The Perils of Parasitism

Fake government "shutdown" has defense contractors fuming

by Justin Raimondo

The government "shutdown" isn’t really a shutdown: the National Security Agency (NSA) is still functioning at full throttle, spying on Americans and violating the Constitution with impunity. And I doubt those aid packages to the Syrian rebels are being delayed by even a minute: after all, a heart-eating cannibal can’t live on human blood alone. The panda cam may be down, but the parasite class, headquartered in Washington, D.C., is still sucking at the teat of the federal Leviathan, as this knee-slapper of a Washington Post article – an interview with a military contractor – makes all too clear:

"Much of the impact of the shutdown is felt by the 800,000 federal workers who are simply furloughed without pay. But the ripple effects spread far and wide, to all the workers employed indirectly on government contracts. One of them, a software engineer with a large D.C.-area defense contractor who asked to remain anonymous, described Monday night what it’s been like to work under the threat of your sole client suddenly going dark."

The reporter, one Lydia DePillis, asks: "So what’s the atmosphere in the office?" Mr. Anonymous Parasite shrugs his shoulders, adjusts his fat ass so as to fit more comfortably in his cushioned $1000 office chair, and avers:

"Day to day, you don’t notice it in the work we do. I go in tomorrow, and I know I have a bunch of bugs to fix."

Yes, that spying-on-Americans software does indeed have a few bugs, but, hey, who would’ve ever thought that Snowden guy would give up his idyllic life in Hawaii for the cold of the Russian winter? Aside from that, however:

"There is that nagging sensation of, like, should I be looking for a new job soon? What’s going on?"

Is the gravy train about to end? Fat chance of that, but still:

"There’s a lot of chatter in the office. We have employees that work on the bases themselves. So they’ll work on an Air Force or Navy base. They actually don’t go to work tomorrow. They all are being stuffed into our office. So we’ve got to move chairs and tables around, because they can’t go to their normal jobs."

The political class is now a huge, voracious parasite

Citizens Are The Soylent Green Of Today's Politics

By Monty Pelerin

Neither American political party is worth supporting. Each has interests inconsistent with those of the American public. The claimed political differences are mostly cosmetic, designed for marketing advantage. Both parties act in their self interest which does not coincide with that of the citizens or the well-being of the country.

Each party behaves like a self-serving criminal gang. The quaint concept of serving the public exists no longer. Routinely they exempt themselves  from the rules and laws they impose on the rest of the country. Their policies enrich the political class while the rest of the country becomes poorer.

Mark Twain described Congress as our ”distinctly native American criminal class.” Albert J. Nock went further, generalizing Twain’s somewhat parochial observation:

Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class

Lest the reader think these two individuals confused or biased, a more complete collection of quotes on government is available here: Do Only Dumb People Believe in Government?

How The Game Changed

As government grew in size and influence, the rewards associated with political office grew. Sacrifice and service were displaced with the opportunity for personal spoils. The motivation subtly changed from service to the accumulation of wealth. Mother Theresa quietly morphed into Gordon Gecko.

Today, politics is considered a lucrative career choice, not service to one’s country. The rise of the professional politician was never anticipated by the Founders of the nation. Yet, had the Constitution been strictly adhered to, the improper incentives that drove the change could never have occurred.

Euro Debt Crisis: Extend and Pretend Phase Begins

Greek Bailout Debt Swap Mooted

by Pater Tenebrarum

How can one continue to pretend that the government of a country that has been in technical default for 90 of the past 180 years and remains clearly bankrupt even after two major bailouts and two 'debt haircuts' in a row will somehow 'make it' and actually repay its debts one day?

The answer is: extend and pretend. As reported by Reuters, Greece, the EU's major leading indicator in terms of bailout policy, is proposing just that solution: 

“Greece is looking into swapping a big chunk of its bailout loans with a 50-year government bond as a way to achieve debt relief once it attains a primary budget surplus this year, an official close to the discussions told Reuters on Saturday.

