An elite that cannot envisage the future except in terms of decline and disaster.

Beware Malthusians in reasonable clothing

The green critics of population control are just as misanthropic as their prophylactic-promoting opponents.

by Tim Black 

The ambient jazzy, folky music - possibly nicked from a nearby Starbucks - had been turned to mute. The lights were dimmed. And the effect was near instant. The postgraduate-dominated audience under-populating the Bloomsbury Theatre in London was finally settling down in glum anticipation of ‘My vision for the future’, the first public event of ‘Population Footprints’ – a ‘UCL and Leverhulme Trust conference on human population growth and global carrying capacity’.

Quite what the audience was expecting, I’m not sure. Doom-laden prophesying? Possibly. Encomia to family planning? Probably. Frighteningly self-righteous blather about there being too many people and too few resources? Almost definitely. This last, after all, is the great unmentionable that the green and the not-so-good can’t stop mentioning, a neo-Malthusian idea that has seized the withered imaginations of every repressed misanthrope from Forum for the Future founder Jonathon Porritt to the patron saint of wildlife programmes, Sir David Attenborough. As Attenborough himself said in a recent piece for the New Statesman: ‘The fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth: there cannot be more people on this earth than can be fed.’

So, given this current cultural climate, in which it’s almost conventional to view the propagation of the species as an act of self-destruction, what the audience was probably not expecting was the opening gambit of Fred Pearce, environment consultant for the New Scientist, author of Peoplequake, and, most important of all, someone who doesn’t think population growth is much of a problem. ‘We are defusing the population bomb’, he declared. There was no booing. But there was no applause either.

Not that Pearce would mind, of course. He seems to be enjoying making a name for himself as the debunker of overpopulation hype. A few weeks ago, for instance, he took on no less a source of procreation anxiety than the United Nations Population Division (UNPD). The problem for Pearce was that in 2009, the UNPD had estimated that the global population, currently just under seven billion, would reach nine billion by 2050 before levelling off. At the beginning of May, however, it revised its predictions. Now global population was not only going to reach nine billion by 2050, but it was going to keep on rising until it reaches over 10 billion by 2100.

Pearce was not convinced that there was much evidence to support such a revision. In fact, as hepoints out in Nature magazine, current world population and current global fertility rates are actually lower than the UN predicted they would be at this stage two years ago. So why, contrary to actual population trends, does the UN now envisage a further rise in future fertility rates? None of this makes sense, argues Pearce: women are now having half as many babies as their grandmothers and world fertility has fallen from 4.9 children per woman in the early 1960s to its current level of around 2.45. The only way the UN can come up with such groundless population projections is by assuming that many developed countries currently with fertility rates well below the replacement level of 2.1 will suddenly start, contrary to all expectations, to produce more and more children. As Pearce observes, this assumption has simply been imposed on to the modelling system. Hence the revision ‘looks more like a political construct than a scientific analysis’.

All of which sounds like a rational voice amid the cacophony of overpopulation doom-mongering. This is surely a good thing, right? What could be better than an award-winning science journalist and author calling out the prophets of overcrowding?

The problem is that while Pearce is correct regarding the population-hyping models used by the UNPD, he has not come to destroy the Malthusian core of green-tinged thinking; he has come, whether he knows it or not, to save Malthusianism, not damn it. Save it, that is, from its overexcited champions who see the threat of ‘catastrophic’ population growth as a stick with which to beat people the world over into prophylactic-using submission.

A reminder that there was a time when climate scientists actually did science

1979 Prediction: Warming Trend Until The Year 2000, Then Cooling

Medieval predictions

Italian Scientists On Trial For Manslaughter After Failing To Predict Earthquake

by W. Briggs

Seven Italian geologists have been hauled before an Italian judge—whether in chains or no, we are not informed—and charged with the heinous crime of manslaughter. Specifically, these men are being held culpable for the deaths of 309 people following an earthquake.

On 6 April 1990, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake shook L’Aquila, Italy. A not unusual event. According to the United States Geological Survey, earthquakes in Italy are as common as Italian soccer players crying foul. At this writing, the last was one month ago, a magnitude 3.3 in Central Italy.

