Free Will versus Determinism and Moral Responsibility

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

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

Quantum uncertainty? Image source.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image source.

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

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

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

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

Cain killing Abel. (Rubens)

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

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

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

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

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

Image source

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

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

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

Related:

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

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

By Robert Fisk

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

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

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

Coup de théâtre

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

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

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

Read more

See also:

Winston Churchill mulls use of mustard gas during WWII.

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

A Statistical Enigma

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

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

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

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

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

Comments from anyone familiar with such matters would be welcome.

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

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

The Stupidity of Self-Hating White Liberals

By Robert Henderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answers to Chiles’ questions 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Chiles Test

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

White House opposes new Iran sanctions 

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

Read more

Meantime, Zbigniew Brzezinski to Israel :

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




and to the NeoCons:

Global awakening precludes American global hegemony



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

Population: Explosion and Implosion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

CanSpeccy: The New European Genocide

Aangirfan: The Population Problem

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

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

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

Both claims are dishonest and stupid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What then to do?

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

How?

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

Israel versus Gaza: The Math

Image source

Amanpour interview with Hamas chief, Khaled Meshaal

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

How Civilization Is Spread

By Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

 An Excerpt from Hadji Murat
(The best story in the world, Harold Bloom)

Chechnya: Image source

In obedience to this command of [Tzar] Nicholas a raid was immediately made in Chechnya that same month, January 1852.

The detachment ordered for the raid consisted of four infantry battalions, two companies of Cossacks, and eight guns. The column marched along the road; and on both sides of it in a continuous line, now mounting, now descending, marched Fagers [Muslim warriors in the service of Russia] in high boots, sheepskin coats, and tall caps, with rifles on their shoulders and cartridges in their belts.

As usual when marching through a hostile country, silence was observed as far as possible. Only occasionally the guns jingled jolting across a ditch, or an artillery horse snorted or neighed, not understanding that silence was ordered, or an angry commander shouted in a hoarse subdued voice to his subordinates that the line was spreading out too much or marching too near or too far from the column. Only once was the silence broken, when from a bramble patch between the line and the column a gazelle with a white breast and grey back jumped out followed by a buck of the same color with small backward-curving horns. Doubling up their forelegs at each big bound they took, the beautiful timid creatures came so close to the column that some of the soldiers rushed after them laughing and shouting, intending to bayonet them, but the gazelles turned back, slipped through the line of Fagers, and pursued by a few horsemen and the company’s dogs, fled like birds to the mountains.

It was still winter, but towards noon, when the column (which had started early in the morning) had gone three miles, the sun had risen high enough and was powerful enough to make the men quite hot, and its rays were so bright that it was painful to look at the shining steel of the bayonets or at the reflections — like little suns — on the brass of the cannons.

The clear and rapid stream the detachment had just crossed lay behind, and in front were tilled fields and meadows in shallow valleys. Farther in front were the dark mysterious forest-clad hills with craigs rising beyond them, and farther still on the lofty horizon were the ever-beautiful ever-changing snowy peaks that played with the light like diamonds.

At the head of the 5th Company, Butler, a tall handsome officer who had recently exchanged from the Guards, marched along in a black coat and tall cap, shouldering his sword. He was filled with a buoyant sense of the joy of living, the danger of death, a wish for action, and the consciousness of being part of an immense whole directed by a single will. This was his second time of going into action and he thought how in a moment they would be fired at, and he would not only not stoop when the shells flew overhead, or heed the whistle of the bullets, but would carry his head even more erect than before and would look round at his comrades and the soldiers with smiling eyes, and begin to talk in a perfectly calm voice about quite other matters.

The detachment turned off the good road onto a little-used one that crossed a stubbly maize field, ant they were drawing near the forest when, with an ominous whistle, a shell flew past amid the baggage wagons — they could not see whence — and tore up the ground in the field by the roadside.
“It’s beginning,” said Butler with a bright smile to a comrade who was walking beside him.

