It’s about when my generation disappears in the next few years: After the Boomers Are Gone, the Bloodshed Begins. It’s not that we have been so fantastic that what follows will be a disaster because they won’t be able to maintain what we left behind. It is what we have done that means that the world that follows will be a disaster, disorder will rule. It’s our fault as well. Here’s the start; you can then read it all for yourself.
The Boomer Age is drawing to its close. When one speaks of this group, it tends to mostly focus on white Boomers (not that others are outside the group, but to such a great extent, it really does mean those of mostly European background, if for no other reason than they have been the largest demographic group). When that age does end, we will see an ever dwindling European demographic majority in many Western nations (Canada and the USA are almost certainly the first, soon followed by a variety of European nations). That significant point of majority will be fading, as the numbers precipitously drop until below 50%. The question looming then is, what is next? Will it be the glorious Brave New World of harmonious multiculturalism or an uneasy balkanization that trends ever more to tribalism and violence? Based on existing evidence and studies, I believe that it will be closer to the latter.
Will just finish off with the author’s bio:
Cam’s a married father of three. Born and raised in Canada, he currently lives on the left coast of Canada, notorious for its milder winters and liberal thinking. He’s a university-educated educator, blogger, former generally indifferent employee within the financial sector, and failed musician. A Christian of what has usually been termed politically conservative leanings, he prefers to be labeled a realist at this time, mostly for lack of a better term, as too often conservatives have been little more than slow-motion liberals.
You might also read the thread at Lucianne.com where the article was found. The optimists are the ones who think they will be able to defend their way of life. The realists are the ones who see a Dark Age coming.
They are smugly confident about their own virtue but are, in reality, the cause of most of the avoidable problems in our political world. Which leads from this: Federal election 2019: Woman charged after Scott Morrison egged while campaigning in Albury. She thinks she has struck a blow for something positive but is only making Australia a worse place to live. The judge who eventually sets her free with a token fine or a few hours of community service, will also be contributing to making Australia a worse place to live. The story comes with this:
Shortly afterwards, Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Sally McManus attacked the PM’s comment.
“How dare you accuse us of this and make the association. You seem to have no respect for the truth or any concern about running down your fellow Australians. We would never support such behaviour,” she tweeted.
And just what had the PM said?
“My concern about today’s incident in Albury was for the older lady who was knocked off her feet,” the Prime Minister tweeted.
“I helped her up and gave her a hug.
“Our farmers have to put up with these same idiots who are invading their farms and their homes.
“We will stand up to thuggery whether it’s these cowardly activists who have no respect for anyone, or militant unionists standing over small businesses and their employees on work sites.”
What a joke. As if there were any circumstances whatsoever that would make Sally or her mates support the PM.
I know that some of you cannot go to the link which is behind the paywall, but in this case you might think about ways to read the whole article. Head off to some coffee shop or the local library. Perhaps even shell out the $3.00. But this is what you should read, which comes with a title that provides you with little sense of what comes next: Piano’s not the key to wealth. I might also mention that the article might also depress you unless you are in on the scam scheme yourself.
The best pianists, for all their thousands of hours of practice and performances, will earn crumbs compared to even second-tier fund managers. The salaries of the best doctors and barristers’ incomes are dwarfed those of money managers.
That’s because they are labourers, and labour is relatively cheap. Siphoning off a portion of capital income is real money.
And in no country is this truer than Australia, where regulation ensures $30bn flows into superannuation accounts every three months. Indeed, whoever wins the federal election will supercharge that flow as the compulsory rate of saving cranks up to 12 per cent by the mid-2020s. Labor, in one of the greatest transfers of wealth ever, wants a 15 per cent rate.
All this and more are from Adam Creighton’s visit to Omaha to listen to Warren Buffett and discuss money management with a number of the 18,000 who showed up to listen to what he had to say. There is then also this:
In advice to budding financiers, Buffett revealed the second and main swing favour of asset management: don’t become a good analyst, be a salesman. At 1.5 per cent a year, you’ll quickly be rich. The wonders of pay based on percentages can’t be oversold, especially in a world where financial assets are swelling faster than inflation and the population together. Managing $1bn entails no more labour than $10m but, for a fee of 1 per cent a year, the pay differs.
The best pianists, for all their thousands of hours of practice and performances, will earn crumbs compared to even second-tier fund managers. The salaries of the best doctors and barristers’ incomes are dwarfed those of money managers.
That’s because they are labourers, and labour is relatively cheap. Siphoning off a portion of capital income is real money.
