The Fascist Threat

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

This talk was delivered at the Doug Casey conference, "When Money Dies," in Phoenix on October 1, 2011.

Everyone knows that the term fascist is a pejorative, often used to describe any political position a speaker doesn’t like. There isn’t anyone around who is willing to stand up and say: "I’m a fascist; I think fascism is a great social and economic system."

But I submit that if they were honest, the vast majority of politicians, intellectuals, and political activists would have to say just that.

Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police State as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive State the unlimited master of society.

Europeans and the wounded snake syndrome

By CanSpeccy

Image source.

During a financial crisis, Teddy Roosevelt remarked that "When people have lost their money, they strike out unthinkingly, like a wounded snake, at whoever is most prominent in the line of vision."

As the debt crisis worsens, Europeans are beginning to exhibit the wounded snake syndrome, with European Bank Head, Christian Noyer, saying Britain's AAA credit rating should be cut before France's:

...they should start by downgrading Britain which has more deficits, as much debt, more inflation, less growth than us and where credit is slumping.

Meantime, in Portugal, Pedro Nuno Santos, vice-president of the Socialist Party, was taped at a party dinner calling for diplomatic warfare against the EU's northern powers:

We have an atomic bomb that we can use in the face of the Germans and the French: this atomic bomb is simply that we won't pay.

Hey, good thinking. Make those Nazi German bastards pay our inflated civil service salaries and fund our early retirement.

In Lisbon, protesters marched on Thursday denouncing plans by the new conservative government to raise the working week to 42 hours. Wages are being cut 16pc for higher paid, and 8pc for lower paid public workers.

But that's not enough, apparently. So why don't they just face reality and cut those public service salaries another 16%?

Why? Because they don't realize what's hit them.

The ruling elite just exported the economies of the Western nations to Asia, Africa and the Middle-East where people work for pennies an hour.

China is Europe's biggest trading partner. Europe imports 282 billion euros a year from China, exporting only 113 billion Euros a year in return. There is a similar huge imbalance in trade with Russia. If it weren't for the Americans buying tons of French wine, Italian fashion wear and millions of German cars, together worth far more than Americans export to Europe, the Europeans would already be flat broke.

So the idea that Portuguese civil servants can go on indefinitely earning many times as much as Chinese workers, while enjoying incredibly cheap manufactured goods from Asia and Eastern Europe is idiotic.

Enjoying the fruits of cheap foreign labor was possible only during the transition to an Asian dominated World economy, and it was made possible by escalating debt.

Now that the cost of debt service is destroying the European economies, it's time to get things straight, not strike out unthinkingly at the Germans who at least have the virtue of being exceptionally competent at manufacturing -- so much so that they can sell much of their stuff at many times the price of Chinese goods because people really like it.

For Europeans as a whole, the only hope is to acknowledge defeat, adjust wages to what is affordable in the global market and get back to work.

Hitchens dead, US mission in Iraq not accomplished, scientists make virus to kill half of humanity (Hey. Well done!), and much more

Father Raymond J. de Souza: Christopher Hitchens lived in service of plain hatred

Peter Hitchens: In Memoriam, my courageous brother Christopher, 1949-2011

Christopher Hitchens Dead at 62: NYTimes Obit
One naturally hopes that Hitchens was wrong in proclaiming the non-existence of God and is now before the throne, receiving a withering reprimand delivered with super-natural sharpness of wit.

James Corbett, Paul Hellyer: US/Canada merger by stealth

[See also:
The Election Over, Canada Renews Anschluss Talks with US

Who stands for Canadian Sovereignty? Not the Conservative Party of Canada]

How Ron Paul will be denied the Republican nomination whatever voters want

Margaret Thatcher (Source: WSJ)

What Would The Iron Lady Do?

Alan Hart - Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews

US Federal Government Takes Final Step to Suspend Constitution

Two teams of scientists have independently constructed a deadly strain of flu able to kill half of humanity
The drug companies can't wait for it to get loose. Novartis is already gearing to produce the vaccine.

Lizard expert [extraterrestrial?]
U. of Texas Dr. Eric R. Pianka

Top Texas scientist looks forward to the emergence of airborne Ebola virus
At the 109th meeting of the Texas Academy of Science at Lamar University in Beaumont on 3-5 March 2006, hundred[s of] members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola. The speech was given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka, the University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert who the Academy named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.

And, in Iraq, Was the Mission Accomplished? Patrick Buchanan

the beginning of the end of Western global dominance The Slog
"The International Monetary Fund having suggested that developing economies will expand three times faster than advanced nations this year, PIMCO put some money where the mouth is by recommending that bond-based lenders desert U.S., U.K. and European debt. Debts from places like Russia and Egypt are now seen as safer."

