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.

Is the Superpower Afraid of Iran?

Does this deal really make the world “a much more dangerous place”?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“Iran’s Nuclear Triumph” roared the headline of the Wall Street Journal editorial. William Kristol is again quoting Churchill on Munich.

Since the news broke Saturday night that Iran had agreed to a six-month freeze on its nuclear program, we are back in the Sudetenland again.

Why? For not only was this modest deal agreed to by the United States, but also by our NATO allies Germany, Britain and France.

Russia and China are fine with it.

Iran’s rivals, Turkey and Egypt, are calling it a good deal. Saudi Arabia says it “could be a first step toward a comprehensive solution for Iran’s nuclear program.”

Qatar calls it “an important step toward safeguarding peace and stability in the region.” Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have issued similar statements.

Israeli President Shimon Peres calls the deal satisfactory. Former Military Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin has remarked of the hysteria in some Israeli circles, “From the reactions this morning, I might have thought Iran had gotten permission to build a bomb.”

Predictably, “Bibi” Netanyahu is leading the stampede:

“Today the world has become a much more dangerous place because the most dangerous regime in the world has taken a significant step toward attaining the most dangerous weapon in the world.”

But this is not transparent nonsense?

In return for a modest lifting of sanctions, Tehran has agreed to halt work on the heavy water reactor it is building at Arak, to halt production of 20-percent uranium, to dilute half of its existing stockpile, and to allow more inspections.

Does this really make the world “a much more dangerous place”?

Consider the worst-case scenario we hear from our politicians and pundits — that Iran is cleverly scheming to get the U.S. and U.N. sanctions lifted, and, then, she will make a “mad dash” for the bomb.

Digging in: Why US won’t Leave Afghanistan

We came, we saw, we stayed. Forever.

By Pepe Escobar

 That’s the essence of the so-called Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) to be struck between the Obama administration and Afghanistan – over 12 years after the start of the never-ending War on Terror.

President Obama and US Secretary of State John Kerry define it as a ‘strategic partnership’. If that’s the case, it’s one of the most lopsided in history; Afghan President Hamid Karzai is no more than a sartorially impeccable American puppet.

Kerry announced the so-called BSA in Washington on Wednesday even before a Loya Jirga (‘Grand Council’, in Pashto) of 2,500 Afghan tribal leaders, clerics, members of parliament and merchants started their four-day deliberations in a tent on the grounds of the Polytechnical University in Kabul on Thursday.

But then Karzai, probably in his last major speech as president, pulled off a fabulous stunt. He knows he is, and will be, accused of selling Afghanistan down the (Panjshir) river. He knows he is sacrificing Afghan sovereignty for years to come – and there will be nasty blowback for it.

So once again he channeled Hamid the Actor, and played his best honest broker impersonation, stressing the BSA should be put off until the Afghan presidential elections in April 2014, and be signed by his successor.

It was high drama

“There’s a mistrust between me and the Americans. They don’t trust me and I don’t trust them. I have always criticized them and they have always propagated negative things behind my back,” he claimed.

I have been to Jirgas in Afghanistan; even looking at those inscrutable, rugged tribal faces is a spectacle in itself. So what were they thinking in Kabul? Of course they did not trust the Americans. But did they trust Karzai? Could they see this was all an act?

Keynesians: Sleepy? Down a Red Bull

The case against economic stimulus

by JULIAN ADORNEY

Fiscal stimulus, beloved by Keynesians, is not only expensive but causes long-term harm to the economy by distorting business incentives. The hundreds of billions of dollars pumped into the economy go, often as not, to cronies and industries chosen by politicians, propping up politically connected businesses at the expense of more efficient ones. 

This practice is not sustainable.

A Keynesian will attempt to justify all of these costs—decisions made by elites at the expense of the consumer—and say that they’re worth it. Why? Because fiscal stimulus cures recessions. Paul Krugman, addressing the just-breaking Great Recession in late 2008, said, “Increased government spending is just what the doctor ordered.” 

But the best reason to oppose fiscal stimulus is that it does just the opposite of what Krugman claims. It doesn’t cure recessions; it exacerbates them. 

Making Recessions Worse

Libertarians haven’t explored this angle enough, because up until recently the research just hasn’t been available to support the assertion. But as I explain here, 100 years of history show that stimulus quantitatively makes recessions worse.

