Why are we not treating global warming as a form of insanity? From Drudge today:
SNOW HITS CAIRO, FIRST IN 100 YEARS…
‘Historic’ Israeli Snowstorm; Power Outage in Jerusalem…
Over 2,000 cold and snow records set in USA this past week…
And from the middle story:
Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat released a statement saying ‘we are battling a storm of rare ferocity.’
The planet’s not warming, it’s cooling.
On my way to work in the morning as I walk over to the station I first pass a Jewish primary school and then turn the corner where I pass the Holocaust Centre. The Holocaust Centre is a memorial to the murder of six million Jews who are lovingly remembered and mourned by many still alive today. And what’s more, many of those murdered were in every way the same as the children who are found in the playground of the school. If you are a Jew, anti-Semitism is no small matter. It has been a life and death issue across the centuries and remains so to this day.
The leaders of the Jewish community constantly seek ways to ensure a Holocaust does not happen again. Mark Liebler seeks ways to ensure that it does not happen again. Hatred of Jews is just how it is in many parts of the world. One of the reasons Australia remains a great nation is that its record in accepting and defending people of Jewish origins is exemplary. No Jew living in this country is anything other than grateful for the not just tolerant attitudes of their fellow Australians but the full acceptance of Jews as an integral part of this community, an overwhelmingly Christian community. A Sir John Monash and a Sir Isaac Isaacson is unimaginable in any part of the world a century ago, but the first led the Australian forces in World War I and the second became Governor-General in 1930. If I am happy to call Australia home, this is part of the reason why.
Andrew Bolt and Mark Liebler are now trying to clarify the issues that stand between them on free speech versus blood libel. Andrew Bolt was dragged through the courts over whether it was legal for him to make pointed remarks about the skin colour of individuals who identified with their Aboriginal descent. This is, moreover, not just a matter of skin colour but involves access to programs designed to overcome Aboriginal disadvantage which are being used by people who are in no way disadvantaged either by circumstance or origins. His point was a valid political point and on those grounds there should never have been a prosecution never mind a conviction. This is not what the law was intended for and was mis-applied. It was no more wrong for Andrew Bolt to point out how these programs are being exploited by those who are experiencing no disadvantage as it was for those to implement these programs in the first place. If we are going to overcome the uncontested existence of Aboriginal disadvantage, then a law that relates specifically to Aboriginals must be enacted which is a law based on racial identification. But if such programs are to exist it also means that they can be criticised on their own terms.
But I have been in this country long enough to remember when the first Aboriginal State Governor, Pastor Doug Nicholls in South Australia, went into a maddened frenzy because his wife had been insulted by someone using a derogatory term for an Aboriginal woman. And you know, I have only ever sympathised with Nicholls. It was an absolute disgrace, utterly indefensible on free speech or any other grounds. Not just impolite. Not just rude. Not just unkind. Not just boorish. It was full blown uncivilised, absolutely unacceptable and is rightly made illegal. People say things to each other in private about other racial and religious groups, but to make these kinds of vicious statements in public is more than just a tut-tut offence against good breeding. It should be a matter for the law.
But that would in no way limit the ability of governments to form policy on Aboriginal issues nor would it stop debate from occurring on any matter relating to Aboriginal policy. That is open and must always be open. But insults and threats, that is, insulting or threatening speech, is different. Here are two significant paras from the article by Daniel Meyerowitz-Katz which touched off this debate:
It would be difficult to have missed the recent campaign in these pages and elsewhere against section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which makes conduct unlawful where it is done because of someone’s race/ethnicity and is reasonably likely to ‘offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate’ them. . . .
Most importantly, 18C does not make it unlawful to merely say something that might be construed as racist and hurt someone’s feelings. What is unlawful is doing something ‘because of’ the race/ethnicity of a person that is reasonably likely to offend them. The issue is not that anyone’s feelings are hurt; it’s that someone is targeted for harassment because they happen to be of a certain ethnicity.
The serious error in my view made by the author of the article was to suggest that those on the other side of this debate were “dishonest”. On this, he wrote:
If people genuinely think it should be legal for Australians to harass others on the basis of race, then they are welcome to make that argument. What’s troubling about the anti-18C campaign is its dishonesty.
The provision is made out to be an offence when it is not. The freedom of speech defences are ignored. It is purported to be a unique law against causing offence, when it is actually modelled on centuries-old breach of the peace laws. One controversial decision is focused on to the exclusion of almost 20 years of positive outcomes.
But then, being honest about 18C makes it harder to spin the provision as a threat to free speech, and nobody wants to openly defend racial harassment. Do they?
They were not being dishonest and it is pernicious for him to have said so. He doesn’t know what they think and has no idea what their motives were, but whatever they were, dishonesty was not amongst them. It is ridiculously wrong to apply motives to people of goodwill in every respect. Everything he wrote was all right to that point so why say it? It ruined the argument because it tried to convict Andrew Bolt and his supporters when the point of this article should have been to explain the way things are as seen by a representative Jew.
