This is Netanyahu from before his latest time as PM. Fascinating. Worth the fifteen minutes.
“You cannot have madmen controlling the nuclear bomb”
Reply
Monthly Archives: October 2015
Millennial attitudes to work – a satire I think
Who are these Millennials?
Millennials (also known as the Millennial Generation or Generation Y) are the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates when the generation starts and ends; most researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.
As for the video, I know this is the reputation but one that I have no personal experience of.
Hunting conservatives down
With Libertarians having defected to the Obama side of politics, there are only we few conservatives left to stand up for the traditional values of the West. It has been clear for a while that it is only in the development of technology that America is a world leader, and it anyway all gets stolen by its enemies as fast as it gets invented. As for social values, the United States has had nothing to offer the rest of us since the 1990s. What we see is the transformation of the specific Judeo-Christian values that made Western civilisation free, prosperous and ascendant into the enemy. They may only be comics, but their storylines no doubt mirror the values of the people who read them. They will yet make it illegal to deny global warming, and who knows what after that.
AND CONTINUING: This is Judge Nepolitano from Reason Mag in October 2012 – the centre of libertarian thought if such a thing can exist – who could not choose between Obama and Romney. The article is The Failures of Obama and Romney. This is how a libertarian looked at the last presidential election:
President Obama is a failure as a president, and Gov. Romney is a failure as a candidate.
When he took office, Obama told the press that if he couldn’t cure the economic mess he inherited from President George W. Bush in four years, he wouldn’t deserve a second term. I guess he didn’t anticipate making the mess worse.
When he took office, the federal government owed $11 trillion to its creditors; today it owes $16 trillion. When he took office, gasoline was running about $1.85 a gallon and today costs about $3.85 a gallon. This is price inflation that he directly caused by flooding the markets with cash, and that directly harms the middle class and the poor. Unemployment has remained north of 8 percent throughout his presidency for those still looking for a job, and about 16 percent if you count all able-bodied out-of-work adults, half of whom have stopped looking for work on his watch.
He supported radical fanatics in their takeovers of the governments of Libya and Egypt, even going so far as to help them kill Col. Gadhafi, the former Libyan strongman who was once our ally. In the process, they opened jails in Libya, and out came some of the same folks the U.S. government has been fighting against in the Middle East since 2001. Obama pushed from power Hosni Mubarak, the strongman in Cairo, and he was replaced by the head of a criminal organization that Obama’s own State Department has prohibited Americans from engaging with. (Query: If the government derives its powers from the consent of the governed, how can the government help a foreign group and at the same time prohibit Americans from doing the same?)
In his lust to build a new world order in the Middle East, a goal for which he roundly criticized President George W. Bush, Obama has unilaterally, unconstitutionally and unlawfully killed Americans there. He killed Osama bin Laden when he could have captured him, and he let a mob kill our ambassador to Libya when he could have protected him — all to justify a value-free foreign policy that has no lasting friends or enemies, just fleeting interests. And he has killed thousands in foreign lands in secret, using drones that will soon find their way here and come back to haunt him.
Perhaps the next month will prove me wrong on Romney, but so far he is putting the electorate to sleep. I believe him when he claims to favor free market approaches to the nation’s economic ills, but I don’t believe him when he rails against big government and central economic planning, because his record belies his words. He is, of course, the father of the individual mandate — a totalitarian giant leap forward for the welfare state. And he has stated that if elected and re-elected, he will borrow money every year he is in office until the last.
When he was interviewed with the president on “60 Minutes” last week, I purposely did not watch or listen to the show. The next morning, I read the transcript of the interview and thought many of Romney’s answers were articulate and rational. Then I watched the same interview on tape and was bored nearly to death. Romney cannot put a fire in people’s bellies. The only reason he gives for voting for him is that he is not Obama — a reason that appeals to just under half the country, but is not enough to seal the deal. He needs to recognize that his audience for victory is not his former neighbors in Boston, but Joe Sixpack in the heartland.
He supports all of Obama’s killings in the Middle East, but claims he wants to control events there with a more muscular foreign policy. He cannot justify that view, along with the fact that it has failed and put us close to bankruptcy, to an electorate weary of wars. He rips into Obama’s borrowing, but overlooks his running mate’s voting record in Congress, which authorized all of it. At first he vowed to repeal Obamacare saying it is unconstitutional, and then he said he wants to keep the parts he likes, even if they are unconstitutional.
Can anyone get excited about Romney? Aside from a capitalistic attitude about the economy — as opposed to the president’s love of central economic planning — does anyone know what views he will embrace on Inauguration Day? Do you know anyone just aching to vote for him, the way conservatives were for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and progressives were for Obama in 2008? I do not know of such a person.
