Utopia, you are standing in it!

It absolutely amazes me that in this day and age there are still people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened. In fact there appears to be an increase of Holocaust deniers.

Some use the picture above, of liberated women in Bergen Belsen as their ‘evidence’ that the Holocaust was a myth. They say of you look at the picture you can see that the women are healthy and seem to be happy. Well of course they were happy, they had just been liberated and they may appear to be healthy, but they are fully covered up and you can’t see the scars and bruises. Additionally some were ‘healthy’ because the human soul and mind is a powerful thing, they just kept going no matter what.

From late 1944, food rations throughout Bergen-Belsen continued to shrink. By early 1945, prisoners would sometimes go without food for days; fresh water was…

The Armistice ending World War I was agreed upon at 5:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918, to come into effect at 11:00 a.m. Paris time (noon German time), for which reason the occasion is sometimes referred to as “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”.

The German Empire consisted of 26 states, each with their own nobility, four constituent kingdoms, six grand duchies, five duchies (six before 1876), seven principalities, three free Hanseatic cities, and one imperial territory. While Prussia was one of four kingdoms in the realm, it contained about two-thirds of Empire’s population and territory, and Prussian dominance had also been constitutionally established, since the King of Prussia was also the German Emperor (German: Kaiser)

In this post I will give a brief summary of the abdications of the German monarchs at the end of the war. Today I will mention the four kingdoms…

That whistling   sound out  of  Wellington  has  come  from the Establishment  as  it  witnesses  a powerful attack   on  the  Reserve Bank. 

One volley has been fired by senior economist Matt Burgess in a research note for the  Wellington-based think-tank,  the  NZ  Initiative.  In Climate of fear: How the Reserve Bank is overstepping its mandate, he documents what he maintains are serious breaches of the RBNZ’s responsibilities as regulator of the financial system, including one instance of misconduct, as it becomes unduly preoccupied with climate change.

A second volley was fired by the NZ Initiative’s chief economist, Eric Crampton, in an article posted by Newsroom.  He raises questions about the RBNZ’s independence from political interference. 

A third has been fired by an experienced business journalist, Jenny Ruth, in an article for Business Desk.  She has questioned the bank governor’s credibility. 

All three refer to the RBNZ’s recent Climate Changed

Were I writing yesterday’s post now I would word some things differently. Yesterday afternoon the Productivity Commission drew my attention to their supplementary paper called “The wider wellbeing effects of immigration” which – despite the title – turns out to be mainly about core economic dimensions of the issue, including a substantive discussion of some of the macroeconomic arguments I have been making. Strangely, there had been no cross-referencing to this document in the parts of the body of the main report where, as discussed yesterday, these issues were briefly discussed. I had seen an earlier draft of the macroeconomic bit of this supplementary paper and had provided some comments on it to the Commission.

Awareness of that supplementary paper does not change my main concern about the overall draft report. There is still little or no compelling analysis or insight on any of wider economic issues, no arguments or…

Richard Nixon resigned the presidency 36 years ago today–the only American president to have done so.

He left the White House on August 9, 1974, to avoid certain impeachment and conviction. By then it had become clear that Nixon had ordered senior aides to cover up the Watergate scandal’s signal crime, the burglary in June 1972 at Democratic national headquarters.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, my new book about media-driven myths, forcing Nixon’s resignation “required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.”

But in the years since 1974, the dominant popular narrative of the Watergate scandal has become the heroic-journalist meme, the widely held notion that the investigative reporting of two young, tireless reporters for the Washington Postled the way in bringing down