Trying To Stay Sane In An Insane World - Part 1

The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself

 

by Jim Quinn

“I mean—hell, I been surprised how sane you guys all are. As near as I can tell you’re not any crazier than the average asshole on the street.” – R.P. McMurphy – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“Years ago, it meant something to be crazy. Now everyone’s crazy.” – Charles Manson 

“In America, the criminally insane rule and the rest of us, or the vast majority of the rest of us, either do not care, do not know, or are distracted and properly brainwashed into acquiescence.”– Kurt Nimmo

I have to admit to being baffled by the aptitude of the Wall Street and K Street financial elite to keep their Ponzi scheme growing. I consider myself to be a rational, sane human being who understands math and bases his assessments upon facts and a sensible appraisal of the relevant information obtained from trustworthy sources. Of course, finding trustworthy sources is difficult when you live in a corrupt, crony-capitalist, fascist state, controlled by banking, corporate and military interests who retain absolute control over the mainstream media and governmental propaganda agencies. Those seeking truth must pursue it through the alternative media and seeking out unbiased critical thinkers who relentlessly abide by what the facts expose. This is no time for wishful thinking, delusions and fantasies. In the end, the facts are all that matter. As Heinlein noted decades ago, the future is uncertain so facts are essential in navigating a course that doesn’t lead you to ruin upon the shoals of ignorance.

“What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the un-guessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!” ? - Robert A. Heinlein

Facts are treasonous and dangerous in an empire of lies, fraud and propaganda. It is maddening to watch the country spiral downward, driven to ruin by a psychotic predator class, while the plebs choose to remain willfully ignorant of reality and distracted by their lust for cheap Chinese crap and addicted to the cult of techno-narcissism. We are a country running on heaping doses of cognitive dissonance and normalcy bias, an irrational belief in our national exceptionalism, an absurd trust in the same banking class that destroyed the finances of the country, and a delusionary belief that with just another trillion dollars of debt we’ll be back on the exponential growth track. The American empire has been built on a foundation of cheap easily accessible oil, cheap easily accessible credit, the most powerful military machine in human history, and the purposeful transformation of citizens into consumers through the use of relentless media propaganda and a persistent decades long dumbing down of the masses through the government education system.

This national insanity is not a new phenomenon. Friedrich Nietzsche observed the same spectacle in the 19^th century.

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

The “solutions” imposed by the supposed brightest financial Ivy League educated minds and corrupt bought off political class upon people of the United States since the Wall Street created 2008 worldwide financial collapse are insane and designed to only further enrich the crony capitalists and their banker brethren. The maniacs are ruling the asylum. John Lennon saw the writing on the wall forty five years ago.

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives…. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends … and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.” – John Lennon, Interview BBC-TV (June 22, 1968)

The world is most certainly ruled by a small group of extremely wealthy evil men who desire ever more treasure, supremacy and control, but the vast majority of Americans have stood idly by mesmerized by their iGadgets and believing buying shit they don’t need with money they don’t have is the path to happiness and prosperity, while their wealth, liberty and self-respect were stolen by the financial elite. Our idiot culture, that celebrates reality TV morons, low IQ millionaires playing children’s sports, ego-maniacal Hollywood hacks, self-promoting Wall Street financiers, and self-serving corrupt ideologue politicians, has been degenerating for decades.

“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.” - Carl Bernstein -1992

The examples of our national insanity are almost too vast to document, but any critical assessment of what we've done over the last one hundred years reveals the idiocy that has engulfed our collapsing empire.

As Entrepreneurs Keep Reminding Us, They Lied To Us In Econ. 101

A combination of passion and perseverance

By John Chisholm

Can theoretical, scientific study of complex systems inform the hardscrabble world of start-ups?

Yes.

To see how, meet the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). [1]  Founded 30 years ago in Santa Fe, NM by Nobel laureates in physics and economics, SFI is the worldwide epicenter of complexity science.  SFI first recognized that the environment, the human brain, the economy, and other complex systems have much in common:

·                     Order in them emerges not from top-down command and control but bottom-up from the interactions of large numbers of interconnected elements.  These elements may be individual species creating sustainable ecosystems; neurons creating thought patterns; or buyers and sellers creating business cycles and wage and price levels.

