EUROPE HAS A NEW LEADER
In May of 1989, I had a cup of coffee with a young man in a café in Nickelsdorf, Austria.
In his mid-twenties, he had crossed an unguarded section of the border with Hungary just two hundred yards away to meet me. There was mud on his shoes from the fields he had crossed.
He was a founder of an Anti-Communist freedom movement in Budapest called Fidesz (the Hungarian acronym for Alliance of Young Democrats). Since 1983, I had made it my business to meet people such as him.
For six years, I had been spending time with armed guerrilla movements fighting wars of liberation within Soviet Third World colonies – in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique and elsewhere. Now, with Soviets defeated in Afghanistan (February 1989), it was time to focus on the new democracy movements in Eastern Europe.
The young man explained in halting English what Fidesz stood for and what they wanted to accomplish – liberation from Soviet tyranny by peaceful means, real democracy with all the freedoms considered normal in the West, to rejoin Western Civilization again.
The more I listened, the more he answered my questions clearly and without guile, the more I was impressed. He was serious, committed, and very smart. I made my decision.
Join the forum discussion on this postA RADICAL CHIC PRESIDENT IN COMMUNIST CUBA
Yesterday and today (3/21-22) are sad days in American history. For decades, leftists and Hollywood liberals have made the pilgrimage to Cuba to pay homage to Fidel Castro and Raul Castro. It’s very chic, it’s very shi-shi, for leftists to celebrate vicious communist dictators.
Communist Havana has always been a magnet for the radical chic of the left, drawn like moths to the flame of this western outpost of totalitarian Communism. Back in the 1960s, the visitors included Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael, while Che Guevara himself received Jean-Paul Sartre. Today, the President of the United States joined them.
I have this to say to Mr. Obama: You, the President of the United States, have now legitimized the corrupt and ignored the oppressed. What’s American about that? Nothing.
I have this to say to the people of Cuba who are witnessing this gaudy spectacle in Havana: America has not forgotten you. When I am president, I will never forget you.
OUR LAST BEST HOPE
America needs something better than a feedback loop for popular resentment. We need a real leader.
America's elite is arrogant and corrupt, but the state of the American people is just as alarming. America had 90% adult literacy in 1790, when only half of Englishmen and a fifth of Spaniards and Italians could sign their names. We had the best educated, most motivated, and healthiest workforce in the world by an overwhelming margin. Now Americans aged 16 to 24 rank at the bottom of a 22-country evaluation of numeracy, literacy, and technological problem-solving. Poor student performance should be no surprise: America's family structure is falling apart. Nearly 30% of non-Hispanic white children are born out of wedlock, as well as 53% of Hispanics and 73% of African-Americans. When Reagan took office, 18% of all American births were to unmarried mothers. By 2014 the figure was above 40%. Catch-up ball doesn't begin to describe our predicament. We need nothing short of a great national turnaround. There are two Republican candidates who made clear from the outset that it isn't business as usual -- Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Another Romney wouldn't be relevant.
IT’S CHARACTER THAT COUNTS
I first became aware of Donald Trump when he chose to make cheating on his first wife front-page news.
It was the early '90s. Donald and Ivana Trump broke up over the course of months. Not that divorce is shocking, mind you; among the glitterati marriage seems more unusual. Nor is infidelity exactly novel.
But it requires a particular breed of lowlife to advertise the sexual superiority of one's mistress over the mother of one's children. That was Trump's style. He leaked stories to the New York tabloids about Ivana's breast implants -- they didn't feel right. Marla Maples, by contrast, suited him better.
She, proving her suitability for the man she was eager to steal from his family, told the papers that her encounters with the mogul were "the best sex I've ever had." It wasn't just Donald Trump's betrayal that caught my eye, nor just the tawdriness: It was the cruelty.
THE FED IS TRAPPED
Interest rates in the United States have fallen to minus 2% in real terms and are dropping into deeper negative territory with each passing month. This is a remarkable state of affairs.
It is clear that the US Federal Reserve is now trapped. The FOMC dares not tighten despite core inflation reaching 2.3% because it is so worried about tantrums in financial markets and about that other Sword of Damocles - some $11 trillion of offshore debt denominated in dollars, up from $2 trillion in 2000.
