By NIALL FERGUSON

In "Democracy in America," published in 1833, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans preferred voluntary association to government regulation. "The inhabitant of the United States," he wrote, "has only a defiant and restive regard for social authority and he appeals to it . . . only when he cannot do without it."

Unlike Frenchmen, he continued, who instinctively looked to the state to provide economic and social order, Americans relied on their own efforts. "In the United States, they associate for the goals of public security, of commerce and industry, of morality and religion. There is nothing the human will despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals."

What especially amazed Tocqueville was the sheer range of nongovernmental organizations Americans formed: "Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations . . . but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools."

Tocqueville would not recognize America today. Indeed, so completely has associational life collapsed, and so enormously has the state grown, that he would be forced to conclude that, at some point between 1833 and 2013, France must have conquered the United States.

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Barbara Kelley

The decline of American associational life was memorably documented in Robert Puttnam's seminal 1995 essay "Bowling Alone," which documented the exodus of Americans from bowling leagues, Rotary clubs and the like. Since then, the downward trend in "social capital" has only continued. According to the 2006 World Values Survey, active membership even of religious associations has declined from just over half the population to little more than a third (37%). The proportion of Americans who are active members of cultural associations is down to 14% from 24%; for professional associations the figure is now just 12%, compared with more than a fifth in 1995. And, no, Facebook FB +0.21% is not a substitute.

Instead of joining together to get things done, Americans have increasingly become dependent on Washington. On foreign policy, it may still be true that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus. But when it comes to domestic policy, we all now come from the same place: Planet Government.

As the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Clyde Wayne Crews shows in his invaluable annual survey of the federal regulatory state, we have become the regulation nation almost imperceptibly. Excluding blank pages, the 2012 Federal Register—the official directory of regulation—today runs to 78,961 pages. Back in 1986 it was 44,812 pages. In 1936 it was just 2,620.

True, our economy today is much larger than it was in 1936—around 12 times larger, allowing for inflation. But the Federal Register has grown by a factor of 30 in the same period.

The last time regulation was cut was under Ronald Reagan, when the number of pages in the Federal Register fell by 31%. Surprise: Real GDP grew by 30% in that same period. But Leviathan's diet lasted just eight years. Since 1993, 81,883 new rules have been issued. In the past 10 years, the "final rules" issued by our 63 federal departments, agencies and commissions have outnumbered laws passed by Congress 223 to 1.

Right now there are 4,062 new regulations at various stages of implementation, of which 224 are deemed "economically significant," i.e., their economic impact will exceed $100 million.

The cost of all this, Mr. Crews estimates, is $1.8 trillion annually—that's on top of the federal government's $3.5 trillion in outlays, so it is equivalent to an invisible 65% surcharge on your federal taxes, or nearly 12% of GDP. Especially invidious is the fact that the costs of regulation for small businesses (those with fewer than 20 employees) are 36% higher per employee than they are for bigger firms.

Next year's big treat will be the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, something every small business in the country must be looking forward to with eager anticipation. Then, as Sen. Rob Portman (R., Ohio) warned readers on this page 10 months ago, there's also the Labor Department's new fiduciary rule, which will increase the cost of retirement planning for middle-class workers; the EPA's new Ozone Rule, which will impose up to $90 billion in yearly costs on American manufacturers; and the Department of Transportation's Rear-View Camera Rule. That's so you never have to turn your head around when backing up.

President Obama occasionally pays lip service to the idea of tax reform. But nothing actually gets done and the Internal Revenue Service code (plus associated regulations) just keeps growing—it passed the nine-million-word mark back in 2005, according to the Tax Foundation, meaning nearly 19% more verbiage than 10 years before. While some taxes may have been cut in the intervening years, the tax code just kept growing.

I wonder if all this could have anything to do with the fact that we still have nearly 12 million people out of work, plus eight million working part-time jobs, five long years after the financial crisis began.

Genius that he was, Tocqueville saw this transformation of America coming. Toward the end of "Democracy in America" he warned against the government becoming "an immense tutelary power . . . absolute, detailed, regular . . . cover[ing] [society's] surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way."

Tocqueville also foresaw exactly how this regulatory state would suffocate the spirit of free enterprise: "It rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces [the] nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd."

If that makes you bleat with frustration, there's still hope.

Mr. Ferguson's new book "The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die" has just been published by Penguin Press.

Benghazi's Legacy of Broken Trust
When serving in harm's way, diplomats, spies and soldiers need to know that their government has their back.
By KEVIN G. NORTON

In 2009, I was a member of a small team of advisers to the Afghan police in Paktia province in the mountains near the southeastern Afghan border. One hot afternoon in early June, we received a desperate call for help from another American unit that was under a sustained attack. We drove out to their position as fast as we could, only to find several casualties and chaos. The Taliban cut off the attack soon after we arrived.

After we evacuated the casualties, the officer in charge of the unit told me that he could not find his interpreter. I led a small group of soldiers down into a wide field to look for the interpreter. We knew the danger: At any moment the Taliban could have resumed the attack and caught us in a very exposed position. We searched for more than 10 minutes before we found his lifeless body. It had been thrown from a vehicle that was hit by an improvised explosive device. We took another few minutes to locate his severed leg.

Why would we take such a risk to find an interpreter? Because he was a part of our team. He had taken on faith that we would do what we could to protect him and never leave him behind. Had we not done so, what message would it have sent to our other interpreters and partners? It would have been extremely difficult to ask others to take risks on our behalf or look out for us.

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Associated Press

Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta

I am reminded of that day in the Afghan mountains whenever I think of the deadly attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11 last year. There are many causes for concern or outrage regarding the attack and its aftermath. But the heart of the scandal is this: Four U.S. citizens, willing to put themselves in harm's way for the country's greater good, were left to die with no support from the government they represented.

While many lawmakers and commentators have pointed out this basic fact, what is less appreciated is what the Benghazi scandal means for others who go abroad to serve the country. Servants of the American people—diplomats, spies, soldiers, aid workers—who work in harm's way should be able to depart these shores confident that their government will do anything it can to protect them. This principle is at the very core of foreign service and is based on trust. Any breach of that trust is devastating to our efforts abroad.

In Benghazi, the U.S. government simply did not do all it could to protect its agents in the field. Leon Panetta, defense secretary at the time of the attack, later told Congress that U.S. forces were not deployed because "you don't deploy forces into harm's way without knowing what's going on."

This was a stunning abdication of responsibility. Mr. Panetta and President Obama knew that Americans were under attack that night. Thousands of U.S. military personnel have given their lives to save their fellow Americans—civilians and soldiers alike—under similar circumstances.

At the conclusion of his recent speech on Memorial Day, Mr. Obama issued a challenge to all Americans: "Let it be our task, every single one of us, to honor the strength and the resolve and the love these brave Americans felt for each other and for our country." Those brave Americans include Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others, including two former Navy SEALs, who died in Benghazi.

Amid the many recent scandals that have come out of Washington, there is a danger that the disastrous Benghazi episode will be put aside before it has been adequately explored—before Americans know exactly who did and did not perform capably and honorably during those terrible hours and their aftermath.

We do already know one essential truth about Benghazi: The sacred bond between the government and those who serve it was broken, and the message was delivered to Americans serving around the world. That's a scandal.

Mr. Norton is a national security consultant and former U.S. Army infantry officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves in all cases to which they think themselves competent, or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property, and freedom of the press."
--Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Cartwright, 1824

Good thing the FBI is no longer keeping an eye on mosques (I do have this right, yes?) and is now relying upon CAIR , , ,

There is also the matter of Baraq and his minions perpetually portraying the Tea Party as the moral equivalent to AQ , , , one might even get the idea that they want to use these capabilities against us , , , but that would be against the law , , , wouldn't it? , , ,

Peer Pressure for Teens Paves the Path to Adulthood
By SHIRLEY S. WANG

New studies on peer pressure suggest that teens—who often seem to follow each other like lemmings—may do so because their brains derive more pleasure from social acceptance than adult brains, and not because teens are less capable of making rational decisions.
[image] Lorenzo Cancian-Kavoliunas

Xavier Corbeil, left, Yannick Stein-Tremblay, center, and Lorenzo Cancian-Kavoliunas, right, friends from Montreal, on a recent visit to New York. They say resisting peer pressure got easier as they grew older.

And scientists say facing the influence of friends represents an important developmental step for teens on their way to becoming independent-thinking adults.

Peer pressure is often seen as a negative, and indeed it can coax kids into unhealthy behavior like smoking or speeding. But it can also lead to engagement in more useful social behaviors. If peers value doing well in school or excelling at sports, for instance, it might encourage kids to study or train harder. And both peer pressure and learning to resist it are important developmental steps to self-reliance, experts say.

Research suggests people are strikingly susceptible to influence as teenagers, but to what degree varies widely. In a growing body of work, including research published in April, scientists suggest that teens are more vulnerable to peer pressure than adults because they get greater pleasure from behaviors they experience as rewarding. They tend to find being liked by other people very gratifying.

Peer influence during adolescence is normal and tends to peak around age 15, then decline. Teens get better at setting boundaries with peers by age 18 according to Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University.

During puberty, people experience an increase in novelty-seeking, demonstrated by interest in exploring a new environment.

"It is adaptive to have a [biological] system that encourages you to start exploring outside the home, to start making your new own peer circles," says Beatriz Luna, a developmental cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center who studies peer influence and the adolescent brain.

In years past, people thought teens didn't have fully developed frontal lobes, the part of the brain critical for decision-making and other more complex cognitive tasks. But a growing body of work seems to show that teens are able to make decisions as well as adults when they are not emotionally worked up.

Bad Pressure: As teens mature, biological changes in their brains make them better able to work past the negative influence of their peers on issues from clothing to smoking.

