express | BARACK Obama will reportedly pocket a staggering £2.5million
(€3million) today for delivering a speech to a sold-out audience in
Milan as part of his lucrative post-presidential speaking tour.
The former President, who has already earned hundreds of thousands of dollars for private speeches since leaving the White House, will make his highest-paying appearance yet at the Global Food Innovation Summit today.
tomdispatch | Since the late eighteenth century, the United States has been
involved in an almost ceaseless string of wars, interventions, punitive
expeditions, and other types of military ventures abroad -- from
fighting the British and Mexicans to the Filipinos and Koreans to the
Vietnamese and Laotians to the Afghans and Iraqis. The country has
formally declared war 11 times and has often engaged in undeclared
conflicts with some form of congressional authorization, as with the
post-9/11 “wars” that rage on today.
Recent presidents have conducted such wars without seemingly asking
the hard questions -- whether about the validity of intelligence claims,
the efficacy of military power, or the likely blowback from invasions,
drone strikes, and the deposing of dictators. The consequences have been
catastrophic for Afghans and Iraqis, Libyans and Yemenis, among
others. At last, however, we finally have a president willing to raise
some of the hard questions about war. Well, at least, about one war. Or,
rather, questions about one war that are, at least, hard to decipher.
“People don't ask that question, but why was there the Civil War?” President Donald Trump wondered
in a recent interview, referring to America’s nineteenth century war
over slavery. “Why could that one not have been worked out?"
Trump then suggested that, had President Andrew Jackson -- to whom he’s compared himself -- been in office, he would have avoided the conflict that claimed
more American lives than any other: “He was really angry that he saw
what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There's no
reason for this.’” Of course, Andrew Jackson, who fought in his fair
share of America’s ceaseless conflicts (including against the British during the War of 1812 and the Seminoles in Spanish Florida), died in 1845, more than a decade and a half before the Civil War began.
No matter. The important thing is that we finally have a president
willing to ask some questions about some wars -- even if it’s the wrong
questions about a war that ended more than 150 years ago.
Today, TomDispatch regular
Andrew Bacevich offers a cheat sheet of sorts: the real questions about
war and national security that should be asked but never are in these
United States. Since it’s bound to take President Trump some time to
work his way to the present -- what with all the questions about why we
fought Japanese, Koreans, Spaniards, Filipinos, Chinese, Mexicans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, Japanese (again), Germans, Koreans (again), Chinese (again), Vietnamese, and so many others -- it’s incumbent upon the rest of us to start asking Bacevich’s questions and demanding some answers.
cbsnews | It is not often you get the chance to meet a man who holds a place in
history like Ben Ferencz. He's 97 years old, barely 5 feet tall, and
he served as prosecutor of what's been called the biggest murder trial
ever. The courtroom was Nuremberg; the crime, genocide; the defendants, a
group of German SS officers accused of committing the largest number of
Nazi killings outside the concentration camps -- more than a million
men, women, and children shot down in their own towns and villages in
cold blood.
Ferencz is the last Nuremberg prosecutor alive today. But he isn't content just to be part of 20thcentury history -- he believes he has something important to offer the world right now.
"If it's naive to want peace instead of war, let 'em make sure they say I'm naive. Because I want peace instead of war."
Twenty-two SS officers responsible for the deaths of 1M+
people would never have been brought to justice were it not for Ben
Ferencz.
The officers were part of units
called Einsatzgruppen, or action groups. Their job was to follow the
German army as it invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and kill Communists,
Gypsies and Jews.
Ferencz believes "war
makes murderers out of otherwise decent people" and has spent his life
working to deter war and war crimes.
kunstler | If you seek to know why this country is in so much trouble, check out
the lead reports about the health care reform bill in today’s New York Times, WashPo,
and CNN. You will find there is no intelligible discussion in any of
them as to what’s actually ailing US health care. All you get is
play-by-play commentary about which political tag-team is “winning,” as
if this were a pro wrestling match — with an overlay of gloat that the
Republicans fell oafishly out of the ring in the early rounds.
