But before that there was this:
Impressive and amazing.
The most original juggler I have ever seen
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Monthly Archives: May 2016
The “I will resign as soon as elected” party
If it is still possible, someone must run in Wentworth as part of the “I will resign as soon as elected” party which will have only a single policy: if elected I will resign the moment the Liberal Party chooses a new leader. Is it too late? This is from Andrew Bolt:
Turnbull Government ministers and influential backbenchers at first did not believe me when I reported that Malcolm Turnbull had quietly had a Greens candidate, Lin Hatfield Dodds, made one of the deputy secretaries of his Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, in charge of his social policy.
Incredible, but true.
Here is how Hatfield Dodd’s job was first advertised, suggesting the power this Greens candidate will now have with Turnbull, whose slogans shape the job description.
Go to the link and read it all. Perhaps Labor really is the lesser of two evils.
Still news, but not for long
Pretty soon, this will be so common it won’t even be news: Attack victim claims police told her to dye hair.
The 20-year-old, who was hospitalised after the attack by four men in which she was beaten and robbed, told Heute newspaper: “I felt so helpless.”
“I had been standing on the platform waiting for the train when a man came up to me and spoke to me in a foreign language. He then started putting his hands through my hair and made it clear that in his cultural background there were hardly any blonde women. I told him to go away, and for a short while he really did go away.”
“But it was only to get his pals and a bit later he came back with three others. They stole my handbag and my cards.”
And if that was not enough, she said that the four had then attacked her, bashing her to the ground in a rage before running off.
She said that from what they had said she understood they were from Afghanistan and that as she lay on the floor in agony nobody on the platform had helped.
After being treated at hospital for bruising to her head, shoulder and elbow as well as her spine and hips, she went to police.
And her distress had turned to anger when police had told her that she should change her hair colour and should not have been travelling alone after 8pm on public transport.
Which really means they cannot think of a thing to do to protect her.
Living in a virtual reality policy bubble
How do you account for this: Obama report card: Approval up, economy down? In fact, Obama’s approval rating remains well up into his eighth year in office in spite of the wreckage not just to the economy, but to the American health care system, the refugee crisis across the Middle East and throughout Europe, the open borders on the American south (and increasingly its north), continuous reductions in living standards, worsening racial relations, and an all-round deterioration in every aspect of American life. You account for it by understanding that the average American knows less about America than you do, and lives in a media bubble almost as tight as the bubble that once surrounded the Soviet Union.
Which is why this remains the single most important story of the Obama years because it explains everything else that would otherwise be inexplicable:
In the New York Times Sunday Magazine, David Samuels details how Ben Rhodes, a script writer, author of the Beloit Journal fiction piece titled “The Goldfish Smiles, You Smile Back,” and brother of CBS president David Rhodes, a man with zero foreign policy experience, shaped and promoted the president’s foreign policy narratives. Samuels observes: “His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling.” (In this respect, of course, he matches the president’s foreign policy background: None.) The article details how these two shaped and spun make-believe about the facts and their policies and with the aid of a supine press and a number of think tanks and social media outlets helped propagate the false narratives these two wove out of their fantasies.
This story happens to be about foreign policy. But it is just as true about every aspect of policy undertaken by Obama. The media, along with a relative handful of “think tanks” and social media outlets, has been able to stop dead in its tracks serious discussion about every aspect of policy. The deliberate warping of reality that surrounds every voter is not just the accidental result of politics as usual. It is the specifically designed outcome of the Obama White House.
In an article published in Quadrant in 2013, I wrote about the virtually identical Obama technique in winning the election he ought never to have won in 2012: The New Politics of Data-Driven Elections. This was the central point although there were many ancillary issues raised as well.
The media everywhere have generally been supporters of the Left. But whether because of the limited availability of alternative sources of information or because of an even more decided shift to the Left, the flow of information to the community is now so entirely biased that straightforward reporting of the views of a mainstream party of the Right can hardly find its way into the national conversation. In many respects during the election, media reports and analysis consisted of Democratic Party talking points. For the Republican Party, as for all parties of the Right, it is as if all games are away games with the media providing the crowd noise. A goal by the home team comes with cheers and general all-round satisfaction; a goal by the other side is met with polite applause or even silence. A foul behind play by a player on the team from the Left is taken as part of the rough and tumble of the game; a much lesser offence committed by the Right-of-centre away team brings down the hostility of the crowd—that is, the mass condemnation of the media.
And it is not that the media are in some ordinary sense corrupt and corrupted. They are not influenced to take positions against their own beliefs. It is, instead, that these are the views of the mainstream media. They call it as they see it, but they see it with eyes far to the Left. It is not possible to succeed in the media unless one sees the issues in this way. The hiring practices of mainstream media organisations (the MSM) are designed in a kind of apostolic succession of like-minded individuals of the Left in major positions of influence.
