Soros and his latest bunny
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Why does anyone trust a socialist?
There are many mysteries in the universe, but in the social universe this is one of the biggest. Two separate stories but with a common cause. The first, How the state of the economy is literally killing people. This is about the United States.
Suicide rates are soaring, according to federal data released last week. Especially in economically depressed states and job-starved upstate New York. People in need of work are twice as likely to take their own lives as employed people, and people fired in their 40s and 50s find it hardest to get hired again.
That makes boosting economic growth a life-or-death issue for many. But you wouldn’t know it listening to President Obama and Hillary Clinton. President Obama whitewashes reality, claiming the “American economy is pretty darn good right now.”
False. The Obama economy is stalled. It grew at a measly .7 percent annualized rate the first quarter of this year. That’s compared with the 3.5 percent rate the US enjoyed for most of the 20th century — what’s needed to sustain employment and optimism.
The second story is if anything even more depressing: Fridges go off as Venezuela power-rationing hits.
Fridges zapped off in kitchens across Venezuela as the government turned off the electricity supply to help ease a power shortage that is worsening the country’s economic crisis.
It is the latest drastic measure by the government in a crisis that already has Venezuelans queuing for hours to buy scarce supplies in shops.
The government imposed a four-hour blackout in eight states starting Monday and said the measure will last 40 days. The states of Caracas and Vargas had also been on the list for blackouts but were spared at the last minute. . . .
President Nicolas Maduro blames the collapse on an “economic war” by capitalists.
They don’t go into the potential death toll since the odd part is that you would get the impression from the journalist that he agrees with Maduro about the causes of the blackouts. The most educated are often the most stupid – see the next Bernie Sanders rally for confirmation.
Advice on moving to Canada in case Trump becomes President
It’s been a long, long time since I left but nothing much seems to have changed. I even used to have a shirt like that. The hat is a “touque” and has the emblem of the Montreal Canadiens (note the spelling). My team was the Toronto Maple Leafs (not Leaves!) who were voted the worst sports franchise in North America and I think they are about to retire the trophy and give it to them permanently. And among the things that are so unusual is that when I left Trudeau was Prime Minister and when I last looked, Trudeau was still Prime Minister. It’s like Cuba with Castro.
On the other hand, moving to a Trudeau-led Canada might mean things will be just like the Obama years:
Trudeau’s public performances in the physical and intellectual domains, as well as his documented appeal to female effusiveness, is a vivid expression of his followers’ utter lack of political sobriety, intellectual acumen and emotional maturity. That a country could give its support and a 66 per cent approval rating to a preening charlatan boggles the mind and beggars the imagination—or would, if Americans had not done the same with a smooth-talking ignoramus like Barack Obama, who thinks the U.S. consists of 57 states and that Austrians speak Austrian.
Canada has gone the way of the U.S. If it were not already obvious, it would take at least the eight limbs of Samadhi yogic meditation and petabytes of quantum computing to calculate the likelihood of such prodigious imbecility coming to pass, both in the leadership and the electorate, who appear to deserve one another. It makes me ashamed to be Canadian.
For Americans who are proud of having elected the most incompetent fool as their president, things will be able to continue as they have for the previous eight years.
UPDATE: He is undoubtedly right about this Trump: Americans will thank me when Lena Dunham flees to Canada, and I suppose Canadians have no one else to blame but themselves.
During a telephone interview with “Fox & Friends,” Trump was asked about a tweet from Lena Dunham on Monday in which she vowed to leave the U.S. for Vancouver if he is elected.
Trump’s response: “Well, she’s a B-actor. You know, she has no — you know, no mojo.”“I heard Whoopi Goldberg too. That would be a great thing for our country,” Trump said, as the show flashed a graphic of celebrities who it said would leave the U.S. for Canada, including Dunham, Jon Stewart and Rosie O’Donnell, with whom the Manhattan real estate mogul has feuded for years.
When co-host Steve Doocy pointed out O’Donnell’s name on the list, Trump remarked, “Now I have to get elected.”
“Now I have to get elected because I’ll be doing a great service to our country,” he said. “Now it’s much more important. In fact, I’ll immediately get off this call and start campaigning right now.”