Britain's self-hating white liberal elite

Try some Nirvana this week-end

Double Standards Under British Law

From a report by the Hudson Institute of New York

Last week a video of young, white, working class woman began circulating through the media. In the video, the woman – Emma West – is seen and heard verbally abusing fellow passengers on a train, many of whom are non-white. Ms. West's rant is certainly offensive, and must have been upsetting to those who had to listen to it. She complained, for example, that the train – and Britain – are full with "a load of black people and a load of ****ing Polish," and tells one woman "You ain't British, you're black. Ms. West was promptly arrested after the Daily Mail and Telegraph asked readers to call in with her identity – which was initially unknown. She has since been refused bail – accordingly for her own protection -- she received death threats – and is now spending time in jail. Her children have also been taken into custody. ." Even though Ms. West's diatribe is deplorable, insulting language should not be a crime.

The timing of the emergence of the video is somewhat unfortunate: Ms. West's case is now being contrasted, by several blogs at least, to the court case a few days later of four young Muslim women,. The four women – who were drunk at the time – had repeatedly assaulted Rhea Page, 22, as she waited for a taxi with her boyfriend. Even after she had collapsed motionless on the pavement, she was met with "a flurry of kicks to the head, back, arms and legs." As the four women attacked her, they shouted "kill the white slag."

Those perpetrating such a vicious and racially-motivated attack should expect to receive a sentence of up to five years.

However, Judge Robert Brown, who heard the case, told the women that: "Those who knock someone to the floor and kick them in the head can expect to go inside, but I'm going to suspend the sentence." The four were instead given a 12 month suspended sentence. Judge Brown took this decision because they were not used to being drunk, he said, because of their "religion."

Many British people now feel that they are living in a two-tier system of double standards: one for the white working class, and one for Muslims.

They "feel it?" They surely know it.

Palestine before 1948, and other links

Images of Palestinian cities during the 1920's and 1930's, before the creation of the state of Israel.

See also:
David Remnick to Haaretz: Gingrich statement on 'invented' Palestinians is 'alarming'

US Asks Iran to return spy drone
An odd request. "We need it to continue spying on you!" Could this thing be some kind of Trojan Horse?

The Government of Canada OutZionizing the Zionists

Aangirfan: In Egypt, what some scholars and Islamist candidates for Parliament are hoping for

Aangirfan: Terrible secrets of cleansed Libyan town

Emma West, an Angry Woman With Much to be Angry About

By CanSpeccy

Emma West. Image source

Who is Emma West, asks "This Is My England" in a blog post about "the viral YouTube hit of ten days ago ...of a woman on a south London tram unleashing a foul-mouthed tirade directed at immigrants and ethnic minorities, thereby upsetting a number of her fellow passengers."

The 34-year-old woman, Emma West of the London Borough of Croydon, is now in jail having been charged with a racially aggravated public order offense. The mother of two young children has been remanded in custody until January 3rd. Bail was denied, by Magistrate Ian McNeal for West's own protection (It's the only way the British state can protect its own citizens, apparently. Bang 'em up in gaol with a bunch of thieves and drug pedlars). West has received numerous death threats and her address has been circulated on Facebook and Twitter.

Commenting on the case, "This Is My England" remarks:

A five-country European survey run by the Guardian in March suggests that further immigration to the UK is not broadly welcomed. Just 31% of the Britons polled agreed with the statement "I approve of people moving from one EU country to another so they can work and live." In the case of moving to the EU from the wider world, just 20% of UK respondents agreed with the corresponding statement.

But, says "This Is My England"

...even those who express similar views to Ms. West's in a more restrained manner are directing their fears and anger at the wrong targets.

...Recent immigrants to this country are here because it has suited the business community to import cheap, willing labour. Should the immigrants face opprobrium for answering that call?

In that, I would say, This Is My England is only half right and largely missing the point.

Liberal Pygmies

Mbuti pygmy. Image source

Enraged by David Cameron's refusal to hand British sovereignty to the European Union of Soviet Socialists, Cameron' coalition partner, Liberal-Democratic Party leader Nick Clegg, resorted to racist abuse, claiming that Cameron, "risked making Britain a ‘pygmy’ on the world stage."

The pygmified Liberal leader seems reluctant, however, to give up his comfy birth as Deputy Prime Minister, a necessary preliminary to the election that will oust the Liberals from Parliament and make way for a handsome Tory majority.

* Pygmy is considered a racist, colonial-era term, which refers to members of a group of hunter-gatherers characterized by shortness of stature and living outside the state structure in the unsettled equatorial rainforest of Central Africa.

See also:

Richard Cottrell: Did the UK just leave the EU? Bilderberg decided six months ago that she’s in forever

Theordore Dalrymple on the Guardian and the "disgrace" of the majority

An editorial in the Guardian on October 25 exposed the nature of what often is called “the European project”: a goal that those pursuing it never state out loud. ...

