Monthly Archives: September 2014

Nobel Peace Prize winner goes to war

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Well sort of. But he did say this which is a copy of what Tony Abbott has been saying:

The president laid out his plan Wednesday evening in a prime-time televised speech to the nation from the White House, saying that after months of preparations he is “poised to go on the offence” against ISIS. He framed it as not a war but a counter-terrorism action even as he admitted that “we have not yet detected specific plotting against our homeland.” He said, however, that the thousands of “trained and battle-hardened” Islamic foreign fighters, some of whom come from the U.S., “could try to return to their home countries and carry out deadly attacks.”

Who was it who said it was better to fight them over there before we had to fight them here?

No doubt Australia would be part of the Coalition of the Willing, if only Obama was himself willing.

Mr Abbott, who spoke with Mr Obama on Tuesday, said Australia had received no specific request for further military assistance beyond air and weapons drops by RAAF personnel.

“A specific request for military assistance in the form of air capability and military advisers could come, but it hasn’t yet come,” he told reporters in Launceston on Thursday.

All in good time, no doubt, all in good time.

Auchy-lès-Hesdin and the history of economic thought

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So far as I can think, aside from a few gravesides, there are no historic sites that one would associate with the study of economics. Yet there is, in fact, one that ought to be preserved both because of its association with one the greatest economists of all time and because of its on-site interest as a place in which, even now, one can trace out the contours of the industrial revolution from the earliest years of the nineteenth century almost right down to the present. I refer here to the textile mill that was set up by Jean-Baptiste Say following his exile from Paris at the hands of Napoleon.

Auchy-lès-Hesdin is a small village, and to be quite technical about it, is found in the Pas-de-Calais department and Nord-Pas-de-Calais region of France. Say, who had been a journalist and writer, having refused to alter the text of his Treatise to suit Napoleon’s statist demands, went off to Auchy to start a textile mill. He went there because by the river sat an old abbey that had one specific feature, a waterfall which could be harnessed to run the machinery of the mill. The waterfall is still there, as are most of the buildings that were subsequently built on the site. These include the power plant that used to generate the steam when steam replaced water, and even more remarkably, an electric generator that was used even later that was driven by diverting the river past a water wheel.

There is also the “Château Blanc”, a massive three-storey house that Say commissioned to be built but which he never lived in since by 1813 he was able to return to Paris. So thus what we find, if you will excuse my enthusiasm, is a kind of Versailles for economists. The buildings are falling apart but are still intact. There is restoration work going on and there seems to be a determination to save this site for posterity if it can be done. But having just been there myself, I cannot tell you just how extraordinary it is. We on this discussion thread have an interest in history, and this is a kind of living history of the industrial revolution that is also a place of great interest because of its association with J.-B. Say.

At the moment, and I cannot tell you why, there is a collection of antique fire trucks housed in one of the buildings. But other possibilities are latent in how this site may be developed, including a museum for the history of economic thought. At the moment, there are some scattered artefacts associated with Say in place but things are at an early stage in thinking this through. I am off here in Australia but this is something that the European Society along with the English should become involved with. And while it may not be politic to say it, as was pointed out by M. Zephyr Tilliette – Auchy’s self-appointed historian – the town lies midway between Azincourt and Crécy and is a short drive from the Calais and Chunnel crossing points.

If I may be allowed to say so, this is a place you should visit if you get the chance. The website I am told is coming, but in the meantime you can make arrangements to visit the site by phoning this number: 06.45.49.59.29. You will not be disappointed.

Why Nikola Tesla never married

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An interesting article: Nikola Tesla Explains Why He Never Married. It is essentially taken from an article published a century ago. How the article begins:

WHEN a man who has made a name for himself deliberately chooses to remain a bachelor the world is naturally curious to know what the reasons were that impelled him to this choice.

Marriage has come to be considered the natural thing for every normal man, and when some pre-eminent man shows a firm determination to sidestep it everybody wonders whether his superior intelligence has revealed to him some fatal defects in the institution of matrimony which are not apparent to the average person.

But the public’s curiosity in this respect is seldom gratified. Most of the distinguished bachelors try to pass off their bachelorhood as a joke, saying that it is not a matter of choice, but because they have never been able to find a woman who would marry them. As a rule, they are singularly averse to giving any serious reasons for their failure to become husbands.

Nikola Tesla, the great scientist and inventor, is a striking exception to this rule. In a recent interview with a representative of this newspaper he frankly explains why he has never married and why he probably never will marry.

