Monthly Archives: October 2015

I’m calm, why shouldn’t I be calm?

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Here is a weird one that needs explanation, from The Oz today:

Sydney shooting: Malcolm Turnbull urges calm, condemns attack

This is how the story begins:

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull condemned the “cold-blooded murder” of Curtis Cheng and said it appears to be an act of terrorism.

Mr Cheng was killed outside NSW Police headquarters yesterday by a 15-year-old boy, who was then shot dead by police.

Witnesses say the attacker yelled “Allah, Allah” after the shooting.

“It is a shocking crime. It was a cold-blooded murder, targeting the NSW Police Service,” Mr Turnbull said.

“It was doubly shocking because it was perpetrated by a 15-year-old boy and it underlines the importance of families, communities, leaders being very aware of whether young people are becoming radicalised.

“It is also important that to remember that the Australian Muslim community will be especially appalled and shocked by this.

Well, some may be shocked and appalled, but not necessarily all. This was also in the very same paper under the heading, Extremist Muslim group to hold workshops at Deakin University. This is the story in full:

An extremist Muslim group will hold workshops at Melbourne’s Deakin University this weekend based on the teachings of Islamic scholars who have recommended the death penalty for homosexuals and apostates, promoted terrorism and preached hatred of Jews and Christians and violence against women.

The Islamic Research and Educational Academy, which earlier this year held a conference at which children as young as five were encouraged to dress up as radical clerics and read controversial sermons and passages from the Koran, has sent text messages to supporters advertising the da’wah workshops as being based on the teachings of “legendary” scholars Zakir Naik and Ahmed Deedat.

Dubbed “The Art of Da’wah” and hosted by the ultraconservative Salafist organisation’s president Waseem Razvi, the workshops, to be held at Deakin’s Burwood campus, promise to use the teachings of Dr Naik and Sheik Deedat to help attendees “learn the art and gain the confidence to talk about Islam to anyone, anywhere and at any time”.

In Islamic theology, the purpose of da’wah is to invite Muslims and non-Muslims to understand the worship of Allah.

Indian “televangelist” Dr Naik has been banned from countries including Britain, Canada and parts of India for his rhetorical support for terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

He has recommended capital punishment for homosexuals and apostates and has been quoted saying “every Muslim should be a terrorist” and asserting men’s “rights” to beat their wives, as long as they do it lightly, so as not to leave a mark.

Sheik Deedat, who died in 2005, was a South African Muslim missionary of Indian descent whose books have been banned from sale in France since 1994 for being “violently anti-Western, anti-Semitic and inciting to racial hate.”

His da’wah centre was heavily financed by the bin Laden family and Deedat praised Osama bin Laden after meeting him.

Deakin corporate communications director Sarah Dolan yesterday said there were no clear grounds to cancel the event at the last minute.

“Nevertheless, we will closely watch how the group represent and conduct themselves,” she said.

“As a university we are committed to the fair and open ­exchange of ideas, but we draw the line not just at anyone promoting or justifying violent extremism but also at any malicious expression of exclusivism intended to encourage people to view others in a way that is disrespectful or hateful.”

Chair in Global Islamic Politics at Deakin Greg Barton said he agreed with the university’s decision, but provisos were certainly necessary.

“When it comes to Zakir Naik, there are reasons to be concerned,” Professor Barton said. “The questions around this event will be who is speaking and what line they take.

“In Australia at the moment we face a very serious struggle with ­violent extremist being recruited from our suburbs, and even from our tertiary institutions, and we have to be wise about how we ­engage. If we simply close the doors on everything, that can support the extremists’ rhetoric.

Neither Mr Razvi nor the ­Islamic academy’s spokeswoman returned calls from The Weekend Australian’ yesterday.

It’s not the lack of spending – it’s the lack of value adding

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Exhibit A in what is wrong with Keynesian economics, in fact all modern macro, has been the United States. This is the main headline at Drudge that comes with the picture:

frowny face

JOBS DRY UP

Here are the sub-heads that spell out the disaster:

Record 94,610,000 Americans Not in Labor Force…
Participation Rate Lowest Since 1977…
Record 56,647,000 Women Not Working…
‘Payrolls Disaster’…
‘Fed never going to raise rates’…
IT’S UGLY!
FLASHBACK: IT’S GOING TO BE GREAT…
Markets at ‘panic levels’…

You elect a socialist who thinks he can direct the economy, keeps interest rates well below equilibrium, promotes crony capitalists at the expense of genuine competition, and makes war on cheap forms of energy and this is what you get. But what truly gets to me is that Samuelson-clone economic theory cannot be eliminated from policy and from the minds of the majority of economists. If they still think you can make an economy grow from the demand side after all of this, I don’t know what it would take to get them to see just how wrong modern economic theory is. It’s not the lack of spending. It’s the lack of value adding. If they cannot tell the difference, they should go back and read Adam Smith and J.S. Mill.

