Monthly Archives: April 2016

Depravity is now part of the curriculum

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From Andrew Bolt which has the lead in, “The Andrews Government is mad, you know”. It’s about an article from The Oz today which I saw but skipped over. It is no longer safe to skip a thing if you are going to keep up with each new step into depravity. This is the story, Year 8 kids to study sex ads under ‘domestic violence’ curriculum, and I will just repeat the same quote from Andrew:

Students as young as 12 will study sexualised personal ads and write their own advertisements seeking the “perfect partner’’ as part of a new school curriculum supposed to combat family violence.

The classroom material includes an example ad from a “lustful, sexually generous’’ person seeking “sexy freak out with similarly intentioned woman’’.

Another ad — to be analysed by Year 8 students aged 12 and 13 — is from a “30-year-old blonde bombshell, wild and sexy, living in the fast lane’’.

“Can you keep up?’’ it asks.

A third example cites a “hot gay gal 19yo’’ who is seeking an “outgoing fem 18-25 into nature, sport and night-life for friendship and relationship’’.

Children are instructed to “write your own personal ad for the perfect partner’’.

The Building Respectful Relationships material, which is meant to prevent family violence, is replacing religious education lessons during class time in Victorian state schools this year. The Andrews Labor government yesterday announced it would spend $21.8 million over the next two years to expand the program to kindergarten and primary schools as part of its $572m package to combat family violence. The funding will target 120 “lighthouse schools’’ and train thousands of teachers, and up to 4000 childcare workers, to teach the respectful ­relationships program.

Are there really people in our departments of education who think this makes sense? Our students may need a safe space at school after all, but unfortunately, they may need it to keep themselves safe from their teachers.

On the road with Tony Abbott

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That’s our former Prime Minister in a karaoke moment in the middle of a bike ride through rural New South Wales. The title of the video is itself a mark of the kinds of fools who cannot recognise genuine goodness in people but prefer the fake socialist variety where no one does anything personally but leaves it to the government to tax others to do what they would never do themselves. The caption that comes with the vid:

Tony Abbott belts out karaoke in a wife-beater singlet singing John Denver classic ‘Country Roads’ with radio presenter Wes Heather.

Such disgusting superiority by people who have nothing to offer the world but their own warped opinions.

Fifty years too late

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Ohio State Shuts Down Student Occupation after Arrests, Expulsion Threatened: “‘If you refuse to leave, then you will be charged with a student code of conduct violation,’ [Ohio State Vice President Jay Kasey] said. ‘If you are here at 5:00 a.m. we will clear the building and you will be arrested.’ He added, ‘We will give you the opportunity to go to jail for your beliefs.’”

Or to be more explicit and to the point:

Kasey had little patience for it. “We told you, and all we can do is be honest with you. If you’re still here at 5:00, our current philosophy is, we are going to take you out — escort you out of the building and arrest you. You will be discharged from school also,” he noted.

Confused, one of the students asked, “discharged as in…?”

“Expelled,” Kasey answered flatly.

I was there at the dawn and while I was among those who might have camped out in the dean’s office had they done it where I went to school, my belief, then as now, was that we were let off too easy.

Via Instapundit

The classical theory of the cycle explained

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I received an email yesterday from someone in America who had read my Say’s Law and the Keynesian Revolution who was then proposing to write a blog about what he had found. And lo and behold, that he has now done: How Keynesian Economics Has Distorted Economic Thinking (Somewhat wonkish). It never occurred to me that all this stuff is for the more studious types, but there you are. Looks natural and straightforward to me. It’s this Keynesian nonsense that requires the effort. You can read the whole of his post at the link, but here’s how it ends:

Contrary to popular belief, Keynes and many of his followers have misrepresented classical economics. This has led many to renounce classical theory without realizing that it not only offers logical explanations for the business cycle, but that the classicalists were well-versed in and rejected Keynesianism before it became known as Keynesianism. And that’s a fact that merits more attention.

