Niall Ferguson: The Failure of the European Union and the Decline of the West

Niall Ferguson quotes from today's Globe and Mail:

The european core, which is really Germany, reaps the benefit of the weak Euro. But in the less productive periphery austerity is being inflicted. This is nothing less than the disintegration of Europe. 

Or what we said in: The Euro: A Weapon of Economic Mass Disruption

On the economic integration of Europe:

Ultimately, it was a conspiracy by the European elite against their electorates. 

 As we also said in: The Facist New World Order.

On Europe's insignificance on the World stage:

Every now and then the Americans try to whip Europe into shape via NATO, but over all, Europe is enormously invisible in the international arena.

 All of which suggests that Europe's leadership is fundamentally incompetent, dishonest and dangerous. Ferguson calls that pusillanimity -- "Latin, for weakness or vacillation of spirit. It's a nice word for cowardice or, in the vernacular, lack of balls. Pusillanimity of leadership is one of the big problems of our time."

In an interview with Michael Posner for the Globe and Mail, Ferguson points out that it is globalization, i.e., free trade with four billion third worlders earning pennies an hour, that is impoverishing low-skilled european workers, a point we have made, as for example in : What's Wrong With Europe and What Needs to Be Done About It.

It is good to see that despite the silence on this issue by all politicians and virtually all economists, I am not the only person pointing out the elephant in the room.

However, it is not just the low-skilled in the West who have suffered economically from globalization. For the first time ever, most unemployed Americans are college educated, and more than half of all people younger than 25 in the U.S. with bachelor's degrees are unemployed or under-employed.

Among older workers, competition from India and other developing nations has hardly helped computer programmers find well paid work in Europe and the US. And the hundreds of thousands of machinists and other skilled workers in Detroit who lost their job during the last several decades can in most cases blame unrestricted low-wage competition first from Mexico, then from China and other developing regions of the Third World.

The only point in the interview on which I disagree with Ferguson concerns the literary non-entity and settler in Britain from the Indian sub-continent, who implied in a review of Ferguson's work that Ferguson is a "racist." This, says Ferguson, was "malicious and defamatory" and he does not intend to take it "sitting idly."

I think this is a totally unproductive line to take, indeed counterproductive. Ferguson should just tell the lying fucker to eat shit and then forget about it. To deny such spurious charges only spreads the libel and diverts energy from useful endeavors.

Aliens R Us

Colonizing the Galaxy: The Fermi Paradox

There are millions, if not billions, of other worlds within our galaxy where life, including intelligent life, might have evolved at some point during the last several billion years. Such a time scale provides any intelligent life form plenty of time to colonize the galaxy. So why hasn't it already reached Earth. That is Fermi's Paradox.

Stephen Webb's book Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life offers fifty possible solutions that fall into three broad categories: “They Are Here”, extraterrestrials are in our vicinity, but hidden somehow; “They Exist But Have Not Yet Communicated”, they exist on a faraway world and have not reached us yet; and “They Do Not Exist”, they have never existed in the first place, or they have existed but have since gone extinct. ... (The Space Review)

This list of possibilities is not exhaustive.

It assumes that extra-terrestrials would be identifiable as such with blue skin, three eyes, two pairs of hands or a coating of green slime.

However, to colonize the galaxy thoroughly means establishing oneself on highly diverse worlds, with different atmospheres, g forces, daylengths, etc.

This would be an enormous challenge and rather pointless if sub-intelligent life forms already exist on habitable planets. In that case, one need only engineer some member of the native fauna, preferably one already possessed of binocular vision and an opposable thumb, so that it acquires one's own, i.e., an alien, mental capacity.

What would that kind of take over look like?

After hundreds of millions of years of dimbulb critters like Tyranosaurus rex, the rhinoceros, the three-toed sloth, the snail darter and the cockroach, there would emerge, in merely an instant of geological time, a species of vastly superior intelligence that rapidly appropriated the resources of the entire planet, created a high-tech civilization and then either destroyed itself through internecine nuclear conflict, or embarked on the colonization of the galaxy.

Should it follow the latter course, the native life form with an alien intelligence would be surprised to find that the task of galactic conquest had already been accomplished by a pre-existent civilization. It would be even more surprised to find that they are us.

First published at the CanadianSpectator.ca February 25, 2007

Atheists for a Religious Society

I support the Church, not as a pillar within, but as a buttress without.

 In times of fear or perplexity I pray to God and it helps. It helps a lot.

Winston S. Churchill

 Then the LORD brought down fire and brimstone (Source)

To the modern mind, the idea that somewhere out there is a being in the form of an anthropoid ape with the power to create thunder and lightning, earthquakes and volcanoes is scarcely credible. The notion that this being created not only the earth but the heavens above is to most of those raised during the modern era utterly absurd. But religion stems from the early days of human existence and to understand how it took root in mens' minds, we need to understand the minds of those who lived in earlier times.

There is no question that any educated person today is vastly more knowledgeable, if less wise, than King Solomon. For the great majority of those who lived before the modern age, education as we understand it was non-existent, as were the multiple and readily accessible sources of knowledge that we take for granted. What people in times past knew, they knew almost entirely from personal experience or from what other people, mostly people as ignorant as themselves, told them.

