CNBC: 'Dead wrong' on Iraq; little known about today's enemies

WASHINGTON - In a scathing report released Thursday, President Bush’s commission on weapons of mass destruction found that America’s spy agencies were “dead wrong” in most of their judgments about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.

The commission was also highly critical of U.S. abilities to assess what existing adversaries have, stating that the United States knows “disturbingly little” about their weapons programs.
On Saddam, the commission stated that “we conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure".

The main cause, the commission said, was the intelligence community’s “inability to collect good information about Iraq’s WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions rather than good evidence. “On a matter of this importance, we simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude,” the report said.

Nota: Mas o problema principal é que um conjunto simples de reflexões indicava precisamente para esta falha de pressupostos, quer no que respeita ao

- suposto perigo militar (já tinham sido derrotados em meia dúzia de dias no Golfo I e depois de 10 anos de sanções com graves repercussões para os civis...),

- às supostas ligações à AlQaeda (os Estados, nenhum Estado "gosta" de terroristas por causa do seu potencial subversivo, para além disso, o ditador mais secular e a personagem mais fundamentalista dificilmente iriam cooperar),

- às expectativas de serem recebidos com "flores" (como já disse, a única razão porque a stuação é ainda assim controlável é porque os xiitas e Kurdos viram na ocupação e na democracia uma via para as suas pretensões).

Agora, Paul Wolfitz já no fim da guerra fria e da queda pacífica do muro, numa para-comissão especial criada na CIA, também se enganou redondamente ao falar que a URSS estava mais perto do que sempre, da sua força e perigo máximo para o "mundo livre".

Que o fim dos tempos não tenha ocorrido só o podemos agradecer a Ronald Reagan e Margaret Tatcher.

O problema perturbante neste caso extremo parece-me ser o facto de existirem pessoas que estão dispostas (os pais e terceiros) a financiar e cuidar dos meios necessários para manter viva "Terry Shiavo" e serem impedidos disso por uma decisão judicial que favorece um marido que não está disposto a fazê-lo. E depois, aparentemente existem considerações que podem ser tecidas, sobre o marido " decisor legal" neste assunto (entretanto com outra relação e dois fiilhos):

"I stand by my earlier comment that the "husband" is a very shady character. He invoked recovered memory syndrome seven years after Terri was hospitalized to say that, when they were newlyweds, she told him to kill her off if she became incapacitated. He got a $700,000 insurance settlement, bought himself two Mercedes and some other goodies, and did not spend one cent on rehabilitation for his wife despite the advice of nurses and doctors that it could help" Via LRCBlog.

"(...) There is a critical difference between a republic and a democracy, Williams notes, citing our second president: “John Adams captured the essence of that difference when he said: ‘You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.’ Nothing in our Constitution suggests that government is a grantor of rights. Instead, government is a protector of rights.”

The Founders deeply distrusted democracy. Williams cites Adams again: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Chief Justice John Marshall seconded Adams’s motion: “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.” “When the Constitution was framed,” wrote historian Charles Beard, “no respectable person called himself or herself a democrat.”

Democracy-worship suggests a childlike belief in the wisdom and goodness of “the people.” But the people supported the guillotine in the French Revolution and Napoleon. The people were wild with joy as the British, French, and German boys marched off in August 1914 to the Great War. The people supported Hitler and the Nuremburg Laws.

Our Founding Fathers no more trusted in the people always to do the right thing than they trusted in kings. In the republic they created, the House of Representatives, the people’s house, was severely restricted in its powers by a Bill of Rights and checked by a Senate whose members were to be chosen by the states, by a president with veto power, and by a Supreme Court.

“What kind of government do we have?” the lady asked Benjamin Franklin, as he emerged from the Constitutional Convention. Said Franklin, “A republic—if you can keep it.”

Let us restore that republic. As Jefferson said, “Hear no more of trust in men, but rather bind them down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution.” The American Conservative, Patrick J. Buchanan

1) Descida de preços não é deflação

A descida de preços causada pelo aumento da produção/produtividade não deve ser denominada de "deflação" e não causa nenhum problema económico.

"...falling prices caused by increases in production and supply are not deflation. Such falling prices are not deflation, because they result neither in a reduction in the average nominal rate of profit on capital in the economic system nor in any generally greater difficulty in repaying debts, which are two essential symptoms of any genuine deflation.

(...)The fall in prices that accompanies it is theresult of the increase in production and supply exceeding this increase in thequantity of money and volume of spending."

"Such falling prices occurred in the United States in the generation prior to the discovery of the California gold fields in 1848, and again in the generation following 1873. Because of the fall in prices in these two generations, prices inthe United States are estimated to have fallen by half over the nineteenth century as a whole. The fall in prices, of course, would probably be significantlymore pronounced under a 100-percent-reserve gold standard."