How not to start a party

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It is depressing to read the Manifesto of the Australian Liberty Alliance. The one step Australians will never take is to build a party allegiance around opposition to the religious beliefs of others. Not only will they not do this, they are right not to do this. Once they ALA put the following into their Manifesto, they killed the party as dead as it could possibly be.

3. Stop the Islamisation of Australia

Islam is not merely a religion, it is a totalitarian ideology with global aspirations. Islam uses the religious element as a means to project itself onto non-Islamic societies, which is manifest in the historical and ongoing expansion of Islam. A multitude of groups, movements and multi-national organisations are actively pursuing this agenda globally, including in Australia. These organisations differ in their strategies, tactical approach and their message, but the common denominator is the desire to promote Islam and project Islam’s societal model of a divinely ordained theocracy across the world.

Islam does not accept the separation of religion from state, but seeks dominance over all aspects of human life and society. Whereas we see religion as part of life, Islam sees life as part of the religion. This is not ‘Islamism’ or a minority view by extremists, this is basic Islamic doctrine. While only a small number of Muslims actively pursue this agenda, Islam’s divine law makes it the duty of all Muslims to contribute to this effort according to their abilities. No other religious ideology in our time has both the doctrinal aspiration as well as the economic and demographic muscle to impose itself globally.

It is our core policy that all attempts to impose Islam’s theocracy and Sharia law on our liberal society must be stopped by democratic means, before the demographic, economic and socio-political realities make a peaceful solution impossible. Australian Liberty Alliance will seek to enact the policy proposals outlined in the white paper “Practical Steps to Stop Islamisation”, published by Q Society of Australia Inc in February 2014.

These proposals include a 10-year moratorium on all resident visa categories for applicants from member countries of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Exceptions shall apply to the humanitarian intake of persecuted non-Islamic minorities from OIC countries.

Further, we will require for accredited Islamic organisations in Australia to formally accept the supremacy of Australian law and universal human rights over Islamic doctrine and Sharia law. For example full face coverings in public spaces shall be prohibited.

We will seek to prevent the implementation of any aspect of Sharia finance, Sharia courts and the influence of local or foreign Sharia councils over Australian institutions, our economic system and our supply chain. Among the proposed measures is the mandatory labelling of products and services from companies that have taken out halal certification, the implementation of the ‘user pays’ principle for halal certification schemes and an end to religious discrimination in Australia’s secular organisations.

A manifesto that promotes an open and tolerant society, one in which all are welcome to practise their religion within the confines of a democratic and free constitution, would have potential. This, however, has none at all and will go nowhere.

You can’t tell the players without a program

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syria competing goals

This is the story as I understand it, but really I don’t understand it at all. Russia, it seems, attacked America’s anti-Assad allies in Syria who are themselves enemies of ISIS but are also the remaining forces of al Qaeda! The US can do nothing to defend its allies, not that they should be its allies, but is in any case without any genuine ability to enforce its will. The diagram above from The Wall Street Journal provides a rough guide to the various major parties and what they are seeking out of the conflict. Meanwhile Europe is submerged in new migrants from alien cultures which has changed Europe forever.

The American reaction is all spelled out here: US urges Russians to focus airstrikes on Islamic State. But in the midst of it, there is a sentence that highlights to me, and probably others, the profound lack of seriousness in American foreign policy:

“We are not yet where we need to be to guarantee the safety and security” of those carrying out the airstrikes, Kerry said, “and that is the discussion that is taking place today,” referring to the US-Russia military talks. “And it will take place even more so over the course of the next few days depending on the outcome today.”

“It’s a way of making sure that planes aren’t going to be shooting at each other and making things worse,” the secretary said in an interview late Thursday on CBS’ “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

Colbert is the replacement for Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. You cannot parody these people and satire is now impossible.

Another one liner – lots of laughs

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Here is a single one-line entry from Drudge today:

LEW: USA goes broke next month…

Why worry? Donald, or maybe Hillary, will be able to make it all better around a year and a half from now:

“Based on this new information, we now estimate that Treasury is likely to exhaust its extraordinary measures on or about Thursday, November 5,” Lew wrote in a letter to Boehner. “At that point, we could be left to fund the government with only the cash we have on hand, which we currently forecast to be below $30 billion. This amount would be far short of net expenditures on certain days, which can be as high as $60 billion.”

Lew said the date could still fluctuate somewhat from Nov. 5, but the letter makes clear that the situation is more urgent than anticipated by lawmakers and staffers who expected to be able to bundle a debt limit increase with an early-December spending package.

