Category Archives: Books and movies

Patriot’s Day

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This is the description of the movie Patriots Day:

An account of the Boston Marathon bombing, PATRIOTS DAY is the powerful story of a community’s courage in the face of terror. In the aftermath of an unspeakable attack, Police Sergeant Tommy Saunders (Mark Wahlberg) joins courageous survivors, first responders and investigators in a race against the clock to hunt down the bombers before they strike again. Weaving together the stories of Special Agent Richard DesLauriers (Kevin Bacon), Police Commissioner Ed Davis (John Goodman), Sergeant Jeffrey Pugliese (J.K. Simmons) and nurse Carol Saunders (Michelle Monaghan) this visceral and unflinching chronicle captures the suspense of one of the most sophisticated manhunts in law enforcement history and celebrates the strength of the people of Boston.

Everything you might want to see except some kind of analysis of the motivation of the bombers. Definitely not recommended.

More interesting, however, is the Superbowl which is Sunday night in the US but kicks off at 10:30 on Monday. It has the Boston Patriots v Atlanta Falcons. An unusually political contest since Boston has Tom Brady as its quarterback, the greatest who has ever played the game. But in very left wing Boston he is known for his friendship with Donald Trump and has even been known to wear the MAGA hat. Even more, the owner is Robert Kraft about whom this story is told:

Friendship and loyalty mean a lot to New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, which explains why he happens to be such a huge fan of President Donald Trump.

After Kraft’s wife passed away from cancer six years ago, only a very few people were thoughtful enough to stick by the Patriots owner’s side as he struggled with adapting to a life without his partner of 48 years. One of those people was Donald Trump.

“When Myra died, Melania and Donald came up to the funeral in our synagogue — then they came for memorial week to visit with me,” Kraft told the New York Daily News in an interview.

“Then he called me once a week for the whole year — the most depressing year of my life when I was down and out,” Kraft added. “He called me every week to see how I was doing, invited me to things, tried to lift my spirits. He was one of five or six people that were like that. I remember that.”

What an amazing gesture. It is no wonder that Kraft has stuck by Trump’s side through thick and thin, including at Indiana Inaugural Ball on Jan. 19, where the then-president-elect acknowledged their friendship in front of the whole world.

“In the audience we have somebody that’s under no pressure whatsoever because he’s got a great quarterback named Tom Brady and a great coach named Belichick — Bob Kraft,” Trump said at the dinner. “Your friend Tom just called, he feels good. He called to congratulate us, he feels good. Good luck. You’re going to do great things.”

Unlike his enemies, Trump is a man of pure decency. Go Pats!

Useful family advice for students

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From Behavioural Economics Saved My Dog by Dan Ariely

Dear Dan, As a university professor who has been teaching for a long time, what advice would you give to students who are starting their academic year? —PETER

Simple: cut all ties with your family—particularly your grandparents. Here’s why: most professors discover that family members, particularly grandmothers, tend to pass away just before exams.

Deciding to look into this question with the kind of rigour that only academics are able to (and have the time for), Mike Adams, a professor of biology at Eastern Connecticut State University, collected years of data and concluded that grandmothers are 10 times more likely to die before a mid-term assessment and 19 times more likely to die before a final exam. Grandmothers of students who aren’t doing so well in class are at even higher risk, and the worst news is for students who are failing: their grandmothers are 50 times more likely to die as the grandmothers of students who are passing the class.

The most straightforward explanation for these results? These students share their struggles with their grandmothers, and the poor old ladies prove unable to cope with the difficult news and die. Based on this sound reasoning, from a public policy perspective, students—particularly ones that are failing—clearly shouldn’t mention the timing of their exams or their academic performance to any relatives. (A less likely interpretation of these results would be that the students are lying, but this is really hard to imagine.)

Joking aside, social relationships are very important for our health and happiness, in good times and bad. And fostering these bonds is a wise goal for anyone at any stage of life.