And so it was. After the shell a thick crowd of mounted Chechens appeared with their banners from under the shelter of the forest. In the midst of the crowd could be seen a large green banner, and an old and very far-sighted sergeant-major informed the short-sighted Butler that Shamil himself must be there. The horsemen came down the hill and appeared to the right, at the highest part of the valley nearest the detachment, and began to descend. A little general in a thick black coat and tall cap rode up to Butler’s company on his ambler, and ordered him to the right to encounter the descending horsemen. Butler quickly led his company in the direction indicated, but before he reached the valley he heard two cannon shots behind him. He looked round: two clouds of grey smoke had risen above two cannon and were spreading along the valley. The mountaineers’ horsemen — who had evidently not expected to meet artillery — retired. Butler’s company began firing at them and the whole ravine was filled with the smoke of powder. Only higher up above the ravine could the mountaineers be seen hurriedly retreating, though still firing back at the Cossacks who pursued them. The company followed the mountaineers farther, and on the slope of a second ravine came in view of an aoul [a mountain village].

Image source.

Following the Cossacks, Butler and his company entered the aoul at a run, to find it deserted. The soldiers were ordered to burn the corn and the hay as well as the saklyas [Plastered mud houses], and the whole aoul was soon filled with pungent smoke amid which the soldiers rushed about dragging out of the saklyas what they could find, and above all catching and shooting the fowls the mountaineers had not been able to take away with them.

The officers sat down at some distance beyond the smoke, and lunched and drank. The sergeant-major brought them some honeycombs on a board. There was no sigh of any Chechens and early in the afternoon the order was given to retreat. The companies formed into a column behind the aoul and Butler happened to be in the rearguard. As soon as they started Chechens appeared, following and firing at the detachment, but they ceased this pursuit as soon as they came out into an open space.

Not one of Butler’s company had been wounded, and he returned in a most happy and energetic mood. When after fording the same stream it had crossed in the morning, the detachment spread over the maize fields and the meadows, the singers of each company came forward and songs filled the air.

“Verry diff’rent, very diff’rent, Fagers are, Fagers are!” sang Butler’s singers, and his horse stepped merrily to the music. Trezorka, the shaggy grey dog belonging to the company, ran in front, with his tail curled up with an air of responsibility like a commander. Butler felt buoyant, calm, and joyful. War presented itself to him as consisting only in his exposing himself to danger and to possible death, thereby gaining rewards and the respect of his comrades here, as well as of his friends in Russia. Strange to say, his imagination never pictured the other aspect of war: the death and wounds of the soldiers, officers, and mountaineers. To retain his poetic conception he even unconsciously avoided looking at the dead and wounded. So that day when we had three dead and twelve wounded, he passed by a corpse lying on its back and did not stop to look, seeing only with one eye the strange position of the waxen hand and a dark red spot on the head. The hosslmen appeared to him only a mounted dzhigits from whom he had to defend himself.

“You see, my dear sir,” said his major in an interval between two songs, “it’s not as it is with you in Petersburg — ‘Eyes right! Eyes left!’ Here we have done our job, and now we go home and Masha will set a pie and some nice cabbage soup before us. That’s life — don’t you think so? — Now then! As the Dawn Was Breaking!” He called for his favorite song.

There was no wind, the air was fresh and clear and so transparent that the snow hills nearly a hundred miles away seemed quite near, and in the intervals between the songs the regular sound of the footsteps and the jingle of the guns was heard as a background on which each song began and ended. The song that was being sung in Butler’s company was composed by a cadet in honor of the regiment, and went to a dance tune. The chorus was: “Verry diff’rent, very diff’rent, Fagers are, Fagers are!”

Butler rode beside the officer next in rank above him, Major Petrov, with whom he lived, and he felt he could not be thankful enough to have exchanged from the Guards and come to the Caucasus. His chief reason for exchanging was that he had lost all he had at cards and was afraid that if he remained there he would be unable to resist playing though he had nothing more to lose. Now all that was over, his life was quite changed and was such a pleasant and brave one! He forgot that he was ruined, and forgot his unpaid debts. The Caucasus, the war, the soldiers, the officers — those tipsy, brave, good-natured fellows — and Major Petrov himself, all seemed so delightful that sometimes it appeared too good to be true that he was not in Petersburg — in a room filled with tobacco smoke, turning down the corners of cards and gambling, hating the holder of the bank and feeling a dull pain in his head — but was really here in this glorious region among these brave Caucasians.