Not only Italian geologists, but geologists everywhere are notoriously bad at predicting just where and when the next earthquake will be. True, these scientists are equipped with elaborate computer models which show how one chunk of earth slides under another and how this slip-sliding causes the earth above to shake and rattle.

Problem is, these models, even though they can be and are used to make predictions, are useless for that task. Geologists at least have the benefit of tracking their faulty predictions, information which can be used to improve their models.

In any case, the L’Aquila quake was not predicted. Which is to say, it was not predicted by the Italian version of the USGS. A man named Giampaolo Giuliani did predict a quake, but he said it would be centered at Sulmona, Italy and that it would take place days before the L’Aquila quake.

The Great Leap Backwards

The Green Fourth Reich

by Dave Blount

Germany produced many of the key figures in the development of socialism, including Otto von Bismarck, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Adolf Hitler, so it should come as no surprise that some Germans are falling head over jackboots for its most alarming incarnation yet, ecototalitarianism:

When it comes to environmental and climate policy, Germany's Scientific Advisory Council on Global Environmental Change (WBGU) is an influential advisory committee for the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. …

In April 2011, the WBGU presented a report entitled "World in Transition - Social Contract for a Great Transformation". The main theses of the WBGU are as follows: The current economic model ("fossil industrial metabolism") is normatively untenable.

"The transformation to a climate friendly economy… is morally as necessary as the abolition of slavery and the outlawing of child labor." The reorganization of the world economy has to happen quickly; nuclear energy and coal have to be given up at the same time and very soon. …

All nations would have to relinquish their national interests and find a new form of collective responsibility for the sake of the climate: "The world citizenry agree to innovation policy that is tied to the normative postulate of sustainability and in return surrender spontaneous and [persistent] desires. Guarantor of this virtual agreement is a formative state […]."

This strong state provides, therefore, for the "social problematization" of unsustainable lifestyles. It overcomes "stakeholders" and "veto players" who "impede the transition to a sustainable society." In Germany, climate protection should therefore become a fundamental goal of the state for which the legal actions of the legislative, executive and judicial branches will be aligned.

Note that all of this rests on the liberal belief that CO2 has a deleterious effect on the climate — an unproven theory that has been crumbling in the face of a cooling climate.

Why should people around the world voluntarily give up their demands for material welfare and security? Consequently, the WBGU admits frankly, that the decarbonization of the society can only be achieved by the limitation of democracy - both nationally and internationally.

Decarbonization means deindustrialization — i.e., poverty directly imposed by the government.

Internationally, the WBGU calls for a "World Security Council" for sustainability. The members of the proposed "future chamber" for Germany would explicitly not be chosen democratically and would limit the powers of Parliament.

This time German oligarchical collectivists won't have to count on the Wehrmacht to impose their dystopian schemes. The United Nations will be much more effective. Democrats can be expected to collude with them eagerly.

For an idea of what happens when authoritarians try to bring about economic transformations on this scale through coercion, refer to Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, which killed 45 million Chinese in four years and subjected the survivors to a generation of abject misery — and remember that unlike environazis, Mao wasn't destroying living standards deliberately.

Bankers, lobbying CEOs, and saber-rattling policy wonks

Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy

"Even large business interests can come and go, but the political apparatus itself, the most inherently corrupting of all institutions given its unavoidably coercive and monopolistic nature, will continue to inflict misery and loot the disadvantaged on behalf of the powerful."

by Anthony Gregory

The idea that corporate interests, banking elites, and politicians conspire to set US policy is at once obvious and beyond the pale. Everyone knows that the military-industrial complex is fat and corrupt, that presidents bestow money and privilege on their donors and favored businesses, that a revolving door connects Wall Street and the White House, and that economic motivations lurk behind America's wars. But to make too fine a point of this is typically dismissed as unserious conspiracy theorizing, unworthy of mainstream consideration.

We have seen this paradox at work in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse. The left-liberals blame Wall Street and Big Finance for betraying the masses out of predatory greed and for being rewarded for their irresponsibility by Washington's bailouts. At the same time, the Left appears reluctant to oppose these bailouts outright, seeing the spending as a necessary evil to return the global economy to stability, however inequitably. What's more, left-liberals fail to call out President Obama and Democratic leaders for their undeniable hand in all this. They blame Goldman Sachs but see their president, who got more campaign money from the firm than from almost any other source, as a helpless victim of circumstance, rather than an energetic conspirator in corporate malfeasance on top of being the enthusiastic heir and expansionist of George W. Bush's aggressive foreign policy.

