The Fallacy of Overpopulation

The Fallacy Behind The Fallacy Of Global Warming

By Dr. Tim Ball

Global Warming was just one issue The Club of Rome (TCOR) targeted in its campaign to reduce world population. In 1993 the Club’s co-founder, Alexander King with Bertrand Schneider wrote The First Global Revolution stating,

“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

They believe all these problems are created by humans but exacerbated by a growing population using technology. “Changed attitudes and behavior” basically means what it has meant from the time Thomas Malthus raised the idea the world was overpopulated. He believed charity and laws to help the poor were a major cause of the problem and it was necessary to reduce population through rules and regulations. TCOR ideas all ended up in the political activities of the Rio 1992 conference organized by Maurice Strong (a TCOR member) under the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The assumptions and objectives became the main structure of Agenda 21, the master plan for the 21st Century. The global warming threat was confronted at Rio through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It was structured to predetermine scientific proof that human CO2 was one contribution of the “common enemy”.

The IPCC was very successful. Despite all the revelations about corrupted science and their failed predictions (projections) CO2 remains central to global attention about energy and environment. For example, several websites, many provided by government, list CO2 output levels for new and used cars. Automobile companies work to build cars with lower CO2 output and, if for no other reason than to appear green, use it in advertising. The automotive industry, which has the scientists to know better, collectively surrenders to eco-bullying about CO2. They are not alone. They get away with it because they pass on the unnecessary costs to a befuddled “trying to do the right thing” population.

TCOR applied Thomas Malthus’s claim of a race to exhaustion of food to all resources. Both Malthus and COR believe limiting population was mandatory. Darwin took a copy of Malthus’s Essay on Population with him and remarked on its influence on his evolutionary theory in his Beagle journal in September 1838. The seeds of distortion about overpopulation were sown in Darwin’s acceptance of Malthus’s claims.

Paul Johnson’s biography of Charles Darwin comments on the contradiction between Darwin’s scientific methods and his acceptance of their omission in Malthus.

Malthus’s aim was to discourage charity and reform the existing poor laws, which, he argued, encourage the destitute to breed and so aggravated the problem. That was not Darwin’s concern. What struck him was the contrast between geometrical progression (breeding) and arithmetical progression (food supplies). Not being a mathematician he did not check the reasoning and accuracy behind Malthus’s law… in fact, Malthus’s law was nonsense. He did not prove it. He stated it. What strikes one reading Malthus is the lack of hard evidence throughout. Why did this not strike Darwin? A mystery. Malthus’s only “proof” was the population expansion of the United States.

There was no point at which Malthus’s geometrical/arithmetical rule could be made to square with the known facts. And he had no reason whatsoever to extrapolate from the high American rates to give a doubling effect every 25 years everywhere and in perpetuity.

He swallowed Malthusianism because it fitted his emotional need, he did not apply the tests and deploy the skepticism that a scientist should. It was a rare lapse from the discipline of his profession. But it was an important one.

Darwin’s promotion of Malthus undoubtedly gave the ideas credibility they didn’t deserve. Since then the Malthusian claim has dominated science, social science and latterly environmentalism. Even now many who accept the falsity of global warming due to humans continue to believe overpopulation is a real problem.

Overpopulation was central in all TCOR’s activities. Three books were important to their message, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) and Ecoscience: Population, Resources and Environment (1977) co-authored with John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, and Meadows et al., Limits to Growth, published in 1972 that anticipated the IPCC approach of computer model predictions (projections). The latter wrote

If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.

Here is what the TCOR web site says about the book.

They created a computing model which took into account the relations between various global developments and produced computer simulations for alternative scenarios. Part of the modelling were different amounts of possibly available resources, different levels of agricultural productivity, birth control or environmental protection.

They estimated the current amount of a resource, determined the rate of consumption, and added an expanding demand because of increasing industrialization and population growth to determine, with simple linear trend analysis, that the world was doomed.

Economist Julian Simon challenged TCOR and Ehrlich’s assumptions.

In response to Ehrlich’s published claim that “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000″ – a proposition Simon regarded as too silly to bother with – Simon countered with “a public offer to stake US$10,000 … on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run.”

Simon proposed,

You could name your own terms: select any raw material you wanted – copper, tin, whatever – and select any date in the future, “any date more than a year away,” and Simon would bet that the commodity’s price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager.

John Holdren selected the materials and the time. Simon won the bet.

Global warming used the idea that CO2 would increase to harmful levels because of increasing industrialization and expanding populations. The political manipulation of climate science was linked to development and population control in various ways. Here are comments from a PBS interview with Senator Tim Wirth in response to the question,“What was it in the late 80s, do you think, that made the issue [of global warming] take off?” He replied,

I think a number of things happened in the late 1980s. First of all, there were the [NASA scientist Jim] Hansen hearings [in 1988]. … We had introduced a major piece of legislation. Amazingly enough, it was an 18-part climate change bill; it had population in it, conservation, and it had nuclear in it. It had everything that we could think of that was related to climate change. … And so we had this set of hearings, and Jim Hansen was the star witness.