Good Pressure: Teens can benefit from the right kind of peer pressure, such as being coaxed into overcoming a fear or trying a challenging activity.

Instead, the key may be that the reward centers of the brain get more activated in adolescence, and seem to be activated by our peers. This heightened rush of neurotransmitters brings the teenager more pleasure than the same experience might in an adult, Dr. Luna says.

In addition, the connections between the frontal lobes and other parts of the human brain are still forming into one's 20s. That means the ability to make decisions when emotional—and peer pressure often induces emotion—isn't at full strength in the teenage years.

"It's not that they don't understand the risks involved," Dr. Luna says.

In terms of who is most resistant to peer pressure, researchers have identified some characteristics of kids who are resilient against peer influence, such as those who are more popular, have families with low dysfunction and have high communication skills. But they still don't know why these kids are less susceptible, according to Mitchell Prinstein, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who studies popularity and peer influence.

Though peer pressure affects all kids, risky, "bad" behaviors like drinking tend to be associated with being popular, so kids who are less popular or have lower self-esteem tend to fall prey to peer influence for these behaviors rather than, for instance, doing well in school.

In a series of studies, including one published last year in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, researchers set up an Internet chat room and led kids to believe they were interacting with three peers who were considered popular or unpopular. The kids were then asked questions like, "Imagine you're in a party scenario and someone offers you alcohol. What would you drink?" If the other people in the room say yes, the effect is "very powerful," says Dr. Prinstein. "We find our respondents dramatically change their response."

When the supposed peers are popular, highly socially anxious kids indiscriminately conform—they would agree with whatever the other kids decided—but low-anxiety kids were more choosy. The kids most likely to be influenced are the least popular—not necessarily because of low self-esteem but because they want to be positively evaluated to fit in.

Another factor that seems to affect peer influence is ethnicity. When the chat room was filled with Caucasians, nonwhites weren't substantially affected by the Caucasians' responses, though it's not possible from the study to conclude why, Dr. Prinstein says. It could be that nonwhites are not as influenced by peers or people outside their own ethnic group.

Also, some of what appears to be resistance to peer pressure is just about wanting to be different. Some people have a higher need for uniqueness, but they're still being influenced, says Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies social influence and consumer decision-making.

Kids from different social circles may wear very different clothing from people in other cliques, but resemble each other, even those outside the mainstream. For instance, a group of friends may sport Mohawk haircuts in reaction to other kids in school wearing preppy gear.

Warm parenting with strict boundaries, so-called "authoritative parenting," is linked to kids who are more independent thinkers. But, Temple's Dr. Steinberg warns, in order for kids to develop the ability to stand up to peer pressure, parents are going to have to let their children stand up to them, too.

"If you're the kind of parent that raises your children with the 'do it because I said so' approach, you're raising a child who's going to be more susceptible to others saying, 'Do this,' " Dr. Steinberg says.

Parents can also help their children anticipate situations of peer pressure, like declining alcohol at a party, and go over strategies to help a child save face while still avoiding an activity. "Sometimes, just having a prepared response can help a teenager get off a runaway train," says Dr. Steinberg, who is also the author of "You and Your Adolescent."

Parents should thoroughly assess their kids' friends, says Dr. Steinberg. It's better to start early and express opinions. Once a child reaches adolescence, friends may wield more influence than authority figures, so simply saying a child isn't allowed to hang out with a particular friend anymore may be met with resistance.

Instead of banning that friend outright, starting a dialogue could get better results. If they have concerns, parents should try to elicit more information, like asking their daughter why she likes a friend who concerns them.

Lorenzo Cancian-Kavoliunas, a 19-year-old Montreal college student, thinks he was able to resist peer pressure more as his confidence grew when he made good friends and began excelling in sports. "It went from below the ground to the heavens," he says.

Having good friends "turns you into a leader," Mr. Cancian-Kavoliunas says. "You don't feel like you have to fit in. You are in.

"Now I peer-pressure people," Mr. Cancian-Kavoliunas says jokingly, "but in a good way," like coaxing friends to train and join him as a lifeguard this summer in Ocean City, Md.

 Lee Smith writing online for The Weekly Standard, June 17:

As if there isn't already enough on the agenda for the G-8 Summit, now Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is threatening Europe . . . explaining [to the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung] that European Muslims traveling to Syria to fight the regime "will return, battle-hardened and with an extremist ideology." The reality, however, is that Europe has much to fear from the regime, which waged a campaign of terror in Europe, particularly Paris, in the 80s. Then under the direction of Bashar's father Hafez, the regime's most notorious operation on the continent was the 1986 Hindawi Affair. An agent of the Damascus regime, Nezar Hindawi, put a bomb in the bag of his girlfriend, an Irish woman unaware of what she was carrying on board a Tel Aviv-bound EL AL flight out of London's Heathrow airport. After the airline's security detected the explosives, Hindawi took refuge in the Syrian embassy in London, leading to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's decision to break off diplomatic relations with Syria.

When the Assad regime issues threats, it's worth taking them seriously.

i continue my explorations on this subject , , ,

To My Congressional Colleagues: Stop the NSA Grandstanding
Members have had ample opportunity to learn about these valuable programs.
By DAN COATS

Last week, Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor, attempted to make a political point by leaking several documents that have seriously harmed America's ability to identify and respond to terrorist threats. As damaging as Mr. Snowden's disclosures are to public safety, I am also troubled by the decision of several members of Congress to mischaracterize this leak to advance their personal and political agendas.

I don't blame citizens for their concern about these secretive NSA programs. Personal privacy and civil liberties are important to all Americans and are protected by the Constitution. Unfortunately, the Obama administration—especially of late—has fueled people's distrust of government, which has made the reaction to Mr. Snowden's leak far worse.

The recent IRS scandal, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's contradictory statements regarding his role in the Justice Department's investigations into journalists, and the administration's inadequate and inconsistent responses to the attacks on our diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, are just a few examples of how the Obama administration has widened the trust deficit plaguing the country.

Though it is more difficult to quantify than the fiscal deficit, the trust deficit is just as profound, providing plenty of reason for many Americans to believe reports about the NSA's intrusiveness in their private lives. Fortunately, the reports are almost uniformly distorted or false.

Following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the American people demanded that the intelligence community be able to "connect the dots" to prevent terrorist attacks. Had the recently revealed programs been available to the NSA before 9/11, we likely could have identified some or all of the hijackers before they murdered thousands.

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Edward Snowden

Twelve years later, the intelligence community is doing exactly what the American people asked for. The counterterrorism programs revealed last week have helped to thwart dozens of terrorist attacks. In one case, these programs identified a connection between al Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan and Najibullah Zazi, an al Qaeda operative in Colorado. This enabled the FBI to stop Zazi and his associates from detonating explosives in the New York City subway system.

These programs represent some of the most effective means available to protect the country from terrorist organizations like al Qaeda. Leaking this information only degrades our ability to prevent attacks. It compromises our sources and gives terrorists critical information on how we monitor their activities.

When I asked NSA Director Gen. Keith B. Alexander about the consequences of Mr. Snowden's leaks during a recent Senate hearing, he replied: "If we tell terrorists every way we track them, they will get through, and people will die." Mr. Snowden apparently did not share that concern or did not care.

Mr. Snowden was wrong about key details of these programs, and the press, blogs and members of Congress from both parties have echoed his distortions. For the record: The government is not and cannot indiscriminately listen in on Americans' phone calls or target their emails. It is not collecting the content of conversations or even their location under these programs. For instance, the only telephone data collected is the time of the call, the phone numbers involved and the length of the call. That is how we connect the dots and identify links between international terrorists and their collaborators within the United States. All of this is done under the supervision of the nation's top federal judges, senior officials across several different federal agencies and Congress.

These programs are legal, constitutional and used only under the strict oversight of all three branches of the government, including a highly scrutinized judicial process. Furthermore, members of both political parties review, audit and authorize all activities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I can attest that few issues garner more of our attention than the oversight of these programs.

Elected officials have a duty to the American people to engage in an informed and honest debate. So it troubles me that some of my colleagues in Congress are engaging in disingenuous outrage when they were given ample opportunity to learn more, ask questions and even vote against these programs. Mischaracterizing national-security programs for political gain is irresponsible and has the potential to weaken the country's defenses. Members of Congress must remain vigilant in the face of misleading information about the substance and utility of our counterterrorism activities.

As a result of these leaks and subsequent spread of misinformation, the federal government faces a Catch-22. The administration must disclose more information about the use of these programs to regain the people's trust and ensure the protection of civil liberties, but doing so also compromises the programs. As the NSA chief said in his recent testimony, "Everything depends on trust. . . . We do not see a trade-off between security and liberty. It is not a choice, and we can and must do both simultaneously."

The government's interest in carrying out these programs is the most compelling imaginable: an enduring defense against terrorist attacks that could take thousands of innocent lives. I have no doubt that returning to a pre-9/11 security posture will make this country less safe. A majority of Americans agree, and their support is likely to grow as sensationalism and fear are replaced with facts.

Sen. Coats is a Republican from Indiana and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"The Constitution "authorizes states to determine the qualifications of voters in federal elections, which necessarily includes the related power to determine whether those qualifications are satisfied," Thomas said in his dissent."

This seems rather definitive to me, what was Scalia thinking?

Umm yes, there is that isn't there? 

That said, I thought the piece added points of merit to our search for Truth.

Democrats in Sacramento are taking a victory lap for balancing this year's budget without raising taxes (not counting the $6 billion retroactive hike voters approved at political gunpoint in November). The dirty little secret is they're instead tapping California's new cap-and-trade program.