The tea-party Right is also hesitant to examine the corporate state too closely. These conservatives detect an elitism in Obama's governance but are loath to earnestly challenge the economic status quo, for it would lead to uncomfortable questions about the warfare state, defense contractors, US wars, the whole history of the Republican Party, and all the typical right-wing assumptions about the inherent fairness of America's supposedly "free-enterprise" system. By refusing to admit that economic fundamentals were unsound through the entirety of the Bush years — by failing to acknowledge the imperial reality of US wars and their debilitating effect on the average household budget — the Right is forgoing its chance to delve beyond the surface in its criticism of Obama's reign.

One word: “Srebrenica.”

The Making of a Monster

by Janine di Giovanni

 

For years, during the grim and seemingly endless Balkan wars of the 1990s, Ratko Mladic appeared a mysterious, almost mythic figure, a stout and red-faced general in combat fatigues, who was rarely seen by anyone but his most trusted men. To many Serbs, he was a hero, a defender of national pride and values. To the families of his victims, he was a coldblooded killer who led his soldiers not into battle, but into a state of carnage during the disintegration of Yugoslavia. While all sides—Muslim, Croats, and Serbs—were guilty of heinous crimes, it was Mladic’s men who crossed into infamy, slaughtering nearly 8,000 Muslim boys and men during the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

During the years I spent reporting these Balkan wars, my notebooks grew thick with accounts of the terror Serbian snipers inflicted on the residents of Sarajevo, the city they held in a malevolent siege for years. I heard lengthy, heartbreaking accounts of the destruction of Srebrenica, Gorazde, Foca, and Mostar.

But I met Mladic only once.

It was the winter of 1993, a particularly desperate time for the Bosnian civilians, whose villages were left behind as smoldering pyres by marauding Serbian soldiers. Somehow, by a muddy road, through pelting, icy rain, I had made it to Lukavica, the Serb military stronghold where Mladic and his men had made a stop. Dressed in full military regalia, the general was seated in his jeep, appearing smaller than I had expected. I asked him for an interview. Looking at me with a glacial stare, he seemed to regard me not as human but as some strange species. “Tell the reporter to move away from my car before I run her down,” he barked to one of his lackeys. I never saw him again.

It would take almost two decades after that before he was finally caught. His wife, Bosiljka, had claimed he was dead; there was speculation that he had had plastic surgery to avoid capture. But last week, after too many close calls, too much leaked information, too many escapes, Serb intelligence agents found the 69-year-old general at last. His face, though aged, was the same—that of Europe’s most notorious fugitive from justice. Serbia’s president during the war, Slobodan Milosevic, who preceded Mladic to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague after he was arrested in 2001, was known as the Butcher of the Balkans (his trial ended without a verdict when he died in prison in 2006). But it was the bloodthirsty Mladic, soon headed to The Hague himself to stand trial, who oversaw the charnel house.

The capture of Mladic ends what Boris Tadic, the current Serb president, described (with a monumental euphemism) as a “difficult period of our history.” His arrest, he said, will remove “a stain from the face of the members of our nation wherever they live.” Perhaps it will also, in some small way, ease the anguish of the families of the victims who, in the words of the prosecutor for the ICTY, suffered “unimaginable horrors.”

Banking is just a part of the free market

The State and 100 Percent Reserve Banking

by George Selgin

Free bankers have been fighting a war on two fronts.  On one they face champions of central banking and managed money.  On the other they struggle against advocates of 100-percent reserve banking.  Although the second front is a lot smaller than the first, it’s far from being unimportant, in part because the battle there is being fought against people who generally favor free markets, who might have been expected to join rather than to oppose our cause.

They oppose it for a variety of reasons, one of which is their belief that, in a truly free-market setting, fractional reserve banking wouldn’t survive.  Instead, they insist, 100-percent reserve banks would prevail.  That they haven't is due, in their opinion, to a banking industry playing field slanted in favor of favor fractional-reserve banks, especially by either implicit or implicit deposit guarantees financed through forced levies upon all banks, and sometimes by taxation or inflation.  In short, fractional-reserve banking has been nurtured by government subsidies.