Socially sanctioned madness
Here’s the new reality, written by someone at the Atlantic: “The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans: Nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to pay for an emergency. I’m one of them.” He writes:
I never spoke about my financial travails, not even with my closest friends—that is, until I came to the realization that what was happening to me was also happening to millions of other Americans, and not just the poorest among us, who, by definition, struggle to make ends meet. It was, according to that Fed survey and other surveys, happening to middle-class professionals and even to those in the upper class. It was happening to the soon-to-retire as well as the soon-to-begin. It was happening to college grads as well as high-school dropouts. It was happening all across the country, including places where you might least expect to see such problems.
It’s not a money-tree you need but a production flow. Wealth is based on real saving and real investment and its dividend is the output of goods and services produced. But it will only work if the economic system is directed by entrepreneurs, with governments as far a way as possible doing only what is required to keep the machine running in good order. Ultimately, living standards fall because there is no structure in place to keep them up.
It’s the same here. Watching Malcolm in action – with the NBN a perfect example of economic illiteracy and ignorance, leaves me unable to identify what is required to make someone like him understand what is actually required to create prosperity and growth.
One of the top 100 moments in major league baseball history
That was 1974. Today the two in the middle with the flag and the matches represent something like half of the American population.
It’s amazing anyone is getting married at all
That uptick for men at the end of the 1970s is me. It had been the world till then that you married the last girl you dated at university, had children and settled into life. I was not prepared to do that, nor were, apparently, others. as these stats make clear.
The median age at first marriage has risen dramatically in recent decades. Historically, the typical American women married between ages 20 and 22. From 1947 to 1972, the median age at first marriage for women ranged from 20.1 (in 1956) to 20.9 (in 1972). What this median number means is that the first-time bride in 1956 was more likely to be 18 than to be 23. In such an culture, most young men took a serious approach to their romantic pursuits, because by the time a man reached his early 20s, most young women were either already married or engaged. High-school boyfriend/girlfriend relationships often led directly to marriage and there were relatively few single people older than 25. The birth rate was substantially higher then, so that the typical 25-year-old man during that era was working to support a wife and two children. A teenage boy could see all around him the same pattern, and follow the familiar steps of a path — finish high school, get a job, marry his girlfriend, have babies — that would lead him toward the role of responsible adulthood by the time he was 25.
This social script has been torn to tatters in the past 40 or 50 years. In 1973, the median age at first marriage for U.S. women reached 21 for the first time in more than two decades, and has continued rising steadily — to 23 in 1980, to 24 in 1991, to 25 in 1998. The median age at first marriage for men, meanwhile, increased from 22.8 (in 1966) to 27.1 (in 1996). What this means, culturally, is that adolescence has been extended and adulthood has been postponed, so that the typical 25-year-old American man nowadays is more irresponsible and immature than his grandfather was at the same age, and this postponement of maturity has social consequences.
Marriage is middle and upper class. It is for grown-ups, of which there are fewer every year.
Hitler’s favourite religion
Hitler, like virtually all socialists, was an atheist. But religion did have its uses, with some religions more useful than others.
‘It’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion,” Hitler complained to his pet architect Albert Speer. “Why did it have to be Christianity, with its meekness and flabbiness?” Islam was a Männerreligion—a “religion of men”—and hygienic too. The “soldiers of Islam” received a warrior’s heaven, “a real earthly paradise” with “houris” and “wine flowing.” This, Hitler argued, was much more suited to the “Germanic temperament” than the “Jewish filth and priestly twaddle” of Christianity.
And how did it matter?
Muslims fought on both sides in World War II. But only Nazis and Islamists had a political-spiritual romance. Both groups hated Jews, Bolsheviks and liberal democracy. Both sought what Michel Foucault, praising the Iranian Revolution in 1979, would later call the spiritual-political “transfiguration of the world” by “combat.” The caliph, the Islamist Zaki Ali explained, was the “führer of the believers.” “Made by Jews, led by Jews—therewith Bolshevism is the natural enemy of Islam,” wrote Mahomed Sabry, a Berlin-based propagandist for the Muslim Brotherhood in “Islam, Judaism, Bolshevism,” a book that the Reich’s propaganda ministry recommended to journalists.
