CanSpeccy

Why we don't need to slaughter infants

2012-03-04T19:58:00.002-08:00

That the World is "overpopulated" is almost universally believed by the inhabitants of the West.

That this is so at a time when prosperity has never before been so widely enjoyed and when the technology for the production, processing, storage and transportation of food has never been more advanced seems surprising.

True, the rate of human population growth has been rapid over the last several generations and must, therefore, be closer to the upper limit than before, but whether we have already passed the carrying capacity of the planet or have yet to reach even the 5 or 10% mark would seem a question entirely beyond the capacity of the average person to judge.

One must conclude, therefore, that anxiety about population is attributable to anti-growth propaganda featuring more or less bogus claims about "peak oil" and global warming, the deification of the Environment, and as I have suggested elsewhere, the self-hating racism of those experiencing civilizational collapse, due to a failure, not of the means of physical support, but of will.

But even if it were possible to show, which it is not, that the world is in some sense "overpopulated," there seems no reason for panic.

If the population exceeds the carrying capacity of the planet, nature will take care of a reduction. No need for a tyrannical elite to dictate who can reproduce and who must die, or to turn morality on its head and announce that killing babies is "permissible".

Overpopulation is part of the normal process of evolution. All animal species at some times exceed the carrying capacity of their habitat. Then the population crashes and the cycle repeats.

One evolutionary biologist, Prof Wynne Edwards, at Aberdeen University, had the idea that animals regulate their numbers to prevent overpopulation, but this proved, by empirical research, to be a fallacy.

The reason that no mechanism preventing overpopulation has evolved is that it is detrimental to the species. The strategy all organisms follow is to multiply to the max because when the population crash comes, those with the most progeny have the best chance of being represented in succeeding generations.

In the past, the wealthy had the best chance of raising a large family. Because wealth was roughly correlated with desirable physical traits and high mental capacity, the reproductive success of the wealthy was good for the species.

In a competitive world, not all the offspring of the wealthy were able to maintain the wealth and status as their parents. This meant that members of the upper classes were constantly being pushed down into the lower strata of society, which ensured that desirable physical, mental and cultural traits were propagated throughout the population.

Now, under the welfare state, the system has gone into reverse. The most educated women have the fewest children and posterity is disproportionately derived from the lowest social classes. This will have catastrophic consequences for Western society.

"The Very [Lethal] Values of a Liberal Society"

2012-03-02T10:25:00.092-08:00

"Ethicists" declare the killing of this child "permissible,"
its potential "morally irrelevant."

After-birth abortion: why should the baby live? is the title of an article in the current issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics by Alberto Giubilini, of the Universities of Milan and Melbourne, and Francesca Minerva, of the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford.

The paper is summarized thus:

By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

The feeble-mindedness and moral nullity of this argument is established by the use of the term "after-birth abortion," a contradiction in terms introduced to establish the moral equivalence of abortion, which is now legal throughout the "liberal" Western world, and infanticide, which is still deemed to be murder.

But this crass effort to manipulate opinion by the misuse of words is totally unnecessary. Self-evidently, it makes no significant moral difference whether a human being is killed immediately before, or immediately after, birth.

But by resorting at the outset of their argument to philosophical fraud, the authors accomplish something that they should, given their beliefs, have avoided at all costs, which is to draw attention to the moral equivalence between the killing of a perfectly healthy infant and the practice of abortion.

As it is, they have succeeded in creating a surge of opposition to the extraordinary evil of murdering, yearly, literally millions of perfectly healthy human beings, with the sole justification that their human potential is of "no moral relevance" -- a morally depraved nonsense that reveals the banality of the evil espoused by the liberal-left that dominates the thought of the Western establishment.

The argument is framed in a vacuum.

No consideration is given to religious scruples, for in the "liberal" West, religion is dead and all but the unenlightened are atheists like the evolutionary biologist and Oxford University professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Richard Dawkins, for whom Christianity is a contemptible delusion.

No consideration is given to the propagation of the race, for in the "liberal" West, there is no such thing as race, the difference between a Chinese and a Zulu being a purely social construct, notwithstanding the liberal's professed delight in human diversity.

No consideration is given to the broader implications of declaring the murder of a newborn child "permissible." Yet if a newborn child lacks "morally relevant" potential, how many of us can truly claim to be different?

But though the case for child murder is made in isolation, one should be under no illusion about what is to follow. As the corpses of little children pile up, the lack of a "morally relevant" potential will be advanced to justify slaughtering the occupants of every mental hospital and every geriatric ward. This has long been the goal of the Fabian left: to exterminate the halt, the sick, the maimed, and every other kind of useless eater.

What passes for "liberalism" provides justification for all the horrors of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism. As they plan for the installation of diminutive gas chambers in every maternity ward, the medical "ethicists" are surely already working to justify the profitable recycling of tissues and organs of those of no "morally relevant" potential.

What distinguishes the vileness of this Western liberalism from the vileness of Nazism is that its racism is the the self-hating racism of a dying civilization rather than the predatory racism of an empire. The West has been turned upon itself for the greater enrichment of a plutocratic and globalist elite.

That the liberal-left program for the the annihilation of Western civilization and its people is based on no ethical system whatever, is evident from the way in which its proponents respond to their critics. Thus, according to the editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, Prof Julian Savulescu, referring to death threats received by the authors of "Why should the baby live?"

... those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society."

Bravo. An exemplary refutation of every argument: find a few nutters threatening violence, preferably skinheads with "fuck off" or "Heil Hitler" tattooed on their foreheads, and use them as a pretext for smearing all opponents as far-right-wing extremist Nazi, fascist, racists.

Which explains why the liberal-left cannot do without the fringe right-wingers, such as Britain's BNP, EDL, British Freedom Party, and the dimwitted knuckle-dragging oafs that these parties attract.

But the vast majority of ordinary people who have never acted in an abusive or threatening manner are in total opposition to the legalization of infanticide and the destruction of their own race and nation by a liberal elite that sanctions the slaughter of millions of healthy humans in utero while condemning as racists those who oppose the replacement of their own people and the destruction of their culture through a combination of state promoted abortion, psychological manipulation under the guise of K to middle-age education and mass immigration of people differing from the indigenous population in race, culture and creed.

Image source. The recent rise in fertility reflects the fertility
of the philoprogenitive immigrants from North Africa and else-
where who are replacing the indigenous Italian population.
.

But the conclusive ethical case against the authors of "Why should the baby live?" is to be found in their names.

Their names are Italian and Italy, with a birth rate barely half the replacement rate, leads the World in the globalist-driven program of national self-destruction.

Italy, will endure, and it will be occupied by people calling themselves Italians. But these will be "new Italians," not the descendants of the now dying generation. They will be the descendants of people from Africa, Asian and the Middle East, a mongrelized population whose "morally relevant" potential will be defined not by a religion or a culture, but according to the needs of a globalist elite.

This is a point one might have expected the public intellectual (or at least the publicly funded intellectual), Richard Dawkins, to have considered and discussed. But apparently, it is a point too abstruse for Oxford's present-day successors to such moral and intellectual heavyweights as Bishop Robert Grosseteste and C.S. Lewis.

But things may yet go astray. The Muslims who seek to settle and occupy the West could yet come out on top. On top, that is, of the plutocrats now seeking to remodel the World in their own interest. In which case, we can look forward to a future when the Atheist dons of Oxford are replaced by God-fearing mullahs who understand that their powers and privileges depend on caring for, not destroying, the people.

But by then, rather sadly, the European peoples will have been submerged and largely displaced by others.

The madness of genius: Glenn Gould

2012-03-01T12:20:00.000-08:00

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Robert Fulford: Was Asperger' Syndrome the source of Gould's genius?

Four views on democracy

2012-02-28T10:40:00.004-08:00

Andrew P. Napolitano: What If Democracy Is Bunk?

What if you are only allowed to vote because it doesn't make a difference? What if no matter how you vote, the elites get to have it their way? What if "one person, one vote" is just a fiction created by the government to induce your compliance? What if democracy is dangerous to personal freedom? What if democracy erodes the people's understanding of natural rights and the foundations of government, and instead turns elections into beauty contests?

What if democracy allows the government to do anything it wants ...

Read more

Peter Hitchens: If not Putin, Who?
I like Vladimir Putin. I wish I did not. But I cannot help it. I know that by saying so, I will trigger the lofty wrath of the right-thinking lobby which wants to portray modern Russia as the Evil Empire in a new Cold War.

In that war, which they are trying so hard to start, they will see me as a traitor. But it is exactly because I love my own country that I can see the point of Mr Putin.

He stands – as no other major leader does in the world today – for the rights of nations to decide their own business inside their own borders.

Read more

Winston Churchill: Speaking on the Parliament Bill, the House of Commons November 11, 1947

... No Government in time of peace has ever had such arbitrary power over the lives and actions of the British people, and no Government has ever failed more completely to meet their daily practical needs. Yet the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues are avid for more power. No Government has ever combined so passionate a lust for power with such incurable impotence in its exercise. The whole history of this country shows a British instinct—and, I think I may say, a genius—for the division of power. The American Constitution, with its checks and counterchecks, combined with its frequent appeals to the people, embodied much of the ancient wisdom of this island. Of course, there must be proper executive power to any Government, but our British, our English idea, in a special sense, has always been a system of balanced rights and divided authority, with many other persons and organised bodies having to be considered besides the Government of the day and the officials they employ. This essential British wisdom is expressed in many foreign Constitutions which followed our Parliamentary system, outside the totalitarian zone, but never was it so necessary as in a country which has no written Constitution.

The right hon. Gentleman spoke about Parliament, about the rights of Parliament, which I shall certainly not fail to defend. But it is not Parliament that should rule; it is the people who should rule through Parliament. That is the mistake he made, an important omission. All this was comprehended by those who shaped the Parliament Act and the settlement which developed upon that Act, so that it was never mentioned again for 36 years until now. That is what the Government are seeking to mutilate, if not to destroy. The object of the Parliament Act, and the spirit of that Act, were to give effect, not to spasmodic emotions of the electorate, but to the settled, persistent will of the people. What they wanted to do they could do, and what they did not want to do they could stop. All this idea of a handful of men getting hold of the State machine, having the right to make the people do what suits their party and personal interests or doctrines, is completely contrary to every conception of surviving Western democracy. "Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made," "Some patient force to change them when we will." We accept in the fullest sense of the word the settled and persistent will of the people. All this idea of a group of super men and super-planners, such as we see before us, "playing the angel," as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, is a violation of democracy. Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.

I remember, many years ago, the late John Morley talking to me about a Greek word, born in the classical cradle of democracy, meaning the wish, the will, and the determination, with special reference to the gods, or to destiny, or, as it was adapted, to the desire of the mass, the inward desire of the mass of the people. This implied, that there should be frequent recurrence, direct or indirect, to the popular will, and that the wish—the —should prevail. That is what the party opposite is afraid of, and that is what this Act is devised to prevent. ...

... all these constitutions have the same object in view, namely, that the persistent resolve of the people shall prevail without throwing the community into convulsion and disorder by rash or violent, irreparable action and to restrain and prevent a group or sect or faction assuming dictatorial power. Single-Chamber Government, as I have said, is especially dangerous in a country which has no written Constitution and where Parliaments are elected for as long as five years. When there is an ancient community built up across the generations, "Where Freedom broadens slowly down From precedent to precedent"," it is not right that all should be liable to be swept away by the desperate measures of a small set of discredited men. "A thousand years scarce serve to form a State." "An hour may lay it in dust." This is the argument against Second-Chamber Government, which is evidently so espoused on that side of the House. In this field the outlook of His Majesty's Ministers is marked by the same meanness of thought and spirit which characterise so much of their action and which destroys their power to help or unite and save our suffering country. They wish to keep the present Second Chamber on the hereditary basis so that they can abuse it, insult it and attack it and yet to cripple its powers, although those powers stand on 36 years of modern Parliamentary title so that, in effect, it is both vulnerable and powerless. That is their tactical method. By this artful, and insincere scheme they hope to substitute for the will of the people the decisions of the Government. This sinister intrigue will be exposed by us, without fear, to the electorate resting upon a universal suffrage. ...

Look around at what is happening every day. The idea of a mandate is only a convention. A band of men who have got hold of the machine and have a Parliamentary majority undoubtedly have the power to propose anything they choose without the slightest regard to whether the people like it or not, or the slightest reference to whether or not it was included in their election literature. I will not expatiate upon the kind of laws they could pass if all is to be settled by a party majority in the House of Commons, under the discipline of the Whips and the caucus. But anyone can see for himself, and it is now frankly admitted on the opposite side of the House, that what is aimed at now is single-Chamber Government at the dictation of Ministers, without regard to the wishes of the people and without giving them any chance to express their opinion. There is, in fact, only one thing that they cannot do under the Parliament Act, 1911, and that is to prolong the life of Parliament beyond the five years' span to which we reduced it in those old days. I must say I am very glad we thought of it.

As a free-born Englishman, what I hate is the sense of being at anybody's mercy or in anybody's power, be he Hitler or Attlee. We are approaching very near to dictatorship in this country, dictatorship that is to say—I will be quite candid with the House—without either its criminality or its efficiency. But let the party opposite not imagine they will rule our famous land and lead our group of Commonwealths and our Empire—or what is left of it—by party dodges and Cabinet intrigues. Lots of people have tried to break the British nation and make it do things it did not want to do. Some were British and some were foreign. They all came a cropper. Do not imagine, I say to right hon. Gentlemen opposite, that you have got this country in pawn. The British are a proud people and, more than any other country in Europe, they have known how to control their rulers. You are our rulers now and we are going to show you that there are limits to your control. ...

Read more

CanSpeccy: The Only Real Breach of the British Constitution

The only real breach of the British Constitution, Lord Salisbury believed, occurs if the government does something of which the great majority of the population strongly disapproves.

For decades, successive British governments have been doing something of which the great majority of the British population strongly disapproves:

Read more

superstar Angelina ‘Humanitarian’ Jolie is now baying for Syrian blood

2012-02-28T10:15:00.002-08:00

Angelina Jolie of the Council on Foreign Relations Conscripted To Sell Genocidal ‘Humanitarian Intervention’ War Doctrine

24 February 2012 14,485 views 45 Comments

by Martin Iqbal

Updated Sunday 26 February, 2012. Click here to go to the update.

Angelina Jolie, Goodwill Ambassador to the UN and member of CFR, is now using her profile to promote NATO’s genocidal ‘humanitarian intervention’ war doctrine. In an interview with the Balkans branch of Al Jazeera (NATO’s ‘Ministry of Truth’), Jolie (whose father has been a staunch defender of George W. Bush and who also visited Israel to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Nakba) promotes her new film ‘In the Land of Blood and Honey’, a pro-war propaganda set-piece centred around the ‘humanitarian intervention’.
Set in Sarajevo, Jolie’s directorial debut aims to justify NATO’s brutal butchery in Bosnia during the 1990s, and Jolie even specifically refers to Syria in her Al Jazeera interview. She puts forth a string of utterly hollow gripes about the inactivity of the ‘international community’ as civilians suffer and die. Jolie’s selective morality means she doesn’t once mention Libya – a nation now butchered, fractured, and transformed into a torture state by NATO’s genocidal ‘humanitarian intervention’; an estimated 100,000 innocent people slaughtered by the very same ‘international community’.
Most likely reading from her pre-defined talking points, Jolie even calls out Russia and China for using their veto powers against the ever benevolent ‘international community’ vis-à-vis Syria.

“I think Syria has gotten to a point, sadly, where some form of, certainly, where some sort of intervention is absolutely necessary.
It’s so disheartening, it’s so sad, it’s so upsetting, it’s so horrible, what’s happening…at this time we just must stop the civilians being slaughtered…when you see that sort of mass violence and murder on the streets we must do something. And I know that the countries in the region are pushing as well, so I feel that this is a good global effort, but then there are these countries that are choosing not to intervene and I don’t feel, I feel very strongly that the use of a veto when you have financial interests in a country should be questioned, and the use of a veto against a humanitarian intervention should be questioned.”

Listen from approximately 8 minutes and 20 seconds in:

Hollywood superstar Angelina ‘Humanitarian’ Jolie is now baying for Syrian blood. The worst part is, due to our pitiful culture of celebrity worship and braindead media consumption, this episode may do great damage to the months of hard work that truth-seekers have done to expose this genocidal doctrine of war.

Update: 26 February, 2012
Yet another celebrity has been conscripted to sell the war on Syria. This time it’s UK singer Joss Stone telling the BBC that “these stories have to be told” otherwise the “massacres will just get worse”.

Via PoorRichard's Blog

The Amazing Ancient Culture of Syria: World's Oldest Known Melody, ca.1400 BC

2012-02-27T12:16:00.005-08:00

By Michael Levy

This unique video, features my arrangement for solo lyre, of the 3400 year old "Hurrian Hymn no.6", which was discovered in Ugarit in Syria in the early 1950s, and was preserved for 3400 years on a clay tablet, written in the Cuniform text of the ancient Hurrian language - it is THE oldest written song yet known! Respect, to the amazing ancient culture of Syria...السلام عليكم

Although about 29 musical texts were discovered at Ugarit, only this text, (text H6), was in a sufficient state of preservation to allow for modern academic musical reconstruction.

In short, the Cuneiform text clearly indicated specific names for lyre strings, and their respective musical intervals -- a sort of "Guitar tablature", for lyre!

Although discovered in modern day Syria, the Hurrians were not Syrian -- they came from modern day Anatolia. The Hurrian Hymn actually dates to the very end of the Hurrian civilisation (c.1400BCE) . The Hurrian civilization dates back to at least 3000 BCE. It is an incredible thought, that just maybe, the musical texts found at Ugarit, preserved precious sacred Hurrian music which may have already been thousands of years old, prior to their inscription for posterity, on the clay tablets found at Ugarit!

My arrangement here, is based on the that the original transcription of the melody, as interpreted by Prof. Richard Dumbrill. Here is a link to his book, "The Archeomusicology of the Near East": http://bit.ly/d3aovp

It is played here, on a replica of the ancient Kinnor Lyre from neighbouring Israel; an instrument almost tonally identical to the wooden asymmetric-shaped lyres played throughout the Middle East at this amazingly distant time...when the Pharaoh's still ruled ancient Egypt.

A photograph of the actual clay tablet on which the Hurrian Hymn was inscribed, can be seen here:

http://www.phoenicia.org/music.html

The melody is one of several academic interpretations, derived from the ambiguous Cuneiform text of the Hurrian language in which it was written. Although many of the meanings of the Hurrian language are now lost in the mists of time, it can be established that the fragmentary Hurrian Hymn which has been found on these precious clay tablets are dedicated to Nikkal; the wife of the moon goddess.

There are several such interpretations of this melody, but to me, the fabulous interpretation just somehow sounds the most "authentic". Below is a link to the sheet music, as arranged by Clint Goss:

http://www.flutekey.com/pdf/HurrianTabLtd.pdf

In my arrangement of the Hurrian Hymn, I have attempted to illustrate an interesting diversity of ancient lyre playing techniques, ranging from the use of "block and strum" improvisation at the end, glissando's, trills & tremolos, and alternating between harp-like tones in the left hand produced by finger-plucked strings, and guitar-like tones in the right hand, produced by use of the plectrum.

I have arranged the melody in the style of a "Theme and Variations" - I first quote the unadorned melody in the first section, followed by the different lyre techniques described above in the repeat, & also featuring improvisatory passages at the end of the performance. My arrangement of the melody is much slower than this actual specific academic interpretation of the melody- I wanted the improvisations in the variations on the theme to stand out, and to better illustrate the use of lyre techniques by a more rubato approach to the melody.

