Monthly Archives: April 2020

If it’s any consolation in Canada it’s even worse

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An article by someone’s whose views I trust, David Solway: The Canadian Way of Dealing with a Pandemic: Ineffective, Clueless, and Dishonest. We are in a pandemic of political ineptitude, but it is a major saving grace to have political leaders like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison instead of Justin Trudeau. Let me, first, note the general position taken by Solway.

If we are to believe many of our politicians and journalists, the good guy working to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 is—you guessed it—China. Some self-serving politicians in the U.S. would like to refer President Trump to the International Court of Justice in the Hague for crimes against humanity for his handling of the crisis—Ohio State Representative Tavia Galonski apparently can’t stomach Trump’s promotion of hydroxychloroquine, which ironically has already saved the life of fellow Democrat Karen Whitsett. A reporter for Phoenix TV tried to put Trump in a bad light by asking whether he was cooperating with China, in her estimation obviously the heroic partner in the struggle. It turns out that Phoenix TV has intimate ties to Communist China and is linked with the PRC’s Ministry of State Security. Joe Biden is a big fan of Communist China and has profited from his family’s business relations with the regime. Trump is beset by those who would like to see him fail in his ongoing effort to find a way between averting economic collapse and maintaining public health. Nonetheless, Americans can remain confident that a responsible president, for all the trials and confusions he must contend with, has their wellbeing at heart and labors tirelessly to provide a solution to the current disaster.

Lots in between that reminds me of what a hopeless home of inanity Canada has become. The relatively few remaining sane Canadians, he points out, are “unfortunately, outnumbered by the many who have been brainwashed by a compliant media establishment and who elect parasitical governments that fritter away the nation’s resources and mismanage the nation’s business and security needs, including the response to national emergencies.” His final para:

At 7 o’clock every evening these brainwashed Canadians step out on their balconies and doorways and bang pots and pans in solidarity with the nurses—though not with the preponderantly male doctors, ambulance drivers, orderlies, and janitors who, being men, are apparently expendable, as good feminist doctrine holds. It is rather sobering to reflect that we have largely become a nation of feminist-inclined pot bangers, as if noisy displays of carefully targeted goodwill were an effective way of dealing with the current pandemic.

It used to be the true north strong and free. Putting their future into the hands of Justin Trudeau had already shown what a nation of fools Canada has become. This merely ices the case against.

More evidence that people on the left are mentally ill

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Only anecdotal, of course, but think of this: There can never be enough death to satisfy Trump-haters. Perhaps I really don’t understand the left all that well, but in the meantime, this does not even slightly feel like an exaggeration.

The left now has a love affair with death.  (All in the name of love, of course.)

So it should come as no surprise that there are Trump-haters out there so deranged that they would prefer millions to die from the coronavirus — even a limitless number — in exchange for Trump losing the election in November.

Ami Horowitz interviewed people in the East Village of New York and posed the following question: “Would you go for this deal, that the coronavirus lasts longer and is more severe, but the president guarantees to lose the election?”

And how surprised are you at the answers she found?

Most people in this leftist stronghold preferred a longer and more severe pandemic if it meant Trump would not be re-elected. Some were fine with a million people dying from the virus. Others said there was no limit to the number of deaths they would accept if it meant Trump was out of office.

The left has always preferred socialism in preference to human welfare. It is why they are socialists in the first place, since by now, even the dumbest and the thickest perfectly well understand how horrific socialism is.

Still, it was good to see that there were other perspectives, even there. But that anyone could stand before a camera and virtually say they would prefer many more people to die if it would mean the end of Donald Trump’s presidency shows a sickness unto moral death.

Hey SloMo, what’s the plan from here?

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Received this quite astute comment about where we are to go from here.

I think the ‘endgame’ will become an interesting political maelstrom. I can’t see how there is any choice but for governments to finally concede to take the calculated (cost vs lives) approach to open back up.

