Dimming the light on human ingenuity

The candle-lit world of Earth Hour is a decadent celebration of an era that we ought to be glad we’ ve left behind.

On 26 March 1886, the House of Lords debated amendments to the recently enacted Electric Lighting Bill, with Lord Houghton proclaiming electric lighting had a ‘very brilliant future before it’. Exactly 125 years later,  the lights will go out on this optimistic vision of a better future.

by Colin McInnes

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is asking for lights to be switched off in homes, public buildings and historic monuments for 60 minutes during Earth Hour, an annual event highlighting the impact of energy use on the environment. ‘Switching off your lights is a vote for Earth… [L]eaving them on is a vote for global warming’, states WWF. Unfortunately the symbolism of this gesture is entirely misplaced and ignores the socially and environmentally progressive story of artificial lighting.

The sweet, and deadly, sides of President Assad

Reports that President Assad sent his wife sentimental pop lyrics perfectly fits the profile of a modern despot.

By Theodore Dalrymple

Some men are born evil, some achieve evil, and some have evil thrust upon them. Bashar al-Assad of Syria falls into the third category; but from the point of view of his victims, it hardly matters. For them, evil is evil and death is death. The psychological origins of a man’s crimes don’t make them less real or horrible to those who suffer from them.

You are being herded and the gate is closing.

“Rise and Rise Again until Lambs become Lions.”

by Mike Krieger

When Central Banking Dies: China and Oil

1. China

China is a topic on which I have differed greatly from many analysts and macro commentators with whom I generally share a similar economic philosophy.  What I have heard from many in this camp is this story about how China was the next great power and that they are going to revalue the yuan higher.  In that process, they would be able to shift their economy away from a dangerous overemphasis on fixed asset investment and toward consumption.  


There was this notion that China had its house in order and was about to totally shift the balance of economic power in the world as the West melted away.  In the middle part of the last decade I heard this argument yet it always seemed a little preposterous.  In 2007/2008 as the Western housing markets and banking systems came apart this view was expressed in the now much maligned (and rightfully so) “decoupling thesis” which turned out to be nothing but a fantasy.  Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the implosion in the West there was still this notion that China was ok.  

Liberal Whitewashing

The Media and Black Homicide Victims

By Heather Mac Donald

Cable mogul Evan Shapiro had a stunningly clueless Trayvon Martin entry on Huffington Post yesterday asking: Why doesn’t the media cover more black crime victims?

Shapiro, the president of indie cable broadcaster IFC, should pose the same question to Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and every member of the black protest establishment: Why don’t you protest more black crime victims? The answer would be the same in all cases: Because the only black victims who interest the race industry and its mainstream media handmaidens are blacks who have been killed by “white” civilians, including honorary whites like Martin’s killer George Zimmerman, or blacks who have been killed or offended by the police (black officers will do here in a pinch).

Unfortunately, there are very few such victims. Ninety-three percent of all black homicide casualties from 1980 to 2008 were killed by other blacks, and are thus of no interest whatsoever to today’s race advocates, because they fail to support the crucial story line that blacks remain under siege by a racist white power structure.

Integration, Not Ideology

The French civic model will survive the recent terror

BY GUY SORMAN

Following a radical Islamist’s cold-blooded murder of seven French citizens—four Jews, two Muslims, and one African—in the Southern cities of Toulouse and Montauban, one could deduce that homegrown Islamic terrorism has become a major threat in Europe, and that racism and anti-Semitism remain pervasive in France. After all, the perpetrator was a French citizen of Arab origin. This may describe the facts, but it doesn’t help us understand them.

