by exPF

Cynicuseconomicus is a UK-centered economics blog, which develops a clear if somewhat pessimistic perspective on the state of the UK and US economies. Its most enjoyable facet is the clear discussion of the technical realities of the current economic situation - interesting to someone who wants to gain an understanding without an advanced economics degree. Things are explained felicitously.

The links on the left hand margin of the blog allow for an easy sequential reading of the past analytical work done on the blog, and one is quickly brought up to speed.

One of the recent revelations posted on Cynicus was the fact that the Bank of England’s policy of “Quantitative Easing” - in fact simply means the creation of money from nothing.  Thus being analogous to the printing of money undertaken by Zimbabwe, or Weimar Germany. He indicates on the blog that Britain is bankrupt and they are basically creating money from nuffin’ in order to finance - well, the status quo, basically.

George Pitcher is Religion Editor of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph. He was ordained priest in the Church of England in 2006 and is Curate at St Bride’s, Fleet Street, in London – the “journalists’ church”.

So says the blurb on the Rev George Pitcher’s Telegraph blog.  It does not mention that George is the most open-minded journalist in the history of the known universe.  Just read the comments to his piece published today and titled Why Auschwitz needs to become history.

If every mainstream journalist was as accomodating and open to ideas as this chap we would have knocked the Establishment over years ago.  I wonder when his bosses are going to correct this, of course, completely unacceptable situation.

India Times reports that:

‘CEO and founder of popular site LinkedIn Reid Hoffman urged the US Congress and the Obama Administration to remove the cap on H-1B visas, which enable foreign nationals to live and work in the United States. LinkedIn is a popular business-oriented social networking site.’

‘“Remove the cap on H-1B visas and impose a 10 per cent payroll tax beyond the benchmark salary for each visa,” Hoffman wrote in an article “Stimulus 2.0: It’s the Startups, Stupid” in TechCrunch, a publication of The Washington Post. A day earlier in another article in The Washington Post, Hoffman made a similar argument for the next phase of stimulus policies.’

‘Observing that the US is a country founded on immigration, Hoffman said, “We should welcome the best and the brightest as our own. Abolish the H-1B cap, and give me an economic reason for preferring local. I’ll only do foreign if I need to.” ‘

You know I remember when they first ballooned the H-1b visa program in the late 90’s there were all these IT luminaries like Tim O’Reilly and Bill Gates saying stuff like each H-1b visa issued would generate 5 jobs.

How’d that theory work out, anyway?

Yeah, I know…. “It would have been so much worse without them…”

British MR readers may know that Peter Hitchens has been dishing it out lately to the BNP, posting on his blog on 24th February, 25th February and 3rd March.  The three posts have attracted 544 comments thus far, the great proponderance from BNP supporters.

Hitchens’ second post was less temperate than his first, and the third less temperate again.  That one was titled, charmingly, “A message to the mug punters, other dupes and self-indulgent fantasists fooled by the BNP - please stop trying to bore me into submission”.  This fully merited a response.

Hitchens has dallied with bits and pieces of truth all his journalistic life.  But he has some serious stopping points in his mentation and he cannot or will not venture beyond them.  Three in particular sing out of those latest postings on the BNP.  One is a stubborn identification of the party leadership as “forever Nazis”.  Another is the irreproachable virtue of the Jews (his mother, a suicide, was part-Jewish).  The third, with which I commence the following response, is the overt expression of racial interests in politics - he really hates that word “blood”.

The response I’ve written is not as eloquent nor as comprehensive as I would have wished.  The Daily Mail has an unstated character limit, and I wound up having to prune the original quite a bit to get it to post.  Anyhow, whilst one acknowledges the extreme unlikelihood of Peter furnishing us with a reply, it would be very good to see him explain his position from an ethical perspective ... or attack ours.

Here we are ...

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by exPF

Note: this is a response to Skeptical’s comment in A religious image:

To wantonly cast aside so many centuries of European Man’s development simply because Christianity has a remote, Jewish origin is nothing short of narcissism. The barbaric ideal is just another romantic fiction that creates more problems than it can solve.

I’m going to give this particular quote a long response. This will ultimately be a restatement of previous arguments in favor of ‘cultural pessimism’. It is a view that I have consistently advocated on this blog, which amounts to essentialism relating to blood in spite of varying levels of civilizational advancement and the ups and downs of prosperity, learning, culture, etc.