Wikipedia says about Wirth,

In the State Department, he worked with Vice President Al Gore on global environmental and population issues, supporting the administration’s views on global warming. A supporter of the proposed Kyoto Protocol Wirth announced the U.S.’s commitment to legally binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

Gore chaired the 1988 “Hansen” Senate Hearing and was central to the promotion of population as basic to all other problems. He led the US delegation to the September 1994International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo Egypt.

That conference emerged from Rio 1992 where they linked population to all other supposed problems.

Explicitly integrating population into economic and development strategies will both speed up the pace of sustainable development and poverty alleviation and contribute to the achievement of population objectives and an improved quality of life of the population.

This theme was central to Rio+20 held in June 2012 and designed to re-emphasize Rio 1992.

The Numbers

The world is not overpopulated. That fallacy is perpetuated in all environmental research, policy and planning including global warming and latterly climate change. So what are the facts about world population?

The US Census Bureau provides a running estimate of world population. It was 6,994,551,619 on February 15, 2012. On October 30, 2011 the UN claimed it passed 7 billion; the difference is 5,448,381. This is more than the population of 129 countries of the 242 listed by Wikipedia. It confirms most statistics are crude estimates, especially those of the UN who rely on individual member countries, yet no accurate census exists for any of them

Population density is a more meaningful measure. Most people are concentrated in coastal flood plains and deltas, which are about 5 percent of the land. Compare Canada, the second largest country in the world with approximately 35.3 million residents estimated in 2013with California where an estimated 37.3 million people lived in 2010. Some illustrate the insignificance of the density issue by putting everyone in a known region. For example, Texas at 7,438,152,268,800 square feet divided by the 2012 world population 6,994,551,619 yields 1063.4 square feet per person. Fitting all the people in an area is different from them being able to live there. Most of the world is unoccupied by humans

 Read the rest at:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/05/overpopulation-the-fallacy-behind-the-fallacy-of-global-warming/

Virulent racists and fiendish eugenicists still forcing their genocical agenda

UN Unveils Plot to Reduce African Population

by  Alex Newman

The United Nations and its oftentimes barbaric population-control apparatus are under fire again after releasing a deeply controversial report claiming that the African population of Kenya is too large and growing too quickly. To deal with the supposed “challenge,” as the UN and its “partners” in the national government put it, international bureaucrats are demanding stepped up efforts to brainwash Kenyan women into wanting fewer children. Also on the agenda: more taxpayer-funded “family-planning” and “reproductive-health” schemes to reduce the number of Africans to levels considered “desirable” by the UN.

Critics promptly lambasted the plot as undisguised eugenics, with some experts calling it a true example of the “war on women.” Among other concerns, analysts outraged by the report noted that the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the establishment’s fiendish efforts to slash human populations — especially those considered “undesirable” by self-appointed guardians of the gene pool — have a long and sordid history going back decades. Today, the agenda marches on, as illustrated in the latest UN report calling for drastically reduced numbers of Kenyans.

Especially troubling is the eugenics component of the agenda, critics say. “This kind of eugenics by the United Nations and their population-control conspirators is not helping the black family but turning large poor families into small poor families,” explained Mark Crutcher, president of the U.S.-based pro-life group Life Dynamics. Crutcher is also the producer of the hard-hitting documentary Maafa21, which exposes what he calls the ongoing genocide of blacks worldwide by prominent establishment forces.

The controversial report, produced by the Kenyan government’s “population” minions and the UNFPA, claims that — despite dramatic declines in fertility over recent decades — authorities must do much more to bring the population down to “desirable” levels. Citing debunked claims about what the UN views as “too many” people supposedly resulting in a wide range of real and imagined problems, the radical document outlines numerous schemes to reduce the population. Among the suggested plots: more taxpayer-funded contraception, re-education, “empowering” women, reducing the “demand” for children, and more.

“One issue surrounds the realization of the policy objective of reducing total fertility rates from the current level of 4.6 to 2.6 children per woman by 2030,” observes the report, taking special aim at the poor. “This is because the demand for children is still high and is unlikely to change unless substantial changes in desired family sizes are achieved.” Incredibly, the document also states matter-of-factly that there is a “need for rapid decline in fertility.” Thus, the UN population-control zealots claimed, “the challenge is how to reduce the continued high demand for children.”

The more than 300-page report, dubbed “Kenya Population Situation Analysis,” does not explicitly call for abortion. However, experts say anyone versed in the UN’s deceptive bureaucratic language would see the real agenda clearly. For example, the document is packed with references to so-called “reproductive health” and “reproductive rights.” As then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it in a 2010 speech, “reproductive health includes contraception and family planning and access to legal, safe abortion.”

Despite occasional claims to the contrary, the Western establishment and the UN have been working fiendishly to promote abortion worldwide. The self-proclaimed goal of the UNFPA, displayed proudly on its website, is “achieving universal access to sexual and reproductive health (including family planning) and promoting reproductive rights.” In Communist China, the UNFPA and its co-conspirators at Planned Parenthood have even been implicated during congressional hearings in forced abortions.

