Monthly Archives: September 2019

Lowe as it gets

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From Saturday’s Age, two stories opposite each other on pages 6 and 7. The top one is a continuation from the front page about the RBA and the Prime Minister taking a different view on economic policy. It begins:

Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe has called for more infrastructure spending across Australia in direct opposition to the views of the Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

When you follow the story to its continuation on Page 6 we find that while the RBA Governor disagrees with the PM on the need for a stimulus, he does agree with The Greens.

He really should just keep his views to himself. Unbelievably out of his depth. Even in the one area he is supposed to know something about – monetary policy – he is lowering rates and threatens to continue to lower rates. No idea about the damage he is doing. You don’t expect more from the Greens, and now that I mention it, I don’t really expect more from a modern economist either. We’ve had ten years of stimulus and look where it’s got us, and now they want more!

Dateless in New York

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A fascinating tale: A Deplorable Looks for a Date. And as a “deplorable”, he does seem to have a redeeming feature or two:

Thomas D. Klingenstein is a principal in the investment firm of Cohen, Klingenstein, LLC and the chairman of the Board of Directors of the Claremont Institute.

Harrowing, a horror story actually, beyond imagination. This, however, is incredible.

Some conservatives would claim that my being turned down because of my politics is an example of the closed-mindedness of liberals. Perhaps. Though it may just be that conservatives like me, surrounded as we are by liberals, would end up dateless if we limited ourselves to conservatives. As an example of the liberal-conservative imbalance in New York City, in my election district on the Upper West side of Manhattan, out of 12,000 people, a whopping four voted for Trump. Two of these four, a married couple, I am friends with. The odds that the fourth is Miss Right are not in my favor.

I thought Trump’s election was itself the Art of the Impossible. Sleepless in Seattle presented a romantic challenge, but finding love and contentment for a conservative in New York seems to be beyond the widest realm of possibility. And just in case you don’t remember the movie plot:

After the death of his wife, Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) moves to Seattle with his son, Jonah (Ross Mallinger). When Jonah calls in to a talk-radio program to find a new wife for his father, Sam grudgingly gets on the line to discuss his feelings. Annie Reed (Meg Ryan), a reporter in Baltimore, hears Sam speak and falls for him, even though she is engaged. Unsure where it will lead, she writes Sam a letter asking him to meet her at the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day.

My only advice to Sam if he’s meeting a reporter in New York, don’t wear your MAGA hat whatever you do.

Oliver Cromwell discusses Brexit

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It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place,

which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice.

Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government.

Ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess?

Ye have no more religion than my horse. Gold is your God. Which of you have not bartered your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defiled this sacred place, and turned the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices?

Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. You were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are yourselves become the greatest grievance.

Your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse this Augean stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings in this House; and which by God’s help, and the strength he has given me, I am now come to do.

I command ye therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place.

Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!

Intelligent design and the true nature of reality

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Venus Flytrap Takes a Bite Out of Darwinism. Watch only if you can bear a true horror story direct from nature. No modern film would go to this kind of story since for the fly, there is no happy ending, even if some do get away. Not to mention that Darwinian theory cannot possibly provide a mechanism through which the Venus Fly Trap could have evolved since the necessary combination of the fly trap along with the ability to gain nutrition from flies defies explanation. Each half is purposeless without the other, and the independent but simultaneous evolution of each is impossible.

On a new episode of ID the Future, Brazilian Scotsman Andrew McDiarmid reads from Scottish Brazilian chemist Marcos Eberlin’s recent book Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose. In this excerpt, the distinguished scientist highlights the challenge the Venus flytrap poses for evolutionary theory. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Dr. Eberlin, the former president of the International Mass Spectrometry Association, describes the problem: The Venus flytrap, like all carnivorous plants, had no use for its insect-trapping function unless it also had an insect-digesting function. And vice versa. Did they really both evolve together? And how, when there would be no functional advantage along much of the evolutionary pathway to the sophisticated finished system? Finally, how did this “evolutionary miracle” also happen in four other carnivorous plant genera?

If you watched the video, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

A classic case of economic ignorance

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I am in the midst of finishing off a book on classical economic theory from which, and only from which, you can discover just how fatal to economic health modern economic theory is. The Australian economy is not far from disaster, real growth is falling as are real wages. But this we find at the top of the front page of The Oz.

PUBLIC SPENDING KEEPS NATION AFLOAT

Here are the opening paras.

Surging federal and state government spending has insulated the economy from a dramatic plunge in growth, as business investment and household spending shrank, raising questions about the health of the economy.

