Bombing Iran

Nuclear proliferation

Nobody should welcome the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. But bombing the place is not the answer

FOR years Iran has practised denial and deception; it has blustered and played for time. All the while, it has kept an eye on the day when it might be able to build a nuclear weapon. The world has negotiated with Iran; it has balanced the pain of economic sanctions with the promise of reward if Iran unambiguously forsakes the bomb. All the while, outside powers have been able to count on the last resort of a military assault.

The Proust index

Advanced economies have gone backwards by a decade as a result of the crisis

NOW almost five years old, the economic crisis rumbles on. In order to assess how much economic progress it has undone, The Economist has constructed a measure of lost time for hard-hit countries. It shows that Greece’s economic clock has been turned back furthest: it has been rewound by over 12 years. Elsewhere in the euro area, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain have lost seven years or more. Britain, the first country forced to rescue a credit-crunched bank, has lost eight years. America, where the trouble started, has lost ten (see left-hand chart).

Lexington

Rick Santorum may have many qualities, but the main one is that he isn’t Mitt Romney

“IT IS now clear this will be a two-person race between the conservative leader Newt Gingrich and the Massachusetts moderate.” So said the conservative leader Newt Gingrich to console himself after being trounced by Mitt Romney in the Florida primary in late January. But late January was an age ago in what America’s discombobulated pundits are now calling the topsiest-turviest primary season they can remember.

By JAMES TARANTO

Mitt Romney is inevitable again, although his detractors can take heart that he's been inevitable before and it's never lasted. That's another way of saying we agree with the conventional wisdom that Rick Santorum put in a poor performance in last night's Mesa, Ariz., CNN debate. (Complicating the inevitability question, Newt Gingrich had a good night, as he always seems to do when he's been counted out, so we can count him back in, at least for the moment.)
Santorum's troubles last night did not result from his supposedly outré social conservatism, as we shall see, but rather from his history as a U.S. senator. His worst moment came in response to a question about his vote in favor of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, a Republican-led (though bipartisan) initiative that is now unpopular among Republicans:

Obama's Forrest Gump analysis of rising gas prices.

'The American people aren't stupid," thundered President Obama yesterday in Miami, ridiculing Republicans who are blaming him for rising gasoline prices. Let's hope he's right, because not even Forrest Gump could believe the logic of what Mr. Obama is trying to sell.
To wit, that a) gasoline prices are beyond his control, but b) to the extent oil and gas production is rising in America, his energy policies deserve all the credit, and c) higher prices are one more reason to raise taxes on oil and gas drillers while handing even more subsidies to his friends in green energy. Where to begin?
It's true enough that oil prices can't be commanded from the Oval Office, so in that sense Mr. Obama's disavowal of blame is a rare show of humility in the face of market forces. Would that he showed similar modesty in trying to command the tides of home prices, car sales ("cash for clunkers"), or the production of electric batteries.

By KENNETH MAXWELL

TOKYO—Japan's financial regulator said Friday it has halted operations of a little-known Tokyo money-management company after the firm allegedly lost billions of dollars in client money.

Enlarge Image

European Pressphoto Agency

The offices of AIJ Investment Advisors in Tokyo

In one of the biggest cases of its kind in Japan, with Tokyo's reputation as a financial center still bruised by the billion-dollar Olympus Corp. accounting scandal, the regulator said investigators found that AIJ Investment Advisors Co. can't account for "most of" the 183 billion yen, or about $2.3 billion, in pension-fund assets under management.

The most dangerous Barack Obama video ever!!!

AMERICA IS GONE!! Listen to this... It is over! WAKE UP PLEASE!!!.

NEW WORLD MAP AFTER 2012

World Collapse Explained in 3 Minutes

The Myth of the End of Terrorism

The Myth of the End of Terrorism

By Scott Stewart |

In this week's Geopolitical Weekly, George Friedman discussed the geopolitical cycles that change with each generation. Frequently, especially in recent years, those geopolitical cycles have intersected with changes in the way the tactic of terrorism is employed and in the actors employing it.

Ron Paul Post CNN Arizona Debate Interview

Dr. Ron Paul - Media Ignores Me, Even Though Were Leading

All Of Ron Paul's Highlights At The GOP CNN Arizona Debate Part 1

John Stossel - Pursuit Of Happiness

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Thomas Sowell - Why Drugs Should Be Legalized

Thomas Sowell - That Top 1%

Thomas Sowell Dismantles Egalitarianism (Frances Fox Piven Edition)

The State versus the Highwayman - Lysander Spooner

Is Confucianism a Religion?