California expects to generate $500 million this year from auctioning off permits to emit carbon, and between $2 billion and $14 billion annually by 2015. This rich new vein of revenues was supposed to flow to green programs (e.g., solar subsidies), but Governor Jerry Brown cut a deal with Democrats in the legislature to seize this year's proceeds to finance more generous welfare and Medicaid benefits. Environmentalists are suddenly stunned to discover that they're not exempt from Sacramento's generally accepted accounting principle of raiding internal accounts to backfill the budget.

Mr. Brown has vowed to repay the $500 million cap-and-trade "loan" in short order. But as a matter of law, he has until the California Air Resources Board (CARB) says it needs the cash to administer the cap-and-trade program. That may be never since CARB's expenditures are discretionary, and the quarterly auctions will produce gushers of revenues that guarantee the cap-and-trade fund never runs dry.

The board's chairwoman Mary Nichols, who's endorsing the raid, has tried to quell enraged environmentalists by reminding them that "the part about the cap-and-trade program that is reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it's the cap," and "not the revenue that we get from the allowances."

Good point, and one which businesses are making in a lawsuit that contends the state is levying an unconstitutional tax under the guise of a "regulatory fee." California's Prop. 13 (1978) requires a supermajority vote of the legislature to raise taxes. CARB circumvented this requirement in 2011 by setting up a state-run auction to sell permits and calling the profits "regulatory fees" that would be used to mitigate emissions.

But as the state Supreme Court underscored in its 1997 Sinclair Paint Co. opinion, regulatory fees cannot "exceed in amount the reasonable cost of providing the protective services for which the fees are charged" or be imposed for "unrelated revenue purposes."

California has never quantified the "reasonable cost" to protect the public from carbon emissions, and it's hard to argue that spending cap-and-trade dollars on welfare checks advances environmental objectives. The state doesn't need to auction off permits to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It could achieve its emissions targets by giving away permits for free and ratcheting the cap down over time.

In short, California Democrats are proving that the real point of cap and trade is to give politicians another revenue stream for income redistribution while dodging accountability for raising taxes. That's worth keeping in mind when liberals resurrect the scheme for the entire U.S.

'There's a sucker born every minute" is one of those great American phrases, fondly and frequently repeated by Americans, who tend to forget that it was said mainly about Americans. In the election of Hassan Rohani as Iran's president, we are watching the point being demonstrated again by someone who has demonstrated it before.



Who is Mr. Rohani? If all you did over the weekend was read headlines, you would have gleaned that he is a "moderate" (Financial Times), a "pragmatic victor" (New York Times) and a "reformist" (Bloomberg). Reading a little further, you would also learn that his election is being welcomed by the White House as a "potentially hopeful sign" that Iran is ready to strike a nuclear bargain.

All this for a man who, as my colleague Sohrab Ahmari noted in these pages Monday, called on the regime's basij militia to suppress the student protests of July 1999 "mercilessly and monumentally." More than a dozen students were killed in those protests, more than 1,000 were arrested, hundreds were tortured, and 70 simply "disappeared." In 2004 Mr. Rohani defended Iran's human-rights record, insisting there was "not one person in prison in Iran except when there is a judgment by a judge following a trial."

WSJ assistant books editor Sohrab Ahmari on the results of Iran's recent presidential election. Photos: Associated Press

Mr. Rohani is also the man who chaired Iran's National Security Council between 1989 and 2005, meaning he was at the top table when Iran masterminded the 1994 bombing of the Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people, and of the Khobar Towers in 1996, killing 19 U.S. airmen. He would also have been intimately familiar with the secret construction of Iran's illicit nuclear facilities in Arak, Natanz and Isfahan, which weren't publicly exposed until 2002.

In 2003 Mr. Rohani took charge as Iran's lead nuclear negotiator, a period now warmly remembered in the West for Tehran's short-lived agreement with Britain, France and Germany to suspend its nuclear-enrichment work. That was also the year in which Iran supposedly halted its illicit nuclear-weapons' work, although the suspension proved fleeting, according to subsequent U.N. reports.

Then again, what looked to the credulous as evidence of Iranian moderation was, to Iranian insiders, an exercise in diplomatic cunning. "Negotiations provided time for Isfahan's uranium conversion project to be finished and commissioned, the number of centrifuges at Natanz increased from 150 to 1,000 and software and hardware for Iran's nuclear infrastructure to be further developed," Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Mr. Rohani's spokesman at the time, argues in a recent memoir. "The heavy water reactor project in Arak came into operation and was not suspended at all."

Nor was that the only advantage of Mr. Rohani's strategy of making nice and playing for time, according to Mr. Mousavian.

"Tehran showed that it was possible to exploit the gap between Europe and the United States to achieve Iranian objectives." "The world's understanding of 'suspension' was changed from a legally binding obligation . . . to a voluntary and short-term undertaking aimed at confidence building." "The world gradually came close to believing that Iran's nuclear activities posed no security or military threat. . . . Public opinion in the West, which was totally against Tehran's nuclear program in September 2003, softened a good deal." "Efforts were made to attract global attention to the need for WMD disarmament by Israel."

And best of all: "Iran would be able to attain agreements for the transfer of advanced nuclear technology to Iran for medical, agricultural, power plant, and other applications, in a departure from the nuclear sanctions of the preceding 27 years."

Mr. Mousavian laments that much of this good work was undone by the nuclear hard line Iran took when the incendiary Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president in 2005.

But that's true only up to a point. Iran made most of its key nuclear strides under Mr. Ahmadinejad, who also showed just how far Iran could test the West's patience without incurring regime-threatening penalties. Supply IEDs to Iraqi insurgents to kill American GIs? Check. Enrich uranium to near-bomb grade levels? Check. Steal an election and imprison the opposition? Check. Take Royal Marines and American backpackers hostage? Check. Fight to save Bashar Assad's regime in Syria? That, too. Even now, the diplomatic option remains a viable one as far as the Obama administration is concerned.

Now the West is supposed to be grateful that Mr. Ahmadinejad's scowling face will be replaced by Mr. Rohani's smiling one—a bad-cop, good-cop routine that Iran has played before. Western concessions will no doubt follow if Mr. Rohani can convince his boss, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, to play along. It shouldn't be a hard sell: Iran is now just a head-fake away from becoming a nuclear state and Mr. Khamenei has shown he's not averse to pragmatism when it suits him.

The capacity for self-deception is a coping mechanism in both life and diplomacy, but it comes at a price. As the West cheers the moderate and pragmatic and centrist Mr. Rohani, it will come to discover just how high a price it will pay.

America's Assimilating Hispanics
The evidence shows they are following the path of earlier immigrants.



As immigration reform moves through Congress, one claim by opponents is that this time immigration is different because the country's latest arrivals aren't assimilating. On the contrary, however, the evidence overwhelmingly shows that today's immigrants are acculturating and moving up the economic ladder like previous generations.

The media's tendency to report "averages" in educational attainment, English-language skills, income and other traditional measures of assimilation can make it difficult to determine whether immigrants are making gains. Since Latino immigration continues, averaging together the poverty rates or homeownership levels of large numbers of people who arrived recently with those who have been here for decades can provide a skewed view of progress.

Measuring assimilation properly requires following the same immigrants over generations. And the good news is that longitudinal studies that take this approach show that Latino immigrants have made gains similar to other groups who preceded them.

Consider the claim that Hispanic immigrants are rejecting English in favor of a separate Spanish-speaking culture. Census data from 2005 show that only one-third of immigrants in the country for less than a decade speak English well, but that number climbs to nearly three-quarters for those here for 30 years or more.

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A 2007 Pew study of 14,000 Latino adults showed that while just 23% of immigrants report being able to speak English very well, "fully 88% of their U.S.-born adult children report that they speak English very well. Among later generations of Hispanic adults, the figure rises to 94%."

All of this follows the traditional three-generation model of linguistic assimilation that characterized European immigrants in the last century. Typically, English is the dominant language of the second generation, and by the fourth generation fewer than a quarter can still speak the immigrant tongue.

Educational progress among Latino immigrants is also evident, and it too fits a pattern shown by previous ethnic newcomers. Nearly half (47%) of foreign-born Hispanics lack a high-school diploma, but that number falls to 17% among their offspring. And 21% of second-generation Hispanics are college graduates, compared with 11% of foreign-born Hispanics residing in the U.S.
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WSJ Political Diary editor Jason Riley on disputes among Republicans over border security and immigration reform. Plus, the Supreme Court‘s decision to strike down Arizona’s voter registration law. Photos: Getty Images

Latino immigrants who have been in the U.S. for three decades or more are also more likely than recent arrivals to own a home, live in a family with an income above the federal poverty line and marry outside of their ethnic group—all common measures of assimilation. According to 2012 Census data, the median household income for second-generation Hispanics is $48,400, versus $34,600 for Hispanic immigrants and $58,200 for all groups.

A Pew report from February on Hispanic and Asian immigrants—who comprise about 70% of foreign born adults in the U.S.—found that the second generation of both groups is more likely than immigrants to have friends outside of their ethnic or racial group, to say their group gets along well with others and to think of themselves as a "typical American." Pew also noted that "second-generation Hispanics and Asians place more importance than does the general public on hard work and career success."

Like many Mexicans today, Italian immigrants who came in large numbers in the late 1800s and early 1900s valued work over education. Italy had one of the highest illiteracy rates in Europe at the time—62% in 1871—and illiteracy was especially pronounced in southern Italy, where most Italian-Americans trace their ancestry. In 1910, just 31% of Italian immigrants aged 14 to 18 were enrolled in school, compared to 48% of the Irish and 56% of the Jews. Today, Italian-Americans exceed national averages in educational attainment and income.

Fears that the newest arrivals are overrunning America and changing it for the worse have a long pedigree. "Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs," wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1751.

Big Ben wasn't paranoid, but he was living with a flood of German immigrants into Philadelphia. Street signs were printed in German, and German-language newspapers proliferated. In 18th-century America, you could travel from Pennsylvania to Georgia and speak only German.

