RedStateEclectic

The Garden of Forking Paths

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”

    Jorge Luis Borges

Find more of Borges at The Garden of Forking Paths.

  

Good Morning, Copenhagen

Or is this taking place at some other time of the day? How cold it must have been, only a month ago.

 

Crepuscular Rays

Still weak and wobbly from a cold, I draw strength from Telemann's music.

 

Excited about Tuesday

I almost gave up on the idea of going there, owing to a complete lack of decent, central accommodation. However, at long last, I have managed to book a very nice place right in the middle of the city's historical core, and its just within walking distance from the exciting events:

I am going to meet Jörg-Guido Hülsmann, sitting in on two lectures he is giving at the University of Gent, Belgium.

I absolutely adore what Jörg-Guido calls "the great charming historical commercial towns [of] Bruges, Antwerp, and Gent." Bruges and Gent used to be whistle stops on my way to and from England. I count them amongst the most beautiful cities of Europe.

 

See also Guido Hülsmann on the Division of Labour, Fiat Money and Central Banking - A(n Ethical) Disaster, Corrupted Economics and the Federal Reserve (2/2), and If a German ...

Funny How Time Slips Away

... isn't it.

 

Saving the Titanic - An Alternative Currency

Image credit.

As the two pieces below show, imagery drawn from the Titanic's disaster enjoys much currency these days, even though the anniversary of the super-vessel's sinking is still five days away.

I consider the Vieira interview (bottom of post) especially noteworthy - a very serious attempt at finding a practical way to fundamentally change the monetary framework of the USA. Vieira makes one wonder: will perhaps Nebraska spearhead a new American currency?

But first this:

We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: the idea that the ship will sink is beyond belief.
 

As we all know, the "unsinkable" Titanic suffered a glancing collision with an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912. Ten minutes after the iceberg had opened six of the ship's 16 watertight compartments, it was not at all apparent that the mighty vessel had been fatally wounded, as there was no evidence of damage topside. Indeed, some eyewitnesses reported that passengers playfully scattered the ice left on the foredeck by the encounter.

But some rudimentary calculations soon revealed the truth to the officers: the ship was designed to survive four watertight compartments being compromised, and could likely stay afloat if five were opened to the sea, but not if six compartments were flooded. Water would inevitably spill over into adjacent compartments in a domino-like fashion until the ship sank.

We can sympathize with the disbelief of the officers, and with their confused reaction, simultaneously reassuring passengers and attempting to goad them into the lifeboats. With the interior still warm and bright with lights, it seemed far more dangerous to clamber into an open lifeboat and drift off into the cold Atlantic than it did to stay onboard.

As a result, the first lifeboats left the ship only partially full. Only when it became undeniable that the ship was doomed did people attempt to "make other arangements," but by then it was too late.

The tragedy was a cruel mix of human error (entering an ice field at nearly top speed, 23-25 knots), hubris-soaked planning (only enough lifeboats for half the passengers and crew) and design flaws: the high-sulfur iron hull plating did not bend when struck by the ice, it shattered like china.

As noted above, the watertight compartment design was also flawed; indeed, some studies have found that the ship would have stayed afloat an additional six hours had there been no watertight compartments, as water would have sloshed evenly along the entire length of the vessel.

I think this perfectly describes the present. Our financial system seems "unsinkable," yet the reliance on debt and financialization has already doomed it, whether we are willing to believe it or not.

Read the entire post.

 

And now, Dr. Edwin Vieira, Jr., Constitutional Attorney and Author, and his plan for a Constitutional alternative gold and silver currency, run at the state level, to bring sound money to America.

 

The Anti-Bernanke

During a lecture entitled “The Fed Unspun: The Other Side of the Story”, Peter Schiff responds to Bernake’s recent four-part college lecture series.

 

The Potato Sensation

I've been waiting for this all my life:

 

Inundated with Fake Science

Image credit.

We are being inundated with "news" of scientific studies that supposedly prove or lend significant credibility to propositions like "margarine increases cancer risk," or as one may read years later: "margarine reduces cancer risk." While I have made up these specific examples, I have actually witnessed similar allegations over the years of compelling benefits and significant dangers ascribed contradictorily to butter and margarine respectively.

Apparently there is a vast and widespread faking industry at work being guided by awkward notions of best practice ( - the below excerpt, unlike the clip, is not an April's Fools Day tall tale, but the "science" referred to in it certainly has that quality:

A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer — a high proportion of them from university labs — are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.

[...]

Part way through his project to reproduce promising studies, Begley met for breakfast at a cancer conference with the lead scientist of one of the problematic studies.

“We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure,” said Begley. “I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they’d done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It’s very disillusioning.”

The source.

 

And:

 

Bubama Advancing

Image credit.

 

It is ironic but perhaps sadly appropriate that Attorney General Eric Holder would choose a law school, Northwestern University, to deliver a speech earlier this month in which he demolished what was left of the rule of law in America.

In what history likely will record as a turning point, Attorney General Holder bluntly explained that this administration believes it has the authority to use lethal force against Americans if the President determines them to be a threat to the nation. He tells us that this is not a violation of the due process requirements of our Constitution because the President himself embodies “due process” as he unilaterally determines who is to be targeted. As Holder said, “a careful and thorough executive branch review of the facts in a case amounts to ‘due process.’” That means that the administration believes it is the President himself who is to be the judge, jury, and executioner.

As George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley wrote of the Holder speech:

“All the Administration has said is that they closely and faithfully follow their own guidelines — even if their decisions are not subject to judicial review. The fact that they say those guidelines are based on notions of due process is meaningless. They are not a constitutional process of review.”

It is particularly bizarre to hear the logic of the administration claiming the right to target its citizens according to some secret selection process, when we justified our attacks against Iraq and Libya because their leaders supposedly were targeting their own citizens! We also now plan a covert war against Syria for the same reason.

I should make it perfectly clear that I believe any individual who is engaging in violence against this country or its citizens should be brought to justice. But as Attorney General Holder himself points out in the same speech, our civilian courts have a very good track record of trying and convicting individuals involved with terrorism against the United States. Our civilian court system, with the guarantee of real due process, judicial review, and a fair trial, is our strength, not a weakness. It is not an impediment to be sidestepped in the push for convictions or assassinations, but rather a process that guarantees that fundamental right to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

I am encouraged, however that there appears to be the beginning of a backlash against the administration’s authoritarian claims. Just recently I did an interview with conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham who expressed grave concern over using these sorts of tactics against Americans using the supposed war on terror as justification. Sadly, many conservative leaders were silent when Republican President George W. Bush laid the groundwork for this administration’s lawlessness with the PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention without trial, and other violations. Similarly, as Professor Turley points out, “Democrats previously demanded the ‘torture memos’ of the Bush administration that revealed poor legal analysis by Judge Jay Bybee and Professor John Yoo to justify torture. Now, however, Democrats are largely silent in the face of a president claiming the right to unilaterally kill citizens.” The misuse of and disregard for our Constitution for partisan political gain is likely one reason the American public holds Congress in such low esteem. Now the stakes are much higher. Congress and the people should finally wake up!