Reading lists

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This is reading time at the beach or on the plane or just because. All suggestions welcome. Let me meantime recommend Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project: a Friendship that Changed the World. It’s about the story of two psychologists who systematically looked at how decision makers systematically make errors. You read it, you will never listen to your doctor in the same way. Also, from the recent past, there is The Swerve: How the World became Modern, the best book with the worst title but a book I think of often. Anyway, some thoughts on reading from an unlikely source.

Just before Marine Gen. James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis was getting ready to deploy with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force to Iraq in early 2004, one of his colleagues asked him about the importance of reading for military officers who sometimes found themselves “too busy to read.”

The legendary general sometimes referred to as “The Warrior Monk” carted around a personal library of 6,000 books with him everywhere, and he had plenty to say on the topic. His response went viral over email, in the days before Facebook and Twitter.

Military historian Jill R. Russell unearthed the email and posted it to the blog “Strife” by King’s College, London in 2013. With Mattis just chosen as President-elect Donald Trump’s Defense Secretary, it’s worth re-reading again, as it offers keen insight into the mind of Mattis.

Here’s what he wrote, on Nov. 20, 2003:

” . . . The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men’s experience), i.e. the hard way. By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed (successfully or unsuccessfully) before. It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

With TF 58, I had with me Slim’s book, books about the Russian and British experiences in AFG, and a couple of others. Going into Iraq, “The Siege” (about the Brits’ defeat at Al Kut in WW I) was required reading for field grade officers. I also had Slim’s book; reviewed T.E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”; a good book about the life of Gertrude Bell (the Brit archaeologist who virtually founded the modern Iraq state in the aftermath of WW I and the fall of the Ottoman empire); and “From Beirut to Jerusalem”. I also went deeply into Liddell Hart’s book on Sherman; and Fuller’s book on Alexander the Great got a lot of my attention (although I never imagined that my headquarters would end up only 500 meters from where he lay in state in Babylon).

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun. For all the “4th Generation of War” intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc, I must respectfully say, “Not really.” Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying (studying versus just reading) the men who have gone before us.

We have been fighting on this planet for 5,000 years and we should take advantage of their experience. “Winging it” and filling body bags as we sort out what works reminds us of the moral dictates and the cost of incompetence in our profession. As commanders and staff officers, we are coaches and sentries for our units: how can we coach anything if we don’t know a hell of a lot more than just the TTPs?

What happens when you’re on a dynamic battlefield and things are changing faster than higher HQ can stay abreast? Do you not adapt because you cannot conceptualize faster than the enemy’s adaptation? (Darwin has a pretty good theory about the outcome for those who cannot adapt to changing circumstance — in the information age things can change rather abruptly and at warp speed, especially the moral high ground which our regimented thinkers cede far too quickly in our recent fights.) And how can you be a sentinel and not have your unit caught flat-footed if you don’t know what the warning signs are — that your unit’s preps are not sufficient for the specifics of a tasking that you have not anticipated?

Perhaps if you are in support functions waiting on the warfighters to spell out the specifics of what you are to do, you can avoid the consequences of not reading. Those who must adapt to overcoming an independent enemy’s will are not allowed that luxury.

This is not new to the USMC approach to warfighting — Going into Kuwait 12 years ago, I read (and reread) Rommel’s Papers (remember “Kampstaffel”?), Montgomery’s book, “Eyes Officers,”“Grant Takes Command” (about the need for commanders to get along, “commanders’ relationships” being more important than “command relationships”), and some others. As a result, the enemy has paid when I had the opportunity to go against them, and I believe that many of my young guys lived because I didn’t waste their lives because I didn’t have the vision in my mind of how to destroy the enemy at the least cost to our guys and to the innocents on the battlefields.

Hope this answers your question…. I will cc my ADC in the event he can add to this. He is the only officer I know who has read more than I.

Semper Fi, Mattis

[My thanks to TMc]

The left sees itself as the Rebel Alliance

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rebel-alliance

I have to say that watching the latest Star Wars was a painful experience but it did not lack for instruction. The franchise is now old and stale. If you have been going along since the first of these in 1977, the point of diminishing return has long ago set in, and the latest is almost a repeat of the very first, only nowhere near as well done. But in enduring this on this one last occasion I will see one of these films, I have finally understood its point.

