Sorry Economists, Politicians Do Not Invest, They Just Spend

In short, there is nothing more opposed to true investment than government spending

By J.T. Young

Despite liberal rhetoric to the contrary, government does not invest, it simply spends. With another fiscal showdown looming expect to hear a litany from the left labeling federal spending as “investment” and as the reason why it cannot be cut. Don’t believe it. At no stage of the process does public sector spending resemble private sector investment.

First, the private sector differentiates its expenditures. Neither necessities nor discretionary spending are expected to return a profit. Only investments are expected to and they make up a relatively small amount for most individuals.

These investments are expected to return at least market-based returns, if not more. Of course, they may not, but the intent is clear and the defining reason for these resources.

Such investment money is freely given – either by a single individual or many individuals giving it to others to invest. Throughout its life, investment money must conform to market rules. When it ceases to, losses accumulate and investors flee.

If successful, profit is returned to the investors and, if unsuccessful, these investors absorb losses. In both cases, the results advance the economy – concentrating resources in the hands of those making good decisions and shifting them away from those making bad ones.

The public sector’s use of resources differs from the private’s at each step.

The public sector does not differentiate its own spending. Everything becomes “necessity” – while individual citizens may label different items differently, government simply absorbs all these verdicts and casts the whole as vital. It is for this reason that government on its own finds it so hard to cut spending.

None of the public sector’s resources are freely given. Governments obtain their resources from taxing. Even when government borrows, it can do so only on its ability to obtain money by fiat.

These resources are therefore not excess or disposable to those from whom they are taken. It is the government, not the individual who determines their amount. As a result, few individuals or businesses have as high a percentage of income that they invest as they pay in taxes.

None of the public sector’s resources are dispersed with the intent of making a profit. Often, just the opposite rationale for public sector spending is given – doing what the private sector does not. As a result, public sector resources are distributed based on politics, with no government program not having powerful political allies supporting it.

The public sector expressly ignores economic criteria when allocating its resources. When by chance its allocations do coincide with economic criteria, it crowds out more efficient private sector investment by subsidization or outright monopoly.

Because its resources are neither allocated based on an expected profit, nor maintained based on competition, government rarely earns a profit, or does so for very long.

As a result there is never a return to “investors” – any return is generally dispersed throughout the citizen body and often expressly directed away from taxpayers as part of intended income redistribution.

Other peoples money are running out.Fast

Taxpayers On the Hook for Trillions in Unfunded State Pension Liabilities

By Eric Boehm

A new assessment of state pension obligations suggests the problem is even worse than it already appears.

How much worse?

Using a more conservative method of accounting for financial gains in the marketplace, there is a $4.1 trillion gap between assets and liabilities — known as the “unfunded liability” — of all state-level pension systems in the United States, according to State Budget Solutions, a fiscally conservative think tank that deals with tax and spending issues at the state level.

On a per-capita basis, each American would have to fork over about $13,100 to fill that gap and fulfill the promises made to current and retired state workers.

The new survey makes the pension crisis look worse than in other reports because of the way State Budget Solutions calculates the plans’ unfunded liabilities.

The group uses a measure called “market value liability,” which assumes that pension funds will earn about 3.22 percent annually — in line with what long-term U.S. treasury bonds pay.  That measure is more accurate than often bloated assumptions that underpin most state pension plans, Eucalitto said.

“They are able to make the unfunded liability seem lower and that means they have to put less money into the pension systems each year,” said Cory Eucalitto, who authored the State Budget Solutions report.

Many states use an assumed return of 7 percent or 8 percent, though some are beginning to adjust those expectations downward.  But every time the investments miss that mark, it widens the gap between the pension fund’s assets and liabilities.

For example, in Pennsylvania the official unfunded liability reported by the state’s two major pension systems is a combined $49 billion. That assumes pension funds will grow at a rate of 7.5 percent every year in perpetuity.

Using the lower, safer growth rate of 3.22 percent, the unfunded liability in Pennsylvania’s two pension plans grows to a combined $156 billion.

This different form of measuring liabilities produces some truly scary results. In five states, State Budget Solutions calculates pension liabilities represent more than 40 percent of the entire state economy. In two states — Ohio and Mississippi — the pension costs are equal to more than half the state’s gross production.

On a per-capita basis, it’s equally worrisome. There are five states where the unfunded pension liability would represent a per-capita cost of more than $20,000, with Alaska leading the way at more than $32,000 per person.

Even Tennessee, on the low end of spectrum, would have to ask each and every resident to pay $5,676 to cover the full cost of its state pension liabilities.

Many states are struggling to find the political will to deal with the tsunami of pension costs poised to wreck budgets for decades to come.

In Illinois, where the state is dealing with the nation’s highest official unfunded liability of $100 billion – State Budget Solutions says it’s really more like $287 billion – Gov. Pat Quinn made an effort at reform this year.

The self-interested society

A dangerous temptation

by Kenneth Minogue
Societies are all imperfect, but self-interested societies fare far better than any of their counterparts.

