Category Archives: Politics – international

Keynesian economics with Chinese characteristics

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By Per Bylund: China: A Keynesian Monster. I have seen this for myself.

Chinese city skylines in the economic development zones consist of business district skyscrapers mixed high-rise apartment complexes at least 30 stories high. The latter exist in groups of a dozen or so buildings of identical designs shooting far up into the sky, sometimes placed in the outskirts to facilitate the city’s expansion or change travel patterns according to some (central) master plan for the city.

The boxy skylines are interrupted by vast numbers of tower cranes in the many construction projects that produce more high-rises and skyscrapers at impressive speeds. The city is conquering the countryside and devouring the surroundings much like a swarm of locusts.

This image is one of production, a society experiencing enormous economic growth and wealth creation.

But traveling as the day gives in to night shows a very different picture of these sprawling Chinese cities. While the setting sun makes the tower cranes stand out even more, what is obviously missing is the sign of civilization: artificial lighting. Many of these newly constructed buildings become silhouettes against the sunset that are as dark as a dead tree trunk.

One can stand in the middle of the city watching the glass-and-metal skyscrapers wrapped in neon lighting, as one would expect. Yet among them see many dark shapes of buildings that are empty – if not dead. These buildings are not necessarily new and move-in ready, they are simply uninhabited and unused.

This is the lesson Bylund is trying to get across.

What China teaches us about economics and economic policy is the lesson that is generally not provided in college classrooms: the important distinction within production between value creation and capital consumption.

The story of China’s economic development is to a great extent one of unsustainable, centrally planned growth specifically in terms of GDP — but a lack of sustainable value creation, capital accumulation, and entrepreneurship.

Production creates jobs even if what is produced is wasteful infrastructure projects, ghost cities, or only ghost buildings in otherwise inhabited cities. But those jobs only exist for as long as the projects are underway – that is, for as long as there is already created capital available to consume, domestically or attracted from abroad.

Production without value added, as discussed here. This same issue is discussed in the video below, but this time in relation to Nazi Germany. Centrally planned economies look superficially great, but are actually a mess.

Found at Small Dead Animals.

Less an outrage than an omen

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Brett Stephens discusses Anti-Zionism Isn’t Anti-Semitism? Someone Didn’t Get the Memo. Here’s the conclusion.

Progressives will have to come to their own reckoning about what to do about the burgeoning anti-Semitism in their midst. As for Jews, they should take the events of the last few days less as an outrage than as an omen.

Oddly, though, one of the few protections Jews now have is that the vast majority still vote for parties of the left. When that eventually stops, you can only imagine how bad things will then become.

And since we’re here, might as well mention this by Melanie Phillips: Why western mobs are now sticking it to the Jews. This is how it starts:

Anyone who imagined that with the Gaza cease-fire the antisemitism that erupted around the west would correspondingly die down has been sorely mistaken.

It has not only continued to become ever more brazen and intimidatory but, astonishing this may seem, it has now morphed into something even more chilling. The toxic core of it, the Israel libel that fuels the onslaught, has become an axiomatic lie and a supposed marker of public conscience.

What some of us warned about the Labour party’s antisemitism under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership has now proved all too true.  This malignity was not confined to the hard-left. It reflected a terrible development that had poisoned the entire “progressive” world and was rippling out beyond even that.

Very depressing but worth reading right through long though it may be.

Seeking the underlying Covid agenda

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From the real story of the Chinese flu.

The virus was not the cause for global catastrophe. It was the response to the virus that crippled the global economy and our society. The disease was not nearly as damaging as the “cure” for the disease.

While it’s important to get to the bottom of what exactly happened in China regarding the virus itself, this does not change the fundamental nature of the COVID-19 pandemic. First and foremost, the *disease itself* is not particularly lethal. With a corrupt, shoddy testing system and an average age of death similar to our average lifespans, COVID-19, had it not been elevated to such an insane level of discourse, would have been understood as just another respiratory illness season. COVID Mania is a toothless endeavor without the information operation attached to it.

This is why the most important thing to uncover is not the origin of the virus itself, but the origin of the information operation that led to the catastrophic effects from insane policies supposedly designed to deal with the virus. I have written about this subject at length. A good starting point is my article from April, titled, “How COVID-19 became a disinformation operation wrapped in a virus.”

We have firm, indisputable evidence that the Chinese government ran a disinformation operation attached to the virus, which did far more damage to the world in the form of spreading fear and panic across the globe. The Chinese government operation succeeded in shutting down the global economy and striking a devastating blow to China’s adversaries when they decided, based on China’s quack science recommendations, to enforce self-sabotage in the form of lockdowns, curfews, and the like.

It was entirely about the American election in 2020, with the anti-Trump left worldwide joining in along with the media.

You will not expel them

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The best article I have seen on the recently-ended conflict: Hamas’s forever war against Israel has a glitch, and it isn’t Iron Dome. This is the glitch, and it is related to a story, told at the very end of the article, of a meeting between two top Israeli generals and General Giap, who led the Vietnamese army against the Americans.

When the Israelis rose to leave, Giap suddenly turned to the Palestinian issue. “Listen,” he said, “the Palestinians are always coming here and saying to me, ‘You expelled the French and the Americans. How do we expel the Jews?’”

