If you are in a party of the left, your constituency doesn’t care what you do. If you are in a party of the right, your constituency does care. Leadership includes having at least some measure of personal standards, and not committing adultery is one of those standards. Entire governments (of the right) have been turned over on just these things. Ever heard of John Profumo? Time to go!
Here’s the US debt story with a bit of historical perspective. Here we find an example of Change You Can Believe In care of the blessedly departed Barack Obama. Consequences include slower growth, limited if not actually negligible increases in the real wage, additional upwards pressure on the price level and some additional increases in rates of interest. But really, where’s the constituency to do anything else? How many non-Keynesians are there, never mind anti-Keynesians?
Remember this? Remember how it ends?
What’s changed and how you gonna change it? Still, there are regulations going and public spending is being better targeted. Large numbers are being peeled from the welfare rolls. Not good, but if the deficit is rising and you’re a Keynesian, what’s the problem? And if you’re not, what are you going to say to convince them otherwise?
Of course, there is then this from Drudge yesterday:
Then there’s this from today:
Really, you only wish people knew how things worked, as in some business comes up with an idea, borrows some money to buy in some capital and labour, and then produces that are sold on the market for a profit. There is endless entrepreneurial drive in the US. With a President who is an entrepreneur, who knows what’s possible.
Not quite “Wake up, you sleepyhead”. From EVERY MORNING IN NORTH KOREA, THE MASSES ARE AWOKEN BY CREEPY SYNTH MUSIC BLASTING OVER LOUDSPEAKERS. Only a handful of comments at the site, but a quite interesting specimen of the mindset of the left. Marty must work for the ABC.
The Winter Olympics are upon us, not usually of much interest in Australia given that we had experienced global warming well before anyone else. But it was nevertheless brought to my attention by this article in the Campus Review: Former North Korean students, in humanising suffering, tighten diplomatic ties. Not one-eyed at all, specially given the grievance expressed against South Koreans who don’t appear to be as sympathetic to the plight of North Koreans as you might wish, but certainly an article with more sense than you get in the American mainstream media. From Instapundit.
“THIS WEEKEND’S COVERAGE OF NORTH KOREA’S REGIME AT THE OLYMPICS WOULD MAKE EVEN FORMER NEW YORK TIMES JOURNALIST WALTER DURANTY BLUSH:” The Media Sides With North Korea Over The United States At The Olympics.
Ben Shapiro tweets:
As they say at David Horowitz’s Front Page Website, “Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out.” The DNC-MSM are really going out of their way to drop the mask this weekend.
Flashback to last year: “Following the lead of CNN’s Brian Stelter, Thursday’s Situation Room touted the spike of sales in the book 1984 and strongly hinted that Americans view the Trump administration as the real-life version of Big Brother portrayed in George Orwell’s classic.”
UPDATE: Speaking of Stelter, as Michael Malice, the author of Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il tweets, “Reminder that CNN was more hostile to an American citizen who made a wrestling gif than to a representative of the most evil government on earth.”
It’s not just the story but the source that is remarkable. From The Sunday Guardian: How Obama’s Hillary Clinton cover-ups destroyed DOJ and FBI. It starts:
The epic Clinton scandals and cover-ups currently under investigation in Washington will make Nixon’s Watergate and subsequent cover-up look like kindergarteners playing in a sandbox.
My columns over the past few years have detailed how Washington DC, under twenty-five years of neoliberalism and the iron-fisted rule of the Clinton/Obama regime, have corrupted and weaponised senior members of Washington’s most bureaucratic law enforcement and intelligence agencies to act against the law and against the principles of democracy. Making matters much worse, senior members of the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency have been operating a “shadow government”, which is only accountable to the “deep state.”
The Obama/Clintons’ shadow government operatives will stop at nothing to cover up their crimes against democracy, including the destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice. Destruction of evidence has been a big theme throughout the Bill/Hillary Clinton era. Just take a look at scandals involving the missing emails, Benghazi, and the Clinton Foundation. Based on the recent announcement from the Department of Justice regarding the 50,000 missing texts written by Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, it appears this trend is continuing. The announcement states, “There was a problem with Strzok and Page’s bureau-issued SamsungGalaxies—that ‘firmware upgrades’ and other technical issues deleted records of texts sent from not only their phones but many phones across the bureau. We regretfully report that these text messages were lost.” This occurred during a crucial time in the Russia investigation that included Michael Flynn’s resignation due to lies about his Russian ties and FBI Director James Comey’s firing.
But it’s only when you see stories like this in the NYT, WP, and on the mainstream media will you know the jig is up. Meantime, it’s the largest conspiracy in history, involving the Democratic Party and everyone who is willing to tolerate, and indeed actively support, the descent of the United States into a one-party state, which includes a large number of nominally Republicans as well. And for further interest, here is a list of some of the author’s other columns.