Here in the Galapagos, the abstraction that must haunt our imaginings is evolution. But the term has two distinct meanings. Here is one genealogy, from Hayek:

Modern biology has borrowed the concept of evolution from studies of culture of older lineage. If this is in a sense well known, it is almost always forgotten.

Of course the theory of cultural evolution [sometimes also described as psycho-social, super-organic, or exsomatic evolution] and the theory of biological evolution are hardly identical.

Here is another, from Matt Ridley:

Thomas Hobbes was Charles Darwin’s direct intellectual ancestor. Hobbes (1651) begat David Hume (1739), who begat Adam Smith (1776), who begat Thomas Robert Malthus (1798), who begat Charles Darwin (1859).

Evolution is clearly a powerful word. The problem is that neither of these meanings has much to do with Darwinian natural selection which, by contrast with these meanings, is a blind process in which random mutations constantly generate new versions of a species that deals more successfully with the environment than its fellows. My concern by contrast is with the emergence of our free civilization, which has no blind random processes in it, though it may well be that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” might be taken to function in the same way.

I am concerned with the evolution of that grand thing called a “free society”—specifically, the only society or civilization that has ever evolved into freedom: our own.

What I mean by this is that our society—namely modern Western Europe and its offshoots in the rest of the world—has evolved into a set of national states, each of which is an association of individualists, managing their own lives and pursuing their own individual projects. That might sound like a description of any kind of human life, so why am I suggesting that it is unique?

The contrast I want to make here is with every other society and civilization because all of them rest, at some level, on legitimation in terms of a comprehensive system of justice. Most such societies are of course largely agricultural, and in them each individual notionally occupies a social status valued according to its supposed contribution to the common good. Human beings living in these just societies live—in principle—the way all human beings ought to live: in castes, or under Sharia, or the Mandate of Heaven, or whatever the hierarchy of belief locally may be, down to and including small tribal groups.

We in Western Europe, however, have taken a different path in which individualists, often identified as town-dwellers or “bourgeoisie,” associate together generally according to their own inclinations rather than in terms of some determinate social status designed to contribute to the good of the community. Individualists (in their very role as individualists) merely associate rather than form a community, though as subjects of a state they may participate in various communities built around specific interests or passions—clubs, religions, industrial enterprises, and so on. But this is incidental to the free lives they lead.

Those who live in just societies have clear functions, and up to a point enjoy the respect appropriate to such a function. Some of these functions are precisely defined: ruler, wife, warrior, priest, etc. But in all cases there will be a well-understood hierarchy governing social life, and its purpose is to preserve the basic aspiration of such comprehensively just societies—namely, social harmony. Thus the Forbidden City in Beijing had a Gate of Supreme Harmony leading to the Hall of Supreme Harmony, passing on to the Hall of Central Harmony and the Hall of Preserving Harmony, all of them clearly issuing from the idea of individual imperial authority.

Individualists in free societies, by contrast, merely have a duty to conform to the laws of their state, which ideally do not distinguish specific functions. In advancing this distinction, I am obviously perilously engaged in an abstract sociological sketch, one at a level comparable to David Riesman’s famous distinction between people living in traditional and modern societies in The Lonely Crowd. In these terms, free individualists are notionally equal under the law, including the ruler himself or herself. But what is it, we may ask, that guides and motivates the lives of these free individualists? The common answer is: self-interest. And my central concern in this paper will be with making sense of this remarkable—and troublesome—term.

In an obvious sense, we all know what “self-interest” means. If a car comes careering towards me, I jump out of the way; it is the basic instinct of self-preservation, and hardly distinguishes an individualist from any other human being. More specifically, as self-interested, I prefer to get a higher rather than a lower wage for the same work. Again, I want my family to prosper and my children to do well at school. Obvious, in fact.

Dogs of war versus the emerging caravan

While the Xi and Putin caravan reenacts the spirit of the Silk Road, the dogs of war keep barking

By Pepe Escobar

The dogs of war bark and the emerging-powers caravan ... keeps on trucking. That's the Group of 20 meeting in St Petersburg in a nutshell. Count on the indispensable (bombing) nation - via US President Barack "Red Line" Obama - to disrupt a summit whose original agenda was to tackle the immense problems afflicting the global economy. 

Economy is for suckers. Get me to my Tomahawk on time. The Obama doctrine - Yes We Scan, Yes We Drone - reached a new low with its Yes We Bomb "solution" to the chemical weapons attack in Ghouta, Syria, presenting world public opinion in the run-up towards the G-20 with the illusionist spectacle of a "debate" in the US Senate about the merits of a new bout of humanitarian bombing. 

What in fact was served was the appalling spectacle of serial wacko Republicans of the John McCain and Lindsey Graham mould squeezing the desperate Obama administration like little lemons. Their Orwellian gambit - "reverse the battlefield momentum" - pushed by the senile McCain, was duly approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This means bombing the hell out of Damascus during a "window of opportunity" of three months, with a possibility of extension. Red Line Obama is on board, assuring, before leaving to Sweden and the G-20, that his former "slap on the wrist" would "fit in" with regime change. 

