Yearly Archives: 2017

This is an American constitutional crisis

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Donald Trump accuses Obama of ‘wire-tapping’ his office before election.

If this is true, you are looking at a genuine effort by a sitting president to subvert not just the election but the Constitution. This is not, as Trump has declared it, “A NEW LOW!” This is beyond the farthest edge of any previous attempt to undermine the democratic process. This is how this should be judged.

Trump’s tweets follow claims made by conservative radio host Mark Levin on his Thursday night show about the alleged steps taken by the Obama administration to undermine the Republican candidate’s campaign to win the White House.

The presenter called the effort a “silent coup” by the Obama administration and called for a congressional investigation into the issue. That contrasts with demands from across the US political spectrum to examine Russian interference in the presidential election.

Levin’s comments were followed up by Breitbart News, the “alt-right” website founded by Steve Bannon, who ran the Trump campaign and is now the president’s chief strategist.

The article stated: “The Obama administration sought, and eventually obtained, authorisation to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign; continued monitoring the Trump team even when no evidence of wrongdoing was found; then relaxed the NSA [National Security Agency] rules to allow evidence to be shared widely within the government, virtually ensuring that the information, including the conversations of private citizens, would be leaked to the media.”

Russia “hacked the election” is known to be a lie. Meetings with Russians or even with Putin represent no issue of any kind about the governance of the United States. These are media lies that have been fostered by political deceit, and most treacherously, the ring leader of these efforts has been the former president. What can one make of this: Obama Officials Set Up Jeff Sessions’ Meeting With the Russian Ambassador. Do you get that? The meeting between Sessions and the Russian Ambassador was a casual meeting that had been arranged by Obama. Here are the two meetings that are at the centre of the controversy.

The first came at a conference on “Global Partners in Diplomacy,” where Sessions was the keynote speaker. Sponsored by the U.S. State Department, The Heritage Foundation, and several other organizations, it was held in Cleveland during the Republican National Convention.
The conference was an educational program for ambassadors invited by the Obama State Department to observe the convention. The Obama State Department handled all of the coordination with ambassadors and their staff, of which there were about 100 at the conference.

Apparently, after Sessions finished speaking, a small group of ambassadors—including the Russian ambassador—approached the senator as he left the stage and thanked him for his remarks. That’s the first “meeting.” And it’s hardly an occasion—much less a venue—in when a conspiracy to “interfere” with the November election could be hatched.

Sessions also apparently met with the Russian ambassador in September. But on that occasion, Sessions was acting as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, not as a surrogate for the Trump campaign. That’s why the meeting was held in his Senate office. His DOJ spokesperson, Sarah Isgur Flores, says they discussed relations between the two countries – not the election.

There was nothing unusual about this: Sessions met with more than two dozen ambassadors during 2016, including the Ukrainian ambassador the day before the meeting with the Russian ambassador.

Obama depends on the ignorance of his supporters and the duplicity of the press (and press ignorance as well), on which he can count to the fullest extent. The original story I found was at The Guardian while the story at Drudge is from The Sun, both British papers. This is how it is reported in The Sun:

‘THIS IS WATERGATE’ Barack Obama denies ‘ever ordering surveillance on any US citizen’ following bombshell accusations he tapped Donald Trump’s phone during US presidential election

The story is the denial. More interesting, if you look at the words, Obama doesn’t deny it may have happened, or even that he had known it was going on, only that he had not ordered it. There is no doubt that Trump has been sitting on this for a while but has finally realised that these attempts to rout his presidency are not going away and need to be dealt with head on. Couple all of this with the following which is already an old story: How Obama is scheming to sabotage Trump’s presidency:

When former President Barack Obama said he was “heartened” by anti-Trump protests, he was sending a message of approval to his troops. Troops? Yes, Obama has an army of agitators — numbering more than 30,000 — who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House.

In what’s shaping up to be a highly unusual post-presidency, Obama isn’t just staying behind in Washington. He’s working behind the scenes to set up what will effectively be a shadow government to not only protect his threatened legacy, but to sabotage the incoming administration and its popular “America First” agenda.

He’s doing it through a network of leftist nonprofits led by Organizing for Action. Normally you’d expect an organization set up to support a politician and his agenda to close up shop after that candidate leaves office, but not Obama’s OFA. Rather, it’s gearing up for battle, with a growing war chest and more than 250 offices across the country.

To say we are in uncharted waters is beyond understatement.

