Australian Politics 2016-11-28 15:35:00
Feminist lack of reality-contact again
Clementine Ford has often appeared in the columns of the Sydney Boring Herald giving aggressively feminist opinions. Her aggression and anger is normal among Leftists but her feminism adds an additional mental health problem to her profile. She constantly denies that men and women are different -- except when women are superior, of course.
But, in denying such a large slice of reality as male/female differences she is, I would argue, a low-level schizophrenic. Denial of reality is the hallmark of schizophrenia. There are probably as many sorts of feminism as there are feminists but I would argue that the more extreme ones have a form of mental illness which is dangerous to vulnerable women who listen to them and take them seriously. It may be worth mentioning that feminist icon Kate Millett was in and out of mental hospitals for much of her life.
And Clemmie has just added more evidence of her poor reality contact. As Tim Blair notes, with links to her Twitter account: "According to Godwin’s Law record-breaker Clementine Ford, Donald Trump is “installing people who pledge support to Nazism.” Also according to Clem, Trump “just made a neo-Nazi his chief strategist”, and Trump “is giving jobs to neo-Nazis".
The chief strategist she is presumably referring to is Steve Bannon, a retired U.S. Navy sailor and merchant banker who is a very forceful conservative. And the American Left and media (but I repeat myself) are in something of a frenzy to discredit him. But they really have nothing to go on except for the scorn he heaps on them. There is an attempt here to use his own words to discredit him but it gets nowhere. It simply reveals that he thinks much the same as Trump and the Trumpians. Just proving that about him is horror enough to the Left, of course, but to anyone else what he says is just a newly legitimated expression of opinion. As did Reagan, Trump has bumped the Overton window rightwards and Bannon is now in that window.
But to the Left, everyone who opposes them and their ideas is a "racist" -- and that accusation is constantly flung at Bannon, spiced up a little by the related accusation that he is antisemitic. But where is the evidence for that? Once again, there is none, aside from one accusation from an embittered ex-wife. Read here just one of many refutations of the "racist" claim from people who know him personally, noting, for instance, that Bannon’s longtime personal assistant is an African American woman, and he has extended family members who are Jewish".
And Bannon has also been an forceful advocate for Israel. As a Jewish American news site put it: "He headed arguably the most pro-Israel media organization in the world, and oversaw an operation that went out of its way to expose and attack antisemitism at every turn".
That is the man Clemmie calls a Nazi.
I have not seen her byline on the SMH recently. Has she become too unbalanced even for the SMH management? She may have had something of a breakdown. She embarrassed herself a couple of weeks ago by accusing someone else of a slur that he did not utter but which she did! Maybe we have heard the last of her in the mainstream media.
Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett calls Fremantle 'disloyal' for axing Australia Day celebrations
West Australian Premier Colin Barnett says he is "extremely disappointed" by the City of Fremantle's decision to axe its Australia Day celebrations.
Fremantle has abandoned its Australia Day festivities in favour of what it describes as a culturally inclusive alternative celebration two days later.
The council voted in January to can its Australia Day fireworks display and replace it with a new event, called One Day.
It said it wanted to celebrate being Australian in a way that included all Australians, and believed moving away from the January 26 date was more in line with Fremantle's values.
Mr Barnett has made it clear he does not support the move. "I am extremely disappointed in the Mayor and the City of Fremantle for doing that," he said. "It's disloyal to our country, it's disloyal to our state, and I think it's disloyal to the community of Fremantle.
"There are people from all over the world who live in Fremantle and we come together as one people, one country on Australia Day — no one should undermine that.
"Everyone understands the history and the debate about Australia Day but Australia Day is our national day, most Aboriginal groups accept it and history is put to one side.
"Australia Day is now a day for all Australians — whatever their background, wherever they were born — and I think any group that tries to detract from that does a disservice to our country and to our people, all of our people."
The City of Fremantle has previously said the move has the support of Aboriginal people in the Fremantle area and denies the council is trying to be politically correct.
SOURCE
Pressure grows on David Morrison to be removed as Australian of the Year
Karel Dubsky, the officer wrongly accused of being involved in the Jedi council sex scandal by former Army chief David Morrison, has come out of the shadows to demand his tormentor’s removal as Australian of the Year.
He has authorised Senator Jacqui Lambie to move a motion in the Senate tomorrow to have Morrison replaced with “a person worthy of the title”. Lambie will say Morrison “allowed Lt-Col Dubsky and others to be wrongly accused of being a members of a group of sex offenders and/or demeaning of women …
“General Morrison’s behaviour caused exceptional and undue harm to retired Lt-Col Dubsky, his family, and other innocent members of the ADF — and demonstrated behaviour that was the opposite required of the Australian of the Year.”