All of my 9 albums of mystical, ancient lyre music are now available from iTunes. For full details please visit: http://www.ancientlyre.com

Our Friends and Enemies in the Middle East

2012-02-26T08:55:00.017-08:00

Senior Hamas leader rebukes Syrian ally Assad, backs rebels
Al-Qaida urges Muslims to help Syrian rebels
Jordan's Muslim Brotherhood urge 'jihad' against Syrian regime
Syrian security forces destroy Wahabi terrorist gang

France’s secret war against the Syrian people
The ‘Friends of Syria’ is a contradiction in terms
Syria's "friends" prepare military assault

Clinton calls Russia and China 'despicable' for failing to condemn Syria
China calls US critique on Syria "super arrogant"
SYRIA: US-NATO Behind the Killings of Civilians

WHY DO PEOPLE IN THE WEST SUPPORT US/NATO'S GLOBALIST ENTERPRISE?

2012-02-25T11:23:00.005-08:00

By CanSpeccy

What is being fast created is a global empire ruled by the 146 corporate entities that control the bulk of international business activity. The people of the so-called Western democracies go along with this project largely because they imagine it to be a war of the West against the Rest.

This is a pathetic misconception.

The Western nations have already been subjugated. Hence, the fraudulent mainstream media that pumps controlled news and propaganda. Hence the ongoing genocidal program to destroy the nations of Europe as racial, cultural and religious communities. Hence, the progressive collapse in Western living standards. Hence, the reduction of the United States to a police state, where citizens can be detained indefinitely without charge or trial, where the president can order the assassination of anyone, including American citizens, where the government declares it vital to grope the genitals of every traveler.

How truly pathetic the people of the Western nations have become.

Libya was occupied and Gaddafi murdered, to Hillary Clinton's ecstatic delight, not because Gaddafi was "killing his own people," but because he put down a violent, US/Nato and Al Qaeda-backed rebellion, intended to restore Libya's resources to the control of the multi-nationals that already own the puppet regimes of Obama, Cameron, Harper, Sarkozy, et al.

The project was a success. Thirty thousand Chinese engineers and technicians were ousted from Libya, an American citizen installed as Libya's Prime Minister and the control of Libya's resources restored to the corporations that, through a network of elite groups meeting at Davos, or less publicly elsewhere, directs the crimes of US/Nato.

Grateful Arabs

2012-02-25T08:24:00.033-08:00

ATTACKS ON BRITISH IN LIBYA; KILLINGS AND TORTURE EVERYWHERE

By Aangirfan

War graves in Libya

In Benghazi, in Libya, Commonwealth War Graves have been smashed up by the mad Islamists put into power by the USA and NATO.

Headstones commemorating British and Allied soldiers, killed during World War II, have been destroyed.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2106230/Insult-WWII-heroes-Graves-British-soldiers-smashed-desecrated-Libyan-Islamists-protest-U-S-soldiers-Koran-burning.html#ixzz1nNBepz3w ...

Read more

THE RCAF: Al-QAEDA'S AIR FORCE

By Stephen Gowans

Canadian fighter pilots “flew 946 sorties and dropped almost 700 bombs” in last year’s NATO intervention in Libya. [1] But rather than enforcing a no-fly zone to protect civilians, the Canadian pilots—and their counterparts from other NATO countries—took sides in the conflict, intervening directly on behalf of anti-Gaddafi rebels.

But who exactly were the rebels that NATO sided with?

Private remarks by Canadian military officers, reported by the Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese, suggest the rebels weren’t everyday people thirsting for democracy, as NATO officials and mainline media made them out to be.

Gaddafi had claimed that “the rebellion had been organized by” Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb “and his old enemies the LIFG (Libyan Islamic Fighting Group), who had vowed to overthrow the colonel and return the country to traditional Muslim values, including Sharia law.” [2] But this was dismissed by the West as propaganda.

Still, a “Canadian intelligence report written in late 2009…described the anti-Gadhafi stronghold of eastern Libya” where the rebellion began, “as an ‘epicentre of Islamist extremism’ and said ‘extremist cells’ operated in the region.” [3]

And Canadian military intelligence noted “in 2004 (that) Libyan troops found a training camp in the country’s southern desert that had been used by an Algerian terrorist group that would later change its name to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb or AQIM.” [4]

Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who had “joined the U.S.-backed resistance to the Soviet (intervention in) Afghanistan, fighting alongside militants who would go on to form al-Qaeda,” was emblematic of the militant Islamic character of the uprising.

“Mr. Belhaj returned to Libya in the 1990s and led the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in fierce confrontations with Col. Gadhafi’s” government. The LIFG was aligned with al-Qaeda. [5]

Belhaj was “the rebellion’s most powerful military leader.” [6]

This should have aroused suspicions about the true nature of the uprising, but there was an earlier clue that the Benghazi revolt was inspired by something other than a thirst for democracy.

“On Feb. 15, 2011, citizens in Benghazi organized what they called a Day of Anger march. The demonstration soon turned into a full-scale battle with police.

“At first, security forces used tear gas and water cannons. But as several hundred protesters armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails attacked government buildings, the violence spiralled out of control. Demonstrators chanted, ‘No God but Allah, Moammar is the enemy of Allah’.” [7]

Today, Libya is a warzone of competing militias. The Transitional National Council, anointed by the West as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people, has no authority.

And now, one year after the uprising began, some NATO officials are admitting that NATO aligned itself with militant Islamic rebels to oust Gaddafi, who US officials had complained was engaging in “resource nationalism,” while oil companies denounced him for trying to “Libyanize” the economy. [8]

According to the Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese, some Canadian military officers in private refer “to the NATO jets bombing Gadhafi’s troops as ‘al-Qaeda’s air force’.” [9] ...

Read more

EGYPT: A REAL REVOLUTION ON ITS WAY?

By Tony Cartalucci

In January of 2011, we were told that "spontaneous," "indigenous" uprising had begun sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, including Hosni Mubarak's Egypt, in what was hailed as the "Arab Spring." It would be almost four months before the corporate-media would admit that the US had been behind the uprisings and that they were anything but "spontaneous," or "indigenous." In an April 2011 article published by the New York Times titled, "U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings," it was stated (emphasis added):

"A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington."

The article would also add, regarding the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED):

"The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department. "

It is hardly a speculative theory then, that the uprisings were part of an immense geopolitical campaign conceived in the West and carried out through its proxies with the assistance of disingenuous organizations including NED, NDI, LaHood's IRI, and Freedom House and the stable of NGOs they maintain throughout the world. Preparations for the "Arab Spring" began not as unrest had already begun, but years before the first "fist" was raised, and within seminar rooms in D.C. and New York, US-funded training facilities in Serbia, and camps held in neighboring countries, not within the Arab World itself.

In 2008, Egyptian activists from the now infamous April 6 movement were in New York City for the inaugural Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM) summit, also known as Movements.org. There, they received training, networking opportunities, and support from AYM's various corporate and US governmental sponsors, including the US State Department itself. The AYM 2008 summit report (page 3 of .pdf) states that the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, James Glassman attended, as did Jared C0hen who sits on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of State. Six other State Department staff members and advisers would also attend the summit along with an immense list of corporate, media, and institutional representatives.

Shortly afterward, April 6 would travel to Serbia to train under US-funded CANVAS, formally the US-funded NGO "Otpor" who helped overthrow the government of Serbia in 2000. Otpor, the New York Times would report, was a "well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars from the United States." After its success it would change its name to CANVAS and begin training activists to be used in other US-backed regime change operations.

The April 6 Movement, after training with CANVAS, would return to Egypt in 2010, a full year before the "Arab Spring," along with UN IAEA Chief Mohammed ElBaradei. April 6 members would even be arrested while waiting for ElBaradei's arrival at Cairo's airport in mid-February. Already, ElBaradei, as early as 2010, announced his intentions of running for president in the 2011 elections. Together with April 6, Wael Ghonim of Google, and a coalition of other opposition parties, ElBaradei assembled his "National Front for Change" and began preparing for the coming "Arab Spring."

An April 2011 AFP report would confirm that the US government had trained armies of "activists" to return to their respective countries and enact political "change," when US State Department's Michael Posner stated that the "US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments." The report went on to explain that the US "organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there." Posner would add, "They went back and there's a ripple effect."

Video: The Revolution Business. The revolutions are fake, the people behind them illegitimate.

....

That ripple effect of course, was the "Arab Spring" and the subsequent destabilization, violence, and even US armed and backed warfare that followed. While nations like Libya and Tunisia are now run by a BP, Shell, and Total-funded Petroleum Institute chairman and a US NED-funded "activist" respectively, Egypt has managed to ward off and expose the US proxy of choice, Mohammed ElBaradei, who's own movement was forced to denounce him as a Western agent.

By striking at the meddling, seditious NGOs, Egypt seeks to undermine the source of destabilization, the conduit through which US money and support is funneled through to "activists," and expose the true foreign-funded nature of the political division that has gripped the nation for now over a year. ...

Read more

WHY DO PEOPLE IN THE WEST SUPPORT US/NATO'S GLOBALIST ENTERPRISE?

By CanSpeccy

What is being fast created is a global empire ruled by the 146 corporate entities that control the bulk of international business activity. The people of the so-called democracies go along with this project largely because they imagine it to be a war of the West against the Rest.

This is a pathetic misconception.

The Western nations have already been subjugated. Hence, the fraudulent mainstream media that pump nothing but controlled news and propaganda. Hence the ongoing genocidal program to destroy the nations of Europe as racial, cultural and religious communities. Hence, the progressive collapse in Western living standards. Hence, the reduction of the United States to a police state, where citizens can be detained indefinitely without charge or trial, where the president can order the assassination of anyone, where the government declares it vital to feel the genitals of every traveler.

How truly pathetic the people of the Western nations have become.

Libya was occupied and Gaddafi murdered, to Hillary Clinton's ecstatic delight, not because Gaddafi was "killing his own people," but because he put down a violent, US/Nato and Al Qaeda-backed rebellion, intended to restore Libya's resources to the control of the multi-nationals that already own the puppet regimes of Obama, Cameron, Harper, Sarkozy, et al.

The project was a success. Thirty thousand Chinese engineers and technicians were ousted from Libya, an American citizen installed as Libya's Prime Minister and the control of Libya's resources restored to the corporations that, through a network of elite groups meeting at Davos, or less publicly elsewhere, directs the crimes of US/Nato.

Sixteen trillion here, fifteen trillion there, soon you're talking real money

2012-02-24T11:13:00.008-08:00

Google for "sixteen trillion" and you come up with some scarey stuff:

Bernanke Secretly Gives away Sixteen Trillion (Ahead of the Heard);
US$ 16000000000000.00 (sixteen trillion) bailout (Pravda Forum);
Bernanke Secretly Gives away Sixteen Trillion Dollars (News Goldseek.com);
FED doles out sixteen trillion in bailouts that banks don't have to repay (trulia.com);
The Sixteen-Trillion-Dollar Mistake (cup.columbia.edu);

and many, many similar stories, although none, it seems, from the mainstream media.

Then comes this speech in the British upper house by Lord James Blackheath, a man of supposedly wide experience of banking and finance, in which the speaker claims to possess documents indicating that the US Fed was a participant in a fraud involving the transfer of $15 trillion dollars from an Indonesian potentate to the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Wow. Beeeeezaaaaaaarrrrre.

However, on the Blackheath claim, at least, we can probably set our minds at rest, for according to Andy McSmith at the Independent the noble lord himself appears to have been taken in by a Nigerian-letter-type scam.

David James was a City businessman commissioned by the Tories, in opposition, to report on ways of eliminating government waste. Last week, the 74-year-old peer was exercised about a story he has picked up that $15trn – that is $15,000,000,000,000 – belonging to "the richest man in the world", Yohannes Riyadi, was deposited in 2009 in the Royal Bank of Scotland. Lord James said he remains baffled after a two-year pursuit of the story, but has all the information on a memory stick, which he is offering to hand over to the Government.

His documents include a letter from the Bank of Indonesia telling him the whole story is a "complete fabrication". He took his concerns to the Treasury minister, Lord Sassoon, who said: "This is rubbish. It is far too much money. It'd stick out like a sore thumb and you can't see it in the RBS accounts."

And an alert Financial Times blogger said that had Lord James googled "Yohannes Riyadi", the first item to come up would be a warning from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that the name is part of an internet scam designed to get money from the gullible. Two agents are trying to trace who is behind it. Perhaps Lord James should offer his memory stick.

But what of Bernanke's "secret," "not-to-be-repayed" "give away" to those undeserving banksters?

Thanks to an amendment by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Wall Street reform law passed in July 2010 directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct "the first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve."

"As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world," said Sanders. "This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you're-on-your-own individualism for everyone else."

But what we also know from Page 137 of the Government Accountability Office report is that by last summer, every cent of the $16 trillion had been repaid.

So perhaps what is most puzzling about the $sixteen trillion is that the US Fed does not do more to publicize the success of an operation that seems to have cost the US taxpayer nothing, while possibly saving the World from a total banking system collapse.

George de Mohrenschildt, George H.W. Bush, Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK

2012-02-24T09:59:00.005-08:00

George de Mohrenschildt, a millionaire petroleum geologist and acquaintance of George H. W. Bush, befriended Lee Harvey Oswald in the period immediately prior to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

De Mohrenschildt supposedly committed suicide by blowing his brains out with a 20 gauge shot gun the day, in 1977, he was to be interviewed by an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

In this video clip, Bill O'Reilly explains the relationship between de Mohrenschildt and the CIA, and the curious circumstances of de Mohrenschildt's death.

In this article, Russ Baker explains why Bill O'Reilly's forthcoming book on the Kennedy assassination is unlikely to tell all.

When Science and Politics Mix

2012-02-23T12:14:00.011-08:00

Politics has to do with appearances without regard for reality. Science has to do with reality without regard for appearances. When science and politics mix the results can be remarkable. Politicians prove to be ignoramuses, scientists prove to be liars. Climate science provides a wonderful example. Nobel Peace Prize winner, Al Gore, intent on making science serve political ends, proves himself to be an ass and the Nobel Peace Prize a joke. Dr. Peter Gleick, member of the US National Academy of Sciences, McArthur Foundation Genius Award winner, intent on shaping public opinion proves himself a thief and liar, and those who backed him, gullible dupes.

Those who care about the perversion of science and wish to avoid being themselves duped by scientists behaving as politicians or politicians falsely claiming scientific expertise should apply to every argument about science the following questions.

Does the argument rest upon observational data?

Are the data disputed by those with expertise to make a plausible judgement?

Do those who advance the argument deal honestly with those who question the data or the logic of the analysis?

On that basis, Al Gore's claim that past increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration were associated with increases in global temperature is based on observable facts, and the data are not, as far as I am aware, disputed by qualified experts. However, what the experts do assert is that Gore has the timing wrong, and that the rise in temperature always came before, not after, the rise in carbon dioxide concentration.

Did Al Gore openly acknowledge this criticism and revise his argument accordingly? Apparently not, and it is this failure that confirms that Gore does not seek to reveal the reality of climate change, but to manipulate public perception of climate change for political reasons.

In addition, it is essential to determine whether the data presented in support of an argument are comprehensive or cherry picked.

In his Forbes blog, the above-mentioned Peter Gleick assails those who claim that global temperature is not rising in a piece entitled "Global Warming Has Stopped"? How to Fool People Using "Cherry-Picked" Climate Data.

The current favorite argument of those who argue that climate changes isn’t happening, or a problem, or worth dealing with, is that global warming has stopped. Therefore (they conclude) scientists must be wrong when they say that climate change is caused by humans, worsening, and ultimately a serious environmental problem that must be addressed by policy makers.

The problem with this argument is that it is false: global warming has not stopped and those who repeat this claim over and over are either lying, ignorant, or exhibiting a blatant disregard for the truth.

These liars, ignoramuses and blatant disregarders of the truth Dr. Gleick fails to mention by name, but he aims to refute them with a series of graphs showing in every case, so he claims, a rising trend in global temperature.

In fact, for the past decade, there seems no discernible trend, but Gleick assures the reader that:

The linear trend (the blue line) over the past decade is relatively flat, but in fact it still exhibited a warming trend, despite the temporary cooling forces that are masking the overall warming

which seems something of a contradiction in terms. If the line is flat it is flat. To talk about a warming trend masked by "temporary cooling forces" appears to be sheer sophistry.

And note that the issue of the past decade is central to Gleick's case, for he has set out to refute those who say that despite the current rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, global temperature is not rising.

But if Gleick's argument about the last decade is dodgy, what about the rest of his evidence?

Four other graphs all show a rise in global temperature or global heat over varying time scales going back to 1880.

So do those graphs clinch his argument? Hardly.

As can be seen in the adjacent image, over the last 130 years, global temperature has been quite variable, falling between 1880 and 1910, then rising more or less continuously until 1945, after which it fell slightly before flattening out for 30 years, then rising until around 2000, since when it has been flat.

Does this reflect a close correlation with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration? No.

Does it show, as Gleick asserts, that those who claim global warming has stopped "are either lying, ignorant, or exhibiting a blatant disregard for the truth"? No.

What it does show is that global temperature varies, sometimes rising sometimes falling, and that while the overall trend since 1880 is upward, the trend since 2000, when atmospheric carbon dioxide was rising quite rapidly, has been flat.

Does this prove that human activity has no effect on climate? Absolutely not. It merely shows that global temperature fluctuates for reasons we do not fully understand.

But if global temperature has, for now, stopped rising, despite the continued and increasing human-caused rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, does that prove that human activity cannot harm the planet? Far from it.

Neither the climate "warmists" nor the warming "skeptics" know enough about the vagaries of the Earth's climate to make any definite statement. All that one can reasonably say is that changing the chemical composition and spectral properties of the atmosphere in an uncontrolled way, as we have been doing with increasing effect, does not seem like a very good idea, and could eventually have clearly apparent and seriously harmful environmental consequences. On the other hand, we cannot simply shut down the fossil-fueled economy overnight, without wiping out most of humanity.

What then to do? The answer is simple, though not easily accepted. Leave climate science to the scientists, and be very skeptical of everything the politicians, including those in white coats, have to tell you about the environmental, social and economic implications of the science.

But we have to act, many will assert. That is true, but we have to act in a state of uncertainty. There are risks whatever course is taken. We must hope for intelligent political decisions base on first-rate, unbiased science, not panic-driven actions serving ulterior political motives.

For now, neither the physical evidence nor the theoretical considerations suggest imminent danger. Viewed in the long-term, we are currently in a pleasantly warm and perhaps all too brief interglacial and seem in greatest danger not of harmful warming but of catastrophic cooling.

Greening the Sahara

2012-02-21T14:29:00.004-08:00

Tensegrity sphere

Are you anxious to feed the hungry, combat the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, and see the desert bloom? If so, this piece, Greening the Sahara, outlining a scheme to do just that by irrigating the ten million square kilometers of the Sahara desert using solar power as the sole driving energy source may be of interest.

The scheme involves the use of geodesic spheres as gigantic, lighter-than-air cloud-containment structures that carry water-saturated air from the coast inland on the sea breeze, deposit the water over the desert during the cool nighttime and return to the coast either on the predawn land breeze or perhaps drawn by camels.

I had intended to add a cost analysis of the scheme but it is some months since I worked on the idea and the details about cost now escape me. As I recall, however, the thing was not altogether unfeasible. In fact, with some ingenuity in the construction of the hot air dirigibles, it seemed to me that the idea could payoff quite well.

Why the Eurozone Is About to Break Up

2012-02-20T12:02:00.007-08:00

Image source: Euro Failure is Systemic.

Mish has a piece today entitled "Why Greece Must Exit the Eurozone." This states exactly what I said a while back, which confirms what a smart fellow Mish is.

Mish's article includes a quote listing the requirements for a successful monetary union as spelled out by Canadian Nobel Prize winning economist, Robert Mundell: requirements that, as we noted earlier, the Eurozone entirely lacks.