The massacres occurred in the midst of a French presidential campaign, and the candidates wasted little time in trying to link them to their own agendas. On the far right, Marine Le Pen argued for a halt to all new immigration and expulsion of all immigrants who have committed crimes, as well as revoking French citizenship for those naturalized immigrants with criminal records. On the left, candidates charged that the incumbent president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was responsible for fostering racial hatred—an absurd accusation against the first French head of state to appoint French citizens of Arab and African descent to major ministerial positions. As for Sarkozy himself, he touted his strong commitment to security, but he couldn’t explain how the killer was able to commit his crimes even as police were well aware of the threat he posed.

Green Extremes

Germany's Failing Environmental Projects

The energy-saving light bulb ends up as hazardous waste, too much insulation promotes mold and household drains are emitting a putrid odor because everyone is saving water. Many of Germany's efforts to protect the environment are a chronic failure, but that's unlikely to change.  

By Alexander Neubacher

Germans support protecting the environment, and they have a special relationship with nature. They like animals and plants, blue skies and the ocean. They want their children to grow up in an intact environment, and try to set an example for others. When it's time to save the world, the Germans are there, doing their utmost. They are determined that conservation efforts won't fail because of them.

Germany used to declare war on its neighbors. Today we explain how they can renounce nuclear power. We've lost the title of the world's top exporter and only manage to come in third place in global soccer rankings, but no one can get the better of us when it comes recycling our waste. Acid rain and forest decline have opened our eyes to the destructive force of civilization from an early age, even though Germany's forests, contrary to expectations, have somehow survived.

Welcome to the United States of Orwell

The Trojan Horse  has passed the gates

1. Our One Last Chance to Preserve the Bill of Rights   

"This Congress and President Obama have shredded the Bill of Rights. We have one last chance to restore the Founding Fathers' bastion against a rogue Central State: the Bill of Rights."

"Everything that Richard Nixon did to me, for which he faced impeachment and prosecution, which led to his resignation, is now legal under the Patriot Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)." Daniel Ellsberg. Can Congress legalize tyranny by passing a law that says it can? Can Congress shred the Bill of Rights by passing a law that says it can? Well, Congress has passed such a law, and President Obama--the most effective Trojan Horse president in American history, a plutocrat dressed as a "progressive"-- rushed to sign it on New Years Eve 2011 when nobody was looking.

This is not a partisan issue, though various flaks and toadies are attempting to make it so. Here is how the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) describes the NDAA: 

Indefinite Detention, Endless Worldwide War and the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

He signed it. We'll fight it. 

If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail

How Brussels Stifles Democracy in Europe

By DANIEL HANNAN

How could so many clever people get it so wrong? The flaws in the euro project are not just clear with hindsight; they were visible at the outset and were widely pointed out. It was never going to be possible to jam widely divergent economies into a single monetary policy. It was plainly reckless to invite Italy and Greece to join the new currency when their government debt was at twice the permitted level of 60 per cent of GDP. Plenty of doubters said so at the time. Yet, in every national parliament, in every central bank, in every university faculty, in every television editorial conference, there was a collective suspension of disbelief. 

Afghan women are squashed between three enemies

For Afghan women little has changed

An old Pashtun proverb sums up the motivation for war in three words, “Zan, zamin, zar” – women, land and wealth. The progress of Afghan women has been promoted as a positive outcome of the international occupation of Afghanistan. Women and women’s rights were seen as just cause for war. And even while some progress has been made to uplift the station of women in Afghan society, much remains the same.

By KHADIJA PATEL.

October 2011 marked 10 years since British and American forces intervened in Afghanistan. Theirs was a mission to mitigate the threat to global security following the attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001. In November of that year, the US state department released an 11-page report on the Taliban’s “war against women”, enumerating the systematic repression of women in Afghanistan: girls could not go to school or university; women were very rarely allowed to work; they were denied access to healthcare; they had to wear a burqa outside the home, but could not leave their homes without a male relative.

