The government should issue bonds that will never be repaid. Not simply replaced with new bonds as at present — never repaid ever.

We quote from an article by Hunter Lewis at Townhall: 

In her speech at the New York Economic Club on Wednesday [April 16, 2014], Janet Yellen said it is “quite plausible” the economy will reach full employment in a couple of years with just the right amount of inflation, which to her mind means 2% a year.

If the economy surprises her, the Fed will “systematically respond to unforeseen economic developments”. But what exactly does this mean? How will the Fed respond?

The Fed has already made loans available to New York and foreign banks at negative real interest rates and created trillions of new dollars — all without support from either history or theory. What other steps could follow?

Here are a few of the radical ideas floating around the halls of the Fed and associated Keynesian economics departments:

1. Take a leaf from Japan by forcing banks to lend in return for Fed support.

2. Require banks to charge negative interest. This means that depositors would lose money if not used. Ms. Yellen voiced support for this idea in 2010. Some supporters of NIPR (negative interest rate policy) would like to eliminate cash entirely, because electronic money is more easily controlled.

3. Hold interest rates down but simultaneously drive inflation up to as much as 5-6%. With real interest rates at negative 5%, borrowing will soar. What isn’t clear in this scenario is why lenders will want to lend, but this idea is supported by leading lights of the Harvard economics department, and let’s not let reality intrude.

4. Create even more money and use it to buy corporate bonds, stocks, real estate, anything that can be bought, which will flood the economy with money.

Some of the ideas waiting in the wings are not monetary. They include:

5. The government should set an annual borrowing target for the economy. If it isn’t being met by the private sector, government will itself step in and borrow to achieve the target. In this proposal, it doesn’t really matter how the borrowing is used. Quantity, not quality, of spending and investment is all that counts.

6. The government should issue bonds that will never be repaid. Not simply replaced with new bonds as at present — never repaid ever.

7. Employers should have to seek government permission to lay off or fire a worker. This idea of Paul Krugman’s is already true to a large degree in France, with the result that employers are very reluctant to hire anyone.

What all these Keynesian ideas have in common is the belief that a crash caused by too much bad debt can be cured by more debt. They also assume that the very government price controls and manipulations that have caused massive unemployment can be used to undo the damage.

Unfortunately these are precisely the ideas guiding Janet Yellen and the other Keynesian PhD’s guiding world economic policy today.

Today we have posted essay number 8, Faust (One), in the series titled The Darkness of This World. (Find it under Pages in our margin.)

Here are some extracts from it:

Post-Enlightenment Romanticism was an escape from the reality of “this world”, and a belief that there could be a better world realized in Art, or in a future brought about by political action. …

The Romantic Movement was seeded in France with the revolutionary idealism of Rousseau, and flowered first in England as resistance to the iron reality of the Industrial Revolution, but found its natural home in Germany. There God died, but the Devil lived on.

The death of God was announced by the German philosopher Nietzsche in 1882, but when had it occurred? God was still alive, tussling with the Devil for the souls of men when the first part of Goethe’s play Faust was published in 1808, so the event must have come about, quietly, sometime in the intervening seventy-four years.

The legend of Faust and his pact with the Devil had arisen in Germany soon after the Reformation began there [in 1517], and about two hundred years before the Enlightenment seriously weakened the power of the Churches. …

The legendary Faust is a man who chooses to sell his soul to the Devil in exchange for power, honor, wealth, fame; delight of the senses and satisfaction of the appetites, especially lust; and knowledge (of both the scientific and the intuitive sorts), for the duration of his life on earth, usually twenty-four years from the day of the compact. As his splendid life goes on, he wonders at moments if he could repent and be saved. He is exhorted by well-wishers to turn to God for mercy. But he chooses to renew his fatal pact. When he dies he goes to hell …

There was a real historical Dr Faust, “magician, necromancer, sodomist, astrologer and palm reader”, living in Germany in the early sixteenth century, and it was on his character, skills and escapades that the legend was based.

His birth name was Georgius Sabellicus. In 1505 he was helped by a certain Franz von Sickengen – who interested himself in mysticism and the magic arts – to obtain the post of schoolmaster in the Rhineland-Palatinate town of Kreuznach. Exposed as having forced boys of his classroom to perform “acts of lewdness”, Sabellicus disappeared from the school and the town. Two years later, as “Johannes Faust”, he was granted the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Theology by the University of Heidelberg. He came top of his class of fifteen, so either he was a brainy fellow, or he had already sold his soul to the Devil.