Moreover, the tentacles from the 1940s reach into the present and the likely future.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the founder of Palestinian nationalism, is notorious for his efforts to persuade the Nazis to extend their genocide of the Jews to the Palestine Mandate. The Mufti met Hitler and Himmler in Berlin in 1941 and asked the Nazis to guarantee that when the Wehrmacht drove the British from Palestine, Germany would establish an Arab regime and assist in the “removal” of its Jews. Hitler replied that the Reich would not intervene in the Mufti’s kingdom, other than to pursue their shared goal: “the annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space.” The Mufti settled in Berlin, befriended Adolf Eichmann, and lobbied the governments of Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria to cancel a plan to transfer Jews to Palestine. Subsequently, some 400,000 Jews from these countries were sent to death camps. . . .
Fearing Muslim uprisings, the Allies did not try the Mufti as a war criminal; he died in Beirut in 1974, politically eclipsed by his young cousin, Mohammed Abdul Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini, better known as Yasser Arafat. Meanwhile, at Munich, the surviving SS volunteers, joined by refugees from the Soviet Union, formed postwar Germany’s first Islamic community, its leaders an ex-Wehrmacht imam and the erstwhile chief imam of the Eastern Muslim SS Division. In the 1950s, some of Munich’s Muslim ex-Nazis worked for the intelligence services of the U.S., tightening the “green belt against Communism.”
The most important lesson from history is how unpredictable it is. The likelihood that Christianity will be the dominant religion of Europe a century from now is already looking very unlikely and becoming less likely by the day.
Is this an anti-Trump cartoon?
This is apparently an anti-Trump cartoon but looks exactly like reality to me. The question is why the #NeverTrump people have the belief that going over the cliff with Hillary is preferable to keeping to the path with Donald. But they do. Here we have this: Charles Koch: ‘It’s possible’ Clinton is preferable to a Republican for president.
Billionaire businessman Charles Koch said Sunday that “it’s possible” another Clinton in the White House could be better than having a Republican president.
Koch, the CEO of Koch Industries, made the comment to ABC News’ Jonathan Karl during an interview that aired on ABC’s “This Week.”
The comment came after Karl asked about Bill Clinton’s presidency. Koch said Clinton was “in some ways” better than George W. Bush. “As far as the growth of government, the increase in spending, it was 2½ times under Bush than it was under Clinton,” he said.
Four years of Hillary does not sound like the answer to me, but since everyone is a political genius and sees more perfectly than anyone else into the nature of things, here we find one more answer among the many others.
An interview with Australia’s human rights commissioner – enough to make your skin crawl
Just the introduction to this interview with Jillian Triggs is enough to make the skin crawl:
After the government’s attempts to trash her reputation and to ignore most of the 16 recommendations in The Forgotten Children report, she’s just back from Geneva where the United Nations review of our human rights record found we’d regressed. Australia, the review found, continues to be in breach of its human rights obligations.
Triggs’ reputation has been self-trashing with no outside assistance required. The interview shows an astonishing level of arrogant ignorance, the basic setting for pretty well everyone on the left. It also shows a fantastic ignorance of the philosophy of Edmund Burke, who understood perfectly well in the 1790s the dangers in trying to implement some abstract set of human rights, which were part of his reflections on the Revolution in France. A bit from Burke, which she would have no comprehension of:
The foundation of government is . . . laid, not in imaginary rights of men, (which at best is a confusion of judicial with civil principles,) but in political convenience, and in human nature; either as that nature is universal, or as it is modified by local habits and social aptitudes.
Some highlights from the interview.
We’ve had, in my view, very poor leadership on this issue for the past 10 to 15 years, from the “children overboard” lie. They’ve been prepared to misstate the facts and conflate asylum-seeker issues with global terrorism. What I’m saying applies equally to Labor and Liberal and National parties. [Where are the Greens?] They’ve used this in bad faith to promote their own political opportunistic positions. . . .