Norway Breaks With Social Democracy

Like many other European systems, Norway has much to gain in bringing in more emphasis on individual responsibility and free markets in the traditional Social Democratic system

by Nima Sanandaji

Largely uncommented on in the US press, Europe’s long-standing social democratic tilt has changed. During recent years, almost all Western European nations have seen a dramatic fall in support for the traditional Social Democratic parties, which for so long have dominated the political landscapes. In response, the centre-left parties have morphed, moving towards greater emphasis on the benefits of free markets and individual responsibility. In several countries the former communist parties now claim that they fill the role of traditional Social Democrats. A new breed of modernized centre-left parties is likely to replace several centre‑right governments during coming years. The third consecutive loss for the German Social Democrats illustrates the continuing difficulties for Europe’s labor movements to gather the strong support that they previously almost took for granted.

Until recently oil-rich Norway has remained unique, as the only nation where Social Democrats have resisted change to highly generous welfare benefits. In 1999 the former Swedish social democratic minister of business, Björn Rosengren, famously called Norway “the last Soviet state” due to the lack of willingness to adopt market policies. But now even Norway is shifting with the recent election of a centre‑right government formed by Erna Solberg. Making the transition from a full-scale welfare state to a system which consistently rewards work more than public handouts will be a difficult one for Norway. Hopefully, the newly elected government will draw inspiration from the neighbor to the east. 

McDonaldising the student soul

In today’s McUniversities, ‘graduate attributes’ are being used to create McStudents with no individuality

By DENNIS HAYES

Students starting university this autumn might be excited about what they could become. They might want to be great thinkers, writers or scientists. But above all, they will want to be individuals. And this desire to be an individual, equipped with the knowledge and understanding needed to become critical and independent-minded, often means that students will dare to disagree and be different. 

Little wonder, then, that students can be challenging and difficult. This is not because they are encouraged by universities, under the banner of ‘student voice’, to express their feelings about things they know nothing about. No, students can be difficult and challenging because they have learned something about their academic subject and, on that basis, feel they can think independently, criticise and challenge. ‘Dare to be different’ might be a good slogan for any student. 

But such a slogan would now probably be banned if it appeared on a t-shirt in many universities in the UK. That’s because being an individual is now out, and being a McDonaldised product with fixed ‘graduate attributes’ (GAs) is now in. That is, in order to sell their graduate products to business, universities have drawn up lists of characteristics students must have acquired by the time they finish being processed.

George Ritzer coined the term ‘McDonaldisation’ as a neat way of describing how the process of rationalisation (an idea borrowed from sociologist Max Weber) was being applied to cultural and social institutions now subject to the four drivers of efficiency, calculability, predictability and control. Writing in 1993, Ritzer had a very depressing view of the McDonaldisation of the university:

‘The modern university has, in various ways, become a highly irrational place. Many students and faculty members are put off by its factory-like atmosphere. They may feel like automatons processed by the bureaucracy and computers or feel like cattle run through a meat-processing plant. In other words, education in such settings can be a dehumanising experience.’ 

Character Formation and the Origins of AA

The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day

by Lewis M. Andrews

It is a fact little appreciated that the presidents of America’s early universities were pioneers of what we would now call mental health care, and bear some credit for central features of today’s therapeutic institutions. These teachers, like today’s, felt an obligation to provide their students with guidance on how to overcome life’s inevitable stresses and setbacks.

But this was before the days of psychiatry and psychotherapy, which did not come into existence until the early twentieth century. Rather, the approach of these early university presidents was to integrate moral education into liberal education in the arts and sciences. Although the most highly acclaimed American colleges and universities today enjoy a reputation as secular institutions, it is often forgotten that nearly all of these schools started in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as seminaries under the leadership of staunchly Christian presidents, and that the therapeutic guidance they provided was given within avowedly religious contexts.

Back in the USSR: The Sovietization of American Life

The ordeal of Ilija Trojanov

by Justin Raimondo

Ilija Trojanov was at the airport in Brazil’s Salvador da Bahia, on September 30, checking in for his flight to the United States, when the person behind the American Airlines counter told him that the computer had issued a "Border Security Crossing" alert – and that it was necessary to contact the American authorities before he could be issued a boarding pass. As the time for his flight approached he was told the airline was forced to refuse him entry to the flight – and that he must return to Germany.