I, of course, go beyond the notion that these ideas merit more attention. I am along the lines that Keynesian theory should go the way of the labour theory of value and the textbooks that carry this debilitating infection should be consigned to the furnace. But that’s just me.

Finally, I will just mention the list of labels he has attached to his post:

Labels: Classical Theory, David Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste Say, John Maynard Keynes, John Stuart Mill, Keynesian Economics, Say’s Law

There they are, almost everything you need to know about what makes an economy go, specially that John Stuart Mill fellow, and Say’s Law.

Susie Kates

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IMG_1472

I thought this was exactly right:

The secret — and don’t worry, I’m not disclosing anything the feminists haven’t already figured out — is monogamous pair-bonding. Each man has to find exactly one woman and close the deal. Happily ever after, ’til death do you part, the whole package.

You don’t know it when you are young, specially in the way the world is now structured, where the sexual wilderness looks like a continuous adventure. But that is the true happiness, if you can find it.

Susie Kates, my one true love.

AND NOW LET ME ADD THIS: Written by a woman so don’t blame me: What Women Really Want Is The Patriarchy. Lots to choose from so you should read it all, but I will restrict myself to this:

As much as stuff is nice, many women still crave a stable, mutual, satiating romantic relationship with an assertive, authentic, direct man. This is normal. . . .

Women can have careers, be independent, strong, and happy, but if they want to do all this and attract the kind of man they really crave, they need to throw out the hallmarks of feminism that claim their male peers are domineering, stupid, misogynist authoritarians who will make their lives miserable. If anything, the opposite is true. The direct, honest, responsible, hard-working man many a woman desires can be just the type she’ll find, once she ditches the ideology that told her she didn’t need that to be happy in the first place.

Just remember, she wrote this and not me. I am merely an innocent bystander reporting while you decide. Found at Instapundit if you are looking for who to blame where, so it says in the comments, that this article has been banned on Facebook. I wonder why and who did it?

Writing in code

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One of the great philologists used to argue that you could not read the ancient Greek writers without appreciating that it was more than their lives were worth to actually say what they meant. Now we are unlikely to boil you in oil, but still, you might lose your writing gig at National Review if you said what you really meant. Take Victor Davis Hanson, who begins and ends his column on White versus White America, with the standard demand that we be spared a Donald Trump as President, but then says this in the middle:

Trump is not so much appealing to the ethnic prejudices of the white poor and working class, or playing on their perceived resentments of the Other. It’s more that he, a crass member of the elite (“It takes one to know one”), is resonating with their deep dislike of the hypocrisies of the white elite, both Republican and Democratic. Middle-class whites should be outraged at the cruel and gross manner in which Trump insulted John McCain and Megyn Kelly, but they are not. Perhaps, if asked, they would prefer to have the latter pair’s money and power if the price was an occasional little slapdown from Donald Trump. What they see as outrageous is not Trump’s crude “Get out of here” to Spanish-language newscaster Jorge Ramos, but rather the multimillionaire dual-citizen Ramos predicating his con on a perpetual pool of non–English speakers, many of whom have broken federal immigration law in a way a citizen would not dare break the law on his tax return or DMV application. For an angry Arizonan, ridiculing “low energy” Jeb is not as crude as Jeb’s own crude “act of love” description of illegal immigration. An act of love for exactly whom?

What is the perceived white elite? Perhaps a Hillary Clinton raking in $300,000 per half hour at UCLA or shaking down Wall Street for $600,000, even as she pontificates on privilege and the dangers of racism (obviously embraced, in her view, by whites other than those of her class). Or a Chelsea Clinton deprecating the attraction of riches, as her Wall Street internships and marriage perpetuate the Clinton model of pay-for-play enrichment — all to be camouflaged by professions of progressive empathy. Or an elite media that snores when an ex-president of the United States jumps on the private plane of convicted child-assaulter Jeffrey Epstein for a trip to his fantasy island. Or a former anti-government “conservative” congressman who hangs around Washington and mysteriously becomes a multimillionaire leveraging his past government service. Our popular culture is one of Pajama Boy, Mattress Girl, and the whiny, nasal-toned young metrosexual with high-water pants above his ankles and horn-rimmed glasses who “analyzes” on cable news. Is it any wonder that millions sympathized with the heroism of Benghazi’s middle-class defenders rather than with the contortions of the far better-educated, smoother, more sensitive, and wealthier Rhodes scholar Susan Rice, novelist Ben Rhodes, or former First Lady Hillary Clinton?

