Goldilocks and the Dollar bear..

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With all the rah-rahing by analysts over the stock market’s performance, more attention needs to go to the stealth implosion of the dollar in the last couple of weeks — and the resurgence of gold prices. While the MSM and the money professionals try to frame the Bear Stearns mess (2 of its hedge funds were wiped out and a third returned 91% losses) as an isolated event, the shock waves are hitting the credit market as supposedly triple-A bonds are suddenly being rechristened junk..

This looks like the end of a long period of financialization that started a while back..maybe even a decade ago… but while it might not be curtains yet, it’s time to look at your savings in dollars and dollar-denominated assets and figure out how you plan to stop them from being wiped out by currency devaluation:

A good piece about that by Ambrose Evans Pritchard in the Telegraph,

When Will Gold Go Ballistic? (read the informative responses here)

which avoids a hard sell on gold, while staying optimistic about its long term prospects.. .
“Here we go:

I started buying gold mining shares in September 2001, missing the bottom by four months. I still hold some shares (mostly duds, since I am the village idiot when it comes to picking stocks). Gold’s 15 to 20 year upward cycle is alive and well.

For those who don’t follow bullion, gold hit $252 an ounce in the Spring of 2001 in a final capitulation sell-off when Gordon Brown began his Treasury sales. It rose to a peak of $730 in May 2006.

Gold has languished since, in part because of sales by the Spanish and Belgian central banks. I remain very wary in the short to medium-term.

What unnerves me is the way gold has tended to move in sympathy with global stock markets. Whenever risk appetite rises, it rises. When investors shun risk, it falls. In other words, it has become correlated with all the speculative trades – notably the yen and franc carry trades – responding to abundant global liquidity. This liquidity is now being drained as the BoJ, ECB, SNB, BoE, Riksbank, and Chinese Central Bank, etc, turn off the tap. So be careful.

While the pattern appears to have changed over the last couple of weeks, this is not long enough to establish a “paradigm change”, excuse the ghastly term. My concern is that gold will fall hard along with everything else (except the yen and the Swissie) in any market crash/correction.

At some point it will decouple, as it did during the 1987 crash when it fell hard, found a ledge, and then recovered hard, while the DOW kept falling. But, I would rather hold Swissies or Yen until gold finds that ledge in a downturn, resuming its old role as a safe store of value. This may happen quite quickly in a crisis. (Of course, I may also be left behind right now in an accelerating rally, but that is a risk I accept)

Ultimately, gold will surge, once it becomes clear that the euro lacks the staying power to serve as an alternative to the dollar. To restate a point I have made many times, the euro-zone is an ill-assorted mix of 13 unconverged national economies – with national treasuries, debt structures, taxes, pensions, and labour laws – that are not ready to share a currency, and are drifting further apart by the day.

(Lest anybody forgets, the motive behind monetary union was PURELY political. The economists at the European Commission warned that the project could not survive over time if it included a Latin Bloc of countries with an unreformed culture of high inflation, rising wage costs, and an export base exposed to Asian competition [unlike Germany’s, which is complimentary] – unless it were backed by a full superstate. They were ignored. Indeed, any future crisis was to be welcomed as the “beneficial crisis”, a chance to force through full political integration that would otherwise have not been possible, as Romano Prodi so candidly admitted when he was Commission chief).

At some point it will become clear to everybody that: the Club Med group cannot compete at an exchange rate of $1.40, $1.45, $1.50, or whatever it reaches; their credit booms are tipping over; they will soon need stimulus more than the US.

Goldman Sachs, by the way, is already ‘shorting’ Italian and French bonds, while going ‘long’ on German bunds to play the divergence (the opposite of the euro-zone ‘convergence play’ that made the banks rich in the 1990s).

We may have a situation where sharp dollar falls caused by impending rate cuts by the Fed sets off a systemic crisis for Euroland. If so, politics will quickly take over from economics and begin to dictate events in Europe. The ECB will have to stop raising rates (whatever Berlin wants), and the euro will become a structurally weak currency tilted to the need of the weakest players. If it doesn’t, the EU itself will blow up. So the ECB will have to change tack to support the union. And the European Court will interpret the treaties in such a way as to force the ECB to do so.

Gold will fly once investors can see that neither of the two reserve currency pillars (euro and dollar) is on a sound foundation, and once the pair are engaged in a beggar-thy-neighbour devaluation contest to stave off a slump (if necessary with the use of Ben Bernanke’s helicopters, meaning mass purchase of Treasuries, mortgage bonds, stocks, or assets of any kind to support the markets). This would amount to a partial breakdown of the monetary system. Gold will not stop at $800. It might well go beyond $2,000.

We are not there yet. Timing is not my forté, but 2008 looks ripe. Watch the Spanish housing market. Watch the French trade data. Watch Chinese inflation. And, of course, watch the US jobs market – the bogus prop to the alleged US recovery (on that, more later).”

Comment:

Well — gold was a bit uncoupled from the dollar index for quite a while, but the technical action over the last few weeks certainly hasn’t been. Gold is once again up when the dollar is down now, and it probably reflects credit anxieties spilling over from the sub-prime mess in the housing market.

(Translation for those who haven’t been following the housing market recently: subprime loans are those substandard loans that used to represent only a miniscule proportion of the housing market but in the last 3-4 years rose to lethal levels. It wasn’t just that the borrowers hadn’t the proper credit history; the lenders were leveraged to the hilt. The lenders, mind you, not being your friendly bank on the corner any more, nor the government-backed lenders like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but a whole plethora of con men in financial fancy dress. These hedge funds and bankers sold their clients substandard mortgage- backed financial securities (MBSs) disguised as gilt-edged investments, which are now blowing up in their faces like hand grenades, as the borrowers find themselves unable to meet their house payments. Why? Because the terms are tightening up — as they tend to do in subprime mortgages…..

Used to be called loan sharking in the old days.

And Pritchard may also be right about the Yen being a safer bet for diversification than the Euro — a faux currency, if ever there was one.