Another common theme throughout the report on Kenya is the alleged “need” to prod women into delaying marriage, family, and child-bearing. Some of the proposed methods for achieving that goal include “education,” with a wide range of schemes admittedly aimed at brainwashing African women into having fewer children. “The achievement of lower fertility is complicated by differences between individual fertility preferences and desirable fertility levels,” the report explains. In other words, the UN knows better than African families.

“Investing” in what the UN calls “education” and “health,” the document continues, would “contribute to the attainment of more favorable demographic indicators.” The “favorable” outcomes the population-control zealots are seeking, according to the report, include “lower fertility through enhanced contraceptive use” and “lower ideal family size.” The document also advocates getting more women into the workforce and government-mandated changes in “gender roles” as a way to ensure fewer African births.

“Sustainable development requires Kenya to be in a position to proactively address, rather than only react to, the population trends that will unfold over the next decades,” the widely criticized UN report continues, alluding to another one of the international outfit’s controversial ploys — sustainability — to empower itself at the expense of liberty, humanity, and national independence. “Universal access to sexual and reproductive health is still being constrained by a number of factors that are economic, social and cultural. UNFPA is expected to be in the forefront in supporting implementation of the Reproductive Health Policy.”

As with coercive sterilization in India and forced abortions in China, American taxpayers are unwittingly helping to fund the radical UN efforts across Africa. Last year alone, for instance, U.S. taxpayers were forced into providing more than $30 million to the UNFPA. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), meanwhile, spent almost $11 million of public funds in 2011 on “family planning” and “reproductive services” in Kenya. By comparison, it spent $60,000 on nutrition. With the Obama administration’s slavish devotion to Planned Parenthood, the UN, and the broader population-control agenda, those numbers are expected to continue rising unless Congress puts its foot down.

Read the rest at:

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/africa/item/17291-un-unveils-plot-to-reduce-african-population

The Right side of history

Why liberals are conflicted over patriotism and western values

by Daniel Hannan

Why is patriotism, in English-speaking societies, mainly associated with conservatives? After all, measured against almost any other civilizational model, the Anglosphere has been overwhelmingly progressive.

It is true that the individualism of English-speaking societies has an anti-socialist bias: There has always been a measure of resistance to taxation, to state power, and, indeed, to collectivism of any kind. But look at the other side of the balance: equality before the law, regardless of sex or race, secularism, toleration for minorities, absence of censorship, social mobility, and universal schooling. In how many other places are these things taken for granted?

So why is the celebration of national identity a largely Rightist pursuit in English-speaking societies? It won’t do to say that patriotism is, by its nature, a Right-of-center attitude. In the European tradition, if anything, the reverse was the case. Continental nationalists—those who believed that the borders of their states should correlate to ethnic or linguistic frontiers—were, more often than not, radicals. The 1848 revolutions in Europe were broadly Leftist in inspiration. When the risings were put down, and the old monarchical-clerical order reestablished, the revolutionaries overwhelmingly fled to London, the one city that they knew would give them sanctuary. With the exception of Karl Marx, who never forgave the country that had sheltered him for failing to hold the revolution that he forecast, they admired Britain for its openness, tolerance, and freedom.

So what stops English-speaking Leftists from doing the same? Why, when they recall their history, do they focus, not on the extensions of the franchise or the war against slavery or the defeat of Nazism, but on the wicked imperialism of, first, the British and, later, the Americans?

The answer lies neither in politics nor in history, but in psychology. The more we learn about how the brain works, the more we discover that people’s political opinions tend to be a rationalization of their instincts. We subconsciously pick the data that sustain our prejudices and block out those that don’t. We can generally spot this tendency in other people; we almost never acknowledge it in ourselves.

A neat illustration of the phenomenon is the debate over global warming. At first glance, it seems odd that climate change should divide commentators along Left–Right lines. Science, after all, depends on data, not on our attitudes to taxation or defense or the family. The trouble is that we all have assumptions, scientists as much as anyone else. Our ancestors learned, on the savannahs of Pleistocene Africa, to make sense of their surroundings by finding patterns, and this tendency is encoded deep in our DNA. It explains the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. When presented with a new discovery, we automatically try to press it into our existing belief system; if it doesn’t fit, we question the discovery before the belief system. Sometimes this habit leads us into error. But without it, we should hardly survive at all. As Edmund Burke argued, life would become impossible if we tried to think through every new situation from first principles, disregarding both our own experience and the accumulated wisdom of our people—if, in other words, we shed all prejudice.

If you begin with the beliefs that wealthy countries became wealthy by exploiting poor ones, that state action does more good than harm, and that we could all afford to pay a bit more tax, you are likelier than not to accept a thesis that seems to demand government intervention, supranational technocracy, and global wealth redistribution.

If, on the other hand, you begin from the propositions that individuals know better than governments, that collectivism was a demonstrable failure, and that bureaucracies will always seek to expand their powers, you are likelier than not to believe that global warming is just the left’s latest excuse for centralizing power.