I don’t think it is dishonesty so much as bewilderment. The judge and the prosecutor misused the law in ways that have put this piece of legislation under deep examination. Andrew Bolt was not causing a breach of the peace, and it was worse than shameful – indeed utterly disgusting – for the prosecutor to have brought the Holocaust into his case. It made me personally very angry at the time because doing so desecrated the sanctity of the Holocaust memorial which should never be demeaned by being brought into the secular world in this way.
But I have Chinese friends who have been abused in public and there are real anti-Semites around who hate people for no other reason than because they are Jews. As a Jew I am with Shylock in asking, “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” But in Shakespeare’s own time, this was a laugh line that in no way was intended to raise sympathy for Shylock nor did it. Anti-Semites perfectly well understand that Jews will bleed since they have so often drawn this blood themselves. It is not a matter of free speech to deny racists the right to their rants, and it is not enough to think that the good people will make such expressions of hatred and ill will unacceptable in polite society.
That the modern practice is to be anti-Zionist, to say that I have nothing against Jews but I am blah, blah, blah about Israel is now the way it is done. Anti-Semitism is very much alive and I am content to have such legislation on the books because, while it is a weak reed, at least it is something.
Free speech is about allowing the freedom to say whatever one believes in the midst of political discourse. If an acceptance of racist rants is defended as examples of free speech then the very notion of free speech will be discredited by these very claims in the eyes of anyone who wishes to live in a decent society where individuals are protected from the kinds of racist abuse that has no part to play in a civilised community which seeks to promote peace, order and good will.
Most of the Obama-related commentary on the funeral in South Africa is about his selfie with with David Cameron and the Prime Minister of Denmark, Helle Thorning-Schmidt. But that wasn’t the blockbuster moment. John Hinderaker at Powerline explains the deeper significance.
Otto Reich, former assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, explains the damaging significance of Obama’s handshake:
The Castro brothers have been vying for the world to see a handshake with a U.S. president for over 50 years. (President Clinton did shake hands with Fidel at a U.N. summit in 2000, but there was no photo.) They knew it would represent a form of recognition, something they forfeited by virtue of presiding over a military dictatorship, and their support for violence and anti-American terrorist movements and governments on three continents.
Until now, every American president had studiously avoided this mistake: At U.N. and other gatherings U.S. Secret Service agents and diplomats were under orders to make sure such a ‘photo op’ so highly desired by the Castros did not happen.
With his greeting, President Obama has squandered U.S. prestige and honor.
All very subtle to you and me but not to those who count.
The power vacuum created by the weakness of the American government is allowing tensions to build in places that were once stable and settled. Nothing is forever stable and settled but the instability is happening now – first between China and Japan and now between Russia and Canada – because the Chinese and Russians have estimated that Obama is a paper tiger who will not defend America’s traditional allies in any serious contest of wills. These are just testing, testing, one two three, testing. The real stuff is to come.
So here is where we are now at, Canada plans claim that would include North Pole. Hamlet also once discussed territorial claims involving the Poles:
Enter HAMLET, ROSENCRANTZ, GUILDENSTERN, and others
HAMLET
Good sir, whose powers are these?CAPTAIN
They are of Norway, sir.HAMLET
How purposed, sir, I pray you?CAPTAIN
Against some part of Poland.HAMLET
Who commands them, sir?CAPTAIN
The nephews to old Norway, Fortinbras.HAMLET
Goes it against the main of Poland, sir,
Or for some frontier?CAPTAIN
Truly to speak, and with no addition,
We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it;
Nor will it yield to Norway or the Pole
A ranker rate, should it be sold in fee.HAMLET
Why, then the Polack never will defend it.CAPTAIN
Yes, it is already garrison’d.HAMLET
Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats
Will not debate the question of this straw:
This is the imposthume of much wealth and peace,
That inward breaks, and shows no cause without
Why the man dies. I humbly thank you, sir.CAPTAIN
God be wi’ you, sir.
And once again worthless rock although it does contain Santa’s workshop.
‘We’re talking about the center of a large, inhospitable ocean that is in total darkness for three months each year, thousands of miles from any port,’ he said. ‘The water in the North Pole is 12,000 feet (3,650 meters) deep and will always be covered by sea ice in the winter. It’s not a place where anyone is going to be drilling for oil and gas.
‘So it’s not about economic stakes, it’s about domestic politics.’
And therefore will be garrisoned to the hilt. The more interesting question is whose side will Obama be on? Given his near hundred percent record of failing to support America’s traditional allies, that it will be the true north strong and free is far from certain.
Here is a bit of a backstory on making movies filling in some behind-the-scenes detail. This bit about unions is probably the least surprising but tells you quite a bit about how hard these things are and how much damage unions do:
Much like an early 1900s coal mine, film sets have a union problem. Because the unions are so specialized, the work is intentionally split up into countless departments, and there are consequences for performing a task not specifically assigned to your department. . . .
