Why Have Young People In Japan Stopped Having Sex?

Is Japan providing a glimpse of all our futures?

The Guardian

Ai Aoyama is a sex and relationship counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back street... she did "all the usual things" like tying people up and dripping hot wax on their nipples. Her work today, she says, is far more challenging. Aoyama, 52, is trying to cure what Japan's media calls sekkusu shinai shokogun, or "celibacy syndrome".

...

Japan's under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. Millions aren't even dating, and increasing numbers can't be bothered with sex. For their government, "celibacy syndrome" is part of a looming national catastrophe. Japan already has one of the world's lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060. Aoyama believes the country is experiencing "a flight from human intimacy" – and it's partly the government's fault.

...

The number of single people has reached a record high. A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all. (There are no figures for same-sex relationships.) Although there has long been a pragmatic separation of love and sex in Japan – a country mostly free of religious morals – sex fares no better. A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way.

Official alarmism doesn't help. Fewer babies were born here in 2012 than any year on record. (This was also the year, as the number of elderly people shoots up, that adult incontinence pants outsold baby nappies in Japan for the first time.) Kunio Kitamura, head of the JFPA, claims the demographic crisis is so serious that Japan "might eventually perish into extinction".

...

"Both men and women say to me they don't see the point of love. They don't believe it can lead anywhere," says Aoyama. "Relationships have become too hard."

Marriage has become a minefield of unattractive choices. Japanese men have become less career-driven, and less solvent, as lifetime job security has waned. Japanese women have become more independent and ambitious.

Lessons for Health Care Reform

Socialism and Cancer

By David Gratzer

It was every parent’s worst nightmare: California teenager Nataline Sarkisyan developed leukemia and struggled with complications after a bone marrow transplantation. She had just one hope left — a liver transplant. But in addition to her grave illness, Nataline and her family had to fight a corporate behemoth, because her health insurance company refused to cover the transplant.

The seventeen-year-old’s death in December 2007 captured national media attention. Newspaper editorials raged at her story; presidential candidate John Edwards campaigned with her family; the insurance company explained that it would review its procedures. Nataline’s sad tale seemed to confirm what many Americans already believed: that U.S. health care is scandalously expensive and not particularly good.

This is a conclusion constantly bolstered by widely-respected critics who compare the American health system to the systems of other nations. To point to just a few prominent examples from the last decade: In a 2000 assessment of the world’s health systems, the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked the U.S. system thirty-seventh — lower than even that of Colombia. In Sicko, Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary comparing health care systems, the U.S. system is portrayed as broken and cruel. A Commonwealth Fund study published in early 2008 surveyed nineteen nations in terms of preventable death and ranked the United States last.

This unrelenting stream of negativity has shaped the debate over U.S. health care reform. Consumers are souring on U.S. health care; policymakers are weighing the political and economic costs of changes to the system; and, according to one recent poll, even doctors — historically the most vocal opponents of socialized medicine — now support the idea of government-run health care.

But a closer look at American medicine shows many areas of strength. Far from dismal, American health care is by some important measures the best in the world. While no one would argue that American health care is perfect, there is excellence here — excellence that must be preserved and even built upon.

Ask yourself a simple question: If your daughter had a bad cough, would you call your pediatrician — or get her on a flight to Bogota, Colombia?

To Save Europe, Free the Markets

It’s time for European leaders to take bold actions, because the alternative is a train wreck

by Frank Hollenbeck

The current European economic strategy is to kick the can down the road. Debt levels in almost all European countries continue to rise and growth seems to be a long forgotten memory. The day of reckoning is around the corner, as Rudi Dornbush once warned, “[t]he crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought, and that’s sort of exactly the Mexican story. It took forever and then it took a night.”

To get real results fast, European leaders need to ditch austerity and focus more on policies that enable the private sector to provide the right supply at the right prices.

A good first step, which may even be politically possible, would be to change the land-use laws, allowing owners of agricultural land to dispose of their assets as they see fit. Land-use legislation in France is a perfect example of the worst of Soviet-style planning. It all began with a 1967 law requiring major cities to establish zoning plans. At first, those plans were only limited to large cities, but were soon extended to most cities. The regulatory framework on land, helped by EU laws and regulations, exploded during the 1980s and 1990s with the creation of coastal laws, wet zone laws, biodiversity laws, and nature zones preservation laws. Environmentalist groups were instrumental in the enactment of many of these new laws.