In fact, rather than the Euro monetary straightjacket, Europe would be better off with a multiplicity of currencies, as Canadian author Jane Jacobs explained in various works on the economy of cities. With a free-floating currency a country, region or city automatically maintains a currency exchange rate that under most circumstances insures balanced trade and full employment. If productivity falls relative to that of trading partners, the currency falls, achieving in effect, a reduction in real wages without modification in nominal wages. Conversely, if productivity rises relative to that of trading partners the currency exchange rate rises, thus achieving an increase in real wages without modification in nominal wages.

Because labor productivity varies not only country by country but region by region and city by city, the greater the number of free floating currencies within a trading area the greater the precision with which real wages are adjusted to productivity and unemployment is minimized.

An alternative to the complication of multiple currencies within a trade zone would be the implementation of automatic wage adjustments according to productivity. Because productivity is difficult to measure accurately and expeditiously, unemployment would be used as a proxy for the inverse of productivity. Thus as unemployment in any region increased, wages would be adjusted downward on a year-to-year, or month-to-month basis. Conversely, as the labor market tightened, wages would be adjusted upward.

A scheme to achieve regional adjustment in wages according to productivity within a currency union such as just outlined would solve the Eurozone crisis, and incidentally, win CanSpeccy the Nobel Prize for economics. But the idea is undoubtedly far above the heads of Merkozy and co, or most economists, so the Eurozone break-up will proceed -- on March 23, so many people are saying.

Hitler's 9/11: How fortunate for leaders that men do not think

2012-02-20T10:48:00.000-08:00

Via WRH

On November 7, 1938, Ernst vom Rath was shot outside the German embassy by Herschel Grynszpan, who wanted revenge for his parents' sudden deportation from Germany to Poland, along with tens of thousands of other Polish Jews.

[The murder provided the Nazis with a justification for] a campaign of terror against Jewish people and their homes and businesses in Germany and Austria. The violence, which continued through November 10 and was later dubbed "Kristallnacht," or "Night of Broken Glass," after the countless smashed windows of Jewish-owned establishments, left approximately 100 Jews dead, 7,500 Jewish businesses damaged and hundreds of synagogues, homes, schools and graveyards vandalized. An estimated 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, many of whom were then sent to concentration camps for several months; they were released when they promised to leave Germany.

Excerpts from This Day in History.

The stinking orthodoxies of the white self-hating liberal-left

2012-02-17T09:36:00.000-08:00

By Patrick Buchanan

My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end.

After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.

The calls for my firing began almost immediately with the Oct. 18 publication of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

A group called Color of Change, whose mission statement says that it "exists to strengthen Black America's political voice," claimed that my book espouses a "white supremacist ideology." Color of Change took particular umbrage at the title of Chapter 4, "The End of White America."

Media Matters parroted the party line: He has blasphemed!

A Human Rights Campaign that bills itself as America's leading voice for lesbians, bisexuals, gays and transgendered people said that Buchanan's "extremist ideas are incredibly harmful to millions of LBGT people around the world."

Their rage was triggered by a remark to NPR's Diane Rehm – that I believe homosexual acts to be "unnatural and immoral."

On Nov. 2, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who has sought to have me censored for 22 years, piled on.

"Buchanan has shown himself, time and again, to be a racist and an anti-Semite," said Foxman. Buchanan "bemoans the destruction of white Christian America" and says America's shrinking Jewish population is due to the "collective decision of Jews themselves."

Well, yes, I do bemoan what Newsweek's 2009 cover called "The Decline and Fall of Christian America" and editor Jon Meacham described as "The End of Christian America." After all, I am a Christian.

And what else explains the shrinkage of the U.S. Jewish population by 6 percent in the 1990s and its projected decline by another 50 percent by 2050, if not the "collective decision of Jews themselves"?

Let error be tolerated, said Thomas Jefferson, "so long as reason is left free to combat it." What Foxman and ADL are about in demanding that my voice be silenced is, in the Jeffersonian sense, intrinsically un-American.

Consider what it is these people are saying.

They are saying that a respected publisher, St. Martin's, colluded with me to produce a racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic book, and CNN, Fox News, C-SPAN, Fox Business News and the 150 radio shows on which I appeared failed to detect its evil and helped to promote a moral atrocity.

If my book is racist and anti-Semitic, how did Sean Hannity, Erin Burnett, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Megyn Kelly, Lou Dobbs and Ralph Nader miss that? How did Charles Payne, African-American host on Fox radio, who has interviewed me three times, fail to detect its racism?

How did Michael Medved miss its anti-Semitism?

In a 2009 cover story in the Atlantic, "The End of White America?" from which my chapter title was taken, professor Hua Hsu revels in the passing of America's white majority. At Portland State, President Clinton got a huge ovation when he told students that white Americans will be a minority in 2050.

Is this writer alone forbidden to broach the subject?

That homosexual acts are unnatural and immoral has been doctrine in the Catholic Church for 2,000 years.

Is it now hate speech to restate traditional Catholic beliefs?

Documented in the 488 pages and 1,500 footnotes of Suicide of a Superpower is my thesis that America is Balkanizing, breaking down along the lines of religion, race, ethnicity, culture and ideology, and that Western peoples are facing demographic death by century's end.

Are such subjects taboo? Are they unfit for national debate?

So it would seem. MSNBC President Phil Griffin told reporters, "I don't think the ideas that (Buchanan) put forth (in his book) are appropriate for the national dialogue, much less on MSNBC."

In the 10 years I have been at MSNBC, the network has taken heat for what I have written, and faithfully honored our contract.

Yet my four-months' absence from MSNBC and now my departure represent an undeniable victory for the blacklisters.

The modus operandi of these thought police at Color of Change and ADL is to brand as racists and anti-Semites any writer who dares to venture outside the narrow corral in which they seek to confine debate.

All the while prattling about their love of dissent and devotion to the First Amendment, they seek systematically to silence and censor dissent.

Without a hearing, they smear and stigmatize as racist, homophobic or anti-Semitic any who contradict what George Orwell once called their "smelly little orthodoxies." They then demand that the heretic recant, grovel, apologize, and pledge to go forth and sin no more.

Defy them, and they will go after the network where you work, the newspapers that carry your column, the conventions that invite you to speak. If all else fails, they go after the advertisers.

I know these blacklisters. They operate behind closed doors, with phone calls, mailed threats and off-the-record meetings. They work in the dark because, as Al Smith said, nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.

Monty Python Philosophy Football

2012-02-16T19:54:00.000-08:00

Via: Wimp.com

German MP's propose tax on the childless

2012-02-16T17:20:00.000-08:00

The idea of taxing people who have no children will no doubt arouse indignation among the brains-washed liberal-leftist masses who have been educated to understand that the only thing wrong with sex is that it perpetuates the human race.

Some German MP's, however, have had the temerity to propose a tax on childless adults as a measure to combat the catastrophic, nation-destroying collapse in the German birthrate. By imposing a tax on the childless, the state would provide couples with an incentive to have children by at least marginally lessening the financial burden of so doing.

At the same time, those without children, would by virtue of the tax, come to bear part of the financial burden that others bear in raising the children upon whom they will become dependent in old age.

To some, the idea that the childless become dependent on other people's children in old age may seem strange, for they will argue, provided I have saved for retirement I will be dependent on no one. But that is not the case. Without a younger generation to provide the labor that delivers the goods and services that the elderly need in order to survive beyond the point of retirement, the elderly cannot remain alive however much money they might have saved.

Oh, it will be said by the thoughtless or the self-genocidal, there will always be immigrants to do the work that we are unable to do when we are old. But that is precisely the problem. If Europeans have no children, there will in future be none of the existing European nations remaining on the face of the Earth.

Yes, there will still be people calling themselves Germans, or French or English, but they will not be the descendants of those ancient races. The proposed legislation would be a small step toward ending the present ongoing self-genocide of the European peoples.

Read article from the German edition of The Local

Kurt Haskell Exposes Government False Flag Operation During Underwear Bomber Sentencing

2012-02-16T17:10:00.000-08:00

Kurt Haskell

Infowars.com Thursday, February 16, 2012: Every victim of a crime in Michigan is entitled to make a statement in open court regarding the impact of the crime on their life. The statement is limited to the victim’s physical, emotional and financial well being as it relates to the crime. Keep that in mind as you read my statement.

Below is a copy of the victim impact statement I gave today at the Underwear Bomber sentencing hearing. When reading my statement, keep in mind that I am a practicing attorney in the State of Michigan.

In addition, I regularly practice in the Court the hearings are taking place at and therefore, I am somewhat limited as to what I can say. We were limited to 5 minutes each.

I wish to thank the Court for allowing me these 5 minutes to make my statement. My references to the government in this statement refer to the Federal Government excluding this Court and the prosecution.

On Christmas Day 2009, my wife and I were returning from an African safari and had a connecting flight through Amsterdam. As we waited for our flight, we sat on the floor next to the boarding gate.

What I witnessed while sitting there and subsequent events have changed my life forever. While I sat there, I witnessed Umar dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt, being escorted around security by a man in a tan suit who spoke perfect American English and who aided Umar in boarding without a passport.

Read more

Paul Volcker Slaps Down Bank of Canada Over Rules to Prevent Banks Too Big to Fail

2012-02-16T16:59:00.000-08:00

By SIMON JOHNSON

Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is the co-author of “13 Bankers.”

The Volcker Rule is intended to curb “proprietary trading” – specifically, high-risk bets placed by our largest banks. The Dodd-Frank financial reform act put it into law, and the relevant regulators have proposed a detailed and credible set of regulations to make it work. In accordance with typical administrative procedure in the United States, comments on these regulations were solicited. The deadline was this past Monday.

Today’s Economist

Perspectives from expert contributors.

Congress rightly decided that excessive risk-taking by very large banks had to be curtailed. Responsible regulators around the world are cheering from the sidelines, and that’s why I was shocked to see the recent comment letter from the Bank of Canada that criticized the American law.

The legislative intent behind the Volcker Rule is clear – and reaffirmed in detail in the comment letter by Senators Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Carl Levin of Michigan, the co-authors of the relevant part of the Dodd-Frank legislation.

The reason that the general approach and this specific regulation makes sense, given past practices and likely future risks, is laid out in meticulous and convincing detail in the comment submitted by Dennis Kelleher and his colleagues from Better Markets.

The big banks and their allies are naturally fighting back. They like the implicit too-big-to-fail subsidies and are apparently offering to split those with people who will support their positions in public (including some of my academic colleagues). Their collective lack of concern for the public interest is also natural, if somewhat callous.

But the executives of these companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to make profits, and they interpret the too-big-to-fail subsidies as helpful in this regard. Government support, after all, allows these banks to borrow more cheaply and to take on more risk (gaining more when they get lucky, precisely because they have “downside protection” provided by taxpayers).

Read more

The Second Great Depression and The Cause That None Dare Name

2012-02-14T12:41:00.000-08:00

The decline in unemployment to 2008 was the result of an unsustainable
credit-based housing bubble created by the US Federal Reserve. Image source

Unemployment in Spain is around 23%. On a true measure, according to the Trades Union Congress, unemployment in the UK now exceeds 6.3 million people or more than 20% of the workforce. US unemployment according to the U6 measure is over 15%.

Among young people (aged 16-24) the rate of unemployment is even worse. In Spain, youth unemployment has surged over 50%. In the UK, youth unemployment now exceeds one million, while hundreds of thousands of immigrants flood in. For black youth in Britain the outlook is particularly grim with unemployment exceeding 50%. But for black youngsters in America, unemployment approaching 90% is catastrophic.

An economic disaster of such magnitude must have an apparent cause, which it does, but the Western political class and the controlled media, including much of the so-called alternative media, will not name it, striving instead to distract attention with endless bogus warnings about terrorism, excess population, resource shortages and global warming.

But in a World possessed of technology that to an earlier generation would appear to be of near magical power, the idea that the highly capitalized Western nations cannot provide their populations with opportunities to work and support themselves is absurd. And indeed if it were not absurd, why do the Western elites continue to promote a flood of immigration to the West, destroying ethnic diversity, social cohesion and religious compatibility while vilifying and criminalizing opposition to this genocidal program as racist and xenophobic?

As for resource shortages, most appear to be artificial. Food prices have been boosted by government programs to encourage the conversion of food into fuel at huge cost to taxpayers and with little if any net gain in energy. Oil prices have been boosted by the continual Western-generated threat or reality of war in the chief oil exporting regions of the World.

As for global warming, all we've seen so far has likely boosted crop yields, as must have the the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.

The reality of mass Western unemployment must, therefore, be hidden, although surely in plain sight.

And the cause is in plain sight, though none in the media dare mention it. It is the 1994 GATT agreement that opened the Western nations to unrestricted free trade with the rest of the World, which is to say with the teeming masses of Asia, the Middle East and Africa, where hundreds of millions of workers are sweated for pennies an hour.

The outcome was predictable and predicted. In fact, Sir James Goldsmith felt so strongly about the damage that would be done to Britain by the 1994 Gatt Agreement that he formed the Referendum Party to take Britain out of the EU and thus make her free to regulate trade in the national interest. Goldsmith, however, died in 1997 and his party was absorbed by another Euroskeptic group now headed by a former commodities broker with a gift for lampooning the charisma-challenged EU leadership, but who seems to have nothing to say against global free trade.

But why, if Third-World competition is wreaking such havoc with Western job markets, does almost no prominent individual or mass media outlet dare speak of it? Because it is immensely profitable to those moving work from the West to the Rest, and it is they who own the political class and thus the education system, which should more accurately be called a system of state indoctrination and propaganda, the broadcast media, and the publishing industry.

As the great classical economist David Ricardo explained, "wages and profits are together always the same," meaning that if you lower wages you increase profits. It is no coincidence, therefore, that while the West suffers the severest depression in jobs and wages since the 1930's, profits of Western corporations are at record highs. In the United States, for example, corporate profits have doubled since 2000, while unemployment has increased by 150%.

What then is the solution? Briefly, there is none. True, we have proposed seeming solutions: either trade protectionism, or government intervention to speed wage convergence between the West and the Rest, while providing income support to those in the West whose wages fall below the subsistence level. But Western governments have shown no interest in either protecting jobs and job skills or preventing the flight of capital to low-wage, low regulation regimes, where profits are highest. It is sufficient, they seem to believe, to provide the unemployed with a dole to keep them alive with crumbs from the bankers' tables but in a state of smouldering resentment, while hastening wage convergence through currency devaluation. Unfortunately, for Western countries, the Chinese are putting on a fine performance in the race to debase, thus preventing the US and Europe from gaining competitive advantage through devaluation.

How will this end? Badly. It will end with the burial of Western Civilization and the emergence of the New World Order, which is to say a global plutocracy ruling over a mongrelized human population. There will be no West or Rest in the future. There will be one global mass, and anyone who objects to the genocidal destruction of their own race, nation and culture will be criminalized and silenced.

Unless, that is, there is push back. But there is no evidence that a reaction is possible, let alone occurring. Seeming opponents of the New World Order are mostly globalist controlled assets. How to tell? find out what they say about globalization of trade, mass migration and multi-culturalism. Most you will find are entirely on board with the Council on Foreign relations, Chatham House, and the pseudo-left-wing media.

Related post:
Crooks and Liars: Hell Is Cheap: China, Apple, And The Economics Of Horror
What's Wrong With Europe and What Needs to Be Done About It
Robert Herndon:The globalist lies about the British job market

Is "Bad Science" an Oxymoron

2012-02-13T12:24:00.000-08:00

View full size

By Alfred Burdett

Having written on occasion about scientific fraud, scientific data manipulation and outright scientific nonsense, I was invited by its creators to comment on a poster entitled Bad Science, the psychology behind bad research, offered as a resource on the ClinicalPsychology.net website.

"Scientists," states an introduction to the poster, "are some of our most trusted members of society ... [but] many scientists are not as trustworthy as we would like to believe. By engaging in various kinds of scientific misconduct, such as falsifying or fabricating data, scientists are getting the results they want without the honesty and integrity that we expect of the scientific institution."

As a scientist of almost 50 years standing, it's news to me that scientists are among the most trusted members of the community. Personally, I would trust a scientists no more and no less than I would trust a banker or a politician. And that is surely not being unduly cynical, for as everyone knows, when their work impinges on important economic or political questions, scientists can be remarkably responsive to the interests of those funding their work, whether it be the tobacco industry, the drug industry, the arms industry or a government with an agenda on climate change, HIV/AIDS, the psychiatric treatment of political dissidents, or the use of tactical nuclear weapons in populated areas. So it seems to me that the people at ClinicalPsychology.net are proceeding on the basis of a questionable assumption.

There is no question, however, that data falsification (are falsified data, truly data at all in the scientific sense?) and data fabrication are not activities to be encouraged, so when ClinicalPsychology.net tells us to read their "infographic" to find out how to fix the problem, we are prepared to read on.

However, what we find is little in the way of the promised account of the "psychology behind bad science" or effective means to "fix the problem," but mainly a series of assertions about the prevalence of scientific fraud. "Shady scientific research is rampant" we are told, which sounds bad, but what does it mean. Well for one thing, "One in three scientists admit to using questionable research practices," which include "dropping data points based on gut feeling," and "changing the results or design of a study due to pressure from a funding source."

So now we begin to have some idea what they are talking about, but it nevertheless remains vague. What, for example, does it mean to drop a data point "based on gut feeling"? Presumably it means that the scientist believes that they have a plausible justification for dropping the data point in question: "I noticed some crud in that tube when I was adding the reagents," or "the rat that died looked sick before we began feeding it GM corn." Adoption of such rationalizations for the selection of data is not considered acceptable practice but it has a venerable history in science, and while few would condone it, the question of whether it constitutes "bad science" is less clear than many might suppose.

Scientific knowledge is not a collection of facts, it is a system of laws, principles and patterns which allow us to infer from a given set of facts another heretofore unknown set of facts, including facts about past, present or future. Thus science as a process of discovery is concerned, primarily, not with any specific facts, but with ideas about the relationships among facts in the observable world. Because there is uncertainty about all particular observed facts, there is no overwhelming reason to reject a good idea because it is inconsistent with some observation that "gut feeling", i.e., some plausible argument, suggests is false.

So whether rejecting data based on "gut feeling" is "bad science" depends, I would say, on circumstances. A scientist with an interesting hypothesis who rejects a contradictory observation on plausible, or even implausible, grounds is doing no more than scientists of the greatest fame, Newton, Galileo, Einstein, for example, had not hesitation in doing.

The critical factor that determines whether overlooking or concealing evidence that contradicts one's hypothesis is to be condemned depends on both the motive and the competence of the individual concerned.

Anyone who fakes data to produce apparent support for a proposition favorable to the entity funding the research, is in my view, not guilty of "bad science", because what they are doing is not science at all. It is merely part of a conspiracy to deceive the public for financial gain. It would be best to deal with such people like any other fraudsters, whether swindling financiers or vendors of quack cancer cures.

However, when a scientist says, and more importantly believes, that things must be this way rather than that whatever the experimental data may show, then they are following a grand tradition in science. Thus, for example, when Einstein was asked by a student what he would have done if Sir Arthur Eddington's famous 1919 gravitational lensing experiment, which confirmed relativity, had instead disproved it, he replied "Then I would have felt sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct."

And that example of scientific arrogance clarifies the importance of competence when it comes to judging data. If you are a Nobel prize winner, potential or actual, you may need a good deal of arrogance to force your ideas into the mainstream, and you may well be justified in ignoring data that in the light of present knowledge are seemingly incongruent with your ideas. But if you are a novice or a hack, you'd be very much wiser to stick with the data you have whatever they seem to show, and leave it to those more perceptive than yourself to rationalize away whatever fails to fit the divine plan, assuming that God got it right.

