Monthly Archives: March 2020

Liars and hypocrites doesn’t even begin to cover it

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The entire post taken from John Hinderaker: EXPOSING LIBERAL HYPOCRISY IS DANGEROUS. The left are loons in so many ways.

Before this New York Post story, I had never heard of Carlos Maza. But a lot of people had; he has 150,000 followers on Twitter and YouTube. Maza is a social justice warrior, and he hates rich people. This is how he describes himself in his Twitter profile: “Marxist pig. Liberal fascist. Queer scum. He/Him. YouTube profits off of hate speech. IG: gaywonk.” He has specialized in exposing the hypocrisy of rich liberals who pretend to be regular folks, in tweets like this one:

Carlos Maza 🌹

✔@gaywonk

Just found out James Carville — who spends his time lecturing Democrats for being “too far left” — lives in an absolutely obscene four story mansion and dear god can we STOP taking political advice from the ultra-wealthy.

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Yeah, well, Carville may live in an “absolutely obscene” four story mansion, but this is just one of the luxury homes in which, it turns out, Mr. Maza himself lives, in Boca Raton, Florida:

Details at the link. Maza’s mother is the partner, to use contemporary lingo, of the founder of a successful software company, who is Maza’s de facto stepfather. They also have a $7 million condominium on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, estimating conservatively.

All of which is fine with me. But there is something unhealthy about railing against other people’s wealth–and hypocrisy!–while enjoying extreme financial privilege. Yet somehow, it is rather common–there are more socialists among the upper crust than among the working class. Maybe you can figure out why.

The most interesting aspect of this story is that Jonathan Levine, the reporter who authored the Post’s story on Carlos Maza, was punished by being locked out of his Twitter account. Exposing socialist hypocrisy is apparently contrary to Twitter’s guidelines.

UPDATE: Carlos Maza fundraises on Twitter and Patreon, soliciting donations of $2 per month to $10 per month from “comrades.” I wonder how many of those socialist “comrades” know that they are supporting–however trivially–the lifestyle of a possible billionaire.

 

Where’s the message for women to value the men in their lives?

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More sexist comments which are now running amok everywhere and all the time: In surprise school visit, Meghan tells schoolboys to honour women. The bits in black are highlighted because of their particular interest.

The Duchess of Sussex has made a surprise visit to a school to deliver an International Women’s Day message to men to “value the women in your lives”….

In a speech addressing the school’s boys in particular, she urged them to “continue to value and appreciate the women in your lives and also set the example for some men who are not seeing it that same way.

“You have your mothers, sisters, girlfriends, friends in your life, protect them,” she said.

“Make sure that they are feeling valued and safe and let’s all just rally together to make International Women’s Day something that is not just on Sunday, but frankly feels like every day of the year.”

Is this really equality that men are being asked to “protect” women to ensure that they are feeling “safe”. Very traditional if you ask me.

And this just in as well: In Mexico, seething anger over violence against women spills into the streets. These people must think there’s some magic cure for any kind of violence, but let’s see what the story says:

Seething anger over a rise in deadly violence against women in Mexico spilled into the streets of the nation’s capital on Sunday as tens of thousands of female demonstrators marched to demand that the government do more to protect them.

Who are they asking to protect them? Not men, surely? If they’re all so equal and everything, why don’t they do it themselves. The entire history of male-female relations, no doubt going back to cavemen and cavewomen was that part of the arrangement was for men to protect women, and almost always from other men who were not part of their own family or tribe. And here is the question, put as succinctly as you like.

“We’re waking up,” said Silvia Gallegos, 52, who marched alongside a group of friends from college as well as her 16-year-old daughter. “We’ve been living with this culture of machismo our whole lives. If we don’t defend ourselves, who will?”

Yes, who will? Who do they have in mind to do the protecting? Feminism tore down the protective barriers, which included quite a number of forms of chivalrous behaviours, and now women are exposed to dangers that were always there but they were too ignorant to recognise.

That’s from Mexico City feminists accidentally firebomb THEMSELVES in pro-abortion protest. Came under the original heading, “Girls can’t throw”. Very nasty.

Better at what?