... Britain’s Conservative Party, the editorial argued, was unfit to govern because of its continued internal division on the issue of the U.K.’s membership in the European Union, the latest manifestation of which was a vote by 80 Conservative members of Parliament in favor of holding a referendum on the issue. A Guardian poll, published in the paper on the same day as the editorial, established that 70 percent of the population believed that such a referendum should be held; 49 percent wanted to leave the union and 40 percent wanted to remain in it (11 percent were undecided).

One can make many criticisms of the Conservative Party, but surely one such criticism is not that 80 of its members of parliament have voiced the disquiet of at least half the nation’s population about the most important question that it faces. The Guardian called the 80 members of parliament “a disgrace,” by which it meant that the opinion of fully half of the population, and possibly more, should not even be heard in the Mother of Parliaments. In other words, the philosopher-kings of the European nomenklatura should be allowed to get on with their work free of interference—because, after all (and as new evidence further proves every day), they are doing such a fantastic job.

Mish: Hell Will Freeze Over Before Finland Signs Treaty; Europe's Blithering Idiots Make UK the Lone Winner

Clegg won't walk. He knows his party faces annihilation in the polls

Emma West and the liberal hatred of democracy

... Emma West was wrong-headed in her rough analysis of what is ailing a Britain she described as now being "fuck all". The real enemies of a relatively low-paid, probably poorly educated person who feels angry and disenfranchised are not her fellow south London residents who happen to have been born in other countries or who happen not to be white. Her real enemies are the politicians who collude with the banks who ruin the economy and the CEOs running the companies that drive down costs via the importation of inexpensive labour, via the off-shoring of more and more jobs and via the sheltering of their profits from the taxation needed to keep this country a decent place to live....

Are Pygmies really human?

Congolese Pygmies Being Eaten

Dave's Chance

Or How Britain's David Cameron Could Smash the Lib-Con Coalition, Win an Election on the Promise of an EU Referendum, and Restore the Thatcherite Agenda Without Maggie's Streak of Lunacy

Up EURS: Cameron in Churchill pose

Britain has refused to join an EU fiscal union under the tutelage of a banker from Goldman Sachs.

This has enraged the Liberal left who know that exclusion from the fiscal union means ultimate exclusion from the emerging Union of European Soviet Socialist Republics, with its cosy unthinking political conformity, its windmills and other boondoggles, and its abundance of comfy well-paid births in the nomenklatura for those of the politically correct tendency.

This outrage provides Cameron with a chance that can come only once in a premier's lifetime.

It is the chance to split the coalition, to go to the country on the promise of a referendum on EU membership, and to restore the Thatcherite agenda without Maggie's streak of lunacy and without her ambivalence on the EU.

The future that Britain out of the EU would then face would be one either of independence, goodwill to all men, peace and prosperity, or of total subservience and incorporation into the American Empire.

If Cameron wishes to be remembered as a great man he would opt for national independence. More likely though, Britain would undergo incorporation as the unnamed fifty-first American state, complete with TSA gropers at Heathrow and surveillance and assassination drones overhead.

See also:
Mish -- Cameron should tell the EU to take all their rules and shove them

PostScript
When Niall Ferguson happens to agree with me, I am reluctant to admit this as proof that great minds think alike, whatever the exceptional force of my own mind. Still, I have to hand it to Ferguson that he quite independently sketched the scenario that I have outlined above. Writing in the Wall St. Journal he has an essay about Europe in the year 2021, which contains the following paragraphs:

David Cameron—now beginning his fourth term as British prime minister—thanks his lucky stars that, reluctantly yielding to pressure from the Euroskeptics in his own party, he decided to risk a referendum on EU membership. His Liberal Democrat coalition partners committed political suicide by joining Labour's disastrous "Yeah to Europe" campaign.

Egged on by the pugnacious London tabloids, the public voted to leave by a margin of 59% to 41%, and then handed the Tories an absolute majority in the House of Commons. Freed from the red tape of Brussels, England is now the favored destination of Chinese foreign direct investment in Europe. And rich Chinese love their Chelsea apartments, not to mention their splendid Scottish shooting estates.

Ferguson also offers in this essay a concise explanation of how bankrupt Britain managed to weather the European debt crisis so easily:

With a fiscal position little better than most of the Mediterranean countries' and a far larger banking system than in any other European economy, Britain with the euro would have been Ireland to the power of eight. Instead, the Bank of England was able to pursue an aggressively expansionary policy. Zero rates, quantitative easing and devaluation greatly mitigated the pain and allowed the "Iron Chancellor" George Osborne to get ahead of the bond markets with pre-emptive austerity. A better advertisement for the benefits of national autonomy would have been hard to devise.