The graduate called himself “the Second Magus”, signaling that he was the successor to Simon Magus, the 1^st century Gnostic teacher of St Paul’s day, written about scornfully in the New Testament and condemned by the Catholic Church as “the father of all heresies”.  (See our post, The father of all heresies, February 21, 2010.)

He stayed in Heidelberg for some years and acquired a dubious reputation as a man of extraordinary powers.

While most commentary on him both in his lifetime and for a few years after his death (which was probably in or about 1540) portrayed him as no more than a braggart, a fraud, and a petty thief, some took him more seriously. An agreement made between himself and the Devil soon became an essential ingredient of his legend. It was related in tones of thrilled horror that he had referred to Satan as his “Schwäger”, his brother-in-law. A demon spirit who takes the form of Helen of Troy occurs in almost all the versions of the story. (She had been Simon Magus’s consort. Though he had found her in a brothel in Tyre, he taught that she had been incarnated in one of her lives as Helen, “the most beautiful woman in the world”, and had descended again from the highest heaven to help him with his mission of redeeming mankind.)

The idea that supernatural powers could be bestowed on a man by the Devil, but had to be paid for with the man’s soul, probably arose from the anathematizing accounts by the Catholic church fathers of the Gnostic cults. Because the Gnostics did not worship the Creator God of the bible but another god whom they “knew” by the gift of intuitive knowledge (the Gnosis); because many of them declared the Creator God to be evil; and because the worship of their god took the form of drugged orgies, perverted sex (anal and oral in order to avoid conception), and the deliberate flouting of biblical commandments, they were considered by Catholics to be devil-worshippers, and their rites Satanic. Their doctrines and practices were deplored in the pulpits of Christendom, embellished with fearful details and scary myths, not only to condemn them and warn the awestruck laity against them, but because the clergy was genuinely full of superstitious terror of the Devil. For centuries Gnostic ritual was considered by Christian theologians to be devil-worship. The Catholic Church succeeded in wiping out Gnosticism in the Middle Ages, using the instrument of the Inquisition. (See our post The heretics of Languedoc, May 1, 2011.)

When the centuries of Church power were brought to an end by the Enlightenment, and Christianity itself took a beating, Faust and the Devil not only survived but flourished.

The Industrial Revolution made it possible as never before for individuals not born to riches and power to acquire them. To those who understood economics it was not an inexplicable phenomenon. But to those who wanted as little to do with the racket and dirt of industry as possible, who were nostalgic for the past, and who continued to believe in the supernatural though the priests had been shouted down by Reason, it was uncanny, magical; and ever-present envy had no trouble diagnosing the cause as demonic. So with the Devil living on in the psyche of Christian Europe long after God had died, Dr. Faust had a new lease of life. …

Again we pick a favorite cartoon from PowerLine’s This Week in Pictures. But there are others just as apt and funny – take a look here.

This is from The Independent:

They are male and female, young and old, black, white and Asian, with hijab and without, but they are all Muslims. And they are all happy.

That’s the message of a new video which shows dozens of British Muslims dancing their hearts out, laughing, singing and smiling along to Pharrell Williams’ hit single “Happy”.

Produced by a group of young Muslims called Honesty Policy, the four-minute video is infectious and its unashamedly positive message has gone viral more than 300,000 hits (and rising) on YouTube this week. Just try and watch it without smiling – you’ll fail.

Aside from making you grin, the point of the video, according its creators, is to show that British Muslims are just as happy, eclectic, cosmopolitan, diverse, creative, fun and outgoing as anyone else. “This video was joining the global movement of happiness inspired by Pharrell,” the Honesty Policy group tells me in an email. “It’s part of something that we as Muslims could find ourselves relating to: happiness. We, too, are happy people, and we promote a message of happiness.”

Here are some more pictures of happy fun-loving Muslims, from Raymond Ibrahim’s website, Islam Translated:

In Idlib, northwest Syria, seven soldiers were recently captured by “rebel” forces.  They were tortured and executed, by beheading, echoing Koran 47:4: “So when you meet in battle those who disbelieve [or “infidels”], then smite the necks [decapitate] until when you have overcome them… That is the command.”

Today [April 18, 2014], Al Hadath News published the following pictures of the aftermath, to document the atrocity — and the nature of the “rebellion,” so frequently portrayed in the West as a fight for “freedom and democracy.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali – a fellow atheist – is fast becoming a figurehead, as well as an active leader, of all Western opposition (such as there is) to …

… this sort of Islamic practice. We have taken the report, raw, from halalporkshop.com, which quotes from a local news source in Daharki, Pakistan, without correcting errors of expression:

A local panchayat- unofficial jury, headed by an influential landlord, ordered killing of a woman in the name of ‘honour’ on Wednesday.

