85 Islamic Sharia courts are now operating in Britain

Britain's "Islamic Emirates Project"

by Soeren Kern

A Muslim group in the United Kingdom has launched a campaign to turn twelve British cities – including what it calls "Londonistan" – into independent Islamic states. The so-called Islamic Emirates would function as autonomous enclaves ruled by Islamic Sharia law and operate entirely outside British jurisprudence.

The Islamic Emirates Project, launched by the Muslims Against the Crusades group, names the British cities of Birmingham, Bradford, Derby, Dewsbury, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Luton, Manchester, Sheffield, as well as Waltham Forest in northeast London and Tower Hamlets in East London as territories to be targeted for blanket Sharia rule.

The project, which uses the motto "The end of man-made law, and the start of Sharia law," was launched exactly six years after Muslim suicide bombers killed 52 people and injured 800 others in London. A July 7, 2011 announcement posted on the Muslims Against the Crusades website, states:

"In the last 50 years, the United Kingdom has transformed beyond recognition. What was once a predominantly Christian country has now been overwhelmed by a rising Muslim population, which seeks to preserve its Islamic identity, and protect itself from the satanic values of the tyrannical British government.

"There are now over 2.8 million Muslims living in the United Kingdom – which is a staggering 5% of the population – but in truth, it is more than just numbers, indeed the entire infrastructure of Britain is changing; Mosques, Islamic Schools, Shari'ah Courts and Muslim owned businesses, have now become an integral part of the British landscape.

"In light of this glaring fact, Muslims Against Crusades have decided to launch "The Islamic Emirates Project," that will see high profile campaigns launch in Muslim enclaves all over Britain, with the objective to gradually transform Muslim communities into Islamic Emirates operating under Shari'ah law.

"With several Islamic emirates already well established across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, including Iraq and Afghanistan, we see this as a radical, but very realistic step in the heart of Western Europe, that willinshaa'allah (God willing), pave the way for the worldwide domination of Islam."

One of the group's strategy documents, "Islamic Prevent 2011: Preventing Secular Fundamentalism and the Occupation of Muslim Land," provides insights into the religious and/or philosophical mindset behind the Islamic Emirates Project. For example, Chapter 1 states: "The Only Identity for Muslims is Islam … In no shape or form can a Muslim support any form of nationalism such as promoting Britishness."

Chapter 4 states: "A Muslim can only abide by Sharia and is not allowed to obey any man-made law." Chapter 5 states: "Muslims must reject secularism and democracy," terms which are "completely alien to Islam and against the basic tenets of Islam." Chapter 10 states: "Every Muslim must call for Sharia to be implemented wherever they are." Chapter 12 states: "It is not allowed for Muslims to integrate with a non-Islamic society." Chapter 13 states: "Muslims should set up Islamic Emirates in the United Kingdom." Chapter 14 states: "Any Muslim who opposed the policies in this pamphlet should be confronted." Chapter 16 states: "Any Muslim who has been affected by the Western way of life need to be rehabilitated."

Hitler was a boyscout

The world's biggest problem?  Too many people

The two kind ladies could kill themselves for a start

By Mary Ellen Harte and Anne Ehrlich in LA Times July 21, 2011

Think back on what you talked about with friends and family at your last gathering. The latest game of your favorite team? "American Idol"? An addictive hobby? The new movie blockbuster? In a serious moment, maybe job prospects, Afghanistan, the economic mess? We live in an information-drenched environment, one in which sports and favorite programs are just a click away. And the ease with which we can do this allows us to focus on mostly comforting subjects that divert our attention from increasingly real, long-term problems.

Notice that we didn't mention climate change above, or the exploding population/consumption levels that are triggering it — the two major factors threatening humanity's future. Sure, if you're not too far from the Western wildfires or Midwestern floodplains, the conversation might have turned to the crazy weather that is finally forcing some media to actually talk about climate change in the context of daily events.

But population? Get out. Way too inconvenient a truth. Take National Public Radio, for example. Of NPR's sparse record of population pieces, just one or two actually address unsustainable population growth. But as the political right whittles away at family planning clinics across the nation, the latest NPR series, "The Baby Project," devotes a plethora of articles to pregnancy, with the most serious subjects the problems some women have conceiving and birthing. If there is even a hint of too many babies, it is well hidden. This, even though a 2009 NPR story on U.S. pregnancies reported that half — yes, half — of all U.S. pregnancies are unintended. That's a lot of unintended consumers adding to our future climate change.

