Bald Chickens

Cut, Cap and Balance: A Chicken Tale

by Karen Kwiatkowski

It is hilarious to observe the most recent preening and fluffing behavior of the national bird in Washington. No, it’s not the bald eagle, or the alleged choice of Ben Franklin, the survival-oriented wild turkey.

The national bird of the federal government, wholly dependent upon a system that feeds it, conveyor-belt style, all the precious fruit of the shrinking American working class it can eat, is the chicken.

And not just any chicken, mind you. The federal government, the elected class in particular, is like the chicken grown in the poultry houses all over the Shenandoah Valley and beyond. These guys and gals look all grown up, but are amazingly immature, inexperienced and ill-informed about the real world. They spend their entire lives closely shielded from the outside world, exposed to little more than others like themselves, with a water drip they take for granted, and a never-empty all-you-can-eat free lunch dispenser. These helpless yet blissfully unaware chickens are a testament to the predictable tendencies of applied central planning, and they are the perfect icon for the government of the United States of America today.

They start out running and chirping, but before a few months pass, these guys are crippled by their own weight. By design, these chickens must be harvested early, before they die of heart failure, or fall down and never get up, trampled and pecked to death by their compadres.

Welcome to the Congress of the United States, analogy courtesy of Perdue, Tyson, and Pilgrim’s Pride.

The latest spectacle of the chickens who run our country comes from the so-called conservatives in the House – who are currently pushing for a Constitutional Amendment to "balance the federal budget," as part of a "Cut, Cap and Balance" package that doesn’t cut, raises the borrowing cap, and continues the ongoing and unsustainable imbalance in government spending. Little of what these Congressmen are doing today, or have been doing for the past twenty years has been even remotely constitutional, so it isn’t clear why amending the Constitution is ever necessary. Most Congressmen haven’t completely read it, don’t understand what they did read, and believe it is a prop best used during election campaigns. Most don’t believe it is the law or binding in any way on their votes and actions.

One side of the Janus-state – the so-called left side, is angry that the Cut, Cap and Balance may interfere with their political base and agendas, while failing to raise tax collections on that part of the country that they do not claim. The so-called right side of the Janus-state believes that as long as defense spending for the corporate empire is nurtured, preserved and expanded, their proposal will appear "conservative" and be welcomed as titillating foreplay for the November elections.

It seems like they take us all for fools, but as usual it is the genuflecting Congress and the emperor who are fooling themselves. While the United States as a functional value has been calmly downgraded (again!) to a C-minus and Americans rapidly seek alternative home bases, passports, ways of making a living off payroll and out of sight, conservatives recall the "glory days" of 1994 and 1995, and as the strutting feather-headed duo of Eric Cantor and Bob Goodlatteproclaim, it might have been so different, if only.

The crux of the Cantor-Goodlatte position is that, in March 1995, if only the Congress had sent a federal balanced budget amendment to the states for ratification, all of their congressional overspending, their lack of personal and institutional principle, their paucity of restraint, their blatant inability to comprehend basic economics, their obsession for power over the less worthy, their obscene vote selling and incessant influence whoring – all of these sins would have been washed away, instantly and permanently.

The whole debate is moot, because it has been demonstrated from the beginning that Congress has never met a law that it couldn’t ignore, modify, or break, starting with the original Constitution.

It is also moot because these congressmen assume that ¾ of the several states would approve such a balanced budget amendment, then, now, or in the future. The states well understand their fundamental relationship to the federal government, that unwritten law of federalism. States exist to bring home the goodies, ideally paid for by other states or by a collective accumulation of shared debt owed by future voters and future taxpayers, again mostly residing in other states. The very idea of a demand to pay the federal bill in a given fiscal year (even 18 months later, as the proposed language has it, allowing time to "measure" the GDP) would be simultaneously laughable and repulsive to state governors and to the people, because they intuitively understand that it would mean both fewer goodies and higher taxation, for the wealthier states first and eventually for even the poorest and smallest of states.

The states would overwhelmingly reject this amendment, even if it had teeth and claws, which it does not. This proposal is the rohypnol in the Constitutional martini, following the tradition of federal government boorishness of the 16^th Amendment and the 1973 War Powers Act. Cap, Cut and Balance should be nicknamed the Roofie Amendment.

Given that most prudent states would immediately just say no, I can envision a contrarian movement among some states to consider the risk and actively support the Balanced Budget Amendment. Counting on staying competitive for business and productivity as people flee ever more federally "owned" states, certain governors might support the Roofie Amendment in order to eventually weaken the DC loyalists and set the stage for real secession. North Dakota, with its questionable legal statehood status may want to go slow in correcting their constitution. A balanced budget amendment, if passed, would bring economic slavery to the more federally integrated states of the union, and place North Dakota in a super-cool position of pre-existing independence from Washington. Republic of Texas flag wavers, Hawaiian revolutionaries, and Vermont secessionists, take note!

American states, of course, cannot print their own money. A smaller group of states, with interests in allowing alternative hard currencies, or even those with a tradition of creative community currencies, might join with the hopeful independents in supporting a Balanced Budget Amendment as a means to ultimate monetary freedom from D.C. Utah's sound money movement and upstate New York community business vouchers, gold and silver holders everywhere, upon ratification of a Balanced Budget Amendment, would become even more valuable, reasonable, popular, and useful.