Try to eradicate? No way

Wait for a Vaccine? long way away and may not work

Wait for Herd immunity? long way off (think need 80%+) and who knows if that will work

Keep flattening forever? doesn’t make sense

Open up and then find the same exponential curve? can we take such a crazy risk (and how is it different to the risk we haven’t allowed ourselves to take to now)

Eventually I think it will just have to get back to normal and people will accept the risk that there’s a new strand of flu and just get on with it. Now how do the politicians enable that from the position we are in now?

Yes, indeed. How does the government begin to ease the restrictions and under what circumstances? Are they even giving us the rudiments of an exit strategy? Nothing so far, so why don’t they get on with it and let us know what’s in their minds and what the end game will look like?

Rudd returns to defend his economics because no one else will

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There was a letter to the editor in The Oz yesterday which they have not even preserved on their editorial page so I have had to re-type it so that you can see it in full. The heading is “Conservative no radical”.

Janet Albrechtsen accuses me of executing a “canny con job” by campaigning as an economic conservative.

As Peter Costello has said, John Howard had become a serious big spender by 2007. Our election commitments tallied about 75 per cent of the Liberals’; hence my statement I would not match his reckless spending promises. Indeed, in May 2008, we budgeted for a surplus of 1.8 percent of GDP. Then came the global recession in September. We took the mainstream conservative approach, learning from the Great Depression by reaching for the proven lever of fiscal stimulus and leaving a legacy of productive infrastructure.

The economic radicals of the Liberal Party voted against the stimulus. If they had succeeded, there would have been a 15-month recession with 210,000 more unemployed according to Treasury and the OECD. Instead, we were the only advanced economy to avoid a recession. Conservative does not mean reactionary.
Kevin Rudd, Sunshine Coast, Qld

The point of a “stimulus” is to reduce unemployment, which other than trivially never occurred. And if he thinks there was no recession in Australia following the GFC, he ought to take a look at the rise in the unemployment rate which has remained more or less at the same elevated rate it reached at the height of the GFC. Meanwhile productivity growth has been dismal, and real wages have continued to stagnate.

So to remind us of just how conservative K. Rudd was, I attach for your interest two articles I published in Quadrant. First, Reflections of a Neo-Liberal, which discusses an article by Rudd published at the time giving his economic philosophy. In my response to Rudd, there was this.

To capture as least some of the rhetorical overdrive, I reproduce the two insert quotes displayed in large print across the page. The first:

The great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed … the emperor has no clothes. Neo-liberalism, and the free-market fundamentalism it has produced, has been revealed as little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy.[ellipses in the original]

And then there’s this:

The stakes are high: there are the social costs of long-term unemployment; poverty once again expanding its grim reach across the developing world; and the impact on long-term power structures within the existing international political and strategic order. Success is not optional. Too much now rides on our ability to prevail.

We are here not discussing whether some policy or another might make the economic system work more effectively. This is not about whether there ought to be a stimulus package and if so, how it ought to be structured. This is beyond the technical side of economics and into the realm of good and evil. It is a psycho-drama in which Frodo and his mates take on Gollum in a bid to save the world.

That was in April, 2009. In July I wrote another, also in Quadrant, The Neo-Socialism of the Twenty-First Century. Here are the final two paras:

We in the West once understood how to develop strong economies. Kevin Rudd’s article reminded me that such knowledge is not possessed by all. The coin of the political realm is now the creation of jobs irrespective of what those jobs actually do. The Soviet Union had no unemployment for almost all of its seventy-odd-year history, but those who had “jobs” produced next to nothing because they did not have the market to guide them, either in what to produce or over which inputs to use.

Why these questions are important was one of the major ideas developed by Friedrich Hayek, the arch “market fundamentalist” [Rudd’s phrase] to whose good advice and sound counsel our Prime Minister has closed his mind. On the surface Rudd appears to be guided by some defunct academic scribbler, but in reality looks to be making it up as he goes along.

And let me just refer to this comment by Rudd in his letter, that in trying to roll back the Great Recession, they were “reaching for the proven lever of fiscal stimulus and leaving a legacy of productive infrastructure”.

Since all that has been proven by the stimulus spending across the world following the GFC was that public spending never brings an economy out of recession, it is astonishing that no one ever seems to learn from experience. Neither here, nor in Obama’s America, nor anywhere else did public spending lead to a recovery. If anything has been proven it is that Keynesian economics is economic nonsense. This was the great Keynesian experiment, adopted across the world, and it was an absolute failure whose dismal legacy remains with us to this day.

