The debate is today on a Wednesday, unlike the previous two which were on a Friday (in Australia, that is). Not to be missed.

As I mentioned on an earlier post, there are the things that must be done to fix the American economy and to restore some kind of order in America’s foreign relations. That is Romney’s speciality. There are also the things that can be said that will gather votes but if implemented would bring further ruin to the United States and to us along with them. That is Obama’s speciality. If the result of the American election interests you, it may all come down to this hour and a half. It will be Mitt Romney’s sound policy and good sense against Obama’s disastrous policy record and far left agenda. Obama also promises to be more aggressive. Mitt will just be Mitt.

The viewing details here in Australia:

Wednesday October 17: Presidential debate #2: Foreign and domestic policy

Watch the debate live on SBS ONE or streamed live on the SBS World News Australia website from 12pm ADST.

And the verdict is:

Can’t tell if it’s universal but it’s how I saw it. Obama was better and Mitt was the same and therefore by being the same was still ten streets better than the president.

Or at least their politicians are. These are results found in a study conducted by two researchers at UCLA:

‘Female politicians with stereotypically feminine facial features are more likely to be Republican than Democrat, and the correlation increases the more conservative the lawmaker’s voting record,’ said lead author Colleen M. Carpinella, a UCLA graduate student in psychology.

The researchers also found the opposite to be true: Female politicians with less stereotypically feminine facial features were more likely to be Democrats, and the more liberal their voting record, the greater the distance the politician’s appearance strayed from stereotypical gender norms. . . .

In fact, the relationship is so strong that politically uninformed undergraduates were able to determine the political affiliation of the representatives with an overall accuracy rate that exceeded chance, and the accuracy of those predictions increased in direct relation to the lawmaker’s proximity to feminine norms.

[Via Instapundit]

The front page story in The Age today:

Gillard files missing, say lawyers
Search fails to find ‘slush fund’ records

It begins:

A FILE detailing Julia Gillard’s role in helping set up a union slush fund from which her former boyfriend stole hundreds of thousands of dollars has disappeared.

Law firm Slater & Gordon yesterday said it could find no documents relating to the work done by Ms Gillard — a former salaried partner of the firm — in establishing the Australian Workers Union Workplace Reform Association in 1992.

Police believe the association was used by Ms Gillard’s former boyfriend and senior AWU official Bruce Wilson to steal more than $400,000, including about $100,000 which helped fund the purchase of a Fitzroy unit bought with Ms Gillard’s professional assistance.

Slater & Gordon managing director Andrew Grech told The Age last night that the firm had not been able to locate any documents relating to the controversial transaction.

‘We have not been able to identify any such documents following extensive searches of our archival records,’ Mr Grech said.

‘If there are such documents, we don’t have them. They could have been misplaced, or lost. I simply don’t know.’

Anyway, that’s how it begins. How it will end is anyone’s guess.

Why was that man laughing?

They just don’t come bigger than this. Obama says he had an off night during the first debate and that if you read the transcript instead of looking at the body language he took Romney apart. But those who watched, and the analyses that came later, were almost unanimous in seeing a decisive win for Mitt Romney. Romney was in command. He totally outshone and overshadowed a tongue tied and incoherent President, supposedly our modern Demosthenes, Pericles and Cicero all in one. Or at least that was the general perception until he was forced, for almost the first time since he began his run for president, to defend his policies in public, under challenge and without a teleprompter. Obama’s dismal showing has led to a surge in support for Romney and unless Obama can pull it back in this debate, the odds that he is about to lose the election will become very short indeed. But once again I point out the one advantage Obama has which is the phenomenal data mining operation he has put in place. Once more I raise that passage from Peggy Noonan written well over a year ago:

The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians. The ‘Analytics Department’ is looking for ‘predictive Modeling/Data Mining’ specialists to join the campaign’s ‘multi-disciplinary team of statisticians,’ which will use ‘predictive modeling’ to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. ‘We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions.’

