Victor Davis Hanson's loyalty is to a part of antiquity about free speech admired by the Enlightenment, not to all of it

Here, idealizing the record of the ancient world on freedom of speech, which is much more complicated than he lets on:

Western civilization’s creed is free thought and expression, the lubricant of everything from democracy to human rights. Even a simpleton in the West accepts that protecting free expression is not the easy task of ensuring the right to read Homer’s Iliad or do the New York Times crossword puzzle. It entails instead the unpleasant duty of allowing offensive expression. ...

Westerners cannot return to the Middle Ages to murder those whose ideas they don’t like. “Parody” and “satire” are, respectively, Greek and Latin words. In antiquity the non-Western tradition simply did not produce authors quite like the vicious Aristophanes, Petronius, and Juvenal, who unapologetically trashed the society around them. If the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo loses the millennia-old right to ridicule Islam from within a democracy, then there is no longer a West, at least as we know it.

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Do we really need to remind a classicist that Socrates was put to death for expressing ideas the Athenians didn't like, long before "the West" even got going?

Or that Solon's reforms of the Draconian laws were approved of in the time of Plutarch precisely for the way they restricted impious and intemperate speech?

"Praise is given also to that law of Solon which forbids speaking ill of the dead. For it is piety to regard the deceased as sacred, justice to spare the absent, and good policy to rob hatred of its perpetuity. He also forbade speaking ill of the living in temples, court-of‑law, public offices, and at festivals; the transgressor must pay three drachmas to the person injured, and two more into the public treasury. For never to master one's anger is a mark of intemperance and lack of training; but always to do so is difficult, and for some, impossible." -- Life of Solon 21.1

Or that the Bible has a venerable tradition advocating self-censorship, arguably with a greater claim to forming the basis of Western experience among more people than Petronius or Juvenal could ever make?

"A fool uttereth all his mind: but a wise man keepeth it in till afterwards." -- Proverbs 29:11

"I will guard my ways, Lest I sin with my tongue; I will restrain my mouth with a muzzle, While the wicked are before me." -- Psalm 39:1

"If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is vain." -- James 1:26

"And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell." -- James 3:6

Or that certain forms of self-censorship could get a person killed under the Romans?

'And the Irenarch Herod, accompanied by his father Nicetes (both riding in a chariot), met him, and taking him up into the chariot, they seated themselves beside him, and endeavoured to persuade him, saying, "What harm is there in saying, Lord Cæsar, and in sacrificing, with the other ceremonies observed on such occasions, and so make sure of safety?" But he at first gave them no answer; and when they continued to urge him, he said, "I shall not do as you advise me." So they, having no hope of persuading him, began to speak bitter words unto him, and cast him with violence out of the chariot, insomuch that, in getting down from the carriage, he dislocated his leg [by the fall]. But without being disturbed, and as if suffering nothing, he went eagerly forward with all haste, and was conducted to the stadium, where the tumult was so great, that there was no possibility of being heard.' -- Martyrdom of Polycarp 8

All of these "speech codes" and more existed in the West long before the West became the West, right alongside the traditions challenging them which Hanson mentions. And speech codes also still exist in our own time, as the anti-Semitic laws of France and a few other countries demonstrate.

Arguably there should be more such laws punishing defamation of more religions if we are going to permit laws benefiting one religion in this respect, if, that is, we are going to continue to emphasize the Western principle of equality before the law. Otherwise the "duty of allowing offensive expression" must also apply to all, including Jews.

Bloomberg's Al Hunt hurls the loaded term "denier" at Republicans

Here's Al Hunt, insinuating that the doubters of climate change are in the same class as Holocaust deniers:

"Still, Francis's message is unsettling to more than a few conservatives, particularly his focus on climate change and his initiatives to influence the United Nations' conference in Paris this year. Some prominent Republicans, such as Senate Environment Committee Chairman James Inhofe, are climate-change deniers."

Bill Donohue to Hugh Hewitt: a single bishop has been found to agree with me, namely the Bishop of Rome

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, here, happy that the pope agrees that there are limits to freedom of speech, limits we impose on ourselves:

"I am obviously delighted that the pope has taken the same position I have on this issue. Radio chatterbox Hugh Hewitt doubted last week whether a single bishop would side with me. What does he have to say now?"

Michael Savage attacks the pope for saying limits exist to free speech, ends up saying the same thing

Michael Alan Weiner

Michael Savage attacked the pope yesterday for two things: for stating that there are limits to freedom of speech, and for opining that human beings bear some responsibility for global warming.

Savage found the first idea an affront to the First Amendment of the US Bill of Rights ("Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"), wondering how the pope never heard of it.

The pope in his capacity as the vicar of Christ on earth, however, wasn't telling Congress to abridge the freedom of speech of anyone. He was simply reminding Christians everywhere (and chiding the secularists of France and the United States especially--hello Hugh Hewitt) to restrain their own speech as a matter of spiritual principle, in obedience to the teaching of Jesus:

"Hear and understand: not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man. ... [W]hat comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a man; but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man."

-- Matthew 15:10f, 18ff.

The pope was reminding the world that there is a higher law than the laws of France or the laws of the United States when it comes to what we say. Every Jew should be able instantly to recognize this idea, since practicing Jews frequently restrain their own speech as a matter of principle. They will often write "G-d" instead of "God" for fear of taking God's name in vain as the commandment in the decalogue warns. More to the point, every Jew should already grasp the Jewish basis for the Christian idea of self-restrained speaking because it comes from the prophet Jeremiah who said that "the heart is evil above all things". And neither do Jews have any excuse to be surprised by the doctrine since it is well worked out by the rabbis in the doctrine of "the evil inclination" which must always be guarded against.

