The Decline of Britain

By Theodore Dalrymple

The Spectator, February 4, 2012: Is the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee a cause for jubilation? Certainly her reign has been a personal triumph: her iron sense of duty, gracefully performed, has been exemplary, if not an example often followed. For 60 years she has exercised a self-control that most of us find difficult even for 60 minutes; her recent state visit to Ireland put all our public figures of the past decades in the shade.

Not that that is very difficult, for there is no disguising that her reign has been an era of continuous and continuing decline. Of course, not even accelerating levels of British incompetence have been able to arrest the march of technical progress, and, in raw physical terms, life in these islands has improved greatly. It is now even possible to find passable food almost everywhere, even in the provinces.

But in relative terms, Britain has declined. When she came to the throne, the British car industry was the second largest in the world; now there is no major British-owned car company. In the land of the industrial revolution, foreign ownership and management is the sine qua non of industrial success. Though we invented the railway, others must build them for us; though we invented nuclear power, we cannot by our unaided efforts build a nuclear power station. Even in football, our clubs are foreign-owned and the players foreign. The British are too undisciplined to be good at what they are most (regrettably and childishly) interested in.

What have the last 60 years done for our villages, towns and cities? British architects, devoid of scruple as of talent or aesthetic sense, have waged war on beauty and triumphed in the struggle. It is as though they personally resented the achievements of the past. Hardly a town exists that has not been ruined by the hacks of modernism and the blindness of the town-planners. It is lucky for them that there is no justice in the world.

But it is in intangibles that the decline has been most marked. In 1952, Britain was among the best-ordered countries in the western world, and now it is the worst. The recent outbreak of mass criminality can have surprised only the wilfully blind. The British are now among the least self-disciplined people in the world: it is as though they had undergone a gestalt switch, so that what they previously decried they now honour, and vice versa. They are the fattest people in Europe: the characteristic smell of Britain is re-used fat. They treat the country as their personal rubbish tip — there is more litter here than anywhere else comparable — and they drink brutishly. They take more drugs than anyone else. They consume without discrimination and dress abominably because they have no self-respect or respect for others, an absence that is often evident in the way they work, no small matter in a service economy. They favour the uncouth over the refined and the stupid over the intelligent; their vulgarity, like their drunkenness, is not unselfconscious but militant. They mutilate rather than beautify themselves; they care for nothing except their odious entertainments, and their popular music is a paean to their hatred of life. They are individualistic without individualism. A consumer society without taste is a horrible thing to behold.

In the wake of the conviction of the murderers of Stephen Lawrence, an editorial in the Guardian referred to the ‘hard lives etched on the faces’ of the accused. By hard lives, it meant not the kind of materially difficult lives that coal miners once lived, but lives lived in a brutal and fundamentally stupid culture: such faces not being biological, but biographical and cultural artefacts. You look for them in vain in pictures of even the poor at the beginning of our monarch’s reign. When you compare the faces and manner of dress in the football crowds from that era — or of footballers, for that matter — when football was a much more proletarian game than it is now, with the faces and manner of dress now, you see only human retrogression. And in no other country do you see so many horrible faces, like those of the murderers of Stephen Lawrence, as in Britain.

Britain is now, what it was not at the beginning of the Queen’s reign, a corrupt country. On the Pelion of inefficiency has been piled the Ossa of careerism. For this Lady Thatcher must take a large part of the blame, for it was her fatuous belief in the wonders of management that gave the new nomenklatura its first lease of life. She made £400,000 salaries (and over) possible in the public service. The ideology of management was something that Blair creatively developed, as the Soviets used to say with regard to Marxist theory, to the point that we now cannot even run a public examination system with any probity.

The revelation that schools regularly deceive Ofsted inspectors was only too emblematic of what the British state now is: a hall of distorting mirrors. Schools, it seems, resort to all manner of subterfuges on the day of inspections in order to appear better than they are. And this corruption is not a malfunction of Ofsted; it is its main purpose. It is instituted to deceive the public into thinking that the government — that shepherd of the carnivorous sheep that constitute its flock — cares about educational standards. How else can one explain the fact that Ofsted warns schools of its impending inspections? Such a warning is a virtual incitement to deception; at the very least, it is a indication that the inspectors want to be deceived. It is by such means that standards can fall in reality while they rise in the virtual world of the government statement.

Wherever one looks in the public service, which is increasingly the means by which a nomenklatura enriches itself personally at the expense of the taxpayer, one finds the same kind of deception, the same attempt to manipulate appearance at the expense of reality, the same demand that employees, from the lowest to the highest, assent to propositions that they know or suspect to be false, in order to destroy their own probity.

Kathleen Ferrier

In 1952, when the Queen came to the throne, the most popular female singer in the country, indeed the second most popular woman in the realm after the Queen herself, was Kathleen Ferrier, whom the great conductor, Bruno Walter, called one of the two greatest influences on his whole musical life, the other being none other than Gustav Mahler. To listen to her performance, when she knew that she was dying, of ‘Der Abschied’, from Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, under Walter’s baton in the year of the Queen’s accession, has been rightly called unbearably moving.

Sixty years later, the most popular female singer was Amy Winehouse, the stupidly tattooed militant vulgarian of disgraceful conduct. Like the British people, of whom she was emblematic, she behaved abominably without being interesting. The first singer died prematurely of cancer; the second of gross overindulgence, in her own vomit. QED.


Kathleen Ferrier: The Keel Row, a traditional Tyneside folk song evoking the life and work of the keelmen of Newcastle upon Tyne who manned the shallow-draughted boats that carried coal from the banks of the river to the waiting colliers.

The Keel Row is the trot march of the Royal Horse Artillery, of which Rudyard Kipling wrote: "The man who has never heard the 'Keel Row' rising high and shrill above the sound of the regiment...has something yet to hear and understand".

It's The Off-shoring, Stupid!

Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2012: Thirty-five big U.S.-based multinational companies added jobs much faster than other U.S. employers in the past two years, but nearly three-fourths of those jobs were overseas, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

Those companies, which include Wal-Mart Stores Inc., International Paper Co., Honeywell International Inc. and United Parcel Service Inc., boosted their employment at home by 3.1%, or 113,000 jobs, between 2009 and 2011, the same rate of increase as the nation's other employers. But they also added more than 333,000 jobs in their far-flung—and faster-growing— foreign operations. ...

Wage convergence between the West and the rest still has a way to go.

Meantime:

One in two new US graduates jobless or underemployed

Spanish unemployment hits a new high of 24.5%.

The US Economy slows

Falling US home prices drag new buyers under water

Eurozone Retail Sales Plunge

Canadian employment withers

and ...

But it would be as tedious as it would be easy to go on, and on, and on.

Harvard University Library and Administrative Stupidity

The Guardian -- Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls. A memo from Harvard Library to 2,100 teaching and research staff called for action after warning it could no longer afford the price hikes imposed by many large journal publishers, which bill the library $3.75m a year.

So, Harvard University, with total revenues of over $3 billion, cannot afford 3.75 million, or just over one tenth of one percent of the universities overall budget, for journal subscriptions.

LOL

What a miserable bunch of pikers.

The reason scholars at top universities publish in top (subscription based) journals is that everyone in a particular field reads the top (subscription based) journals in that field.

"Freely available" open access journals are not free. There is a publication charge paid by the author.

So what Harvard University Library wants is for its top researchers to publish in second tier open access journals at their own expense so that librarians have more cash to spend on whatever it is that librarians, not scholars, want.

Thanks to Professor Mark J. Perry's Carpe Diem blog for the reference to the Guardian report.