Found at Captain Capitalism.

A narcissist can never be wrong since he is always right

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From an article by Richard Epstein on Presidential Indecision:

The Obama personal hesitation stems, unfortunately, from reasons unrelated to the military and political issues. Part of his problem is that he cannot bring himself to acknowledge that he was wrong to oppose the Iraqi surge in 2006, and wrong to pull out American troops from Iraq as President. A strong president learns from his past mistakes, but Obama does not.

One reason for his dogged persistence lies in his flawed world view, which deep down, regards the United States (and Israel) as akin to colonial powers, whose actions should always be examined under a presumption of distrust. His ingrained uneasiness with the values of western civilization makes it impossible for him to think and act as the leader of a western nation. Instead, he much prefers to regard himself as a nonpartisan critic and a bystander to world affairs. He has no firm conviction in the rightness of his cause, and hence no confidence in his ability to get others to act as perils mount.

What makes the situation even worse is that Obama receives support from commentators and public intellectuals who think that his reluctance to commit military force should be commended as part of some grand plan to restore American hegemony by gentler means. Just that kind of thinking was evident in a recent column by Thomas Friedman, “Leading From Within,” which refuses to come to grips with the short-term peril that ISIS presents. Friedman accepts the conventional analysis that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake and ignores the current short-term military crisis in order to piece together some long-term strategic plans to make things better.

I am always leery of perspectives that give Obama the benefit of the doubt, that suggest there is actually a strategic view, however wrong it might be, beneath it all. Ill will and hatred for the West are more my thing. But at least he is being driven by the politics of the moment to take actions he would never personally have authorised under any circumstances. In the meantime, he is trying to manoeuvre so that the Democrats in Congress don’t have to take a position right before the election. It is only fortunate that the enemy in this case is so vile, and continues to emphasise just that every day so that no one is allowed to forget, that makes even this limited response possible.

A farrago of vacuous ideas and empty nonsense

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I came across a book in one of the still remaining second hand book shops I frequent by two Nobel Prize winners, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. It’s title was Animal Spirits with the basic premise stated on the cover, that “human psychology drives the economy and why it matters for global capitalism”. So far, so ordinary but since this is all part of the new direction in economics, I thought I would give it a go.

Well, what a farrago of vacuous ideas and empty nonsense. I had always thought it was ridiculous that Keynes had made such a fetish about “animal spirits” himself, seeing as how every classical economist was perfectly aware of how crucial business confidence is to economic outcomes. If nothing else, Frank Knight had published his Risk, Uncertainty and Profit in 1921, a book I am pretty certain Keynes raided in writing the General Theory published in 1936. That Akerlof and Shiller write as if they have introduced some new conceptions into economics was astonishing, but given the low level of historical knowledge within the profession, you can just about get away with anything.

But what really did get to me was this book, published in 2009 at the height of the GFC and as the stimulus programs were getting into full swing, were not just advocating such public spending but made it clear how much economists had learned from Keynes and how fortunate we lot were that economists such as themselves were now on the watch and in control of policy.

A repeat of the Great Depression is now a possibility because economists, the government and the general public have in recent years grown complacent. They have forgotten the lessons of the 1930s. In those hard times we learned how the economy really works. . . .

In the middle of the Great Depression John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. In this 1936 masterwork, Keynes described how creditworthy governments like those of the United States and Great Britain could borrow and spend, and thus put the unemployed back to work. [My bolding]

I have an article on this book at Quadrant Online, Phlogiston with a Keynsian Twist. I think of it as a contender for the worst book on economics ever written. Lots of bad books on the subject, of course, but you don’t normally find two people at the highest level of the profession conspiring to write such stuff. Read the review, but spare yourself the trouble of reading the book, unless you would like to see just how empty economics can be in this day and age.

What to expect when you’re expecting to be a grandfather – from GWB

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GWB grandfathering advice:

Speaking at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., Mr. Bush told his predecessor to get ready to be “like, the lowest person in the pecking order in your family,” Politico reported.

“Be prepared to fall completely in love again,” he said. “You’re not going to believe it. You’re just not going to believe the joy and the fun. And I’m looking forward to talking to you after that child is born. And we all wish the very best. … It’s going to be an awesome period for you.”