These same techniques have become Obama’s standard means of governance. The following para from the Samuels article, with its direct quotes, ought to be the single most damning statement ever written about the media. But even though it is being discussed across the right side of politics in the United States, it is an absolute non-story where it counts, in the conscious understanding among Americans of how deeply they are being manipulated at every turn.
Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Rhodes can say it in print, spitting in the eye not just of every Democrat opponent but also into the eyes of the reporters he describes, because after more than seven years in the White House he knows you and they don’t count. Conservative opinions are of no consequence since whatever influence we might think we have in writing blog posts and specialist articles read by like-minded people, they are utterly irrelevant given the forces that are ranged against us. If Obama can permit Iran to build nuclear weapons in plain sight of everyone without bringing the world down on his head, what is it you think he cannot do by using the same techniques across every other area of government policy?
The single most important story of the Obama years
This is the single most important story in the last eight years. It involves the utterly absurd and bizarre way in which American foreign policy is made, and the absence to an infinite degree of the media as a check on government. It explains better than anything I have read why the Western world is finished and done. If you are not on top of this story, you have no serious conception about how deranged the world in which you live actually is.
I have discussed it already – The Obama White House counted on the ignorance and stupidity of the media – but my impression from the lack of interest and the comments is that no one thinks of this as anything very much at all and I don’t just mean here but everywhere. Perhaps there is a weariness in dealing with Obama and his lying that everyone just says, so what else is new? For me, however, this is one of the most clarifying stories I have ever read since what it says is that there is literally nothing that a party of the left can do that will cause outrage. Literally nothing at all. And the blame here cannot be landed on the left, but on the right, who has no idea how to fight and so far as the party administrations on the right are concerned, are of zero use at all. If anyone can read this and then worry about Donald Trump, they are too hopelessly gone. We will deserve what we get if the one lifeline we are finally thrown is rejected. All of the following are different takes on this same story.
Richard Fernandez: The Men Who Would Be King
Thomas Ricks: A stunning profile of Ben Rhodes, the asshole who is the president’s foreign policy guru
John Podhoretz: White House admits it played us for fools to sell Iran deal
Lee Smith: Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru Boasts of How the Administration Lied to Sell the Iran Deal
The Daily Mail: White House BRAGS about how it tricked reporters into cheerleading for Obama’s Iran nuclear deal by creating a media ‘echo chamber’
Alex Griswold: Obama Advisor Openly Brags About Lying to Public, Media Yawns
Claudia Rosette: Meet the Flimflam Man Behind Obama’s Foreign Policy ‘Narrative’
Eli Lake: Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru Is the ‘Blob’ He Hates
David Gerstman:Grand Deception: How Obama and Ben Rhodes Lied Us Into the Iran nuke deal
David Rutz: Seven Takeaways from the NY Times Profile of Failed Novelist Ben Rhodes
Paul Fahri: Obama official says he pushed a ‘narrative’ to media to sell the Iran nuclear deal
Scott Johnson: The runt of Rhodes
Clarice Feldman: An Epiphany on the Road to Tehran
Jed Babbin: The Eight-Year Amateur Hour
New York Daily News: Obama’s Iran scam: The President hard sale of the nuclear deal with the mullahs was chock full of spin and half-truths
Washington Examiner: How Obama plays his adoring fans in the press
Fred Flietz: Ben Rhodes: The Sycophantic Political Operative Shaping Obama’s Foreign Policy
Nicole Duran: Obama blasts Trump: ‘This is not entertainment’ or a ‘reality show’
Ed Driscoll: BEN RHODES SAYS OTHERWISE. Obama hammers Trump: Presidential Race ‘not a reality show’
Aaron Klein: 7 Shocking Revelations in NY Times’ Profile of Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru
Aaron Klein: NY Times: White House Used ‘Often Misleading Or False’ Narrative To Sell Iran Deal To ‘Clueless’ Reporters
John Podhoretz: “Meet the Press” panel doesn’t discuss Obama @morningmoneyben House gloating about scamming America on Iran and insulting WH reporters
Aaron McLean: Ben Rhodes, Liar
Lee Smith: The Ben Rhodes Blow-up
Daniel Drezner: My extremely lukewarm take on Ben Rhodes
Carlos Lozada: Why the Ben Rhodes profile in the New York Times Magazine is just gross
Clifford May: Obama’s ‘boy wonder’
Scott Johnson: The Goldberg Variations
Patrick L. Smith: Did the New York Times just accidentally tell the truth about the Obama administration?
John R. Schindler: As Boyish Ben Rhodes Drops Truth Bombs, Obama’s Media Mask Crumbles
The Diplomad: On the Iran Deal: Guess What?