Each side, convinced of its own bona fides, suspects the motives of the other, which is what makes the debate so vinegary. Proponents of both points of view are quite sure that they are dealing in proven facts, and that their critics must therefore be either knaves or fools.

The two sides don’t simply disagree about the interpretation of data; they disagree about the data. Never mind how to respond to changes in temperature; there isn’t even agreement on the extent to which the planet is heating. Though we all like to think we are dealing with hard, pure, demonstrable statistics, we are much likelier to be fitting the statistics around our preferred Weltanschauung.

Central to the worldview of most people who self-identify as Left-of-center is an honorable and high-minded impulse, namely support for the underdog. This impulse is by no means confined to Leftists, but Leftists exaggerate it, to the exclusion of rival impulses.

Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist, a man who began as a partisan liberal, and who set out to explain why political discourse was so bitter. In his seminal 2012 book, The Righteous Mind, he explains the way people of Left and Right fit their perceptions around their instinctive starting points. As he puts it, our elephant (our intuition) leans toward a particular conclusion; and its rider (our conscious reasoning) then scampers around seeking to justify that lean with what look like objective facts.

The liberal Support for the underdog is balanced by other tendencies in conservatives, such as respect for sanctity. In Leftists, it is not. Once you grasp this difference, all the apparent inconsistencies and contradictions of the Leftist outlook make sense. It explains why liberals think that immigration and multiculturalism are a good thing in Western democracies, but a bad thing in, say, the Amazon rain forest. It explains how people can simultaneously demand equality between the sexes and quotas for women. It explains why Israel is seen as right when fighting the British but wrong when fighting the Palestinians.

 Read the rest at:

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-Right-side-of-history-7783

Hungary Sets Up a State Authority to Rewrite History

Nearly half of Hungary’s Jews are actively considering emigration because of the unmitigated rise anti-Semitism

by Thomas Ország-Land

The physical destruction of European Jewry during the Nazi era has been probably the most thoroughly documented disaster in all human history. A huge proportion of the eyewitness accounts, expert analyses and artistic depiction of that catastrophe pertains to the organized murder of close to 600,000 Hungarian citizens of Jewish birth perpetrated by the Hungarian state in collaboration with Nazi Germany. This happened at the close of the Second World War when an Allied victory was already obvious.

Randolph L. Braham, the doyen of Holocaust studies and once a youth survivor of a Hungarian slave-labour camp, has assembled and classified the thousands of books and articles generated by the Hungarian Holocaust and made them accessible through an invaluable bibliography. It is accompanied by a magisterial encyclopaedia, edited by Braham and introduced by the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, chronicling the wartime fate of thousands of ravaged Jewish communities. Both authors are enormously influential American historians of Hungarian origin well disposed towards

These books are likely to prove useful for university courses in Holocaust studies and European history as well as political science, literature and sociology. They are being published at a critical moment.

Fearing a significant setback in national elections widely expected in April, Hungary‘s ultra-Conservative, populist government has set about courting the resurgent far-Right by denying in its new constitution the country’s enduring responsibility for the Holocaust. The government has also included several anti-Semitic authors in the national school curriculum, tacitly encouraged demands by anti-Semitic nationalists for the official rehabilitation of the WW2 leader Miklós Horthy and, in the worst tradition of East European authoritarianism, it has just announced plans for the establishment of a state historical research foundation clearly intended to rewrite official history.

This has contributed to mounting safety concerns by the surviving Jewish community. Authoritative research results just published by the Vienna-based Fundamental Rights Agency suggest that nearly half of Hungary’s Jews are actively considering emigration because of the unmitigated rise anti-Semitism. Theirs is the highest proportion of Jews to entertain such plans in the eight countries surveyed where Europe’s largest Jewish populations live. Braham’s books comprise a treasure house of meticulously assembled research findings exploring the background to the unfolding social crisis.

The three-volume geographical encyclopaedia is an exhaustive research and teaching aid chronicling the tragedy of hundreds of well established East European Jewish communities deeply loyal to the indigenous society that enthusiastically participated in their destruction. Illustrated by many historic photographs, the work is organized alphabetically by county, each section prefaced with a map and a contextual history describing its Jewish population up to and into the fateful year of 1944.

Entries track the demographic, cultural, and religious changes in even the smallest communities where Jews lived before their marginalization, dispossession, ghettoization and eventual deportation to slave-labour and death camps. It provides both panoramic and microscopic views of the destruction of most of the Jews of Hungary, until then the last significant surviving Jewish community within Nazi-occupied Europe.

Most individual entries are set out in a common format, detailing the first available records of local Jewish settlement; employment patterns; synagogues and other community buildings and their ultimate fate; the names of rabbis and other leaders; shifts in the local Jewish population from the beginning until the Holocaust; references to Jewish-Christian relations; Zionist organization; the implementation of anti-Jewish measures; the deportation of Jews; survival statistics; Jewish demographics up to the present; and whether there is a Holocaust memorial in the town today.

