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Where is the “Free” part?

Posted by M. C. on December 22, 2019

“Free trade”, “requires”, “prohibits”. Any agreement longer than this post is not “free”.

Everytime there is a requires or prohibits someone is making out and the rest of US are getting screwed.

From Voterama in Congress
Setting New Rules for North American Trade: Voting 385-41, the House on Dec. 19 passed a bill (HR 5430) giving congressional approval to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which would replace the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as the framework for commerce among the three countries. The agreement requires Mexico to guarantee workers the right to join unions and engage in collective bargaining; authorizes fast-track probes of labor violations in Mexico and factory-specific penalties when transgressions are found; gives U.S. dairy and poultry farmers and to a lesser extent winemakers more access to Canadian markets; raises environmental standards but does not address climate change; reduces patent protections for certain pharmaceuticals; sets wage requirements that benefit U.S. and Canadian auto factories over Mexico’s; prohibits duties on digital products; and protects Internet companies against liability for their users’ content. A yes vote was to pass the bill. Kelly: Yes. Thompson: Yes.

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Thing you shouldn't do over the age of 30

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Top US General Denies That US Troops Died in Vain in Afghanistan – News From Antiwar.com

Posted by M. C. on December 21, 2019

The M-I-C lips are moving therefore…

https://news.antiwar.com/2019/12/20/top-us-general-denies-that-us-troops-died-in-vain-in-afghanistan/

‘I don’t think anybody has died in vain, per se’

Jason Ditz

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley sought to defend the Afghan War on Friday, despite the Afghanistan Papers showing systematic official lies about the failed conflict, insisting that the documents were a “mischaracterization” of the war, and that there was no unified decision to deceive the public.

Rather, the position here seems to be that hundreds of Pentagon officials took it upon themselves and each individually decided to deceive the public a little bit, culminating in a colossal lie which couldn’t be explicitly blamed on anyone.

Gen. Milley insisted the war had been a success in that there hadn’t been any specific terror attacks out of Afghanistan for the war’s duration, and particularly objected to the idea that anyone had died “in vain” in the conflict.

“I don’t think anybody has died in vain, per se,” Milley said, saying if anyone’s death was in vain, he “could not look at myself in the mirror.” Since he can still do that, he’s concluded no one died in vain.

The entire idea that troops died in vain is largely a military creation at any rate, built to try to shame politicians into keeping the war going on the notion that if the war is lost all the deaths were in vain.

Yet now, the war is plainly lost, and officials are still looking to give those deaths some specific merit. Broadly, assigning meaning to the deaths is something that was largely just an exercise military brass sought in the first place, and should have little impact on either US policy in Afghanistan going forward, or culpability on the years of deception from the Afghanistan Papers.

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Why The Afghanistan Papers Are An Eerie Reminder Of Vietnam | PopularResistance.Org

 

 

 

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Watch “Talking About Stoicism Part 50 Life is Opinion” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on December 21, 2019

Your Happy Place

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EconomicPolicyJournal.com: Thanks Socialists: Venezuela Refugee Crisis to Become the Largest in Modern History

Posted by M. C. on December 21, 2019

https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2019/12/thanks-socialists-venezuela-refugee.html

Thanks Socialists: Venezuela Refugee Crisis to Become the Largest in Modern History

The Venezuelan refugee crisis is about to surpass the scale of the Syrian crisis.

According to Hearts on Venezuela, as 2019 comes to a close, four years since the start of the Venezuelan socialist-caused humanitarian crisis, 4.6 million Venezuelans have fled the country, about 16 percent of the population. The figure is strikingly similar to the 4.8 million people that had fled Syria by 2015, four years into the massive forced displacement crisis there.

The Venezuelan refugee crisis is one of the largest in modern history, and, if current trends continue, there could be as many as 6.5 million Venezuelans living outside of the country by 2020 (based on estimates from the U.N. Refugee Agency)—far outpacing the speed of displacement seen in Syria.

Socialism, in terms of a successful economy, can’t exist  (SEE: Hayek Explains Why Socialism is Impossible).

