It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked - Warren Buffet (2007)

It surely kind of prophetic to hear a market guru, like Buffett, embracing such a philosophical approach two years ago as the Berkshire profits plunged 96% in early March amid the dysfunctional world economy. It is even more baffling to hear him blame the derivatives after admitting that the firm' s equity holdings had lost 44% because of them. One has to wonder exactly which game is he playing. In 2003, he was among the very first experts to warn about CDOs calling derivatives *financial weapons of mass destruction* and *time bombs*. This grabbed the media's attention and put on a red alert a myriad of intrigued journalists who directly began to investigate the opacity surrounding these innovative products, all of which led them to the conclusions that Buffett would eventually be proven right. Yes, this was the ultimate CDOs horror story that circulated for many months on the Net. Talk about complacency! But even more troubling: how does it come to be that he was unable to take action in order to prevent his shareholders from dealing with this nasty surprise? And one might ask too: how does it come that Buffett' shareholders didn't do anything to reduce Berkshire's exposure to those exotic financial deals... Of course everybody reaped highly satisfying returns for a while. But that was then, and this is now. As of October 2008, the Size of Derivatives Monster was coming down to $190K per person on the planet! It is not a matter of 'if' but 'when' and when this derivative bubble explodes, we will see who was swimming naked. What a clever man, Buffett, whose private wealth won't most likely suffer too much from the Greatest Depression.

George Handlery about the week that was. Does openness demand liking? The state and the economy, the state in the economy. First order, then, perhaps, democracy. Permissive schools link to merciless unemployment. Crime and freedom. Tyranny and security. Their precondition: negotiate without preconditions. Staling was OK because he also killed “Fascists”.
 
1. French “human righters” have launched an initiative a few weeks ago. They wish to drag Geert Wilders who is Dutch before a French court. The charge: he hates French Muslims. Not liking Muslims even if they are French might be unkind, perhaps even wrong. On the other hand, it is a distortion that the lack of liking or the suspicion of an agenda equals hate which imperils its object. The advocacy and methods of these activists waters down the essentials of human rights concerns. There is no right to be liked. In demanding just that, a criteria for the observance of human rights that might be PC-proof is set up. This is nice but that still does not make the definition logical. Must one love all those that are “different” and who come here with the express intent to remain different? If so, then a lot of people are handed a reason to define themselves as negating human rights related values.

In 1993, a year after the war in Bosnia broke out, the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina lodged an appeal with the International Court of Justice against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, alleging that the country was committing genocide against it. The wheels of international justice turn slowly, especially at the ICJ (an arbitration court with no coercive power and little competence in international criminal law) and the ruling was not handed down until February 2007. It found against Bosnia and in favour of Serbia on almost every single count, especially on the central charge that Yugoslavia had somehow controlled the Bosnian Serbs.

Lost in the controversy over the release of the now-infamous “torture memos,” and the forthcoming release of Abu-Ghraib-style photographs, is the broad question of what, exactly, ought to be classified. The existing system of intelligence classification is merely a codification of the age-old need to keep secrets from one’s enemy. “Truth,” intoned Winston Churchill, “is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” There is some merit to this, especially in the context of a world war, but it is not the last word on the topic, and still less a rule of thumb for the control of information in a liberal democracy.

I’m tired of people who are busy losing this world war because they are still obsessed with the previous one, which ended generations ago. Anti-Nazism has mutated into a permanent witch-hunt on an imaginary enemy. The notion that “neo-Nazis” constitute a prominent group today is nonsense. The most dangerous people by far are those running the European Union, who are busy dismantling European civilization and enlarging the borders of the EU to include the Middle East and North Africa, thus flooding their own countries with tens of millions of Muslims and other hostile aliens without consulting the native population. This makes the EU the largest criminal entity on the planet, preoccupied with destroying an entire continent, dismantling the greatest civilization that has ever existed and replacing the native population with others. I have described this in my book Defeating Eurabia, which is available online.
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George Handlery about the week that was. Hesitant vacillation as a policy principle. Paralyzing preconditions for soluble problems. The failed state and its benefits. Iran, the Anti-Racism Conference and nuclear negotiations. Too neutral? In whose favor? When an enemy is more useful to a dictatorship than a friend.
 
1. It has become fashionable to present reports on piracy that are wrapped in a tranquilizer. It is suggested that the solution of the problem is in Somalia. Save Somalia (throw money at it?) and all will be hanky-dory. One is tempted to suspect that the popularity of the mantra has to do with the trick of attaching an otherwise threateningly soluble problem to a precondition that cannot be met. The benefit is that, succumbing to the West’s luxurious self-doubts, a good reason is given to persist in doing the unreasonable. Thereafter it becomes easy to desist from solving the solvable.

Grandma Esther & Grandpa Al,
about 2 years after her liberation from Auschwitz.

My amazing grandmother, Esther Klein, is turning 91 next month. She was in her mid-twenties when she was liberated by the Swedish Red Cross from an aimless, endless transport, after having spent several nearly lethal winter weeks in Ravensbrueck. Before that, she’d “worked” for several months in Auschwitz, after having lived for a very short time, along with her elderly parents, in a temporary tent city near her hometown of Seredna, constructed right along the railroad tracks, the better for the Jews to wait for their “ride.”

Before that, Esther Herskovitz was a bright, active young woman with bad hay fever, living near the Czech border in a small town in a big house with an orchard and a vineyard and a large, warm family, all of which have since vanished, literally, into thin air. Except the allergies… and my grandmother.

Almost all Western governments now exhibit certain common, antinomian traits. They pontificate ceaselessly. They are averse to standing custom and local habit; they mistrust free transactions and lie in wait for opportunities to interfere in commerce and free trade. Judaism and Christianity irritate them and they seek to repress the symbols of those faiths while making common cause with dubious faiths hostile to Judaism and Christianity.

George Handlery about the week that was. A root of troubles: The conflict between pay now and pay perhaps later. Piracy is good business. Trying to try pirates. Autocracy as an enhancer of limited means. The US’ Iraq woes: the consequence of devastating success? War, terrorism and democratic society.
 
1. Sometimes, like a good snapshot, a single case might reveal more about a general occurrence than a long essay can. The item below fits the generalization. Interestingly, the source is an ex CP member and a valued colleague from my professorial escapade after the (official) fall of Communism. Instead of “Marxism-Leninism” my buddy now teaches “management science”.

The new enemy of the West is ideological Islam. If NATO wants to be a useful instrument in defending the West against this enemy it needs to accept a new member state – Israel – and stop groveling to Turkey.