Extra Credits
Published on 22 Nov 2018This series is brought to you by World of Tanks PC. Check out the game at https://redir.wargaming.net/z3ehuthn/… and use the code ORLIK for extra goodies.
Poland is threatened in 1939 not just by the Nazis, but by its own precarious geography between Germany and Soviet Russia. Edward Rydz-Śmigły spreads the Polish cavalry and tanks as thin as he has to around the border…
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November 23, 2018
Defense of Poland – The Battle of the Border – Extra History – #1
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“These are deficits of choice, not necessity”
The federal government released its fall economic statement the other day. The contents would not really have been a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention since the last election, as Andrew Coyne explains:
The 2018 fall economic statement begins with a puzzle. Economic growth, it trumpets, is strong — the strongest in the G7 in, er, 2017. Unemployment is at a 40-year low; capacity utilization is back to pre-recession levels; profits are up; wages are growing faster than they have in eight years.
All this good news has produced a bumper crop of revenues to the federal treasury: an average of roughly $5.5-billion more annually over the next couple of years than was projected in the spring budget. Yet deficits are now projected to be … higher than expected — at $19.6 billion and $18.1 billion, respectively, about 10 per cent over forecast.
What explains this surprising result? Simple: as it has done throughout its tenure, the Trudeau government took the revenue windfall, and spent it — every last dollar and then some.
This is what the government calls “carefully managing deficits over the medium term.” It used to talk about reducing or even eliminating deficits. Now it seems devoted to doing whatever it takes to keep them in the $20 billion range, in perpetuity.
To be sure, the current set of projections, like its predecessors, shows deficits declining majestically in later years. But somehow in the here and now they never do. Once upon a time, this was supposed to be owing to a shortfall in revenues, the fruit of the Harper government’s supposed obsession with austerity.
By now this is not even pretended. The last Harper budget projected revenues for the current fiscal year at $326.9 billion, enough for a small surplus. The latest estimate has them at $328.9 billion — yet the deficit stands at $18.1 billion. Even allowing for a couple of billion dollars in accounting adjustments, it’s clear what is going on. These are deficits of choice, not necessity.
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The Aggregate Demand Curve
Marginal Revolution University
Published on 18 Apr 2017This wk: Put your quantity theory of money knowledge to use in understanding the aggregate demand curve.
Next wk: Use your knowledge of the AD curve to dig into the long-run aggregate supply curve.
The aggregate demand-aggregate supply model, or AD-AS model, can help us understand business fluctuations. In this video, we’ll focus on the aggregate demand curve.
The aggregate demand curve shows us all of the possible combinations of inflation and real growth that are consistent with a specified rate of spending growth. The dynamic quantity theory of money (M + v = P + Y), which we covered in a previous video, can help us understand this concept.
We’ll walk you through an example by plotting inflation on the y-axis and real growth on the x-axis — helping us draw an aggregate demand curve!
Next week, we’ll combine our new knowledge on the AD curve with the long-run aggregate supply curve. Stay tuned!
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QotD: Inactivist bumper stickers
I’ve received several hundred suggestions for inactivist bumper-sticker slogans and, as befits the situation, I’ve been slow to read them. Still, I like some of them quite a bit:
Visualize me ignoring you.
How about “let’s not.”
Don’t honk if you can’t be bothered.
Don’t Act, NOW!
If not now, whenever.
Leave well enough alone
Slacking: It’s not just for kids.
YOU Save the Whales!
Practice Random Acts of Self-Restraint.
Ask Not.
Future Site of Political Statement.And so on.
But there’s a problem. Many readers segued too easily from celebrating inactivism to championing outright sloth. For example, “Practice Random Acts of Self-Restraint” is a fine inactive motto. But “They can have my channel changer when they pry it out of my cold, dead hand,” while very funny is off point. “Don’t Mess With Stasis,” doesn’t quite rhyme but it’s got the right idea. “Think globally, act loafally,” meanwhile, has the wrong idea — except insofar as it mocks people with stupid bumper stickers.
The funny thing is that inactivists are actually very active people. I would bet that — this is a broad generalization-the folks who find inactivism politically appealing probably work harder and are more successful then people who find conventional activism attractive. Inactivists didn’t boycott the Million Mom March simply because they had better things to do. They stayed home because they believe the Million Mom March was a vast, peripatetic parade of propaganda. Inactivists don’t fail to mobilize solely because we’d rather watch a rerun of Matlock than chant for vegetable rights and peace at city hall. We actually don’t believe in vegetable rights. We want our carrots to remain as chattel.
