Utopia, you are standing in it!

Written by Joe Geary

On Sunday, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn admitted that his party has “a real problem” with antisemitism, while launching a website to educate the party’s members and supporters about bigotry.

Called “No Room for anti-Semites, We’re Already Full,” the website provides “some basic tools to understand antisemitism so that we can hide it better.”

The website includes a video of Corbyn denouncing antisemitism in his party. He apologized for the “hurt that has been caused to many Jewish people,” admitting that attempts to hide the antisemitism in his party have been bungled.

Corbyn said that he spent his entire life campaigning for a multicultural society. He credits the Jewish people for being at the “heart of the Labour Party” but that the concerns of the Jewish community in the U.K. could now be dismissed, given that Labour had a new much larger block of voters.

People…

Emma Vere-Jones – according to a website in that name  – describes herself as a journalist, author and copywriter.   What distinctions she draws among those different forms of writing are a moot point, assuming she is the same Emma Vere-Jones who has brought a bunch of political pamphleteers to account as “advertisers” for disseminating material with which she disagrees.

Pamphleteering – we should not forget – was an early form of journalistm and in the days before the advent of the periodical press, pamphleteers were the world’s proto-journalists.

As a paper platform for a spectrum of religious fanatics, eccentrics, social commentators, and satirists, the pamphlet evolved as a weapon of propaganda (forged between the fledgling press and Star Chamber censorship) for powerful vested interest groups, political parties, governments – and revolutionists.

The Guttenberg revolution of the Renaissance provided the spark and the Reformation of the sixteenth century…

How many times can you say the same thing over and over and over again?

When it comes to the minimum wage, we may never know the answer.

No matter how often new research is produced showing that low-skilled workers are hurt when politicians cut off the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, politicians persist in pushing for bad policy.

Many state already have increased minimum wages, and the “Fight for $15” crowd wants a nationwide increase.

So let’s explain, for the umpteenth time, why this is misguided.

We have lots of data and anecdotes to review, so let’s begin with some scholarly research from Europe.

Here are some results from a study in Denmark, where the minimum wage increases when workers reach age 18, at which point many of them lose their jobs (h/t: Marginal Revolution).

This paper estimates the long-run impact of youth minimum wages…

Two months ago, I pointed out that San Francisco’s housing crisis was a “learnable moment” because some folks on the left actually now understand the negative consequences of government intervention.

Now I’m wondering if we might actually have a learnable moment on the issue of minimum wages for Crazy Bernie.

The Vermont socialist is experiencing something akin to what it’s like to be an entrepreneur or business owner. He’s having to generate revenue for his campaign and figure out the best way to allocate the funds.

And – surprise, surprise – he doesn’t want to pay above-market wages. Which makes him a giant hypocrite since he wants to use government coercion to impose higher minimum wages on the private sector.

Professor Art Carden highlights three things that Bernie should learn from this experience.

Bernie Sanders is having trouble with his unionized–and apparently underpaid–labor force. …the Sanders campaign…

The media went nuts when former Greens leader, Bob Brown turned on a wind farm in his backyard. Rampant hypocrisy, was just the first of the charges levelled at a man renowned for his hatred of reliable and affordable electricity.

In the result, the Liberal/National Coalition were very grateful that Dr Bob’s hatred of coal led him and his acolytes on a protest tour of Far North Queensland during the Federal election campaign in May, where Bob and a bunch of sandal wearing troglodytes railed against Adani’s proposed Carmichael mine.

Locals were ready to lynch him and his entourage (pubs refused to serve them beer) and, thanks to Bob’s job and economy wrecking stance, voters took their baseball bats to the heavily green tinged Labor party, returning the Coalition to Federal government.