There are many ways to critique and chuckle at the proposals by Cantor and Goodlatte to somehow rein in federal spending by making a law, but there is one staring God-awful gap in the proposed amendment. No version of the law, past of present, deals with or even mentions the existence and processes of bank of the federal government, the Federal Reserve. For the liars in Washington, D.C., both on the left and right, this failure to address the Federal Reserve is a very good thing. Running out of money? We’ll "do you a favor" and print more!

In 1994, the Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was the bank’s Bifrons. Feared and powerful, moving corpses here and there, scaring all the chickens. It is unthinkable that a balanced budget amendment in 1994 would have addressed the Fed. Only Ron Paul, writing of gold and liberty and transparency, boldly spoke of the Bifrons, then and now. Today, a less impressive Bifrons exists, and Dr. Paul chairs the financial services subcommittee. He routinely takes on the corpse carrier – but still, Cantor and Goodlatte and the rest of the chicken-hearted, bird-brained "conservatives" in Congress cannot bring themselves to address the Fed in the language of the Cut, Cap and Balance Amendment.

Our feathered friends in Congress do enjoy their water drip and their never-ending free lunch. There is a solution, and it starts by not listening to dim-witted chickens trying to buy you one more drink before the bar closes. End the Fed and its interest rate fixing, repeal the 16^th Amendment, repeal the 17^thAmendment, bring the troops home, end the empire. Start with just these things, and watch the country’s economy and its attitude soar, the young delighted that they actually have a hopeful and peaceful future, the old embraced and cared for, the middle generations employed and empowered. In parts and pieces, we can take back our country, and most of us will survive when the empire ends. I find myself oddly reminded of Hoover’s purported campaign promise, and FDR’s four freedoms. I, too, see chicken on the menu.

How wages rise

The Central Role of Saving and Capital Goods

By L. V. Mises

As the popular philosophy of the common man sees it, human wealth and welfare are the products of the cooperation of two primordial factors: nature and human labor. All the things that enable man to live and to enjoy life are supplied either by nature or by work or by a combination of nature-given opportunities with human labor. As nature dispenses its gifts gratuitously, it follows that all the final fruits of production, the consumers' goods, ought to be allotted exclusively to the workers whose toil has created them.

But unfortunately in this sinful world conditions are different. There the "predatory" classes of the "exploiters" want to reap although they have not sown. The landowners, the capitalists, and the entrepreneurs appropriate to themselves what by rights belongs to the workers who have produced it. All the evils of the world are the necessary effect of this originary wrong.

Such are the ideas that dominate the thinking of most of our contemporaries. The socialists and the syndicalists conclude that in order to render human affairs more satisfactory it is necessary to eliminate those whom their jargon calls the "robber barons" — i.e., the entrepreneurs, the capitalists, and the landowners — entirely; the conduct of all production affairs ought to be entrusted either to the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion, the state (in the Marxian terminology called Society), or to the men employed in the individual plants or branches of production.

Other people are more considerate in their reformist zeal. They do not intend to expropriate those whom they call the "leisure class" entirely. They want only to take away from them as much as is needed to bring about "more equality" in the "distribution" of wealth and income.

But both groups, the party of the thoroughgoing socialists and that of the more cautious reformers, agree on the basic doctrine according to which profit and interest are "unearned" income and therefore morally objectionable. Both groups agree that profit and interest are the cause of the misery of the great majority of all honest workingmen and their families, and, in a decent and satisfactory organization of society, ought to be sharply curbed, if not entirely abolished.

Yet this whole interpretation of human conditions is fallacious. The policies engendered by it are pernicious from whatever point of view we may judge them. Western civilization is doomed if we do not succeed very soon in substituting reasonable methods of dealing with economic problems for the present disastrous methods.

Three Factors of Production

Mere work — that is, effort not guided by a rational plan and not aided by the employment of tools and intermediary products — brings about very little for the improvement of the worker's condition. Such work is not a specifically human device. It is what man has in common with all other animals. It is bestirring oneself instinctively and using one's bare hands to gather whatever is eatable and drinkable that can be found and appropriated.

Nanny state for all

Gardener ordered to remove plants or face fines

By David Hurley

A resident has been ordered by Frankston City Council to tear out plants from a nature strip in front of her home.

Hannah Russell has tended the plants on the nature strip in Seaford Grove, Seaford, for the past 12 years.

Ms Russell, 60, said she had asked the council at the time for permission to brighten up the nature strip and was given an enthusiastic thumbs up.

So she was shocked to receive a letter from the council last month saying she could face a daily $200 fine if she did not remove the plants within 14 days.

Ms Russell has responded by tidying up her front garden and the nature strip, but is refusing to destroy her garden.

"I believe it is a thing of great beauty and it would be a waste to have to destroy it," she said.

"The council has made out it is an eyesore, but it is anything but. It has been a real labour of love."

The council said in its letter to Ms Russell it had no record of her asking for permission to "beautify" the nature strip.

Despite the threat of fines, Frankston chief executive George Modrich said on Friday council had no interest in issuing a fine.

"A standard 'notice to comply' was issued, however, at this stage, council has no interest in fining Ms Russell, as evidenced by the fact that no fine has been issued well beyond July 5," Mr Modrich said.

‘Of course I support a free press, but…’

All-party support for regulating the media threatens to reverse the historic gains of the struggle for press freedom.

by Mick Hume 

You would be hard pressed to know it from the madness of recent news headlines, but there has been an even more important issue at stake in the hacking furore than whether Rebekah Brooks would lose her key to the News Corp executive washroom, or whether a committee of British MPs would get to enjoy an orgasm of outrage in front of Rupert Murdoch this week.