Peter Berger

On February 5, 2012, the New York Times carried a story about a Confucian academy in South Korea. It is one of some 150 such academies (seawon) in the country. Their main program consists of retreats, especially for schoolchildren. The program, apparently quite rigorous, is to provide training in moral behavior and etiquette (the two are closely related in Confucian thought). Park Seok-hong, head of a large academy originally founded in 1543, explained the basic assumption of these programs: “We may have built our economy, but our morality is on the verge of collapse.”
It is not a new lament. It recurs in many countries, including Western ones, wherever modernization has led to economic development, but also to a weakening of traditional patterns of belief and values. Recourse to Confucianism is not new either.

Francis Fukuyama

I’ve promised to write about the surveillance drone that I’ve been building over the past couple of months. I have always wanted to have my own drone that could send back a live video feed. This is partly inspired by products like the AeroVironment RQ-11 Raven, which is currently in use by the US military, and which you can view in action here. The Raven is basically just a glorified RC airplane, with a sophisticated landing system that allows it to be recovered by a soldier without great pilot skills (which is one reason they cost around $35,000 each).
To get to the bottom line, my drone has taken its first flights, the results of which you can see in a video of my office at Stanford and in a local park.
When my kids were younger I looked into buying an RC helicopter for this purpose and actually tried to wire a camera on a car, but the consumer technology wasn’t up to snuff back then. Now it is.
Instead of using an RC airplane I went with a helicopter for a couple of reasons. I could test the helicopter in my back yard, while an airplane would require a runway. Helicopters are better for precise, close-in surveillance because they can hover. The big drawback is that they are very hard to fly; indeed, learning to fly an RC helicopter is the single biggest impediment to the use of this kind of drone. (Among other reasons, they’re hard to fly because left and right switch meanings on the joystick when the helicopter is pointing toward you.)

Little Brother Is Watching A lot more than money is at stake in online marketing. J.P. O’Malley

The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood once pondered the impact of two famous dystopian texts from the first half of the 20^th century: George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.¹ These two novels, Atwood argued, were the perfect models for using fiction as allegory to predict, or at least to force some disciplined thought about what future societies might be like. As the century unfolded, however, technology outpaced what Orwell or Huxley could have imagined, and global politics, its ideologies in tow, changed in ways neither man could reasonably have predicted. As a result, what we understood these books to mean and to portend changed dramatically. Atwood tried to describe where that shift had taken us by 2007:

Centralization and the Capitalist Market Economy. János Kornai

Not long ago, I was shown at a provincial university the quotas for admission that the faculty of economics had received from the ministry for this academic year, derived from the national admittance threshold points: “Students on basic training 750, students on the masters’ course 120,” and so on. I could hardly believe my eyes. Exactly 120 on the masters’ course? Not 119 or 121? I got in touch with people at other universities, who confirmed that they too had received similar detailed numerical quotas from the higher authorities. None of the university people could tell me quite how the figures had been calculated, but they suspect that someone above had produced aggregate national quotas for the each major field that were broken down to institution level.

Triage in the Drug War A short-term strategy for targeting the most violent Mexican cartels Mark A.R. Kleiman

There’s really nothing wrong with existing U.S. drug policy, except that all but one of its underlying ideas is false.
The one true idea is that drug use can be a dangerous activity for drug-takers and others, both because people under the spell of intoxication partially lose control of their behavior and because people under the spell of addiction partially lose control of their drug-taking. It follows that a purely free-market approach to addictive intoxicants will not lead to good results; taxes and regulations are necessary, and prohibition may be justified. Whether prohibition is actually justified for any given drug depends on the risks of the drug, how deeply socially embedded its use has become, and the state’s capacity to enforce it. (In my view, the answer is “no” for alcohol, but “yes” for cocaine.)
But this simple truth is taken, by both U.S. domestic law and policy and by the international drug control regime, as implying a number of stark falsehoods:

U.S. Soldiers Grow Opium/Heroin Poppy in Afghanistan!