A literary dispute of the highest political importance

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huxley-to-orwell

The writer of Brave New World had previously taught high school French to the writer of 1984! What follows below is the text of the letter Huxley wrote to Orwell in 1949. But what is truly fascinating and worth dwelling on is that Huxley argued that a soft fascism, guided by a gentle and soothing elite who made their prisoners love their almost invisible chains, was the way totalitarian governments would evolve, rather than a world of increasingly brutalised citizens, the mailed fist and the gulag. I will note that the bolding in the text below is my own.

Shortly after George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, he received a letter from his onetime high school French teacher, Aldous Huxley, who had published Brave New World 17 years earlier. Here are Huxley’s comments, via Letters of Note:

Wrightwood. Cal.

21 October, 1949

Dear Mr. Orwell,

It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution? The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.

Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government. Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations. Another lucky accident was Freud’s inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism. This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years. But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large-scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.

Thank you once again for the book.

Yours sincerely,

Aldous Huxley

No one in 1949 could possibly imagine what our world would be like, but of the two forms of totalitarian control, the vision Huxley had then is the one more true to form about the world in which we find ourselves living today. But Orwell did get the part about those who control the past controlling the future. We have gone beyond the memory hole to the point where some events are never recorded while what never occurred instantly becomes the official narrative even while millions perfectly well know none of it is or was ever true. There is plenty of both of these disturbing and prophetic books in our modern world.

The wages of ignorance

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I have been following this business about wages with no little amazement. Here is the story that sums it up but it was in all the papers today:

A demoralised government put in a dismal performance in parliament today. In Question Time and the debate that followed, Malcolm Turnbull was constantly on the defensive on an issue that is a gift for Bill Shorten — pay cuts for workers.

There was a time when I was Chief Economist for the Chamber of Commerce that a decision like this would have been recognised by a Coalition Government as a reprieve for the economy and very good news for workers. Naturally, the Labor side would have talked about workers losing pay etc, but the government would have stood there with small business and the unemployed, reminding everyone that economic growth and higher wages can only come from a stronger economy. So let’s look at some more of this story and then come back to the issues again.

The government looks frozen in the headlights as this dire political threat approaches. Unions are mobilising with a potent message to ordinary workers — whether there are 700,000 or 285,000 hurt by the cuts.

This was a shared humiliation for the Coalition. Barnaby Joyce was difficult to understand, despite his volume. Julie Bishop offered a mundane answer about strong exports from Western Australia, doing nothing to turn pressure back on Labor. Scott Morrison went through the economic growth figures but barely stirred the backbench.

Turnbull had no answer on penalty rates other than to attack Shorten’s history at the AWU. The Prime Minister seemed to be losing his voice as he ploughed on through Question Time and the suspension motion. He was also losing traction.

And the Coalition backbench did nothing to help. Staring at their mobile phone screens or their paperwork, MPs and ministers barely offered a murmur of support. There were no cheers, no interjections. It was a huge contrast with the Labor benches, where MPs are fired up over penalty rates.

In the month of the GFC the unemployment rate was recorded at 3.9%, which I always remember since it was the first time I had seen it fall below four in all the years I had been in Australia (the number has since been revised to 4.2%). The latest unemployment rate is much higher, at 5.7%, and real earnings are falling. A fall in penalty rates is an unmitigated good thing for the economy. It might end up being a minor retreat for a relative handful of employees but looking at the larger story, it is all to the good. It will make our industry stronger, create more jobs, and add to future prosperity. If nothing else, it is a decision that not only can be defended, it ought to have been.

The long faces on the Liberal side is the most comprehensive sign that these people have more than lost their way. They have no idea this side of the next Newspoll which way is up, with the Prime Minister the worst of the lot. They stand for nothing and most definitely do not stand for private sector growth. This is a decision that they ought to have embraced and welcomed, not run from. That they have no idea why living standards are falling – to them it’s in spite of the NBN and not because of it – tells me how far out in the economic wilderness they are.

“The proportion of those who can explain the world is gradually shrinking”

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I really notice this in discussions of global warming and replacement technologies: The proportion of those who can explain the world is gradually shrinking. A very interesting article from which you find:

Too many everyday things are already indistinguishable from magic to the average man. Four centuries ago everyone knew how everything in their village worked. Even a hundred years ago an intelligent person could figure out how anything he would likely encounter, even the steam locomotive. But today people are surrounded by things about whose workings they haven’t a clue. Medical devices, synthetic pharmaceuticals, designer pathogens. The proportion of those who can explain the world is gradually shrinking.

