In the film, Australian scientists explain that the great white shark had been tagged with a tracking device. They said the shark was eaten by a mystery creature in the depths of the ocean four months later, with the tag washing up on shore about 4km from where it was initially tagged.
In a clip from the film, Riggs says: “When I was first told about the data that came back from the tag that was on the shark, I was absolutely blown away.”
The shark had been swimming at a depth of 1,900ft when there was a huge temperature change – going from 7C to 25C in just seconds.
Scientists say this could only have happened by the shark being eaten by another creature – the latter temperature indicates that the tag was inside the stomach of another animal.
“The question that not only came to my mind but everyone’s mind who was involved was, ‘what did that?'” Riggs said. “It was obviously eaten. What’s gonna eat a shark that big? What could kill a 9ft great white?”
With the temperature going from 7C to 25C in just seconds it’s the final proof of global warming for sure.
The left is very successful at appealing to the principle of justice, and justice for the man lowest down. Sometimes, as conservatives, we miss the force of that. We reply by chanting “Liberty!” But we have to remember that justice is a key principle. Right, the Pledge of Allegiance: “With liberty and justice for all.” So we can’t ignore justice, and what I do in the book and film is to engage the left on its own terms. I go “Ok, let’s really look at whether or not America has been good for the common man.” Forget about the rich guy, he’s going to do well everywhere. Let’s judge a society by the kind of life it makes available to the ordinary fellow. So I’m willing to argue that the left is actually attacking ordinary people.
People do want to live in a just society and only a society based on individual freedom can deliver it, and as an added bonus it comes with prosperity as well. But we have to be prepared to say it, which first means we have to understand it. D’Souza spells it out remarkably well.
You can get my Defending the History of Economic Thought as an e-book at this link. It is the first ever book length defence of HET and was written because the History of Economic Thought was, and still is, under threat of exile from amongst economists to the History and Philosophy of Science. It thus is not just an examination of why economists must study HET to become better economists, but why economists must preserve HET if economics is itself to become a better study of how economies work. This is from the link to the e-book:
This book explains the importance of the history of economic thought in the curriculum of economists, whereas most discussions of this kind are devoted only to explaining why such study is of value simply to the individual economist. Steven Kates reaches out past the individual to explain the crucial importance of the history of economic thought in the study of economics itself; without its history at the core of the curriculum, he contends, economics is a lesser subject, less penetrating, less interesting and of much less social value.
The book has had a number of reviews which reminded me just how useful this book is, not because they agreed with me, but because they didn’t. Not that any of them disagreed with me over the importance of the subject itself, only about whether my approach to teaching HET was a sensible one or whether I had overstated the opposition to HET amongst the profession in general. But twice in five years, major societies were faced by attempts to remove HET from within the economics classification and only rearguard action by a handful of historians of economics was able to reverse these already taken decisions.
I will be speaking about the book at the History of Economic Society meeting in Montreal in June and then, at the Australian Society meeting in Auckland, there will be a symposium on the book and its message. Economists have shifted away from being part of the humanities into becoming, not just a social science but social-physics. It is mathematics and pseudo-rigour that now drive the way in which economic theory is designed. Economics cannot be mathematical since there are no data for most of the important questions economics tries to answer. One of the reasons Keynesian economics will not die is that there is a belief that you can measure the things that need to be measured since the national accounts – a set of identities, for heaven’s sake – can be used as a proxy for economic relations. The History of Economic Thought at least reminds economists that their subject once was part of the humanities and some even begin to realise it still needs to be if it is to be any use to society.
Reading classical economics for me is to be in the company of economists who understood how economies worked. I have of late been reading Simon Newcomb’s “The Problem of Economic Education” which was published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics in July 1893. And what he does is go through the kinds of economic illiteracy that was all too common in the general population of his time, with a decidedly pessimistic view of whether these ideas can ever be eradicated amongst the population in general. And this was even though there was then universal understanding amongst economists about how fallacious these fallacious ideas were. An example:
From the economic point of view, the value of an industry is measured by the utility and cheapness of its products. From the popular point of view, utility is nearly lost sight of. . . . The benefit is supposed to be measured by the number of laborers and the sum total of wages which can be gained by pursuing the industry. . . . Here legislation only reflects the sentiment of a large majority of the active business community. A man’s economic usefulness to society is supposed to be measured by his expenditure of money and consumption of goods. He who spends freely is pointed out as a benefactor; while the miser, who invests his income, is looked upon as a selfish being, mindful only of his own aggrandizement. (p. 7)
Well, that was in 1893 for goodness sake. Who today would think spending is good and saving bad? From The Australian today:
CLIVE Palmer wants the age at which Australians can access their superannuation lowered, saying it will boost domestic demand for goods and services and increase economic growth. . . .
