The Myth of American Meritocracy

By Ron Unz

 The American Conservative, November 28, 2012: ^[1]Just before the Labor Day weekend, a front page New York Times story broke the news of the largest cheating scandal in Harvard University history, in which nearly half the students taking a Government course on the role of Congress had plagiarized or otherwise illegally collaborated on their final exam.^{1 [2]} Each year, Harvard admits just 1600 freshmen while almost 125 Harvard students now face possible suspension over this single incident. A Harvard dean described the situation as “unprecedented.”

But should we really be so surprised at this behavior among the students at America’s most prestigious academic institution? In the last generation or two, the funnel of opportunity in American society has drastically narrowed, with a greater and greater proportion of our financial, media, business, and political elites being drawn from a relatively small number of our leading universities, together with their professional schools. The rise of a Henry Ford, from farm boy mechanic to world business tycoon, seems virtually impossible today, as even America’s most successful college dropouts such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg often turn out to be extremely well-connected former Harvard students. Indeed, the early success of Facebook was largely due to the powerful imprimatur it enjoyed from its exclusive availability first only at Harvard and later restricted to just the Ivy League.


During this period, we have witnessed a huge national decline in well-paid middle class jobs in the manufacturing sector and other sources of employment for those lacking college degrees, with median American wages having been stagnant or declining for the last forty years. Meanwhile, there has been an astonishing concentration of wealth at the top, with America’s richest 1 percent now possessing nearly as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent.^{2 [3]} This situation, sometimes described as a “winner take all society,” leaves families desperate to maximize the chances that their children will reach the winners’ circle, rather than risk failure and poverty or even merely a spot in the rapidly deteriorating middle class. And the best single means of becoming such an economic winner is to gain admission to a top university, which provides an easy ticket to the wealth of Wall Street or similar venues, whose leading firms increasingly restrict their hiring to graduates of the Ivy League or a tiny handful of other top colleges.^{3 [4]} On the other side, finance remains the favored employment choice for Harvard, Yale or Princeton students after the diplomas are handed out.^{4 [5]}

The Battle for Elite College Admissions
As a direct consequence, the war over college admissions has become astonishingly fierce, with many middle- or upper-middle class families investing quantities of time and money that would have seemed unimaginable a generation or more ago, leading to an all-against-all arms race that immiserates the student and exhausts the parents. The absurd parental efforts of an Amy Chua, as recounted in her 2010 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, were simply a much more extreme version of widespread behavior among her peer-group, which is why her story resonated so deeply among our educated elites. Over the last thirty years, America’s test-prep companies have grown from almost nothing into a $5 billion annual industry, allowing the affluent to provide an admissions edge to their less able children. Similarly, the enormous annual tuition of $35,000 charged by elite private schools such as Dalton or Exeter is less for a superior high school education than for the hope of a greatly increased chance to enter the Ivy League.^{5 [6]} Many New York City parents even go to enormous efforts to enroll their children in the best possible pre-Kindergarten program, seeking early placement on the educational conveyer belt which eventually leads to Harvard.^{6 [7]} Others cut corners in a more direct fashion, as revealed in the huge SAT cheating rings recently uncovered in affluent New York suburbs, in which students were paid thousands of dollars to take SAT exams for their wealthier but dimmer classmates.^{7 [8]}

But given such massive social and economic value now concentrated in a Harvard or Yale degree, the tiny handful of elite admissions gatekeepers enjoy enormous, almost unprecedented power to shape the leadership of our society by allocating their supply of thick envelopes. Even billionaires, media barons, and U.S. Senators may weigh their words and actions more carefully as their children approach college age. And if such power is used to select our future elites in a corrupt manner, perhaps the inevitable result is the selection of corrupt elites, with terrible consequences for America. Thus, the huge Harvard cheating scandal, and perhaps also the endless series of financial, business, and political scandals which have rocked our country over the last decade or more, even while our national economy has stagnated.

Read more

A very fast sail boat

World record nautical mile, average speed 65 knots, 120 kph.

Wikipedia Wales Denies Porn-Vending Career Earned a Fortune

Here's your correction, Wikipedia founder

Head of online 'encyclopedia' known for damaging reputations demands retraction

by Chelsea Schilling 

Chelsea Schilling is a commentary editor and staff writer for WND, an editor of Jerome Corsi's Red Alert and a proud U.S. Army veteran. She has also worked as a news producer at USA Radio Network and as a news reporter for the Sacramento Union.More ↓

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Former porn star Sylvia Saint wears Bomis.com T-shirt (Photo by Wikimedia Commons)

(WARNING: This story contains information of a graphic nature that some readers may find offensive.)
The founder of Wikipedia, the online “encyclopedia” that has damaged reputations with reckless, irresponsible and defamatory charges, has demanded of WND a correction to a column which characterized him as making a “fortune” in pornography before starting the company.
In her Jan. 14 column at WND, Judith Reisman came to the defense of heavy-metal drummer Bradlee Dean, who Reisman argues, has been “slammed” by Wikipedia.
Reisman, Ph.D., an author and academic known for debunking myths about pornography and the fraudulent sex research of Alfred Kinsey, wrote:

Wikipedia’s trashing of iconoclastic, ordained preacher Bradlee Dean proves that the heavy-metal drummer and his band have been doing a great job of delivering truth to American youth. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s creator, made his original fortune as a pornography trafficker. Wales’ cult of far-leftist volunteer editor zealots labor minute-by-minute to mislead readers who think Wikipedia’s half-truths – and worse – are a legitimate “encyclopedia.”

Shortly after publication, Reisman’s statement that “Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s creator, made his original fortune as a pornography trafficker” caught the attention of none other than the Wikipedia founder himself.
In an email to WND, Wales wrote:

This is absolutely and categoricallly [sic] false. I have never made any “fortune”, as a pornography trafficker or otherwise, and I have never been a “pornography trafficker” at all.
Additionally, as I have never even heard of Bradlee Dean, your disgusting attempt to smear me is absolutely and completely irrelevant to the argument you sought to make in the first place.
I demand an immediate edit to that story to remove the lie about me.

WND Editor Joseph Farah explained to Wales that Wikipedia’s own page about Bomis – a now-defunct company founded by Wales and his partner in 1996 – states that “Bomis ran a website called Bomis Premium at premium.bomis.com until 2005, offering customers access to premium, X-rated pornographic content.”
Wikipedia also notes that launch of the popular website was supported by Bomis: “[Bomis'] primary business was the sale of advertising on the Bomis.com search portal, and to provide support for the free encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia.”

For the lurid details read on

Canada-Syria: White dominions, brown colonies

By Eric Walberg

France and Britain have begun to circle Syria like vultures (my apologies to vultures, who politely wait for their prey to die). They plan to save Syria from chemical bombs — a surreal replay of Suez 1956, where France and Britain cooked up a pretext to invade Egypt with the US posing as the more restrained gang member, not to mention Iraq 2003, when they reversed their roles.

Meanwhile, Canada sings on demand for its US-Israeli sponsors. The Canadian government solemnly announced this week it is ready — if asked by NATO — to deploy the Canadian Joint Incident Response Unit, which handles chemical, biological and radioactive attacks. Canada will also send a Disaster Assistance Response Team to provide clean water in Syrians, as well as engineers and staff who can help set up a field hospital. A friendly navy frigate is already offshore.

