Desperate Leftists VS Fantasy Fascism

Anti-fascists can't admit that the EDL is crumbling because posturing against this allegedly Nazi grouping is all they have going for them.

By Patrock Hayes

The decision of English Defence League (EDL) founder and leader Tommy Robinson to quit his post last week has prompted much debate. His justification is that the EDL’s street protests against Islamic extremism were ‘no longer productive’ - if, of course, they ever were.

In truth, the EDL has been a spent political force for a couple of years. In 2011, when it was at its peak, it could get together several thousand people for its demos; today, it is hard pushed to reach triple digits. In fact, you’ll find fewer EDL supporters than police officers on a typical EDL demo today, the police’s primary role being to keep the EDL away from the ranks of anti-fascist protesters that trail around after the EDL like aggressive groupies. The EDL doesn’t even have any real membership base to speak of, often referring to the number of ‘Likes’ on its Facebook page as evidence of its alleged popularity.

Given how personality-driven the EDL has been, the departure of the charismatic Robinson, alongside his deputy Kevin Carroll, is likely to prove terminal for the group. Attempts by relative unknowns to assume leadership, most notably former Lincolnshire councillor Elliott Fountain, have led to ridicule and bafflement among followers. A planned demo in Bradford last weekend went ahead and mobilised a few hundred, but it quickly petered out due to a lack of speakers.

It seems that the 30-year-old Robinson’s decision to quit was as much personal as political - he says his political activities were causing his young family problems. But there does seem to be another element to his decision, too. Announcing his departure at a press conference organised by the anti-extremist group the Quilliam Foundation – formed by reformed Islamists – Robinson said the EDL has been hijacked by ‘Nazis’. He has grown tired, it seems, of having to defend the actions of certain ‘extremist right-wing’ members of the EDL, singling out an individual in a press conference who recently sported a tattoo on his chest with a mosque being blown up. ‘I want to lead a revolution against Islamist ideology’, he said. ‘I don’t want to lead a revolution against Muslims.’

My Very Own Argentine Welfare

Ruined by Welfare

By Bill Bonner

Stock market investors seem to have gotten over their joy at Janet Yellen’s appointment as the next chair of the Fed. Now they are focusing on their chagrin at Washington. Without a deal being passed by Congress, the feds will have to stop borrowing tomorrow. On Tuesday, the Dow fell 133. Gold did nothing worth mentioning. As usual, investors are looking in the wrong direction…

Where does real wealth come from?

We will answer the question ourselves: Not from the Fed. Not from the government. Not from stimulus programs. Not from the Democrats. Or the Republicans. Or the Tea Party. Not from Obama. Not from a bipartisan agreement to extend spending and pretend that the feds can pay their bills.

Nope. No gimmicks. No magic. No claptrap formulas. Wealth comes from work, savings and innovation. Typically, somebody works long hours, saves money and starts a business that produces something people want. 

Mountain Zombies

But now, in the mountains of Argentina… as on the fruited plains of the United States of America… the wealth machine has begun to sputter and choke.
We promised to tell you how our real estate investment in Argentina has become a welfare program. Coming right up.

But first, here’s a story from the US as told by The Economist: 

“Established firms are usually in the business of preserving the old world; start-ups are under more pressure to come up with new ideas, and if they do so they usually create lots of new jobs. But these growth machines have broken down. America is not producing as many start-ups as it did a decade ago and those that have been created are providing fewer jobs – less than five each, compared with an historical average of about seven. Start-ups created 2.7 million new jobs in the 2012 financial year compared with 4.7 million in 1999.” 

What went wrong? Zombies. 

“[I]n 2009-11 the Obama administration issued 106 new regulations each expected to have an economic impact of at least $100 million a year. [...] The Vanguard Group, an asset management firm, calculates that since 2011 Washington’s bickering politicians have imposed, in effect, a $261 billion uncertainty tax that has cost up to 1 million new jobs.

The Sarbanes-Oxley act imposes additional costs of $1 million a year on public companies. Investors no longer bother with “growth stocks” because there is more money to be made in making lots of big trades in established firms. The dramatic decline in the number of firms going public since 2001 is worrying because, over the past four decades, more than 90% of jobs created by start-ups came into being after they went public.” 

Similarly, up in the Andes, the Argentine zombies are squeezing out initiative wherever they find it. On the ranch that we bought in Argentina were 25 families living in various nooks and crannies up in the hills. We didn’t even know they were there. Nobody mentioned it.

