Goldwater-Rockefeller Redux

“History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

By Patrick J. Buchanan
Mark Twain’s insight comes to mind as one observes the panic of Beltway Republicans over the latest polls in the battle of Obamacare.

According to Gallup, approval of the Republican Party has sunk 10 points in two weeks to 28 percent, an all-time low. In the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, approval of the GOP has fallen to 24 percent.

In the campaign to persuade America of their Big Lie — that the House Republicans shut down the government — the White House and its media chorus appear to have won this round.

Yet, the truth is the Republicans House has voted three times to keep open and to fund every agency, department and program of the U.S. government, except for Obamacare.

And they voted to kill that monstrosity but once.

Republicans should refuse to raise the white flag and insist on an honorable avenue of retreat.

And if Harry Reid’s Senate demands the GOP end the sequester on federal spending, or be blamed for a debt default, the party should, Samson-like, bring down the roof of the temple on everybody’s head.

This is an honorable battle lost, not a war.

Why, after all, did Republicans stand up? Because they believe Obamacare is an abomination, a new entitlement program this nation, lurching toward bankruptcy, cannot afford.

It is imposing increases in health care premiums on millions of Americans, disrupting doctor-patient relationships and forcing businesses to cut workers back to 29 hours a week. Even Democratic Sen. Max Baucus has predicted a coming “train wreck.”

Now if the Republican Party believes this, what choice did the House have except to fight to defund or postpone it, against all odds, and tune out the whining of the “We-can’t-win!” Republican establishment?

And if Republicans are paralyzed by polls produced by this three-week skirmish, they should reread the history of the party and the movement to which they profess to belong.

In the early 1960s, when the postwar right rose to challenge JFK with Mr. Conservative, events and actions conspired to put Barry Goldwater in the worst hole of a Republican nominee in history.

Kennedy was murdered in Dallas one year before the election. Goldwater had glibly hinted he would privatize Social Security, sell the Tennessee Valley Authority and “lob one into the men’s room at the Kremlin.”

After his defeat of Nelson Rockefeller in the California primary assured his nomination, Goldwater was 59 points behind LBJ — 77-18.

The Republican liberals — Govs.

Life-Extending Biotechnologies

Creating and Solving Our Economic Problems

By Patrick Cox

If you read today's headlines, the issues that are driving the current political strife and confusion may appear to be separate from those driving the economic problems. In fact, though, the debt, the deficit, and healthcare costs are all consequences of something that has no historical precedent. That is the "demographic transition," which is dramatically reducing the worker-to-beneficiary (WtB) ratio, the number of people paying into entitlements systems compared to the number of recipients.

We hear incessantly that we must learn from history to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. While there is some truth in this adage, the really spectacular mistakes come from assuming that the past is a reliable guide to the future. It's not.

The truly new, even if it is essentially positive in nature, almost always creates massive disruption. Economist Joseph Schumpeter called this "creative destruction" and described the process whereby established institutions resist change but are eventually replaced.

The demographic transition, driven by improvements in technologies that increase human lifespans while reducing birthrates, is one of the biggest changes ever to hit human societies. Moreover, it is not only ongoing, it is accelerating.

In the short run, this means that the dynamics that have created fiscal crises globally will continue to worsen. At some point, however, these same scientific and technological forces are going to win out over the old institutions and create a far better world. I'll get to that in a bit.

Human Lifespans Are Still Increasing Rapidly

To review: For most of human history, life expectancies were relatively constant except during periods such as war or pandemic disease. Over the centuries, average lifespans increased so slowly that the improvements were largely unnoticeable. In modern times, however, it has become obvious that the very gradual increases in lifespans were actually the first stages of exponential growth.

In just over a century, average Western life expectancies have nearly doubled. Just as importantly, birthrates have plummeted. In America, they are about half what they were in 1920. The same trends are evident throughout the developed world and continue to spread across the globe.

Demographers and some policy makers have finally begun to acknowledge the depopulation problem. Low birthrates and swelling older populations are inverting the "demographic pyramid." The ancient and reliable status quo – populations with many young people and relatively few older people – is being flipped on its head.