In such a world, what was not to believe about an extra-terrestrial ape with magical powers and the vanity, arrogance, and cruelty of the local lord or petty prince? People are afflicted by plagues, they are struck by lightning, crushed in the rubble of houses shattered by earthquakes, starved when their crops are destroyed by a swarm of locusts. If, then, a tribal chief or elder says he was addressed by a voice from a burning bush unconsumed by the fire, which explained such disasters as punishment for disloyalty, for failure to keep the Sabbath holy, for coveting a neighbor's house, or wife, for lying, stealing, or committing adultery, why would you not believe it? For no reason, apparently, since religion has been universally accepted by mankind as far back in time as we have knowledge.

Today, the circumstances of the potential believer are very different. We are raised with the understanding that whatever happens has a material cause and that whatever we seek to have happen must be initiated through the arranged occurrence of necessary causal prerequisites.

Everything that happens, we believe, is just physics.

Yet few of us could give a satisfactory account of Newton's laws of motion, let alone the workings of a cell phone, so we are not physicists, just believers in physics. We have faith in physics. And having faith in physics, we accept the word of the high priests of physics who tell us what can be done by physics and what cannot. And what cannot be done by physics, so we are told, is the creation of the Universe by an ape with magical powers. In fact, according to physics, magic is whatever is inconsistent with physics, which means that the religion of the magical ape is, in principal, false.

Thus the scientific revolution has brought about a transformation in our understanding of the world and, with that change, a transformation in our moral universe.

So long as mankind believed in the ape magician with a proprietorial interest in human affairs, morality was fixed, independent of human desire or belief, and enforced by belief in the most extreme system of Hellish punishment and Heavenly reward. Thus, until the modern age, religious belief provide a rigid matrix for the control of human behavior that operated internally, controlling the behavior of the individual through control of his beliefs and emotions.

Having abandoned religion for physics, we are now free to do as we please except insofar as we are subject to an ever broadening array of state-enforced external controls achieved through video surveillance, X-ray scans, body searches and an increasingly Stasi-like systems of spying.

David Hume, who was the first to clearly explain the physics approach to knowledge, was among the first to grasp how faith in physics would transform morality. "Honesty," he said, is the best policy, "but the wise knave will take advantage of every exception."

To those of us brought up in the West during the early post-Christian era, the significance of David Hume's analysis of morality was not particularly shocking. Most of us knew of the Golden Rule and, to many of us there is no phrase in the New Testament that is unfamiliar. Thus we internalized, in some degree, the moral precepts of Christ in early childhood, and though we were later taught to ridicule them, we mostly believed that the residue of Christian moral feeling within our hearts was universal.

But among those socialized as Christians but taught to ridicule Christianity, few socialized their own children in the Christian tradition with anything like the rigor with which they themselves had been so indoctrinated. Thus over a period of several generations, Western society has undergone a transformation from one in which many, especially of the ruling elite, were imbued with the values of saintly virtue to one imbued with the virtues of the intelligent psychopath. We may say "I feel your pain," but why would we, except for hypocritical public display, have the slightest concern for your suffering, particularly if we profit by it?

To most intelligent atheists, whether they be psychopaths, or tenderhearted individuals brought up with the psychopath's moral code, the consequences of this progressive transformation of society, from one regulated by self control to one in which behavior must be subject to continual external control seems, at best, to lack charm, and at worst, to be headed for tyranny, or collapse, or quite likely tyranny followed by collapse.

It is time, therefore, to ignore foolish intellectuals such as the late Christopher Hitchens or the even more foolish evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins who seek popular acclaim by pointing out the obvious physical inconsistencies and impossibilities of the various religious creeds, and instead turn to the question of what role religion has played in the evolution of humanity and whether the continuation of humanity as it has flowered in the West is possible under a regime of unenlightened atheism.

Religions are not all equal. Religion is one of the factors that differentiate societies and determine their prospects of survival. The importance of religion thus depends not on its truth as physics, but its impact on the physics of survival of tribes, nations and civilizations.

How religion may serve society in the modern age is a fascinating question and it is ultimately a physics question, since the survival of human groups depends on the control of human behavior, and human behavior is a matter of psychology, which in turn depends on neurological physiology, all of which resolve to matters of physics.

It is time, then, for those committed to the faith of physics to apply their minds to broadening that faith in ways that make it compatible with human survival, and with a reversal of the present decline of Western civilization.

The Fascist New World Order

The New World Order is the objective of a fascist movement for global empire.

To understand what the New World Order is to be, one must understand the term Fascism, which is used as widely as it is misunderstood. In particular, it is usually conflated with National Socialism or Nazism from which it differs in fundamental ways.

Flag of Fascist Italy

To Benito Mussolini, who created and led Italy's National Fascist Party, fascism meant absolute control of the nation by the state, which in turn was controlled by the will of a single individual, the dictator. Thus, under fascism, the people, their culture, loyalties and religious traditions are shaped at the will of the state employing any means, including eugenics, state-controlled education, propaganda and economic manipulation.

