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Monthly Archives: June 2016
Good ideas need even better organisation
Running a presidential campaign is not an amateur hour. One of the things that Trump offered, or it seemed to me, was that he could work through others. This is a very big worry to me: Trump’s relationship with RNC sours.
“I don’t think we are going to take a lot of political advice from Priebus,” a campaign official said. “From my perspective, we should not be relying on the RNC for much, because I’m not sure they are fully supportive yet,” the campaign official said, adding “but we hope and expect to soon be on the exact same page.”
The fraught dynamic is a potentially serious liability for an insurgent campaign that has proudly eschewed political infrastructure and is dwarfed by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s operation, which is expected to raise $1.5 billion or more. And the situation is equally problematic for the Republican Party, which typically relies on its presidential candidate to help boost down-ballot candidates, enhance voter data and raise money.
There are a million snares that are out to derail this campaign. Either Trump gets everyone on board he can or he will be sunk by September. Meanwhile, the media distortion grows by the hour and will become immense over time. with this recent example by Ann Coulter that can only be expected.
Now you see why reporters aren’t quoting Trump and have to hope you won’t read the speech for yourself.
Of course the ratio will be 100-1 of those who read reports versus those who read the speech. I just hope he is up for the discipline of the campaign because that is what it will need from this moment on in. And yet, as Victor Davis Hanson explains, the US will sink without this change in direction: Same Old, Same Old Horror – The Orlando massacre brings up familiar lessons that we never quite learn.
The inability of Barack Obama and the latest incarnation of Hillary Clinton to utter “radical Islam” or “Islamic terrorism” in connection with Muslims’ murderous killing sprees again is exposed as an utterly bankrupt, deadly, and callous politically correct platitude. Mateen did not learn to hate homosexuals from the American government, popular American culture, or our schools, but rather from radical and likely ISIS-driven Islamic indoctrination. From Iran to Saudi Arabia, the treatment of gays is reprehensible—but largely exempt from Western censure, on the tired theory that in the confused pantheon of -isms and -ologies, multiculturalism trumps human rights.
Finally, the Left will blame guns, not ideology, for the mass murder, forgetting that disarmed soldiers who could not shoot back were slaughtered by Major Hasan, that the Tsarnaev brothers preferred home-cooked explosives to blow up innocents in Boston, that the Oklahoma and UC Merced Islamists did their beheading or stabbing with a knife, and that Mateen likely followed strict gun-registration laws in obtaining his weapons.
Who but Trump would deal with it? No one, and that is the catastrophe that stands before us.
Insomniacs awake!
The question is: Should we be sleeping TWICE a day?. This, however, I found quite interesting being now trapped awake most of the night:
Around a third of the population have trouble sleeping, including difficulties maintaining sleep throughout the night.
So there may be an answer in going back to our primaeval past. This is how it concludes:
A number of recent studies have found split sleep provides comparable benefits for performance to one big sleep, if the total sleep time per 24 hours was maintained (at around seven to eight hours total sleep time per 24 hours).
However, as might be expected, performance and safety can still be impaired if wake up and start work times are in the early hours of the morning.
And we don’t know if these schedules afford any benefits for health and reduce the risk for chronic disease.
While the challenges of night shift work cannot be eliminated, the advantage of some split shift schedules is that all workers get at least some opportunity to sleep at night and do not have to sustain alertness for longer than six to eight hours.
Although we aspire to have consolidated sleep, this may not suit everyone’s body clock or work schedule.
It might in fact be a throwback to a bi-model sleep pattern from our pre-industrial ancestors and perhaps work well in a modern industrial setting.
Seminar on supply-side economics is classical economic theory
This is a trial run for a paper I will be delivering next month, first at Freedomfest in Las Vegas and then at the Chinese Economic Society Australia meeting in Cairns. Supply-side economics is classical economics. If you are going to understand the first you can only do it by understanding the second. The details:
You are warmly invited to School of EFM Research Seminar presentation by our Associate Professor Steve Kates. Your host is Dr Ananta Neelim.
Title: Political Economy in Crisis: Were the Classical Economists Right After All?
Abstract: There are, generally speaking, five streams of macroeconomic thought that compete for allegiance in the modern world.