Debating your future

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On one side, we have Anjem Choudary who was chairman of Britain’s Society of Muslim Lawyers. Via Andrew Bolt, Choudary: terrorism is “part of Islam”.

http://youtu.be/WNSbkWVSDpM

With some of the text:

Britain and the US are the true terrorists:

Well if you look in the Oxford dictionary in fact, the word terrorism is the use of violence against a community or a section of the community for political purposes. So I would say to you that the ordinary English meaning is precisely what the Americans and the British are doing in Afghanistan, and what they did before in Iraq, to establish their own military and economic interests no matter what the cost is to the life and wealth of the people… I think there is something called state terrorism, which in fact the Americans are in fact engaging in quite regularly.

The Islamic State’s terrorism is “pro-life”:

I think that there is terrorism which is pro-life, and there is terrorism which is against life. You know, you could terrorise the enemy in order to make sure that the war ends quickly. And I think this is what the Islamic State in fact are trying to do, to scare off the Americans and their own allies in Syria and Iraq. And then there is terrorism which is against life, which is like carpet bombing, dropping nuclear weapons, the shock and awe that we saw in Iraq before.

Terrorism is “part of Islam” and killing civilians is legitimate:

Allah mentions in the Quran in fact, if you look in Chapter eight, verse 60, he said “Prepare as much as you can steeds of war to terrorise the enemy.” So terrorising the enemy is in fact part of Islam, I mean this is something that we must embrace and understand, as far as the jurisprudence of jihad is concerned. Secondly, I think that think that people need to appreciate is that in war, the Muslims are not distinguishing in general between civilians and military. Because those very civilians are those that put the people in charge, and those people in charge – Barack Obama and others – are sending their troops to Muslim countries. So they’re not making that distinction, let alone between people who are journalists, who are considered to be the right hand in fact, and the propaganda machine of the Obama administration.

James Foley and other journalists are seen as the enemy:

I don’t know the details of Mr James Foley… But what I can definitely tell you is that journalists in general from the West, the civilians from places like America, at the current time are in a position where there is no sanctity for them in Muslim countries. There is no one to give them that sanctity. We are uprising against our own regimes, and they are seen as enemies of the Usama Muslims.

Taking hostages is what Mohammed did, too, and all non-Muslims in Muslim lands are targets:

…the Prophet himself took hostages from a tribe which had an alliance with another tribe, who had actually taken the Muslims hostage…. But what I can say to you definitely is that at the current time, in Muslim countries, there is no sanctity for non-Muslims who are citizens of those regimes who are fighting against Muslims. So my advice to you, which is good advice, is to withdraw completely your own civilians, and your own journalists, and your own armies from Muslims countries.

Everyone’s against the Muslims, who are the victims and entitled to hit back at these criminals:

You know, the killing of James Foley is not going to make a difference to the heinous, very barbaric, criminal nature of the American regime and the history of atrocities against Muslims… You can see that what happened with the Taliban, and what’s happening with the Islamic State, and what’s happening to the Americans and their own allies in the area, is a direct result of their own policy over the last decade… China occupies and tortures people in the Xinjiang. The Russians do it in Chechnya. The Burmese do it to the Muslims in Burma. The Indians do it in Kashmir. We are the only ones defending ourselves, we are rising up. You know, when people rise up, of course there will be casualties.

Never mind the atrocities we see from the Islamic State:

It is never justified to kill women and children, as a general rule… Many of the images that you see are from other battlefields, from the Nusayris [Alawites] for example in Syria, from Hizbullah in Iran, who have killed women and children, and then they’re blaming the Muslims…

OB: (crosstalk) But Mr Choudary, we can also see images of people being executed, soldiers, Syrian soldiers being executed en mass and being put into mass graves. I mean, those images exist.

AC: Remember, we’re talking about people who are criminals. The soldiers of the Syrian regime committed horrendous crimes. Remember, the Nusayris [Alawites] in Syria are people who consider the Sunnis to be like animals, even the children and women are animals. They slaughter them the way they would a dog or a cat.

Shariah is coming to the West, which must submit:

I believe that one day the Sharia will be implemented in Russia and in China and America. There is no, if you like, permanent treaty between the Islamic State and any nation which is implementing non-Islamic law. There could be a temporary ceasefire with those people who are not enemies to the Muslims. But definitely, because of the aggression of the Americans, and the British and others, there will never be a treaty with these people. I think eventually they will be conquered… Now we see the re-emergence of the Khilafah [Caliphate], we can see a new world order. Finally, we have a state where the Muslims are implementing Sharia, and it is expanding once more, and inshallah all the world will be governed by the Sharia.

