Category Archives: Pols and Pundits

Glenn Greenwald On Intellectual Credibility

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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.”

The Corporate Media: Suffering From Truth Emergency

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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 Tagore

What 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……

Lew Rockwell On The Climatista Totalitarians

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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.”

More From The Easter Bunny…

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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.

Including hounding erstwhile presidential candidates long after they have ceased to be of political importance.

(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”)

Obama’s Man In China – Jon Huntsman Jr.

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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.’ Continue reading →

Is Latin America Moving Right?

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Alvaro Vargas Llosa of the Independent Institute asks whether Latin America is moving right and what that could mean:

“Chile’s runoff election this month will probably mean the end of the center-left coalition’s two-decade hold on power and the emergence of businessman Sebastian Pinera as a political tour de force. Continue reading →

Kingsford Capital And The Captured Media

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Mark Mitchell at Deep Capture has some interesting details about the extensive influence of hedge-funds, specifically Kingsford Capital, on the reporting of stories in the financial press:

“Another focus of my investigation at CJR was the appalling bear raid on a collectibles company called Escala. Not only was Escala the victim of massive amounts of illegal naked short selling, but a hedge fund convinced the Spanish government that Escala’s parent company, based in Madrid, was fleecing investors in philatelic collectibles. Continue reading →

Swine-Flu Vaccine Facts That Should Frighten You

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One of the best read articles in 2009 on Lew Rockwell was  one by Bill Sardi on eighteen reasons you shouldn´t take the swine flu vaccine.  Here´s an excerpt, but it´s worth reading the whole piece.

“4. The vaccines will be produced by no less than four different manufacturers, possibly with different additives (called adjuvants) and manufacturing methods. The two flu inoculations may be derived from a multi-dose vial and in a crisis, and in short supply, it will be diluted to provide more doses and then adjuvants must be added to trigger a stronger immune response. Adjuvants are added to vaccines to boost production of antibodies but may trigger autoimmune reactions. Some adjuvants are mercury (thimerosal), aluminum and squalene. Would you permit your children to be injected with lead? Lead is very harmful to the brain. Then why would you sign a consent form for your kids to be injected with mercury, which is even more brain-toxic than lead? Injecting mercury may fry the brains of American kids. Continue reading →

Ilana Mercer On Subverting Natural Law

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“Oblivious to the cameras – or perhaps for them – Amanda Knox, 22, and Raffaele Sollecito, 25, exchanged a slow, sensual kiss in full view of world media. Not far from where the two kissed lay the body of Meredith Kercher, the English girl with whom Knox had shared student accommodation in Perugia, Italy. Her throat slit, Meredith had expired in slow agony.”

I´m sure that opening, from a piece by the always incisive Ilana Mercer, got your attention.

Mercer writes here about an American “media mafia” baying in full-throated support of the murderous Amanda, as an innocent abroad, caught in the toils of  Italy´s provincial justice system.

Now, we can always be counted on to get interested in anything at which media mobs bay…and this case proves to be interesting on other counts as well.

For one thing, I have  a long-standing interest, nourished by the late William Roughhead, in true crime….but this go round, it´s not the murder itself that strikes me, but this passage in Mercer´s piece:

“In American (positive) law, procedural violations can get evidence of guilt – a bloodied knife or a smoking gun – barred from being presented at trial. More often than not, such procedural defaults are used to suppress immutable physical facts, thus serving to subvert the spirit of the (natural) law and justice.”

Mercer, I suppose, means that sometimes technical details of  “how” trip up the more important objective of the law..which, she says, is to do justice. I´m tempted to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes to her (that it´s not the business of the law to do justice..however one construes that), but I´ll pass….

Instead, I´ll ask another question:

By distinguishing between procedural niceties of law and the ends of justice they ought to serve, isn´t Ms Mercer making a rather good argument for the use of extra-legal methods in conducting war….

And wouldn´t that allow for some tactics I am sure she´d condemn ,if they were taken up by one of her most frequent targets, Islamic terrorists?

Brown Calls Climate-Skeptics Flat-Earthers; IPCC Calls Hackers Sophisticated

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Gordon Brown, Britain´s PM and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, takes to peevish name-calling over the growing response to Climate-gate:

“The Prime Minister launched an outspoken attack on climate-change sceptics amid growing signs of public doubts about the scientific and political consensus on the environment.”

—  Telegraph, December 6

Apparently, it´s unwashed climate-bloggers who are anti-scientific, not the agitprop team masquerading as independent scientists that got outed at East Anglia for such trivial matters as manipulating professional journals, doctoring research, defying freedom of information requests, and conspiring to destroy vital records that correctly belong to the public.

No, no, that wouldn´t be unscientific says Brown.

The real villains of the story are the people who conclude from this revealing tableau that the science of global warming may need to go a bit further before it underpins a global taxation regime likely running to billions, if not trillions.

“With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn’t be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics. We know the science. We know what we must do.”

In short, act first, think later.

Obviously, Brown is also taking a leaf out of the book of whoever it was who said, strength lies not in defence but in attack…..

At least, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) disagreed and said the matter could not be swept under the carpet; it would be investigated.

Meanwhile, some speculation here on something that at first bothered me —  whether this hack, which first showed up on Russian servers, is connected to Russian crime or even to the Russian government. The emails, posted over a 15 year period ending November 12,  were sent on October 12  to the BBC, which didn´t respond. Then,  realclimate (a pro AGW site) was hacked and the data uploaded there. But the site was quickly shut down by the owners. Then, a link was posted  via a Saudi computer on The Air Vent, a climate skeptic blog, with a link to a computer in Tomcity in Tomsky, Siberia.

“The server is used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes, according to the Mail on Sunday.”

The vice chairman of the IPCC thinks the hack shows evidence of being sophisticate and wellfunded.

But frankly, so what if the hackers were Russian? Climate science is international and cap and trade is international. If there were repeated freedom of information requests that the researchers  blocked, then it´s vital for the data to be in the public domain.

So, the speculation is interesting, but essentially irrelevant….and at this stage, suspiciously misleading.

The hackers have the last word on this:

“We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”

Or as someone said: NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.

If we have a global government (and we have), then everyone all over the world has a right to the information behind that government´s policies.