‘If you live in our country, abide by our values’

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I can barely believe this story is true: PRINCE Charles issued an extraordinary rallying cry today calling on Muslims living in the UK to show more respect for British values.

The heir to the throne railed against the radicalisation of young British men by Islamist extremists as he launched an impassioned defence of Britain’s “Christian” heritage.

Telling British muslims that they should show more respect for “the values we hold dear,” the Prince revealed that he was terrified by the influence of radical preachers who spread their teachings on the internet.

In an unprecedented outburst, he said: “The radicalisation of people in Britain is a great worry, and the extent to which this is happening is alarming, particularly in a country like ours where we hold values dear.

“You would think the people who have come here, or are born here, and go to school here, would abide by those values and outlooks.”

He added that it was “frightening” that young British Muslims were being radicalised by “crazy stuff on the internet”.

The outspoken comments are a further sign that the Prince is not prepared to keep quiet on political causes close to his heart, despite assuming more and more responsibility from the Queen.

They came as he started a six-day tour of the Middle East in his mother’s place, during which he has been urged to speak out against the barbaric practises of some Gulf states.

It is understood that the Prince will challenge new Saudi king Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud over the terrible punishment handed down to blogger Raif Badawi when the pair meet face to face this week.

Interestingly, and bravely, he also seems to be calling on people living in other countries to show more respect for British values as well.

Have you changed your views on Tony yet, Janet?

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A few words about that editorial-page dill, Janet Albrechtsen. She had an article yesterday on Shut down the sheiks who incite violence by Muslims. She, you must recall, was one of those who harped on the need to rid ourselves of Tony Abbott and replace him with Malcolm. So this is what she wrote on the weekend:

Three fundamental failures rooted in politics, law and culture have led the West to a dangerous inflexion point in relation to the way we use words in the terrorism space. Politically, we fail to discuss the critical issue of the relationship between Islam and terrorism. Legally, we have laws that fail to prosecute those who incite murderous violence. Culturally, we have created a system of competitive victimhood, where people vie for victimhood status, become infantilised by a bevy of laws and concomitant social diktats about what can and cannot be said.

OK Janet, who’s going to undo these failures? Which political leaders, either here or in the US, will do what they can to reverse these trends? Who is more serious, Tony or Malcolm? I have to say that I am sick of the commentariat class who know what they want and can write it all down but have no clue whatsoever what it takes to actually achieve a political end. My irritation at reading her junk views on this and that knows almost no bounds.

The nightmare world they are helping to create

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You really do wonder how out of the picture our media and elites are if they are in any way surprised by this:

Gay and lesbian people should be put to death or otherwise punished under sharia, according to two imams who share leadership positions with Shady Alsuleiman, the controversial sheik invited to a Ramadan dinner at Kirribilli House by Malcolm Turnbull.

The Australian National Imams Council, of which Sheik ­Alsuleiman is president, has at least three executive members who believe the only punishment for homosexuality is the death penalty, according to Islamic law.

This is a 1400-year old legal code that is brought with imams wherever they go. There is no changing their minds or arguing another point of view. As for you, you either believe in freedom of religion – and that is their religion – and you believe in freedom of speech – and their right to say what they believe – or you don’t. It’s all very well to have these abstract principles but they don’t always work in concrete situations. They rightly take us for fools, but if you have some plan to stop their religion and their philosophy becoming dominant in the West over the next century, you had better put your plan into operation soon, because it is already nearly too late if it isn’t too late already.

It is the hatred of Christianity by our atheist left that is the largest part of our undoing. Half our society is blind, ignorant and insane. But at least it is mostly the younger half who will have to live most of their lives in the nightmare world they are helping to create.

Stating the obvious on Obama and ISIS

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obama islamic terrorism denial

And he’s not alone on his side of the aisle: Just 29% Of Democrats Say Orlando Was An Islamic Terror Attack. With that in mind, read Caroline Glick on Obama and the Moderate Muslims. Here are the questions she asks:

How can enforcing ignorance of a problem help you to solve it? How does refusing to call out the Islamic extremists that Islamic moderates like the Green revolutionaries and Sisi risk their lives to fight weaken them? How does empowering jihad apologists from CAIR and MPAC help moderate, anti-jihad American Muslims who currently have no voice in Obama’s White House?

We will add this, CIA Chief Contradicts Obama On ISIS Threat, Warns Of Intensified Terror Campaign, but the unmentionable point is made by these and a thousand other articles and tens of thousands of other acts.

Good ideas need even better organisation

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Running a presidential campaign is not an amateur hour. One of the things that Trump offered, or it seemed to me, was that he could work through others. This is a very big worry to me: Trump’s relationship with RNC sours.

“I don’t think we are going to take a lot of political advice from Priebus,” a campaign official said. “From my perspective, we should not be relying on the RNC for much, because I’m not sure they are fully supportive yet,” the campaign official said, adding “but we hope and expect to soon be on the exact same page.”

