Monthly Archives: May 2016

A vote for the Liberals is not a vote for Malcolm

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We all know that Malcolm Turnbull would not lift a finger to stop illegal immigration if things were up to him. The boats would just roll on in and nothing of consequence would be done. If you are looking for a reminder, you can find one here. He is a shallow narcissist, but most importantly represents none of the values that brought the Coalition to government in 2013. In contrast, I do not know what Bill Shorten himself believes, other than that he believes with all his heart that the polling shows that stopping the boats is a major aim across Australia. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for us, many of his Parliamentary colleagues prefer virtue signalling to winning the next election.

Here, however, is what we find today: Federal election 2016: Turnbull leaves Shorten at sea over refugees.

Malcolm Turnbull has captured the necessary spirit on asylum-seekers for a Coalition leader and confronted suggestions that he is “soft on boats”.

There was no lawyerly dissembling for the Prime Minister yesterday; no awkward body language nor any weasel words as he not only defended Peter ­Dutton’s unvarnished reality about the financial cost of taking refugees, but also refined and ­extended the argument.

Turnbull heartily embraced the Immigration Minister’s “brutal” and “no sugar-coated” view of ­illegal boat arrivals and the cost of caring for refugees after Bill ­Shorten tried to turn border protection into a positive for Labor.

He might well have picked up one of Tony’s old set of speaking notes as he left for the press conference. Even as dense as he is, he knows that in the party he is the nominal leader of, he has no choice but to take this line. The slightest softness and he might well be cut down overnight by the party room. But as the next para in the story puts it:

Labor hopes to prove Turnbull inconsistent and insincere on ­social issues he once supported.

And that’s just the point. Malcolm’s own personal beliefs count for absolutely nothing. This is the view of the party room and it is absolutely united on this one issue, which may yet be the decisive issue in this election. There is then the National Party after that.

The idea of voting out the Coalition to teach those traitorous 52 Liberals a lesson is so bizarrely self-defeating that it leaves me dumbfounded. Rather than being Machiavellian – daringly clever in achieving some subtle but desirable conspiratorial end – it is the absolute opposite. It can never make sense to give your enemies a victory they don’t deserve. Losing is not a form of winning. Malcolm being the empty suit he is, will soon find the international environment dominated by a new President of the United States who is in many important respects, the American Tony Abbott. Malcolm will therefore adjust his views to suit the time, and one can only hope that sometime in 2017, he will be given his own gold (Cartier) watch and shoved out the Parliamentary door. Malcolm’s authority is diminishing each day as others begin to see him for what he is. There is so much political insanity around, getting the Libs back may be one of the most crucial election results in Australian history.

There is no such thing as a predictive theory of surprise, change and innovation

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The argument is not new, which only means that it is a truth long known: The new astrology – By fetishising mathematical models, economists turned economics into a highly paid pseudoscience. But I have to say that this is a very long and tedious article, so long and tedious that no one will ever read it, at least among the economists. And this is point blank wrong:

After the Great Recession, the failure of economic science to protect our economy was once again impossible to ignore.

The failure of economic theory has been the least discussed issue among economists I have ever seen. If there has been a serious post mortem, I haven’t come across it. And the supposed issue, if any has arisen, has been the failure to predict the GFC which could never have been predicted. Even trying to trace it after it all happened has been near impossible. A crisis will almost inevitably seem to come from nowhere, although there will be some who can say afterwards that they could see it all before. The actual problem is with the theory itself, but let us go to the text to see what they have to say:

Ultimately, the problem is . . . with uncritical worship of the language used to model them, and nowhere is this more prevalent than in economics. The economist Paul Romer at New York University has recently begun calling attention to an issue he dubs ‘mathiness’ – first in the paper ‘Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth’ (2015) and then in a series of blog posts. Romer believes that macroeconomics, plagued by mathiness, is failing to progress as a true science should, and compares debates among economists to those between 16th-century advocates of heliocentrism and geocentrism. Mathematics, he acknowledges, can help economists to clarify their thinking and reasoning. But the ubiquity of mathematical theory in economics also has serious downsides: it creates a high barrier to entry for those who want to participate in the professional dialogue, and makes checking someone’s work excessively laborious. Worst of all, it imbues economic theory with unearned empirical authority. . . .

Romer is not the first to elaborate the mathiness critique. In 1886, an article in Science accused economics of misusing the language of the physical sciences to conceal ‘emptiness behind a breastwork of mathematical formulas’. More recently, Deirdre N McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics (1998) and Robert H Nelson’s Economics as Religion (2001) both argued that mathematics in economic theory serves, in McCloskey’s words, primarily to deliver the message ‘Look at how very scientific I am.’

