STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Showing 3701 - 2 of 2
August 06, 2014
We started following this Africa Rising meme long ago, and we've watched its construction closely. It began with a murmur and now has turned into a roar. This week, the White House hosts African leaders along with the Anglosphere's top multinationals, as we can ...
August 06, 2014
We weren't going to write another article on the income inequality meme, but it's like a train wreck – we can't look away. Here's ANOTHER article on "income inequality" – and it's not even a standalone item but one that deals with an exhaustive S&P research ...
August 06, 2014
Individualism – a Hundred Years Apart As a rather friendly observer of 19th Century America, Alexis de Tocqueville oddly shared a view of individualism with someone who isn't usually linked to his political viewpoint, namely, Karl Marx. This is understandable ...
August 05, 2014
This Bloomberg article states flatly that US income disparities are a growing problem that badly needs to be addressed. You would think with the wars, disease and starvation in the world that there would be more to write about than the climbing wealth of the ri ...
August 05, 2014
Fifty years on, Vietnam is being re-analyzed in the mainstream media. This Politico article is one of the better ones, but unfortunately, it still doesn't present the full perfidy of that war's progression, nor the manipulated dialectic that it was part of. Mod ...
August 05, 2014
Dear President Obama, For nearly six years, now, you have declared your intention and desire of being my Nanny-in-Chief. Your original campaign slogan of "Hope and Change" was really a promise of "Control and Command." Well, Mr. President, I have a request: Min ...
August 04, 2014
This article, written by Mark Leonard, the absurdly young-looking Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, claims that the growing tensions between Russia and the West have ended the dream of globalization. But we are used to analyzing these sorts ...
August 04, 2014
Like the US, Britain has a plethora of policing services and secret-service facilities. And as in the US, these services are growing increasingly corrupt. Of course, corruption is in the eye of the proverbial beholder, and one can make the argument that any sor ...
August 04, 2014
President Obama announced last week that he was imposing yet another round of sanctions on Russia, this time targeting financial, arms, and energy sectors. The European Union, as it has done each time, quickly followed suit. These sanctions will not produce the ...
August 03, 2014
Economically, there is not much that pleases me because I think we are in an economy that is on steroids – in other words, the money printing – and the money printing goes essentially to wealthy people. Of course, they spend and as a result of the asset bub ...
August 02, 2014
Once more we are reminded how the modern economic intelligentsia is divorced from our miserable economic realities. And we have Paul Krugman to thank for that. In a recent editorial, Krugman pointed out that top economists believe the Obama administration's "st ...
August 02, 2014
Nothing in the world is easier than opposing a war that ended long ago. It takes no real courage to be against the Vietnam War in 2014. What takes courage is opposing a war while it is being fought – when the propaganda and intimidation of the public are at t ...
August 01, 2014
Bail out. The party's over! That's what we're reading in some publications now that markets have taken a tumble. We're not so sure. Our short-term perspective has been that this faux Wall Street Party can go on at least until the fall – as we've been writing ...
August 01, 2014
Those that honor us with their patronage know that we have been ahead of the proverbial curve when it comes to what we call the marijuana meme. This poll proves it once more. Think about it. Does the Canadian government takes polls and advertise them on subject ...
July 31, 2014
Recovery? Really? Now the trumpets are sounding for a US recovery, but as we've pointed out many times, what is going up mostly is the stock market as the Fed determinedly debases currency. And as we've predicted, Ms. Yellen has no intention of stopping. She is ...
July 31, 2014
Boy, this is a patronizing story from the New York Times. It basically says that people are stupid and they should be rioting in the streets over "income disparity." They just don't know it yet! We're well aware of this meme, and have written about it a lot. We ...
July 31, 2014
A manufactured conflict is flashing through libertarianism: self-described "humanitarians" versus insultingly-labeled "brutalists." In a much circulated article entitled "Against Libertarian Brutalism," the libertarian luminary Jeffrey Tucker defines the "human ...
July 30, 2014
So we learn that Abenomics is not working so well. Okay ... we never expected it to. Honestly, where has a Keynesian economic program ever really rebuilt an economy? FDR tried it in the US, but the US economy didn't recover until the end of World War II when vi ...
July 30, 2014
The New York Times is out with what is apparently intended to be a definitive history of why marijuana was criminalized. This is a very important issue because the sudden reversal in marijuana laws and regulations is bringing up a question about criminal justic ...
July 30, 2014
In the history of political thought natural rights theory is most closely associated with John Locke, although as Brian Tierney has shown, the idea had been formed much earlier and some, for example Fred D. Miller, Jr., even hold that Aristotle was already cons ...
July 29, 2014
Here is an article that probably has been written to remind people that it is possible to approach the stock market rationally using the tools provided by Great Minds. The subtext of the article is the efficacy of modern portfolio theory, which we shall see is ...
July 29, 2014
We've predicted this in a series of articles. Enforced scarcity is how the power elite initiates further globalism and exercises controls. Of course, the mainstream media is sure there's a water problem, one that is only going to be compounded by a capitalist t ...
July 29, 2014
We live in a time when virtually all political parties and candidates stand for the same fundamental ideological idea: state interventionism and compulsory redistribution. This also applies to the mainstream media. Even many who say they adhere to a "pro-market ...
July 29, 2014
The extraordinary propaganda being conducted against Russia by the US and UK governments and Ministries of Propaganda, a.k.a., the "Western media," have the purpose of driving the world to war that no one can win. European governments need to rouse themselves f ...
July 28, 2014
If the government or mainstream media say something definitive, assume the opposite. This article explains to us that the Fed has little power to create "irrational" bubbles. And that the current stock bubble – bigger than any bubble in history – is a ratio ...
