Archive for March 2009

All over Europe Islamic banks are establishing branches, Western banks are offering Sharia-compliant financial services, and European governments are trying to outcompete each other in welcoming them. Proponents of banking along the lines of Sharia (Islamic law) claim that the Islamic banking system is “more ethical” than the West’s capitalist system. This is not true. Unfortunately, however, in our age of crashing financial markets, many Westerners – not just the traditional anti-capitalist European left – seem very eager to buy that argument.

Early this month, even the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano voiced its approval of Sharia banking. “The ethical principles on which Islamic finance is based may bring banks closer to their clients and to the true spirit which should mark every financial service,” the paper said in a downright stupid and “unethical” article published on March, 4.

The article, entitled “Islamic finance proposals and ideas for the West in crisis” [pdf] suggests that the basic rules of Islamic finance could relieve suffering markets and particularly international financial systems. It says that in the current atmosphere of crisis banks should take Muslims as an example and that the Islamic finance system may pave the way for the establishment of new rules in the Western world.
[Read more]

“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency,” said Lord Keynes.

Ben Bernanke disagrees. A student of the Depression, the Fed chair appears far more fearful of deflation a vicious cycle of falling prices, debt defaults, home foreclosures and rising unemployment.

Deflation is what America underwent in the 1930s. A Fed-created bubble burst, causing margin calls to go out to stockholders, who ran to their banks that, besieged, collapsed, wiping out a third of our money. As Milton Friedman, who won a Nobel for his thesis that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression, told PBS in 2000:

“For every $100 in paper money, in deposits, in cash, in currency, in existence in 1929, by the time you got to 1933 there was only about $65, $66 left. And that extraordinary collapse in the banking system, with about a third of the banks failing … with millions of people having their savings essentially washed out, that decline was utterly unnecessary.

“(T)he Federal Reserve had the power and the knowledge to have stopped that. And there were people at the time who were … urging them to do that. So it was … clearly a mistake of policy that led to the Great Depression.”

Is Bernanke fighting the war of 1929 in 2009? Surely, today, with the explosion in M1, the basic money supply, there is no shortage of dollars out there, even if they are not circulating fast enough.

To end our recession, Bernanke may be running an even greater risk: hyper-inflation. This has destroyed more nations than deflation or even depression.
[Read more]

GALLIANO, La. - Ten inmates have been charged with hate crimes after two incidents that left a couple of white prisoners beaten unconscious in the Lafourche Parish Detention Center.

Sheriff Craig Webre said that internal investigation showed that the attacks, which occurred on Monday, March 10 and Friday, March 13, were motivated solely by race. He said the investigation showed that a 28-year-old inmate, James Ingram, had made a statement that several white boys had to leave the cellblock “on their own or through the hospital.”

According to the investigation, two inmates were beaten by a gang of eight shortly before midnight in the first attack and three were beaten by a group of seven prisoners in the second instance. In both cases, Webre said that the victims were immediately given medical attention.
[Read more]

Two teenagers accused of terrorizing three women at gunpoint have been charged as adults with multiple counts of kidnapping, sexual assault and aggravated robbery.

The two — George McClain, 17, and Tywann Hale, 16 — are accused of entering a home in the 900 block of South Havana Street on Feb. 18. There, according to the Denver district attorney’s office, they terrorized the women at gunpoint by holding them against their will, robbing them and sexually assaulting one of them.

The victims were 18, 19 and 30 years old, according to Lynn Kimbrough, spokeswoman for the Denver DA’s office.
[Read more]

Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology, is said to have proclaimed, “Demography is destiny.” So you might think that annual release of the latest birth statistics by the federal National Center for Health Statistics might engender some careful scrutiny in the press.

But you would be W-R-O-N-G.

Instead, the New York Times covered Births: Preliminary Data for 2007 in its “Health” section. The insightfulness of Main Stream Media analysis is displayed in this quote from the NYT’s article ’07 U.S. Births Break Baby Boom Record [by Erik Eckholm, March 19, 2009]:

“But in contrast with the culturally transforming postwar boom, when a smaller population of women bore an average of three or four children, the recent increase mainly reflects a larger population of women of childbearing age…”

Nothing “culturally transforming” going on in the new birth numbers. Nothing! Just move along, folks, no need to gawk.

The Associated Press write-up by AP medical writer Mike Stobbe [March 18, 2009] reflects the conventional wisdom:

“Behind the number is both good and bad news. While it shows the U.S. population is more than replacing itself, a healthy trend, the teen birth rate was up for a second year in a row.”