“Without sufficient cash, it would be impossible for the United States of America to meet all of its obligations for the first time in our history,” Lew wrote.

This would all be coming to a country near you except that our creative new PM is finding ways to increase taxes on the wealthy.

Speaking of the last days of Europe

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Mark Steyn with a pointed story about our future:

When visiting foreign cities, I’ve lately made a habit of visiting their old Jewish cemeteries. For one thing, a community in such steep decline that it can no longer tend its graves is a sobering preview of the demographic eclipse Catholics and Protestants will shortly be confronting across the Continent. I also like to visit, if any are to hand, Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries. And oddly enough in Malmö, Sweden the CWGC is responsible for two graves that happen to lie within the city’s Jewish cemetery.

As noted yesterday, Malmö is currently accepting up to a thousand “refugees” every 24 hours. Which means that a single day’s intake of Muslims now outnumbers what remains of a once strong Jewish community in the city. Their only cemetery (which opened in 1872) has had a rough few years: Mourners have been harassed, the burial chapel has been firebombed, and the overnight ritual of shmirat hamet has required police protection. The new mayor’s longtime predecessor was indifferent to the rise in violent anti-Semitic attacks, and apparently happy to see Jews leave. The cemetery sits on the Föreningsgatan in a corner of the main St Paul’s graveyard, walled off from the rest. The Christian cemetery has the air of an open city park, pedestrians and bicyclists criss-crossing from one street to the next. But its Jewish neighbor lies behind heavy solid metal gates, reinforced at the back by beams driven into the ground.

Nevertheless, it’s well-tended. Even as the Jewish community decays, it will be a while before its cemetery is reduced to the garbage-strewn scrubland of broken stones I toured in Tangiers. I walked to the back of the graveyard, where in the center of a small circle stands a memorial to concentration camp survivors brought to Malmö by Count Bernadotte, many of whom were so weak they died shortly after arrival. On the bench a yard away sat the only other persons in the cemetery – two Arab teens rocking their skateboards back and forth under their feet and eyeing me with a bored half-curiosity.

I asked if they knew where the graves of the Commonwealth airmen were. Which was a silly question on my part, because I doubt they had a clue what the “Commonwealth” was. But they were affable enough, and I explained the tombstones I was seeking looked like all the others, except, in addition to the Star of David, they’d have the badges of their services. And the lads rose, somewhat reluctantly, to assist me.

We soon found the graves, just behind the memorial to the camp victims: Henry George Popper, 19 years old, of the Royal Air Force, and SS Solomons, 32 years old, of the Royal Australian Air Force, both on a Lancaster bomber that came down over Sweden on August 30th 1944. The inscriptions read:

Han stupade i strid for fosterlandet och friheten.

Which means: He died fighting for his homeland and for freedom.

What were two Jews doing in the skies over Europe in 1944? At that time, RAF and other allied bombers were being downed by German night-fighters guided by ground controllers at radar screens. So the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Malvern developed a method of jamming the enemies’ equipment. The only drawback was that it required an eighth member of the air crew – the “Special Duty Operator” or SO – who could recognize not only, in the cacophony of the Continent, who was speaking German, but understood the lingo well enough to pick up on the enemy’s quite sophisticated efforts at misdirection. There was no room for the SO in the heated forward section of the Lancaster bombers, so they sat in the back, dressed as best they could to weather temperatures that, at 20,000 feet over Germany, got down to minus 60 Fahrenheit.

Because of the language requirement, many of the SOs were Jews of German extraction, for whom being shot down and captured in the Third Reich meant not a PoW camp but certain torture and death. Yet they, like all the other SOs, cheerfully volunteered for the job. One such was 19-year old Henry George Popper, born Heinz George Popper.

He was a year or so older than the bigger Muslim lad in the cemetery, but he didn’t get to loaf around with his skateboard all day. I bid the boys farewell, and, as I headed back to the gate, my eye fell on another headstone: Julius Popper, Esq (1892-1957) and Dr Eugenie Popper (1894-1974). They were the parents of Henry George Popper and they lived in Barking, Essex. Yet they too wound up in Malmö. Eugenie Popper’s words on her husband’s death hint at the depths of pain with which they lived after the war:

He came the long way to rest in a Jewish spot with our only child.

Henry George Popper is not a famous war hero – just a teenager doing his duty to King and country. Today, all around the cemetery where he lies, thousands of men his age arrive every week in Malmö, supposedly “refugees” from today’s war. But, unlike Popper and Solomons, they’re not interested in fighting for their country, merely in scramming to the welfare gravy trains of Northern Europe. And if they won’t do anything for their own countries, why would Swedes expect them to do anything for theirs? A society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for, and so Henryk Broder’s last Europeans rush to embrace those who will supplant them.