Once again Prime Minister Stephen Harper plays his supporting role in the NATO-scripted drama unfolding in the Middle East. He takes “the threat of chemical weapons in Syria very seriously”, but demurs on whether Canada will send CF-18 fighter jets over Syria, as it did in Libya to enforce a no-fly zone, or put combat troops on the ground. He has not yet given the current opposition coalition, the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), his blessing, although US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton formally recognized the opposition at a Friends of Syria summit in Morocco on Wednesday, joining the Euro crowd.

The Canadian government has no foreign policy anymore, doing exactly as it is told by its Israeli advisers, so the reason for Harper’s coyness must be found there. Israel itself is in a quandary about Syria.

Israeli policy during the past three decades has following the divide-and-conquer Yinon Doctrine, playing various forces among its Arab neighbors against each other — Maronite and Orthodox Christian, Sunni and Shia Muslim, Druze, etc — in order to keep the Middle East weak and unstable.

In Syria, that even meant quietly supporting the Muslim Brotherhood during its ill-fated uprising in 1981, not because Israel wanted an Islamist Syria, but to keep the Syrian government off-balance. The secular and nationalist Baathist regime, together with Egypt, fought a war with Israel in 1967. These secular governments were the big threat, and it was only natural to try and cripple the regimes of Egypt and Syria, even if that meant working with Islamists.

Today, the West is eagerly arming the SNC, where Islamists predominate, even as Israel and Canada dawdle. How can this be?

The explanation is simple. As Kissinger said of Iraq and Iran during their war in the 1980s, “A pity they both can’t lose.” Or Truman when the Germans invaded Russia 22 June 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.” Not only is Egypt now rediscovering its Islamic, very anti-Zionist roots, making Egyptian Islamists the main enemy, but there is no guarantee the SNC will defeat the Syrian army, and unlike far away France, Britain and the US, Israel must live chock-a-block with whoever is in Damascus — and Cairo — when the mustard gas clears.

Ha, ha. Only joking. What about the chemical weapons threat? Syria is one of the few countries that has not signed the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). (Israel has signed but not ratified it.) But Assad has made it clear he will not approve their use on civilians. Saddam Hussein’s example is proof enough of the madness of that. The real worry over WMDs is that whatever supplies the Syrian government has could soon fall into the hands of the western-backed rebels, in particular, al-Nusrah Front (aka, al-Qaeda in Iraq).

However, who can blame Assad if he drops a few on invading Brits, French, and yes Americans? It would be a perfect way to ‘celebrate’ the centenary of WWI, where holier-than-thou Germany, Britain and France pioneered their use, despite having signed the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 banning them. Britain used chlorine against the Germans in 1915 but the wind blew back on the British trenches — a case of ‘friendly gas’. The US took their use to new heights in Vietnam with Agent Orange. Only the one-time US ally Saddam Hussein was ever brought to justice for using them. The US and Russia still have stockpiles (not to mention nuclear and biological weapons), despite their obligation under the CWC to destroy them all.

The Syrians would get special satisfaction from gassing the French, who carved up and invaded Syria in 1920. Syria was promised France by Britain as its reward for the 1.7 million French who died in the WWI bloodbath that killed 16 million (Britain lost ‘less than’ a million). The only ‘positive’ outcome for the Allies was the destruction and occupation of the Ottoman Caliphate and the creation of a Jewish state there.

This was an outrageous betrayal of the Arabs, who had arguably tipped the balance in WWI — at great loss — in Britain’s favor, on the promise of post-war independence. But, as the Spanish say, ‘You don’t dance with the devil; he dances with you.” Britain wanted Iraq for its oil and Palestine for a Jewish state, “the hill citadel of Jerusalem” according to geopolitical theorist Halford Mackinder — the last link in the British empire. With a wink and a nod from Britain, France invaded Syria in 1920 and crushed a heroic uprising in 1925--1927, killing thousands. Greater Syria was divided into southern Turkey, French-occupied Lebanon/ Syria, and British-occupied Jordan/ Palestine.

It was not till 1946 that the French were finally booted out — kicking and screaming. Post-WWII Syrian politics is a litany of coups, egged on by the US, until the army and socialist Baathists finally settled on Hafiz al-Assad in 1971. Trying to pick up the pieces after the brutal French occupation and living next door to permanent nightmare Israel are not conducive to the charade of western-style pluralism, so the subsequent harsh dictatorship of Assad I and the new-improved Assad II are not surprising. The SNC alternative has no prospects for ruling a united Syria. Syria’s future under the SNC is already being played out in Iraq, though Assad is far more popular and sensible than Saddam Hussein, and his demise will take down much of the Syria social order with him.

This is fine from an Israeli point of view as long as the Islamists are kept busy fighting their coalition ‘allies’ within the SNC. But if the Islamists dominate in the SNC, and if the power vacuum allows al-Qaeda to take root (it already has), this could be a problem for Israel. Look what happened to the Islamists in Gaza, where they surged and triumphed in elections in 2006 and remain strong. Israel has only to look south to Egypt to see how a revolutionary coalition can turn into an Islamic government which is not nearly as pliable as the secular dictatorship it replaced. This is what keeps many Israelis rooting for Assad.

When France was colonizing Syria a century ago, Canada was already the great colonial success story as a ‘white dominion’, and was allowed to join the ranks of the imperial rich, unlike Syria et al. (Lawrence ‘of Arabia’ lobbied Churchill to create a united Arab British mandate as the first ‘brown dominion’, with no success.)

As a former colony of both France and Britain, the loyal ‘white dominion’ of yesteryear, Canada may look like the perfect intermediary today: ‘Be nice and you too can graduate from colony to dominion.’ However, the flip side of white dominion status is that, like Israel or South Africa, you have built your society on the bones of the ‘brown’ natives. So it is not surprising that this week, even as Harper was toying with recognizing the SNC (who cares?), he faces ongoing protests over government neglect of Canada’s First Nations.

Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence began a hunger strike in Ottawa charging the government with “marginalizing our political leadership, along with the enforced segregation of our people so that our rich heritage can be wiped out and the great bounty contained in our traditional lands be made available for exploitation by large multi-national companies.” But Canada’s First Nations — what’s left of them — can thank their lucky stars they weren’t born in the ‘brown colonies’ of the Middle East.

Eric Walberg is author of Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games http://claritypress.com/Walberg.html You can reach him at http://ericwalberg.com/ 

Are We Causing Global Warming Yet? A Skeptic Says Yes!

Climate constantly changes and with it the mean temperature, whether estimated at a particular place, over a region or over the entire globe. Human activities — the combustion of fossil fuels, the clearing of land, the building or roads and cities — affect the climate in various ways, some tending to raise the temperature, others tending to lower it.

Image source.

The effect of adding carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere is well known. Less well known is the effect of deforestation. The removal of trees that efficiently absorb sunlight, exposes bare ground that reflects back into space much more of the incident sunlight than the canopy of a forest, and which, as it is heated by the sun, emits much of the absorbed heat to outer space as infra-red radiation.

Trees, in contrast, don't heat up much in the sun: they cool by evaporation of transpired water. In the process, solar energy is converted to the latent heat of vaporization, which warms the atmosphere when the water vapor lost by trees condenses to form clouds. The clouds may reflect sunlight, but they also reflect infra-red radiation emitted from the ground that would otherwise have escaped to outer space. Trees, in other words, may contribute to global warming, though as repositories of carbon they also counteract warming. Overall their effect on global temperature is probably positive. Then they emit hydrocarbon pollutants too — an estimated 30 million tons per year in the US, alone.

