Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

Not as wild as you might think

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Some background on Cheryl Strayed, the woman who wrote the book that has been turned into the film, Wild, starring Reece Witherspoon:

Strayed married Marco Littig on August 20, 1988. They were married for six years. In 1999, Strayed married filmmaker Brian Lindstrom. They have two children and live in Portland, Oregon. Her daughter, Bobbi Strayed Lindstrom, played the younger version of Strayed in the film adaptation of Wild. A long-time feminist activist, Strayed served on the first board of directors for Vida: Women in Literary Arts.

Conventional as her life may seem, I take it then that the film is intended to portray a feminist icon, although I must confess to having been quite shocked by the way the story went. I am a first-stage feminist going back to the 1960s. The moment the word “zipless” appeared, I knew exactly where I was. Indeed, I am a nineteenth century feminist, in that probably the greatest influence on my thinking has come through John Stuart Mill and his The Subjection of Women.

Still, what astonished me about the story was the role that men played in saving her at each of the main turning points in her life, at least as portrayed in the film. I won’t say where, but you can watch for it. The final moments, when a group of chaps tell her the trail name others have given her – something like Queen of the PCT (that is, Queen of the Pacific Crest Trail where she was hiking) – was due to the way everyone had bent over backwards to help her out as if she were royalty, made me think this was supposed to be a parody of the self-contained, independent woman. But it’s not.

One final point. Her mother dies of some unspecified form of cancer, but in the actual account she dies of lung cancer, and had presumably been a smoker. Not mentioned, nor do I recall seeing her mother with a cigarette. In Hollywood, positive characters are not permitted to have negative characteristics.

One of the great scandals in the history of science

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That the promoters of global warming are prone to exaggerate if not actually lie has made me sceptical of any of the recent nonsense that this is the warmest year ever. It is, unfortunately, a full-time job to keep an eye on the weather-gauge, and with Andrew Bolt on leave, who’s around to do it. Luckily, John Hinderaker at Powerline is onto it. His latest article is Was 2014 Really the Warmest Year Ever? I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t. First he goes back over the long series back a few thousand years, which makes the present one of the coolest periods in the planet’s history. Then he turns to the recent record:

Moreover, contrary to the activists’ claims, 2014 wasn’t even the warmest recent year. The “warmest ever” designation came from NASA and NOAA, which are run by global warming activists. They have distorted surface temperature records by surreptitiously “adjusting” historical records to make the past (e.g., the 1930s) look cooler and the present warmer. This is one of the great scandals in the history of science, which we have written about repeatedly. Since the activists won’t say what changes they have made and why they have made them, their records must be considered hopelessly corrupt. Beyond that, they aren’t even adjusted for the urban heat island effect, which obviously exists. Most temperature recording stations are in urban areas, and they have gotten warmer in recent decades as a result of economic development and population growth, not carbon dioxide.

The only global temperature records that are fully transparent are satellite records in the lower atmosphere. These go back only to 1979. They show no warming during the last 18 years. The satellite records, interpreted by two different groups, find 2014 to be either the third warmest or the sixth warmest since 1979. But the real point is that the differences are infinitesimal. The uncorrupted atmospheric data show that no significant warming is going on.

The corruption, driven as it is by an anti-capitalist, anti-free-market band of vandals – who nevertheless are in large part in it for the grant money it allows them to collect – is merely one of the ways we are being ruined, but as important as any of the rest. The left used to say that capitalism would make the workers poor. Now that we have seen that capitalism has made the workers extraordinarily well off, the left are determined to make sure we all end up poor, and they will certainly succeed if we let them.

MORE REALITY TO ADD TO THE REST: This is from a climate blog linked to at Drudge:

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano: ‘Claiming 2014 is the ‘hottest year’ on record based on hundredths of a degree temperature difference is a fancy way of saying the global warming ‘pause’ is continuing.’

Astrophysicist Dr. Dr David Whitehouse: ‘The NASA press release is highly misleading…talk of a record is scientifically and statistically meaningless.’

Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer: ‘Why 2014 Won’t Be the Warmest Year on Record’ (based on surface data)– ‘We are arguing over the significance of hundredths of a degree’

Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels debunks 2014 ‘hottest year’ claim: ‘Is 58.46° then distinguishable from 58.45°? In a word, ‘NO.’

No Record Temperatures According To Satellites

Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl: ‘Please laugh out loud when someone will be telling you that it was the warmest year’

Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.: ‘We have found a significant warm bias. Thus, the reported global average surface temperature anomaly is also too warm.’

