President Obama has adopted the unsustainable position that he will not negotiate with Congress over spending and the debt ceiling. He is betting he can get Republicans to fold without having to give up anything he wants. That's why we're hearing ridiculous claims from him like the one he made speaking to the Business Roundtable this week: "You have never seen in the history of the United States the debt ceiling or the threat of not raising the debt being used to extort a president or a governing party and trying to force issues that have nothing to do with the budget and nothing to do with the debt." This is nonsense, of course. Moreover, the implication that Obamacare has "nothing to do with the budget and nothing to do with the debt" is simply dishonest. The law accounts for a large part of the budget and we now know that it will cost twice as much in the next ten years as President Obama promised before it was passed. The truth is the President may soon be forced to negotiate.  Here's why.

There was a shooting two days ago (9/16) in DC. The details are still sketchy as I write this, but it appears that a deranged man decided to kill other people for some reason. In response, the usual talking heads will be debating whether this is actual Terror or merely something like it. But the T-word will be spoken in the same grave way we speak of cancer - a thing to be dreaded above all else. Certainly this shooting was a horrible, tragic thing - especially for the families involved. But that said, any talk about an "age of terror" is utter drivel. Terror is NOT worse now than it was before 9/11 - it's just that we've been bombarded with fear for more than a decade, creating a culture-wide residue that poisons every mind it touches. In actual fact, you are eight times more likely to be killed by a SWAT Team cop than a terrorist. Does that mean that we should all have a collective panic attack and beg for anti-SWAT SWAT Teams? Now here's the truth they don't want you to know: You are taught to fear because fear makes you easy to manipulate. If someone is making you afraid, they're also making you into an easy mark - a sucker.  Our government wants us to live in fear. Think of how many things people have accepted from governments just because they were afraid. Things like complete online surveillance, crotch searches at airports, random searches on the highways, and so on. Do you think those would have been accepted in 1920? Of course they wouldn't, because people hadn't been sufficiently frightened at that time.

[Note:  Paul Rosenberg, has spent many years trying to protect Internet users from unjustified surveillance by groups like the NSA. Many TTPers subscribe to his Virtual Private Network (VPN) called - for reasons known only to him - Cryptohippie, to avoid tracking by the snoops. I never go online without it.  Here Paul discusses the latest revelation of unconstitutional NSA Orwellian fascism. -JW] On September 5th, Glenn Greenwald, Ed Snowden and others revealed that the NSA was able to break the vast majority of encryption used on the Internet. You can find the story here or here, and commentary by cryptographer Bruce Schneier here. In the NSA documents, ordinary Internet customers are referred to as "adversaries."  We're all perps now. If all Internet users are "adversaries," do you really think anyone is safe? Forget about the US Constitution; it's a non-factor now. This is just the latest example of people who are drunk on power and don't care about the principles on which this country was founded. The NSA and the entire US/UK "security" apparatus is a gigantic drunken beast. The operators are arrogant and untouchable.  The reality is, the system is beyond broken, no matter what kind of happy talk you hear on TV. Here's what this means to you.

On this 12th anniversary of the Moslem Atrocity of 9/11, our problems seem worse than ever.  The federal government has metastasized into a cancer that many consider terminal for our country's existence.  Tens of millions of us have given up hope of ever finding a job again - while millions more just starting out in their twenties have never had a job at all.  The problems seem so numerous and insuperable that many of us have given up on America's future.  Most horrifying is that this is what Zero wants, the destruction of America's future is his goal.  The more we suffer, the more he gloats, laughing in our faces as he plays another round of golf and Mrs. Zero is treated as royalty, going off on another multi-million dollar vacation. And all the while, his corrupt corporatist cronies, like those at Solyandra, make hundreds of millions. So it is only appropriate that we commemorate this day by committing ourselves to creating a new America that will conquer the Curse of Zero, and reclaim our future of optimism. The good news is that this creation is already well underway.  There's a blueprint for it and the foundation is being laid.  Here it is.

Saudi Arabia has secretly offered Russia a sweeping deal to control the global oil market and safeguard Russia's gas contracts, if the Kremlin backs away from the Assad regime in Syria. The revelations come amid high tension in the Middle East, with US, British, and French warship poised for missile strikes in Syria. Iran has threatened to retaliate. The strategic jitters pushed Brent crude prices to a five-month high of $112 a barrel. "We are only one incident away from a serious oil spike. The market is a lot tighter than people think," said Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review. Leaked transcripts of a closed-door meeting between Russia's Vladimir Putin and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan shed an extraordinary light on the hard-nosed Realpolitik of the two sides.  Prince Bandar, head of Saudi intelligence, allegedly confronted the Kremlin with a mix of inducements and threats in a bid to break the deadlock over Syria.   Here they are.