It will not be “a Jewish spot” much longer – nor a European one.

Syrial killers

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WAR: RUSSIA BEGINS AIRSTRIKES IN SYRIA; WEST DISPUTES TARGETS

USA DISARRAY

Both from Drudge. From the first story:

Russia launched airstrikes Wednesday in Syria, sharply escalating Moscow’s role in the conflict but also raising questions about whether its intent is fighting Islamic State militants or protecting longtime ally, President Bashar Assad.

If ISIL is fighting Assad, and the Russians are trying to protect Assad, then who are the Russians bombing if not ISIL? And then from the second story which is essentially that Putin treats Obama as a no-account nonentity:

This would be a plain victory for Assad, who invited the Russians to join his battle to cling on to power, and a defeat for the United States, which has demanded he step down.

The attacks came despite President Barack Obama sitting down with Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Monday at the United Nations for 90 minutes of what both camps called “business-like” talks.

Seriously, who would trust Obama or Kerry on anything? This is no longer the cold War so I no longer have any kind of reflex anti-Soviet bias in thinking about Russia, authoritarian state though it may well still be. Who any longer knows who’s on whose side in the Middle East. But my enemy’s enemy is my friend, in this business with ISIL that is more than ever the bottom line.

Hypocrisy thy name is Malcolm Turnbull

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It’s things like this infuriating piece of hypocrisy from the political editor of The Australian that has me thinking about cancelling my sub:

Tony Abbott is trying to ensure his assassination does not mean that all the good he did as Caesar is interred with his bones, but must defend his legacy himself because there is no other ­“Anthony” who will do it for him.

But while the former prime minister has a legitimate right to borrow the ears of Ray Hadley’s radio listeners, he needs to ensure that in delivering his own eulogy he does not stir their “hearts and minds to mutiny and rage”.

Abbott has to strike a fine balance between citing his achievements, defending his name from the “evil” others suggest will live after him — and doing wrong to “the honourable men” who wronged him.

While there is a great deal of sympathy for Abbott among Liberal supporters who want him shown reverence in his demise, there are as many who will not forgive him if he shows he is ­ambitious and fatally damages those who have taken over.

Let me put it to you this way. Here are the issues that matter to me:

  • border protection
  • preventing as much as possible policies being put in place to deal with the non-existent problem of “climate change”
  • finding ways to restore the budget to balance through cuts to spending
  • fighting ISIS

So tell me this. Is there now a dime’s worth of difference between the Libs, Labor and the Greens on any of these once the next election is in the past? So far as policy goes, what difference will it make who wins? The more I see the policies now being put in place by our new Government, policies that were obviously only prevented by Tony Abbott’s presence, the more I appreciate just how good he was and how hard the job he had was. What a singularly rotten crew he was dealing with. In the words of Eric Abetz:

It is understandable that with the removal of Tony Abbott, Kevin Andrews and myself from the Ministry that our core constituency feels disenfranchised and concerned that their views will no longer be heard.

Well it is understandable to me, just not to the political editor of The Australian for whom such thoughts, like the Golden Rule, are far too complex to comprehend. The problem with the political elites of this country is that they seldom associate with people such as myself. This is a facebook comment passed along to me which ought to be food for thought for those who think they have their ears to the ground:

As the ‘New Liberals’ slowly nudge their way to the left, so more of we traditional Liberals will not move. Abbott, and I use the word purposely, was voted for because of his dogmatic stance on rectifying the economic shambles and illegal immigration, the rest of the Party rode his coat tails to power, carbon mitigation generally being of less concern. Any fiddling at the edges with the migration policy will bring a resounding unwelcome electoral lesson to our newly enlightened, more socially aware, culturally encompassing, all embracing, green tinged, treacherous Representatives.

The mutiny and rage has not been stirred by Tony but by Malcolm. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is sound advice, but sounds very hollow coming from people who have already done unto Abbott what they do not wish to see done unto themselves.

Gross Output further explained

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This diagram might help to explain the concept of the Gross Output first discussed in this post: A Triumph for Supply-side “Austrian” Economics and Say’s Law. The diagram shows the economy divided into its various stages of production. Adding them all up gives you a measure of the whole economy, not just the final output. Note that each stage is larger than the one above which indicates that there has been value adding activity going on.

GO

The problem with double counting is massive if you are trying to measure final output. If, however, you are trying to work out the level of activity across every part of the economy, it is not the central problem, and this is especially so if you are interested in proportions. If the data were divided into where jobs were, the division between the different parts of the economy that took in the stages of production would make perfect sense. If we were trying to measure jobs and counted only those who were in retail and personal services, we would immediately see what was wrong with the stat. GO tries to make up some of the deficiencies in knowing only final output and ignoring the economy’s interior.