Monthly Archives: July 2020

How do Democrats get a single vote?

Posted on by
1
President of Portland police union, targeted
in protests, says community has ‘had enough’
Oregonian, by Tom Hallman, Jr. Original Article
Hours before what is expected to be the 53rd straight night of protests in the city, the head of the Portland police union said the community has “had enough.” Portland Police Association President Daryl Turner, surrounded by 20 faith leaders, business owners, police officers and neighborhood residents, held a news conference in front of the union’s offices in North Portland. On Saturday, protesters broke in and lit a fire inside. The building itself was covered with graffiti.
‘
Seattle rioters seen damaging,
looting stores; police say fire
sparked at precinct, officer hospitalized
Fox News, by Bradford Betz Original Article
At least two people were arrested in Seattle and a police officer is in the hospital Sunday after a march through downtown devolved into property damage and looting, police say. Police said Sunday evening the demonstrators had broken out several windows of the East Precinct, then threw a device into the lobby that ignited a small fire. The fire was later extinguished and no injuries were reported, police said. The demonstration started between 2 and 3 p.m. near the intersection of 3rd Avenue and Pine Street. A photo posted on Seattle’s DOT traffic channel showed crowds blocking an intersection.
‘
Bill Barr appoints immigration judge who’s
a fmr director at FAIR, known for hard-line
immigration policies
BizPac Review, by Vivek Saxena Original Article
Members of the left are upset that Attorney General Bill Barr has appointed an immigration judge who actually respects and believes in America’s immigration laws. “The judge, Matthew J. O’Brien, was officially named to his new position in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) in June — but was just formally inducted into the largest ever corps of immigration judges along with 45 others,” Law & Order, a far-left news website, complained Saturday. “‘From 2016 to 2020, he served as the director of research at the Federation for American Immigration Reform.’ … The group, known in immigration law circles by its acronym, FAIR,
`

`

These were the latest three posts at lucianne.com

The Seven Deadly Sins and the evil of the modern left

Posted on by
2

This chart put out by the Smithsonian in Washington disappeared too rapidly since it really does say what needs saying about the modern left. It is evil to its very core. Everything listed on that chart are seen as bad. White Culture is seen as bad. If you want to understand politics in the West today, you need to absorb what you are being explicitly told. These values, these beliefs are bad for you and bad for any society in which these occur.

What you see in this chart is the explicit rejection of the Seven Virtues and the adoption of the Seven Deadly Sins. Here they are in order as represented by the moral vultures seen everywhere on the left.

Envy is the resentful covetousness towards the traits or possessions of others.

Sloth is a habitual disinclination to exertion, a desire for something for nothing, the belief that the world owes them a living.

Greed is a rapacious desire and pursuit of material possessions but without first attempting to produce the valuable goods and services that could be exchanged for what they want.

Wrath is uncontrolled feelings of anger, rage, and even hatred. In its purest form, wrath presents with injury, violence, and hate.

Pride also known as hubris is identified as dangerously corrupt selfishness, the putting of one’s own desires, urges, wants, and whims before the welfare of other people. It is considered the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins.

Lust is usually thought of as intense or unbridled sexual desire. However, lust can also mean unbridled desire in general; thus, lust for money, power, and other things.

Gluttony is the overindulgence of anything to the point of waste.

“I have unfettered legal power”

Posted on by
1

“I’m in charge of spectrum auctions and if I say to you everyone in this room, ‘if you want to bid next week in our spectrum auction you better wear red underpants on your head’, you’ll be wearing them on your head,” he said. “I have unfettered legal power.”

The quote is from Stephen Conroy and may be found here: Conroy plays down ‘red underpants’ comments. They love the power, these totalitarians. Daniel Andrews has never shown himself as anything other than stoopid. But he likes the power to tell everybody else what to do. He has screwed up every single thing he has done since becoming Premier, and especially the lockdown, but he gets to give the orders. He has even sold out Victoria to the Communist Party of China to cover his fantastically large deficit expenditures. Disgusting.

Meanwhile: Coronavirus: Levels of herd immunity in UK may already be high enough to prevent second wave, study suggests.

“The outbreaks look similar at the beginning. But in the heterogeneous population, individuals are not infected at random.

“The highly susceptible people are more likely to get infected first. As a result, the average susceptibility gets lower and lower over time.”

She added: “We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20 percent. It’s very striking.”

I only wish there was herd immunity against voting for socialists. There is, of course, but only after the voting is over plus around half a dozen years. And even then, it’s always only temporary.

NOW COMING TO MELBOURNE:

Explaining what is wrong with Magic Money Theory [MMT]

Posted on by
2

This was from Beachcomber in the comments:

Hi Steve, I just read a fascinating essay by Peter Smith at Quadrant: Money printing in the age of Covid

In the essay it states:

In the age of COVID-19, bonds sold to finance deficit spending are being largely or wholly bought up by respective central banks. This is manifest in banks’ holdings of deposits with their central bank and of treasury notes or bills.