Free bankers have tried responding to this argument by noting how fractional reserve banking has prevailed under every sort of bank regulatory regime, from the earliest beginnings of banking, not excepting regimes that involved very little regulation, like those of Scotland, Canada, and Sweden, and that lacked even a trace of government guarantees or other sorts of artificial support.  But since some 100-percenters seem unmoved by this approach, I here take a different tack, which consists of pointing out that every significant 100-percent bank known to history was a government-sponsored enterprise, which depended for its existence on some combination of direct government subsidies, compulsory patronage, or laws suppressing rival (fractional reserve) institutions. Yet despite the special support they enjoyed, and their solemn commitments to refrain from lending coin deposited with them, they all eventually came a cropper. What’s more, it was these government-sponsored full-reserve banks, rather than their private-market fractional reserve counterparts, that were the progenitors of later central banks, starting with the Bank of England.

So far as records indicate, the very earliest banks were private institutions that began as sidelines to other businesses.  The very first bankers may have been thetrapezites or money-changers of ancient Athens, or their later Roman counterparts.  But the earliest concerning which any details are known were the “banks of deposit” that arose during the 12^th century in Italy, especially in Genoa and Venice, and the record clearly indicates that these banks were credit-granting institutions rather then mere coin warehouses.  Indeed, it was almost inevitable that they should have been so, because in order to efficiently undertake to make payments by bank transfer, and so spare their clients the necessity of dealing with the shoddy coins then available, they were bound to promise to return on demand, not the very coins deposited with them, but coins of equal value, which in effect meant becoming debtors rather than bailees.  Moreover, overdrafts were bound occasionally to result in credits in excess of cash reserves, while the interest to be earned from additional lending allowed bankers to reduce the fees they charged for their payment services, and even to occasionally pay interest on their “deposits.”   In any event the lending was never concealed.  In London goldsmith banking took a similar course, though not until the mid-17^th century.  In short, so far as records indicate, all of the earliest private banks operated on a fractional-reserve basis.

For your own good

It's time to stand up for smokers' rights

by John Humphreys

Perhaps it is inevitable that people will always need to find a minority to hate. Whether it is based on race, or sex, or sexual preference, or lifestyle choice, or language, or religion, or personal habits... the instinct to discriminate, to distrust "different" people, and to enforce conformity is a constant theme throughout history and throughout the world. If this instinct was purely personal, then it would not be a big issue. People could simply choose to associate with those people they prefer, and we could all live in peace. But sadly, many groups want to use the government to force their bigotry on others.
Over the past 100 years there have been some great improvements in social policy, as the government removed most of their discrimination based on race, religion, sexual preference and sex. There are a few outstanding issues (women in the military, gay adoption rights, special rules for Aborigines) but on the whole we now have less official discrimination in these areas. Sadly, not all minorities have been this lucky.
While some minorities become popular political causes, other minorities are on the receiving end of negative political populism. Politically correct campaigners will loudly support the "good minorities" such as GLBT or immigrant groups, but they are equally loud in their condemnation of the "wrong minorities". This seems to indicate that we are not becoming more tolerant... we are simply switching our bigotry on to other areas.
Some of the biggest victims of this modern discrimination are smokers.
Immediately the anti-smoking bigots will insist that they are not really bigoted, because smokers deserve to be punished. Of course, that is exactly what the racists, sexists and homophobes say. 
Most people want to consider themselves a "good person", and so bigots often feel the need to create artificial reasons to justify their intolerance. The excuses range from the plain wrong to the desperate, but the common theme is that in all cases the freedom of smokers is considered irrelevant. If a "good minority" was dismissed this quickly there would be cries of pain from an outraged media and a horde of moralising pundits. But when it comes to smokers... the "moral police" join the lynch mob and declare smokers guilty by definition.
One of the first lines from the bigots is that smoking is bad for you. True, but so what? Lots of things are bad for you, but life is about more than longevity. 
People often make trade-offs between "quality of life" and "quantity of life". We make many decisions that will marginally increase our chance of death, but for a benefit. People choose to go skiing, or sky-diving, or motorbike riding, or drinking, or working in a mine, or eating fatty food, or playing contact sports... knowing that there is a health risk but determining that the benefit is worth the cost. In a free society, people should be free to make their own life decisions.
The health Nazis don't get this point. They really seem to think that the whole purpose of life is to live for as long as possible... and if you ever make an "unhealthy" decision, then you are simply wrong and need to be controlled by your owner the government. A whole army of these anti-fun fanatics have been put together in the Preventative Health Taskforce, so that the government knows exactly how to micro-manage your life. 
As the IPA explained, "The Taskforce recommends 39 accords, scorecards, standards, reviews, action research projects, frameworks, compacts, programs, partnerships, systems, initiatives, criteria, surveys, strategies, agencies, curricula and campaigns for obesity alone". In New Zealand, the fun police have even claimed that when you have two drinks in a night, you are officially "irrational" and therefore had no fun. (Read Eric Crampton's response here.)
At the core, the idea here is that smokers are just "wrong" and they need to be fixed. As a Facebook friend recently put it, "since you do not act like an adult but like a 13-year-old kid that thinks that smoking is cool, the government has to set limits to your destructive and anti-social behaviour". 
Sadly, the author didn't even seem to notice the totalitarian nature of his sentence. Imagine the response if somebody made the same comment about one of the "good minorities".
Thankfully, when most normal people are pushed they admit that people should be free to choose their own lifestyle. The debate then turns to "externalities".
The first externality used to justify anti-smoking intolerance is the health costs of smoking that fall on the taxpayers because of our socialist health system. Again, there is truth in this claim. The most obvious solution would be to introduce a smokers-premium on health insurance, but that would require health policy reform, which is always difficult in our modern welfare-democracy (note, private health providers already have a smokers premium). 

