대한민국 상공에 먹구름이 배회하고 있다

 

대한민국, 구체적으로 말하면 서울의 상공에 거대한 먹구름이 떠 있다. 처음 보는 사람은 그 거대한 규모에 기겁을 하고 만다. 먹구름 속에 저장된 전하(電荷)의 양이 얼마인지 도저히 가늠할 수가 없고, 거기에서 터져 나올 천둥 소리가 얼마나 클지 아무도 예측할 수가 없으며, 지상에 내리 꽂히는 벼락이 얼마나 파괴적일지 누구도 감히 추측할 수가 없다. 소수의 사람만이 그 먹구름의 파괴성을 어림잡고 있지만, 그들조차도 감히 입을 뗄 수가 없다.

 

머지 않아 천둥이 치고 서울의 땅위에 벼락이 떨어지는 시간이 오면, 사람들은 연극 무대의 배역을 맡은 듯이 각자의 연기를 펼칠 것이다. 용감한 사람, 비겁한 인간, 배신자, 기회주의자, 이름 없는 영웅, 반역자, 밀고자, 광대, 천둥벌거숭이, 도망자, 추종자 등이 서울에서 자신의 배역을 연기할 것이다.

 

조직과 돈과 신념을 갖춘 세력이 최종적인 승리를 거둘 것이다. 하지만 그중에서도 가장 중요한 요소는 신념이다. 탄핵이 인용되면, 대한민국은 공산화가 되고, 자유를 갈구하는 인간들은 살 수 없는 땅이 될 거라는 자각과 자유에 대한 신념이 그것이다. 거리에는 피가 흐르고, 비명이 터져 나오고, 절규가 새어나오고, 함성과 고함이 난무하며, 사람들은 이리저리 분주하게 뛰어다닐 것이다. 그들의 눈에는 핏발이 서려 있고, 살기가 가득할 것이다. 하지만 대한민국이 새롭게 태어나려면 피할 수 없는 통과의례이다.

 

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트럼프의 7 개국 입국 금지로 미국이 시끄럽다. 아래는 오래 전부터 이슬람의 개혁을 주장하고, 그들의 테러에 대한 합리적인 대책을 요구했던 소말리아 출신의 페미니스트 알리의 글이다.

 

 

 

트럼프의 입국 금지는 서툴렀지만, 급진 이슬람에 대한 그의 견해는 옳다

Trump’s Immigration Ban Was Clumsy But He’s Right About Radical Islam

 

                                         아얀 히르시 알리

 

 

I was a Muslim refugee once. I know what it’s like. I know what it’s like to gamble your entire future on a one-way ticket to a foreign land, what it’s like to fill in the forms, not knowing for sure what the right answers are. I know what it’s like to fear rejection, deportation and the dangers that await you back home.

 

 

Yet today I am an American citizen, one who has more reason than most to fear Islamic extremism. And that’s why I want to plead with my fellow Americans to calm down and think rationally about the dilemmas and trade-offs that we face.

 

 

When Donald Trump set out his views on Islamic extremism in a campaign speech last August, I was surprised and excited. In particular, Trump’s pledge that, if elected president, he would focus on the ideology underlying the violence — and not only on the acts of violence themselves — was a welcome departure from the approach taken by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

 

 

Liberals who have been so quick to heap opprobrium on President Trump should read that speech. In it, he rightly condemned “the hateful ideology of radical Islam” for “its oppression of women, gays, children and nonbelievers.” And he argued persuasively for a non-military response to the threat: “Just as we won the Cold War, in part, by exposing the evils of communism and the virtues of free markets, so too must we take on the ideology of Radical Islam.” Best of all, in my eyes, Trump promised that his “administration will be a friend to all moderate Muslim reformers in the Middle East, and will amplify their voices.”

 

 

“Our administration will be a friend to all moderate Muslim reformers in the Middle East and will amplify their voices.

 

—Donald Trump, August 2016

 

 

Finally, I thought, we could have a commander-in-chief who understands the true nature of the challenge we face — who sees that we need more than drone strikes abroad and empty domestic programs supposed to counter “violent extremism.”