The bibliography is an indispensable guide through the maze of source material quantifying the tragedy. It includes close to six thousand annotated references to independent and periodical literature published in many countries and in many languages on all aspects of the recorded history of Hungarian Jewry before, during, and after the Holocaust. References to works in Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish are rendered in English translation. Each entry is provided with a succinct annotation when its title is not indicative of its content. Supplied with author, name, and geographic indexes, the book is easily usable.

It lists a wealth of little known but valuable material as well as work that has come to shape our view of the Holocaust. Its authors include such outstanding witnesses and commentators as Miklós Radnóti, probably the greatest poet of the Holocaust whose collection of poetry has just been publicly torched in an orgy of book burning at a rally of Hungarian racists. There are also such authorities as György Konrád, the sociologist and best-selling novelist, Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, professor of Holocaust studies and literature at Texas University in Dallas, and Paul Lendvai, a much revered foreign correspondent based in Vienna and lately also in Budapest, who is bitterly loathed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

The book faithfully represents the views of some academic apologists of Holocaust deniers as well as the treatment they sometimes manage to provoke from eminent historians. For example, one article listed by the book, originally published in the Budapest Népszabadságnewspaper by Géza Jeszenszky, a Rightist politician turned historian, defends the new Orbán constitution by minimizing the responsibility of the state for the Holocaust crimes of the Horthy era. And his argument is accompanied by a brilliant rebuttal by Professor István Deák, a highly respected Hungarian historian at Columbia University, New York, in the context of a wider discussion of Orbán’s undemocratic legislative programme.

The government’s new constitution muscled through parliament in the absence of cross-party support came into force in 2012. It denies not the occurrence of the Holocaust but Hungary’s culpability for the Holocaust murders during the rule of Admiral Horthy, by shifting all blame on his German Nazi allies. Teachers throughout the Hungarian school system departing from this line face dismissal.

And the administration is about to set up a historiography authority operating under government control to clarify remaining controversial issues of the past. It will be called the Veritas Institute of Historical Research and open in 2014, the election year that the government has also just devoted to Holocaust remembrance. The purpose of the institute, according to the official Gazette, is “to strengthen national cohesion” by generating popular awareness of “the true nature of the fateful political and social developments” in the country’s recent history “interpreted correctly and free of distortion.”

 Read the rest at:

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/142291/sec_id/142291

Illusions of Control in the Omnicompetent French State

Discontent springs eternal, and therefore so does the search for scapegoats

by Theodore Dalrymple

Should there be any limitation on the freedom of public expression, and if so why, how and when imposed? The question has become acute in France where the Minister of the Interior, Manuel Valls, has declared his intention of seeking to silence a stand-up comedian, Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, because of his increasingly anti-Semitic tirades. M. Valls, hitherto the most popular minister in President Hollande’s government, has managed to corner himself by an astonishing lack of adroitness, having fallen prey to the illusion of many politicians in a highly centralized state, namely that they can control what happens in society.

M’Bala M’Bala – known universally in France by his first name – was born 47 years ago of a French mother and a Cameroonian father. He started his career as a left-wing satirist in a duo with a Jewish colleague called Elie Semoun, but they fell out and M’Bala M’Bala thereafter grew ever more anti-semitic in his comic act. In 2007 he was fined nearly $10,000 for having called the Holocaust ‘memorial pornography.’ Increasingly refused access to mainstream media, he bought and still runs a one man theatre in Paris, theThéâtre de la Main d’Or, where it now takes several months to obtain a ticket. Repeated denunciation by the great and the good has done nothing to curb his popularity: he has 400,000 ‘friends’ on Facebook (more than half the number of Jews in France) and has popularized a gesture called la quenelle whose precise meaning is contested (especially by M’Bala M’Bala when he is in trouble with the law) but which now seems to almost everyone to be a forme fruste of the Nazi salute.

The social composition of M’Bala M’Bala’s friends and supporters is revealing and instructive. There are Holocaust deniers, of course, or those who think it did not go far enough (among them M’Bala M’Bala himself, who said of Patrick Cohen, a Jewish radio announcer, ‘When I hear him speak, I say to myself, gas chambers… what a pity.’); members of the national Front; disgruntled youth of North African origin and Palestinisan sympathies; Third-Worldists who, again like M’Bala M’Bala himself, are against what they call ‘the System.’

Hostility to, and resentment against, ‘the System’ is what unites these groups, and what makes possible a de facto, and indeed intellectually semi-coherent, alliance between the far left and the far right: for what both really hate is the spontaneous order of liberalism which they see as the origin of their woes and dissatisfactions.

The French press, media and intellectuals castigate ad nauseam what they call the ‘ultra-liberalism’ of the present-day western world: and their characterization, as intellectually lazy as it is inaccurate, now goes virtually by default. Very few are the commentators who see through its inaccuracy. That a country whose public sector accounts for more than half of economic activity, and which is as highly-administered as France (and, it must be said, often well-administered, for who would not rather go on the Paris Metro than the New York Subway?), cannot plausibly be described as ‘ultra-liberal,’ ought to be perfectly obvious even on the most casual reflection, but alas it is not. If France is ultra-anything it is ultra-corporatist, but even that would be an exaggeration. And so present discontents are laid at the door of ultra-liberalism, though in fact a considerable proportion of the resentments and discontents of the young who approve of M’Bala M’Bala are attributable to the rigidity of the French labor market, which is caused precisely by an illiberal nexus of protections and restrictions.