In that paper, I start with research done by Christina Romer, former chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and coauthor of Obama’s 2009 plan for recovery. In 1999, Romer created a measure of the severity of recessions. The idea, in simple terms, is to add up how much industrial production was lost from one peak until the economy got back to that level. Add up the shortfall for each month between those two points, and you have one number—percentage-point months (PPM) lost—that tells you how deep that recession cut. 

Since she published the paper in 1999, she did not include data for the 2000–2001 recession nor the 2008 recession. I was able to ballpark the former and I used Krugman’s own figure (which even he says is probably a little low) for the latter. 

What I found was that Keynesian thinking has made recessions less frequent, but more painful and durable.  

The Body Economic

If you imagine that the economy is like a person, then a recession would be our need for sleep. It’s natural and normal to sleep, just like recessions are a natural market self-correction. Fiscal stimulus works like downing a Red Bull every time you need to sleep. Doing so lets you stay awake a little longer. But eventually you’re going to have to sleep, and your crash will be much worse than if you had just let your body rest instead of trying to counter that instinct with a stimulant.

Iran: Past the Paranoia

At once theocratic, secular, hostile, and modern, Iran is not America's natural enemy

By PETER HITCHENS

The story of the cardboard tanks was a haunting urban myth of 1930s Britain, often recalled by adults during my 1950s childhood. It concerned a middle-class couple who took a motor tour of the Third Reich about the time of the Munich Agreement. As they drove their very solid, very British automobile along a twisting mountain road, they suddenly came face to face with a squadron of Hitler’s feared new tanks. It was too late to stop, too narrow to swerve. Commending their souls to God, the couple braced themselves for certain death. But death did not come—only a strange splintering noise and some strangled cries of “Achtung!” and “Engländer Schweinehund!” The tank was a mere mock-up, made of cardboard, bamboo, string, and chewing gum, and the couple sliced through it, quite unhurt. This tale, wholly false, was told 70 years ago to spread foolish complacency about the real peril of German rearmament. It was retold 50 years ago to remind us how gullible we had been about a dangerous enemy.

It concerns me now as I write about a recent visit to Iran, the country that has been designated as the next official enemy of what is still called “The West.” I came away so completely opposed to this silly hostility that I fear I am in danger of stirring up apathy, like the people who spread the myth of the cardboard Panzers. I am a Cold War veteran who believes in deterrence and accepts that there was a genuine Soviet threat. I am an incorrigible Zionist. I think my own country has allowed its armed forces to become lamentably weak. But I think the difference between the official account of Iran as sinister menace and the Iran I experienced is so great that it is a sort of duty to draw attention to it.

This general fear is so strong that members of my own family, used to my traveling to many curious corners of the world and much-traveled themselves, were apprehensive about my going to Tehran. Feelings were a little high at the time. A group of Royal Navy bluejackets and Marines had just been seized by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the waters off Basra and released after alleged ill treatment. These trained warriors spoke of their experiences as if they had been held in the dungeons of man-eating pirates, claiming to have been scared of torture and, in the case of the one woman involved, of rape. So terror-stricken had they been that they allowed themselves to be filmed more or less admitting to losing their way and rambling into Iranian waters. One had been persuaded to pen a letter denouncing Britain’s military presence in Iraq. Their subsequent fate—sudden release after an apparent deal, the sale by some of them of their pathetic memoirs to mass-circulation newspapers, a national revulsion against them for their general feebleness—is interesting in itself, but it is not part of my story.

The American Police State

Mass incarceration "The New Jim Crow"

By Marc Parry

On a winter afternoon in 2004, a woman waits in the detective unit of a Philadelphia police station. Two officers, outfitted with combat boots and large guns, enter the room. The cops place their guns on the table, pointed at her.

The woman is 22, tiny, and terrified.

The officers show her a series of photos of men from around her neighborhood. Two of the men are her roommates, Mike and Chuck, low-level drug dealers who keep crack and guns in the shared apartment. Some of the photos were taken in front of her home.

Spewing obscenities about the woman's supposed appetite for casual sex, the cops press for information about her roommates and threaten criminal charges if she fails to cooperate.

"If you can't work with us," one cop says, "then who will you call when he's sticking a gun to your head? ... He'll kill you over a couple of grams. You know that, right?"

Such scenes are nothing unusual in the lower-income black neighborhood where this woman spends most of her time. Girlfriends and relatives routinely face police pressure to inform on the men in their lives.

Unknown to the cops, though, there is one difference this time. The woman under interrogation, Alice Goffman, has been watching them.