Michael Savage, however, is lately more interested in removing the guards, indeed in "unprotected talk", rather than in the circumspect speech implied by his well-known motto of borders, language, culture. Freedom of speech as understood absolutely by civil libertarians is at war with that, because it leads to open borders, many languages and multiculturalism. Savage should understand by now that such libertarianism is incompatible with conservatism, and that when it comes to mental disorders, liberalism does not have a corner on the market.

The coup de grace came yesterday when Savage turned to the global warming statement made by the pope. Savage said he objected to the pope addressing a matter that had nothing to do with religion because it was outside the pope's area of expertise, outside his scope, as Savage put it, which it certainly is.

But isn't that nice. The pope exercises his freedom of speech on a matter not expressly religious and Savage all of a sudden wants to limit it, obviously because he disagrees with it but also because the pope is not an expert. But the pope has every right to speak his nonsense in the United States, whether religious or otherwise. The point of criticism on this matter should be on the substance of what the pope says, not on his role as pope supposedly "pontificating" about it.

In this still Protestant country, the pope is viewed as nothing more than a man who is no different from us, whether he speaks about the teaching of Jesus or anything else. We can say that the pope is right about the limits to freedom of speech as he stated them, and that he is probably quite mistaken about the human role in global warming, because on both counts we can look into the matter and decide for ourselves from the evidence.

We read, mark, learn and inwardly digest, but unless we do, we risk appearing Christians or Jews or Americans in name only.

Gold and the dollar remain uncorrelated: Gold is not money and continues to rise with the dollar

.DXY is trading at about 92.50 today with gold at about 1235 yesterday, surging to 1262 at this hour.

On 1 November 2005 .DXY was 91.57 with gold at 460.

Pope Francis reminds everyone that freedom of speech is not absolute

Quoted here:

"If my good friend Dr. Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch," Francis said, throwing a pretend punch his way. "It's normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others."

"There are so many people who speak badly about religions or other religions, who make fun of them, who make a game out of the religions of others," he said. "They are provocateurs. And what happens to them is what would happen to Dr. Gasparri if he says a curse word against my mother. There is a limit."

Uh oh: Today's jobless claims soar well above 500k to within 1.2% of last year's level at this time

Best reason yet to vote for Romney in 2016: The enemy of my enemy is my friend

"Retail and Food Services Sales" falls 0.94% in December, which is cautionary for GDP

The drop is not that odd for a December.

In December 2007 we had a drop of 0.6%, in December 2008 a drop of 2.5% (part of the big whopper decline of 12.25% between summer 2008 and March 2009), and in December of 2011 a drop of 0.3%.

The drop in January 2014 when GDP went severely negative was 1.26%, so the 0.94% magnitude this time does not augur well for 4Q2014 GDP.

Glenn Greenwald eviscerates the Solidarity with Charlie Hebdo hypocrisy of the left and right

Excerpts from his excellent analysis, here:

[T]his week’s defense of free speech rights was so spirited that it gave rise to a brand new principle: to defend free speech, one not only defends the right to disseminate the speech, but embraces the content of the speech itself. Numerous writers thus demanded: to show “solidarity” with the murdered cartoonists, one should not merely condemn the attacks and defend the right of the cartoonists to publish, but should publish and even celebrate those cartoons. “The best response to Charlie Hebdo attack,” announced Slate’s editor Jacob Weisberg, “is to escalate blasphemous satire.”

...

Anti-Islam and anti-Muslim commentary (and cartoons) are a dime a dozen in western media outlets; the taboo that is at least as strong, if not more so, are anti-Jewish images and words. Why aren’t Douthat, Chait, Yglesias and their like-minded free speech crusaders calling for publication of anti-Semitic material in solidarity, or as a means of standing up to this repression? Yes, it’s true that outlets like The New York Times will in rare instances publish such depictions, but only to document hateful bigotry and condemn it – not to publish it in “solidarity” or because it deserves a serious and respectful airing.

...

[T]he journalist Chris Hedges was just disinvited to speak at the University of Pennsylvania for the Thought Crime of drawing similarities between Israel and ISIS.

That is a real taboo – a repressed idea – as powerful and absolute as any in the United States, so much so that Brooks won’t even acknowledge its existence. It’s certainly more of a taboo in the U.S. than criticizing Muslims and Islam, criticism which is so frequently heard in mainstream circles – including the U.S. Congress – that one barely notices it any more. ...  When those demanding publication of these anti-Islam cartoons start demanding the affirmative publication of those ideas as well, I’ll believe the sincerity of their very selective application of free speech principles. One can defend free speech without having to publish, let alone embrace, the offensive ideas being targeted. But if that’s not the case, let’s have equal application of this new principle.

Communist journalist with Sine Hebdo explains Charlie Hebdo's work protecting Israel under Philippe Val

From the story by Michel Warschawski here:

Nevertheless, broadly speaking, Charlie was part of my political environment. That is, until Philippe Val, the chief editor, expelled one of the founders of the weekly and it's most popular caricaturist, Bob Sine, falsely accused of being an anti-Semite. The expulsion of Sine was clearly a signal of kneeling to the dominant ideology that was using "anti-Semitism" in order to shut the mouth of journalists critical to Israel. A couple of years later, Philippe Val was appointed by Nicolas Sarkozy [sic] as general director of one of the national radio channels. No comment…

As an act of solidarity with Sine, I joined the editorial staff of "Sine Hebdo", a new satirical weekly he opened together with other former journalists of Charlie Hebdo who left, as a protest of Val's decision.

"I learned a thing or two from ol' Charlie don'tcha know . . .