Tzar Putin's 20th Century War in Chechnya

The aoul which had been destroyed was that in which Hadji Murad had spent the night before he went over to the Russians. Sado and his family had left the aoul on the approach of the Russian detachment, and when he returned he found his saklya in ruins — the roof fallen in, the door and the posts supporting the penthouse burned, and the interior filthy. His son, the handsome bright-eyed boy who had gazed with such ecstasy at Hadji Murad, was brought dead to the mosque on a horse covered with a barka [a burqa? or robe]; he had been stabbed in the back with a bayonet. the dignified woman who had served Hadji Murad when he was at the house now stood over her son’s body, her smock torn in front, her withered old breasts exposed, her hair down, and she dug her hails into her face till it bled, and wailed incessantly. Sado, taking a pick-axe and spade, had gone with his relatives to dig a grave for his son. The old grandfather sat by the wall of the ruined saklya cutting a stick and gazing stolidly in front of him. He had only just returned from the apiary. The two stacks of hay there had been burnt, the apricot and cherry trees he had planted and reared were broken and scorched, and worse still all the beehives and bees had been burnt. The wailing of the women and the little children, who cried with their mothers, mingled with the lowing of the hungry cattle for whom there was no food. The bigger children, instead of playing, followed their elders with frightened eyes. The fountain was polluted, evidently on purpose, so that the water could not be used. The mosque was polluted in the same way, and the Mullah and his assistants were cleaning it out. No one spoke of hatred of the Russians. the feeling experienced by all the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them — like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves — was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.

The inhabitants of the aoul were confronted by the choice of remaining there and restoring with frightful effort what had been produced with such labor and had been so lightly and senselessly destroyed, facing every moment the possibility of a repetition of what had happened; or to submit to the Russians — contrary to their religion and despite the repulsion and contempt they felt for them. The old men prayed, and unanimously decided to send envoys to Shamil asking him for help. Then they immediately set to work to restore what had been destroyed.

The Tragic Truth About the State of Israel

We must tell the Palestinians, that we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes, may leave.
Moshe Dayan
Israeli Defense Chief of Staff (1953-)
Defense Minister (1967-), etc., etc.
Quoted by Noam Chomsky.

By Luke Hiken

ProgressiveAvenues, November 20, 2012: In the 1940’s and 50’s, I was raised on the North Shore of Chicago, in a suburb named Glencoe. The town was at least 95% Jewish, and everyone knew who the 3 black families were, knew the handful of Christians and “others” who resided near us. We understood that we comprised one of the wealthiest, fanciest Jewish ghettos in the United States, and perhaps the world. The great majority of us went to temple at the North Shore Congregation Israel, and donated $5.00 a shot for stickers to purchase “trees” to plant in the new State of Israel. We were going to transform the desert into a promised land and help the oppressed Jews of Europe to create a homeland where pogroms, ghettos and the Holocaust were a thing of the past. For literally decades, Zionists had perpetuated the myth that the territory that would become the State of Israel was “a land without a people, for a people without a land.” How noble and just it all seemed.

If anyone would have asked us why we were planting trees in Israel, when the Holy Land was already covered with Olive trees planted by Arab families for more than 5 centuries, we would have accused them of rank anti-semitism. If someone had suggested that we were purchasing guns, and missiles, instead of agricultural tools, we would have fought them on the spot. Yet history judges us harshly and we now have a reckoning to deal with.

I represented men and women on death row in California for over 25 years. All of the defendants on death row, without exception, were brutalized as young children, either by their parents, or their community. The great majority of prisoners were victims of brutality, and they responded to the society that brutalized them by killing in return.

One would have expected that those who were brutalized as children would have recognized how horrible the experience was and rejected such behavior when it was their turn to have authority over others. But that is simply not so. Humans, unfortunately, by and large, grow up to perpetrate the same atrocities that were perpetrated upon them against those they are close to. While this phenomenon is not universal, it is so common as to be the expectation for law enforcement and the society at large. Children of convicts are expected to become criminals when they grow up, and the society does everything in its power to ensure that that expectation is met. Young black children in this country have to be saints to stay out of reformatories and prisons. One out of three black people in the United States are in prison or on parole.