We were told there were some people who rented some of our land. They paid us in sheep, goats and cattle. We thought they were independent yeomen farmers… and a source of revenue for the farm. Some of them came to visit before we left on Sunday.

The Paradox of Conservative Bioethics

The Necessity and Tragedy of Public Bioethics

By Yuval Levin

Among the more prominent peculiarities of our politics in recent years is that something called “bioethics” has become a key conservative priority. The bioethics movement has been around in America since at least the late 1960s, when the Hastings Center was created as the first bioethics think tank. Its task was to advance the study of the ethics of biology and medicine, and to examine the moral and social significance of new developments in genetics, psychopharmacology, reproductive medicine, and other new frontiers of biological science. The movement has since grown by leaps and bounds, and bioethics has developed into a profession, if not an industry.

Some American conservatives have long shared the concerns that animate bioethics. The pro-life movement has always worried deeply about the treatment of the unborn by scientists and doctors, and many conservatives have through the years been interested in various issues surrounding medical ethics, illicit drug-use, assisted suicide, and other social and cultural matters that have much to do with modern science. But it was not until fairly recently that bioethics emerged as a general and prominent category of concern for the American right.

That concern has been particularly influenced by worries about what has been dubbed the “Brave New World.” This allusion to Aldous Huxley’s famous book hints at a vision of a world reshaped by biotechnology: procreation replaced by manufacture, the pursuit of happiness replaced by drugs, and human nature remade into something lower and shallower, more easily satisfied but less capable of greatness and awe. This general vision has expressed itself in specific disquiet about reproductive technologies like cloning and genetic engineering; about the transformation of human embryos into research tools and raw materials; about psychoactive drugs and assorted enhancement technologies; and about a wide array of other attempts to fundamentally reshape human life through biology and medicine. American conservatives have begun to think hard about “where biotechnology may be taking us,” as Leon Kass puts it, and what we might do about it.

The resulting intellectual and political activity has melded some of the interests of the pro-life movement with those of conservatives more concerned with the general culture and its institutions, and it has formed, through that combination, an altogether plausible conservative program. This trend, together with several sensational recent advances in biotechnology, has sent bioethics toward the top of the agenda of the American right. President Bush’s first prime-time address to the nation was about his new policy on the funding of embryonic stem cell research. Human cloning has been prominent on the congressional agenda for much of the past two years. And a substantial portion of the intellectual energy of the conservative movement has been devoted to the cause of a new bioethics.

The trouble with money

Modeling Money

by Robert P. Murphy

Non-economists often think that "economists study money." The reality, though, is that most academic economists hardly think about money at all. Whether we're talking about tariffs, wages, Social Security taxes, or pollution, the analysis (though often couched in dollar terms for the benefit of the general public) really is grounded in microeconomics and would work just as well if we were talking about a barter economy. In fact, in a typical Ph.D. program, students study models with money in them only when explicitly trying to answer questions about central-bank policy. Even in these cases—in which the very purpose is to draw conclusions about appropriate monetary policy—the underlying logic of the model doesn't really have a role for money. Instead, economists insert money into the model somewhat awkwardly, through various ad hoc assumptions.

Capitalism, Socialism or Fascism?

Whatever you call it, it is a very dangerous system

By WashingtonsBlog

What is the current American economy: capitalism, socialism or fascism?

Socialism

Many people call the Bush and Obama administration’s approach to the economic crisis “socialism”.

Are they right?

Well, Nouriel Roubini writes in a recent essay:

This is a crisis of solvency, not just liquidity, but true deleveraging has not begun yet because the losses of financial institutions have been socialised and put on government balance sheets. This limits the ability of banks to lend, households to spend and companies to invest…

The releveraging of the public sector through its build-up of large fiscal deficits risks crowding out a recovery in private sector spending.

Let's Get the U.S. Debt Default Over With

Why it’s inevitable and why postponing it will exacerbate its consequences

by Martin Hutchinson
Washington has been consumed by negotiations about avoiding a debt default. On all sides we are told how irresponsible and disastrous it would be to allow the United States to default on its debt obligations. That's quite correct: it would be irresponsible and disastrous. But given the fiscal and monetary policies of the last five years, and the slim-to-none chance of getting them reversed in the near future, such a default is inevitable in the long run. Thus we might as well get it over with, since the earlier we default, the smaller the amount of wealth and living standards that will be wiped out.

