America’s Coastal Royalty

The real national divide isn’t between red and blue states

By  Victor Davis Hanson

The densely populated coastal corridors from Boston to Washington and from San Diego to Berkeley are where most of America’s big decisions are made. 

They remind us of two quite different Americas: one country along these coasts and everything else in between. Those in Boston, New York, and Washington determine how our government works; what sort of news, books, art, and fashion we should consume; and whether our money and investments are worth anything.

The Pacific corridor is just as influential, but in a hipper, cooler fashion. Whether America suffers through another zombie film or one more Lady Gaga video or Kanye West’s latest soft-porn rhyme is determined by Hollywood — mostly by executives who live in the la-la land of the thin Pacific strip from Malibu to Palos Verdes.

The next smart phone or search engine 5.0 will arise from the minds of tech geeks who pay $2,000 a month for studio apartments and drive BMWs in Menlo Park, Palo Alto, or Mountain View.

The road to riches and influence, we are told, lies in being branded with a degree from a coastal-elite campus like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, or Berkeley. How well a Yale professor teaches an 18-year-old in a class on American history does not matter as much as the fact that the professor helps to stamp the student with the Ivy League logo. That mark is the lifelong golden key that is supposed to unlock the door to coastal privilege.

Fly over or drive across the United States, and the spatial absurdity of this rather narrow coastal monopoly is immediately apparent to the naked eye. Outside of these power corridors, our vast country appears pretty empty. The nation’s muscles that produce our oil, gas, food, lumber, minerals, and manufactured goods work unnoticed in this sparsely settled fly-over expanse.

People rise each morning in San Francisco and New York and count on plentiful food, fuel, and power. They expect service in elevators and limos that are mostly made elsewhere by people of the sort they seldom see and don’t really know — other than to influence through a cable-news show, a new rap song, the next federal health-care mandate, or more phone apps.

In California, whether farms receive contracted irrigation water, whether a billion board feet of burned timber will be salvaged from the recent Sierra Nevada forest fires, whether a high-speed-rail project obliterates thousands of acres of ancestral farms, whether gas will be fracked, or whether granite should be mined to make tony kitchen counters is all determined largely by coastal elites who take these plentiful resources for granted. Rarely, however, do they see how their own necessities are procured. Instead, they feel deeply ambivalent about the grubbier people and culture that made them.

In Kansas or Utah, people do not pay $1,000 per square foot for their homes as they do on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They do not gossip with the people who write their tax laws, as is common in the Georgetown area of Washington. Those in the empty northern third of California do not see Facebook or Oracle founders at the local Starbucks any more than they bump into the Kardashians at a hip bistro.

The problem is not just that the coasts determine how everyone else is to lead their lives, but that those living in our elite corridors have no idea about how life is lived just a short distance away in the interior — much less about the sometimes tragic consequences of their own therapeutic ideology on the distant, less influential majority.

In a fantasy world, I would move Washington, D.C., to Kansas City, Mo. That transfer would not only make the capital more accessible to the American people and equalize travel requirements for our legislators, but also expose an out-of-touch government to a reality outside its Beltway.

I would transfer the United Nations to Salt Lake City, where foreign diplomats would live in a different sort of cocoon.

I would ask billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and the Koch Brothers to endow with their riches a few Midwestern or Southern universities. Perhaps we could create a new Ivy League in the nation’s center.

I would suggest to Facebook and Apple that they relocate operations to North Dakota to expose their geeky entrepreneurs to those who drive trucks and plow snow. Who knows — they might be able to afford a house, get married before 35, and have three rather than zero kids.

America is said to be divided by red and blue states, rich and poor, white and non-white, Christian and non-Christian, old and new.

I think the real divide is between those who make our decisions on the coasts and the anonymous others who live with the consequences somewhere else. 

None Dare Call It Fascism

It is happening right now

By John C. Goodman

Here is something that is odd.

For the past six years President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have waged a relentless attack on the health insurance industry. In the most recent iteration, the president assures us he is not responsible for the wave of health insurance policy cancellations. The insurance companies are.

Okay, so where is the other side?

When is the last time you saw an insurance industry executive interviewed on a TV talk show, presenting the industry’s answer to all these attacks? You can’t remember seeing that? I can’t either.

Well what about the health insurance industry trade groups, the folks who are supposed to explain to Congress and the general public the industry’s position? When is the last time you saw one of those representatives on TV? Can’t remember? Nor can I.

Okay, let’s try one more option. When is the last time you saw someone from a university or independent think tank giving the health insurance industry side of all the complaints that are being slung their way? Don’t bother responding. We both know that answer as well.

I submit that this is not a small matter.

A free society requires the free flow of information. In any public policy dispute, if only one side is heard from, we are likely to get further and further away from the truth. The attackers will find there is no penalty for getting minor facts wrong or shading the truth. That will embolden them to make more serious errors, eventually resorting to downright lying. If the only entity providing any push back is the Washington Post fact checker, we are in real trouble. Roughly 99.99% of the population doesn’t read the Washington Post.