All these regulations stifled construction. From 1997-2007, France had a housing bubble, but, unlike Spain, there was very little construction since zoning laws left very little land to build on. Housing prices increased 140 percent over this period which was 90% faster than households’ incomes. Yet, construction cost only increased 30 percent. This was clearly a land-oriented bubble, and the main culprit was land use regulation.

Of course it does- you’re in a crisis

Realizing unpleasant realities

By mpersianis 

IMF, Troika and the Austerity mess

Consensus has it, the austerity drive has been harmful for economies in the European South. Indeed, this conclusion is so widely held by so many reasonable people, that one can hardly cast doubt on it. Mistakes made -sometimes silly ones, other times infuriating ones- are being admitted and they are slowly being ticked off in the “lessons learnt” list.

But at the same time, there is a lot to be asked about the effectiveness of PIGS’ programs. The latest discussions, in Cyprus and elsewhere, draw a dreadful picture.

1) Productivity was the problem, it is said, but internal devaluations and wage cuts didn’t do anything for exports and GDP growth. Worse, unemployment is still growing.

2) States were told they couldn’t borrow, and they moved into austerity mode. This, in its turn, put pressure on GDP and on fiscal revenues, essentially backfiring.

3) Another point made, is that, as programs are being implemented, gini coefficients worsen and economies are becoming more unfair.

None of this is strictly speaking wrong. Even in Ireland, the “success story” that others hope to emulate, the “end of the crisis” has come at immense suffering among the country’s citizens.

In Defence of Free Will

Waging war against modern determinism

By Tim Black

Does marriage depend on your DNA?’ asks one headline. ‘How to spot a murderer’s brain’, advises another. These are not isolated stories; they are just a couple of examples of a thoroughly deterministic worldview that has gained ascendancy in recent years. Everywhere you look, you can see its traces: our adult lives are determined by whether we were breastfed as babies; our evaluation of art is determined by our neural pathways; society’s future is determined by the laws of climate change. In this view, man is no longer the subject of history, no longer the locus of free will; rather, he is the object of history, at the mercy of forces beyond his control, his free will an illusion determined by his brain.

And it is because we at spiked have a far more modern view of man, of our capacity to shape our future rather than be shaped by it, that we have published five essays debunking determinism in several of its most prominent guises.

In the launch essay, ‘Standing up to the white-coated gods of fortune’, editor Brendan O’Neill noted the religious and superstitious form in which deterministic attitudes appeared in pre-modern times. Today, things are different. Our fate is not said to lie in the hands of a god, but in our genes or our brains or some external law of nature. The scientist, not the priest, has become our guide to the future. As O’Neill argues, ‘Fate has been brought back from the dead and she’s been dolled up in pseudoscientific rags’.

In ‘Never mind the neuro-bollocks’, Stuart Derbyshire took on the current leader in the field of scientistic determinism: neuroscience. He looked at the extent to which not only neuroscientists themselves, but professors, politicians and philosophers have thoroughly embraced the view that everything, from our behaviour to our political opinions, can be explained by looking at the workings of our grey matter. We do not consciously choose to do anything; our brains do all of that for us. In a thoroughgoing critique of this position, Derbyshire showed that while neuroscience can potentially tell us some useful things - mainly about the brain - there is much it will never be able to explain away, not least the nature of consciousness and, ultimately, free will.

When Hyman Minsky Runs For The Hills

Japan Central Bank To "Own" 100% Of GDP In 5 Years

By Tyler Durden

Over a year ago, in "Japan's WTF Chart" we showed where Japan lies on the sovereign debt-to-tax revenue continuum. The "where", with a WTF-inducing 1900% sovereign debt/revenue, was essentially off the chart as it was nearly 5 times greater than the first runner up: Greece, with 400%. Naturally, that ratio is absolutely unsustainable and the second rates begin creeping higher, all bets are off, however the day of reckoning could be delayed if as we said two years before Japan's berserko QE was unveiled, the BOJ entered "hyprintspeed" and started monetizing debt at a pace that would make Hyman Minsky and Rudy von Havenstein both break out in a lunatic cackle.

