Monthly Archives: June 2016

Chapter One: The Vase

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clinton crisis of character

Secret Service agent to release tell-all book about the Clinton White House and the culture that ‘sickened’ him. The main points:

  • Gary Byrne says he was posted outside Bill Clinton’s Oval Office in 1990s
  • Was one of the agents who testified to a grand jury about Monica Lewisnky [sic]
  • Complained about her behavior and ‘out of hours’ access to the West Wing
  • Releasing book so voters understand the ‘real’ Clinton before the election
  • Reports say his expose is causing deep concern in the White House
  • The release of the book comes a month before the Democratic convention
  • Secret Service agents have openly discussed protecting Hillary in the past
  • Investigative journalist Ron Kessler said agents detested Hillary

My guess is that if the book is being published there’s nothing in it that will disturb Hillary. I’ve heard every story before and it has not made any difference. Character may be destiny, but policy sense is what we are looking for in a president, which this discusses not at all. If Obama can get away with his book being written by Bill Ayers, this will make less noise than a tree falling in the forest.

Facts be damned

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trump economic tweet

Obama said the economy is great, thanks to him, and Trump therefore tweeted the above sets of data which the Washington Post then fact checked. The result: WashPost’s Bump ‘Fact-Checks’ Trump’s Retweeted Obama Economy Charts: Facts Win, 9-0.

Readers can rest assured that despite [The Washington Post‘s] pitiful efforts, the chart-containing tweet which Trump retweeted still stands tall. Trump struck out the Obama-supporting side on nine pitches, er, charts. Bump doesn’t even have a clue that this is objectively the case.

The charts in the retweet are based purely on facts. Each clearly indicates in its red-shaded area what has happened during Barack Obama’s presidency, Each shows that the trends presented have gotten worse under Obama.

You would actually think these journalists would prefer to see the economy run well than have a Democrat in the White House. In fact, they just don’t care. They will continue to lie and mislead to protect the Obama legacy, such as it is, and to get Hillary elected in spite of everything. It is all politics all of the time, and facts be damned.

Ignoring the evidence is a specialty of the left

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There are some things, as Orwell famously said, that are some things so stupid only an intellectual could believe them. From an article by Stacy McCain on Stereotypes are Accurate.

“Consensus” among intellectuals is harmful. Beliefs that are widely accepted in academia are never examined skeptically, and contradictory evidence is ignored or suppressed. . . .

One of the books I most often recommend is Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, which examines how certain liberal prejudices distort public policy discussions. Chapter Four, “The Irrelevance of Evidence” shows how liberal beliefs are simply immune to facts. For example, no matter how much evidence you produce showing that the breakdown of the family is a major cause of poverty, liberals insist that racism is the main reason for poverty in America, even though it can be shown that family breakdown causes poverty for white people, too.

The willingness of people to accept explanations that confirm their own prejudices produces myths of “settled science” that can endure for decades within the elite intelligentsia. In his book The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Sowell examines the claims made in Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism. Lenin asserted that the collapse of capitalism (which Marx had claimed was imminent in the mid-1800s) had been delayed because capitalists had found new sources of profit by exploiting the poor in undeveloped countries. It takes Sowell precisely two pages to destroy Lenin’s claim, showing that the “evidence” provided by Lenin was simply false. And yet, despite the demonstrable falsity of Lenin’s core thesis, and despite the subsequent failure of the Soviet economy, anti-capitalist ideas about “imperialism” and “exploitation” continue to be influential among intellectuals and policy makers. This is just one example of how the leftist prejudices in academia have prevented us from learning useful lessons from recent history. In fact, as John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr explain in their 2005 book In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage, academics refuse even to admit the most basic truths of Cold War history, i.e., that the Communist Party in the United States was controlled by Moscow as an instrument of Soviet policy, used for espionage and subversion. The idea that “McCarthyism” was essentially paranoid — that there was no domestic threat from Soviet agents and that innocent liberals were wrongfully persecuted in a “witch hunt” — continues to be promoted in American universities, despite the abundant evidence that Joe McCarthy was basically right about the Communist menace. (See Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies by M. Stanton Evans.) The world looks much different when you are willing to examine facts that may contradict your own prejudices, but for decades the academic elite in America has ignored evidence that doesn’t conform to the “progressive” worldview.

