Yearly Archives: 2016

Donald Trump and Ali G

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I find this astonishing in a number of ways, all of which seem to the credit of Donald Trump. One has to assume Trump had never heard of Ali G before they met. So before you watch, answer this: “What is the most popular thing in the world?” Try to get a sensible answer from that off the top of your head.

Second, Ali G names a problem he thinks needs to be solved. Trump gives him the perfect solution on the spot. If you watch, you will see how Ali G does a double take at the profound sense of the answer to his stupid question.

Lastly, Trump sizes Ali G up, sees he’s a weightless buffoon, and has the perfect response. And it’s only the first minute you have to bother with.

You can’t be serious

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I’m used to Australian commentary on the American election to be one-sided and Democrat, but the AFR piece this morning – These times call for a serious president, not a childish one like Donald Trump – reaches a new low in stupidity and ignorance. You would at least think that after eight years of Obama, he might be just a touch reticent about his own judgment in such things, but instead he can still write about the difference between outsiders entering the race when Obama did in comparison to now when the outsider is Trump:

In 2008, the challenger was The One. In 2016, it’s The Donald. Then, the themes of the day were hope and change. Now, the themes are anger and retreat.

If he can still write “The One” and the words “hope and change” without feeling the irony and disappointment, then this is one commentator who can with the greatest safety be ignored. I wonder why he thinks all this is taking place after eight years of Obama:

Every day, the liberal international order that has existed for 70 years seems less liberal, less international and less orderly. The United States has inched back from the world and challengers have stepped into it. The West is drooping. The historic project to unite the European continent seems shaky. The Middle East is a bloody mess. There are more refugees, asylum seekers and displaced people than at any time since the end of the Second World War.

So his solution: more of the same. So let us have a look at who will be president if it is not Donald Trump. This is from Instapundit:

CLINTON FOUNDATION GOT $100 MILLION FROM “BLOOD MINERALS” FIRM: Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unaccountably delayed implementation in 2009 of a congressionally mandated certification process designed to bar human rights abuses by mining companies in Africa.

The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock found a hundred million reasons for Clinton’s dallying. Two years before, the Clinton Foundation got a $100 million pledge from the Vancouver, Canada-based Lundin Group.

Lundin is one of the giants of the global mining industry, with huge operations in the Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia. Those operations were repeatedly condemned by human rights groups claiming native populations were being forced to flee their homelands and even being killed because they stood in the way of Lundin projects.

“’Blood minerals’ are related to ‘blood diamonds,’ which are allegedly mined in war zones or sold as commodities to help finance political insurgencies or despotic warlords,” according to Pollock. Lundin has a long history of “cutting deals with warlords, Marxist rebels, military strongmen and dictatorships” in war-torn Africa.

The least surprising aspect of this story? Spokesmen for the Clinton Foundation and Lundin refused to comment.

Not the Nine O’Clock News, or the news anywhere. And this is one that comes to our attention. How many others just like it are there?

Which really does make this article more than odd which is A Response to My Conservative #NeverTrump Friends on why he won’t vote for Hillary. Why is such an article even necessary? How can anyone who is even remotely Republican think of voting for her?

Here, then, are nine reasons (there are more) why a conservative should prefer a Trump presidency to a Democrat presidency:

• Prevent a left-wing Supreme Court.

• Increase the defense budget.

• Repeal, or at least modify, the Dodd-Frank act.

• Prevent Washington, D.C. from becoming a state and giving the Democrats another two permanent senators.

• Repeal Obamacare.

• Curtail illegal immigration, a goal that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with xenophobia or nativism (just look at Western Europe).

• Reduce job-killing regulations on large and small businesses.

• Lower the corporate income tax and bring back hundreds of billions of offshore dollars to the United States.

• Continue fracking, which the left, in its science-rejecting hysteria, opposes.

For these reasons, I, unlike my friends, could not live with my conscience if I voted to help the America-destroying left win the presidency in any way.

I just don’t understand how anyone who understands the threat the left and the Democrats pose on America will refuse to vote for the only person who can stop them.

It is hard to understand, almost as hard as to understand why people on the left also want to vote for Hillary.

Just how corrupt is she?

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I’m used to Australian commentary on the American election to be one-sided and Democrat, but the AFR piece this morning – These times call for a serious president, not a childish one like Donald Trump – reaches a new low in stupidity and ignorance. You would at least think that after eight years of Obama, he might be just a touch reticent about his own judgment in such things, but instead he writes about the difference between outsiders entering the race when Obama did in comparison to now when it is Trump:

In 2008, the challenger was The One. In 2016, it’s The Donald. Then, the themes of the day were hope and change. Now, the themes are anger and retreat.