What do we do? The president’s failures are legion and have made all of us the worse for them. Gov. Romney’s failures are obvious and will give us four more years of Obama. Who says the system is not fixed?
If it was not blindingly obvious that Romney was oceans better than Obama their political judgement is empty and warped. Four years later, it would be interesting if they might just perhaps you know maybe think they might just possibly have been wrong.
Spare me your ignorant lessons in political calculation
Do we really need such sanctimonious lessons in political calculation from the very leaders of the anti-Abbott Australian? To start we have Chris Kenny with Tony Abbott loyalists need to accept Malcolm Turnbull. But really, how do you beat this for destroying your own argument:
In Abbott’s favour were strong policy settings (border protection, climate change and attempted budget repair), the escalating issue of union power and corruption being teased out in the royal commission he established, and how all this had rendered Bill Shorten nigh-on unelectable.
So what’s Turnbull got that beats all of that, specially since Turnbull would not have achieved a single one of these, not one. As for “time to move on”, I will move on when Turnbull shows me he’s not everything I now assume he is. Then there’s this from Paul Kelly across the front page of the Inquirer section: The dilemma of conservatism. Other than wanting stability, honesty, personal responsibility, a free market economy and the government out of our lives – you know, those conservative values – what exactly do others add to the mix that I am missing. Here’s Kelly:
Turnbull does not say this but his mission is to modernise the Liberal Party. He is a social progressive who champions same-sex marriage, serious action on climate change, a multicultural society, a repudiation of monarchical trappings and an economy, entrepreneurial and innovative, geared to aspiration.
What an empty set of junk-filled cliched nonsense. If this is what Kelly and Turnbull think of as the issues of our time, they are so out of their tree that it is hard to fathom exactly how their rose-tinted glasses may be removed. These are people living in a bubble while just over the hill the entire Western world is under siege.
And then The Oz goes after David Flint because they think of him as part of the elites of our society. From Cut & Paste:
If words have meaning, Professor David Flint AM would be regarded as the member of an “elite”. Educated in Sydney, London and Paris, he became a tenured professor in law. In 1997, the Howard government appointed Flint chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Authority, one of the most influential positions in Australian public life. According to Who’s Who in Australia 2003, he is a member of Sydney’s Union Club. Yet Flint reckons he is not part of any elite, and he has just written a book, The Twilight of the Elites (Freedom Publishing), to prove his point. Following the American commentator Christopher Lasch, Flint maintains that “elite opinion is the opinion typical of the upper-middle-class liberal — that is, liberal in the American sense”. In short, elite opinion “tends to be left-wing on social and cultural issues”. How convenient, especially for a commentator who claims to disapprove of labelling.
Not even close. The elites of any society are a swarm of types like Malcolm who are the insiders, the kinds of people I think of as the Progressive Internationalists. People like David Flint often rise but they are never accepted. Richard Nixon would be your prime example, always an outsider to your Malcolm Turnbull types, in just the same way that Tony Abbott was. It is people like Turnbull, Kenny and Kelly who find, eventually, that they have to bring in some outsider to do their work for them. But as tone deaf to modern reality it is hard to imagine these people being more so than they are. In the meantime, we shall see if Turnbull and Morrison can do any better than Abbott and Hockey. Maybe they can, but they haven’t yet. And to say that whatever else, Malcolm will be better than Bill Shorten is only to admit that there was no argument at all in favour of the switch, since this argument works even better on behalf of Tony.
Stone Age primitives
Another day in the Middle East.
PALESTINIANS TORCH JEWISH SHRINE AMID ‘REVOLUTION’ CALLS…
Terrorist Disguised as Journalist Stabs IDF Soldier…
MEDIA FEARS: ‘Open season on reporters’…
Why shouldn’t they burn to the ground ancient historic sites in Israel when they do it in their own countries as well? They are stone age primitives with iPhones living in our midst. But you know what. This is strangely a sign of some kind of understanding between the two sides. It’s not much, but the Palestinian leader, Mahmud Abbas, said this:
“Illegal” arson “offends our culture and our religion and our morals.” He said a committee would investigate and the damage would be repaired.
On the other hand, he has not criticised randomly stabbing old ladies in the street so there other kinds of things that do not necessarily offend his culture, religion or morals.
Meanwhile in Western Europe. At a community Information Evening about Refugee Camp in a small District of City Kassel, population 4000. This is ONE Day before 800 immigrant will arrive. A German Politican, Walter Lübcke, is shown speaking to the gathered citizenry:
Here’s the translation:
@(:31) “it´s so great that this country (GERMANY) has values and these values make it really worth it to live in our country (for the refugees)” He continues, “We need to stand up for these basic values and anyone who decides not to STAND UP FOR THESE VALUES has the right to leave the country/state if they are not in agreement. It is the freedom of every German….(Audience boos….Audience member, “I can´t believe it – piss off/get outta here!)
