George Rebane

• Idiocracy here and now
• Greenpeace sowing peace in the Antarctic
• The China Model may be our common future
• World Bank scandal and the role of government

The other night we had one of our movie nights with friends – cocktail hour then dinner then a movie in front of a warming fireplace.  The movie was the dark comedy ‘Idiocracy’ (2005) and told the story of a future 500 years from now where the imbeciles had outbred people with three digit IQs and dominated society.  As you can imagine, lots of TV was included in the daily fare of that future society.  After the movie ended, we turned off the DVD player and on came a regular TV channel.  From what was streaming out at us – especially the commercials – it was hard to tell that the movie had ended.  Scary.

There is a little saga being played out in the Antarctic between the Greenpeace ship Esperanza and a small Japanese fleet claiming to start something called ‘scientific whaling’.  The Esperanza launched motorized inflatables against the main Japanese ship.  And as they came along side the crew of the small Greenpeace craft threw acid bottles at the Japanese crew.  Then the same idiots pulled along side and two of them actually boarded the Japanese vessel.  The Japanese, of course, took the enviro-hooligans into custody and will turn them over to authorities.  Greenpeace is now claiming that the Japanese have taken hostage two of their crew members thereby yielding up another perfectly good English word to the politically correct word manglers.  Go figger.

In their last 2007 issue The American has an extensive analysis of what may now be termed ‘The China Model’.  The thesis is that China seems to heading toward a social model that mixes a heavy dose of capitalism and entrepreneurial freedoms with a continuing iron-fisted limitation of personal liberties.  The news is that this may result in a new kind of equilibrium and demonstrate that capitalistic growth can co-exist with a repressive socialist regime with an entrenched and corrupt cadre of elites.  This is an eye-opener to the world’s sleaze bags running countries ranging from banana republics to sub-Sahel African countries to mid-eastern secular dictatorships to our favorites Cuba and North Korea.  These guys are saying to themselves that there may be a way to survive, maintain control, and still prosper if we follow the China Model.  Vietnam is currently the poster-child of doing exactly this.  Unfortunately our own US of A has also been headed for that destination as we slowly diminish our corporate freedoms and rapidly continue reducing our personal liberties.

Mike McDaniel, SESF Executive Director, looks at the recent $570,000,000 scandal at the World Bank (don’t look for it in your mainstream media) and posts the question ‘What is the role of government?’.