The award winning Waffle Street the movie

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It is, of course, already a must-see movie, but if there is an imperative form of must see, it definitely applies here. Waffle Street the movie is getting closer to general release and will no doubt be shown some time in Australia. In the meantime:

The 2015 Hollywood Film Festival announced the winners of six categories Sunday night at the Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood.

Sharing the title for best narrative film is Forward. Side. Close!, an Austrian film that follows the story of a castle-dwelling, obsessive compulsive man, and Waffle Street, the true story of the vice president of a $30 billion hedge fund, who loses his job and ends up working as a waiter at a waffle shop.

And then there’s this from the Woodstock Film Festival which has just initiated its Carpe Diem [Jay] Andretta Award:

Jay’s wife, Lauri Andretta, and son, Jim Andretta, will present the inaugural Carpe Diem Andretta Award to Waffle Street on October 3 during the annual Maverick Awards Gala at BSP Kingston, NY. Woodstock Film Festival alums Eshom and Ian Nelms (Lost On Purpose, 2013) return to Woodstock with Waffle Street, their third feature, based on the memoir of James Adams, former VP of a $30 billion hedge fund, who loses his job and unexpectedly winds up in the world of the unemployed. In this genuine riches-to-rags story, Jimmy, played by a charming James Lafferty (One Tree Hill, Oculus), finally finds work waiting tables at a chicken & waffles chain, where the hectic pace and general mayhem become both comedic and endearing. Under the tutelage of master grill man Edward (Danny Glover in a stunningly earnest performance), Jimmy learns some hard lessons about life, finance and making grits. But the foremost thing he discovers is carpe diem, as he begins to enjoy the pleasures of the moment and realize that the measure of a man is far more than luxury homes and expensive cars. Fundamentally, Waffle Street is an authentic account of what it means to rediscover yourself.

The story is amazing. If they film is only half as good as the book, it will be as good a night at the movies as you are likely to have. For myself, I can see there is sense in a carpe diem approach to life, but I have to say that having watched this grow from book to movie one step at a time, it’s not the kind of thing that ever gets something like this done.

The “broken people” are everywhere now

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Anywhere in American society where the left forms the majority, or even the near-majority, is a wreck. Who can analyse an entire culture, especially one as diverse as the American, but this seems generally right to me:

Once you recognize the influence of mental illness in shaping [left ideologies of all kinds], you find yourself nodding in agreement with Professor Glenn Reynolds: “I’m beginning to think that most lefty movements are just about broken people trying to manipulate the rest of us so they can feel good about their broken selves.”

Indeed, the “broken people” are everywhere now, piling up like debris scattered by a storm or a flood. Decades of societal breakdown — accompanied by a cultural decadence that celebrates divorce, bastardy, prostitution and every imaginable perversion as expressions of “diversity” — have produced a generation of young people who lack the ability to form healthy, normal relationships. The “broken people” demand that society be further re-structured to accommodate their depravity and helplessness. School children must be taught how to negotiate sexual consent, because there are no longer any moral customs to regulate sexual behavior, nor are any of these feral youth capable of romantic sentiment, having been raised in a godless carnival of cruelty devoid of anything that might plausibly be called love.

The stability of the era in which I was raised – the era of the Saturday Evening Post and its covers – is gone for all time. Being young today is a trial, whether male or female. Each has its horrors, related to each other, but impossible to avoid unless your luck really does hold out.

So, there’s been a fall in productivity – whatever might have caused that?

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The more I look at commentaries like this, the more I come to the conclusion that modern economics is a complete wasteland. The subheading reads: “The global productivity slowdown will pose a huge challenge for Scott Morrison”. But what is truly bizarre is this:

The IMF has been troubled over the failure of world growth to meet its forecasts. Every time the fund has looked at world growth in the past five years, it has had to downgrade its forecasts. If the world economy had grown in line with the forecasts it made five years ago, the economies of the advanced world would be 14 per cent bigger than they are while those of the developing and emerging world would be 23 per cent bigger. But the forecasts of employment the fund makes for advanced countries have been much closer to the mark. Indeed, for a range of countries, including Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain, employment growth has been better than the IMF predicted, although output growth has been worse. More workers are producing less output than was expected.