Not even the ghost of Machiavelli would come up with an adjective to describe the whole planet waiting in disbelief to see whether the almost universally despised House of Representatives (15% approval rating, according to RealClearPolitics) decides, Roman Empire style, to give the thumbs down and authorize the bombing of one of the oldest cities in humanity (well, they have an illustrious precedent of applauding Shock and Awe over Baghdad, which topped the Mongols going medieval in the 13th century). 

And all this against the will of the "American people" who, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll support this folly by an overwhelming 9%. 

Yes We Bomb. But what for? The following exchange might have come straight from Monty Python. Unfortunately, it's real.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey: "The answer to whether I support additional support for the moderate opposition is yes." 

Senator Bob Corker (R, Tennessee): "And this authorization will support those activities in addition to responding to the weapons of mass destruction." 

Dempsey: "I don't know how the resolution will evolve, but I support - " 

Corker: "What you're seeking. What is it you're seeking?" 

Dempsey: "I can't answer that, what we're seeking ... "

The Pentagon may be clueless - rather, playing clueless. But Bandar Bush, AIPAC/Israel and vast sectors of the industrial-military complex know exactly what they are seeking. And Secretary of State John Kerry knows not only what they are seeking but also who's footing the bill, as in "if the United States is prepared to go do the whole thing the way we've done it previously in other places, they'll carry that cost. That's how dedicated they are to this." 

Lousy game theory in Syria

From the perspective of game theory, the mooted attack on Syria is a colossal failure

By Chan Akya

"Because it's there" - Edmund Hillary on why he climbed Mount Everest 

There are multiple humanitarian considerations to whatever is going on in the Middle East region, be it the military coup in Egypt or the mass murders of citizens in Syria. Then again, one does find it difficult to distinguish between the folks who are supposedly the friends of the West and those that are described as the other side. What, for example is the difference between the repression and killing of Shi'ite protesters in Bahrain and the killings of civilians in Syria? 

If the criterion is that countries cannot be allowed to commit mass murder of their populations, how would the West describe the actions of its allies in Turkey (against the Kurds now and previously the Armenians) or Saudi Arabia? 

So we can easily remove humanitarian concerns as the key motivation of any attack on Syria. 

Regime change is the next potential reason for any action in Syria, but that obviously begs the question of exactly what is in store for the country once the brutal Bashar Al-Assad regime is removed. From whatever the news reports point out, the counterpart of the Syrian regime is now well split between the generic opponents of Assad, while other groups have been bolstered by the presence of al-Qaeda trained militants. Minorities including Syria's long-established Christian community have been brutally targeted by opponents of the Assad regime. 

Without needing to dwell on the ironies of the West intervening on behalf of al-Qaeda and other assorted Christian killers, the question does beg: what's the plan exactly if Assad were to be removed from power. If the fighting to date is any indication, it would be more brutal than the kind of fighting that has marked Libya since its "liberation" from Gaddafi all those months ago.

Creative Destruction—The Best Game in Town

A market economy is a profit-and-loss system

By Robert Higgs  

In his justly famous 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Joseph A. Schumpeter described the dynamics of a market economy as a process of “creative destruction.” In his view, innovation—“the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates”—drives this process. Its most important result is that for the first time in history, the mass of the population in developed countries enjoys a standard of living that even the aristocrats of past ages could scarcely have imagined, much less have actually had.

Yet, as Schumpeter sought to express by his pithy term, the process is not merely creative, but also destructive. As a market economy develops, it necessarily brings about an immense variety of changes in particular demands and supplies, and hence it results in losses as well as profits. For those who rely on selling goods or services in declining or disappearing demand, for those whose locations no longer fit well into emerging spatial patterns of production, for those whose techniques of production no longer represent a means of maximizing net revenues, for those whose skills and experience no longer attract eager buyers in the labor markets—for them and countless others, the process of economic development brings anxiety, disappointment, loss, and in some cases ruin.

The losers take little solace in the thought that their economic displacement or demotion by more competitive workers and producers constitutes the heart and soul of a process by which the entire society, on average, becomes richer. And their plight has always attracted legions of critics who correctly blame the market system for the wreckage. It is simply impossible for the process of economic development to operate without losers. A market economy is a profit-and-loss system. Profits signal the desirability (to consumers) of moving resources to new employments; losses signal the desirability (to consumers) of removing resources from current employments. On the one hand, people are drawn by the prospect of heightened economic pleasure; on the other hand, they are repelled by the onset of persistent economic pain. In this way the overall system continually reshapes itself to comport more effectively with the prevailing patterns of demand and supply.

For the losers, the perceived remedy of their plight has often been not to make the necessary personal adjustments as well as possible, but to use force, especially state force, to burden or prohibit the more successful competitors in the market. Thus, the market’s critics demand bailouts, subsidies, tax breaks, and corporate and personal welfare of various sorts to soften the blows of the Schumpeterian “perennial gale of creative destruction.” Notice, however, that all such attempts to soften the blows also serve to mute or falsify the messages the market system is sending about where resources can be employed most productively in the prevailing circumstances. Amelioration of the suffering softens the blows, to be sure, but it also slows the process by which wealth is being created and introduces wasteful measures that may, especially if they are state-mandated, become entrenched in the politico-economic system and thereby serve as channels for resource waste and as permanent fetters on real progress.