The Race Thing: Derbyshire on McDonald

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I went back and looked for the Derbyshire review of Kevin McDonald. That’s the piece the Jewcy interview I referred to in my previous post started from.Derbyshire’s criticism of it seems right to me. Which is why I think that tabooing discussions like that doesn’t do any good. A bad argument can usually be shown up for being bad.

Besides that, JD’s own criticism isn’t free from a couple of errors: for one thing, that reference to the 1924 immigration restrictions as being non-racist but only raciaLIST.

(And I will need to go back and research it a bit more).

But I recall it had a color component in it, not just a fear of the destabilizing effects, as D says.

Read the Thind decision, based on color (1923).

Anyway, here’s D in his usual blunt words:
 
The American Conservative
March 10th, 2003
 
[Couple of notes here. (1) The review title, like most titles of pieces, was not mine. It was thought up by the editors of The American Conservative. For the record, I submitted this review under the suggested title “The Jew Thing.” (2) This review generated a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with readers and commentators. I have put some of this, with my own responses to it, in my “Notes” pages.]
 
The Marx of the Anti-Semites

The Culture of Critique
By Kevin MacDonald
1stBooks; 466 pp. $9.00

One evening early on in my career as an opinion journalist in the U.S.A., I found myself in a roomful of mainstream conservative types, standing around in groups and gossiping. Because I was new to the scene, a lot of the names they were tossing about were unknown to me, so I could not take much part in the conversation. Then I caught one name that I recognized. I had just recently read and admired a piece published in Chronicles under that name. I gathered from the conversation that the owner of the name had once been a regular contributor to much more widely read conservative publications, the kind that have salaried congressional correspondents and full-service LexisNexis accounts, but that he was welcome at those august portals no longer. In all innocence, I asked why this was so. “Oh,” explained one of my companions, “he got the Jew thing.” The others in our group all nodded their understanding. Apparently no further explanation was required. The Jew thing. It was said in the kind of tone you might use of an automobile with a cracked engine block, or a house with subsiding foundations. Nothing to be done with him, poor fellow. No use to anybody now. Got the Jew thing. They shoot horses, don’t they?

Plainly, getting the Jew thing was a sort of occupational hazard of conservative journalism in the United States, an exceptionally lethal one, which the career-wise writer should strive to avoid. I resolved that I would do my best, so far as personal integrity allowed, not to get the Jew thing. I had better make it clear to the reader that at the time of writing, I have not yet got the Jew thing — that I am in fact a philosemite and a well-wisher of Israel, for reasons I have explained in various places, none of them difficult for the nimble web surfer to find.

If, however, you have got the Jew thing, or if, for reasons unfathomable to me, you would like to get it, Kevin MacDonald is your man. MacDonald is a tenured professor of psychology at California State University in Long Beach.. He is best known for his three books about the Jews, developing the idea that Judaism has for 2,000 years or so been a “group evolutionary strategy.” The subject of this review is a re-issue, in soft cover, of the third and most controversial of those books, The Culture of Critique, first published in 1998. Its subtitle is: “An evolutionary analysis of Jewish involvement in twentieth-century intellectual and political movements.” The re-issue differs from the original mainly by the addition of a 66-page preface, which covers some more recent developments in the field, and offers responses to some of the criticisms that appeared when the book was first published. The number of footnotes has also been increased, from 135 to 181, and they have all been moved from the chapter-ends to the back of the book. A small amount of extra material has been added to the text. So far as I could tell from a cursory comparison of the two editions, nothing has been subtracted.

The main thrust of this book’s argument is that Jewish or Jewish-dominated organizations and movements engaged in a deliberate campaign to de-legitimize the Gentile culture of their host nations — most particularly the U.S.A. — through the twentieth century, and that this campaign is one aspect of a long-term survival strategy for the Jews as an ethny. In MacDonald’s own words: “[T]he rise of Jewish power and the disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S. are the real topics of CofC.” He illustrates his thesis by a close analysis of six distinct intellectual and political phenomena: the anti-Darwinian movement in the social sciences (most particularly the no-such-thing-as-race school of anthropology associated with Franz Boas), the prominence of Jews in left-wing politics, the psychoanalytic movement, the Frankfurt School of social science (which sought to explain social problems in terms of individual psychopathology), the “New York intellectuals” centered on Partisan Review during the 1940s and 1950s, and Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy.

MacDonald writes from the point of view of evolutionary psychology — a term that many writers would put in quotes, as the epistemological status of this field is still a subject of debate. I have a few doubts of my own on this score, and sometimes wonder whether evolutionary psychology may eventually turn out to be one of those odd fads that the human sciences, especially in the U.S.A., are susceptible to. The twentieth century saw quite a menagerie of these fads: Behaviorism, Sheldonian personality-typing by body shape (ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph), the parapsychological reseaches of Dr. J.B. Rhine, the sexology of Alfred Kinsey, and so on. I think that the evolutionary psychologists are probably on to something, but some of their more extreme claims seem to me to be improbable and unpleasantly nihilistic. Here, for example, is Kevin MacDonald in a previous book: “The human mind was not designed to seek truth but rather to attain evolutionary goals.” This trembles on the edge of deconstructionist words-have-no-meaning relativism, of the kind that philosopher David Stove called “puppetry theory,” and that MacDonald himself debunks very forcefully in Chapter 5 of The Culture of Critique. After all, if it is so, should we not suppose that evolutionary psychologists are pursuing their own “group evolutionary strategy”? And that, in criticizing them, I am pursuing mine? And that there is, therefore, no point at all in my writing, or your reading, any further?