Quando os preços baixam por efeito do aumento da produtividade, (imaginemos uma economia com quantidade monetária fixa e em sistema de 100% de reservas e uma descida de preços num determinado produto por efeito de inovação tecnológica) significa que sobram unidades monetárias para serem aplicadas entre maior consumo (do mesmo produto ou outros produtos) e maior investimento (=poupança) para fazer face ao aumento da procura do mesmo produto ou novos produtos. A descida de preços representa assim a libertação de recursos para maior investimento (=poupança) e consumo e "production creates its own demand"

Por último, a descida de preços numa economia com quantidade fixa de dinheiro não dificulta os devedores porque no limite as vendas totais nominais são constantes (representam é maior quantidade de bens) assim como a sua capacidade de sustentar determinado serviço de dívida nominal.

2) Deflação

Ocorre quando assistimos à contração monetária só possível no actual sistema em que o crédito ao investimento está suportado em parte no crescimento da massa monetária e não por poupança real.

Resulta assim, que a contrapartida dos depósitos à ordem - são os créditos concedidos às empresas (e deixaram de representar a posse de uma determinada quantidade de ouro colocado à guarda/depósito) o que potencialmente levanta a possibilidade da massa monetária poder contrair por "default" (neste caso, o que é de esperar dos Bancos Centrais é a emissão de toda e qualquer quantidade monetária necessária, ou seja inflação monetária, para faze face à insolvência dos depósitos).

A principal causa para os ciclos económicos é um sistema monetário que para seu proveito (e do financiamento do déficit do Estado quando a sua dívida pública acaba nos Bancos Centrais), tem a capacidade de conceder crédito por emissão monetária e não pela captação de poupança (abstenção de consumo materializada na acumulação de valores monetários disponíveis para serem voluntáriamente emprestados a troco de um juro ou dividendos/ganhos), o que se reflecte numa taxa de juro abaixo da taxa natural, criando a ilusão de sustentabilidade dos investimentos realizados.

"Such deflation, as I have said, is a decrease in the quantity of money and/orvolume of spending in the economic system. That is what produces not only afall in prices but at the same time a sharp reduction or even total wiping out ofbusiness profitability and a greatly increased difficulty of repaying debts andthus widespread insolvencies and bankruptcies.

Profits are cut because the monetary contraction reduces sales revenuesimmediately, but aggregate costs, specifically aggregate depreciation cost andaggregate cost of goods sold, fall only with a time lag in response to thereduction in business firms’ expenditures for the factors of production.14At the same time, the monetary contraction increases the difficulty ofrepaying debt, simply because there is less money out there to earn."

3) 100% Padrão Ouro

"There are two basic reasons why the 100-percent-reserve gold standard wouldbe a guarantee against deflation.

First, under a 100-percent-reserve goldstandard, nothing could happen that would suddenly reduce the quantity of money in the economic system. Once gold money comes into existence, it stays inexistence. It is not wiped out by the failure of debtors, as are fiduciary media.

Second, nothing could happen that would suddenly increase the need or desire ofpeople to hold money rather than spend it, because none of the artificial inducementsto a lower demand for money for holding would exist that set the stage forsuch an increase.

It must be recalled that what creates the potential for a suddenincrease in the need and desire to hold money is that first, people are misled intoexperiencing an artificial decrease in their need and desire to hold money. All theinducements that mislead them into this decrease are caused by the prior undueincrease in the quantity of money, especially in the form of credit expansion.

A100-percent-reserve gold standard would thus be a system in which the quantityof money would not decrease and the demand for money for holdingwould not suddenly increase. As a result, it would be a system in which totalspending in the economy would virtually never contract. Thus . . . it would bea system that was deflation proof as well as inflation proof."

THE GOAL OF MONETARY REFORM - George Reisman

"We conclude with the observation that there has been far too much concentration on the form, the type of taxation, and not enough on its total amount. The result has been endless tinkering with kinds of taxes, coupled with neglect of a far more critical question: how muchof the social product should be siphoned away from the producers? Or, how much income should be retained by the producers and how much income and resources coercively diverted for the benefit of non-producers?

(...) Even more egregious was an early doctrine of another group of supposed free-market advocates, the supply-siders. In their original Laffer-curve manifestation, now happily consigned to the dustbin of history, the supply-siders maintained that the tax rate that maximizes tax revenue is the "voluntary" rate, and a rate that should be diligently pursued. It was never pointed out in what sense such a tax rate is "voluntary," or what in the world the concept of "voluntary" has to do with taxation in the first place. Much less did the supply-siders in their Lafferite form ever instruct us why we must all uphold inaximizing government revenue as our beau ideal. Surely, for free-market proponents, one might think that minimizing government depredation of the private product would be a bit more appealing" The Consumption Tax: A Critique By Murray N. Rothbard

"Three books of Hayek’s in particular deserve great praise in this connection: Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle, Prices and Production, and Monetary Nationalism. It is probably fair to say that this early work of Hayek’s is his least well-known work. Far better known (and far more dubious) are his later (post World War II) lucubrations in the field of political philosophy. The more important, then, is it to emphasize that Hayek’s 1974 Nobel Prize was not awarded for his later, better-known work, but in explicit recognition of his early contributions to the so-called Mises-Hayek business cycle theory. Given this, Hayek’s Nobel Prize was certainly well deserved.

