LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
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With Law And Church Behind Us…
“Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law (as well as the church) on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.”
- Historian Alan Bullock
John Gatto On State-Controlled Consciousness
Toward the end of this video, John Taylor Gatto, the iconoclastic critic of compulsory education and state schools and ardent advocate of “unschooling,” has an especially memorable passage.
He points out that while the state can violently coerce a few people at a time (through arrest and shooting), there’s no way (outside war or genocide, I presume) to coerce large masses of people over time, except through controlling their minds.Or more accurately, through creating the habits and attitudes that make them obedient to puppet strings in their own minds.
Compulsory schooling by the state, he argues, is a way to colonize the minds of children to make them their own police-force, eager to report other deviants.
[Preparing them to become tax snitches, as I blogged earlier, or political informants, or supporters of biometric ID legislation].
In “Dumbing Us Down”, Gatto argues that state schooling causes the following in a child’s mind:
1) Confusion, with its jumbled ensemble of tests, memorized and then forgotten
2) Dependence on class position
3) Indifference/apathy
4) Emotional dependency
5) Intellectual dependency
6) Provisional self-esteem that needs the assurance of experts to maintain
7) Habituation to constant surveillance and the denial of privacy
Bastiat On The Virtues Of Misers
In my view, the moral problem at the root of socialism is actually not envy, as many libertarians contend. I grew up among socialists, and they were, by far, motivated by honorable concerns: a sense of injustice, grief for the poor, compassion.
(I’m not talking here about political activists, some of whom do, in fact, have much baser motives).
The principal flaw in the socialist world view, as I see it, is a too great concern with appearances and an inability to see cause and effect in any complex way. It’s not the ‘materialism’ of dialectical materialism I object to. It’s the lack of ‘mind’ in the materialism. The reasoning is limited, superficial, and inaccurate. It lacks sufficient particularity, as Michael Oakeshott argued in “Rationalism in Politics” (1962).
And as Oakeshott argued there, that can be a problem in Hayek, as well.
Libertarian theorist, Frederic Bastiat, makes much the same point in his acute analysis of the superiority of the miser over the spendthrift, an analysis that would be iconoclastic from the point of view of traditional religious morality, where the miser’s avarice would usually be condemned and the spendthrift’s generosity praised:
Camus On God
“I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live my life as if there isn’t and die to find out there is.”
Climate Scientists: Academic Barrow Boys
Climate scientists are fighting back, reports The Washington Times.
Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher says:
“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules.”
Of course, climate skeptics (or rather, critics of anthropogenic global warming, AGW) would argue that it’s the climatistas who’ve brought Barrow boy (street-wise) tactics into what ought to be a nice, genteel gathering of Harrow alumni.
Popular British TV writer and eminent free-speech QC, John Mortimer, author of the serial, “Rumpole of the Bailey,” saw through this convenient sentimentality about “gentlepersons” a bit more keen-sightedly than most.
In one episode of the serial, Rumpole, Mortimer’s aging, scruffy, Shakespeare-quoting Old Bailey barrister, defends Nigel Timson, a youthful member of a clan with an inelegant and chequered past, a true Barrow boy, who’s accused of insider- trading at the silk-stocking firm where he’s a broker.
It doesn’t help things that Nigel is living with the daughter of the head of the firm, who isn’t keen on a Barrow boy for a son-in-law. The plot-twist is that the Barrow boy, despite his spotty family history, is actually innocent. I won’t tell you the rest, but the larger point is that clever crooks know how to play to their advantage on public preconceptions about class behavior.
The same holds true for university intellectuals. They also usually enjoy the general presumption that they hold to higher standards of behavior and ethics than the ‘baser sort’ outside the ivory towers. What the climate fracas shows is that that presumption might be just as outdated as the presumption about the virtues of Harrow boys that Rumpole overturns…
Kurt Tucholsky On Love Of Country
“We have just written “no” on 225 pages, “no” out of sympathy and “no” out of love, “no” out of hate and “no” out of passion - and now we would like to say “yes” for once. “Yes” - to the countryside and the country of Germany America. The country where we were born and whose language we speak. (…)
And now I would like to tell you something: it is not true that all those who call themselves ‘national’ and who are nothing but gentrified militants have taken out a lease on this country and its language just for them. Germany America is not just a government representative in his tailcoat, nor is it a headmaster, nor is it the ladies and gentlemen of the steel helmets. We are here too. (…)
Germany America is a divided country. We are one part of it. And whatever the situation, we quietly love our country - unshakably, without a flag, or a street organ, no sentimentality and no drawn sword.”
(Kurt Tucholsky, Heimat, in Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Berlin 1929, p. 226)
Roderick Long On Confucian Libertarianism
Masterful libertarian scholar, Roderick Long, has a very long, fascinating paper, “Rituals of Freedom: Austro-Libertarian Themes In Early Confucianism,” at Mises.org. It traces libertarian ideas in Confucian thought, and makes a convincing argument that Confucianism is a better source of libertarian inspiration than the much more frequently cited Daoism.
I’m republishing a post on Long’s paper by Brian Caplan, at Marginal Revolution, because the pdf of Long’s paper isn’t very reader-friendly for a blog and Caplan has nice quotes from the piece.
“Unfortunately, Long points out, a much stronger theme in Taoist is primitivist hostility to modern civilization. Listen to Lao-tzu describe the Taoist utopia:
Lessen the population. Make sure that even though there are labor saving tools, they are never used. Make sure that the people look upon death as a weighty matter and never move to distant places. Even though they have ships and carts, they will have no use for them. … Make sure that the people return to the use of the knotted cord [in lieu of writing]. … Then even though neighboring states are within sight of each other, [and] can hear the sounds of each other’s dogs and chickens … people will grow old and die without ever having visited one another.
In contrast, Long finds much of value in the Confucians:
The early Confucians, by contrast, may not be as radical in their anti-statism as the Taoists, but in my estimation they make up for this flaw by firmly yoking their anti-statism to the cause of civilization, commerce, and the Great Society; their overall program thus looks a lot more like contemporary libertarianism than the Taoist program does. One Confucian text, while noting approvingly Laozi’s hostility to despotism, sharply criticizes Laozi for wanting to “drag the present age back to the conditions of primitive times and to stop up the eyes and ears of the people”; the best ruler instead “accepts the nature of the people,” which is to long for “beautiful sounds and forms,” “ease and comfort.”
The highlight of Long’s article is his discussion of the Sima Qian (c. 145-85 B.C.). Almost two thousand years before Adam Smith, Qian opined that “Wealth and currency should be allowed to flow as freely as water!” and had arguments to defend his position. And who said that Chinese intellectuals had no appreciation for the merchant class? Few Western thinkers match Sima’s appreciation of entrepreneurship:
These, then, are examples of outstanding and unusually wealthy men. None of them enjoyed any titles or fiefs, gifts, or salaries from the government, nor did they play tricks with the law or commit any crimes to acquire their fortunes. They simply guessed what course conditions were going to take and acted accordingly, kept a sharp eye out for the opportunities of the times, and so were able to capture a fat profit. … There was a special aptness in the way they adapted to the times …. All of these men got where they did because of their devotion and singleness of purpose. … [T]here is no fixed road to wealth, and money has no permanent master. It finds its way to the man of ability like the spokes of a wheel converging upon the hub, and from the hands of the worthless it falls like shattered tiles. … Rich men such as these deserve to be called the “untitled nobility” …
Murray Rothbard praised Sima in his history of economic thought, but Long notes that he neglected to mention that he was a Confucian!
It is hard to read this piece and not stand in awe of Long’s command of the Chinese literature. This is a body of thought comparable to Western philosophy in its intricacy and depth. Even if you couldn’t care less about Chinese proto-libertarians, this article exemplifies the true meaning of scholarship. And so the Sage says: check it out!”
Shocks And Doctrines: WSJ Uses Quake To Critique Klein
Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal adds some nuance to Naomi Klein’s black-and-white picture of Milton Friedman’s contributions to the Chilean economy, noting how prosperity and effective enforcement of building codes have protected Chilean victims of the recent earthquake from the devastation that Haiti suffered:
“In left-wing mythology—notably Naomi Klein’s tedious 2007 screed “The Shock Doctrine”—the Chicago Boys weren’t just strange bedfellows to Pinochet’s dictatorship. They were complicit in its crimes. “If the pure Chicago economic theory can be carried out in Chile only at the price of repression, should its authors feel some responsibility?” wrote New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis in October 1975. In fact, Pinochet had been mostly indifferent to the Chicago Boys’ advice until the continuing economic crisis forced him to look for some policy alternatives. In March 1975, he had a 45-minute meeting with Friedman and asked him to write a letter proposing some remedies. Friedman responded a month later with an eight-point proposal that largely mirrored the themes of the Chicago Boys.
For his trouble, Friedman would spend the rest of his life being defamed as an accomplice to evil: at his Nobel Prize ceremony the following year, he was met by protests and hecklers. Friedman himself couldn’t decide whether to be amused or annoyed by the obloquies; he later wryly noted that he had given communist dictatorships the same advice he gave Pinochet, without raising leftist hackles.
As for Chile, Pinochet appointed a succession of Chicago Boys to senior economic posts. By 1990, the year he ceded power, per capita GDP had risen by 40% (in 2005 dollars) even as Peru and Argentina stagnated. Pinochet’s democratic successors—all of them nominally left-of-center—only deepened the liberalization drive. Result: Chileans have become South America’s richest people. They have the continent’s lowest level of corruption, the lowest infant-mortality rate, and the lowest number of people living below the poverty line.
Chile also has some of the world’s strictest building codes. That makes sense for a country that straddles two massive tectonic plates. But having codes is one thing, enforcing them is another. The quality and consistency of enforcement is typically correlated to the wealth of nations. The poorer the country, the likelier people are to scrimp on rebar, or use poor quality concrete, or lie about compliance. In the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, thousands of children were buried under schools also built according to code.
In “The Shock Doctrine,” Ms. Klein titles one of her sub-chapters “The Myth of the Chilean Miracle.” In her reading, the only thing Friedman and the Chicago Boys accomplished was to “hoover wealth up to the top and shock much of the middle class out of existence.” Actual Chileans of all classes—living in the aftermath of an actual shock—may take a different view of Friedman, who helped give them the wherewithal first to survive the quake, and now to build their lives anew.”
My Comment:
Friedman, was, of course, from an Austrian perspective, far from being an ideal free-marketer. In a devastating piece, “Milton Friedman Unraveled,” (1971), Rothbard even questioned his claim to be called a free marketer of any kind, listing among many sins, his advocacy of withholding taxes and of an absolute dollar standard.
All true, no doubt. But the fact remains, even if it was only in a very constrained sense that he advocated more freedom in the markets, he did advocate it. And as the article above suggests, contra Rothbard, even a limited advocacy of market freedom is better than an outright assault on it.
Glenn Greenwald On Intellectual Credibility
Glenn Greenwald never fails. I was just catching up on the infamous Leon Wieseltier-Andrew Sullivan ethno-politico-theological brouhaha of last month that I completely missed while trekking around Latin America, and I found this simple but wise paragraph:
“What one thinks of Andrew Sullivan, or how angry he’s made one over the years, ought to be about the most irrelevant factor imaginable in determining one’s reaction to this TNR attack. Sometimes, even people you don’t like are the targets of odious and harmful accusations, and sometimes, even your Bestest Friends, fellow party members and listserv pals might do wrong things that merit criticism. Wieseltier’s polemic is a classic example of anti-semitism accusations tossed around with no conceivable basis and for purely ignoble ends. It’s the very tactic that has caused significant damage in the past. So obviously unhinged is this particular assault that it actually presents a good opportunity to discredit behavior like this once and for all. That’s all that should matter; how many grudges one nurses towards Andrew Sullivan is nice fodder for gossipy listserv chats, but no responsible or even adult commentator would allow it to influence one’s views on this matter.”