The panchayat also ordered to give two minor daughters of a man, charged for having illicit relations with the woman, as vani to the other party. Vani is traditional custom in rural areas of the country wherein girl, from a family of male accused of crimes, are forcibly married to a man of the rival group.

The landlord also imprisoned the accused in his private jail. The panchayat also ruled to kill minor girls, 10-year-old Zubaida and seven-over-old Abida, if they were not handed over to the landlord in three days.

While it is true that the law of the land in Pakistan does not permit this, it is also true that many a local panchayat can and does get away with ordering such atrocious cruelties, and that they are carried out.

Could anything make it plainer that women, from their infancy, are slaves in Islam?

If the professors of Women’s Studies at Brandeis University ( see our post below, Brandeis University shames itself, April 10, 2014) do not know this, they should have it knocked into their thick heads. And if they do know it and believe it does not matter, they should be fired and their department closed.

Actually, all departments of Women’s Studies should be closed. They are departments of Navel-Gazing, nothing more – like departments of Black Studies, Transgender Studies, and Whatever Other Studies that study nothing worth studying. They are the most conspicuous institutional evidence of Western decadence, planted and cultivated to be arrogant nuisances in the ideological hothouse of Leftism.

The important website that ironically names itself The Religion of Peace, today records 22793 deadly terrorist attacks by Muslims since 9/11/2001.

Here is today’s list of recent attacks:

Islam’s Latest Contributions to Peace: “Mohammed is God’s apostle. Those who follow him are harsh

to the unbelievers but merciful to one another” Quran 48:29

2014.04.16 (Ramadi, Iraq) – Eight people are ripped apart when two Shahid suicide bombers plow into a crowd.

2014.04.16 (Wala, Nigeria) – Eighteen people are slaughtered by militants fighting for Islamic law.

2014.04.15 (Nwokyo, Nigeria) – Women and children are among at least nine who die when Muslim militants torch a Christian worship center and hospital.

2014.04.15 (Baiji, Iraq) – Two brothers bleed to death following a Mujahideen bombing.

2014.04.14 (Abuja, Nigeria) – Activists for an Islamic state slaughter over eighty innocents at a bus stop with a massive bomb blast.

2014.04.14 (Maaloula, Syria) – Three Shia journalists are picked off by Sunni gunmen.

Note that in just three days, in one country alone – Nigeria – at least 97 people, including children, were murdered by Muslims. 

This is from Gatestone, by Soeren Kern:

The project — Muslims in the Eyes of Czech Schoolchildren — is being spearheaded by a Muslim advocacy group and is being financed by American taxpayers through a grant from the US Embassy in Prague. (The US State Department is also promoting Islam in other European countries.)

The group says the Czech Ministry of Education has authorized it to organize lectures and seminars aimed at “teaching Czech schoolchildren about Islamic beliefs and practices” and at “fighting stereotypes and prejudices about Muslims”.

But critics — there are many — say the project’s underlying objective is to convert non-Muslim children to Islam by bringing proselytizing messages into public schools under the guise of promoting multiculturalism and fighting “Islamophobia”.

The group’s website says the first phase of the project involves “analyzing the accuracy of the information about Islam in Czech textbooks on history, geography and social sciences, and mapping the level of teaching about Islam in Czech grammar schools and other secondary schools”.

The second phase of the project involves the implementation of a three-level program that will “acquaint both pupils and teachers with Islam and Muslims” and help them to develop better “critical reception skills” when analyzing supposedly Islamophobic information.

Develop “critical reception skills”? What is a “reception skill”? The ability to swallow any tosh that’s shoved down your throat? As for critical skill, that’s exactly what Muslims don’t want to have brought to bear on their holy texts.

This is a farce, a ruse, a sly cover for proselytizing. “Dawa” they call it. The wonder is that the Czech Ministry of Education cannot see that that’s the case – or doesn’t care that it is.

According to the group’s website:

“The first level acquaints the reader with the history of Islam, the basic religious concepts of tradition and contemporary issues such as family [Sharia] law, the veiling of women and Islamophobia.”

Notice how  (unfortunately non-existent) “Islamophobia” is added on to the fact of “the veiling of women”, so that it seems to be equally factual.