But what threatens the foundations of a free society most of all is when it is the government (and its allies in the private sector) who are doing the attacking, and when the reason there is no response is that the victims of the attacks have been threatened and bullied into silence.

I believe that is where we are today ? not just with respect to health insurance, but with respect to health care generally. I’m afraid other industries are not far behind.

During the debate leading up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, I talked to a number of CEOs of large health insurance companies. I frequently heard such comments as, “Don’t tell anyone I told you this” or, “If you use this information, don’t mention my name” and even, “Don’t tell anyone that we ever had this conversation.”

As far as I can tell, things have gotten worse. In fact I don’t know any employee of any health insurance company that is willing to go on the record with any statement that is critical of the Affordable Care Act.

Now it’s possible that my experience is unique. And I know that there are many readers of this blog who also interact with folks in the industry. So if I’m wrong about this, please correct me in the comments.

Slouching Towards Sharia

At what point will the Darwinian survival instinct take hold?

by Richard Butrick 

The post WW1-2 attack on the authoritarian institutions of Western Civilization launched by The Frankfurt School created the opening and the intellectual foundation for Political Correctness - or so the story goes.

Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and The Frankfurt School

Their targets?  The evil institutions that brought us World War I-II. Their weapon? Critical Theory. Their base of operations? Academe. The lasting effect was to provide a vacuum or an opening for the legitimization of a new metric of good and evil  - a  “transvaluation of values” -  which is now enshrined in the PC-think which dominates our culture today.

Critical theory was the brain child of Max Horkheimer, the founder of the Frankfurt School. The three leaders of the Frankfurt School (FS) of main interest here are Horkheimer, Ardorno and Marcuse. All three started out as Marxists of one stripe or another and all three became influenced by the newly hatched “sciences” of Psychology and Sociology. Their writing is a wondrous overblown admixture of techno-babble from  Marx, Freud and Weber strung together with post-Hegelian philosophical patois. Shall we say dense? Shall we say a sophomoric affinity for the polysyllabic? Shall we say a sophomoric affinity for hyperbolic juxtaposition (“Indelible in resistance to the fungible world“, “in semblance nonsemblance is promised“)?

Here is a key passage from Horkheimer:

Although most people never overcome the habit of berating the world for their difficulties, those who are too weak to make a stand against reality have no choice but to obliterate themselves by identifying with it. They are never rationally reconciled to civilization. Instead, they bow to it, secretly accepting the identity of reason and domination, of civilization and the ideal, however much they may shrug their shoulders. Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity. These people willingly embrace or force themselves to accept the rule of the stronger as the eternal norm. Their whole life is a continuous effort to suppress and abase nature, inwardly or outwardly, and to identify themselves with its more powerful surrogates—the race, fatherland, leader, cliques, and tradition. For them, all these words mean the same thing—the irresistible reality that must be honored and obeyed. However, their own natural impulses, those antagonistic to the various demands of civilization, lead a devious undercover life within them.

Let me see now if I get this. Those of us who are too weak to stand up against reality? What do we do? We honor and obey the irresistible reality of more powerful surrogates? I just thought we were ducking reality but evidently we are identifying with “the” irresistible reality? Not only that, we secretly accept the identity of reason with domination! No wonder we obliterate ourselves by identifying with “it” and lead a devious undercover life.

Now check out this valiant attempt to explain critical theory. It is from Wikipedia but I could just as well taken the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Here it is:

Obamacare Will Follow the Fate of Prohibition

"Unintended Consequences" will be written on the tombstone of Obamacare

by Norman Berdichevsky

It may take as long, but Obamacare will certainly follow the ignominious example of Prohibition (the notorious 18th amendment that was the law of the land from 1920 to 1933) and ultimately be rescinded whether by simple legislative majorities in Congress with the approval of a sitting President or the much longer and demanding route of a constitutional amendment (the 21st which simply repealed the 18th).

Like Prohibition, Obamacare is a massive intrusion into the private lives of ordinary citizens with respect to the decisions they had always deemed their own responsibility in the marketplace. Like Prohibition, all sorts of pseudo-moral arguments about providing “care” for everyone, regardless where (if anywhere at all) on their list of priorities. Like Prohibition, it was exploited by politicians who argued that it was a step to protect the most innocent, defenseless segment of the population – women, the disabled, the aged, infirmed and very young.

This goes against the grain of many on today’s political scene who, when recalling Prohibition, cast it in terms of a move made by the most conservative elements in society attempting to impose their religious or moral values on those citizens who had other and more “liberal” social mores. This was a screen as is Obamacare today, hiding the triumph of massive federal power over individual liberties and states’ rights. Prior to 1920, the prohibition of the manufacture, sale and transport of alcoholic beverages had only been regulated at the county or state level.