It's true that many on the left promote a separate Hispanic identity, but their impact is small compared to the great assimilating maelstrom of American culture and economic life. The stultifying attractions of the welfare state are also a barrier to upward mobility, but that is best addressed with reforms, not by limiting immigration. Despite fears and much bad data, immigrants continue to be the American asset they have always been.

"I think we have gone beyond the point where we are getting diminishing returns, in addition, the corrosion of professionalism within the USG and the naked politicization of some of the elements have done much to erode my faith in it."

Knowing you GM, that says quite a lot.

Thank you for that piece GM.

second post

Money to burn
The muddle-headed world of American public-pension accounting
 
 
SLOWLY but surely the cost of America’s public-sector pension promises is becoming clear. Last year the best estimate of the shortfall was more than $4 trillion. To deal with its deficit, a giant Californian pension fund, CalPERS, recently announced plans that will increase contributions by employers (in effect, taxpayers) by up to a half, starting in 2015-16.

Final-salary pension costs have risen for decades because workers are living longer and the retirement age has barely budged. The bill was disguised in the 1980s and 1990s by good asset returns. But dismal equity markets have since forced many private providers to close final-salary schemes to new members and switch to less lavish defined-contribution plans.

This shift has hardly happened in the public sector, in large part because the accounting treatment is so different. Devin Nunes, a Republican congressman, recently revived a bill to move to a more conservative accounting approach.

Failing to recognise the true cost of public pensions builds up all sorts of problems, as an academic paper last year made clear. As pension funds become more mature (i.e., more of their members are retired) their asset allocation should, in theory, become more conservative. After all, the fund has to worry more about paying benefits immediately and has less scope to gamble that riskier assets will deliver long-term growth.

Sure enough, mature pension funds in Canada and Europe and in America’s private sector all follow this approach. But more mature American public plans have riskier portfolios than less mature equivalents. In its latest “Global Financial Stability Report” the IMF worried that American funds had increased the riskiness of their portfolios, “exposing them to greater volatility and liquidity risks”.

The explanation for such Behaviour is not hard to find. American public-sector schemes discount their liabilities by the expected return on their assets. The riskier the asset mix, the higher the assumed return—and the lower the bill appears to be.

This is an odd way of thinking. Suppose a car company borrowed $10 billion in the form of a 20-year bond to build a manufacturing plant and planned to pay off the debt with the profits from running the plant. The car company will assume a higher return on capital than its financing cost (otherwise it should not build the plant). But it still has to recognise the $10 billion bond liability on its balance-sheet. It cannot say it owes only $2 billion because it expects a very high return.

The reason is clear. If the plant fails to earn a high return, the firm will still be liable to repay the bond. Similarly, if pension schemes fail to earn a high return on their assets, they still have to pay benefits. Final-salary pensions are a debt-like liability.

When private-sector companies account for their pension schemes, therefore, they discount liabilities with a corporate-bond yield. Lower yields have pushed up liabilities and led to big deficits. Moody’s, a ratings agency, will in future use a long-term bond yield to discount American public-pension schemes, resulting in much larger liabilities than before.

Even if you use the expected-return methodology, the discount rate used by public-sector pension funds should fall. That is because all pension funds tend to own some bonds, and low bond yields mean low future returns. But the paper finds no link at all between the discount rates used by public-sector funds and the level of bond yields.

The motto seems to be: if reality is challenging, just ignore it.

The Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) did change the rules for public pension funds last year. But the revised rules still throw up absurdities. In a paper for theFinancial Analysts Journal, Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Rochester argues that by destroying assets invested in cash a scheme can reduce its deficit by increasing the expected return on remaining assets. “A plan can sometimes improve its funding status by literally burning money,” he remarks.

This seemed such a startling finding that The Economist asked GASB to comment. Instead of a detailed rebuttal, we received this response: “GASB gave serious consideration to the views of Professor Novy-Marx when developing its new pension standards.” Not serious enough, it seems. American taxpayers must not know whether to laugh or cry.

Economist.com/blogs/buttonwood

Why This Gigantic "Intelligence" Apparatus?
Mises Daily: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 by Robert Higgs


[From the Beacon blog of the Independent Institute (2010).]

On July 19, 2010, the Washington Post publishedthe first of three large reports by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the dimensions of the gigantic US apparatus of "intelligence" activities being undertaken to combat terrorist acts against the United States, such as the 9/11 attacks. To say that this activity amounts to mobilizing every police officer in the country to stop street fights in Camden only begins to suggest its almost-unbelievable disproportion to the alleged threat.

Among Priest and Arkin's findings from a two-year study are the following:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

[We] discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001.
Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings — about 17 million square feet of space.

Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year — a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

According to retired admiral Dennis C. Blair, formerly the director of national intelligence, after 9/11 "the attitude was, if it's worth doing, it's probably worth overdoing." I submit that this explanation does not cut to the heart of the matter. As it stands, it suggests a sort of mindless desire to pile mountains of money, technology, and personnel on top of an already-enormous mountain of money, technology, and personnel for no reason other than the vague notion that more must be better. In my view, national politics does not work in that way.

As Priest and Arkin report, "The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 2 ½ times the size it was on September 10, 2001. But the figure doesn't include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs." Virtually everyone the reporters consulted told them in effect that "the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending." To be sure, they received more than they could spend responsibly, but not more than they were eager to spend irresponsibly. After all, it's not as if they were spending their own money.

"The most plausible reason why so few attacks have occurred is that very few persons have been trying to carry them out."

Why would these hundreds of organizations and contracting companies be willing to take gigantic amounts of the taxpayers' money when everyone agrees that the money cannot be spent sensibly and that the system already in place cannot function effectively or efficiently to attain its ostensible purpose? The question answers itself. It's loot for the taking, and there has been no shortage of takers. Indeed, these stationary bandits continue to demand more money each year.

And for what? The announced goal is to identify terrorists and eliminate them or prevent them from carrying out their nefarious acts. This is simultaneously a small task and an impossible one.

It is small because the number of persons seeking to carry out a terrorist act of substantial consequence against the United States and in a position to do so cannot be more than a handful. If the number were greater, we would have seen many more attacks or attempted attacks during the past decade — after all, the number of possible targets is virtually unlimited, and the attackers might cause some form of damage in countless ways. The most plausible reason why so few attacks or attempted attacks have occurred is that very few persons have been trying to carry them out. (I refer to genuine attempts, not to the phony-baloney schemes planted in the minds of simpletons by government undercover agents and then trumpeted to the heavens when the FBI "captures" the unfortunate victims of the government's entrapment.)
So the true dimension of the terrorism problem that forms the excuse for these hundreds of programs of official predation against the taxpayers is small — not even in the same class with, say, reducing automobile-accident or household-accident deaths by 20 percent.

Yet, at the same time, the antiterrorism task is impossible because terrorism is a simple act available in some form to practically any determined adult with access to Americans and their property at home or abroad. It is simply not possible to stop all acts of terrorism if potential terrorists have been given a sufficient grievance to motivate their wreaking some form of havoc against Americans. However, it is silly to make the prevention of all terrorist acts the goal. What can't be done won't be done, regardless of how many people and how much money one devotes to doing it. We can, though, endure some losses from terrorism in the same way that we routinely endure some losses from accidents, diseases, and ordinary crime.

The sheer idiocy of paying legions of twenty-something grads of Harvard and Yale — youngsters who cannot speak Arabic, Farsi, Pashtun, or any of the other languages of the areas they purport to be analyzing and who know practically nothing of the history, customs, folkways, and traditions of these places — indicates that no one seriously expects the promised payoff in intelligence to emerge from the effort. The whole business is akin to sending a blind person to find a needle inside a maze buried somewhere in a hillside.
 

That the massive effort is utterly uncoordinated and scarcely able to communicate one part's "findings" to another only strengthens the conclusion that the goal is not stopping terrorism, but getting the taxpayers' money and putting it into privileged pockets. Even if the expected damage from acts of terrorism against the United States were $10 billion per year, which seems much too high a guess, it makes no sense to spend more than $75 billion every year to prevent it — and it certainly makes no sense to spend any money only pretending to prevent it.

What we see here is not really an "intelligence" or counterterrorism operation at all. It's a rip-off, plain and simple, fed by irrational fear and continually stoked by the government plunderers who are exercising the power and raking in the booty to "fight terrorism."


Robert Higgs is senior fellow in political economy for the Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review. He is the 2007 recipient of the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of Liberty. Send him mail. See Robert Higgs's article archives.

The Founders didn't quite anticipate the imperial bureaucracy
Published by: Dan Calabrese

Our masters.
 
First of all, I wish someone could explain to me how Beltway conventional wisdom declares a shallow hack like Ezra Klein "bright," but doesn't recognize the real brainpower in Jay Cost. If you read the Weekly Standard at all, you know Cost for being thorough, analytical and always honest in his assessments. And as we see here, he does his homework and knows his history. Cost has done a really excellent piece that spells out one of the biggest problems facing the citizens of this nation - the fact that a gigantic bureaucracy the Founders could never have anticipated, and really designed no mechanism for reining in, has become such a power unto itself.

Here is the money passage:

The Declaration of Independence vested all sovereign power in the people alone, while the Constitution established a government to manage that power in a republican fashion. While the people still swear fealty to the founding ideals, they have not put much thought recently into the problems the Founders tackled. As society has become more complex, the government has, too; Americans have not reexamined the structure of government, in an age in which it accounts for more than 20 percent of the national economy, to ensure it still reflects the republican spirit. In fact, there has not been a serious public discussion about the organization of the bureaucracy since the 1880s, even as it has doubled in size many times over. And so today, it is a vast enterprise of millions of workers, with precious little oversight from the people’s elected representatives.