The Party

China’s Never-Ending Party

by John Derbyshire 

You think the 2012 Republican field is lackluster? Check out these party animals.

The “party” in that last sentence is the Chinese Communist Party. The gents standing in the picture are the aptly named Standing Committee (changwu weiyuanhui, literally “everyday affairs committee”) of the CCP’s Central Politburo. Except in the most strictly taxonomic sense, they are not animals, but human beings, or somewhat lifelike simulacra thereof. These are the people who run the affairs of the world’s most populous nation and will continue to do so for another year or so. The picture was taken in October 2007 and they serve five-year terms.

The members of the Standing Committee are so lacking in luster, one feels that the guy wearing a blue tie with his hands folded in front of him—it’s Wu Bangguo—might as well have gone the whole distance and worn a clown suit. The current ages, left to right, are 68, 55, 57, 68, 68, 69, 71, 57, and 67. Technocrats? You bet. From the left again: Numbers one and four are trained in geology, number two in economics and law, and all the rest in engineering—electrical, hydraulic, electronic, electrical, chemical, chemical. They have “rarely appeared in public together again,” we are told. I should think so: That much dullness all in one place might collapse spacetime.

“China’s ‘miracle’ this past quarter century is a political one: the survival of the communist system in all its lawlessness and control-freak brutality.”

I acquired that picture from a book called The Party by Australian journalist Richard McGregor. Published last year (I’m behind on my reading), The Party explains the miracle of China in recent years.

It’s not the ten percent annual growth figures: Any fool nation with a billion people could have done that, starting as they did from such a low base. No, China’s “miracle” this past quarter century is a political one: the survival of the communist system in all its lawlessness and control-freak brutality. You might almost say “half century”: I was hanging out with Old China Hands in the early 1970s, when the Cultural Revolution was in full flood. General opinion among the OCH’s was that the regime had committed suicide and would be gone before the decade ended.

Forward to 1989 and the nationwide demonstrations that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre. The regime seemed indecisive. Rumors circulated that a senior military commander was balking at party orders to move on the demonstrators. (McGregor says those rumors were correct: It was Lieutenant-General Xu Qinxian, commander of the 38th Army. He was court-martialed and sentenced to five years for his insubordination.) Well nigh everyone—including me, and including veteran dissident Wang Bingzhang—thought the game was up for the ChiComs.