“The second level offers a deeper look at the issues and puts more emphasis on the involvement of the pupils.… Pupils will be divided into three groups within which they will study any of the following topics: the veiling of women, media coverage of Islam, and Muslims in the Czech Republic.

The veiling of women, we have little doubt, will be explained to seem a Very Good Thing; and “media coverage of Islam and Muslims” will be objected to wherever it says anything that Muslims don’t like to have said, regardless of whether it is true or not. Any media discussion of Islam which is not obsequious will be condemned as “Islamophobic”.

Each group will be led by an experienced tutor, who will acquaint students with the problems by means of prepared materials and subsequent debate.

The experienced “tutor” will be a trained indoctrinator. The debate on his side will amount to “‘Shut-up,’ he explained.”

“The third level provides schools with artistically oriented projects or discussions with Muslims and professionals dealing with Islam. Artistic activities would involve making a film or taking photographs focused on a day in the life of a Muslim or art workshops and competitions focused on the possibility of integrating Muslims into Czech society.”

But not making cartoons of Muhammad, or there will be Muslim riots from Britain to Bangladesh.

A thought in passing: it seems that Muslims really believe that Islam is attractive; that once infidels know about it, they will be irresistibly drawn to it. Women to subjugation. Men to putting their foreheads on the ground five times a day. And perhaps even more amazing – there are apparently thousands  of men and women who are drawn to it. Is it possible, we wonder, that the constant condemnation of our civilization by a dominant left-intelligentsia, our failure to teach the virtues of individual freedom, capitalism, and reason, is leaving our children easy prey to any confidence trickster with a mission, any ideological mountebank who comes along and offers them his certainties?

But to return to the text:

Do the Czech Muslims want to integrate? There’s yet more sly wording to confuse the easily gulled Ministry of Education. When they get down to the nitty-gritty in those classrooms, the “tutor’ will demonstrate that, as Sharia law cannot be reconciled with Czech law, it would be best to have just Sharia. “After all,” he will say, smiling all the while, “it is the word of Allah.”

The group also organizes thematic lectures, workshops and debates for schools or groups of students, many of which are held at the Municipal Library in Prague — and which are more openly geared toward converting Czech youth to Islam.

One such lecture entitled “Paths of Young Czech Women to Islam” answers questions such as: What makes a young Czech woman want to become a Muslim? It is the main motive always falling in love with a Muslim man or are there other reasons? How does one convert to Islam? How can new Muslims cope with non-Muslim relatives?

Another lecture entitled “Koran, Sunna and the Internet: Where to Do Muslims Get Their Information?” answers questions such as: Where can one get information about the Muslim faith? Is the Koran the only source of information about Islam or are there other sources? Where can one find information that is not mentioned directly in the Koran? The lecture is supplemented by providing students with hands-on opportunities to work with various Islamic texts, including the Koran and the Hadiths [sayings of the Prophet Mohammed].

Students wanting to participate in the lectures but lacking previous knowledge of Islam are advised to attend a 15-minute introductory course that “represents the characteristics of Islam and advocates it in the context of Christianity and Judaism.” The lectures are “suitable for children from about the age of 15, although it is possible to customize the program for younger pupils.”

A statement on the group’s website justifies the project this way:

The Muslim community in the Czech Republic is small, but it raises strong emotions. Issues relating to Muslims or Islam appear almost daily in television news, newspapers and Internet debates. But the topic is discussed only marginally in regular school lessons. This condition leads to acceptance and subsequent consolidation of prejudices and stereotypes that are supported by latent Islamophobia. We would like this project to contribute to improving the situation. We provide information about Islam that is factually accurate. Students will also have the opportunity to meet with Muslims and get to know them before forming an opinion of them.

We would laugh at the idea that Islam is dead keen on factual accuracy, if we were not depressed over this whole enterprise, and the degree of pusillanimity among Western governments that it so maddeningly illustrates.

One of the co-founders of the project, a Czech-Palestinian named Sadi Shanaah, was quoted by the Prague Post as saying, “School lessons do not pay sufficient attention to Islam. Pupils want to learn more about it.”

Czech school-children are clamoring to learn about Islam? A lie that is instantly contradicted by the group itself:

But the group recently ran an advertisement promising to pay 250 Czech korunas ($13 dollars) to any student aged 15 to 18 years who would agree to attend a two-hour presentation about Islam.

