Guess who was “a supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War”

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Can this possibly be true and not common knowledge? From: This is the open scandal that Congress should investigate:

John Brennan’s CIA operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign, leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump. An official in the intelligence community tells TAS that Brennan’s retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism, decorating offices with “Hillary for president cups” and other campaign paraphernalia.

A supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War, Brennan brought into the CIA a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump. He bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as “non-partisan.”

This is just a throw-away para and is entirely by-the-way in discussing the role of international agencies in trying to subvert Trump’s run for president which is in and of itself an extraordinary scandal. From Wikipedia:

In 1976, he voted for Communist Party USA candidate Gus Hall in the presidential election; he later said that he viewed it as a way “of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change.”

And this was the man who headed the CIA from 2013 until January! How does one keep up with all of the skulduggery and deceit? You can read the entire episode here told by Brennan himself from his own perspective. How did this man get top security clearance never mind the job running the CIA?

FWIW I picked this up at Instapundit where none of the comments even so much as glanced at Brennan’s personal history. Does none of this any longer even matter?

Art of the Impossible book launch Sydney 27 April

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Mark Lathan & Ross Cameron introducing Dr Steven Kates “The Art of the Impossible” –  Sydney 27 April

Join Mark Latham and Ross Cameron as they discuss candidly the Trump election win before introducing Dr Steven Kates to speak about his new book “The Art of the Impossible: A Blog History of the Election of Donald J Trump as President“.

“The book is a complete compilation of my blogs on the 2016 American presidential election beginning in July 2015 as the election cycle began and ending with the tallying of the votes which was completed on November 9, 2016. It is a blog history, and may be the very first of its kind.”

Dr Steve Kates was the Chief Economist for the Australian Chamber of Commerce for 24 years and a Commissioner on the Productivity Commission. He is now associate professor of economics in the College of Business at RMIT University in Melbourne.

This LibertyWorks event is proudly co-sponsored by Connor Court and Australian Taxpayers Alliance.

When: Thur 27 April from 6:15 pm
Where: Metropolitan Hotel, Sydney
Early bird tickets can be purchased HERE for $15 inc complimentary drink. (Note: LibertyWorks financial members attend for free but you must reserve tickets)

Ross Cameron and Mark Latham to launch The Art of the Impossible: Sydney April 27 @ 6:15pm

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Ross Cameron and Mark Latham [!!!!!] will be launching The Art of the Impossible in Sydney on April 27 @ 6:15 pm. The best (and probably the only) book on an American presidential election ever written in Australia and the first book ever written entirely as a series of blog posts. It is a reminder just how necessary Donald Trump was and a reminder of how fortunate we are that he was elected.

This is where it will be held:

Metropolitan Hotel Sydney
1 Bridge Street
Sydney, NSW 2000

And this is where you will need to book your ticket.

But if you have already bought a copy of the book and would like to have it signed, just bring it along on the night and entry will be free – but you will have to buy your own drinks.

Trump’s cautious and necessary start to rebuilding American credibility

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Whose judgement can you trust in such a snake pit as foreign relations? But with Trump, at least I am never in any doubt that he is on the same side as I am in every conflict. Two stellar authorities among the many who comment have recently written on where he has taken the US since becoming president. Let me start with The Diplomad: Climbing out of the Obama Foreign Policy Hole. There he writes:

The Russians and the Chinese certainly have taken note of the change in Washington, and I suspect that the regimes in Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela, and the fetid leaders of ISIS and the other radical Islamist death cults have, as well. We can see positive change all around; we see it in the willingness of the Chinese to work much more energetically to control Krazy Kim and deal with the unbalanced nature of our bilateral trade, we see it in the Russian acquiescence to our blasting their Syrian ally, we even see it on our border where illegal crossings have plummeted as the coyotes fear the new sheriff.

I am optimistic that we have begun the long climb out of the Obama foreign policy hole.

The same note is struck by Claudia Rosett: Trump juggles the foreign policy balls Obama dropped.

The Trump administration is taking heat for striking a Syrian air base with Tomahawk missiles and hitting ISIS terrorists in Afghanistan with a MOAB, a conventional bomb so big that it has been dubbed the “Mother of All Bombs.” No doubt there are useful debates to be had about the pros and cons, both tactical and juridical. But one sure upside of these strikes is that they are a step toward restoring abroad the credibility of America as a power to be reckoned with.

That’s big, in ways that go way beyond the immediate battlefields. In a world grown dramatically more dangerous during President Obama’s eight years of appeasement and retreat, America badly and urgently needs to restore its lost credibility. . . .