Cell phones, robots, mesh nets, remote imaging, data mining, stealth, invisible lethal chemicals and contagious diseases exist cheek by jowl with ox drawn carts, subsistence agriculture, illiteracy and fanaticism around Mosul and in other global cities.

I used to ask all my engineering type friends if they could explain to me what happens when I push the number 5 on a calculator and then multiply it by 7. They would all explain it in similar ways but nothing ever made true sense. They understood, but I was a primitive. And while my knowledge and skills are sufficient for me to earn a living today, if I were transported back to 1000 A.D. I would have nothing I could tell them that would be of the slightest use to them in raising the standard of living or deepening their knowledge of the world.

“We will keep our promises to the American people”

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I have provided a more compact version of the speech. A true show stopper! Here’s how it starts.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, the First Lady of the United States, and Citizens of America:

Tonight, as we mark the conclusion of our celebration of Black History Month, we are reminded of our Nation’s path toward civil rights and the work that still remains. Recent threats targeting Jewish Community Centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week’s shooting in Kansas City, remind us that while we may be a Nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms.

Each American generation passes the torch of truth, liberty and justice –- in an unbroken chain all the way down to the present.

That torch is now in our hands. And we will use it to light up the world. I am heretonight to deliver a message of unity and strength, and it is a message deeply delivered from my heart.

A new chapter of American Greatness is now beginning.

A new national pride is sweeping across our Nation.

And a new surge of optimism is placing impossible dreams firmly within our grasp.

What we are witnessing today is the Renewal of the American Spirit.

Our allies will find that America is once again ready to lead.

All the nations of the world — friend or foe — will find that America is strong, America is proud, and America is free.

And I do have to say I am amazed at the Democrats who do not applaud a single statement made by the President. You can find the full text here.

UPDATE: I will only mention this report of Trump’s speech that is featured at Drudge because it has the following passage:

Putting some policy meat on the bones, he proposed introducing an Australian-style merit-based system to reduce the flow of unskilled workers — and held out the prospect of a bipartisan compromise with Democrats on root-and-branch immigration reform.

We led the world and the world is now following our example. I will just say that if our Liberal Party can somehow manage to lose the next election in an international environment that ought to be exactly what they ought to have hoped for, they will be remembered as the most incompetent bunch of dimwitted losers in the history of politics.

On the other hand, maybe these people are just insane

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The election results, the Superbowl and now the Academy Award results apparently lead to the conclusion DID THE OSCARS JUST PROVE THAT WE ARE LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?. From The New Yorker.

Once this insight is offered, it must be said, everything else begins to fall in order. The recent Super Bowl, for instance. The result, bizarre on the surface—with that unprecedented and impossible comeback complete with razzle-dazzle catches and completely blown coverages and defensive breakdowns—makes no sense at all in the “real” world. Doesn’t happen. But it is exactly what you expect to happen when a teen-ager and his middle-aged father exchange controllers in the EA Sports video-game version: the father stabs and pushes the buttons desperately while the kid makes one play after another, and twenty-five-point leads are erased in minutes, and in just that way—with ridiculous ease on the one side and chicken-with-its-head-cut-off panic infecting the other. What happened, then, one realizes with last-five-minutes-of-“The Twilight Zone” logic, is obvious: sometime in the third quarter, the omniscient alien or supercomputer that was “playing” the Patriots exchanged his controller with his teen-age offspring, or newer model, with the unbelievable result we saw.

There may be not merely a glitch in the Matrix. There may be a Loki, a prankster, suddenly running it. After all, the same kind of thing seemed to happen on Election Day: the program was all set, and then some mischievous overlord—whether alien or artificial intelligence doesn’t matter—said, “Well, what if he did win? How would they react?” “You can’t do that to them,” the wiser, older Architect said. “Oh, c’mon,” the kid said. “It’ll be funny. Let’s see what they do!” And then it happened. We seem to be living within a kind of adolescent rebellion on the part of the controllers of the video game we’re trapped in, who are doing this for their strange idea of fun.

So why worry? Wait for the reset and you can have the universe just the way you like it.

Energy illiteracy a subset of economic illiteracy

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And it’s not just energy illiteracy, fewer and fewer any longer know much of anything about how products come into existence and then find their way to buyers. I’ve just had my first class of the semester which I always begin with a presentation which includes this:

In 1900 there were no cinemas in England. In 1914 there were more than 5000. What had to happen for those 5000 cinemas to come into existence?

Here is the wrong answer: cinemas came into existence because there was a demand for movies and more entertainment.

The video is from Canada via Small Dead Animals. And if like that you might like this.