US Soldiers guarding opium in Afghanistan

Ron Paul on the FBI and CIA

Ron Paul on CIA Drug Trafficking

The Snowball of Empire Mises Daily: Friday, by Nico Perrino

Those of us who spent our younger years living in the coldest of the 50 states remember fondly those afternoons spent at play just after a fresh coat of snow blanketed the ground. We'd grab our jackets and gloves, run out of the house, and convene at the nearest large field (perhaps the backyard) and bask in the winter wonderland presented to us only sporadically during those very cold months.
Snowball fights, snowmen, and creating igloos were among some of the activities we'd all partake in; merrily disregarding frostbite to salvage one more minute outside.
But one activity among them all sticks out to a great number of us.
It was the simplest of games, yet always one of the most fun. When there was enough snow on the ground, everyone from the neighborhood or school would compete to try and roll the largest snowball.
As with all things, it would start out small; one kid packing a handful of snow and rolling it along the ground adding more and more snow with each cycle. A few minutes would go by and eventually the ball would be up to his knees — a few more, his waist.

Mises Academy: Hunt Tooley teaches The Totalitarians

"All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

Benito Mussolini

In many ways, the absolute state dreamed up by Machiavelli and other Renaissance Europeans couldn't hold a candle to the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. If the old absolutists claimed potential and occasionally de facto total control over the lives of subjects, the total-war regimes made numerous "great leaps forward" to achieve ubiquitous surveillance, eradication of even the claim to individual rights, creation of concentration camps, ethnic cleansing on a scale unprecedented in human history, and mass killings of whole categories of individuals branded as "enemies of the state."

[Human Action (1949)]

Media of exchange and money are market phenomena. What makes a thing a medium of exchange or money is the conduct of parties to market transactions. An occasion for dealing with monetary problems appears to the authorities in the same way in which they concern themselves with all other objects exchanged, namely, when they are called upon to decide whether or not the failure of one of the parties to an act of exchange to comply with his contractual obligations justifies compulsion on the part of the government apparatus of violent oppression. If both parties discharge their mutual obligations instantly and synchronously, as a rule no conflicts arise which would induce one of the parties to apply to the judiciary. But if one or both parties' obligations are temporally deferred, it may happen that the courts are called to decide how the terms of the contract are to be complied with. If payment of a sum of money is involved, this implies the task of determining what meaning is to be attached to the monetary terms used in the contract.

Let's End Social Security as We Know It. by Doug Bandow

Governments of most industrialized nations are staggering under mountainous debts. Aging populations and slowing economic growth have undermined generous welfare states. Least affordable are public pensions modeled after the infamous "investment" scheme popularized by Charles Ponzi. Collect money from current taxpayers to pay current beneficiaries, and let the future take care of itself.

With Washington facing its fourth straight trillion-plus dollar annual deficit Congress should be imposing tough budget cuts. But despite last year's multiple budget battles, Congress and the White House still refuse to confront America's spending problem. Republicans won't propose any serious reductions — such as means testing Social Security or Medicare, reducing military outlays, or slashing corporate welfare. Democrats just want to find someone else to tax.

Worrisome Belligerence: GOP Presidential Candidates and Foreign Policy. by Ted Galen Carpenter

Foreign policy has not featured prominently in the campaign among Republican candidates for the presidential nomination. That may be a blessing in disguise. On the relatively rare occasions when those aspirants for the White House do address foreign policy topics, it is enough to make intelligent voters wish that the candidates would stick to domestic topics. With the notable exception of Congressman Ron Paul — who has almost no chance of getting the GOP nomination — all of the candidates have embraced an alarming, reckless belligerence.

Obama's Busted Budget by Michael D. Tanner

In a town where bipartisan budget chicanery has been raised to an art form, President Obama's latest budget proposal should be hailed as the da Vinci of fiscal obfuscation.

The president claims that his budget proposal reduces debt by $4 trillion over the next 10 years, combining $2.4 trillion in spending cuts with $1.6 trillion in tax hikes. Almost none of that is true.
Let's start with the idea that the president's budget would reduce the debt. That is true only using Washington math, under which a smaller increase is actually a decrease. In reality, the president's budget adds $6.7 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, bringing it to nearly $25.5 trillion by 2022. That would be more than 100 percent of our GDP.

Wars Should Be Hard to Start. by Benjamin H. Friedman

The New York Times' report on Special Operation Command's proposal for more authority to deploy troops never quite says what new powers are sought. That vagueness, combined with the murky existing law on deploying special operations forces outside war zones, makes evaluating the proposal tough.

What is clear is that it is already too easy to deploy special operations forces on lethal missions. According to the Times, 12,000 special operators are deployed abroad and have operated in 70 nations in the last decade. Other reports claim that special operations forces have lately conducted operations in Syria, Nigeria, Iran, Algeria, and even Peru. In some cases, the special operators are reportedly collecting intelligence, a job various intelligence agencies already have. In others, the special operations forces are seemingly committing acts of war, which should require explicit congressional approval.