And that’s why Glenn Greenwald is one of the very few mainstream writers on politics I can read regularly without a bad case of moral indigestion.
Other good responses to Wieseltier came from Sullivan himself, and from Matthew Yglesias and Joe Klein.
Yglesias’s post minced no words:
“For the purposes of intimidation, after all, baseless charges work better than well-grounded ones. Nikolai Krylenko, Bolshevik Minister of Justice, said “we must execute not only the guilty, execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.” And it’s much the same here. If you call anti-semites anti-semites, then people who aren’t motivated by anti-Jewish racism will figure “hey, since my political opinions aren’t motivated by anti-Jewish racism, then I’m safe.” The idea is to put everyone on notice that mere innocence will be no defense.”
The only problem was I wasn’t actually clear from reading Yglesias (apparently a long-time sparring partner of Wieseltier’s) where exactly runs the thin red line you can’t cross. Maybe that takes years of hanging out at MSM confabs, a future I’m as likely to encounter as sequestration in a Saudi harem.
Reading Sullivan, on the other hand, I felt I was reprising some of my own intellectual history:
“As a Jew and a Catholic, we read Buddhist scriptures together. We were, in fact, somewhat painfully alike in many ways: religious traditionalists whose reverence for our faiths was also marked by our rebellion within them. We share a commitment to secularism and religion, these days a very rare combination. His mentor was Isaiah Berlin; mine Michael Oakeshott.”
But, finally, it’s Jeffrey Goldberg, taking Wieseltier’s part, who - with minor adjustments- gets the final word on the whole sad business:
“I wish that he (Lila: all of them) would open up that their hearts to complexity.”
Mark Twain: the War Prayer
Mark Twain’s satirical “War Prayer”:
“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”
Manmohan Singh Needs to Emphasize Discipline, Not Blame Democracy
C. Gopinath, writing in The Hindu, blows away the notion that democracy can be blamed for slow decision-making and bureaucratic delays in India:
“It is easier for Dr Manmohan Singh’s to admit that we have bottlenecks in areas of roads, power and ports. Everybody knows that. It is also easy to blame democracy, for that is something we are not going to give up. The unintended message, unfortunately, is that we have to put up with these inefficiencies.
Other observers have chimed in, talking about a democracy tax or a discount due to democracy. The real problem is that we lack the work ethic that should drive us to excellence. Instead, the dominant ethic seems to be that the individual should do whatever it takes to get ahead, and forget about the rest of society. Look at the way we treat garbage (keep the house clean and dump the trash outside), drive on the road violating rules just so we are ahead, and so on.
Statesmen should not be finding excuses for lapses but challenging the people to new heights. The former President, Mr Abdul Kalam, continues to do a great job inspiring people with his vision for a prosperous future.
If Dr Manmohan Singh is looking for a theme on which to build his legacy, he should pick discipline. Nobody seems to be paying attention to it.”
Business Managers Need To Change Their Framework
The Economic Times notes the poverty of management frameworks rooted in the demands of mass manufacture (Fordism and Taylorism):
“Ramnath Narayanswamy, professor of economics and social science at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore, who teaches a course on spirituality at the workplace, explains: “Management as a discipline quite literally originated in North America against the historical backdrop of Fordism and Taylorism. While its reach is indeed universal, its origins are very North American and in some respects, the discipline is still a prisoner of its historical orientation.
The excessive emphasis on analytical intelligence as opposed to emotional and spiritual intelligence is a case in point. The overwhelming predominance of “reason” and “science” when in fact it’s our daily experience that all life is based on faith and sacrifice, is another. Or the importance accorded to tools and techniques in MBA education at the expense of neglecting character, values and attitude might be yet another.”
There is a realisation that management theory has to be home grown and not just transplanted from the West. Satish Pradhan, executive VP-group HR, Tata Sons, says, “Western thinking has been dedicated to frameworks and metaphors, and the poverty of these frameworks is revealing itself — it’s not intellectually robust.”
In contrast, says Pradhan, thinking in this part of the world isn’t linear, so one cannot simply take ideas and replicate them. By the same token, this makes it difficult for Eastern concepts to be understood or grasped fully by Westerners. “It’s much like how the Americans wondered, ‘The Japanese are hiding something’ when they visited factory shopfloors of Japanese companies to learn the secrets of their success in managing costs and quality in the early ‘80s.”
Why The Establishment Is Attacking Ron Paul
“If the guy is such a sure loser in 2012, why all the attacks? In his quiet way, Paul must have tapped into something. And you can get an idea of that something from what Pat Buchanan wrote the other day about the CPAC poll.
After asking “how do conservatives justify borrowing hundreds of billions yearly from Europe, Japan and the Gulf states — to defend Europe, Japan and the Arab Gulf states?” Buchanan answered his own question by making the case that such policies are not conservative at all.
“Ron Paul’s victory at CPAC may be a sign the prodigal sons of the right are casting off the heresy of neoconservatism and coming home to first principles,” Buchanan concluded.
Buchanan has put his finger on why the unemotional Texas congressman produces such an emotional reaction. The party establishment has to dread the prospect of a candidate who can unite the youthful libertarian conservatives with the Buchananite America-first types. Such a character might win a plurality running against Romney, Huckabee and neocon Barbie doll Sarah Palin.
And Paul might have the most money of them all, thanks to the support of those young voters who actually understand how the internet works. I suspect this is what all the shouting is about, even though the subject of it all never raises his voice.”
Paul Mulshine, NJ Star Ledger, via Lew Rockwell.
Sibel Edmonds On Traitors In High Places
“Sibel Edmonds: The Traitors Among Us,”
by Brad Friedman, Hustler Magazine, March 2010
“Edmonds’s most disturbing allegations, however, may be against high-ranking appointed officials in the Bush Administration. Elaborating on testimony she laid out in her sworn deposition, Edmonds told American Conservative magazine’s Phil Giraldi—a 17-year CIA counterterrorism officer—very specific details of alleged traitorous schemes perpetrated by top State and Defense Department officials. As already noted, these included Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and, perhaps most notably, former Deputy Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, the third-highest-ranking official in the Bush State Department.
Edmonds said that Feith and Wolfowitz were involved in plans to break Iraq into U.S. and British protectorates months prior to 9/11. She also claimed that the duo shared information with Grossman on how to blackmail various officials and that Grossman had accepted cash to help procure and sell nuclear weapons technology to Israel and Turkey—and, from there, on to the foreign black market. There the technology would be purchased by the highest bidder, such as Pakistan, Iran, Libya, North Korea or possibly even al-Qaeda.
Additionally, Edmonds claimed that Grossman, the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey before taking his State Department post, had tipped off Turkish diplomats to the true identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson’s front company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, a full three years prior to their being publicly outed by columnist Robert Novak. That in itself, according to George H.W. Bush, would be an act of treason carried out by “the most insidious of traitors.”
Former CIA counterterrorism officer Giraldi summed up Edmonds’s disclosures to me in blunt terms: “This was a massive coordinated espionage effort directed against United States nuclear secrets engineered by foreign agents who successfully corrupted senior government officials and legislators in our Congress. It’s that simple.”
According to a declassified version of a 2005 Department of Justice Inspector General’s report, Sibel Edmonds’s allegations are “credible,” “serious” and “warrant a thorough and careful review by the FBI.”
Perhaps more damningly, the FBI’s John Cole recently confirmed a key element of Edmonds’s claims when he revealed the existence of “the FBI’s decade-long investigation” of the State Department’s Grossman. Edmonds claimed that Grossman was perhaps the top U.S. ringleader for the entire foreign espionage scheme. The probe, Cole added, “ultimately was buried and covered up.”More at Antiwar by Philip Giraldi, on Edmond’s credibility.
Here is an op-ed written by Sibel Edmonds about the role of foreign agents in “hijacking” the country.
I should note that Edmonds herself has been seen by some as playing a sophisticated role of disinformation by overemphasizing Arab involvement in 9-11.
Frankly, I don’t know enough about her to argue if that’s plausible or not. In any case, even if her revelations serve an ulterior purpose, they are bad enough as they stand….
Random Thoughts On My Return
My thoughts on the last leg of my schlepp back to the US were mixed….how did my 4 month jaunt get stretched to double the length, for starters..
And why does a continent as rich in natural resources as South America have poverty of any kind….and why is customer service such a difficult concept for some cultures….
But let me rewind a bit.
I left you in Salta, where I spent a two days recovering from a 33 hour bus trip from Montevideo sans any food.
That wasn’t provoked by an attack of asceticism. When I got to Buenos Aires, I had no Argentine pesos on me, the banks were closed, the ATM wouldn’t take my card for some reason, and it was pouring too heavily for me to venture out into the city. The restaurants at the station wouldn’t accept Uruguayan pesos or a card. So, between Friday morning in Uruguay and late Monday in Salta I literally ate nothing, except for a soggy white bread sandwich with watery cheese and ham. I didn’t really feel hungry, though, until I got off at Salta….
But more on all that in another post, when I’ll give you my impressions of my trip back..
Today, I’m still catching up and will just leave you with a few random thoughts….
1. The infrastructure and organization of the United States is still unparalleled and impressive in every way, in spite of deterioration and neglect…
2. Americans should get over their love affair with politics. They’re bad at it, it doesn’t suit their style, and it annoys everyone else. America is at her best making things happen. The business of America really is business.
3. I love the English language. With a smattering of Asian and European languages for comparison, I still find everything I want in English.
4. You can lead a rich, well informed, and not uncomfortable life without a car or a bicycle, without air conditioning, a fan, internet, a phone, an I-Pod, a blackberry, wireless, a TV, or even a radio.
5. If you’re willing to drink tap water and eat stall food, you can eat every meal out on 2 dollars a day in Peru, and have meat/fish at least once a day. If you cooked at home, you could eat well for under 15 dollars a month.
6. America has been a unique experiment in history, made possible because several favorable elements lined up in one spot on the globe. One of those elements - in fact, one of the cardinal ones - was the puritan work ethic. What it does it say that our intelligentsia, by and large, despises it.
7. A man can be free with just economic freedom. Even if he cannot act politically, or speak his thoughts, he can think them. If he can think his own thoughts, he is still his own man. But a man without economic freedom can think only his master’s thoughts….and his master will be the state.
8. It isn’t the politicians we need to worry about. They have to stand election. It isn’t even the financiers. They have to reckon with bankruptcy.
But the media faces neither elections nor a balance-sheet. There you have the tyrant.
The Corporate Media: Suffering From Truth Emergency
We have an elite that has a stranglehold on what gets heard through its grip on professional societies and the major print and TV news. Prizes, media attention, peer approval go to very few media outlets. It’s well- known that only reporters and columnists at a handful of papers get serious attention. That’s a truly dangerous state of affairs and we’re suffering the fall-out from it. What makes it even worse is that news itself is more and more swept aside by trashy, sensation-seeking reporting, which leaves the audience with misinformation or simply a great black hole of ignorance.
Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips analyze the “truth emergency” ravaging the corporate media in the West (and to a lesser degree, everywhere):
“Truth Emergency: Keeping the Facts at Bay
The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.
