The Ideology Of Catastrophe

An instrument of political and philosophical resignation

A time-honored strategy of cataclysmic discourse, whether performed by preachers or by propagandists, is the retroactive correction. This technique consists of accumulating a staggering amount of horrifying news and then—at the end—tempering it with a slim ray of hope. First you break down all resistance; then you offer an escape route to your stunned audience.

By Pascal Bruckner

As an asteroid hurtles toward Earth, terrified citizens pour into the streets of Brussels to stare at the mammoth object growing before their eyes. Soon, it will pass harmlessly by—but first, a strange old man, Professor Philippulus, dressed in a white sheet and wearing a long beard, appears, beating a gong and crying: "This is a punishment; repent, for the world is ending!"

Random Thoughts

Evolution, creationism and government

By Thomas Sowell

How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on, and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?

Why should being in a professional sport exempt anyone from prosecution for advocating deliberate violence? Recent revelations of such advocacy of violence by an NFL coach should lead to his banishment for life by the NFL, and criminal prosecution by the authorities. If you are serious about reducing violence, you have to be serious about punishing those who advocate it.

The Afghan Syndrome

After Vietnam, there is a new syndrome on the block

By Tom Engelhardt

Take off your hat. Taps is playing. Almost four decades late, the Vietnam War and its post-war spawn, the Vietnam Syndrome, are finally heading for their American grave. It may qualify as the longest attempted burial in history. Last words — both eulogies and curses — have been offered too many times to mention, and yet no American administration found the silver bullet that would put that war away for keeps.

Richard Nixon tried to get rid of it while it was still going on by “Vietnamizing ^[2]” it. Seven years after it ended, Ronald Reagan tried to praise it into the dustbin of history, hailing it as “a noble cause ^[3].” Instead, it morphed from a defeat in the imperium into a “syndrome,” an unhealthy aversion ^[4] to war-making believed to afflict the American people to their core.

The good midwife of Sichuan

Private health providers, won’t make a killing

By The economist

The scene at the women’s and children’s hospital in Chengdu could be in any well-appointed modern maternity unit. Doting fathers stare at newborns dozing on crisp bedding as masked cleaners keep the corridors spotless. The Angel hospital in Sichuan’s capital is part of a wave of privately owned hospitals, catering to patients fleeing crowded state clinics.

The patients here are well-off locals, paying from 20,000 yuan ($3,200) for a Caesarean delivery and the latest drugs. Rooms cost extra, including suites for families to host postnatal banquets.

The roots of private health care in Communist China go back to clinics that treated venereal disease. In other respects, the taint of private care has gone, and foreign investment is encouraged. Over 30 joint ventures have been approved; many more are in the pipeline. The country’s new five-year plan endorses private-sector investors as part of the solution to the country’s shortage of affordable health care. Health spending has soared in recent years and is set to top 700 billion yuan by 2015.

Media Dishonesty and Race Hustlers

Liberal's Risky Investment

by Walter E. Williams

When NBC's "Today" show played the audio of George Zimmerman's call to a Sanford, Fla., police dispatcher about Trayvon Martin, the editors made him appear to be a racist who says: "This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black." What Zimmerman actually said was: "This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. It's raining, and he's just walking around, looking about." The 911 officer responded by asking, "OK, and this guy – is he black, white or Hispanic?" Zimmerman replied, "He looks black." NBC says it's investigating the doctoring of the audio, but there's nothing to investigate; its objective was to inflame passions.

In his Associated Press article titled "Old photos may be deceptive in Fla. shooting case," Matt Sedensky pointed out that the photos carried by the major media were several years old and showed Zimmerman looking fat and mean and Martin looking like a sweet young kid.

The "Shadow" Government of USA

Leviathan

By Iain Murray

How many Americans work in government? That’s a difficult question to answer. Officially, as of 2009, the federal government employed 2.8 million individuals out of a total U.S. workforce of 236 million — just over 1 percent of the workforce. But it’s not quite as simple as that. Add in uniformed military personnel, and the figure goes up to just under 4.4 million. There are also 66,000 people who work in the legislative branch and for federal courts. That makes the figure around 2 percent of the workforce.