Obama’s policies invited the world’s most dangerous actors to conclude that America would no longer act in defense of the Free World, or of the rules and understandings that promote a modicum of peace. This is a path to conflict and carnage on a scale not seen since World War II. It is imperative that Trump find ways to change this calculus.

One need not love the use of ordnance to appreciate that with the unprecedented moves of hitting a Syrian air base with cruise missiles and dropping a MOAB to obliterate an ISIS nest in Afghanistan, he has sent an important message, in terms that predatory tyrants, from Moscow to Beijing to Tehran to Pyongyang, will understand.

Both should be read in full. It is an always dangerous world, and even more dangerous after eight years of Obama. But these seem to be calculated risks and nothing done so far seems to have been anything other than temperate. The risks remain enormous, but to me anyway, they seem the right steps to have taken.

Which American president does this remind you of?

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Other than his being an introvert, that is. From introverts tend to be better CEOs — and other surprising traits of top-performing executives:

So what did make CEOs successful? After analyzing all of their data, the researchers found that roughly half of the candidates earning an overall ‘A’ rating in their database, when evaluated for a CEO job, had distinguished themselves in more than one of four management traits. (Only five percent of the weakest performers, meanwhile, had done the same.) The four were: reaching out to stakeholders; being highly adaptable to change; being reliable and predictable rather than showing exceptional, and perhaps not repeatable, performance; and making fast decisions with conviction, if not necessarily perfect ones.

Indeed, that last trait — a willingness to make a call quickly, even without all the needed information — was one of the four “essentials” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, detailed in his own letter to shareholders last week. Calling it “high-velocity decision-making,” Bezos wrote that “most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90 percent, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.” Being wrong isn’t always so bad, he wrote. “If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”

Botelho agreed that first trait was the most surprising. “We frankly expected to find that strong CEOs stood out for the quality of their decisions — that they turn out to be right more frequently,” she said. “But what very clearly stood out was the speed. Quality was likely something they developed earlier, but then they’re willing to step up and make the decision faster, even with more uncertainty.”

Finding yourself right most of the time gives the confidence to keep making those decisions, and allows others to to defer to your decision-making when everything is so entirely opaque. It’s like the question Napoleon used to ask his generals: do you think of yourself as lucky. For those where things turned out as they had hoped, it would often have looked as if it had been little more than luck. But the better judgement you have, as they say, the luckier you become.

Advising the president on North Korea

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On every issue both international and domestic I find myself on the same side as Donald Trump. He is, moreover, not a lone wolf, he is not the head of some “think tank” that pours out advice without responsibility, but the head of an administration of people who have had to deal with international relations for decades past, but in which every moment is something new. What to do about North Korea, led by a madman with ambitions to build nuclear weapons and a delivery system that will reach the United States (and therefore also Australia)? I have no idea what the right answer is, but of all people across the globe I am content to see it is Trump attempting to deal with a situation that has been allowed to fester and rot. So where among our local papers can one turn to for guidance?

This is from The Australian today, We should make the best of being region’s odd man in. From which:

Donald Trump’s inexperience, recklessness and incoherence in foreign policy adds another element to this already volatile mix of superpower politics, mad dictatorships and menacing brinkmanship. The Trump administration is not a reliable ally for Australia given its contradictory and confused approach to foreign policy.

The only thing confused here is the donkey who wrote this article. Meanwhile at The Age we have another piece of advice: Donald Trump is right to try something new on North Korea. There we find:

Donald Trump is therefore quite right when he asserts that US policy has failed. So it’s time to hold our breath while he tries out a new tactic: play the vicious little dictator at his own game. The Kims have always used belligerence to extract concessions, like loosened sanctions, because no one is ever sure just how far Pyongyang will go. . . .

China might not be able to stop North Korea’s weapons program. Perhaps nothing can except a war. It would be a terrible, brutal, bloody war and it would be unforgivable for Mr Trump to trigger it lightly or by accident. But US policy on North Korea has so far been a failure. The White House is right to try something new.

The Australian’s continuous and ignorant attacks on Donald Trump is making the paper almost unreadable. But here is how it is. The world now depends on the American president as its best chance of solving the problem of North Korean and its nuclear ambitions. These media leftists with their automatic opposition to anything Trump does are worse than tiresome, they are making it more difficult to find solutions to major problems that will take us all down if we do not do something about them.

Cross Post: Jim Rose When two refugees from the Khmer Rouge found paradise on Earth

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Read the article to the end because it goes in a very different direction from how you might have expected from the way it begins.
__________

When a Cambodian man and his pregnant wife, having fled the Khmer Rouge, were on the bus from Sydney Airport, they quickly concluded that they were in paradise. They slept on top of the blankets of the neatly made bed at the migrant hostel in 1978 because they did not want to get into any trouble for messing up the bed and be sent back to hell. Such was their ingrained fear of arbitrary power and victimisation.