I agree that sloth is funny. And I suppose that’s why so many people want Homer Simpson to become the inactivist spokesperson. I laugh whenever I hear Homer Simpson speak admiringly of Teamsters: “Oh, I always wanted to be a Teamster. So lazy and surly… mind if I relax next to you?” And his campaign slogan when he ran for garbage commissioner was pretty good. “Can’t someone else do it?” The best line from that episode was when he told Springfield voters “Animals are crapping in our houses and we’re picking it up! Did we lose a war?” But still, Homer’s wrong when he tells his kids “You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is: Never try.”
Jonah Goldberg, “Let History Come To You”, National Review, 2002-07-24.
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November 22, 2018
This is why tax cuts are always criticized for benefitting the rich
Rebecca Zeines and Jon Miltimore explain why newspaper headlines and TV anchors always seem to decry any tax cut as being disproportionally beneficial to the wealthy:
But crucial facts are often missing in these articles. As a recent Bloomberg piece explained, two key points tend to be overlooked in articles written by media outlets and progressive tax proponents:
- The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent).
- The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of total individual income taxes.
These numbers date back to 2016 but remain applicable in 2018.
These data show that the bottom 50 percent of US taxpayers paid just 3 percent of total income taxes in 2016, while the top 50 percent accounted for 97 percent.
Here is a wonderful visual representation of this dynamic, courtesy of Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute:
There is a clear correlation between economic freedom and prosperity, and tax climate is a key component of economic freedom.
Economist Dan Mitchell explains it best: Heavy taxation destroys entrepreneurship. The more money is taxed out of the private sector, the less is available for investment, development, and worker compensation (recall that after Trump’s tax bill was enacted, many businesses raised workers’ wages and offered bonuses).
Efforts to improve America’s tax climate are consistently and predictably derided as tax cuts for “the rich.” But, as the above diagram shows, it’s quite impossible to offer people a comparatively huge tax cut when they’re paying a comparatively tiny percentage of income taxes.
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Perseus – Medusa – Extra Mythology – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 19 Nov 2018Join the Patreon community! http://bit.ly/EMPatreon
Perseus is not intimidated by the grey women and their eyeball, or by Hermes’s complicated directions, or by Medusa, or by a winged horse sprouting out of Medusa’s blood, or by Andromeda’s boyfriend, or by his own dad.
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The apparently unexpected backlash over cancelling a French-language university in Ontario
I suspect a lot of the uproar is actually just target-of-opportunity stuff to justify criticism of Ontario premier Doug Ford. Chris Selley points out that until the announcement, there wasn’t actually a lot of support for the new university among French-speaking Ontarians:
You would never know it since Thursday, when the Ontario government cancelled plans to open a new French-language university in Toronto, but those plans were not universally beloved. A lot of people hated the location. In an op-ed in Le Droit, University of Ottawa political scientist François Charbonneau complained it was being built to serve future francophone immigrants, not proper Franco-Ontarians in a community where they’ve been established for generations.
He called it “a historic mistake that perfectly illustrates what it means to be a minority: to have no power over one’s own destiny and to be dependent on ideological rantings with no democratic legitimacy.”
Higher-education consultant Alex Usher was among many who dismissed enrollment projections for the university as “fantasy.” Writing on the Higher Education Strategies blog, Usher called a recent survey of francophone Ontario high school students the “worst piece of social science I have ever seen.” It found lots of interest in attending the new university, but didn’t bother asking about their interest in existing bilingual alternatives like Laurentian University and the U of O.
To language hawks, bilingualism is the enemy: French always loses out in a budget crunch, and it does nothing to advance the right to live one’s life solely in French. Trouble is, very few students at French-language Ontario high schools are remotely interested in living their lives solely in French.
These are all things Premier Doug Ford and his ministers might have mentioned if they hoped to leave an impression other than that Ontario francophones just aren’t worth the money. They might wisely have chosen not to axe the French Language Commissioner in the same fiscal update, transferring its complaint-resolution powers to the ombudsman but orphaning its advocacy mandate. Finance minister Vic Fedeli hasn’t even said how much of its $1.2 million budget he hopes to recoup.
But they did what they did, all at once, and they said it was all about saving money. I suspect the whirlwind they reaped came as a surprise.
Good heavens, though, what wind.
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Shipping Up To Boston/Enter Sandman – Bagpipe Cover (Goddesses of Bagpipe x The Snake Charmer)
TheSnakeCharmer
Published on 16 Mar 2018Its St. Patrick’s day and i have something very special for you!! Bringing a mix of Irish tunes and metal for you on the Bagpipes with 3 Female Bagpipers all the way from US, Scotland and India. We love DropKick Murphys Shipping up to Boston and we’re also metal heads so we chose to mix both the awesome songs as a St. Patrick’s day song !!