The excess of government debt isn't just a U.S. problem, far from it. The IMF's Fiscal Monitor "Taxing Times" released this week, sets out the bloating of government debt worldwide over the last five years.  U.S. gross public debt has increased from 73.3% of GDP in 2008 to a projected 106.7% of GDP in 2013, an increase of 33.4 percentage points, or 6.7 percentage points a year. That's not as large as the total deficits, because even if real GDP hasn't grown much, nominal GDP has, reducing the debt/GDP ratio. 

The 1970s, in this respect, were in retrospect a healthy period, in which the large budget deficits (but nothing like as large as recently) were wiped out by inflation, so the U.S. debt/GDP ratio actually fell. Compared to the 1970s, the last few years have seen even slower growth, low but not zero inflation and budget deficits (from the middle of this decade to be joined by rapidly growing social security and Medicare deficits) a multiple of their 1970s size. In consequence, the debt/GDP ratio has grown at a rapid clip. 

6.7 percentage points a year is a LOT; it's more than double the rate of growth of nominal GDP, which itself includes a chunk of inflation. Thus the rise in debt is swallowing more than twice as much as the economy generates in new output each year. Needless to say, this is completely unsustainable.

The problem is not confined to the U.S. Britain's problem is almost as bad; gross debt there increased from 51.9% of GDP in 2008 to a projected 82.1% of GDP, an increase of 30.2 percentage points, or 6.2 percentage points a year—again double the increase in nominal GDP, which in Britain has consisted almost entirely of inflation. This is not due to British "austerity"—policies since May 2010 have slowed the debt increase somewhat, but killed the economy, since they involved heavy tax rises and very few genuine spending cuts. 

The eurozone's performance as a whole has not been quite as bad—the debt/GDP ratio has increased by 25.4 percentage points, or 5.1 percentage points a year—still more than double the eurozone's feeble nominal GDP growth. 

Obesity is not a disease

Pretending otherwise will stoke an epidemic and crush the NHS

By Max Pemberton

‘Well, what diets have you tried so far?’ asked the GP, flicking through the patient’s notes. I was an innocent trainee doctor on my general practice placement at the time and watched the interaction carefully, sensing a row was about to ensue. ‘Look, I don’t want to go on a diet, I want you to prescribe me these,’ snapped the patient, bringing out a neatly folded page she had torn out of a magazine. The GP, rolling his eyes at me, took the paper but didn’t read it. I suspected he’d read it before. This was yet another example of what’s becoming a very British epidemic: obesity being self-diagnosed as disease.

The doctor attempted to explain that tablets really aren’t suitable in her case. As well as having some potentially nasty side effects, they’re expensive to prescribe, and don’t offer a long-term solution. This was clearly not what the woman wanted to hear. ‘Fine then, don’t help me, see if I care. I’ll get my sister to get them off her GP — he gives her whatever she wants’; and she stormed out. It struck me as bizarre that while some people using the NHS are dangerously malnourished, other people are desperate to take tablets to ensure that their food passes through their body unabsorbed, while the taxpayer foots the bill.

It happens all the time. The patients who are not interested in changing their diet in any way, demanding to have their cake, eat it and then pop a pill so that the calories never touch their waistline. And as a result, Britain now combines austerity with obesity. The majority of us are now overweight or obese — a third of children are considered too heavy. It costs an extra £5 billion a year, and 300 hospital admissions a day are directly due to obesity. To pick up the newspapers is to witness a country adjusting itself to losing a national battle of the bulge.

Take the East Midlands Ambulance Service. It emerged this week that it has been picking up so many fat patients — weighing in excess of the 28-stone maximum — that it needs a new fleet. It has, hitherto, been struggling along with just one ambulance for fatties (a ‘bariatric’ vehicle), but now thinks all 272 of its ambulances need to be upgraded with double-wide stretchers for patients who (it says) can weigh in at 55 stone. The plan will cost £27 million.

Why Paul Krugman should never be taken seriously again

Where I come from, we do not fear bullies. We despise them.