And that's what the right calls the "liberal" side of the mass media. The politically conservative U.S. mass media cover unsustainable population levels even less.

That pretty much reflects the appalling state of U.S. public education today on population. The U.S. approach to population issues across all levels of government, in terms of such things as education, attacks on family planning and tax deductions for children, is an exercise in thoughtlessness. The ramifications, however, are far more insidious and brutal. Women are culturally conditioned daily to welcome the idea of having children — plural, not one or none. How to support those children economically is not discussed. Indeed, our abysmal lack of adolescent sex educational programs ensures there will be plenty of young women who secure their destinies, and those of their babies, to brutal poverty and shortened lives through unwanted pregnancies and lack of choice. The latest available statistics from the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan tell the story: 1 in 5 American children lived in poverty in 2008; 1 in 3 if they were black or Latino.

Sure, there's much talk and concern that birthrates are down and will result in not enough workers to support the elderly. But this argument is overblown; after all, a 70-year-old can be more economically productive than a 7-year-old. And a large, pre-working population inflicts costs on a society. Furthermore, the birthrates in developing nations remain high, and the consequences affect us all.

The country is Canada and the year is 2011

HOW UNCLEAN WAS MY VALLEY               

By Mark Steyn 

Take a look at this photograph. It appeared in The Toronto Star’s education section on Saturday:

It’s the scene every Friday at the cafeteria of Valley Park Middle School in Toronto. That’s not a private academy, it’s a public school funded by taxpayers. And yet, oddly enough, what’s going on is a prayer service – oh, relax, it’s not Anglican or anything improper like that; it’s Muslim Friday prayers, and the Toronto District School Board says don’t worry, it’s just for convenience: They put the cafeteria at the local imams’ disposal because otherwise the kids would have to troop off to the local mosque and then they’d be late for Lesbian History class or whatever subject is scheduled for Friday afternoon.

The picture is taken from the back of the cafeteria. In the distance are the boys. They’re male, so they get to sit up front at prayers. Behind them are the girls. They’re female, so they have to sit behind the boys because they’re second-class citizens – not in the whole of Canada, not formally, not yet, but in the cafeteria of a middle school run by the Toronto District School Board they most certainly are.

And the third row? The ones with their backs to us in the foreground of the picture? Well, let the Star’s caption writer explain:

At Valley Park Middle School, Muslim students participate in the Friday prayer service. Menstruating girls, at the very back, do not take part.

Oh. As Kathy Shaidle says:

Yep, that’s part of the caption of the Toronto Star photo.

Yes, the country is Canada and the year is 2011.

Just so. Not some exotic photojournalism essay from an upcountry village in Krappistan. But a typical Friday at a middle school in the largest city in Canada. I forget which brand of tampon used to advertise itself with the pitch "Now with new [whatever] you can go horse-riding, water-ski-ing, ballet dancing, whatever you want to do", but perhaps they can just add the tag: "But not participate in Friday prayers at an Ontario public school."

Some Canadians will look at this picture and react as Miss Shaidle did, or Tasha Kheiriddin in The National Post:

Is this the Middle Ages? Have I stumbled into a time warp, where “unclean” women must be prevented from “defiling” other persons? It’s bad enough that the girls at Valley Park have to enter the cafeteria from the back, while the boys enter from the front, but does the entire school have the right to know they are menstruating?

But a lot of Canadians will glance at the picture and think, “Aw, diversity, ain’t it a beautiful thing?” – no different from the Sikh Mountie in Prince William’s escort. And even if they read the caption and get to the bit about a Toronto public school separating menstruating girls from the rest of the student body and feel their multiculti pieties wobbling just a bit, they can no longer quite articulate on what basis they’re supposed to object to it. Indeed, thanks to the likes of Ontario “Human Rights” Commission chief commissar Barbara Hall, the very words in which they might object to it have been all but criminalized.

Islam understands the reality of Commissar Hall’s “social justice”: You give ’em an inch, and they’ll take the rest. Following a 1988 cease-and-desist court judgment against the Lord’s Prayer in public school, the Ontario Education Act forbids “any person to conduct religious exercises or to provide instruction that includes religious indoctrination in a particular religion or religious belief in a school.” That seems clear enough. If somebody at Valley Park stood up in the cafeteria and started in with “Our Father, which art in Heaven”, the full weight of the School Board would come crashing down on them. Fortunately, Valley Park is 80-90 per cent Muslim, so there are no takers for the Lord’s Prayer. And, when it comes to the prayers they do want to say, the local Islamic enforcers go ahead secure in the knowledge that the diversity pansies aren’t going to do a thing about it.