The development of European man’s civilization is not the same as the development of European man.

I refuse as too simplistic the notion that European man has ‘developed’ into some kind of higher, superior form viz-a-vis his former self. Advantages - spiritual, physical, mental - which accrue to us a result of our historical development, are not the same as essential traits which become part of our nature through natural selection.

I have always been skeptical of using metrics of civilizational development in assessing the viability of a race or nation. This is because most of these metrics are based on refinements in memes, and work done by the upper 1% of thinkers and scarcely understood by the rest - mostly they are refinements of mental modules and toolsets which, grand as they might be, are ultimately phenotypic rather than genotypic. The wealth of accumulated cultural inheritance has grown so great that it leads us to continuous hubristic over-evaluation of our own merits and abilities both as individuals and as nations.

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By David Hamilton

New-born babies are now tested for tuberculosis in UK hospitals. TB was the biggest killer in this country during the 19th century. It had nearly been eradicated. But Third World immigrants have brought it back.

The first duty of Government is to protect the population. But for sixty years successive governments have been neglecting this responsibility and exposing innocent members of the public to deadly diseases.  They should have reversed the idea and not allowed immigrants into the country without proper health checks - all should have been screened for TB.

The Daily Mail of 5th July 2001 described Newham, London as TB capital of the West.  It had 108 cases per 100,000 people which over twice that of India, where there are 41 cases per 100,000, and more than Russia, where there are 91 cases. On an average day, seven people in London show the first symptoms of TB - a persistent cough, chest pains and sweats.

In English Witness P Scrivener categorised stories of imported diseases under Genocide.  Conservative writer and former prison psychiatrist Dr. Anthony Daniels in the Daily Mail 10th May 2001:-

One obvious explanation (of the increase in TB in the Western world) makes officials uneasy that there has been a virtual conspiracy of silence about it. The explanation is the vast population movement from areas of high prevalence of the disease such as Africa and Asia, to areas of much lower prevalence, such as Western Europe and North America.”

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by exPF

It seems that one essential feature influencing the fate of a culture is the canon of stories which it uses to entertain young children. I had previously thought of morality as being the result of dictated principles, when a commentator on this website suggested that morality is also determined largely by story-telling. I think that that is an astute observation - morality plays and stories with moral messages seem to be important.

It also strikes me to what extent children’s minds, say up to the age of 8, are basically marinated in non-stop storytelling. In our capacity as adults we might tend to view storytelling principally as a vehicle for different skills and concepts: the ability to identify numbers, colors, ability to read, or lessons about the animal kingdom. These are things that children typically absorb up to the age of 5. While we may view the stories as a vehicle, children seem to view them as an end in itself. I think children take great delight in storytelling.

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Our sturdy Danish colleague Balder has posted what he calls “a tribute” to Kevin MacDonald’s Occidental Observer piece from 29th January, The Global Anti-Semitism Report: The organized Jewish community opposes free speech.  Balder’s piece is titled Strange bedfellows - Protests against the Durban II conference.  He has circularised me with it, and I am pleased to post it in full below.

GW

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Censorship promotors behind the Durban II protests

On April 20-24, 2009, in Geneva, Switzerland, the United Nations will host the “Durban Review Conference,” – a follow-up to the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance (WCAR).

The debate goes on whether we should participate in this conference or not

The allegation is that Islamic countries, that apparently form a majority in this UN forum, are trying to use the conference to promote banning criticism of religion, especially Islam. Another concern from many parties, is that it will be used to one sided criticize the policies of the state of Israel.

Many voices, not least from the side of anti-immigrationalists, and adversaries of islamization, are speaking for a boycott of this conference.

This is a rather unique development.

Tens, if not hundreds of such conferences have been held the later years, not least under the auspices of the European Union. Never before have these conferences drawn anywhere near as much criticism, although they all basically have the same aim: restricting freedom of speech in order to silence anti-immigration, traditionalist, Christian, and nationalist voices.

In the context of the European Union such conferences have resulted, in amongst other things, the passing of new laws, most notably the: Council Framework Decision on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law (PDF), which if fully implemented, will be the end of free speech as we still know it in Denmark.

Together with the similarly vicious European Arrest Warrant, we are one step closer to complete dictatorship and loss of traditional civil rights.

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