Birthrates are already well below replacement level in many countries, including Austria, Canada, Germany, Italy, Korea, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, and Switzerland. Less-developed countries are behind the curve but catching up rapidly, which means they will not be able to supply the immigrants to make up for the First World's depopulation problems, as they have done in the past.

Academic and Media Blindness

Given that the media and high-level academics such as Paul Ehrlich have been proclaiming imminent overpopulation doom for as long as I can remember, you might think that the flipping of the demographic pyramid amounts to some unforeseeable "black swan" event. Let's dispense with that drivel now.

Sociologist Warren Thompson and other demographers were already measuring the impact of improvements in medical and other health-related technologies a hundred years ago. Thompson forecast the demographic transition in the 1920s, using relatively simple mathematical extrapolations of trends that had been obvious for some time.

You might assume, therefore, that the demographic transition, with its predictions of falling birthrates and populations, is a minor theory. On the contrary, Thompson's book Population Problems was the major demographic text until the 1960s. The truth was known but was ignored, starting in the 1970s, by a younger generation that looked backwards and insisted that historical birthrates would continue forever.

ECB’s Draghi: Knowing Too Much About Our Big Banks Could Set Off A Panic

Meaning: The truth shall not be known until after the Eurocrats decided who would have to pay for the bailouts.

By Wolf Richter   

European banks, like all banks, have long been hermetically sealed black boxes. If someone managed to pry open just one tiny corner, the reek of asset putrefaction that billowed out was so strong that the corner would immediately be resealed. In cases where the corner didn’t get resealed fast enough and too much of the reek spread, the whole bank collapsed, only to be bailed out by taxpayers, often in other countries; it’s easier that way.

The only thing known about the holes in the balance sheets of these black boxes, left behind by assets that have quietly decomposed, is that they’re deep. But no one knows how deep. And no one is allowed to know – not until Eurocrats decide who is going to pay for bailing out these banks. How do we know? ECB President Mario Draghi said that on Friday in Washington.

And today, the Eurogroup of 17 finance minister had a huddle in Luxembourg to try to decide that issue.

The IMF, which can only sniff around the surface of the banks, determined that the Spanish and Italian banks alone would have to recognize an additional €230 billion ($310 billion) in losses over the next two years. As we have seen time and again, bank losses are always much larger when the truth finally seeps out, and that doesn’t happen until after the bank collapses and someone from the outside counts what’s left over.

Additional, because these banks have already written off a mountain of bad assets. In both countries, banks collapsed and were bailed out, some twice – in Spain at the expense of taxpayers in other Eurozone countries.

Next year will be a moment of truth, so to speak, when the ECB is to become the regulator of the 130 largest banks in its bailiwick. Imbued with new powers, it will subject them to a somewhat realistic evaluation, rather than the “stress tests” of yore that were nothing but banking agitprop – assuming certain banks in Italy and Spain can be kept upright until then.

The birth of the 'de-Americanized' world

All aboard the petroyuan

By Pepe Escobar 

This is it. China has had enough. The (diplomatic) gloves are off. It's time to build a "de-Americanized" world. It's time for a "new international reserve currency" to replace the US dollar. 

It's all here, in a Xinhua editorial, straight from the dragon's mouth. And the year is only 2013. Fasten your seat belts - and that applies especially to the Washington elites. It's gonna be a bumpy ride. 

Long gone are the Deng Xiaoping days of "keeping a low profile". The Xinhua editorial summarizes the straw that broke the dragon's back - the current US shutdown. After the Wall Street-provoked financial crisis, after the war on Iraq, a "befuddled world", and not only China, wants change. 

This paragraph couldn't be more graphic:

Instead of honoring its duties as a responsible leading power, a self-serving Washington has abused its superpower status and introduced even more chaos into the world by shifting financial risks overseas, instigating regional tensions amid territorial disputes, and fighting unwarranted wars under the cover of outright lies.