Nobody would know a thing about the “mosqueteria” story were it not for the blogger Blazing Cat Fur, whom I was honoured to say a word for in Ottawa a few months back. He broke this story and then saw it get picked up without credit by the Toronto media. He does that a lot. Currently, he’s featuring the thoughts of Jawed Anwar, the editor of The Muslim, a publication for Greater Toronto Area Muslims, and of Dr Bilal Philips, a “Canadian religious scholar” who was born in Jamaica but grew up in Toronto and has many prestigious degrees not only from Saudi Arabia but also from the University of Wales, where he completed a PhD in “Islamic Theology”. Dr Philips is in favour of death for homosexuals and, as one Canadian to another, Mr Anwar was anxious to explain to his readers that that’s nothing to get alarmed about:

Although, there is no clear-cut verse in Qur’an that categorically suggests killing of homosexuals, sayings of Prophet Muhammad suggests three types of sentences, and among that one is death. Bilal Philips is suggesting, based on his opinion on the Qur’anic/Prophetic principles of society. He is not advising the Islamic judiciary to kill any gay person they found, but what he is “suggesting” is judicial punishment of death sentence for those who confess or are seen “performing homosexual acts” by “four reliable witnesses without any doubt.”

The essence of Islamic laws is to protect the life of human beings. And it happens that sometimes killing of a person can save thousands and sometimes millions of lives. The Islamic judiciary can punish a person with death sentence to save others’ lives.

Okay, great, thanks. Glad you cleared that up. Two eminent “Canadian” Muslims are openly discussing the conditions under which homosexuals should be executed – and doing so in the cheerful knowledge that Commissar Hall, so determined to slap down my “Islamophobia”, isn’t going to do a thing about their “homophobia”. She’s more likely to accept a complaint from another “Canadian”, Mohammad Baghery, who accuses Michael Coren of the crime of “making fun of Muslims”. (Barbara Hall's incoherent thoughts can be heard here: appropriately enough, she sounds like the robot voice that instructs you to buckle your seatbelt.)

Waiting for the Superman

'First responders' who don't

Police and firefighters stood by and watched a suicidal man drown. We need to restore the principle that the real constituency for public safety is the public, not bureaucrats and government workers.

By Steven Greenhut

On Memorial Day, a suicidal man waded into San Francisco Bay outside the city of Alameda and stood there for about an hour, neck deep in chilly water, as about 75 bystanders watched. Local police and firefighters were dispatched to the scene after the man's desperate mother called 911, but they refused to help. After the man drowned, the assembled "first responders" also refused to wade into the water to retrieve his body; they left that job for a bystander.

The incident sparked widespread outrage in Northern California, and the response by the Fire Department and police only intensified the anger. The firefighters blamed local budget cuts for denying them the training and equipment necessary for cold-water rescues. The police said that they didn't know if the man was dangerous and therefore couldn't risk the safety of officers.

After a local TV news crew asked him whether he would save a drowning child in the bay, Alameda Fire Chief Ricci Zombeck gave an answer that made him the butt of local talk-show mockery: "Well, if I was off duty, I would know what I would do, but I think you're asking me my on-duty response, and I would have to stay within our policies and procedures, because that's what's required by our department to do."

If you stand a better chance of being rescued by the official rescuers when they are off duty, then what is the purpose of these departments, which consume the lion's share of city budgets and whose employees — in California anyway — receive exceedingly handsome salaries?

In Orange County, where I worked for a newspaper for 11 years, the average pay and benefits package for a firefighter is $175,000 a year. Virtually every Orange County deputy sheriff earns, in pay and overtime, more than $100,000 a year, with a significant percentage earning more than $150,000. In many cities, police and fire budgets eat up more than three-quarters of the budget, and that doesn't count the unfunded liabilities for generous pension packages, which can amount to more than 90% of a worker's final year's pay. It's hard to argue that these departments are so starved for funds that they're entitled to stop saving lives.

After I wrote a newspaper column deploring the Alameda incident, I received many emails from self-identified police officers and firefighters. Though a few were appalled by the new public safety culture they saw on display, most defended it; some even defended Zombeck's words. Many made reference to a fire in San Francisco that week that had claimed the life of at least one firefighter.