He also projects what seems eminently sensible, a re-union of the British Isles:

At the beginning of David Cameron's premiership in 2010, there had been fears that the United Kingdom might break up. But the financial crisis put the Scots off independence; small countries had fared abysmally. And in 2013, in a historical twist only a few die-hard Ulster Unionists had dreamt possible, the Republic of Ireland's voters opted to exchange the austerity of the U.S.E. for the prosperity of the U.K. Postsectarian Irishmen celebrated their citizenship in a Reunited Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland with the slogan: "Better Brits Than Brussels."

His anticipation of a Nordic union also seems both plausible and desirable:

Another thing no one had anticipated in 2011 was developments in Scandinavia. Inspired by the True Finns in Helsinki, the Swedes and Danes—who had never joined the euro—refused to accept the German proposal for a "transfer union" to bail out Southern Europe. When the energy-rich Norwegians suggested a five-country Norse League, bringing in Iceland, too, the proposal struck a chord.

These ideas lead naturally to the conclusion that Europe will be transformed into a German-dominated block. This was essentially the arrangement envisaged by Neville Chamberlain in the 1930's as he worked to set Germany against Russia, the goal being to create a central European German Empire that would be balanced to the East by a truncated Russia and to the West by an Atlantic bloc comprising Britain, France and the US. Ferguson's prediction differs only in the assumption that France will go with Germany not Britain. But who knows. Do the French really wish to submerge their identity in a German-dominated union? We'll see.

Post-postscript
This explanation of Cameron's foreign policy from the BBC sitcom Yes Minister via Mish:

Episode Five: The Writing on the Wall

Sir Humphrey: Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last five hundred years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it's worked so well?

Hacker: That's all ancient history, surely?

Sir Humphrey: Yes, and current policy. We had to break the whole thing [the EEC] up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn't work. Now that we're inside we can make a complete pig's breakfast of the whole thing: set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians, the Italians against the Dutch. The Foreign Office is terribly pleased; it's just like old times.

Hacker: But surely we're all committed to the European ideal?
Sir Humphrey: [chuckles] Really, Minister.

Hacker: If not, why are we pushing for an increase in the membership?
Sir Humphrey: Well, for the same reason. It's just like the United Nations, in fact; the more members it has, the more arguments it can stir up, the more futile and impotent it becomes.

Hacker: What appalling cynicism.
Sir Humphrey: Yes... We call it diplomacy, Minister.

See also:
Peter Hitchens: David Cameron’s Phoney War, or A Curse in Disguise

Patrick Buchanan: David Cameron's Finest Hour

Mish: Sniveling, apologetic Cameron seeks to snatch defeat from jaws of EU victory

The end of education as we know it?

First Nations University, Saskachewan, Canada. Cool building, but is it 

obsolete already?

In a NY Times article entitled Death Knell for the Lecture: Technology as a Passport to Personalized Education, Daphne Koller offers some good ideas on harnessing the power of the Internet in education, but fails to mention the critical reform necessary to the creation of a truly effective educational system freed both of its present role as the prime conduit of state propaganda and of the suffocating burden of bureaucratic administration. That critical reform is to make a complete break between learning and educational accreditation.

Without separation of learning and accreditation, students are compelled to enroll in a high school or college to gain a recognized educational qualification. But if accreditation could be gained by successfully challenging a public exam without the necessity of enrolling in school or college and paying the enormous associated cost, either directly or as a taxpayer, then the power of the digital media, combined with a private sector mentoring and coaching industry, could truly revolutionize education in both cost and effectiveness.

Thereafter, schools and universities would be patronized only insofar as they provided a cost competitive service, which they would certainly be unable to do without radical reform.

At the higher levels, at least, the services of private coaches, working with students either face-to-face or online, would generally be both more effective and much cheaper than those of institutionalized school teachers or professors.

A private sector coaching industry will make use of teaching talent wherever it is to be found, and it will require no ivy-clad halls or multimillion-dollar football coaches to deliver its services.

Instead, private homes, church basements, or commercial office spaces in every village, town and city will become the schools of the future. Students will advance at their own pace, studying sometimes full-time, sometimes part-time and often only intermittently.

All educational transactions would be voluntary. No student would be stuck for a semester, a year or longer still with a teacher with whom they lack rapport or effective communication.

Teachers would achieve status according to the success of their students and could charge accordingly. But their key function and the chief measure of their success would be the degree to which they taught students to love learning and thus how to teach themselves.

Exporting the economy

David Ricardo (1772-1823). Image source

Until recent times, it was understood that the prosperity of a nation depended on three factors: capital invested in industry; the skills and experience of the workforce, and the availability of land for economic activity, i.e., the three factors of production, land, labor and capital.

International trade was acknowledged to be advantageous to all parties insofar as it enabled each country to do more of what it is did best. This was the theory of comparative advantage, enunciated by 19th Century British economist and bond trader, David Ricardo.