The solution, for Beijing, is to "de-Americanize" the current geopolitical equation - starting with more say in the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for emerging economies and the developing world, leading to a "new international reserve currency that is to be created to replace the dominant US dollar". 

Note that Beijing is not advocating completely smashing the Bretton Woods system - at least for now, but it is for having more deciding power. Sounds reasonable, considering that China holds slightly more weight inside the IMF than Italy. IMF "reform" - sort of - has been going on since 2010, but Washington, unsurprisingly, has vetoed anything substantial. 

As for the move away from the US dollar, it's also already on, in varying degrees of speed, especially concerning trade amongst the BRICS group of emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which is now overwhelmingly in their respective currencies. The US dollar is slowly but surely being replaced by a basket of currencies. 

"De-Americanization" is also already on. Take last week's Chinese trade charm offensive across Southeast Asia, which is incisively leaning towards even more action with their top commercial partner, China. Chinese President Xi Jinping clinched an array of deals with Indonesia, Malaysia and also Australia, only a few weeks after clinching another array of deals with the Central Asian "stans". 

Chinese commitment to improve the Iron Silk Road reached fever pitch, with shares of Chinese rail companies going through the roof amid the prospect of a high-speed rail link with and through Thailand actually materializing. In Vietnam, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang sealed an understanding that two country's territorial quarrels in the South China Sea would not interfere with even more business. Take that, "pivoting" to Asia. 

The secrets contained within the imposing walls of the Kremlin

Moscow's princes always managed to survive

by DAVID HAY

Everyone has some idea of what the Kremlin is. The red stars and the ring of Gothic-looking walls and towers have represented Russia and its government so many times that they are like a trademark.

Today, it is the flag of the Russian Federation that flutters from a handsome cupola inside the walls; the implication is that Putin's Russia is as mighty and immutable as any historic empire. But that is not the only message written in the stone and brick. The secret is to look behind the dazzling facades.

In the eight centuries of its existence, the Kremlin has been used to symbolise everything from Soviet dictatorship and proletarian revolution to imperial tsarism and even an inscrutable theocracy. The palaces are opulent, but there is menace here, as well as power. In 1839, a celebrated French traveller called the Marquis de Custine described the fortress as a "satanic monument", "a habitation that would suit some of the personages of the Apocalypse". "Like the bones of certain gigantic animals," he concluded, "the Kremlin proves to us the history of a world of which we might doubt until after seeing the remains."

But there is far more to the Kremlin than a pile of ancient bones. Its timelessness is the result of careful image-management. Parts of the citadel are truly old, including its most sacred building, the Cathedral of the Dormition whose structure was completed in 1479. The paved square around this is the focus of most guided tours, and it includes two other cathedrals, a 16th-century belltower and a palace that looks like a giant jewel-box.

If you stand here for long enough, you might imagine golden-robed boyars, but the present setting would have been entirely alien to them. Today's Kremlin is Stalin's creation, an expurgated version of a mid-19th-century complex that was in turn unrecognisably transformed after Napoleon abandoned it in 1812. And there had been innumerable programmes of rebuilding before that. The Kremlin may well be a perfect symbol of the Russian past, but what it embodies is not some romance of eternity, but disinformation, upheaval and loss.

Founded in the 12th century, the fortress started life as a collection of timber palaces and churches on a hill between two riverbanks. Its main defence back then was not its ugly, clay-smeared wooden walls but its remote location in the heart of dense and uninviting virgin forest.

The place came close to ruin many times. But Moscow's princes always managed to survive, they kept their Mongol overlords on side, and their victories over neighbours, cousins and overmighty courtiers were rewarded with a steady flow of cash and manpower. By the time the Mongol empire started to unravel in the 15th century, Moscow's citadel was home to the region's dominant military power.

The Kremlin of the guidebooks dates from this moment. It was built on the orders of Ivan III, a prince whose calculating use of sovereignty exceeded even 15th-century European standards. When he turned his mind to a new fortress, Ivan did not rely on the skills of local men. The future symbol of Russian statehood was designed by Italian contemporaries of Leonardo da Vinci, including a Milanese straight from the Sforza court and an architect from Bologna who doubled as cannon-founder, mint-master and all-purpose magician....