The message they sent was clear: Don't criticize firefighters, because they put their lives on the line protecting you.

There's no doubt that firefighters and police have tough and sometimes dangerous jobs, but that doesn't mean the public has no business criticizing them, especially if they have become infected with the bureaucratic mind-set spread by public-sector union activism. The unions defend their members' every action; to the extent that they admit a problem, they always blame tight budgets.

The unions that represent first responders also have a legislative agenda to reduce oversight and accountability. I recall when a state Assembly member closely aligned with public-safety unions contacted me about a union-backed bill that was too egregious even for his taste. Sponsored by a firefighters union after a district attorney prosecuted an on-duty firefighter for alleged misbehavior that led to a death, the bill in its original form would have offered immunity to firefighters even for gross negligence on the job. The legislation failed after the media started paying attention and ignited a contentious public debate.

Perhaps the outrage at the Alameda incident will likewise cause a far-reaching discussion, one that helps restore the principle that the real constituency for public safety is the public, not bureaucrats and government workers.

Not really

The Dark Future of the West

Will the East dominate the West by the end of this century? Absolutely, says Stanford professor of classics and history Ian Morris; and there is little the West can hope to do about it.

By Ben Dunant 

In a talk hosted by the New America Foundation and the Atlantic Council in Washington – “Will the East dominate the West in the 21st Century? ” – Professor Morris elaborated on his recent book, Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future . With his background in the archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, Morris introduces a long view to the currently fashionable topic of the fate of civilizations, also tackled by Niall Ferguson in latest bestseller Civilization: the West and the Rest. As the subtitle of Morris’ book belies, these works of history find their niche through addressing popular concerns about the future. Ferguson confirmed this appeal in a congratulatory review of Why the Rest Rules: “one really scholarly book about the past is worth a hundred fanciful works of futurology.”

While Ferguson identifies a series of transferable “killer applications” for civilizational ascendancy, such as science, democracy and medicine, capable of being “downloaded” by any aspiring power, Morris puts forward the accidents of geography – and the adaptive responses it demands from “lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable ways of doing things” – rather than civilizational genius as the primary motor of historical change. This sets the deterministic tone of the grand predictions that follow.

Using an index of social development of his own invention to measure East-West competition stretching back to the end of the last ice age some 12,000 years ago, carefully constructed graphs show East and West more or less keeping pace with each other up until the relative end of the timescale, revealing little more than the blind drift of history. The Roman Empire marked an unprecedented peak of development, during which the West rose significantly above the East, only to have the roles reversed as the Empire disintegrated and Europe entered its Dark Age. The East kept up its lead until Europe entered the early modern period in the 17th century – an era of Western dominance (just about) still ongoing.

The lady vanishes

Shale and its Discontents 

The New York Times still doesn’t get the shale revolution

 

By R. Bryce.

The shale-gas (and shale-oil) revolution is the single most important development in the North American energy sector since the discovery of the East Texas Field in 1930. But you won’t get that story by reading the New York Times.

Instead, two recent articles by Ian Urbina, the Times’ designated reporter on shale development, claim that the shale business is overhyped. On Sunday, June 25, the paper ran a front-page story that relied largely on anonymous sources who used phrases such as “giant Ponzi schemes,” “inherently unprofitable,” and “an Enron moment” to describe the last few years of shale development in the U.S. The story ended with yet another unattributed quote, which discussed a rather lackluster well that had been drilled into a shale bed in Europe. An employee of an oil-field-services company said the well “looked like crap” and that it would likely be sold to another company. According to the anonymous source, there’s “always a greater sucker.”

But who’s the sucker here?

Believing Urbina’s story entails believing that the industry’s top management and financial analysts — at ExxonMobil and several other major energy companies — are chumps. In late 2009, ExxonMobil paid $41 billion for XTO Energy, a Houston-based company that was sitting atop huge shale-gas assets. According to the president of Shell US, Marvin Odum, the company has invested some $17 billion in shale drilling over the past few years. During a recent presentation at the Aspen Institute, Odum said, “We wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t real.” Numerous companies are building huge pipelines into the Eagle Ford shale in South Texas.

Believing Urbina also requires even the most casual observers of the energy industry to disregard the billions of dollars that consumers have saved over the past couple of years due to the reduced price of natural gas — a price drop made possible by a boost in production. The latest spot price for natural gas at the Henry Hub in Louisiana is about $4.40. To make the math easy, let’s call it $4. Over the four-year period from 2005 to 2008, U.S. natural-gas prices averaged about $7 per thousand cubic feet. That price reduction is now saving American consumers about $60 billion per year, or about $180 million per day. 