To be fair to Kevin MacDonald, not all of his writing is as silly as that. The Culture of Critique includes many good things. There is a spirited defense of scientific method, for example. One of the sub-themes of the book is that Jews are awfully good at creating pseudosciences — elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content — and that this peculiar talent must be connected somehow with the custom, persisted in through long pre-Enlightenment centuries, of immersing young men in the study of a vast body of argumentative writing, with status in the community — and marriage options, and breeding opportunities — awarded to those who have best mastered this mass of meaningless esoterica. (This is not an original observation, and the author does not claim it as such. In fact he quotes historian Paul Johnson to the same effect, and earlier comments along these lines were made by Koestler and Popper.) MacDonald is very scathing about these circular and self-referential thought-systems, especially in the case of psychoanalysis and the “pathologization of Gentile culture” promoted by the Frankfurt School. Here he was precisely on my wavelength, and I found myself cheering him on. Whatever you may think of MacDonald and his theories, there is no doubt he believes himself to be doing careful objective science. The same could, of course, be said of Sheldon, Rhine, Kinsey et al.

It is good to be reminded, too, with forceful supporting data, that the 1924 restrictions on immigration to the U.S. were not driven by any belief on the part of the restrictionists in their own racial superiority, but by a desire to stabilize the nation’s ethnic balance, which is by no means the same thing. (In fact, as MacDonald points out, one of the worries of the restrictionists was that more clever and energetic races like the Japanese would, if allowed to enter, have negative effects on social harmony.) MacDonald’s chapter on “Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy” is a detailed survey of a topic I have not seen discussed elsewhere. If the Jews learned anything from the twentieth century, it was surely the peril inherent in being the only identifiable minority in a society that is otherwise ethnically homogeneous. That thoughtful Jewish-Americans should seek to avoid this fate is understandable. That their agitation was the main determinant of postwar U.S. immigration policy seems to me more doubtful. And if it is true, we must believe that 97 per cent of the U.S. population ended up dancing to the tune of the other 3 per cent. If that is true, the only thing to say is the one Shakespeare’s Bianca would have said: “The more fool they.”

Similarly with MacDonald’s discussion of Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Empire and the many horrors that ensued. This was until recently another taboo topic, though the aged Alexander Solzhenitsyn, presumably feeling he has nothing much to lose, has recently taken a crack at it. I believe MacDonald was driven by necessity here. Having posited that Jews are out to “destroy” (this is his own word) Gentile society, he was open to the riposte that if, after 2,000 years of trying, the Jews had failed to accomplish this objective in even one instance, Gentiles don’t actually have much to worry about. So: the Jews destroyed Russia. Though MacDonald’s discussion of this topic is interesting and illuminating, it left me unconvinced. As he says: “The issue of the Jewish identification of Bolsheviks who were Jews by birth is complex.” Paul Johnson gives only 15-20 percent of the delegates at early Party congresses as Jewish. If the other 80-85 per cent were permitting themselves to be manipulated by such a small minority, then we are back with Bianca.

Since the notion of “group evolutionary strategy” is central to MacDonald’s case, I wish he had been better able to convince me of its validity. For instance: I happen to be fairly well acquainted with the culture and history of China, a nation which, like the diaspora Jews, awarded high social status and enhanced mating opportunities to young men who had shown mastery of great masses of content-free written material. Anyone who has read stories from the premodern period of China’s history knows that the guy who gets the girl — who ends up, in fact, with a bevy of “secondary wives” who are thereby denied to less intellectual males — is the one who has aced the Imperial examinations and been rewarded with a District Magistrate position. This went on for two thousand years. Today’s Chinese even, like Ashkenazi Jews, display an average intelligence higher by several points than the white-Gentile mean. So: was Confucianism a “group evolutionary strategy”? If so, then plainly the Chinese of China were, in MacDonald’s jargon, the “ingroup”. But then… what was the “outgroup”?

The more I think about the term “group evolutionary strategy,” in fact, the more I wonder if it is not complete nonsense. From an evolutionary point of view, would not the optimum strategy for almost any European Jew at almost any point from A.D. 79 to A.D. 1800 or so have been conversion to Christianity? Rather than learning to argue fine points of theology, wouldn’t a better strategy have been to learn, say, fencing, or Latin? Sure, the Jews held together as a group across 2,000 years. The gypsies held together pretty well, too, across many centuries; yet their “group evolutionary strategy” was the opposite of the Jews’ at almost every point. And the Jewish over-representation in important power centers of Gentile host societies became possible only after Jewish emancipation — which, like abolition of the slave trade, was an entirely white-Gentile project! Did the genes of 12th-century Jews “know” emancipation was going to happen 700 years on? How? If they didn’t, what was the point of their “evolutionary strategy”? There is a whiff of teleology about this whole business.

Kevin MacDonald is working in an important field. There is no disputing the fact that we need to understand much more than we currently do about how common-ancestry groups react with each other. Group conflicts are a key problem for multiracial and multicultural societies. Up till about 1960, the U.S. coped with these problems by a frank assertion of white-Gentile ethnic dominance, very much as Israel copes with them today by asserting Jewish ethnic dominance. This proved to be quite a stable arrangement, as social arrangements go. It was obviously objectionable to some American Jews, and it is not surprising that they played an enthusiastic part in undermining it; but they were not the sole, nor even the prime, movers in its downfall. It was replaced, from the 1960s on, by a different arrangement, characterized by racial guilt, shame, apology, and recompense, accompanied by heroic efforts at social engineering (“affirmative action”). This system, I think it is becoming clear, has proved less stable than what went before, and has probably now reached the point where it cannot be sustained much longer. What will replace it? What will the new arrangement be?

At times of flux like this, there are naturally people whose preference is for a return to the older dispensation. It is obvious that Kevin MacDonald is one of these people. If this is not so, he has some heavy explaining to do about phrases like: “the ethnic interests of white Americans to develop an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society.” Personally, I think he’s dreaming. The older dispensation wasn’t as bad as liberal commentators and story-tellers would have us believe, but it is gone for ever, and will not return. For America, the toothpaste is out of the tube.

