Quote of the Day

Democracy, Fascism and Private Definitions

George Orwell noticed that political writing tended to be vague and wrote Politics and the English Language.

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

Meanwhile, in Europe...

Europe is an ageing, moribund continent and the sh*t will hit the fan sooner rather than later

For years, since the onset of the euro crisis, we have heard that the crisis is over. Every year, politicians keep on telling us that the worst is over, but that next year will be so much better. Do you really think so? Here are some hard facts & figures instead of wishful thinking of lying politicians showing that the euro crisis is not over. On the contrary, things are getting worse.

Italy

La Dolce Vita, the good life, is no longer achievable for millions of Italians. Italy is the third largest Eurozone country and is in dire straits. Public debt has ballooned to well over 130 percent! Is this money ever going to be repaid? Who is going to do that? The country has one of the fastest aging populations in the world. Italian women, when having any children at all, prefer to have just one child. In order for a society to maintain a healthy demographic balance, they should have at least two. Nonetheless, unemployment, from a European perspective, is relatively low at 12 percent. But wait, youth unemployment is virtually at 40 percent. So there are no jobs in Italy, public debt is out of control and its aging population lays a heavy burden on both income taxes and Social Security payments.

Spain

Spain is one of the Eurozone’s largest countries. It is not in a recession, but in a downright depression. Do you need some figures? Unemployment stands at 26.3 percent?. That means more than one out of every four workers is idling and receiving benefits from government and waiting for better days. Even worse, youth unemployment is a staggering 57 percent. Indeed, more than one out of every two youngsters is out of work or is not expected to find one soon. Do you need more proof? Spanish government is spending billions on Social Security, money it simply does not have. Public debt has gone from a fairly modest 30 percent in 2007 to well over 90 percent this year and will soon move to 100 percent and beyond.

Portugal

Portugal is one of the smaller Eurozone countries in the Mediterranean Sea with an economy that is in shambles. The country had to be bailed out by the rest of the Eurozone to the tune of €78 billion. Public debt is around 128 percent, hardly lower than Italy’s. Unemployment hovers around 16.5 percent, which is unsustainable in the medium term. Youth unemployment stands at a depressing h 42 percent.

Although it seems that Portugal has lived up to its promises as part of the bail-out programme, the country will need a second bail-out coming 2014. Of course, it will be paid by other Eurozone members having a healthier economy.

Europe in shambles

Politicians babble about the worst of the crisis being behind us, or even ‘fixed.’ That is just cheap talk. The hard facts & figures prove them wrong. Europe is on the verge of a genuine collapse. On the one hand, this is because the Euro simply does not work, but makes things worse instead. On the other hand, Eurozone member states are simply unable to devaluate their currencies as they are part of the single currency bloc. As long as this flawed monetary currency, or rather political currency, is kept afloat, less well-off countries within the Eurozone will continue to suffer.

Baby Ounces

Struggling for survival in Havana

By Yoanni Sánchez

He has sewn a double lining into the bottom of his pants. Big enough to hold the milk powder he sneaks out of the factory. So far he’s never had any problems, but every now and then they bring in a new guard and he avoids taking anything home for a few days. His work at the Dairy Complex has never been professionally interesting to him, but he wouldn’t exchange it for any other. To his place as a packer he owes his daughter’s quinceañero celebration, the new roof on his house, the motorbike he rides around the city. He has a job envied by many. An occupation someone with just a sixth grade education can do, but one coveted by academics, experts and even scientists. It’s a workplace where you can steal something.

Ingenuity and illegality are combined when it comes time to make a living. Hoses rolled up under a shirt carry alcohol out of the distilleries. Cigar rollers calculate when the security camera looks away to slip a cigar under the desk. Bakers add extra yeast to make the dough rise disproportionately so they can resell the flour. Taxi drivers are experts in fiddling with the meter; clerks steal a little bit from each tube of liquid detergent; farmers add a few small stones to each bag of beans… so they weigh more. Creativity in the quest of embezzling the State and the customer stretches across the island.