It’s no wonder that some agency somewhere in the bureaucracy could have worked so perniciously for so long against the people’s interests. Perhaps the only surprise is that we ever noticed the malfeasance at the IRS at all. Were it not for the over-the-top questioning from the IRS—asking one group to pledge not to protest abortion clinics, another to reveal what books their members were reading, another to say what they’re praying about—all this might still be hidden in the shadows, unbeknownst to an overburdened Congress and an incurious media. And it remains to be seen what will be done about it, whether the bureaucracy, now under attack, has the resources and wherewithal to block oversight and prevent reform.

If there is a battle between the people and the bureaucracy to see who will maintain power, the bureaucracy has a huge advantage because it knows the inside picture, knows where the bodies are buried and knows how to lay hold of the public's resources. Elected officials are theoretically responsive to the voters, but the truth is they know the bureaucracy can make more trouble for them on any given day than some constituent.

The IRS is far from the only bad actor here. We've all heard stories of the excesses at the EPA, and the truth is few really know what goes on in a broad sense within every little agency of the federal government. Even Obama's defenders - in a strange manner of defending him - acknowledge that the government is too big for anyone to really keep tabs on what it's doing.

Congress could pass reforms that would make the bureaucracy more accountable, which would most certainly mean it would have to be smaller, but if Congress tries, you know the greatest resistance will come from the bureaucracy itself and its champions in Congress.

This is a fight that needs to be waged at some point. I'm not sure how to fight it, and I don't see anyone willing to lead it. But someone needs to.

Follow all of Dan's work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.

Data Watch
________________________________________
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) Increased 0.1% in May To view this article, Click Here
Brian S. Wesbury - Chief Economist
Bob Stein, CFA - Deputy Chief Economist
Date: 6/18/2013

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased 0.1% in May, coming in below the consensus expected gain of 0.2%. The CPI is up 1.4% versus a year ago.
“Cash” inflation (which excludes the government’s estimate of what homeowners would charge themselves for rent) was up 0.1% in May and is up 1.2% in the past year.
The gain in the CPI in May was led by rent (+0.2%) and energy (+0.4%). Food prices were down 0.1%. The “core” CPI, which excludes food and energy, was up 0.2% in May, exactly as the consensus expected. Core prices are up 1.7% versus a year ago.
Real average hourly earnings – the cash earnings of all employees, adjusted for inflation – were down 0.2% in May, but are up 0.5% in the past year. Real weekly earnings are up 0.9% in the past year.

Implications: For now, all continues to be quiet on the inflation front. Consumer prices rose a tepid 0.1% in May and are only up 1.4% from a year ago. The slight rise in May was due to rent (both actual rent and owners’ equivalent rent) as well as energy costs. Food and medical care each declined 0.1%. “Core” prices, which exclude food and energy, were up 0.2% in May and are up 1.7% from a year ago. Neither overall nor core price gains in the past year set off alarm bells. Instead, they suggest the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation, the PCE deflator (which usually runs a ¼ point below the CPI) will remain below the Fed’s target of 2%. We don’t expect this to last. Inflation probably bottomed in April when it was up only 1.1% from the prior year, and will be noticeably higher a year from now. However, for the Fed, the key measure of inflation is its own forecast of future inflation, which we see released tomorrow with the FOMC statement. So, even if inflation goes to roughly 3% in 2014, as long as the Fed projects the rise to be temporary it will not react to that inflation alone by raising short-term interest rates. The Fed is more focused on the labor market and, we believe, is willing to let inflation exceed its long-term target of 2% for a prolonged period of time in order to get the unemployment rate down. The worst news in today’s report was that “real” (inflation-adjusted) average hourly earnings declined 0.2% in May, although they are still up 0.5% in the past year. Given today’s news it looks like “real” (inflation-adjusted) consumer spending is growing at a 2.5% annual rate in Q2, consistent with our forecast of 2.5% real GDP growth.

Guest Column: The 'Sex Jihad'
by Raymond Ibrahim
Special to IPT News
June 18, 2013
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4048/guest-column-the-sex-jihad
 
News emerged a few weeks ago in Arabic media that yet another fatwa had called on practicing Muslim women to travel to Syria and offer their sexual services to the jihadis fighting to overthrow the secularist Assad government and install Islamic law. Reports attribute the fatwa to Saudi sheikh Muhammad al-'Arifi, who, along with other Muslim clerics earlier permitted jihadis to rape Syrian women.

Muslim women prostituting themselves in this case is being considered a legitimate jihad because such women are making sacrifices—their chastity, their dignity—in order to help apparently sexually-frustrated jihadis better focus on the war to empower Islam in Syria.

And it is prostitution—for they are promised payment, albeit in the afterlife. The Quran declares that "Allah has purchased of the believers their persons [their bodies] and their goods; for theirs (in return) is the garden (of Paradise): they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain (Yusuf Ali trans. 9:111).

On the basis of this fatwa, several young Tunisian Muslim girls traveled to Syria to be "sex-jihadis." Video interviews of distraught parents bemoaning their daughters' fates
are on the Internet, including one of a father and mother holding a picture of their daughter: "She's only 16—she's only 16! They brainwashed her!" pleads the father.

Most recently, the Egyptian-based news service Masrawy published a video interview with "Aisha," one of the Tunisian Muslim girls who went sex-jihading in Syria, only to regret her actions. While in Tunisia, Aisha said she met a Muslim woman who began talking to her about the importance of piety, including wearing the hijab; she then went on to talk about traveling to Syria to help the jihadis "fight and kill infidels" and make Allah's word supreme, adding that "women who die would do so in the way of Allah and become martyrs and enter paradise." (According to mainstream Islamic teaching, dying in jihad is the only guaranteed way to avoid hell.)

Aisha eventually came to the conclusion that she was being exploited in the name of religion and left.

While news that Muslim girls in hijabs are prostituting themselves in the name of Islam may surprise some, Islamic clerics regularly issue fatwas permitting forbidden things—so long as they help the jihad. For instance, not only did the original "underwear bomber" Abdullah Hassan al-Asiri hide explosives in his rectum to assassinate Saudi Prince Muhammad bin Nayef—they met in 2009 after the 22-year-old Asiri "feigned repentance for his jihadi views"—but, according to Shi'ite talk-show host Abdullah Al-Khallaf, he had fellow jihadis sodomize him to "widen" his anus to fit more explosives.

Al-Khallaf read the fatwa that purportedly justified such actions during a 2012 Fadak TV episode.

After praising Allah and declaring that sodomy is forbidden in Islam, the fatwa asserted:

However, jihad comes first, for it is the pinnacle of Islam, and if the pinnacle of Islam can only be achieved through sodomy, then there is no wrong in it. For the overarching rule of [Islamic] jurisprudence asserts that "necessity makes permissible the prohibited." And if obligatory matters can only be achieved by performing the prohibited, then it becomes obligatory to perform the prohibited, and there is no greater duty than jihad. After he sodomizes you, you must ask Allah for forgiveness and praise him all the more. And know that Allah will reward the jihadis on the Day of Resurrection, according to their intentions—and your intention, Allah willing, is for the victory of Islam, and we ask that Allah accept it of you.

While all these sex-fatwas may seem bizarre, they highlight two important (though little known in the West) points. First, that jihad is the "pinnacle" of Islam—for it makes Islam supreme; and second, the idea that "necessity makes permissible the prohibited." Because making Islam supreme through jihad is the greatest priority, anything and everything that is otherwise banned becomes permissible. All that comes to matter is one's intention, or niyya (see Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi's discussion along these lines).
As for the intersection between sex and violence (jihad), it was once explored by the Arabic satellite program Daring Question, which aired various clips of young jihadis giddily singing about their forthcoming deaths and subsequent sexual escapades in heaven. After documenting various anecdotes indicative of jihadi obsession with sex, Egyptian human rights activist Magdi Khalil concluded that "absolutely everything [jihad, suicide operations, etc.] revolves around sex in paradise," adding, "if you look at the whole of Islamic history, you come up with two words: sex and violence."

Indeed, Islam's prophet Muhammad maintained that death during jihad not only blots out all sins—including sexual ones—but it actually gratifies them:

The martyr is special to Allah. He is forgiven [of all sins] from the first drop of blood [that he sheds]. He sees his throne in paradise, where he will be adorned in ornaments of faith. He will wed the 'Aynhour [a.k.a. "voluptuous women"] and will not know the torments of the grave, and safeguards against the greater terror [hell]. … And he will copulate with 72 'Aynhour (see The Al Qaeda Reader, p. 143).

This goes to one of the many seeming contradictions in Islam: Muslim women must chastely be covered head-to-toe—yet, in the service of jihad, they are allowed to prostitute themselves. Lying is forbidden—but permissible to empower Islam. Intentionally killing women and children is forbidden—but permissible during the jihad. Suicide is forbidden—but permissible during the jihad—when it is called "martyrdom."

One may therefore expect anything from would-be jihadis, regardless of how un-Islamic the means may otherwise seem.

Even so, this uncompromising mentality, which is prevalent throughout the Islamic world, especially along the frontlines of the jihad, is the same mentality that many Western leaders and politicians think can be appeased with just a bit more respect, well-wishing, and concessions from the West.

Such are the great, and disastrous, disconnects of our time.

Raymond Ibrahim is author of the new book, Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (published by Regnery in cooperation with Gatestone Institute, 2013). A Middle East and Islam expert, he is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and associate fellow at the Middle East Forum.

From the Editor
Hi there,
Journalists have a terrible reputation. A recent survey in Sydney found that journalists (including shock jocks, TV reporters and newspaper reporters) ranked just above car salesmen and state politicians. There’s a simple explanation for that, as a columnist for the Daily Caller (himself a journalist probably) declared: “Most journalists are not interested in the truth, and most people know this”.