Minerals and mortality

Male residents in the small Somerset village of Hinton St George have the highest life expectancy in the UK – at 88.7 years. ...Residents of Hinton St George are expected to live on average almost four years longer than the place with the lowest life expectancy – Bootle in Merseyside. This is Somerset

Houses of Hinton St. George, England are built of the local limestone.

South Somerset has some of the most beautiful villages in England. There are two reasons for this.

One is the construction, in the 19th Century, of the Great Western Railway network, which generated an agricultural boom by providing the means whereby dairy and horticultural products could be shipped from Somerset to the rapidly growing London metropolis. The resulting prosperity is evident in the architecture of both village and farm buildings of the era.

The other reason for the charm of South Somerset is the mellow yellow Jurassic limestone from which most houses are built, which can easily be cut to form decorative doorway arches, and window frames and mullions.

It is likely that the local limestone also accounts for the unusual longevity of Hinton St. George's residents.

As Wessex Water, the Malaysian owned company that supplies the village, reports, the water supplied to the village is moderately hard, containing 68 mg of Calcium per liter. Assuming a consumption of two liters of water per day, that means a daily intake of calcium from drinking water of 136 mg, or about one fifth of the average daily calcium requirement for an adult.

In addition to calcium, the local limestone bedrock will have enriched the groundwater from which the local water source is derived in magnesium, which plays a key role in the prevention of ischemic heart disease and stroke.

Almost certain it is the minerals in the water supply that delay mortality in the village of Hinton St. George.

The higher mortality among residents of the Merseyside town of Bootle, likely reflects the fact that that community is supplied by surface water originating from reservoirs United Utilities, which is typically devoid of calcium, magnesium and other minerals.

Why blog?

A writer is a person who would run about in public flapping their arms up and down if it were the only way they could attract attention. H.L. Mencken

Some blog for attention, others to change the world. To the hypergraphiliac a blog must be the joy of their life.

But whatever the motive, writing disciplines thought. It requires evidence in support of assertions of fact and coherence in logical development. Writing for publication, even under a pseudonym, reinforces the need for both clarity and focus.

Blogging can thus be important, not so much as a means to propagate one's opinion, than as a way of discovering what one's opinion is.

Onion Sauce

THE Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said "Bother!" and "O blow!" and also "Hang spring-cleaning!" and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Continued here.

That, surely, is one of the greatest pleasures of having a blog.

One can say, "Hang blogging" and bolt out of the house without even waiting to put on a coat and walk down the street or across the meadow and feel the warmth of the spring sunshine on one's back.

Like playing hooky from school, or  quitting a job, letting a blog go hang, provides the delightful sense of freedom. Freedom to explore the endless possibilities of existence.

Of Men, and Apes and Civilization

The close DNA sequence similarity between men and apes has led some to suppose that a man is no more than a wimpy chimp with a slightly swollen head. Further, it has been suggested, since the difference between men and apes is so trivial, there must be creatures somewhere in the limitless expanse of the universe at least as superior in intellect to us as were are to chimps. So, according to this line of thinking, despite the modest enlargement of the human fore-brain, we have little to be swelled-headed about.

But this reflects a misunderstanding of the difference between men and apes and the significance of that difference.

Both men and apes are mammals, which means that they are built to the same plan. They have liver and lights, stomach and spleen, four limbs, a head and a tail. At the cellular level the similarity of design is even closer: the same membranes, organelles, nucleic acids and enzymes. So inevitably men and apes share much the same DNA sequence, as they do with horses and hamsters, and even with reptiles and fishes, fungi and forest trees.

There is an underlying biochemical unity to the life of this Earth. But that does not make the fangs of a tiger and the molars of a camel functionally equivalent. Small changes in the proportions and slight differences in the elaboration of a basic design can result in fundamental differences in function.

Thus with the brains of man and chimp. In the lobes and their connections the two are largely similar. But the human brain has approximately twice the mass of the brain of a chimp, and there is a many-fold difference between the two in the size of certain lobes. The human brain is thus adapted to functions unknown to the mind of a chimp.

And it is possible for very slight genetic changes to result in qualitatively transformational changes in function. For example, a single-gene mutation that results in one additional rounds of cell division in some portion of the embryonic brain would double the final volume of that part of the brain.

Why, then, it might be said, if the only thing distinguishing a man from an ape is a small collection of single gene mutations, the difference between us is indeed trivial. But that is to misunderstand the evolutionary step that man has made and which no other ape has, or could ever make, so long as mankind exists.

To evolve a larger brain, an organism must have use for a larger brain. The brain is an energy intensive organ, requiring a continuous infusion of glucose and oxygen. A chimp with a brain like that of a human would be at a severe disadvantage. It would want to sit around and think but it would need to work harder than every other chimp to obtain the food necessary to keep its costly brain alive.

The only way such a chimp could survive would be to invent language, create a civilization and its associated technologies thereby raising the chimp living standard while lowering the hours of work.

That is what mankind achieved. And that is what no other species on Earth can achieve while mankind exists because mankind has preempted the resources of the entire planet.

As to the claim that an extraterrestrial intelligence would likely consider the mind of man as feeble a thing as we humans are inclined to consider the mind of a chimp, the answer should be, "give us time."

It took humans about one hundred thousand years to exchange the lifestyle of an ape for that of a yuppie. But most of that transformation occurred, with exponential acceleration, in the last ten thousand years.

Humanity is now at a critical point in its existence. We have technology that can put the entire accumulated knowledge of the species at the fingertips of every one of the seven billion membners of the species. And electronic media allow us to do that at trivial cost. The result could be an explosion in technological innovation the like of which we can hardly imagine and which will either lead us very quickly to self-destruction or grant us the power of gods.

Not only do we have the ability to educate every receptive mind to a point far beyond that reached by Aristotle or Newton, but to build intelligent machines that can outperform the human intellect by orders of magnitude.

This is precisely the transformation that any intelligent civilization created by organically evolved creatures anywhere in the universe must have undergone. It is the transformation from advancement through haphazard accumulation of mutations and genetic rearrangements that yield short-term survival advantage, to the engineered improvement of the organism and its enveloping civilization.

And once evolution is intelligently planned, it likely follows the same course anywhere in the universe. There is now no apparent limit to the advancement of human knowledge and dominion over the planet and beyond—unless we are destroyed by our own technology. But in that case, intelligent life may be a self-limiting phenomenon wherever it arises in the universe, in which case the civilization of humanity is approaching a climax of complexity that will never be exceeded anywhere in the universe.

Screw the Banks

Image Source

I've had it with banks.

It's OK if the Fed or some other central bank offers a helping hand when a bank faces a rare liquidity crisis due to circumstances beyond its control. But when banks create an interminable economic catastrophe through chronic insolvency resulting from unfathomable incompetence or criminal insanity it's time make the bankers pay.

That time has come. It is time for governments to expropriate every bank in need of a bailout, fire the CEO and other top officials, kick out the useless directors, which is to say all of them, recapitalize as necessary and inform the shareholders that due to the foolishness of their investment, the value of their holding is precisely zero.

The high street banking operations should be retained in public ownership indefinitely, while the venture capital operations are sold on the understanding that they will never receive a government bailout and will be broken up by the government if they come anywhere close to being too big to fail.

In addition, we need a new system of money creation. Allowing private institutions to create credit without limit led to the present disaster. In future, private institutions wishing to offer credit must first raise the capital, either privately, or by borrowing from the central bank. In that way, the central bank, which must be nationalized, will have firm control over the money supply and can prevent credit bubbles such as have disrupted the World economy since the turn of the century.

The following links provide the evidence, if you need it, of the criminal complicity of the New World Ordure governments of the EU and the US in the current unending banking crisis.