Of course, an issue even larger than the health care fiasco is this
society’s tragic and astounding inability to discuss anything coherently
in the public arena, and that might possibly be traced to the failures
of education in our time and its effects on the current crop of editors
and news producers — people who grew up hearing that reality was just a
constructed “narrative” and that one narrative was as good as another.
So, you would surmise from reading the papers (or their web editions)
that the health care problem was simply a matter of apportioning
insurance coverage. That is what the stage magicians call misdirection.
Any way you cut the dynamics of health insurance, as practiced in the
USA these days, it is nothing but racketeering, literally a conspiracy
between informed players to swindle uninformed “patients.” The debate in
congress (and the news media) is just about who gets to be swindled.
This is almost entirely due to the hocus-pocus of pricing for
services. For an excellent dissection of all this, I urge you to read
Karl Denninger’s comprehensive manifesto, How To Permanently Fix Health Care For All,
which he posted one month ago. You have to wonder whether anybody in
congress happened to read this, because the debate has been devoid of
any of the crucial points that it addresses.
The way it works now, the so-called “providers” (doctors, hospitals)
refuse to post the cost of any service, and then charge whatever they
feel they can extract, subject to an abstruse and dishonest ceremonial
“negotiation” with the insurance company. The result: hospital and
insurance executives get paid multi-million dollar salaries, doctors get
to drive fine German cars, and the patient gets financially ass-raped,
kicked to the curb, and eventually stuffed into the bankruptcy courts.
When Jackie Thennes decided to switch doctors earlier
this year, the hospital system in her Chicago, Il. suburb seemed like
the natural choice. She’d been to the immediate care facility multiple
times before for screenings, and the doctor was in-network.
But Thennes, who is 50 and looking for work, got a nasty surprise
when the bill arrived in the mail: along with an anticipated charge for
the doctor’s visit, she was also charged a “facility fee.” At $235, the
fee was slightly more than the doctor’s visit itself.
Thennes tried to contest the charge with the hospital system, but
to no avail. And while she said she won’t go to the facility again, she
worries about getting hit with the same fee somewhere else.
This is “going to deter me from getting the medical attention I need,” she said. “I’m going to get sick just worrying about it.”
These kinds of facility fees are common at hospitals, where they
help pay the hospital system’s overhead costs. But as doctors’ offices
increasingly are being bought up by big hospital systems, patients are
being charged facility fees of up to hundreds of dollars out-of-pocket
without warning and without the ability to contest them.
The rate of hospital-employed doctors increased by almost 50% between July 2012 and July 2015, according to an analysis conducted
by the nonprofit Avalere Health for the Physicians Advocacy Institute.
By July 2015, nearly 40% of doctors were employed by hospitals, the
analysis found. The trend occurred across the country but was especially
prominent in the Midwest.
It’s hard for patients to research which doctors charge facility
fees, since there’s no comprehensive resource to track it, said Chuck
Bell, programs director for Consumers Union, the policy and mobilization
arm of Consumer Reports.
There is one foolproof option, though, Bell said: ask pre-emptively.
Still, “why should patients have to do this?” Bell said. “Health
care has become this outlier bad, terrible customer experience. Even a
mechanic has to tell you up-front what the estimate is for working on
your car.”
Moving along, let’s take a look at a very disturbing trends happening
with regard to student loans, which as you know are almost impossible
to get rid of, even in bankruptcy. They essentially follow you to the
grave.
Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio)
introduced a bill with several prominent co-sponsors last week that
would prohibit the government from garnishing borrowers’ Social Security
disability and retirement checks to pay for defaulted student loans.
This marks the second time the Senators have tried to curb this
practice; they introduced a similar bill in 2015 was never enacted into
law. And given today’s highly partisan lawmaking environment, getting
the bill through this time may not be much easier.
“It’s a challenge,” Brown told MarketWatch. Still, he said he’s
hopeful lawmakers will respond to growing concern on this topic from
constituents. “Senators and House members are hearing about this problem
more and more. We’re hearing all kinds of people calling us surprised
that [the government] can do this.”