Anyhow, to restore your failing faith in journalists, I’d like to tell you about Odoardo Focherini, who has become the first Rightous Among the Nations, an Israeli honour for non-Jews who saved Jews from the Holocaust, to be beatified by the Catholic Church. The ceremony took place on Saturday in his home town of Carpi in northern Italy.   
In 1942 Focherini was managing director of a newspaper called L’ Avvenire d’ Italia. He and his wife Maria had seven young children.  It was not a good time to be a journalist, as Italy was governed by Fascists and was allied with the Nazis, but Focherini was using his contacts to set up a network for Jews escaping to Switzerland.
After Italy switched sides and joined the Allies on September 8, 1943, the Germans began to deport Italian Jews to their concentration camps. Focherini, with the approval of his wife, stepped up his efforts. He had saved about 100 Jews before he was arrested in March 1944. Thereafter he was in a series of camps before succumbing to a leg ulcer on December 27, 1944 in Hersbruck.

The Rome office of the American Jewish Committee said Focherini “acted selflessly in accordance with the highest moral principles shared by our two fraternal religions. This act will create yet another bond between Christians and Jews, further enriching our deepening dialogue. May the recognition and memory of Odoardo Focherini’s profound faith and humanity be a blessing to all the world’s peoples.”

I hope that will restore your faith in journalists. Some of them, at least, are interested in the truth.

"The people can never willfully betray their own interests: But they may possibly be betrayed by the representatives of the people; and the danger will be evidently greater where the whole legislative trust is lodged in the hands of one body of men, than where the concurrence of separate and dissimilar bodies is required in every public act."
--James Madison, Federalist No. 63, 1788

a) Hat tip to our BigDog:

http://themonkeycage.org/2013/06/14/the-oversight-of-too-much-oversight/

b)

Global fish prices leap to all-time high
By Emiko Terazono in London

Global fish prices have leapt to all-time highs as China’s growing appetite for high-end species from tuna to oysters runs up against lower catches.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s global fish price index, an industry benchmark that tracks the cost of wild and farmed seafood, hit a record high in May, up 15 per cent from a year ago and above the peak set in mid 2011.

“In the coming months, supply constraints for several important species are likely to keep world fish prices on the rise,” the Rome-based FAO has warned.

The changing Chinese diet has already boosted demand for grains and livestock feed. The same phenomenon is now under way in the seafood industry, where the total value of fish trade is expected to reach $130bn this year.

China is the world’s largest producer of farmed tilapia, but it is increasing imports of other types of fish such as salmon and shellfish.

The impact of this shift is important for more expensive shellfish products, for which China has become a leading market. The country’s oyster and mussel consumption is growing as much as 20 per cent a year, tightening the global market.

Oyster prices, which have more than doubled over the past three years, are expected to rise further in 2013 as supplies from France remain low due to a virus that has destroyed the country’s young stock.

Richard Haward, a seventh generation oysterman in Essex, northeast of London, said: “Demand from Hong Kong and China and a worldwide shortage of supplies has increased prices.”

Urbanisation and the advent of supermarkets is contributing to higher fish consumption in emerging markets.

Audun Lem, a fish expert at the FAO, said: “The product development, including ready meals and clean fillets really facilitates fish consumption.”

The jump in Asian demand has coincided with low supplies for several key species due to disease and high feeding costs in the aquaculture industry.

The cost of tuna, one of the most heavily traded fish species, has risen to a record high, up 12 per cent over the past year on strong sashimi and sushi demand, as well as from the canned tuna industry. This has coincided with smaller catches.

Shrimp, another heavily traded species, has seen prices up 22 per cent as supplies have been hit by a disease spreading in southeast Asia as well as by a fall in low wild harvests.

Salmon prices have surged 27 per cent over the past year, but are well below their record highs. The price of aquaculture production is expected to remain high as the industry battles with record feed costs. Fishmeal prices remain near a record high due to a sharp decline in supplies of anchovies, used to manufacture feed rations.

I am reminded of Joe Rogan's comment that Big Country is a light heavyweight who likes to eat.  I'm thinking he could do a lot better in the LH division , , , 

Data Watch
________________________________________
Retail Sales Increased 0.6% in May, Above the Consensus Expected Gain of 0.4% To view this article, Click Here
Brian S. Wesbury - Chief Economist
Bob Stein, CFA - Deputy Chief Economist
Date: 6/13/2013

Retail sales increased 0.6% in May, coming in above the consensus expected gain of 0.4%. Sales are up 4.3% versus a year ago.
Sales excluding autos rose 0.3% in May, matching consensus expectations. These sales were up 0.6% including revisions to prior months and are up 3.4% in the past year.
The increase in sales in May was led by autos and grocery stores. There were no major gains or losses in other categories.
Sales excluding autos, building materials, and gas rose 0.3% in May but were up 0.6% including revisions to prior months. Even if unchanged in June, these sales will be up at a 2.6% annual rate in Q2 versus the Q1 average.

Implications: So much for the theory that the federal spending sequester or end of the payroll tax cut was going to kill the consumer. Sales were up 0.6% in May and are up at a 3.8% annual rate since the beginning of the year. With consumer prices up at an annual rate of only about 0.6% since the start of the year, “real” (inflation-adjusted) sales are up at more than a 3% annual rate. “Core” sales, which exclude autos, building materials, and gas, rose 0.3% in May and 0.6% including upward revisions to prior months. Other analysts, who had been forecasting roughly 1.5% real GDP growth in Q2 are reacting to this report by marking up their forecasts; we’re holding steady where we’ve been all along, at 2.5%. Nonetheless, this growth is nothing to write home about – it’s still Plow Horse growth – but much better than many analysts were projecting at the beginning of the year. For the rest of 2013, we still expect two major themes to play out for the consumer: first, an acceleration in consumer spending growth versus the past couple of years despite higher taxes and the sequester; second, a transition away from growth in auto sales and toward other areas, like furniture, appliances, and building materials. Consumer spending should accelerate because of continued growth in jobs, hours, and wages. In addition, households have the lowest financial obligations ratio (debt service plus other recurring monthly payments) since 1981. In other news this morning, new claims for unemployment insurance declined 12,000 last week to 334,000. Continuing claims ticked up 2,000 to 2.97 million. Plugging these figures into our employment models suggests a solid nonfarm payroll gain of 185,000 in June. On the inflation front, no sign that loose monetary policy is having an effect yet on trade prices. Import and export prices fell in May, both for overall and core measures and are also down from a year ago. An easy Fed will eventually generate higher inflation figures, but those numbers certainly aren’t here yet.

second post of the day

It's the Profiling, Stupid!
Obama, Trust and the NSA
By Mark Alexander • June 13, 2013         
"All men having power ought to be distrusted..." --James Madison (1787)
 

Last week, Barack Hussein Obama deflected new concerns about the National Security Administration's intrusive domestic data-mining operations, saying, "If people can't trust ... the executive branch ... to make sure we're abiding by the Constitution, due process, and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here."
Barack, we have some problems here.
Of course, trusting the Executive Branch is not the issue. The problem is Obama's life-long record of deceit and deception, and his utter contempt for Rule of Law.
Amidst recent revelations that Obama's black-bag cutouts inspired his "low-level" union cadres at the IRS to target his Patriot and Tea Party political enemies list, and scripted a cover-up of the Benghazi murders in order that it not derail his 2012 re-election campaign momentum, is it conceivable that his "low-level" union cadres at the NSA might collect intelligence data on U.S. citizens to profile those whom oppose Obama?
As with the other scandals, Obama's political handlers and their Leftmedia talkingheads are obfuscating the facts regarding NSA data collection. They ignore legitimate civil liberty concerns, and focus instead on the question of whether such data is essential to our national security.
Allow me to reframe a quote from James "Ragin' Cajun" Carville's political playbook about focusing on the big issue, and adapt it for the big data debate: "It's the profiling, stupid!"
The question is not whether intelligence data collection is critical to our nation's ability to defend itself -- good intelligence is, and has always been a critical component of national defense and security.
The overarching questions are, what is the scope of domestic NSA intelligence gathering, and what is the potential for an administration to use that information to profile and target political opponents?
Post Your Opinion
Here is a very brief background pertaining to the genesis of the NSA data-mining programs that have violated First and Fourth Amendment proscriptions against government infringement of the rights of American citizens.
After World War I, a civilian code-breaking group called Black Chamber seized daily telegrams from major telegraph companies, in violation of the 1912 Radio Communications Act. This operation was exposed and shut down, but after World War II, President Harry Truman rightly deemed the threat of nuclear weapons to be so significant that, by way of executive order, he formed the National Security Agency.
The NSA was tasked with collecting as much signal and communication intelligence as the limits of technology would allow, and its budget soon dwarfed that of the Central Intelligence Agency as it expanded those limits. The NSA exponentially accelerated the old Black Chamber ops far beyond any commercial capabilities, and disseminated its findings to the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (DEA predecessor) and the Department of Defense.
NSA operated without court orders and warrants, and its domestic data mining operations flourished unabated until two of its collection programs, "SHAMROCK" and "MINARET," were discovered by congressional investigators after the Vietnam War.
In 1975, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Frank Church (D-ID) noted that these programs "certainly appear to violate section 605 of the Communications Act of 1934 as well as the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution." He described the NSA operations as "the largest government interception programs affecting Americans ever undertaken." But those operations were a drop in the ocean compared to NSA programs today.
From 1980 to 2000, NSA intelligence gathering capabilities advanced well beyond what academicians considered the theoretical limits, due primarily to Internet communication and transactions. However, congressional intelligence oversight committees maintained strict limits on domestic intelligence gathering.
Fast forward to the rise of "Jihadistan" and the 9/11 al-Qa'ida attack on American soil.
Under the authority of post 9/11 Patriot Act provisions, the NSA greatly expanded its gathering operations to include mountains of metadata -- essentially macro data tags about micro data -- on virtually every electronic transmission and transaction, including the tagging of individual financial, telecommunication and internet traffic. That is on top of all the data the government already maintains on individuals, and when ObamaCare is fully implemented, the government will then have complete access to medical histories and conditions.
The NSA has the added benefit of tapping into massive commercial data mining operations at Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple, and collected chat videos, stored data, file transfers, social networking, videos and photos, and especially encrypted communications, which can be virtually deciphered and read in real time. (For the record, the massive commercial data mining also poses significant threats to privacy, and should be subject to disclosure limitations and regulation requiring consumers to approve or disapprove the collection of such data.)
 