What matters far above and beyond all of that is the future of a free press. And it already seems clear that, no matter who might eventually get convicted of what and how far Murdoch’s shares might fall, the biggest loser will be press freedom.

We have entered the age of ‘I support a free press, but…’ Every leading British politician who has spoken on this subject of late has begun by assuring us that of course they want to see a free, even a ‘raucous’ press, one that ‘can make our lives miserable’, etc. This just the warm-up, going through the motions.

Then comes the punchline: ‘But….’ In the light of recent revelations, they conclude, the ‘culture’ of the press must, of course, be made more responsible, to produce a more ethical servant of the ‘public interest’. And to ensure the raucous Fleet Street Kids behave themselves along these lines, new proposals for more intervention in the news media have been streaming off the presses with the support of all parties – parliamentary hearings, police investigations and a judge-led public inquiry empowered by the government to ‘craft a new system of press regulation’.

The notion that more official regulation of the media is a good thing for the people goes against the tide of history. The fight to free the press from state control has been central to almost every major struggle for liberty and democratic revolution.

It was in the midst of the English Revolution of the 1640s that John Milton wrote his pioneering pamphlet against the system under which nobody could publish anything without a licence from the king, so that ‘unoffensive books must not stir forth without a visible jailer in their title’. Milton asked only for a ‘free and open encounter’ between Falsehood and Truth.

When the American revolutionaries wrote the Bill of Rights into their new Constitution in 1789, the First Amendment could not have been clearer about the principle of the press being freed from state control in a democratic society. ‘Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.’

In the 1840s, the first articles a young Karl Marx had published in a German newspaper were a polemical series against the control of the press by the Prussian state. Marx argued that ‘The free press is the ubiquitous vigilant eye of a people’s soul, the embodiment of a people’s faith in itself…. It is the spiritual mirror in which a people can see itself, and self-examination is the first condition of wisdom.’

This is just part of the history of struggle that has brought us to something imperfectly approximating a free press. Yet now, in twenty-first-century Britain, it seems the authorities are agreed upon the project of turning back the clock. More than 200 years after the American Puritans declared that politicians ‘shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press’, our allegedly liberal British politicians appear bent on doing just that. The fact that the new anti-press regulations have this time been justified as a defence of victims rather than of kings, and as an attack on the power of Murdoch rather than on the liberties of the public, does not alter the fact that they represent a poke in the ‘vigilant eye of a people’s soul’.

Worse, as this is the UK 2011, and our elected politicians lack the nerve to do things in their own name, they have handed over the future of press freedom to a judge: the unelected and unaccountable Lord Justice Leveson, who now apparently has the authority to reverse the gains of history. Tory prime minister David Cameron told parliament this week that, although a new legal regulator of the press might be needed, of course he did not personally favour ‘full statutory regulation’. But the judge’s inquiry was free to consider all options, and if m’lud decided to bring the press under full state regulation then, said Cameron, ‘we will have to be guided by what this inquiry finds’.

Goods as rights

A Fling with the Welfare State

From the best of intentions to bankruptcy and recriminations

by Noemie Emery

The intentions of Democrats are only the best. They want all of the old to have lavish retirements, all of the young to have scholarships, verse-penning cowboys to have festivals funded by government, and everyone to have access to all the best health care, at no cost to himself. In the face of a huge wave of debt swamping all western nations, this is the core of their argument: They want a fair society, and their critics do not; they want to help, and their opponents like to see people suffer; they want a world filled with love and caring, and their opponents want one of callous indifference, in which the helpless must fend for themselves. (“We must reject both extremes, those who say we shouldn’t help the old and the sick and those who say that we should,” quips the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg.) But in fact, everyone thinks that we “should” do this; the problem, in the face of the debt crisis, is finding a way that we can. It is about the “can” part that the left is now in denial: daintily picking its way through canaries six deep on the floor of the coal mine, and conflating a “good” with a “right.”

Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt linked “freedom from want” to “freedom of speech” and “freedom of worship,” the left has been talking of everything that it thinks would be nice to have in terms of an utter and absolute right: a right to a job and a right to an income, a right to retire in comfort in Florida, a right to the most advanced health care without paying much for it, and a right to have your children taken care of while you work all day at your job. The problem is that these are all goods and services, though of varying importance, and goods and rights are not the same things. People tend to concur upon rights (except for the speech rights of those who oppose them), and they do not depend upon others to supply and pay for their rights. With goods, there is always a political argument: about the value of the good, who is to get it and who is to pay. And all this comes down to the question of “fairness,” about which there is no end of disputation and grief. 


And on nothing does the rights/goods division loom larger than on the issue of health care. Rights come from nature, and cost no one money, but good health in nature is rare. It is only thanks to human ingenuity over centuries and billions of dollars of effort that we have been able to conquer illnesses not long ago fatal, rebuild bodies broken in war or by accidents, postpone or ameliorate the problems of aging, and bring people back from the dead. The roll call of miracles that surrounds us today—the vaccines and the pills that have vanquished infections, the devices that let amputees run marathons, the organ transplants and the open heart surgeries, the techniques that replace hips, knees, and heart valves, not to mention the treatments that make so many public men cancer survivors, that saved Bob Dole years ago, are saving Dick Cheney, and once kept John Kennedy able to function—all of these are the result of the time, sweat, and strain of doctors and nurses, technicians and scientists, inventors and makers of drugs and devices, administrators of hospitals and large corporations, whose time is expensive, and who need to be paid.

