Monthly Archives: November 2013

Under continual assault by Chinese hackers!

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The following passage is a throwaway from a chapter in a new book on the 2012 American election campaign. This is from the chapter on Mitt Romney’s search for a Vice President. The only background knowledge you need is that Beth Myers led the search for Romney’s VP.

Myers set up her operation in a third-floor office on Boston’s Commercial Street that became known as ‘the clean room.’ Because the Romney campaign’s servers were under continual assault by Chinese hackers, the computers in the clean room were not connected to the Internet. [My bolding]

Are these Chinese hackers just so much the way things are that it is not even worth dwelling on? Is this just the way things are today, that even a candidate for President finds it almost impossible to prevent hacking by the Chinese – which Chinese, I’d like to know, and for what purpose?

The entire link tells a story which mostly focuses on Chris Christie. The choice of Paul Ryan seems on the telling to come from nowhere and most of what I would have liked to know are not dealt with. But what really comes across is how many major issues have to be handled in such short spaces of time. And as much as I already dislike Christie this story makes him even more repugnant than everything I already knew had already made him appear.

Philistines and ignoramuses

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The Australian Business Deans Council has in its preliminary report indicated that it would lower the journal ranking of History of Political Economy to a B which if it did would merely display, for all to see, what a Philistine bunch of ignoramuses they are. They are for nuts and bolts, debits and credits, tangibles and assets, not this academically philosophical, highly abstract historical economics kind of stuff, which is actually what a proper education consists of, including a business education.

For those as far from economics as a council made up of the deans of schools of business, this may seem a remote and unimportant area of study. The reality is that it is an area of study at the very forefront of economic theory. As just one example, one of the great monetary theorists in the world today, David Laidler, has just written an article on “Three Revolutions in Macroeconomics: Their Nature and Influence” going back over the historical development of three different revolutionary episodes in macroeconomics and in which he ends the abstract with these words: “some implications of this story for today’s macroeconomics are briefly discussed.” Nor is he the only major economist who has done important work in the History of Economics. Nobel Prize winners, including Paul Samuelson and George Stigler, have done extensive research in this area, not as a way to pass the time but as real and genuine contributions to our understanding of how economies work.

I have even written a book just this year on the crucial importance of this area titled, Defending the History of Economic Thought (Elgar 2013). This may be an area that is under-appreciated even amongst economists but when the moment of truth came in 2007 to remove the History of Economic Thought from within the economics classification, there was an uprising amongst economists in general, not only across the academic world but encompassing economists at every level reaching right through to the secretaries of every economics-related department in the Federal public service. It should therefore not be left to the tender mercies of the deans of schools of business to make such negative determinations about the value of journals in one of the most important areas of economics.

Tea drinkers are different, more refined

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Being a tea drinker from way back, the common experience in going out to coffee shops with my wife is that when they bring her coffee and my tea they almost always, if they don’t first ask, put the tea in front of her and the coffee in front of me. There is a latent categorisation by gender that runs deep in our cultural assumptions. But the evidence that tea drinkers are different from those coffee drinking types is now available, and not through some academic paper but from the evidence of the market where no more conclusive proof could possibly be found. This is the story.

Last week Starbucks opened a Teavana tea bar in New York City, the first step towards creating what it hopes will be a counterpoint to its enormously successful coffee locations. Before being bought by Starbucks last year, Teavana had primarily been known for retail shops that sold tea and supplies — but didn’t serve the drink. With the tea bar concept, Starbucks had to rethink some of the most basic elements of its successful formula for a different kind of customer — including the paper cup itself.

The paper cup. Oh the brutes who drink coffee, what do they care? They would lap it up from a saucer if that was all there was. Tea drinkers are, of course, different:

The goal was to make a cup that felt more like drinking from china than a flimsy, on-the-go piece of cardboard. Double-walled insulation was built into the cup itself, foregoing the need for the cheap cardboard sleeves Starbucks customers (and coffee drinkers everywhere) need to deal with. The texture of the cup itself is different as well; embossed paper is used to provide what’s described as a ‘feathery’ and ‘foamy’ feel. According to the report, the insulating design requires around 50 percent more material than is used in traditional Starbucks cups and sleeves.

“The new design has found quite a following inside the company.” I can’t say I’m even a bit surprised.

[My thanks to JIK for bringing this to my attention.]

Abiding by our way of life

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Let me return to that speech by Rupert Murdoch the other day to pull two other bits from it. First this:

But at the end of the day, the values that define Australia depend on more than good government and strong allies. They depend on sound and vigorous institutions especially private institutions.

You can’t have the rule of law if the courts aren’t free and independent – or if you have lawyers running amok as they do in the American system. We cannot allow the rule of law to become the rule of lawyers!

You can’t have a free democracy if you don’t have a free media that can provide vital and independent information to the people.

