Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

At the heart of the book is his 1978 discovery of the cause of the 1929 stock market crash, a discovery that vindicates the classical economics, which had been blamed for the crash and the Great Depression.

One of the most hotly debated causes of the crash is the Smoot-Hawley tariff. Protectionists like Alfred Eckes and Pat Buchanan argue that it could not have affected the market because the law was not passed until 1930, long after the crash. Although this is true, much of the legislative activity took place in 1929. As economist Alan Reynolds convincingly demonstrated in National Review (November 9, 1979), actions favoring passage of the tariff bill correlate quite well with declines in the stock market during 1929, culminating on October 29.

The reason why the market crashed well in advance of the tariff becoming law is because markets are forward-looking, and quickly capitalize any policy that will impact on future profits. Fred Kent, Director of the Bankers' Trust Company, confirms that this is what happened in 1929. In a speech on November 11, 1929, Kent said, "As soon as dealers in securities, who were constantly on the watch for indications as to business conditions, realized that this feeling of uneasiness (on account of the tariff bill) was spreading throughout industry, they began selling stocks."

I am disturbed by your continual smears of honorable Americans like Jamie Gorelick. If you disagree with the opinions of Ms. Gorelick, then please voice that at your discretion, but engaging in personal smears campaigns at the behest of Karl Rove and Grover Norquist really do a disservice to your readers. Jamie Gorelick’s memo did not disallow sharing of information between the military and the FBI. Please issue a correction in your next blog.

Officials at Australia's Parliament House on Friday overturned a day-old ban on guards and attendants using the word "mate" to address lawmakers and visitors after the new rule sparked outrage among prime ministers past and present.

The Allstate Insurance Company is being sued by a former worker in Illinois who has alleged he was fired for writing articles opposing same-sex marriage and the gay lifestyle.

J. Matt Barber, of Villa Park near Chicago, was fired from his job as a manager in the corporate security division of the company three days after meeting with supervisors in December 2004 who confirmed that he wrote the articles.

Barber, 35, and a Christian, says he had written the opinion articles on his own time, which were later posted on conservative websites. The titles of the writings included "Intolerance Will Not Be Tolerated!" and "The Gay Agenda vs. Family Values."

As part of the plan, the US president has been playing host at the White House to leaders of African countries that he didn’t know existed, but that the US intelligence services did.

At the same time, Washington is charging full steam ahead to establish US transnationals like Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Marathon Oil, Amerada Hess and Ocean Energy in the extremely rich Gulf of Guinea, which has become a priority for the U.S. – not for humanitarian reasons, but for its huge reserves of hydrocarbons and gas.

Palestinian Arabs and indeed all the Arab states of the Middle East hate Jews. They hate Jews so ferociously that they can't live alongside them. Not even if there are 8,000 Jews living among 2 million Arabs. There is not an Arab state or an Arab controlled piece of territory in the Middle East that will allow one Jew to live in or on it...

The ethnic cleansing of the Jews from the Middle East began in 1921 when Churchill created the state of Jordan out of 80% of the Palestine mandate. The order creating the state of Jordan said no Jew is allowed to live on this land. That was what the Arabs wanted. No Jew should dirty this land. Seventy-percent of the population of Jordan is Palestinian Arabs. But they don't want Jordan as their Palestinian state because there are no Jews there to drive into the sea. Palestinians have shown twice -- in 1948 and again in 2000 that they want to kill Jews more than they want a Palestinian state. Jew-hatred is the cause of the Middle East conflict and it is the only reason the Jews in Gaza are an issue at all.

The United Nations bankrolled the production of thousands of banners, bumper stickers, mugs, and T-shirts bearing the slogan "Today Gaza and Tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalem," which have been widely distributed to Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza Strip, according to a U.N. official.

We're sorry about Ms. Sheehan's son, but the entire nation was attacked on 9-11. This isn't about her personal loss. America has been under relentless attack from Islamic terrorists for 20 years, culminating in a devastating attack on U.S. soil on 9-11. It's not going to stop unless we fight back, annihilate Muslim fanatics, destroy their bases, eliminate their sponsors and end all their hope. A lot more mothers will be grieving if our military policy is: No one gets hurt!

As Maureen Dowd said, it's "inhumane" for Bush not "to understand that the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute."...

The logical, intellectual and ethical shortcomings of such a statement are staggering. If one dead son means no one can win an argument with you, how about two dead sons? What if the person arguing with you is a mother who also lost a son in Iraq and she's pro-war? Do we decide the winner with a coin toss? Or do we see if there's a woman out there who lost two children in Iraq and see what she thinks about the war?