CORRECTION: I did think it was a near impossibility that the Guardian had broken ranks but that is how it looked. From Tom in the comments:
Don’t get too excited, Steve: the Sunday Guardian is an Indian outfit and has nothing to do with the Green communist propaganda rag in the UK. The fanciful idea that the Graniaud would use a Ben Garrison cartoon should have alerted you. They are up to their necks in Steve Bell and his ilk. Steve used to be amusing in a nihilistic way, but has become a parody of himself since Trump sent him around the bend.
So we are back to where we were, a near universal media silence on the greatest political scandal of our lifetimes. It’s not even that virtually none of it is reported, but that the left and their minions prefer not to know.
This is from Instapundit discussing Jordan Peterson, the most articulate defender of our Western values found anywhere in the world. The question that really is of central interest is why he has become the phenomenon he is. I have my own views but am interested in yours.
AMADEUS SYNDROME: “As I say, [Peter] Hitchens at least feints towards what’s really bugging many of these people. It is the Amadeus syndrome. Many of [Jordan] Peterson’s haters on the right have been toiling in the fields these long years, equally worried about, writing about, the treatment of men, especially young men; about the erosion of freedoms, etc. Where, they are wondering, are their rewards? So they are bitter. It’s a feeling I’m familiar with,” Kathy Shaidle writes.
Read the whole thing.
As Dr. Helen noted earlier today, “Still at #1 on Amazon, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.”
And for a tiny sample of what he says and the approach he takes, here is a relatively uncharacteristic interview in that he is being interviewed by people who ought to understand what he’s on about but do not. These I went looking for to see what Peterson has said about Donald Trump. These were about the only things I could find, but there are probably others.
The hosts asking the questions are supposedly on the conservative side but are clearly open-ended critics of Trump. Peterson was much more careful and if he was critical, it was only about Trump’s timing in what he said and not what he said. The bozos interviewing cannot see the point. This is Peterson in my own rough but reasonably accurate transcription (from around 2:00 in):
“Truth is a tricky thing because you have to take the temporal context into account. There are white lies and black truths. Black truth is when you use the truth in a way that isn’t truthful. . . just like a white lie is a lie that isn’t harmful…
“What Trump did wrong … was he failed to specify the time and the space of the utterance. Because what he should have come out and done is said that I unequivocally denounce the white supremacist racism that emerged in Charlottesville, and then he should have shut up. And then two weeks later he could have said, well when we look at the political landscape as a whole that it’s pretty obvious there are reprehensible individuals acting out on both ends of the extreme. The Charlottesville week was not the week to make that point.”
And this is Peterson’s views on Trump’s intelligence.
He gets it, even if he is cautious about saying it. And then this, where he is being interviewed by Canada’s Cathy Newman, and if you don’t know about Cathy Newman’s interview with Jordan Peterson, you should seek it out at your earliest opportunity.
The left will get him if they can, the very thing he worries about himself.
TO WHICH MAY BE ADDED THIS: This is titled What It’s Like To Be A Conservative Talking To Progressives. Actually, it is only our dearest wish, but the link does have the original Cathy Newman interview of Jordan Peterson. It’s all there, including a proper level of ridicule for Newman. But as the author writes:
The point here is not what it’s like to be Jordan Peterson giving an interview, it’s that this same interview technique gets used on conservatives fairly often. Case in point, ex-Google engineer James Damore gave an interview to CNN Tech in which his views were repeatedly mischaracterized in much the same way. CNN Tech’s Laurie Segall brought up the alt-right twice, forcing Damore to denounce a group he had no connection to in the first place. The effort seemed less to understand than to throw him into a hole of insinuations from which he could not escape.
There are no friendly interviews from the left of the right, where the interest is merely to understand our point of view. Whether Peterson has shown the rest of us the way we will only know when someone else does what he did.
AND THIS FROM THE COMMENTS: Addresses the question, can men and women work together in the workplace? Says we don’t know since it has only been going on for the past forty years. Makes the suggestion that makeup should be banned from the work environment.
Latest series of headlines in a kind of random order of discovery.