– Rabindranath TagoreWhat are some of these truths, that not knowing them creates a literal state of emergency for human society? Here are two of many possible examples. A 2008 report from The World Bank admitted that in 2005, over three billion people lived on less than $2.50 a day and about forty-four percent of these people survive on less than $1.25. Complete and total wretchedness can be the only description for the circumstances faced by so many, especially those in urban areas of so-called developing nations. Simple items Americans take for granted like phone calls, nutritious food, vacations, television, dental care, and inoculations are beyond the possible for billions of people.6
In another ignored but related story, Starvation.net logged the increasing impacts of world hunger and starvation. Over 30,000 people a day (eighty-five percent of children under five) die of malnutrition, curable diseases, and starvation. The number of deaths has exceeded three hundred million people over the past forty years. These stories should be alarming headlines, certainly more significant than celebrity tripe and tabloid hype.7
Continuing on the theme of human poverty and its ramifications, farmers around the world grow more than enough food to feed the entire world adequately. Global grain production yielded a record 2.3 billion tons in 2007, up four percent from the year before, yet, billions of people go hungry every day. The website Grain.org describes the core reasons for continuing hunger in a recent article “Making a Killing from Hunger.” It turns out that while farmers grow enough food to feed the world, commodity speculators and huge grain traders like Cargill control the global food prices and distribution. Starvation is profitable for corporations when demands for food push the prices up. Cargill announced that profits for commodity trading for the first quarter of 2008 were eighty-six percent above 2007. World food prices grew twenty-two percent from June 2007 to June 2008 and a significant portion of the increase was propelled by the $175 billion invested in commodity futures that speculate on price instead of seeking to feed the hungry. This results in erratic food price spirals, both up and down, with food insecurity remaining widespread.“
My Comment:
Some of this commentary of course paints speculation with too broad a brush. Futures markets can, and do, provide efficient allocation of resources if they function as they should. The problem is not the futures market but the corruption of the market and the constant meddling in it by the state, which blunts the normal checks that the market would otherwise provide.
And again that goes back to public culture and professional standards that have become debased. The deeper question is how they became debased.
Which, of course, leads us to the government’s manipulation of the interest rate. That is where the problem lies.
But meanwhile, where is the media in all this? Providing the context so people can understand what’s going on?
No. It’s rooting around in John Edward’s trash can……
Did Bethany McLean Even Break The Enron Story?
n “Enronathon,” Seth Mnookin of The Wall Street Journal suggests Bethany McLean wasn’t quite the first person to break the story of Enron…and that she had a good bit of unacknowledged help:
“If journalism were in the Olympics, the Enron story might well be pairs figure skating. Bethany McLean, the young Fortune writer who first wrote about Enron’s shady finances a year ago, has, of course, already been awarded the gold.
And with that have come the requisite endorsements: In the past two months, she was hired as a consultant by NBC News and shared in a $1.4 million deal to co-author a book on the scandal. But another team is also vying for top honors — amid complaints about shoddy judging.
Reporters and editors at the Wall Street Journal believe their work has been unjustly ignored, with some wondering whether Pulitzer rivals like the Washington Post and the New York Times have gone out of their way to praise McLean.
Enron did not collapse under its own weight,” says Jonathan Friedland, the Journal editor who’s been in charge of much of the paper’s Enron coverage. “Without our reporting, I don’t think any of this would have happened.”
In response, McLean’s former editor at Fortune and current Time Inc. editorial director John Huey says, “Bethany was the first journalist in a widely respected national publication to suggest that the emperor at Enron had no clothes.” (Not that her own publication took much note: Fortune had to airbrush out Kenneth Lay from a November SMARTEST PEOPLE WE KNOW cover photo.) Let’s recap: In September 2000, Jonathan Weil wrote a long story for the now-defunct Texas edition of the Journal about odd accounting at various Texas-based energy traders; it included four paragraphs on Enron.
James Chanos, a well-known short-seller who was one of the first to start unloading Enron stock, says he got interested in the company after reading Weil’s piece.
Almost six months later, in March 2001, the then 30-year-old McLean (who Times columnist Maureen Dowd has suggested will be played by Alicia Silverstone in the inevitable movie) wrote her little-noticed 2,400-word story, “Is Enron Overpriced?”
Then, in October, the Journal ran a three-day series by Rebecca Smith and John Emshwiller detailing Enron’s unorthodox partnerships. Their articles are seen by many on Wall Street as ultimately sinking the company. Weil’s partisans think he should get credit for crossing the finish line first (an item, “Credit Due,” ran in “Page Six” recently).
But even Chanos says that “Bethany’s piece was the first one to raise really specific questions.”
Most of the Journal’s brain trust, though, are plugging Smith and Emshwiller, who, of course, wrote their stories in 2001 and are thus eligible for this year’s Pulitzers. “The Fortune story basically said this is a company that nobody understands,” says Journal deputy managing editor Daniel Hertzberg. “It didn’t show what was wrong with the company. It took Becky and John to do that.” That’s the competition.
Now for the judging. In January, Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post’s media writer, highlighted McLean as the first journalist to ask questions about Enron. Ten days later, the Times‘ Felicity Barringer wrote her profile of “the financial reporter everyone loves to lionize.” While McLean was being anointed as a journalistic sex symbol in a story hitherto dominated by a balding Kenneth Lay, folks at the Journal felt they were being robbed:
“People are trying to queer the Pulitzer pitch for the Journal,” says one editor there. That’s sour grapes, counters Kurtz: “In this case, a 31-year-old reporter beat them and the rest of the world by a considerable margin.”
In a bit of circular logic endemic to media reporters, Kurtz adds, “I must have been onto something, since after my piece appeared, she was profiled in the Times, given a contract by NBC, and offered a book deal.” As for McLean, she seems slightly embarrassed by all the attention. “I’ve told people I’ve gotten too much credit,” she says. “I did raise alarm bells, but I didn’t know the half of it.” “Read more: Enronathon http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/5756/#ixzz0dvvQZvUI
My Comment:
Please note also that the book was co-authored with Peter Elkind, who isn’t attributed in many of the stories.
Not that I’m all that sympathetic to the Wall Street Journal on the Enron story, since they don’t give credit to the alternative press either, and what goes around comes around. (My own experiences of plagiarism from articles and books can be found at the tab, ABOUT - half-way down the page).
If liberal columnists steal without attribution even from liberal bloggers, can you imagine the cone of silence that descends when the victim isn’t liberal? Libertarians and conservatives get stripped clean by the vultures of the “free” (of all ethics) press.
With them, it’s never about public welfare or the good of the nation, even though that’s the standard that they like to foist on other people. Even with the global economy melting down under their noses, they’re jealous of sharing the information that activists, bloggers, and ordinary citizens give out generously for the common good.
(Again, there are honorable exceptions).
In short, they make up credit - just like the Federal Reserve.
Or they steal it - like their banker friends.
Or they collude with each other to “take-down” anyone not part of their game - just like their hedge-fund allies.
And no matter what, they always cover for each other.
Notice how other people’s personal lives are fair game for stalking, extortion, and exposes, but never theirs, as this piece on Maria Bartiromo suggests.
(Ms. McLean figures in that piece too. In fact, a brief google tells us that McLean´s had plagiarism problems and conflicts of interest more than a couple of times).
Item One. Here’s an earlier complaint about Fortune magazine plagiarism. A Fortune writer apparently used material from interviews and articles by an outfit called Annex Research, without attributing or acknowledging it. An email to Fortune got no response, either. The Fortune writer? Bethany McLean…
Item Two: McLean at it again, swiping material from the Orange County Register Weekly
Item Three: Libertarian economist, Bill Anderson, in a piece called “The Most Dishonest ´Journalists´ In the Room,” describes how McLean was having a romantic relationship with the lead prosecutor in the Enron trial, Sean Berkowitz, before the sentencing, while she was covering the trial and getting out the government´s side of the story. Omitted in that story as well was the disturbing fact that the prosecutor had suborned perjury in order to get a full conviction of Jeffrey Skilling.
And that´s besides Item Four….
That fetching stock-manipulation thing she had going with hedge buddies Marc Cohodes and Jim Chanos.
No wonder none of them can get the story right.
And no wonder they still won’t get it straight, not until after activists, or bloggers, or less-known writers at their own outfits or elsewhere do the hard work. Then they’ll slide in to take the credit.
Nice work.
Just as cushy and exploitative as anything on Wall Street, in its way.
Business men and real capitalists do the hard work of producing. Then the faux capitalist money-men and their shills in government rush in to cream the money off and cover themselves with glory via their mouthpieces in the shill media.
No wonder the media doesn’t understand capitalism. No wonder they love the crony capitalist bordello they call home. It’s the only one they know, the poor things.
[Again, they really ARE a minority of journalists, just a powerful minority. There are hundreds of honorable hard-working journalists who write their own stories rather than steal them off the net, whose names never get into headlines, and who wouldn't be caught dead behaving like this].
And don’t miss the other telling details:
Enron’s Ken Lay was a Republican.
Goldman Sachs is a Democrat cash-cow, for the most part.
Jim Chanos, hedge-fund master mind, used to work at Deutsch Bank.
And Bethany McLean was once a Goldman Sachs banker….. (Maybe that explains her kid-glove treatment of Hank at Vanity Fair).….
….And her equally interesting white-washing of Spyro Contogouris, who colluded with hedge funds to attack Prem Watsa’s Fairfax Financial.
Honestly. Rielle Hunter has nothing on any of these gold-diggers.
US Support For White Phosphorous In Gaza
Eileen Fleming in Op-Ed News:
“The Ileana Ros-Lehtinen/AIPAC driven House Resolution 867 boiled down to a call for censorship of the Goldstone Report without “any endorsement or further consideration” from the Obama Administration, rife with inaccuracies and undermines support for the universality of human rights.
“It is no surprise that Congress is trying to cover their culpable asses for during the 23 days of Israeli assault on Gaza, “Washington provided F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles, and a wide array of munitions, including white phosphorus and DIME. The weapons required for the Israeli assault were decided upon in June 2008, and the transfer of 1,000 bunker-buster GPS-guided Small Diameter Guided Bomb Units 39 (GBU-39) were approved by Congress in September. The GBU 39 bombs were delivered to Israel in November (prior to any claims of Hamas cease fire violation!) for use in the initial air raids on Gaza. [1]
One of the few who have been to Gaza, Congressman Baird D-WA, wrote, “H.Res. 867 is very serious business. If, as Goldstone asserts and the evidence I have seen supports, there were in fact gross violations of international law and human rights on all sides, we cannot in good conscience support H.Res. 867.
“This is about much more than just another imposed political litmus test that we are all too often asked to perform. This is about whether we as individuals and this Congress as an institution find it acceptable to drop white phosphorous on civilian targets, to rocket civilian communities, to destroy hospitals and schools, to use civilians as human shields, and to deliberately destroy nonmilitary factories, industries and basic water, electrical and sanitation infrastructure. This is about whether it is acceptable to restrict the movement, opportunities and hopes of more than a million people every single day.
“At the end of the day, this is also about our own domestic security. If we are seen internationally as condoning violations of human rights and international law, if our money and our weaponry play a leading role in those violations, and if we reflexively obstruct the findings of someone with the credentials, history and integrity of Justice Goldstone, it can only diminish our international standing and our own security.“-Rep. Brian Baird (D) represents Washington’s 3rd district.” [2]
Lew Rockwell On The Climatista Totalitarians
Lew Rockwell in The Misesean Vision:
“Let me give another example of the banality of evil. Several decades ago, some crackpots had the idea that mankind’s use of fossil fuels had a warming effect on the weather. Environmentalists were pretty fired up by the notion. So were many politicians. Economists were largely tongue-tied because they had long ago conceded that there are some public goods that the market can’t handle; surely the weather is one of them.
“Enough years go by and what do you have? Politicians from all over the world, every last one of them a huckster of some sort only pretending to represent their nations, gathering in a posh resort in Europe to tax the world and plan its weather down to precise temperatures half a century from now.
“In the entire history of mankind, there has not been a more preposterous spectacle than this!
