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KEYNES WASN’T A KEYNESIAN |
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Written by Jack Kelly
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Friday, 28 December 2012 |
Conservatives
speak disparagingly of "Keynesian economics."
If he were alive today, I suspect John Maynard Keynes would be critical,
too, of policies advocated in his name - even more than he was when alive.
Lord
Keynes (1883-1946) was the most celebrated economist of the 20th Century,
chiefly because in his "General
Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money" (1936), he told politicians
exactly what they wanted to hear.
Despite
that, Keynes deserved his fame. He was a
genius who made a fortune in the stock
market (he made most of his picks while lying in bed in the morning, that
day's edition of the London Times in hand). He
was fun at parties. He had a quick
wit.
He was fond of reminding investors,
for example, that "the market can remain irrational far longer than you can
remain solvent."
And
he had an important insight very relevant to today.
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PEAK FARMLAND HAS ARRIVED |
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Written by Matt Ridley
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Wednesday, 26 December 2012 |
It's a brave scientist who dares to announce the turning
point of a trend, the top of a graph. A paper published this week does just that, persuasively
arguing that a centuries long trend is about to reverse: the use of land for
farming.
The authors write: "We are confident that we stand on the peak of
cropland use, gazing at a wide expanse of land that will be spared for
Nature."
Jesse Ausubel and Iddo Wernick of Rockefeller University,
and Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, have
reached this conclusion by documenting the gradual
"dematerialization" of agriculture.
Globally, the production of a
given quantity of crop requires 65% less land than it did in 1961, thanks to
fertilizers, tractors, pesticides, better varieties and other factors.
Even corrected for different kinds of crops, the acreage
required is falling at 2% a year. "Peak Oil" turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. But Peak Farmland is now very real.
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PRESIDENT HUSSEIN SAVES EARTH FROM APOCALYPSE |
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Written by To The Point News
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Friday, 28 December 2012 |
As we celebrate our narrow escape from the Mayan-Republican
Apocalypse of December 21, 2012, the American media is living up to its
reputation as the people's fearless truth-teller, by correctly attributing our
miraculous collective salvation to Barack Hussein.
The consensus among the media experts and celebrities can be
best expressed by this unbiased quote from CNN: "If you don't think Hussein
is god, you're just stupid."
According to an ancient prophecy, the Mayan calendar would end on 12/21/2012
with a big comet (or other large-caliber assault weapon that the NRA protects
from government control) falling off a physical cliff and striking the United
States in karmic retaliation for Bush's tax cuts and suppression of
undocumented Mayan voters in swing states.
Some experts estimated that, in addition to total death and
destruction, this could result in the loss of all accrued Social Security
benefits and free government-mandated health care, as well as a severe climate
change as the planet would burn to a crisp.
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HALF-FULL REPORT 12/21/12 |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Friday, 21 December 2012 |
Welcome to
the shortest day of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere - or, as it's also
known this year, Moron Day. Today,
anyone with a three-digit IQ gets to make fun of morons and retards - in particular,
all the morons who panicked over Mayan Calendar Idiocy, and all the morons to
whom TIME Magazine credits
for re-electing Zero.
Actually,
though, the End of the World didn't happen today because that already happened
on November 6th. At least for
America....
Yet there are some House Pubs who aren't
whimpering. Yesterday, 13 of them pushed
Speaker Boehner's Plan B off
a cliff. This turned even the folks
at Fox into Nervous Nellies, blaring Fiscal
Crisis Nears As Plan B Fails. This
is a real two-fer.
First, the
quicker we go over this dreaded "fiscal cliff" thing, the better. Second, this
vote damages Boehner's speakership hopefully beyond repair. All it takes is 17 of the 234 House Pubs to
Just Say No to Boehner on January 3rd, and he's out.
John Boehner
is a nice, amicable, and competent guy.
But he's the wrong guy now to be in charge of the only chance we have
for fiscal sanity and reigning in Emperor Zero.
There's a scene in Godfather I
that every House Pub should be thinking of now.
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WHAT DO GUNS HAVE TO DO WITH IT? |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Thursday, 20 December 2012 |
Who is the
more demented - the witch doctor with his nonsense incantations or those who
believe him?
The witch
doctor's acolytes are worshipfully eulogizing his eloquence - "pitch-perfect,"
declared Vanity Fair - in Newton,
Connecticut last Sunday (12/16).
Yes, the
speech - the official text is here
- would have been pitch-perfect if it had been delivered by Ronald
Reagan, George Bush, or Mitt Romney, for their words would have been deeply
sincere. For them to be spoken by a fanatical
advocate of unrestricted abortion and infanticide, and of ruining every
American child's future with trillions of debt, is to take hypocrisy into The
Twilight Zone.
The quote
from Christ is the final straw. This
speech is disgustingly, sickeningly, unctuously deceitful. And it's being
hailed by Zero's Amen chorus in the CommieMedia. Of course.
What better way to advance your political agenda than by using children
shot to death by a madman?
