Yearly Archives: 2014

Parkinsons’s disease

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If you keep a Keynesian as Treasury secretary you are going to get Keynesian advice. If you take advice from a Keynesian, you will never get the economy working properly again.

I have just seen this story at Andrew Bolt and it is a report of a speech given by the Treasury Secretary, Martin Parkinson, on what the government needs to do. Here is how it starts.

Treasury boss Martin Parkinson says the goods and services tax will have to be boosted or broadened if the budget is to have any hope of returning to surplus.

He must be from the same school of advisors who told the first President Bush to break his “no new taxes” promise. Paying for public service waste with higher tax revenues is both an economic loser and even worse, a political loser.

Stop fixating on the deficit. Do the specific things that make the economy work better. Lower public spending. Reduce regulation. Fix up IR. Encourage private industry in every way you can.

If you start raising taxes you will be out on your ear at the next election.

Are these really the people we trust to bring us the news?

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I get to the papers at the end of the day and when I saw the story that the “ABC’s Scott warns on News Corp’s position of power” on page 5 of today’s AFR, I went searching back through all of the other normal websites to see if anyone else had focused on such blithering idiocy but it seems not. It appears that whatever may be Mr Scott’s strengths, irony is not amongst them. The first two paras of the story:

ABC managing director Mark Scott hit out at Rupert and Lauchlan Murdoch’s News Corporation, arguing its newspapers have been never been [sic] more assertive in exercising their power through “aggressive editorial positioning”.

In a carefully worded attack, Mr Scott claimed News’s share of newspaper sales in Australian capital cities could rise from “70 per cent” to “80 per cent” and predicted that print titles which survive the digital revolution will be more powerful than ever.

Although this has been pointed out on endless occasions, he apparently still cannot see the difference between the number of newspapers and the number readers. For the kinds of things Scott would like to concentrate on, there is still The Green-Left Review which is another title although one without the circulation of The Australian say. Thus, two titles but a different number of readers. Should not be all that hard to see the difference. But then Mr Scott entered a zone of his own with the following:

He also predicted a rise in ideologically slanted news.

He is predicting this! This is the future someday but not yet! What a discerning mind he has! A national treasurer without a doubt. From someone at the ABC to say this is beyond the realms of normal out-to-lunchness and into some kind of stratospheric zone previously never encountered. But meanwhile back at the ABC ranch house:

Mr Scott defended the ABC’s role and hit back at allegations of a left-wing bias at the corporation as it braces for the Abbott government’s May budget.

One can only hope that the aftershocks he is bracing for will be even beyond anything he is capable of imagining today.

What it takes to make a culture a great culture

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The article by Charles Murray, at least according to its title, is about whether America is past it, but is in reality about what it takes to make a culture a great culture great in the sense of innovation and historically significant achievement.

Human achievement has clustered at particular times and places, including Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Sung China, and Western Europe of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. But why? What was special about those times and places? In the book’s final chapters, I laid out my best understanding of the environment within which great accomplishment occurs. . . .

To guide the discussion, I’ll provide a running synopsis, in language drawn from Human Accomplishment, of the core conditions that prevailed during the glorious periods of past achievement. I’ll focus in particular on science and technology, since these are the fields that preoccupy our contemporary debates over the present course and future prospects of American innovation.

Of course it is not just America’s prospects which are now being submerged but the prospects more or less across the globe. I will provide the five headings Murray uses but the whole article is worth the time to read:

1. WEALTH, CITIES, POLITICS

2. RAW MATERIALS

3. THE NEED FOR PURPOSE AND AUTONOMY

4. TRANSCENDENTAL GOODS

5. HOW AMERICA MATCHES UP

The US is being used as a case study. It was the most advanced of our various cultures but its rot is also happening more rapidly than anywhere else. Decline of the West is an old story but it takes a long time for the fall to complete itself given the heights from which it begins. Still declining and not a single reason anywhere on the horizon to think that any of it can be reversed.

Balanced budget amendment

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It is good to see that at least someone notices the problems with deficits and public spending even if economists are not amongst them. It appears that some kind of critical mass may have taken place in the United States over whether enough states have passed a balanced budget amendment that must lead to a constitutional convention which will determine whether or not the federal government of the United States must by constitutional law maintain a balanced budget. The article is titled, Balanced budget convention gains steam as congressman calls for official evaluation and this is how it begins:

Rep. Duncan Hunter on Tuesday asked Congress to evaluate whether enough states have officially called for a constitutional convention to propose a balanced budget amendment — marking the next step toward what could be an historic gathering.