“I don’t know if it is tragedy or farce that the meeting on global warming came to an end with the politicians racing home to deal with snowstorms and record cold temperatures.”
Doug Valentine On The Impotence Of Progressives
Doug Valentine offers a piece on the futility of much activism.
(Please note: The opinions in this piece are not mine. They are Doug’s. But his point was not to exclude himself or any other writer who claims to be an activist. Its something all of us feel one time or other. I know I do. Frequently. At some level, what writers do is perfectly useless and only a form of self-advancement, if that).
Why Don’t All You People Just Shut Up!
“As my friend Roger says, ‘Never have so many held Washington hangers-on office for so long and talked endlessly to each other for so much money and done so little as the Republic rotted. The utter impotence of the progressive think tanks, lobbies, etc. is a great unwritten story.’
More From The Easter Bunny…
I’ve been curious about the identity of the Easter Bunny, although, strictly speaking, it doesn’t affect the validity of the anti-NSS campaign.
The Bunny has zeal. Bunny-speak is brave, plain-spoken and easy to read:
“The SEC was created to reassure the unwashed masses that it was safe to invest in the markets, after the Great Crash of 1929 proved it was anything but. It was a PR firm for Wall Street, slipped through as an alternative to a regulator who would or could actually do anything to curb the real crookery on Wall Street. At the helm was one of the greatest stock manipulators of all time, Joe Kennedy, who along with Percy Rockefeller and others amassed incredible fortunes running stock pools in the 1920’s.
For those who don’t know what a stock pool is, it’s a hedge fund whose sole purpose is to manipulate stocks, first up, then down, making money in both directions. Which was enormously lucrative for the operators of the pools, and the investors therein - the only losers were always the general investing public, and other participants who weren’t on the inside. I would argue that’s precisely what some of the most lucrative hedge funds of modern times also do - there aren’t a lot of ways to beat the market with 30 or 40% returns, year after year, that don’t involve larceny and criminal behavior, at least in my study of the last century of market history.”
The Bunny doesn’t mince words:
“I concluded a while ago that the rot in the system is pervasive, runs from top to bottom, and is largely unfixable. You have oligarchs, powerful and rich families and corporations, who are having their bought-and-paid-for politicians operate the country for their personal enrichment, at the direct expense of everyone else…..
“My point is that absolute power and wealth enable one to control the safeguards that were put into place to protect populations. By co-opting politicians and capturing regulators, the bad man is allowed to come into the room and do whatever he wants, whenever he likes - and the captured media merely pretends that it can’t hear the cries for help or investigate the countless damaged lives. It’s as bad as Russia under the communists, or perhaps worse.”
The Easter Bunny stays under wraps for a reason I can guess… but maybe not express publicly.
I asked a couple of people in a position to know if it was so-and-so. They denied it stoutly.
I could, of course, go the route of the New York press, which likes to stake out, tap phones, access medical records illegally, go undercover,or violate court orders, or any number of other things.
(If only John Edwards knew how lucky he was to avoid a life as a national figure, official prey for every predator with a pen)
But that particular game doesn’t seem worth either the moral or social candle. And, most often, almost as much can be learned by reading between the lines and studying public evidence as by sleuthing.
But, while sleuthing only requires elbow grease and chutzpah, analysis requires a degree of knowledge, judgment, and intellect that is simply beyond the pay-grade of some journalists, however exalted their professional status. These petty despots have pens and they have power, but they have no clothes, as surely as the emperor they shill for.
A few have figured that out. More will follow suit.
To make the story short, I went and reread a few public records that reference NSS and replayed the stout denials in my mind, recalling as best I could the silences, the gaps, the tone of the answers. I reread The Bunny carefully.
He’s an erudite man, it’s clear. I came to my conclusion about who he was. Right or wrong, time will tell.
I only bring it up to show how looking at the big picture and developing the correct perspective can be as useful and is far more cost-efficient than private-eye sleuthing that reporters think is the one and only credible way to tell a story. Baloney. And morally dangerous baloney. Dirty tricks, even for some intended good you believe in, inevitably corrupt the people who play them, in the same way black ops corrupt intelligence agencies.
Sleuthing is good to add the footnotes and the QED at the bottom of a piece of research and critical analysis. But as a way of curing social cancers - and financial racketeering is more social cancer than legal infraction - it has limited use. By the time you have written your expose to your editor’s satisfaction and done what it takes to avoid libel litigation, the story is old, the crooks have covered their tracks in paper dirt, and a new game is afoot.
Far better to play Sherlock and deduce your conclusions. Leave the investigative reporters to do their thing. You do yours but you do it to appease your own conscience, out of love for what human beings might be (hard to love them as they are, frankly), out of sheer intellectual curiosity (a great part of what drives me), glee at pelting stones at arrogant predators, and…yes…because after life’s fretful fever, we really don’t know what comes next. It might be wise to hedge our bets, as Pascal did.
There may or may not be Judgment Day. But should it roll around, we want to be able to pass muster. Well, at least, we want the She: Who Is Probably Not There to know we tried…
And then of course, we write mainly because it’s fun…
How, my dear Mary, — are you critic-bitten
(For vipers kill, though dead) by some review,
That you condemn these verses I have written,
Because they tell no story, false or true?
What, though no mice are caught by a young kitten,
May it not leap and play as grown cats do,
Till its claws come? Prithee, for this one time,
Content thee with a visionary rhyme.
(Percy B. Shelley, “The Witch of Atlas”)
Bill Anderson On The New KKK: Kleptocrats, Kartels, and Kon Men
“As I see it, the bankers are not clueless at all. They understand the game, they understand that the government is going to clean up the mess that they and their friends in Congress and the Bush and Obama administrations have created, and they understand that their antics are going to give them what they always have wanted: a nice, cozy, financial cartel which will provide sweet political contributions for the political classes, bonuses and high pay for themselves, and very little for everyone else.
US Military to Coordinate Haiti Earthquake Relief
Update: Thanks to reader Jeff for this video of an outfit helping with Haiti’s water needs. It might be a better place for donations than any government relief effort.
Original Post:
I haven’t commented on the Haiti earthquake, mainly because I haven’t been on top of the details. Besides, there’s so much coverage in the MSM about it. My beat here remains the untold story.
But one angle does trouble me. The intervention of the military. I can’t bring myself to say they shouldn’t be involved, which would be the principled thing to say, but it bothers me a lot:
“Sometimes it takes a catastrophe to demonstrate just how much more the U.S. military is able to do than simply kill the enemy. Only the U.S. can initially control flights into and out of the Port-au-Prince airport from aboard a nearby Coast Guard cutter, while waiting for an Air Force special-ops team to set up shop at the airport and step up operations to 24/7. Only U.S. warships have the capability to generate up to 400,000 gallons of fresh water a day from seawater. Only the U.S. military can send a spy drone from California to fly lazy orbits over Port-au-Prince snapping close to 1,000 pictures a day, which when compared with similar ones shot last summer, create a map of the hardest hit areas that can be instantly relayed to those working on the ground.
Only the U.S. military has enough aluminum matting to boost the runway capacity of Port-au-Prince airport. Only the U.S. military has the surveillance capability to quickly assess additional Haitian airfields and seaports for use in rescue relief operations. Only the U.S. military has the wide variety of vessels and aircraft to utilize those fields and ports, including air-cushioned vehicles capable of ferrying 60 tons of supplies from ship to shore at 40 knots. (See TIME’s exclusive photos of the aftermath of the earthquake.)
But the limits of U.S. capability can also be seen: The Pentagon diverted an unmanned Global Hawk drone bound for Afghanistan to Haiti instead, to photograph the damage there. “We were about to send that Global Hawk over to the war” until the earthquake, explained Air Force Col. Bradley Butz. “It will stay here until the President says it’s time to send it forward.”
While the drone had no comment about its sudden change of mission, some of those bound for Haiti welcomed the new assignment after more than eight years of war. “Marines are definitely warriors first,” Captain Clark Carpenter said Friday as his unit prepared to ship out to Haiti from North Carolina. “But we are equally as compassionate when we need to be, and this is a role that we like to show - a compassionate warrior that can reach out that helping hand to those who need it.”
Read more at Time for the corporate media’s view of the intervention.
And read Michel Chossudovsky, for the deep structure of the intervention, recent US interventions in Haiti, and the extent and implications of a US military presence there (he argues that it’s to monitor and intervene in Cuba and Venezuela).
I recall the tsunami relief effort in 2004 and the intrusion of military vessels and spy satellites into Indonesia and other regions in Asia. Humanitarian interventions are a prime locus for state meddling, because most people will feel reluctant to second-guess what’s happening. They don’t want come off as hard-hearted carping critics, with nothing positive to offer.
A life saved in Haiti is good PR for a life or two killed elsewhere. If such calculations are mathematical (and with the state they always have to be), then we are indeed better off with the US military, many would say.
Meanwhile, JP Morgan, I see, is donating a million to the relief effort.
And Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America are giving a million apiece too. That will be millions taken from the tax-payer and rival banks long defunct. But from wherever it comes, lives will be saved, right?
Thus do they wash their hands clean of guilt.
Who knows.
Maybe Lloyd Blankfein IS doing god’s work.
Or, at least, he’s Dean of the Jeffrey Levitt School of Philanthropy.
[For those with short memories, Levitt stole some $15 million in the 1980s, in the biggest white-collar crime in Maryland history, and almost single-handedly brought down the savings and loan business in the state. One reason he was able to get away with his thieving for so long was that he was careful to make judicious and well-publicized charitable donations].
Obama’s Man In China - Jon Huntsman Jr.
I’ve been thinking that any real change in the US..or anywhere else… will only come from outside politics, from business, or from technology, or from a cultural trend (such as, off-grid living) or from a spiritual movement. But occasionally, I wonder if some politician could actually push things in a new direction, make some kind of real difference.
Recently, some people have been touting a GOP dark horse who´s joined Team Obama. That’s former Utah governor and current Ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman Junior, who even struck some writer at the Washington Post as a potential ‘next big thing.’ (more…)
Pankaj Mishra On The Strength Of Passivity
The old world, with its failures, weaknesses, and poverty, has at least a proper estimation of the limits of human action, says writer Pankaj Mishra in an oped in the New York Times, last August:
“India may have been passive after the Mumbai attacks. But India has not launched wars against either abstract nouns or actual countries that it has no hope of winning or even disengaging from. Another major terrorist assault on our large and chaotic cities is very probable, but it is unlikely to have the sort of effect that 9/11 had on America.
The Machinery of Habit
A piece I wrote four years ago, The Burgh: Downsizing,” examines the nature of change and habit in relation to urban economies transformed by globalization and war.
“The boys come in and the beer flows. Ricardo tells us about training. Four-mile runs, 200 push-ups every morning, wall-climbing. “They break you, man,” he shakes his head. “They make you tough.
“I said I hoped so, considering where he was going. But Melanie, who studies the theology of the medieval anchoress Juliana of Norwich and sells papers on a corner in Oakland for the Socialist Worker, is more worried about his getting into what she calls killing mode. I ask her if a mode is the same as a habit. It takes time after all to form a habit. A mode on the other hand sounds like a gearshift on an Audi. And if you can shift into a gear, you can shift out. Maybe it’s really a question of what sort of habits. Learning, retraining, moving need effort. They don’t come easily. But war is a machinery that moves on its own and blood-lust, like a winter flu, might be easy to pick up and impossible to get rid of.
War and demolition come too easily to human nature. And take away too much. Anything worth pursuing, on the other hand, needs to be stalked through the years with the patience and vigilance of a hunter, cultivated through seasons of scarcity and remembered in times of forgetting. In our sophistication we laugh at those who buy dear and hold dearer. Who stay when they should have left. Bag holders. Fools. Who step into the river and expect the waters to stay the same. The immobilized in our mobile society. What is the value of an abandoned church, an obsolete mill, an aging worker? Flux, we shrug, is the only certainty. Change is the first law of nature.