One look at the chart below, which shows JPM's estimate for various central bank holdings as a percent of host nation GDP, is enough to explain why that distant giggling is Hyman Minsky warming up... and he is running for the hills.

The reason: while as a result of its recent decision to double its monetary base in (every) two years Japan's central bank now holds about 40% of local GDP on its books, it has precommited to seeing this percentage hit 60% over the next two years. But that's jst the beginning.

As JPM's Mike Cembalest points out, the "contingent" line is where the BOJ's asset holdings as a % of GDP will rise to should Japan's 2% inflation goal prove elusive. Did we say "contingent" - we meant definite. And as the line shows, the Bank of Japan will, for the first time in history, "own" all of Japan's GDP on its balance sheet some time in 2018 when its "assets" as a percentage of GDP surpass 100%, and then proceed in linear fashion to add about 10% of GDP to its balance sheet with every passing year until everything inevitably comes crashing down.

Seventy Two Hours

Modern civilization is a product of laissez faire. It cannot be preserved under the ideology of government omnipotence

by Richard Fernandez

 “A Pyrrhic victory is a victory with such a devastating cost that it is tantamount to defeat. Someone who wins a Pyrrhic victory has been victorious in some way; however, the heavy toll negates any sense of achievement or profit.”

That about describes the academic achievement of Heinz Dietrich, one of the leading exponents of the Socialism of the 21st Century who is now distancing himself from the economic disaster about to overtake Venezuela, a country which conscientiously followed his advice.

The man credited with pioneering the idea of 21st Century socialism, which was championed and put into application in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez, recently made a damning condemnation of current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

German sociologist and political analyst Heinz Dieterich said Maduro has a “complete inability to deal with the serious problems of the country.” He added that if the Venezuelan president doesn’t do something to rectify the economic and political problems facing his country soon, he could be out of office by April of 2014.

Foreign Policy sums up it up succinctly. “Venezuela’s economy is in an endless state of disarray.” It took Dietrich’s medicine and died.

Inflation is soaring, and basic staples are increasingly harder to find. Electricity blackouts are frequent, and crime presents an enormous problem for citizens and companies crazy enough to do business there.

The problem for Venezuelans is that their government has no clue as to what to do. …

Venezuela’s persistently high inflation has several root causes. Because of repeated elections and populist tendencies, the government continues to spend much more than it earns via taxes. Since it has few options to finance its deficit, it has been forced to devalue the currency twice this year, and this means producers – who mostly rely on imports to supply the market – are forced to pass this on to consumers.

Taming inflation would require the government to order their finances, but the administration seems reluctant to do so. For example, according to government sources, giving away gasoline for (practically) nothing costs Venezuelan taxpayers $24 billion in direct subsidies and lost revenues. This amount represents roughly a quarter of all spending included in the 2013 budget. But regardless of how dire the situation is, the government refuses to consider decreasing subsidies because it is fearful of a public backlash.

It almost sounds like Socialism in the 21st century isn’t doing too well, though doubtless Dietrich will claim the fault lies in the bumbling Venezuelans not faithfully following his program. People like him inevitably try again and again and again … Thank God this can’t happen in America.

Yet we are often advised to be careful of what we want, lest we get it. And for many years people have wanted a society where, like Julia, government takes care of you. Peak Oil has an article which describes the welfare system the Obama administration has victoriously managed to enshrine at the center of American life. Now it has the permission to expand indefinitely, via the removal of caps on the debt limit. To appreciate the magnitude of Obama’s achievement Peak Oil describes how the Food Stamp shutdown was averted.

… this past weekend when a “temporary system failure” caused food stamp cards to stop working in 17 U.S. states. Within hours, there were “mini-riots” at Wal-Marts and other retailers that rely heavily on food stamp users … if Congress had not pushed through a “deal”, the USDA would have started cutting off food stamp benefits on November 1st …

According to Reuters, the state of North Carolina had already cut off some welfare benefits for the month of November … And as Mac Slavo recently detailed, the USDA was already planning to cut off food stamp assistance to millions of Americans on November 1st … It may not happen this month, or even this year, but food stamp riots are coming to America.

But riots won’t come … if the Food Stamps can be kept flowing without interruption. Welfare is the oxygen of social peace.  With it everything seems fine. Without it, asphyxiation begins almost immediately.