The legitimate purpose for gathering massive amounts of metadata, and probably many "deeper layers of data," is that such data can be sifted by algorithms in search of patterns, trends and associations that may be linked with national security threat profiles.
When there were profile hits in the data, investigators are required by law, subject to the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), to obtain a court order to conduct a deeper review of the stored data.
Now, if the executive branch is to be trusted, and congressional oversight is sufficient, then there is no problem with the collection of metadata, and the transactions or transmissions associated with that data. But our Founders wisely established that no such trust should ever be afforded those in power, so the question of trust should be a mute point.
So, who is to be trusted?
Post Your Opinion
Certainly not Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who was asked in a March congressional hearing, "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Clapper responded, "No, sir. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect [intelligence on Americans], but not wittingly."
Clapper, who apparently does not grasp the concept that when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging, attempted to parse his response, saying this week, "I responded in what I thought was the most truthful or least most untruthful manner, by saying, 'No.' And again, going back to my metaphor, what I was thinking of is looking at the Dewey Decimal numbers of those books in the metaphorical library. To me collection of U.S. persons data would mean taking the books off the shelf, opening it up and reading it."
OK, in the intelligence trade craft, "gathering intelligence" refers to the accumulation of data. "Collection" refers to the analysis of data, but Clapper obviously knew that the distinction between gathering and collecting intelligence would not be apparent to any elected official during the hearings.
But according to White House paid professional liar Jay Carney, Obama "certainly believes that Director Clapper has been straight and direct in the answers he's given," and added that he thinks Clapper has been "aggressive in providing as much information as possible to the American people, to the press."
So, what about "trusting the executive branch" with collection programs like PRISM, which co-opt data from domestic telecommunication and Internet service providers?
In 2005, then Senator Obama declared, "If someone wants to know why their own government has decided to go on a fishing expedition through every personal record or private document, through library books they've read and phone calls they've made -- this legislation gives people no rights to appeal the need for such a search in a court of law. ... This is just plain wrong."
In 2008, an indignant candidate Obama promised, "I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining the Constitution and our freedom. That means no more illegal wiretapping ... [spying] on citizens ... tracking citizens who do nothing but protest... No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. ... The law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers ... justice is not arbitrary. [Bush] acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security... The first thing I will do, when I am president, is call in my attorney general and ... review every executive order issued by George Bush to determine which of those have undermined civil liberties, which are unconstitutional, and I will reverse them with a stroke of a pen."
Now, Obama says, "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That is not what this program is about. What the intelligence community is looking at is phone numbers and duration of calls. They're not looking at names and not looking at content." He added that when he became president, "My assessment was [that NSA intelligence] helps us prevent terrorist attacks. The modest encroachments" on privacy, he said, "was worth us doing." (Watch Obama then and now.)
In fact, under the Obama administration, the NSA activities have massively expanded.
Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), one of the key architects of the Patriot Act, said this week that the scope of the NSA data mining operation is "beyond what the Patriot Act intended." Sensenbrenner, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations, added, "I know because I helped draft Section 215 and it was designed to prevent the NSA from [domestic] data mining and that is exactly what they're doing. ... Apparently what the president seems to think is that universal background checks for guns are okay, so universal seizure of people's telephone records is okay."
According to The New York Times' editorial on NSA operations and Obama's response, "He has now lost all credibility."
The Times later amended that post to read, "lost all credibility on this issue," but they had it right the first time.
Ironically, amid the NSA controversy, Obama announced last week, "We're going to take a new step to make sure that virtually every child in America's classrooms has access to the fastest Internet. I am directing the Federal Communications Commission, which is the FCC, to begin a process that will connect 99 percent of America's students to high-speed broadband Internet within five years."
 

Recall, if you will, just a few weeks back when Obama preached his "ignore tyranny sermon" to Ohio State graduates: "You've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices."
Well, in Ronald Reagan's inimitable words, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." And indeed, "tyranny is always lurking just around the corner," and our Founders expected us to be ever vigilant against despotism, regardless of Obama's demand we "reject these voices."
Note that Obama's IRS profiling of Patriot and Tea Party political opponents was not the first time this administration's foot soldiers set their sights on his political adversaries. There are many other examples of government agencies targeting his enemy list.
For example, the Department of Homeland Security wasted no time after Obama took office targeting conservatives in a 2009 DHS document "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment." That terrorist profile included a footnote that defines "rightwing extremism in the United States" as any groups that question federal authority and support states' rights. It also notes that DHS "will be working with its state and local partners over the next several months" to collect information on these radicals, with "a particular emphasis" on sources of "rightwing extremist radicalization." DHS czar Janet Napolitano expressed her concerns about "trends of violent radicalization in the United States," but insists, "We are on the lookout for criminal and terrorist activity but we do not -- nor will we ever -- monitor ideology or political beliefs."
Right, you can trust her -- she's from the government.
And consider the 2010 security exercise at Ft. Knox, in which an Obama supporter wrote into the scenario that "Tea Party terrorists" were the adversaries.
The bottom line is that most Americans in the military, intelligence and law enforcement communities are Patriots -- and there are even some in the IRS and other civilian government agencies. But when Obama's wayward NeoCom cadres use the power of their government office to profile and target his political adversaries, that does not require a directive from Obama. The profilers were already predisposed with a political bias, and Obama has fueled that predisposition in every government agency.
Where there is a corrupt executive, there will be corruption in the ranks. Obama is not to be afforded any measure of trust. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, "The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered."
Footnote: Amid all the debate about NSA profiling of terrorists, I thought the Left universally argued that "profiling" was a bad word. Fact is I fully support tactical profiling measures, like behavioral profiling at airport security checkpoints, rather than subjecting grandmothers and babies to full body searches. (Read "Anyone for Terrorist Profiling?")
Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis
 
Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post

Gun Owners of America
________________________________________
Nevada's Governor Vetoes Universal Background Checks!

While Biden set to jumpstart push for gun control next week
 
“One of the few who do know what they are doing is Gun Owners of America and Larry Pratt.” -- Peter Moss, “Who is Winning the Gun War?” AmmoLand, June 5, 2013
 
Stunning victory for gun rights in Nevada!
 
You guys did a tremendous job bombarding Governor Brian Sandoval’s office with phone calls, and he has listened to your appeals.
 
Governor Sandoval vetoed the Universal Background Check bill yesterday, and now, the anti-gun Left is in full-mourning.
 
The Associated Press reports that, “It is a significant defeat for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's gun control advocacy group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns [MAIG]. The organization spent hundreds of thousands of dollars working to get the bill passed through to the governor.”
 
Despite Bloomberg’s fortune, his anti-gun MAIG simply doesn’t have the grassroots behind it.
 
GOA was joined by other groups on Tuesday, June 4, in asking Nevada gun owners to urge Sandoval to veto the legislation.
 
The next day, reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “2,200 people called his office between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m....  Four out of five calls [were] for the veto.”
 
According to the Journal, this onslaught was one of the chief reasons that the Governor set up a hotline number.  His office simply couldn’t get work done as they were being “bombarded by calls from people who want the governor to veto the gun control bill passed by the Legislature.”
 
Once the Governor set up a hotline number -- and Bloomberg started running ads urging people nationwide to call it -- GOA urged gun owners nationwide (last Friday) to call Sandoval’s office.
 
As of this past Tuesday, more than 100,000 calls had already been placed to the Governor.  And this just underscores how important it is for gun owners to join GOA’s email service.
 
Every new person you encourage to sign up for our free email alerts or for a new GOA membership gives us a louder voice in Washington and in states across the country!
 
The Governor was inclined to veto the gun control bill all along, but gun owners can be sure that -- had the poll results gone the other way -- he could have been easily persuaded to bow to Bloomberg’s pressure.
 
Nevada is a key state as it is home to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) and to “swing vote” Senator Dean Heller (R).  Defeating Universal Background Checks in the Silver State -- with overwhelming numbers of callers opposing it -- sends a powerful message from a Purple State, that Americans do NOT want additional gun control!
 
Thanks to everyone who emailed our alerts ... who made phone calls ... and who registered their opinion with the Governor’s office.
 
Your activism makes a difference ... and your continued support helps keep us in the fight.
 
Double-barrel Joe Biden set to jumpstart push for gun control
 
Meanwhile, at the national level, the Vice President is planning an event where he will push gun control next week.
 
While he’s keeping the details of the event hush-hush, Biden said, “I personally haven’t given up [efforts at gun control], nor has the President.”
 
GOA will keep you posted on all the latest news and efforts in Washington to restrict our gun rights.
 
Thanks again for your support.  And remember:
 
Every new person you encourage to sign up for our free email alerts or for a new GOA membership gives us a louder voice in Washington and in states across the country!
 

Well, I'd quibble with that, IMHO the Soviet defeat in Afg was more than a very small part, but anyway, let's return to the subject of the thread.