It may seem perfectly normal in a galaxy far far away that an acceptable response to the police asking for identification is to shoot them dead, or that it makes perfect moral sense to attack the government’s major defence installation, but nothing is explained. There is no manifesto published by these rebels, there is no obvious list of grievances that need redressing. These are just rebels against authority, and that is apparently quite enough.

To find the film engaging, it seems you have to be the kind of person who finds Castro an heroic figure, the leader of a rebel army that was able to kill its way into power. It makes no difference what the principles were, it was only that they were rebels.

Rebellion may have a romantic association just like righting wrongs and helping the poor. The reality is that the American Revolution turned out to be the only one in history that left its population no worse off than it began. All other rebellions and revolutions have led to the introduction of tyrannical governments that were worse than the ones replaced, almost invariably much much worse.

But there is nevertheless an infantile mindset that glories in such revolutions, and likes to think of itself as oppressed and in need of liberation. This is the left in all its different forms. That there are tyrannies in the world, where government oppression exists, is hardly in doubt. That many of the fools who find themselves siding with the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars are among those being oppressed is very much in doubt. Watching the film made me more aware than usual of the mentality on the left who find catharsis in watching authority figures killed and “the establishment” torn down. It is the kind of mental sickness that has Obama supporting “the rebels” in Syria, or Castro in Cuba. It is a disease which warps individual judgement to such an extent that it must become the aim of everyone to prevent such people from achieving political power ever again.

Tax and spend, and then when the taxes run out spend some more anyway

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This is from a review of a book titled, Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe, found at the History of Economics Online discussion forum. It’s why you should never elect socialists. They promise you everything and leave you living desperate lives where it becomes barely possible for more than half the population to stay economically afloat.

U.S. businesses are increasingly at a competitive disadvantage with respect to tax burdens when compared to businesses in other OECD countries. The U.S. now has the second highest corporate income tax rate, at 40 percent when calculating federal and state corporate income taxes. U.S. businesses face high business tax and compliance costs. American businesses face a tax penalty when they repatriate profits earned by their foreign subsidiaries. The U.S. has the eighth highest dividend tax rate, and the highest estate and inheritance tax rate among OECD countries. Finally, the U.S. has one of the highest tax rates in the world on corporate capital gains. Much of this tax burden on business is borne by workers in the form of lower wages and employment opportunities.

In contrast, the most successful OECD countries have enacted new fiscal rules to constrain the growth in government spending. John Merrifield and I document how new fiscal rules have enabled these countries to reduce taxes and borrowing. By the end of the twentieth century Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries imposed the lowest top income tax rates compared to other OECD countries; and these countries are successfully addressing unfunded liabilities in their entitlement programs.

Fiscal rules in the U.S. have been relatively ineffective in constraining the growth in federal spending. For half a century rapid growth in federal spending has been accompanied by deficits and debt accumulation. With total debt now in excess of 20 trillion dollars, the U.S. is one of the most indebted countries in the OECD. The total debt burden as a share of GDP exceeds 100 percent, and is projected to grow even higher in coming decades under current law. Growing unfunded liabilities threaten the viability of federal entitlement programs. These flaws in tax and fiscal policy are causing a massive redistribution of income and wealth in the U.S.

On top of everything else, it has made the rich richer and the poor more desperate.

3000

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This is my 3000th post. Begun just for fun and to communicate with friends and family, there is now a surprisingly large number of people who wander in. It hasn’t changed what I do since this is still just for me to keep track of what’s what and to remember what’s been going on that has interested me.