ZeroHedge: Video Explanation Of How The ESM Is Europe's Uber-TARP On Steroids

Golem XIV: Plan B – How to loot nations and their banks legally

 Nigel Farage: The EU Heading for Economic and Democratic Disaster

Mish: IMF Chief Jackass Calls for Taxpayer-Funded Bank Recapitalisations to Avoid Painful Deleveraging; Mish Says Fire the Parasites and Disband the IMF

The United States of Assault

America's Supreme Court helps
bring home the lessons of Guantanamo

By Naomi Wolf

The Guardian, 5 April 2012: In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the "trespass bill", which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.

Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to "turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks." He said he felt humiliated: "It made me feel like less of a man."

In surreal reasoning, justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices' decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest – that is, who are not yet convicted – haven't been introduced into a prison population.

Our surveillance state shown considerable determination to intrude on citizens sexually. There's the sexual abuse of prisoners at Bagram – der Spiegel reports that "former inmates report incidents of … various forms of sexual humiliation. In some cases, an interrogator would place his penis along the face of the detainee while he was being questioned. Other inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex". There was the stripping of Bradley Manning is solitary confinement. And there's the policy set up after the story of the "underwear bomber" to grope US travelers genitally or else force them to go through a machine – made by a company, Rapiscan, owned by terror profiteer and former DHA czar Michael Chertoff – with images so vivid that it has been called the "pornoscanner".

Believe me: you don't want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. History shows that the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations.

The political use of forced nudity by anti-democratic regimes is long established. Forcing people to undress is the first step in breaking down their sense of individuality and dignity and reinforcing their powerlessness. Enslaved women were sold naked on the blocks in the American south, and adolescent male slaves served young white ladies at table in the south, while they themselves were naked: their invisible humiliation was a trope for their emasculation. Jewish prisoners herded into concentration camps were stripped of clothing and photographed naked, as iconic images of that Holocaust reiterated.

One of the most terrifying moments for me when I visited Guantanamo prison in 2009 was seeing the way the architecture of the building positioned glass-fronted shower cubicles facing intentionally right into the central atrium – where young female guards stood watch over the forced nakedness of Muslim prisoners, who had no way to conceal themselves. Laws and rulings such as this are clearly designed to bring the conditions of Guantanamo, and abusive detention, home.
I have watched male police and TSA members standing by side by side salaciously observing women as they have been "patted down" in airports. I have experienced the weirdly phrased, sexually perverse intrusiveness of the state during an airport "pat-down", which is always phrased in the words of a steamy paperback ("do you have any sensitive areas? … I will use the back of my hands under your breasts …"). One of my Facebook commentators suggested, I think plausibly, that more women are about to be found liable for arrest for petty reasons (scarily enough, the TSA is advertising for more female officers).

I interviewed the equivalent of TSA workers in Britain and found that the genital groping that is obligatory in the US is illegal in Britain. I believe that the genital groping policy in America, too, is designed to psychologically habituate US citizens to a condition in which they are demeaned and sexually intruded upon by the state – at any moment.

The most terrifying phrase of all in the decision is justice Kennedy's striking use of the term "detainees" for "United States citizens under arrest". Some members of Occupy who were arrested in Los Angeles also reported having been referred to by police as such. Justice Kennedy's new use of what looks like a deliberate activation of that phrase is illuminating.

Ten years of association have given "detainee" the synonymous meaning in America as those to whom no rights apply – especially in prison. It has been long in use in America, habituating us to link it with a condition in which random Muslims far away may be stripped by the American state of any rights. Now the term – with its associations of "those to whom anything may be done" – is being deployed systematically in the direction of … any old American citizen.

Where are we headed? Why? These recent laws criminalizing protest, and giving local police – who, recall, are now infused with DHS money, military hardware and personnel – powers to terrify and traumatise people who have not gone through due process or trial, are being set up to work in concert with a see-all-all-the-time surveillance state. A facility is being set up in Utah by the NSA to monitor everything all the time: James Bamford wrote in Wired magazine that the new facility in Bluffdale, Utah, is being built, where the NSA will look at billions of emails, texts and phone calls. Similar legislation is being pushed forward in the UK.
With that Big Brother eye in place, working alongside these strip-search laws, – between the all-seeing data-mining technology and the terrifying police powers to sexually abuse and humiliate you at will – no one will need a formal coup to have a cowed and compliant citizenry. If you say anything controversial online or on the phone, will you face arrest and sexual humiliation?

Remember, you don't need to have done anything wrong to be arrested in America any longer. You can be arrested for walking your dog without a leash. The man who was forced to spread his buttocks was stopped for a driving infraction. I was told by an NYPD sergeant that "safety" issues allow the NYPD to make arrests at will. So nothing prevents thousands of Occupy protesters – if there will be any left after these laws start to bite – from being rounded up and stripped naked under intimidating conditions.

Why is this happening? I used to think the push was just led by those who profited from endless war and surveillance – but now I see the struggle as larger. As one internet advocate said to me: "There is a race against time: they realise the internet is a tool of empowerment that will work against their interests, and they need to race to turn it into a tool of control."

As Chris Hedges wrote in his riveting account of the NDAA: "There are now 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies that work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, the Washington Post reported in a 2010 series by Dana Priest and William M Arken. There are 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances, the reporters wrote, and in Washington, DC, and the surrounding area 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2011."
This enormous new sector of the economy has a multi-billion-dollar vested interest in setting up a system to surveil, physically intimidate and prey upon the rest of American society.

Now they can do so by threatening to demean you sexually – a potent tool in the hands of any bully.

See also:
American Tyranny: Sexual Humiliation From Abu Ghraib to an Airport Near You

Bush-Obama Program of Sexual Humiliation From Abu Ghraib to the High School Prom

Why the US Tortures People

Supermodel Bar Raefeli on airport pat down: 'It left me no doubt about her sexual preference'

Becky Ackers: Mr. Idiot of the Keystone Gestapo Speaks

The People Versus Parliament

Statue of Simon de Montfort on the Haymarket
Memorial Clock Tower in Leicester.

The origins of the English Parliament, it is claimed, are to be found in the ancient moots and witans of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. But as a body representative of the common people of England, Parliament can be dated precisely to the year 1265 when the rebel, Simon de Montfort 6th Earl of Leicester, made King Henry III a captive figurehead and called a Parliament of elected representatives, two from each county and from selected boroughs.

Although de Montfort was killed in battle by royalist forces the same year and his body hacked in pieces, Henry III's successor, Edward I, reestablished an elected Parliament, a model that has been retained ever since. And since, by the Great Charter (Magna Carta) of 1215, the king had ceded control over taxation to Parliament, the financing of the English government has, for almost 750 years, been under the nominal control of the people.

But, as a result of the constitutional changes that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the executive branch of the English Government passed from monarch to Parliament. And because Parliamentary votes are now controlled not by the representatives of the people expressing the interests of their constituents, but by the party machines that are owned by hidden financial or alien interests, the people no longer have significant control over the government.

That is why an "independent" Government advisory body, the "Committee on Standards in Public life," insolently proposes taxpayer funding of election campaigns by parties the taxpayers won't support voluntarily.

What this reveals is that something has gone hopelessly wrong with England's Parliamentary system, which is democratic in name only, and is in reality a system of government by factions serving interests of which most citizens are only dimly aware but to which, if they knew of them, they would be vehemently opposed.

On the right, those interests include Israel, the finance and real estate industries, and the American war for global empire. On the left, those interests include, Israel, the finance and real estate industries, and the American war for global empire.

A measure of the anti-democratic nature of parliamentary government in Britain and elsewhere is the near universal contempt with which politicians treat the taxpayer.

To the left, the taxpayer is a whingeing anti-social element who is assumed to be a cheat and a liar unless investigation proves otherwise, and who any politician should be proud to punish.