U.S. natural-gas production is now at, or above, the peaks achieved in the early 1970s. In 2011, we’ve had more than a dozen days in which gross domestic gas production has been as high as 64 billion cubic feet. The last time the U.S. had gas production at that level was in 1971, when gas production averaged 62 billion cubic feet per day.

Assessing Risk

One Million Dead in 30 Seconds

In an increasingly urbanized world, earthquakes threaten unprepared cities with mass destruction.

by Claire Berlinski

Seismic risk mitigation is the greatest urban policy challenge that the world confronts today. If you consider that too strong a claim, try to imagine another way in which bad urban policy could kill a million people in 30 seconds. Yet the politics of earthquakes are rarely discussed, and when discussed, widely misunderstood. Take the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, which released 600 million times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb. The ensuing partial meltdown of the Fukushima reactor prompted international hysteria about nuclear power, but few seemed to realize that a far deadlier threat had been averted. As seismologist Roger Bilham has aptly put it, houses in seismically active zones are the world’s unrecognized weapons of mass destruction—and Japan’s WMDs didn’t go off. Its buildings—at least those that weren’t swept away by the accompanying tsunami, a force of nature against which we are still largely helpless—remained standing, and the people inside survived.

That so few buildings collapsed in the earthquake was a human triumph of the first order. It showed that countries can make great progress in seismic risk mitigation; in the Kobe earthquake of 1995, 200,000 buildings collapsed. But cities around the world seem happy to ignore the earthquake threat—one that is only growing as the cities themselves get bigger and bigger.

In January 2010, an earthquake struck Haiti and destroyed nearly 100,000 buildings. Hospitals, schools, government buildings, jails, hotels, churches, whole neighborhoods—all crumbled, entombing everyone inside. After the quake, I received an e-mail from a scholar of international relations. “It’s odd that earthquakes tend to occur frequently in countries that can least afford them,” she wrote.

You could only write such a sentence if you had never given the matter much thought. It isn’t odd; in fact, it isn’t true. Mother Nature doesn’t have it in for the poor. Rather, earthquakes come to our attention only when they are disasters, and they are disasters only when they strike dense urban areas full of badly made buildings. Last year, there were a number of earthquakes larger than the one that leveled Port-au-Prince, but they didn’t make the news because they happened in the middle of nowhere. California’s Loma Prieta quake, the “World Series earthquake” of 1989, was as big as the one in Port-au-Prince. It killed so few people by comparison—only 63—because San Francisco’s buildings and infrastructure were well designed and strong.

In the wake of the Kobe quake, Japanese engineers took extensive measures to reinforce buildings and infrastructure. They installed rubber blocks under bridges. They spaced buildings farther apart to prevent domino-style tumbling. They introduced extra bracing, base isolation pads, hydraulic shock absorbers. A minute before the March earthquake, automatic seismic monitoring systems sent warnings to Japanese cell phones. Elevators glided obediently to the nearest floor and opened. Surgeries were halted. Videos from Tokyo show skyscrapers swaying gracefully, like cornstalks in the wind. Not one collapsed.

Likewise, the aftershock that struck Christchurch, New Zealand, this past February was deadly, but the astonishing part of that story isn’t that several of the city’s buildings collapsed; it’s that most of them did not. The peak ground acceleration—a measurement of how much the ground shakes—was immense, one of the highest ever recorded. Something like that would have flattened most cities. New Zealand’s strict and well-enforced building codes saved Christchurch from annihilation.

Paying the tab

Going Soft On Greece

IBD Editorial

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Sunday praised Greece for its economic policy "leadership." Wait a minute: Isn't this the country that lied to its creditors and has just stuck U.S. taxpayers with an IMF bailout?

Greece is such a wretched mess that it's hard not to feel sorry for it. It's racked up $329 billion in debts it can't pay.

Now it's passed an austerity package in exchange for a $145 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund and has its hand out again for a bailout from Europe, which will be hashed out Wednesday.

Beset by riots from its own clueless citizens who refuse to recognize that it's out of money, Greece has become pathetic. In such straits, it's tempting to offer its government some encouragement.

But the hard fact remains that Greece's woes are self-made, making Clinton's words of praise reek of weakness and disingenuity.