Then there are sulfur emissions from coal fired power plants, which give rise to white sulfate particles that cool the atmosphere by reflecting sunlight; and the production of black carbon particles (soot) during the combustion of diesel and heavy oil, which absorb sunlight and thus warm the atmosphere.

So it's complicated, which is why it takes a supercomputer to model the climate, and why the validity of the results obtained are always open to question.

But despite the unending debate, and the endless muddying of the waters by partisans, politicians and boobs on both sides of the argument, most if not all informed global warming skeptics appear to acknowledge that raising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration as we are currently doing will likely raise global temperature by the end of the present century significantly above what it would otherwise have been.

What well-informed skeptics are in most cases skeptical about is not the likelihood of human-caused global warming but the magnitude of the effect as predicted by the so-called warmists, and the necessity of taking drastic or enormously costly actions to prevent the warming that will occur without major efforts at mitigation.

Christopher Monckton, who served as an adviser to UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is a skillful debater and a fair mathematician who has followed the climate change debate, and has participated vigorously in it for years, is undoubtedly a climate warming skeptic. So whatever warming he agrees has occurred and is likely to occur in the future should atmospheric carbon dioxide continue rising on its present course might be considered a lower bound for the warming that virtually all the experts, skeptic or warmist, say we can expect (all other things being equal, which they almost certainly will not be).

It is convenient, therefore, that Christopher Monckton has just published an estimate of the rate of warming over recent and future decades. This estimate is contained in a post on Alan Watts blog from which the following is an excerpt.

I have had the pleasure of being on the planet for 60 years. I arrived when it first became theoretically possible for our CO2 emissions to have a detectable effect on global temperature. From 1952 to the present, the planet has warmed at a rate equivalent to 1.2 Celsius degrees per century. ...

Late in 2001 there was a phase-transition from the warming to the cooling phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the most influential of the ocean oscillations. From 1990-2001 is 11 years; from 2001-2012 is 11 years. So 1990-2012 is a period centered on a phase-transition: with minimal natural distortion, it will indicate the recent temperature trend.

Since 1990 the world has warmed at 1.4 Cº, century, or a little under 0.3 Cº in all. Note that 1.4 Cº/century is a little greater than the 1.2 Cº/century observed since 1952. However, the period since 1990 is little more than a third of the period since 1952, and shorter periods are liable to exhibit somewhat steeper trends than longer periods.

So the slightly higher warming rate of the more recent period does not necessarily indicate that the warming rate is rising, and it is certainly not rising dangerously.

For the 21st century as a whole, IPeCaC is predicting not 1.2 or 1.4 Cº warming but close to 3 Cº, more than doubling the observed post-1990 warming rate. Or, if you believe the latest scare paper from our old fiends the University of East Anglia, up to 6 Cº, quadrupling it.

Whether Christopher Monckton's estimate is closer to the truth than that of the University of East Anglia, I will not venture to say. But what Monckton makes clear is that rational people on the skeptic side of the climate warming debate do expect climate warming in the century and a half beginning 60 years ago, of around 2 degrees Celcius, assuming that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration continues rising on its present course.

Two degrees is the difference in temperature between London and Edinburgh, or between London and Paris. Such a change can hardly be called catastrophic, and for some people, the Scotch for example, it will surely be of huge benefit. But for others, there will undoubtedly be a downside, especially where a change in temperature is associated with a reduction in rainfall and soil water. The viability of the Canadian prairies as grain growing region, for example, could be radically affected.

Thus it seems only sensible to consider measures to limit greenhouse gas emissions and atmospheric release of other greenhouse gases. In the case of carbon dioxide emissions, these can be limited easily and efficiently by means of a carbon tax. All governments need revenue. They might as well tax something we don't want, including the causes of climate warming, while easing up on taxes on such things as income, that we do want.

The objection energy intensive industries in countries with a carbon tax are placed at a disadvantage in competition with competitors in countries without a carbon tax, can be disposed of by the imposition of countervailing duties on goods from countries that do not impose a carbon tax. If the US or the EU were to institute a carbon tax on that basis, the rest of the World would be compelled to follow.

Britain's Jewish Government

The cowardice at the heart of Britain's relationship with Israel

While the British Government relentlessly pursues a tri-partisan program of genocide through mass immigration against the English, it remains utterly committed to the nationalist Jewish program of Palestinian settlement.

Close friends and allies: Prime Minister David Cameron shaking hands with Israeli Ambassador to Britain, Daniel Taub  Photo: EPA

By Peter Oborne

The Telegraph: 8:39PM GMT 12 Dec 2012:

It is impossible to understand the modern Conservative Party without a grasp of the scale and profundity of its links to the state of Israel. The connection dates back at least as far the historic meeting between the great Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann and the Conservative prime minister A J Balfour in 1905, during which Weizmann convinced Balfour of the case for a Jewish national state.

The warmth forged 107 years ago is today sustained by the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI). Some 80 per cent of all Tory MPs are members, including most Cabinet ministers. No other lobbying organisation – and certainly not one that acts in the interests of a foreign country – carries as much weight at Westminster. Every year, it takes a significant number of parliamentarians to Israel. Meanwhile, its sponsors play an important role in financing both the Tories nationally, and MPs at the local level.

There is no doubt that the CFI has exercised a powerful influence over policy. The Conservative politician and historian Robert Rhodes James, writing in the Jerusalem Post in 1995, called it “the largest organisation in Western Europe dedicated to the cause of the people of Israel”. Its power has not waned since. On Tuesday, it hosted approximately 100 Tory MPs, including six Cabinet ministers, and a further 40 peers, at a lunch in central London. The speaker was David Cameron, who pronounced himself a “passionate friend” of Israel, making clear (as he has done in the past) that nothing could break that friendship.

This speech can be seen as part of a pattern. The CFI can call almost at will upon the Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer or Foreign Secretary. The Palestinians enjoy no such access. They would be lucky to get a single Conservative MP in the audience for their events, and perhaps some moribund peer to make an address. There is no such organisation as the Conservative Friends of Palestinians.

This lack of even-handedness reflects itself in policy. When William Hague denounced Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon as “disproportionate”, the CFI (as I revealed in a film on the pro-Israeli lobby for Channel 4’s Dispatches) complained in person to David Cameron. It obtained a promise that the word would never be used again – one that was kept when Israel bombarded Gaza last month, even though the number of Palestinian deaths vastly exceeded those on the Israeli side.

Read more

Prime Minister David Cameron: “My belief in Israel is unbreakable and
commitment to Israel’s security is non-negotiable.” Note: Britain has no formal
treaties with Israel and Israel has made no commitment whatever to the
security of Britain.

But the Labor Party is no less adamant in its commitment to the welfare of the state of Israel.

Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) is a Westminster based pro-Israel lobby group working within the British Labour party which exercises significant influence over British Middle East policy. It is considered one of the most prestigious groupings in the party and is seen as a stepping stone to ministerial ranks by Labour MPs. LFI boasts some of the wealthiest supporters of the party, and some of its most generous donors, such as Lord Sainsbury of Turville, Michael Levy, Sir Trevor Chinn and Sir Emmanuel Kaye [1]. Two of its leading members, Michael Levy, and David Abrahams, have been embroiled in major scandals involving the New Labour government in recent years. [2] Both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair have been members of the group. Source: Spinwatch

While Labour originally carried a reputation for having more voices sympathetic to the Palestinians – especially during the Thatcher years – the New Labour government of Tony Blair has reversed this orientation. Although one of Tony Blair’s first acts after becoming an MP in 1983 was joining LFI, the relationship truly developed in the early 90s, when as shadow Home Secretary, Tony Blair met Michael Levy at a private meeting at the latter’s house. Michael Abraham Levy is a former chairman of the Jewish Care Community Foundation, a member of the Jewish Agency World Board of Governors, and a trustee of the Holocaust Educational Trust. [7] According to Andrew Porter of The Business, Levy expressed his willingness “to raise large sums of money for the party” which led to a “tacit understanding that Labour would never again, while Blair was leader, be anti-Israel" SourceWatch

Over the last year, Tel Aviv-based think tank The Reut Institute has offered a lot of advice to supporters of Israel in the West on how to respond to “the erosion in Israel’s diplomatic status” (aka ‘delegitimization‘), including a focus “on engaging the hearts and minds of liberal progressive elites”.

A recent report looked specifically at London, saying “liberal and progressive left” voices are the ones “most effective” in shielding Israel. Reut urged Israel’s defenders to “substantively engage liberal and progressive circles” by “responding to their concerns and building personal relationships”.

Now it has been reported that Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) is set to “re-invent itself” in order to “develop the ‘progressive case’ for Israel”. Jews For Justice for Palestinians

Labor Friends of Israel (LFI), a powerful group within the country’s main opposition party, is still behaving like a secret society.

Unlike a similar “friends of Israel” group belonging to the Liberal Democrats – the junior party in the ruling coalition - the LFI does not appear to have supplied any information about the sources of its finances to the UK’s Electoral Commission. This lack of disclosure could be illegal. Legislation applying to “members’ associations” of political parties stipulates that all donations above £7,500 ($11,600) must be notified to the Commission within 30 days.

Today, I asked Ben Garrett, the LFI’s head of policy and research, why his organization seems to be breaking the law. “I am not willing to comment,” he replied. 21st Century British Nationalism

Then there's the Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel, who are currently concerned about, among other things, bias against Israel in the British House of Lords:

What struck me is how much the House of Lords talks about Israel and the Palestinians, far more than a country the size of Wales, with seven million citizens, would merit. Lord Monroe Palmer, former LDFI chairman

UKIP, according to their web site:

supports the only true democracy in the Middle East which provides a homeland for the Jewish people, to excersise their right to self-determination. Source.http://www.ukipfoi.moonfruit.com/"

UKIP, one might have thought, would be more concerned about Britain providing a homeland for the British, but if so, one would probably have been wrong. 

And anyhow, why this terrific love affair and concern for a country believed to possess several hundred nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to all capitals in Europe, and where a reputable scholar has announced that these weapons will used to take down the world before the state of Israel is conquered:

Our [Israel's] armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under. Martin van Creveld, professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

And why this love affair with a state of which the religious authorities deride the religious tradition of Britain and the rest of Europe and applaud the Islamic takeover of Europe.

And why no such love affair with any other country. For example Britain's wartime allies, France, Russia, the US, or the Commonwealth countries such as Canada and New Zealand?

Certainly the preference for Israel can have nothing to do with the Jewish Holocaust, since the leaders of all three of Britain's leading political parties are staunch advocates of a policy of genocide against their own people, this policy to be effected by a combining the repressed fertility of the indigenous population with a program of mass immigration. As a result, London, once the largest city in the World, with about 8 million English inhabitants, now has barely three and a half million English residents, who live as a minority among four and a half million people of 300 other ethnicities.

The city of Leicester, located at the heart of England, is majority non-English, and in England's second city, Birmingham, English elementary school children are not even the largest minority.

So what's with these friends of Israel, other than being been bought and paid for agents of a foreign power?

Restoring Full Employment in Europe and America

In the discussion of another post, it has been argued that the cause of the Second Great Depression has nothing to do with mass export of jobs to the Third World but can be attributed solely to excessive public sector debt.

This is the kind of meaningless thought that the media and the liberal-left and pseudoconservative blogs seek to impose upon the public so that people fail to grasp how they are being screwed by the plutocratic elite.

"Of course" says our commentator, "I value public services as much as anyone else ..."

Well I sure don't.

I don't want the goddam government picking my pocket and the deciding how much of the cash it has taken from me it is prepared to spend on my healthcare, my kids education whatever.

But increasing public sector debt does not cause a depression. When public sector debt is incurred, it increases aggregate demand, even if that increased demand is due solely to spending by unproductive bureaucrats.

That is why the Keynesian solution to recession or depression is to increase the public sector deficit. And in times past, when national economies were more or less self-contained, that worked. And it worked because increased public spending directly and indirectly increased demand for domestically produced goods and services, which created a demand for increased labor and thus brought down unemployment. Insofar as it increased productive labor, not futile bureaucracy, the cost of the stimulus was recovered through an increase in the output of useful goods and services.

How powerless Americans have been entrapped in forced
labor and poverty. Read more.

But in today's era of globalization, increased deficits in the Western economies increase aggregate demand for cheap goods and services from the Third World, thus having little effect on domestic employment. The net result is an increase in debt service costs which become a drag on the economy when the rate of increase in the debt falls below the debt service costs.

Western governments reacted to the financial crisis by pumping up government deficits. With little to show for their stupidity, governments have now panicked about the unsustainability of mounting debt and so have opted for austerity. But obviously cutting debt cuts aggregate demand and so worsens the depression.

What the damn fools in government need to do is restore full employment and that cannot be done while wages in the West have a legal minimum ten to twenty times Third World sweatshop wages against which the least competent unemployed Western workers must compete.

So there are only two means to restore full employment in the West:

1. Tariffs to exclude cheap labor intensive imports from the Third World,


2. Wage subsidies that enable Western workers and firms to compete with China and the rest of the developing world.

This is a choice that globalist liberals, and other mouthpieces of the plutocratic elite, are incapable of confronting. Hence the flim-flam about excessive public sector debt, etc.

Then there's immigration. When you've millions of excess workers, stop importing more from the Third World. But that's another obvious reality that a liberal globalist will never take on board.

The fact that these three options are never considered suggests that impoverishing the Western working and middle-class is, in fact, part of the globalist strategy and that we will not see a resumption of mass prosperity in the West for decades, and perhaps not ever. For what is the difference between working in competition with sweatshop labor employed for pennies an hour and outright slavery.

I guess one difference is that slaves don't have to worry about paying rent or finding the wherewithal to buy food: the provision of healthful board and lodging being a necessary part of an efficient slave economy.

Free Will versus Determinism and Moral Responsibility

Michio Kaku, the Physicist of the New World Order, who calls those opposed to globalization terrorists, tells us in this video (via Aangirfan's interesting post on free will and consciousness) that quantum theory proves that human action is not predetermined.

But the point he makes is a trivial quibble of absolutely no consequence. Microscopic events may be indeterminate, but anyone expecting a bunch of air molecules by chance to pile up behind their automobile and drive them to the office without the use of gasoline is going to be late for work. The behavior of most macroscopic systems is highly deterministic.

Quantum uncertainty? Image source.

And when a macroscopic system behaves in an unexpected fashion, for example, if your car accelerates when you put your foot on the brake, no sensible person will say it must have been due to quantum randomness. In such an event, the sensible assumption is that there has been a serious mechanical or electronic malfunction, or perhaps someone sabotaged your car.

