Monthly Archives: September 2019

A world less divided by religious intolerance

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Pakistan Flirts with a Strong Israel:

According to an op-ed in Haaretz this week, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and his military supporters are allowing a highly-censored media unprecedented freedom to discuss the possibility of establishing diplomatic relations with Israel.

This may go well beyond my enemy’s enemy and into the territory of mutual respect and accommodation in a less religiously divided world – that is, a world less divided by religious belief. The Enlightenment may yet become universal. These are only the first seeds, but this is how the world must go if we are all to live in peace and in prosperity.

Fake news, the lamestream media and Donald Trump

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Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

…the Economy, where there is NO Recession, much to the regret of the LameStream Media! They are working overtime to help the Democrats win in 2020, but that will NEVER HAPPEN, Americans are too smart!

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Arab-Israeli peace is possible

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Bad though this is, it is part of the way forward: Why Arabs Hate Palestinians. Read all of it but this is the part that matters.

Many people in the Arab countries are now saying that it is high time for the Palestinians to start looking after their own interests and thinking of a better future for their children…. The Arabs seem to be saying to the Palestinians: “We want to march forward; you can continue to march backward for as long as you wish.”

“We should not be ashamed to establish relations with Israel.” — Ahmad al-Jaralah, a leading Kuwaiti newspaper editor, arabi21.com, July 1, 2019.

The shame is not establishing relations. Why be an enemy with people who would like nothing better than to be your friend?

Entrepreneurship in one lesson

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This is from a French soldier’s view of US soldiers in Afghanistan. Unexpectedly entirely positive. Here I only put up this passage to explain what entrepreneurship looks like.

And combat? If you have seen Rambo you have seen it all — always coming to the rescue when one of our teams gets in trouble, and always in the shortest delay. That is one of their tricks: they switch from T-shirt and sandals to combat ready in three minutes. Arriving in contact with the enemy, the way they fight is simple and disconcerting: they just charge! They disembark and assault in stride, they bomb first and ask questions later — which cuts any pussyfooting short.

It is the only managerial style that works. Of course, it won’t work in areas which are funded by the public sector, where profitability and adding value are never a consideration. But in the private sector, if a business is left alone to get on with its business, this is how it is done.

Keynesian economics is guaranteed to make an economy’s problems worse

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This is Judy Sloan stating as clear as you like: Time to get the budget in surplus and pay off debt. What it is really about is how disastrous Keynesian economics is and always has been. I am a month away from finishing my book on how the idiocies of Keynesian economics replaced classical theory that had created the world of wealth we have now all become not just used to, but have come to believe it is all just automatic. It was for a while, but with Keynesian economics at the heart of policy making, we are potentially heading for a very large fall in living standards. The following are Judy’s comments about Keynesian theory and policy from her column today.

I’ve been reading Paul Tilley’s Changing Fortunes: A History of the Australian Treasury and a theme that emerges is the advent after World War II of unquestioned Keynesian thinking among senior officials.

Having seen the economic damage and human suffering the Depression caused — although Australia was less affected than many other economies and recovered more rapidly — consensus emerged that the federal government must seek to manage demand actively to maintain full employment.

There was little questioning whether this approach would work or what any adverse consequences might be. Rather, the politicians of the day meekly accepted Treasury’s advice that monetary and fiscal policy should be used to boost employment when needed and to quell inflationary pressures when required….

The Keynesian salad days came to an abrupt end during the Whitlam years when the stable relationships on which the theory was based — in particular, the inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation — fell apart. In its place, a prolonged period of stagflation ensued in which unemployment rose in the context of high inflation….

Today we observe Treasury as a much diminished institution with plenty of Keynesian devotees still occupying positions at various levels….

In the context of today’s debate about appropriate action to deal with a soft economy, many of the debates of yesteryear are there in the background. The simplistic Keynesian response is that the government must spend more immediately, even though experience says this is costly and largely ineffective….

And let us not forget that the government has been running a budget deficit for more than a decade — a long-running Keynesian experiment — yet we still find ourselves in a relative economic slump.

It’s time to get the budget back into surplus and start repaying the accumulated debt.