IMF predicts riskier and bleaker times ahead for Australia

Nothing succeeds, As planned.

by GREG JERICHO

The latest World Economic Outlook released by the IMF on Wednesday was a bit of a sobering document. Given that the IMF has been delivering pretty sober assessments for more than four years now, it's not that surprising.

This time the outlook also involved a bit of looking back at how good things were expected to be before the GFC/great recession hit, and how bad they were predicted to be once it did. What is striking is that for many countries and parts of the world, 2013 finds them in a worse position than where they were expected to be in April 2009 when the IMF issued its first bleak outlook after the tumult of the GFC.

So while there has been some joy in the UK because the IMF has revised its prediction for growth in 2013 from the meagre 0.7% expected in the April WEO up to 1.4%, it is worth remembering that back in April 2009 the IMF expected the UK to be growing about 2.8% by now. For the next three years it kept revising down that prediction. Only in the past year has the IMF been too pessimistic.

For Australia, the reverse is true. If we look at the predictions for GDP growth from 2007 onwards, the IMF in 2008, before the GFC hit, was rather buoyant about Australia's future. It expected by the end of 2013 Australia's economy would have grown 20% above where it was in 2007. When the GFC hit, the IMF got real gloomy and revised this down to a mere 9.2%. And yet on Wednesday the IMF reported Australia's economy growing by 16% since 2007.

In fact, if you look at a comparison of where the IMF expected advanced economies to be by 2014 when the GFC hit and where they are now, Australia has performed better than all but Singapore, Taiwan and Israel.

Lost in Germany

Spanish Jobseekers Lured on False Pretenses

Diego Lopez, 21, was promised a job contract and shared apartment, but they have not materialized.

By Der Spiegel

They were promised new jobs in Germany — but their hopes have now been quashed. Nearly 130 would-be Spanish workers are stranded in Erfurt after private employment agencies apparently failed to follow through.

When night falls in Erfurt, Diego Lopez has to go into the "hole." That's what the 21-year-old Spaniard calls the cellar of an old school where he and 20 of his countrymen have been sleeping in recent weeks. Bunk beds are crammed next to each other in two small rooms, which smell like sweat and dirty socks, Lopez says. The ventilation system doesn't work properly, and they all have to share a single shower, he adds.

But unlike their last accommodations, at least the heat works and they don't have to sleep on the floor. Furthermore, Lopez can still afford to stay here. A night in the "hole" costs €3.50 ($4.74).

A trained geriatric nurse, he is one of 128 Spaniards who have been stranded in Erfurt after being promised jobs that didn't come through. Full of hope, they struck out for Germany two weeks ago to take part in a program that the Federal Employment Agency calls "The job of my life." The new initiative promises young people from ailing southern European countries either dual vocational training or employment as a skilled worker, along with language courses and lodging — all subsidized by the German state. And it was this program that two private job placement agencies used to lure the Spaniards to the eastern German state of Thuringia.

From Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves

All in all, the shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves adage no longer really works

By Anthony de Jasay

Before sociology rose to the rank of intellectual respectability, we had old home truths telling us how things tended to work in certain ways and not in others. The early bird got the worm, the pounds would take care of themselves if you took care of the pence, you had to lie on the bed that you had made, and honesty was the best policy. Some of these old adages have blossomed out into research programmes, books, and creeds. "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" became a doctrinal wave lapping at the rocky question of who gets what.