Piling up Debt to Subsidize our Betters

Summarizing The True Sad State Of The World In Two Charts

USA Injustice System

In US 97% of convictions are the result of plea bargains

By Conrad Black

Every resident of or frequent visitor to the United States should rejoice at the Supreme Court’s decision last week expanding the rights of defendants to effective counsel in plea-bargain negotiations. As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion, the country no longer has a “trial system,” but rather a system in which “the negotiation of a plea bargain, [instead of] the unfolding of a trial, is almost always the critical point for a defendant.” In federal cases, 97 percent of convictions — and in state cases, 94 percent of convictions — are the result of plea bargains.

The "German Problem"

We're Good Europeans, Yet They All Hate Us

By Christopher Caldwell

Once again, Europe has a country at its centre that is too big for its neighbours. Merely by keeping on its best behaviour, Germany has managed to reawaken the historic "German problem". It has succeeded its way into a crisis. Ever since Greece's finances became a matter of public concern just over two years ago, Germany has been regaining its status as the leading power in Europe. It subjected itself almost a decade ago to a painful reform of its welfare state and a freeze in real wages that has made it as competitive an exporter as any country in the world, including China. 

Now Germany's economy is better balanced than those of other European countries, its reputation for honest accounting stands higher, and it has kept its triple-A credit rating while France, Austria and others have been downgraded.

How the Left Turned Against the Jews

How the Left Turned Against the Jews

Separated at birth: The movements for Jewish self-determination and Russian Communism were inextricably linked 

by NICK COHEN

In Weimar Germany, riddled with resentment after defeat in World War I and the national catastrophe of the Treaty of Versailles, demagogues knew that they could win the attention of the mob by palming the race card from the bottom of the deck.

"You cry out against Jewish capital, gentlemen?" cried one. "You are against Jewish capital and want to eliminate the stock manipulators. Rightly so. Trample the Jewish capitalists under foot, hang them from the street lamps, stamp them out."

Ruth Fischer sounded like a Nazi. She used the same hate-filled language. She wanted to murder Jews. But Hitler would never have accepted her. Fischer was a leader of the German Communist Party. She made her small differences of opinion with the Nazis clear when she went on to say that her audience should not just trample Jewish capitalists to death, but all capitalists.

In the meantime, the debasement of paper money continues

Does the ‘recovery’ matter?

by DETLEV SCHLICHTER 

I was thinking of starting this blog with a cynical comment along the lines of, last week equity markets came off, I think we need another €1 trillion from the ECB! – Okay, maybe it wasn’t the greatest joke but you get the idea. But then the Wall Street Journal beat me to it, and they weren’t even trying to be funny. In an article on weaker data in the Euro Zone one could find this remark:

“The unexpected drop in the purchasing managers’ index survey suggests more stimulus from the European Central Bank through interest-rate cuts or additional bank lending may be required to protect the economy from a more severe downturn.”

Sure. And why not?

The Never Ending Con of "Climate Change"

Global Warming Models Are Wrong. Again

The observed response of the climate to more CO2 is not in agreement with predictions.

By WILLIAM HAPPER

During a fundraiser in Atlanta earlier this month, President Obama is reported to have said: "It gets you a little nervous about what is happening to global temperatures. When it is 75 degrees in Chicago in the beginning of March, you start thinking. On the other hand, I really have enjoyed nice weather."

What is happening to global temperatures in reality? The answer is: almost nothing for more than 10 years. Monthly values of the global temperature anomaly of the lower atmosphere, compiled at the University of Alabama from NASA satellite data, can be found at the website http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/. The latest (February 2012) monthly global temperature anomaly for the lower atmosphere was minus 0.12 degrees Celsius, slightly less than the average since the satellite record of temperatures began in 1979.

The Latest European Con

The Firewall- An Irrelevancy

By Mark Grant

“Tough luck, Lonnehan. But that's what you get for playing with your head up your ass!”