The Fed has been forced by circumstances to act as the world's central bank, nursing a fragile and treacherous financial system struggling with unprecedented leverage.
Average debt ratios are 36 percentage points of GDP higher than they were at the top of the pre-Lehman bubble in 2008, and this time emerging markets have been drawn into the quagmire as well by the spill-over effects of quantitative easing. Like it or not, the Fed is stuck with the task of cleaning up a global mess that is arguably of its own making.
The three big blocs of the world economy are all in a short-term cyclical upswing. My fear is that the Fed may have repeated the error made by Alan Greenspan during the East Asia crisis of 1998 when he slashed rates and held them too low for too long, fueling the dotcom bubble.
BEWARE OF GOVERNMENT GLOBAL NEWS NETWORKS
Berlin, Germany. Even though the Berlin Wall was destroyed more than a quarter-century ago and the city rebuilt, new propaganda wars are being waged here and elsewhere by the major and some minor powers in a more sophisticated way than the Soviets ever imagined.
Disinformation has always been a staple of states and spies, but now the world’s airways are being swamped with state-controlled TV “news” stations. Of the 83 TV channels I have access to in my hotel room, roughly 32 of the 51 non-German channels are largely owned or controlled by various governments.
This includes the Russian, Chinese, Qatar (Al Jazeera), Thai, Vietnamese, Armenian, Turkish, and Cuban governments. The Russian, Chinese, Qatar, Japanese and French governments have full-time English-language channels here in Berlin, clearly designed to reach an audience outside of their home-country nationals who may be living in or visiting Berlin.
These are almost entirely commercial-free channels, paid for by the taxpayers of their respective countries, and are now found in most major cities in the world, at some considerable cost. The question is: Why are they doing it?
THE TRUE PATH OF HUMAN EVOLUTION
A lot of people believe that human nature is evolving and changing in some significant manner. This comes in part from a social psychological notion that culture can change human nature, and that different cultures therefore create, to a significant degree, different people.
If human nature were indeed so malleable, then it could be argued that we can evolve that nature into something different. But human nature is not that malleable. Human nature is pretty much what it was thousands of years ago.
Even so, we are certainly in a better condition, particularly in the West, than our more primitive ancestors. So what is it, exactly, that is changing and evolving in us that leads to such improvement?
Human culture: the understandings, innovations, and meaning that we are able to teach to others, and pass down through the generations.
So -- what are the common features of successful human culture? Knowing this would place us on the true path of human evolution.
THE ONLY WAY
HALF-FULL REPORT 03/18/16
On Wednesday (3/16), Megyn Kelly interviewed Ted Cruz.
At 4:25 Cruz explains why Trump is the one candidate Hillary can beat. At 7:30 he explains how he’ll get a majority of delegates and avoid a contested convention.
But in case there is, here’s a neutral solution for avoiding it. Plus a slew of convincing reasons (beyond Cruz’s) why Trump has no chance of beating the PIAPS in November.
We have to get out of here, however, so we see what’s happening with Putin, and bad news in China. The Hero of the Week will surprise you, yet you may cheer nonetheless.
YOU AMERICA
The paradox of the individualistic society is that it can only exist if individuals embrace virtues that are greater than their own needs and whims.
A society where each individual acts as a little tyrant, pursuing his desires with total selfishness at the expense of everyone else becomes collectivist as the little tyrants turn to a series of big tyrants to get what they want no matter who gets hurt by it.
As individual virtues and social compacts break down, selfish squabbles escalate. Tribalism turns into legal civil war. Laws become the means by which one group imposes its will on the other and by which one man seizes the property of another. The people come to view the system with contempt. All virtues and principles are abandoned as neighbor turns on neighbor in resentment and hatred.
Ideas can exist objectively. Feelings only exist subjectively. Identity politics resolves this problem by treating the objective response to feelings as privilege. But even subjective empathy can never truly approach the subjective experience of the crybully.
Even a member of that same identity group will differ in some way from the multiple intersectional identities of the crybully. And that difference is its own privilege. This isn't really politics. It's self-help narcissism crossbred with stale Marxism.