Trojanov is an acclaimed author of 20 books, including Along the Ganges, Collector of Worlds, and Mumbai to Mecca. He is the co-author of Angriff auf die Freiheit (Attack on Freedom), with Juli Zeh, a 2009 jeremiad against State surveillance. Trojanov was on his way to the Denver conference of the German Studies Association, and had been issued an invitation to appear at the Goethe-Institut’s "New Literature From Europe" Festival in November.

He had earlier been denied a visa to enter the United States, but with the help of an American university he was finally granted his travel papers: thus the "security alert" came as a surprise.

So why all the trouble over traveling to the US?

In response to media queries, the US embassy in Berlin had "no comment" to make. That’s because no comment was necessary: Trojanov was among the prominentsigners of an open letter addressed to German Chancellor Angela Merkel protesting NSA surveillance on German soil as an "historic attack on our democratic, constitutional state." That is clearly the reason for this Soviet-style harassment by the Obama administration.

Behind the curtain at the IPCC

Pay No Attention to the Bad Data

By STEVEN F. HAYWARD

Thought experiment: Imagine you are a national security reporter, covering the release of a massive, 2,000-page report on domestic intelligence gathering activities and future threat assessment from the National Security Agency. But instead of issuing the full report, the NSA issues a 30-page “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM) written by political appointees at the Justice Department, promising that the full 2,000-page report will be released a few days later. Would you print a front-page story based only on the 30-page summary, or would you demand to see the full report?

If you’d go with the politically massaged summary, then congratulations​—​you too can be an environmental reporter. Because that’s exactly what the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) did on Friday, September 27, in Stockholm, releasing only the SPM while withholding the full report. And the media played along, generating predictable headlines over the weekend about the increasing certainty of climate scientists that humans are warming the world.

To be fair, if they had waited until Monday’s release of the full Working Group I report on the current state of climate science, they’d have had to make sense of a jargon-filled report that Dutch scientist Arthur Petersen told the BBC “is virtually unreadable!” Churchill once quipped about a massive bureaucratic report that “by its very length, it defends itself against the risk of being read.” The IPCC appears to be following this example.

The (Needed) Revolution Emerging in Higher Education

As higher education costs soar, the gap between wealthy and poor families widens as non-wealthy students are forced to become debt-serfs to pay for college

Higher education is just the latest in a long line of labor-intensive industries with enormous fixed costs that now faces competition from new technologies and new far more efficient systemic processes.

By Charles Smith

There is a revolution underway in education being driven by digital technology.  Like all technologically fueled upheavals, this revolution requires creative destruction of the current industry, which is resisting the revolution even as it attempts to embrace the parts that might preserve the status quo.

This is an old story:  Huge labor-intensive industries with enormous fixed costs face competition from new technologies and new systemic processes.  Those earning a living within the old industries resist the destruction of the institutions and cost structures that have supported them, but resistance is futile, for the new technologies and processes are faster, better, and cheaper, often by an order of magnitude.

Though the entire spectrum of education from preschool to doctoral studies is being revolutionized, I will focus on higher education, which is already being creatively disrupted by digital technologies.  All that is needed to fulfill the revolution is a parallel advance in systemic processes.

The Old System: Systemic Scarcity of Media and Knowledge

To understand the revolution, we need to start with the historical roots of the current system, which arose from a profound scarcity of knowledge and instruction.  In the ancient world, storing information was extremely expensive.  Even after Gutenberg’s printing press made mass-produced books available, books remained expensive.  Only a wealthy household could afford to buy more than a few books.

Informed instruction was similarly limited.  Instruction in universities was often one person reading a text aloud to a classroom of students; this is the source of Cambridge University’s longstanding academic rank of “Reader.”

Greens Anti-Coal War Turns Heat on World’s Poor

Social engineers are rarely fans of democracy

by Peter C. Glover

If ever proof were needed that capitalism works for the interest of the poorest and most vulnerable (and for all of us) while leftist social engineering works against those interests, consider the escalating green war on coal.

