Fromelles and Vimy Ridge

Posted on September 1, 2014 by lawofmarkets

We have been travelling almost parallel to the trench lines of the first World War in a France that has had almost no mention that we can see of the fact that the war began exactly a hundred years ago this month. But we have been to both Fromelles and today to Vimy Ridge to see the Australian and Canadian memorials. Fromelles was a disaster but Vimy Ridge was a famous turning point during the war (famous in Canada anyway). The interesting point made by the guide today was that it was always seen as a great source of comfort to have either the Canadians or Australians on ones flanks since everyone felt a kind of security in knowing that such reliable forces were at their side. I can still see why that would be.

But the absence of any particular reflection about the events of a hundred years ago is truly striking. I don’t know what I did expect but I didn’t expect nothing at all.

Israel’s challenge is to stay alive in a sea of barbarians

Posted on August 31, 2014 by lawofmarkets

A problem we will all soon be sharing. In the meantime, this is about Israel and how it has united in the face of its enemies.

Who in their right mind believes that Israel started this war, that Hamas wasn’t just waiting for an excuse to fire so it could arrest its rapid decline into irrelevance? Who is still sufficiently naïve to believe that had Israel made a deal with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas would not have fired? Who imagines that a Palestinian state will stop Hezbollah from doing the same thing, when it gets the command from Tehran? Who is so divorced from reality as to suggest that a Palestinian state will do anything to stop the steady march of the Islamic State across the region? It is no accident that Israelis were so riveted by the photos of Hamas executing people on the streets of Gaza last Friday, for they were a reminder of what we’re fighting, a reminder of what they would have tried to do to us if we didn’t find all the tunnels, a reminder of the barbarism that surrounds us everywhere we look – in Gaza, in Syria, with IS. We are far from perfect, but make no mistake: Israel’s challenge is to stay alive in a sea of barbarians.

Reclining seats on planes

Posted on August 29, 2014 by lawofmarkets

It is one of the phenomena for me on planes that the person in front of me is always, and often, the only person to put their seat back from the moment of takeoff. I am not an unreasonable person – ok, perhaps I am – but I have no problem if we are all heading off to sleep around, say, late in the evening as we leave. But at 9:00 am or anything it is more or less daytime, you should leave your seat vertical, especially if you are watching the movies and not trying to sleep. Then it is a matter of courtesy not to rob the person behind you of the limited and diminishing space the airline provides.

Megan McCardle has now lost me forever with this insufferable and ridiculous article on Fighting for Legroom at 40,000 Feet. Here’s her argument why it is none of my business if the jerk in front wants to fly from Melbourne to London with his seat rolled back.

The airline owns the plane, not you. You are renting a seat from them. They have chosen to rent seats that recline. If you can’t handle someone in front of you reclining, you have a few choices: You can politely ask them not to recline, you can purchase a more expensive seat that offers more legroom, or you can find another mode of transportation. What you are not entitled to do is modify the seat to prevent it from reclining, no matter how unfair you feel life is to us tall folks. The person in front of you purchased that seat with the expectation that it would be able to recline. If your legs are actually preventing movement of the seat (which happened to me on one particularly tight flight), that’s tough luck on them. But you should not go beyond what nature has given you in the way of reclining prevention.

You can also argue that if someone on the train wants to talk as loud as he likes for the entire forty minutes on the way home on his mobile, that there is no common etiquette that can be called upon that should stop him. Or if someone wants to sit in a coffee shop for hours on end nursing his coffee while he surfs the net that it’s quite all right and none of anyone else’s business.

The airlines managed to ban smoking on planes however inconvenient it may be to any particular passenger, and they have a limit on the size of passengers allowed in a normal economy seat, so they can do something about reclining seats. How’s this:

No seat can be put back until after the meal that is classified as the dinner meal unless it is 10:00 pm or later at the airport from which the plane has taken off.

If you’re six foot eight and can’t travel without putting your seat back, then you should pay for the privilege by paying for a more expensive seat where there is more room between rows. Otherwise, sit up straight until after dinner or after ten.