- Keynesian which comes in many varieties all of which argue recessions are due to failure of aggregate demand and which deny the validity of Say’s Law
- New Classical based on rational expectations but with no embedded theory of recession
- Austrian which typically ignores aggregations, where activity is driven by marginal utility and which builds a theory of recession based on structural imbalances caused by financial dislocation
- Marxist and other forms of socialist theory whose aim is to centralise economic decisions and whose main focus of analysis are exploitation of the working class and concern with inequality
- Classical which emphasises the supply-side of the economy, focuses on the role of the entrepreneur, sees recessions as due to structural imbalances which may come from a variety of causes and explicitly incorporates Say’s Law.
The aim of the paper is to argue that economic theory reached its deepest and most profound level in the writings of the late classical economists which flourished over the period from the publication of John Stuart Mill’s Principles in 1848 through until the publication of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory in 1936. The paper will discuss the classical framework and contrast this approach with the alternatives that today compete for the allegiance of economists.
Date: Friday 17 June 2016
Venue: RMIT University Building 80, Level 11 Room 9 – 445 Swanston Street between Franklin and A’Beckett Streets
Time: 10.30am-12.00pm; Seminar runs 11.00am to 12.00pm
Morning tea will be served at 10.30am. If you would like to come, please RSVP through email esther.ng@rmit.edu.au
Just watch
Diamond & Silk, whoever they are, say what needs to be said.
Whatever you do, don’t do anything
The article by Michael Totten is titled, Banning Guns and Muslims Isn’t the Answer to Orlando. And this is what he concludes:
So what’s the answer? The answer is that The Answer doesn’t exist.
So therefore don’t try anything, except more war in the Middle East which has worked so well. On the other hand, we could follow someone’s advice given to Mark Steyn:
“I listen to people say ‘oh, we’re now going to have to have metal detectors in night clubs, security in nightclubs.’ Ok, so what happens next? They blow up a bakery, they blow up a little pastry shop, so then you’re gonna have to have metal detectors to get into the pastry shop?
“Instead of having all these individual perimeters around every Dunkin Donuts franchise or every gas station, or every J.C. Penny, why not have just one big perimeter around the country?” Steyn concluded. “We could call it a border! And we could have, like, a border security!”
Well, at least it is an answer.
The biggest dud in Australian election history
I have let myself think the thought on occasion that there is a tacit agreement between the ABC, the ALP and Turnbull that the Libs win this election under Malcolm, implement as much of the left agenda as possible and then allow Labor to win in 2019. The only problem has turned out to be that Malcolm is such a dud that he is apt to lose the election even with the others lying dead. These thoughts have again crept into my mind reading Terry McCrann via Andrew Bolt: Shorten goes back to Labor’s disastrous past.
OPPOSITION Leader Bill Shorten has now officially committed to embracing two of the three policies that defined the Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard governments as the two worst in our history…
Yesterday, Shorten committed to go back to the ‘Rolls-Royce’ version of the National Broadband Network that Rudd signed off on during a VIP flight with then communications minister Stephen Conroy.
This joins Shorten’s earlier commitment to bring back the carbon tax which Rudd’s successor Gillard imposed on Australians in her squalid deal with then Greens leader Bob Brown.
That would leave just the boats and the 50,000-plus illegal arrivals and the 1200-plus deaths at sea.
But does anyone doubt that if we got a Shorten-led government in three weeks that the boats would start coming again? And once they did, that Shorten would cave on the Abbott government’s tough-love turn-back policies?
This has now been more than reinforced by the lead story in today’s Oz: Federal election 2016: Bill Shorten veers left on treaty, boats.
Why would Labor do this since it can only alienate everyone but the rustidons? Labor has even gone so far as to promise to do some serious cuts to public spending: Federal election 2016: Labor locks in $33 billion of cuts.
And not even that seems to scare enough voters towards a Malcolm-led Coalition even as the Coalition’s own traditional voters continue to seek alternatives. There is no doubting that Malcolm is the worst leader of any major party in Australian history. Not just a tin ear, but an arrogance so unearned it is hard to see how he ever came to think of himself as the moral conscience of the nation he clearly thinks he is. He really is thick. This from Andrew Bolt has such a sense of unreality about it that it is hard to believe it’s actually true. The heading from Andrew is Turnbull: whites “invaded” this land. This “always will be Aboriginal land” and this is what it said:
I have warned conservatives about what Malcolm Turnbull would be like once elected.