“People talk about joining but they don’t,” says Ricardo, “I’m the only one who did.” He sounds proud.
“I ask him if he thinks good health insurance and tuition money are worth risking his life for. He laughs.
“Look — I ain’t gonna die. Most of the guys who teach me, they’ve been there. They got through. More chances I’d get shot in a ghetto. So some guy’s lost an arm…or a leg. So what? All this new technology now, reconstruction…they can make you another leg; it’s really no big deal.”At 26, you can think of that as a good trade. An amputation of the body or the mind is all it takes to keep up with change. Like those translucent lizards which shed their tails seasonally as they wait immobile and vigilant for flies on dusty window sills, we might grow new limbs just as good. New memories to replace old ones. Here in the hills, at the confluence of three rivers, we have learned not to resist the laws of nature.
“But perhaps we don’t live by nature alone. Perhaps, as Juliana of Norwich said, we also need mercy and grace.”
“The need to change and the machinery of habit that makes it difficult - a theme I find myself returning to , over and over, especially when I’m confronted with the depressing spectacle of people going back to the same propaganda, the same bogus assertions that caused this global catastrophe in the first place.
Going back, like dogs to vomit.
I’m sorry if that sounds ugly, but what’s happening now in DC is ugly….and very very dangerous.
MindBody: Reading Between The Tea-Leaves
When I was young - around 11 or 12 - I recall having very strong hunches about things that would pan out. Nothing weird, simply day-to-day things. I’d lose my stamp album and then I’d go to sleep and in my dreams I’d see it was in the bottom drawer of a cupboard. And when I woke up and went to the drawer, I’d find it. I would have very strong feelings I’d pick up from other people’s emotions. When someone said something, I’d feel the emotion from which they spoke. I’d hear anger, and overlaid on that, jealousy or envy. I’d often have a sense of what someone was going to say before they said it.
None of this was overtly alarming. It blended very easily into what I considered normal and never made me feel different. I didn’t talk about it to anyone, except my mother, who dismissed it as “just imagination.” But I always knew it wasn’t either “just” or “imagination.” (more…)
Felix Salmon Gets It Right On Short-Selling
Felix Salmon gets it right about short-selling this time round, at Seeking Alpha: (December 31):
“It’s not just short-sellers, either: most financial professionals are essentially parasitical on people who genuinely add value in the real world. Old-fashioned lending is important, and I’d say that stock markets in general also count as a positive financial innovation, since they make it vastly easier for companies to raise equity capital. But in my ideal world, people working for real companies like Kodak would make more money, in general, than people working for more parasitical financial-services companies. The fact that it’s the other way around worries me. While finance may or may not be good at the efficient allocation of capital, it seems to be positively bad when it comes to the efficient allocation of the labor of intelligent and perspicacious individuals.”
P. J. O’Rourke On Santa And God
P. J. O’Rourke via Samizdata:
“I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat. God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well-being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on virtually everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club. Santa Claus is another matter. He’s cute. His nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without thought of a quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he’s famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.”
Frank Chodorov On Destroying The Citadel Of Power
Frank Chodorov, on the seduction of power, from Mises.org
“For, it is said that while Saul of Tarsus was carrying out his duties as Commissar of Truth, the Messiah he had been denying appeared before him and convinced him of his error. So, after a bit of soul searching, he quit his job and thereafter dedicated himself to the task of preaching the very doctrine he had been denouncing. And because he was now the persecuted rather than the persecutor, he was effective; everywhere he went he found willing listeners, even in Rome itself. More important than their numbers was the conviction of his converts that in the eyes of God the lowliest in society was equal unto Caesar. The psalm of freedom — of the dignity of the individual — reawakened their souls. Neither the lash nor the dungeon vile nor the wild beasts in the arena could rob them of their self-esteem. By their very suffering and death they transmitted their faith to others, the sect grew, and at long last Caesar capitulated.
From the story of Saul, who came to be known as Paul, we draw the lesson: that when people want freedom they will get it. When the desire of the business man for “free enterprise” is so strong that he will risk bankruptcy for it, he cannot be denied. When youth prefers prison to the barracks, when a job in the bureaucracy is considered leprous, when the tax collector is stamped a legalized thief, when handouts from the politician are contemptuously rejected, when work on a government project is considered degrading, when, in short, the state is recognized to be the enemy of society, then only will freedom come, and the citadel of power collapse.”
The Creation Of Professional Consensus
An article that illustrates how professional consensus is created in the sciences today:
“To experts such as McIntyre and Pielke, perhaps the most baffling thing has been the near-unanimity over global warming in the world’s mainstream media - a unanimity much greater than that found among scientists.
“For example, last year the BBC environment reporter Roger Harrabin made substantial changes to an article on the corporation website that asked why global warming seemed to have stalled since 1998 - caving in to direct pressure from a climate change activist, Jo Abbess.
“‘Personally, I think it is highly irresponsible to play into the hands of the sceptics who continually promote the idea that “global warming finished in 1998” when that is so patently not true,’ she told him in an email.
“After a brief exchange, he complied and sent a final note: ‘Have a look in ten minutes and tell me you are happier. We have changed headline and more.’
“Afterwards, Abbess boasted on her website: ‘Climate Changers, Remember to challenge any piece of media that seems like it’s been subject to spin or scepticism. Here’s my go for today. The BBC actually changed an article I requested a correction for.’
“Last week, Michael Schlesinger, Professor of Atmospheric Studies at the University of Illinois, sent a still cruder threat to Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, accusing him of ‘gutter reportage’, and warning: ‘The vibe that I am getting from here, there and everywhere is that your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists … I sense that you are about to experience the “Big Cutoff” from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included.’
“But in the wake of Warmergate, such threats - and the readiness to bow to them - may become rarer.
“A year ago, if a reporter called me, all I got was questions about why I’m trying to deny climate change and am threatening the future of the planet,’ said Professor Ross McKitrick of Guelph University near Toronto, a long-time collaborator with McIntyre.
“‘Now, I’m getting questions about how they did the hockey stick and the problems with the data.
‘Maybe the emails have started to open people’s eyes.’
Read more here at the Daily Mail.The Conscience Of A Speculator
December 20, 1998: an exchange between George Soros and Steve Kroft on “60 Minutes”:
“Kroft: “You’re a Hungarian Jew …”
Soros: “Mm-hmm.”……Kroft: “My understanding is that you went … went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.”
Soros: “Yes, that’s right. Yes.”
Kroft: “I mean, that’s—that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?”
Soros: “Not, not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t … you don’t see the connection. But it was—it created no—no problem at all.”
Kroft: “No feeling of guilt?”
Soros: “No.”
Kroft: “For example, that, ‘I’m Jewish, and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be these, I should be there.’ None of that?”
Soros: “Well, of course, … I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was—well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in the markets—that is I weren’t there—of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would—would—would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the—whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the—I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.”
The Culture of “Da Boyz”
In a piece on Pamela Martens, the former Wall Street whistle blower, who last year unearthed the black box of Markit, as well as the Primex dark pool, Stephen Metcalf discloses the culture of “da boyz.”
Whistle-blower´s Grim Tale, Stephen Metcalf, The Observer, December 1, 2002
“The secret to Wall Street’s systemic chauvinism is simple: The Street is insulated against litigation and bad publicity. All employees at the major investment banks must sign a mandatory arbitration clause, effectively giving away their right to sue their employer. Claims are adjudicated in what amounts to an industry-controlled private justice system, by arbitration panels staffed overwhelmingly by white males in their 50’s and 60’s. In mandatory arbitration, no depositions are made public, and awards have ironclad gag provisions. So Wall Street can continue to smile, and smile, and be a villain. One anecdote in particular conveys the full horror of the situation. When two female Smith Barney employees complained of strikingly similar episodes involving a male co-worker, in which the man forced himself on them physically, the firm waited four years before conducting a hearing. “A week before the hearing,” Ms. Antilla writes, Smith Barney “forced the two women to undergo examinations by a psychiatrist of the brokerage firm’s choosing.” One of the women was subjected to a Gulag-quality interrogation. The grilling included “questions about her sex life, the opening of her gynecological records, and queries about her menstrual periods, her marital counseling, and her divorce. The psychiatrist even had copies of her therapy records.” The woman finally broke down when the psychiatrist asked her to recite in reverse order the names of the U.S. Presidents.”
Totalitarianism: The Total Domination of Man
From “Evil: The Crime Against Humanity,” by Jerome Kohn
The “total domination of man” was radically evil, in Arendt’s eyes, not only because it was unprecedented but because it did not make sense. She asked: Why should lust for power, which from the beginning of recorded history has been considered the political and social sin par excellence, suddenly transcend all previously known limitations of self-interest and utility and attempt not simply to dominate men as they are but to change their very nature; not only to kill whoever is in the way of further power accumulation but also innocent and harmless bystanders, and this even when such murder is an obstacle, rather than an advantage, for the accumulation of power?
(see “Ideology and Propaganda”)There is no ready answer to that question. In Hitler’s case it is well known that his unrelenting dehumanization and destruction of those who presented no threat to him hindered his ability to fight effectively against his real enemies at the end of World War II. What is the point of dominating men at any cost, not as they are but in order “to change their very nature”? If it is for the sake of “the consistency of a lying world order,” as she went on to suggest, what is the point of a system that even if it succeeded in destroying the human world would not end in the creation of a “thousand-year Reich” or “Messianic Age” but only in self-destruction? Arendt, to be sure, never thought the suicidal “victory” of totalitarianism likely. That would first require global rule by one totalitarian power, and in that regard she believed that Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941 was symbolically significant in spite of his pact with Stalin two years earlier and in spite of the two leaders’ mutual admiration which she emphasized. Moreover, she saw that “no system has ever been less capable [than totalitarianism] of gradually expanding its sphere of influence and holding on to its conquests.” Most important of all, because plurality is the inescapable condition of human existence–”not Man but men inhabit this planet”–Arendt increasingly came to consider farfetched the notion that a single totalitarian regime could ever destroy the entire world.”
Intellectual Self-Defense for Libertarians
I posted this at Lew Rockwell last week:
“There are two ways to approach the world.
In one, the popular one now, you try to control the bad actors. You create laws to trip them up before hand, or round them up after. You rely on regulations and regulators.
Nothing wrong with that, except that we already have lots of regulators and it didn’t help.
Why?
The reason is so obvious you question the intelligence of anyone who can’t see it. It’s simple. People willing and able to scam the system are going to be willing and able to game the regulations too.
In a fight between regulators and scammers, my money’s on the scammers. They’re usually richer and nastier.
In the second approach, you don’t overlook the bad actors. You hope they get what they have coming to them. But you don’t rely on laws or lawyers because you’re old enough to have figured out that bit about the bad actors being bigger and nastier than the good ones.
So what do you do?
You focus on getting out of the way of the bad guys. You limit the damage they can do to you. And most of all, you figure out how to avoid them in the first place.
Here are five warnings I wish I’d heeded more:
1. Be careful whom you deal with
Don’t lie down with a dog and you won’t get up with fleas. Delousing yourself is much harder than not getting loused up in the first place.
But delousing is what we do a lot of these days. It’s practically the only thing going on in the economy now. Right now there are people all over the country delousing the SEC.. and the Congress… and the banks…and the hedge-funds. There’s even a global delousing effort going on. The fumigators are at work. Pest control is in full force and the exterminators are crawling over the baseboards in the cellar. There’s an international delousing effort at the BIS, with headquarters at Switzerland and local shops all over the world.