If he can still write “The One” without feeling the irony and disappointment, then this is one commentator who can with the greatest safety be ignored. I wonder why he thinks all this is taking place after eight years of Obama:

Every day, the liberal international order that has existed for 70 years seems less liberal, less international and less orderly. The United States has inched back from the world and challengers have stepped into it. The West is drooping. The historic project to unite the European continent seems shaky. The Middle East is a bloody mess. There are more refugees, asylum seekers and displaced people than at any time since the end of the Second World War.

So his solution: more of the same. So let us have a look at who will be president if it is not Donald Trump. This is from Instapundit:

CLINTON FOUNDATION GOT $100 MILLION FROM “BLOOD MINERALS” FIRM: Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unaccountably delayed implementation in 2009 of a congressionally mandated certification process designed to bar human rights abuses by mining companies in Africa.

The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock found a hundred million reasons for Clinton’s dallying. Two years before, the Clinton Foundation got a $100 million pledge from the Vancouver, Canada-based Lundin Group.

Lundin is one of the giants of the global mining industry, with huge operations in the Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia. Those operations were repeatedly condemned by human rights groups claiming native populations were being forced to flee their homelands and even being killed because they stood in the way of Lundin projects.

“’Blood minerals’ are related to ‘blood diamonds,’ which are allegedly mined in war zones or sold as commodities to help finance political insurgencies or despotic warlords,” according to Pollock. Lundin has a long history of “cutting deals with warlords, Marxist rebels, military strongmen and dictatorships” in war-torn Africa.

The least surprising aspect of this story? Spokesmen for the Clinton Foundation and Lundin refused to comment.

Not the Nine O’Clock News, or the news anywhere. And this is one that comes to our attention. How many others just like it are there?And that wasn’t even what I thought was the worst of it. So let me add this from the Daily Caller link:

It wasn’t the first time Clinton consorted with mining moguls. In the waning hours of his presidency in 2001, Clinton pardoned Glencore International mining and oil magnate Marc Rich after his wife, Denise, made generous donations to the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign and his Clinton Library.

Clinton’s pardon erased a 65-count indictment against Rich for trading with Iran against the oil embargo. Rich did the Iranian oil sales while Americans were held captive in the country by the Mullahs.

Just how deep and far does it go? Which really does make this article more than odd which is A Response to My Conservative #NeverTrump Friends on why he won’t vote for Hillary. Why is such an article even necessary? How can anyone who is even remotely Republican think of voting for her?

Here, then, are nine reasons (there are more) why a conservative should prefer a Trump presidency to a Democrat presidency:

• Prevent a left-wing Supreme Court.

• Increase the defense budget.

• Repeal, or at least modify, the Dodd-Frank act.

• Prevent Washington, D.C. from becoming a state and giving the Democrats another two permanent senators.

• Repeal Obamacare.

• Curtail illegal immigration, a goal that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with xenophobia or nativism (just look at Western Europe).

• Reduce job-killing regulations on large and small businesses.

• Lower the corporate income tax and bring back hundreds of billions of offshore dollars to the United States.

• Continue fracking, which the left, in its science-rejecting hysteria, opposes.

For these reasons, I, unlike my friends, could not live with my conscience if I voted to help the America-destroying left win the presidency in any way.

I just don’t understand how anyone who understands the threat the left and the Democrats pose on America will refuse to vote for the only person who can stop them.

It is hard to understand, almost as hard as to understand why people on the left also want to vote for Hillary.

Economics from bad to worse

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I’m afraid I have now come upon the definitive evidence that economists have no idea how an economy works. It’s from The Economist last month, it’s titled, “Money from Heaven”, but it is the subtitle that provides all the evidence that economic theory is lost in the forest and is unlikely to find its way out any time soon: To get out of a slump, the world’s central banks consider handing out cash.

“HELICOPTER money” sounds like an item on an expense claim at a hedge fund. In fact, it is shorthand for a daring [!!!] approach to monetary policy: printing money to fund government spending or to give people cash. Some central bankers seem to be preparing their whirlybirds (and their printing presses). In March Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, described helicopter money as a “very interesting concept”. Ardent supporters see it as a foolproof way to perk up slumping economies.