The transition between apparent normalcy and desperation is abrupt because, as Mike Adams writing in Natural News explains, welfare dependents have no financial or logistical reserves to speak of. Poor people live from welfare check to welfare check. The system has to keep on going. If money runs out then government has to borrow. Anything is possible except stopping the flow. Once the trickle halts then there’s literally nothing to eat, not even the possibility of foraging or growing supplementary food, a fallback which was long mankind’s strategy when facing hard times.

Green Bridge to Nowhere

A bridge leading someplace nobody would really want to go.

By Jonathan H. Adler

James Gustave “Gus” Speth is the consummate environmental insider. For over thirty years he has played a key role in the development of environmentalist organizations and agendas. He was present at the founding of the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1970 and later launched the World Resources Institute, a $27 million enterprise that may be the most influential environmental think tank in the world. He served on, and eventually chaired, President Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality, where he oversaw production of the apocalyptic Global 2000 report. During the 1990s he worked on President Clinton’s transition team and headed up the United Nations Development Program, and he is now dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

His prominence within the environmental establishment means that when Gus Speth speaks, environmentalists listen. He is not only an academic dean but, in many respects, the dean of contemporary environmental thinkers. Like others, he advocates ambitious and far-reaching environmental programs; unlike many, he has held positions in which to make such things happen. Few with his green bona fides have his currency in the halls of power or connections with global leaders. Yet like so many celebrated environmental thinkers, he lacks a clear or compelling vision of how to reconcile contemporary civilization with the need for environmental protection.

In The Bridge at the Edge of the World, Speth argues that all the environmental progress of the past thirty to forty years may be for naught, as an environmental crisis of global proportions is still with us. The resource shortfalls and ecological ruin predicted by the Global 2000 report may not have come to pass on schedule, but they are imminent nonetheless. Thus, he seeks radical change to our economic, political, and social systems. “The end of the world as we have known it” is inevitable; the only question is whether we will suffer planetary ruin or a radically transformed civilization. Speth’s hope is to point the way to the latter course.

Speth’s eco-pessimism is not particularly new or original, but his critique of the modern environmental movement could be. In his view, the modern environmental establishment has proven itself impotent. It has accomplished much, but not nearly enough. Working within the system failed, he maintains, because it did not seek sufficiently radical change. Saving human civilization from collapse requires more than minor adjustments, he warns, as environmental degradation is but a symptom of broader social problems, and is “linked powerfully with other social realities, including growing social inequality and neglect and the erosion of democratic governance and popular control.” Reversing course will require a “transformative change in the system itself,” including an “assault on the citadel of consumption” and the remaking of corporations. “Our duty,” Speth proclaims, is “to struggle against the contempocentrism and anthropocentrism that dominate modern life.” A “bridge” to a sustainable society requires revisiting democratic capitalism, remaking industrial civilization, and reorienting human consciousness; “we must return to fundamentals and seek to understand both the underlying forces driving such destructive trends and the economic and political system that gives these forces free rein.” Nothing less will do.

Potemkin Parliament

Washington’s governing systems are in a bad way

By Mark Steyn

The least dispiriting moment of another grim week in Washington was the sight of ornery veterans tearing down the Barrycades around the war memorials on the National Mall, dragging them up the street, and dumping them outside the White House. This was, as Kevin Williamson wrote at National Review, “as excellent a gesture of the American spirit as our increasingly docile nation has seen in years.” Indeed. The wounded vet with two artificial legs balancing the Barrycade on his Segway was especially impressive. It would have been even better had these disgruntled citizens neatly lined up the Barrycades across the front of the White House and round the sides, symbolically Barrycading him in as punishment for Barrycading them out. But, in a town where an unarmed woman can be left a bullet-riddled corpse merely for driving too near His Benign Majesty’s palace and nobody seems to care, one appreciates a certain caution.