Mr. Hunter, California Republican, said Congress should take stock of where things stand after Michigan last week approved an official call for a balanced budget amendment convention. According to some analysts, Michigan’s move makes it the 34th state to request a convention.

For something as unconventional as the notion of a balanced budget amendment to have passed at different times and in different states through 34 different legislatures shows there is an understanding of the problems that runaway federal spending has caused. The disasters that have befallen one economy after another due to the insane levels of public spending after the GFC are due almost in their entirety to the spending that followed the financial crisis and not to the crisis itself. But you almost have to be a non-economist even to notice. Economists still think that C+I+G provides them with some form of understanding about what to do in recessions, with no lessons learned from the past five years.

And since we will be having a vote on amending the constitution at our own next election, I cannot see why we shouldn’t include one on a balanced budget as well.

A clear case of racial vilification returns

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I should say straight out that I am a free speech absolutist. If we think governments have a role in licensing what we say to each other, there really is a slippery slope we have embarked upon. Given the world as it is, there is almost no danger of any kind for someone on the left to say whatever it is they want since none of the speech codes and rules of PC apply to them. Only to us on the right. But as dangerous as it often can be to say certain things, the government should not be in a position to restrict the kinds of things we say to each other.

The post found below was put up this morning and then taken down by me. I could see where the conversation was going and I was not interested in fostering a discussion over whether Australian women on an international scale are or are not slatterns. What I was really interested in was this example of a comment made about Australians that annoyed me not a little but whether it was protected free speech. It is not just minorities that can find themselves on the wrong end of comments that do insult whether or not that was the intention. Kathie Shaidle, writing on her blog in Toronto, wrote about her own relatively constrained sexual experience that “my ‘number’ (as the kids call it these days) is so low that in certain Australian provinces I would still be considered a virgin.” And in Toronto, where the Australian ex pat community is both small and non-violent, no one would really have been offended and therefore taken her to court never mind taken out a contract on her life. Try that remark with any one of a hundred-plus other national, racial or ethnic groups and we’ll see how you go.

But if it were any one of these hundred-plus national, racial or ethnic groups she would have been shunted before some tribunal who would adjudicate her right to have said what she said. And if they had decided that some group had been vilified, humiliated or even merely made uncomfortable, some penalty would have been assessed. So she chooses Australians as her target and really there was only me to get upset, hurt, disgusted, perturbed, shamed, since how many people in Australia read a Canadian blog?

But what’s the answer? How should Australians react to this slur on Australian women? Well, you know what. This is what we do. We get on with life. We don’t make a federal case out of it. We don’t go to some court for redress for our hurt feelings. We just get on with life, which is how it ought to be. Anyway, what follows is the post I put up this morning, now perhaps put in its proper context. Bear in mind that this was originally posted on the first of April.
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I am reluctant to bring this up, but if ever I have seen need for a Racial Discrimination Act this is it. Kathy Shaidle, a Canadian blogger, is entitled to advertise her book in any way she likes, but still there is a certain profiling that leaves me somewhat nonplussed and decidedly uncomfortable. This is from her advertising promotion for her new book, Confessions of a Failed Slut:

As the only female columnist at controversial, conservative Taki’s Magazine, Kathy Shaidle soon found herself covering an unlikely beat: sexuality.

“Unlikely” because as the married, 50-year-old Shaidle explains, “my ‘number’ (as the kids call it these days) is so low that in certain Australian provinces I would still be considered a virgin.”

I take it that one’s number is the number of sexual partners one has had. And, of course, to refer to our political divisions as “provinces” is quite provincial but what would you expect from a Canadian? But if I understand the comparison she is making, the implication is that Australians are so sexually out there that an Australian maid with as few liaisons as Kathy has had would not even think of herself as ever having had sex at all.

It’s not even that I am insulted by the implication, although I am, but my main curiosity is where did such an analogy come from? Do Australian girls in Canada, or anywhere else for that matter, have a reputation somewhere along these lines. I am thankfully well past the age and inclination of ever having to enter into the sexual wilderness of the present day to find out for myself, but there is nothing I know of that makes me think of our local maidens as anything other than innocent, modest and pure, or no less so than anyone else.

There was a joke when I was young about a particular ethic group which went, what’s a virgin in such-and-such country, and the answer was the fastest girl in Grade 2. But we used to tell ethnic jokes in those days and it was just a joke without much more than a bit of fun (except for people of that ethnic group who didn’t find it funny at all). But Australians? I must do a bit of research.