"We stand by the people and government of Greece as you put your country back on a path to economic stability and prosperity," Clinton said, appearing with Greek Foreign Minister Stavros Lambrinidis and praising Greece for its recent austerity measures. "Committing to bring down the deficit and passing the medium-term fiscal strategy were vital first steps. We know these were not easy decisions. They were acts of leadership."

Leadership? Actually, in other places, this is known as paying one's bills and living within one's means.

Greece, though, pretty well amounts to the Bernie Madoff of governments. And its late efforts to correct course are driven by the fact that it's bankrupted itself.

Its bad path started from the beginning of the crisis.

• ·        Having promised the European Union it would never let its deficit go higher than 3% of GDP upon joining in 1981, it blithely ignored that and racked up a deficit of 10.5% of GDP without ever seriously trying to cut the size of its government. Today, its endless spending has left it with debt worth 143% of GDP.
• ·        Greece's debt crisis was marked by a notable dishonesty. Working with investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, it borrowed more than it could repay to finance its bloated government and then hid the debt from the European Union and its creditors.
• ·        Using an off-balance-sheet currency swap arrangement since 2002, it swapped its own debt into euro debt to keep it off the official statistics.
• ·        That enabled Greece to issue $15 billion worth of bonds it couldn't have issued under honest conditions.
• ·        The country has also been plagued by corruption and a riot-prone citizenry that not only has no idea what big government costs, but has clearly been taught by its own government to always blame others.

This is the sorry reality of Greece. As Clinton pays a solicitous visit, she does so knowing that the U.S. and Europe have been saddled with bailing Greece out.

The U.S. piece of the IMF bailout is $39 billion, money from U.S. taxpayers she purports to represent.

Instead of coddling Greece like a spoiled debutante, wouldn't it have been better to deliver an icier greeting to a country that has practiced so much habitual dishonesty? Some tough love might ensure Greece's government recognizes its error. After all, its weakness not only hurts itself, but leaves it as an enfeebled NATO ally that can no longer pull its weight.

But there are several reasons why that's not happening.

First, Greece's problems are big, and a recalcitrant Greece could pull down some big continental banks.

So Hillary's conciliatory words are little more than the weakness of a banker who wants a faulty creditor to keep paying. That's not a good position for a superpower to be in against a beggar state that isn't even sure it needs to reform.

Second, the U.S. federal debt showdown has the U.S. sadly in about the same situation at home — too much borrowing and big government.

How the U.S. could exert any moral authority over Greece at such a time is hard to see. So while the U.S. is paying the Greeks' tab, it has a tough time telling Greece to live within its means.

Clinton may want to finesse everything, but it's obvious the U.S. position is one of a big government comforting another big government instead of standing up for the interests of the U.S. taxpayers. In the end, again, it's they who get stuck with the tab.

State is essentially a concept of power

The Character of American Individualism

By Murray N. Rothbard

Individualism, and its economic corollary, laissez-faire liberalism, has not always taken on a conservative hue, has not always functioned, as it often does today, as an apologist for the status quo. On the contrary, the revolution of modern times was originally, and continued for a long time to be, laissez-faire individualist. Its purpose was to free the individual person from the restrictions and the shackles, the encrusted caste privileges and exploitative wars, of the feudal and mercantilist orders, of the Tory ancien régime.

Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson, the militants in the American Revolution, the Jacksonian movement, Emerson and Thoreau, William Lloyd Garrison and the radical abolitionists — all were basically laissez-faire individualists who carried on the age-old battle for liberty and against all forms of State privilege. And so were the French revolutionaries — not only the Girondins, but even the much-abused Jacobins, who were obliged to defend the Revolution against the massed crowned heads of Europe. All were roughly in the same camp. The individualist heritage, indeed, goes back to the first modern radicals of the 17th century — to the Levellers in England, and to Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson in the American colonies.

The conventional historical wisdom asserts that while the radical movements in America were indeed laissez-faire individualist before the Civil War, that afterwards, the laissez-fairists became conservatives, and the radical mantle then fell to groups more familiar to the modern Left: the Socialists and Populists. But this is a distortion of the truth. For it was elderly New England Brahmins, laissez-faire merchants and industrialists like Edward Atkinson, who had financed John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry, who were the ones to leap in and oppose the US imperialism of the Spanish-American War with all their might.

