Monthly Archives: May 2020

Camus’ The Plague

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Not a single person I once was friends with back in Canada has changed their political position in all the years since I’ve known them, not a single one, and I’ve known them all for more than fifty years. It really is weird. Most I am happy to see when I go home but we seldom discuss politics; some I can still talk politics with but it is always through gritted teeth (theirs) and I never bring politics up. Some I do not bother seeing when I am there and why I avoid them is always for political reasons. And not one of them I see more frequently than once every two years since I hardly ever get back. As I say, weird. Yet why dealing with the coronavirus is a political issue is hard to explain, but it is. The virus will never disappear, it will always mutate, and I do not expect us to stay in lockdown forever. And while perhaps I should be, I am not frightened by it even though I am in the high-danger zone according to age and “co-morbidities” and it may get me yet.

Just finished Albert Camus’ The Plague. It was written in the 1940s as a political allegory about radical political views being akin to a virus. Today it reads just like a story about a plague-ridden population put into lockdown. The political allegory is near invisible. The horrors of an epidemic are made very clear.

The point of the story is to use the virus as a metaphor for totalitarian political repression. The irony today is that actual existing political leaders have used the spectre of a virus as a means to repress populations all around the world by arguing they have done so to protect them.

As for The Plague, it is only a story:

Oran was decimated by the bubonic plague in 1556 and 1678, but all later outbreaks (in 1921 – 185 cases, 1931 – 76 cases, and 1944 – 95 cases) were very far from the scale of the epidemic described in the novel.

Brilliantly written and well worth reading, especially now.

Daniel Andrews is an economic fool

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For sheer hypocritical moronic stupidity, it’s hard to beat this from Mr Lockdown Victoria about his putting the state into hock to the Chinese:

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has defended the state’s relationship with China, saying any cooling of the partnership would cost jobs.

He cannot see what’s wrong with China because they are doing just what he would do himself if he could. The people of Victoria have with blind faith in miracles, put the state’s economy into the hands of the person least capable of directing us towards growth and prosperity. The last line of the story is pure enchantment:

Mr Andrews travelled to China to sign a second BRI deal in October last year, agreeing on areas of co-operation including increasing the involvement of Chinese companies in Victoria’s $107bn infrastructure program.

Infrastructure spending – such as the tunnel and the train – literally means public spending on loss-making projects. Economic ignorance comes at a very high price and we are going to pay it. The Federal Government, if for no other reason than to protect itself never mind Australia’s future, must prevent this communist jerk from ruining the economy.

The kinds of forecasts we are dealing with seem similar to this: Australia’s coronavirus response avoided about 14,000 deaths, Chief Medical Officer says. That is the story from just today!

The Chinese flu has flown

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Callling it the Chinese flu is, of course, no more racist than worrying about the German measles. And while there may be gratitude from some to our hysterical political class, none of it will come from me. This is from Rage and Recriminations in the Wake of COVID-19 by Roger Kimball.

Back in March, we were told ad nauseam that we needed to close up the country for “15 days to slow the spread.” The major concern, we were told, was to “flatten the curve” in order not to overwhelm the healthcare system. But the healthcare system never came close to being overwhelmed, not even in New York, notwithstanding Andrew Cuomo’s impersonation of the Angel of Death when it came to nursing homes.

How long ago that seems. As it turns out, the 15 days were merely a softening up period. It was only after the nation got hooked on President Trump’s near daily press conferences that the Svengali-like Anthony Fauci, accompanied by his comely, Vanna White-like assistant Dr. Deborah Birx, dispensed ever-more alarming scenarios of the countless deaths that awaited us—the models said so!—unless we closed our eyes and hid under our desks until Saturday next.

To date, there are nearly 100,000 deaths attributed to the Wuhan flu. Half of those are in nursing homes. Half are over 80. According to the CDC, in 2017-2018, 45 million people in the United States were sick with influenza, 21 million went to the doctor, 810,000 were hospitalized, and there were 61,000 deaths. Last year, flu deaths topped 80,000. Unlike this Chinese virus, which affects mostly the elderly and infirm, the flu is deadly for young and old alike.

And this just in from the CDC: the mortality rate of the Wuhan flu is remarkably low: right in line, in fact (and as I suggested at the time), with the projection made by the Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis in February. While he acknowledged that there was much we did not know about the virus, he nonetheless said that “reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05 percent to 1 percent.” But with every passing day—and this was back in February—the evidence suggests that we will wind up on the lower end of that spectrum….