Yet even that doesn’t tell the full story. A lot of government work is done by contractors or grantees — from arms manufacturers to local charities, from environmental-advocacy groups to university researchers. A lot of the work they do is funded nearly entirely by taxpayers, so they should count as part of the federal government. Unfortunately, we can’t ask the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) how many government contractors and grantees there are. They don’t keep such records.

You Are No Better Than A Racist

If You Don’t Believe In Man-Made Global Warming

Kari Norgaard claims that she is not plauged by any  "aberrant sociological behavior"

by James E. Miller

Oregon University professor Kari Norgaard has made headlines with a controversial paper claiming that global warming skeptics are plagued by an “aberrant sociological behavior.”  From the Daily Mail:

Sociology and environmental studies professor Kari Norgaard wrote a paper criticising non-believers, suggesting that doubters need to be have a ‘sickness’.

The professor, who holds a B.S. in biology and a master’s and PhD in sociology, argued that ‘cultural resistance’ to accepting humans as being responsible for climate change ‘must be recognised and treated’ as an aberrant sociological behaviour.

Resolving skepticism about climate change alarmists, she added, is a challenge equitable to overcoming ‘racism or slavery in the U.S. South’.

Norgaard added that effective international action on climate change is being hampered by ‘weak’ responses to the crisis by both individuals and societies.

Choosing Prosperity

The Rise and Fall of Indian Socialism

By Sam Staley 

India became the poster child for post–World War II socialism in the Third World. Steel, mining, machine tools, water, telecommunications, insurance, and electrical plants, among other industries, were effectively nationalized in the mid-1950s as the Indian government seized the commanding heights of the economy.

Other industries were subjected to such onerous regulation that innovation came to a near standstill. The Industries Act of 1951 required all businesses to get a license from the government before they could launch, expand, or change their products. One of India’s leading indigenous firms made 119 proposals to the government to start new businesses or expand existing ones, only to find them rejected by the bureaucracy.

Egypt’s bread revolution

Soaring food prices could spark another uprising

by Heba Habib

Pouring onto the streets in an unprecedented uprising last year, Egyptians toppled their dictator of three decades with resonating, populist chants for “bread, freedom and social justice.”

But while more freedom and social justice remain a possibility for Egypt, bread might be harder to come by.

Rain in Spain has not left the Plain

Wait a Moment

By Mark Grant

It sounds good when said and credible and positive but the problem is that it is one more absurd illusion. Spain, this morning, says the next round of budget cuts are going to come from Education and Health benefits which is all very nice except they do not totally come under the purview of the Spanish Federal government. The way that Spain is currently constructed these expenditures are mostly under the control of the regional governments and so that these kinds of promises by the current administration in Spain are wisps of cultivated air floating from Madrid to Berlin. Even if the Federal government could get the cuts accomplished it will take them months and perhaps months and months so that the headlines of what Spain is going to do has all of the substance of the milky froth atop some cup of coffee in Valencia that resembles a cappuccino.

Tale of two small countries

Why is Cayman rich and Belize poor?

By Richard W. Rahn

Cayman is rich, and Belize is poor. Why? Both are small Caribbean countries with the same climate and roughly the same mixed racial heritage, and both were English-speaking British colonies. Belize (the former British Honduras) received its independence in 1981, while Cayman is still not fully independent but is self-governing at the local level, with its own currency, laws and regulations.

Belize should be richer: It has a larger population than Cayman (345,000 as contrasted with Cayman's 54,000). Belize has a much larger and more varied land area with many more natural resources, including gas and oil, and some rich agricultural land that Cayman lacks. Both have nice beaches, but Belize has the second-largest barrier reef in the world after Australia and also has Mayan ruins. Yet Cayman, with fewer points of interests, has done more to attract tourists.