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry: ‘With 2014 essentially tied with 2005 and 2010 for hottest year, this implies that there has been essentially no trend in warming over the past decade.’

Why Obama stayed home

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Why did Obama stay home? a number of people have asked. This is John Hinderaker’s answer:

I offer two possible explanations. The first is incompetence. The second is that if it didn’t seriously occur to Obama that he should go, it may simply not have occurred to him to send anyone else.

He also canvasses five other possibilities:

1. Incompetence: This theory should always be on the table when government at any level is involved. And it can explain why Obama didn’t have a top level official appear at the Paris rally.

2. Security: Don’t make me laugh. When Obama wants to do something, he doesn’t let security issues interfere.

3. Terrorism, what terrorism?: The estimable Byron York posits that Obama skipped Paris because he wants to downgrade the issue of terrorism. John finds this theory plausible, and I do too.

4. No sympathy for colonialists: This is a crude summary of an elaborate theory offered by Lee Smith. It’s worth considering, but very speculative. I think Smith may be over-thinking this.

5. He’s too cool: This, in essence, is the theory the White House is now providing.

Others have said that he stayed home to watch the football, which is plausible, although I was able to watch the games easily enough here in Australia. That, too, is not why I think he stayed home.

Here’s my answer. He didn’t go because he supports the other side. He did not want to add even so much as an ounce of support for those who are fighting the Islamists since he wants to see them succeed. I would be happy to entertain some other answer as the real one were it not for the fact that there is not a single position Obama has taken, at any time in his life, that would make me think he is on my side of any important ideological question, and this one least of all.

And having written this, I came across this, by Roger Simon: Is the White House a ‘Sleeper Cell’?. The idea is so obvious, and has been for so long, that I assumed that no one has put two and two together because the conclusions are not just terrible for the politics of it, but is vastly discrediting for the American system of government. Let me go to how Simon ends his article before coming back to the point:

A “sleeper cell” in the White House? It would certainly explain Obama’s not going to France, which was a decision that hurt the USA, hurt the effort against Islamic terror and hurt the president’s already tarnished reputation into the bargain. There are so many other things that the existence of a White House “sleeper cell” would explain that I couldn’t even begin to count them. And as you know, a cell doesn’t have to be violent to be active. There are many ways to do damage.

But who would be a member of this cell? Is it one or all of them? Well that, I am sorry to say, I cannot tell you. I do not have the proper clearance. You are, however, free to guess. Who would stop you?

Simon has clearly come to the same conclusion as I have, but won’t say it. It is just too terrible to have to admit. A Parliamentary system can be subverted, I suppose. But anyone who gets to the top has had to go through the proving ground of the Parliament itself. You must stand your ground on innumerable occasions, being asked questions by people whose interests are to find a flaw in your policies, that being the members of the opposition parties. This is a crucible that simply does not exist in a republican presidential system, and especially one in which the media is as corrupt as that found in the US.

Obama has never had to face serious questioning at any stage of his rise, nor does he now that he has reached the presidency. No one knows who he is, really is, nor has anyone probed him to find out what he truly believes. But you would have to have been born an idiot not to understand exactly what he stood for even before he was elected. Since that time, there has never been an instance that he has stood up to any radical Islamic government. The only time Egypt, for example, caught his interest was after Al-Sisi successful coup. Then, but only then, he was set to punish the Egyptians. Nor did he provide any support of any kind, not even ideological, when the Iranian people tried their own counter-revolution.

This is not a first-time instance, either. The near-as-certain certainty is that the FDR White House was riddled with Stalin’s agents. Not spies who tried to steal secrets, but the actual policy advisers who ran the government. This is the final paragraph of my review of Diana West’s American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character which I titled, with good reason, America, the Big Dumb Ox. This is where the title comes from:

As a result of reading West’s book, I now look on the United States as a big dumb ox, led around by a cabal of its enemies whose intent is to take the beast out to slaughter. It is a very large beast and will not go quietly. But given what you will learn from this book, you will be in some despair in trying to work out what can be done. This is a very troubling book which I nevertheless encourage you to read.

When I see the Obama White House, my attitude is, so what’s new? And what has been the most troubling part in reading West has been the effort made by the “elites” on the conservative side of politics in the US to discredit everything she wrote. The only conclusion vast enough to make sense of it all is the notion of progressive internationalism, whose most important ideal is bound up in the notion of open borders. If Islam, as peaceable as most of its adherents no doubt are, has within it a core of violent primitives, who cannot be contained by the more civilised notions that have been painfully and slowly accumulated in the Judeo-Christian West, then this entire progressive internationalist enterprise is a planetary disaster that will bring on a new Dark Age. But the vision will not disappear, and on we go.