The enforcement of Prohibition was beyond the capabilities of the Federal government and led to widespread flouting of the law and a massive “unintended” increase in violent crime, smuggling and the rampant corruption of public officials and the police forces of many major American cities. Although the  arguments used by some conservative and very naïve clerical circles made it initially appear that support for Prohibition came from the conservative Right and “traditionalists," it was criminal organizations, notably the organized Mafia and corrupt politicians working hand in glove through the Democrat Party in big city machines that protected racketeering and the ill-gotten gains of the bootleggers and smugglers. By 1925, in New York City alone, there were anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 speakeasy clubs. Only when the Democrats finally understood that Prohibition was costing them votes, did they call for its repeal.

Prohibition lost its advocates one by one but it still took the hard and very long route of a constitutional amendment to alter the law. Obamacare’s victory in the Supreme Court promises that it too will resist all attempts to get rid of it because of the legal precedent. What had been a local issue in many “dry counties” where fundamentalist protestant sects predominated was elevated into a nationwide movement at the end of the 19^th century largely by what we would call the LEFT.

Who originally supported Prohibition and why it reveals much the same “logic” as the one behind Obamacare, the protection of the weak and the cries for social justice. The leading advocate on the national scene arguing for prohibition was the American Temperance Society (ATS). By 1845, a decade after its founding, the ATS had reached 1.5 million members. Predictably, women constituted from 35% to a majority of 60% of membership in local chapters. They argued from the very beginning that alcohol and saloons were intimately connected with prostitution and violence against women. Just as the Democrats cast their approach to health care with accusations that anyone opposed were mean spirited and lacking in compassion, they framed their arguments over prohibition in the same way as many in the clergy arguing that failing to ban alcoholic beverages would leave women and children unprotected.

When there was no going home

For the Pilgrims "going home" wasn't an option

by Jeff Jacoby

Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday. Nearly four centuries have passed since that first celebration in 1621, when, as Edward Winslow wrote in a letter to a friend back in England, the settlers of Plymouth Colony paused to "rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors" and "for three days … entertained and feasted" with 90 of their Wampanoag neighbors. What Thanksgiving was at the outset — part joyful harvest festival, part expression of prayerful gratitude, part occasion for games and reunions — it remains recognizably to this day.

The story of that first Thanksgiving is also a story of immigrants, whose journey to the New World prefigured tens of millions of immigrant stories that followed. There is irony in the fact that Thanksgiving today is so bound up with "going home," as the crowded highways and packed airports of the long holiday weekend attest. For the Pilgrims "going home" wasn't an option. When they left Europe the year before, they left for good. As they parted from friends and familiar surroundings, recalled Plymouth's governor William Bradford, "what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye."

Well into the 19^th century, most immigrants to America knew there would be no turning back. Before telephones, air travel, and the internet revolutionized modern society, immigration typically meant not only transplanting yourself to a new home, but severing your links with the old. Once that boat to America sailed, you left behind people and places and connections you had known your whole life, yet would likely never see again.

The United States, we glibly tell ourselves, is a nation of immigrants, who have transformed America in the process of becoming American. Tens of millions of us have foreign-born loved ones, colleagues, neighbors, teachers. I grew up in Cleveland, where it was common to hear English spoken with Eastern European accents. Cleveland once had the world's second-largest Hungarian population and more Slovaks than any city on earth. I'm sure it never occurred to me how astonishing this was.

If you're a US native, it's so easy to take it for granted that waves of people from other lands uproot themselves to come here. Yet try to imagine the opposite: throngs of US citizens forsaking life in America in order to start anew in Hungary or Slovakia (or Ireland or Vietnam or Nigeria). Try to imagine yourself among them, undergoing such dislocation.

Recently I have been reading Becoming Americans, a sweeping collection of immigrant writing that conveys the experience of coming to America through the firsthand accounts of immigrants reaching back to 1623. Published by the Library of America, the anthology was edited by Amherst College professor Ilan Stavans, a Mexican Jew of Polish-Ukrainian ancestry who immigrated to America in 1985. He describes the book as his "love letter to the United States," but as many of the selections make clear, becoming Americans could be a wrenching ordeal.

Destructive Preservation

What the saving of their souls was for the ancients, saving of electricity has become for the moderns

by Theodore Dalrymple 

The one thing that many environmentalists seem not to care about is the environment. By this I mean its visual appearance. They would happily empty any landscape or any city of beauty so that the planet might survive. Like the village in Vietnam, it has become necessary to destroy the world in order to save it. And, of course, destruction of beauty has the additional advantage of being socially just: for if everyone cannot live in beautiful surroundings, why should anyone do so? Since it is far easier to create ugliness than to create beauty, equality is to be reached by the former rather than by the latter. 

The indifference of environmentalists to aesthetic considerations was illustrated by a friend, who kindly forwarded to me a brochure about a fully ecological house, erected (or assembled, since it was pre-fabricated) in the centre of Paris in front of Haussmann-style buildings. Needless to say, it completely destroyed the harmony of the surrounding townscape. 

