What’s the answer?

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Via SDA where it says:

This was an interesting graphic in a recent e-mail:
Leftist_Propaganda_Online.jpg

In comparison, Prager University has 70 million views per month. Not bad, but nothing compared to the Leftist Propaganda Machine.

Take some time to talk with your left-of-centre friends and figure out why they think the way they do. The power of the media is daunting.

And no different here. We few may frequent a few websites, watch Bolt and The Outsiders and read Quadrant, but the overwhelming bias towards the vast ignorance of the left is near impossible to counter. And the speed with which those who are looking towards some kind of salvation turn on PDT – vide Ann Coulter – because he cannot do it all and on his own is astonishing, repulsive, ungrateful and depressing. And then, of course, there’s this.

PERSPECTIVE:

Some people have no idea when they’re well off

On the one hand…

Saudi Arabia opens airspace to Israel for first time…

Jewish candidate for Muslim party breaks barriers in Tunisia…

Not to mention:

KOREAS PREPARE FOR MOON-KIM SUMMIT:

Negotiators for North and South agreed Saturday on a plan to meet again Thursday inside the Demilitarized Zone — a buffer area separating the two countries — to continue refining the agenda for next month’s historic, top-level summit between their respective leaders. [[President Moon Jae-in of South Korea and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un]

MORE:

The likelihood of any Kim-Trump summit remains unknown, as does the agenda, and the North hasn’t publicly acknowledged its invitation. But some preliminary talks appear to have occurred in recent days as North Korean diplomats traveled to Finland and Sweden for talks. The latter is an occasional intermediary for matters involving the North and the United States.

Here’s the diplomatic background, including the Trump Administration’s “maximum pressure” timeline.

But on the other hand…

Stormy Daniels’ lawyer posts photo of mystery disc in safe, teasing a ‘picture’…

Ex-PLAYBOY model apologizes to first lady for 10-month affair she claims she had with Trump…

If that’s all they’ve got, they’ve got nothing except among political idiots, of which there is no shortage. And for good measure, it wasn’t “Trump’s budget” that went through Congress, it was the combined efforts of those two renowned fiscal conservatives, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.

Thieves and the receivers of stolen goods

Not a lot you can do about this in the meantime, but the notion that Paul Ryan ran for VP in 2012 because of his fiscal credential is more bizarre than almost all the rest. The most corrupt political class in the world, but in saying this, I will leave the President out of it.

 

There is nothing there other than plunder and piracy. The common good is used only as a cover for unconscionable theft, and those on the receiving end, are no better than the receivers of stolen goods, many of which are among the largest businesses in the land. You may still not appreciate what a disgusting con game Keynesian economics is, but one day, hopefully soon, the penny might drop.

Kafka as a how-to book

“Once you have gone through this process you never want to go through this again.”

“The day you realise your government doesn’t actually care about you is the day you grow up.”

“The day you realise your government will actively prosecute you for non-existing crimes, that is a very bad day for you and your country.”

The background to the story is told here by David Solway: ‘Social Justice’ Is About Anything but Justice, where the events take place in Canada.

Most people are blissfully unaware of the havoc wrought by our misnamed “Social Justice” and “Human Rights” ideology until they are themselves hit by a summons, a legal suit or a ruling in law that deprives them of their peace of mind, robs them of productive time and leaves them substantially out of pocket. It is like being struck by a bolt of lightning while believing oneself to enjoy adequate shelter. My wife and I have been struck by such unexpected intrusions into our lives on three separate occasions over the last few years.

Read David’s article and then watch the video. The people who now make it to the top of the political process, mainly on the left but not just on the left, hate middle-class society and culture and are doing everything they can to bring it down. We may have more technical gadgetry today, but philosophically we are a decadent society of losers who hate and envy those who achieve and use pseudo-forms of compassion for the disadvantaged to create wreckage wherever they can.

In episode 73 of The Fiamengo File professor Janice Fiamengo describes her experience, and the significance for all citizens of once-free and just countries, of being dragged through a protracted and expensive quasi-judicial process on false claims easily discredited by even a casual observer.

This Social Justice Tribunal stand as an example of what can happen to a law abiding citizen in a society pushed far off the course of justice by the SJW tyrants now wreaking havoc in the west.

 

“Welcome refugees” is the craziest political slogan of all time

From The Other McCain

‘Europe Is Already Under an Invasion’

 

On the occasion of the anniversary of the 1848 revolution, Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban gave a powerful speech in Budapest:

The situation, my dear friends, is: They want to take away our country! . . . They want us to hand it over willingly to others. To strangers from another continent, who do not speak our language, who do not respect our culture, our laws and our way of life. Who want to replace our way of life with theirs. From now on they do not want us and our descendants to live here, but someone else. . . .

There is no exaggeration in this! We can see it day by day, as great European peoples and nations, step by step, area by area, from city to city, lose their homeland. The situation is such that those who do not stop the migration at their borders will be lost. Slowly but surely they will be consumed. All of this by external forces, international powers that are trying to force it upon us, with the help of their local allies, and they see the upcoming election as a great opportunity for this.