No opposition to that war was more thoroughgoing than that of the laissez-faire economist and sociologist William Graham Sumner or than that of Atkinson who, as head of the Anti-Imperialist League, mailed antiwar pamphlets to American troops then engaged in conquering the Philippines. Atkinson's pamphlets urged our troops to mutiny, and were consequently seized by the US postal authorities.

In taking this stand, Atkinson, Sumner, and their colleagues were not being "sports"; they were following an antiwar, anti-imperialist tradition as old as classical liberalism itself. This was the tradition of Price, Priestley, and the late-18th-century British radicals that earned them repeated imprisonment by the British war machine; and of Richard Cobden, John Bright, and the laissez-faire Manchester School of the mid-19th century. Cobden, in particular, had fearlessly denounced every war and every imperial maneuver of the British regime. We are now so used to thinking of opposition to imperialism as Marxian that this kind of movement seems almost inconceivable to us today.

By the advent of World War I, however, the death of the older laissez-faire generation threw the leadership of the opposition to America's imperial wars into the hands of the Socialist Party. But other, more individualist-minded men joined in the opposition, many of whom would later form the core of the isolationist Old Right of the late 1930s. Thus, the hardcore antiwar leaders included the individualist Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin and such laissez-faire liberals as Senators William E. Borah (Republican) of Idaho and James A. Reed (Democrat) of Missouri. It also included Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., father of the Lone Eagle, who was a congressman from Minnesota.

Almost all of America's intellectuals rushed to enlist in the war fervor of the First World War. A leading exception was the formidable laissez-faire individualist Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the Nation, grandson of William Lloyd Garrison and former member of the Anti-Imperialist League. Two other prominent exceptions were friends and associates of Villard who were later to serve as leaders of libertarian thought in America: Francis Neilson and especially Albert Jay Nock. Neilson was the last of the laissez-faire English Liberals, who had emigrated to the United States; Nock served under Villard during the war, and it was his Nation editorial denouncing the progovernment activities of Samuel Gompers that got that issue of the magazine banned by the US Post Office. And it was Neilson who wrote the first revisionist book on the origins of World War I, How Diplomats Make War (1915). The first revisionist book by an American, in fact, was Nock's Myth of a Guilty Nation (1922), which had been serialized in LaFollette's Magazine.

We are all Greeks now Part II

Divinely comical

by DETLEV SCHLICHTER

“Italy, long a bystander to the euro-zone’s debt woes, was thrust into the eye of the storm on Monday, as investors fled the country’s bonds and Europe’s leaders struggled to keep the crisis from infecting the Continent’s third-largest economy.”

Thus reports the Wall Street Journal Europe this morning. What?, I was thinking. Bystander? Investors fleeing the country? –-  Was anybody still holding Italian bonds?

That Italy was next in line was so obvious, how can anybody truly be surprised? What were you thinking, sitting on a pile of Italian debt while watching Greek bonds slide into the Aegean Sea? This has been talked about for more than a year, for chrissake!

On CNBC yesterday, PIMCO’s Mohamed El Erian said that Italy was not like Greece, Ireland, or Portugal. Better maturity profile, yes, and more debt held by domestic investors. Ah, very clever.

Well, could it be that you are over-analyzing the issue, Mohamed? – I am all for keeping it simple: Italy will not repay its debt, neither will Spain, France or Germany for that matter.

The question is not if Italy is in better shape than Greece but whether it is in good enough shape.

Almost all states are meeting their present obligations by borrowing more. They are servicing their debt by accumulating more debt.

This is not a healthy strategy. It relies crucially on the willingness of your creditors to keep funding an EVER-growing debt pile. Maybe that is asking a bit too much. In any case, lenders are having a re-think right now.

Remember: on a long enough time-line, everywhere is Greece.

Oh, please, you cannot be surprised!

Hey, bond investors, why not be a step ahead of the curve for a change and sell some Bunds? The German government is also heading for fiscal trouble – it is just a question of time. Either Germany has to bail out everybody else in Europe and goes broke that way, or the other European governments finally do the honest and manly thing – don’t count on it!- and default, in which case Germany has to bail out its bankers who for years have been happily handing their funds over to Greek and Italian politicians for a few basis points more in spreads, financial geniuses that they are.

So who is thinking that Bunds are a safe haven? Well, probably the same guys who thought that Italy would be safe. Better maturity profile.

Sorry if I am quoting myself – and Oscar Wilde – but you got to have a heart of stone not to be crying with laughter at the plight of the euro-elite and their grand design built on cheap money and ever more debt.

