Actually it turns out it’s Number 702! How did that happen? I must be going at the rate of around 80 a month which is much too many. Still fun to do.
Most interesting development is that I am about to edit a book on The Best Australian Political Blogs which will be a way of helping each of us bloggers to preserve at least some of what we write from falling into a black hole from which it can never be retrieved.
Hi Joshi.
This was picked up from a Canadian blog site which described the video as “a 1945 production from Australia’s National Film Board which briefly explains the history of the formation of six states of the Commonwealth of Australia en route to showcasing the planned city of Canberra.”
It’s a different world, and I don’t just mean it’s before the lake.
[Via SmallDeadAnimals]
The fantastical will to lie at every moment is a pathology beyond comprehension to the normal mind. Obama denies ever knowing his uncle in Boston, denies he ever stayed with him when he was a student. Roger Simon discusses this improbability and takes it further. Who is this man, the President of the United States?
Around Obama there is an unprecedented silence, almost a media omertà. So much remains unknown about this man, although we do know, through the debate surrounding David Maraniss’s failed and tentative biography, that the president lied about his personal history on multiple occasions in his autobiography Dreams from My Father.
He, of course, lies when the truth will cause him harm, but he also lies when it should make no difference. Now he admits he lied about living with his uncle, although no one in the media describes it quite like that:
The White House said Thursday that President Barack Obama briefly lived with an uncle who faced deportation from the United States, correcting its previous statements that the president had never met Onyango Obama.
The 69-year-old, Kenyan-born half-brother of Obama’s estranged father was granted permission this week to stay in the U.S. after ignoring a deportation order two decades ago. The uncle is also known as Omar Obama.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said that when the case first arose, officials looked for records of a meeting but never directly asked the president.
A wilderness of mirrors.
I was just thinking this very thought myself:
TONY Abbott says the government does not have an ‘endless supply of money’ to prop up businesses like Qantas or Holden, warning the companies must operate profitably if they want to survive. . . .
‘In the end, businesses have to operate profitably. And in the end they have to operate profitably because of their own decisions and from their own resources. They can’t expect government to do anything other than to create … the best possible market conditions for them to operate.
‘And that means getting taxes down, getting regulation down, creating as far as we can a climate of confidence and certainty.’
This is the right answer anyway, but the way the union-run Labor Party raided the cookie jar has meant that the workers in both firms cannot look to the government for assistance. There’s nothing there. So it’s a bit rich to read this:
Federal Labor is demanding Prime Minister Tony Abbott personally intervene to resolve a dispute between government ministers about more taxpayer support for Holden.
Why do they suppose the money has run out? Would they have gone even deeper into debt to fund yet more assistance while trying to pay for everything else they’ve put on the tab.
And this is going to become the story on a wider variety of issues. The government will be unable to afford bailouts and injections and forms of assistance that might once have been routine.
And it will roll on from there elsewhere.
And if this is the way it is with Holden and Qantas who represent two of Australia’s oldest and best known brand names so it will be down the line with others and hopefully with other parts of our welfare dependency-ridden state as well.
One of the great mysteries of economics as it is now is to say that consumption comprises 60-70% of the economy and that therefore we must stimulate consumption to stimulate economic growth. But the reality is that so far as the value added of different activities go, consumption contributes either around 6-7%, which is the soak up of resources in the retail sector, or 100% which when all is said and done is the ultimate contibution consumer demand makes since final consumption is the point of all economic activity. As with so much in economics today, the problem starts from the Keynesian mindset that pervades macro.
The great Austrian economist, Mark Skousen, has been hassling the American government for many years to fix up the way they gather and report statistics and of all things, they have now begun to supplement their usual national accounting stats with a measure that actually burrows into the data in ways that show the underlying supply-side contribution of different sectors of the economy.
Forbes in its latest issue carries an article by Skousen, Beyond GDP: Get Ready For A New Way To Measure The Economy, which explains what is being done and how it will make a difference.
Starting in spring 2014, the Bureau of Economic Analysis will release a breakthrough new economic statistic on a quarterly basis. It’s called Gross Output, a measure of total sales volume at all stages of production. GO is almost twice the size of GDP, the standard yardstick for measuring final goods and services produced in a year.
This is the first new economic aggregate since Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was introduced over fifty years ago.