–RW

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Sean Penn

The Dumb and Dumber of economics

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The Great Criticism of Keynes That Every Economist Should Read

Posted by M. C. on December 21, 2019

Almost no one has ever read the book. There is good reason for this. Keynes’ book is unreadable. Its arguments are incoherent. This is why we rarely see direct quotes from the book.

https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/

By Gary North

In 1959, Henry Hazlitt’s book, The Failure of the “New Economics,“ was published by D. Van Nostrand Company, a reputable but midsized publishing company. The book was subtitled An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies.
This was Hazlitt’s magnum opus. That is to say, it was his great work. Yet it was narrowly focused. It was a monograph. In clear prose, he took apart John Maynard Keynes’s magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), the book that indirectly reshaped economic theory in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Book Almost Nobody Has Read

Almost no one has ever read the book. There is good reason for this. Keynes’ book is unreadable. Its arguments are incoherent. This is why we rarely see direct quotes from the book. Keynesianism did not become a major factor in the thinking of most economists until 1945. The Keynesian movement accelerated in 1948 because of the first edition of Paul Samuelson’s textbook Economics. I own a reprint of that original edition. Keynes is not quoted in the book. Samuelson mentioned him on pages 253 and 303. The book and its later editions have sold something in the range of four million copies. It was the most successful economics textbook of the twentieth century. It shaped the thinking, or rather the non-thinking, of millions of students for seventy years. Yet almost none of these students has ever read The General Theory cover to cover.
Samuelson in 1946 wrote a laudatory assessment of the impact of The General Theory. It was published in Econometrica, an academic journal not noted for its clarity.
In any case, it bears repeating that the General Theory is an obscure book, so that would be anti-Keynesians must assume their position largely on credit unless they are willing to put in a great deal of work and run the risk of seduction in the process. The General Theory seems the random notes over a period of years of a gifted man who in his youth gained the whip hand over his publishers by virtue of the acclaim and fortune resulting from the success of his Economic Consequences of the Peace.
A reprint of his article is here.
The General Theory was not well received at the time of this publication. Richard Ebeling, a Misesian economist, wrote in 2004,
Except for some of Keynes’s young protégés at Cambridge University, most of the reviewers of the book were highly critical of many of its theoretical “innovations,” as well as its inflationary prescriptions for unemployment. Even some economists who later became proponents of Keynes’s “new economics” were initially highly critical of his work. For example, Alvin Hansen, who was one of the leading advocates of Keynesian economics in the United States in the 1950’s and 1960’s, wrote in late 1936 that The General Theory “is not a landmark in the sense that it lays the foundation for a ‘new economics.’ … The book is more a symptom of economic trends than a foundation stone upon which a science can be built.”
Yet within a few years, and most certainly by the end of World War II, Keynes’s ideas had virtually pushed aside every other explanation of the causes and cures of economic depressions. Keynes’s book became the foundation stone for the new “macroeconomics.”
In contrast to Keynes’s book, Hazlitt’s book is readable, although not so readable as all of his other books. That is because he had to spend his time trying to make sense out of Keynes’s convoluted prose and shifting definitions. But the book is coherent, and his explanations are lucid, as long as he was not directly citing Keynes.
I read the book in the summer of 1963. I know this because I used to write the date on which I had bought a book on the front inside cover page. I did not read Economics in One Lesson until 1971, when I became a senior staff member at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). The first book spoiled me. It really is a tour de force. I realize that the second book was his bestseller and is a fine introductory book for people who know nothing about economic theory, but his book on Keynes outshines it. Unfortunately, almost nobody has read it. It remains an unread book that demolishes an equally unread book.
In 1960, Van Nostrand published a follow-up volume edited by Hazlitt, The Critics of Keynesian Economics. It is a compilation of scholarly articles written by critics of Keynes.
The Mises Institute has done yeoman service in making certain that both of these books remain in print, and both of them remain available in PDF format free of charge.

The Memory Hole

Hazlitt’s book was not the first full-length book to criticize Keynes or the longest. That honor belongs to Arthur Marget, who was the first economist to devote a book to critiquing a narrow aspect of Keynes’s General Theory. It is a two-volume behemoth of over fourteen hundred pages, The Theory of Prices. It also covered Keynes’s earlier book, Treatise on Money (1930). The first volume was published in 1938; the second volume was published in 1942. It was unknown when it was published, and it remained unknown after it was republished in 1966. It is not as incoherent as Keynes’s book, but it is turgid, prolic, and unread. Almost no economist has ever heard of Marget. That was true in his day, too. There is no Wikipedia entry on him. His book did not go down the memory hole. It was published at the bottom of the memory hole, and it remained there. John Egger wrote a detailed review of it in 1995, which gives you some indication of just how obscure it is. It took over half a century to get a detailed review. Egger concluded, “Labels aside, Marget’s work offers scholarship in the history of monetary doctrine that is unmatched, and an analysis of processes that is in some respects unmatched, in explicitly Austrian works. ‘Prolixity’ or not, it deserves to be recognized as an exciting and significant contribution to the tradition of the methodologically individualistic analysis of monetary processes.” The use of the adjective “exciting” to describe this book I regard as exaggerated. The Mises Institute has made a PDF available of each volume.
Hazlitt in 1959 was a well-known economist. He had a regular column in Newsweek from 1946 to 1966. The Mises Institute has reprinted those articles in a massive 800-page book, Business Tides. Yet despite his name identification, the economic guild successfully blacked out references to Hazlitt’s book on Keynes. I never recall seeing a footnote to the book in any academic economic article other than those published in Austrian school journals.
The economists’ academic guild never took Hazlitt seriously. After all, Hazlitt did not go to college. Keynes did go to college, but he did not major in economics. He majored in mathematics. That certainly did not in any way hamper his capture of the academic guild after 1945.

