See if you can see any connection.
November 9 was the day, thirty years ago, that the Berlin Wall fell.
November 9-10 was Kristallnacht in 1938.
November 11 was the day the Armistice was signed to end World War I, you know, the War to End All Wars.
And now, we have Angela Merkel, with her open-borders policy, which may end up being as destructive as any of these previous disasters.
This was at the World Series game held at the centre of the swamp.
This was at the White House where Trump welcomed the Nationals who had won the World Series.
And this is from the LSU-Alabama game played yesterday that I picked up from Youtube. Watched it on The Outsiders where you can hear wild cheering, but this version, for some reason, has had the sound cut off. Perhaps it will be restored later, but does not work for me so far. [comes the morning, the sound now works.]
The left is not only repulsive and deep-set fools, but are also adolescent and the proven enemies of free expression.
A shorter version with the sound turned on.
From Paul Kelly on why Labor lost: A tale of two Labors. Here is Labor’s core constituency:
Labor has no option but to remain a champion of progressivism, the tertiary-educated, high-income cosmopolitans focused on climate change, social justice, inclusion and, increasingly, identity politics.
Progressivism!! The Moron Class, he means. And then he says it again.
It must reconcile the cultural tension — certain to intensify — between urban, well-off, self-righteous progressives and the alienated, more socially conservative workers facing poorer incomes and weaker services.
I especially liked the “self-righteous” bit. Did he really mean to say that? Does he think this is a positive feature?
He is of course discussing the self-satisfied, pseudo-intellectual classes, many if not most of whose incomes are paid via taxation, who would be the last groups damaged by the political dead ends they are pursuing. They rack up high incomes while providing near nothing to the strength of the economy. The entire public service is filled with people like that, not to mention our crony capitalists, and there are others as well.
For a Keynesian, value is determined by demand. For classical economists it is production costs in relation to scarcity that determines the exchange value of a good or service.
More to the point, however, do they mean value in use or value in exchange? Unless you know, both the question and the answer are meaningless.
And as for the answers given, the one thing that never determines exchange value are consumers by themselves. Ever seen a supply curve?
This being the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I thought I might tell the story when I was there myself. I was hitchhiking in Europe in 1973 and as we were at the East German border already, thought we (me and my girlfriend) might head off to Berlin by hitching along the highway from the West German border into Berlin. A longish way, but if you were picked up a ride at all, there was only one destination the driver would have been heading for. And we ended up being picked up by a man in a Mercedes, so that an hour and a half or so later, we were in Berlin. And the moment we exited the car, in the dead centre of West Berlin, right on the Kurfürstendamm, we were approached by three members of the American military who took out a joint which we smoked right there and then. Welcome to Berlin.
West Berlin was quite an adventure in so many ways, but I will stick to the main event which was to go to the Wall, and then afterwards to travel into East Berlin. Now I must confess that at the time, I was a very long-haired person, which in those days was something of a novelty, specially in Europe. So we went to the Wall, got up on the observation deck, looked through binoculars into this no-mans-land space between the two walls (both built by the East Germans so that they could trap anyone caught in the middle – barbed wire everywhere). I then looked over at the watchtower about 100 metres off in the distance in which there were two East German guards with their own binoculars looking back at me.
The next day – and how surprisingly vivid these memories are – we crossed over at the one checkpoint where crossings were permitted. To leave the Allied section for the Soviet Zone was nothing at all. You just went over the line and no one would stop you. But then there was the East German border where we each first had to change ten marks (which was actually real money back then) into the worthless East German currency. And then we got to the border guard who checked our passports who, when he looked at my passport photo and then at me, reached out and swept the hair from my face to make sure it was really me and that was really my passport. And with the passport stamped and the money exchanged – and this might have taken an hour or so – we went towards the gate into East Berlin.
And before we exited, there to greet us was a very upbeat official greeter from East Germany who spoke with a French Canadian accent. Incredible, I said, how did you end up speaking English with a French Canadian accent? Because, he said, he had been a prisoner of war in Quebec.
Then into East Berlin where we went first to the dreariest coffee shop I have ever seen. Near the wall, but the first place you could go to. If you wanted to demonstrate how awful communism is, that was the way to do it, and it did it very well.
Then past all of the buildings that were along the border wall, that were relics of the old German Reich. Every building still had bullet holes and chipped stone from the rifle fire that were relics from a war that had ended 28 years before. Nothing of the kind remained in the western half of the city.
