Spooky Jessica

Over drinks last night, Doctor Yowie first raised a toast to the Collins Street specialist who confirmed the Professor's robust good health, then wondered if there might not be some brain damage after all. It was mention of blonde sort-of economist Jessica Irvine (and several bottles of Tasmanian pinot noir) that prompted his sarcasm.

"What did they see in her at News Ltd!"

"You don't know her unique qualification?"

"Unqualified credulity?"

"Well, there's that, but I suspect having a dad who runs ASIO didn't hurt either"

Could this be true? If so, let us hope in the interests of the nation's security that Jessica is one piece of fruit who fell very far from David Irvine's tree

UPDATE: Nobody could claim Jessica a fit candidate for the intelligence business, so whoever hired her at News Ltd is stuck with his recruit until Col Allan pauses between mouthfuls of fairy penguin and roast infant to fire him. Jessica explains girlynomics:

5. What’s the most unusual problem you’ve ever solved with economics?
You’re talking about my weight loss articles, aren’t you? Through doing Bridges’ program last year I encountered the most magical of all statistics - more exciting that the budget balance, the jobless rate or foreign debt. It’s the figure for the calorie deficit you need to build over time to shed one kilogram of fat. The figures is about 7,500 calories - and is roughly the calorie content of one kilo of fat. Weight issues are all about the supply of calories to the body versus the demand the body has for them. Every day you need a certain amount of calories to carry out the body’s basic needs - growing eyelashes, keeping your heart beating and firing your muscles to brush your teeth.

For someone of my age height and weight it is around 1500 calories (you can find out your own ‘‘basal metabolic rate’’ from any number of online calculators including this). So every day you get to eat a certain amount of  without putting on weight (for me, 1500). If you eat more, the body stores the excess energy in fat cells. If you eat less energy than your body needs - either because you reduce your intake, increase your energy needs through exercise, or both - you lose weight. Once you build a cumulative calorie deficit of 7,500 calories, you will lose about one kilo of weight. BAM! Once you know this, you can make better decisions about what to eat and how much to exercise you need to do to keep you at the weight you’re happy with. It’s more accounting than economics, but it works.

Jessica's Jerk

HARD though it is to believe, there really is someone dimmer than blonde economics writer Jessica Irvine, who penned this analysis before being seduced to the dark ranks of Rupert Murdoch's scribblers:

The tax backdown negotiated by Julia Gillard ended up costing the Australian taxpayer about $60 billion over the coming decade. Figures released by Treasury in February 2011 showed the original ''resources super profits tax'' would have made about $99 billion between 2012-13 and 2020-21. The revised minerals resource rent tax was forecast to earn $38.5 billion. A backdown, to be sure, but a tax nevertheless.

So, has the prospect of higher taxation killed mining investment and jobs? Hardly.

And who is sillier than the authoress of that article? Why, the genius who poached Irvine from Fairfax, bestowed upon her the title of National Economics Editor, and did both those things while simultaneously laying off intelligent News Ltd journalists.

Come on, who ever you are who did the poaching, 'fess up.

 

Blonde On Blonde On Blonde

DOCTOR YOWIE says it will take him at least an hour to wriggle free of domestic obligations and report to the first tee, so there is yet time to see what wisdom Australia’s quality journalists have been distilling for weekend readers. At the Silly, for instance, the kettle is cold, with blonde economics writer Jessica Irvine informing us that, while markets are efficient, they are not fair and more redistribution of wealth is required. If you are Jessica that makes sense, and if it also makes sense to her boss, Silly editrix Amanda Wilson, it may be that it is the sisterhood which makes most sense of all. There are many dills with testicles filling Fairfax pages, so you can only think Irvine’s piffle is Wilson’s endorsement of equal opportunity idiocy.

If that is the case, the Saturday Silly is a bumper issue, because someone has re-animated Ann Summers, another blonde, and pointed the desiccated corpse of her intellect at the matter of Julia Gillard’s conspicuous lack of public appeal. It is not that our PM is a liar, an overgrown student politician, a liar, an atrocious manager, a liar, or a promoter of grubs and ally of brothel-creeping till-ticklers – no, none of that has anything to do with it all, not even a bit. Yes, you guessed it. In the Silly Menstrual Herald it all boils down to Gillard being a woman and, consequently, cursed by the sexist burden of needing  “to invent herself in front of us, to define what a woman leader is by being one”.  But don’t you worry, because Summers has it all figured out:

“…the more anniversaries she ticks off, the greater the likelihood the Australian public will come to accept her, admire her and, who knows, even like her.”

Yes, that would be right. The longer Gillard survives in office, the longer she will not have been ousted – a startling insight which establishes our PM really does have something in common with the Professor, who is never in the kitchen so long as he remains in bed. Did Summers need to be bribed with some of those hand-me-down, AWU-financed outfits from Town Mode (not the leather mini, God forbid!), or is she simply incapable of expressing any thought not tapped from the standard mould of feminist victimhood?

Down in Melbourne, a third blonde, Suzy Freeperson-Greene, is inspired to all sorts of ruminations and regrets about Christmas by a suburban trader group’s miscue in hanging decorations on the Kew Junction war memorial. The local merchants had the tinsel down in no time – less, actually, than Freeperson-Greene takes to make her point, which emerges in the final paragraphs as having something to do with a vagrant who paints red hearts in black trees and sells them to people who wish to encourage public nuisances. Since it is a miserable image and she is another of the Phage’s many resident grumblebunnies, the author can rejoice in having her festive season kicked off on a suitably depressing and dour note.

To her credit, though, Freeperson-Greene does advise readers that, come Christmas, “kids do complicate things.” It is a most reassuring observation. Even at Fairfax, every so often anyway, they really do notice what goes on in the world the rest of us inhabit.

Jessica Rabbits On

BLONDE columnist Jessica Irvine, another Silly girl, denounces rent seeking, of which she believes any industry  campaign to foil fresh and higher taxes is an example. Members of the Criminal-Australian community should now feel free to make off with Jessica's handbag. It would be nothing less than rent seeking were she to object.

More on Jessica's unique economic perspectives at Catallaxy.

Jess' A Minute, Blondie

BLONDE economist Jessica Irvine tells us “… many other loved Australian brands such as Holden and Vegemite were American-owned from the start -- by General Motors and Kraft.”

That would have been news to poor old Fred Walker, of the Fred Walker Cheese Company, who went to his grave in 1935 believing his chief chemist, Cyril Callister, invented the world’s greatest toast enhancer 13 years earlier. Kraft entered a partnership with Fred in 1925 and bought out the company upon the founder’s death.

Jessica is a bit closer, but still wrong, about Holden, which was building bodies for imported GM chasis under contract , as well as doing the odd bit of work for GM rivals. It was in 1931, 75 years after Holden began, that GM took control.

Yes, they are small details. But if a newspaper and featured columnist cannot get the small things right, why should they be trusted on the big ones?