Strengthening Dubsky’s arm is a leaked police report which suggests Morrison was aware of the “Jedi Council” pornography scandal for 10 months before he made the thundering YouTube speech in June, 2013, that brought him worldwide acclaim and a lucrative career as a “diversity” champion.
Dubsky has a private letter from the Army affirming he was never a member of the “Jedi Council”. “But by not correcting the public record my name remains smeared,” he says.
He met Defence Minister Marise Payne in Canberra two weeks ago to plead for a public exoneration. But last week he received a formal letter from Defence saying the case was closed and no apology would occur.
To this day, Morrison refuses to comment, or apologise, to the man whose life he ruined.
SOURCE
Former Australian of the Year winners slam the awards and say they have been 'hijacked by activists'
Former winners of Australian of the Year honours have slammed the nominations for 2017, claiming the awards have been 'hijacked' by political activists.
Among the diverse list of nominees this year are 'social innovators', 'healthy living advocates' and a mining magnate described as an 'anti-slavery advocate'.
It's a list that Catherine McGregor, a 2016 Australian of the Year finalist, says proves the current system is 'broken' and is why she 'regrets' ever being a part of the awards, The Australian reports.
The transgender former Army officer was last year named Queensland's Australian of the Year and believes the system needs to be revamped. 'I think it has been hijacked by activists,' she said. 'It is unrepresentative of middle Australia and I regret profoundly ever being involved with it.'
Among those nominated for the major honour in 2017 is Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest. While he's most well known around the world for his AUD$5 billion worth, stemming from his Western Australia mining empire, that's not why he's been put up for the award.
Instead, it's his work as a 'philanthropist and anti-slavery advocate' that led to his nomination.
Equally controversial was the selection of Victorian representative Paris Aristotle. Mr Aristotle, an 'anti-torture and refugee rehabilitation advisor', was given the honour despite massive support for Motor Neurone Disease (MND) sufferer Neale Daniher.
A former AFL player and coach turned tireless MND champion, Daniher received a groundswell of support in Victoria for his work to raise awareness for the disease.
However despite his bravery in the face of the disease that is killing him he was overlooked by Victorian judges.
In recent years the award has been handed to scientists, lawyers, sports stars, musicians, educators and people from all walks of life.
However 1994 Australian of the Year Ian Kiernan - the founder of Clean Up Australia Day - is among many who believe those doing their jobs shouldn't be nominated.
'I believe you shouldn’t get the award for just doing your job — you’ve got to go further, doing something significant for your country,' Mr Kiernan said.
SOURCE
Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here
The S&P 500 in Weeks 3 and 4 of November 2016
We're catching up with two weeks worth of action in the S&P 500, so let's start with what stood out during Week 3 of November 2016.
First and foremost, our prediction from five weeks ago appears to have held throughout nearly every trading day of the last five weeks, with the S&P 500 actual values consistently falling within 3% of the red-dotted line that we sketched on top of our standard forecasting model to anticipate its future trajectory at that time, as almost indicated by the hand-drawn red-shaded region (since we drew it slightly narrower than intended).
In the chart above, our hand drawn forecast applies only to the period where our standard model would be affected by the echo effect from past volatility (indicated as the brown-shaded region), which is an artifact of our model's use of historic stock prices from 1 month, 12 months and 13 months earlier in its projections of future stock prices. To work around the echo effect, we literally connected the dots corresponding to the trajectory associated with 2016-Q4 on both sides of the period we identified over five weeks ago where we anticipated that our model's projections would be less accurate than usual.
Back then, we assumed that investors would keep their forward-looking focus fixed on the very near term future defined by the expectations associated with the current quarter of 2016-Q4, which we predicted would be the case as investors would be greatly influenced by their concerns over the Fed's plans to hike short term interest rates, where that concern would largely trump (pun intended) any noise introduced by the U.S. national elections.
Speaking of which, the outcome of the elections contributed quite a lot of noise, where the actual trajectory of the S&P 500 swung from the low end of our forecast range to the high end. That said, coming out of Week 3 of November 2016, it would appear that investors remained focused on 2016-Q4 in setting current day stock prices.
Here are the headlines that we identified as being relevant to the stock market in Week 3 of November 2016:
- Monday, 14 November 2016
- Tuesday, 15 November 2016
- Fed won't be easily swayed from December rate hike: Rosengren
- Washington stimulus would bring more rate hikes: Fed's Rosengren
- This story provides a pretty good example of why changes in fiscal policy (changes in government spending or taxation) often fail to deliver intended results, which happens because central banks use monetary policy to offset the effects of fiscal policy.
