Monthly Archives: October 2014

Australia is still the best there is

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This was done and published by the Macquarie University Muslim Student’s Association and what is as exciting as the result is the positive appreciation of the students themselves about the country in which they live. This is from the text of the accompanying story:

It’s the reaction of passersby that makes you proud to be Australian; in every single scene, people young and old, rush to the defence of those being mistreated.

Saleh was overwhelmed by the positive response and shared on his Facebook page his delight at how inclusive and instinctively protective Australians are.

“I’m not going to lie… the lady at the end of this video almost made me cry,” he wrote.

“This social experiment was possibly one of the most eye opening experiences ever. EVERY SINGLE PERSON STOPPED and interfered. NOWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD have we seen such a response!”

“This video is hard proof that the Australian public do not welcome hate against Muslims. Yes it does occur.

“But it is clearly not welcome.”

From Andrew Bolt.

Who would have expected that stagnation would continue so long?

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I will, along with the rest of us, see what happens, but I am not, to say the least, encouraged. From The Australian:

THE global economy faces another five years of stagnation, the International Monetary Fund warned overnight as it cut its growth forecasts for the third year in a row and urged nations to ­reinvigorate economic reforms.

Releasing the fund’s updated economic outlook, IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard ­described global growth as ­“mediocre” and, in a reference to the agenda Australia has set for the G20 members ahead of next month’s summit in Brisbane, said the difficult outlook underlined the importance of identifying economic reforms that could lift output.

Who could have expected such an outcome? The people who run our economies do not have a clue. This is all so unexpected for them, and they will therefore persist in running budget deficits and keep interest rates low until our economies finally tick up which means, of course, that is of course if you are a classically trained economist, that their very policies will continue to be the reason our economies refuse to grow. And if they still attribute the problems to the Global Financial Crisis of six years ago, they are seriously seriously out to lunch.

The mainstream Australian view

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This is the mainstream Australian view provided by Peter Costello, the best almost-Prime Minister this country will unfortunately never have:

This idea that Australia’s treatment of Muslims is to blame for terrorism is so fanciful you would wonder how anyone could believe it. But it is standard-issue opinion among university academics, ABC journalists and Greens senators. They act on the principle that “My enemy’s enemy is my friend”. Since they don’t like open liberal Western capitalist society, they feel natural support for those who regard themselves as at war with Western civilisation. The brutality of Islamic State does not seem to worry them nearly so much as the imagined “brutality” of the Australian Government.

Thank heavens, real people don’t fall for such rubbish. They know our society, for all its faults, is worth protecting. They are not taken in by the claims of the extremists or their odd bedfellows on the Australian political Left.

The people on the front line in the effort against terrorism are not the problem, they are a crucial part of the solution.

Obama and Team America

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I understand America is filled with people of goodwill who find it hard to truly appreciate human evil and depravity. I suppose none of us who have lived in the cushy world of the West have faced true adversity and serious evil. It is why, even now and in spite of everything, ISIS and its reflex cruelties are hard to absorb and accept.

But the true horror of the moment is that Obama is himself entirely part of the problem and in no way whatsoever part of any solution. He is a man filled with hatreds for our Western civilisation. If you cannot see it in the way he has dealt with economic issues, and then with the rise of militants of the ISIL variety, perhaps now, with his response to the Ebola virus, it will begin to dawn on people that Obama is not part of Team America, or indeed Team Western Civilisation. Factor this into the notion of Obama as a man who cares about the country he was elected to lead:

The Obama administration is not considering a ban on travelers from countries most affected by the deadly Ebola virus outbreak, the White House said on Monday.

“A travel ban is not something that we’re currently considering,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters at a daily briefing.

“We feel good about the measures that are already in place,” he said.

Ebola is easily contained in first world countries is the mantra of the moment from the people who think that global warming is the greatest problem facing us today. I just hope that this time they do have it right. What ultimately brought the Athenians down in their war with Sparta these 2500 years ago was the plague that overcame Athens. Just for the record:

The Plague of Athens was a devastating epidemic which hit the city-state of Athens in ancient Greece during the second year of the Peloponnesian War (430 BC), when an Athenian victory still seemed within reach.

For more, you might look at Viruses, Plagues and History which as I recall discussed in part how various pathogens at various times have changed the course of history. Everyone, always lives in interesting times.

Disgust at our immodesty, disrespect, materialism and impatience

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The lack of insight by Americans into how strange American ways of being are to the rest of the world is almost perfectly captured in this story: American Sex and the Middle East. The point of the story is that people in the middle east find American actions and attitudes in regard to sexual relations incomprehensible and baffling. This is the final para:

I don’t know how California’s sexual consent on campus code will strike Middle Easterners once they get wind of it. When they learn that the codes are being imposed because elite young Americans are so often hammered, let alone that on a regular basis they cavort around their coed dorms like horny satyrs and nymphs, they will not be surprised. Their default expectation of us is already one of disgust at our immodesty, disrespect, materialism and impatience. Will they find any of this as funny as I do? Well, I’m headed back to the Arab Gulf for a few days later this month, and I intend to ask. I’ll let you know what I find out.

What’s so special about the Middle East when it comes to this? I suppose having been brought up in the culture and having watched it evolve, I have some understanding of what is going on but it is still incomprehensible and baffling, specially if the aim of it all is to find peace, contentment and a satisfying life. It just looks to me as a world that has spun out of control with absolutely no mechanism to bring it back into a sensible orbit.