But now liberals demand that we listen to the same old arguments all over again, not because Sheehan has any new insights, but because she has the ability to repel dissent by citing her grief.

"We seem to have a botwar on our hands," said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure.

"There appear to be three different virus-writing gangs turning out new worms at an alarming rate, as if they were competing to build the biggest network of infected machines."

Hypponen said in a statement that varieties of three worms -- "Zotob," "Bozori" and "IRCbot" -- were still exploiting a gap in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 2000 operating system on computers that had not had the flaw repaired and were not shielded by firewalls.

"The latest variants of Bozori even remove competing viruses like Zotob from the infected machines," Hypponen said in a statement on the company's Web site. (http://www.f-secure.com)

The song has been stolen, video put to it, and I wish there were a way to stop it.

Let me start by saying that the intent of the song was to mock my own country for its bullying ways around the world. The idea was to point out how casually the US plays World Police. The song takes on the persona of the US government, ridiculing the fact that we push others around without much concern. It is satire, which some have mistaken for literal propoganda. It was meant to be heard in the US and cause a US citizen to realize of how stupid our actions sound when put to music.

Here in America, while we love our country, a good many of us have real problems with our foreign policy. And it isn't just President Bush. After all, the Kosovo policy occurred under Clinton.

Somalia, Grenada,
Or rescuing Kuwait-a
We screwed ya Rwanda
Wish we coulda helped ya
Iraqi embargo
That's where we got hustled

Ooo so now we're helping out in Kosovo
We'll make a show and then we'll see how it goes
And then we really don't know
Good luck to Kosovo

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What the social scientists and revolutionary romantics failed to comprehend was that the riots were taking place in those American cities most receptive to blacks. Los Angeles, one of the best places in America for blacks to live, belched forth the smoke of civil violence. Conversely, areas with a darker racial past did not fall into the grip of riots. In Birmingham, Alabama, for instance, the only smoke climbing upward was from the steel plants. Mississippi burned not from black unrest, but from Klan violence. Beyond that, deprivation, poverty and discrimination within the black community had been far greater in other decades.

Harvard sociologist Edward Banfield observed that the rioters were primarily young males whose politics led them to target liquor stores, and noted that the riots occurred on hot, sultry summer nights. This led him to conclude that the riots erupted merely “for fun and profit.” To Banfield and other observers, the riots had all the political content of a late spring panty raid on a college campus.

Damian Williams, the man who beat and actually danced around the unconscious body of white truck driver Reginald Denny, during the 1992 Rodney King riots, claimed he had no idea what the Rodney King verdict was. He justified his actions by claiming he got caught up in the violence itself. Most of us, of course, choose to walk away from violence and not get “caught up” in it. Similarly, British soccer rioters do not themselves complain of grievances, oppression or deprivation (albeit some social scientists have been happy to reconstruct their behavior in those terms). Rather, soccer rioters talk about “getting off” on the sheer pleasure of the riots or having an “aggro,” as they refer to the ecstasy derived from engaging in violence.

One who took up that suggestion was the journalist Eugene Methvin. Methvin was, perhaps, the first to undertake such a systematic analysis, and he documented how to prevent riots. But it was hardly what the liberal establishment wanted to hear. Methvin found that the greatest deterrent to a riot was not an understanding of root causes or implementation of social programs but a fast and decisive police response. In a comparative study of the Watts riots and the Rodney King riots, I later found that Methvin was uncannily correct.

The Watts riots were quenched when then Inspector Daryl Gates decided that the tactics of riot control where not applicable to the mobile hit-and-run rioting the Los Angeles police encountered in Watts. Gates teamed police cars filled with heavily armed officers to intercept the rioters, and then proceeded to process and detain rioters at the scene. This way, officers would not be going back and forth from the riot scene to book the rioters. Once these alternations in police response were implemented, the Watts riot began to subside

Unfortunately, the police failed to heed that lesson. During the 1992 King riots, the Los Angeles police, for reasons that one can only speculate about, did none of the things they had learned from Watts. Gates, then chief of police, lingered at a dinner and then took a helicopter ride over the city as it burned, while the police response remained without a central command structure or decision making authority.