Various other supposed facts about the trickiness of scientists are offered, the claims supported by a reference list comprising merely a set of unclickable URLS without description of the content to which they point and no means of examining that content other than by laboriously typing the URL into a browser navigation window, which is something very few people will bother to do. So for example, the first reference:

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124,

is one heck of a line to type accurately, and gives no idea that it leads to a paper by John P. A. Ioannidis in PLoS Medicine, titled: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.

It is not immediately apparent what to make of a scientific paper claiming that (virtually) all scientific papers are false. No doubt it would have amused Epimenides, the Cretan philosopher immortalized for the paradoxical claim that "all Cretans are liars."

What, on examination, Ioannidis appears to be saying is that most published scientists don't understand the statistical methods they are using, which may be correct but is largely irrelevant. Statistics are not as important as many people seem to think. Scientists such as Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin got along perfectly well without statistics and most scientists, today, use statistics only because there is a rather pointless tradition that insists that they do so. In fact, common sense is often a better guide to the scientific significance of a set of data than statistics. That P < 0.05 does not mean that the result is of any scientific importance. Thus, as Yonatan Loewenstein comments on the Ioannidis paper it is probably closer to the truth to say that most scientific papers are true but useless.

The other references seem to be of rather trivial significance or totally irrelevant, but having been compelled for the purpose of this review to look them up, I have listed them below with clickable links for the convenience of any who may wish to examine them.

Carey, B. 2011. Fraud Case Seen as a Red Flag for Psychology Research. NY Times.
Fanelli, D. 2009. How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data. PLoS ONE 4(5): e5738.
Roche, T. 2011. OMG ALIENS!!1!! Or is it Just More Fake Science News? Techyum.
Goldacre, B. 2011. I foresee that nobody will do anything about this problem. Bad Science Blog.
Pinto. N. 2011. Women's Funding Network sex trafficking study is junk science. CityPages
Van Guyt, M. 2011. What to Do About Scientific Fraud in Psychology? Psychology Today.
Corbyn, Z. 2011. Researchers failing to make raw data public Nature.
Petroc, P. et al. Riot control: How can we stop newspapers distorting science? Guardian
Martin, B. 1992. Scientific fraud and the power structure of science. Prometheus, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 83-98.

But what is it that we are given to understand will make scientists more trustworthy? Three recommendations are offered.

1. Make raw data available to other scientists.
2. Hold journalists accountable.
3. Introduce anonymous publication.

Making raw data available to other scientists would allow others to perform their own analysis of the data, but it won't stop people fiddling the so-called raw data. Furthermore, the demand for publication of raw data is opposed for some valid reasons. For example, a scientist might spend years gathering data that they will then analyze in a series of publications. But if they are required to release the raw data with their first publication, then it is open to anyone to make use of the data and thus take credit for what has been largely the work of another. So although publishing raw data is I believe highly desirable in some cases, e.g., global weather data, it does not seem reasonable to demand this in all cases.

In fact, many scientists already publish their raw data, and when scientists withhold raw data without adequate reason, others can draw their own conclusions.

Holding journalists accountable is an excellent idea, but what that has to do with science more than anything else I am not sure.

The idea of anonymous publication is a new one on me, but it looks like a non-starter. I cannot imagine any scientist bothering to publish anything f it was not to have their name on it.

Overall, I have to say that the ClinicalPsychology.net poster on "Bad Science, the psychology behind bad research" delivers less than it promises and unhelpfully promotes a poorly defined concept of "bad science" that obscures rather than clarifies thought about the scientific method. I would say that anything that does or might advance understanding of reality is science and that anything that obscures understanding of reality is not "bad science" but something altogether different: careerism, perhaps, or politics, PR, and many other things of which we certainly have far too much. But to call such activities "bad science" is not only to coin an apparent oxymoron but to suggest that what is essentially detrimental to the pursuit of knowledge could with some tweaking be made useful and productive. This I do not believe. Institutionalized science in the West is now deeply corrupt. We are, I believe, past peak science. As universities expand and fill their ranks with second- third- and fourth-rate faculty engaging increasing numbers of graduate students of minimal talent in the scientific enterprise, the prospect for a great 21st century for Western science dims in proportion. Which is not to say the Western nations do not have first-rate scientists still. But the environment is not favorable to creating new generations of committed scientists of genius. For one thing, that would be elitist and intellectualist and other things that we now apparently cannot tolerate.

Nevertheless, I believe ClinicalPsychology.net's poster will prompt any thoughtful person to speculation and reflection that can clarify their understanding of the scientific process and its relation to society and the political and economic forces that shape society. Perhaps these and other comments on the poster will prompt further reflection by its creators leading to a deeper examination of the interesting questions raised.

To those who may find my somewhat unorthodox view of the scientific process of interest, I recommend Paul Feyerabend's fascinating study Against Method.

How can Wikileaks battle mainstream media disinformation by working in collaboration with the mainstream media? LOL

2012-02-11T17:37:00.000-08:00

A project such as Wikileaks could provide a most effective mechanism for both diverting the alternative media with misleading or fabricated information, and identifying for termination genuine leaks damaging to US/NATO's imperialist agenda and the anti-social or criminal activities of multinational corporations.

That Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is a recipient of the Sam Adams Award "for integrity in intelligence," which is given annually by a group of retired CIA officers, appears to confirm the hypothesis that Wikileaks is an intel operation.

That Wikileaks claims to have as its primary interest, oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East in no way detracts from the notion that it is an intel or propaganda operation serving the the aims of Western hegemony.

That Wikileaks has collaborated extensively with the mainstream media in the selection and redaction of material to be leaked supports the same conclusion.

In this excellent analysis of Wikileaks and the parties with which it has collaborated, Professor Michel Chossudovksy spells out exactly why Wikileaks has the essential features of a mechanism for the manufacture of controlled dissent.

Human Biodiversity: Liberals Rediscover IQ

2012-02-11T10:22:00.000-08:00

By Dennis Mangan

Whenever the subject of intelligence testing comes up, especially in the context of racial and ethnic differences in intelligence, or disparate outcomes in education, liberals can always be counted upon for their skepticism towards the entire subject of IQ testing. They will usually claim that the tests are either biased or don't measure anything real - as in "IQ measures the ability to take an IQ test". This is of course ironic, since individual differences in intelligence as measured by IQ testing is the most established and robust finding of modern psychometrics, and liberals constantly proclaim their devotion to science, only inbred conservatives being opposed to scientific findings.

But liberals become IQ believers when something like this happens: Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice.

Some of the quotes from the article show how a study like this operates. For instance:

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as "Family life suffers if mum is working full-time," and "Schools should teach children to obey authority."

I guess smart liberals believe that a mother working outside the home full-time couldn't possibly have any downside for family life, and that their indoctrination of schoolkids in things like environmentalism, global warming, and the essential evilness of America's past don't constitute teaching children to obey their authority.

The essential point to make here is that the average Democratic Party member is very likely not as intelligent as the average Republican, since the Democratic Party contains more minorities, who on average score lower on IQ tests than whites. But once you point out something like that, liberals go into IQ denial.

How Iran Threatens the United States of Aggression

2012-02-10T13:16:00.000-08:00

Each star marks the location of a US military base. Image Source: Juan Cole

Nulius in verba: On the word of no one

2012-02-09T10:49:00.000-08:00

Or how the Royal Society betrayed its original purpose to become another
quasi governmental organization spewing the scientifically correct official line

By Andrew Montford

Foreword by Professor Richard Lindzen

Andrew Montford provides a straightforward and unembellished chronology of the perversion not only of The Royal Society but of science itself, wherein the legitimate role of science as a powerful mode of inquiry is replaced by the pretence of science to a position of political authority.

The simple chronology speaks for itself, though one cannot read it without thinking, at least, about the motivations. Already in the 19th century, gentleman scientists, like Darwin, noted the potential constraints on scientific inquiry that were associated with functioning within universities. The potential in recent years is obviously magnified by the near monopoly over science support exercised by governments. In the US, our National Academy of Science (NAS) has always had official status as adviser to the government. However, the role was relatively passive until the 1970s.

The 1970s saw a marked expansion of the National Research Council, the branch of the National Academy of Science responsible for responding to government requests. With the presidency of Frank Press (1981-1993), the staff of the NRC increased to over a thousand. Frank often boasted that The Royal Society was envious of the position of the NAS and the existence of its NRC. The global warming issue, it would appear, has offered The Royal Society the opportunity to rectify this situation.

Nevertheless, there are certain peculiarities of The Royal Society’s behavior that are perhaps worth noting. The presidents involved with this issue (May, Rees and Nurse) are all profoundly ignorant of climate science. Their alleged authority stems from their positions in the RS rather than from scientific expertise. This is evident in a variety of ways.

For example, in an exchange in the Financial Times (April 9, 2010), Martin Rees and Ralph Cicerone (President of the NAS) defended global warming concern by noting essentially that carbon dioxide (CO2) was increasing and that climate was changing. Of course, climate is always changing, and increasing CO2 must make some contribution, but none of this suggests anything alarming. The alarm results from controversial feedbacks wherein the small impacts of CO2 are, in current computer models, greatly amplified. With respect to these feedbacks, Rees and Cicerone say: “Uncertainties in the future rate of this rise (referring to global mean temperature anomaly), stemming largely from ‘feedback’ effects on water vapor and clouds are topics of current research.” That is to say, we don’t even know if there is a problem. Yet, Rees and Cicerone conclude: “Our academies will provide the scientific backdrop for the political and business leaders who must create effective policies to steer the world toward a low-carbon economy.”

In other words, regardless of the science, the answer is predetermined. Is this simply ignorance or dishonesty? My guess is that Rees and Cicerone were only mindlessly repeating a script prepared by the environmental movement. In this report Montford documents some disturbing general trends, which one can only hope that scientists of good standing shall increasingly continue to oppose.

Summary

For 300 years after its foundation, the Royal Society adopted a position of aloofness from political debates, refusing to become embroiled in the controversies of the day. This position was encapsulated in the Society’s journal, The Philosophical Transactions, which carried a notice that ‘It is neither necessary nor desirable for the Society to give an official ruling on scientific issues, for these are settled far more conclusively in the laboratory than in the committee room’.

In the 1960s, the society became increasingly involved at the interface of science and political policymaking.With the elevation of Robert May to the presidency, the Society became highly politicised, involving itself in political advocacy and media campaigns. In 1989 it had issued the first of its highly controversial position papers on climate change, a document that eschewed the sober language of the scientist in favour of denunciations of those who questioned the reality or extent of manmade global warming.

May’s political approach was continued by his successor, Martin Rees, with the Society’s authority being used to try to cut off funding of sceptic groups and with Rees putting forward positions on the economics of climate change. The Society issued a series of highly political statements demanding action from politicians.

Under Rees, another combative statement on the science of global warming was issued. With the Society again adopting a political rather than scientific tone, a substantial group of the fellows was stirred to action, demanding that the Society reconsider the unscientific way in which it was addressing the global warming question, the result being a much improved position paper on global warming that reflected at least some of the critics’ concerns.

Despite this, the Society has yet to distance itself from its former unscientific conduct, and the new president, Paul Nurse, has begun his term of office by staking out some very questionable positions on the role of scepticism in the climate debate.

Immense damage has been done to the reputation of the Society by its last three presidents. While the fellows’ rebellion has improved matters considerably, the continuing desire of the Society’s leadership to engage in political controversies represents a serious ongoing risk to the Society’s reputation and an abandonment of its principles.

Full report

The US Federal Reserve Really Does Turn Over Profits to the Treasury

2012-02-06T21:02:00.002-08:00

It is repeatedly stated by bloggers and others self-published on the Internet that the US Federal Reserve is a scam because it prints money for the US Government and then charges the US Treasury interest on the money thus conjured out of thin air.

In fact, charging interest on money created out of thin air is what commercial banks do. They create credit in amounts many times what has been placed on deposit with them and charge borrowers for the use of the money thus created.

The Fed, however, operates differently. If the Treasury needs money, it prints off some bonds and hands them over to the Fed, which then writes the Treasury a check for money it does not have -- so-called ink money.

The Treasury then spends the money the Fed just created out of thin air, while paying interest at the rate specified by the bonds held in the Fed's portfolio.

However, at the end of the year, the Fed pays the Treasury its profits, i.e., interest earned on the Government paper it holds less operating expenses.

So all that actually happens is that the Government pays itself interest on money created for it by the Fed, less the cost of the Fed's role as an intermediary.

Why, one might ask, involve the Fed at all?

The answer is that by handling the Government's paper, the Fed can control the money supply by selling bonds to the public, or buying them back.

When the Fed sells bonds it takes money out of circulation and reduces the money supply. When the Fed buys bonds either from the Government or the public it increases the money in circulation.

The money that the Fed receives on the sale of bonds to the public goes out of existence as magically as the ink money with which it purchased the bonds was conjured into existence.

The only significant consequence for the Treasury of Fed bond sales is that the interest on the bonds is no longer returned, courtesy of the Fed. It is at this point that the interest on the money created by the Fed becomes a real expense to the Treasury and thus to the American taxpayer.

This is as it should be, since the money with which the bonds have been purchased by private parties is real money, not funny money, which is to say that by purchasing government bonds, investors are giving up use of their money and expect, naturally, to earn interest in return.

Confirming that the Fed does not earn interest beyond its expense of operation on bonds that it purchases from the Treasury, the New York Times states in an article published today:

The Federal Reserve said on Tuesday that it contributed $76.9 billion in profits to the Treasury Department last year, slightly less than its record 2010 transfer but much more than in any other previous year.

The Fed is required by law to turn over its profits to the Treasury each year, a highly lucrative byproduct of the central bank’s continuing campaign to stimulate economic growth.

Almost 97 percent of the Fed’s income was generated by interest payments on its investment portfolio, including $2.5 trillion in Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities, which it has amassed in an effort to decrease borrowing costs for businesses and consumers by reducing long-term interest rates.

So if any cranks or crackpots out there still wish to maintain that the Fed prints money and pockets the interest on it, I say take it up with the New York Times, and don't waste your time arguing the point here.

None of which is intended to suggest that the Fed is an unmitigated blessing on the American people or that it should not be audited. On the contrary, it is impossible to judge the value of the Fed without knowing what it does, and anyone who opposes a thorough review of the Fed's activities is probably a banker whose owes their job and bonuses to the generosity of the Fed to undeserving speculators and fraudsters.

Iran provides the West good reason to resist multiculturalism

2012-02-06T19:45:00.000-08:00

The practices of Muslims are in some respects deeply repulsive to those brought up in the ethical and legal tradition of the West.

The point is vividly illustrated in the case of Saeed Malekpour, an Iranian citizen resident in Canada, who, while in Iran to see his dying father, was arrested, charged, convicted and condemned to death on the basis of a confession made under torture.

The 35-year-old website designer was found guilty of desecrating and insulting Islam by developing software to upload photographs to the Internet, a program that has been used by pornographic websites.

Mr. Malekpour claims not to have known that his software was used by pornographers and even if he had known, his actions do not, by Western standards, justify the death penalty.

If the government of Iran of any other country maintains a legal system that imposes the death penalty on those convicted on evidence from torture of acts that in the West would considered either perfectly harmless or only mildly anti-social, that is no reason for Western military intervention.

One cannot prevent all the evil in the world and to presume that hanging pornographers is worse than Western practices abhorrent to Muslims such as the state-funded slaughter of millions of humans in utero or the current American practice of detention or execution of citizens without due process is sheer humbug and hypocrisy.

Thus, the lesson of the Malekpour case for the West is not that we need to undertake regime change in Iran. The lesson that the West should draw from the inhumane standards of Iran's Islamic courts is that the Islamization of the West is something to be fiercely resisted.

That Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, a state-appointed leader of England's established church, has argued that adoption in Britain of certain aspects of Sharia law in the UK "seems unavoidable," is truly contemptible. Even more contemptible is his reasoning for this despicable betrayal of the people he is supposed to serve.

The UK has to "face up to the fact," Dr. Williams is reported by the BBC to have said, that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system. A statement to which the obvious retort is that such citizens are not suited to life in Britain should return whence they or their recent immigrant ancestors came.

Or to put it more succinctly: bollocks to you Dr. Williams and bollocks to that traitor and warmonger Tony Blair who appointed such a creep as an Archbishop of the Anglican Church.

Canada's interprovincial equalization payments are unfair

2012-02-06T10:57:00.000-08:00

A group at the University of Toronto has discovered what must always have been self-evident to anyone but a liberal fanatic for total government control of everything, that a program to equalize incomes that ignores differences in the cost of living between town and country, and between the rich provinces and the poor is bound to be unfair.

As the star.com reports:

In a 41-page paper to be released Monday by the Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation at the University of Toronto, equalization expert Peter Gusen said the status quo is unconstitutional.

And that [it] costs Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick billions of dollars annually that go instead to Quebec, Manitoba and Prince Edward Island.

“If equalization continues to ignore differences in expenditure need it will not be treating provinces fairly and it will not be fulfilling its constitutional mandate,” writes Gusen.

When dispensing equalization payouts from the taxpayer-funded $15.4 billion pool, Ottawa doesn’t take into account that wages and cost-of-living expenses are higher in Ontario and B.C. than in much of the country.

“Provinces … differ in their ability ‘to provide reasonably comparable levels of public services’ because they have to spend different amounts to offer similar services; in other words, because they have different expenditure needs,” he writes, quoting Section 36.2 of the Constitution Act.

So far as it goes, the argument seems reasonable, but it could certainly go much further. For example, why are Federal public servants of the same grade paid the same salary wherever they live in Canada, even though costs of living vary greatly. This is surely grossly unfair since it means that either those whose work requires them to live in Toronto or Vancouver are grossly underpaid or that a civil servant in Come By Chance, Newfoundland or Pelican Narrows, Saskatchewan is greatly overpaid.

If salaries currently paid to Federal civil servants in Toronto are adequate, as they must be since vacant positions with the Federal Government in Toronto are promptly filled, the Federal Government must have very substantial scope for savings to the taxpayer by adjusting civil service wages downward in areas with a lower cost of living than Toronto.

But better still would be to cut the Federal public service, currently numbering 250,000, and return the resultant savings to the taxpayer. The job cuts, apparently, are coming. Whether we see the tax cuts, remains to be seen. We may not even see a spending cut. If Harper has his way, we will almost certainly see a Canadian role in any new Middle-East war, and keeping a soldier in the field is even more costly than employing a Field Interviewer for Statistical Survey Operations in Iqaluit, Nunavut.

Arab league monitors find slaughter in Syria the work of foreign-backed subversives

2012-02-05T09:04:00.001-08:00

A report by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) based on a one month inquiry by 160 monitors failed, as Pepe Escobar reports in the Asia Times, to conclude that:

... the "evil" Bashar al-Assad government is indiscriminately, and unilaterally, killing its own people, and so regime change is in order.

So the report was either ignored (by Western corporate media) or mercilessly destroyed - by Arab media, virtually all of it financed by either the House of Saud or Qatar. It was not even discussed - because it was prevented by the GCC from being translated from Arabic into English and published in the Arab League's website.

Until it was leaked. Here it is, in full.

The report is adamant. There was no organized, lethal repression by the Syrian government against peaceful protesters. Instead, the report points to shady armed gangs as responsible for hundreds of deaths among Syrian civilians, and over one thousand among the Syrian army, using lethal tactics such as bombing of civilian buses, bombing of trains carrying diesel oil, bombing of police buses and bombing of bridges and pipelines.

... So the current "Arab-led drive to secure a peaceful end to the 10-month crackdown" in Syria at the UN is no less than a crude regime change drive. Usual suspects Washington, London and Paris have been forced to fall over themselves to assure the real international community this is not another mandate for NATO bombing - a la Libya. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described it as "a path for a political transition that would preserve Syria's unity and institutions".