To the right, there may be surreptitious gestures to mollify the higher bracket taxpayer. But the main objective is to compete with the left for the votes of the supposedly underprivileged, downtrodden, exploited or discriminated against with promises of ever more broad-ranging taxpayer funded giveaways, subsidies and regulatory mechanisms.

Previously I suggested that some semblance of democratic balance might be achieved by populating the upper house in every parliamentary system with those who pay the highest taxes. The aim of that proposal was to make the influence of the money power in politics more visible and therefore more responsible.

But giving the money power, which has the means to avoid heavy taxation, overt political influence would provide minimal relief to the little people, the middle class, who lose half their income in taxes largely so that politicians are able to buy the votes of the great army of bureaucrats who administer the multitudinous "benefits" that secure the votes of the lower classes.

To remedy the financial exploitation and destruction of the common folk, I propose two innovations, one symbolic and the other of substance.

The symbolic innovation would be a scheme to recognize taxpayers for the contribution they make to the Treasury, this to be accomplished by the issuance of medals based on a person's tax contributions during the past five years. Thus, those contributing on average more than they receive in benefits, either monetary or in kind, would receive a Citizenship Medal Third Class, which would be cast in bronze and announced in newspapers, local radio, etc. Those contributing a net amount of, say $10,000 a year would receive a Citizenship Medal Second Class, which would be cast in Silver. Those contributing $100,000 per year would receive a Citizenship Medal First Class, which would be cast in Gold. In addition there could be medals in platinum or studded with diamonds for the nation's greatest taxpayers. Medals would be issued every five years so that, on formal occasions, veteran taxpayer would have a series of medals to add to their military service medals.

But more than this is needed to restore to the English and the other Parliamentary democracies the power over the public purse that English citizens enjoyed under Simon de Montfort's Parliament of 1265. To restore that right, the innovation of substance that I propose is a Citizen's Assembly to rule on all money bills proposed by the executive branch of government, i.e., Parliament.

The Citizen's Assembly, like Simon de Montfort's Parliament, whose members were elected by freeholders with property of a rentable value in excess of forty shillings a year, should represent the competent and responsible middle class. This community would be defined by taxpayer status. All those awarded a Medal of Citizenship First Class or higher would be eligible to sit as a member of the Citizens' Assembly. From among those eligible individuals two would be selected at random from each constituency and required to serve for a period of three years, selection of representatives being made yearly such that one third or the Assembly's members were replaced each year.

This idea would undoubtedly be dismissed by the establishment parties and their media hangers on as totally insane, and it is, I acknowledge, something that could surely not be instituted other than by a conquering warrior and intellectual giant such as de Montfort. Sadly, therefore, we must expect that the Western democracies will continue their accelerating plunge through corruption, into chaos leading to not-long-delayed extinction.

Did Anders Breivik Strike a Blow For or Against Multicultural Genocide in Europe?

Source: Islamophobia Watch. The unstated assumption that Islamophobia Watch
makes is that if you oppose multiculturalism and European genocide by mass
immigration you are a fist waving Nazi like Anders Breivik

After 9/11, one must always ask: Cui bono? who gains?

If Anders Breivik thought that killing 80 of his Norwegian compatriots struck a blow against multiculturalism and the genocide of the Norwegian people by mass immigration, he was, and presumably remains, totally insane.

But according to the most recent psychiatric report, Anders Breivik is, and presumably always has been, sane.

And if Breivik was sane at the time of the Oslo bombing and Utoya massacre for which he claims responsibility, then his intention must have been to achieve precisely what he did achieve, namely, to smear by association with his criminal action the great majority of Europe's indigenous population who share his claimed opposition to multiculturalism and mass immigration.

So which is it? Is Breivik a nutter? Or is he an agent of the same evil forces that used 9/11 to bring the American people to the will of a globalist elite intent on war for global empire?

Aangirfan provides a mass of information that may help you decide.

Another bad idea from the left

Image source

An "independent" Government advisory body, the "Committee on Standards in Public life," has proposed that UK taxpayers should fund the election campaigns of parties that taxpayers won't support voluntarily.

This is a thoroughly bad idea. Government has always belonged to the people with the money. If you take it away from them, then the plebs will start yelling "Share the wealth" in real earnest. Then what will become of all those people who actually worked quite hard to accumulate a little capital to retire on or to hand on to their posterity? Without the restraining hand of accumulated wealth to limit the scope of government, they'd be wiped out by massively increased taxes to pay for the dreams and schemes of socialist politicians who will rise to power by mobilizing the envy of those without wealth, ambition or energy. The result would be a nation without incentives to produce, only the desire for endless benefits paid for by someone else.

No, as usual, the left have this entirely wrong. What's needed is to make the role of wealth in government more visible and, therefore, more responsible.

Here in Canada we should wind up the Senate and reconstitute it as the "House of Wealth," membership of which would depend on the amount of tax paid in the last five years. The Brits should do the same thing with the House of Lords.

If nothing else, this would be an incentive for the wealthy to pay their taxes. It would also be an acknowledgment of their contribution to the finances of the nation. And because it would require the wealthy to advance their interests not by stealth but by open advocacy, it would encourage them to show greater moderation and responsibility.

In the original version of this post I mistakenly attributed the plan for taxpayer funding of election campaigns to Labour Pary leader Ed Milliband. My apologies to Ed, although it's seems safe to assume that the Labour Party will unhesitatingly accept any amount of money for party political purposes extorted impartially from taxpayers whether supportive or opposed to the policies of the Labour Party.

Democracy, realpolitik and war

The future of humanity is secure. Image source

Yesterday, I ended a post on the causes of war with the statement:

... if reason for hope [of preventing war] remains, perhaps that hope depends on the spread of Einstein's contempt and loathing for those who delight in the violent exercise of power.

This feeble sentiment was added, I suppose, to soften the bleakness of the statement that preceded it:

Einstein's political incoherence [on the prevention of war] signified a fundamental clarity of vision: [for humanity] there is no way forward.

By way of excuse for my lapse into wishful thinking, I can offer only the fact of my Quaker upbringing.

But the notion that the people's will could somehow trump the dictates of real politik is absurd. If every democratic state eschewed violence, it would only encourage the aggression of all the others.

And, in any case, few states are controlled to a significant degree by public opinion. On the contrary, it is state-controlled education, police enforced political correctness and state or corporate controlled media that determine public opinion. From that we must conclude that war will remain, as it has always been, an instrument of state power. But though war, in the era of weapons of mass destruction threatens the destruction of civilization, humanity may yet survive. As Einstein put it:

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

So there we are, a comforting thought to end a discussion about war: humanity may survive nuclear Armageddon -- to fight another day with sticks and stones.

The Causes of War

Francisco José de Goya: The truth of war.

One of the most useful things an intellectual can do is to review the analyses and prognostications of an earlier generation of intellectuals. By so doing, he will realize the almost total futility of intellectual speculation.

The truth of this assertion is well illustrated by the pronouncements about the causes of war by prominent European thinkers in the aftermath of World War 1. Galvanized by the enormous human and material costs of that war, intellectuals sought to discover the roots of war in the hope that this knowledge would provide means to prevent future wars.

Many underlying causes of war were proposed.

Communists, including V.I. Lenin and most left-wing European economists, asserted that war was the product of capitalism and the drive for colonies to which capitalism gave rise, and that war would disappear from the Earth once all mankind embraced socialism.

On the one hand, this contention is a mere truism, for if any political system were to conquer the globe, whether it be communist, capitalist, feminist or vegetarian, there would, in theory, be no contending parties among whom war could occur. On the other hand, the idea that global governance of whatever complexion would eliminate war is an obvious absurdity, since in the absence of external threat, internal conflict leading to civil war is all the more likely.