Incidentally, among Austrian economists there has been some speculation why Hayek’s recognition came so late (in 1974). One highly plausible explanation is this: If the prize is awarded for the development of the Mises-Hayek business cycle, then as long as both Mises and Hayek are still alive you can hardly give the prize to Hayek without giving it also to Mises. Yet Mises was a life-long opponent of paper money (and a proponent of the classical gold standard) and of government central banking—and the prize money for the economics “Nobel” was “donated” by the Swedish National Bank. Mises, then, so to speak, was persona non grata for the “donors.” Only after Mises had died in 1973, then, was the way free to give the prize to Hayek, who, in contrast to his “intransigent” master and mentor, had shown himself sufficiently willing to compromise, “flexible,” and “reasonable." Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Interviewed by Mateusz Machaj

"Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have." Davy Crockett

"(...) John Maynard Keynes in 1936 proposed a counter-depressionary program of large government deficits. Heargued that rich people were saving far too much money. They were building up monetary assets. They were notspending enough money to create opportunities forinvestment and expansion.

So, he concluded, the government ought to borrow moneyfrom these people and start spending. It did not matterwhat the government spends money for, he said. Anythingwill do. Even pyramids.

Ancient Egypt was doubly fortunate, and doubtless owed to this its fabled wealth, in that it possessed two activities, namely, pyramid-building as well as the search for precious metals, the fruits of which, since they could not serve the needs of many by being consumed, did not stale with abundance. The Middle Ages built cathedrals and sang dirges. Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York. ("General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money," p. 131)

He was a defender of make-work projects. As children, teachers assigned us busy work to keep us occupied. Eventually, we caught on: the work was not meaningful. Itwas wasting our time. Keynes advised the governments ofhis era to imitate our teachers.

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again. (Ibid., p. 129)

What Keynes and his followers ignored is the fact thatcapital investment is driven by the hope of future income,and future income depends on future sales. Sellers don'tplan to give away their future output. They plan to sellit to consumers.

But how will consumers buy this output? With money. But where will they obtain this money? In one of fourways: exchanging their productive assets, including theirlabor, for money; borrowing money; stealing money; orprinting money.

Keynes proposed to add to the monetary reserves of consumers by having the government borrow and then spend the money any old way. To this income stream would beadded whatever money the government could extract by taxes: theft by majority vote. His disciples added counterfeiting, also known as counter-cyclical central bank monetary policy.

The consumer would supply the rest of the moneythrough his labor. What is the free market's solution to recessions? Price competition (to clear the market) and thrift (to expand productivity). Why thrift? To provide tools for workers, i.e., to increase their productivity. Their increasing level of output will then provide them with thepurchasing power they will need to increase spending.

The free market's answer to the Great Depression wa sthrift: the purchase of assets, including corporate debt.

Keynes's answer to the Great Depression was thrift: thepurchase of government debt. What did it matter which agency served as the pipelineof money from rich savers to employees?

It mattered agreat deal. Capital produces output. Government debt\produces dependency: dependency of income recipients on thestate and dependency of the state on taxpayers.

(...) The Keynesian theory taught that in recessions,governments would run deficits. In boom times, they wouldrun surpluses. In the long run, deficits and surpluseswould balance out. There would be no piling up of debt.

We know how that theory has worked out. The Federal government has run huge deficits during recessions andmerely large deficits during boom times. It has runofficial surpluses only by siphoning enough money out ofthe officially off-budget Social Security Trust Fund to cover up the red ink in the on-budget deficit.

Under the guidance of Keynesian economists andpoliticians, the Federal government never experiences a surplus. The debt national debt keeps growing.

(...) So, in boom times they reduce the percentage of their income devoted tothrift, and in bad times, they borrow more and save evenless. Keynes' solution to national economic recession was more thrift by the rich, more spending by the government,and more spending by the common people.

When does government debt get paid off? Never. When does consumer debt get paid off? Never." Gary North

"Built on the postmodern, postnational, post-religious, post-logical, welfare-state legacy of the mass-murderous 20th century, the Brussels Leviathan is basically a rebirth of the Soviet Union, dressed in velvet(...). What few understand is that the Balkans' present is the EU's future. Seeking to outrun entropy, the Leviathan will eventually run out of people, welfare money, or both. And when that happens, there may well be a Succession War on a continental scale that would easily dwarf the 1990s tragedy in the former Yugoslavia. One peek behind the curtain of false prosperity – no more than the legacy of a once-powerful civilization now dying – would make it obvious that the difference between Balkans kleptocrats and the Brussels Eurocrats is not one of principle, but of scale." Eastern Empire Rising? EU Back in the Balkans, by Nebojsa Malic

Para reforçar o que aqui disse, "JCE diz que "Gertrude Himmerfarb sugeriu recentemente que esta ideia de um poder central unitário, intérprete infalível da razão contra os interessses particulares dos indivíduos e das instituições particulares, permeia todo o pensamento francês do século xviii"...e acaba mais À frente com "...porque são os povos de lingua inglesa os primeiros a levantar-se em defesa...".

