EDITORIAL Showing 3501 - 2 of 2
The Only Truly Compliant, Submissive Citizen in a Police State Is a Dead One
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 ...
ABCs of the Coming Credit Crunch?
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 ...
Yemen's Chaos … Continued
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 ...
A World Without the Welfare State
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 ...
World Bank Economist Shares His View on Economic Success
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 ...
Capturing the Illogic of the 'War on Terror'
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 ...
After a Twelve Year Mistake in Iraq, We Must Just March Home
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 ...
Daniel McAdams: Why Washington Provides Neither Peace Nor Prosperity
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 ...
Brazil's False Choices May Not Stand
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 ...
Panic of Elon Musk: Cars Will Drive Themselves This Summer
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 ...
Paul Tudor Jones Advances the 'Income Inequality' Meme and Warns of Violence to Come
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 ...
West Must Help China Build 'New World Order'?
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 ...
Moral Disorder
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 ...
Autonomy Has Nothing to Do With It
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 ...
Droughts in the News: Time for Another Scarcity Meme?
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 ...
How America Became the World’s Policeman
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 ...
Real Reason for the Asian Investment Bank – and Western Participation
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 ...
Tesla's Musk Continues to Restyle Himself as a Tech Visionary. But Why?
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 ...
The Wolf Is Guarding the Hen House: The Government's War on Cyberterrorism
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 ...
Construction of a Meme: The Fed Loses 'Patience'
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 ...
NAU at Work? Canadian, Mexican Border Agents Can Now Work Within US, Carry Firearms
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 †...
Business Ethics and Moral Market Conduct
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 ...
Shock: Germany Mulls Cyprus Solution to Solve Grexit?
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 ...
World Economy Grows While Carbon Emissions Don't – Are We Sure?
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 ...
A Green Light for the American Empire
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 ...
Marc Faber: Democracy Is Increasingly Dysfunctional?
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 ...
Limited Hangout Campaigns Probably Won't Answer Fed Critics
March 14, 2015
This is another one of a series of articles in Bloomberg that seem to comprise a "limited-hangout" campaign supporting the Fed. This one makes a feint toward supporting a rules-based Fed program but then seems to settle for a more generic potential solution: "T ...
Intellectual Property? Be Careful What You Wish For …
March 14, 2015
We try not to utilize two of the same outlets in the same edition but this second editorial from Bloomberg dovetails with our first article quite nicely. It is putatively about the recent decision to give the Gaye family a victory in a much-discussed plagiarism ...
Latest Mystery: Why Consumers Aren't Spending
March 13, 2015
Is it really a mystery why people aren't spending? The numbers that the mainstream media uses are "cooked" and thus the conclusions that can be drawn from those numbers are faulty as well. For Bloomberg editorialists the idea that their data is faulty never see ...
Mainstream Reporting Evaporates
March 13, 2015
What is analogous to debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Reporting for a mainstream Western publication, especially in the US. Most modern mainstream reporting is inaccurate: yet excessive pains are taken to ensure the "objectivity" and "ac ...
The Endless Hopelessness of a Crushing Debt Contraction – and What to Do About It
March 12, 2015
This is another one of those hopeless articles that the mainstream media specializes in. There's nothing about it that provides any action points. You can understand what is going to happen but you can't do anything about it. This is a specialty of the so-calle ...
Confidence In Government Is Getting Worse
March 12, 2015
Those who believe in social salvation by government cannot be pleased with these polls. Maybe that's why they are polling the same issue over and over. It seems something like a compulsion. Ask enough times and maybe you'll get the right answer. Only, no ... so ...
The Libertarian Principle of Secession
March 12, 2015
For a century and a half, the idea of secession has been systematically demonized among the American public. The government's schools spin fairy tales about the "indivisible Union" and the wise statesmen who fought to preserve it. Decentralization is portrayed ...
Questionable Narratives: Gold Versus Stocks
March 11, 2015
We track dominant social themes and this is a consistent one: Don't invest in gold. Gold traveled up against the dollar to nearly US$2000 an ounce, but you wouldn't know it from the mainstream media. Most of the coverage gold received was negative and took plac ...
Senate Bill Introduced to Legalize Medicinal Cannabis: Ride the Wave
March 11, 2015
Believe us now? Meme watching is a skill. As soon as we detected the first "green shoots" of cannabis legalization we knew change was afoot. Change from the top down. It's important to re-emphasize. We use VESTS to discern what the internationalist power struct ...