It looked like a three-dimensional Mondrian, all boxes and bright colours. Inside, it was more a laboratory than a home, the kind of sterile environment necessary for in vitro fertilisation. However much it might have been heated by the sun, it lacked warmth. It was a proper place for androids, not for humans.

The brochure claimed many advantages for it, not the least of which was that the residents could monitor their energy consumption electronically hour by hour, minute by minute, in order to minimise it. Thus they could ensure that they never forgot their own impact on the environment, and were never totally free of anxiety about it. What the saving of their souls was for the ancients, saving of electricity has become for the moderns. 

No consideration was given in the brochure to such questions as the harmonisation of new houses with the pre-existing townscape or landscape, or how these cheap and gaudy constructions would look after a few years of wear and tear; but the smallness of the houses was vaunted as an enormous social advantage. There simply was not enough room, not enough land area, said the brochure, for everyone to occupy as much space as he wanted. 

This was an odd claim, because the house was by no means as efficient in concentrating the population as – the very Haussmann-style buildings in the front of which it was assembled, which manage so marvellously to combine elegance, grandeur, human scale and density of population, and which are now so desired and desirable as places to live that they have become too expensive to buy for anyone who does not already own part of one. Oddly enough, no one has ever suggested building as Haussmann did, albeit with such energy-saving devices as ingenuity might supply. The past is the one thing we don’t want to learn from, especially if we are architects. 

To go from the sublime to the ridiculous, I recently saw an example of environmentalist brutalism in a city not quite as famed as Paris for its beauty, namely Liverpool. Actually, Liverpool was once, at least in parts, a rather grand city, other parts of it being hideous beyond description, of course. It was once one of the largest entrepots and passenger ports in the world; the proceeds of the slave trade in the eighteenth century had been invested in elegant Georgian buildings and the proceeds of the hugely expanded trade of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in grandiloquent municipal buildings. 

The Love Potion of Socialized Medicine

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea  

by Bryan Caplan

During my flight to Italy, I read Barbara Demick's outstanding Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea cover to cover. Even if you've studied Communism for decades, you'll be appalled: In the 90s, North Korea basically moved from total state control over the economy to having no economy at all. The government stopped paying salaries and stocking the stores - without relaxing the near-prohibition on all private sector activities. For most, the only way to obey the law was to sit still until you died of hunger. The exiles Demick interviewed, starved and imprisoned, were the lucky ones. All had friends and family who perished in this absurdist hell.

Yet after all their suffering, North Korean exiles who made it to South Korea still had good things to say about their homeland. The most striking:

There were things she [Mrs. Song] missed about North Korea - the camaraderie among neighbors; the free health care before the system broke down.

Frankly, this makes about as much sense as ex-cons pining for their prison hospital. The North Korean government turns a country into a prison, starves millions to death, and yet escapees still think "free health care" is worth mentioning? What's wrong with people? 

To me, this reveals a lot about the world-wide appeal of government-run health care. Socialized medicine is like a love potion. The government can treat you like dirt, but as long as it slips a little of this potion into your drink, you'll probably think "How wonderful - the government loves me so much that it takes care of me whenever I'm sick without asking for a thing in return." And who would be vile enough not to love such a government back?

My point: Whatever you think about socialized medicine, it's not that great. It's not remotely enough to, say, redeem North Korea. The fact that anyone would imagine otherwise reveals a strong human tendency to judge socialized medicine like a bad boyfriend - with our hearts instead of our heads. When someone says, "Dump him - he's just not good for you!" we really ought to calm down and listen.

Best of the Worst - What Price for Democracy

Majority rule ensures that collective choice trumps individual choice

by Anthony de Jasay*

For the last twenty years or so, the European economy looked tired, sluggish, beset by chronic unemployment while straining such muscle as it had to spread the "social" safety net ever wider, ever higher. At the same time, the American economy showed vigorous growth, resilience and innate energy. Europe was by and large social democrat, America unrepentantly capitalist. Opinions were deeply divided about the merits of each, mostly because they sprang from the ineradicable gut feelings of each side. Lately, however, the clean cut between the two systems has become more and more blurred. America has acquired a hugely expensive public health care system, an interventionist monetary policy to make Keynes blush, an inexorably rising deficit that made the Director of the Budget throw down his job in despair, a solid complicity between the labour unions, the tort lawyers and the administration, and an economy that seems unable to respond to doping and is crawling along as sluggishly as the European one. Perhaps a little too soon, some observers are now saying that the US have "Europeanised" themselves; both continents have become democratic in the same sense.