You cannot use maths because there is nothing to count, or at least nothing to count that really counts. That, and the fact that what was true last year is only the most imperfect guide to what will happen next. You cannot have a predictive theory of surprise, change and innovation. You can only have a theory of what conditions will lead to surprise, change and innovation, but that was done by the 1850s.

The Murdoch-Trump alliance

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I might start being able to read The Oz again: Why Rupert Murdoch Decided to Back Donald Trump. It is dearly to be wished. From which:

The Murdoch-Trump alliance is the result of at least two private meetings between the billionaires this spring as well as phone calls from Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Murdoch’s view, according to those who’ve spoken with him, is that Trump is a winner whom the “elites” failed to take seriously. “He doesn’t like people to be snobs and treat Trump like a clown,” one person explained. Murdoch’s outlook is also informed by his take on the winnowed GOP field. When it came down to the final three candidates, Murdoch simply saw Trump as the best option. “He never liked Cruz,” the source explained. Kasich made a personal pitch to Murdoch that he could win on a second ballot at the convention, but failed to persuade. In March, Murdoch tweeted that the GOP would “be mad not to unify” behind Trump.

And hopefully after our election, he can have another look at Turnbull again, assuming the Libs win, of course. I look forward to Niki Savva’s next book on The Subtle Genius and Hidden Strengths of Tony Abbott. But first the Coalition has to win.

A little test you can try at home

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Scott Adams – that’ right, Dilbert’s Scott Adams – on About those policy details. It is Trump’s policy details he had in mind, but the issue is no doubt universal in democracies if the argument is actually valid:

Here’s a little test you can try at home. In your mind, divide your friends and coworkers into two groups. One group understands a lot about making business decisions and one group has no business experience. Ask each of them individually this question:

How much detail should Trump provide on his policies?

A. Lots of detail so we know exactly what he plans to do.

B. We only need the big picture now because the details will be negotiated later, and the environment will change by then. Also, presidents have access to better advice and information than candidates.

I predict that your most experienced friends and coworkers will choose B. Let me know in the comments how it goes.

By the time I got to it, there were 3651 comments.

Life’s essential skills

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A list of 25 Essential Skills I Wish Somebody Taught Me When I Was Younger. I will give you the last one, but if this is 25th, and it rightly belongs at the end, think of how useful the previous 24 might be:

25. How To Manage Your Personal Finances

Rule #1: Spend less than you earn.

Rule #2: Get another source of income (possibly a passive one)

Rule #3: Invest in assets (opportunities that have Return on Investment)

“Some of these,” as he writes, “can be learned within several hours while some require more than that. But, you have to know that learning even one of these skills can help you grow exponentially and give you incredible results in every area of your life.”

An even more than usually repulsive and disgusting anti-Trump “conservative”

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This time it is Bill Kristol who has a strategy of his own to stop Trump, explained here.

Their plan is to run a candidate who could win three states and enough votes in the electoral college to deny both parties the needed majority. This would throw the election into the House of Representatives, which would then elect a candidate the Kristol group found acceptable. The fact that this would nullify the largest vote ever registered for a Republican primary candidate, the fact that it would jeopardize the Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, and more than likely make Hillary Clinton president, apparently doesn’t faze Kristol and company at all.

And why should Trump be stopped. These are hardly the kind of specifics that amount to any kind of charge at all:

Their chief justification for opposing Trump is that he is not a “constitutional conservative” and in fact is “without principles” and therefore dangerous. The evidence offered is that he has supported Democrats in the past and changed his positions on important issues.

A second charge against Trump is that his character is so bad (worse than Hillary’s or Bill’s?) that no right-thinking Republican could regard him as White House worthy.

In addition to alleging that Trump is lacking in principles and character, Kristol claims that the Republican candidate is a crackpot conspiracy theorist, a disqualifying trait. Kristol’s evidence is a remark Trump made on the eve of the Indiana primary suggesting that Ted Cruz’s father might have something to hide about his alleged acquaintance with Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

The article is by David Horowitz and the title is “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew”. I might have had some qualms about the title, but Horowitz explains himself in a way I am completely sympathetic with.

All these dishonesties and flim-flam excuses pale by comparison with the consequences Kristol and his “Never Trump” cohorts are willing to risk by splitting the Republican vote. Obama has provided America’s mortal enemy, Iran, with a path to nuclear weapons, $150 billion dollars, and the freedom to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver the lethal payloads. Trump has promised to abandon the Iran deal, while Hillary Clinton and all but a handful of Democrats have supported this treachery from start to finish. Kristol is now one of their allies.