“I think we should be allowing people to access their super at 50 if they want to.
“It’s up to them, it’s their savings … we want to get that money released from the super funds.”
On this, Newcomb wasn’t even close to being pessimistic enough. Now, and since 1936, even economists think saving is a bad thing and spending is good.
I have just received through the post a first edition copy of Hartley Withers, The Case for Capitalism. The preface is found below but comes with this one warning which to modern sensibilities can set them off in every direction but towards trying to understand what the author was saying. This was written when the most wealthy countries in the world were the capitalist economies of the British Isles, northern Europe, North America along with Australia and New Zealand. His reference to the Anglo-Saxon nations only refers to their social and economic organisations which anyone else is free to adopt, as some have since the 1920s, with exactly the results he describes. But the effect is moral rather than just economic since, as he makes clear, people who are challenged to do their best become better people. This is a moral statement even more than an economic. Written in 1920 just after the Russian Revolution, the book has not lost a beat in its ability to articulate why free enterprise is beyond all doubt the only system capable of providing prosperity and human freedom, not just together but you cannot have either without a free market economy in place.
PREFACE
To make a better world we want better men and women. No reform of laws and institutions and economic systems will bring it unless it produces them. Institutions and systems that turn men and women into machines working under the control of officials or of monopolies will not make them better even if, as is very far from likely, they make them better off. It is only through facing life’s problems for ourselves, making our own mistakes and scoring our own hits, that we can train and hammer ourselves into something better. Individual freedom, initiative and enterprise, have been the life-blood of the Anglo-Saxon nations and have made it what it is, pre-eminent among the nations of the world because its men and women can think and act for themselves. If we throwaway this heritage because we think that regulation and regimentation will serve us better, we shall do a bad day’s work for ourselves and for human progress. And yet this seems to be the object to which many earnest and sincere reformers are now trying to lead us, when they ask us to accept nationalization of industry or its organization under Guild monopolies, as a remedy for the evils which are evident in our economic system. If they succeed life will cease to be an adventure and become a drill; the tendency to variation which, as science teaches us, is the secret of development, will be killed or checked, and we shall be standardized, like Government boots.
This book is written to show that the greater output of goods and services on which material progress depends cannot be expected with certainty under any form of Socialism that has yet been proposed; that Capitalism, though a certain amount of robbery goes on in its backyard, does not itself rob anybody, but has wrought great benefits for all classes; and that, if improved and expanded as it may be without any sudden change in human nature such as other systems demand, it may earn for us the great material advance that is needed to provide us with a better, nobler, and more beautiful world.
I read the brief rap on this story, Actor Alec Baldwin arrested after riding bike wrong way, and thought typical arrogance, right down to the “don’t you know who I am?” business. But then I read the actual sequence of events, which included his arrest because he did not have identification with him as he was doing what everyone who rides a bike has done at some point in their lives. And who wouldn’t have been irritated. Read it.
Actor Alec Baldwin was arrested Tuesday and issued two summonses — one for disorderly conduct — after riding a bicycle the wrong way on a New York street, police said.
The “30 Rock” star allegedly became angry and started yelling at police after they asked him for identification to give him a summons, police said. The other summons was for riding a bike against the flow of traffic. Baldwin is to appear in court July 24.
“Police stated that he got belligerent and started arguing with them and using profanity,” Deputy Chief Kim Y. Royster said.
Baldwin was not carrying identification and police took him into custody, police said.
The actor reportedly became angry at the officers, yelling “Give me the summons already,” a law enforcement official said.
After his release, Baldwin took to Twitter, posting the badge number of the officer he said arrested him and saying, “photographers outside my home ONCE AGAIN terrified my daughter and nearly hit her with a camera. The police did nothing.”
In another tweet, he lamented, “New York City is a mismanaged carnival of stupidity that is desperate for revenue and anxious to criminalize behavior once thought benign.”
Once in custody, Baldwin was taken to a nearby precinct, where he reportedly asked the desk supervisor: “How old are these officers, that they don’t know who I am?” according to a law enforcement official.
Baldwin was stopped for riding a bicycle the wrong way on Fifth Avenue and 16th Street, police said.
The only reason you might know that someone was arrested and handcuffed for riding a bike on the wrong side of the street is because it is Alex Baldwin. This story could not happen in any other country in the world. This is definitely an “only in America” story. Can you actually disagree with him where he wrote, “New York City is a mismanaged carnival of stupidity that is desperate for revenue and anxious to criminalize behavior once thought benign.”