- Oil prices jump 3 percent on hopes of OPEC output cut
- Wall Street rises, lifted by technology and energy stocks
- Wednesday, 16 November 2016
- Thursday, 17 November 2016
- Friday, 18 November 2016
Now, let's move into Week 4 of November 2016, where something more interesting happened in a Thanksgiving holiday-shortened week.
For investors focusing on the future, the big news of the week was the shift in how far forward investors were looking, which changed from 2016-Q4 to 2017-Q2 during the course of the week.
As for what caused that shift, here are the news items for which we took special note of during Week 4 of November 2016.
- Monday, 21 November 2016
- Tuesday, 22 November 2016
- Wednesday, 23 November 2016
- Oil prices edge down on doubts about OPEC-led cuts
- Fed policymakers confident of need for rate hikes on eve of Trump win
- This is the biggest news of the week. Following the release of the Fed's 2 November 2016 FOMC statement, this news all but locked in the probability of a December 2016 hike in short term interest rates at 100%, which freed investors to look beyond the current quarter of 2016-Q4 and the Fed's December meeting to look at the more distant future. Based on what we've observed, investors have shifted their focus to 2017-Q2, which accounts for the continuing rise in the S&P 500 off its pre-election lows during the past week. In addition to confirming that change in our chart above, that shift in how far forward investors shifted their attention was surprisingly captured in at least one contemporary news source: Get Ready for Higher Interest Rates, Fed Minutes Say, where June 2017 (the month ending 2017-Q2) would coincide with current expectations of the timing of the Fed's next short term rate hike after December 2016.
- Dow, S&P close at records; U.S. yields, dollar at multi-year highs
- Friday, 25 November 2016
Elsewhere, Barry Ritholtz divided the economic and market news into its positives and negatives for both Week 3 and Week 4 of November 2016.
Looking forward over the next couple of weeks, in the absence of more fundamental events to change expectations or new noise events, we think that the S&P 500 will continue running to the high side of our forecast range for 2017-Q2, which shows the effects of a small echo from late 2015. That said, pay attention to the difference in where stock prices can be expected to go if investors focus on either 2017-Q2 or 2017-Q3. Unless the expectations for the change in the growth rate of future dividends for 2017-Q3 improves significantly, any news that would reasonably delay the expected timing of the Fed's next rate hike out of 2017-Q2 would likely coincide with a significant downward change in U.S. stock prices.
William Black on Krugman
The economists from UMKC are on a tear. As well they should be. They have been beavering away in almost total obscurity keeping the light of Institutionalism alive. It's kind of a lonely pursuit but it has one overwhelming advantage—you are correct so much more often than the convention-wisdom economists (who are almost always wrong.) And the folks who got it so disasterously wrong in 2008 haven't altered their worldviews one iota so they are still disasterously wrong.
Today, we see Bill Black give Paul Krugman a royal smackdown. Krugman has a lot of fans so taking him on entails some risk. But the fact remains that while Krugman is easily the most enlightened economist who is allowed to write for the New York Times, he is a thoroughly conventional thinker. And in his recent role as defender of Clintonism, he was forced to sound even more like a shill for Wall Street than normal. So Black is facing a high hanging curve ball here because Institutionalists live to take on anyone willing to embarrass themselves by spouting the neoliberal idiocies.
Even so, I am pretty sure that folks like Black and Hudson are NOT getting ahead of themselves. The neoliberals are shameless. They do not change their POV just because they are wrong. So I must assume that most of the time, the heterodox economists at UMKC must content themselves with celebrating their small victories at their small parties.
Krugman’s Failure to Speak Truth to Power about Austerity
By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN, November 22, 2016
In the first column in this series I explained how Hillary Clinton, during the closing 40 days of her campaign, showcased repeatedly her promise to assault the working class with continuous austerity. I explained that her threat represented economic malpractice – and was insane politics. I showed that the assault on the working class via austerity was such a core belief of the New Democrats that their candidate highlighted that assault even as the polls showed massive, intense rejection of her candidacy by the white working class. I also noted that in this second series in the column I would discuss the failure of her campaign team, and her de facto surrogate, Paul Krugman to speak truth to power about the dual idiocy of her campaign promise to wage continuous war on the working class through austerity forever.
The broader point is the one made so often and so well by Tom Frank – it is morally wrong, economically illiterate, and politically suicidal for the New Democrats to continue to assault the working class via austerity, “free trade” (sic) deals, and financial deregulation. The only thing worse is to then insult the working class for reacting “badly” to being pummeled for decades by the Party that once defined itself as the party of working people. The New Democrats decided to insult the white working class in response to polls showing that the white working class was enraged at Hillary Clinton. Arrogance and self-blindness are boon companions.