Troops March On White House In Support Of Ron Paul

Ron Paul is the choice of the troops for president in 2012

Steve Watson

Marking President’s day today, February 20th, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of active duty troops and veterans will descend on Washington DC and the White House to show support for Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign.

NDAA Is Now Law, and Libertarians Are Now Anti-Government Extremists!. by Gary D. Barnett

Democracy, which I consider to be the first step or beginning of socialism, thrives on propaganda, and uses this propaganda to indoctrinate the people. Once this indoctrination is complete, totalitarianism is the end result, and then propaganda is replaced by the razor’s edge of the state’s sword. This is our lot today. Propaganda has labeled those of us who desire to protect freedom as dissenters, and as enemies of the State. Given the now "legal" ability of the State to imprison indefinitely or murder any it chooses to, the sword has become the state’s weapon of choice. The circle is nearly complete!
According to a Reuter’s article published recently, the "FBI warns of threat from anti-government extremists." "Anti-government extremists opposed to taxes and regulations pose a growing threat to local law enforcement officers in the United States, the FBI warned on Monday." The article went on to say that: "These extremists, sometimes known as "sovereign citizens," believe they can live outside any type of government authority.

Coming into her own

Slowly but surely, the president is making her mark on the government

SÃO PAULO

DURING her first year as Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff was careful not to make changes so big that they might be seen as a rebuke to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, her predecessor and patron. She waited to replace the pork-barrel ministers she inherited from him until corruption charges against them became overwhelming, and implemented only limited reforms. Many pundits expected that in 2012 she would take advantage of the quiet period between Christmas and Carnival in February to be more ambitious—only to be disappointed by yet more incrementalism.

A way out of the woods

The euro may survive brinkmanship over Greece, but the road to recovery will be long and hard

LAST year every new jolt in the euro crisis sent financial markets into a spin. This year they have become blasé. They barely even registered the torching of buildings in Athens, nor the last-minute cancellation of a meeting of ministers that was supposed to agree on a new aid package for Greece.
Although a calm is welcome, nonchalance is not justified. A deal probably will be done on Greece, and there are promising signs of reform all over the continent. But, the problems ahead for the euro zone remain huge. The crisis is, in effect, moving from an acute to a chronic phase.

Schumpeter

America is becoming a less attractive place to do business

IS AMERICA fading? It seems an odd thing to say about a country that so dominates the industries of the future. Where else could Facebook have grown from a student prank to a $100 billion company in less than a decade? America has been gripped by worries about decline before, notably in the 1970s, only to roar back. But this time it may be serious.
There is little doubt that other countries are catching up. Between 1999 and 2009 America’s share of world exports fell in almost every industry: by 36 percentage points in aerospace, nine in information technology, eight in communications equipment and three in cars. Some loss of market share is inevitable as China and other economies emerge. But even in absolute terms, there is cause for worry. Private-sector job growth has slowed dramatically, and come to a halt in industries that are exposed to global competition. Median annual income grew by an anaemic 2% between 1990 and 2010.

by Taki

As I watched last week’s Western posturing after the Russo-Chinese veto of the UN Security Council’s resolution against Syria, Captain Renault of Casablanca fame kept coming to mind. Like the good captain, who was shocked to discover gambling was taking place at Rick’s Café (while pocketing his winnings), I was shocked that Uncle Sam’s Secretary of State and her British equivalent were so upset that the big bad Russkis and the tricky Fu Manchus could veto a resolution against the world’s worst man ever, Bashar al-Assad. Following the veto, ominous warnings were issued against the Syrian strongman by the fierce-looking William Hague—a Mister Clean lookalike who is reputed to have worn diapers until he was 16—and echoed by Hillary the Great, the only woman to have ever been cuckolded by Monica Lewinsky.
The reason for my shock was simple. Uncle Sam has been vetoing UN Security Council resolutions against Israel since the latter’s inception.

Jim Rogers: Don't Pay Attention to Governments. by Robert Wenzel

Jim Rogers, who received the Mises Institute's Schlarbaum Prize for the lifetime defense of liberty in 2010, proved today that he deserved the award.

“If you listen to governments, then you are not going to make a lot of money. Governments lie, distort and make mistakes,” he said this morning on CNBC.

And, he clearly recognizes the near-global money printing now being conducted by central banks.