Valuation and Description

Any language worth the name makes a clear enough separation between words that evaluate and words that simply describe. Consider pairs of words that perform the former job and pairs that do the latter. In the first set, you find such pairs of opposites as "good-bad", "handsome-ugly", "nice-nasty", "right-wrong", "true-false" and "just-unjust". In each pair, the first word is indisputably, self-evidently superior and preferable to the second. It simple makes no sense to say that bad is better than good that nasty more agreeable than nice nor that false is worthy of more respect than true. In the second set of words, you find such pairs as "like-unlike", "great-small", "many-few", "long-short", "many-few", "equal-unequal". The first word in each pair is no more valuable, desirable or commendable than the second. They both describe; any ranking we give them comes from some particular context in which "long" is preferable to "short" or vice versa. "Equal-unequal" is such a pair of words, though you would not believe it from listening to everyday political rhetoric. So is "democratic-undemocratic".

The Maximin Rule

Winston Churchill is supposed to have said that democracy is the worst political system except for all the others.1 This is a good enough aphorism, but it is rather poor decision theory. It is hardly an ideal of rationality to adopt it as a rule.

There is a great multitude of possible political systems from theocracy to technocracy, feudalism to plutocracy, hereditary monarchy to populist mob rule, dictatorship of the few to democracy. Each system is capable of producing a range of good and bad outcomes, with probabilities we can only guess. It is no use saying that we refuse to guess at such uncertain outcomes; for whether we have guessed or not, or guessed right or not, the outcomes arrive just the same, and it is better to at least try and anticipate them even if we cannot be confident to guess right, than give up hope and not try at all. Perhaps needless to say, the outcomes a given political system produces depend not only on the system itself, but on the kind of people and the kind of historical conjuncture to which it is applied.

By opting for a political system, we opt for what game theorists would call a "strategy" in a game we play "against" destiny. Each strategy is geared to produce one out of a range of outcomes from very good to very bad. Rationality, understood as being true to one's likes and dislikes, requires us to opt for the strategy that offers the best combination of outcomes weighted by their probabilities.

Expect Cashless Society, Not Hyperinflation

Perhaps that's why art, diamonds, and Bitcoins are going through the roof?

By Martin Armstrong

One of the greatest failed predictions over the last few years has been that the Fed’s massive monetary stimulus would result in runaway hyperinflation. Certainly we can debate whether the official consumer price index is artificially lower than what reality would suggest, but it's clear current U.S. inflation is nowhere near levels of hyperinflation and has actually been trending lower over the past two years as deflationary trends persist, in spite of the Fed’s best efforts to the contrary.

So how is it that the Fed can create all this money and not create inflation? Martin Armstrong, who has long criticized calls for hyperinflation or even high inflation in the U.S., said one of the main reasons is because the U.S. dollar is the global reserve currency.

“Dollars are sloshing around the entire world, not just our global economy. And the idea that if you just increase the money supply you’ll create inflation, that’s really very old-school. That might apply to Bangladesh…but it doesn’t apply when the currency is actually the reserve currency and that everybody is using it on a global scale,” he said in a recent interview with Financial Sense.

But this begs the question: What happens if the U.S. dollar loses its reserve currency status?"

With regards to this point, Martin said, 

“The euro is a dead issue…You can’t use the yen. And China and Russia—forget it—their currencies aren’t ready for prime-time. So, unfortunately, everybody is in dollars.”

Then again, perhaps it’s not just due to a lack of alternatives. As Gary Shilling points out, from 2001 to 2013, the share of daily trading in U.S. dollars only declined 3%—even with the creation of the euro and massive trade coming out of China over that time. When you consider the Six Reasons Why the U.S. Dollar Won’t Collapse, it really doesn’t appear this will be changing any time soon.

Welcome to Cuba

They herd people into Borg-like collectives, yet every individual is savagely atomized. I never felt so alone in my life.

By Michael J. Totten

Okay, I didn’t have to lie to immigration, customs, and security officials at Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport. I could have just applied for a journalist visa and hoped they’d approve me. But colleagues warned I’d have to wait months for an affirmative, and the authorities wouldn’t tell me if the answer was no. They’d simply toss my application into the trash if they thought I’d write anything “negative.” Six months, nine months, a year would finally pass and I’d still be waiting and wondering if I’d ever hear from them.

I have a job to do. I can’t wait six to twelve months in bureaucracy hell. So I lied.

“Tourism” I said when the nice woman at Passport Control asked what I was doing there.

The Cubans knew I was coming. My name was on the flight manifest. If anyone Googled me, they’d find out at once that I work as a journalist. And if they checked their records they’d know I didn’t have the right visa. Reporters who work in Cuba on tourist visas are arrested, interrogated, and deported. It makes no difference whether or not off-the-books journalists are friendly to the government. They must register with and—more important—get permission from the proper officials.

I had to stay off their radar. Freedom House ranks Cuba as the sixth worst country in the entire world for journalists. The Castro government creates a more hostile working environment than even the Syrian and Iranian governments. The only countries on earth that repress reporters more ruthlessly are, in order, North Korea, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Eritrea, and Belarus. All are either communist or post-communist in-name-only.