 Read the rest at:

http://www.libertylawsite.org/2014/01/07/illusions-of-control-in-the-omnicompetent-state/

Bernanke's era of anarchy to go on

Money creation out of "thin air" is a pure redistribution of wealth

By Noureddine Krichene 

A recent survey by Transparency International put Somalia top of their country ranking for corruption; very amusing indeed; that top spot is due, in part, to acts of piracy committed by Somali pirates. 

Piracy is confiscation of wealth by brute force. Money counterfeiting confiscates wealth, and so does swindling. Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 10 years in jail, simply because swindling is a crime; his victims lost their wealth that they had entrusted to him. Yet, when outgoing Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke prints every US$85 billion every month out of thin air, this act is considered a virtue - even though it is forced confiscation of wealth. It is called an economic "stimulus" in that, according to its proponents, it boosts the economy and moves it towards full employment. 

Bernanke leaves office at the end of this month following destructive years during which he spread financial chaos, mass-unemployment, inflation, confiscation, and poverty in the US and beyond. 

The United States was enjoying great prosperity before Bernanke turned it into a country of desolation. His tenure as a policy maker and Fed chairman will be seen by history as an era of fallacies and anarchy. His unorthodox money policies and near-zero interest rates helped to bring about the worst financial nightmares in the post-World War II period, destroyed US banks, and set off currency devaluation in other industrialized countries. 

Ignoring the US Constitution and thinking of money as a baby's toy, Bernanke ruled with absolute power in money destruction. Comparing 2000, just before Bernanke joined the Fed board of governors in 2002, and 2013, we can say that Bernanke deservedly won the title "Helicopter Ben". Fed credit rose from US$0.5 trillion to $4 trillion, a multiple of eight. US government debt is now at $17 trillion, compared with $3.4 trillion before his move to the Fed. Crude oil is at $100/barrel compared with $18/barrel; gold rose from $250 an ounce to $1,300 an ounce. Food prices are at least four times higher. Stock price indices shattered all records in 2013. Yet US real per-capita incomes are far less than in 2000. That is Bernanke's legacy of disorder. 

Bernanke believes in a theory that stipulates that "money helicoptering" is the key to prosperity and full-employment. So fancy is this theory that it has been marvelled at by US politicians and academics alike. And it is so fallacious that many years of injecting vast amounts of money into the economy have utterly failed to achieve full employment, merely chaos. 

If his theory were true, full-employment would have been almost instantaneous. Contrary to sciences where relations are exact, economics theories may never be confirmed by facts. In exact sciences, there is an immutable relation between temperature and mercury expansion, for instance, which enables us to measure temperature with precision. In economics, there is no such exact relationship between zero interest and full-employment. If an exact relationship existed, Bernanke would have attained full-employment many years ago. 

He only encouraged intense asset speculation and brought about financial disorder, and impoverishment. He is not alone in this, for sure - many economic theories their proponents claimed to be exact, such as communism and Keynesianism, have failed miserably and caused disasters wherever applied. Now we can add or Bernanke-ism to that roll of dishonor. 

When Somali pirates get a ransom for a ship, no doubt this money will increase demand for goods and services by the pirates; it will squeeze the demand for goods and services of those who had to pay it. Piracy employment is uncertain and piracy itself amounts to a redistribution of wealth only - not the creation of wealth.

Read the rest at:

 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GECON-01-070114.html

The Socialist government in France is running out of other people's money

Angry French Union So Called Workers Take Two Bosses Hostage

by Tyler Durden

Workers at a tire plant in Northern France have taken two managers hostage until Goodyear (the firm that owns the plant and has been trying to shutter it for years) meets the major unions demands, WSJ reports, as Goodyear winds down operations with the plant almost idle, French labor law requires the company to keep all workers employed, which means many of them don't work more than a couple of hours a day while still getting full salary. The situation is why Titan International's Maurice Taylor blasted that he "would be stupid" to operate the plant on that basis.

As we noted previosuly the tire factory farce escalated a year ago...

The saga of the capitalist vs the socialist goes on with Round 3, following round 1 in which the "Titan CEO Crushes Socialist "Work Ethic", Tells France "You Can Keep Your So-Called Workers" and round 2 in which "Socialist France Responds To Titan CEO, Hilarity Ensues." With the entire "developed" world now a real-time parody of itself, in which the truth about the true state of affairs is only revealed in grotesque, farcical, ad-hominem repartees between various members of the insolvent status quo plutocracy, we can only hope for many more rounds of this didactic back and forth.

Excerpted from Titan CEO Maurice Taylor's follow up letter in response to Arnaud Montebourg's letter responding to Maurice Taylor.