See also:

Robert Fisk: From Washington this looks like Syria's 'Benghazi moment'. But not from here

Pepe Escobar: US will continue to arm anti-government rebels in Syria after veto

Brookings: ‘Horrific Provocation’ and ‘Tehran-Sponsored 9/11′ Needed to Trigger Iran Invasion

Wayne Madsen: World War III Has Begun – The First Asymmetric War

West gunning for Putin as Syria face-off unfolds

Public Education: The Foundation of the New World Order

2012-02-04T19:23:00.000-08:00

By Gary North

LEWROCKWELL.COM: One of the most alluring temptations that face men is the desire to enter the inner ring. C. S. Lewis wrote a wonderful essay with this title. It should be part of every person's rite of passage into adulthood.

The desire to enter the inner ring is closely related to the desire to maintain a New World Order. There is always an institutional claimant to New World Order status. It is always structured in terms of a series of concentric rings. These rings are always vertical. They are part of a pyramid of power. They are best represented by a stepped pyramid. (See Genesis 11.)

Every empire has been founded in the name of – on behalf of – some version of a New World Order. Empires all have this in common: they are eventually replaced. There is nothing more defunct than a New World Order that has failed. Think "Ottoman Empire." Think "Thousand-Year Reich." Think "British Empire." Think "Soviet Union."

When they are riding high, they seem unbeatable. What could possibly replace them? Most people cannot imagine anything. But there are always a few who can. They get together informally to help arrange the transition. Then they get together formally. They screen access to meetings. They set up a new inner ring.

In our day, the cry is "Next year, in Davos!" The best book on this is an insider's book, David Rothkopf's Superclass. It is not a conspiracy theory-type book. It is a "look how we've made it" book. It's a "top of the world, Ma!" book. He also sees that this superclass is vulnerable to changes outside of its control: in Asia, in the Third World. "We've made it" can become "we've lost it."

Count on it.

You may not have time to read his book. You do have time to watch a couple of his videos. They are posted here.

In summary, here is his thesis. About 6,000 people, 94% male, average age 61, meet from time to time to set the agenda for the rest of us. Here is the central fact: about 30% of them attended one or more of about 20 elite universities.

Here, I want to focus on this final point: elite universities. Another book spoke of this, a book that became an instant pariah in the liberal Establishment: The Bell Curve. It was published in 1994.

THE BELL CURVE

The book is important enough to warrant a Wikipedia entry. Here is the latest Wikipedia summary. It's close enough for my purposes.

The Bell Curve is a best-selling and controversial 1994 book by the Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein (deceased before the book was released) and political scientist Charles Murray. Its central argument is that intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors and is a better predictor of many personal dynamics, including financial income, job performance, chance of unwanted pregnancy, and involvement in crime than are an individual's parental socioeconomic status, or education level. The book also argues that those with high intelligence, the "cognitive elite", are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence, and that this is a dangerous social trend with the United States moving toward a more divided society similar to that in Latin America.

Much of the controversy concerned the parts of the book in which the authors wrote about racial differences in intelligence and discuss the implications of those differences. The authors were reported throughout the popular press as arguing that these IQ differences are genetic, and they did indeed write in chapter 13: "It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences." The introduction to the chapter more cautiously states, "The debate about whether and how much genes and environment have to do with ethnic differences remains unresolved."

The book created a firestorm of controversy. Not at all controversial was its statement that Ashkenazi Jews have statistically abnormal high intelligence. Everyone assumes this in academia. What drew the attention of critics were its statements about African-Americans' lower IQ level. That debate drowned out the central claim of the book, namely, the common worldview fostered by the nation's elite universities.

The book also argues that those with high intelligence, the "cognitive elite", are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence, and that this is a dangerous social trend with the United States moving toward a more divided society similar to that in Latin America.

The book discussed Rothkopf's point. The elite in the United States attend a handful of academically superior universities. These universities have a common worldview. The authors did not label it as secular humanism. They did not have to. The secular humanists who read the book and who went ballistic over its politically incorrect racial implications shared this worldview. They did not perceive the crucial theme of higher education as a screening system. Why not?

I noticed something early in life. Each of my friends' homes had a distinct smell. Mine, of course, did not. In short, it is hard to notice what is under our noses.

We all notice other people's accents. We, of course, have no accents. You do not notice what is normal, and what we are is normal.

So common in American academia are the presuppositions of the humanist elite that its members are incapable of thinking in terms of rival presuppositions. They cannot imagine alternatives. So, to be anti-Darwin is to be anti-scientific. To be anti-Keynesian is to be anti-economics. Milton Friedman spoke for the guild in 1965: "We are all Keynesians now." No, we weren't. And still aren't. They may be. We aren't.

My father-in-law R. J. Rushdoony identified these presuppositions in his 1963 book, The Messianic Character of American Education. The title says it all. He examined carefully the confessions of faith made by the two dozen intellectual founders of tax-funded K-12 education in the United States. When you combine this book with John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education. you have the basic picture.

Rushdoony followed the confessions. Gatto followed the money. Both men concluded that the public school system is a means of political control of the voters by a self-conscious elite. Rushdoony correctly identified the system of public education as America's only established church. The teachers constitute a priesthood. Gatto, a self-defrocked priest, does not dispute this claim.

A COMBINATION OF ACTIVE INGREDIENTS

The heart of today's superclass is the combination of three factors: money, political power, and an old boy network. These three characteristics are the foundations of every New World Order is history.

If today's New World Order is to be displaced, this must include a re-structuring of the educational system. Why? Because this is the heart of the elite's old boy network.

It is not money, which is based on the satisfaction of customer demand, and is therefore always shifting: new customer tastes, new customers with money, and new technologies. Wealth in a free market economy is based above all on price competition. In contrast, the superclass's wealth is based on political and bureaucratic control over markets. No such control can withstand price competition. Price competition is the acid that undermines every elite that is based on money

Politics is not crucial, because politics is based on a shared worldview and access to tax money. When new money replaces old money, new political alignments replace old ones. Politics is based on votes. Votes can change, and do.

So, the core battle is over education: its presuppositions, its content, and its delivery system. It is a battle over the political delivery of education vs. the free market delivery of education. It is also a battle over accreditation.

TWO RIVAL SYSTEMS

The modern war for political power is a war over two systems of control: democracy vs. bureaucracy. Democracy counts votes. Bureaucracy counts exams. Democracy screens access to power by vote-getting. Bureaucracy screens access by examination, followed by tenure. Politics secures power by patronage funded by tax money. Bureaucracy secures power by enforcing rules that are written by the bureaucracy, interpreted by the bureaucracy, and enforced by the bureaucracy. The term for this process is "administrative law." This thesis was laid out by Harvard legal historian Harold Berman in the Introduction to his book, Law and Revolution (1983). I regard this introduction as the most important essay I have ever read. He argued that the West is losing its liberty because of the relentless spread of administrative law, which is undermining the Western legal tradition.

Bureaucracy is based on substituting examinations and academic criteria for votes. We begin to get to the heart of the matter when we look at the steady replacement of democracy by bureaucracy. When a Civil Service system replaced the spoils system in the United States, the Old World Order of politics was itself replaced. The culmination of this process was the New Deal. It came to power by votes. Its legacy, secured by Truman, was massive bureaucracy.

This process has happened all over the West. The original Anglo-American model was based on two things: family connections and access to the two major universities, Oxford and Cambridge. The elite sent their sons there, not for formal education, which everyone knew was irrelevant, but for contacts: the old boy network. In the United States, Harvard, then Yale, then Princeton served as the equivalents.

The rival model to England's was Prussia's. It began in the aftermath of Napoleon's defeat of the Prussian military in 1806. It was an imitation of the French system, which Napoleon was developing: the premier academies. Passing exams was crucial to entry into power. The University of Berlin was the central institution, but there were other universities with influence.

In the United States, the English model served the elite from 1636 to 1960. The elite, trained in a handful of elite universities, have controlled the common people by means of the tax-funded Prussian school system. The sons of the elite go to the prep schools and the 20 elite universities. The masses go to public schools, K-graduate school. A handful of elite graduate schools, law schools, and business schools let a few carefully screened "Prussians" enter the elite. Think "the Clintons." They got to go to Yale Law School. They were outsiders. The two Bushes, father and son, weren't.

This conflict between "Britain" and "Prussia" has gone on in the United States ever since the 1840s: the coming of tax-funded schools in New England.

The Prussian system is now winning. This became visible around 1960, when Harvard began opening access to formal exams. This came at the expense of "legacies." It was a zero-sum game. The legacy candidates could not compete intellectually with the outsiders.

The most readable account of this transition is David Brooks' book, BoBos in Paradise. Don't let the book's humor fool you. It is a profound book, despite the covering of pop sociology. He has identified the shift, although he does not identify it as Prussian. It was a shift that Brooks, as a secular Jew, could see clearly. When exams replaced legacies, Jews won. More to the point, non-practicing Jews won.

Brooks does not discuss the European roots of this conflict. It began under Napoleon and his bureaucratic revolution, which gave citizenship to Jews. It culminated in the Dreyfus affair in the late 1890s, when the military falsely accused and convicted a Jewish officer of treason, and then got caught. The political battle split the nation. This same conflict in Germany culminated with the Nazis: a revolt of the German masses against Prussia and all things Prussian except war. That revolt ended in 1945.

Brooks refers to what was really the first skirmish in the United States, which took place in the 1920s. Jews were getting into Harvard by exams. This was self-consciously blocked by the president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, who imposed quotas against them. This was the gentlemen's agreement where it really mattered: at the entry point. This quota system lasted until the late 1930s.

There is always a system of screening access to positions of power and influence. If a system does not screen by money bids, then it screens by other kinds of bids. Here is the universal rule in all systems: high bid wins. In the Prussian system, the currency for bidding is the score on an examination.

The ultimate model is medieval China's system of examination-based bureaucracy, which screened out legacy bureaucrats. The ultimate model of its displacement may turn out to be post-1978 China. The Communist engineering school graduates at the top are caught in the crossfire of rival systems. I think they will lose.

The central pillar of the New World Order is education in the broadest sense. I will go even further. If this single pillar of the New World Order is displaced – not destroyed, merely displaced – then the existing New World Order will not survive.

The existing model for education is Prussian. It is access by examination. Rich men can get in, but they are screened. Very smart men can get in, but they are screened. By what are they screened? By a theological confession: "salvation by law." The system rests on political-bureaucratic control over free markets. Why? Because of the acid of the free market: price competition.

PRICE COMPETITION

The free market does not reward people in terms of their family connections, or their alma maters, or their class rings. It does not reward secret handshakes. It rewards the ability to meet customer demand at a price more favorable than the competition.

This ability involves skills that are inherently beyond the ability of exam-takers to codify and master. As Ludwig von Mises' student Israel Kirzner has shown for over four decades, if entrepreneurship were governed by a formula, it would become insurance. It would move from uncertainty-management to statistical risk-management. It would become a formula. Profits would disappear, So would losses. Both would be replaced by insurance contracts and normal rates of return.

All old boy networks are inherently anti-market networks. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith made this observation:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. (Book I, Chapter X, Part II)

These words have come down through history as a condemnation of every would-be New World Order. What Rothkopf describes as a superclass, Smith described as a conspiracy. Rothkopf refuses to use this word. That's because the superclass is a conspiracy: the largest, richest, and most powerful conspiracy ever seen.

It rests ultimately on a single pillar: a system of screening based on formal education.

That pillar has begun to crack.

CONCLUSION

What A. Lawrence Lowell did to Jews in the 1920s, the superclass and its Prussian-based educational system do to the practicing confessionalists of every rival confession. It sets quotas on entrance into the inner circles. It screens them out. It sets the agenda.

This agenda is clear: political power. Its confession is clear: "Collective man is the measure of all things." It has this corollary: "It is a moral imperative for those who know what is really best for others to get access to badges and guns and use them for a higher purpose."

The mortal enemies of the superclass are those people who have a seven-word offer: "I can sell it to you cheaper." Jews and Armenians have been saying this for a thousand years. Scots and Dutchmen have been saying it for 300 years. Now Asians are saying it.

This is the soft underbelly of the superclass. This is why, in the immortal words of Mr. T, it's going down.

US and Israel Divided Only on Timing of Iran Strike

2012-02-04T18:03:00.000-08:00

Bloomberg: The U.S. and Israel are publicly disagreeing over timing for a potential attack on Iran’s disputed nuclear facilities, as that nation’s leader said it won’t back down.

The U.S. and Israel have a “significant analytic difference” over estimates of how close Iran is to shielding its nuclear program from attack, Aaron David Miller, a former Mideast peace negotiator in the Clinton administration, said today.

“There’s a growing concern -- more than a concern -- that the Israelis, in order to protect themselves, might launch a strike without approval, warning or even foreknowledge,” he said in an interview.

Read more

WAPO: Israel to nuke Iran to prevent Iran building a nuke that would deter Israel from nuking Iran

2012-02-04T11:10:00.000-08:00

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has a lot on his mind these days, from cutting the defense budget to managing the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But his biggest worry is the growing possibility that Israel will attack Iran over the next few months.

Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June — before Iran enters what Israelis described as a “zone of immunity” to commence building a nuclear bomb.

Read more

The Forgotten Man - A Painting by Jon McNaughton

2012-02-04T08:29:00.000-08:00

Fred on Why the US Government Is a Greater Danger to America Than Nazi Germany Ever Was

2012-02-03T17:21:00.000-08:00

Vote? Why? What candidate in the quadiennial resurrection of the Mickey Mouse club wants to do anthing that I want done?

I want to roll back the onrushing police state and return to constitutional government. The plunge into totalitarianism is a far worse danger than World War Two, in which the US was never in danger of being invaded, and in which the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Who do I vote for? No candidate (except Ron Paul: ERP) is against sovietization.

I want to end our stupid wars, now. Yesterday. Who do I vote for? There is no anti'war candidate (ERP). Obama sends the troops anywhere he can think of, and all the Republicans want to attack Iran.

Read More

The Cost of Britain's kleines Huhn

2012-02-03T17:14:00.000-08:00

Britain's Minister for Climate Panic and Punitive Remedial Measures, Chris Huhne, aka kleines Huhn, has resigned from the Government after being charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice by having his former wife take the blame for a speeding offense.

Over at WUWT, Chris Monckton explains the sheer insanity of the former ministers trillion-dollar plan to cut Britain's carbon emissions 80% by 2042:

Under Huhne, the Climate Change Department has been indistinguishable from a lunatic asylum. I first came across him – or, rather, didn’t come across him – when he and I were due to debate the climate at the annual jamboree of a massive hedge-fund in Spain three years ago. Huhne only found out that I was to be his opponent when he reached Heathrow Airport. He turned straight around and went back to London.

When I visited the House of Lords’ minister, Lord Marland, at the Climate Change Department a couple of years ago, I asked him and the Department’s chief number-cruncher, Professor David Mackay (neither a climate scientist nor an economist, of course) to show me the Department’s calculations detailing just how much “global warming” that might otherwise occur this century would be prevented by the $30 billion per year that the Department was committed to spend between 2011 and 2050 – $1.2 trillion in all.

There was a horrified silence. The birds stopped singing. The Minister adjusted his tie. The Permanent Secretary looked at his watch. Professor Mackay looked as though he wished the plush sofa into which he was disappearing would swallow him up entirely.

Eventually, in a very small voice, the Professor said, “Er, ah, mphm, that is, oof, arghh, we’ve never done any such calculation.” The biggest tax increase in human history had been based not upon a mature scientific assessment followed by a careful economic appraisal, but solely upon blind faith. I said as much. “Well,” said the Professor, “maybe we’ll get around to doing the calculations next October.”

Read more

Clear Water At the North Pole: 1959

2012-02-03T14:02:00.000-08:00

US Submarine Skate (SSN-578), surfaced at the North Pole, 17 March 1959

1959: So where's the ice?

The NAZIS and FASCISTS who founded the THE EU and their influence today

2012-02-03T13:39:00.000-08:00

Link via Aangirfan's: FASCISM, TOP FAMILIES, FALSE FLAG OPS, which includes an informative interview with Annie Machon, an MI5 whistle-blower.

What Is the Point?

2012-02-03T10:47:00.000-08:00

This is my first blog post in over a week, which raises hope of an eventual full remission of the compulsive blogging disorder (CBD).

What I find most helpful in suppressing the blogging impulse is recognition that there really is no point in it: wait a day or two and someone is sure to make the case better than I can.

This was well demonstrated yesterday by Alex Kurtagic's demolition of a university-sponsored pseudo-scientific study proving that all right-wingers are dumb racists.

The study reminds one of those reports that students using Macs are dumber than those with IBM PC, or that folks who use Internet Explorer are dumber than those using Firefox.

But perhaps the study is a hoax to prove that liberal academics will believe anything. If so, we look forward to the follow up.

More US scrap metal headed for Persian Gulf

2012-01-28T17:53:00.000-08:00

USS Ponce joins USS Enterprise in Persian Gulf

By YaYaCanada

How much clearer could it be that a false flag event is planned?
Further to our earlier discussion about the US having found a way to dispose of its scrap metal and at the same time create a pretext (with the help of Israel?) for WWIII, here is the latest news report (bolding mine):

Pentagon deploys ‘mothership’ to Persian Gulf as tensions with Iran escalate

The Pentagon is rushing a “mothership” to the Middle East to be used by commando teams as unrest in the region heightens, reports The Washington Post.

The U.S. Navy is planning to refit the USS Ponce, an amphibious transport docking ship, which was about to be retired and decommissioned.

The Ponce was commissioned in 1971 - it's now over 40 years old. Wikipedia reports:

On 2 December, 2011, Ponce came home to await decommissioning on 30 March, 2012, when she would be towed to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and be placed with the mothball fleet

And now "she" is headed to the Gulf. How much clearer could it be that a false flag event is planned?

Stop The False Flag Attack On The U.S.S. Enterprise

Europe's Iran Oil Embargo: Iran Strikes First

2012-01-27T17:45:00.001-08:00

ZeroHedge: In what is likely a long overdue move, Iran has finally decided to give Europe a harsh lesson in game theory. Instead of letting Euro-area politicians score brownie points at its expense by threatening to halt imports and cut off the Iranian economy, the Iranian government will instead propose a bill calling for an immediate halt to oil deliveries to Europe.

Read more

Has Iran dealt the EU a harsh lesson in game theory, or merely extricated itself from the consequences of its threat to close the Strait of Hormuz should Europe impose an embargo on the import of Iranian oil?

The European embargo was scheduled to go into effect in July. Closure of the Strait of Hormuz would have elicited the promised American military action to open the Strait. So by making meaningless any European embargo, Iran avoids the need to make good on its threat to blockade the Strait, and thus denies US/Israel the long hoped for pretext for a war that would likely have escalated to the use of nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities.

Now US/Israel will need a different justification for nuking Iran to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons to deter US/Israel from nuking Iran.

The Unbearable Whiteness... ...of Being Mitt Romney

2012-01-27T14:15:00.000-08:00

By Andy Nowicki

In my previous article "Defiant Chastity," I asked the plaintive question: Is there anywhere in the debauched landscape of postmodern America where one can still find determined cultural resistance to the wearisome blight of entrenched sexual permissiveness, or stiff defiance against the dully exasperating trend towards enforced tolerance for every conceivable brand of unwholesome carnal perversity?

I then met my own seemingly rhetorical question with a surprisingly concrete answer: Yes, I replied; there IS, in fact, just such an unapologetically unreconstructed, sexually reactionary culture still in existence! It lies in the American West, among the denizens of "Deseret" (that is, Utah), which is to say, among the Latter-Day Saints, or Mormons.