Biologists studying our closer animal relatives, the chimps and baboons, gorillas and Orangutangs, discovered that fighting was endemic among them, which means, so they concluded, that the impulse to violence must be hard-wired in the deep structure of the human mind. To this conclusion the Darwinists added that war was good for us, pruning the weaker individuals and races from the human thicket, leaving space for the fittest to survive.

But the notion that men fight because of the violent propensity of their evolutionary ancestors flatly contradicts the Darwinian view that behavior is shaped by the present day contingencies of natural selection, not remote evolutionary history. During embryogenesis the human organism reveals its phylogenetic history by the transient formation of gills, but that doesn't mean that people can breath under water.

Moreover, in the context of World War 1, which killed so many of the finest of the European nations, the idea that warfare improves those races or nations that successfully engage in it was an absurdity. Thus, as James Barr, onetime president of the British Medical Association, remarked, "while the virility of the nation was carrying on the war, the derelicts were carrying on the race."

Einstein fulminated against war and patriotism, while advocating, with seeming inconsistency, a Jewish homeland in Palestine. All would be well, he seemed to think, if everyone would join him in despising the man who takes "pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band..." a man having a brain, Einstein wrote, "by mistake, when he needed only a backbone." War, so Einstein asserted "ought to be abolished with all possible speed."

Einstein, it is clear, was not, on the subject of war, a systematic thinker.

Sigmund Freud offered a more coherent theoretical account of the causes of war, which he maintained, arose from a primal drive to hatred arising from repressed childhood urges. This dangerous impulse, he argued, must be sublimated if human civilization is to survive.

During the interwar years, Freud's ideas held broad sway. Unfortunately, there is no more evidence to support them than there is for the contending narratives of Haitian Vodou or the Roman Catholic Church.

Remarkably, European intellectuals of the interwar years seem rarely to have discussed the actual and obvious cause of war: namely, that war offers what often appears the simplest, fastest and most entertaining way for those who rule to get whatever they want, whether it be land, slaves, oil, tribute, honor, glory or global hegemony.

That war can destroy a nation or set all of civilization into decline is, on that interpretation, irrelevant. Operation Iraqi Freedom will cost the United States around three trillion dollars, including the cost of caring for the human wreckage. But of what concern is that to the leaders: as George W. Bush shouted at the launch of "Shock and Awe," a murderous high-tech assault on one of the world's oldest and largest cities: "I feel good."

Which means that until the world is so arranged that it is the leaders who are at greatest risk of being torn to pieces, incinerated, crushed or buried alive in the wars that they instigate, war will continue to offer immense potential profit and enjoyment for the ruling psychopaths.

Oddly, it was the politically incoherent Albert Einstein, whose insight into the nature of physical reality gave rise to precisely such a check on the political leadership, namely nuclear weapons, that has served for more than 50 years to prevent another unlimited global military conflagration.

And still, as they plot murderous campaigns of acquisition or domination, the rulers of the World must consider the risk of being among the first to be vaporized in an act of nuclear retaliation.

But as a long-term preventive, nuclear deterrence is a dubious proposition. Miscalculation or circumvention will surely lead to wars greater than any yet known.

This means, perhaps, that intelligent life is a self-limiting phenomenon and that we are late in the final chapter of the human story. In that case, Einstein's political incoherence signified a fundamental clarity of vision: there is no way forward.

Or if reason for hope remains, perhaps that hope depends on the spread of Einstein's contempt and loathing for those who delight in the violent exercise of power.

These comments draw on the chapter "Why War" in Richard Overy's excellent: "The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars."

See also: Democracy, Realpolitik and war

They may be terrorists, but they are our terrorists

By Seymour Hersh

From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain peaks, has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now includes a counterintelligence training facility and a private airport capable of handling Boeing 737 aircraft. It’s a restricted area, and inhospitable—in certain sections, the curious are warned that the site’s security personnel are authorized to use deadly force, if necessary, against intruders.

It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six American citizens. It was initially part of the broad-based revolution that led to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But, within a few years, the group was waging a bloody internal war with the ruling clerics, and, in 1997, it was listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. In 2002, the M.E.K. earned some international credibility by publicly revealing—accurately—that Iran had begun enriching uranium at a secret underground location. Mohamed ElBaradei, who at the time was the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency, told me later that he had been informed that the information was supplied by the Mossad. The M.E.K.’s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and JSOC began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush Administration’s fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations. Funds were covertly passed to a number of dissident organizations, for intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime terrorist activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.

Despite the growing ties, and a much-intensified lobbying effort organized by its advocates, M.E.K. has remained on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations—which meant that secrecy was essential in the Nevada training. “We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official told me. “We were deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in communications—coördinating commo is a big deal.” (A spokesman for J.S.O.C. said that “U.S. Special Operations Forces were neither aware of nor involved in the training of M.E.K. members.”)

Read more

See Also:
Iran says it captured Israel-backed ‘terrorist team’ US operated deep in Iran, trained assassins
Israel Blames U.S. for Media Reports About Iran Strategy

Liberalism, Realpolitik and How It Is That People Murder One Another By the Million, But Feel Badly About Doing So

In his latest work "On China," Henry Kissinger provides a concise definition of realpolitik: most wars result, he says, from a failure by one or more of the parties to a dispute to understand the underlying power relationships.

Or more explicitly, every state is prepared to rob, pillage, rape, enslave or utterly destroy any other state, its people, treasures, and institutions, whenever a profitable opportunity occurs.

This is the fundamental characteristic of human society. Throughout human existence, men have lived as members of a tribe, a clan, a nation or an empire. It was the conflict among groups during the early stages of human development, when groups were small, that drove the development of human language and intelligence.

Tribes with leaders of exceptional intelligence, energy and charisma tended to outwit or outfight their neighbors, and thus had the best chance of survival and expansion. Because the tribal leader fathered a disproportionate number of a tribe's progeny, his intellectual attributes tended to be perpetuated and spread through the creation of colonies to occupying the territory of defeated rivals.

This mode of existence required a dual code of behavior: within the tribe, honesty, kindness and mutual aid; among tribes, relentless treachery, brutality and exploitation.

Hence, today, as rivals for the U.S. Presidency compete for inter-tribal psychopathic cred, we repeatedly hear that "all options are on the table," i.e., we'll nuke anyone, if we can get away with it.

In times past, this state of affairs was generally accepted as both right and natural. All foreigners were evil bastards to be mugged whenever possible.

Today, as the money power seeks to create a global system in which mankind will be divided between a ruling set, and a mass of subordinate and essentially domesticated humans to be bred, culled, and brainwashed as best serves the elite, inter-tribal denigration is harmful to the smooth running of the empire. Hence tribal loyalties are condemned as racism.

Anti-racism is now a project to destroy every national, racial, cultural and religious heritage: the destruction to be carried out, as necessary, with nukes, napalm, anti-personnel mines and toxic gases.

Here is the fly in the smooth unguent of liberal morality: to be anti-racist, we must destroy all those who seek to preserve their own race; to be pro-diversity, we must destroy all diversity by mongrelizing the World's human population; to show religious tolerance we must be intolerant of all who believe theirs to be the true faith.

Somehow, even through the miasma of self-congratulatory humbug that engulfs the liberal mind, something about this seems, well, not quite morally sound.

Birth Control, Canadian Style: Or how one Western nation is committing suicide

With a fertility rate of 1.36, versus the replacement rate of 2.1, Vancouver's existing population will decline by three quarters in just three generations as they are replaced by people from elsewhere.

Vancouver, like the great cities of Western Europe, now makes largely sterile those it sucks in to power the economic machine: they work, die with few if any descendants, and are replaced, mainly by those of another race and culture.