The ad — which indicates that the American embassy in Prague was financing the April 2 event — states:

Event will take place at a school in New Butovice (7 minutes’ walk from the metro station). You get a brief introduction to Islam through which you can learn more about the veiling of Muslim women, media coverage and Muslims in the Czech Republic. Then you will have the opportunity to meet with Amirah, a Malaysian Muslim who is studying medicine in Prague, and to ask her everything you want about Islam or Muslim life in the Czech Republic.

… Most Muslims in the Czech Republic are immigrants from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and Turkey. But a study produced for the Czech Interior Ministry in 2007 … found … a large number of Czech converts to Islam. It is estimated that at least 2,000 Czechs have converted to Islam since the end of Communist rule in 1989.

They got to like being oppressed? Couldn’t bear being unyoked?

Many are women who have married Muslims, but just as many are young males who are “looking to Islam in their search for spirituality,” according to Radio Free Europe. …

As the Muslim population grows, so do tensions with the population at large.

In November 2013, two Muslim women threatened to file an anti-discrimination lawsuit against a nursing school in Prague after they were asked to remove their hijab head covering in class.

“The principal summoned me and told me: ‘If you want to be in the school, you must not wear the scarf.’ I said this was against my religion as I am a Muslim,” Nasra, one of the women, told Czech Television.

The school defended itself, saying that although Czech law does not regulate the wearing of headgear, the school’s dress code bans the practice. The school also said the women, one from Somalia aged 23, and another from Afghanistan aged 25, disagreed with the compulsory physical education and the conditions of compulsory practice.

More recently, Muslims in the Czech Republic have tried to ban a book about Islam they say is Islamophobic.

The book, Islam and Islamism, was written by Lukas Lhot’an, a former Muslim who is now an apostate from Islam. Released in 2011, the book describes how some Muslims are abusing the ideology of multiculturalism to infiltrate Czech schools.

Lhot’an … says Muslim institutions in the country are now headed by Islamists who dominate the entire Islamic community. He accuses Muslim extremists of giving lectures aimed at recruiting converts and new jihad fighters, and alleges that Czech mosques are being controlled by Saudi Arabia.

The Islamic Center of Prague has filed a ten-page criminal complaint against Lhot’an, accusing him of promoting hatred, while the head of the Muslim community in Brno, Muneeb Hassan Alrawi has this to say about Lhot’an: “He is a hyperactive idiot, but also an unhappy man. He makes his living from doing harm. The police investigation will only provide publicity to him. He desires nothing but this.”

But others say the objective of the criminal complaint is obvious: Its aim to prevent Lhot’an from disseminating his view of Islam. … [His]  book describes extremist tendencies inside the Czech Muslim community and tries to highlight their contempt for democracy and women’s rights and their justification of suicide bombers.

And the Obama administration, through the State Department, is providing them with your money to help them.

From Front Page:

Al-Jazeera America, which launched less than a year ago, is slashing expenses and laying off staff as it struggles to gain a foothold in the US.

Hard to imagine why it should be so unpopular.

Some of our greatly valued readers have pointed out to us – in comments on this website and on our Facebook page – that right is not on the side of the Nevada rancher and his allies in their dispute with the Bureau of Land Management (see our post below, It begins?, April 11, 2014).

Cliven Bundy is breaking the law.

We believe in the rule of law. We are not anarchists. So we take their point.

However, it is not a clear-cut issue, as this article from Investor’s Business Daily explains:

It was a tense standoff in rural Nevada with armed protesters closing I-15 for a while and facing off against even more heavily-armed federal agents.

For now, that volatile Bundy Ranch confrontation has been defused. But it’s not over by any means. And we may well experience others that do not pause in non-violence.

These are profound disputes illustrative of abiding suspicions among average Americans and their government headed by a man who promised to bring people together but didn’t. And it comes in an uncertain economic time when so many have given up big dreams to just keep what they have.

The specific Nevada dispute, such as it is, has been simmering for 21 years between a Mormon cattle rancher named Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management, better-known in the West as BLMM, the Bureau of Land Mis-Management.

But the far larger issue, most intense in the West, involves a mounting distrust and suspicion of all things federal — Congress, the bureaucracy and especially an aloof president. His perceived interests are inserting an over-reaching government into the lives of every American for their own good from closing coal mines and rewriting restaurant menus to seizing private property and regulating cow farts. …

Little known in the urban East, BLM is charged with managing nearly 300 million federal acres mostly across the West. That’s an area equivalent to the second and fourth largest states combined, Texas and Montana.

Nevada is the seventh-largest state with 110,567 square miles. That’s 1,626 times larger than all of Washington, D.C., 84% of it still owned by the federal government.

