Monthly Archives: June 2015

I yam in the grate saten

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In New York, in fact. The main purpose of my trip was originally to debate the author of a book called Seven Bad Ideas in Economics about Say’s Law, which was bad idea Number 2. The venue was to be at Freedomfest in Las Vegas. In the end, he decided discretion was the better part of valour, and so, I will be having that debate, with me taking both sides. As I tell everyone else, I will be having a one-man show in Vegas.

But other stops along the way as well, which mostly includes meeting and discussing authors I am bringing together in my Modern Critics of Keynes, of which there are hardly any. These are economists who have each already written extensive critiques of Keynesian economics. If you can think of more than two, you are doing well. I am happy to say that on a previous such appeal, I was given one name that will now appear and star in this volume. Given how few there are, this was a reason for serious gratitude.

Meantime, blogging will be lighter than usual.

The Zaki Chronicles

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These are the six posts I have put up since Monday when Zaki Mullah appeared on Q&A. It follows my own reaction to the ABC using a jihadist against a government minister, basically siding with the jihadists against a government that is trying to deal with a terrorist threat to this country. But it also follows a second trail, which is the refusal of some elements within the government, who do not wish to see the ABC made to live up to its charter of evenhandedness. If you cannot even get Liberal Members of Parliament angry with the ABC siding with the terrorists against the elected government of this country, then we are at a strange place indeed. It’s one thing to be on the left. It is quite another to have one’s views so distorted that they prefer to take the side of a convicted terrorist against a government that is trying to deal with the terrorists who are already in our midst.

Q&A has made Abbott’s anti-terrorist laws a certainty

The question really is just how depraved is the ABC?

“Heads should roll”

What an insufferable hypocrite

The only issue is the indelible green-left bias of the ABC

Where’s the outrage?

And what is particularly disturbing, as the last of these posts show, is that there are members of the right-side party that see personal advantage in maintaining the status quo at the ABC.

Where’s the outrage?

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I just watched Steve Ciobo on Bolt and what a disappointment. Where’s the “heads will roll” attitude? I want an ABC version of The Bolt Report, and whatever it takes to get it, should be high on the government’s agenda. Along with a savaging of that billion dollars of funding.

Why is there still a pro-ABC faction in the government?

Dead man talking

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First at Tim Blair and then Andrew Bolt, so why not here? An interview with Bill Shorten not to be missed! The problem is that Shorten is the walking dead. He will not lead the ALP into the next election. Labor will make the switch as close to the next election as possible to maximise the potential for Tanya to run at the same time as Hillary. Meantime, there is this to help see us through the night.

Onwards and downwards

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The problems caused by Keynesian theory is not that you end up with a sudden downturn, but that you squeeze the life out of the economy by a form of slow asphyxiation. If you have a job and a house, and you continue to work and live where you lived before, nothing much changes around you, other than a rise in prices and a slowdown in income after tax. You are affected but not a lot. Those in transitions, either entering the economy to work, looking for better jobs at higher pay or trying to buy a house, all these are at the pointy end. They notice, since the ability to rise up the income scale is obstructed by some invisible barrier. Things just don’t work out. Which brings me to this story: Americans Are Delaying Major Life Events Because of Money Worries. Life is getting harder so corners are being cut.

ABOUT half of American adults have postponed a major life decision in the past year for financial reasons, mainly because they lack sufficient savings or are worried about the economy, or both, a new survey finds.

The survey, conducted for the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, found that the proportion of people delaying big decisions like buying a home or getting married had risen to 51 percent, from 31 percent in a similar survey in 2007, before the start of the financial downturn.

The change was striking, and the percentages more than doubled in some areas. Nearly a quarter said they had delayed higher education, up from 11 percent in 2007, and 18 percent said they had put off retiring, compared with 9 percent in the earlier survey. Twenty-two percent said they delayed buying a home in 2015, compared with 14 percent in 2007.

That’s the way it goes. And these are the people who might most at the front in encouraging governments to increase their spending to stimulate demand. So onwards and downwards, and no one has a clue why.

Finding the straight and narrow

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Finding the straight and narrow has never been more difficult. The only time I ever seriously shocked and angered my mother with anything I ever said was when I quoted a friend of mine:

“Better a sexual revolution than no revolution at all,” he said.

I didn’t understand her attitude then but I do now. The values of the adult world allowed restraint because there were genuine moral restraints that were felt and understood. There is almost nothing there now. For a reminder of how things once were, read Stacy McCain’s Let’s Bring Back Guilt and Shame. It’s a thought, but for the moment that’s all it is. But if you read it, you will also see why the video’s been posted.