Ricardo was explicit, however, in stating that international free trade is beneficial to all parties only if capital is immobile, since exporting capital, one of the factors of production, will inevitably lower the productivity and hence reduce the prosperity of the population.

Consistent with these ideas, enlightened national governments endeavored to restrict capital outflow, promote workforce education and training, and in the Western World, limit mass immigration from the developing World since that diluted the capital stock of the nation on a per capita basis, reduced the per capita availability of land and infrastructure, and lowered average workforce skills and education -- aside from its potential for destroying the nation through population replacement and reproductive competition.

But today, to hear the media, the Nobel-prize-winning economists, the politicians-on-the-make, and the human rights activists tell it, that's all anti-diluvian racist rubbish.

How come?

In one word, globalization.

Or in several words: We're an empire now and the leadership elected nationally, serves the empire not you, the people, who elected them.

But how does that change the principles of economics?

Easily: through the allocation of money, fame and power.

Thus, says J.J. goldberg in a  Jewish Daily Forward article entitled: A Low-Rent America Can't Be a Strong Friend of Israel.

Fans of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman might get a kick out of this. Nearly a decade and a half ago, the acclaimed economist savagely reviewed a new book on the perils of economic globalization, dismissing it as “simplistic,” “foolish,” “thoroughly silly” and more. He said the author, Rolling Stone investigative journalist William Greider, had naively failed to consult “competent economists,” which led him to “trip on his own intellectual shoelaces.” Classic Krugman.

Krugman has since moved from MIT to a tenured chair at Princeton and a Nobel Prize. Greider moved from Rolling Stone to the smaller and less remunerative weekly The Nation. The funny thing is, Greider turned out to be right. Krugman got globalization very wrong.

Then there's the case of Paul Craig Roberts, a better man than Krugman, surely. Former Deputy Secretary of the US Treasury, former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service, senior fellow in political economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, contributor to numerous magazines and newspapers, author or co-author of eight books.

On March 26, 2010, Roberts wrote Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It

There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.

Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.

Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”

Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.

Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.

Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.

Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.

Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”

In evidence of this charge of treason by America's elite Roberts continued:

I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.”

For the last six years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.

...The American corporate media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.

And what Roberts says of the American elite and the American corporate media is true of the elite and the corporate media throughout the West. The interests of the people are to be sacrificed without limit for the "interest groups that empower the government."

Thus, jobs are off-shored and outsourced to take advantage of cheap labor in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Thus, mass migration from the developing world to densely populated Western Europe is promoted to drive down wages, while it destroys local culture, and in an increasing number of urban areas, reduces the indigenous populations to a demoralized minority that is being out-bred by the immigrants, of whom some show an unconcealed contempt for local customs and religion.

Likewise in America, native born citizens are displaced from the labor pool by millions of illegal immigrants who work in the underground economy at below minimum wages and often under appalling and illegal conditions, a process enabled by the Federal Government by the deliberate non-enforcement of Federal immigration law.

Thus, also, Nobel Prizes and newspaper columns for bent economists, power and prestige for "human rights advocates" who promote mass immigration and genocidal policies of political correctness and multi-culturalism, and massive profits for those enabled by a corrupt political establishment to engage in unrestricted global wage arbitrage resulting in mass unemployment in the West, collapsing welfare services, failing schools, underfunded pensions, and racial and cultural demoralization and destruction.

And astonishingly, so callous is the ruling elite that the fate of the unemployed and the underemployed is barely discussed. Indeed, it is enforced by minimum wage laws, bad schools, and welfare legislation that scandalously deny employment and the opportunity to gain work experience to a large part of the workforce that cannot compete with Asian labour that in some industries earns only pennies per hour.

What Milton Friedman said in 1978 about black poverty in the United States, is now applicable to much of the white working class in the U.S., Canada and Europe. Sadly, Milton Friedman is no longer around to state the fact.

Awesome Urban Skiing: Trail, BC

JP Auclair Street Segment (from All.I.Can.)
by Sherpas Cinema
Via Wimp.com

The Mechanics of Empire

By Eric Walberg

Smoke rising after a cross-border NATO air strike on
a Pakistani border post Nov. 26, 2011 (Image source)

NATO helicopters violated the airspace of Pakistan from Afghanistan on Friday and opened unprovoked fire on a check post in Mohmand, northwest Pakistan at midnight. Presumably the pilots got the wrong coordinates from MacDill Air Force Central Command in Florida or took too many army-prescribed uppers. The attack continued even after Pakistani commanders pleaded with coalition forces to stop.

As a show of anger, Pakistan ordered the CIA to vacate drone operations at Shamsi Air Base in southwestern Baluchistan and closed both the Khyber and Baluchistan supply routes into Afghanistan, cutting off 70 per cent of NATO's supplies. It was the worst such incident since 9/11.