This is evolution in progress. The Western nations are dying at the hands of a machine of their own construction, replacing themselves with the people of the Third World.

And as the Western peoples destroy themselves, so also is Western Civilization destroyed. Thus, insists Rowan Williams the retiring Archbishop of Canterbury, Sharia law in Britain is inevitable.

Which makes one wonder: is this really the expression of the democratic will? Do the people of the West consciously and deliberately wish for their own extinction? Or are the European peoples victims of a traitorous elite that accepts the genocide of their own people as the price of global power?

To oppose this genocide is, by some, called racism. Yet those who come from the Third World to the West should be aware: they likely will also be made largely sterile by the machine as were the Europeans they have replaced: they have been summoned to serve the machine, ultimately to be replaced, not by their own posterity, but by who ever may provide the cheapest labor. For, as the owners of the machine understand, immigrants are cheaper than citizens raised and educated at home, and are more easily controlled than an indigenous population with a sense of national identity and a belief in the Western tradition of human and civil rights.

If resistance is to be anything but futile, the nations of the Earth, Black, White, Red, Yellow and Brown, must join in opposition to the globalist agenda. Even then, the chance of avoiding assimilation -- the reduction of mankind to the status of a domesticated animal to be bred, culled, and indoctrinated at the will a deracinated globalist elite -- will be less than fair.

See also: How the West destroys its own

The Numero: Beyond Gold and Fractional Reserve Banking

In reponse to my report of a dialog between a gold bug and an apologist for the US Federal Reserve, Tom Sullivan commented, and I paraphrase:

we need a currency whose value can not be easily manipulated. Neither gold nor fiat currency as managed by the World's central banks meet that requirement.

What monetary system, then, can meet that requirement?

Here I outline the most elegant possible solution to that challenge.

The Numero: A Monetary Unit Based Upon the Cardinal Numbers

A Numero, pronounced with emphasis on the second syllable, is a unit of currency designated by a unique whole number. If you "own" the Number 1, you have a unit of currency. To own the Number 1, you must have an account with the monetary authority or a bank acting as the agent of the monetary authority, which registers your ownership of the Number 1.

Additional units of currency are created by the use of additional cardinal, or counting, numbers up to a published total based on a country's existing stock of money (or in economist speak, M2), which for the United States is currently around $10 trillion. Thus, the ownership of every single number, i.e., each distinct Numero, would be recorded, the information held in a geographically distributed, nuclear-attack-hardened, and highly redundant electronic archive.

Although a bank statement would normally show only the total of Numeros owned by an account holder, the identity and ownership of each Numero, whether in hand or loaned, would be on record. Thus, the total quantity of money would always be public knowledge, and any attempt to inject units of currency with identity numbers that exceeded the authorized total of Numeros in circulation, or which duplicated the unique identifying numbers of existing units of currency, would be recognized as counterfeit and rejected by the bank system.

Because a number is not a physical thing, there will be no physical Numeros or cash. All payments will be made by means of a cash or credit card, requiring highly reliable verification of the user's ID, for example, by means of a retinal scan or some other form of bio-identification.

Converting From an Existing Currency to the Numero

Converting funds from US dollars or Renmimbi or Euros to Numeros is a conceptually simple process. Each unit of the old currency will be converted to Numeros at the current rate of exchange with, for the sake of argument, the US dollar.

Thus, for Americans, the transition will involve only a change in name of the unit of currency, while bank balances and amounts borrowed or loaned remain quantitatively the same. For those holding currency other than the US dollar, the transition will involve a change in the quantity of currency units, owned, loaned or borrowed. Holders of the British pound, for instance, would find the quantity of Numeros they owned approximately 1.58 times (at the current exchange rate) the number of pounds owned previously.

As more than one country adopted the Numero, we would have the beginnings of a global currency that facilitates trade by eliminating the need for currency markets, foreign exchange bureaux, or currency hedging operations.

Money Created by Fractional Reserve Banking

With the Numero, money is neither created (except under very specific conditions) nor destroyed. So what about the money created by fractional reserve banking, which goes out of existence when a loan is repaid?

There are several possibilities. One is that loan repayments would be made to the Central Bank via the lending bank. The Central Bank would then lend this money back to the commercial banks at a rate of interest that keeps all the money in circulation. For example, if there is a tendency for private sector debt deleverage, something of which the Central Bank would be immediately aware, interest rates would fall. Conversely, if loan capital was in short supply, the central bank rate would rise.

In addition to loans from the Central Bank, commercial banks would be free to borrow at interest from depositors to support their lending operations, but such loans would be restricted to the amount borrowed from depositors, not some indefinite multiple, as under the existing system of fractional reserve banking.

Alternatively, money presently in existence as a result of fractional reserve banking operations, could at the time of repayment, be distributed by the Central Bank among all citizens in proportion to the quantity of Numeros they already own. The implications of this are interesting but it would require a diversion of too great length to include it in this brief outline.

What About the Pennies?

If you buy an item for a dollar ninety-nine, how do you make change?

Just as you do now, using pennies or cents, each of which will itself be a unique cardinal number preceded by a symbol indicating it to be a cent not a Numero.

Those with goods to sell will carry a float of pennies, which will be bought and sold by the Central Bank at the rate of 100 to the Numero.

As with the quantity of Numeros, the quantity of pennies will be publicly known and fixed, and the identity of the owner of each penny registered.

The Numero and International Trade

The Numero would bring to international trade the stabilizing function that gold once served.

A country running a trade deficit would experience a decline in the amount of currency in circulation, which would drive down prices and wages (see discussion of adjusting wages while maintaining full employment here), thereby increasing its international trade competitiveness, which in turn would lower its trade deficit. Conversely, a country running a trade surplus would experience an increase in currency in circulation which would drive up prices and wages, thereby reducing its international trade competitiveness and hence its trade surplus.

Changing the Money Supply

If for some reason it were deemed necessary to change the money supply, this could be accomplished by the simple expedient of incrementing or decrementing the number of Numeros registered to each individual in proportion to the number of Numeros already owned.

But there is no obvious reason why the quantity of money need change over time, provided there is flexibility in prices and wages to accommodate changes in the availability of goods, services and labor. In time, with a fixed quantity of money, the World would grow used to the idea that allowing bankers to create money without limit according to their own perceived advantage or the political advantage of their political masters is always unnecessary and usually harmful to the public wellbeing.

The Impact of the Numero on the Incidence of Financial Fraud and Other Crimes

Because the legitimate ownership of every Numero will be known to the financial authorities, financial fraud, counterfeiting, tax evasion, the vending of illegal drugs, trading in slaves, money laundering, illegal political campaign contributions, bribery and the financing of terrorism will become virtually impossible without prompt detection and apprehension of the criminals concerned.

Is the US Fed Truly Evil? A Dialog Between a Goldbug and a Bank Apologist

In response to an earlier post about the operations of the US Federal Reserve, Harry raised the following question, which I paraphrase: Is not the Federal Reserve the creature of the monied interest, and if so, how does it serve that interest?

In answer, I have to admit that I don't know. However, I gained some insight into the question from the following dialogue between an advocate of gold as money (Goldbug), and a defender of the Fed (Fed Apologist).

Goldbug: Gold has been money for thousands of years and it has always held its value.

The price of an ounce of gold today will buy a suit fit for a United States senator, two thousand years ago, an ounce of gold would have bought a toga fit for a Roman senator. But in the span of the mere 99 years since the passing of the Federal Reserve Act, the United States dollar has lost 96% of its value.

It's time to return to gold, and time to abolish both the Fed with its freedom to print limitless quantities of fiat currency and the fractional reserve banking system that allows sociopathic banksters to print their own money. We will then once again have sound money that does not rob widows and orphans of their means of existence or deny savers the rewards of thrift.