I find myself saying pompous things like, “Please don’t break the rules here in the camp. If you do they declare you noncompliant and you end up staying longer or they are spiteful to you. Please be patient.” You can hear I’m not saying anything very comforting. The government has used the word unlawful [in relation to asylum seekers] and George Orwell understood the power of language very well. In the department you have a minister saying, “You will call these people ‘illegals’.” It’s shocking that Australia would come to that depth of abuse of power. . . .
A shocking phenomenon is Australians don’t even understand their own democratic system. They are quite content to have parliament be complicit with passing legislation to strengthen the powers of the executive and to exclude the courts. They have no idea of the separation of powers and the excessive overreach of executive government. . . .
“I must stay calm, I must keep my answers measured, moderate and evidence-based, I mustn’t be rattled by them and I mustn’t react with the same lack of courtesy that they show to me.” The reality was that they could suffer no harm from this, whereas if I gave the wrong answers, I could lose my case and I just had to keep control of myself. I knew we had the law right and the facts right. I knew that anger was under the surface. I knew I could have responded and destroyed them – I could have said, “You’ve asked me a question that demonstrated you have not read our statute. How dare you question what I do?” . . .
Some parliamentarians, and surprising ones, a Nationals MP, says “Come and give us a seminar.” Another one asked me to come up and work in parliament with the members of a particular committee that she was on. Terrific! But they listened to me and do you know, the response of some of them was, “Well, we had no idea Australia had signed up to these treaties. We should withdraw from them!”
I’ve just turned 70 and I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’m so confident about the law and about the evidence for the law not being respected that I feel very sure-footed in going forward on these other issues. My resilience and determination and experience for a long time in the law give me the determination to get through the remaining 15 months to continue to speak out. When you see that you are being bullied by people who you know are not coming from a good place, you know you don’t have to give in to them. They are cowards and the moment you stand up to them they crumble, and they did crumble. And several now have been seen off long before me. They’re not used to a woman aged 70 standing up to them. They can’t quite believe it. If I were 40 looking for a career opportunity, I probably wouldn’t do what I’ve done because it would have queered the pitch for me professionally. But why do I care now? I can do what I’m trained to do and they almost can’t touch me. And I’ll continue to do that work when I’ve finished with this position.
The whole interview is a reminder of how lacking in balance these people are. Read the whole thing. Quite a revelation in the mindset of the left.
Delusional
Ignorant to an extent never seen before in a major world “leader”, we have this from Obama today:
President Barack Obama boasted of his legacy during a town hall in Britain, asserting that he single-handedly saved the world during his presidency.
“Saving the world economy from a Great Depression — that was pretty good,” Obama bragged when asked by a student in London what he wanted his legacy to be.
He recalled that when he visited London in 2009, the world economy was in a “freefall” because of irresponsible behavior of financial institutions around the world.
“For us to be able to mobilize the world’s community, to take rapid action, to stabilize the financial markets, and then in the United States to pass Wall Streets reforms that make it much less likely that a crisis like that can happen again, I’m proud of that,” he said.
What made the difference was the TARP that was put in place by his predecessor. A reminder since it is now so long ago even Obama seems to have forgotten:
The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is a program of the United States government to purchase assets and equity from financial institutions to strengthen its financial sector that was signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush on October 3, 2008. It was a component of the government’s measures in 2008 to address the subprime mortgage crisis.
Obama’s contribution was the stimulus that came immediately after, which has made America’s recovery for all practical purposes non-existent, along with everyone else’s. As if a law professor turned community organiser would have the slightest idea about how an economy works. But if he doesn’t even remember who put the TARP in place, it might be a consequence of his choom-gang youth, which from other news also today we learn:
Using marijuana earlier in life is linked to poorer psychological health, and that can contribute to more health problems down the road.
“It is well-established that if you begin using at an early age and use a lot then, there are significant negative outcomes particularly in terms of mental health. . . .
Earlier cannabis use is linked to cognitive problems. Hills said, “One 2012 study showed early, regular use of marijuana – the kind of level they describe in this study — led to an eight point decline in IQ over time.”
If Obama really thinks he had much if any involvement in stabilizing international financial markets after the GFC, he must have been somewhere else at the time to be so unaware of what was going on.
Law of Markets 