A Bug Czar has been crowned and fleas have been declared insecta non grata.
There - that should do it, eh? Any bug with a classical education should figure it out.Which is another way of saying none of this will work. Or if it works, it won’t work the way you want it to.
The fact is, lice and ticks are at home on a dog. It’s R & R for them. Holiday Inn, Bed & Breakfast, and a luxury spa combined. Get them to leave? Good luck. Much better, don’t take your dog to bed in the first place. Much better, if you have a dog, let him drool in the kennel, not on your pillow.
The short version of all that is we do jack-ass things and then wonder who’s braying.
I say jack-ass with no disrespect. Some say that those who get conned “deserve what they get.”
That is the New Testament of the confidence man and the Sunday sermon of the predator.
As financial doctrine, it occasionally makes sense. As moral insight, it’s almost always junk. Very often victims are only weak, naive, or ignorant. The kind of people who wouldn’t know malice if they saw it in the dollar-bin with a white tag tied to its toe. They’re people who follow the rules, thinking other people follow them too. They’re honorable, so they believe in the honor of their fellow man.Now, not only is being honorable not wrong, it’s the way things should be. But doves should learn not to coo at snakes, and beautiful souls have to wise up to what goes on in the rest of the world… or expect an ugly life.
So, rule number one. Research the people you plan to make your associates. And don’t dismiss your research. When you find out your prospective partner filed for bankruptcy six times in the last ten years, don’t tell yourself it will be different this time, because it won’t. One bankruptcy is a financial failure. Three is a losing streak. Six is a career decision. Follow your gut instinct.
If your boss conducts business with a wink and a leer, don’t pass it off as southern charm. He’s not Dagwood Bumstead looking for a lump of emotional candy. He’s a creep, and you’re a pawn in his narcissistic chess game. Ask for a transfer about two minutes after that. If you’re out of a job, so be it. There’s no guarantee you won’t be out of one, if you put up with it.
2. Never stop learning
Ignorance kills, as a lawyer friend of mine likes to say. Don’t be ignorant. Learn as much as you can about as many things as you can. Do your research. Know what you’re dealing with. With the internet, it’s much easier. You can do a google search on anything or anyone. You can go into google news archives and find newspaper articles and information from as far back as the 1980s.
So start reading.Project Gutenberg has thousands of classic books online. PubMed allows you to access medical journals. LexisNexis will allow you to research law. Edgar will show you company filings. You can search houses for sale on Realtor.com and look up where a house is on Google Earth. You can go to WhoIs to find out about domain names and IP address. You can find out how well a website is doing by looking up Technorati or Alexa rankings. The Way Back Machine lets you look up old magazine articles, even when they’ve been pulled off the current site. Some sites like Zabasearch collect people’s information and put it all in one spot. That’s free information. If you pay, you can get much more.
Mind you, I find data sites downright creepy, especially when they’re online, and especially when they’re centralized and can be accessed with a key-stroke. If people have paid for their sins, why not let them start fresh? There may be a recording angel, but surely he lives farther north than DC.
On the other hand, just because the technology is already out there, it pays to keep up with what’s being done with it. Because if it’s out there, your business partner… or your employer… or your enemies ….or your friends.. probably know about it already. They might even have mined it for information to deploy against you. Shouldn’t you be prepared?
3. Limit what people know about you. Many of us from small towns grew up around trustworthy people. Our friends and our neighbors knew everything about us, and we didn’t mind, because no one was malicious enough to hurt anyone else.
The big world isn’t so nice. People who have things to hide themselves will be only too anxious to find something on you, attack being the best form of defense in their minds. If they can’t find anything wrong, they’ll hit you with whatever else they can, even a silly thing you said casually. They’ll dig out what your crazy cousin did fifteen years ago. Or perhaps you saved your husband’s latest rant about his mother online. Don’t be surprised if you wake up one morning to find it in the New Yorker.
So, keep things to yourself, even among close friends and relatives.
That’s a hard one for me. I’m a verbal person. I write, I talk, even if it’s only to myself. Leave me next to a blank wall and I’ll strike up a conversation. And it will be two-way.
Fortunately, most people are unlikely to hurt you. But occasionally you’ll run into a psychopath who will. And if you work in politics, the media, or in business, psychopathy is practically the norm.
So keep track of what’s being written about you on the net with Google alerts. Write to sites that aggregate information and ask for your name to be removed from their lists. You might have to repeat that every year . Put yourself on the national do-not-call list so that your telephone number’s out of the reach of marketers.
And then limit the information you give out, even to your lawyer.
It’s taken me half a lifetime to figure out that any questionnaire shoved under my nose doesn’t automatically deserve to be filled in. Leave things blank unless you’re told it’s mandatory to fill it in. Or become creative. Develop fictitious personalities, throw-away mail addresses, exotic, non-existent addresses. Use another name when doing business. Avoid registering products or filling out questionaires in your own name. Use fake birth-dates and vary them according to a system that you, and only you, know. Change your passwords every few weeks, using a system to keep track. Write them down broken up in alternate pages in a notebook, without anything to signify what the numbers mean. If the book is lost, no one will be able to make use of the information. Neither will you, of course, but losing a little time is better than losing your savings.Hacking email, spying on private business, blackmailing and outing people, it’s all fair game these days. Attacking the privacy of public figures has become a national pastime - witness the Letterman case. But it’s not just public life. Private business is a circus of outing and shaming too. Corporations spy on and threaten each other, as well as their employees. Employees write tell-all books.
We live in a spy state, where every half-wit believes it’s his divine right to nose into anything, no matter how little it’s his business. So, these days not only is it wise to keep your own secrets, you might be wise to keep other people’s secrets.
But what should you do if inspite of that, you become a target of an attack on your privacy?
Often, nothing, unfortunately.I’ll give you the example of an aunt of mine who didn’t want anyone to know she was sick, in case it would prejudice employers against hiring her. A colleague not only hacked her email but forwarded details about her illness to dozens of people. A frail, sensitive woman, her health broke down under the stress.
I’ll give you the advice I gave her. Say your piece once in private, and say it once in public. Then forget about it. Move on. You’re not the first person to have been screwed over and you won’t be the last. Innocent people are constantly being ruined by the powerful and the unscrupulous. That’s the ugly truth of our system. Reputations are often lost, unjustly. Our salvation is to worry less about our reputations and more about our consciences.
What we do where no one can see and none can retaliate is the test of who we are.As for what others think, the world is a large place. Move far away, if you need to. As for the system, stop trying to reform it. It’s beyond reform.
4. Learn to say no
Telling someone no doesn’t come naturally. We’re trained to go through life being agreeable. In fact, learning to say no might be the hardest thing you learn. But it might also be the most important, and once you learn it, it can become good sport.
Speaking for myself, I’ve come to relish saying no to pests. And the nay-saying that gives me the greatest pleasure of all is nay-saying to internet marketers. It’s not that I’m ever rude to one. I never hang up. My malice is much deeper. I let them prattle on, even asking polite questions. Then I stop them courteously and ask them why they think they have the right to call me on a weekend and waste half-an-hour selling me something I didn’t ask for. Occasionally, when they’re especially pushy, my toying becomes cruel. I turn the tables on them. Instead of selling me things, they find themselves signing petitions or supporting causes or accepting market analysis or invitations to baby showers or anything else at hand.
Can I call you, I ask. Tonight? Tomorrow? I press them to reply. Can you buy two? Now? Pretty soon, they’re begging to hang up.
Try it and see. It’s balm in gilead.
I advise you to use this technique on rude or uncooperative colleagues too. Give them a taste of their own medicine, and do it generously. Let their cup run over. You will get something better than love. You’ll get respect.
5. Learn how to retaliate
Despite all the myths propagated about forgiveness, I’ve learned that submitting meekly to injustice usually breeds weakness, resentment, and ill- health. There’s nothing that drives up your self-respect as much as socking it back to bullies. I’m not advising being unduly aggressive. Try a friendly approach as long as you can. But when that doesn’t work, time to get tough. Throw some metaphoric crockery. Thumb your nose and thumb it publicly. Turn on the spotlight and watch the cockroaches run.
In other cases, all you may need to do is wait. Time has a knack of delivering even the biggest fish to a patient angler…and when that moment comes, don’t flinch. Yank that line and watch your target flop and wriggle on the sand.
Watch with a smile. Defy the received wisdom and develop a healthy conscience about revenge. It’s highly moral. Only our wimpy but violent age derides its feline nobility.
The uncomfortable truth is the New Testament is meant for people on the same moral level of development….for family.. and for friends. But in the big, dirty world, the Old Testament works much better.
Gandhi said an eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind. I say an eye for an eye, and after the first blind man, everyone else’s eyesight gets better in a hurry.
Become a moral vigilante. Why waste time going through the system if you can get better results outside of it? Use the law to warn, to shame, to threaten. But don’t labor under the delusion that a court case always helps. Your enemy will pour his time and money into creating mushroom clouds of paper. He’ll drown you in verbiage and “accidentally-on-purposes.” He’ll postpone and prevaricate and petition. He’ll appeal and block and delay…. and hide behind a fog of corporate black ink like an injured squid.
Instead, if you’re obliged by professional ethics to speak up, consider other channels of actions besides the court. Try mediation or arbitration. Perhaps you’re better off complaining to the Better Business Bureau. Or posting on a consumer forum.
Monetary compensation is often not the best justice either. It can make you look like an extortionist. Try going public. Give the bully a taste of his own medicine. Post the hacker’s private information on a website. Put him on the run. That might not make you rich, but the moral satisfaction is tremendous.
Of course, it could also be dangerous. You risk violating the law yourself. In that case, you might be best off to leave your job. Maybe even leave town. Leave the thugs to the mercies of the universe. It sometimes does a better job of retribution than it’s given credit for. Villains do not always go to jail. And if the skeptics are right, they might never go to hell. But they often get dragged into divorce court, which is a good deal worse, from all accounts.
And meanwhile, there are all those other ways the wicked verily get their reward.
Envious rivals cut their throats; the tax man cometh, and the SEC with him; and then cometh old age, failing libido, dead-beat in-laws and brain-dead grandchildren. The inheritance get squandered and the sycophants and courtiers vanish with the money. The trash-mouth gets acid reflux, the glutton gets dyspepsia and the aging lecher ends up alone, romancing his own hairless skull and wrinkled hide.Then at the end comes the greatest punishment of all for persisting in evil deeds. You stare into the mirror and evil stares back at you, looking not so much devilish as hollow and bewildered, less like a fiend from hell and more like a Goldman CEO at a Congressional hearing.
Hannah Arendt taught us about the banality of evil. It was left to our age to practice the evil of banality. Habit, laziness, gullibility, ignorance, vanity, greed, fear, cowardice, bravado. We are duped not by heroic evil, but by humdrum vice.
The greatest and best defense we have against the charlatans and knaves who brought our society to its knees is not the law.
It is self-knowledge and discipline.”Rewriting of History Underway
Taibbi on the tea-parties, being sloppy with his facts again, all in the name of rhetoric:
“It’s amazing, literally amazing to me, that it wasn’t until Obama pushed through a package containing a massive public works package and significant homeowner aid that conservatives took to the streets. In other words, it wasn’t until taxes turned into construction jobs and mortgage relief that working and middle-class Americans decided to protest. I didn’t see anyone on the street when we forked over billions of dollars to help JP Morgan Chase buy Bear Stearns. And I didn’t see anyone on the street when Hank Paulson forked over $45 more billion to help Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch, a company run at the time by one of the world’s biggest assholes, John Thain. Moreover I didn’t see any street protests when the government agreed to soak up hundreds of billions in “troubled assets” from Citigroup, a company that just months later would lend out a jet furnished with pillows upholstered with Hermes scarves to former chief Sandy Weill so that he could vacation in Mexico over Christmas.”