The belief that AGW can be rolled back by evidence is a quaint enlightenment notion that has had about as much evidence as global warming. Apparently, the new Godzilla film is drenched in AGW and anti-nuclear sentiments as well. The title of the review explains the rest: Suspend your reality for Godzilla: It’s an anti-global-warming alarmism smash.
The film opens at a huge quarry, where humanity’s insatiable thirst for fossil fuels (or diamonds or platinum or something) has uncovered a terrifying secret: a pair of radioactive MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms). The point here, nominally, is that man brings about his own destruction by despoiling the planet. However, it’s worth noting that the one of the MUTOs immediately attacks a nuclear power plant, while the other, later, attacks a repository of nuclear waste. In this, the MUTOs feel like close cousins of the worst of the greens, those folks who demand action on climate change yet mindlessly attack nuclear power—the sole technology that could allow us to maintain our standard of living while reducing carbon emissions.
As the film progresses, the intellectual center of the picture is revealed to be Dr. Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), who takes an almost zen-like approach to the MUTOs. He believes that Godzilla, who he has been searching for his entire adult life, is not a threat to humanity but a part of Earth’s natural biosphere. The giant lizard exists to “restore balance.” Serizawa also laments the “arrogance of man” for thinking he can control nature; the good doctor believes that the only way to stop the rampaging MUTOs is to let Godzilla fight them and kill them, to let nature run its course. The leaders of men disagree, opting to try and gather all three of the giant creatures into the same area off America’s west coast, where they will be destroyed by a thermonuclear warhead. This plan backfires, leading to a nuke threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of San Franciscans.
Etc, etc etc. Anyway, great cinematography. And since it’s only a movie, what possible influence could it have?
I have just gone through a large section of Simon Newcomb’s Principles of Political Economy published in 1886 just as I was reading The Economist and The Financial Times 2013 book of the year, When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence. The difference in substance and depth is so profound it leaves me in despair.
But I want to focus on one particular aspect of what really is a book of junk ideas and simplistic formulations. Lots of dross gets published but only one book per annum is rated the best of the year. If this is what economic journalism sees as the finest flowering of contemporary thought, there cannot be all that much economic thought in contemporary journalism.
The author is Stephen D. King who is Chief Economist for a bank, HSBC in particular. He is therefore fixated on the monetary side of economics with the actual productive side having a mere shadowy existence somewhere deep in the background. No evident consideration of value added and production, just shifts in aggregates, most of which are financial.
But let me leave all that to the side along with his smugness and self-satisfaction. No admirer of contemporary economic thought myself, his bizarrely superficial economic recommendations that rest on his support for nominal GDP targeting show him to be about as deep as anyone could be who never thinks in terms of the entrepreneur and value adding activity. That is not, however, why I have bothered to bring his book up.
You see, he blames my poor generation, we baby boomers, for our economic problems today. And while I also think of my generation as the beginning of the rot, I don’t think of things in quite the same sort of way. If anything, where I feel we baby boomers may be most at fault is producing the generations that have come after. So with this in mind, let me take you to what he has to say (all quotes taken from page 243) about our current economic problems in relation to my generation:
“The boomers’ preferences have dominated society’s choices since they first reached adulthood in the 1960s and 1970s. In their twenties and thirties they accepted higher inflation; their mortgages were, in effect, partially written off even as pensioners saw their savings destroyed.”
In 1970, as the Great Inflation was getting under way, even the oldest of the baby boomers was no more than 25 and most were under twenty. We didn’t cause the inflation and I would hardly say we had accepted the acceleration in prices given that we did what we could to end it. If you want causes, you have to go back to the generation before. But if you want solutions, who were our political leaders that we first voted for and put into office? In the US it was Ronald Reagan and in the UK, Margaret Thatcher. Where are your equivalents today? There is not a ghost of a chance that his generation would ever put either of these into office. They were giants compared with the pygmies who have come since. He goes on about my generation, here in a continuation of the above quote:
“Now in their fifties, sixties and seventies, they insist on low inflation, fearing the erosion of their lifetime savings as they head into retirement. The boomers have had their cake and made sure they could eat it.”
You really do have to help me out here, Stephen. We didn’t cause the inflation of the 1970s since we were not in political charge but have worked hard ever since to make sure inflation does not take off again. Was this the wrong call? Should we have had more inflation? Do we need more inflation now? What’s your point? Well here are his thoughts about how to deal with this baby boomer generation for whom he has a name of his own.
“One answer would simply be to wait for the selfish generation to expire. By that stage, however, the damage may have been done: their gains will have been the rest of society’s losses.” [My bolding]
Yes, we could wait for us all to die off, but that’s such a slow process, he thinks. So what to do? In a continuation from the previous sentence and in the same para he therefore suggests this.