The disastrous Keynesian wreckage that has been devastating economies across the world has to a large extent been driven by the Y=C+I+G+X-M formula which everyone learns in first year and then, because it is so ridiculously simple, is never forgotten again. It helps establish in the minds of economists, governments and the public that economies are driven from the demand side when it is the one place that an economy receives no momentum at all. As Mark has put it:
By focusing only on final output, GDP underestimates the money spent and economic activity generated at earlier stages in the production process. It’s as though the manufacturers and shippers and designers aren’t fully acknowledged in their contribution to overall growth or decline.
There are no perfect measures at the aggregate level and the double counting that affects such an aggregate is noted by Skousen. But anything that can finally place the focus on the production side of the economy and end the preoccupation with demand is a massive step forward.
I hope the ABS is taking note.
On the left are the figures for GDP. On the right are the figures for contributions to growth. Conveniently the GDP data go back to September 2007 so there are a couple of things that are worth pointing out.
First we should note the recession we never had which is quite prominent. You will see a major drop in GDP that somehow escaped being recorded as two consecutive quarters of falling output. Same time as the unemployment rate went from the 3.9% recorded at the time to 5.8%. Didn’t have a recession? It was the recession we didn’t have to have, had it anyway but called it something else.
Then a mint of government spending later we have a massive debt as well as low growth and rising unemployment. GDP growth for the quarter was 0.6% and for the year less than two and a half. And if you’d like to see the evidence of public spending, look at the figures for GFCF-Priv and GFCF-Pub, that is private investment and public investment. Private is falling. Public is rising with a full year reduction in investment in both sectors together of negative 2.0%.
More evidence to ignore that shows public spending does not get you growth, employment or higher living standards.
These are very revealing figures. I only hope our new government understands that growth and prosperity can and will only come from the private sector acting on its own initiative.
Conrad Black accuses Andy McCarthy of creating schisms on the right in endorsing Diana West’s American Betrayal. This is his article from National Review:
This is not a return to Diana West’s book. However, Andy McCarthy, a man for whom I have very great respect and whom I like very much, has written a review of it in The New Criterion that, because of its revisionist presentation of a number of historical events, is among the most discouraging political documents I have read in many years. Mr. McCarthy, a former prosecutor and distinguished and perceptive writer of the sensible Right, has frequently inspired me by his writing, and when I met him, at a difficult time in my own former travails, by his conversation also. I confidently turned to his review of Ms. West’s America Betrayed, which readers of this column will find it hard to forget after the robust knockabout the book received here and in her reply to me. The rigor of the review and its application to the book are matters I will address in a letter to The New Criterion, which the editor of that publication graciously invited, as I am mentioned, quite unexceptionably, in the review.
What seriously depresses me are three positions taken in the review. First is Andy McCarthy’s view that the scandalous, cowardly refusal of the mainstream elite of American culture and politics to recognize that America’s Islamist enemies are enemies can be traced to Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government in World War II. It is a fact that alarms and disgusts all of us in this debate, including Ms. West and her more vocal (than I am) critics, but I do not agree about the source of the problem. Second is Andy’s qualified accommodation, as worthy of reasonable consideration, of the claims by Ms. West that Lend-Lease was at least in significant part a mistaken reinforcement of Stalinist totalitarianism to the ultimate detriment of the West; that the Normandy invasion served Stalin’s purposes and enhanced his penetration of Western Europe; that Franklin D. Roosevelt was more or less ambivalent about the comparative virtues of Stalinist Communism and Western democracy (though he acknowledges that FDR disapproved of the barbarism of Stalin’s rule); that the Yalta agreement “gave” Stalin half of Europe; and that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were so significantly influenced in a pro-Soviet direction by Soviet agents and such arch-sympathizers that the distinction between an agent and a sympathizer was academic in the United States. And third, I am distressed by Andy McCarthy’s partial defense of Joseph R. McCarthy and his conclusion that the smear of McCarthy enabled Communism and anti-American reflexes to flourish in the United States through all the intervening years and are responsible for the inadequate general response to the Islamist threat that, I repeat, all the participants in this very heated and prolonged exchange revile in almost equally emphatic strictures.
