Keep the scourge of scientism out of schools

Why evidence-based teaching methods are a bad idea

By Frank Furedi

At a time when society finds it hard to provide compelling answers to the problems that people face, the realm of science is being plundered in search of moral authority. The exhaustion of the old taken-for-granted ideals, values and ideologies has led to a search for new ways for validating views and opinions. Instead of trying to give meaning to the problems we face through reflection and debate, governments now embrace science as the unique source of truth.

This is giving rise to ‘policy-led science’ - that is, science that has a tendency to mould itself around the needs of policymakers. This strengthens the dogma of scientism, which aims to spread scientific discourse into our personal, cultural and social experiences, where actually other modes of non-scientific reflection are really needed. This is why, today, we have everything from the ‘science of parenting’ to the ‘science of happiness’ and the ‘science of the spiritual life’.

Scientism is now used to legitimate various policies and claims made by all sorts of institutions. Consequently, evidence, or rather evidence-based policy, which enjoys the authority of science, dominates the modern political landscape. Today, policies are judged not on the grounds of whether they are good or bad, but on the question of whether they are evidence-based.

Scientific evidence is, of course, a useful resource for decision-makers. But not every research finding adds up to ‘evidence’ that can directly be used to forge a new policy. Evidence needs to be tested, interpreted and given meaning before it can become a reliable source of action. The use of scientific evidence for political ends is particularly troublesome in the sphere of social policy, where the problems facing people are context-specific and mediated through various different influences and factors. That is why, historically, so-called evidence-based policy has proven to be no more or no less effective than policies driven by a more explicitly political agenda.

Despite the undistinguished record of ‘evidence’-based policy, governments desperate to legitimise their authority have embraced it with unprecedented enthusiasm in recent years. An area where this is most apparent is education. The growth of scientism in education is illustrated by recent calls to introduce randomised control trials (RCTs) into schooling. These calls, outlined by the science writer Ben Goldacre in a paper called Building Evidence into Education, are supported by the UK’s Department of Education.

Youth In Revolt: The Demographics Behind Middle Eastern Uprisings

If the peaceful world of markets as a road to the future is cut off, then the violent world of revolution becomes the answer by default

By Jerry Bowyer

Much has been written about the various uprisings which have been gaining strength and momentum since 2008. Usually it takes the tack of focusing on the abuses of the particular regime in question, because the press tends to see things through the eyes of the official underdog in any story based around conflict. Supply side economists like me have pointed to the ways in which monetary debasement by the United States helped set off a wave of food price spikes and launched an Inflation Intifada. My friend David Goldman has documented the economic problems from a supply side perspective in greater depth here in the Asia Times.

But very little has appeared in the public discussion about the demographic component of this wave of destabilization. That’s a shame because although there are real economic risks in a country which gets out of balance and skews too old, there are also severe consequences to a country which gets out of balance in the opposite direction, at least when that occurs in conjunction with other risk factors. Skew too young and you get a revolution: an analysis of all the countries which have gone through a revolution, coup attempt or civil war in the recent ‘Arab Spring’ shows that every single one of them had a median age of 24 or younger. The story of political revolutions is more often than not the story of starting with a nation which has low life expectancy and high birth rates (hence a young median age) and adding high youth unemployment, one or another radical ideology and a food price spike.

Photo source: census.gov

Photo Source: census.gov

Skew too old and you get a regime of ‘get off my lawn’: perfectly groomed, no change, frozen in time, slow death. A Japan which dreams only of its former glories; thinks any possible future lies with robots; is obsessed with horror movies about the vengeful ghosts of discarded children, and sells more adult diapers per year than it does baby diapers paints a sad but accurate picture of the future of that nation. Interestingly, the Nordic types seem more cinematically captivated by lurid crime films about murdered children who are avenged by girls with dragon tattoos, than they are by waterlogged girl ghosts.

Photo Source : www.census.gov

The traditional remedies prescribed by global elite opinion don’t seem to help much. For example, higher education is not a reliable social stabilizer. The old cliché about universities as schools of revolution seems to match the history better than the newer cliché about how sending them to college keeps them off the streets. In terms of the Arab Spring, Egypt, for example, had perhaps the highest proportion of college grads in the Muslim middle east.