Some of my colleagues in the media weren’t sure I’d get away with it. “You’re pretty high profile,” said one. “And it’s not like you can hide.”

Several who have worked in Cuba in the past warned me not to bring a laptop. “That alone will be a red flag,” said one. “They’ll put you under surveillance.”

I’d also have to hide my notebook.

“Cuban security agents from the Ministry of Interior will sweep through your hotel room,” warned a veteran American visitor to Cuba, “so lock all your note-taking materials up in your room safe.”

“The Castro government already knows who you are and what you’ll be doing,” said Valentin Prieto, a Cuban exile in Miami and founder of the blog, Babalu. “And make no bones about it, the KGB, Stasi, et al have nothing—and I mean nothing—on the Cuban security apparatus. It may seem primitive, but it is highly effective. You will be monitored from the moment you step on the tarmac. You will never be alone while on the island, even in your hotel room if not especially so. Be careful and keep in mind that you are in a very closed society whose fuel is fear.”

1984 as an instruction manual

“Refusal will result in a Racial Discrimination note being attached to your child's educational record…”

By Daniel Hannan

What is the single most depressing aspect of this letter? Is it the idea of labelling eight-year-olds racists? Is it the moronic conflation of religion and ethnicity? Is it the ugly grammar ("As such our expectations are that all children in years 4 to 6 attend school on Wednesday…")? Is it the bullying tone? Is it the unconscionable choice of font? Is it that someone can write that way and yet hold a position of authority in a school?

Or is it this: that however many times prime ministers declare multi-culturalism to be a failed ideology, a petty, officious, bossy, self-righteous, self-serving, Leftist chunk of the public sector remains stuck in 1980?

Canada's Chief Censor

Jennifer Lynch, QC, 1953-2013 RIP

By mark steyn

The Chief Commissioner of the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission died two weeks ago. Regular readers of SteynOnline as far afield as Australia and South Africa will know her name: Jennifer Lynch, QC ("Queen Censor," as I liked to say) sat at the pinnacle of the Canadian state's corrupt "human rights" regime at the time the Canadian Islamic Congress invited it to assist them in effectively imposing a lifetime publication ban on me in my own country. Her role in that battle and its outcome was reflected in The National Post's headline upon her passing:

Former Human Rights Chief Dies Months After Commission Stripped Of Mandate To Fight Hate Speech

In the piece, Jennifer Lynch is reported to have found her unsought moment in the limelight a little uncomfortable:

Ms. Lynch lamented the "completely unbalanced" discussion in which she was cast as the Queen Censor, or even the Chief Commissar.

How odd to hear the head of a state agency whose principal purpose is to label citizens - Racist! Sexist! Homophobe! Islamophobe! - object to being labeled herself. I'm proud to say I gave her both names, and made a point of referring to her as "Commissar Lynch" in Canadian media appearances. We never met, mainly because she didn't want to and went to great lengths to avoid my company. Nevertheless, we had several mutual friends, who told me that Jennifer was a decent, well-meaning sort who was simply in a mess not of her making. I don't doubt it. When the Canadian thought police began their campaign against me and Ezra Levant, a number of outraged American readers wrote to me, saying, "You need to start kicking up a fuss about this, Steyn, and then maybe Canadians will get mad and elect a conservative government that will end this nonsense." Made perfect sense. Except that Canada already had a Conservative government, under a Conservative Prime Minister, with a Conservative Justice Minister, who had appointed a Conservative to serve as the very head of the "human rights" commission investigating me: Jennifer Lynch. Ms Lynch had been Chief of Staff to Joe Clark, a former Conservative (after a fashion) Prime Minister. But, as a current cabinet minister once remarked to me, when an incoming Conservative ministry takes over the reins of Big Government, there are thousands and thousands of positions to fill in the bureaucracy, and nowhere near enough reliable Conservatives to fill them. So you find who you can, and the bureaucracy trundles on regardless. As I say somewhere in After America, you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life. Jennifer Lynch, garlanded with every bauble the Canadian state could confer (the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal, etc), was the sort of person a government turns to fill all these posts. I'm sure she was decent and well-meaning and pleasant and likeable, but she put her fine qualities in the service of a squalid and corrupt regime whose practices could not survive the light Ezra and others shone on them.

Even from a distance, I grew inclined to accord her less respect as our battles wore on. Had I found myself in her position, I would have recognized that it was indefensible and liquidated the problem by taking the lead on the abolition of Section 13. Instead, she embarked on her disastrous campaign for a "balancing" of rights. "I'm a free speecher. I'm also a human rightser," she told The National Post, as if it were a finely nuanced trade-off between two rights. But it's not: "Free speech" is a right the citizen is free to exercise against the state; contemporary "human rights" are pseudo-rights that the state confers on those citizens who meet its approval. Aside from the intellectual dishonesty, Ms Lynch practiced a more basic kind, forever calling for a "balanced debate", while declining ever to engage or even be seen with anybody on the other side. She, Ezra and I all wound up testifying to Parliament, but she insisted not only that our appearances had to be entirely separate, but at least a week apart - so that we would not even be in the same news cycle. It didn't work. In my own testimony, I mischievously quoted as a great crusader for free speech Michael Ignatieff, then the Leader of the Liberal Party. Ignatieff was only one of many prominent Liberals who declined to come to Commissar Lynch's aid in her hour of need.