Pakistani army post struck by NATO helicopters
resulting in the deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers. (Image source)

This is not the first time NATO helicopters attack Pakistani soldiers or that Pakistan closed the Khyber Pass. A US airstrike in 2008 killed 11 soldiers and last year two, prompting Pakistan to shut the Khyber Pass for 10 days in protest against the almost daily, illegal and unsanctioned US air strikes that since 2004 have killed 2,780 people, 83 per cent civilians, among them 72 soldiers.

However, this time the rhetoric is full blast. Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani announced Pakistan would boycott the crucial Bonn II conference on Afghanistan this week, fatally undermining it. Army Chief General Ashfaq Kayani call the attack a "blatant and unacceptable act", and Interior Minister Rehman Malik insisted on Sunday that the “NATO supply line had not been suspended but permanently stopped.”

Pakistanis lead by Imran Khan protesting drone attacks. (Image source)

That is highly unlikely, but this could be the trigger for a political earthquake against a despised national government. MP Ahmed Khan Bahadur from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial Awami National Party told CNN, "This is the time to be united as a nation and to punch NATO with a fist. NATO could never dare if we were united." Politically ambitious media star Imran Khan, who heads the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Party, said it was time for Pakistan to pull out of the US-led "war on terror". Hundreds of thousands have rallied in Peshawar, Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi to protest government corruption and the alliance with the US.

How we stopped Colonel Gadhaffi killing his own people

By Aangirfan


Majer in Libya
In August 2011, NATO carried out a major massacre in the Libyan town of Majer.

NATO murdered 85 People, including 33 Children and 32 Women.

German broadcaster Deutsche Welle has investigated:

1. 500-pound bombs were dropped on people's homes.

2. NATO's bombing of Majer was meant "to clear the way for rebels to advance on the embattled Gadhafi-controlled city of Zlitan, 10 kilometers to the north."

Qana massacre in Lebanon
According to San Francisco Bay View:

"NATO used the same tactic that Israel used during the two Qana massacres.

"After the first three bombs dropped at around 11 pm, many residents of the area ran to the bombed houses to try to save their loved ones.

"NATO then instantly struck with more bombs slaughtering 85 Libyans."

The QANA massacres were carried out with American weapons in 1996 and 2006.

51 children were murdered.

QanaMajer
http://libyasos.blogspot.com/2011/08/libya-nato-in-zlitan-massacred-85.html
http://youtu.be/JF9ZYup4Qwc
http://libyasos.blogspot.com/2011/11/operation-unified-protector-nato-in.html
http://libyasos.blogspot.com/p/photo.html
http://libyasos.blogspot.com/p/tribunal.html

Climategate: That's just how science is done

The scepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.

Bertrand Russell, The Will To Doubt

By CanSpeccy

The Hockey Stick Graph (Source)

Climategate is the alleged scientific misconduct revealed through publication, by a person or persons unknown, of thousands of email communications among leading climate scientists.

These revelations are, says Financial Times columnist Christopher Caldwell, a catastrophe for science.

What the emails show, says Caldwell, is "that scientists are no less prone to vanity, rivalries and corner-cutting than people in other walks of life."

This, says Caldwell, has "undermined the scientists’ claim to be speaking as scientists rather than as interested parties."

That's the catastrophe?

LOL.

Anyone who thinks that the debate between climate "warmists" and "denialists" falls short of science's tradition of objectivity and fairness should remind themselves of the long-running dispute between Isaac Newton, the founder of modern science, and Gottfried Leibniz, variously described as "the last universal genius" and "the most comprehensive thinker since Aristotle." Terms employed by the chief protagonists or their associates in that debate included "thief," "toady" and "ape."

In comparison, the dispute between Mike Mann and Steve McIntyre over the hockey-stick graph has been conducted with collegial restraint.

The discovery, for those to whom it is a discovery, that scientists are not lobotomized calculating machines programmed solely for the revelation of truth, but self-serving, self-aggrandizing, largely irrational people like the rest of us, provides, surely, an important lesson.

For how, in a democracy, can science be properly managed if the public is imbued with the delusional belief that scientists are mostly saints not sinners?

Scientists can be, as anyone who has studied the history of science knows, furiously competitive to a degree that can, and often does, influence the objectivity of their work.

Scientists, for example, often fiddle their results, less with the intent to deceive than because of an overwhelming conviction of the correctness of their scientific intuition.

But so what? Everything eventually comes out in the wash. Or should do. Mistakes and fakes cannot be concealed for ever in an empirical science where others can repeat your observations and experiments. Science is a competitive enterprise and if you get something important wrong, someone will be happy to point out your error.

More often, though, if someone else's result does not fit their model of the world, an experienced scientist will just ignore it. People who want to find something out, don't waste their time acting as policemen.

And if your hunch is right and you fake results to prove it, what harm is done?

Galileo claimed to have observed more than it was possible to see with his primitive telescope, but his ideas about the solar system proved consistent with later more precise observations.