It’s a war being conducted from the very top. President Obama, the European Union, even the United Nations are among those doing their level best to prevent the exploitation of one of the most ubiquitous, and thus cheap, energy resource available to us.  In vain pursuit of controlling the global climate via the doomed war on man-made carbon dioxide emissions, social engineers are prepared to ignore both the economy-busting cost and, ultimately, the human cost.

But if the recent ignominious dumping of Australia’s carbon-tax-imposing Labour Government teaches anything, it’s that, in a democracy, it’s the people that call the shots in the global marketplace, not governments. Just ask Julia Gillard (who imposed the disastrous Oz carbon tax) and Kevin Rudd (who pushed her aside then tried to run with it). Quite simply, the message to democratic governments worldwide is straightforward enough: an industry and society crippling carbon tax is a step too far. Democratic governments can take their chances. We cannot, however, take the same view when it comes to the world’s millions still living in poverty. Not that they appear to factor in the ideological calculations of the unelected ‘greenist’ elites at the European Union Commission or United Nations (or greens generally).

Social engineers are rarely fans of democracy. They know well enough that electorates will allow them only so much rope; precisely why greens prefer ‘backdoor’ means, such as procuring regulations from government quangos. Apart from getting fellow green ideologues into key government roles, it usually means lobbying for policies that skew the free marketplace. In the case of energy, they lobby against hydrocarbon resources while contriving to represent renewable energy as a commercially economic alternative. Joe Average, for a while at least, is duly taken in. Unfortunately, as the world’s first government to impose a carbon tax just found out, you can fool some of the people some of the time…

Don’t think for one moment, however, that the social engineers are prepared to bow to the will of the people. It’s not in their DNA. Which is precisely why they have been lobbying hard for the world’s banks to step in and cut the usual investments and loans to hydrocarbon energy industry businesses; and lately, with some success. Investment loans are crucial to enable economically viable electricity generating power plants to be built in developing states.

Whatever the question, it is hard to imagine the Communist Party to be the answer

Democratic Failure In The Czech Republic Authors A Communist Party Revival

By Doug Bandow

The Czech Republic is one of the most successful members of the former Soviet Empire.  Dominated by the U.S.S.R. after the Red Army overran the country in the closing days of World War II, Prague was a freedom domino in 1989, joining its neighbors in overthrowing Communist rule.  Yet Czechs with whom I recently spoke fear liberty is in retreat.  Indeed, the former Communist Party might reenter government after elections later this month.

Czechoslovakia was one of several countries created in 1918 out of the remains of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Cynics called the new entities “states for a season,” doomed to extinction.

The party’s revival is particularly incongruous because the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, or KCSM, remains largely unreconstructed.  Throughout its rule the Party “interned more than 250,000 political prisoners,” noted foreign correspondent James Kirchick, yet after the Velvet Revolution offered only a perfunctory apology for its discreditable role.  In 1996 the communists channeled George Orwell in calling their 40 year rule “one of the greatest periods of social and economic growth.”

In fact, the KCSM is the only Communist Party in Eastern Europe which still unashamedly calls itself Communist.  Kirchick explained, “while Communist Parties in the other countries in the former Eastern bloc dissolved (Poland), transformed into social democratic parties (Hungary), or merged with pre-existing ones (Slovakia), the Czech Communists did no such thing,” instead digging in and maintaining their party’s “doctrinaire Marxist outlook.”  The Party even offered its condolences to North Korea, which maintains a particularly virulent form of totalitarianism, after the death of dictator Kim Jong-il in 2011.

The Party has benefited from the collapse of the Civic Democratic Party (ODS)—the leading party on the right since it was founded by Klaus more than two decades ago—which is polling just six percent.  TOP 09 is in better shape, but not much.  Polls put the two parties at under 20 percent combined.