And indeed, the government can. The federal student loan program provides many options borrowers can use to manage their debts, but once borrowers default,
the government has extraordinary powers to get its money back,
including garnishing tax refunds, Social Security checks and wages.
A growing number of borrowers are losing out on a portion of
their Social Security checks to pay back student loans. The number of
borrowers over 65 facing this predicament jumped 540% between 2002 and
2015, according to a report released by the Government Accountability Office in December.
Multiple factors explain that spike. For one, over the past
several years we’ve witnessed rapid growth in the number of students
going to college or returning to school during their career. But perhaps
more important, rising college costs over the past few decades means
that it’s more likely that an older adult would have taken on a student
debt either to pay for their own schooling or that of a child.
The challenges these older or disabled borrowers face paying back
their loans is increasingly pushing them toward the financial brink.
The 1996 law that allows the feds to garnish Social Security benefits
over student loans requires that they leave the borrower with a minimum
of $750 in benefits. But that floor hasn’t been adjusted since the 1990s
to account for the rising cost of living. In 2015, about 67,300
borrowers over 50 had their benefits garnished below the poverty line
from just 8,300 borrowers in 2004.
Student loans and healthcare are both ticking time bombs and I see no
real effort underway to tackle them at the macro level where they need
to be addressed. Watch these two issues closely going forward, as I
think fury at both will be the main driver behind the next populist
wave.
Counterpunch | It somehow makes US Americans feel good that the “commies” finally
came around and saw the light. It’s a psychological and emotional salve
that reassures the gullible, the uninformed, and the nationalists that
the sacrifices on their side were not in vain. The problem is it’s dead
wrong.
3.8 million of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s fellow Vietnamese and over 58,000 US Americans did not die
in a war of economic systems or ideologies. The world is not binary
and the cause for which they gave their all was not about a free market
vs. a centrally planned economy. It was about Vietnamese governing Viet
Nam without continued foreign interference, occupation, and war. Viet
Nam won the war because it expelled yet another foreign invader.
Despite what embittered Vietnamese-Americans and diehard veterans who desperately want to believe, and want you to believe, that the loss of limbs, life and sanity were not in vain, it’s really that simple.
The “hardline communists” of whom you spoke, Mr. Viet, were also
pragmatists – out of necessity. They made the fateful decision to bend
rather than break with the Đổi Mới (renovation) reforms of 1986, which
began to bear fruit in the mid-1990s during my first visit to the
country of your birth. Viet Nam has one of the fastest growing
economies in the world and is considered to be one of the great success
stories of the developing world. It also ranks 5th among countries sending their young people to study in the US.
In spite of extremes of wealth and poverty that are characteristic of
any rapidly developing economy, Viet Nam’s government has been praised
for converting wealth
into national well-being, i.e., helping to create a rising tide that
raises all boats, certainly not a claim the US can make, where extreme
wealth concentration and a resulting oligarchy are the order of the
day. (20 US Americans own as much as wealth as 50% of the population.)
The Communist Party is not a monolith, as you know. In fact, there’s
probably more diversity of opinion within this one party than in the US
in which “there is only one party… the Property Party … and it has two
right wings: Republican and Democrat”, as another US writer and public
intellectual, Gore Vidal, once described the US political system. I
know this because Viet Nam is not a country I visit from time to time; I
have lived here for over a decade.
theculinarychronicles | Truth be told, most of my “mom-meal knock offs” aren’t 100%
authentic. But that sure isn’t do to lack of trying! She was so quick
maneuvering around the kitchen–throwing a little of bit of this and a
little bit of that into pans that we could never keep up. Let’s not even
begin to get into how she never measured!
So, on one recent weekend, I found myself recreating a meal that we often had growing up– Bún Thịt Nướng or Vietnamese Grilled Pork over Vermicelli Noodles. It’s not a dish that I eat (or more like “order“)
often these days but when I do get the chance to enjoy it, I am
reminded of how it really is a great depiction of Vietnamese cuisine. An
extremely savory and mutli-layered flavor protein, combined with tons
of fresh herbs, pickled veggies, cold noodles, various textures, and all
enhanced by a spicy nước chấm (dipping sauce). And like many Vietnamese dishes, Bún Thịt Nướng is not difficult to make but it does take some time preparing as there are many steps and components to the dish.