If there’s an electrical cord in the way, even an extension cord plugged into nothing, someone from the electrical union has to move it, regardless of how easy it might be to do it yourself. And there are unions for everything, making you twist, turn, and dance through so much red tape that you practically mummify yourself with it any time you want to finish a simple task. And when we say ‘everything,’ we mean it — pushing the dolly, holding the clapper, setting up lunch, sculpting Robert Downey Jr.’s facial hair — every conceivable task is assigned to a specific department. And only that department.
If you want further reason to be depressed about our economic future, this article Janet Yellen and the Phillips Curve will supply it. If you believe this thing called the Phillips Curve relationship works, then you believe that higher inflation can bring faster growth and lower unemployment along with it. It is exactly this that Janet Yellen apparently believes. This is a direct quote:
“Each percentage point reduction in inflation costs on the order of 4.4 percent of gross domestic product, which is about $300 billion, and entails about 2.2 percentage-point-years of unemployment in excess of the natural rate.”
That is, reducing inflation slows growth and raises unemployment. If you want growth, inflation is therefore the way to go.
Yellen believes that the central bank should maintain enough inflation to prop up business activity, because ‘uncertainty about sales impedes business planning and could harm capital formation just as much as uncertainty about inflation can create uncertainty about relative prices and harm business planning.’ This approach extends the Fed’s mission beyond even the dual mandate of Humphrey-Hawkins and into the sphere of American corporate activity, a place that the business economist Greenspan was reluctant to go. Yellen, a disciple of predictive modeling, dismisses the notion that the Fed could go too far. To her the record shows that ‘tuning works even if it is not “fine.”‘
Here’s the article’s conclusion:
It isn’t just the 1970s, but the last few years, that show how money creation does not produce permanent employment gains. This was raised time and time again at Yellen’s recent Senate Banking Committee hearing, when several Democrats bemoaned the absence of any ‘trickle down’ effect from quantitative easing. Do we want the Fed to double-down on that folly with Janet Yellen at the helm?
This is not going to end well.
Home Alone, as told above, is about an abused psychotic child in the midst of a dysfunctional family. Don’t believe it? Then watch this alternate reading of the plot from this properly annotated trailer.
Harold Lasswell explaining the difference between propaganda and education in 1935:
The spread of controversial attitudes is propaganda; the spread of acceptable attitudes is skills education. It is proper to speak of Communism as propaganda in Chicago and as education in Moscow.*
Today, of course, we could define propaganda and education in exactly the same way but the examples would be reversed.
*Harold D. Lasswell. 1935. “The Person, Subject and Object of Propaganda.” Annals of the American Academy of Political Science, vol 179: 189. Quoted in Wolfgang Schivelbusch. 2006. Three New Deals. New York: Picador, 74.
Quite exceptional contemporary film of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
From Powerline.
The thing about Obama is that he thinks everyone wants what he wants, an easy life with no work and lots of free time to shoot hoops. To the extent we can actually find out anything factual about his days before politics – in fact, even about his days since he became the President – he seems to have be a vacuum of inertia, the farthest thing in the world from a work-obsessed dynamo.
Same might be said about most of the Labor Party front bench. University grads who went to work for a union seems to be the mould. Their assumption, like Obama’s, is to get more income for less work. That’s the union mantra. That’s all they can think of asking for. That all they want, more of what’s going with less personal effort required to get it.
To a limited extent, that’s what the private sector is designed to do, to increase the volume of goods and services while reducing the cost of getting what we get. Just that with the private sector, there is this one requirement. You have to work. You have to produce something. You need to put something into the communal bowl before you can take something out for yourself.
Socialists don’t see it that way. They are all about taking out. They never discuss putting in. And so far as they are concerned, society’s largest enemies are those who have put in so much that they have actually received a seriously larger income than the people they employ.
But you know, the people on the receiving end of these plundered goods, not only do they not appreciate what they receive, their lives are ruined by it. The promise of endless wealth on the condition of absolutely no work is no one’s model of Nirvanah.
Mark Steyn has a nifty article on just this sort of thing with this as the conclusion he reaches towards the end:
So what does every initiative of the Obama era have in common? Obamacare, Obamaphones, Social Security disability expansion, 50 million people on food stamps . . . The assumption is that mass, multi-generational dependency is now a permanent feature of life. A coastal elite will devise ever smarter and slicker trinkets, and pretty much everyone else will be a member of either the dependency class or the vast bureaucracy that ministers to them. And, if you’re wondering why every Big Government program assumes you’re a feeble child, that’s because a citizenry without ‘work and purpose’ is ultimately incompatible with liberty. The elites think a smart society will be wealthy enough to relieve the masses from the need to work. In reality, it would be neo-feudal, but with fatter, sicker peasants. It wouldn’t just be ‘economic inequality,’ but a far more profound kind, and seething with resentments.
Being on leave is a vacation. Being unemployed, even with more or less the same income to spend, is not a life of endless joy. It is the very essence of an empty life. This is what socialism brings, and the seething resentment that comes with it as well.
Law of Markets 