The Country Party

The question is not what the Republican Establishment will do with these dissidents but what the dissidents will do with the Establishment

by Angelo M. Codevilla

The Republican Party died during the struggle over Obamacare. Its most vital elected officials chose to represent their voters. This left their erstwhile leaders to continue pursuing acceptance by the ruling party, its press and its class. The result is a new party that represents the roughly three fourths of Republican voters whose social identities are alien to those of the ruling class and whose political identity is defined by opposition to the ruling party. These voters are outsiders to modern America’s power structure. Hence the new party that represents them is a “country party” in the British tradition of Viscount Bolingbroke’s early eighteenth century Whigs, who represented the country class against the royal court and its allies in Parliament. The forthcoming food fight over the name “Republican” is of secondary importance.

The new party came to be as organizations such as the Club For Growth, the several pro-life organizations, the Tea Parties, etc. joined together with the Congressmen and Senators they had helped elect to mount an effort which was less an attempt to de-fund Obamacare than it was the assertion of a bona fide opposition to the ruling class.

This has been a long time coming. Obamacare was a trigger, not a cause. While a majority of Democrats feel that officials who bear that label represent them well, only about a fourth of Republican voters and an even smaller proportion of independents trust Republican officials to represent them. They hear themselves insulted from on high as greedy, racist, violent, ignorant extremists, and resent the ever-growing U.S. government’s edgy social, ethical, and political character.

But the Republican leadership’s kinship with the socio-political class that runs modern government is deep. Rather than defending their voters’ socio-political identities, they ignore, soft-pedal, or give mere lip service to their voters’ concerns. It chooses candidates for office whose election only steadies America on a course of which most Americans disapprove.

More Drugs … More Drones … More Credit-Pushing Drivel

Get used to it

by bill bonner

“Dad, I’ve got to do something,” begins a panicky letter from one of the children. “When I changed my job status I lost my health insurance. The best policy I can find is $550 a month. What should I do?” “Don’t buy the insurance,” we suggested. “It’s a waste of money. Just don’t get sick,” we added helpfully.

There are two ways a government can rip off its citizens – force and/or fraud. Health care uses both. Back in the time of Genghis, Attila, Caesar and Napoleon, things were simpler. People were conquered. They submitted. “Insurgents” were disposed of. Houses were looted. Maidens were deflowered. Those were the good ol’ days – before health insurance! But even in the oldest of days, a man on his own couldn’t keep a whole population under his heel. He needed help. Thus were born the ruling elites, sharing power among at least enough people to control the armed forces. There are governors of all sorts. But if they don’t control the military and police, they will soon be governed by them.

The beauty of democracy is that it defrauds the average person into believing that he has been taken into the ruling elite. He thinks that, ultimately, he decides what government does. Naturally, he deserves a share in the spoils. All government is an exercise in larceny. All governments take things away from some people – power, money, dignity, freedom – to bestow favors on the ruling elite and its clients. The masses willingly and eagerly comply, as long as they think they can get something out of it – that is, someone else’s property.

A Zombie War

The argument in Congress, which when last we checked was holding up the whole parade, was over how health-care insurance works. Roughly, $2.2 trillion is spent annually in America – more, per capita than in any other nation – on health-related consumption. The fight is over who gets the money and who gets the care. It is a zombie war… As far as we know, no one suggests the obvious solution: Let people decide for themselves. To win elections, governments need to give as well as take. So, in addition to public safety and national security, they offer free health care, free education, free highways, and free elections to determine who gets what. As near as we can tell, most of the money spent on health care is simply wasted. Just compare life expectancies.

France has a nationalized system. It costs considerably less per person than the US system. Britain, France, Germany – all the developed countries have health-care programs partly or wholly run by the feds. All spend substantially less than the US and all have about the same or better life expectancies.

A Predictable Game

Every step toward socialism signifies a reduction in the overall economic means and the consumption of capital

BY JR NYQUIST

President Barack Obama says that Wall Street should be concerned by the government shutdown. But this shutdown is only partial, and the effects aren’t as dire or threatening as the president would like us to believe. The real threat to Wall Street is government deficit spending and our gradual drift toward socialism; that is to say, toward ever-increasing government intervention in the economy. A massive government intrusion into the healthcare industry via The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (of 2010) is the reason for the present government shutdown. Some members of Congress wish to delay the full effect of this legislation which may indeed place the entire system upon a slippery socialist slope.