And then to have suggested that left behind from the stimulus was “a legacy of productive infrastructure” you really do have to wonder what kind of fantasyland Rudd is living in. The Pink Batts and School Halls programs left nothing productive behind. Only left behind were the debts and deficits which remain with us still, more than a decade later.

Malevolent lies that may kill countless people

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That virtually the whole of the CV episode is based on defeating Donald Trump in November is highlighted here: THE CHLOROQUINE AFFAIR – How Media Brainwashes & then Politicizes Their Audiences. That we live in a society of vast numbers of hysterics and fools is now proved beyond all possibility of refutation. No one is dying, and beyond that, there are now means of dealing with the virus that are proving virtually certain. Read it all. This is how it starts:

In a coordinated effort led by GOOGLE searches that return answers on board with Democrat narratives we see in the mainstream media that has gone into frantic hypermode denying first, and covering up second, the reports of the effectiveness of the malaria and Lupus drug PLAQUÉNIL, aka, hydroxychloroquine.

For COVID-19 treatments, the drug is to be used in conjunction with Z-Pac, Azithromycin, a short treatment antibiotic, along with Zinc.

In order to promote the MSM’s narratives (which happen to be malevolent lies that may kill countless people), the Democrat-owned media deliberately omitted the reporting of not one, but many successful clinical trials, some randomized. You will read about these next!

We took YAHOO NEWS as an example of what the people see.

In coordination with the mainstream media’s multi-pronged attacks, YAHOO set up a number of straw man ploys.

Distractions, redirections, misleading assumptions, no recollection of history, all passed on as medical advice.

Whereas the drug cocktail was used in China and elsewhere with documented success, the media has not reported the fact. The deliberate omissions problem first arose when the president of the United States mentioned that the drug might work. We should understand he did not prescribe the drug, but reacted to all the medical field reports in existence. In coordination with RESIST, the Democrat-Socialist movement to obstruct any success the president might enjoy, including his astonishing, booming economy, the mainstream media refused to cover the truth of the story immediately after the president raised the issue. That is why the media and their politicians first denied the success of the economy, then tried to talk it down, and when that too failed, tried to take the credit for it.

What we have here is a coordinated knee-jerk media that immediately rose against even testing the drug to save human lives. They would refuse people life-saving treatment merely because the president recommended it. Not because collectively they, or their “witnesses,” aka, Democrat activists they trotted out, knew anything about its effectiveness.

Democrats (and GOOGLE searches) insist it is dangerous because it has not been tested. Actually, millions of people use it regularly across the world against malaria, which was once humanity’s biggest killer. It is one of the most tested drugs ever invented. Not only is it safe in the 600-2400mg dosages (12 pills for the heavy weight adult) as it is usually used, but it is very safe. Its side effects are mainly benign and mild. Yes, as reported in the literature, some get diarrhea and suicidal thoughts. However, people have reportedly had frequent bouts of diarrhea and even committed suicide simply by watching CNN and MSDNC. Second, the media collectively warned against the Z-Pac antibiotic, because used on heart patients it carries cardiovascular risk. Patients, the media insisted, can die from it.

But dying from COVID-19 never happens, and there’s absolutely no risk to blind pedestrians running across a highway either.

People who go into politics do it because they love the power that comes with it. If there are any other reasons, they evaporate almost the moment they are elected, with the occasional honourable exception.

One flu over the cuckoo’s nest

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AND IN WORDS

“The much-maligned University of Washington IHME model“……
Don’t you mean the “the broken clock that isn’t even right twice a day” model?
The “even the blind squirrel dies before finding a nut” model?
The “hasn’t even been remotely close but we’ll all go with it because a really rich liberal that we worship used his money to back it so it must be right” model?
The “model that single handedly got the US population to never trust models put together by the elites for the next 100 years” model?
The “model that Global Warmist Michael Mann would even disapprove of because it makes his hockey stick look like he knew what he was talking about and not lying his A $ $ off” model?