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Clint Eastwood’s ‘Richard Jewell’ Movie Is Remarkably Libertarian

Posted by M. C. on December 21, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/12/20/clint-eastwoods-richard-jewell-reveals-an-appetite-for-libertarian-entertainment/

By

I generally resent recommending art for political reasons. I believe art and beauty transcend ideology and should be judged on aesthetic merit first and foremost. In the case of “Richard Jewell,” however, the unusual point of view moves the film in a novel direction and makes it a compelling standout feature.

Director Clint Eastwood is an avowed libertarian, and “Richard Jewell” is probably the single most self-consciously libertarian film he’s ever made.

Of course, I don’t understand everything about Eastwood’s brand of libertarianism. His support of gun control, for instance, is a major departure from libertarianism. It’s also hard to take his 2012 Chrysler Super Bowl commercial as anything other than support for the Obama auto bailout, even if Eastwood claimed that’s not what he intended. Moreover, the actor/director has endorsed an array of big-government politicians in California.

Still, ‘Richard Jewell’ Is a Libertarian Film

I am going to give Eastwood a pass on all of that, however, because his job isn’t to be consistent. His job is to create compelling cinema, and he delivers that, film after film.

“Richard Jewell” is probably not his strongest work. It leaves little room for suspense and is a bit predictable, in part because we all know the story: Security guard Richard Jewell find a suspicious backpack at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, which turns out to be a bomb that kills two people and injures more than 100. At first heralded as a hero, Jewell soon becomes the FBI’s primary suspect and the target of a media rampage.

It is exquisitely acted, however, with Eastwood’s minimalist directing style shining through. The characters Eastwood introduces are as familiar to the American psyche as they are unusual to meet onscreen: a hard-working and loving, if TV-addicted, single mom; a geeky, libertarian lawyer; an overweight, overzealous copper.

The cop is an interesting stage in the artistic trajectory of the director, whose iconic ’70s role was “Dirty Harry,” the out-of-bounds police officer pursuing rough justice in San Francisco, a city gone awry. My guess is that Eastwood feels more like the libertarian lawyer these days. Nonetheless, the cop he’s created with actor Paul Walter Hauser is highly sympathetic, if flawed.

Clint Eastwood’s Characters Are Recognizable

I can think of two reasons Eastwood continues to create novel but easily recognizable characters. First, he makes films from the point of view of ordinary Americans. Second, he makes libertarian films. Since libertarianism is a very American worldview, one reason blends into the other.

For a film to make a libertarian point, the director must introduce characters that would not figure into your standard “critique of American capitalism” Hollywood drama. Most of the films produced in this country today are ideological and amount to some sort of soft Marxism. It’s hard to imagine that in different hands, Jewell’s persona would morph into anything other than a villain or an unfortunate victim of circumstances, but in Eastwood’s reading, he is an individual in his own right.

The American film industry can make an anarchist — or wannabe anarchist — film such as “Bonnie and Clyde” or “V for Vendetta.” That’s admirable, because anarchist cinema is too important to be left to the Spaniards and Ukrainians. Or the Russians, for that matter.

Libertarianism is right next door to anarchy, but somehow not many artists are interested in making films representing that outlook. The pent-up demand for this type of entertainment has surfaced since the emergence of the Tea Party in the beginning of President Barack Obama’s first term. Ten years later, there’s finally a movie about healthy, vocal mistrust of the state and the media, and the tension between respect for authority and individual autonomy.

Filmmakers Should Explore More Libertarian Themes

Nobody in the world can possibly make a film like that except for American artists, and out of all big-name directors in America, Eastwood is the only one who picks up this opportunity.

I am not arguing that American filmmakers should be producing libertarian-themed work because it’s a potential money-maker. I am not arguing they should fill this niche because it suits my political agenda — which, to be sure, it does, even if I’m not strictly speaking a libertarian.