But if a country has a large youth co-hort and a high college matriculation rate and at the same time has high unemployment, then higher education seems to function as an unrest accelerant. It raises expectations, but fails to deliver on a higher standard of living. It exposes young people to revolutionary ideologies, and instills attitudes of condescension and even contempt for the more cautious politics of their elders. And it connects people with these ideas and attitudes and frustrations with other people who share them.  This is a recipe for violence and bloodshed. All of this is rendered even more heartbreaking when one realizes that the pattern is that young people are typically the vanguard of the revolution, not its eventual rulers. Self-sacrificing idealists start revolutions, but self-seeking realists consolidate them.  And if you don’t believe me, than just ask the Egyptian military.

As my friend Reuven Brenner has taught me, capital markets and revolutions are not opposites. They are alternatives, alternative answers to the question which all young people ask, “How can I create the future that I want?” If the peaceful world of markets as a road to the future is cut off, as it has been for decades in the countries under question, then the violent world of revolution becomes the answer by default.

What does a 'two-state solution' mean?

For the time being, these words lack any meaning in today's Middle East

By Reuven Brenner 

In light of what is going on the Middle East, and the efforts of US Secretary of State John Kerry to restart negotiations to reach a ''two-state'' solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, it is worth briefly summarizing solutions I write about 30 years ago.

The efforts of the United States and Europe to bring about a "two-state" solution in the Middle East are incomprehensible.

A stable "state" must have one army - in Israel, that was Ben-Gurion's, the country's first prime minister - correct - and painfully delivered message when firing on Altalena in June 1948. He ordered the newly created Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to fire on the ship by that name, when fractions of the Irgun, a para-military organization, were unwilling to put down the arms and be absorbed into the IDF. Following that painful episode in Israel's history - the idea of Jews shooting Jews few years after 6 million perished still shocks - the fractions of the Irgun put down the arms. The new state's monopoly on force has not been challenged since.

Somehow this lesson has not sunk in elsewhere, the spread of failing states around the world notwithstanding: and they began failing when, rationalized one way or another, states started to tolerate military groups within their borders, in the Middle East in particular. At one time it was Jordan for a while (until the king's army pushed out Fattah), Lebanon, and now Syria - to name just two.

How does then the current push toward a two state-solution (for Israel and Palestinians) in the Middle East look today through this prism? The Palestinians have many armies, and no leader in sight is willing and be able to do what Ben-Gurion did.

It is not clear with whom to then even negotiate or about what, since nothing would be enforceable. What type of "state" is anyone talking about? What can one negotiate about, when one side cannot enforce anything? It is not even clear whether there is such a thing as a "Palestinian tribe": There appear four rather distinct ones, with only one represented in the negotiation.

Some 60% of Jordan's population is Palestinian, and they may represent one group. The present "two-state" discussion does not even refer to them. Then there are the Palestinians living in the West Bank, who have representation in the present negotiations.

The third group includes the about 1,400,000 Arabs within Israel's 1967 borders - who prefer to be living within a prosperous, stable Israel; this is what one can infer from the fact that they have been "voting with their feet" and have stayed - though they were free to migrate, as many discontented people throughout history have done. After all, that is what created the US, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Latin American countries - the list is long).

Drunks, fools and the United States of America

The Constitution, the Sour Spot, and the Great Syria Train Wreck

by WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

There’s a tough issue that humanitarian interventionists need to take into account when it comes to Syria. There is really no good way to read the Constitution that gives the president an unlimited unilateral power to order US forces into combat for humanitarian missions, and it is even harder to find justification for a unilateral power to order retaliatory strikes.

As commander in chief the president has a widely recognized and long established power to take emergency action to deal with military and security threats. And the president also has the power to deploy the US military on non-combat operations for humanitarian purposes—for example, when the US Navy responded to the Indian Ocean tsunami. But acts of war against an enemy that does not directly threaten the United States of America or its treaty allies must pass a tougher test.

If the president really can launch discretionary military attacks on humanitarian grounds around the world at will, we have an elected dictatorship, not a system of limited powers. Is the President of the United States to be the judge, jury and enforcer of international law even when nothing in either US or international law gives him these powers?

As a practical matter, one can see circumstances (a fast moving wave of genocidal violence while Congress is out of session, for example) in which a president could responsibly substitute consultation with Congressional leaders for a full and formal vote. But what President Obama wants in Syria is a retaliatory strike. He is not intervening rapidly to stop a wave of chemical attacks. He is acting at leisure, with reviews of evidence, international consultation, reports from observers. It seems to make little difference whether he acts on it today or tomorrow or next week. There is, evidently, no practical reason for failing to consult Congress; the President himself has chosen to postpone any military action until Congress acts on the matter. In such a case it seems very hard to create a sound constitutional argument justifying presidential action if Congress rejects his proposal.

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]