EDITORIAL
Showing 3351 - 2 of 2
April 03, 2015
One of the reasons for libertarian antagonism towards the welfare state lies in the fact that welfarism is an attempt to philosophically compromise freedom with totalitarianism (i.e., merge what is politically "the good" with what is politically "the evil"). It ...
April 02, 2015
The Daily Bell has been part of my life for the last eight years. I started it in 2007, while I was still living and working in Vancouver, because there was something I wanted to share with you. That something was what I saw every time I looked through the surf ...
April 02, 2015
If the US public were polled in depth about the loss of privacy that has taken place since 9/11, chances are there would be a significant percentage of people that would resist the trade-off. Likewise, if people were polled in depth about the globalized warfare ...
April 02, 2015
There are powerful forces in the US and abroad that will resist any consensus that links military service to depression and suicide. This study published yesterday in JAMA Psychiatry states bluntly suicide does not seem to be much enhanced by deployment in Afgh ...
April 01, 2015
Ben Bernanke was once among the most powerful men on the planet because of the monetary control he exercised as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Now he is not quite so powerful, but apparently he is prepared to be a good deal more informative. He has started a ...
April 01, 2015
What if you could get rid of the IRS? There are so many alternative forms of taxation that are likely preferable and simpler, one is certainly justified in asking: Why the IRS and its administration of progressive taxation? Certainly it is well known that initi ...
April 01, 2015
If you buy into the version of Christianity Lite peddled by evangelical leaders such as Franklin Graham, who recently advised Americans to do as the Bible says and "submit to your leaders and those in authority," then staying alive in the American police state ...
March 31, 2015
It is important to keep track of the war on terror and its damages. A big war creates immense antipathy among those subject to its destruction ... Trade suffers; blowback occurs. And for the US, such a war can be economically draining far beyond what is now bei ...
March 31, 2015
A big mainstream media meme is that when economic conditions worsen, people respond by seeking out Hitler-esque leaders who will express the frustration of the "people" via genocide, incipient warfare and the creation of a police state. Regardless of whether th ...
March 31, 2015
Discrimination has become a "dirty word." It has come to carry the "politically incorrect" connotation of prejudice, hatefulness, racism, and cruel intolerance towards others in society. There is only one problem: Which one of us does not discriminate? Indeed, ...
March 30, 2015
Predictably, the death of Lee Kuan Yew has generated many positive comments in the mainstream media about his "leadership" of Singapore. The main thrust of the comments has to do with his ability to run an authoritarian regime that produced a kind of capitalist ...
March 30, 2015
Leaders in high places around the world are making it clear that the drug war is in a sense "over" – and all that is left to do is wind it down. Of course, if you ask the millions who have suffered from the drug war and their families, the "war" is an all-too ...
March 30, 2015
A responsible financial institution would not extend a new loan of between 17 and 40 billion dollars to a borrower already struggling to pay back an existing multi-billion dollar loan. Yet that is just what the International Monetary Fund (IMF) did last month w ...
March 29, 2015
The long-term trends are not hopeful in the context of traditional modern investing. As we've discussed, there's too much monetary and political influence in the world, too many technocrats trying to tell you what to do. And too much mob rule as well, where you ...
March 28, 2015
This article from Bloomberg further deconstructs the conclusions of "Capital in the Twenty-First Century." It is incredible that this book was named the Financial Times Business Book of the Year. The book has already been singled out for mathematical mistakes t ...
March 28, 2015
The breadth of this scandal (see excerpt above) is extraordinary and comes not long after a top executive at Monsanto issued a plaintive tweet lamenting the West's eroding faith in "science." You can see our Monsanto analysis here: "Monsanto Laments Dwindling F ...
March 27, 2015
The stock market has moved down hard these past few days and perhaps there is more to come. The moves allowed the New York Post's John Crudele to readdress a favorite topic of his, which is market-rigging in the US and abroad. His most recent article seems to h ...
March 27, 2015
The furor over "Top Gear" clearly expresses the sickness at the heart of British society. As in many authoritarian countries, people's resentments and grievances are often not recognized or properly expressed until triggered by an event too important to be igno ...
March 27, 2015
Professor Michel Chossudovsky is the author of many important books. His latest is The Globalization of War: America's Long War Against Humanity. Chossudovsky shows that Washington has globalized war while the US president is presented as a global peace-maker, ...
March 26, 2015
Once more this weary meme is dredged up. We suspect it will be regularly trotted out within the context of "robots stealing our jobs." Imagine you were on a farm and robots were taking over all the menial tasks. The average economically illiterate person would ...
March 26, 2015
We've tracked this emergent meme a number of times. You can see one of our articles here: Smart City or Dumb Idea? An excerpt: Gradually you realize that by keeping the definition amorphous the concept [of the Smart City] becomes a weapon that can be used again ...
March 26, 2015
When the 'documentary' "The Hunting Ground" premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, it was advertised as a "piercing, monumental exposé of rape culture on campuses." In fact, its objectivity and perspective have been systematically dismantled since then. ...
March 25, 2015
Is Grexit really so grave? The adversarial stance taken by the two parties is likely partially for public consumption. Following the political adage of never letting a good crisis "go to waste," the entire affair has been in a sense orchestrated. At least the l ...
March 25, 2015
What we call "memes," the mainstream media might term "trends."There are two examples in this analysis: self-driving cars and water shortages. We've identified both as having elements involving government and corporate control. In other words, these are not mer ...
March 25, 2015
Americans as young as 4 years old are being leg shackled, handcuffed, tasered and held at gun point for not being quiet, not being orderly and just being childlike—i.e., not being compliant enough. Americans as old as 95 are being beaten, shot and killed for ...