Eu observo apenas que da cultura francesa saiu muito do pensamento liberal clássico e também da produção de teoria económica, muita dela, antecedente da Escola Austriaca (que corrigiu alguns rumos da teoria económica clássica com origem inglesa)."

Fica a chamada de atenção para Remembering Gustave de Molinari, no Mises Institute:

"March 3 marks the 185th anniversary of economist and philosopher Gustave de Molinari's birth in Belgium. It is a date worth commemorating, because according to David Hart, "He was the leading representative of the laissez-faire school of classical liberalism in France in the second half of the 19th century."

Onde estão expostas algumas citações:

"Government must confine itself to the naturally collective functions of providing external and internal security."

"Society is heavily taxed in the increased costs which follow government appropriation of products and services naturally belonging to the sphere of private enterprise."

"Citizens of constitutional States have obtained a right of consent to public expenditure, and to the taxes which furnish it, but the right has proved sterile. Their representatives have never checked the progressive rise in taxation and expenditure which has occurred in every State…And this process must continue indefinitely for just so long as governments, charged with guaranteeing national security, maintain their right of unlimited requisition upon the life, liberty, and property of the individual."

"[Individual sovereignty] is the right of each man to dispose freely of his person and his property and to govern himself."

"A natural instinct reveals to these men that their persons, the land they occupy and cultivate, the fruits of their labor, are their property, and that no one, except themselves, has the right to dispose of or touch this property."

"…when the sphere of collective government has been reduced to its natural limits, and individual action has obtained perfect freedom, the influence of individuals upon the destinies of society and the race will rapidly increase."

"(...) When we Americans think of revolution, we think of the Spirit of '76 and the republic that came out of our War of Independence. But when Louis XVI was dethroned in 1789, that revolution gave us the guillotine, the Terror, and the Napoleonic wars. When kings depart, democracy is not always at hand.

What is critical in a revolution is the character of the men who make it. When the czar abdicated, a democratic socialist took power, but a weak Alexander Kerensky was soon run out of the Winter Palace by Bolsheviks. After World War II, there came the Chinese and Cuban revolutions that looked to the Russian as the model. As did Pol Pot's revolution in Cambodia, which came out of an earlier American intervention.

In the Middle East, rebellions and revolutions do not have Hollywood endings. In 1952, King Farouk of Egypt was ousted in a colonels' coup from which the dictator Nasser emerged. In 1958, King Feisal of Iraq was overthrown, his body dragged through the streets of Baghdad. Saddam came out of the pile. In 1968, King Idris was overthrown. Enter Ghadafi. In 1974, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was ousted by Col. Mengistu. A million perished. In 1979, the shah fell to a revolution that butchered all remnants of his pro-American government.
It is this history that causes one to smile at the giddiness of neocons who see events in Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon as vindication and harbingers of two, three, many "Prague springs" sweeping the Islamic world. (...)

Though from the look of that Beirut crowd of 500,000, roaring for Sheik Nasrallah of Hezbollah, it may be premature to call this democracy. A day after that monster rally in a land of 4 million, the pro-Syrian prime minister, ousted after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, was voted back into office by parliament, an in-your-face defiance of America and "the international community."

Rather than democracy, revolution may be on the march. If the May elections in Lebanon are free, Hezbollah could move closer to power. While that might constitute pure democracy, is it something we Americans should applaud, subsidize, or fight for?

In elections thus far in the Middle East, the returns have been mixed. In Iraq, Kurds voted for autonomy now, independence later. Shias voted as Ayatollah Sistani told them. Whether the new regime will be pro-Iranian, we know not. It will surely be less pro-American than the ousted Alawi regime. But the cost of a Shi'ite government in Iraq is already known: 1,500 U.S. dead, 10,000 U.S. wounded, 200 billion U.S. dollars gone." Patrick J. Buchanan

"(...) He was talking about the great betrayal at the end of World War I.The Arabs had been promised an independent country if they fought the Turks. It was a lie. The British and French negotiated a secret agreement that divided up the Middle East between them. France got Syria and, by chopping off the mountainous, coastal region, created Lebanon, just as the British created Jordan by severing Palestine east of the Jordan River.

Saladin was a Kurd, born in Tikrit, where Saddam Hussein was born. Saladin whipped the Crusaders and drove them out of Jerusalem.