"The truth is, that, even with the most secure tenure of office, during good behavior, the danger is not, that the judges will be too firm in resisting public opinion, and in defence of private rights or public liberties; but, that they will be ready to yield themselves to the passions, and politics, and prejudices of the day."
--Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833

Keynesian Model Blew It Again To view this article, Click Here
Brian S. Wesbury - Chief Economist
Bob Stein, CFA - Deputy Chief Economist
Date: 6/17/2013

If there’s one economic conclusion we can make from recent data, it’s that the Keynesian model has failed - again.
Remember that “fiscal cliff clock” on cable TV? Well, the year-end deal included an end to the payroll tax cut and then two months later, on March 1, the dreaded federal spending sequester went into effect. In other words, the Keynesian clock struck midnight, the economy was supposed to slow sharply, and a recession was possible.
The theory was – still is in some quarters – that higher payroll taxes and less federal spending would reduce spendable incomes (especially for government workers and contractors) and hit consumer spending. This drop in spending would set off a multiplier effect that would drag down economic growth.
One widely-followed Keynesian forecasting unit predicted an uptick in the unemployment rate in the second quarter and a decline in nonfarm payroll growth to 100,000 per month. And when March payrolls rose a tepid 88,000, Keynesians blamed it on the fiscal cliff and said “here we go, it’s started.”
But the unemployment rate is lower in Q2 than in Q1 and nonfarm payrolls have risen an average of 155,000 since the sequester went into effect. Payroll growth during the same three months in 2012 was 147,000. Even the tepid March number was revised from 88,000 to 142,000.
The Keynesians, expecting doom and gloom anytime the government cuts spending, have pounced on any signal of soft economic growth. They jumped on the initial report of weakness in retail sales in March and blamed it on the sequester, even though the last three times Easter had been in March, like this year, sales have been unusually weak compared to other indicators (2002, 2005 and 2008).
But we found out this past week that core retail sales – which take out the monthly volatility caused by autos, gas, and building materials – have been up eleven months in a row and didn’t miss a beat after the sequester went into effect. Assuming consumer prices rose 0.1% in May (see our forecast table, below), “real” (inflation-adjusted) retail sales are up about 3% from a year ago. Total consumption, adjusted for inflation, is up 2.1% during the year-ended April 2013 versus the 1.8% growth during the year-ended April 2012
Meanwhile, equity investments, held by US households, are up about $800 billion in value since March 1. Taken at face value, it seems like the effect of the sequester has been positive, not negative.
Keynesians haven’t even been right about the stock market. We’re not going to call anyone out by name, but we’re thinking of a famous Keynesian economist who is widely known for having made a prescient call about 2008-09, whose name starts with an “R” and sounds a lot like Houdini.
It’s true that he called the collapse in 2008-09, but he originally went bearish in 2005, especially after Hurricane Katrina. Reports say that he recently turned bullish. So what if you sold in mid-2005 and waited until now to buy back in? Since mid-2005, the annualized total return on the S&P 500, including reinvested dividends, has been 6.2%. That’s nothing compared to the late 1990s – but, hey, it ain’t shabby either. In other words, completely ignoring the dire Keynesian advice, even when it was right, would have been profitable.
In mid-2005, you could have bought a 10-year Treasury Note that yielded 4%. Less drama for sure, but no clear advantage. Gold, on the other hand, was trading at about $430/oz. back in mid-2005, so that would have been a great buy, but not an option normal Keynesians would have recommended.
The bottom line is that all this focus on government actions through the lens of a Keynesian model has been basically worthless. Investors are better served when they follow free-market economic theories that focus on production, not demand-side models that focus on spending and debt. And this appears true in both the long, and the short, run.

Yes, in part by arming the M. with stingers.

Worth noting there that there was one helluva an upside too-- arguably precipitating the fall of the Soviet Empire.

I was disappointed to see a 7-2 decision penned by Scalia banning AZ from requiring proof of citizenship to vote on the basis of federal pre-emption.

Woof All:

I am very pleased with the synergy of the DBMA Training Groups in the Midwest.

Here are some fotos of their most recent fight day:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/midwesttribe/sets/72157634117815194/

HCTHC!
Guro Crafty

a) http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/06/17/watch-share-both-parties-are-dragging-us-into-war-in-the-middle-east/

b) I know! Lets give these guys night vision goggles and manpads!

http://dcclothesline.com/2013/06/17/syrian-rebels-sing-we-destroyed-america-with-a-civilian-airplane/?fb_source=pubv1

c)  Is what we are doing a matter of doing what is necessary to keeping this thing going and letting them kill each other?

Sunday 9/22/13 

a) "Well Levin asks why do we need government to compile there own metadata when the privates are already snooping on us and they can get warrants to get data from them?"

"I don't buy we are safer.  I don't buy government or some of its people will not use data for its own purposes and that this is not just a slippery slope but history tells us lack of transparency with the excuse of national security will by default of human nature to abuse."

These seem like good points.

b) Still, why is Snowden giving stuff to the Chinese?  Why divulge that the Brits were listening in to foreign leaders at a conference?

c) Not metada, but your actual email
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350920/americas-vast-margin-error-victor-davis-hanson

d) The Problem is bigger than you think:
http://reason.com/archives/2013/06/17/citizens-and-the-state-the-problem-is-bi

e) Jonah Goldberg:  Do You Want To Play a Game?

Despite last week's somewhat tinfoil-hatted G-File, I've actually been pretty careful about not locking into a position on the substance of the NSA story because I've had the sense from the beginning that there's just too much we don't know yet. That said, here are some partial conclusions I've come to over the last week.

First, James Clapper simply lied to Congress. I understand why he did. But from what I can tell, most of the people who lie to Congress do so for what they think are good reasons (Lois Lerner is an exception to that rule). That Clapper was unprepared to answer that question in a way that wasn't objectively deceitful amounts to gross malpractice.

Edward Snowden is fishier than the Frying Dutchman's All-You-Can-Eat Seafood Buffet. I'm not saying he's a Chinese agent or anything. Or, better said, I'm not saying he revealed all of this stuff as an agent of the Chinese. He might be auditioning for the position now. After all, you kind of lose some street cred when you bitch about the evil of the surveillance state and a lack of transparency and then set up shop in China. It's sort of like quitting your job as a lighting technician at the Mickey Mouse Club because you don't approve of the lax moral standards and then applying for a job at the Spearmint Rhino. Regardless, I think he's pretty clearly lying about what he was able to do as a cog in the NSA machine. He says he had the "authorities" to read anyone's e-mail, including the president's. I call shenanigans on this -- or at least the experts I've talked to do. It's unclear he even had the capability, which is a very different thing than the authority. I have the capability to drive my car through the window of a crowded Chipotle Mexican Grill and proclaim, "I came here to do two things: Chew gum and eat burritos, and I'm all out of gum!" That doesn't mean I have the authority to do such a thing.

This brings us to a really important distinction in all this: Existence vs. Abuse. I am coming around to the view that the program as it exists isn't necessarily outrageous on the merits. As far as we know so far, Snowden hasn't revealed any actual abuses of the program. And his hints about abuses are like bad pretzels: impossible to swallow without a lot of grains of salt. Now, you can argue that the existence of the program itself is, uh, itself an outrage. I have many friends who think this. I am truly torn on this question.

But you know what else is outrageous? The nuclear bomb. It's a barbaric weapon that can do a lot more damage than scanning your metadata. But like it or not, in a world where nuclear weapons exist, it's necessary for us to have nuclear weapons. The fact that they are horrible things doesn't mean we should get rid of them, it means that we should A) try really hard to keep our enemies from getting them and, more relevant, B) implement protocols that reassure people they won't be misused. Americans don't worry -- that much, at least -- about some bad actor in the White House or military launching a nuke on Trenton, N. J., and not just because the result would arguably be an improvement. We all understand that there are a whole bunch of hoops you have to jump through just to launch one of those suckers. First, there's the paperwork. Then, tour boss needs to get the order and his boss needs the order and all the way up and down the chain there are codes and redundancies until those two dudes have to turn the keys at the same time.

We know this mostly from Hollywood, of course. Which brings me to the last point. It would be in America's interest for the government to reassure people in the exact same way. No, I don't mean the government should make some bad movies about incredibly conscientious NSA spooks, but the government needs to get the reassurances sufficiently out there that they become fodder for the popular culture. To the extent there have been any movies and TV shows about NSA-CIA domestic snooping and evil-doing, they all make it seem like it's really easy for Alec Baldwin to get all up in your business like Frank Oz's hand inside Yoda. In the Bourne movies, all you've got to do is say the wrong word into your cell phone and the next thing you know some Monty Python dudes are knocking on your door asking for your liver, or something like that.

The problem with the nuclear-bomb analogy is that super-secret spying by keystroke is by its nature invisible. If someone drops a nuke by accident, odds are even the Today Show would lead with that over, say, Kim Kardashian's latest Facebook update about her irritable-bowel-syndrome diet. That's why the government needs to be a lot more transparent about this stuff. Now, my friends say that more transparency will make it harder to fight terrorists. To which I say, "Well, okay." Lots of things make it more difficult to fight terrorism. A few that come to mind: The First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, posse comitatus rules, the moral, legal, and cultural strictures against indiscriminately flinging nuclear weapons at the Middle East, etc. Rand Paul makes a sound point when he says things would be easier for the watchmen if we simply installed microchips in everyone. That alone is not a boffo argument for doing so. I'm open to compromise here, but when a majority of the American people think the government will use these tools to harass political opponents, the government has an obligation to clear the air and reassure their bosses (and, in case you didn't read the American User Agreement called "the Constitution," that's us). If that makes things more difficult, well, that's too bad.

f) The new war, the secret war-- cyberwar:   http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/general-keith-alexander-cyberwar/all/

reliability of this site is unknown:

http://www.siotw.org/modules/news_english/item.php?itemid=1150#.Ub-6dZ9FEDB.facebook