So, too, do we watch this phenomenon being tragically repeated in the State of Israel. One would expect that a people who had been subjected to the atrocities of World War II, to the Holocaust, to the discrimination and slaughter perpetrated against the Jews, would be the first nation on earth to oppose a similar oppression against others. Yet, the sad reality is that the racism and violence perpetrated against Palestinians in the State of Israel is outlandish and inexcusable.

Gaza is nothing short of a concentration camp. Children are starving there and Israel will kill any individual or group that attempts to bring food or water into that land. Israel is the last country on the face of the earth that has dared to impose a formal state of apartheid against an indigenous population. Israeli checkpoints are the precise duplicates of what the Nazi checkpoints at the borders of the ghettos looked like in 1938 Germany. The excuses and rationalizations used by Israel to perpetuate this oppression against the Palestinian people are precisely those used by the Nazis: Palestinians pose a threat to the security of the nation; they will steal jobs and security from the rightful people of the nation; they are untrustworthy, and owe no allegiance to the nation. The parallels are terrifying.

That this should be the situation in 2012 is so pathetic as to be comical in an historical context. The anti-semitism of the prevailing nations of World War II, the United States and Great Britain was so profound as to obviate the possibility that Jews would be permitted to immigrate or seek sanctuary in either of those victorious countries. The Christian majorities of those countries so hated the Jews that allowing them to seek sanctuary in either country was out of the question.

Instead, anti-semitic nations decided to give the Jews who survived the Holocaust land that belonged to the Palestinians. Kill two birds with one stone. Keep Jews out of the U.S. and Great Britain, and give them the land of a bunch of Muslims that, according to the U.S. and Great Britain, were little more than savages. Certainly, the Western powers could control any opposition the local population might put up to prevent the Jews from entering the new state of Israel. It would be a walk in the park for these countries to disenfranchise the Palestinian people, who had lived on the land for centuries. The fact that Jews had lived in Palestine for centuries without undergoing the sort of atrocities perpetrated by European Christians upon them was quickly overlooked. Give us our land, said the Zionists, and we will take care of the rest.

So now, we are confronted with the situation where there is not a Muslim on the face of the earth that does not see Israel’s occupation of the Holy Land as an unjustified invasion of their land. The only difference between this and the initial colonization of the United States of America, is that, unlike what happened to the American Indians, Caucasians, whether Christian or Jewish, have not been able to eradicate sufficient numbers of indigenous people to take over the land without opposition. The Muslims have not acceded to the colonial expansion of the “settlers” in Israel, to the U.S. demand for expansion of the militarist Israeli state, or to the eradication of those who inhabited the land before the Jews arrived.

In virtually every temple and Jewish Community Center in the United States, Israel is seen as “the good guy” in the Middle East, and the Arabs are seen as devils. The impact this has had on Jews in the United States is to divide the community into two totally distinct communities: those who are Zionists and those who identify with being Jewish, but reject the racism and violence perpetrated by Israel against the entire Muslim world. It is impossible for Jews who take pride in their heritage, to participate in their own communities without endorsing the atrocities perpetrated by Israel against Arabs throughout the world. Jews who reject Zionism are outcasts in the established Jewish communities. They have no base and no community. We are either anti-Muslim or invisible. We are left with no alternatives within the broader community.

The U.S. is perfectly content to let Israel serve as the buffer between hostile Arab nations and U.S. imperialism. After all, it is the Jews who are fighting Muslims on a daily basis, not Americans. But once the State of Israel is defeated because of its bellicose intransigence and intolerance to those with whom they should be sharing the land, Jews everywhere will suffer the consequences and be at risk. One could not write a more ironical conclusion. Non-Zionist Jews are like the non-existent Left in the United States – we are simply not included in the debates of our nation or among our people; and, because Zionists permit no rational debates or discussions, they are without a clue as to the international implications of their cruelty toward the Palestinian peoples. The world will not put up with this indefinitely. It is just a matter of time.

Luke Hiken is an attorney who has engaged in the practice of criminal, military, immigration, and appellate law.

