Most of what Americans think they know about capitalism and communism is total nonsense. Here's a clearer picture.

As the commentary around the recent deaths of Nelson Mandela, Amiri Baraka and Pete Seeger made abundantly clear, most of what Americans think they know about capitalism and communism is arrant nonsense. This is not surprising, given our country's history of Red Scares designed to impress that anti-capitalism is tantamount to treason. In 2014, though, we are too far removed from the Cold War-era threat of thermonuclear annihilation to continue without taking stock of the hype we've been made, despite Harry Allen's famous injunction, to believe. So, here are seven bogus claims people make about communism and capitalism.

1. Only communist economies rely on state violence.

Obviously, no private equity baron worth his weight in leveraged buyouts will ever part willingly with his fortune, and any attempt to achieve economic justice (like taxation) will encounter stiff opposition from the ownership class. But state violence (like taxation) is inherent in every set of property rights a government can conceivably adopt - including those that allowed the aforementioned hypothetical baron to amass said fortune.

In capitalism, competing ownership claims are settled by the state's willingness to use violence to exclude all but one claimant. If I lay claim to one of David Koch's mansions, libertarian that he is, he's going to rely on big government and its guns to set me right. He owns that mansion because the state says he does and threatens to imprison anyone who disagrees. Where there isn't a state, whoever has the most violent power determines who gets the stuff, be that a warlord, a knight, the mafia or a gang of cowboys in the Wild West. Either by vigilantes or the state, property rights rely on violence.

The United Nations is hammering the Vatican for what a panel calls a failure to fully address sex abuse in the Catholic Church. "The Holy See has consistently placed the preservation of the reputation of the church and the protection of the perpetrators above children's best interests," the Committee on the Rights of the Child says, per the New York Times. The Vatican "has not acknowledged the extent of the crimes committed, has not taken the necessary measures to address cases of child sexual abuse and to protect children, and has adopted policies and practices which have led to the continuation of the abuse by and the impunity of the perpetrators."

The church "still places children in many countries at high risk of sexual abuse, as dozens of child sexual offenders are reported to be still in contact with children," the panel says. Leaders must "immediately remove" priests linked to child abuse. The Vatican, the BBC notes, responded that while it "takes note of the concluding observations," it "does, however, regret to see an attempt to interfere with Catholic Church teaching on the dignity of the human person." The church also "reiterates its commitment to defending and protecting the rights of the child." The BBC notes that the Vatican has denied UN requests for records on the abuse; church officials say they only release the information when a government seeks it in a legal case.

Just in case you had any lingering doubt about the uselessness of many U.S. public schools, I bring to you Marinette Middle School. Yes, the administrators of this school thought it would be a fantastic idea to gather sixth graders around and ask them in front of all their classmates questions like; if their parents are alcoholics, use drugs or are divorced.

This story emerge only a week after I published the very disturbing article: Lunches Seized and Tossed in Trash at Salt Lake City Elementary School for Kids with Unpaid Balances.

Now, from local station NBC26 we discover that:

A distinguished member of the U.S. Supreme Court gave a sobering reminder of how history can and likely will repeat itself when the conditions are right. Justice Antonin Scalia said that he would not be surprised if Americans were once again imprisoned in concentration camps by the federal government.

The 77-year-old justice was answering questions after giving a classroom lecture to a group of law students in Honolulu. One student asked about the deplorable 1944 Korematsu v. United States decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court verified the constitutionality of the president ordering the mass-imprisonment of Americans in the name of national security.

Scalia cited the wartime "panic" as a reason Americans accepted President Franklin Roosevelt's hostile treatment of citizens of his own country.

Mohamed Morsi, the deposed Egyptian president, appeared in public on Tuesday for the second time since his detention after the military takeover in July, this time locked in a soundproof glass cage as the defendant at a criminal trial.

The installation of the cage, a novelty in Egyptian courts, underscored the extent of the effort by the new government to silence the former president and his fellow defendants, about 20 fellow leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. It dominated the courtroom debate, with lawyers for the defendants arguing that it deprived the accused of their right to hear or participate in their own trial and supporters of the government crediting the soundproof barrier with preserving order in the court.

"The glass cage was the hero of today's trial," Egyptian state television declared.

For his first appearance, at another trial in the same makeshift courtroom in November, Mr. Morsi insisted on wearing a dark business suit instead of the customary white prison jumpsuit, and then stole the spotlight by disrupting the proceeding. He shouted from the cage, which was not soundproof, that he was the duly elected president and the victim of a coup, and his fellow defendants shut down the trial by chanting against military rule.

Appearing on Tuesday in ordinary prison dress, Mr. Morsi passed his cage angrily and bided his time for a chance to speak again. When the judge turned on the microphone so that Mr. Morsi could acknowledge his presence, he shouted out, "I am the president of the republic, and I've been here since 7 in the morning sitting in this dump," according to an account on a Brotherhood website that was confirmed by people who had been present.

Panic is making an enemy of telephones for Catherine Yeung, the director for equities at Fidelity Investment Management Ltd. in Hong Kong.