Forward another dozen years to 2001, when Gordon Chang brought out his book The Coming Collapse of China. Chang said it would all be over for the CCP in five years. (Ten years on, he’s still saying it.) As it happens, I spent the summer of 2001 in China with my family. I came back convinced that the Communist Party could go on indefinitely, and I wrote articlessaying so. How come Gordon Chang’s speaking fees are so much higher than mine? It’s an unjust world all right.

And they’re still there. They’ll still be there next fall, though the lineup will have changed somewhat. Xi Jinping, second from the right in that photograph, will almost certainly take over the top spot from Hu Jintao. (The CCP, like our own beloved Republican Party, adheres to the next-in-line principle of leadership selection.) Whatever: There’ll be nine sixty-ish gents with dark blue suits, red ties, and engineering degrees.

Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four is told that the future will resemble a boot stamping on a human face forever. China’s future will be a well-polished pair of black Oxfords padding diffidently across the Great Hall of the People’s deep-pile carpets forever. The guys with the boots will be kept discreetly out of sight except when needed.

The Chinese Communist Party has it figured out. After 62 years of blunders, horrors, and reversals, they have pulled off a miracle of statecraft, a Staatskunst Wunder. With their 77 million members distributed in hundreds of thousands of cells, they have turned Lenin’s crude power cult into a robust, adaptable apparatus of total control that, like God in the universe, is everywhere present but nowhere visible—or is visible only, as with that photograph, in a form so bland the eye turns away in search of something recognizably human.

They have their placemen in every bank and company, every school and college, every church and drama club, every military unit and research institute. When the party says, “Jump!” the organization jumps, however “independent” it is in theory; as their banks jumped, against their better judgment, during 2009’s financial crisis.

The party has it all figured out. They will go on forever.

"Save" the Planet or the Treasury ?

The agenda revealed

by Richard

In theory, all the greenery coming out of our provincial government and the EU – like carbon credits - is intended to bring down "carbon" emissions, and thus save the planet. That governments make money out of the measures is just coincidental.

And if you believe that one, the latest Reuters report will comes as a bit of a shock. It tells us that the EU's carbon credit market could be flooded with excess permits over the next decade, cutting prices in half and depriving governments of billions in budgeted revenues.

Apparently, this terrible outcome will arise from the new "energy services directive", due in late June, which will force owners of buildings, vehicles and more controversially, industry, to cut energy consumption through efficiency measures.

One might have thought that such a move would be applauded for its planet-saving potential, but not a bit of it. More efficiency and thus less energy usage means less CO2 which means less permits needed ... leading to a surplus.

"There's a real concern of negative impacts on prices if the issue is not properly addressed," says one EU source. "Some of the studies imply that carbon prices will collapse".

One study suggests carbon credit prices might fall to €14 per tonne, compared to a business-as-usual price of €25. Another sees the price dropping to zero. "The energy services directive could potentially wipe out billions of euros for governments across the EU, unless EU ETS allowances are set aside," says Sanjeev Kumar at environment consultancy E3G.

So it is that there are strong rumor that the governments of EU member states will block the energy-reduction measures, to avoid

Laughter is a formidable weapon

End Game Part II

Keep sleeping, it's late already

End Game

By RT

A small group of anti-war protesters, over Memorial Day weekend, held a silent dance protest at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C.

Socialists of Europe unite

Putin Wins Over Khodorkovsky in European Court

By R. Wensel

The European Court of Human Rights has rejected former Russian 

oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky's claim that he was prosecuted for political reasons. The seven-judge panel, including one Russian justice, said in its 46-page ruling, 

"Khodorkovsky's case might raise some suspicion as to what the real intent of the Russian authorities might have been for prosecuting him, (but) claims of political motivation behind prosecution required incontestable proof, which had not been presented."

Stoned by the Stone Age Hillbillies

Muslim girl, 19, 'stoned to death after taking part in beauty contest'

by WILL STEWART

A teenage Muslim girl was stoned to death under 'Sharia law' after taking part in a beauty contest in Ukraine.

Katya Koren, 19, was found dead in a village in the Crimea region near her home. 

Friends said she liked wearing fashionable clothes and had come seventh in a beauty contest.