One strand of the great controversies about this subject is social mobility, or rather its loss of vigour. Those who believed that inequality was a moral wrong, as well as the down-to-earth utilitarians who held that it reduced aggregate material welfare and was the source of most ills from short life expectancy, poor health and delinquency, to teenage pregnancy and school failure, sought consolation in social mobility. If it was at work, inequality was condemned to gradual erosion. According to the "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves" doctrine, the great frequency of cases of the great wealth amassed by the grandfather was barely maintained by the son and lost by the grandson, and this lent support to the theory, advanced by Milton Friedman, that capitalism had a built-in tendency to reduce inequality. The last thirty years or so has cast much doubt on this appealing theory. Throughout the Western world income distribution was getting more skewed in favour of the top deciles of society. Oddly, this was particularly true of English speaking countries, which were less illiberal and more inclined to let markets do their work than other countries. Friedman's theory was falsified. There must have been a reason. Social mobility appears to have failed. Shirtsleeves seemed to lead to Saville Row suits but not shirtsleeves. Incomes went to the top and stayed there.

The US Has Repeatedly Defaulted

The Last Stage of Plunder

by George Washington

Some people argue that countries can’t default.  But that’s false.

It is widely stated that the U.S. government has never defaulted.  However, that is also a myth.

Catherine Rampbell reported in the New York Times in 2011:

The United States has actually defaulted on its debt obligations before. 

The first time was in 1790, the only episode Professor Reinhart unearthed in which the United States defaulted on its external debt obligations. It also defaulted on its domestic debt obligations then, too. 

Then in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, the United States had another domestic debt default related to the repayment of gold-based obligations.

(Update.)

Donald Marron writes at Forbes:

The United States defaulted on some Treasury bills in 1979 (ht: Jason Zweig). And it paid a steep price for stiffing bondholders. 

Terry Zivney and Richard Marcus describe the default in The Financial Review...:

Investors in T-bills maturing April 26, 1979 were told that the U.S. Treasury could not make its payments on maturing securities to individual investors. The Treasury was also late in redeeming T-bills which become due on May 3 and May 10, 1979. The Treasury blamed this delay on an unprecedented volume of participation by small investors, on failure of Congress to act in a timely fashion on the debt ceiling legislation in April, and on an unanticipated failure of word processing equipment used to prepare check schedules.

The Law of Career Security

France's Minister Orders Telecom Companies "to be Virtuous and Patriotic" and to Use Alcatel-Lucent to Prevent Layoffs

By Mike "Mish" Shedlock

In France, companies need approval from the unions and the government to fire workers. The government gets to decide if you make too much money to lay anyone off. Moreover, the government can decide you make too much money, even if you have a loss.

Then there's the newly passed "Law of Career Security" to consider. Yes, that's the precise title.

It took me a bit to piece this story together because translations from French are particularly difficult.

Alcatel-Lucent Background

Before tackling French news reports from Wednesday, here is an Alcatel-Lucent Factbox from the Chicago Tribune, in English. 

 Paris-based telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent unveiled plans on Tuesday to cut about 10,000 jobs worldwide by the end of 2015 in a cost-cutting drive to save 1 billion euros and reverse years of losses.

Alcatel mainly builds and develops telecommunications networks and related equipment for network operators - such as Verizon or AT&T - and other enterprise customers.

Alcatel-Lucent was created from the merger of France's Alcatel and U.S. firm Lucent in 2006, against a backdrop of global competitive pressures that also led to a similar tie-up between Nokia and Siemens to create Nokia Siemens Networks.

The cuts announced on Tuesday are across all regions, with 4,100 jobs to go in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 3,800 in Asia-Pacific and 2,100 in the Americas.

It is not the first job-cuts plan at Alcatel-Lucent: in 2012, it said it would axe 5,000 jobs and in 2007 it announced 12,500 job losses.

Alcatel has only reported one year of profit since the merger, in 2011, ending every other year in the red.

Schoolkids : Prisoners of their Genes ?

Let’s bash the idea that some kids aren’t genetically cut out for learning

By FRANK FUREDI

One of the dirty secrets of the modern British educational establishment is that it lacks faith in the ability of education to make a significant difference to people’s lives. This is the most interesting thing about the publication of a document attributed to Dominic Cummings, who until recently served as a special adviser to the Tory secretary of state for education Michael Gove: it lets this secret out; it openly acknowledges the low expectations that policymakers have of children and of schools.