The Progressive Avenues website, www.progressiveavenues.org, is regularly updated in the “What’s Added, What’s New” link on the Home page, at http://www.progressiveavenues.org/Whats_New_Added.html

55 Reasons Why You Should Buy Products That Are Made In America This Holiday Season

For made-in-America read made-in-Canada/UK/Greece/Spain etc., depending on your place of residence

And remember that every cheap item from Asia, Africa or the Middle-East that you do not buy from WalMart or some other emporium for foreign  sweatshop products means more pressure on the governments of China, BanglaDesh, Indonesia, etc., etc., to rebalance their domestic economies and allow their own citizens to consume more of what they produce and thus achieve an immediate increase in standard of living.

By Michael, The Economic Collapse Blog, November 19, 2012: This is the time of the year when Americans run out to their favorite retail stores and fill up their shopping carts with lots of cheap plastic crap made by workers in foreign countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.  By doing this, the American people are actively participating in the destruction of the U.S. economy.  You see, buying products that are made in America is not just a matter of national pride.  It is a matter of national survival.  If we do not support American workers, they are going to continue to see their jobs shipped out of the country.  If we do not support American businesses, they are going to continue to die off at a staggering rate.  Last year, the United States had a trade deficit with the rest of the world of 558 billion dollars.  More than half a trillion dollars that could have gone into the pockets of U.S. workers and U.S. businesses went overseas instead.  If that money had stayed in the country, taxes would have been paid on that mountain of cash and our local, state and federal government debt problems would not be as severe.  As a result of our massive trade imbalance, we have lost tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of national wealth.  Both major political parties have sold us out on these issues, and we are getting poorer as a nation with each passing day.  We desperately need a resurgence of economic patriotism in the United States before it is too late.

Yes, I know that it is very tempting to buy foreign-made products.  After all, they are almost always cheaper.
But most people don't often think about why they are cheaper.

Unfortunately, in the name of "free trade" American workers have been merged into a global labor pool where they have to compete directly for jobs with workers on the other side of the globe that live in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.  This makes employing American workers a tremendous liability.
If a company hires you and pays you 10 to 15 dollars an hour with benefits, how is it going to compete with another company that pays workers a dollar an hour with no benefits on the other side of the planet?

Both major political parties are pushing this emerging "one world economic system", but it is absolutely killing American jobs.  We have already seen a mass exodus of jobs and businesses out of this country, and wages for the jobs that remain in the United States are being forced down because there are hordes of unemployed workers that are willing to take just about any decent job they can find.

It has become painfully obvious that our politicians are not going to do anything to help us on these issues, so what we need is a mass awakening among the American people.

We need to educate people that buying things that are made in America is good for the economy and that buying things that are made elsewhere is bad for the economy.

But for now, most Americans are clueless.  They will line up on Black Friday morning and trample one another in a desperate attempt to save a few bucks on cheap plastic devices that were made on the other side of the planet.

And they will pay for much of this "shopping" with credit cards.

Credit card debt is on the rise once again.  In fact, average credit card debt per borrower was 4.9 percent higher in the third quarter of 2012 than it was in the third quarter of 2011.  It looks like most of us didn't learn our lessons from the last financial crisis.

But not all Americans enjoy the shopping that is typically involved with this time of the year.  One recent survey found that approximately 45 percent of all Americans think that there is so much financial pressure associated with the holidays that they wouldn't mind skipping them completely.

That same poll found that approximately 41 percent of all Americans would only be able to survive for two weeks without a paycheck.  Many Americans are up to their eyeballs in debt, their incomes are not keeping up with rising prices, and they find themselves scratching and clawing just to make it from month to month.
Meanwhile, we continue to destroy our own jobs and businesses by spending our money on products that have been made outside the country.

The following are 55 reasons why you should buy products that are made in America this holiday season...
1. When you buy products that are made in America you support American workers.

2. When you buy products that are made in America you support companies that are doing business in America.

3. In 2000, there were more than 17 million Americans working in manufacturing, but now there are less than 12 million.

4. The United States has a trade imbalance that is more than 7 times larger than any other nation on earth has.

5. Our trade deficit with China in 2011 was $295.5 billion.  That was the largest trade deficit that one country has had with another country in the history of the planet.

6. In 2011, our trade deficit with China was 28 times larger than it was back in 1990 and more than 49,000 times larger than it was back in 1985.

7. When NAFTA was passed in 1993, the United States had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars.  In 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of 61.6 billion dollars.

