Monthly Archives: March 2014

Obama’s psychiatric disorder

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It has become pretty clear that Obama is not all there, living in a fantasy world of his own. Here is the latest version:

For anyone who has observed Barack Obama over the years, it’s obvious that a fundamental part of his self-identity involves seeing himself, and having others see him, as pragmatic rather than ideological, reality-based, driven by reason instead of bias.

This has never actually been true. Mr. Obama is, in fact, unusually dogmatic, blind to counter-evidence, and mostly unable to adjust his views to the way things are. So when his worldview collides with reality, he often can’t adjust. He instead creates his own make believe world.

And so on and so forth but to what end? He is supported by the Democrats, the media and by those at the bottom of the income pile whose lives can never be made materially better by asking them to work for what they get.

Mr. Putin, meanwhile, is in the process of restoring the Russian empire. He is besting Mr. Obama at every turn, from arms control agreements to Crimea and Ukraine to Syria, Egypt, and Iran. Russia has established a major presence in the Middle East for the first time since the 1970s. Early in his presidency President Obama canceled a missile defense agreement with Poland and the Czech Republic–and got nothing in return from Putin. Our adversaries are emboldened; our allies are afraid. Confidence in America is collapsing.

Yet the president seems clueless to all this; his failures don’t seem to compute with him. Even Jimmy Carter eventually understood the errors of his ways and adjusted his dealings with the Soviet Union. Mr. Obama remains off in his own world.

In psychiatry, there’s a condition known as dissociative disorder. It’s considered to be a coping mechanism, when the person literally dissociates himself from a situation or experience too traumatic to integrate with his conscious self. A person escapes reality in ways that are unhealthy.

And not just him but all of those highly educated idiots who voted for him twice and support him still. Call them nuts if you like, but they are running America.

First use of aggregate demand and aggregate supply

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Robin Neill put the following question up on the Societies for the History of Economics (SHOE) list last night:

Colleagues:

Who and when was the terms “aggregate demand” and “aggregate supply” first used?

I have now written both to the list and to Robin. Here is what I wrote to Robin:

Dear Robin

You have put the cat amongst the pigeons with your question, if only they knew. Using superhuman restraint, I did not point out that the use of aggregate demand was forbidden amongst economists precisely because they had all absorbed Say’s Law. If you understand that demand is constituted by supply, then so far as aggregates go, there is no aggregate demand separate from aggregate supply, and anyways, it is the structure of production, i.e. the structure of supply, that matters and not the aggregate. Not that the classics ignored such aggregates. John Stuart Mill was pretty straightforward, but on behalf of the classical view, to wit, “[aggregate] demand for commodities is not demand for labour”. Again a complete contradiction of modern macro. I don’t know if you’ve seen either, but I discuss AD in both my Say’s Law and the Keynesian Revolution and my Free Market Economics. The 2nd ed of FME will be coming out in a few months so if you haven’t seen it yet, I’d wait for that. But in short form, I have argued in every place I can that the introduction of AD was Keynes’s big contribution which has ruined economic theory, macroecvonomics and the theory of the cycle ever since.

And this is what I wrote to SHOE:

The question really is who can take us back before Keynes? So here, from The General Theory page 25:

“Let Z be the aggregate supply price of the output from employing N men, the relationship between Z and N being written Z = φ(N), which can be called the Aggregate Supply Function. Similarly, let D be the proceeds which entrepreneurs expect to receive from the employment of N men, the relationship between D and N being written D = f(N), which can be called the Aggregate Demand Function.”

And then there is this from page 32:

“The idea that we can safely neglect the aggregate demand function is fundamental to the Ricardian economics, which underlie what we have been taught for more than a century. Malthus, indeed, had vehemently opposed Ricardo’s doctrine that it was impossible for effective demand to be deficient; but vainly. For, since Malthus was unable to explain clearly (apart from an appeal to the facts of common observation) how and why effective demand could be deficient or excessive, he failed to furnish an alternative construction; and Ricardo conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain. Not only was his theory accepted by the city, by statesmen and by the academic world. But controversy ceased; the other point of view completely disappeared; it ceased to be discussed. The great puzzle of Effective Demand with which Malthus had wrestled vanished from economic literature. You will not find it mentioned even once in the whole works of Marshall, Edgeworth and Professor Pigou, from whose hands the classical theory has received its most mature embodiment. It could only live on furtively, below the surface, in the underworlds of Karl Marx, Silvio Gesell or Major Douglas.”

