Monthly Archives: April 2017

Adversity is good for the soul

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Read this if you can bear it: David Archibald’s WA election diary. This is how it starts:

I have had more than ten years before the mast fighting the global-warmers. Early on in that interminable campaign, when I talked to federal politicians on the subject their eyes would glaze over. I realized they had no interest in stopping the harm to the country. In fact, when a Perth businessman hired a private room in a restaurant so that a few real scientists could give a briefing to Julie Bishop and Mathias Cormann, the response of those two was “Change public opinion and we will follow public opinion.” No leadership, no sense of right and wrong, no inclination to do the right thing for the country if it meant the slightest bit of effort on their part, or risking any of their political capital.

It’s long but filled with the kinds of detail you only wish wasn’t true but should know about anyway.

Know thine enemy

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There is something so pathetically inane among the supposed right side of the political spectrum that I am at a loss to understand how to get others to see what is right before their eyes. The left knows its own. They can tell from the phrases they all use, their uniformity of perspective on every issue, their inability to reason and make sense of a contrary argument, that they are part of that side of the political world. The comments on my post on John Brennan dealing with Guess who was “a supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War” has led me to put up this post as a response.

The first of these comments is just empty rhetoric from some Democrat/Hillary troll (however he might deny it) and is hardly worth a moment’s thought. But given that I had been on the left in my youth, one of the many things I have learned is that the most perfect dye-marker of someone who no longer has those views is that they never leave anyone in doubt about the ways their political beliefs have changed by their unrelenting criticisms of the left. Brennan has never said a word to indicate he has changed his political beliefs and was appointed by Obama! If you think he was ideologically a different man in 2013 than he was in 1976, when he could not even bring himself to vote for Carter for heaven’s sake, you really ought to rethink these things again.

This comment is purely incoherent:

You can’t have it both ways Kates. On one hand you are complaining that a pinko ran the CIA. On the other you defend Trump’s assertions that Putin’s Russia is no worse than the USA! Make up your mind (if that’s at all possible).

These others, however, make a valid point, I suppose, but seem to be merely a preference to do nothing even as a three-alarm fire is raging right before them. Those asking that we investigate further whether the beliefs that John Brennan hold have changed in a more benign direction are, I’m afraid, forms of rhetorical junk. What genuine point do they make unless they have some reason to think that if we spent time and effort looking more closely at Brennan’s current views that there is something else we might find?

Christopher Hitchens was a Trotskyist around the same time.

Steve do you agree with what you thought in 1976?

The traffic from left to right is very thin. With no exception I can think of, all of the people I associated with in my student days have not changed their politics in any way other than to follow whatever the modern fashion might be. To remain friends, we just have to stay off certain topics, which is all right since I see them only every year or so at the most. I have a friend from my university days who went on to become Vice-President of a major Canadian insurance company, but when he retired he immediately went back to overtly expressing the political beliefs of his (and my) youth, beginning his instant return to the far left by reading every Chomsky book he could find. No doubt almost every corporate boardroom has imbeciles just like him. There is no country that would not be turned into Venezuela if these people had their way. They are as unable to understand the workings of a free market as they are to understand how hydrogen and oxygen turn into water.

If after eight years you still want to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, and John Brennan along with him, I cannot think what can be done to make you see how you are playing into the hands of the left assuming you are not actually part of the left already. And to be quite honest, I am anyway unable to distinguish you from these leftist loons, although I am willing to hear in what way I may be wrong.

From the front page to the last page the media will lie to you without batting an eye

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This is from Tim Blair. You cannot trust the American media from the front page to the sports page.
_____

Even the sports coverage in the New York Times is loaded with fake news.

Take a look:

NYT Sports

✔@NYTSports

Patriots’ turnout for President Obama in 2015 vs. Patriots’ turnout for President Trump today: http://nyti.ms/2o4Kwj7 

Bravo, NYT! That’s sure stickin’ it to the Prez. But then come two crushing counterplays from the New England Patriots:

✔@Patriots

These photos lack context. Facts: In 2015, over 40 football staff were on the stairs. In 2017, they were seated on the South Lawn. https://twitter.com/NYTSports/status/854793140125020160 …

View image on Twitter

New England Patriots

✔@Patriots

Comparable photos: The last time the won two Super Bowls in three years, 36 players visited the White House. Today, we had 34.