Indeed, beyond the so-called "Zion Curtain" of Mormondom, pre-sexual revolution mores still largely hold sway. Girls are taught to dress modestly and always to behave in a ladylike fashion; boys are raised to be chivalrous, courtly, and responsible breadwinners; young couples are expected to put off intimate relations until their Temple marriage—wherein they are "sealed" to one another, not just for life but for eternity (!).

The fact that these quaint old customs still endure in one sector of America must be upsetting enough to the average standard-bearing Zeitgeist enforcer, inclined as such a one is to bouts of hysterical outrage that anyone anywhere might choose not to accept "enlightened" cultural norms as... well, normative.

Yet there was one significant oversight in my "Defiant Chastity" piece, since I neglected to mention a crucial piece of the puzzle, one that goes far to explain the extent of the desperate fear and ardent loathing that Mormonism provokes in the hearts of our modern-day cultural commissars.

What truly renders the Latter-Day Saints beyond the pale is in fact the overwhelming paleness of their sweet, wholesome Latter-Day Saintly complexions. ...

Read more

Racism in Britain: We Obsess Over Black Britons While Chinese are Ignored

2012-01-27T10:04:00.000-08:00

By William Dove

January 12, 2012: Now that Britain has become a country with an unhealthy obsession with race and racism, as shown most recently by the ridiculous outrage over some nonsensical tweeting by Diane Abbott, it was nice to see in the Guardian an aspect of this issue which is almost never raised, namely that of racism towards Chinese and East Asians living in Britain.

Actress Elizabeth Chan complained that Chinese Britons such as herself are "virtually invisible in public life", that she had to endure people making strange kung-fu noises at her and that she had been denied roles which were deemed to be for white characters only.

She also noted that while TV in her youth provided a reasonable number of black and South Asian role models not a single Chinese or East Asian was to be found.

These days I suppose young Chinese growing up in Britain do at least have Gok Wan and the girl from Harry Potter to look up to but there is no denying that there does seem to be a lack of East Asians in prominent places in society.

Friends and relatives of an East Asian background have told me of how they have had to endure being called "Chinky" and such like while also getting the feeling that they are not being taken seriously perhaps in part because of their often weaker English skills.

What is also clear is that what some disparagingly call the "Race Relations Industry" seems to be concerned with just a few races in particular rather than in the status of all the races present in the United Kingdom.

For instance despite the fact that we have and have had in this country black and South Asian cabinet ministers and MPs not only are there no East Asian MPs at present but there has, so far as I am aware, never been an MP from an East Asian background.

Yet one never hears anti-racism campaigners call for more East Asian representation or for "all Chinese shortlists". Instead they seem to rather enjoy spending their time trying to segregate black Britons from the rest of the country by talking about something called the "black community", as something seperate from mainstream British society.

Does this "community", which apparently contains everyone from the Archbishop of York to the killers of Ben Kinsella, have a set of shared values? How does one join it or leave it if one wants to? When we hear talk of "problems in the black community" as we did after the riots (in which hordes of white people took part and which not a few black police officers attempted to control) are we talking about the Archbishop or other elements within this so called community? As Bim Adewunmi pointed out, the people chosen to represent the "black community" often seem to be ex-gang members, which must surely be offensive to the many black Britons who have never had anything to do with gangs.

Unlike in America most black people in this country are here because they or their not too distant ancestors came here by choice. This is also true of the large numbers of people of East Asian descent in the country. Despite this there is an overwhelming emphasis on the fortunes of black people with some regard thrown in for South Asians.

Instead of obsessing over one or a few ethnic groups we should have a society in which racial discrimination is outlawed and where people of all races are free to succeed or fail on their own merits rather than being told that they are victims of a racist society or that members of another race are attempting to, for example, "divide and rule" them. While black Britons do no doubt suffer racism in different forms from time to time, the fact that there are plenty of successful black politicians, businessmen, doctors, journalists and so on would suggest that white oppression is not (thank goodness) the force it once was.

We should also have a society in which people are able to withstand the power of words with tolerance.

As an Englishman when I go abroad I'm often told by foreigners things like "You must like the rain because it reminds you of home". This is not quite as bad as being called a "Chinky", but it is still mildly annoying and based on racial stereotypes. I always respond by saying "Oh so it never rains in the rest of the world?".

Jokes about the rain are of course not the worst forms of verbal racial abuse. John Terry recently got into trouble for allegedly calling Anton Ferdinand a "F****** black c***". Now it is a matter of opinion that Mr Ferdinand is a "F****** c***" but it is a matter of fact that he is what is generally regarded as "black". Strangely though it was the word "black" which was considered most offensive, presumably if Mr Terry just called Mr Ferdinand an "F****** c***" that would have been mere banter.

Mr Terry should not have to face charges for inserting the word "black" into a barrage of obscenities. On the other hand the "racist tram lady" Emma West should perhaps face charges for disturbing the peace and maybe for her threatening behaviour.

What was interesting about the West incident was that while she raged against "F****** Polish" and "F****** brown people" she was told by another passenger that she had "F*** all to say" and that "You're f****** waking my baby up". This response was praised by a government minister who apparently felt that liberal use of the F-word in a public place is reasonable behaviour so long as the word is not accompanied by words like "Polish", "brown" or "black".

It may be unpleasant at times, but proper tolerance means having to put up with things we don't like.

Never again do I want to hear of someone being arrested for singing "Kung Fu Fighting" on the grounds that it's offensive to Chinese (when I heard that story my first thought was that at least they were not singing George Formby, whose series of songs on the career choices of a fictional "Mr Wu" might be somewhat un-PC nowadays) and nor do I want to hear of people being denied their full potential because of racial discrimination.

Sadly I fully expect to hear more instances of both kinds of folly.

More Climate Skeptic Physics Nonsense

2012-01-24T19:57:00.000-08:00

Perpetmo (Image source)

I am not a physicist, but I believe that the second law of thermodynamics is rather widely accepted among physicists, which leads me to the conclusion that an unintelligible paper published in an obscure journal, which purports to refute the second law, should be regarded with considerable skepticism.

As discussed in an earlier post, such a paper was recently reproduced at Roger Tattersall's popular Tallbloke' Talkshop, prompting refutations over at Anthony Watts' WUWT, first by Willis Eschenbach and, today, by Robert Brown of the Duke University Physics Department.

But Hans Jelbring, author of this remarkable theory, has struck back promptly at the Talkshop with a new derivation of his theory. Unfortunately, the new derivation does not address the inherent absurdity of the conclusion, which seems to be contradicted by any number of simple observations.

Tallbloke, himself, is an advocate of the Jelbring "thermo-gravitational" hypothesis, asserting the Jelbring' thesis as follows:

... gravity causes there to be a temperature gradient from cold high up, because more of the total energy is locked away as gravitational potential energy compared to warm at the bottom where the near surface air is hotter than the average because less of the total energy is locked away. Again, total energy remains equally distributed throughout the troposphere, as the second law of thermodynamics demands, but because of the difference in gravitational potential energy between molecules at the bottom and top, there is a thermal gradient.

My own off the cuff refutation of this was as follows:

Consider an airless, sunless planet without an internal heat source that passes through a cloud of gas, thereby acquiring an atmosphere.

Initially the planet surface temperature will approximate to the microwave background temperature of 2.75 K. However, as gas accumulates around the planet, the gas is compressed gravitationally, with resultant heating in accordance with the gas laws. The warmth of the atmosphere will heat the planet surface, which will then radiate more energy than it receives from outer space.

Eventually, the thermal energy released in the gravitational compression of the atmosphere will be entirely dissipated, by which time the temperature of the planet surface will have returned to its original value of 2.75 K, though the atmospheric pressure gradient from the surface to outer space remains.

So the gravitational effect on the surface temperature is transient only.
According to this account, the internal temperature of large gas planets must be due either to residual heat acquired during the process of formation, or produced by nuclear reactions, such as as account, in part, for the Earth’s internal heat.

Is this not correct?

Tallbloke, to whom this argument was addressed, made no response. Several others did respond, but with what appeared to be spurious objections, for example, that my argument would be invalid if I made my planet spin, or if I added a sun.Other objections were no more compelling.

In his new derivation of the hypothesis, Jelbring considers:

...two air parcels of equal and suitable mass (a billion molecules) which have to carry an equal amount of total energy regardless of their altitude if an adiabatic condition is assumed.

The proof that follows is mathematical, but the essence of it appears to be that as a parcel of air is raised or lowered in the Earth's gravitational field its gravitational potential energy is increased or decreased with a corresponding decrease or increase in temperature, thus maintaining total energy constant.

Now the concept of potential energy is not the easiest thing to grasp, and so the Jelbring hypothesis may have some plausibility. But if one considers the various implications, as does the above-cited Robert Brown, one sees that they flatly contradict the second law of thermodynamics, the law that outlaws perpetual motion machines and free energy.

My own attempt at a refutation at the Talkshop, is as follows:

If your packets of air are in rigid, sealed capsules, you can raise them or lower them in a gravitational field as much as you like and they will undergo no change in temperature, even though you have changed their gravitational potential energy.

From this we can infer that the change in gravitational potential energy of air with altitude does not explain the change with altitude in air temperature, which results from the work done as the gas is compressed or expanded with change in barometric pressure with altitude.

Whether that settles the argument for all reasonable people, I leave for reasonable people to decide, but at least my conclusion places me on the same side as the Duke University Physics Department, which I find encouraging.

But in any case, if Hans Jelbring does not want to be affronted by non-physicists continually claiming to have rubbished his theory, he really has no one to blame but himself, since he has failed to put it to the test of the professional physics community by having it published in a reputable physics journal. He has, it is true, published his thesis, but in a sociology journal edited by a retired geography professor, which as I discussed in an earlier post, absolutely does not rate in the eyes of the scientific community.

So what are we to conclude? Seemingly, that popular websites dealing with scientific topics can be swamps of obscurity, nonsense and misinformation. Or is there something sinister at work here? Are we seeing an attempt to discredit the climate warming skeptics by associating them with bogus science, or perhaps part of a general effort to convince the public that the blogsphere as a whole is wasteland to be avoided for the safety and reliability of the mainstream media? But more on that in another post.

Some Climate Warming Skeptics Ready to Ditch the Second Law of Thermodynamics

2012-01-20T15:32:00.000-08:00

Image source

I am not a climate warming skeptic. I am a skeptic about everything, especially about scientific claims made by those, like Al Gore and the Coal Alliance, who have a political agenda. For that reason, I follow the climate change debate with a skeptical eye for claims made on either side.

Among those skeptical of alarmist claims about human-caused, or anthropogenic, climate change are some of undoubted ability whose critical evaluation of the work of the mainstream school of climate science, which is closely wedded to projections of massive climate disruption due to human activity, deserves careful attention.

However, because of the politics, much skeptic clamor is as preposterous as any of the nonsense with which Al Gore has managed to pervert the course of public debate and embarrass the scientific community. In some cases, the nonsense is surely propagated with the deliberate intent to deceive, but in most cases the spread of nonsense is likely driven solely by wishful thinking, something that is with us always.

An example of the apparent will of the climate skeptic to believe is provided by the ongoing debate at Tallbloke's Talkshop and at Anthony Watt's web site concerning the "Gravito-Thermal Hypothesis" of Hans Jelbring, a debate of such intensity as to create moments of severe inter-Skeptic friction (and here).

The Jelbring hypothesis is quite obscure. So obscure in fact, that it has been claimed that no one understands it well enough to explain it. But what the hypothesis asserts is that the greenhouse effect:

...can be explained as ... a consequence of known physical laws describing the behaviour of ideal gases in a gravity field.

Now this is a radical claim, published it should be noted, in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. To understand why it is radical, one needs to be clear as to what the greenhouse effect is.

The so-called greenhouse effect has in fact little to do with greenhouses, but consists in the increase in the Earth's surface attributable to the presence of the atmosphere.

The way that the atmosphere raises the Earth's surface temperature is not immediately apparent. Ignoring internally generated heat, the Eath's surface temperature is largely determined by the amount of radiation received from the Sun. Thus the surface is usually warmer during the day than at night and warmer during the long days of summer than during the short days of winter.

The Sun does not, however, raise the Earth's temperature continuously, because the Earth emits energy to space in the form of heat (i.e., infra-red radiation), at a rate proportional to its temperature. Thus the Earth's temperature fluctuates around a stable equilibrium value, such that planet-wide incoming solar radiation matches planet-wide outgoing infra-red radiation (averaged over the course of the year). Thus any warming tendency is counteracted by an increase in surface temperature and hence an increase in outgoing radiation. Conversely, any cooling tendency is counteracted by a decrease in surface temperature and hence a decrease in outgoing radiation.

Thus, the presence of an atmosphere will make no difference to the mean, planet-wide year-round temperature at the Earth's surface, provide it is transparent to all radiation.

However, the Earth's atmosphere does affect the temporal and spatial distribution of heat at the Earth's surface by acting as a thermal buffer. For example, it cools the surface during the day, while warming it night. But here we are concerned only with mean, year-round, planet-wide surface temperature which is dictated by the radiant energy balance, and so the temperature buffering effects of the atmosphere, or for that matter of the oceans and Earth's crust, can be ignored.

Moreover, the atmosphere does raise the temperature of the Earth's surface because it is not transparent to all radiation. Although nitrogen and oxygen, the chief constituents of the atmosphere are essentially transparent to solar and infra-red radiation, the atmosphere also contains trace amounts of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane and ozone, the so-called greenhouse gases (plus water droplets in clouds), all of which absorb radiation, particularly in the infra-red portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

When a molecule of greenhouse gas absorbs radiation, its temperature, i.e., its kinetic energy or velocity, is raised above the ambient temperature. In time, this energy is either transmitted through collision with circumambient molecules to non-greenhouse gases such as oxygen and nitrogen that make up most of the atmosphere, or it is emitted as infra-red radiation. The radiation may be emitted in any direction, which means that some will intercept the ground and cause surface warming. This is the greenhouse effect that keeps our planet at a temperature consistent with organic life, which is to say approximately 33 K above what it would be without a greenhouse effect. The effect is evident in the difference in temperature usually experienced between clear and cloudy nights. The clouds act as radiators, beaming infra-red radiation to the ground and substantially raising the temperature.

But not so, according to Hans Jelbring.

Jelbring contends that the greenhouse effect is almost entirely the result of a gravitational effect on the atmosphere. Unfortunately, precisely what this effect is supposed to be, no one, as noted above, seems able to clearly explain. However, without overly straining one's intellect to understand the theory, one can rather more easily consider its implications and the empirical evidence that would support it.

If Jelbring is correct, it would mean that even if a planetary atmosphere were entirely transparent, which is to say free of greenhouse gases and thus incapable of either absorbing or emitting radiant energy, it would nevertheless raise the surface temperature of the planet above what it would be without an atmosphere.

What does that imply? First, that by raising the temperature of the surface, the atmosphere must raise the outgoing radiant flux at the surface, which in turn, means an increase in radiant flux to outer space, if the atmosphere is entirely transparent (i.e., free of greenhouse gases). In fact, it means that the planet would be at least slightly luminous (i.e., outgoing radiation would exceed incoming radiation). But that is not what CERES (Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System) experiment satellite measurements indicate.

There are other implications that raise even more fundamental issues. For example, if as Jelbring claims, gravity is responsible for the atmospheric temperature lapse rate, this implies a refutation of the second law of thermodynamics, the rule that outlaws perpetual motion machines and free everlasting energy.

It is not inconceivable, therefore, that excitement in the climate skeptic camp about Jelbring's thermo-gravitational hypothesis stems, at least in part, from wishful thinking, not sound scientific analysis.

Consistent with this conclusion, Jelbring's paper, published in 2003, has been cited in the scientific literature only twice, and both citations are in the same journal, Energy and Environment, as the original paper.

According to SCIMAGO, an independent journal ranking agency, Energy and Environment is a low ranking journal in terms of prestige and citations of articles in the rest of the literature. For example, on the Scimago journal prestige ranking index Energy and Environment ranks fortieth out of 49 journals concerned with energy and the environment with a score of 0.03 versus a score of 0.73 for the top journal in that category and scores of 7.8 and 10.0 for Nature and Cell, respectively.

If we turn to the journal itself, we see that the Editor is Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, who, if we look her up here, appears to be no mean scholar. She is the author of a number of frequently cited books and journal articles. However, she has not published in the fields of either climate science or physics. Moreover, according to Wikipedia, she is is an Emeritus Reader in Geography at the University of Hull in Kingston-upon-Hull England, which leads one to question her competence to determine the fate of a paper that challenges a fundamental law of physics. Wikipedia also tells us that the journal Energy and Environment, which she has edited since 1996 is aimed at, among others, "the international social science and policy communities," hardly a group liable to provide critical assessment of the thermo-gravitational hypothesis.

Wikipedia also states:

According to Fred Pearce, Boehmer-Christiansen is a sceptic about acid rain and global warming and calls the science reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "political constructs." Real Climate, a prominent blog run by climate scientists, asserted in 2011 that her journal once published a paper that claimed that the sun is made of iron; Boehmer-Christiansen responded that the claim was false

We can say, then that Jelbring's highly questionable thesis was published in a journal of minimal scientific significance edited by a scholar of limited or non-existent credentials in the field with which Jelbring's paper deals [though we think Prof Boehmer-Christiansen, sure has the IPCC weighed up right].

The journal has an Editorial Advisory Board, but the membership does not appear strong in the physical sciences. For example, Maarten J. Arentsen holds a Master’s degree in political science specializing in scientific methodology and political modernization; David J. Ball, is Professor of Risk Management, Middlesex University, Hendon, UK; Max Beran, Independent Environmental Services Professional, Oxford, UK; etc.

None of which proves that Jelbring's hypothesis is unquestionably wrong. Perhaps the Earth really does glow in the dark, and perhaps the second law of thermodyamics will have to be repealed. But for now, mainstream science is ignoring the thing, and are probably none the worse for doing so.

Revised January 22, 2012

Power, Propaganda, and Purpose in American Democracy

2012-01-19T12:44:00.000-08:00

By Andrew Gavin Marshall

One central facet to the development of the modern institutional society under which we live and are dominated today, was the redefining of the concept of ‘democracy’ that took place in the early 20th century. This immensely important discussion took place among the educated, elite intellectual class in the United States at that time, and the consequences of which were profound for the development of not only American society and democracy, but for the globalization that followed after World War II. The central theme that emerged was that in the age of ‘mass democracy’, where people came to be known as “the public,” the concept of ‘democracy’ was redefined to be a system of government and social organization which was to be managed by an intellectual elite, largely concerned with “the engineering of consent” of the masses in order to allow elite-management of society to continue unhindered.

The socio-economic and political situation of the United States had, throughout the 19th century, rapidly changed. Official slavery was ended after the Civil War and the wage-slave method of labour was introduced on a much wider scale; that is, the approach at which people are no longer property themselves, but rather lend their labour at minimal hourly wages, a difference equated with rental slavery versus owned slavery. While the system of labour had itself changed, the living conditions of the labourers did not improve a great deal. With Industrialization also came increased urbanization, poverty, and thus, social unrest. The 19th Century in the United States was one of near-constant labour unrest, social upheaval and a rapidly growing wealth divide. And it was not simply the lower labouring classes that were experiencing the harsh rigors of a modern industrial life. One social critic of the era, writing in 1873, discussed the situation of the middle class in America:

Very few among them are saving money. Many of them are in debt; and all they can earn for years, is, in many cases, mortgaged to pay such debt… [We see] the unmistakable signs of their incessant anxiety and struggles to get on in life, and to obtain in addition to a mere subsistence, a standing in society… The poverty of the great middle classes consists in the fact that they have only barely enough to cover up their poverty… their poverty is felt, mentally and socially, through their sense of dependence and pride. They must work constantly, and with an angry sense of the limited opportunities for a career at their command.[1]

As immigrants from Europe and Asia flooded America, a growing sense of racism emerged among the faltering middle class. This situation created enormous tension and unease among middle and working class Americans, and indeed, the industrialists who ruled over them. Yet many in the middle class viewed the lower class, which was increasingly rebellious, as well as the immigrant labourers – also quite militant – as a threat to their own standing in society. Instead of focusing primarily on the need for reorganization at the top of the social structure, they looked to the masses – the working people – as the greatest source of instability. Their approach was in attempting to preserve – or construct – a system beneficial to their own particular interests. Since the middle class survived on the backs of the workers, it was not in their interest as a class to support radical workers movements and revolutionary philosophies. Thus, while criticizing those at the top, the call came for ‘reform’, not revolution; for passive pluralism not democratic populism; for amelioration, not anarchy.