I am a Jew who has never been to Israel and has never been a Zionist in the sense of believing that Jews can rid themselves of Jew hatred by having their own nation state. But half of world Jewry now lives in Israel, and the enemies whom Obama and Hillary have empowered — Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, ISIS, and Hamas — have openly sworn to exterminate the Jews. I am also an American (and an American first), whose country is threatened with destruction by the same enemies. To weaken the only party that stands between the Jews and their annihilation, and between America and the forces intent on destroying her, is a political miscalculation so great and a betrayal so profound as to not be easily forgiven.

Utterly beyond the pale and all comprehension. Kristol is siding with the greatest carriers of evil in our time, and a bleak centuries-long future for the entire human race will be the result of their success. The arrogant, smug brainlessness of those who would risk the election of Hillary where there is no other viable candidate beyond Donald Trump makes these people vile and despicable. And that goes for Commentary who has published this article by Jonathan Tobin criticising Horowitz titled, Breitbart’s ‘Renegade Jew’ Disgrace. And beyond that, it extends to Powerline, who has made Tobin’s article one of its “picks”. Unforgivable and worthless.

REACTIONS TO THE HOROWITZ ARTICLE: Just because they state the obvious does not make it nonetheless true: Renegade Conservative Site BREITBART’s Sin–Not Anti-Semitism, But Pro-Trumpism.

AND NOW TO ADD TO THE REST: Found here:

David Horowitz incidentally has been a great friend to me over the years. I have known him since I was 15 years old when I once worked for Alan Dershowitz. He is now a Trump delegate and I know he will have Trump’s ear on the issues that matter regarding world peace.

Wow. If ever there were a killer argument to vote for The Donald, that is it.

A case study of a Trump supporter who works for the Murdoch press

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If you work for Murdoch, them’s the rules. You cannot support Donald Trump for president. So let us see how Tim Blair gets around it.

A number of friends and many readers are fans of Donald Trump. That’s OK. I understand his appeal, even if he’s a fraud. Although it’s true that he does sometimes make the right calls:

Donald Trump on Friday picked a prominent climate change skeptic to help him craft his energy policy and pushed back against renewed calls that he release his income tax returns — saying his tax rate is “none of your business.”

But for Melbourne-based artist and writer Aubrey Perry, support for Trump is an absolute deal-breaker. This applies even when Trump’s supporters are her parents:

I’d known for a while that my mum was open to the idea of Trump as her candidate. My dad has been a Trump supporter from the beginning. But I’ve lived in Australia for the past seven years. They live in the US. We text and Facebook with each other, but we don’t discuss politics.

And I don’t use Twitter much. But, wow. My mum does. I recently checked her Twitter page for the first time in a while and was shocked …

I was shocked.

I told her so. Publicly. Finally. I wrote back, “Your Twitter feed makes me disappointed and embarrassed of you as a person, a supposed critical thinker, and my mother. Shocked.”

Here’s her mother’s Twitter page. It isn’t shocking at all. It’s just the opinions of someone who happens to be very enthusiastic about a certain presidential candidate. Yet this has led Aubrey to denounce her family as racists and to “sever all ties with my parents as long as they promote these ideologies of hate and xenophobia”.

A reminder to Aubrey, who is evidently a Clinton backer: Hillary attended Trump’s wedding. Shocked!

But do go to her mother’s twitter page and you will find a quite nicely put and succinct summary of why sensible people support Trump and abominate Hillary. Lots to see, but this one I liked best, specially in this context:

women for trump

Why Democrat are guaranteed to be corrupt and sleazy

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From The New York Times, in a story with the title, Little Is Off Limits as Donald Trump Plans Attacks on Hillary Clinton’s Character.

Donald J. Trump plans to throw Bill Clinton’s infidelities in Hillary Clinton’s face on live television during the presidential debates this fall, questioning whether she enabled his behavior and sought to discredit the women involved.

Mr. Trump will try to hold her accountable for security lapses at the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and for the death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens there.

And he intends to portray Mrs. Clinton as fundamentally corrupt, invoking everything from her cattle futures trades in the late 1970s to the federal investigation into her email practices as secretary of state.

These are all true. The question is why he is the only one who would use these stories? That is what is wrong with American politics and its media. If telling the truth about Democrats in relation to character issues that matter is considered unfair, the election of Democrats of bad character is guaranteed.