The theory of National socialism was very different as it considered the state the embodiment of the nation and thus the means by which the will of the nation was expressed. This feature of German Nazism accounts for it genocidal approach to other nationalities, including Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Poles and other Slavs as well as Jews, for by enslaving or exterminating other peoples the German people were to benefit through access to resources and land.

The present-day conflation of Fascism with Nazism is surely not accidental as it serves to mask the fascist character of the globalist imperative. Contrary to the nationalist ideal, the New World Order, as advocated by the Rhodes-Milner group in Great Britain in the early decades of the last century and by the NeoCons of the United States since George H.W. Bush's declaration of the New World Order before a joint session of Congress on September 11, 1991, requires the destruction of the nation states, and the racial groups that those states represent. Thus, the objective is not the superiority of one nation over all others*, but the destruction of all nations and the subordination of all peoples to the control of an undemocratic system of global governance. This is not National Socialism or Nazism but anti-nationalism, and closely akin to Soviet Communism except in its collaboration with, rather than through the destruction of, the Money Power, which is what makes it distinctively fascist.

Raphael Lemkin

The destruction of a nation's identity, culture and racial distinctness are all aspects of genocide as Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term, defined it. And the objective of globalist fascism is precisely that. Human biodiversity is to be eradicated by mongrelization of the World's population through mass migration, as was forced upon the people of the independent nations held captive within the borders of the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era.

United Nations flag

National identities are to be submerged within undemocratic, supranational entities such as the UN, the EU, NAFTA, and cultures and religions are to be trivialized and ultimately discarded for a sense of "global belonging." Religion is to be held in contempt and ties of family, national and racial kinship are to be condemned and criminalized as racism.

These objectives can be achieved only by totalitarian means, including the denial of free speech (political correctness), the denial of democracy (hackable voting machines, propaganda administered through the state-controlled education system, government infiltration of the Internet, and a compliant and mendacious corporate media), and eugenics (state funded mass abortion, euthanasia, promotion of non-reproductive sex, and the fostering of contempt for family values).

Existing national constitutions impede the project for a New World Order and must be discarded. This has already occurred in Britain where mass immigration has been forced upon an unwilling population in clear defiance of Britain's unwritten constitution, while in America, where the Constitution is now understood to be no more than a "piece of paper," the government is intent on the legalization of propaganda And "Psychological Operations" targetting U.S. citizens.

This is the complete antithesis of democracy. It is government of the people by hidden forces that seek to reduce the people to the status of domesticated animals, to be bred, herded, culled, and indoctrinated as the government sees fit. The New World Order marks the end of humanity as a collection of free men and women and its transformation to a colonial species where a hidden power, of which the people know little or nothing, controls, exploits and as it deems fit, ends the lives of every individual.

* Some might argue that the New World Order is, in fact, more Nazi than fascist; i.e., that the goal is the domination of the World by Israel and the Jewish people as ordained by the Torah, for which reason Jewish nationalism and racism is tolerated in the name of anti-racism. This seems a reasonable hypothesis, although one that is difficult to evaluate. The assumption that the New World Order is a Jewish conspiracy inspired by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whether they be a forgery or otherwise, is consistent with the behavior of the state of Israel and the utterances of a significant minority of powerful Jews. Notwithstanding that possibility, it should be acknowledged that the majority of ordinary Jews are every bit as manipulated and deceived as the rest of us, while many of them, and quite possibly the majority, oppose Israel's brutal nationalism.

Michael Wolff: The Facebook Fallacy

Technology Review, May 22, 2012: For all its valuation, the social network is just another ad-supported site. Without an earth-changing idea, it will collapse and take down the Web.

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Parallel Universes

Every informed person knows that the official inflation and unemployment rates are fictions; yet, the presstitute media continue to report the rates with a straight face as fact.

The way the government has rigged the measure of unemployment, it is possible for the US to have a zero rate of unemployment and not a single person employed or in the work force.

The way the government has the measure of inflation rigged, it is possible for your living standing to fall while the government reports that you are better off.

(Recovery or Collapse? Bet on Collapse, Paul Craig Roberts)

Politically, we live in a world of facts and of lies. A search for the facts usually reveals a reality either unconnected with, or in total contradiction to, the mainstream media narrative.

Paul Craig Roberts, author, journalist, scholar, former Deputy Secretary of the US Treasury, provides a striking illustration of this dichotomy in his account of America's war on non-existent terrorists.

Likewise, the mainstream media account of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988, which contributed to the swell of propaganda that justified NATO's rape and pillage of Libya, is for the most part equally divorced from any plausible account of what really happened (and here).

In a piece about fake terrorists created by the US Government, Paul Craig Roberts asks, does the West have a future? Who knows. But the West surely has no democratic future so long as a lying media and a government of fraudsters insure that the public exists in a universe of fabricated information unconnected with reality.

Academic bloat. Source

Prof. Mark Perry reproduces the bar chart to the right as evidence of extraordinary administrative bloat at a major American university.

Which raises the question: why any administrators at all?