The unanimity on this last point underlines the source of my concern. A relatively united Right, which included Diana West and other participants in this discussion, exercised a great influence in assisting President Reagan and his followers and collaborators in mobilizing opinion to support his arms buildup, his development of anti-missile defenses, his stiffening of the backbone of the Western alliance, and the consensus he helped create for a rollback of the Soviet intrusions in Central America, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the imposition of martial law in Poland. That unity of the influential Right was vitally important to the course corrections that lifted the United States and the West out of the inanities and shabby compromises of the Carter era, and led the world to the collapse of the Soviet Union and of international Communism, and to the triumph of democracy and market economics in most of the world. The New Criterion itself played an important and distinguished role in the intellectual phase of that struggle. Diana West, Andy McCarthy, and most of those who have supported and opposed Ms. West in this controversy all played their parts, and there is credit for all of them in the result: the greatest and most bloodless strategic victory in the history of the nation-state.
A schism as profound as this controversy has now become will splinter the Right and render it incapable of united action, and perpetuate the precise condition that Andy decries and mistakenly lays at the door of Soviet wartime infiltration, both directly and through sympathizers. The process of fragmenting the Right, in this now notorious instance, began with Ms. West’s frequently, though not entirely, outrageous book, but for a writer of the stature of Andy McCarthy to take the positions mentioned above, and for The New Criterion to lend the exposition of those opinions the mantle of its earned prestige, is, and to say the least, very worrisome.
OK, I give up. Where’s the schism? Who is more in the tradition of Ronald Reagan, Conrad Black or Diana West? Reagan was demonised on the left as much as McCarthy ever was. For a variety of reasons it was not made to stick, but it wasn’t for want of trying. If I am not prepared to sell out one of the most relentless fighters on behalf of freedom I do not think of myself as anything other than acting in step with the values of a free world. No one in politics gets it right every time. No one can see the future perfectly. No one has absolutely pure and unblemished motives in everything they do. But if we are to walk away from McCarthy and his aims who then should be the person in the 1950s we should look to as the example of how these issues could be fought out? No one’s name comes to mind because no one else seemed willing to take these issues on and was capable of highlighting them in the same way.
If some of us over here prefer to honour McCarthy rather than revile him, so what? I can work perfectly well with people of a similar persuasion to myself who hold different views about McCarthy’s approach to dealing with our deadliest enemies. If it’s tactics and strategy you are worried about, then say so and this can be discussed. But it looks like a different agenda in play, one that is hard to fathom but seems to suggest that McCarthy was actually wrong in what he said, not in what he did. Since every single person he named in the 1950s has since that time been demonstrated to be an actual communist, communist sympathiser and useful idiot, nothing of what he did strikes me as wrongheaded and against my interests.
McCarthy’s only piece of bad luck was to have arrived on the scene at the same time as television. He seems strange to us today in those grainy black and white takes, but these are the takes made by his enemies in the media. We have our own battles today against a different kind of tyranny. I only wish we had a McCarthy right now who could show the same kind of leadership today that he did then.
This is from an article by Harvey Klehr on FrontPageMag with the title, “Setting the Record on Joe McCarthy Straight”.
But if McCarthy was right about some of the large issues, he was wildly wrong on virtually all of the details.
There is no indication that he had even a hint of the Venona decryptions, so he did not base his accusations on the information in them. Indeed, virtually none of the people that McCarthy claimed or alleged were Soviet agents turn up in Venona. He did identify a few small fry who we now know were spies but only a few. And there is little evidence that those he fingered were among the unidentified spies of Venona.
Many of his claims were wildly inaccurate; his charges filled with errors of fact, misjudgments of organizations and innuendoes disguised as evidence.
He failed to recognize or understand the differences among genuine liberals, fellow-traveling liberals, Communist dupes, Communists and spies — distinctions that were important to make.
The new information from Russian and American archives does not vindicate McCarthy. He remains a demagogue, whose wild charges actually made the fight against Communist subversion more difficult.
Like Gresham’s Law, McCarthy’s allegations marginalized the accurate claims. Because his facts were so often wrong, real spies were able to hide behind the cover of being one of his victims and even persuade well-meaning but naïve people that the whole anti-communist cause was based on inaccuracies and hysteria.