Too much of a Good Thing is bad.

Good Things

By Thomas Sowell

Life has many good things. The problem is that most of these good things can be gotten only by sacrificing other good things. We all recognize this in our daily lives. It is only in politics that this simple, common sense fact is routinely ignored.

In politics, there are not simply good things but some special Good Things -- with a capital G and capital T -- which are considered always better to have more of.

Many of the things advocated by environmental extremists, for example, are things that most of us might think of as good things. But, in politics, they become Good Things whose repercussions and costs are brushed aside as unworthy considerations.
Nobody wants to breathe dirty air or drink dirty water. But, if either becomes 98 percent pure, 99 percent pure or 99.9 percent pure, there is some point beyond which the costs skyrocket and the benefits become meager or non-existent.

If the slightest trace of any impurity were fatal, the human race would have become extinct thousands of years ago.
Not only does the body have defenses to neutralize small amounts of some impurities, some things that are dangerous, or even fatal, in substantial amounts can become harmless or even beneficial in extremely minute amounts, arsenic being one example. As an old adage put it: "It is the dose that makes the poison."

In other words, removing arsenic from our drinking water should obviously be a very high priority -- but not after we have gotten it down to some extremely minute trace. There is never going to be 100 percent clean water or air and, the closer we get to that, the more costly it is to remove extremely minute traces of anything. But none of this matters to those who see ever higher standards of "clean water" or "clean air" as a Good Thing.
One of the things that have ruined our economy is the notion that both Democrats and Republicans in Washington pushed for years, that a higher rate of home ownership is a Good Thing.


There is no question that there are benefits to home ownership. And there should be no question that there are costs as well. But costs get lost in the shuffle.

Among the things that Washington politicians of both parties did for years was come up with more and more laws, rules and pressures on private lenders to lower the qualifications standards required for people to get a mortgage to buy a home.

It was a full-court press from Congressional legislation to regulations and policies created by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Federal Reserve, not to mention the buying of the resulting risky mortgages by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from the original lenders -- and even threats of prosecution by the Department of Justice if the racial mixture of people who were approved for mortgages didn't match their expectations.

The media chimed in with expressions of outrage when data showed that black applicants for mortgage loans were turned down more often than white applicants. Seldom was it even mentioned that white applicants were turned down more often than Asian American applicants.
Nor was it mentioned that white applicants averaged higher credit ratings than black applicants, and Asian American applicants averaged higher credit ratings than white applicants -- or that black applicants were turned down at least as often by black-owned banks as by white-owned banks.
Such distracting details would have spoiled the story that racial discrimination was the reason why some people did not get the Good Thing of home ownership as often as others.

Even after the risky mortgages that were made under government pressure led to huge bankruptcies and bailouts, as well as disasters for home owners in general and black home owners in particular, home ownership remains a Good Thing. The Justice Department is again threatening lenders who don't lower their standards to let more minority applicants get mortgage loans.

Higher miles per gallon for cars is a Good Thing in politics, even if it leads to cars too lightly built to protect occupants when there is a crash. More students going to college is another Good Thing, even if lowering standards to get them admitted results in lower educational quality for others.

No tolerance to intolerance

Maskophobia, Murderphobia and Bombphobia

By D. Greenfield

Even as Australia was banning the veil, New Zealand was caught in a scandal over the veil after the Saudi consulate complained when two of their masked slaves were refused access to a Kiwi bus.

But the two bus drivers dodged accusations of Islamophobia by claiming that they instead suffer from Maskphobia. Maskphobia being the fear of people wearing masks.

While liberal New Zealand newspaper writers are ridiculing it as a dodge, it's actually a far more honest position than condemning every concern about Islam as Islamophobia. Few people are concerned about Islam because it is a five letter word or foreign. They are concerned about it, because it has a habit of murdering their kind of people. The kind who don't attend mosques, wear veils or bow to a desert deity who commanded his followers to subjugate all infidels. The proper term for this concern is Murderphobia.

Some people riding on a bus are concerned that Muslims will follow their habit of detonating buses in the name of Allah. That the masked and hooded lady is concealing a bomb belt under her portable black tent. This condition is known as Bombphobia.

When boarding a plane, many worry that a Quran bearer will be flying the friendly skies with them and will attempt to hijack the plane and steer it toward the nearest large building full of non-Muslims. This is known as Boxcutterphobia.

Some women worry about being sexually assaulted by a member of a religion which says that those of another gender who do not wear the veil are free for the taking. This is called IslamoRapephobia.

And some parents are concerned about their children being exploited in sex rings by a religion, which cannot be named, yet which consider infidel girls to be fair prey. And whose prophet married and raped a child. This is called IslamoPedoPhobia.

Many cartoons are concerned that if they depict the Prophet of the Religion of Peace (Pigs Be Upon Him) that they will then have to go into hiding and run for their lives. This is known as CartoonPhobia.

Blind people are worried that they will be left without transportation by Muslim cabbies who hate their seeing eye dogs, because their religion says that dogs prevent angels from entering a house. This is called StrandedByBigotedIslamoCabbiesPhobia.