Gregor Mendel's revolutionary findings on the segregation of genetic components during reproduction are said by statisticians to have been too good to be true. But they are consistent with verified theory.

Arthur Eddington's measurement on May 29, 1919 of the deflection of starlight by the gravitational pull of the sun, which was generally accepted at the time as proof of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, was highly questionable due to measurement error. Nevertheless, subsequent evidence confirmed the result that Eddington claimed.

Newton and Einstein fiddled their results by introducing what later proved to be unnecessary fudge factors.

Newton corrected his calculation of the speed of sound to make it match what proved to be an inaccurate experimental measurement by incorporating a meaningless adjustment for what he called the "crassity of the particles."

Einstein fiddled his cosmological model by introducing the cosmological constant, a fudge factor to explain why gravity doesn't cause everything in the universe to glom together in a heap.

When Hubble showed that the universe was expanding, Einstein described his cosmological constant as "the greatest blunder of my career."

As it happens, the cosmological constant has come back into vogue to account for the fact that the universe is not only expanding but is expanding at an accelerating rate.

So much for the objectivity and irreproachable integrity of scientists.

Thus, when Caldwell says: "The emails were damaging because they undermined the scientists’ claim to be speaking as scientists rather than as interested parties, the damage, surely, can only be to scientific humbugs.

It is the mistaken belief in the saintly, unprejudiced, objectivity of scientists that constitute the real danger to science.

Ignorance of the frailties of scientists means failure to guard against the ever present danger of science being skewed by outside interference: Al Gore, the Green Party, oil, the tobacco industry, big pharma, the UN, all seeking to control the scientific message and the scientific agenda for financial or political reasons.

Enough of such interference and science is corrupted beyond redemption, as was true of genetics in the Soviet Union during the Lysenko era, and in Germany during the Nazi era.

Indeed, the magnitude of current efforts by both government and industry to influence science for financial or political ends is indicative of the unhealthy intellectual times in which we live.

Solving the Debt Crisis: An Ingenious Proposal

By CanSpeccy

Image source: Allen Roland's Blog

Australian economist Steve Keen proposes that instead of governments printing money and giving it to banks that lent money to folks who can't pay it back, they should print money and give it to the folks that can't pay back the money that banks lent -- on the condition that the recipients use the money to pay off their debts.

On the face of it, what Keen proposes is an alternative without a difference. Either way, the banks get back what they irresponsibly or incompetently lent to sub-prime borrowers who, by definition, were unlikely to pay it back. However, two important features distinguish Keen's idea from current mainstream economics thinking.

First, he says that not only should free money be given to debtors unable to repay their loans, but to everyone else too, which sounds fair, if inflationary.

Second, he says that when the banks get back the money they lent, they should not be allowed to lend it again. This seems a reasonable proposition, since the money lent was conjured by the banks out of thin air, so any right they had to lend it in the first place was by virtue of a government-granted license to print money, which evidently was employed irresponsibly, since much if not most of the money lent can't be paid back.

Then, argues Keen, once the unsustainable debt load has been reduced to a reasonable level, banks can be allowed to resume lending only to the extent required to support productive new investment in R and D, production facilities and other things that expand the real economy. This, says Keen, would bring to an end what he calls the Ponzi economy where people borrow to make speculative investments in assets they expect will rise in price because other people are borrowing to make speculative investments in assets they expect will rise in price.

Such restriction to bank activity would slash profits of the financial sector, from about 40% of all US corporate profits, currently, to perhaps five or six percent, which would seem entirely adequate for an industry that does little other than shuffle paper, or just digits, losing trillions in the process for which they expect the taxpayer to reimburse them.

In the course of such a contraction, Keen believes most banks would go broke and in that case, he indicates, their function should be taken over by the Government. That seems reasonable. Governments often manage to run things like railroads, highways, water works and post offices with tolerable efficiency, or at least not absolutely intolerable inefficiency.

Certainly, creating money out of nothing and lending it to people who might be able to pay it back looks like something governments could do at least as well as Northern Rock, Royal Bank of Scotland or any of the multitude of other banks that stupidly lost all the money they had, and even more that they didn't have, while paying their directors phenomenal salaries and bonuses.

The great merit of Steve Keen's scheme, so he maintains, is that it would end the second great depression now, rather than in a decade or two as will otherwise be the case. This claim, however, is not altogether convincing. The private sector cannot pay people more than their labor is worth. Yet minimum wages in the Western world are well above average salaries in China and other low-wage jurisdictions against which, under the GATT agreement, workers in the West must now compete without protection.

Furthermore, automation tends to reduce the global demand for labor. For example, Apple Corporation, embarrassed by a high suicide rate among workers employed by the Chinese contractor that manufacures the i-Pad, have decided to replace the workers with a million robots.