And on the point of Israel having something very much like the old American dispensation, I am unimpressed by MacDonald’s oft-repeated argument — it is a favorite with both Israelophobes and antisemites — that it is hypocritical for Jews to promote multiculturalism in the U.S. while wishing to maintain Jewish ethnic dominance in Israel. Unless you think that ethnic dominance, under appropriate restraining laws, is immoral per se — and I don’t, and Kevin MacDonald plainly doesn’t, either — it can be the foundation of a stable and successful nation. A nation that can establish it and maintain it would be wise to do so. The U.S.A. was not able to maintain it, because too many Americans — far more than 3 per cent — came to think it violated Constitutional principles. Israel, however, was founded on different principles, and there seems to be no large popular feeling in that country for dismantling Jewish-ethnic dominance, as there was in Lyndon Johnson’s America for dismantling European dominance. The Israelis, most of them, are happy with Jewish-ethnic dominance, and intend to keep it going. Good luck to them.

The aspect of Macdonald’s thesis that I find least digestible is his underlying assumption that group conflict is a zero-sum game, rooted in an evolutionary tussle over finite resources. This is not even true on an international scale, as the growing wealth of the whole world during this past few decades has shown. On the scale of a single nation, it is absurd. These Jewish-inspired pseudoscientific phenomena that The Culture of Critique is concerned with — Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School and so on — were they a net negative for America? Yes, I agree with MacDonald, they were. Now conduct the following thought experiment. Suppose the great post-1881 immigration of Ashkenazi Jews had never occurred. Suppose the Jewish population of the U.S. in 2003 were not the two to four per cent (depending on your definitions) that it is, but the 0.3 per cent it was at the start of the Civil War. Would anything have been lost? Would America be richer, or poorer? Would our cultural and intellectual life be busier, or duller?

It seems incontrovertible to me that a great deal would have been lost: entrepreneurs, jurists, philanthropists, entertainers, publishers, and legions upon legions of scholars: not mere psychoanalysts and “critical theorists,” but physicists, mathematicians, medical researchers, historians, economists — even, as MacDonald notes honestly in his new preface, evolutionary psychologists! The first American song whose words I knew was “White Christmas,” written by a first-generation Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant. The first boss I ever had in this country was a Jew who had served honorably in the U.S. Marine Corps. Perhaps it is true, as MacDonald claims, that “most of those prosecuted for spying for the Soviet Union [i.e. in the 1940s and 1950s] were Jews.” It is also true, however, that much of the secret research they betrayed to their country’s enemies was the work of Jewish scientists. The Rosenbergs sold the Bomb to the Soviets; but without Jewish physicists, there would have been no Bomb to sell. Last spring I attended a conference of mathematicians attempting to crack a particularly intractable problem in analytic number theory. A high proportion of the 200-odd attendees were Jews, including at least two from Israel. Sowers of discord there have certainly been, but on balance, I cannot see how anyone could deny that this country is enormously better off for the contributions of Jews. Similarly for every other nation that has liberated the energies and intelligence of Jewish citizens. Was Hungary better off, or worse off, after the 1867 Ausgleich? Was Spain better off, or worse off, before the 1492 expulsions? “To ask the question is to answer it.”

Now, Kevin MacDonald might argue that he, as a social scientist, is not obliged to provide any such balance in his works, any more than a clinical pathologist writing about disease should be expected to include an acknowledgment that most of his readers will be healthy for most of their lives. I agree. A scientist, even a social scientist, need not present any facts other than those he has uncovered by diligent inquiry in his particular narrow field. He is under no obligation, as a scientist, to soothe the feelings of those whose sensibilities might be offended by his discoveries. Given the highly combustible nature of MacDonald’s material, however, it wouldn’t have hurt to point out the huge, indisputably net-positive, contributions of Jews to America, right at the beginning of his book, and again at the end. MacDonald has in any case been fairly free in CofC with his own opinions on such matters as U.S. support for Israel, immigration policy, and so on. He is entitled to those opinions: but having included them in this book, his claim to dwell only in the aery realm of cold scientific objectivity does not sound very convincing.

This is, after all, in the dictionary definition of the term, an antisemitic book. Its entire argument is that the Jews, collectively, are up to no good. This may of course be true, and MacDonald is entitled to say that the issue of whether his results are antisemitic is nugatory, from a social-science point of view, by comparison with the issue of their truth content. I agree with that, too: but given the well-known history of this topic, it seems singularly obtuse of MacDonald not to keep a jar of oil close at hand to spread on the troubled waters his work is bound to stir up. From my own indirect, and rather scanty, knowledge of the man, I would put this down to a personality combination of prickliness and unworldliness, but I am not sure I could persuade less charitable souls that my interpretation is the correct one, and that there is not malice lurking behind MacDonald’s elaborate sociological jargon.

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When the issue is inflammatory, the way you link my post may create the impression that your opinions are endorsed by my blog. That would be unfair.

If not, please change as requested.

Police State Chronicles: Executive property grab…

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From the White House website, more stunning developments..(I have emphasized what seem the most vague provisions)

For Immediate ReleaseOffice of the Press Secretary
July 17, 2007

Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq

RSS Feed White House News

Fact sheet Message to the Congress of the United States Regarding International Emergency Economic Powers Act
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that, due to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq and undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq and to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, it is in the interests of the United States to take additional steps with respect to the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 of May 22, 2003, and expanded in Executive Order 13315 of August 28, 2003, and relied upon for additional steps taken in Executive Order 13350 of July 29, 2004, and Executive Order 13364 of November 29, 2004. I hereby order:

Section 1. (a) Except to the extent provided in section 203(b)(1), (3), and (4) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(1), (3), and (4)), or in regulations, orders, directives, or licenses that may be issued pursuant to this order, and notwithstanding any contract entered into or any license or permit granted prior to the date of this order, all property and interests in property of the following persons, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons, are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense,

(i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:

(A) threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq; or

(B) undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people;

(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or

(iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.

(b) The prohibitions in subsection (a) of this section include, but are not limited to, (i) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order, and (ii) the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.

Sec. 2. (a) Any transaction by a United States person or within the United States that evades or avoids, has the purpose of evading or avoiding, or attempts to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.

(b) Any conspiracy formed to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.

Sec. 3. For purposes of this order:

(a) the term “person” means an individual or entity;

(b) the term “entity” means a partnership, association, trust, joint venture, corporation, group, subgroup, or other organization; and

(c) the term “United States person” means any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person in the United States.