March 24, 2015
This is a good analysis of what could go wrong with world markets (especially Western and US ones) and why ... It touches on a number of memes: Sort through them to better understand what's taking place, or what could take place – and could not. More: "Maybe ...
March 24, 2015
We've written articles in the past pointing out that Yemen is perhaps the most important country in the Middle East. It's not widely regarded as so in the West because of the lack of reporting on the country within a comprehensible socio-political context. But ...
March 24, 2015
We live in an era in which few can even conceive of a world without the welfare state. Who would care for the old? How would people provide for their medical needs? What would happen to the disadvantaged and needy that fell upon hard times? There were free-mark ...
March 23, 2015
Now that we understand the reality of economic growth, we have a real problem with books – and analysis – like this. One model for prosperity (which we are partial to) holds that the less force used in creating an economy, the better. People ought to have t ...
March 23, 2015
This is one of those articles that deserves a wide audience because it captures the essential illogical nature of the "war on terror" in a single incident and provides us clarity about its destructive aftermath. Certainly, it may be argued that the article is i ...
March 23, 2015
Twelve years ago last week, the US launched its invasion of Iraq, an act the late General William Odom predicted would turn out to be "the greatest strategic disaster in US history." Before the attack I was accused of exaggerating the potential costs of the war ...
March 22, 2015
Anthony Wile: Is Ukraine going to divide into two separate entities? Daniel McAdams: That is not for us to decide. In principle, secession is a commendable pursuit. Our country was founded on secession. The Founders decided that they no longer wanted to be gove ...
March 21, 2015
This article is an almost perfect example of false choices. The editorial staff is counseling Dilma Rousseff to get out of the way so that a man who knows better than she how to wield the power of the state can exercise it. The implication – stated outright a ...
March 21, 2015
We just covered Elon Musk's latest statements regarding self-driving cars and his prediction that in the not-too-distant future driving would be banned. Cars would drive themselves without human input. See here: "Tesla's Musk Continues to Restyle Himself as a T ...
March 20, 2015
This Ted Talk by Paul Tudor Jones has been getting a lot of attention, perhaps because it amplifies the "social justice" meme that we've written about before. The idea here is that societies benefit from social justice and that only government activism can keep ...
March 20, 2015
It used to be those who used the phrase "New World Order" were derided as conspiracy theorists. So what do we call Bloomberg now that its lead editorial for Friday trumpets the term? The editorial – penned by Bloomberg's editorial board – makes the point th ...
March 20, 2015
Pervasive disorder dominates our lives today. It is not a frivolous thing, but a deadly thing that has seeped into our culture like nerve gas quietly permeating the brains of combatants in war. It has come over us because our society's intellectuals, who are su ...
March 19, 2015
Several news items on the central banking front. As we can see from the above news excerpt, Cyprus is making threatening noises regarding its monetary nexus. President Nicos Anastasiades is, in fact, in the process of removing Governor Chrystalla Georghadji. He ...
March 19, 2015
Here comes Reuters, right on time. With California and Brazil suffering from horrible droughts – or so the mainstream media tells us – this article pounds the drum for water scarcity. Of course, as followers of the Daily Bell/VESTS model, the reality of a w ...
March 19, 2015
A pivotal debate in post-WWII America destroyed the nation's deep streak of isolationism; this is the foreign policy of nonintervention by one nation into the affairs of another. On one side was the Old Right. They were a group of politicians and writers who co ...
March 18, 2015
High finance and international politics are subtle affairs. On its surface, the effort to create an Asian-oriented "world bank" is straightforward. But beneath the surface, currents swirl. The putative reason for such a bank is that the current World Bank is of ...
March 18, 2015
Elon Musk is not your normal car company executive. Perhaps he's interested in the fundamentals of his auto enterprise but he's also given to making big pronouncements, ones that are increasingly futuristic. We recall he had ideas about building a "hyperloop" m ...
March 18, 2015
Nothing you write, say, text, tweet or share via phone or computer is private anymore. As constitutional law professor Garrett Epps points out, "Big Brother is watching .... Big Brother may be watching you right now, and you may never know. Since 9/11, our nati ...
March 17, 2015
This AP article is a good example of a mainstream media promotion. The promotion – theme – involves central banking. The positioning of the article attempts to make the meme credible and the "news" believable. Knowing what we now know about operations of ce ...
March 17, 2015
We last wrote about the nascent NAU in late January, in an article entitled, "Shock: CNN Editorial Calls for a North American Union." Now, once more, these three large states seem to have taken another step toward unity. … Now we can update our speculation †...
March 17, 2015
A recently released report on the degree of confidence that Americans have in the country's leading political and economic institutions showed that few of these institutions are held in high regard by the public. The survey was conducted by NORC, a respected re ...
March 16, 2015
Now the Cyprus episode begins to become clearer. What the EU needed was a precedent, and apparently Cyprus sufficed. We've written about Cyprus before, some two years ago when the Cyprus default was ongoing. In an article entitled, "Yes, Cyprus Was Aimed at Sin ...
March 16, 2015
We are supposed to be relieved that there is economic growth without an increase in carbon. In fact, we can't remember a more useless evolution – if the statistics are even accurate. Of course, if you believe in global warming, and that carbon dioxide is the ...
March 16, 2015
The American Empire has been long in the making. A green light was given in 1990 to finalize that goal. Dramatic events occurred that year that allowed the promoters of the American Empire to cheer. It also ushered in the current 25-year war to solidify the pow ...
March 15, 2015
I think everywhere in the world, not just in Europe but also in the US, voters are increasingly skeptical about whether a "democratic" government is actually looking after their own interest or looking after the people's interest. I think increasingly people re ...