“To the socialist, the coming of Socialism means a transition from an irrational economy [to a rational economy],” wrote Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. “Under Socialism, planned management of economic life takes the place of anarchy in production….” Here the socialist does not know rational from irrational. In terms of healthcare, the government proposes that all Americans shall have health insurance regardless of the cost to the government or to individual payers. By such enactment the government is driving up the price of health care for everyone by forcing millions of previously uninsured persons into the market. It is, in fact, akin to what the government did to the business of buying and selling family homes during the previous decade (when the government encouraged a large number of loans to persons who would never otherwise qualify– producing a bubble in the housing market).

Government intervention in the economy is seldom helpful. More typically, it degrades and demoralizes. Such was the intervention that produced the housing bubble. Such was the “war against poverty.” Such shall be the result of offering everyone high-quality health care by means of legislation. To put it bluntly, the Affordable Care Act doesn’t guarantee a larger number of doctors for a larger number of insured persons. But if it did so, the increase of doctors would take place upon a false basis; for the economy cannot sustain what it cannot afford.

Does the impracticability of the Affordable Health Care Act signify its imminent defeat in Congress? In this regard we may predict with a high degree of certainty that the present attempt to stop ObamaCare will fail. As Mises noted several decades ago in his book on Socialism, the socialists believe in the excellence of government intervention and control. Furthermore, he added, “It is false to imagine that the socialist ideology dominates only those parties which call themselves socialist or … ‘social.’ All present-day political parties are saturated with the leading socialistic ideas.” Such is the situation of today.

No new "Little Red Book" - that's official.

China has strayed too far from Maoist ideology, and has no other holy scriptures left to chant

By Xi Wang
A Chinese military scholar is working on a fresh book of quotations from late supreme leader Mao Zedong, according to a report, indicating a growing nostalgia in the ranks of the ruling Chinese Communist Party for the country's Maoist past. However, official news agency Xinhua has disputed the report as "erroneous".

The cutting-edge Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolis Daily said at the weekend that the new version of what had been widely known as the "Little Red Book" would be edited by a scholar from the People's Liberation Army (PLA), and be published in time for the 120th anniversary of Mao's birth in December.

And the book's editor, Chen Yu, a researcher with the Academy of Military Sciences under the PLA, confirmed the story to Hong Kong media, calling it a work of "scientific research".

"It is merely a publication of scientific research, not a re-publishing of the previous quotations from Chairman Mao," Chen told the South China Morning Post.

But the official news agency Xinhua rejected the report about the new book.

"We understand through concerned government departments that the story circulating on the Internet that the 'new edition of Chairman Mao's Quotations' may be published within this year. This is purely an erroneous report," according to Xinhua. But it made no comment on whether, or when, Chen's book would eventually be published.

Must-have accessory
The book became a must-have accessory for the politically correct revolutionary during the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) after it was first published by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) News in 1964. Party historian Han Gang told the Southern Metropolis Daily that Chen's project comes at a time of huge social tension and complex conflicts, as well as clashing values.

"The new edition of the Quotes of Chairman Mao represents a symbolic return to the past, but it certainly isn't just simple nostalgia," Han was quoted as saying.

"It probably expresses more a sense of unhappiness with our present reality."

Analysts said the new selection of Mao quotes likely reflects a sense among many in the Party that it has strayed too far from its ideological roots.

"I think that this represents a longing for past glories on the part of the Chinese Communist Party," US-based scholar and rights activist Liu Qing said in a recent interview. "This is a common death-bed phenomenon."

Corruption, abuse of power
Liu said Chinese leaders, who have repeatedly warned that the party could lose power if rampant corruption and abuse of power are allowed to continue unchecked, have "admitted" that the regime is sick to the core. 

Hitching to Gomorrah

Perhaps our civilization will go quietly, nicely.

by Theodore Dalrymple 

When I was sixteen years of age my parents allowed me to hitch-hike my way round England, Scotland, Ireland, France and Switzerland. Perhaps they were pleased to disembarrass themselves of a youth who, around them at least, was sullen and uncommunicative; but what would nowadays seem a decision of parental irresponsibility did not then seem at all extraordinary. I doubt that many parents now would give their sixteen year-old son such permission; but I am not sure whether this tells us more about the increased dangerousness of the world or a change in parental attitudes towards risk.