I spend most of the time below describing steps to preparing the pork
so if you have any questions, about the condiments in particular, feel
free to shoot me an email. Since I was too lazy to pull out the grill, I
ended up using my tried and true All-Clad grill pan to cook the pork.
It worked fairly nicely but if you want the true authentic flavor, I’d
recommend using an outdoor grill with with one of those wire mesh
grilling baskets. You can pick one up for really cheap at most Asian
grocery stores. You can’t beat the slightly charred flavor produced by
cooking it that way. Plus, if you’re ever in Việt Nam, you’ll see that
it’s the way my peeps do it.
I was quite pleased with the final dish. The warm grilled meat over
the cold veggies and noodles are a perfect pairing–particular for warm
summer days.
foodforfour | This refreshing vermicelli noodles with wok-tossed beef is our
family’s favourite during the summer months. Thin juicy slices of beef
with beautiful flavours of lemongrass is served on a bed of cold
vermicelli noodles, fresh herbs, topped with sprinkles of fried shallot
and chopped peanuts, and drenched in fish sauce.
This dish is really easy to make and also very versatile. The
vermicelli noodles salad and fish sauce forms the basis of many popular
Vietnamese dishes as the beef can be substituted for another type of
protein. Other Vietnamese vermicelli noodle dishes are served with pork skewers (bun nem nuong), grilled pork ( bun thit nuong), spring rolls (bun cha gio), sugarcane prawn (bun chao tom) and grilled fish.
The trick to preparing this dish is to prepare all your ingredients
before you start to stir fry. Fish sauce dipping sauce can be made the
day before to save time.
Nước mắm pha (mixed fish sauce) is the most well known dipping sauce made from fish sauce. Its simplest recipe is some lime juice, or occasionally vinegar, one part fish sauce (nước mắm), one part sugar and two parts water. Vegetarians create nước chấm chay (vegetarian dipping sauce) or nước tương (soy water) by substituting Maggi seasoning sauce for fish sauce (nước mắm).[citation needed]
To this, people will usually add minced uncooked garlic, chopped or minced Bird's eye chilis, and in some instances, shredded pickled carrot/white radish and green papaya for bún. Otherwise, when having seafood, such as eels, people also serve some slices of lemongrass.
It is often prepared hot on a stove to dissolve the sugar more
quickly, then cooled. The flavor can be varied depending on the
individual's preference, but it is generally described as pungent and
distinct, sweet yet sour, and sometimes spicy.
wikipedia |Fish sauce is an amber-colored liquid extracted from the fermentation of fish with sea salt. It is used as a condiment in various cuisines. Fish sauce is a staple ingredient in numerous cultures in Southeast Asia and the coastal regions of East Asia, and features heavily in Burmese, Cambodian, Filipino, Thai, Lao and Vietnamese cuisines. It also was a major ingredient in ancient European cuisine, but is no longer commonly used in those regions.
In addition to being added to dishes during the cooking process, fish
sauce is also used as a base for a dipping condiment and is prepared in
many different ways in each country. It is eaten with fish, shrimp, pork, and chicken. In parts of southern China, it is used as an ingredient for soups and casseroles. Fish sauce, and its derivatives, impart an umami flavor to food due to their glutamate content.
theburningplatform | In Part One of this article I detailed how propaganda has been utilized by the Deep State
for decades to control the minds of the masses and allow those in
control to reap the benefits of never ending war. In Part Two I will
discuss recent events, false flags, and propaganda campaigns utilized by
the Deep State to push the world to the brink of war.
The people realize they have been screwed and continue to be screwed
by the politicians, bankers and corporate fascists running the show.
This is the major reason Trump was elected. People were desperate for
someone who offered them a promise of economic revival and reduced
government interference in their lives.