 

 

Perhaps it was my high expectations that made last Friday’s executive order on immigration so puzzling. It was, apart from anything else, clumsy. It caught border protection agents and customs officials by surprise. It sowed confusion and fear among travelers, immigrants and legal permanent residents. Its poor execution was a gift to the president’s critics.

 

 

In halting the entry of all refugees, and in appearing to be directed against Muslims — including even those who had worked for the U.S. military as interpreters — it was much too broad. In temporarily banning citizens from just seven countries, however, it was also too narrow (citizens from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and several North African countries have also been implicated in terrorism).

 

 

True, the president had made clear back in August that this was part of what he intended to do. “We will have to temporarily suspend immigration from some of the most dangerous and volatile regions of the world that have a history of exporting terrorism,” he said. “As soon as I take office, I will ask the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to identify a list of regions where adequate screening cannot take place. We will stop processing visas from those areas until such time as it is deemed safe to resume based on new circumstances or new procedures.”

 

 

But what got lost in the hysteria that followed last Friday’s announcement was that these are temporary measures, not the foundation for future policy. As Trump said in August, his administration “will establish a clear principle that will govern all decisions pertaining to immigration: we should admit into this country those who share our values and respect our people ... In addition to screening out all members or sympathizers of terrorist groups, we must also screen out any who have hostile attitudes towards our country or its principles — or who believe that Sharia law should supplant American law. Those who do not believe in our Constitution, or who support bigotry and hatred, will not be admitted for immigration into the country. Only those who we expect to flourish in our country — and to embrace a tolerant American society — should be issued immigrant visas.”

 

 

If that is still the Trump administration’s plan, then it has my support. Let me explain why.

 

 

“We must screen out those who have hostile attitudes towards our country or its principles.

 

—Donald Trump, August 2016

 

 

As I said, I was once a Muslim refugee. En route to Canada to consummate a marriage arranged against my will by my father, I fled from Frankfurt Airport to the Netherlands and requested asylum.

 

 

It was not easy. I learned Dutch. I worked in a factory to make ends meet, and also worked as an interpreter for abused Muslim women. But I worked hard. And I studied.

 

I received a master’s degree in political science from the University of Leiden, where I read John Locke, Voltaire and John Stuart Mill. I eventually rejected Islam as a system that was too intolerant of free thought. I later emigrated to the United States, after I found that the Dutch were themselves not quite as committed to free thought and free speech as I had been led to believe.

 

My story is unusual, but it is not unique. In the course of working with Muslim communities over the past two decades, I have come to distinguish between four types of Muslim immigrants: adapters, menaces, coasters and fanatics.

 

Many Muslim immigrants have adapted over time by adopting the core values of Western democracies, using the freedoms they have found in the West to learn, educate themselves and their children, find gainful employment, start businesses, vote and take part in politics and thrive in many ways.

 

 

Then there are those individuals — mostly young men — who choose to become menaces in their homes and outside in public. Some have been subjected to domestic violence and then commit it themselves. Others drop out of school, commit crimes big and small, and spend periods of their lives in prison.

 

 

A third group of Muslim immigrants are the “coasters” — men and women with little or no formal education who thankfully accept welfare, live off it and invite their families from abroad to come and partake of it. They see no reason to work because the kind of jobs available to them are the menial, repetitive sort that are “beneath” them and pay only a bit more than the benefits they claim.

 

Finally, there are the fanatics — those use the freedoms of the countries that gave them sanctuary to spread an uncompromising practice of Islam.

 

These different categories are not rigidly separate. A coaster’s children can become adapters; some menaces clean up their acts; some fanatics get disillusioned with the pursuit of religious utopia. It also goes the other way, however. Menaces can turn into fanatics, sometimes as a result of exposure to Islamism in prison. Even the children of adapters can embrace fanaticism.

 

 

We cannot pretend that all Muslim immigrants are perfect adapters; but similarly, we cannot assume that no Muslim immigrants are fanatics. In our immigration policy, we need to make all possible effort to welcome adapters and exclude troublemakers. The question is how.

 

 

“Many Muslim immigrants have adapted over time by adopting the core values of Western democracies.