. . . you better stay away from Copperhead Road."

Freedom of speech in France: Comic says he's Charlie Coulibaly, gets investigated by police

"I am Charlie Coulibaly"

Reported here in WaPo:

'Almost 4 million people across France turned out Sunday in support of free speech. Yet, on Monday, for instance, a 31-year-old Tunisian-born man was sentenced to 10 months in jail after verbally threatening police and saying an officer shot in last week’s attack “deserved it.” Also on Monday, a Paris prosecutor opened an investigation against an anti-Semitic French comedian, Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, for a post on his Facebook page calling himself “Charlie Coulibaly” — a reference to Amedy Coulibaly, the gunmen who killed four people Friday inside a Paris kosher market. The comedian — whose comedy show, which featured an explicit skit mocking the Holocaust, was banned last year for inciting hate — suggested that he was a victim of a double standard.

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France has anti-Semitism laws on its books, but many of its Muslims wonder why there aren't any laws protecting Muslims from anti-Islamic speech, such as Charlie Hebdo routinely practices against the prophet Muhammad.

The UK's Jeremy Warner joins the cognoscenti: high asset prices are going bye-bye

Here:

"It is as if all the inflation that used to go into consumer prices has been diverted into financial assets and real estate instead. ... Static or falling prices, on the other hand, are always extremely bad for corporate profits in the long term. ... In a deflationary environment, equities and property will inevitably perform badly: only fixed-interest sovereign bonds, the least risky form of investment, do well."

Charlie Hebdo's editor Charb was raised by communists

CNN reports here:

[Daniel] Leconte gave The New York Times some insight into Charbonnier's upbringing. He was raised by communists, the filmmaker said, and grew up to be a left-wing activist. "He has this education, and this culture, which was one part of his personality," Leconte told the newspaper, "but at the same time he was totally radical."

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And conservatives in America, like Roger Kimball and Ralph Peters, want to be in solidarity with a communist.

Update: By the way, Ralph Peters is all for the murder of American citizens when necessary, just in case you were wondering (here).

Why New York City is a sitting duck for the next terrorist attack

Because the communist mayor of New York, de Blasio, yanked all the undercover cops from the mosques, that's why.

Story here.

Say what you want about Rudy Giuliani. He put 'em there in the first place and kept us safe, and Bloomberg then ramped up the spies. But under de Blasio . . . it's all over.

"Piss Christ" still prominent on CNN, but Muhammad cartoons won't be

Brian Stelter states the CNN policy here about displaying images of the Muslim prophet:

"Many major news organizations, including CNN, generally refrain from showing images that purport to show the prophet. In recent days, executives at CNN have cited concerns about the safety of staff members and sensitivity towards Muslim audiences, but they have also indicated that the network's decision is subject to change."

"Piss Christ" is shown here at CNN as one of 10 controversial works of art, along with an obscene "The Holy Virgin Mary".

Sensitivity towards Christian audiences obviously counts for little at CNN.

Commentary's Jonathan Tobin must be kidding about "the rising tide of hate"

Here is Tobin:

"By choosing to stay away from the march, the United States expressed not only its public disdain for the effort to respond to the rising tide of hate, but the president also demonstrated that he doesn’t understand that being the leader of the free world occasionally requires him to show up even when he’d rather stay home."

Rising tide of hate?

Charlie Hebdo has had the hate turned up to full-throttle for most of its reincarnated existence, deliberately trying to incite the followers of Moses, Jesus and Muhammad in every Wednesday's 60,000 print run since 1992 when its pro-Israel owner Philippe Val resurrected it from the dustbin of history.

The only hatred rising today, in fact, is at Charlie Hebdo, with Muhammad again on the cover, but on a print run of 3 million, not 60,000.

Tobin is only angry that President Obama didn't join in the chorus attacking faith in Paris on Sunday. We all know that New York intellectuals have a vested interest, just as Charlie Hebdo does, in keeping the flames of enmity burning between the Jews and the Muslims. The calling card of victimhood in Washington insures that the cash and military assistance to Tel Aviv never stops.

We also know why Obama didn't go to Paris. It surely wasn't out of principle . . . he's just too damn lazy. But in this case the sin of omission landed Obama on the correct side of the issue, just as Corinne "Coco" Rey made the fateful conservative choice to save the life of her toddler and let the terrorists into the building to kill her colleagues.

When people make the right choice for the wrong reasons we can still say so in this country, at least until the likes of Commentary decide it's time to circulate a petition to have us outlawed. President Obama may be many things, but the most important of those now is that he's lame.

The surest way to make France safer for everyone, including Jews, would be for the self-appointed elites of liberalism to restrain themselves and stop goading the masses which they claim the right to govern. That they can't bring themselves to do this is the best proof that they are not superior to the rest of us, and that there is nothing to their faith but loathing, for God and for themselves.

American manufacturing still in depression

Reported here:

"American manufacturing has still not recovered to 2007 output or employment levels," the study [by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation] says. ... The foundation ... says the recent job gains barely make a dent in what it calls the "unprecedented" decline in U.S. manufacturing since 2000. The result is a sector still hobbled by high effective corporate tax rates and limited public investment in research, development and job training. Even with the recent improvement, the study says the U.S. has lost roughly 1 million manufacturing jobs and 15,000 manufacturing establishments since 2000. Trouble in the sector goes even deeper than that, the study says. ... Without computer production, durable goods manufacturing actually declined by nearly 10 percent between 2000 and 2009, according to the foundation. Even non-long-term goods, which include most of the manufacturing related to the nation's energy boom, have underperformed overall economic growth, the study says.