I don’t wish to be impertinent since, after all, the IMF is comprised of some of the most highly paid economists in the world, experts in the dark arts of econometrics and modern macroeconomic theory. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to point out that now, five years after the stimulus, when governments around the world commandeered huge swathes of their nations’s savings, the inevitable consequence has been a fall in productivity. Rather than our resources being used in truly value adding activities determined by the market, they were instead used by clunks in government and Treasury on such pieces of economic junk, like the NBN, Building the Education Revolution and Pink Batts. In the US there’s been Solyndra and everywhere you go there are the many, many green energy projects that have absorbed capital. The result today is that we have a dearth of the kinds of new investments coming on stream that would maintain productivity. Instead, we find it difficult even to maintain previous standards of living, never mind getting them to grow. Of course, the IMF, being such geniuses, has all the angels covered:

The IMF says weak business investment is partly responsible for the poor growth outcome but says that by far the most important issue is weak productivity on its broadest measure. It is not just output per worker that is disappointing. The additional output from every dollar of business investment also has been weak.

There is no settled explanation for this. The IMF says a shift in the composition of economic growth also may be contributing. Service industries are accounting for most of the increase in growth, rather than manufacturing. Output can be harder to measure in service industries, and they are often more labour-intensive. The IMF says it is also possible the revolution in information and communications technology is delivering fewer gains in productivity than was the case through the 1990s. It also speculates that the pay-off from additional investment in education may be diminishing.

Let us therefore take the NBN as the prime example of what has gone wrong. In every way most of the infrastructure construction might be listed in the national accounts as business investment. You could say the same for all of the desal plants that were built. But crony capitalism is not free enterprise, and the outcomes that are fed by public monies are duds no matter which way you look at it.

Economics remains wedded to C+I+G. It still believes SPENDING causes growth, with all those multiplier thingys hanging off the initial expenditure. It is a stunning failure of policy, although hardly anyone at all has noticed just how great a failure it has been. In the US they surveyed the nation’s economists and some massive majority have stated that the stimulus created additional jobs. With that kind of thinking so widespread, it should be no surprise just how dismal our economic prospects now are.

And for what it’s worth, the worst thing that the RBA should now do is lower rates of interest, which is probably the reason they are going to do it the next chance they get.

I hit him when he hit me back

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palestinian mourners

The headline’s in quotation marks because the activist-journalist at the SMH thinks this is a preposterous over-reaction: ‘The terrorist was shot and killed; that is the right response.’ The picture also comes with the story, with this text beneath it:

Palestinian mourners cry at the family house upon the arrival of the body of Amjad Jundi, 19, who was killed after stabbing a soldier on a bus in southern Israel. Photo: Nasser Nasser

The story is worth a read, however, since it is a more than usually one-eyed, one-sided approach of the kinds we find everywhere. A 15-year old was shot down in the street in Sydney just last week because he had just murdered an employee of the NSW police. No one in Australia is asking for our police rules of engagement in dealing with murderers while in the midst of a murderous rampage. Ruth Pollard, the activist-with-byline at the SMH, ought to try a similar kind of argument as a think-piece on her editorial page. I suspect even regular readers of Fairfax might find her just a tad idiotic even for their own fellow-leftist tastes.

UPDATE: From Brett Stevens via the Wall Street Journal discussing these murders on Israeli streets under the heading, Palestine: The Psychotic Stage. No answers in how to deal with the problem but some moral rebalancing about who are the murderers and who are being attacked in the street:

Treatises have been written about the media’s mind-set when it comes to telling the story of Israel. We’ll leave that aside for now. The significant question is why so many Palestinians have been seized by their present blood lust—by a communal psychosis in which plunging knives into the necks of Jewish women, children, soldiers and civilians is seen as a religious and patriotic duty, a moral fulfillment. Despair at the state of the peace process, or the economy? Please. It’s time to stop furnishing Palestinians with the excuses they barely bother making for themselves.

Above all, it’s time to give hatred its due. We understand its explanatory power when it comes to American slavery, or the Holocaust. We understand it especially when it is the hatred of the powerful against the weak. Yet we fail to see it when the hatred disturbs comforting fictions about all people being basically good, or wanting the same things for their children, or being capable of empathy.

Today in Israel, Palestinians are in the midst of a campaign to knife Jews to death, one at a time. This is psychotic. It is evil. To call it anything less is to serve as an apologist, and an accomplice.

Apologists and accomplices they may be, but they feel as moral and pleased with themselves as if they had just put fifty cents into a beggar’s hat.

Their vision of our future

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You antediluvian reptile, you. You reactionary, backward neolithic barbarian, locked into your out-dated twentieth-century mindset. This is what our elites believe, and this is the world they are making for us from inside their gated communities. From The Atlantic: The Case for Getting Rid of Borders—Completely. This is the conclusion:

Closed borders are one of the world’s greatest moral failings but the opening of borders is the world’s greatest economic opportunity. The grandest moral revolutions in history—the abolition of slavery, the securing of religious freedom, the recognition of the rights of women—yielded a world in which virtually everyone was better off. They also demonstrated that the fears that had perpetuated these injustices were unfounded. Similarly, a planet unscarred by iron curtains is not only a world of greater equality and justice. It is a world unafraid of itself.