The human brain, so far as we know, functions as a deterministic system little if at all affected by quantum uncertainty, which means that Kaku's remarks about Einstein versus Heisenberg are irrelevant. But, that does not mean that the workings of the human brain are necessarily predictable. For one thing, complex macroscopic systems, though operating in accordance with classical deterministic laws, can be highly unpredictable. Thus, as Richard Feynman explained:

If water falls over a dam, it splashes. If we stand nearby, every now and then a drop will land on our nose. This appears to be completely random … The tiniest irregularities are magnified in falling, so that we get complete randomness.

Feynman's insight has since been formalized in chaos theory, which reveals that many complex systems, the weather for example, or the economy, operate chaotically, which means for all practical purposes, indeterminately.

Transitions in the evolution of a complex system under the
influence of a strange attractor. Image source.

An interesting feature of chaotic systems is that they may show a relatively constant pattern of behavior for long periods, following what is know as a "strange attractor," but then abruptly switch to a totally different pattern.

Not surprisingly, the brain, the most complex system that we know of in the entire universe, will sometime undergo a sharp transition in mode of operation, shifting abruptly from one more or less constant pattern to a strikingly different pattern. Such epiphanies may occur spontaneously, although they are perhaps more often the result of an external shock.

But even if, for classical or quantum reasons, the operations of the brain — which we assume to underlie the workings of the mind — are indeterminate, this tells us little of interest about the question of free will.

Image source.

If the possession of free will consists solely in the fact that our brains sometimes do random and hence unpredictable things, so what? As far as the question of moral responsibility is concerned, we can no more take credit or blame for what is strictly determined than for what occurs as a matter of pure chance.

Which brings us to the core question: what is free will, anyhow? If Cain willed to kill Abel, how could he have acted otherwise than to go ahead and kill him? Could he, at the same time, have willed not to will to kill Abel? But if so, what if the will to kill Abel were stronger? Could he then have willed to will not to kill Abel more strongly? This leads to an infinite regress.

The conclusion seems to be that we will what we will and that's that for good or ill. And if sometimes our actions are theoretically unpredictable due to classical or quantum indeterminism, our actions are nevertheless driven either by chance or necessity, which is rather different from the idea that most people have of free will.

But this is a dangerous conclusion if naively understood, since it seems to imply that we are not responsible for our actions. But this is an error arising from ambiguity of the term "responsible."

Cain killing Abel. (Rubens)

To many, the notion that Cain could do no other than kill his brother means that he was not morally responsible for his actions and therefore should not have been held accountable or punished. But "moral responsibility" is not synonymous with "legal responsibility." Under the law of sane and civilized society, Cain would be held responsible for killing Abel, for the simple reason that he did indeed kill Abel.

Furthermore, under the law of any sane and civilized society, Cain would be punished for killing Abel, not because of his moral culpability but to deter others who might otherwise emulate his crime. And if a jeering hate-filled mob attended Cain's public hanging, so much the better to deter others who might otherwise follow Cain's criminal example.

Sadly, such simple logic is beyond the comprehension of most brought up under the lib-left ideology propagated by Western cultural institutions. We have been taught by the state propaganda machine — known as the K-to-middle-age education system — to see only the relationships among events that the state wishes us to see, while ignoring most of the picture without an understanding of which a sane and civilized society is impossible.

But what is perhaps an even more subversive and dangerous view of the world than some flaky notion about free will, is the Parmenidesian belief that all change, and therefore, all human action, good or evil, is an illusion.

In Parmenides' day, the best evidence for this idea was provided by the paradoxes of Zeno, which showed that movement was, if not impossible, almost so. The most famous of Zeno's paradoxes concerned the race between Achilles and the tortoise, in which Achilles was continually reaching the point just left by the tortoise, by which time the tortoise had moved ahead just a little bit more, so Archilles was always behind.

Image source

Zeno had another zinger: the Arrow Paradox. At any instant, an arrow in flight must be at a particular place. At that moment it cannot be moving to any other place or it would not be where it is, so at no instant can it move. This would have been more convincing if Zeno had offered to serve as the target at javelin practice. Still many sharp physicists of the modern era are Parmenidisians: Einstein for instance, and Hermann Weyl who wrote:

The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the world-line of my body, does a section of the world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.

On this view, we are like flies in amber, incapable of doing right or wrong. Our entire potential, intellectual, physical and moral, has already been realized and is open to view by any time traveler, in which case, the notion of free will is entirely redundant.

Related:

Medical Express: Our brains reveal our choices before we're even aware of them

War Criminals at Work: Lie of the Week, Syrian Government About to Gas Own People

By Robert Fisk

The Independent, December 8, 2012: The bigger the lie the more people will believe it. We all know who said that – but it still works. Bashar al-Assad has chemical weapons. He may use them against his own Syrian people. If he does, the West will respond. We heard all this stuff last year – and Assad’s regime repeatedly said that if – if – it had chemical weapons, it would never use them against Syrians.

But now Washington is playing the same gas-chanty all over again. Bashar has chemical weapons. He may use them against his own people. And if he does…

Well if he does, Obama and Madame Clinton and Nato will be very, very angry. But over the past week, all the usual pseudo-experts who couldn’t find Syria on a map have been warning us again of the mustard gas, chemical agents, biological agents that Syria might possess – and might use. And the sources? The same fantasy specialists who didn’t warn us about 9/11 but insisted that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction in 2003: “unnamed military intelligence sources”. Henceforth to be acronymed as UMIS.

Coup de théâtre

And now, the coup de théâtre. Someone from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation called me up this week to talk about the use of chemical weapons by Hafez al-Assad in Hama during the Sunni Muslim uprising in the city in 1982. Their sources were the same old UMIS. But I happened to have got into Hama in February 1982 – which is why the Canadian was calling me – and while Hafez’s Syrian army was very definitely slaughtering its own people (who were, by the way, slaughtering regime officials and their families), no one ever used chemical weapons.

Not a single soldier I saw in Hama carried a gas mask. No civilians carried gas masks. The dangerously perfumed air which I and my colleagues smelt after chemicals were used by our (then) ally Saddam against Iranian soldiers in the 1980s was not present. And none of the dozens of civilian survivors I have interviewed in the 30 years since 1982 ever mentioned the use of gas.

But now we are to believe that it was used. And so the infantile new fairy tale has begun: Hafez al-Assad used gas against his own people in Hama 30 years ago. So his son Bashar may do the same again. And wasn’t that one of the reasons we invaded Iraq in 2003 – because Saddam had used gas against his own people already and may do so again?

Read more

See also:

Winston Churchill mulls use of mustard gas during WWII.

Winston Churchill on the good moral effect of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.

A Statistical Enigma

An author is someone who would run around in public waving their arms up and down if that were the only way they could attract attention
H.L. Mencken

Most bloggers, I suspect are at least as self-obsessed as any other kind of author and thus probably check their blog stats frequently to see if anyone has actually read a thing they have written. Certainly, I have to confess to viewing my stats at least occasionally, but find it less than satisfying not only because the numbers are distinctly unastronomical, but because it is hard to know what the numbers, such as they are, really mean.

Of yesterday's 571 page views, for example, how many represented people who got here by accident and left as fast as their browser back-button would take them, how many read something, and of those who read something, how many read a piece right through and felt they had, if not learned something, at least found food for thought. In addition, arises the nagging question of how many page views were generated not by people, but by spam delivering robots. Yesterday for example, one intelligent comment was posted together with half a dozen imbecile bits of spam.