Charlie Hebdo to exploit mockery of Muhammad in an attempt to escape bankruptcy

Yahoo News reports here:

This week's three million copies of Charlie Hebdo, the first post-attack issue of the French satirical weekly, will defiantly feature caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, its lawyer said Monday. ... The paper's distributors, MLP, had initially planned to print one million copies of the issue currently being put together by survivors of the shooting. But MLP said demand from France and abroad has been huge and that three million copies would now be released. The original paper printed at 60,000 copies a week, selling 30,000. ... Charlie Hebdo had been sliding towards bankruptcy before the attack against it. ... Wednesday's edition aims to raise fresh cash to ensure the survival of the weekly, with all revenue from the sales, at three euros ($3.5) a copy, going to Charlie Hebdo once the cost of the paper has been deducted.

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Israeli-American Rahm Emanuel once said "never let a good crisis go to waste".

I predict they'll fail.

Average hourly earnings went up almost 29% under Bush, almost 12% under Obama to date

Up $4.12/hour under Bush after 8 years

Up $2.18/hour under Obama after almost 6 years

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League is right: Charlie Hebdo went way over the top of acceptable

Here in "Muslims are right to be angry":

[W]hat happened in Paris cannot be tolerated. But neither should we tolerate the kind of intolerance that provoked this violent reaction. Those who work at [Charlie Hebdo] have a long and disgusting record of going way beyond the mere lampooning of public figures, and this is especially true of their depictions of religious figures. ... In 2012, when asked why he insults Muslims, [Charb] said, “Muhammad isn’t sacred to me.” Had he not been so narcissistic, he may still be alive. Muhammad isn’t sacred to me, either, but it would never occur to me to deliberately insult Muslims by trashing him.

Hugh Hewitt here can't believe there's an important Catholic alive who shares Donohue's opinion.

I can't believe it either, but at least we've got Bill Donohue.

Philippe Val, pro-Israeli refounder of Charlie Hebdo, says slaughtered cartoonists "were not bad people"

Cabu's "Gay Lobby in Conclave" in ridicule of the Roman Catholic Church electing a new pope in early 2013.

Excuse me.

Traditional Catholics will agree that an image of a daisy chain of sodomizing/sodomized cardinals from the pen of Cabu is precisely the mark of a bad person, meant to provoke and not to unite.

Go ahead. Tell us this isn't the face of contemporary liberalism everywhere in the West, and that the Jewish left isn't behind this.

Philippe Val, quoted here in the UK Independent:

“I am practically alone, all my friends are gone,” he said in the statement broadcast by France Inter radio and transcribed by Libération. “They were not bad people, they just wanted to make us laugh. They just wanted humour to have a place in our lives, that's all." ...

He individually paid tribute to his murdered colleagues, including the “genius” cartoonist Cabu, full name Jean Cabut, who was murdered alongside the magazine’s editor Stéphane Charbonnier or “Charb” during their morning editorial meeting. ...

“Today is hard but it is the ultimate weapon,” Mr Val continued. “It is the weapon of solidarity. Let people laugh, let them ridicule the bastards…we cannot live in fear.”

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We know who the bastards are.

We are NOT Charlie

Real Clear Markets tonight recycles John Tamny's nonsense about gold and the dollar being related

Hey, if it wasn't convincing six days ago at Forbes, give it another try at Real Clear Markets. That's the meaning of libertarian ideology, as with all ideologies: Repeat until it becomes the truth.

Occasionally gold and the dollar do seem to track each other. This has been so recently under elevated gold prices and repressed dollar prices. Perhaps that's what one should expect when conditions are being manipulated and price discovery is difficult because it is being deliberately obscured. But the so-called correlation between gold and the dollar doesn't hold up over the longer term.

For example, tonight the dollar is trading near its recent closing high, at 91.86. The last time the dollar was near this level was on 11 November 2005, closing at 91.98.

The gold price then in 2005 was not quite $467 an ounce, but tonight gold is nearly $1,218, over 2.5x higher even though the dollar price is nearly identical to what it was almost 10 years ago.

The dollar and gold are not correlated, sorry. 

Hey Rush you lazy, mouth-flapping idiot: the French Muslim bike cop was armed and fired at the terrorists before they offed him

So says the BBC here.

Rush Limbaugh used the incident to say all French cops are unarmed because France is a sadly misguided liberal country.

Dumb shit.

nous sommes des idiots!

Charlie Hebdo's Coco, who let the terrorists in, doesn't think too highly of the proponents of traditional morality

Here Coco imagines the anti-same sex marriage activist Frigide Barjot and the conservative Christian politician Christine Boutin in France with an unholy and dirty dilemma in June 2013 when French conservatives had just marched in Paris against the recent legalization of same sex marriage.

Conservatives in the United States who say "I am Charlie Hebdo" are ignoramuses.

Charlie Hebdo's Jewish connection: Is "Hebe Dough" behind the controversial Muslim-baiting cartoons?

Have the Jews brought the terror upon France as much as the leftists did who brought in all the Muslims in the first place?

The anti-Semitic terrorist incident at the Paris kosher shop by a member of the same terrorist cell which attacked satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo ("Charlie Weekly") should have been a clue.

The whole affair, including the attack on Charlie Hebdo, was primarily an anti-Semitic affair, but no ordinary anti-Semitic affair brought to you by a good ole' 'Murican bubba wearing a white sheet. No, it appears this was strictly an internecine battle between fellow Semites. 

In the comments section to a post at Takimag here one wag mocks Charlie Hebdo for its far-left pro-Israeli support backed by "Hebe Dough".

Does that stand up to scrutiny?

At least two of the victims at Charlie Hebdo were Jewish: Elsa Cayat, 54, and Georges Wolinski, 80. (The terrorists left all the women alive, except the Jewess).