The point of this story is that nothing is as simple in the Middle East as it appears to be to the president and his neoconservative ideologues. Lebanon remains part of Syria in the minds of many Syrians and, indeed, in the minds of some Lebanese. It's no big deal for France to join the United States in calling for a Syrian withdrawal. France is not popular in either Syria or Lebanon. The president of Syria has taken no public notice of the president's demands. He is not, as it has been erroneously reported in some outlets at this writing, withdrawing the troops from Lebanon. He is redeploying them along the border – on the Lebanese side.(...)

But even if Syria decides to withdraw, that won't end Syrian influence. Lebanon has many factions. There are the Druze, the Maronite Christians, the Eastern Orthodox Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims and Palestinian refugees. They were embroiled in a terrible civil war in the 1970s, and it was the Syrians, invited in, who finally brought it to a halt.

(...) The latest administration talking point that is worming its way into what is fondly called the news media is that democracy is breaking out all over the Middle East. The people in the Middle East have been having elections for decades. The president conveniently forgot that Yasser Arafat was elected in a free and fair election. The trouble is, the results of elections don't last very long. There is no reason to believe the Iraqi elections will be any different. The Middle East is full of ruins left by past superpowers. As a Palestinian friend of mine likes to say, pointing to those ruins: "They are all gone. We are still here." Charley Reese

"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." – James Madison

Harry Brown (libertarian) enfrenta as criticas ao seu artigo (e como é dificil temperar os excessos de entusiasmo pela "liberation" e a "revolution" dos outros...aqui como na Ucrania (onde os "oprimidos" votaram em 44% pelo outro candidato)...:

"My article "The Syrian Hoax" – on the Syrian-Lebanese situation – has provoked more criticism than any article I've published in a long time.

Some of the responses have been of the scholarly variety . . . "You are an absolute idiot. With reporters like you we don’t need any other enemies." , "Keep pushing the liberal propaganda on us Harry. You are good at it. We know at least 50 percent of the American public are clueless. Just like you. Now if we can convert the rest of us to sniveling cowards like you, we'll be in real good shape for the future."

It's obvious from what they say that these people know much more about the Syrian situation than I do. It's quite cruel that they don't pass on to me any of their superior knowledge. They hinted that they know things I don’t know, but they refuse to tell me what those things are.

Syrian Occupiers & American Occupiers

I pointed out in my article that the 13,000 Syrians "occupying" Lebanon are nothing compared to the 150,000 American troops in Iraq – and yet George Bush is demanding an immediate withdrawal of all 13,000 Syrians. (Yes, I know that Bush isn't the only "world leader" calling for Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon, but he's the only one making a lot of noise about it.) Someone wrote to tell me that there is no comparison between the Syrian and American occupiers: The difference is that Syria has no interest whatsoever in promoting freedom for the Lebanese, whereas the US has allowed open protests, free speech, and a landmark vote involving dozens of political parties. The Syrians have turned Lebanon into a complete client state.

But Zvi Bar'el has pointed out in the Israeli publication Haaretz: Just to calm those who note the "historic moments" in the Middle East, Lebanon is the freest country in the region. Its parliament has real power and its newspapers and electronic media demarcated the boundaries of freedom of expression before Al Jazeera did so. Anti-establishment satire has existed there for a long time and its citizens, even more than the citizens of Turkey, regard themselves as more Western than Arab.

In fact, if the Syrians won't let the Lebanese express themselves, why are the American media making such a big thing out of a few thousand people holding rallies in Martyrs Square, rooting for the Syrians to leave Lebanon.

We've all read about such demonstrations and seen them on television. From the media, we could easily draw the impression that there isn't a single Lebanese who doesn't want the Syrians out of Lebanon by High Noon. But it might help to add some perspective if the media just as ardently covered the pro-Syrian demonstrations – which, in fact, are considerably larger than the anti-Syrian rallies. As with the anti-Syrian demonstrations, some of the participants have been urged to join the demonstrations by various organizations and some are everyday people who want to express their opinions.

And as to the idea that the Iraqi people under American occupation are much freer than the Lebanese, please take a closer look at the police state the American military has established in Iraq.

Not Much Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing

Syria is not my idea of a nice country. But it's also not a threat to anyone – not even to the Lebanese. Few Americans understand the long relationship between Syria and Lebanon – a relationship that began way before George W. Bush was born.

But neither reality nor history mean anything to George Bush or to the sycophants who are willing to follow him down the barrel of a cannon. As the Israeli writer Uri Avnery has pointed out, "George Bush, the (not-so-)Quiet American, runs around the world hawking his patent medicines, 'freedom' and 'democracy,' in total ignorance of hundreds of years of history." Avnery's article "The Next Crusades" is an excellent summary of U.S. and Israeli meddling in the Middle East.(...)