I grew up in the Detroit-area and saw George Wallace win the Democratic Party primary for the presidential nomination, so none of this is new to me. We all know that the New Democrats are never going to listen to my warnings or Tom Frank’s warnings. But the leaks show that Hillary had many competent staff who raised difficult questions. Why wasn’t any senior campaign staffer willing to tell her that her austerity threats were economically illiterate and politically suicidal? Krugman warned President Obama several times that austerity was a terrible economic policy.
John Boehner, March 2009:It’s time for government to tighten their belts and show the American people that we ‘get’ itBarack Obama, yesterday:“At a time when so many families are tightening their belts, he’s going to make sure that the government continues to tighten its own,” Obama said. “We’ll never know how differently the politics would have played if Obama, instead of systematically echoing and giving credibility to all the arguments of the people who want to destroy him, had actually stood up for a different economic philosophy. But we do know how his actual strategy has worked, and it hasn’t been a success
Why did he cease speaking truth to power as the election came down to the wire?
The New Democrats Were Locked Into Austerity
Ever since the birth of the New Democrats, their adherents have embraced austerity. This act of mutual economic and political self-destruction has become so core to their identity that Hillary unhesitatingly made it one her most important closing pitches during the last 40 days of her campaign against Trump. At the very moment when her pollsters were warning her that she could lose due to working class hostility, she chose to showcase her hostility to the working class by promising to inflict eight more years of austerity on them. In your face working class! This is a political strategy that has no upside, but a toxic downside. Despite intense criticism from progressives of her austerity threats, Paul Krugman never urged her publicly to promise to end austerity’s assault on the working class. Similarly, no one on her official campaign team had the courage and strength to tell her to stop and reverse her position.
Part of Krugman’s problem was that while he has come some distance from his long-held support for austerity, his reflexes are still wrong because he does not understand sovereign money. A November 14, 2016 Krugman column revealed the hold his past dogmas still had on him.Eight years ago, as the world was plunging into financial crisis, I argued that we’d entered an economic realm in which “virtue is vice, caution is risky, and prudence is folly.” Specifically, we’d stumbled into a situation in which bigger deficits and higher inflation were good things, not bad. And we’re still in that situation — not as strongly as we were, but we could still very much use more deficit spending.Krugman still does not understand sovereign money. A budget deficit for a government with a sovereign currency is not a moral issue. Budget surpluses are not a “virtue” and deficits are not a “vice.” The economic issue is strictly pragmatic – what size budget deficit or surplus is best for the overall economy? The political issue is the one Krugman made in his criticism of President Obama’s embrace of the self-inflicted wound of adopting your opponents’ economic illiteracy.
Many economists have known this all along. But they have been ignored, partly because much of the political establishment has been obsessed with the evils of debt, partly because Republicans have been against anything the Obama administration proposes.
But notice that even though he was writing after the 2016 elections, Krugman could not bring himself to be candid about the identity of “much of the political establishment.” Yes, Republicans always said they favored austerity (except when they held the presidency and had to deal with a recession). But New Democrats believed in the same terrible economics and, unlike the Republicans, Hillary’s embrace of continuous austerity as a means of waging a unceasing onslaught on the working class was so passionate that she highlighted that embrace during the last 40 days of her disastrous campaign even as ever poll and pundit warned her that she was enraging the white working class. Krugman cannot identify Hillary and the New Democrats as the most prominent leader of “the political establishment [that] has been obsessed with the evil of debt” without raising the obvious question – why didn’t he speak truth to power? Why didn’t he advise her to end her obsession with sovereign debt and her economic policies that made war on the working class?
Of course, Krugman did something worse than simply fail to speak truth to power. He joined in the reprehensible effort to trash the reputation of a well-respected economics scholar, Professor Gerald Friedman. Friedman had donated to Hillary’s campaign, who dared to point out that Bernie Sanders’ economic stimulus proposals were far superior to her proposals. On what basis did Krugman seek to destroy the scholar? Krugman complaint was that the economist was insufficiently “obsessed with the evils of debt.” Friedman’s study made a point that Krugman had long made (and I quoted above). The 2009 fiscal stimulus was far too small and that the federal government had made a dire mistake in moving toward austerity in 2010 rather than increasing substantially the size of the stimulus package.
What was really going on, of course, is that Krugman was out to defeat Bernie’s candidacy for the nomination. Had Bernie won that nomination he would now be President-elect. Sanders was the one candidate for the nomination that embodied what Krugman said the Democratic Party desperately needed – ending the hold of “the political establishment obsessed with the evils of debt.” Krugman simply viewed truth and Friedman as collateral damage in his zealous fight to defeat Bernie. Krugman has been unable yet to summon the integrity and courage to admit how badly he served the Nation and the millions of Americans that rejected that “political establishment.” I hope he will reach out to Friedman and begin to offer his apologies. more