Her battered body was buried in a forest and was found a week after she disappeared.

Police have opened a murder investigation and are looking into claims that three Muslim youths killed her, claiming her death was justified under Islam.  

One of the three - named as 16-year-old Bihal Gaziev - is under arrest and told police that Katya had 'violated the laws of Sharia'. Gaziev has said he has no regrets about her death.

Stoning is a divisive subject among Muslims, with some groups interpreting it as Islamic law and others disagreeing.

According to Amnesty International's annual report on death sentences worldwide, issued in April, there were no reports of judicial executions carried out by stoning in 2010

However, new death sentences by stoning were reportedly imposed in Iran, the Bauchi state of Nigeria and Pakistan. 

At least 10 women and four men remained under sentence of death by stoning at the end of the year in Iran, where adultery is the only crime which carries that penalty under Sharia law.

It was widely imposed as a sentence in the years following the 1979 Islamic revolution, and even though Iran's judiciary still regularly hands down such sentences, they are now often converted to other punishments

The barbaric practice was thrown into the international spotlight last year when an Iranian woman, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, was sentenced to death by stoning for adultery after suffering years of abuse at the hands of her drug addict husband.

Miss Ashtiani's lawyer said she was allegedly beaten and sold for sex by opium-addict Ebrahim Ghaderzade, who she is accused of killing.

She was jailed for ten years for murder and sentenced to death for adultery. She was also convicted of having illicit relations for which she received 99 lashes.

The Iranian authorities eventually suspended the stoning after an outcry from the international community.

The European Union has called the sentence 'barbaric', the Vatican pleaded for clemency and Brazil, which has tried to intervene in Iran's stand-off with the West over its nuclear programme, offered Miss Ashtiani asylum.

A number of celebrities, including Robert Redford, Robert De Niro and Sting called for her release in an open letter to the Iranian regime, backed by more than 80 actors, artists, musicians, academics and politicians.

Rule of Law

Is Obama above the law?

By George F. Will

The U.S. intervention in Libya’s civil war, intervention that began with a surplus of confusion about capabilities and a shortage of candor about objectives, is now taking a toll on the rule of law. In a bipartisan cascade of hypocrisies, a liberal president, with the collaborative silence of most congressional conservatives, is traducing the War Powers Resolution.
Enacted in 1973 over President Nixon’s veto, the WPR may or may not be wise. It is, however, unquestionably a law, and Barack Obama certainly is violating it. It stipulates that a president must terminate military action 60 days after initiating it (or 90, if the president “certifies” in writing an “unavoidable military necessity” respecting the safety of U.S. forces), unless Congress approves it. Congress has been supine and silent about this war, which began more than 70 days ago.
All presidents have resented the WPR but have taken care to act “consistent with” its 48-hour reporting requirement. So on March 21, two days after the administration took the nation to war in Libya, Obama notified Congress of this obvious fact, stressing that U.S. operations would be “limited in their nature, duration, and scope” in the service of a “limited and well-defined mission.” Months ago, before it metastasized into regime change, the “well-defined” mission was to protect civilians.
In his March 28 address to the nation, Obama said “the United States will play a supporting role.” But the WPR does not leave presidential warmaking utterly unrestrained if it is a “supporting role.”

The Power of Incentives

Teachers hostage to 'success'

by M. Goodwin

The e-mail box runneth over with bad tidings. 

Teachers are reporting that cheating is rampant in New York City schools - and they claim principals are the culprits.

The reports are responding to my column that many schools are denying students the freedom to fail in a misguided bid to help them. To judge from the response, the problem is worse than I feared. Much worse.

First, a professional in a Manhattan high school wrote to say that teachers in her school are "encouraged" to pass 80 percent of students, no matter their grades or attendance. She offered student writing samples filled with glaring errors of spelling and grammar to prove that "social promotion is alive and well."

Now others are revealing shocking examples from their schools about how unprepared kids are being pushed along to the next grade and out the door with a sham diploma. Their disheartening tales deserve attention.

"Our mandated passing rate is 60 percent," one wrote. "We need to explain in detail why this student failed, what methods were used to get him to pass, how much home contact was made.

"The one group that is not called in for interrogation is the students themselves. No blame falls on them . . . The students know what is going on. It has empowered them to feel that they can work less or not at all and still pass the class."