However, of all the elaborate and clever ways to “struggle” that I have known, there is one that stands out as remarkable. I heard it from a friend who gave birth to an underweight baby at the Havana maternity hospital. Both the child and the mother had to stay in the medical center until the baby gained almost a pound. The process was slow and the new mother was desperate to go home. The bathroom had no water, the food was terrible, and every day her family had to make great sacrifices to bring her meals and clean clothes. To top it off, my friend looked at the other low birthweight babies and they were putting on ounces rapidly. She expressed her desperation to another patient who responded, laughing, “Boy, are you stupid! You don’t know that the nurse sells the ounces?” That lady in the white coat who walked the halls every morning charged for entering a higher weight into the medical record. She was selling non-existent baby ounces. What a business!

After hearing that story, nothing surprises me anymore, I am never shocked by the many ways in which Cubans “struggle” for survival. 

The Educational Octopus

Why do public school teachers send their own children to private schools at double the rate of the national average?

By Mark J. Perry 

In his latest weekly column, economist and GMU professor Walter E. Williams presents these facts about where various groups of parents send their own children – private or public schools:

General public: Nationally, 11% of all parents enroll their children in private schools, and 89% of American students attend public schools.

Public School Teachers: Nationally, more than 20% of public school teachers with school-age children enroll them in private schools, or almost twice the 11% rate for the general public.

Philadelphia Public School Teachers: 44% enroll their own children in private schools, or four times the national average.

Cincinnati Public School Teachers: 41% enroll their own children in private schools, more than three times the national rate.

Chicago Public School Teachers: 39% enroll their own children in private schools, more than three times the national average.

Rochester, NY Public School Teachers: 38% enroll their own children in private schools, or more than three times the national rate.

San Francisco-Oakland Public School Teachers: 34% enroll their own children in private schools, slightly more than three times the national average.

New York City Public School Teachers: 33% enroll their own children in private schools, three times the national rate.

Members of Congress: 33% to 44% enroll their children in private schools, three to four times the national average.

Walter concludes that:

The fact that so many public school teachers enroll their own children in private schools ought to raise questions. After all, what would you think, after having accepted a dinner invitation, if you discovered that the owner, chef, waiters and busboys at the restaurant to which you were being taken don’t eat there? That would suggest they have some inside information from which you might benefit.

In a 1995 article in The Freeman called the “Educational Octopus” I wrote:

What would you conclude about the quality of product or service X under the following circumstances?

1. The employees of Airline X and their families are offered free airline tickets as an employee benefit. The employees refuse to travel with their families on Airline X and instead pay full fare on Airline Y when flying.

2. The employees of Automaker X are offered a company car at a substantial discount and they instead buy a car at full price from Automaker Y.

3. Employees at Health Clinic X and their families are offered medical care at no additional cost as a benefit and yet most employees of Clinic X pay out-of-pocket for medical services at Clinic Y.

Universities: bastions of conformism

Students have become ban-happy self-regulators afraid of growing up.

By Joanna Williams

When news emerged last week that two students from the London School of Economics had been banned from wearing ‘Jesus and Mo’ cartoon t-shirts on a stall at the university’s freshers’ fair, it was only the most recent act of censorship carried out by students’ unions.

At the latest count, the students’ unions at six universities have banned the song ‘Blurred Lines’ from being played in their buildings. In the past few months alone, Derby University students have banned the UKIP candidate for Derbyshire police and crime commissioner from speaking in debates; the University of East Anglia has banned the showing of rugby and cricket matches sponsored by NatWest bank in the union bar; Lancaster University students’ union has banned ‘lads’ mags’ from the campus shop; and students at Essex University look set to ban Starbucks from their campus.