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One of the most egregious, and ubiquitous [supplications to the diversity gods], comes from some of those who demand gender diversity in the workplace. It is entirely reasonable to be in favour of gender diversity to increase the pool of talent. The deeper the talent pool that appointments are drawn from, the better a company will perform. That ought to be the extent of gender diversity.

Instead, there is a coterie of loud men and women who go much further. Often to justify quotas and other special measures for women, they claim that women are not just equally talented to men but also better than men.

The quote above is from Janet Albrechtsen in an article titled in the newspaper, “For better or worse, sex doesn’t define skill sets” with this as the sub-heading: Modern-day feminists are wrong to claim women are superior to men”.

This is a dangerous area for any male to get involved with, but what has brought me back into it has been going to see the latest movie incarnation of The Invisible Man. A more wicked film I have seldom seen. If you want to know the story, you can go to the link. All I will tell you is that unlike the original tale, and unlike every other film made based on the concept, this one is not primarily about someone who works out how to make themselves invisible with the plot then teasing out possible implications from having such an intriguing ability. In this film, invisibility is entirely secondary to the plot, which is about a woman who leaves an abusive husband who then, because he has, for no reason discussed in the film, a device that can make him invisible, then menaces his absent wife by turning up at various moments but invisible to her and everyone else. The invisibility aspect is entirely secondary to using the concept to portray spousal abuse.

Tomorrow there will be the final of the women’s twenty-20 cricket final. Are women better at cricket than men? On Monday, there will be thousands of men driving trucks across Australia. Are any of those truck drivers female, and are these handful of women “better” at driving trucks than any of the men? Same for plumbers, same for construction workers, same for lots of things. There was also this from Janet:

Last week, the Australian ­Financial Review ran this headline: “Why women make better CEOs”. The piece regurgitated some “new research” from the Macquarie Business School by Farida Akhtar, a senior lecturer in actuarial studies and business analytics, that finds that women are not only different from men, they also are better than men. According to this research, said the AFR, women create stronger corporate cultures, they nurture employees more, they create better reward systems and offer greater flexibility. Tech companies run by female chief executives do better because women can shape innova­tion and sustainable growth strategies.

But do such companies make more money or satisfy their customers more completely? It’s an academic writing the article so that’s the kind of question that would seldom cross such a person’s mind. And as Janet writes, “a review of more than 3000 companies fails to find any evidence that women on boards or in the C-suite cause, lead to or produce better corporate performance.” But the debate is ideological so facts will not intrude on any part of the debate or convince anyone on the other side of the divide.

There is then this about politics in the US from Cosmopolitan: Stop Lying, America: You Were Never Gonna Vote for a Woman President. Well apparently not among the Democrats, and certainly not for Elizabeth Warren. But in my time I have been all in for Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin among others. But here is the author reflecting on the moment that she realised that Hillary would lose in 2016:

“It’s not just about losing,” I said … to myself. “It’s about all the little boys who will grow up thinking they get to—or have to—behave that way to be president. And all the little girls who will think they’ll never have a chance.”

In deciding who gets which jobs, it’s not a matter of chivalry, men stepping aside to allow a woman to precede them, or at least it shouldn’t be. Political leaders are chosen for their leadership abilities and the clarity of their policy direction. They are not chosen because of which sex they happen to be, or at least that should never ever be part of the equation. And if you think that it should be, you are a moron, whether you are a male or a female. You are just a complete jerk.

Pinky promise! Now there is real leadership ability if you’ll pardon me while I go roll my eyes.

Maths is hard

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That’s why fact checking from the media is so important. That’s why it will be so important that the American media will be keeping an eye on Joe Biden.

Something is certainly self-evident but the media are unlikely to tell us 2hqt that is in regard to the Democrat candidate whoever it might be any time this side of November.

“No permanent additional employment can be created by State expenditure”

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A review of the following book was put up on the Societies for the History of Economics online discussion thread:

Robert W. Dimand and Harald Hagemann, editors, The Elgar Companion to John Maynard Keynes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2019. xxi + 648 pp. $250 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-1-84720-008-2.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Bradley W. Bateman, Randolph College.