P.S. One correction: In my previous article I said "Syrian troops first invaded Lebanon at the time of the Gulf War." This was wrong on two counts. The Syrian troops were invited in by the Lebanese government, and that was in the mid-1970s. Several readers noticed my carelessness, and I'm grateful for the correction. March 11, 2005"

" (...) does feminism preach, as it has for decades, that there is no difference whatever (except the famed le petit difference) between the two sexes, that their capacities, traits, etc. are all equal, "(...) the same, or are they saying, as feminists have recently taken to arguing, that women are very different, that they are nurturing, caring, etc., and therefore superior to men? And how can they say both at the same time, or have it both ways?

These are cogent questions, but they have not penetrated to the heart of the feminist agenda. Here is how these seemingly embarrassing contradictions and double standards can be resolved: men are the evil, victimizer sex; women are the good, victimized sex. The two genders are ineluctable enemies. Therefore, all tactics and strategies are permissible and valuable if they result in the victory of women over the Male Enemy. Hence, attack one-sex colleges if they are male, proclaim their greatness if they are female. If you are talking about qualities such as career advancement, intelligence, success, proclaim women as exactly man's equal and denounce as "sexist" any intimation to the contrary; but if you are talking about such good things as nurturing, peace, etc., proclaim women's innate superiority. Don't worry about such "objective" qualities as fairness, logic, truth, or non-contradiction; remember, all's fair in hate and war" The Irrepressible Rothbard

1) Haaretz: End the occupation - but only in Lebanon

"(...)Just to calm those who note the "historic moments" in the Middle East, Lebanon is the freest country in the region. Its parliament has real power and its newspapers and electronic media demarcated the boundaries of freedom of expression before Al Jazeera did so. Anti-establishment satire has existed there for a long time and its citizens, even more than the citizens of Turkey, regard themselves as more Western than Arab.

But this is not the main point. Three occupying countries remain in the Middle East: Syria, Israel and the United States. The two Western occupiers are now demanding that the Arab occupying state desist from occupying. In its honor, they pushed for the Syria Accountability Act - legislation enabling sanctions to be applied, and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559.

The status of this resolution is no different than that of resolutions 242 and 338, which call for Israel to withdraw from the territories it conquered. Israel countered these resolutions with a legalistic argument, claiming it was not a case of occupation, but rather of liberation - or at most, a case of administered territories. That is, a deposit. Syria has a literary argument similar to that of Israel: the government of Lebanon invited it into the country. And the United States, of course, came to Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction. But without any such weaponry, it will make due with establishing democracy.(...)

It may suddenly dawn on Israel that the weakening of Syria's control in Lebanon enhances the power of the more dangerous enemy, Hezbollah.(...)"

2) So What’s Doing in Syria & the Rest of the Middle East?, Harry Browne

1. There are 13,000 Syrian troops in Lebanon. (...)

Sirios (embaixador) : Actually, if anyone with a sense of fairness would look at the history of our presence in Lebanon, you could easily tell that we had 42,000 troops in Lebanon 10 years ago, and we started a series of withdrawals and redeployments. Today, we have only 13,000 troops, and they — all of them are outside major Lebanese cities. So we have done this in the past, and we have explicitly said that we will continue doing this. . . . And we have repeatedly said on the record in the past three years, not because of this pressure now, the moment the Lebanese government will ask us to leave, we will leave. And we are leaving, absolutely.

2. The Syrian troops in Lebanon are all in the countryside — ready to help restore order if needed, but generally out of sight of the Lebanese people. The American troops in Iraq are all over the place — killing insurgents and civilians alike while devastating cities like Fallujah.

3. There are no reports of Lebanese insurgents fighting the Syrian troops, while there are daily clashes between Iraqi insurgents and American troops.

4. As Pat Buchanan has pointed out, it would make no sense for the Syrians to have assassinated the Lebanese ex-Prime Minister — since they had to know that they would automatically become the #1 suspect and bring the wrath of Bush down upon their heads.

5. Syrian troops first invaded Lebanon at the time of the Gulf War. And while Syria was overrunning Lebanon, President George H.W. Bush was proudly listing Syria as a member of the coalition of nations fighting Saddam Hussein.

6. The Bush administration, as usual, won’t negotiate anything with anyone. The Bushies prefer to make accusations in the media, assert that they have evidence that no one ever gets to see, and incite Americans to hate another nation of human beings.

(...)8. The TV pictures of a Lebanese crowd celebrating the fall of the pro-Syrian Lebanese government no more demonstrate the attitudes of all Lebanese than do the TV pictures of U.S. pro-abortion rallies demonstrate that all Americans (or even a majority) are in favor of abortions.

9. Despite the State Department’s human rights report of torture and other ghastly conditions inside Syria, the U.S. government has sent some of its "War on Terror" prisoners to Syria for interrogation — and, presumably, torture. And not one American politician is embarrassed by the contradiction."