While a few students may challenge what has been termed a ‘war against free speech on campus’, or argue that students’ unions are not meant to be the moral arbiters of their members, what’s really noticeable is the louder clamour for more bans and increased censorship. The outgoing president of a consortium of students’ unions based in Medway in Kent has criticised the absence of a ban on political and religious extremists; and the Lancaster ban on lads’ mags has been labelled as not going nearly far enough in the perceived battle against sexism on campus.

It seems that far from revelling in the freedom of having left school and home behind, students are quick to impose new sets of restrictions upon themselves. This goes beyond socialising and shopping and impacts upon the academic realm too: research conducted at one university suggests 88 per cent of students were in favour of a requirement to make all students abide by a code of conduct and 82 per cent supported minimum attendance requirements with all the associated form-filling and register-taking.  It seems that students want external monitoring and regulation because they don’t trust themselves to withstand the temptation to miss seminars or behave inappropriately in the lecture theatre.  This lack of trust in themselves and each other is one reason why songs such as ‘Blurred Lines’ and ‘lads’ mags’ are described as ‘dangerous’ by those campaigning for bans: one can only assume that in their fevered imaginations it is only a ‘brave’ ban on such incendiary material that prevents mass rape on campus.

The Simple Truth

Restoring a naive view of truth

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

"I remember this paper I wrote on existentialism. My teacher gave it back with an F. She’d underlined true and truth wherever it appeared in the essay, probably about twenty times, with a question mark beside each. She wanted to know what I meant by truth."

—                           Danielle Egan (journalist)

Someone says to you: “My miracle snake oil can rid you of lung cancer in just three weeks.” You reply: “Didn’t a clinical study show this claim to be untrue?” The one returns: “This notion of ‘truth’ is quite naive; what do you mean by ‘true’?”

Many people, so questioned, don’t know how to answer in exquisitely rigorous detail. Nonetheless they would not be wise to abandon the concept of ‘truth’. There was a time when no one knew the equations of gravity in exquisitely rigorous detail, yet if you walked off a cliff, you would fall.

Often I have seen – especially on Internet mailing lists – that amidst other conversation, someone says “X is true”, and then an argument breaks out over the use of the word ‘true’. This essay is not meant as an encyclopedic reference for that argument. Rather, I hope the arguers will read this essay, and then go back to whatever they were discussing before someone questioned the nature of truth.

In this essay I pose questions. If you see what seems like a really obvious answer, it’s probably the answer I intend. The obvious choice isn’t always the best choice, but sometimes, by golly, it is. I don’t stop looking as soon I find an obvious answer, but if I go on looking, and the obvious-seeming answer still seems obvious, I don’t feel guilty about keeping it. Oh, sure, everyone thinks two plus two is four, everyone says two plus two is four, and in the mere mundane drudgery of everyday life everyone behaves as if two plus two is four, but what does two plus two really, ultimately equal? As near as I can figure, four. It’s still four even if I intone the question in a solemn, portentous tone of voice. Too simple, you say? Maybe, on this occasion, life doesn’t need to be complicated. Wouldn’t that be refreshing?

If you are one of those fortunate folk to whom the question seems trivial at the outset, I hope it still seems trivial at the finish. If you find yourself stumped by deep and meaningful questions, remember that if you know exactly how a system works, and could build one yourself out of buckets and pebbles, it should not be a mystery to you.

If confusion threatens when you interpret a metaphor as a metaphor, try taking everything completely literally.

Imagine that in an era before recorded history or formal mathematics, I am a shepherd and I have trouble tracking my sheep. My sheep sleep in an enclosure, a fold; and the enclosure is high enough to guard my sheep from wolves that roam by night. Each day I must release my sheep from the fold to pasture and graze; each night I must find my sheep and return them to the fold. If a sheep is left outside, I will find its body the next morning, killed and half-eaten by wolves. But it is so discouraging, to scour the fields for hours, looking for one last sheep, when I know that probably all the sheep are in the fold. Sometimes I give up early, and usually I get away with it; but around a tenth of the time there is a dead sheep the next morning.

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.