We are doomed

The Dream of the Mont Pelerin Society

by R. Higgs

Just after World War II, classical liberalism reached its lowest ebb. Europe lay in ruins, one-half locked under Soviet domination, the other half drowning in dirigisme. In Britain, a Labor government wielded power, nationalizing basic industries and creating a full-fledged welfare state. In France and Italy, communists and their political allies threatened to take power. In Scandinavia and the Low Countries, welfare states blossomed while free markets withered. Spain and Portugal endured fascist dictatorships.

Germany languished under Allied occupation, with controls choking the revival of its economy and the population struggling to avoid starvation. In the United States, most people had lost their old faith in the free market and gained a new faith in the ability of government to solve economic problems and guarantee social security. Everywhere in the West both masses and elites, especially the intellectuals, plunged waywardly down what Friedrich A. Hayek had just dubbed "the road to serfdom."

Peering into the abyss ahead, Hayek determined to form a society committed to persuading the intellectuals, and hence the masses and their political leaders, to change course. This society would bring together for mutual enlightenment and encouragement the leading figures of classical liberalism. Included would be Englishmen such as Lionel Robbins, John Jewkes, and Michael Polanyi; Austrian émigrés such as Ludwig von Mises, Fritz Machlup, Karl Popper, and of course Hayek himself; Americans such as Henry Hazlitt, Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, Aaron Director, and George Stigler; Germans such as Wilhelm Röpke and Walter Eucken; Frenchmen such as Maurice Allais and Bertrand de Jouvenel; and other Western Europeans.

In April 1947 the men named above and others — 39 persons in all, from 17 countries — met in Switzerland and formed the Mont Pèlerin Society. They adopted a Statement of Aims that briefly described their view of the prevailing crisis:

Over large stretches of the earth's surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared. In others they are under constant menace from the development of current tendencies of policy. The position of the individual and the voluntary group are progressively undermined by extensions of arbitrary power.

The statement avowed that "what is essentially an ideological movement must be met by intellectual argument and the reassertion of valid ideas" and identified six broad areas in which further study and debate would be worthwhile in combating the prevailing intellectual tendencies. The statement concluded,

The group does not aspire to conduct propaganda. It seeks to establish no meticulous and hampering orthodoxy. It aligns itself with no particular party. Its object is solely, by facilitating the exchange of views among minds inspired by certain ideals and broad conceptions held in common, to contribute to the preservation and improvement of the free society.

Fifty years later it appears that, despite individual disagreements and rivalries, personality clashes, and administrative difficulties, the society has prospered and remained steadfast in adherence to its initial statement of aims. It has served essentially as an international club at whose meetings leading classical liberals can exchange and debate ideas in the comfort of a solidary environment.

A Strange Sentence in the Times

by Jeffrey Goldberg'

Does something in this lade from the Times seem strange?

RAFAH BORDER CROSSING, Egypt -- Hundreds of Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip arrived here by the busload on Saturday to pass through the reopened border into Egypt, taking the first tangible steps out of a four-year Israeli blockade.

So: For the first time in four years, Gazans can cross the border into Egypt. This fact suggests that Egypt had blockaded its border with Gaza. But wait -- somehow, it was a four-year Israeli blockade that kept Gazans from crossing into Egypt. According to the Times story, Egypt decided to "stop enforcing Israel's blockade of the Palestinian territory."

It always seemed to me that Israel and Egypt, two independent states, decided jointly to blockade Gaza. Does the Times believe the Mubarak regime decided to participate in the blockade of Gaza because Israel ordered it to participate? Does anyone actually believe that Egypt closed its border with Gaza only because it was in Israel's interest? Or was Egypt's government and military worried about the spread of Hamas ideology into Sinai and beyond?

This sort of question also arose during the flotilla debacle. The world was focused on Israel's closure of Gaza, but the Israeli closure was a closure only because Egypt had also imposed a closure. You can't close three sides of a four-sided territory (Israel controlled the western shore of Gaza, its northern and eastern borders) and expect to have an effective closure. And yet, there was no international pressure on Egypt to open its border. This suggests that Israel was the target of disproportionate animus.