If the ALP is wondering why the Murdoch Press was a tad hostile to its re-election, they might wish to dwell on this. And this is not just Rupert Murdoch but a pretty sizeable proportion of the country who believe exactly the same. Who were people the likes of Rudd and Gillard to threaten these long-established traditions of freedom and the media? On that alone they needed to go not to mention the rest.

We are not yet overwhelmed by governments but have been moving rapidly in that direction. Our election may have saved us from even more. All governments want to spend so it will be hard to stop even our present incumbants from supporting their vision with our money. But at least there is the possibility that they will see it as their role to build the civic culture that Murdoch was discussing.

And then, from that same speech, there was this:

But for all this progress, there is still a strand among some parts of Australian society who seem to value every culture except our own. These people are gravely confused about what real multiculturalism is. Multiculturalism is not relativism, and tolerance is not indifference.

Australia has clear values and strong institutions. One key value is an openness to all comers – provided they are willing to abide by our way of life.

Australia is what it is because of who we already are. I have always been struck that we made a Jew our Governor-General in 1930. This is a country open to the talents. But it is not a country into which we can bring strings of takers who do not contribute or who do not wish to embrace the values of an open and tolerant society that have developed on this continent over the past 200 years. Never perfect, but it has always been the ideal.

The rules for radicals keep on changing

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There’s something new every day. This one is “Ten New Rules for Radicals“. Here’s the list:

1. SPELL YOUR ENEMIES’ NAMES WRONG
2. PRETEND THAT LOGICAL FALLACIES CONSTITUTE AN ARGUMENT
3. MAKE YOUR HEADLINES HYPERBOLIC AND PATENTLY FALSE
4. USE FIGHTIN’ WORDS SUCH AS “TAKEDOWN”
5. NEVER DISCUSS THE FACTS
6. BE OBSESSED WITH RAPE
7. SAY THE WORD “EVIL” A LOT
8. DISH IT OUT, BUT DON’T TAKE IT
9. BE COMPLETELY UNAWARE OF NUMBERS
10. TRY TO MAKE YOUR ENEMIES GO BROKE

Why are they mentioning it now?

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china nuclear strike range

The headline of the story that goes with this picture is “Inside China: Nuclear submarines capable of widespread attack on U.S.“. The first two paras read as follows:

Chinese state-run media revealed for the first time this week that Beijing’s nuclear submarines can attack American cities as a means to counterbalance U.S. nuclear deterrence in the Pacific.

On Monday, leading media outlets including China Central TV, the People’s Daily, the Global Times, the PLA Daily, the China Youth Daily and the Guangmin Daily ran identical, top-headlined reports about the “awesomeness” of the People’s Liberation Army navy’s strategic submarine force.

That is the map that accompanied the story. There are many many ways in which Obama as president is a disaster with this being near the top. Meanwhile Gillard took our defence expenditure down below where it was in 1938. Now picture the geo-political world twenty years from today.

UPDATE: Two further stories on Drudge about American foreign policy idiocies.

Top generals: Obama ‘purging military’…

Israel ‘furious’ with White House for leak on Syria strike…

From the first:

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Patrick Brady, recipient of the U.S. military’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor, as well as other top retired officers, say President Obama’s agenda is decimating the morale of the U.S. ranks to the point members no longer feel prepared to fight or have the desire to win.

“There is no doubt he (Obama) is intent on emasculating the military and will fire anyone who disagrees with him” over such issues as “homosexuals, women in foxholes, the Obama sequester,” Brady told WND.

And from the second:

Israel is fuming with the White House for confirming that it was the Israeli Air Force that struck a military base near the Syrian port city of Latakia on Wednesday, hitting weaponry that was set to be transferred to Hezbollah.

It is more than just incompetence although there’s plenty of that as well.

The answer is don’t get sick

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I had a doctor friend one time who told me about how much his practice was supported by the old ladies who would fill their days by going from doctor to doctor in the area with the same non problems. A form of social work for him but very costly for the rest of us. So I see this headline, Reform Health Cover or Collapse, which remarkably is about Australian, and think of him and of how expensive health care has become everywhere.

But there is nowhere that collapse may be more just around the corner than in the US. Watching the “health care” debate from this relatively safe distance is one more example of the great disaster that socialism in all its forms brings with it. But the debate in the US is remarkable for the lack of good will, specially if I may say so, on the side of the Democrats. The president’s no-compromise-on-anything attitude has brought on a train wreck.

There is partisanship and then there is partisanship but then there is the indefensible. I don’t think you can watch the defenders of the insane Affordable Care Act in the US without really appreciating just how deep the divide is, but it’s not a divide over good policy but has been sheer Democrat stubborness in not taking on board a single Republican suggestion during the entire period since the process began. James Taranto has a go at the kinds of defence of the now indefensible we see with a discussion of the various attempts to justify – not apologise for but justify – the actual harm being caused.