Religious minorities, particularly Jews, are concerned that they are being driven out of the neighborhoods, cities and countries where they used to live by Islamic bigotry. This is a problem that everyone knows does not exist, which is why we are not allowed to talk about it. We are not allowed to talk about it in France, in Sweden or in the Negev. Like the rapes, murders, bombings and Muslim hate crimes-- it is something we do not talk about. But it might be called KristallnachtPhobia.

This entire complex of phobias of course has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam. It just happens to entirely coincidentally involve Muslims. Which is no reflection on Islam, the latter being a wonderful Religion of Peace, which has inspired many people to do great things, like conquering and enslaving entire cultures, forcing women to dress like Klansmen and learning to use flight simulators. And I for one would never presume to suggest otherwise.

Islam is a wonderful religion. I'm not just saying that because I have a knife to my throat. It's one of those special religions whose very specialness is hard to express in words, but can be best learned about by visiting the survivors of a bomb attack in the hospitals and helping them feed themselves.

Islamophobia of course has no place in a modern society. It's as ridiculous as being afraid of land mines or serial killers. But unfortunately there is a constellation of related disorders that coincide with it. Such as Maskohpbobia, Bombophobia and Murderphobia that are in no way a response to anything Islamic, but do coincide with some behaviors that are occasionally spotted around people with veils, beards and holy books that tell them to slay the infidels.

What can we as a modern society do about this tragic situation? As tolerant people we must endeavor to accommodate these conditions. And as our Muslim neighbors are known to be fantastically tolerant people, as the diverse religious composition of their countries testifies, we are doubtlessly sure that they will eager accommodate these fears with their usual tolerance.

That will require them to make some slight adjustments to their daily routines. The veil must go. We recognize that this is a deep custom of religious significance and helps remind the Muslim male that his wife is his property, while reassuring him that absolutely no other man has looked at his property during the day, but this irrational fear we have of masks must be accommodated. It is the only tolerant thing to do.

Also the killing really must stop. We recognize that killing people is often mentioned in the Quran and that Jihad is a vital religious duty for Muslims-- and we would never dream of impeding their spiritual journey, even if it's on a plane with bombs in their underwear, but our nervous condition requires that we must ask them to carry out this religious obligation of theirs at home.

We are not particularly concerned whether they practice their Jihad in Saudi Arabia or Pakistani or whatever other of their countries they like. But due to our condition of Murderphobia, we ask that they not practice it here.

It is a lot to ask. We know. But we really must insist on being accommodated. And as a tolerant religion, the Islamic community, with its storied heritage and its water clocks, will no doubt be happy to comply.

Also the taxis for the blind thing. You hate dogs, we hate dogs too. Everyone hates dogs. I have no idea why anyone keeps them around. Certainly the blind don't need them. Mostly they're just lazy. If they really wanted to see, they would. Besides if they're blind, it's probably because Allah punished them for not getting up to prayers on time or walking a step ahead of a Muslim-- but still they have this irrational fear of not being able to get around, especially when your wonderful tolerant religion has monopolized so many of the cabs. So be good chaps and help them out.

Then there's the cartoons. Obviously you have the right to take an ax to anyone who draws squiggly lines that look like your prophet-- even though you don't know what your prophet looked like since no one is allowed to draw him. And none of us would dare interfere with this binding religious duty, just as we wouldn't dream of looking twice at an angry bearded man wearing a heavy vest in warm weather. Still some of our infidel cartoonists have this irrational fear of being murdered. Which naturally has nothing to do with your threats and plans to murder them. But still it would calm their irrational phobia if you wouldn't murder them. Thanks, that's a good Ahmed.

Finally the rapes. We don't like it. I don't want to be rude here, but we have a custom about these things. Our peculiar custom is that women are human beings with equal rights, who can't just be seized and assaulted because they're not wearing your favored full body headbags. I know this is natural in your culture and being a wholly tolerant person, who actually has an advanced degree in Tolerance, I would never object. But still it might be best if you accommodated our peculiar little culture and refrained from doing that sort of thing.

I don't know about you, but I for one am glad that we had this little chat. With such dialogue, many misunderstandings can be cleared up. For instance, many Muslims think that we are Islamophobic. Not at all. We are only Bomb, Murder, Rape and many other kinds of Phobic. Also we don't like masks in public, especially when they're worn by people with a history of triggering our Bomb and Murderphobias.

We appreciate your tolerance. Now please take that damn mask off. Our phobias are acting up again.

Ten thousand slow pricks, rather than an axe to the head.

Is Obama Our Gorbachev?

by D. Greenfield

He was a youthful leader with a law degree elected on the promise of reforms that would revitalize a world power trapped in the economic doldrums by its bureaucracy and huge debt. His approach of international engagement attempted to break through his country's global isolation by forging new ties and treaties with old enemies. And faced with a troubled war in Afghanistan, he authorized a temporary troop surge and counterinsurgency strategy, followed by a phased withdrawal shortly thereafter. Who was he?

The answer of course is Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. The man with the red spot on his head. Also the leader who presided over the dismantling of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

On June 22nd, Obama delivered his final phase of the Gorbachev Afghanistan strategy, the reversal of the surge followed by a handover of responsibility to the Afghan national forces. The numbers are different. Gorbachev's surge took place in 1985. Obama's in 2009. But both Gorbachev and Obama approved the surge in the same year that they took office.