Traps on the road towards barbarism

The future hides in the past's shadows

By Nicholas A Biniaris

“Which is the plan, which is the appropriate shoe for the road?”     - Aristophanes: The Birds 

Yet another military strike is being debated against another country of the much-aggrieved Middle East. There are arguments for and against this new adventure into the unknown. This time, the analysts are reluctant to declare victory as they did in Iraq or to plot a democratic Syria free of President Bashar al-Assad. 

This is just one episode in the long and bloody saga of a Muslim world in transformation, and at the same time torn between acceptance and denial of the world. This episode is also another trap for the West, which is only bound to lose money, influence and its cohesion to the glee of fanatics, Russians, Chinese and assorted satraps all over the world. 

This trap opened with the Iranian Revolution and continued with the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. That historical event contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union but created a psychological trap for the West, that of invincibility. That led to the first Gulf War and insidiously and cumulatively developed into a direct threat to the West slowly dragging us into a vortex of barbarity, self-deception and degradation of political life. 

Pro-strike arguments range from moral obligation to the loss of credibility of the US and its president. Shocked viewers of horrific images are totally justified to express their indignation. However, indignation, as Spinoza remarked, must turn to understanding, and this I suggest should lead to a rational plan to redress the cause of indignation. 

Do governments have such a plan? It may be argued that perhaps President Barack Obama had a plan. His view was correct as long as he stuck with it: stop the fearful satraps from spreading pernicious Salafism; come to terms with Iran; cease to condone Israel's conflictual plans for the area and address only its legitimate security problems; curtail the rampant megalomaniac aspirations of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's neo-Ottomanism and last but not least, recognize that Russia has legitimate interests and influence in the area. 

Indeed, these were a tall order to fulfill. 

What skeptics and students of history think, is that moral arguments in the midst of a civil war are dubious. In post-modern rich liberal states, politicians actually lead by stealth and leaks through the press. These elected executives try to sell cheap moralism, not morality in any way, while they know that when the going gets tough the state will break every rule and use any means to survive. Terrorism brought about an ad hoc abrogation of our rights to privacy and circumvented legality for the sake of a great good, notional security. 

The pro-strike side also argues that the West has a legal right to launch a punitive assault against the perpetrators of the crime. They base this on the Kosovo's intervention in 1999, the case which Diane Johnstone in her book Fools' Crusade debunked as a totally illegal one. 

The strike on Syria is illegal even if the US Congress gave its approval for the strike. In this case at least Obama tried to conform to the American form of government. He should be commended for this. However, according to international law the right to protect does not offer a legal framework to attack another country without a mandate from the Security Council. 

The arguments against the attack range from the hypocrisy of the West to the possible dire consequences of a strike. 

The hypocrisy view examines all the previous behavior of the West in similar cases. None complained against Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons against Iran. Israel has developed nuclear weapons and so did Pakistan and North Korea. Egypt most probably has chemical weapons. Another question arises about the providers of these lethal weapons and it seems that Western firms and governments have fulfilled this role. 

The dire consequences arguments spin various scenarios about possible failures if the wrong targets are hit, civilians are killed or even if Assad continues to use chemicals since he is punished but still survives. Should the protectors strike again and again? 

What if Assad and Hezbollah retaliates against Israel? They have no chance of success but they have the chance to turn the Arab street in their favor. What if Iran gives him a helping hand to attack Western hardware? What if Iran decides that this attack is a preamble against it? In that case it may be more than willing to punish in several ways the protectors.

There are more considerations to be countenanced. Russia may become more committed in an anti-western stand. China may similarly decide to go for a more assertive foreign policy if it observes the West committed to ad hoc policies of use of hard power. 

Is seems that the pro arguments have won and as all predict the strike will go on. Is it the morality argument, or the credibility and interest's argument which would sway the leaders for a pro-strike decision? These interests though must be made visible and explicit to the citizens so that at least an act of war can be justified in their eyes. Nothing of this sort has happened up to now. 

We know that chemical weapons were used repeatedly but we don't know who gassed whom. However, if Assad reveals tomorrow that he possesses two nuclear bombs and he plans to drop one on Tel Aviv and the other on Ankara, then the West would have to start negotiations as it is with North-Korea. 

The gist of this argument is that entertaining moral arguments for war independently of power is irrelevant since war is a function of power and interests. The West is, relatively speaking, all-powerful and hence it tries by subterfuge to present power as moral responsibility to protect. The punitive expedition against Syria is war. War though presupposes rules and conditions about prisoners, non-combatants and most importantly a tenable purpose, and finally a treaty of capitulation which enforces the will of the victor. It seems that even war in our times has lost its character! 

The optimistic plan is that after this strike the two warring sides will be forced to find a political solution and stop destroying Syria and its people. This is perhaps what is hidden behind Obama's move to ask Congress to authorize the strike. 