In comments the question is asked as to from where the “central bank” garners the money to buy the bonds.

To which Peter Smith answers:

It creates it out of thin air cos it can.

The central bank simply issues a cheque or like instrument, drawn on the central bank, which allows the holder of the bond (assume it is a non-bank – the process is short-circuited if the holder is a bank) to lodge the cheque in its bank account. The bank correspondingly lodges the cheque with the central bank and sees its deposts with the central bank increase accordingly. The central bank now has an asset – the bond – and a corresponding liability – the bank’s deposit. It can go on doing this till the cows come home. Or, practically speaking, until inflation rears its ugly head.

Is this true? Can this continue forever? With shrinking incomes and the associated shortage of money supply, inflation seems unlikely. Peter Smith makes a distinction from Modern Monetary Theory without explaining how it is different. Can the creation of money from nothing by the Government continue forever? If so, then Andrews can reign forever!

First, if there is an authority on the banking system in Australia outside and beyond the reach of government, it is Peter Smith. He was, when I first met him, the economist for the Australian Bankers’ Association, then became the Chief Economist for the State Bank of Victoria and finally was the first Chief Executive for the Australian Payments Clearance Association. No one gets this stuff better than he does.

But let me buy into this because this is part of my expertise as well. And to follow this with any understanding you have to divide the economy into two halves. On one side is production, the actual goods and services produced, which also includes the production of inputs into the production process, such as iron ore and natural gas.

And on the other side there is the monetary side of the economy which is completely distinct. This comprises:

  • money as a medium of exchange, say a $100 note, but represents the value of goods and services so that we can sell what we produce to buy what others produce
  • money which we set aside as a store of value, such as bank accounts or superannuation savings, and
  • money which we use as a unit of account so that businesses can calculate how much things cost to produce so that they can determine what to charge so that they can calculate whether they are making a profit.

And it should be emphasised that only profit-making businesses create more value than they use up in production. Loss-making enterprises – which include virtually every activity run by governments – slow the economy, using up more value than they create. Loss-making enterprises cause the economy to contract. Only if there are other enterprises making profits – almost always private sector enterprises – can the economy expand. Without understanding that, you cannot understand the first thing about how an economy works.

Creating more money does NOT create productive resources. Giving more money to governments, or allowing them to print more money out of thin air, lets governments spend on non-productive activities which they inevitably do. Spending more on non-productive activities means less is spent on productive activities.

And adding to the problems, when the government expands the volume of money by just printing the stuff up, they undermine each of the uses money has: as a medium of exchange, as a store of value and as a unit of account. The economy can no longer be run as productively as it might have been and often even leads to a fall in real income across the entire community.

Virtually no politician I have ever met has understood this. Virtually no political leader I see in the news today understands this. All of the others are Keynesians now, who believe the mere spending of money creates jobs, growth and higher real earnings. On this they could not be more wrong.

We will be paying for this ignorance for a very long time to come.

Is this the worst journalism you have ever read?

Posted on by
1

It’s a good thing that The Age is still around so I don’t have to depend on the hysterics at The Oz for my news. Take this today by someone classified as the Associate Editor: Code red for Premier Daniel Andrews as coronavirus crisis reignites. He starts:

Daniel Andrews’s premiership has been smashed and his legacy imperilled. He has had a horrible month; in normal circumstances the Victorian Premier might already have walked.

But for complex social and psychological reasons the Andrews experiment is on life support rather than in the political mortuary. His community is still more interested in beating the virus than in revenge politics.

In his own obtuse way, he has put his finger on the problem: there is no opposition party or leader in Victoria. My favourite party trick at the moment is to ask people to name the Victorian Opposition Leader. Virtually no one can do it. But back to the article as The Oz does everything it can to beat up this dead horse for reasons unknown to me:

Just as the behaviour of the COVID-19 virus can be unpredictable, so is the state of mind of Victorians as they confront their gravest challenge since World War II. The latest record numbers have stunned an already stunned city, with deaths certain to rise [they certainly cannot fall].

“We are in the fight for our lives,” Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos says.

Today the community’s narrowed eyes are focused almost completely on suppressing the killer virus that is marching through the metropolitan area.

He finishes with this:

This once-in-a-lifetime event has entered a highly emotional phase. The economy was retrievable until the fresh outbreak but is now under even greater threat. We are staring at potentially large-scale loss of life. If this crisis deepens and the government is nailed by the judicial inquiry, how long could the Labor caucus justify retaining Andrews at the helm?

Of course Andrews is going to resign, in just the same cowardly way that John Cain left the mess he was responsible for to Joan Kirner. Some legacy! Andrews is the worst premier Victoria has ever had, and that is really really saying something.

Defund the ABC

Posted on by
Reply

Modern Monetary Theory: How MMT is challenging the economic establishment

Illustration of a tree with money for leaves and lush flowers on the ground below where the money falls.