The bureaucratic takeover of the university stems from giantism in academia, a result of the belief unsupported by any realistic evidence that half the population can benefit from a higher education even if the result is mass unemployment and a population burdened with a trillion-dollars in student loans.

But a system of higher education large enough to accomodate half the population cannot replicate the university training of old. Where could one possibly find the requisite number of true scholars to tutor such a multitude of students? And what true scholar would wish to devote their lives to the education of so many of those marginally educable at the level of abstraction and detail required of a university training?

As a consequence, university students are now mostly taught, not by scholars, but by academic hacks, drudges and careerists.

To restore integrity to the academic world it would be necessary to return to a system of academic elitism, which allowed only those truly gifted and those truly committed to learning to enter institutions of higher education.

Universities could then once again be managed by the scholars themselves, as in 1687, when Isaac Newton represented the University of Cambridge before (hanging) Judge Jeffreys because of the University's stubborn refusal, in accordance with the law, to award an MA to a Catholic who would not take the Oaths of Supremacy.

And one need not go back to the 17th Century to find universities functioning as self-governing communities of scholars. Such was the model in England as recently as 50 years ago, when only one or two percent of school leavers pursued higher education and universities were correspondingly small.

But the way forward will not likely be by way of a return to the past, but by an entirely new course, as discussed here.

See also

Mish: First Time Ever - Majority of Unemployed Have Some College Education; Five Solutions to Education, Student-Loan Crisis

Peter Thiel: On college administrators as the sub-prime mortgage lenders of education

Bill Bonner: Sorry, Graduates, But Most Of What You Learned Is Useless

Protestors in Chicago Can Fatally Fracture NATO

The NATO summit in Chicago, on 20-21 May, will be a lightening-rod for protest. This is a historic moment when peace activists have an opportunity to deflect NATO's current trajectory toward expanding and intensifying global warfare. NATO is the most powerful military alliance ever devised in human history. However, the alliance is unstable. NATO is wrought with fractures, which protestors in Chicago could break open, if they act thoughtfully.

Protestors in Chicago before NATO Summit begins. [Photos: M Skinner.]

Among the thousands of protestors expected in Chicago will be a group of veterans of the Global War on (of) Terror who will attempt to return their war medals to NATO generals. The war vets state:

 "We were awarded these medals for serving in the Global War on Terror, a war based on lies and failed polices. This endless war has killed hundreds of thousands, stripped the humanity of all involved, and drained our communities of trillions of dollars, diverting funds from schools, clinics, libraries, and other public goods.”

Like many people in the NATO states, these veterans were initially duped by the myths that support war. But myths can be debunked. Let's look at some of the mythical representations of NATO countered by the factual realities that are of use to those in Chicago and around the world protesting against NATO's destructive power.

Myth #1: NATO is controlled by the United States.

Reality #1: NATO is not controlled by the United States. NATO is certainly dominated by the United States. America's close ties with Britain and Canada make domination by the Anglo trio within NATO even more powerful, but not omnipotent.

The U.S. cannot control NATO, because the NATO decision-makers must reach a consensus within the North Atlantic Council (NAC) before taking action. Consensus can constrain the power of any one state or group of states. American decision-makers and their closest allies, who bristle at the constraint of consensus wish to streamline the NATO decision-making process.

Any reform that reduces decision-making authority to less than consensus would afford the U.S. and its closest allies greater power. But, thus far, the consensus model remains in place.
Which leads us to ...

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The New Genocidists, No. 37: Eco-Fascist Pentti Linkola

This is Finnish writer Pentti Linkola — a man who demands that the human population reduce its size to around 500 million and abandon modern technology and the pursuit of economic growth — in his own words.
He likens Earth today to an overflowing lifeboat:

What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.

He sees America as the root of the problem:

The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom.

He unapologetically advocates bloodthirsty dictatorship:

Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent a dictator that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. The best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and where government would prevent any economical growth.

We will have to learn from the history of revolutionary movements — the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades — and forget our narcissistic selves.

A fundamental, devastating error is to set up a political system based on desire. Society and life have been organized on the basis of what an individual wants, not on what is good for him or her.

As is often the way with extremist central planners Linkola believes he knows what is best for each and every individual, as well as society as a whole:

Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be an engineer or an acrobat, only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or mankind as a whole. In this time and this part of the World we are headlessly hanging on democracy and the parliamentary system, even though these are the most mindless and desperate experiments of mankind. In democratic coutries the destruction of nature and sum of ecological disasters has accumulated most. Our only hope lies in strong central government and uncompromising control of the individual citizen.

In that sense, Linkola’s agenda is really nothing new; it is as old as humans. And I am barely scratching the surface; Linkola has called for “some trans-national body like the UN” to reduce the population “via nuclear weapons” or with “bacteriological and chemical attacks”.
But really he is just another freedom-hating authoritarian — like the Nazis and Stalinists he so admires — who desires control over his fellow humans. Ecology, I think, is window-dressing. Certainly, he seems to have no real admiration or even concept of nature as a self-sustaining, self-organising mechanism, or faith that nature will be able to overcome whatever humanity throws at it. Nor does he seem to have any appreciation for the concept that humans are a product of and part of nature; if nature did not want us doing what we do nature would never have produced us. Nature is greater and smarter than we will probably ever be. I trust nature; Linkola seems to think he knows better. As George Carlin noted:

We’re so self-important. Everybody’s gonna save something now. Save the trees. Save the bees. Save the whales. Save those snails. And the greatest arrogance of all, save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet? We don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven’t learned how to care for one another and we’re gonna save the fucking planet?