Meanwhile, on the other side, we have Michael Coren in The Toronto Sun with a different perspective on Face the truth about Islam and terrorism.

Only a bigot believes that all Muslims are terrorists, but only a fool believes there is no link between Islam and terrorism.

Yet as still another innocent person is beheaded and paraded before the world, there are two odious coalitions that refuse the embrace or admit the truth.

The first is in some ways easier to deal with. This dark gang includes Islamic fundamentalists, anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic fanatics, haters of the west and in particular the United States and hard left extremists who believe all violence and instability aids their cause.

The second is more complex and nuanced. This alliance involves the cowardly, the absurdly naive, the usefully stupid, the relativist deniers and those who due to good will or a total lack of historical consciousness believe all religions are the same and if only everybody had high speed Internet and a full belly we could all dance together into the sunset.

There are in fact four stages involved in the denial of Islamic terror. The first is where we empty our heads. The second is where we bury of heads. The third is where we bow our heads. The fourth is where we lose our heads.

The first three are metaphorical, the last is literal.

The first stage involves ignorance. We assume Islamic violence is all our fault because of, for example, the Crusades.

This is what I call the Kevin Costner school of history.

In the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, dashing Kev tells us that his dad thought it wrong to try to convert people to another religion. Quite so, but Robin’s dad obviously knew little of the Crusades because they never tried to convert Muslims and were a direct response to 300 years of Islamic violence in the Holy Land. They were a product of Islamic brutality, not its cause.

From the Crusades we blame imperialism, even though the major empire o f the Islamic world was Turkish and Muslim; we blame Israel; we blame George Bush; we blame everyone and everything other than the genuine article.

The second stage is an attempt to ignore what is going on, to pretend if we are sufficiently indifferent it will all disappear and we can return to our Netflix and HBO and be terribly smug and clever in our own cocoons of moribund complacency.

Next is submission, where we become subservient to an Islamic ascendancy that takes the shape of anti-racism, anti-Islamophobia, liberalism and a bewildering belief that Christianity is oppressive and reactionary and perhaps Islam really does have quite a lot to offer if we give it enough time and thought.

Finally comes, well, the decapitation of the few followed by the political and moral decapitation of the many.

If you doubt me, ask Arab Christians how quickly the Islamic cringing minority becomes the angry, demanding group insisting that their rights and sensitivities triumph over all other feelings and aspirations.

This is not about individual Muslims but about an Islamism that runs directly contrary to progress, human rights, sexual and gender equality, pluralism, independent opinion and individual, scientific and ethical advancement.

The blades are hovering quite close now, closer than you might imagine.

And for one more perspective, here is Victor Davis Hanson on Are the Orcs Winning?

Facing the truth

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This is by Michael Coren in The Toronto Sun: Face the truth about Islam and terrorism:

Only a bigot believes that all Muslims are terrorists, but only a fool believes there is no link between Islam and terrorism.

Yet as still another innocent person is beheaded and paraded before the world, there are two odious coalitions that refuse the embrace or admit the truth.

The first is in some ways easier to deal with. This dark gang includes Islamic fundamentalists, anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic fanatics, haters of the west and in particular the United States and hard left extremists who believe all violence and instability aids their cause.

The second is more complex and nuanced. This alliance involves the cowardly, the absurdly naive, the usefully stupid, the relativist deniers and those who due to good will or a total lack of historical consciousness believe all religions are the same and if only everybody had high speed Internet and a full belly we could all dance together into the sunset.

There are in fact four stages involved in the denial of Islamic terror. The first is where we empty our heads. The second is where we bury of heads. The third is where we bow our heads. The fourth is where we lose our heads.

The first three are metaphorical, the last is literal.

The first stage involves ignorance. We assume Islamic violence is all our fault because of, for example, the Crusades.

This is what I call the Kevin Costner school of history.

In the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, dashing Kev tells us that his dad thought it wrong to try to convert people to another religion. Quite so, but Robin’s dad obviously knew little of the Crusades because they never tried to convert Muslims and were a direct response to 300 years of Islamic violence in the Holy Land. They were a product of Islamic brutality, not its cause.

From the Crusades we blame imperialism, even though the major empire o f the Islamic world was Turkish and Muslim; we blame Israel; we blame George Bush; we blame everyone and everything other than the genuine article.