The only issue is the indelible green-left biases of the ABC

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Let me come back to this Zaki business one last time because it does worry me that either the government doesn’t get the point, or doesn’t want to. I don’t care that they gave Zaki air time. In fact, the more they let him talk, the more he demonstrates what a danger he and others like him are. That was not the problem. The problem was that he was brought onto Q&A by the ABC specifically to ambush a government minister. It was the ABC’s intent that is so vile, not the particular means they chose on this occasion. What the program demonstrated, far better than anything else in recent times, is that the ABC is out to harm the government because the ABC, contrary to its charter, is pursuing a green-left agenda of its own. The entire organisation is now a billion dollar version of the Green-Left Review. That is the problem. That is what you must deal with.

My worry is that no one seems to get it. All the quotes that follow are from The Australia today. Each is one more example of missing the point. Here first is Julie Bishop:

The ABC’s action in allowing a former terror suspect to air his views runs counter to the government’s work in attempting to protect Australians from terrorism, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop says.

This is from Christopher Pyne discussing Mark Scott:

“He’s trying to pretend the government is trying to close free speech at the ABC. This is typical of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation; rather than ’fessing up to their mistake, which was to bring a convicted terrorist on to the audience of Q&A and give them a platform … (and) put at risk the people in the audience,” Mr Pyne told the Nine Network.

Then Peter Reith:

Peter Reith, a former Liberal cabinet minister, accused Mr Scott of reducing the ABC’s blunder to a question of audience security and not the “shocking and offensive” decision to give Mallah a platform.

“The ABC head was basically saying the real problem is that ‘we didn’t manage the security side of it’ as if, you know, if they’d got that right then having this guy on would be OK,” Mr Reith told Sky News.

Even Malcolm got into the act:

“This guy on social media not so long ago nominated two female journalists and said that they should be publicly raped,” Mr Turnbull said. “What if he had said that again in the Q&A live audience? Why would you ever put a person (like that) in a live audience? It’s incredible.”

The issue is neither terrorism nor free speech. The issue is the ABC. Nothing else. The issue is whether the government is going to take on the the fanatical leftist bias of the ABC, or is instead going to leave it alone until it conspires with the Greens and ALP to see it defeated at the polls. I would have thought that an instinct for self-preservation would have driven the government towards some such conclusion already.

I am in no doubt how difficult this task is. But I am also in no doubt that unless you identify the problem for what it is and then deal with the problem itself, you and we will never be rid of this deformed monstrosity of the far left. This is what you must do if you are to survive. You must set down a strategy for dealing with the indelible green-left political biases of the ABC and then do what you can to counter this malignant publicly-funded cancer in our social midst.

What a disgusting hypocrite

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It really is hard to credit such lack of judgement, but there you are. Now Mark Scott himself has gotten into it. From The Australian:

“As someone said to me this week, free-speech arguments would be easier if you were always defending Martin Luther King,” Mr Scott said at a Centre for Corporate Public Affairs’ function. “At times, free-speech principles mean giving platforms to those with whom we fundamentally disagree.

That is exactly the point, but it is precisely what you and the ABC never do. Is he really that dense? Does he honestly not see what the rest of us are saying. It is that the ABC does not give platforms to those with whom they fundamentally disagree, unless they first stack the deck. The entire explosion over Zaki was that this was the typical ABC approach. Yes, see, we have the Minister whose views we fundamentally disagree with and have provided him with a platform. But of course, we then try to expose him to our own hit job, in a way that would never ever happen if he were someone from the left, or even better from the Greens.

It is insulting and disgusting to have to listen to such shallow reasoning. This is now the Thursday after the Monday and is this really the best Scott can do? Because you didn’t give Zaki a “platform”. You gave him an opportunity to sandbag a government minister, which you were hoping he would do. He was not there because anyone cared about his opinions.

The political side of the ABC is a wasteland of vacuity. It is an empty shell of green-left ignorance and the greenest and most left of them all appears to be its CEO. But the most disgusting part is this, from the opening para of the article:

ABC managing director Mark Scott has compared extremist Zaky Mallah’s right to appear on Q&A with the campaign for free speech that flowed from the jihadist murder of 12 journalists from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

To even mention Charlie Hebdo in such circumstance is beyond maddening. If I follow this analogy right, Zaki, according to Scott, is like those poor journalists who were murdered by jihadi gunmen, in that he is being deprived of his right to free speech (really, how? when? where?). And the jihadi murderers at Charlie Hebdo are likened to the people who object to Zaki, a former jihadist himself, being brought in to confront a government Minister on national television. This is so warped that really, it is time for the board at the ABC to ask for Scott’s resignation and set the Corporation off in a new direction. He is a mouthpiece for the left and is too blinded by his prejudices to understand what he is saying and why what the ABC did was so fundamentally wrong.

Here, if you can bear it, is Scott’s speech in full.