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THE CORNBALL RACISM OF THE LEFT |
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Written by Jack Kelly
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Friday, 21 December 2012 |
He
owes his escape from poverty to the work ethic and the values his mom drummed
into him -- and to Chic-fil-A french fries, Tim
Scott says.
His
single parent mother often worked 16 hour days as a nurses assistant "cleaning
up other people's feces," so Tim and his brothers would have food in their
bellies and clothes on their backs.
As
a freshman in high school in North Charleston, Tim Scott couldn't afford to buy
a sandwich at Chic-fil-A. But he'd often
make a meal of the fries at a restaurant near the movie theater where he worked
part time. One day the restaurant's
owner struck up a conversation. John
Moniz became Tim Scott's mentor.
"My
mother taught me how to shoot for the stars, but he taught me how to think it
through," Mr. Scott said. "It's about thinking your way out of poverty." Having a job is good, John Moniz told Tim. But creating jobs is better. After college, Tim Scott started his own
insurance agency.
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MICHIGAN WINS, THUGS LOSE |
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Written by Jack Kelly
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Monday, 17 December 2012 |
It
was, said the business correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, "akin to
pot-smoking pagans driving the Mormons out of Utah."
Rick
Newman was referring to the votes last Tuesday
(12/10) which made Michigan -- birthplace of the United Auto Workers and the
Teamsters -- the 24th right to work state.
Organized
labor wouldn't have suffered this stunning defeat if union bosses hadn't tried
to amend Michigan's constitution to forbid any restrictions on their
power. Their hubris led to their downfall -- a fate the ancient Greeks would instantly recognize -- and a huge win for the people of Michigan.
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WEEKLY MIND FOOD 12/20/12 |
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Written by Joe Katzman
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Thursday, 20 December 2012 |
Weekly Mind Food aims to show you what TTPers without a
regular column, but with deep expertise in key fields, are paying
attention to. We call ourselves TTP's Team B. Note the "Weekly
Mind Food" category in the left side-bar now, which will have
all our issues. They're Free Access, as
are all the linked articles, so feel free to read them at your leisure
- and to mail the article's URL to your friends!
Thanks to dkemp, edd7, finn-san, hardcharger, mae, and of
course prosenberg. Lots of Hanukkah and Christmas links this week,
including a "Carol of the Bells" you haven't heard before. Children and
control seem to be an entwined and recurring theme, mostly for reasons
that are more important than recent shootings.
There's also a strong
discussion of class in America: Producer class, Government class - and
a Praetorian class? On the technical field, we have medtech roundup,
more on spying home appliances, and the US Intelligence Council's 2030
"megatrend" forecasts.
The latter are, of course, already getting sharp
criticism. And what the heck... how about reliving the biggest armored
clash from Desert Storm? Or having Carl Sagan explain the wonders of
the universe. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good read.
To simplify your scans, I've divided the links into sections:
your weekly Copybook Heading, plus Economos
(global economy), Ekpolitismos (culture
& civilization), Polis (domestic
politics), Techne Logos (tech), Stratiootika
(geopolitics & military), plus 1 Good News This
Week item to brighten your week and/or make you better.
Enjoy!
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SHOULD WE BE SURPRISED OBAMA WANTS SECRETARIES OF DEFENSE & STATE WHO HATE ISRAEL? |
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Written by Caroline Glick
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Tuesday, 18 December 2012 |
Many in the American Jewish community are
aghast to discover that President Obama is planning to appoint former
Senator Chuck Hagel to serve as Defense Secretary. If you want the skinny on
how Hagel has come to be known as one of the few ferociously anti-Israel
senators in the past generation, Carl from Jerusalem at Israel Matzav provides it.
Meantime, all I can say is I don't understand how anyone can
possibly be surprised. Shortly after word came out that Hagel is the
frontrunner for the nomination, I read a quaint little blog post written by a
conservative leaning commentator voicing her belief that Obama wouldn't want to
risk his relations with Israel's supporters by appointing Hagel.
But as Powerline
pointed out yesterday (12/17), this is the entire point of the nomination.
Obama wants to hurt Israel. He does not like Israel. He is
appointing anti-Israel advisors and cabinet members not despite their
anti-Israel positions, but because of them.
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OBAMA’S DISASTER OF SYRIA |
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Written by John Hannah
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Monday, 17 December 2012 |
Watching the nightmare in Syria unfold, you have to ask
yourself: Could the Obama administration have made a worse hash out of the
situation if it had tried?
Short of an outright Iranian victory that saw the Assad
regime's power fully restored, it's hard to imagine a more dire set of
circumstances for U.S. interests. The Syrian state is well on its way to
imploding. A multiplicity of increasingly well-armed militias are rushing to
fill the vacuum. At the forefront of the fight are a growing number of radical
Islamist groups, including some affiliated with al Qaeda.