The latest national accounts show annual economic growth fell to 1.4 per cent — the slowest since 2009 — as rapid increases in public spending and global demand for the nation’s coal, LNG and iron ore papered over weak or falling household spending and business investment.

That it is the public spending that is taking the economy to death’s door occurs to no one. Let me therefore take you to a bit from the introduction to my forthcoming book.

The chapter goes to some length in discussing the advent of Keynesian theory, which was summarised by Paul Krugman in his introduction to The General Theory which was published in 2006, seventy years after Keynes’s original publication in 1936.

“Stripped down, the conclusions of The General Theory might be expressed as four bullet points:

1. Economies can and often do suffer from an overall lack of demand, which leads to involuntary unemployment
2. The economy’s automatic tendency to correct shortfalls in demand, if it exists at all, operates slowly and painfully
3. Government policies to increase demand, by contrast, can reduce unemployment quickly
4. Sometimes increasing the money supply won’t be enough to persuade the private sector to spend more, and government spending must step into the breach.

“To a modern practitioner of economic policy, none of this – except, possibly, the last point – sounds startling or even especially controversial. But these ideas weren’t just radical when Keynes proposed them; they were very nearly unthinkable. And the great achievement of The General Theory was precisely to make them thinkable.”

There is no question that Keynes did indeed make each of these more than just thinkable. He was able to turn these propositions into the mainstream where they have been accepted by virtually every economist ever since. It is classical economic theory that has now become unthinkable. The result of the Keynesian Revolution has left things so that the classical alternative is not just no longer contemplated by anyone within the mainstream of economic theory, but that no one within the mainstream even knows what that alternative is.

I stumbled onto classical theory by accident but it has been so accurate in allowing me to understand what’s going on that I can never understand why others don’t sicken of this Keynesian trash. It has never ever in a single instance brought an economy from recession into recovery. It’s all set out in my Free Market Economics. How we ended up in this dismal place we are now in is what my next book will go into chapter and verse.

Even the devil may quote scripture

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You want to see quite a bit of hyperbole, try this on for size:

The case of Sri Lankan asylum­ ­applicants Nadesalingam Murugappan, his wife Kokilapath­mapriya Nadarasa and their two children is the public policy ­dilemma from hell.

And what’s the issue that is so hard to resolve?

The adults separately came to Australia illegally in 2012 and 2013, claimed asylum, had those claims rejected and have exhausted every avenue of appeal.

In the meantime, they married, had two kids born in Australia, got jobs in a rural town and are loved by their community. Australia would be better off with this ­family, and they would be better off here.

Their supporters make much of the Christian case for exercising compassion to them: whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.

Yet Scott Morrison forcefully, directly, powerfully made the moral as well as policy case for ­returning them to Sri Lanka.

Apparently because these are model citizens with nice children, we should throw our laws overboard and let them stay. We just yesterday turned back the sixth boat of illegal migrants from Sri Lanka so there is even more reason for making this policy stick.

But what makes this story even more disgusting are the arguments that are being used against Scott Morrison – who I am growing to like more and more with each decision he has made: Attack on Morrison’s faith splits Labor.

Opposition home affairs spokeswoman Kristina Keneally and agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon stepped up their calls for Mr Morrison to “show Christian leadership” and intervene in the case, arguing that he had put his faith in the public sphere.

Well, I remember the last time Ms Keneally was in the news showing her minuscule moral leadership ability: Keneally wants Australia to refuse visa for Raheem Kassam.

This was because of his wishing to come to the CPAC meeting last month in Sydney where Keneally, because of this, became the butt end of every joke made by virtually ever speaker. Get to the final para of the story where you find this:

“Ms Keneally went so far as to describe the CPAC event as a ‘talkfest of hate’, a ludicrous accusation that merely makes use of the kind of language that is used to shut down healthy debate – a fundamental component of a liberal democracy and a free society.”

Raheem, who made it despite Ms Keneally’s best efforts, described the problems that would have followed him all of his life had a visa been refused, since forever after he would have had to tick yes on every application where it asked, have you ever been refused a visa? We thus have this self-appointed moral giant wishing to visit serious harm on someone else for massively insufficient reasons. So again quoting: from here.

Labor’s use of Scott Morrison’s Christianity in a political attack over the deportation of a Sri Lankan­ Tamil family has triggered divisions within the ALP, as federal parliament prepares to debat­e the repeal of the medivac bill and religious freedom.

Christian Labor MPs distanced themselves yesterday from two of their frontbench colleagues who demanded the Prime Minister act on his religious beliefs and allow the Tamil family to remain in Australia­ despite being found not to be genuine refugees.