The problem is no one is capable of saving the US Titanic. The iceberg was struck sixteen years ago when the Deep State
engineered a plundering campaign driving the national debt from $5.8
trillion to $20 trillion, and unfunded welfare liabilities to $200
trillion. Unpaid for tax cuts will not save us. Unpaid for shovel ready
infrastructure projects will not save us. Threatening foreign countries
with tariffs will not bring manufacturing jobs back. Excessively low
interest rates will not spur investment, but it will create a pension
crisis and impoverish senior citizens.
Devaluing your currency when every country in the world attempts the
same “solution” will not work. Passing an Obamacare lite healthcare plan
that keeps mega-corporation insurance companies and hospitals in charge
solves nothing. The demographic time bomb of boomers turning 65 cannot
be reversed. Providing the appearance of normalcy and improvement by
artificially boosting the stock and real estate markets to all-time
bubble highs only makes the coming crash that much more devastating.
It is clearly evident to me the drumbeat of war is louder than it has been in decades as this Fourth Turning enters its ninth year. Every previous U.S. Fourth Turning has climaxed with a more horrific war than the previous, as the technological “advances” allow the Deep State controllers to create cannon fodder more efficiently. The year 2011 seems to have been the nexus for the Deep State
to create new enemies and sow the seeds of discontent and revolution
around the globe. U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq in 2011, while troop
levels in Afghanistan remained low.
filmsforaction | Getting blocked by a paywall can be irritating, especially if you’re
trying to access peer-reviewed scientific research. Open access
advocates would certainly think so. To paraphrase Richard from HBO’s
“Silicon Valley,” who doesn’t want free information? Well, there may now
be a way to get scientific publications for free — and it’s completely
legal.
“Now more than ever, humanity needs to access our collective knowledge, not hoard it behind paywalls,” according to Unpaywall’s website.
“Lots of researchers feel the same; that’s why they upload their papers
to free, legal servers online. We want to help bring that open access
content to the masses.”
SUPER LEGAL
Unlike similar services that rely on means like automated web
scraping, Unpaywall’s method of getting full-text access to scientific
journals is totally legal. It scans a database of more than 90 million digital object identifiers (DOIs) for
copies of papers that the researchers themselves have uploaded, whether
on some pre-press servers or university websites. Unpaywall is also
completely secure, as it doesn’t ask you for any personal information.
Best of all, to use the service, you just need to install the plug-in on
your Chrome or Firefox desktop browser. A little lock symbol will
appear every time you visit a journal article’s landing page. If the
lock is green, you have access to a full-text copy of the article. A
gold lock means an article already has open license access from the
publisher.
“We’re able to deliver an OA copy to users more than half the time,” Jason Priem, one of Unpaywall’s creators, told The Chronicle of Higher Education.
He’s excited for the service to hit critical mass: “That’s when people
start thinking, ‘Hey, why are we paying millions of dollars to subscribe
to tens of thousands of journals when our researchers have about a
better-than-even chance of reading an article with no subscription at
all?'”
Counterpunch | Keen’s “Minsky” model traces this to what he has called “endogenous
money creation,” that is, bank credit mainly to buyers of real estate,
companies and other assets. He recently suggested a more catchy moniker:
“Bank Originated Money and Debt” (BOMD). That seems easier to remember.
The concept is more accessible than the dry academic terminology
usually coined. It is simple enough to show that the mathematics of
compound interest lead the volume of debt to exceed the rate of GDP
growth, thereby diverting more and more income to the financial sector
as debt service. Keen traces this view back to Irving Fisher’s famous
1933 article on debt deflation – the residue from unpaid debt. Such
payments to creditors leave less available to spend on goods and
services.
In explaining the mathematical dynamics underlying his “Minsky”
model, Keen links financial dynamics to employment. If private debt
grows faster than GDP, the debt/GDP ratio will rise. This stifles
markets, and hence employment. Wages fall as a share of GDP.