And in no country is this truer than Australia, where regulation ensures $30bn flows into superannuation accounts every three months. Indeed, whoever wins the federal election will supercharge that flow as the compulsory rate of saving cranks up to 12 per cent by the mid-2020s. Labor, in one of the greatest transfers of wealth ever, wants a 15 per cent rate.
As wages stagnate and asset prices soar, the division of jobs between those who rely on wages and those whose “wages” entail a hefty chunk of capital income raises questions about the fairness of the tax system.
I’m as against Labor’s proposed interference in childcare wages as the next furious pundit. It is already a bottomless pit of public spending and any extra will be hoovered up by childcare centres. The proposal does nothing to unbutton the straitjacket on workers’ productivity imposed by Labor’s “quality framework”, which mandated maximum child-to-carer ratios among other feel-good imposts that abolished affordable childcare.
The last paras:
Regulation tends to benefit the better off, as it did in Omaha, where low-income Uber and Lyft drivers did a roaring trade. But too bad for them a federal rule in response to Nebraska floods outlawed “gouging” of consumers in emergencies. Without surge pricing, Omaha’s rich visitors enjoyed cheap $US7 rides between high-end hotels and bars.
“Why are you poorer than Warren?” Munger [the $2 billion dollar man] was asked.
“Well, why was Albert Einstein so much poorer than me?” he mused, after a long pause. Becoming a scientist is also a bad idea.
You have now read around a third, so you can decide whether to spend the $3. Nevertheless, it might be the best career advice you ever get. Still, I would rather be Albert Einstein than Warren Buffett, but that’s just me.
I found these were actually funny. Sent to me by Tony and now passed on to you.
These great questions and answers are from the days when “Hollywood Squares” game show responses were spontaneous, not scripted, as they are now!
Q. Do female frogs croak?
A. Paul Lynde: If you hold their little heads under water long enough.
Q. If you’re going to make a parachute jump, at least how high should you be?
A. Charley Weaver: Three days of steady drinking should do it.
Q. True or False, a pea can last as long as 5,000 years…
A. George Gobel: Boy, it sure seems that way sometimes.
Q . Paul, what is a good reason for pounding meat?
A. Paul Lynde: Loneliness! (The audience laughed so long and so hard it took up almost 15 minutes of the show!)
Q. You’ve been having trouble going to sleep. Are you probably a man or a woman?
A. Don Knotts: That’s what’s been keeping me awake.
Q. According to Cosmopolitan, if you meet a stranger at a party and you think that he is attractive, is it okay to come out and ask him if he’s married?
A. Rose Marie: No, wait until morning.
Q. Which of your five senses tends to diminish as you get older?
A. Charley Weaver: My sense of decency..
Q. What are ‘Do It,’ ‘I Can Help,’ and ‘I Can’t Get Enough’?
A. George Gobel: I don’t know, but it’s coming from the next apartment.
Q. As you grow older, do you tend to gesture more or less with your hands while talking?
A. Rose Marie: You ask me one more growing old question Peter, and I’ll give you a gesture you’ll never forget.
Q. Paul, why do Hell’s Angels wear leather?
A. Paul Lynde: Because chiffon wrinkles too easily.
Q. Charley, you’ve just decided to grow strawberries. Are you going to get any during the first year?
A. Charley Weaver: Of course not, I’m too busy growing strawberries.
Q. In bowling, what’s a perfect score?
A. Rose Marie: Ralph, the pin boy.
Q. During a tornado, are you safer in the bedroom or in the closet?
A. Rose Marie: Unfortunately Peter, I’m always safe in the bedroom.
Q. Can boys join the Camp Fire Girls?
A. Marty Allen: Only after lights out.
Q. When you pat a dog on its head he will wag his tail. What will a goose do?
A. Paul Lynde: Make him bark?
Q. If you were pregnant for two years, what would you give birth to?
A. Paul Lynde: Whatever it is, it would never be afraid of the dark..
Q. According to Ann Landers, is there anything wrong with getting into the habit of kissing a lot of people?
A. Charley Weaver: It got me out of the army.
Q. Back in the old days, when Great Grandpa put horseradish on his head, what was he trying to do?
A. George Gobel: Get it in his mouth.
Q. Jackie Gleason recently revealed that he firmly believes in them and has actually seen them on at least two occasions. What are they?
A. Charley Weaver: His feet.
Q. According to Ann Landers, what are two things you should never do in bed?
A. Paul Lynde: Point and laugh
Taxpayers spend more than $1 billion a year on the ABC and its 1983 act requires the board “to ensure that the gathering and presentation by the corporation of news and information is accurate and impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism”.