Sec. 4. I hereby determine that the making of donations of the type specified in section 203(b)(2) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(2)) by, to, or for the benefit of, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order would seriously impair my ability to deal with the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, and I hereby prohibit such donations as provided by section 1 of this order.

Sec. 5. For those persons whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order who might have a constitutional presence in the United States, I find that, because of the ability to transfer funds or other assets instantaneously, prior notice to such persons of measures to be taken pursuant to this order would render these measures ineffectual. I therefore determine that for these measures to be effective in addressing the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1(a) of this order.

Sec. 6. The Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, is hereby authorized to take such actions, including the promulgation of rules and regulations, and to employ all powers granted to the President by IEEPA as may be necessary to carry out the purposes of this order. The Secretary of the Treasury may redelegate any of these functions to other officers and agencies of the United States Government, consistent with applicable law. All agencies of the United States Government are hereby directed to take all appropriate measures within their authority to carry out the provisions of this order and, where appropriate, to advise the Secretary of the Treasury in a timely manner of the measures taken.

Sec. 7. Nothing in this order is intended to affect the continued effectiveness of any rules, regulations, orders, licenses, or other forms of administrative action issued, taken, or continued in effect heretofore or hereafter under 31 C.F.R. chapter V, except as expressly terminated, modified, or suspended by or pursuant to this order.

Sec. 8. This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right, benefit, or privilege, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, instrumentalities, or entities, its officers or employees, or any other person.

GEORGE W. BUSH

THE WHITE HOUSE,

July 17, 2007.

Noah Feldman on tradition and modernity among conservative Jews

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Joey Kurtzman refers me to a remarkable and relevant article in the New York Times:

“Quite a coincidence: I discovered your interlocutor Scimitar just last night, when I was up late reading a discussion he had in the comment thread to a post on a white nationalist website. Very interesting stuff, though totally outside the realm of accepted discourse. I’m eager to get back into some of these issues, and I’m going to try to grab a chunk of time to read your interaction with him.

At this very moment I’m in the middle of doing an e-mail interview with Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law school and observant Jew who had an already-controversial article titled “Orthodox Paradox” in today’s NY Times Magazine. He states his professional interest as “the predicament of faith communities that strive to be modern while simultaneously cleaving to tradition,” and in the article he discusses (among other things) some of the ugliest aspects of the theology of traditional Jewish communities, the sort of Judaic dirty laundry I’ve not seen discussed before in the mainstream media. Very interesting.

If you read the article any time today or tomorrow, and have any questions you’d like him to answer, just send them to me and I’ll bounce them off him.”

Well, here’s an excerpt from the piece for publishing which the New York Times deserves a round of applause:

“Goldstein committed his terrorist act on Purim, the holiday commemorating the victory of the Jews over Haman, traditionally said to be a descendant of the Amalekites. The previous Sabbath, he sat in synagogue and heard the special additional Torah portion for the day, which includes the famous injunction in the Book of Deuteronomy to remember what the Amalekites did to the Israelites on their way out of Egypt and to erase the memory of Amalek from beneath the heavens.

This commandment was followed by a further reading from the Book of Samuel. It details the first intentional and explicit genocide depicted in the Western canon: God’s directive to King Saul to kill every living Amalekite — man, woman and child, and even the sheep and cattle. Saul fell short. He left the Amalekite king alive and spared the sheep. As a punishment for the incompleteness of the slaughter, God took the kingdom from him and his heirs and gave it to David. I can remember this portion verbatim. That Saturday, like Goldstein, I was in synagogue, too.

Of course as a matter of Jewish law, the literal force of the biblical command of genocide does not apply today. The rabbis of the Talmud, in another of their universalizing legal rulings, held that because of the Assyrian King Sennacherib’s policy of population movement at the time of the First Temple, it was no longer possible to ascertain who was by descent an Amalekite. But as a schoolboy I was taught that the story of Amalek was about not just historical occurrence but cyclical recurrence: “In every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands.” The Jews’ enemies today are the Amalekites of old. The inquisitors, the Cossacks — Amalekites. Hitler was an Amalekite, too.

To Goldstein, the Palestinians were Amalekites. Like a Puritan seeking the contemporary type of the biblical archetype, he applied Deuteronomy and Samuel to the world before him. Commanded to settle the land, he settled it. Commanded to slaughter the Amalekites without mercy or compassion, he slew them. Goldstein could see difference as well as similarity. According to one newspaper account, when he was serving in the Israeli military, he refused to treat non-Jewish patients. And his actions were not met by universal condemnation: his gravestone describes him as a saint and a martyr of the Jewish people, “Clean of hands and pure of heart.”

It would be a mistake to blame messianic modern Orthodoxy for ultranationalist terror. But when the evil comes from within your own midst, the soul searching needs to be especially intense. After the Hebron massacre, my own teacher, the late Israeli scholar and poet Ezra Fleischer — himself a paragon of modern Orthodox commitment — said that the innocent blood of the Palestinian worshipers dripped through the stones and formed tears in the eyes of the Patriarchs buried below.

Iraq War Mongering: psychologists “brand” the war..

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Thanks to a reader for this tip:

“The key to boosting the image and effectiveness of U.S. military operations around the world involves “shaping” both the product and the marketplace, and then establishing a new identity that places what you are selling in a positive light, said clinical psychologist Todd C. Helmus, the author of “Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation.” The 211-page study, for which the U.S. Joint Forces Command paid the Rand Corp. $400,000, was released this week.Helmus and his co-authors concluded that the “force” brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and has lost ground to enemies’ competing brands. While not abandoning the more aggressive elements of warfare, the report suggested, a more attractive brand for the Iraqi people might have been “We will help you….”

More here at MSNBC.

Ron Paul Road Show (cont): Do we need the government to make us moral (revised)…

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This post takes up a previous post by a communitarian blogger, who wrote in to distance himself from the Ron Paul campaign. The blogger, Scimitar, objected to some Ron Paul critics who had made a wrong-headed connection between racialist or racist ways of thinking and Paul’s libertarian’s position.