Michael Totten: Washington’s Idiotic Echo Chamber
The Observer: Deception on—Not Just in—Iran
What I cannot fathom is why this is not the single most debated issue on the conservative right side of politics. There are thirty-five stories that I have collected to go with my own which are listed in the order in which they were found. Everyone sees how sensationally incredible this is, but no matter how much tinder there is, it is obviously not possible to generate genuine heat about any issue since it will never enter in any way into the mainstream media and therefore into popular consciousness. This is the world we are in. And this is the problem we are facing on the right if we cannot find a means to break through and have a scandal of such dimension recognised for what it is. You really do have to appreciate that Rhodes could say without any concern that he, a failed novelist, is the single most important influence on Obama’s foreign policy and have it confirmed by others in the White House. And I regret to say that even those among us who read these blogs don’t see this as the absolute beyond the pale scandal it is because they didn’t read it on a front page or see it repeated on the news for three nights in a row.
Trump endorsing Netanyahu in 2013 Israeli election
More of the story here.
The man who organized the video endorsement and the interview was 30-year-old British-born public relations phenom Jonny Daniels, who runs the Holocaust commemoration organization From The Depths and is arguably the Israeli closest to Trump. . . .
“It is very good news for Israel that he will be the Republican candidate for president, because we really do have a good friend in Donald Trump,” Daniels said. “I’m not sure people realize who he is beyond his media persona. He is a politician playing politics, and there are certain things you do and say for votes, and if it’s inflammatory so be it. Netanyahu and Obama have also reached out to their voter base, and that’s what Trump has been doing.”
Meanwhile, the editor of the Weekly Standard, supposedly a friend of Israel, is trying to organise a different candidate from the right. These are the friends of Hillary and therefore the deepest most implacable enemies of Israel, not to mention the United States: Mitt Romney met privately with William Kristol, who is leading the effort to draft an independent candidate. If you want to know why Republicans are beyond useless, this is hard to beat:
Thursday, both Kristol and Romney attended an awards gala for American Friends of The Hebrew University, an area group that supports the Jerusalem-based school.
At the dinner, when asked in front of the attendees about possibly running as an independent this year, Romney said he was not interested.
“No, I’m certainly going to be hoping that we find someone who I have my confidence in who becomes nominee. I don’t intend on supporting either of the major-party candidates at this point,” Romney said, according to the Washington Examiner.
But, Romney added, “I am dismayed at where we are now, I wish we had better choices, and I keep hoping that somehow things will get better, and I just don’t see an easy answer from where we are.”
Thursday, that is AFTER Trump had locked the nomination process up. Whose side are these people on, because it does not appear to be on the same side as those who support the long-term survival of the Israeli state.
Free trade is just another word for nothing left to lose
Comparative advantage is obviously true: you can get more output if production is undertaken by producers who use fewer resources per unit of output. Can also be explained as recommending that production should be undertaken by the lowest cost producers if maximising production is the aim. And as with every statement such as this in economics, it comes with the proviso “all other things being equal”.
One of the bits about free trade I like to tease others with is that every trade negotiation is about concessions to reduce one’s own trade protection so that we can have the opportunity to sell more of our stuff to them. But they will only do that if we give them greater access to sell their stuff in our markets. No one, but absolutely no one, begins from the proposition that since free trade is so great, we will cut our tariffs and trade protection to zero and then cream all of the great advantages it will thereafter bring.
Which brings me to this article from which the above graph was taken: If trade made the US rich, explain this graph. Here’s the most specific para but do read the lot:
If your argument is founded on logical fallacies and theories that do not match reality, perhaps the belief is wrong. It goes without saying that the situation is complex, but to some extent, that is irrelevant. The result is what matters, and for as far as reliable records go back, the result is wrong.
Obviously, many, many, many other things are not equal but that is, of course, the point. Economic theory is looking like just so much hot air even here. The adjustment process is not instantaneous but requires immense restructuring that can take a generation. You know that business about there being no such thing as a free lunch. Maybe we should start thinking that maybe there’s no such thing as free trade either. No adjustment comes without costs. And when you add them in, free trade may be less of the bargain we traditionally think it is.
The arguments for free trade never envisaged a monstrous welfare and bureaucratic class either, where their level of demand was unrelated to the provision of value adding goods and services. And that’s just where criticism of the traditional theory might start.
The decline of the West – another take
I came across this article on Cognitive decline: the irreducible legacy of open borders reading the comments on a post by Captain Capitalism on the same issue with the provocative title: Who Will Pay for Everything When the White People are Gone?