                                                                          -The Sting

There is noise and fluff and soap bubbles floating in the wind but don’t be distracted. Like so many things connected to the European Union it is just hype. In the first place do you think that any nation in Europe is actually going to put up money for the firewall no matter what size that they claim it will be? Let me give you the answer; it is “NO.” The firewall is just one more contingent liability that is not counted for any country’s financials, one more public statement of guarantee that everyone on the Continent hopes and prays will never be taken too seriously and certainly never used. Any rational person knows that some promise to pay in the future will not solve anything and it certainly won’t create some kind of magic ring fence around any nation. Think it through; what will it do to stop Spain or Italy from knocking at the door of the Continental Bank if they get in trouble and the answer is clearly nothing, not one thing. The firewall is just a distraction to lull all of you back to sleep and all of the headlines and discussion about it makes zero difference to any outcome and so is nothing more than a ruse. “Look this way please, do not look that way, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, put up your money to buy our sovereign debt like a good boy and everything will be just fine.”

“Did you ever hear of a hustle called Two Brothers and a Stranger?”

                                                                        -The Color of Money

Reaching the bottom of the slippery slope.

Obscure Court Decision Gives Government Sweeping Power

By THOMAS SOWELL
When a 1942 Supreme Court decision that most people never heard of makes the front page of the New York Times in 2012, you know something unusual is going on.

What makes that 1942 case — Wickard v. Filburn — important today is that it stretched the federal government's power so far that the Obama administration is using it as an argument to claim before today's Supreme Court it has the legal authority to impose ObamaCare mandates on individuals.

Roscoe Filburn was an Ohio farmer who grew some wheat to feed his family and some farm animals. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture fined him for growing more wheat than he was allowed to grow under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, which was passed under Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce.

Filburn pointed out that his wheat wasn't sold, so that it didn't enter any commerce, interstate or otherwise. Therefore the federal government had no right to tell him how much wheat he grew on his own farm, and which never left his farm.

Is technology and industry good or bad?

Bicenntenial of Luddite Lawlessness

BY BRUCE WALKER   

Is technology and industry good or bad? There is no moral answer to the question. Certainly there are happy men and women who worked in old trades exchanging the material benefits of technology for the comfort and emotional satisfaction of keeping alive old ways of work. The delightful town of Williamsburg in Virginia or the equally happy Silver Dollar City in the Ozarks are filled with folks whose joy is preserving the making of horseshoes, candles, rock candy, and many other products whose manufacture is a part of our history.

Empires Then and Now

The American people are victims of the American empire

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Great empires, such as the Roman and British, were extractive. The empires succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance. The reason Rome did not extend its empire east into Germany was not the military prowess of Germanic tribes but Rome’s calculation that the cost of conquest exceeded the value of extractable resources. The Roman empire failed, because Romans exhausted manpower and resources in civil wars fighting amongst themselves for power. The British empire failed, because the British exhausted themselves fighting Germany in two world wars.

In his book, The Rule of Empires (2010), Timothy H. Parsons replaces the myth of the civilizing empire with the truth of the extractive empire. He describes the successes of the Romans, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Spanish in Peru, Napoleon in Italy, and the British in India and Kenya in extracting resources. To lower the cost of governing Kenya, the British instigated tribal consciousness and invented tribal customs that worked to British advantage.

They Can Force You To Buy Broccoli

Abolishing the diktat of a bunch of 18^th C. idealists

The case of Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida is one of the most important cases to ever come to the US Supreme Court. If the government wins, it can force you to do anything it wishes. Today’s arguments in this case do not exaggerate the threat.

We have not had a true constitution since FDR threatened to pack the court in order to get his New Deal programs adopted. The Court folded and the famous “switch in time that saved nine” (West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 1937) allowed the Court to make any interpretation it wanted to carry out an administration’s social policy. I was taught in constitutional law courses in college and law school that this marvelous thing was a “living constitution”, that we were not bound by the diktat of a bunch of 18^th C. idealists whose ideas didn’t favor an intrusive government. The important thing, I was taught, was to advance social policy for the benefit of the people.