 

 

As an immigrant of Somali origin, I have no objection to other people coming to America to seek a better life for themselves and their families. My concern is with the attitudes many of these new Muslim Americans will bring with them — and with our limited capacity for changing those attitudes.

 

 

According to projections in a 2011 Pew report, more than a third of Muslim immigrants to the U.S. between 2010 and 2030 will be from just three countries: Pakistan, Bangladesh and Iraq. Only Iraq was targeted by President Trump’s executive order. Another Pew study of opinion in the Muslim world shows just how many people in these countries hold views that most Americans would regard as extreme. (Data on opinion are unavailable for the other two big “sender” countries, Somalia and Iran, both of which were targeted by the executive order.)

 

 

In a survey of Muslims who believe Sharia law should be official national law in their country, three-quarters of Pakistanis and almost half of Bangladeshis and Iraqis think that those, like me, who leave Islam should suffer the death penalty. More than 80 percent of Muslims in Pakistan and around two-thirds of Muslims in Bangladesh and Iraq regard Sharia law as the revealed word of God. Only tiny fractions would be comfortable if their daughters married Christians. Only a minority regards honor killings of women as “never justified.” More than a quarter of Bangladeshi Muslims, 13 percent of Pakistani Muslims and 7 percent of Iraqi Muslims think suicide bombings in defense of Islam are often or sometimes justified.

 

 

People with views such as these pose a threat to us all, not because those who hold them will all turn to terrorism. Most will not. But such attitudes imply a readiness to turn a blind eye to the use of violence and intimidation tactics against, say, apostates and dissidents — and a clear aversion to the hard-won achievements of Western feminists and campaigners for minority rights. Admitting individuals with such views is not in the American national interest.

 

 

Contrary to some of the president’s more strident critics, restrictions on foreign immigration are not immoral per se. Canada, for example, accepts only whole families, single women or children from Syria, but excludes single men as a possible security threat. Most countries have such rules. Recent terrorist cases suggest that the U.S. could do with tightening its rules, or applying them more rigorously.

 

The Tsarnaev family came to the U.S. on tourist visas and over time gained asylum. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two brothers responsible for the Boston marathon bombings, received his green card in 2007 and became a U.S. citizen in 2012 on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

 

 

The culprit behind the pressure cooker bombings in New York was Ahmad Khan Rahami. He was born in Afghanistan and came to the United States when his father requested asylum. He was a naturalized U.S. citizen at the time of the attacks.

 

The Chattanooga shooting of July 2015, in which four Marines and a Navy sailor were killed, was carried out by Muhammad Abdulazeez. Born in Kuwait, he was a naturalized U.S. citizen.

 

 

Tashfeen Malik, one of the killers in the San Bernardino massacre in December 2015, entered the United States on a K-1 fiancee visa with a Pakistani passport.

 

“Contrary to some of the president’s more strident critics, restrictions on foreign immigration are not immoral per se.

 

In retrospect, all these cases were not vetted closely enough. Yet two further points immediately follow from this. First, the different statuses of these perpetrators — children of asylum seekers, recipients of tourist visas, fiancée visas, permanent residents, naturalized citizens — show that it is not enough to focus on refugees alone. Indeed, no refugee has yet committed a terrorist act.

 

Second, and more importantly, the problem of Islamist terrorism will not be solved by immigration controls and extreme vetting alone. That’s because the problem is already inside our borders.

 

Several perpetrators of recent attacks were U.S. citizens who were born and raised in the United States: Maj. Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 and wounded more than 30 at Fort Hood in 2009, was born in Virginia in 1970 to Palestinian parents who had immigrated to the U.S. And the other culprit in San Bernardino was Syed Rizwan Farook, a U.S. citizen born in Chicago in 1987 to parents who had immigrated from Pakistan. The Orlando night club shooter who killed 49 and injured 53 was Omar Seddique Mateen, a U.S. citizen born in New York in 1986 to Afghan parents.

 

The Obama administration had a flawed solution to this problem, which it called countering violent extremism. The Trump administration needs a completely new approach that targets not just violence, but the proponents of subversive Islamist views — the phenomenon of dawa or proselytizing. This ideological indoctrination is the essential prelude to acts of jihad, yet for too long it has been going on with impunity.