July 28, 2014
We are very sad for the chief Ebola doctor, Umar Khan, who is only 39 years old and a valiant fighter against this terrible disease. Wikipedia describes it as follows: "Manifestation of Ebola begins abruptly with a sudden onset of an influenza-like stage charac ...
July 28, 2014
Remember back in April, 2007, when then-CIA director George Tenet appeared on 60 Minutes, angrily telling the program host, "we don't torture people"? Remember a few months later, in October, President George W. Bush saying, "this government does not torture pe ...
July 27, 2014
Mexican President Vicente Fox Quesada wrote the Foreword to my new book, The Cannabis Encyclopedia, that will be released in December of 2014. I was fortunate to meet President Fox in San Francisco last year, 2013, at a press conference in San Francisco, CA. I ...
July 26, 2014
Nation-states don't exist. Only cultures abide. But is has been the great triumph of globalists that they have created an entire history built around non-existent entities. "France goes to war with Germany." "Russia makes peace with Austria." "Tensions arise be ...
July 25, 2014
It began with a bizarre statement by Janet Yellen. "Monetary policy faces significant limitations as a tool to promote financial stability," Yellen told an audience at an event put on by the International Monetary Fund. We covered this announcement via a write- ...
July 25, 2014
This article supports the meme that the mainstream media in the West is engaged in a meaningful news exercise. It is not, but pretending it is sustains the larger media fiction. It is amazing how intricate journalism has gotten in the past century. Unfortunatel ...
July 25, 2014
Despite the conclusion by US intelligence that there is no evidence of Russian involvement in the destruction of the Malaysian airliner and all lives onboard, Washington is escalating the crisis and shepherding it toward war. Twenty-two US senators have introdu ...
July 24, 2014
The news regarding Colombia's intention to legalize marijuana – as yet little reported in the wider, Western world – is truly shocking, though regular readers of our publications will not be much surprised. More than almost any other publication we know of, ...
July 24, 2014
Our perception has changed. Once this article would have made a kind of sense to us (long ago). But it surely doesn't now. It's jam-packed with various sorts of financially illiterate assumptions. Sorry for picking on it; there are hundreds if not thousands of ...
July 24, 2014
The Italian Marxist and philosopher Paolo Virno was imprisoned in 1979 for his affiliation with the Red Brigades. The organization attempted to create a revolutionary state through acts of violent destabilization such as bank robbery. While in prison, Virno had ...
July 23, 2014
This UK Telegraph article, predictably by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, gives us some more insight into how China's impossible boom has been created, leveraged and elongated, possibly to the breaking point. It's not a pretty picture. Years ago, we began to write tha ...
July 23, 2014
We heartily encourage people not to vote. Your vote doesn't really matter within the larger scheme of things. Anyway, many voting districts are so gerrymandered that the incumbent would have to perform a ghastly crime in broad daylight to stand any chance of lo ...
July 23, 2014
The concept of "rights" was developed, in part, from the concept of "right" – correct, true – as used in the tradition of natural law ethics (concerning how we ought to act or not act because we are human beings). In time, a natural rights theory was produc ...
July 22, 2014
This pernicious elite meme amply illustrates what we call directed history. In this case endless articles are appearing to explain why the dollar is in terminal decline as the BRICS (including South Africa) are ascending. We last wrote about this issue here: Do ...
July 22, 2014
Will Rand Paul be the next US president? We believe it's perfectly possible, and thus we've been following this meme. Now it seems Rand Paul – and the news media – are coining a new phrase, "conservatarian." We weren't familiar with the term, but we found n ...
July 22, 2014
The Obama Administration has proposed its latest form of collectivist control over the American people. In a letter to Congress, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has called for punishment and prohibition of any company that tries to move its headquarters overse ...
July 21, 2014
This is an interesting article because it shows clearly that controlling the Fed's business practices is a kind of non-starter. Reining in Fed behavior won't make a real difference. The article revolves around a Republican proposal having to do, in part, with r ...
July 21, 2014
US fedgov is going to reduce sentences for drug offenders. With a push on to decriminalize and legalize drugs, why should people continue to stay in jail? We asked that question a while ago and now have our answer. People won't. A bigger question, of course, is ...
July 21, 2014
Just days after the tragic crash of a Malaysian Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine, Western politicians and media joined together to gain the maximum propaganda value from the disaster. It had to be Russia; it had to be Putin, they said. President Obama held ...
July 20, 2014
Was there any justifiable reason to incarcerate [drug users] in the first place? Stephan Kinsella: Well, finally, an easy one! Of course not. Drug laws are completely evil. I believe some day we will look back on this like we look back on the days of chattel sl ...
July 19, 2014
The UN has now called for the decriminalization not just of marijuana but of other drugs as well, including so-called injectables. Our analyses are often correct, but in this case, we're a little surprised at how fast confirmation has arrived. The Economist inf ...
July 18, 2014
Dominant social themes are almost always economically literate. But rarely do we discover linkages that allow the presentation of two at once. This article offers one untruth – that robots will put almost everyone out of work – and then compounds it with an ...
July 18, 2014
There are two ways to confront this wrongheaded Reuters editorial. One way is by pointing out that aggregators like Google (and others) are protected by various legislative and court rulings that allow them to post the most salacious and destructive information ...
July 18, 2014
Mark Tier's latest title, Trust Your Enemies: A Political Thriller, which I found to be an intensely compelling Libertarian ride, is his first foray into fiction, following upon his excellent nonfiction writing that I've enjoyed for years. Having known Mark for ...
July 18, 2014
The unilateral US sanctions announced by Obama on July 16 blocking Russian weapons and energy companies access to US bank loans demonstrate Washington's impotence. The rest of the world, including America's two largest business organizations, turned their backs ...