“My way of playing this is to own real assets like commodities,” he said “You now have the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the Federal Reserve printing money. The way to protect yourself at a time like this is to own assets.”

A Greenbacker Invents a Nut-Case History of Libertarianism

Gary North

I have been asked by several of my subscribers to respond to this article: Proof Libertarianism is an Illuminati Ploy. It appears here: http://www.henrymakow.com/libertarianism_as_an_illuminat.html
Let me say, before I begin, that the author of this article is the only person I have come across who could profitably study with Ellen Brown.
There is a subhead: William S. Volker (1859-1947) was a wealthy German-Jewish businessman.
There is a biography of William Volker, Mr. Anonymous (1951). On Page 16, we read:

After supper they gathered around Dorothea to pray and to listen to her read passages from the Bible. The Scriptures finished, she laid the Bible aside and explained the practical application of each admonition. Dorothea also passed along to her children the plain homilies she had learned from her parents. She spoke with serious purposefulness; her steady voice revealed her deep conviction. William joined his mother's circle of instruction before he could comprehend all her teachings. And each Sunday the whole family attended the Lutheran Church services in Esperke where the family prayers were supplemented with more formal worship.

Down With the Presidency. by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

The modern institution of the presidency is the primary political evil Americans face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank accounts. It skews the culture toward decadence and trash. It tells lie after lie. Teachers used to tell school kids that anyone can be president. This is like saying anyone can go to Hell. It's not an inspiration; it's a threat.

Obama’s Phony Theology Offers Phony Financing on Everything. John Ransom

Rick Santorum struck the right note with conservatives when he attacked Obama on his phony liberal theology. This is the red meat that conservatives have been waiting for. They want someone who will take the fight to the enemy, exposing the false religiosity of the liberal left.
“I just said that when you have a world view that elevates the Earth above man and says that, we can't take those [energy] resources because we're going to harm the Earth by things that frankly are just not scientifically proven- for example, that politicization of the whole global warming debate,” Santorum told liberal Grand Inquisitor Bob Scheiffer on CBS News’ Face the Music. “I mean, this is just all an attempt to centralize power and to give more power to the government.”

The Left Fuels Santorum Surge. Star Parker

A succession of high profile left wing decisions and initiatives of recent weeks drive home the extent to which the left is changing the face of America.
Notable among these are the decision of a federal appeals court in California to uphold a prior court decision finding California’s Proposition 8, defining marriage as between a man and a woman, unconstitutional; the reversal of a decision, due to a tsunami of left wing pressure, of the Susan G. Komen Foundation to withdraw its funding to Planned Parenthood; and the Obama administration rulemaking refusing to grant a religious exemption from the new health care law employer mandate requiring provision of free contraception and sterilization services as part of health coverage.
These developments are, I think, helping to buoy the newly surging candidacy of former Republican Senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum.
Why?

Illustration by Ted McGrath

By Michael Lewis

About Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis is the author of the best-sellers The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine; The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game; Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game; and Liars Poker among other works.
More about Michael Lewis

To: The Upper Ones From: Strategy Committee Re: The Counterrevolution
As usual, we have much to celebrate.
The rabble has been driven from the public parks. Our adversaries, now defined by the freaks and criminals among them, have demonstrated only that they have no idea what they are doing. They have failed to identify a single achievable goal.

Santorum Is Romney's Toughest Challenge Yet

Illustration by Ryan Rhodes

By Ramesh Ponnuru

The latest not-Romney is the strongest one yet. Mitt Romney has beaten back challenges from Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich in succession.

Santorum’s Surge Raises Cheers From Camp Obama: Albert R. Hunt

“The one who can beat Obama: Rick Santorum,” the television commercial proclaims. That boast brings cheers from two quarters: the faithful followers of the conservative Republican presidential candidate, and the Democratic president’s political strategists.
The former Pennsylvania senator is on fire in the Republican contest, threatening the front-runner, Mitt Romney, in the critical Michigan primary next week and nationally.

If U.S. Troops Pull Out, Economic Growth May Slow: Amity Shlaes

Out. Everywhere. Yesterday. Those three words sum up the mood here at home when it comes to American military presence outside U.S. borders.
President Barack Obama is signaling he wants to get out of Afghanistan so badly that he’s even taking a few political gambles to accelerate a pullout. There’s also a more general sense that putting soldiers in other countries has proved a bad investment for everyone involved, rendering those nations sadder, rougher and poorer.

Friday, February 24, 2012