By Wednesday, however, it was business as usual. Which is to say the usual last-minute deal just ahead of the usual make-or-break deadline to resume spending as usual. There was nothing surprising about this. Everyone knew the Republicans were going to fold. Folding is what Republicans do. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are so good at folding Obama should hire them as White House valets. So the only real question was when to fold. They could at least have left it for a day or two after the midnight chimes of October 17 had come and gone. It would have been useful to demonstrate that just as the sequester did not cause the sky to fall and the shutdown had zero impact on the life of the country so this latest phoney-baloney do-or-die date would not have led to the end of the world as we know it. If you’re going to place another trillion dollars of debt (or more than the entire national debts of Canada and Australia combined) on the backs of the American people in one grubby late-night deal, you might as well get a teachable moment out of it.

The GOP was concerned about polls showing their approval ratings somewhere between Bashar Assad and the ebola virus, but it’s hard to see why capitulation should command popularity: The late Osama bin Laden’s famous observation about the strong horse and the weak horse has some relevance to domestic politics, too. Republicans spent a lot of time whining that, if Obama was prepared to negotiate with the Iranians, the Syrians, and the Russians, why wouldn’t he negotiate with the GOP? Well, the obvious answer is Rouhani, Assad, and Putin don’t curl up in a fetal position at the first tut-tut from Bob Schieffer or Diane Sawyer.

The thesis of my recent book After America is stated on page six thereof — “that the prevailing political realities of the United States do not allow for any meaningful course correction.” That’s what the political class confirmed yet again this week. Which brings me to the sentence immediately following: “And, without meaningful course correction, America is doomed.”

Finally … Meet the World’s First Ever ‘Climate Refugee’

49,999,999 to Go

by Pater Tenebrarum

Back in April 2011, the UN engaged in what Anthony Watts referred to as 'bureaucratic idiocy at its finest'. It all started with Gavin Atkins asking a fair enough question: “What happened with the climate refugees?” 

“In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. These people, it was said, would flee a range of disasters including sea level rise, increases in the numbers and severity of hurricanes, and disruption to food production.

The UNEP even provided a handy map. The map shows us the places most at risk including the very sensitive low lying islands of the Pacific and Caribbean.

It so happens that just a few of these islands and other places most at risk have since had censuses, so it should be possible for us now to get some idea of the devastating impact climate change is having on their populations. Let’s have a look at the evidence:

Bahamas:

Nassau, The Bahamas – The 2010 national statistics recorded that the population growth increased to 353,658 persons in The Bahamas. The population change figure increased by 50,047 persons during the last 10 years.

St Lucia:

The island-nation of Saint Lucia recorded an overall household population increase of 5 percent from May 2001 to May 2010 based on estimates derived from a complete enumeration of the population of Saint Lucia during the conduct of the recently completed 2010 Population and Housing Census.

Seychelles:

Population 2002, 81755

Population 2010, 88311

Solomon Islands:

The latest Solomon Islands population has surpassed half a million – that’s according to the latest census results.

It’s been a decade since the last census report, and in that time the population has leaped 100-thousand.

Meanwhile, far from being places where people are fleeing, no fewer than the top six of the very fastest growing cities in China, Shenzzen, Dongguan, Foshan, Zhuhai, Puning and Jinjiang, are absolutely smack bang within the shaded areas identified as being likely sources of climate refugees.

Similarly, many of the fastest growing cities in the United States also appear within or close to the areas identified by the UNEP as at risk of having climate refugees.

More censuses are due to come in this year, and we await the results for Bangladesh and the Maldives -said to be places most at risk -with interest.

However, a very cursory look at the first available evidence seems to show that the places identified by the UNEP as most at risk of having climate refugees are not only not losing people, they are actually among the fastest growing regions in the world.” 

(emphasis added)

Oops! After that monumental blunder, you would normally expect the UN to do something along the lines of publishing a press release that could be saying something like: “We hereby concede that we were completely wrong about 'climate refugees'. We  apologize for having unnecessarily contributed to the hysteria and panic over climate change”.

So what did the UN do?

It simply 'disappeared' the site containing its 2005 claims – when clicking on the link, browsers suddenly displayed a '404' error message instead. Then it dispatched one of its employees to comment on Gavin Atkins' article as follows: 

America The Reckless

The Show Must Go On at Any Price

by Michael Spence

The world’s developed countries face growth and employment shortfalls, while developing countries are confronting huge challenges in adapting to increasingly volatile capital flows while adjusting their growth patterns to sustain economic development. And yet America’s political dysfunction has come to marginalize these (and other) crucial issues. It is all very difficult to fathom.