·                      Those interconnected elements also form feedback loops that can produce unpredictable and often extreme results (e.g., peacocks’ tails, fads, best-sellers, cancer).

·                     Diversity tends to grow with the number of combinations of elements, that is, exponentially with the number of elements (e.g., the Cambrian explosion and the Industrial Revolution).  Diversity tends to enhance robustness (e.g., genetically similar crops are more vulnerable to parasites; identical PC operating systems, to viruses).

·                     Unintended consequences arise if you try to control such systems top down (e.g., drug wars foster organized crime; draining of wetlands cause flash floods and droughts; rent control reduces the quantity and quality of housing and thus may drive up rents).

·                     The systems are dynamic and never at equilibrium.

So what do complex systems and SFI tell us about entrepreneurship?

Who and What Would the Syria War Be For?

The real question

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

Last week, hell came to the tiny Christian village of Maaloula where they still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

“Rebels of the Free Syrian Army launched an assault aided by a suicide bomber from Jabhat al-Nusra,” the al-Qaida-linked Islamic terrorist group, writes the Washington Post.

The AP picked up the story:

One resident said bearded rebels shouting “God is great!” attacked Christian homes and churches. “They shot and killed people. … I saw three bodies lying in the middle of a street.”

Maaloula is now a “ghost town.” Christians left behind were told, “Either you convert to Islam or you will be beheaded.”

“Where is President Obama?” wailed a refugee. And, indeed, where is Obama?

He is out lobbying Congress for authority to attack the Syrian army that defended Maaloula as John McCain beats the drums for a Senate resolution to have the U.S. military “change the momentum” of the war to the rebels who terrorized the convent nuns of Maaloula.

If we strike Syria and break its army, what happens to 2 million Syrian Christians? Does anyone care?

Do the Saudis who have signed on to Obama’s war—but decline to fight—care? Conversion to Christianity is a capital offense in Riyadh.

Do the Turks, who look the other way as jihadist killers cross their frontier to set up al-Qaeda sanctuaries in northern Syria, care?

Do the Israelis, who have instructed AIPAC to get Congress back in line behind a war Americans do not want to fight, care about those 100,000 dead Syrians and 400 gassed children?

Here is Alon Pinkas, Israel’s former general consul in New York, giving Israel’s view of the Syrian bloodletting: “Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death. That’s the strategic thinking here.”

According to two polls reported this weekend by the Jerusalem Post, Israelis by 7-1 do not want Israel to go to war with Syria. But two-thirds of Israelis favor the United States going to war with Syria.

Peggy Noonan writes that the debate on war on Syria “looks like a fight between the country and Washington.”

She nails it. The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Weekly Standard are all up for air strikes. In the think tanks of D.C., the corridor talk is all about “On to Teheran!”

But what of the soldiers who will fight the neocons’ war? Major General Robert Scales speaks for our next generation of wounded warriors.

Our fighting men, Scales writes, “are tired of wannabe soldiers who remain enamored of bloodless machine warfare. … Today’s soldiers know war and resent civilian policymakers who want the military to fight a war that neither they nor their loved ones will experience firsthand.”

Enthusiasm for war is likely higher at Cafe Milano in Georgetown than in the mess hall at Camp LeJeune.

Why is opposition to the war surging? Because the case for war is crumbling.

U.S. credibility is on the line, we are warned.

If we do not attack Syria to punish a violation of Obama’s “red line,” no one will believe us again. Our allies will no longer have confidence that America will come over and fight their next war for them.

Yet George Bush blustered in his “axis-of-evil” State of the Union that “the world’s worst dictators” would not be allowed to get “the world’s worst weapons.”

And Kim Jong Il went out and tested an atom bomb and built an arsenal of nuclear weapons. And what did The Decider do? Nothing.

Did our alliances collapse because “W’s” bluff was called?

Should Congress really authorize a war on Syria because Hillary Clinton and Obama said “Assad must go!” and Obama said his “red line” has been crossed?

Or should Congress used this vote as a teaching tool for Baby Boomer Bismarcks by declaring:

“We are not taking our country to war because you blundered in issuing ultimata you had no authority to issue. Rather than go to war, you should admit your mistake, as real leaders do, and take responsibility.”