My Comment:
Er, Matt. It was the Dems who rolled over for the bail-outs. It was the Republicans, the Southern Republicans, who stymied it first time round…until they had their arms twisted.
Before you got your consciousness raised on the subject several years late, it was right libertarians who were objecting most strongly to the financializing of the economy…..
The Penson video post wasn’t as big a deal as it was made out to be, to my mind. But this post and his debate on 9-11 with David Griffin (at Alternet) do betray some ignorance…
Update:
Louis Proyect has a review of “Dime’s Worth of Difference” (Cockburn and St. Clair) that has a precis that will disabuse anyone inclined to believe the Democrats are more people-friendly than the Republicans…
Libertarian Living: Neuroeconomics and Cooperation
“The Science and Ethics of Cooperation,” by Michael Townsey, Prout Institute:
“The cooperative system is fundamental to the organization and structure of a Prout (the Progressive Utilization Theory) economy. It is an expression of economic democracy in action - cooperative enterprises give workers the right of capital ownership, collective management and all the associated benefits, such as profit sharing.[i] Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, the propounder of Prout, goes further and argues that an egalitarian society is actually not possible without a commitment to the cooperative system.[ii] The commitment is not just to an economic order but also to a cooperative ethic and culture. This essay explores some of the scientific evidence that humans have a predisposition to cooperation and in particular to economic cooperation. The evidence comes from a new and exciting field of research known as neuro-economics. We then turn to those insights provided by sociological studies.
Neuro-economics
Neuro-economics is the study of the neuro-physiological underpinnings of economic decision making. The field is new and providing unexpected insights into human economic behavior. Classical economic theory requires individuals to make complex calculations to maximize their personal advantage or utility. Utility, however, is a strangely ambiguous concept. On the one hand it is given a numerical value which implies the counting of something but on the other it is entirely abstract and not anchored to anything in the real world that can be counted. The advent of neurophysiology led to the idea that utility was really a surrogate for some chemical currency inside the brain, with most interest focused on serotonin molecules because these are known to be responsible for the experience of pleasure.
It turns out that a wide range of molecules of emotion[iii] impinge on the mental cost-benefit calculations that are supposed to take place inside the brain and they have unexpected effects. For example, in a ’sharing experiment’, person A was asked to share a sum of money with person B. These experiments demonstrated behavior inconsistent with neoclassical theory. People appear to put a high value on fairness. In a follow up experiment, persons A and B were placed in the same experimental scenario as before, but they were (unknowingly) given an intranasal administration of oxytocin. Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that plays a key role in social attachment and affiliation in animals and causes a substantial increase in trust in humans. In these experiments the effect of oxytocin was to increase the amount of money that A gives B. The experimenters concluded that “oxytocin may be part of the human physiology that motivates cooperation.”[iv] It is worth adding that such hormone-mediated interactions are not confined to human relationships but are also likely to be involved in human-animal relationships.[v]
Oxytocin is not the only neuro-chemical to promote cooperation. Recent observations of bonobo monkeys in the jungles of the Congo reveal fascinating contrasts with chimpanzees.[vi] Bonobos are matriarchal and show little aggression compared to the patriarchal chimps. Chimps respond to strangers with aggression, while bonobos demonstrate curiosity. When under stress, chimp tribes degenerate into fighting while bonobos respond to stress by engaging in collective sexual activity. Scientists have concluded that bonobos demonstrate higher levels of trust both with each other and with strangers. Of most interest, however, from a neuro-economics point of view, is the ability of the monkeys to perform a simple task requiring cooperation in retrieving some bananas that are out of reach. Although both species are intelligent enough to work out a solution (for example, by one climbing on the shoulders of the other or by one holding a ladder for the other), the chimps fail because they cannot trust one another. On the other hand, bonobos have no trouble cooperating to retrieve the bananas.[vii]“
Cow College Versus Ivy League
I’ve been thinking about the psychological roots of the anger between the two parties.
It’s not simply political, that’s clear. It’s ethnic, demographic, geographical and many other things that have been explored by a lot of people.One element that hasn’t attracted that much attention though is one that’s always struck me quite strongly - the anger directed toward people with Ivy League or elite school educations by those who attended humbler schools. The “cows and the ivies” is where some of the class-warfare of today is played out.
We hear a lot about how the poor and middle-class envy the rich, but I’m not thoroughly convinced by the thesis. Most of the people I’ve talked to seem to admire the rich in the most uncritical sort of way. They ape their life styles as best they can. And they ascribe to rich people all sorts of virtues they think they lack themselves, when in point of fact, great wealth (I’m talking about tens of millions and more) is usually the result of many other things besides hard work and skill. It also takes luck, contacts, and some money to start with. It takes a certain kind of personality - a not very admirable one, often. Everyone knows Balzac’s line about there being no great fortune without a crime behind it..
The truth is money alone doesn’t confer enough status to provoke envy. Who envies a rich garbage man? No one.And no one envies bankers these days, no matter that they keep making money. They’ve lost their status. It’s status that provokes envy.
And today, the most obvious and common insignia of status is graduating from an elite school. The left side of the political spectrum is associated, rightly or wrongly, with the high status universities - with Ivies like Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and Wellesley - as well as with all the other universities, which, though not Ivy, are considered elite, such as, Brown, Columbia, Duke, Chicago, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, or Wellesley. Cornell.
On the elite list are also some public universities, like Berkeley, and a couple of more conservative schools, like Chicago and Dartmouth.
But, in general, the elite schools are associated with liberal-left politics and with internationalism. The cow-colleges (and we’re fond of cows ourselves) have become the terrain of a kind of chip-on-the-shoulder nationalism and conservatism (of course, I’m simplifying this terribly).
This leads to a lot of hilarious posturing by the cow crowd - about effete elites (read Boston Brahmins, Jews), decadence (not sure what that’s supposed to mean - perhaps feminists and homosexuals?), affirmative action (read, Hispanics and Blacks) etc. etc. - although by and large these schools are as - or more - likely to have middle-class students than the state universities. And though affirmative action - if one were to include women and legacy students - surely benefited whites far more than it ever did non-whites.
I recently came across an example of this envy in a bit of resume-massaging. Someone who studied at a locally respectable state university (Georgia State), was a very mediocre student (C’s and low B’s), and then paid for a year’s study at Oxford - or was it at Heidelberg? (something anyone with money can do), inverted the order of their studies on their resume thus:
“Studied politics at Oxford and at Georgia State…”
This mean little ruse gives the false impression that the student was admitted competitively to the rigorously selective undergraduate program at Oxford - an academic achievement of a much higher caliber than mere attendance.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that the Georgia State student might not be smart or might not do very well in life. He might. But the deception betrays a certain envy - the same envy that, unfortunately, I detect in some of the populist hatred of liberal “elites.”
I say that objectively, since I’ve no great love for those elites myself. But I have even less love for the anti-intellectualism of some parts of the right. For its open contempt for scholarship, intellectual striving, cosmopolitan sympathies, and international standards - things that to me are the essence of decent liberalism.
That’s the kind of liberalism with which I have no quarrel, no matter if its politics differs from mine. No matter if it embraces the state more than I do. I am any day closer to that liberalism than to the yahoo know-nothing right.
And, as always, the ever insightful - if often spiteful - Anne Coulter manages to find an example of the envy I’m talking about not in a conservative, but in the kind of liberal I don’t like - Keith Olberman.
Quote:
“Finally, you can stop pretending that you went to the hard-to-get-into Cornell.
Now you won’t have to quickly change the subject whenever people idly remark that they didn’t know it was possible to major in “communications” at an Ivy League school. No longer will you have to aggressively bring up Cornell when it has nothing to do with the conversation. Relax, Keith. Now you can let people like you for you.”That’s on Olbermann’s constant derision of cow-college graduates and his name-dropping about the “Ivy” he went to, when he actually studied “communications” at the agricultural school affiliated to Cornell.
Update: Correction. Cornell contradicts Anne Coulter’s description of Olbermann’s alma mater.
Here is a latter written to someone who asked about the criticism:
Dear Tammie,
Many people have contacted us about the false and negative statements about Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences being made by Ann Coulter in the media recently.
Cornell as a whole–and all of its colleges–are considered “Ivy League.” The term “Ivy League” was initially used by sportswriters, and became the official name in 1954 of the NCAA Division I athletic conference to which Cornell belongs. The “Ancient Eight” are Cornell, Princeton, Brown, Yale, Dartmouth, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and Harvard. Additionally, CALS admits 1 out of every 5 applicants, as does the College of Arts & Sciences.
Please feel free to watch Mr. Olbermann’s response on his Countdown show at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/vp/29539156#29539156
Thank you for your concern about the College.
Sincerely,
Ellen Leventry
Web Communications Specialist
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Cornell UniversityApologies. Ms. Coulter was apparently off-base on that. Hmm. Why am I not surprised? But her larger point stands, I believe.
Roderick Long: Six Talking Points for Libertarians
Roderick Long at Austro-Athenian blog has a list of principles he thinks libertarians should emphasize in public interaction to define themselves as a clear-cut alternative to either conservatives or liberals:
1. Big business and big government are (for the most part) natural allies.
2. Although conservative politicians pretend to hate big government, and liberal politicians pretend to hate big business, most mainstream policies – both liberal and conservative – involve (slightly different versions of) massive intervention on behalf of the big-business/big-government elite at the expense of ordinary people.
3. Liberal politicians cloak their intervention on behalf of the strong in the rhetoric of intervention on behalf of the weak; conservative politicians cloak their intervention on behalf of the strong in the rhetoric of non-intervention and free markets – but in both cases the rhetoric is belied by the reality.
4. A genuine policy of intervention on behalf of the weak, if liberals actually tried it, wouldn’t work either, since the nature of government power would automatically warp it toward the interests of the elite.
5. A genuine policy of non-intervention and free markets, if conservatives actually tried it, would work, since free competition would empower ordinary people at the expense of the elite.
6. Since conservative policies, despite their associated free-market rhetoric, are mostly the diametrical opposite of free-market policies, the failures of conservative policies do not constitute an objection to (but rather, if anything, a vindication of) free-market policies.
Matthew 24:33
Matthew 24:33
“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness, and cares of this life; and so that day come upon you unawares. For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth. Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.
But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but my Father only.”
My Comment:
And that pretty much takes care of anyone who says that specific historical events can be foretold from the Bible…Even the scripture that they claim as infallible in its literal sense contradicts them..
New Labor Turns Brits into Libertarians?
From The Guardian:
“A poll run by PoliticsHome this week revealed a fascinating result to the question: “Do you think in general, the state has too much or too little of a say in what people can and cannot do?” Nearly four-fifths of the sample (79%) answered that the state had too much of a say, while only 8% believe the state has too little say.
If the poll is an accurate reflection of the nation’s mood this is an important finding. For some time I have been aware of sharp change in the public’s attitudes to surveillance, as well as a general feeling that the government is too quick to seize personal data and tell people how to lead their lives.”Florida Republicans Purge Libertarians from GOP
“On Friday — timed just right to minimize news coverage — Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer and the state party Grievance Committee notified a number of party members, many of them holding elective office, that they were effectively purged from the party and had been removed from their offices and would be ineligible to hold any other party positions for periods ranging from two to four years.
The targets of this purge are mostly members of the Florida chapter of the Republican Liberty Caucus, a group which seeks to return the party to its core beliefs of individual liberty, limited government, and free markets. These particular individuals were targeted because they had expressed opinions critical of party policy, candidates, and office holders, on the basis of which the grievance committee decided that they had “engaged in disruptive conduct likely to interfere with the activities of the Republican Party.”