This is precisely what is happening. But mainstream models ignore the
overgrowth of debt, as if the economy operates on a barter basis. Keen
calls this “the barter illusion,” and reviews his wonderful exchange
with Paul Krugman (who plays the role of an intellectual Bambi to Keen’s
Godzilla), who insists that banks do not create credit but merely
recycle savings – as if they are savings banks, not commercial banks. It
is the old logic that debt doesn’t matter because “we” owe the debt to
“ourselves.”
The “We” are the 99%, the “ourselves” are the 1%. Krugman calls them “patient” savers vs “impatient” borrowers,
blaming the malstructured economy on personal psychology of indebted
victims having to work for a living and spend their working lives paying
off the debt needed to obtain debt-leveraged homes of their own,
debt-leveraged education and other basic living costs.
By being so compact, this book is able to concentrate attention on
the easy-to-understand mathematical principles that underlie the “junk
economics” mainstream. Keen explains why, mathematically, the Great
Moderation leading up to the 2008 crash was not an anomaly, but is
inherent in a basic principle: Economies can prolong the debt-financed boom and delay a crash simply by providing more and more credit,
Australia-style. The effect is to make the ensuing crash worse, more
long-lasting and more difficult to extricate. For this, he blames mainly
Margaret Thatcher and Alan Greenspan as, in effect, bank lobbyists. But
behind them is the whole edifice of neoliberal economic brainwashing.
Keen attacks this “neoclassical” methodology by pointing that the
logical fallacy of trying to explain society by looking only at “the
individual.” That approach and its related “series of plausible but
false propositions” blinds economics graduates from seeing the obvious.
Their discipline is the product of ideological desire not to blame banks
or creditors, wrapped in a libertarian antagonism toward government’s
role as economic regulator, money creator, and financer of basic
infrastructure.
Keen’s exposition undercuts the most basic and fundamental
assumptions of neoclassical (that is, anti-government, anti-socialist)
economics by showing that instead of personifying economic classes as
“individuals” (Krugman’s “prudent” individuals with their inherited
fortunes and insider dealings vs. spendthrift individuals too
economically squeezed to afford to buy houses free of mortgage debt) it
is easier to start with basic economic categories – creditors, wage
earners, employers, governments running deficits (to provide the economy
with money) or surpluses (to suck out money and force reliance on
commercial banks).
lewrockwell |QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong I live in Israel and today I
listened to your podcast with Macrovoices. At some point you mentioned
that there is more oil in Golan heights than in Saudi Arabia -and this
oil belongs to genie energy. Is it true? How can it be that nobody knew
nothing about this in Israel? Are you sure 100 % about this information?
I will be happy to know more about this.
ANSWER: Yes. This is one of the best kept secrets.
You can imagine that if this went into production, then the disputed
Syrian land issue occupied by Israel would come to the forefront. This
is why it gets no play but this is one reason Obama was working to
overthrow the Syrian government. They would not have political people on
the Strategic Advisory Board if they did not need political strings
pulled.
Politically, you have the Pipe Line from Qatar being
one major issue that was to compete with Russia in selling gas to
Europe, which is why Putin is involved. He is not involved in Egypt,
Israel, or even Afghanistan. This is the reason why Putin has an
interest in Syria and the mainstream media of course championed Obama
claiming he was defending children. Then we have Genie Oil and strategic
oil reserves within occupied Syria. Just look at the people who are are
heavy hitters on the Strategic Advisory Board of Genie Oil! Not bad for a company nobody has heard of and the glaring issue is why do you need heavy hitters like this just to pump oil? Location! Location! Location! The
mainstream media is not going to report on this issue. They even
have Rupert Murdoch on their Strategic Advisory Board. This is hush hush
in the mainstream media.
counterpunch | Since the inception of the the State of Israel, one Israeli
government after the other has insisted that the Israeli state
officially represents every last Jew on the planet – thus conflating
nationality and religious identity. The fabricated nature of this claim
has become more obvious as Israeli behavior and culture has grown ever
more racist and the policies of its governments more blatantly in
violation of international law and the norms of human and civil rights.