Then went to the museum of course which I remember little of. But what is indelible was the War Memorial for which the changing of the guard was the highlight. I stuck around to watch it at least twice, and maybe even one more time after that. Was it at the museum, I don’t know. But what got me was that even with only two guards going and two guards plus their commander coming out and then returning, the goose-stepping of just five soldiers made the entire square shake. Have just found a video someone must have taken back then, but the sound quality gives you no sense of any of it. What an entire army must have sounded like would have been incredible.
Then as night fell, back through the gate which you had to get through by 6:00 pm or something. But along the way there were all kinds of men dressed in black who wanted to change money and would speak to you out of the side of their mouths and in very subdued tones. But with the unimaginable creepiness of it, there was no way I would have ever talked to any of them, never mind attempted to change money.
Whether this was an important part of my education in turning my back on the left, it was no doubt part of it. Communism is gone, but there are always enough crazies around who want to put it back. Dark, dark times, now gone, but you never know your future. There are always people stupid enough to give others genuine power who promise paradise on earth, or at least free stuff, but will only put you in chains. This is a bit of a reminder of what it’s like, but you know what, there are still socialists everywhere who think, this time it will be different.
If you are a threat to the Clintons, what else do you expect. All three posts below are from Instapundit. You will not see any of it in the local paper, or on the ABC which is well-known for its support of violence.
LET’S PLAY A ROUND OF “WHISTLEBLOWER SHIT-SHOW!” Well, CBS fired Ashley Bianco, producer formerly of ABC for allegedly releasing the video that outlines how ABC spiked an investigation of pedophile and Clinton mega-donor Jefferey Epstein. Megyn Kelly interviews her and she tearfully denies it. On the same day, James O’Keefe published a letter from the real whistleblower.
In the meantime both networks are following the DNC-talking points about investigating leakers: When the President does it, it’s bad. When they do it…crickets.
Where to start? I wish Kelly had asked Bianco what CBS told her when they fired her. That aside, I’ve been asked a lot about her legal remedies. Honestly, you could take what I know about Labor Law, put in your eye and still see pretty well. As I understand it, NY is an “at-will” state, meaning they can fire you for no reason unless it’s a race/age/gender thing.
Defamation? Maybe, but defamation claims in NY require “in hac verbae”, that is a pleading of the actual defamatory statement in the Complaint. And you can bet that both CBS and ABC would fight coughing up any docs for years, and would resist pre-action discovery to depose the HR departments to find out what ABC said to CBS. I doubt this lady has the financial wherewithal for that kind of fight.
But, this may be one of the rare instances where a cause of action for Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress might work. Very generally, the tort requires that the plaintiff must have been in the “zone of danger” of the defendant’s negligent act, or it must have been foreseeable that the defendant’s negligent conduct would have caused the plaintiff emotional harm. (And New York does not, like a few states, require physical harm or contact). And if CBS fired an employee on ABC’s mistaken say-so, well, that’s pretty damned negligent. Dare I even say “collusion”?
Who’s taking odds that CBS writes a check to make this go away?
BTW, Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself.
Then this.
Not to mention this.
It’s sort of all taken as something of a joke, but with today the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it’s kind of spooky how ignorant so many people in the media and among the general population are.
First from Australia.
Malcolm Roberts@MRobertsQLDAdam, Can you confirm the credentials of Professor Micky Mouse from the Micky Mouse Institute For The Blind that is included in your list of “scientists”? Unprecedented propaganda.
Quote Tweet
Adam Bandt@AdamBandt·This is unprecedented. 11,000 scientists from around world unite to declare global climate emergency. Governments, including our own, have not got global warming under control. #Greens will press on with getting Aust Parl to declare a climate emergency. https://sbs.com.au/news/11-000-scientists-from-around-the-world-unite-to-declare-global-climate-emergency…650
And then from Canada.
I have finally submitted the manuscript for my Summary and Translation of Classical Economic Theory into a format that can be read by a modern economist. This is part of the note that went with the submission.
I think and hope I have now completed everything I need to do to submit my manuscript. I have adjusted the title, but am still looking for something that really says in compact form what I mean, which is that if you want to understand how an economy works, you will have to return to the economic theories of the classical economists. That is what the book is about, plus also being about how to understand a classical text since one must first work through how economic terminology has changed since classical times. If you read the word “saving” as a Keynesian does, you will not only not understand a classical text, you will also not be able to make sense of how an economy works.