Nearly a decade later, Goffman is emerging as a rising star of sociology. The 2004 interrogation shows why. After spending her 20s immersed in fieldwork with wanted young men—a project she began as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania—Goffman has brought back the story of a "profound change" in the way America governs urban ghettos.

In a book coming out this spring, Goffman, now a 31-year-old assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, documents how the expansion of America's penal system is reshaping life for the poor black families who exist under the watch of its police, prison guards, and parole officers.

Starting in the mid-1970s, the United States stiffened its laws on drugs and violent crime and ratcheted up the police presence on city streets. The number of people in American jails and prisons has risen fivefold over the past 40 years. There are now roughly six million people under criminal-justice supervision. "In modern history," Goffman writes, "only the forced labor camps of the former U.S.S.R. under Stalin approached these levels of penal confinement."

Goffman's book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (University of Chicago Press), is an up-close account of that prison boom told largely through the story of a group of young friends in Philadelphia's 6th Street neighborhood. (The location and names in the book are pseudonyms.) The study describes how fear of confinement has transformed work, health, and family life, causing men to disengage from the very mainstream institutions that might put them on a better path.

The threat of incarceration has created "a new social fabric," Goffman writes, "one woven in suspicion, distrust, and the paranoiac practices of secrecy, evasion, and unpredictability." It has turned ghettos into "communities of suspects and fugitives."

A windfall Afghan exit strategy for Obama

Karzai is offering Obama an exit strategy

by M K Bhadrakumar

The tough-talking, no-nonsense US National Security Advisor Susan Rice met her match at the presidential palace in Kabul Monday evening over a “working dinner”. One would have loved to be a fly on the wall. But there was no need, because no sooner than the pomegranates and grapes were eaten after the rich meal of pilav and kebabs and Rice reported back to Washington her conversation with President Hamid Karzai, which lasted several hours, the White house released a curtly worded readout on what transpired. 

In sum, the readout makes it clear that President Barack Obama expects Karzai to back off from his pre-conditions for signing the status of forces agreement (known as the Bilateral Security Agreement or BSA.) 

Karzai’s spokesman Aimal Faizi, who was present at the dinner, later went public with a candid media briefing. He disclosed that there were heated exchanges.  Faizi said the American ambassador James Cunningham “made the President very angry; his reaction was strong and intense.” 

The argument arose over Karzai’s new precondition that the Obama administration should release all the Afghan prisoners at Guantanamo Bay (estimated to number 20 Taliban leaders). Cunningham tried to explain that the US domestic laws prevail over Guantanamo prisoners. 

Hmmm. Faizi added that Karzai’s strongest language was reserved for another exchange with Rice herself when he pressed that American counterterrorism raids on Afghan private homes should forthwith cease (which are the sole combat activity undertaken nowadays by American troops with the drones silently bearing the main burden of the war). 

The Physics of Party Government

Nothing that we, the ruled, do can bring back the America they have already destroyed

by Angelo M. Codevilla

It took Woodrow Wilson a century and a quarter, and help from Harry Reid. But America now has what Wilson said we needed in 1885: government by a majority party empowered to do whatever it wants to push the country along the paths of progress – just like in Europe. Harry Reid and the Obama Democrats’ unilateral change of rules to make the US Senate run strictly on majority votes simply capped a long process of growth in partisanship that has Europeanized public life in America without changing a word in the Constitution. This is not how Wilson wanted to do it, but the unlovely results are the same.

Wilson’s signature work, Congressional Government(1885) argued that the US Constitution’s authors had bequeathed to us a vehicle with too many brakes and steering wheels, but with no driver in charge and not enough horsepower. Whereas James Madison had seen our Constitutional system of checks and balances as means to “refine and enlarge the public view,” Wilson saw it as substituting endless argument and compromise for necessary univocal action. He wrote that our Founding Fathers had done us wrong.

Wilson wanted us to have a parliamentary system with “responsible parties.” Like in Europe, the party that won a majority of seats would vote in unison and wield the power, as the British Jurist William Blackstone had said of his parliament, to do “all that is not naturally impossible” and to test the meaning of that limit as well.

But constitutions and rules were never the main reason why America did not have “responsible parties.” That reason was the diversity of American political life. From the eighteenth century until very recently, all of our political parties were loose coalitions of people who represented countless different kinds of people and interests. Moreover, none of those interests was interested in imposing a comprehensive agenda on the rest. Given that, party discipline could not have existed regardless of legislative or constitutional language.

