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Monthly Archives: December 2015
“One of the dumbest statements I’ve ever heard in politics.”
What I find the most remarkable is that even the standard “97% of scientists” isn’t good enough for him but has to raise it to 99.5. And I can now see more clearly than ever that to go with his hatreds and narcissism, his lying and ignorance, he is also as thick as two planks. The story is titled Who’s the dumb one? Obama reacts to Trump climate criticism. And aside from everything else, I think on this and by now he even has the politics of it completely wrong. Here’s the story in full.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama defended his remarks about the threat posed by climate change, saying Republicans, including U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, were “the only people” disputing the gravity of the problem.
Obama has called climate change a great threat to future generations. At a news conference on Tuesday before leaving the U.N. climate summit in Paris, he likened global warming to the threat posed by terrorism and Islamic State and said both problems can be addressed by applying steady pressure and new ideas.
Republicans seized on his comments as understating the threat of terrorism [not to mention overstating the threat of climate change]. Trump, front-runner to be the Republican nominee in the 2016 presidential election, told MSNBC that Obama’s comment was the “one of the dumbest statements I’ve ever heard in politics.”
“Well, you know, Mr. Trump should run back a tape or quote on some of the stuff he’s said,” Obama retorted, during an interview with CBS “This Morning” that was broadcast on Friday.
“But, look, here’s what we know: 99.5 percent of scientists in the world say this is a really urgent problem,” he said. “Political parties around the world. The only people who are still disputing it are either some Republicans in Congress or – folks on the campaign trail.”
Obama was among more than 150 world leaders in Paris this week at the start of a U.N. conference that aims to reach an agreement to curb global warming.
On Tuesday, Obama said rising seas and warming climates could be drain on economic resources.
“This is an economic and security imperative that we have to tackle now,” he said.
Why it has been kid gloves in dealing with Obama up till now I don’t know, but Donald does seem to have the kind of political abrasiveness that gets results. And by siding with the “0.5%”, which is now around 50%, Trump is even right about the issue itself.
[Via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit]
The left seeks only plausible liars to lead them
There is no point in arguing that Hillary is being inconsistent, or that those who have accused her husband of rape have made a case that needs to be answered. Same with everything else about the lies that surround Clinton. No one believes her unless they desperately want to. But many of those who vote for the left now understand somewhere deep inside that everything they believe is wormeaten and rotten. If they are therefore to go on as before, they must find ways to shield themselves from the truth they will not confront. So they look for liars, and the better they are the more they seek them out. Clinton to Obama and to a different Clinton, with the media there to protect them at every turn. America and the West may crash and burn but they will keep their illusions at all cost. The applause at the end shows there are some who will never allow reality to intrude, but seeing how muted the applause was shows even among those who show up at Clinton event know that she is lying and her husband is as well. What she represents remains an unknown to me, but she is 50-50 to be the next president of the United States/
The corruption of the fourth estate
This is Pat Buchanan on Why Liberal Media Hate Trump but it is more than that. It has a history lesson worth thinking about.
In the feudal era there were the “three estates” – the clergy, the nobility and the commons. The first and second were eradicated in Robespierre’s Revolution.
But in the 18th and 19th century, Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle identified what the latter called a “stupendous Fourth Estate.”
Wrote William Thackeray: “Of the Corporation of the Goosequill – of the Press … of the fourth estate. … There she is – the great engine – she never sleeps. She has her ambassadors in every quarter of the world – her courtiers upon every road. Her officers march along with armies, and her envoys walk into statesmen’s cabinets.”
The fourth estate, the press, the disciples of Voltaire, had replaced the clergy it had dethroned as the new arbiters of morality and rectitude.
Today the press decides what words are permissible and what thoughts are acceptable. The press conducts the inquisitions where heretics are blacklisted and excommunicated from the company of decent men, while others are forgiven if they recant their heresies.
Now do read on how this is affecting us today and especially how the media is aiming to prevent, if it can, the election of Donald Trump.
Obama is the cause of a problem of gargantuan proportions
From Roger Simon, From Paris to San Berdoo, Obama’s War on Western Civ Continues. How it would unfold was not predictable with any kind of detail. That it has come to this ought to be a surprise to no one who was paying attention.
America, and its trailing entities in Europe, has a problem now of gargantuan proportions. Barack Obama was and is precisely the wrong man, possibly the worst conceivable man, to be president of the United States at this point in history. No one more invidious could be invented.
