Current Events

Jews Should Use Alinskyite Tactics Against Anti-Semites

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Caroline Glick makes good suggestions for Jewish student groups contending with campus anti-Semites:

Educational efforts are of little value in contending with thugs. But this doesn’t mean that there is nothing to be done. Groups like Block the Boat for Gaza, Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voices for Peace, Adalah, the Arab Resource and Organizing Center and Direct Action for Palestine need to be investigated.
 
Where does their money come from? Who are their leaders? What are their ties to terrorist groups? What are their ties to organized labor? What are their ties to politicians? What is their tax status and what do their tax returns say? If members of various groups are intimidating Jewish students then there should be restraining orders against them. Criminal complaints should be filed against them. Their tax-exempt status should be challenged.
 
Jewish students should be demanding that Students for Justice in Palestine be expelled from their campuses along with other hate groups, like Jewish Voices for Peace. Jewish alumni should be organizing to withhold all donations from universities that permit anti-Semitic groups to operate on campus. And Jewish lawyers should be filing lawsuits against universities and other institutions that enable the operation of anti-Semitic groups on their premises.

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Buy Ebola, Sell the Fed

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The stock market began to recover from its recent selloff as initial ebola fears abated. Meanwhile bond markets remained strong.

Conclusions? The fed-fueled bubble bull market in stocks isn’t over. Ebola won’t kill us all. Future Ebola outbreaks will have to be much more severe to generate market reactions of similar magnitude. (Corollary: The next Ebola-inspired market selloff will be a buying opportunity, and thus may not happen.)

Caveats. Watch for a govt bond selloff, perhaps as a result of unexpected events. The entire financial world has been watching for this for the past several years. It could happen in two weeks or two years, but it will happen eventually.

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. You would be crazy to listen to me and probably shouldn’t even be reading this, as I have predicted twenty of the last 2 bear markets in bonds.

Received Cynicism is a Bigger Problem than Anti-Americanism

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Rush Limbaugh was speculating today about the causes of anti-American sentiment in disaffected young people like the NYC hatchet jihadi. He attributes the anti-Americanism to leftist ideas and historical ignorance endemic to our schools. I think this is correct to some extent.

However, the jihadis and other violent anti-American Americans are extreme outliers. The vast majority of people on the Left are not nearly so hostile to American institutions and culture, though they tend to hold grievances against this country and its political system and culture that conservatives do not. Limbaugh makes the typical culturally tone-deaf conservative error of attributing to anti-Americanism that which could better be attributed to cynicism and ignorance.

The USA is a political, economic and cultural wonder, but you need some history to appreciate this fact and our schools no longer teach it. If you don’t know much history, facile cynicism and the tendentious explanations of people who really don’t like the country become plausible. It’s difficult for someone who understands the origins of this country’s institutions and traditions to become a jihadi. It’s even more difficult to become a jihadi if you also understand the intellectually convoluted roots of modern Islamism.

China Syndrome comes home to roost.

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Two viruses are making the news these days. One, Ebola hemorrhagic fever has infected two in the United States with no deaths yet. It has created wide spread concern bordering on panic. The other, Non-Polio Enterovirus D 68, appears to have infected 825 this year and been directly responsible for at least one death and indirectly responsible for many others, primarily among children. It has generated comparatively little media attention and very little panic. Why the difference?

First the victims of D 68 are primarily children, Ebola also strikes adults. As a culture we no longer value children as much as we once did. Children are an option, almost a luxury. They have become more expensive than most luxuries we consume. Perhaps it is because the high cost to rear a child is reflective of the damage we humans are doing to the planet Or because so few of them die at an early age as compared to the past. And I suspect that childlessness is far more prevalent among our media elite opinion makers. In any case, few children vote and so they don’t really matter to policy makers.

Second, D 68 generally kills indirectly by weakening the child so that pneumonia or some other respiratory illness can be the cause of death. Ebola eats you alive! I’ve seen it on TV! And it is a terrible new way to die unlike ways we’ve died before.

Finally, WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE. D 68 is poorly understood and we have no idea how prevalent it is in the population or how many childhood deaths it has contributed to. And it’s non-Polio. But we know Ebola has a 50-70% fatality rate among those who contract it in African third world countries. After all it’s hemorrhagic fever. We’re going to bleed to death. So, if it gets loose here we could have millions of deaths like that! But we actually have all the tools we need in our public health system to prevent it from spreading widely, once we get the Bozos out of power. So it’s highly unlikely that this outbreak will spread among the general population.

It’s a very small probability of a terribly frightening event. And some folks have used the propensity of people to exaggerate the possibility of catastrophic outcomes to further their political goals. I’m thinking of nuclear power, an energy source that has killed no one in the US. Compared to the coal industry, which routinely contributes to the death of both its producers and consumers, nuclear power is harmless. However, some used Three Mile Island to shut down the development of power plants that could have cushioned us from the effects of the OPEC cartel. Or how about the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) fraud? Or the reaction to a terrible but unrepeated terror bombing? The public has been taught to fear by leaders who want to harness public opinion to support their political goals.

Now comes Ebola. True, a threat. But a highly improbable one. Except when the incompetence of our elite leaders is made abundantly clear for all to see. And then those leaders have the audacity to be surprised when a formerly courageous people are reduced to trembling? The chickens are coming home to roost.

Economic and Political Turmoil a Century after the Great War: Is it Deja Vu All Over Again?

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This year marks a century since the outbreak of WW I and coincidently the initiation of US Federal Reserve System operations. Prior to these events, politics were democratizing, economic growth was booming, economies were liberalizing and global trade and finance were growing, all at a pace not seen again for almost another century. Recognizing that achieving these mutual benefits required an externally imposed political discipline, all of the countries participating in this happy situation voluntarily followed a set of rules governing domestic and international trade and finance for automatic and continuous adjustment to changing economic reality, then provided by the gold standard.

It was during this enlightened period that philosopher George Santayana wrote: “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Hedge fund manager and Brookings Director Liaquat Ahamed set out to remind us why countries failed to recapture this economic dynamism after the Great War with the publication of the Pulitzer Prize winning Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World in 2009. This book took on greater significance when in 2010 Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke recommended only this historical account in response to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s request for a book reference explaining the 2008 financial crisis. What history had this most recent financial crisis already repeated and what was Chairman Bernanke determined to avoid repeating in the aftermath?

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