Why didn't the "Great Powers" twist the arms of the combatants just after the armed struggle started? What actually happened was that the West, Turkey, Russia, Iran and China were playing criminal games on the back of the Syrian people. 

It is more than obvious that neighboring governments didn't care for the thousands killed and tortured, of all creeds, ethnicities and political views as they tried to implement their agendas. Three developments to be noticed: Israel's acceptance of the strike, Egypt's refusal to condone it and Turkey's insistence of toppling Assad.

Israel is ideologically pressed to strike because chemicals awaken a horrible past; Egypt because Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has actually an Assad-type agenda, and Turkey because it wants to shape the area and exclude any Kurdish aspiration for statehood. 

The future hides in the past's shadows
Self-deception has ruled the West for over 20 years since the demise of the Soviet Union. That historical change filled the minds and hearts of our leaders and citizens of a fool's euphoria about the West's historical mission for the future of mankind. This triumphalist spirit seemed to realize the march of geist to freedom. Old Hegel was back with a smirk on his face. Freedom is not a given. It is historically reinvented by us with new vocabularies, as the late Richard Rorty would have said. 

The Cold War left a host of legacies and traumas: NATO, mutual destruction assurance, a reflexive hostility for Russia which has sidetracked effective and multilateral policies in the Middle East and an epiphany that the atheists and communists were struck down by God's scimitar. This last legacy left also a spirit of triumphalism to the side of the victorious mujahideen. 

The old issue of the role of religion in politics came back on the world stage by default. The West may not be atheistic but it is immersed in the meta-modern culture of the individual's self-realization and combined with its dominance in shaping political processes globally symbolized immorality and oppression.

These facts create new causes of conflict for both victors; the fundamentalists of nostalgia and the fundamentalists of the future. The Muslim ideology is under the spell of faith as a tool for reshaping the world; the West under the spell of invincibility and moral superiority and the thrust of globalization. 

All the above plus more tangible problems: poverty, inequality, suppression, demographics, democracy as a given, pressed the Muslim world towards a dramatic transformation. At the same time, as the late Marshall McLuhan had observed, restructuring of social groups and processes go on as our science and technology adventure is incessantly producing new extensions of our nervous system and translates the world in different vocabularies. 

I would add that these changes are not yet comprehensible to the slow thinkers called politicians or for that matter to interest bound analysts and academics. If McLuhan has touched part of the truth, this historical Gordian Knot becomes even more difficult to untie for both contestants. 

A civil war plus a religious sectarian war is the most barbaric of all wars. If external powers take sides because of interests or ideology it is a conflict without resolution in the minds of the warring factions in the spirit of vengeance for the defeated and triumphalism for the victor. No defeated side will acknowledge its defeat since it will ascribe it to the other's Protectors. Immanuel Kant in his book Perpetual Peace argued convincingly that outside powers should never take part in a civil war.

In the midst of a clear political revolution the ugly sectarianism raised its venomous head: Shiites, Sunnis, Alawites, Christians, Jihadists, Salafists, Moslem Brothers go hand in hand with different ethnicities: Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Hellenes, Armenians, and more. What do we know about all of these conflicts, historical animosities and political power struggles? Very little and actually they don't seem to be part of any coherent plan of ours. 

A possible punitive attack against Syria in the immediate future is just a chapter of the historical transformation of the area, more or less a minor one since the tectonic plates of sectarianism, nationalism, fanaticism emergent new ways of life and energy resources, the blood of the economy are colliding with unpredictable force and cataclysmic repercussions for all of us.

The first is the millions of refugees seeking shelter in a Europe already saturated by refugees of other wars. The opposition in Syria, if it topples Assad and this may be realized sooner than later after the strike, will be less than willing to accommodate western interests lest it is branded as stooges of the West. No entity in the Moslem world is at the present moment friendly to the West. 

It is not "politically correct" to be pro-Western in these countries. Even in Turkey, a member of NATO and a "Westernized" country for 70 so years, America and Israel are considered the most dangerous countries for Turkey. The day after in Syria will be no better than the day after in Iraq. It may even be worse for Christians and Alawites. Look at Egypt; it is the Copts who are suffering the unintended consequence of Sisi's coup. 

The 9/11 attacks opened a huge trap for the international security system since we were foolish enough to accept security as a given (Europe is a consumer of security) or as a simple task since we possessed the most advanced weapons ever devised by man. This trap has ensnared us in the most chaotic way with something we believe we can manage as we managed the Cold War. 

We cannot. All other important problems of our societies , employment, education, Medicare, loss of competitiveness and problems about the environment, the disarmament from nuclear weapons, the economic cycles of boom or bust are sidelined in the effort to deal with this historical phenomenon which neither our sociologists, or social scientists or historians comprehend in full. 

It seems foolish to believe that solely with projection of air-power and action at a distance we can manipulate the social forces of history. Our encounter with such a historical development, actually a hot magma, creates conditions of osmosis with barbarism and contempt for civilized behavior which prompts us also into similar actions and psychology. 