In any event, I can point to movies made by true-blue lefties that inadvertently make conservative points. HBO’s “Chernobyl” is one obvious example, albeit that mini-series went awry because of the creators’ insistence on authenticity, which led them to rely on sources hostile to socialism. More generally, however, good art transcends artist intentions, and a good artist allows his art to lead him into places he wouldn’t dare visit alone.

American filmmakers should try to work with libertarian themes because these creators are in an ideal position to explore them, and taking that kind of risk would lead their craft in a new, interesting direction. We’ve all seen filmmakers’ cookie-cutter wokeness. Show us something new. Ars gratia artis.

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9 Books Rory Gilmore And Jess Mariano Read Together On ...

 

 

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Reindeer Games – Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on December 21, 2019

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/reindeer-games/#more-11453′

James Howard Kunstler

The WashPo staffers had barely finished toasting “merry impeachmas” — and then quickly deleting the incriminating tweet + photo that signaled their self-owned chagrin — when the implications of the day’s solemn work started sifting through those quarters of the alt-news media where the chronically self-owned don’t dare to go, or even look: Nancy Pelosi and her too-clever-by-half Lawfare grunts had engineered a Hanging Chad Impeachment.

Apparently, Mrs. Pelosi wants to play Hide the Salami with the impeachment bill. She invoked some slippery procedure to stash it where the sun don’t shine in the hope that the senate won’t be able to follow through with its duty to try the very charges set out in the bill. How’s that gonna go over when the details are actually sorted out?

So far, there are just opinions a’plenty. One was offered by Noah Feldman of Harvard, the very fellow who testified last week fervidly in favor of impeachment before Mr. Nadler’s Judiciary Committee. He wrote, in a Bloomberg op-ed, that the action would signify that the president had not, in fact, been impeached, that it would only be so if the bill were conveyed to the senate. The issue of conveyance looms large in the present kerfuffle. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sweden: The Wages of Self-Loathing Is Civil War – American Thinker

Posted by M. C. on December 21, 2019

The Islamist elements have most of the hand grenades in civilian possession, principally the M75 hand grenade from the former Yugoslavia.  Hand grenade attacks in Sweden peaked at 40 in 2016.  The Islamists also have more explosives on hand.

Swedish truck-maker Scania, a Mr. Leif Ostling, has said Sweden is headed for civil war because of the problem of its violent migrants who have no inclination to integrate into Swedish society.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/12/sweden_the_wages_of_selfloathing_is_civil_war.html

By David Archibald

The Danes have put extra resources into controlling the country’s links to Sweden because of bombs going off in Denmark due to people coming from Sweden.  The people from Sweden are Islamist criminals.  The Swedish government reacted to the Danish move by calling the Danes Nazis.  Swedish society has changed for the worse, and the Swedish people are aware of what they have lost.

All this is known, but what is interesting is that a former head of the Swedish truck-maker Scania, a Mr. Leif Ostling, has said Sweden is headed for civil war because of the problem of its violent migrants who have no inclination to integrate into Swedish society.  As a successful businessman, his views can’t be dismissed as being from some sort of antisocial loon living in his mother’s basement.

This raises the question: how do you have a civil war in this day and age?  Having a civil war is aspirational, but is it achievable?

The population of Sweden is now 10.1 million, of which 8% are of the Islamist persuasion.  The first question is, who owns the guns, and how many are there?

This site says civilians in Sweden are estimated to hold 2,296,000 guns, legally and illegally, of which about half are rifles.  There is a big hunting tradition in Sweden.  As of the year 2011, licenced firearms per 100 head of population was 6.5, and registered guns per 100 people was 18.9.  So the average gun-owner has three of them.

The Swedish government is thinking along the same lines.  They are currently trying to restrict weapons use by hunters.  Magazines and ammunition are to be registered with the police and be kept apart from the weapons.

The Islamist elements have most of the hand grenades in civilian possession, principally the M75 hand grenade from the former Yugoslavia.  Hand grenade attacks in Sweden peaked at 40 in 2016.  The Islamists also have more explosives on hand.  In the first nine months of 2019, there were 97 explosions in Sweden.  Even the BBC has noticed.  A litany of horrors could be written about Sweden, with all the murders and rapes and knifings and so on, but just consider that there is an explosion just about every second day.

The defense forces in Sweden have 139,180 firearms, and the police a further 38,000.

All in all, there are plenty of guns to go round to have a civil war with.  This won’t be a brutish affair conducted with knives and sticks.