Whom do these sometimes incoherent Trump supporters likely despise? I would wager anyone who has never been sideswiped in a hit-and-run by an illegal-alien driver but lectures others on why “illegal alien” is a racist term; anyone who has lucrative government employment and whose job description does not exist in the poorer-paying private sector; any politician or his appendage who somehow became quite wealthy on a GS salary in Washington; anyone who makes more than $50 an hour and lectures others on why the country is going broke and must tighten its belt; anyone who sermonizes on free trade and knows few people who ever lost jobs through outsourcing; anyone who freely uses the word “white” in a way and context that he would never use “black” or “Latino”; or anyone who hires someone else to clean his house, watch his kids, and take care of his yard, and then lectures others on their illiberality.

Or to put it this way, whom do these sometimes very coherent Trump supporters likely despise? I’ll leave it to you to work it out.

Stagnant economic thought

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This is Paul Kelly writing on Staying smart in dangerous post-GFC world. Doesn’t look all that smart to me, but this is what he writes:

The world suffers from what former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers brands “The Age of Secular Stagnation”, the failure of economies to recover from the 2008-09 global financial crisis, the upshot being weak growth, low or negative interest rates, rising asset prices, more inequality and poor investment.

That is, the failure to recover has been caused by the failure to recover. Hard to argue with, but also not much guidance either. Secular stagnation is the ultra-version of Keynesian economics – as Alvin Hansen said, “secular stagnation is just another name for Keynes’s underemployment equilibrium”. We are all so satisfied with our living standards or something that no one wants to spend on anything any more. So the economy just vegetates. Here’s the Summers’ version:

Secular stagnation may be a reason that US growth is insufficient to reach full employment: “Suppose then that the short term real interest rate that was consistent with full employment . . . had fallen to negative two or negative three percent.”

And then Kelly quotes something else:

The former governor of the Bank of England during the crisis, Mervyn King, in his recent book The End of Alchemy, argues that while the 1930s Depression produced a robust policy response this has not been replicated in the years since the GFC.

“Without reform of the financial system, another crisis is certain and the failure to tackle the disequilibrium in the world economy makes it likely that it will come sooner rather than later,” King says. “Since the end of the immediate banking crisis in 2009 recovery has been anaemic at best. There was a continuing shortfall of demand and output from the pre-crisis trend path of close to 15 per cent.” . . .

There is, moreover, no sign of any substantial recovery, with King warning that “markets do not expect interest rates to return to normal for many years”.

Actually quite scary. More on Summers, and just as scary:

Summers fears a recession, after a weak post-GFC recovery, “would strongly suggest that the current stagnation is secular — that is, indefinite — rather than merely cyclical or temporary”. That is, instead of moving ahead to a period of normalisation the world might be only part way through a slow growth era “shaped by previously unthinkable and far-fetched policies” like negative real interest rates.

The idea is that there is an interest-rate policy that will get us out of this mess is probably the most far-fetched idea of the lot. But what makes this such an interesting column is how Kelly is able to sum up in a single para where we stand and what we urgently need to do.

The core need is for policies that recognise the real problems and priorities, making the 2016 election a plus, not a minus, for the nation and keeping the destructive populists at bay.

The destructive populists are Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn wouldn’t know one end of a balance sheet from the other. Trump, however, is the only person running for high office anywhere who has actually run a productive value-adding business for many many years. Why you would trust him to get an economy going when we have Hillary or Bernie Sanders sitting in the wings instead is completely beyond me.