This began to change after the Civil War, when Southerners, a substantial sector of the Democratic Party, acted in unison to protect their peculiar, embattled model of race relations as well as other interests, and thus made it necessary for the rest of the House of Representatives to observe some degree of discipline. The Senate, by contrast, remained proud of its indiscipline – until now.

Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” put America on the slope to Harry Reed’s imposition of rule by a disciplined majority party because it was the first instance in US history in which a political party tried to impose a new way of life on the whole country. That requires discipline on the part of the imposers and elicited the same from the opponents. Since that time, with few respites, the Democratic Party has presented America with ever-edgier, ever more urgent versions of the same agenda: “new freedom,” “new frontier,” “new foundation,” etc.

Each click of this ratchet required more unison on the part of those who tightened it. Why should anyone be surprised that it elicited a response from the people it squeezed? Newton’s Third Law Of Motion applies to politics as well as to physics. The US Constitution’s words count little against such forces, much less the rules of the US Senate.

Some to Misery Are Born

Life at the bottom

by Theodore Dalrymple

Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born,

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

The first couplet of Blake’s verse seems to me a good deal more certain than the second because happiness and misery, while opposite, are not in the least symmetrical. I count myself to have had more than a usually fortunate life (except for a wretched childhood), and I think I have been in the top one percent of humanity where luck is concerned, but still I would not say that I had been born to sweet delight, even if I cannot take the credit for my good fortune. 

The problem is that sweet delight, as the Buddha knew, contains within itself the seeds of its own decay, unlike misery which has within it no inherent tendency to change into its opposite and can last a lifetime. It is impossible to remain ecstatic for very long. Anyone who says that he can and does is either lying or mad. Happiness is like the blush of a grape, and consciousness of it is like the finger that destroys that blush. But there are many people whose misery is continuous and unremitting and seems from birth to have been predestined.

I have spent quite a lot of my professional life as a doctor among such people, and recently I was asked by the courts to examine a woman charged with murder whose deed was terrible and reprehensible but whose life, it seemed to me (and I am generally no determinist), had led, if not quite inexorably to murder, at least to constant disaster.

Her father and uncle sexually abused her from the age of eight, and when she told her mother, a cocaine addict, her mother beat her for being a “dirty” girl. Her father and uncle were alcoholics. Her father invited men into the house to have sex with her mother in return for money. He was violent if she refused and sometimes if she accepted. 

Her mother soon left her father and had a succession of lovers to live in with her. All of them were drug addicts or alcoholics, and practically all were violent. She (the woman whom the courts asked me to examine) began to take drugs and drink, at her mother’s instigation and with her encouragement, at the age of twelve or thirteen. By the age of fifteen she was pregnant by one of her mother’s lovers, who more or less forced himself upon her with her mother’s consent. Her mother meanwhile had several children by different men. Suffice it to say that life did not improve for her thereafter.

She was not intelligent and her school did nothing to prepare her for life in a modern economy, let alone provide her with anything recognizably like a liberal education. She could read, just about, but could not add six and seven and could not multiply five by four (though she knew, she told me proudly, her two times table). This, after a state education costing $100,000! A miracle of incompetence and dereliction of duty! Her few jobs did not last long, were unskilled, and paid very little, giving her an income no larger than that provided by the state, the latter increasing with each of her successive children (by different men, of course). In all, she had worked but a few months in her life, the rest given over to childbearing. Everyone around her lived the kind of life she had led, or to which she had been led.

Masking Totalitarianism

Because Americans still retain a large measure of liberty, tyrants must mask their agenda

By Walter E. Williams

One of the oldest notions in the history of mankind is that some people are to give orders and others are to obey. The powerful elite believe that they have wisdom superior to the masses and that they’ve been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Their agenda calls for an attack on the free market and what it implies — voluntary exchange. Tyrants do not trust that people acting voluntarily will do what the tyrant thinks they should do. Therefore, free markets are replaced with economic planning and regulation that is nothing less than the forcible superseding of other people’s plans by the powerful elite.

Because Americans still retain a large measure of liberty, tyrants must mask their agenda. At the university level, some professors give tyranny an intellectual quality by preaching that negative freedom is not enough. There must be positive liberty or freedoms. This idea is widespread in academia, but its most recent incarnation was a discussion by Wake Forest University professor David Coates in a Huffington Post article, titled “Negative Freedom or Positive Freedom: Time to Choose?” (11/13/2013) (http://tinyurl.com/oemfzy6). Let’s examine negative versus positive freedom.