Back in the early 1970s, Cayman was as poor on a per capita basis as is Belize today. Both countries had ambitions to be tourist and financial centers. Cayman succeeded and has about six times the real per capita income of Belize. What did Cayman do right and Belize do wrong?

The time bomb no one can defuse

This should be a great time to be a eurosceptic
By Gideon Rachman

The sceptics predicted the single currency would not work. They would love to gloat. Instead, they face a dilemma. For now the sceptics are being told that they must do everything possible to keep the euro together – or risk economic Armageddon.

This conundrum has provoked much head-scratching in Downing Street. Both David Cameron and George Osborne thought the euro was a bad idea – and neither man is surprised to see it in trouble. Instinct and intellect lead the British prime minister and his chancellor to believe that the single currency could well fall apart. If that is the case, then it would seem futile and counterproductive to pour money and energy into trying to prop up a doomed project.

Yet all the briefings Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne are getting from the UK Treasury suggest that a break-up of the single currency could provoke an economic cataclysm – with banks and businesses collapsing across Europe, and the risk of another Great Depression.

Many of the academic and City economists consulted by the prime minister and his senior colleagues have been just as gloomy as the Treasury. Confronted with so many assurances that the break-up of the euro spells disaster, Britain’s leaders have reluctantly gone against their initial instincts. They are urging European colleagues to do everything they can to keep the single currency together. In a memorable phrase, Mr Osborne told eurozone leaders to follow the “remorseless logic” of monetary union and press on towards a true fiscal union in Europe.

Strangers in a Stranger Land

Filling the Blanks

By Victor Davis Hanson

Trostkyzation

In ancient Rome, when the emperor or an especially distasteful elite died, his image on stone and in bronze was removed. And by decree there arose a damnatio memoriae, a holistic effort to erase away his entire prior existence. When Tiberius got through with the dead Sejanus, few knew that he had ever existed, such were the powers of the Roman state to create alternate realities. Orwell’s Animal Farm ^[1] and 1984 ^[2] explored the communist state’s efforts to airbrush away history. Orwell perhaps was most notably influenced by the removal of Leon Trotsky from the collective Russian memory to the point that he never existed. That force was used in these instances does not mean that something like them could not happen ^[3] through collective volition; indeed, I think we are starting to see dangerous signs that a sort of groupthink is already beginning.

Nature and Volatility

Two Kinds of Black Swans

by John Azis

The black swan is probably the most widely misunderstood philosophical term of this century. I tend to find it being thrown around to refer to anything surprising and negative. But that’s not how Taleb defined it.

Taleb defined it very simply as any high impact surprise event. Of course, the definition of surprise is relative to the observer. To the lunatics at the NYT who push bilge about continuing American primacy, a meteoric decline in America’s standing (probably emerging from some of the fragilities I have identified in the global economic fabric) would be a black swan. It would also be a black swan to the sorry swathes of individuals who believe what they hear in the mainstream media, and from the lips of politicians (both Romney and Obama have recently paid lip service to the idea that America is far from decline). Such an event would not really be a black swan to me; I believe America and her allies will at best be a solid second in the global pecking order — behind the ASEAN group — by 2025, simply because ASEAN make a giant swathe of what we consume (and not vice verse), and producers have a historical tendency to assert authority over consumers.

The aim of practical politics

Plenty of gloom

Forecasters of scarcity and doom are not only invariably wrong, they think that being wrong proves them right

The Economist
IN 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus inaugurated a grand tradition of environmentalism with his best-selling pamphlet on population. Malthus argued with impeccable logic but distinctly peccable premises that since population tended to increase geometrically (1,2,4,8 ) and food supply to increase arithmetically (1,2,3,4 ), the starvation of Great Britain was inevitable and imminent. Almost everybody thought he was right. He was wrong.