Mr. Lübcke trys to continue, “We have freedom, we have a democratic system, the majority” – but is then drowned out in the general uproar. Audience member, “What democracy!?”
There is no making sense of this in terms of straightforward electoral politics. On whose behalf is this all happening and for what reason? Who in Europe wants this change and why do they want it? This is unprecedented in history, that a sovereign people have been sold down the river by its leaders.
The award winning Waffle Street the movie
It is, of course, already a must-see movie, but if there is an imperative form of must see, it definitely applies here. Waffle Street the movie is getting closer to general release and will no doubt be shown some time in Australia. In the meantime:
The 2015 Hollywood Film Festival announced the winners of six categories Sunday night at the Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood.
Sharing the title for best narrative film is Forward. Side. Close!, an Austrian film that follows the story of a castle-dwelling, obsessive compulsive man, and Waffle Street, the true story of the vice president of a $30 billion hedge fund, who loses his job and ends up working as a waiter at a waffle shop.
And then there’s this from the Woodstock Film Festival which has just initiated its Carpe Diem [Jay] Andretta Award:
Jay’s wife, Lauri Andretta, and son, Jim Andretta, will present the inaugural Carpe Diem Andretta Award to Waffle Street on October 3 during the annual Maverick Awards Gala at BSP Kingston, NY. Woodstock Film Festival alums Eshom and Ian Nelms (Lost On Purpose, 2013) return to Woodstock with Waffle Street, their third feature, based on the memoir of James Adams, former VP of a $30 billion hedge fund, who loses his job and unexpectedly winds up in the world of the unemployed. In this genuine riches-to-rags story, Jimmy, played by a charming James Lafferty (One Tree Hill, Oculus), finally finds work waiting tables at a chicken & waffles chain, where the hectic pace and general mayhem become both comedic and endearing. Under the tutelage of master grill man Edward (Danny Glover in a stunningly earnest performance), Jimmy learns some hard lessons about life, finance and making grits. But the foremost thing he discovers is carpe diem, as he begins to enjoy the pleasures of the moment and realize that the measure of a man is far more than luxury homes and expensive cars. Fundamentally, Waffle Street is an authentic account of what it means to rediscover yourself.
The story is amazing. If they film is only half as good as the book, it will be as good a night at the movies as you are likely to have. For myself, I can see there is sense in a carpe diem approach to life, but I have to say that having watched this grow from book to movie one step at a time, it’s not the kind of thing that ever gets something like this done.
The “broken people” are everywhere now
Anywhere in American society where the left forms the majority, or even the near-majority, is a wreck. Who can analyse an entire culture, especially one as diverse as the American, but this seems generally right to me:
Once you recognize the influence of mental illness in shaping [left ideologies of all kinds], you find yourself nodding in agreement with Professor Glenn Reynolds: “I’m beginning to think that most lefty movements are just about broken people trying to manipulate the rest of us so they can feel good about their broken selves.”
Indeed, the “broken people” are everywhere now, piling up like debris scattered by a storm or a flood. Decades of societal breakdown — accompanied by a cultural decadence that celebrates divorce, bastardy, prostitution and every imaginable perversion as expressions of “diversity” — have produced a generation of young people who lack the ability to form healthy, normal relationships. The “broken people” demand that society be further re-structured to accommodate their depravity and helplessness. School children must be taught how to negotiate sexual consent, because there are no longer any moral customs to regulate sexual behavior, nor are any of these feral youth capable of romantic sentiment, having been raised in a godless carnival of cruelty devoid of anything that might plausibly be called love.
The stability of the era in which I was raised – the era of the Saturday Evening Post and its covers – is gone for all time. Being young today is a trial, whether male or female. Each has its horrors, related to each other, but impossible to avoid unless your luck really does hold out.
So, there’s been a fall in productivity – whatever might have caused that?
The more I look at commentaries like this, the more I come to the conclusion that modern economics is a complete wasteland. The subheading reads: “The global productivity slowdown will pose a huge challenge for Scott Morrison”. But what is truly bizarre is this:
The IMF has been troubled over the failure of world growth to meet its forecasts. Every time the fund has looked at world growth in the past five years, it has had to downgrade its forecasts. If the world economy had grown in line with the forecasts it made five years ago, the economies of the advanced world would be 14 per cent bigger than they are while those of the developing and emerging world would be 23 per cent bigger. But the forecasts of employment the fund makes for advanced countries have been much closer to the mark. Indeed, for a range of countries, including Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain, employment growth has been better than the IMF predicted, although output growth has been worse. More workers are producing less output than was expected.