Actually the seasonal flu WAS a big story in the leftist press just a few weeks ago:
— “Past (flu and virus) epidemics prove fighting coronavirus with travel bans is a mistake.” – Washington Post
— “Don’t Worry About The Coronavirus. Worry About The Flu” — Buzzfeed
— “Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No.” — Vox
— “Get a grippe, America. The flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus, for now.” – Washington Post
— “We Should Deescalate the War on the Coronavirus” – Wired
— “Worried About Catching The New Coronavirus? In The U.S., Flu Is A Bigger Threat” — NPR
— “Be wary of an aggressive government response to coronavirus.” — Washington Post
That’s the cream of the leftist media less than two months ago. How stupid are people that they ever read or listen to them.

Modeling was invented in Mexico.They fill a bag with candy, blindfold you, and give you a stick. Then they twirl you around and if you are lucky, you accidentally hit the bag and get the candy.

The most plausible model without severe restrictions is that of Sweden. The experience there is that less severe restrictions are leading to results that may be better than in Norway, which has severe restrictions. Certainly comparison between areas with more severe restrictions and less severe does little to support the more restrictive mindset.

The Sweden approach appears to be closing to within a near match of US deaths per population, and it entailed virtually no abridgement of legal rights, nor destruction of their economy.

There isn’t a government “worker” at any level of government who is going to miss a single paycheck, a single accrued vacation day, a single accrued sick day, accrued benefit and they will of course keep their gold plated taxpayer funded health insurance. Most of them are living the life of Riley, sitting at home watching porn on their taxpayer purchased computers. My guess is most of them are enjoying the whole show.

Spoiler alert! The government will be reluctant to admit it was ever wrong about anything having to do with their reaction to this event. Sorry I wrecked the surprise for every one…

 

An absence of envy and resentment makes this the most false narrative you will ever see

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Nothing beautiful about this.

An interesting ad that in far too many ways mirrors our present predicament. Everything is a perfect caricature about the CV shutdown other than the attitude of the rest of the inmates or the attitude of the authorities. One person’s freedom is everyone else’s annoyance. The reality is that others resent everyone’s good fortune. If this chap really did try to liberate himself, even in such a miniature fashion, all of the other residents would have joined the establishment to make sure he was locked down. And even on the premise shown here, the authorities would not have allowed him to run free but have trebled its efforts to make an example of him to all the others.

Making the economy grow again

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Jeffrey Tucker is the editor in chief at the American Institute for Economic Research where the article discussed below has been posted. A bit, actually quite a bit, more charitable about the New York Times than I would ever be, but let that go. He is discussing the miracle of the market economy that goes along without any serious appreciation of its role or any understanding of how it works. “Socialism” as it exists today is based on the market economy. He is also talking about role of the mainstream media as “we watch freedom going down the drain”.

I have meshed my classical understanding of the operation of an economy – what it means to be an actual liberal – with what needs to be done to get our economies moving forward in this post of mine at the AIER: This Economy Can be Revived. This comes at an opportune time: Trump to announce council for “opening our country” next week. This is how my article begins:

In my previous article, “A Classical Economic Response to the Coronavirus Recession,” my aim was to discuss why modern macroeconomics cannot explain the nature of an economy, and more importantly cannot provide a sound analytical basis for policy. If we follow modern macro in dealing with the coronavirus, we will leave our economies mired in slow growth, higher unemployment and even deeper in debt.

That, however, is not the full story, but you will have to read right to the end to find out how things could turn out well if we understand what needs to be done.

Here we are in the midst of a new kind of policy, something never experienced anywhere ever before, where the deliberate aim of government policy has been to slow the rate of growth, raise the level of unemployment, and rack up much higher levels of debt.

We are on the breathtaking edge of a global consensus on entering a socialist compact to manage the economy from the centre, or at least, for the time being from each nation’s own economic centre. Global government perhaps is now on the horizon if things continue as they are. It is a truly terrifying prospect, made all the worse because of how complacently it has all been accepted.