Wolinski, who goes all the way back to the very beginning of the paper in 1960, had helped resurrect the defunct publication in its current form in 1992 with the help of a strongly pro-Israel figure named Philippe Val. It was Val who had authorized the republication of the controversial Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2005 and who also fired an allegedly anti-Semitic contributor in 2008, the noteworthy cartoonist Maurice Sinet. Val also had published controversial value judgments about the Palestinians. In addition, one of Wolinski's co-workers at Hara-Kiri, the predecessor to Charlie Hebdo, was the Polish-Jewish novelist Roland Topor.

Whatever else comes out about the decidedly pro-Jewish, anti-Palestinian, atheistic, anti-religious, morally offensive and far-leftist character of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo in the coming weeks and months, one thing is for sure: CHARLIE HEBDO COULDN'T CARE LESS ABOUT FREEDOM OF SPEECH, in France or anywhere else.

Conservatives in America should take note: Philippe Val and the late editor Charb had tried unsuccessfully in 1996 to get the political party of Marine LePen, Front National, outlawed, one of the only political parties in Europe with the guts to stand consistently against the invasion of Europe by Muslim populations.

So-called conservatives in the United States standing in solidarity today or anyday with this bunch of lunatics, perverts and malcontents are as crazy as Charlie Hebdo is.

Ron Paul, delusional as ever, says global war on terror is a lie, champions free-trade and ignores the illegal immigrant invasion

Charlie Hebdo massacre scene: Just lies to Ron Paul!

At, where else?, Zero Hedge, here, in a speech long enough for Fidel Castro to give:

"With cradle-to-grave welfare protecting all citizens from any mistakes and a perpetual global war on terrorism, which a majority of Americans were convinced was absolutely necessary for our survival, our security and prosperity has been sacrificed.

"It was all based on lies and ignorance."

Libertarians will never boldly go where no man has gone before

That's because they'll be retreating underground to their inner planet "Galt".

Libertarians hate the original Star Trek on television for some reason, more than any other show (the riveting "24" also does poorly with them). Who knew?

The story is here.

Except that libertarian Justin Amash likes to imagine Thomas Massie is his X-Wing Starfighter wingman in the Rebel Alliance. He said so with a Lego toy a year ago.

Maybe it's time to raise the qualification age to run for Congress? 

Persons taking food stamps in October 2014 are UP 0.5% from September

Persons taking food stamps in October 2014 number 46,674,364. This is up 0.5% from September.

But compared to October 2013 persons taking food stamps are down 1.6%.

If the economy is improving the number should be going down, shouldn't it?

Liberalism simply caved in fear at the front door to Charlie Hebdo, bringing death to its followers

A happy and especially healthy New Year!

When push comes to shove, certain things, like your own flesh and blood, become more important than the cause of liberalism. It's what they do that counts, not what they say.

Corinne "CoCo" Rey, quoted here:

Eleven-thirty am, in Paris. Corinne Rey, known as Coco, a cartoonist who works for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, had just picked up her daughter from a nearby creche. “When I got to the front door of the magazine’s building with her, two masked and armed men threatened us – violently,” she said. “They wanted to get inside, go upstairs. I tapped in the entrance code … They spoke perfect French. They said they were from al-Qaida.”

Surviving "innocents" at Charlie Hebdo say they vomit on all their new supporters!

Liberalism believes in nothing!

Quoted here:

“We have a lot of new friends, like the pope, Queen Elizabeth and (Russian President Vladimir) Putin. It really makes me laugh,” Bernard Holtrop, whose pen name is Willem, told the Dutch centre-left daily Volkskrant in an interview published today.

France’s far-right National Front leader “Marine Le Pen is delighted when the Islamists start shooting all over the place,” said Willem, 73, a long-time Paris resident who also draws for the French leftist daily Liberation.

He added: “We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends.”

Free ice cream for everyone, too!

What do liberals and libertarians have most in common this week?

What do liberals and libertarians have most in common this week?

The almost giddy pleasure they take in ridicule of religious founders and their followers.

That this ridicule of religion has animated liberalism for a long time in America is a given. Just ask any devout Christian, if you can still find one, how Serrano's Piss Christ made him feel.

But conservatives, on the other hand, have always believed above all in self-restraint, without which there cannot be any such thing called limited government. As Oswald Spengler reminded us in the 1930s but everyone seems to have long since forgotten, Christianity is renunciation and nothing else. The exploding ignorance of this knowledge had already gone hand in hand with the development of totalitarian forms of government in Spengler's own time, and has only gotten worse since. The world is now dominated as a consequence by two forms of fascism which ended up winning against communism, one of the left and one of the right: the one is in China and the other in the United States. The reason? Fascism is more successful at production and consumption than communism, which is all there is to materialist philosophers. To them self-restraint is as much of an enemy as it was an opiate to Marx. 

The most uncomfortable example of self-restraint for our own time has been self-censorship, which is nothing more than the recognition of the existence of the evil inclination inside of every human being, a recognition only made possible by an openness to a moral vision of the universe. That moral vision says that that evil inclination must be restrained by the free choice of the self if civilized society is to survive. But our supposed political allies today in conservatism and libertarianism want nothing to do with that. They have together more in common with liberalism than with the transcendent world of which I am writing. 

Self-censorship in fact used to be seen as a virtue in America, when it was a more religiously informed country. "Let what you say be simply 'Yes' or 'No'; anything more than this comes from evil", said the founder of our religion. The idea was to live and let live because the evil and the good had to grow up together until the harvest. Otherwise the wheat would be lost with the tares. Accordingly, to be wise meant often to hold your tongue and keep your peace, even when you knew you were right, and to forgo arguments especially over religion because you were free to go to your church or to no church at all, and I was free to go to mine. "Strive for peace with all men", said another of our authorities. If Christians have been given their own form of jihad, that has been it, but they have failed miserably at it.