The notion has as much potential to drive recovery as the NBN or Building the Education Revolution. It continues to believe that public sector waste in the form of fake versions of productive investment (green energy, crony capitalist enterprises, rail and roads) will make an economy grow. No modern economics text so far as I know even discusses the notion of value added outside of the national accounts, which means economists grow up without knowing the single most important part of what causes growth. It is never part of the equation. Seriously, how could any self-respecting economist endorse this?

Advocates of helicopter money do not really intend to throw money out of aircraft. Broadly speaking, they argue for fiscal stimulus—in the form of government spending, tax cuts or direct payments to citizens—financed with newly printed money rather than through borrowing or taxation. QE qualifies, so long as the central bank buying the government bonds promises to hold them to maturity, with interest payments and principal remitted back to the government like most central-bank profits. (The central banks now buying government bonds insist they will sell them at some point.) Bolder versions of the strategy make the central bank’s largesse more explicit. It could, for instance, hand newly printed money directly to citizens. Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain’s Labour Party, has proposed “people’s QE” of this sort.

The advantages of helicopter money are clear. Unlike changes to interest rates, stimulus paid for by the central bank does not rely on increased borrowing to work. This reduces the risk that central banks help inflate new bubbles, and adds to their potency when crisis or uncertainty make the banking system unreliable. Fiscal stimulus financed by borrowing provides similar benefits, but these could be blunted if consumers think taxes must eventually go up to pay off the accumulated debts—a problem helicopter money flies around.

Haven’t these people ever heard of Venezuela? Do they really not understand that growth comes from value adding production and can come from nothing else. Do they not understand that for a project to be value adding, the value of what is produced must be greater than value of the resources used up. Loss making enterprises cannot cause growth. If this is really what economist think, economics is beyond a pseudo-science and into the region of crackpot.

They think we’re fools

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paris-bombing

Gavin McInnes has done something quite extraordinary and it turns out that having done what he’s done, the result is even more extraordinary than you might ever have imagined it would be. He has gone and interviewed Jesse Hughes, lead singer of Eagles of Death Metal, the group playing at the Bataclan in Paris on the night it was stormed by Islamists and where almost 100 members of the audience were killed. The piece is titled Surrendering to Death where his point is that we are unprepared for what is being inflicted on us and are doing nothing to toughen up. I begin towards the start of the interview but there is much more there:

Do you think political correctness is killing our natural instincts and making us vulnerable?

Definitely. There were two girls who were involved. They were at the venue and vanished before the shooting, and these women were in traditional Muslim garb. They knew people wouldn’t check them because of the way they were dressed. They got caught a few days later.

The fear of offending Muslims is a terrorist’s greatest weapon.

“When the cops went in after the attack, they shut down, what, 450 mosques? They found recruitment material in every single one of them.”
Look at the guys who bombed Brussels. They were wearing black gloves on one hand. Their luggage was too heavy to lift, but they didn’t want anyone helping them with it. Nobody brought any of this up until after the bombs went off.

We’d rather die than be called a bigot.

How is a faith being associated with racism? Just take out the word “Islam” and replace it with “communism.” It’s an ideology. The same way the Rosenbergs could sell nuclear secrets from within America is the same way Muslim terrorists can attack us from within. It’s okay to be discerning when it comes to Muslims in this day and age.

Where is this push coming from? Is it all our fault?

Of course not. When you’re at a soccer game in Europe and you see the words “United Arab Emirates,” you know there is a lot of Arab money floating around and influencing the dialogue. The conversation is constantly being steered away from scrutiny. They think we’re fools. . . .

Political correctness kills.

Davey [bassist Dave Catching] was in the middle of the stage and when the lights went on, he saw shit he’d never seen before in his life, awful stuff. It has no parallel. It’s not just death. It’s the most unsuspecting, innocent victims you can imagine—people who are gripped in terror and can’t move as a result of it.

It’s like a metaphor for all of Western civilization.

I watched about seven people die. A couple of them were three feet from the barrier. They could have fallen backwards and been alive but they were too scared to even turn around. I remember a woman just standing with her hands up in a surrender pose. The terrorist finally saw her and all she did was go, “No no no.” She surrendered to death in front of my very eyes. I was yelling at her, “HEY!” and I don’t think she could hear me. She was so terrified, I think she’d already given up.

It’s not long but whether it is or not, it is filled with a kind of detail about the modern non-defence of the West that should be thought about. They are out to kill us and take our countries from us – including your very own country, the one you are living in right now. They want to take your country and make it their country. That’s exactly what they want and this is the kind of article that reminds you why they may well end up doing what they have set out to do.