“Heads should roll” – metaphorically, of course

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At least it’s a start on what needs to be done. So far, it’s only about Q&A. The story from The Australian:

Tony Abbott says “heads should roll” at the ABC after the broadcaster “betrayed” Australia by repeatedly broadcasting extremist Zaky Mallah’s claims that Muslims are “justified” in joining Islamic State.

The Abbott government has today launched its own investigation into Mallah’s appearance on Q&A last Monday, arguing internal ABC inquiries have often resulted in “virtual whitewashes” of wrongdoing.

The Prime Minister said the broadcaster’s decision to rebroadcast Monday night’s program in full yesterday was “utterly incomprehensible”.

“Here we had the ABC admitting a gross error judgment and then compounding that terrible mistake – that betrayal, if you like, of our country by giving a platform to this convicted criminal and terrorist sympathiser – they compounded the mistake by rebroadcasting the program,” Mr Abbott said in Canberra.

“Now, frankly, heads should roll over this. Heads should roll over this. I’ve had a good discussion with the Communications Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, I know he has made a very strong representation to the ABC.

“We’ve announced that we are not satisfied with an internal ABC inquiry because so often we’ve seen virtual whitewashes when that sort ever thing happens. There is going to be an urgent government inquiry with recommendations, and frankly the ABC ought to take some very strong action straightaway.”

The ABC is a mad dog running loose

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Just what is Zaki Mallah’s point of view, exactly? His views on anything are of so little interest in an intellectual sense that it is beyond belief that I have had to endure his illogical and illiterate ranting on our national broadcaster. He was there, not because he had anything of any interest to say about anything at all. He was there because he threatened to murder other people and went to jail, but the attempt to put him away for terrorism was stopped at the supreme court. His beliefs are, of course, fascinating as a case study since there are appear to be many others like him. And I wish others would ask him about his actual beliefs about how things should go in the Middle East, say, or how he thinks religious tolerance ought to be practised, or what he thinks of whatever is the other side in his own religious wars. These would be fascinating, because the more you hear the more you fear for this country’s future.

So this conversation between Andrew Bolt’s producer and Raphael Epstein of the ABC is incredible. Is Epstein simply not capable of some basic distinctions. We read Andrew Bolt because he articulates views we are interested in hearing. No one would do the same for this Zaki fellow. His views, to the extent that I know them, are vile and disgusting, of no interest as an actual set of beliefs. The prelude to this exchange is Rafael Epstein, who is apparently a radio host on 774 in Melbourne, telling Andrew’s editor, Damon Johnston, “there seems little difference between the ABC giving a platform to Zaky Mallah and the Herald Sun giving one to Andrew”. This is from Andrew’s blog. The dialogue is not perfect, but in essence Raphael equates the ABC giving a platform to Zaky and and the Herald Sun giving one to Andrew Bolt:

EPSTEIN

No, I don’t think it is a partisan criticism, but it goes to, you are essentially I guess editorialising that the ABC is in some way doesn’t have the nation’s best interests at heart and [inaudible] appropriate given that one incident

JOHNSTON

Yeah, yeah, I think in that context it is appropriate to question that

EPSTEIN

Is that, so let me try and fit around they can Damon. Andrew Bolt, columnist, very very popular. He, I guess, I’m trying to frame his words in a way that are acceptable to him. He doesn’t believe in the concept of the stolen generations, he strongly questioned that. He has got a lot of strong questions on the science of climate change, many people would feel that they are irrefutable facts and that by questioning those things, Andrew Bolt is in some way corroding the social fabric. Does that mean that we can all we should question the Herald Sun’s real commitment to cohesive society?

JOHNSTON

Are you trying to draw some equivalency between Zaki Mallah and Andrew Bolt? Last time I looked Andrew hadn’t done 2 ½ years jail

EPSTEIN

No no no I’m not saying they are saying that all I am just trying to, I’m trying to get at whether or not it is fair to attack the ABC’s intentions towards the country around some coverage. Andrew Bolt is clearly very popular, I don’t want to get into the ins and outs of his columns, I don’t think this is the place to do that. However, if he is asking a lot of significant questions around the stolen generation and climate change science and they are things that for many people, not for everyone, for many people they are irrefutable facts. Can I then question the Herald Sun and say well, you are in some way being corrosive in you know, [inaudible]

Look Raphael. The ABC did not put Zaki onto Q&A because of what he thinks but because of how he was treated by the law. You used him as some kind of weird exhibit of repressive legislation. I wish you would ask him his opinions of many more things, since the minuscule bits we saw were terrifying and provides a broader lesson to the rest of us. If you think Zaki has a point of view on any single issue that is worth considering as a genuine perspective of any value of any kind in any place at any time, then you and the crew you work with are as far as it is possible to be from understanding just exactly what the problem with the ABC is.