Scimitar correctly noted that libertarianism is a philosophy that undermines collectivist policies or group-based policies – of any kind. He argued that it would also tend to undermine more benign racialism – feelings of group identity and solidarity with people of the same language, race, or culture. I tend to disagree with him on that, although I think, over the long haul, libertarianism (since it leaves people free to be individuals), does encourage people to be open to others — but that’s very different from forcing them to.

Scimitar then identified libertarianism with license and moral relativism, and a blogger at Cynical Nerd seconded that, calling libertarianism a kind of a “nothing” when it comes to political ideology and the “goals” of life.

Well – surprise – I agree.

Libertarianism has “nothing” to tell you about what ends or goals you should choose for yourself or what gods you should worship or refuse to worship. So, if you are looking for an explanation of the universe that fits the whole world, a religion that works for everyone, a “truth” you can bite into like an apple — libertarianism won’t give it to you — at least not in an obvious way.

But that is just why I am a libertarian. Libertarianism is ONLY a theory of how people or groups should best associate; and it is the ONLY approach to politics with enough sophistication to understand that different groups and peoples might have different beliefs about how to conduct their lives. Politics, note, are not the end-all of life and libertarianism starts from that assumption. That is its beauty.

Libertarianism is not moral relativism – it is pluralism. It is perpectivalism. It involves understanding that our moral language is itself ambiguous and depends on context — Libertarianism simply leaves room for the greatest number of contexts. It does not assume there is NO objective truth or truths; it just involves an agreement that a government is not the best place to find them and that were there any sort of truths and “final ends” found embodied in a government, they would only be corrupt forms of them.

Scimitar: by checking the growth of the state, libertarianism is the only theory about human association, that lets those civic associations you like flourish – churches, cultural groups….

The bigger the state gets, the more energy is taken away from those associations…

Does libertarianism lead to anarchy?

Yes – and that’s a good thing. Anarchy is not chaos. Even chaos is not chaos, as scientists have long ago conceded.

Chaos and what we called randomness have patterns of far greater complexity than we have suspected so far. Those patterns are actually disrupted and destroyed by government interference. Left to themselves, humans are hardwired to associate in very complex ways that self-regulate and avoid the excesses of crime we now have everywhere, which we falsely blame on human nature alone.

Of course, human nature is not solely good. But libertarianism is realistic enough about that too. That’s why it allows for self-interest and natural limits to regulate human beings , rather than the government. If you have an Augustinian view of life, if you think human beings are inherently flawed, why would you give a few human beings so much concentrated power?

Who will guard the guardians — doesn’t that thought occur to you?

Contrary to your criticism, libertarianism sees through that kind of “guardianship” and is humble and wise enough to see that nature herself possesses self-regulatory mechanisms that would work if we did not get in the way. Bargaining for goods in a market (and a market, however free, always has laws – the question is only what kind of laws) is one way; family and kinship groups are another; even death and disease are hard facts which set limits to how far our license can go.

Do too many serious drugs and you will die… or go nuts. That’s a pretty sharp boundary just there. Does the state really need to waltz every petty marijuana possessor off to jail?

Or take last night, when the ever vigilant MSM (mainstream media)- NBC in this case – ran an investigative piece on what it called sexual predation by adults on teens. It takes some doing to get me to start defending sexual predators, but what I saw last night sounded like straight entrapment. I don’t know what the resumes of those men were, but to me, at least, it seems that if you chat up a police decoy posing as a teen who explicitly sets up an occasion for a crime and leads you into it — that’s not just an undercover operation. That’s entrapment. That’s creating a crime that would not have occured without you.

(More on this expose another time…and no, this is not a defense of pedophiles).

Libertarianism does recognize the faults in human beings but it also recognizes that the state incentivizes, exacerbates and multiplies those faults — because it relies on collectivist thinking; because it manipulates and lives off the lowest common elements in the nature of mass man. It appeals to the mass and not to the individual, and masses of men – mobs – are very different from aggregates of individuals. The mass can be manipulated by propaganda, as I write in this piece.

A mob is not a group. Individuals in groups do not need a political messiah to rescue them from their own uniqueness. An individual might have a relationship with Jesus Christ or a guru or the Unknown God. But only a mass wants a superman in front of it to lead it to the third reich, manifest destiny, the worker’s paradise…or most likely, hell on earth…

Only the mass wants to exchange the freedom to shape your own life and to think for yourself for the questionable intoxication of merging with the crowd.

Individuals, lightly restrained, develop self-government.

Masses, overregulated and terrorized by power, develop nothing but hero worship and a love of slavery.

Does that mean we should not have laws?

No, of course not. Anarchy does not mean the absence of law or morality or order. It is simply a refutation of state (admittedly corporate-state) imposed law, morality or order.

In my reading of anarchism anyway (I know there are some anarchists who think all law is coercive and all inequality or hierarchy illegitimate – I tend to think their position misguided) would not, for example, do away with customary laws, common law, and more organic, community based standards. It would simply prevent an estranged, alienated state and a distant judiciary imposing laws and regulations, however well-meaning, for the “good” of a non-existent or ambiguous collective that is so large that meaningful identification of its “interests” is difficult if not impossible in many areas.

Those are my random thoughts this Sunday morning. I am listening to Garrison Keillor and thinking – to a lot of people (including me) — that’s America. Not the U.S. government – its past or its future…

Now, I need to get to two other points Scimitar made:

First – that he is more an American because his ancestors were here long before those of more recent immigrants and because they lost their lives in the wars that shaped the geographical boundaries of this state:

(In his comments below, Scimitar says I do not correctly state his position, which, he says, was simply a belief most “whites” held until the 198os. As I understand his clarification, he does not claim to be “more” American than other immigrants, he only says that being American before the 1980s meant giving centrality to the traditional cultural heritage of the country — constitutionalism, classical republican thought, Christianity, etc etc).