It must be stated plainly, nothing distinguishes what is different about Islam from us more than its opposition to peaceful coexistence, however poorly we have lived up to our own ideals. Islam means submission to its law, its prophet and its God. A Muslim is "one who submits". Peace only exists between the two of us when we submit to them. Which is why it follows that inviting Muslims into Christian countries is a recipe for conflict.

All around us this week so-called conservatives are urging us to join them in unloading a barrage of invective against Islam's founder, Muhammad. They do not want to live in peace. They want a war, which threatens to destroy us all.

Here's Roger Kimball at Pajamas Media:

"Were I (per impossible) editor of The New York Times, I would run those cartoons of Mohammed on the front page of the paper every day for a month." 

Here's Ralph Peters at Fox News:

"Even if those terrorists are tracked down and killed - and I hope they are killed and die miserably - the end result of this is going to be we're going to continue to self-censor."

"The correct response to this attack, by all of us in journalism ... if we had guts, those cartoons would be reprinted on the front page of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times tomorrow. They won't be."

And here's a local libertarian in Michigan, one Steve Gruber:

It was blood thirsty little pieces of crap-spawned from the repugnant womb of modern Islam that murdered a dozen innocents inside an office for a French satirical magazine. Screaming glory be to Allah while executing 10 staff members and two police officers the vile nature of modern Islam was on display for all to see once again. Why did they attack the magazine? Because the magazine routinely skewered just about anyone and everyone and had the courage to publish cartoons making fun of Mohammed. Well too damn bad. ... In the spirit of America let me say to hell with Mohammed and any of his followers if they think it proper to murder cartoonists or anyone else in the name of Allah.

What these individuals, were they conservatives, should be calling for is separation, keeping Muslims at a distance from Christian civilization, because the two are fundamentally not reconcilable until Muslims undergo a reformation of their own which renounces the inspiration of Koranic surahs legitimating violence against infidels. I predict it will be a cold day in hell before that happens because the so-called conservatives cannot see that the so-called innocents were anything but. They were as much the enemies of what made the West the West as the Muslims are.

Instead all that these ideologues of ours offer is ridicule of Islam, but from the safe distance of an increasingly less intact West. They call this courage, but shrink from what real courage requires: The courage that doesn't need to justify itself in the face of mortal danger, but which freely and quickly acts to excise the cancer and banish it, as well as abolish the tenuous economic cords made of petroleum from which it profits. Libertarian devotion to first principles of freedom of movement, trade and the like all work together to sabotage this doctor from performing the necessary surgery. All they can do is insult, and retreat to the safety of the drone war against an implacable enemy, ala John Galt.

Having grown up in a Christian denomination which held very dim views of everyone else's religion but was convinced everyone else was worth converting to our way of thinking because Christ died for them too, I find the overt lack of charity toward a whole religion and its founder a sign of profound decadence in our own civilization, criminal acts by religious fanatics notwithstanding.

We have to live together in the same world, but it were better if we grew in separate gardens to the extent that that is possible. The only constructive policy with Islam going forward is utter disengagement with its worst elements, and repression of those when called for, such as now in Yemen. Unfortunately for the West, this means withdrawing from Muslim lands, especially Arabia, and actively choosing to promote independence in energy to the extent that whether Islam reforms or does not reform, we can live without them and prevent them from harming others.

We cannot continue to serve God and mammon. Otherwise we are no different than them.

Rate of wage growth slows by almost 44% year over year 2014 vs. 2013

Not-seasonally-adjusted, the average hourly earnings of all employees grew by 1.88% between December 2012 and December 2013, to $24.30 from $23.85.

For the latest similar period ending in December 2014, average hourly earnings grew by 1.06%, a decline in the rate of growth of almost 44%, to $24.56.

This is pretty surprising given the enormous gains made by the stocks of corporations in 2013, up nearly 30%, and in 2014, up 11%.

Obviously the gains are accruing to the stockholders, not the workers who are viewed as a cost, not an asset.

Are full-time jobs up 427,000 or down 47,000 in December?

Not-seasonally-adjusted full-time is in red.

The latest Employment Situation Report for December 2014 shows full-time jobs either up 427,000 in the seasonally-adjusted measure, or down 47,000 in the not-seasonally-adjusted measure, both from the respective November levels.

Which to believe?

Since 1968 the not-seasonally-adjusted count of full-time jobs between November and December has gone down 33 times vs. 13 times going up, with one year flat (1992). This is consistent with the historical record of cyclicality in full-time vs. part-time.

Full-time typically peaks in the summers and troughs in the winters while part-time does the opposite. Full-time tends to peak in the summers with work related to seasonal and student employment, while part-time tends to peak in the winters with holiday additions to the workforce.  Therefore it is consistent with this pattern to expect part-time jobs to be peaking right now (they already did last month) and full-time to be near its lowest point in the current cycle, which usually happens in January, for which measure we will have to wait another month.

So full-time down 47,000 is obviously more in keeping with the generally expected pattern than the seasonally-adjusted figure.

It is noteworthy, however, how low that negative full-time figure is relative to the recent past and to the historical average.

The 30-year average of the subtractions to full-time between November and December (excluding the outlier years in 2007, 2008 and 2009 when employers panicked and fired 1.4 million on average, 1.7 million on average in 2008 and 2009 alone) is a subtraction of nearly 244,000 full-time jobs.  Add to that that we haven't had this low a subtraction since the year 2000 between November and December and you get the feeling that things are indeed improving.