After a few weeks, they stopped stealing the sauces and other condiments from the dining hall at the hostel because they realised that the food would keep coming and there was no need to hoard. They then started to act as mentors to incoming refugees assuring them that they could sleep under the blankets, and the food would arrive three times a day, every day.

When the Salvation Army helped them and their new baby into a house in suburban Sydney, the Salvos were very embarrassed about the furniture they managed to find for them.

The Cambodian couple thought they were in paradise again. The house and furniture were better than anything they had seen in a middle-class home in their own country.

After a few years of hard work, the father saved enough to open an electrical retailing franchise store in the suburbs.

The mother went to the store one afternoon to fill in for an absent worker.

She did not come back for 7-years.

She was great at bargaining with fellow refugees. She knew that her fellow refugees only had a certain amount of money, and she bargained to find out what that was. She wrapped the goods up tightly because she knew that they took public transport home.

The word spread that her store was a good place for a bargain, and the store prospered.

Their daughter grew up to be a lawyer and wrote one of the best autobiographies I have read.

I had some Cambodian friends at graduate school in Japan in 1995 to 1997. Friendly, kind people despite growing up in hell.

They also gave me great insight into the blinding power of nationalism.

Two Cambodian friends, educated urbane people, referred to the time after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia as when they were a Vietnamese colony.

Another Cambodian, who no one liked, when he annoyed his Vietnamese class mates too much, they would say, “Remember 1979.”

This taunt would throw this Cambodian into a fit of nationalist pique. He raged against the invasion.

If any country would have benefited from an invasion from hell, it would have been Cambodia under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge by 1979. At least, the Devil waits for you to die before he torments you.

Original posted here

Keynesian economics wrecks economies

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I picked this up at Andrew Bolt which reminds me why I tend not to read the papers any more. The article is quite accurate and important – Living standards in decline as real wage growth stagnates. The problem is that we are never told why it is, and I suspect it’s because most economists cannot work it out since they are all Keynesians.

Nothing about the deadness of our economies worldwide has surprised me since I wrote on The Dangerous Return to Keynesian Economics back at the start of 2009. You can either find the explanation for how badly our economies have gone since the stimulus in John Stuart Mill’s Principles first published in 1848, or my own Free Market Economics, for which the third edition is coming out in June. Where else you can find a modern classical critique of Keynesian theory I could not tell you since I don’t think any other such book exists.

MAGICAL THINKING UPDATE: This article came up in conversation this morning, by Peter Martin in The Age: The Dark Side of Harry Potter could transfer to our world. It begins:

John Maynard Keynes is one of the most important people who ever lived. His conviction that governments should spend up when things turn down saved lives and probably saved capitalism.

Aside from the fact that The General Theory was published in 1936 and the Great Depression ended in 1933 and therefore could not have saved capitalism, Keynesian economics has blighted lives endlessly across the world since it was published since for those economies that did not begin as market economies, the belief that public spending will create growth has led to a fantastic reduction in living standards wherever such demand-side policies have been applied. Same again although in a somewhat milder form where market-based systems had already been established. If you think Keynesian theory has any answers to our economic problems you are more into magical thinking than even Harry Potter himself.

A Trump partial have-done list three months in

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It does occur to me from time to time that the media keep harping on Russia and the other non-issues precisely because Trump is moving forward on so many parts of his agenda. I cannot tell you the provenance of the following list which was sent to me with no source attached, but it is only a partial list since I have been trying to keep track myself. There is even this story today – North Korea’s embarrassing missile launch failure may have been caused by US cyber attack – which whether true or not might just possibly be true and will put lots of questions into lots of minds.

Not immediately doing everything is no criticism when the alternative to Trump was Hillary. A partial Trump agenda is immensely to be preferred to any possible alternative universe in which Hillary is the president. There’s lots more than just this.

