Starts 45 minutes in. You can either watch it yourself or let his enemies interpret it for you. As good as any speech of its kind you have ever heard, and it holds its strength right to the end. From Drudge:
We have just received our survey form and on the ballot itself there is a bar code and the bar code is different for my wife’s ballot and mine. So far as I can tell, how I vote will be known to someone at the ABS, and perhaps to many many others. The accompanying letter does not give me confidence:
Your response is confidential, by law. It cannot be connected to you. The ABS will destroy all information after the survey is collected.
My assumption was that I would get two envelopes, the first to put my absolutely untraceable ballot into, and then the second to put the first envelope into that I would mail off. That way, my ballot would arrive at the ABS, someone would check on the first ballot that I am a registered voter and, having done so, throw the second envelope unopened into the pile with all the other ballots. It is these second envelopes that would be opened and my vote counted only then. That way, no one could possibly know how I voted, either before, during or after.
This way, I cannot tell who will know how I voted nor how that information might be used.
A few excerpts from Orwellian Nice Guys that resonated with me.
My friends, I’m not much of a theologian. I have my faith in God, but I struggle with it as any man might. One truth, however, I believe in totally and absolutely. Our world is a fallen world. While it is full of good things, good people, and pleasant times, such are always bounded by suffering, evil tyrants, and pain. There will be no utopia of man. Protesters out in the streets holding their signs “love wins” are delusional fools, or worse. Only God could ever make such a thing come to pass, and God is the one thing they hate the most. . . .
I don’t care what social “scientists” say about the falseness of free will. They will tell us all day that free will doesn’t exist; that choice is an illusion, that all is predetermined in probabilistic or even fatalistic fashion. We are passengers in our bodies, mere observers. No. I don’t believe this. Even if their data was true, even if every experiment they’ve conducted was accurate, they are making an assumption as to the nature of man. They assume that the flesh is all there is, and all that ever will be. That no part of us is greater; that there is no divine. . . .
Do you know why I believe the free market is superior to a command economy? Because in a command economy, those doing the commanding think they have all the answers, and they damn well don’t. In a capitalist economy, it’s every man trying to figure out his own little corner of things, trying and often failing. Some eventually figure out what people want, what they need, and deliver it. It’s trial and error as much as anything, but that’s a branch of human knowledge that is given too little attention those days. . . .
Competitive victimization is now a thing, where people compete for social status by claiming they’ve suffered more than another. People in First World countries who do this need to be committed. While some RadFem is complaining that a man whistled at her on the subway, people die in job lots all over the world. Slavery proliferates. War rages on. Genocide is a fact of life for millions.
It is proof that such people can never be made happy. Even at the pinnacle of technological society, in the richest, most peaceful places in all of human history, they complain about perceived imperfections because even still, their utopia is not here. And idiots everywhere cater to their delusional fantasies in an effort to be seen as nice. In so doing, they are throwing away everything our forebears labored, fought, and died to create for us. Look at Venezuela for a glimpse at the future that might await us, should they hold on to the levers of culture, media, and political power. . . .
One thing I know is true: since we live in a fallen world, the idea that we can nice-guy our way out of every problem is a category error. It cannot be. Anyone who demands this of us is either a tyrant, or one of their stooges, and deserves our contempt.
And here I am referring to virtually the whole of the entertainment industry.
Television’s glittering Emmys placed politics front and center on Sunday, lavishing “The Handmaid’s Tale” with awards for its bleak portrait of an authoritarian America.
The glitzy ceremony in downtown Los Angeles — the first under the administration of President Donald Trump — was widely expected to have a strongly political flavor, and host Stephen Colbert set the tone in his opening monologue.
“However you feel about the president, and you do feel about the president, you can’t deny that every show was influenced by Donald Trump in some way,” he said.
“All the late night shows, obviously, ‘House of Cards,’ the new season of ‘American Horror Story.'”
Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and HBO miniseries “Big Little Lies” were the big winners, with five statuettes each.
“Big Little Lies” cast members Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern and Alexander Skarsgard all took home Emmys, along with director Jean-Marc Vallee. It also won outstanding limited series.
“The Handmaid’s Tale,” Hulu’s acclaimed series based on the 1985 novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, won awards for writing and directing as well as the biggest prize of the night — outstanding drama series.
Ann Dowd, picking up her first Emmy at age 61 for her portrayal of brutal instructor Aunt Lydia, spoke of how her award was “a dream” while outstanding lead actress Elisabeth Moss turned the air blue with an expletive-strewn acceptance speech.
“That was the clean version,” Moss joked backstage after the show, describing the opportunity
“I was just trying to remember everybody, and you do have a weird out of body experience.”
Atwood, 77, said “One takeaway would be ‘never believe it can never happen here’ which was one of the premises that I used for the book. And, as I’ve often said, nothing went into the book that people hadn’t done.”
As it happens, I read The Handmaid’s Tale when it came out and was astonished by how moronic it was. I used to read everything she wrote since we are almost of the same generation, both from Toronto and we used to catch up occasionally when we were living in Vancouver back in my hippy day in the 70s. If you liked the book and then the show, you are now officially classified as dull witted, stupid, and fantastically ignorant of everything that matters. It was, in fact, the last thing of hers I ever read so have been free of her idiocies for more than two decades. How do people take such things seriously?
It’s actually a quite to the left video since she accepts the left on every issue but the economy. I suppose you have to start somewhere.
Let me match that with something from Steve Hayward discussing a presentation he had made at Berkley!
although I identified myself proudly to the audience as a Fox News-watching, certified card-carrying member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, the most hostile questions from the audience were not directed at me, but rather at the new Chancellor, Carol Christ, who is an old-fashioned John Stuart Mill-quoting liberal. Just as in the 1960s, the far left hates liberals more than conservatives.