By Niall Ferguson

It’s an ill wind that blows no one any good. The financial crisis that came to a head five years ago with the failure of Lehman Brothers has been especially beneficial to the economist Paul Krugman. In his widely read New York Times column and blog, Krugman regularly boasts that he has been ‘right’ about the crisis and its consequences. As he wrote in June last year:

‘I (and those of like mind) have been right about everything.’

Those who dare to disagree with him — myself included — he denounces as members of the ‘Always-Wrong Club.‘

He wrote back in April:

‘Maybe I actually am right and maybe the other side actually does contain a remarkable number of knaves and fools. … Look at the results: again and again, people on the opposite side prove to have used bad logic, bad data, the wrong historical analogies, or all of the above. I’m Krugtron the Invincible!’

That last allusion is to the 1980s science fiction superhero, Voltron (below). The resemblance between Krugman and Voltron was suggested by one of the gaggle of bloggers who are to Krugman what Egyptian plovers are to crocodiles.

As a Princeton professor and Nobel Prize winner, Krugman is indeed widely believed to be intellectually invincible. He himself acknowledges having made only two mistakes, both predating the crisis: the impact of information technology on productivity, which he underestimated, and the significance of the federal deficits of the Bush administration, which he overestimated.

‘In the Great Recession and aftermath, however, I went with [my] models — and they worked!’

‘Let those who are without error cast the first stone,’ Krugman wrote back in 2010. Unfortunately, this is not an injunction he himself has heeded. Repeatedly, over the last five years, he has heaped opprobrium on others. His latest performance is characteristic; perhaps not quite intentionally he even refers to ‘my own unpleasantness with Ferguson’.

Sterile Thinking

A society that brutally separates the fit from the unfit paves the way to its own self-inflicted horrors

This winter is the centenary of the first mandatory sterilization laws in the United States, a major milestone in the eugenics movement. In 1907, as a precondition to parole, some 300 Indiana prisoners came forward to be sterilized. Holding that “heredity plays a most important part in the transmission of crime, idiocy, and imbecility,” the state legislature passed the first law that March permitting prisons to require sterilization “to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists.”

This was the first legislative application of the notion of “negative eugenics” — the idea that the undesirable elements of society could be reduced by preventing their reproduction. A flurry of states followed Indiana’s example, although many of their statutes were quickly overturned in court. Few sterilization operations were actually performed until the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, ruled that 

“it is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

This opinion bears an uncanny resemblance to a passage penned in 1924 in Germany: 

“To prevent defective persons from reproducing equally defective offspring, is an act dictated by the clearest light of reason.... It would prevent the unmerited suffering of millions of persons, and above all would, in the end, result in a steady increase in human welfare.” 

These lines from Mein Kampf were put into practice when the Nazis came to power in 1933. American eugenics advocates, who could not know the full horrors to come, lauded the Nazis for “proceeding toward a policy that will accord with the best thought of eugenists in all civilized countries.” Years later, defendants at Nuremberg appealed to American precedent at their trials.

In the United States, tacit public support of compulsory sterilization eventually led to enthusiastic participation by asylums and prisons, even as scientific criticism of sterilization’s eugenic assumptions deepened. In 1934, the American Neurological Association created a committee to investigate the practice in institutions for the mentally ill; it found no scientific basis for a sterilization program, and caustically remarked that “the race is not going to the dogs, as has been the favorite assertion for some time.” Nevertheless, eugenic sterilization did not significantly abate until after World War II. By the 1960s, when the practice finally crept out of favor, an estimated 60,000 people had been sterilized in the United States.

What was lost goes well beyond the harm to individuals and the betrayal of basic justice in Buck v. Bell (which was never overturned). The desire to avoid the birth of disabled or troubled individuals is of course understandable. But a society that implements this desire by brutally separating the fit from the unfit paves the way to its own self-inflicted horrors. We forget the dark lessons of our eugenic history at our own peril.

Now France to Break Away From EU?

Stay Tuned

By john smith

Time to take bets on Frexit and the French franc? ... We have a minor earthquake in France. A party committed to withdrawal from the euro, the restoration of French franc, and the complete destruction of monetary union has just defeated the establishment in the Brignoles run-off election. It is threatening Frexit as well, which rather alters the political chemistry of Britain's EU referendum. Marine Le Pen's Front National won 54pc of the vote. It was a bad defeat for the Gaulliste UMP, a party at risk of disintegration unless it can find a leader in short order. President Hollande's Socialists were knocked out in the first round, due to mass defection to the Front National by the working-class Socialist base. The Socialists thought the Front worked to their advantage by splitting the Right. They have at last woken up to the enormous political danger. The Front National is now the most popular party in France with 24pc according to a new Ifop poll. – UK Telegraph

In our quest to quantify what we call the Internet Reformation, the Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is sometimes helpful because of his skill (unusual in the mainstream media) in integrating business and economic trends with political ones.