The Russian surge took their troop numbers to 140,000. Our surge took them to 100,000. The Soviet's Afghan allies also had much higher troop numbers than our Afghan allies do, but similar rates of desertion and non-performance. The Russian counterinsurgency strategy was more aggressive than ours, but it came with a much higher casualty rate. Almost five times higher. But beneath the numbers, the trajectory was nearly the same.

The similarities however go beyond this. Obama has been chosen to play a similar historical role. That of dismantling a world power. Obama won his election by 53 percent. Gorbachev won his by 59 percent. Both men ran virtually unopposed. Except that Gorbachev actually ran unopposed without the need for a popular election. Obama was forced to contend with the electorate and an opponent, whom his own Pravda media buried in an endless torrent of propaganda.

To many liberals, America looks like the Soviet Union did to conservatives back then, an empire built on a discredited economic and political philosophy that is standing in the way of history. And they see themselves as reformers guiding it into a new era. Post-Communism for the USSR and Post-Capitalism and Post-Nationalism for the US and Europe.

While Gorbachev was introducing a certain amount of private enterprise into a socialist system, Obama is tearing out the last remains of free enterprise and replacing it with socialism and crony capitalism. These reforms differ radically in direction, but not in nature. Both men were and are slowly dismantling a system that their backers did not believe in anymore. Rather than reform it through revolution, they avoided confrontation with a process of slow reforms that would let them keep their power while slowly turning the system into something fundamentally different, while preserving their own wealth and power.

The end result of that approach in Russia, after some twists and turns, is a crony capitalist oligarchy run by the former KGB. What it will look like in the United States isn't as obvious, but the EU provides a likely road map. If Russia went from a Communist oligarchy with no democracy to a crony capitalist oligarchy with very limited democracy-- the United States is going from a federalized democracy to a socialist oligarchy with no democracy. There will still be people at the top and at the bottom, but far fewer people in the middle who are not members of the 'Party'. And there will be no legal way to change the system.

The people behind this think of themselves as being on the right side of history. The United States, as well as any nation state based on free elections, free enterprise and common national identities, is to them a historical aberration being set right by global unions, open borders and progressive government. As far back as the late 19th century, they chose the path of peaceful transition over violent revolution, confident that the forces of historical momentum and the growing conversion of entire professions and the entire apparatus of government to their way of thinking under the influence of their educational and cultural programming would make active violence unnecessary. There would be no abrupt shift, only a gradual transition. Ten thousand slow pricks, rather than an axe to the head.

Every new Democratic administration in the 20th century served as a transition point, turning radical ideas into actual policy. From FDR to JFK to Carter and Clinton, the radicals made their revolutions, and then the conservatives made them seem socially acceptable, stripping away the most objectionable parts, but keeping the basic structure intact. The Obama Administration has followed a similar pattern, while meeting unprecedented resistance because it tried to do too many things, too fast.

FDR was the precedent for radical action, and indeed his administration carried out even more radical change with an even greater contempt for the Constitution and the laws, than the present occupants of the White House. But FDR's avuncular patrician persona was calculated to make Americans feel safe with his policies. Obama lacks such cover. His administration was meant to transition the very idea of what American leadership is, but that very transition undermined the margin of political safety that he needed. If Clinton's sleazy hippie antics at least seemed part of American life, there is no precedent for Obama's behavior outside the EU. And even the EU did not move someone so foreign so close to the top.

If Obama was meant to be the American Gorbachev, then he was an unwise choice. Attempting a cultural assault together with a political assault was overambitious, an overestimation of both media influence and the tolerance of the nation for radical change. That is not to say that the left has lost. Despite the 2010 setbacks, the Obama Administration and its allies have kept on track, ramming their agenda through by executive order, coming in through the window when the door was shut and through the chimney when the the window was barred. And the Republican congress has shown no real ability to confront him on his own terms. Which they can't do, because like most of the political class, their beliefs differ in detail, not in substance.

What most fail to understand is that the left's political victories are a product of its cultural victories. By the time that the left scores a political victory, it has long since secured the cultural battlefield, and even its opponents in the political and media classes lack a secure vision of their own. They are no longer conservatives, rather they are conservative liberals. The liberal beliefs of yesterday have become the conservative beliefs of tomorrow. The front line gets moved further and further away in the name of a greater appeal. There are victories from year to year, but look from the vantage point of generations, and the conservative side has racked up a profound and comprehensive defeat.

Why does the left think that the momentum of history is on their side, that the United States is doomed to collapse, that free enterprise will be replaced by socialism, that nationalism will give way to a global political authority, that the mores and values of the American family will be replaced identity politics? Because it can look back 50 or 75 years and celebrate victory after victory. What conservative can do that? Instead conservative politicians can look back with faint nostalgia, while being forced to admit that the liberals turned out to be right about most things. They don't really want to go back 50 or 75 years. What they want is a kinder and gentler liberalism.

25 years from now will they want to go back to a time before gay marriage was universally legal, industry wasn't controlled by international treaties, cheap energy contributed to global warming, guns were widely available, free speech meant that people could say anything, and border controls made it difficult for people to travel from one country to another? No they won't. These things will become unquestionable outside of a small extremist fringe. Instead the battles will be fought over One Child policies, the internationalization of the military, domestic peacekeeping operations, Spanish only requirements in some states, and as usual, taxes.

It doesn't have to happen this way. But if things keep going as they are, then it will. And keep in mind these are conservative estimates. The reality in 25 years will probably be worse. Far worse.