You don’t actually need to wait that long after today’s presser:
JOURNALIST:
Do you agree that the colonisation of Australia can fairly be described as an invasion?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I think it can be fairly described as that and I’ve got no doubt – and obviously our first Australians, Aboriginal Australians describe it as an invasion.
And never may people with no Aboriginal ancestors feel an equal right to call this home:
So this was and is and always will be Aboriginal land.
And so the racial division of this country proceeds, encouraged by the party many would have expected to resist.
OK, he’s stupid. But are the fools who line up behind him impervious to the damage he is doing to Australia. Forget party politics for a minute. Everything he believes if implemented would make this country worse. The debts, the super, the spending, the NBN, the Republic, his version of reconciliation, his way of dealing with climate change, his lack of a personal will to protect our borders, and now his actually stating that white settlement in Australia is in some sense illegitimate. Meanwhile he thinks he’s a genius which may be the falsest belief he may have.
Trump on the growing threat of terrorism inside our borders
“If we don’t get tough and we don’t get smart and fast, we are not going to have our country any more.”
And what do we want?
As Ed Driscoll says, it’s comforting to know that America’s newsrooms and television studios are flooded with experts who know ISIS better than ISIS itself. At least Donald Trump seems to know what I want: ‘It’s absolute war!’ Trump demands tougher domestic surveillance of mosques as he says Hillary Clinton is ‘almost like a maniac’ for avoiding mention of Islamic terrorism in the wake of Orlando massacre.
And in regard to fighting with one arm behind our back, this was sent out this morning by Freedomfest, where I heard Trump speak last year: Facebook Censures FreedomFest…the message Facebook wouldn’t let us post. The posting begins:
Dear FreedomFest friends and attendees,
First We Mourn
Like all Americans, FreedomFest is mourning the horrifying loss that took place in Orlando Sunday morning. Our next thought is on the minds of all Americans too: What can we do to stop this terrorism?
Dr. Tawfik Hamid will offer an answer and a solution in his talk at FreedomFest, “How Radical Islam Works, Why It Should Terrify Us, and How to Defeat it.”
Dr. Hamid is particularly equipped to address this topic. He is an Islamic thinker and reformer and a one-time Islamic extremist from Egypt. He was a member of a radical Islamic organization in Egypt with Dr. Ayman Al-Zawaherri (who later became the first in command of Al-Qaeda). More than 30 years ago he started a reformation within Islam.
We attempted to share this same information on Facebook on Sunday, but Facebook censured the post. That’s right, Facebook would not allow us to post this information. We assume that it is because it was filled with “trigger words” that Facebook would not allow. We’ve never had this happen before. It’s a strange feeling to press “Publish” only to see Facebook ignore it and do absolutely nothing.
We will only work this out if we have a free debate with all sides all in discussing all of the issues. You may be sure Islamists have no problem saying anything they want to each other, even on Facebook.
The progressive hierarchy of identity groups
The question is why did this take so long: I’m a Gay Activist, and After Orlando, I Have Switched My Vote to Trump. It’s an interesting post with many different facets even given how short it is.
I also now realize, with brutal clarity, that in the progressive hierarchy of identity groups, Muslims are above gays. Every pundit and politician — and that includes President Obama and Hillary Clinton and half the talking heads on TV — who today have said “We don’t know what the shooter’s motivation could possibly be!” have revealed to me their true priorities: appeasing Muslims is more important than defending the lives of gay people. Every progressive who runs interference for Islamic murderers is complicit in those murders, and I can no longer be a part of that team.
I’m just sick of it. Sick of the hypocrisy. Sick of the pandering. Sick of the deception.
And you know what makes me angrier still? The fact that I have to hide my identity and remain anonymous in writing this essay. If I outed myself as a Trump supporter, I would be harassed and doxxed and shunned by everyone I know and by the Twitter lynch mobs which up until yesterday I myself led.
Everyone is just part of an identity group to the left where everything depends on how many votes and how much money there is in supporting you.
Law of Markets 