Indeed, the most recent CDC guidance, though hedged with technicalities and alternative scenarios, basically confirms Ioannidis’s prediction. As Daniel Horowitz noted, the report should be “earth-shattering to the narrative of the political class.” But the guardians of The Narrative are strong. More likely, it will wind up in “the thick pile of vital data and information about the virus that is not getting out to the public.”

What does it say? Among other things—and for the first time—it offers an overall death rate for the virus. And what is it? The horrifying 3.5 percent that the now-thoroughly discredited Imperial College model predicted? (Now “thoroughly discredited” but deeply influential on the projections of important people like Anthony Fauci.) Not hardly. Under the report’s most likely scenario, the number is 0.26 percent—almost exactly what Ioannidis said in February.

We have a population of 25 million and around a 100 deaths. I wish we had been more like Sweden, or Taiwan, or a few others where heads were kept level. The question now is what would we do if there really were a pandemic?

 

Obama led a gangster government but no one really cares

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Which led to this.

We are in fact just so used to the criminality of the left and of the Obama administration that none of this outrages any of us any longer, perhaps a bit but not really. We are used to the left acting illegally followed by the protection and lying obfuscation of the media that it is partly just how we think things are and cannot be changed, and partly because a kind of numb despair has soaked into all of our responses.

I find this in particular fascinating in how clearly things are put: Nevertheless, Sidney Powell Persisted. That so few know who Sidney Powell is and what she did is the problem in a nutshell.

She was demeaned and ridiculed as a “#MAGA lawyer” by the smart set at Politico.

She was second-guessed as a “screw-up” by legal blogs.

She was written off for “crackpot conspiracy theories” by former intelligence officials doing their best to protect their friends in the permanent bureaucracy.

Nevertheless, Sidney Powell persisted.

In an honest universe, Ms. Powell, the courageous attorney who engineered a miraculous defense of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn that led to the Justice Department withdrawing criminal charges against President Trump’s former National Security Adviser, would be hailed as a political and cultural hero. This solitary woman just faced down the epitome of the “old boys network” and emerged victorious.

Is there any better symbol of the patriarchy than Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel team, which was populated by a bunch of “old white guys” on a five to one ratio to the three women selected for the task of investigating President Trump?

As Gen. Flynn was facing sentencing for his guilty plea that was forced upon him by the strong-arm tactics of Mueller and the disgraced FBI officials on the 7th floor of the J. Edgar Hoover building, Judge Emmit Sullivan accused the 33-year veteran of the United States Army of “selling out your country.” Sullivan indicated that he was not inclined to let Flynn off without serving time, as his lawyers had promised.

Flynn began to rethink the effectiveness of his multi-million-dollar defense, whose firm included former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder. Enter Sidney Powell, who took the reins of the case in June 2019.

As Flynn’s new counsel, Powell inherited a client who had pled guilty to Mueller’s prosecutors, articulated that guilty plea in open court, and was merely awaiting the inevitable sentencing that could lead to a humiliating jail sentence.

Powell examined the case and advised on a radical Hail Mary defense: Withdraw your plea and fight these corrupt bastards. Flynn, drawing on his military career and training, trusted in Powell’s leadership and charged up that hill.

There’s much more at the link. Do you think any of this matters? Are you interested enough to continue even if only to find out the kind of world in which you live?

And there is now this as well: Curiously Odd Decision by Judge Sullivan to Hire Beth Wilkinson. Who are these people, and what’s it got to do with the rest of this, you might ask?

Gen. Flynn’s counsel files a Petition for Writ of Mandamus with the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, asking the Court to “Mandate” that Judge Sullivan dismiss the case based on controlling Circuit precedent, an exercise that almost never produces a Writ such as that sought by the Defendant.

Giving a “one-finger salute” to the filing of the Petition, Judge Sullivan enters an Order setting a briefing schedule for the filing of opposition and reply briefs on the issues before the Court as set forth in the DOJ motion to dismiss, setting a hearing date nearly two months away.

The next morning the Circuit Court of Appeals ORDERS the district judge to personally respond to the Petition for Writ of Mandamus and address the issue of whether he has any discretion on the question of granting the motion to dismiss the case — giving him only 10 days to do so, which includes a federal three-day holiday weekend.