SHARE , COMMENT, LIKE – Tell us what you think 🙂PATREON – https://www.patreon.com/thesnakecharmer
Buy Now:
iTUNES – https://goo.gl/VD4RqZ
GOOGLE PLAY – https://goo.gl/kvbfs8
SPOTIFY – https://goo.gl/SqoSYPBagpipers :
Archy Jay – (The Snake Charmer)
Jane Espie (Phantom Piper) https://www.youtube.com/user/JaneEspie
Chelsea Joy – (Dame of Drones) https://goo.gl/PBr2aUVideo Credits :
Videographer 1 – Harald Weinkum
Videographer 2 – Neoric Productions
Editor – Karan KatiyarMusic :
Harald Weinkum: bass, guitars, keyboards
George Dum: drums
Mixed and mastered by George Dum at Liquidfish Studios,
Los AngelesFor bookings – archyj03@gmail.com
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QotD: They’re not “trade wars”, they’re “economic suicide bombings”
… this recent Facebook post by Steve Horwitz:
Instead of “trade wars,” let’s call them what they really are: economic suicide bombings.
Indeed so.
Like physical bombings, the economic suicide bombings that are tariffs and other trade restrictions create particular jobs by destroying real wealth. Those who then resupply the wealth that is destroyed applaud the suicide bombings, and tirelessly repeat ancient, absurd dogmas to justify the bombings. But unlike physical bombings, the victims of economic suicide bombings are largely unseen and, hence, ignored.
The people – and they are many – who cling to the dogma of protectionism do so as a matter of faith. This dogma cannot withstand the scrutiny of reason or be justified by any competent observation of reality. Yet the uncivilized and destructive religion of protectionism nevertheless flourishes, no doubt in no small part because the narrow interests of a relatively small but politically powerful cabal of producers are served by the public taking to be true all the mysticism of protectionism and its alleged miracles.
Whether or not Jesus miraculously created abundance out of the scarcity of five loaves and two fish I will not here say. I am, however, quite confident that when the likes of Donald Trump, Peter Navarro, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, and Sherrod Brown promise to perform a similar miracle – that is, to create abundance out of artificially contrived scarcity – they are either delusional about their own powers or are cynically playing their congregations for fools.
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2018-10-12.
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November 21, 2018
The wisdom of Zim Tzu, post-Bear-mauling edition
After every game, even a putrid excuse for a game like the Sunday night contest in Chicago, the NFL requires that all head coaches make the time to talk with the local (and sometimes national) sports media about what the hell just happened. Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer is rumoured not to enjoy this particular part of his job, and as a result tends to carefully craft his words to cloak their real importance from the smelly, small-minded hoi-polloi he has to face from the rostrum. Fortunately, the Daily Norseman employs the world’s top expert in Zimspeak, Herr Doktor Professor Theodore “Ted” Glover, BA, MA, Ph.D, etc. Every week, Herr Glover works tirelessly to decipher, decode, decrypt, and de-everything-else required to dig down to the primal essence of coach Zimmer’s koans for we weak-armed, weak-willed, and weak-minded normies.
The Vikings warrior poet coach dispenses his words of wisdom
ED NOTE: This has bad words. Most of the other things we write on here usually don’t, but this one does. It seems to be a popular bit, so until the law catches up with me, I’m going to keep doing it. Thanks for understanding, and thanks for not reading and not letting your kids read it if bad language isn’t your thing. Hope you enjoy the rest of our articles—Ted
When you’re a warrior poet, you have to be on the lookout for self-fulfilling prophecies from your troops. Self fulfilling prophecies tell you that you can’t do X because of Y, based on past history. You can’t invade Russia in the late summer because of the Russian winter, or that you can’t masturbate without arms, for example. And as much as you tell your troops there is zero correlation between X and Y, because you have a cousin without any arms and he says he did just fine in that department thank you very goddamn much, once your troops believe weird shit happens in Chicago and that you’ll lose, when weird shit does happen in Chicago and you do lose, your troops are almost relieved. But you can’t let them walk around thinking they’re a bunch of no arms whacking reverse Nostradamus fap gods though, because then everything you’ve worked for is lost, and you’re on the street looking for work in someplace other than Cleveland. Yeah, fuck The Land, which is quite possibly the dumbest nickname for any city I’ve ever heard. Except for Green Bay, which is known as the toilet paper capital of the world, and that’s the most accurate nickname for any city ever.