As you can see, the main area of birth statistics you are allowed to worry about in public is…teen births. Teen births are Bad. It doesn’t matter if a 19-year-old high school graduate married lady gives birth. Teen births are, ipso facto, socially unhealthy.

[...]

Here’s a picture of California.

As you can see, it’s a rather nice piece of terrain. Why did a policy of, in effect, turning California over to foreign nationals and their progeny ever strike anybody as a good idea?
[Read more]

WASHINGTON — Mexican drug cartels and their vast network of associates have branched out from their traditional business of narcotics trafficking and are now playing a central role in the multibillion-dollar-a-year business of illegal immigrant smuggling, U.S. law-enforcement officials and other experts say.

The business of smuggling humans across the Mexican border always has been brisk, with many thousands coming across every year. But smugglers affiliated with the drug cartels have taken the enterprise to a new level — and made it more violent — by commandeering much of the operation from independent coyotes, according to these officials and recent congressional testimony.

U.S. efforts to stop the cartels have been stymied by a shortage of funds and the failure of federal law-enforcement agencies to collaborate effectively with each other, their local and state counterparts and the Mexican government, officials say.
[Read more]

Although the primary ethnic fault line in America’s schools today is between blacks and Hispanics, there can be friction whenever different groups mix, and as student populations become more diverse it opens up new opportunities for conflict. In Hamtramck, Michigan, the tensions are between blacks and Arabs. After a racially-motivated brawl in 2004, the superintendent of schools promised a constant police presence at Hamtramck High School, but police patrols were not enough. The next year, the school spent $22,000 on surveillance cameras to try to keep peace in a school that was averaging at least one fight every three days. The cameras were in addition to metal detectors and photo IDs students had worn for years. “It’s just the way things are,” said Terrell Beasley, who was hospitalized after an attack by Arabs. “Blacks and Arabs don’t get along. It’s been like that since the beginning.”

In rural Gentry, Arkansas, Hmong immigrants are a source of friction. Between November 2005 and January 2006, police arrested 14 public school students for what they called “racially motivated” fights. One student had to go to the hospital, and two Hmong and two Hispanic teenagers were expelled.

The town quickly called in professional help to try to ease the tension. “We really want to make people aware of what’s going on over there before someone gets killed,” said Tessie Ajala, who
led an intervention program at the high school.

[Subscription Required]
[Read more]

Belgrade — Ten years on, Serbia still bears the scars of NATO’s air war over Kosovo but remains as dogged as ever in its opposition to the independence of the ethnic Albanian-majority territory.

The 11-week bombing campaign was launched on March 24, 1999, after the collapse of Western-brokered peace talks between the regime of late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and separatist Kosovo Albanians.

“Although everyone feared the bombings, nobody really believed it would happen and when I heard the first air raid sirens and saw the lights in the sky, I thought it was a test,” recalled Igor Marovic, an anti-Milosevic student activist at the time.

Western leaders saw the air war, the first of its kind in NATO’s history, as the only way to end the 1998-1999 violent crackdown by Milosevic’s forces on the Kosovo Liberation Army and their supporters.

NATO set out to destroy several dozen military targets, but went on to strike infrastructure like bridges, railway junctions, the electricity grid and the Milosevic propaganda machine.

Its bombs and missiles took out many targets with precision, but the alliance came in for fierce criticism when some went astray, hitting homes, refugee convoys, a bus, train, hospital and the embassy of China.
[Read more]

Some government estimates are that at least 12 million illegal aliens are living and working in the United States. Assuming that only one in four illegal aliens hold a job, and those who don’t are their dependents, that would mean at least three million American jobs are being held by these people. Coincidently, that’s the number of jobs the $787 billion stimulus bill is supposed to “create or save.”

There’s a much cheaper way to create three million jobs without bankrupting the country: Deport illegals.

Much of the so-called stimulus bill President Obama signed calls for infrastructure repairs and new public works projects. If many “shovel ready” building projects can now be funded, how many jobs will be taken by unskilled or semi-skilled laborers from Mexico and elsewhere? I think we all know the answer to that – a lot.

Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act allows state and local law enforcement officers to receive training on immigration
law that qualifies them for “cross designation” to perform immigration law enforcement. In order words, trained local police officers are authorized to enforce immigration law and arrest illegal aliens they encounter during the normal course of their duties.
[Read more]

Visit http://singingrevolution.com to request a screening of The Singing Revolution in your area.

Most people don’t think about singing when they think about revolutions. But song was the weapon of choice when, between 1986 and 1991, Estonians sought to free themselves from decades of Soviet occupation. During those years, hundreds of thousands gathered in public to sing forbidden patriotic songs and to rally for independence.
[Read more]