There is nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The people are fucked. Difference. The planet is fine.

Linkola and similar thinkers seem to have no real interest in meeting the challenges of life on Earth. Their platform seems less about the environment and more about exerting control over the rest of humanity. Linkola glories in brutality, suffering and mass-murder.

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UN Chief: Syrian Terror the Work of Al Qaeda

Al  Qaeda bombing in Syria?

On Friday, Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary general, blamed al-Qaeda for a double bombing that killed 55 people in Damascus, Syria, last week.

Al Qaeda, you know, the folks who:

Libya's new American PM and sponsor

helped US/Nato kill Qaddafi and install an American oil man as prime minister of Libya;

Al Qaeda in Iraq (Source)

justified the American occupation of Iraq ;

provided the US with a pretext for its pre-911-planned war on Afghanistan; 

aided in the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

And Now:

Judge: Iran, Taliban, al Qaeda liable for 9/11.

Yeah, those guys are good.

Or are people who believe what the US Government and its presstitute media say about al Qaeda a bit, you know, stoopid?

Paul Craig Roberts: America's missing terrorists

If there were any real terrorists, Jose Rodriguez would be dead.

Who is Jose Rodriguez? He is the criminal who ran the CIA torture program. Most of his victims were not terrorists or even insurgents. Most were hapless individuals kidnapped by warlords and sold to the Americans as “terrorists” for the bounty paid.

If Rodriguez’s identity was previously a secret, it is no more. He has been on CBS “60 Minutes” taking credit for torturing Muslims and using the information allegedly gained to kill leaders of al Qaeda. If terrorists were really the problem that Homeland Security, the FBI and CIA claim, Rodriguez’s name would be a struck through item on the terrorists’ hit list. He would be in his grave.

So, also, would be John Yoo, who wrote the Justice (sic) Department memos giving the green light to torture, despite US and International laws prohibiting torture. Apparently, Yoo, a professor at the Boalt School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, was ignorant of US and international law. And so was the US Department of Justice (sic).

Notice that Rodriguez, “The Torturer of the Muslims,” doesn’t have to hide. He can go on national television, reveal his identity, and revel in his success in torturing and murdering Muslims. Rodriguez has no Secret Service protection and would be an easy mark for assassination by terrorists so capable as to have, allegedly, pulled off 9/11.

Another easy mark for assassination would be former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who staffed up the Pentagon with neoconservative warmongers such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, who in turn concocted the false information used to justify the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Rumsfeld himself declared members of al Qaeda to be the most vicious and dangerous killers on earth. Yet Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Richard Perle, together with neoconservative media propagandists, such as William Kristol and Max Boot, have been walking around safe for years unmolested by terrorists seeking revenge or bringing retribution to those responsible for as many as 1,000,000 Muslim deaths.

Condi Rice, Colin Powell, who delivered the Speech of Lies to the UN inaugurating the invasion of Iraq, and Dick Cheney, whose minimal Secret Service protection could not withstand a determined assassination attempt, also enjoy lives unmolested by terrorists.

Remember the deck of cards that the Bush regime had with Iraqi faces? If terrorists had a similar deck, all of those named above would be “high value targets.” Yet, there has not been a single attempt on any one of them.

Strange, isn’t it, that none of the above are faced with a terrorist threat. Yet, the tough, macho Navy Seals who allegedly killed Osama bin Laden must have their identity kept hidden so that they don’t become terrorist targets. These American supermen, highly trained killers themselves, don’t dare show their faces, but Rodriguez, Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice can walk around unmolested. Indeed, the Seals’ lives are so endangered that President Obama gave up the enormous public relations political benefit of a White House ceremony with the heroic Navy Seals. Very strange behavior for a politician. A couple of weeks after the alleged bin Laden killing, the Seals unit, or most of it, was wiped out in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

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How Google will mainlines "facts" from the CIA, World Bank and Trikipedia Direct to You

Google is making a big change to how it displays results in its dominant search engine.  It is rolling out a new feature called the Knowledge Graph which breaks from the traditional practice of matching keywords with webpages.

According to an article on Blog Tips about Google's Knowledge Graph, immediate answers or "facts" from pre-selected sources like the CIA Factbook, Wikipedia, and the World Bank will be provided in search results along side the organic results:

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Fixing Europe's Financial Mess With Two Simple Measures

Image Source

Michael Pettis has an article on Spain's financial difficulties explaining why no set of conventional measures can keep Spain indefinitely within the Eurozone.

Alternatives to the conventional measures exist, Pettis acknowledges, but considers these "too unlikely to consider."

On the contrary, I believe some alternatives are very "likely" to be workable, although given the blinkered view of those who advise governments, the likelihood of their ever attaining the attention of policy makers may indeed be small.