Certainly it seemed a gentler, and therefore a freer, world in certain respects. Sometimes I would hitch-hike on my own, sometimes with a French friend. I remember once arriving together in the northern industrial city of Leeds late one rainy day; the youth hostel was closed for the night and hotels were beyond our means. We went to a police station and a friendly desk-sergeant, seeing that we were naïve but well-behaved adolescents, put us in a cell overnight on his own authority, that is to say without any reference to the rules that almost certainly would prevent him nowadays from acting in this way. The following morning, at an early hour unfamiliar to most of the middle classes, a policeman woke us from our bed of concrete and gave us a cup of tea before sending us on our way. We thought the world was a friendly place.

In the countryside we practised what the French call ‘camping sauvage,’ wild camping, without fear or interference: that is to say we pitched our tents whenever we were tired and wherever we could find what seemed to us a good enough corner. In Europe, at least, such camping is now strictly forbidden, verboten, vietato, prohibido, the inevitable consequence, I suppose, of the vast increase in the numbers of people moving around. People who wish to camp are now dragooned into camping sites, where there are all kinds of facilities for them. It is one of the ironies of the world that the freer people are to roam, the less worthwhile it is to do so, and the more constrained by regulations their supposed freedom is.

Humanitarian Wars and Their NGO Foot-Soldiers

Governmental funding of NGOs has been an increasingly effective tool for mobilizing popular support for governmental policies

by Daniel McAdams

In February, 2011, Soliman Bouchuiguir told a lie. It was a big one. As the head of the Libyan League for Human Rights, Bouchuiguir initiated a petition that was eventually signed by 70 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) demanding that the US, EU, and UN “mobilize the United Nations and the international community and take immediate action to halt the mass atrocities now being perpetrated by the Libyan government against its own people.”

The petition invoked the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, a 2005 UN policy shift away from respect for national sovereignty toward green-lighting “humanitarian intervention,” including with military force, anywhere human rights are suspected of being violated.

Bouchuiguir’s petition was designed to tick all the necessary boxes of the R2P criteria. It reported that Libyan leader Gaddafi was deliberately killing peaceful protestors and innocent bystanders. He was using snipers to fire on Libyans at random, using helicopter gunships and fighter jets to attack, and even firing artillery shells into the crowd. The petition was where we first saw the oft-repeated line that the Gaddafi regime was employing foreign mercenaries against his own people.

Speaking in support of his petition before the UN Human Rights Council a few days later, Bouchuiguir claimed that Gaddafi had already killed 6,000 of his own people and was determined to kill many more. Based on his testimony and the petition signed by the 70 NGOs, Libya was suspended from membership in the UN Human Rights Council. On the strength of that suspension the issue was moved along rapidly to the UN Security Council, where teeth would soon be put into the campaign for military intervention.

A troubled young mother is shot dead and our ruling class applauds

The praetorians are way out of control 

By ESTHER GOLDBERG

An unarmed 34-year-old woman suffering from postpartum depression is surrounded by the authorities while sitting in her car, and gunned down in cold blood. She is blocked in. She cannot move. And yet she is killed by heavily armed security officers. Her one-year old child witnesses this from the back seat. Why is this not a national tragedy?

Miriam Carey was a young African-American woman who wanted to better herself. She went to college and graduated with a BA degree in health and nutrition science. She became a dental hygienist. One of her neighbors noted that it was obvious she was educated. She gave birth to her daughter a year ago and began to suffer from postpartum depression. She displayed some irrational behavior and was put on medication.

Thus far it’s not an uncommon story. About 50% of women who give birth suffer from postpartum depression. A friend of mine was on medication for more than 8 years after her daughter was born. This might conceivably happen to my daughter. Or to one of Obama’s daughters, come to think of it.