[From Instapundit]

Wondering why people with low IQs don’t do nuclear physics

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This is a story that even though it is reported in the newspapers I refuse to believe is true. Rooly truly this is what it’s supposedly about: Feds Wonder Why Fat Girls Can’t Get Dates:

The federal government is spending nearly a half a million dollars to find out why obese teenage girls have a hard time getting dates.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded a $466,642 grant last week for the study, which will examine whether social skills have an impact on why obese girls have fewer dating experiences than their less obese counterparts.

“Mounting evidence demonstrates that weight influences intimate (i.e., dating and sexual) relationship formation and sexual negotiations among adolescent girls,” the grant’s abstract states. “Obese girls consistently report having fewer dating and sexual experiences, but more sexual risk behaviors (i.e., condom nonuse) once they are sexually active.”

“The conceptual framework that has guided this research presumes that differences in the social skills for relating to peers and intimate partners along with differences in the relationship experiences of obese and non-obese girls account for these differences,” it said.

“However, no studies have actually examined whether the interpersonal skills and intimate relationships of obese and non-obese girls differ.”

I would not presume to know the answer myself. Even in this day of high debt and deficits, I only hope half a million is enough. But if you want more proof there are some crazy people in high places, try this out.

California [has passed] an affirmative consent bill (SB-967) that effectively declares all sex between drunk people to be rape, and requires consent to be conveyed verbally or otherwise, adding that lack of resistance or objection does not constitute consent. Enthusiastic and on-going consent must be present in order for sex to not be rape. And once again, any sane person realizes that, under this bill, it is men who are required to obtain ongoing consent from women, and that when two drunk people have sex, the man will be held to adult standards and the woman will be treated as a child incapable of consenting to activity because she did a few shooters beforehand.

Again hard to really treat this as actually true.

[Both found at Captain Capitalism.]

John Stuart Mill and the logic of economics

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I have just been confronted by two articles I have refereed, both on the economics of John Stuart Mill, that I rejected because they have no idea what Mill is trying to explain or the logic of what he is getting at. Both, however, are likely to be published no matter what I might think. Here was Mill, the man with the nineteenth century’s highest IQ, the author of the book on logic that was used for two generations across the English speaking world, a book still eminenty worth reading to this day, yet both of these papers criticise Mill for contradicting himself and faulty logic.

Mill’s Principles of Political Economy is far and away the best book on economic theory ever written. My own book on Free Market Economics (now in its second edition) is Mill brought up to date with a few modern gadgets. Also brought into the text and heavily criticised are the various additions to economic theory that have made economics far worse as a tool of analysis and a basis for policy, most notably MC=MR and Keynes.

All I can say is how exasperating it is to read these critics of Mill who cannot even begin to understand the problems with their interpretations. But what is the peculiar bit is that in being possibly the only economist in the world who thinks of Mill as the best economist who has ever lived, there is not a soul alive who I can turn to for support. I am not the smartest person on the world today, but I do come closer to understanding Mill than anyone else writing on economics. The massacre of our economies by the modern doctors of economic theory is as obvious to me as it is invisible to them. So on it will go but the certainty is that if we keep up in the way we have, we will never ever generate a recovery worth having and living standards will continue to fall.

Student demos for a conservative cause

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Les Mis is a truly misbegotten piece of literature, which has irritated me in the same way each of the times I have seen it. My sympathies are instantly on the side of Inspector Jobert and his attempts to put down the demonstrators in the streets. These radical nitwits have poisoned the wells of western civilisatin and are about to snuff out our entire way of life on behalf of equality, climate change and multiculturalism, three of the most inane causes ever invented.

But what is going on in Hong Kong is different. Same students, same demos, but this time on behalf of conservative and small-l liberal causes. There the students are fighting a desperate, and almost certainly losing battle on behalf of their desire to be governed by people of their own choosing according to their own values based on how things have been done in the past. Alas, their values are personal freedom politically and capitalism economically. They are therefore, as they say, on the wrong side of history, something that all of those fools on the left will immediately understand and therefore viscerally oppose everything these students are trying to preserve.

Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?

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The American economy is dead, dead, dead. That’s the reality. But then there is the politics. This is what the president says: Obama Claims His Economy Is A Success. And you know what? It’s hard to fault the politics even for a second. He is ruining the US and it is clear to anyone with the slightest awareness, even those media jerks who will never abandon their man. They all know, but they won’t say. So Obama just gives them copy and a story to run. The rest of us can say he is a liar but he has had six years’ experience walking all over every criticism which he knows he will never be called out on. Incredible to see, but the world always has been a mysterious place. This is the new politics:

President Barack Obama claimed Thursday that “the facts” demonstrate that his economic policies are safely guiding the nation’s towards middle-class prosperity.

“Those are the facts,” he said. “It’s not conjecture, it’s not opinion… I laid out facts,” he told his audience of upper-income progressives at Northwestern University in Illinois Oct. 2.

Obama’s pitch to the progressives combined a mix of flattery, selective data and visceral campaign pitches, including promises of cheap loans for his student audience, more power for would-be regulators and greater wages for women.

“If we make sure a woman is paid equal to her efforts, it won’t just give women a boost; it’ll give their families and the entire economy a boost… Let’s catch up to 2014, pass a fair pay law, and make our economy stronger,” he told his audience, which included many university-trained women, who comprise one of the most pro-Democratic voting blocs.

He also suggested that wise government leadership created many private-sector gains, such as the boom in oil-drilling and natural-gas fracking.

Progressive economic “policies are right for America, they are supported by the facts,” he said.