Merkel’s not insane. She, like others of her kind, just thinks that everyone should be allowed to go wherever others have been successful in creating wealth so that they too can have their fair share as well. What could possibly be wrong with that? What could be more just? A hundred years from now they will all look back at us and think how primitive we must have been.

[Via Instapundit]

Something we can all agree with Trump about

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I’m not sure if you are being diplomatic that you’re supposed to say it just because you think it. From the Donald: Trump: Merkel Insane.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s invitation to migrants to come to her country has been described as “insane” by U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has predicted more violence will follow in the country as a result.

Donald Trump, the Republican Party presidential front-runner, was talking about Mrs. Merkel’s invitation to migrants on the American political interview show, ‘Face The Nation’.

Mr Trump said: “I do not like the migration. I do not like the people coming”. Instead he favours “a safe zone for people”, an idea on which he expanded.

He said: “Frankly, look, Europe is going to have to handle — but they’re going to have riots in Germany. What’s happening in Germany, I always thought Merkel was like this great leader. What she’s done in Germany is insane. It is insane. They’re having all sorts of attacks.”

It will be hard to keep this out of the news but the media will no doubt find a way.

What does a modern economist think a classical economist believed?

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I am writing a paper in which I begin by setting down what a modern economist would believe about “classical” economics. In reality, of course, virtually no economist today would have the slightest clue how an economist prior to 1936 would have looked at the operation of an economy or dealt with the problems it might have. I have pulled together my own summary and am putting up it here so that others can tell me what they think. I would merely emphasise that what I have below is such a misbegotten caricature that economists ought to be thoroughly disgusted with their own discipline if they really think their ancestors believed anything like this caricature. Because if this really were what economists once believed, even Keynesian economics would have been an improvement.

The more one knows about the economics prior to the publication of The General Theory, the less dogmatic one can be about the teachings of “classical” theory, especially since in the Keynesian version it covers the entire period from 1776 to 1933. Nevertheless, here is a summary statement that more or less captures the modern version of the essential beliefs of economists prior to 1936.

The economy was seen as a world of more or less instantaneous adjustment due to the flexibility of prices and wages. Such rapid adjustments were expected to lead to an almost instantaneous economic reconfiguration in the face of new circumstances. Theory was almost entirely devoted to the long term with short-term fluctuations of little interest since downturns were so brief and government policy would anyway have been unable to alleviate any of the problems that might arise. The economy was, for all practical purposes, in equilibrium because of virtually instant adjustment made through changes both upwards or down in the price level. The key concept was Say’s Law, which stated that supply created its own demand, which in turn meant involuntary unemployment would never occur. Laissez-faire was the core policy setting. Market adjustment could not be improved on, with regulation of business and industry seen as almost never beneficial, but virtually certain to cause harm. Regulation was kept to a minimum as were welfare payments to the poor and unemployed.

For us it’s still not too late

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There is no doubt that Malcolm’s hold on the Lodge is dependent on how he handles “multiculturalism”, that is, on how he lays down the law on unacceptable behaviours in a society made up of many different peoples from many different backgrounds. And we have the European example right before us of how it is not to be done. Nick Cater discusses just this issue today in an article with the appropriate title, Nightmare behind the diversity dream revealed.

The utopian dreamers who see virtue in diversity seem oblivious to the damage they have done. If only we were nicer to our guests, they insist, then everything would be fine.

The severity of the social fracturing is seldom reflected in the mainstream media. Well-intended journalists and editors are uncomfortable about giving oxygen to the ugly side of multiculturalism. Strict social sanctions have been imposed on anybody breaking the code of niceness.

Now, thanks in part to the internet, the thought police are losing control. On social media, ordinary citizens share information — some of it correct, some little more than rumour — in a space where they no longer feel ashamed to speak their minds.

The mainstream media are in cahoots with the barbarians not at the gates but inside the gates. Cater lists examples of crime explosions caused by the arrival of migrants who have absolutely none of the background cultural understanding of what it takes to live in a modern society. Yet he also notes this about Angela Merkel

Scarily, Germany’s Angela Merkel has responded by preparing to send the thought police into Facebook. “Are you working on this?” she was overheard asking Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg last month. “Yeah,” replied Zuckerberg.

The idea that private thoughts could be expunged on the orders of a German chancellor is too horrible to contemplate. Yet Merkel nurses the delusion that a quick word with Zuckerberg will silence discontent.