Why Is Debt The Source Of Income Inequality And Serfdom?

It's The Interest, Baby

by Charles Hugh-Smith

"Governments cannot reduce their debt or deficits and central banks cannot taper. Equally, they cannot perpetually borrow exponentially more. This one last bubble cannot end (but it must)."

I often refer to debt serfdom, the servitude debt enforces on borrowers. The mechanism of this servitude is interest, and today I turn to two knowledgeable correspondents for explanations of the consequences of interest.

Correspondent D.L.J. explains how debt/interest is the underlying engine of rising income/wealth disparity:

Here is a table of the growth rate of the GDP.

If we use $16T as the approximate GDP and a growth rate of, say, 3.5%, the total of goods and services would increase one year to the next by about $500B.

Meanwhile, referencing the Grandfather national debt chart with the USDebtClock data, the annual interest bill is $3 trillion ($2.7 trillion year-to-date).

In other words, those receiving interest are getting 5-6 times more than the increase in gross economic activity.

Using your oft-referenced Pareto Principle, about 80% of the population are net payers of interest while the other 20% are net receivers of interest.

Also, keep in mind that one does not have to have an outstanding loan to be a net payer of interest. As I attempted to earlier convey, whenever one buys a product that any part of its production was involving the cost of interest, the final product price included that interest cost. The purchase of that product had the interest cost paid by the purchaser.

Again using the Pareto concept, of the 20% who receive net interest, it can be further divided 80/20 to imply that 4% receive most (64%?) of the interest. This very fact can explain why/how the system (as it stands) produces a widening between the haves and the so-called 'have nots'.

Longtime correspondent Harun I. explains that the serfdom imposed by debt and interest is not merely financial servitude--it is political serfdom as well:

As both of us have stated, you can create all of the money you want, however, production of real things cannot be accomplished with a keystroke.

Then there is the issue of liberty. Each Federal Reserve Note is a liability of the Fed and gives the bearer the right but not the obligation to purchase — whatever the Fed deems appropriate. How much one can purchase keeps changing base on a theory-driven experiment that has never worked. Since the Fed is nothing more than an agent of the Central State, the ability to control what the wages of its workers will purchase, is a dangerous power for any government.

If a Federal Reserve Note is a liability of the central bank, then what is the asset? The only possible answer is the nations productivity. So, in essence, an agent of the government, the central bank, most of which are privately owned (ownership is cloaked in secrecy) owns the entire productive output of free and democratic nation-states.

People who speak of liberty and democracy in such a system only delude themselves.

Then there is the solution, default. That only resolves the books, the liability of human needs remain. Bankruptcy does not resolve the residue of social misery and suffering left behind for the masses who became dependent on lofty promises (debt). These promises (debts) were based on theories that have reappeared throughout human history under different guises but have never worked.

More debt will not resolve debt. The individual’s liberty is nonexistent if he does not own his labor. A people should consider carefully the viability (arithmetical consequences) of borrowing, at interest, to consume their own production. The asset of our labor cannot simultaneously be a liability we owe to ourselves at interest.

Thank you, D.L.J. and Harun. What is the alternative to the present system of debt serfdom and rising inequality? Eliminate the Federal Reserve system and revert to the national currency (the dollar) being issued by the U.S. Treasury in sufficient quantity to facilitate the production and distribution of goods and services.

Is this possible? Not in our Financialized, Neofeudal-Neocolonial Rentier Economy; but as Harun noted in another email, 

Governments cannot reduce their debt or deficits and central banks cannot taper. Equally, they cannot perpetually borrow exponentially more. This one last bubble cannot end (but it must).

What we are discussing is what will replace the current system after it self-destructs.

The Science of Hatred

What makes humans capable of horrific violence? 

BY TOM BARTLETT, WITH PHOTOS BY TARIK SAMARAH AND MATT LUTTON

The former battery factory on the outskirts of Srebrenica, a small town in eastern Bosnia, has become a grim tourist attraction. Vans full of sightseers, mostly from other countries, arrive here daily to see the crumbling industrial structure, which once served as a makeshift United Nations outpost and temporary haven for Muslims under assault by Serb forces determined to seize the town and round up its residents. In July 1995 more than 8,000 Muslim men, from teenagers to the elderly, were murdered in and around Srebrenica, lined up behind houses, gunned down in soccer fields, hunted through the forest.