Visiting the battlefields of France

Posted on August 25, 2014 by lawofmarkets

We have just been off to a couple of the battlefields of France which have great meaning to me. Yesterday it was Azincourt and today Crecy, 1415 and 1346 respectively. Not great successes for the French but the museum at Azincourt was the best of its kind I have yet seen (and I have seen many). If, for example, you would like to find out what the field of vision was for someone wearing armour or how heavy one of the broadswords was, this is where you can find out. Not many French visitors, as you can imagine, but both were very well served.

Now onto a different kind of historic site, Jean-Baptiste Say’s cotton mill and his local historian, M. Zephyr Tilliette. They are trying to preserve Say and his memory in Auchy–les-Hesdin where the factory is. Longer story than the one I currently know, but I will know much more later on.

On the road in northern France

Posted on August 24, 2014 by lawofmarkets

Here I am in the far north west of France, on my way today to Auchy-des-Hesdins, the home of J.-B. Say where he went to set up and run his factory making textiles after being exiled by Napoleon for refusing to endorse his centralised economic policies. That Napoleon also offered him an immense amount of money, in the form of an appointment as a tax commissioner, which he indignantly knocked back, may be the single most principled act in the history of economics. See who else would refuse something like ten times the average wage, and especially someone who could have you arrested at will, because he did not agree with what he was asked to write. But such as he was.

I might add that virtually my last act before heading off was to do the final touches of the 2nd ed which will be out in September. I like to tell those here in France that my Free Market Economics is Say’s sixth edition as it combines emphasis on the entrepreneur, uncertainty and Say’s Law. I am looking forward to the factory tour tomorrow.

Don’t call me stupid

Posted on August 22, 2014 by lawofmarkets

It is the second time in two days that I have come across an article that deals with IQ, the third rail of public commentary up until now. Here is today’s: Are we becoming more STUPID? IQ scores are decreasing – and some experts argue it’s because humans have reached their intellectual peak

IQ test results suggest people [living] in the UK, Denmark and Australia have become less intelligent in the past decade. . . .

Some studies have shown the average IQ of Westerners has plunged 10 points or more since Victorian times and others claim it will keep decreasing.

Yesterday it was an article on IQ versus poverty which discussed “a longer running controversy is the persistent gap in literacy and numeracy associated with socioeconomic status.” This is moving into even more dangerous territory since it is grouping IQs by categories of some kind.

It must be the weather.

“No faith teaches people to massacre innocents”

Posted on August 21, 2014 by lawofmarkets

Between rounds of golf, these were President Obama’s remarks on the execution of journalist James Foley by Islamic State:

Today, the entire world is appalled by the brutal murder of Jim Foley by the terrorist group ISIL. Jim was a journalist, a son, a brother and a friend. He reported from difficult and dangerous places, bearing witness to the lives of people a world away.

He was taken hostage nearly two years ago in Syria, and he was courageously reporting at the time on the conflict there. Jim was taken from us in an act of violence that shocked the conscience of the entire world. He was 40 years old, one of five siblings, the son of a mom and dad who worked tirelessly for his release. Earlier today, I spoke to the Foleys and told them that we are all heartbroken at their loss and join them in honoring Jim and all that he did.

Now, Jim Foley’s life stands in stark contrast to his killers. Let’s be clear about ISIL. They have rampaged across cities and villages killing innocent, unarmed civilians in cowardly acts of violence. They abduct women and children and subject them to torture and rape and slavery. They have murdered Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, by the thousands. They target Christians and religious minorities, driving them from their homes, murdering them when they can, for no other reason than they practice a different religion.

They declared their ambition to commit genocide against an ancient people. So ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just god would stand for what they did yesterday and what they do every single day. ISIL has no ideology of any value to human beings. Their ideology is bankrupt. They may claim out of expediency that they are at war with the United States or the West, but the fact is they terrorize their neighbors and offer them nothing but an endless slavery to their empty vision and the collapse of any definition of civilized behavior.

Any thoughts while you’re at it about Hamas? Words are his specialty. Actions not so much.

FROM THE COMMENTS: This was an interesting observation from the Catallaxy comments thread whose accuracy would be useful to know:

“no faith teaches people to massacre innocents.”