"(...) Libertarian societies in all their variety would not be utopias, of course. Libertarianism does not propose an end to evil or even to coercion, but only the flourishing of civilization in the absence of institutionalized coercion. Crime would not disappear, poor taste would still exist, and even conservative communities would remain beset with imperfection. Removing the privileges of the state would make these evils smaller, less centralized, and more manageable, however. This picture is no abstraction or economic construct; it arises from the practice of actual institutions.

The record of civil society and the free market is as old as the human race. The libertarian idea of society would hold true even if a degree of coercion were absolutely necessary and ineradicable: the more authority residing in civil society rather than the state, the better. But there are at least a few prima facie considerations that lend weight to so-called radical libertarianism.

The most widely agreed upon of all so-called public goods, national defense, is not what it seems. The mightiest military on earth failed to prevent the atrocity on 9/11. On the contrary, U.S. interference in the Middle East and support for thuggish regimes has endangered Americans. Is a country ripe for invasion without a standing army? The last 200-odd years have shown many instances, including our own Revolutionary War, where guerrilla forces have been more effective than regular armies. Nor is there any need for conscription when people want to defend their homes; conscription is what states need to make people fight for causes in which they don’t believe.

A libertarian order is not coming any time soon, but it should be plain to anyone who undertakes the investigation that the solution to war, bureaucracy, taxation, personal irresponsibility, and the rot of culture is not more government, it’s less."

Earlier in this century, left-liberalism came to Americans preaching the alluring gospel of Liberation from Guilt. Americans, they boldly proclaimed, are repressed, inhibited, guilt-ridden for giving in to their natural desires and impulses. We come to preach you a joyous removal of guilt, hammered into you by repressed ministers and priests. We preach hedonism, the end of guilt, following your desires, and to put it in a common rebarbative phrase of the 1960s Sexual Revolution: "if it moves, fondle it." Sex, furthermore, is "only a drink of water," natural and harmless.

The era of guiltlessness under our left-liberal culture lasted, as I remember, about six months. Now, the entire culture is characterized by massive collective guilt, and if anyone fails to give due public lip-service to a long list of solemnly avowed guilts, he is literally driven from public life. Guilt is everywhere, all-pervasive, and brought to us by the same scoundrels who once promised us easy liberation. A brief rundown: guilt for centuries of slavery, guilt for the oppression and rape of women, guilt for the Holocaust, guilt for the existence of the handicapped, guilt for eating and killing animals, guilt for being fat, guilt for not recycling your garbage, guilt for "desecrating the Earth."

Note that this guilt is never confined to the specific individuals, say, who enslaved or murdered or raped people. (...) Some groups are accorded the status of Official Victims; everyone not in the Victim groups are, therefore, criminals and Official Victimizers. The Victimizers are expected to feel guilty about the victims, and therefore – because there is no point to guilt without a payoff – to pay through the nose in money, privileges, and "empowerment" forever and ever without end. Amen.

There is never a way of getting out from under. And this is what our liberators have brought us. In return for old-fashioned Christianity and guilt about sex, they have brought us a new religion of Victimology and of the Goddess Nature. And even sex, the last bastion of hedonism, is no longer guilt-free; with the onslaught of "sex exploits women," and ravening condomania in the interest of "safe sex," it might be better to scrap the whole thing and go back to Christian guilt. Certainly it would be simpler and more peaceful.

As in all other aspects of our rotten culture, the only way to save the day is to raise the banner high and engage in a frontal and all-out onslaught against the left guilt-inducers. In such an onslaught lies the only hope of taking back our lives and our culture from these malignant pests and tyrants." Murray N. Rothbard

"Yes, our man (Yushchenko) and our system (democracy) won in Ukraine, and once again good triumphed over bad. Yet this presentation, so characteristic of the Western media, misses the point about what the struggle is really about.

If the issue was fair elections, there would have been an equal furore about the grossly rigged elections by which Ilham Aliyev assumed the presidency of Azerbaijan in 2003 from his father, a ruthless KGB hardman in the former Soviet state. In fact the West turned a blind eye, in order to maintain access to Azerbaijan’s oil supplies after a $13 billion contract had been signed with BP in 1998. Equally, there would have been uproar when the pro-Russian Shevardnadze was ousted as President of Georgia in 2003 and the West’s favoured candidate won 96 per cent of the vote to replace him. But nobody raised any complaint.

If the issue was legitimate government, much more attention would have been focused on Yushchenko’s aides and the tenor of his administration. His closest aide, Julia Timoshenko, known as Ukraine’s ‘gas princess’, and now appointed Prime Minister, has been widely accused by both the Russian and Ukrainian authorities of bribery and embezzlement.(...)

What has been at stake in Ukraine is less a fight over democracy than a struggle over the geopolitics of oil and military reach. If Ukraine is absorbed into the Nato orbit, Russia will be deprived of access to its naval bases in the Crimea, and Russian oil and gas exports will be squeezed by a new US straitjacket.