Ah there’s the problem: “the recognised standards of objective journalism”. In 1983 they may have meant to present both sides of a story as accurately as possible. Today, it is as Newman writes:
“There is no bias at the ABC” is a myth. It is a lie, repeated over and over in an effort to hide the reality that the ABC is a left-wing sanctuary. How else to explain its obsessive, often fanciful, coverage of US President Donald Trump, its unceasing apocalyptic views on climate change, its superficial one-sided commentary on immigration and identity, its anti-business mentality and hostility towards the Catholic Church? Even ABC Kids feels compelled to rap a lesson on white male privilege.
News gathering has been replaced by views gathering, and it is the views of the left that one can be guaranteed to find and nothing else.
Worth all 16 minutes. Her name is Karen Straughan. And here she is discussing Jordan Peterson on the MGTOW movement (Men Going Their Own Way). It’s about Men’s Rights, or in reality, their lack of rights once they are the biological parent of some woman’s child. A modern horror story.
Now even a first marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
From America, a conclusion which applies here with even more force than there since rates in the US have been rising: Trump’s Keynesian Monetary Policy.
The New York Timesreported today on Trump’s advocacy of easy-money Keynesianism.
President Trump on Friday called on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates and take additional steps to stimulate economic growth… On Friday, he escalated his previous critiques of the Fed by pressing for it to resume the type of stimulus campaign it undertook after the recession to jump-start economic growth. That program, known as quantitative easing, resulted in the Fed buying more than $4 trillion worth of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities as a way to increase the supply of money in the financial system.
Simply stated, the Keynesians are all about artificially boosting consumption, but sustainable growth is only possible with policies that boost production.
Why raising rates is good for production is to modern ears a complete conundrum. Think of this from The ABC:
If the jobs data is right, then everything is OK and unemployment will fall, wages will rise and it will be high-fives back in the RBA’s Martin Place redoubt.
Absolutely incomprehensible to a modern economist is the absence of any relationship between the rate of growth and unemployment. Just as incomprehensible is the possibility that lowering interest rates from the low rates they are presently at might actually do harm and do no good whatsoever at all.
I have no love of communism but as my father was one himself, I make distinctions between those who turned towards the Soviet Union in the 1930s on the one hand and Lenin and Stalin on the other. It was an evil but within it all there is a softness I have always felt towards Pete Seeger, whom I first heard perform at my summer camp in 1955 because he was at the time unable to perform anywhere else in North America. And from that moment, I loved his voice, his music and the banjo, which I still play, sort of. And I have also given my grandchildren a banjo of their own so that when they turn 100 and are asked where did you get that banjo, they can say it was given to them by their grandfather on the day they were born.
Pete provided much of the soundtrack for the political awakening of several generations of activists. The songs he wrote, including the antiwar tunes, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” “If I Had a Hammer” and “Turn, Turn, Turn,” and those he has popularized, including “This Land Is Your Land” and “We Shall Overcome,” have been recorded by hundreds of artists in many languages and have become global anthems for people fighting for freedom. He introduced Americans to songs from other cultures, like “Wimoweh” (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight”) from South Africa, “Tzena, Tzena” from Israel (which reached number two on the pop charts), and “Guantanamera” from Cuba, inspiring what is now called “world music.”
Thanks to Seeger’s influence, protest songs — via folk, rock, blues, and soul genres — became popular and even commercially successful. He recorded over eighty albums — of children’s songs, labor, civil rights, and antiwar songs, traditional American folk songs, international songs, and Christmas songs. Among performers around the globe, Seeger became a symbol of a principled artist deeply engaged in the world.
Even if I do not in any way share his politics, I love his music which has deep deep meaning to me. What more is there to say than that? Well, perhaps there is this: the vile idiots on whose website this post was found are themselves a menace and evil to the core. If you are looking for a fight, it is these people you should take on and not the memory of one of the greatest folk singers who has ever lived. It would be as idiotic as refusing to play God Bless America sung by Kate Smith because of something she had said or done back in the 1930s.
If you are wondering why you should never go to a mainstream economist to solve our economic problems, you should read through this: A Rare Prize for an Economist Looking at the Big Picture. That is, he has won the John Bates Prize awarded to economists under 40. “New” Keynesian Economics is not actually new; more like the far-left wing of modern macro.
Nakamura is one of the leaders in the field of New Keynesian economics. This school of thought, which has become the dominant paradigm at central banks around the world, holds that recessions happen because companies are unable to adjust their prices in response to events like a financial crisis or a big rise in interest rates. Without the ability to adjust prices, the theory goes, companies cut their output and lay off workers instead. In a 2008 paper with frequent co-author and husband Jon Steinsson, Nakamura showed that even very small amounts of this so-called price stickiness can generate large recessions, and make the economy very sensitive to changes in monetary policy.