We resort to barbarism (drones, production of new lethal weapons, torture, Guantanamo); illegality (the NSA scandal); loss of cohesion (the British vote in the House of Commons, Germany's abstention from hard-power projection, Russia's strong opposite views); stealth undeclared wars and last but not least economic decline and bankruptcy. We are writing history all right, but to our expense.  

An American Satyricon

Our elites would be right at home in Petronius’s world of debauchery and bored melodrama

By  Victor Davis Hanson

Sometime in the mid-first century a.d., an otherwise little known consular official, Gaius Petronius, wrote a brilliant satirical novel about the gross and pretentious new Roman-imperial elite. The Satyricon is an often-cruel parody about how the Roman agrarian republic of old had degenerated into a wealth-obsessed, empty society of wannabe new elites, flush with money, and both obsessed with and bored with sex. Most of the Satyricon is lost. But in its longest surviving chapter — “Dinner with Trimalchio” — Petronius might as well have been describing our own 21st-century nomenklatura.

For the buffoonish libertine guests of the host Trimalchio, food and sex are in such surfeit that they have to be repackaged in bizarre and repulsive ways. Think of someone like the feminist mayor of San Diego, Bob Filner, who once railed about the need to enforce sexual-harassment laws, now only to discover ever creepier ways to grope, pat, grab, squeeze, pinch, and slobber on 18 co-workers and veritable strangers, whether in their 20s or over 60. Unfortunately, the sexual luridness does not necessarily end with Filner’s resignation; one of his would-be replacements is already under attack by his opponents on allegations that as a city councilman he was caught masturbating in the city-hall restroom between public meetings.

In good Petronian fashion, the narcissist Anthony Weiner sent pictures of his own genitalia to near-strangers, under the Latinate pseudonym “Carlos Danger.” Was Eliot Spitzer any better? As the governor of New York, he preferred anonymous numbers — “Client #9” — to false names, real to virtual sex, very young to mature women, and buying rather than romancing his partners. Is there some Petronian prerequisite in our age that our ascendant politicians must be perverts?

Transvestitism and sexual ambiguity are likewise Petronian themes; in our day, the controversy rages over whether convicted felon Bradley Manning is now a woman because he says he is. The politically correct term “transgendered” trumps biology; and if you doubt that, you are a homophobe or worse. As in the Roman Satyricon, our popular culture also displays a sick fascination with images of teen sex. So how does one trump the now-boring sexual shamelessness of Lady Gaga — still squirming about in a skimpy thong — at an MTV awards ceremony? Bring out former Disney teenage star Miley Cyrus in a vinyl bikini, wearing some sort of huge foam finger on her hand to simulate lewd sex acts.

The orgies at Trimalchio’s cool Pompeii estate (think Malibu) suggest that in imperial-Roman society Kardashian-style displays of wealth and Clintonian influence-peddling were matter-of-fact rather than shocking. Note that in our real version of the novel’s theme, Mayor Filner was not bothered by his exposure, and finally had to be nearly dragged out of office. Carlos Danger would have been mayor of New York, but the liberal press finally became worried over its embarrassment: Apparently two or three sexting episodes were tolerable, but another four or five, replete with more lies, risked parody.

US: The indispensable (bombing) nation

The Empire of Chaos is now totally out of control

By Pepe Escobar

Yes We Scan. Yes We Drone. And Yes We Bomb. The White House's propaganda blitzkrieg to sell the Tomahawking of Syria to the US Congress is already reaching pre-bombing maximum spin - gleefully reproduced by US corporate media. 

And yes, all parallels to Iraq 2.0 duly came to fruition when US Secretary of State John Kerry pontificated that Bashar al-Assad "now joins the list of Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein" as an evil monster. Why is Cambodia's Pol Pot never mentioned? Oh yes, because the US supported him.

Every single tumbleweed in the Nevada desert knows who's itching for war on Syria; vast sectors of the industrial-military complex; Israel; the House of Saud; the "socialist" Francois Hollande in France, who has wet dreams with Sykes-Picot. Virtually nobody is lobbying Congress NOT to go to war. 

And all the frantic war lobbying may even be superfluous; Nobel Peace Prize winner and prospective bomber Barack Obama has already implied - via hardcore hedging of the "I have decided that the United States should take military action" kind - that he's bent on attacking Syria no matter what Congress says. 

Obama's self-inflicted "red line" is a mutant virus; from "a shot across the bow" it morphed into a "slap on the wrist" and now seems to be "I'm the Bomb Decider". Speculation about his real motives is idle. His Hail Mary pass of resorting to an extremely unpopular Congress packed with certified morons may be a cry for help (save me from my stupid "red line"); or - considering the humanitarian imperialists of the Susan Rice kind who surround him - he's hell bent on entering another war for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the House of Saud lobby under the cover of "moral high ground". Part of the spin is that "Israel must be protected". But the fact is Israel is already over-protected by an AIPAC remote-controlled United States Congress. [1] 

"You can't say that"

Blunt words about Muslim backwardness

Illustration by Persian scholar Al-Biruni (973-1048) of different phases of the moon, from his masterpiece Kitab al-Tafhim.