To be sure, some observers have opined that in the racially tense atmosphere of Los Angeles in 1992, the police did not want cameras instantly televising live coverage of scores of young black males in handcuffs, surrounded by heavily armed police. But it remains the case that by adopting a less assertive approach, the LAPD allowed the riots to escalate to ever greater heights of destruction. When the police backed off, as had police in other cities in the 1960’s, riots grew in intensity, numbers and duration. The flames burned out of control.

Postwar generations argued over whether the two atomic bombs, the fire raids, or the August Soviet invasion of Manchuria - or all three combined - prompted Japan to capitulate, whether Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a stain on American democracy, or whether the atomic bombs were the last-gasp antidote to the plague of Japanese militarism that had led to millions of innocents butchered without much domestic opposition or criticism from the triumphalist Japanese people.

TO OUR GOOD AND LOYAL SUBJECTS:

After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in Our Empire today, We have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure.

We have ordered Our Government to communicate to the Governments of the United States, Great Britain, China and the Soviet Union that Our Empire accepts the provisions of their Joint Declaration.

To strive for the common prosperity and happiness of all nations as well as the security and well-being of Our subjects is the solemn obligation which has been handed down by Our Imperial Ancestors and which lies close to Our heart.

Indeed, We declared war on America and Britain out of Our sincere desire to ensure Japan's self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from Our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement.

But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone - the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of Our servants of the State, and the devoted service of Our one hundred million people - the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.

Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.

Such being the case, how are We to save the millions of Our subjects, or to atone Ourselves before the hallowed spirits of Our Imperial Ancestors? This is the reason why We have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers.

We cannot but express the deepest sense of regret to Our Allied nations of East Asia, who have consistently cooperated with the Empire towards the emancipation of East Asia.

The thought of those officers and men as well as others who have fallen in the fields of battle, those who died at their posts of duty, or those who met with untimely death and all their bereaved families, pains Our heart night and day.

The welfare of the wounded and the war-sufferers, and of those who have lost their homes and livelihood, are the objects of Our profound solicitude.

He then cites "The enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives and do incalculable damage."; the remark is interpreted to refer to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki days before. He, however, never mentions the Soviet's invasion.

With the far shorter missions possible from planned new bases in Okinawa and his fleet vastly augmented by more B-29s and the transference from Europe of thousands of idle B-17s and B-24, the "mad bomber" LeMay envisioned burning down the entire urban and industrial landscape of Japan. His opposition to Hiroshima was more likely on grounds that his own fleet of bombers could have achieved the same result in a few more weeks anyway.

Using the history and projections available to him, President Truman made the grave decision to use the atomic bomb in an effort to end the war quickly, thus avoiding a costly invasion.

My prediction: The US and UK get Honshu. USSR gets Hokkaido. Korea gets Shikoku. Red China gets Kyushu.

Oh yeah, Commies on both ends of Japan. I like that.

The Bomb is looking like the lesser of evils more and more.

Interesting thought, Alan. Only point of contention: Red China wouldn't have Kyushu, it would likely be a second Taiwan.

And there would be no Japan. The grudges earned by the Japanese in the first half of the 20th century (especially after a ground fight to take the islands) pretty much guarantee that even if any Japanese were still alive after the last fight.

When I was in hospice training, I was taught that no one ever recovers fully from grief. There will always be times when memories of a loss, whether over someone's death or some other tragic event, will trigger feelings of remorse. What one who has suffered a loss must do is to recover to the point that the loss is manageable, when it no longer interferes with everyday normal life. Pearl Harbor, and WWII in general, provoke strong feelings - and strong disagreements - in both the United States and Japan, even among those who have no conscious memory of December 7, 1941. But this day has scarcely any effect whatsoever on relations between our governments or our citizens. The vast majority of us refuse to blame events of the past on those who weren't there.

Wars do not always end with such peaceful results. In many cases, virulent bitterness is passed from generation to generation. Such lies at the root of the current war we fight against terrorism. Afghanistan and Iraq are only the beginning. Terrorism will never go away completely, but if we fight this war right we will fight every government that willingly aids and abets our enemies and we will be victorious, and if we do our postwar job right as we did in Japan, today's enemies will be tomorrow's allies.

The hardships and sufferings to which Our nation is to be subjected hereafter will be certainly great. We are keenly aware of the inmost feelings of all of you, Our subjects. However, it is according to the dictates of time and fate that We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is unsufferable.

Having been able to safeguard and maintain the structure of the Imperial State, We are always with you, Our good and loyal subjects, relying upon your sincerity and integrity.