But the significance of the Ukrainian confrontation goes even wider. China remains the sole long-term challenger to US hegemony, and while the Chinese economy has been expanding at a phenomenal rate, its weakness continues to be its energy supply. (...)"

By subsidizing with tax funds (with funds taken from others) people who are poor, more poverty (bad) will be created. By subsidizing people because they are unemployed, more unemployment (bad) will be created. By subsidizing unwed mothers, there will be more unwed mothers and more illegitimate births (bad), etc.

Obviously, this basic insight applies to the entire system of so-called social security that has been implemented in Western Europe (from the 1880s onward) and the U.S. (since the 1930s): of compulsory government "insurance" against old age, illness, occupational injury, unemployment, indigence, etc. In conjunction with the even older compulsory system of public education, these institutions and practices amount to a massive attack on the institution of the family and personal responsibility.

By relieving individuals of the obligation to provide for their own income, health, safety, old age, and children's education, the range and temporal horizon of private provision is reduced, and the value of marriage, family, children, and kinship relations is lowered.

Irresponsibility, shortsightedness, negligence, illness and even destructionism (bads) are promoted, and responsibility, farsightedness, diligence, health and conservatism (goods) are punished.

The compulsory old age insurance system in particular, by which retirees (the old) are subsidized from taxes imposed on current income earners (the young), has systematically weakened the natural intergenerational bond between parents, grandparents, and children.

The old need no longer rely on the assistance of their children if they have made no provision for their own old age; and the young (with typically less accumulated wealth) must support the old (with typically more accumulated wealth) rather than the other way around, as is typical within families.

Consequently, not only do people want to have fewer children—and indeed, birthrates have fallen in half since the onset of modern social security (welfare) policies—but also the respect which the young traditionally accorded to their elders is diminished, and all indicators of family disintegration and malfunctioning, such as rates of divorce, illegitimacy, child abuse, parent abuse, spouse abuse, single parenting, singledom, alternative lifestyles, and abortion, have increased.

(...) Subsidies for the ill, unhealthy and disabled breed illness, disease, and disability and weaken the desire to work for a living and to lead healthy lives. One can do no better than quote the "dead Austrian economist" Ludwig von Mises once more:

being ill is not a phenomenon independent of conscious will. . . . A man's efficiency is not merely a result of his physical condition; it depends largely on his mind and will. . . . The destructionist aspect of accident and health insurance lies above all in the fact that such institutions promote accident and illness, hinder recovery, and very often create, or at any rate intensify and lengthen, the functional disorders which follow illness or accident. . . . To feel healthy is quite different from being healthy in the medical sense. . . . By weakening or completely destroying the will to be well and able to work, social insurance creates illness and inability to work; it produces the habit of complaining—which is in itself a neurosis—and neuroses of other kinds. . . . As a social institution it makes a people sick bodily and mentally or at least helps to multiply, lengthen, and intensify disease. . . . Social insurance has thus made the neurosis of the insured a dangerous public disease. Should the institution be extended and developed the disease will spread. No reform can be of any assistance. We cannot weaken or destroy the will to health without producing illness.4" Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"It is unfortunate, though perhaps inevitable, that people who have lived only in conditions of liberty and democracy should have limited interest in the legal provisions that keep societies free. That much is clear from the public’s response to the Prevention of Terrorism Bill. The past week saw one of the gravest parliamentary debates of modern times, on a measure which would undermine an 800-year-old principle of English law: that no man should face imprisonment without trial. And yet to judge by the opinion polls, most citizens seem to care little about the issues involved. Inasmuch as they have followed the debate at all, it is simply to absorb the glib suggestions of the Prime Minister that the only ‘civil liberty’ which matters is personal protection from a terrorist bomb.(...)

Mercifully, it is unlikely that the average law-abiding citizen will fall foul of the provisions in the Prevention of Terrorism Bill. But that should not blind us to their potential. They are levers of despotism, no matter how worthy the intentions of those ministers who have conceived them. Coming from any government this Bill would be a disgrace. Coming from a government which has so often trumpeted its commitment to human rights, it is also, of course, the height of hypocrisy."

...observou em Democracy in America, "The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; in uniting together they have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the states chooses to withdraw from the compact, it would be difficult to disapprove its right of doing so..."

Lincoln entendeu que não. Os Chineses parece que também não.

"(...) it seems that the growing opposition to the Syrian presence in Lebanon may pose another threat to the stability of the Lebanese economy. According to the Kuwaiti Al Siyasa newspaper, Syrians, including senior officials, have withdrawn recently some US$3.5 billion deposited in Lebanese banks. One bank owner told the newspaper that out of US$10 billion held in Lebanese banks by Syrian officials, senior officers and businessmen, some $3.5 was withdrawn in recent days. According to him, the CBL has ordered not to publish this information in fear that the local economy will collapse."