In particular, I believe it would be possible, relatively simple, and politically feasible to construct a mechanism that could adjust for differences in productivity among the Eurozone nations: for example, by adjusting all wages on a yearly or quarterly basis according to the national or regional unemployment rate.

President Hollande of France has taken what could be a step in this direction by cutting cabinet salaries by 30%. Now if this were to be applied across the board, France would, at a stroke, be largely free of her economic difficulties. The cost of living would fall, unemployment, and with it the cost of welfare programs, would fall, the government deficit would fall, while international competitiveness would increase.

Add to an automatic wage rate adjustment mechanism, a wage subsidy program, which avoids the problems associated with a negative income tax, and full employment could be restored, while the small and medium enterprise sector would have the benefit of a level, or more nearly level, global playing field, so far as labor costs are concerned.

Together these measures should initiate a virtuous cycle of rising output and declining costs able to restore Europe to prosperity without importing millions from the third world to provide cheap labor for jobs "Europeans won't do."

Peak Civilization

Spreading civilization. (Image source)

With a title well chosen to appeal to Scotch nationalism in the run-up to a referendum on independence for Scotland, Arthur Herman's book, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, relates how the philosophers of the Scottish enlightenment discovered a progressive force at work in history that relentlessly drives human civilization onward and upward.

This force, so these philosophers realized, was economic development. In the beginning, in a state of nature, uncivilized man, the hunter and gatherer, laid up no treasures on earth, thought only for the day, and in Christlike fashion, achieved his best chance of survival by sharing all that he had with his fellows. In this lowly state, mankind required no government, no laws, no polished manners.

Then men learned to domesticate animals and began a nomadic life in pursuit of grazing for herds of sheep, goats or cattle. The accumulation of wealth on the hoof made life more secure, but when survival from day to day no longer depended on the ethic of universal sharing, conflict arose over the ownership of wealth. But men still lived in small groups and disputes were resolved arbitrarily by family elders and clan chiefs or by inter-tribal warfare, without complication of laws and law courts, judges and advocates.

In time, however, men found cultivation of the soil more profitable than the nomadic life. Farming supported a larger population and the adoption of a settled life allowed the accumulation of unmovable capital: buildings, roads, temples, irrigation systems. Conflicts over the control of wealth then became more numerous and more complex. To avoid chaos, a system of laws was proclaimed, courts were established to administer the law, and brilliant attorneys emerged who strove to insure that disputes were won by whoever could pay the largest fees.

The adoption of law as a basis for social regulation represented a momentous step up the ladder of civilization. But still men were crude and unpolished in manners and more inclined to settle disagreements by violence than civilized negotiation.

But with the settled life, came an increase in trade, in manufactures and in the division and specialization of labor. The rise of commerce brought men of different clans and creeds together in arrangements of mutual benefit, which encourage tolerance and politeness.

Thus, as the city of Glasgow grew through the profits of Britain's gigantic slave-based trade in sugar, rum, tobacco, and cotton, so emerged liberalism, full-fledged, polished, tolerant and polite, in all its hypocritical glory: the highest stage of civilization yet achieved.

But today, the evolution of civilization has advanced by another stage. The liberal spirit of the eighteenth century led directly to mass democracy which led, naturally, to as many as 90% of the population voting themselves a share of the wealth of the rest. Thus, as the Scotch prepare to leave the United Kingdom, Government spending totals 50% of GDP, a proportion that the French government exceeds handily at 55%, while the newly elected President of France promises earlier payment of state pensions and higher minimum wages: this as European economies stagger under the weight of competition from 50-cent-an-hour Asian competition.

Thus has Western Civilization truly achieved its apogee. Or as David Brooks explains, why "neither the United States nor the European model [of civilization] will work again."

GOTCHA!

Murdoch Exec and Husband Charged

And for those too young to remember the original 1982 Gotcha! headline in Murdoch's Sun:

The sinking Agentine cruiser, ARA General Belgrano

The holed cruiser was the ARA General Belgrano, which went to the bottom, taking 323 Argentine sailors with her: sunk by the Royal Navy nuclear submarine, Conqueror on the order of Margaret Thatcher.

When struck, the General Belgrano was outside, and steaming away from, the "military exclusion zone" around the Falkland Islands, which Britain declared following the Argentine invasion.

Causes of the Falklands War

Europe's New Plan for Financial Debauchery

To prevent social unrest turning to revolt, European governments spend half the national wealth employing mostly useless "public servants" engaged in things like education, so-called, as in teaching kids how to be gay, how to engage in fellatio, etc.; social services, so-called, as in paying off the underclass with sick benefits, etc.; and policing, as in spying on ordinary decent people and enforcing the political correctness laws.

The cost of this program now exceeds the taxpaying capacity of the productive minority so governments have borrowed recklessly to cover the gap. Trouble is, the interest on the debt is now driving the gap even wider, so the new idea is to print money to cover the gap.

The advantages of printing money are that it enables repayment of foreign loans with a debased currency, while stimulating the economy by promoting exports and import substitution. Money printing may also ignite new property bubbles, which are stimulative as they lead to construction booms that cannot be off-shored.