Or to quote Mark Twain this time, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” There is quite a bit of that around and it will be the death of us.

Does Obama have anything to do with the American election this year?

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trump foreign policy

This is not a particular good article, but the point it makes is a serious one: 3 Reasons We’ve Forgotten Obama in the 2016 Race — and Why We Shouldn’t.

[Let me] illustrate a particular media trend — a blindness to the powerful impact of over seven years of a disastrous presidency. How does Obama get off the hook for all this? Why do we not see the 2016 election for what it rightly is, a referendum on his failed presidency? Here are three key reasons, from the least effective to the most.

The real reason is that virtually the whole of the media support the Democrats and can barely push the keys to say a word of criticism of Obama. This will be the problem from here to November. Whether Trump can withstand what he will need to deal with over the coming months is the question, along with how much help will he get from the RNC along with how much he will ask for. As noted here, The media have reached a turning point in covering Donald Trump. He may not survive it. It’s the Washington Post, so they will do all they can to make sure that he doesn’t withstand it, but we are certainly about to find out.

Interest rates and economic growth

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Low interest rates kill off economic growth. Australia has maintained high rates over most of the period since the GFC, and even with the recent cuts our rates remain higher than the international standard. And how are we going?

The Australian economy is expanding at a much stronger clip than anticipated, with one analyst saying the latest GDP figures put doomsayers firmly in the corner as expectations of another rate cut were trimmed.

Meanwhile, back in the US of A, the land of near-zero rates: Shock Report on Jobs Signals Obama Economy Is on Brink of Recession.

If you step back and look at the whole business sector, a case can be made that the United States has been in a mild business recession for as much as a year, if not longer.

Take business fixed investment in equipment, software, plants, buildings, and so forth. This has been slowing for six straight quarters. It even went negative in the first quarter on a year-on-year basis. . . .

Core capital goods, including orders, shipments, and backlogs, have turned negative over the past three months and across the past year. This is a proxy for business investment, and it’s not a good omen.

Finally, the closely watched ISM reports for manufacturing and services are barely above 50. In other words, they point to the front end of a recession. On the manufacturing side, key indicators like production and employment are below year-ago levels. New orders are flat. On the services side, the overall index is below year-ago levels, as is employment and new orders.

The entire article is incoherent to an exceptional extent. In fact, economic policy is incoherent to an exceptional extent. But if you are looking at incoherence, this part of the Australian story is hard to beat:

JP Morgan chief economist Sally Auld questioned the [Australian] growth indicators and expects the RBA to cut rates to a new record low in August.

She said domestic final demand, which is the total amount of spending in the economy, only rose by 0.1 per cent in the quarter and 0.9 over the year.

Ms Auld said all price indicators in the quarterly release were very weak, vindicating the Reserve Bank’s decision to cut rates to 1.75 per cent last month.

“The headline GDP numbers are going to continue to be flattered by very strong net exports. Which will mean that GDP looks good, but it’s not the sort of growth that actually generates any inflation for you,” she said.

She wants inflation! Inflation is apparently good for growth. These people will ruin us yet. With Glenn Stevens gone, there is no certainty that we any longer have a steady hand on the monetary tiller. A rate cutter Glenn was not, but I suspect that even though they all watched him operate, and can see his success before their eyes, they are now going to bring rates down. Mistake, mistake, mistake if they do. If you would like to understand what’s wrong with artificially lowering rates, you would have to go back to economic texts written a hundred years ago or more, unless you would like to read my own, which is about to go into its third edition next year.

It is not enough to just say “what a jerk” and then move on

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Sure it’s funny in a pathetic kind of way. Sure the president of the United States has been elected because he can read a teleprompter while having black skin. Sure we know he pretended to have written two books when we know the first one was written by the communist Bill Ayres and the second was just a gaggle of campaign rhetoric written by no one in particular. The only people who will find the video truly funny are our enemies, the enemies of the United States, the enlightenment and Western civilisation. They laugh at us because so many across the US are simpletons and fools, and their president is all the proof they need.

The real issue is not how funny the video is but what can be done about what it reveals? It is essential to recognise that it is the media, our universities and that proportion of our own societies who are members of the far left that need to be countered with some kind of strategy. Donald Trump has begun what must not become merely his own theme, with no one else entering these wars on his side. Our enemies must be called out. Those who support Obama must be themselves made to share in the shame in having been taken in by such a transparent charlatan. The institutions that have given a pass to the infantile fantasies of the left must be ridiculed and deprived of funds. There is a great deal that needs to be done, but who will do it?