But I will mention this, since it is now more likely to happen then not, specially since the contracts have been signed. My collected blog posts on the American election – which comes to 135,000 words – is going to be published in January. My provisional title is, A Blog History of the American Election: 2016. So far as I know, this will be near enough the first time a collection of blog posts has been turned into a published narrative. I have now read these over in order four times and they really do bring back each of the moments, since each moment was the most recent moment of the election process – and that is even assuming that the process has even yet come to an end. It therefore has the quality of suspense since until the voting was over, no one could say how it would end. What makes this one work so well is that I was at one of the very first Trump rallies in July 2015, heard him speak and watched the election first hoping that that he was worth backing, and then when I decided he was, that he would win.

I actually think that blogs will become the first draft of history. The media have so completely sold out to the left that it is impossible to get anything like an objective sense from them. I, of course, am also a partisan, but have no pretensions that I can and could affect the result so I just react to events without attempting to shape them. That is all the more the case since I have been watching the election from Australia so am remote from even the most limited ability to affect the outcome. The media’s aim is to get you to vote a certain way, and the only way they want to you vote is for the left. They are now a pernicious force that Donald Trump has gone some limited way towards containing, but their poison has hardly diminished. I will certainly let you know where you can get a copy when the book is published.

Meantime, this still remains a way to communicate with family. Hi Joshi.

There is a limited case for reading Keynes today

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I am returning to the question of whether it is worth one’s while to read The General Theory since I may have been a little hasty in my previous advice. It is not to be read for entertainment, nor to understand how an economy works. But if you are interested in the history of economic theory, then that is a different story altogether. I have now replied again.

Thinking over what you had written, of course since you are an historian of economics you have to read The General Theory. You are not looking for enlightenment in the normal sense but to see how economics has “progressed”, and to understand in detail the steps along the way. Importantly, you will be reading it backwards in time, so that you are looking at it from now and trying to understand the origins of what we find in our texts. My original copy of The GT has become so fragile that I had to buy a second copy that I look at instead since the older one is disintegrating. And while I have probably read at one time or another every page of the book, I have not read them in order, from page 1 to the end. But I have read the index! And all of the footnotes. Never ignore the footnotes.

As for his definitions, Keynesian terminology is now so pervasive you will not stumble on a thing. Even his idiotic term “marginal efficiency of capital” is straightforward enough so that won’t be the obstacle it was at the start – his adoption of “marginal” concepts was a stroke of genius given when he was writing, although there is nothing “marginal” about mec and the mpc. The general problem will be that the presuppositions of the classical era will have evaporated so that it is less obvious what he’s going on about and why any of it matters. In it’s own way, because of my focus on Say’s Law, it was the first three chapters and then Book VI, which are the last three chapters, where I began and that led me to the rest. But since everything since 1936 has depended on acceptance of aggregate demand, which everyone now does accept, the book seems less idiotic to a modern reader than it did to Frank Knight and Henry Clay. And even then, since there was a consensus even among classical economists to increase spending to diminish the impact of The Great Depression, the radical nature of The GT remains in disguise. Seriously, can anyone really understand what this means and why it is so important?

“Say’s law, that the aggregate demand price of output as a whole is equal to its aggregate supply price for all volumes of output, is equivalent to the proposition that there is no obstacle to full employment.” (GT: 26)

This may be the least controversial statement in the entire General Theory over which literally no controversy of any serious kind occurred. Yet it is this statement that has made economics into the useless mess it is, wrecking our economies without hardly a soul understanding what’s involved and why it matters.

Keynes knew what he was up to. So once you understand that the entire book is aimed at demonstrating that Say’s Law as Keynes understood it is wrong, reading the book is then a walk in the park – at midnight in the midst of a hurricane.

The revolt of the dispossessed

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I have been re-reading Christopher Lasch’s brilliant The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy which was published more than a decade ago. It’s about the we-know-what’s-best-for-you types who have risen to the top of power structures across the world. A brief but inadequate summary but you’ll get the point:

Controversy has raged around Lasch’s targeted attack on the elites, their loss of moral values, and their abandonment of the middle class and poor, for he sets up the media and educational institutions as a large source of the problem. In this spirited work, Lasch calls out for a return to community, schools that teach history not self-esteem, and a return to morality and even the teachings of religion. He does this in a nonpartisan manner, looking to the lessons of American history, and castigating those in power for the ever-widening gap between the economic classes, which has created a crisis in American society. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy is riveting social commentary.