So let me say this straight out. Wherever you are, wherever you are reading this right this minute, you cannot know what political system and religious values will prevail one hundred years from today. You may have your preferences, and you may find it inconceivable that Sharia may dominate the planet. But if the US can elect an Obama in 2008, don’t you tell me what will not happen by the year 2115.

Groucho and me

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An email from my cousin, having sent him an email about Woody Allen about his days as a stand-up comedian, this was part of his reply:

If I¹m not very much mistaken, I spotted you in a Youtube clip, in the audience of a 1971 concert by Grand Funk Railroad. Check out the guy, 4 minutes and 15 seconds into the song. That is you. Digging the groove and slightly affected by mind-altering substances. Am I right or am I right?

 

He might well have been right, although the chap in the video was much too clean-cut for me in those days. I would also have been doing my final exams in my Masters year just as the concert was being held, although at this stretch, who can be sure. But what I do know for sure was that I was never able to listen to the kind of whatever it is that the band is playing. So I wrote back:

That was amazing. We both watched it and while it couldn’t have been me, it was uncanny. I actually had to look up where it was filmed, since 1971 was about right for when I might, just possibly, but only very very remotely, have gone to hear The Grand Funk Railroad. But at Shea Stadium in New York, even as far gone as I am, I was not there, not then. But if I told you I was, who might have doubted it. I can only say, you have more fortitude than I do for getting all the way to 4:15.

But appropriately, given what began this correspondence, I have had another Zelig-like moment. You can see me over Groucho’s left shoulder in Horsefeathers (1932) at the beginning of the clip below, but then from 15 seconds in. It is ridiculous how close I now look to that chap, mortar board and all, unlike that extraordinarily good looking chap sitting in the bleachers watching the concert in 1971.

I sent an actual photo of myself to a number of people that I found on the Camp White Pine website taken when I was 17 and no one recognises me. In fact, almost everyone refuses to believe I once looked like that. A kind of reverse-Zelig.

This is me when I was a mere cherub. I’m the one on the left:

me in 1965

The only certainty I can tell you is that no one who knew me in 1971, or when this picture was taken in the early 1960s, would ever have foretold how I would end up or who I would be today, I least of all.

“Our common enemy is radical, extremist Islam — not normal Islam”

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It is not a war on terror. It is not a war for free speech. It is a war for the preservation of our western civilisation and modernity. This is Benjamin Natanyahu speaking in Paris:

“Our common enemy is radical, extremist Islam — not normal Islam,” Netanyahu said at the Grand Synagogue in Paris, after briefly joining other world leaders in a march against extremism through the capital that drew up to 1.6 million people, according to AFP. . . .

“Although the various factions of Islamic extremism are involved in their own local bloody conflicts, including among themselves, they are all driven from the same ambition: to impose a dark despotic regime on the world, to take humanity a thousand years backward. They trample anyone who does not share their beliefs, and at the top of the list are their fellow Muslims, but their greatest hatred is reserved for Western culture, the same culture that respects freedom, equal rights, all the things they so despise.”

“Radical Islam does not hate the West because of Israel. It hates Israel because it is an organic part of the West. It sees Israel, and rightly so, as an island of democracy, justice and Western tolerance in a sea of fanaticism and violence that it wants to impose on the Middle East, Europe and the world,” continued Netanyahu.

Israel, he stressed, is attacked “because of its very existence and essence. But not only we are being attacked. Look around you: the whole world is under attack, the whole world.

The war is not on Islam. The war is with Islam, against its extremest fringe. George Bush Jr tried to make that point by calling it a “War on Terror”. The same desire not to offend is found in the “Je suis Charlie” slogan. Both fail to get to the heart of the matter because they refuse to make the statement that needs to be said. We are in a struggle on the side of the majority of the world’s Muslim population against our common enemy, radical extremist Islam. Unless there is clarity about who the enemy is, this is a war that cannot be won since there is no clear idea what it is that must be defeated.

Bolt is back

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Actually, he is still in Holland. But in case you missed them, there are two new posts up at his blog. The first is, No, you are not all Charlie. Here is the whole thing:

I am in Holland and the other night, in Groningen, passed one of those demonstrations now held all over Europe in support of the magazine Charlie Hebdo and the journalists murdered this week by Islamists. Many people held up the sign seen at all these demonstrations: Je suis Charlie. I am Charlie.