The downside to money printing, which is to say inflating the money supply, is the inflation of the price level. This will cause labor unrest, strikes, etc.and middle-class unrest as savings are progressively wiped out.

The Eurozone's central problem, a competitive imbalance between Germany and the rest will continue, unless inflation wrecks the German economy, then the whole Eurozone will be in the same basket*.

* The term basket case, incidentally, arose from the practice of South Pacific Islanders to place those for burial in a basket.

JOHN MAULDIN: Germany Has Waved The White Flag And Will Allow Printing And Inflation

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

For quite some time in this letter I have been making the case that for the eurozone to survive, the European Central Bank would have to print more money than any of us can now imagine. That the sentiment among European leaders was that they were prepared for such a move was clear – except for Germany, which is haunted by fears of a return to the days of the Weimar Republic and hyperinflation.

When Germany agreed to a fixed monetary union and a European Central Bank, it was with the clear understanding that it would be run along the lines of the German central bank, the Bundesbank. The members of the Bundesbank and the German members of the ECB were most outspoken about the need for a conservative monetary policy that would keep a clamp on inflation.

However, as I have previously noted, the Bundesbank was a toothless tiger. Germany has two votes out of 23 on the ECB, and the loud drumbeat from most of Europe, which is experiencing the difficulty of austerity accompanied by too much debt, is for a far more accommodating ECB.

The simple fact is that Mario Draghi, the Italian president of the ECB, created €1 trillion euros to help fund European banks, which promptly turned around and bought their respective countrys' sovereign debt. Germany's Angela Merkel forced the Bundesbank to "play nice" and go along with what was seen as the only way to solve a growing banking crisis in Europe. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that this at least bought a year during which things could be sorted out. But it turns out that a trillion euros just doesn't go as far as it used to. The "relief" lasted about a month. The last few weeks have presented yet another budding crisis, as least as large as the last one. Where to get the next trillion?

This week the German Bundesbank waved the white flag. The die is cast. For good or ill, Europe has embarked on a program that will require multiple trillions of euros of freshly minted money in order to maintain the eurozone. But the alternative, European leaders agree, is even worse. Today we will look at the recent German shift in policy, why it was so predictable, and what it means. This is a Ponzi scheme that makes Madoff look like a small-time street hustler. There is a lot to cover.

Read more

WHO WAS OSAMA? WHO IS OBAMA?

By Michel Chossudovsky

While the President and Commander in Chief of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama "celebrates" the first anniversary of the alleged death of bin Laden, the substantive issue as to WHO WAS OSAMA BIN LADEN remains unheralded. (Remarks by President Obama in Address to the Nation from Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, see video at foot of article)

Through lies and fabrications --which he intends to use in his election campaign-- president Obama`s carefully scripted speech upholds a world of total fantasy, in which "bad guys" are lurking and "plotting acts of terror". Meanwhile, Islamic "jihadists" are said to be threatening Western civilization.

Each and every statement in Obama's May 1st speech at Bagram Air Force base regarding the role of Al Qaeda is a fabrication:

Read more

Fukushima: Long past time for decisive action

This time no one dropped a bomb on us ... We set the stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own lands, and we are destroying our own lives. Haruki Murakami

Fukushima: 1920 GMT, 13 March 2011 (source)

The Government of Japan has failed to deal effectively with the Fukushima disaster, which now threatens a global catastrophe.

Asahi Shimbun, May 10, 2012: Mitsuhei Murata, 74, a professor emeritus at Tokaigakuen University who once served as Japan's ambassador to Switzerland, said, "The existence of the No. 4 reactor has become a major national security issue for the entire world..."

"If an accident should occur at the No. 4 reactor, it could be called the start of the ultimate catastrophe for the world," Murata said as a witness at an Upper House Budget Committee hearing in March....

Compared with the No. 1 to No. 3 reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, which all experienced meltdowns, the No. 4 reactor was not seriously damaged by the March 11, 2011, quake and tsunami because it was undergoing a periodic inspection at the time.

However, the No. 4 reactor building houses a storage pool containing 1,535 spent fuel rods, the largest number of any of the reactors.

An explosion and fire at the No. 4 reactor blew away the walls and roof of the steel-reinforced concrete building, so the reactor building was hit by major structural damage.

Moreover, the storage pool is still not covered and remains exposed to the atmosphere. That situation has raised serious questions about what would happen if another quake with an intensity of 7 struck the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant.

Murata has his own predictions.

"If the storage pool should collapse and the 1,535 fuel rods began burning in the atmosphere, an endless amount of radiation would be emitted. Of course, that would mean that Tokyo would become unlivable," he said.

Murata continued: "Just 50 meters from the No. 4 reactor is the common pool for the No. 1 to No. 6 reactors. The common pool holds 6,375 spent nuclear fuel rods. If a fire should occur at the No. 4 reactor pool, the common pool would also not stand a chance."

That is the potential crisis at the No. 4 reactor that is causing so much fear around the world.