Europe is already under an invasion. If we let it, in the coming decades, tens of millions will begin to move into Europe from Africa and the Middle East. Western Europe is watching this with their hands in the air. Whoever puts his hands up is disarming himself. He is no longer making decisions about his fate. The history of the losers will be written by others in the years ahead. The young people in Western Europe will see it, when they become a minority in their own country and they lose the only thing in the world they can call home. Such forces as now reveal themselves have not been seen in the world for a long time.

Africa will have ten times more young people than Europe. If Europe does nothing, they will kick down the doors, and Brussels will not protect Europe. They do not want to stop the migration, but rather to support it and organize it. They want to dilute and replace the people of Europe!

You may be wondering, who are “they”?

Media financed by foreign groups, and a domestic oligarchy, professional activists . . . agitators, organizers of riots, chains of NGOs paid by international speculators, which can be summed up with George Soros’ name, since he personifies it. This is the world we must fight against, to defend our own.

 

Last July, I reported how Orban’s anti-Soros rhetoric was condemned by some (including the Israeli ambassador) as anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, it is a fact that “professional activists” funded by Soros, along with other “external forces,” do support unlimited immigration to Europe, and havesought to undermine Hungary’s government, which opposes this Islamic “invasion.” Hungary faces an election on April 8 — about three weeks from now — and Orban’s speech could be seen as an effort to rally support for his party and to counter the challenge of the Jobbik party, which is even farther to the right than Orban’s nationalist Fidesz party.

Michael Brendan Dougherty is concerned by a passage of Orban’s speechwhich “reads like a checklist drawn from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” but it must be asked: What is the alternative? That is to say, if the meddling activists funded by Soros have inflamed public opinion in Hungary, so that the nationalist government of Orban is threatened by openly anti-Semitic rivals, do we expect Orban to ignore this threat? And if Orban does a bit of dog-whistling about the “crafty” Soros who “speculates with money,” is that worse than what would happen in Hungary if Orban were to fall, and Jobbik were to gain power?

The Left has sown the wind and is reaping the whirlwind, including an ugly resurgence of anti-Semitism. It is a mistake to blame the reaction in Europe without acknowledging the Left’s role in provoking that reaction. The crisis in Europe is a result of two decades of misguided policies promoted by the elites in Brussels and elsewhere, policies that were supported by many American politicians in both parties. It is reasonable to hope that, if Orban wins a solid victory in next month’s election, this will relieve the pressure against his government, and thereby help suppress the more extremist elements in Hungary.

It is a shame, and also highly ironic, that George Soros has managed to rekindle the toxic politics of European anti-Semitism. It will be recalled that Soros was a Nazi collaborator in World War II, and is it anti-Semitic to despise a self-hating Jew? Yet no one could imagine that the Jews of Europe will benefit from an influx of Muslim immigrants. So it appears that once again, Soros is collaborating with the enemies of the Jewish people, while at the same time causing his own enemies to hate Jews!

What is happening in Europe could be a harbinger of our own future, unless more Americans wake up to the danger of cultural Marxism.

You know, there may be something to this

Nice to be on TV, I suppose, but the plot lines seem a bit farfetched. From a comment at Instapundit:

I think aliens control American politics, and use it as source material for an intergalactic reality show.

“In next week’s episode, watch as we switch the winner of the presidential race at the last minute. You won’t believe what happens to the supporters of the losing candidate!”

AND FROM THE EPISODE AFTER THE ONE NEXT WEEK:

GIRLS WILL BE BOYS, AND BOYS WILL BE GIRLS. IT’S A MIXED-UP, MUDDLED-UP, SHOOK-UP WORLD, EXCEPT FOR LOLA.

● Feminists ‘self-identify’ as males… to infiltrate men-only swim session.

● “A man with a violent criminal record is suing a battered women’s shelter for refusing to take him in…after getting drunk and becoming belligerent. So he went to a battered women’s shelter and demanded entry, claiming he identified as a woman. The battered women’s shelter is a faith based organization and it denied him entry. The man, you should know, does not appear to have taken steps to legally change his name nor to have surgery to conform to his supposed gender identity.”

● “Look, either we all agree that there’s such a thing as consensus reality, or we don’t. If you can change your sex just by saying so, you should be able to change your race too. If you guys expect me to accept Caitlyn Jenner, then I expect you to accept Rachel Dolezal. She’s a strong, beautiful black woman. And you can be one too.”