Consider how, on hearing of the mass murders in San Bernardino, the first thing out of his mouth was … gun control. That is not just blindness. It’s something scarier — willfull distortion for evil political ends.
Consciously or unconsciously, probably both, this man seeks to destroy the very thing that nurtured him from Honolulu to the White House.
So now the game has changed and Islamic terror has reached our shores as never before, just as many have predicted. It has invaded our bourgeois neighborhoods, with the neighbor next door unwilling to a report a garage bomb factory for fear of being called racist. (This, too, is at the foot of Obama.) What, in the words of Lenin, is to be done?
But while Obama will no longer be president in 2017, the media and the Democrats will still be there, as dangerously empty-headed as ever.
Attention Scott Sumner: Did you know that the Great Depression was a worldwide problem?
There’s a new book by Scott Sumner with the title, The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression. As is all too frequent, the view is restricted to the United States, where the Great Depression was prolonged by something like a decade until the 1940s because of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Australia reached its trough in 1932 and the UK and most of the world in 1933. The true lessons to be learned are found by not looking at the US. This is the blurb found at the link to the book.
Economic historians have made great progress in unraveling the causes of the Great Depression, but not until Scott Sumner came along has anyone explained the multitude of twists and turns the economy took. In The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression, Sumner offers his magnum opus—the first book to comprehensively explain both monetary and non-monetary causes of that cataclysm.
Drawing on financial market data and contemporaneous news stories, Sumner shows that the Great Depression is ultimately a story of incredibly bad policymaking—by central bankers, legislators, and two presidents—especially mistakes related to monetary policy and wage rates. He also shows that macroeconomic thought has long been captive to a false narrative, which continues to misguide policymakers in their quixotic quest to promote robust and sustainable economic growth.
The Midas Paradox is a landmark treatise that solves mysteries that have long perplexed economic historians and corrects misconceptions about the true causes, consequences, and cures of macroeconomic instability. Like Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, it is one of those rare books destined to shape future research and debate on the subject.
With economics, it’s a “can’t-do attitude” that overwhelmingly works best. Leave it to the market is the answer, although there are some things governments can do. Making adjustment easier, diminishing regulation, pulling back on public spending and easing credit conditions are classical elements in a recovery program. None of these were followed by the US while all of these were followed by Australia and the UK. That’s why our economies recovered and the American economy didn’t. These are the lessons that ought to have been learned but the solipsistic approach to economic policy by American economists, where only the US economy is examined, means that the actual lessons that ought to have been learned never are. Keynes may have been British but it is Samuelson who spread the disease across the globe.
“We must now confront this evil”
He is from the Labour Party in the UK and at the link is the full text of Hilary Benn’s extraordinary speech in favour of Syria airstrikes which he gave in the House of Commons. And he does not beat around the bush.
The question which confronts us in a very, very complex conflict is at its heart very simple. What should we do with others to confront this threat to our citizens, our nation, other nations and the people who suffer under the yoke, the cruel yoke, of Daesh? The carnage in Paris brought home to us the clear and present danger we face from them. It could have just as easily been London, or Glasgow, or Leeds or Birmingham and it could still be. And I believe that we have a moral and a practical duty to extend the action we are already taking in Iraq to Syria. And I am also clear, and I say this to my colleagues, that the conditions set out in the emergency resolution passed at the Labour party conference in September have been met. . . .
The question for each of us – and for our national security – is this: given that we know what they are doing, can we really stand aside and refuse to act fully in our self-defence against those who are planning these attacks? Can we really leave to others the responsibility for defending our national security when it is our responsibility? And if we do not act, what message would that send about our solidarity with those countries that have suffered so much – including Iraq and our ally, France. . . .
Now Mr Speaker, I hope the house will bear with me if I direct my closing remarks to my Labour friends and colleagues on this side of the House. As a party we have always been defined by our internationalism. We believe we have a responsibility one to another. We never have – and we never should – walk by on the other side of the road.
And we are here faced by fascists. Not just their calculated brutality, but their belief that they are superior to every single one of us in this chamber tonight, and all of the people that we represent. They hold us in contempt. They hold our values in contempt. They hold our belief in tolerance and decency in contempt. They hold our democracy, the means by which we will make our decision tonight, in contempt. And what we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated. And it is why, as we have heard tonight, socialists and trade unionists and others joined the International Brigade in the 1930s to fight against Franco. It’s why this entire House stood up against Hitler and Mussolini. It is why our party has always stood up against the denial of human rights and for justice. And my view, Mr Speaker, is that we must now confront this evil. It is now time for us to do our bit in Syria. And that is why I ask my colleagues to vote for the motion tonight.