Keynesian economic policy has NEVER worked, not a single time, not anywhere, not ever. Let me take you to my own: The Dangerous Persistence of Keynesian Economics where all of this is spelled out in more detail. And I cannot refrain from adding this quote at the front of the article.

Why have the IMF, the OECD, the ILO, the treasuries of every advanced economy, the Treasury in Australia, the business economists around the world, why have they got it so wrong and yet you in your ivory tower at RMIT have got it so right?

—Question to Steven Kates from Senator Doug Cameron, Senate Economic References Committee, September 21, 2009

My cat gets tired of it after a while but not the media

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From Conservativetreehouse who notes that:

It is a metaphor often used to say President Trump’s tweets and media messages are akin to watching a cat chase a red dot controlled by POTUS….   Apparently President Trump also thought it was funny.

It’s astonishing, and also depressing to find how accurate this metaphor is. Sadly, given that there are still people who read the NYT and WP and believe what they say, you really can fool some of the people all of the time.

Brexit and love of country vs love of personal wealth

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From Quadrant Online: Feckless ‘conservatism’. From an unexpected source, the real feel for the Brexit catastrophe. Traitors everywhere in our their midst.

The UK’s Country Squire magazine (‘making country life better since 1902′) is not the first and most obvious publication in which one might expect to gain an understanding of the Brexit mess and why, three years after the electorate voted 52/48 to quit Europe, the voters’ will remains frustrated. Yet there it is in a recent edition, one of the most acute analyses of the two major parties’ drift from both base and principle, and a polarised electorate’s disgust with each and both. Author David Eyles puts it this way:

The Fabians believe in gradual change by attrition rather than open revolution. As a result of this thinking, one Labour policy was to get 50% of school leavers to attend a university. As a result, all tertiary education centres such as teacher training colleges, polytechnics and technical colleges converted to call themselves ‘universities’ more or less overnight. On paper, it gave third or fourth rate tertiary education institutions the same status as Oxford, Cambridge, the ‘Red Brick’ universities, the great northern universities and the London Colleges. A generation has now passed through this system, taught mostly by Left-leaning Postmodernist professors and lecturers. This has created an entire structure of Leftist, so-called ‘progressives’ who now dominate the Civil Service, Local Government and most of the large charities, think tanks and, importantly, the media…..

…. By contrast, the Conservatives do not really have any core philosophies except for some rather vague ones … Indeed many actions of this and the last Conservative government suggest that they are still following the path set out for them by Tony Blair. Former soldiers are still being questioned over actions for which they were acquitted many years ago. Children are increasingly being taught about sex and LGBT issues at very young ages – there is a sense that not only is their innocence being lost far too early, but that this is sowing the seeds of confusion for their adult lives. The police are questioning, cautioning and prosecuting people for “hate crimes”. Free speech is being shut down. The Conservative journey to the Left is a long one. In political distance, it is longer than the similar one undertaken by the Labour Party.

As Eyles observes, illustrating his point with the chart reproduced above,

The Conservative Party have failed the country on three counts. The first is their failure to recognise and stop what Postmodernism and the mass move to the Left amongst our establishments have achieved. The second is their own movement to the Left because they have tried to pursue the Leftist Establishment. In so doing, unforgivably, they have abandoned their core voters. The third is their failure to achieve Brexit.

Whatever else you might read about Brexit, Eyles’ insights should not be overlooked.

China has been waging war on the US for decades

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This is from Bazza McKenzie, discussing PDT’s policy on China. He is replying to John Hinderaker at Powerline.

John apparently does not realize China has been waging war on the US for decades, with the intention of displacing the US as the world’s dominant nation, and doing it with the aid of a congress of traitors and Wall Street. PDJT is fighting back on behalf of the US and succeeding.

PDJT does not want or expect a deal. Any honest deal (end their mercantilist trade policy, state owned industry, IP theft and forcible IP transfer, opioid shipments to US), enforceable against China, would implode their economy. Thus they will not do it voluntarily.