Nazis thought they were nice people too

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Screen-Shot-2016-06-02-at-11.24.07-PM

Via Instapundit where we find this in the comments:

F–k Godwin’s Law-
I hate nazis.
That is what they are. Wondering how many of them are paid by a guy who worked for the nazis.

BTW do you know who he means by the “guy who worked for the nazis”? A genuine possibility. More of the story from The Guardian: Protesters attack Trump supporters, as Trump calls for Clinton to ‘go to jail’

Inside the rally, the presumptive Republican nominee for president responded to a fiery speech earlier in the day by his main rival, Hillary Clinton, in which she lambasted him as “ temperamentally unfit” to be president and castigated his “thin skin”.

Trump struck out at Clinton, attacking her on her email controversy, saying: “I will say this: Hillary Clinton has to go to jail.”

It really is the White House or the Big House.

“I don’t think voters know quite how vindictive Turnbull is”

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Any idea what Andrew Bolt means?

I don’t think voters know quite how vindictive Turnbull is, and what depths his media team have stooped to in trying to intimidate journalists.

When I am permitted to reveal some confidences I will. I am not quite saying Turnbull is a Rudd, but I am saying that the advertising does not resemble the goods and there will be buyers’ remorse. Already many Liberal MPs are worried. The superannuation strife is just a hint of what’s to come.

I know he is shallow, mean-spirited, narcissistic and incompetent. He is a left-wing troll heading a party of what ought to be liberal conservatives. If there’s more, it is pointless to wait till the 3rd of July to let us know.

Meanwhile, we have Malcolm’s father-in-law venting steam on Tony Abbott in his new book just published. Either the author is incoherent or the writer of the article, since I really could not work out from this what he was saying. Ravings of an old man, I suppose. You work this out and get back to me:

The book also republishes a blistering letter Mr Hughes sent to his brother, the late Robert ­Hughes, world-renowned as an art critic and accomplished historian, when Mr Abbott became Liberal leader.

”This is a potentially catas­tro­ph­ic decision,” he wrote. “To elect Abbott in his place is the equivalent of putting the bull in charge of the china shop or the principal ­lunatic in charge of the asylum. Abbott’s behaviour in relation to the risks of global warming may be compared to the oscillations of the weather vane.”

Well, the catastrophe turned out to be that Abbott had a fantastic win at the 2013 election which allowed Malcolm to stage a coup to become the Prime Minister he could never have become on his own. If he meant anything else, I could not work it out.

Delusional thinking is kind of like deceiving yourself

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When I use the word delusional, there is nothing necessarily psychotechnical about it. So I went to the most authoritative source I could find, and this is what it says on Google:

Delusional comes from a Latin word meaning “deceiving.” So delusional thinking is kind of like deceiving yourself by believing outrageous things. Delusional thoughts are often a sign of mental illness, but the word can also be used more loosely to describe behavior that is just not realistic.

So perhaps this is only delusional in a loose sort of way:

President Barack Obama on Wednesday delivered a fervent appeal for a Democratic successor, wading deeper into the race to replace him even as his party has yet to produce a presumptive nominee.

Without mentioning any presidential candidates by name — Democrat or Republican — Obama lambasted what he said were economic myths peddled by the GOP, insisting any clear-eyed assessment shows the country better off now then when he took office.

The GFC began and ended during the presidency of George W. Bush. Again from Google:

The financial crisis of 2007–08, also known as the global financial crisis and the 2008 financial crisis, is considered by many economists to have been the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Obama became President in January 2009. All the hard work had been done. He had the easier job of building the American economy back up. If he thinks things are better now than on the day he took over, I know which meaning of delusional I would choose.

And when you have decided about economic policy, let us move onto how well he thinks he’s done on medical care and peace in the Middle East. You might also find this interesting which is a CNN report on the speech in which the following video is taken. Guess which bit is never mentioned.

I might just further add that this has been up all day at Drudge, very unusual, and still has had only 757,071 hits. The reach of conservative-leaning media is small. Obama is such an embarrassment but they might still elect Hillary. And if the media has its way, they will.