 

 

Addressing the problem of Islamist terrorism will require much more than better immigration controls, though we certainly need those. It will necessitate the systematic dismantling of the ideological infrastructure of dawa, which is already well established right here in the United States.

 

President Trump was right back in August. The threat posed by “the hateful ideology of radical Islam” needs to be countered. American citizens — including immigrants — must be protected from that ideology and the violence that it promotes. But the threat is too multifaceted to be dealt with by executive orders. That is why Trump was right to argue in August for a commission of some kind — I would favor congressional hearings — to establish the full magnitude and nature of the threat.

 

 

Until we recognize that this ideology is already in our midst, we shall expend all our energies in feverish debates about executive orders, when what is needed is cool, comprehensive legislation.

 

 

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NassimNicholasTaleb 트윗

   

 

I wonder what the Enlightenment people would call a "Left" that's authoritarian, repressive, disciplinarian, & despotically normative. (이 아래에 댓글들이 엄청나게 달렸다. 관심 있는 분은 가서 일독)

 

권위주의적이고, 억압적이며, 규제를 고집하고, 독재적으로 규범적인 좌파들을 계몽주의 사람들은 무엇이라고 불렀을까?

 

Enlightenment was marked by emphasis on the scientific method+ reductionism along with increased questioning of religious orthodoxy

 

계몽주의는 종교적 정통에 대한 점증하는 회의와 함께 과학적인 방법과 환원주의 강조라는 특징이 있다.

 

 

2 books to understand the "left" phenomenon:

 

Where and how it began - "Demons"

What it is now - "Liberalism is a mental disorder"

좌파 현상을 이해하기 위한 두 가지 책

 

좌파는 어디에서, 어떻게 시작되었나 --- 도스토예프스키의 <악령>

현재의 좌파 -------- 좌파는 정신 질환이다. ( Michael Savage가 2005년 출판한 책)

 

 

"To me you are tarantulas... your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue." - Nietzche (탈레브가 인용한 니체의 글)

 

나에게 너는 타란툴라 독거미이다... 독재자가 되고 싶은 너의 가장 내밀한 욕망은 그리 하여 도덕의 언어를 둘러쓰고 있다. --니체

 

 

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슈피겔 지의 표지, 트럼프가 자유의 여신의 목을 쳤다.

 

 

 

 

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오늘날 문제의 핵심은 법정 화폐 시스템이 완전히 통제 불가능해졌다는 것이다. 그에 대한 조치가 취해지기 전까지는, 우리는 자산 거품과 붕괴를 계속해서 경함할 것이다.

 

 

 

 

Don’t Blame Trump When the World Ends

 

Posted on February 3, 2017 by MN Gordon

 

There was, indeed, a time when clear thinking and lucid communication via the written word were held in high regard. As far as we can tell, this wonderful epoch concluded in 1936. Everything since has been tortured with varying degrees of gobbledygook.

 

The fall from grace was triggered by the 1936 publication of John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. The book is rigorously indecipherable. What’s more, it has the ill-effect of making those who read it dumber.

 

Nonetheless, politicians and establishment economists remain enamored with Keynes’ gibberish. For it offers academic rationale for governments to do what they love to do most – borrow money and spend it on inane programs. In particular, Keynes advocated filling bottles with money and burying them in coalmines for people to dig up as a way to end unemployment. Somehow, this public works egg hunt would make everyone rich.

 

Over the years this reasoning has inspired countless government stunts to save the economy from itself. Not long ago, Keynes devotee, Paul Krugman, took this logic and ran with it to the outer limits of deep space. In the process, he seems to have lost his mind.

 

According to Krugman, the proper way to propel an economic growth chart up and to the right is to borrow massive amounts of money and spend it preparing for an alien invasion. Naturally, it takes a Nobel Prize winning economist to come up with such nonsense.

 

Better Markets

 

Unfortunately, Keynes’ drivel became the archetypical for illogical economic thought, and still infects economic discourse to this day. You can hardly browse the headlines of Yahoo finance without your eyeballs being lacerated by it.