Of course, the immediate question that comes to me is — which Christianity? Whose idea of federalism (it was controversial from the start, right?…but that aside, here is his original comment:

“Well, I reserve the right to celebrate, defend, and honor the customs of my people. We used to have a word for this. It was called “American.” Some of us have deeper roots in this country than others. My ancestors were here in the seventeenth century – before there was even a “United States.” The men who fought and died at Charleston, Cowpens, Camden, Horseshoe Bend, and the Alamo, who marched with Scott at Veracruz, Monterrey, and Mexico City, with Lee at Fredericksburg, Antietam, and Gettysburg shared this understanding of America. “We are a nation of immigrants” is not something they would have understood. ”

(Reading this over, I am not sure he is right to say I misunderstood him. What I said sounds like a pretty good inference from what he says…

Still, I accept the correction and take it from there)

S’s second point was that Jews, as a group, have pursued their own self-interest as a minority by advocating government policies that change the racial mix in the country against white, Christian culture (these are Scimitar’s categories, not mine), while at the same time, making their position impregnable. That is, he thinks critiques of imperialism and racism against whites are political moves to decrease white power and increase the power of minorities ...ostensibly, although, he says, the ones who really benefit are the opinion makers, who – he claims – are largely Jewish.

I am going to refrain from dismissing this out of hand as anti-Semitic, which I know a lot of people would do, perhaps with justification. But since this is a blog about propaganda and mass thinking, I don’t shy away from the topic and want to address it seriously. But carefully. Because, it’s something that isn’t really clear in my mind, though I have talked about it before in relation to hate speech laws – which I oppose. Coincidentally, there was a fascinating discussion of a John Derbyshire post, “Be Nice or We’ll Crush You” (- this is not an endorsement of D’s positions on this or any other matter) at Jewcy.com, which has a penchant for taking on controversial topics – at the invitation of its very bright, entertaining, and open minded editor, Joey Kurtzman, who writes:

“Even interested non-scientists like you and me, John, have learned that human populations have different distributions of various alleles (variants of a certain gene); that some of these variations between groups result in different distributions of biological traits such as Tay-Sachs disease, sickle cell anemia, and so on; and that we need prepare ourselves for the very real possibility that the list also includes psychological and behavioral traits.

I’m not asking for crudeness or intentionally insulting behavior, of course. But if puncturing some of our American and Jewish anxieties about race-related language will make it easier to have the honest discussion I’m looking for, then, hey, I say let’s go for it. Jewess is innocuous enough—let’s you and I agree to use it. If anyone calls you an antisemite or asks you to take one of the ADL’s sensitivity courses, you just tell them that a Jew gave you permission—nay, urged you!—to use the word. Pass the buck to me.”

I say carefully, because again, I find the tools of analysis – the terms (American, whites, Jews) elusive when you look at them closely and because ascription of intent or motivation to a whole group is usually a bit of an exercise in futility.

Given that, however, let’s look at what he is saying closely…

When I said that the topic of the alleged mongrelization of the state by Jewish opinion makers is one to be negotiated carefully, I wasn’t merely referring to the possibility of being seen as anti-Semitic, I was also wondering about the actual validity of the argument, its elusiveness as an analytical tool.

After all, Jews are well represented across the whole spectrum of political beliefs (from socialism to neo-liberalism, WSJ style, to Austrian economics to anarchism). If they hold these views out of self-interest only, their self-interest must then be a remarkably protean creature.

What’s more, it isn’t clear to me that the policies that opinion makers pursue are the ones that represent the interests of ordinary Jews either here or in Israel. Even if they do represent Jewish elite interests, it’s usually also true that they represent other non-Jewish elite interests. In which case, to what degree can any policy they pursue be seen as specifically or solely Jewish?

It’ s not that I don’t see from where S is coming…or even some one like Kevin McDonald. I do. But I tend to think that there isn’t all that much to be gained analytically by going down that track — although censoring discussion of it also doesn’t do much good.

You have to differentiate between the opinions of Jews and the opinions of Jewish lobbying groups and action committees. Then too, Jews are highly represented in espousing views that are called anti-Semitic — from Shahak, in Israel, decribed here by Christopher Hitchins to Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomksy and Jeff Blankfort here in the US. What does S say to that?

Or to the fact that two of the leading theorists of libertarianism (which he sees as undermining communitarian ethics) were Ayn Rand (with whom I go along only partly and warily) and Murray Rothbard, both Jewish, and both interested in the flourishing of civic society. That’s what S wants to see flourishing and which he thinks libertarians undermine.

Here is Rothbard on family, education and government in

“The Progressive Era and the Family,” (Joseph R. Peden and Fred R. Glahe (eds.), The American Family and the State (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 1986).

“The expansion of compulsory public schooling stemmed from the growth of collectivist and anti-individualist ideology among intellectuals and educationists. The individual, these “progressives” believed, must be molded by the educational process to conform to the group, which in practice meant the dictates of the power elite speaking in the group’s name.”
And here is a quote from Rand on individualism and the flourishing of moral law:

“Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.”

Or take the case of immigrants. Is an immigrant like me always more suspect than say an Anglo-American, for instance, in such matters as espionage against the country? I think it is not self-evidently the case. For myself, if the US were to go to war with India and the US were at fault, I would find it extremely difficult to remain here and would probably leave or even give up my citizenship. On the other hand, say the issue was Indian immigration here. I would not side with my own racial group if it was in violation of the law or of ethics, certainly, but also, I think, in other less clear cut situations. I would tend to bend over backwards to the community in which I lived, as a matter of generosity to the racial “other” (NOT because I was kow-towing to the dominant thinking of the state on the issue). That is a subtle but important moral distinction.

In other words, I would more than likely injure my own racial self interest out of an obligation to the immediate community in which I lived and to which I also feel a group affiliation.

And I think that obtains with Jews, as well. Some Jewish opinion leader probably hold views that might seem mistaken or even prejudiced to an outsider, simply from their own perceptions of obligation and from multiple affiliations that have nothing to do with intent to propagandize. In other words, they may genuinely see things that way. On the other hand, I do not think the same of some Jewish-American politicians, like Douglas Feith or Richard Perle, whose actions seem to be more like the “pursuit of group self-interest” model you reference.