Judge Flynn doubles down by hiring private legal counsel to assist him in responding to the Circuit Court’s order.

Wow. Why they don’t clap this “judge” in jail I cannot answer, but the judge has no fear of defying the law as he so clearly has now done.

A supply-side take on the PM’s package

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I have to say that I have been charmed by the approach taken by the Government to bring us out of the lockdown. I find this especially extraordinary:

“Value created by establishing successful products and services, the ability to be able to sell them at a competitive and profitable price and into growing and sustainable markets. It’s economics 101.“

Here’s the thing. It is not Economics 101 and has not been for two generations. It ought to be, but isn’t. Because this is an entirely supply-side statement. There is not an ounce of C+I+G anywhere to be seen. It is entirely about Value Adding as the absolutely necessary core for regenerating growth.

Keynesian economics may really be dead, and not a moment too soon.

Vote to leave these fools behind

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https://twitter.com/darrengrimes_/status/1264669957230649348

Here’s the story from the first link above.

Boris Johnson’s under-fire chief adviser Dominic Cummings squashed a plan to delay Britain’s true Brexit day which was “all but agreed” while he and the Prime Minister were “laid out on their sickbeds”.

Cummings, resented by much of the media establishment and the “deep state” for his role in the Vote Leave campaign and open disdain for journalists and bureaucrats, is currently the subject of a media circus over allegations he broke lockdown rules by travelling from London to Durham so his family could look after his young child if he and his wife were incapacitated by their coronavirus infections.

Much to journalists’ chagrin, Boris Johnson has elected to stand by Cummings, saying he acted “responsibly, legally, and with integrity” — causing anti-Cummings commentators such as Piers Morgan of Good Morning Britain to demand that state officials scour his personal data for evidence of potential wrongdoing.

Less extensively reported is the fact that, on recovering from the Chinese virus, one of Cummings’ first was to squash a plan “concocted by underlings” while he and the Prime Minister were laid low to delay Britain’s true Brexit day.

Technically, the United Kingdom has already left the European Union, but it remains in a so-called “transition period” in which it remains subject to the bloc’s laws, trade policy, judges, and migration regime — effectively EU membership in all but name, but minus representation in EU institutions such as the Commission and the Court of Justice.

Remainers had seen the coronavirus as an opportunity to extend this “transition”, currently due to expire in December 2020, and apparently a plan to do so had been “all but agreed at official level” while Johnson and his adviser were out of action.

“A deal to extend the transition in light of the [pandemic] had been all but agreed at official level,” reported Jeremy Warner, the Remain-voting assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph, in an article published earlier in May.

“The EU was to have spared the UK’s blushes by proposing it, rather than the other way around. This would have allowed the UK government to present the concession as a favour to the EU, rather than a climbdown,” he explained.

“But then Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, returned and the plan, concocted by underlings while he and Boris Johnson were laid out on their sickbeds, was scuppered,” he lamented.

The ongoing efforts to oust the Brexiteer by elements of the press on both the liberal left and the liberal “right” have been criticised by some viewers as partisan and motivated by his perceived failure to play ball with lobby correspondents who have hitherto relied on “access” to government ministers for much of their work.

For example, social media users have observed that reporters hounding him for the alleged dangerousness of his journey to Durham were crowding him and each other in large numbers while making no effort to observe social distancing and not even wearing masks outside his house.

A sign with an electronic billboard playing official “stay at home” messaging driven to Cummings’ home by the anti-Brexit activist group Led by Donkeys may also have been flouting the lockdown rules the adviser is alleged to have broken.

WITH A BIT OF AN UPDATE:

https://youtu.be/BJtj2mkTxU0

The stupidest most ignorant people, lacking in judgement and sense, are the ones now reporting the news. But remember, they are not the ones who will be taken down by the havoc they cause. In their own generation it will be the ones who are at the fringes, and after they pass on, they will not care.

Adam Smith and the Free Market

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A friend sent this along for comment.

Have Adam Smith and his writings been hijacked by free market economics?

Yes. Smith was deeply suspicious of the business class. When I was teaching, I used to give quotes without attribution for students to comment on, and they regularly treated Smith quotes as being from Marx. Smith knew nothing of capitalism, which barely existed in his day, and would be appalled by the idea of an economy based on a class of workers without property. His insight that people’s selfishness might produce collectively beneficial results (“the invisible hand”) has been taken over by so-called free market economics, and debased into a “greed is good” mantra that is totally antithetical to Smith’s teaching.