Right now there aren't two visions for this country. There is one vision and then critiques of that vision. Many of these critiques are incisive, witty and on point, but they are a reaction. A reaction to liberalism. The Reagan era came closest to setting out a different vision for the country and occasionally even trying to implement to it. It took the left some time to recover from the political and cultural defeats they were dealt, but they did it a while back. The same can't be said for our side.

As things stand now the left doesn't need to win every fight. It just has to stay in the game. And the dismantling of America will still continue. If Obama does not get the chance to play Gorbachev, then someone else will. And if the current patterns continue, it may well be a Republican who plays Yeltsin, bringing down the United States with the force of his misplaced moral convictions. Doing on faith what even the left is too pragmatic to do in the name of politics.

A nation cannot exist without direction. And a world power cannot survive without a sense of destiny. To the left, the United States is on the same path as the USSR. And the time frame in which this is averted continues to shrink. America is not static, its population is being transformed and its values are being dramatically altered. When the time comes for it to fall, the population and its values will have changed so much that there will be few who will even care if it lives or dies. That is the long term goal of the left. A long term goal now temptingly within their reach.

East of Eden

Poverty in America

C. Feldman

We are told that 30 million Americans live in poverty, but what exactly does “poverty” mean in America. Heritage’s Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield examine the record and report that it’s not quite what you might think:

According to the government’s own survey data, in 2005, the average household defined as poor by the government lived in a house or apartment equipped with air conditioning and cable TV. The family had a car (a third of the poor have two or more cars). For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, a DVD player, and a VCR.

If there were children in the home (especially boys), the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation. In the kitchen, the household had a microwave, refrigerator, and an oven and stove. Other household conveniences included a washer and dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.

The home of the average poor family was in good repair and not overcrowded. In fact, the typical poor American had more living space than the average European. (Note: That’s average European, not poor European.) The average poor family was able to obtain medical care when needed. When asked, most poor families stated they had had sufficient funds during the past year to meet all essential needs.

By its own report, the family was not hungry. The average intake of protein, vitamins, and minerals by poor children is indistinguishable from children in the upper middle class and, in most cases, is well above recommended norms. Poor boys today at ages 18 and 19 are actually taller and heavier than middle-class boys of similar age in the late 1950s and are a full one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than American soldiers who fought in World War II. The major dietary problem facing poor Americans is eating too much, not too little; the majority of poor adults, like most Americans, are overweight.

The authors argue persuasively that the President and advocates like Marion Wright Edelman  blur the distinction between poverty and deprivation and that the new standards advocated by the President deal not with ameliorating actual deprivation . They are income redistribution measures, plain and simple. Distinguishing between those who meet the current or proposed new “poverty ” test and those actually living in deprivation may shrink the one trillion dollar poverty budget but is the only way to  ease the plight of those actually living in deprivation:

Those who are without food or homeless will find no comfort in the fact that their condition is relatively infrequent. Their distress is real and a serious concern.

Nonetheless, wise public policy cannot be based on misinformation or misunderstanding. Anti-poverty policy must be based on an accurate assessment of actual living conditions and the causes of deprivation. In the long term, grossly exaggerating the extent and severity of material deprivation in the U.S. will benefit neither the poor, the economy, nor society as a whole.

Poverty is a choice

The Coming UK Energy Meltdown

by H. Sarman

The UK desperately needs a new energy strategy based on a realistic assessment of its assets, its needs and the options available to it. Unfortunately, its freedom for technical and financial manoevre is deeply restricted by its self-imposed Climate Change Act and its commitment to the EU's 20-20-20 targets. Its technically illiterate, if financially canny politicians and civil service do not appear to understand that the world’s financiers are not likely to place the required £200 billion of long-term investment into their vision of a "low carbon" infrastructure while this concept remains so woolly and badly defined. If the UK government continues on this course, it will lead the country toward certain energy failure.

After hundreds of years of imperial and industrial power, the UK has suddenly become more or less powerless as a world player. With its North Sea resources fast depleting just when the world’s upstream energy producers of oil, coal and gas are struggling to meet rising global demand, saddled with a public debt of £ 1 trillion, and a massive trade deficit, its leading role as an innovative, world-class centre of scientific and manufacturing know-how being ceded to Germany, Japan and now China, it is ill prepared to become a net energy importer. Yet energy import dependence is what the country is rapidly headed for.

Figure 1

As the dramatic chart of Oil Drum editor Euan Mearns illustrates, the UK has run through most of its hydrocarbon inheritance within the lifetime of anyone over fifty years old today. This means that the country will be faced with an entirely new situation. In one way or another, Britain has been energy self-sufficient for most of the last five hundred years. The destruction of its forests for ship building and fuel, prior to the industrial revolution, came to an end with the invention of the steam engine and the exploitation of coal, which energized the industrial revolution. The empire-builders of the 19th century ensured secure commodity supplies, including hydrocarbons, by planting the Union Jack on an unprecedented fraction of the World’s land surface. Two of the world’s top oil companies are still domiciled in the UK (Shell partly).

Britain’s luck held out even as its Empire was dismembered during the period from 1947 to 1970. By then, the technology of finding and producing oil and gas in stormy, exposed seas enabled the country to replace oil and gas imports from its colonies and protectorates, with supplies from reservoirs under the North Sea. Very briefly, around the turn of the last century at a period of unprecedented low energy prices, Britain once more became a net energy exporter.