Whatever you might see as the cause, there is no doubt that wealth generation in an environment of personal and political freedom was first achieved by the culture of the North Atlantic, and it is these economies that have continued to succeed where others have not. The template is there for anyone to adopt, and has been in Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and a scattered few others. But it is the North Atlantic tribes and their diaspora who have done far better than the rest. Here is the core of the message found in the first article:
A country’s economic success is causally connected to the intelligence of its people; that a nation of dimwits cannot compete with a nation of philosophers; and that between the simpleton and the savant lies a distribution of intellect that differs among peoples. Immigration from the third world will move the center of gravity of brainpower down the IQ spectrum, and in the long run, through influx, fecundity and gene flow, will have a lasting effect.
The basis of all this is described as “smart fraction theory”.
The fundamental assertion of smart fraction theory is that per capita GDP is proportional to the size of a country’s smart fraction, a proposition established empirically in The Smart Fraction Theory of IQ and the Wealth of Nations and also in Smart Fraction Theory II: Why Asians Lag, where it was determined that a verbal IQ of about 106 sets the lower bound of the smart fraction.
The rest is math along with the four laws outlined. There to be read at the link along with the article by Captain Capitalism who provides his own projections of what this will mean for living standards as time goes by. We have been living through a Golden Age.
The Obama White House counted on the ignorance and stupidity of the media
This is how the foreign-policy media is described by the would-be novelist who manages American foreign policy: “They literally know nothing.” You don’t know about this? Maybe it’s for the best if you want to continue to sleep peacefully through the night. Just read the rest below and think how much greater the depth and professionalism of a Trump White House will be. This may be the single most astounding revelation about the abysmal Obama administration to have surfaced, although no doubt more will be revealed as the years go by.
As with almost everything else of significance, if you haven’t been following this story, it’s only because it’s almost impossible to find in your local press. But it does start at The New York Times and is about someone named Ben Rhodes: The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru. So begin with this from the story:
The Boy Wonder of the Obama White House is now 38. . . .
As the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, Rhodes writes the president’s speeches, plans his trips abroad and runs communications strategy across the White House, tasks that, taken individually, give little sense of the importance of his role. He is, according to the consensus of the two dozen current and former White House insiders I talked to, the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from Potus himself.
And this is a bit more on who he is and what he does:
According to Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff, who is known for captaining a tight ship, “I see it throughout the day in person,” he says, adding that he is sure that in addition to the two to three hours that Rhodes might spend with Obama daily, the two men communicate remotely throughout the day via email and phone calls. Rhodes strategized and ran the successful Iran-deal messaging campaign, helped negotiate the opening of American relations with Cuba after a hiatus of more than 50 years and has been a co-writer of all of Obama’s major foreign-policy speeches. “Every day he does 12 jobs, and he does them better than the other people who have those jobs,” Terry Szuplat, the longest-tenured member of the National Security Council speechwriting corps, told me. On the largest and smallest questions alike, the voice in which America speaks to the world is that of Ben Rhodes.
And here, just a bit more, to get the full flavour of what we are dealing with, that is, an absolute policy cypher who knows nothing about foreign policy but knows a lot about how to craft a media campaign to make the policy acceptable to the ignorant and gullible:
Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies. His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling.
So we proceed through the article to find this first mention of his contempt for the media, which also comes with a kind of implied contempt for Obama himself:
When Rhodes joined the Obama campaign in 2007, he arguably knew more about the Iraq war than the candidate himself, or any of his advisers. He had also developed a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour. If anything, that anger has grown fiercer during Rhodes’s time in the White House. He referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.
But what has made this profile so infamous is this passage with its direct quotes:
Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
We ought to be terrified and sickened but we’re not because we find it so hard to believe that this is the way the US is governed. But it is. Sound policy criticism, no doubt on every aspect of the Obama administrations, is messaged to death which happens because the media is ignorant and incompetent. Once you know that, and combine it with Obama’s far-far-to-the-left beliefs, much of what you see around you falls into place.
You should, by the way, read the whole article linked to above. This is the world of virtual reality we are all living in.
As unknown to the world of politics as anyone I have ever seen
Here is one example of Trump dishonesty from a post titled Donald Trump Lies.
I once received a tip that Trump and Richard Nixon had had a lengthy meeting in Trump’s office. Trump said he knew nothing about it. I ran the story, not only because I had an excellent source, but also because a Nixon aide confirmed it.
Got it? Trump denied to some journalist meeting with the President of the United States when in fact he really had, and this is classified as a lie. My take: Trump doesn’t even care if other people know he met with the President, and second, he can keep a secret. Third, he seems to have been dealing at a very high political level for quite a long time. Trump is as unknown to the world of politics as anyone I have ever seen.
Meanwhile, back in the world of Republican politics and the idiots who end up in Congress, we have Paul Ryan. Does he not have even the most basic irony-detection device?
House Speaker Paul Ryan is refusing to support Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for president, insisting Thursday that the businessman must do more to unify the GOP.
And just what is the bit that Ryan is doing towards achieving this unity? You might well ask since no answer is at all obvious to me.
Law of Markets 