Smith complemented The Wealth of Nations with The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which explained that the moral sentiments of trust and compassion were required, among other things, to make a market economy operate at all. This idea has no role in “free market economics,” which imagines that economic actors are soulless egoists. Smith also maintained the first modern version of the labor theory of value, on which the exchange value of a commodity is the labor embodied in it. “Free market” economics rejects this in favor of a subjective theory of value on which price is determined entirely by supply and effective demand, what people with money will pay for it, because labor value is deemed “Marxist,” because Marx developed the most sophisticated version of value theory. A theory without labor value is not Smithian.

The problem here begins with knowing what is meant by “Adam Smith and his writings” and following that what is meant by “free market economics”. And then with making sense of “economic actors are soulless egoists” and “a ‘greed is good’ mantra”. Then beyond all of that, there is this which makes his argument utterly vacuous: “Marx developed the most sophisticated version of value theory” which he rounds us to “a theory without labor value is not Smithian” which means in his hands that only Marxists with their labour theory of value can truly state that they are following in the genuine tradition of Adam Smith.

Adam Smith is best understood via the invisible hand, that an economy is driven by individual decision making through entrepreneurial activity. The quotation is attempting to argue that Karl Marx is the true descendent of Adam Smith. Every aspect of this argument is false, an attempt to appropriate Smith, who advocated free markets, on behalf of Marx, who advocated a centralised tyranny in which markets play no role in directing resources towards their highest valued uses.

Lost and gone forever

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Clementine Ford

Oh my darling, oh my darling
Oh my darling, Clementine
You are lost and gone forever

Not sure if there are any souls more wayward than those who have been caught up in the latest intellectual fad that disappears into the mists of time even while they live. Which brings me to this from Andrew Bolt: CLEMENTINE FORD AND THE BETRAYAL OF FEMINISM.

Clementine Ford is called “Australia’s most prominent contemporary feminist”. What stunning proof that feminism has betrayed itself.

This movement once demanded women receive equal treatment. Now it demands women receive special protection, as if they’re as fragile as sexists always claimed.

Take Ford. She’s the kind of feminist who’s tweeted “kill all men”, and on Saturday complained that “coronavirus isn’t killing men fast enough”.

This brand of feminism now attracts official support. Ford last year got a gig on the ABC, and Melbourne City Council this month gave her a grant to write another book.

But check out the double standards.

Last year, Ford joined another public lynching by the Left of Alan Jones, after he said he was sick of the global warming idiocy of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and wanted a sock stuffed “down her throat”. This was too much for the suddenly delicate sensibilities of Ford, who said she deplored such “verbal assaults” which were “sexist” and an affront to “human dignity”

So let me say it right here: there is no greater possibility for contentment and life satisfaction than from a happy marriage, especially if it is blessed with children. There are no longer any rules that inhibit women from achieving whatever they are capable of. But there are many traps for the unwary that will derail many from finding where their true happiness will lie. It is so unfashionable to say this, but this is for almost everyone – male of female – the absolute truth.

The left is depraved and sickening to its very core

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There is no higher level of disgust I can conjure that might arise from something else. If this is how the left sees the world, their personal misery and self-hatred are so all-consuming of their inner being that they are oblivious to everything that surrounds them. It’s from The Guardian.

For the full sense of how out of their tree these people are, you should go to this link and read through the entire cartoon, if you can stomach it. They are filled with hate and venom. This is entirely beyond ignorance since it takes very little to understand the rudiments of how an entrepreneurially-driven economy works. You eat because someone runs a farm, other people transport farm produce to where it can be sold by retailers, with plenty of other steps along the way. And why do individuals run farms, transport companies, retail outlets? Because that is how they earn their living. Yet there are people all over Australia, all over the Western world, who are so filled with such forms of madness that they do not care if the entire structure of the world crashes down upon our heads, which includes themselves, because they want vengeance on a world that is not how they would have liked it to be.

And following the cartoon there is this:

News is under threat …

… just when we need it the most. Millions of readers around the world are flocking to the Guardian in search of honest, authoritative, fact-based reporting that can help them understand the biggest challenge we have faced in our lifetime. But at this crucial moment, news organisations are facing an unprecedented existential challenge. As businesses everywhere feel the pinch, the advertising revenue that has long helped sustain our journalism continues to plummet. We need your help to fill the gap.