In 1865 an influential book by Stanley Jevons argued with equally good logic and equally flawed premises that Britain would run out of coal in a few short years’ time. In 1914, the United States Bureau of Mines predicted that American oil reserves would last ten years. In 1939 and again in 1951, the Department of the Interior said American oil would last 13 years. Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong.

When Government Safety Nets Break

Feeding the dolphins

by Gary North

The West's governments are going to default, one way or another. Politicians cannot bring themselves to stop spending money the governments do not have.

The deficits of the major Western governments are now so great as to be irreversible. The governments must now borrow money to be used to pay interest on money already borrowed. In the housing market, this is called a backward-walking mortgage. It invariably spells default. The subprime mortgages were mostly of this type.

The West's largest governments are therefore subprime borrowers.

Carnaval Is Over

The end of the Brazilian miracle

BY BILL HINCHBERGER

When she strides into the White House on Monday, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff will carry with her one thing sure to draw the envy of her American counterpart Barack Obama -- a whopping 77 percent approval rating. Sitting pretty as a BRIC, at the top of the world, the darling of international investors, preparing to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, Brazil is caught up in a national adrenaline rush comparable -- stereotypically, perhaps -- to what Carnaval dancers feel when they march amid the cheers into Rio de Janeiro's Sambadrome.

Roosevelt's vision in deep trouble

The Origins of Entitlement

By Robert Samuelson

Would Franklin Roosevelt approve of Social Security? The question seems absurd. After all, Social Security is considered the New Deal's signature achievement. It distributes nearly $800 billion a year to 56 million retirees, survivors and disabled beneficiaries. On average, retired workers and spouses receive $1,839 dollars a month -- money vital to the well-being of millions. Roosevelt would surely be proud of this, and yet he might also have reservations. Social Security has evolved into something he never intended and actively opposed.

It has become what was then called "the dole" and is now known as "welfare." This forgotten history clarifies why America's budget problems are so intractable.

A BRIC Wall

The Buck Stops Here

By John Butler

Already on the defensive due to a persistent failure to achieve its stated policy aims, the US Fed was subject to much fresh criticism over the past week, including from the BRIC nations, collectively the largest foreign holders of US dollar reserves. While the dollar remains the world’s pre-eminent reserve currency, there is growing recognition everywhere, except inside the Fed itself, that a choice will soon have to be made: Either the Fed must move to implement a credible, rules-based monetary policy, focused primarily on preserving the purchasing power of the dollar, or the dollar will lose reserve currency status, initiating a vicious spiral of dollar and US Treasury market weakness, which would quickly spill over into the financial system generally. Were that to happen, the current debate about how to reduce the US budget deficit would be promptly settled, as it would become impossible for the US to finance public sector deficits in the first place. Does the Fed, or the government, see the danger? Regardless, investors need not only to see it, but to understand it and to act accordingly. Time may be shorter than I previously thought.

We want war, and we want it now

Reading the  roasted duck

By Pepe Escobar 

It was deep into the night, somewhere over Siberia, in a Moscow to Beijing flight (BRIC to BRIC?) when the thought, like a lightning bolt, began to take hold. 

What the hell is wrong with those Arabs? 

Maybe it was the narcotic effect of that perennially dreadful Terminal F at Sheremetyevo airport - straight out of a Brejnev gulag. Maybe it was the anticipation of finding more about the Russia-China joint naval exercise scheduled for late April. 

Or it was simply another case of "you can take the boy out of the Middle East, but you can't take the Middle East out of the boy". 

With friends like these ... It all had to do with that Friends of Syria (fools for war?) meeting in Istanbul. Picture Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal - who seems to have a knack for sending US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton into rapture - feverishly arguing that the House of Saud, those paragons of democracy, had "a duty" to weaponize the Syrian "revolutionary" opposition. 

And picture al-Faisal ordering an immediate ceasefire by the Bashar al-Assad government, guilty - according to the House of Saud - not only of cruel repression but crimes against humanity. 

No; this was not a Monty Python sketch.