STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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January 23, 2013
Interesting to read about the mood at Davos, which is yet another confab of mostly lower elites and Hollywood "stars." Lower elites go to such confabs to divine just what dominant social themes are in fashion at the moment. The idea is to promote those themes c ...
January 23, 2013
To argue with Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is risky. He is well-informed, he has travelled much, writes well and has a sharp intellect. Yet I must affirm that he is mistaken in some of the opinions expressed in his recent article at The Telegraph, "A new Gold Standa ...
January 23, 2013
Last week the Bundesbank (the German central bank) surprised markets around the world by announcing that it will repatriate a sizable portion of its gold bullion reserves held in France and the United States. To many, the news from the world's second largest ho ...
January 22, 2013
As pointed out by our Beijing columnist in a recent article, Japan is a curious amalgamation of features and a kind of bifurcated culture. There is the exquisite genius of Japanese art ... and then there is the brutality of Japanese industry, economics and poli ...
January 22, 2013
The spectacular, tragic and bloody hostage-taking in Algeria that has now failed at the cost of almost all the lives of the involved hostages is widely being reported as organized by "veteran jihadist Mokhtar Belmokhtar." And according to newspapers like the Gu ...
January 22, 2013
PBS executives apparently want people to go to jail. Or some people anyway. Wall Street people. But here are some people they seem to be leaving out. They don't seem to want company execs of failing "green" companies that have borrowed hundreds of millions from ...
January 22, 2013
List of children killed by drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen Compiled from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports. – Droneswatch.org Dominant Social Theme: "Crack some eggs to make an omelet." Free-Market Analysis: ... OK, that's the list. What is t ...
January 22, 2013
Last week President Obama bluntly warned Congress that he will not negotiate when it comes to raising the statutory debt limit. If Republicans attempt to use a debt ceiling vote to win concessions on spending from the White House, Mr. Obama threatens simply to ...
January 21, 2013
Across Europe we learn conscription is a dead letter as 17 European countries have "abolished or suspended" it. Now Switzerland is considering it (once again), too. The standard libertarian approach to conscription is that it is a kind of state-mandated slavery ...
January 21, 2013
The Financial Times (excerpt above) is reporting that the West "faces decades of conflict in N. Africa." The world's biggest news aggregator, Matt Drudge, is featuring the news on his front page. No doubt it's being promoted throughout the mainstream media as i ...
January 21, 2013
We missed this study in The Lancet when it came out more than a year ago but it is certainly worth commenting on. Even the public summary itself is a damning indictment of the various flu vaccines currently being promoted by Big Pharma. The summary of this stud ...
January 21, 2013
So few grasp this that it's embarrassing. The political purpose of America, as made pretty clear by the Founders and the Declaration of Independence, was to secure for the people a country in which they can be free as they could be in the state of nature only a ...
January 20, 2013
The Daily Bell is pleased to present this exclusive interview with Andy Hoffman. Here's a brief snippet. Daily Bell: Do you still think the world will run out of gold? Andy Hoffman: Just like "peak oil" and other "peak" commodity analyses, the "peak gold" theor ...
January 19, 2013
Federal Reserve officials in August 2007 saw the beginnings of the crisis in subprime mortgages and concluded that the U.S. economy would be able to withstand it, even as some Fed members warned that it could trigger a downturn, transcripts from their 2007 meet ...
January 19, 2013
Over the past two months, Europe's problems seem to have disappeared from the headlines. However, the new French Socialist government is pushing ahead with policies that favor significantly higher government spending, greater regulation of business and commerce ...
January 18, 2013
Barry Eichengreen is a professor of economics and political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former senior policy adviser at the International Monetary Fund. So why does he, in our view, misrepresent the history of the financial industry ...
January 18, 2013
This caught our beady eye because we can never figure what Bill Gates is up to, and he is certainly a man to follow. Or at least, he was. But after announcing he was going to keep his fortune intact until he died, he changed and decided he was going to give muc ...
January 17, 2013
With the UN's World Water Day fast approaching on March 22, we wanted to take the opportunity to urge people not to attend and not to participate. What is not particularly clear about UN efforts because they are so massive and so obfuscated is that the entire w ...
January 17, 2013
We've written about the NRA numerous times now and usually not with any great enthusiasm. Bluntly, we believe the NRA is perhaps an organization controlled surreptitiously at the very top by a globalist power elite that wants to build world government and needs ...
January 17, 2013
"Each fancies that no harm will come to his neglect..." – Thucydides Everyone has an incentive to use resources freely available to all... but none has a corresponding incentive to conserve or replenish the resources. Parcels privately held are better cared f ...
January 16, 2013
The meme to end all memes! We've been waiting for this article for, well ... forever! So ... thanks, Ben Bernanke. We notice you traveled all the way to India to give your speech. Afraid it wouldn't be so well received at home? That's not surprising considering ...
January 16, 2013
The birth, and the apparent death, of the trillion dollar platinum coin idea may one day be recalled as a mere footnote in the current debt crisis drama. The ultimate rejection of the idea (which was to use a loophole in commemorative coinage law to mint a plat ...
January 16, 2013
Those concerned about "The New World Order" speak as if the United States is coming under the control of an outside conspiratorial force. In fact, it is the US that is the New World Order. That is what the American unipolar world, about which China, Russia and ...
January 15, 2013
The meme of the regnant technocrat has never been more powerful, it seems. The powers-that-be that utilize these technocrats for their own purposes are clever, indeed. It is hard to dislike a technocrat like the aged and cautious Mario Monti who just resigned a ...
January 15, 2013
Michael Savage has come out in opposition to flu jabs. His audience of some 10 million listeners is now at least partially aware that the king of conservative shock jocks has serious questions about the flu vaccine. The popular alternative news site World Net D ...