WATCH: Israel downs Iranian drone, destroys its operating base
Israel warns: Iran and Syria playing with fire
Iran: We’ll open the gates of hell for Israel and attack American bases
Report: Air traffic to Ben-Gurion airport temporarily halted
Israel hits Iranian targets in Syria after shooting down Iranian drone
JUST IN: ISRAELI F-16 Shot Down Overnight: “This is a serious Iranian attack”
Israel says it does not seek escalation, but ready to exact a heavy price
Israel’s military strikes in Syria, downs Iranian drone Israel Launches ‘Large-Scale Attack’ on Targets in Syria
Netanyahu leads urgent military conference in Tel Aviv
Tehran says Israeli claim it downed Iranian drone is ‘ridiculous’
Russia concerned by strikes in Syria, calls for restraint
Moscow implies Israel air offensive hit Iranian, Syrian, Hizballah targets
“Major Escalation”: Israel Carries Out “Large Scale Attack” On Syria After Israeli F-16 Shot Down
Mostly gathered at Bad Blue News
This is the only thing I can find. The jerks asking the questions are supposedly on the conservative side but are clearly open-ended critics of Trump. Peterson was much more careful and if he was critical, it was only about Trump’s timing in what he said and not what he said. The bozos interviewing cannot see the point. This is Peterson in my own rough but reasonably accurate transcription (from around 2:00 in):
“Truth is a tricky thing because you have to take the temporal context into account. There are white lies and black truths. Black truth is when you use the truth in a way that isn’t truthful. . . just like a white lie is a lie that isn’t harmful…
“What Trump did wrong … was he failed to specify the time and the space of the utterance. Because what he should have come out and done is said that I unequivocally denounce the white supremacist racism that emerged in Charlottesville, and then he should have shut up. And then two weeks later he could have said, well when we look at the political landscape as a whole that it’s pretty obvious there are reprehensible individuals acting out on both ends of the extreme. The Charlottesville week was not the week to make that point.”
And this is Peterson’s views on Trump’s intelligence.
He gets it, even if he is cautious about saying it.
Just wandering through Instapundit this morning and the overpowering sense of no is everywhere. Examples:
1) LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Mad Max violence stalks Venezuela’s lawless roads.
In one video apparently showing a looting and uploaded to social media, people are seen gleefully dragging live chickens from a stranded truck.
The looters use tree trunks and rocks to stop vehicles, and are particularly fond of “miguelitos” – pieces of metal with long spikes – to burst tires and halt vehicles.
A ring-road round the central town of Barquisimeto, with shanty-towns next to it, is notorious among truckers, who nickname it “The Guillotine” due to the regular attacks.
In some cases, crowds simply swarm at trucks when they stop for a break or repairs. Soldiers or policemen seldom help, according to interviews with two dozen drivers.
Yone Escalante, 43, who also takes vegetables from the Andes on a 2,800-km (1,700-mile) round-trip to eastern Venezuela, shudders when he recalls how a vehicle of his was ransacked in the remote plains of Guarico state last year.
“Social media” is as close as this Reuters report gets to the words “socialism” or “socialist.”
2) INEZ FELTSCHER STEPMAN: How Uber’s Pay Gap Disproves The Pay Discrimination Myth. “It turns out that female Uber drivers work shorter hours, are less likely to work during peak times, and drive more slowly. Because the compensation structure is automatic, Stanford researchers were able to pin down the three factors that caused the gap: experience on the platform, willingness to work at peak times and in busy areas, and driving speed preferences.”
Nonsense. Unshakable feminist media science demonstrates irrefutably that when men are doing better than women it’s because of discrimination, and when women are doing better than men it’s because men are stupid and incompetent and should be more like women.
3) FALLEN ANGELS IS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? The sun is going to be really cool in 2050, scientists say. “Based on 20 years of data collection and observations, a research team led by physicist Dan Lubin calculated that the sun will be 7% cooler — and dimmer — by the mid-century.”
4) JUST RELEASE EVERYTHING BUT THE LAUNCH CODES AND THE NOC LIST: A second memo is on the horizon as Nunes gears up to launch the next strike in his investigation into the FBI.
A brief exchange in which Peterson comprehensively rebuts everything she premises her questions on. He worries about when he finally makes a mistake after which his credibility will fall apart. We out here will forgive him, but the question will be whether he then forgives himself.
But his style as much as his content is what is so formidable. He never backs down! He never accepts the premise of the person asking the question, since in dealing with the media, the person on the other side will almost always be an enemy who is trying to do him in. And really, who is going to be able to rebut Karl Jung who is the basis for much of what he says? You would have to be as much a genius as Jung was himself to know in which way Peterson was wrong or even misguided. Won’t find anyone like that on the media, or anywhere else either. As he says about what has drawn others to listen closely to what he says:
“I tell archetypal stories. I think that’s it.”
And as for the most important lesson he provides to young men causing them to pay attention to what he says:
“Rights are not as useful in regard to establishing what’s meaningful in your life as responsibility.”
This is the blurb that comes with the vid:
Jordan Peterson sits down with the CBC’s Wendy Mesley to talk about political polarization, Pepe the Frog and his support from the far right. He has a new book called 12 Rules for Life: an Antidote to Chaos. Peterson sparked controversy in 2016, when he spoke against a federal bill on gender expression and the University of Toronto’s policy requirement to address students by their gender pronoun of choice.
But not every interview is hostile: Jordan Peterson – What if Cathy Newman had been a Male Interviewer?
Always makes sense and speaks directly to the point.
Law of Markets 