More here at The Next Right. Thanks to reader, Zara.
Solzhenitsyn On Why We Don’t See the Truth
“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes… we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.”
-Solzhenitsyn
(Thanks to reader, Sean)
Stalinist “Libertarian” Fan Mail
The morning mail can always be guaranteed to bring something out of the fever swamps. This one calls itself libertarian. But it shows every sign of a Stalinist disposition, down to the puerile and quasi-racist invective. I’ll parse it after I’ve had breakfast. Just a small sample of the abuse you get for pouring yourself near full time into enlightening people and supporting unpopular positions…when they are unpopular. This one doesn’t even write me a mail under his own name. And so far, his contribution to libertarianism seems to be confined to writing apoplectic email. Hmmm. I am usually less annoyed by such things. I really should go and get some coffee…
“It seems that your beloved barefoot snowbilly from Wasilla has not quite made it through “The Language of Empire” http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2009/09/07/from-the-people-and-sarah-palin-who-brought-us-the-iraq-war/ Do you still defend this vile, statist thug? Will I STILL see more stupid LRC posts in the near future? I have a question. If I asked you to choose a position on the the Socialist-Corporatist TARP Program (I call it the TARD program, for obvious reasons), would your position be closest to… A) “This whole situation is a perfect demonstration of why “doing nothing” and letting failing companies fail would have been much better than sinking valuable money and resources into them.” or B) “inaction is not an option we have got to shore up our economy… ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy um helping the… oh - its gotta be all about job creation too - shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reigning in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans and trade we’ve got to see trade as opportunity not as competitive um scary thing but one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today we we’ve got to look at that as more opportunity - all those things under the umbrella of job creation - this bailout is a part of that.” I will give you a hint. The first statement was made by a principled Libertarian, and the second statement was made by an idiot. What if that idiot also “managed a 6 percent increase in part of the state’s budget, as well as being responsible for a windfall tax on oil companies—much like that proposed by Democrats” and gave their state “some of the highest resource taxes in the world”? Do you still defend this vile, statist thug?”
My Comment:
First. Nowhere have I written that I support Sarah Palin’s positions. I’ve clearly stated “I am no fan of hers”. I thought she was unqualified…besides having some criticisms of her personal choices that may or may not be relevant to her candidacy as Vice-President. As a long-time (since 1991) antiwar activist, I obviously don’t support her pro-war position. But let’s see, exactly who were the choices? McCain, Biden, Obama…yes , wow, a bunch of peaceniks, all. I supported only one person this time around - that’s Ron Paul. In 2004, I supported any third party candidate, including Nader. Not because of lack of principle, or because I agree with all of Nader’s positions, but on the principle of support for any one opposed to the status quo. I stand by those positions.
I was opposed to the war in Yugoslavia, when many people thought it was a good war. I opposed the First Gulf War and the Second, as well as the sanctions, when hardly anyone talked about them (in 1995). I’ve signed petitions/letters in support of people as different in their politics as Norman Finkelstein and Ward Churchill, on one hand, and Hans Hoppe on the other. I’ve written in support of Jerry Falwell when he was attacked personally. I also defended Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Sonia Gandhi when they were attacked personally. And, I defended Sarah Palin. No candidate for public office (or anyone else) for that matter, deserves to be trashed personally in such a racial, sexual, and classist way.
Demonizing them as though they were each a mini-Attila the Hun is an exercise in silliness. These politicians are run-of-the-mill people, no worse nor better than those around them. I will bet “principled libertarian” above would never dream of criticizing the people pushing the war on terror - the neo-conservative cabal running the government. Oh no. That would never happen.
And I’ll bet he wouldn’t call them the translation of “Wasilly snowbilly” that would apply to neo-conservatives.
I wrote about Goldman Sachs - more than two years ago - “Why It’s Time to Sell Goldman.”And I’ve written dozens of pieces and posts about them since. A piece I wrote last year was the first to tie Goldman to AIG (”Putting Lipstick on an AIG”). And I took TARP apart almost as soon as it came out.
But I guess, actually reading what people wrote would be asking too much from the underworld of internet forums.
Sorry to be so dour. But reading this sort of thing, I wonder why anyone should bother. Why inform people about the malignant lot at the top? The people at the bottom seem pretty malignant too…
On my darker days, I wonder if they don’t deserve each other…
The Over-Medicated and the Under-Medicated
From Dissident Voice, a piece by Joseph Grosso on the drug companies’ recreation of the definition of disease:
“This year will see the publication of the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), the field bible for mental health professionals. If earlier editions are any indication the latest one will feature and slew of newly established disorders all to be treated with the latest anti-depressants or anti-psychotics……
Other disorders, both mental and physical, conjured up or legitimized in recent years include Social Anxiety Disorder, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, Irritable Bowl Syndrome, Estrogen Deficiency disease, Osteoporosis, not to mention the always stretching boundaries of ADD (see Adult ADD) and ADHD to include more and more drug takers. It can’t be said that the effort of branding new disorders and expanding the very concept of what disease is has been a failure for the drug companies. Prescription drug use has skyrocketed over the past two decades. Americans now spend money on prescription drugs in amounts that equal or surpass the amount spent on higher education and automobiles. Their profits enable to have a death lock over the country’s political process. The predictable flipside being that, according to a 2005 survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse the number of Americans who admitted to abusing prescription drugs doubled from 1992-2003.
While American children living in the suburbs get pumped with medication for all sorts of overstated or marketed illnesses, children living in the planet’s rapidly expanding slums perish of preventable digestive-tract diseases rooted in contaminated drinking water and overall polluted conditions. In sub-Saharan Africa alone neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are the most common conditions affecting the region’s poorest 500 million people. A recent assessment published in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases estimates that hookworm, an infection that weakens immune systems and causes anemia, occurs in 40-50 million school aged children. Schistosomiasis, the second most prevalent NTD claims 192 million victims and is ‘possibly associated with increased horizontal transmission of HIV/AIDS.’ There are many others (Lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, roundworm) often overlapping in the same individuals. Why put all of them under the banner of ‘Neglected’? The WHO webpage puts it thusly:
The misery caused by neglected tropical diseases is largely hidden. Affected people live almost exclusively in remote rural areas and sprawling shantytowns, where lack of safe drinking water, poor education, poor sanitation, substandard housing and where access to health care may be virtually non-existent… Neglect also occurs at the level of research and development. The incentive to develop new diagnostic tools, drugs, and vaccines is low for diseases with a market that cannot pay…”
Samuel Johnson on Hypocrisy
Samuel Johnson writing about the misuse of the charge of “hypocrisy”:
“Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.”
The Hundred Who Made the Economy Collapse
Vanity Fair’s piece on the hundred who made the economic crisis manages to include blackberries and VIP rooms, Ralph Nader, George Bush and Bill Clinton, Woodrow Wilson, Republicans Hank Paulson and Hank Greenberg…
But it omits Robert Rubin….and Larry Summers…and Tim Geithner….and any of the numbers of hedge funds that were shorting companies for years….and it forgets AIG….and Barney Frank..[Correction: It does include AIG and Barney Frank, a great improvement] and even good old Eliot Spitzer, who should have done much more, for all that sound and fury about going after crooks…
What a tendentious list.
Do-Gooding Dimwit?
Meddling and ignorant idealism is never a power for good, as this recent turn of events in Burma illustrates:
It is a remarkable irony that an unknown American, who presumably wanted to champion Suu Kyi’s democratic cause, was the catalyst for her latest troubles. But so go the unintended consequences of political inexperience. “Burma’s pro-democracy movement has long been an attraction for fantasists, fanatics and adventure tourists,” writes Aung Zaw, editor of the respected online news magazine the Irrawaddy, sho covers Burma from neighboring Thailand. “Did John William Yettaw consider the consequences [of his swim]? Did he think for a minute that he would do more harm than good? Probably not.”
One of Suu Kyi’s lawyers branded Yettaw a “wretched American.” Inside the country, it can be easy to spot the foreign idealists masquerading as, say, tourists or teachers, who have made it their mission to change Burma…… As Aung Zaw noted in the Irrawaddy, two British activists who were convicted for staging separate political protests in Burma in 1999 were both released early after serving only a fraction of their jail sentences. Good news for them. But Burmese can hardly expect the same treatment. If Suu Kyi is convicted — and Burmese courts have a frighteningly high conviction rate — few expect the Lady to taste freedom anytime soon. “
More here at Time.
My Comment
Idealists? I wonder. A large number of these do-gooders aren’t idealists so much as vain, self-important no talents, who gain a passing glory by linking themselves to ‘mass movements’ or ‘popular leaders’. In their own countries, they’re nobodies. But in a third-world country, their US citizenship, racial membership in the ‘ruling class,’ and the relative strength of their currency, gives them a status that their own accomplishments cannot. It goes to their head. Pretty soon, they fancy themselves saviors. They interfere, stir up trouble, and then conveniently leave, letting the ‘natives’ take the rap for their arrogant intervention…
On the other hand, there’s something remarkably “stagey” about the whole incident. And when I note that Gordon Brown - he who sold off Britain’s gold at the bottom of gold prices and has now presided over the bankruptcy of its banking system — seems to be throwing righteous and media-genic fits over the Burmese junta’s response, I have to wonder.
I think about Bill Clinton’s miraculous intervention on behalf of the two journalists in North Korea….and in a world of simulation and media myth-making, I have to file this under “What really did happen?”
Individuals and Institutions
“Nothing can be achieved without individuals, nothing can last without institutions”
– Robert Schuman (1886-1963)
Christopher Dawson on Hostility to Religion (Comment added)
“Behind this vague tendency to treat religion as a side issue in modern life, there exists a strong body of opinion that is actively hostile to Christianity and that regards the destruction of positive religion as absolutely necessary to the advance of modern culture.”
– Christopher Dawson
My Comment:
As I’ve written, I am an agnostic and a skeptic….not so much about God, as about language. Which means, I read Dawson or Voegelin, with as much attention (or inattention) as I read Marx. The latter does not seem any more “scientific” than the former to me. Indeed, the only thing that makes something a religion is the hostility to opposition that adheres to it. [correction: this is an overstatement. It should read "one of the things that make something a religion."] From that point of view, most of those who believe themselves to be actively hostile to “god” and “religion” are actually devout believers - their temperament is exactly like the rabid fundamentalists they denounce.
I, on the other hand, believe myself to be a Christian agnostic and a Christian skeptic.
How can I subscribe to such a contradiction in terms? [For those unfamiliar with theology, there are many leading theologians who are quite skeptical or even unbelieving in "god"].
For me, it is not a question of lacking faith in God. That is quite a simple-minded kind of contrarianism.
My heresy is a little deeper. I lack faith in language. I have no faith in words as a fixed repository of meaning.
As for “god” - the conventions and symbols one grows up with can never really be uprooted and it seems wiser and truer to accept them as equally the outgrowth of the mind as logic or empiricism. If I must confess disbelief in “god,” then I must confess it equally in “man,” “truth,” “justice” or “logic,” “you” or “me.”
What naive empiricists never realize is that what endows facts with their “factuality” is the “mind.” There is no escaping that.
Not do we have to go from naive empiricism to naive idealism, i.e., we don’t have to leap from “just the facts, ma’am” to “Just my opinion.”
Instead, we continually adjust our thoughts and subjective experience to the hard edges of facts so-called, to the limitations of objective experience. We do that through the refinement of our language. We continually reflect the tension of existence in a conditional, fractured, and fluctuating reality through language that expresses the contradiction and paradoxes inherent in our existence as mind-body.
In that spirit, I have no problem with affirming:
Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium…..
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