Anyone here ever rented from a landlord located clear across the continent? You get the set-up for conflicting priorities, miscommunication, misinterpretation, misunderstanding and missteps. Bundy’s family has ranched the area since even before Joe Biden was born, back in the 1880’s when Rutherford B. Hayes was president.

Sixty-six years later in 1946 BLM was created, ostensibly to organize a crazy-quilt of laws and regulations governing federal lands. In 1993, BLM notified Bundy that he could not graze his cattle on federal lands anymore because the desert tortoise there was now endangered.

Forget that this same federal government exploded atomic bombs in Nevada for generations with little concern for natural impacts. And it would like to store thousands of tons of nuclear waste there too.

So, for the sake of an endangered wild tortoise the Bundy family ranch became an endangered species. The feds are doing the same to thirsty California farms for the sake of an endangered minnow.

Bundy’s response was very Western. He went ahead anyway. Legally, Bundy hasn’t a leg to stand on. He doesn’t own the land. He hasn’t paid rent. And he’s lost three court battles.

Armed with a court order, BLM decided the time had come for action, eviction of about 1,000 of Bundy’s cattle, even separating newborn calves and mothers.

BLM saw no contradiction sending in dozens of armed federal agents to confront a 67-year-old man behind in his rent while the president of the United States and the nation’s chief law enforcement officer traveled to New York to dine with and speak on behalf of the notorious Al Sharpton, who’s been more than $1 million behind in his income taxes.

That’s the kind of double-standard cronyism and de facto discrimination that gets people’s backs up. …

So, in pickups and on horseback hundreds of angry strangers and militia members, alerted by email and texts, became Bundy supporters. They converged on the ranch. Tensions rose. And the BLM, remembering past deadly government-citizen conflicts named Waco, Ruby Ridge and Wounded Knee, released the seized cattle.

Now, here comes the political part that will seem quite familiar to Chicagoans:

A Chinese company has wanted to build an immense solar-panel farm in Nevada under the name ENN Mojave Energy. It would need additional tortoise habitat to mitigate its complex.

The local lobbyist who’s represented the Chinese-backed firm is a failed Democrat politician named Rory Reid, who got his gully washed in the 2010 race for governor by Republican Brian Sandoval.

Oh, look! Reid also happens to be the son of Harry Reid, the dottering Democrat Senate majority leader for a few more months, who’s somehow managed to become a millionaire on congressional pay.

Now, perhaps you understand why Bundy Ranch supporters smell a cattle-thieving, land-grabbing Washington political conspiracy where, clearly, none exists.

Oh, one other thing. Last week the Senate confirmed a brand-new director of BLM. He’s Neil Kornze, at 35 an unusually inexperienced youngster to be running such a powerful agency with sprawling powers.

However, Nevada native Kornze had something special going for him in the Senate and Obama White House drive to get him the job. He was a senior policy aide to – Wait for it! – Harry Reid, whose son represented the Chinese solar farm.

Now, go wash your hands.

*

And this is an editorial from the same IBD website: 

Does the government really need to own 30% of the U.S., with the percentage in Western states much higher? The government’s agenda in this and many other land-confiscation activities is motivated by a desire to comply with a UN “rewilding” program that advocates pushing humans out of rural areas and into densely packed urban zones to promote what the UN calls “sustainable development”:

Land … cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market,” says the U.N.’s Agenda 21 action plan. “Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes.

So the UN and its tool, the Obama administration, are mounting a massive attack on private property. 

But our land can be controlled, apparently, by Harry Reid’s donors and relatives and former staffers as well as assorted globalists and Chinese investors. In their view, this land is not your land, it’s their land.

Bundy, who lives in a country founded by armed Americans resisting a tyrannical government, has objected, reviving the long-simmering Sagebrush Rebellion between residents of the West and a land-grabbing federal government.

In the end, Bundy and the people who rallied to his cause, some of whom carried firearms of their own while demonstrating , proved what the Second Amendment is all about.

From Mauldin Economics: Things That Make You Go Hmmm…

If you jump to the 27:00 minute mark of this edition of The Charlie Rose Show, you will find an excellent interview with David Stockman about his wonderful recent book, The Great Deformation. Stockman finally gets the platform he deserves with Charlie Rose, and I urge you to watch him explain why the Fed is a perennial “bubble machine”. Stockman’s takedown of Paul Krugman alone is worth the price of admission — though even the normally neutral Rose can’t resist taking a shot at a former establishment insider turned outsider.