 

Just this week, for instance, we came across a headline titled, The Coming Trump Financial Crash. The author, Dennis M. Kelleher, happens to be President and CEO of the oddly named company Better Markets. The company website clarifies that Better Markets is “a nonprofit that promotes the public interest in the financial markets.”

 

What exactly this Washington, D.C. based nonprofit does – or how they keep the lights on – is unclear. But what is clear is that Kelleher is very comfortable applying words and terms to construct sentences with haphazard syntax. Kelleher also seems panicked that financial deregulation by Trump is going to cause a great big crash:

 

“If the Trump administration does just half of what it says it’s going to do in economic policy and financial regulation, another financial crash is almost certain and sooner rather than later. Worse yet, if they do that, the next crash will be much worse than the last one.

 

“Why another crash? Because it appears he is going to cause an asset and stock market bubble at the very same time he is reducing or eliminating the most sensible financial regulation designed to prevent the highest risk gambling on Wall Street. Tax changes that favor the wealthiest and repatriation of overseas profits that will most likely fund stock buybacks and M&A will be a short-term boost for the stock market. However, there has been almost no discussion of concrete policies that would actually produce sustainable and durable economic growth in the real economy.

 

“We have already seen the beginnings of the stock market bubble, with financial stocks leading the way as investors think that Wall Street’s highly profitable, but highest risk activities will create outsized returns […]. If financial regulation designed to protect Main Street’s jobs, homes and savings from Wall Street’s excesses are weakened or eliminated, then those activities will lead to financial excesses and almost certainly end in a financial crash.”

 

Do you follow the logic?

 

Don’t Blame Trump When the World Ends

 

Here at the Economic Prism we think Kelleher is giving President Trump too much credit for what he can and can’t do. While we agree a stock market crash is in the cards. Unlike Kelleher, when the crash does inevitably come, we don’t think President Trump is who the fingers of blame should be pointed at.

 

Regulations, which Kelleher advocates, don’t get at the core of the problem. Rather, the core of the problem is that today’s fiat money system is completely out of control. Until something is done about it, we’ll continue to experience epic asset bubbles and busts.

 

President Trump’s efforts to ease corporate tax policy or financial regulations are small potatoes compared to the destructive market whipsaws that come with rampant credit creation. Offshore corporate coffers would’ve never been stuffed so full if we had sound money with honest limits.

 

You may love the man. You may hate him. But the fact is, President Trump has been dealt the worst hand of any incoming U.S. President since James Buchanan – or maybe ever.

 

He’s taking over at a time when the national debt has experienced exponential growth for over 45 years. The national debt was under $400 billion when Tricky Dick Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. Today it’s nearly $20 trillion.

 

In short, the debt curve is entering a hyperbolic state. No amount of monetary gas will be able to propel it straight up forever. Of course, when you tack on unfunded liabilities, like social security, prescription drugs, and medicare, the debt runs up to a breathtaking $104.6 trillion. Each taxpayer’s on the hook for over $874,800.

 

At the same time, the stock valuations are at nose bleed heights. The Shiller’s Cyclically Adjusted Price Earnings (CAPE) ratio, for instance, is currently 28.5. That’s 70 percent higher than the CAPE’s long-term historical average.

 

In addition, there have only been two occasions over the last 100 years that saw the CAPE at a higher valuation than today. One was during the late 1920s, right before the stock market crash. The other was the late 1990s, just prior to the popping of the internet bubble.

 

Similarly, the Buffett indicator, which is a ratio of the total market capitalization over gross domestic product, also shows that stocks are significantly overvalued. The ratio currently stands at about 126 percent. A fairly valued market is a ratio somewhere between 75 and 90 percent. Anything above 115 percent is considered significantly over valued.

 

The point is a century of scientific mismanagement of the currency has pushed the economic, financial, and social order well past any rational limit. Total government debt and stock valuations are at all-time extremes. Something big is coming. You can guarantee it.

 

But don’t blame Trump when the world ends. There ain’t a doggone thing he or anyone else can do to stop it.