PDJT is gradually imposing it on them anyway, but he is doing it at a pace which allows US supply chains to adjust without massive disruption to the US economy. Thus he goes through the motions of seeking a deal and imposing tariffs gradually but continuously. It has taken the Chinese some time to realize what he is doing because they are so used to dealing with traitorous,, self-serving politicians happy to sell out their countrymen.

At the same time PDJT is educating the public to the threat posed by China. He has already achieved strong public recognition of that and by 2020 the recognition will be stronger and China’s commiecrat candidate will be pilloried in public by PDJT for working on behalf of the enemy.

The number of people I hear mention tariffs as a major count against Trump is stunning. Managing the economy is only one part of a President’s job. Foreign policy and national defence is another, and a much much bigger part as well.

Meanwhile:

How does one deal with friends when political issues come up?

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It is kind of a problem dealing with friends when political issues come up. I clearly do not say to them directly that I think they are fw of the highest order so am very polite, adjusting for how impolite my thoughts at many such moments in fact actually are. This from The Diplomad is, however, more in keeping with what I think: The Lost Minds of the West.

And there is so much of it around. Trump, climate change, socialism, abortion, border protection, Brexit, the defence of Western Civilisation, the politics of the Middle East, and the list goes on. As The Diplomad writes, these people are “repulsive beyond words”. I, of course, never have to worry they will come across my thoughts on the net since not one of these ever opens up the blog, even though they know I post things from time to time.

But it really is their complacent stupidity that gets me. Had two of them the other day going on about how the Solomon Islands are sinking, proving climate change. So, I said, if the oceans were rising in the Solomon Islands, they would also be rising at St Kilda Beach. Oh no, they said, the oceans are variable in their height. So I said, I know that the tides in the Bay of Fundy (New Brunswick who are not au fait with Canadian geography) are the highest in the world so there is variation from the moon and the winds.

https://youtu.be/qfhNjpu_IU4

But with the Solomon Islands, part is “sinking” but other parts are “rising”. What you see is not the rising of the oceans but the shifting of the land itself. This is from the ABC of all things: Is the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu growing, and not sinking, as Craig Kelly says?.

Speaking at a local party event, audio of which was leaked to the Guardian, Mr Kelly set out to debunk several justifications for climate change action, including the argument that Tuvalu, the Pacific island nation, was slipping beneath the sea.

 

“The science tells us that Tuvalu, which I often hear about, is actually growing not sinking,” he told colleagues.

The notion that it was “leaked” is bizarre since there is no doubt that if asked by a reporter, Craig would have said the same thing and into a microphone and on camera. And this is what the fact check found out.

In the four decades to 2014, Tuvalu’s total land area grew by 73 hectares, or 2.9 per cent.

Well fancy that. Do they know? Do they care? But the real question is: do I tell them they are ignorant fools. I could alienate my wife’s best friends since these are their core beliefs, and here I deal only with climate which is from The Diplomad discussing the CNN candidates forum on climate change..

For SEVEN HOURS (!) the Dem candidates came forward to prove that they have lost their minds, or, at least, that they assume the voters have. I, of course, did not watch this idiocy for seven hours but would pop in and out. My disgust quota was quickly filled. Let me sum up the doings: the CNN show revealed the left as comprised of totalitarian morons. One after another, these politicos came forward trying to outbid each other in the Stalinist lunacy auction. In the end, we got a Democratic Party leadership doing their best Ayesha (“She who must be obeyed!”) impression, committed to abolishing the internal combustion engine, ending fracking, ending offshore drilling, forcing Americans to give up meat, banning plastic straws, condemning “industrial farming,” and, the best for last, killing babies of color in foreign lands. You read that last one right. Bernie “Honeymoon in the USSR” Sanders wants the USA to fund a huge abortion scheme to kill unborn babies in South America in the name of fighting “climate change.” The brown children must be sacrificed to the Goddess Gaia! I guess he’s going for the Margaret Sanger White Supremacist vote, or he’s just trying to burnish his credentials as a Socialist, you know, a National Socialist . . .. Don’t build a border wall or put babies in cages! No, kill them before they’re born! Bumper sticker, anybody?

You got an answer to this, I’d love to know what it is.