Beware most strictly of any outbursts of emotion which may engender needless complications, or any fraternal contention and strike which may create confusion, lead you astray and cause you to lose the confidence of the world.

Let the entire nation continue as one family from generation to generation, ever firm in its faith in the imperishability of its sacred land, and mindful of its heavy burden of responsibility, and of the long road before it.

Unite your total strength, to be devoted to construction for the future. Cultivate the ways of rectitude, foster nobility of spirit, and work with resolution - so that you may enhance the innate glory of the Imperial State and keep pace with the progress of the world.

Why Titan Lacks Intelligent Life

Hey, Bush is only continuing the trend that started in the wake of the budget debacle of 1995. Since then, the GOP's chronic vacillation on domestic issues has eroded the presence of conservatives at the polls on Election Day. Memo to the GOP leadership: if you won't fight for us we won't fight for you.

Here are the returns, the total votes from the last three elections, including yesterday's in this district in Ohio. In 2002, there were 184,100 total votes casts. In 2004, there were 310,000 votes casts. Yesterday, 111,000 votes cast. So if you go back to 2002, and then you look at 2005, and then you add up the fact that this is a heavily Republican district, what do you find? You find that Republicans stayed home. The Republicans didn't show up and vote against somebody. They didn't show up and vote for Hackett. They stayed home.

[Y]ou've got an unpopular governor in Ohio, Mr. Taft. He has raised taxes. Jean Schmidt voted for those taxes, and we had calls from people yesterday, and I'm telling you what, you've got a moderate governor, and this Jean Schmidt is said to be a Reagan Republican, but today's the first time I heard that. I know she ran a positive, uplifting campaign, she didn't do a dirty campaign, but the fact of the matter is, folks, the conservatives do the heavy lifting in this party, and then if they're represented by a bunch of moderates who undo the work the Republicans say, "Okay, screw you, I'm staying home. I'm voting for you, I put you in office and you raise my taxes?"

Volkogonov should check the Comintern records of J. Peters, the man Whittaker Chambers identified as his Soviet "control" for his espionage activities from 1934 to 1938. Peters was a Hungarian-born Comintern agent assigned to work with the Communist Party, USA. His name crops up frequently in Soviet espionage literature. Peters' predecessor as Chambers' control was Alexander Ulanovski, whose wife Nadya Ulanovskaya, after surviving the Gulag and migrating to Israel, verified the accuracy of Chambers' account of his espionage activities from 1932 to 1934. If he learns nothing else, he will find that he was wrong in saying that there is evidence that Chambers was a Communist but none showing that he had any contact with Soviet intelligence.

Volkogonov should also check the KGB's Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov file. He was identified as "Hiss's wartime controller" by Oleg Gordievsky, a high-level KGB defector and co-author of the book KGB: The Inside Story. Gordievsky says in the book that he once attended a secret lecture at which Akhmerov "mentioned Hiss" in the context of discussing wartime agents in the U.S.

It is not even clear how widely the VENONA revelations were shared within the United States Government. Thus, a Soviet cable of March 30, 1945 identified an agent, code-name ALES, as having attended the Yalta Conference of February 1945. He had then journeyed to Moscow where, according to the cable, he and his colleagues were "awarded Soviet decorations." This could only be Alger Hiss, Deputy Director of the State DepartmentÂ?s Office of Special Political Affairs; the other three State Department officials in the delegation from Yalta to Moscow are beyond suspicion. The party was met by Andrei Vyshinsky, the prosecutor in the Moscow trials of 1936-38. By no later than June 1950, the U.S. Army was persuaded that ALES was Hiss.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel, beloved editor of The Nation, describes the split [within the AFL-CIO] as a regrettable but probably necessary step needed to rejuvenate a labor movement "that can provide an organized and intelligent moral center to a majoritarian progressive politics - the folks who brought you the weekend, the eight-hour day, and so much else that makes this country (almost) civilized."

"The death of organized labor has been going on now for more than 40 years. It has proceeded under liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, in boom times and bust, through every change in work environments, job types, and worker demographics…. [The Change to Win unions] could start by recognizing that this is now a free-agent nation. If there's a model for labor negotiations in the future, it's the model of the Major League Baseball Players Association, which works out very bare-bones collective agreements featuring salary basements and basic work rules and benefits, but doesn't punish high achievers for the good of the benchwarmers. Unions have been grotesquely slow to learn the benefits of flexibility in the workplace."