You letter shows the extent to which your political class is out of touch with real world problems.

You call me an extremist, but most businessmen would agree that I must be nuts to have the idea to spend millions of US dollars to buy a tyre factory in France paying some of the highest wages in the world.

Your letter did not mention why the French government has not stepped in to rescue this Goodyear tyre factory.

The extremist, Mr Minister, is your government and the lack of knowledge about how to build a business. 

Your government let the wackos of the communist union destroy the highest paying jobs. 

At no time did Titan ask for lower wages; we asked only if you want seven hours pay, you work at least six. 

France does have beautiful women and great wine. 

PS: My grandmother named my father after French entertainer Maurice Chevalier, and I inherited the name. 

I have visited Normandy with my wife. I know what we did for France. 

But now, Goodyear is entangled in legal proceedings with unions representing workers, led by the communist-backed CGT... and their actions have re-escalated... (via WSJ)

Workers at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. factory in northern France prevented two managers from leaving the facility on Monday, the latest in a string of protests by union members who were accused by a U.S. executive last year of doing little work. 

...

Mickaël Wamen, a union representative, said the managers would be held until workers get a satisfactory response to their requests. He said the managers already have been informed that they will spend the night at the site. 

Goodyear, of Akron, Ohio, has been trying to shut the plant for several years, but is entangled in legal proceedings with unions representing workers, led by the communist-backed CGT. Efforts to sell the factory to U.S. tire maker Titan International Inc. hit the headlines last year, after Titan Chief Executive Maurice Taylor blasted French labor laws and work habits.

Read the rest at:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-01-06/angry-french-union-workers-take-two-bosses-hostage

By Their Fruits Shall Ye Know Them

"Obama, Obama, there are a billion Osamas"

by Angelo M. Codevilla

A New Year’s wake-up call from the International Business Times: “In their annual End of Year poll, researchers for WIN and Gallup International surveyed more than 66,000 people across 65 nations and found that 24 percent of all respondents answered that the United States “is the greatest threat to peace in the world today.” Pakistan and China fell significantly behind the United States on the poll, with 8 and 6 percent, respectively. Afghanistan, Iran, Israel and North Korea all tied for fourth place with 4 percent.”

This confirms what international travelers sense: whereas not so long ago foreigners saw Americans as the embodiment of peace and freedom, a plurality now see us as a source of trouble for themselves. For more people than not, being on America’s side now means being on the side of trouble. Why? And what is that to us?

As ever in human history, the reputation of “dangerous to peace” does not attach itself to nations that trample over others as victorious aggressors, or whose power looms ominously. Rather, it is yet one more dangerous indignity heaped upon those who are perceived as weak and inept. That perception means that more and more people are likely to deprive us of our peace.

The question for us Americans to ponder as we enter into yet another election year is: how, since 9/11, did our leaders manage to use this country’s mighty military; how did they manage to sacrifice some 10,000 American dead and 30,000 crippled for life, to kill several hundred thousand foreigners while spending between two and three Trillion dollars, in a way that earned us no peace abroad or at home and the title of “greatest threat to peace in the world” to boot? How has all this effort made more and more people hostile to us?

We may see part of the answer in a December 29 Wall Street Journal feature by Philip Mudd, deputy director of CIA’s counterterrorism center 2003-6 and senior intelligence adviser at FBI 2009-10.

We should take Mr. Mudd at his word that our Best And Brightest have been in charge since the beginning, and have followed a consistent plan: “We met every afternoon in the CIA director’s conference room at 5. At the FBI director’s conference room, we met every morning shortly after 7.” Nose to the grindstone, early and late.

These high officials believe that America is beset by a shadowy spider-web of international rogues, and that the path to our peace lies in mapping that network. “How best can we clarify the blurry picture of an emerging terror conspiracy overseas or in the United States? How can we identify the key players and the broader network of fundraisers, radicalizers, travel facilitators and others quickly enough so they can’t succeed? And how do we ensure that we’ve mapped the network enough to dismantle—and not merely disrupt—it?”

Their answer, since they pretend to be agnostic about that network’s composition, is to gather as much data about what everyone in the world is doing and then to sort it by sophisticated mathematical algorithms to isolate “gossamer contacts…in an ocean of seemingly disconnected data,” and then to focus their investigations. To do otherwise – to start from openly available facts about who wants to do what to whom would be “profiling” of the racist kind.

But, technology has enabled our wizards to combine socio-political agnosticism with effectiveness: “The fastest, most efficient solution to mapping a network of conspirators lies in following digital connections among people. And as digital trails expand, digital network mapping will increase in value…link cellphones, email contacts, financial transactions, travel and visa information, add in whatever else you can find, and …Bingo! Within a day, you can have the beginnings of an understanding of a complex network. Even so, an analyst has to ask other questions. Where did the conspirators travel a year ago? Five years ago? Who did they live with? Who did they sit next to on an airplane? [for that] Investigators need an historical pool of data.”