Another puzzle is the source of hits. During the last couple of weeks I have had a mass of hits -- well relatively speaking -- from Sweden, second in number only to hits from the US. That's very nice if so many Swedes have visited, and well they might since they are among the smartest people on the planet. Moreover, that the clicks from Sweden are genuine visits is suggested by the fact that they correlate quite closely with downloads of the piece entitled: The Cause and Cure of the Second Great Depression, which despite a minor miscalculation about the result of the recent US Presidential election, is probably the most significant article appearing here recently.

Still, I have a nagging anxiety that I'm being targeted by a scoundrel spambot using an open link on an ill-attended server in Sweden.

Comments from anyone familiar with such matters would be welcome.

In the meantime, we will blog on. Once we have recovered our messianic self-confidence, that is.

Related:
CanSpeccy: Recognition at Last -- Sort of.

The Stupidity of Self-Hating White Liberals

By Robert Henderson

England Calling, December 2, 2012: In 2003 radio and TV presenter Adrian Chiles self-indulgently allowed himself a gigantic wallow in liberal breast beating. In a long article for the Daily Telegraph entitled ”Why are all my friends White?”, Chiles expressed his surprise that he, a white liberal bigot of impeccable anti-racist, multiculturalist credentials, had no non-white friends and precious little deep social interaction with blacks and Asians:

The thought struck me as I was looking through my wedding photos recently: why is it that I have no black or Asian friends? I work with some black people, I socialise with them, but when I looked at the pictures of the 131 guests at my wedding, I was shocked to find that there wasn’t a single non-white face among them. I consider myself a fairly liberal, open-minded chap, so the demographic of my circle of friends was quite troubling. I decided to investigate further, and scrolled down the 99 names in my mobile phone’s memory, to find that there is only one black person on the list – a television producer whom I work with.

It’s not that I haven’t come into contact with many black or Asian people during my life. I grew up in the West Midlands, which is home to the largest non-white communities outside the capital. And I now live in Hammersmith, a decidedly multi-racial area of west London. Yet, when Petal Felix, the aforementioned producer, came to visit me to discuss the possibility of making a documentary on the very subject that was causing me such concern, I was horrified to realise she was the first black person who’d ever been to my house.

Faced with this traumatic (for the politically correct) disjunction between the quasi-religious utterances about the enriching qualities of racial and ethnic diversity in a society and claims that “race is just a social construct” that people such as Chiles routinely make, he embarked on a series of exquisitely exciting (for a modern white liberal) exercises in masochism as he explored the very white, very English world he inhabited and in all probability still inhabits. (The absence of non-white faces in Chiles’ wedding photos is made all the more enjoyable for normal, that is, politically incorrect people, because his then wife Jane Garvey, who is currently employed by the BBC as the presenter of the feminist propaganda vehicle Woman’s Hour, is an especially devout disciple of political correctness).

We decided to make a film – The Colour of Friendship [for the BBC] - that would attempt to find out whether mine was an isolated case or not; and whether 21st-century Britain really is a multi-cultural melting pot, or – if we’re brave enough to admit it – still a largely segregated nation.

Chiles worked with an all black team whilst making his programme. He finds being in the racial minority disconcerting:

As a white, middle-class male, very rarely have I found myself working in a minority – until now. This time, the producer, executive producer, researcher and camera crew on this documentary were all black. I was surprised to find that I couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable with the situation and grew increasingly defensive about it, although I was unable to articulate exactly why…

Chiles takes the all black TV crew to a Pakistani–run pub in West Bromwich (the area in the English midlands where he grew up) which he still regularly frequents and fondly imagines is an example of unalloyed multiculturalism in action. Much to his horror when they arrive he finds “the punters in the Sportsman turned out to be 95 per cent white. The only Asians in there were staff, serving beer and curry to groups of white blokes.” His liberal fantasy world has overcome reality.

Throughout the programme Chiles is constantly putting his liberal foot in it. When he recounts a story about how his wife could not say the word black when giving a description of someone his black producer, Petal tells him that it “is typical behaviour for white people who don’t mix with black people. For God’s sake, it’s perfectly all right to call black people black!” At one point he uses the term “half-caste” and is covered in liberal horror when he is told “mixed-race” is the polite word these days. Most traumatically for Chiles (and hilariously for the politically incorrect), he meets Simon Darby of the West Midlands branch of the British National Party. Unsurprisingly, Darby complains that whites cannot celebrate their whiteness. This leads to the ultimate horror for a white liberal of being suspected by Petal of wanting to celebrate his whiteness:

I wondered aloud why it would be quite reasonable for Petal to say publicly that she was proud to be black, while for me to say that I was proud to be white would cast me, in some people’s eyes, as either a football hooligan or a Nazi.

So are you proud to be white?” Petal asked me.

“Actually, no.” I shouted back, startling an elderly woman, who was struggling past with her shopping. “I just want to know what the difference is.”

In addition to these embarrassments Chiles constantly encounters the physical reality of racial and ethnic division. He visits Handsworth, and Hagley, towns stuck in the middle of the heavily black and Asian settled West Midlands and discovers Handsworth is almost entirely non-white and Hagley almost entirely white.

He also addresses racial separateness at the individual level when he meets Nigerian Didi Anolue who tell him she is looking for a husband – specifically, a black Nigerian. She rules out marrying a white man, which sounds fine coming from her.

But how would it sound if a white woman in Stourbridge declared she’d never marry a black bloke, I wondered. It would sound terrible. But what’s the difference?

At the end of his Odyssey Chiles seeks answers to his questions:

If anyone would be able to answer my growing list of questions, it would be Dr Robert Beckford, who runs the Centre for Black Theology at the University of Birmingham. He told me the reason I am unable to assert that I’m proud to be white (not that I’d want to) is that “the language of whiteness has been appropriated by the far Right”, and it has to be taken back from them before people like me can understand what it means to be white and engage in a sensible debate about race. And another thing, he said: “Everyone’s always studying Afro-Caribbean culture or Asian culture. Why isn’t anyone studying white culture?”

Until that happens, I might never find out why I have no close black or Asian friends. But, whatever the reason, I don’t think it necessarily makes me a bad person.

The answers to Chiles’ questions 

Chiles should not be surprised at what he finds because all he is displaying is normal human behaviour, namely, a selective preference for those who most resemble him. This is called assortative selection and is a trait widely found throughout the animal kingdom.

The strength of assortative selection in humans can be seen most easily in mating patterns. Even in such racially and culturally mixed areas as inner London, the number of mixed race relationships is remarkably small considering the apparent opportunities on offer. Indeed, the fact that there are shared external physical differences which cause human beings to classify people by race testifies to the general reluctance of humans to mate with those who radically differ from them in physical appearance.

There are also differences in mating patterns where mixed race relationships occur. Women are more likely to take a mate of a different race than men and the higher the socio-economic class, the less likely that a mixed race relationship will exist.

These selective tendencies are very powerful. In Freakonomics Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner cite a study made of a US dating site (the full story is on pp 80-84). The site is one of the largest in the US and the data examined covered 30,000 people equally divided between San Diego and Boston. Most were white but there was a substantial minority of non-white subjects.