George Soros is more dangerous than Angela Merkel

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Naturally in an English paper, this time The Daily Express. You won’t find this mentioned in the US. EU is in ‘mortal danger’ of collapse, warns billionaire global finance guru George Soros unless it spends £24 BILLION EVERY YEAR to tackle the migrant crisis.

Mr Soros said EU leaders needed to agree a surge in funding to deal with the influx of more than a million refugees flooding into Europe.

He suggested that at least €30 billion (£24 billion) a year would be needed and said Europe should be looking to accept between 300,000 and 500,000 a year.

Mr Soros said: “Thirty billion might sound like an enormous sum, but it is not when viewed in proper perspective.

“First, we must recognise that a failure to provide the necessary funds would cost the EU even more.

“There is a real threat that the refugee crisis could cause the collapse of Europe’s Schengen system of open internal borders among 26 European states.

“The asylum seekers are desperate.

“Legitimate refugees must be offered a reasonable chance to reach their destinations in Europe.

“EU leaders need to embrace the idea that effectively addressing the crisis will require “surge” funding, rather than scraping together insufficient funds year after year.

Soros is channelling immense amounts of money to every presidential candidate in the US – Democrat or Republican – except for Donald Trump. This is what he wants and every candidate will give him that except for one.

Voter judgment and Donald Trump

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This is a post about political judgment, or more to the point, the lack thereof. And it relates to Donald Trump versus Justin Trudeau. First Canada and its previous PM, Stephen Harper:

The fact that he steered the country safely through the market crash of 2008, signed lucrative international trade deals, kept taxes down, reduced the GST (Goods and Services Tax) and provided the country with a balanced budget plainly counted for nothing. His emendation of citizenship protocols in an effort to check the spread of culturally barbaric practices, chiefly associated with Islam, counted against him. At the end of the day, he was simply unlikeable, he was “Harperman,” and he had to go.

Compared with Harper we have Trudeau:

Trudeau has been in office for half a year, more than enough time to engineer the rapid deterioration of a once-prosperous and relatively secure nation. He has brought in 25,000 “Syrians” and is aiming for many thousands more, all living off the public dole and no doubted salted with aspiring jihadists. He intends to build mosques (which he calls “religious centers”) on military bases and is re-accrediting Muslim terror-affiliated organizations that Harper defunded. He inherited Harper’s balanced budget and in just a few short months was busy at work racking up a $29.4 billion deficit. Not to worry, since Trudeau is on record saying that budgets balance themselves. Magic is afoot.

So the issue is now Trump or not Trump. The summation which is similar to my own:

Would any sane person choose a Trudeau-type figure over a Harper or a Trump to lead their country into a problematic future? The larger issue is whether any reasonable person should predicate his voting preference on personal liking or disliking. Trudeau is intellectually vapid, has the wrong instincts, and is unlearnable. But he is liked. As for Trump, I am not suggesting that he would be a better choice than Cruz may be or Rubio may have been, though I suspect he might. He still has much to learn about the intricacies and priorities of governing and about looking “presidential.” What matters is that a candidate for political office is smart, has the right instincts, and is willing to learn. I believe Trump qualifies in these respects. Disliking him is beside the point.

Writing for The Federalist, Timm Amundson acknowledges that Trump can be rude, arrogant and reckless, and asks: “How can a principled, pragmatic, deliberate conservative be drawn to such a candidate?” And answers: “It is because I believe conservatism doesn’t stand a chance in this country without first delivering a very heavy dose of populism,” that is, “a platform built largely on the principle of economic nationalism…focus[ing] on three primary policy areas: trade, defense, and immigration.” This is Trump’s bailiwick.

So we are into an American election where all of the best educated are siding with candidates that will doom their country because they do not personally like Trump, or prefer a woman irrespective of any other considerations. But the #NeverTrump are the worse buffoons of all, but there you are since they may yet carry the day.