Since Paris, and now even more so after the attacks in California yesterday, there is a movement of the parties of the left towards the need to defend ourselves against barbarians.
“We’re from the Government and are here to screw you”
Something has gone fantastically wrong with the American system of governance. It is partly that the Democrats have gone not just full socialist but have pivoted anti-West. It is also that the media has been corrupted by this far left message which only allows a filtered version of events to enter the national conversation. This is a column from The Wall Street Journal: America at Obama’s End. I don’t think it comes anywhere near the assessment it needs to make, although there is some soul searching going on somewhere.
We are near the end of the seventh year of Barack Obama’s presidency, and by any measure the United States is a fractured nation. Its people are more divided politically than any time in recent memory. Personally, many are anxious, angry or just down.
Whatever Mr. Obama promised in that famous first Inaugural Address, any sense of a nation united and raised up is gone. This isn’t normal second-term blues. It’s a sense of bust.
The formal measure of all this appeared last week with the release of the Pew Research poll, whose headline message is that trust in government is kaput. Forget the old joke about the government coming to “help.” There’s a darker version now: We’re the government, and we’re here to screw you.
But it’s not just Obama since Merkel in Germany seems to have the same ethos, as do others. But the American contagion is the worst and will require a very fresh and different start to overcome the eight years of Obama-led havoc that will not be easily reversed. Yet what may be the sourest note of all in this article is how it ends:
Mr. Obama has repeatedly mocked institutions he didn’t control and abused the powers of those he did. Almost always, the ridicule and condescension came in front of cheering audiences. It’s hardly a surprise that Donald Trump is exploiting and expanding the loss of public faith. Mr. Obama spent seven years softening up Mr. Trump’s audiences for him.
We may get a third Obama term after all.
It turns out not even to be about the president at all, but to warn Americans not to vote for Donald Trump as if it would be the same as four more years of Obama.
[Via Instapundit]
Where are the anti-Keynesian economists?
I have taken the quote below from Terry McCrann via Andrew Bolt who titles his post Economy lifts, but where’s the business investment? Trying to make sense of an economy by using modern economic theory to find your way is an impossibility. I say this often, but who can understand any of this if they have not read pre-Keynesian economics? It’s impossible to read J.S. Mill unless you are schooled in the classics, but you can read Henry Clay’s 1916 Economics: an Introduction for the General Reader, or even my own Free Market Economics: an Introduction for the General Reader (2nd ed 2014). If you do not understand the classical theory of saving and investment you will never be able to think through economic events. This is the excerpt from Terry.
THE “good” economic growth figures for the September quarter capture a simple, brutal reality about today’s, and even more, tomorrow’s Australia: after the resources boom we are getting poorer…
There’s a seeming contradiction or paradox in the GDP figures. We continue to record relatively strong growth in the economy. That’s, of course, “relative” to other developed economies which are barely staying out of recession….
Yet right now it’s become a sort of empty growth. In simple terms we are producing more but earning less; we are shipping off more and more of Western Australia to Japan and of course especially China and getting less per tonne and so more or less the same actual dollars overall…
But our incomes aren’t growing.
This shows up in all, sorts of places — like wages, which are now growing at their lowest pace in 60 years and barely keeping up with (very low) inflation.
If it’s not value adding it will not add to growth. If it requires a government subsidy – green energy, NBN, pink batts – it will lower our standard of living. You cannot make an economy grow from the demand side. The proportion of non-Keynesians in the profession is under 10%, and the proportion who are actively anti-Keynesian may be less than 1%. What to do about this I do not know, but you would think by now that there would be some kind of effort to overturn Keynesian macro, but near as I can tell, there is hardly a whisper of dissent.
Stupid? Insane? You pick the word since it really is hard to be this out of it
Go on, watch it. He really did say it and he said it right there. From which this headline:
Your Stupid President: Obama Declares, In Paris, in the Wake of a Mass Shooting Resulting in 132 Deaths, That Mass Shootings Just Don’t Happen Outside the US
And this is the comment from Ace of Spades.
I saw this headline earlier and I thought it was a nothing thing, because I thought he meant — I don’t know what I thought he meant, but I thought I must have read it wrong, because this social-promotion imbecile couldn’t possibly have declared that mass shootings don’t happen in Paris while standing in Paris in the aftermath of a mass shooting.
But he did.
He’s insane.
Law of Markets 