In this regard I might just mention my own visa experience, which came about because of changes to Australian laws. Since until 1975, which was when I arrived, we Commonwealth members just had to show up and gain admittance. But then from January 1 that year, you had to have a migrant visa which was not all that easy to get – for me, two interviews with the High Commission in Canada, which included a university professor to assess my economic qualifications. After I had arrived, and as told to me by an English mate who came around the same time, there were thousands of English sunning themselves on Bali waiting to cross over on December 31 when, on Christmas Eve, Hurricane Tracy devastated Darwin. Wanna know how many of those English made it into Australia after that. Well, I can tell you the exact number. Not a single one. And that was when Whitlam was Prime Minister, a Labor PM, Ms Keneally.

The million dollar question no one could answer

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Last week “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” was filmed in Melbourne and this was the Million-Dollar question:

Who is the Victorian Leader of the Opposition?

Well the contestant who had known everything else didn’t know so he asked the audience. And the audience didn’t know either.

So he phoned a friend. And his friend – a Professor of Politics at the University of Melbourne – also didn’t know?

So he chose the 50-50. And even then he got it wrong.

So I will tell you. From Wikipedia, since I didn’t know either.

The current Opposition Leader is Michael O’Brien of the Liberal Party. He was elected Liberal leader on 6 December 2018, replacing Matthew Guy who resigned after losing the 2018 Victorian state election.

Undoubtedly the only time you will see his name in print between now and the next election.

And why did this come to mind? Because of this article in The Oz today: Victoria’s dodgy power supply is likely to short-circuit everyone. Where, among other things, you may read:

In Victoria, however, too much bird slicing is barely enough.

To entice renewable investment, the Victorian government absorbs the risk, guaranteeing fixed-price contracts for up to 20 years. The size of the liability further governments will inherit has not been calculated.

When it comes to saving the planet, the Victorian RET is about as useful as gluing your hands to the tarmac. As an incentive for rent-seekers, on the other hand, it is working a treat.

The result is more windmills under construction than in the rest of the country put together. Another dozen or so projects are waiting for approval. It means that more than 1500 or so turbines could be fitfully turning in a few years, generating 6600MW on paper at least, larger than the state’s coal-generating capacity before the closure of Hazelwood.

Non-synchronous power of this kind is worse than useless in a crisis, however. It serves only to destabilise the grid.

Not to mention this from the Financial Review: Victoria’s energy plan is a ‘leap of faith’, whose first line:

Victoria’s aggressive wind and solar push will shut down coal power stations and could send electricity prices skyrocketing, EnergyAustralia has bluntly told the state Labor government.

 Just because the place is named Victoria is no reason to drive us back to living standards last seen in Victorian times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Too smart for their own good

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This post got me thinking about something I have noticed for quite some time: Why the smartest people can make the dumbest mistakes. Before going on let me take you to the heart of it. As you will see, the author of this report, ironically, exactly demonstrate personally the case he is trying to make out.

Consider people’s beliefs about issues such as climate change. Among Democrats, the pattern is exactly as you would hope [?????]: the more educated someone is, the more likely they are to endorse the scientific evidence that carbon emissions generated by humans are leading to global warming. Among Republicans, however, the exact opposite is true: the more educated someone is, the less likely they are to accept the scientific evidence…. When it comes to certain tightly held beliefs, higher intelligence and knowledge is a tool for propaganda rather than truth seeking, amplifying our errors.

The unfortunate conclusion is that, even if you happen to be rational in general, it’s possible that you may still be prone to flawed reasoning on certain questions that matter most to you.

Universities are filled with people who really do believe global warming is an issue needing deep consideration and urgent action. They are also places filled with socialists, who because they hunger for someone else to pay their bills, and hate it when someone gets rich running a business, want the government to run the economy. The media the same. Talking to these people leave you aware how precarious our future is. The more we breed ignorant elites who think they are smarter than everyone else while knowing nothing about politics, history and economics, the more in danger we become.

What really needs teaching is the imperative that whatever you may believe, you should be able to make the strongest possible case for the other side of the argument. The smug insufferable ignorance of the global-warming set, or these full-on clueless imbecilic socialists, is a continuous astonishment to me. They’ll tell you about some phone call from a Nigerian scammer as they head off to some demo on behalf of some group who would if they could rob and murder them in their sleep, and who even say so everywhere else but to their face. And sometimes even to their face.

The American election is still a toss up. Trump is by no means the certainty he ought to be. And you know what? Given the profile of the man who wrote this article –

David Robson is a senior journalist at the BBC –

there would not the the slightest doubt that he is worried about global warming, favours socialism, votes far left and hates PDT.