The party that he founded, the Australian Greens enjoy enormous financial support from renewable energy rent seekers and…

Charles Plosser’s review paper entitled ‘Understanding real business cycles‘ is a must for all those interested in the modern theories of the business cycles. A major advantage of the paper that it is written in plain English, it has a well-organized structure and summarizes by giving a clear vision of future development. Some of the most important suggestions of the paper:

1. Keynesian macro is not a theory judged by the modern choice-theoretic standards. Keynesian models had significant empirical success but failed to trace the macro-level back to solid microfoundations.
2. The aim of general equilibrium modelling is to help us to understand the role played by optimization and equilibrating tendencies at the agent-level. It makes no sense to postulate a disequilibrium framework or market failures before understanding the contribution of a general macroeconomic equilibrium.  Large-scale fluctuations may be triggered even in the absence of market failures.
3. RBC-theory has common…

In last year’s excellent book, The Wizard and the Prophet, Charles Mann juxtaposed two polemics on the environment in the 1940s during the turning point of agricultural development: Norman Borlaug and William Vogt. Borlaug (the Wizard) took the scientific approach to innovate and develop new tools to solve problems facing agriculture. Vogt (the Prophet and arguably the founder of the modern environmental movement) would see an environmental problem as a reason for man to pull back and let the planet heal itself.

To this day, both approaches (to innovate or to pull back and take precaution) have defined environmental debates. There is no doubt which side I fall on. Borlaug’s scientific route has allowed humanity to thrive over the last 70 years. The Green Revolution in agriculture led to global economic expansions as abundance led to generations of risk-takers being able to leave the land and develop other opportunities…

This brilliant map by Norse Redditor PisseGuri82 explores the question, “When were the world’s current international borders first defined?” Today’s international borders loom large in the consciousness of people around the world. Ask anyone to imagine a world map, and the first thing that they will think of is the outlines of various modern nation-states. But that was not always the case. Far from being an innate feature of our planet’s landscape, or even having significant historical basis, most of the world’s international borders were only created in the 20th century, and they came into existence with only the stroke of a pen.

Below is the cartographer’s description of their process:

Researching this has been painstaking, because a lot of the sources are fuzzy. Even the facts are fuzzy, different cultures have had different systems for defining a ruler’s area of influence and which rulers together form a larger entity. National…

Two animal activists thought they were doing the world a favour by sneaking into a home and releasing a caged bird. But it ended in disaster.

By Ben Graham, News.com.au

A seasoned veterinary nurse has hit out at the “despicable” actions of two animal rights activists who snuck into her mother’s home to “rescue” a caged bird — which was then fatally mauled by a cat.

Georgia Rowe, a Wildlife Information, Rescue and Education Service volunteer from Mosman on Sydney’s north shore, wrote a lengthy post for the Mosman Daily Facebook page saying she had been in the UK visiting “old and unwell relatives” when the pair struck.

She wrote that on Saturday, at about 9.30am, the pair — a young woman and a man, according to a neighbour’s description — entered the home via two locked gates.

It was then that the activists stole her non-releasable rescue rainbow lorikeet…

A new Prime Minister is expected to be appointed tomorrow, the day before MPs break up for the summer recess. With just 14 weeks remaining before the current Article 50 deadline, the Commons is then not due to meet for almost six weeks. This creates some very obvious scrutiny gaps. Meg Russell and Daniel Gover suggest that pressures for a Commons ‘recall’ during the summer recess seem likely, but that this will revive difficult questions about who can, and should be able to, recall MPs.

On Thursday, MPs are due to leave Westminster for the summer recess. Yet, barring mishaps, a new Prime Minister is expected to be installed in Downing Street only the preceding day, making immediate parliamentary scrutiny of the new government’s key decisions all but impossible. An added pressure, of course, comes from the Brexit context. The current Article 50 deadline for the UK to depart…

i don’t believe this. Not in response to condemnation by non Greens, only after backlash from within. If Green members did not like it why did they run it.

Greens co-leader James Shaw has said sorry for a Green Party attack ad that featured an exaggerated voice-over of Simon Bridges.

The ad was pulled after massive backlash from Green Party members who said the ad was mocking Bridges’ accent. pic.twitter.com/MPvWyJ3W8i

— Jason Walls (@Jasonwalls92) July 23, 2019

Who approved that crap

Was it Gareth ‘Plotter and Schemer’ Hughes?
Don’t forget they ran this in a poll week. Want to bet it makes the TV News at 6? Mission accomplished!