“No debate or dialogue” is the very essence of a fascist mentality

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In 1933, Adolf Hitler wished to kill the Jews. He was a National SOCIALIST, that is, he was a man of the left. It was not that he was a German nationalist that made him the psychopathic madman that he was, but that he wished to kill German citizens of Jewish descent, invade other countries, enslave their citizens and also kill their citizens of Jewish descent. He is unique in European history; no one either before or since has had a program anything like the one he spent twelve years trying to achieve.

Which is why stories like this are so repulsive: Far-right on edge of power as Austria votes for president since the basic premise is that with such parties, the political environment of Europe is returning to the policies of Hitler and the Nazis. This is what is going on in Austria:

Austrians voted Sunday in a key presidential runoff which could usher in the European Union’s first extreme right-wing leader amid the continent’s worst post-war migrant crisis.

A huge influx of asylum-seekers, growing unemployment and frozen reforms have left Austria deeply polarised and driven angry voters away from the centrist ruling coalition toward fringe groups.

For the first time since 1945, the president will not come from one of two main parties, prompting national media to warn of a political “tsunami”.

Instead, the showdown pits 45-year-old Norbert Hofer of the anti-immigration Freedom Party (FPOe) against the Green-backed economics professor Alexander van der Bellen, 72.

This is what democracy is for. Fringe groups move to the centre if they offer policies that voters wish to endorse. No one anywhere in the world believes that Norbert Hofer wishes to murder Austrian citizens or wage war outside Austria’s borders. One is not “right wing” if they wish to see their borders made secure and their country not overrun by citizens who decide to show up and live there. So again, let us look at just how bad Hofer is:

Observers warn that beneath Hofer’s smooth image lurks a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”, who has already threatened to seize upon never-before-used presidential powers and fire the government if it fails to get tougher on migrants or boost the faltering economy.

European leaders including European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker have also voiced concern at the turn of events in Austria.

“The prospect of seeing the far-right win forces me to say that I don’t like them,” Juncker told French newspaper Le Monde on Friday.

“The Austrians don’t like to hear this but I don’t care: there is no debate or dialogue with the far-right.”

“No debate or dialogue” with people who do not wish to see their homeland flooded with migrants who do not speak German, have no cultural ties with Austria and have no marketable skills. This chap Juncker is made of the same stuff as Merkel. If they aim to impose their views without debate or dialogue, if they wish to ignore the expressed wishes of the voting public, it is they who are the fascists, the Nazis, the criminal gangs, the right wingers. And it is they who will be the death of Europe for reasons still completely unexplained.

Anti-Trump Republicans are the worst kind of fools

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Whether he knows it yet or not, Paul Miringoff at at Powerline will vote for Donald Trump. There are nerves to settle and plenty of time to do it. But in his quite informative column discussing his uncertainties he brings two other columnists into it who are both deeply anti. You really do have to think these people ought to have their keyboards taken away from them for their own safety. The first is Michael Gerson:

Gerson contends that Trump is unfit to be president:

It is not enough for GOP partisans to assert Trump’s superiority to Clinton on this issue or that. They must justify that Trump has the experience, knowledge, temperament, judgment and character to be president of the United States.

Gerson argues that Trump fails this test because of his positions on illegal immigration and Muslim entry into the U.S., and because a New York Times piece showed Trump to be a “cave-man” when it comes to women.

The second article is by Robert Kagan:

He argues that Trump will bring fascism to America. . . . Kagan has announced that he supports Hillary (some attribute this decision to an affinity with the Democrat on foreign policy issues).

It’s not just an over-heated brain. The man is a moron with pretentions to insight. My wife gets mad at me for not explaining myself when I kick such stupidity out the door without discussion. But there are morons everywhere and you cannot parse their idiocies to the end of time.

Paul, you gotta stop reading these guys and worrying about their opinions. Steve Hayward is trying to explain things to you on your own blogsite: THE ENDLESS ENIGMA OF DONALD TRUMP. This is where things are heading, and you should be heading there along with everyone else: New Poll: Republicans Are Increasingly Positive About Donald Trump.

The sharp elbows of Justin Trudeau

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Above is the moment when St Justin Trudeau elbowed an MP in the chest right on the floor of the House of Commons. Below is a discussion of these events by Canadian commentator Brian Lilley.

Below is the discussion on the Brian Lilley radio show where you can hear the comments among the population. It last a couple of hours but it is extraordinary and especially the part at the start when Brian explains what went on. The metaphor for the kind of mentality Trudeau has is quite striking, no pun intended.