If you want to understand the attractions of Donald Trump, there is no better place I can think to look. And if you want an even better idea what it’s all about, you should read The economic losers are in revolt against the elites by Martin Wolf [perfect name] in The Financial Times.

Losers have votes, too. That is what democracy means — and rightly so. If they feel sufficiently cheated and humiliated, they will vote for Donald Trump, a candidate for the Republican party’s presidential nomination in the US, Marine Le Pen of the National Front in France or Nigel Farage of the UK Independence party. . . .

It is not hard to see why ordinary people, notably native-born men, are alienated. They are losers, at least relatively; they do not share equally in the gains. They feel used and abused. After the financial crisis and slow recovery in standards of living, they see elites as incompetent and predatory. The surprise is not that many are angry but that so many are not.

Branko Milanovic, formerly of the World Bank, has shown that only two parts of the global income distribution enjoyed virtually no gains in real incomes between 1988 and 2008: the poorest five percentiles and those between the 75th and the 90th percentile. The latter includes the bulk of the population of high-income countries.

The Clinton Foundation is the perfect example of how our elites operate. They shaft you and steal your money, and most importantly, they use government as their major tool to syphon the wealth of the hard-working majority to themselves and their friends.

“There is no third option, there is no compromise, there is no sitting out the election”

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Speaking of political idiots, this has just come my way which might help some see things more clearly: Conservative leaders step up for Trump, warn of a “Clinton Progressive Police State”. If the title doesn’t make you see the point, perhaps the introduction to the publication will:

Longtime conservative maven Richard Viguerie has produced an instant publication for these final, frantic days before the election, consisting of essays penned by a group of 18 conservative leaders who include Brent Bozell, Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell Jr., Craig Shirley, Joseph Farah, David Keene and James Dobson.

Mr. Viguerie says the compilation is meant to “attack the idea that not voting for Donald Trump somehow advances conservative principles.” The 25-page booklet is titled “Hail Hillary: Is a Clinton-Progressive Police State in America’s Future?”

Interesting. Some in GOP circles seem to suggest there’s virtue in shunning Mr. Trump.

“Hail Hillary is a cannonball through the doors of the ivory towers of those conservative who continue to obdurately claim that a Hillary Clinton presidency might not be that bad, that the country can recover after four or eight years, and that her policies won’t be aimed at marginalizing, if not outlawing, the conservative worldview,” says Mr. Viguerie.

“This is now a binary choice: Donald Trump and Mike Pence vs. Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine. In this battle there is only the victory or defeat of constitutional liberty and the rule of law. In this battle there is no third option, there is no compromise, there is no sitting out the election. I’m all in for Trump and Pence.”

Anyone who cannot see the difference a Trump administration would make in comparison with an administration led by Hillary is so out of it politically that there is never any further reason to pay attention to a thing they say about the great issues of our time.

Meanwhile if LIQ wants to make out the case for four years of Hillary, he is more than welcome to try. Not some link to someone else, but in his own words. As for the case against in my previous post, he ought to have gone to my link to the post by Publius Decius Mus where it is all spelt out. If LIQ can provide an answer to PDM based on conservative principles, international fame awaits.

Read this now while there is still time

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This is the incredible Introduction to a book by Paul Hellyer written in 1999. Hellyer had been a Liberal Party cabinet minister from the days before I left Canada when the Liberal Party was the party of business. The title is Stop Think, and given its message could have been written this morning on behalf of Donald Trump. It is the most accurate and prescient writing I have ever come across on anything. It may only just explain what now cannot be stopped, but there is still the possibility that Trump will win. This will help you understand how essential it is that he does. And to repeat, this was written in 1999.
__________

Have you ever tried to write a column or a book to say to the vast majority of economists and opinion leaders that they have got it all wrong; that they have set the world on a collision course with disaster? It is presumptuous, of course, but those of us who are dissenters, and our ranks are growing daily, have a moral obligation to ourselves to sound the alarm before it is too late.