The second stage is an attempt to ignore what is going on, to pretend if we are sufficiently indifferent it will all disappear and we can return to our Netflix and HBO and be terribly smug and clever in our own cocoons of moribund complacency.

Next is submission, where we become subservient to an Islamic ascendancy that takes the shape of anti-racism, anti-Islamophobia, liberalism and a bewildering belief that Christianity is oppressive and reactionary and perhaps Islam really does have quite a lot to offer if we give it enough time and thought.

Finally comes, well, the decapitation of the few followed by the political and moral decapitation of the many.

If you doubt me, ask Arab Christians how quickly the Islamic cringing minority becomes the angry, demanding group insisting that their rights and sensitivities triumph over all other feelings and aspirations.

This is not about individual Muslims but about an Islamism that runs directly contrary to progress, human rights, sexual and gender equality, pluralism, independent opinion and individual, scientific and ethical advancement.

The blades are hovering quite close now, closer than you might imagine.

Is this the dumbest book on economics ever written?

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There will have to be a wall of shame for economists who endorsed Keynesian solutions back in 2009 who will need to have their beliefs brought back to haunt them. Picked up in a secondhand bookshop a particularly pathetic version of what had been quite common back in those heady days of the stimulus, this being a book titled, Animal Spirits, written by two Nobel Prize winners, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. If these types were ever capable of shame they would be buying up every copy in print and have them consigned to the flames. Instead and no doubt, they continue in the delusion that we have been saved from far worse by the timely actions taken to stimulate demand.

Mind you, I had been just as certain that the entire attempt to diminish the impact of the recession and return us to reasonable rates of growth would turn out the disaster it has been. But for myself, I can now run the told-you-so as much and as far as I like. There is not a shred of evidence, outside their own nonsense-Keynesian models, that the stimulus did anything but harm. But since they are incapable of even having a glimmer of a notion that the economic models they have devoted their lives to understanding are about as useful as the theory of phlogiston was in physics, they just carry on. It is only we critics who go back to those books and try to remind others that Keynesian economic policy has been an unmitigated disaster. So far are we now from a robust recovery, a ten year pause will turn out to be the best we can hope for. This is from the Preface, and recall that this is from 2009 just as the stimulus programs were getting under way:

“A repeat of the Great Depression is now a possibility because economists, the government and the general public have in recent years grown complacent. They have forgotten the lessons of the 1930s. In those hard times we learned how the economy really works. . . .

“In the middle of the Great Depression John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. In this 1936 masterwork, Keynes described how creditworthy governments like those of the United States and Great Britain could borrow and spend, and thus put the unemployed back to work.”

That was 2009. Is the world in 2014 the one they expected, the outcome they foresaw? I suspect not. Yet there is hardly another ripple of any other kind they could blame the deeply depressed nature of the American economy on other than the policies of the past five years. The one certainty is that no one is any longer telling us now about the great “masterwork” written by Keynes.

Almost as nonsensical is the potted history of economic thought they provide. Can they actually be as ignorant of pre-Keynesian economic thought as they suggest by these words:

“According to traditional economics, free market capitalism will be essentially perfect and stable. There is little, if any, need for government interference. On the contrary, the only risk of major depression today, or in the future, comes from government intervention.

“This line of reasoning goes back to Adam Smith.” (p. 2)

The notion that Adam Smith, or any other economist of the classical tradition, expected a ripple-free economy with no depressions and that no government interference was ever necessary is so lacking in historical accuracy that I would barely accept such ignorance from a first year student. That they could believe and commit to print such obviously untrue statements – obvious, that is, to anyone who has taken the trouble to learn even the rudiments of the classical theory of the cycle or what Adam Smith had actually written – is a disgrace.

But if I have to choose the least sensible statement they made in this startling superficial and inane book, it is their attribution of the cause of the Global Financial Crisis to an excess of saving, the precise issue raised by Keynes:

“In the short run, an exogenous increase in the demand for desired saving rate of just a couple of percentage points may be enough to tip the economy into recession, as indeed seems to be happening in the current financial crisis.” (p. 116)

The entire financial world held its breath as the banking system teetered on the edge of collapse, with every lender profoundly unsure of the safety of lending to others, and this is reduced to decisions to save. It is embarrassing to have to read such thoughts from two of the most respected economists in the world. This is more of the Keynes the master, but though no one any longer would write any such thing given how events have turned out, it makes one despair whether economic theory can ever again provide serious guidance to those who make economic policy. It is a frightening book lacking even the rudiments of depth or common sense.