The embedded notion that is almost explicit in the text is that only by understanding classical economic theory can one understand how an economy works, which also says, and the text discusses, that you cannot understand the operation of an economy using mainstream theory, any version of socialist economic theory, New Classical economics, Austrian economics or, for that matter, the economic theories of the early classical economists, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
It is only with the publication of John Stuart Mill’s Principles in 1848, and then from within his last edition published during his lifetime in 1871, can one discover the actual operation of an economy. What that theory is no one any longer knows, other than a few specialists who number fewer than 100 across the world. And then, amongst those, there is oddly only a single one who believes that Mill’s text is the lost ideal of economic theory. I perfectly well understand how ridiculous it is to believe any such thing, but I do. The classicals laid it all out before the arrival of the Marginal Revolution which turned economics from the supply side to the demand side. But what has completely collapsed economic theory as a sound means to make sense of an economy was the advent of the Keynesian Revolution in the decade after the publication of The General Theory in 1936, where not only was everything overturned, but a new set of technical terms was introduced whose use makes a classical text all but incomprehensible to a modern economist. You will need my text to understand classical economic theory. You cannot do it on your own since you won’t know either the meaning of the terms or the presuppositions that underpinned the theory.
Our economies have managed, but only just, to maintain the role of the entrepreneur in directing our private sector firms, but the pretence found in modern macro that public spending – G – is as productive or as value-adding as private investment – I – is tearing our economies down, with no understanding of what is happening, least of all among our economists. That capitalists have been transformed into crony capitalists, who are now among the major welfare recipients taken from the massive tax revenues collected by governments, is a large part of the problem. What to do is hard to say, but first the problem needs to be recognised. That is what this book attempts to do.
You don’t often seem something like this, an article pointing out the dead heart of libertarian philosophy by a conservative who understands the problem: How Libertarianism Makes People Susceptible To Huge Government. Title doesn’t really get there for me, but the text of the article does.
:Libertarianism has become less about a commitment to limited government and more a philosophy of autonomous individualism. The latter is an ideology that undermines the possibility of the former, in large part because it really does leave people alone.
If libertarians were actually conservatives, I would take the point. But the article makes the case that what libertarians lack is an understanding of the fundamental point made by conservatives. Libertarian philosophy is as dead as socialism while pretending to be on the other side. Let me begin by pointing out from the article that what is missing is conservative philosophy. It is the presuppositions in libertarian thought that make it so empty.
Astute libertarians (or classical liberals, for those who prefer that label) recognize that political liberty has cultural prerequisites. We are born neither free nor rational, but come into this world dependent and lacking in reason. Care and instruction are necessary for us to attain even some freedom and rationality, along with the virtues needed to exercise them well.
In essence, for a libertarian society to exist requires everyone to be born into a classical liberal society, learn their morality from an existing social structure, not be continually menaced by socialists in their midst, and then, but only then, be allowed to get on with their lives.
Only a virtuous people is capable of sustaining self-government.
The often-tenuous conservative-libertarian alliance has rested upon this truth … while remaining aware that limited government is dependent upon cultural antecedents that promote and protect the virtues required for self-government. Practical libertarianism requires strong families, churches, and communities, which provide stability, a sense of belonging, and the moral instruction that enables self-government….
Many libertarians appear to have forgotten or never learned this insight, as they now seem eager to condemn cultural conservatism as incompatible with individual autonomy. Such libertarianism is hostile to traditional forms of community, especially the family and church, which it sees as repressive and restrictive….
Today’s libertarianism allows and even encourages the destruction of the virtues and associations necessary for successful self-government.
Here is the central point.
Those of us who value liberty must not only promote virtue in the private sphere, but also wrestle with how government intervention is to promote it and how much intervention is necessary….
The paradox of libertarianism is that it depends upon cultural capital it cannot replenish.
Libertarians presuppose the continuing existence of all of the institutional structures that make our societies operate, in the same way that socialists presuppose the continuing existence of all of the necessary elements of a productive economy. A libertarian society has never been attempted, nor is it even possible, so there will never be a real-world example to demonstrate its inevitable failure. But like socialists who have seen many failures in the many attempts to set up a socialist economic structure, the end result is always the declaration that real socialism has not yet been tried. It would thus be said when the first libertarian state had broken down that a real libertarian society has never been tried. In this case, it will always remain true because it never will be tried.
Law of Markets 