How many Syrians should we kill to restore the credibility of Barack Obama? How many Syrians should we kill to impress upon Iran how resolute we are? How many Syrians should we kill to reassure nervous allies that Uncle Sam will forever come fight their wars for them?

In America, before we put a man to death, we prove him guilty of murder “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Should we not set as high a standard of proof before we kill a thousand Syrians and plunge the United States into another war?

Where is the evidence Assad ordered a gas attack? German intelligence says it intercepted orders from Assad not to use gas. Congressmen coming out of secret briefings say the case is inconclusive.

The American people do not want war on Syria, and such a war makes no sense. Who is trying to stampede Congress into war on Syria, and then on Iran—and why? Therein lies the real question. 

The Virus of Imperalism (Part II)

Salvation through Big Government

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

After the American “Civil War,” the Republican Party, which for the succeeding half century would enjoy monopolistic political power matched only by the Bolsheviks in Russia, set about to deify Abraham Lincoln. During his own lifetime Lincoln was the most hated and reviled of all American presidents in history, as historian Larry Tagg has shown in his book, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: America’s Most Reviled President. Several decades of propaganda by the Republican Party and its associated lapdog media changed all of that. The deification of Lincoln led to the deification of the presidency itself, and eventually to the entire federal government.

The renowned novelist Robert Penn Warren (author of All the King’s Men) wrote in The Legacy of the Civil War that Official State Propaganda asserted that the Civil War left America with “A Treasury of Virtue” so powerful that it was henceforth assumed that anything the U.S. government did from then on was virtuous by virtue of the fact that it was the U.S. government that was doing it. All any American had to do to remind the world of “our” virtue was simply to recite a few lines from one of Lincoln’s political speeches about “the last best hope of earth,” or our alleged desire to “make all men free.”

The Official State Propaganda line was supplemented by the political clout of the “Progressives” of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, many of whom were postmillennial pietists. As Murray Rothbard wrote in his essay, “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals,” many of these influential writers, journalists, politicians, preachers, scientists, and political activists “possessed an intense messianic belief in national and world salvation through Big Government” (emphasis added).

Woodrow Wilson was a Progressive pietist of the most extreme sort. After he delivered his “war message” on April 2, 1917, wrote Rothbard, he received a letter of congratulations from his son-in-law “and fellow . . . pietist and progressive, Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo.” “You have done a great thing nobly!” wrote McAdoo. “I firmly believe that it is God’s will that America should do this transcendent service for humanity throughout the world and that you are His chosen instrument.”

American foreign policy has not changed one iota to this day. It is still based on the premise that American presidents still possess that “treasury of virtue” handed down to them by “Father Abraham” himself; and that they are God’s chosen people to rule the world and remake it in their image. Or else.

The Virus of Imperialism (Part 1)

Endless Wars for Endless Peace

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

In his famous 1898 essay, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain,” the great Yale University libertarian scholar William Graham Sumner argued that America had crossed the Rubicon, so to speak, and had become an imperialistic empire. It had become the Spanish empire. But Sumner was only half right. The conquest of Cubawas an imperialistic war, but so were all other American military adventures since the American Revolution. Apparently, even a man as brilliant and astute as Sumner was somewhat befogged by the endless and pervasive drumbeat of war propaganda.

“War is the health of the state,” Randolph Bourne explained in his famous essay of that title. But to the average citizen war means heavy taxation, conscription, censorship, dictatorship, and death. War enriches the state like nothing else can, while impoverishing, enslaving, and ending the lives of many of its citizens. Hence lies, myths, superstitions, and propaganda have always been the essential ingredient of the warfare state. Without them, the public would never acquiesce in the never-ending wars of conquest and imperialism that have long characterized the American state.

The War of 1812

Barely twenty years after the U.S. Constitution was ratified there arose quite a few American politicians who believed it was their “manifest destiny” to invade and conquer Canada. One of the congressional leaders of the early nineteenth-century war party, Henry Clay, celebrated the declaration of war against Great Britain on June 4, 1812, by declaring that “Every patriot bosom must throb with anxious solicitude for the result. Every patriot arm will assist in making that result conducive to the glory of our beloved country” (David and Jeane Heidler, Henry Clay: The Essential American, p. 98).