Read the rest at:

 http://www.libertylawsite.org/2014/01/05/by-their-fruits-shall-ye-know-them/

100 Years After The Outbreak Of World War I, Could The World Commit Suicide Again?

Gallup’s latest poll finds 72 percent of Americans find Washington to be the largest threat to their freedom today

By Steven Hayward,

Humans are a sentimental species, making much of anniversaries and reunions.  We’re probably not far from extending our sentimental capacities to observing anniversaries of anniversaries, like aging baby boomers who argue over which Woodstock reunion was the best because their memory of the original is fading into the mists.

Already we are seeing the first trickle of articles and books that will reach a flood by summer noting the 100^thanniversary of the outbreak of World War I.  These retrospectives come in two types.  The first is the never-ending historical argument over causation of the catastrophe whose derangements of the European equilibrium have not completely subsided today.  The various diagnostic camps formed into fixed positions decades ago: “miscalculation” (Barbara Tuchman) economic and demographic asymmetries (Marxists and other varieties of material determinists), or fear of rising rival power that spurs preemption (the various descendents of Thucydides).

The second retrospective mode comes from those who wish to dilate the famous remark that Mark Twain probably never said:

“History doesn’t repeat itself—but it rhymes.” 

Given that World War I was a surprise, a war that was thought to be impossible right up to the moment it wasn’t, could we wander into the same kind of conflagration today?  There are lots of plausible candidates for the locus of a world-splitting cataclysm, ranging from a rising China or that crucible of conflict since the beginning of recorded history—instability and ambition for conquest (or revenge) in south central Asia.  Certainly the rise of radical Islam in recent decades has taken the place of revolutionary Communist, socialist, and fascist ideologies that did so much to disrupt the 20^th century in the aftermath of World War I.

Perhaps this retrospection on causal catastrophism will represent the much wished-for inversion of Santayana’s injunction to recall history so as not to repeat it.  As was the case before World War I, there are many secular reasons for optimism beyond the fine-toothed combing and re-telling of the political mistakes of 1914.  China is probably just too large and unwieldy to become a genuine threat of global war.  North Korea would be rolled up quickly if it ever acted seriously on its belligerent rhetoric.  India and Pakistan—or Iran and everyone in its neighborhood—may come to open war at some point (or the Syrian and Libyan civil wars may spread), and bad as that prospect is it would not likely spill over beyond the region or draw in the remaining world powers.  European disarmament—the great windmill of the 1930s—is coming to pass by degrees, the result of welfare-statism more than authentic Kantian pacifism.  Before long most of Europe won’t be able to fight each other even if they wanted to.  (Better watch out for those old Russians, though.  They didn’t get the memo from Brussels.)  The terror threat will be with us for a while, but can’t by itself plunge the world into a total war.

Beyond the geopolitical hypotheticals, Steven Pinker and others have noted that violence in the world, as measured in open conflicts and deaths, has been declining significantly for the last several decades.  The warfare that leading nations engage in today, such as the U.S. campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, resemble the pre-1914 world of professional armies and remote battle plains, with conflicts that did not involve whole populations like World Wars I & II.  Perhaps the promise of modernity, which was at the root of Progressive optimism a century ago, has belatedly come to fruition?

One aspect of the Great War story of a century ago seems to be missing from the growing inventory: the changes to the idea of Progress itself, and the rise of the administrative state in its wake.  The conventional wisdom for many years in U.S. historiography is that the coming of World War I entailed the end of the Progressive Era and its momentum for reform.  It is certainly true that World War I put paid to the easygoing faith in inevitable progress that prevailed everywhere in the advanced industrial nations before the war, and gave way to the existential pessimism of the interwar period that in turn brought us fully to today’s “postmodernism” that openly disdains progress in just about every form.

But it is quite wrong to suppose that World War I ended Progressivism.  To the contrary, it accelerated the rise of the modern administrative state that is the defining feature of what goes by the label of “Progressivism” today.  The British historian A.J.P. Taylor made this point inadvertently at the time of the 50^thanniversary of World War I: “Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.  He could live where he liked and as he liked.  He had no official number or identity card.”

The same was true of the United States, where the brand new income tax barely reached 10 percent on a small handful of the highest incomes, and regulation was confined to a few well-defined agencies overseeing a small number of national industries and markets.  But as Taylor correctly notes, “All this was changed by the impact of the Great War.”  Far from ending “Progressivism,” World War I provided the launchpad for a century of wholesale expansion of administrative government in the United States, starting with jacking up the income tax to over 90 percent and then, in World War II, extending its reach to the lowest rungs of the middle class.  Coupled with the crisis of the Great Depression, “Progressive” government hasn’t looked back.  In other words, if you’d described to Progressive reformers in 1910 the course of American government over the next century, they wouldn’t have regarded World War I as the end of their dreams, but rather as the turning point.  Not for nothing did Randolph Bourne say that “War is the health of the State.”

 Read the rest at :

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenhayward/2014/01/05/100-years-after-the-outbreak-of-world-war-i-could-the-world-commit-suicide-again/print/

Merry Christmas