Two weeks ago, the Financial Times reported that Greek savers were lining up to buy physical gold. I am sure in a few weeks from now we hear the same from Italy. This is still a sensible strategy, in my view – and not just for Greeks and Italians. The governments are bust, the banks are bust – and the major risk is that in their desperation the Eurocrats will use the printing press to buy some time.

Will the ECB be a push-over? – Of course!

Read the rest at http://papermoneycollapse.com/2011/07/divinely-comical/

The titanic struggle

The end of progress?

Government overregulation threatens innovation

By R. Rahn

Have things stopped getting better? Americans had become used to ever-increasing living standards, but there is evidence that for many people, life is not improving. There is also a growing pessimism about the future with surveys showing that Americans do not think their children and grandchildren will be better off.

Last week, there was a most interesting discussion between two of the world's leading tech gurus - George Gilder and Peter Thiel - at FreedomFest in Las Vegas. Mr. Gilder has written some of the most influential books of our time, including "WealthandPoverty," "Microcosm" and "Telecosm," and was the one who popularized Moore's Law, which says computer power doubles about every 18 months and costs fall by half. Mr. Thiel is best known as a co-founder of PayPal and the angel investor in Facebook. He also has gained attention by offering $100,000 grants to college students who drop out to form companies.

Mr. Thiel argues that, in many areas, progress has stopped or almost stopped. For instance, for hundreds of years, mankind has sought to travel faster and faster - first with faster and faster sailing ships and then with powered sea vessels, and subsequently with trains, automobiles and airplanes. Fifty years ago, it was widely predicted and assumed that commercial airplanes would be traveling at speeds of 2,000 miles an hour or more by now. It hasn't happened. In fact, travel times have gotten slower. The Concorde, which became the first supersonic commercial airplane in 1976, was abandoned eight years ago. Planes now fly no faster than they did in the 1960s because of government policies and restrictions. In addition, the government's incompetent Transportation Security Administration has unnecessarily managed to increase trip times to another hour or so.

Nuclear power was supposed to bring us electricity too cheap to meter. But government restrictions on many types of power production and excessively costly regulation have driven up energy prices in real terms after centuries of falling energy prices. After the first moon landings, many confidentially predicted that the moon would have permanent manned bases by now and, perhaps, even be colonized - but now the space shuttle has been abandoned with no replacement. Drug approvals are dramatically down at the Food and Drug Administration compared with where they were a decade or more ago. Meanwhile, the promised cure for cancer is still in the future, even though progress has been made.

Some industries, notably education, have been showing negative productivity, in that it now costs more in real terms to provide the same level of education in primary and secondary school as well in college than it did four decades ago.

George Gilder, while agreeing with Mr. Thiel's critique of government in denying people the benefits of existing or new technologies, is somewhat more optimistic about the ability of venture capitalists and the tech entrepreneurs to overcome the heavy drag of government on our lives. Mr. Gilder notes that Moore's Law continues to hold decades after Gordon Moore first described the process. In every decade, we have seen a hundredfold increase in computer power and a 524-fold increase in bandwidth, which is why you can now see movies on your cellphone.

The technologies would have translated into much higher real incomes for most people if it were not for the heavy foot of government on the economic windpipe. Whereas the private sector makes almost everything faster, cheaper and better, the government makes almost everything slower, more expensive and worse.

It is no secret that those in government seek power - including the power to tax and regulate. But it takes some time to figure out how to regulate new industries. Old industries, such as energy production, transportation and education, are heavily regulated. Accordingly, the people do not get the benefits of lower costs and better products in these industries that would be possible if the regulators were not outlawing innovations. The United States and other governments are now in the process of destroying the global financial industry through misguided and destructive regulations. Few medical advances come from countries that have nationalized medicine, and if Obamacare is allowed to continue in the United States, it is almost a certainty that medical progress will be stifled and millions will die unnecessarily early.

The government has not figured out how to destroy the Internet and advances in computers. So the struggle goes on between those who try to innovate faster than the government can find ways to outlaw the future. It is no surprise that as governments grow, the rate of technological progress in those countries slows down and vice versa.

There is a titanic struggle now going on in Washington over the size of the U.S. government. Those who want a smaller government are, in effect, saying they want to unleash the future with all of its benefits by removing many of the regulatory and tax restrictions that impede human progress, while those who seek a bigger government are, in reality, pushing for a less prosperous and less kind future.