The factory is now a low-budget museum where you can watch a short film about the genocide and meet a survivor, a soft-spoken man in his mid-30s who has repeated the story of his escape and the death of his father and brother nearly every day here for the past five years. Visitors are then led to a cavernous room with display cases containing the personal effects of victims—a comb, two marbles, a handkerchief, a house key, a wedding ring, a pocket watch with a bullet hole—alongside water-stained photographs of the atrocity hung on cracked concrete walls. The English translations of the captions make for a kind of accidental poetry. “Frightened mothers with weeping children: where and how to go on … ?” reads one. “Endless sorrow for the dearest,” says another.

Across the street from the museum is a memorial bearing the names of the known victims, flanked by rows and rows of graves, each with an identical white marker. Nearby an old woman runs a tiny souvenir shop selling, among other items, baseball caps with the message “Srebrenica: Never Forget.”

This place is a symbol of the 1995 massacre, which, in turn, is a symbol of the entire conflict that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. The killings here were a fraction of the total body count; The Bosnian Book of the Dead, published early this year, lists 96,000 who perished, though there were thousands more. It was the efficient brutality in Srebrenica that prompted the international community, after years of dithering and half measures, to take significant military action.

While that action ended the bloodshed, the reckoning is far from finished. Fragments of bone are still being sifted from the soil, sent for DNA analysis, and returned to families for burial. The general who led the campaign, Ratko Mladic, is on trial in The Hague after years on the run. In a recent proceeding, Mladic stared at a group of Srebrenica survivors in the gallery and drew a single finger across his throat. Around the same time, the president of Serbia issued a nonapology apology for the massacre, neglecting to call it genocide and using language so vague it seemed more insult than olive branch.

Standing near the memorial, surrounded by the dead, the driver of one of those tourist-filled vans, a Muslim who helped defend Sarajevo during a nearly four-year siege, briefly drops his sunny, professional demeanor. “How can you forgive when they say it didn’t happen?” he says. “The Nazis, they killed millions. They say, ‘OK, we are sorry.’ But the Serbs don’t do that.”

Some Serbs do acknowledge the genocide. According to a 2010 survey, though, most Serbs believe that whatever happened at Srebrenica has been exaggerated, despite being among the most scientifically documented mass killings in history. They shrug it off as a byproduct of war or cling to conspiracy theories or complain about being portrayed as villains. The facts disappear in a swirl of doubts and denial.

A new Bosnian film explores how that refusal to face the truth can become bizarre, like a hallucination. In the film, one actress plays multiple characters, each a different Serbian woman with a different reaction to Srebrenica. One character, a fast talker in a white blazer, suggests the story has been manufactured. Another, wearing hoop earrings and an animal-print blouse, doesn’t deny the killings occurred but won’t discuss them either. “Money, how you live, where you vacation, that’s what we should worry about,” she says. Yet another character—again, the same actress, this time with chopped blond hair—seems weirdly pleased to broach the morbid topic. “I don’t often get the opportunity to talk about guilt,” she says.

Listening to those women is an actor playing a Srebrenica survivor, who gently prompts them to move past their superficial banter. At one point, late in the film, he reveals his own obsession: “I often think about a particular moment, a situation. When mass killings are happening and you are tied up, and when they are taking you to the pit where they throw in the dead bodies, and when you see them killing people and you know it’s your turn next, at that second, that moment right before you are killed, what do you think about?”

Pensions misery looms for the 'have-it-all’ generation

As the baby boomers approach retirement, many face a pensions crisis thanks to quantitative easing. 

By Jeremy Warner

Intergenerational unfairness is one of those intellectually sloppy complaints that nevertheless commands a strong following among a certain cadre of privileged young metropolitan types. It even has its own think tank – the grandly named Intergenerational Foundation. Already there is a huge volume of literature on how voracious baby boomers have stolen the food from their children’s mouths – and pretty vacuous stuff it is too.

When it comes to the aberration of absurdly high house prices, there may even be something in it, but it seems an oddly irrelevant obsession set against much more worrying divides, such as wealth and regional disparities within generations. The unfairness lies not in the fact that the old are in aggregate so much richer than the young – this has always been the case – but that children from poorer backgrounds will generally be at a substantial disadvantage to those from richer ones.

Yet for those who continue to insist that the baby boomers have had it cushy, consider the following. Say you have done the right thing throughout your working life, and saved when means allowed. A typical middle-income earner might in that time reasonably hope to accumulate a pension pot of perhaps a couple of hundred thousand pounds. This, at least, is the position a friend finds himself in approaching retirement age. As it happens, the average pot on buying an annuity is much smaller – just £33,000.

To his dismay, my friend has discovered that his own, considerably larger sum will buy him and his wife a pension of little more than £10,000 a year, and that’s assuming both no inflation-proofing and that he invests the lot, rather than take his entitlement to a tax-free lump sum. Together with the basic state pension, this may be just about enough to keep the wolf from the door, but it can hardly be thought of an example of rampant intergenerational unfairness. Many retirees face much worse, leaving them reliant on benefits.