The fraught dynamic is a potentially serious liability for an insurgent campaign that has proudly eschewed political infrastructure and is dwarfed by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s operation, which is expected to raise $1.5 billion or more. And the situation is equally problematic for the Republican Party, which typically relies on its presidential candidate to help boost down-ballot candidates, enhance voter data and raise money.

There are a million snares that are out to derail this campaign. Either Trump gets everyone on board he can or he will be sunk by September. Meanwhile, the media distortion grows by the hour and will become immense over time. with this recent example by Ann Coulter that can only be expected.

Now you see why reporters aren’t quoting Trump and have to hope you won’t read the speech for yourself.

Of course the ratio will be 100-1 of those who read reports versus those who read the speech. I just hope he is up for the discipline of the campaign because that is what it will need from this moment on in. And yet, as Victor Davis Hanson explains, the US will sink without this change in direction: Same Old, Same Old Horror – The Orlando massacre brings up familiar lessons that we never quite learn.

The inability of Barack Obama and the latest incarnation of Hillary Clinton to utter “radical Islam” or “Islamic terrorism” in connection with Muslims’ murderous killing sprees again is exposed as an utterly bankrupt, deadly, and callous politically correct platitude. Mateen did not learn to hate homosexuals from the American government, popular American culture, or our schools, but rather from radical and likely ISIS-driven Islamic indoctrination. From Iran to Saudi Arabia, the treatment of gays is reprehensible—but largely exempt from Western censure, on the tired theory that in the confused pantheon of -isms and -ologies, multiculturalism trumps human rights.

Finally, the Left will blame guns, not ideology, for the mass murder, forgetting that disarmed soldiers who could not shoot back were slaughtered by Major Hasan, that the Tsarnaev brothers preferred home-cooked explosives to blow up innocents in Boston, that the Oklahoma and UC Merced Islamists did their beheading or stabbing with a knife, and that Mateen likely followed strict gun-registration laws in obtaining his weapons.

Who but Trump would deal with it? No one, and that is the catastrophe that stands before us.

Insomniacs awake!

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The question is: Should we be sleeping TWICE a day?. This, however, I found quite interesting being now trapped awake most of the night:

Around a third of the population have trouble sleeping, including difficulties maintaining sleep throughout the night.

So there may be an answer in going back to our primaeval past. This is how it concludes:

A number of recent studies have found split sleep provides comparable benefits for performance to one big sleep, if the total sleep time per 24 hours was maintained (at around seven to eight hours total sleep time per 24 hours).

However, as might be expected, performance and safety can still be impaired if wake up and start work times are in the early hours of the morning.

And we don’t know if these schedules afford any benefits for health and reduce the risk for chronic disease.

While the challenges of night shift work cannot be eliminated, the advantage of some split shift schedules is that all workers get at least some opportunity to sleep at night and do not have to sustain alertness for longer than six to eight hours.

Although we aspire to have consolidated sleep, this may not suit everyone’s body clock or work schedule.

It might in fact be a throwback to a bi-model sleep pattern from our pre-industrial ancestors and perhaps work well in a modern industrial setting.

Seminar on supply-side economics is classical economic theory

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This is a trial run for a paper I will be delivering next month, first at Freedomfest in Las Vegas and then at the Chinese Economic Society Australia meeting in Cairns. Supply-side economics is classical economics. If you are going to understand the first you can only do it by understanding the second. The details:

You are warmly invited to School of EFM Research Seminar presentation by our Associate Professor Steve Kates. Your host is Dr Ananta Neelim.

Title: Political Economy in Crisis: Were the Classical Economists Right After All?

Abstract: There are, generally speaking, five streams of macroeconomic thought that compete for allegiance in the modern world.

  • Keynesian which comes in many varieties all of which argue recessions are due to failure of aggregate demand and which deny the validity of Say’s Law
  • New Classical based on rational expectations but with no embedded theory of recession
  • Austrian which typically ignores aggregations, where activity is driven by marginal utility and which builds a theory of recession based on structural imbalances caused by financial dislocation
  • Marxist and other forms of socialist theory whose aim is to centralise economic decisions and whose main focus of analysis are exploitation of the working class and concern with inequality
  • Classical which emphasises the supply-side of the economy, focuses on the role of the entrepreneur, sees recessions as due to structural imbalances which may come from a variety of causes and explicitly incorporates Say’s Law.

The aim of the paper is to argue that economic theory reached its deepest and most profound level in the writings of the late classical economists which flourished over the period from the publication of John Stuart Mill’s Principles in 1848 through until the publication of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory in 1936. The paper will discuss the classical framework and contrast this approach with the alternatives that today compete for the allegiance of economists.

Date: Friday 17 June 2016

Venue: RMIT University Building 80, Level 11 Room 9 – 445 Swanston Street between Franklin and A’Beckett Streets

Time: 10.30am-12.00pm; Seminar runs 11.00am to 12.00pm

Morning tea will be served at 10.30am. If you would like to come, please RSVP through email esther.ng@rmit.edu.au