Then, on October 3, Miriam crashed her car into a security barrier near the White House. She was surrounded by security men shouting at her and pointing high-power guns. Was it so irrational to try to escape, to protect her daughter from men pointing pistols at her? A chase ensued, and she then crashed her car into a median somewhere in the vicinity of the Congress. She was blocked by security forces from several agencies. She could not move. She was unarmed, and alone save for her daughter. In her car, unprotected. And then she was killed.

After the Boston Marathon killings, Boston police spent over 2 hours in a stand-off gun fight with the surviving bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. They threw flash-bang grenades to disorient him. They brought in a negotiator to talk him into giving himself up. Eventually he did, and he walked out alive. But Miriam was not given that chance. She was trapped in her car, just sitting there. And they killed her. They emptied multiple rounds of ammunition before dragging her body from the car, her one-year old child witnessing all this from the back seat.

Are we so dead to any instinct of what is owed a mother that we are not shocked by this? We have read of police who kill without asking questions, and are inured to it. But a mother? I would have thought that ordinary Americans would be revolted by this. And then the murdering police get a standing ovation from the men and women of the Senate. Yes, kill Miriam. Take no chances. Our lives are precious. Her life and the life of people like her are not.

'Confusionists', Mao and urban morality

"Spiritual pollution" and the New China

By Francesco Sisci 
BEIJING - It is hard to understand and reconcile the appeal of Maoist thought and its communist drive in China with the freewheeling turbo-capitalism one sees in the same country nowadays. The simple - and certainly true - answer is that people miss the egalitarian spirit even though they do not pine for the poverty and social and political duress of the past. 

Perhaps there is also a more complicated element to the picture. In the early 1980s, China launched a campaign against "spiritual pollution". It was aimed at rooting out the Western values seeping through society that were considered the ultimate cause of the Wall of Democracy movement in Xidan. A couple of years before, those demonstrations asked for political and economic reforms. The institutionally materialistic Communist Party saw correctly that a "spiritual" element needed to be addressed while China was in the process of implementing economic reforms. 

The cure, one can say now, was wrong - incoming Western values were helping rather than thwarting economic reforms - but the analysis was right. A huge change was occurring in the Chinese mindset and that had to be addressed as the real root of all evils. 

Checkmate in Baghdad and Geneva

A bear toying with a cocker spaniel

by G. Murphy Donovan 

“Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.” - JFK

War is a messy business. Serial wars get even more untidy over time. Often, it’s hard to know where one begins and another ends. Such is the case today as the Arab spring looks like another Muslim winter. America and Europe stumble from one conflict venue to another wondering what happened to all those rosy assertions about jasmine, justice, moderation, and modernity. The Islamic world is a mess and no one has a clue as to where or how the sequential mayhem ends. In Syria, the nanny states of the West are again perched on the brink of another sectarian and/or tribal abyss.

Nonetheless, the optimism of intervention still prevails. Today you hear argument after argument about the responsibilities of power and success – or preaching about very selective humanitarian concerns. If you read enough foreign policy analysis you might come to believe that someone has the answer, or that somehow Europe and America have the “responsibility” to make the Third World well. Never mind that the very words “developing” and “emerging” have become geo-political oxymorons, triumphs of hope over experience.

Ironically, the grand strategy, if there is one, when you strip away the boilerplate, can be summarized with a single word - that word is “more.” More is the mantra of imprudent expectations; bailouts at home and flailouts abroad. If one “investment” doesn’t work, surely the original sacrifice wasn’t big enough. No thought seems to be given to developing a new game plan. More aid, more pandering, more troops, more drones, or more missile strikes; but never more common sense. It’s always more, and more is never enough.

And now "more" is accompanied by “red line” moralizing, the color coded version of chicken. Alas, the no-fault/default cultures of Europe and America are unlikely enforcers of any kind of norms and standards in the less civilized world. The West insists, ironically, on measures of accountability and restraint that have been abandoned in Europe and America. Political decay, especially in the First World, has consequences.

All the rhetoric about global responsibility is a rehash of the “white man’s burden” trope. Worse still, the hand-wringing and preaching seems to validate “orientalism,” guilt driven theories that excuse and forgive Muslim pathology because the chaos is thought to be the results of European racism, colonialism, or exploitation.