The threat of a default on US sovereign debt has been lifted – for now – but the deeper problem persists: For America’s Republicans and Democrats, negotiating a fiscal grand compromise appears to carry higher costs than playing a game of brinkmanship, even at the risk of default. Surely this involves a collective miscalculation of the longer-term costs.

Setting aside the external impact on the global economy, the damage to domestic stability and growth from anything other than a short-term technical default would be so severe that the political system (and both parties with it) could not withstand the backlash. Domestic and foreign holders of US Treasury bills would regard a deliberate, unforced default as a betrayal of trust.

Some are reassured by this fact, because it suggests that a real default will not happen. And that means that the fragile global economy, dependent (for now) on a single country for its main reserve currency, can withstand America’s political shenanigans.

That may be true, and it may be the only practical choice in the short run. But the US pattern of decision-making (or non-decision-making) has already created additional risk. It will surely be reflected in upward pressure on interest rates, at which point the Federal Reserve will enter the picture.

Philanthropy’s Original Sin

War Against the Weak

In a dark chapter of American history, thousands of people were once forcibly sterilized with the aim of improving the nation’s “genetic stock.” But while state governments and the scientific community have been making amends for eugenics, another set of key players has been all but overlooked: philanthropists, who sought to use their wealth and influence to care for the weak and vulnerable by eliminating them.

By William A. Schambra

Philanthropy has many wonderful qualities — and never tires of proclaiming them, for one quality it sorely lacks is humility. It regularly thumps itself on the back, for instance, for devoting some $300 billion a year to good causes. And though philanthropic spending on social causes is dwarfed by that of the government, foundations proudly claim that dollar for dollar their spending is in fact more effective than the government’s. While government tends to stick with the safe and the routine, philanthropy regularly and energetically seeks out the next new thing; it claims it is at the cutting edge of social change, being innovative, scientific, and progressive. Philanthropy, as legendary Ford Foundation program officer Paul Ylvisaker once claimed, is society’s “passing gear.”

Indeed, philanthropy increasingly prides itself on its ability to shape and guide government spending, testing out potential solutions for social problems and then aggressively advocating for their replication by government. Any employee of a philanthropic organization can immediately tick off a list of major accomplishments of American foundations, all of which followed this pattern of bold experimentation leading to government adoption. For example, Andrew Carnegie’s library program pledged funding to construct the buildings, if the local municipalities would provide the sites and help pay for the libraries’ operation. The Rockefeller Foundation funded a moderately successful hookworm abatement program in the southern United States, which strongly involved local governments. The Ford Foundation’s “gray areas” project in the 1960s experimented with new approaches to urban poverty that then became the basis for the Great Society’s War on Poverty.

And yet, in all this deafening clamor of self-approbation, we rarely hear from these foundations about another undertaking that bears all the strategic hallmarks of American philanthropy’s much-touted successes, with far more significant results: that the first American foundations were deeply immersed in eugenics — the effort to promote the reproduction of the “fit” and to suppress the reproduction of the “unfit.”

Philanthropy vs. Charity

Although some of its animating ideas of course reach much further back into history, modern eugenics began with the mid-nineteenth-century work of Sir Francis Galton, the great English statistician and cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton proposed that talent and high social rank had hereditary origins, and that society could and should give monetary incentives for marriages of and progeny from eminent couples. By the turn of the twentieth century, eugenics was considered a cutting-edge scientific discipline backed up by a growing political and social movement — and therefore a particularly worthy candidate for philanthropists’ attention. It is no surprise, then, that the first major foundations devoted resources not only to the research behind the movement, but also to lobbying for government adoption of eugenic policies: at the federal level, restricting immigration of the “unfit”; at the state level, their mandatory institutionalization and sterilization.

Eugenics was American philanthropy’s first great global success. It inspired and cultivated programs around the world, but nowhere with more consequence than in the nation that sought most fervently to imitate America’s eugenic example, Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

The Obamacare Train Wreck

Defunding or repealing the law is practically impossible, but here’s how we can fix it

by Richard A. Epstein

It is now common knowledge that the bugs in the Obamacare website have been embedded in the system from the start. For the past two weeks, not only have many individuals found it impossible to access the website, but they are often frozen in place once they pass through the initial portal. The problems will just get worse. The current law requires extensive communications between enrollees and their chosen insurance carriers, as well as massive interaction with both federal and state organizations. As a result, web traffic builds up behind bottlenecks and leads to massive frustration. As I warned last May, watching Obamacare unravel is a painful business.