Hundreds of years of energy independence and trading experience appear to have instilled much unrealistic optimism among policymakers over the sharply changed circumstances in which the UK now finds itself. The country’s energy and economic policy relies on assumptions that are completely unrealistic in today’s multi-polar world.

The “central” fossil energy price projections for 2010 prepared by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) are summarized below.

Figure 2

For readers who prefer to think in traditional market trading units, the conversion factors for these are shown below.

	To convert from $/GJ
Oil	to Dollars per barrel multiply by	5.7
Gas NBP	to pence per therm, multiply by	6.7
Coal ARA	to $ per tonne, multiply by	25.0

The central planning scenario with which the new Coalition Government started out in May 2010, was for oil to rise from $70 to $85 per barrel by 2025. It assumed that the price of gas would rise from 58 to 71 p per therm in 2025. And that coal would actually get cheaper over the next 15 years, falling to $80/t.

Just one year later, a snapshot of the present (June 2011) shows Brent oil comfortably over $100/b, gas pushing 70 p/therm this coming winter and coal already 50% more expensive than the government’s assumption for 2025! 

The worst fate that can befall a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended

The Folly that is “Local” Currency

by George Selgin 

How’s this for a great idea: we build a small fleet of cars, and market them to people in the local community. How do we compete with Ford, G.M., Toyota, and all those other huge car companies? Easy. You see, our cars will have special octane requirements that will prevent them from refilling at ordinary gas stations. Instead, we’ll set up a few local stations that will be the only ones equipped with the right fuel. To top it off (so to speak), our cars will also have small gas tanks to prevent them from reaching the next town on a single tank. (Should we decide to go electric, we can instead equip them with special plugs and voltage requirements to accomplish the same result.) What all this means is that unlike other cars ours—call them “LETS” for “Local Energy Transportation Systems”—can only be used around town. That way, people who go shopping with them have no choice but to shop locally, and so contribute to boosting the local economy. Who wouldn’t want to do that?

The answer, to get serious, is plenty of people wouldn’t. Even people who like to buy local don’t like having to do so; and the option of driving out of town, whether to shop or for some other reason, is valuable. So a car that can go anywhere is worth more—for many a lot more—than one that can’t, which means that so long as Ford or Toyota or any other manufacturer can make a decent “national” car for no less than what the local alternative would cost, we’d better leave making cars to them.

Such reasoning presumably explains why there’s no such thing as a Local Energy Transportation System aimed at challenging existing car makers. Yet there is such a thing as LETS: it stands for “Local Exchange Trading System,” and there are now several hundred such systems in operation around the world. LETS are part of a still larger “local currency” movement. Like the fictional LETS we were just toying with, actual LETS and other local currency arrangements are designed to encourage people to shop locally. The UK LETS website, for example, boasts that, unlike ordinary money which “is quickly sucked out of the area where it has been created,” LETS “stays local, benefiting the community, rather than outside-interests.” The schemes’ promoters see to it that their currency won’t “leak out” of the local economy by encouraging local merchants and banks to accept it, while scrupulously refraining from encouraging “outsiders” from doing so. In short, they make a virtue of their currencies’ limited usefulness—of the fact that, unlike most exchange media, they are not generally accepted.

Wirtschaftswunder

‘German Miracle’ Barack Obama doesn’t see

Blinded by big government, the Obama Depression is no accident

By Milton Wolf

“The eye does not see what the mind does not know.” The difference between your patient’s life and death, my professors would warn, is what you see, and you cannot see what you do not know. Barack Obama cannot see a way out of America’s current economic malaise. He should ask the Germans what they know.

Obamanomics has produced the weakest, most anemic recovery since the 1930s, when another generation’s big-government planners turned their great recession into the Great Depression. To be fair, PresidentGeorge W. Bush certainly did not give the best economic handoff - he too was addicted to spending - but to be clear, President Obama has unarguably fumbled the ball. He has, to borrow his own phrase, put his “boot on the neck” of American businesses with his increased taxes and regulatory burden; he has grown government with his wildly increased spending and outright take-overs; and he has weakened the dollar with his “quantitative easing” printing press.

The devastation caused by Obamanomics is now undeniable. According to Investors Business Daily, 2 million net private-sector jobs have been lost; unemployment has increased by 1.5 percentage points; long-term unemployment is the worst ever on record; the dollar is 12 percent weaker; the number of Americans on food stamps has increased by 37 percent; the Misery Index (unemployment plus inflation) has increased by 62 percent; and the national debt has exploded by an alarming 40 percent. Mr. Obama is on pace to saddle America with more job-killing debt than all the first 43 presidents - combined.

Another Non-Hate Crime

by Dave Blount

White is the wrong color skin to wear on a subway into the Bronx, as Jason Fordell learned the hard way:

After Fordell transferred to a crowded 4 train at 42nd St., four young, black men began harassing him, cops said.

“People started saying stupid little comments — cracker this, white boy this, f—-t this,” Fordell said. …

As the train continued into the Bronx, the confrontation became physical, he said.

“I was in a headlock, punched and kicked on the floor,” Fordell said.

Then a passenger decided to join in — declaring, “Oh, I get a few shots, too,” before kicking and punching Fordell in the head, according to cops.

When Fordell finally left the train at his Fordham Road stop, his original attackers snatched his bag and ran. Inside was $2,900 worth of merchandise, cops said.

Fordell says everyone on the train egged on the attackers.

Police do not consider the incident a hate crime, for reasons that should be obvious by now.