I have seen the phrase aggregate demand used before that but in a kind of aimless way. But I am interested in its use prior to 1936 as well.

The examples others have come up have been just as I described, random uses in an aimless way. But now we use AD as the basis for stimulating our economies and are then astonished that the real world does not follow textbook theory. The real world actually does follow textbook theory, but of course you have to use the right textbook.

The law and Mr Steyn

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steyn monkey trial

Actually don’t click there but click here to assist Mark Steyn. But just how broken is the American justice system. This broken:

After a year and a half ensnared by poisonous fecal tendrils in the unpumped toxic septic tank of DC “justice”, I don’t think “broken” quite covers it. To any non-American, this system is utterly repulsive. In England, trial by jury replaced trial by ordeal. Somehow America has managed to turn trial by jury into a mere postscript to trial by ordeal. I think it ought to be possible to litigate a 270-word blog post in under 270 weeks. So let’s get on with it.

In the meantime, Steyn doesn’t think Michael Mann actually wants to go to court, but with a $30m countersuit in the way he will have no choice. Steyn will some day end up with a bit of that Nobel Prize loot Mann never actually won.

Stop laughing, this is serious

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susan rice at un

And this is some of the text that went with the picture:

There’s an amazing picture taken a few days ago at the United Nations.

Russia had just vetoed America’s diplomatic proposal for Ukraine. So Ambassador Samantha Power, the former Harvard professor appointed by Barack Obama, who is also a former Harvard grad himself, walked over to Russia’s ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, to give him a piece of her mind.

Churkin didn’t even stand up. He just looked at her. And his aides, standing behind him, laughed.

They weren’t laughing at the ironically named Ambassador Power. They were laughing at their good luck; that they had the good fortune to get into the invading business when a feckless man like Barack Obama was in charge of the free world.

Meanwhile, Russian forces storm Ukraine naval HQ in Crimea. Can’t really be much of an issue since so little attention is being paid to it. There’s perhaps not much you can do but to me the response from the West still looks like slow motion insanity. Next stop, Estonia?

UPDATE: Remember this quote and then watch the video below:

“One cardinal rule of the road is, we don’t watch CNN, the news or MSNBC. We don’t watch any talking heads or any politics. We watch SportsCenter and argue about that,” Obama told The New York Times.

What you are watching is the President of the United States right this minute choosing his bracket, that is choosing which college team will win the NCAA Basketball tournament which is about to start.

More of why the US is heading to the ash heap

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A philosophy for those who can’t make it in the world as it actually exists:

If the tech scene is really a meritocracy, why are so many of its key players, from Mark Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs, white men? If entrepreneurs are born, not made, why are there so many programs attempting to create entrepreneurs? If tech is truly game-changing, why are old-fashioned capitalism and the commodification of personal information never truly questioned? . . .

The undue emphasis placed on entrepreneurship, combined with a limited view of who “counts” as an entrepreneur, function to exclude entire categories of people from ascending to the upper echelon of the industry. And the ideal of authenticity privileges a particular type of self-presentation that encourages people to strategically apply business logics to the way they see themselves and others.

It is with their ignorance that the world we have built will be torn to pieces. Just go thou and achieve. Not so in America any more, at least not amongst some of those who would like to pull down merit as an actual criterion for success.

Digital elitism is optimistic, in that technology is positioned as a solution to an array of difficult problems. At the same time, it inculcates an air of superiority and a universality of experience that truly only applies to a very small number of the world’s most privileged individuals.

Digital elitism does not reconfigure power; it entrenches it. It provides justification for enormous gaps between rich and poor, for huge differences between average people and highly sought-after engineers. It idealizes a “better class of rich people” (as Kara Swisher put it) who evangelize philanthropy and social entrepreneurship — but it also promotes the idea that entrepreneurship is a catch-all solution, and that a startup culture is the best way to solve any problem.

But not everyone can work at a startup, and the business model of startups cannot be applied to all situations.

And if an entrepreneurial business model can’t be applied to all situations it therefore apparently shouldn’t be applied to any. The fantastic ignorance of how things work by people who can only tamper with mechanisms they have no clue about, as sensible as putting a screw driver into an electric socket, will only destroy, only destroy. Nihilists with a collective death wish.