Apologist: It is true that the dollar has lost much of its value since 1913, but to put that in perspective, 99 years exceeds the normal span of a man's life, and a devaluation of 96% in almost 100 years amounts to an inflation rate of only 3.1% per year, which, according to the economists, is almost ideal.

Moderate inflation is necessary as a stimulus to economic expansion. Without it, people will be inclined to hoard money, so driving the economy into a recession or depression for want of demand.

But, under the wise monetary policy set by the Federal Reserve to promote maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates, US GDP per capita has increased in constant dollars from around $10,000 per person in 1913 to more than $48 thousand today.

Goldbug: That's all twaddle and bunkum, the idea that ...

Apologist: Wait a minute. Let me finish. When you talk of abolishing fiat money and fractional reserve banking, you display your ignorance of the history of money. There never was, what shall we call it, a golden age, when gold was the only medium of exchange -- at least not in the last thousand years or more.

Chinese merchants during the 8th Century Tang Dynasty used bills of exchange, or promissory notes, to finance trade, as did the Arabs of the tenth century and, a little later, the merchants of Europe. Even though backed by gold, the quantity of such paper could, and was, expanded far beyond the gold monetary base. And governments issued coins, whether of gold or other metals, with a face or fiat value far in excess of the value of the metal of which the coins were minted. For example, in the early 16th Century, Henry VIII of England doubled the money supply over a period of around 20 years by debasing the coinage, thereby creating one of the greatest bouts of inflation in England's history.

Goldbug: Yes, yes, we know that where there's a will to rob the citizenry of the value of their labor, the government will find a way. But the use of gold as money should severely limit the ways of government and bankster theft. If a bank loses all its money in reckless speculation, there will be no bailouts with freshly printed cash from the Fed because any fresh money must have a base in real money, which is to say gold, which cannot be conjured out of thin air, but is essentially fixed in quantity.

Apologist: So now you acknowledge that fractional reserve banking is a necessity, but bankers should be held more closely accountable for their mistakes? If so, then we are in complete agreement. The financial meltdown of 2008 exposed weaknesses in the system of bank regulation and the need to impose stricter discipline on bankers who may be so highly motivated by the existing system of remuneration as to take undue risks with their shareholders' capital.

Goldbug: In no way are we in agreement. Far from it. I do not concede a necessity for fractional reserve banking. What we need is a system that combines the stability of gold with a cashless, digital currency one hundred percent backed by gold. Such systems already exist: Gold Money, for example. All that's needed is to establish such a system on a nation-wide and international basis with secure, distributed gold storage and an equally secure, distributed computerized administration.

Under such a system, physical cash would not exist. All payments would be by the use of a cash card employing highly secure bio-identification (e.g., a retinal scan). Payments would instantaneously transfer the registration of the specified quantity of gold from one account to another.

Apologist: So under that system, how could the US economy continue to function? At present, consumption accounts for 73% of the US economy, and most of that consumption is financed with credit.

With no bank credit creation, there'd be no economy!

Goldbug: What you mean is, there'd be no Fed- and bankster-induced booms and busts. There would still be credit. But it would be based on real money. Thus, if you had cash, which is to say gold, surplus to your immediate requirements, you could lend it to a bank at interest, thereby providing the bank with funds for car loans, mortgages, etc.

Apologist: But under the system you propose, the quantity of credit would be totally inadequate to the need. Moreover, the quantity of money would be fixed, not by the needs of the economy, but by the amount of gold, a purely accidental quantity. Under such an arrangement, there would be persistent deflation as the economy grew. That is to say there would be deflation if the economy grew.

But in fact, the economy would likely go into a never ending depression as people hoarded money as its value rose, the effect of which would be to make the value of money rise even further.

Goldbug: If Americans have such an insatiable appetite for consumption that under the Fed's "wise" monetary policy they borrowed their brains out during the housing boom, why are we to believe that in the absence of credit, they will refuse to spend even what little cash they actually have. In fact, one can assume just the reverse, that as debt is greatly reduced, so also will be the tendency to save.

Furthermore, we know that the Great Depression resulted from the failure of Fed monetary policy. The monetary expansion during the Twenties, which the Fed failed to check, resulted in the Great Crash, which caused a collapse in money supply, which the Fed also failed to check. Only a World war, it seems, and the near total destruction of the industrial base of all of America's competitors, was sufficient to restore American prosperity.

Apologist: It cannot be denied that the Fed made mistakes in the Twenties and Thirties, but that was due to inadequate information and the primitive state of economic models of the era. Today, the Fed is much better equipped to handle booms and busts as it has demonstrated since the credit crisis of 2008 by bailing out the World's banking system with an infusion of $16 trillion, all of which, incidentally, has been repaid.

Goldbug: Oh well done! The Fed saved the World from a disaster of its own making. It was the Fed that allowed credit to expand without limit, until a true Ponzi economy was achieved, when money was borrowed primarily not to finance consumption or investment but to invest in assets that were rising in price because people were borrowing money to invest in assets that were rising in price.

The Fed created this mother of all bubbles by driving the Fed Funds rate from 6.5% in 2000 to a low of 1% three years later, with Alan Greenspan claiming all the while that you can't recognize a bubble before it's burst. Well Ol' Al must have had his suspicions about a bubble since he set about deliberately sticking a pin in the economy with 17 consecutive Fed Funds rate hikes from 1% in 2003 to a high of 5.25% in June 2006, when the property crash and the consequent global financial meltdown, began.

During the early years of this century, bank deregulation, predatory lending, mortgage derivatives combined with Greenspan's injection of low interest stimulant, drove America's private indebtedness to an insane all-time high in excess of 300% of GDP.

And you congratulate the Fed for saving the World from the inevitable bust. LOL.

And we're nowhere near out of the woods yet. Unemployment according to the metrics of the 1930's is still as high as during the Great Depression. Black youth unemployment approaches 90% and folks think blacks are especially prone to crime: no, they're especially prone to unemployment in a system that educates black youth poorly and then denies them the right to work for less than the minimum wage.

Apologist: You're just ranting. The Fed has nothing to do with black education, which I agree is deplorable in its failure to prepare the average black youth for productive employment. And the Fed has nothing to do with minimum wage laws, which I agree are damaging in their impact on those at the margin of employability.

Goldbug: But as for the Fed's role in the creation of booms and busts, I note that you have nothing to say.

Apologist: Far from it. I was just pointing out ...

At which point, I fell asleep and can, therefore, report no more of the conversation. However, the comments of others would be appreciated.

Qantitative Easing and Central Bank Profits: Don't No Bloggers Know Nuthin' No How?

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) The Federal Reserve and its district banks said Tuesday it earned $77.4 billion last year, down from $81.7 billion in 2010 but the second-highest level in the central bank's history. The bumper earnings allowed the Fed to distribute $75.4 billion to the U.S. Treasury, also the second-highest level ever. The earnings was derived primarily from $83.6 billion in interest income on securities acquired through open market operations, from Treasury securities, federal agency and government-sponsored enterprise mortgage-backed securities, and GSE debt securities.

On this, WRH Commented:

Can you imagine what that 77 billion dollars would have done in circulation in the US, rather than as profit to a private central bank to which charges the US government interest to borrow from it?

Which is completely arse backwards.

In the operations reported, the Fed was buying stuff from anyone who was in the market to sell. The stuff purchased, which included both government and privately issued securities, earned the Fed interest that contributed to its profits of $77.4 billion. Of that profit, the Fed delivered to the US Treasury $75.4 billion, i.e., the total profit less the Fed's seemingly quite adequate operating expense of $2 billion.