The questionnaire the would-be daters had to fill in included a question choice on race as “same as mine” and “doesn’t matter”. The study compared the responses by white would-be daters (those from non-white were not analysed) to these questions with the race of the emails actually sent soliciting a date. The result in Levitt and Dubner’s words was:

Roughly half of the white women on the site and 80 percent of the white men declared that race didn’t matter to them. But the response data tell a different story The white men who said that race didn’t matter sent 90 percent of their e-mail queries to white women. The white women who said race didn’t matter sent about 97 percent of their e-mail queries to white men.

Is it possible that race really didn’t matter for these white women and men and that they simply never happened to browse a non-white date that interested them?

Or, more likely, did they say that race didn’t matter because they wanted to come across especially to potential mates of their own race as open-minded?

In short, around 99% of all the women and 94% of all men in the sample were not willing to seek a date of a different race. How much stronger will be the tendency to refuse to breed with a mate of a different race? Considerably greater one would imagine.

The effect of social and economic differences is that the higher up the social scale a white person is, the more likely they are to have meaningful social contact with non-whites. Moreover, the contact they do have is almost entirely with middle-class and very westernised blacks and Asians.

The truth which “white middle class liberals” like Mr Chiles find disconcerting is that they are much more likely to live in a very white world than the white working class whom they both despise and fear.

The Chiles Test

Chile provides the answer “The only thing I know for sure is that, in this multi-racial society, many middle-class whites have much less meaningful contact with black or Asian people than they would like to think. If you don’t believe me, check your wedding photos and your address book.

If the Chiles test is based on non-white faces in wedding photos, arguably the most potent indicator of social interaction, it is a fair bet that most white liberals would score perilously close to zero.

What did Chiles learn from his experiences? That the liberal fantasy of multiculturalism and multiracialism is just that, a fantasy and a most dangerous one because of the fractured society it produces? Don’t be silly the man’s a white liberal. At the time the programme was broadcast Chiles announced to the Birmingham Evening Mail that he “hopes his three-year-old daughter Evie will marry a black or Asian man one day” (Aug 18 2003 Graham Young).

Chiles’ ignorance of the realities of racial and ethnic difference or a refusal to acknowledge them, is summed up in that wish. He fails utterly to understand that the conflict in heterogeneous societies is not merely between white and non-white, but amongst non-whites of different types and those of the same race but different origins, for example, in Britain blacks with West Indian ancestry are often at daggers drawn with blacks from Africa. He makes the mistake, which itself is an unconscious form of racism as defined by modern liberals, of lumping all non-whites together.

If his daughter does marry a “black or Asian man” she will not be decreasing racial and ethnic tension in Britain but increasing it, because the greater the heterogeneity the greater the mistrust and tension between racial and ethnic groups occupying the same territory.

Obama's second term: all options no longer on the table?

The White House won't punish the Palestinian authority in "retaliation" for U.N. statehood vote

The White House won't seek to punish the Palestinian Authority for this week's statehood vote at the United Nations, but did not vow to veto pending legislative proposals to cut off U.S. aid in retaliation.

Read more

White House opposes new Iran sanctions 

The White House announced its opposition to a new round of Iran sanctions that the Senate unanimously approved Friday, in the latest instance of Congress pushing for more aggressive punitive measures on Iran than the administration deems prudent.

Read more

Meantime, Zbigniew Brzezinski to Israel :

The US won't follow Israel "like a stupid mule"




and to the NeoCons:

Global awakening precludes American global hegemony



But blowing up people in far away places with drones, is still not just an option but an everyday occurrence.

The European Nation State: Sold Out By a Treasonous Globalist Elite

The crime of the [German Nazi] Reich in wantonly and deliberately wiping out whole peoples is not utterly new in the world. It is only new in the civilized world as we have come to think of it. It is so new in the traditions of civilized man that he has no name for it.

It is for this reason that I took the liberty of inventing the word, “genocide.” The term is from the Greek word genes meaning tribe or race and the Latin cide meaning killing. Genocide tragically enough must take its place in the dictionary of the future beside other tragic words like homicide and infanticide. As Von Rundstedt has suggested the term does not necessarily signify mass killings although it may mean that.

More often it refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight. The end may be accomplished by the forced disintegration of political and social institutions, of the culture of the people, of their language, their national feelings and their religion. It may be accomplished by wiping out all basis of personal security, liberty, health and dignity. When these means fail the machine gun can always be utilized as a last resort. Genocide is directed against a national group as an entity and the attack on individuals is only secondary to the annihilation of the national group to which they belong.
Raphael Lemkin

The new push for a European Union federation, complete with its own head of state and army, is the "final phase" of the destruction of democracy and the nation state ...
Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic

The Telegraph, September 22, 2012: In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Václav Klaus warns that "two-faced" politicians, including the Conservatives, have opened the door to an EU superstate by giving up on democracy, in a flight from accountability and responsibility to their voters.

"We need to think about how to restore our statehood and our sovereignty. That is impossible in a federation. The EU should move in an opposite direction," he said.

Last week, Germany, France and nine other of Europe's largest countries called for an end to national vetoes over defence policy as Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, urged the creation of a directly elected EU president "who personally appoints the members of his European government".

Mr Westerwelle, in a reference to British opposition, called for nation states to be stripped of vetoes on defence to "prevent one single member state from being able to obstruct initiatives" which "could eventually involve a European army".

The new offensive followed the unprecedented declaration by the Commission's president, José Manuel Barroso, during his "state of union" address to the European Parliament on 12 September, that he would make proposals for a fully-fledged EU "federation" in 2014. "Let's not be afraid of the word," he said.

Speaking in Hradcany Castle, a complex of majestic buildings that soars above Prague, and is a symbol of Czech national identity, Mr Klaus described Mr Barroso's call for a federation, quickly followed by the German-led intervention, as an important turning point.

"This is the first time he has acknowledged the real ambitions of today's protagonists of a further deepening of European integration. Until today, people, like Mr Barroso, held these ambitions in secret from the European public," he said. "I'm afraid that Barroso has the feeling that the time is right to announce such an absolutely wrong development.

"They think they are finalising the concept of Europe, but in my understanding they are destroying it."

Read more

The Czech's know a thing or two about undemocratic superstates. First they learned at the hands of the Nazi's, they they had forty and more years of the Commies. Not surprisingly, Czechs who remember the past detest the Liberal-left/pseudoConservative plan for a totalitarian European superstate: the reconfiguration of the Soviet Union to the West of the original.

Population: Explosion and Implosion

Trikipedia says the World is overpopulated. They quote Steve Jones, head of the biology department at University College London, as saying, "Humans are 10,000 times more common than we should be".

Let's see, ten billion divided by ten thousand, that's one million. A total world population one quarter that of Elizabethan England. LOL. See what passes for scholarship nowadays -- pure genocidal propaganda.

Actually, nearly everything said about population seems to be propaganda. Yet the real issues are simple enough. Thomas Malthus got it right: population increases until limited by food supply, unless people limit their fertility by indulgence in "vice."

The green revolution vastly increased the World's food supply, hence a doubling in Africa's population in the last 40 years with massive increases elsewhere too.

Meantime, the West embarked on the wholesale indulgence in "vice", thus driving the fertility rate of the European nations well below the replacement rate.

So in fact there are several big stories concerning population. One is the population explosion in Africa and the Islamic World. Another is the collapse in the population of the European peoples (preceded by aging of the population and a collapse in the fertile proportion of the population) and their replacement by immigrants of mainly reproductive age and high fertility.

