Steyn and Hannity discuss the "fiscal cliff"

P*ssing on the poor - Calif. Teachers' video pushes class warfare

This animated video fairy tale (narrated by Ed Asner) purporting to "explain poverty" has one segment depicting a rich fat cat peeing on the less fortunate. Classy!  Obama will be proud.



[From The Blaze]

Big Data: Is Hayek Dead?

Proponents of “Big Data” hail it as a “managerial revolution”. What would Friedrich Hayek have said?

Terence Corcoran:

... Many decades ago, The Economist declared "Keynes is dead,"

... As we know, Keynes was resurrected ...

... Given the state of government policy around the world, it's beginning to look like it's time to ask the question: Is Hayek dead?

... Hayek's warning was aimed at the menace of central planning, but it likely also applies to big data corporate planning. Regardless of volume and quality, he said, data and statistics are about the past and are notoriously incapable of predicting even the smallest of changes in economic behaviour. Big data may have uses, but a management revolution based on terabytes of data and YouTube views? Let's hope Hayek isn't dead yet.

This also brings to mind “climate change”. Whether applied to directing an economy or managing “climate change” (which inevitably leads to attempts at directing the global economy) central planning is fatally flawed.  Both climate change and economics have in common: 

Huge complexity   |
Faulty theory       |
Faulty data          |  >> Disastrous policy
Faulty models       |

Hayek is alive and well.

How Mark Carney wooed his wife

From a wag in the comments to a Telegraph story on Mark Carney:

... By all accounts she's one of the world's great champagne socialists, so I presume the words "I am a banker and have ambitions to make myself exceedingly rich" were sufficient for her to immedately drop her knickers. ...

Speaking of "champagne socialists", the Telegraph had reported:

Mrs Carney, who is the vice–president of Canada 2020, a Left–wing think-tank, is the sister of Lady Rotherwick, whose estate in Oxfordshire plays host to the Cornbury rock festival, which has been attended by David Cameron at least four times.

Andrew Weaver's political science

In past posts I've referred to prominent UVic climate 'science' Prof Andrew Weaver's field as 'political' science.

Well, now I see he's made it official.

Mark Carney walks on water because ...

... he's best buds with a fawning pack of Canadian media party suck-ups.  BC Blue compiles the evidence from the Twitterverse and beyond (here and here).  Implicated are the National Post's John Ivison, Maclean's Paul Wells, CP's Bruce Cheadle ... and more.

Why does the Jewish-owned media hate Israel?

Lawrence Solomon in his NatPo piece, The Jewish press and Israel, refers to a tweet from Rupert Murdoch which asks: Why Is Jewish owned press so consistently anti-Israel in every crisis?

Naturally Murdoch got leftist blow-back:

Many in the left-wing press immediately pounced on Murdoch’s comment, claiming, as a Guardian writer did, that Murdoch had “slipped into an anti-Semitic usage.”

A CNN commentator called Murdoch’s tweet “beyond outrageous to offensive, truly offensive … reviving the old canard about Jews controlling the media.”

Solomon defends Murdoch: noting that many of the largest, most influential media outlets (including NYT, LATimes, Chicago Trib, NBC, CBS, Viacom, MTV and ABC) are a) Jewish-owned and b) anti-Israel.

Anti-Semites who believe Jewish ownership leads the press to show favouritism toward Jews haven’t been paying attention. The New York Times during the 1930s and 1940s played down the Nazi atrocities, burying stories of concentration camps and Jewish mass murders in small stories in the paper’s interior. In recent decades, the Times has been consistently anti-Israel.

... Anti-Semites looking for media coverage sympathetic to Israel would be hard-pressed to find it in the Jewish-led press (Mort Zuckerman’s New York Daily News and U.S. News and World Report being notable exceptions). The narrative the anti-Semites are most comfortable with, ironically, comes from Jews.