How DNA Is Turning Us Into a Nation of Suspects
March 11, 2015
Every dystopian sci-fi film we've ever seen is suddenly converging into this present moment in a dangerous trifecta between science, technology and a government that wants to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful. By tapping into your phone lines and cell ...
Central Banking is a Technocratic Art Form
March 10, 2015
Our ongoing effort to analyze the arguments against an "audit" of the Fed has been helped immeasurably by Bloomberg View, which regularly advances arguments why the Fed should be left alone. These editorials have become more frequent now that the Fed and other ...
Is McDonald's Part of a Bigger Problem?
March 10, 2015
In the 1950s, the burger was surely considered "America's food." But today, the US consuming public has apparently grown wary of such staples, and McDonald's is bearing the brunt of the damage. What remains McDonald's great selling point is its price. People wh ...
Economic Delusions, Political Demagoguery and Ideological Deceptions
March 10, 2015
We live in a time, as, indeed, mankind has lived already for a long time, in which economic delusions, political demagoguery and ideological deceptions abound due to the power lusting of those who wish to gain control of government to serve their own ends at ot ...
India, the Next China?
March 09, 2015
China, Brazil and now India. Among the BRICs, only Russia and South Africa receive a measure of bad press. Russia a great deal of it, to be sure. But this is surely another meme in the making, one brought to us by the miracle of central banking that has lifted ...
Juncker: Ukraine Confrontation Justifies EU Army
March 09, 2015
The current Ukraine is the gift that keeps on giving from the standpoint of the expansion of state power. As Russia is considerably demonized, the vast military-industrial complex of the West – including NATO and various standing armies – is invigorated. NA ...
Don’t Be Fooled by the Federal Reserve’s Anti-Audit Propaganda
March 09, 2015
In recent weeks, the Federal Reserve and its apologists in Congress and the media have launched numerous attacks on the Audit the Fed legislation. These attacks amount to nothing more than distortions about the effects and intent of the audit bill. Fed apologis ...
James Turk: Sovereignty Is Under Threat Worldwide
March 08, 2015
Yes, authoritarians and other sociopaths seek one thing above all else – control. Some are satisfied with just dominating the local PTA, but others want to dominate the world. It is just a matter of degree, but these people exist. And they will do whatever th ...
German Recovery? Don't Bet on It
March 07, 2015
For those impatient to proclaim a Western recovery, this Reuters article is for you. It tries to make the case that the numbers are finally turning favorable for Germany and perhaps for parts of Europe as well. We can't help recall the talks of green shoots som ...
Ferguson's Problem Is not Police Racism But a Broken Justice System
March 07, 2015
The Department of Justice report on Ferguson is startling. The statistic that jumps out is not one that this article in The Atlantic makes the lead – but it IS the lead or should be. Here is the horrible statistic in context as the article relates it toward t ...
Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard: The Verdict After Fifty Years
March 07, 2015
What I will be discussing in my talk today is the crucial role that the ideas of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard have played in the defense of liberty and Western civilization. All Americans well read in political affairs know of these famous thinkers. They were t ...
Chinese Trap
March 06, 2015
We wrote about the China property crash recently, but this follow-up article in the UK Telegraph is noteworthy because it seems to reveal some serious economic dilemmas. Interestingly, our initial article analyzed an editorial in Bloomberg not long ago that had ...
The Growing Divide Between Western Rhetoric and Economic Reality
March 06, 2015
This article provides us with a logical sequence of events showing quite clearly why central planning ought to work – even though it doesn't. In fact, the entire article is an exercise in cognitive dissonance. It makes logical, if inaccurate, assumptions and ...
How To Benefit When Colombia Becomes the Saudi Arabia of Cannabis Oil
March 06, 2015
Forget about ISIS, OPEC, the problems with hydraulic fracturing or fracking, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran as well as wars for oil and gas reserves and pipeline routes now going on throughout the Middle East and the Ukraine. The next oil rush will be cannabis oil fo ...
More Central Bank Transparency Is Inevitable
March 05, 2015
Bloomberg has been running a series of editorials defending the Federal Reserve and criticizing those who are supporting various congressional bills to pry it open. This article is a little different because it takes the position that some additional sunlight c ...
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