Besides, group affiliation itself, as I noted, is complex.

I am an Indian, but also a Christian. Isn’t my Christianity (which is as old as European Christianity) less tainted by the antiSemitism of European Christianity? Or does that have to be weighed against my third-world affiliation, which with its assumed Arabism, is seen by some as necessarily anti-Semitic?

Or is seen also as having its own racism. As a Jewish reader at this blog said – “Gandhi didn’t like blacks” ?

Is that the slur which Indians now have to juggle to survive the ideological smell test?

Can you see how convoluted these questions get?

And isn’t it possible also that state policies can be enacted because of structural reasons that coincide with the group preferences of opinion- makers, but are not caused by them in some simple one to one manner? Does there need to be intent? If so, whose specifically and how?

Mind you, I see the same problems in discussions of imperialism which too simply conflate it with “white” and “Christian” — there is certainly a bit of both in Western imperialism, but how it operated is not as clear cut as people make out.

Aren’t Jews also white…and American…and even Anglo? And doesn’t the racial mongrelization that S says their opinion makers pursue apply also to them?

Isn’t it also true that while this and related topics are taboo in leading opinion journals and universities, they are still discussed everywhere in less prestigious outlets, and that if there is censorship, quite a bit of it is self-censorship? And the self-censorship arises out of our own servility to power and prestige?

And if you don’t speak up forthrightly about what you find important or truthful, whose fault is that?

And if you are afraid you might lose a job or a promotion or a review, then how deeply held and morally important are your convictions?

Isn’t it also true that some part of the reason why this debate can never take place openly is not really because of the arguments themselves but because we do not trust each other enough?

That we do not really feel that we are above board in doing justice to each others’ claims?

And that, in fact, we are not above aboard?

Only look at the way people debate each other – the level of vituperation. Neither left nor right is able to see each other with any degree of respect and consideration. And isn’t that really the reason we resort to political correctness and other speech codes?

Who really is persuaded solely by arguments? The reason Marxism had such a hold over the third world was because its adherents often showed more concern for the welfare of ordinary people than adherents of other ideologies. People were persuaded not by the ideas alone but – at least initially – by the kind of people who held the ideas. Lack of trust does not persuade.
And isn’t every debate about race and gender in this country poisoned by that lack of trust? And isn’t that why we try so desperately to show our ideological purity? To prove our guiltlessness by distancing ourselves from anyone who might contaminate us, as though they were untouchables?

Isn’t that really why we are afraid of ideas that are free of fashionable dogmas? They are not”pure”?

Isn’t that really how propaganda works here — by our own self-censorship and weakness in articulating our own thoughts?

Would we really be afraid to be called anti-Semites, or whatever else, if we were completely free in our consciences about it?

And when we are free of such feelings — or at least — are struggling at all times to be free of them, then, wouldn’t what we said carry a weight and a force which would be infectious and free us of our fear?

Isn’t it the case that reason backed by moral qualities and emotional truth has a power that we fail to possess not because we lack the ability to argue but because we lack that kind of moral clarity and consideration for other human beings…. and it shows?

And that, S., is what I meant when I talked about rationality.

I don’t mean appealing to logic – as if rationality were a matter of syllogism. Rationality as a tool to coerce or manipulate is only the rationality of the state – a bureaucratic rationality that reduces everything to mass man and mass ideas.

But individuals are not mass men. They are developed not only in logic, but in their emotions, in their intuitions, in the full range of their humanity. They are able to love – to have caritas – for the other, to see the other as human in the same ways as they are.

That “right reason,” rooted in emotions and intuition, is precisely what allows us as individuals to self-organize outside the coercion of the state. That kind of reason is what libertarianism values and sets free in individuals.

A reason that is not seperate from conscience and belongs only to the individual — not to the group.

Which is why I am a libertarian.

(Note: I should add that since Lib. posits reciprocal behavior that respects individuals’ life, liberty and property it assumes a certain set of ethics…

To that extent it certainly does impose norms – only not in an obvious way. How then would a Lib. community defend itself from another imperialist community? Well – it would do so by banding with other libertarian groups. Would that always work? It might not. But a state, too, has no guarantee of surviving the depredations of another state. My idea, however, is that it’s only propaganda (by interested elites) that gives the state its legitimacy. That is, you have to have a priesthood preaching the divine right of the king, or, now, you have to have opinion-makers touting the sanctity of the corporate-state for the rulers to acquire power. For, contrary to popular assumption, governments ultimately only get their power from the submission of the governed. In a so-called democracy, the masses submit because they are hit over the head, not with a baton – although that, too — but with propaganda.

Gandhi on Propaganda….

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Government “education has torn us from our moorings, our training has made us hug the very chains that bind us.” -M. K. Gandhi quoted in Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973), p. 57.

Police State Chronicles: antispyware and the feds..

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“Update A recent federal court decision raises the question of whether antivirus companies may intentionally overlook spyware that is secretly placed on computers by police.

In the case decided earlier this month by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, federal agents used spyware with a keystroke logger–call it fedware–to record the typing of a suspected Ecstasy manufacturer who used encryption to thwart the police.

A CNET News.com survey of 13 leading antispyware vendors found that not one company acknowledged cooperating unofficially with government agencies. Some, however, indicated that they would not alert customers to the presence of fedware if they were ordered by a court to remain quiet…”

More at CNet News.com via Phoenix Insurgent.

Police State Chronicles: anarchists arrested in Spokane…

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 Spokane update: Police video shows anarchists did not provoke attack’

“A few days ago I blogged about 18 anarchists in Spokane getting arrested in a demonstration against police brutality that ended in police brutality — sort of proving their point. In the immediate aftermath, police contended that they were responding to an assault on a police officer by one of the protestors. Eyewitness accounts by protestors indicated the police were lying their asses off about that….”

More at Brad Spangler.