[Came upon this website via a link that went through Instapundit]

Immigration policy

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This is about the United States but the point is just as valid here:

Our Immigration Policies: An ideal immigration policy would be based on merit, would focus on adding highly skilled immigrants, would be easily adjustable, wouldn’t change the demographics of our country and would be simple and inexpensive for law-abiding immigrants. Our current system meets none of these requirements.

Instead, we have a system that for all practical matters favors a law-breaking 17 year old from Mexico with a third grade education over a British neurosurgeon or a German engineer.

Moreover, at times like these, when so many Americans are out of work, it’s worth asking whether it makes sense to be bringing in any new citizens. That’s not a slam on immigrants because we have a lot of hard-working entrepreneurs who came here because they saw America as a land of opportunity; it’s an acknowledgement of the most basic fact of immigration: the whole purpose of it is to benefit people who are already American citizens. Bringing in uneducated ditch-diggers who’ll never pay income tax doesn’t benefit most Americans.

Intentionally changing the demographics of the country doesn’t benefit most Americans.

Rewarding lawbreakers who come into the country illegally doesn’t benefit most Americans.

Bringing in more than a million new immigrants a year when there are less people working today than there were seven years ago doesn’t benefit most Americans.

Immigration could be America’s greatest strength, but our poorly designed system makes no sense.

No business could survive if it brought in the same number of new employees every year, regardless of qualifications or need, then added everyone who could sneak into its lobby onto the payroll. Long term, our nation isn’t much different than that business.

Agree, disagree, or let’s discuss

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Hard work and in-depth analysis is not the Obama long suit. In fact, shallow, stupid, superficial and socialist seems more to the point. I mean, why go through all of those decision papers and do the hard yards when a snap decision off the top of the head will do just as well. From an article with the interesting title, How Barack Obama gets things done:

In early 2012, The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza obtained hundreds of pages of White House memos that offered an intimate look into the inner-workings of Obama’s team. Among the story’s nuggets: the president prefers to have “decision” memos delivered to him with three checkboxes at the bottom that read: “agree”, “disagree”, or “let’s discuss.”

But so long as he is keeping his eye on the ball, plugged in and keeping up with events, you can sleep well at night knowing your interests are in the best of hands. From the same article:

“One cardinal rule of the road is, we don’t watch CNN, the news or MSNBC. We don’t watch any talking heads or any politics. We watch SportsCenter and argue about that,” Obama told The New York Times.

Feel better now? But who are the bigger morons, Obama or the people who voted for him twice?

And a bit more insight from Bret Stephens who has looked at this same article and sub-titles his own, We need a president who rarely thinks and never speaks about how he looks in jeans. OK, fine, we may have just that person beginning in January 2017 at the soonest.

The new world order

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This is one tenth of the story it ought to be given the corruption of the media and its infusion into the left. That the elites in the United States no longer have the ideological understanding of what constitutes a free society is melded into every policy you see. If occasionally someone at Fox, or Rush Limbaugh, or a Sarah Palin, or the right-side blogs gets into these issues, the sum and substance still amounts to almost no opposition at all. So the headline this morning at Drudge actually shows someone who understands just what a buffoon Obama is and what a train wreck American foreign policy has become:

RUSSIA LAUGHS AT OBAMA ‘SANCTIONS’; CALLS HIM ‘PRANKSTER’

“Prankster” is merely what they say in public. The words they must use in private must add no end to the hilarity as they look over Obama and Kerry, and before that Hillary. They show such immense disdain because they can. The consequences will continue far into the future.

And speaking of that future, how’s this for the new world order, also from Drudge, RUSSIACHINA PUSH FOR CONTROL OF INTERNET…

The United States is planning to give up its last remaining authority over the technical management of the Internet.

The Commerce Department announced Friday that it will give the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an international nonprofit group, control over the database of names and addresses that allows computers around the world to connect to each other.

Administration officials say U.S. authority over the Internet address system was always intended to be temporary and that ultimate power should rest with the “global Internet community.”

But some fear that the Obama administration is opening the door to an Internet takeover by Russia, China, or other countries that are eager to censor speech and limit the flow of ideas.

“If the Obama Administration gives away its oversight of the Internet, it will be gone forever,” wrote Daniel Castro, a senior analyst with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

Castro argued that the world “could be faced with a splintered Internet that would stifle innovation, commerce, and the free flow and diversity of ideas that are bedrock tenets of world’s biggest economic engine.”

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, called the announcement a “hostile step” against free speech.

The world moves faster than you can ever believe and at the moment is accelerating into who knows what but has a very bad feel about it.