“Not able to adjust their prices”? Surely they can put their prices down. Who would stop them? Surely they could raise their prices as well if they saw fit. But the problem is that at the prevailing prices and other prices as well, these firms cannot make a profit. As noted in the article:
Exactly why companies can’t adjust prices, however, remains something of a mystery. Nakamura’s research has helped to shed light on this question. Another 2008 paper with Steinsson helped to establish that price stickiness probably results from multiple factors.
The other word for it being a “mystery” is that they are “clueless”. I wonder if there are any lessons to be learned from the United States.
From which the title of this post comes. Mark starts with a story from Melbourne about Barry McKenzie or something. Meanwhile, from today’s Cut and Paste in The Australian.
Oh dear. Annette Grossbongardt in Der Spiegel on February 7:
The East German state had a habit of taking children from politically undesirable parents and giving them up for adoption. It is a horrific aspect of the communist regime that has never received the attention it deserves.
Grossbongardt continues:
Parents were required to raise their children to become “active contributors to socialism”. If they didn’t do so sufficiently in the eyes of the state, then, in a worst-case scenario, their parenting rights could be withdrawn. This law, says a legal commentator, “opened the door” to punishing aberrant behaviour displayed by parents … Fleeing the country, or even attempting to, was considered a “seriously negligent breach of duty”, the lawyer says. Parents could also lose their children for “subversive agitation”. Indeed, “essentially anything that was adversarial to the state” was considered a violation, “including saying anything that was critical of the regime or reading the foreign press”. The law also foresaw another political justification for interfering in a parent’s rights: a “non-socialist lifestyle”. That applied to people who were active in the church, to those who did not fulfil the “obligation to work”, or to women who frequently changed partners and had many children.
The Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada, has ruled that a 14-year-old girl can, without parental permission, get hormone treatments to change her sex, and it has also ruled that the father is guilty of “family violence” because he called her a girl.
Back in February of this year, the girl’s father was ordered to stop calling her a girl and calling her by her birth name, which he refused to do. To stop that crime, the Supreme Court issued a “protection order” mandating that her father be arrested immediately without a warrant, if calls her a girl privately or publicly or speaks about the case at all.
So the courts in Canada will now force parents to indulge the delusions of minor children who think they’re members of the opposite sex.
Virtually proving that the opposition to the move is correct in its belief that this is craziness, the court also expunged court records of the names of two doctors who were in favor of a gender transition for the girl, one doctor of whom, Dr. Wallace Wong, is catching flak for “diagnosing as much as 20 percent of the children in his local orphanage system with some form of gender dysphoria,” reported The Federalist.
The court also emphasized that Clark must not allow relevant documents (petitions, affidavits, letters, court orders, etc.) to come into the hands of third parties not “authorized by order of this court,” or with “written consent” from his daughter.
While forbidding Clark to speak to the public about his daughter’s case, [bc supreme Court Justice] Marzari stated that she was not overriding Clark’s “freedom of thought and speech.” “There is no requirement that [Clark] change his views about what is best for [Maxine],” she explained. “It is only how he expresses those views privately to [Maxine] and publicly to third parties that is affected.”
The fact that Clark is now not allowed to express his views publicly to anyone at all was, apparently, understood to be a fairly imposed consequence for his previous court-objected behavior. Had he strictly abstained from referring to his daughter “as a girl or with female pronouns,” he might not have been guilty of family violence and so subject to this order.
While the judge’s view of matters enjoys support on the political left, some feel the ruling is biased and politically motivated. Kari Simpson, president of Canadian pro-family organization Culture Guard, argued that Marzari’s decision severely limits Clark’s freedom of speech. Citing Marzari’s significant and recent history of LGBT and pro-abortion activism before her 2017 appointment to the BC Supreme Court, Simpson argued that she was operating as an “activist judge” more interested in delivering a ruling convenient to her cause than enforcing laws designed to protect families and children.
Unfortunately, the gag order on Clark makes it difficult to report his reaction to this new development in his case. In the meantime, his appeal of the court’s original ruling regarding testosterone injections is set to be heard on May 14.
Freedom of speech in Canada includes the provision that a judge can stop someone from saying what they think in public. A totally moronic age, perhaps, but actually an age of deep evil, which is getting worse! The thing is that everyone knows how insane all this is, but no one is allowed to say it.
Law of Markets 