  1. In January, Trump signed an executive order that would cut two regulations for every new regulation proposed. Trump stated, “If there’s a new regulation, we have to knock out two.”
  2. President Trump signed an executive order advancing construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines, previously blocked by the Obama administration. Subsequently, the Trump administration approvedthe construction of both pipelines.
  3. Trump signed an executive order in February known as “Enforcing the Regulatory Reform Agenda.” The order will create regulatory watchdogs that will find new onerous regulations to eliminate. Trump saidthat “every regulation should have to pass a simple test: Does it make life better or safer for American workers or consumers? If the answer is no, we will be getting rid of it and getting rid of it quickly.”
  4. Trump signed a bill that rescinds the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) broadband privacy rule that many scholars argue are duplicitous and onerous. Critics of the rule, including FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, argue that the Federal Trade Commission would be better suited to protect consumer privacy than the FCC. Katie McAuliffe, executive director for Digital Liberty, said this broadband rule “was a power grab under the guise of privacy.”
  5. Trump signed J.Res. 58, which overturns the Education Department’s rule that relates to how teacher training programs are assessed. The Washington Postexplained the rule’s unpopularity: “Teachers unions said the regulations wrongly tied ratings of teacher-training programs to the performance of teachers’ students on standardized tests; colleges and states argued that the rules were onerous and expensive, and many Republicans argued that Obama’s Education Department had overstepped the bounds of executive authority.”
  6. The president signed legislation that nullifies a Department of Education rule relating to state accountability requirements. The rule concerned states’ accountability in identifying failing schools and reporting their plans for improving them to the federal government. Trump commented on rescinding both education rules, saying they “eliminate harmful burdens on state and local taxes on school systems that could have cost states hundreds of millions of dollars.”
  7. Trump signed an executive order that minimizes the burden of Obamacare. The executive order makes it harder for the IRS to enforce Obamacare’s individual mandate. Judge Andrew Napolitano called Trump’s Obamacare executive order “revolutionary.”
  8. President Trump signed an executive order killing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). He told Breitbart News during the campaign, “The TPP is another terrible one-sided deal that rewards offshoring and enriches other countries at our expense. I will stop Hillary’s Obamatrade in its tracks, bringing millions of new voters into the Republican Party. We will move manufacturing jobs back to the United States and we will Make America Great Again.”
  9. President Trump signed an executive order instituting a federal hiring freeze, although there is an exemption for the military. A federal hiring freeze was the second point in President Trump’s “Contract with the American Voter.” During his inaugural address, the president said, “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth.”
  10. President Trump signedlegislation that repealed a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rule mandated under the Dodd-Frank Act that requires companies such as Exxon Mobil or Chevron to publicly disclose the taxes and fees they pay to foreign governments. Analysis shows that the regulation costs the industry$1.3 billion.
  11. President Trump instituted a freeze on all new regulations that have not been finalized.
  12. President Trump signed a resolution that overturned the “Stream Protection Rule” issued by Obama’s Department of Interior during his last weeks in office. Trump said the resolution would “eliminate another terrible job-killing rule.”
  13. President Trump signed an executive order that would review every executive agency and department to find out, as Trump says, “where money is being wasted [and] how services can be improved.”
  14. President Trump signed legislationthat repeals a Social Security Administration rule that bars Americans from their right to bear arms. Breitbart’s AWR Hawkins wrote about the rule: “Of all the regulations on the chopping block this week, the Social Security gun ban stands out as especially egregious. The Obama administration fashioned it in a way that gives the Social Security Administration the ability to bar certain beneficiaries from buying guns based on a need for help in managing their finances.”
  15. President Trump signed legislation that eliminates an onerous methane emissions rule that effectively drove energy production from federal lands.
  16. Trump signed an executive order that would review the Clean Power Plan, and possibly rescind Obama-era regulation that limits coal-fired power plants.
  17. President Trump signed legislationthat repeals a Department of Labor rule that severely limits the ability of states to implement drug testing.
  18. President Trump signed legislationthat repeals the Bureau of Land Management’s rule that would shift resource management from the states to the federal government.
  19. President Trump signed an executive order in February that scales back the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial overhaul. The executive order directs the Department of the Treasury to consult with regulatory agencies and report to the president about what could be done to eliminate what the administration considers “overreaching.”
  20. President Trump signed an executive order delaying the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule that critics contend limits consumer choice for retirement account holders.White House chief strategist Steve Bannon detailed President Trump’s agenda in three parts: economic nationalism, national sovereignty, and deconstruction of the administrative state. At CPAC, Bannon said, “The way the progressive left runs is that if they can’t get it passed, they’re just going to put it in some sort of regulation in an agency,” he said. “That’s all going to be deconstructed.”White House estimates show that the regulations that Trump has already repealed will save approximately $10 billion over the next ten years or $1 billion per regulation.Trump has said that he wants to eliminate “a little more than 75 percent” of the regulations in the federal register. “We don’t need 97 different rules to take care of one element,” he said.

    “We’re cutting regulations massively for small business and large business,” the president added.

The fact that Steve Bannon features on the list makes me think it is actually quite old, although it cannot be more than three months old since Trump only became president in January.