In fact, immediately after last year's accident, the biggest concern raised by the United States was the storage pool at the No. 4 reactor. ...

Arnie Gundersen, a U.S. nuclear engineer who visited Japan in February, has raised other concerns. ...

He said the spent nuclear fuel in the No. 4 reactor pool is equivalent to several reactor cores and contains radiation equal to the amount released in the atmosphere by all past nuclear experiments.

Gundersen has also written that the No. 4 reactor building's structure has weakened, the building is tilted, and that he has advised friends in Tokyo to immediately evacuate should the No. 4 reactor collapse.

TEPCO on April 26 issued a press release that disputed Gundersen’s claims.

"The No. 4 reactor building is not tilted and it, including the storage pool, will not be destroyed by a quake," it said. ...

TEPCO officials also explained that the steel support at the base of the pool and concrete wall had been reinforced by last July, which has increased by 20 percent the leeway against a possible quake.

In addition, the utility conducted a simulation exercise using analytical models that showed that even if a lower-6 intensity quake were to strike the plant again, it would not collapse.

So Tepco says they have "increased by 20% the leeway against a possible quake." Great. The risk of doomsday reduced by 20%.

And, says Tepco, it has "conducted a simulation exercise using analytical models that showed that even if a lower-6 intensity quake were to strike the plant again, it would not collapse."

Oh that's simply wonderful -- unless a higher-6 intensity quake were to strike the plant, or maybe a 7 intensity quake, or an 8 intensity quake or, as they had on the day of the Tsunami, a 9 intensity quake, which would be a thousand times greater than the lower-6 quake that Tepco are confident the No. 4 spent fuel pool can withstand.

When is the president of Tepco going to commit sepuku?

When in the Prime Minister of Japan going to step down?

When is the Government of Japan going to nationalize Tepco and deal with Fukushima as an emergency?

When is Japan going to call on all of the World's major engineering consultancies to submit proposals for remedial measures for implementation with all possible speed?

When will Japan evacuate all children within the zone of significant radioactive contamination?

When will the Government of Japan provide evacuees from the innermost zone of contamination with proper housing instead of cardboard boxes?

When will Japan begin building a barrage around the Fukushima waterfront to contain leakage of radiation from the stricken plant, which threatens to poison the oceans and fisheries of the World?

When will the Japanese Government, which has over the last twenty years dispensed untold billions on roads to nowhere, grasp that Fukushima is the ultimate stimulus program with national destruction as a quite conceivable alternative?

When will Japanese people by the million decide the only sensible thing to do is to emigrate?

And when will Canada reopen its visa application office in Japan? Or are we no longer a nation offering safe haven to those fleeing for their lives.

POSTSCRIPT

Globe and Mail, May 10, 2012: The government of Japan approved Wednesday a ¥1-trillion ($12.6-billion) public bailout for the operator of Japan's tsunami-devastated nuclear power plant and put it under temporary state control. In exchange, Tokyo Electric Power Co. Inc. has appointed new management and pledged to cut costs while raising utility rates on power from its other plants as it works to stabilize the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant and compensate tens of thousands of victims of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

"I hope Tokyo Electric will work to win back public trust," Economy and Trade Minister Yukio Edano said.

Hey, Yukio, let's not do anything, eh. Just keep our fingers crossed. Duh.

Time, now, for a new Japanese Government that the World can trust.

And see:

Fukushima kids sue for evacuation

Canada's Left Coast Loonies Blacklist Dr. Seuss

The other day I wrote about Britain's pathetic Chiefs of Police who blacklisted use of the word "blacklist," a term of 17 Century coinage, because, they say, it's racist, a contention at least a stupid as the contention of those who demand the firing of anyone using the word "niggard," coined in 1600, or its adjectival form "niggardly" because, to an illiterate, it is vaguely similar to the word "nigger," coined a hundred years later.

But it is unnecessary to go so far afield to discover examples of loony liberal political correctness. Here at home on the Left Coast of Canada the Prince Rupert School Board has threatened a Grade 1 teacher with disciplinary action for wearing a tee-shirt quoting Dr. Seuss.

The quote is from Dr. Seuss's book Yertle the Turtle, in which Yertle has the other turtles stack up one upon another, so he can see the sights from the tippy top.

 I know, up on the top you are seeing great sights,
but down here at the bottom
we, too, should have rights

Wow, dangerous political message.

Which explains why all eight teachers of the Prince Rupert School District have been warned in writing that they could be disciplined for displaying political messages.

Too much of that sort of thing and kids might start thinking outside the box.

But here's a good one from across the pond:

Home Office minister John Denham criticised by the police for using the phrase "nitty gritty" because of race relations rules.

Although this is almost unbelievable stupid, there is a dark side to it. It is part of a program to deligitimize certain points of view, not by argument but by criminalizing certain words and phrases. That way, the politically correct defeat all opposition without having to frame an argument -- something that few of them are able to do.

The antidote is never to apologize for the correct use of words that liberals and lefties have for self-serving reasons proclaimed "inappropriate," "racists" or "insensitive." Most sensitivity around the use of words amounts to nothing more than passive aggression, which should be vigorously repelled.