11:30 AM – 20 Apr 2017

Meanwhile:

Omri Ceren @omriceren

NYT: hey, sorry we forgot to mention that the anti-Israel propaganda we published on Sunday was authored by a mass-murdering terrorist

 

TO ALL THAT LET ME ADD THIS: Via Instapundit, this:

Michael Oren: …I talk about an incident that occurred in May of 2010 with the New York Times when Mahmoud Abbas published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he alleged that he insinuated that the Arabs accepted the U.N. partition resolution of 1947, and the Jews rejected it. And I called up the editor of the New York Times, and I said wait a minute, this is exactly the opposite. Don’t you check facts? We [Israel] accepted it. The Arabs rejected it, and went to war against it. That was the war of independence. And the Arabs rejected the first two-state solution. And he says well, that’s your interpretation. Now wait a minute, there are certain in-controversial historical facts, uncontestable facts. I mean, did the Allies land, or did they not land on Normandy Beach in June, 1944? And the editor’s response was [analogous to] well, some people think so.

Guess who was “a supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War”

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Can this possibly be true and not common knowledge? From: This is the open scandal that Congress should investigate:

John Brennan’s CIA operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign, leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump. An official in the intelligence community tells TAS that Brennan’s retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism, decorating offices with “Hillary for president cups” and other campaign paraphernalia.

A supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War, Brennan brought into the CIA a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump. He bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as “non-partisan.”

This is just a throw-away para and is entirely by-the-way in discussing the role of international agencies in trying to subvert Trump’s run for president which is in and of itself an extraordinary scandal. From Wikipedia:

In 1976, he voted for Communist Party USA candidate Gus Hall in the presidential election; he later said that he viewed it as a way “of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change.”

And this was the man who headed the CIA from 2013 until January! How does one keep up with all of the skulduggery and deceit? You can read the entire episode here told by Brennan himself from his own perspective. How did this man get top security clearance never mind the job running the CIA?

FWIW I picked this up at Instapundit where none of the comments even so much as glanced at Brennan’s personal history. Does none of this any longer even matter?

Art of the Impossible book launch Sydney 27 April

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Mark Lathan & Ross Cameron introducing Dr Steven Kates “The Art of the Impossible” –  Sydney 27 April

Join Mark Latham and Ross Cameron as they discuss candidly the Trump election win before introducing Dr Steven Kates to speak about his new book “The Art of the Impossible: A Blog History of the Election of Donald J Trump as President“.

“The book is a complete compilation of my blogs on the 2016 American presidential election beginning in July 2015 as the election cycle began and ending with the tallying of the votes which was completed on November 9, 2016. It is a blog history, and may be the very first of its kind.”

Dr Steve Kates was the Chief Economist for the Australian Chamber of Commerce for 24 years and a Commissioner on the Productivity Commission. He is now associate professor of economics in the College of Business at RMIT University in Melbourne.

This LibertyWorks event is proudly co-sponsored by Connor Court and Australian Taxpayers Alliance.

When: Thur 27 April from 6:15 pm
Where: Metropolitan Hotel, Sydney
Early bird tickets can be purchased HERE for $15 inc complimentary drink. (Note: LibertyWorks financial members attend for free but you must reserve tickets)

Ross Cameron and Mark Latham to launch The Art of the Impossible: Sydney April 27 @ 6:15pm

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Ross Cameron and Mark Latham [!!!!!] will be launching The Art of the Impossible in Sydney on April 27 @ 6:15 pm. The best (and probably the only) book on an American presidential election ever written in Australia and the first book ever written entirely as a series of blog posts. It is a reminder just how necessary Donald Trump was and a reminder of how fortunate we are that he was elected.

This is where it will be held:

Metropolitan Hotel Sydney
1 Bridge Street
Sydney, NSW 2000

And this is where you will need to book your ticket.

But if you have already bought a copy of the book and would like to have it signed, just bring it along on the night and entry will be free – but you will have to buy your own drinks.

Trump’s cautious and necessary start to rebuilding American credibility

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Whose judgement can you trust in such a snake pit as foreign relations? But with Trump, at least I am never in any doubt that he is on the same side as I am in every conflict. Two stellar authorities among the many who comment have recently written on where he has taken the US since becoming president. Let me start with The Diplomad: Climbing out of the Obama Foreign Policy Hole. There he writes:

The Russians and the Chinese certainly have taken note of the change in Washington, and I suspect that the regimes in Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela, and the fetid leaders of ISIS and the other radical Islamist death cults have, as well. We can see positive change all around; we see it in the willingness of the Chinese to work much more energetically to control Krazy Kim and deal with the unbalanced nature of our bilateral trade, we see it in the Russian acquiescence to our blasting their Syrian ally, we even see it on our border where illegal crossings have plummeted as the coyotes fear the new sheriff.

I am optimistic that we have begun the long climb out of the Obama foreign policy hole.

The same note is struck by Claudia Rosett: Trump juggles the foreign policy balls Obama dropped.