From the dumbest economic analysts in Australia, our very own ABC: Modern Monetary Theory: How MMT is challenging the economic establishment.

What if everything we thought we knew about public finance over the past 40 years has been wrong? A new economic theory has emerged that could rewrite our understanding of how governments create and spend money and what type of society we can afford to build.

And if it is correct, people may be furious. Because it could show that Australia’s political elite can afford to spend far more than they are on public health and education, social housing, scientific research and green energy schemes, while eliminating unemployment.

And yet they’re not — either from a misunderstanding of government finances or because they don’t want to. However, to embrace this radical economic theory you will have to forget what you’ve learned about budget deficits (that they’re bad) and government debt (that it burdens future generations).

Why? Because proponents of the theory say that far from being a problem, budget deficits are often a good thing — they can be the source of healthy economic growth.

More at the link and some previous discussion of MMT here.

Daniel Andrews is showing the way. He spends enormous amounts of money, but never finishes a project so that nothing is ever completed. Tunnels, train lines, you name it, he has left all kinds of useless projects halfway done, which even if completed would never earn as much in revenue as they cost to build. Just build it and they will come, they in this case being massive debt and deficits.

The ABC is filled with such deadheads. I never watch the thing myself but only found out about this from someone else who monitors the place. I don’t know how anyone can listen to such ignorance day after day, but I guess someone has to do it.

ABC delenda est which is Latin for Defund the ABC.

Davy Crockett provides advice on how to be a politician

Posted on by
1

If it’s cynical, it is nevertheless just how it seems to be. He was much more than the King of the Wild Frontier. This was, of course, all I ever knew which came via Walt Disney when I was seven.

It also was the moment that something changed in my life. I was watching Davy Crockett at the Alamo in full colour on our black and white TV and then, suddenly, I realised that it wasn’t a colour TV set and ever since a B&W TV has been black and white. But until then, I imagined and saw everything in colour.

Anyway, a bit more of Davy Crockett wisdom. Shame Walt Disney didn’t focus on any of this.

The President’s Lady and the Battle of New Orleans

Posted on by
1

I have just finished a novel on Andrew Jackson’s wife, The President’s Lady written by Irving Stone in 1951:

In this acclaimed biographical novel, Irving Stone brings to life the tender and poignant love story of Rachel and Andrew Jackson. “Beyond any doubt one of the great romances of all time.” — The Saturday Review of Literature.

An incredible story of both of them, but it ends just as he becomes president and she almost exactly at the same time passes away. She never even made it to the inauguration. They both had an amazing life – he meets her when she is 16 and already married in what we would today call an abusive relationship. But in 1792 a divorce was only available at the initiative of her husband, which must go through the state legislature which her first husband, unbeknownst to her, never undertakes although she thinks he has. So beyond everything else – including a duel to the death – the marriage is a major political scandal where he is elected although she is, according to the morality of the time, an adulteress!

He arrives in Washington without his beloved wife and finds the atmosphere cold and distant. This, however, is how the book ends.

But he reckoned without the mob of his followers who had come to Washington City from ever part of the Union to witness his inauguration. They poured down Pennsylvania Avenue, streamed through the gates of the White House, found their way into the East Room, devoured the ice cream and cakes and orange punch. They climbed on the furniture to catch a glimpse of Andrew, soiling the damask chairs with their muddy boots, staining the carpets, breaking glasses and china, shouting and surging and pushing, all thousands of them, wanting to reach Andrew and embrace him.

He stood at the back of the room, imprisoned, yet feeling the first glint of happiness since Rachael’s death. These were the people; they had stood by him. They had loved Rachael, they had vindicated her. For that, he loved them, and would fight for them the rest of his days.

They were “the deplorables” of their own time. I was not the first to notice how similar Donald Trump is to Andrew Jackson, but it is more obvious to me now than it was before.

The video of the Battle of New Orleans above is all that I can find of the movie made from the book at the time. In the book, the battle is a minor moment in the story since it is mostly about her and not him. Lots about him, but almost everything is only seen through her own eyes. If she was not present, virtually all other events are only described where she is being told about them either by her husband or by others. A brilliant book and a story I had never even heard hinted at before. This, btw, is the flyer for movie that was made from the book.

General Invincible295.jpeg

Even more than before, I understand that Donald Trump is the Andrew Jackson of our own time.

And here is The Battle of New Orleans as sung by Johnny Horton:

As amazing to me as anything is that this is a compilation of the pictures with the words put together by Diana West which has had almost 18 million hits. If only American Betrayal had had as many hits and readers.

And then there is this, the story of how The Star Spangled Banner was written.

I may have been born and brought up in Canada where the War of 1812 has always had a different meaning. But I am at one with freedom and liberty and in the world today it means to side with the United States of America against its enemies both foreign and domestic.