While much of the rest of the world has strived to increase diversity
and tolerance, Israel and a small number of other states (such places
as Myanmar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, etc.) go about practicing official
discrimination, segregation, and expulsion. As they do so, they
inevitably produce cultures that those who support human and civil
rights can only describe as ugly and deformed. As a consequence, more
and more Jews have responded by disassociating themselves with Zionist
Israel.
What then has been the response of the Israeli government? It is,
essentially, to spit in the face of Jews supportive of human rights. The
Israelis seek to force the issue by using their influence and that of
Zionist lobby surrogates to push for new laws in key foreign lands, such
as the U.S. and the U.K., to make criticism of the Israeli state
legally synonymous with anti-Semitism. The U.S. and British adoption of
the suspect portion of the “working definition” of anti-Semitism cited
here is a step in this direction, and a consequence of Zionist pressure.
It should be noted that Israel and its supporters, being the “deep
thinkers” they aren’t, have created an reductio ad absurdum situation.
To wit, anyone who publicly condemns Israeli human rights violations
(that is Israeli racist acts) must be anti-Semitic (racist) – even if
they happen to be Jewish. That is what you get when you pursue
particularistic expediency over the general logic of tolerance and
humanitarianism.
One can ask how it is that American and British, as well as other
politicians and law makers, who are themselves part of cultures that are
even now seeking to overcome racism, can buy into such an illogical
argument?
Their doing so seems to be an expression of the electoral
marketplace. Politicians need money to survive in their chosen career.
As long as it does not cost them an overwhelming number of votes, they
will sell their support to high bidders. And, no one bids higher than
the Zionists.
This means that democratic politics is most often not a principled
activity. It can be idealized, of course, but as long as it is dependent
on incessant fund-raising, it will be corrupt in practice. That is why
the Zionists can easily arrange for most Western politicians to
selectively suppress free speech in their own countries and support
racism in Israel.
strategic-culture |What
the latest release of UN Holocaust files shows is that Washington and
London were indeed well aware of the Nazi Final Solution in which
millions of European Jews and Slavic people were being systematically
worked to death or exterminated in gas chambers. So the question again
is: why did the US and Britain not direct more of their aerial bombing
campaign to destroy the Nazi infrastructure?
One
possible answer is that these Western allies had a callous disregard
for the Nazi victims. Washington and London establishments were
themselves accused of harboring antisemitic prejudices, as can be seen
from the scandals when both these governments spurned thousands of
European Jewish refugees during the Second World War, in effect sending
many of them to their deaths under the Nazi regime.
Not
excluding the above factor of Western racist insouciance, there is a
second more disturbing factor. That the Western governments, or at least
powerful sections, were loath to hamper the Nazi war effort against the
Soviet Union. Notwithstanding that the Soviet Union was a nominal
«ally» of the West for the defeat of Nazi Germany.
This
perspective harks to a radically different conception of the Second
World War in contrast to that narrated in official Western versions. In
this alternative historical account, the rise of the Nazi Third Reich
was deliberately fomented by American and British rulers as a bulwark in
Europe against the spread of communism. Adolf Hitler’s rabid
anti-Semitism was matched only by his detest of Marxism and the Slavic
people of the Soviet Union. In the Nazi ideology, they were all
«Untermenschen» (subhumans) to be exterminated in a «Final Solution».
So,
when Nazi Germany was attacking the Soviet Union and carrying out its
Final Solution from June 1941 until late 1944, little wonder then that
the US and Britain showed a curious reluctance to commit their military
forces fully to open up a Western Front. The Western allies were
evidently content to see the Nazi war machine doing what it was
originally intended to do: to destroy the primary enemy to Western
capitalism as represented by the Soviet Union. This is not to say that
all American and British political leaders shared or were even aware of
this tacit strategic vision. Leaders like President Franklin Roosevelt
and Prime Minister Winston Churchill appeared to be genuinely committed
to defeating Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, their individual views must be
set against a background of systematic collusion between powerful
Western corporate interests and Nazi Germany.