The prospect that Assad' s demise will be accompanied by the
use (and/or proliferation) of chemical weapons and massive communal
bloodletting gets higher by the day. Libya on steroids is what we're looking
at, only this time not on the distant periphery of the Middle East but in its
heartland, a gaping strategic wound that is likely to threaten the stability
and wellbeing of Syria's five neighbors -- critical American partners all --
for years to come.
Does it require saying that it need not have been this way?
Evidently yes.
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WHY DOES OBAMA WANT TO RAISE TAXES IN ORDER TO GET LESS REVENUE? |
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Written by Richard Rahn
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Tuesday, 18 December 2012 |
In times past, political leaders would lay out their
domestic and foreign policies in clear, coherent terms. President Obama talks
about getting our fiscal house in order but fails to propose any meaningful spending cuts.
His proposals to increase the tax rate on the top 2 percent
of taxpayers would fund the government for eight
days - assuming no behavioral change by those whose feathers are being
plucked.
In the real world, we know people will spend a great deal of
time and effort to avoid paying high marginal tax rates. In high tax states
such as California and New York, high earners will be expected to pay marginal
tax rates well over 50 percent.
We only need to look at what happened in Britain after the
former Labor government of Gordon Brown increased the top rate to 50 percent.
In the tax year 2009-10, more than 16,000 people declared an annual income of
more than 1 million British pounds. This number fell to 6,000 after the tax
rate was increased, partially because two-thirds of those who earned 1 million
pounds or more left Britain to avoid the top rate.
George Osborne, the current finance minister, just announced
that the Conservative government will reduce
the rate in order to obtain more
revenue. Why can't -- or won't -- Mr. Obama figure this out?
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MICHELLE OBAMA’S MESSAGE FOR US |
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Written by Dr. Joel Wade
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Wednesday, 19 December 2012 |
"Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that
you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of
your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push
yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go
back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."
This statement by Michelle
Obama on Feb. 18, 2008, at an appearance at UCLA, initially struck me as supremely
arrogant and frightening... because it is
supremely arrogant and frightening; and it is an honest expression -except for
the putting-down-divisions part - of what Obama has tried to do as President.
It is an expression of progressive
presumptuousness: trying to make people better; thinking the right leaders can
mold us into the kind of people that the progressives think that we should be.
But let's look at it from a
different angle; perhaps we should be thanking Michelle Obama for her challenge that we start living up to and acting upon the principles of America's founding.
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WAYNE LAPIERRE IS RIGHT |
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Written by To The Point News
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Friday, 21 December 2012 |
Headline today (12/21):
NRA
Blames Media, Music, and More for Culture of Violence
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HALF-FULL REPORT 12/14/12 |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Friday, 14 December 2012 |
We'll get to
the grim stuff later. Let's start out
with great hat trick the sports world scored this week.
First, the
happiest TTPer this week has got to be Ella -- because Texas A&M's Johnny
Football won
the Heisman (12/08). Here's why they call Jonathan Paul Manziel "Johnny
Football." The best is saved for last, when - against #1 Alabama - he runs
straight into one of his linemen knocking the ball loose, spins backwards to
catch his fumble in mid-air, scampers evading tacklers, and rifles the ball
across his body to a receiver in the end zone for a touchdown. Gig ‘em,
Aggies!
Second, what
Michael Jordan is to basketball and Joe DiMaggio to baseball, Leo Messi is to
soccer. Many of the sport's devotees
consider Messi to be the best there's ever been - and he proved it this week
(12/09), when he scored
his 86th goal of the year, breaking a record held for 40
years. Messi is only five-foot-seven,
but there's never been a ball magician on the field like him.
Third, the
best boxer on the planet, Manny Pacquiao - world champion in six divisions from flyweight (112 lbs)
to light middleweight (154 lbs) - got cold-cocked with one of the most
devastating knockout punches in the history of pugilism.
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WHY THERE CAN’T BE PEACE WITH THIS PRESIDENT |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Thursday, 13 December 2012 |
"The fact is, we live according
to Lenin's formula: Kto-Kovo?" explained Joseph Stalin in a speech to the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in April 1929. And indeed, President Zero lives by it as
well. Which is why there can't be peace
with him - not for Republicans in Congress nor for any non-mooching American.
For Lenin, the only question that
mattered in human affairs was Kto-Kovo?
- Who-Whom?, who defeats whom, who wins and who loses. (For some perverse
reason, you often see the phrase transliterated from the Russian Cyrillic as "Kto-Kogo." I insist on transliterating it as pronounced
in Russian.)
It is the only question that
matters for Zero. It is not just a
stance, an intellectual assumption of faculty lounge Marxism. It defines his basic outlook on the world and
makes him who he is - profoundly anti-capitalist, anti-freedom, and anti-American. It makes him, as was Lenin and as the Left
has always been, metaphysically
fascist.
Only by understanding this can
Republicans on Capitol Hill prevent their being hopelessly steamrollered by
him. Kto-Kovo?
is far more than a political strategy for power. It is a statement about how the world works,
about the nature of reality.
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