This article, excerpted above, is a good example of how he does it. It seems once again to support our own perspective that the 21st century is a good deal different from the 20th and what we call the power elite is having a harder time than ever establishing and maintaining its dominant social themes.

In the US, we see ongoing changes stemming from an inchoate Tea Party movement, which in our view is a version of libertarianism. And as we've often pointed out, libertarianism, appealing both to social libertarians on the left and economic libertarians on the right, is quite possibly the biggest political movement in the US.

In England you've got UKIP, a libertarian leaning organization that wants to take Britain out of the EU. And now, in France you've got the Le Pen Front National – a party that used to be considered fascist and racist but which, under the leadership of the charismatic Marine Le Pen, has become somewhat left-libertarian, though admittedly more left than libertarian.

Evans-Pritchard does us the service of alerting us to this development. Here's more:

Both the two great governing parties of the post-War era have fallen behind for the first time ever. The Gaullistes (UMP) are at 22pc, and the Socialists at 21pc. I am watching this with curiosity, since Marine Le Pen told me in June that her first order of business on setting foot in the Elysee Palace (if elected) would be to announce a referendum on membership of the European Union, with a "rendez-vous" one year later:

"... Europe is just a great bluff. On one side there is the immense power of sovereign peoples, and on the other side are a few technocrats." Asked if she intended to pull France of the euro immediately, she hesitated for a second or two and then said: "Yes, because the euro blocks all economic decisions. France is not a country that can accept tutelage from Brussels."

Officials will be told to draw up plans for the restoration of the franc. Eurozone leaders will face a stark choice: either work with France for a "sortie concerted" or coordinated EMU break-up: or await their fate in a disorderly collapse. "We cannot be seduced. The euro ceases to exist the moment that France leaves, and that is our incredible strength. What are they going to do, send in tanks?"

Liberals, Conservatives and Medical Progress

Infinite Progress and Finite Resources

By Daniel Callahan

Whether one wants to call it a problem, a plague, or a pending crisis, it is clear that healthcare systems throughout the developed world are increasingly difficult to sustain. This is true whether they are market-dominated (as in the United States) or government-run and heavily regulated (as in Canada and Western Europe). In the U.S., tens of millions go without health insurance. Medicaid costs are giving the states economic fits, and the projections for Medicare over the next two decades are a well-publicized source of anxiety. In Canada, waiting lists plague the national healthcare system, and though patients are well covered for physician and hospital costs, they also pay a good bit out of their own pockets for other services. In Western Europe, the combination of lagging economies, high unemployment, and a citizenry unwilling to tolerate benefit cuts is giving administrators and legislators a chronic headache.

Yet even as healthcare costs continue to rise faster than inflation on both sides of the Atlantic, there is good reason to doubt that the actual health gains will be anywhere proportional to the cost escalation. Indeed, the recent history of health progress shows a significant divergence of costs and benefits: small health gains achieved at higher costs. Moreover, the fact that the rising cost problem afflicts all systems should undercut a common misconception afflicting both pro-government and pro-market advocates: that there is an organizational solution if only their respective ideological strategies were implemented. That may have been the case in the past, but it makes less and less sense in light of expensive medical advances and undiminished public demand for them. We increasingly want more healthcare than we can reasonably afford, and we are often unsatisfied with the healthcare we get.

Our predicament invites us to consider two fundamental but neglected problems: our unwavering national commitment to medical progress and the way medicine and the broader culture situate the place of death in human life. But haven’t these problems been discussed enough already — such as the high cost of medical care at the end of life or the role of technology in pushing up costs? I think not. The dilemmas of progress and the realities of death are commonly domesticated and often trivialized, turned into little more than troublesome management puzzles. We have lacked a serious and sustained consideration of the value of medical progress, beyond simply discussing how best to manage and pay for it. And we have approached death in the public square mainly with calls for new death-defying advances and greater patient choice at the end of life. Such responses are insufficient to the challenges ahead and the gravity of these subjects.

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....