From Robert Spencer

It also says that Muslims must fight against the “People of the Book” – Jews, Christians, and others who are considered to have received previous revelations from Allah – until they “pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued” (9:29). That option of submission and subjugation, however, is not open to groups that have no written revelation that could qualify them for “People of the Book” status. Hence for the Yazidis, to convert or die are the only Qur’anic options open for them.

The great scholar and expert on Islam ( family in Kenya and schooling in Indonesia, for example, must have provided some exposure ) is being disingenuous.

Under Islam, the Yazidis aren’t even as low in the hierarchy as Christians and Jews. They are seen as idolators and devil worshipers and hence ‘not innocent’. This is another speech brought to you by the representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood apparently embedded through the US government.

So the bit left out of this speech is – ‘but it is righteous to slaughter kuffir’.

Team Australia versus Team Barbarian

Posted on August 20, 2014 by lawofmarkets

Beheading journalists may be of more interest to journalists but this is what truly got to me this morning: Christians Crucified, Beheaded, Buried Alive:

Reverend Franklin Graham, head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the international Christian aid group Samaritan’s Purse, said ISIS jihadists are crucifying and beheading Christians in Iraq and Syria–“people are dying for their faith”–and added that he has heard of “incidences where entire families have been buried alive because they refused to convert to Islam.”

But if photographic evidence is more of what you’re looking for, there is this:

Horrific video of American freelance photo-journalist James Wright Foley, 40, being beheaded by ISIS in revenge for US airstrikes 12-days ago in Iraq was posted to the internet Tuesday afternoon.

For more, go to Andrew Bolt.

You may think this “Team Australia” is a bit hokey but I’m with Tony Abbott. This is our version of “you’re either with us or against us”. He is asking people to declare their own position. This is a civilisational war and I know which side I’m on. And I might add that I’m not all that sure we’re going to win it.

UPDATE: Comments by Tony Abbott on the murder of the journalist in Iraq:

TONY Abbott has described the claimed beheading of American journalist James Foley by Jihadist group Islamic State as absolutely sickening and pure evil.

The Prime Minister said he had not seen the video released by the group purportedly showing a masked militant executing the reporter but said it showed why there could be no compromise with the murderous terrorists.

“It’s absolutely sickening, absolutely despicable and it’s a sign that there can be no compromise whatsoever with the murderous terrorists of the ISIL movement,” Mr Abbott told Brisbane Radio 4BC.

“This is evil, this is as near pure evil as we are ever likely to see.”

Mr Abbott said while it was not Australia’s intention to get caught up in unwinnable wars, he would keep talking to partners and allies about how to be useful. Australia had already joined an international air lift to provide humanitarian aid.

“We’re certainly not going to participate in ground wars and things like that,” he said.

But Mr Abbott said Australia agreed with US President Barack Obama’s position not to stand on the sidelines and watch a potential genocide.

The Obama administration says it has not confirmed the authenticity of the video.

The last line is equivocation of the finest kind. What side Team Obama is on is as yet unknown.

Why do they want to drown us all in blood?

Posted on August 19, 2014 by lawofmarkets

Anyway, that is what they are telling us, Islamic State message to America: ‘we will drown all of you in blood’.This is the message.

The Islamic State militant group that has seized large parts of Iraq and drawn the first American air strikes since the end of the occupation in 2011 has warned the United States it will attack Americans “in any place” if the raids hit its militants.

The video, which shows a photograph of an American who was beheaded during the U.S. occupation of Iraq and victims of snipers, featured a statement which said in English “we will drown all of you in blood”.

I suspect they mean it. But with one of their supporters now president of the United States, I imagine not very much is going to be done about any of it.

Melbourne – world’s best place to live and to visit

Posted on August 19, 2014 by lawofmarkets

Conde Nast in the US has designated Melbourne as “the friendliest city in the world”. Tied with Auckland for first place, this is what they said:

Readers called Melbourne “one of the classiest cities in the world” with the locals “a friendly bunch” with a “wonderful sense of humour”.

Melbourne’s abundance of national parks and public art are given special mention by readers, and the magazine itself calls it the “capital of cool” for its cuisine, its happening night-life and its world-class arts scene.

I’m more of a world heritage type myself so it’s Paris and London that I head for. But for just cruising through life, who can argue with the results of a survey?

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