8. One professor has estimated that cutting the U.S. trade deficit in half would create 5 million more jobs in the United States.

9. Overall, the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the globe since 1975.  That 8 trillion dollars could have gone to support U.S. businesses and pay the wages of U.S. workers.  Federal, state and local taxes would also have been paid on that 8 trillion dollars if it had stayed in the United States.

10. According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.

11. The United States has lost an average of approximately 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

12. According to U.S. Representative Betty Sutton, the United States has lost an average of 15 manufacturing facilities a day over the last 10 years.

13. During 2010 alone, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities permanently shut down in the United States every single day.

14. Overall, the United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.

15. The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.

16. Between December 2000 and December 2010, 38 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Ohio were lost, 42 percent of the manufacturing jobs in North Carolina were lost and 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.

17. As I have written about previously, 95 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were middle class jobs.

18. Due in part to the globalization of the labor pool, only about 24 percent of all jobs in the United States are "good jobs" at this point.

19. Right now, more than 41 percent of all working age Americans do not have a job, and the vast majority of the new jobs that are being created are low paying jobs.

20. The United States now has 10 percent fewer "middle class jobs" than it did just ten years ago.
21. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. economy loses approximately 9,000 jobs for every $1 billion of goods that are imported from overseas.

22. As our economic infrastructure is gutted, formerly great manufacturing cities all over America are being transformed into festering hellholes.

23. Between 2001 and 2007, the value of products that Wal-Mart imported from China grew from $9 billion to $27 billion.

24. In 2001, American consumers spent 102 billion dollars on products made in China.  In 2011, American consumers spent 399 billion dollars on products made in China.

25. The United States spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.

26. Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Today, China’s high-tech exports are more than twice the size of U.S. high-tech exports.

27. In 2002, the United States had a trade deficit in "advanced technology products" of $16 billion with the rest of the world.  In 2010, that number skyrocketed to $82 billion.

28. The United States has lost more than a quarter of all of its high-tech manufacturing jobs over the past ten years.

29. Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry was actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.

30. The Chinese undervalue their currency by about 40 percent in order to gain a critical advantage over foreign competitors.  This means that many Chinese companies are able to absolutely thrive while their competition in the United States goes out of business.

31. According to the New York Times, a Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China thanks to all the tariffs.

32. In 2010, China produced more than twice as many automobiles as the United States did.
33. Since the auto industry bailout, approximately 70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United States.

34. Do you remember when the United States was the dominant manufacturer of automobiles and trucks on the globe?  Well, in 2010 the U.S. ran a trade deficit in automobiles, trucks and parts of $110 billion.

35. In 2010, South Korea exported 12 times as many automobiles, trucks and parts to us as we exported to them.

36. In 2010, China produced 627 million metric tons of steel.  The United States only produced 80 million metric tons of steel.

37. In 2010, China produced 7.3 million metric tons of cotton.  The United States only produced 3.4 million metric tons of cotton.

38. Today, China produces nearly twice as much beer as the United States does.

39. 85 percent of all artificial Christmas trees are made in China.

40. Right now, China is producing more than three times as much coal as the United States does.

41. China is now the number one supplier of components that are critical to the operation of U.S. defense systems.  How stupid can we possibly be?

42. According to author Clyde Prestowitz, China’s number one export to the U.S. is computer equipment.  According to an article in U.S. News & World Report, during 2010 the number one U.S. export to China was “scrap and trash”.

43. All over the United States, road and bridge projects are being outsourced to Chinese firms.  Just check out the following excerpt from a recent ABC News article....

In New York there is a $400 million renovation project on the Alexander Hamilton Bridge.
In California, there is a $7.2 billion project to rebuild the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco and Oakland.
In Alaska, there is a proposal for a $190 million bridge project.
These projects sound like steps in the right direction, but much of the work is going to Chinese government-owned firms.
"When we subsidize jobs in China, we're not creating any wealth in the United States," said Scott Paul, executive director for the Alliance for American Manufacturing.

44. The new World Trade Center tower is going to include glass that has been imported from China.

45. The new Martin Luther King memorial on the National Mall was made in China.

46. The Chinese economy has grown 7 times faster than the U.S. economy has over the past decade.
47. The Chinese economy is projected to be larger than the U.S. economy by 2016.