By mark steyn

In 2010, the best selling atheist Richard Dawkins, in the “On Faith” section of the Washington Post, called the pope “a leering old villain in a frock” perfectly suited to “the evil corrupt organization” and “child-raping institution” that is the Catholic Church. Nobody seemed to mind very much.

Three years later, in a throwaway Tweet, Professor Dawkins observed that “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” This time round, the old provocateur managed to get a rise out of folks. Almost every London paper ran at least one story on the “controversy.” The Independent‘s Owen Jones fumed, “How dare you dress your bigotry up as atheism. You are now beyond an embarrassment.” The best-selling author Caitlin Moran sneered, “It’s time someone turned Richard Dawkins off and then on again. Something’s gone weird.” The Daily Telegraph‘s Tom Chivers beseeched him, “Please be quiet, Richard Dawkins, I’m begging.”

It’s factually unarguable: Trinity College graduates have amassed 32 Nobel prizes, the entire Muslim world a mere 10

None of the above is Muslim. Indeed, they are, to one degree or another, members of the same secular liberal media elite as Professor Dawkins. Yet all felt that, unlike Dawkins’s routine jeers at Christians, his Tweet had gone too far. It’s factually unarguable: Trinity graduates have amassed 32 Nobel prizes, the entire Muslim world a mere 10. If you remove Yasser Arafat, Mohamed ElBaradei, and the other winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, Islam can claim just four laureates against Trinity’s 31 (the college’s only peace-prize recipient was Austen Chamberlain, brother of Neville). Yet simply to make the observation was enough to have the Guardian compare him to the loonier imams and conclude that “we must consign Dawkins to this very same pile of the irrational and the dishonest.”

Full disclosure: Five years ago, when I was battling Canada’s “human rights” commissions to restore free speech to my native land, Richard Dawkins was one of the few prominent figures in Her Majesty’s dominions to lend unequivocal support. He put it this way: “I have over the years developed a dislike for Mark Steyn, although I’ve always admired his forceful writing. On this issue, however, he is clearly 1000% in the right and should receive all the support anybody can give him.”

Let me return the compliment: I have over the years developed a dislike for Richard Dawkins’s forceful writing (the God of the Torah is “the most unpleasant character in all fiction,” etc.), but I am coming round rather to admire him personally. It’s creepy and unnerving how swiftly the West’s chattering classes have accepted that the peculiar sensitivities of Islam require a deference extended to no other identity group. I doubt The Satanic Verses would be accepted for publication today, but, if it were, I’m certain no major author would come out swinging on Salman Rushdie’s behalf the way his fellow novelist Fay Weldon did: The Koran, she declared, “is food for no-thought … It gives weapons and strength to the thought-police.”

That was a remarkably prescient observation in the London of 1989. Even a decade ago, it would have been left to the usual fire-breathing imams to denounce remarks like Dawkins’s. In those days, Islam was still, like Christianity, insultable. Fleet Street cartoonists offered variations on the ladies’ changing-room line “Does my bum look big in this?” One burqa-clad woman to another: “Does my bomb look big in this?” Not anymore. “There are no jokes in Islam,” pronounced the Ayatollah Khomeini, and so, in a bawdy Hogarthian society endlessly hooting at everyone from the Queen down, Islam uniquely is no laughing matter. Ten years back, even the United Nations Human Development Program was happy to sound off like an incendiary Dawkins Tweet: Its famous 2002 report blandly noted that more books are translated by Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand years.

What Dawkins is getting at is more fundamental than bombs or burqas. Whatever its virtues, Islam is not a culture of inquiry, of innovation. You can coast for a while on the accumulated inheritance of a pre-Muslim past — as, indeed, much of the Dar al-Islam did in those Middle Ages Dawkins so admires — but it’s not unreasonable to posit that the more Muslim a society becomes the smaller a role Nobel prizes and translated books will play in its future. According to a new report from Britain’s Office of National Statistics, “Mohammed,” in its various spellings, is now the second most popular baby boy’s name in England and Wales, and Number One in the capital. It seems likely that an ever more Islamic London will, for a while, still have a West End theater scene for tourists, but it will have ever less need not just for Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward and eventually Shakespeare but for drama of any kind. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe Dawkins is wrong, maybe the U.N. Human Development chaps are wrong. But the ferocious objections even to raising the subject suggest we’re not.

A quarter-century on, Fay Weldon’s “thought police” are everywhere. Notice the general line on Dawkins: Please be quiet. Turn him off. You can’t say that. What was once the London Left’s principal objection to the ayatollah’s Rushdie fatwa is now its reflexive response to even the mildest poke at Islam. Their reasoning seems to be that, if you can just insulate this one corner of the multicultural scene from criticism, elsewhere rude, raucous life — with free speech and all the other ancient liberties — will go on. Miss Weldon’s craven successors seem intent on making her point: In London, Islam is food for no thought. 

A Dissent on Syria

Smooth words for a rough job

By  Jim Manzi

On Tuesday, the National Review magazine again endorsed military action in Syria. I disagree.

Though it is difficult to know precisely what action is being contemplated, I hope and expect that if the U.S. does launch such an attack, that our military would accomplish its defined tasks, and that we would more likely than not avoid some kind of a disaster. But the risks of a terrible outcome are not trivial, and not worth the putative benefits. 

The most common argument for attacking Syria is that we must maintain our credibility when the sitting president issues ultimatums (even if they are ill-advised).

The problem with this is that while the president of the United States has awesome powers under the Constitution, they do not include declaring war. He can declare “red lines” all he wants, but he can’t constitutionally commit the nation to preemptive military action in the event they are crossed. If this “loss of credibility” means in practical terms that U.S. presidents are less able to make credible insinuations that they can unilaterally commit us to wars, then this would likely result in: fewer such presidential assertions being issued; more consultation and consideration before they are issued; and more reliable delivery on the threats when the situation calls for it. Such a loss of credibility would be a feature, not a bug.

The best argument for attacking Syria is that it is necessary to maintain a credible deterrent against the use of chemical weapons in order to protect ourselves. This argument should carry great weight, but unfortunately we are on the horns of a dilemma.

On one hand, if the attack is not severe enough to force Assad from power, then where is the deterrence? If he is prepared to order (or at least tolerate) the gassing of thousands of citizens of his own country, why would the prospect of losing some soldiers and military facilities deter him or others like him? Even if it entirely eliminated his chemical-weapons capacity, he would still be in power, would have gotten the benefit of using them, and would have shown both that he can take a punch from the U.S. and that he is tough enough to do anything to win. Even after the fact and in full knowledge of such a U.S. attack, he would likely view using the weapons as having a positive net outcome. 

But on the other hand, forcing Assad from power represents a far larger and more uncertain undertaking than has been publicly discussed. 

Is The US Going To War With Syria Over A Natural Gas Pipeline?

Fight is all about control of the energy flow in Middle East

by Michael Snyder

 Could it be because Qatar is the largest exporter of liquid natural gas in the world and Assad won't let them build a natural gas pipeline through Syria?  Of course.  Qatar wants to install a puppet regime in Syria that will allow them to build a pipeline which will enable them to sell lots and lots of natural gas to Europe.

Well, it turns out that Saudi Arabia intends to install its own puppet government in Syria which will allow the Saudis to control the flow of energy through the region.

On the other side, Russia very much prefers the Assad regime for a whole bunch of reasons.  One of those reasons is that Assad is helping to block the flow of natural gas out of the Persian Gulf into Europe, thus ensuring higher profits for Gazprom. 

Now the United States is getting directly involved in the conflict.  If the U.S. is successful in getting rid of the Assad regime, it will be good for either the Saudis or Qatar (and possibly for both), and it will be really bad for Russia.  This is a strategic geopolitical conflict about natural resources, religion and money, and it really has nothing to do with chemical weapons at all.

It has been common knowledge that Qatar has desperately wanted to construct a natural gas pipeline that will enable it to get natural gas to Europe for a very long time.  The following is an excerpt from an article from 2009...

Qatar has proposed a gas pipeline from the Gulf to Turkey in a sign the emirate is considering a further expansion of exports from the world's biggest gasfield after it finishes an ambitious programme to more than double its capacity to produce liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Syria’s War Redraws America’s Political Map

Conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats join forces on Syria

By PAUL GOTTFRIED

The current debate about whether the president should take military action against the Syrian regime after Assad’s alleged use of chemical warfare against his people has taken a noteworthy turn. Those who oppose military intervention entirely or insist on making it contingent on congressional approval do not break down into the usual partisan categories. Broadly speaking, those who oppose immediate presidential intervention, or intervention generally, are a growing combination of conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. Standing with them is now more than half of the American public.

Among the prominent opponents of intervention are Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee, all outspoken small-government conservatives and U.S. Senators who are concerned about constitutional restraints on presidential powers. These figures are making common cause with people on the left, who insist that the UN, not the U.S. government, should handle the Syrian crisis. For leftist critics, our country has domestic concerns that are more pressing than meddling in another country’s civil war. Significantly, opponents of intervention, right and left, see no “American interest” at stake in Syria.

Those on the other side, led by Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, Congressman Peter King of New York, and the Rupert Murdoch media empire, believe that Obama should be bombing Syrian military installations without congressional approval and trying to overthrow and replace the Assad regime. Those who favor intervention typically endorse a far-reaching involvement in Syria that goes well beyond destroying chemical weapons facilities. From their point of view, the Obama administration has compromised American credibility by not taking decisive action to remove the Syrian government. It has also dishonored the “democratic values” that the U.S. should strive to bring to other nations. In a ringing statement of this creed, Brookings Institute fellow and a leading neoconservative theorist Robert Kagan delivered a speech last week, affirming the need for a global American presence aimed at nurturing democratic institutions worldwide. Kagan, who was a major rhetorical influence on the foreign policy of George W. Bush, views the Obama administration as retreating into an isolationist posture that betrays what the U.S. has stood for internationally for the last hundred years.