January 15, 2013
President Obama announced his choices for key national security posts this past week, and there has been both celebration and gnashing of teeth in Washington and around the country. There is widespread belief that either or both of these nominees will have an i ...
January 15, 2013
How To Restore the West: Axiom 2 "Human action is purposeful behavior." – Ludwig von Mises. Contrary to politically correct elite propaganda and indoctrination, only a small percentage of the population has the capability and desire to initiate purposeful in ...
January 14, 2013
This is one of the stranger articles we've read in a while, and it is published in TNT Magazine, which is one of the first-ever "expatriate" magazines for readers in such countries as Australia and South Africa. The gentleman providing the financial analysis "e ...
January 14, 2013
The irascible and brilliant James Delingpole has just posted an article over at the UK Telegraph announcing the closure of the New York Times's environmental desk. Big news, indeed ... It is an article that lampoons its subject even while declaring victory. Del ...
January 14, 2013
We wish Paul Salopek well. This is a great opportunity to write and stay physically fit at the same time. National Geographic is going to spend a lot of money sponsoring him as he walks around the world. Salopek is an award-winning journalist and we can expect, ...
January 14, 2013
It may not be the kind of experience many others have had other than at the Department of Motor Vehicles but I recently went through one that brought to mind Franz Kafka. I have been trying to refinance my house for months but my bank, Wells Fargo, refused to e ...
January 13, 2013
The Daily Bell is pleased to present this exclusive interview with Terry Coxon. Daily Bell: Glad to speak with you again. Let's jump right in. You've been speaking out for freedom and free markets for decades. Yet things seem to be getting worse. Why is that? T ...
January 12, 2013
SF Gate explained in a recent editorial that the "'trillion dollar coin' idea is worthless." But, of course, it's not. It's a great idea! I'll tell you why in a minute. The SF Gate editorial gives us the background. "The idea of a 'trillion-dollar coin' came fr ...
January 12, 2013
"Information is the hardest currency." ~ Andrew Vachss Washington's negotiations to address the fiscal cliff of automatic tax increases and spending cuts legislatively triggered at the close of 2012 are the latest in an ongoing effort to address increasing U.S. ...
January 11, 2013
Greece is going to ban most cash transactions. As of last year, cash transactions over 1500 euros were banned. This moves the ban down by 1,000 euros. But from what we've read, the average Greek's transactions are already recorded in numerous ways so it is poss ...
January 11, 2013
Is the current Syrian administration doomed? There are or were YouTube videos of UN vehicles carrying armed "rebels" into Syria to fight against the government. These were said to be the same "al Qaeda" fighters that had added to forces overthrowing Syria's Mu ...
January 11, 2013
The District of Columbia (DOC) has an enormous listing of guns that are not legal according to statute. Some other states have such listings as well, though perhaps not in such detail. Is this, then, the future of US weapons? Continued complexity and further ba ...
January 11, 2013
A study by Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, published in the current issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science, is getting a lot of news this week. Twenge found that college kids today are more likely to call themselves gifted and driven t ...
January 10, 2013
We are suspicious of this sudden discovery that the European crisis has lessened. Der Spiegel, an elite mouthpiece if there ever was one, is virtually announcing it. But here is what inquiring minds want to know: Is the article accurate? And why would Der Spieg ...
January 10, 2013
With gun control becoming an explosive controversy in the US, it is interesting to note accusations now being leveled at Syria regarding its possession of uranium. This is likely part of the demonization of weapons generally that are not in the control of "resp ...
January 10, 2013
Once, when my son was in elementary school, they had some kind of special event celebrating the achievements of various students – I can't recall just what the festivities were all about. What I do recall vividly is that the principal had invited a local poli ...
January 10, 2013
Economists who hold the popular view that expanding the money supply will provide the best medicine for our ailing economy dismiss the inflationary concerns of monetary hawks, like me, by pointing to the supposedly low inflation that has occurred during the cur ...
January 09, 2013
Sir Evelyn de Rothschild is making points about one of his favorite topics in this just-released series of remarks. That topic is financial regulation. Evelyn de Rothschild – surely one of the more powerful men in the world – is focused on financial regulat ...
January 09, 2013
Thanks to economist Gary North for this one. The bill, Illinois SB3341, passed the state senate in the spring and was handed off to the house this fall. With three amendments introduced in the house, it now sits in committee (see ilga.gov for progress). But we' ...
January 08, 2013
Chrystia Freeland is one of those Reuters commentators who apparently believe that the best way to implement free-market capitalism is to use government to support it. As government is force and free-markets are voluntary, this becomes a questionable propositio ...
January 08, 2013
Of course, we're being sarcastic. We're expanding on a previous topic here that mentioned our doubts (along with those expressed by much of the rest of the alternative media) about the Lord's Resistance Army and why it needed to be "hunted." In a previous artic ...
January 08, 2013
Creating and sustaining a nation of zombies is expensive. Large sections of the US population have been turned into zombies. Retirees. Medicare dependents. Food stamp recipients. Disabled people. They are not necessarily bad people. They are not necessarily dis ...
January 08, 2013
In November the largest chunk of new jobs came from retail and wholesale trade. Businesses gearing up for Christmas sales added 65,700 jobs or 45% of November's 146,000 jobs gain. With December sales a disappointment, these jobs are likely to reverse when the J ...
January 07, 2013
This article posted by the UK Telegraph deals with the emergence of alternative money in a stressed Greek society. What's an alternative dominant social theme? That people will take action, however ineffective, when they have no other options. A subdominant soc ...
January 07, 2013
This is a scary article that fits right in with our larger theory about power elite fear-based promotions. We call them dominant social themes and theorize with a good deal of corroborative evidence that these memes are intended to scare people into giving up p ...