Among the “official reasons” for the invasion of Canada in 1812 were the alleged “impressment” of American sailors by the British government, but that had been going on for decades, as Justin Raimondo has pointed out. The tall tale was also broadcast that the “evil” British were encouraging Indians to attack American settlers. The real reason for the War of 1812, however, was an impulse to grow the state with an imperialistic war of conquest. The result of the war was a disaster — the British burned down the White House, the Library of Congress, and much of Washington, D.C. Americans were saddled with a huge war debt that was used as an excuse to resurrect the corrupt and economically destabilizing Bank of the United States, a precursor of the Fed.

The Mexican-American War

When James K. Polk became president in 1845 he announced to his cabinet that one of his chief objectives was to acquire California, which was then a part of Mexico. As he wrote in his diary, “I stated to the cabinet that up to this time as they knew, we had herd of no open act of aggression by the Mexican army, but that the danger was imminent that such acts would be committed. I said that in my opinion we had ample cause of war.”

A fear of Free and Frank Discussion

Branding one's political opponents as 'phobic' is a sly and illiberal tactic

By FRANK FUREDI

Poor Stephen Fry. Over the years he has been cavalier about condemning certain people as homophobic. As a consummate practitioner of the art of emotional correctness, he knows that the charge of phobia – whether homophobia, Islamophobia, Judaeophobia, xenophobia and even Europhobia (hatred of the EU) – rings all the right bells.

Yet now he finds himself on the receiving end of the phobia slur - and he isn’t happy about it. He’s been accused of being nothing less than an ‘Islamophobe’, after he defended the anti-religious crusader Richard Dawkins’ stupid remarks on Twitter regarding Islam’s undistinguished historical role.

‘Am I an Islamophobe?’, asked Fry in his cringing defence of the right to criticise what he called ‘Islamofascism’. Depicting himself as a lonely liberal valiantly fighting for unpopular causes, he lamented that the ‘squeezed liberal finds himself in the position that cannot criticise Islamofascism because it’s somehow “racist”’.

Unfortunately, Fry is very selective indeed in his defence of the right to criticise beliefs and practices that one abhors. For this squeezed liberal has no inhibitions about denouncing critics of gay marriage as homophobes. Just as some dogmatic commentators insist on equating the questioning of Islam with Islamophobia, so many defenders of the gay-marriage consensus cannot imagine that their opponents might just have some genuine intellectual or moral criticisms of gay marriage.

Allegations and counter-allegations of ‘phobia!’ point to a disturbing development in the public life of Western societies. The ascendancy of the metaphor of phobia is inversely proportional to the depoliticisation of certain views and outlooks. For example, the displacement of the term anti-Semitism by Judaeophobia represents the supplanting of a political category (hatred of Jews) with a psychological one (irrational fear of Jewish stuff). Similarly, through the narrative of Islamophobia, prejudice against Muslim people is depoliticised and turned into a medical problem. 

As is the case with all medical diagnoses, accusing someone of being phobic is really to make a statement about that person’s mental and moral condition. So the diagnosis of homophobia or Islamophobia is not so much a comment on the content of what has been said, as it is a verdict about the psychological deficits of the guilty, phobia-suffering party. When Fry protested his innocence of the charge of Islamophobia, he was in effect rejecting its implied psychological slur.

The rise of the narrative of phobia reflects the increasing influence of the therapeutic culture, which tends to interpret conflict and troublesome behaviour through the medium of psychology. In our therapeutic era, emotional dysfunctions are frequently depicted as the cause of social problems. Unprocessed or unmanaged emotions are said to be the source of many of the ills that afflict society. Even wars between nations are now attributed to some emotional or psychological defect on the part of a group or leader. The early twentieth-century term xenophobia is no longer simply a descriptive term; rather, it is a therapeutic diagnosis.

The irrational fears associated with all these so-called phobias are said to be just a few of the many emotional disorders that dominate life today. The diagnosis of phobia is a central part of a therapeutic worldview which looks upon stress, rage, trauma, low self-esteem and addiction as dominant features of the human experience.