Merkel has become a deeply polarising figure, splitting Europeans into opposite camps. There are those who think she deserves the Nobel Peace Prize and those who think she has completely lost the plot.

Progressive internationalism is the socialism of our era, an insane belief that we can all get along through good will alone. A bit of reality would therefore go a long way.

A 2010 study by the Institute for the German Economy found the unemployment rate for those without a German passport is 14 per cent. Among those from Islamic countries it was even higher: 55 per cent for Lebanese migrants, 46 per cent for Iraqis and 28 per cent for Afghans.

Elsewhere in Europe, the picture is much the same; asylum-seekers are far likelier to live off welfare than locals or migrants who arrive by other means.

The same picture — mercifully on a smaller scale — is emerging in Australia.

A study of 8500 entrants under the humanitarian resettlement program conducted by the Gillard government in 2011 found that more than six out of 10 refugees had failed to get a job after five years. Eighty-three per cent received Centrelink payments. As in Europe, those from Islamic countries fared worse. Fewer than one in 10 Iraqi and Afghan refugees had found work; 94 in every 100 were receiving welfare.

“Fared worse” depends on the intent of those who have come here, such as whether their intent was actually to work for a living. And there is nothing merciful about our smaller numbers. That has been through the hard work done to limit those arriving uninvited by boat, not an ounce of which was supported by Labor.

We are not a “multicultural” society. We are an Australian community made up of people from many different backgrounds. We are the freest most open society in the world, and it should be the most pressing imperative of our political class to ensure that we stay just exactly like that. Meanwhile our “well-intentioned journalists and editors” should get out of their bubbles and start to think of how we might ourselves avoid the fate of Europe. For us, it’s still not too late.

Refugees have stopped flowing into Europe

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Either that, or the news has stopped flowing to the rest of us. In somehow related news:

Turkey says two male suicide bombers behind Ankara blasts…
Govt Imposes News Blackout…

And then there is this:

China asks world to impose ‘code of conduct’ on Internet…

The best bit in this last story is in the final para, that “observers will be watching to see what China’s conception of a ‘code of conduct’ entails.” Yes, we will all be watching closely. Who could possibly guess what they would want? Which then leads to this:

WIKILEAKS release of Obamatrade text stokes ‘freedom of expression’ fears…

From which we find:

One chapter appears to give the signatory countries (referred to as “parties”) greater power to stop embarrassing information going public. The treaty would give signatories the ability to curtail legal proceedings if the theft of information is “detrimental to a party’s economic interests, international relations, or national defense or national security” – in other words, presumably, if a trial would cause the information to spread.

I don’t suppose that means that if there can be no trial, the thieves who stole this information would then immediately go free. Depending on judges to maintain free speech is such an old fashioned idea. How’s this for a story: Judges plan to outlaw climate change ‘denial’.

Including senior judges and lawyers from across the world, the three-day conference on “Climate Change and the Law” was staged in London’s Supreme Court. It was funded, inter alia, by the Supreme Court itself, the UK government and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

As one of the two UN sponsors of its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, UNEP has been one of the main drivers of alarm over global warming for 40 years. The organiser and chairman of the conference was the Supreme Court judge Lord Carnwath, a fervent believer in man-made climate change, who has worked with the Prince of Wales for more than 20 years, and with UNEP since 2002.

The purpose of this strange get-together was outlined in a keynote speech (visible on YouTube) by Philippe Sands, a QC from Cherie Blair’s Matrix Chambers and professor of law at University College, London. Since it is now unlikely that the world will agree in Paris to a legally binding treaty to limit the rise in global temperatures to no more than 2 degrees C from pre-industrial levels, his theme was that it is now time for the courts to step in, to enforce this as worldwide law.

“The most important thing the courts could do,” [Justice Sands] said, was to hold a top-level “finding of fact”, to settle these “scientific disputes” once and for all: so that it could then be made illegal for any government, corporation (or presumably individual scientist) ever to question the agreed “science” again. Furthermore, he went on, once “the scientific evidence” thus has the force of binding international law, it could be used to compel all governments to make “the emissions reductions that are needed”, including the phasing out of fossil fuels, to halt global warming in its tracks.

Better not to know any and all of this, specially with the world in such competent hands. Our elites are doing everything they can to cut off all sources of information that are not officially sanctioned. The rest of us can go on if we like here on the net since virtually no one reads any of this anyway. And you can see this for yourself by just asking all of your friends about global temperature growth for the past eighteen years. You know what it’s been and I know, but even so it is the best kept secret in the world.