We seem to be hell bent toward a world without borders. Someone has decided to eradicate the nation state as an effective political entity and to rob it of much of its power by moving back to the corporatism of the medieval society; this is not forward-looking but a wish to move back to the pre-democratic era. Decisions that have been the prerogative of national governments are being transferred to outsiders including the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and transnational corporations.

Apart from the dubious merit of such a massive transfer of power is the undeniable fact that it is being done without the advice or consent of the people whose lives are being affected. They, whoever they may be, are re-engineering the world without asking for our opinions and without giving us the opportunity to express them in any tangible way through the ballot box.

To add insult to injury, globalization is being pushed down our throats without the courtesy of any vision of what the world will look like when the revolutions has run its course. Who will be in charge? To whom will they be accountable? How will changes be effected? What recourse will there be for the people who believe they have been seriously disadvantaged in the process?

A skeptic might conclude that there are no satisfactory answers to these questions because globalization is, in reality, a smoke-screen for the biggest power grab in history. The wealthiest, most powerful, people in the world have become impatient with democracy which sets standards of conduct and taxes wealth to provide services for the common good. To paraphrase, their battle hymn is Arthur Christopher Benson’s immortal line, “God who made us mighty, make us mightier yet.”

This can be achieved by shackling the nation states; by taking away their right to determine the conditions upon which direct foreign investment is welcome; by insisting that they must admit goods produced under the most despicable of circumstances; by requiring that their land and assets be “for sale” to foreigners; and that their central banks be immune to political control.

The aim of the game is a world where nation states are powerless to protect their citizens from external shocks and developments; where governments are mere pawns in the hands of international banks, supranational corporations and world bureaucracies accountable to no one. To an extent considered inconceivable to many, the globalized world would be a world dominated by power and greed.

No one would deny that there are benefits to international action. Treaties to ban the use of land mines and a World Court to try persons accused of crimes against humanity may be steps in the right direction. Similarly there can be benefits to liberalized and freer trade, but only if it does not undermine the viability of national economies and if the rules include acceptable safeguards and standards in areas such as labor and environmental protection.

Those standards to not yet exist, and the transnational corporations sponsoring globalization are determined that they never will exist, except on a purely voluntary and consequently ineffective basis. No mandatory restrictions on their freedom of action are on the negotiating table.

If liberalized trade may ultimately bring about some positive results the same cannot be said about globalized financial services and unrestricted capital flows. They/ are a recipe for international instability and chaos and there is no existing or potential financial watchdog that can prevent it. The principal beneficiaries of such a system are the parasitical currency traders and short-term money lenders who, like vampires, live by sucking the life-blood from one target of convenience after another.

Yet this kind of system has been the object of the negotiations for a Multilateral Treaty on Investment under the OECD, the proposed Free Trade agreement for the Americas, the Article IV Amendments being pushed by the International Monetary Fund and other venues. They lead to a dead end that is difficult, almost impossible to reverse. Still, the trend must be reversed!

The claim that globalization is the road to nirvana for a desperate world is false. It is the road that will lead inevitably to another financial meltdown, the impoverishment of millions of innocent people and the death of democracy in any meaningful sense. This book is dedicated to alternatives that would lead to a world of greater justice and opportunity for all.

It is not intended to be anti-American because, in truth, it is not. Yet it is impossible to write about globalization, and the imposition of a neo-classical economic system with a track record of failure, without holding the coach accountable for a game plan resulting in injuries to most of the players.

Readers familiar with my work will note that some of the arguments have been borrowed from earlier books. Everyone will find a certain amount of repetition. This is not inadvertent. Some of the principal points need to be emphasized over and over again.

Finally, it must be admitted that I am of a generation unschooled in the niceties of political correctness and inclusive language. I hope that I may be forgiven for expressing my hopes without fear or favor.