To get the flavour of the review, this was its first line:

Rarely does one read a reference work for pleasure. After all, would you take the Encyclopedia Britannica or the New Palgrave to the beach for your holiday? Not likely. And yet, there are reference books that one not only depends on, but enjoys. These might be surveys of the literature such as G.C. Peden’s little gem, Keynes, the Treasury, and British Economic Policy (1988); or they might be traditional multi-volume works like the Dictionary of National Biography. A good reference work can take many forms; but when you find a well-written and authoritative work that can help you in your research, you turn to it regularly and, yes, can even come to enjoy it.

I therefore wrote a note to put my own perspective forward.

I hear all the time that Keynesian economics has been transcended, that it is a thing of the past, but the evidence, both from the way our textbooks are written and in the way policy is conducted across the world, is that the very core of macro theory and policy remains Y=C+I+G. I am in no doubt that this collection is indeed a valuable collection in that it consolidates a great deal of writing on Keynesian economics and its history into a single volume. Yet the issue for me remains, that economists continue to trundle down this Keynesian path without the slightest evidence that it accurately explains how economies work, or that there has ever been a single instance where a Keynesian fiscal expansion has actually succeeded in bringing an economy out of recession and restoring full employment. You might have hoped that the failure of every stimulus in the world to succeed following the GFC might have created some kind of learning experience, but so far there is little evidence that economists are even beginning to rethink these macro models. Since the bibliography includes G.C. Peden, I will add in my favourite quotation from his writings, and leave it at that. And what this quote shows is that it’s not as if pubic spending didn’t have a constituency before Keynes, and yet, when it was tried, it turns out that the “Treasury View” was absolutely correct, as it has been every time a “fiscal stimulus” has been tried. Winston Churchill was the British Chancellor of the Exchequer and this is from his Budget Speech in May 1929, from well before the stock market crash in October.

“Churchill pointed to recent government expenditure on public works such as housing, roads, telephones, electricity supply, and agricultural development, and concluded that, although expenditure for these purposes had been justified:

‘For the purposes of curing unemployment the results have certainly been disappointing. They are, in fact, so meagre as to lend considerable colour to the orthodox Treasury doctrine which has been steadfastly held that, whatever might be the political or social advantages, very little additional employment and no permanent additional employment can in fact and as a general rule be created by State borrowing and State expenditure.’” (Peden 1996: 69-70)

I just wonder whether this volume has an entry on Critics of Keynesian Economics. I doubt that it does, but in any case it would undoubtedly and unfortunately have to be a very short entry.

So far no rejoinder to my response, but will let you know if there ever is.

Super Tuesday: the Dems are not just worried about losing but about losing big

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From Why the Dems are desperate to scuttle Bernie.

That if Sanders is nominated, Donald Trump will crush him in November. And not only will the White House be lost, all hopes of winning the Senate and blocking Trump’s second-term Supreme Court nominees would also be lost.

And not only the Senate but Nancy Pelosi’s House could also be lost. And not only the House but hundreds of down-ballot candidates could also lose, leaving the GOP with the whip hand in redistricting congressional seats through the decade.

For Democrats, the fear is of the Harding-Coolidge Roaring ’20s revisited.

And if Trumpists rule the roost in the Republican Party and the populist-left of “Crazy Bernie” dominates the Democratic Party, what happens to the agenda of the establishment?

Today promises to a fateful one in the history of the Democratic Party, and it will answer many questions:

Will Sanders win enough delegates to give him an insurmountable lead for the nomination? Or will he have a good, but not a great, night, winning most of the states, but not a large enough pile of delegates to reach 50% before the convention in Milwaukee?

As for Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who was being urged to drop out and back Biden before he got the first returns on his $500 million investment in his campaign, what did he buy with that half billion? We shall find out today. …

What the establishment wants is for the first ballot to end without a nominee — if that nominee would be Sanders — and the pledged delegates to be freed of their commitments, and for the superdelegates to vote on the second ballot, and for the party thus to be spared falling into the custody of an angry septuagenarian socialist.

For the Democratic establishment, the stakes could not be higher and thus that establishment, after Biden’s landslide in South Carolina, is not disguising its interests or demands: Sanders must be denied the nomination, and Biden is the only one who can accomplish that.

He is also uncontrolled and uncontrollable. He would be the Donald Trump of the left. PDT has taken the US back to JFK’s New Frontier. Bernie would take the US forward to a Venezuelan future. Even mainstream Dems are terrified and so should we all. And you know what’s most terrifying of all. There is no certainty that Bernie would lose.