Unfortunately what we don't see yet is the kind of addition to the full-time rolls which occurs rarely at this time of year and typically after recessions. The last time we saw this in the November-December data was in 2005, 2004 and 2003 when we had three back to back years of full-time gains averaging 290,000, well above the average gain for the 13 up years of 145,000.

What we'd like to see right now, but don't, is a similar strong recovery of full-time after a recession like we've seen in the past.

For example, after the recession of 1970, full-time recovered between November and December of both 1971 and 1972, adding an average of 105,000 full-time jobs for those two months. Similarly after the recession of 1974, full-time jobs recovered for three straight years, averaging an addition of 195,000 full-time jobs between November and December of 1975, 1976 and 1977. And of course after the recession of 2001 we've already pointed out the three years of November-December additions to full-time averaging 290,000, double the average.

Even the long drought of additions to full-time jobs at this time of year which began in 1978 and lasted through 1992 was broken for two back-to-back years in 1986 and 1987 when an average of 66,000 full-time jobs were added between November and December. This was the rather delayed recovery of full-time after the recession of 1982, which cast a long shadow over employment much like the most recent recession has done.

As things stand, the current brutal drought of full-time additions at this time of year now stands at a record nine years, one more than the previous record posted between 1978 and 1985. The average subtraction to full-time then between November and December was 202,000. Now it has soared to 586,000 on average, almost 3x worse.

That's the scale of the trouble we've been in, and so far there's been no sign of leadership out of this mess, except that the pain right now is well-below its average level for this time of the year.

The simple fact remains that full-time is still far below its 2007 peak, no matter how you measure it.

On GDP Mish sounds just like Ambrose Evans-Pritchard five years ago

Here is Mish in 2015:

"Effectively we have borrowed current growth from the future. Looking ahead, growth surprises will be predominantly on the downside for years to come."

Here is Ambrose in 2010:

"Debt draws forward prosperity, which leads to powerful overhang effects that are not properly incorporated into Fed models. That is the key reason why Ben Bernanke’s Fed was caught flat-footed when the crisis hit, and kept misjudging it until the events started to spin out of control."

Rush Limbaugh is a buffoon who just makes stuff up about the two dead policemen at Charlie Hebdo

Here, doing his very best to misinform as usual, and making a fool of himself:

"The two cops who were shot, do you know how they arrived on the scene?  They rode their bicycles.  That's right.  They came pedaling up.  After hearing about this attack, and the cops are dispatched, the two who were shot showed up on bicycles."

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One of the two dead policemen was a body guard of one of the employees of the French satirical publication targeted by two Muslim fanatics. He was already in the office when he was gunned down. He wasn't outside on a bicycle.

If there were two officers of the municipal police on bicycles dispatched to the scene, obviously only one of them was shot, and the other escaped.

The intricacies of the French police force obviously don't interest Rush Limbaugh, either. He would rather ridicule and caricature the French police as mindless victims of liberalism who must do their jobs without being able to defend themselves, when the fact is municipal police are typically unarmed but can choose to carry if they wish. Nevertheless the municipal police, which are basically the traffic division in France but enforce the local laws at the behest of mayors, represent barely 7% of the police force in France.

The national police are all armed, and the militarized units especially so.

TARP ends, but conservatives still don't realize it was just a sideshow

Existing crisis loans 1st of the month in billion$

That TARP was just a sideshow was not known at the time in 2008, but it should be known by now.

Too bad conservatives haven't paid attention.

TARP assumed the role of the main actor on the stage of the financial panic as the liberal government of George W. Bush tried to show that it was capable of doing something to bring the panic of 2008 to an end. Bush at length signed the TARP legislation on October 3, 2008, at which point the stock markets promptly rewarded him by caving over the next three weeks, setting the stage for the final denouement by March 2009. Only Securities and Exchange Commission changes to mark-to-market accounting rules at that point stopped the cratering and put a floor under stock prices. Meanwhile behind the scenes the liberal government of Woodrow Wilson in the form of the Federal Reserve had already been hard at work for months frantically doing the real rescue.

Now that TARP is over, liberal political operatives are wont to characterize TARP as a success because it supposedly made a profit accruing to the government, and hence to The People, who are ever almighty in liberalism. They also say this to keep our eyes off the ball. "Conservatives" continue to take that bait and argue there was a loss to TARP, never examining themselves to see if they are in the larger truth. National Review's Matt Palumbo is just the latest example, here, quibbling over a few measly billions of dollar based on an argument from inflation to substantiate a loss to TARP.

It doesn't get much more pathetic than that.

TARP became the sideshow it always was once and for all when Bloomberg News, using the Freedom of Information Act, forced the Fed long after the fact in late 2010 and early 2011 to reveal the true scope of its bailout of the world in 2008-2009. Behind the scenes the rest of us had groped in the dark trying to fathom TARP's $700 billion bailout, when that turned out to be just a decimal point in the real bailout, the Fed's $7.7 trillion lending authority through the discount window and other programs.

"Conservatives" still haven't grasped this.

Over five million Americans lost their homes in the wake of the panic, almost 30 million ended up filing first time claims for unemployment in 2009 (85% more than did just last year), and almost eight years after the employment peak of 2007 full-time jobs still have not recovered, the most disgraceful record in the post-war.

The Federal Reserve bailed out hundreds upon hundreds of large banks and corporations not just in the United States but all across the globe by backstopping them with promises of huge sums if needed while regular Americans were simply left to fend for themselves:

$7.77 trillion -- The amount the Fed pledged to rescue the financial industry, according to Bloomberg research that examined announced, implied or actual upper limits on lending and guarantees. This number, which represents potential commitments, not money out the door, was first published in March 2009, when it peaked.