This is what became known as the ‘Progressive Movement’ in American history. Influential journalists became leading ‘Progressives,’ and prominent social thinkers and social critics began further analyzing and arming the journalists with reformist ideas. The middle class was itself a major audience for progressive journalists. They acknowledged the need for social change and reorganization, and pushed for a method of achieving such change through the rational approach of ‘social science’ and “social evaluation.”[2] One of these leading progressive journalists, Edward Bellamy, wrote a book in 1888, “Looking Backward,” in which he argued that, “it would be the force of public opinion – opinion bolstered by the instrument of reason – that would perform the task of remaking the world for the benefit of all humanity.” Thus, “an informed and intelligent ‘public’ would be the agency through which a new historical epoch would be initiated.”[3]

This progressive form of journalism came to be known as “muckraking,” a term coined by Teddy Roosevelt in 1906, as this reform-oriented investigative journalism “began to reshape the discourse of public life,” driven by increasing discontent over governmental and corporate corruption.

The notion of “the public” was born in the eighteenth century Enlightenment, fused with the notion that the public was a rational body of persons, able to comprehend, identify and organize facts, premised on – as philosopher Jürgen Habermas articulated – the “informed, literate men, engaged with one another in an ongoing process of ‘critical-rational’ debate.” Thomas Jefferson reiterated such notions, suggesting that, “the creed of our political faith” rested at “the bar of public reason.” Progressive journalism gave profound emphasis to the promotion of facts and “social documentation.”[4]

Mass circulation media had changed the nature of “the public” in the late 19th century. In particular, the newspaper industry grew, and like with other industries between the 1880s and World War I, “financial consolidation and technological innovation combined to alter the character and scale of big-city and small-town journalism,” as newspapers became big business. Thus, news was becoming ‘standardized,’ and the growth and business of magazine publishing followed suit.[5]

Yet, the proliferation of mass media was of a dual nature. While more people were able to gain access to more information from more places simultaneously, there was also the development of a trend in the emergence of a “public” increasingly defined as “spectators,” no longer active participants in the ‘public square,’ but observers from afar, in their geographically segregated middle class.[6]

As the first decade of the 20th century drew to a close, and World War I drew nearer, a new concern was increasingly developing among the ‘Progressive’ movement and its ideologues and journalists. While continuing to push for reform, there was a growing rumbling and sense of revolution brewing from below, among the working class people. This concern increasingly moved to the forefront among Progressive intellectuals, who saw their own class and social conceptions threatened by the grumbling masses trapped in poverty beneath them. Perhaps the most influential intellect of the early 20th century was a man named Walter Lippmann, a Harvard graduate who joined with Progressive publicists and had even joined the Socialist Party in 1910. By 1914, however, Lippmann had turned from his socialist inclinations, and wrote the well-received Drift and Mastery, which prompted Teddy Roosevelt to refer to Lippmann as “the most brilliant man of his age,” at just 25 years old. Lippmann’s principle concern was with the notion of the people ruling:

Ongoing middle-class hostility toward big business – once understood as a constructive catalyst for social reform – had now become, to Lippmann’s increasingly conservative mind, an inadvertent stimulus of social disintegration. As attacks on the practices of big business mounted and an increasingly militant working-class movement challenged the very concept of privately held wealth, Lippmann became more and more alarmed… In a country once “notorious for its worship of success,” Lippmann wrote, public disfavor was being heaped “savagely upon those who had achieved it.”[7]

Lippmann held the muckraking journalists increasingly responsible for this change on social perception, in which social unrest “threatened to spin out of control.” Lippmann described what he saw as an atmosphere of “accusation,” largely aimed at big business, which he viewed as “a collective psychological malady, a dangerous condition of paranoia, that, unless checked, posed a greater danger to society than the excesses of wealth.” Society was a pot on the verge of boiling over. As Lippmann wrote:

The sense of conspiracy and secret scheming which transpire is almost uncanny. “Big Business,” and its ruthless tentacles, have become the material for the feverish fantasy of illiterate thousands thrown out of kilter by the rack and strain of modern life… all the frictions of life are readily ascribed to a deliberate evil intelligence, and men like Morgan and Rockefeller take on attributes of omnipotence, that ten minutes of cold sanity would reduce to a barbarous myth.[8]

In 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt gave an interview with the New Haven Register in which he lamented that the excesses of big business, coupled with the challenge of muckraking journalism, was creating a deeply precarious situation, in which, “sooner or later, unless there is a readjustment, there will come a riotous wicked, murderous day of atonement.” Thus, a “search for order” had come to dominate the minds of the once-reformist intellectuals of the day. As Stewart Ewen wrote in his excellent book, PR! A Social History of Spin:

Progressives looked for new strategies that might be employed to contain this impending social crisis. In this quest, a growing number turned toward the new ideas and techniques of the social sciences, hoping to discover foolproof instruments for diagnosing social problems and achieving social stability… To Lippmann and a growing number of others… the social sciences appealed less in their ability to create an informed public and more in their promise to help establish social control.[9]

Lippmann felt that the “discipline of science” would need to be applied to democracy, and that, “social engineers, social scientists, armed with their emerging expertise, would provide the modern state with a foundation upon which a new stability might be realized.” Thus, explained Ewen:

[N]ovel strategies of social management and the conviction that a technical elite might be able to engineer social order were becoming increasingly attractive… Accompanying a democratic current of social analysis that sought to educate the public at large, another – more cabalistic – tradition of social-scientific thought was emerging, one that saw the study of society as a tool by which a technocratic elite could help serve the interests of vested power.[10]

One of the most important works of this period was the 1895 work by French social psychologist, Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, in which he analyzed the changing nature of politics from being middle class oriented to transforming into popular democracy in which “the opinion of the masses” was becoming the most important opinion in society. Le Bon wrote that, “The destinies of nations are elaborated at present in the heart of the masses, and no longer in the councils of princes.” He lamented that, “the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to destroy utterly society as it now exists,” and that, “The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings.” The “crowd,” postulated Le Bon, was only able to ‘react’ and was driven not by logic or reason, but by passion and emotion.[11]

An associate and friend of Le Bon’s, Gabriel Tarde, expanded upon this concept, and articulated the idea that “the crowd” was a social group of the past, and that “the public” was “the social group of the future.” The public, argued Tarde, was a “spiritual collectivity, a dispersion of individuals who are physically separated and whose cohesion is entirely mental.” Thus, Tarde identified in the growth of the printing press and mass communications, a powerful medium through which “the public” is shaped, and that, if managed appropriately, could bring a sense of order to a situation increasingly chaotic. The newspaper, Tarde explained, facilitated “the fusion of personal opinions into local opinions, and this into national and world opinion, the grandiose unification of the public mind.” A German sociologist named Ferdinand Tonnies argued that the newspaper became a channel through which one faction of society could “present its own will as the rational general will.” Thus, “objective reality” was in actuality, managed and controlled. The press, in this case, as the “organ of public opinion” could be a “weapon and tool in the hands of those who know how to use it and have to use it… It is comparable and, in some respects, superior to the material power which the states possess through their armies, their treasuries, and their bureaucratic civil service.”[12]

One of Walter Lippmann’s most influential teachers at Harvard, Graham Wallas, wrote that, “Organized Thought has become typical.” Thus, the idea of “the public” – malleable to suggestion, organized and controlled – came to manifest a type of ‘solution’ to the problem of “the crowd” – irrational, emotionally driven, and reactive. While the crowd was irrational, the ‘public’ could be reasoned with.[13]

One individual who was greatly influenced by these ideas was a man named Ivy Lee, a newspaperman who graduated from Princeton in 1898, and had come to offer his services to major industrial executives as one of the first corporate public relations practitioners. In 1916, he told a group of railroad executives that, “You suddenly find you are not running a private business, but running a business of which the public itself is taking complete supervision. The crowd is in the saddle, the people are on the job, and we must take consideration of that fact, whether we like it or not.” Thus, Lee felt that it was essential for the business community to “manufacture a commonality of interests between them and an often censorious public to establish a critical line of defense against the crowd.”[14]

Ivy Lee defined the job of public relations persons to that of a “news engineer,” and described himself as “a physician for corporate bodies.” The aim was to “supply news” to the press and the public so as to “understand better the soundness of a corporation’s policy or perspective.”[15]

One notable event was what came to be known as the Ludlow Massacre. The Colorado coal strike began in September 1913, in which roughly eleven thousand miners (mostly Greeks, Italians and Serbs) went on strike following the murder of one of their organizers. They went on strike against the Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation, which was owned by the Rockefeller family, and against their low pay, horrible living conditions, and the “feudal domination of their lives in towns completely controlled by the mining companies.” The strikers were immediately evicted from their shacks in the towns, and subsequently set up tent colonies, when the Rockefellers hired gunmen (using Gatling guns and rifles) to raid the tent colonies. The Colorado governor called out the National Guard (whose wages were paid by the Rockefellers), and raided the colonies. On 20 April 1914, the largest tent colony at Ludlow, housing over one thousand men, women and children, was machine gunned by the National Guard, with the strikers firing back. When the leader of the strike was called up to negotiate a truce, he was shot dead, and the machine gun fire continued, with the Guard moving in at nightfall to set fire to the tents. The following day it was discovered that one tent included the charred bodies of eleven children and two women. This became known as the Ludlow Massacre.[16]

The Rockefeller Foundation emerged in this era, and became immediately interested in the ‘construction of knowledge’ as a means to defending the interests of the Rockefeller Group and capitalist society as a whole. The Rockefeller Foundation secretary, Jerome Greene, identified “research and propaganda” as a means to quiet social and political unrest. It was felt that “public opinion on the labor question could be shaped through the foundation in order to counter leftist and populist attacks on both the Rockefeller business enterprises and on capitalism.”[17]

Following the Ludlow Massacre in 1914, a government commission – the Walsh Commission – was appointed to study the issue, and the Rockefeller Foundation began preparation for its own study.[18] As the Walsh Commission began their work, the Rockefeller Foundation sought to join forces with other major corporate leaders to advance their formation of ideology, and attended a conference “held between representatives of some of the largest financial interests” in the United States. This conference resulted in two approaches being pushed forward in terms of seeking to “educate the citizenry in procapitalistic ideology and thus relieve unrest.” One view was the interpretation that the public was provided with “poor quality of facts and interpretation available on social and economic issues.” Thus, they felt there was a need for a “publicity bureau” to provide a “constant stream of correct information” targeted at the lower and middle classes. However:

The Rockefeller representatives at the conference proposed an alternative strategy of public enlightenment. Although they accepted the usefulness of such a publicity organization, they also wanted a permanent research organization to manufacture knowledge on these subjects. While a publicity organization would “correct popular misinformation,” the research institution would study the “causes of social and economic evils,” using its reputation for disinterestedness and scientific detachment to “obtain public confidence and respect,” for its findings. And, of course, the research findings could be disseminated through the publicity bureau as well as other outlets.[19]

While the Rockefeller Foundation sought to manufacture ideology in response to the Ludlow Massacre and industrial relations in general, on the corporate side of the matter, the Rockefeller group employed the ideas of an emerging field of public relations, and specifically utilized the talent of Ivy Lee, one of the first PR men in America. Lee’s efforts were employed in “damage control” for the Rockefeller name, which was highly despised by the general public in the early 20th century. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. hired Ivy Lee on behalf of the Rockefellers to “secure publicity for their views.” What Lee did for the Rockefellers initially was to produce a series of circulars entitled, “Facts Concerning the Strike in Colorado for Industrial Freedom,” which were sent to “public officials, editors, ministers, teachers, and prominent professional and business men,” in an attempt “to cultivate middle-class allies.”[20]

Based around the concept that “truth happens to an idea” – a famous phrase of Ivy Lee’s – his bulletins were operating on the basis that “something asserted might become a fact, regardless of its connection to actual events.” As Lee explained to the Walsh Commission in 1915, in regards to his definition of ‘truth’: “By the truth, Mr. Chairman, I mean the truth about the operators’ case. What I was to do was to advise and get their case into proper shape for them.”[21] When asked the question, “What personal effort did you ever make to ascertain that the facts given to you by the operators [the Rockefeller group] were correct?,” Lee responded: “None whatever.” As Lee stated to a grouping of railroad executives in 1916:

It is not the facts alone that strike the popular mind, but the way in which they take place and in which they are published that kindle the imagination… Besides, What is a fact? The effort to state an absolute fact is simply an attempt to… give you my interpretation of the facts.[22]

With World War I, the term ‘propaganda’ became popularized and took on negative connotations. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson established the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI) as a “vast propaganda ministry.” The aim of the CPI was to build support in the public for the war, and such an effort was especially challenging in the face of significant anti-war sentiments and potential resistance. This potential was especially ripe in immigrant communities, cramped in urban ghettos and lost to the failed promises of “opportunity” that drew them to America in the first place. Before U.S. involvement in the war, “working-class and radical organizations, pacifists, anarchists and many socialists, maintained that this was nothing but a ‘rich man’s war’.”[23]

It was not only in America that working class sentiments were extremely anti-war, but in Britain and other major nations as well. To add to this situation, in 1917, Russia was in the midst of revolution, leading to the exacerbation of fears on the part of many leading intellectuals and social analysts that revolution was possible anywhere. Thus, many of these analysts and intellectuals had begun lobbying President Wilson “for the establishment of an ideological apparatus that would systematically promote the cause of war. One of these analysts was Arthur Bullard, a leading Progressive, who had been a student of Wilson when the president had been a history professor at Princeton.” Bullard advocated a strong wave of publicity for the government in promoting the war, to “electrify public opinion.” Bullard thus suggested the formation of a “publicity bureau” for the government, “which would constantly keep before the public the importance of supporting the men at the front. It would requisition space on the front page of every newspaper; it would call for a ‘draft’ of trained writers to feed ‘Army stories’ to the public; it would create a Corps of Press Agents,” and to organize a propaganda campaign aimed at making the struggle “comprehensible and popular.”[24]

Walter Lippmann, who was the most respected and influential political thinker of that era, wrote a private letter to President Wilson supporting Bullard’s recommendation, adding that the chief aim of such an agency should be to promote a vision and advertise the war as seeking “to make a world that is safe for democracy.” According to Lippmann, war necessitated the nurturing of “a healthy public opinion.” The President asked Lippmann to develop a plan for the specifics of such an agency, for which Lippmann developed a grand strategic vision, mobilizing communications specialists, and the motion picture industry. Thus, in April of 1917, the Committee on Public Information (CPI) was formed, whose membership included the secretary of state, the secretary of war, and the secretary of the navy, as well as a civilian director, George Creel, a Progressive journalist. Creel, who had been central in the original generation of Progressive writers and publicists, had developed an extensive list of contacts and understood well “the importance of public opinion.” Thus, as Stuart Ewen wrote, “When war was declared, an impassioned generation of Progressive publicists fell into line, surrounding the war effort with a veil of much-needed liberal-democratic rhetoric.”[25]

As the concepts and ideas of “public opinion” and “mass democracy” emerged, the dominant political and social theorists of the era took to a debate on redefining democracy. Central to this discussion were the books and ideas of Walter Lippmann. With the concept of the “scientific management” of society by social scientists standing firm in the background, society’s problems were viewed as “technical problems” intended to be resolved through rational professionals and experts. Scientific Management, then, would be applied not merely to the Industrial factories to which the concept was introduced by Frederick Taylor, but to society as a whole. Lippmann took it upon himself to describe the role and means through which “Scientific Management” could be applied within an industrial democratic society. Lippmann felt that the notion of an “omnicompetent, sovereign citizen” was “a false ideal. It is unattainable. The pursuit of it is misleading. The failure to produce it has produced the current disenchantment.” Further, for Lippmann, society had gained “a complexity now so great as to be humanly unmanageable.” Thus, there was a need, wrote Lippmann, “for interposing some form of expertness between the private citizen and the vast environment in which he is entangled.” Just as with Frederick Taylor’s conception of “scientific management” of the factory, the application of this concept to society would require, in Lippmann’s words, “systematic intelligence and information control,” which would become “the normal accompaniment of action.” With such control, Lippmann asserted, “persuasion… become[s] a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government,” and the “manufacture of consent improve[s] enormously in technique, because it is now based on analysis rather than rule of thumb.”[26]

Thus, arose the panacea of propaganda: the solution to society’s ailments. “In a world of competing political doctrines,” wrote Lippmann, “the partisans of democratic government cannot depend solely upon appeal to reason or abstract liberalism.” Henceforth, “propaganda, as the advocacy of ideas and doctrines, has a legitimate and desirable part to play in our democratic system.” Harold Lasswell, a leading political scientist and communications theorist in the early 20th century, wrote that: “The modern conception of social management is profoundly affected by the propagandist outlook. Concerted action for public ends depends upon a certain concentration of motives… Propaganda is surely here to stay; the modern world is peculiarly dependent upon it for the co-ordination of atomized components in times of crisis and for the conduct of large scale ‘normal operations’.” In other words, propaganda is not merely a tool for times of war and crisis, but for times of peace and stability as well; that propaganda is the means and method through which to attain and maintain that stability. Lippmann added to the discussion that, “without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event.”[27]

In 1922, Lippmann wrote his profoundly influential book, Public Opinion, in which he expressed his thoughts on the inability of citizens – or the public – to guide democracy or society for themselves. The “intellectuality of mankind,” Lippmann argued, was exaggerated and false. Instead, he defined the public as “an amalgam of stereotypes, prejudices and inferences, a creature of habits and associations, moved by impulses of fear and greed and imitation, exalted by tags and labels.”[28] Lippmann suggested that for the effective “manufacture of consent,” what was needed were “intelligence bureaus” or “observatories,” employing the social scientific techniques of “disinterested” information to be provided to journalists, governments, and businesses regarding the complex issues of modern society.[29] These essentially came to be known and widely employed as think tanks, the most famous of which is the Council on Foreign Relations, founded in 1921 and to which Lippmann later belonged as a member.

In 1925, Lippmann wrote another immensely important work entitled, The Phantom Public, in which he expanded upon his conceptions of the public and democracy. In his concept of democratic society, Lippmann wrote that, “A false ideal of democracy can lead only to disillusionment and to meddlesome tyranny,” and to prevent this from taking place, “the public must be put in its place… so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.”[30] Defining the public as a “bewildered herd,” Lippmann went on to conceive of ‘public opinion,’ not as “the voice of God, nor the voice of society, but the voice of the interested spectators of action.” Thus, “the opinions of the spectators must be essentially different from those of the actors.” This new conception of society, managed by actors and not the “bewildered herd” of “spectators” would be constructed so as to subject the managers of society, wrote Lippmann, “to the least possible interference from ignorant and meddlesome outsiders.”[31] In case there was any confusion, the “bewildered herd” of “spectators” made up of “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” is the public, is we, the people.

Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and former member of Woodrow Wilson’s wartime propaganda machine, the Committee on Public Information (CPI), was another ‘actor’ who played his part in redefining democracy in the age of public opinion. In his 1923 book, Crystallizing Public Opinion, Bernays explained how the ideas of individuals could be shaped into mass opinions through the use of propaganda and ‘public relations.’ Known commonly as the “Father of Public Relations,” Bernays, returning from the post-War Paris Conference in 1919, believed quite strongly in the idea that if propaganda could be used effectively in times of war, it can and should be used effectively in times of peace.

In 1928, Edward Bernays wrote an article for the American Journal of Sociology entitled, “Manipulating Public Opinion: The Why and the How.” Public opinion, explained Bernays, “is the thought of a society at a given time toward a given object; broadly conceived, it is the power of the group to sway the larger public in its attitude.” Bernays was also influenced not simply by his own experiences in the wartime Committee on Public Information, but also by his uncle, Sigmund Freud’s ideas which regarded people as irrational and driven by subconscious emotional desires. With such a conception of the psychology of individuals and groups, Bernays and others felt that people must have their beliefs and opinions shaped by others, others who presumably are the exceptions to the rule regarding the emotionally driven irrational mind. Reflecting this belief, Bernays wrote: “Public opinion can be manipulated, but in teaching the public how to ask for what it wants the manipulator is safeguarding the public against his own possible aggressiveness.”[32] Today – claimed Bernays – the swaying of public opinion “is one of the manifestations of democracy that anyone may try to convince others and to assume leadership on behalf of his own thesis.”[33]

Bernays’ attempt to present the manipulation of public opinion as a “manifestation of democracy” crudely neglects the reality of those who have access to the apparatus and mechanisms that sway public opinion, itself. If that apparatus, which it largely is, is confined to the upper class of society, is that not a bastardization of democratic ideals? Bernays further explained:

The manipulation of the public mind… serves a social purpose. This manipulation serves to gain acceptance for new ideas.[34]

Bernays described the nature of propaganda, explaining that one major experiment on the manipulation of public opinion concluded that “attitudes were often created by a circumstance or circumstances of dramatic moment.” Thus, Bernays explained, “very often the propagandist is called upon to create a circumstance that will eventuate in the desired reaction on the part of the public he is endeavoring to reach.”[35] In other words: problem, reaction, solution. Create a problem to incur a specific reaction for which you provide a desired solution. For the propagandist, “analysis of the problem and its causes is the first step toward shaping the public mind on any subject.”[36] Bernays wrote:

This is an age of mass production. In the mass production of materials a broad technique has been developed and applied to their distribution. In this age, too, there must be a technique for the mass distribution of ideas. Public opinion can be moved, directed, and formed by such a technique. But at the core of this great heterogeneous body of public opinion is a tenacious will to live, to progress, to move in the direction of ultimate social and individual benefit. He who seeks to manipulate public opinion must always heed it.[37]

Bernays later wrote on the development of the public relations industry, of which he was a central and pioneering actor. “Public relations,” wrote Bernays, was “a relatively new profession, and its practitioner, the professional counsel on public relations, serve a constructive function in our complex, free society.” He elaborated: “public relations came about because organized activity, which depends on public support, needed a societal technician to counsel it – the counsel on public relations.” This, Bernays felt, was vital to a “democratic society”:

New and faster means of communication and transportation furthered the growth of the profession. Social science research increased understanding of human behavior. The greater complexity of the society and the overlapping and interwoven network of communications that hold it together almost made the evolution of the new profession inevitable.[38]

As Bernays explained, “[i]n a democratic society almost every activity depends on public understanding and support,” and thus, he concluded, this can only be brought about “by public education, persuasion, and suggestion by effective public relations. This profession makes it possible for minority ideas to be more readily accepted by the majority.” He referred to this as “the marketplace of ideas,” but neglected to explain that, like other markets, this one, too, is rigged. His conception of “democratic society” is very much an elitist view of democratic society, articulated best by Walter Lippmann in seeking to “engineer the consent” of the public, which was viewed as irrational and incapable of true democracy. Reflecting on his 1923 book, Crystallizing Public Opinion, Bernays discussed the concept of the “manufacture of consent,” a term coined by Walter Lippmann but which Bernays was eager to present as his own. He stated: “I refined the approach and called it the engineering of consent”:

In the engineering of consent, determination of goals is subject to change after research about the relevant publics. Only after we know the state of public opinion through research can we be sure that our goals are realistic.[39]

In 1947, Bernays re-examined his support for propaganda in a democratic society, writing that:

Today it is impossible to overestimate the importance of engineering consent; it affects almost every aspect of our daily lives. When used for social purposes, it is among our most valuable contributions to the efficient functioning of modern society.[40]

Naturally, it seems, “efficiency” is held in high regard as an objective of social planning and thus, an aim of society itself. As such, “effect” is often left by the wayside, as in: the effect of an “efficient” modern society is secondary to the actual efficiency of it. Thus, if the effect of a modern society is dehumanization, so long as that process is “efficient,” social planners may view it as desirable, present it as “functioning,” and see whatever means which bring it about as “valuable contributions.” But then, it must be conceded, the ‘desired effect’ for social planners is always social control. Regardless of the human or dehumanizing effects of such a system, if the result is “order and control,” and so long as this is achieved “efficiently,” the system functions well.

In 1928, Edward Bernays wrote a book entitled, Propaganda, which later became used by infamous propagandists such as Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels. On the first page of his book, Bernays wrote, and it is worth quoting at some length:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.

They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.[41]

These ideas, among many others, have had incredible influence on the philosophy, actions, intentions, and perceptions of not only American society, but the world at large. They spurred on the development of the consumer society, along with other projects of social engineering that have, through the course of the 20th century, been focused on the application of social control. It is fundamentally though the notion of “engineering consent” that we have come to the point where so few are able to control so much, leaving little to nothing for the vast majority of the world’s people. This elite intellectual discussion which took place in the early 20th century came to define democracy not only for America, but the world as a whole. Thus, we have a new understanding when it comes to our leaders expressing their desires and objectives of spreading democracy around the world. In short, they seek to “engineer consent” on a much larger, grander scale than ever before imagined. It is the globalization of social engineering which we are witnessing in the modern era, and its origins lay in the discernable past.

Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada, writing on a number of social, political, economic, and historical issues. He is also Project Manager of The People’s Book Project. He is also the host of a podcast show, “Empire, Power, and People” in cooperation with BoilingFrogsPost.com.

Notes

[1] Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996), page 42

[2] Ibid, pages 44-46.

[3] Ibid, page 46.

[4] Ibid, pages 49-50.

[5] Ibid, pages 50-54.

[6] Ibid, pages 58-59.

[7] Ibid, pages 60-61.

[8] Ibid, pages 62.

[9] Ibid, pages 63-64.

[10] Ibid, page 64.

[11] Ibid, pages 64-66.

[12] Ibid, pages 67-71.

[13] Ibid, pages 71-73.

[14] Ibid, pages 74-75.

[15] Ibid, pages 76-78.

[16] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (Harper Perennial: New York, 2003), pages 354-355.

[17] Robert F. Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad (Indiana University Press: Boston, 1980), page 67.

[18] Ibid, page 68.

[19] Ibid, pages 69-70.

[20] Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996), page 78.

[21] Ibid, page 79.

[21] Ibid, pages 80-81.

[22] Ibid, pages 104-105.

[23] Ibid, pages 104-105.

[24] Ibid, pages 106-107.

[25] Ibid, pages 108-109.

[26] Frank Webster and Kevin Robins, “Plan and Control: Towards a Cultural History of the Information Society,” Theory and Society (Vol. 18, 1989), pages 341-342.

[27] Ibid, pages 342-343.

[28] Sidney Kaplan, “Social Engineers as Saviors: Effects of World War I on Some American Liberals,” Journal of the History of Ideas (Vol. 17, No. 3, June 1956), pages 366-367.

[29] Sue Curry Jansen, “Phantom Conflict: Lippmann, Dewey, and the Fate of the Public in Modern Society,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (Vol. 6, No. 3, 2009), page 225.

[30] Walter Lippmann, et. al., The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy (Harvard University Press, 1982), page 91.

[31] Ibid, page 92.

[32] Edward Bernays, “Manipulating Public Opinion: The Why and the How,” American Journal of Sociology (Vol. 33, No. 6, May 1928), page 958.

[33] Ibid, page 959.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid, pages 961-962.

[36] Ibid, page 969.

[37] Ibid, page 971.

[38] Edward Bernays, “Emergence of the Public Relations Counsel: Principles and Recollections,” The Business History Review (Vol. 45, No. 3, Autumn 1971), page 296.

[39] Ibid, page 297.

[40] Edward Bernays, “The Engineering of Consent,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Vol. 250, Communication and Social Action, March 1947), page 115.

[41] Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Ig Publishing, 1928), page 37.
Share this:

About Andrew Gavin Marshall:
I am a 24 year old independent researcher and writer based out of Montreal, Canada. I have written dozens of articles, essays, and reports online and in print on a wide array of social, economic, and political issues, always from a highly critical perspective. My writing can be found on my blog, www.andrewgavinmarshall.com. I am Project Manager of The People's Book Project (www.thepeoplesbookproject.com), an initiative through which I am attempting to write a comprehensive book on the institutions and ideas of power in our world, and what we can do about it.

US Democracy: Iowa Republican Party Too Incompetent or Currupt to Count the Caucus Vote

2012-01-19T11:59:00.000-08:00

(CNN) -- Rick Santorum finished the Iowa Republican caucuses 34 votes ahead of Mitt Romney, but results from several precincts are missing and the full actual results may never be known, according to a final certified tally released Thursday by the Iowa GOP.

American democracy is now a joke on multiple levels. Not only are the candidates bought, but election outcomes can be manipulated in multiple ways through the absence of simple, straight-forward, open and observed vote counting methods.

And the US Government is committed to the spread of democracy. LOL.

Ron Paul, a Weak Candidate But the Only One Representing the Ideas of Ron Paul

2012-01-18T11:23:00.000-08:00

For a seventy-six-year-old, Ron Paul does OK.

He has remarkable stamina, he speaks to the point, he is unwavering in his adherence to the US Constitution, his defense of individual liberty, and his opposition to preemptive wars for empire.

And he is a man of courage. By reminding Americans of their rights under the Constitution, and by drawing their attention to the emergence of domestic tyranny and the cost of criminal wars of aggression, Ron Paul challenges America's bi-partisan ruling class in a way that invites an assassin's bullet.

Against all that, Ron Paul wears a remarkably ill-fitting suit, speaks less well than many a high-school principal, and lacks the chief elements of charisma other than courage, consistency and dignity under attack. What is more, his ideas about money seem distinctly out of date.

So who will Americans chose? Slick Mitt or the Black O'Bomber, trusty operatives in the implementation of global plutocracy and domestic peonage, or Ron Paul, the people's tribune, without powerful friends, a man who can expect to achieve little as president other than by application of the Presidential veto, a device used 414 times by Grover Cleveland, the President that Paul admires most.

Americans are not noted for their sophisticated grasp of political reality. For many, charisma is the thing. Give them a Kennedy or an Obama and they have a leader they will follow, however dark or dangerous or detrimental to their personal interest may be the the course upon which he embarks.

But Americans cannot be entirely indifferent to their private interests, which makes the candidacy of Ron Paul of more than academic interest.

He promises Americans a restoration of liberties and a tangible increase in freedom through elimination of the income tax. Abolition of the income tax is an unattainable goal, yet President Paul could surely be relied upon to veto inevitable proposals for tax increases.

More radically, Paul promises to decriminalize drugs, a proposal with profound significance for black Americans, who account for most of the one in 32 Americans under correctional supervision (i.e., one in three black Americans), the majority of whom were jailed for drug offenses.

On the downside to bringing the troops home and restoring freedom to Americans, the imperialist elite, both left and right, remind Americans, is the horrifying danger of a nuclear-armed Iran, or Syria, and of the continuing monstrous threat of Al Qaeda terrorism. The war for global empire plus routine state groping, surveillance and intimidation of the citizen, they assert, is America's only hope for security, or as the British said during World War I, this is "the war to end all war," for which, it is implied, all must be sacrificed.

See also:

Angelo M. Codevilla: America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution
JAY: Why does the “mainstream media” hate Ron Paul?

January 18, 2012: Ron Paul introduces legislation to repeal Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act

Patrick Buchanan: Ron Paul has authenticity

The Eurozone and the Curate's Egg: Both Good in Parts

2012-01-16T11:58:00.000-08:00

Punch cartoon by George du Maurier (November, 1985).
Bishop: "I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr Jones";
Curate: "Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of
it are excellent!"

The fundamentals of the Euro zone "are on average sound" Herman von Rompuy

The joke about the curate's egg (see image) never struck me as particularly funny, but it is bizarre, and in a macabre way funny, to hear the same logic advanced by the President of Europe to assure the World of the soundness of the European economy and financial system.

The complexity of Europe's financial difficulties as discussed in fascinating detail by John Ward, to whom I am indebted for the above quote by Von Rompuy, is far beyond my comprehension, but to reduce matters to a thumbnail sketch, the problem seems to be as follows.

The Greek’s (and sundry others able to get away with it) are lazy bums who won’t work (LBW3), or if they work they pretend not to, so as to avoid paying tax. Then they demand a huge pension or a government job punching tickets on the Athens subway at an annual salary of $96,000 a year.

This leaves the Greek government short of cash, obviously, so they borrow it, since the morons that run banks (MTRBs) don’t care that the Greeks will never repay, since they’ve insured the debt by way of a credit default swap with JP Morgan or some other damn fool American bank (DFAB), run by morons who don’t care if their CDS’s go toes up because they know Wacky Benacky has a printing press and will bail them out without limit.

If this analysis is correct, it indicates an obvious remedy, as follows.

The ECB should print all the Euros required to pay off all the stupid debts run up by hopeless places like Greece and Italy, etc. Then they should say, “That’s it, you morons. No more of this nonsense. Anyone stupid enough to lend to those Greek morons can damn well go broke when the Greeks refuse to repay. What’s more, any of you morons too big to fail is gonna be broken up.”

This would leave a lot of Greecians, Portugalians, etc. without a job, which is why I devised the Eurozone adjustment mechanism (EAM), to restore competitiveness to countries that have been priced out of the global job market by those damn fool Germans exporting like crazy and driving up the value of the Euro.

The scheme is simplicity, itself. In each country wages are adjusted annually according to the unemployment rate. Where unemployment is above or below the equilibrium rate, wages would, respectively, be lowered or raised at the beginning of each year by an appropriate amount (say, one percent for every percentage point by which unemployment was above or below the equilibrium rate) . On that basis, wages in spain, across the board, would take a hit of something like 17% this year, whereas Germans might get a raise of one or two percent.

If introduced, this scheme would be hugely unpopular, since it would mean that unemployed Greeks, Spaniards, etc. would have to take a low-wage job rather than live on money they've borrowed without ever intending to pay it back from those dumb Germans and other crazily productive North European protestants.

But as the alternative to the implementation of our modest proposal appears to be absolute and total civilizational collapse (ATCC), the price in unpopularity would seem to be worth paying, especially since it would be the moron politicians who'd be paying it. But then that explains why the moron politicians (actually not so moronic as they seem, evidently) will never adopt such a scheme even in a hundred years.

Contains Milk, Egg and Fish

2012-01-16T09:52:00.000-08:00

In search of a decent sherry, we invested recently in an Australian product of the Emu brand, which is pleasant flavored and moderately dry. Curious to know more about this very reasonably priced wine, I was astounded on examining the label to read as follows: "contains milk, egg and fish."

How can that possibly be?

For very good reason, according to this short article by Richard Gowel: it is to "fine" the wine; fining being the process of removing harsh tasting phenolics, or unwanted color from wine made with the final squeeze of the grape. There you are then!

Or to be more specific, the milk protein casein is a fining agent that precipitates phenolics, as does albumen, a protein from egg whites. But of all, the best fining agent, apparently, is isinglass, a protein obtained from the swim bladder of certain fishes.

From this we can infer that Emu sherry is made from a juice so rough that it requires the combined fining power of all three agents, derivatives of milk, egg and fish, to make it drinkable. But drinkable it certainly is, with a distinctive and likable flavor.

Mitt Romney's Top Campaign Contributors

2012-01-15T12:52:00.000-08:00

Goldman Sachs: $367,200
Credit Suisse: $203,750
Morgan Stanley: $188,800

Source: Zero Hedge via WRH.

The New World Order and the Drive for an Independent Scotland

2012-01-14T20:21:00.000-08:00

Will Scotland be free or just a manageable
chunk to be fed into the Euro-blender? (Image source)

Aangirfan has a thought-provoking piece on the consequences of independence for Scotland, which suggests that separation would make the Scotch significantly better off than the English.

What such calculations ignore is that if regions are free to split from larger political units to maximize resource revenue per capita, then why won't the Highlands and Islands split from Scotland and take the bulk of the oil revenue with them?

By tradition, the Highlanders never liked those lowland bastards and will be happy to let them freeze in the dark.

Then why would London, which subsidizes most of the UK, not split too? The bankers may be crooks but they generate a lot of income, and as a city state, London would have more cred than almost any other metropolis.

After that, maybe the SouthWest could separate, establishing themselves as a homeland for the Celts: no immigrants, thank you.

The net result of this kind of anti-nationalist politics will be the disintegration of geopolitically significant nation states into trivialities at the mercy of the world's great powers, most notably, in the case of the remnants of a UK breakup, the undemocratic EU and US/NATO.

When US/NATO tells the Scotch or the Welsh or the Cornish what weapons systems are to be located on their territory, or how many troops they are to supply for the next war of imperial aggression, how much independence do these people think they'll have?

A saner route for those who want greater autonomy, would be to work for regional devolution within a federal state. The Blair scheme for Scotch and Welsh Parliaments while England remains governed in all matters above the municipal by the Parliament in Westminster, an institution often dominated by Scotch or Welsh politicians, was either a work of monumental incompetence, or a devious scheme to destroy the United Kingdom: the latter surely being the case, since Blair is nothing if not a creature of the New World Order, which requires the destruction of the nation state.

A rational scheme for devolution in the UK would divide the country into a dozen provinces including Scotland, North and South, Wales, North and South, England, East and West, top, middle and bottom, plus London and Northern Ireland. Most powers would be devolved to the regions with the exception of control over the central bank, foreign policy and defense. Logically, the newly devolved nation would provide the Republic of Ireland with a standing invitation to join, as one or two additional provinces for a total of probably 14 self-governing regions within a Confederation of the British Isles.

But now the Scotch have latched onto the idea of getting rich at the expense of the English and gratifying what that son of the Manse John Buchan called their "narrow nationalism," it is doubtful if the tide undermining the Union can be stemmed.

But beside finding themselves a very small fish in the EU, US/NATO world, the Scotch may find that after independence the broad high road to London, or what Sam Johnson called the only fine prospect in Scotland, is beset with many hurdles, particularly if the breakup of Britain provokes an English nationalist backlash. For the four million Scots who have already taken the high road South, that might prove troublesome indeed: visas, passports at the border, the Scotch Groat not accepted as currency in England, passenger manifests required for all flights over England originating or ending in Scotland, English control of Naval bases Clyde and Faslane, US control of anti-missile radar installations, and much, much more.

Here, Peter Hitchens explains how Scottish nationalism will transform Britain into a collection of manageable chunks to be fed into the Euro-blender and destroyed for ever.

Notice how any part of the UK can have a referendum on reducing the powers of London (and Northern Ireland can vote to leave the Union altogether, any time it wants to).

But nobody can have a vote of any kind on reducing the powers of Brussels, let alone on leaving the EU.

The truth is obvious, but nobody observes it.

Brussels rejoices to see Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland becoming ever more separate from England.

It would like to see England itself Balkanised into ‘regions’ – and the new multicultural republic of London under President Boris is a major step towards that.