medium |Skin in the Game
is necessary to reduce the effects of the following divergences that
arose mainly as a side effect of civilization: action and cheap talk (tawk),
consequence and intention, practice and theory, honor and reputation,
expertise and pseudoexpertise, concrete and abstract, ethical and legal,
genuine and cosmetic, entrepreneur and bureaucrat, entrepreneur and
chief executive, strength and display, love and gold-digging, Coventry
and Brussels, Omaha and Washington, D.C., economists and human beings,
authors and editors, scholarship and academia, democracy and governance,
science and scientism, politics and politicians, love and money, the
spirit and the letter, Cato the Elder and Barack Obama, quality and
advertising, commitment and signaling, and, centrally, collective and
individual.
This idea is weaved into history: all warlords and warmongers were
warriors themselves and, with few exceptions societies were run by risk
takers not risk transferors. They took risks –more risks than ordinary
citizens. Julian the Apostate, the hero of many, died on the battlefield
fighting in the never-ending war on the Persian frontier. One of
predecessors, Valerian, after he was captured was said to have been used
as a human footstool by the Persian Shahpur when mounting his horse.
Less than a third of Roman emperors died in their bed –and one can argue
that, had they lived longer, they would have fallen prey to either a
coup or a battlefield.
And,
one may ask, what can we do since a centralized system will necessarily
need people who are not directly exposed to the cost of errors? Well, we
have no choice, but decentralize; have fewer of these. But not to
worry, if we don’t do it, it will be done by itself, the hard way: a
system that doesn’t have a mechanism of skin in the game will eventually
blow up and fix itself that way. We will see numerous such examples.
For
instance, bank blowups came in 2008 because of the hidden risks in the
system: bankers could make steady bonuses from a certain class of
concealed explosive risks, use academic risk models that don’t work
(because academics know practically nothing about risk), then invoke
uncertainty after a blowup, some unseen and unforecastable Black Swan,
and keep past bonuses, what I have called the Bob Rubin trade. Robert
Rubin collected one hundred million dollar in bonuses from Citibank, but
when the latter was rescued by the taxpayer, he didn’t write any check.
The good news is that in spite of the efforts of a complicit Obama
administration that wanted to protect the game and the rent-seeking of
bankers, the risk-taking business moved away to hedge funds. The move
took place because of the overbureaucratization of the system. In the
hedge fund space, owners have at least half of their net worth in the
funds, making them more exposed than any of their customers, and they
personally go down with the ship.
The
interventionistas case is central to our story because it shows how
absence of skin in the game has both ethical and epistemological effects
(i.e., related to knowledge). Interventionistas don’t learn because they they are not the victims to their mistakes. Interventionistas don’t learn because they they are not the victims of their mistakes, and, as we saw with pathemata mathemata :
medium |Symmetry, symmetry everywhere — Belief and worship requires an entry fee — The Gods do not like cheap signaling.
Note:
I am posting these excerpts from SKIN IN THE GAME as I am ending the
grueling Greek-Orthodox lent period which, for the most part, allows no
animal products. This diet is particularly hard to keep in the West
where people use butter and dairy products. But once you fast, you feel
entitled to celebrate Easter; it is like the exhilaration of fresh water
when one is thirsty. You’ve paid a price. Your holiday is different
from that of others who stole it.
Fasting
is one of the human sacrifices that make like different from an
experience machine — or, worse, a hedonic, pleasure-seeking mercenary
pursuit. Recall our brief discussion of the theological necessity of
making Christ man –he had to sacrifice himself. Time to develop the
argument here.
The
main theological flaw in Pascal’s wager is that belief cannot be a
free-option. It entails a symmetry between what you pay and what you
receive. Things otherwise would be too easy. Accordingly, the skin in
the game rules that hold between humans also hold in the rapport with
the gods.
To
summarize, in a Judeo-Christian place of worship, the focal point, where
the priest stands, symbolizes Skin in the Game. The notion of belief
without tangible proof is not existent in history.
The
strength of a creed did not rest on “evidence” of the powers of its
gods, but evidence of the skin in the game on the part of its
worshippers.[1]
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