The generals were intrigued. “And what do you tell them?”

“I tell them,” Giap replied, “that the French went back to France and the Americans to America. But the Jews have nowhere to go. You will not expel them.”

I am not sure how positive that is about the future, but it is undoubtedly the truth. Fascinating article from end to end and well worth your time.

How the UK government weaponised fear during Covid

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And it was hardly the only one.

And as for recent books with a focus on how deluded we have been by our institutions, there is also this one: The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History. Here’s the description at the link.

“The New York Times is by far the most influential newspaper in the world and thus receives far too little journalistic scrutiny due to its power to affect careers. Any book that casts a critical eye on the Paper of Record’s history, as this book does, is performing a valuable service.”—Glenn Greenwald

 

Think a newspaper can’t be responsible for mass murder? Think again.

As flagship of the American news media, the New York Times is the world’s most powerful news outlet. With thousands of reporters covering events from all corners of the globe, the Times has the power to influence wars, foment revolution, shape economies and change the very nature of our culture. It doesn’t just cover the news: it creates it.

But the institution that is the New York Times is showing cracks. No longer the fact-stringing paper of record once known as the Gray Lady, the Times has become a political lightning rod that divides more often than it unites. It is frequently beset by scandal and has even emerged as a symbol of the political, cultural and social ills plaguing our society.


The Gray Lady Winked pulls back the curtain on this illustrious institution to reveal a quintessentially human organization where ideology, ego, power and politics compete with the more humble need to present the facts. In its 10 gripping chapters, The Gray Lady Winked offers readers an eye-opening, often shocking, look at the New York Times’s greatest journalistic failures, so devastating they changed the course of history.


These are the stories that mattered most, including the Times’s disastrous coverage of the:


Second World War – Holocaust – Rise of the Soviet Union – Cuban Revolution – Vietnam War – Second Palestinian Intifada – Atomic Bombing of Japan – Iraq War – Founding of America


The result is an essential look at the tangled relationship between media, power and politics in a post-truth world told with novelistic flair to reveal a uniquely powerful institution’s tortured relationship with the truth.


Most importantly of all, The Gray Lady Winked presents a cautionary tale that shows what happens when the guardians of the truth abandon that sacred value in favor of self-interest and ideology—and what this means for our future as much as for our past.

From Quora

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What do you do if a girl hits you?

“An aggressive action from anyone should be rejected and punished.”

Related questions.

Why is it OK for a woman to hit a man, but it’s wrong for that same man to hit that same woman back in self-defense?
Is it right if a girl hits you and you hit her back?
What should a guy do if a girl hits him?
Is it okay to hit a girl if she hit you first?
What do you do when a woman hits you? Do you hit back, ignore her, or threaten to call the police?
Say a woman hits a man for no reason. The man did not provoke her in any way. Does the man have every right to hit a woman back, in self defense, for hitting him for no reason?
How come boys aren’t allowed to hit girls but I see a lot of girls hitting boys?
What can you do if a girl hits you and you’re a guy and you can’t hit her back?
In America, why are people shocked when a man hits a female back? Why should man not hit back a female, when he would hit back another male?
Is it illegal to hit a woman for self-defense?
`
The answers are similar throughout. If someone is attacked, whether by a woman or a man, the right to defend oneself is universally understood.
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The Covid class divide

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Sounds a lot like Australia.

From a lefty source:

There’s a huge Covid class divide. The economy has not just bounded back for upper income Americans Australians; it’s given them higher housing values and lower interest rates. Meanwhile, 12 million service industry workers are still out of work. Small businesses are struggling. The affluent see Covid as a health problem, while for the working class it’s about economic survival. And liberals are doing the same thing they did with Trump: Clothing their class privilege as science and facts and morality. The politicians are even worse. Instead of coming up with a clean Covid bill, Democrats are now trying to pressure Biden into student loan forgiveness. Can you believe it? What kind of society thinks it’s ok to ask 12 million people who lost their jobs to Covid to foot the bill for the student loans of the top 40% of earners? Sure, maybe it will accidentally help someone in a food line who dropped out of college. But college-educated Americans are back at work. The Covid recession is over for them. Why are the Democrats designing legislation to help the people who need it least, in the belief that some of the benefits might trickle down to help those who need it most?

Oh, I think I know why

For all of those oh so concerned upper-middle-class lefties, helping “the poor and disadvantaged” comes right after helping themselves. You know, like all those public servants who never lost a day’s pay over the whole of the last year.

Via Instapundit.

Civilisation v barbarism

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On the right are the rockets being fired indiscriminately by Hamas terrorists at Israeli neighborhoods.

On the left are the IDF’s Iron Dome interceptor missiles twirling as their insanely advanced systems try to match the trajectory of the Hamas rockets to keep them from killing innocent people.

My book launch with Andrew Bolt

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Thanks to my very good friend Rodney, I have now discovered these on Youtube. This was on the day that Andrew Bolt launched my Art of the Impossible which was my collected blog posts on the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Quite a day, in many ways foreshadowing the events of the four years that would follow. My thanks to Andrew Bolt again.