In the meantime, I think there needs to be a reference to our Human Rights Commission so that if Kathy ever sets foot on these shores down under that she will end up facing the same kind of tribunal faced by her Canadian mates Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn.

Posted on the first of April 2014.

The voting class and the working class

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Watching Q&A last night, and especially the discussion on stopping the boats, reminded me of a post I put up in 2012. I repeat it here.

Ann Coulter does the numbers and it is now a demographic battle in the US about who comes and who votes. It wasn’t the young after all who had voted to subvert the America of individual effort and personal responsibility. Ann tells a quite disturbing story:

On closer examination, it turns out that young voters, aged 18-29, overwhelmingly supported Romney. But only the white ones. . . .

What the youth vote shows is not that young people are nitwits who deserve lives of misery and joblessness, as I had previously believed, but that America is hitting the tipping point on our immigration policy.

The youth vote is a snapshot of elections to come if nothing is done to reverse the deluge of unskilled immigrants pouring into the country as a result of Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act. Eighty-five percent of legal immigrants since 1968 have come from the Third World. A majority of them are in need of government assistance.

Whites are 76 percent of the electorate over the age of 30 and only 58 percent of the electorate under 30. Obama won the “youth vote” because it is the knife’s edge of a demographic shift, not because he offered the kids free tuition and contraception.

There is even this, which does seem to show there is a way out, as difficult as it may be:

Nearly 20 percent of black males under 30 voted for Romney, more than three times what McCain got.

It is working and paying taxes that may be the divide that matters. As she points out, it is immigration policy that is in the middle. And it will be the big issue of the future as the US does or does not submerge itself under a flood of migrants from places where no one can even conceivably be employed in a high tech, English speaking nation as the US for the time being now is. This is how she concludes:

Romney got a larger percentage of the white vote than Reagan did in 1980. That’s just not enough anymore.

Ironically, Romney was the first Republican presidential candidate in a long time not conspiring with the elites to make America a dumping ground for the world’s welfare cases. Conservatives who denounced Romney as a ‘RINO’ were the ones doing the bidding of the real establishment: business, which wants cheap labor and couldn’t care less if America ceases to be the land of opportunity that everyone wanted to immigrate to in the first place.

The parties of the left are actively ruining their countries for political advantage. Many of these people will never pay more in taxes than they take in welfare. But they’re not being brought here to work. They are being brought here to vote.

Living life to the fullest

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There is an article today in the Wall Street Journal with the intriguing title, “Advice for a Happy Life by Charles Murray” that has as its sub-title, “Consider marrying young. Be wary of grand passions. Watch ‘Groundhog Day’ (again). Advice on how to live to the fullest”. Sensible all the way through but I will just highlight one of the five and you can read the rest for yourself, which you should do. You might then be interested in the book he’s written, The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead, which I assume expands on the five points made in the article. This is Point 4:

Take Religion Seriously

Don’t bother to read this one if you’re already satisfyingly engaged with a religious tradition.

Now that we’re alone, here’s where a lot of you stand when it comes to religion: It isn’t for you. You don’t mind if other people are devout, but you don’t get it. Smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore.

I can be sure that is what many of you think because your generation of high-IQ, college-educated young people, like mine 50 years ago, has been as thoroughly socialized to be secular as your counterparts in preceding generations were socialized to be devout. Some of you grew up with parents who weren’t religious, and you’ve never given religion a thought. Others of you followed the religion of your parents as children but left religion behind as you were socialized by college.

By socialized, I don’t mean that you studied theology under professors who persuaded you that Thomas Aquinas was wrong. You didn’t study theology at all. None of the professors you admired were religious. When the topic of religion came up, they treated it dismissively or as a subject of humor. You went along with the zeitgeist.

I am describing my own religious life from the time I went to Harvard until my late 40s. At that point, my wife, prompted by the birth of our first child, had found a religious tradition in which she was comfortable, Quakerism, and had been attending Quaker meetings for several years. I began keeping her company and started reading on religion. I still describe myself as an agnostic, but my unbelief is getting shaky.

Taking religion seriously means work. If you’re waiting for a road-to-Damascus experience, you’re kidding yourself. Getting inside the wisdom of the great religions doesn’t happen by sitting on beaches, watching sunsets and waiting for enlightenment. It can easily require as much intellectual effort as a law degree.

Even dabbling at the edges has demonstrated to me the depths of Judaism, Buddhism and Taoism. I assume that I would find similar depths in Islam and Hinduism as well. I certainly have developed a far greater appreciation for Christianity, the tradition with which I’m most familiar. The Sunday school stories I learned as a child bear no resemblance to Christianity taken seriously. You’ve got to grapple with the real thing.