Cummings is unequivocal on this point. He believes that what mainly determines pupils’ performance is not the quality of teaching, but their IQ levels and genetic inheritance. He claims that up to 70 per cent of a child’s performance levels are genetically derived. That’s another way of saying that teachers and schools can have at best a marginal impact on children, whose fate is apparently bestowed on them by their genes.

IPCC In A Stew

How They Cooked Their Latest Climate Books

Activists gather outside the the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dressed as scientists in lab coats on one side of a giant 12 meter seesaw to give a visual image of the IPCC report's key finding that there is 95% scientific certainty that humans cause climate change on September 27, 2013 in Stockholm. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change publishes the first volume of its Fifth Assessment Report, dealing with the scientific evidence for global warming

By Larry Bell

I have asked my friend Dr. Vincent Gray from New Zealand, who has served as an expert reviewer for all five of the reports issued by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to comment on the latest Summary for Policymakers (AR5) report.  Dr. Gray holds a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Cambridge University and is the author of a book The Greenhouse Delusion.

Vincent, as a climate scientist and long-standing IPCC expert reviewer, what is your opinion regarding the science offered behind the “greenhouse delusion” in this latest report?

Larry, they have found that the public will believe almost anything that is represented as being agreed by “scientists”, provided that you have enough of them and they are backed up by the requisite number of celebrities and public figures.

Unfortunately for their message, there is no evidence that human-emitted greenhouse gases have a harmful influence on the climate. So it becomes necessary to use spin, distortion, deception and even fabrication to cover up this absence of evidence with a collective assertion of belief in their cause to an increased level of certainty. In the end they must rely merely upon collective opinions within their selected ranks, of which they once again claim high levels of certainty. However, they run into the problem of imposing such severe discipline on so many people, most whom have been trained to think independently.

So how do they attempt to impose discipline like this?

2000+ Reasons Why GMOs Are Safe To Eat And Environmentally Sustainable

Genetically modified foods are among the most extensively studied scientific subjects in history

A popular weapon used by those critical of agricultural biotechnology is to claim that there has been little to no evaluation of the safety of GM crops and there is no scientific consensus on this issue. Those claims are simply not true.

by Jon Entine

“The science just hasn’t been done.” - Charles Benbrook, organic researcher, Washington State University.

“There is no credible evidence that GMO foods are safe to eat.” - David Schubert, Salk Institute of Biological Studies

“[The] research [on GMOs] is scant…. Whether they’re killing us slowly— contributing to long-term, chronic maladies—remains anyone’s guess.” - Tom Philpott, Mother Jones

“Genetically modified (GM) foods should be a concern for those who suffer from food allergies because they are not tested….” - Organic Consumers Association

The claim that genetically engineered crops are ‘understudied’—the meme represented in the quotes highlighted above—has become a staple of opponents of crop biotechnology, especially activist journalists. Anti-GMO campaigners, including many organic supporters, assert time and again that genetically modified crops have not been safety tested or that the research done to date on the health or environmental impact of GMOs has “all” been done by the companies that produce the seeds. Therefore, they claim, consumers are taking a ‘leap of faith’ in concluding that they face no harm from consuming foods made with genetically modified ingredients.

That is false.

Genocidal Impulses & Human Depopulation

Human Exceptionalism

By Wesley J. Smith

There is a difference between voluntary family planning and radical Malthusian depopulation misanthropy. Alas, I fear the latter is subsuming the former.

A review of a book in the New York Times shows the extent of human loathing among the Davos set. (This commentary is about the review, not the book, which I haven’t read.) Alan Weisman, who last described how wonderful earth would become if humans ceased to exist–but who would know if we were gone?–now has written an apparently apocalyptic tome about the need to radically reduce our numbers.

The most effective way to kill off humans is to allow too many of us to exist. From the review of Countdown:

As Alan Weisman’s “Countdown” amply demonstrates, we are well on our way. Some seven billion people are alive today; the United Nations estimates that by the end of the century we could number as many as 15.8 billion. Biologists have calculated that an ideal population — the number at which everyone could live at a first-world level of consumption, without ruining the planet irretrievably — would be 1.5 billion.

