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Ok, maybe the time as not quite arrived just yet but it is an idea I have long liked, and it seems I am not the only one:
The notion gives me the giggles and it has much to commend it. Yes, I used to be a futures trader 😉 October 9th, 2016 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
 What do you think is going to happen with the economy? Disaster. What do you mean by disaster? Depression, unemployment, reduction in living standards, banks going bust, hundreds of thousands not being able to pay their mortgages. Perhaps even the breakdown of the state. Where? Just about everywhere in the Western/developed world. Why do you think that? Because of government deficits, government debts, private debts and money printing. And why should that lead to disaster? Because eventually people will stop lending to the government. At which point the government will be unable to pay it’s bills. At which point it will have to stop spending money on things like pensions, health, education, defence. At which point you’re going to get riots. What from old people, sickies and children? More from people who thought they might need the state at some point in the future. Anyway, can’t they just print the money they need? Well, they’re already doing that. But money printing eventually leads to inflation. Inflation dislocates the economy. It becomes impossible to plan because you no longer know how much you can buy for and how much you can sell for. At that point you no longer know what activities are profitable and what unprofitable. But there’s been plenty of printing in the last few years and very little inflation. Hey, look at Japan. Maybe. There’s been plenty of inflation in assets such as houses, shares and precious metals. Indeed, according to Jesse Columbo there’s hardly an asset class out there that isn’t currently in a bubble. And bubbles eventually pop. Do they? I give you Japan again. Yes, they’ve been printing money and keeping it all together for 25 years. But there’s been no growth. And anyway they are getting ever more desperate. At time of writing they are considering helicopter money. This is part of a progression from low interest rates to no interest rates to negative interest rates. So, they will have negative interest rates and then they will have ever-more negative interest rates and where Japan goes we will follow. Yes, but… oh I don’t know. It just doesn’t sound right.  Where the Japanese lead we follow. Perhaps not so neatly. October 8th, 2016 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
Bouattia argues that a ‘Eurocentric’ curriculum is problematic because BME students ‘don’t see themselves in what they’re studying, and can’t relate to it’. According to her, any body of knowledge produced solely by white people is inaccessible to BME students. Presumably, this includes the plays of Shakespeare; the ancient literature of Suetonius, Tacitus and Plutarch; the political economy of Adam Smith and Karl Marx; and the science of Pythagoras, Archimedes, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. BME students cannot relate to these classical authors, she says. But there would be no point in BME students going to university if they refused to learn anything that didn’t relate to their immediate lived experience. If it were applied, Bouattia’s approach to education would limit the potential aspirations of BME students, leaving them without access to the necessary historical, philosophical and intellectual grounding they need to develop as thinkers. October 7th, 2016 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
My lack of enthusiasm for Theresa May is long on record, so there were no real surprises for me in her typically Blairite speech. But I am very happy is was poorly received (and predictably so).
Never forget that May opposed Brexit and has been consistently terrible on pretty much every issue. But once we are out of the EU (and realistically long before then, as the underpinning assumption on all sides of the spectrum have now shifted to trying to shape the post-EU realities), there is one less massive Brussels-sized shield between the British state and the people who wish to roll it back, compared to the situation on June 22nd of this year. The battle we won over Brexit was not the end, it was merely the end of the beginning. It was essential so that we can now fight on a battlefield where the arrows we shoot rain down on our real enemies, the ones in Westminster. And sooner rather than later, one of those arrows needs to end up in Theresa May’s eye, ideally whilst the disarranged Labour Party is still lead by an unelectable anti-Semitic Worzel Gummidge clone. October 6th, 2016 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
This New Statesman article argues that while the proponents of Brexit were libertarian, what we are going to end up with is more statism. I happen to think that we would never have reduced the size of the state inside the EU, so leaving it was a necessary first step. But it was never going to be all that was needed. Theresa May does seem to favour some particularly odious policies. On the other hand, there has been talk of reducing corporation tax and VAT. Trade could still end up being free-er on net. We might eventually get rid of May, or new political factions might rise to dominance that offer more hope. Am I right to be at all optimistic? October 6th, 2016 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
October 5th, 2016 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Theresa May:
Quite. October 5th, 2016 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Of course, those left-wingers, Labourite or otherwise, fingered as anti-Semitic never think of themselves as such. They’re anti-Zionist, they say. It’s the Israeli state they’re opposed to, not Jews as a whole. Yet the distinction rarely holds up, not least because their opposition to Israel, indeed the obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is so overdetermined. It’s not born of some actual, let alone vested, interest in this one particular conflict out of all the other conflicts in the world. No, it’s fuelled by their opposition to what Israel represents – its nation-building futurity, its embrace of liberal capitalism, its sheer modern-ness. And ultimately, that image of Israel, as the exemplar of capitalist modernity, both feeds into and draws on what anti-Semitism has always held Jewry to represent: the moneyed power behind the throne, and the source of the world’s problems. October 5th, 2016 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was at the UN general assembly in New York the other day and talking to the foreign minister of another country. I won’t say which one, since I must preserve my reputation for diplomacy. But let’s just say they have an economy about the size of Australia (though getting smaller, alas), plenty of snow, nuclear missiles, balalaikas, oligarchs, leader who strips to the waist… you get the picture. – Boris Johnson, in fine form as usual 😀 October 4th, 2016 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yesterday something reminded me of the Space Cadets:
At the time I talked about it a great deal, as everybody did, but I could not watch it for more than a few seconds at a time. Too close to home. On discovering that it was a hoax one of the cadets said, “I was planning my speech about achieving my childhood dreams. I’m a little bit broken-hearted.” I was a little bit broken-hearted for her. I, too, had grown up dreaming of space. The cruellest aspect of the show was that it made clear to the world that the cadets had been selected for their credulity and lack of scientific knowledge. Like many of those reading this I would have “failed” that particular test. But let us not put on airs; it is proverbial among scammers that there is good hunting to be had among educated people who think they could never be fooled by anything. Why am I still thinking about these nine innocents sold a pup when a whole decade has gone by? Millions agree to take jobs and find them not as advertised. Billions agree to take spouses and find them not as advertised. Such is the way of the world. At least the cadets were handsomely paid. Enough, I assume, to head off any lawsuits about breach of contract – and I would imagine that those contracts were written by clever lawyers in the first place. If the cadets had been the type to read every sub-clause in a contract they would not have been chosen to be filmed larking around in a wooden replica spaceship allegedly equipped with gravity generators. My memory was triggered (not, like, triggered triggered; just triggered) by all the talk now about consent. I am not thinking primarily about sexual consent, although that is relevant, but about the increasing sensitivity around posting any photographs and films of people without their permission. This new sensitivity isn’t just politically correct wailing. Brian Micklethwait of this parish finds it entirely consistent with his libertarian principles to take care to hide the faces of ordinary people he photographs, as he mentions here, even as he points out that the case is different for public figures. The world has changed. The internet never forgets a name. It is getting closer to never forgetting a face. When the cadets signed their contracts that wasn’t so obvious. October 3rd, 2016 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
The concepts that we need to grasp here are folk marxism, oikophobia and conservatism by proxy. Most modern leftists haven’t read a line of Marx. But his odious creed has passed down to them in a diluted form in which people are to be divided onto groups and all relationships are to seen as being between oppressor and oppressed. Needless to say that the oppressed are always noble and the oppressors all evil. This gives us identitarian politics. Oikophobia then comes into play, as the leftists see their own culture as an oppressor culture. Another symptom of leftist thinking since the time of that scoundrel Rousseau is the admiration of the noble savage which I call ‘conservatism by proxy’. This has a religious element in that it is often given voice by those tiresome people who’d never go near a church in their own countries, but will wax lyrical about the ‘spirituality’ of monks in Cambodia, Laos or some God-forsaken place like that. In Australia the modern leftist’s conservatism by proxy is usually satisfied by the simple expedient of admiring Aboriginal culture because: “It has been around for 40,000 years.” Thus do lefties satisfy their need to admire tradition and obtain the joy that conservatism brings, without suffering the awful fate of having to be labelled ‘conservative.’ Add to these three, the zero sum fallacy view of the economy, the inability to understand the distinction between speech and deed or between ought and is and you have a good summary of the neuroses and intellectual bigotries of many leftists. This is a comment I saw on Sp!ked that I thought was right on the money (reproduced with a few typos corrected). October 2nd, 2016 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
Willie Penrose, a Labour member of the Irish Dáil, is singing an old song from a tradition known all over the world:
Following the link about South Africa took me to this BBC story: The BBC describes the quota in lyrical terms:
It almost seems a pity to tear oneself away from sharing these glad hosannas to look at a couple of ominous lines some grinch has inserted into the same report:
and
Going back to the report about Mr Penrose’s Irish Music Quota Bill in TheJournal.ie, some of the comments strike a discordant and ominous note:
Unlike Mr Penrose, I am not musical, and I don’t keep up with these internet thingies the young folk use … but isn’t there a thing called “music streaming” now? October 1st, 2016 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
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