So who else was carrying the anti-communist cause at the time? Where are these wild inaccuracies? Just yesterday I was reading a book co-authored by Klehr* and I opened it at random onto a section dealing with Owen Lattimore who is treated as a possible Soviet agent but over whom judgment must be suspended. But see Blacklisted by History Chapter 29 and elsewhere. Seventy years later Klehr (and Haynes) can’t make up their minds. McCarthy was there, then, right on the spot, trying as best he could surrounded by enemies out to destroy his reputation. There may be a strategic sense in attacking McCarthy today although I barely see it and don’t accept it. But if Lattimore in their minds is a 50-50 or less, then who can really be a certainty unless they confess in open court? But let’s take this one para from the above quotation to see what we find:
He failed to recognize or understand the differences among genuine liberals, fellow-traveling liberals, Communist dupes, Communists and spies — distinctions that were important to make.
Let me see. McCarthy is trying to sort out all of this in real time on his own and didn’t quite make all the fine distinctions we still cannot make three generations later. If Klehr is still not willing to point the finger at Lattimore because we cannot be absolutely positively sure, then what was McCarthy supposed to do? He wasn’t writing some useless scholarly tract. He was trying to help save the West from communist tyranny. And it wasn’t the US that was directly endangered but large parts of Asia and Europe. But if the US was going to carry this fight, it had to first know it was in a fight. This kind of refined sorting things out seventy years later is supposedly “right-wing” political writing at its worst. And the thing is, what’s the issue if people like me think back on McCarthy in a positive way?
I could see an argument that says you don’t want to get caught up in any of this since the McCarthy name remains a stick to beat you with. If the argument went that this is one sleeping dog that should be left to lie, then I could acknowledge that there are genuine dangers in bringing McCarthy up. But that does not seem to be the point. The criticisms are about McCarthy, what he did and how he did it that for all I can see could easily be published in the Washington Post.
Well let me use the Deng Zhao Ping ratio of 70% good 30% bad since if that’s good enough for Mao it ought to be more than good enough for Joe McCarthy (how bout 90-10?). In my view, though, looking back but having watched the ways of the Left, the reason McCarthy became as notorious as he did was because he was so effective in what he did. I don’t know exactly what these McCarthyist tactics are supposed to mean, but if it means exposing the existence of evil doers in the State Department, I am all for it.
* John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. 2006. Early Cold War Spies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. For the discussion on Owen Lattimore see Chapter 2 on Amerasia.
From Peggy Noonan, and you have to go through the whole 800 words before you come to this:
Commentators like to decry low-information voters—the stupid are picking our leaders. I think the real problem is low-information leaders. They have so little experience of life and have so much faith in magic — in media, in words — that they don’t understand people will get angry at you when you mislead them, and never see you the same way again.
From Instapundit whose entire post reads, “PEGGY NOONAN BEGINNING TO WONDER if Obama’s as smart as he was cracked up to be.” For myself, I don’t think being smart is all that it’s cracked to be either but that’s something else again.
In the meantime, for some further sense of the extent to which the President is a fraud, you should also read Jack Cashill’s latest on How Author Obama Foreshadowed President Obama. If you don’t know this story already, it’s really time you did. And more here.
Malcolm Turnbull speaking today about the ABC:
COMMUNICATIONS Minister Malcolm Turnbull has accused the ABC of ‘last century work practices’ and warned the public broadcaster that he had experience in restructuring television networks.
He told the Coalition party room today that the ABC had committed a ‘shocking error of judgment’ in partnering with The Guardian on the publication of a document leaked by US fugitive Edward Snowden.
In response to a scathing critique of the broadcaster by South Australian Senator Cory Bernardi, Mr Turnbull defended ABC managing director Mark Scott and said the broadcaster was not ‘cannibalising’ private media companies.
However, he suggested the ABC’s operations could be modernised, saying ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘last century work practices’ were a problem for the broadcaster.
‘I’ve actually restructured a television network,’ Mr Turnbull told colleagues, referring to his work as a broadcast lawyer in the 1990s sale of Network Ten.
Mr Turnbull also questioned whether the broadcaster was adhering to its obligations under law.
‘The real question is, is the ABC adhering to its statutory charter and in particular its obligation to give fair treatment to both sides of politics,’ Mr Turnbull said, according to those at the meeting.
Law of Markets 