Pardon me, but those signs are just not true. Charlie Hebdo was selected by al Qaeda for attack precisely because almost no one else was Charlie Hebdo. It was almost alone in newspapers and magazines to mock the ideology that so many other journalists fear. That is why it was the target, and, say, The Age, The Guardian or the New York Times not.

And I suspect this attack will work. There will in fact be fewer Charlie Hebdos than ever. More on this in tomorrow’s Sunday Herald Sun, once the lawyers have carefully checked what I am permitted to say under our already absurd laws against free speech.

The second is his column in the Herald Sun today, Are we really all Charlie? No, no and shamefully no. Here are the first two paras:

PROTESTERS around the West, horrified by the massacre in Paris, have held up pens and chanted “Je suis Charlie” — I am Charlie.

They lie. The Islamist terrorists are winning, and the coordinated attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine and kosher shop will be just one more success. One more step to our gutless surrender.

UPDATE: Perhaps more than just a one-week wonder: French Premier Declares ‘War’ on Radical Islam as Paris Girds for Rally:

Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared Saturday that France was at war with radical Islam after the harrowing sieges that led to the deaths of three gunmen and four hostages the day before. New details emerged about the bloody final confrontations, and security forces remained on high alert.

“It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity,” Mr. Valls said during a speech in Évry, south of Paris.

We’ll see. Check back in about a week.

“What are economists for? To make people laugh” – vale Bernard Maris

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PARIS - CHARLIEHEBDO - TRIBUTE

I have written a note on Bernard Maris for The Conversation. My title was taken from an article he had written in 1999: “What are economists for? To make people laugh”. This is part of what I wrote:

“There is no doubting that our economic visions were vastly different – he was a great admirer of John Maynard Keynes, to whom he dedicated a book, Keynes ou l’économiste citoyen. But the soul of our societies is that we are able to discuss our own views with each other in a spirit of good will, and with the aim of finding the truth, as best we can find it.

“At the conference I attended in July, I was in a roomful of individuals, like Maris, who are on the opposite side on matters I hold very dear. But the conference was one of the most enjoyable I have ever been to, filled with interesting people saying interesting things, and a paper of my own has been solicited and will be published later this year.”

It was in this spirit that he lived. My hope is that he will have died in the spirit of Hugh Latimer, who said, as he was being led to the stake with is fellow martyr, Nicholas Ridley, at Oxford in 1555.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, as I trust shall never be put out.

The candles shown are tributes left in front of the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris.

Bernard Maris

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This is a post I have written for The Conversation on Bernard Maris, who was murdered in the offices of Charlie Hebdo.

What are economists for? To make people laugh

My own introduction to the murders at Charlie Hebdo came via an email I received that morning from the Research Network on Innovation, which shares with me a deep interest in the economics of the entrepreneur. I had been invited to the first ever conference on Jean-Baptiste Say and the Entrepreneur in July last year, held at the university in Boulogne-sur-Mer. This was the note, which came in both French and English, sent out by its director.

“Dear colleagues,

“I have been shocked to learn that our colleague Bernard Maris was murdered in the office of the journal “Charlie Hebdo”, Paris. From the beginnings of Innovations, Bernard (uncle Bernard) has been a major scientific support for our journal. He has been a member of the Scientific Committee, author and advisor of the Editorial Board of Innovations.

“Best regards”

Bernard Maris is seldom named as among the victims in English-language reports. Whether I had met Maris I do not recall, as there was a very large number of economists at the conference. But he was well known in France, as the first line of this obviously recently updated Wikepedia entry shows.

“Bernard Maris (23 September 1946 – 7 January 2015) was a French economist, writer and journalist who was also a shareholder in Charlie Hebdo magazine. He was murdered in January 2015, in the Charlie Hebdo shooting at the headquarters of the magazine in Paris.”

Everything I am about to say about Bernard will therefore be stitched together from other sources, since my only association is via his work on innovation and entrepreneurship which is only a small part of what he did. But the one word description that does come out in what I have read is “iconoclast”. That he was so closely associated with Charlie Hebdo makes that very clear. And brave as well, as undoubtedly he understood the risks, as did each of the others. This is from an AFP write up that I came across yesterday (my translation assisted by Google).

“As a recognized researcher, he was familiar to many for his many appearances on radio, television and in the press.

“Shareholder of Charlie Hebdo since 1992, he wrote a weekly satirical weekly column signed “Uncle Bernard”. And what illustrated his talents as a difficult-to-categorise populariser was his frequent description as a “journalist-economist”.