The Bright Side of Bad News

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has tried to put a positive gloss on the messy situation with the dubious observation that the system glitches are due to heavy consumer demand. Her statement subtly implies that the nation’s alleged need for the program is the cause of its momentary glitches. She claims that things are “getting better by the day.” Not so. The government site was not built for heavy traffic, nor was it tested before going live. It is no mean feat to try to fix a balky computer system on the fly.

As a result of these problems, calls to delay the implementation of the individual mandate are now reaching a fever pitch, such as Peggy Noonan’s to delay the individual mandate a year. The bugs need to be worked out before ordinary people are slapped with fines for failing to enroll in the derelict system before the penalty deadline now set for March 31, 2014.

Thus far, the Obama Administration has been mum on the sources and extent of the difficulties. But make no mistake about it: they reflect the broader structural weaknesses of the program, which were hidden from view by the disastrous launch. Nonetheless, the system’s basic design is flawed, and its gaffes will become only more apparent as implementation moves forward.

Toleration and Bias

The Genius of American Citizenship

By Richard Samuelson

Joseph Stalin apparently coined the term "American exceptionalism" to denounce the heresy that Marx's universal historical laws would somehow not apply to the United States. Though it's now clear that every nation is an exception to the historical dialectic that was supposed to culminate in the triumph of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, the U.S. remains an exceptional nation in other crucial ways. Anyone who becomes an American citizen is fully American, from that day forward. By contrast, a naturalized citizen of France, Japan, or Nigeria can live for decades in his new country, and his family can remain there for generations, yet many of the locals will still think of them as foreigners. To be sure, there is an American culture. When traveling around the world, one can often spot other Americans, and not only because of language; dress, deportment, and music often distinguish us. But when it comes to American nationalism, such things are relatively trivial. In America, politics, not culture, makes the nation.

The exceptional character of American nationalism confuses students of nationalism. According to a standard work like Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism (1983), "nationalism uses the pre-existing, historically inherited proliferation of cultures or cultural wealth." Is American a nation in that sense? Not exactly. American identity is bound up with our Union, Constitution, and laws, rather than with tribe, clan, or culture. Thus, one of our early treaties asserted that the U.S. "is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." That stipulation presumes that American identity is primarily political, denying as it does a massive historical and cultural fact—that the vast majority of America's citizens have been Christians. The cultural heritage of most Americans is Christian, and even the American creed draws upon the Judeo-Christian tradition in important ways. In the U.S., however, nation and culture are separate to an unusual degree. That reality, in turn, affects a range of important questions connecting what kind of government America will have to what kind of nation it will be.

Welcoming Immigrants

We Americans often celebrate our ability to turn people from all over the world into Americans. That is not to deny that immigration policy has, periodically, roiled our politics. In the 1790s Federalists worried that refugees from European revolutions would bring their mistaken political ideas to America. The 1850s saw nativist animus against Irish immigrants and, more generally, against growing numbers of Catholics in what had been a predominantly Protestant land. In the early 20th century, popular and Progressive ideas of racial purity influenced the debate. Today, the issue is immigration from South and Central America.

Nihil Scriptum Est

And then again, Nihil Sub Sole Novum

While Santiago Capital's Brent Johnson believes "anything is possible," he warns "there's a catch." While it may be true for the individual (climb Everest, win a gold medal, walk on the moon), it is not true for the world at large because, as he so eloquently notes in this brief presentation, "the best thing we can learn from history is... that the world does not learn from history." And there is indeed plenty that is occurring once again - in oh-so-predictable cycles - that we have seen time and time again... and apparently choose to ignore the conclusion. As Johnson concludes, "you either believe in magic, or you believe in math."

Something here for everyone... 4th Turnings, Kondratieff Waves, Dalio's beautiful deleveraging, the unsustainable nature of the current cycle and the pulling forward of our demand... "you either believe in magic... or you believe in math"

Listen at this great short video at the end of page of:

 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-17/you-either-believe-magic-or-you-believe-math