You’ve read 37 articles in the last six months. We believe every one of us deserves equal access to quality news and measured explanation. So, unlike many others, we made a different choice: to keep Guardian journalism open for all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay. This would not be possible without financial contributions from our readers, who now support our work from 180 countries around the world.

Aside from the heading about news being under threat, about which I could not agree more, the lack of self-awareness in their insane attack on business owners who depend on revenues exceeding costs if they are to continue, adds to the general repulsiveness of the people who can write such things. They see themselves as a business in need of revenue to cover their costs in producing screeds such as this to attack profit-earning businesses, such as themselves. It is a form of mental illness. I wonder if they despise their readers as much as I do.

Reaping the whirlwind

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The video is on the simplistic side but is accurate enough. The point is that spending of itself doesn’t make your economy grow and more especially, able to repay a loan. Only value adding investment does that, investments where every dollar spent leads to output whose value is greater than a dollar. virtually no government ever does that, and when occasionally some government does, that government is not run by Daniel Andrews, nor, unfortunately, by Scott Morrison.

Let me continue along the same line of thought with this from Mises.org: Central Banks Are Destroying What Was Left of Free Markets. It is a more sophisticated version of what I wrote about earlier: “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency”. The author here is Alasdair Macleod, “the Head of Research at Goldmoney”.

Those receiving subsidies and loan guarantees are no doubt grateful, though they probably see it as the government’s duty and their right. But someone has to pay for it. In the past, the redistribution of wealth through taxes meant that the haves were taxed to give financial support to the have-nots, at least that was the story. Today, through monetary debasement nearly everyone benefits from monetary redistribution.

This is not a costless exercise. Governments are no longer robbing Peter to pay Paul. They are robbing Peter to pay Peter as well. You would think this is widely understood, but the Peters are so distracted by the apparent benefits they might or might not get that they don’t see the cost. They fail to appreciate that printing money is not just the marginal source of financing for excess government spending, but that it has now become mainstream.

I will take you to the final para which ought to make you think very hard about where we are heading, but you may have to read the part in between, and perhaps also my own previous article to make sense of it. No one can know for sure, but why would you trust a central bank?

Earlier in the descent into the socialization of money, nations had opportunities to change course. Unfortunately, they had neither the knowledge nor the guts to divine and implement a return to free markets and sound money. Those opportunities no longer exist, and there can be only one outcome: the total destruction of fiat currencies, accompanied by all the hardships that go with it.

And while you are considering all this, let me bring this up as well: The Worldwide Lockdown May Be the Greatest Mistake in History.

The forcible prevention of Americans from doing anything except what politicians deem “essential” has led to the worst economy in American history since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is panic and hysteria, not the coronavirus, that created this catastrophe. And the consequences in much of the world will be more horrible than in America.

Oh, really? How so?

The lockdown is “possibly even more catastrophic (than the virus) in its outcome: the collapse of global food-supply systems and widespread human starvation” (italics added). That was published in the left-wing The Nation, which, nevertheless, enthusiastically supports lockdowns. But the American left cares as much about the millions of non-Americans reduced to hunger and starvation because of the lockdown as it does about the people of upstate New York who have no incomes, despite the minuscule number of coronavirus deaths there. Or about the citizens of Oregon, whose governor has just announced the state will remain locked down until July 6. As of this writing, a total of 109 people have died of the coronavirus in Oregon….

Michael Levitt, professor of structural biology at Stanford Medical School and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry, recently stated, “There is no doubt in my mind that when we come to look back on this, the damage done by lockdown will exceed any saving of lives by a huge factor.”

To the left, anyone who questions the lockdown is driven by preference for money over lives. Typical of the left’s moral shallowness is this headline on Salon this week:

“It’s Time To Reject the Gods of Commerce: America Is a Society, Not an ‘Economy,’” with the subhead reading, “America Is About People, Not Profit Margins.”

And, of course, to smug editors and writers of The Atlantic, in article after repetitive article, the fault lies not with the lockdown but with President Donald Trump. The most popular article in The Atlantic this week is titled “The Rest of the World Is Laughing at Trump.” The elites can afford to laugh at whatever they want. Meanwhile, the less fortunate — that is, most people — are crying.

Maybe a year from now we will be looking back at all this and laughing. Or maybe not.