BORDC is proud to present Jayel Aheram with the May 2013 Patriot Award. Jayel’s work also employs many media, combining his ability to capture a visual experience with journalistic expertise, a broad range of experiences and activism and organizing work across several social movements. In addition to its inspiring breadth, Jayel’s work also reminds us that creative expression can dramatically strengthen political activism by making the issues more accessible, and the concerns more powerful, to public audiences. via www.bordc.org I'm always happy to see great freedom lovers get noticed! Congratulations, Jayel, from your RSE family! | Continue »

At a time, when Western public perception of the Islamic world is being massively influenced by one-sided, distorting, instigative, and inimical preconceptions, it is incumbent on the truly critical and open mind to seek out sound sources of information on Islam. The inestimable Ludwig von Mises Institute has made available on-line this instructive lecture (lasting 40 minutes) by the Turkish scholar and journalist Mustafa Akyol. | Continue »

My last post was entitled The State of Physics, a discipline increasingly becoming susceptible to politicisation, the growing cancer of our society. On the state of economics, I have written earlier in my Economics - Rite of Passage of an (Intellectually) Corrupt Culture: Mainstream economics is one of the most important multipliers of the statist intellectual status quo. Millions of young people are trained by economists to submerge themselves in a sub-culture of unthinking imitation of academic rituals that only reflect the inability of economists to appreciate the genuine subject-matter of their discipline (self-generating order of a level of complexity that cannot be captured by deterministic formal models). Many of those brainwashed in that way end up as experts or people in otherwise reputable and influential positions. The teaching effect of mainstream economics is to initiate entire generations of soon-to-be dignitaries and young people with good career prospects into dogmatism and sophisticated ways of being ignorant. My ideas resonate intriguingly with the below analysis of the contributions to economics of this year's Nobel prize winners: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2010 was awarded jointly to Peter A. Diamond, Dale T. Mortensen and Christopher A. Pissarides. Diamond, 70, is an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a specialist in Social Security. Bernie Madoff would have loved to have Diamond on his team, since Diamond completely ignores the Ponzi like aspects of Social Security and tinkers with "fixing" the scam. Going beyond Madoff, Diamond then ignores the coercion involved in SS. He focuses with tunnel-like narrow vision beyond the coercive aspects, and Ponzi like aspects, to pontificate in numerous journal articles and books about how to "save" SS, including recommendations to cut "benefits" and aggressively increase SS taxes. With this absurd background, President Obama has nominated Diamond to become a member of the Federal Reserve. The Senate failed to approve his nomination, because of Republican foot dragging, before members adjourned to campaign for the midterm congressional elections. In an apparent effort to prove his cluelessness goes beyond SS and that he doesn't understand the proper methodology of economics, Diamond was elected a fellow and has served as President of the Econometric Society. Econometrics is a faulty method of economics whose followers blew up the hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management and the sub-prime mortgage industry. Mortensen, 71, is an economics professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He studies frictional unemployment. This is like studying half time in a basketball game. Yeah, it exists, but it is a pretty simple concept that doesn't tell you much about the game. Frictional unemployment simply means that if someone loses a job, it takes them time to find another job. Mortensen along with Pissarides (who is 62, and a professor at the London School of Economics) and, to some degree, Diamond have taken the simple concept of frictional unemployment and put it in mathematical form to create search and matching theory. There appear to be no successful practical applications for the Alice in Wonderland equations created. Their only valuable input is one we have been pointing out here regularly: "that more generous unemployment benefits give rise to higher unemployment and longer search times." Outside of this obvious point, these guys have no real insights that can help anyone understand the economy and one of them. Diamond, is near the controls of the greatest Ponzi scheme the earth has ever experienced. I would be objecting less if the award was given directly to Madoff. In summary, the Nobel Committee could have only done a worse job by giving the award jointly to Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke. The source. (Hat tip to Lew Rockwell) Also, see my posts on last year's Economics Nobel Prize: Elinor Ostrom - An Interview, Ever Heard of Elinor Ostrom? | Continue »

In America the rights of individuals are considered superior to the claims of the state. In cases of criminal prosecution the government must prove its case before the rights of an individual can be disturbed. Not so in communist countries where Socialist Law prevails and imprisonment is a method of political control. What now for America under the administration of Barack Obama? When the New York Times punctures a White House meme, it can reasonably be considered a flop. Last week, Barack Obama himself accused the Chamber of Commerce of using foreign money to push its domestic political activism, which... | Continue »

A long time ago, in a cyber world far, far away (Usenet), there lived a creature called the Whoosh bird, so named for the sound that was made as it followed a bit of obvious information right over the head of the clueless. I am quite happy to report that apparently it isn't quite extinct, because I absolutely heard it again today: And it isn't like he went home and realized we were laughing at them. No, he wrote his column and made it perfectly clear that the entire left is just a dumb as he is. Seriously, the vendors' next t-shirt should say "Liberals Are Mentally Superior." | Continue »

I've long noticed that "the Jews," for some reason, have exclusive right to the "Martyrs of the Holocaust" title. | Continue »