Thus it seems that more is required than Steve Keen's ingenious scheme to unwind the World's burden of debt if everyone who wishes to work has the opportunity to do so at a living wage. Moreover, in discussing his proposal with the BBC's Sarah Montague, Keen does not deal with the problem of unpayable sovereign debt, which is a major factor in the  current economic difficulties of many Western nations.

Nevertheless, the time is surely ripe for new ideas on how to assist homeowners, small business, and others burdened by intolerable debt to deleverage without intensifying the current recession or depression. Steve Keen is one of the few economists with a new idea worth considering.

And, insofar as it is inflationary, Keen's proposal for distributing government-created money would lower real wages, increase labor demand and so reduce unemployment. What's more, by distributing the cash equally to everyone, it would help redress the balance between the 1% and the 99.

See also:
Exporting the economy
The Economist Who Said "The Emperor Has No Clothes"

Can England Be Once More a Green and Pleasant Land?

The New Jerusalem

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear!O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my charriot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

William Blake (1804)

By CanSpeccy

When Blake wrote The New Jerusalem (1804), the industrial revolution in England was well advanced. Energy use per capita was twice that of mainland Europe. Coal was the chief source of energy and was carried by sea from Newcastle to Blake's native London.

With more than a million inhabitants, London was Europe's largest city and largest port, a place of docks and warehouses, of shipyards, foundries and factories, of tanneries and textile mills.

Back-to-back houses, without a yard. Source

In London and other industrial cities, workers lived in tiny houses, usually built back-to-back without yards, close to the factory or mill where they worked, which meant that the first great industrial cities, though hideous, were compact.

Workers' housing: Liverpool, England

Travel was limited. Blacktop had yet to be invented. The best roads were the ancient, deeply rutted Roman highways. Intercity travel by coach was slow, costly and dangerous. Working people lived close to their place of employment, commuting no more than a mile or two. They rarely traveled except by shanks pony. Many never in their lives traveled more than five or ten miles from their place of birth.

Thus, in Blake's day, despite the great "wen" of London and other teeming industrializing cities, the mines, the "dark satanic mills," much in England  was yet both green and pleasant.

With a total population of 8.6 million according to the census of 1801, the average population density was only 65 per square kilometer, or about 3.5 acres per person. But the rural population density was much less, and, as millions migrated to the industrial cities, the countryside became even more sparsely populated.

But first the railway and then the automobile, combined with rising incomes, changed all that.

The Global Debt Crisis: How Things Got This Screwed Up

Total US debt Image source

The global debt crisis is highly complex, yet in its ultimate causes, extremely simple.

Speaking before the Senate of the United States on October 5, 1994, Sir James Goldsmith said:

I believe that GATT... [i]f it is implemented, ... will impoverish and destabilize the industrialized world while at the same time cruelly ravaging the third world.

That is precisely what has come to pass.

Since 1994, wage arbitrage by multinational corporations, the majority of which are controlled by a few dozen financial entities, has destroyed tens of millions of jobs in Western Europe and North America, while driving up many-fold the value of the most successful exponents of off-shoring and outsourcing: companies such as Apple, IBM and Microsoft.

How have Western nations handled the job losses?

By maintaining consumer spending without regard for the loss of high-skills, high-wage, long-term jobs.

How have they done maintained consumer spending? By keeping real interests rates near zero or less, thereby enabling consumers to replace income with debt. Much of the consumer credit went into housing, which being largely a local industry, concealed the loss of long-term manufacturing, design, engineering and other professional jobs.

How have China and other developing nations handled the job gains?

By keeping wages and hence consumer spending low to achieve annihilating export competitiveness with high-wage Western workers, while enabling a tsunami of cheap credit to flow into job-creating investment in manufacturing and export service industries, with much of this money slopping over into real estate, including investment in China's empty cities.

So why isn't everyone happy?

Jesse Ventura: How Corrupt Republicans and Corrupt Democrats Ruined America

Ventura raises the same question we did concerning the fate of Navy SEAL Team 6: US Navy SEALs: Two Helicopters.

Ron Paul Highlights - CNN National Security Debate

How Canadian police handle a non-violent protest

Link source: Toronto G20 Exposed See from 2 minutes 10 seconds ...

And how the RCMP use agents provocateurs to create some action

Globe and Mail, November 22, 2011: In early 2009, two strangers started mingling with the activist communities of Kitchener-Waterloo and Guelph.

The first was a man. Those who crossed paths with him say he ingratiated himself by chauffeuring people to protests in his white van and buying them pitchers of beer at the bar after. The second, a woman, told people she had fled an abusive relationship ...

Read more

The European Freemasonry of Goldman Sachs

Le Monde's London correspondent, Marc Roche, claims that Goldman Sachs has infiltrated senior positions of power across Europe, including those of the Prime Ministers of Greece and Italy and the new head of the European Central Bank. Source: GRTV