I don’t wish to be impertinent since, after all, the IMF is comprised of some of the most highly paid economists in the world, experts in the dark arts of econometrics and modern macroeconomic theory. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to point out that now, five years after the stimulus, when governments around the world commandeered huge swathes of their nations’s savings, the inevitable consequence has been a fall in productivity. Rather than our resources being used in truly value adding activities determined by the market, they were instead used by clunks in government and Treasury on such pieces of economic junk, like the NBN, Building the Education Revolution and Pink Batts. In the US there’s been Solyndra and everywhere you go there are the many, many green energy projects that have absorbed capital. The result today is that we have a dearth of the kinds of new investments coming on stream that would maintain productivity. Instead, we find it difficult even to maintain previous standards of living, never mind getting them to grow. Of course, the IMF, being such geniuses, has all the angels covered:
The IMF says weak business investment is partly responsible for the poor growth outcome but says that by far the most important issue is weak productivity on its broadest measure. It is not just output per worker that is disappointing. The additional output from every dollar of business investment also has been weak.
There is no settled explanation for this. The IMF says a shift in the composition of economic growth also may be contributing. Service industries are accounting for most of the increase in growth, rather than manufacturing. Output can be harder to measure in service industries, and they are often more labour-intensive. The IMF says it is also possible the revolution in information and communications technology is delivering fewer gains in productivity than was the case through the 1990s. It also speculates that the pay-off from additional investment in education may be diminishing.
Let us therefore take the NBN as the prime example of what has gone wrong. In every way most of the infrastructure construction might be listed in the national accounts as business investment. You could say the same for all of the desal plants that were built. But crony capitalism is not free enterprise, and the outcomes that are fed by public monies are duds no matter which way you look at it.
Economics remains wedded to C+I+G. It still believes SPENDING causes growth, with all those multiplier thingys hanging off the initial expenditure. It is a stunning failure of policy, although hardly anyone at all has noticed just how great a failure it has been. In the US they surveyed the nation’s economists and some massive majority have stated that the stimulus created additional jobs. With that kind of thinking so widespread, it should be no surprise just how dismal our economic prospects now are.
And for what it’s worth, the worst thing that the RBA should now do is lower rates of interest, which is probably the reason they are going to do it the next chance they get.
Terror the musical
How has this had 1.3 million hits and I have missed it up till now? From the text that goes with the vid:
Ahmedido Domingo (aka Ahmadinejad), Erdogano Pavarotti (aka Erdogan) and Assad Carreras (aka Bashar Assad) singing about the benefits of terrorism.
I hit him when he hit me back
The headline’s in quotation marks because the activist-journalist at the SMH thinks this is a preposterous over-reaction: ‘The terrorist was shot and killed; that is the right response.’ The picture also comes with the story, with this text beneath it:
Palestinian mourners cry at the family house upon the arrival of the body of Amjad Jundi, 19, who was killed after stabbing a soldier on a bus in southern Israel. Photo: Nasser Nasser
The story is worth a read, however, since it is a more than usually one-eyed, one-sided approach of the kinds we find everywhere. A 15-year old was shot down in the street in Sydney just last week because he had just murdered an employee of the NSW police. No one in Australia is asking for our police rules of engagement in dealing with murderers while in the midst of a murderous rampage. Ruth Pollard, the activist-with-byline at the SMH, ought to try a similar kind of argument as a think-piece on her editorial page. I suspect even regular readers of Fairfax might find her just a tad idiotic even for their own fellow-leftist tastes.
UPDATE: From Brett Stevens via the Wall Street Journal discussing these murders on Israeli streets under the heading, Palestine: The Psychotic Stage. No answers in how to deal with the problem but some moral rebalancing about who are the murderers and who are being attacked in the street:
Treatises have been written about the media’s mind-set when it comes to telling the story of Israel. We’ll leave that aside for now. The significant question is why so many Palestinians have been seized by their present blood lust—by a communal psychosis in which plunging knives into the necks of Jewish women, children, soldiers and civilians is seen as a religious and patriotic duty, a moral fulfillment. Despair at the state of the peace process, or the economy? Please. It’s time to stop furnishing Palestinians with the excuses they barely bother making for themselves.
Above all, it’s time to give hatred its due. We understand its explanatory power when it comes to American slavery, or the Holocaust. We understand it especially when it is the hatred of the powerful against the weak. Yet we fail to see it when the hatred disturbs comforting fictions about all people being basically good, or wanting the same things for their children, or being capable of empathy.
Today in Israel, Palestinians are in the midst of a campaign to knife Jews to death, one at a time. This is psychotic. It is evil. To call it anything less is to serve as an apologist, and an accomplice.
Apologists and accomplices they may be, but they feel as moral and pleased with themselves as if they had just put fifty cents into a beggar’s hat.
Law of Markets 