And JSM-quoting liberals are the worst, bless them.
There seems to be as much fun in destruction as in creating, maybe more.
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
“This is known as “bad luck.”
Robert A. Heinlein
An interview with John Cleese. So he doesn’t like Trump, but it is still John Cleese.
The comedy legend on Monty Python’s legacy, political correctness, and the funniest joke he ever told.
How can you resist? And as for the interviewer, he is obviously a politically correct nonce which makes his reactions so precious. The first question up: “Is death funny?” All depends on whose death you’re talking about, I suppose, but now find out what Cleese thinks instead. What you do not find out is the funniest joke he thinks he has ever told.
Possibly the most misunderstood person in politics today: Hunter Valley Bushfire: Hunter Valley homes at risk, Tony Abbott joins fire fight.
Tony Abbott has been hailed as a hero after saving a house from ember attack while battling a bushfire burning near his Sydney northern beaches electorate of Warringah.
This afternoon embers from the Beacon Hill bushfire ignited local resident Barry Cafe’s fence.
Mr Cafe told local paper the Manly Daily that it wasn’t every day that a former prime minister saves your home.
“I told everybody, ‘I’m fine, Tony’s here’,” he said.
“He’s a top bloke … We couldn’t do without them (the Rural Fire Service).”
In the letters section of this week’s Economist which is dated September 7, 2017.
You don’t Say
The term “Say’s Law”, (Economics brief, August 12th) was invented by the American economist, Fred Taylor, and popularised in his introductory text, published in 1921. Moreover, the phrase “supply creates its own demand” is not classical in origin, but was first used in print by another American economist, Harlan McCracken, in a text that John Maynard Keynes is known to have read while he was writing the General Theory. Jean-Baptiste Say neither invented the concept nor was he its most staunch defender.
STEVEN KATES
Associate Professor
School of Economics, Finance and Marketing
RMIT University
Melbourne, Australia
And while you may think this is purely a factual statement about the construction of a book that was published more than 80 years ago, it is actually a suggestion that the mythological version of how Keynes came to write his book is many miles short of the truth. And as for the contents of the book, that falls even many miles shorter not just of the truth [how ridiculous to have argued that classical economists had no theory of involuntary unemployment] but of an understanding of how an economy first goes into recession and then recovers.
You may think such a thing is impossible, and certainly impossible to prove, and even more certainly impossible for me to prove, but before you say that first you have to watch the presentation yourself. The venue is Los Angeles.
I also replied to the fellow who had invited me and sent the video because he wrote that “I suggest the phrase Supply Creates the Means to Demand” which is his own way of explaining Say’s Law to himself. And this is the way someone brought up in a Keynesian environment will understand these issues because it has become second nature to think in relation to demand. But unless you can break the habit that thinking an economy is driven by demand and not supply, it becomes impossible to understand classical theory, and in my view impossible to understand how a market economy works. So I wrote back with this:
Your note does remind me how difficult it is to understand since the issue of spending never seems to go away, which a supply-side economist, like Mill and myself, see as about as irrelevant to aggregate economic outcomes as it is possible to be. If you tell me that in a recession there is some kind of panic and credit freezes up and business ventures are not commenced at the same rate as in good times, I will say of course, but so too did JSM.
Thinking in money flows and in relation to spending will stop you from understanding Mill and thus, in my view, from understanding how an economy adjusts. Once you are thinking about whether people will spend their money and not whether entrepreneurs will try to open new businesses and expand old ones, you fall into the Keynesian trap from which economic theory has been unable to emerge for more than eighty years. A financial crisis stops the flow of credit but does not stop the desire of business people to set up new firms or expand the ones they already run, nor does it stop wage earners from trying to find jobs. A really bad downturn can take 2-3 years to get back to normal but things do re-arrange themselves. Having a government stimulus on top of all of the other disruptions in the flow of capital and labour into their most productive forms of contribution can extend the recession outwards for a much longer period of time, and like the situation right now everywhere round the world, it can prevent a serious recovery from ever gathering pace. The Japanese lost decade of the 1990s is now 25 years long! The notion that buyers will stop buying for years on end and businesses will stop trying to find ways to earn profits because there has been a downturn is not just incoherent but contrary to every historical situation in which a downturn has ever occurred. It might be what an academic would do – just give up and wait for a government subsidy – but it is not the kind thing people who make a living by running businesses are apt to do. A stimulus can kill off a recovery but it can never cause one. All this is perfectly obvious to me, but very difficult to explain. This is my own variant on demand for commodities is not demand for labour: employment varies directly with productivity and inversely with the real wage. I developed the theory as an employer advocate in our national wage cases in the 1980s and then when I found the same thing in Mill, which is his explanation for his fourth proposition on capital*, I had found the parent stem for everything which I now believe, and see demonstrated everywhere I go.
Mill noted that even in his own time how difficult it was to keep these things straight, and every economist of his time had read his text. Much more difficult now because of the Keynesian presuppositions and terminology that infuse modern theory with virtually no supply-side economics to be found anywhere at all.
* Mill’s fourth proposition on capital – the Fermat’s Last Theorem of economics – states that “demand for commodities is not demand for labour”. Universally accepted by mainstream economics in Mill’s lifetime, even described in 1876 as “the best test of a sound economist”, which it is. You can read my entire paper on it if you are interested: MILL’S FOURTH FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITION ON CAPITAL: A PARADOX EXPLAINED.
Law of Markets 