That’s Deep Ecology anti-human talk–which alas, has become mainstream within the environmental movement.

But here’s the thing: You can’t go from 7 billion (or 9 billion, or 15 billion) to 1.5 billion through voluntary, non-lethal means. China’s tyrannical one-child policy has not reduced the number of people in that populous country, only slowed the rate of growth. If female infanticide, forced abortion, and eugenics don’t do the job, imagine what it would take!

And where would the human cancer-on-the-earth coming Apocalypse be without global warming hysteria?

In our own time, there are a few mitigating indicators. Much of the current population growth comes in the developing world, where carbon consumption remains low, so the environmental effect is relatively muted. The next thousand Americans will do more than twice as much damage as the next hundred thousand Nigeriens, though that is hardly a cause for celebration…

Ignorance, Intelligence, and War-Making

By trying to fit the world’s manifold terrorists into the concept of al Qaeda, US intelligence dumbs itself down

by Angelo M. Codevilla

Last week, US special forces captured one Abu Anas Al-Libi, suspected of having taken part in the 1998 bombing of US embassies in Africa that killed 224 and injured some four thousand. Good. But the US government treated the event much as The New York Times and especially The Wall Street Journal described it, “a major victory” especially for US intelligence in the “war against al Qaeda.” The Journal went on to describe Al-Libi as “an intelligence gold mine” who can tell us “the ways that al Qaeda is decentralizing and expanding in Africa,” and to urge the government to get this war-winning information out of him by…well, you know… This is fantasy. It shows deadly misunderstanding of intelligence and of the war we are in.

There is no reason to doubt that Al-Libi is someone whose death would benefit mankind, and, in his case, some reason to regret our Constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. But pressuring him is most unlikely to yield important intelligence.

The least reason is that his interrogators will quickly demonstrate that they know very little about the matters about which they will be questioning him. The first rule of interrogation is to ask only about things of which one is absolutely certain that the prisoner knows. Letting the prisoner “know that you know” makes fruitful interrogation possible. There can be zero bluffing. The moment that interrogators show that they are either mistaken, or working from unconfirmed reports, or just trying to get an education, they discredit themselves. The prisoner can safely weave narratives of truth and tendentiousness. He can lead them on wild goose chases, at best. Pressure is irrelevant, or worse. The prisoner can better mislead the interrogators by giving the deepest disinformation only after “enhanced interrogation.”

By now, the targets of US intelligence know very well that US intelligence is so starved for knowledge, its operatives so eager to please superiors, that it tends to call good whatever comes its way. They remember – better than the US media – that CIA discovered that one of its main sources in Afghanistan was an enemy agent only after that agent had blown himself up along with seven CIA officers.

Environmentalism As Religion

We risk entering the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better

by Michael Crichton 

We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears. 

As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why. 

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious. 

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths. 

There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe. 

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith. 

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them. 

Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let's examine some of those beliefs. 

There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden? 

The IMF Proposes A 10% Supertax On All Eurozone Household Savings

It all hangs on the IMF's notion - or hope - that it can be implemented by stealth, before people have the chance to put their money somewhere else

by Raul Ilargi

This is a story that should raise an eyebrow or two on every single face in Europe, and beyond. I saw the first bits of it on a Belgian site named Express.be, whose writers in turn had stumbled upon an article in French newspaper Le Figaro, whose writer Jean-Pierre Robin had leafed through a brand new IMF report (yes, there are certain linguistic advantages in being Dutch, Canadian AND Québecois). In the report, the IMF talks about a proposal to tax everybody's savings, in the Eurozone. Looks like they just need to figure out by how much.

The IMF, I'm following Mr. Robin here, addresses the issue of the sustainability of the debt levels of developed nations, Europe, US, Japan, which today are on average 110% of GDP, or 35% more than in 2007. Such debt levels are unprecedented, other than right after the world wars. So, the Fund reasons, it's time for radical solutions.