48. One economist is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040.

49. In recent years the U.S. economy has embraced "free trade" and the emerging one world economy like never before.  Instead of increasing the number of jobs in our economy, it has resulted in the worst stretch of job creation in the United States in modern history....

If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.

50. If you gathered together all of the workers that are "officially" unemployed in the United States today, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the world.

51. China now holds approximately more than a trillion dollars of U.S. government debt.  If you were alive back when Jesus was born and you had spent a million dollars every single day since then, you still would not have spent that much money by now.

52. Jeffrey Immelt, the head of Barack Obama's highly touted "Jobs Council", has shipped tens of thousands of good jobs out of the United States.

53. Without enough good jobs, more Americans than ever before are falling into poverty.  Today, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government.

54. According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.

55. If U.S. consumers do not start supporting U.S. workers and U.S. businesses, eventually we will all be so poor that very few of us will be able to afford to buy any gifts during the holiday season.

Fred on US Self-Assassination

If you're gonna have a blog, you ought to write something on it once in a while. But it's hard to do that when other people not only say what you'd have said if you'd thought of it, but do so with more pith and punch that you'd have mustered under even the greatest provocation.

Fred Reed is a case in point. He see the utter hopeless mental, financial and material deterioration of Western civilization as led by the United States, the country that was once seriously referred to as the the "Leader of the Free World," and spells out the criminal imbecility of the leadership so clearly that there seems little left to say. For example:

To me Mr. Romney’s candidacy signaled the Republicans’ admirable capacity to do the impossible: find an aspirant even more depressing than Obama. But they managed. It was a triumph of the human spirit. Never underestimate American ingenuity.

How was this result achieved? Mr. Romney asserted that Russia is America’s most perilous adversary, wanted to deal fiercely with China, asserted the nonexistence of Palestinians, pledged his undying troth to Israel (America presumably would be a second wife), wanted to attack Iran, and thinks we need to increase the military budget.

Oh god. Oh god.

Were the Chinese paying him off? If you want to bring the United States down, keep it spending. On anything. On everything. Does nobody understand this?

It is most curious. Conservatives think that Reagan the Baffled won a great victory over the Soviet Onion by spending it into penury. Grrr. Woof. But in the great sweep of things, what he did was to increase military spending. The Russians didn’t matter: The Pentagon quickly found another financial pretext in Terrorism after the budgetary godsend in New York. Subsequent presidents continued the trend. From a Chinese point of view, it is wonderful. They build their economy while we assassinate ours. They don’t need a military. Ours is doing the job for them.

Read more. 

Or consider this:

We are doomed, saith the preacher, and should accommodate ourselves to it. In times of growing governmental power, protestation at some point becomes futile. Little is served by standing in front of a charging Mongol army and shouting, “No! You should reconsider! Perhaps some other course would be advisable. Let’s parley….”

Complaint is useless. It is too late. It booteth not. We are done. The Mongols ride. America comes apart at the seams. The country turns into something altogether new, new for America.

In high school, I read Shirer, first Berlin Diary and then The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I had little idea what I was reading. A naval base in rural Virginia is not a hotbed of historical understanding, or any understanding. I knew nothing of Weimar or the Spartacists or the Treaty of Versailles. Still, I dimly grasped that a theretofore civilized country with great rapidity turned into something horrible. It was not an evolutionary change, like the Industrial Revolution. Brahms to Goebbels in a decade.

Something alike happens in America, and one wonders—I wonder, anyway—how can this be? In little more than a decade, the Constitution has died, the economy welters in irreversible decline, we have perpetual war, all power lies in the hands of the executive, the police are supreme, and a surveillance beyond Orwell’s imaginings falls into place.

These observations are now commonplace. It is almost boring to read of them—yet they proceed apace. Where we go, we go fast. Already against the authorities there is no recourse. Should you talk back to the police, you will spend the night in jail.

I sometimes wonder whether there is not some malign force in play, some diabolical miasma with a sense of humor that, having brought the Soviet Union down, amuses itself by turning the United States into the same thing. Or maybe it is just that if any state that can become totalitarian, it will.

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We are so doomed, even Fred has lost the will to resist.

But if you think Fred is a pessimist, take a look at this: