https://twitter.com/Crazyinnasia/status/1243576571144949764
He just better hope she doesn’t get quicker and that his back holds out.
Passing the time
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Monthly Archives: March 2020
With Paul Kelly in The Oz might as well read The Age
It’s Paul Kelly and he is right up to form: Coronavirus: It’s masks on, gloves off for Trump and Xi. Does he not know that China covered up for more than a month? Does he not know that the US is an open society where the President is surrounded by a media made up of people such as himself who are always on the lookout for something, anything, to criticise? This is how the article begins:
A vicious competition, propaganda war and nationalistic blame game has been unleashed between China and the US as their relations nosedive and the struggle against COVID-19 — affecting virtually every nation — becomes decisive in 21st-century global leadership.
National leaders, China’s Xi Jinping and America’s Donald Trump, have both launched domestic campaigns with megaphones to the world seeking to discredit each other’s countries in a test of their rival ideological systems, ability to save their own people and offer an example to the world.
Current trends suggest more Americans than Chinese will die from COVID-19, a virus that originated in China. It is hard to imagine a more incendiary political package for Trump who brands the pandemic a “China virus” to deflect responsibility as the US health system falters amid a rising death toll.
My disgust level is at near peak level. The final para:
But the ultimate play is China. Every sign is that Trump, from the start, sought an economic confrontation with Beijing but wanted to avoid any military confrontation. Now he has got more than he bargained for — not the military showdown — but a comprehensive contest of political systems. By our standards, America should win. America needs to win. But is Trump the man for the job?
He actually takes Chinese propaganda at face value! It really does disgust me to read such stuff.
SINCLAIR ASKS: “Weren’t you promising to subscribe to the Age? How’s that working for you?”
It’s actually working out quite well. I didn’t cut my sub to The Oz, just added in The Age. I therefore now have three sudokus to do each day instead of just two.
FROM LOUISE AT THE COMMENTS SECTION OF THE OZ: Virtually all of the comments are similar to mine and hers, but this does stand out.
This morning I watched Donald Trump’s press conference on Sky New Live. He gave an informative, measured and statesman like speech. He spoke about the need for global cooperation against a common enemy.
He detailed his conversation with President Xi and stressed that it was in no way combative and they had a good working relationship. They will be exchanging all data for analysis and research in both countries.
He also spoke about the capacity of the US to produce ventilators in large quantities and how they can be used domestically and to assist their friends across the globe.
He had to put up with snide, nitpicking questions from many of the journalists present, and he did this calmly and without losing his temper.
He came across as a man who recognised the gravity of the situation, was concerned for his countrymen, indeed all people, and was doing his very best to keep his country afloat.
Going on the offensive
Speaking of The Midwich Cuckoos, I genuinely do find talking to anyone on the left all too frequently just like talking to a wall. What especially infuriates me when I think I am just chatting, I am often and suddenly told “I don’t want to talk about that” which just comes out of nowhere to me. Not only are these idiots offended when I say something, even obliquely, about something that’s on my mind, but they don’t want to engage and immediately want to end the conversation.
And while on the subject of being offended, I was in a book shop today and I said to the 30-ish chap behind the counter how put off I was by all the titles such as “The Art of Not Giving a F*ck” – and there were quite a number like that – and he was obviously put off by my language. So I said to him, if you are put off by my saying what I said, just think of what I feel by having to read such titles. I think he saw my point but only barely. He can get knotted.
And another thing. I was reading an article on the recessionary effects of the CV and right in the middle was an unintended rhyming couplet.
The deeper they are and the longer they last,
The more ongoing the damage after the downturn has passed.
And so all such recessions seem always to be.
But if you’re going to quote this couplet you’ll have to cite me.
At long last a practical suggestion to deal with the economic consequences of the CV
From The Onion, of course.
This, however, not from The Onion, but seems related. It is a story you will see today, if you see it at all, and never again after: Former Senate Staffer Who Opposes Trump Accuses Biden of Sexual Assault.
Why anyone thinks this is newsworthy is completely beyond me.
The Fish Face Files
Every single one of my friends from youth is on the left and often on the loopiest part of the moronic left. Since I see them each for around one day every two years, we manage to get by well enough so that I can still exchange Christmas cards and we let each other know when they have added to their number of grandchildren. To talk politics with them is the instant death of friendship of any kind so I don’t. I, of course, cut no one off, but they would and do. In fact, the six links below is from one of these former friends who now lives in the most idiotic part of the world, possibly bar none, Silicon Valley.
Since the election of PDT he has sent me more than 3200 emails, every one of them containing some news item from media organisations around the world which all have a single characteristic, they are all fanatically anti-Trump. When I was there in Palo Alto in January, I suggested we get together, but after three days he wrote back to say that he had suddenly decided to go to Hawaii for his anniversary. It really is hard on my nerves anyway since he has no other conversation, other than to tell me about how he loves to drive the California hills in his Porsche – no license plates so that he can speed as much as he likes without getting ticketed. I call the file of his emails the Fish Face Files because my Dad could not remember his last name so he called him “fishface” (only to me, of course) which sounds similar to his actual name. Here for your interest are these latest six. The media road guaranteed to bring you to a peak level of ignorance.
From the New York Times: An Open Letter to President Trump
New York Times again, but Paul Krugman: On Coronavirus, We’re #1
More New York Times but the editorial this time: Why Is America Choosing Mass Unemployment?
Another NYT editorial: Trump Wants to ‘Reopen America.’ Here’s What Happens if We Do
More from the NYT: ‘It’s a Wreck’: 3.3 Million File Unemployment Claims as Economy Comes Apart
And this last one from CNN: Fact check: Trump utters series of false and misleading claims at coronavirus briefing
I, of course, welcome these emails since they keep me up to date on the latest thinking on the left. But they are depressing all the same, and remind me why Joe Biden might yet be president.
Herd immunity from common sense is the fundamental characteristic of the left
Talking to friends on the left (actually they are almost entirely my wife’s friends) never fails to astonish me about how lock-step they all are with whatever happens to be the latest ideological fashion statement of the moment. I am often taken by surprise since it is often difficult to keep up with the what beliefs are in or out, but it only requires a conversation with any one of them and I find myself right up to date.
It reminded me of one of my favourite books of my youth, The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndam. I read every one of his books when I was a young lad, the most famous being The Day of the Triffids. All of Wyndam’s books are astonishing reads and it seems all are still in print. But the Midwich Cuckoos remains the one I have loved the most, and strangely seems absolutely relevant to understanding the mentality on the left side of politics. I will describe the plot but from the movie made from the book, Village of the Damned (1960 film). The book is better, an absolute page turner. From these plot details of the film you will see how relevant the book is to the mind-numbing sameness of the belief structures on the left. I have left out anything that might give the plot and ending away in the following which is mainly done to show how accurately the book describes the modern left.
The inhabitants of the British village of Midwich suddenly fall unconscious, as does anyone entering the village. Two months later, all women and girls of child-bearing age in the affected area are discovered to be pregnant. All the women give birth on the same day. Their children have a powerful telepathic bond with one another. They can communicate with each other over great distances, and as one learns something, so do the others.
At age three, the children dress impeccably, always walk as a group, speak in an adult manner, and behave maturely, but show no conscience or love, and demonstrate a coldness to others, causing the villagers to fear and be repulsed by them. The children begin to exhibit the power to read minds and to force people to do things against their will. Zellaby, whose “son” David is one of the children, is eager to work with them. Zellaby compares the children’s resistance to reasoning with a brick wall and uses this motif as self-protection against their mind reading after the children’s inhuman nature becomes clear to him.
It may even be that Wyndam wrote the book as a caricature of the mentality on the left in his own time, published as it was in the midst of the cold war (1957). Whether or not that was his intention, it certainly fits the mould today.
How to structure public spending so it actually does some good
I have an article up at the American Institute for Economic Research explaining how idiotic a “stimulus” at this time is: A Classical Economic Response to the Coronavirus Recession. It takes as read that we are going to have a massive amount of public spending, and given that as the certainty, how to do it with minimal economic damage. That we are even having a lock-down is also taken as read since others have already made that decision. This is the central point made in the article.
Let me take you back to the economics before Keynes, to when economists understood the nature of the cycle.
Recessions in those days were rightly understood as due to structural faults in the economy. A recession occurred when the bits did not properly mesh. Some parts of the economy were no longer able to run at a profit because of structural changes in the economy, sometimes on the demand side but more often on the supply side. There, therefore, needed to be some shifts in the entire apparatus of production. What turned the adjustment process into a recession occurred when the adjustment process required was too large to occur as in normal times when as one business would close down another would open.
During recessions, for whatever the reason might be, the number of businesses closing would exceed the number opening, and along with the slowing of production in total, there would be a rise in unemployment. If ever there has been a downturn that cannot in any way be explained as a fall in demand it is the forced closures that have followed the coronavirus panic. The downturn is entirely structural in nature. That is why when I hear discussions of the need for a stimulus I am even more than usual amazed at how beyond sense economic policy has become. What is needed, and what is largely being done, are measures to hold both capital and labour in place until the closures are brought to an end.
The last thing we need now is a Keynesian-type “stimulus” where government spending on wasteful junk takes over from actual productive firms.
But the policy everywhere is never let a crisis go to waste. It is not you and me the political class are thinking about, but themselves in how they can use the crisis to benefit themselves. You just have to hope against all likelihood that the damage done is kept to a minimum.
A sampler of the politics of The Atlantic
If you are interested in the politics of The Atlantic, let me present you with the final paras of this long and astonishingly inane article which I have just received: How the Pandemic Will End.
One could easily conceive of a world in which most of the nation believes that America defeated COVID-19. Despite his many lapses, Trump’s approval rating has surged. Imagine that he succeeds in diverting blame for the crisis to China, casting it as the villain and America as the resilient hero. During the second term of his presidency, the U.S. turns further inward and pulls out of NATO and other international alliances, builds actual and figurative walls, and disinvests in other nations. As Gen C grows up, foreign plagues replace communists and terrorists as the new generational threat.
One could also envisage a future in which America learns a different lesson. A communal spirit, ironically born through social distancing, causes people to turn outward, to neighbors both foreign and domestic. The election of November 2020 becomes a repudiation of “America first” politics. The nation pivots, as it did after World War II, from isolationism to international cooperation. Buoyed by steady investments and an influx of the brightest minds, the health-care workforce surges. Gen C kids write school essays about growing up to be epidemiologists. Public health becomes the centerpiece of foreign policy. The U.S. leads a new global partnership focused on solving challenges like pandemics and climate change.
In 2030, SARS-CoV-3 emerges from nowhere, and is brought to heel within a month.
It’s all politics on the left. Saving lives is the last thing on their minds.
A test of common sense, civility and courage
The harm to our economies and our way of life because of the over-reaction to the Corona Virus is discussed today by Henry Ergas in The Australian: Coronavirus: It will be unhealthy to ignore the cost of all this.
While the response of federal and state governments to the spread of COVID-19 is understandable, there must be a danger of going too far.
To say that is certainly not to recommend an attitude of benign neglect. Nor is it to ignore the fact these are decisions being taken in the depths of uncertainty, where risks are hard to measure and errors could lead to disaster.
But it is no less a fact that some 430 people die in this country every day, so that since the beginning of the year there have been almost 37,000 deaths, of which 12 are due to the coronavirus.
And it is also a fact that, every day, decision-makers around Australia take decisions that balance life and death: not merely by determining how much we should spend on public health but also by assessing whether to spend taxpayers’ funds on making roads safer, reducing the risk of fires or strengthening the emergency services.
Inevitably, those decisions involve trade-offs: they require us to assess how much we are willing to give up so as to prevent a person dying sooner than they otherwise would.
He puts his finger right on the problem, that every life matters and if we can save but one life, etc etc etc.
It is undoubtedly true that decisions that involve balancing lives and costs are far easier to take when the life at issue is not likely to be your own. It is one thing to think in terms of trade-offs when those who will be affected are anonymous draws from a large population and quite another when it is a matter of family and friends.
But that is precisely why we so often delegate these decisions to others, from the physicians who assess whether it is worth undertaking a procedure on a grievously ill patient to the institutions that select, out of the many who desperately need them, the few who will receive donated organs.
These are tragic choices, and we know that they will be better taken at a distance, dispassionately weighing the consequences.
He finishes with this:
This crisis is … a test of common sense, civility and courage: the common sense to avoid taking decisions that we may regret for decades to come; the civility, in the term’s old meaning of “civil righteousness”, to be mindful of what we owe each other and prudent before inflicting costs on people who will struggle to bear them; and most of all, the courage to calmly confront, and ultimately defeat, an enemy who, as the Treasurer put it, flies no flag and has no face.
That enemy is deadly enough. It would be a disgrace if we made the harm it wreaks even greater than it needs to be.
Whenever this panic comes to an end and we return to something like normal, this will be remembered as a very odd episode in our history, along the lines, I believe, with the Salem Witch Trials from the supposed Dark Ages of our past.
Woody Allen is the best director of comedy in our time
Mia Farrow has finally succeeded in destroying Woody Allen — and we should be afraid.
In the scorched-earth campaign to vanquish Woody Allen — a concerted effort to kill his career, destroy his reputation, to go after him with proverbial torches and pitchforks until he has no recourse except to shrivel up and play dead — the mob has spoken. Woody, 84, is a filthy child molester, the woke practitioners of street justice have declared. Damn the truth.
We should all be afraid.
And from deeper into the text:
Among the disturbing revelations we learned at the time was that Mia, in the summer of ’92, videotaped the then-7-year-old Dylan, who was at times naked, over the course of two or three days. The tape was never presented in court, but was leaked to a local TV station. Some who’ve seen the video said Mia coached the reluctant child to talk about the molestation she supposedly suffered at the hands of her father — often stopping and restarting the tape in what appeared to be attempts to get the child to make the accusations Mia wanted to hear. Many observers, including me, concluded that Mia violated her own daughter’s privacy and risked mentally damaging her in a twisted ploy to make Woody pay.
Enlarge ImageWoody Allen, 84, is now married to his adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, 49.
Woody Allen, 84, is now married to Soon-Yi Previn, 49.TheImageDirect.com
But he didn’t. New York state sex-crimes investigators decided that no crime could be proven, and dropped their case against Woody.Experts at Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut went as far as to suggest that Mia may have coached her daughter to lie, thereby planting a false abuse narrative in her head.
Mia’s adopted son Moses insists the allegations are preposterous.
“So many times I saw my mother try to convince her that she was abused — and it has worked,” Moses wrote on his blog. “Some day, I hope Dylan can escape from my mother, confront the truth and begin her own healing.”
The custody trial concluded with Mia retaining the kids. But most of us who experienced the spectacle believe that Mia helped emotionally cripple Dylan, and alienated her from her father. She should be ashamed.
Ashamed is hardly the word for it. And although she pans the book, I will read it first chance I get to buy it.
And then this from Cut&Paste a few days ago: A truly great director could make a great film of all this but he wouldn’t, Woody. More slagging of the greatest comic movie director of our era.
Woody Allen has been consistently funny since I first came across him on late night television and I still remember fondly his What’s Up, Tiger Lily?. To go back a year, I saw his What’s New, Pussycat first when it came out, and then in German in Germany around 1972, as Was ist neues, Pussykatzen?, which made it even more hilarious. There was also a time when I would say that my favourite movie of all time was Crimes and Misdemeanors which is described at the link as “a 1989 American existential comedy-drama film“. Whether I would still think it as good as I once did half a life-time ago I’d have to watch it again to find out. Here is part of one of the reviews made when it came out:
The wonder of Crimes and Misdemeanors is the facility with which Mr. Allen deals with so many interlocking stories of so many differing tones and voices. The film cuts back and forth between parallel incidents and between present and past with the effortlessness of a hip, contemporary Aesop. The movie’s secret strength – its structure, really – comes from the truth of the dozens and dozens of particular details through which it arrives at its own very hesitant, not especially comforting, very moving generality.
And if that doesn’t interest you, try this:
The chief strength of the movie is its courage in confronting grave and painful questions of the kind the American cinema has been doing its damnedest to avoid.
Whenever his movies would come to play, I would see it in the very first week since very few of his films would last for even two. It may take a special view of the world to enjoy his films but I definitely have whatever that is. And if I filtered out movies based on the politics of the producers and actors, I would hardly have made it to a single film over the past thirty years.
On the left though he may be, he is no longer in because of the claims made by his former wife. Once again, if I chose my films based on the morality of the actors and producers who made them, I would have seen hardly a film over the past thirty years. In any case, I have followed this story from the start and believe Woody’s side sounds infinitely more plausible. On this, I am on the same side as his son: Woody Allen’s son Moses Farrow defends father over sexual assault claims.
Sadly for Allen, he has fallen on the wrong side of the thought police. This comes at the very end of the C&P.
The Boston Globe, July 19, 2016:
Whether or not he’s the devil incarnate off screen I simply don’t feel I can say. But I can say this: He’s likely the most overrated film director working … I truly believe that in 50 years audiences will look at most of these movies and wonder what in hell we were thinking.
He says “in 50 years” because he knows that if you watched any of Allen’s best films today, you would enjoy them and see how much fun they are. So he punts for half a century, but in my view, come back in fifty years and Woody Allen will be among the very few directors from our era who is still remembered.
Law of Markets 