in action

With a head-chopping, totalitarian party to vote for.

A beheading, a few summary executions, a lynching, torturous interrogations, gross violations of the Geneva Conventions — directed at black African captives, with many performed before crowds yelling, “Allahu Akbar!” Those are some of the escapades of the Libyan mujahideen — those lovable “rebels” struggling for democracy in the Arab Spring. John Rosenthal continues his reporting at Pajamas, with the warning that some of the video accompanying his latest article is sickening. A sampling of his story:

What is probably the most harrowing of the clips depicts a public beheading. A man with a long knife can be seen alternately sawing and hacking at the neck of a man who has been suspended upside-down. The victim’s inert body is soaked in blood. The beheading takes place in front of a burnt-out building in what appears to be a public square. The Dutch public broadcaster NOS has identified the location as the main square of the rebel capital of Benghazi.
A crowd numbering at least in the hundreds cheers on the assailants. At one point, a man begins chanting “Libya Hurra!”: “Free Libya!” According to the NOS translation, someone can be heard saying, “He looks like an African.” As the principal assailant begins to saw at the victim’s neck, members of the crowd yell “Allahu Akbar!” Dozens of members of the crowd can be seen filming the proceedings with digital cameras or cell phones.

There’s much more where that came from. John concludes by pointing out that, while it may seem odd that the “rebels” would tape record their own atrocities, that is what is typically done by . . . jihadists — who use the ghoulish recordings for intimidation and other purposes.