The therapeutic worldview is not just about medicalising individuals and our behaviour. It also tries to provide a system of meaning through which human experience might be interpreted and understood. In the twenty-first century, meaning is increasingly sought in the realm and idiom of emotions. Through the policing of emotions, some attitudes are condemned as negative and others held up as positive. So hate is a negative and happiness a positive emotion. The range of emotions which fuel a ‘phobia’ are all diagnosed as negative, which is why this sentiment can be so readily pathologised.

Today’s meshing together of moral and medical categories makes it very difficult to have a mature and tolerant exchange of opinions. The labelling of someone’s speech, attitudes or behaviour as a phobia shuts down discussion. It is not possible to have a genuine, substantive debate or disagreement with someone who is diagnosed as phobic - after all, there is little point in taking the arguments of irrational and psychologically disturbed individuals seriously. Apparently, such people don’t have rational political views; they are simply possessed of an irrational mental condition.

So the narrative of phobia absolves people of the tough task of defending their views through debate, by inviting them to medicalise their opponents and in the process close down discussion. The medicalisation of political opponents represents a kind of existential annihilation of those we disagree with. Diagnosed as irrational or ill, they can be safely ignored; their opinions can be treated as symptoms of a mental disorder, which we don’t have to take seriously.

The authoritarian implications of this resorting to psychological demonisation are clear if we think back to Stalin’s Russia. There, dissidents were sometimes incarcerated in mental-health institutions. Today in the West, phobic individuals are not incarcerated, of course. But they do face cultural and institutional stigmatisation. How long before ‘phobics’ are encouraged to participate in anger-management classes or pressurised to have their awareness raised?

The dehumanising premise behind the narrative of phobia, the systematic refusal to take seriously the mental capacities of one’s opponents, is the apotheosis of closed-mindedness. When people refuse to submit their arguments to full public scrutiny, on the basis that anyone who tries to knock them down is a ‘hater’ or ‘phobic’, then issues are rarely clarified and truth remains obscured. What we end up with is debatephobia.

No, Stephen Fry and his mate Richard Dawkins do not suffer from Islamophobia. They are, to use an old-fashioned political expression, just utterly wrong.

Australia's Rejection Of Kevin Rudd May Foretell Political Change In The U.S.

The English speaking peoples tend to move in a sort of partial political sync with one another

By Jerry Bowyer

With the victory of the Tony Abbott led conservatives in Australia, we can see that the Anglosphere is now post progressive. The English speaking nations of the world: England, New Zealand, Canada and now Australia are governed by conservatives. America stands apart from them as the sole remaining major leftist-governed power in the Anglo world.

If you’d like to throw India into the mix too, you find Manmohan Singh, who is pushing to deregulate foreign investment markets and has just appointed a monetary hawk, Raghuram Rajan, as the new head of the Reserve Bank of India. Canada entirely skipped the recent wave of progressivism which swept the Anglosphere, and under PM Stephen Harper has surpassed the United States in economic freedom. Our northern neighbor is now listed by both the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom and the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World as the most economically free nation in North America. Harper has been particularly diligent in cutting corporate taxes while the U.S. now has the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world.

England rejected the hard-core labourite policies of Gordon Brown, putting the Tory David Cameron in power. New Zealand has a center right government in power as well. The English speaking peoples (to borrow Winston’s Churchill’s evocative phrase) tend to move in a sort of partial political sync with one another. Thatcher paved the way for Reagan, preceding him, anticipating him and inspiring him. Then we see the near simultaneous rise of Blair and Clinton, then the later hawkish Blair corresponds with Bush. Brown and Obama moved both their countries hard left in step with one another. And as of last year, England moved right under Cameron. In Australia, John Howard allied with and paralleled with his friend Bush, Russ/Gilliard tracked with Obama.

And in what could herald yet another political shift, this time back to the right, Australia just handed a decisive victory to the Liberal National Party (the Australian conservative party), and a decisive defeat to the incumbent Labour Party under Kevin Rudd. Why?

Letters and secret files reveal the tormented life of Lina Prokofiev

New book on Soviet composer's family will show how his wife was abandoned, tortured by Stalin's police and sent to the gulag

Lina Prokofiev in Moscow in 1936 with her sons Oleg, centre, and Svyatoslav. 