“He had written numerous books with evocative titles including, in 1998, Ah that economic Lovely War!, and in 2010, Marx, Marx oh, why have you forsaken me? But it was his Anti-saving manual, released in early 2000, in which the first volume is devoted to the ants and the second to the grasshoppers, that was his most successful publication.

“He was a member of the scientific board of Attac, and the Green candidate in the 2002 legislative election. In 2011, the President of the Senate, Jean-Pierre Bel, was surprised that Maris had been asked to join the General Council of the Banque de France.”

Another side to Maris has been provided this morning by his fellow Frenchman, Alain Alcouffe, on the Societies for the History of Economics online discussion forum.

“Among the victims of the attack against Charlie Hebdo magazine was Bernard Maris, (January 8th). He was a well-known figure in the world of economics and especially among historians of economics as he has devoted several essays to Keynes and economic methodology. His wit and irony were directed against any bigotry and pedantry and contemporary economists were not spared.

“Among his last books one was coauthored with Gilles Dostaler, Capitalisme et pulsion de mort : Freud et Keynes [Capitalism and death drive] (2009). As far as I know, few of his publications have been translated into English (if any).”

There is no doubting that our economic visions were vastly different – he was a great admirer of John Maynard Keynes, to whom he dedicated a book, Keynes ou l’économiste citoyen. But the soul of our societies is that we are able to discuss our own views with each other in a spirit of good will, and with the aim of finding the truth, as best we can find it. At the conference I attended in July, I was amongst roomsful of individuals, like Maris, who are on the opposite side on matters I hold very dear. But the conference was one of the most enjoyable I have ever been to, filled with interesting people saying interesting things, and a paper of my own has been solicited and will be published later this year.

I will finish with something written by Maris that was translated into English by Alain Alcouffe as a tribute to Maris’s memory. It is from the last pages of Maris’s 1999 book, Lettre ouverte aux gourous de l’économie qui nous prennent pour des imbéciles (Open letter to the gurus of economics who take us for idiots). And for that title alone, I feel even more deeply the loss to the world of this brave man, who stood by the values of the enlightenment against a darkness that threatens us all.

What are economists for?

If economics is the science of the market, they are useless – we have known it for a long time (since Keynes), and we get confirmation now from the most ultra orthodox (Debreu).

If the economy is a science that predicts the future, then the greatest economist is Madame Soleil [a famous French astrologer]

If economics is the science which deals only with “trust”, then the greatest economist is Freud. If economics is the science which deals only with “transparency”, then the greatest economists are accountants, policemen, customs officers or judges.

If economics is a religion, then Camdessus is the high priest of it, but the best economist will remain Pope John Paul II.

If economics is only gossip and chatter, many journalists can aspire to be awarded the Golden Palm.

Every activity has a social utility. Even parasites are useful: they allow us to highlight the so-called “useful” people. Just as there is nothing “harmful” in ecology – except in empty heads of hunters – it is rare to be unable to associate a utility to a part of the social body. The parable of Saint-Simon, which showed that the wealth of France would not decrease if we removed many lazy people, writers and others, is questionable, and the same holds for the uselessness of the ancient Greek and music taught at University. So … What are the casuists of utilitarianism for?

Unquestionably the “experts”, the merchants of economic tales have a function of exorcism of the future. In a world without religion, they have the same function as gurus and cult leaders – and many of them combine the two businesses. They also play the role of bards, shamans or witch doctors of Indian tribes who talk incessantly to prevent the sky from falling on the heads. They are the inexhaustible storytellers of irrational, credulous, illiterate and but not uncultured societies that are no doubt more cheerful than ours.

But what have the children of Smith, Marx and Keynes to do? Are they condemned to play the roles of sorcerer, high priest or guru?

Obviously not. They can denounce the merchants of confusion, promote economics as a science of man, and not as a hard science, they can question history, civilizations, they can think about value and wealth. They can denounce efficiency and productivity – or simply leave it to business managers, they are paid for it! – And they can return to psychology, sociology, history, philosophy. Thinking about labor, time, money. In short, they can go back to Smith, Keynes and Marx.

They can also go for soup and sell their beautiful science for the lentils of expertise, and be content with the role of the fool whose legs are pulled twice a year when growth projections are presented, and every day when the Russian mafia recycles dollars which have been loaned to it in false candor.

But then, they should not speak of “quality assessment” or “technical correction”

Let them put a pointed cap, a red nose, let them wag with their ears and tickle the armpits.

What were economists for, one will ask a hundred years from now? To make people laugh. (English . Alain Alcouffe]