"My children hate that BlackBerry," said Yeung, whose clients have been calling amid two weeks of declines that erased $3 trillion from global stocks. She's advising calm, noting that profits are rising and shares just got a lot less expensive.

"Being a contrarian and getting in when things seem bad is often a good thing," she said in an interview today. "The companies we are looking into can still deliver attractive margins. Things are getting cheap."

Strategists from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to AMP Capital Investors and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are also telling clients to hang on after losses that began with currencies in Turkey and Argentina spread to developed markets. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index slid 2.3 percent yesterday, capping its first 5 percent retreat in eight months, while Japan's Topix index plunged 4.8 percent for its biggest decrease since June.

"We didn't expect the U.S. would be this weak," Kathy Matsui, chief Japan strategist for Goldman Sachs in Tokyo, said by e-mail. "Since we do not see sufficient reason to change our fundamental earnings outlook and stock prices have fallen, the market still appears attractive to us."

The American equity gauge rose from a three-month low today, adding 0.9 percent to 1,757.17 as of 1:35 p.m. in New York.

GCHQ technicians watched as journalists took angle grinders and drills to computers after weeks of tense negotiations

New video footage has been released for the first time of the moment Guardian editors destroyed computers used to store top-secret documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Under the watchful gaze of two technicians from the British government spy agency GCHQ, the journalists took angle-grinders and drills to the internal components, rendering them useless and the information on them obliterated.

The bizarre episode in the basement of the Guardian's London HQ was the climax of Downing Street's fraught interactions with the Guardian in the wake of Snowden's leak - the biggest in the history of western intelligence. The details are revealed in a new book - The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man - by the Guardian correspondent Luke Harding. The book, published next week, describes how the Guardian took the decision to destroy its own Macbooks after the government explicitly threatened the paper with an injunction.

In two tense meetings last June and July the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, explicitly warned the Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, to return the Snowden documents.

Heywood, sent personally by David Cameron, told the editor to stop publishing articles based on leaked material from American's National Security Agency and GCHQ. At one point Heywood said: "We can do this nicely or we can go to law". He added: "A lot of people in government think you should be closed down."

Downing Street insiders admit they struggled to come to terms with Snowden's mega-leak, and the fact that the 29-year-old American was able to upload top secret British material while working at an NSA facility in faraway Hawaii. Snowden wasn't even a full-time NSA employee, but a private contractor, one of 850,000 Americans with access to top secret UK information. "We just sat up and thought: 'Oh my God!'" one Downing Street insider said.

China's new high-speed maneuvering warhead is a "great concern" because it appears designed for use with both nuclear and conventional Chinese military forces, a Pentagon intelligence official said Thursday.

Lee Fuell, a technical intelligence specialist with the Air Force National Air and Space Intelligence Center, said during a congressional China commission hearing the recently tested hypersonic glide vehicle "is basically a ballistic missile-launched system that gets the target - or gets the payload fast and high, pitches over, dives to hypersonic speed, and then basically just glides to the target."

"At this point, we think that's associated with their nuclear deterrent forces," Fuell said. "Of great concern would be if they were to apply the same technology and capability with a conventional warhead or even just without a warhead because of the kinetic energy that it has."

Combined with medium-range ballistic missiles "hypersonic vehicles of any kind - whether they're glide vehicles or cruise missiles - are extremely difficult to defend against because just the time is so compressed between initial detection, being able to get a track, being able to get a fire control solution," Fuell said.

The campaign by the French government, mass media and influential organizations to silence the Franco-Cameroonese humorist

Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala continues to expose a radical split in perception within the French population. The official "mobilization" against the standup comedian, first called for by Interior Minister Manuel Valls at a ruling Socialist Party gathering last summer, portrays the entertainer as a dangerous anti-Semitic rabble rouser, whose "quenelle"* gesture is interpreted as a "Nazi salute in reverse".

For his fans and supporters, those accusations are false and absurd.

The most significant result of the Dieudonné uproar so far is probably the dawning realization, among more and more people, that the "Shoah", or Holocaust, functions as the semi-official State Religion of France.

On RTL television last January 10, the well-known nonconformist commentator Eric Zemmour (who happens to be Jewish) observed that it was "grotesque and ridiculous" to associate Dieudonné with the Third Reich. Zemmour described Dieudonné as a product of the French left's multiculturalism. "It's the left that has taught us since May '68 that it is prohibited to prohibit, that we must shock the bourgeois. It is the left that has turned the Shoah into the supreme religion of the Republic..."

Zemmour suggested that Dieudonné was provoking "the respectable left-wing bourgeoisie" and that he "reproaches Jews for wanting to conserve the monopoly of suffering and steal primacy in suffering from descendants of slavery".

The debt of the U.S. government has increased $6.666 trillion since President Barack Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, according to the latest numbers released by the Treasury Department.

When President Obama was first inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2009, the debt of the U.S. government was $10,626,877,048,913.08, according to the Treasury Department's Bureau of the Public Debt. As of Jan. 31, 2014, the latest day reported, the debt was $17,293,019,654,983.61 - an increase of $6,666,142,606,070.53 since Obama's first inauguration.