Taranto has, as one example, a discussion on why men are being forced to buy maternity care from which they had been previously exempt. Not the only anomaly. People are being kicked off their previous plans because they do not include a host of mandated forms of coverage that constitute the legislated bare minimum but male maternity coverage is pretty clear cut. So Kathleen Sebelius, the Health Secretary, has been defending these mandates in Congress where she pointed out that men often have wives who need maternity coverage. Taranto goes on:

Sebelius’s point is actually a reasonable one, as far as it goes: A male policyholder can benefit from maternity coverage if his plan covers his wife as well as him. But the exchange reveals two other ObamaCare oddities.

First, it’s not only men who are forced to buy maternity coverage they are physically incapable of using. So are women in the stage of life between childbearing age and Medicare eligibility.

Second, under-30s are exempt. That’s right, the geniuses who wrote ObamaCare are forcing everyone to buy maternity care except the age cohort that includes women at peak fertility.

Geniuses every one.

Fixing IR

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I had wondered how Tony Abbott and Eric Abetz were going to deal with the now misshapen federal industrial relations tribunal given the disproportionately large number of union appointments under the previous government. Abolish; abolish and re-constitute; new legislation; many new appointments but with an employer background. Every one would have been costly and taken a political toll. What they are now proposing to do shows what a creative and sensible government we are now blessed with. Apparently The Australian has an exclusive: “Tony Abbott to bring in new IR supremo“:

THE Abbott government is moving to impose an appeals body over the nation’s workplace umpire, declaring concern at inconsistent decisions by the Fair Work Commission.

The new body, which follows employer claims that Labor had stacked the tribunal, would be headed by a Coalition appointee and would establish a new avenue for appeal against commission rulings.

And then, with the appeals process in place, the re-balancing of the Commission can take place over the next few years as retirements and other departures take place.

I am filled with admiration for whoever thought this up.

The Murdoch vision

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Rupert Murdoch gave a speech last night to the Lowy Institute on “Let’s learn to thrive on disruption“. And what he means he says early on:

For Australia is on the cusp of becoming something rare and valuable in this new world: an egalitarian meritocracy, with more than a touch of libertarianism.

But we can’t wait for later.

In the past few years, we have all seen how advances in communications and travel have eliminated the tyranny of distance. The same might be said for size.

Think about Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. These are all small places, and hardly blessed with natural resources. Yet not only have they carved out a competitive position in the world because of their free, open and dynamic economies, they have become a source of inspiration for countries around the globe.

Australia can and should do better than all of them.

Australia is the best country in the world because we do have the great English traditions of free institutions, free markets and a willingness to accept and adapt to change. The US was once such a country but isn’t any more or at least may no longer be. We are such a country and are getting better. But what I found most astonishing in the speech was this:

Australia must be the world’s disruptive economy.

The economist Joseph Schumpeter once described the process of ‘creative destruction’ as essential to capitalism. The current fashionable word to capture that sense of creative chaos is ‘disruption’.

As soon as I saw the word “disruption” in the title I went looking for Schumpeter’s name. He is the economist of disruption, who sees that the role of the entrepreneur is not to behave in the way economic theory now teaches, concerned with incremental change with one more unit of some already-existing product leading to a change in revenues and costs. It is about individuals who do new things in new ways. Understanding the role of entrepreneurship is to understand the way in which the world betters itself by a continual introduction of new ideas embodied in wholly different ways of doing things.

It is the vision of people who look forward to the future, who want to engage with change because they know that change is coming, understand that change is often for the better and have introduced institutions that will allow such changes to be introduced, causing disruptions of course, but also with a relatively smooth transition to the new. This is how it has always been in this, the last-ever new frontier society in the world, and I too hope it will continue in just this way, building on our past and on into a future filled with unknown unknowns.

He was right to be wrong

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An interesting article by Walter Lacquer on Isaiah Berlin versus Isaac Deutscher titled, Better to be Wrong than Right? For some intellectuals, it all depends. I read both when I was much younger but of the two I can only think I have been influenced by Isaiah Berlin. The article ends like the title itself with a paraphrase of something Arthur Koestler wrote in one of his books about some Stalinist who believed, given the circumstances of the 1930s, that while it was wrong to have supported Stalin he had been right to be wrong. This is how it is put by Lacquer:

As the leftist French journalist Jean Daniel once put it: better to be wrong with Jean-Paul Sartre than right with Raymond Aron. Sartre might have been consistently wrong in his political judgment and his intellectual opponent Aron almost always right. But Sartre, like Deutscher, was pro-Soviet during the cold war while Aron, like Isaiah Berlin, was pro-American (and also, like Berlin, pro-Israel). And that settled the matter.

This is how reputations quite often develop in the world of ideas, and how they endure—an interesting issue itself, and certainly one in need of further investigation.

If you’re on the left, your reputation is impregnable. There is no need of investigation. There are almost no major leftists of the past whose names are mud. Not Stalin, not Mao although maybe Pol Pot who simply gets ignored except by people like me. That is just how it is and will remain.