But how will it play out? A t the moment, the Islamists attack police stations, control no-go areas and enclaves, and are not sufficiently discouraged from these activities by the police.  Public opinion is becoming less tolerant of the situation.  In terms of the politics, leftists won the last election, in September 2018, and the Social Democrats retained control of the government.  Their main opposition is the Sweden Democrats, whom the prime minister has called “an extremist and racist party.”  In a recent poll, the Social Democrats are at 22% support, and the Sweden Democrats are more popular at 24%.

A sign of the shift in public opinion is the fact that the leader of the Moderate Party, with 70 out of the 349 seats in the Swedish parliament, has apologized on Facebook to all those who had criticized the country’s immigration policies over the years.  The shifting winds of public opinion will encourage a crackdown on the Islamist enclaves, which in turn enrages the Islamists, and they are likely to respond with more attacks on the police and other public institutions.

How we get to civil war is that the government reaction to the escalating violence is likely to lag too far behind events and public opinion.  And then an officer in the armed forces will have his wife or daughter killed and lead his unit in taking over the parliament building.  Nobody in the police force will stop him, because the police have been taking the brunt of the Islamist violence for decades.

The next phase will be the reaction of the lefties running Germany, France, and the European Union.  The yellow vests have been protesting in France for over a year now.  Early on, they were surprised to see European Union decals on French armored personnel0carriers.  It seems that Macron and Merkel have conspired to create a French-German force to put down insurrections in Europe.  To get to Sweden, this force would have to pass through Denmark, and the Danes are likely to stop them.  If that fails, any armored column is unlikely to get across the Oresund Bridge that connects Denmark and Malmö in Sweden.  The Swedes make good antitank weapons.

Yes, you can have a civil war in this day and age.  With respect to Sweden, what can’t go on forever won’t.  If the state does not maintain its monopoly on violence, the state ceases to exist.

People can have a short memory for trials and tribulations when they have been civilized and comfortable for a while.  Across the border in Norway, the Norwegians had a bad time in WW2, with near starvation conditions.  So in the 1950s, they built grain storage to last them at least a year, in the manner of Joseph’s advice to the Egyptian pharaoh.  Two generations later, all the pain had been forgotten, and the grain silos were converted to student accommodations.  The pain of Sweden’s coming civil war won’t be forgotten as quickly.

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LAWLESS SWEDEN: Lone migrant youths turn shopping centre ...

 

 

 

 

 

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JOHN KIRIAKOU: James Comey’s Interview on Fox News Screams Out for Correction – Consortiumnews

Posted by M. C. on December 21, 2019

And the truth of the matter is that the FISA court isn’t really a court at all.  It meets in secret.  A “defendant” has no idea that the government is asking for a warrant against him.  The defendant has no attorney to represent his interests before the court. 

The FISA judges have to know they are being played. The truth is that if they make waves they loose their jobs.

The FISA court has become such an embarrassment to those who pay attention that it has to pretend they care.

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/19/john-kiriakou-james-comeys-interview-on-fox-news-screams-out-for-correction/

By John Kiriakou

Former FBI Director James Comey gave an interview this week to journalist Chris Wallace on Fox News in which he made one of the most disingenuous and dissembling statements I’ve heard in years, one that screams out for correction and real Congressional oversight.

When asked about Justice Department Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz’s report, which found “17 significant errors and omissions” by the FBI when it began investigating alleged Russian involvement with the 2016 Trump campaign and it applied for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, Comey said that he had been “overconfident” when he defended the FBI’s use of FISA.

Overconfident! Comey ignored the fact that the FBI repeatedly renewed the warrant against Page, whom the FBI suspected was working for Russian intelligence, even if it had no evidence to indicate that was the case.  He downplayed the fact that an FBI attorney illegally changed an FBI report to indicate that Page was not working for the CIA, when the FBI knew for a fact that he was.

Perhaps most disingenuously, Comey told Wallace that, “I thought the FBI had gone about this in a thoughtful and appropriate way.  He’s (Horowitz) right.  I was wrong.  I was overconfident as director in our procedures…It’s incredibly hard to get a FISA.”

Comey’s Lie About a FISA Warrant 

Even more importantly, at least for the American people as a whole, is Comey’s lie that “it’s incredibly hard to get a FISA.”  It’s actually incredibly easy to get a FISA.  Over its 33-year lifespan, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has issued 33,942 warrants.  It has denied 12.  In fact, between the court’s creation in 1986 and 2003, it didn’t deny a single request for a warrant.  Those numbers simply don’t support Comey’s odd contention that it’s “incredibly hard” to get a FISA.  He’s lying to us… Read the rest of this entry »

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The Best Optical Illusion of the Year for 2019

Posted by M. C. on December 20, 2019

https://kottke.org/19/12/the-best-optical-illusion-of-the-year-for-2019

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