“Another would be to recognise the futile nature of the large amounts of medical expenditure for those approaching the final curtain, a use of resources for which the returns are, sadly, lacking [!!!]. It seems unlikely [!!!], however, that society is yet [!!!] willing to embrace voluntary euthanasia – let alone the involuntary kind – any time soon [!!!], or to become indifferent to death, whatever the age.”
This is not written as a joke in “a modest proposal” sort of way. You can quite clearly see that even if he’s not game to say it, his actual real answer is to leave us all to die off as quickly as possible. If we are no longer productive, we should no longer be allowed to absorb resources.
This man is an absolute caricature, a Monty Python version of a merchant banker.
And while he has a chapter he titles, “Dystopia”, these answers are in the following chapter, the one he titles, “Avoiding Dystopia” where he has put all of his suggested remedies. And while Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph may believe, as it says on the cover of the book, that “it is alarmingly difficult not to disagree with Stephen King”, if he really believes that, I think he might have had the wrong Stephen King in mind.
The single most important characteristic I share with David Horowitz is that I, too, was a red-diaper baby that shifted from the radical left to the conservative right side of politics. Encounter Press is in the process of issuing the collected conservative writings of David Horowitz. The emphasis is, of course, on the word, “conservative” since his previous writings were entirely on the left where he was amongst its leadership group and was for many years the editor of Ramparts when I was one of its subscribers. This is from a column at Powerline where they discuss this publishing venture under the heading, David Horowitz: Who are our Enemies. From Horowitz’s article explaining why he is publishing these books:
It is for this conservative audience — a constituency on whom the American future depends — that I undertook to put together The Black Book of the American Left. It is first of all a narrative map of the battles fought over the last 40 years and — it must be said – lost, almost every one. The Black Book contains a record as complete as any likely to be written of the struggle to resist a Communist-inspired Left that was not defeated in the Cold War but took advantage of the Soviet defeat to enter the American mainstream and conquer it, until today its members occupy the White House.
It is an often overlooked but immensely significant fact that during the Cold War the vast majority of American progressives supported the Communist enemy, working as apologists, appeasers, and enablers for a global movement openly dedicated to the destruction of their country. At the time, the progressive movement was much smaller than it is now and was opposed by mainstream Democrats whom progressives referred to derisively as “Cold War Liberals.” In 1968, progressive activists staged a riot at the Democratic Party convention. The riot was overtly designed to destroy the electoral chances of Hubert Humphrey, regarded as the Cold War Liberal in Chief because of his support for the Vietnam War.
The Progressive Party, was formed in 1948 to challenge the cold war liberalism of Harry Truman and was in fact controlled by the Communist Party. The so-called New Left that emerged in the Sixties did not represent a clean break with communism and was not, in fact, a “new” left but a continuation of the old. It developed a modernized, deceptive political rhetoric — calling itself “populist” and even “liberal” — but it was mobilized behind the same malicious anti-individualist, anti-capitalist, and anti-American agendas as the Communist movement from which it sprang.
After the convention riot of 1968, this neo-Communist Left marched off the streets and into the Democratic party, and over the next decades took commanding positions in the party’s congressional apparatus, and eventually its national leadership. As it acquired power, it gradually shifted its self- identification from “liberal” to the bolder “progressive,” a designation shared by most leaders of the Democratic Party today. The betrayal of the Vietnamese by the “Watergate” Democrats, the appeasement of Latin American Communists (now firmly entrenched throughout the hemisphere and allied with our enemy Iran), the betrayal of the Iraqis and the sabotage of the war on terror, the traducing of the civil-rights movement and its transformation into a mob led by the racial extortionists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (the latter now the president’s chief adviser on race), the subversion of the modern research university and the conversion of its liberal-arts divisions into doctrinal institutes for training American youth in the radical party line known as political correctness, the rise of a campus fascism aligned with Islamic Jew haters and genocidal terrorists, the political undermining of the public-health system during the AIDS epidemic which led to half a million avoidable deaths — all these were crucial battles lost during the 40 years that preceded the White House reign of Barack Obama. All are documented in the pages of these volumes in week-by-week accounts of the arguments and conflicts that accompanied them.
A video about the Machal, the pilots who comprised the Israeli airforce in 1948. A miraculous story, at the link a trailer for a film I intend to see.
My Uncle Harold was there, not as a flyer but as part of the ground crew, as he had been during the war in Europe along with my Uncle Percy. Bless them both.
The film is Above and Beyond. And as one of those interviewed said, a thousand years from now, as Jews look back on their history from what will then be 6774, the two moments they will remember of our present era are the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel. What else they will be compelled to remember of events during this coming one thousand years fills me with enormous fears.
Law of Markets 