“One of the keys to understanding why we’ve avoided another Great Depression, so far, is to see how bold the Fed was in 2008 and 2009,” said Niall Ferguson, a Harvard University history professor. “That boldness consisted of a range of contingency commitments that backstopped the banking system. Just because they weren’t used doesn’t mean they weren’t important.”

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Actual loans at rock bottom prices over time amounted to about half that, at $3.3 trillion, as can be appreciated here in just one of the lending programs of the Fed, the famous discount window. The low interest rates charged there, a sideshow in themselves, are thought to have benefited the banks at the same time by about $13 billion, according to Bloomberg, over what they would have had to pay at market rates.

That was simply the cherry on the gargantuan crony capitalism cake, an object, I am sure, of singular fascination for the likes of the Matt Palumbos of the world.

That spike in the graph is the discount window lending in the 2008 panic

John Early's model predicts 4Q2014 GDP between -1.2% and +1.4%

See John Early's "5 Reasons GDP Growth in Q4 May be 0%" at Seeking Alpha, here.

The House has a Boehner again

Top 10 investing years for subsequent 10 year returns since 1965 to date

1988: 18.80% nominal per annum average from the S&P500 12/'88-12/'98

1987: 18.15%

1989: 17.99%

1990: 17.57%

1979: 17.27%

1981: 16.53%

1982: 16.16%

1978: 16.14%

1977: 15.02%

1985: 14.98%

These years have an average total S&P500 market capitalization to GDP (in trillions) ratio of 48.

The ratio at the end of 3Q2014 was 112, which historically produces 10 year returns averaging about 3.24% nominal.

Rush Limbaugh is back for 2015 and he's dumber than ever, just like Zero Hedge

Here:

And the second thing I saw was the economy is growing at this 5% rate.  By the way, do you know how that happened, folks?  Do you know what the bulk of the economic growth -- I mean, what is the economy?  The economy is consumer spending, essentially, consumer spending and consumption, commerce.  You know what the majority of spending was in the fourth quarter was people spending money on Obamacare, mandated by law.  The vast majority of our economic growth -- this was made public by Tyler Durden at -- I forget the website.  It's off the top of my head.  Well-known business website.  Over half of the spending in this country in the fourth quarter was you and me and everybody else spending money on health care. ... Well, some economic growth, when over half of it is essentially required by the government? 

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Aside from the fact that the quarter in question is stated in error as the fourth, the idea that "the majority of spending . . . was people spending money on Obamacare" is ludicrous.

Line 17 in the snapshot above from the GDP report shows that 3Q2014 healthcare spending was $2.0089 trillion. Line 2 shows the total of all personal spending at $12.002 trillion. Healthcare spending thus represented just 16.7% of that in 3Q. And that percentage is identical to the percentage spent also on healthcare in 2013. Healthcare spending is not anywhere near "over half of the spending in this country in the fourth [sic] quarter".

ObamaCare hasn't suddenly driven up healthcare spending in 2014 at all. Maybe after the fourth quarter is over and we get the final number for that in March 2015 we will be able to say that Obamacare has driven up healthcare spending overall, but so far we cannot say that. So far such increases have been born by too small a percentage of the adult population to show up in the data.

What we can say is that so far healthcare spending is growing at a pace slightly behind the pace of the overall economy, which grew at 4.96% annualized in 3Q. Healthcare spending grew at a slightly less robust 4.6% rate.

It is likewise incorrect to say as Rush Limbaugh says that healthcare spending accounts for "the bulk of the economic growth" in 3Q. Healthcare spending grew $88.6 billion in 3Q2014 from 2013, which represents just 10.65% of the $831.7 billion overall increase in GDP over 2013 in the latest report. Over 89% of the increased growth thus came from other categories.

Conservatism is not about fighting lies with more lies.

John Tamny of Forbes spends four pages trying to convince us falling oil prices are always due to a rising dollar

Here, in Forbes:

"Falling crude prices ... were a function of a rising dollar that revealed itself in a major decline in the price of gold that is and was priced in dollars."

I don't know. Maybe he's trying to convince himself, not us. Reminds me of listening to a religious fanatic who can't stop talking. You know the kind. They usually get older and eventually think the better of it and move on. But not John Tamny.

The idea that a falling dollar produces higher oil prices is a nice theory occasionally supported by the data. The trouble is, there are too many examples of the correlation breaking down.

Crude oil prices from the mid-1980s to 2004 were remarkably range-bound between $12 and $35 a barrel despite the huge drop in the dollar from 1985 and its subsequent rise through the early 2000s. The dollar's rise in the late 1990s did nothing to change this. In fact, oil rose in tandem with the dollar then, as it did marginally after 1995 and as it did at the end of the late recession.

The sheer scale of the moves in oil prices is not commensurate with the relatively small moves in the dollar since 2005, nor is the relative tranquility of oil prices before that explained by the out-sized moves in the dollar.

The case is similar with gold, which at the current price of the dollar is still much, much higher than a dollar at this level in the past would indicate is called for. Gold was quiescent for 20 years and a lot lower than now all the while the dollar moved dramatically down and up again and down, off the 85 level. Contrary to Tamny, the recent decline in the price of gold has hardly been major, and hardly enough to convince that it is hewing to the performance of the dollar.

To illustrate how little gold has cared for the dollar's level, just look at how long it took for gold to peak after the 2008 all-time low in the dollar: over three years. And there is also that roughly 13 point rise in the dollar during the late recession when gold also began its long and biggest leg up.

That's not supposed to happen.

Sorry!