Negative freedom or rights refers to the absence of constraint or coercion when people engage in peaceable, voluntary exchange. Some of these negative freedoms are enumerated in our Constitution’s Bill of Rights. More generally, at least in its standard historical usage, a right is something that exists simultaneously among people. As such, a right imposes no obligation on another. For example, the right to free speech is something we all possess. My right to free speech imposes no obligation upon another except that of noninterference. Likewise, my right to travel imposes no obligation upon another.

Positive rights is a view that people should have certain material things — such as medical care, decent housing and food — whether they can pay for them or not.

Seeing as there is no Santa Claus or tooth fairy, those “rights” do impose obligations upon others. If one person has a right to something he did not earn, of necessity it requires that another person not have a right to something he did earn.

If we were to apply this bogus concept of positive rights to free speech and the right to travel freely, my free speech rights would impose financial obligations on others to supply me with an auditorium, microphone and audience. My right to travel would burden others with the obligation to purchase airplane tickets and hotel accommodations for me. Most Americans, I would imagine, would tell me, “Williams, yes, you have the right to free speech and travel rights, but I’m not obligated to pay for them!”

What the positive rights tyrants want but won’t articulate is the power to forcibly use one person to serve the purposes of another. After all, if one person does not have the money to purchase food, housing or medicine and if Congress provides the money, where does it get the money? It takes it from some other American, forcibly using that person to serve the purposes of another. Such a practice differs only in degree, but not kind, from slavery.

Under natural law, we all have certain unalienable rights. The rights we possess we have authority to delegate. For example, we all have a right to defend ourselves against predators. Because we possess that right, we can delegate it to government, in effect saying, “We have the right to defend ourselves, but for a more orderly society, we delegate to you the authority to defend us.” By contrast, I don’t possess the right to take your earnings to give to another. Seeing as I have no such right, I cannot delegate it.

The idea that one person should be forcibly used to serve the purposes of another has served as the foundation of mankind’s ugliest and most brutal regimes. Do we want that for America? 

Those who know, those who don’t know, and those who don’t care to know

Sheeple: Why You Should Feel Sorry For Them

by Brandon Smith

It is often said there only two kinds of people in this world: those who know, and those who don’t. I would expand on this and say that there are actually three kinds of people: those who know, those who don’t know, and those who don’t care to know. Members of the last group are the kind of people I would characterize as “sheeple.”

Sheeple are members of a culture or society who are not necessarily oblivious to the reality of their surroundings; they may have been exposed to valuable truths on numerous occasions. However, when confronted with facts contrary to their conditioned viewpoint, they become aggressive and antagonistic in their behavior, seeking to dismiss and attack the truth by attacking the messenger and denying reason.  Sheeple exist on both sides of America's false political paradigm, and they exist in all social "classes".  In fact, the "professional class" and the hierarchy of academia are rampant breeding grounds for sheeple; who I sometimes refer to as "intellectual idiots".  Doctors and lawyers, scientists and politicians are all just as prone to the sheeple plague as anyone else; the only difference is that they have a bureaucratic apparatus behind them which gives them a false sense of importance.  All they have to do is tow the establishment line, and promote the establishment view.

Of course the common argument made by sheeple is that EVERYONE thinks everyone else is blind to the truth, which in their minds, somehow vindicates their behavior.  However, the characteristic that absolutely defines a sheeple is not necessarily a lack of knowledge, but an unwillingness to consider or embrace obvious logic or truth in order to protect their egos and biases from harm.  A sheeple's mindset is driven by self centered motives.

So-called mainstream media outlets go out of their way to reinforce this aggressive mindset by establishing the illusion that sheeple are the “majority” and that the majority perception (which has been constructed by the MSM) is the only correct perception.

Many liberty movement activists have noted recently that there has been a surge in media propaganda aimed at painting the survival, preparedness and liberty cultures as “fringe,” “reactionary,” “extremist,” “conspiracy-minded,” etc. National Geographic’s television show “Doomsday Preppers” appears to have been designed specifically to seek out the worst possible representatives of the movement and parade their failings like a carnival sideshow. Rarely do they give focus to the logical arguments regarding why their subjects become preppers, nor do they normally choose subjects who can explain as much in a coherent manner. This is a very similar tactic used by the establishment media at large-scale protests; they generally attempt to interview the least-eloquent and easiest-to-ridicule person present and make that person a momentary mascot for the entire group and the philosophy they hold dear.

The goal is to give sheeple comfort that they are “normal” and that anyone who steps outside the bounds of the mainstream is “abnormal” and a welcome target for the collective.