The Trump administration is taking heat for striking a Syrian air base with Tomahawk missiles and hitting ISIS terrorists in Afghanistan with a MOAB, a conventional bomb so big that it has been dubbed the “Mother of All Bombs.” No doubt there are useful debates to be had about the pros and cons, both tactical and juridical. But one sure upside of these strikes is that they are a step toward restoring abroad the credibility of America as a power to be reckoned with.

That’s big, in ways that go way beyond the immediate battlefields. In a world grown dramatically more dangerous during President Obama’s eight years of appeasement and retreat, America badly and urgently needs to restore its lost credibility. . . .

Obama’s policies invited the world’s most dangerous actors to conclude that America would no longer act in defense of the Free World, or of the rules and understandings that promote a modicum of peace. This is a path to conflict and carnage on a scale not seen since World War II. It is imperative that Trump find ways to change this calculus.

One need not love the use of ordnance to appreciate that with the unprecedented moves of hitting a Syrian air base with cruise missiles and dropping a MOAB to obliterate an ISIS nest in Afghanistan, he has sent an important message, in terms that predatory tyrants, from Moscow to Beijing to Tehran to Pyongyang, will understand.

Both should be read in full. It is an always dangerous world, and even more dangerous after eight years of Obama. But these seem to be calculated risks and nothing done so far seems to have been anything other than temperate. The risks remain enormous, but to me anyway, they seem the right steps to have taken.

Which American president does this remind you of?

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Other than his being an introvert, that is. From introverts tend to be better CEOs — and other surprising traits of top-performing executives:

So what did make CEOs successful? After analyzing all of their data, the researchers found that roughly half of the candidates earning an overall ‘A’ rating in their database, when evaluated for a CEO job, had distinguished themselves in more than one of four management traits. (Only five percent of the weakest performers, meanwhile, had done the same.) The four were: reaching out to stakeholders; being highly adaptable to change; being reliable and predictable rather than showing exceptional, and perhaps not repeatable, performance; and making fast decisions with conviction, if not necessarily perfect ones.

Indeed, that last trait — a willingness to make a call quickly, even without all the needed information — was one of the four “essentials” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, detailed in his own letter to shareholders last week. Calling it “high-velocity decision-making,” Bezos wrote that “most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90 percent, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.” Being wrong isn’t always so bad, he wrote. “If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”

Botelho agreed that first trait was the most surprising. “We frankly expected to find that strong CEOs stood out for the quality of their decisions — that they turn out to be right more frequently,” she said. “But what very clearly stood out was the speed. Quality was likely something they developed earlier, but then they’re willing to step up and make the decision faster, even with more uncertainty.”

Finding yourself right most of the time gives the confidence to keep making those decisions, and allows others to to defer to your decision-making when everything is so entirely opaque. It’s like the question Napoleon used to ask his generals: do you think of yourself as lucky. For those where things turned out as they had hoped, it would often have looked as if it had been little more than luck. But the better judgement you have, as they say, the luckier you become.

Advising the president on North Korea

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On every issue both international and domestic I find myself on the same side as Donald Trump. He is, moreover, not a lone wolf, he is not the head of some “think tank” that pours out advice without responsibility, but the head of an administration of people who have had to deal with international relations for decades past, but in which every moment is something new. What to do about North Korea, led by a madman with ambitions to build nuclear weapons and a delivery system that will reach the United States (and therefore also Australia)? I have no idea what the right answer is, but of all people across the globe I am content to see it is Trump attempting to deal with a situation that has been allowed to fester and rot. So where among our local papers can one turn to for guidance?

This is from The Australian today, We should make the best of being region’s odd man in. From which:

Donald Trump’s inexperience, recklessness and incoherence in foreign policy adds another element to this already volatile mix of superpower politics, mad dictatorships and menacing brinkmanship. The Trump administration is not a reliable ally for Australia given its contradictory and confused approach to foreign policy.

The only thing confused here is the donkey who wrote this article. Meanwhile at The Age we have another piece of advice: Donald Trump is right to try something new on North Korea. There we find:

Donald Trump is therefore quite right when he asserts that US policy has failed. So it’s time to hold our breath while he tries out a new tactic: play the vicious little dictator at his own game. The Kims have always used belligerence to extract concessions, like loosened sanctions, because no one is ever sure just how far Pyongyang will go. . . .

China might not be able to stop North Korea’s weapons program. Perhaps nothing can except a war. It would be a terrible, brutal, bloody war and it would be unforgivable for Mr Trump to trigger it lightly or by accident. But US policy on North Korea has so far been a failure. The White House is right to try something new.

The Australian’s continuous and ignorant attacks on Donald Trump is making the paper almost unreadable. But here is how it is. The world now depends on the American president as its best chance of solving the problem of North Korean and its nuclear ambitions. These media leftists with their automatic opposition to anything Trump does are worse than tiresome, they are making it more difficult to find solutions to major problems that will take us all down if we do not do something about them.