● “Last week, a U.S. District judge named George L. Russell III declared that the local high school in St. Michaels is violating the rights of a student named Max Brennan, who was born a girl but has decided he is a boy. (Like the parties to the case, judge, defendant, and plaintiff, we’ll refer to Max as a boy, for courtesy’s sake.) When Max told school authorities about his decision, they did what they could to accommodate him, calling him by his new name and referring to him with masculine pronouns. On Max’s behalf, they even subjected school staff to a ‘professional development workshop’ on the subject of transgender students. Max wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to use the boys’ locker room when changing clothes for gym class and showering afterwards. The school administration offered him instead the use of a ‘gender-neutral’ restroom where he could change, and gym teachers allowed him additional time to get to class. Max says he has been ‘generally accepted and recognized as male’ by his classmates. But when he used the restrooms to change clothes, he reported receiving ‘weird looks.’ A gay rights activist group called FreeState Justice volunteered to take the school district to court. Judge Russell agreed that not allowing Max full use of the locker room ‘harms his health and well-being.’ Max now has the right to shower with the boys, while the case continues its way through the courts. Doubtless some parents in St. Michaels are wondering why, all of a sudden, the law requires their sons to shower with a girl, just because the girl says she is a boy. They join many parents around the country under similar circumstances who are wondering the same thing. This is where [Ryan T. Anderson’s new book], When Harry Became Sally will come in handy.”

Finally, it’s may be behind the Commentary subscriber paywall, but if you have access to it, Sohrab Ahmari’s new article, “The Disappearance of Desire: The transgender movement’s missing element,” is a fascinating deep-dive read.

The universe may be defined as where everything is possible, but some things are just too outrageous even for intergalactic TV.

They believe they have a right and duty to keep you ignorant

Your choices are being limited by people on the left side of the political spectrum who prevent you from hearing alternative points of view because you might think these other views are actually correct. If they thought you would never agree with them, they would not try to stop you from hearing what these other points of view are.

It is an astonishing arrogance that Google, twittwr, Facebook, and other forms of social media – the “they” in the heading – believe they have the right and the duty to keep you from hearing other people’s opinions.

Open debate is the only defence against wrong opinion. Google stops you from hearing the truth at least some of the time, and perhaps as much as half the time. We should not put up with it. Totalitarians keep you from hearing other opinions that they do not agree with. Their aim is to take your freedom from you as best they can by preventing you from hearing opinions they do not think you should be allowed to find out.

Funny enough, you can find both Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto on Google, as you should. You just can’t find all of the videos from PraegerU,

The difference between Keynesian and classical economics

Just posted on Quora in answer to the question: What is the difference between Keynesian and classical economics? There are 13 other replies which not much more than prove to me that no one without a truly specialist knowledge of classical theory would have the slightest idea what an economist between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have understood about anything in relation to the operation of an economy. Their ignorance of what classical economists believed is matched by their ignorance of how an economy actually works. Anyway, this is what I wrote.

The differences between classical and Keynesian economics are so vast that to accept one version of how an economy works means you must reject the other. Classical economic theory is the theory that was developed between let us say 1776 and the 1870s, almost entirely by philosophers and business people who were actually looking at the economy. Modern economic theory has almost entirely been developed within universities by people who have neither a philosophical training nor have ever run a business as their primary mode of earning a living.

Here’s the difference. Classical economic theory begins from the existence of a market economy in which, on one side of the equation, there is a mass of people who would like to buy goods and services, and on the other side there are people who would like to earn their living by producing and selling things to others. The producers continually try to work out what to produce that others will buy, and do it by trying to decide what buyers will pay enough for in total to cover their production costs. These producers hire employees and the combined incomes of producers and wage earners become the purchasing power of the community.

Classical economic theory is thus entirely supply-side driven. And what is particularly interesting about reading the classical literature is that government regulation was an important part of how the economic system worked. The very first Factory Act in Great Britain was introduced in 1802, and there were many others that came after. The notion that classical economics was simply leave everything to the market is 100% wrong. If you look at the greatest economics text of the era, John Stuart Mill’s 1848 Principles of Political Economy, the final 200 pages are devoted to discussing the role of government in ensuring that economic activity was carried out in a morally acceptable way to the benefit of the entire community.

But crucially, classical theory assumes the role of the independent entrepreneur as the linchpin in making an economy work. Try to find a modern economic text that starts from there. Other than my own – Free Market Economics, Third Edition – none of the major mainstream texts starts from the supply side and none – as in zero – feature the role of the entrepreneur.

Keynesian economics assumes economies are driven from the demand side. That is, it is buying goods and services that makes an economy grow and employ, not their production. It is based on the total confusion between the demand for a single product – the greater the demand for shoes the greater the production of shoes will be along with the greater the level of employment for shoemakers. Demand affects individual products; demand in aggregate does not affect the level of output in total. The more that is produced, the higher the level of demand, for the obvious reason that the more that is produced, the more there is that buyers are able to demand. But if you are a Keynesian, you will go on believing that the cause of higher output is higher demand, whereas the reason more can be demanded is that more output is being produced. Public spending may have many benefits, but increasing the level of income and speeding up the rate of economic growth is not one of them. If anything, higher levels of public spending slow things down and lower real incomes below levels that otherwise would have been reached.

Keynesian economics is based on the fallacious belief that buyers will not buy as much as an economy can produce, and therefore demand must be stimulated to ensure everything produced is bought and that everyone who wants to work is employed. A great theory if you are in government and need a justification for taking as much money as you can get away with from income-earning citizens and spending it yourself. But a pernicious theory if you are interested in raising living standards as rapidly as possible.