There are the things that must be done to fix the American economy and to restore some kind of order in America’s foreign relations. That is Romney’s speciality. There are also the things that can be said that will gather votes but if implemented would bring further ruin to the United States and to us along with them. That is Obama’s speciality. If the result of the American election interests you, it may all come down to this hour and a half. It will be Mitt Romney’s sound policy and good sense against Obama’s disastrous policy record and far left agenda.

The viewing details here in Australia:

Wednesday October 17: Presidential debate #2: Foreign and domestic policy

Watch the debate live on SBS ONE or streamed live on the SBS World News Australia website from 12pm ADST.

Here is the text that goes with the chart:

The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported. [My bolding]

Had the reverse been the case, the news would have, of course, been front page and top of the bulletin across the world. If we had been worrying about being hit by a meteorite, the whole world would have been in collective relief that we had escaped. Not with this. Here we are dealing with people with other agendas running, not just a selfless desire to save the planet from a rise in temperature. Without the data to support them, those agendas will not go away, but it will be harder to make the case given just how contrary to the facts the global warming argument has become.

This is from Ryangirl as you will see why. Not your usual Macro 101.

[Via Instapundit]

To me, the most interesting bit about the “crude joke” made about Tony Abbott’s Chief of Staff was to find out that his Chief of Staff is a woman. Did the Prime Minister not know this when she accused Abbott of being a misogynist? The hollowness of everything that comes out of the mouth of the likes of Gillard, Roxon and Plibisek is quite astonishing to behold. Abbott’s Chief of Staff, by the way, is named Peta Credlin which I also didn’t know. Unlike those Labor time servers, this is a real position that requires genuine talent and ability.

First the quote, and then I’ll tell you where it’s from:

2010 Australian economist Steven Kates defends Say’s Law, and calls Keynesian economics a ‘conceptual disease’.

But before I tell you where it’s from, I will tell you how I found it. I was wandering through the Hill of Content bookshop in Melbourne and looking through the political and economics books when I came across something I had not seen before titled, The Economics Book. Just like that, THE Economics Book, and published by one of my favourite publishers, DK, whose travel books I always get because they specialise in spaced out pages and big print. They also do great kids books but this one was about economic theory.

My first test for any book is to look up “Say’s Law” which wasn’t there but “Say, Jean-Baptiste” was with pages 74-75 darkened. So I popped over to have a look and here I found a section on “Supply Creates Its Own Demand”, Keynes’s dreaded words, but with a more promising subtitle, “Gluts in Markets”. And there to begin the explanation was a four box schematic with arrows, with the first box reading:

People produce commodities and sell them to earn money.

This was a sensationally accurate beginning, something I am not sure I have ever come across before. To understand Say’s Law you must understand that production comes first, then whatever has been produced has to be sold for money and then the money received is used to buy something else.

Incredible, I said to myself, and looked at the back for some bibliographic reference of which there was none. But I did then notice there was an entire section on “Free-Market Economics” under the sensationally accurate heading, “The Invisible Hand of the Market Brings Order” followed by a six page section (pgs 56-61) specifically on “Free-Market Economics”.

It was then that I did something I have never done with any other book before, and I looked at the index, and there, bless my soul, it said, “Kates, Steven 74”! So back to page 74 I went – the section on Say’s Law – and there it was, the words you see above, “Keynesian economics a ‘conceptual disease’”.

Did I really say those words? I must have and you may be sure that they express my view with an accuracy not less than 100%. But fancy someone coming across those words and immortalising them in this wonderful (and it is wonderful) publication. Not only does it delve into economic theory but has long discussions on the history of economics, my other great economic area of deepest interest. It moreover does a wonderful job on economic history which is also extremely important but which is not for me a personal area of expertise.

But having found my own brief mention what occurred to me is how difficult it must have been for the authors to find anyone to say anything negative about Keynes and Keynesian economics. I am editing another book which is a collection of articles criticising Keynesian economic theory and you have no idea how scarce, even now, such articles are. Given the disasters since the Global Financial Crisis, and the harm that Keynesian policies have done, you might think there would be endless papers on this question but the reality is that there are virtually none. Hence they had to come to me for a quote and there I am, so there you are.