Because you are Zim Tzu, The King In The North, Emperor of the Motor City Feline Tribe, Grounder of Airplanes, Defrocker of Cardinals, Subduer of Equestrian Excrement Consumers, Nightmare of Clan Fromage, Breaker Of Gold Fever, High Septon Of Eagan, Lord Commander Of The Iron Range And Twin Cities, Master Of Fortress TCO, Honorary Elder Of Mankato and Protector Of The Realm.
And when the Great Unwashed want to know how to keep their fears from becoming a real life Ouroboros, you must speak, to calm them and make them throw up their own ass, so you can get things back on track. And that is where we come in, your friends at The Daily Norseman.* We take what is said in the day after a game press conference, regurgitate what is really inferred,** and then everyone can walk away happy with an understanding of what’s to come.***
*I have no friends.
**We do nothing of the kind. The law firm of Franklin, Bash, and Bateman gently reminds you that this is a work of satire, and any and all interpretations are just mindless bullshit that have no inference on actual words of Mike Zimmer, spoken or otherwise, and they can sue you and take Ted for all his money in exorbitant lawyer fees if you try to sue him.
***If you understand any of this, seek professional medical help.
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Allied War Economy During World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special
The Great War
Published on 19 Nov 2018Check Out Supremacy 1914: https://www.supremacy1914.com/index.p…
Financing and supplying the First World War was a huge economic undertaking that influenced the British, French, American and Italian economies profoundly and shaped the global balance of power.
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Statistics Canada’s instrumentalist philosophy
In the Financial Post, Bruce Pardy discusses the motivation behind Statistics Canada’s recently revealed demand for the private financial records of half a million Canadians:
Recently it was revealed that Statistics Canada sought to obtain the private banking information of half a million Canadians without their knowledge or consent. Jennifer Robson, professor of political management at Carleton University, in an interview with the CBC, justified the data sweep on the grounds that governments need this information to make good policy. But don’t be concerned, she said, it is not for ideological purposes, since Statistics Canada is ideologically neutral. That made me laugh. The very idea of policy based on data reflects an instrumentalist belief that governments should solve social problems by political means. That requires an ideological confidence in the administrative state, to which the agency is a handmaiden.
Ideology is not a dirty word. An ideology is merely a worldview, a lens through which to perceive society. Political parties, by definition, each have one (and sometimes extra ones for special occasions). But it is another thing for a public agency to act independently in furtherance of its own ideology while pretending to be neutral.
Statistics Canada’s deep dive into banking records — presently on hold while federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien investigates its legality — appears not to have been directed by government officials but was undertaken on its own initiative. The agency’s decision is consistent with a conviction that the more personal data available to government, the better off we will be; that governments are benevolent; that private financial matters call for public policy management; and that a bigger government is a better government. A commitment to social policy, wrote Milton Friedman “involves the acceptance of the socialist view that political mechanisms, not market mechanisms, are the appropriate way to determine the allocation of scare resources to alternative uses.”
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Testing The Worst Tools On AMAZON
Wranglerstar
Published on 24 Aug 2017Testing The Worst and Most Ridiculous Tools On AMAZON.
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QotD: Occupations and sex differences
Sex differences are a distribution, not a hard, bright line. For example, the women’s world record in the hundred-meter dash is slower than the U.S. high school boys’ record. Men on average are faster than women. But the women at the top of the distribution — those Olympians — are still faster than most men. It would be absurd to say that a woman can’t run the hundred meter in 11 seconds, just because most women can’t. It would be equally absurd to say that men are not, on average, faster than women.
So it’s possible that the distribution of nurturing traits is skewed enough that fewer men will be good at the difficult and emotionally taxing job of providing intimate care for sick and needy people. While there are plenty of health care jobs that don’t require so much direct human interaction, they tend to require more training. And the ability to sit in a classroom and absorb material from a textbook is also a human trait that is unevenly and unfairly distributed. It’s not that no men can succeed in transitioning from old-style “manly” jobs to the pink-collar professions, but that fewer men may be able to do so than we’d like to think.
Megan McArdle, “Some Blue-Collar Workers Probably Shouldn’t Do Pink Jobs”, Bloomberg View, 2017-01-06.
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November 20, 2018
Remy: The Legend of Stan Lee
ReasonTV
Published on 19 Nov 2018Remy recalls a time when experts were claiming “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry,” and how Stan Lee took a stand.
Written and Performed by Remy
Video Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg
Music tracks and background vocals by Ben Karlstrom
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