So all of the Fed's supposedly outrageous net profit actually went to the US government, which promptly put it into "circulation in the US" through its massive program of deficit war-mongering and welfare spending.

And over at the Slog, we find this:

The money siphoned out of the US economy by the banks during QEs 1 and 2 – calculated against the lending they might have produced for US exporters - nets out at a deficit reduction of some $2 trillion.

Now the Slog has much to say that is eminently sensible and all that it says is said well, whether it is sensible or not, but this statement is not sensible at all.

QE and bank bailouts are not the same thing at all. Bailouts are, in fact, repayable loans backed by more or less credible collateral. And although the Fed's bank bailouts have been massive, $16 trillion, in fact, they have all been repaid (see Page 137 of the Government Accountability Office report on the US Federal Reserve).

QE is something altogether different. It consists in buying securities in the open market, usually government bonds, using "ink money", i.e., money that has been created out of thin air for the sole purpose of increasing the money supply. As indicated above, the income derived from the acquired financial instruments is turned over to the US Treasury, less the Fed's operating expenses, and used to finance the operations of government.

So, no, QE does not deny US industry capital to finance its operations. On the contrary, it injects money into the financial system that stimulates the economy through increased business investment, construction and consumption.

Afgan massacre: In the footsteps of the Nazis?

The Australian, March 21, 2012: RESIDENTS of an Afghan village near where an American soldier is alleged to have killed 16 civilians are convinced that the slayings were in retaliation for a roadside bomb attack on US forces in the same area a few days earlier.

In accounts to The Associated Press and to Afghan government officials, the residents allege that US troops lined up men from the village of Mokhoyan against a wall after the bombing on either March 7 or 8, and told them they would pay a price for the attack.

Holocaust Encyclopedia. SERBIA, April 1941, The Axis Occupation of Yugoslavia: Germany established a military occupation administration in Serbia, and an indigenous administration and police force nominally supervised by a puppet Serb government... By the end of summer an uprising, based in Serbia and Bosnia and initiated by the Communist-led Partisan Movement and by the Serb nationalist Cetnik Movement of Draza Mihailovic, had inflicted serious casualties upon German military and police personnel. Hitler ordered that, for every German death (including those of ethnic Germans in Serbia and the Banat), German authorities were to shoot 100 hostages.

Wikipedia.org The Panjwai shooting spree: The Panjwai shooting spree (or Kandahar massacre) occurred in the early morning of Sunday, 11 March 2012, when sixteen civilians were killed and five wounded in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Among the dead were nine children, four men, and three women, of whom eleven were from the same family. Some of the corpses were partially burned. United States Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, age 38, was taken into custody by U.S. military authorities as the primary suspect.

United States authorities said the killings were the act of a single soldier, while some eyewitnesses reported seeing multiple soldiers. On 15 March, an Afghan parliamentary probe team made up of several members of the National Assembly of Afghanistan announced that up to 20 American soldiers were involved in the killings.

Rawa News: Probe team: Women sexually assaulted before killing in Panjwai The Wolesi Jirga’s, or lower house of Parliament, delegation investigating the Kandahar shootings by US troops said besides killing 16 civilians, the soldiers sexually assaulted them.

So has the US Army gone one step beyond that of the Nazi Reich, not only killing hostages in retaliation for US combat deaths, but raping them first then mutilating and burning the corpses?

Is Blogger Driving You Crazy?

Have just spend an hour figuring out why Blogger's admin. "quick edit" button disappeared from my blog.

After wading through a mass of complex and totally irrelevant advice from the well-meaning and apparently clueless, I found an explanation of the problem and a simple solution at Deepak Kamat's StramaXon blog, which Kamat describes as "A Blogger and Web design help blog."

StramaXon offers what looks to be most helpful advice on many issues that must sometimes drive programming-illiterate Blogger users crazy. This is a resource worth book-marking.

Third World Wages Coming to a Factory or Workshop Near You

Commenting on my little rant about British Budget Baloney, Roderick Russell makes the point that:

In Canada we can compete in export markets with the third world, at the things that we do well, where the requirement is for a highly educated and skilled work force and capital intensity. Indeed in Canada we have the extra advantage of huge natural resources to exploit.

This is absolutely true, but it supports rather than negates my argument that mass unemployment in Europe and America is due to competition from cheap Third World labor and that the recovery of full employment will not likely be achieved without the imposition of Third World wages on a large part of the Western workforce.

As Roderick Russell asserts, Canada competes well with the Third World in natural resources which make up an overwhelmingly large share of Canada's exports. Like Russia and Australia, Canada has a vast storehouse of natural wealth, which means that a significant proportion of Canada's rather small workforce can get decent wages in the capital intensive production of the resources upon which the World's industrial economy depends.

In other words, Canadian labor has a monopoly in the exploitation of a huge natural resource base, which greatly enhances wages. If Canada were to allow "guest workers" from the Third World to work in Canada's resource industry at Third World wages -- as Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute proposed many years ago as a way to develop the oil sands economically -- Canadian wages would be headed sharply downward, as they are in in the US and Europe.

But that means, simply, that Canadian labor is somewhat sheltered from low-wage Third-World competition. And yet despite such protection, the Canadian labor market is not immune to the effects of competition from low-wage Third-World nations.

A few years ago Canada was the largest exporter of car parts to the US. Then we were overtaken by Mexico. Now Mexico has been overtaken by China. Furthermore, most of the industrial and technology products that Canada exports are re-exports, things snapped together or stitched up with parts or fabric made with cheap labor abroad. This has caused huge long-term damage to Canada's industrial sector.

Thirty years ago Canada had a highly diversified industrial economy. Then with NAFTA, jobs began going South. The Janzen swimwear factory in Vancouver, to take one local example, moved to Mexico to take advantage of wages below the British Columbia minimum wage.

With the GATT agreement, we came into competition with cheap labor everywhere. Sawmills and pulp mills were dismantled in British Columbia and moved to places like Indonesia and the Philippines. That's capital disinvestment in the resource industry and is one of the factors accounting for declining real wages throughout British Columbia's once mighty forest-based industry.

Declining wages are a reality in the high-tech world also. Computer science grads who, in the 80's and 90's could expect to start work at $80,000 or more a year were suddenly in surplus. The local computer science school went from being a a training ground for the brightest Canadian geeks to a school for students mainly from Asia.

America's best hope for economic recovery seems to depend on the oil and gas industry, which through new technology may make America once again energy self-sufficient. With natural gas in the US selling at less than $3.00 per million btu's American industry has an energy cost advantage over Asia, which in part counteracts the wage differential.

But in addition to the impact of a developing energy cost advantage, the rise in American unemployment has been limited in recent years by declines in real wages, whereas in Britain and the rest of Europe real wages have risen.

Yet, still, black youth unemployment in America is around 90% and youth unemployment overall is approaching 50% as it is in Britain and most of the rest of Europe. And the longer young people remain unemployed the greater becomes the loss of workforce skills.

There's no doubt that unusually high unemployment in America and Europe can be reduced by lowering wages. In fact, unemployment is less high in America that it would otherwise be because of a booming underground economy that employs millions, many of them illegal immigrants, at less than minimum wage and often under conditions that fail to meet statutory workplace health and safety standards.

So yes, mass unemployment can be beaten, and is being beaten in some degree, by the adoption of Third World wages and working conditions. There may be other alternatives as I have spelled out elsewhere, but there seems zero interest in such solutions.

Huge trade deficits induced by stimulus spending will hasten the Third-Worldization of wages in the West by precipitating substantial currency realignments. The sooner this happens the better chance Western nations have of retaining manufacturing workforce skills and the critical mass of engineering and software firms necessary to a revival of manufacturing industry.