The ease with which all this has come about is in part because of the way the role of the dead hand of government has already been meshed into the prevailing theory of the economy as a whole, which is a direct descendant of the Keynesian theory brought to life with the publication of Keynes’s General Theory in 1936.

I will state the problem in a single sentence and then elaborate from there. Modern macroeconomic theory looks only at the money value of what is being bought and sold at the present time and virtually never looks at the economy as a whole in structural terms nor over the longer term.

If you are interested in the full explanation of the way our economies are structured as a pathway towards understanding how we can revive our economies from here, just go to the link.

And in getting an upturn in place, there should be no doubt that many have been very badly damaged by this programmed downturn and many may never recover from the losses they have sustained. But if we go about this in the right way, in about a year our economies will be trundling along as if nothing had ever happened. At the very height of what must not be done is to start from the premise that was is needed now is a stimulus of any kind.

I might add that the picture below is the one that accompanies my article and seems quite a appropriate for both Easter, and the theme of freedom which comes with Passover, which we are also celebrating at the moment. My best wishes for the holiday to you all in the hope that our present political disease will soon be passed and that our freedoms will be taken back with this knowledge of how they can be stolen almost in a fit of inattention.

Revive the economy

SHUT DOWN THE ABC “NEWS” AND CURRENT AFFAIRS DIVISION

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This is our ABC, scum, traitors and liars. Hardly an honest word to be found anywhere in this story. And where true, not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who might be affected. Not just propaganda, but Chinese propaganda. Watching the ABC for news is a form of self-administered ignorance. This is despicable. And what is worst of all, not only is everything below modern media misdirection, along with CNN and the rest, but it is also what the journalists, reporters, management and administration at the ABC appear to want and hope to be true. They appear to want people to die, and the more that die the better since these deaths might move the political centre to the left.

Coronavirus is hurting America’s place as a world leader while China appears to rise

By Washington bureau chief David Lipson

Updated 

A homeless man with a US flag attached to his backpackPHOTO: The coronavirus pandemic could reshuffle global power permanently, with the US no longer on top. (ABC News: Niall Lenihan )
RELATED STORY: Trump’s oscillating approach to coronavirus follows an old pattern of leadership
RELATED STORY: America is in the calm before a storm that could kill millions and reshape the world order
RELATED STORY: In a health, economic and electoral quandary, Trump backflips on coronavirus again
RELATED STORY: New Yorkers want the world to know one thing: don’t follow their lead
RELATED STORY: Grief, stigma and propaganda: Inside Wuhan’s coronavirus recovery

Yesterday in America, 1,940 people died from coronavirus. In a single day, 31,935 new infections were recorded.

I personally know five people who have been told they have COVID-19.

Only one of them was able to get a test and it came back inconclusive.

The rest were told by their doctors “don’t bother” because there weren’t enough test kits to go around.

On the testing front, things have improved greatly in recent weeks, but not everywhere.

An empty street in New York

PHOTO: New York, known as the city that never sleeps, has suddenly fallen quiet amid strict lockdowns to fight coronavirus. (Supplied: Hamish Seears)

And yet, since the start of the crisis, the President has boasted about America’s testing capacity.

“Anyone who needs a test gets a test … and they’re beautiful,” Donald Trump said during a tour of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

That was five weeks ago.

America is now the world’s ‘worst-case scenario’

In New York, things are looking so dire that prison inmates are being asked to don protective gear as they dig mass graves on Hart Island in the Bronx.

A drone shot of men in protective gear digging mass gravesPHOTO: Prison inmates in New York dig mass graves for COVID-19 victims. (Reuters: Lucas Jackson)

The island has been used for decades to bury New Yorkers with no next of kin or no money to afford a proper funeral.

As COVID-19-related deaths surge, new trenches have been dug to cope with an expected influx of coffins.

Furthermore, the official death toll in New York hasn’t been counting those who died outside of hospital.

On Monday, that was 280 people.

So, it’s very likely the real number of infections and deaths is much higher than the already-staggering published numbers.

The world is no longer measuring the “worst-case scenario” against Wuhan, Italy or Spain.

For now, America is the benchmark.

A nation accustomed to being a world-beater in business, innovation, sport and on the battlefield, has been reduced to its knees.