By Dalya Alberge

She endured an abusive husband who likened her to "an infected tooth", and torture by Stalin's secret police, who stuck needles in her, threatened her children and drove her to the brink of madness. The tragic life of the wife of Sergei Prokofiev, one of the 20th century's greatest composers, is now revealed in hundreds of previously unpublished letters, as well as secret Soviet files.

The cruelty suffered by Lina Prokofiev at home paled against her later torture, but she never stopped loving her husband – even when he abandoned her for another woman – and she never spoke publicly of her suffering during eight years in a Siberian prison camp.

Prokofiev (1891-1953) is the composer of masterpieces such as the opera War and Peace, the ballet Romeo and Juliet and the children's fable, Peter and the Wolf. But when Simon Morrison, a British-born music professor at Princeton University and president of the Prokofiev Foundation, was given access to the unpublished documents by Prokofiev's family for a new book, he was shocked by their contents. They revealed "a real indictment of his personality", he told theObserver. "I have a moral question. Prokofiev's music is some of the most emotional of the 20th century, but he was a person of very little feeling. As a biographer, you have responsibilities. As a listener, I don't think I can listen to the music the same way again. It is a harrowing story." Letters from Lina to her children from the gulag are equally poignant, he added.

The 600 letters – whose contents are to be published on 21 March by Harvill Secker in The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev – were made available to Morrison by Prokofiev's older son, Svyatoslav, whose "dying wish was for his mother's story to be told in unvarnished guise".

An America In Decline Literally Becomes The 'New' Great Britain

America’s historic emphasis on property rights, sound money and limited government fostered a corporate culture of innovation and growth

By Jerry Bowyer

I’ve argued this point before and often investors intuitively get the point better than money managers. For example, the other day I was talking to my cardiologist, and after the examination we were chatting in the hallway and he asked me for a stock tip. I don’t give stock tips, but I did explain what my research had found: that one of the most important things to look at when one is compiling a portfolio is the country in which a company is domiciled.

Almost all of the discussion on TV and the internet is about which American stock to buy and once in a while, about whether to buy some American bonds. What is ignored is the extremely important question of the environment, does the home country honor wealth creation or not. “…and right now our country does not,” he said finishing my sentence for me. He got it – instantly – partly because he’s smart, but partly because he doesn’t have his mind cluttered with the normal detritus of modern financial-speak.

On the other hand, I hear a lot of objections to the idea of looking at country characteristics from money managers and financial advisors (though thankfully, not from any that I’m working with right now), and the objection which I hear most often is something like this:

“Most companies have operations all over the world. What is an ‘American Company’ today? Apple and Microsoft may be based here in the U.S. but the majority of their operations are in other countries.”

In other words, since we have a global economy, the country of domicile doesn’t matter. The problems with this point of view are numerous. First, it confuses revenues with profits. As a shareholder I don’t own a fractional share of revenues, I own a fractional share of profits. Companies sell goods and services at a price, and all those sales together go into an aggregate number called revenues. Various costs are subtracted from the revenues to calculate various progressively smaller measures of profit and loss: gross income, net income, EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), taxable income, etc. Profits are much more important than revenues, and the regulations under which a company must operate can severely impair profits.

Some legal environments leave companies with a great deal more room for agility than others. Some countries, on the other hand, mandate ‘stakeholder capitalism’ which is really not capitalism at all, but a form of guided economy, in which boards of directors are force-fed members whom the shareholders would never have chosen, who represent various special interest groups such as labor or greens. Boards are prevented from setting executive compensation at levels which will promote the greatest profitability and are instead hamstrung in their salary-setting by government edict or convoluted voting processes. Regulations discourage many restructuring and updating actions that might be taken by good management. Anti-takeover laws forbid the dreaded ‘hostile takeover,’ imposed on management by outside investors who purchase controlling shares in order to make companies more lean and profitable. In general, some countries have environments which are conducive to innovation and some do not.

Of the top 500 Multinational Companies as ranked by Fortune Magazine, 133 are headquartered in the United States.

How about China? China houses 61 of the top 500. It housed only 16 of them in 2005. We are 4% of global population with a civilization which started only 300 years ago. They are 19% of global population with a civilization which started 3000 years ago, and yet we have 26% of multination companies and they have only 16%.

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.