Skype began as a very cool service. I used it and recommended it - a lot. Skype (originally Sky peer-to-peer) was a peer to peer voice system, which means that there was no central computer controlling everything. It was also encrypted, though the internal details were never revealed. But, as will a lot of good tech ideas, the developers were persuaded to sell it. In this case, to eBay in 2005. (For $2.5 billion, which is a lot of persuasion!) Then, after doing very little with the tech for several years, eBay sold it to Microsoft for $8.5 billion in 2011. That's when the serious trouble began. Here are the highlights:

For my summer holidays I have been mostly reading Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand has her faults but, boy, was she prescient.  She wrote it back in the 1950s. One of the things she foresaw was the current nonsensical, dishonest, canting campaign against shale gas. In Atlas, it takes the form of Rearden Metal, the miracle technology which is going to transform the US economy if only the progressives will let it. But of course, Rand's fictional progressives don't want Reardon Metal to succeed any more than their modern, real-life equivalents want shale gas to succeed. Why not? For the same rag-bag of made-up, disingenuous scare-mongering reasons which progressives have used to justify their war on progress since time immemorial: it's unfair, it uses up scarce resources, it might be dangerous. As they are attempting to do now in Britain's West Sussex, and have succeeded in doing in New York. Here's a relevant excerpt from Rand.

There's really no more doubt about it, the US government is a Surveillance State, far beyond any East German autocrat's wildest dreams. And it is far, far more dangerous to us than Al Qaeda. We all come from a background that taught us that the Soviet Union and its totalitarian empire was horrifying (which it was), and that the USA was good, noble and pristine. That makes it hard for us to accept that the US has now become what East Germany once was. We keep looking for reasons to not to believe it. So what now?  Your first move is to protect yourself. There's no use in saying much against a surveillance state while they're listening to your every word.  There are two ways to protect yourself:

China's new leaders are close to abandoning the country's one-child policy, belatedly moving to avert an ageing crunch as the work force goes into sharp decline. Jun Ma from Deutsche Bank said the new policies should shore up the pension system and inject stimulus as China's growth sputters. "As tens of millions of sibling-less people in China are now entering their child-bearing age, we expect this policy shift would induce a baby boom," he said. The one-child policy dates back to 1971 in its original form and has led to 336 million abortions and 222 million sterilizations, often badly executed in poor regions. Recent abuses have caused uproar, with photos circulating on the Chinese internet of a young mother lying beside a fully formed baby after she had been seized by police for failing to pay the "social compensation fee" for an illegal child. She was forced to undergo an abortion just before her natural birth. Premier Li Keqiang clearly views the policy an anachronism at a time when China is running out of workers, and faces a demographic time-bomb. There are currently five workers for every pensioner. This ratio will fall to two by 2035.  So any baby boom over the next few years may come too late.

During the Bastille Day celebrations this month, French President François Hollande declared - to the incredulity of pretty much everyone in France - that "the recovery is here". There are no particular economic indicators that would suggest this. Consumer spending and manufacturing remain at historic lows; growth in the third quarter is expected to be zero; the OECD has predicted that unemployment will actually be worse next year; and only this week a senior member of the FPD, Germany's junior coalition partner, pronounced that he was "very worried" about France, arguing that Hollande's decision to raise taxes was "fundamentally wrong." As an Austrian-American born and raised in Paris, and still living there, I have always been intrigued by the French faith in the French way. No other country - save for the United States - is as persuaded that it embodies a universal model for human societies. But a system whose economic performance is mediocre in times of prosperity and plain lousy in times of crisis can hardly purport to be a "model." And sadly, the same advantages that make the French believe in their system are also what make the country so unprepared for reform. The French, in short, are living in la-la land and their current system is doomed.

Babies got cheaper this month. Twice. First, Belgian scientists announced that their new method has the potential to cut the costs of some in-vitro fertilization treatments from $7,500 to below $300. Their cut-price recipe requires little more than baking soda and lemon juice in place of purified carbon dioxide gas to maintain acidity when growing an embryo in a lab before implanting it. Second, a baby called Connor was born after 13 of his parents' embryos had their genomes analyzed using next-generation DNA-sequencing techniques in an Oxford laboratory. Only three of the embryos were found to have the right chromosome number, and one of these "normal" embryos was then implanted in his mother. This new approach, made possible by the rapidly falling cost of DNA sequencing, promises to cut the number of failures during IVF, reducing both cost and heartache. The two announcements are a reminder that cost reduction and productivity boosts are the purpose of most innovation. Medicine is no exception. Innovation is driving down the costs of medical interventions all the time, and the falls may be about to accelerate, thanks to biotechnology and information technology. Whence, then, the relentless rise in the costs of healthcare? Part of the answer is known as the Jevons paradox after the Victorian economist Stanley Jevons.

When the history of the global warming scare comes to be written, a chapter should be devoted to the way the message had to be altered to keep the show on the road. Global warming became climate change so as to be able to take the blame for cold spells and wet seasons as well as hot days. Then, to keep its options open, the movement began to talk about "extreme weather." Those who made their living from alarm  switched tactics  to jump on any unusual weather event -- whether it was a storm, a drought, a blizzard or a flood -- and blame it on man-made carbon dioxide emissions. This proved a rewarding tactic, because people -- egged on by journalists -- have an inexhaustible appetite for believing in the vindictiveness of the weather gods. The fossil fuel industry was inserted in the place of Zeus as the scapegoat of choice, with scientists as the weather gods' priests. The fact that people have short memories about weather events is what enables this game to be played. Even here in mild England, people are always saying, "I have never known it so cold/hot/mild/windy/wet/dry/changeable as it is this year." One Christmas I noticed the seasons had been pretty average all year, neither too dry nor too wet nor too cold nor too warm. "I have never known it so average," I said to somebody. I got a baffled look. Nobody ever calls the weather normal.