Most Europeans are too brainwashed to see that their anxiety about the population explosion drives their own extinction, an anxiety deliberately fostered by the political lackeys and dupes of a plutocratic elite that seeks the annihilation of the most powerful nation states through a program of genocide against the indigenous people of those nations.

But the mainstream political parties and the corporate media outlets respond to this analysis with charges of racism, and xenophobia, while state-funded organs of political correctness deploy anti-free speech laws to muzzle critics of genocidal population policies.

None of which alters the fact that the nations of Western Europe are being inundated by people of non-European extraction and of alien culture, who are in many cases possessed of an aggressive settler mentality.

Many London boroughs now have a majority ethnic population, my father's home town, the City of Leicester is majority ethnic, in Birmingham, England's second city, English Children in primary school are not even the largest minority. Overall, 25 percent of births in Britain are to foreign-born mothers, and many more to foreign-born fathers of English mothers and grand-daughters of foreign born fathers or mothers. Thus the English will be an ethnic minority in their own home within a generation.

The idea that there are just too many people on earth is a value judgement not a matter of scientific fact. The carrying capacity of the globe has been estimated at about 1 person to every 27 square meters. My own calculation, based on the solar energy available for crop production and industrial and domestic use, suggests 80 square meters is more reasonable, i.e., a global population of one trillion -- but I'm not advocating it.

So we are nowhere near a physical population limit. But rapid population growth inevitably means a declining quality of life for everyone. Doubling the population every thirty or forty years means doubling the infrastructure every thirty or forty years or experiencing a decline in quality of life. Yet it can take generations to create great institutions. And there's no means to double the number of Yellowstone or Serengeti national parks. Or recover millions of acres of green belt built over to accommodate a population explosion fueled entirely by mass immigration.

And you cannot turn out extra copies of Oxford University or Trinity College Cambridge at will. Nor can you simply enlarge the institutions you've got without changing them and quite likely destroying their effectiveness in the process, as has happened to most Western Universities that, in recent decades, have become giant bureaucracies repugnant to any free-thinking scholar.

The Western World should leave the Third World to care for itself. At present Africans and Muslims vehemently oppose adoption of the Western way of "vice." That is their choice. Let them deal with the consequences. In the meantime, the nations of a dying Christendom should pay head to their tradition, for the wages of sin are death.

Related:

CanSpeccy: The New European Genocide

Aangirfan: The Population Problem

Only Dupes, Liars and Politicians Talk of "The Scientific Consensus" on Climate Change

This video records a debate on whether there is a need for action to reduce anthropogenic carbon emissions. The warmist, in the debate, economist Richard Denniss, sought chiefly to establish two points. First, that there is a scientific consensus that we face catastrophic climate disruption unless anthropogenic carbon emission (i.e., the burning of fossil fuels) is drastically curbed; and second, that those who question the "scientific consensus" are conspiracy theorists who, by implication, should be discredited if not forcibly silenced.

Galilei Galileo: Tried by the Inquisition for questioning the "Scientific Consensus."
Painting: Joseph Nicolas Robert-Fleury.

Both claims are dishonest and stupid.

The claim that there is a scientific consensus according to which the world faces an unacceptable risk of catastrophic climate warming due to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide is false not because of a lack of agreement among climate scientists, but because there never is, and never can be, a consensus among scientists on anything. And there is never a scientific consensus on anything because if there were, that would mark the end of science as it relates to the issue in question.

Yes, there are times when most scientists either accept, or do not challenge, a particular conclusion or theory, although that is certainly not true today of any general conclusion about climate change. But the scientific community never formally declares a "Scientific Consensus" about anything because it is axiomatic to science that there is no scientific fact or theory immune to challenge. And, in fact, to successfully challenge what was heretofore a generally accepted scientific theory constitutes the highest aspiration of every ambitious scientist.

When climate warmists talk about the scientific consensus they are, then, attempting, and with considerable success, to impose a gag on scientists who might challenge what is not the "scientific Consensus" but what the warmists hope to impose as the political consensus.

The attempt by climate warmists to tag those skeptical about climate warming as "conspiracy theorists" is a further deadly attack on the integrity and effectiveness of science. For it is precisely the unconventional view, the outsider's insight, the theory out of left field, on which the advancement of science depends. Not all seemingly far-out theories are correct, of course. Some, most in fact, are just far-out and wrong. But the near universal labeling of critics of a non-existent "Scientific Consensus" as "conspiracy nuts" who ought to be gassed, seems to mark, if not the end, at least the beginning of the end of the age of reason and with it the end of real science.

When Will Obama Do the Right Thing By America's Black Youth?

Time for a Constitutional amendment:
assuring the right to a job at a living wage 

Youth unemployment in America has grown throughout the depression as older, more experienced workers have been increasingly driven to compete with workforce entrants for low-skill and poorly paid jobs. Among black youth (aged 16 to 24) the official unemployment rate is around 40% although, if discouraged workers are included, the actual rate may be twice that.

How then do young blacks react when apparently excluded from the world of work? Black males have never been accused of lacking balls, so it should be a matter for no surprise if many of them take to mugging white people, stealing cars and dealing drugs, with the corollary that many of them are sent to jail (at a cost to the taxpayer of $30,000 per convict per year) where they learn the customs and creed of the hardened criminal.

Unemployed youths who avoid trouble with the law are nevertheless a burden on society, being largely if not entirely dependent on the taxpayer for food, clothing, healthcare and lodging. In addition, the existence of a great underclass of unemployed or underemployed Americans, both young and old, necessitates a huge welfare bureaucracy that adds an enormous overhead to the cost of welfare.

Failing to acquire workforce skills, many unemployed youths of today will become the long-term unemployed adults of tomorrow, insuring a snowballing increase in the proportion of the population that is economically dysfunctional, criminally inclined and deeply disillusioned about the society in which they live.

What then to do?

Simple: legislate the right of every citizen to work at a living wage.

How?

As I have described here and here and here. Which is to say, by means of a wage subsidy program that will achieves three things:

• (1) Drive the cost of employing a marginal worker to below the value of that worker's labor: the essential condition for employment in the private sector;


• (2) Provide marginal workers the opportunity to raise their workforce skills and thus increase their earnings potential and their contribution to the economy;


• (3) Create a vast low-wage labor resource that will stimulate rates of business formation and expansion.

In addition, a wage subsidy program will save hugely in welfare costs and the costs of crime and other forms of social dysfunction, to an extent that greatly exceeds the cost of the subsidy.

Needless to say, the imperialist warmongers, Zionists stooges and and Wall Street operatives who run the US, Canada, and Britain, don't give a damn about the poor or the taxpayer and will give not the slightest thought to this self-evident solution to the West's chief social and economic problem.

In fact, what the ruling elite hope for is that the faces of the poor be, not ground, but underground, pending which desired state, they are to be fed on the crumbs from the bankers tables, but otherwise  left to fester, while they're place in society is taken by hungrier, more energetic, Third World immigrants, with no conception of the rule of law, the rights of man, freedom of speech or constitutional government: a new people, in other words, for a new regime of plutocratic despotism.

Israel versus Gaza: The Math

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Amanpour interview with Hamas chief, Khaled Meshaal

Israel Defense Minister: Still not the time to conquer Gaza
(For that we need greater control over the White House. Now if some crazed racist white supremacist were to take out Obama, who has become far too independent since his re-election, we'd have that dumb Zionist stooge Joe Biden at our beck and call.)