Start by jarring yourself out of unreflective atheism or agnosticism. A good way to do that is to read about contemporary cosmology. The universe isn’t only stranger than we knew; it is stranger and vastly more unlikely than we could have imagined, and we aren’t even close to discovering its last mysteries. That reading won’t lead you to religion, but it may stop you from being unreflective.

Find ways to put yourself around people who are profoundly religious. You will encounter individuals whose intelligence, judgment and critical faculties are as impressive as those of your smartest atheist friends—and who also possess a disquieting confidence in an underlying reality behind the many religious dogmas.

They have learned to reconcile faith and reason, yes, but beyond that, they persuasively convey ways of knowing that transcend intellectual understanding. They exhibit in their own personae a kind of wisdom that goes beyond just having intelligence and good judgment.

Start reading religious literature. You don’t have to go back to Aquinas (though that wouldn’t be a bad idea). The past hundred years have produced excellent and accessible work, much of it written by people who came to adulthood as uninvolved in religion as you are.

A Canadian view of Australian girls

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shaidle - confessions of a failed slut

I am reluctant to bring this up, but if ever I have seen need for a Racial Discrimination Act this is it. Kathy Shaidle, a Canadian blogger, is entitled to advertise her book in any way she likes, but still there is a certain profiling that leaves me somewhat nonplussed and decidedly uncomfortable. This is from her advertising promotion for her new book, Confessions of a Failed Slut:

As the only female columnist at controversial, conservative Taki’s Magazine, Kathy Shaidle soon found herself covering an unlikely beat: sexuality.

“Unlikely” because as the married, 50-year-old Shaidle explains, “my ‘number’ (as the kids call it these days) is so low that in certain Australian provinces I would still be considered a virgin.”

I take it that one’s number is the number of sexual partners one has had. And, of course, to refer to our political divisions as “provinces” is quite provincial but what would you expect from a Canadian? But if I understand the comparison she is making, the implication is that Australians are so sexually out there that an Australian maid with as few liaisons as Kathy has had would not even think of herself as ever having had sex at all.

It’s not even that I am insulted by the implication, although I am, but my main curiosity is where did such an analogy come from? Do Australian girls in Canada, or anywhere else for that matter, have a reputation somewhere along these lines. I am thankfully well past the age and inclination of ever having to enter into the sexual wilderness of the present day to find out for myself, but there is nothing I know of that makes me think of our local maidens as anything other than innocent, modest and pure, or no less so than anyone else.

There was a joke when I was young about a particular ethic group which went, what’s a virgin in such-and-such country, and the answer was the fastest girl in Grade 2. But we used to tell ethnic jokes in those days and it was just a joke without much more than a bit of fun (except for people of that ethnic group who didn’t find it funny at all). But Australians? I must do a bit of research.

In the meantime, I think there needs to be a reference to our Human Rights Commission so that if Kathy ever sets foot on these shores down under that she will end up facing the same kind of tribunal faced by her Canadian mates Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn.

Posted on the first of April 2014.

You’ve been warned

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If you happen to be the kind of person who thinks the global warming is a modern form of the madness of crowds, then the world must indeed look like an insane asylum. The article is titled, Global warming dials up our risks, UN Report says. This, remember, is not science fiction:

If the world doesn’t cut pollution of heat-trapping gases, the already noticeable harms of global warming could spiral “out of control,” the head of a United Nations scientific panel warned Monday.

And he’s not alone. The Obama White House says it is taking this new report as a call for action, with Secretary of State John Kerry saying “the costs of inaction are catastrophic.”

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that issued the 32-volume, 2,610-page report here early Monday, told The Associated Press: “it is a call for action.” Without reductions in emissions, he said, impacts from warming “could get out of control.”

One of the study’s authors, Maarten van Aalst, a top official at the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said, “If we don’t reduce greenhouse gases soon, risks will get out of hand. And the risks have already risen.”

Twenty-first century disasters such as killer heat waves in Europe, wildfires in the United States, droughts in Australia and deadly flooding in Mozambique, Thailand and Pakistan highlight how vulnerable humanity is to extreme weather, according to the report from the Nobel Prize-winning group of scientists. The dangers are going to worsen as the climate changes even more, the report’s authors said.

“We’re now in an era where climate change isn’t some kind of future hypothetical,” said the overall lead author of the report, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science in California. “We live in an area where impacts from climate change are already widespread and consequential.”

Nobody is immune.